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Carried away by his 99% election responsibility, the Realmleader announced that he would call the new Reichstag and shout his counterproposals at it at the same moment they were being delivered in London. His Minister of Propaganda & Public Enlightenment Paul Joseph Goebbels told him the world had had enough Nazi stump-speaking for the present. A 19-day "oratorical armistice" was thereupon declared for all Germany. Into the silence came bad news. The British had decided to fulfill their legal duty under the Locarno Pact, to engage in military staff conversations with France and Belgium to prepare for possible "unprovoked aggression'' against them during the period of negotiation. True, Foreign Minister Eden had told Ambassador von Ribbentrop that these talks were not to be directed against Germany. Nevertheless the British Cabinet was scheduled to meet in two days to decide when and where to hold them. Suddenly the Wilhelmstrasse had an extraordinary case of jitters.
It announced that a "congenial atmosphere" for counterproposals had vanished. Nevertheless that afternoon Ambassador Ribbentrop was handed 22 pages of German typescript. With his brother-in-law, Foreign Office Division Chief Dr. Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff, and 26 other experts, he led the huge German delegation by air to London. The German diplomatist was at the British Foreign Office at the unprecedented hour of 9:55 o'clock the next morning, two minutes before Captain Eden.
German Peace. Last week's Peace Plan of the German Government proved to be a remarkable document. Read by itself in one piece, it was eminently reasonable, generous and idealistic, calculated to convince any open-minded crowd in the world.
It rejected the Locarno Powers' proposals on the grounds that they were based on the inferiority of a Germany without sovereignty over its own territory. It then launched into a recapitulation of 1914-18, touching off the Allies' hamstringing of Woodrow Wilson's famed Fourteen Points, the Allied occupation of the German Ruhr and the Franco-Soviet Pact of this year. The emotional, if not the legal, argument of this last was that if a man who has humored one neighbor by keeping his dog in the house finds that that neighbor has agreed with the neighbor on the other side to keep both their dogs in their yards, the first agreement is void, and the man may let his dog out.
Most important, Hitler declined to submit the Rhineland dispute to arbitration on the grounds that no international court of law was competent to judge this political case.
He proposed instead a four-month period for the "atmosphere to calm," during which Germany and its "equals," France and Belgium, all promise to send no more troops to the border, the stalemate to be policed by a commission of one Briton, one Italian and one neutral. During the succeeding period of negotiation, Germany will demilitarize back from the border mile for mile with France and Belgium, will make a 25-year non-aggression pact with both, will discuss a mutual assistance pact, an air pact and non-aggression pacts with Poland, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia and Austria.
To show that they have really reformed, France and Germany were to suppress, each within its own borders, all inflammatory print and talk against the other. Germany will return to the League of