But, on 21 May 1935, Hitler said, “The German Government will scrupulously maintain every treaty voluntarily signed, even though it was concluded before their accession to power and office.”
On assurances Hitler was even more emphatic. In the same speech, the Reichstag Speech of 21 May 1935, Hitler accepted assurances as being of equal obligation, and the world at that time could not know that that meant of no obligation at all. What he actually said was,
“And when I now hear from the lips of a British statesman that such assurances are nothing and that the only proof of sincerity is the signature appended to collective pacts, I must ask Mr. Eden to be good enough to remember that it is a question of assurance in any case. It is sometimes much easier to sign treaties with the mental reservations that one will consider one’s attitude at the decisive hour than to declare before an entire nation and with full opportunity one’s adherence to a policy which serves the course of peace because it rejects anything which leads to war.”
And then he proceeded with the illustration of his assurance to France.
In this connection the position of a treaty in German law should not be forgotten. The appearance of a treaty in the Reichsgesetzblatt makes it part of the statute law of Germany, so that a breach thereof is also a violation of German domestic law.
(This section deals with fifteen only of the treaties which Hitler and the Nazis broke. The remainder of the 69 treaties which the German Reich violated between 1933 and 1941 are dealt with in other sections of this chapter.)
A. Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, signed at the Hague on the 29th of July, 1899.
The Hague Conventions are of course only the first gropings towards the rejection of the inevitability of war. They do not render the making of aggressive war a crime, but their milder terms were as readily broken as more severe agreements.
On 29 July, 1899, Germany, Greece, Serbia, and 25 other nations signed a convention (TC-1). Germany ratified the convention on 4 September 1900, Serbia on the 11 May 1901, Greece on the 4 April 1901.
By Article 12 of the treaty between the Principal Allied and Associated Powers and the Serb-Croat-Slovene State, signed at the St. Germaine-en-Laye on 10 September 1919, the new Kingdom succeeded to all the old Serbian treaties, and later changed its name to Yugoslavia.