CHAPTER FOUR

HITLER AND STALIN: DANCING WITH THE BEAR

It is well known that Adolph Hitler was ultimately responsible for the slaughter of some six million Jews by the end of World War II. By the beginning of 1939, in fact, he had already proven himself one of the most ruthless dictators Europe had ever seen. But not even Hitler's record of murder and cruelty at that time could match the one achieved by Joseph Stalin. Fathered by an alcoholic, impoverished cobbler named Besarion Jughashvili in what is now the Republic of Georgia, he quite literally made his name in the rising Bolshevik movement with an article published in March of 1913 and signed "K. Stalin"--an unmistakeably Russian surname meaning "man of steel." It fit him like a coat of mail. After gaining full control of the Soviet Politburo in 1930, he promptly launched a purge--the Great Terror--that took the lives of 750 thousand men he distrusted. Also, by widely confiscating household food in the 1930s, he starved to death at least five million people, mostly in the would-be "counter-revolutionary" republic of Ukraine (Applebaum). In 1939, Stalin was the one man Hitler could never intimidate, let alone defeat. His only recourse was courtship: a prolonged, fitful, ambivalent dance of diplomacy with the Russian bear.

In the prelude to the outbreak of World War II, therefore, the single most important thing that happened in 1939 was not a particular event, such as the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia on March 15 or the Anglo-French declaration of war against Germany on September 3. Far more important than either of these events is the story of how Germany and the Soviet Union changed from bitter enemies into secret collaborators.

In the late thirties, the diplomatic world had good reason to think that Germany and the Soviet Union--bastions respectively of Fascist capitalism and Communism--deeply distrusted each other. On May 2, 1935, six weeks after Hitler announced that Germany was re-arming in defiance of the Versailles treaty, the Soviet Union signed with France a pact of mutual assistance designed to encircle Germany and thus check its aggression. On November 25 of the following year, Germany signed with Japan a pact designed for their common defense against "the Communist International, known as the Comintern," and specifically against "Communist subversive activities"--"interference . . . in the internal affairs of the nations" (DGFP 1936, 297). Later signed by Spain, Italy, Hungary, and a number of other countries, this pact did not mention the USSR but clearly implicated the Soviet Union as the ringmaster of international communism.

The implication was made explicit in the Secret Additional Protocol that accompanied the pact and was signed on the very same day. This protocol clearly states that international communism is something exported by the USSR, which thereby threatens the signatories. Yet rather than agreeing to defend each other against the Soviet Union, Germany and Japan agree only that if either one of them is attacked or threatened, the other will "take no measures which would tend to ease the situation of the USSR" (DGFP 1936, 298, emphasis mine). In other words, they will do nothing to aid Soviet aggression, and they also agree to "conclude no treaties with the U.S.S.R. contrary to the spirit of this agreement without mutual consent" (GDFP 1936, 298, emphasis mine). But they do not commit themselves to defend each other in case of a Soviet attack.

What did this strange omission mean? In a speech to the Soviet Congress delivered just three days after the pact was signed, Soviet Foreign Minister Maksim Litvinov declared that the pact was "only a cover" for the secret agreement, which had been furnished to him by a Soviet intelligence officer named Walter Krivitsky (Krivitsky, "Stalin" 88). Litvinov thus implied that the secret agreement betrayed an anti-Soviet bias masked by the "cover" pact. Yet as we have just noted, an anti-Soviet bias was clearly implied by the public agreement, and the lack of any provision for mutual defense in the secret protocol surely left an opening that the Soviets could probe. In any case, according to Krivitsky, who defected to the U.S. at the end of 1938, neither the pact nor the secret agreement did anything to check Stalin's long-standing desire for his own deal with Germany.¹ On the contrary, Krivitsky reports that as soon as the two agreements were signed, "Stalin gave the word to all his lieutenants: 'In the nearest future we shall consummate an agreement with Germany'" (Krivistky, "Stalin" 88).

The nearest future turned out to be a long way off. Even though Germany forged strong economic ties with the Soviet Union in April 1935, when it granted the Soviets 200 million marks' worth of credit for the importation of German goods, and even though the President of the Reichbank, Hjalmar Schacht, repeatedly pressed the Soviets to accept still more credits in return for oil and other raw materials, Hitler remained steadfastly hostile to the Soviet Union up through 1938. He had no interest in using trade relations as a bridge to political rapprochement. At the Nuremberg rally of September 1936, he and other Nazi leaders launched a major propaganda campaign against Communism, and in February 1937, shortly after the Soviet government expressed its willingness to enter "political negotiations" with Germany for the sake of "improving relations and peace," Hitler flatly said no.² We should also recall that during the anxious summer and early fall of 1938, the Soviet Union repeatedly urged France to join it in defending Czechoslovakia against Germany--until the Munich agreement sanctioned the German seizure of the Sudetenland. Finally, besides approaching open war with Germany, the Soviet Union fought Germany by proxy in Spain, where the Soviets backed the Republican Loyalists against the Nazi-backed Nationalists in a civil war that lasted until April of 1939.

As 1939 began, then, who could have guessed that Germany and the Soviet Union might end up breaking the ice of hostility that had steadily congealed between them?³ Yet on January 12, diplomats attending a reception in Berlin might have seen the ice starting to crack in what Kravitsky called "the cordial and demonstrative chat of Hitler with the new Soviet ambassador" (Krivitsky, "Stalin" 89).⁴ A week later came another crack. When the London News Chronicle reported that a rapprochement between Germany and the Soviet Union was on the way, the story was promptly reprinted without critique of any kind in Pravda, Stalin's mouthpiece (Krivitsky, "Stalin" 89). And on January 25, the diplomatic correspondent for the London Daily Herald reported that the Nazi government did not count on having to fight the Soviet Union. On the contrary, Germany was said to expect that if war broke out in Europe, the Soviet Union "would adopt a policy of neutrality and non-intervention," and for that reason Germany was sending to Moscow a trade delegation "whose objects are political rather than commercial" (Kravitsky, "Stalin" 89).

A still more telling sign of Moscow's foreign policy came a little over a month later, on March 10, in Stalin's report to the 18^th Congress of the Communist Party. This long speech is curiously two-faced. Taking up rhetorical arms against aggression, Stalin charges three nations--Germany, Italy, and Japan--with shredding peace treaties, abandoning the League of Nations, and launching a "new imperialist war." Italy, he notes, seized Abyssinia in 1935; Germany and Italy sent troops to Spain in 1936; in 1937, after siezing Manchuria, Japan invaded China, occupying Peking, Tientsin, and Shanghai, and had just taken the Island of Hainan in early February of 1939; and Germany, after annexing Austria in March of 1936, had just occupied the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1938.

Logically, such a list of aggressive acts might well culminate in a literal call to arms against them. But Stalin's chief target in this speech is not aggression. It is acquiescence to aggression. "In every way," Stalin declares, "aggressor states . . . infringe upon the interests of the non-aggressive states, primarily England, France, and the U.S.A., while the latter draw back and retreat, making concession after concession to the aggressors." Here Stalin invites a charge of hypocrisy. Since the Soviets had signed a treaty of alliance with Czechoslovakia in May 1935 but did nothing to prevent the German seizure of the Sudetenland, why shouldn't the craven conceders include the USSR? To this there is a ready answer. As we have seen already, the 1935 treaty of alliance obliged the Soviets to defend the Czechs only if France came to their aid first. But France never came to their aid. Rather than doing so, it joined England in approving the seizure of the Sudetenland by means of an agreement--at Munich-- in which the Soviet Union took no part.

Besides chiding the western democracies for passively accepting acts of imperialist aggression, Stalin faults them for trying to foment new fighting between Germany and the Soviet Union. In the previous November, Germany had forced Czechoslovakia to give Hungary a small region called Carpatho-Ukraine, thereby placing it under control of the Reich. As a result, Stalin charged, the western press was loudly decrying a German plan to annex the whole of the Soviet Ukraine--a much larger territory--no later than "this spring." Stalin found this prospect both ridiculous and poisonous. Ridiculous because it envisioned a gnat swallowing an elephant, and poisonous because its only purpose, apparently, was to start a needless war. "It looks as if the object of this suspicious hullabaloo," he stated, "was to incense the Soviet Union against Germany, to poison the atmosphere and to provoke a conflict with Germany without any visible grounds."

This is as close as Stalin came to forswearing war with Germany. In the face of provocation by the western press, of new imperialist belligerence "overriding the elementary principles of international law," and of evidence that even Britain and France--the appeasers of Munich--are re-arming, Stalin insists that the Soviet Union stands for peace. Even while faulting the western democracies for not intervening against the aggressors, and even while claiming to support "nations which are the victims of aggression and are fighting for [their] independence," Stalin declares that the Soviet Union will not intervene in other nations' wars. The USSR is "ready," he says, "to deal two blows for every [one]" delivered by anyone who would try to cross its borders. But otherwise, he says, "we stand for peaceful, close and friendly relations with all the neighbouring countries which have common frontiers with the U.S.S.R." Strictly speaking, this would exclude Germany, which has no border with the U.S.S.R., but since Stalin also says that the Soviets "stand for peace and the strengthening of business relations with all countries," and since the USSR had been doing business with Germany for four years, he was effectively saying that the Soviets would make no war against Germany--not even to support the latest victim of its aggression--Czechoslovakia. By way of explanation, Stalin could have simply explained that the Czechs were not fighting for their independence, which they were about to lose entirely when Germany occupied Bohemia and Moravia (including Prague) just five days after Stalin's speech.

In tacitly accepting Germany's aggression, Stalin set an example that would be followed, ironically enough, by Pius XII, the new pope of the Roman Catholic church. Though his predecessor, Pius XI, had repeatedly attacked both Hitler and Nazism, the new pope explicitly refused to say anything about Germany's latest move. On March 15, three days after Pius XII was crowned, France and Great Britain asked the Vatican to join them in protest against what Germany had done to Czechoslovakia on that very day. Yet according to a report by the German ambassador to the Vatican, Pius XII told those around him that he saw "no reason to interfere in historic processes in which, from the political point of view, the Church is not interested" (Lewy 220).⁵

Equally cool to the fate of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union was much more interested in forging new relations with Germany, especially since Germany had started putting out feelers of its own. In late March or early April, shortly after Stalin publically declared that the Soviets stood for "peace and the strengthening of business relations with all countries," a key aide to Ribbentrop was told to strengthen his personal relations with the staff of the Soviet embassy in Berlin. As Ribbentrop's specialist in Poland and the Baltic states, Peter Kleist wondered what change in policy this order might signify. But on April 7 he dutifully complied by accepting an invitation to tea from Georgi Astakhov, Chargé d'Affaires for the USSR in Berlin. When Kleist and another German official--a specialist in East European affairs--arrived at the stately home of the Soviet embassy on Unter den Linden, they were received by Astakhov alone, who clearly sought to open a chink in the wall between their two nations. "It was absurd," he reportedly said, "for Germany and the Soviet Union to fight each other over ideological subtleties. Why not establish a common policy?" When Kleist resisted, stressing their philosophic differences, Astakhov dismissed them. "Stalin and Hitler," he said, "were men who created those realities and never let themselves be dominated by them" (Toland 2:34). Yet if this was a signal that Stalin was poised to re-create those realities, Hitler was not ready--or at least not yet. When Kleist told Ribbentrop what Astakhov had said, the foreign minister tersely replied: "I do not think the Fuhrer would wish that conversation to be continued" (Toland 2: 34).

