On August 22, 1939, in a conference between Hitler and all of the Reich's senior military leaders, Hitler stated quite explicitly that the coming war against Poland was to be a "war of extermination" in which Hitler expressed his intention to "...to kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children of the Polish race or language".[46] The British historian Sir John Wheeler-Bennett wrote that whatever doubts the Wehrmacht might still have had about the sort of regime that they were about to go to war for and the kind of people that they would be fighting for in this war, should have been clearly dispelled by Hitler's genocidal comments during the conference of August 22, 1939, and that the claims made after the war that the Wehrmacht simply did not understand the nature of the regime that they fought for, are not believable.[46] Anti-Semitic and anti-Polish attitudes like the views expressed above coloured all the instructions that came to Wehrmacht during the summer of 1939 as part of the preparations for the invasion of Poland.[45]