THE FORCED WAR
When Peaceful Revision Failed
By David L. Hoggan
Chapter 3
The Danzig Problem
The Repudiation of Self
Determination at Danzig
The establishment of the so-called Free City of Danzig by the victorious Allied and Associated Powers in 1919
was the least defensible territorial provision of the Versailles Treaty. It was soon evident to observers in the
Western World, and to the people of Germany, Poland, and Danzig, that this incredibly complicated international
arrangement could never function satisfactorily.
Danzig in 1919 was an ordinary provincial German city without any expectation or desire to occupy a central
position on the stage of world politics. The Danzigers would have welcomed special Polish economic privileges in
their city as a means of increasing the commerce of their port. They were horrified at the prospect of being
detached from Germany and separately constituted in an anomalous position under the jurisdiction of an
experimental League of Nations, which did not begin to exist until 1920.
One might well ask what the attitude of the people of Portland, Oregon, would be if their city were suddenly detached from the United States and placed under the jurisdiction of the United Nations in the interest of guaranteeing special port facilities to Canada near the estuary of the Columbia River. It would be small consolation to recall that the area around Portland, before passing under the sovereignty of the United States in 1846, was settled by the British Hudson Bay Company. The traditionally friendly relations between Canadians and Portlanders would soon deteriorate under such exacerbating conditions.
It is not surprising that the National Socialists of Adolf Hitler won an electoral majority at Danzig before this was possible in Germany. The Danzigers hoped that perhaps Hitler could do something to change the intolerable conditions established during 1919 and the following years. It was easy in 1939 for Margarete Gärtner, the National Socialist propagandist, to compile extensive quotations from approximately one hundred leading Western experts who deplored the idiocy of the Danzig settlement of 1919. Her list was merely a sampling, but it was sufficient to substantiate the point that at Danzig a nasty blunder had been made.
The issue exploited by Lord Halifax of Great Britain to destroy the friendship between Germany and Poland in March 1939 was the Danzig problem. The final collapse of the Czech state in March 1939 produced less effect in neighboring Poland, where the leaders were inclined to welcome the event, than in the distant United States. The Polish leaders had agreed that the return of Memel from Lithuania to Germany in March 1939 would not constitute an issue of conflict between Germany and Poland. Hitler emphasized that Germany would not claim one inch of Polish territory, and that she was prepared to recognize the Versailles Polish frontier on a permanent basis. Polish diplomats had suggested that a settlement of German requests for improved transit to German East Prussia would not present an insuperable problem. The German leaders were disturbed by Polish discrimination against the Germans within Poland, but they were not inclined to recognize this problem as an issue which could produce a conflict between the two states. It was primarily Danzig which made the breach. It was the discussion of Danzig between Germany and Poland which prompted the Polish leaders to warn Hitler that the pursuance of German aims in this area would produce a Polish-German war.
Polish defiance of Hitler on the Danzig question did not occur until the British leaders had launched a vigorous encirclement policy designed to throttle the German Reich. It is very unlikely that the Polish leaders would have defied Hitler had they not expected British support. The Polish leaders had received assurances ever since September 1938 that the British leaders would support them against Hitler at Danzig. Many of the Polish leaders said that they would have fought to frustrate German aims in Danzig had Poland been without an ally in the world. They were seeking to emphasize the importance which they attached to Danzig in discussing what they might have done in this hypothetical situation. This does not mean that they actually would have fought for Danzig in a real situation of this kind, and it is doubtful if Pilsudski would have fought for Danzig in 1939 even with British support. It is evident that Danzig was the issue selected by the Polish leaders to defy Hitler after the British had offered an alliance to Poland.
It is easy to see to-day that the creation of the Free City of Danzig was the most foolish provision of the Versailles Treaty. A similar experiment at Trieste in 1947 was abandoned after a few years because it was recognized to be unworkable, and it is hoped that Europe in the future will be spared further experiments of this kind. Danzig had a National Socialist regime after 1933, and Carl Burckhardt, the last League High Commissioner in Danzig, said in 1937 that the union between Danzig and the rest of Germany was inevitable. The Polish leaders professed to believe that it was necessary to prevent Danzig from returning to the Reich. This is especially difficult to understand when it is recalled that the Poles after 1924 had their own thriving port city of Gdynia on the former German coast, and that otherwise the Poles had never had a port of their own throughout their entire recorded history. The Poles claimed that the Vistula was their river, and that they deserved to control its estuary. When Joseph Goebbels observed that it would be equally logical for Germany to demand Rotterdam and the mouth of the Rhine, the Poles answered with the complaint that the Germans controlled the mouths of many of their rivers, such as the Weser, the Elbe, and the Oder, but for unfortunate Poland it was the Vistula or nothing. The Germans might well have answered this complaint with one of their own to the effect that it was unfair of God to endow Poland with richer agricultural land than Germany possessed. The Poles were usually impervious to logic when Danzig was discussed. This in itself made a preposterous situation more difficult, although a compromise settlement on the basis of generous terms from Hitler might have been possible had it not been for British meddling.
The Allied Powers in 1920 converted Danzig from a German provincial capital to a German city state in the style prevailing in the other Hanseatic cities of Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck. The latter three cities remained separate federal states within the German Empire created by Bismarck. The difference was that the victorious Powers insisted that Danzig should not join the other states of the German Union, or again become a part of Germany. They also decreed that Danzig should submit to numerous servitudes established for the benefit of Poland.
The renunciation of Danzig by Germany and the creation of the Free City regime was stipulated by articles 100 to 108 of the Versailles Treaty. A League High Commissioner was to be the first instance of appeal in disputes between Poland and Danzig. The foreign relations of Danzig were delegated to Poland, and the Free City was to be assigned to the Polish customs area. The Poles were allowed unrestricted use of Danzig canals, docks, railroads, and roads for trading purposes and they were delegated control over river traffic, and over telegraph, telephone, and postal communications between Poland and Danzig harbor. The Poles had the privilege of improving, leasing, or selling transit facilities. The residents of Danzig forfeited German citizenship, although formal provision was made for adults to request German citizenship within a two year period. Double citizenship in Danzig and Germany was forbidden. The League of Nations, as the Sovereign authority, was granted ownership over all possessions of the German and Prussian administrations on Danzig territory. The League was to stipulate what part of these possessions might be assigned to Poland or Danzig.
The formal treaty which assigned specific property of Poland was ratified on May 3, 1923. The Poles received the Petershagen and Neufahrwasser barracks, naval supplies, oil tanks, all weapons and weapon tools from the dismantled Danzig arms factory, supply buildings, an apartment building, the state welfare building on Hansa square, the major railroad lines and their facilities, and ownership over most of the telegraph and telephone lines. Other facilities were assigned to the Free Harbor Commission supervised by the League of Nations in which the Poles participated. The Poles requested a munitions depot and base for a small Polish Army garrison. The Westerplatte peninsula close to the densely populated Neufahrwasser district was assigned to Poland on October 22, 1925. The Danzig Parliament protested in vain that this decision constituted "a new rape of Danzig." The Poles also received permission to station warships and naval personnel in the area. These various awards meant that by 1925 the Polish Government was the largest owner of property in the Free City area.
The Danzig constitution was promulgated on June 14, 1922, after approval by Poland and the League of Nations. Provisions were enacted to guarantee the use of the Polish language by Poles in the Danzig courts, and a special law guaranteeing adequate educational facilities for the Polish minority was passed on December 20, 1921. The Danzig constitution was based on the concept of popular sovereignty despite the denial to Danzigers of the right of self-determination. The constitution stipulated that the construction of fortifications or manufacture of war material could not be undertaken without League approval.
The constitution provided for a Volkstag (assembly) of 120 members with four year terms. It was primarily a consultative body with the right to demand information about public policy, although the formal approval of the Volkstag for current legislation enacted by the Senate was required. The Senate with its 22 members was the seat of carefully circumscribed local autonomy. The President and the other seven major administrative officers, who were comparable to city commissioners, were elected for four years and received fixed salaries. The seven Senate administrative departments included justice and trade, public works, labor relations, interior (police), health and religion, science and education, and finance. There was no separate executive authority.
The Danzig constitution of 1922 replaced the Weimar German constitution of August 11, 1919, which had been tolerated as the fundamental law of Danzig until that time. The election to the Weimar constitutional assembly in January 1919 had taken place throughout West Prussia, and it constituted a virtual plebiscite in favor of remaining with Germany. The Allies refused to permit them a plebiscite of their own which they knew would end in a defeat for Poland. The British Government played a more active role than any other Power, including Poland, in the organization of the Danzig regime. British policy was decisive in the regulation of early disputes between Danzig and Poland. The British at Danzig furnished the first three League High Commissioners, Sir Reginald Tower, General Sir Richard Haking, and Malcolm S. MacDonnell, and the last of the British High Commissioners, after an Italian and Danish interlude, was Sean Lester from Ulster, who held office from 1934 until late 1936. British interest was largely a reflection of British investment and trade, and much of the industrial enterprise of Danzig came under the control of British citizens during these years. The British also played a decisive role in securing the appointment of Carl Jacob Burckhardt, the Swiss historian who succeeded Lester and who held office until the liberation of Danzig by Germany on September 1, 1939. The so-called liberation of Danzig by the Red Army on March 30, 1945, referred to in recent editions of the Encyclopaedia Britanica, was actually the annihilation of the city.
The territory of the Free City had approximately 365,000 inhabitants in 1922. The Polish minority constituted less than 3% of the population at that time, but the continued influx of Poles raised the proportion to 4% by 1939. The introduction of proportional representation enabled the Poles to elect 5 of the 120 members of the second Volkstag following the promulgation of the unpopular 1922 constitution. The German vote was badly split among the usual assortment of Weimar German parties. The Conservatives (DNVP) elected 34 deputies and the Communists elected 11. The Social Democrat Marxists elected 30 and the Catholic Center 15. The remaining 25 deputies were elected by strictly local Danzig German parties. This disastrous fragmentation in the face of a crisis situation was changed after the National Socialists won the Danzig election of 1933. The divided Danzig Senate presided over by a Conservative president was followed by a united National Socialist Senate. This created a slightly more favorable situation for coping with the moves of the Polish Dictatorship at Danzig.
It would not be correct to define Danzig's status as a Polish protectorate under the new system despite extensive Polish servitudes (i.e. privileges under international law). Danzig was a League of Nations protectorate. This was true despite the fact that the Allies, and not the League, created the confusing Free City regime, and despite the absence of a formal ceremony in which actual sovereignty was transferred to the League. The protectorate was administered by a League of Nations High Commissioner resident in Danzig, by the Security Council of the League of Nations in Geneva, and, after 1936, by a special committee of League member states. The capital of the political system which included Danzig was moved from Berlin to Geneva, and this was an extremely dubious move from the standpoint of the Danzigers. The League was in control at Danzig as it had been in Memel before Lithuania was permitted to seize that German city.
The Poles with varying success began an uninterrupted campaign in 1920 to push their rights at Danzig beyond the explicit terms of Versailles and the subsequent treaties. One of the earliest Polish aims was to establish the Polish Supreme Court as the final court of jurisdiction over Danzig law. This objective was never achieved because of opposition from the League High Commissioners, but Poland was eventually able to establish her Westerplatte garrison despite the early opposition of League High Commissioner General Sir Richard Haking. The Poles never abandoned these efforts, and everyone in Danzig knew that their ultimate objective was annexation of the Free City.
The existing system was unsatisfactory for Poland, Germany, and Danzig. The Poles wished to usurp the role of the League, and both Germany and Danzig favored the return of the new state to the German Reich. There could be no talk of the change of system in Germany in 1933 alienating the Danzigers, because the National Socialists won their majority in Danzig before this had been accomplished in Germany. The change of system in Germany was matched by the unification of Danzig under National Socialist leadership.
They were confident that they could contend with the German argument against their case on this point. The German argument was based on two principal facts. In the first place, Germanic tribes had occupied the Danzig area until the late phase of the "Wandering of the Peoples (Völkerwanderung)" in the 4th century AD. Secondly, the Poles had never settled the Danzig region before the Germans arrived to found their city in the late Middle Ages.
The Polish reply to this German argument was two-fold. They contended that the early German tribes in the Danzig area were representative of the entire Germanic civilization, which included, besides Germany, Scandinavia, England, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. They concluded that the Germans had no right to base claims on the early history of these tribes. Secondly, the small early West Slavic tribes, which were bordered by the West Slavic Poles, West Slavic Czechs, Borussians, and Germans on land, and on water by the Baltic Sea, had been largely assimilated by their neighbors. These tribes had settled the Danzig region between the "Wandering of the Peoples" and the founding of Danzig by the Germans. It was argued that these early West Slavic tribes, who had maintained a fishing village on the site of the later city of Danzig, were more intimately related to the Poles than to their other neighbors. It was this doctrine which provided the claim that Poland might legitimately consider herself the heir to the entire German territory between the Elbe and the Vistula. At one time or another this area had been occupied by West Slavic tribes.
These were the principal so-called historical arguments of the Poles. They claimed along economic lines that Danzig had grown rich on the Polish hinterland. This was undoubtedly true, although the local West Prussian hinterland, which had long been German, also contributed to Danzig's prosperity.
We have noted the Polish natural law argument that Danzig should belong to them because they controlled most of the Vistula River. They also raised the strategic argument that ownership of Danzig was necessary to defend Poland and to guarantee Polish access to the Sea. The second point, if one overlooks the feasibility of granting Poland port facilities in German harbors, had been met after 1924 by the construction of the neighboring port of Gdynia. The first point concerning defense does not merit lengthy examination. Danzig was distant from the bulk of Polish territory, and therefore it could contribute little to the defense of Poland. Ian D. Morrow, the principal British historian of the treaty settlement in the eastern borderlands, concluded that the problem of Polish claims to Danzig "constitutes as it were a permanent background to the history of the relations between the Free City of Danzig and the Republic of Poland."
The German Order of Knights played an important role in the early history of Danzig. The Order had been commissioned by the Roman Catholic Popes and German Emperors to end the threat of heathen invasion in Eastern Europe. The Order established its control over West Prussia by 1308. Danzig was developed within this territory by German settlers, and the Order permitted her to join the Hanseatic League. Danzig grew rapidly for more than one hundred and fifty years under the protection of the Order, and at one time it was the leading ship building city of the world. The first Poles appeared in the area, and the tax register at Danzig indicated that 2% of the new settlers in the period from 1364 to 1400 were Polish.
Polish historians have emphasized that a trading settlement of Germans on the Danzig site had first received approval for an urban charter in 1235 from Swantopolk, a West Slavic chieftain. They therefore concluded that the first German trading settlement in the area was under Slavic sovereignty. They have regarded this as a sort of precedent to suggest that the Poles were requesting a return to the original state of affairs when they demanded Danzig. This is an impossible mystique for anyone questioning the allegedly close affinity between the early West Slavic tribes of the coastal area and the Poles.
Polish historians see a great tragedy for Poland in the conquest of West Prussia by the German Order of Knights in 1308. The Knights were able, at least temporarily, to establish a common frontier between their conquests along the Baltic Sea and the rest of Germany. They also attained a frontier with the German Knights of the Sword farther to the North. This linked up the German eastern conquests of the Middle Ages in one contiguous system from Holstein to the Gulf of Finland. It meant that any belated Polish attempt to attain territorial access to the Baltic Sea would have to contend with a solid barrier of German territory between Poland and the coast. The various German Orders in their conquests had never seized any territory inhabited by the Poles. This meant that the Poles, if they attacked the Germans, would be unable to claim either to Pope or to Emperor that they were seeking to liberate Polish territories under German control.
Confusion in the Papacy during the 15th century, and distractions in the German Empire, enabled the Poles to isolate the German Order of Knights, and to attack the Order with the aid of Tartar and Lithuanian allies. The relations between the Poles and the German Emperors, however, remained peaceful throughout this same period. There were no wars at all between the German Emperors and the Polish Kings from this time until the disappearance of Poland in the 18th century.
The Poles began their victorious struggle against the Order in 1410. They never lost the initiative after their great field victory at Tannenberg (Grünwald) in the first year of the war. The struggle dragged on to the accompaniment of sporadic bursts of activity from the Poles, and the Germans defended themselves stubbornly in their cities. The ultimate outcome of the war was influenced by internal German struggles between the colonists and the celibate knights from all parts of Germany. The colonists in both town and countryside had begun to consider themselves the native Germans several generations ·after the first settlement, and they regarded the Knights, who had no family roots in these provinces, as foreigners. The internecine struggles which followed decisively weakened the Order. The territorial integrity of the Order state was shattered at the peace of Thorn in 1466.
Some Polish historians regard the period of the Order in West Prussia as a mere episode in which Poland at last had begun to make good her claims to the heritage of the West Slavic tribes. The Poles in 1466 annexed most of West Prussia and part of East Prussia. They reached the Baltic coast, but they failed to establish Polish maritime interests. Danzig seceded from the Order state, but she retained her status of German city within the Hanseatic League. Her position was unique. Unlike the other Hanseatic cities, she was neither a member of a German territorial state nor under the immediate jurisdiction of the Emperor. Danzig enjoyed the theoretical protection of the Polish Kings, but she was independent of them. She never compromised her independence by permitting a Polish army to control the city. King Stephen Bathory of Poland became impatient with the state of affairs in 1576. He threatened the Danzigers with war if they did not accept his demand for a Polish military occupation and a permanent Polish garrison. Danzig in reply did not hesitate to defy Stephen Bathory. The war which followed was a humiliation for the proud Polish state at the zenith of her power. The Polish forces were unable to capture Danzig. Danzig in the 17th century declined rapidly in commercial importance along with the other cities of the Hanseatic League. There were many complex causes both economic and political, but the principal factor was the successful manner in which the Dutch and the Danes conspired to thwart Hanseatic interests. Danzig continued to maintain her freedom from Polish control despite her decline, and indeed, the Polish state itself experienced a period of uninterrupted decline after the great Ukrainian uprising against Poland in 1648. The situation of Danzig remained unchanged until she was annexed by Prussia in the 18th century.
Prussia surrendered to Napoleon I at the Peace of Tilsit in 1807. Danzig was separated from Prussia and converted into a French protectorate with a permanent French garrison. By this time the city had become ardently Prussian, and this unnatural state of affairs, which was also inflicted on Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck, was violently resented by the Danzigers. The French regime at Danzig was threatened by Napoleon's debacle in Russia in 1812. This event enabled the Prussians to recover Danzig early in 1814 after a long siege. Danzig remained enthusiastically Prussian until the city was literally annihilated by Russian and Mongolian hordes in 1945.
The Danzigers thought of port facilities for the Poles in German harbors along the lines subsequently granted to the Czechs at Hamburg and Stettin. This arrangement satisfied the Czech demand for access to the Sea. No one thought of Polish rule at Danzig until it became known that the Poles were demanding Danzig at the peace conference, and that President Wilson favored their case. The disillusioned Danzigers petitioned the German authorities at Weimar to reject any peace terms which envisaged the separation of Danzig from Germany. There was still some hope in April 1919, when the Allies refused to permit Polish troops in the West under General Haller to return to Poland by way of Danzig. German troops occupied Danzig at that time, and the Poles were required to return home by rail.
The Danzigers were in despair after receiving the preliminary draft of the Versailles Treaty in May 1919. They discovered that some queer fate was conspiring to force them into the ludicrous and dubious situation of a separate' state. Danzig discovered in May 1919 that the 14 Points and self-determination had been a trick, a ruse de guerre a l'americaine, and in June 1919, with the acceptance of the treaty by the Weimar Government; it was evident that Danzig must turn her back on her German Fatherland. The Allied spokesmen in Danzig urged her to hasten about it, and not be sentimental. The Germans had been tricked and outsmarted by the Allies. After all, Danzig had lost World War I.
Poland made no effort to build a merchant marine or to acquire colonies, although the neighboring German principality of Brandenburg, with a less favor able 17th century geographic and maritime position, engaged in foreign trade and acquired colonies in Africa. These facts in no way diminished the Polish right to play a maritime role in the 20th century, but it was unwarranted for Polish spokesmen to mislead the Polish people about their past. An especially crass example of this was offered by Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski, Vice-Premier of Poland from 1935 to 1939, and from 1926 the leading Government figure in Polish commerce and industry. Kwiatkowski was a close personal friend of President Moscicki, and he was entrusted with the organization of the Central Industrial Region (COP) of Poland before World War II. He was an expert engineer who had studied in Krakow, Lvov, and Munich, and he had earned the proud title "creator of Gdynia" for his collaboration with Danish colleagues in the construction of Poland's principal port. Kwiatkowski, like some other scientists, was guilty of distorting history, and he went to absurd lengths to identify Poland with the nests of West Slavic pirates of the early Middle Ages who had operated from Rügen Island off the coast of Pomerania. Kwiatkowski announced at a maritime celebration on July 31, 1932, that, if the heroes of Poland's great naval past could raise their voices once again, "one great, mighty, unending cry would resound along a stretch of hundreds of miles from the Oder to the Memel: 'Long live Poland!'."
At Paris the Poles had argued that Danzig was indispensable for their future maritime position. Lloyd George frustrated their plan to annex Danzig, but they were told by the Danes that the West Prussian coast north of Danzig presented the same physical characteristics as the north-eastern coast of Danish Zeeland. The Danes had built Copenhagen, and there was no reason why the Poles could not build their own port instead of seeking to confiscate a city built by another nation. The Poles were fascinated by this prospect, and they were soon busy with plans for the future port of Gdynia.
The construction of Gdynia and Polish economic discrimination in favor of the new city after 1924 produced a catastrophic effect on the trade of the unfortunate Danzigers. The Polish maritime trade in 1929 was 1,620 million Zloty, of which 1,490 million Zloty still passed through Danzig. The total land and sea trade by 1938 had declined to 1,560 million Zloty, and only 375 million went by way of Danzig. The Danzig trade was confined mainly to bulk products such as coal and ore. Imports of rice, tobacco, citrus fruits, wool, jute, and leather, and exports of beet sugar and eggs passed through Gdynia. Danzig was virtually limited to the role of port for the former German mining region of East Upper Silesia. The trade of Gdynia had become more than three times as valuable as that of Danzig. Trade between Danzig and Germany was discouraged by a heavy Polish protective tariff.
Polish concern about Danzig might have diminished after the successful completion of the port of Gdynia had Polish ambitions been less insatiable. Unfortunately this was not the case, and the Poles remained as jealous as before of their position within the so-called Free City.
The Poles had originally insisted that Danzig was the one great port they needed to guarantee their maritime access. They soon began to speak of modern sea power, and it was easy to demonstrate that one port was a narrow foundation for a major naval power. They described Danzig as their second lung, which they needed to breathe properly. It was a matter of complete indifference to them that Danzig did not wish to be a Polish lung. They were equally unmoved by the fact that millions of their Ukrainian subjects did not care to live within the Polish state, and that nearly one million Germans had left Poland in despair during the eighteen years after the Treaty of Versailles. Life had been made sufficiently miserable for them to do otherwise. It could be expected that the Germans would also evacuate a Polish Danzig, and thus make room for a Polish Gdansk. The Polish leaders were encouraged to hope for this result because of the manifestly ridiculous and humiliating situation created for Danzig by the Treaty of Versailles.
The preoccupation of the Polish leaders with Danzig was quite extraordinary. This was indicated by the press and by the analytical surveys of the Polish Foreign Office, Polska a Zagranica (Poland and Foreign Lands), which were sent to Polish diplomatic missions abroad. These secret reports were also distributed among Foreign Office officials, Cabinet members, and Army leaders. They emphasized the consolidation of National Socialist rule at Danzig after the 1934 Pact, the economic problems of Danzig, and the constitutional conflict between the Danzig Senate and the League. It was possible to conclude from these reports that Danzig was the cardinal problem of Polish foreign policy despite the conclusion of the 1934 Pact with Germany. The line taken by the Polish Foreign Office was simple and direct. It was noted that Polish public opinion was increasingly aroused about Danzig, and that the Government continued to maintain great interest in the unresolved Danzig problem. Above all, it was stressed that Danzig, although it did not belong to Poland, was no less important to Poland than Gdynia, which was Polish. It would be impossible to convey Polish aspirations at Danzig in terms more eloquent.
It should be evident at this point that no serious person could expect a lasting agreement between Germany and Poland without a final settlement of the Danzig question. The Danzig status quo of Versailles was a source of constant friction between Germany and Poland. The Polish leaders after 1935 continued to believe that the ideal solution would have been the annexation of Danzig by Poland, and Pilsudski himself had favored this solution, under favorable conditions, such as the aftermath of a victorious preventive war against Germany. [The Poles never stood a chance with 'leaders' like this.DC]
Pilsudski's preventive war plans dated from 1933, when Germany was weak. After the 1934 Pact, the Poles opened an intensive propaganda campaign against the Czechs, and the prospects for a Polish success at Teschen, in cooperation with Germany, were not entirely unfavorable. It seemed by contrast that Poland had nothing more to seek at Danzig. Pilsudski had declared in March 1935 that no Power on earth could intimidate Germany any longer.
Hitler talked with good sense and conviction of abandoning claims to many German territories in Europe which had been lost after World War I. These included territories held by Denmark in the North, France in the West, Italy in the South, and Poland in the East. Hitler expected Poland to reciprocate by conceding the failure of her earlier effort to acquire Danzig. Hitler was not prepared to concede that Danzig was lost to Germany merely because she had been placed under the shadowy jurisdiction of the League. Danzig was a German National Socialist community plagued with a Polish economic depression and prevented from pursuing policies of recovery to improve her position. Danzig wished to return to Germany. Hitler had no intention of perpetuating the humiliating status quo of surrendering this purely German territory to Poland. He was willing to recognize extensive Polish economic rights at Danzig. It would have been wise for the Poles to concentrate upon obtaining favorable economic terms and otherwise to wash their hands of the problem.
The following year was relatively calm although there were many irritating minor incidents involving economic problems and the operations of Polish pressure groups on Danzig territory. Danzig and Poland concluded an economic pact on August 8, 1934, which contained mutual advantages on taxes and the marketing of Polish goods in Danzig territory. The conciliatory trend at Danzig was strengthened when Greiser succeeded Rauschning as Senate President on November 23, 1934. The Poles had no complaints about Greiser, but they objected to Albert Forster, the National Socialist District Party Leader. Forster was an energetic and forceful Franconian with the Sturheit (stubbornness) characteristic of the men of his district. He was one of Hitler's best men, and his assignment at Danzig was a significant indication of the seriousness of Germany's intentions. Forster was less cosmopolitan than Greiser, but he was highly intelligent, and he fully understood the scope and significance of the Danzig problem despite his West German origin. He was a stubborn negotiator with both Poland and the League, but he loyally supported Hitler's plans for a lasting agreement with Poland. He also shared Hitler's enthusiasm for an understanding with England. Lord Vansittart described Forster in his memoirs as "a rogue [Forster was exceptionally handsome] who came to our house with glib professions and a loving mate [Forster's wife was exceptionally beautiful]." This brief rejection of Forster by the leading British Germanophobe tallied closely with the negative attitude of the Poles.
The effort of Hitler to achieve greater harmony with Poland at Danzig did not achieve lasting results. Friction began to increase again early in 1935, and this trend continued until the outbreak of war in 1939. Many of the new disputes were economic in nature. Danzig was experiencing a severe depression, and the local National Socialist regime wished to do more to help the people than had been done by the Conservative regime in the past. The lack of freedom made it impossible to emulate the increasing prosperity which existed in Germany. The deflationary monetary policies of Poland were anathema in Danzig, where the Danziger Gulden was tied to the scarce Zloty of the Poles. An attempt to free the Gulden from the Zloty, without leaving the Polish customs union, produced a crisis in May 1935. Danzig received much expert advice from Hjalmar Schacht. the President of the German Reichsbank. The Polish financial experts regarded this as unwarranted German interference in the affairs of German Danzig. The crisis reached a climax on July 18, 1935, when Poland put Danzig under a blockade, and commanded the shipment of all goods through Gdynia. Danzig responded by opening her economic border with East Prussia in defiance of Poland. This involved an attempt to circumvent the Polish customs inspectors and to ignore the Polish tariff requirements. Hitler intervened at this critical point and used his influence to obtain the agreement of August 8, 1935, which amounted to a total retreat for Danzig. This capitulation ended any hope that Danzig might be able to ameliorate the economic depression through her own efforts.
A typical dispute of this drab period transpired in 1936 when the Poles abruptly issued regular Army uniforms to the Polish customs inspectors in the hope of accustoming the Danzig population to a regular Polish military occupation. The Danzig Government protested, but the Poles, as usual, refused to accept protests from Danzig. A dangerous atmosphere was maintained by the constant agitation of the Polish pressure groups. The Polish Marine and Colonial League demonstrated in Warsaw in July 1936 for the expansion of existing Polish privileges at Danzig, and its activities were accompanied by a new campaign against Danzig in the Polish press. Relations between Poland and Danzig were as bad as they had been during the Weimar Republic. Hitler had attempted to reduce friction on the basis of the status quo, but this effort had failed.
Beck outlined the situation. He expected Chodacki to maintain Poland's position at Danzig by means short of
war, but he intimated that events at Danzig might ultimately lead to war. Beck emphasized the importance of the
British and French attitudes toward Polish policy at Danzig, and Chodacki realized that Beck wished to have the
support of the Western Powers in any conflict with Germany. It was evident that Paris and London would be
decisive in the determination of Polish policy at Danzig. Beck admitted that the two Western Powers seemed to be
indifferent about Danzig in 1936, but he expected their attitudes to change later. He discussed the details of current
disputes at Danzig, and it was evident that the two men were incomplete agreement. Chodacki assumed the new
post several days later.
The Danzigers had been annoyed with League High Commissioner Sean Lester for several years. Lester was an Ulsterman who seemed to delight in conducting a one man crusade against National Socialism and all its works in Danzig. The officers of the German cruiser Leipzig ostentatiously refused to call on Lester when their ship visited Danzig harbor in June 1936. The Danzigers repeatedly urged the British to withdraw him, and at last this request was granted. Several replacements were considered, but the choice fell on Carl Jacob Burckhardt, a prominent Swiss historian who was an expert on Cardinal Richelieu and the traditions of European diplomacy. Burckhardt was acceptable to the Poles, and he received his appointment from the League Security Council on February 18, 1937. Burckhardt had been extraordinarily discreet in concealing his fundamental sympathy for Germany. He was later criticized by many League diplomats, but at the time he was universally regarded as an admirable choice.
Chodacki had been sent to Danzig to maintain the claims and position of Poland, whereas Burckhardt was merely the caretaker of the dying League regime. Chodacki was instructed to insist on Polish terms at Danzig, and he was not expected to believe in the permanent preservation of peace. The emphasis of his mission was on stiffening the Polish line without risking a conflict until Poland had British and French support. The attitude he adopted at Danzig was provocative and belligerent. He delivered an important speech to a Polish audience at GrossTrampken, Danzig territory, on Polish Independence Day, November 11, 1937. He made the following significant statement, which left no doubt about his position: "I remember very well the time I went into the Great War, hoping for Poland's resurrection. The Poles here in Danzig should likewise live and wait in the hope that very presently they may be living on Polish soil".
This was holiday oratory, but it should have revealed to the last sceptic that neither Chodacki nor Beck had abandoned hope of annexing Danzig to Poland. A final solution would be required to end the unrest caused by rival German and Polish aspirations at Danzig, and there could be no lasting understanding between Poland and Germany until such a solution was achieved. Self-determination for the inhabitants was the best means of resolving this issue in view of the conflicting German and Polish claims. It was no longer news to the Danzigers that many Poles hoped for the ultimate annexation of Danzig to Poland. They would not have been surprised to discover that Beck's High Commissioner entertained similar sentiments privately. It would be difficult to argue that Chodacki's publicly announced campaign of Polish irredentism was calculated to reduce the growing tension between Danzig and Poland. Beck had responded to the Danzig situation by sending a chauvinist to maintain the Polish position.
Irresponsible fishing in troubled waters by foreigners also occasioned much bad feeling. A typical example was the circulation of rumors by the Daily Telegraph, an English newspaper. The Daily Telegraph reported on May 10, 1937, that Joseph Goebbels had announced Germany's intention to annex Danzig in the near future. It is easy to understand the effect produced on the excitable Poles in the Danzig area by such reporting, and it would have been a pleasant surprise if this particular newspaper of Kaiser-interview and Hoare-Laval Pact fame had not contributed to alarmism at Danzig. The statement attributed to Goebbels in this instance was purely an invention. By 1938, tension had been built up to a point where incidents of violence played an increasingly prominent role. Meetings of protest, more frequently than otherwise about imaginary wrongs, were organized by pressure groups in surrounding Polish towns. They invariably ended with cries of: "We want to march on Danzig!" and with the murderous slogan: "Kill the Hitlerites!"
Chodacki told Smigly-Rydz at Polish Army maneuvers in September 1937 that the National Socialist revolution in Danzig was virtually completed, and that the "Gleichschaltung" (coordination) of Danzig within the German system had been achieved. The one exception was that Danzig still had her made-in Poland depression, whereas Germany was swimming in plenty. The effective organization work of Albert Forster convinced the Poles that Danzig was at last slipping through their fingers. Awareness of this increased Polish exasperation. Chodacki claimed that in 1938 one of his speeches at Torun or elsewhere in West Prussia would have been sufficient to set a crowd of tens of thousands marching against Danzig. He admitted that he was often tempted to deliver such a speech. He felt goaded by fantastic attacks in the Krakow press that he was too conciliatory toward Danzig.
The current mentality of the Polish leaders indicated that a solution would be difficult, and it is painful to recall that the entire problem would not have existed had Danzig not been placed in a fantastic situation by the peacemakers of 1919. The Danzig problem resulted from a wretched compromise between Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson. It epitomized the comment of the American publicist, Porter Sargent: "The Anglo-Saxon peoples held the world in the palms of their hands, and what a mess they made of it". There was nothing left but to try for a solution. It would be scant consolation in the event of failure to know that the blame would be shared by men of two generations. The cost of failure would be paid by untold generations.
The peoples of Russia were suffering on an unprecedented scale from their misfortune in falling prey to the merciless minority clique of Bolshevik revolutionaries, who seized power in the hour of Russian defeat in World War I. The Bolsheviks later wrought untold havoc on the peoples of Poland and Germany. The Communists by means of murder and terror have depopulated the entire eastern part of Germany, and they hold Central Germany, the heart of the country, in an iron grip.
It is a sad commentary that millions of Germans and Poles are now collaborating under a system which has destroyed the freedom of their two nations. They were unable to unite in defense of their freedom. It is of course possible that the Soviet Union would have triumphed over Germany and Poland had the two nations been allies. It is more likely that a Polish-German alliance would have been the rock to break the Soviet tide. The present power of the Bolsheviks is so great that no one knows if it is possible to prevent their conquest of the world, and the failure of German-Polish cooperation is one of the supreme tragedies of world history.
The conflict between Warsaw and Berlin became the pretext in 1939 for the implementation of the antiquated English balance of power policy. This produced a senseless war of destruction against Germany. As it turned out, each Allied soldier of the West was fighting unwittingly for the expansion of Bolshevism, and he was simultaneously undermining the security of every Western nation. Never were so many sacrifices made for a cause so ignoble. Neither Germany nor Poland desired to evangelize the world or to impose alien systems of government of foreign nations throughout the globe. There was a monumental difference between them and the Soviet Union on this point. The elements of friction between Germany and Poland, despite the senseless provisions of the 1919 Versailles Treaty, were markedly reduced under the benign influence of the treaty between Pilsudski and Hitler. A few concessions on both sides, if only in the interest of establishing a common front against Bolshevism, could have reduced this friction to insignificance. The two nations were natural allies. They were new states seeking to overcome the uncertainty and fear occasioned by the frustration of their healthy nationalist aspirations over many centuries. The leaders of both nations hated the Bolshevist system and they regarded it as the worst form of government devised by man. They realized that the Soviet Union possessed natural resources and population which made the combined resources and populations of Germany and Poland puny by comparison.
It is evident from a survey of the international situation sent to missions abroad by the Polish Foreign Office in 1936 that the Soviet Union was regarded as the greatest foreign threat to Poland. This report confirmed the impressions of the diplomatic-military committee established by Pilsudski in 1934 to study the German and Russian situations. Nevertheless, Poland rebuffed the suggestions of Hermann Göring after 1934 for German-Polish collaboration against the Soviet Union. The great question was whether or not Poland intended permanently to follow a policy of impartiality toward the Soviet Union and Germany.
Polish experts in Moscow were impressed by mid-1936 with the improved living conditions in Russia under the 2nd Five Year Plan, which appeared to be far less drastic and cruel than the 1st Five Year Plan. They conceded that the Soviet system was consolidating its position. A new series of Soviet purges began later the same year. They lasted nearly three years, and dwarfed the bloody Cheka purges of 1918, or the purge in 1934 which followed the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad administrator. Foreign observers wondered whether the new purges would strengthen or weaken the Soviet regime. Opinions were divided on this crucial point, but it was evident that the new upheavals constituted a crisis for the regime.
Hitler hoped that the British would not intervene while he was securing Germany's position through understandings with Germany's principal neighbors, and by a limited and moderate program of territorial revision. British leaders had opposed the German customs union before 1848, and they had opposed the national unification of Germany during the following years. Nevertheless, Bismarck had outbluffed Palmerston at Schleswig-Holstein in 1864, and it was evident by 1871 that Tories and Liberals alike were wining to accept the results of Bismarck's unification policy despite his repeated use of force. Germany was conceded to be the strongest military power on the European continent after 1871. The balance of power was operating, but the British faced colonial conflicts with France and Russia, and the 1875 Franco-German "war scare" crisis showed that Germany could still be checked by a hostile combination. At that time, a momentary coalition of France, Great Britain, and Russia was formed against Germany within a few days.
Hitler hoped that a German program of territorial revision and defense against Communism would be accepted by the British leaders, if it was carried through with sufficient speed. If the tempo was slow, the latent British hostility toward everything German could easily produce new flames. The traditional warlike ardor of the British upper classes was momentarily quiescent, but it could be aroused with relative ease. Hitler hoped that a refusal to pursue political aims overseas or in the West or South of Europe would convince the British leaders, once his position was secure, that his program was moderate. His strength would still be insufficient to overshadow the primary position of the British Empire in the world. He was wining to place Germany politically in a subservient position to Great Britain, and to accept a unilateral obligation to support British interest at any point. Hitler hoped that the British would appreciate the advantages of this situation. They could play off the United States against Germany. Germany would be useful in resisting American assaults against the sacred British doctrine of colonialism, and the United States could be used to counter any German claims for special privileges.
Hitler's ideas were confirmed by a brilliant report of January 2, 1938, from Joachim von Ribbentrop, German Ambassador to Great Britain. Ribbentrop pointed out that there was no real possibility of an Anglo-German agreement while conditions were unsettled, but that perhaps a strong German policy and the consolidation of the German position would make such an agreement possible. The German Ambassador emphasized that an understanding with Great Britain had been the primary aim of his activity during his many months in London. He had reached his conclusions after personal conversations with the principal personalities of British public affairs. Ribbentrop's report was decisive in winning for him the position of German Foreign Minister in February 1938. No other German diplomat of the period had presented Hitler with a comparable analysis of British policy and of the British attitude toward Germany. The Ribbentrop report was comparable to the 1909 memorandum of Alfred Kiderlen-Waechter on Anglo-German and Russo-German relations. This memorandum had been requested by Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, and it brought Kiderlen from the obscure Bucharest legation to the Wilhelmstrasse despite the fact that he was disliked by Kaiser Wilhelm II.
The controversial question of whether or not the Russian regime was successfully consolidating its position could not be decisive for Hitler under these circumstances. The impulse for rapid moves and definitive results arose from Hitler's evaluation of the situation in London. Hitler's basic program, after the recovery of the Saar and the restoration of German defenses in the Rhineland, was to liberate the Germans of Austria, aid the Germans of Czechoslovakia and place German relations with France, Italy, and Poland, his principal neighbors, on a solid basis. It would be possible afterward to talk to the British about a lasting agreement, when the prospects for success would be more favorable. Improved German-American relations would follow automatically from an AngloGerman understanding. Hitler also hoped to act as moderator between Japan and Nationalist China to restore peace in the Far East, and to close the door to Communist penetration which was always opened by war and revolution. If this moderate program could be achieved, the prospects for the final success of the Bolshevik world conspiracy in the foreseeable future would be bleak.
No nation occupied a more crucial position in the realization of Hitler's program than Poland, because Hitler recognized that the Poland of Pilsudski and his successors was a bulwark against Communism. The Polish leaders failed to recognize the importance of German support against the Soviet Union. Germany and Poland were conducting policies of defense against Bolshevism, but there were no plans for aggressive action against Russia, and the Polish leaders failed to see the need for any understanding with Germany to cope with the existing situation.
By 1848, the modern intellectual movement of Czech nationalism, which originated from the impact of the Slavophile teachings of Johann Gottfried Herder in the late 18th century, had begun to make considerable headway with the Czech masses. The Frankfurt Parliament in 1848 anticipated the dissolution of the Austrian Empire, and it quite naturally assumed that Bohemia and Moravia, which had been integral parts of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, would find their future in a modern national German state. It came as a rude shock when the Czech historian and nationalist leader, Francis Palacky, addressed the Frankfurt Parliament with the announcement that his Czech faction hoped Austria would be preserved, and that they would oppose union with Germany if this effort failed. Only the continuation of the Austrian Empire stood as a buffer between the Czechs and Germany [after 1848]. Eduard Benes, the 20th century Czech nationalist leader, advocated full autonomy for both Germans and Czechs of Bohemia in his Dijon dissertation of 1908. He envisaged a Habsburg Reich in which full equality would exist among Slavs, Germans, and Magyars. This seemed feasible, since the experiment of granting full equality to the Magyars in 1867 had proven successful.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire held out with amazing vitality during the first four years of bitter conflict in World War I. The overwhelming majority of Czech deputies to the Austrian Reichsrat (parliament) were loyal to the Habsburg state during these four years. In the summer and autumn of 1918, during the fifth year of the war, unendurable famine and plague produced a demoralization of loyalty among the many nationalities of the Austrian part of the Empire. The Habsburg state was paralyzed. It had attempted to escape from the war by means of a separate peace, but it had failed. The problem of the Czechs and Germany could be postponed no longer. Arnold Toynbee, in his massive survey, Nationality and the War, had predicted in 1915 that Austria-Hungary would collapse, and he had advised that Bohemia and Moravia, the two mixed German-Czech regions, should be assigned to Germany in the coming peace treaty.
The world was confronted in the meantime with one of the most bold conspiracies of history. Czech revolutionaries went abroad during World War I to organize a propaganda movement among the Allies for the creation of a veritable Czech empire. The Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary was condemned because the allegedly dominant German and Magyar nationalities constituted merely half the total population of the federated Habsburg states. The Czech revolutionaries although constituting less than half the total population. The situation would have been still worse had not some of their more extravagant schemes failed, such as the creation of a Slavic corridor from Bohemia to Croatia. It was surely the most brazen program of national aggrandizement to arise from World War I. It was also the program least likely to succeed over a protracted period, unless the subject peoples could be appeased, and unless good relations could be established with neighboring states. The Czech nationalist leaders, and their small group of Slovak allies, who in contrast to the mass of the Slovak people had fallen under Czech influence, made little progress in either direction during the twenty years following World War I. It is for this reason that there was still a Czech problem after World War II, which had now become a problem of Czech imperialism. They might have pressed for Czech autonomy within an independent Austrian state, which later could have been united with Germany at one stroke, while retaining guarantees for the Czechs. If this did not seem feasible following the accomplishments of Czech revolutionaries at Prague after October 1918, there were still other alternatives. They might at least have contested the spread of Czech rule over the traditional German parts of Bohemia and Moravia, or over the indisputably Magyar regions from the Danube to Ruthenia. It would have been easy for them to insist that the Czechs keep their promises of autonomy to the Slovaks. These promises had been incorporated in the famous Czech-Slovak declaration of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in October 1918 (prior to the Czech declaration of independence at Washington, D.C., on October 23, 1918). The first Czech president, Thomas Masaryk, had declared that his pledge to the Slovaks, which he later violated, was solemn and binding.
The Allies might have contested the assignment of the distant region of Ruthenia to Czech rule, or they might have insisted on binding minority guarantees for a Czech state which had promised to become another Switzerland, but which developed a unitary state system and centralized administration in the French style. The Allies did none of these things, and the Czech Government was soon spending lavish sums subsidizing foreign writers to fill the foreign press with deceptively optimistic reports about their regime.
The Czechs had a solid economic position in the unravished principal Austrian industrial regions, the industrial heart of a former Great Power, which had fallen under their control. They also had a flourishing agricultural economy, and conditions of relative prosperity existed in their richly endowed country until the advent of the world depression in 1929. Czechoslovakia appeared to be a wealthy and progressive country when compared to such backward states as Yugoslavia or Rumania, and the Czech leaders were not reticent in taking full credit for this phenomenon.
A system of liberal politics prevailed among the principal Czech political parties, and this was part of their heritage from Austrian parliamentary experience. Czech propagandists exploited this fact to claim that their country was a model democracy. A war-weary generation in the West was looking for a few good results from the recent holocaust, and it is not surprising that Philoczechism became a popular phenomenon. There was also some thing romantic about it, because relatively few people in Great Britain or France had been aware of the existence of the Czechs prior to World War I. There had been talk of Bohemians in the old days, and few seemed to be certain whether this term included Slavs, Germans, or both.
The Czech émigrés during World War I were more successful than the Poles in ingratiating themselves with the Western Allies. This was not fully evident until the period of peacemaking, when Czech and Polish interests clashed. In the early phase of World War I, Roman Dmowski and Thomas Masaryk, the leading Polish and Czech spokesmen in the West, vied with one another in being pro-Russian. Thomas Masaryk dreamed of a Czech kingdom under a Romanov prince, but his dream was shattered by the Russian Revolution. The Polish state which emerged from the war developed a policy contrary to the pro-Russian attitude of Dmowski, but in the Czech state the pro-Russian attitude and policy of Masaryk, and of Eduard Benes, his principal disciple, prevailed after the war. The accidental conflict in 1918 between the Czech prisoners of war in Russia, and the Bolsheviks, was not permitted by Masaryk to destroy the fundamental pro-Russian orientation of Czech policy.
There was conflict between Poles and Czechs in the rich Austrian industrial region of Teschen, which was under the control of the local Polish community when Austria-Hungary concluded an armistice with the Western Powers. The Teschen area consisted of the five principal districts of Friedeck, Freistadt, Bielitz, Teschen, and Jablonkau. The Polish deputies of the Austrian Reichsrat proposed to their Czech colleagues at the end of World War I that Friedeck, which had a distinct Czech majority, should go to the Czech state, and that the latter four districts should be assigned to Poland. The Czechs and Poles in the area agreed to a provisional compromise along these lines, and it was decided that 519 square kilometers should be Czech and 1,762 square kilometers Polish. The Poles did not realize that Eduard Benes had persuaded French Foreign Minister Pichon in June 1918 to support a Czech claim for the entire area. The Poles concentrated on securing their claims against Germany during the weeks following the Austro-Hungarian and German armistice agreements of November 1918, and they regarded the Teschen area with complacency. This mood was shattered on the eve of the Polish national election of January 26, 1919, when the Czechs ordered a surprise attack against the Poles in the Teschen area. Czech action was based on the assumption that the Teschen question could be resolved by force, and that the district was well worth a local war, particularly since Western Allied support of the Czech position against Poland was assured.
The Western Allied leaders intervened on February 1,1919, after the Czechs had completed their military advance, and they ordered a cessation of military operations pending a final solution by the Peace Conference. A plebiscite was proposed in the following months, but the Czechs, with French support, concentrated first on delaying, and then on canceling, this development. Their objective was achieved in 1920 during the Russo-Polish war. The Poles were told in good ultimative form at the Spa conference in July 1920 that they must relinquish their demand for a plebiscite, and submit to the arbitration of the Allied Powers. The greater part of the Teschen area was assigned to Czechoslovakia on July 28, 1920. The Czech objective had been achieved by an exceedingly adroit combination of force and diplomacy.
The Poles were aware of the fact that the Czechs had used their influence to prevent the assignment of East Galicia to Poland, although this issue was ultimately decided in favor of Poland by the separate treaty between Russia and Poland at Riga in 1921. The Poles were equally conscious that Czechoslovakia favored the Soviet Union during the 1920-1921 war. The French were increasingly inclined to regard the Czech pro-Russian policy as realistic, and hence to favor Czechoslovakia over Poland. It was evident after the Pilsudski coup d'Etat in 1926 that Czech political leaders were in close contact with many of the Polish politicians opposing the Warsaw dictatorship.
Winston Spencer Churchill had much to say on the subject of Czech-Polish relations. Churchill was the most articulate advocate of the British encirclement of Germany in the period before the Czech crisis of 1938. Churchill was noted for his belligerency, which was often regarded by his compatriots as a romantic love of adventure. He was noted for adopting the most uncompromising view of a situation and also the one most likely to produce a conflict. This had been true of his attitude in the Sudan, South Africa, and India, during the 1936 British abdication crisis, and toward many other problems in addition to Anglo-German relations. The same Churchill saw no reason why Poland should not turn her other cheek to the Czechs. When Polish leaders failed to look at matters the same way, Churchill invoked strong criticism: "The heroic characteristics of the Polish race must not blind us to their record of folly and ingratitude which over centuries had led them through measureless suffering." The arguments of strategy, politics and race appeared to Churchill to dictate a Polish policy of friendship toward Czechoslovakia.
The three arguments which impressed Churchill carried little weight with the Polish leaders. They were not inclined after the death of Pilsudski in 1935 to modify the existing anti-Czech policy. This did not mean that they were unwilling under all circumstances to fight at the side of the Czechs in some war against Germany, and they made this clear to their French allies during the Czech crisis in 1938. If France supported the Czechs, if the Czechs were willing to fight, and if the Czechs disgorged the territory seized from Poland in 1919-1920, the Poles would cooperate with the Czechs. The Poles did not expect these conditions to be met for the simple reason that they did not believe the Czechs would dare to fight the Germans.
The primary aim of Polish policy was to secure Polish claims against the Czechs by agreement, by threat of force, or by force. Foreign Minister Rickard Sandler of Sweden asked Beck before the 1938 Czech crisis why it was difficult to achieve an entente between Warsaw and Prague. The Polish Foreign Minister replied that one factor was Poland's lack of enthusiasm about a Power whose claim to an independent existence was problematical. Czechoslovakia, in his opinion, was an artificial creation which violated the liberty of nations, and especially of Slovakia and Hungary. Beck's attitude was that of Mussolini, who publicly referred to the Czech state as CzechoGermano-Polono-Magyaro-Rutheno-Rumano-Slovakia. Beck emphasized that the Czechs were a minority in their own state, and that none of the other nationalities desired to remain under Czech rule. He also objected to Czech hypocrisy in stressing the allegedly liberal and democratic nature of their regime. They granted extensive rights on paper to all citizens of the state, but they exercised a brutal and arbitrary police power over the nationalities which constituted the majority of the population. Sandler was much impressed by Beck's remarks, and he observed that the Czechs obviously lacked the capacity to achieve good relations with their neighbors.
Beck's attitude was not based primarily on these abstract considerations. Pilsudski's program had called for the federation (of the Lithuanians, White Russians and Ukrainians) under Polish control. If this program had been achieved, the Poles would have been a sort of minority within a large federation, although the granting of actual autonomy to the other peoples would have been in contrast to the Czech system. Ideological differences were not decisive for Beck, who did not consider the democratic liberalism of France an insurmountable obstacle to FrancoPolish collaboration. He could not consistently boycott the same ideology at Prague.
The situation, quite apart from the specific dispute over Teschen, was deter mined by purely power political considerations. Poland and Czechoslovakia were bitter rivals for power and influence in the same Central-Eastern European area. Both were allied separately with Romania, and Warsaw resented the fact that Bucharest usually appeared to be closer to Prague. The Czech alliances with both Yugoslavia and Romania gave Prague a position of power in the general area equal to that of Warsaw. The Czechs also had an alliance with France, and they enjoyed better treatment from Paris than Warsaw received. They had ties with other allies of France in a general system directed against Germany and Hungary. The warm friendship between Prague and Moscow gave Czechoslovakia an extra trump, which the Poles could match only by establishing closer relations with Germany.
In the Polish mind, the advantage of eliminating a dangerous rival far outweighed the consideration that Germany would be in a position to secure a greater immediate gain than Poland at Czech expense. Loyalty toward the Versailles treaty and the other Paris treaties of 1919 was not a compelling motive, because the Poles were dissatisfied with the terms of these treaties.
The argument that the two nations were sister Slavic communities was anathema to the Poles. This reminded them of the indiscriminate Pan-Slavic vehicle of Russian domination over the lesser Slavic peoples. The Poles did not reject ties with sister Slavic communities, but they opposed to the Czech or Russian idea of Pan-Slavism their own more exclusive concept, which substituted themselves for the Russians as the dominant Slavic force. The Czechs were at least half-German in race, according to many Poles, and they were considered Predominantly German in the cultural, political and social spheres. The Russians also were placed at the outside border of Slavdom because of their enormous Asiatic racial admixture. The same criterion was applied to the Serbs and the Bulgars, who had experienced a strong oriental influx in their Balkan environment. The Slavic community recognized by the Poles included themselves, the Ukrainians, the White Russians, the Slovaks, the Croatians, and the Slovenians. According to Beck, the two foreign Slavic peoples most popular in Poland because of close cultural ties with the Poles were the Slovaks and the Croats.
Relations between Warsaw and Belgrade, also, were cool, although there were no disputes between two countries separated so widely geographically. The Polish attitude toward Yugoslavia was negative, because the Roman Catholic Croats in Yugoslavia were oppressed by the semi-oriental Greek Orthodox Serbs, who possessed the real power in the state. The Slovak people in Czechoslovakia were conspicuously unhappy under the alien rule and oppressive economic domination of the Czechs. In Poland the argument of cultural affinity could be a great force in condemning rather than in supporting the idea of collaboration with Prague.
It would provoke endless controversy to decide whether Churchill or the Polish leaders had the more noble understanding of what Poland owed Czechoslovakia, or what would best serve Polish interests. It is more relevant to realize that the Polish leaders had a definite Czech policy, and that it was an intelligible policy whatever one may think of it. Beck never would have been at a loss in replying to any arguments on this subject from Churchill. The Czechs had taken the initiative in provoking the antagonism between Czechoslovakia and Poland. It is true· that the ultimate dissolution of Czechoslovakia made the Polish military position more vulnerable on the German side, but this would not have been serious had not Poland provoked a conflict with Germany instead of accepting German friendship. The main military threat to Poland came from the Soviet Union. In this respect the removal of Czechoslovakia was a gain, because the Czechs had made it clear that they would support Russia in the event of a conflict between Poland and Russia.
Hitler, contrary to popular superstition, never referred to his own regime as the One Thousand Year Reich. Nevertheless, like any other German conscious of them, he had a profound respect for the traditions of German history. If the role of Bohemia within Germany had worked well for more than one thousand years, one could be pardoned for skepticism toward the radical solution of placing that region within the confines of a Slavic state.
It might have been possible for a larger number of people to accept this radical solution in time had conditions within Czechoslovakia been tolerable for the Germans living there, and had these local Germans become resigned to their fate. The Sudeten Germans were divided into four groups of Bavarian, Franconian, Saxon, and Silesian dialects and local cultures. They were far less aggressive politically than the Czechs, and they submitted without violence to the establishment of Czech rule in 1918 and 1919. It would have been easy to appease them, and it could have been done with a little local autonomy and with an impartial economic policy. The Czechs should have realized the importance of this for the future of their state, since the ratio of Germans to Czechs in the entire region of Bohemia-Moravia was approximately 1:2, and there were far more Germans than Czechs in Slovakia. The Czechs, instead, soon developed a contemptuous attitude toward the Germans, and they began to believe that the Germans could be handled more effectively as passive subjects than as active citizens.
The Germans were divided politically, but a new development appeared after conditions became increasingly worse for them and better for the Germans across the frontier. In the 1935 national Czechoslovak election, the Sudeten German Party (SdP), which was inspired by admiration for Adolf Hitler and his policies, captured the majority of the German vote, and it became the largest single party in Czechoslovakia. There were 800,000 unemployed workers in Czechoslovakia at that time, and 500,000 of these were Sudeten Germans. Marriages and births were few, and the death-rate was high. It is not surprising that conditions changed after the liberation of the Sudetenland in 1938. The Northern Sudetenland (the three districts of Eger, Aussig, and Troppau: the two southern sections were assigned to Bavaria and German Austria) led all regions of Germany in the number of marriages in 1939 (approximately 30% ahead of the national average). The birth-rate in 1940 was 60% greater than the birth-rate of 1937. The period of Czech rule was a bad time for the Bohemian Germans, and conditions prior to the Munich conference became steadily worse. These people were patient, but they were not cowards, and the ultimate reaction was inevitable.
It is impossible under these circumstances to claim that Hitler created an artificial problem, either in the Sudetenland or in the Bohemian-Moravian region as a whole. This problem had been created in the first instance by the peacemakers of Paris, and in the second instance by Czech misrule. It was evident that the Sudeten problem would come to a head of its own momentum if Hitler succeeded in liberating the Germans of Austria from the Schuschnigg dictatorship. Hitler had no definite plans before May 1938 for dealing with this problem, but he was determined to alleviate conditions for the Germans in some way, and there can be no doubt that he [no less ardently than the Polish leaders] hoped for the total dissolution of Czechoslovakia. It is for these reasons that the German and Polish leaders found a basis for agreement whenever Czechoslovakia was discussed.
This situation, and especially the inevitable German attitude toward Czechoslovakia, was no mystery to foreign statesmen before the year of the Czech crisis, 1938. Lord Halifax, who was British Foreign Secretary throughout most of 1938, told Hitler after a luncheon at Berchtesgaden on November 19, 1937, that Great Britain realized that the Paris treaties of 1919 contained mistakes which had to be rectified. Halifax assured Hitler that Great Britain did not believe in preserving the status quo at all costs. He mentioned the burning questions of Danzig, Austria, and Czechoslovakia quite on his own initiative, and without any prompting from Hitler. This was before Hitler had made any statement publicly that Germany was concerned either with the Czech or Danzig problems. Indeed, no such statement was necessary, since the situation was perfectly obvious.
At one time it seemed that common antipathy toward Czechoslovakia might cement a virtual alliance between Germany and Poland. It was evident that this commost bond would disappear after the Czech problem was solved, unless the Poles realized that antipathy toward the Soviet Union was a much more important issue in uniting the two countries. In the meantime, the points of friction between Germany and Poland would remain unless an understanding far more comprehensive than the 1934 Pact could be attained.
Beck instructed Ambassador Lipski at Berlin to propose a German-Polish declaration on Danzig in September
1937. The Germans were requested to join in avowing that "it is imperative to maintain the statute which
designates Danzig as the Free City." Foreign Minister Konstanin von Neurath of Germany was less friendly than
Hitler toward Poland, and he peremptorily instructed Moltke in Warsaw "to tell Beck again" that Germany would
not recognize the peace treaties of 1919.
Neurath had been Foreign Minister since 1932. He served under several Chancellors of the Weimar Republic,
and he was retained at his post by Hitler. He was not a particularly zealous Foreign Minister of the Third Reich,
because he was an aristocrat who had little sympathy for Hitler's egalitarian measures. Hitler admired Neurath
personally, but he recognized him as a weak link in the chain of German policy. Hitler was more intimate with
Joachim von Ribbentrop, an ex-officer and merchant sincerely devoted to Hitler's policies. Ribbentrop gradually
replaced Alfred Rosenberg as the principal National Socialist Party expert on foreign affairs, and he developed an
extensive Party bureaucratic organization to keep in touch with foreign countries. This organization was known as
the Ribbentrop Office, and it foreign contacts were so extensive that it came to be looked upon as Germany's
second and unofficial foreign service. Ribbentrop wished to retain control of this organization, and at the same time
come to the top in the regular German Foreign Office. His ambition was recognized by the professional diplomats,
and they did what they could to place obstacles in his way.
Neurath was pleased that he had persuaded Hitler to send Ribbentrop, and not Franz von Papen, as German Ambassador to London in 1936. Neurath believed that Ribbentrop would be unable to cope with the British situation, and that he would ruin his career at this difficult post. Papen, who had known Ribbentrop for many years, was more astute, and he feared that the London embassy would provide the non-professional diplomat with an opportunity to show Hitler what he could do. The event was to prove that Papen was right.
Neurath rejected Beck's gesture in September 1937 without consulting Hitler, because he assumed that no other German response was possible. Hitler did not wish to bind Germany permanently to the Danzig status quo, but he had a more flexible conception of German foreign policy. He was counting on Polish friendship in dealing with the crises which were likely to arise in Austria and Czechoslovakia.
Beck's attempt to regulate Danzig affairs exclusively with Germany conformed to a trend. Great Britain and France were represented with Sweden on a new League Commission of Three to supervise League responsibilities as the sovereign Power at Danzig. This was clearly a caretaker arrangement, and Foreign Minister Anthony Eden of Great Britain tacitly spoke for the Commission when he told the new League High Commissioner, Carl Jacob Burckhardt, on September 15, 1937, that "British policy had no special interest as such in the situation in Danzig." This position was consistent with British policy established by Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1919 when he said that Great Britain would never fight for the Danzig status quo. Burckhardt had no illusions about the role of the League at Danzig. He told Adolf Hitler on September 18, 1937, that he hoped the role of the League was merely temporary, and that the ultimate fate of Danzig would be settled by a direct agreement between Germany and Poland. Hitler listened to Burckhardt's views without offering any plan for a solution. Burckhardt surmised that Hitler feared to raise the Danzig question, because it would affect the related questions of the Corridor, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. Hitler, after nearly five years in power, had pursued no questions of territorial revision, although responsibility for the ill-fated Austrian revolution of July 1934 had been falsely attributed to him.
Jozef Lipski, the Polish Ambassador in Berlin, knew that Hitler was a sincere advocate of an understanding with Poland. Lipski was not inclined to accept the categorical statement on Danzig by Neurath. He hoped to obtain the declaration of Danzig which Beck had requested, and he was encouraged by conversations with Marshal Göring.The German Marshal had many duties connected with the German Air Force, the second German Four Year Plan, and the Prussian State Administration, but he was also intensely interested in foreign affairs. He was the Second Man in the Reich, and Hitler employed him as an Ambassador-at-large to Poland. He knew the Polish leaders, and he desired a lasting understanding with Poland. He was accustomed to discuss important matters of state with Polish representatives. He usually gave the German Foreign Office full information concerning these discussions, but it was sometimes necessary to inquire what he had said to foreign diplomats.
Lipski approached Neurath several times for a Danzig declaration. Neurath on October 18, 1937, bluntly told Lipski that "some day there would have to be a basic settlement on the Danzig question between Poland and us, since it would otherwise permanently disturb German-Polish relations." Neurath added that the sole aim of such a discussion would be "the restoration of German Danzig to its natural connection with the Reich, in which case extensive consideration could be given to Poland's economic interests."
Lipski was surprised, and he asked if the question would be broached soon, or perhaps immediately. Neurath evaded this inquiry, but he requested Lipski to inform Beck of his attitude. Lipski mentioned that Robert Ley, Chief of the German Labor Front, Artur Greiser, President of the Danzig Senate, and Albert Forster, District National Socialist Party Leader at Danzig, had declared publicly in recent days that Danzig must return to Germany. Neurath did not question or seek to excuse these statements. He replied that there was a need to solve the Danzig problem, and his conversation with Lipski ended in an impasse.
There was also the problem of German access by land to East Prussia, which had been severed from the Reich. In May 1935, when Germany was engaged in her huge superhighway construction project, German Ambassador Hans Adolf von Moltke informed Beck at Warsaw that Germany wished to build a super highway across the Polish Corridor to East Prussia. He inquired about the Polish attitude toward this plan, and Beck said that he would study the question. This was the beginning of protracted evasion by Beck. Repeated reminders from Moltke did not produce a definite statement about the Polish attitude toward the project. Fritz Todt, the National Inspector for Roads in Germany, discussed German plans with Julian Piasecki, the Polish Deputy Minister for Transportation. Moltke concluded after more than two years of fruitless inquiry that the attitude of the Polish Government was negative. The plan embodied a vital German national interest, and its acceptance by Poland would have improved prospects for a comprehensive German-Polish agreement. Moltke was unwilling to concede a final defeat in this matter.
Moltke presented a startling proposition to the German Foreign Office in October 1937. He suggested that Germany should build a superhighway up to the Corridor boundary from both Pomerania and East Prussia without waiting for Polish permission to link the route through the Corridor. Moltke failed to see that this would be a provocation which would stiffen Polish resistance to the German proposal. He believed that possible Polish objection to the construction of major military roads into the frontier area would be rendered pointless, and the Poles would find it expedient to conclude an agreement. He also had another factor in mind. The influx of tourists into Germany had greatly increased since the 1936 Olympic Games at Berlin, and Moltke believed that the complaints of foreigners, and especially tourists, who would be irritated by the break in the superhighway to historic old East Prussia, could be exploited to apply pressure on the Poles.
The Poles knew that the Germans desired a superhighway across their Corridor, and Neurath's conversations with Lipski suggested the possibility that Germany was about to demand Danzig. Lipski was reticent when he conversed with Neurath again on October 23, 1937, and Neurath retained the false impression that the Poles were prepared to accept a German solution of the Danzig question. Neurath was also weighing favorably a suggestion from Albert Forster in Danzig that an offer to use Polish steel for the superhighway and a new Vistula bridge might influence the Poles to accept the highway project.
The attitude of Neurath was fully shared by Czech Ambassador Slavik in Warsaw. The Czech diplomat regarded the recovery of Danzig by Germany as inevitable. He reported to Foreign Minister Kamil Krofta that in the opinion of Léon Noël, the French Ambassador to Poland, Danzig was lost to Poland. The conclusion of a provisional agreement on Danzig between Germany and Poland on November 5, 1937, did not change his opinion. He reported to Krofta on November 7, 1937, that League High Commissioner Burckhardt continued to insist that the union of Danzig with Germany could not be prevented. It was not surprising that the Czechs were complacent in their expectation that the German campaign of territorial revision would begin at Danzig in the vicinity of Poland. They were counting on Italy to prevent a German move into Austria, and they had nothing to fear from Germany as long as the Schuschnigg dictatorship was maintained. The fate of Danzig was a matter of complete indifference to Czechoslovakia.
Polish policy toward the Germans during the early years was more severe in the former German territories than in Galicia, Congress Poland, or the Kresy. More than one million acres of German-owned land were confiscated during the years from 1919-1929 in the provinces of Posen and West Prussia. German language schools throughout Poland were closed during the years before 1934. There were 21 German deputies in the Polish Sejm after the 1928 election, 5 German deputies after the election in autumn 1930, and no German deputies after 1935. Two Germans were allowed to sit in the less important Polish Senate at that time, but they were denied their seats many months before the outbreak of the German-Polish war in 1939.
The exceptionally miserable conditions in the former German provinces inevitably produced protests from the local German population. There was much enthusiasm among the younger Germans in 1933 when the Hitler Revolution triumphed in the Reich, and this further irritated and antagonized the Poles. The older Germans were aware of this, and many of them were concerned about it. The younger Germans were attracted to the Young German Party for Poland (JDP) which had been founded by Dr. Rudolf Wiesner at Bielitz in 1921. A number of more conservative German parties had opposed this group, and in 1934 Senator Hasbach attempted to unite the conservative opposition in the Council of Germans in Poland (RDP). The conservatives controlled most of the remaining German language press, and in 1937 there was a split in the Young German leadership, when a more radical faction under Wilhelm Schneider sought to obtain control. Wiesner won out after much difficulty, but it was a conspicuous fact that no outstanding leadership emerged in any of the German groups. The contrast between the German factions in Poland and the Sudeten German Party in Czechoslovakia under Konrad Henlein was very great.
Both the conservative and radical groups were nominally pro-Hitler, but the latter had more ambitious ideas concerning the extent to which social reforms like those of the Reich could be of benefit in improving conditions for the Germans of Poland. Neither group indicated the slightest expectation that they would or could come under German rule. The Office for Ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle) in the Reich, which promoted cultural contracts between Germans abroad and Germany, did not interfere with the struggle between the German political factions in Poland. Both factions hoped that the rapprochement between Germany and Poland would improve their position, but there was no indication of this in the years after the conclusion of the 1934 pact. The Germans of Poland, with very few exceptions, remained strictly loyal to the Polish state, and later research by the Dutch expert, Louis de Jong, contradicted the popular Polish claim that there was a German 5th column in Poland. The agents of the German intelligence service in Poland were almost exclusively Jews and Poles. Thousands of young Germans of military age were serving with the Polish Army when war came in 1939. The prominent Germans of Poland remained in the country in September 1939 and experienced arrest, transportation into the interior, or death.
An article in Gazeta Polska, the Government newspaper at Warsaw, stated on October 21, 1935, that moral solidarity and cultural ties were clearly within the rights of the Germans of Poland. This was all that the German minority sought.
The Germans of Poland failed to unite, but their morale improved after 1933. They took an active part in the 1935 Polish national election, although it was known that they would be allowed no seats in the Sejm. The National Democrats, a strictly Polish party, boycotted the same election. They provoked the authorities in a manner of which the Germans would never have dreamed. The Germans of Poland, when allowance is made for a few individual exceptions, were passive, and not trouble-makers. Hitler was understandably concerned about their unfair treatment, but he merely wished that they would receive decent treatment as Polish subjects.
The Polish minority in Germany was more united and more ably organized. The Union of Poles in Germany (Zwiazek Polakow w Niemczech) was organized at Berlin in 1922. All members automatically received the newspaper, Polak w Niemczech (The Pole in Germany). It had been true for generations that many people of Polish descent in Germany preferred to be considered German. The Union of Poles sought to combat this tendency, and it opposed the so-called "subjective census" introduced by the Weimar Republic and continued by Hitler. The old Hohenzollern bureaucracy had counted Poles on the basis of documentary evidence. The modern technique called for a subjective declaration of ethnic identity in addition to an identification of the mother tongue. This meant in Weimar days that a person could say his mother tongue was Polish, but that he was ethnically German. Many thousands of Poles had emigrated to work in West German industry as well as in the industries of France, and now the census permitted them to identify themselves as Germans. Under the conditions, only 14,000 claimed to be Poles in the census of 1939, although the Germans estimated that there must be at least 260,000 Poles in Germany by objective criteria, and the Polish Government claimed that there were 1,500,000. Economic conditions in Germany were good, there was no economic discrimination against the Poles, and the national feeling of the Polish minority was lax. The same trend had been displayed in elections to the Reichstag during the Weimar Republic, but under Hitler it became an avalanche.
During the 1928 school year, only 6,600 children had attended Polish schools in Germany, and of these 4,172 were in the Berlin and Ruhr areas. On the other hand, the Poles maintained many cooperatives, which were less explicitly an indication of national identity. The Polish press in Germany welcomed the improved economic and social conditions under Hitler, and it recognized the National Socialist program to secure these conditions for the Polish minority. The German citizen law of September 15, 1935, was explicit in recognizing that the Polish minority enjoyed full citizen rights. In 1937, the Polish minority organization still maintained 58 grammar schools and 2 high schools (gymnasia), and these institutions provided ample space for Polish children wishing to attend Polish schools in the Reich. A general meeting of the Polish organization was held on March 6, 1938, in the Strength through Joy (KdF) theater in Berlin with Father Domanski and Secretary-General Czeslaw Kaczmarek presiding. Many proud speeches were made. A large organization was formally in evidence, but there was little behind it, as the May 1939 German census clearly revealed.
A promising German-Polish pact on minorities was concluded at last on November 5, 1937. It was agreed that on the same day Hitler would speak to the leaders of the Polish minority and President Moscicki of Poland would address the German minority leaders. Hitler was extremely pleased with what he regarded as a concrete step in the direction of a comprehensive German-Polish understanding. He could not know that the Polish leaders would consider the new pact a dead letter. He agreed to amnesty a number of German citizens of Polish extraction, who had violated German criminal laws. He also granted Lipski's request for a compromise declaration on Danzig. It was agreed that the Danzig question would not be permitted to disturb German-Polish relations. Hitler displayed his Austrian charm when he received the delegation from the Polish minority in Germany. He emphasized to them that he was an Austrian, and that precisely for this reason he could understand their situation especially well. The Poles were extremely pleased by the warmly personal nature of Hitler's remarks. The reception given to the German minority leaders by President Moscicki at a vacation resort in the Beskiden mountains was more reserved.
The so-called Hossbach version of the conference, which is supposed to have become one of the most celebrated documents of all time, was written several days after the event, and it could carry no weight in a normal court of law, even if an actual copy of this memorandum was available. Hossbach had been an opponent of Hitler and his system since 1934, and he was not averse to the employment of illegal and revolutionary means in eliminating Hitler. He was an ardent admirer of General Ludwig Beck, the German Chief of Staff, whose life he had once helped to save on the occasion of a cavalry accident. Beck was a determined foe of Hitler, and he was engaged in organizing opposition against the German Chancellor. Hossbach was naturally on the alert to provide Beck with every possible kind of propaganda material. Hitler was popular in Germany, and only extreme methods might be effective in opposing him.
It would be the duty of every historian to treat the so-called Hossbach memorandum with reserve, even if it could be shown that the version introduced at Nuremberg was an authentic copy of the memorandum which Hossbach began to write on November 10, 1937 (he failed to recall later when he completed his effort). The fact is, however, that no copies of this original version have been located since World War II. The version introduced by the American Prosecution at Nuremberg, the only one extant, was said to be a copy made from the original version in late 1943 or early 1944, but Hossbach declared in a notarized affidavit on June 18, 1946, that he could not remember whether or not the Nuremberg copy corresponded to the original which he had made nearly nine years earlier. In other words, the sensational document, which was the primary instrument used in securing the conviction and execution of a number of Germany's top leaders, has never been verified, and there is no reason to assume that it is authentic. Raeder explained that Hitler's views, as expressed on November 5, 1937, offered no basis to conclude that any change in German foreign policy was about to take place, but the judges at Nuremberg, with the dubious help of an unconfirmed record, decided that Hitler had revealed unmistakably his unalterable intention to wage a war of criminal aggression.
Fritsch and Blomberg were dead when this conference was investigated after World War II, but Neurath and Göring agreed with Raeder about the essential nature of Hitler's remarks. Hitler had discussed German aspirations in Central Europe and the danger of war, but this was certainly a very different thing than announcing an intention to pursue a reckless foreign policy or to seek a war. Even the alleged Hossbach memorandum introduced at Nuremberg, as A.J.P. Taylor has pointed out, does not anticipate any of the actual events which followed in Europe during 1938 and 1939. It does contain some offensive and belligerent ideas, but it outlines no specific actions, and it establishes no time tables. Hence, error had been added to error. It was false to assume that the document was authentic in the first place, and it was incorrect to assume that even the fraudulent document contained any damaging evidence against Hitler and the other German leaders. Unfortunately, most of the later historians in Germany and elsewhere have blindly followed the Nuremberg judgment and have arrived at the mistaken conclusion that Hitler's conference of November 5, 1937, was relevant to the effort of determining the responsibility for World War II.
The other principal point of friction was the Danzig-Corridor problem. Hitler hoped to reassure the Poles by his statement that he was contemplating peaceful negotiation to resolve this problem. Neurath was not content to leave Hitler's vague assurance unqualified, and he sought to interpret it as part of a quid pro quo bargain. According to Neurath, Hitler's promise to the Poles on Danzig would be a dead letter if they did not respect the treaty on minorities.
The Poles attempted to interpret Hitler's statement as a disavowal that Germany intended to acquire Danzig. They were on weak ground in this effort, because the German failure to accord them a voluntary recognition of their frontiers meant that Germany was automatically claiming the territory assigned to Poland on the western side of the German 1914 eastern frontier. The Polish Foreign Office on November 9, 1937, protested against a speech by Albert Forster in Düsseldorf on November 6th. Forster had declared to a large audience that his aim was to achieve the reunion of Danzig with the Reich. This speech was merely one incident in a major campaign to acquaint the German population with the Danzig problem.
It was decided at the German Foreign Office on November 23, 1937, that the recent Danzig meetings carried out by Forster in various German cities had been so successful that this program should be intensified. Plans were made to prepare one hundred additional meetings in the near future, and an additional fifty meetings before April 1938. Arrangements were made to provide the best possible speakers from Danzig. The Danzig Senate President, the Volkstag President (Danzig Lower House), the Danzig District Propaganda Leader, the Danzig Labor Front Leader, and many other prominent Danzigers were enrolled in addition to Forster. It was discovered that Der Danziger Vorposten (The Danzig Sentinel), the principal news organ of Danzig, was an excellent newspaper, and plans were made to increase its circulation in the Reich. Das Deutsche Danzig (German Danzig), a travelling Danzig exposition, was also planned, and it was scheduled to open at Muenster in Westphalia by the end of November 1937. The German Foreign Office had concluded that current knowledge and awareness of Danzig in the Reich was "proper" but "insufficient." This activity was an excellent indication of the German attitude toward Hitler's Danzig declaration. It was regarded as the hopeful beginning of a definite diplomatic campaign to recover Danzig.
The Czechs were well aware of the hostility of their principal neighbors. It was not surprising that on February 22, 1938, during the early phase of the Austrian crisis, Kamil Krofta, Czechoslovakia's Foreign Minister, prepared a memorandum which explained why he favored definite Czech action to prevent the reunion of Austria and Germany. The complacent assumption that Danzig was the primary objective of German expansion would be shattered unless the puppet dictatorship in Austria could be maintained as a buffer against the realization of Hitler's dream of Greater Germany. Palacky had supported an independent Austria against the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848, and Krofta hoped that it would be possible to support an independent Austria, although merely a fragmentary rump-Austria, against Hitler.
In the foreground the Czechs were facing a surprise, and the Germans and the Poles were soon in a position to score their separate triumphs at Czech expense. In the background was the Soviet Union, the greatest single peril either Germans or Poles had ever had to face. It was desirable for Germany and Poland to unite against this danger, although perhaps no one, including the German and the Polish leaders, knew how great the peril really was.
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Chapter 5 The Road to Munich
One might well ask what the attitude of the people of Portland, Oregon, would be if their city were suddenly detached from the United States and placed under the jurisdiction of the United Nations in the interest of guaranteeing special port facilities to Canada near the estuary of the Columbia River. It would be small consolation to recall that the area around Portland, before passing under the sovereignty of the United States in 1846, was settled by the British Hudson Bay Company. The traditionally friendly relations between Canadians and Portlanders would soon deteriorate under such exacerbating conditions.
It is not surprising that the National Socialists of Adolf Hitler won an electoral majority at Danzig before this was possible in Germany. The Danzigers hoped that perhaps Hitler could do something to change the intolerable conditions established during 1919 and the following years. It was easy in 1939 for Margarete Gärtner, the National Socialist propagandist, to compile extensive quotations from approximately one hundred leading Western experts who deplored the idiocy of the Danzig settlement of 1919. Her list was merely a sampling, but it was sufficient to substantiate the point that at Danzig a nasty blunder had been made.
The issue exploited by Lord Halifax of Great Britain to destroy the friendship between Germany and Poland in March 1939 was the Danzig problem. The final collapse of the Czech state in March 1939 produced less effect in neighboring Poland, where the leaders were inclined to welcome the event, than in the distant United States. The Polish leaders had agreed that the return of Memel from Lithuania to Germany in March 1939 would not constitute an issue of conflict between Germany and Poland. Hitler emphasized that Germany would not claim one inch of Polish territory, and that she was prepared to recognize the Versailles Polish frontier on a permanent basis. Polish diplomats had suggested that a settlement of German requests for improved transit to German East Prussia would not present an insuperable problem. The German leaders were disturbed by Polish discrimination against the Germans within Poland, but they were not inclined to recognize this problem as an issue which could produce a conflict between the two states. It was primarily Danzig which made the breach. It was the discussion of Danzig between Germany and Poland which prompted the Polish leaders to warn Hitler that the pursuance of German aims in this area would produce a Polish-German war.
Polish defiance of Hitler on the Danzig question did not occur until the British leaders had launched a vigorous encirclement policy designed to throttle the German Reich. It is very unlikely that the Polish leaders would have defied Hitler had they not expected British support. The Polish leaders had received assurances ever since September 1938 that the British leaders would support them against Hitler at Danzig. Many of the Polish leaders said that they would have fought to frustrate German aims in Danzig had Poland been without an ally in the world. They were seeking to emphasize the importance which they attached to Danzig in discussing what they might have done in this hypothetical situation. This does not mean that they actually would have fought for Danzig in a real situation of this kind, and it is doubtful if Pilsudski would have fought for Danzig in 1939 even with British support. It is evident that Danzig was the issue selected by the Polish leaders to defy Hitler after the British had offered an alliance to Poland.
It is easy to see to-day that the creation of the Free City of Danzig was the most foolish provision of the Versailles Treaty. A similar experiment at Trieste in 1947 was abandoned after a few years because it was recognized to be unworkable, and it is hoped that Europe in the future will be spared further experiments of this kind. Danzig had a National Socialist regime after 1933, and Carl Burckhardt, the last League High Commissioner in Danzig, said in 1937 that the union between Danzig and the rest of Germany was inevitable. The Polish leaders professed to believe that it was necessary to prevent Danzig from returning to the Reich. This is especially difficult to understand when it is recalled that the Poles after 1924 had their own thriving port city of Gdynia on the former German coast, and that otherwise the Poles had never had a port of their own throughout their entire recorded history. The Poles claimed that the Vistula was their river, and that they deserved to control its estuary. When Joseph Goebbels observed that it would be equally logical for Germany to demand Rotterdam and the mouth of the Rhine, the Poles answered with the complaint that the Germans controlled the mouths of many of their rivers, such as the Weser, the Elbe, and the Oder, but for unfortunate Poland it was the Vistula or nothing. The Germans might well have answered this complaint with one of their own to the effect that it was unfair of God to endow Poland with richer agricultural land than Germany possessed. The Poles were usually impervious to logic when Danzig was discussed. This in itself made a preposterous situation more difficult, although a compromise settlement on the basis of generous terms from Hitler might have been possible had it not been for British meddling.
The Establishment of
the Free City Regime
Danzig was historically the key port at the mouth of the great Vistula River artery. The modern city of Danzig
was founded in the early 14th century, and it was inhabited almost exclusively by Germans from the beginning.
There had previously been a fishing village at Danzig inhabited by local non-Polish West Slavs which was
mentioned in a church chronicle of the 10th century. The Germans first came to the Danzig region during the
eastward colonization movement of the German people in the late Middle Ages. Danzig was the capital of the
Prussian province of West Prussia when the victors of World War I decided to separate this Baltic port from
Germany. The city had been a provincial capital within the German Kingdom of Prussia prior to the establishment
of the North German Federation in 1867 and of the German Second Empire in 1871. The Allied Powers in 1920 converted Danzig from a German provincial capital to a German city state in the style prevailing in the other Hanseatic cities of Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck. The latter three cities remained separate federal states within the German Empire created by Bismarck. The difference was that the victorious Powers insisted that Danzig should not join the other states of the German Union, or again become a part of Germany. They also decreed that Danzig should submit to numerous servitudes established for the benefit of Poland.
The renunciation of Danzig by Germany and the creation of the Free City regime was stipulated by articles 100 to 108 of the Versailles Treaty. A League High Commissioner was to be the first instance of appeal in disputes between Poland and Danzig. The foreign relations of Danzig were delegated to Poland, and the Free City was to be assigned to the Polish customs area. The Poles were allowed unrestricted use of Danzig canals, docks, railroads, and roads for trading purposes and they were delegated control over river traffic, and over telegraph, telephone, and postal communications between Poland and Danzig harbor. The Poles had the privilege of improving, leasing, or selling transit facilities. The residents of Danzig forfeited German citizenship, although formal provision was made for adults to request German citizenship within a two year period. Double citizenship in Danzig and Germany was forbidden. The League of Nations, as the Sovereign authority, was granted ownership over all possessions of the German and Prussian administrations on Danzig territory. The League was to stipulate what part of these possessions might be assigned to Poland or Danzig.
The formal treaty which assigned specific property of Poland was ratified on May 3, 1923. The Poles received the Petershagen and Neufahrwasser barracks, naval supplies, oil tanks, all weapons and weapon tools from the dismantled Danzig arms factory, supply buildings, an apartment building, the state welfare building on Hansa square, the major railroad lines and their facilities, and ownership over most of the telegraph and telephone lines. Other facilities were assigned to the Free Harbor Commission supervised by the League of Nations in which the Poles participated. The Poles requested a munitions depot and base for a small Polish Army garrison. The Westerplatte peninsula close to the densely populated Neufahrwasser district was assigned to Poland on October 22, 1925. The Danzig Parliament protested in vain that this decision constituted "a new rape of Danzig." The Poles also received permission to station warships and naval personnel in the area. These various awards meant that by 1925 the Polish Government was the largest owner of property in the Free City area.
The Danzig constitution was promulgated on June 14, 1922, after approval by Poland and the League of Nations. Provisions were enacted to guarantee the use of the Polish language by Poles in the Danzig courts, and a special law guaranteeing adequate educational facilities for the Polish minority was passed on December 20, 1921. The Danzig constitution was based on the concept of popular sovereignty despite the denial to Danzigers of the right of self-determination. The constitution stipulated that the construction of fortifications or manufacture of war material could not be undertaken without League approval.
The constitution provided for a Volkstag (assembly) of 120 members with four year terms. It was primarily a consultative body with the right to demand information about public policy, although the formal approval of the Volkstag for current legislation enacted by the Senate was required. The Senate with its 22 members was the seat of carefully circumscribed local autonomy. The President and the other seven major administrative officers, who were comparable to city commissioners, were elected for four years and received fixed salaries. The seven Senate administrative departments included justice and trade, public works, labor relations, interior (police), health and religion, science and education, and finance. There was no separate executive authority.
The Danzig constitution of 1922 replaced the Weimar German constitution of August 11, 1919, which had been tolerated as the fundamental law of Danzig until that time. The election to the Weimar constitutional assembly in January 1919 had taken place throughout West Prussia, and it constituted a virtual plebiscite in favor of remaining with Germany. The Allies refused to permit them a plebiscite of their own which they knew would end in a defeat for Poland. The British Government played a more active role than any other Power, including Poland, in the organization of the Danzig regime. British policy was decisive in the regulation of early disputes between Danzig and Poland. The British at Danzig furnished the first three League High Commissioners, Sir Reginald Tower, General Sir Richard Haking, and Malcolm S. MacDonnell, and the last of the British High Commissioners, after an Italian and Danish interlude, was Sean Lester from Ulster, who held office from 1934 until late 1936. British interest was largely a reflection of British investment and trade, and much of the industrial enterprise of Danzig came under the control of British citizens during these years. The British also played a decisive role in securing the appointment of Carl Jacob Burckhardt, the Swiss historian who succeeded Lester and who held office until the liberation of Danzig by Germany on September 1, 1939. The so-called liberation of Danzig by the Red Army on March 30, 1945, referred to in recent editions of the Encyclopaedia Britanica, was actually the annihilation of the city.
The territory of the Free City had approximately 365,000 inhabitants in 1922. The Polish minority constituted less than 3% of the population at that time, but the continued influx of Poles raised the proportion to 4% by 1939. The introduction of proportional representation enabled the Poles to elect 5 of the 120 members of the second Volkstag following the promulgation of the unpopular 1922 constitution. The German vote was badly split among the usual assortment of Weimar German parties. The Conservatives (DNVP) elected 34 deputies and the Communists elected 11. The Social Democrat Marxists elected 30 and the Catholic Center 15. The remaining 25 deputies were elected by strictly local Danzig German parties. This disastrous fragmentation in the face of a crisis situation was changed after the National Socialists won the Danzig election of 1933. The divided Danzig Senate presided over by a Conservative president was followed by a united National Socialist Senate. This created a slightly more favorable situation for coping with the moves of the Polish Dictatorship at Danzig.
It would not be correct to define Danzig's status as a Polish protectorate under the new system despite extensive Polish servitudes (i.e. privileges under international law). Danzig was a League of Nations protectorate. This was true despite the fact that the Allies, and not the League, created the confusing Free City regime, and despite the absence of a formal ceremony in which actual sovereignty was transferred to the League. The protectorate was administered by a League of Nations High Commissioner resident in Danzig, by the Security Council of the League of Nations in Geneva, and, after 1936, by a special committee of League member states. The capital of the political system which included Danzig was moved from Berlin to Geneva, and this was an extremely dubious move from the standpoint of the Danzigers. The League was in control at Danzig as it had been in Memel before Lithuania was permitted to seize that German city.
The Poles with varying success began an uninterrupted campaign in 1920 to push their rights at Danzig beyond the explicit terms of Versailles and the subsequent treaties. One of the earliest Polish aims was to establish the Polish Supreme Court as the final court of jurisdiction over Danzig law. This objective was never achieved because of opposition from the League High Commissioners, but Poland was eventually able to establish her Westerplatte garrison despite the early opposition of League High Commissioner General Sir Richard Haking. The Poles never abandoned these efforts, and everyone in Danzig knew that their ultimate objective was annexation of the Free City.
The existing system was unsatisfactory for Poland, Germany, and Danzig. The Poles wished to usurp the role of the League, and both Germany and Danzig favored the return of the new state to the German Reich. There could be no talk of the change of system in Germany in 1933 alienating the Danzigers, because the National Socialists won their majority in Danzig before this had been accomplished in Germany. The change of system in Germany was matched by the unification of Danzig under National Socialist leadership.
The Polish Effort
to Acquire Danzig
Dmowski and Paderewski presented many arguments (at Versailles) to support their case for the Polish
annexation of Danzig. It should occasion no surprise that Poland sought to achieve this program of annexation. The
strategic and economic importance of Danzig at the mouth of the river on which the former and present capitals of
Poland, Krakow and Warszawa (Warsaw), were located, was very great. The National Democratic leaders were not
worried that they would create German hostility by making this "conquest." They argued at Versailles that
Germany in any case would seek revenge from Poland because of the other treaty provisions. They claimed that the
region on which Danzig was situated belonged to the Poles by right of prior settlement, and they spoke of the socalled recent German invasion of the territory some six hundred years earlier. The history of the Polish state, from
the Viking regime imposed in the 10th century until the 18th century partitions, extended over eight hundred years,
and the Poles were satisfied that their state was more ancient than Danzig. They were confident that they could contend with the German argument against their case on this point. The German argument was based on two principal facts. In the first place, Germanic tribes had occupied the Danzig area until the late phase of the "Wandering of the Peoples (Völkerwanderung)" in the 4th century AD. Secondly, the Poles had never settled the Danzig region before the Germans arrived to found their city in the late Middle Ages.
The Polish reply to this German argument was two-fold. They contended that the early German tribes in the Danzig area were representative of the entire Germanic civilization, which included, besides Germany, Scandinavia, England, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. They concluded that the Germans had no right to base claims on the early history of these tribes. Secondly, the small early West Slavic tribes, which were bordered by the West Slavic Poles, West Slavic Czechs, Borussians, and Germans on land, and on water by the Baltic Sea, had been largely assimilated by their neighbors. These tribes had settled the Danzig region between the "Wandering of the Peoples" and the founding of Danzig by the Germans. It was argued that these early West Slavic tribes, who had maintained a fishing village on the site of the later city of Danzig, were more intimately related to the Poles than to their other neighbors. It was this doctrine which provided the claim that Poland might legitimately consider herself the heir to the entire German territory between the Elbe and the Vistula. At one time or another this area had been occupied by West Slavic tribes.
These were the principal so-called historical arguments of the Poles. They claimed along economic lines that Danzig had grown rich on the Polish hinterland. This was undoubtedly true, although the local West Prussian hinterland, which had long been German, also contributed to Danzig's prosperity.
We have noted the Polish natural law argument that Danzig should belong to them because they controlled most of the Vistula River. They also raised the strategic argument that ownership of Danzig was necessary to defend Poland and to guarantee Polish access to the Sea. The second point, if one overlooks the feasibility of granting Poland port facilities in German harbors, had been met after 1924 by the construction of the neighboring port of Gdynia. The first point concerning defense does not merit lengthy examination. Danzig was distant from the bulk of Polish territory, and therefore it could contribute little to the defense of Poland. Ian D. Morrow, the principal British historian of the treaty settlement in the eastern borderlands, concluded that the problem of Polish claims to Danzig "constitutes as it were a permanent background to the history of the relations between the Free City of Danzig and the Republic of Poland."
The German Order of Knights played an important role in the early history of Danzig. The Order had been commissioned by the Roman Catholic Popes and German Emperors to end the threat of heathen invasion in Eastern Europe. The Order established its control over West Prussia by 1308. Danzig was developed within this territory by German settlers, and the Order permitted her to join the Hanseatic League. Danzig grew rapidly for more than one hundred and fifty years under the protection of the Order, and at one time it was the leading ship building city of the world. The first Poles appeared in the area, and the tax register at Danzig indicated that 2% of the new settlers in the period from 1364 to 1400 were Polish.
Polish historians have emphasized that a trading settlement of Germans on the Danzig site had first received approval for an urban charter in 1235 from Swantopolk, a West Slavic chieftain. They therefore concluded that the first German trading settlement in the area was under Slavic sovereignty. They have regarded this as a sort of precedent to suggest that the Poles were requesting a return to the original state of affairs when they demanded Danzig. This is an impossible mystique for anyone questioning the allegedly close affinity between the early West Slavic tribes of the coastal area and the Poles.
Polish historians see a great tragedy for Poland in the conquest of West Prussia by the German Order of Knights in 1308. The Knights were able, at least temporarily, to establish a common frontier between their conquests along the Baltic Sea and the rest of Germany. They also attained a frontier with the German Knights of the Sword farther to the North. This linked up the German eastern conquests of the Middle Ages in one contiguous system from Holstein to the Gulf of Finland. It meant that any belated Polish attempt to attain territorial access to the Baltic Sea would have to contend with a solid barrier of German territory between Poland and the coast. The various German Orders in their conquests had never seized any territory inhabited by the Poles. This meant that the Poles, if they attacked the Germans, would be unable to claim either to Pope or to Emperor that they were seeking to liberate Polish territories under German control.
Confusion in the Papacy during the 15th century, and distractions in the German Empire, enabled the Poles to isolate the German Order of Knights, and to attack the Order with the aid of Tartar and Lithuanian allies. The relations between the Poles and the German Emperors, however, remained peaceful throughout this same period. There were no wars at all between the German Emperors and the Polish Kings from this time until the disappearance of Poland in the 18th century.
The Poles began their victorious struggle against the Order in 1410. They never lost the initiative after their great field victory at Tannenberg (Grünwald) in the first year of the war. The struggle dragged on to the accompaniment of sporadic bursts of activity from the Poles, and the Germans defended themselves stubbornly in their cities. The ultimate outcome of the war was influenced by internal German struggles between the colonists and the celibate knights from all parts of Germany. The colonists in both town and countryside had begun to consider themselves the native Germans several generations ·after the first settlement, and they regarded the Knights, who had no family roots in these provinces, as foreigners. The internecine struggles which followed decisively weakened the Order. The territorial integrity of the Order state was shattered at the peace of Thorn in 1466.
Some Polish historians regard the period of the Order in West Prussia as a mere episode in which Poland at last had begun to make good her claims to the heritage of the West Slavic tribes. The Poles in 1466 annexed most of West Prussia and part of East Prussia. They reached the Baltic coast, but they failed to establish Polish maritime interests. Danzig seceded from the Order state, but she retained her status of German city within the Hanseatic League. Her position was unique. Unlike the other Hanseatic cities, she was neither a member of a German territorial state nor under the immediate jurisdiction of the Emperor. Danzig enjoyed the theoretical protection of the Polish Kings, but she was independent of them. She never compromised her independence by permitting a Polish army to control the city. King Stephen Bathory of Poland became impatient with the state of affairs in 1576. He threatened the Danzigers with war if they did not accept his demand for a Polish military occupation and a permanent Polish garrison. Danzig in reply did not hesitate to defy Stephen Bathory. The war which followed was a humiliation for the proud Polish state at the zenith of her power. The Polish forces were unable to capture Danzig. Danzig in the 17th century declined rapidly in commercial importance along with the other cities of the Hanseatic League. There were many complex causes both economic and political, but the principal factor was the successful manner in which the Dutch and the Danes conspired to thwart Hanseatic interests. Danzig continued to maintain her freedom from Polish control despite her decline, and indeed, the Polish state itself experienced a period of uninterrupted decline after the great Ukrainian uprising against Poland in 1648. The situation of Danzig remained unchanged until she was annexed by Prussia in the 18th century.
Prussia surrendered to Napoleon I at the Peace of Tilsit in 1807. Danzig was separated from Prussia and converted into a French protectorate with a permanent French garrison. By this time the city had become ardently Prussian, and this unnatural state of affairs, which was also inflicted on Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck, was violently resented by the Danzigers. The French regime at Danzig was threatened by Napoleon's debacle in Russia in 1812. This event enabled the Prussians to recover Danzig early in 1814 after a long siege. Danzig remained enthusiastically Prussian until the city was literally annihilated by Russian and Mongolian hordes in 1945.
Danzig's Anguish at
Separation from Germany
Danzig saw nothing of war or invasion from 1814 until the defeat of Germany in 1918. The Danzigers did not
contemplate the possibility of annexation by the new Polish state until after the close of World War I. They were
assured by German Chancellor Hertling in February 1918 that President Wilson's peace program with its 13th Point
on Polish access to the Sea did not threaten their affiliation with Germany in any way. The President's Ambassador
had assured the German Government that this was the case when the point about Polish access to the Sea was
discussed before American entry into the war. The Presidents program was based on national self-determination,
and Danzig was exclusively German. The Danzigers thought of port facilities for the Poles in German harbors along the lines subsequently granted to the Czechs at Hamburg and Stettin. This arrangement satisfied the Czech demand for access to the Sea. No one thought of Polish rule at Danzig until it became known that the Poles were demanding Danzig at the peace conference, and that President Wilson favored their case. The disillusioned Danzigers petitioned the German authorities at Weimar to reject any peace terms which envisaged the separation of Danzig from Germany. There was still some hope in April 1919, when the Allies refused to permit Polish troops in the West under General Haller to return to Poland by way of Danzig. German troops occupied Danzig at that time, and the Poles were required to return home by rail.
The Danzigers were in despair after receiving the preliminary draft of the Versailles Treaty in May 1919. They discovered that some queer fate was conspiring to force them into the ludicrous and dubious situation of a separate' state. Danzig discovered in May 1919 that the 14 Points and self-determination had been a trick, a ruse de guerre a l'americaine, and in June 1919, with the acceptance of the treaty by the Weimar Government; it was evident that Danzig must turn her back on her German Fatherland. The Allied spokesmen in Danzig urged her to hasten about it, and not be sentimental. The Germans had been tricked and outsmarted by the Allies. After all, Danzig had lost World War I.
Poland's Desire for
a Maritime Role
The distinguished Polish historian, Oskar Halecki, has declared that the demands of Dmowski at Versailles were
"unanimously put forward by the whole nation." Polish spokesmen have insisted that the entire Polish nation was
longing for a free marine frontier in the North, and for a coastal position which would enable Poland to play an
active maritime role. This was doubtless true after 1918, although for more than three hundred years, when Poland
from the 15th to the 18th centuries held most of the West Prussian coastline, the Poles played no maritime role. It should be added that they also held coastal territory east of the Vistula with harbor facilities during those years.
When struggles occurred during the 17th century between rival Swedish and Polish Vasa kings, the Poles chartered
German ships and crews from East Prussian bases to defend their coasts from the Swedes rather than to undertake
their own naval defense. Poland made no effort to build a merchant marine or to acquire colonies, although the neighboring German principality of Brandenburg, with a less favor able 17th century geographic and maritime position, engaged in foreign trade and acquired colonies in Africa. These facts in no way diminished the Polish right to play a maritime role in the 20th century, but it was unwarranted for Polish spokesmen to mislead the Polish people about their past. An especially crass example of this was offered by Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski, Vice-Premier of Poland from 1935 to 1939, and from 1926 the leading Government figure in Polish commerce and industry. Kwiatkowski was a close personal friend of President Moscicki, and he was entrusted with the organization of the Central Industrial Region (COP) of Poland before World War II. He was an expert engineer who had studied in Krakow, Lvov, and Munich, and he had earned the proud title "creator of Gdynia" for his collaboration with Danish colleagues in the construction of Poland's principal port. Kwiatkowski, like some other scientists, was guilty of distorting history, and he went to absurd lengths to identify Poland with the nests of West Slavic pirates of the early Middle Ages who had operated from Rügen Island off the coast of Pomerania. Kwiatkowski announced at a maritime celebration on July 31, 1932, that, if the heroes of Poland's great naval past could raise their voices once again, "one great, mighty, unending cry would resound along a stretch of hundreds of miles from the Oder to the Memel: 'Long live Poland!'."
At Paris the Poles had argued that Danzig was indispensable for their future maritime position. Lloyd George frustrated their plan to annex Danzig, but they were told by the Danes that the West Prussian coast north of Danzig presented the same physical characteristics as the north-eastern coast of Danish Zeeland. The Danes had built Copenhagen, and there was no reason why the Poles could not build their own port instead of seeking to confiscate a city built by another nation. The Poles were fascinated by this prospect, and they were soon busy with plans for the future port of Gdynia.
The construction of Gdynia and Polish economic discrimination in favor of the new city after 1924 produced a catastrophic effect on the trade of the unfortunate Danzigers. The Polish maritime trade in 1929 was 1,620 million Zloty, of which 1,490 million Zloty still passed through Danzig. The total land and sea trade by 1938 had declined to 1,560 million Zloty, and only 375 million went by way of Danzig. The Danzig trade was confined mainly to bulk products such as coal and ore. Imports of rice, tobacco, citrus fruits, wool, jute, and leather, and exports of beet sugar and eggs passed through Gdynia. Danzig was virtually limited to the role of port for the former German mining region of East Upper Silesia. The trade of Gdynia had become more than three times as valuable as that of Danzig. Trade between Danzig and Germany was discouraged by a heavy Polish protective tariff.
Polish concern about Danzig might have diminished after the successful completion of the port of Gdynia had Polish ambitions been less insatiable. Unfortunately this was not the case, and the Poles remained as jealous as before of their position within the so-called Free City.
The Poles had originally insisted that Danzig was the one great port they needed to guarantee their maritime access. They soon began to speak of modern sea power, and it was easy to demonstrate that one port was a narrow foundation for a major naval power. They described Danzig as their second lung, which they needed to breathe properly. It was a matter of complete indifference to them that Danzig did not wish to be a Polish lung. They were equally unmoved by the fact that millions of their Ukrainian subjects did not care to live within the Polish state, and that nearly one million Germans had left Poland in despair during the eighteen years after the Treaty of Versailles. Life had been made sufficiently miserable for them to do otherwise. It could be expected that the Germans would also evacuate a Polish Danzig, and thus make room for a Polish Gdansk. The Polish leaders were encouraged to hope for this result because of the manifestly ridiculous and humiliating situation created for Danzig by the Treaty of Versailles.
The preoccupation of the Polish leaders with Danzig was quite extraordinary. This was indicated by the press and by the analytical surveys of the Polish Foreign Office, Polska a Zagranica (Poland and Foreign Lands), which were sent to Polish diplomatic missions abroad. These secret reports were also distributed among Foreign Office officials, Cabinet members, and Army leaders. They emphasized the consolidation of National Socialist rule at Danzig after the 1934 Pact, the economic problems of Danzig, and the constitutional conflict between the Danzig Senate and the League. It was possible to conclude from these reports that Danzig was the cardinal problem of Polish foreign policy despite the conclusion of the 1934 Pact with Germany. The line taken by the Polish Foreign Office was simple and direct. It was noted that Polish public opinion was increasingly aroused about Danzig, and that the Government continued to maintain great interest in the unresolved Danzig problem. Above all, it was stressed that Danzig, although it did not belong to Poland, was no less important to Poland than Gdynia, which was Polish. It would be impossible to convey Polish aspirations at Danzig in terms more eloquent.
It should be evident at this point that no serious person could expect a lasting agreement between Germany and Poland without a final settlement of the Danzig question. The Danzig status quo of Versailles was a source of constant friction between Germany and Poland. The Polish leaders after 1935 continued to believe that the ideal solution would have been the annexation of Danzig by Poland, and Pilsudski himself had favored this solution, under favorable conditions, such as the aftermath of a victorious preventive war against Germany. [The Poles never stood a chance with 'leaders' like this.DC]
Pilsudski's preventive war plans dated from 1933, when Germany was weak. After the 1934 Pact, the Poles opened an intensive propaganda campaign against the Czechs, and the prospects for a Polish success at Teschen, in cooperation with Germany, were not entirely unfavorable. It seemed by contrast that Poland had nothing more to seek at Danzig. Pilsudski had declared in March 1935 that no Power on earth could intimidate Germany any longer.
