Joseph Avenol’s Betrayal of the League of Nations

The nadir was reached the next month, on the day the Germans marched into Paris. Avenol called in his Greek aide, Thanassis Aghnides, and announced, ‘That’s it, it is done.’ When Aghnides asked what Avenol meant, he was stunned by the reply from the secretary-general. ‘What the English prevented my country for three hundred years from doing, namely achieving hegemony over Europe,’ explained Avenol. ‘We must work hand-in-hand with Hitler in order to achieve the unity of Europe and expel England.’

In the next weeks Avenol praised Hitler and Mussolini, denounced Britain and the United States and declared: ‘It is the end of the world of the 19th century. We are at the beginning of a great revolution.’ He argued that, ‘except for the Germans and Italians who have a program, a doctrine, and a method, no one seems to have one….They contain things which one can no longer reject.’ He described ‘a new France, which was to be given a new soul to work in collaboration with Germany and Italy and keep the British out of Europe,’ and discussed how to use the League machinery for a new European League.

Avenol fired the last British employees and asked Aghnides and then another official, Carlos Pardo, to make contact with the German consul in Geneva. Both refused. He tried, again without success, to induce an Italian former League official, Pietro Stoppani, to open a pipeline to Rome. Avenol then made a hurried trip to Bern, Switzerland, where Lester and many others at the League were convinced he met the German and Italian ambassadors to offer to hand over the League, but Avenol later denied it.

In a final, characteristic act of self-abnegation, Avenol wrote to the Vichy government to affirm his loyalty to puppet leader Marshal Henri Pétain and offered to resign. Ordered out, he hung on in Geneva another month in a final drive to dismantle the League–firing more staff, then refusing to write a new budget and arguing that the League could not legally exist without one.

Finally, on August 31, 1940, Joseph Avenol left Geneva and the League of Nations for good. Spurned by the Vichy government, he had to flee back into Switzerland on New Year’s Eve 1943 to avoid arrest by the Germans he had praised and hoped to work with.

The job of salvaging the wreckage Avenol had left behind fell to the new secretary-general, Sean Lester, who was as principled and honorable as Avenol was corrupt. He had endured a frightening tour of duty in Danzig as high commissioner. His phones had been tapped. His butler had spied on him. Nighttime walks had been interrupted by Nazi victims, too scared to be seen at his office, appearing out of the dark to beg for help. Appointed Avenol’s deputy in 1936, he had been warned by Anthony Eden that he would probably be the next secretary-general. ‘If I thought so,’ Lester had replied, ‘you wouldn’t see my heels for the dust.’

Pressured by Avenol to resign, however, Lester dug in his heels. ‘I began my life politically in one ‘lost cause’ [Irish independence],’ he said, ‘and it seems likely I shall finish it in another.’ He gathered the League’s remaining 100 employees, counting the guards and janitors, of the original 700 into a few offices and managed to keep the League’s technical and humanitarian programs in drug control, economics, labor standards and refugee aid–which Avenol had earlier dispersed to Britain, the United States and Canada–in limited operation for the rest of the war.

Joseph Avenol outlived by six years the organization he subverted and tried to destroy. On April 18, 1946, the Assembly of the League of Nations voted to dissolve and transfer its building, assets, responsibilities and hopes to the new United Nations.

This article was written by John W. Osborn, Jr. and originally appeared in the July 1997 issue of World War II magazine. For more great articles subscribe to World War II magazine today!