Germany leaves the League of Nations

On 19 October 1933 the Reich Foreign Minister, Konstantin von Neurath, notified Joseph Avenol, Secretary-General of the League of Nations, that Germany was leaving the organisation. It was the formal act behind a decision the world had learned of five days earlier. On Saturday 14 October Adolf Hitler’s government had announced that Germany was quitting the Geneva Disarmament Conference and the League, and on the same day President Paul von Hindenburg dissolved the Reichstag and called new elections and a plebiscite for 12 November. Seven years after Germany had been admitted to the League as a symbol of the reconciliation of Locarno, Hitler broke with the system of collective security. It was the first time he had openly defied the great powers, and the first time he discovered that he would pay no price for doing so.

The dispute over “equality of rights”

The issue on which the break formally turned was older than Hitler’s rule. The Treaty of Versailles had disarmed Germany, limiting its army to 100,000 men with no tanks, heavy artillery or military aircraft. Yet the preamble to the treaty’s military clauses stated that this was intended to make possible a general limitation of the armaments of all nations. For years Weimar Germany pointed out that the victors had not kept this promise and demanded equality of rights: either the others would disarm, or Germany would be allowed to rearm. In February 1932 the Disarmament Conference convened by the League opened in Geneva under the chairmanship of the former British Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson. In the summer of 1932 Germany withdrew from its work, returning only after Britain, France, Italy and the United States recognised, on 11 December, the principle of German equality “in a system which would provide security for all nations”.

That principle, however, was never turned into any concrete agreement. France, which had occupied the Ruhr in 1923 and evacuated the Rhineland in 1930, refused to reduce its army without new guarantees of its security. In March 1933 the British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald put forward a draft convention which provided, among other things, for armies of 200,000 men each for Germany, France (in Europe), Italy and Poland. On 17 May 1933 Hitler made a speech in the Reichstag affirming his peaceful intentions and his readiness to disarm if others did the same. It sounded moderate, but at the same time the government was preparing a secret expansion of the armed forces, and Göring’s Air Ministry was taking shape.

14 October

After the first months of Nazi rule – the Enabling Act, the persecution of opponents and of Jews, and mounting reports of secret rearmament – Britain and France lost their appetite for concessions. In the autumn of 1933 they agreed on a revised plan under which, during the first years of the convention, Germany would convert the Reichswehr into a short-service army under international supervision. Only after this probationary period, usually reckoned at four years, would the other powers reduce their armaments and Germany achieve genuine equality. On the morning of 14 October the British Foreign Secretary, John Simon, presented the proposal to the conference bureau.

Hitler had long wanted to free himself from the constraints of Geneva and needed only a pretext. In the preceding days he had discussed the break with Neurath and with the Reichswehr Minister, Werner von Blomberg, and he had also obtained Hindenburg’s consent. Later on 14 October Neurath telegraphed Henderson that Germany was withdrawing from the conference because it was being denied equality of rights. The Reich government issued a proclamation to the nation declaring that Germany, as a second-class nation, could neither take part in the conference nor remain in the League. That evening Hitler gave a radio address. He spoke of his desire for peace, of how no German wanted war, and of the wrong done to Germany at Versailles, but declared that he would sign nothing that denied the German people their honour and equal rights.

Under the League Covenant a member could withdraw on two years’ notice, provided it had fulfilled its obligations. Neurath’s letter of 19 October was precisely such a notice, so Germany formally remained a member until the autumn of 1935. In practice, from October 1933 it took no further part in the League’s work or in the disarmament talks. A few months earlier, on 27 March 1933, Japan had taken the same step after being condemned for its seizure of Manchuria. Of the seven great powers of the day, only Britain, France and Italy were left in the League. The United States had never joined, and the Soviet Union was not yet a member.

The plebiscite of 12 November

Hitler decided to turn the withdrawal from the League into a demonstration of national unity. A law of July 1933 allowed the government to call plebiscites, and the vote was set for 12 November, the day after the fifteenth anniversary of the 1918 armistice. Voters received two ballot papers. On the first they voted for the Reichstag, but since July the NSDAP had been the only legal party, and the only choice was its single list. On the second they were asked whether they approved of the government’s policy as set out in the proclamation of 14 October and accepted it as the expression of their own will. A campaign against the “armaments madness” of other countries swept the whole country. Writers, professors, businessmen, bishops bound by the recent Concordat and Protestant clergy all called for a “yes” vote, and on 11 November so did Hindenburg, in a rare radio broadcast. Even Pastor Martin Niemöller, later a prisoner in the concentration camps, sent Hitler his congratulations on the decision.

According to the official results, more than 96 per cent of those entitled to vote took part in the plebiscite, and 95.1 per cent of valid votes endorsed the government’s policy. The NSDAP list received 92.1 per cent of the vote. The ballot was not free: there was no opposition, the press was subordinated to the party, and in the concentration camps and small towns it was hard to vote against. Historians nevertheless agree that the rejection of the “Versailles Diktat” as such was genuinely popular in Germany, and that many opponents of Nazism supported the decision out of national sentiment.

Reactions

The powers received Hitler’s decision with unease but without action. France was unwilling to act alone, Britain still believed an agreement was possible, and the Italy of Benito Mussolini, who a few weeks earlier had concluded a pact with the Soviet Union, tried to mediate. The Disarmament Conference continued to meet into 1934, but without Germany it no longer had any purpose. In Moscow, Germany’s departure from the League hastened a change of course: the Soviet Union began to seek membership of an organisation it had until then denounced as a tool of the imperialists.

Poland reacted quite differently. Józef Piłsudski and the Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, had long had no faith in the Geneva system, and on hearing that Germany had walked away from the disarmament table they concluded that security had to be secured through direct talks. On 15 November 1933 the new Polish envoy in Berlin, Józef Lipski, asked Hitler whether the loss of security resulting from Germany’s exit from the League could be made good by a direct Polish–German agreement. The Chancellor accepted the proposal, and the talks ended in January 1934 with the signing of a declaration of non-aggression.

Significance

Leaving the League of Nations was Hitler’s first major foreign-policy move and set the pattern for those that followed. The dictator combined a break with the Versailles order with professions of his love of peace, and used success abroad to strengthen his hold on power at home. He also saw that the Western powers would go no further than protests. From then on no international agreement constrained German rearmament. In March 1935 Hitler openly reintroduced universal conscription and revealed the existence of the Luftwaffe; in March 1936 he sent troops into the demilitarised Rhineland.

For the League of Nations, the departure of two great powers within a single year marked the beginning of the end. The organisation that had failed to stop Japan in Manchuria now lost the state whose revisionism posed the greatest threat to peace in Europe. Italy left the League as well in 1937. The Soviet Union’s entry in 1934 did not reverse the trend, and in the crises that followed, from Ethiopia to Munich, decisions were taken outside Geneva.