THE PRESIDENT: Dr. Nelte, wouldn’t it be possible for you to pass over the reading of these passages which come from the book of Major General Temperley? The Tribunal will take notice of them. There are quite a number of long speeches from the book.
DR. NELTE: I intended to ask the Tribunal whether it would kindly take judicial notice of these passages if I submit them.
They carry particular weight because Temperley reports and judges retrospectively from the year of 1936.
The statements made by Temperley, who witnessed the disarmament conference, the official negotiations and the negotiations behind the scenes, are deeply moving because they reveal the tragic—I must use the word—fateful—and primary conflict: fateful because the thesis presented by the representatives of the different countries—which was derived from the national, given conditions and from traditionally bound conceptions—proved that the difficulties could not be overcome and thus formed the origin of the confusion the last consequences of which we have just experienced. Temperley says:
1) (Page 50) “The French had studied the question of disarmament much more thoroughly than any other nation, and some of their best brains of the General Staff and Naval Staff had examined the problem for months... To characterize their problem roughly, it was their goal to disarm themselves as little as possible although they were the strongest power of the world, but at the same time to keep Germany in a state of disarmament down to the minutest detail according to the conditions of the peace treaty...
(Page 71) “In the report which I gave, I spared neither the French nor us. We had made big mistakes, but at that time I came to recognize that in reality the French never thought of disarming at all... M. Paul Boncour certainly was honest and worked intensively in order to achieve success, but the pressure of the French General Staff upon the Government was too great...
2) (Page 126) “Mr. Stresemann knew his people best. It was a race against time. How long could he keep his people in an atmosphere of cooperative acquiescence without any tangible success in the form of concessions on the part of the Allies? Ought the Allied Governments to have given faster and more willingly what they were ready to give? Would this gesture have prevented the catastrophe?... Doubtless, history will provide the answer. I do not know what kind of an answer it is going to be, but it seems certain to me that the most important period, when Germany turned away from the road of peace, will be found to be the period of co-operation between 1929 and 1930... Would a less hesitating policy as regards the cancellation of the debts, economic reconstruction, and concessions in the treaties have prevented Hitlerism and all its consequences? Who knows?... In his Review of International Affairs, 1930, Professor Arnold Toynbee writes: ‘For the foreign observer who visited Germany at that time it was a terrible and strange drama to see a whole nation—one of the greatest and most civilized nations of the world—engaged in a heroic struggle against fate, half paralyzed already in titanic battle, driven by the conviction that its steps had already irresistibly been led on to the path of destruction.’ (Pages 128 and 129) “The German people had lost hope... The French had always contended that Germany would maintain a pretext of modesty as long as the Rhineland was occupied, and that when the occupation ceased the true color would show... This has proved to be a good prediction, yet it was a concurrence of circumstances and the expression of a people taking its last gasp rather than premeditated planning...
3) (Page 151) “I was present at the session and was profoundly moved in the face of the attitude of the French delegation and that of the Little Entente. They believed that they now had Germany financially by the throat and that her utter ruin was only a question of weeks. Our Foreign Office recognized the situation. Yet after a discussion with Henderson I ask myself whether he really did recognize the abyss which was gaping before us...”
Perhaps one certain passage might be of interest, on Page 38, under (4):
“I also name the general staffs, because there is no greater illusion than that they, taken as a whole, are in favor of war. I know the general staffs of many countries very well, and have never known any general staff which would have glorified war or would have wished for war. They knew too much about it. If they advocated strength, it was because they believed in the idea that armed strength can prevent war.