Next day Ciano called at the Berghof. He came to sound out the chances for a conference on a peaceful settlement of the looming conflict. But he found Hitler at a table spread with strategic maps, wholly absorbed in military problems. Germany, Hitler said, was virtually unassailable in the West. Poland would be crushed within a few days, and since Poland in the later confrontation with the Western powers would be on their side, he would be eliminating one enemy at once. In any case he was determined to utilize the next Polish provocation as the pretext for an attack, and he gave the deadline as “end of August at the latest.” If he waited too long, autumn rains would make the roads in the East too muddy for motorized forces. Ciano, who on the previous day had heard from Ribbentrop that Germany wanted neither Danzig nor the Corridor, but war with Poland, “soon realized that there is nothing more to be done. He has decided to strike and he will strike.”
By chance, an Anglo-French commission of military men had just begun negotiations in Moscow. The commission had arrived in the Soviet capital the previous day in order to conduct staff conferences exploring the military aspects of the alliance that had been under discussion for months. This group had set out for Moscow on August 5. A plane would have taken them there in a day. But with provoking casualness they had sailed to Leningrad aboard a freighter whose speed, as a later Soviet account noted with some bitterness, “was limited to thirteen knots.”
When the delegation finally arrived, it was too late. Hitler had forestalled them.
In the middle of July Moscow had once again taken the initiative and revived the German-Soviet trade negotiations broken off by Hitler three weeks earlier. This time Hitler did not hesitate, although he may have been merely counting on the discouraging effect the negotiations would have on England and Poland. Both in Moscow and in Berlin he saw to it that the thread was taken up and spun further. On the evening of July 26 Julius Schnurre, an official of the Economic Department of the German Foreign Office, had dinner with two Russian diplomats. While dining these men explored the possibilities of a political rapprochement. The Soviet charge d’affaires, Georgi Astakhov, declared that in Moscow they had never quite been able to understand why National Socialist Germany had taken so hostile an attitude toward the Soviet Union. Schnurre replied that “there could be no question of our being any threat to the Soviet Union…. German policy is aimed at England.” In any case a “far-reaching compromise of mutual interests” was quite conceivable to him, all the more so since antagonisms between their two countries did not exist “along the entire line from the Baltic to the Black Sea and to the Far East.” England could offer the Soviet Union “at best participation in a European war and the hostility of Germany,” whereas Germany could guarantee that she could continue her development unmolested. In addition, the German diplomat concluded, “in spite of all the differences in their views there is one common element in the ideology of Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union: opposition to the capitalist democracies of the West.”127
These were the crucial phrases which for three weeks dominated a German-Soviet exchange of views conducted with growing intensiveness. And from now on it was Germany that pressed forward with undisguised eagerness, while the Russians dragged their feet. On August 14 Ribbentrop sent Count Friedrich von der Schulenburg, the German Ambassador in Moscow, telegraphic instructions containing the great bid of delimiting spheres of interest between the Baltic and the Black Sea. He referred again to the two countries’ shared opposition to the “capitalistic western democracies,” dangled the prospect of quick booty, and in order to accelerate the “historic turning point” offered to come promptly to Moscow. In excellent spirits, expecting an affirmative answer from Moscow, Hitler told his military commanders the same evening that now “the great drama is approaching its climax.”
But Molotov, who had instantly perceived the advantage that German impatience offered him, maneuvered elaborately on questions of timing and agenda. He asked about German readiness to conclude a nonaggression pact, worked out a plan for phased rapprochement, and finally proposed a “special protocol” which, as he remarked with sibylline obscurity, would define “the interests of the contracting parties in various questions of foreign policy.” By that he actually meant preparations for the partition of Poland and the liquidation of the Baltic states. He finally suggested, as the date for Ribbentrop’s trip to Moscow, August 26 or 27, and though the Germans twice nervously pressed for an earlier date, would not be budged.
Ribbentrop had asked his ambassador to explain that “German-Polish relations are growing more acute from day to day. The Führer does not wish to have our efforts to clarify German-Russian relations suddenly disturbed by the outbreak of a German-Polish conflict. He considers previous clarification necessary in order to be able to take account of Russian interests in case of such a conflict.”
Hitler, fearing that he would be unable to keep his military timetable, finally took an unconventional step to break the deadlock. In a telegram dispatched on the evening of August 20 and addressed to “Herr J. V. Stalin, Moscow,” he asked the leader of the Soviet Union to receive Ribbentrop as early as August 22 or 23. His Foreign Minister, he said, had “plenipotentiary authority to draw up and sign the nonaggression pact as well as the protocol.”
Hitler waited for the answer in a state of extreme tension. Since he could not sleep, he telephoned Göring in the middle of the night, spoke of his worries, and expressed his annoyance at Russian stolidity. Since the beginning of the second half of August he had pushed forward the preparations for war without letup. He had called up 250,000 men, concentrated rolling stock, ordered two battleships and part of the submarine fleet to prepare to sail, and in a secret instruction canceled the party rally intended for the first week in September, the so-called “Reich Party Day of Peace.” For twenty-four hours, war or peace, the success or failure of his plans, depended on Stalin. At last, at 9:35 P.M. on August 21, the reply arrived: The Soviet government “agrees to Herr von Ribbentrop’s arriving in Moscow on. August 23.”
Freed from unbearable suspense, Hitler summoned the top military command for a conference at Obersalzberg next day at noon, in order, as he said, to acquaint them with his “irrevocable decision to act.”
Once again a desperate race against the impending doom began. The Western powers had not remained unaware of the lively exchanges between Moscow and Berlin. The British cabinet, moreover, had early been informed by von Weizsäcker of the far-ranging German-Soviet contacts.128 Everything now depended on the immediate conclusion of the Anglo-French military consultations that had begun so belatedly in Moscow.
These negotiations, which on the Soviet side had been conducted by Marshal Voroshilov, had soon come to a halt because of a seemingly insoluble problem: Poland’s determined opposition to granting any passage rights to the Red Army. While the Soviet negotiators stubbornly demanded to know how they were to make contact with the enemy, if Warsaw took this position, and while the Western delegates tried to protract the negotiations, Poland recklessly disavowed her guarantor powers and flatly declared that she absolutely refused to allow the Soviet Union to enter territory that had been hers as recently as 1921. Increasingly disturbed by news of a German-Soviet rapprochement, the West pressed Warsaw to yield. Bonnet and Halifax implored the Polish Foreign Minister, urging that the entire system of alliances would collapse if Poland persisted in her refusal. But Beck remained haughtily negative. Poland, he said on August 19, could not even permit “discussion in any form of the use of part of our territory by foreign troops. For us that is a question of principle. We have no military agreement with the U.S.S.R. We do not want one.”