-3-                             
 
 
 
we had received no reply to the State Department's invitation to send
delegates to the proposed April conference in Washington.
The reply was that the Economics and Labor ministries objected- i.e.,
Nazi officials.
 
 
When one, therefore, wonders about the possibility of a real peace
conference in Washington or elsewhere, the answer is: Will Germany or
Italy confer seriously with any other peoples when their major aims are
to dominate Europe and do it by frightening the populations of
democratic countries? Several times since I have been here the peoples
of England and France, especially those of smaller nations, have been
frightened so that they yielded, events in Ethiopia and Spain being
best examples. At the same time, great business companies of all
democratic countries have supported the German-Italian demands by
increasing sales of arms and war supplies, ours quite as much as
others. Even small countries, like Rumania, have risked their own fates
by selling war materials.
 
 
So, how can a peace conference succeed? 0nly through a real
economic-finance cooperation between England, France and the United
States. Can this be done? You know how much opposition English and
French businessmen made to the Buenos Aires proposals - almost as much
as Italy and Germany made through secret propaganda before and while
you were in Latin America. In case Spain is actually annexed by
Mussolini and then Germany proceeds to make moves into the eastern zone
(same as the 1900-1914 policy of army officials here), England and
France might be frightened enough to join the United States in real
peace agreements. But one can never know what the DuPonts and the steel
people cooperating in Europe with
(15) Schacht