760C.62/1178: Telegram
The Ambassador in France (Bullitt) to the Secretary of State
[Received August 30—9 a.m.]
1660. For the President and the Secretary. I have just read at the Foreign Office the account which Henderson gave Coulondre of his conversation last night with Hitler.
Hitler in a condition of violent excitement stated that Poland because of the actions of the “dirty English” had taken an intolerable position. He must have at once delivered to him Danzig, the Corridor and the Polish provinces of Pomerania and Silesia. Furthermore, he had already prepared an economic accord between Germany and Poland which he had ready for signature by Poland. He would wait 24 hours but if a responsible Polish statesman did not come to Berlin to sign an agreement on this basis within 24 hours he would crush Poland.
The British Ambassador replied that this statement sounded like an ultimatum. He would like to have assurance before transmitting any message to his Government that Hitler did not intend to make war without further notification.
Hitler replied that he could not give any promise to refrain from war before consulting his associate power, the Soviet Union.
The British Ambassador then said that a delay of 24 hours was much too short. Hitler replied that it would take only 80 minutes for a responsible Polish official to take a plane in Warsaw and reach Berlin.
The British Ambassador asked how such an official would be received and Hitler made it clear that he would be received with the same official courtesy as Schuschnigg81 and Hacha.82
Leger then asked to see me urgently. While I was with him he had in my presence a 15-minute conversation with Daladier on their direct telephone. Their estimate of the situation is as follows.
Hitler is attempting to repeat step by step the maneuver which won him Austria and Czechoslovakia without war.
They take it as certain that Poland will not weaken and that no Pole will follow the footsteps of Schuschnigg and Hacha to Munich.
They believe that Hitler will send a definite ultimatum today and that at the last minute Mussolini will intervene and propose a general conference for the settlement not only of the Polish-Danzig dispute but of all other questions of national demands including his own.
[Page 384]The position of Daladier and Leger remains the same as that expressed in the British note. They will not be drawn into a general conference on the Polish-German dispute in view of the conditions for peace with Poland which Hitler gave last night to the British Ambassador in London since acceptance of a conference would imply a willingness to consent to the enslavement of Poland in Germany.
They will insist that the Polish dispute should be settled by direct negotiation between Germany and Poland and that the larger questions should be reserved for a conference when this dispute shall have been settled.
Leger, after talking with Daladier, asked me to communicate to the President most urgently that the French Government hoped that the President would not call any general conference but would insist if he should make a further statement or effort that the Polish-German dispute should be settled by direct negotiation between Poland and Germany.
Both Daladier and Leger agreed that the only possible alternative might be an appeal by the Pope, the King of Belgium, or the Queen of the Netherlands to Germany and Poland under the terms of the Hague Convention of 1927 [1907]83 for special mediation to which Germany was still a signatory. By this convention each party to a dispute obliges itself to choose a mediator and these mediators meet and attempt to produce a settlement acceptable to both sides. Their decision is not binding on either power.
Leger asked me to suggest to the President instantly that he might propose to either the Pope, the King of Belgium, or the Queen of the Netherlands that one of them should issue at once an appeal to Germany and Poland to accept the special mediation provided for in the Hague Convention of 1927 [1907]. He felt that since Hitler had refused to answer the President’s two messages any further appeal by the President would be left without answer.
- Kurt Schuschnigg, former Austrian Chancellor.↩
- Emil Hacha, former President of Czechoslovakia.↩
- Signed October 18, 1907, Foreign Relations, 1907, pt. ii, p. 1181.↩