Did Hitler Care About Danzig?

[fireofice]

Hitler's May 23 speech is sometimes cited to show that Danzig was only a pretext for war and not the actual objective. Here is what the relevant part says:

Danzig is not the subject of the dispute at all. It is a question of expanding our living space in the East and of securing our food supplies, of the settlement of the Baltic problems.

https://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/docum ... ?mode=text

Wow, sounds like he didn't care about Danzig! Well here's what Schniewind had to say about it.

Q. Now, I will have the so-called Schmundt minutes put to you. Document L-79, Prosecution Exhibit 1083; the following sentence is contained therein and I quote: "Danzig is not the subject of the dispute at all. It is a question of expanding our living space in the East and of securing our food supplies, of the settlement of the Baltic problem". Doesn't that sentence tell us that Danzig was only a pretext?

A. If you read it out of the context as you did now, one might infer this after having witnessed the development of events, but I read the sentence before the one that you read. There it says: "Poland will always be on the side of our adversaries; in spite of treaties of friendship, Poland has always had the secret intention of exploiting every opportunity to do us harm," Such a sentence and such a meaning was quite within the scope of Hitler's statements; and if you go on to say now that that was Poland's attitude, namely, an adverse attitude, then if you continue this trend of ideas, you may arrive at the result that Danzig is not the final objective; that is, if conflicts arise, further developments will occur. This idea, by the way, is also expressed in the Fuehrer directive about Case White, where a similar deduction is made and from where you can clearly infer this trend of ideas.

https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/s ... _Vol-X.pdf pp. 732-733

Schniewind also actually ended up being acquitted.

[TlsMS93]

It is not known when these notes were put on paper, the author died before he could be questioned, the only one who seems to endorse the content is Nicolaus von Below who, due to his Prussian origins, may well have been trying to distance himself from Hitler in the post-war frenzy.

Hitler in this meeting, if we are to base the document on its face value, was interpreting the geopolitics that had developed up until then, such as the encirclement that Poland had achieved with the West and how this was making them tough in dealing with Germany in the negotiations for Danzig and the corridor and its ethnic minority in the country, and not as a long-term plan for a war of conquest. Note that Poland considered it preferable to have Danzig at the cost of peace, so Danzig ceased to be a question of taking the city and stopping there, it became a question of reviewing the Polish state as a whole.

Poland had partially mobilized its forces without any provocative act on the German side and Hitler did not react accordingly. There was a debate on the old forum about this, that Hitler had known for some time that they were just buying time, pretending to negotiate in order to gain time to drag the Soviets into their encirclement of Germany.

The commander-in-chief of the Polish armed forces, Edward Rydz-Smigly, also stated: “Poland wants war with Germany, and Germany will not be able to avoid it even if it wants to.”

[fireofice]

The commander-in-chief of the Polish armed forces, Edward Rydz-Smigly, also stated: “Poland wants war with Germany, and Germany will not be able to avoid it even if it wants to.”

Origins of this quote here:

https://archive.codohforum.com/20230609 ... 93#p103293

[TlsMS93]

The commander-in-chief of the Polish armed forces, Edward Rydz-Smigly, also stated: “Poland wants war with Germany, and Germany will not be able to avoid it even if it wants to.”

Origins of this quote here:

https://archive.codohforum.com/20230609 ... 93#p103293

They will say that this source is spurious but Hitler saying that he already had death units stationed in the east to kill without mercy all men, women and children of Polish descent or language is considered true.

[Scott]

Talking about Death's Head Units, SS-Totenkopfverbände is a big tell because in 1939 they had barely been constituted as SS combat units and largely by using concentration camp staff as a source of manpower to mitigate the competing and well-established Regular Army personnel procurement process.

The 1st SS combat division was Hitler's LAH Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler or Life Guards. There was also a Regular Army Unit formed in 1939 called the Führerbegleitbatallion which escorted the Führer whenever he travelled outside of Germany to the Front, an elite guards unit which Erwin Rommel had once belonged to.

The 2nd SS combat division was the SS-VT Verfügungstruppen, or special purpose units, "Das Reich," commanded by SS-Generaloberst Paul Hausser, who developed the Waffen-SS or armed SS concept. The 2nd SS Das Reich was a motorized division and later an elite Panzer (armored) division.

The 3rd SS combat division was the SS-TV or Totenkopfverbände, later SS-TK (Totenkopf - Death's Head). The 3rd SS combat unit was formed by SS-Obergruppenführer Theodor Eicke, who was a penologist and Old Fighter who developed the German concentration camp system. The SS-TK never used the familiar SS runes on their collar tabs but had the Death's Head skull symbol instead, as also used on all SS cap devices.

In 1940, the SS-TK was a full-fledged motorized division that operated notably in France, and later it became a full Panzer division.

The first three Waffen-SS units are considered elites, although a few others like the 5th SS Wiking, which recruited a lot of foreigners, and the 12th SS Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) are notable as well. Of the approximately 38 or so bona fide Waffen-SS divisions, it is fair to say that at least half of them were not strictly elite.

For Hitler to speak of his Totenkopf units as his personal elites here is rather odd. That is not what the LAH or SS-VT were called, let alone the 3rd SS-VT originally staffed by prison camp guards to avoid manpower conflicts with the Wehrmacht.

On the other hand, Prussian elite calalvry had long been called Death's Heads, and the German cavalry Hussars had used the skull and crossbones symbol in the past.

But it seems that the rhetoric is a bit out of context here to suggest that Hitler was expecting antiquated Prussian cavalry units to liquidate the Polish threat or butcher the Joos.

Clearly propagandists are trying to suggest an English eqivalence between Death's Head Units and extermination battalions in a literal sense.

Btw, the German Regular Army Panzer (tank) units also used Totenkopf collar tabs, and this predateds the Waffen-SS.

A good example of a the Totenkopf is the fur Hussar's cap worn by the elderly Prussian Field Marshal August von Mackensen (1849-1945).