to Poland would strengthen Poland and successfully maintained to Stresemann that Germany should not make any loans to Poland but should try to persuade other nations not to makes loans to Poland. Following Dirksen's recommendation, Stresemann ordered Friedrich Sthamer, the German ambassador to the Court of St. James's, to lobby Montagu Norman, the governor of the Bank of England, to ask him to pressure British banks into not making any loans to Poland. Sthamer was successful and reported to Berlin that Norman felt that the Treaty of Versailles was too harsh on Germany and was willing to support Germans efforts to revise Versailles by denying Poland loans. In November 1925, Dirksen lamented that war with Poland was not possible because of the Treaty of Versailles, which had disarmed Germany and also because of the Franco-Polish Alliance. He said that if only Germany was rearmed, he would be all for launching a war against Poland at once. In a memorandum to Stresemann on 29 December 1925, Dirksen argued that Germany should annex all of Poland that had belonged to Germany in 1914, and he went on to vent his anti-Polish feelings by saying that he loathed all Poles. Stresmann wrote that Germany's chances of regaining the mostly-German city of Danzig would be higher if the Germans were willing to renounce their claim on the mostly-Polish city of Poznań. However, Dirksen was adamant that Posen, as he insisted on calling Poznań, had been German and would be so again and wrote that he did not feel that Germany should compromise in any way on its claims on the lands that once been German and that the frontier should be "rounded off" somewhere to the east. When Germany signed an arbitration treaty with Poland in 1926, Dirksen noted it meant only renouncing war with Poland was "for the time being" and that from the German view, the treaty was only for public relations to portray Germany as the peaceful partner in its relations with Poland. Ambassador to Soviet Union In 1928, in a major promotion, Dirksen became the Ministerial Director of the East Division of the Foreign Office. On 28 January 1928, Dirksen attended a secret conference in Berlin with General Werner von Blomberg of the Truppenamt (the disguised General Staff), who was pressing for an invasion of Poland later that year. Dirksen argued against it because under the present international conditions, "a