The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Chapter 14: The Turn of Poland Summary

Book Three: The Road to War

• The next nation on Hitler's hit list was Poland.
• By the end of October 1938, the Nazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop had begun to lay the groundwork for some kind of settlement between Germany and Poland.
• Poland had just occupied a strip of Czech territory for itself, thanks to Hitler's urging, and the two nations were on friendly terms for now.
• By the middle of November, the Polish government rejected Germany's settlement requests, noting that they went against strong assurances that Hitler had given to Poland just recently. Among other things, the Nazis wanted the free city of Danzig, which had a large population of ethnic Germans, to "revert" to Germany. They also wanted to build a highway and railroad across Poland, which would give them easier access to both Danzig and East Prussia.
• On November 24, Hitler issued a directive to his top military commanders, instructing them to begin preparations to occupy Danzig with a surprise invasion.
• Although the Polish Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, had made it perfectly clear to Hitler that this would lead to an armed conflict, Hitler was sure that he could get his way without it.
• Early in the winter of 1939, Hitler and Foreign Minister Beck met to discuss their situation. Hitler seemed a little more conciliatory than he'd been with the Czechs.
• Still, the Polish Foreign Minister told the Nazi Fuehrer that he saw no agreement whatsoever on the Danzig situation.
• If Foreign Minister Beck was pessimistic at the start of the new year, his mood was worse by spring of that year.
• As the months went by, the Nazis continued to press for Danzig, as well as for the Polish government to sign the Anti-Comintern Pact against Russia.
• By late February, Beck really started to understand what was happening, especially after he saw Hitler occupy Bohemia and Moravia and send his troops to annex Slovakia.
• A hubbub of diplomatic activity sprang up in late March as Britain, France, Poland, and Russia were beginning to monitor the Nazis' attitudes toward Poland with a very close eye.

A Slight Aggression By the By

• In this short section, Shirer offers an account of the German occupation of the Lithuanian district of Memel in late March, 1939.
• As he explains, the occupation meant that still another of the terms of the Versailles Treaty had been ignored as Hitler engineered a bloodless conquest of Lithuania.
• "Although the Fuehrer could not know it," he concludes ominously, "it was to be the last." (3.14.37) The last bloodless conquest, that is.

The Heat on Poland

• The German occupation of Memel finally convinced the people of Poland that they might be next on Hitler's list. The Polish Army started to call up its reserves, and Hitler debated what to do.
• To his frustration, Hitler soon discovered that he couldn't intimidate the Polish government as easily as he'd intimidated the leaders of Austria and Czechoslovakia.
• Poland had an advantage that the Austrians and the Czechs hadn't been able to enjoy: they could rest assured that Britain and France were finally on their side.

"Case White"

• When Hitler learned that Britain had made a formal guarantee of Poland's safety, it threw him into a rage. Rage seems to be his default mode.
• He then goes on to describe "Case White": the "top-secret directive" that laid out Hitler's plans for war against Poland.
• Hitler soon began to collect intelligence on Poland's military strengths and weaknesses, trying to determine what kind of resistance he might encounter.
• Meanwhile, Mussolini was still at it in the Mediterranean. In early April, Italy's forces invaded Albania, which gave the fascist dictator a base of operations to continue aggression against Greece and Yugoslavia. The small countries of Europe were getting nervous.
• In response, France and Britain signed treaties with Greece and Rumania. The two sides were starting to form more clearly.
• From across the Atlantic Ocean, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was perking his ears up too.
• In the middle of April, he addressed a telegram to both Mussolini and Hitler, asking them to guarantee the safety of thirty-one independent nations, including Poland, the Baltic States, Russia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Great Britain.
• Hitler promised that he'd reply in a speech delivered in the Reichstag at the end of the month. In the meantime, he sent messages to the states mentioned by Roosevelt (except Poland, Russia, Britain, and France) and asked them if they felt threated by him and if they'd encouraged Roosevelt to make that proposal of safety.
• As Shirer records, most of the countries answered "no" to both questions. They were afraid to antagonize the Fuehrer.
• Soon enough, their replies would become ammunition for Hitler.

Hitler's Reply to Roosevelt

• Shirer describes the speech that Hitler delivered in the Reichstag at the end of April 1939 as his most brilliant speech ever.
• He denounced the Anglo-German naval treaty of 1935, and declared that Poland, not Germany, had broken the nonaggression pact.
• Hitler told the Reichstag that he was willing to negotiate replacement treaties.
• The Fuehrer then launched into a long, highly sarcastic response to President Roosevelt's telegram, and managed not to answer the American president's question regarding Poland.
• Less than a week later, the Polish government responded to Hitler's speech by delivering one of its own. In it, Foreign Minister Beck made it perfectly clear that Poland had no plans to give in to Hitler's bullying anytime soon.

