Hitler came into power the Polish ruler, Marshal Josef Pilsudski, is credibly reported to have sounded out France on the possibility of a preventive war, designed to overthrow the Nazi regime. The French were unresponsive, and Pilsudski lost much of his faith in the value of the French alliance.
One of Hitler’s first diplomatic objectives was to weaken the links between France and the states of eastern Europe. So, in his first talks with Polish diplomats, he was careful to emphasize German respect for Polish nationalism, German willingness to accept the status quo on such thorny questions as Danzig and the Polish Corridor. Pilsudski’s disillusionment with France played into Hitler’s hands.
One of the first successes of Nazi diplomacy was the signing of a ten-year pact with Poland. Each government renounced the use of force against the other and affirmed the intention “to settle directly all questions of whatever nature which concern their mutual relations.”1
Until the spring of 1939 Hitler, Göring, Ribbentrop, and other Nazi leaders tried to keep Polish confidence alive by stressing publicly and privately their pacific intentions toward Poland and their antibolshevism. Typical of this tendency was the conversation of Göring with the Polish Commander in Chief, Marshal Smigly-Rydz, in Warsaw on February 16, 1937.2
Göring was profuse in his assurances that Hitler was committed to a policy of rapprochement with Poland and of irreconcilable anticommunism. This sounded all the more reassuring in Polish ears because the pre-Hitler German governments had never been willing to conclude with Poland an “Eastern Locarno,” accepting the new borders in the East, as in the West.
Moreover, there had been close secret relations between the Reichswehr and the Red Army. German technical advisers had assisted the development of the Soviet aviation industry. In return German officers were permitted to experiment in Russia with weapons forbidden under the Versailles Treaty. All this was well known to the Poles, who were always afraid of a new partition of their country between its powerful neighbors.
Later, after the German military position had become much stronger, there were at least three strong German hints that Poland should join in a combination with Germany against the Soviet Union.3 Ribbentrop proposed to the Polish Ambassador in Berlin, Lipski, that Danzig should be reunited with Germany and that an extraterritorial railway and motor road should be built across the corridor. In return for these concessions Germany would be willing to guarantee the existing frontier and to extend the German-Polish nonaggression pact for twenty-five years. Ribbentrop also suggested “a joint policy toward Russia on the basis of the anti-Comintern Pact.”
When the Polish Prime Minister, Col. Josef Beck, visited Hitler in Berchtesgaden on January 5, 1939, the Führer emphasized “the complete community of interest” between Poland and Germany as regards Russia and added that “every Polish division engaged against Russia was a corresponding saving of a German division.”
Finally, Ribbentrop, in talking with Lipski on March 21, 1939, argued that Germany, by defeating Russia in the last war, had contributed to the emergence of the Polish state. Ribbentrop also, according to Lipski, “emphasized that obviously an understanding between us would have to include explicit anti-Soviet tendencies.”
So there is some reason to believe that Hitler’s decision to destroy Poland, in agreement with the Soviet Union, was a reaction to the British guarantee, extended to Poland on March 31, 1939. Up to that time it had been Nazi policy to offer Poland the role of a satellite ally in an ultimate move against the Soviet Union, the kind of role that was later assigned to Hungary and Rumania. The history and the present map of Europe might have been greatly altered if Poland had accepted this suggestion. But Beck adhered to a middle line. He refused to take sides with Germany against the Soviet Union as he refused to take sides with the Soviet Union against Germany. He feared equally the embraces of both his neighbors.
With Poland immobilized and with the Soviet Union weakened by the vast purges which eliminated many leading political and military figures between 1935 and 1938, Hitler could feel that his rear in the East was safe. Then he commenced to slip off, one by one, the restraints on Germany’s freedom to arm at will. His method was simple but effective. He confronted Britain and France with a succession of accomplished facts. Invariably he followed each new step toward rearmament or, later, toward territorial expansion with assurances of his devotion to peace. The standard French and British reaction was simple but ineffective. It was limited to verbal protests and appeals to the increasingly impotent League of Nations.
Hitler won a legal minor victory in the Saar plebiscite of January 13, 1935. This small but highly industrialized region, rich in coal, had been detached from Germany and placed under League of Nations administration by the terms of the Versailles Treaty. There was to be a plebiscite after fifteen years, with three choices: return to Germany, annexation by France, or continuation of League rule. About 90 per cent of the Saarlanders who participated voted for return to Germany. The Third Reich gained territory and prestige.
Hitler launched a frontal attack on the Versailles system when he announced the creation of a German air force on March 9, 1935, and the restoration of compulsory military service a week later. Here was an issue on which the western powers could have made a stand without much risk. German rearmament had not advanced far enough to support a war. But nothing of consequence happened. Representatives of Britain, France, and Italy met at Stresa, in northern Italy, and came to an agreement to oppose “unilateral repudiation of treaties which may endanger the peace of Europe.”
The British and French were so concerned about obtaining Mussolini’s signature to this paper formula that they failed to admonish the Italian dictator about his obvious intention to invade Ethiopia. And in June Great Britain came to a naval agreement with Germany providing that the German Navy should not exceed one-third of the British.
Even after he had obtained a free hand in rearming on land, on sea, and in the air, Hitler still faced an obstacle inherited from the Treaty of Versailles. Germany was forbidden to build fortifications or maintain troops in a wide demilitarized belt along its western frontier. So long as this arrangement remained in force, the vital Ruhr and Rhineland industries were vulnerable to a swift invading thrust from France. The demilitarization of the Rhineland was endorsed by the Treaty of Locarno, of which Britain and Italy were coguarantors.
Hitler decided to challenge this last limitation. He sent troops into the forbidden area on March 7, 1936. The official excuse for this action was the Franco-Russian military alliance, which had been negotiated by Pierre Laval, of all unlikely individuals, and which was on the eve of ratification in the French parliament. In an effort to soften the shock of this action, German Foreign Minister von Neurath proposed to the signatories of the Locarno Treaty a twenty-five-year nonaggression pact, with demilitarization on both sides of the Franco-German frontier, limitation of air forces, and nonaggression pacts between Germany and its eastern and western neighbors. Nothing ever came of this suggestion.
Hitler later declared that the sending of troops into the Rhineland was one of the greatest risks he had ever taken. It is highly probable that immediate French military action would have led to the withdrawal of the German troops, perhaps to the collapse of the Nazi regime. But France was unwilling to move without British support. Britain was unwilling to authorize anything that savored of war. There was a general feeling in Britain that Germany was, after all, only asserting a right of sovereignty within its own borders.
Hitler had brought off his great gamble, and the consequences were momentous. The French lost confidence in Britain. The smaller European countries, seeing that Hitler could tear up with impunity a treaty concluded with the two strongest western nations, lost confidence in both. There was a general scuttle for the illusory security of no alliances and no binding commitments. It was now possible for Germany to bar and bolt its western gate by constructing the Siegfried Line and to bring overwhelming pressure to bear in the East, as soon as its military preparations
