Academic literature on the topic 'Saint Germain Treaty'

While the peacemakers at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 did not anticipate the extensive revanchist and state-sponsored terrorism that would bedevil the Great Powers during the interwar years, members of the British delegation persuaded their French and American counterparts that the unprecedented scale of production of weapons in wartime would lead to an upsurge in global arms trafficking in peacetime. They signed the Convention for the Control of the Trade in Arms and Ammunition, at Saint-Germain-en-Laye on September 10, 1919. National priorities and diverging security concerns in the years following the signing of treaty, however, took precedence over ratification and enforcement of the agreement. By the end of 1924, the League of Nations had emerged as the principal organization concerned with stopping international arms trafficking and keeping surplus munition stocks from being “distributed to persons and states who are not fitted to possess them.”

This chapter examines the material in four of the volumes published in the Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la seconde guerre mondiale. The main concern of this chapter is to examine how the Vatican responded to the predicament of the Jews (and also the Poles) during the Holocaust era. It begins with volume vi because this covers efforts of the Holy See to help victims of the war (especially baptized Jews) in the period between March 1939 and December 1940. The two parts of volume iii that concern Poland (in effect two separately published volumes on the same theme but chronologically divided) are treated next, since they deal predominantly with the relationship between the Vatican and the Poles. Finally, the chapter examines the letters of Pope Pius XII to the German bishops between 1939 and 1944, which are fundamentally different in character from the ‘normal’ documentation of the Vatican Secretariat of State.