The encirclement directed by the Western Powers against the Reich is the argument which Hitler used when, on 28 April 1939, he denounced the Naval Agreement which he had concluded in 1935 with Great Britain. This thesis of encirclement occupied a great deal of space in the German White Book of 1939, relative to the origins of the war; but is it possible to speak of encirclement when Germany had, in May 1939, obtained the alliance with Italy and when, on 23 August 1939, she concluded the German-Russian Pact, and can we forget that the diplomatic efforts of France and of Great Britain in respect to Greece, Romania, Turkey, Poland, are subsequent both to the destruction of the Czechoslovakian State and to the beginning of the German-Polish diplomatic conflict. Had not the British Prime Minister declared on 23 March 1939 before the House of Commons that British policy had only two aims: To prevent Germany from dominating Europe and “to oppose a method which, by the threat of force, obliged the weak states to renounce their independence”? What Hitler Germany called “encirclement” was simply a fence, belatedly built in an attempt to check measureless ambitions.
But German propaganda did not limit itself to this. Did we not see one of its spokesmen point to the contrast between the passivity of France and Great Britain in September 1938 and the resistance which they showed in 1939 to the Hitler policy, wherefrom it was concluded that the peace would have been maintained if the Western Powers had exercised pressure on Poland to bring it to accept the German demands, as they had exercised pressure the previous year on Czechoslovakia? A strange argument, which is equivalent to saying that Germany would have been willing not to make war if all the Powers had yielded to her will! Is it an excuse for the perpetrators of these violations that France and Great Britain had for a long time opposed the violations of international law by Germany merely by platonic protests?
Public opinion in France and Great Britain, deceived by Hitler’s declarations, may have believed that the designs of National Socialism contemplated only settling the fate of German minorities; it may have hoped that there was a limit to German ambitions; and, ignorant as they were of the secret plans of which we have proof today, France and Great Britain allowed Germany to rearm and reoccupy the Rhineland at the very moment when, according to the testimony of Ribbentrop himself, a military reaction on their part would, in March 1936, have placed the Reich in a critical situation. They permitted the aggression of March and September 1938, and it required the destruction of the Czechoslovakian State to make the scope of the German plans clear to the Allies. How can one be astonished that their attitude then changed and they decided to resist the German plans? How could one still claim that the peace could have been “bought” in August 1939 by concessions, since the German secret documents prove that Hitler was determined to attack Poland as early as May 1939, and that he would have been “deeply disappointed” if she had yielded, and that he wished a general war?
In reality, the war was implied by the coming to power of the National Socialists. Their doctrine inevitably led to it.
As Sir Hartley Shawcross forcefully brought out before Your High Tribunal, a war of aggression is self-evidently a violation of international law and, more particularly, a violation of the General Treaty for the Renouncement of War of 27 August 1928, under the name of the Paris Pact, or the Kellogg-Briand Pact, of which Germany is one of the signatories. This pact continues to constitute a part of international law.
May I reread Article I of this Treaty?
“The High Contracting Parties solemnly declare, in the name of their respective peoples, that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies and renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their reciprocal relations.”
War of aggression thus ceased to be lawful in 1928.
Sir Hartley Shawcross told you, with eloquence, that the Paris Pact, a new law of civilized nations, was the foundation of a better European order. The Paris Pact, which remains the fundamental charter of the law of war, indeed marks an essential step in the evolution of the relations between states. The Hague Conventions had regulated the “law of the conduct of war.” They had instituted the obligation of recourse to arbitration as a preliminary to any conflict. They had, essentially, established a distinction between acts of war to which international law and custom allow recourse and those which it prohibits. The Hague Convention did not even touch upon the principle of war which remained outside the legal sphere. This is, in fact, what is brought into being by the Paris Pact, which regulates “the right of declaration of war.” Since 1928 the international law of war has emerged from its framework of regulations. It has gone beyond the empiricism of the Hague Convention to qualify the legal foundation of recourse to force. Every war of aggression is illegal, and the men who bear the responsibility for bringing it about place themselves by their own will beyond the law.
What does this mean, if not that all acts committed as a consequence of this aggression for the carrying on of the struggle thus undertaken will cease to have the juridical character of acts of war?