Hitler talked with good sense and conviction of abandoning claims to many German territories in Europe which had been lost after World War I. These included territories held by Denmark in the North, France in the West, Italy in the South, and Poland in the East. Hitler expected Poland to reciprocate by conceding the failure of her earlier effort to acquire Danzig. Hitler was not prepared to concede that Danzig was lost to Germany merely because she had been placed under the shadowy jurisdiction of the League. Danzig was a German National Socialist community plagued with a Polish economic depression and prevented from pursuing policies of recovery to improve her position. Danzig wished to return to Germany. Hitler had no intention of perpetuating the humiliating status quo of surrendering this purely German territory to Poland. He was willing to recognize extensive Polish economic rights at Danzig. It would have been wise for the Poles to concentrate upon obtaining favorable economic terms and otherwise to wash their hands of the problem.
Hitler's Effort to
Prevent Friction at Danzig
The Poles were seeking to extend their privileges at Danzig when Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933.
There had been chronic tension between Danzig and Poland throughout the period of the Weimar Republic in
Germany. Indeed, the 1919 settlement at Danzig virtually precluded conditions of any other kind. The improvement
of German-Polish relations shortly after the advent of Hitler was accompanied by a temporary relaxation of tension
between Poland and Danzig, but it would have required a superhuman effort to maintain a lasting détente within the
context of the Versailles status quo. Hermann Rauschning, the first National Socialist Danzig Senate leader, was
known to be extremely hostile to Poland, but Hitler persuaded him to go to Warsaw for talks with the Polish leaders
in July 1933. Rauschning was accompanied by Senator Artur Greiser, who was known for his moderate views on
Poland. A favorable development took place on August 5, 1933. Danzig and Poland agreed to settle important
disputes by bilateral negotiation instead of carrying their complaints to the League of Nations. Either party was
obliged to give three months' notice before appealing to the League if bilateral negotiations failed. The Poles also
agreed to modify their policies of economic discrimination against Danzig, but they failed to keep this promise. The following year was relatively calm although there were many irritating minor incidents involving economic problems and the operations of Polish pressure groups on Danzig territory. Danzig and Poland concluded an economic pact on August 8, 1934, which contained mutual advantages on taxes and the marketing of Polish goods in Danzig territory. The conciliatory trend at Danzig was strengthened when Greiser succeeded Rauschning as Senate President on November 23, 1934. The Poles had no complaints about Greiser, but they objected to Albert Forster, the National Socialist District Party Leader. Forster was an energetic and forceful Franconian with the Sturheit (stubbornness) characteristic of the men of his district. He was one of Hitler's best men, and his assignment at Danzig was a significant indication of the seriousness of Germany's intentions. Forster was less cosmopolitan than Greiser, but he was highly intelligent, and he fully understood the scope and significance of the Danzig problem despite his West German origin. He was a stubborn negotiator with both Poland and the League, but he loyally supported Hitler's plans for a lasting agreement with Poland. He also shared Hitler's enthusiasm for an understanding with England. Lord Vansittart described Forster in his memoirs as "a rogue [Forster was exceptionally handsome] who came to our house with glib professions and a loving mate [Forster's wife was exceptionally beautiful]." This brief rejection of Forster by the leading British Germanophobe tallied closely with the negative attitude of the Poles.
The effort of Hitler to achieve greater harmony with Poland at Danzig did not achieve lasting results. Friction began to increase again early in 1935, and this trend continued until the outbreak of war in 1939. Many of the new disputes were economic in nature. Danzig was experiencing a severe depression, and the local National Socialist regime wished to do more to help the people than had been done by the Conservative regime in the past. The lack of freedom made it impossible to emulate the increasing prosperity which existed in Germany. The deflationary monetary policies of Poland were anathema in Danzig, where the Danziger Gulden was tied to the scarce Zloty of the Poles. An attempt to free the Gulden from the Zloty, without leaving the Polish customs union, produced a crisis in May 1935. Danzig received much expert advice from Hjalmar Schacht. the President of the German Reichsbank. The Polish financial experts regarded this as unwarranted German interference in the affairs of German Danzig. The crisis reached a climax on July 18, 1935, when Poland put Danzig under a blockade, and commanded the shipment of all goods through Gdynia. Danzig responded by opening her economic border with East Prussia in defiance of Poland. This involved an attempt to circumvent the Polish customs inspectors and to ignore the Polish tariff requirements. Hitler intervened at this critical point and used his influence to obtain the agreement of August 8, 1935, which amounted to a total retreat for Danzig. This capitulation ended any hope that Danzig might be able to ameliorate the economic depression through her own efforts.
A typical dispute of this drab period transpired in 1936 when the Poles abruptly issued regular Army uniforms to the Polish customs inspectors in the hope of accustoming the Danzig population to a regular Polish military occupation. The Danzig Government protested, but the Poles, as usual, refused to accept protests from Danzig. A dangerous atmosphere was maintained by the constant agitation of the Polish pressure groups. The Polish Marine and Colonial League demonstrated in Warsaw in July 1936 for the expansion of existing Polish privileges at Danzig, and its activities were accompanied by a new campaign against Danzig in the Polish press. Relations between Poland and Danzig were as bad as they had been during the Weimar Republic. Hitler had attempted to reduce friction on the basis of the status quo, but this effort had failed.
The Chauvinism of Polish
High Commissioner Chodacki
Josef Beck, Poland's Foreign Minister, soon decided that renewed tension had made Danzig the most prominent
front in the conduct of Polish diplomacy, except possible Paris. He decided to recall Kasimierz Papée, the Polish
High Commissioner, and to replace him with a man who enjoyed his special confidence. The choice had fallen on
Colonel Marjan Chodacki, who ranked second in Beck's estimation to Juliusz Lukasiewicz at Paris. Chodacki in
1936 was Poland's diplomatic representative at Prague. Beck invited his friend to return to Warsaw from Prague on
December 1936 for three days of intensive discussions on the Danzig situation before clearing the channels for his
new appointment. Beck told Chodacki at Warsaw of his decision, and he requested him to take the Danzig post.
Chodacki accepted with the slightest hesitation. Beck asked if Chodacki was not afraid to accept such a dangerous
mission. Chodacki, instead of replying, asked Beck a question in return: "Are you not afraid to send me there?."
Beck agreed with a smile that this question had a point. He knew that his friend was the most ardent and sensitive
of Polish patriots. The Danzigers had been annoyed with League High Commissioner Sean Lester for several years. Lester was an Ulsterman who seemed to delight in conducting a one man crusade against National Socialism and all its works in Danzig. The officers of the German cruiser Leipzig ostentatiously refused to call on Lester when their ship visited Danzig harbor in June 1936. The Danzigers repeatedly urged the British to withdraw him, and at last this request was granted. Several replacements were considered, but the choice fell on Carl Jacob Burckhardt, a prominent Swiss historian who was an expert on Cardinal Richelieu and the traditions of European diplomacy. Burckhardt was acceptable to the Poles, and he received his appointment from the League Security Council on February 18, 1937. Burckhardt had been extraordinarily discreet in concealing his fundamental sympathy for Germany. He was later criticized by many League diplomats, but at the time he was universally regarded as an admirable choice.
Chodacki had been sent to Danzig to maintain the claims and position of Poland, whereas Burckhardt was merely the caretaker of the dying League regime. Chodacki was instructed to insist on Polish terms at Danzig, and he was not expected to believe in the permanent preservation of peace. The emphasis of his mission was on stiffening the Polish line without risking a conflict until Poland had British and French support. The attitude he adopted at Danzig was provocative and belligerent. He delivered an important speech to a Polish audience at GrossTrampken, Danzig territory, on Polish Independence Day, November 11, 1937. He made the following significant statement, which left no doubt about his position: "I remember very well the time I went into the Great War, hoping for Poland's resurrection. The Poles here in Danzig should likewise live and wait in the hope that very presently they may be living on Polish soil".
This was holiday oratory, but it should have revealed to the last sceptic that neither Chodacki nor Beck had abandoned hope of annexing Danzig to Poland. A final solution would be required to end the unrest caused by rival German and Polish aspirations at Danzig, and there could be no lasting understanding between Poland and Germany until such a solution was achieved. Self-determination for the inhabitants was the best means of resolving this issue in view of the conflicting German and Polish claims. It was no longer news to the Danzigers that many Poles hoped for the ultimate annexation of Danzig to Poland. They would not have been surprised to discover that Beck's High Commissioner entertained similar sentiments privately. It would be difficult to argue that Chodacki's publicly announced campaign of Polish irredentism was calculated to reduce the growing tension between Danzig and Poland. Beck had responded to the Danzig situation by sending a chauvinist to maintain the Polish position.
The Deterioration of the
Danzig Situation after 1936
Issues of dispute between Danzig and Poland were markedly on the increase throughout 1937. Chodacki later
declared that fifteen one thousand page volumes would be required to describe the Danzig-Polish disputes prior to
World War II. There can be no doubt that the year 1937 contributed its share. Times remained hard in both Danzig
and Poland, and the great majority of disputes were economic in nature. The Poles placed heavy excise taxes on
imports from the huge Danzig margarine industry to protect Polish competitors. They rejected the contention of
Danzig that this measure was a violation of the August 6, 1934, economic treaties to eliminate trade barriers
between the two countries. This single dispute produced an endless series of reprisals and recriminations. Irresponsible fishing in troubled waters by foreigners also occasioned much bad feeling. A typical example was the circulation of rumors by the Daily Telegraph, an English newspaper. The Daily Telegraph reported on May 10, 1937, that Joseph Goebbels had announced Germany's intention to annex Danzig in the near future. It is easy to understand the effect produced on the excitable Poles in the Danzig area by such reporting, and it would have been a pleasant surprise if this particular newspaper of Kaiser-interview and Hoare-Laval Pact fame had not contributed to alarmism at Danzig. The statement attributed to Goebbels in this instance was purely an invention. By 1938, tension had been built up to a point where incidents of violence played an increasingly prominent role. Meetings of protest, more frequently than otherwise about imaginary wrongs, were organized by pressure groups in surrounding Polish towns. They invariably ended with cries of: "We want to march on Danzig!" and with the murderous slogan: "Kill the Hitlerites!"
Chodacki told Smigly-Rydz at Polish Army maneuvers in September 1937 that the National Socialist revolution in Danzig was virtually completed, and that the "Gleichschaltung" (coordination) of Danzig within the German system had been achieved. The one exception was that Danzig still had her made-in Poland depression, whereas Germany was swimming in plenty. The effective organization work of Albert Forster convinced the Poles that Danzig was at last slipping through their fingers. Awareness of this increased Polish exasperation. Chodacki claimed that in 1938 one of his speeches at Torun or elsewhere in West Prussia would have been sufficient to set a crowd of tens of thousands marching against Danzig. He admitted that he was often tempted to deliver such a speech. He felt goaded by fantastic attacks in the Krakow press that he was too conciliatory toward Danzig.
The Need for a Solution
The Danzig problem by 1938 was a skein of conflicting interests between exasperated Poles and impatient
Danzigers. The absurd regime established at Versailles was a failure. Hitler intervened repeatedly for moderation,
but he was no less disgusted with the humiliating farce than the Danzigers, and he was weary of conciliation at
Danzig's expense. Intelligent foreign observers expected this attitude. Lord Halifax, who had out-maneuvered
Gandhi of India on many occasions, visited Hitler at Berchtesgaden on November 19,1937. He inquired whether
Hitler planned to do something about Danzig. Hitler was understandably evasive in his reply, but Halifax made no
secret of the fact that he expected German action to recover Danzig. The current mentality of the Polish leaders indicated that a solution would be difficult, and it is painful to recall that the entire problem would not have existed had Danzig not been placed in a fantastic situation by the peacemakers of 1919. The Danzig problem resulted from a wretched compromise between Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson. It epitomized the comment of the American publicist, Porter Sargent: "The Anglo-Saxon peoples held the world in the palms of their hands, and what a mess they made of it". There was nothing left but to try for a solution. It would be scant consolation in the event of failure to know that the blame would be shared by men of two generations. The cost of failure would be paid by untold generations.
Chapter 4
Germany, Poland, and the Czechs
The Bolshevik Threat
to Germany and Poland
The failure of two neighboring nations with similar interests to cooperate against a mutual danger posing a
threat to their existence is a sorrowful spectacle. The civilizations of ancient Greece and of Aztec America were
overwhelmed by alien invaders because of internecine strife. In the 1930's, the authoritarian and nationalistic states
of Germany and Poland were seeking to promote the development, livelihood, and culture of their national
communities, but they faced a common threat from the Soviet Union. The ideology of the Soviet Union was based
on the doctrines of class hatred and revolutionary internationalism of Karl Marx. The peoples of Russia were suffering on an unprecedented scale from their misfortune in falling prey to the merciless minority clique of Bolshevik revolutionaries, who seized power in the hour of Russian defeat in World War I. The Bolsheviks later wrought untold havoc on the peoples of Poland and Germany. The Communists by means of murder and terror have depopulated the entire eastern part of Germany, and they hold Central Germany, the heart of the country, in an iron grip.
It is a sad commentary that millions of Germans and Poles are now collaborating under a system which has destroyed the freedom of their two nations. They were unable to unite in defense of their freedom. It is of course possible that the Soviet Union would have triumphed over Germany and Poland had the two nations been allies. It is more likely that a Polish-German alliance would have been the rock to break the Soviet tide. The present power of the Bolsheviks is so great that no one knows if it is possible to prevent their conquest of the world, and the failure of German-Polish cooperation is one of the supreme tragedies of world history.
The conflict between Warsaw and Berlin became the pretext in 1939 for the implementation of the antiquated English balance of power policy. This produced a senseless war of destruction against Germany. As it turned out, each Allied soldier of the West was fighting unwittingly for the expansion of Bolshevism, and he was simultaneously undermining the security of every Western nation. Never were so many sacrifices made for a cause so ignoble. Neither Germany nor Poland desired to evangelize the world or to impose alien systems of government of foreign nations throughout the globe. There was a monumental difference between them and the Soviet Union on this point. The elements of friction between Germany and Poland, despite the senseless provisions of the 1919 Versailles Treaty, were markedly reduced under the benign influence of the treaty between Pilsudski and Hitler. A few concessions on both sides, if only in the interest of establishing a common front against Bolshevism, could have reduced this friction to insignificance. The two nations were natural allies. They were new states seeking to overcome the uncertainty and fear occasioned by the frustration of their healthy nationalist aspirations over many centuries. The leaders of both nations hated the Bolshevist system and they regarded it as the worst form of government devised by man. They realized that the Soviet Union possessed natural resources and population which made the combined resources and populations of Germany and Poland puny by comparison.
It is evident from a survey of the international situation sent to missions abroad by the Polish Foreign Office in 1936 that the Soviet Union was regarded as the greatest foreign threat to Poland. This report confirmed the impressions of the diplomatic-military committee established by Pilsudski in 1934 to study the German and Russian situations. Nevertheless, Poland rebuffed the suggestions of Hermann Göring after 1934 for German-Polish collaboration against the Soviet Union. The great question was whether or not Poland intended permanently to follow a policy of impartiality toward the Soviet Union and Germany.
Polish experts in Moscow were impressed by mid-1936 with the improved living conditions in Russia under the 2nd Five Year Plan, which appeared to be far less drastic and cruel than the 1st Five Year Plan. They conceded that the Soviet system was consolidating its position. A new series of Soviet purges began later the same year. They lasted nearly three years, and dwarfed the bloody Cheka purges of 1918, or the purge in 1934 which followed the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad administrator. Foreign observers wondered whether the new purges would strengthen or weaken the Soviet regime. Opinions were divided on this crucial point, but it was evident that the new upheavals constituted a crisis for the regime.
Hitler's Anti-Bolshevik
Foreign Policy
Recent Soviet developments did not affect the tempo of Hitler's policy, which was geared to speed, although
actual German preparations for defense were exceedingly lax because of monetary inflation fears. Hitler was
striving to win the friendship of Great Britain, and to foster Anglo-German collaboration in the spirit and tradition
of Bismarck, Cecil Rhodes, and Joseph Chamberlain. He was aware of the traditional British balance of power
policy. He realized that he must complete his continental defensive preparations against Bolshevism before the
British decided that he was "too strong", and moved to crush him as they had crushed Napoleon. Hitler hoped that the British would not intervene while he was securing Germany's position through understandings with Germany's principal neighbors, and by a limited and moderate program of territorial revision. British leaders had opposed the German customs union before 1848, and they had opposed the national unification of Germany during the following years. Nevertheless, Bismarck had outbluffed Palmerston at Schleswig-Holstein in 1864, and it was evident by 1871 that Tories and Liberals alike were wining to accept the results of Bismarck's unification policy despite his repeated use of force. Germany was conceded to be the strongest military power on the European continent after 1871. The balance of power was operating, but the British faced colonial conflicts with France and Russia, and the 1875 Franco-German "war scare" crisis showed that Germany could still be checked by a hostile combination. At that time, a momentary coalition of France, Great Britain, and Russia was formed against Germany within a few days.
Hitler hoped that a German program of territorial revision and defense against Communism would be accepted by the British leaders, if it was carried through with sufficient speed. If the tempo was slow, the latent British hostility toward everything German could easily produce new flames. The traditional warlike ardor of the British upper classes was momentarily quiescent, but it could be aroused with relative ease. Hitler hoped that a refusal to pursue political aims overseas or in the West or South of Europe would convince the British leaders, once his position was secure, that his program was moderate. His strength would still be insufficient to overshadow the primary position of the British Empire in the world. He was wining to place Germany politically in a subservient position to Great Britain, and to accept a unilateral obligation to support British interest at any point. Hitler hoped that the British would appreciate the advantages of this situation. They could play off the United States against Germany. Germany would be useful in resisting American assaults against the sacred British doctrine of colonialism, and the United States could be used to counter any German claims for special privileges.
Hitler's ideas were confirmed by a brilliant report of January 2, 1938, from Joachim von Ribbentrop, German Ambassador to Great Britain. Ribbentrop pointed out that there was no real possibility of an Anglo-German agreement while conditions were unsettled, but that perhaps a strong German policy and the consolidation of the German position would make such an agreement possible. The German Ambassador emphasized that an understanding with Great Britain had been the primary aim of his activity during his many months in London. He had reached his conclusions after personal conversations with the principal personalities of British public affairs. Ribbentrop's report was decisive in winning for him the position of German Foreign Minister in February 1938. No other German diplomat of the period had presented Hitler with a comparable analysis of British policy and of the British attitude toward Germany. The Ribbentrop report was comparable to the 1909 memorandum of Alfred Kiderlen-Waechter on Anglo-German and Russo-German relations. This memorandum had been requested by Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, and it brought Kiderlen from the obscure Bucharest legation to the Wilhelmstrasse despite the fact that he was disliked by Kaiser Wilhelm II.
The controversial question of whether or not the Russian regime was successfully consolidating its position could not be decisive for Hitler under these circumstances. The impulse for rapid moves and definitive results arose from Hitler's evaluation of the situation in London. Hitler's basic program, after the recovery of the Saar and the restoration of German defenses in the Rhineland, was to liberate the Germans of Austria, aid the Germans of Czechoslovakia and place German relations with France, Italy, and Poland, his principal neighbors, on a solid basis. It would be possible afterward to talk to the British about a lasting agreement, when the prospects for success would be more favorable. Improved German-American relations would follow automatically from an AngloGerman understanding. Hitler also hoped to act as moderator between Japan and Nationalist China to restore peace in the Far East, and to close the door to Communist penetration which was always opened by war and revolution. If this moderate program could be achieved, the prospects for the final success of the Bolshevik world conspiracy in the foreseeable future would be bleak.
No nation occupied a more crucial position in the realization of Hitler's program than Poland, because Hitler recognized that the Poland of Pilsudski and his successors was a bulwark against Communism. The Polish leaders failed to recognize the importance of German support against the Soviet Union. Germany and Poland were conducting policies of defense against Bolshevism, but there were no plans for aggressive action against Russia, and the Polish leaders failed to see the need for any understanding with Germany to cope with the existing situation.
