Word: foreigners
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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 noon on the day of the invasion, French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet, a devoted believer in the appeasement of Hitler, telephoned Rome to say that France would welcome such a conference. He did not even mention any need for the Germans first to withdraw from Poland...
...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...
...Sunday, Sept. 3. Ribbentrop scornfully let it be known that he would not be "available" but that Henderson could deliver his message to the departmental interpreter, Paul Schmidt. As it happened, Schmidt overslept that morning, arrived by taxi to see Henderson already climbing the steps of the Foreign Ministry, and slipped in a side door just in time to receive him at 9. Henderson stood and read aloud his message, declaring that unless Britain were assured of an end to the Polish invasion within two hours, "a state of war will exist between the two countries...
...early as Sept. 4, the Polish government began evacuating Warsaw. The Bank of Poland sent its gold reserves south, to a haven near the Rumanian border. On Sept. 7 the Foreign Ministry told all diplomats that President Ignacy Moscicki, Premier Felicjan Slawoj-Skladkowski and their Cabinet ministers were leaving immediately by truck convoy for Naleczow, a resort 85 miles southeast of Warsaw. Finding no telephone lines working and almost no electricity, the ministers and diplomats trekked onward the next day to Krzemieniec, some 200 miles farther southeast. Throughout this flight, they were repeatedly attacked by German planes, for the Germans...
That very same day, I later discovered, my father -- a state secretary in the Foreign Ministry -- had taken part in a last-ditch attempt to dissuade Hitler from issuing the invasion order. In his notes my father remarked, "This afternoon is the most depressing of my life. Apart from the unforeseeable consequences for the existence of Germany and of my family, it is appalling that my name should be connected with this event...