Homer
Lots to digest here, but things are clearly heating up to a climax. We don’t even have the bombshell of the Non-Aggression Pact yet. Can’t wait to see the fallout over that.
A couple points on what I managed to read:
First was the speech by Forster where he laid out his “seven points” in the dispute over Danzig. The real problem with the whole situation is that points one through three set out the basis of the Danzig dispute. On those three points, he was exactly correct. Danzig was and always had been a German city. The surrounding province of Pomerania was ethnically German, although in that region there was no clear ethnic demarcation line between German and Pole. Wilson’s insistence on an independent Poland was not in itself a bad idea, but the idea that Poland have access to the sea was. There was no way to accomplish this without incorporating unwilling Germans into Polish territory. It turned out to be the trigger for world war.
The Russians solved this problem neatly in 1945. Today, there are no Germans in Danzig, Pomerania or Silesia. Nor are there any Poles in what used to be Polish territory, but is now western Belarus and Ukraine. The means involved were to create millions of what were known as “displaced persons” although the much of the German populace preemptively aided the Russians by fleeing in terror before the advance of the Red Army.
But I digress.
On the the second point, which I found a bit darkly humorous. The German Commander in Chief gave a pep talk to metal workers in Dusseldorf. There were undertones in the article that the German laborer was getting antsy about war coming, and was weary of “long hours, low wages and food scarcity.” Had Brauchitsch been somewhat more sagacious, his speech should have been: “Hey, these are the salad days. In a few years, add to the misery daily bombings, but we can get you away from all of this by replacing you with foreign workers so you can go serve the Fatherland at wonderful places like Stalingrad, Alamein, Kursk and Normandy.....”
Well this was the overall ramifications of the breakup of the Austrian-Hungarian empire. Borders were drawn haphazardly without thought of whether neighbors could co-exist, see Yugoslavia.
But to argue your point, Gdansk was not always a German city. The city was called “Gdansk” before it was given it’s Germanized name, “Danzig.” The city changed hands between Poles and Germans over centuries.
And history has shown over the long-run, while brutal, it was the correct thing to do, as it has granted the longest period of peace in recent European history. In the immortal words of The Offspring, "You gotta keep 'em separated."