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

688 DER FUEHRERfrontier question outstanding: that of the Saar Basin and its eighthundred thousand inhabitants. Legally — as not even the peace treatiesdenied —it was German territory; but the Treaty of Versailles providedthat it was to be governed for fifteen years by a League of NationsCommission with headquarters in Saarbrucken; economically, it wasincluded in the French customs zone; the currency was French, Frenchgoods dominated the markets; the coal mines, which constituted thechief industry, were administered by a French government consortiumand French officials. The totally German territory was strangelypermeated by the French language and French customs, and the FrenchTricolors waved over the coal shafts. The ultimate fate of the territorywas to be decided by a plebiscite to be held in 1935 at the earliest. TheSaarlanders were unquestionably Germans and wanted to be Germans;the majority of the population of Alsace-Lorraine probably did not; nowHitler said:As a National Socialist, I, along with all my supporters, decline, on thebasis of our national principles, to acquire people of a strange nation, whocannot be made to love us, with the blood and life of those who are dearand precious to us. It would be a gigantic event for all mankind if bothnations, once and for all, should banish force from their mutual relations.The German nation is willing! Just as I freely invoke the rights whichare given us in the treaties themselves [he meant Versailles andLocarno] I will just as freely declare that, as far as Germany is concerned,there are no further territorial conflicts between the two countries. Afterthe return of the Saar to Germany, only a madman could conceive thepossibility of war between the two countries; from our point of viewthere can be no morally or reasonably justifiable ground for one. For noone could demand that, to achieve a correction, dubious in value as well asscope, of the present frontiers, a million human lives should be sacrificed.These declarations of peace were now submitted to the German voter,and it was to them that the question referred which he was to answer atthe polls: Do you, German man, do you, German woman, approve thispolicy of your government? Again Hitler drove and flew up and downGermany, and everywhere his word to the masses