World War Two historians have shown that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler never wanted war with Britain or France and that he took pains to avert one. As noted in Patrick Buchanan's excellent treatise, “Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War,” Hitler feared the outbreak of a Second World War and made clear he never wanted a war with Britain, France or even Poland. Rather, the historical record strongly suggests that he sought to make Britain and Poland allies in his planned invasion of the Soviet Union. This explains why, until the end of August 1939, he did not ask for one square inch of Polish territory but merely the return of the independent German city of Danzig and a road highway/rail corridor connecting Danzig and East Prussia with the rest of Germany. Hitler apparently believed that his uncharacteristically modest demands would be satisfied by diplomacy without the need for military conflict.
On September 2, 1939, the day after he invaded Poland but before Britain and France had declared war on Germany, Hitler offered to end the war and withdraw from the rest of Poland if he was allowed to keep Danzig and the Polish Corridor (defined by Hitler to include most but not all of the former German province of West Prussia) while allowing Poland to retain the rest of the former German territory of West Prussia along with all of Posen and East Upper Silesia which they had annexed from Germany in 1919 without plebiscites. When Hitler was informed that Britain had declared war on Germany the following day in response to Germany's invasion of Poland, accounts indicate that he turned ‘ghastly white' and fell into a depression.
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