Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

620 DER FUEHRERthere was not a word of the hoped-for statement that after disarmamenthad taken place the United States would join in guaranteeing the newEuropean state of peace.Bitter feelings in London and Paris! The Daily Telegraph in Londonwrote that, aside from Hitler, all the statesmen who had received thePresident's message would view it with disappointment; the MorningPost declared that if Roosevelt was not prepared for warlikeintervention, he could not secure peace. In France the same Echo deParis, which only a short time before had been so enthusiastic aboutRoosevelt, bluntly stated that America understood nothing and hadlearned nothing. But the reaction of Rome was that Italy accepted theAmerican President's proposal 'unconditionally.'The next day Hitler said almost the same thing to an astonishedGerman Reichstag and an astonished world. The world, and the Germanpublic as well, had expected a speech full of violent threats, a speech inwhich Hitler would outdo Papen's battlefield bombast. Instead of this,Hitler said:'The proposal of the American President, of which I learned onlytoday' — and which, it had to be admitted, granted Germany no heavyarms — 'obligates the German government to warm thanks. Germany isready to agree without further discussion to this method for relief of theinternational crisis. . . . Heavy offensive weapons are exactly whatGermany does not possess. . . . The only nation which might justifiablysuffer from fear of an invasion is Germany. . . . Germany is prepared atany time to renounce offensive weapons if the rest of the worldrenounces them. . . . Germany is prepared to participate in any solemnnon-aggression pact, for Germany does not think of an attack, but of hersecurity.'This was a complete reversal of the German foreign policy initiatedby Schleicher. But it was not, as most of his audience and readersthought, a reversal of the foreign policy formulated by Hitler more thantwo years before. It was the continuation of his tactics formulated in hiscorrespondence with Herve and Papen. Two years before, he hadwarned his Sudeten German supporters that a war would only carryBolshevism into Europe, and now he repeated that the consequence of awar, however it turned out,