The phantom crisis

Taylor provides us with a striking passage on the atmosphere surrounding the final dispute which was to lead to the Second World War. ¹ “In strange contrast to earlier crises,” he notes, “there were no negotiations over Danzig, no attempts to discover a solution; not even attempts to screw up the tension.” It exhibited “none of the manoeuvres and bargaining which had marked the Czechoslovak crisis.” While this is a pertinent observation on the extraordinary reluctance of the powers to seek a resolution to what seemed to divide them, Taylor is right but for the wrong reasons. In his view, the Danzig crisis was “formulated in the last days of March when Germany made demands concerning Danzig and the Corridor and the Poles rejected them.” It is quite possible, however, to omit almost all reference to increasing German pressure on the Poles between October 1938 and March 1939 for a settlement of the Danzig and “Polish Corridor” questions without obscuring our understanding of the events of 1939. Taylor’s interpretation of the advent of war is founded on the proposition that possession of the Free City was what Hitler truly wanted and that a deal, in which the British were prepared to collude, might have been arranged to give it to him, but that time ran out. In reality, the central issues were the wider ambitions of Hitler, their implications for the future of Poland, and the distribution of power in Europe.