With hindsight, it is easy to condemn the high-handed rejection of Trott's various attempts to persuade British officialdom of the integrity of his cause. Many of his friends failed to understand why he felt impelled to return to Nazi Germany. Although he had been accepted at Oxford as an honorary Englishman, Trott never doubted where his allegiance lay. He saw it as a civic duty to serve one's country and bring about change, even at the cost of one's own life. Trott told his friend Sheila Grant Duff that he thought it "humiliating to be an emigrant". She proved to be less understanding than another fellow student who was present in the junior common room at Balliol in January 1933 when Trott learnt that Hitler had been appointed Chancellor. Charles Collins recalled how Trott "knew at once that a terrible disaster had befallen his country...A number of things he was sure of immediately: that overt resistance to the regime would be useless for a long time to come, that nevertheless he must oppose it by all means in his power; that a common ground must be found for as many opponents of the regime as possible, and that he himself would try to find that ground in a struggle for the ‘liberal rights'; that although it would certainly be at the cost of handicap for his own career, he would not join the Nazi Party unless it should ever become his clear duty to do so in furtherance of his anti-Nazi activity." The playwright William Douglas-Home, who was present at a dinner given in June 1939 by Lord and Lady Astor, where Trott was seated opposite the Foreign Minister Lord Halifax, was equally struck by the young German's sincerity. Home describes him as being "as passionate an anti-Nazi as he was a patriot". 

And yet many of his closest friends doubted his motives-as did the powers that be. Their distaste for Trott's Hegelian affinities, their disappoval of his links with the appeasing Cliveden set, their suspicion of his left-wing sympathies and his ambiguous role as a German foreign office official, and above all their lack of understanding of the constraints of life under dictatorship all combined to cloud their judgment. Even allowing for the uncertainties of the time, it is breathtaking to read Anthony Eden's response to a memorandum of the German resistance outlining the urgent need to remove Hitler and asking for British solidarity. Eden declared that until "these people" broke cover and gave "some visible sign of their intention to assist in the overthrow of the Nazi regime, they can be of little use to us or to Germany". He dismissed Trott as "not untypical of a number of young Germans in the German ministry of foreign affairs who, profoundly anti-Nazi in upbringing and outlook, have never quite been able to bring themselves to pay the price for their convictions and resign from the service of the Nazi regime". As if conditions in Hitler's totalititarian state were comparable to those in England, Eden, then Foreign Secretary, took his honourable stand against Chamberlain's policy of appeasement and resigned. 

Eden's rebuff was based on a devastating assessment written anonymously for the Foreign Office by Richard Crossman, who had known Trott at Oxford and even spent a few days in 1935 with him on a tour of Germany, although he claimed that their relationship was coloured by mutual distrust. Crossman opined that Trott's unhappy and uncertain state of mind confirmed his own feelings "that in any serious political conflict Adam's high-minded idealism would somehow twist to avoid the really unpleasant decision to work for a revolution in Germany".