>I believe some of the surviving generals testified that if Munich hadn't happened, Hitler wouldn't have backed down, and the plan to depose him would have gone forward. Of course, these men were also trying to live through Nuremberg, so their honesty and reliability is questionable.

And they had similar ideas when remilitarizing the Rhineland.

I don't think their reliability is questionable. The military was a major arm of pre-Nazi German politics. And they were tentative of losing another war so soon after World War 1.

The issue was that France kept backing down. Even when Germany invaded Poland and France declared war, France didn't actually do anything. German generals were fearful of the French pushing through the western border while they were in Poland, and basically got lucky that didn't happen.

Then when they blitzed through Netherlands, Belgium, and France, the military leaders calmed down a lot since basically it all worked out.

But at any point pre-1940 if things went south and it looked like WW1 all over again, the military very likely would have couped Hitler.

I suspect German blitz tactics that overwhelmed France and Poland would have similarly prevailed against the Czech. Czechoslovakia is a lot smaller than Poland and it's landlocked so there's no reinforcements coming in. Sure it's mountainous, but it's small - heck it made short work of Yugoslavia which was all mountains and much bigger.

You don't really have Britain and France on the other side - not without a naval invasion or violating Dutch sovereignty. Otherwise you've just got the Maginot crossing. And frankly, given how non-aggressive France was when Germany invaded Poland, I doubt they would have been more aggressive with the Czechs. Though a more aggressive push by the French would have been a lot more interesting. German military leaders feared a French invasion when the forces were split in Poland.

We heard about potential military coups when he marched into the Rhineland and when he threatened Czechoslovakia. Both were due to fears of France. It's possible that basically any time before the Fall of Paris if the war started the go poorly, that would've been it. But victories kept Hitler in power and the military appeased.

>Was it a realistic scenario at one point for Poland to join the Axis powers or was Hitler’s plan always to invade Poland and subjugate it due to Poland being controlled by the Slavic people who Germany saw as beneath them?

Short answer, possibly, with some major reservations.

Germany wanted Danzig back. Historically, Prussia/Germany controlled the northern Polish coast up through the Baltic states. It lost the Danzig corridor in WW1 and had this German exclave that it wanted to connect again.

Could Poland have been a full Axis member despite being Slavic? Probably. Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania all got to join in and none of them were Aryan.

In an alternative history, could Poland have joined the anti-commiterm pact with Germany? Sure. But that was 1936. By 1939 when Hitler wanted to expand - this is post the Anschluss of Austria and the Sudetenland - he wanted Danzig. So, perhaps Poland could have given up the Danzig corridor and appeased Hitler and avoided the need for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between the USSR and Germany to divvy up Poland.

But what that would end up looking like for Poland is being stuck between two very hostile neighbors. If Poland was aligning with Germany, then like other European Axis minors, there's a lot of deference being given to Germany. More than likely, they still end up being the front line of the German-Soviet conflict.

Long term it's harder to guess at, but you'd likely see Poland become a puppet of Nazi Germany, similar to Viche France.

>The bones were from bears/big cats and other animals used for fighting, not for snacking on as I thought at first.

Well maybe it depends on which animal lost the fight. Not just letting that go to waste.

That blows.

Heck, the glass could've changed hands multiple times as it traveled across Europe. Nothing says it went directly from the middle east to Scotland.