[When] the Fuehrer received the Polish Foreign Minister at Berchtesgaden shortly after New Years's - on January 5, 1939 - he was not yet prepared to give him the treatment which he had meted out to Schuschnigg and was shortly to apply to President Hacha. The rest of Czechoslovakia would have to be liquidated first. Hitler, as the secret Polish and German minutes of the meeting make clear, was in one of his more conciliatory moods. He was "quite ready," he bagan, "to be at Beck's service." Was there anything "special," he asked, on the Polish Foerign Minister's mind? Beck replied that Danzig was on his mind. It became obvious that it had also been on Hitler's.
"Danzig is German," the Fuehrer reminded his guest, "will always remain German, and will sooner or later become part of Germany." He could give the assurance, however, that "no fait accompli would be engineerered in Danzig."
He wanted Danzig and he wanted a German highway and railroad across the Corridor. If he and Beck would "depart from old patterns and seek solutions along entirely new lines," he was sure they could reach an agreement which would do justice to both countries.
Beck was not so sure. Though, as he confided to Ribentrop the next day, he did not want to be too blunt with the Fuhree, he had replied that "the Danzig problem was a very difficult one." He did not see in the Chancllor's suggestion any "equivalent" for Poland. Hitler thereupon pointed out the "great advantage" to Poland "of having her frontier with Germany, including the corridor, secured by treaty." This apparently did not impress Beck, but in thh end he agreed to think the problem over further.
William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall fo the Third Reich , p. 457.
These stories are more proof that nothing ever changes, really.
I see someone complaining about votes not being counted!
After mulling it over that night, the Polish Foriegn Minister had a talk with Ribbentrop the next day [January 6, 1939] in Munich. He requested him to inform the Fuehrer that whereas all his previous talks with the Germans had filled him with optimism, he was today, after his meeting with Hitler, "for the first time in a pessimistic mood." Particularly in regard to Danzig, as it had been raised by the Chancellor, he "saw no possibility whatever of agreement."
It had taken Colonel Beck, like so many others who have figured in these pages, some time to awaken and to arrive at such a pessimistic view. Like most Poles, he was violently anti-Russian. Moreover, he disliked the French, for whom he had nursed a grudge since 1923, when, as Polish military attache in Paris, he had been expelled for allegedly selling documents relating to the French Army. Perhaps it had been natural for this man, who had become Polish Foreign Minister in November 1932, to turn to Germany. For the Nazi dictatorship he had felt a warm sympathy from the beginning, and over the past six years he had striven to bring his country closer to the Third Reich and to weaken its traditional ties with France.
Willaim L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Thrid Reich, p. 457