Hitler

– exactly as Henlein had been ordered to do in the Sudetenland the previous year, so that it was impossible to meet it. Hitler now demanded the arrival of a Polish emissary with full powers by the following day, Wednesday, 30 August. Even the pliant Henderson, protesting at the impossible time-limit for the arrival of the Polish emissary, said it sounded like an ultimatum. Hitler replied thathis generals were pressing him for a decision. They were unwilling to lose any more time because of the onset of the rainy season in Poland. Henderson told Hitler that any attempt to use force against Poland would inevitably result in conflict with Britain.
    When Henderson had left, the Italian Ambassador Attolico was ushered in. He had come to tell Hitler that Mussolini was prepared to intercede with Britain if required. The last thing Hitler wanted, as he had made clear to his generals at the meeting on 22 August, was a last-minute intercession to bring about a new Munich – least of all from the partner who had just announced that he could not stand by the pact so recently signed. Hitler coldly told Attolico that direct negotiations with Britain were in hand and that he had already declared his readiness to accept a Polish negotiator.
    Hitler had been displeased at Henderson’s response to his reply to the British government. He now called in Göring to send Dahlerus once more on the unofficial route to let the British know the gist of the ‘generous’ terms he was proposing to offer the Poles – return of Danzig to Germany, and a plebiscite on the Corridor (with Germany to be given a ‘corridor through the Corridor’ if the result went Poland’s way). By 5 a.m. on 30 August, Dahlerus was again heading for London in a German military plane. An hour earlier Henderson had already conveyed Lord Halifax’s unsurprising response, that the German request for the Polish emissary to appear that very day was unreasonable.
    During the day, while talking of peace Hitler prepared for war. In the morning he instructed Albert Forster, a week earlier declared Head of State in Danzig, on the action to be taken in the Free City at the outbreak of hostilities. Later, he signed the decree to establish a Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich with wide powers to promulgate decrees. Chaired by Göring, its other members were Heß as Deputy Leader of the Party, Frick as plenipotentiary for Reich administration, Funk as plenipotentiary for the economy, Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery, and Keitel, chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht. It had the appearance of a ‘war cabinet’ to administer the Reich while Hitler preoccupied himself with military matters. In reality, the fragmentation of Reich government had gone too far for that. Hitler’s own interest in preventing any centralized body operating as a possible check on his own power was to mean that the Ministerial Council was destined not to bring even a limited resurrection of collective government.
    Hitler spent much of the day working on his ‘proposals’ to be put to the Polish negotiator who, predictably, never arrived. From the outset it had not been a serious suggestion. But when Henderson returned to the Reich Chancellery at midnight to present the British reply to Hitler’s communication of the previous evening, he encountered Ribbentrop in a highly nervous state and in a vile temper. Diplomatic niceties were scarcely preserved. After Ribbentrop had read out Hitler’s ‘proposals’ at breakneck speed, so that Henderson was unable to note them down, he refused – on Hitler’s express orders – to let the British Ambassador read the document, then hurled it on the table stating that it was now out of date, since no Polish emissary had arrived in Berlin by midnight. In retrospect, Henderson thought that Ribbentrop ‘was wilfully throwing away the last chance of a peaceful solution’.
    There had, in fact, been no ‘last chance’. No Polish emissary had been expected. Ribbentrop was concerned precisely
not
to hand over terms which the British might have passed to the Poles, who might have been prepared to discuss them. Hitler had needed his ‘generous suggestion over the regulation of the Danzig and Corridor Question’, as Schmidt later heard him say, as ‘an alibi, especially for the German people, to show them that I have done everything to preserve peace’.
    The army had been told on 30 August to make all preparations for attack on 1