The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

  That guarantee would be honored, but because the British government was “scrupulous” concerning its obligations to Poland the Chancellor must not think it was not anxious for an equitable settlement.

  It follows that the next step should be the initiation of direct discussions between the German and Polish Governments on a basis … of safeguarding Poland’s essential interests and the securing of the settlement by an international guarantee.

  They [the British government] have already received a definite assurance from the Polish Government that they are prepared to enter into discussions on this basis, and H. M. Government hope the German Government would also be willing to agree to this course.

  … A just settlement … between Germany and Poland may open the way to world peace. Failure to reach it would ruin the hopes of an understanding between Germany and Great Britain, would bring the two countries into conflict and might well plunge the whole world into war. Such an outcome would be a calamity without parallel in history.45

  When Hitler had finished reading the communication, Henderson began to elaborate on it from notes, he told the Fuehrer, which he had made during his conversations with Chamberlain and Halifax. It was the only meeting with Hitler, he said later, in which he, the ambassador, did most of the talking. The gist of his remarks was that Britain wanted Germany’s friendship, it wanted peace, but it would fight if Hitler attacked Poland. The Fuehrer, who was by no means silent, replied by expatiating on the crimes of Poland and on his own “generous” offers for a peaceful settlement with her, which would not be repeated. In fact today “nothing less than the return of Danzig and the whole of the Corridor would satisfy him, together with a rectification in Silesia, where ninety per cent of the population voted for Germany at the postwar plebiscite.” This was not true nor was Hitler’s rejoinder a moment later that a million Germans had been driven out of the Corridor after 1918. There had been only 385,000 Germans there, according to the German census of 1910, but by this time, of course, the Nazi dictator expected everyone to swallow his lies. For the last time in his crumbling mission to Berlin, the British ambassador swallowed a good deal, for, as he declared in his Final Report, “Herr Hitler on this occasion was again friendly and reasonable and appeared to be not dissatisfied with the answer which I had brought to him.”

  “In the end I asked him two straight questions,” Henderson wired London at 2:35 A.M. in a long dispatch describing the interview.46

  Was he willing to negotiate direct with the Poles, and was he ready to discuss the question of an exchange of populations? He replied in the affirmative as regards the latter (though I have no doubt that he was thinking at the same time of a rectification of frontiers).

  As to the first point, he would first have to give “careful consideration” to the whole British note. At this point, Henderson recounted in his dispatch, the Chancellor turned to Ribbentrop and said, “We must summon Goering to discuss it with him.” Hitler promised a written reply to the British communication on the next day, Tuesday, August 29.

  “Conversation was conducted,” Henderson emphasized to Halifax, “in quite a friendly atmosphere in spite of absolute firmness on both sides.” Probably Henderson, despite all of his personal experience with his host, did not quite appreciate why Hitler had made the atmosphere so friendly. The Fuehrer was still resolved to go to war that very weekend against Poland; he was still hopeful, despite all the British government and Henderson had said, of keeping Britain out of it.

  Apparently, Hitler, encouraged by the obsequious and ignorant Ribbentrop, simply could not believe that the British meant what they said, though he said he did.

  The next day Henderson added a postscript to his long dispatch.

  Hitler insisted that he was not bluffing, and that people would make a big mistake if they believed that he was. I replied that I was fully aware of the fact and that we were not bluffing either. Herr Hitler stated that he fully realized that.47

  He said so, but did he realize it? For in his reply on August 29 he deliberately tried to trick the British government in a way which he must have thought would enable him to eat his cake and have it too.

  The British reply and Hitler’s first reaction to it generated a burst of optimism in Berlin, especially in Goering’s camp, where the inimitable Dahlerus now spent most of his time. At 1:30 in the morning of August 29 the Swede received a telephone call from one of the Field Marshal’s adjutants, who was calling from the Chancellery, where Hitler, Ribbentrop and Goering had pondered the British note after Henderson’s departure. The word to Dahlerus from his German friend was that the British reply “was highly satisfactory and that there was every hope that the threat of war was past.”

  Dahlerus conveyed the good news by long-distance telephone to the British Foreign Office later that morning, informing Halifax that “Hitler and Goering considered that there was now a definite possibility of a peaceful settlement.” At 10:50 A.M. Dahlerus saw Goering, who greeted him effusively, pumped his hand warmly and exclaimed, “There will be peace! Peace is secured!” Fortified with such happy assurances, the Swedish courier made immediately for the British Embassy to let Henderson, whom he had not yet personally met, in on the glad tidings. According to the ambassador’s dispatch describing this encounter, Dahlerus reported that the Germans were highly optimistic. They “agreed” with the “main point” of the British reply. Hitler, Dahlerus said, was asking “only” for Danzig and the Corridor—not the whole Corridor but just a small one along the railroad tracks to Danzig. In fact, Dahlerus reported, the Fuehrer was prepared to be “most reasonable. He would go a long way to meet the Poles.”48

  Sir Nevile Henderson, on whom some light was finally dawning, was not so sure. He told his visitor, according to the latter, that one could not believe a word that Hitler said and the same went for Dahlerus’ friend, Hermann Goering, who had lied to the ambassador “heaps of times.” Hitler, in the opinion of Henderson, was playing a dishonest and ruthless game.

