First Step?

Fuehrer Adolf Hitler is no man to take unnecessary risks. If the German Navy were to steam into Danzig Harbor and forcefully take over the Free City, Britain's Peace Front might well become a War Front. A neater, less dangerous solution would be for the Danzig Senate simply to declare the City annexed to Germany. This would place Poland in the bad strategic position of having to take the initiative and becoming the technical aggressor. If Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain should get fainthearted about the Polish Guarantee, as the Nazis confidently expect, he would have a hole, albeit small, through which he could weasel. The first timid step in this direction was taken last week when a German naval delegation, at the invitation of the Danzig Government, visited the Free City.

President of the Danzig Senate is Arthur Greiser, a native of Poznan, who went to Danzig in 1920 because American relief food was plentiful there. A failure at everything else, he went into politics, progressively switching from the Socialists, to the Stahlelm (reactionary veterans' party), to the Nazis. Oratory and a talent for street-fighting made him Deputy-gauleiter of Danzig and President of the Senate in 1934, a year after the Nazis had gained control of the Danzig Government. Nazi Greiser prefers autonomy for Danzig to actual annexation by Germany, but when the time comes he won't have much to say about it.

To match Polish Navy week at neighboring Gdynia, President Greiser, conveniently a lieutenant in the German Navy, invited a naval delegation from East Prussia to dedicate a Danzig monument to German sailors lost in the World War. The delegation, including the Reich's Rear Admiral Fleischer and a company of marines with a brass band, arrived in Danzig last Sunday. There were speeches and a parade, all surprisingly nonbelligerent. The Poles ignored the move, and sly Danzig Nazis reasoned that if they could get away with one "foreign" naval detachment in the Free City, they might get away with more.

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