“Should action of the kind referred to in Paragraph 1 be taken by a third power against one of the contracting parties, the other contracting party shall not support such action in any way.”
Then Article 2 deals with the ratification of the treaty, and the second paragraph states:
“The treaty shall come into force on the exchange of the instruments of ratification and shall remain in force for a period of 10 years from that date . . . .”
As the Tribunal will observe, the treaty is dated the 31st of May 1939. At the bottom of the page there appears the signature of the Defendant Ribbentrop. The Tribunal will shortly see that less than a year after the signature of this treaty the invasion of Denmark by the Nazi forces was to show the utter worthlessness of treaties to which the Defendant Ribbentrop put his signature.
With regard to Norway, the Defendant Ribbentrop and the Nazi conspirators were party to a similar perfidy. In the first instance I would refer to Document TC-30, which is the next document in the British Document Book 3 and which will bear the Exhibit Number GB-78. The Tribunal will observe that that is an assurance given to Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands on the 28th of April 1939. That, of course, was after the annexation of Czechoslovakia had shaken the confidence of the world; and this was presumably an attempt, now submitted by the Prosecution to be a dishonest attempt, to try to reassure the Scandinavian States. The assurance is in a speech by Hitler and reads:
“. . . I have given binding declarations to a large number of states. None of these states can complain that even a trace of a demand contrary thereto has ever been made to them by Germany. None of the Scandinavian statesmen, for example, can contend that a request has ever been put to them by the German Government or by German public opinion which was incompatible with the sovereignty and integrity of their state.
“I was pleased that a number of European states availed themselves of these declarations by the German Government to express and emphasize their desire too for absolute neutrality. This applies to the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, et cetera.”
A further assurance was given by the Nazi Government on the 2d of September 1939 which, as the Tribunal will recollect, was the day after the Nazi invasion of Poland. The Court will observe the next document in British Document Book 3 is the Document TC-31, which will be Exhibit GB-79. That is an aide-mémoire that was handed to the Norwegian Foreign Minister by the German Minister in Oslo on the 2d of September 1939. It reads: