The German ultimatum to Poland

At midnight on 30–31 August 1939, in the office of the Reich Foreign Minister on the Wilhelmstraße in Berlin, there took place one of the best-known scenes of the last days of peace. Joachim von Ribbentrop took out a long document and read it aloud in German, at breakneck speed, to the British ambassador, Nevile Henderson. It contained Germany’s proposals for settling the dispute with Poland, set out in sixteen points. When Henderson asked for the text, Ribbentrop refused: it was too late, he said, because the Polish plenipotentiary whom Germany had demanded by the end of 30 August had not come to Berlin. The following evening German radio announced that Poland had rejected Germany’s “magnanimous” proposals. The Polish government never received them.

War chronologies record that on 30 August Germany presented Poland with an ultimatum concerning the Corridor and the Free City of Danzig. This is a simplification. There was no formal ultimatum – that is, a demand with a deadline and a threat of consequences – addressed to the Polish government. What there was, rather, was a deadline set through Britain, which Henderson himself called an ultimatum, and demands which were never put to Poland but whose rejection was nonetheless announced. The whole procedure, as Hitler himself later admitted in the presence of his interpreter, was meant to provide Germany with an alibi.

Six days’ delay

On 25 August, after the signing of the Anglo-Polish alliance in London and the news from Mussolini that Italy was not ready for war, Hitler halted the attack on Poland that had been set for dawn the next day. He did not abandon the war. He merely wanted to try once more what had failed to work after the pact with Moscow: to detach Britain from Poland, or at least to make Poland look, in the eyes of the world and of his own people, like the side that had rejected peace. All the while the Wehrmacht continued its concentration, and there were clashes on the border, such as the Jablunkov incident, as well as German terrorist attacks, like the one at Tarnów station.

There were several channels of communication. The official one was Henderson, who flew to London on 26 August with Hitler’s “final offer”: once the Polish question had been settled, Germany was prepared to guarantee the existence of the British Empire. The unofficial one was the Swedish industrialist Birger Dahlerus, a friend of Hermann Göring, who shuttled by air between Berlin and London. On the evening of 28 August Henderson brought back the British government’s reply. London declared its wish for an understanding with Germany, but not at Poland’s expense, and proposed direct Polish–German negotiations, the outcome of which would be guaranteed by the powers. It added that it had obtained the Polish government’s consent to such talks.

A plenipotentiary within 24 hours

At 7.15 p.m. on 29 August, at the Reich Chancellery, Hitler handed Henderson his reply. It opened with a long indictment of Poland: the rejection of the German proposals in March, the mobilisation, the harassment of Danzig, the persecution of the German minority. The Reich’s demands were defined as “the return of Danzig and the Corridor to Germany” and the safeguarding of the security of the Germans in the rest of Poland – far more than in the proposals of October 1938 and March 1939, when the talk had been only of Danzig and an extraterritorial road. Nevertheless, the Reich government declared that, “in spite of its scepticism”, it accepted the British proposal for direct negotiations. It would draw up its proposals and, if there was time, pass them to the British before the Polish plenipotentiary arrived. Germany counted on the arrival of such a plenipotentiary, empowered not only to negotiate but also to conclude an agreement, “tomorrow, Wednesday, 30 August”.

Henderson immediately remarked that this sounded like an ultimatum. According to his telegram to London, Hitler and Ribbentrop, after several heated exchanges, assured him that it was intended only to stress the urgency of the matter at a moment when two mobilised armies stood facing each other. Asked whether a Polish envoy would be well received and whether the talks would be conducted on an equal footing, Hitler replied: “Of course.”

In Warsaw and in London nobody had any doubt what a summons for a Polish plenipotentiary to come to Berlin the very next day meant. In March 1939 the President of Czechoslovakia, Emil Hácha, summoned to the Reich Chancellery, had signed his consent to the occupation of his country in the middle of the night under the threat that Prague would be bombed. The Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, had no intention of going to Berlin, or of sending anyone there, on such terms. The British government took a similar view. On 30 August the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, telegraphed Henderson that he could not advise the Poles to accept such a procedure, as it was “wholly unreasonable”. He proposed the normal diplomatic channel: when the German proposals were ready, Ribbentrop should summon the Polish ambassador and hand them to him for transmission to his government. London therefore did not press Warsaw to comply with the German demand, and the British ambassador in Warsaw, Howard Kennard, presented Beck with London’s reply to Berlin, together with its recommendations to the Poles, only in the early hours of 31 August, after the German deadline had expired.

Mobilisation postponed

On the same day a drama over mobilisation was played out in Warsaw. Since 23 August a covert emergency mobilisation had been under way, extended to further units on 27 August. On 29 August, at the request of Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, President Ignacy Mościcki decided to proclaim general mobilisation. While the notices were already being prepared, the British and French ambassadors, Kennard and Léon Noël, began urging Beck that open mobilisation would damage the last attempts at negotiation and give Hitler a pretext for accusing Poland of provocation. The Polish government gave way and the announcement was postponed. Only in the afternoon of 30 August did posters announcing general mobilisation appear on the streets of Polish towns, with Thursday 31 August as its first day. Because of the delay, when war broke out a large proportion of the reservists were still on their way to their units. According to estimates cited in Polish literature, by 1 September the mobilisation of the army had been about two-thirds completed and its concentration less than half. Berlin used the Polish mobilisation in its propaganda as proof of Poland’s ill will all the same.

The sixteen points

By midnight on 30–31 August no Polish plenipotentiary had arrived in Berlin. A few minutes after midnight Henderson came to Ribbentrop with the British government’s reply. London took note of Germany’s agreement to direct negotiations, proposed that both sides undertake not to make any troop movements while they lasted, and suggested a provisional arrangement for Danzig. It added that it was impracticable to establish contact that same day.

In response, as Henderson described it in a telegram sent the same night, Ribbentrop read out a long document in German “at top speed”. Henderson, assuming he would receive the text anyway, did not try to note down all the points. He remembered the main ones: the return of Danzig to the Reich, a plebiscite in the Corridor, an international commission for the period of the vote, Gdynia to remain Polish. When he asked for the text, Ribbentrop refused, saying it was too late because the Polish representative had not arrived by midnight. Henderson retorted that in that case the demand for a plenipotentiary to be sent by 30 August had in effect been an ultimatum. Ribbentrop denied it, calling it the ambassador’s invention, and declared that he would never summon the Polish ambassador himself; at most he might receive him if the ambassador asked for an interview. The interpreter Paul Schmidt recalled that both men were so angry that for a moment he feared they would come to blows.

The full text, made public the following day, contained these points. The Free City of Danzig was to return to the Reich immediately. The fate of the Corridor – the area from the Baltic to the line Kwidzyn–Grudziądz–Chełmno–Bydgoszcz and on westwards to Trzcianka – was to be decided by a plebiscite held no earlier than twelve months later. The vote was to be open to those who had lived there or been born there before 1 January 1918, and Germans who had left after the war were to return to cast their ballots. Until the plebiscite the area was to be placed under the authority of a commission of four powers – Italy, the USSR, France and Britain – and the Polish army, police and officials were to leave it within a short time. Gdynia was to remain Polish. The losing side was to receive an extraterritorial strip one kilometre wide for a motorway and a four-track railway. Danzig and Gdynia were to be purely commercial cities, without fortifications, and Hel was to be demilitarised. Disputes over the treatment of minorities since 1918 were to be examined by an international commission; the minorities were to receive far-reaching guarantees and exemption from military service; and once agreement had been reached, both armies were to demobilise.

On paper the proposals looked moderate, and some historians, especially in Germany in the first decades after the war, presented them as a reasonable offer rejected by Poland. Today the prevailing view is that they were never meant to be a basis for negotiation. Before any talks at all, Poland would have had to withdraw from most of Pomerania, and its access to the sea would have been decided by a plebiscite held under the supervision of foreign powers, with voters brought in from the Reich. A deadline set so that it could not be met, and the refusal to hand the text to anyone, showed that the aim was something else. Hitler is said to have remarked in Schmidt’s presence that he needed an alibi, above all in the eyes of the German people, to show that he had done everything to preserve peace.

31 August

On the morning of 31 August Dahlerus, to whom Göring had shown the German document during the night, took its contents to the British embassy and from there, together with the embassy counsellor, to the Polish ambassador in Berlin, Józef Lipski. According to Dahlerus’s account, Lipski did not want to acquaint himself with it and was convinced that in the event of war the German regime would quickly collapse. Lipski was, in any case, under instructions not to accept from the Germans any documents that might turn out to be an ultimatum.

That same day Beck, after talking to Kennard, instructed Lipski to request a meeting with Ribbentrop. The Polish government gave the British a written reply: it confirmed its readiness for a direct exchange of views with Germany, and proposed a mutual undertaking that troops would not cross the border while the talks lasted, as well as a provisional arrangement in Danzig. Lipski asked for an interview in the early afternoon. Ribbentrop received him only in the evening, at about half past six. The ambassador stated that the Polish government was favourably considering the British proposal and would shortly give a formal reply. Ribbentrop asked only whether he had full powers to negotiate. When Lipski replied that he did not, the conversation was over. On returning to the embassy, Lipski found that its telephone link with Warsaw had been cut.

That the conversation would change nothing had been decided earlier. Around midday on 31 August Hitler had signed Directive No. 1 for the Conduct of the War, setting the attack on Poland for 4.45 a.m. on 1 September. At around 9 p.m. German radio stations broadcast an announcement with the text of the sixteen points and a statement that Germany had waited in vain for two days for a Polish plenipotentiary, and that its proposals had therefore “in effect been rejected”. A quarter of an hour later the State Secretary, Ernst von Weizsäcker, handed the text to Henderson. It was the first official copy the British received. Poland never received an official copy.

What followed

That same evening SS men staged a Polish attack on the radio station at Gleiwitz, and at dawn on 1 September Germany attacked Poland. In his speech to the Reichstag Hitler presented the war as a response to Poland’s refusal to negotiate and to Polish provocations, and the sixteen points and the “vain wait” for a Polish plenipotentiary became a permanent fixture of German propaganda. A telegram from Halifax, who during the night of 31 August–1 September had urged that Lipski should at least be allowed to accept the German document, was deciphered at the British embassy in Warsaw early in the morning of 1 September, by which time it no longer had any meaning. On 3 September Britain and France declared war on Germany.

For historians the episode of 29–31 August is an example of how Hitler conducted diplomacy in the last days of peace: not in order to reach an understanding with Poland, but to drive a wedge between Poland and its allies and to prepare his own people for a war which the Germans, unlike in 1914, greeted without enthusiasm. In this respect he failed. Neither Britain nor France regarded Poland’s stance as a reason to break their commitments. According to the American historian Gerhard Weinberg, even Henderson – for two years of his embassy in Berlin one of the most zealous advocates of concessions to Germany – understood during the night of 30–31 August that he was dealing with an alibi carefully prepared for a war that had already been decided upon.