White Paper

No shady "deal" signed in Paris but a sturdy British White Paper announced to the world last week the terms on which Britain, France, Italy and Belgium are willing to settle with Germany the issue of Adolf Hitler's treaty-breaking remilitarization of the Rhineland:

I. During the period of negotiation British and Italian troops occupy a zone in Germany 12 1/2 miles wide bordering the French Frontier.

II. No further German forces enter the Rhineland and no fortifications are erected there.

III. The German charge that the Franco-Soviet mutual assistance treaty violates the Locarno Pact is adjudicated by the Permanent Court for International Justice at The Hague.

IV. An international conference makes Adolf Hitler's peace proposals and others the subject of negotiation.

V. The general staffs of Britain, France, Italy and Belgium remain in constant liaison "for the period of emergency," the implication being that if no peaceful solution is reached by the Conference this liaison solidifies into a British-French-Italian-Belgian military alliance.

Significance. The releasing in London of such a British White Paper as this forced observers to surmise that either Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and Premier Benito Mussolini have secretly almost settled their differences about Ethiopia, or else that the whole project of having British & Italian soldiers guard the Rhineland shoulder-to-shoulder was sheer diplomatic March Madness. The Dean & Chapter of Liverpool's Anglican Cathedral were so incensed that they refused to offer the usual Sunday prayers for His Majesty's Government and to the congregation Canon Thomas Arthur Edwards Davey cried: "We will not lead you to pray for blessings upon proposals which require Britain to link arms with the armies of the country which is committing barbarous outrages upon the defenseless people of Ethiopia."

In Berlin, Adolf Hitler closeted himself with Joachim von Ribbentrop and Foreign Minister von Neurath, stewed over the White Paper most of a day and a night. Next afternoon von Ribbentrop and his aides appeared at Templehof Airport with a locked briefcase, boarded a plane, landed at dusk in London, where a "No!" but not a flat refusal to negotiate was expected to come out of the briefcase. It was understood that the German counterproposals would be amplified "orally."

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