“9. I shall lose no opportunity of impressing on Minister for Foreign Affairs necessity of doing everything possible to prove that Hitler’s allegations regarding German minority are false.”
And yet, again, we have further corroboration of General Lahousen’s evidence in a memorandum, which has been captured, of a conversation between the writer and Keitel. It is 795-PS, and it becomes GB-54. That conversation with Keitel took place on the 17th of August, and from the memorandum I quote the first paragraph:
“I reported my conference with Jost to Keitel. He said that he would not pay any attention to this action, as the Führer had not informed him, and had only let him know that we were to furnish Heydrich with Polish uniforms. He agrees that I instruct the General Staff. He says he does not think much of actions of this kind. However, there is nothing else to be done if they have been ordered by the Führer; that he could not ask the Führer how he had planned the execution of this special action. In regard to Dirschau, he has decided that this action would be executed only by the Army.”
That then, My Lord, was the position at the end of the first week in August—I mean at the end of the third week in August. On the 22d of August the Russian-German Non-Aggression Pact was signed in Moscow, and we have heard in Hitler’s speech of that date to his commanders-in-chief how it had gone down as a shock to the rest of the world. In fact, the orders to invade Poland were given immediately after the signing of that treaty, and the H-hour was actually to be in the early morning of the 25th of August. Orders were given to invade Poland in the early hours of the 25th of August, and that I shall prove in a moment.
Oh the same day—the 23rd of August—that the German-Russian agreement was signed in Moscow, news reached England that it was being signed. And of course the significance of it from a military point of view as to Germany, particularly in the present circumstances, was obvious; and the British Government immediately made their position clear in one last hope—and that one last hope was that if they did so the German Government might possibly think better of it. And I refer to Document TC-72, Number 56; it is the first document in the next to the last part of the Tribunal document book, in which the Prime Minister wrote to Hitler. That document becomes GB-55:
“Your Excellency:
“Your Excellency will have already heard of certain measures taken by His Majesty’s Government, and announced in the press and on the wireless this evening.
“These steps have, in the opinion of His Majesty’s Government, been rendered necessary by the military movements which have been reported from Germany and by the fact that apparently the announcement of a German-Soviet agreement is taken in some quarters in Berlin to indicate that intervention by Great Britain on behalf of Poland is no longer a contingency that need be reckoned with. No greater mistake could be made. Whatever may prove to be the nature of the German-Soviet agreement, it cannot alter Great Britain’s obligation to Poland, which His Majesty’s Government have stated in public repeatedly and plainly and which they are determined to fulfill.