Polish Hostility
Toward the Czechs
The attitudes of the German and Polish leaders toward little Czechoslovakia were identical. The Czech problem,
in contrast to the problem of Bolshevism, had moderate dimensions, and both countries were inclined to
contemplate a solution of their grievances against the Czechs by some sort of aggressive action. The Polish press
was many years ahead of the press of Germany in advocating the dissolution of Czechoslovakia. A Polish press
campaign with this objective began in 1934, after the conclusion of the German-Polish pact. The German and
Polish leaders in the same year discussed their mutual dislike of the Czechs in terms more concrete than the Poles
were willing to employ toward the Soviet Union. There have been many attempts to solve the Czech problem
during the past five generations. This problem arose with the spread of a hitherto unknown anti-German Czech
nationalism during the 19th century. The problem did not exist in the 12th century when Bishop Otto of Freysing, a
princely medieval chronicler, related the exploits of Czech shock troops fighting for Frederick I (Hohenstaufen) in
his wars against the Lombard League. It did not exist in the 13th century when the proud new city of Königsberg
(Royal Hill) on the Pregel River in East Prussia was named after Ottokar, a Bohemian king of the Premyslid line,
who was noted for his brave deeds and for his loyalty to the Holy Roman Empire. It did not exist in the 14th
century when Charles IV (Luxemburg-Premyslid) made Prague the most glorious capital city the Holy Roman
Empire had ever known. It did not exist in the 15th century when John Hus, the martyr of the Czech religious
reform movement, reported back to Bohemia, on his trip to the Council of Constance, that the audience which
listened to him at Nuremberg was the most enthusiastic and grateful congregation he had ever encountered. It did
not exist in the 16th century, when the Austrian duchies and the Bohemian kingdom were firmly welded under the
Habsburg sceptre within the framework of the Holy Roman Empire, or in the 17th century, when Bohemian Germans and Czechs fought on both sides in the Thirty Years' War. All historians agree that the 18th century
period of Habsburg rule was the most tranquil in Bohemian history. By 1848, the modern intellectual movement of Czech nationalism, which originated from the impact of the Slavophile teachings of Johann Gottfried Herder in the late 18th century, had begun to make considerable headway with the Czech masses. The Frankfurt Parliament in 1848 anticipated the dissolution of the Austrian Empire, and it quite naturally assumed that Bohemia and Moravia, which had been integral parts of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, would find their future in a modern national German state. It came as a rude shock when the Czech historian and nationalist leader, Francis Palacky, addressed the Frankfurt Parliament with the announcement that his Czech faction hoped Austria would be preserved, and that they would oppose union with Germany if this effort failed. Only the continuation of the Austrian Empire stood as a buffer between the Czechs and Germany [after 1848]. Eduard Benes, the 20th century Czech nationalist leader, advocated full autonomy for both Germans and Czechs of Bohemia in his Dijon dissertation of 1908. He envisaged a Habsburg Reich in which full equality would exist among Slavs, Germans, and Magyars. This seemed feasible, since the experiment of granting full equality to the Magyars in 1867 had proven successful.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire held out with amazing vitality during the first four years of bitter conflict in World War I. The overwhelming majority of Czech deputies to the Austrian Reichsrat (parliament) were loyal to the Habsburg state during these four years. In the summer and autumn of 1918, during the fifth year of the war, unendurable famine and plague produced a demoralization of loyalty among the many nationalities of the Austrian part of the Empire. The Habsburg state was paralyzed. It had attempted to escape from the war by means of a separate peace, but it had failed. The problem of the Czechs and Germany could be postponed no longer. Arnold Toynbee, in his massive survey, Nationality and the War, had predicted in 1915 that Austria-Hungary would collapse, and he had advised that Bohemia and Moravia, the two mixed German-Czech regions, should be assigned to Germany in the coming peace treaty.
The world was confronted in the meantime with one of the most bold conspiracies of history. Czech revolutionaries went abroad during World War I to organize a propaganda movement among the Allies for the creation of a veritable Czech empire. The Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary was condemned because the allegedly dominant German and Magyar nationalities constituted merely half the total population of the federated Habsburg states. The Czech revolutionaries although constituting less than half the total population. The situation would have been still worse had not some of their more extravagant schemes failed, such as the creation of a Slavic corridor from Bohemia to Croatia. It was surely the most brazen program of national aggrandizement to arise from World War I. It was also the program least likely to succeed over a protracted period, unless the subject peoples could be appeased, and unless good relations could be established with neighboring states. The Czech nationalist leaders, and their small group of Slovak allies, who in contrast to the mass of the Slovak people had fallen under Czech influence, made little progress in either direction during the twenty years following World War I. It is for this reason that there was still a Czech problem after World War II, which had now become a problem of Czech imperialism. They might have pressed for Czech autonomy within an independent Austrian state, which later could have been united with Germany at one stroke, while retaining guarantees for the Czechs. If this did not seem feasible following the accomplishments of Czech revolutionaries at Prague after October 1918, there were still other alternatives. They might at least have contested the spread of Czech rule over the traditional German parts of Bohemia and Moravia, or over the indisputably Magyar regions from the Danube to Ruthenia. It would have been easy for them to insist that the Czechs keep their promises of autonomy to the Slovaks. These promises had been incorporated in the famous Czech-Slovak declaration of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in October 1918 (prior to the Czech declaration of independence at Washington, D.C., on October 23, 1918). The first Czech president, Thomas Masaryk, had declared that his pledge to the Slovaks, which he later violated, was solemn and binding.
The Allies might have contested the assignment of the distant region of Ruthenia to Czech rule, or they might have insisted on binding minority guarantees for a Czech state which had promised to become another Switzerland, but which developed a unitary state system and centralized administration in the French style. The Allies did none of these things, and the Czech Government was soon spending lavish sums subsidizing foreign writers to fill the foreign press with deceptively optimistic reports about their regime.
The Czechs had a solid economic position in the unravished principal Austrian industrial regions, the industrial heart of a former Great Power, which had fallen under their control. They also had a flourishing agricultural economy, and conditions of relative prosperity existed in their richly endowed country until the advent of the world depression in 1929. Czechoslovakia appeared to be a wealthy and progressive country when compared to such backward states as Yugoslavia or Rumania, and the Czech leaders were not reticent in taking full credit for this phenomenon.
A system of liberal politics prevailed among the principal Czech political parties, and this was part of their heritage from Austrian parliamentary experience. Czech propagandists exploited this fact to claim that their country was a model democracy. A war-weary generation in the West was looking for a few good results from the recent holocaust, and it is not surprising that Philoczechism became a popular phenomenon. There was also some thing romantic about it, because relatively few people in Great Britain or France had been aware of the existence of the Czechs prior to World War I. There had been talk of Bohemians in the old days, and few seemed to be certain whether this term included Slavs, Germans, or both.
The Czech émigrés during World War I were more successful than the Poles in ingratiating themselves with the Western Allies. This was not fully evident until the period of peacemaking, when Czech and Polish interests clashed. In the early phase of World War I, Roman Dmowski and Thomas Masaryk, the leading Polish and Czech spokesmen in the West, vied with one another in being pro-Russian. Thomas Masaryk dreamed of a Czech kingdom under a Romanov prince, but his dream was shattered by the Russian Revolution. The Polish state which emerged from the war developed a policy contrary to the pro-Russian attitude of Dmowski, but in the Czech state the pro-Russian attitude and policy of Masaryk, and of Eduard Benes, his principal disciple, prevailed after the war. The accidental conflict in 1918 between the Czech prisoners of war in Russia, and the Bolsheviks, was not permitted by Masaryk to destroy the fundamental pro-Russian orientation of Czech policy.
There was conflict between Poles and Czechs in the rich Austrian industrial region of Teschen, which was under the control of the local Polish community when Austria-Hungary concluded an armistice with the Western Powers. The Teschen area consisted of the five principal districts of Friedeck, Freistadt, Bielitz, Teschen, and Jablonkau. The Polish deputies of the Austrian Reichsrat proposed to their Czech colleagues at the end of World War I that Friedeck, which had a distinct Czech majority, should go to the Czech state, and that the latter four districts should be assigned to Poland. The Czechs and Poles in the area agreed to a provisional compromise along these lines, and it was decided that 519 square kilometers should be Czech and 1,762 square kilometers Polish. The Poles did not realize that Eduard Benes had persuaded French Foreign Minister Pichon in June 1918 to support a Czech claim for the entire area. The Poles concentrated on securing their claims against Germany during the weeks following the Austro-Hungarian and German armistice agreements of November 1918, and they regarded the Teschen area with complacency. This mood was shattered on the eve of the Polish national election of January 26, 1919, when the Czechs ordered a surprise attack against the Poles in the Teschen area. Czech action was based on the assumption that the Teschen question could be resolved by force, and that the district was well worth a local war, particularly since Western Allied support of the Czech position against Poland was assured.
The Western Allied leaders intervened on February 1,1919, after the Czechs had completed their military advance, and they ordered a cessation of military operations pending a final solution by the Peace Conference. A plebiscite was proposed in the following months, but the Czechs, with French support, concentrated first on delaying, and then on canceling, this development. Their objective was achieved in 1920 during the Russo-Polish war. The Poles were told in good ultimative form at the Spa conference in July 1920 that they must relinquish their demand for a plebiscite, and submit to the arbitration of the Allied Powers. The greater part of the Teschen area was assigned to Czechoslovakia on July 28, 1920. The Czech objective had been achieved by an exceedingly adroit combination of force and diplomacy.
The Poles were aware of the fact that the Czechs had used their influence to prevent the assignment of East Galicia to Poland, although this issue was ultimately decided in favor of Poland by the separate treaty between Russia and Poland at Riga in 1921. The Poles were equally conscious that Czechoslovakia favored the Soviet Union during the 1920-1921 war. The French were increasingly inclined to regard the Czech pro-Russian policy as realistic, and hence to favor Czechoslovakia over Poland. It was evident after the Pilsudski coup d'Etat in 1926 that Czech political leaders were in close contact with many of the Polish politicians opposing the Warsaw dictatorship.
Polish Grievances and
Western Criticism
Experts on Central-Eastern Europe have criticized the insufficient cooperation among the so-called succession
states after 1918. The Poles in particular have received a large share of this criticism. It has been said that Polish
differences with the Czechs over Teschen, or over the Czech pro-Soviet orientation, were minor compared to the
importance of Czechoslovakia as a bastion which protected the Polish southern flank against German expansion. It
has been argued that the Poles and Czechs both profited from World War I, and that they should have been
prepared to cooperate in defending their positions against revisionist Powers. Emphasis has been placed on the
contention that they were sister Slavic nations with special ties of ethnography and culture. Winston Spencer Churchill had much to say on the subject of Czech-Polish relations. Churchill was the most articulate advocate of the British encirclement of Germany in the period before the Czech crisis of 1938. Churchill was noted for his belligerency, which was often regarded by his compatriots as a romantic love of adventure. He was noted for adopting the most uncompromising view of a situation and also the one most likely to produce a conflict. This had been true of his attitude in the Sudan, South Africa, and India, during the 1936 British abdication crisis, and toward many other problems in addition to Anglo-German relations. The same Churchill saw no reason why Poland should not turn her other cheek to the Czechs. When Polish leaders failed to look at matters the same way, Churchill invoked strong criticism: "The heroic characteristics of the Polish race must not blind us to their record of folly and ingratitude which over centuries had led them through measureless suffering." The arguments of strategy, politics and race appeared to Churchill to dictate a Polish policy of friendship toward Czechoslovakia.
The three arguments which impressed Churchill carried little weight with the Polish leaders. They were not inclined after the death of Pilsudski in 1935 to modify the existing anti-Czech policy. This did not mean that they were unwilling under all circumstances to fight at the side of the Czechs in some war against Germany, and they made this clear to their French allies during the Czech crisis in 1938. If France supported the Czechs, if the Czechs were willing to fight, and if the Czechs disgorged the territory seized from Poland in 1919-1920, the Poles would cooperate with the Czechs. The Poles did not expect these conditions to be met for the simple reason that they did not believe the Czechs would dare to fight the Germans.
The primary aim of Polish policy was to secure Polish claims against the Czechs by agreement, by threat of force, or by force. Foreign Minister Rickard Sandler of Sweden asked Beck before the 1938 Czech crisis why it was difficult to achieve an entente between Warsaw and Prague. The Polish Foreign Minister replied that one factor was Poland's lack of enthusiasm about a Power whose claim to an independent existence was problematical. Czechoslovakia, in his opinion, was an artificial creation which violated the liberty of nations, and especially of Slovakia and Hungary. Beck's attitude was that of Mussolini, who publicly referred to the Czech state as CzechoGermano-Polono-Magyaro-Rutheno-Rumano-Slovakia. Beck emphasized that the Czechs were a minority in their own state, and that none of the other nationalities desired to remain under Czech rule. He also objected to Czech hypocrisy in stressing the allegedly liberal and democratic nature of their regime. They granted extensive rights on paper to all citizens of the state, but they exercised a brutal and arbitrary police power over the nationalities which constituted the majority of the population. Sandler was much impressed by Beck's remarks, and he observed that the Czechs obviously lacked the capacity to achieve good relations with their neighbors.
Beck's attitude was not based primarily on these abstract considerations. Pilsudski's program had called for the federation (of the Lithuanians, White Russians and Ukrainians) under Polish control. If this program had been achieved, the Poles would have been a sort of minority within a large federation, although the granting of actual autonomy to the other peoples would have been in contrast to the Czech system. Ideological differences were not decisive for Beck, who did not consider the democratic liberalism of France an insurmountable obstacle to FrancoPolish collaboration. He could not consistently boycott the same ideology at Prague.
The situation, quite apart from the specific dispute over Teschen, was deter mined by purely power political considerations. Poland and Czechoslovakia were bitter rivals for power and influence in the same Central-Eastern European area. Both were allied separately with Romania, and Warsaw resented the fact that Bucharest usually appeared to be closer to Prague. The Czech alliances with both Yugoslavia and Romania gave Prague a position of power in the general area equal to that of Warsaw. The Czechs also had an alliance with France, and they enjoyed better treatment from Paris than Warsaw received. They had ties with other allies of France in a general system directed against Germany and Hungary. The warm friendship between Prague and Moscow gave Czechoslovakia an extra trump, which the Poles could match only by establishing closer relations with Germany.
In the Polish mind, the advantage of eliminating a dangerous rival far outweighed the consideration that Germany would be in a position to secure a greater immediate gain than Poland at Czech expense. Loyalty toward the Versailles treaty and the other Paris treaties of 1919 was not a compelling motive, because the Poles were dissatisfied with the terms of these treaties.
The argument that the two nations were sister Slavic communities was anathema to the Poles. This reminded them of the indiscriminate Pan-Slavic vehicle of Russian domination over the lesser Slavic peoples. The Poles did not reject ties with sister Slavic communities, but they opposed to the Czech or Russian idea of Pan-Slavism their own more exclusive concept, which substituted themselves for the Russians as the dominant Slavic force. The Czechs were at least half-German in race, according to many Poles, and they were considered Predominantly German in the cultural, political and social spheres. The Russians also were placed at the outside border of Slavdom because of their enormous Asiatic racial admixture. The same criterion was applied to the Serbs and the Bulgars, who had experienced a strong oriental influx in their Balkan environment. The Slavic community recognized by the Poles included themselves, the Ukrainians, the White Russians, the Slovaks, the Croatians, and the Slovenians. According to Beck, the two foreign Slavic peoples most popular in Poland because of close cultural ties with the Poles were the Slovaks and the Croats.
Relations between Warsaw and Belgrade, also, were cool, although there were no disputes between two countries separated so widely geographically. The Polish attitude toward Yugoslavia was negative, because the Roman Catholic Croats in Yugoslavia were oppressed by the semi-oriental Greek Orthodox Serbs, who possessed the real power in the state. The Slovak people in Czechoslovakia were conspicuously unhappy under the alien rule and oppressive economic domination of the Czechs. In Poland the argument of cultural affinity could be a great force in condemning rather than in supporting the idea of collaboration with Prague.
It would provoke endless controversy to decide whether Churchill or the Polish leaders had the more noble understanding of what Poland owed Czechoslovakia, or what would best serve Polish interests. It is more relevant to realize that the Polish leaders had a definite Czech policy, and that it was an intelligible policy whatever one may think of it. Beck never would have been at a loss in replying to any arguments on this subject from Churchill. The Czechs had taken the initiative in provoking the antagonism between Czechoslovakia and Poland. It is true· that the ultimate dissolution of Czechoslovakia made the Polish military position more vulnerable on the German side, but this would not have been serious had not Poland provoked a conflict with Germany instead of accepting German friendship. The main military threat to Poland came from the Soviet Union. In this respect the removal of Czechoslovakia was a gain, because the Czechs had made it clear that they would support Russia in the event of a conflict between Poland and Russia.
The Anti-German
Policy of Benes
The critical attitude of Hitler toward Czechoslovakia is much easier to analyze and to explain. He had realized
since his boyhood days at Linz that the Germans were confronted with a Czech problem, although at the time this
problem was a matter of concern only to those Germans who were subjects of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. He
had never sympathized with Czech aspirations for political independence, and he regarded it as a misfortune that in
many respects, and particularly in local government, the Czechs of Bohemia enjoyed more privileges than the
Bohemian Germans under Habsburg rule. Habsburg policy was based on the assumption that the loyalty of the
Bohemian Germans could be taken for granted, but special privileges were required for the Czechs to appease their
nationalism. Hitler became a German nationalist at an early date, and, as such, an opponent of the multi-national
Habsburg system. He knew that Bohemia, which had been traversed on foot by his musical idol, Richard Wagner,
had been an integral part of the One Thousand Year Reich of Charlemagne. Hitler, contrary to popular superstition, never referred to his own regime as the One Thousand Year Reich. Nevertheless, like any other German conscious of them, he had a profound respect for the traditions of German history. If the role of Bohemia within Germany had worked well for more than one thousand years, one could be pardoned for skepticism toward the radical solution of placing that region within the confines of a Slavic state.
It might have been possible for a larger number of people to accept this radical solution in time had conditions within Czechoslovakia been tolerable for the Germans living there, and had these local Germans become resigned to their fate. The Sudeten Germans were divided into four groups of Bavarian, Franconian, Saxon, and Silesian dialects and local cultures. They were far less aggressive politically than the Czechs, and they submitted without violence to the establishment of Czech rule in 1918 and 1919. It would have been easy to appease them, and it could have been done with a little local autonomy and with an impartial economic policy. The Czechs should have realized the importance of this for the future of their state, since the ratio of Germans to Czechs in the entire region of Bohemia-Moravia was approximately 1:2, and there were far more Germans than Czechs in Slovakia. The Czechs, instead, soon developed a contemptuous attitude toward the Germans, and they began to believe that the Germans could be handled more effectively as passive subjects than as active citizens.
The Germans were divided politically, but a new development appeared after conditions became increasingly worse for them and better for the Germans across the frontier. In the 1935 national Czechoslovak election, the Sudeten German Party (SdP), which was inspired by admiration for Adolf Hitler and his policies, captured the majority of the German vote, and it became the largest single party in Czechoslovakia. There were 800,000 unemployed workers in Czechoslovakia at that time, and 500,000 of these were Sudeten Germans. Marriages and births were few, and the death-rate was high. It is not surprising that conditions changed after the liberation of the Sudetenland in 1938. The Northern Sudetenland (the three districts of Eger, Aussig, and Troppau: the two southern sections were assigned to Bavaria and German Austria) led all regions of Germany in the number of marriages in 1939 (approximately 30% ahead of the national average). The birth-rate in 1940 was 60% greater than the birth-rate of 1937. The period of Czech rule was a bad time for the Bohemian Germans, and conditions prior to the Munich conference became steadily worse. These people were patient, but they were not cowards, and the ultimate reaction was inevitable.
It is impossible under these circumstances to claim that Hitler created an artificial problem, either in the Sudetenland or in the Bohemian-Moravian region as a whole. This problem had been created in the first instance by the peacemakers of Paris, and in the second instance by Czech misrule. It was evident that the Sudeten problem would come to a head of its own momentum if Hitler succeeded in liberating the Germans of Austria from the Schuschnigg dictatorship. Hitler had no definite plans before May 1938 for dealing with this problem, but he was determined to alleviate conditions for the Germans in some way, and there can be no doubt that he [no less ardently than the Polish leaders] hoped for the total dissolution of Czechoslovakia. It is for these reasons that the German and Polish leaders found a basis for agreement whenever Czechoslovakia was discussed.
This situation, and especially the inevitable German attitude toward Czechoslovakia, was no mystery to foreign statesmen before the year of the Czech crisis, 1938. Lord Halifax, who was British Foreign Secretary throughout most of 1938, told Hitler after a luncheon at Berchtesgaden on November 19, 1937, that Great Britain realized that the Paris treaties of 1919 contained mistakes which had to be rectified. Halifax assured Hitler that Great Britain did not believe in preserving the status quo at all costs. He mentioned the burning questions of Danzig, Austria, and Czechoslovakia quite on his own initiative, and without any prompting from Hitler. This was before Hitler had made any statement publicly that Germany was concerned either with the Czech or Danzig problems. Indeed, no such statement was necessary, since the situation was perfectly obvious.
At one time it seemed that common antipathy toward Czechoslovakia might cement a virtual alliance between Germany and Poland. It was evident that this commost bond would disappear after the Czech problem was solved, unless the Poles realized that antipathy toward the Soviet Union was a much more important issue in uniting the two countries. In the meantime, the points of friction between Germany and Poland would remain unless an understanding far more comprehensive than the 1934 Pact could be attained.
Neurath's Anti-Polish Policy
Rejected by Hitler
It remained established German policy after 1934 to expect some revision of the Versailles Treaty along the
German eastern frontier. An enduring German-Polish collaboration would depend upon a successful agreement on
this issue. The German-Polish non-aggression pact of January 1934 was as silent as the Locarno treaties about
German recognition of the eastern status quo. The Germans did not consider the Versailles treaty binding, because
it violated the armistice agreement of 1918, and it was signed under duress. The Polish leaders were aware of this,
and occasionally Beck sought to obtain new guarantees without concluding a comprehensive agreement with
Germany. Neurath was pleased that he had persuaded Hitler to send Ribbentrop, and not Franz von Papen, as German Ambassador to London in 1936. Neurath believed that Ribbentrop would be unable to cope with the British situation, and that he would ruin his career at this difficult post. Papen, who had known Ribbentrop for many years, was more astute, and he feared that the London embassy would provide the non-professional diplomat with an opportunity to show Hitler what he could do. The event was to prove that Papen was right.
