German Documents
Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945. Series D, Volume V. (H.M.S.O., 1953. 25s.) THIS is the fifth volume in the fourth series of German Foreign Office Documents edited by American, British and French scholars. The material it presents relates to a host of smaller European powers, to Latin America and to the Middle East, bringing the whole story of pre-war diplomacy up to Maroh, 1939, the fatal month of Hitler's occupation of Prague. There is little variety of pattern: the Germans are discovered pressing all the smaller democratic powers to abandon collective security in favour of neutrality which will, in its turn, leave them isolated and therefore, with the possible exception of Switzerland, helpless.
In Poland and South-East Europe German policy is seen to be another thing: there Hitler hoped to build up authoritarian regimes dependent on himself. This hope was frustrated in Yugoslavia when Prince Paul dismissed Stoyadinovie in February, 1939; it is amusing to observe with what promptitude the German Minister in Belgrade then advised a revolution in policy in order to support Croat separatism and thus to weaken the Yugoslav state. • Together with the Nazi drive for political domination in Eastern Europe went an economic offensive upon an unprecedented scale; the newly available documents more than justify the most anti-Nazi conjectures of pre-war days. It is interesting to find here that the notorious German-Roumanian commercial treaty of March 23rd, 1939, was completed in principle when Wohltat. saw King Carol over five weeks earlier and the King declared himself "as favouring an extensive reliance on Germany for Roumanian economic develop- ment."
The chapter on the Middle East, together with that on the Jewish question, reveals the advances made by King I bn Saud to the Germans, and the exploitation of Arab sentiment, facilitated as it was by the Nazis' persecution of the Jews. While Nazis and Arabs united to oppose the realization of the Zionists' aim of a Jewish national home in Palestine, Hitler's diplomacy here was nevertheless curbed by his fear of objections from his friend Mussolini. It is curious, in view of the anti-Nazi feeling in Switzerland, to find that the Germans originally marked the passports of their Jews with a J. three centi- metres high to please the Swiss authorities: the latter were alarmed by the exodus of Austrian Jews after the Anschluss and wished to be able to refuse them entry into Switzerland.
Although there are two more volumes to come in order to bring Us up to the outbreak of war, it is this fifth volume in Series D which marks the essential break between Hitler and the heirs of Pilsudski. After nearly six months of playing upon Poland's Ukrainian susceptibilities by insisting upon the policy of "Hands off Ruthenia" for everyone but himself, in March, 1939,• Hitler agreed to the Magyar annexation of that region and thus to the common frontier with Hungary for which the Poles had been feverishly pleading. Simultaneously, however, he vetoed Polish interference in Slovakia, which he put under German protection. And a few days later, en March 23rd, he seized the Memel Territory from Lithuania which Was like Scotland to the Poles. Danzig and the Corridor were Clearly the next thing, and indeed the directive for the German attack upon Poland was dated April 3rd.
ELIZABETH WISKEMANN.
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