In August of 1939 Germany, although undoubtedly intending to attack Russia at some convenient opportunity, concluded a treaty of non-aggression with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. When Belgium and the Low Countries were occupied and France collapsed in June of 1940, England—although with the inestimably valuable moral and economic support of the United States of America—was left alone in the field as the sole representative of democracy in the face of the forces of aggression. At that moment only the British Empire stood between Germany and the achievement of her aim to dominate the Western World. Only the British Empire—and England as its citadel. But it was enough. The first, and possibly the decisive, military defeat which the enemy sustained was in the campaign against England; and that defeat had a profound influence on the future course of the war.
On the 16th of July of 1940 Hitler issued to the Defendants Keitel and Jodl a directive—which they found themselves unable to obey—for the invasion of England. It started off—and Englishmen will forever be proud of it—by saying that:
“Since England, despite her militarily hopeless situation, shows no signs of willingness to come to terms, I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England and if necessary to carry it out. The aim is . . . to eliminate the English homeland as a base for the carrying on of the war against Germany . . . . Preparations for the entire operation must be completed by mid-August.”
But the first essential condition for that plan was, I quote:
“. . . the British Air Force must morally and actually be so far overcome that it does not any longer show any considerable aggressive force against the German attack.”
The Defendant Göring and his Air Force, no doubt, made the most strenuous efforts to realize that condition, but, in one of the most splendid pages of our history, it was decisively defeated. And although the bombardment of England’s towns and villages was continued throughout that dark winter of 1940-41, the enemy decided in the end that England was not to be subjugated by these means, and, accordingly, Germany turned back to the East, the first major aim unachieved.
On the 22d of June 1941 German Armed Forces invaded Russia, without warning, without declaration of war. It was, of course, a breach of the usual series of treaties; they meant no more in this case than they had meant in the other cases. It was a violation of the Pact of Paris; it was a flagrant contradiction of the Treaty of Non-Aggression which Germany and Russia had signed on the 23rd of August a year before.
Hitler himself said, in referring to that agreement, that “agreements were only to be kept as long as they served a purpose.”
The Defendant Ribbentrop was more explicit. In an interview with the Japanese Ambassador in Berlin on the 23rd of February 1941, he made it clear that the object of the agreement had merely been, so far as Germany was concerned, to avoid a two-front war.
In contrast to what Hitler and Ribbentrop and the rest of them were planning within the secret councils of Germany, we know what they were saying to the rest of the world.