Again Neutral

Little mountain-locked Switzerland, with a tradition of neutrality rooted four centuries back, kept out of the last war and is determined to keep out of the next. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, France, Switzerland's neighbor on the west, assured her that her neutrality would be kept inviolate. Last week she received the same assurance from her other two neighbors, Italy and Germany, Europe's major nonLeague powers.

By an agreement drawn in London in 1920, governing Switzerland's adherence to the League, the nation was made exempt from any participation in League military undertakings, but remained obligated to participate in economic and financial sanctions applicable under Article XVI of the League Covenant. Weakening of the League system, however, convinced Switzerland that her position would be more secure if she returned to unconditional neutrality. Accordingly, two months ago the Government at Berne dispatched a note to League headquarters at Geneva renouncing Switzerland's remaining sanction obligations. Shortly thereafter, Swiss Foreign Minister Dr. Giuseppe Motta took pains to inform the German and Italian Governments of Switzerland's step. Last week, in notes issued simultaneously in Berlin and Rome, they made their acknowledgments.

"The German Government has taken note with great interest that the Swiss Government has been successful in its efforts to free itself of obligations that were indeed liable to endanger its neutrality. . . . The Swiss Government can therefore be assured that its determination to remain neutral at all times will find a corresponding determination on the part of the German Government to acknowledge and respect this neutrality," wrote Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano replied in almost identical terms.

Now a member of the League in little but name, the Government of Switzerland is cool to playing host to the League which is permanently planted in a new, $10,000,000 palace in Geneva. Last week the German press took up the problem. Under Switzerland's new neutral position the further stay of "the one-sided power and propaganda apparatus of the League on Swiss soil must become a constant and embarrassing burden for the Swiss Government," warned the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung.

While last week's German assurance in effect guaranteed Switzerland that no German troops would march through her territory in event of war, it did not preclude the possibility that Chancellor Hitler may one day gobble the nation whole. There are some 3,000,000 Germans, "racial comrades" of the Fuehrer, within the nation's boundaries. Fully three-fourths of the population speak German. Reich Field Marshal Goering recently published in his National Zeitung a map of Greater Germany, prepared by Reich propagandists for school use, which pictured practically the whole of Switzerland as belonging to the Reich. The Swiss frontier is "the boundary of the internal separation of the German people," announced Goering's newssheet and claimed Switzerland's 3,000,000 Germans as "exiled citizens of the German Reich." Official Swiss protests registered in Berlin brought a semiofficial promise that the map would be withdrawn from educational circulation.

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