[b]14: THE TURN OF POLAND[/b]

 

 

ON OCTOBER 24, 1938, less than a month after Munich, Ribbentrop was host to Jozef Lipski, the Polish ambassador in Berlin, at a three-hour lunch at the Grand Hotel in Berchtesgaden. Poland, like Germany and indeed in connivance with her, had just seized a strip of Czech territory. The luncheon talk proceeded, as a German Foreign Office memorandum stressed, "in a very friendly atmosphere." [1]

 

Nevertheless, the Nazi Foreign Minister lost little time in getting down to business. The time had come, he said, for a general settlement between Poland and Germany. It was necessary, first of all, he continued, "to speak with Poland about Danzig." It should "revert" to Germany. Also, Ribbentrop said, the Reich wished to build a super motor highway and a double-track railroad across the Polish Corridor to connect Germany with Danzig and East Prussia. Both would have to enjoy extraterritorial rights. Finally, Hitler wished Poland to join the Anti-Comintern Pact against Russia. In return for all these concessions, Germany would be willing to extend the Polish-German treaty by from ten to twenty years and guarantee Poland's frontiers.

 

Ribbentrop emphasized he was broaching these problems "in strict confidence." He suggested that the ambassador make his report to Foreign Minister Beck "orally -- since otherwise there was great danger of its leaking out, especially to the press." Lipski promised to report to Warsaw but warned Ribbentrop that personally he saw "no possibility" of the return of Danzig to Germany. He further reminded the German Foreign Minister of two recent occasions -- November 5, 1937, and January 14, 1938 -- when Hitler had personally assured the Poles that he would not support any change in the Danzig Statute. [2] Ribbentrop replied that he did not wish an answer now, but advised the Poles "to think it over."

 

The government in Warsaw did not need much time to collect its thoughts. A week later, on October 31, Foreign Minister Beck dispatched detailed instructions to his ambassador in Berlin on how to answer the Germans. But it was not until November 19 that the latter was able to secure an interview with Ribbentrop -- the Nazis obviously wanted the Poles to consider well their response. It was negative. As a gesture of understanding, Poland was willing to replace the League of Nations' guarantee of Danzig with a German-Polish agreement about the status of the Free City.

 

"Any other solution," Beck wrote in a memorandum which Lipski read to Ribbentrop, "and in particular any attempt to incorporate the Free City into the Reich, must inevitably lead to conflict." And he added that Marshal Pilsudski, the late dictator of Poland, had warned the Germans in 1934, during the negotiations for a nonaggression pact, that "the Danzig question was a sure criterion for estimating Germany's intentions toward Poland."

 

Such a reply was not to Ribbentrop's taste. "He regretted the position taken by Beck" and advised the Poles that it was "worth the trouble to give serious consideration to the German proposals." [3]

 

Hitler's response to Poland's rebuff on Danzig was more drastic. On November 24, five days after the Ribbentrop-Lipski meeting, he issued another directive to the commanders in chief of the armed forces.

 

[quote]TOP SECRET

 

The Fuehrer has ordered: Apart from the three contingencies mentioned in the instructions of 10/21/38 [i] preparations are also to be made to enable the Free State of Danzig to be occupied by German troops by surprise.

 

The preparations will be made on the following basis: Condition is a quasi-revolutionary occupation of Danzig, exploiting a politically favorable situation, not a war against Poland. [ii] ...

 

The troops to be employed for this purpose must not simultaneously be earmarked for the occupation of the Memelland, so that both operations can, if necessary, take place simultaneously. The Navy will support the Army's operation by attack from the sea ... The plans of the branches of the armed forces are to be submitted by January 10, 1939.[/quote]

 

Though Beck had just warned that an attempt by Germany to take Danzig would lead "inevitably" to conflict, Hitler now convinced himself that it could be done without a war. Local Nazis controlled Danzig and they took their orders, as had the Sudeteners, from Berlin. It would not be difficult to stir up a "quasi-revolutionary" situation there.

 

Thus, as 1938 approached its end, the year that had seen the bloodless occupation of Austria and the Sudetenland, Hitler was preoccupied with further conquest: the remainder of Czechoslovakia, Memel, and Danzig. It had been easy to humble Schuschnigg and Benes. Now it was J6zef Beck's turn.

 

Yet, when the Fuehrer received the Polish Foreign Minister at Berchtesgaden shortly after New Year's -- on January 5, 1939 -- he was not yet prepared to give him the treatment which he had meted out to Schuschnigg and was shortly to apply to President Hacha. The rest of Czechoslovakia would have to be liquidated first. Hitler, as the secret Polish and German minutes of the meeting make clear, was in one of his more conciliatory moods. He was "quite ready," he began, "to be at Beck's service." Was there anything "special," he asked, on the Polish Foreign Minister's mind? Beck replied that Danzig was on his mind. It became obvious that it had also been on Hitler's.

 

"Danzig is German," the Fuehrer reminded his guest, "will always remain German, and will sooner or later become part of Germany." He could give the assurance, however, that "no fait accompli would be engineered in Danzig."

 

He wanted Danzig and he wanted a German highway and railroad across the Corridor. If he and Beck would "depart from old patterns and seek solutions along entirely new lines," he was sure they could reach an agreement which would do justice to both countries.

 

Beck was not so sure. Though, as he confided to Ribbentrop the next day, he did not want to be too blunt with the Fuehrer, he had replied that "the Danzig problem was a very difficult one." He did not see in the Chancellor's suggestion any "equivalent" for Poland. Hitler thereupon pointed out the "great advantage" to Poland "of having her frontier with Germany, including the Corridor, secured by treaty." This apparently did not impress Beck, but in the end he agreed to think the problem over further. [4]

 

After mulling it over that night, the Polish Foreign Minister had a talk with Ribbentrop the next day in Munich. He requested him to inform the Fuehrer that whereas all his previous talks with the Germans had filled him with optimism, he was today, after his meeting with Hitler, "for the first time in a pessimistic mood." Particularly in regard to Danzig, as it had been raised by the Chancellor, he "saw no possibility whatever of agreement." [5]

 

It had taken Colonel Beck, like so many others who have figured in these pages, some time to awaken and to arrive at such a pessimistic view. Like most Poles, he was violently anti-Russian. Moreover, he disliked the French, for whom he had nursed a grudge since 1923, when, as Polish military attache in Paris, he had been expelled for allegedly selling documents relating to the French Army. Perhaps it had been natural for this man, who had become Polish Foreign Minister in November 1932, to turn to Germany. For the Nazi dictatorship he had felt a warm sympathy from the beginning, and over the past six years he had striven to bring his country closer to the Third Reich and to weaken its traditional ties with France.

 

Of all the countries that lay on the borders of Germany, Poland had, in the long run, the most to fear. Of all the countries, it had been the most blind to the German danger. No other provision of the Versailles Treaty had been resented by the Germans as much as that which established the Corridor, giving Poland access to the sea -- and cutting off East Prussia from the Reich. The detachment of the old Hanseatic port of Danzig from Germany and its creation as a free city under the supervision of the League of Nations, but dominated economically by Poland, had equally outraged German public opinion. Even the weak and peaceful Weimar Republic had never accepted what it regarded as the Polish mutilation of the German Reich. As far back as 1922, General von Seeckt, as we have seen, [iii] had defined the German Army's attitude.

 

[quote]Poland's existence is intolerable and incompatible with the essential conditions of Germany's life. Poland must go and will go -- as a result of her own internal weaknesses and of action by Russia -- with our aid ... The obliteration of Poland must be one of the fundamental drives of German policy [and] is attainable by means of, and with the help of, Russia.[/quote]

 

Prophetic words!

 

The Germans forgot -- or perhaps did not wish to remember -- that almost all of the German land awarded Poland at Versailles, including the provinces of Posen and Polish Pomerania (Pomorze), which formed the Corridor, had been grabbed by Prussia at the time of the partitions when Prussia, Russia and Austria had destroyed the Polish nation. For more than a millennium it had been inhabited by Poles -- and, to a large extent, it still was.

 

No nation re-created by Versailles had had such a rough time as Poland. In the first turbulent years of its rebirth it had waged aggressive war against Russia, Lithuania, Germany and even Czechoslovakia -- in the last instance over the coal-rich Teschen area. Deprived of their political freedom for a century and a half and thus without modern experience in self-rule, the Poles were unable to establish stable government or to begin to solve their economic and agrarian problems. In 1926 Marshal Pilsudski, the hero of the 1918 revolution, had marched on Warsaw, seized control of the government and, though an old-time Socialist, had gradually replaced a chaotic democratic regime with his own dictatorship. One of his last acts, before his death in 1935, was to sign a treaty of nonaggression with Hitler. This took place on January 26, 1934, and, as has been recounted, [iv] was one of the first steps in the undermining of France's system of alliances with Germany's Eastern neighbors and in the weakening of the League of Nations and its concept of collective security. After Pilsudski's death, Poland was largely governed by a small band of "colonels," leaders of Pilsudski's old Polish Legion which had fought against Russia during the First World War. At the head of these was Marshal Smigly-Rydz, a capable soldier but in no way a statesman. Foreign policy drifted into the hands of Colonel Beck. From 1934 on, it became increasingly pro-German.

 

This was bound to be a policy of suicide. And indeed when one considers Poland's position in post-Versailles Europe it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Poles in the nineteen thirties, as on occasions in the centuries before, were driven by some fateful flaw in their national character toward self-destruction and that in this period, as sometimes formerly, they were their own worst enemies. As long as Danzig and the Corridor existed as they were, there could be no lasting peace between Poland and Nazi Germany. Nor was Poland strong enough to afford the luxury of being at odds with both her giant neighbors, Russia and Germany. Her relations with the Soviet Union had been uniformly bad since 1920, when Poland had attacked Russia, already weakened by the World War and the civil war, and a savage conflict had followed. [v]

 

Seizing an opportunity to gain the friendship of a country so stoutly anti-Russian and at the same time to detach her from Geneva and Paris, thus undermining the system of Versailles, Hitler had taken the initiative in bringing about the Polish-German pact of 1934. It was not a popular move in Germany. The German Army, which had been pro-Russian and anti-Polish since the days of Seeckt, resented it. But it served Hitler admirably for the time being. Poland's sympathetic friendship helped him to get first things done first: the reoccupation of the Rhineland, the destruction of independent Austria and Czechoslovakia. On all of these steps, which strengthened Germany, weakened the West and threatened the East, Beck and his fellow colonels in Warsaw looked on benevolently and with utter and inexplicable blindness.

 

If the Polish Foreign Minister at the very start of the new year had, as he said, been plunged into a pessimistic mood by Hitler's demands, his spirits sank much lower with the coming of spring. Though in his anniversary speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, Hitler spoke in warm terms of "the friendship between Germany and Poland" and declared that it was "one of the reassuring factors in the political life in Europe," Ribbentrop had talked with more frankness when he paid a state visit to Warsaw four days before. He again raised with Beck the question of Hitler's demands concerning Danzig and communications through the Corridor, insisting that they were "extremely moderate." But neither on these questions nor on his insistence that Poland join the Anti-Comintern Pact against the Soviet Union did the German Foreign Minister get a satisfactory answer. [6] Colonel Beck was becoming wary of his friends. As a matter of fact, he was beginning to squirm. On February 26, the German ambassador in Warsaw informed Berlin that Beck had taken the initiative in getting himself invited to visit London at the end of March and that he might go on to Paris afterward. Though it was late in the day, Poland, as Moltke put it in his dispatch, "desires to get in touch with the Western democracies ... [for] fear that a conflict might arise with Germany over Danzig." [7] With Beck too, as with so many others who had tried to appease the ravenous appetite of Adolf Hitler, the scales were falling from the eyes.

 

They fell completely and forever on March 15 when Hitler occupied Bohemia and Moravia and sent his troops to protect "independent" Slovakia. Poland woke up that morning to find itself flanked in the south along the Slovak border, as it already was in the north on the frontiers of Pomerania and East Prussia, by the German Army. Its military position had overnight become untenable.

 

March 21, 1939, is a day to be remembered in the story of Europe's march toward war.

 

There was intense diplomatic activity that day in Berlin, Warsaw and London. The President of the French Republic, accompanied by Foreign Minister Bonnet, arrived in the British capital for a state visit. To the French Chamberlain suggested that their two countries join Poland and the Soviet Union in a formal declaration stating that the four nations would consult immediately about steps to halt further aggression in Europe. Three days before, Litvinov had proposed -- as he had just a year before, after the Anschluss -- a European conference, this time of France, Britain, Poland, Russia, Rumania and Turkey, which would join together to stop Hitler. But the British Prime Minister had found the idea "premature." He was highly distrustful of Moscow and thought a "declaration" by the four powers, including the Soviet Union, was as far as he could go. [vi]

 

His proposal was presented to Beck in Warsaw by the British ambassador on the same day, March 21, and received a somewhat cool reception, as far as including the Russians was concerned. The Polish Foreign Minister was even more distrustful of the Soviet Union than Chamberlain and, moreover, shared the Prime Minister's views about the worthlessness of Russian military aid. He was to hold these views, unflinchingly, right up to the moment of disaster.

 

But the most fateful event of this day of March 21 for Poland took place in Berlin. Ribbentrop invited the Polish ambassador to call on him at noon. For the first time, as Lipski noted in a subsequent report, the Foreign Minister was not only cool toward him but aggressive. The Fuehrer, he warned, "was becoming increasingly amazed at Poland's attitude." Germany wanted a satisfactory reply to her demands for Danzig and a highway and railroad through the Corridor. This was a condition for continued friendly Polish-German relations. "Poland must realize," Ribbentrop laid it down, "that she could not take a middle course between Russia and Germany." Her only salvation was "a reasonable relationship with Germany and her Fuehrer." That included a joint "anti-Soviet policy." Moreover, the Fuehrer desired Beck "to pay an early visit to Berlin." In the meantime, Ribbentrop strongly advised the Polish ambassador to hurry to Warsaw and explain to his Foreign Minister in person what the situation was. "He advised," Lipski informed Beck, "that the talk [with Hitler] should not be delayed, lest the ChanceIlor should come to the conclusion that Poland was rejecting all his offers." [8]

 

[b]A SLIGHT AGGRESSION BY THE BY[/b]

 

Before leaving the Wilhelmstrasse, Lipski had asked Ribbentrop whether he could tell him anything about his conversation with the Foreign Minister of Lithuania. The German replied that they had discussed the Memel question, "which called for a solution."

 

As a matter of fact, Ribbentrop had received the Lithuanian Foreign Minister, Juozas Urbays, who was passing through Berlin after a trip to Rome, on the previous day and demanded that Lithuania hand back the Memel district to Germany forthwith. Otherwise "the Fuehrer would act with lightning speed." The Lithuanians, he warned, must not deceive themselves by expecting "some kind of help from abroad." [9]

 

Actually, some months before, on December 12,1938, the French ambassador and the British charge d'affaires had called the attention of the German government to reports that the German population of Memel was planning a revolt and had asked it to use its influence to see that the Memel Statute, guaranteed by both Britain and France, was respected. The Foreign Office reply had expressed "surprise and astonishment" at the Anglo-French demarche, and Ribbentrop had ordered that if there were any further such steps the two embassies should be told "that we had really expected that the French and British would finally become tired of meddling in Germany's affairs." [10]

 

For some time the German government and particularly the party and S.S. leaders had been organizing the Germans of Memel along lines with which we are now familiar from the Austrian and Sudeten affairs. The German armed forces had also been caIled in to co-operate and, as we have seen, [vii] three weeks after Munich Hitler had ordered his military chiefs to prepare, along with the liquidation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia, the occupation of Memel. Since the Navy had had no opportunity for glory in the march -- in to landlocked Austria and Sudetenland, Hitler decided that Memel should be taken from the sea. In November, naval plans for the venture were drawn up under the code name "Transport Exercise Stettin." Hitler and Admiral Raeder were so keen on this little display of naval might that they actually put to sea from Swinemuende aboard the pocket battleship Deutschland for Memel on March 22, exactly a week after the Fuehrer's triumphant entry into Prague, before defenseless Lithuania had time to capitulate to a German ultimatum.

 

On March 21, Weizsaecker, who much later would proclaim his distaste for the brutality of Nazi methods, notified the Lithuanian government that "there was no time to lose" and that its plenipotentiaries must come to Berlin "by special plane tomorrow" to sign away to Germany the district of Meme!' The Lithuanians had obediently arrived late in the afternoon of March 22, but despite German pressure administered in person by Ribbentrop, egged on by a seasick Hitler aboard his battleship at sea, they took their time about capitulating. Twice during the night, the captured German documents reveal, the Fuehrer got off urgent radiograms from the Deutschland to Ribbentrop asking whether the Lithuanians had surrendered, as requested. The dictator and his Admiral had to know whether they must shoot their way into the port of Meme!' Finally, at 1: 30 A.M. on March 23, Ribbentrop was able to transmit by radio to his master the news that the Lithuanians had signed. [11]

 

At 2:30 in the afternoon of the twenty-third, Hitler made another of his triumphant entries into a newly occupied city and at the Stadttheater in Memel again addressed a delirious "liberated" German throng. Another provision of the Versailles Treaty had been torn up. Another bloodless conquest had been made. Although the Fuehrer could not know it, it was to be the last.

 

[b]THE HEAT ON POLAND[/b]

 

The German annexation of the Memelland came as "a very unpleasant surprise" to the Polish government, as the German ambassador to Poland, Hans-Adolf von Moltke, reported to Berlin from Warsaw on the following day. "The main reason for this," he added, "is that it is generally feared that now it will be the turn of Danzig and the Corridor." [12] He also informed the German Foreign Office that Polish reservists were being called up. The next day, March 25, Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, reported that Poland had mobilized three classes and was concentrating troops around Danzig. General Keitel did not believe this showed "any aggressive intentions on the part of the Poles," but the Army General Staff, he noted, "took a somewhat more serious view." [13]

 

Hitler returned to Berlin from Memel on March 24 and on the next day had a long talk with General von Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chief of the Army. From the latter's confidential memorandum of the conversation it appears that the Leader had not yet made up his mind exactly how to proceed against Poland.14 In fact, his turbulent brain seemed to be full of contradictions. Ambassador Lipski was due back on the next day, March 26, and the Fuehrer did not want to see him.

 

[quote]Lipski will return from Warsaw on Sunday, March 26 [Brauchitsch noted]. He was commissioned to ask whether Poland would be prepared to come to some terms with regard to Danzig. The Fuehrer left during the night of March 25: he does not wish to be here when Lipski returns. Ribbentrop shall negotiate at first. The Fuehrer does not wish, though, to solve the Danzig problem by force. He would not like to drive Poland into the arms of Great Britain by doing so.

 

A military occupation of Danzig would have to be taken into consideration only if Lipski gives a hint that the Polish Government could not take the responsibility toward their own people to cede Danzig voluntarily and the solution would be made easier for them by a fait accompli.[/quote]

 

This is an interesting insight into Hitler's mind and character at this moment. Three months before, he had personally assured Beck that there would be no German fait accompli in Danzig. Yet he remembered that the Polish Foreign Minister had stressed that the Polish people would never stand for turning over Danzig to Germany. If the Germans merely seized it, would not this fait accompli make it easier for the Polish government to accept it? Hitherto Hitler had been a genius at sizing up the weaknesses of his foreign opponents and taking advantage of them, but here, for almost the first time, his judgment has begun to falter. The "colonels" who governed Poland were a mediocre and muddling lot, but the last thing they wanted, or would accept, was a fait accompli in Danzig.

 

The Free City was uppermost in Hitler's mind, but he was also thinking beyond it, just as he had done in regard to Czechoslovakia after Munich had given him the Sudetenland.

 

[quote]For the time being [Brauchitsch noted], the Fuehrer does not intend to solve the Polish question. However, it should be worked on. A solution in the near future would have to be based on especially favorable political conditions. In that case Poland shall be knocked down so completely that it need not be taken into account as a political factor for the next few decades. The Fuehrer has in mind as such a solution a borderline advanced from the eastern border of East Prussia to the eastern tip of Upper Silesia.[/quote]

 

Brauchitsch well knew what that border signified. It was Germany's prewar eastern frontier, which Versailles had destroyed, and which had prevailed as long as there was no Poland.

 

If Hitler had any doubts as to what the Polish reply would be they were dissipated when Ambassador Lipski returned to Berlin on Sunday, March 26, and presented his country's answer in the form of a written memorandum.  [15] Ribbentrop read it at once, rejected it, stormed about Polish mobilization measures and warned the envoy "of possible consequences." He also declared that any violation of Danzig territory by Polish troops would be regarded as aggression against the Reich.

 

Poland's written response, while couched in conciliatory language, was a firm rejection of the German demands. It expressed willingness to discuss further means of facilitating German rail and road traffic across the Corridor but refused to consider making such communications extraterritorial. As for Danzig, Poland was willing to replace the League of Nations status by a Polish-German guarantee but not to see the Free City become a part of Germany.

 

Nazi Germany by this time was not accustomed to see a smaller nation turning down its demands, and Ribbentrop remarked to Lipski that "it reminded him of certain risky steps taken by another state" -- an obvious reference to Czechoslovakia, which Poland had helped Hitler to dismember. It must have been equally obvious to Lipski, when he was summoned again to the Foreign Office the next day by Ribbentrop, that the Third Reich would now resort to the same tactics against Poland which had been used so successfully against Austria and Czechoslovakia. The Nazi Foreign Minister raged at the alleged persecution of the German minority in Poland, which, he said, had created "a disastrous impression in Germany."

 

[quote]In conclusion, the [German] Foreign Minister remarked that he could no longer understand the Polish Government ... The proposals transmitted yesterday by the Polish Ambassador could not be regarded as a basis for a settlement. Relations between the two countries were therefore rapidly deteriorating. [16][/quote]

 

Warsaw was not so easily intimidated as Vienna and Prague. The next day, March 28, Beck sent for the German ambassador and told him, in answer to Ribbentrop's declaration that a Polish coup against Danzig would signify a casus belli, that he in turn was forced to state that any attempt by Germany or the Nazi Danzig Senate to alter the status of the Free City would be regarded by Poland as a casus belli.

 

"You want to negotiate at the point of a bayonet!" exclaimed the ambassador.

 

"This is your own method," Beck replied. [17]

 

The reawakened Polish Foreign Minister could afford to stand up to Berlin more firmly than Benes had been able to do, for he knew that the British government, which a year before had been anxious to help Hitler obtain his demands against Czechoslovakia, was now taking precisely the opposite course in regard to Poland. Beck himself had torpedoed the British proposal for a four -- power declaration, declaring that Poland refused to associate itself with Russia in any manner. Instead, on March 22, he had suggested to Sir Howard Kennard, the British ambassador in Warsaw, the immediate conclusion of a secret Anglo-Polish agreement for consultation in case of a threatened attack by a third power. But, alarmed by German troop movements adjacent to Danzig and the Corridor and by British intelligence concerning German demands on Poland (which the tricky Beck had denied to the British), Chamberlain and Halifax wanted to go further than mere "consultations."

 

On the evening of March 30, Kennard presented to Beck an Anglo-French proposal for mutual-assistance pacts in case of German aggression.  [viii] But even this step was overtaken by events. Fresh reports of the possibility of an imminent German attack on Poland prompted the British government on the same evening to ask Beck whether he had any objection to an interim unilateral British guarantee of Poland's independence. Chamberlain had to know by the morrow, as he wished to answer a parliamentary question on the subject. Beck -- his sense of relief may be imagined -- had no objection. In fact, he told Kennard, he "agreed without hesitation." [19]

 

The next day, March 31, as we have seen, Chamberlain made his historic declaration in the House of Commons that Britain and France "would lend the Polish Government all support in their power" if Poland were attacked and resisted. [ix]

 

To anyone in Berlin that weekend when March 1939 came to an end, as this writer happened to be, the sudden British unilateral guarantee of Poland seemed incomprehensible, however welcome it might be in the lands to the west and the east of Germany. Time after time, as we have seen, in 1936 when the Germans marched into the demilitarized Rhineland, in 1938 when they took Austria and threatened a European war to take the Sudetenland, even a fortnight before, when they grabbed Czechoslovakia, Great Britain and France, backed by Russia, could have taken action to stop Hitler at very little cost to themselves. But the peace-hungry Chamberlain had shied away from such moves. Not only that: he had gone out of his way, he had risked, as he said, his political career to help Adolf Hitler get what he wanted in the neighboring lands. He had done nothing to save the independence of Austria. He had consorted with the German dictator to destroy the independence of Czechoslovakia, the only truly democratic nation on Germany's eastern borders and the only one which was a friend of the West and which supported the League of Nations and the idea of collective security. He had not even considered the military value to the West of Czechoslovakia's thirty-five well-trained, well-armed divisions entrenched behind their strong mountain fortifications at a time when Britain could put only two divisions in France and when the German Army was incapable of fighting on two fronts and, according to the German generals, even incapable of penetrating the Czech defenses.

 

Now overnight, in his understandably bitter reaction to Hitler's occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain, after having deliberately and recklessly thrown so much away, had undertaken to unilaterally guarantee an Eastern country run by a junta of politically inept "colonels" who up to this moment had closely collaborated with Hitler, who like hyenas had joined the Germans in the carving up of Czechoslovakia and whose country had been rendered militarily indefensible by the very German conquests which Britain and Poland had helped the Reich to achieve. [x] And he had taken this eleventh-hour risk without bothering to enlist the aid of Russia, whose proposals for joint action against further Nazi aggression he had twice turned down within the year.

 

Finally, he had done exactly what for more than a year he had stoutly asserted that Britain would never do: he had left to another nation the decision whether his country would go to war.

 

Nevertheless, the Prime Minister's precipitate step, belated as it was, presented Adolf Hitler with an entirely new situation. From now on, apparently, Britain would stand in the way of his committing further aggression. He could no longer use the technique of taking one nation at a time while the Western democracies stood aside debating what to do. Moreover, Chamberlain's move appeared to be the first serious step toward forming a coalition of powers against Germany which, unless it were successfully countered, might bring again that very encirclement which had been the nightmare of the Reich since Bismarck.

 

[b]CASE WHITE[/b]

 

The news of Chamberlain's guarantee of Poland threw the German dictator into one of his characteristic rages. He happened to be with Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, and according to the latter he stormed about the room, pounding his fists on the marble table top, his face contorted with fury, and shouting against the British, "I'll cook them a stew they'll choke on!" [22]

 

The next day, April 1, he spoke at Wilhelmshaven at the launching of the battleship Tirpitz and was in such a belligerent mood that apparently he did not quite trust himself, for at the last moment he ordered that the direct radio broadcast of his speech be canceled; he directed that it be rebroadcast later from recordings, which could be edited.[xi] Even the rebroadcast version was spotted with warnings to Britain and Poland.

 

[quote]If they [the Western Allies] expect the Germany of today to sit patiently by until the very last day while they create satellite States and set them against Germany, then they are mistaking the Germany of today for the Germany of before the war.

 

He who declares himself ready to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for these powers must realize he burns his fingers... .

 

When they say in other countries that they will arm and will keep arming still more, I can tell those statesmen only this: "Me you will never tire out!" I am determined to continue on this road.[/quote]

 

Hitler, as his cancellation of the direct broadcast showed, was cautious enough not to provoke foreign opinion too much. It was reported in Berlin that day that he would denounce the Anglo-German naval treaty as his first reply to Chamberlain. But in his speech he merely declared that if Great Britain no longer wished to adhere to it, Germany "would accept this very calmly."

 

As so often before, Hitler ended on an old familiar note of peace: "Germany has no intention of attacking other people ... Out of this conviction I decided three weeks ago to name the coming party rally the 'Party Convention of Peace'" -- a slogan, which as the summer of 1939 developed, became more and more ironic.

 

That was for public consumption. In the greatest of secrecy Hitler gave his real answer to Chamberlain and Colonel Beck two days later, on April 3. It was contained in a top-secret directive to the armed forces, of which only five copies were made, inaugurating "Case White." This was a code name which was to loom large in the subsequent history of the world.

 

[quote]TOP SECRET

 

Case White

 

The present attitude of Poland requires ... the initiation of military preparations to remove. if necessary. any threat from this direction forever.

 

1. Political Requirements and Aims

 

... The aim will be to destroy Polish military strength and create in the East a situation which satisfies the requirements of national defense. The Free State of Danzig will be proclaimed a part of the Reich territory at the outbreak of hostilities, at the latest.

 

The political leaders consider it their task in this case to isolate Poland if possible, that is to say, to limit the war to Poland only.

 

The development of increasing internal crises in France and the resulting British cautiousness might produce such a situation in the not too distant future.

 

Intervention by Russia ... cannot be expected to be of any use to Poland ... Italy's attitude is determined by the Rome-Berlin Axis.

 

2. Military Conclusions

 

The great objectives in the building up of the German armed forces will continue to be determined by the antagonism of the Western democracies. "Case White" constitutes only a precautionary complement to these preparations ...

 

The isolation of Poland will be all the more easily maintained, even after the outbreak of hostilities, if we succeed in starting the war with sudden, heavy blows and in gaining rapid successes ...

 

3. Tasks of the Armed Forces

 

The task of the Wehrmacht is to destroy the Polish armed forces. To this end a surprise attack is to be aimed at and prepared.[/quote]

 

As for Danzig:

 

[quote]Surprise occupation of Danzig may become possible independently of "Case White" by exploiting a favorable political situation ... Occupation by the Army will be carried out from East Prussia. The Navy will support the action of the Army by intervention from the sea.[/quote]

 

Case White is a lengthy document with several "enclosures," "annexes" and "special orders," most of which were reissued as a whole on April 11 and of course added to later as the time for hostilities approached. But already on April 3, Hitler appended the following directives to Case White:

 

[quote]1. Preparations must be made in such a way that the operation can be carried out at any time from September I, 1939, onward.[/quote]

 

As in the case of the date Hitler gave long in advance for getting the Sudetenland -- October 1, 1938 -- this more important date of September 1, 1939, would also be kept.

 

[quote]2. The High Command of the Armed Forces [OKW] is charged with drawing up a precise timetable for "Case White" and is to arrange for synchronized timing between the three branches of the Wehrmacht.

 

3. The plans of the branches of the Wehrmacht and the details for the timetable must be submitted to OKW by May I, 1939. [23][/quote]

 

The question now was whether Hitler could wear down the Poles to the point of accepting his demands, as he had done with the Austrians and (with Chamberlain's help) the Czechs, or whether Poland would hold its ground and resist Nazi aggression if it carne, and if so, with what. This writer spent the first week of April in Poland in search of answers. They were, as far as he could see, that the Poles would not give in to Hitler's threats, would fight if their land were invaded, but that militarily and politically they were in a disastrous position. Their Air Force was obsolete, their Army cumbersome, their strategic position -- surrounded by the Germans on three sides -- almost hopeless. Moreover, the strengthening of Germany's West Wall made an Anglo-French offensive against Germany in case Poland were attacked extremely difficult. And finally it became obvious that the headstrong Polish "colonels" would never consent to receiving Russian help even if the Germans were at the gates of Warsaw.

 

Events now moved quickly. On April 6 Colonel Beck signed an agreement with Great Britain in London transforming the unilateral British guarantee into a temporary pact of mutual assistance. A permanent treaty, it was announced, would be signed as soon as the details had been worked out.

 

The next day, April 7, Mussolini sent his troops into Albania and added the conquest of that mountainous little country to that of Ethiopia. It gave him a springboard against Greece and Yugoslavia and in the tense atmosphere of Europe served to make more jittery the small countries which dared to defy the Axis. As the German Foreign Office papers make clear, it was done with the complete approval of Germany, which was informed of the step in advance. On April 13, France and Britain countered with a guarantee to Greece and Rumania. The two sides were beginning to line up. In the middle of April, Goering arrived in Rome and much to Ribbentrop's annoyance had two long talks with Mussolini, on the fifteenth and sixteenth. [24] They agreed that they "needed two or three years" to prepare for "a general conflict," but Goering declared that if war came sooner "the Axis was in a very strong position" and "could defeat any likely opponents."

 

Mention was made of an appeal from President Roosevelt which had arrived in Rome and Berlin on April 15. The Duce, according to Ciano, had at first refused to read it and Goering declared that it was not worth answering. Mussolini thought it "a result of infantile paralysis," but Goering's impression was that "Roosevelt was suffering from an incipient mental disease." In his telegram to Hitler and Mussolini the President of the United States had addressed a blunt question:

 

[quote]Are you willing to give assurance that your armed forces will not attack or invade the territory of the following independent nations?[/quote]

 

There had followed a list of thirty-one countries, including Poland, the Baltic States, Russia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Britain. The President hoped that such a guarantee of nonaggression could be given for "ten years at the least" or "a quarter of a century, if we dare look that far ahead." If it were given, he promised American participation in world-wide "discussions" to relieve the world from "the crushing burden of armament" and to open up avenues of international trade.

 

"You have repeatedly asserted," he reminded Hitler, "that you and the German people have no desire for war. If this is true there need be no war."

 

In the light of what now is known, this seemed like a naive appeal, but the Fuehrer found it embarrassing enough to let it be known that he would reply to it -- not directly, but in a speech to a specially convoked session of the Reichstag on April 28.

 

In the meantime, as the captured German Foreign Office papers reveal, the Wilhelmstrasse in a circular telegram of April 17 put two questions of its own to all the states mentioned by Roosevelt except Poland, Russia, Britain and France: Did they feel themselves in any way threatened by Germany? Had they authorized Roosevelt to make his proposal?

 

"We are in no doubt," Ribbentrop wired his various envoys in the countries concerned, "that both questions will be answered in the negative, but nevertheless, for special reasons, we should like to have authentic confirmation at once." The "special reasons" would become evident when Hitler spoke on April 28.

