Locarno Signed: Europe's Last Hope for Peace

The Germans called it their "diplomatic Versailles," a treaty they actually chose to sign. Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann walked into the London ceremony on December 1, 1925, with France and Belgium agreeing to Germany's western borders, something the Treaty of Versailles had simply imposed six years earlier. The Locarno Treaties were actually a set of seven agreements negotiated in the Swiss lakeside town of Locarno in October 1925. The centerpiece was the Rhineland Pact, in which Germany, France, Belgium, Britain, and Italy guaranteed the inviolability of the Franco-German and Belgian-German borders and the demilitarization of the Rhineland. Stresemann's strategy was to stabilize Germany's western frontier in order to preserve flexibility in the east. The treaties deliberately omitted guarantees of Germany's eastern borders with Poland and Czechoslovakia. Those countries received French promises of mutual assistance, but not German recognition of their territorial integrity. The asymmetry was intentional and consequential. Locarno earned Stresemann and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926 and facilitated Germany's admission to the League of Nations. The treaties created what contemporaries called the "Spirit of Locarno," a brief period of European optimism and cooperation that collapsed with the Great Depression. Hitler withdrew from Locarno in 1936, remilitarized the Rhineland in violation of the treaty, and the framework that was supposed to prevent another war became evidence that appeasement had started earlier than anyone wanted to admit. The eastern borders that Locarno left deliberately vague were the ones Hitler violated first.