The personal remarks were made by other posters and had been removed by me.
Andreas,
I thank you for that clarification.
I would like to address the points you made, which I agree are quite valid.
What would have happened if Poland had acceded to German demands, which began to be made at the end of 1938, and agreed to the reunification of Danzig with Germany (which was the desire of the overwhelming majority of the city's people) and an extra-territorial road and rail link to East Prussia across the Corridor?
In the first place, the sole remaining bone of contention between Germany and Poland would have been removed, and there would have been no cause for conflict, at least on the German side. Germany would have continued the process of drawing Poland into an anti-Soviet alliance, in the same way as it drew Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and (briefly) Yugoslavia into such alliances without invading them (Yugoslavia was invaded in April 1941 only after the Government of the Regent Prince Paul was overthrown in a coup and a pro-Soviet regime installed).
Andreas, you need to realise that until March 1939, when Britain issued its "blank cheque" to Poland, Hitler did not regard Poland as an enemy. Rather he regarded it as a potential ally in a future confrontation with the Soviet Union, which was quite realistic, given the anti-Soviet posture of Pilsudski in particular. His preferred option was to make an ally of Poland, in which case its large army would be available to form part of the anti-Soviet coalition.
Hitler only decided to invade Poland when he realised that its army would not join him as an ally, but on the contrary would join an Anglo-French coalition against Germany.
Andreas, check out Soviet Government material produced in the mid-1930s. You will see that the view of the Soviet Government was that Poland, together with other countries such as Finland and Romania, would inevitably join Germany in an anti-Soviet war. Check out in particular the book "Hitler Over Russia" by the Comintern agent Ernst Henri (or Genri), dating from 1935, in which Henri describes a scenario of a German-Polish-Romanian invasion of the Soviet Union.
Henri was spot on in his assessment of the roles of Finland and Romania in making war on the Soviet Union. He even predicted with uncanny accuracy the military roles those two countries did in fact play.
He was only wrong about Poland. He assigned to the Polish army the role that was actually played by the German Army Group Centre in Barbarossa, ie the advance on Moscow.
However, at the time his prediction was entirely reasonable. Nobody could have predicted in 1935 that Poland would not join Germany in a war on the Soviet Union, but would to the contrary join Britain and France in an anti-German coalition and end up being invaded and crushed by Germany.
It must have been a matter of great satisfaction to Stalin that his clever diplomacy resulted in the large Polish army being destroyed by Germany rather than being deployed alongside Germany against him.
Andreas, you need to realise that Hitler's basic attitude toward Poland was entirely different to his attitude toward Czechoslovakia and the Czech nation.
He certainly regarded Czechoslovakia as a sworn enemy of Germany that needed to be eliminated. Like most German Austrians he had a very negative attitude of the Czech nation, regarding it as a rival to the German antion within the living space of the Habsburg Monarchy.
Check out the references to "Czechoslovakia" and "Czechs" in Mein Kampf, and compare them with the references to "Poland" and "Poles". You will find plenty of hostile references to Czechs, while Poles and Poland barely rate a mention.
Like most German Austrians, he had no particular hostility to Poles, who were not regarded as an ethnic threat within the Austrian lands. In fact, his conciliatory attitude toward Poland between 1933 and 1939, contrasting strongly with the "cold war" waged by the Weimar Republic, surprised many contemporary observers, and was expalined by them as due to his Austrian origin; he was pursuing a traditional Austrian policy toward Poland, as opposed to the Prussian policy of confrontation.
Furthermore, even in regard to Czechoslovakia, his enmity was reserved for the Czechs (and Jews), not the minority peoples who made up just on half the population of that country. In the Munich settlement in September 1938 he forced the Czech Government to grant autonomy to Slovakia and Ruthenia (the latter had been promised autonomy in the Versailles strtlement but it had been withheld by the Czechs), as well as ceding German- and Hungarian-inhabited lands.
In March 1939, he forced the final break up of Czecho-slovakia (the federal state which had replaced the unitary Czechoslovakia in the Munich settlement), establishing a protectorate over Czechia (which retained its existing government under President Hacha) and giving independence to Slovakia and Ruthenia (in the latter case only for a few days before it was annexed by Hungary).
The real change in Czechoslovakia came at Munich, not in March 1939. It was at Munich that the Benes regime was overthrown and puppet regimes under Hacha in Czechia and Tiso in Slovakia established. Both regimes continued after march 1939; the main change was the disbandement of the Czech army, still basically loyal to Benes and plotting to upset the Munich settlement by subverting Slovak autonomy.
It also needs to be remembered that Poland had supported Germany in the elimination of Czechoslovakia in September 1938, taking the disputed Cieszyn territory and hoping to partition Slovakia with Hungary.
What would have been the effect on Poland's access to the sea?
In the first place, Germany proposed that Poland would have designated crossing points over or under the extra-territorial German combined road and rail link to East Prussia, thereby maintaining access to its new port at Gdynia, which by 1939 had equalled Danzig in the volume of Polish overseas trade passing through it.
In other words, there would have been a German passage across Polish territory linking East Prussia to the main part of Germany, and a similar Polish passage across the German passage linking the port of Gdynia to the main part of Poland.
As far as Polish access to the port of Danzig was concerned, the model of Memel could have been followed.
In March 1939, Germany compelled Lithuania to return Memel and the surrounding territory to it. However, it entered into a treaty with Lithuania that gave the latter full access to the port of Memel without customs barriers. A similar arrangement could have been made with Poland in the case of a Danzig returned to German sovereignty.
The treaty allowing Lithuanian access to Memel remained in operation until the Soviet occupation of Lithuania in June 1940 and its subsequent annexation. At that pont Germany rescinded the treaty and access to Memel, arguing that such access had been granted to an independent Lithuania, not to the Soviet Union.
That caused conflict between Germany and the Soviet Union, which wanted to use the port of Memel as the inheritor of Lithuania's rights, a conflict that is fully documented in diplomatic exchanges between Germany and the Soviet Union at that time.