 

By April 22 the German Foreign Office was able to draw up a report for the Fuehrer that most of the countries, including Yugoslavia, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Luxembourg "have answered both questions in the negative" -- a reply which would soon show what an innocent view their governments took of the Third Reich. From Rumania, however, came a tart answer that the "Reich Government were themselves in a position to know whether a threat might arise." Little Latvia up in the Baltic did not at first understand what answer was expected of it, but the Foreign Office soon put it right. On April 18 Weizsaecker rang up his minister in Riga

 

[quote]to tell him we were unable to understand the answer of the Latvian Foreign Minister to our question about the Roosevelt telegram. While practically all the other governments have already answered, and naturally in the negative, M. Munters treated this ridiculous American propaganda as a question on which he wished to consult his cabinet. If M. Munters did not answer "no" to our question right away, we should have to add Latvia to those countries which made themselves into willing accomplices of Mr. Roosevelt. I said that I assumed that a word on these lines by Herr von Kotze [the German minister] would be enough to obtain the obvious answer from him. [25][/quote]

 

It was.

 

[quote]HITLER'S REPLY TO ROOSEVELT[/quote]

 

The replies were potent ammunition for Hitler, and he made masterly use of them as he swung into his speech to the Reichstag on the pleasant spring day of April 28, 1939. It was, I believe, the longest major public speech he ever made, taking more than two hours to deliver. In many ways, especially in the power of its appeal to Germans and to the friends of Nazi Germany abroad, it was probably the most brilliant oration he ever gave, certainly the greatest this writer ever heard from him. For sheer eloquence, craftiness, irony, sarcasm and hypocrisy, it reached a new level that he was never to approach again. And though prepared for German ears, it was broadcast not only on all German radio stations bqt on hundreds of others throughout the world; in the United States it was carried by the major networks. Never before or afterward was there such a world-wide audience as he had that day. [xii]

 

The speech began, after the usual introductory dissertation on the iniquities of Versailles and the many injustices and long suffering heaped upon the German people by it, with an answer first to Great Britain and Poland which shook an uneasy Europe.

 

After declaring his feeling of admiration and friendship for England and then attacking it for its distrust of him and its new "policy of encirclement" of Germany, he denounced the Anglo-German Naval Treaty of 1935. "The basis for it," he said, "has been removed."

 

Likewise with Poland. He made known his proposal to Poland concerning Danzig and the Corridor (which had been kept secret), called it "the greatest imaginable concession in the interests of European peace" and informed the Reichstag that the Polish government had rejected this "one and only offer."

 

[quote]I have regretted this incomprehensible attitude of the Polish Government ... The worst is that now Poland, like Czechoslovakia a year ago, believes, under pressure of a lying international campaign, that it must call up troops, although Germany has not called up a single man and had not thought of proceeding in any way against Poland. This is in itself very regrettable, and posterity will one day decide whether it was really right to refuse this suggestion, made this once by me ... a truly unique compromise ...[/quote]

 

Reports that Germany intended to attack Poland, Hitler went on, were "mere inventions of the international press." (Not one of the tens of millions of persons listening could know that only three weeks before he had given written orders to his armed forces to prepare for the destruction of Poland by September 1, "at the latest.") The inventions of the press, he continued, had led Poland to make its agreement with Great Britain which, "under certain circumstances, would compel Poland to take military action against Germany." Therefore, Poland had broken the Polish-German nonaggression pact! "Therefore, I look upon the agreement ... as having been unilaterally infringed by Poland and thereby no longer in existence."

 

Having himself unilateral1y torn up two formal treaties, Hitler then told the Reichstag that he was willing to negotiate replacements for them! "I can but welcome such an idea," he exclaimed. "No one would be happier than I at the prospect." This was an old trick he had pulled often before when he had broken a treaty, as we have seen, but though he probably did not know it, it would no longer work.

 

Hitler next turned to President Roosevelt, and here the German dictator reached the summit of his oratory. To a normal ear, to be sure, it reeked with hypocrisy and deception. But to the hand-picked members of the Reichstag, and to millions of Germans, its masterly sarcasm and irony were a delight. The paunchy deputies rocked with raucous laughter as the Fuehrer uttered with increasing effect his seemingly endless ridicule of the American President. One by one he took up the points of Roosevelt's telegram, paused, almost smiled, and then, like a schoolmaster, uttered in a low voice one word, "Answer" -- and gave it. (This writer can still, in his mind, see Hitler pausing time after time to say quietly, "Antwort," while above the rostrum in the President's chair Goering tried ineffectually to stifle a snicker and the members of the Reichstag prepared, as soon as the Antwort was given, to roar and laugh.)

 

[quote]Mr. Roosevelt declares that it is clear to him that all international problems can be solved at the council table.

 

Answer: ... I would be very happy if these problems could really find their solution at the council table. My skepticism, however, is based on the fact that it was America herself who gave sharpest expression to her mistrust in the effectiveness of conferences. For the greatest conference of all time was the League of Nations ... representing all the peoples of the world, created in accordance with the will of an American President. The first State, however, that shrank from this endeavor was the United States It was not until after years of purposeless participation that I resolved to follow the example of America....

 

The freedom of North America was not achieved at the conference table any more than the conflict between the North and the South was decided there. I will say nothing about the innumerable struggles which finally led to the subjugation of the North American continent as a whole.

 

I mention all this only in order to show that your view, Mr. Roosevelt, although undoubtedly deserving of all honor, finds no confirmation in the history of your own country or of the rest of the world.[/quote]

 

Germany, Hitler reminded the President, had once gone to a conference -- at Versailles -- not to discuss but to be told what to do: its representatives "were subjected to even greater degradations than can ever have been inflicted on the chieftains of the Sioux tribes."

 

Hitler finally got to the core of his answer to the President's request that he give assurances not to attack any of thirty-one nations.

 

[quote]Answer: How has Mr. Roosevelt learned which nations consider themselves threatened by German policy and which do not? Or is Mr. Roosevelt in a position, in spite of the enormous amount of work which must rest upon him in his own country, to recognize of his own accord all these inner spiritual and mental impressions of other peoples and their governments?

 

Finally, Mr. Roosevelt asks that assurance be given him that the German armed forces will not attack, and above all, not invade the territory or possessions of the following independent nations ...[/quote]

 

Hitler then read out slowly the name of each country and as he intoned the names, I remember, the laughter in the Reichstag grew. Not one member, no one in Berlin, I believe, including this writer, noticed that he slyly left out Poland.

 

Hitler now pulled the ace out of the pack, or so he must have thought.

 

[quote]Answer: I have taken the trouble to ascertain from the States mentioned, firstly, whether they feel themselves threatened, and secondly and above all, whether this inquiry by the American President was addressed to us at their suggestion, or at any rate, with their consent.

 

The reply was in all cases negative ... It is true that I could not cause inquiries to be made of certain of the States and nations mentioned because they themselves -- as for example, Syria -- are at present not in possession of their freedom, but are occupied and consequently deprived of their rights by the military agents of democratic States.

 

Apart from this fact, however, all States bordering on Germany have received much more binding assurances ... than Mr. Roosevelt asked from me in his curious telegram...

 

I must draw Mr. Roosevelt's attention to one or two historical errors. He mentioned Ireland, for instance, and asks for a statement that Germany will not attack Ireland. Now, I have just read a speech by De Valera, the Irish Taoiseach, [xiii] in which, strangely enough, and contrary to Mr. Roosevelt's opinion, he does not charge Germany with oppressing Ireland but he reproaches England with subjecting Ireland to continuous aggression ...

 

In the same way, the fact has obviously escaped Mr. Roosevelt's notice that Palestine is at present occupied not by German troops but by the English; and that the country is having its liberty restricted by the most brutal resort to force ...[/quote]

 

Nevertheless, said Hitler, he was prepared "to give each of the States named an assurance of the kind desired by Mr. Roosevelt." But more than that! His eyes lit up.

 

[quote]I should not like to let this opportunity pass without giving above all to the President of the United States an assurance regarding those territories which would, after all, give him most cause for apprehension, namely the United States itself and the other States of the American continent.

 

I here solemnly declare that all the assertions which have been circulated in any way concerning an intended German attack or invasion on or in American territory are rank frauds and gross untruths, quite apart from the fact that such assertions, as far as the military possibilities are concerned, could have their origin only in a stupid imagination.[/quote]

 

The Reichstag rocked with laughter; Hitler did not crack a smile, maintaining with great effect his solemn mien.

 

And then came the peroration -- the most eloquent for German ears, I believe, he ever made.

 

[quote]Mr. Roosevelt! I fully understand that the vastness of your nation and the immense wealth of your country allow you to feel responsible for the history of the whole world and for the history of all nations. I, sir, am placed in a much more modest and smaller sphere ...

 

I once took over a State which was faced by complete ruin, thanks to its trust in the promises of the rest of the world and to the bad regime of democratic governments ... I have conquered chaos in Germany, re-established order and enormously increased production ... developed traffic, caused mighty roads to be built and canals to be dug, called into being gigantic new factories and at the same time endeavored to further the education and culture of our people.

 

I have succeeded in finding useful work once more for the whole of the seven million unemployed ... Not only have I united the German people politically, but I have also rearmed them. I have also endeavored to destroy sheet by sheet that treaty which in its four hundred and forty-eight articles contains the vilest oppression which peoples and human beings have ever been expected to put up with.

 

I have brought back to the Reich provinces stolen from us in 1919. I have led back to their native country millions of Germans who were torn away from us and were in misery ... and, Mr. Roosevelt, without spilling blood and without bringing to my people, and consequently to others, the misery of war ...

 

You, Mr. Roosevelt, have a much easier task in comparison. You became President of the United States in 1933 when I became Chancellor of the Reich. From the very outset you stepped to the head of one of the largest and wealthiest States in the world ... Conditions prevailing in your country are on such a large scale that you can find time and leisure to give your attention to universal problems ... Your concerns and suggestions cover a much larger and wider area than mine, because my world, Mr. Roosevelt, in which Providence has placed me and for which I am therefore obliged to work, is unfortunately much smaller, although for me it is more precious than anything else, for it is limited to my people!

 

I believe however that this is the way in which I can be of the most service to that for which we are all concerned, namely, the justice, well-being, progress and peace of the whole community.[/quote]

 

In the hoodwinking of the German people, this speech was Hitler's greatest masterpiece. But as one traveled about Europe in the proceeding days it was easy to see that, unlike a number of Hitler's previous orations, this one no longer fooled the people or the governments abroad. In contrast to the Germans, they were able to see through the maze of deceptions. And they realized that the German Fuehrer, for all his masterful oratory, though scoring off Roosevelt, had not really answered the President's fundamental questions: Had he finished with aggression? Would he attack Poland?

 

As it turned out, this was the last great peacetime public speech of Hitler's life. The former Austrian waif had come as far in this world as was possible by the genius of his oratory. From now on he was to try to make his niche in history as a warrior.

 

Retiring for the summer to his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, Hitler did not publicly respond to the Polish answer to him which was given on May 5 in a speech by Colonel Beck to Parliament and in an official government memorandum presented to Germany on that date. The Polish statement and Beck's speech constituted a dignified, conciliatory but also firm reply.

 

[quote]It is clear [it said] that negotiations, in which one State formulates demands and the other is obliged to accept those demands unaltered, are not negotiations.[/quote]

 

[b]THE INTERVENTION OF RUSSIA: I[/b]

 

In his speech to the Reichstag on April 28, Hitler had omitted his customary attack on the Soviet Union. There was not a word about Russia. Colonel Beck, in his reply, had mentioned "various other hints" made by Germany "which went much further than the subjects of discussion" and reserved the right "to return to this matter, if necessary" -- a veiled but obvious reference to Germany's previous efforts to induce Poland to join the Anti-Comintem Pact against Russia. Though Beck did not know it, nor did Chamberlain, those anti-Russian efforts were now being abandoned. Fresh ideas were beginning to germinate in Berlin and Moscow.

 

It is difficult to ascertain exactly when the first moves were made in the two capitals toward an understanding between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union which was to lead to such immense consequences for the world. One of the first slight changes in the wind, as has already been noted, [xiv] took place as far back as October 3, 1938, four days after Munich, when the counselor of the German Embassy in Moscow informed Berlin that Stalin would draw certain conclusions from the Sudeten settlement, from which he had been excluded, and might well become "more positive" toward Germany. The diplomat strongly advocated a "wider" economic collaboration between the two countries and renewed his appeal in a second dispatch a week later. [27] Toward the end of October, the German ambassador in Moscow, Friedrich Werner Count von der Schulenburg, notified the German Foreign Office that it was his "intention in the immediate future to approach Molotov, the Chairman of the Council of the People's Commissars, in an attempt to reach a settlement of the questions disturbing German-Soviet relations." [28] The ambassador would hardly have conceived such an intention on his own, in view of Hitler's previous extremely hostile attitude toward Moscow. The hint must have come from Berlin.

 

That it did becomes clear from a study of the captured Foreign Office archives. The first step, in the German view, was to improve trade between the two countries. A Foreign Office memorandum of November 4, 1938, reveals "an emphatic demand from Field Marshal Goering's office at least to try to reactivate our Russian trade, especially insofar as Russian raw materials are concerned." [29] The Russo-German economic agreements expired at the end of the year and the Wilhelmstrasse files are full of material showing the ups and downs experienced in negotiating a renewal. The two sides were highly suspicious of each other but were vaguely drawing closer together. On December 22, there were lengthy talks in Moscow between Russian trade officials and Germany's crack economic troubleshooter, Julius Schnurre.

 

Shortly after the New Year, the Soviet ambassador in Berlin, Alexei Merekalov, made one of his infrequent trips to the Wilhelmstrasse to inform it "of the Soviet Union's desire to begin a new era in German-Soviet economic relations." And for a few weeks there were promising talks, but by February 1939 they had pretty much broken down, ostensibly over whether the main negotiations should be conducted in Moscow or Berlin. But the real reason was revealed in a memorandum of the director of the Economic Policy Department of the German Foreign Office on March 11, 1939: Though Germany was hungry for Russia's raw materials and Goering was constantly demanding that they be obtained, the Reich simply could not supply the Soviet Union with the goods which would have to be exchanged. The director thought the "rupture of negotiations" was "extremely regrettable in view of Germany's raw-materials position." [30]

 

But if the first attempt to draw nearer in their economic relations had failed for the time being, there were other straws in the wind. On March 10, 1939, Stalin made a long speech at the first session of the Eighteenth Party Congress in Moscow. Three days later the attentive Schulenburg filed a long report on it to Berlin. He thought it "noteworthy that Stalin's irony and criticism were directed in considerably sharper degree against Britain than against the so-called aggressor States, and in particular, Germany." The ambassador underlined Stalin's remarks that "the weakness of the democratic powers ... was evident from the fact that they had abandoned the principle of collective security and had turned to a policy of nonintervention and neutrality. Underlying this policy was the wish to divert the aggressor States to other victims." And he quoted further the Soviet dictator's accusations that the Western Allies were

 

[quote]pushing the Germans further eastward, promising them an easy prey and saying: "Just start a war with the Bolsheviks, everything else will take care of itself. This looks very much like encouragement ... It looks as if the purpose ... was to engender the fury of the Soviet Union against Germany ... and to provoke a conflict with Germany without apparent reasons.[/quote]

 

In conclusion Stalin formulated the guiding principles:

 

[quote]1. To continue to pursue a policy of peace and consolidation of economic relations with all countries.

 

2.... Not to let our country be drawn into conflict by warmongers, whose custom it is to let others pull their chestnuts out of the fire. [31][/quote]

 

This was a plain warning from the man who made all the ultimate decisions in Russia that the Soviet Union did not intend to be maneuvered into a war with Nazi Germany in order to spare Britain and France; and if it was ignored in London, it was at least noticed in Berlin. [xv]

 

Still, it is evident from Stalin's speech and from the various diplomatic exchanges which shortly took place that Soviet foreign policy, while cautious, was still very much open. Three days after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia on March 15, the Russian government proposed, as we have seen, [xvi] a six-power conference to discuss means of preventing further aggression, and Chamberlain turned it down as "premature." [xvii] That was on March 18. Two days later an official communique in Moscow, which the German ambassador there hurriedly wired to Berlin, denied that the Soviet Union had offered Poland and Rumania assistance "in the event of their becoming the victims of aggression." Reason: "Neither Poland nor Rumania had approached the Soviet government for assistance or informed [it] of any danger threatening them." [34]

 

The British government's unilateral guarantee of Poland of March 31 may have helped to convince Stalin that Great Britain preferred an alliance with the Poles to one with the Russians and that Chamberlain was intent, as he had been at the time of Munich, on keeping the Soviet Union out of the European concert of powers. [35]

 

In this situation the Germans and Italians began to glimpse certain opportunities. Goering, who now had an important influence on Hitler in foreign affairs, saw Mussolini in Rome on April 16 and called the Duce's attention to Stalin's recent speech to the Communist Party Congress. He had been impressed by the Soviet dictator's statement that "the Russians would not allow themselves to be used as cannon fodder for the capitalist powers." He said he "would ask the Fuehrer whether it would not be possible to put out feelers cautiously to Russia ... with a view to rapprochement." And he reminded Mussolini that there had been "absolutely no mention of Russia in the Fuehrer's latest speeches." The Duce, according to the confidential German memorandum of the meeting, warmly welcomed the idea of a rapprochement of the Axis Powers with the Soviet Union. The Italian dictator too had sensed a change in Moscow; he thought a rapprochement could be "effected with comparative ease."