  But the Swede, now at the very center of affairs, could not be persuaded—his awakening was to come even after Henderson’s. Just to make sure that the ambassador’s inexplicable pessimism did not jeopardize his own efforts, he again telephoned the British Foreign Office at 7:10 P.M. to leave a message for Halifax that there would be “no difficulties in the German reply.” But, advised the Swede, the British government should tell the Poles “to behave properly.”49

  Five minutes later, at 7:15 o’clock on the evening of August 29, Henderson arrived at the Chancellery to receive from the Fuehrer Germany’s actual reply. It soon became evident how hollow had been the optimism of Goering and his Swedish friend. The meeting, as the ambassador advised Halifax immediately afterward, “was of a stormy character and Herr Hitler was far less reasonable than yesterday.”

  The formal, written German note itself reiterated the Reich’s desire for friendship with Great Britain but emphasized that “it could not be bought at the price of a renunciation of vital German interests.” After a long and familiar rehearsal of Polish misdeeds, provocations and “barbaric actions of maltreatment which cry to heaven,” the note presented Hitler’s demands officially and in writing for the first time: return of Danzig and the Corridor, and the safeguarding of Germans in Poland. To eliminate “present conditions,” it added, “there no longer remain days, still less weeks, but perhaps only hours.”

  Germany, the communication continued, could no longer share the British view that a solution could be reached by direct negotiations with Poland. However, “solely” to please the British government and in the interests of Anglo–German friendship, Germany was ready “to accept the British proposal and enter into direct negotiations” with Poland. “In the event of a territorial rearrangement in Poland,” the German government could not give guarantees without the agreement of the Soviet Union. (The British government, of course, did not know of the secret protocol of the Nazi–Soviet Pact dividing up Poland.) “For the rest, in making these proposals,�
�� the note declared, “the German Government never had any intention of touching Poland’s vital interests or questioning the existence of an independent Polish State.”

  And then, at the very end, came the trap.

  The German Government accordingly agree to accept the British Government’s offer of their good offices in securing the dispatch to Berlin of a Polish emissary with full powers. They count on the arrival of this emissary on Wednesday, August 30, 1939.

  The German Government will immediately draw up proposals for a solution acceptable to themselves and will, if possible, place these at the disposal of the British Government before the arrival of the Polish negotiator.50

  Henderson read through the note while Hitler and Ribbentrop watched him and said nothing until he came to the passage saying that the Germans expected the arrival of a Polish emissary with full powers on the following day.

  “That sounds like an ultimatum,” he commented, but Hitler and Ribbentrop strenuously denied it. They merely wished to stress, they said, “the urgency of the moment when two fully mobilized armies were standing face to face.”

  The ambassador, no doubt mindful of the reception accorded by Hitler to Schuschnigg and Hácha, says he asked whether if a Polish plenipotentiary did come he would be “well received” and the discussions “conducted on a footing of complete equality.”

  “Of course,” Hitler answered.

  There followed an acrimonious discussion provoked at one point by Hitler’s “gratuitous” remark, as Henderson put it, that the ambassador did not “care a row of pins” how many Germans were being slaughtered in Poland. To this Henderson says he made a “heated retort.”*

  “I left the Reich Chancellery that evening filled with the gloomiest forebodings,” Henderson recounted later in his memoirs, though he does not seem to have mentioned this in his dispatches which he got off to London that night. “My soldiers,” Hitler had told him, “are asking me, ‘Yes or no?’” They had already lost a week and they could not afford to lose another “lest the rainy season in Poland be added to their enemies.”

  Nevertheless it is evident from the ambassador’s official reports and from his book that he did not quite comprehend the nature of Hitler’s trap until the next day, when another trap was sprung and the Fuehrer’s trickery became clear. The dictator’s game seems quite obvious from the text of his formal note. He demanded on the evening of August 29 that an emissary with full powers to negotiate show up in Berlin the next day. There can be no doubt that he had in mind inflicting on him the treatment he had accorded the Austrian Chancellor and the Czechoslovak President under what he thought were similar circumstances. If the Poles, as he was quite sure, did not rush the emissary to Berlin, or even if they did and the negotiator declined to accept Hitler’s terms, then Poland could be blamed for refusing a “peaceful settlement” and Britain and France might be induced not to come to its aid when attacked. Primitive, but simple and clear. *

  But on the night of August 29 Henderson did not see it so clearly. While he was still working on his dispatches to London describing his meeting with Hitler he invited the Polish ambassador to come over to the embassy. He filled him in on the German note and his talk with Hitler and, by his own account, “impressed on him the need for immediate action. I implored him, in Poland’s own interests, to urge his Government to nominate without any delay someone to represent them in the proposed negotiations.”52

  In the London Foreign Office, heads were cooler. At 2 A.M. on August 29, Halifax, after pondering the German reply and Henderson’s account of the meeting with Hitler, wired the ambassador that while careful consideration would be given the German note, it was “of course unreasonable to expect that we can produce a Polish representative in Berlin today, and German Government must not expect this.”53 The diplomats and Foreign Office officials were now laboring frantically around the clock and Henderson conveyed this message to the Wilhelmstrasse at 4:30 A.M.

