Word: danzig
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Last week a diplomatic drama as strange as a Wagnerian opera unrolled in the Bavarian Alps. The setting was Wagnerian-Führer Adolf Hitler's Berghof at Berchtesgaden, a mountain hideaway 15 miles from music-haunted Salzburg, 600 miles from Danzig, 1,300 miles from Moscow, and 3,000 feet above sea level. Facing the cloud-capped mountains the brown and white Berghof itself-huge echoing rooms, wide halls, bedrooms for 40 guests, guards' turrets, flower gardens, machine-gun nests-seemed as unreal as the home of the Troll kings...
...Croatia and the seacoast of Dalmatia stretching down the Adriatic. Eastward lies fertile Hungary, and Rumania with its oil wells, its grain, its ports on the Danube and Black Sea. Northeast, across what had been Czecho-Slovakia, lies Poland and the minute spot on the map known as Danzig, the present battlefield in Europe's war of nerves...
...parading their naval might and displaying confidence in any impending struggle; Rumania, where natives, irritated at charges that they are lukewarm in their resistance to aggression, are now declaring they can resist alone; Turkey, key to the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean; Poland, unshaken by the struggle over Danzig, counting on its muddy roads to bog down motorized infantry in the event of invasion and on the spirit of its people to fight if necessary, to ignore provocations until...
...only point their guns in vain. Military maneuvers are but an adjunct in this weird conflict. It has its positions that must be taken, its genius, Adolf Hitler, its victims, like Dr. Benes of Czecho-Slovakia, its troops, the hardened ranks of editors and orators, its battlegrounds, like Danzig, its staff headquarters, like Berchtesgaden. And it has its heroes...
...Danzig. Checking every assault, and sometimes counterattacking, Poland, guided chiefly by Foreign Minister Josef Beck has shown Europe's chancelleries that much has been learned of the new war since Czecho-Slovakia was conquered by it. When Nazis interfered with Polish customs officials, Foreign Minister Beck countered by closing the Polish frontier to offending Danzig concerns. When Nazis threatened to precipitate a crisis by disregarding Polish authorities, he sent an ultimatum to the Nazi Danzig Senate, demanding that interference cease-but added a conciliatory offer to negotiate, postponing a showdown. When the Senate agreed to negotiate, the frontier...