Merkel ally Steinbach quits in row over blame for WWII

[Bacon King]

Yes, but the view that some teach that a country like France was a victim is just as ridiculous.

France wasn't in the path of Hitler's expansion to the Ural so it could avoid war with Germany, also France as a great power could stop Germany's expansion at an early point, so France is indeed not entirely a victim.  Still, considering the consequences of a German dominated Europe, declaring war on Germany is certainly defensible on moral grounds, so to say that they weren't a victim at all would be incorrect.

Assuming Poland would have given in and ceded Danzig et al, Hitler would have probably started demanding the "rightfully German" Alsace-Lorraine from France, as it would the only area left to be claimed out of Germany's already-existing territorial ambitions. This border region of course held the huge defensive forts of the Maginot Line, so we could have been similar in some ways to the Sudetenland crisis where Hitler gobbles up the border areas of a country on the pretext of defending ethnic Germans while also taking over the country's main defensive line.

Of course, Hitler was a maniac, so who knows how this speculative alternate history would have actually unfolded.

[Bacon King]

I've always been intrigued by the fact that Hitler's demands on Poland did not include all territory from the former Germany that Poland was awarded after WW One. He did not demand any part of Polish Upper Silesia, or territory in the Posen/Poznan West Prussia region. Instead the final German demands, which they had been talking about since around the start of 1939 were Polish agreement to German annexation of Danzig, and Germany taking the corridor, either thru a plebiscite (this idea came out in the end of August right before the invasion) or right away.
Had Poland agreed to these terms, somewhat similar to the German takeover of the Memel region from Lithuania on March 18, 1939, there is of course no telling what then would have happened.  Personally I believe Hitler would have attempted to draw Poland, as a technically intact, still sovreign nation, into a war of conquest against the Soviets, with Poland serving as a German ally just as other east european countries did in fact, such as Hungary, Rumania, and the puppet states of Croatia and Slovakia.

Interesting bit of speculation. Had Poland ceded Danzig but not gone to war, Stalin would have almost certainly still pushed to claim the land the Soviet Union was given in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and that would have pushed Poland quite strongly into the Axis camp just as the Soviets' claims against Karelia in Finland and Bessarabia in Romania did for those countries.

Or, if Poland had given into Germany but not the Soviet Union, then the British would have supported Poland against Stalin, given their defensive pact. Hitler would quickly join in the fight as well, of course, fighting against the Soviet Union alongside the British. Probably what he was actually hoping for, considering his adulation for England. This intention especially makes sense considering the apparent "compromise" nature of German claims, like you state.