In thus abruptly terminating a conversation initiated by one of Germany's own diplomatic feelers, Hitler exemplified the contradictions that beset other European leaders in the spring of 1939. On one hand, the Nazi invasion of Bohemia and Moravia on March 15 shocked all those who had believed Hitler's assurances of the previous September: that the Sudetenland was "the last territorial demand which I intend to make in Europe."⁶ Most shocked of all was Neville Chamberlain, who decried the invasion just two days after it occurred--in a speech delivered to a packed town hall in his home city of Birmingham on the eve of his seventieth birthday. While insisting that he was still right to have signed the Munich Agreement, he denounced Hitler for violating its terms and thus prompting questions about still more aggression: "Is this, in fact, a step in the direction of an attempt to dominate the world by force?" If so, he concluded, and if British freedom itself were threatened, the nation would fight back"to the utmost of its power."

Chamberlain's dismay at the latest act of German aggression was widely shared on the Continent, where threats of further aggression were already afoot. Hitler's next targets, it was rumored, would be Danzig and the old German seaport of Memel, which--since 1924--had been indirectly governed by Lithuania under a League of Nations statute (Karski 266). Another threat shadowed Romania. Hours before Chamberlain spoke at Birmingham on March 17, the Romanian ambassador to London, Virgil Tilea, sought British help in stopping what he called "an immediate push" into his country by German troops (Paillat 1 GI 384): a point that gave special urgency to Chamberlain's speech. Visiting Ankara at about the same time, Gheorgi Kiossievanov, Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Bulgaria, "expressed to the Turks his great anxieties over German pressure on the Balkans and asked the Turks what they could do to resist it" (Watt 277). And on March 18, France and Russia joined Britain in protesting the illegality of Hitler's act--above all in breaking his pledge to respect the independence of Czechoslovakia (French Yellow Book 78: 89). Russia was particularly harsh. Rather than averting any threats to world peace, it charged, Germany's latest act "tends to multiply them, to disturb the political stability of Central Europe, to increase the causes of anxiety already existing in Europe, and, finally, to deal a new blow to the feeling of security of nations" (French Yellow Book 82: 97).

The German seizure of Czechoslovakia thus roused alarm bells right across Europe. Yet even as those bells clanged, Germany continued its diplomatic and commercial transactions with other European nations as if conducting business as usual. The day after the Romanian ambassador sought British help in thwarting "an immediate push" by German troops, the British ambassador to Bucharest telegraphed Lord Halifax in London that Germany was not threatening Romania and that its commercial negotiations with Berlin had assumed --mirabile dictu--"a tone more conciliatory since the Czech coup" (Paillat 2 RG 384).⁷ On March 17 likewise, the British ambassador to Poland was assured that reports of Hitler's designs on Memel and Danzig were due only to local excitement and not to be taken seriously (Karski 266-67).

The fact that Hitler actually did sieze Memel three days later (Watt 157) might have led the British to wonder about the fate of Danzig as well, though Danzig would not fall until the following September. But meanwhile, in the immediate aftermath of the Czech coup, the governor of the Bank of England dutifully obeyed a Nazi order regarding just over 23 tons of Czech gold held by the Bank of England in the name of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and worth 5.6 million pounds. The Nazi order came filtered through Czech bank directors. On pain of death for disobedience, the Czech directors asked the Bank of England to transfer the gold from the Czech BIS account to the Reichsbank BIS account. To the consternation of MPs such as George Strauss, who charged in parliament that such a transfer sanctioned "the most notorious outrage of this generation--the rape of Czechoslovakia," the governor of the Bank of England--Montague Norman--insisted that BIS transactions could not be disrupted by "political" factors (Lebor. Quinn).

In the spring of 1939, evasions or downright contradictions of this kind seemed to undermine foreign policy right across the Continent. If the Governor of the Bank of England could do business with a nation whose latest act outraged his own countrymen, could Stalin do business with a nation that his own had just condemned for striking a "new blow" against international security? To some extent, Germany and the USSR still behaved like enemies. In early April, as noted above, Hitler firmly rejected overtures made by Georgi Astakhov, Soviet chargé d'affairs in Berlin, and on April 17, Soviet Foreign Minister Litvinov proposed to the British ambassador in Moscow a political and military alliance pitting France, Britain, and the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany (Roberts 922). Yet on this very day, the German Secretary of State, Baron Ernst von Weizsächer, was visited at Wilhelmstrasse--for the first time in over nine months--by Alexei Merekalov, the Soviet ambassador, accompanied by Astakhov.

Above all, Merekalov wanted to know if the Soviet Union's contract with the Skoda arms factory in Czechoslovakia would still be honored--now that Czechoslovakia was part of the Reich. But aside from that point, each of the three men who attended this meeting reported it in his own way. According to Weizsächer, Merekalov seized the chance to propose that Russia "live with [Germany] on a normal footing. And from normal, the relations might become better and better" (qtd. Roberts 921). But by his own account Merekalov said nothing of the kind. Following Litvinov's instructions (telegraphed on April 5), he spent most of his time pressing Weizsächer to clear the way for "the fulfillment of Skoda's accepted obligations" (Roberts 923, 922). And according to Astakhov, the friendly overtures all came from Weizsächer, who not only shifted the conversation from business to politics but also sought to sound as reassuring as possible:

Weizsächer wanted to know whether the USSR felt threatened by Germany. Merekalov replied that the USSR was interested in removing the danger of war, and as to Germany he did not feel especially threatened. The meeting concluded with a question from Merekalov about Weizsächer's perspectives on Soviet- German relations. . . . "You know full well [said Weizsächer] that between us there are contradictions of an ideological character. At the same time, however, we sincerely want to develop economic ties with you." (qtd. Roberts 923)

In Merekalov's report to Moscow (telegraphed the day after the meeting), his account of Weizsäcker's final words is almost exactly the same as Astakhov's (Roberts 922). But does this mean that the friendly overtures came from Germany alone? Not necessarily, since a further report indicates that Merekalov may indeed have raised "the possibility of a normalization or even further improvement of German-Russian political relations."⁸ But we will probably never know for certain exactly what Merekalov and Weizsäcker said to each other on April 17. Whatever they said, each party to the meeting evidently sought to represent the other side as the suitor, the party in quest of better relations. The startling divergence in their reports thus illustrates the contradictions in their foreign policy: while deeply distrusting each other, Germany and the Soviet Union were each bent on taking tentative steps toward rapprochement. To justify those steps, each had to imagine that the other side was taking them first.

But nothing tentative was signified by Germany's public stance. On April 20, just three days after Merekalov and Weizsächersounded each other out, Hitler celebrated his fiftieth birthday with a parade designed to manifest the invincible power of German arms. For nearly five hours, forty to fifty thousand German troops, accompanied by long range artillery guns and all the latest machinery of war, goose-stepped through central Berlin along the newly-completed east-west axis while 162 warplanes flew overhead.

With twenty thousand official guests filling the grandstand and hundreds of thousands of spectators, the whole event paid homage to the Fuhrer, whose portrait was almost as widely displayed throughout Berlin as was the swastika.⁹ Films of the day provide a vivid record of it.¹⁰ In the morning, a large band plays for Hitler in front of the Reich chancellery, though he stands in the entrance without ever cracking a smile. To start the parade, he is driven to the reviewing stand in the first car of a motorcade: a large open car with three rows of seats. Standing just behind the windshield on the passenger side of the front seat, heedless of anyone who might be tempted by such a target (as many had been before), he gives the Nazi salute to massive crowds shouting "Sieg Heil!" as he wheels past.¹¹

For the parade itself, he sits on a golden throne with red plush upholstery in the center of the front row of the reviewing stand. Beside him are not only Ribbentrop and Field Marshall Hermann Goering but also--as a "Guest of Honor"--Emil Hacha, who had succeeded Edvard Beneš as president of Czechoslovakia and had just been forced to play an utterly humiliating role in the Nazification of his country.

It was the final chapter of Hacha's political life. In the late afternoon of March 14, knowing that German troops were about to occupy his country, the old and ailing Czech leader made one last move to salvage what he could of Czech independence. Accompanied by his Foreign Minister, František Chvalkovský, he boarded a special train from Prague to Berlin that reached Berlin at 9:00 PM. Though received at the station with full military honors, the two Czechs were met at the Chancellery with something quite different: a demand for their signatures on a document that would immediately make Bohemia and Moravia--the last remaining parts of Czechoslovakia--a Protectorate of the Reich. Cutting off any negotiation, Hitler declared that Prague would be occupied by 9:00 AM the next day, warned that whoever tried to resist would be "trodden underfoot," signed the document himself (about 12:30 AM), and walked out. The Czechs were then left to the mercies of Ribbentrop, Goering, and Wilhelm Keppler, then Reich Commissioner in Slovakia, which had already been taken over by Germany. While Hacha and Chvalkovský protested for hours that they would be forever cursed by their people if they signed the document, the Germans ceaselessly thrust it upon them, pushed pens into their hands, and threatened that Prague would be bombed to ruins if they did not sign by 6:00 AM. Finally, at about 4 AM, the exhausted Czechs gave in. Led back into Hitler's presence, they signed. As they left the Chancellery, Chvalkovský said to Hacha, "Our people will curse us, and yet we have saved their existence. We have preserved them from a horrible massacre."¹²

While the Czechs mourned, Hitler rejoiced. Bursting into the room where his private secretaries sat wearily awaiting whatever he might need them for, he raised them to their feet, kissed them, and told them, "Children, this is the greatest day of my life. I shall enter history as the greatest German of them all" (Watt 154). He had conquered Czechoslovakia by means of sheer intimidation.

In ancient Rome, a victorious general--vir triumphalis-- typically led a long triumphal procession through the city by riding in a chariot drawn by four horses and immediately followed by captured foreign leaders, usually walking in chains. By placing the utterly humiliated Emil Hacha on the reviewing stand with him for the grand parade on April 20, Hitler achieved approximately the same effect. Along with his birthday, he was celebrating his conquest of Czechoslovakia just over one month before.

He was also anticipating the conquest of Poland, for in early April--as we saw in the previous chapter-- he had ordered the armed forces to be ready to be ready to invade it by September 1. But by the end of April he had come to realize that he could not take Poland without the help of Russia. Though one might have assumed that Hitler's new strategy would be top secret, it was explained with astonishing frankness to Paul Stehlin, a 32-year-old French Air Force captain and military counsellor to the French ambassador in Berlin.

