This is my latest timeline. I will reveal no details. Enjoy.
It was 1938 and German dictator Adolf Hitler had once again crashed Europe into a diplomatic crisis, this time over the Czech region known as the Sudetenland. National Socialism was still a very recent phenomenon and it would be a very short-lived one. In 1918, the German Empire had been defeated and the Treaty of Versailles had been forced upon the cast down giant. The army was limited to a mere 100.000 men, no tanks and no heavy artillery, a mere police force to a country that had once been the most powerful nation of Europe. It was an army barely worth speaking of and German military leaders predicted that even a war against Poland or Czechoslovakia was unwinnable. A navy of a mere six battleships of some 10.000 tons, no air force and 132 billion German marks in war reparations completed the picture along with territorial loss which crippled Germany, something the French leader Clemenceau ‘le Tigre’ hoped would be permanent. While the Entente powers revelled in their victory, Germany sank into chaos. Germany was now a republic as the Hohenzollern dynasty had been deposed and communist revolution was in the air, but the gutted army and the Freikorps militias put them down in 1919 and executed the leaders of the revolution. What followed was a period wracked with internal instability which was shown by the fact that in the period 1918-1933, Germany had twenty governments. Coup, communist revolution and foreign enforcement of war reparations (such as the occupation of the Ruhr Area) loomed. Hyperinflation, a weak economy and millions of poor unemployed led to an explosive situation.
In this situation, a veteran Austrian corporal from the Great War known as Adolf Hitler began his journey to total power. In 1919, he joined the DAP or German Workers Party which he renamed the National Socialist German Workers Party or NSDAP. He quickly removed its founder Anton Drexler from power. He turned out to be a great speaker and quickly rose through the ranks of the Nazi party as it was known by its opponents. It quickly became one of the dominant parties in its home region of Bavaria. In 1923 a coup was launched by him, but it failed and Hitler was imprisoned although he was released only two years later only to take power democratically in 1933 after the dubious burning of the Reichstag. He immediately began his program to restore Germany to its former glory to prepare for things that would remain in his fantasy world. In 1935, he reintroduced conscription to rapidly expand the German army and he remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936 without opposition which perhaps encouraged him to go further. In the Anschluss in 1938 he annexed Austria after his 1934 attempt had failed due to opposition from the other fascist dictator in Europe: Mussolini. By 1938, times had changed and after the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, France and Britain were no longer friends with Italy. His ultimate goal being a Greater Germany, he set his sights on the German-speaking Sudetenland in 1938 which was then part of Czechoslovakia, a new state created out of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire which had collapsed in 1918. Czechoslovakia was hemmed in after the Anschluss, making it Hitler’s next target, especially with its demographics (the Sudetenland was inhabited by Czech Germans).
The great powers called for a conference which was held in Munich and present were Adolf Hitler, Neville Chamberlain, Édouard Daladier and Benito Mussolini. Notably missing were Czechoslovakian president Edvard Benes and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin who was upset about not being invited and the USSR not being recognised as a great power. Negotiations commenced in September 1938 and Neville Chamberlain was willing to appease the Germans to avoid war. France had an alliance with Czechoslovakia and was less enthusiastic, but did follow the British. On September 29th, Chamberlain requested a one day delay from Hitler to confer with his colleagues in London. Hitler agreed, but was not too happy with this as he felt that he had been forced to act like a bourgeois politician. The impatient dictator was furious in fact and perhaps he wanted a war to reach his goals and test German military strength. He ordered the German army to execute Fall Grün, the planned invasion of Czechoslovakia. This was the signal for the anti-Hitler elements to move against him and old coup plans were put into action. The border defences in the Sudetenland were very potent, similar to France´s Maginot line if although not as strong. They would undoubtedly cause the German army severe losses although victory was not in doubt. The problem was, however, that it would trigger the alliance with France and in 1938, Germany could not defeat France, let alone Britain as well. German military leaders knew this and many conservative political leaders merely wanted to restore 1914 borders and take the Sudetenland if possible. They refused to go to war for Hitler´s mad schemes and risk the re-emergence of Germany as a great power which was only just beginning.
