German demands on Poland

On 21 March 1939 the Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop summoned the Polish ambassador in Berlin, Józef Lipski, and renewed Germany’s demands on Poland: the incorporation of the Free City of Danzig into the Reich and consent to the construction of an extraterritorial motorway and railway across Polish Pomerania linking the Reich with East Prussia. It is often said that on this date Hitler “demanded the return of Danzig”. That is a simplification. The demands were not new – Berlin had first put them forward as early as October 1938 – and no formal ultimatum was issued on 21 March. What had changed were the tone and the circumstances. The conversation took place six days after Germany occupied Bohemia and Moravia and a day after Ribbentrop had demanded that Lithuania hand over Klaipėda. In Warsaw it was read as a sign that Poland was next in line.

The first demands: Berchtesgaden, October 1938

For the first few years after the declaration of non-aggression of 1934 the Danzig question remained in the background. As late as February 1938 Adolf Hitler assured the Reichstag that Poland respected the national character of the Free City, and that Danzig and Germany respected Polish rights. Everything changed after the Munich Agreement. On 24 October 1938 Ribbentrop invited Lipski to lunch at the Grand Hotel in Berchtesgaden and put to him the idea of a “general settlement” (Gesamtlösung) of Polish–German relations. Danzig was to return to the Reich, and Germany was to obtain an extraterritorial motorway and railway across the Polish Corridor. In exchange, Poland would keep an extraterritorial road and railway in Danzig, a free port and economic facilities; Germany would recognise its borders, and the 1934 declaration would be extended by twenty-five years. Ribbentrop also proposed that Poland join the Anti-Comintern Pact.

The Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, considered these proposals unacceptable. On 19 November 1938 Lipski handed Ribbentrop the reply that any attempt to incorporate Danzig into the Reich must lead to conflict, and proposed replacing the League of Nations guarantee with a bilateral Polish–German agreement on the Free City. Berlin took this as a sign that Poland would need more persuading. As early as 24 November Hitler ordered the army to prepare a plan for the surprise occupation of Danzig should a favourable political situation arise.

On 5 January 1939 Beck met Hitler at the Berghof. The Chancellor was courteous but firm: Danzig was German and would sooner or later return to the Reich. The next day, in Munich, Ribbentrop repeated the October proposals. Beck returned to Warsaw convinced that the matter was becoming dangerous and presented his pessimistic conclusion to President Ignacy Mościcki and Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły. At the end of January Ribbentrop came to Warsaw for the fifth anniversary of the 1934 declaration. He was received with full honours, but on Danzig and the motorway he was again refused. On 30 January, in a speech to the Reichstag, Hitler still spoke warmly of Polish–German friendship.

The conversation of 21 March

In the spring of 1939 the map of Central Europe changed within a week. On 14 March the Slovak State was proclaimed, on 15 March the Wehrmacht entered Prague, and on 16 March Hitler announced the creation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Hungary occupied Carpatho-Ukraine and gained the common border with Poland that Beck had long wanted, but at the same time German troops took up positions in western Slovakia, and Poland found itself in a German pincer from the north, west and south. The Polish press reacted critically to the events in Bohemia, which caused irritation in Berlin.

At noon on 21 March Ribbentrop received Lipski. According to the ambassador’s account, the conversation was distinctly cooler than previous ones. Ribbentrop complained about the tone of the Polish press and declared that the Führer was increasingly surprised by Poland’s attitude. He then repeated the October proposals: the return of Danzig to the Reich and an extraterritorial link across Pomerania, in exchange for recognition of Poland’s borders and a twenty-five-year pact. He added a hint that Slovakia could be discussed as part of a general settlement, and suggested that Beck should soon come to Berlin to talk to Hitler. He also pressed for a quick settlement. In a later memorandum the Polish government recorded that the German side had made the maintenance of its proposals in full conditional on an early agreement. It was not an ultimatum with a deadline, but the time pressure was obvious. Lipski left for Warsaw to report to Beck.

Poland was also alarmed by what was happening at the same time. The day before, in the same office, the Lithuanian Foreign Minister Juozas Urbšys had been told to hand over the Klaipėda Region, and on 22 March Lithuania gave way. The pattern was the same as with Czechoslovakia: first the “settlement” of an allegedly minor issue, then a diktat.

Poland’s response

Warsaw responded in two ways. On 23 March, on the instructions of the Inspector General of the Armed Forces, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, the Chief of the General Staff, General Wacław Stachiewicz, ordered a secret emergency mobilisation of part of the armed forces. Within a few days four infantry divisions were mobilised, among them the 26th Infantry Division and the 30th Polesie Infantry Division, together with General Władysław Anders’s Nowogródek Cavalry Brigade. Some of these units were moved to threatened sectors – north of Warsaw around Płock and Sierpc, and to the area of Piotrków – and soon afterwards work began on forming army commands, including that of the Modlin Army. It was the first step on the road to war and at the same time a signal to Berlin that Poland did not intend to share Czechoslovakia’s fate.

On 24 March Beck gathered his closest colleagues at the ministry and declared that Poland had drawn a line beyond which it would not retreat: a unilateral attempt to change the status of Danzig would mean war. On the same day the Polish ambassador in London, Edward Raczyński, passed on to the British Beck’s proposal that, instead of a broad declaration by four powers, a confidential bilateral agreement should be concluded.

On 26 March Lipski returned to Berlin and handed Ribbentrop a written reply. Poland proposed a joint Polish–German guarantee of the Free City’s separate status, with full freedom for its inhabitants in internal affairs and respect for Polish rights, and declared its readiness to grant further facilities for rail and road transit between the Reich and East Prussia. The only thing it would not accept was extraterritoriality – that is, surrendering sovereignty over the strip of land through which the routes would run. Ribbentrop received the reply badly. According to Polish accounts, he declared that any violation of Danzig’s borders by Polish troops would be treated as aggression against the Reich, and accused Poland of a mobilisation reminiscent of Czechoslovakia’s conduct. On 28 March Beck told the Reich’s ambassador in Warsaw, Hans-Adolf von Moltke, that any attempt by Germany or the Danzig Senate to change the status of the Free City would be a cause of war for Poland. When Moltke remarked that Poland wanted to negotiate “at bayonet point”, Beck replied that this was merely a repetition of the German method.

Berlin’s motives

To many contemporaries, in the West as well, the German demands looked moderate. Danzig was an overwhelmingly German city, governed since 1933 by the Nazis under Gauleiter Albert Forster, and an extraterritorial road across the Corridor would not take a single metre of land from Poland. Warsaw saw things differently. Danzig was the key to the mouth of the Vistula, and an extraterritorial strip across Pomerania would have meant permanent German rights in the very middle of Poland’s access to the sea, which could at any moment become a pretext for fresh demands. Joining the Anti-Comintern Pact would have bound Poland to Germany against the USSR and made it a junior partner of the Reich, as had happened to Hungary. The fate of Czechoslovakia had shown that one concession leads to the next.

Some historians believe that in the autumn of 1938 and the winter of 1939 Hitler genuinely hoped to win Poland as an ally or satellite in a future war, whether in the west or against the USSR, and that Danzig was for him a test of its compliance. As late as 25 March he instructed the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Walther von Brauchitsch, not to resolve the Danzig question by force for the time being, so as not to drive Poland into Britain’s arms, but to consider military action if favourable political conditions arose. The Polish reply of 26 March convinced him that he could not count on voluntary concessions, and in the last days of March the staffs began work on a plan for war with Poland.

Significance

The conversation of 21 March opened the last, five-month chapter of Polish–German relations before the war. Reports of German pressure on Poland and of Polish troop movements, exaggerated by rumour, prompted the British government to take an unprecedented step: on 31 March 1939 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced a guarantee to Poland. On 3 April the Wehrmacht High Command issued a directive on Case White (Fall Weiss), the war against Poland, with readiness set for 1 September. On 28 April Hitler repudiated the 1934 declaration, and on 5 May Beck answered him in the Sejm with a speech about the honour that Poland would not surrender for the sake of peace.

Throughout the summer of 1939 Danzig became the symbol of the whole dispute: the city armed itself and took in German “volunteers”, and the Danzig Senate harassed Polish customs officers. For Hitler, however, it was not an end in itself. On 23 May he told his generals that the issue was not Danzig but the expansion of living space in the east. On 1 September 1939 the first shots of the war were fired precisely on the territory of the Free City, at Westerplatte and at the Polish Post Office, and on the same day Forster proclaimed the incorporation of Danzig into the Reich.