Word: british
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Polish frontier, it was still conceivable that Hitler might once again achieve his goal without a major war. Italy's Benito Mussolini, who had promised to join Hitler's side in case of war, telephoned Berlin to say that he wished to remain neutral; Mussolini had been telling the British and French all that week that if they , would agree to a new four-power conference (much like the one at Munich that had carved up Czechoslovakia the previous year), he might be able to arrange some kind of compromise based on the return of Danzig to Germany. Just before...
...British insisted on that, however, and so, after several anxious telephone calls between London and Paris, the two Allies' ambassadors in Berlin finally requested an interview at 7:15 p.m. with German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. They told him that unless Germany immediately stopped its invasion, they would "without hesitation fulfill their obligations to Poland...
...next day, Saturday, Sept. 2, while the German tanks kept pressing forward, Hitler made no response. The British Cabinet met in the afternoon and decided that Hitler was stalling and that Britain and France should deliver an ultimatum to Berlin at midnight, to expire at 6 a.m. the following day. When Halifax proposed this to Paris, however, Bonnet said the French military commanders needed another 48 hours to mobilize...
Schmidt dutifully took the British ultimatum to Hitler's Chancellery, where he found the Fuhrer at his desk and the "unavailable" Ribbentrop standing at a nearby window. Schmidt translated the ultimatum aloud. "When I finished, there was complete silence," he recalled. "Hitler sat immobile, gazing before him. After an interval that seemed an age, he turned to Ribbentrop, who had remained standing by the window. 'What now?' asked Hitler with a savage look...
That very night, Britons learned of the first such sacrifice: 200 miles west of Scotland in the North Atlantic, the unarmed British liner Athenia, carrying 1,400 passengers from Liverpool to Montreal, was hit and sunk by a torpedo from the German submarine U-30; 112 passengers, including 28 Americans, died...