“loosening the inner cohesion of our enemies by favoring the anti-Semitic movements, supporting… the pacifistic movements, promoting aspirations for autonomy (Alsace, Brittany, Corsica, Ireland), accelerating the breakdown of morals, and inciting the colonial peoples to rebellion.”124
The day after the signing of the Pact of Steel Hitler had summoned the commanders in chief of the army, navy, and air force to his office in the chancellery and outlined his ideas and intentions. According to the minutes kept by his chief adjutant, Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Schmundt, he predicted with extraordinary acuteness the course of the first phase of the war: the overwhelming thrust into Holland and Belgium and subsequently—contrary to the strategy of the First World War—an advance not upon Paris but on the Channel ports, as launching places for the bombing and blockade of England. For in this speech England appeared as the chief antagonist. Hitler said:
The mass of eighty millions [Germans] has solved the ideational problems. The economic problems must also be solved…. Courage is needed to solve the problems. The principle of circumventing a solution of problems by adapting to circumstances must not be allowed to obtain. Rather, what is necessary is to adjust circumstances to requirements. Without invasion of foreign countries or attacking the property of others, this is not possible….
Danzig is not the object at stake. We are concerned with expanding our living space in the East and securing our food supplies…. In Europe no other possibility is open….
The question of sparing Poland can therefore no longer be considered and we are left with the decision to attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity.
We cannot expect a repetition of the Czech solution. This time there will be fighting. Our task is to isolate Poland. Success in this isolation is decisive…. It must not come to a simultaneous conflict with the West….
Basic principle: Conflict with Poland—beginning with the attack on Poland—will succeed only if the West stays out of it. If that isn’t possible, then it is better to attack the West and in doing so simultaneously finish off Poland….
The war with England and France will be a life-and-death struggle…. We will not be forced into a war, but we cannot get around it.125
From this point on, the signs of the war to come increased. On June 14 General Blaskowitz, commander in chief of Army Group 3, ordered his units to complete all preparations for marching against Poland by August 20. A week later the Oberkommando of the Wehrmacht (OKW) (High Command of the Armed Forces) presented the timetable for the offensive, and another two days later Hitler gave orders to work out precise plans for seizing the bridges over the lower Vistula. On July 27, finally, the directive for the conquest of Danzig was formulated. Only the date was left open.
Meanwhile, the German press, after a longish silence, resumed its anti-Polish campaign, extending the demands of Germany to the entire Corridor, Posen, and parts of Upper Silesia. An incident in Danzig, in the course of which an SA man was killed, provided fresh material for the propaganda campaign. The Polish government reacted with increasing toughness and decreasing moderation. It insisted on conducting its dialogue with the Reich in the icy tone of an outraged great power. Various signs indicated that it was gradually adjusting to the idea that war was inevitable. It tightened the Danzig customs regulations, thus initiating a crisis which led to an angry exchange of notes between Warsaw and Berlin. Provocations, warnings, and ultimatums followed in quick succession; the various white and blue books are filled with them. In Danzig itself camp followers began to arrive, “harbingers of evil and stormy petrels,” who by their actions or exaggerated reports worsened the crisis. “Everywhere they want the catastrophe,” Italian Ambassador Attolico wrote resignedly. When the German ambassador in Paris called on the French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet on August 8, before going on vacation, both men were in a pessimistic mood. “As I listened to him,” Bonnet later wrote, “I had the feeling that everything had already been decided. And when he took his leave I realized that I would not see him again.”
Three days later Carl Jacob Burckhardt, the League of Nations high commissioner for Danzig, arrived at Obersalzberg for a conversation. Hitler seemed “much older and grayer,” as Burckhardt later described him. “He gave the impression of fear and seemed nervous.” He was also much exercised over the Poles’ arrogant determination, which in reality suited his plans. He complained, he threatened that if there were the slightest incident he would smash the Poles without warning, wipe Poland off the map. “I will strike them like lightning with the full power of a mechanized army.” When his visitor suggested that this would lead to a general war, Hitler declared excitedly: “Then so be it. If I have to wage war, I would rather do so today than tomorrow.” He said he could only laugh at the military strength of England and France; nobody was going to scare him with the Russians; the plans of the Polish General Staff exceeded “all the visions of Alexander and Napoleon by far.” Once again he tried, through Burckhardt, to launch his idea of a permanent balance of power with the West:
This eternal talk about war is foolishness and is driving the nations insane. What is the real question?
Only that we need grain and lumber. I need room in the East because of the grain; I need a colony for lumber, only one. We can manage. Our crops have been excellent in 1938 and this year. But one of these days the soil will have enough and will go on strike like a body that has been doped. What then? I cannot have my people suffering hunger. Wouldn’t I be better off leaving two millions on the battlefield than losing even more from hunger? We know what it’s like to die of hunger….
I have no romantic goals. I have no desire to dominate. Above all, I want nothing of the West, not today and not tomorrow. I desire nothing from the thickly settled regions of the world. There I am seeking nothing; once and for all, absolutely nothing. All the ideas that people ascribe to me are inventions. But I must have a free hand in the East.126
Next day Ciano called at the Berghof. He came to sound out the chances for a conference on a peaceful settlement of the looming conflict. But he found Hitler at a table spread with strategic maps, wholly absorbed in military problems. Germany, Hitler said, was virtually unassailable in the West. Poland would be crushed within a few days, and since Poland in the later confrontation with the Western powers would be on their side, he would be eliminating one enemy at once. In any case he was determined to utilize the next Polish provocation as the pretext for an attack, and he gave the deadline as “end of August at the latest.” If he waited too long, autumn rains would make the roads in the East too muddy for motorized forces. Ciano, who on the previous day had heard from Ribbentrop that Germany wanted neither Danzig nor the Corridor, but war with Poland, “soon realized that there is nothing more to be done. He has decided to strike and he will strike.”
By chance, an Anglo-French commission of military men had just begun negotiations in Moscow. The commission had arrived in the Soviet capital the previous day in order to conduct staff conferences exploring the military aspects of the alliance that had been under discussion for months. This group had set out for Moscow on August 5. A plane would have taken them there in a day. But with provoking casualness they had sailed to Leningrad aboard a freighter whose speed, as a later Soviet account noted with some bitterness, “was limited to thirteen knots.”
When the delegation finally arrived, it was too late. Hitler had forestalled them.
In the middle of July Moscow had once again taken the initiative and revived the German-Soviet trade negotiations broken off by Hitler three weeks earlier. This time Hitler did not hesitate, although he may have been merely counting on the discouraging effect the negotiations would have on England and Poland. Both in Moscow and in Berlin he saw to it that the thread was taken up and spun further. On the evening of July 26 Julius Schnurre, an official of the Economic Department of the German Foreign Office, had dinner with two Russian diplomats. While dining these men explored the possibilities of a political rapprochement. The Soviet charge d’affaires, Georgi Astakhov, declared that in Moscow they had never quite been able to understand why National Socialist Germany had taken so hostile an attitude toward the Soviet Union. Schnurre replied that “there could be no question of our being any threat to the Soviet Union…. German policy is aimed at England.” In any case a “far-reaching compromise of mutual interests” was quite conceivable to him, all the more so since antagonisms between their two countries did not exist “along the entire line from the Baltic to the Black Sea and to the Far East.” England could offer the Soviet Union “at best participation in a European war and the hostility of Germany,” whereas
