The Myth of ‘London’s Nazi Memorial’

Eavesdrop on some guides at the top of the Duke of York’s steps and you will hear them talk about the ‘Nazi dog’ that is buried by a tree on the pavement on Carlton House Terrace, or even that this is London’s ‘only Nazi memorial’.

We’ll come back to whether canines might subscribe to any political ideology later (and, indeed whether this is a grave), but there is certainly a stone that commemorates a dog (a terrier or a german shepherd, accounts differ) that belonged to a pre-WW2 German ambassador to Britain.

This was “Giro” Ein Treuer Begleiter!. (Giro. A faithful companion!) and he belonged to Leopold von Hoesch, a career diplomat who was Weimar Germany’s ambassador to Paris before taking up his post in London in 1932. The building at 9 Carlton House Terrace, where the gravestone is located was formerly the German Embassy (it now houses the Royal Society).

After the Nazis assumed power in 1933 von Hoesch found himself Hitler’s representative to the Court of St James. It is fair to say that he was not overly sympathetic to the new regime and as the decade progressed, was increasingly at odds with the Nazi hierarchy, particularly von Ribbentrop, an ideological Nazi who had the ear of Hitler. 

Von Hoesch died in the embassy building in April 1936 and such was the respect in which he was held by the British Government, was given what amounted to a state funeral. His coffin – draped in a swastika and with embassy staff giving the Nazi salute from the embassy’s balcony – was escorted down The Mall and past Buckingham Palace by red-coated Grenadier guards, while a 19 gun salute was fired in St James’s Park. (You can see the Gaumont British Newsreel of this here – it really is extraordinary.)

We can probably agree that calling Giro a ‘nazi dog’ is ridiculous, but there is a broader problem, and that is that the stone does not mark a grave at all. Giro seems to have been buried in the garden of no. 9, the stone being moved in the 1960s when access to an underground carpark was being constructed. Whether the remains of Giro survived this work is not known.