POWER POLITICS: German Drums

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Last week occurred the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, the treaty that was going to insure the peace of Europe forever and ever, Amen. No celebrations marked the date. Instead, all eyes were on the man who had torn that document to shreds, Adolf Hitler. That day he was on a Bavarian mountain top directing a campaign to reclaim for the German Fatherland the Free City of Danzig, neutralized and placed in customs union with renascent Poland by the treaty-makers. As the Führers well-oiled propaganda machine went into high gear, as his high-powered Army stood by prepared, if need be, to enforce the Leader's will, Europe's war drums throbbed louder and faster.

War of Nerves. No longer was there any doubt that Adolf Hitler is determined to have Danzig this summer, preferably without war, but, if necessary, with war. Nor could there be any doubt last week that, as matters now stand, Poland would fight rather than give up the mouth of the Vistula. But the big question was whether Poland's allies, Britain and France, would also go to war. Despite a great Anglo-French outcry of resonant warnings that further aggression would be met "by force", the Nazis believed that when the showdown came Britain and France, as they did last summer over Czecho-Slovakia, would not only back down but would try to restrain Poland from resisting.

As the Nazis followed through their by now familiar routine of the "war of nerves" by massing troops on the Polish border, smuggling SS men and ammunition into Danzig, spreading tales of terror, creating incidents and sounding false alarms, the outline of the coup could be foreseen. Danzig would have an "internal uprising." The eight members of the Danzig Senate—all Nazis—would declare the Free City absorbed into the Reich. At that moment police and soldiers would evict the Polish customs guards on the area's borders and take over. If the Poles decided then to march into Danzig, they, and not the Nazis, would be placed in the position of being the aggressors.

Die. While war fears rose in Britain and France, in Germany the people believed that their Führer was again going to have his way by simply threatening to fight. That was not the situation, however, reflected to the outside world by the German propaganda machine. A purported Hitler speech to a purported "War Council" that the Führer hastily appointed "leaked" through the Reichswehr and somehow got into the hands of French Rightist Deputy Henri de Kerillis, who also happens to be editor of L'Epoque.

"The die is cast," Herr Hitler was quoted as saying. "We cannot retreat now. Our backs are against the wall. It is not a question of knowing if I am right or wrong in posing so brutally the Danzig question. What is done is done, and we must accept the consequences. We must have our way, whatever the cost, in the few weeks which still separate us from the autumn months.