When he returned, Avenol told two officials of the League’s International Labor Organization that “left-wing organizations like the ILO are finished” and Europe “would be governed by Hitler, Mussolini, and…” His sentence trailed off without ending, and both of the ILO officials were certain Avenol was about to add himself.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in World War II magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Finished politically by the Ethiopian fiasco, the League had to watch helplessly as its Free City of Danzig came under the control of the Nazi Party. (The Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, had made formerly German-held land into an independent territory administered by the League of Nations, with Danzig as its capital.) The League’s only response to the unification of Germany and Austria in 1938 was to drop Austria from the dues list. And the League Assembly was a mere onlooker to the September 1939 signing of the Munich Pact, in which Britain and France permitted Hitler to take over the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. Spain’s foreign minister–who had angrily tangled with Avenol over German and Italian intervention in his nation’s civil war–noted with contempt how “the representatives of nearly fifty nations silently swallowed their indignation at being made the laughingstock of the whole world.”

Avenol brushed aside Albania’s appeal for an emergency meeting as Italy invaded that country in April 1939. And Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland never came up in Geneva. Respect for the League had fallen so far that the Gestapo invaded the home of the League high commissioner in Danzig the night before the war began, and when Britain and France sent in notifications of their declarations of war, they pointedly did not invoke the Covenant of the League of Nations–Part I of the Treaty of Versailles. Instead, they cited the Kellogg-Briand Pact–a 1928 treaty renouncing war that had been signed or ratified by every world power and almost all independent nations–and their guarantees to Poland.

By May 1940, the League’s deputy secretary-general, Sean Lester of Ireland, lamented: “The dearth of leadership and inspiration was unbelievable. The office seemed without soul. One who had known the Secretariat in the old days of glory would not have thought it could have sunk so low.”

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.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to