That is the procedure of going to the League or in the case of a flagrant breach, of taking more stringent action.
I remind the Tribunal of this provision because of the quotations from Hitler which I mentioned earlier, when he said that the German Government will scrupulously maintain every treaty voluntarily signed, even though they were concluded before their accession to power and office. Whatever may be said of the Treaty of Versailles, whatever may be argued and has been argued, no one has ever argued for a moment, to the best of my knowledge, that Herr Stresemann was in any way acting involuntarily when he signed, along with the other representatives, the Locarno pact on behalf of Germany. It was signed not only by Herr Stresemann, but by Herr Hans Luther, so that there you have a treaty freely entered into, which repeats the Rhineland provisions of Versailles and binds Germany in that regard. I simply call the attention of the Tribunal to Article 8, which deals with the remaining in force of the treaty. I might perhaps read it because as I told the Tribunal all the other treaties have the same lasting qualities, the same provisions as to the time they will last, as the Treaty of Mutual Guarantee. It says:
“Article 8. The present treaty shall be registered at the League of Nations in accordance with the Covenant of the League. It shall remain in force until the Council, acting on a request by one or other of the High Contracting Parties notified to the other signatory powers 3 months in advance, and voting at least by a two-thirds majority, decides that the League of Nations ensures sufficient protection to the High Contracting Parties; the treaty shall cease to have effect on the expiration of a period of 1 year from such decision.”
That is, that in signing this treaty, the German representatives clearly placed the question of repudiation or avoidance of the treaty in hands other than their own. They were at the time, of course, a member of the League, and a member of the Council of the League, but they left the repudiation and avoidance to the decision of the League.
Then the next treaty on my list is the Arbitration Treaty between Germany and Czechoslovakia, which was one of the Locarno group and to which I have already referred, but for convenience I have put in Exhibit GB-14, which is British Document TC-14. As a breach of this treaty, as charged in Charge 8, of Appendix C, I mentioned the background of the treaty, and I shall not go into it again but I think the only clauses that the Tribunal need look at, are Article 1, which is the governing clause, and says as follows (Document TC-14):
“All disputes of every kind between Germany and Czechoslovakia with regard to which the parties are in conflict as to their respective rights, and which it may not be possible to settle amicably by the normal methods of diplomacy, shall be submitted for decision either to an arbitral tribunal, or to the Permanent Court of International Justice as laid down hereafter. It is agreed that the disputes referred to above include, in particular, those mentioned in Article 13 of the Covenant of the League of Nations.
“This provision does not apply to disputes arising out of events prior to the present treaty and belonging to the past.
“Disputes for the settlement of which a special procedure is laid down in other conventions in force between the High Contracting Parties, shall be settled in conformity with the provisions of these conventions.”