In the night from September 29th to September 30th, the plotters began to move. General Ludwig Beck Chief of Staff of the Oberkommando des Heeres (the army High Command), ordered his troops to arrest the Nazi leadership and announced a state of martial law. Himmler ordered his SS units to start a countercoup immediately and attempted to contact Hitler whose whereabouts were unknown for the first few hours of September 30th. SS and SA units fought the army, but the SA largely consisted of veterans and soon deserted en masse. The Wehrmacht outnumbered the SS by far and the Waffen SS was soon surrounded in several street battles and defeated. Himmler was arrested as was Heydrich. Other top Nazi leaders such as Hess, Bormann, Nebe, Heydrich and Hitler himself were arrested while Goering fled to Sweden. Beck became president while DNVP leader Carl Goerdeler became Chancellor and SPD member Wilhelm Leuschner Vice-Chancellor. They declared that Hitler had been deposed for attempting to go to war with France, Britain and Czechoslovakia and would be tried for treason while in reality he had already been shot. The coup d’état was complete.
While this took place, Daladier, Mussolini and Chamberlain had all been sleeping and police officers woke them and quickly escorted them to a safer location while the army cleaned up the last remnants of the SS and executed the Nazi leaders, barring Goering who had fled to Sweden, by firing squad. This was a very unwelcome surprise as the old Prussian aristocracy, the Junkers, were back, an enemy that France and Britain had vanquished just shy of twenty years before. The new legal government was, however, recognised by France, Britain and Italy. Mussolini made a proposal that was accepted. On October 3rd 1938, Prague was informed they could accept the annexation or fight it alone. Czechoslovakia acquiesced and German forces moved into the Sudetenland and occupied it in the next few days and the Czechoslovakians let them as they knew that they couldn’t defeat Germany by themselves.
For Germany, this was a new beginning and the government began reorganizing the country and government. Beck issued a statement in which elections were announced while he set up the framework for a new government. He was a military officer and because the army had executed the coup and because Beck was a general, the government was effectively a military junta although that would not be accepted for long which Beck understood. The army was a bulwark of conservatism and many high ranking officers were aristocrats of the landed elite, Junkers, and staunch monarchists who wanted a conservative, nationalist regime to rearm Germany and restore Germany’s position as a dominant power in Europe and re-establish 1914 borders with Poland. The opposition, mostly the SPD, would rather see a true parliamentary democracy although this summoned bad memories from the era of the Weimar Republic.
A compromise settlement was reached with a system called ‘guided democracy’. The military would tolerate a parliamentary democracy with a bicameral parliament, but demanded the reinstating of the monarchy and guarantees for a to be determined military budget and the army would remain influential. Mostly the SPD resisted, but in the end they gave in which created the new issue of who was to become Emperor. A regency council was created with several prominent and notable nationalist, conservative leader as members and general Beck at the head. Emperor Wilhelm II was still alive at this point, but he was dismissed as unacceptable as he was disgraced because of his association with the end of the war and his flight to the Netherlands. His son, Wilhelm, was considered to be a reactionary and unacceptable to the reconstituted SPD. Wilhelm II’s grandson, the prince of Prussia, also named Wilhelm, had entered a morganatic marriage and had renounced his right to the throne, leaving his younger brother. He was a business man and quite an able administrator even though he had not pursued a military career. He had disassociated himself with the Nazis and during his time in Detroit and the rest of the US, he had acquainted President Roosevelt. He was deemed appropriate and he accepted the throne. On January 5th 1939, he was crowned Emperor Ludwig Ferdinand I of Germany and head of state of the interim government in a ceremony in the Aachen Cathedral where the medieval kings of Germany had been crowned. After an interregnum of more than twenty years, the German Empire had been restored although keen observers noticed a difference. Instead of becoming German Emperor like his predecessors, Ludwig Ferdinand was Emperor of Germany as he now controlled all traditional lands of the Holy Roman Empire except for Bohemia-Moravia and Germany was subsequently known as the Empire of Germany even if the alternative title of German Empire remained in use in many circles and the black, white and red was restored as the German flag. The interim government wrote down a new constitution (which emphasized the rights of the military) and legalized the liberal, social-democrat, catholic and nationalist-conservative parties while the Nazis and communists were banned by a decree by Beck. Trade unions were also once again legalized and anti-Jewish legislation was abolished and the Länder as they were in the German Empire were restored with small adjustments in Thuringia.
