Then on the same page...
THE PRESIDENT: Have you not read this already?
DR. VON LÜDINGHAUSEN: Yes. I want now to read a passage following this:
“I am certain that Freiherr von Neurath, as well as other career officials in the Foreign Office, had no concrete knowledge of any possible plans for violence on Hitler’s part. On the contrary, during the first years after the change of government one generally lent credence to the oft-repeated declaration of peaceful intentions by the National Socialist leaders. I am even of the opinion that the latter themselves, during the first years, did not want to bring about a war. Rather was it believed and hoped in the highest circles of the Party, to which Neurath did not belong at all, that it would be possible to continue winning cheap laurels without war through the hitherto successfully practiced tactics of bluff and sudden surprise. It was not until later that the megalomania arising from the belief in their own luck and their own infallibility and invincibility, which had assumed mystic proportions caused by unrestrained sycophancy, led Hitler and his immediate entourage to include war among their instruments of political power. We, the officials of the foreign service, and with us Baron von Neurath, our chief, became aware of this development only gradually and as outsiders. Until about the beginning of 1936 only a very few officials had been admitted into the Party which, for its part, treated the staff of the Foreign Office, including the recently admitted members, with suspicion and distrust.”
THE PRESIDENT: Dr. Von Lüdinghausen, is this not really all argument? You are reading at great length.
DR. VON LÜDINGHAUSEN: I have already finished, Mr. President.
[Turning to the defendant.] Did you yourself see in the Party program of the National Socialists any intention or desire to break with other powers?
VON NEURATH: No. Contrary to the allegations of the Prosecution, which do not gain in accuracy by repetition, I cannot possibly detect any intention to resort to armed hostilities in the event of failure to reach these aims, and from Hitler’s various statements I know that he himself at that time, that is, at the beginning of his term of Government, had no such intentions. He wanted as close an understanding as possible with England, and a stable, peaceful relationship with France, which would remove the ancient enmity of the two peoples. The latter, he told me, was the special reason for his publicly declaring after the Saar plebiscite that he was renouncing once and for all any attempts to regain Alsace.
DR. VON LÜDINGHAUSEN: The Prosecution charges in particular that from the following sentences of the Party program you must have known that the Nazis were pursuing aggressive foreign political ends and that they thus were aiming at war from the very beginning. It reads:
“We demand the union of all Germans in a Greater Germany on the basis of the right of nations to self-determination. We demand equal rights for the German people in respect to other nations, the repeal of the Treaty of Versailles, and the Treaty of St. Germain.”