“In terms of law: How will France be able to foresee, when determining the aggressor herself, what attitude the guarantors of the Locarno Pact will afterwards assume towards her one-sided definition? The answer to the question of whether France would have to fear sanctions in such a case depends in practice not only on the faithful adherence to the pact by the guarantors—about which the German Government do not wish to raise doubts in any way—but also on the most various prerequisites of a purely factual nature, the probability or improbability of which is not to be perceived in advance. In addition, however, the evaluation of the relationship between the new Treaty of Alliance and the Rhine Pact cannot be made dependent on the treaty relationship between France and Germany on the one hand and the Guaranteeing Powers on the other, but only on the direct treaty relationship between France and Germany themselves. Otherwise one would have to expect Germany to tolerate silently every possible violation of the Rhine Pact by France, in confidence that the guarantors would have to provide for her security. That certainly is not the intention of the Rhine Pact.

“In terms of realistic politics: When a country is attacked by such a superior military coalition as a consequence of a decision, incorrect because taken in advance in one of the party’s own interests, it is an empty consolation to obtain its right in subsequent sanctions against the aggressors condemned by the League of Nations Council. For what sanctions could actually hit such a gigantic coalition reaching from East Asia to the Channel? These two countries are such powerful and important members and especially militarily strong factors of the League of Nations that according to all practical considerations, sanctions would be unthinkable from the outset.

“Therefore this second reservation dealing with the consideration of probable sanctions is of no consequence at all from a realistic political point of view.

“I now ask the members of the Council to bear in mind not only the legal and practical political scope of this obligation of France’s to act independently, but to ask yourselves above all whether the opinion can be advocated that the German Government of that time, which signed the Locarno Pact, would ever have taken upon themselves the obligations of this Pact, had it contained such one-sided stipulations as have now later developed.”

I now go to Page 26 of the document book, and the same document, and to clarify the German point of view, I add the following. I quote:

“But the Franco-Soviet Russian alliance means, beyond that—in the German Government’s view of history—a complete elimination of the hitherto existing European balance and consequently of the fundamental political and legal conditions under which the Locarno Pact was concluded at that time.”

With this, Germany had expressed the legal basis of her attitude toward the Locarno Pact and the Versailles stipulations regarding the demilitarization of the Rhineland. In order to prove her will to disarm, there is in the same document on Page 7, that is, Page 27 of the document book, an exhaustive and detailed disarmament proposal.

I ask the Tribunal to accept in evidence the document just cited, so that I may later refer to it.

With this exposition I conclude my presentation on Germany’s reasons for reoccupying the Rhineland. Regarding the role of the Defendant Von Ribbentrop in the occupation of the Rhineland, I shall enter upon that when I call the Defendant to the witness stand.

After the occupation of the Rhineland, the Defendant Von Ribbentrop returned to London, where he was then ambassador. On 4 February 1938 he was appointed Foreign Minister, and from that time on, conducted the foreign policy along the lines laid down by Hitler. In proof of this statement I refer to Ribbentrop Exhibit Number 10, to be found in the document book. This is a very short document that I submit to the Tribunal for judicial notice. It is an excerpt from the speech of the Führer before the German Reichstag in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin on 19 July 1940. I quote: