The important speech of the Fuehrer in the Reichstag on 7 March reads as follows:

Men of the German Reichstag! France has replied to the repeated friendly offers and peaceful assurances made by Germany by infringing on the Rhine Pact through a military alliance with the Soviet Union, exclusively directed against Germany. In this manner, however, the Locarno Rhine Pact has lost its inner meaning and ceased in practice to exist. Consequently, Germany regards herself for her part as no longer bound by this dissolved treaty. The German Government are now constrained to face the new situation created by this alliance, a situation which is rendered more acute by the fact that the Franco-Soviet Treaty has been supplemented by a Treaty of Alliance between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, exactly parallel in form. In accordance with the fundamental right of a nation to secure its frontiers and insure its possibilities of defense, the German Government have today restored the full and unrestricted sovereignty of Germany in the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland.

After a hard inner struggle I have, therefore, decided in the name of the German Reich Cabinet [Reichsregierung] to submit the following memorandum to the French Government and the other signatory powers of the Locarno Pact today.

We have no territorial claims to make in Europe. We know above all that all the tensions resulting either from false territorial settlements or from the disproportion of the numbers of inhabitants to their living spaces cannot, in Europe, be solved by war.