Germany's former colonial possessions in the Pacific (German New Guinea and German Samoa), which had been allocated to Japan after World War I as C-Class Mandates according to the Treaty of Versailles, were to be sold to Japan (both Weimar and Nazi-era Germany never relinquished claims to their pre-war colonial territories) at least temporarily in the interest of the Tripartite Pact, its alliance with that country.[55] Australia and New Zealand were designated as future Japanese territories, although Hitler lamented his belief that the white race would disappear from those regions.[56] He nevertheless made it clear to his officials that "the descendants of the convicts in Australia" were not Germany's concern and that their lands would be colonized by Japanese settlers in the immediate future, an opinion also shared by Joseph Goebbels, who expressed his conviction in his diary that the Japanese had always desired "the fifth continent" for emigration purposes.[57] In his only recorded lengthy discussion on the subject he argued that its people still lived in trees and had not yet learned to walk upright.[58] Historian Norman Rich stated that it can be assumed that Hitler would have attempted to recruit the Anglo-Saxons of these two countries as colonists for the conquered east; some of the English were to share the same fate.[56][59]