Although these Conventions are mentioned in the Indictment I do not rely on them save to show the historical development of the law. It is unnecessary, therefore, to argue about their effect, for their place has been taken by more effective instruments. They were the first steps.

There were, of course, other individual agreements between particular States which sought to preserve the neutrality of individual countries as, for instance, that of Belgium, but those agreements were, in the absence of any real will to comply with them, entirely inadequate to prevent the first World War in 1914.

Shocked by the occurrence of that catastrophe the Nations of Europe, not excluding Germany, and of other parts of the World came to the conclusion that in the interests of all alike a permanent organization of the Nations should be established to maintain the peace. And so the Treaty of Versailles was prefaced by the Covenant of the League of Nations.

I say nothing at this moment of the general merits of the various provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. They have been criticized, some of them perhaps justly, and they were made the subject of much warlike propaganda in Germany. But it is unnecessary to enquire into the merits of the matter, for however unjust one might for this purpose assume the Treaty to be, it contained no kind of excuse for the waging of war to secure an alteration in its terms. For not only was it a settlement by agreement of all the difficult territorial questions which had been left outstanding by the war itself but it established the League of Nations which, if it had been loyally supported, could so well have resolved those international differences which might otherwise have led, as they did lead, to war. It set up in the Council of the League, in the Assembly and in the Permanent Court of International Justice, a machine not only for the peaceful settlement of international disputes but also for the ventilation of all international questions by frank and open discussion. At the time the hopes of the world stood high. Millions of men in all countries—perhaps even in Germany—had laid down their lives in what they believed and hoped to be a war to end war. Germany herself entered the League and was given a permanent seat on the Council, on which, as in the Assembly, German Governments which preceded that of the Defendant Von Papen in 1932 played their full part. In the years from 1919 to 1932 despite some minor incidents in the heated atmosphere which followed the end of the war, the peaceful operation of the League continued. Nor was it only the operation of the League which gave good ground for hope that at long last the rule of law would replace that of anarchy in the international field.

The Statesmen of the world deliberately set out to make wars of aggression an international Crime. These are no new terms, invented by the Victors to embody in this Charter. They have figured prominently in numerous treaties, in governmental pronouncements and in declarations of Statesmen in the period preceding the Second World War. In treaties concluded between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and other States—such as Persia (1 October 1927), France (2 May 1935), China (21 August 1937)—the Contracting Parties undertook to refrain from any act of aggression whatsoever against the other Party. In 1933 the Soviet Union became a party to a large number of treaties containing a detailed definition of aggression. The same definition appeared in the same year in the authoritative Report of the Committee on Questions of Security set up in connection with the Conference for the Reduction and the Limitation of Armaments. But States went beyond commitments to refrain from wars of aggression and to assist States victims of aggression. They condemned wars of aggression. Thus in the Anti-War Treaty of Non-Aggression and Conciliation of 10 October 1933, a number of American States—subsequently joined by practically all the States of the American Continent and a number of European countries—the Contracting Parties solemnly declared that “they condemned wars of aggression in their mutual relations or in those of other States.” That Treaty was fully incorporated into the Buenos Aires Convention of December 1936 signed and ratified by a large number of American countries, including the United States of America. Previously, in February 1928, the Sixth Pan-American Conference adopted a Resolution declaring that as “war of aggression constitutes a crime against the human species * * * all aggression is illicit and as such is declared prohibited.” In September 1927 the Assembly of the League of Nations adopted a resolution affirming the conviction that “a war of aggression can never serve as a means of settling international disputes and is, in consequence, an international crime” and declaring that “all wars of aggression are, and shall always be, prohibited.” The first Article of the Draft Treaty for Mutual Assistance of 1923 reads: “The High Contracting Parties, affirming that aggressive war is an international crime, undertake the solemn engagement not to make themselves guilty of this crime against any other nation.” In the Preamble to the Geneva Protocol of 1924 it was stated that “offensive warfare constitutes an infraction of solidarity and an international crime.” These instruments remained unratified, for various reasons, but they are not without significance or instruction.

These repeated condemnations of wars of aggression testified to the fact that, with the establishment of the League of Nations and with the legal developments which followed it, the place of war in International Law had undergone a profound change. War was ceasing to be the unrestricted prerogative of sovereign States. The Covenant of the League did not totally abolish the right of war. It left certain gaps which probably were larger in theory than in practice. In effect it surrounded the right of war by procedural and substantive checks and delays which, if the Covenant had been observed, would have amounted to an elimination of war not only between Members of the League, but also, by virtue of certain provisions of the Covenant, in the relations of non-Members. Thus the Covenant restored the position as it existed at the dawn of International Law, at the time when Grotius was laying the foundations of the modern law of nations and established the distinction, accompanied by profound legal consequences in the sphere of neutrality, between just and unjust wars.

Neither was that development arrested with the adoption of the Covenant. The right of war was further circumscribed by a series of treaties—numbering nearly one thousand—of arbitration and conciliation embracing practically all the nations of the world. The so-called Optional Clause of Article 36 of the Statute of the Permanent Court of International Justice which conferred upon the Court compulsory jurisdiction with regard to most comprehensive categories of disputes and which constituted in effect the most important compulsory treaty of arbitration in the post-war period, was widely signed and ratified. Germany herself signed it in 1927; her signature was renewed and renewed, for a period of five years, by the National-Socialist Government in July 1933. (Significantly, that ratification was not renewed on the expiration of its validity in March 1938.) Since 1928 a considerable number of States signed and ratified the General Act for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes which was designed to fill the gaps left by the Optional Clause and the existing treaties of arbitration and conciliation.

All this vast network of instruments of pacific settlement testified to the growing conviction that war was ceasing to be the normal and legitimate means of settling international disputes. The express condemnation of wars of aggression, which has already been mentioned, supplied the same testimony. But there was more direct evidence pointing in that direction. The Treaty of Locarno of 16th October 1925, to which I will refer later and to which Germany was a party, was more than a treaty of arbitration and conciliation in which the parties undertook definite obligations with regard to the pacific settlement of disputes that might arise between them. It was, subject to clearly specified exceptions of self-defense in certain contingencies, a more general undertaking in which the parties agreed that “they will in no case attack or invade each other or resort to war against each other”. This constituted a general renunciation of war and was so considered to be in the eyes of jurists and of the public opinion of the world. For the Locarno Treaty was not just one of the great number of arbitration treaties concluded at that time. It was regarded as the cornerstone of the European settlement and of the new legal order in Europe in partial, voluntary and generous substitution for the just rigours of the Treaty of Versailles. With it the term “outlawry of war” left the province of mere pacifist propaganda. It became current in the writings on international law and in official pronouncements of governments. No jurist of authority and no statesman of responsibility would have associated himself, subsequent to the Locarno Treaty, with the plausible assertion that, at least as between the parties, war had remained an unrestricted right of sovereign States.

But although the effect of the Locarno Treaty was limited to the parties to it, it had a wider influence in paving the way towards that most fundamental and truly revolutionary enactment in modern international law, namely, the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War of 27 August 1928, known also as the Pact of Paris, or the Kellogg-Briand Pact, or the Kellogg Pact. That Treaty—a most deliberate and carefully prepared piece of international legislation—was binding in 1939 upon more than sixty nations, including Germany. It was—and has remained—the most widely signed and ratified international instrument. It contained no provision for its termination, and was conceived as the cornerstone of any future international order worthy of that name. It is fully part of international law as it stands today, and has in no way been modified or replaced by the Charter of the United Nations. It is right, in this solemn hour in the history of the world when the responsible leaders of a State stand accused of a premeditated breach of this great Treaty which was—and remains—a source of hope and faith for mankind, to set out in detail its two operative Articles and its Preamble:

“The Preamble