 

[quote]The object [said Mussolini] would be to induce Russia to react coolly and unfavorably to Britain's efforts at encirclement, on the lines of Stalin's speech ... Moreover, in their ideological struggle against plutocracy and capitalism the Axis Powers had, to a certain extent, the same objectives as the Russian regime. [36][/quote]

 

This was a radical turn in Axis policy, and no doubt it would have surprised Chamberlain had he learned of it. Perhaps it would have surprised Litvinov too.

 

On the very day of this discussion between Goering and Mussolini, April 16, the Soviet Foreign Commissar received the British ambassador in Moscow and made a formal proposal for a triple pact of mutual assistance between Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union. It called for a military convention between the three powers to enforce the pact and a guarantee by the signatories, to be joined by Poland, if it desired, of all the nations in Central and Eastern Europe which felt themselves menaced by Nazi Germany. It was Litvinov's last bid for an alliance against the Third Reich, and the Russian Foreign Minister, who had staked his career on a policy of stopping Hitler by collective action, must have thought that at last he would succeed in uniting the Western democracies with Russia for that purpose. As Churchill said in a speech on May 4, complaining that the Russian offer had not yet been accepted in London, "there is no means of maintaining an Eastern front against Nazi aggression without the active aid of Russia." No other power in Eastern Europe, certainly not Poland, possessed the military strength to maintain a front in that region. Yet the Russian proposal caused consternation in London and Paris.

 

Even before it was rejected, however, Stalin made his first serious move to play the other side of the street.

 

The day after Litvinov made his far-reaching offer to the British ambassador in Moscow, on April 17, the Soviet ambassador in Berlin paid a visit to Weizsaecker at the German Foreign Office. It was the first call, the State Secretary noted in a memorandum, that Merekalov had made on him since he assumed his post nearly a year before. After some preliminary remarks about German-Russian economic relations, the ambassador turned to politics and

 

[quote]asked me point-blank [Weizsaecker wrote] what I thought of German-Russian relations ... The Ambassador spoke somewhat as follows:

 

Russian policy had always followed a straight course. Ideological differences had had very little adverse effect on relations between Russia and Italy and need not disturb those with Germany either. Russia had not exploited the present friction between Germany and the Western democracies against us, neither did she wish to do that. As far as Russia was concerned, there was no reason why she should not live on a normal footing with us, and out of normal relations could grow increasingly improved relations.

 

With this remark, toward which he had been steering the conversation, M. Merekalov ended the talk. He intends to visit Moscow in a day or two. [37][/quote]

 

In the Russian capital, to which the Soviet ambassador returned, there was something up.

 

It came out on May 3. On that date, tucked away on the back page of the Soviet newspapers in a column called "News in Brief," appeared a small item: "M. Litvinov has been released from the Office of Foreign Commissar at his own request." He was replaced by Vyacheslav Molotov, Chairman of the Council of the People's Commissars.

 

The German charge d'affaires reported the change to Berlin the next day.

 

[quote]The sudden change has caused the greatest surprise here, as Litvinov was in the midst of negotiations with the British delegation, had appeared in close proximity to Stalin at the parade on May 1 ...

 

Since Litvinov had received the British Ambassador as recently as May 2 and had even been mentioned in the press yesterday as a guest of honor at the parade, it seems that his dismissal must be due to a spontaneous decision by Stalin... . At the last Party Congress Stalin urged caution lest the Soviet Union be dragged into conflicts. Molotov, who is not a Jew, has the reputation of being the "most intimate friend and closest collaborator" of Stalin. His appointment is obviously intended to provide a guarantee that foreign policy will be conducted strictly on lines laid down by Stalin. [38]

 

The significance of Litvinov's abrupt dismissal was obvious to all. It meant a sharp and violent turning in Soviet foreign policy. Litvinov had been the archapostle of collective security, of strengthening the power of the League of Nations, of seeking Russian security against Nazi Germany by a military alliance with Great Britain and France. Chamberlain's hesitations about such an alliance were fatal to the Russian Foreign Commissar. In Stalin's judgment -- and his was the only one which counted in Moscow-Litvinov's policies had failed. Moreover, they threatened to land the Soviet Union in a war with Germany which the Western democracies might well contrive to stay out of. It was time, Stalin concluded, to try a new tack. * If Chamberlain could appease Hitler, could not the Russian dictator? The fact that Litvinov, a Jew, was replaced by Molotov, who, as the German Embassy had emphasized in its dispatch to Berlin, was not, might be expected to have a certain impact in high Nazi circles.

 

To see that the significance of the change was not lost on the Germans, Georgi Astakhov, the Soviet charge d'affaires, brought the matter up on May 5 when he conferred with Dr. Julius Schnurre, the German Foreign Office expert on East European economic affairs.

 

[quote]Astakhov touched upon the dismissal of Litvinov [Schnurre reported] and tried ... to learn whether this event would cause a change in our attitude toward the Soviet Union. He stressed the great importance of the personality of Molotov, who was by no means a specialist in foreign policy but who would have all the greater importance for future Soviet foreign policy. [39][/quote]

 

The charge also invited the Germans to resume the trade negotiations which had been broken off in February.

 

The British government did not reply until May 8 to the Soviet proposals of April 16 for a military alliance. The response was a virtual rejection. It strengthened suspicions in Moscow that Chamberlain was not willing to make a military pact with Russia to prevent Hitler from taking Poland.

 

It is not surprising, then, that the Russians intensified their approach to the Germans. On May 17 Astakhov again saw Schnurre at the Foreign Office and after discussing problems of trade turned to larger matters.

 

[quote]Astakhov stated [Schnurre reported] that there were no conflicts in foreign policy between Germany and the Soviet Union and that therefore there was no reason for any enmity between the two countries. It was true that in the Soviet Union there was a distinct feeling of being menaced by Germany. It would undoubtedly be possible to eliminate this feeling of being menaced and the distrust in Moscow ... In reply to my incidental question he commented on the Anglo-Soviet negotiations to the effect that, as they stood at the moment, the result desired by Britain would hardly materialize. [40][/quote]

 

Three days later, on May 20, Ambassador von der Schulenburg had a long talk with Molotov in Moscow. The newly appointed Commissar for Foreign Affairs was in a "most friendly" mood and informed the German envoy that economic negotiations between the two countries could be resumed if the necessary political bases for them were created. This was a new approach from the Kremlin but it was made cautiously by the cagey Molotov. When Schulenburg asked him what he meant by "political bases" the Russian replied that this was something both governments would have to think about. All the ambassador's efforts to draw out the wily Foreign Commissar were in vain. "He is known," Schulenburg reminded Berlin, "for his somewhat stubborn manner." On his way out of the Russian Foreign Office, the ambassador dropped in on Vladimir Potemkin, the Soviet Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and told him he had not been able to find out what Molotov wanted of a political nature. "I asked Herr Potemkin," Schulenburg reported, "to find out." [41]

 

The renewed contacts between Berlin and Moscow did not escape the watchful eyes of the French ambassador in the German capital. As early as May 7, four days after Litvinov's dismissal, M. Coulondre was informing the French Foreign Minister that, according to information given him by a close confidant of the Fuehrer, Germany was seeking an understanding with Russia which would result in, among other things, a fourth partition of Poland. Two days later the French ambassador got off another telegram to Paris telling of new rumors in Berlin "that Germany had made, or was going to make, to Russia proposals aimed at a partition of Poland." [42]

 

[b]THE PACT OF STEEL[/b]

 

Although the top brass of the Wehrmacht had a low opinion of Italian military power, Hitler now pressed for a military alliance with Italy, which Mussolini had been in no hurry to conclude. Staff talks between the two high commands began in April and Keitel reported to OKW his "impression" that neither the Italian fighting services nor Italian rearmament were in very good shape. A war, he thought, would have to be decided quickly, or the Italians would be out of it. [43]

 

By mid-April, as his diary shows,44 Ciano was alarmed by increasing signs that Germany might attack Poland at any moment and precipitate a European war for which Italy was not prepared. When, on April 20, Ambassador Attolico in Berlin wired Rome that German action against Poland was "imminent" Ciano urged him to hasten arrangements for his meeting with Ribbentrop so that Italy would not be caught napping.

 

The two foreign ministers met at Milan on May 6. Ciano had arrived with written instructions from Mussolini to emphasize to the Germans that Italy wished to avoid war for at least three years. To the Italian's surprise, Ribbentrop agreed that Germany wished to keep the peace for that long too. In fact, Ciano found the German Foreign Minister "for the first time" in a "pleasantly calm state of mind." They reviewed the situation in Europe, agreed on improving Axis relations with the Soviet Union and adjourned for a gala dinner.

 

When after dinner Mussolini telephoned to see how the talks had gone, and Ciano replied that they had gone well, the Duce had a sudden brain storm. He asked his son-in-law to release to the press a communique saying that Germany and Italy had decided to conclude a military alliance. Ribbentrop at first hesitated. He finally agreed to put the matter up to Hitler, and the Fuehrer, when reached by telephone, readily agreed to Mussolini's suggestion. [45][/quote]

 

Thus, on a sudden impulse, after more than a year of hesitation, Mussolini committed himself irrevocably to Hitler's fortunes. This was one of the first signs that the Italian dictator, like the German, was beginning to lose that iron self-control which up until this year of 1939 had enabled them both to pursue their own national interests with ice-cold clarity. The consequences for Mussolini would soon prove disastrous.

 

The "Pact of Steel," as it came to be known, was duly signed with considerable pomp at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin on May 22. Ciano had bestowed on Ribbentrop the Collar of the Annunziata, which not only made Goering furious but, as the Italian Foreign Minister noticed, brought tears to his eyes. In fact, the plump Field Marshal had made quite a scene, complaining that the collar really should have been awarded to him since it was he who had really promoted the alliance.

 

"I promised Mackensen [the German ambassador in Rome]," Ciano reported, "that I would try to get Goering a collar."

 

Ciano found Hitler looking "very well, quite serene, less aggressive," though he seemed a little older and his eyes more deeply wrinkled, probably from lack of sleep. [xviii] The Fuehrer was in the best of spirits as he watched the two foreign ministers sign the document.

 

It was a bluntly worded military alliance and its aggressive nature was underlined by a sentence in the preamble which Hitler had insisted on putting in declaring that the two nations, "united by the inner affinity of their ideologies ... are resolved to act side by side and with united forces to secure their living space." The core of the treaty was Article III.

 

[quote]If contrary to the wishes and hopes of the High Contracting Parties it should happen that one of them became involved in warlike complications with another Power or Powers, the other High Contracting Party would immediately come to its assistance as an ally and support it with all its military forces on land, at sea and in the air.[/quote]

 

Article V provided that in the event of war neither nation would conclude a separate armistice or peace. [46]

 

In the beginning, as it would turn out, Mussolini did not honor the first, nor, at the end, did Italy abide by the second.

 

[b]HITLER BURNS HIS BOATS: MAY 23, 1939[/b]

 

The day after the signing of the Pact of Steel, on May 23, Hitler summoned his military chiefs to the study in the Chancellery in Berlin and told them bluntly that further successes could not be won without the shedding of blood and that war therefore was inevitable.

 

This was a somewhat larger gathering than a similar one on November 5, 1937, when the Fuehrer had first imparted his decision to go to war to the commanders in chief of the three armed services. [xix] Altogether fourteen officers were present, including Field Marshal Goering, Grand Admiral Raeder (as he now was), General von Brauchitsch, General Halder, General Keitel, General Erhard Milch, Inspector General of the Luftwaffe, and Rear Admiral Otto Schniewind, naval Chief of Staff. The Fuehrer's adjutant, Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Schmundt, was also present and, luckily for history, took notes. His minutes of the meeting are among the captured German documents. Apparently Hitler's words on this occasion were regarded as such a top secret that no copies of the minutes were made; the one we have is in Schmundt's own handwriting. [47]

 

It is one of the most revealing and important of the secret papers which depict Hitler's road to war. Here, before the handful of men who will have to direct the military forces in an armed conflict, Hitler cuts through his own propaganda and diplomatic deceit and utters the truth about why he must attack Poland and, if necessary, take on Great Britain and France as well. He predicts with uncanny accuracy the course the war will take -- at least in its first year. And yet for all its bluntness his discourse -- for the dictator did all the talking -- discloses more uncertainty and confusion of mind than he has shown up to this point. Above all, Britain and the British continue to baffle him, as they did to the end of his life.

 

But about the coming of war and his aims in launching it he is clear and precise, and no general or admiral could have left the Chancellery on May 23 without knowing exactly what was coming at the summer's end. Germany's economic problems, he began, could only be solved by obtaining more Lebensraum in Europe, and "this is impossible without invading other countries or attacking other people's possessions."

 

[quote]Further successes can no longer be attained without the shedding of blood ...

 

Danzig is not the subject of the dispute at all. It is a question of expanding our living space in the East, of securing our food supplies and also of solving the problem of the Baltic States... . There is no other possibility in Europe ... If fate forces us into a showdown with the West it is invaluable to possess a large area in the East. In wartime we shall be even less able to rely on record harvests than in peacetime.[/quote]

 

Besides, Hitler adds, the population of non-German territories in the East will be available as a source of labor -- an early hint of the slave labor program he was later to put into effect.

 

The choice of the first victim was obvious.

 

[quote]There is no question of sparing Poland and we are left with the decision:

 

To attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity. [xx]

 

We cannot expect a repetition of the Czech affair. There will be war. Our task is to isolate Poland. Success in isolating her will be decisive.[/quote]

 

So there will be war. With an "isolated" Poland alone? Here the Fuehrer is not so clear. In fact, he becomes confused and contradictory. He must reserve to himself, he says, the final order to strike.

 

[quote]It must not come to a simultaneous showdown with the West -- France and England.

 

If it is not certain that a German-Polish conflict will not lead to war with the West, then the fight must be primarily against England and France.

 

Fundamentally therefore: Conflict with Poland -- beginning with an attack on Poland -- will only be successful if the West keeps out of it.

 

If that is not possible it is better to fall upon the West and to finish off Poland at the same time.[/quote]

 

In the face of such rapid-fire contradictions the generals must have winced, perhaps prying their monocles loose, though there is no evidence in the Schmundt minutes that this happened or that anyone in the select audience even dared to ask a question to straighten matters out.

 

Hitler next turned to Russia. "It is not ruled out," he said, "that Russia might disinterest herself in the destruction of Poland." On the other hand, if the Soviet Union allied herself to Britain and France, that "would lead me to attack England and France with a few devastating blows." That would mean committing the same mistake Wilhelm II made in 1914, but though in this lecture Hitler drew several lessons from the World War he did not draw this one. His thoughts now turned toward Great Britain.

 

[quote]The Fuehrer doubts the possibility of a peaceful settlement with England. It is necessary to be prepared for the showdown. England sees in our development the establishment of a hegemony which would weaken England. Therefore England is our enemy, and the conflict with England is a matter of life and death.

 

What will this conflict be like? [xxi]

 

England cannot finish off Germany with a few powerful blows and force us down. It is of decisive importance for England to carry the war as near as possible to the Ruhr. French blood will not be spared. (West Wall!) The duration of our existence is dependent on possession of the Ruhr.[/quote]

 

Having decided to follow the Kaiser in one mistake -- attacking France and England if they lined up with Russia -- Hitler now announced that he would follow the Emperor in another matter which eventually had proved disastrous to Germany.

 

[quote] The Dutch and Belgian air bases must be militarily occupied. Declarations of neutrality can be ignored. If England wants to intervene in the Polish war, we must make a lightning attack on Holland. We must aim at establishing a new line of defense on Dutch territory as far as the Zuyder Zee. The war with England and France will be a war of life and death.

 

The idea that we can get off cheaply is dangerous; there is no such possibility. We must then burn our boats and it will no longer be a question of right or wrong but of to be or not to be for eighty million people.[/quote]

 

Though he had just announced that Germany would attack Poland "at the first suitable opportunity" and though his listeners knew that almost all of Germany's military strength was being concentrated on that objective, Hitler, as he rambled on, could not keep his thoughts off Great Britain.

 

"England," he emphasized, "is the driving force against Germany." Whereupon he discussed her strengths and weaknesses.

 

[quote]The Britisher himself is proud, brave, tough, dogged and a gifted organizer. He knows how to exploit every new development. He has the love of adventure and the courage of the Nordic race ...

 

England is a world power in herself. Constant for three hundred years. Increased by alliances. This power is not only something concrete but must also be considered as psychological force, embracing the entire world.

 

Add to this immeasurable wealth and the solvency that goes with it.

 

Geopolitical security and protection by a strong sea power and courageous air force. [/quote]

 

But Britain, Hitler reminded his hearers, also had her weaknesses, and he proceeded to enumerate them.

 

[quote]If in the last war we had had two more battleships and two more cruisers and had begun the Battle of Jutland in the morning, the British fleet would have been defeated and England brought to her knees. [xxii] It would have meant the end of the World War. In former times ... to conquer England it was necessary to invade her. England could feed herself. Today she no longer can.