Ludwig Ferdinand also made overtures to Prague for an alliance and succeeded after some nifty negotiating, promising that the new borders of Czechoslovakia were sacrosanct and that Germany would assist against any Hungarian or Polish incursions. Hungary had already laid claim to Ruthenia while Poland had already made several minor irredentist claims. At this point, Hácha feared the opportunistic Hungarians and Poles more than the new non-Nazi regime in Berlin and accepted. Hungary, as a result, floated more into Rome´s sphere of influence. As Czechoslovakia was clearly the weaker partner of the two, the country quite quickly became a puppet state. On the other hand, the young Emperor did not renounce claims on Poland as many nationalist leaders were lobbying for the restoration of 1914 borders with their eastern neighbour. The monarchist regime organized elections in February 1939 in which a DNVP-Zentrumpartei coalition emerged with Kuno Graf von Westarp as the new chancellor.
Economically, Germany was not doing well. Under the guidance of Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler had rapidly rearmed Germany at the cost of everything else, leading to Germany heading toward bankruptcy as Germany had a lot of outstanding loans. The new government cut in the military budget extensively and began a series of cutbacks and recovery programs, programs that were not always liked but that Ludwig Ferdinand knew to be necessary and so he approved of them. This would slow down rearmament, resulting in Germany being a year behind in 1940 compared to what it would have been under Hitler. The remaining Nazi members were granted amnesty if they co-operated. Basically, the new regime needed the bureaucracy the Nazis had built to run Germany.
In Germany´s foreign policy, Berlin sought detente with Paris and London and had already abstained from invading Czechoslovakia and even announced Hitler´s plans to do so which caused quite a shock. The alliance between Prague and Berlin to protect the Czechs from further incursions could count on some measure of goodwill in London although the French remained sceptical or lukewarm at best although the denouncing of the Nazi regime led to a thaw. France looked upon the new Prussian government with suspicion since they would no doubt try to reclaim Alsace-Lorraine, but Ludwig Ferdinand declined to take a side on this matter. He wanted to remain on Paris´ good side for his own reasons.
With the new system of government and the most pressing matters taken care of, Germany set its sights towards its eastern borders where there were many unsettled irredentist claims and the nationalists were already sharpening their blades as they expected a war. Ludwig Ferdinand and the cooler heads in his cabinet and the Reichstag preferred negotiations and had a minimum program of Danzig, a border revision of Upper Silesia and the Polish Corridor and a maximum program of 1914 borders with any settlement in between being seen as an acceptable possibility. They took a slow pace and opened a channel via the Polish embassy, but quickly the French and British were drawn in as they were friends with Poland although Poland had no guarantees from either France or Britain. Chamberlain at the time was willing to negotiate since his appeasement policy had proven successful previously which had given him some more stature on the international stage. In the immediate aftermath of the Munich Conference, Poland had occupied small pieces of Czechoslovakia so Hácha was supportive of Germany as well. Bad Polish-Czechoslovakian relations already stretched back quite a while. A conference was called in the city of Dresden. Munich and Nuremberg were purposefully not chosen as they were to loaded with the recent Nazi past. This was known as the Dresden Conference which commenced in November 1939. The Poles themselves were invited unlike the Czechs at the Munich Conference, but they immediately took a defiant stance. Poland itself was a dictatorship and was not in the mood for negotiating over any cession of territory, certainly not to their western neighbour. Negotiations were tough with an obstinate Polish refusal to concede and unrest brewing in Danzig. In a secret operation, Germany had sent agents-provocateurs to Danzig to support the call for annexation by Germany. The Poles instated martial law and outlawed the protests, but they continued. As the conference dragged on, Germany gave a warning to Warsaw that they wouldn’t tolerate the oppression of German people who were exercising their democratic constitutional rights. German panzer divisions began massing against the border and the Polish army announced a partial mobilization.