  He conveyed four further messages from London during the day, August 30. One was a personal note from Chamberlain to Hitler advising him that the German reply was being considered “with all urgency” and that it would be answered later in the afternoon. In the meantime the Prime Minister urged the German government, as he said he had the Polish government, to avoid frontier incidents. For the rest, he “welcomed the evidence in the exchanges of views which are taking place of the desire for an Anglo–German understanding.”54 The second message was in similar terms from Halifax. A third from the Foreign Secretary spoke of reports of German sabotage in Poland and asked the Germans to refrain from such activities. The fourth message from Halifax, dispatched at 6:50 P.M., reflected a stiffening of both the Foreign Office and the British ambassador in Berlin.

  On further reflection, Henderson had got off a wire to London earlier in the day:

  While I still recommend that the Polish Government should swallow this eleventh-hour effort to establish direct contact with Hitler, even if it be only to convince the world that they were prepared to make their own sacrifice for preservation of peace, one can only conclude from the German reply that Hitler is determined to achieve his ends by so-called peaceful fair means if he can, but by force if he cannot.55

  By this time even Henderson had no more stomach for another Munich. The Poles had never considered one—for themselves. At 10 A.M. that morning of August 30, the British ambassador in Warsaw had wired Halifax that he felt sure “that it would be impossible to induce the Polish Government to send M. Beck or any other representative immediately to Berlin to discuss a settlement on the basis proposed by Hitler. They would sooner fight and perish rather than submit to such humiliation, especially after the examples of Czechoslovakia, Lithuania and Austria.” He suggested that if negotiations were to be “between equals” they must take place in some neutral country.56

  His own stiffening attitude thus reinforced from his ambassadors in Berlin and Warsaw, Halifax wired Henderson that the British government could not “advise” the Poles to comply with Hitler’s demand that an emissary with full powers come to Berlin. It was, said the Foreign Secretary, “wholly unreasonable.”

  Could you not suggest [Halifax added] to German Government that they adopt the normal procedure, when their proposals are ready, of inviting the Polish Ambassador to call and handing proposals to him for transmission to Warsaw and inviting suggestions as to conduct of negotiations.57

  The promised British reply to Hitler’s latest note was delivered to Ribbentrop by Henderson at midnight on August 30–31. There now ensued a highly dramatic meeting which Dr. Schmidt, the only observer present, later described as “the stormiest I have ever experienced during my twenty-three years as interpreter.”58

  “I must tell you,” the ambassador wired Halifax immediately afterward, “that Ribbentrop’s whole demeanor during an unpleasant interview was aping Hitler at his worst.” And in his Final Report three weeks later Henderson recalled the German Foreign Minister’s “intense hostility, which increased in violence as I made each communication in turn. He kept leaping from his chair in a state of great excitement and asking if I had anything more to say. I kept replying that I had.” According to Schmidt, Henderson was also aroused from his chair. At one point, says this sole eyewitness, both men leaped from their seats and glared at each other so angrily that the German interpreter thought they were coming to blows.

  But what is important for history is not the grotesqueness of this meeting between the German Minister for Foreign Affairs and His Majesty’s Ambassador in Berlin at midnight of August 30–31, but a development, during the tempestuous interview, which produced Hitler’s final act of trickery and completed, when it was too late, the education of Sir Nevile Henderson insofar as the Third Reich was concerned.

  Ribbentrop scarcely glanced at the British reply or listened to Henderson’s attempted explanation of it.* When Henderson ventured to ask for the German proposals for a Polish settlement, which had been promised the British in Hitler’s last not
e, Ribbentrop retorted contemptuously that it was now too late since the Polish emissary had not arrived by midnight. However, the Germans had drawn up proposals and Ribbentrop now proceeded to read them.

  He read them in German “at top speed, or rather gabbled to me as fast as he could, in a tone of utmost annoyance,” Henderson reported.

  Of the sixteen articles I was able to gather the gist of six or seven, but it would have been quite impossible to guarantee even the exact accuracy of these without a careful study of the text itself. When he had finished I accordingly asked him to let me see it. Ribbentrop refused categorically, threw the document with a contemptuous gesture on the table and said that it was now out of date since no Polish emissary had arrived by midnight.†

  It may have been out of date, since the Germans chose to make it so, but what is important is that these German “proposals” were never meant to be taken seriously or indeed to be taken at all. In fact they were a hoax. They were a sham to fool the German people and, if possible, world opinion into believing that Hitler had attempted at the last minute to reach a reasonable settlement of his claims against Poland. The Fuehrer admitted as much. Dr. Schmidt later heard him say, “I needed an alibi, especially with the German people, to show them that I had done everything to maintain peace. This explains my generous offer about the settlement of the Danzig and Corridor questions.”*