Hitler renounces the naval agreement and the declaration with Poland

On 28 April 1939 Adolf Hitler delivered, in Berlin’s Kroll Opera House, where the German parliament had sat since the fire in the Reichstag building, one of the longest speeches of his life. According to the French ambassador in Berlin, Robert Coulondre, it lasted two and a half hours. Formally it was a reply to the appeal of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt of 14 April. The most important things in it, however, were two announcements tucked away in the middle. Hitler declared that the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 had lost its basis, and that he regarded the Polish–German non-aggression declaration of 1934 as having been unilaterally violated by Poland and therefore “no longer in existence”. The governments in London and Warsaw received German memoranda on both matters bearing that day’s date.

Some chronologies split these events over two days, with the naval agreement renounced on 28 April and the declaration with Poland on 29 April. In fact Hitler renounced both agreements in the same speech, and the memorandum to Poland was dated 28 April. The date of 29 April may derive from the fact that the French ambassador in Warsaw, Léon Noël, reported in a dispatch of that day that the German chargé d’affaires had delivered the memorandum to the Polish Foreign Ministry “this morning”, and the Warsaw newspapers published its text on 29 April. Both decisions should therefore be tied to the day of the speech.

After the guarantee

The speech closed six weeks in which Germany’s position had changed more than in the several preceding years. On 15 March the Wehrmacht occupied Bohemia and Moravia in breach of the Munich Agreement, and on 21 March the Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, renewed the demands on Poland: Danzig was to return to the Reich, and an extraterritorial motorway and railway line were to run across Polish Pomerania. On 26 March Poland refused. Then, for the first time since 1933, Britain stopped giving way. On 31 March the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, announced the British guarantee to Poland in the House of Commons, and on 6 April, after talks in London with the Polish Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, the two governments issued a communiqué on mutual undertakings of assistance, to be replaced by a permanent agreement. On 7 April Italy invaded Albania, and on 13 April Britain and France responded with guarantees for Romania and Greece. On 26 April Chamberlain announced the introduction of conscription in Britain, the first in peacetime in its history.

Hitler took the guarantee as an act of defiance by a state that was meant to be his junior partner, and as the beginning of the “encirclement” of Germany. On 1 April, at the launch of the battleship Tirpitz at Wilhelmshaven, he threatened publicly that if Britain did not abandon this policy, Germany would renounce the naval agreement. Two days later the chief of the OKW sent the armed forces the Case White directive, which ordered readiness for war with Poland from 1 September. Outside a narrow circle of military men nobody knew of this directive. The speech of 28 April was its public, diplomatic face.

The naval agreement

Hitler justified the renunciation of the naval agreement in the same way as at Wilhelmshaven. He said that in 1935 he himself had proposed a limit on the German fleet, but on one condition: the conviction that war between Germany and Britain would never again be possible. Now British policy, “unofficially and officially”, left no doubt that this conviction was no longer shared in London. Since Britain was proclaiming that Germany had to be opposed in all circumstances, and was confirming this through “the policy of encirclement known to us”, the basis of the agreement had fallen away. He added that this had no “practical material significance” for Germany but was a matter of self-respect, and that he would gladly enter into new negotiations if the British government so wished.

On this one point Hitler was telling the truth: ending the agreement changed nothing in the shipyards. In January 1939 he had already approved Plan Z, a shipbuilding programme for a fleet that was to exceed the 35 per cent limit many times over by the mid-1940s. The Kriegsmarine, however, was not even close to that limit. British experts estimated that Germany could reach it in 1942 or 1943 at the earliest. Renouncing the agreement was therefore a political gesture. Hitler was annulling an agreement he had for four years presented as proof of his desire for an understanding with Britain, and signalling that he would no longer keep to its limits if London would not give him a free hand on the Continent. The notes of 1935 had described the agreement as permanent and made no provision for denouncing it.

London received the decision without surprise. Germany had been saying for months that the agreement no longer sufficed, and for some time it had been refusing to give the British the information on shipbuilding that the agreement required. At a Cabinet meeting on 3 May the First Lord of the Admiralty judged that Germany was building ships as fast as it could but would not exceed 35 per cent before 1942 or 1943. The British government replied to Berlin with a note rejecting the charge that it was encircling Germany. Ending the agreement did, however, confirm Chamberlain’s Cabinet in its conviction that the Third Reich had to be contained rather than persuaded.

The declaration with Poland

The longer part of the speech concerned Poland. Hitler recalled that in 1934 he had concluded with “the late Marshal” Józef Piłsudski an agreement in which both states renounced war. He called Danzig “a German city that wishes to belong to Germany”. Then, for the first time in public, he listed the proposals made to Poland: Danzig was to return to the Reich as a free state, and Germany was to receive an extraterritorial road and railway line across the Corridor. In return he promised recognition of Poland’s economic rights in Danzig and a free port of any size, recognition of the Polish–German border as final, a twenty-five-year non-aggression pact, and a joint guarantee by Germany, Poland and Hungary of Slovakia’s independence. Poland, he said, had rejected this offer and agreed only to discuss replacing the League of Nations High Commissioner in Danzig and easing transit. Worse still, it had succumbed to a “lying campaign” in the international press and called up reservists, although Germany “had not called up a single man”.

The decisive argument concerned Britain. Poland had accepted an obligation of mutual assistance which in certain circumstances would require it to take up arms against Germany, even in a conflict between Germany and another state into which Britain had been drawn. According to Hitler, the 1934 declaration had left in force only the obligations that existed when it was signed, namely the alliance with France. The new obligation, he claimed, violated it. “I therefore consider the agreement that we once concluded with Marshal Piłsudski to have been unilaterally violated by Poland, and thereby no longer in existence,” he declared. He gave an assurance, however, that if Poland wished to conclude a new agreement, based on “absolutely clear” obligations for both sides, Germany was ready to do so.

The memorandum handed to Poland developed these arguments in diplomatic language. In it the German government wrote that the Polish–British agreement was a “regular pact of alliance” directed solely against Germany, and that Poland had “arbitrarily and unilaterally” deprived the declaration of its force. It ended with an invitation to talks on a new agreement.

Where the falsehood lay

Hitler’s argument did not survive comparison with the text of the declaration. The 1934 document stated that it did not affect the international obligations of either party, and it did not forbid new ones. If new agreements violated the declaration, Germany itself would already have done so by concluding the Anti-Comintern Pact and its agreements with Italy. The declaration had been concluded for ten years and could not be denounced during that time. The earliest possible date for denunciation fell in 1943, and even then a six-month period would begin, after which the declaration would lapse. The British prosecutor at Nuremberg called the renunciation “trebly invalid”: premature by more than five years, failing to observe the period of notice – since the attack came after only four months – and based on a pretext.

The account of the proposals themselves was false as well. The Polish Foreign Ministry assured the French ambassador that the proposal of a joint guarantee for Slovakia had never been formally put to Poland. Nor was it true that Germany had not called up reservists or given any thought to “moving against Poland” – for three weeks the staffs had been working on a plan of attack that was to be ready by 1 September. Hitler nevertheless kept up an appearance of moderation. Ambassador Coulondre wrote that the speech was a speech for the defence, not for the prosecution. At the same time he warned against being misled by its calm tone.

The rest of the speech was filled with mockery of Roosevelt. With exaggerated emphasis, and to the laughter of the deputies, Hitler read out the list of thirty-one states that, as the President had asked, Germany was not to attack, and declared that Germany had asked them whether they felt threatened. He offered to conclude non-aggression pacts with any state that wished for one.

Beck’s reply

In Poland the speech caused no surprise. Noël reported that since March the policy of 1934 had been regarded in Warsaw as dead, through Germany’s fault. The reply took a week to prepare. On 5 May Beck delivered a speech in the Sejm, the lower house of parliament, before the deputies, the diplomatic corps and foreign journalists, and it was broadcast by radio at home and abroad. He calmly described how Hitler had made the Polish–British understanding a pretext for breaking an agreement he had himself concluded. He recalled that the Polish proposals of 26 March, which provided for a joint Polish–German guarantee for the Free City, had gone unanswered, and that Warsaw had learned only from Hitler’s speech that they had been treated as a refusal to negotiate. He declared that Poland would not let itself be pushed away from the Baltic, was not in the habit of trading in other people’s interests, as in the matter of Slovakia, and did not regard Germany’s readiness to recognise its borders as a concession. Poland was ready to talk to Germany, provided the Reich showed peaceful intentions.

He ended the speech with words that generations remembered: “Peace is a precious and desirable thing. Our generation, bled in wars, surely deserves peace. But peace, like almost everything in this world, has its price – a high one, but a measurable one. We in Poland do not know the concept of peace at any price. There is only one thing in the life of men, nations and states that is beyond price. That thing is honour.” The deputies gave the minister a standing ovation. The same day the Polish chargé d’affaires in Berlin delivered to the German Foreign Ministry a memorandum in which the Polish government demonstrated that the renunciation of the declaration was groundless and declared its readiness to discuss Danzig and transit “on the principles of good neighbourliness”.

Significance

On 28 April 1939 Hitler broke the two agreements that in 1934–1935 had been his greatest diplomatic successes. Both had enabled him to survive the most dangerous period of rearmament: the declaration with Poland removed the threat of Polish preventive action and broke up the French system of alliances, while the naval agreement was the first instance of one of the victors consenting to a breach of Versailles. Now that the Wehrmacht was strong, he no longer needed them. Hitler did not, however, break off talks. He left the door open to “new agreements”, and until the end of August he presented Germany as the side ready to compromise and Poland as the side that refused to.

What followed

After 28 April there were no longer any real negotiations between Berlin and Warsaw. The dispute shifted to Danzig, where incidents multiplied all summer and where the local Nazis were secretly arming. In May Germany concluded an alliance with Italy, and in August a pact with the Soviet Union whose secret protocol provided for the partition of Poland. Following up the offer made in the speech, Germany concluded non-aggression pacts with Denmark, Estonia and Latvia, while Sweden, Norway and Finland turned it down. On 25 August Poland signed an alliance with Britain. On 1 September 1939 Germany attacked Poland without a declaration of war, breaking a declaration that by its own terms was to remain in force until 1944. On 3 September Britain declared war on Germany. That same day a German submarine – a weapon permitted under the 1935 agreement – sank the passenger liner SS Athenia, and in October another broke into Scapa Flow and sank the battleship HMS Royal Oak.