On April 30, just two days after Hitler's speech to the Reichstag, Stehlin was summoned by a telephone call from General Karl-Heinrich Bodenshatz, Chief of the Luftwaffe, and briefed for two hours on Hitler's plans for Poland now that Jozef Beck, its Foreign Minister, had firmly refused to give up either Danzig or the corridor. Poland, Bodenshatz noted, was now tied to England by a guarantee of mutual assistance that would oblige it to attack Germany if war broke out between Germany and England. Though Hitler was determined to reclaim both Danzig and the corridor, he would not risk fighting a prolonged war on two fronts or without having "the necessary trump cards [atouts] in hand." For this purpose, Bodenshatz continued, "an entente between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union" was "indispensable," and negotiations for this purpose were already underway. Without going into details, he said simply, "You will learn one day that something is afoot in the East." (Stehlin 148, translation mine).

Stehlin was dumbfounded. How could this new opening to Russia be reconciled with Hitler's declaration that Russia was the one country he could never accommodate? Bodenshatz brushed the question aside. "Hitler is a soldier," he said. "When his mind is on military strategy, he doesn't care about ideology. . . . The Poles believe they can defy us, feeling strengthened by the support of France and Great Britain, and thinking they can count on material aid from Russia. They're fooling themselves. Just as Hitler did not believe that he could occupy Austria and then Czechoslovakia without the assent of Italy, he no longer thinks of settling the German-Polish dispute without Russia." Then, more and more excited, he said, "There have already been three partitions of Poland. Well! Believe me, you're going to see a fourth."¹³ In other words, having been carved up three times in the late eighteenth-century by Prussia, Russia, and Austria, and thus deprived of its sovereignty until 1918, Poland was about to be carved up again--this time by Germany and the Soviet Union.

Why, one wonders, would a German general thus break the news of Hitler's new Ostpolitik to a French diplomat? Bodenshatz himself made his motives clear: he aimed to scare off any intervention by the French--or its British allies. With Russia no longer their potential ally but rather Germany's partner, how could the French or the British defend Poland, or do anything to stop Hitler's invasion of it? "In any case," said Bodenshatz, "we will manage this affair in such a way that you may have neither any reason nor any intention of intervening" (Stehlin 377, my translation).

Head spinning from all of this news and straining to forget none of it, Stehlin rushed off to tell Paul Coulondre. Though the French ambassador was just as amazed as Stehlin had been, he shrewdly observed--in talking to Stehlin a few days later--that Hitler's plans to carve up Poland were coming to light just as the Soviet Union was replacing Litvinov, its Foreign Minister, who had been constantly pushing France and Britain to form a united front against Germany.¹⁴ In any case, the news was alarming, for the threat of German-Soviet collaboration could lead both France and Britain to accept certain Soviet claims on Poland. So the ambassador wound up by insisting on the need to act in Moscow: "to intensify our efforts . . . to derail a possible German attempt at an entente with the Soviet Union" (Stehlin 149-51, translation mine).

At the ambassador's behest, Stehlin flew to Paris so as to report directly to Georges Bonnet, the Foreign Minister. But in Paris, he waited in vain for an invitation from the Foreign Ministry, and his repeated phone calls drew nothing but answers ranging from astonishment to rudeness. After spending six days without ever reaching anyone willing to hear him out, let alone ever speaking to Bonnet himself, he returned to Berlin. Some weeks later, he was told that it would be wiser for him not "to send reports of this order, or, more generally, foreign to his duties, if [he] expected to keep his post in Germany" (Stehlin 151-52, translation mine).

Given the appalling unresponsiveness of the French Foreign Ministry, the only one who truly grasped the import of Stehlin's news was Ambassador Coulondre, who immediately linked it--as noted above-- to the fall of Maksim Litvinov, the Soviet Foreign Commissar. His fall was sudden. On May 1, Litvinov had sat beside Stalin on the reviewing stand for the May Day parade and had been treated as a guest of honor: clear signs, it would seem, that his position was secure. Up to this point, however, he had been steadily seeking an alliance with Britain, and to that end he received Sir William Seeds, the British ambassador to Moscow, on May 2. The next day he found himself sacked. Dismissed with no public explanation and barely any public notice, he was replaced by Vyacheslav Molotov, whom Soviet newspapers called Stalin's "most intimate friend and closest collaborator." As reported to Berlin by Werner von Tippelskirch, Chargé d'Affaires at the German Embassy in Moscow, the appointment of Molotov seemed to ensure that Soviet foreign policy would henceforth strictly implement Stalin's ideas.¹⁵

The meaning of the change was immediately clear to Walter Krivitsky, the Soviet intelligence officer who was now living in America. Asked by a journalist on the Baltimore Sun what he thought of the move, Krivitsky said it meant that Stalin was about to make a deal with Hitler. While Litvinov, Krivistsky said, "personified the policy which brought the Soviet Union into the League of Nations" and into "collaboration with democratic powers," Stalin "had to choose between the Rome-Berlin axis and the Paris-London axis." In replacing Litvinov with Molotov, he chose Rome and Berlin.

Recognizing the importance of these developments, the French Ambassador did not stop with sending Stehlin on what turned out to be a futile trip to Paris. On May 7, one week after Stehlin's conversation with Bodenshatz, Coulondre sent a detailed report on it to Georges Bonnet, though he identified Stehlin and the German general only as C and X, respectively.¹⁶ From this conversation Coulondre inferred not only that Hitler was determined to reclaim Danzig and reunite East Prussia with Germany, but also that to gain these ends he would "come to an understanding with Russia." For Coulondre, in fact, the "entirely new" revelation is "the new orientation of Germany toward Russia," which--he notes-- significantly coincides with "the resignation of M. Litvonov" (FYB, Document 123).

Two days later, in his next message to Bonnet, Coulondre strives to decode mixed signals. On the one hand, Poland's new alliance with Britain as well as Beck's rejection of Hitler's demands on Danzig, which the German press described as "offers" of a "generosity unparalleled in history," seemed to place Poland on a collision course with Germany.¹⁷ On the other hand, German propaganda claimed that there would be no war: Poland would eventually give up its heroism when it realized that London and Paris would not fight for Danzig, that "Danzig is not worth a European war."¹⁸ At the same time, the resignation of Litvinov prompted some Germans to speculate that the already "slow and uneven course of Anglo-Russian negotiations" might be wrecked altogether. In addition, it was rumored throughout Berlin "for the past twenty-four hours" that Germany has proposed or was about to propose a partition of Poland, and also that "the Soviet Government has decided to change its policy" toward Germany (Couldondre, FYB Document 125).

Two weeks later, the rumors were confirmed in Coulondre's next message to Bonnet, which laid out "from a reliable source" Ribbentrop's agenda for Poland. Eventually, Poland "would be bound to disappear, once more partitioned between Germany and Russia." Clearly entailing "a rapprochement between Berlin and Moscow," this partition "would be the only way of bringing about a permanent settlement of the German-Polish dispute, that is, according to the methods already applied in the case of Czechoslovakia, the deletion of Poland from the map" (emphasis mine). Beyond this chilling prospect, Ribbentrop was also said to believe that the Russo-German partition of Poland would "above all" enable the Reich to destroy Great Britain. Finally, while Coulondre did not know how much Hitler agreed with Ribbentrop, how much the Fuhrer might revise his "ideological" hostility to Russia, the ambassador noted that there were already signs of his willingness to do so--such as the absence of attacks on the Soviet Union in his speeches of the past few months (Coulondre, FYB, Document 127).

While Coulondre was thus explaining to the French Foreign Office just how Germany would collaborate with the Soviet Union in carving up Poland, a young German diplomat working in Moscow was risking his career--and probably his life--to sound the alarm among his fellow diplomats there. Though his grandmother was Jewish, Hans Heinrich Herwarth von Bittenfeld not only bore the name of an illustrious Prussian Field Marshall but also--by his own efforts--had become private secretary to Ambassador Werner von der Schulenburg at Moscow's German Embassy. Herwarth--nicknamed Johnnie-- was a dissident. He kept in close touch with the German resistance, and especially with Erich Kordt, special assistant to Ribbentrop, who--through his brother Theo at the German Embassy in London--had been seeking British help in stopping Hitler. In August of 1938, therefore, Herwarth had been asked to confer with British and French diplomats in Moscow about Hitler's designs on Czechoslovakia (Herwarth 123-24). In May of the following year, after six months away from Moscow, he returned not only to witness the growing rapprochement between Germany and the Soviet Union but also to keep foreign diplomats apprised of this dramatic development.

Johnny had to choose his contacts carefully. Though he had earlier fed information to Guido Relli, an expert on Russia who worked in Moscow's Italian Embassy, he now concluded that Mussolini would not oppose a pact between Stalin and Hitler, especially since Italy was well on its way to forging its own military alliance with Germany: the "Pact of Steel" that would be signed in Berlin on May 22 by Ribbentrop and Count Galeazzo Ciano, Italy's Foreign Minister. Since Italy had thus bound itself to Germany, Herwarth resolved to say nothing more to Relli; and since France and Britain were both actively negotiating with the Soviet Union to form an alliance against Germany, Herwarth could not easily communicate with his French and British colleagues. But since he knew that the Foreign Offices of both France and Britain "maintained confidential contact with Washington" (Herwarth 153), he decided to focus on Moscow's American Embassy, and specifically on Charles "Chip" Bohlen, a dashing young Harvard graduate who at just 34 had become the senior Russian-language officer in charge of political reporting at the American Embassy. Though Bohlen's main job at this time was to find out whether Stalin would make a deal with Hitler or side with Britain and France against the Fuhrer, he found it all but impossible to glean any information from Russian officials. So Bohlen was the ideal receiver for Herwarth's handoffs--especially since they could be made in secret between sporting friends. Like many other bright young diplomats from various Moscow embassies, Bohlen and Herwarth regularly gathered to ski, ride horses, play tennis, and socialize at a dacha 12 miles west of Moscow that had been leased by the American Embassy. The dacha comprised not only a bright yellow two-story frame house and a tennis court but also a stable for two lean horses that furnished a convenient way to elude both eavesdroppers and listening devices.

By May 16, when he first went riding with Bohlen through fields near the dacha, Herwarth knew very well what was brewing in Berlin. Since Germany's military experts thought the USSR incapable of fighting Germany over Poland, Germany was considering a "major shift" in its relation to the Soviet Union. To that end, the German Foreign Ministry had asked Herwarth himself to arrange a meeting between Molotov and Schulenburg as soon as the German Ambassador returned to Moscow from Berlin. But as Herwarth gradually explained all this to Bohlen, he found the American diplomat skeptical, and two days later, when Herwarth told him that Schulenburg would soon be back in Moscow with orders to see if the Russians were ready to co-operate with Germany, Bohlen seemed "even more skeptical."¹⁹

Strange as it may seem to us now, Bohlen's reluctance to believe that the Soviets were contemplating any sort of deal with Germany was also the reigning conviction in the very nation that had most to lose by such a deal: Poland, whose attitude toward the Soviet Union was almost self-contradictory.

On one hand, the Poles hated the Russians more than anyone else. In May of 1938, as noted in Chapter 1, Field Marshall Edward Smigly-Rydz, Commander in Chief of the Polish Army, told French ambassador Leon Noel that while the German is a "man of order," however adversarial, "the Russian is a barbarian, an Asiatic, a corrupt and poisonous element, with which any contact is perilous and any compromise, lethal" (qtd. Carley 44-45). This almost visceral loathing partly explains why Beck refused to consider any dealings with Russia even after the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia on March 15. Two days later, when Chamberlain proposed that Poland sign a declaration of mutual consultation (just that, not mutual aid) in case of German attack on France, Poland, Romania, or the USSR, Beck said no. Signing such a document, he said, would "definitely place Poland in the Soviet camp" and thereby antagonize Hitler, with whom he still hoped to reach a compromise over Danzig and the corridor. Instead of signing such a declaration, Beck proposed a secret agreement between Britain and Poland: a provisional agreement on mutual assistance that Beck did sign in London on April 6 (Karski GPP 267, Wandycz 155).

We have seen already, however, that Britain's commitment to the defense of Poland was not only provisional but also ambiguous. Just as dubious was the commitment of the French--in spite of terms spelled out on May 19, when General Tadeusz Kasprzycki, Poland's Minister of War, signed a military convention with Maurice Gamelin, Commander of the French Army. These two agreed on three points: if war broke out between Germany and Poland, France would immediately strike Germany from the air; on the third day of French mobilization, the French army would launch a diversionary offensive into German territory; and no later than fifteen days afterwards, the full French army would undertake a major military offensive--"un action offensive avec le gros de ses forces" (Richard Watt, 402). But all these terms were part of a military convention that required first a political treaty between France and Poland, and this treaty was not signed and ratified until September 4, three days after Germany invaded Poland (Prazmowska 143). Recent research shows, in fact, that Gamelin never intended to meet the French commitments made in the military convention, that he wanted the Poles to fight the Germans on their own (Cienciala 245).

Besides expecting far more help from Britain and France than they would ever get, Poland also counted--amazingly enough--on support from the Soviet Union. Beck told Chamberlain that the Poles trusted the USSR no more than they had the Tsars. But the Poles, he added, would not oppose British and French overtures to Moscow because Poland wanted the USSR to remain neutral--as if the Soviets could be trusted to remain so. Furthermore, according to a Polish historian, Beck "also declared that he would welcome any allied agreement with the USSR so long as it would allow the transit of military supplies and the Soviet delivery of raw materials to Poland" (Wandycz 155). On May 16, the very day on which Herwarth first told Bohlen about new overtures between Germany and Russia, the Poles and the Soviets ratified a trade agreement (it had been signed in February) under which Poland would get raw materials from the USSR. Consequently, in spite of their distrust for the Soviet Union, the Poles trusted it to back them against Germany. They could not believe the Soviets would help the Nazis carve up Poland, for that would put the German army and air force threateningly close to Moscow. What they believed was quite the opposite: that a German attack on Poland would automatically bring them Soviet aid, probably including military supplies and air support (Wandycz 156).

Reading the Soviet Union, then, through lenses bifocally ground with both trust and distrust, the Poles simply could not see--or did not wish to see--what the USSR actually intended. But after hearing out Johnny Herwarth on May 16 and again on May 18, Chip Bohlen began to see that in spite of their ideological hostility, Germany and the Soviet Union might indeed be edging toward one another. On May 20, therefore, he and Stuart Grummon, the new American Chargé d'Affaires, sent a coded telegram to Cordell Hull, the American Secretary of State. Without revealing Herwarth as Bohlen's source, this telegram reports what Ribbentrop had just told Ambassador Schulenburg during the ambassador's recent visit to Berlin--beginning with a truly amazing claim. According to the telegram, the German government had concluded that "Communism had ceased to exist in the Soviet Union; that the Communist International was no longer a factor of importance in Soviet foreign relations, and that consequently . . . no real ideological barrier remained between Germany and Russia" (Bohlen 70, emphasis added).

The statement I have italicized is truly startling. Since nothing in Herwarth's own memoir confirms it, it can only be a distorted version of what he told Bohlen about the erosion of the "ideological barrier" to negotiations between Germany and the USSR.²⁰ Given Bohlen's knowledge of Soviet Russia, one wonders why he would report without question or even comment the news that Germany thought Communism dead in the USSR. But the rest of the telegram is plausible and cautious in reporting what Ribbentrop had said to Schulenburg. According to Bohlen and Grummon, Ribbentrop told Schulenburg that "the German government was not alarmed at the prospect of an agreement between Great Britain and the Soviet Union as it was not convinced that England and France would be disposed to lend extensive or wholehearted assistance to any country in Eastern Europe." While shrewdly assessing in this way the ineffectiveness of anything that France or Britain might offer the Soviet Union, Ribbentrop also urged Schulenburg to indicate that Germany could offer something more: a "change in attitude" toward the Soviet Union "as well as the assurance that Germany was in favor of the maintenance of an independent Poland" (Bohlen 71). But "in the event of a conflict with Poland" over Danzig and the corridor to East Prussia, Ribbentrop said, "Germany had no intention of attempting to occupy the whole of that country." While thus implying that it might well occupy part of Poland, Ribbentrop seemed bent on assuring the Soviets that Germany would not occupy it to the Russian border. Ribbentrop also recalled what his aide Peter Kleist had been told by Georgi Astakhov of the Soviet Embassy in Berlin on April 7: "that Soviet foreign policy was now on a new basis" (Bohlen 71, Toland 2:34).

In wiring this report to Cordell Hull, Bohlen withheld the name of his source for the same reason that he decided not to share Hewarth's information with any of the French or British diplomats in Moscow, where circulation of it would endanger its source. But just as Paul Coulondre in Berlin was reporting to Georges Bonnet on German interactions with the Soviets, Bohlen's account of them enabled Hull to inform both the British and French ambassadors in Washington (Bohlen 72). He must also have shared the news with FDR, who--as of May 19--was already urging Congress to repeal the arms embargo section of the 1937 neutrality law by June 12, when King George VI and Queen Elizabeth were due to visit Washington.²¹ But Congress failed to repeal the embargo even as the threat of war--and thus the French and British need for arms--grew.

To be fair, Bohlen's second report on negotiations between Germany and Russia suggested wariness on both sides. On May 22, thanks to what he learned from Johnny Herwarth, he wired a detailed account of the conversation held on May 20 between German Ambassador Schulenburg and Vyacheslav Molotov, the new Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Though they spoke in what Schulenburg himself described as "most friendly fashion," Molotov was guarded. Asked if the Soviet Union might resume the economic negotiations that had been stalled for several months, Molotov said they could continue only if the two countries had established a "political basis" for them. What this meant he stubbornly declined to say. But according to Herwarth via Bohlen, he gave the impression "that only a definite proposal from the German government would be seriously considered here [in Moscow]."²²

Possibly because Ribbentrop feared that news of a German approach to the USSR might alarm Japan, which was fighting the Soviets in Mongolia even as Germany was courting Japan, Schulenburg was told to sit tight rather than making any proposal "and wait to see if the Russians will speak more openly."²³ Waiting to see what the Russians might say or do while they were talking to France and England as well as to Germany was an extraordinarily ticklish task. Writing to Weizsäcker, the German State Secretary, on May 22, Schulenburg further elaborated on his May 20 meeting with Molotov, who seemed to him, he wrote, "quite suspicious [recht verdächtig]," and before we resume economic discussions, "he apparently wants to obtain from us more extensive proposals of political nature." But we can't be sure, he noted, that the Kremlin won't use any such proposals "only to exert pressure on England and France," and it is "extraordinarily difficult" to learn anything about "the English-French-Soviet negotiations," except for the simple fact that they were evidently proceeding. (While Schulenburg was visiting Molotov's adjunct, Vladimir Potemkin, he heard the British ambassador being announced.) "On the other hand," Schulenburg declared, "if we want to accomplish something here, it is unavoidable that we sooner or later take some action." (http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/nsr/nsr-01.html#8).

"Sooner or later take some action." In spite of his seeming reluctance to make any specific proposal to the Soviets, Ribbentrop himself was eager to act. And by a telling coincidence, "sooner or later" is precisely the phrase used by Paul Coulondre in a telegram sent to Georges Bonnet on May 22, the very same day that Schulenburg wrote to Weizsäcker. Having learned from "a reliable source" exactly what Ribbentrop was planning, Coulondre writes that "sooner or later," he expects Poland "to disappear, once more partitioned between Germany and Russia." For Ribbentrop, Coulandre reports, such a partition would not only entail "a rapprochement between Berlin and Moscow," but also effect "a permanent settlement of the German-Polish dispute, that is, according to the methods already applied in the case of Czechoslovakia, the deletion of Poland from the map" (FYB Document 127, emphasis added). As if this chilling prospect were not bad enough, Coulondre went on to explain Ribbentrop's ultimate aim. Though Hitler himself had not yet embraced his Foreign Minister's Ostpolitik, Ribbentrop took heart from the glacial pace of Anglo-Soviet negotiations, which fed his hope "that a Russo-German cooperation would one day give the Reich a chance of striking a mortal blow at the world power of the British Empire" (Coulondre, FYB, Document 127).

On May 23, the very next day, Hitler declared war on Poland so as to strike just such a blow. At a meeting of generals, admirals, and other officers sworn to secrecy, he said that "the problem 'Poland' cannot be dissociated from the show-down with the West," and we must therefore "attack Poland at the first opportunity" (qtd. Cameron Watt 321). Though no foreign diplomat could have known about this meeting, Coulondre's telegram to Bonnet plainly pointed in its direction, and at the very least showed why the British and French should be urgently accelerating the pace of their own negotiations with the USSR. Yet neither government gave any sign of urgency. On May 24, Neville Chamberlain told the British parliament that Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, had just conferred in Paris with Georges Bonnet about "the strategic cooperation of France, Russia, and Great Britain in resistance to aggression." Since Coulondre's chilling telegram reached Bonnet on May 22, he would surely have shared its contents with Halifax, who would just as surely have shared them with Chamberlain. But in speaking to parliament on May 24, Chamberlain was ponderous, circumlocutory, and vague. "All relevant points of view have now been made clear," he said, "and I have every reason to hope that as a result of proposals which His Majesty's Government are now in a position to make on the main questions arising, it will be found possible to reach full agreement at an early date" even though "there still remain some further points to be cleared up." So much for urgency. In the face of news that Ribbentrop sought to wipe Poland off the map of Europe in order to strike a "mortal blow" at the British Empire, Chamberlain sounds as if he were trying to settle a mild dispute between the members of a cricket club.

By contrast, the Foreign Office of Germany was now unequivocally bent on dancing with the bear--or rather cutting in on the British lion. On May 30, during a long talk with Georgi Ashtakhov, the Soviet Chargé in Berlin, State Secretary Weizsächer asked him if there were "any room at all for a possible gradual normalization of relations between Soviet Russia and Germany, now that Moscow had perhaps already listened to the enticements of London." Without saying anything about those enticements, Astakhov assured Weizsächer that in Russia's opinion, "foreign and domestic policy did not have to interfere with each other." In other words, Astakhov plainly implied that no matter how much the Nazis vilified Communism and the Soviets vilified Nazism in their respective homes, they might still find common ground on foreign policy. As a result, in a "most urgent" telegram sent that very day to Schulenburg, Weizsächer boldly announced, "Contrary to the policy previously planned, we have now decided to undertake definite negotiations with the Soviet Union." (http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/nsr/nsr-01.html#11).

Unfortunately, Bohlen caught no hint of this new initiative. On the contrary, while mistakenly inferring that the German Ambassador had been muzzled by his government for the whole month of June, he also detected open hints that impending Soviet talks with the British and French "might produce a military agreement" (Bohlen 74). Or more likely, might not. In a speech to Supreme Soviet on May 31, Molotov charged that British and French proposals did not support the "elementary principle of reciprocity," for they had not yet shown the USSR that it "might count on [their] assistance in the event of its being directly attacked" ("M. Molotov's Speech" 8). Was Molotov angling for a better deal from Britain, as Cameron Watt suggests (C. Watt 361), or covertly signaling that the Soviet Union was seeking a better deal elsewhere?

In any case, Moscow did not think it could rely on military aid from France and Britain, and the British themselves could not promise it in good faith. In early June, when its military planners were still awaiting the results of the conscription launched on April 27, all they could foresee was helping defend Poland from the air (C. Watt 331), and even that was doubtful. Ribbentrop in particular was absolutely convinced that neither France nor Britain would do anything for Poland, let alone for the USSR, which is why he now thought that Germany could sieze Poland with no interference from Britain or France and with Soviet cooperation. Ironically, the diplomatic conduit for this new policy--the man who urgently cabled Schulenburg to start negotiations with Molotov--was State Secretary Weizsächer, whose personal project was to cage the dogs of war with British help.

On June 1, at a meeting in Berlin with Carl Burckhardt, Swiss League of Nations High Commissioner in Danzig, Weizsächer asked him to tell the British that they should maintain "un silence menacant"--a threatening silence--so as to undermine Ribbentrop's conviction that they would not march (Klemperer 118). But when Burckhardt himself tried to convince Ribbentrop that France and Britain would back Poland if it went to war over Danzig, the Foreign Minister would not budge (C. Watt 323). Weizsächer thus found himself caught in the planning of a war he opposed.

Yet all the while, even as he did Ribbentrop's bidding, even as he pressed Schulenburg to seek Soviet help in carving up of Poland, Weizsächer was trying to circumvent the Foreign Minister so as to keep Germany out of war. He may even have had a hand in the secret mission of a young German diplomat named Adam von Trott, who had studied in England, made important friends there, and belonged to the German Resistance. Whether or not Trott met Weizsächer in the spring of 1939, just before travelling to England in early June, he fully shared Weizsächer's aversion to Nazi belligerence, and to that end he made good use of his close friendship with David Astor, whose mother--the celebrated Lady Astor--not only invited him to a grand dinner on June 3 at Clivedon, the Astors' estate, but also seated him next to Lord Lothian, a prominent advocate of appeasement, and opposite Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Minister.²⁴ This gave Trott the chance to explain his peace plan at length: if Britain would acknowledge Germany's "legitimate" grievances in the aftermath of Versailles, and in particular if Britain would support Germany's claim to Danzig and the Polish corridor, Germany would let Czechoslovakia resume its pre-Munich status.²⁵ But this deal had no chance. Even if Hitler had been willing to let Czechoslovakia go--a pure fantasy--Britain would not even consider trading away the territorial claims of Poland, as William Strang of the Foreign Office had said in the previous December, when Carl Geordeler sought the same concession. As a result, though Halifax arranged for Trott to meet Chamberlain for half an hour on June 7, nothing came of his initiative.²⁶ By mid-June, in fact, British officials had come to think of Trott as a Nazi agent (C. Watt 393-94).

What then remained to the British but an Ostpolitik of its own? Given the futility of seeking any further agreement from the Nazi regime or any practical help from the German Resistance, Britain continued its stately march toward a deal with the Soviet Union. On May 24, as noted above, Chamberlain told the House of Commons that he looked forward to "full agreement at an early date" after some "further points" were "cleared up." On June 7, he told the House that Britain and France were ready to give the USSR "full military support" in case of any aggression by a European power. But in admitting that "one or two difficulties" still remained, Chamberlain alluded to a sticking point over Russia's Baltic neighbors--Latvia, Estonia, and Finland--which did not want the "protection" that the Soviets proposed to offer them as part of its agreement with Britain and France (C. Watt 374-75). Under questioning, Chamberlain also admitted that he had not even chosen the Foreign Office emissary who would be sent to Moscow to bring the British Ambassador there up to date on the Foreign Office's latest proposals: one more sign of the chronic arthritis that gripped the British Government.

Nothing seemed fit to cure that arthritis. On June 15, two weeks after State Secretary Weizsächer told Ambassador Schulenburg that "we have now decided to undertake definite negotiations with the Soviet Union," the British were plainly informed of this development by Erich and Theo Kordt, who came to London on behalf of the "German Opposition" to speak with Sir Robert Vansittart, Chief Diplomatic Advisor to the Foreign Secretary. When the Kordt brothers told Vansittart that Hitler was now seeking a deal with the Soviet Union, Vansittart stated that Britain would surely conclude its own agreement with the Soviets.²⁷ Yet at just about the time of this conversation, Molotov was testily dismissing the latest set of British proposals presented by William Strang, whom the Foreign Office had sent to Moscow on June 12 (C. Watt 374). And two more months would pass before the British sent anyone else to Moscow.

By the end of June, Germany had concluded that the Soviets had no serious interest in making a deal with Britain and France. Via John Herbert King, a Soviet agent in the British Foreign Office, this point was conveyed by Molotov to the German Embassy in London on June 29.²⁸ Possibly because of this news, Hitler seems to have felt that he could now take Danzig whenever he wanted with no interference . In Paris on June 30, Daladier was told that Hitler had authorized Gauleiter Albert Forster--the leading Nazi official in Danzig--to sieze the city over the weekend of July 1-2: the same weekend for which a coup in Danzig was boastfully predicted by Otto Abetz, Ribbentrop's personal representative in Paris (C. Watt 325). Though no coup materialized, a group of young German militants--"Hitler Jugend"--crossed the Polish frontier in Pomerania on June 30. Promptly arrested and imprisoned by the Poles, they were just as promptly released by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs as soon as it learned of the incident from the German Embassy in Warsaw.²⁹

Though nowhere publicized in either the German or the Polish press, the Hitler Jugend border-crossing stunt was reported to the British by Josef Beck as a "significant fact." But what did it signify? That a coup was indeed imminent, or that the Hitler Youth were simply restless? Was the import of this "significant fact" overridden by the fact that on the very same day, June 30, Paul Coulondre was told in Berlin by Ernst von Weizsächer that there was no reason to anticipate a German coup in Danzig? Or as Coulondre noted, was that assurance itself undermined by the recollection that just before the Germans occupied Prague, Weizsächer had promised Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador, that the Reich "would behave in a proper way"?³⁰

Whatever Germany's exact intentions, France and Britain had to know that Molotov loathed their negotiators: on July 17 he called them "crooked and cheats" and accused them of playing "clumsy tricks." But of course the Russians were playing tricks of their own. On the same day that Molotov made his comments, General Sir Henry Pownall, director of the British War Office, told his diary that Russian obstructionism was putting agreement endlessly out of reach. "As soon as our people give way on one point," he noted, "the Russians produce a brand new obstacle which they say is essential or the deal's off" (qtd. Watt 379). At the same time, Molotov was growing steadily more receptive to overtures from Germany--as Chip Bohlen knew. By July 1, after yet another round of horseback riding with Johnny Herwarth, Bohlen had learned what Molotov and Ambassador Schulenburg had said to each other on June 28. Assuring Molotov that "Germany entertained no aggressive designs against the Soviet Union," Schulenburg also noted that "the nonaggression treaty of 1926 between Germany and the Soviet Union was still in existence." Molotov was skeptical. Since Germany had just renounced its nonaggression treaty with Poland, he wondered what such treaties were worth, and when Schulenburg claimed that Poland itself had broken the treaty by joining Britain's "encirclement" of Germany, Molotov said that Poland's latest move was "purely defensive." After objecting that the word "defensive" was "only academic," Schulenburg asked about commercial negotiations between Germany and Russia--and thereby gained an encouraging response. While Molotov had told him on May 20 that commercial negotiations between Germany and the USSR could proceed only after they had established a new "political basis," he now simply stated that Germany's Commercial Counselor in Moscow--Gustav Hilger--should take up these negotiations with Anastas Mikoyan, Soviet Commissar for Foreign Trade. Most important, Molotov ended by affirming that the ambassador "was correct in assuming that the Soviet Union desired normal relations with all countries which did not transgress Soviet interests"--including Germany.³¹

Nevertheless, relations between Germany and the Soviet Union remained anything but crystal clear. On June 30, one month after Schulenburg had been told to "undertake definite negotiations with the Soviet Union," and just one day after he sent to Berlin his generally positive report on his meeting with Molotov, Hitler sent word that "further activities in Moscow were to be stopped in view of the conduct of the Russians."³² Each side faulted the sluggishness of the other. In spite of Molotov's encouraging words to Schulenburg about economic negotiations, Mikoyan had earlier told a German official that Moscow "had lost all interest in these negotiations as a result of . . . German procrastination" (Ericson 46). By July 12 Karl Schnurre was feeling just as impatient with the Russians. As chief economic negotiator for the German Foreign Office, he "repeatedly" told Werner von Tippelskirch "that without any positive reaction by Molotov it would be difficult to make any progress." In addition, State Secretary Weizsächer still thought that Moscow might make a deal with the British and French.

According to Tippelskirch, "he could not imagine that the Soviet Union after having entered the negotiations would let them pass without result and sink back into isolation."³³

Yet as I have already noted above (note 31), it was on this very day,

July 12, that Molotov sent a quite different message to the German Embassy in London by means of John Robert King, his secret agent in the British Foreign office. Having already sent word (on June 29) that the Soviet Union did not much care for Anglo-French overtures, he now repeated the point (C. Watt 368). By late July, therefore, not long after Mikoyan was pushed into re-opening economic negotiations and transferring them to Berlin (C. Watt 379), the Germans were openly urging the Soviets to side with them rather than with Britain and France. On the evening of July 26, acting on instructions from Ribbentrop, Karl Schnurre invited Georgi Astakhov, the Soviet Charge d'Affaires, and Yevgeny Babarin, chief of the Soviet trade mission, to have dinner with him at a Berlin restaurant, where they talked until shortly after midnight. Telling his guests that Germany sought not only economic collaboration with the USSR but also "the re-establishment of good political relations," Schnurr argued that the split between their ideologies--Communism and Fascism--mattered less than what they shared: "opposition to the capitalist democracies." While Schulenburg had barely mentioned those democracies in his meetings with Molotov, Schnurre did all he could to steer the Russians away from them. German policy, Schnurre insisted, was aimed at England, not Russia, which had nothing to fear from Germany. They could readily settle their differences to their mutual advantage. But if the Soviet Union signed a treaty with England, Schnurre asked, "what could England offer Russia? At best, participation in a European war and the hostility of Germany, but not a single desirable end for Russia." Nevertheless, Schnurre failed to get Astakhov or Babarin to say anything about Russia's negotiations with the British, let alone about which way the Soviets might be leaning. To Schnurre it seemed that Moscow was simply procrastinating. He could take comfort only from the thought that even after months of negotiating with England, Moscow was still undecided.³⁴

A few days later in Moscow, Ambassador Schulenburg drew essentially the same conclusion from yet another meeting with Molotov on August 3. Though the Soviet Foreign Minister seemed "unusually open," and though he definitely favored an economic agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union as well as "normalization and improvement of mutual relations," he displayed what Schulenburg called "the old mistrust of Germany," which led the ambassador to think "that the Soviet government is at present determined to sign with England and France if they fulfill all Soviet wishes." Given the sticking points between the allies and the Soviets, that was a very big if, and Schulenburg himself noted that Soviet "mistrust of England is also great." But getting the Soviets "to swing about," he concluded, would "take considerable effort."³⁵

By August 7, however, just four days later, Schulenburg could report that the British and French were getting nowhere with Molotov. Though Schulenburg himself had found the Soviet Foreign Minister "very communicative and amiable," the ambassador had learned that Molotov "sat like a bump on a log" with the British and French ambassadors, who "are both said to be completely exhausted and glad that they now have a breathing spell ahead of them" (Schulenburg). The breathing spell would come because a delegation of French and British military officials was now enroute to Moscow to negotiate a military agreement with the Soviet Union. But it was exquisitely predestined to fail.

For a start, the French chose to head their delegation not Maurice Gamelin, Commander of the French Army, who had signed a military convention with Poland on May 19, but a lesser official--General Aimé Doumenc, commandant of France's first military region. His record was impressive: during the first Great War, for instance, he had helped to create tank divisions. But the instructions he got for his trip to Russia were not just vague but almost self-contradictory: while Gamelin told him to refuse committing any French troops to support the Red Army, Daladier said simply, "Bring us an accord at any price!" (Paillat, 1 GI 74). The British delegation was likewise handicapped. On July 20 William Strang of the Foreign Office, who had been negotiating in Moscow for over a month, warned that any military commission sent there should be headed by an officer ranking at least as high as General William Edmund Ironside, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, whose recent visit to Poland had been "prominently reported" in the Soviet press (C. Watt 381). But to head their delegation this time, the British chose a lesser admiral with a name worthy of an opera by Gilbert and Sullivan: Sir Reginald Plunket-Ernle-Etle-Drax, aka Admiral Drax. A man of "scarcely quick comprehension," he was given even less authority than Doumenc had: he could do nothing without approval of the British government (C. Watt 382; Paillat, 1 GI 75).

Besides handicapping their delegations in this way, the British and French behaved as if they had all the time in the world to cut a deal with the Soviets and thus head off the Nazi attack on Poland. At a diplomatic reception in Berlin on July 27, Goering was flabbergasted to learn from Captain Paul Stehlin of the French Embassy that the French ambassador was vacationing in the French Midi and would probably not return until August 15. Stehlin himself took no vacation at all. When Bodenschatz told him that Poland would be struck by September 1, he flew to Paris so as to warn General Joseph Vuillemin, Commander in Chief of the French Air Force. But on August 1, when Stehlin pressed him to say what France would do for Poland against Germany, Vuillemin could only shrug. "The fighter planes are good," he said, "but our bombing capacity is almost non-existent"--no match for the Luftwaffe. Though Stehlin also hotly demanded to see both Daladier and Guy La Chambre, the French Air Minister, all he got was a meeting at which La Chambre promised to update the prime minister on their interview (Paillat, 1 GI 75).

The British moved at their own stately pace. To be fair, neither their delegation nor the French one--26 officers in all-- could fly to Moscow without landing first on German territory, where their top secret war plans might be seized. So after overruling a Foreign Office proposal to have them escorted by a major fleet of cruisers and destroyers, Halifax sent them all off unescorted on a slow-moving steamer named City of Exeter, which left the port of Tilbury on the north shore of the River Thames some 25 miles downstream from London Bridge. Ironically, the date of their departure--August 5--was also the date on which British Airways launched the first of its first weekly transatlantic flights in order to compete with Pan Am, which had started its own transatlantic service on May 20. But instead of flying, the Anglo-French delegation might as well have been taking a leisurely cruise. Everything about the trip was stately, futile, and slow. By day, the voyaging officers used the room reserved for children's games (how apt!) to discuss--laboriously--what they hoped to gain from the Soviets and were willing to give in return. Every night they wore dinner jackets for meals served by turbaned Indian waiters. And leading them on was a slow-witted British admiral who had been told "to proceed only with extreme prudence," for even though "a German-Soviet collusion [was] possible," he would have time "to conduct the negotiations with the greatest possible slowness" (Paillat, 2 GI 75).

Taking five days to reach Leningrad on August 10, they arrived too late to catch the midnight train to Moscow and therefore did not reach the Soviet capital until the following day, August 11. On this same day in Salzburg, the topic of their intentions came up in the course of a grueling, ten-hour exchange between Ribbentrop and Count Ciano, the Italian foreign minister. At one point they nearly came to blows. Having explained to Ribbentrop that Italy could not go to war, Ciano screamingly demanded to know just what Germany wanted. When Ribbentrop shouted simply "War! . . . We want war, we want war," Ciano warned him that Britain and France would declare war on Germany. "No," said Ribbentrop. "they won't dare. They won't budge. They can't intervene because they aren't ready to fight" (Brissaud 2:99, my translation). For once Ribbentrop was absolutely right. He knew better what the French and British would do, or rather wouldn't do, than they themselves did--or were willing to admit.

But in any case, the French and British officers who came to Moscow on August 11 were royally entertained on their first night there at a sumptuous dinner for fifty hosted by Marshall Clement Vorochilov, Commissar of the People for Defense. Afterwards they adjourned to a music salon worthy of Versailles--and no doubt redolent of Catherine the Great--where they heard a lovely concert as the Soviets served them angelic smiles (Paillat, 2 GI 75). But the next day, after this siren song no doubt wafted them into a good night's sleep, Vorochilov treated them like so many lackadaisical schoolboys. To open their first meeting, he solemnly announced his power to "sign military accords in favor of peace against the aggressor," and then asked Plunket and Doumenc--the heads of the British and French delegations--what authority they had. Ooops! Doumenc, it turned out, was empowered to treat "all military questions" but not settle any of them, and Plunket had no written power at all. Visibly vexed, the Marshall could only regret that neither the British nor the French was authorized to sign a military convention with him.

By this time Count Ciano was meeting Hitler himself at the Berghof, where--on two successive days (August 12 and 13)--the Fuhrer explained just how he planned to carve up eastern Europe, smash Poland, and drag Italy into his war (Brissaud 2:100; Ciano, JP 1:128). Meanwhile, on the 13^th, the second meeting of the British and French officers with Marshall Vorochilov went no better than the first. When General Doumenc started to explain proposals that had been put together like tinkertoys in the children's playroom of the British steamer, the Marshall simply asked him what the delegation expected the Soviets to do in case of an attack on Britain, France, Poland, or Romania. It took another day for Doumenc to come up with an answer: On the 14^th, he said that the USSR could send to Poland and Romania "war supplies of every nature." Vorochilov then raised two pointed questions. Will Warsaw let Soviet troops cross Poland en route to the enemy? And will Bucharest let Soviet troops into Romania?

Once again, the visitors had no ready answer. Knowing the Poles were adamantly opposed to having the Red Army on their soil, Doumenc tried a Hail Mary pass. On the evening of August 17, even after Daladier had vetoed (by telegram) any further appeal to Poland, Doumenc secretly sent to Warsaw an aide named Captain Andre Beaufre, who put the Soviet proposal to Marshall Rydz-Smigly, president of Poland, and one of his generals. They would not budge. "We know the Russians better than you do," said the Poles. "They cannot be trusted." (Paillat 2 GI 77-78).

At that very time in Moscow, the Soviets were proving as much by their growing interest in making a deal with Germany at the expense of Poland. Describing his latest meeting with Molotov in a telegram to Weizsächer of August 14, the third day of talks between the Soviets and the Anglo-French delegation, Schulenburg reported that Molotov listened "with the greatest attentiveness" to his comments on Poland (Yale Avalon, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/ns032.asp), which doubtless included Hitler's plans for dividing it with the Soviets. Though Schulenburg was guarded about Molotov's response, Ribbentrop immediately replied by saying--in a return telegram sent that very night--that "that there exist no real conflicts of interest between Germany and the U.S.S,R," that "the capitalistic Western democracies are the unforgiving enemies" of both, that the time has come to clarify "German-Russian relations," and that Ribbentrop himself was ready to visit Moscow in order to lay out the views of the Fuhrer directly to Stalin himself (Yale Avalon Document 175). In light of this overture, it is startling to read the Open Letter widely posted in America on the very same day as this exchange of telegrams between Moscow and Berlin--August 14. Signed by four hundred leading Americans including such celebrated writers as Ernest Hemingway, Clifford Odets, William Carlos Williams, and Richard Wright, the letter not only urges closer cooperation with the Soviet Union but also denounces Fascists for "sowing suspicion" of the USSR and spreading "the fantastic falsehood that the USSR and the totalitarian states are basically alike" ("Open Letter of the 400"). So much for the wisdom of great American sages. In less than two weeks, the real falsehood would turn out to be the expectation that Hitler and Stalin would never make a deal.

Hardly anyone saw it coming. So far as we know, for instance, Russia was not even mentioned during a lunch held in Paris on August 14, when Churchill sat down with a distinguished French general. But we are nonetheless lucky to have a detailed record of their conversation.

At a table set in a shady corner of the Bois de Bologne, Churchill was cordially received by General Alphonse Joseph Georges, Commander of the North East Front. They were introduced to each other by Major-General Sir Edward Louis Spears, a British Army officer who had been serving as a liason between the British and French forces and who had known both men for years. With strong chin, sparkling brown eyes, firm mouth accentuated by a thin moustache, and skin leathered dark by years of service in Algeria, the 65-year-old French general fully engaged his English guest. As a long-serving veteran of the French army, he had been gravely wounded twice--once early on in World War I and once again in 1934, during an assassination-- but like the 65-year-old Churchill, he remained vigorous, alert, and clear-sighted. According to Spears, who reports on the lunch in great detail (right up to its servings of wood strawberries soaked in white wine), the two men agreed on many things. Both thought the postponement of war engineered by the Munich agreement had done more for Germany than for the allies. A year's delay, said Georges, had given Germany time to build the Western Wall, (aka Siegfried Line), which was much thicker and stronger than France's Maginot Line. Also, though French artillery had once been far better than Germany's, Georges could no longer say so, especially since, as he ruefully noted, Hitler's seizure of Czechoslovakia had gained him Skoda, one of the greatest weapons factories in the world.

What then of their respective air forces? Churchill must have known that Britain had 280 bombers, 140 torpedo bombers, and 52 other combat planes including fighters and dive bombers (Ellis 241-42). Likewise, Georges had to know that France's operational warplanes included 585 fighters (with 28 obsolete) and 140 bombers (with 65 obsolete) (Ellis 237). But neither man knew that Germany had 1011 fighters (more than triple the allies' total), 1014 bombers (nearly triple the allies' total), and 267 dive bombers and ground attack planes (Ellis 237). All that Georges and Churchill knew about German air power is that it had formidably grown since the Munich agreement and that the allies would have to go on building-- and buying from the United States--as many planes as they could.

Given the probable superiority of the German air force, Spears himself put in a question that was never really answered: couldn't German bombers besiege the Maginot Line along with the hundreds of thousands of men posted along it and all the trains needed to supply them? And even if trains were replaced by motor vehicles, couldn't they too be hit from the air?

Whether or not they could, Churchill was troubled by the termination of the Maginot Line at Montmédy, beside the southern tip of Belgium, with nothing but earthworks flanking the Ardennes Forest and stretching northwest along the Belgian border to Dunkirk on the coast. This strategy, he darkly noted, presupposed not only the strength of the earthworks but the impassibility of the Ardennes. "Remember," he told Georges, "that we are faced with a new weapon"--namely masses of German tanks--and that instead of blocking their advance, forests would hide them from French bombers. Spears and Churchill both knew that France's strategy raised urgent questions. If France was planning a purely defensive war and did not know what Belgium would do, why had it not fortified its whole frontier? If it planned an offensive war, even if it were allowed to cross Belgium, could it really beat an enemy as powerful as Germany? (Spears 4-7).

These questions remained unanswered. Though Georges went on to show his two English guests "miles of tank obstacles" and "the amazing forts of the Maginot Line, with their underground railways" and "garrisons . . . hundreds of feet below the surface" (Spears 8), the French never had a clear-cut strategy. Still more remarkably, neither Churchill nor Georges ever mentioned Poland or the negotiations underway in Moscow, where Ribbentrop and Molotov were closing a deal that would shortly cut out Britain and France as well as cutting up the nation they had both pledged--remember?-- to defend.

This deal should not have taken France and Britain wholly by surprise. The Italians had known about it ever since the previous spring, when Johnny von Herwarth--as noted earlier--tipped off Guido Relli at the Italian embassy. But after his set-to with Ribbentrop in Salzburg and then with Hitler at the Berghof, Count Ciano returned to Rome so "disgusted" with the lies and deceptions of Germany that he urged Mussolini to stay out of further involvement in its wars (Ciano JP 1:129). Nevertheless, Johnny did his best to keep both the Italians and the Americans abreast of what was happening. On August 16 in Moscow, guests at a ball given by the German Embassy began to notice the curious absence of Ambassador Schulenburg. At this opportune moment, Johnny told both Chip Bohlen and the first secretary of the Italian embassy not only that Schulenburg was even then talking with Molotov but also that Ribbentrop was ready to fly to Moscow and sign an agreement (Herwarth 159). Word was also passed to the Italians in Berlin, where Admiral Wilhelm Canaris--anti-Hitler Chief of the Abwehr (German Military Intelligence)--told the Italian military attaché what Hitler was planning. Though Mussolini was already balking at war, as the admiral might have known, Canaris hoped that il Duce might refuse to join any attack on Poland (Paillat 2 GI 78n20).

All the while, Schulenburg's courtship of Molotov was nearing consummation. On August 16 he cabled State Secretary Weizsächer that during a meeting held on the evening before, Molotov "quite clearly expressed [his] wish to conclude a non-aggression pact with us" (Yale Avalon https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/ns037.asp). At the same time, the Soviets used their meetings with the British and French officers to learn as much as they could about the weakness of their would-be prospective allies. When General Chapochnikov explained that the Soviets could attack Germany with 5000 planes and 120 infantry divisions, the British could offer nothing close to such numbers, and Admiral Drax divulged that by itself, Poland could not hold off the Wehrmacht for more than two weeks. This confirmed to Vorochilov what he already knew: that Britain and France could not effectively aid Poland from the west, and that Soviet troops could not reach the western half of Poland in time to thwart a German invasion (Paillat, 2 GI 78).

So even as the Soviet officers thus milked their French and British counterparts for useful information, Ribbentrop hastened to close a deal with Stalin. On August 18 he told Schulenburg to propose two articles to Molotov:

ARTICLE 1. The German Reich and the U.S.S.R. will in no event resort to war or to any other use of force with respect to each other.

ARTICLE 2. this agreement shall enter into force immediately upon signature and shall be valid and undenounceable thereafter for a term of twenty-five years. (Yale Avalon https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/ns040.asp)

Ribbentrop also implied that in return for letting Germany invade Poland, Germany would let the Soviet Union have its way with the Baltic States as well as getting a chunk of Poland.

In response, Stalin told a meeting of the Politburo on the very next day that the Soviet Union had a "capital choice": seek a "dangerous" modus vivendi with the western democracies or sign a non-aggression pact allowing Germany to conquer Poland but also granting Russia "a part of Poland" and "liberty of action in the Baltic States" (Paillat 2 GI 80). Stalin himself, of course, had already chosen the latter course. Besides what Russia would gain in the Baltics and Poland, he aimed to see both sides exhausted by the coming war between Germany and the Anglo-French allies--so that Europe might be ripe for Soviet domination (Paillat 2 GI 81-82),

By late that night, as Schulenburg reported to the German Foreign Office, the Soviets had re-drafted Ribbentrop's two articles by turning them into five, but the only substantive changes were a limit of five years for the treaty (renewable at that time) and the explicit requirement that "a special protocol . . . in the field of foreign policy" be signed at the same time. (Yale Avalon Document 190, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/ns043.asp). Since Hitler knew very well what that protocol meant for his designs on Poland, he drafted a telegram that Ribbentrop addressed directly to Stalin via Schulenburg, who was ordered to hand it to Molotov. While accepting the Soviet draft of the proposed agreement, Hitler said that the "supplementary protocol" could be clarified by means of personal negotiation, and for that purpose he asked Stalin to receive Ribbentrop no later than Wednesday, August 23 "to draw up and sign the non-aggression pact as well as the protocol" (Yale Avalon Document 189, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/ns044.asp).

With the telegram sent off about 4:30 PM on August 20, Hitler anxiously awaited Stalin's response. After silently pacing the great halls of the Berghof for much of the next day, he finally got the news in the middle of dinner. "I have them . . . I have them," he flushingly blurted. Over coffee at the end of the meal he trumpeted the news to all present, calling first for champagne to toast this "great diplomatic triumph" and then for the showing of a film in which the Red Army parades before Stalin. "What happiness," he declared, "that such a powerful army is now neutralized" (Toland, Hitler 2: 49).

On the next day, August 22, after giving final instructions to the departing Ribbentrop, Hitler addressed a specially convoked meeting of his high command at the Berghof. Since Hitler's right-hand man Hermann Göring showed up in a ridiculous outfit--sleeveless green leather shirt, grey knickers, grey stockings, red and gold belt, and ceremonial dagger sheathed in gilded leather--all the others thought the meeting was a masquerade. But Hitler was deadly serious. Announcing that he was about to conclude a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, he also declared that "the order of the attack on Poland is fixed for dawn on August 26" (Paillat, 2 GI 87). He then belched the dragon fire of pure megalomania. Reminding his hearers that "Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter," he called for the "physical destruction" of the enemy, meaning first of all the merciless annihilation of "men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language" so that Germany might gain the Lebensraum--the living space--it needed (Lochner 11-12). Nothing would stop them. Those "wretched worms, Daladier and Chamberlain," he predicted, "will be too cowardly to attack." Dismissing the weakness of Mussolini and the Emperor of Japan, he declared that Stalin alone would be his only partner in conquest--as if their division of Poland would be merely a prelude to "the redistribution of the world" (Lochner 1-4). Most stunning of all was his final prediction: "After Stalin's death--he is a very sick man--we shall demolish the Soviet Union. The dawn of German domination of the world will then break" (AP, "Reveal").

Though Hitler had already left behind him a trail of broken pledges and shredded treaties, this was probably the first time he had ever quite so emphatically revealed his treacherous intentions in advance: just before the non-aggression pact was signed, he proclaimed his intention to demolish it--along with the Soviet Union. This was the personal secret hidden beneath and behind the officially secret protocol that Germany shared with Russia--their secret plan to carve up Poland.

At 9:00 PM on August 22, Ribbentrop and his aides took off for Moscow in a four-engine Condor FW 200. Though they stopped overnight in Königsberg (ironically enough the birthplace of Immanuel Kant, who wrote a famous essay on "Perpetual Peace"), they did not sleep. Ceaselessly phoning Berlin and Berchtesgarten, the senior members of the delegation scribbled notes for their meeting with Stalin while the younger members drank to war in the bar of the Park Hotel (Schmidt 202). Amazingly enough, however, the delegation included one man who would not have drunk with them: Johnny von Herwarth, who had done all he could to tell his fellow diplomats what was coming.

Though there was now no chance of stopping it, the Anglo-French delegation in Moscow made one more feeble try. In the late afternoon of August 22, just hours before Ribbentrop left Berlin, General Doumenc asked Marshall Vorochilov to meet the Anglo-French delegation once again. The Marshall could only decline. "If the French and English delegations had arrived with all propositions concrete and clear," he said, "we could have finished all our work and signed the military convention."³⁶ Whether or not they could ever have signed it, they would never sign it now. Its time had irrevocably passed.

The next day, after a four-hour flight from Königsburg delivered him to Moscow, Ribbentrop was whisked at once to the Kremlin, where Stalin got him down to business at once. First of all, he swept aside like so much rubbish the Briand-Kellogg pact of 1928-29, which had outlawed war among its signatories--including Britain, France, Germany, and the Soviet Union. Stalin then told Ribbentrop exactly what the Soviet Union wanted from its agreement with Germany: the Baltics and half of Poland. If not, said Stalin, Ribbentrop might as well fly back to Berlin at once (Caton 2: 547). But as soon as Ribbentrop had gained--via telegram--Hitler's acceptance of Stalin's terms, he signed the non-aggression pact (Paillat, 2 GI 88).

In Paris, at the end of the afternoon of this same day, French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier put a crucial question to a council of war--a gathering of his leading military and civil officers. Does France, he asked, have "the necessary means to honor its commitments with regard to Poland, that is to say, to declare war on Germany?" According to Claude Paillat, who has examined all the relevant evidence of French preparedness, a truthful answer would have been unequivocally no. But the answers Daladier got were blandly reassuring. "The state of aviation," replied Air Minister Guy La Chambre, "should not weigh on decisions of the government, as during the crisis of Munich in 1938." Maurice Gamelin, Commander of the French Army, spoke just four words. "The army is ready," he said (Paillat 2 GI 12). Ready, he should have said, to let Germany take Poland.

Yet in Berlin on the morning of this same day, August 23, Hitler was told that Britain was ready. In a letter delivered to the Berghof by British Ambassador Nevile Henderson, Chamberlain told Hitler that Britain was fully prepared to meet its obligations to Poland. The next day in London he made the same statement to an exceptional gathering of both houses of parliament--Commons and Lords--which massively approved, and on the day after that, August 25, Poland and the United Kingdom signed the Agreement of Mutual Assistance, formalizing the pledge of support that Britain had made on March 31. In response to these moves, Hitler did just what he had done to justify his invasion of Czechoslovakia back in October. On receiving Chamberlain's letter from Henderson on the 23^rd, he denounced the abuse of German minorities in Poland, charging Britain with encouraging it and threatening war if it continued (Coulondre, "Mr. Chamberlian's Message" No. 217), and on the 24^th he answered Chamberlain's letter by repeating this charge in writing: "The unconditional guarantee given by Britain to Poland has encouraged the latter to terrorize the German minorities." Possibly taking his devious cue from the radio address delivered that very day by the new Pope Pius XII, who called for peace and "new negotiations," he also tasked other Powers--meaning mainly Britain and France--with offering a "pacific solution of present difficulties" (Coulondre, "Mr. Chamberlain's Message" No. 221).

Friday, August 25, was a day of nonstop news and dueling developments. At 12:45 PM, after notifying Mussolini that he was about to invade Poland, Hitler summoned Henderson to the Berghof, told him the Polish question had to be settled once and for all, and offered to make a pact with Britain that would guarantee the future of the British Empire (Overy). At 3:02 PM, he ordered his troops to attack Poland the very next day, confirming what he had told his high command on August 22 (Overy). But he was soon confronted by a rapid trio of revelations. First, a telegram from Mussolini informed him--probably not to his surprise-- that Italy would not join him in his war against Poland (Munholland). Second, at 5:30 PM Robert Coulondre--the French Ambassador--told him "on [his] word of honor" that France would fight for Poland if it was attacked (Overy, Paillat, 2 GI 95). Finally, at 6:00 PM, Ribbentrop brought news that England had just signed the Agreement of Mutual Assistance, committing itself--like France--to fight for Poland if attacked. Whether or not Hitler was finally persuaded that either one would do so (something he had scathingly denied up to now), he then decided to postpone the invasion of Poland (Overy).

In London meanwhile, the last of Hermann Göring's efforts to hold off the war played itself out to the bitter end. Though Göring was Hitler's second in command, he had up to now been doing all he could to check the Führer's belligerence. On the morning of August 25, in an eleventh-hour quest for "an understanding with England," he sent to London a wealthy Swedish businessman named Birger Dahlerus, whom he had known for years and who had excellent contacts in England.³⁷ At 6:30 PM Dahlerus spoke to Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Minister. Testifying about this trip at the Nuremberg Tribunal in March of 1946, Dahlerus could not say whether or not Hitler had approved it. But in any case, since Halifax was expecting a personal report on Hitler's proposals from Ambassador Henderson, who was due in London on the very next day, Halifax thanked Dahlerus for his efforts and said he hoped that "an agreement might really become possible." But this was not good enough for Göring. When Dahlerus reached him by phone at 8:00 PM, Göring urged him "to do everything in [his] power to arrange a conference between representatives of England and Germany." As a result, Dahlerus met Halifax again at 11:00 AM the next morning (Saturday), obtained from him "an excellent letter" clearly stating England's desire for "a peaceful settlement," and flew back to Berlin, where about 10 PM he caught up with Göring in his train and handed him the letter. After tearing it open, reading it quickly, and then asking Dahlerus to "translate it exactly," Göring took him at once to the Chancellery. When they showed the letter to Hitler just after midnight, he sounded by turns like Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll. After launching a bellicose rant about building U-boats and airplanes to "win the war," he finally settled down to formulate a list of proposals that Dahlerus might take back to England: a list more detailed than the one he had given to Henderson on Friday.

It is hard to know what to make of these proposals. Since they included not only a guarantee of Poland's boundaries but also a pledge that Poland would get both "a free harbor in Danzig" and "a corridor to Gdynia," they come close to a total renunciation of Hitler's rationale for war. They were plausible enough for Dahlerus to take back to London by special plane on Sunday morning, August 27, for a meeting with Halifax and Chamberlain at 10 Downing Street, and then for a long conversation with Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs. According to Dahlerus, "the English made the greatest effort to deal in a fair and peaceable way" with the points of Hitler's proposal, but they wanted Poland's borders to be guaranteed by all five great powers (Russia, Germany, France, England, and Italy), and regarding the corridor they wanted Germany to start negotiations with Poland at once. After Dahlerus flew back to Berlin and reported the English position to Göring about 11 that night, Göring said he had better discuss it with Hitler alone and headed off to the Chancellery while Dahlerus went to his hotel. His sleep was short--if he slept at all. At 1:00 AM a phone call from the Chancellery informed him that Hitler would accept the English terms if they were essentially confirmed by Henderson, the British ambassador, who was due back from London that day--Monday, August 28.

Heading straight to the British Embassy, Dahlerus relayed this news--with Göring's full knowledge-- to Sir Ogilvie Forbes, Counsellor and Chargé d'Affaires, who cabled London at once, as Göring was happy to learn from Dahlerus in the morning. Shortly after midnight on the next day, Tuesday the 29th, yet another phone call from the Chancellery--this time from Lieutenant Colonel Konrad-- brought Dahlerus some remarkable news. On receiving from Henderson a written statement of the British terms, Konrad said, Hitler found them "highly satisfactory" and now, Konrad added, "peace is assured!"

But by 10:30 that night it was falling apart. Rushing to see Dahlerus at his hotel, Forbes reported that Hitler and Henderson had just parted company after "a big quarrel." What then, Forbes wanted to know, could Dahlerus suggest? Before Dahlerus could answer he was phoned by Göring, who summoned him to his house, confirmed the story of the quarrel, explained every point in the German reply to the British note delivered by Henderson, and told Dahlerus to go back to London at once and "make every effort" to patch things up with the British government. Just a few hours later, therefore, at 5:00 AM on Wednesday the 30th, the indefatigable Dahlerus flew to London yet again to meet Chamberlain, Halifax, and Cadogan. But they now had no trust left for Hitler, and saw no way of stopping him from making war on Poland. Phoning this news to Göring in Berlin, Dahlerus tried to persuade him to arrange a meeting of British and German delegates somewhere outside Germany. But this was impossible, said Göring. The only hope, he seemed to imply, was a meeting in Warsaw set for that afternoon: a meeting in which the Polish Government would discuss German proposals that the British Government viewed "with the greatest suspicion." Late that night, after Dahlerus returned to Berlin, learned from Göring what the proposals were, and got them in a written note, he telephoned their contents to Forbes at the British Embassy, and then delivered the note to Henderson at 10 AM on Thursday the 31^st.

It was now high time to let Poland have its say. Since Henderson told Dahlerus that he must immediately take the German note to the Polish Ambassador, Józef Lipsky, Dahlerus did so--only to find that Lipsky had "no reason to negotiate with the German government." By 1:00 that afternoon, Göring himself had received a copy of a cable to Lipsky in which the Polish government had said essentially the same thing. To Dahlerus the situation now seemed "impossible." Late that afternoon, he managed to meet both Henderson and Forbes at Göring's house, where Dahlerus suggested that Göring should represent Germany at a meeting with British delegates in Holland. Though all present agreed, and though Henderson promised to take this proposal to the British government, Dahlerus suspected that he already knew that German forces "were on the march." And so they were. When Dahlerus next met Göring at 8 AM on Friday September 1, he learned enough to realize that "the full force of the German army" had been unleashed on Poland.

Why should the wholly predictable failure of the Dahlerus mission be of any interest to us now? For a start, it uncannily re-enacts the diplomatic moves that Neville Chamberlain so doggedly pursued in the days leading up to Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia, which had begun precisely eleven months before. Though history never repeats itself, it occasionally rhymes, and nothing about the outbreak of World War II is more astonishing than the flurry of shuttle diplomacy that led right up to its opening blast. It also shows us again how utterly duplicitous Hitler could be. To keep the British from declaring war as long as possible, he masqueraded as a reasonable man willing to accommodate their terms. But he had already voiced his real aims on the evening of August 22, when he told his high command that Germany would not only annihilate the Poles but eventually demolish the Soviet Union and dominate the whole world. He saw nothing but victory ahead of him. As soon as the news of the signing of the pact with Russia reached him at the Berghof on August 23, he cried, "We have won!" And the next day, as he and his guests beheld the crimson hues of the setting sun from the terrace of the Berghof, all he could see was "tides of blood" (Toland 2:56).

Up to 11:00 AM on September 3, when Chamberlain declared war on Germany, he did everything he could to stem those tides. In the course of what he called "one long nightmare," he was accused of "cowardice and treachery" in the House of Commons for holding back the declaration while unable to publicize his reasons for doing so: 1) through Birger Dahlerus, as already explained, Göring was making last-ditch overtures for peace; 2) by means of a telephone call from Count Ciano to Lord Halifax just after midnight on August 31, Mussolini proposed a conference on September 5 to revise "the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles which are the cause of the present troubles"; and 3) the French sought time to evacuate their women and children and mobilize their armies (Chamberlain 4: 443). But by the late morning of September 3, diplomacy had done its utmost. It was now time for war.

TO RETURN TO CONTENTS CLICK HERE

FOR CHAPTER FIVE CLICK HERE

FOR WORKS CITED CLICK HERE