4 Dec. 45

intended to attack the state concerned. Nor was it only the formal treaty which they used and violated as circumstances seemed to make expedient. These defendants are charged, too, with breaches of the less formal assurances which, in accordance with diplomatic usage, Germany gave to neighboring states. You will hear the importance which Hitler himself publicly attached to assurances of that kind. Today, with the advance of science, the world has been afforded means of communication and intercourse hitherto unknown, and as Hitler himself expressly recognized in his public utterances, international relations no longer depend upon treaties alone. The methods of diplomacy change. The leader of one nation can speak directly to the government and peoples of another, and that course was not infrequently adopted by the Nazi conspirators. But, although the methods change, the principles of good faith and honesty, established as the fundamentals of civilized society, both in the national and international spheres, remain unaltered. It is a long time since it was said that we are part one of another, and if today the different states are more closely connected and thus form part of a world society more than ever before, so also, more than before, is there that need for good faith and honesty between them.

Let us see how these defendants, ministers and high officers of the Nazi Government, individually and collectively comported themselves in these matters.

On the 1st of September 1939 in the early hours of the morning under manufactured and, in any event, inadequate pretexts, the Armed Forces of the German Reich invaded Poland along the whole length of her frontiers and thus launched the war which was to bring down so many of the pillars of our civilization.

It was a breach of the Hague Conventions. It was a breach of the Treaty of Versailles which had established the frontiers between Germany and Poland. And however much Germany disliked that treaty — although Hitler had expressly stated that he would respect its territorial provisions — however much she disliked it, she was not free to break it by unilateral action. It was a breach of the Arbitration Treaty between Germany and Poland concluded at Locarno on the 16th of October 1925. By that treaty Germany and Poland expressly agreed to refer any matters of dispute not capable of settlement by ordinary diplomatic machinery to the decision of an arbitral tribunal or of the Permanent Court of International Justice. It was a breach of the Pact of Paris. But that is not all. It was also a breach of a more recent and, in view of the repeated emphasis laid upon it by Hitler himself, in some ways a more important engagement into which Nazi Germany had entered with Poland. After the Nazi Government came into power, on the 26th of January 1934