Germany announced on October 14, 1933 that it was leaving the League of Nations and the Geneva disarmament talks, and the announcement was put to the German people in a plebiscite that returned a claimed 95 per cent in favour. Hitler said the other powers had refused Germany equality and treated it as second-class. He framed the withdrawal as a blow for honour. It was the first open break with the treaty system set up at Versailles.
The break had been building. It began in January. Germany had joined the League only in 1926, and had spent years negotiating about the size of its army under the disarmament clauses, and by the autumn of 1933 Hitler had concluded that no amount of talk would give him what he wanted, which was the right to rearm openly. He took Germany out, and he took the opportunity to tell the army and the world what was coming, in a broadcast the same day.
The effect was quick. Freed of the League's supervision and of the disarmament talks, Germany began rebuilding the army without the pretence of limits, reintroduced conscription in 1935, and reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936, each step a repudiation of Versailles and each one met by the other powers with notes rather than force. The League, which had been meant to stop exactly this, watched its authority drain away.
Germany never went back. The League limped through the 1930s and was wound up after the war, and its failure to check the withdrawals of Germany, Japan and Italy in the middle of the decade is the standard example of what a league of states without the will to enforce its rules can and cannot do. The plebiscite that endorsed the withdrawal was held with the party's full machinery behind it, and the result was taken everywhere as a vote for Hitler rather than for the League question it claimed to ask.