The Intervention of Russia: I

• In this section, Shirer describes Hitler's wavering attitude towards Soviet Russia, and notes that by the spring of 1939, the Fuehrer was abandoning his anti-Russian efforts.
• Drawing on captured documents, Shirer presents a detailed description of how Germany and Russia began to draw closer throughout the winter and spring of 1939.
• While Britain and France seemed to want to keep the Soviets at arm's length, the Nazis were realizing that they could be valuable allies. The Soviets seemed interested, too.
• By May 1939, French intelligence was reporting that Germany was in the process of making or maybe had already made, proposals that would draw Russia into a planned partition of Poland.

The Pact of Steel

• At the same time, Hitler was also working on a formal military alliance with Italy—one that would guarantee that if Germany went to war, Italy would follow suit.
• Because Italy wanted to avoid a full-on European war for at least another few years, Mussolini and his government were worried that Hitler was about to get them into a risky situation.
• But when Foreign Ministers Count Galeazzo Ciano and Joachim von Ribbentrop met together in early May, Ribbentrop assured Ciano that Germany wasn't interested in an immediate war, either.
• With that assurance in mind, Mussolini decided to throw his lot in with Hitler. In Shirer's view, the decision was impulsive. Up to that time, Mussolini was pursuing his own national interests without being involved with Germany's.
• The German-Italian alliance was signed in late May, and it came to be known as the "Pact of Steel."

Hitler Burns His Boats: May 23, 1939

• As captured notes from a top-secret meeting reveal, Hitler was ready to admit that blood would have to be spilled if Germany was going to conquer more territories.
• Although he was clear about the need to restrict the war to Poland, he wavered back and forth between different sets of plans.
• One set declared what Germany would do if Britain and France entered the war, and another declared how things would go if the Western powers stayed out of it.
• Hitler was simultaneously admitting that Germany couldn't win the war if Britain and France attacked, and insisting simultaneously that it would win if they did.
• Still, none of the officers in the room offered any opposition to his ideas. Instead, they began to draw up their plans for attack.

The Intervention of Russia: II

• By the summer of 1939 the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had finally agreed discuss a mutual assistance agreement with the countries threatened by Nazi Germany. Although the Russians had been pushing for such talks for some time, the Western powers had been putting them off.
• The Soviets let it be known that they were still open to the discussions, but made it clear that they weren't impressed by the waffling of the Western democracies.
• They also made it clear that they had no plans to cancel their business relationships with Italy and Germany in the meantime.
• Hitler decided to ramp up his own efforts to woo the Soviet Union before it got too close to Britain and France. But by the end of June, he broke off talks with the Soviets.

Plans for Total War

• Shirer speculates that the Nazi Fuehrer may simply have been too preoccupied with his plans for war with Poland to think about an alliance with the Soviets.
• As he explains, although the quarrel over Danzig was just a convenient excuse for Hitler's war, it continued to be a hot-button issue throughout the summer of 1939.
• Throughout June, July, and August, both Germany and Poland continued to keep close eyes on the region, and to assert their respective rights and powers.
• At one point the tensions erupted in an exchange of messages between Berlin and Warsaw that were so violent that they couldn't even be made public.
• Finally, by the autumn of 1939 Hitler was practically chomping at the bit to get to war.
• He'd also made a firm decision regarding the Russians, and was now convinced that he wanted them on his side.

The Intervention of Russia: III

• By the middle of June, the Russians had proposed a new trade agreement with Germany.
• Soon, the two nations were discussing further friendly relations, and by the end of July, the Germans had become more urgent in their negotiations.
• Shirer explains that this was because, on July 23, France and Great Britain had agreed to military-staff talks with Russia to discuss how to deal with Hitler's armies.
• He notes that while the British approached the talks skeptically, and not entirely in good faith, the Russians appeared to have taken them much more seriously.
• While the British dawdled in their attempts to come to an agreement with Russia, the Germans acted much more swiftly.
• While there was still time, Hitler tried to secure a formal agreement with Russia before his Western adversaries could.

The Hesitation of Germany's Allies

• In this very short section, Shirer describes the anxiety in Italy and Hungary as each nation pondered Germany's apparent eagerness to go to war... and to go to war soon.

Ciano at Salzburg and Obersalzberg: August 11, 12, 13

• In the middle of August 1939, the Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano paid a visit to the Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.
• There, Ciano received what Shirer calls "the shock of his life." (3.14.354)
• What exactly did Ribbentrop spring on Ciano? Oh, nothing much. Just the info that Hitler didn't care a bit about the Danzig, but simply wanted war.
• Although Ciano attempted to convince Ribbentrop that any war against Poland would turn into an all-out European war, Ribbentrop just put him off.
• The same thing happened when Ciano met with Hitler the next day.
• At his meeting with the Fuehrer, Ciano gave Hitler a detailed account of Italy's military strengths and weaknesses. According to Shirer, it must have convinced him that Italy would be pretty much useless in the coming conflict.
• Although Ciano urged Hitler to sign a public declaration that Italy and Germany were still committed to peace, Hitler wouldn't sign. Instead, he gave Ciano a rough sense of his projected timeline for the invasion of Poland.
• As Ciano left Germany, he recorded in his diary that he was revolted by what Hitler and Germany was doing.