Should Herr Von Ribbentrop really have had the opinion in 1939 that his acts, measured by traditional diplomatic technique, would be considered as a crime punishable by international law?
I have already pointed out that generally, and therefore also by Herr Von Ribbentrop, the then existing frontier line in the East was considered untenable in the long run and therefore in need of adjustment. The Peace Conference at Versailles, by satisfying the Polish demands when this state was newly created, created problems which could not be solved by international co-operation in the time between the two World Wars. These frontiers could never be guaranteed within the framework of European pacts. A guarantee for the Eastern frontier created by Versailles could not be reached within the framework of the Locarno Treaties because of the opposing interests of the participating powers, whereas it was arrived at for the Western frontiers. All that was achieved after endless efforts was arbitration treaties, in connection with the Locarno system, between Germany and Poland and Germany and Czechoslovakia. They did not contain any guarantees for frontiers, but only a procedure for settling litigations. I shall deal with them when I come to the various violations of treaties of which Herr Von Ribbentrop is accused.
After Hitler had also expressed his distrust towards collective security by leaving the Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations, he went over to the system of bilateral treaties. In this connection, at the negotiations preparatory to the agreements between Germany and Poland of 1934, it was clearly stated that a solution of the problems between the two states should be found in the spirit of the treaty. We will not suppress here that only peaceful means were considered for this arbitration and a 10-year nonaggression pact was concluded. Whether Hitler believed honestly in the possibility of solving this problem or hoped to change the untenable situation in the East by means of evolution is of no importance for the forming of an opinion on Herr Von Ribbentrop’s behavior. He did not take any initiative in this step but found this agreement an existing political and legal fact.
The experience made in the adjustment of interests of states teaches that agreements are durable only when they correspond to political realities. If that is not the case, the force of facts oversteps, of itself, the original intention of the contracting parties. A great statesman of the nineteenth century has expressed this truth by saying, “The element of political interest is an indispensable foundation of written treaties.”
Thus, the Eastern question was not removed by the agreement of 1934 but continued to burden international relations. As shown by the evidence, it became more and more clear in the course of political evolution that sooner or later solutions of some kind had to be sought. Both the statute of the Free City of Danzig, which was in contradiction with ethnological, cultural, and economic facts, and the isolation of East Prussia through the creation of a corridor, had brought about causes for conflict, which a number of statesmen feared as far back as Versailles.
Taking into consideration such a state of affairs, the British Declaration of Guarantee to Poland of 21 March 1939, enlarged on 25 August 1939 into the Mutual Aid Agreement, sufficed in case of the appearance of a possibility of conflict with this country, to make the Poles averse, from the very start, to a sensible revision even on a modest scale.
This Declaration of Guarantee shows once more to how great an extent Great Britain, taking a sensible political view, drew conclusions from the decline of the collective security system and what little confidence she had in the practical results of the moral condemnation of war through the Kellogg Pact.
Herr Von Ribbentrop had, therefore, to draw the conclusion from the behavior of Great Britain that the attitude of the Polish Government, from which Germany was entitled to expect some concession, was bound to become rigidly inflexible. The developments during the following months proved this conclusion to be right.
The entry of the Soviet Union into the conflict shows, in particular, that the coming danger would develop within the compass of the traditional principles of politics and the realization by each state of its own interests. The Soviet Union, too, had in her turn left the ground of the collective security system. She looked at the approaching conflict from the viewpoint of Russian interests exclusively. In considering this state of affairs Herr Von Ribbentrop took pains at least to localize the threatening conflict, if it could not be avoided. He had every reason to hope for success in this endeavor, as both the powers mainly interested in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and Germany, concluded not only the Non-Aggression and Friendship Agreement previous to the outbreak of armed hostilities but simultaneously came to terms, by way of a secret agreement, concerning the future fate of the territory of Poland and the Baltic countries.
Nevertheless, the machinery of the mutual aid agreements was set going, and thereby the local Eastern European conflict became a world conflagration. If the Prosecution want to apply a legal standard to these happenings, they cannot do so without taking into consideration the Soviet Union from the point of view of partnership.