Word: danzigers
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Last week Danzig churned with rumors like a pot coming to boil. Because Nazis interfered with Polish customs guards, Warsaw closed the frontier to certain goods, sent a note to the Danzig Senate demanding that interference cease, offering to negotiate. Danzig's Nazi press screamed that Poland had opened a trade war, and the rumors began: at 7 o'clock August 6 trouble would break when Nazis refused to recognize the authority of customs officials; highly placed Poles were preparing to flee; stories from Berlin had German officers getting assignments for August 19 in the Polish towns...
...Germans, only other people to celebrate the anniversary of the World War, thought up such a metaphor to describe the conflict. But Marshal Smigly-Rydz made it clear that it was not war, but Polish independence, that made the date memorable, warned against the use of force in Danzig, mentioned the military agreements with Poland's friends, and said peace for Poles could never mean "take" for one nation, and "give" for another. Day after he spoke the Danzig Senate was reported to have accepted the Polish offer to negotiate...
...grew eloquent: 2,000,000 men under arms in Germany, with 500,000 to be added in August; heavy concentrations of German troops on the Polish frontier from Danzig to Cracow; five German divisions in motion near Breslau; schools in Bohemia transformed into hospitals; troops and supplies moving east through Ostmark*-all this convinced him that "it would be disastrous, it would be pathetic, it would be shameful for the House to write itself off as an effective and potent factor in the situation. . . ." If things were in dead balance, no move should be taken that might weaken resistance...
...only in his "private, personal capacity," the suspicion grew among Laborites, Liberals and non-appeasing Conservatives that the Chamberlain Government had far from re formed. "Is the Government still yearning after appeasement?" angrily asked Labor Leader Arthur Greenwood. "Is it prepared to try to buy off Hitler by sacrificing Danzig and perhaps Poland itself? Is it toying with the idea that it can, by sweet reasonableness and financial aid, persuade Germany to beat her swords into plowshares...
Meanwhile, the German press called Sir Edmund's visit a "secret council of war" and railed against "English interference" and "blustering." More German and Polish military activity was noticeable in and around Danzig, and German Air Marshal Hermann Göring announced that this year's German air maneuvers would begin August 1, and would be held on the Netherlands frontier. Just as another warning to Poland's allies as well as to Germany that Poland would not accept a "Munich deal" over Danzig, Marshal Smigly-Rydz gave an interview to the Paris newspaper, Le Petit Parisien...