ABSTRACT
Document Three, ‘Note concerning the consequences that follow, from a military point of view, from Germany’s renunciation of the Locarno Treaty’ is a wideranging assessment, prepared by the intelligence department (the Deuxième Bureau) of the French army General Staff in early April 1936. The document was drafted at a key moment in the history of international relations between the two world wars. By marching troops into the Rhineland on 7 March 1936, Germany smashed the last and, from the French perspective, the strongest pillar of the post-1918 order in Europe. The demilitarised status of the Rhineland had been entrenched in Articles 42 through 44 of the Treaty of Versailles. It was also guaranteed by Germany, France, Britain and Italy in the series of inter-locking treaties of mutual guarantee that made up the Locarno Accords of 6 October 1925. Locarno had been at the centre of French security policy since the mid-1920s. Its violation by Germany was therefore a challenge to the existing political order and a grave blow to French strategy and diplomacy.1
