This seems absolutely absurd when I first heard about it but I can't seem to find a straight answer to it. Some say yes, absolutely not, or yes but he was lying.
I know he gave a speech to the generals a few months before the invasion talking about Living room. And even detailed elaborate plans of defeating England and France... Thing is, by 1939 he was pretty certain that the Allies weren't willing to negotiate so this could be seen as being practical to think of the blowback an armed invasion of Poland would bring.
As far as living room, it seems that it can be argued that all of his recent "reunifications" have been because the Germans living there were being oppressed. I buy it, since the Germans took the brunt of the blame of WW1. So when he "liberated" East Prussia he needed efficient access to it, which cut through Poland. From what I understand he was negotiating either to annex Danzig and North Poland into Germany and allow the Poles to have a protected trade road to the sea through it. Or vice versa, allow Germany a protected trade road through Danzig into East Prussia.
Apparently he tried many times to negotiate for this, and even delayed the invasion because he kept wanting one more crack at a peaceful solution. Poland thought Britain and France would protect them from all out invasion, and Britain also assured them that Germany would be shelling the borders for weeks. They never expected a horrific, bloody, decisive, and very quick invasion that lasted only 18 days.
I even heard that Hitler let a battalion of British troops freely escape back to Britain as a show of good faith that he did not want world war.
At this point I've only seen a map on a very sketchy you tube video that claims Hitler was then offering all the German claimed Poland back, but not Russia and of course not the Danzig area. Is that real? I can't find evidence for that anywhere else and I feel like I've been looking hard.
I feel it necessary to disclaim that in no way do I think Hitler wasn't a bad guy. The reason I'm so darn curious about this is because it means that World War 2 could have been avoided both before and after the Poland invasion. But the rumour is that Churchill was absolutely determined for a years long war, and Stalin was giddy for a European War that would weaken capitalism and make it ripe for communism.
I'm not in any way a historian and given the nature of this topic I may have easily stumbled upon some bias interpretations of events. I just want to know what really happened with Poland.
Thanks!
The answer to this is an emphatic no. Much of these youtube videos tend to be neonazi apologia that is Quatsch.
Poland existed in a very nebulous position in Hitler's Weltanschauung. On one hand, the Polish corridor fell under the rubric of reuniting lost German territories and would seemingly put Germany on a collision course with Poland. But Hitler could temporally put aside such motivations if it suited immediate needs. One of Hitler's very first diplomatic agreements was the Polish-German Nonaggression Pact of January 1934. Although the Pact did gloss over the issue of Danzig and the Polish corridor, it did lead to a mild warming of Polish-German relations and a brief downplaying of Danzig in National Socialist agitprop. The Danzig issue returned in the post-Munich Pact diplomacy, but it was a pretext for Hitler to start a war, not its cause.
The Polish-German Pact did form the basis for negotiations during and after Munich. In a series of meeting in 1938 and 1939, Von Ribbentrop implied to the Polish Foreign Minister Jozef Beck and Ambassador Jozef Lipski that Germany would expand the Pact if Poland gave up Danzig and allowed for German-controlled motorways into East Prussia. In exchange for these concessions, Germany would back Poland's access to territory within Ukraine or Lithuania. The Polish responses to these overtures were naturally quite cool; after all, neither Ukraine nor Lithuania were Hitler's to give and accepting this redefined Pact would mean Poland was Germany's vassal. For their part, Anglo-French, and to a lesser extent American diplomacy was trying to stiffen Polish resolve on the Danzig issue lest it give in and present Hitler with another bloodless victory. Hitler's own post-Munich moves such as the absorption of the rump Czechoslovakian state had shown that he was a fundamentally untrustworthy diplomatic partner. This Western diplomacy was messy, but also predicated on trying to stop the outbreak of general European war. Had Poland followed suit and surrendered the corridor for other compensation, that might mean war in Eastern Europe.
