![]() With his eastern flank secure, Hitler ordered his generals to finalize “Case White,” the invasion of Poland. As Timothy Snyder put it, “the two regimes immediately found common ground in their mutual aspiration to destroy Poland.…Hitler saw Poland as the ‘unreal creation’ of the Treaty of Versailles, Molotov as its ‘ugly offspring.’” According to this, Bessarabia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and eastern Poland would become part of Stalin’s sphere of influence while Hitler would get all of western Poland. However, the crucial part of the agreement was a secret protocol that reshaped the map of central Europe. In the official agreement the Soviets promised not to aid Britain or France in the event of a war with Poland. The result was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, hastily signed so that Hitler could have his pact before his planned invasion of Poland. Despite his disdain for the Bolsheviks, Hitler leapt at the chance to sign a peace treaty with Stalin that would allow him to wage war against Poland without risking either a two-front war with the West or having to contend with Soviet interference in the east. At the same time, he learned that French and British talks to secure a nonaggression pact with the Soviets had broken down. On April 28, Hitler withdrew from the nonaggression pact with Poland and the London Naval Agreement. By the summer of 1939, Hitler had succeeded in annexing Austria, the Sudetenland, and, finally, all of Czechoslovakia without a shot being fired. Only with Lebensraum, or “living space,” could Germans fulfill their destiny as the “master race.” For him, Germany’s future lay in territorial expansion. Germany should have won World War I, he argued, but it had been stabbed in the back by Jews and communists and reduced still further by the hated Treaty of Versailles. Long before Adolf Hitler took power in January 1933, he articulated his violent, racially based worldview in his book Mein Kampf. It opened fire at 4:43 a.m., marking the beginning of World War II. In the gray morning light of September 1, 1939, the ship quietly moved the short distance from Danzig harbor to the Bend of Five Whistles, across from the small Polish military transit depot at Westerplatte. Unbeknownst to onlookers, over 200 marines were hidden below deck, preparing for a deliberate and unprovoked attack against Poland. ![]() But the ship had a more sinister purpose. Officially, it was there to celebrate the anniversary of the German victory in the Battle of Tannenberg in World War I: colorful flags flew from the masts and the men stood at attention in their white dress uniforms, brass buttons shining in the late summer sun. On August 25, 1939, the aging German pre-dreadnought battleship Schleswig-Holstein arrived in the port of the Free City of Danzig. ![]() Top Photo: Adolf Hitler receives a parade of German troops at Aleje Ujazdowskie in Warsaw, October 5, 1939. ![]()
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