JUSTICE AND TREATIES

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 59, Issue 4186, 15 September 1939, Page 6

JUSTICE AND TREATIES

WHAT WAS THE GERMAN ATTITUDE ? MYTHS AND OBSERVATION. To many people the explanation of Germany’s frame of mind is the “ injustices” of the Peace of Versailles (says an article in the Contemporary Review by Victor Germains). The German people, we are told, are maddened by intolerable wrongs. Appease these wrongs and you will get peace; fail to appease them, and the best you will get is war, which will mean new wrongs and new wars in the course of time, even if you are victorious.

My personal feelings, based upon eight years of intimate knowledge of Germany and the Germans, is that the alleged wrongs of the Peace of Versailles have very little to do with present-day German intransigence. First of all, the Peace of Versailles was, under the conditions of thetimes, the only peace possible. After four and a half years of war with Germany, with public passion roused by savage outrages—and the memory of what Germany actually did in Belgium and in Northern France has too easily passed from mind—no British or French Government could actually have shown greater generosity

to Germany. It would merely have been kicked out of office if it had tried. Secondly, no British or French Government could actually have waged war against Poland or Czechoslovakia for the sake of the revision of terms deemed onerous or unjust by Germany.

Thus, all this talk of the “ injustice ” or otherwise of the Peace of Versailles is academic. Incidentally, the Peace of Versailles was very much more generous to Germany than any conceivable terms that would have been offered by Germany had she been victorious, and is much more generous than the terms dictated by Hitler to Czechoslovakia at the sword’s point. One doesn’t quite see why we should always be running round in sackcloth and ashes, lamenting over our alleged deficiencies at Versailles. The terms given were less hard than Germany really deserved.

The truth of the matter seems to me that if a Government wishes to attack its neighbours in greed, whe-

ther of territory or of gold, it will always be able to manufacture some pretext convincing to its own people if not to the world at large. Had Germany been treated more generously at Versailles we should not have avoided the present crisis; it would only have come earlier, and perhaps upon a more intense scale— for the really unpardonable crime perpetrated by England and France in the last war is that they won it and Germany lost.