In mid January 1940, the Poles barged out of the conference to the disappointment and dissatisfaction of both Chamberlain and Daladier while the other great dictator of Europe, Stalin, looked on to see if an opportunity would arise for him. Also, Germany, under the table of course, renounced its claims on Alsace-Lorraine which pleased the French delegation. In the city centre of Danzig, the peaceful protests erupted into violent riots out of frustration as the police dispersed them every time. Police and army units opened fire on the crowd and now both the French and British declared an end to continued support for the Polish government and Germany declared war on January 25th 1940.
Although the German army was superior, it would not be an easy affair for either side. The Poles still had a large army and Germany had drastically scaled down its rearmament program a year before, although German army doctrine was generally more modern and the army was led by superior officers compared to the Polish army. The Luftwaffe immediately began an all out assault and proved to be superior in both numbers and technology. The German Air Force in that period consisted of 1250 fighter craft, 330 Ju 87 Stuka dive bombers, 1200 conventional bombers, and an assortment of 600 transport and 370 reconnaissance aircraft for a total of 3.750 aircraft, all up to modern standards. With experience form the Spanish Civil War, the Luftwaffe was the most experienced, best trained and best equipped air force at the time. The Polish air force was smaller and many planes were far from modern standards with about 600 modern aircraft so the Germans quickly achieved air superiority. On the ground things were more troublesome as the 7TP tank proved a match for the Panzer II, Germany’s most numerous tank. The Panzer III proved superior but Germany only had a small number of these. The Polish corridor was seized and Germany’s doctrinal superiority showed. Poland’s small armoured forces were dispersed over the infantry. Although the 7TP was equal to the Panzer II, the Germans enjoyed quantitative superiority. The Polish commander in chief, Edward Rydz-Śmigly, ordered a retreat to the San and Vistula rivers where his forces regrouped to mount a static defence. Czech involvement would make matters worse.
The Munich Coup
Chapter I: Coup, the German-Polish War the Third Balkan War, and the Threat from the East, 1938-1942
It was 1938 and German dictator Adolf Hitler had once again crashed Europe into a diplomatic crisis, this time over the Czech region known as the Sudetenland. National Socialism was still a very recent phenomenon and it would be a very short-lived one. In 1918, the German Empire had been defeated and the Treaty of Versailles had been forced upon the cast down giant. The army was limited to a mere 100.000 men, no tanks and no heavy artillery, a mere police force to a country that had once been the most powerful nation of Europe. It was an army barely worth speaking of and German military leaders predicted that even a war against Poland or Czechoslovakia was unwinnable. A navy of a mere six battleships of some 10.000 tons, no air force and 132 billion German marks in war reparations completed the picture along with territorial loss which crippled Germany, something the French leader Clemenceau ‘le Tigre’ hoped would be permanent. While the Entente powers revelled in their victory, Germany sank into chaos. Germany was now a republic as the Hohenzollern dynasty had been deposed and communist revolution was in the air, but the gutted army and the Freikorps militias put them down in 1919 and executed the leaders of the revolution. What followed was a period wracked with internal instability which was shown by the fact that in the period 1918-1933, Germany had twenty governments. Coup, communist revolution and foreign enforcement of war reparations (such as the occupation of the Ruhr Area) loomed. Hyperinflation, a weak economy and millions of poor unemployed led to an explosive situation.
