demand that Britain return the former German African colonies. In a memo, Vansittart wrote that it was best to let the article "past in stony silence" as Rothermere "flew from topic to topic" and "it would be a waste of time and not very dignified to follow him with denials". In 1935, President Edvard Beneš of Czechoslovakia signed a defensive alliance with the Soviet Union. Taking a claim straight from Nazi propaganda, Rothermere had the Daily Mail attack Czechoslovakia as the aggressor, claiming that Germany was now threatened by the potential for Soviet forces to be in Czechoslovakia.. In October 1935, Rothermere supported the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and was opposed to the government's half-hearted policy of imposing sanctions on Italy via the League of Nations. Rothermere sent Brooks to Geneva to write an article calling for the end of the League of Nations as Brooks wrote the League would "make our sons into the hirings of some unworthy race". He had the Daily Mail support the Hoare-Laval pact of December 1935 that would had essentially rewarded Italy for invading Ethiopia. In 1936, Rothermere took an increasingly apocalyptic and hysterical tone in his writings as he became convinced that Western civilization was on the brink of destruction. The victory of the Front populaire led by the Socialist Léon Blum in the elections for the French National Assembly in May 1936 followed by the outbreak of the Spanish civil war in July convinced Rothermere that Communists were taking over Europe. The Soviet intervention in the Spanish civil war greatly upset Rothermere who wrote that a "Red victory" in Spain would mean the loss of Portugal, which in turn "would mean the destruction of all that splendid work of national development which has done by the strong and enlightened government of Dr. Salazar." Rothermere believed that a Communist government would grant the Soviet Navy bases, which allow the Soviet Union to threaten British shipping on the Western approaches. In an article entitled "Get Together with Germany" published in July 1936, Rothermere praised the Nazi regime as a force for order in a world that depicted as descending into chaos as he wrote: "...this powerful, patriotic and superbly organised country constitutes an element of stability amid those rising tendencies of disorder and disruption, which are becoming increasingly and seriously manifest in Europe". At Rothermere's urging, George Ward Price, the "extra-special correspondent" of the