The propaganda certainly had its effect. The fear of war with the western powers, while still widespread among the German population, was — at least until August — nowhere near as acute as it had been during the Sudeten crisis. People reasoned, with some justification (and backed up by the German press), that despite the guarantees for Poland, the West was hardly likely to fight for Danzig when it had given in over the Sudetenland.96 Many thought that Hitler had always pulled it off without bloodshed before, and would do so again.97 Some had a naïve belief in Hitler. One seventeen-year-old girl recalled much later how she and her friends had felt: ‘Rumours of an impending war were spreading steadily but we did not worry unduly. We were convinced that Hitler was a man of peace and would do everything he could to settle things peacefully.’98 Fears of war were nevertheless pervasive. The more general feeling was probably better summed up in the report from a small town in Upper Franconia at the end of July 1939: ‘The answer to the question of how the problem “Danzig and the Corridor” is to be solved is still the same among the general public: incorporation in the Reich? Yes. Through war? No.’99
But the anxiety about a general war over Danzig did not mean that there was reluctance to see military action against Poland undertaken — as long as the West could be kept out of it. Inciting hatred of the Poles through propaganda was pushing at an open door. ‘The mood of the people can be much more quickly whipped up against the Poles than against any other neighbouring people,’ commented the exiled Social Democratic organization, the Sopade. Many thought ‘it would serve the Poles right if they get it in the neck’.100 Other reports from the Sopade’s observers, whose anti-Nazi attitude needs no underlining, emphasize the impact the propaganda was having even among those hostile to the regime. Existing anti-Polish feelings were being massively sharpened. ‘An action against Poland would be greeted by the overwhelming mass of the German people,’ ran one report. ‘The Poles are enormously hated among the masses for what they did at the end of the War.’101 ‘If Hitler strikes out against the Poles, he will have a majority of the population behind him,’ commented another.102 In Danzig, too, where, not surprisingly, fear of a war was especially pronounced, the daily reports about ‘Polish terror’ were manufacturing antagonism among those who had never been ‘Pole haters’. Above all, no one, it was claimed, whatever their political standpoint, wanted a Polish Danzig; the conviction that Danzig was German was universal.103
The issue which the Danzig Nazis exploited to heighten the tension was the supervision of the Customs Office by Polish customs inspectors. These had indeed sometimes abused their position in the interests of increased Polish control over shipping. But there had been nothing serious, and matters could quite easily have been amicably resolved, or at least a
This allegation was transmitted by Forster to Carl Burckhardt, the League of Nations High Commissioner in Danzig. Overlooking no possibility of trying to keep the West out of his war with Poland, Hitler was ready to use the representative of the detested League of Nations as his intermediary.107 On 10 August, during a dinner in honour of the departing Deputy Representative of Poland in Danzig, Tadeusz Perkowski, Burckhardt was summoned to the telephone to be told by Gauleiter Forster that Hitler wanted to see him on the Obersalzberg at 4p.m. next day and was sending his personal plane ready for departure early the following morning.108 Following a flight in which he was regaled by a euphoric Albert Forster with tales of beerhall fights with Communists during the ‘time of struggle’, Burckhardt landed in Salzburg and, after a quick snack, was driven up the spiralling road beyond the Berghof itself and up to the Eagle’s Nest
