Although Hitler might feel that this pact would strengthen his position vis-à-vis the Western powers, the alliance could only bring misfortune to Mussolini. The elementary rules of diplomacy should have taught him better: since he owed to the backing of Germany whatever conquests the world would ever permit him to make, his next move should have been to secure what he had acquired by coming to an agreement with the Western powers. Instead he now tied his country’s destiny unconditionally to a stronger power that was bent on war, and thus reduced himself to the status of a vassal. Henceforth he must, as he had once said in a moment of exuberance in Berlin, “march to the end” with Hitler.
The so-called Pact of Steel obligated each of the partners to provide military support to the other upon the outbreak of hostilities. It drew no distinction between attacker and attacked, between offensive and defensive arms. It was an unconditional pledge of military aid. Later, when Ciano first saw the German draft that was subsequently incorporated almost unchanged into the wording of the pact, he said: “I have never read a treaty like it. It is real dynamite.”
The pact was signed in a grand ceremony in the Berlin chancellery on May 22, 1939. “I found Hitler very well, quite serene, less aggressive, slightly aged,” the Italian Foreign Minister noted. “There are somewhat darker rings around his eyes. He sleeps little. Less and less.” Mussolini himself seems to have received the reports from his Berlin delegation with some anxiety. A week later he sent a personal memorandum to Hitler in which he once again emphasized Italy’s desire for a period of several years of peace. He recommended using this interlude for “loosening the inner cohesion of our enemies by favoring the anti-Semitic movements, supporting… the pacifistic movements, promoting aspirations for autonomy (Alsace, Brittany, Corsica, Ireland), accelerating the breakdown of morals, and inciting the colonial peoples to rebellion.”124
The day after the signing of the Pact of Steel Hitler had summoned the commanders in chief of the army, navy, and air force to his office in the chancellery and outlined his ideas and intentions. According to the minutes kept by his chief adjutant, Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Schmundt, he predicted with extraordinary acuteness the course of the first phase of the war: the overwhelming thrust into Holland and Belgium and subsequently—contrary to the strategy of the First World War—an advance not upon Paris but on the Channel ports, as launching places for the bombing and blockade of England. For in this speech England appeared as the chief antagonist. Hitler said:
The mass of eighty millions [Germans] has solved the ideational problems. The economic problems must also be solved…. Courage is needed to solve the problems. The principle of circumventing a solution of problems by adapting to circumstances must not be allowed to obtain. Rather, what is necessary is to adjust circumstances to requirements. Without invasion of foreign countries or attacking the property of others, this is not possible….
Danzig is not the object at stake. We are concerned with expanding our living space in the East and securing our food supplies…. In Europe no other possibility is open….
The question of sparing Poland can therefore no longer be considered and we are left with the decision to attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity.
We cannot expect a repetition of the Czech solution. This time there will be fighting. Our task is to isolate Poland. Success in this isolation is decisive…. It must not come to a simultaneous conflict with the West….
Basic principle: Conflict with Poland—beginning with the attack on Poland—will succeed only if the West stays out of it. If that isn’t possible, then it is better to attack the West and in doing so simultaneously finish off Poland….
The war with England and France will be a life-and-death struggle…. We will not be forced into a war, but we cannot get around it.125
From this point on, the signs of the war to come increased. On June 14 General Blaskowitz, commander in chief of Army Group 3, ordered his units to complete all preparations for marching against Poland by August 20. A week later the Oberkommando of the Wehrmacht (OKW) (High Command of the Armed Forces) presented the timetable for the offensive, and another two days later Hitler gave orders to work out precise plans for seizing the bridges over the lower Vistula. On July 27, finally, the directive for the conquest of Danzig was formulated. Only the date was left open.
Meanwhile, the German press, after a longish silence, resumed its anti-Polish campaign, extending the demands of Germany to the entire Corridor, Posen, and parts of Upper Silesia. An incident in Danzig, in the course of which an SA man was killed, provided fresh material for the propaganda campaign. The Polish government reacted with increasing toughness and decreasing moderation. It insisted on conducting its dialogue with the Reich in the icy tone of an outraged great power. Various signs indicated that it was gradually adjusting to the idea that war was inevitable. It tightened the Danzig customs regulations, thus initiating a crisis which led to an angry exchange of notes between Warsaw and Berlin. Provocations, warnings, and ultimatums followed in quick succession; the various white and blue books are filled with them. In Danzig itself camp followers began to arrive, “harbingers of evil and stormy petrels,” who by their actions or exaggerated reports worsened the crisis. “Everywhere they want the catastrophe,” Italian Ambassador Attolico wrote resignedly. When the German ambassador in Paris called on the French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet on August 8, before going on vacation, both men were in a pessimistic mood. “As I listened to him,” Bonnet later wrote, “I had the feeling that everything had already been decided. And when he took his leave I realized that I would not see him again.”
Three days later Carl Jacob Burckhardt, the League of Nations high commissioner for Danzig, arrived at Obersalzberg for a conversation. Hitler seemed “much older and grayer,” as Burckhardt later described him. “He gave the impression of fear and seemed nervous.” He was also much exercised over the Poles’ arrogant determination, which in reality suited his plans. He complained, he threatened that if there were the slightest incident he would smash the Poles without warning, wipe Poland off the map. “I will strike them like lightning with the full power of a mechanized army.” When his visitor suggested that this would lead to a general war, Hitler declared excitedly: “Then so be it. If I have to wage war, I would rather do so today than tomorrow.” He said he could only laugh at the military strength of England and France; nobody was going to scare him with the Russians; the plans of the Polish General Staff exceeded “all the visions of Alexander and Napoleon by far.” Once again he tried, through Burckhardt, to launch his idea of a permanent balance of power with the West:
This eternal talk about war is foolishness and is driving the nations insane. What is the real question?
Only that we need grain and lumber. I need room in the East because of the grain; I need a colony for lumber, only one. We can manage. Our crops have been excellent in 1938 and this year. But one of these days the soil will have enough and will go on strike like a body that has been doped. What then? I cannot have my people suffering hunger. Wouldn’t I be better off leaving two millions on the battlefield than losing even more from hunger? We know what it’s like to die of hunger….
I have no romantic goals. I have no desire to dominate. Above all, I want nothing of the West, not today and not tomorrow. I desire nothing from the thickly settled regions of the world. There I am seeking nothing; once and for all, absolutely nothing. All the ideas that people ascribe to me are inventions. But I must have a free hand in the East.126