In this situation, a veteran Austrian corporal from the Great War known as Adolf Hitler began his journey to total power. In 1919, he joined the DAP or German Workers Party which he renamed the National Socialist German Workers Party or NSDAP. He quickly removed its founder Anton Drexler from power. He turned out to be a great speaker and quickly rose through the ranks of the Nazi party as it was known by its opponents. It quickly became one of the dominant parties in its home region of Bavaria. In 1923 a coup was launched by him, but it failed and Hitler was imprisoned although he was released only two years later only to take power democratically in 1933 after the dubious burning of the Reichstag. He immediately began his program to restore Germany to its former glory to prepare for things that would remain in his fantasy world. In 1935, he reintroduced conscription to rapidly expand the German army and he remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936 without opposition which perhaps encouraged him to go further. In the Anschluss in 1938 he annexed Austria after his 1934 attempt had failed due to opposition from the other fascist dictator in Europe: Mussolini. By 1938, times had changed and after the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, France and Britain were no longer friends with Italy. His ultimate goal being a Greater Germany, he set his sights on the German-speaking Sudetenland in 1938 which was then part of Czechoslovakia, a new state created out of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire which had collapsed in 1918. Czechoslovakia was hemmed in after the Anschluss, making it Hitler’s next target, especially with its demographics (the Sudetenland was inhabited by Czech Germans).
The great powers called for a conference which was held in Munich and present were Adolf Hitler, Neville Chamberlain, Édouard Daladier and Benito Mussolini. Notably missing were Czechoslovakian president Edvard Benes and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin who was upset about not being invited and the USSR not being recognised as a great power. Negotiations commenced in September 1938 and Neville Chamberlain was willing to appease the Germans to avoid war. France had an alliance with Czechoslovakia and was less enthusiastic, but did follow the British. On September 29th, Chamberlain requested a one day delay from Hitler to confer with his colleagues in London. Hitler agreed, but was not too happy with this as he felt that he had been forced to act like a bourgeois politician. The impatient dictator was furious in fact and perhaps he wanted a war to reach his goals and test German military strength. He ordered the German army to execute Fall Grün, the planned invasion of Czechoslovakia. This was the signal for the anti-Hitler elements to move against him and old coup plans were put into action. The border defences in the Sudetenland were very potent, similar to France´s Maginot line if although not as strong. They would undoubtedly cause the German army severe losses although victory was not in doubt. The problem was, however, that it would trigger the alliance with France and in 1938, Germany could not defeat France, let alone Britain as well. German military leaders knew this and many conservative political leaders merely wanted to restore 1914 borders and take the Sudetenland if possible. They refused to go to war for Hitler´s mad schemes and risk the re-emergence of Germany as a great power which was only just beginning.
In the night from September 29th to September 30th, the plotters began to move. General Ludwig Beck Chief of Staff of the Oberkommando des Heeres (the army High Command), ordered his troops to arrest the Nazi leadership and announced a state of martial law. Himmler ordered his SS units to start a countercoup immediately and attempted to contact Hitler whose whereabouts were unknown for the first few hours of September 30th. SS and SA units fought the army, but the SA largely consisted of veterans and soon deserted en masse. The Wehrmacht outnumbered the SS by far and the Waffen SS was soon surrounded in several street battles and defeated. Himmler was arrested as was Heydrich. Other top Nazi leaders such as Hess, Bormann, Nebe, Heydrich and Hitler himself were arrested while Goering fled to Sweden. Beck became president while DNVP leader Carl Goerdeler became Chancellor and SPD member Wilhelm Leuschner Vice-Chancellor. They declared that Hitler had been deposed for attempting to go to war with France, Britain and Czechoslovakia and would be tried for treason while in reality he had already been shot. The coup d’état was complete.
While this took place, Daladier, Mussolini and Chamberlain had all been sleeping and police officers woke them and quickly escorted them to a safer location while the army cleaned up the last remnants of the SS and executed the Nazi leaders, barring Goering who had fled to Sweden, by firing squad. This was a very unwelcome surprise as the old Prussian aristocracy, the Junkers, were back, an enemy that France and Britain had vanquished just shy of twenty years before. The new legal government was, however, recognised by France, Britain and Italy. Mussolini made a proposal that was accepted. On October 3rd 1938, Prague was informed they could accept the annexation or fight it alone. Czechoslovakia acquiesced and German forces moved into the Sudetenland and occupied it in the next few days and the Czechoslovakians let them as they knew that they couldn’t defeat Germany by themselves.