 

The moment England is cut off from her supplies she is forced to capitulate. Imports of food and fuel oil are dependent on naval protection.

 

Luftwaffe attacks on England will not force her to capitulate. But if the fleet is annihilated instant capitulation results. There is no doubt that a surprise attack might lead to a quick decision.[/quote]

 

A surprise attack with what? Surely Admiral Raeder must have thought that Hitler was talking through his hat. Under the so-called Z Plan, promulgated at the end of 1938, German naval strength would only begin to approach that of the British by 1945. At the moment, in the spring of 1939, Germany did not have the heavy ships to sink the British Navy, even by a surprise attack.

 

Perhaps Britain could be brought down by other means. Here Hitler came down to earth again and outlined a strategic plan which a year later, in fact, would be carried out with amazing success.

 

[quote]The aim must be to deal the enemy a smashing or a finally decisive blow right at the start. Considerations of right or wrong, or of treaties, do not enter into the matter. This will be possible only when we do not "slide" into a war with England on account of Poland.

 

Preparations must be made for a long war as well as for a surprise attack, and every possible intervention by England on the Continent must be smashed.

 

The Army must occupy the positions important for the fleet and the Luftwaffe. If we succeed in occupying and securing Holland and Belgium, as well as defeating France, the basis for a successful war against England has been created.

 

The Luftwaffe can then closely blockade England from western France and the fleet undertake the wider blockade with submarines.[/quote]

 

That is precisely what would be done a little more than a year later. Another decisive strategic plan, which the Fuehrer emphasized on May 23, would also be carried out. At the beginning of the last war, had the German Army executed a wheeling movement toward the Channel ports instead of toward Paris, the end, he said, would have been different. Perhaps it would have been. At any rate he would try it in 1940.

 

"The aim," Hitler concluded, apparently forgetting all about Poland for the moment, "will always be to force England to her knees."

 

There was one final consideration.

 

[quote]Secrecy is the decisive prerequisite for success. Our objectives must be kept secret from both Italy and Japan.[/quote]

 

Even Hitler's own Army General Staff, whose Chief, General Halder, sat there listening, was not to be trusted entirely. "Our studies," the Fuehrer laid down, "must not be left to the General Staff. Secrecy would then no longer be assured." He ordered that a small planning staff in OKW be set up to work out the military plans.

 

On May 23, 1939, then, Hitler, as he himself said, burned his boats. There would be war. Germany needed Lebensraum in the East. To get it Poland would be attacked at the first opportunity. Danzig had nothing to do with it. That was merely an excuse. Britain stood in the way; she was the real driving force against Germany. Very well, she would be taken on too, and France. It would be a life-and-death struggle.

 

When the Fuehrer had first outlined his plans for aggression to the military chiefs, on November 5, 1937, Field Marshal von Blomberg and General von Fritsch had protested -- at least on the grounds that Germany was too weak to fight a European war. [xxiii] During the following summer General Beck had resigned as Chief of the Army General Staff for the same reason. But on May 23, 1939, not a single general or admiral, so far as the record shows, raised his voice to question the wisdom of Hitler's course.

 

Their job, as they saw it, was not to question but to blindly obey. Already they had been applying their considerable talents to working out plans for military aggression. On May 7, Colonel Guenther Blumentritt of the Army General Staff, who with Generals von Rundstedt and von Manstein formed a small "Working Staff," submitted an estimate of the situation for Case White. Actually it was a plan for the conquest of Poland. It was an imaginative and daring plan, and it would be followed with very few changes. [48]

 

Admiral Raeder came through with naval plans for Case White in a top-secret directive signed May 16. [49] Since Poland had only a few miles of coast on the Baltic west of Danzig and possessed only a small navy, no difficulties were expected. France and Britain were the Admiral's chief concern. The entrance to the Baltic was to be protected by submarines, and the two pocket battleships and the two battleships, with the "remaining" submarines, were to prepare for "war in the Atlantic." According to the instructions of the Fuehrer, the Navy had to be prepared to carry out its part of "White" by September 1 but Raeder urged his commanders to hasten plans because "due to the latest political developments" action might come sooner. [50]

 

As May 1939 came to an end German preparations for going to war by the end of the summer were well along. The great armament works were humming, turning out guns, tanks, planes and warships. The able staffs of the Army, Navy and Air Force had reached the final stage of planning. The ranks were being swelled by new men called up for "summer training." Hitler could be pleased with what he had accomplished.

 

The day after the Fuehrer's lecture to the military chiefs, on May 24, General Georg Thomas, head of the Economic and Armaments Branch of OKW, summed up that accomplishment in a confidential lecture to the staff of the Foreign Office. Whereas it had taken the Imperial Army, Thomas reminded his listeners, sixteen years -- from 1898 to 1914 -- to increase its strength from forty-three to fifty divisions, the Army of the Third Reich had jumped from seven to fifty-one divisions in just four years. Among them were five heavy armored divisions and four light ones, a "modern battle cavalry" such as no other nation possessed. The Navy had built up from practically nothing a fleet of two battleships of 26,000 tons, [xxiv] two heavy cruisers, seventeen destroyers and forty-seven submarines. It had already launched two battleships of 35,000 tons, one aircraft carrier, four heavy cruisers, five destroyers and seven submarines, and was planning to launch a great many more ships. From absolutely nothing, the Luftwaffe had built up a force of twenty-one squadrons with a personnel of 260,000 men. The armament industry, General Thomas said, was already producing more than it had during the peak of the last war and its output in most fields far exceeded that of any other country. In fact, total German rearmament, the General declared, was "probably unique in the world."

 

Formidable as German military power was becoming at the beginning of the summer of 1939, the prospect of success in the war which Hitler was planning for the early fall depended on what kind of a war it was. Germany was still not strong enough, and probably would never be, to take on France, Britain and Russia in addition to Poland. As the fateful summer commenced, all depended on the Fuehrer's ability to limit the war -- above all, to keep Russia from forming the military alliance with the West which Litvinov, just before his fall, had proposed and which Chamberlain, though he had at first seemed to reject it, was, by May's end, again mulling over.

 

[b]THE INTERVENTION OF RUSSIA: II[/b]

 

In a debate in the House of Commons on May 19, the British Prime Minister had again taken a cool and even disdainful view, as Churchill thought, of the Russian proposals. Somewhat wearily he had explained to the House that "there is a sort of veil, a sort of wall, between the two Governments which it is extremely difficult to penetrate." Churchill, on the other hand, backed by Lloyd George, argued that Moscow had made "a fair offer ... more simple, more direct, more effective" than Chamberlain's own proposals. He begged His Majesty's Government "to get some brutal truths into their heads. Without an effective Eastern front, there can be no satisfactory defense in the West, and without Russia there can be no effective Eastern front."

 

Bowing to the storm of criticism from all sides, Chamberlain on May 27 finally instructed the British ambassador in Moscow to agree to begin discussions of a pact of mutual assistance, a military convention and guarantees to the countries threatened by Hitler. [xxv] Ambassador von Dirksen in London advised the German Foreign Office that the British government had taken the step "with the greatest reluctance." Furthermore, Dirksen divulged what was perhaps the primary reason for Chamberlain's move. The British Foreign Office, he reported urgently to Berlin, had got wind of "German feelers in Moscow" and was "afraid that Germany might succeed in keeping Soviet Russia neutral or even inducing her to adopt benevolent neutrality. That would have meant the complete collapse of the encirclement action." [53]

 

On the last day of May, Molotov made his first public speech as Commissar for Foreign Affairs in an address to the Supreme Council of the U.S.S.R. He castigated the Western democracies for their hesitation and declared that if they were serious in joining Russia to stop aggression they must get down to brass tacks and come to an agreement on three main points:

 

1. Conclude a tripartite mutual-assistance pact of a purely defensive character.

 

2. Guarantee the states of Central and Eastern Europe, including all European states bordering on the Soviet Union.

 

3. Conclude a definite agreement on the form and scope of the immediate and effective aid to be afforded each other and the smaller states threatened by aggression.

 

Molotov also declared that the talks with the West did not mean that Russia would forego "business relations on a practical footing" with Germany and Italy. In fact, he said that "it was not out of the question" that commercial negotiations with Germany could be resumed. Ambassador von der Schulenburg, in reporting the speech to Berlin, pointed out that Molotov had indicated that Russia was still prepared to conclude a treaty with Britain and France "on condition that all her demands are accepted," but that it was now evident from the address that it would take a long time before any real agreement was reached. He pointed out that Molotov had "avoided sallies against Germany and showed readiness to continue the talks begun in Berlin and Moscow." [54]

 

This readiness was now suddenly shared by Hitler in Berlin.

 

During the last ten days of May, Hitler and his advisers blew hot and cold over the thorny question of making advances to Moscow in order to thwart the Anglo-Russian negotiations. It was felt in Berlin that Molotov in his talk with Ambassador von der Schulenburg on May 20 [xxvi] had thrown cold water on Germany's approaches, and on the following day, May 21, Weizsaecker wired the ambassador that in view of what the Foreign Commissar had said "we must now sit tight and wait to see if the Russians will speak more openly." [55]

 

But Hitler, having fixed September 1 for his attack on Poland, could not afford to sit tight. On or about May 25, Weizsaecker and Friedrich Gaus, director of the Legal Department of the German Foreign Office, were summoned to Ribbentrop's country house at Sonnenburg and, according to Gaus's affidavit submitted at Nuremberg, [xxvii] informed that the Fuehrer wanted "to establish more tolerable relations between Germany and the Soviet Union." Draft instructions to Schulenburg were drawn up by Ribbentrop outlining in considerable detail the new line he was to take with Molotov, whom he was asked to see "as soon as possible." This draft is among the captured German Foreign Office documents. [56]

 

It was shown to Hitler, according to a notation on the document, on May 26. It is a revealing paper. It discloses that by this date the German Foreign Office was convinced that the Anglo-Russian negotiations would be successfully concluded unless Germany intervened decisively. Ribbentrop therefore proposed that Schulenburg tell Molotov the following:

 

[quote]A real opposition of interests in foreign affairs does not exist between Germany and Soviet Russia ... The time has come to consider a pacification and normalization of German-Soviet Russian foreign relations ... The Italo-German alliance is not directed against the Soviet Union. It is exclusively directed against the Anglo-French combination ...

 

If against our wishes it should come to hostilities with Poland, we are firmly convinced that even this need not in any way lead to a clash of interests with Soviet Russia. We can even go so far as to say that when settling the German-Polish question -- in whatever way this is done -- we would take Russian interests into account as far as possible.[/quote]

 

Next the danger to Russia of an alliance with Great Britain was to be pointed up.

 

[quote]We are unable to see what could really induce the Soviet Union to play an active part in the game of the British policy of encirclement ... This would mean Russia undertaking a one-sided liability without any really valuable British quid pro quo ... Britain is by no means in a position to offer Russia a really valuable quid pro quo, no matter how the treaties may be formulated. All assistance in Europe is rendered impossible by the West Wall ... We are therefore convinced that Britain will once more remain faithful to her traditional policy of letting other powers pull her chestnuts out of the fire.[/quote]

 

Schulenburg also was to emphasize that Germany had "no aggressive intentions against Russia." Finally, he was instructed to tell Molotov that Germany was ready to discuss with the Soviet Union not only economic questions but "a return to normal in political relations."

 

Hitler thought the draft went too far and ordered it held up. The Fuehrer, according to Gaus, had been impressed by Chamberlain's optimistic statement of two days before, May 24, when the Prime Minister had told the House of Commons that as the result of new British proposals he hoped that full agreement with Russia could be reached "at an early date." What Hitler feared was a rebuff. He did not abandon the idea of a rapprochement with Moscow but decided that for the time being a more cautious approach would be best.

 

The backing and filling which took place in the Fuehrer's mind during the last week of May is documented in the captured German Foreign Office papers. On or about the twenty-fifth -- the exact day is not quite certain -- he had suddenly come out for pushing talks with the Soviet Union in order to thwart the Anglo-Russian negotiations. Schulenburg was to see Molotov at once for that purpose. But Ribbentrop's instructions to him, which were shown Hitler on the twenty-sixth, were never sent. The Fuehrer canceled them. That evening Weizsaecker wired Schulenburg advising him to maintain an "attitude of complete reserve -- you personally should not make any move until further notice." [57]

 

This telegram and a letter which the State Secretary wrote the ambassador in Moscow on May 27 but did not mail until May 30, when a significant postscript was added, go far to explaining the hesitations in Berlin. [58] Weizsaecker, writing on the twenty-seventh, informed Schulenburg that it was the opinion in Berlin that an Anglo-Russian agreement would "not be easy to prevent" and that Germany hesitated to intervene decisively against it for fear of provoking "a peal of Tartar laughter" in Moscow. Also, the State Secretary revealed, both Japan and Italy had been cool toward Germany's proposed move in Moscow, and the reserve of her allies had helped to influence the decision in Berlin to sit tight. "Thus," he concluded, "we now want to wait and see how deeply Moscow and Paris-London mutually engage themselves."

 

For some reason Weizsaecker did not post his letter at once; per):laps he felt that Hitler had not yet fully made up his mind. When he did mail it on May 30, he added a postscript:

 

[quote]P.S. To my above lines I must add that, with the approval of the Fuehrer, an approach is nonetheless now to be made to the Russians, though a very much modified one, and this by means of a conversation which I am to hold today with the Russian charge d'affaires. [/quote]

 

This talk with Georgi Astakhov did not get very far, but it represented for the Germans a new start. Weizsaecker's pretext for calling in the Russian charge was to discuss the future of the Soviet trade delegation in Prague, which the Russians were anxious to maintain. Around this subject the two diplomats sparred to find out what was in each other's mind. Weizsaecker said he agreed with Molotov that political and economic questions could not be entirely separated and expressed interest in the "normalization of relations between Soviet Russia and Germany." Astakhov asserted that Molotov had no "intention of barring the door against further Russo-German discussions."

 

Cautious as both men were, the Germans were encouraged. At 10:40 o'clock that evening of May 30 Weizsaecker got off a "most urgent" telegram [59] to Schulenburg in Moscow:

 

[quote]Contrary to the tactics hitherto planned we have now, after all, decided to make a certain degree of contact with the Soviet Union. [xxviii][/quote]

 

It may have been that a long secret memorandum which Mussolini penned to Hitler on May 30 strengthened the Fuehrer's resolve to turn to the Soviet Union, however cautiously. As the summer commenced, the Duce's doubts mounted as to the advisability of an early conflict. He was convinced, he wrote Hitler, that "war between the plutocratic, self-seeking conservative nations" and the Axis was "inevitable." But -- "Italy requires a period of preparation which may extend until the end of 1942 , . . Only from 1943 onward will an effort by war have the greatest prospects of success." After enumerating several reasons why "Italy needs a period of peace," the Duce concluded: "For all these reasons Italy does not wish to hasten a European war, although she is convinced of the inevitability of such a war." [60]

 

Hitler, who had not taken his good friend and ally into his confidence about the date of September 1 which he had set for attacking Poland, replied that he had read the secret memorandum "with the greatest interest" and suggested that the two leaders meet for discussions sometime in the future. In the meantime the Fuehrer decided to see if a crack could be made in the Kremlin wall. All through June preliminary talks concerning a new trade agreement were held in Moscow between the German Embassy and Anastas Mikoyan, the Russian Commissar for Foreign Trade.

 

The Soviet government was still highly suspicious of Berlin. As Schulenburg reported toward the end of the month (June 27), the Kremlin believed the Germans, in pressing for a trade agreement, wished to torpedo the Russian negotiations with Britain and France. "They are afraid," he wired Berlin, "that as soon as we have gained this advantage we might let the negotiations peter out." [61]

 

On June 28 Schulenburg had a long talk with Molotov which proceeded, he told Berlin in a "secret and urgent" telegram, "in a friendly manner." Nevertheless, when the German ambassador referred assuringly to the nonaggression treaties which Germany had just concluded with the Baltic States, [xxix] the Soviet Foreign Commissar tartly replied that "he must doubt the permanence of such treaties after the experiences which Poland had had." Summing up the talk, Schulenburg concluded:

 

[quote]My impression is that the Soviet Government is greatly interested in learning our political views and in maintaining contact with us. Although there was no mistaking the strong distrust evident in all that Molotov said, he nevertheless described a normalization of relations with Germany as being desirable and possible. [62][/quote]

 

The ambassador requested telegraphic instructions as to his next move. Schulenburg was one of the last survivors of the Seeckt, Maltzan and Brockdorff-Rantzau school which had insisted on a German rapprochement with Soviet Russia after 1919 and which had brought it about at RapaUo. As his dispatches throughout 1939 make clear, he sincerely sought to restore the close relations which had existed during the Weimar Republic. But like so many other German career diplomats of the old school he little understood Hitler.

 

Suddenly on June 29 Hitler, from his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, ordered the talks with the Russians broken off.

 

[quote]Berchtesgaden, June 29, 1939

 

... The Fuehrer has decided as follows:

 

The Russians are to be informed that we have seen from their attitude that they are making the continuation of further talks dependent on the acceptance of the basis for our economic discussions as fixed in January. Since this basis was not acceptable to us, we would not be interested in a resumption of the economic discussions with Russia at present.

