Foreign Minister Józef Beck, he realized that all hope of doing a
deal at Russia’s expense was gone.
The basic cause was still Germany’s comparative military
weakness, and General Göring spelled this out at a secret Cabi-
net-level staff conference on his return to Berlin on May ,
:
Germany cannot solve the Danzig problem at this
moment. The limits of our support [for Danzig] are
determined by the extents of our own vital interest: In
the first instance, this is our restoration as a Great
Power, and the completion of our rearmament is in
turn a prerequisite for this.His air force was still only an imperfect sword, one that both
Hitler and he hesitated to lift from its scabbard. By the end of
he would have on paper eighteen hundred planes, but few
of these were of a type or quality that could be pitted against
either the French or the Polish air forces. If anything, the Luft-
waffe was useful only as a vehicle for Göring’s personal ad-
vancement. In the summer of he dropped broad hints that
he wanted the rank of Luftmarschall, but he drew a blank all
around and had to wait until April , , for his next pro-
motion, to (four-star) Colonel General.
Even before the Luftwaffe squadrons started filling, his
bluster became louder. In January he told Sir Eric Phipps
that although Germany was perplexed by Britain’s hostility, she
did not want war. “If,” he added, “our just demands prove in
the course of time to be unobtainable by peaceful means, then,
terrible as it is to contemplate, war seems inevitable.” Among
those demands he included Austria (he suggested a plebiscite be
held among Austrians themselves); an end to the oppression of
the German minority in Czechoslovakia (which thus figured for