This is CBS Eye on the World.

Here's John Batchelor.

December, 1944, Berlin at the Reichs Chancellery.

Invited to dinner is our protagonist, Ernest Tennant. He is to sit with the dictator, Adolf Hitler,

and a man by the name of Ribbentrop, Joachim Ribbentrop, who will eventually be the ambassador

of Germany to England and Great Britain, and then he will be the foreign minister of Hitler, who will launch

a predatory war that here in the 21st century still scars civilization. I attend this dinner

thanks to a new book, Coffee with Hitler by Charles Spicer, the untold story of the amateur spies who tried to civilize the Nazis.

One of those informants, amateur spies, is Ernest Tennant, a man of the city, a well-thought-of,

gentlemen in London. Charles, congratulations. Your book is wonderfully written. It is transporting.

And you take me right

into this dinner in the redesigned Reich Chancellor. And the dinner is meant to begin a conversation

between these two countries, Great Britain and Germany, who are eyeing each other as possible

adversaries, but are both still weighed down by the damage of the

first war. What do we need to know about Ernest Tennant, him attending this dinner that night?

What is his ambition? Good evening to you, Charles. Good evening. And thank you for having me.

Ernest Tennant had been extraordinarily scarred by his experiences in the Great War, as it then would be being called, in that he had, he joined up in military intelligence.

And by 1916, so in the trenches in France, By 1916, two thirds of his male family members and his schoolmates,

of about 32 male friends and relations, within two years, two thirds of them had been killed.

And this left him absolutely convinced that the most important thing was to prevent another war

on the continent and particularly between Britain and Germany.

And the attendance of this dinner, he is an acquaintance, a colleague, a correspondent with Ribentrop, Fun Ribotrop.

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