Word: edenized
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What to do about the great rupture was scheduled to be decided at Geneva. Setting out by way of Paris, Britain's handsome young Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was accompanied by the Lord Privy Seal, Viscount Halifax, generally considered pro-German. In a parting speech to the House of Commons the Foreign Secretary had indicated that since the Versailles and Locarno eggs had been broken there was nothing to do but hatch new pacts and trust Germany not to break them...
Just 24 hours later Captain Eden and Lord Halifax returned to London from Paris, hastily and much perturbed. They had not been to Geneva, and frantic longdistance telephone calls to 14 European Foreign Ministers informed those statesmen that there was not going to be any going to Geneva last week. A call to this effect caught Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff as he was about to entrain in Berlin, switched his destination from Geneva to London. Emphatically in Paris "something had happened...
Stiffening was too strong a word. The British made unanimous a decision by all Locarno Powers present that the guilt of Germany in remilitarizing the Rhineland was "clear and irrefutable." This did not prevent Captain Eden from telling Ambassador von Hoesch that, if Germany would cut down her new Rhineland garrisons to a total of only 10,000 troops, Britain might be able to wangle France into some kind of deal...
...that moment last week Adolf Hitler dashing about Germany delivering was election speeches. He was quite out of touch with the experienced German diplomats of the Wilhelmstrasse whose shrewd advice in foreign policy he so often takes. Therefore the rough Realmleader's natural reaction to the Eden "smoothie" was to order von Hoesch to tell Britain in effect to go to hell. Ran the official Hitler text: "The German Government cannot enter into a discussion with regard to lasting or provisional limitation of German sovereignty in the Rhineland territory...
...Eden's frown and Flandin's cracking...