Germany goes for Danzig in March 1939 instead of Czechoslovakia

Say Hitler goes for Danzig in March of 1939 instead of occupying the rest of Czechoslovakia

Would the Western Allies and the Poles agree or would this lead to war

What would happen to the rump Poland after losing Danzig

Would the Western Allies allow Germany to occupy the rest of Czechoslovakia after taking Danzig
 

TruthfulPanda

Gone Fishin'
1 - Poland wants to fight
2 - France and UK wring their hands and urge restraint
3 - what happens next is up in the air ...
 
I don't think France and the UK would go to war over Danzig, since they did not want to go to war over the Sudetenland. Especialy since Danzig is not actualy part of Poland. So if Poland would go to war over it, it would stand alone. The question is, would a Germany without the Czech loot be able to defeat Poland. My gut feeling says yes it would, although it would take longer than OTL. I think Poland would think the same and simply accept a German Danzig, but would not accept an invasion into Poland proper and most certainly would fight if Germany would try to gain more of Poland (like the corridor, upper Silesia, Posen, etc).
 

trajen777

Banned
This is the best Situation for Hitler
1. Sweep in grab (what AH should have done in WW1 )
2. Poland with out Danzig would have been at mercy of Germany -- no port
3. Poland becomes a satellite of Germany
 

nbcman

Donor
The Polish Government didn't take a hard line with the Nazis over Danzig until after the start of negotiations with the French and British on 22 March 1939 which led to the guarantee of Polish borders at the end of March 1939. If the Germans pressed the Poles without the Franco-British guarantee, maybe the Poles would have fought alone or maybe they would have buckled and joined the Anti-Comintern Pact.
 
The Polish Government didn't take a hard line with the Nazis over Danzig until after the start of negotiations with the French and British on 22 March 1939 which led to the guarantee of Polish borders at the end of March 1939. If the Germans pressed the Poles without the Franco-British guarantee, maybe the Poles would have fought alone or maybe they would have buckled and joined the Anti-Comintern Pact.
With that British and France have nobody left to throw under the bus, so... Germans take Paris in September?
 
I think Hitler could get away with pretty much everything it wanted as long as it was simply reversing Versailles, (with the exception of alsace-lorraine), so as long as Hitler keeps demanding territory that was lost in Versailles I think that the UK and France are never going to go to war.

In fact I think in Munich Hitler could had got a way better deal and rather than just deal with the Sudetes, go all out and tell Chamberlain that he his territorial demands will cease when Versailles is completely destroyed, which is what everone was expecting.

The main problems for Germany started when it took Prague since it is something Versailles definitively didn't covered and it also shat on Chamberlain's "peace for our time" claim. Even OTL after the invasion of Poland, France and the UK went to war kicking and screaming.

So yeah, I think Germany can definitively go for Danzig instead of Prague, it will still piss of Chamberlain becuase his "peace for our time" rethoric got shot down, but it will not lead to war. There is in fact people that claim that even OTL Hitler could had avoided war with France and the UK if he just took Danzig and left the rest of Poland alone, it is unknown if he could had done it, but it shows just how of a wide margin to operate Hitler had, he simply just spent it all on Prague and in the end achieved way less than he could.
 
A. J. P. Taylor made a curious argument that due to an accident of geography, as long as the Poles resisted incorporation of Danzig into the Reich, Hitler could not get Danzig without launching an all-out war with Poland--he couldn't just seize the city like Memel because the only adjoining German area (East Prussia) was cut off from Danzig by the unbridged Vistula! Leaving aside the fact that by the time the war broke out (indeed for some months before that) Hitler was no longer interested in Danzig but in the destruction of Poland, I am not convinced that Hitler could not have limited the fighting to Danzig and the Corridor if he had wanted to. If he had done that and emphasized the limited nature of his demands, it is likely that, had Hitler not seized Prague, Great Britain and France would have acquiesced.

Of course if you assume that any German-Polish war, even one with ostensibly limited aims, would escalate into a world war, there was obviously a case that Germany gain control of the rump Czecho-Slovakia first, to have the important Czech arms industry when the next world war started. But I am not so sure that this assumption was correct.
 
Would it be big enough to cover Poland's needs?
Danzig was a free city independent of Poland and had in the early 1920s had strikes against support the Polish during the Polish -Soviet War. Gdynia was built up specifically to be the Polish port on the Baltic.

If Wikipedia is to be believed it was already the largest port in the Baltic in 1938 because of these investments and was already handling 8.7 million tons.
 
A. J. P. Taylor made a curious argument that due to an accident of geography, as long as the Poles resisted incorporation of Danzig into the Reich, Hitler could not get Danzig without launching an all-out war with Poland--he couldn't just seize the city like Memel because the only adjoining German area (East Prussia) was cut off from Danzig by the unbridged Vistula! Leaving aside the fact that by the time the war broke out (indeed for some months before that) Hitler was no longer interested in Danzig but in the destruction of Poland, I am not convinced that Hitler could not have limited the fighting to Danzig and the Corridor if he had wanted to. If he had done that and emphasized the limited nature of his demands, it is likely that, had Hitler not seized Prague, Great Britain and France would have acquiesced.

Of course if you assume that any German-Polish war, even one with ostensibly limited aims, would escalate into a world war, there was obviously a case that Germany gain control of the rump Czecho-Slovakia first, to have the important Czech arms industry when the next world war started. But I am not so sure that this assumption was correct.

Hitler could had invaded Poland outright and Britain and France would not had declared war, definitively not. I have read multiple posts here that after the Sudetes Czescholovakia was a puppet German state and there was no reason to invade it:

The simple fact is that very little would have probably changed; when German troops marched into Prague on 15 March 1939 he was simply making de jure that which was already de facto: that Czechoslovakian independence had ended with the signing of the Munich Agreement.

The Munich agreement was signed on 30 September 1938 and, as per the agreement, German forces began occupying the so called ‘Sudetenland’ in stages from 1 October onwards. Under the agreement, those territories ‘of preponderantly German character’ were to be ceded to the Reich; the Czechs and French interpreted this as meaning territories with German majorities of 75 to 80%, however the German and British representatives insisted that a simple majority was all that was required for the territory to become German. Moreover, Czechs who had taken up residence in the region between 1918 and 1938 were not to be counted. Consequently, the Czechs lost even more land than was expected by them or the French. It needs to be remembered that Munich was a conference without Czech participation; the agreement was made between Britain, France and Germany, and presented to the Czechs as a fate accompli, as though Czechoslovakia were an Anglo-French colony rather than an independent and sovereign state. The reality was that Czech sovereignty ended the moment that the Chamberlain flew to see Hitler at Birchesgarten.

After Hitler had occupied all of the territory that he wanted in October 1938, occupation of the rest was simply unnecessary; Germany held Czechoslovakia’s throat in its jaws, the slightest pressure would crush the windpipe. The government of Edvard Beneš fell on October 5th, before the land transfer had even been completed. It was replaced by a new regime lead by Emil Hácha that was conservative, authoritarian and completely subservient to Berlin; in December 1938 the Communist Party was dissolved and all Jewish teachers in Czechoslovakia (or Czech-Slovakia as it was by this time) lost their jobs. In January 1939, the Czechs were instructed to withdraw from the League of Nations, join the Anti-Comintern Pact, accept German direction of its foreign policy, sign a preferential trade agreement with Germany and introduce the Nuremburg Race Laws in full (the dismissal of Jewish teachers in December had occurred without prompting from Berlin). The Germans also demanded and received millions of Francs worth of gold bullion from the Czech central bank. Clearly what remained of Czechoslovakia was a German colony even before the Wehrmacht paraded through Prague in March 1939.

Internationally little would have changed; the good feelings towards Germany generated by Munich in Britain and France were destroyed by Kristallnacht; the anti-Jewish pogrom of 9-10 November 1938. That revealed true nature of the Nazi regime to people internationally who had been largely indifferent or ignorant. When Goebbels’ propaganda machine started laying the groundwork for the invasion of Poland, no-one had any illusions as to what was actually going on; the British embassy in Berlin informed London that the exact same stories of abuses of ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia that were published in the German newspapers prior to Munich were now being reprinted word for word, with only the town names changed from Czech to Polish. (Proof of just how short the time between the two events was and how little prior planning was actually involved; there simply wasn’t time to fabricate stories of new atrocities, so the old ones were recycled.) No-one in London, Paris, and particularly Warsaw would have been under any illusions that ceding Danzig and the Pomeranian Corridor to Hitler would have permitted Poland to keep any independence; it would have become every bit the puppet that Prague had become.

Assuming the same guarantees, diplomatic manoeuvres, and ultimate outbreak of war, the Polish campaign would have been largely unaffected; although some German forces did attack Poland from Slovakian territory, they were limited by the terrain and restricted roads, the bulk of the German army attacked directly out of Germany proper.

March 15 gave Hitler a parade and a night in Hradschin castle, little else.

A repeated argument here is that Hitler only got so strong after he captured Prague's industry. If this is true he had already done it by turning it into a satellite and there was no need to invade it directly.

Now I don't know if this is true, but if it is, then Hitler can just invade Poland and he would have everything he needs for his war with the USSR without going to war in the west.

I don't know if this would put him in a better or worse position than OTL though.
 
Didn't Hitler invade what was left of the Czech state to seize their gold reserves?

Since the Nazi economy was running into trouble.

Invading Danzig may not have helped them much.
 
Didn't Hitler invade what was left of the Czech state to seize their gold reserves?

Since the Nazi economy was running into trouble.

Invading Danzig may not have helped them much.

Read my post above. Apparently Czechoslovakia was a complete German satellite since the Sudetes thing. If this is true, invading it was completely pointless and just done by Hitler to show off.
 
I think Hitler could get away with pretty much everything it wanted as long as it was simply reversing Versailles, (with the exception of alsace-lorraine), so as long as Hitler keeps demanding territory that was lost in Versailles I think that the UK and France are never going to go to war.
I disagree. Both Austria and Sudetenland were not areas Germany lost in Versailles. Both had been part of Austro-Hungary and not Germany. I think it was not the idea of reversing Versailles, but the idea of uniting the German people. Austria and Sudetenland were full of Germans who wanted to join Germany (at least Nazi-Germany managed to make it look like they did). The same is true for Danzig and Memel (more or less). It was not true for rump Czechia, or the Polish Corridor/Upper Silesia/Posen. When Nazi Germany annexed rump Chechia it showed that it cared nothing about unifying all German people, but simply wanted everything it could grab.
 
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