5
Dec. 45
SIR
DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: No, My Lord, no oral
witnesses.
If the tribunal please,
before I come to the first treaty I want to make
three quotations to deal with a point which was
mentioned in the speech of my learned friend,
the Attorney General, yesterday.
It
might be thought from the melancholy story of
broken treaties and violated assurances, which
the Tribunal has already heard, that Hitler and
the Nazi Government did not even profess it
necessary or desirable to keep the pledged word.
Outwardly, however, the professions were very
different. With regard to treaties, on the 18th
of October 1933, Hitler said, "Whatever we
have signed we will fulfill to the best of our
ability."
The Tribunal will note
the reservation, "Whatever we have signed."
But on the 21st of May 1935 Hitler
said, "The German Government will
scrupulously maintain every treaty voluntarily
signed, even though it was concluded before
their accession to power and office."
On
assurances Hitler was even more emphatic. In the
same speech, the Reichstag Speech on May 21,
1935, Hitler accepted assurances as being of
equal obligation, and the world at that time
could not know that that meant of no obligation
at all. What he actually said was:
"And
when I now hear from the lips of a
British statesman that such assurances
are nothing and that the only proof of
sincerity is the signature appended to
collective pacts, I must ask Mr. Eden to
be good enough to remember that it is a
question of an assurance in any case. It
is sometimes much easier to sign
treaties with the mental reservations
that one will reconsider one's attitude
at the decisive hour than to declare
before an entire nation and with full
opportunity one's adherence to a policy
which serves the course of peace because
it rejects anything which leads to war."
And
then he proceeds with the illustration of his
assurance to France.
Never having seen
the importance which Hitler wished the world to
believe he attached to treaties, I shall ask the
Tribunal in my part of the case to look at 15
only of the treaties which he and the Nazis
broke. The remainder of the 69 broken treaties
shown on the chart and occurring between 1933
and 1941 will be dealt with by my learned
friends.
There is one final point as
to the position of a treaty in German law, as I
understand it. The appearance of a treaty in the
Reichsgesetzblatt makes it part of the
statute law of Germany, and that