What the World Rejected: Hitler's Peace Offers of 1933-1939

Germany's enemies maintain today that Adolf Hitler is the greatest disturber of peace known to history, that he threatens every nation with sudden attack and oppression, that he has created a terrible war machine in order to cause trouble and devastation all around him. At the same time they intentionally conceal an all-important fact: they themselves drove the Leader of the German people finally to draw the sword. They themselves compelled him to seek to obtain at last by the use of force that which he had been striving to gain by persuasion from the beginning: the security of his country. They did this not only by declaring war on him on September 3, 1939, but also by blocking step for step for seven years the path to any peaceful discussion.

The attempts repeatedly made by Adolf Hitler to induce the governments of other states to collaborate with him in a reconstruction of Europe resemble an ever-recurring pattern in his conduct since the commencement of his labors for the German Reich. But these attempts were wrecked every time by reason of the fact that nowhere was there any willingness to give them due consideration, because the evil spirit of the Great War still prevailed everywhere, because in London and Paris and in the capitals of the Western Powers' vassal states there was only one fixed intention: to perpetuate the power of Versailles.

A rapid glance at the most important events will furnish incontrovertible proof for this statement.

When Adolf Hitler came to the fore, Germany was as gagged and as helpless as the victors of 1918 wanted her to be. Completely disarmed, with an army of only 100,000 men intended solely for police duties within the country, she found herself within a tightly closed ring of neighbors all armed to the teeth and leagued together. To the old enemies in the West, Britain, Belgium and France, new ones were artificially created and added in the East and the South: above all Poland and Czechoslovakia. A quarter of the population [2] of Germany were forcibly torn away from their mother country and handed over to foreign powers. The Reich, mutilated on all sides and robbed of every means of defense, at any moment could become the helpless victim of some rapacious neighbor.

Then it was that Adolf Hitler for the first time made his appeal to the common sense of the other powers. On May 17, 1933, a few months after his appointment to the office of Reichskanzler, he delivered a speech in the German Reichstag, from which we extract the following passages:

"Germany will be perfectly ready to disband her entire military establishment and destroy the small amount of arms remaining to her, if the neighboring countries will do the same thing with equal thoroughness.

... Germany is entirely ready to renounce aggressive weapons of every sort if the armed nations, on their part, will destroy their aggressive weapons within a specified period, and if their use is forbidden by an international convention.

... Germany is at all times prepared to renounce offensive weapons if the rest of the world does the same. Germany is prepared to agree to any solemn pact of non-aggression because she does not think of attacking anybody but only of acquiring security."

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