 

The Fuehrer has agreed that this answer be delayed for a few days. [63][/quote]

 

Actually, the substance of it was telegraphed to the German Embassy in Moscow the next day.

 

[quote]The Foreign Minister [Weizsaecker wired] ... is of the opinion that in the political field enough has been said until further instructions and that for the moment the talks should not be taken up again by us.

 

Concerning the possible economic negotiations with the Russian Government, the deliberations here have not yet been concluded. In this field too you are requested for the time being to take no further action, but to await instructions.  [64][/quote]

 

There is no clue in the secret German documents which explains Hitler's sudden change of mind. The Russians already had begun to compromise on their proposals of January and February. And Schnurre had warned on June 15 that a breakdown in the economic negotiations would be a setback for Germany both economically and politically.

 

Nor could the rocky course of the Anglo-French-Soviet negotiations have so discouraged Hitler as to lead him to such a decision. He knew from the reports of the German Embassy in Moscow that Russia and the Western Powers were deadlocked over the question of guarantees to Poland, Rumania and the Baltic States. Poland and Rumania were happy to be guaranteed by Britain and France, which could scarcely help them in the event of German aggression except by the indirect means of setting up a Western front. But they refused to accept a Russian guarantee or even to allow for Soviet troops to pass through their territories to meet a German attack. Latvia, Estonia and Finland also stoutly declined to accept any Russian guarantee, an attitude which, as the German Foreign Office papers later revealed, was encouraged by Germany in the form of dire threats should they weaken in their resolve.

 

In this impasse Molotov suggested at the beginning of June that Great Britain send its Foreign Secretary to Moscow to take part in the negotiations. Apparently in the Russian view this would not only help to break the deadlock but would show that Britain was in earnest in arriving at an agreement with Russia. Lord Halifax declined to go. [xxx] Anthony Eden, who was at least a former Foreign Secretary, offered to go in his place, but Chamberlain turned him down. It was decided, instead, to send William Strang, a capable career official in the Foreign Office who had previously served in the Moscow Embassy and spoke Russian but was little known either in his own country or outside of it. The appointment of so subordinate an official to head such an important mission and to negotiate directly with Molotov and Stalin was a signal to the Russians, they later said, that Chamberlain still did not take very seriously the business of building an alliance to stop Hitler.

 

Strang arrived in Moscow on June 14, but though he participated in eleven Anglo-French meetings with Molotov, his appearance had little effect on the course of Anglo-Soviet negotiations. A fortnight later, on June 29, Russian suspicion and irritation was publicly displayed in an article in Pravda by Andrei Zhdanov under the headline, "British and French Governments Do Not Want a Treaty on the Basis of Equality for the Soviet Union." Though purporting to write "as a private individual and not committing the Soviet Government," Zhdanov was not only a member of the Politburo and president of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Soviet Parliament but, as Schulenburg emphasized to Berlin in reporting on the matter, "one of Stalin's confidants [whose] article was doubtless written on orders from above."

 

[quote]It seems to me [Zhdanov wrote] that the British and French Governments are not out for a real agreement acceptable to the U.S.S.R. but only for talks about an agreement in order to demonstrate before the public opinion of their own countries the alleged unyielding attitude of the U.S.S.R. and thus facilitate the conclusion of an agreement with the aggressors. The next few days will show whether this is so or not. [66] [/quote]

 

Stalin's distrust of Britain and France and his suspicion that the Western Allies might in the end make a deal with Hitler, as they had the year before at Munich, was thus publicized for all the world to ponder. Ambassador von der Schulenburg, pondering it, suggested to Berlin that one purpose of the article was "to lay the blame on Britain and France for the possible breakdown of the negotiations." [67]

 

[b]PLANS FOR TOTAL WAR[/b]

 

Still Adolf Hitler did not rise to the Russian bait. Perhaps it was because all during June he was busy at Berchtesgaden supervising the completion of military plans to invade Poland at the summer's end.

 

By June 15 he had General von Brauchitsch's top-secret plan for the operations of the Army against Poland. [68] "The object of the operation," the Commander in Chief of the Army, echoing his master, declared, "is to destroy the Polish armed forces. The political leadership demands that the war should be begun by heavy surprise blows and lead to quick successes. The intention of the Army High Command is to prevent a regular mobilization and concentration of the Polish Army by a surprise invasion of Polish territory and to destroy the mass of the Polish Army, which is expected to be west of the Vistula -- Narew line, by a concentric attack from Silesia on the one side and from Pomerania-East Prussia on the other."

 

To carry out his plan, Brauchitsch set up two army groups -- Army Group South, consisting of the Eighth, Tenth and Fourteenth armies, and Army Group North, made up of the Third and Fourth armies. The southern army group, under the command of General von Rundstedt, was to attack from Silesia "in the general direction of Warsaw, scatter opposing Polish forces and occupy as early as possible with forces as strong as possible the Vistula on both sides of Warsaw with the aim of destroying the Polish forces still holding out in western Poland in co-operation with Army Group North." The first mission of the latter group was "to establish connection between the Reich and East Prussia" by driving across the Corridor. Detailed objectives of the various armies were outlined as well as those for the Air Force and Navy. Danzig, said Brauchitsch, would be declared German territory on the first day of hostilities and would be secured by loyal forces under German command.

 

A supplemental directive issued at the same time stipulated that the order of deployment for "White" would be put into operation on August 20. "All preparations," it laid down, "must be concluded by that date." [69]

 

A week later, on June 22, General Keitel submitted to Hitler a "preliminary timetable for Case White." [70] The Fuehrer, after studying it, agreed with it "in the main" but ordered that "so as not to disquiet the population by calling up reserves on a larger scale than usual ... civilian establishments, employers or other private persons who make inquiries should be told that men are being called up for the autumn maneuvers." Also Hitler stipulated that "for reasons of security, the clearing of hospitals in the frontier area which the Supreme Command of the Army proposed should take place from the middle of July must not be carried out."

 

The war which Hitler was planning to launch would be total war and would require not only military mobilization but a total mobilization of all the resources of the nation. To co-ordinate this immense effort a meeting of the Reich Defense Council was convoked the next day, on June 23, under the chairmanship of Goering. Some thirty-five ranking officials, civil and military, including Keitel, Raeder, Halder, Thomas and Milch for the armed forces and the Ministers of the Interior, Economics, Finance and Transport, as well as Himmler, were present. It was only the second meeting of the Council but, as Goering explained, the body was convoked only to make the most important decisions and he left no doubt in the minds of his hearers, as the captured secret minutes of the session reveal, that war was near and that much remained to be done about manpower for industry and agriculture and about many other matters relating to total mobilization. [71]

 

Goering informed the Council that Hitler had decided to draft some seven million men. To augment the labor supply Dr. Funk, the Minister of Economics, was to arrange "what work is to be given to prisoners of war and to the inmates of prisons and concentration camps." Himmler chimed in to say that "greater use will be made of the concentration camps in wartime." And Goering added that "hundreds of thousands of workers from the Czech protectorate are to be employed under supervision in Germany, particularly in agriculture, and housed in hutments." Already, it was obvious, the Nazi program for slave labor was taking shape.

 

Dr. Frick, the Minister of the Interior, promised to "save labor in the public administration" and enlivened the proceedings by admitting that under the Nazi regime the number of bureaucrats had increased "from twenty to forty fold -- an impossible state of affairs." A committee was set up to correct this lamentable situation.

 

An even more pessimistic report was made by Colonel Rudolf Gercke, chief of the Transport Department of the Army General Staff. "In the transportation sphere," he declared bluntly, "Germany is at the moment not ready for war."

 

Whether the German transportation facilities would be equal to their task depended, of course, on whether the war was confined to Poland. If it had to be fought in the West against France and Great Britain it was feared that the transport system would simply not be adequate. In July two emergency meetings of the Defense Council were called "in order to bring the West Wall, by August 25 at the latest, into the optimum condition of preparedness with the material that can be obtained by that time by an extreme effort." High officials of Krupp and the steel cartel were enlisted to try to scrape up the necessary metal to complete the armament of the western fortifications. For on their impregnancy, the Germans knew, depended whether the Anglo-French armies would be inclined to mount a serious attack on western Germany while the Wehrmacht was preoccupied in Poland.

 

Though Hitler, with unusual frankness, had told his generals on May 23 that Danzig was not the cause of the dispute with Poland at all, it seemed for a few weeks at midsummer that the Free City might be the powder keg which any day would set off the explosion of war. For some time the Germans had been smuggling into Danzig arms and Regular Army officers to train the local defense guard in their use. [xxxi] The arms and officers came in across the border from East Prussia, and in order to keep closer watch on them the Poles increased the number of their customs officials and frontier guards. The local Danzig authorities, now operating exclusively on orders from Berlin, countered by trying to prevent the Polish officials from carrying out their duties.

 

The conflict reached a crisis on August 4 when the Polish diplomatic representative in Danzig informed the local authorities that the Polish customs inspectors had been given orders to carry out their functions "with arms" and that any attempt by the Danzigers to hamper them would be regarded "as an act of violence" against Polish officials, and that in such a case the Polish government would "retaliate without delay against the Free City."

 

This was a further sign to Hitler that the Poles could not be intimidated and it was reinforced by the opinion of the German ambassador in Warsaw, who on July 6 telegraphed Berlin that there was "hardly any doubt" that Poland would fight "if there was a clear violation" of her rights in Danzig. We know from a marginal note on the telegram in Ribbentrop's handwriting that it was shown the Fuehrer. [73]

 

Hitler was furious. The next day, August 7, he summoned Albert Forster, the Nazi Gauleiter of Danzig, to Berchtesgaden and told him that he had reached the extreme limit of his patience with the Poles. Angry notes were exchanged between Berlin and Warsaw -- so violent in tone that neither side dared to make them public. On the ninth, the Reich government warned Poland that a repetition of its ultimatum to Danzig "would lead to an aggravation of German-Polish relations ... for which the German Government must disclaim all responsibility." The next day the Polish government replied tartly

 

[quote]that they will continue to react as hitherto to any attempt by the authorities of the Free City to impair the rights and interests which Poland enjoys in Danzig, and will do so by such means and measures as they alone may deem appropriate, and that they will regard any intervention by the Reich Government as an act of aggression. [74][/quote]

 

No small nation which stood in Hitler's way had ever used such language. When on the following day, August 11, the Fuehrer received Carl Burckhardt, a Swiss, who was League of Nations High Commissioner at Danzig and who had gone more than halfway to meet the German demands there, he was in an ugly mood. He told his visitor that "if the slightest thing was attempted by the Poles, he would fall upon them like lightning with all the powerful arms at his disposal, of which the Poles had not the slightest idea."

 

[quote]M. Burckhardt said [the High Commissioner later reported] that that would lead to a general conflict. Herr Hitler replied that if he had to make war he would rather do it today than tomorrow, that he would not conduct it like the Germany of Wilhelm II, who had always had scruples about the full use of every weapon, and that he would fight without mercy up to the extreme limit. [75][/quote]

 

Against whom? Against Poland certainly. Against Britain and France, if necessary. Against Russia too? With regard to the Soviet Union, Hitler had finally made up his mind.

 

[b]THE INTERVENTION OF RUSSIA: III[/b]

 

A fresh initiative had come from the Russians.

 

On July 18, E. Babarin, the Soviet trade representative in Berlin, accompanied by two aides, called on Julius Schnurre at the German Foreign Office and informed him that Russia would like to extend and intensify German-Soviet economic relations. He brought along a detailed memorandum for a trade agreement calling for a greatly increased exchange of goods between the two countries and declared that if a few differences between the two parties were clarified he was empowered to sign a trade treaty in Berlin. The Germans, as Dr. Schnurre's confidential memorandum of the meeting shows, were rather pleased. Such a treaty, Schnurre noted, "will not fail to have its effect at least in Poland and Britain." [76] Four days later, on July 22, the Russian press announced in Moscow that Soviet-German trade negotiations had been resumed in Berlin.

 

On the same day Weizsaecker rather exuberantly wired Ambassador von der Schulenburg in Moscow some interesting new instructions. As to the trade negotiations, he informed the ambassador, "we will act here in a markedly forthcoming manner, since a conclusion, and this at the earliest possible moment, is desired here for general reasons. As far as the purely political aspect of our conversations with the Russians is concerned," he added, "we regard the period of waiting stipulated for you in our telegram [of June 30] [xxxii] as having expired. You are therefore empowered to pick up the threads again there, without in any way pressing the matter." [77]

 

They were, in fact, picked up four days later, on July 26, in Berlin. Dr. Schnurre was instructed by Ribbentrop to dine Astakhov, the Soviet charge, and Babarin at a swank Berlin restaurant and sound them out. The two Russians needed little sounding. As Schnurre noted in his confidential memorandum of the meeting, "the Russians stayed until about 12:30 A.M." and talked "in a very lively and interested manner about the political and economic problems of interest to us."

 

Astakhov, with the warm approval of Babarin, declared that a Soviet-German political rapprochement corresponded to the vital interests of the two countries. In Moscow, he said, they had never quite understood why Nazi Germany had been so antagonistic to the Soviet Union. The German diplomat, in response, explained that "German policy in the East had now taken an entirely different course."

 

[quote]On our part there could be no question of menacing the Soviet Union. Our aims were in an entirely different direction ... German policy was aimed at Britain ... 1 could imagine a far-reaching arrangement of mutual interests with due consideration for vital Russian problems.

 

However, this possibility would be barred the moment the Soviet Union aligned itself with Britain against Germany. The time for an understanding between Germany and the Soviet Union was opportune now, but would no longer be so after the conclusion of a pact with London.

 

What could Britain offer Russia? At best, participation in a European war and the hostility of Germany. What could we offer against this? Neutrality and keeping out of a possible European conflict and, if Moscow wished, a German-Russian understanding on mutual interests which, just as in former times, would work out to the advantage of both countries ... Controversial problems [between Germany and Russia] did not, in my opinion, exist anywhere along the line from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and to the Far East. In addition, despite all the divergencies in their views of life, there was one thing common to the ideology of Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union: opposition to the capitalist democracies in the West. [78][/quote]

 

Thus in the late-evening hours of July 26 in a small Berlin restaurant over good food and wine partaken by second-string diplomats was Germany's first serious bid for a deal with Soviet Russia made. The new line which Schnurre took had been given him by Ribbentrop himself. Astakhov was pleased to hear it. He promised Schnurre that he would report it at once to Moscow.

 

In the Wilhelmstrasse the Germans waited impatiently to see what the reaction in the Soviet capital would be. Three days later, on July 29, Weizsaecker sent a secret dispatch by courier to Schulenburg in Moscow.

 

[quote]It would be important for us to know whether the remarks made to Astakhov and Babarin have met with any response in Moscow. If you see an opportunity of arranging a further conversation with Molotov, please sound him out on the same lines. If this results in Molotov abandoning the reserve he has so far maintained you could go a step further ... This applies in particular to the Polish problem. We would be prepared, however the Polish problem may develop ... to safeguard all Soviet interests and to come to an understanding with the Government in Moscow. In the Baltic question, too, if the talks took a positive course, the idea could be advanced of so adjusting our attitude to the Baltic States as to respect vital Soviet interests in the Baltic Sea. [79][/quote]

 

Two days later, on July 31, the State Secretary wired Schulenburg "urgent and secret":

 

[quote]With reference to our dispatch of July 29, arriving in Moscow by courier today:

 

Please report by telegram the date and time of your next interview with Molotov as soon as it is fixed.

 

We are anxious for an early interview. [80][/quote]

 

For the first time a note of urgency crept into the dispatches from Berlin to Moscow.

 

There was good reason for Berlin's sense of urgency. On July 23, France and Britain had finally agreed to Russia's proposal that militarystaff talks be held at once to draw up a military convention which would spell out specifically how Hitler's armies were to be met by the three nations. Although Chamberlain did not announce this agreement until July 31, when he made it to the House of Commons, the Germans got wind of it earlier. On July 28 Ambassador von Welczeck in Paris wired Berlin that he had learned from "an unusually well-informed source" that France and Britain were dispatching military missions to Moscow and that the French group would be headed by General Doumenc, whom he described as being "a particularly capable officer" and a former Deputy Chief of Staff under General Maxime Weygand. [81] It was the German ambassador's impression, as he stated in a supplementary dispatch two days later, that Paris and London had agreed to military-staff talks as a last means of preventing the adjournment of the Moscow negotiations. [82]

 

It was a well-founded impression. As the confidential British Foreign Office papers make clear, the political talks in Moscow had reached an impasse by the last week in July largely over the impossibility of reaching a definition of "indirect aggression." To the British and French the Russian interpretation of that term was so broad that it might be used to justify Soviet intervention in Finland and the Baltic States even if there were no serious Nazi threat, and to this London at least -- the French were prepared to be more accommodating -- would not agree.

