ABSTRACT
Hitler's demands for a resolution in Germany's favour of the Danzig question finally disabused the Polish foreign minister Jôzef Beck of any remaining hopes of reaching a reasonable compromise with the Führer. Beck now turned to the western powers, and on 6 April 1939, the preparation of a treaty of alliance between Britain and Poland was announced. The British guarantee of aid to Poland in the event of German aggression was intended more as a warning to Hitler than as a serious military commitment, as the cataclysmic events of September 1939 starkly revealed. It also destroyed any last faint hopes of bringing the Soviet Union into an eastern European collective security system to counter potential German aggression. The guarantee fuelled Russian suspicions of a malevolent western plot to unleash Hitler against the Soviet Union. Deeply suspicious of the Polish government, and disinclined to believe in the ability or inclination of the Baltic states and Finland to resist German pressure for their territory to be used as a base for an assault on the Soviet Union, Stalin appears to have decided in the spring of 1939 to pursue two options: alliance with the western powers or an accommodation with Germany. In the end, it was the German option which proved by far the more attractive. Whereas the British and French negotiators seemed only to cavil during the long and wearisome negotiations in Moscow throughout the summer, the Germans were swift to agree to a brutal territorial carve-up of north-eastern Europe. At one p.m. on 23 August 1939, the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop landed in Moscow after an early morning flight from Künigsberg. Twelve hours later, he was signing the non-aggression pact and the infamous secret protocol. So eager had the Germans been for such an agreement that they abandoned their original claim to the territories of the former duchy of Kurland; at eleven p.m., the Führer agreed to assign the whole of Latvia to the Soviet sphere of influence. 1
