Göring roared with delighted laughter. Later still, the FA
sent further good tidings out to Kurfürst: The British and
French ambassadors had been heard slamming the phone down
on each other.
It was now September , . Shortly before : .. Hitler’s
armies engulfed the Polish frontier. Simulating anger, Göring
reported to Dahlerus at eight o’clock that the Poles had demol-
ished the Dirschau Bridge (in fact, the Nazi “first strike” there
had failed) and had seized a German radio station at Gleiwitz (in
fact these “Poles” were SS men in Polish uniforms). He still had
a faint hope that Britain and France would hesitate to wade in.
Throwing a cape around his shoulders, he climbed into his two-
seater sports car and drove into Berlin.
At the Reichstag building he took Rosenberg aside. “I
fought like a lion last night,” he disclosed, “to get the decision
postponed twenty-four hours to allow time for the Sixteen
Points to sink in. But Ribbentrop saw the Führer talking tough
with Henderson, so the peabrain thought he had to talk even
tougher.”
Wearing a soldier’s field-gray tunic, Hitler climbed the
podium of the Reichstag assembly hall and announced that he
had invaded Poland. “If anything should befall me in this strug-
gle,” he announced, “then my successor shall be party-member
Göring.”
Too jaded to be much elated at this public endorsement,
Göring phoned Dahlerus afterward and brought him around to
discuss with a tired but dispassionate Führer the vanishing
prospect of getting Britain to a conference table. Hitler was in-
transigent. “I am resolved to march on,” he snarled, “and to
smash Poland’s intriguing and obstructionism once and for all.”
Afterward the FA heard Dahlerus phoning London, but