For Germany, this was a new beginning and the government began reorganizing the country and government. Beck issued a statement in which elections were announced while he set up the framework for a new government. He was a military officer and because the army had executed the coup and because Beck was a general, the government was effectively a military junta although that would not be accepted for long which Beck understood. The army was a bulwark of conservatism and many high ranking officers were aristocrats of the landed elite, Junkers, and staunch monarchists who wanted a conservative, nationalist regime to rearm Germany and restore Germany’s position as a dominant power in Europe and re-establish 1914 borders with Poland. The opposition, mostly the SPD, would rather see a true parliamentary democracy although this summoned bad memories from the era of the Weimar Republic.
A compromise settlement was reached with a system called ‘guided democracy’. The military would tolerate a parliamentary democracy with a bicameral parliament, but demanded the reinstating of the monarchy and guarantees for a to be determined military budget and the army would remain influential. Mostly the SPD resisted, but in the end they gave in which created the new issue of who was to become Emperor. A regency council was created with several prominent and notable nationalist, conservative leader as members and general Beck at the head. Emperor Wilhelm II was still alive at this point, but he was dismissed as unacceptable as he was disgraced because of his association with the end of the war and his flight to the Netherlands. His son, Wilhelm, was considered to be a reactionary and unacceptable to the reconstituted SPD. Wilhelm II’s grandson, the prince of Prussia, also named Wilhelm, had entered a morganatic marriage and had renounced his right to the throne, leaving his younger brother. He was a business man and quite an able administrator even though he had not pursued a military career. He had disassociated himself with the Nazis and during his time in Detroit and the rest of the US, he had acquainted President Roosevelt. He was deemed appropriate and he accepted the throne. On January 5th 1939, he was crowned Emperor Ludwig Ferdinand I of Germany and head of state of the interim government in a ceremony in the Aachen Cathedral where the medieval kings of Germany had been crowned. After an interregnum of more than twenty years, the German Empire had been restored although keen observers noticed a difference. Instead of becoming German Emperor like his predecessors, Ludwig Ferdinand was Emperor of Germany as he now controlled all traditional lands of the Holy Roman Empire except for Bohemia-Moravia and Germany was subsequently known as the Empire of Germany even if the alternative title of German Empire remained in use in many circles and the black, white and red was restored as the German flag. The interim government wrote down a new constitution (which emphasized the rights of the military) and legalized the liberal, social-democrat, catholic and nationalist-conservative parties while the Nazis and communists were banned by a decree by Beck. Trade unions were also once again legalized and anti-Jewish legislation was abolished and the Länder as they were in the German Empire were restored with small adjustments in Thuringia.
Ludwig Ferdinand also made overtures to Prague for an alliance and succeeded after some nifty negotiating, promising that the new borders of Czechoslovakia were sacrosanct and that Germany would assist against any Hungarian or Polish incursions. Hungary had already laid claim to Ruthenia while Poland had already made several minor irredentist claims. At this point, Hácha feared the opportunistic Hungarians and Poles more than the new non-Nazi regime in Berlin and accepted. Hungary, as a result, floated more into Rome´s sphere of influence. As Czechoslovakia was clearly the weaker partner of the two, the country quite quickly became a puppet state. On the other hand, the young Emperor did not renounce claims on Poland as many nationalist leaders were lobbying for the restoration of 1914 borders with their eastern neighbour. The monarchist regime organized elections in February 1939 in which a DNVP-Zentrumpartei coalition emerged with Kuno Graf von Westarp as the new chancellor.
Economically, Germany was not doing well. Under the guidance of Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler had rapidly rearmed Germany at the cost of everything else, leading to Germany heading toward bankruptcy as Germany had a lot of outstanding loans. The new government cut in the military budget extensively and began a series of cutbacks and recovery programs, programs that were not always liked but that Ludwig Ferdinand knew to be necessary and so he approved of them. This would slow down rearmament, resulting in Germany being a year behind in 1940 compared to what it would have been under Hitler. The remaining Nazi members were granted amnesty if they co-operated. Basically, the new regime needed the bureaucracy the Nazis had built to run Germany.
In Germany´s foreign policy, Berlin sought detente with Paris and London and had already abstained from invading Czechoslovakia and even announced Hitler´s plans to do so which caused quite a shock. The alliance between Prague and Berlin to protect the Czechs from further incursions could count on some measure of goodwill in London although the French remained sceptical or lukewarm at best although the denouncing of the Nazi regime led to a thaw. France looked upon the new Prussian government with suspicion since they would no doubt try to reclaim Alsace-Lorraine, but Ludwig Ferdinand declined to take a side on this matter. He wanted to remain on Paris´ good side for his own reasons.
With the new system of government and the most pressing matters taken care of, Germany set its sights towards its eastern borders where there were many unsettled irredentist claims and the nationalists were already sharpening their blades as they expected a war. Ludwig Ferdinand and the cooler heads in his cabinet and the Reichstag preferred negotiations and had a minimum program of Danzig, a border revision of Upper Silesia and the Polish Corridor and a maximum program of 1914 borders with any settlement in between being seen as an acceptable possibility. They took a slow pace and opened a channel via the Polish embassy, but quickly the French and British were drawn in as they were friends with Poland although Poland had no guarantees from either France or Britain. Chamberlain at the time was willing to negotiate since his appeasement policy had proven successful previously which had given him some more stature on the international stage. In the immediate aftermath of the Munich Conference, Poland had occupied small pieces of Czechoslovakia so Hácha was supportive of Germany as well. Bad Polish-Czechoslovakian relations already stretched back quite a while. A conference was called in the city of Dresden. Munich and Nuremberg were purposefully not chosen as they were to loaded with the recent Nazi past. This was known as the Dresden Conference which commenced in November 1939. The Poles themselves were invited unlike the Czechs at the Munich Conference, but they immediately took a defiant stance. Poland itself was a dictatorship and was not in the mood for negotiating over any cession of territory, certainly not to their western neighbour. Negotiations were tough with an obstinate Polish refusal to concede and unrest brewing in Danzig. In a secret operation, Germany had sent agents-provocateurs to Danzig to support the call for annexation by Germany. The Poles instated martial law and outlawed the protests, but they continued. As the conference dragged on, Germany gave a warning to Warsaw that they wouldn’t tolerate the oppression of German people who were exercising their democratic constitutional rights. German panzer divisions began massing against the border and the Polish army announced a partial mobilization.
In mid January 1940, the Poles barged out of the conference to the disappointment and dissatisfaction of both Chamberlain and Daladier while the other great dictator of Europe, Stalin, looked on to see if an opportunity would arise for him. Also, Germany, under the table of course, renounced its claims on Alsace-Lorraine which pleased the French delegation. In the city centre of Danzig, the peaceful protests erupted into violent riots out of frustration as the police dispersed them every time. Police and army units opened fire on the crowd and now both the French and British declared an end to continued support for the Polish government and Germany declared war on January 25th 1940.
Although the German army was superior, it would not be an easy affair for either side. The Poles still had a large army and Germany had drastically scaled down its rearmament program a year before, although German army doctrine was generally more modern and the army was led by superior officers compared to the Polish army. The Luftwaffe immediately began an all out assault and proved to be superior in both numbers and technology. The German Air Force in that period consisted of 1250 fighter craft, 330 Ju 87 Stuka dive bombers, 1200 conventional bombers, and an assortment of 600 transport and 370 reconnaissance aircraft for a total of 3.750 aircraft, all up to modern standards. With experience form the Spanish Civil War, the Luftwaffe was the most experienced, best trained and best equipped air force at the time. The Polish air force was smaller and many planes were far from modern standards with about 600 modern aircraft so the Germans quickly achieved air superiority. On the ground things were more troublesome as the 7TP tank proved a match for the Panzer II, Germany’s most numerous tank. The Panzer III proved superior but Germany only had a small number of these. The Polish corridor was seized and Germany’s doctrinal superiority showed. Poland’s small armoured forces were dispersed over the infantry. Although the 7TP was equal to the Panzer II, the Germans enjoyed quantitative superiority. The Polish commander in chief, Edward Rydz-Śmigly, ordered a retreat to the San and Vistula rivers where his forces regrouped to mount a static defence. Czech involvement would make matters worse.
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