Poland did not need this Western pressure to hold fast over Danzig. Realistically, Beck and the Polish foreign policy leadership had correctly ascertained that Danzig was a pretext for a general war. Von Ribbentrop's overtures were a sounding out of other hypothetical courses of action, but Hitler had more or less resolved to have an actual war over Poland by 1939. In a May 1939 meeting with his generals, the German dictator declared:
Danzig is not the objective that this is about. For us, this is about extending our Lebensraum in the east and securing a food supply, as well as solving the problem of the Baltic states. food can be supplied only from places that are sparsely populated. Using the fecundity there, thorough German cultivation will vastly increase the surpluses. There is no other possibility in sight in Europe.
Hitler would likewise claim that he feared some foolish diplomatic intervention over Danzig in other meetings with his military chiefs and diplomats. All of this led to Germany's unilateral abrogation of the Polish-German Nonaggression Pact in April 1939 and preparations for war.
Although the idea that Poland unwisely stood in the way of peace was a prominent feature of Nazi propaganda justifying the war and remains a staple of neonazi apologia for Hitler, there really was no realistic option for Poland in 1939. Beck had signaled a willingness to compromise to von Ribbentrop in their negotiations, but German demands were often quite excessive . When the Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano visited the Salzburg in August 1939, he wrote in his diary:
The decision to fight is implacable. [Ribbentrop] rejects any solution which might give satisfaction to Germany and avert the struggle. I am certain that even if the Germans were give more than they ask for they would attack just the same, because they are possessed by the demon of destruction.
Ciano tried to mount a last-ditch effort to dissuade Germany from war, but this proved fruitless. Other moves to restrain Hitler both within Germany and without proved to be equally in vain. While was wrong in his belief that a Polish war wold not precipitate a wider European conflict, his behavior- what Ciano termed the "demon of destruction"- guaranteed that one would occur.
German policies towards occupied Poland also did not really make much room for a future independent Polish state. Much of prewar Poland outside of the annexed Reichsgaue was lumped into the General Government. The name was apt as the General Government was not a puppet state or even a German satrap like the Reichsprotectorates carved out of the rump Czechoslovakia. In the latter cases, the non-German inhabitants were at least acknowledged as minorities under German suzerainty. The General Government did not even maintain these pretenses of limited autonomy. Berlin more or less treated the General Government as a racial dumping ground for inferiors and did little to even seek collaboration among the land's Polish occupants.
This low status of the Poles even in the stark racial hierarchies of the Third Reich did rankle the General Government's chief, the lawyer Hans Frank. This jurist, who was one of the more corrupt and venal members of the NSDAP (which says a lot), nonetheless began to argue that German racial policies towards the Poles were counterproductive, especially in light of the failures of Barbarossa. Frank's circle formed a kind of loose form of loyal opposition within the Third Reich, and Frank even went on a lecture tour in 1942 decrying the SS's use of arbitrary detention (of Aryans) and warned that unless Germans were cautious, they would end up in a police state.
Hitler stripped Frank of his titles, but not his position and Frank continued to hold a loose sort of court in Krakow that tried to create allies among the Poles. This was a dead letter on many levels and never went beyond Chopin concerts or chess tournaments. The same constraints that prevented Poland from becoming a serious partner in the 1930s prevented even a limited cooperation between the General Government and its Polish population. National Socialism was predicated on racialist assumptions of German dominance and its leaders could never conceive of any system that questioned German hegemony. Vassalage, not alliance, was what Germans demanded of their would-be partners in Europe. Not surprisingly, there were very little incentives for non-Germans to participate in this system that made them permanent inferiors.
Sources
Housden, Martyn. Hans Frank: Lebensraum and the Holocaust. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Mazower, Mark. Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. New York: Penguin Press, 2008.
McDonough, Frank. The Origins of the Second World War: An International Perspective. London: Continuum, 2011.
Mùˆller, Rolf Dieter. Enemy in the East: Hitler's Secret Plans to Invade the Soviet Union. London: I.B. Tauris, 2015.
Weinberg, Gerhard L. Germany, Hitler, and World War II: Essays in Modern German and World History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Winstone, Martin. The Dark Heart of Hitler's Europe: Nazi Rule in Poland Under the General Government. London: I. B. Taurus, 2014.