 

Also, on June 2 the Russians had insisted that a military agreement setting down in detail the "methods, form and extent" of the military help which the three countries were to give each other should come into force at the same time as the mutual-assistance pact itself. The Western Powers, which did not think highly of Russia's military prowess, [xxxiii] tried to put Molotov off. They would only agree to starting staff talks after the political agreement had been signed. But the Russians were adamant. When the British tried to strike a bargain, offering on July 17 to begin staff conversations at once if the Soviet Union would yield on its insistence on signing political and military agreements simultaneously and also -- for good measure -- accept the British definition of "indirect aggression," Molotov answered with a blunt rejection. Unless the French and British agreed to political and military agreements in one package, he said, there was no point in continuing the negotiations. This Russian threat to end the talks caused consternation in Paris, which seems to have been more acutely aware than London of the course of Soviet-Nazi flirtations, and it was largely due to French pressure that the British government, on August 23, while refusing to accept the Russian proposals on "indirect aggression," reluctantly agreed to negotiate a military convention. [84]

 

Chamberlain was less than lukewarm to the whole business of staff talks. [xxxiv] On August 1 Ambassador von Dirksen in London informed Berlin that the military negotiations with the Russians were "regarded skeptically" in British government circles.

 

[quote]This is borne out [he wrote] by the composition of the British Military Mission.  [xxxv] The Admiral ... is practically on the retired list and was never on the Naval Staff. The General is also purely a combat officer. The Air Marshal is outstanding as a pilot and an instructor, but not as a strategist. This seems to indicate that the task of the Military Mission is rather to ascertain the fighting value of the Soviet forces than to conclude agreements on operations ... The Wehrmacht attaches are agreed in observing a surprising skepticism in British military circles about the forthcoming talks with the Soviet armed forces. [86][/quote]

 

Indeed, so skeptical was the British government that it neglected to give Admiral Drax written authority to negotiate -- an oversight, if it was that, which Marshal Voroshilov complained about when the staff officers first met. The Admiral's credentials did not arrive until August 21, when they were no longer of use.

 

But if Admiral Drax had no written credentials he certainly had secret written instructions as to the course he was to take in the military talks in Moscow. As the British Foreign Office papers much later revealed, the Admiral was admonished to "go very slowly with the [military] conversations, watching the progress of the political negotiations," until a political agreement had been concluded. [87] It was explained to him that confidential military information could not be imparted to the Russians until the political pact was signed.

 

But since the political conversations had been suspended on August 2 and Molotov had made it clear that he would not assent to their being renewed until the military talks had made some progress, the conclusion can scarcely be escaped that the Chamberlain government was quite prepared to take its time in spelling out the military obligations of each country in the proposed mutual-assistance pact. [xxxvi] In fact the confidential British Foreign Office documents leave little doubt that, by the beginning of August, Chamberlain and Halifax had almost given up hope of reaching an agreement with the Soviet Union to stop Hitler but thought that if they stretched out the staff negotiations in Moscow this might somehow deter the German dictator from taking, during the next four weeks, the fatal step toward war. [xxxvii]

 

In contrast to the British and French, the Russians placed on their military mission the highest officers of their armed forces: Marshal Voroshilov, who was Commissar for Defense, General Shaposhnikov, Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army, and the commanders in chief of the Navy and Air Force. The Russians could not help noting that whereas the British had sent the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Edmund Ironside, to Warsaw in July for military talks with the Polish General Staff, they did not consider sending this ranking British officer to Moscow.

 

It cannot be said that the Anglo-French military missions were exactly rushed to Moscow. A plane would have got them there in a day. But they were sent on a slow boat -- a passenger-cargo vessel -- which took as long to get them to Russia as the Queen Mary could have conveyed them to America. They sailed for Leningrad on August 5 and did not arrive in Moscow until August 11.

 

By that time it was too late. Hitler had beaten them to it.

 

While the British and French military officers were waiting for their slow boat to Leningrad the Germans were acting swiftly. August 3 was a crucial day in Berlin and Moscow.

 

At 12:58 P.M. on that day Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, who invariably left the sending of telegrams to State Secretary von Weizsaecker, got off on his own a wire marked "Secret -- Most Urgent" to Schulenburg in Moscow.

 

[quote]Yesterday I had a lengthy conversation with Astakhov, on which a telegram follows.

 

1expressed the German wish for remolding German-Russian relations and stated that from the Baltic to the Black Sea there was no problem which could not be solved to our mutual satisfaction. In response to Astakhov's desire for more concrete conversations on topical questions ... I declared myself ready for such conversations if the Soviet Government would inform me through Astakhov that they also desired to place German-Russian relations on a new and definitive basis. [89][/quote]

 

It was known at the Foreign Office that Schulenburg was seeing Molotov later in the day. An hour after Ribbentrop's telegram was dispatched, Weizsaecker got off one of his own, also marked "Secret -- Most Urgent."

 

[quote]In view of the political situation and in the interests of speed, we are anxious, without prejudice to your conversation with Molotov today, to continue in more concrete terms in Berlin the conversations on harmonizing German-Soviet intentions. To this end Schnurre will receive Astakhov today and will tell him that we would be ready for a continuation on more concrete terms. [90][/quote]

 

Though Ribbentrop's sudden desire for "concrete" talks on everything from the Baltic to the Black Sea must have surprised the Russians -- at one point, as he informed Schulenburg in his following telegram which was sent at 3:47 P.M., he "dropped a gentle hint [to Astakhov] at our coming to an understanding with Russia on the fate of Poland" -- the Foreign Minister emphasized to his ambassador in Moscow that he had told the Russian charge that "we were in no hurry." [91]

 

This was bluff, and the sharp-minded Soviet charge called it when he saw Schnurre at the Foreign Office at 12:45 P.M. He remarked that while Schnurre seemed to be in a hurry, the German Foreign Minister the previous day "had shown no such urgency." Schnurre rose to the occasion.

 

[quote]I told M. Astakhov [he noted in a secret memorandum]92 that though the Foreign Minister last night had not shown any urgency to the Soviet Government, we nevertheless thought it expedient to make use of the next few days [xxxviii] for continuing the conversations in order to establish a basis as quickly as possible.[/quote]

 

For the Germans, then, it had come down to a matter of the next few days. Astakhov told Schnurre that he had received "a provisional answer" from Molotov to the German suggestions. It was largely negative. While Moscow too desired an improvement in relations, "Molotov said," he reported, "that so far nothing concrete was known of Germany's attitude."

 

The Soviet Foreign Commissar conveyed his ideas directly to Schulenburg in Moscow that evening. The ambassador reported in a long dispatch filed shortly after midnight [93] that in a talk lasting an hour and a quarter Molotov had "abandoned his habitual reserve and appeared unusually open." There seems no doubt of that. For after Schulenburg had reiterated Germany's view that no differences existed between the two countries "from the Baltic to the Black Sea" and reaffirmed the German wish to "come to an understanding," the unbending Russian Minister enumerated some of the hostile acts that the Reich had committed against the Soviet Union: the Anti-Comintern Pact, support of Japan against Russia and the exclusion of the Soviets from Munich.

 

"How," asked Molotov, "could the new German statements be reconciled with these three points? Proofs of a changed attitude of the German Government were for the present still lacking."

 

Schulenburg seems to have been somewhat discouraged.

 

[quote]My general impression [he telegraphed Berlin] is that the Soviet Government are at present determined to conclude an agreement with Britain and France, if they fulfill all Soviet wishes ... I believe that my statements made an impression on Molotov; it will nevertheless require considerable effort on our part to cause a reversal in the Soviet Government's course.[/quote]

 

Knowledgeable though the veteran German diplomat was about Russian affairs, he obviously overestimated the progress in Moscow of the British and French negotiators. Nor did he yet realize the lengths to which Berlin was now prepared to go to make the "considerable effort" which he thought was necessary to reverse the course of Soviet diplomacy.

 

In the Wilhelmstrasse confidence grew that this could be accomplished. With Russia neutralized, Britain and France either would not fight for Poland or, if they did, would easily be held on the western fortifications until the Poles were quickly liquidated and the German Army could turn its full strength on the West.

 

The astute French charge d'affaires in Berlin, Jacques Tarbe de St.-Hardouin, noticed the change of atmosphere in the German capital. On the very day, August 3, when there was so much Soviet-German diplomatic activity in Berlin and Moscow, he reported to Paris: "In the course of the last week a very definite change in the political atmosphere has been observed in Berlin ... The period of embarrassment, hesitation, inclination to temporization or even to appeasement has been succeeded among the Nazi leaders by a new phase." [94]

 

[b]THE HESITATION OF GERMANY'S ALLIES[/b]

 

It was different with Germany's allies, Italy and Hungary. As the summer progressed, the governments in Budapest and Rome became increasingly fearful that their countries would be drawn into Hitler's war on Germany's side.

 

On July 24 Count Teleki, Premier of Hungary, addressed identical letters to Hitler and Mussolini informing them that "in the event of a general conflict Hungary will make her policy conform to the policy of the Axis." Having gone so far, he then pulled back. On the same day he wrote the two dictators a second letter stating that "in order to prevent any possible misinterpretation of my letter of July 24, I ... repeat that Hungary could not, on moral grounds, be in a position to take armed action against Poland." [95]

 

The second letter from Budapest threw Hitler into one of his accustomed rages. When he received Count Csaky, the Hungarian Foreign Minister, at Obersalzberg on August 8, in the presence of Ribbentrop, he opened the conversation by stating that he had been "shocked" at the Hungarian Prime Minister's letter. He emphasized, according to the confidential memorandum drawn up for the Foreign Office, that he had never expected help from Hungary -- or from any other state -- "in the event of a German-Polish conflict." Count Teleki's letter, he added, "was impossible." And he reminded his Hungarian guest that it was due to Germany's generosity that Hungary had been able to regain so much territory at the expense of Czechoslovakia. Were Germany to be defeated in war, he said, "Hungary would be automatically smashed too."

 

The German memorandum of this conversation, which is among the captured Foreign Office documents, reveals Hitler's state of mind as the fateful month of August got under way. Poland, he said, presented no military problem at all for Germany. Nevertheless, he was reckoning from the start with a war on two fronts. "No power in the world," he boasted, "could penetrate Germany's western fortifications. Nobody in all my life has been able to frighten me, and that goes for Britain. Nor will I succumb to the oft-predicted nervous breakdown." As for Russia:

 

[quote]The Soviet Government would not fight against us ... The Soviets would not repeat the Czar's mistake and bleed to death for Britain. They would, however, try to enrich themselves, possibly at the expense of the Baltic States or Poland, without engaging in military action themselves.[/quote]

 

So effective was Hitler's harangue that at the end of a second talk held the same day Count Csaky requested him "to regard the two letters written by Teleki as not having been written." He said he would also make the same request of Mussolini.

 

For some weeks the Duce had been worrying and fretting about the danger of the Fuehrer dragging Italy into war. Attolico, his ambassador in Berlin, had been sending increasingly alarming reports about Hitler's determination to attack Poland. [xxxix] Since early June Mussolini had been pressing for another meeting with Hitler and in July it was fixed for August 4 at the Brenner. On July 24 he presented to Hitler through Attolico "certain basic principles" for their discussion. If the Fuehrer considered war "inevitable," then Italy would stand by her side. But the Duce reminded him that a war with Poland could not be localized; it would become a European conflict. Mussolini did not think that this was the time for the Axis to start such a war. He proposed instead "a constructive peaceful policy over several years," with Germany settling her differences with Poland and Italy hers with France by diplomatic negotiation. He went further. He suggested another international conference of the Big Powers. [97]

 

The Fuehrer's reaction, as Ciano noted in his diary on July 26, was unfavorable, and Mussolini decided it might be best to postpone his meeting with Hitler. [98] He proposed instead, on August 7, that the foreign ministers of the two countries meet immediately. Ciano's diary notes during these days indicate the growing uneasiness in Rome. On August 6 he wrote:

 

[quote]We must find some way out. By following the Germans we shall go to war and enter it under the least favorable conditions for the Axis, and especially for Italy. Our gold reserves are reduced to almost nothing, as well as our stocks of metals ... We must avoid war. I propose to the Duce the idea of my meeting with Ribbentrop ... during which I would attempt to continue discussion of Mussolini's project for a world conference.

 

August 9. -- Ribbentrop has approved the idea of our meeting. I decided to leave tomorrow night in order to meet him at Salzburg. The Duce is anxious that I prove to the Germans, by documentary evidence, that the outbreak of war at this time would be folly.

 

August 10. --  The Duce is more than ever convinced of the necessity of delaying the conflict. He himself has worked out the outline of a report concerning the meeting at Salzburg which ends with an allusion to international negotiations to settle the problems that so dangerously disturb European life.

 

Before letting me go he recommends that I shall frankly inform the Germans that we must avoid a conflict with Poland since it will be impossible to localize it, and a general war would be disastrous for everybody. [99][/quote]

 

 

 

Armed with such commendable but, in the circumstances, naive thoughts and recommendations, the youthful Fascist Foreign Minister set out for Germany, where during the next three days -- August 11, 12 and 13 -- he received from Ribbentrop and especially from Hitler the shock of his life.

 

[b]CIANO AT SALZBURG AND OBERSALZBERG: AUGUST 11, 12, 13[/b]

 

For some ten hours on August 11, Ciano conferred with Ribbentrop at the latter's estate at Fuschl, outside Salzburg, which the Nazi Foreign Minister had taken from an Austrian monarchist who, conveniently, had been put away in a concentration camp. The hot-blooded Italian found the atmosphere, as he later reported, cold and gloomy. During dinner at the White Horse Inn at St.Wolfgang not a word was exchanged between the two. It was scarcely necessary. Ribbentrop had informed his visitor earlier in the day that the decision to attack Poland was implacable.

 

"Well, Ribbentrop," Ciano says he asked, "what do you want? The Corridor or Danzig?"

 

"Not that any more," Ribbentrop replied, gazing at him with his cold, metallic eyes. "We want war!"

 

Ciano's arguments that a Polish conflict could not be localized, that if Poland were attacked the Western democracies would fight, were bluntly rejected. The day before Christmas Eve four years later -- 1943 -- when Ciano lay in Cell 27 of the Verona jail waiting execution at the instigation of the Germans, he still remembered that chilling day of August II at Fuschl and Salzburg. Ribbentrop, he wrote in his very last diary entry on December 23, 1943, had bet him "during one of those gloomy meals at the Oesterreichischer Hof in Salzburg" a collection of old German armor against an Italian painting that France and Britain would remain neutral  -- a bet, he remarks ruefully, which was never paid. [100]

 

Ciano moved on to Obersalzberg, where Hitler during two meetings on August 12 and 13 reiterated that France and Britain would not fight. In contrast to the Nazi Foreign Minister, the Fuehrer was cordial, but he was equally implacable in his determination to go to war. This is evident not only from Ciano's reports but from the confidential German minutes of the meeting, which are among the captured documents. [101] The Italian Minister found Hitler standing before a large table covered with military staff maps. He began by explaining the strength of Germany's West Wall. It was, he said, impenetrable. Besides, he added scornfully, Britain could put only three divisions into France. France would have considerably more, but since Poland would be defeated "in a very short time," Germany could then concentrate 100 divisions in the west "for the life-and-death struggle which would then commence."

 

But would it? A few moments later, annoyed by Ciano's initial response, the Fuehrer was contradicting himself. The Italian Minister, as he had promised himself, spoke up to Hitler. According to the German minutes, he expressed "Italy's great surprise at the entirely unexpected gravity of the situation." Germany, he complained, had not kept her ally informed. "On the contrary," he said, "the Reich Foreign Minister had stated [at Milan and Berlin in May] that the Danzig question would be settled in due course." When Ciano went on to declare that a conflict with Poland would spread into a European war his host interrupted to say that he differed.

 

"I personally," said Hitler, "am absolutely convinced that the Western democracies will, in the last resort, recoil from unleashing a general war." To which Ciano replied (the German minutes add) "that he hoped the Fuehrer would prove right but he did not believe it." The Italian Foreign Minister then outlined in great detail Italy's weaknesses, and from his tale of woe, as the Germans recorded it, Hitler must have been finally convinced that Italy would be of little help to him in the coming war. [xl] One of Mussolini's reasons, Ciano said, for wanting to postpone the war was that he "attached great importance to holding, according to plan, the World Exhibition of 1942" -- a remark that must have astounded the Fuehrer, lost as he was in his military maps and calculations. He must have been equally astounded when Ciano naively produced the text of a communique, which he urged to be published, stating that the meeting of the Axis ministers had "reaffirmed the peaceful intentions of their governments" and their belief that peace could be maintained "through normal diplomatic negotiations." Ciano explained that the Duce had in mind a peace conference of the chief European nations but that out of deference to "the Fuehrer's misgivings" he would settle for ordinary diplomatic negotiations.

 

Hitler did not, the first day, turn down completely the idea of a conference but reminded Ciano that "Russia could no longer be excluded from future meetings of the powers." This was the first mention of the Soviet Union but it was not the last.

 

Finally when Ciano tried to pin his host down as to the date of the attack on Poland Hitler replied that because of the autumn rains, which would render useless his armored and motorized divisions in a country with few paved roads, the "settlement with Poland would have to be made one way or the other by the end of August."

 

At last Ciano had the date. Or the last possible date, for a moment later Hitler was storming that if the Poles offered any fresh provocation he was determined "to attack Poland within forty-eight hours." Therefore, he added, "a move against Poland must be expected any moment." That outburst ended the first day's talks except for Hitler's promise to think over the Italian proposals.

