THE PRESIDENT: It is perhaps involved in the map. I think perhaps you should refer to the organization of the Air Force, with group commands at Warsaw and Königsberg.
LT. COL. GRIFFITH-JONES: I am much obliged. Under the paragraph “Assumptions,” Sub-heading 2, “Organization of the Air Force in Peacetime,” seven group commands:
1-Berlin, 2-Brunswick, 3-Munich, 4-Vienna, 5-Budapest, 6-Warsaw, and 7-Königsberg.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes.
LT. COL. GRIFFITH-JONES: I am very much obliged. And lastly, in connection with that document, on Page 4 of the Tribunal’s translation, the last paragraph:
“The more the Reich grows in area, and the more the Air Force grows in strength, the more imperative it becomes, to have locally bound commands . . . .”
I emphasize only the opening, “The more the Reich grows in area, and the more the Air Force grows in strength . . .” Now I would say one word on that document. The original, I understand, is signed by an officer who is not at the top rank in the Air Force and I, therefore, don’t want to overemphasize the inferences that can be drawn from it, but it is submitted that it at least shows the lines upon which the General Staff of the Air Force were thinking at that date.
The Tribunal will remember that in February 1938 the Defendant Ribbentrop succeeded Von Neurath as Foreign Minister. We have another document from that captured microfilm, which is dated the 26th of August 1938, when Ribbentrop had become Foreign Minister, and it is addressed to him as “the Reich Minister via the State Secretary.” It is a comparatively short document and one that I will read in whole:
“The most pressing problem of German policy, the Czech problem, might easily, but must not, lead to a conflict with the Entente.”—TC-76 becomes GB-31—“Neither France nor England is looking for trouble regarding Czechoslovakia. Both would perhaps leave Czechoslovakia to herself, if she should, without direct foreign interference and through internal signs of disintegration due to her own faults, suffer the fate she deserves. This process, however, would have to take place step by step, and would have to lead to a loss of power in the remaining territory, by means of a plebiscite and an annexation of territory.