offering to visit the Kremlin himself. Time weighed heavily as
Göring waited for London’s reply, through Dahlerus, and Hit-
ler waited for Moscow’s. Once, on the twenty-first, Göring went
to see Hitler. Together with Himmler and Brauchitsch they re-
viewed the tricky military “overture” to White a bold strike by
divebombers and special assault forces to seize the mile-long
Dirschau Bridge across the River Vistula.
Then the phone rang again. Hitler was jubilant: “Stalin has
agreed,” he said.
Overnight Göring’s edginess vanished. Now, surely, Britain
would never interfere. Poland’s fate was sealed. “Each time you
see the Führer,” he sighed to Beppo Schmid after visiting the
Berghof, “you come away a new man. He’s a genius!”
At noon on August , Hitler invited his fifty top generals
and admirals to come to a “tea party” in plain clothes. They
converged on Berchtesgaden from every quarter of the Reich
fifty scar-faced, monocled gentlemen with unmistakably military
comportment and drove up the mountain lanes to the
Berghof. A summer thunderstorm was rumbling slowly along
the valleys, crowding out the August sun. Unpublished candid
snapshots by Hitler’s air-force adjutant, Nicolaus von Below,
show Göring lolling near one door, his ample lower half clad in
gray silk stockings and matching knickerbockers, the upper in a
white blouse and sleeveless green leather hunting jerkin; his
leather belt sagged under the weight of a golden dagger. “Field
marshal,” shouted General Erich von Manstein, no friend of
such uniformed foppery, “Are you the bouncer?”
Hitler spread out a sheaf of notes on the grand piano. In
his ninety-minute speech he made clear his resolve, as Manstein
wrote in his pocket diary, to “settle Poland’s hash.” Dramatically,
he declared that Ribbentrop was departing for Moscow to sign
the Nazi-Soviet pact. “Now,” he triumphed, “I have Poland