The German people did not protest against this order. The state intervened to increase the production of substitute goods which would help to relieve the insufficiency of raw materials and would enable the Reich, in the event of war, to maintain the level of production necessary for the Army and Air Force, even if imports were to become difficult or impossible. The Defendant Göring, in September 1936, inspired the drawing up and directed the application of the Four Year Plan which put Germany’s economic system on a war footing. The expenses entailed by this rearmament were assured thanks to the new system of work treaties. The Defendant Schacht during the 3½ years he was at the head of the Reich Ministry of Economics brought into being this financial machinery and thereby played an outstanding role in military preparations as he himself recalled, after he left the Ministry, in a speech that he made in November 1938 at the Economic Council of the German Academy.
Germany thus succeeded in 3 years’ time in recreating a great army and in creating on the technical plane an organization entirely devoted to future war. On 5 November 1937, when expounding his plan for home policy to his collaborators, Hitler stated that rearmament was practically completed.
THE PRESIDENT: Would that be a convenient time to break off? We will adjourn, then, for 10 minutes.
[A recess was taken.]
M. DE MENTHON: While Hitler’s government was giving to the Reich the economic and financial means for a war of aggression he was carrying on simultaneously the diplomatic preparation of that war by endeavoring to reassure the threatened nations during the period which was indispensable to him for rearmament and by endeavoring also to keep apart his eventual adversaries one from the other.
In a speech on 17 May 1933, Hitler, while asking for a revision of the Treaty of Versailles, declared that he had no intention of obtaining it by force. He stated that he admitted “the legitimate exigencies of all peoples” and asserted that he did not want to “germanize those who are not Germans.” He wished to “respect the rights of other nationalities.”
The German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact, concluded on 26 January 1934, which was to reassure for a time the Warsaw government and to lull it into a state of false security, was principally intended to bar French policy from any action. In a work published in 1939 entitled Deutschlands Aussenpolitik 1933-39, an official writer, Professor Von Freytagh-Loringhoven, wrote that the essential purpose of this pact was to paralyze the action of the Franco-Polish alliance and to “overthrow the entire French system.”
On 26 May 1935, 10 days after denouncing the military clauses of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany started negotiations with Great Britain which were to result in the Naval Agreement of 18 June 1935, negotiations which were intended to reassure British public opinion by showing it that, while the Reich was desirous of becoming once more a great military power, it was not thinking of reconstituting a powerful fleet.
Immediately following the plebiscite of 13 January 1935 which decided the return of the Saar territory to the Reich, Hitler formally declared “that he would make no further territorial demands whatsoever on France.”
He was to use the same tactics towards France until the end of 1938. On 6 December 1938 Ribbentrop came to Paris to sign the Franco-German Declaration which recognized “the frontiers as definite” between the two countries, and which stated that the two governments were resolved: