As part of his aggressive foreign policy after the Nazi rise to power, Adolf Hitler sought to bring Danzig back under German control, and also wished Poland to sign the Anti-Comintern Pact.

[9] The Maginot Line implied a defensive strategy in the event of war, which created a major strategic problem, namely how France would aid its allies in Eastern Europe should Germany turn east instead of west.

[19] Ribbentrop wanted Danzig to be returned to the Reich; extraterritorial roads running across the Polish Corridor to link East Prussia with the rest of Germany and for Poland to sign the Anti-Comintern pact.

[23] In November 1938, Lipski met with Ribbentrop and read him a statement declaring that the Polish government was unwilling to accept any changes in the status of the Free City, but still wanted good relations with the Reich.

[24] Lipski told Ribbentrop that Polish public opinion would not tolerate the Free City rejoining Germany and predicated that if Warsaw allowed that to happen, then the Sanacja military dictatorship that had ruled Poland since 1926 would be overthrown.

[29] Roosevelt stated: "Had we had this summer 5,000 planes and the capacity immediately to produce 10,000 per year, even though I have to ask Congress for the authority to sell or lend to the countries in Europe, Hitler would not have dared to take the stand he did".

His views on this issue created considerable opposition within the Quai d'Orsay, where it was argued that Poland was too valuable an ally to be abandoned, and that if France renounced the Polish alliance, Warsaw would align with Berlin.

[44] Beck told Count Hans-Adolf von Moltke, the German ambassador in Warsaw, that he was planning to spend his Christmas holiday on the French Riviera and gambling in the casinos of Monte Carlo.

[58] Together with St. Léger and Marshal Maurice Gamelin, Daladier envisioned a bloc to consist of France, Great Britain, Poland, the Soviet Union, Romania and Yugoslavia that would resist the hegemonic claims of the Reich.

[64] On 24 March 1939, Colonel Beck, who was part of the triumvirate which ruled the Sanacja regime and largely ran foreign policy on his own, told a meeting of the Polish cabinet that Poland should go to war if Germany made any attempt to alter the status of Danzig.

[25] Aside from the possibility that a revolution in Poland might overthrow the Sanacja regime should it allow Danzig to be returned to Germany, Beck as part of his plans for a "Third Europe" (i.e. a block of Eastern European states under Polish leadership) had sought to develop closer economic relations with Sweden and Finland.

In 1938, he had at the last moment recoiled from war; in 1939 the calendar would be more rigid both because Hitler was more determined and because the autumn rains in Poland made any postponement beyond the 1 September date he had tentatively set extremely dangerous".

[70] On 29 March 1939 Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker, the State Secretary of the Auswärtiges Amt, told the Danzig government the Reich would carry out a policy to the Zermürbungspolitik ("attrition politics") towards Poland, saying a compromise solution was not wanted.

[102] At the time, both Forster and Greiser dismissed the Grubanu incident as unimportant to Burchkhardt, but later on in the summer of 1939 the killing of Grubnau played a central role in Nazi propaganda as an example of the alleged Polish "oppression" of the Germans of Danzig.

[109] On 5 May 1939, Halifax in a memo to the cabinet wrote: "Danzig has become a test case and the stakes not be lower than the German attempt at domination of Eastern Europe and Polish determination to maintain the independence of their foreign policy".

[112] The majority of the British cabinet led by Chamberlain and strongly supported by the National Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Simon, favored resolving the crisis by allowing the Free City to rejoin Germany in exchange for a German promise to respect Polish independence.

[92] The British historian Martin Alexander wrote: "As far as Gamelin was concerned, had been blatantly misleading in sending Kasprzycki away from Paris believing that if Poland suffered a German attack, it could count on a bold French relief offensive against the Reich's western borders within three weeks".

[127] Gamelin openly admitted to Field Marshal Lord Gort, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, when he visited Paris that he had no intention of launching any offensive into Germany in the event of war.

[127] On 19 May 1939, Count Johannes von Welczeck, the German ambassador in Paris, met with Bonnet to claim that the Reich did not want a conflict with France while he criticized Britain for an alleged "encirclement" policy of Germany.

[129] On 21 May 1939, Halifax, who had gone to Geneva to attend the spring session of the League of Nations, told Burckhardt that he wanted a compromise solution in which Danzig would remain a Free City, but would be represented in the Reichstag, thereby creating a link to Germany.

On 15 March 1939, Germany had occupied the Czech part of Czecho-Slovakia, which had done immense damage to Hitler's claim that he was only trying to undo an "unjust" Treaty of Versailles by bringing all of the ethnic Germans "home to the Reich".

[145] On 18 July 1939, Wohlthat together with Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador to the Court of St. James, met with Sir Horace Wilson, the Chief Industrial Adviser and very close friend of Chamberlain to discuss finding a way to end the crisis.

[146] On 22 July 1939, both The Daily Telegraph and the News Chronicle ran as their frontpage stories that Britain was about to float a loan worth hundreds of millions of pounds sterling to Germany in exchange for the Reich not invading Poland.

[150] At the same time, the British embassy in Berlin received false reports that Hitler was planning to call a conference to be attended by himself, Chamberlain, Daladier, Mussolini, the U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Japanese prime minister Hiranuma Kiichirō to end the crisis peacefully.

[151] The Senate backed down while the British who were informed after the fact of the Polish decision to confront the Free City were thrown into panic over the possibility of an armed clash in Danzig plunging Europe into war.

[153] On 16 August 1939, The Danzig Senate president Greiser invited Chodacki to his house, where he offered a compromise under which if the extra Polish customs officials were withdrawn, the rest could continue their duties without harassment.

[165] On 18 August 1939, the SS-led Heimwehr (Home Guard), which was mostly made up of teenagers from the Hitler Youth, took part in a public parade, during which guns were provocatively displayed while members of the Polish and Jewish minorities were threatened with violence.

[164] In Warsaw, the French ambassador Léon Noël had a meeting with Colonel Beck and Marshal Smigly-Rydz where he practically begged the Poles not to respond to these provocations by sending troops into the Free City.

In his letter to Hitler, Chamberlain wrote: "Whatever may prove to be the nature of the German-Soviet Agreement, it cannot alter Great Britain's obligation to Poland which His Majesty's Government have stated in public repeatedly and plainly and which they are determined to fulfill.

[186] Weinberg wrote: "Very revealing, and sometimes overlooked in the literature on the subject, is the fact not only that Hitler held to the 1 September date rather than allow the additional day of negotiations his own schedule permitted, but that in the event he could see no reason even to await his 3:00 pm deadline on the 31st".