Scholarly Work

Fit to burst with pride at the latest achievement of laborious German scholarship, secretaries of the Berlin Foreign Office last week called in correspondents of all nations to inspect a 100,000-word White Book titled Documentary pre-History of War. Published simultaneously in twelve languages, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop's rebuttal to Lord Halifax consists of 482 documents adduced to prove the complete war guiltlessness of Nazi Germany.

Correspondents were told Lord Halifax's British Blue Book was a poor thing, hastily published immediately after the outbreak of hostilities, not a scholarly work at all. The Foreign Office spokesman carefully emphasized that the White Book, much longer, and published three months after the outbreak of the war, is a scholarly, accurate German work.

Digging into the fat tome, which in English runs to 344 pages, scholars noted that it falls into four sections. The first, comprising more than half the book, rehearses the whole of German-Polish relations, 1919-39, to depict "The Fight Against the Germans in Poland and Against Danzig and Germany's Attempts Under National Socialism to Reach an Understanding with Poland." This is largely made up of reports by German diplomats and consuls in Poland of "injustices" and "atrocities" suffered by expatriate Germans at the hands of Poles. The short second section, "The British War Policy," accusingly produces 38 documents to prove that Great Britain, after Munich, did not halt her rearmament program. This section was published last month (TIME, Dec. n). Section three, "Germany's Efforts to Secure Peaceful Relations With Its Neighbors," traces the activities of the Fuehrer "to achieve good relations" with Great Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Lithuania. The Fuehrer is quoted (cracking back when British Ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson complained of German noncooperation with Britain) : "It takes two to make a love match." In the fourth and final section, "Poland as the Tool of England's War Will," the German White Book duplicates many of the British Blue Book's documents on the August 1939 crisis, but omits altogether the German-Soviet Pact, the curtain raiser to World War II.

Other omissions: the text of the Munich Pact; President Roosevelt's proposal that Germany guarantee neighboring States against aggression, although the blistering Reichstag speech of the Fuehrer in reply to Mr. Roosevelt is given. In effect, the White Book argues that if all the events of the last 20 years are taken as a whole, there can be no doubt that Germans and Germany have always been right. Nearest thing to a juicy revelation is the disclosure that shortly before the Fuehrer and the late Polish Dictator Marshal Josef Pilsudski made their ten-year Peace Pact in 1934, the German Legation in Warsaw was advised by the Berlin Foreign Office that the Pact "in no sense includes recognition of the present German east border but on the contrary brings to expression that with this document a basis for the solution of all problems, including herewith the territorial, is to be created."

The White Book's wealth of hitherto unpublished material should be welcomed by future historians, who can use it to prove either side of the case.

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