in his case by service in Warsaw and Danzig during his younger years". When Britain offered the "guarantee" of Poland on 31 March 1939, Dirksen protested to Halifax: "Britain, by her guarantee to Poland, placed the peace of the world in the hands of minor Polish officials and military men". Dirksen's policy in the Danzig Crisis was one to attempting to allow Germany to attack Poland without fear of British involvement. Dirksen wanted a war against Poland in 1939 but not a war against Britain and repeated his efforts to sever Britain from Poland by trying to persuade Britain to give up its "guarantee" of Poland. In his meetings with Halifax in the spring and the summer of 1939, Dirksen often told him about "Polish adventurism and moral turpitude" and attacked the British quite violently for being so "foolish" as to make a "guarantee" of a people who, Dirksen insisted, did not at all deserve British protection. Dirksen reported to Weizsäcker that he wanted "to enlighten the English, who are unsophisticated in continental and especially East European affairs, on the nature of the Polish state, and on our claims to Danzig and the Corridor". On the British efforts to create a "peace front" to "contain" Germany, Dirksen told Halifax that all Germans were "unanimously determined to parry this danger of encirclement and not to tolerate a repetition of 1914". Despite Dirksen's attempts to argue that the Free City of Danzig, which was 90% German, should be allowed to return to the Reich, the German occupation of the Czech half of Czecho-Slovakia on 15 March 1939 meant the British were not receptive to his appeals in 1939, unlike in 1938 over the Sudetenland. As Halifax put it on 20 July 1939: From 14 April to 16 August 1939, the German embassy in Britain received on a weekly basis anonymously mailed packages containing decrypted diplomatic cables to and from the Foreign Office to the British embassy in the Soviet Union. They were carefully edited to make it appear that Anglo-Soviet relations were far better than what there were and that the talks to have the Soviet Union join the "peace front" were going well. Dirksen was not entirely certain of the origin of packages or the precise veracity of their contents, but he passed them on along back to Berlin and said that intelligence might be useful. Two cipher clerks in the