4 Dec. 45

It was made quite clear to them that resistance would be useless and would be crushed "by force of arms with all available means," and it was thus that the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was set up and that Slovakia was turned into a German satellite, though nominally independent state. By their own unilateral action, on pretexts which had no shadow of validity, without discussion with the governments of any other country, without mediation, and in direct contradiction of the sense and spirit of the Munich Agreement, the Germans acquired for themselves that for which they had been planning in September of the previous year, and indeed much earlier, but which at that time they had felt themselves unable completely to secure without too patent an exhibition of their aggressive intentions. Aggression achieved whetted the appetite for aggression to come. There were protests. England and France sent diplomatic notes. Of course, there were protests. The Nazis had clearly shown their hand. Hitherto they had concealed from the outside world that their claims went beyond incorporating into the Reich persons of German race living in bordering territory. Now for the first time, in defiance of their solemn assurances to the contrary, non-German territory and non-German people had been seized. This acquisition of the whole of Czechoslovakia, together with the equally illegal occupation of Memel on the 22d of March 1939, resulted in an immense strengthening of the German positions, both politically and strategically, as Hitler had anticipated it would, when he discussed the matter at that conference in November of 1937.

But long before the consummation by the Nazi leaders of their aggression against Czechoslovakia, they had begun to make demands upon Poland. The Munich settlement achieved on the 25th of October 1938, that is to say within less than a month of Hitler's reassuring speech about Poland to which I have already referred, and within, of course, a month of the Munich Agreement, M. Lipski, the Polish Ambassador in Berlin, reported to M. Beck, the Polish Foreign Minister, that at a luncheon at Berchtesgaden the day before, namely, on the 24th of October 1938, the Defendant Ribbentrop had put forward demands for the reunion of Danzig with the Reich and for the building of an extra-territorial motor road and railway line across Pomorze, the province which the Germans called "The Corridor". From that moment onwards until the Polish Government had made it plain, as they did during a visit of the Defendant Ribbentrop to Warsaw in January 1939, that they would not consent to hand over Danzig to German sovereignty, negotiations on these German demands continued. And even after Ribbentrop's return from the visit to Warsaw, Hitler thought it worthwhile, in his Reichstag speech on the 30th of January 1939, to say: