Plan v. Plan v. Plan
(See Front Cover)
Adolf Hitler was reasonably happy last week. Behind him was a Germany so united on paper as to leave no outside doubt that he was its one & only master. Before him was a ring of sovereign powers who could not make up their common mind what to do about this fuzzy-lipped little man who had just spat in their respective faces.
Fortnight ago Adolf Hitler had collected 44,952,937 fresh pieces of paper purporting to show that 99% of German voters approve his three great steps toward FREEDOM AND PEACE. That these three steps had rashly violated Germany's most solemn treaty obligations and had thereby unbalanced the peace of Europe seemed to disturb no one inside the Fatherland. Once again Germany had a real Army, with more than half a million men cocked and primed to strike at a minute's notice. Once again a tough, hard-hitting German Navy was in the making. Once again the Rhineland, sacred soil to every German, was back in the Fatherland's military fold, with German guns and German gunners muzzling the frontier. And once again Germany was virtually friendless in an angry world.
Wooing Problem, Finished with an "election" in which the loss of even one per cent of the vote was surprising. Adolf Hitler last week turned back to the difficult international front where the Locarno Powers were waiting for him to make amends for his remilitarization of the Rhineland. In the glass and steel elegance of the Reichskanzler Palace on the Wilhelmstrasse, the Realmleader summoned his foreign policy favorites: Special Ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop, Foreign Minister Baron Constantin Neurath, Nazi Foreign Affairs Expert Alfred Rosenberg. Germany's problem: to woo Great Britain away from France and split the Locarno Powers.
Last month the League of Nations Council had voted Germany guilty of violating the Locarno Pact, had then adjourned without taking any punitive action. Playing close to the sidelines instead of in the middle of the official field, the Locarno Powers, by means of a British White Paper, had stated the terms on which they would settle the issue of Germany's treaty rupture: 1) occupation of a strip of the Rhineland frontier by British and Italian troops during the period of negotiation; 2) cessation of all German military activities in the Rhineland; 3) adjudication by the World Court of the German charge that the Franco-Soviet mutual assistance treaty violates the Locarno Pact; 4) an international conference for peace. France called these proposals an ultimatum. Britain described them as merely proposals. Ambassador Ribbentrop delivered Hitler's rejection of them only to Britain's Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. If Hitler could produce counterproposals that seemed reasonable to Britain, unreasonable to France, he would succeed.