Municipality of Rhineland
The Municipality of Rhineland is a rural municipality (RM) in the Canadian province of Manitoba that incorporated on January 1, 2015 via the amalgamation of the Rural Municipality of Rhineland and the towns of Gretna and Plum Coulee. It was formed as a requirement of "The Municipal Amalgamations Act", which required municipalities with a population less than 1,000 to amalgamate with one or more neighbouring municipalities by 2015. The Government of Manitoba initiated the amalgamations for municipalities to meet the 1997 minimum population requirement of 1,000 to incorporate a municipality.
Remilitarization of the Rhineland
As regards Germany, it had always been assumed by the states of the "cordon sanitaire" that if Germany should attack any of them, France would respond by beginning an offensive into western Germany. Long before 1933, German military and diplomatic elites had regarded the Rhineland's demilitarized status as only temporary, and planned to remilitarize the Rhineland at the first favorable diplomatic opportunity. In December 1918, at a meeting of Germany's leading generals (the German Army functioned as a "state within the state"), it had decided that the chief aim would be to rebuild German military power to launch a new world war to win the "world power status" that the "Reich" had sought, but failed to win in the last war. All through the 1920s and the early 1930s, the "Reichswehr" had been developing plans for a war to destroy France and its ally Poland, which necessarily presumed remilitarization of the Rhineland. Steps were taken by the German government to prepare for the remilitarization, such as keeping former barracks in a good state of repair, hiding military materials in secret depots, and building customs and fire watch towers that could be easily converted into observation and machine gun posts along the frontier.