The "Saar question" has ceased to be "a Franco-German question. requires a trip to this tiny territory to realize that the conflict here is purely an internal German conflict.
is a conflict over Hitler.
Adolf Hitler was unknown to the makers of the Treaty of Versailles. ]When the paragraphs concerning the JSaar were written, the present Chan-Jcellor of Germany was a lance corporal just demobilized, and casting Jabout Munich for a political toehold.
So the treaty makers wrote that because the German army had Jdestroyed the coal mines in Northern France, the Saar coal mines should jgo to France. The Saar territory would cease to be a part of Germany for fifteen years. It would become a Jcustoms and currency unit with France. It would be governed by a commission of the League of Nations. The mines would be counted as worth 300,000,000 gold marks on the sum Germany owed France for reparations. At the end of fifteen years the population would vote. If they voted to return to Germany, France would re-sell the mines to Germany Jat a price fixed by one French, one [German and one neutral expert.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.