A series of international agreements drawn up in Locarno, a health resort in Switzerland at the north end of Lake Maggiore. Their object was to ease tension by guaranteeing the common boundaries of Germany, Belgium, and France as specified in the Versailles Peace Settlement in 1919. Gustav Stresemann, as German Foreign Minister, refused to accept Germany’s eastern frontier with Poland and Czechoslovakia as unalterable, but agreed that alteration must come peacefully. In the ‘spirit of Locarno’ Germany was invited to join the League of Nations. In 1936, denouncing the principal Locarno treaty, Hitler sent his troops into the demilitarized Rhineland; in 1938 he annexed the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, and in 1939 invaded Poland.