Waiting for Hitler: Have We Learned the Lessons of Locarno?

The pact planted the seeds that let totalitarianism flourish.

Lake Maggiore, Italy — During a five-hour boat trip along this picturesque lake hugging the southern slope of the Alps, the leaders of England, France, and Germany — belligerents in  World War I — dreamed of a world at perpetual peace.

The result was a series of treaties known as the Locarno Pact, the agreement that paved the way for Germany’s entry into the League of Nations on September 10, 1926. The mood of soaring optimism — the “spirit of Locarno” — seemed to herald a new age of international harmony. “Away with the rifles, machine guns, cannon!” declared French delegate Aristide Briand. “Clear the way for conciliation, arbitration, peace.”

A century later, the credulous assumptions underlying the pact and the league are stunningly clear: Paper treaties and grandiose rhetoric cannot tame the Will to Power. Whether today’s political leaders have learned the lessons of Locarno is another matter.

To be sure, the European powers had reasons to celebrate. Seven countries — Belgium, Britain, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Italy, and Poland — sent delegations to the conference in Locarno, Switzerland, a beautiful resort city on Lake Maggiore. In the end, Germany accepted all of its obligations under the Treaty of Versailles. France got a British pledge to safeguard its security. There were guarantees to maintain Germany’s western borders and the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland. After years of political isolation, Germany was admitted to the League of Nations as an equal partner.

“We all met together in great amity,” recalled Winston Churchill, who hosted meetings with German leadership at his London office, “and thought what a wonderful future would await Europe if its greatest nations became truly united and felt themselves secure.” Sir Austen Chamberlain, the British Foreign Secretary who helped negotiate the Locarno treaties, received the 1925 Nobel Peace Prize.

Yet, even at this moment of diplomatic triumph, there were violent political figures casting long shadows across the continent.

In addition to Britain and France, Italy was the other “Great Power” included in the Locarno Pact. Benito Mussolini, acting as Italy’s foreign minister as well as head of state, arrived at Locarno playing the role of the statesman. Yet, scorning the “putrid corpse of democracy,” he had seized power in 1922, establishing the first fascist regime in Europe. He proceeded to govern Italy as a dictator and gangster.

Nevertheless, Italy, along with Britain, was made the guarantor of Locarno’s Rhineland agreement. Mussolini was expected to help enforce the demilitarization of the Rhineland — the German territory bordering France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg — as stipulated by the Versailles Treaty. Never mind that he openly regarded the pacific and democratic goals of the League of Nations with contempt.

Meanwhile, Mussolini’s great admirer had recently been released from a German prison, following a botched attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic. Adolf Hitler, the charismatic leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party — the Nazi Party — refused to accept political defeat.

On February 27, 1925, Hitler made his first public appearance since his imprisonment, returning to the beer hall where he had staged his failed putsch. In an incendiary speech, he identified “the enemy” as the Weimar Republic, the communists, and the Jews. “To this struggle of ours there are only two possible issues: either the enemy passes over our bodies or we pass over theirs!”

Later that year, the first volume of Hitler’s prison memoir, Mein Kampf, appeared in German bookstores. Subtitled “A Reckoning,” it offered a glimpse into the racist nightmare that would soon haunt and terrorize Europe. The 400-page diatribe laid out the alleged ills afflicting Germany: the ongoing military threat of France, the degenerative effects of “mongrel” races on the German character, and the need for more “living space,” i.e., expanding Germany’s borders eastward.

On this latter point, the Locarno Pact prevaricated — with devastating results. After the First World War, the modern state of Poland was created, in part, out of Germany’s eastern border: a source of intense German anger and resentment. The German negotiators at Locarno ruled out any diplomatic plan to guarantee the frontiers of Poland.

Polish leaders immediately condemned the pact for creating a geopolitical vulnerability. Under Locarno, Great Britain and Italy guaranteed Germany’s western borders but offered no military assurances to defend Poland’s borders with Germany. Thus, Germany was given what looked like a free hand to alter its eastern borders without inviting a military response. Józef Piłsudski, Poland’s first Chief of State, denounced Locarno for creating “a particularly bad and dangerous international system for the future.”

Almost as soon as Hitler and his Nazi Party seized power, in January 1933, the inherent weaknesses of the international system became apparent. The architects of Locarno had not reckoned with the possibility of a totalitarian state hellbent on military domination.

In October, Hitler stormed out of the World Disarmament Conference and pulled Germany out of the League of Nations. Almost immediately, he secretly built up the German military, established an air force, and began building battle cruisers and submarines. On March 17, 1934, amid a sea of military uniforms, Hitler staged a massive ceremony at the State Opera House. The shackles of the Versailles Treaty were being publicly shattered.

Nevertheless, on May 21, Hitler delivered a conciliatory “peace speech” to the Reichstag. “The principal effect of every war is to destroy the flower of the nation . . . Germany needs peace and desires peace!” The “renaissance of the West” was at hand, he said, and Germany intended to make “an imperishable contribution to this great work.” Once Germany’s “equality” with other nations was firmly established, he said, she would rejoin the League of Nations. In the meantime, Hitler promised to honor Germany’s nonaggression pact with Poland and “uphold and fulfill all obligations arising out of the Locarno Treaty.”

Hitler’s speech was hailed in the West as a masterstroke for international peace and security. “These were honeyed words of peace, reason and conciliation,” wrote journalist William Shirer, who was present in the Opera House, “and in the Western democracies of Europe, where the people and their governments desperately yearned for the continuance of peace on any reasonable basis, on almost any basis, they were lapped up.”

Even as Hitler spoke, however, his plans for territorial expansion were being drawn up. On March 7, 1936, he ordered 19 infantry battalions into the demilitarized Rhineland.

The Locarno Pact, with its numerous security guarantees, was finally put to the test. If France mobilized its army, it could drive the Germans out, discrediting Hitler and the Nazi Party. But France looked to Britain, which in turn looked to Mussolini’s Italy. Il Duce, of course, ignored their diplomatic messages — he was busy expanding Italy’s colonial empire with his invasion of Ethiopia.

In both cases, the League of Nations imposed ineffective sanctions and took no other action. In October 1936, Mussolini signed the “Rome-Berlin Axis” pact with Hitler. “Following Ethiopia, the League was reduced to idealistic irrelevance,” writes historian Ian Kershaw. “As an instrument intended to uphold and secure the peace of Europe, it was dead.”

The “spirit of Locarno” died along with it. The dark future envisioned by the Polish leadership at Locarno arrived like a thunderbolt on September 1, 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland on its western border, igniting the Second World War. Within 35 days, Poland became the first of many victims of the Nazi Blitzkrieg.

All of this deserves to be remembered as the democratic West confronts new forms of totalitarian aggression. In Beijing, Pyongyang, Tehran, and Moscow, the storyline is the same: The dictators and gangsters are in control. Lies and propaganda are the currency of the realm. Their political lifeblood is the lust to dominate. And no peace treaties, paper alliances, or “memorandums of understanding” — no modern version of the Locarno Pact — will stop them.