January 1939: the Polish authorities decline Hitler’s offer

In the second week of January 1939, shortly after Minister Józef Beck spoke with Adolf Hitler in the dictator’s spectacular mountain residence near Berchtesgaden, the Polish leaders who gathered in the Royal Castle in Warsaw unanimously rejected the German offer. The way they saw it, an acceptance of the Reich’s proposal would place Poland well on its path towards vassalage and subjection to Germany. Contrary to popular belief, the offer concerned not only Poland’s consent to the annexation of Gdańsk to the Reich and to creating an extraterritorial link between Germany with Gdańsk Pomerania. Hitler’s vision was to turn Poland into the Reich’s satellite state and have Polish troops hemorrhage on the Eastern Front while helping to build the German empire.