"When questioned Laval said "well it's only his word against mine as there were "nip witnesses present when we spoke." His questioner, the Paris correspondent of "The Times," said "He seemed to have relished; rather than regretted the absence of witnesses."
"In October 1934. two years: after the fall of his own Government, Laval became Foreign Minister after the murder of Barthou in Marseilles. "immediately he started to sound out both Mussolini and Hitler with the idea of buying them off.
"Ribbentrop, Hitler's Ambassador-at-Large, had a mysterious interview with Laval in December during his visit to Paris as a result of which the decision which had apparently already been reached to postpone the Saar plebiscite for ten years, was abandoned in return for one of Hitler's subsequently infamous "ne further territorial claims" afirmations.
"This led directly (o Hitler's first breach of the Versailles Treaty, the introduction of military conscription in Germany.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.