Word: polished
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...coax the Soviet Union into the Grand Alliance was a ticklish business. The last thing the Polish and Rumanian Governments want is a Red Army on their soil, even one fighting in their defense. They are more than willing, however, to accept Russian planes and munitions. Off early this week from London for Moscow was Soviet Ambassador to the Court of St. James's Ivan M. Maisky. He was carrying home to Dictator Joseph Stalin and Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinoff the outlines of a plan of "limited aid" in case of war. Far from being insulted at being told...
...Free City of Danzig, ostensibly governed by Poland and the League of Nations, is Poland's No. 2 port. It handles two-thirds the tonnage of nearby, all-Polish Gdynia. For four years Danzig has been run by a German Nazi Government. For Germany to take Danzig would be, politically, like the Italians taking Albania. The question that made Danzig a birthday box with a bomb in it was: how much more grabbing will the "Peace Front" permit the Axis...
Characteristically, the German press built up a horror campaign, screaming that Polish excesses toward Germans were "increasing in an alarming manner." In the village of Altdorf, said one report, "three Germans were beaten by Poles with clubs and wire whips and injured considerably because they spoke German." German divisions were moved up to Poland's western border. On their part, the Poles ordered Polish Nazis to take off their distinctive white socks, and moved new divisions into place opposite the German Army concentrations. In Danzig itself, newspapers reported that Adolf Hitler would be made an honorary citizen...
Three days before the Hitler birthday, the Danzig crisis took an apparent turn for the better. A "deal" was reported in the making, whereby Poland would voluntarily give Danzig to Germany. The Germans were said, in any case, to be planning no invasion of Danzig across Polish soil: to save Poland's face, the invasion would come from adjoining East Prussia...
Even as the Foreign Minister traveled through Germany on his way back, an anti-Polish Nazi diplomatic and press barrage was going full blast. A Polish-British treaty, said Herr Hitler's diplomats and newspapers, would be considered an unfriendly act against the Third Reich. Furthermore, the signing of such a treaty was likely so to incense the Führer that, instead of asking merely for the return of the Free City of Danzig and a road across the Polish Corridor as he is now doing, Aggrandizer Hitler would raise the ante and want Polish Silesia, a slice...