(d) Using economic pressure and patient psychological treatment with slowly intensified pressure directed at changing the regime.

My next subject is Germany’s diplomatic preparations for the conquest of Austria.

The program of the Nazi conspiracy with respect to Austria consisted of weakening that country externally and internally by removing its support from without, as well as by penetrating within. This program was of the utmost significance, especially since, as the Court will remember, the events of 25 July 1934 inside Austria were overshadowed in the news of the day by the fact that Mussolini had brought his troops to the Brenner Pass and posed there as a strong protector of his northern neighbor, Austria.

Accordingly, interference in the affairs of Austria and steady increase in the pressure needed to acquire control over that country, required removal of the possibility that Italy or any other country would come to its aid. But the foreign policy program of the conspiracy for the weakening and isolation of Austria was integrated with their foreign policy program in Europe generally.

I should like, therefore, at this juncture, to digress for a moment from the presentation of evidence bearing on Austria alone and to consider with the Tribunal the general foreign policy program of the Nazis. It is not my intention to examine this subject in any detail. Historians and scholars exhausting the archives will have many years of probing all the details and ramifications of European diplomacy during this fateful decade.

It is instead my purpose to mention very briefly the highlights of the Nazis’ diplomatic preparation for war.

In this connection I should like to offer to the Tribunal Document Number 2385-PS, a second affidavit of George S. Messersmith executed on 30 August 1945 at Mexico City. This has been made available to the defendants in German, as well as in English.

This is a different affidavit from Document Number 1760-PS which was executed August 28. This second affidavit, which I offer as Exhibit USA-68, consists of a presentation of the diplomatic portion of the program of the Nazi Party. To a considerable extent it merely states facts of common knowledge, facts that many people who are generally well informed already know. It also gives us facts which are common knowledge in the circle of diplomats or of students of foreign affairs. It consists of some 11 mimeographed pages, single-spaced. I read first from the third paragraph in the affidavit:

“As early as 1933, while I served in Germany, the German and Nazi contacts which I had in the highest and secondary categories openly acknowledged Germany’s ambitions to dominate southeastern Europe from Czechoslovakia down to Turkey. As they freely stated, the objective was territorial expansion in the case of Austria and Czechoslovakia. The professed objectives in the earlier stages of the Nazi regime, in the remainder of southeastern Europe, were political and economic control and they did not, at that time, speak so definitely of actual absorption and destruction of sovereignty. Their ambitions, however, were not limited to southeastern Europe. From the very beginnings of 1933, and even before the Nazis came into power, important Nazis speaking of the Ukraine freely said that ‘it must be our granary’ and that ‘even with southeastern Europe under our control, Germany needs and must have the greater part of the Ukraine in order to be able to feed the people of greater Germany.’ After I left Germany in the middle of 1934 for my post in Austria, I continued to receive information as to the German designs in southeastern Europe. In a conversation with Von Papen shortly after his appointment as German Minister to Austria in 1934, Von Papen frankly stated to me that ‘southeastern Europe to Turkey is Germany’s hinterland and I have been designated to carry through the task of bringing it within the fold. Austria is first on the program.’

“As I learned through my diplomatic colleagues, Von Papen in Vienna and his colleague Von Mackensen in Budapest were openly propagating the idea of the dismemberment and final absorption of Czechoslovakia as early as 1935.”