East and West in Hitler's military strategic plans of “post-munich” period

The authors once again revert to the question of the place of the East and the West in Hitler's military strategic plans for the postMunich period - more precisely, its initial phase, October 1938 - January 1939. The main sources are: published materials of the British Foreign Office; archival materials of meetings of the British Cabinet of Ministers and its committees, diplomatic documents from collections of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR, as well as correspondence of former Russian tsarist diplomats. Hitler's military strategic plans for the period “after Munich” have not been officially recorded anywhere. It is only known that on October 21, 1938, a directive appeared, setting the Wehrmacht with the task of defeating the remainder of Czechoslovakia, capturing the Memel region and strengthening the western German border. November 24 was followed by an order to prepare for an attack on Danzig, which was under the control of the League of Nations. After the solution of these problems, with a high probability Hitler could move troops into the territory of the USSR, which always remained his more "sworn" enemy, rather than the West. Already in the summer of 1938, two French ambassadors informed their Foreign Ministry that “Hitler is now paying particular attention to the USSR issue”, planning to “divide it into a number of more or less independent parts ... Ukraine should be one of such semiindependent parts...”. Under pressure from Hitler on October 8, 1938, Podkarpatskaya Rus (Zakarpate) and Slovakia were granted autonomy in the “new” Czechoslovakia. But on October 25, a coup d'etat took place in the Republic of Karpatskaya Rus, the prime minister - rusyn Brodia - was replaced by the “Ukrainian” Voloshin, and the region became known as the Zakarpatska Ukrainе (Transcarpathian Ukraine). The birth of autonomy “Zakarpatska Ukrainе” gave rise to a stable idea in Europe: Hitler intends to turn it into a “Ukrainian Piedmont”. The fact that Hitler intended to start the movement not in the western, but in the eastern direction, without stopping at the border of the USSR, was confirmed by his persistent “courting” of Polish politicians that continued from October 1938 to March 26, 1939. In the course of this "courtship", the question of “policy to be pursued by Poland and Germany towards Russia” has consistently been raised. Hitler clearly made a bid to turn Poland into his ally, which he would hardly have done for the purpose of joint actions against England, and especially against France, with which Poland formally still remained in co-operation relations. In the event of war with the West Reich had enough Polish neutrality provided by the Polish-German Declaration of 1934 on the non-use of force. The authors do not consider the reasons why, contrary to the expectations of many, the western not the eastern version of Hitler's aggression will be realized in the autumn of 1939.

Keywords

Authors

References