 

Having given them twenty-four hours' thought, he told Ciano the next day that it would be better if no communique of any kind were issued about their talks. [xli] Because of the expected bad weather in the fall

 

[quote]it was of decisive importance, firstly [he said], that within the shortest possible time Poland should make her intentions plain, and secondly, that no further acts of provocation of any sort should be tolerated by Germany.[/quote]

 

When Ciano inquired as to "what the shortest possible time" was, Hitler replied, "By the end of August at the latest." While it would take only a fortnight, he explained, to defeat Poland, the "final liquidation" would require a further two to four weeks -- a remarkable forecast of timing, as it turned out.

 

Finally, at the end, Hitler uttered his customary flattery of Mussolini, whom Ciano must have convinced him he could no longer count on. He personally felt fortunate, he declared, "to live at a time when, apart from himself, there was another statesman living who would stand out in history as a great and unique figure. It was a source of great personal happiness that he could be a friend of this man. When the hour struck for the common fight he would always be found at the side of the Duce, come what may."

 

However much the strutting Mussolini might be impressed by such words, his son-in-law was not. "I return to Rome," he wrote in his diary on August 13, after the second meeting with Hitler, "completely disgusted with the Germans, with their leader, with their way of doing things. They have betrayed us and lied to us. Now they are dragging us into an adventure which we have not wanted and which might compromise the regime and the country as a whole."

 

But Italy at the moment was the least of Hitler's concerns. His thoughts were concentrating on Russia. Toward the end of the meeting with Ciano, on August 12, a "telegram from Moscow," as the German minutes put it, was handed to the Fuehrer. The conversation was interrupted for a few moments while Hitler and Ribbentrop perused it. They then informed Ciano of its contents.

 

"The Russians," Hitler said, "have agreed to a German political negotiator being sent to Moscow."

 

_______________

 

[b]Notes:[/b]

 

i. See above, p. 428. The three "contingencies" were the liquidation of the rest of Czechoslovakia, occupation of Memel and protection of the Reich's frontiers.

 

ii. Italics in the original.

 

iii. See above, p. 212.

 

iv. See above, pp. 212-13.

 

v. As a result of that war, Poland pushed its eastern boundary 150 miles east of the  ethnographic Curzon Line, at the expense of the Soviet Union -- a frontier which  transferred four and a half million Ukrainians and one and a half million White  Russians to Polish rule. Thus Poland's western and eastern borders were unacceptable  to Germany and Russia respectively -- a fact which seems to have been lost  sight of in the Western democracies when Berlin and Moscow began to draw together  in the summer of 1939.

 

vi. "I must confess," Chamberlain wrote in a private letter on March 26, "to the  most profound distrust of Russia. I have no belief whatever in her ability to maintain  an effective offensive, even if she wanted to. And 1 distrust her motives ...  Moreover, she is both hated and suspected by many of the smaller states, notably  by Poland, Rumania and Finland." (Feiling. The Life of Neville Chamberlain,  p. 603.)

vii. See above, pp. 428-29.

 

viii. In the telegram of instructions to Kennard [18] it was made clear that Russia was to be left out in the cold. "It is becoming clear," it said, "that our attempts to consolidate the situation will be frustrated if the Soviet Union is openly associated with the initiation of the scheme. Recent telegrams from a number of His Majesty's Missions abroad have warned us that the inclusion of Russia would not only jeopardise the success of our constructive effort but also tend to consolidate the relations of the parties to the Anti-Comintern Pact, as well as excite anxiety among a number of friendly governments."

 

ix.  See above, p. 454.

 

x. Chamberlain could not have been ignorant of Poland's military weakness. Colonel Sword, the British military attache in Warsaw, had sent to London a week before, on March 22, a long report on the disastrous strategic position of Poland, "bounded on three sides by Germany," and on the deficiencies of the Polish armed forces, especially in modern arms and equipment. [20]

 

On April 6, while Colonel Beck was in London discussing a mutual-assistance pact, Colonel Sword and also the British air attache in Warsaw, Group Captain Vachell, sent fresh reports which were even less hopeful. Vachell emphasized that during the next twelve months the Polish Air Force would have "no more than about 600 aircraft, many of which are no match for German aircraft." Sword reported that the Polish Army and Air Force were both so lacking in modern equipment that they could put up only a limited resistance to an all-out German attack. Ambassador Kennard, summing up his attaches' reports, informed London that the Poles would be unable to defend the Corridor or the western frontier against Germany and would have to fall back on the Vistula in the heart of Poland. "A friendly Russia," he added, was "thus of paramount importance" for Poland. [21]

 

 

xi. Actually, the relay of the broadcast to the American radio networks was cut off  after Hitler had begun to speak. This led to reports in New York that he had been  assassinated. I was in the control room of the short-wave section of the German  Broadcasting Company in Berlin, looking after the relay to the Columbia Broadcasting  System in New York, when the broadcast was suddenly shut off. To my  protests, German officials answered that the order had come from Hitler himself.  Within fifteen minutes CBS was telephoning me from New York to check on the  assassination report. I could easily deny it because through an open telephone  circuit to Wilhelmshaven I could hear Hitler shouting his speech. It would have  been difficult to shoot the Fuehrer that day because he spoke behind a bulletproof  glass enclosure.

 

 

xii. On the day of the speech Weizsaecker wired Hans Thomsen, German charge in Washington, instructing him to give the Fuehrer's address the widest possible publicity in the United States and assuring him that extra funds would be provided for the purpose. On May I Thomsen replied, "Interest in speech surpasses anything so far known. I have therefore directed that the English text printed here is to be sent ... to tens of thousands of addressees of all classes and callings, in accordance with the agreed plan. Claim for costs to follow." [26]

 

 

xiii. Hitler was careful to use the Gaelic word for Prime Minister.

 

xiv. See above, p. 427.

 

xv. Though an Associated Press dispatch from Moscow (published in the New York  Times March 12) reported that Stalin's condemnation of efforts to embroil Russia  in a war with Germany had led to talk in diplomatic circles in Moscow of the possibility  of a rapprochement between the Soviet Union and Germany, Sir William  Seeds, the British ambassador, apparently did not participate in any such talk. In  his dispatch reporting Stalin's speech Seeds made no mention of such a possibility. One Western diplomat, Joseph E. Davies, former American ambassador in Moscow, who was now stationed in Brussels, did draw the proper conclusions from Stalin's speech. "It is a most significant statement," he noted in his diary on March II. "It bears the earmarks of a definite warning to the British and French governments that the Soviets are getting tired of 'nonrealistic' opposition to the aggressors. This ... is really ominous for the negotiations ... between the British Foreign Office and the Soviet Union. It certainly is the most significant danger signal that I have yet seen." On March 21 he wrote to Senator Key Pittman: "... Hitler is making a desperate effort to alienate Stalin from France and Britain. Unless the British and French wake up, I am afraid he will succeed." [32]

 

xvi. See above, p. 460.

 

xvii. In explaining to the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, on March 19 why the Russian proposal for a conference, preferably at Bucharest, was "not acceptable," Lord Halifax said that no Minister of the Crown could be spared for the moment to go to Bucharest. It is obvious that this rebuff soured the Russians in the subsequent negotiations with the British and French. Maisky later told Robert Boothby, a Conservative M.P., that the rejection of the Russian proposal had been "another smashing blow at the policy of effective collective security" and that it had decided the fate of Litvinov. [33]

 

 

xviii. If some credence can be cautiously given to the published journal of Litvinov (Notes for a Journal), Stalin had been contemplating such a change since Munich, from which the Soviet Union had been excluded. Toward the end of 1938, according to an entry in this journal, Stalin told Litvinov that "we are prepared to come to an agreement with the Germans ... and also to render Poland harmless." In January 1939 the Foreign Commissar noted: "It would appear they have decided to remove me." In the same entry he reveals that all his communications with the Soviet Embassy in Berlin must now go through Stalin and that Ambassador Merekalov, on Stalin's instructions, is about to begin negotiations with Weizsaecker in  order to let Hitler know "in effect: 'We couldn't come to an agreement until now,  but now we can.''' The Journal is a somewhat dubious book. Professor Edward  Hallett Carr, a British authority on the Soviet Union, investigated it and found that  though undoubtedly it had been touched up to a point where some of it was "pure  fiction," a large part of it fairly represents Litvinov's outlook.

 

 xix. Ciano's diary for May 22 is full of titbits about Hitler and his weird entourage.  Frau Goebbels complained that the Fuehrer kept his friends up all night and exclaimed,  "It is always Hitler who talks! He repeats himself and bores his guests."  Ciano also heard hints "of the Fuehrer's tender feelings for a beautiful girl. She is  twenty years old, with beautiful quiet eyes, regular features and a magnificent body.  Her name is Sigrid von Lappus. They see each other frequently and intimately."  (The Ciano Diaries, p. 85.) Ciano, a great man with the ladies himself, was obviously intrigued.  Apparently he had not yet heard of Eva Braun. Hitler's mistress,  who was rarely permitted at this time to come to Berlin.

 

xx. See above, p. 305.

 

xxi. Emphasis in the original.

 

xxii. Emphasis in the original.

 

 

xxiii. Hiller's understanding of the Battle of Jutland was obviously faulty.

 

 

xxiv. See above, p. 308.

 

xxv. In giving these tonnages for German battleships, General Thomas was deceiving  even the Foreign Office. An interesting German naval document51 dated more  than a year before, February 18, 1938, notes that false figures on battleship tonnage  had been furnished the British government under the Anglo-German naval agreement.  It states that the actual tonnage of the 26,000 -- ton ships was 31,300 tons;  that of the 35,000 -- ton battleships (the top level in the British and American navies)  was actually 41,700 tons. It is a curious example of Nazi deceit.

 

xxvi. On May 27, the British ambassador and the French charge d'affaires in Moscow  presented Molotov with an Anglo-French draft of the proposed pact. To the surprise  of the Western envoys, Molotov took a very cool view of it. [52]

 

xxvii. See above, pp. 481-82.

 

xxviii. The affidavit was rejected as evidence by the tribunal and is not published in the Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression or Trial of the Major War Criminals volumes of the Nuremberg evidence. This does not detract from its authenticity. All material dealing with Nazi-Soviet collaboration during this period was handled gingerly by the tribunal, one of whose four judges was a Russian.

 

 

 xix. In Nazi-Soviet Relations, a volume of German Foreign Office documents on that  subject published by the U.S. State Department in 1949, the English translation  of the telegram came out much stronger. The key sentence was given as: "We  have now decided to undertake definite negotiations with the Soviet Union." This  has led many historians, including Churchill, to conclude that this telegram of  May 30 marked the decisive turning point in Hitler's efforts to make a deal with  Moscow. That turning point came later. As Weizsaecker pointed out in the May 30  postscript to his letter to Schulenburg, the German approach, which Hitler had  approved, was to be "a very much modified one."

 

 xxx. To try to forestall an Anglo-French-Russian guarantee of Latvia and Estonia,  which bordered on the Soviet Union, Germany had hastily signed nonaggression  pacts with these two Baltic States on June 7. Even before this, on May 31, Germany  had pushed through a similar pact with Denmark, which, considering recent  events, appears to have given the Danes an astonishing sense of security.

 

xxxi. According to the British Foreign Office papers, Halifax told Maisky on June 8  that he had thought of suggesting to the Prime Minister that he should go to Moscow,  "but it was really impossible to get away." Maisky, on June 12, after Strang  had left, suggested to Halifax that it would be a good idea for the Foreign Secretary  to go to Moscow "when things were quieter," but Halifax again stressed the impossibility of  his being absent from London "for the present." [65]

 

xxxii. On June 19 the High Command of the Army had informed the Foreign Office  that 168 German Army officers "have been granted permission to travel through  the Free State of Danzig in civilian clothes on a tour for study purposes." Early in  July General Keitel inquired of the Foreign Office "whether it is politically advisable  to show in public the twelve light and four heavy guns which are in Danzig  and to let exercises be carried out with them, or whether it is better to conceal the  presence of these guns." [72] How the Germans succeeded in smuggling in heavy  artillery past the Polish inspectors is not revealed in the German papers.

 

xxxiii. See above, p. 495.

 

xxxiv. The British High Command, like the German later, grossly underestimated the  potential strength of the Red Army. This may have been due in large part to the  reports it received from its military attaches in Moscow. On March 6, for instance,  Colonel Firebrace, the military attache, and Wing Commander Hallawell, the air  attache, had filed long reports to London to the effect that while the defensive capabilities  of the Red Army and Air Force were considerable they were incapable of  mounting a serious offensive. Hallawell thought that the Russian Air Force, "like  the Army, is likely to be brought to a standstill as much by the collapse of essential  services as by enemy action." Firebrace found that the purge of higher officers had  severely weakened the Red Army. But he did point out to London that "the Red  Army considers war inevitable and is undoubtedly being strenuously prepared for  it." [83]

 

 

xxxv. Strang, negotiating with Molotov in Moscow, was even cooler. "It is, indeed, extraordinary," he wrote the Foreign Office on July 20, "that we should be expected to talk military secrets with the Soviet Government before we are sure that they will be our allies."

 

The Russian view was just the opposite and was put by Molotov to the Anglo-French negotiators on July 27: "The important point was to see how many divisions each party would contribute to the common cause and where they would be located." [85] Before the Russians committed themselves politically they wanted to know how much military help they could expect from the West.

 

xxxvi. The British mission consisted of Admiral Sir Reginald Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, who had been Commander in Chief, Plymouth, 1935-1938, Air Marshal Sir Charles Burnett and Major General Heywood.

 

 

xxxvii. A conclusion reached by Arnold Toynbee and his collaborators in their book, The Eve of War, 1939, based largely on the British Foreign Office documents. See p. 482.

 

xxxviii. On August 16, Air Marshal Sir Charles Burnett wrote to London from Moscow: "I understand it is the Government's policy to prolong negotiations as long as possible If we cannot get acceptance of a treaty." Seeds, the British ambassador in Moscow, had wired London on July 24, the day after his government agreed to staff talks: "I am not optimistic as to the success of military conversations, nor do I think they can in any case be rapidly concluded, but to begin with them now would give a healthy shock to the Axis Powers and a fillip to our friends, while they might be prolonged sufficiently to tide over the next dangerous few months." [88] In view of what Anglo-French intelligence knew of the meetings of Molotov with the German ambassador, of German efforts to interest Russia in a new partition of Poland -- which Coulondre had warned Paris of as early as May 7 (see above, p. 482), of massive German troop concentrations on the Polish border, and of Hitler's intentions, this British trust in stalling in Moscow is somewhat startling.

 

 

xxxix. Emphasis in the original document.

xl. Typical was a vivid report Attolico sent of a talk he had with Ribbentrop on July 6. If Poland dared to attack Danzig, the Nazi Foreign Minister told him, Germany would settle the Danzig question in forty-eight hours -- at Warsaw! If France were to intervene over Danzig, and so precipitate a general war, let her; Germany would like nothing better. France would be "annihilated"; Britain, if she stirred, would be bringing destruction on the British Empire. Russia? There was going to be a Russian-German treaty, and Russia was not going to march. America? One speech of the Fuehrer's had been enough to rout Roosevelt; and Americans would not stir anyway. Fear of Japan would keep America quiet.

 

[quote]I listened [Attolico reported] in wondering silence, while Ribbentrop drew this picture of the war ad usum Germaniae which his imagination has now established indelibly in his head ... He can see nothing but his version -- which is a really amazing one -- of an assured German victory in every field and against all comers ... At the end, I observed that, according to my understanding, there was complete agreement between the Duce and the Fuehrer that Italy and Germany were preparing for a war that was not to be immediate. [96][/quote]

 

But the astute Attolico did not believe that at all. All through July his dispatches warned of imminent German action in Poland.

 

xli. At one point, Ribbentrop, with obvious exasperation, told Ciano, "We don't need  you!"; to which Ciano replied, "The future will show." (From General Halder's  unpublished diary, entry of August 14. [102] Halder says he got it through Weizsaecker.)

xlii. Though the German minutes explicitly state that Ciano agreed with Hitler "that  no communique should be issued at the conclusion of the conversation," the Germans  immediately double-crossed their Italian ally. D.N.B., the official German  news agency, issued a communique two hours after Ciano's departure and without  any consultation whatever with the Italians, that the talks had covered all the  problems of the day -- with particular attention to Danzig -- and had resulted in a  "hundred per cent" agreement. So much so, the communique added, that not a  single problem had been left in suspense, and therefore there would be no further  meetings, because there was no occasion for them. Attolico was furious. He protested  to the Germans, accusing them of bad faith. He tipped off Henderson that  war was imminent. And in an angry dispatch to Rome he described the German  communique as "Machiavellian," pointed out that it was deliberately done to bind  Italy to Germany after the latter's attack on Poland and pleaded that Mussolini  should be firm with Hitler in demanding German fulfillment of the "consultation"  provisions of the Pact of Steel and under these provisions insist on a month's grace  to settle the Danzig question through diplomatic channels. [103]

 

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