For some ten hours on August 11, Ciano conferred with Ribbentrop at the latter’s estate at Fuschl, outside Salzburg, which the Nazi Foreign Minister had taken from an Austrian monarchist who, conveniently, had been put away in a concentration camp. The hot-blooded Italian found the atmosphere, as he later reported, cold and gloomy. During dinner at the White Horse Inn at St. Wolfgang not a word was exchanged between the two. It was scarcely necessary. Ribbentrop had informed his visitor earlier in the day that the decision to attack Poland was implacable.
“Well, Ribbentrop,” Ciano says he asked, “what do you want? The Corridor or Danzig?”
“Not that any more,” Ribbentrop replied, gazing at him with his cold, metallic eyes. “We want war!”
Ciano’s arguments that a Polish conflict could not be localized, that if Poland were attacked the Western democracies would fight, were bluntly rejected. The day before Christmas Eve four years later – 1943 – when Ciano lay in Cell 27 of the Verona jail waiting execution at the instigation of the Germans, he still remembered that chilling day of August 11 at Fuschl and Salzburg. Ribbentrop, he wrote in his very last diary entry on December 23, 1943, had bet him “during one of those gloomy meals at the Oerstereichischer Hof in Salzburg” a collection of old German armor against an Italian painting that France and Britain would remain neutral – a bet, her remarks ruefully, which was never paid. (To be continued.)
William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
The Duce is anxious for me to prove by documentary evidence that an outbreak of war at this time would be folly. . . . It would be impossible to localize it in Poland, and a general war would be disastrous for everyone. Never has the Duce spoken of the need for peace so unreservedly and with so much warmth. . . . Ribbentrop is evasive. Whenever I ask him for particulars about German policy his conscience troubles him. He has lied too many times about German intentions towards Poland not to feel uneasy now about what he must tell me, and what they are really planning to do. . . . The German decision to fight is implacable. Even if they were given more than they ask they would attack just the same, because they are possessed by the demon of destruction. . . . At times our conversation becomes very tense. I do not hesitate to express my thoughts with brutal frankness. But this does not move him. I am becoming aware how little we are worth in the opinion of the Germans.
Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm