Adolf Hitler
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plans between the long-term anti-British course, whose major instruments such as a vastly expanded Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe would take several years to complete, and Hitler's immediate foreign policy in 1939, which was likely to provoke a general war by engaging in such actions as attacking Poland. Hitler's dilemma between his short-term and long-term goals was resolved by Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, who told Hitler that neither Britain nor France would honour their commitments to Poland, and any German–Polish war would accordingly be a limited regional war. Ribbentrop based his appraisal partly on an alleged statement made to him by the French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet in December 1938 that France now recognized Eastern Europe as Germany's exclusive sphere of influence. In addition, Ribbentrop's status as the former Ambassador to London made him in Hitler's eyes the
leading Nazi British expert, and as a result, Ribbentrop's advice that Britain would not honour her commitments to Poland carried much weight with Hitler. Ribbentrop only showed Hitler diplomatic cables that supported his analysis. In addition, the German Ambassador in London, Herbert von Dirksen, tended to send reports that supported Ribbentrop's analysis such as a dispatch in August 1939 that reported British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain knew "the social structure of Britain, even the conception of the British Empire, would not survive the chaos of even a victorious war", and so would back down. The extent that Hitler was influenced by Ribbentrop's advice can be seen in Hitler's orders to the German military on 21 August 1939 for a limited mobilization against Poland alone. Hitler chose late August as his date for Fall Weiss in order to limit disruption to German agricultural production caused by mobilization. The problems caused by the need to begin a campaign in Poland in late August or early September in order to have the campaign finished before the October rains arrived, and the need to have sufficient time to concentrate German troops on the Polish border left Hitler in a self-imposed situation in August 1939 where Soviet co-operation was absolutely crucial if he were to have a war that year.
The Munich agreement appeared to be sufficient to dispel most of the remaining hold which the "collective security" idea may have had in Soviet circles, and, on 23 August 1939, Joseph Stalin accepted Hitler's proposal to conclude a non-aggression pact (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), whose secret protocols contained an agreement to partition Poland. A
Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler and Mussolini at the Munich Conference