Neurath rejected Beck's gesture in September 1937 without consulting Hitler, because he assumed that no other German response was possible. Hitler did not wish to bind Germany permanently to the Danzig status quo, but he had a more flexible conception of German foreign policy. He was counting on Polish friendship in dealing with the crises which were likely to arise in Austria and Czechoslovakia.
Beck's attempt to regulate Danzig affairs exclusively with Germany conformed to a trend. Great Britain and France were represented with Sweden on a new League Commission of Three to supervise League responsibilities as the sovereign Power at Danzig. This was clearly a caretaker arrangement, and Foreign Minister Anthony Eden of Great Britain tacitly spoke for the Commission when he told the new League High Commissioner, Carl Jacob Burckhardt, on September 15, 1937, that "British policy had no special interest as such in the situation in Danzig." This position was consistent with British policy established by Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1919 when he said that Great Britain would never fight for the Danzig status quo. Burckhardt had no illusions about the role of the League at Danzig. He told Adolf Hitler on September 18, 1937, that he hoped the role of the League was merely temporary, and that the ultimate fate of Danzig would be settled by a direct agreement between Germany and Poland. Hitler listened to Burckhardt's views without offering any plan for a solution. Burckhardt surmised that Hitler feared to raise the Danzig question, because it would affect the related questions of the Corridor, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. Hitler, after nearly five years in power, had pursued no questions of territorial revision, although responsibility for the ill-fated Austrian revolution of July 1934 had been falsely attributed to him.
Jozef Lipski, the Polish Ambassador in Berlin, knew that Hitler was a sincere advocate of an understanding with Poland. Lipski was not inclined to accept the categorical statement on Danzig by Neurath. He hoped to obtain the declaration of Danzig which Beck had requested, and he was encouraged by conversations with Marshal Göring.The German Marshal had many duties connected with the German Air Force, the second German Four Year Plan, and the Prussian State Administration, but he was also intensely interested in foreign affairs. He was the Second Man in the Reich, and Hitler employed him as an Ambassador-at-large to Poland. He knew the Polish leaders, and he desired a lasting understanding with Poland. He was accustomed to discuss important matters of state with Polish representatives. He usually gave the German Foreign Office full information concerning these discussions, but it was sometimes necessary to inquire what he had said to foreign diplomats.
Lipski approached Neurath several times for a Danzig declaration. Neurath on October 18, 1937, bluntly told Lipski that "some day there would have to be a basic settlement on the Danzig question between Poland and us, since it would otherwise permanently disturb German-Polish relations." Neurath added that the sole aim of such a discussion would be "the restoration of German Danzig to its natural connection with the Reich, in which case extensive consideration could be given to Poland's economic interests."
Lipski was surprised, and he asked if the question would be broached soon, or perhaps immediately. Neurath evaded this inquiry, but he requested Lipski to inform Beck of his attitude. Lipski mentioned that Robert Ley, Chief of the German Labor Front, Artur Greiser, President of the Danzig Senate, and Albert Forster, District National Socialist Party Leader at Danzig, had declared publicly in recent days that Danzig must return to Germany. Neurath did not question or seek to excuse these statements. He replied that there was a need to solve the Danzig problem, and his conversation with Lipski ended in an impasse.
There was also the problem of German access by land to East Prussia, which had been severed from the Reich. In May 1935, when Germany was engaged in her huge superhighway construction project, German Ambassador Hans Adolf von Moltke informed Beck at Warsaw that Germany wished to build a super highway across the Polish Corridor to East Prussia. He inquired about the Polish attitude toward this plan, and Beck said that he would study the question. This was the beginning of protracted evasion by Beck. Repeated reminders from Moltke did not produce a definite statement about the Polish attitude toward the project. Fritz Todt, the National Inspector for Roads in Germany, discussed German plans with Julian Piasecki, the Polish Deputy Minister for Transportation. Moltke concluded after more than two years of fruitless inquiry that the attitude of the Polish Government was negative. The plan embodied a vital German national interest, and its acceptance by Poland would have improved prospects for a comprehensive German-Polish agreement. Moltke was unwilling to concede a final defeat in this matter.
Moltke presented a startling proposition to the German Foreign Office in October 1937. He suggested that Germany should build a superhighway up to the Corridor boundary from both Pomerania and East Prussia without waiting for Polish permission to link the route through the Corridor. Moltke failed to see that this would be a provocation which would stiffen Polish resistance to the German proposal. He believed that possible Polish objection to the construction of major military roads into the frontier area would be rendered pointless, and the Poles would find it expedient to conclude an agreement. He also had another factor in mind. The influx of tourists into Germany had greatly increased since the 1936 Olympic Games at Berlin, and Moltke believed that the complaints of foreigners, and especially tourists, who would be irritated by the break in the superhighway to historic old East Prussia, could be exploited to apply pressure on the Poles.
The Poles knew that the Germans desired a superhighway across their Corridor, and Neurath's conversations with Lipski suggested the possibility that Germany was about to demand Danzig. Lipski was reticent when he conversed with Neurath again on October 23, 1937, and Neurath retained the false impression that the Poles were prepared to accept a German solution of the Danzig question. Neurath was also weighing favorably a suggestion from Albert Forster in Danzig that an offer to use Polish steel for the superhighway and a new Vistula bridge might influence the Poles to accept the highway project.
The attitude of Neurath was fully shared by Czech Ambassador Slavik in Warsaw. The Czech diplomat regarded the recovery of Danzig by Germany as inevitable. He reported to Foreign Minister Kamil Krofta that in the opinion of Léon Noël, the French Ambassador to Poland, Danzig was lost to Poland. The conclusion of a provisional agreement on Danzig between Germany and Poland on November 5, 1937, did not change his opinion. He reported to Krofta on November 7, 1937, that League High Commissioner Burckhardt continued to insist that the union of Danzig with Germany could not be prevented. It was not surprising that the Czechs were complacent in their expectation that the German campaign of territorial revision would begin at Danzig in the vicinity of Poland. They were counting on Italy to prevent a German move into Austria, and they had nothing to fear from Germany as long as the Schuschnigg dictatorship was maintained. The fate of Danzig was a matter of complete indifference to Czechoslovakia.
The German-Polish
Minority Pact of 1937
The Germans had sought a treaty on minorities with Poland since 1934. when Beck exploited Russian entry into
the League of Nations as a pretext to repudiate the existing treaties. The Germans of Poland were in a weak
position, and they lacked the compact organization of the Germans in Czechoslovakia. The Polish treatment of the Germans after 1918 was harsh. Approximately 70% of the 1918 German population of Posen and West Prussia had
emigrated to Germany before the Pilsudski coup d'Etat in 1926, and this comprised no less than 820,000
individuals from these two former German provinces. Polish propaganda often pretended that the Germans who
remained were largely great landowners, but this was not so. It is true that 80% of the 325,000 Germans remaining
in the two provinces by 1937 lived from agriculture, but they were mainly peasants. There were still 165,000
Germans by 1939 in East Upper Silesia, which had been detached from Germany despite the German victory in the
1921 plebiscite. There were also 364,000 Germans in Congress Poland in 1939, and there were 60,000 within the
former Kresy territory of Volhynia. Germans were scattered through the Wilna area, and as late as 1939 there were
over 900,000 Germans in the former German and Russian Polish territories. This did not include Austrian Galicia,
where the Germans were mainly agricultural, although the industrial town of Bielitz had a German population of
62%. A critical study of the 1931 Polish census, which contained startling inaccuracies in several directions,
showed that the given figure of 727,000 Germans was short of the real figure by more than 400,000. Polish policy toward the Germans during the early years was more severe in the former German territories than in Galicia, Congress Poland, or the Kresy. More than one million acres of German-owned land were confiscated during the years from 1919-1929 in the provinces of Posen and West Prussia. German language schools throughout Poland were closed during the years before 1934. There were 21 German deputies in the Polish Sejm after the 1928 election, 5 German deputies after the election in autumn 1930, and no German deputies after 1935. Two Germans were allowed to sit in the less important Polish Senate at that time, but they were denied their seats many months before the outbreak of the German-Polish war in 1939.
The exceptionally miserable conditions in the former German provinces inevitably produced protests from the local German population. There was much enthusiasm among the younger Germans in 1933 when the Hitler Revolution triumphed in the Reich, and this further irritated and antagonized the Poles. The older Germans were aware of this, and many of them were concerned about it. The younger Germans were attracted to the Young German Party for Poland (JDP) which had been founded by Dr. Rudolf Wiesner at Bielitz in 1921. A number of more conservative German parties had opposed this group, and in 1934 Senator Hasbach attempted to unite the conservative opposition in the Council of Germans in Poland (RDP). The conservatives controlled most of the remaining German language press, and in 1937 there was a split in the Young German leadership, when a more radical faction under Wilhelm Schneider sought to obtain control. Wiesner won out after much difficulty, but it was a conspicuous fact that no outstanding leadership emerged in any of the German groups. The contrast between the German factions in Poland and the Sudeten German Party in Czechoslovakia under Konrad Henlein was very great.
Both the conservative and radical groups were nominally pro-Hitler, but the latter had more ambitious ideas concerning the extent to which social reforms like those of the Reich could be of benefit in improving conditions for the Germans of Poland. Neither group indicated the slightest expectation that they would or could come under German rule. The Office for Ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle) in the Reich, which promoted cultural contracts between Germans abroad and Germany, did not interfere with the struggle between the German political factions in Poland. Both factions hoped that the rapprochement between Germany and Poland would improve their position, but there was no indication of this in the years after the conclusion of the 1934 pact. The Germans of Poland, with very few exceptions, remained strictly loyal to the Polish state, and later research by the Dutch expert, Louis de Jong, contradicted the popular Polish claim that there was a German 5th column in Poland. The agents of the German intelligence service in Poland were almost exclusively Jews and Poles. Thousands of young Germans of military age were serving with the Polish Army when war came in 1939. The prominent Germans of Poland remained in the country in September 1939 and experienced arrest, transportation into the interior, or death.
An article in Gazeta Polska, the Government newspaper at Warsaw, stated on October 21, 1935, that moral solidarity and cultural ties were clearly within the rights of the Germans of Poland. This was all that the German minority sought.
The Germans of Poland failed to unite, but their morale improved after 1933. They took an active part in the 1935 Polish national election, although it was known that they would be allowed no seats in the Sejm. The National Democrats, a strictly Polish party, boycotted the same election. They provoked the authorities in a manner of which the Germans would never have dreamed. The Germans of Poland, when allowance is made for a few individual exceptions, were passive, and not trouble-makers. Hitler was understandably concerned about their unfair treatment, but he merely wished that they would receive decent treatment as Polish subjects.
The Polish minority in Germany was more united and more ably organized. The Union of Poles in Germany (Zwiazek Polakow w Niemczech) was organized at Berlin in 1922. All members automatically received the newspaper, Polak w Niemczech (The Pole in Germany). It had been true for generations that many people of Polish descent in Germany preferred to be considered German. The Union of Poles sought to combat this tendency, and it opposed the so-called "subjective census" introduced by the Weimar Republic and continued by Hitler. The old Hohenzollern bureaucracy had counted Poles on the basis of documentary evidence. The modern technique called for a subjective declaration of ethnic identity in addition to an identification of the mother tongue. This meant in Weimar days that a person could say his mother tongue was Polish, but that he was ethnically German. Many thousands of Poles had emigrated to work in West German industry as well as in the industries of France, and now the census permitted them to identify themselves as Germans. Under the conditions, only 14,000 claimed to be Poles in the census of 1939, although the Germans estimated that there must be at least 260,000 Poles in Germany by objective criteria, and the Polish Government claimed that there were 1,500,000. Economic conditions in Germany were good, there was no economic discrimination against the Poles, and the national feeling of the Polish minority was lax. The same trend had been displayed in elections to the Reichstag during the Weimar Republic, but under Hitler it became an avalanche.
During the 1928 school year, only 6,600 children had attended Polish schools in Germany, and of these 4,172 were in the Berlin and Ruhr areas. On the other hand, the Poles maintained many cooperatives, which were less explicitly an indication of national identity. The Polish press in Germany welcomed the improved economic and social conditions under Hitler, and it recognized the National Socialist program to secure these conditions for the Polish minority. The German citizen law of September 15, 1935, was explicit in recognizing that the Polish minority enjoyed full citizen rights. In 1937, the Polish minority organization still maintained 58 grammar schools and 2 high schools (gymnasia), and these institutions provided ample space for Polish children wishing to attend Polish schools in the Reich. A general meeting of the Polish organization was held on March 6, 1938, in the Strength through Joy (KdF) theater in Berlin with Father Domanski and Secretary-General Czeslaw Kaczmarek presiding. Many proud speeches were made. A large organization was formally in evidence, but there was little behind it, as the May 1939 German census clearly revealed.
A promising German-Polish pact on minorities was concluded at last on November 5, 1937. It was agreed that on the same day Hitler would speak to the leaders of the Polish minority and President Moscicki of Poland would address the German minority leaders. Hitler was extremely pleased with what he regarded as a concrete step in the direction of a comprehensive German-Polish understanding. He could not know that the Polish leaders would consider the new pact a dead letter. He agreed to amnesty a number of German citizens of Polish extraction, who had violated German criminal laws. He also granted Lipski's request for a compromise declaration on Danzig. It was agreed that the Danzig question would not be permitted to disturb German-Polish relations. Hitler displayed his Austrian charm when he received the delegation from the Polish minority in Germany. He emphasized to them that he was an Austrian, and that precisely for this reason he could understand their situation especially well. The Poles were extremely pleased by the warmly personal nature of Hitler's remarks. The reception given to the German minority leaders by President Moscicki at a vacation resort in the Beskiden mountains was more reserved.
The Bogey of the
Hossbach Memorandum
A mysterious event which took place on the same day as the German-Polish minority pact has furnished ideal
subject matter for professional propagandists. Hitler addressed a conference attended by some of his advisers, but
without the majority of his Cabinet. The narrow circle included Defense Minister Werner von Blomberg, Army
Commander Werner von Fritsch, Navy Commander Erich Raeder, Air Force Commander Hermann Göring, and
Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath. Colonel Hossbach, an officer of the German General Staff assigned by
the General Staff for liaison work with Hitler, was also present. This man was in no sense Hitler's personal
adjutant, although this idea has persisted in many accounts. The so-called Hossbach version of the conference, which is supposed to have become one of the most celebrated documents of all time, was written several days after the event, and it could carry no weight in a normal court of law, even if an actual copy of this memorandum was available. Hossbach had been an opponent of Hitler and his system since 1934, and he was not averse to the employment of illegal and revolutionary means in eliminating Hitler. He was an ardent admirer of General Ludwig Beck, the German Chief of Staff, whose life he had once helped to save on the occasion of a cavalry accident. Beck was a determined foe of Hitler, and he was engaged in organizing opposition against the German Chancellor. Hossbach was naturally on the alert to provide Beck with every possible kind of propaganda material. Hitler was popular in Germany, and only extreme methods might be effective in opposing him.
It would be the duty of every historian to treat the so-called Hossbach memorandum with reserve, even if it could be shown that the version introduced at Nuremberg was an authentic copy of the memorandum which Hossbach began to write on November 10, 1937 (he failed to recall later when he completed his effort). The fact is, however, that no copies of this original version have been located since World War II. The version introduced by the American Prosecution at Nuremberg, the only one extant, was said to be a copy made from the original version in late 1943 or early 1944, but Hossbach declared in a notarized affidavit on June 18, 1946, that he could not remember whether or not the Nuremberg copy corresponded to the original which he had made nearly nine years earlier. In other words, the sensational document, which was the primary instrument used in securing the conviction and execution of a number of Germany's top leaders, has never been verified, and there is no reason to assume that it is authentic. Raeder explained that Hitler's views, as expressed on November 5, 1937, offered no basis to conclude that any change in German foreign policy was about to take place, but the judges at Nuremberg, with the dubious help of an unconfirmed record, decided that Hitler had revealed unmistakably his unalterable intention to wage a war of criminal aggression.
Fritsch and Blomberg were dead when this conference was investigated after World War II, but Neurath and Göring agreed with Raeder about the essential nature of Hitler's remarks. Hitler had discussed German aspirations in Central Europe and the danger of war, but this was certainly a very different thing than announcing an intention to pursue a reckless foreign policy or to seek a war. Even the alleged Hossbach memorandum introduced at Nuremberg, as A.J.P. Taylor has pointed out, does not anticipate any of the actual events which followed in Europe during 1938 and 1939. It does contain some offensive and belligerent ideas, but it outlines no specific actions, and it establishes no time tables. Hence, error had been added to error. It was false to assume that the document was authentic in the first place, and it was incorrect to assume that even the fraudulent document contained any damaging evidence against Hitler and the other German leaders. Unfortunately, most of the later historians in Germany and elsewhere have blindly followed the Nuremberg judgment and have arrived at the mistaken conclusion that Hitler's conference of November 5, 1937, was relevant to the effort of determining the responsibility for World War II.
Hitler's November 1937
Danzig Declaration
The November 5, 1937, treaty on minorities would have resolved one of the two major points of friction
between Germany and Poland had it been observed by the Poles. It guarded against assimilation by force,
restrictions against the use of the mother tongue, suppression of associations, denial of schools, and the pursuit of
policies of economic discrimination. The other principal point of friction was the Danzig-Corridor problem. Hitler hoped to reassure the Poles by his statement that he was contemplating peaceful negotiation to resolve this problem. Neurath was not content to leave Hitler's vague assurance unqualified, and he sought to interpret it as part of a quid pro quo bargain. According to Neurath, Hitler's promise to the Poles on Danzig would be a dead letter if they did not respect the treaty on minorities.
The Poles attempted to interpret Hitler's statement as a disavowal that Germany intended to acquire Danzig. They were on weak ground in this effort, because the German failure to accord them a voluntary recognition of their frontiers meant that Germany was automatically claiming the territory assigned to Poland on the western side of the German 1914 eastern frontier. The Polish Foreign Office on November 9, 1937, protested against a speech by Albert Forster in Düsseldorf on November 6th. Forster had declared to a large audience that his aim was to achieve the reunion of Danzig with the Reich. This speech was merely one incident in a major campaign to acquaint the German population with the Danzig problem.
It was decided at the German Foreign Office on November 23, 1937, that the recent Danzig meetings carried out by Forster in various German cities had been so successful that this program should be intensified. Plans were made to prepare one hundred additional meetings in the near future, and an additional fifty meetings before April 1938. Arrangements were made to provide the best possible speakers from Danzig. The Danzig Senate President, the Volkstag President (Danzig Lower House), the Danzig District Propaganda Leader, the Danzig Labor Front Leader, and many other prominent Danzigers were enrolled in addition to Forster. It was discovered that Der Danziger Vorposten (The Danzig Sentinel), the principal news organ of Danzig, was an excellent newspaper, and plans were made to increase its circulation in the Reich. Das Deutsche Danzig (German Danzig), a travelling Danzig exposition, was also planned, and it was scheduled to open at Muenster in Westphalia by the end of November 1937. The German Foreign Office had concluded that current knowledge and awareness of Danzig in the Reich was "proper" but "insufficient." This activity was an excellent indication of the German attitude toward Hitler's Danzig declaration. It was regarded as the hopeful beginning of a definite diplomatic campaign to recover Danzig.
Austria as a Czech Buffer
The German Foreign Office assumption about Danzig was basically correct although somewhat premature.
Hitler did not pursue the Danzig question during the winter of 1937-1938, and by February 1938 the Austrian
question commanded his full attention. It was soon evident that an Austrian crisis was approaching its climax, and
there could be no doubt that a solution of the Austrian problem would automatically raise the Czechoslovakian
problem. The existence of 3,500,000 unhappy Sudeten Germans could be ignored neither by the Czechs, by Hitler,
nor by the world if the Germans of Austria were united with Germany. A Czechoslovakian crisis in turn could
provide the first major opportunity for Germany and Poland to cooperate in an international crisis, because the
attitudes of both of these states toward the Czechs were hostile and fundamentally identical. If this cooperation
proved successful, it might be possible to deal with the two principal points of friction between Germany and
Poland with greater prospect of success. The Czechs were well aware of the hostility of their principal neighbors. It was not surprising that on February 22, 1938, during the early phase of the Austrian crisis, Kamil Krofta, Czechoslovakia's Foreign Minister, prepared a memorandum which explained why he favored definite Czech action to prevent the reunion of Austria and Germany. The complacent assumption that Danzig was the primary objective of German expansion would be shattered unless the puppet dictatorship in Austria could be maintained as a buffer against the realization of Hitler's dream of Greater Germany. Palacky had supported an independent Austria against the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848, and Krofta hoped that it would be possible to support an independent Austria, although merely a fragmentary rump-Austria, against Hitler.
In the foreground the Czechs were facing a surprise, and the Germans and the Poles were soon in a position to score their separate triumphs at Czech expense. In the background was the Soviet Union, the greatest single peril either Germans or Poles had ever had to face. It was desirable for Germany and Poland to unite against this danger, although perhaps no one, including the German and the Polish leaders, knew how great the peril really was.
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Chapter 5 The Road to Munich
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