English Translation

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I should like to begin by thanking the President-in-Office of the Council for his excellent report, and I would like to thank the President of the Commission for his reply. It was already evident in 1937 that the Treaty of the Alliance of France and Czechoslovakia with Soviet Russia had significantly weakened the position of power of France, and thus also Benesch's reputation in Central Europe. Poland had approached Germany even more closely and Hungary, Yugoslavia and Romania sought more and more reference to the Axis powers. Benesch did not do Czech politics, but a democratic-capitalist policy, in which Jews and emigrants, who hated Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany from the bottom of their hearts, spoke the big word. I want to say something about Benesch's Central European conception of state. As Benesch himself explained, although he had an everlasting friendship with France, he only directed himself to England when it came to political decisions. It is well known that, even before the First World War, it was the dream of British politics not only to take possession of Western Asia, but also to create a direct land route to Africa and India via the Near East. The greatest danger that England feared in Europe was the possibility of a German-Russian alliance. It was therefore England's attempt after the World War to lock Germany from Soviet Russia through a belt of seemingly free states, which were drawn from British-Western Asia across the Balkans to the Baltic regions and connected via Scandinavia to England in the North Sea. Dr. Benesch now intended to manage this isolation zone and make Prague the capital of that eastern part of Europe, which was practically a British-French colony in Europe. But in order to enable the Czech people to live in an independent state, it was necessary to break up the living space that the German nation held closed for centuries; for this reason, an independent Austria was created in Versailles and St.-Germain and 31⁄2 million Sudeten Germans were beaten to Czechoslovakia together with 3 million Slovaks and one million Hungarians. In this way, the Czechs were able to attract the western-oriented eastern part of Central Europe; Dr. Benesch expanded the base in 1920–22 by creating the originally Hungarian-directed Little Entente with Yugoslavia and Romania. Benesh gradually all countries of the eastern part of Central Europe, including Poland and 24e 10 11