alarmed that they do not. Thus, they are trapped in a sort of contradiction, for the moment one admits, and they admit it, the unlimited nature of German National Socialist demands, then there is no hope of ending them by settling the crisis of Danzig, and consequently there is no advantage of compromising oneself on the subject. On the contrary there are major disadvantages". As part of the effort to deter Germany from attacking Poland in the summer of 1939, Coulondre was very much in favor of having the Soviet Union join the "peace front". Coulondre reported to Paris that he had heard rumors that Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, and Field Marshal Walter von Brauchitsch, the Army's commander, had warned Hitler that Germany could not defeat Britain, France, and the Soviet Union all at once, which for him was further evidence of the need to have the Soviet Union join the "peace front". In August 1939, Coulondre noted that for the first time the German newspapers were accusing the Poles of insulting "German honour", an allegation which he noted had last been made in September 1938 when Czechoslovakia had been accused of insulting "German honour", leading him to conclude: "The Hiterian plan continues to develop according to a well-known procedure". Coulondre further noted that Danzig crisis was now escalating as the Reich had made the status of the German minority in Poland into an issue instead of just the Free City of Danzig, the city-state which was not part of Poland and was thus potentially easier to resolve than the question of the volksdeutsche minority in Poland. During the Danzig crisis, Coulondre consistently advocated as a solution a compulsory population exchange along the lines of the Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923 under which all of the ethnic Germans living in Poland would be expelled into Germany and all the ethnic Poles living in Germany would be expelled into Poland, saying that the Poles and Germans needed to be separated by force if necessary for their own good as the two peoples simply could not get along. The last days of peace At the height of the Danzig crisis, Coulondre was summoned to a meeting with Hitler at about 7:00 pm on 25 August 1939. Hitler had scheduled the invasion of Poland for the next day and wanted his peace offer to France to