Page 125 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

112 The French Diplomats

Brownshirts. Hitler and François-Poncet continued to discuss the issue
32
of the two paramilitary organizations at several meetings early in 1934, but
the Führer would not budge. in a conversation with Foreign Minister Neu-
rath, the French ambassador pointed out that the amplification of these
two paramilitary organizations equipped Germany with the largest military
establishment in the world. He tried to prod Neurath into voicing his own
opinion by stating that he could not possibly expect France to “give its
blessing to such a system.” But neither the foreign minister nor any other
Nazi leader would retreat from the claim that the ss and sa were purely
political bodies. this conceit had become a part of Nazi orthodoxy. 33
Nevertheless, François-Poncet clung to the position that some agree-
ment might yet be possible because Germany was too weak to sustain an
aggressive foreign policy. But he now watered down the expectations. early
in 1934 he proposed that the goal of total disarmament be abandoned in
favor of “limited and controlled rearmament.” “any agreement,” he argued,
“even a mediocre one . . . [would be] better than none.” He ruled out the
imposition of sanctions because neither Great Britain nor italy would agree
to them; even France would probably demur. Years later, François-Poncet
claimed that he never expected Hitler to “scrupulously observe limitations
and rulings imposed by an international convention: i knew he was a cheat.”
But he thought that an agreement on partial disarmament would “embar-
rass him and slow him down; that the institution of a board of surveillance,
to which complaints might certainly be addressed, would hamper the free-
dom of his movements; and that abuses cited by this board would place
him in a poor position both before nations too readily inclined to trust him
and before his own people. i also believed that publicity given to his acts
of fraud, constituting a warning and an alarm more arresting than ambas-
sadorial reports, would incite our government and the whole country to
devote all their energies, all their labor, and all their ardor to increasing the
strength of our military apparatus.” 34
On May 30, 1934, François-Poncet framed yet another argument de-
signed to buttress his position on the limitation of rearmament. He did
so in response to a question he had posed to himself: will the Nazis be
guided by party doctrines in formulating future policies? His answer, radi-
cally different from some of his own earlier views and certainly from those
of rumbold or the american diplomats in Germany, was that, “in reality,
the politics practiced by the leaders of the third reich is a politics of ‘cir-
cumstances,’ whose characteristic feature is its opportunism.” in short, in
formulating state policies, Hitler and his subordinates reacted to specific