by Simon Winder
The weary sequence of events is well known: each aspect of the Versailles Treaty would now be undone as rapidly as possible. Some key elements lay in the east (particularly the ‘Polish Corridor’ and Danzig) but the critical moment lay in the remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936. This was preceded a year before by a plebiscite administered by the League of Nations in the Saarland. This was France’s only serious spoil from 1918, but in line with the Treaty the inhabitants had to decide their own future. The plebiscite was fair, with the territory flooded with British and Italian troops under League of Nations command, but disastrous, with an overwhelming vote to re-join Germany. Years of handing out Marianne dolls to schoolchildren, bribes, threats and encouragements to learn French had made no difference whatsoever in the face of a German nationalism just as mad and self-sufficient as France’s own. The French left and the Nazis moved in.
The Rhine’s left bank remained the great guarantee and tripwire for Belgium and France. The German army was still small and undertrained, the German air force only re-founded a year before. As they marched in German troops were under orders to retreat in the face of resistance, but there was none. Only four years after the Thiepval and Verdun commemorations, but also in societies that had been themselves shaken badly by the Depression, by the threat of communism and by a great intellectual wave of belief in the futility of the Great War, it was impossible to imagine a counter-invasion of the Rhineland. The French needed British assistance, but neither country in the end could conceive of re-opening the spigot of 1914.
The Western Allies in all their military planning still faced the crucial problem of how to go about invading Germany, which had been unresolved in 1918 and, as it turned out, would remain so in 1939. The Great War had been entirely occupied by the straightforwardly heroic task of taking back national territory seized by an invader. How many years and deaths would have been required to reach Berlin? The Germans had secretly been building lines of fortification east of the Rhine since 1934 – but these were now left in favour of the great West Wall, or Siegfried Line (a British term reconditioned from the Great War). This, oddly, became known as the ‘Limesprogramm’ – reviving the Roman Empire idea, much beloved of Wilhelm II, of a sequence of anti-barbarian forts. Again, without irony, the original ‘Limes’ being built to keep Germans out seems to have escaped everybody – but Nazism was such a hopeless mess of Caesarian, Wagnerian, Nordic and Fordist impulses that it is too easy to pick holes. Work began on what were planned to be some twelve thousand forts and bunkers from Kleve to the Swiss border, to be finished in 1952. Unlike the Maginot Line and Eben-Emael, however, these forts (which by November 1938 had already used over a million tonnes of cement, almost seven million tonnes of gravel and sand and employed well over half of all German concrete mixers) were there not for defence, but simply to hold off Allied troops while any German opponent in the east (such as Poland or Czechoslovakia) was first destroyed. If there ever had been an opportunity for the Allies to stop Germany, it was now passed.
The Kingdom of Mattresses
One of the more gloomy/peculiar things to do in the Rhineland is spend a night at the Hotel Dreesen in Bad Godesberg, south of Bonn. With its old-fashioned, mournful gilt and riverside location, for more than a century it has been providing a very mild inland holiday experience. It lies at the heart of Nibelung country, with the Rhine down which Siegfried travelled from Xanten to Worms, and with the Siebengebirge (Seven Mountains) in which Brünnhilde once slept on the opposite bank. A quick ferry journey across the river takes you to the guilty pleasure of the Nibelung Hall, built in 1913 to commemorate the centenary of Wagner’s birth. Enjoyably morose paintings of The Ring fill the feast-hall-style interior, sculptures of Fasolt and Fafner, a Jugendstil curtain showing the Norns measuring fate. An anxious sign explains that the swastika motif in the windows has an ancient and blameless origin. The hall itself has kept its purity, but things get somewhat miscellaneous alongside it, with a jaunty life-size Siegfried’s Dragon put in for the fiftieth anniversary of Wagner’s death in 1933 – a statue which I think would have made the Master very angry indeed – and a vivarium specializing at the moment in albino anacondas, oddly.
Bad Godesberg itself is a superbly arrogant Wilhelmine suburb, little bombed, with as its central focus the great tower which was blown up in the painfully silly sixteenth-century Cologne War discussed earlier. The Hotel Dreesen remains famous for hosting the Chamberlain–Hitler talks in September 1938 at which the future of Czechoslovakia hung in the balance. The Wagnerian flavour was ideal for Hitler, and the Norns were busy at work as the two men tried to gauge each other’s intentions. The jittery, fearful atmosphere of those days has been overlaid by so many later disasters. The Soviet Union and France had guaranteed Czechoslovakia’s borders, but Britain refused to join them. Through arrogance, narrowness, contempt for Hitler but also a genuine horror of what war might mean, Chamberlain made it clear to Hitler that he could do as he wished. The Munich Conference later in the month broke up the Czechoslovak state, removing the key bastion that hemmed in the Third Reich. The Soviets in total disgust at Western weakness began to make other plans. It is possible to stand in the same lightly remodelled entrance to the Hotel Dreesen that Hitler and Chamberlain stood in for their famous picture together, but it is not fun to do so.
The fighting that eventually broke out in the West ran along the same divide as in the First World War. The region described in this book was swept over twice, in 1940 and then in 1944. In the nightmarish interlude terror, genocide, forced labour, aerial bombing and the collapse of almost all social and economic norms wracked the occupied zones. Of course, for those living there it seemed in late 1940 to be a permanent future and the compelling shape we give the Second World War, ending with the Liberation, was not available to those who lived through it.
Every actor in 1939 was almost immobilized with self-consciousness. The Low Countries remained anxiously and even despairingly neutral. The Swiss mobilized some 400,000 troops and adopted their traditional ‘Porcupine Principle’. The French and British, with no plan as to how they might invade the Third Reich, hoped that a fresh blockade would smother the German economy and topple Hitler – but, with the Nazi–Soviet Pact, this was like staking out the front of a house and pretending not to notice the convoys of trucks delivering all the world’s goods through the back garden. The Allied commanders were reduced to near paralysis by their memories of the First World War. The scale of what was achieved was nonetheless extraordinary. French society was entirely reshaped and over two million men sent to the front. With the declaration of war and the activation of the Maginot Line, a ‘red zone’ was declared along the borders which shifted some two million civilians west and south-west, clearing the Nord, Ardennes, Alsace, Lorraine and the Franche-Comté of most of their population. Within weeks of the war’s outbreak it was fair to say that France was a different country, its pre-war shape gone whatever the outcome.
For the Germans the self-consciousness around 1914–18 was quite different. The plan, motivating even the most secretly anti-Hitler officer in the German armed forces, was to remove the shame of 1918. Hitler imagined a great, immediate, bludgeoning encounter in 1939 which might perhaps reach the Somme by winter, the immense German casualties forming the blood sacrifice that would awe future generations, with 1940 finishing the job. A bit less nibelungentreu, most generals focused on the disastrous failure to secure the Channel ports in 1914. France could be defeated in due course, but this time Britain would be the primary focus, with an invasion of Belgium and the Netherlands giving Germany the string of great docks and harbours from Rotterdam to Boulogne, closing the Channel and allowing for as long a time as needed to grind away at British seapower and bomb London flat. Unfortunately for the Germans, this plan fell into Allied hands in the January 1940 ‘Mechelen incident’ when a German plane crashed in Belgium. The Allies were sure it was a fake, but the Germans did not know this and felt obliged to rethink.
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nbsp; One oddity in 1940 was that the Maginot Line worked really well, securing a huge chunk of the frontier. This so reduced the Germans’ strategic options that all they could do really was invade through central Belgium or the Ardennes or both. This should have simplified life for the Allies too, keeping their main forces back to respond to whatever the Germans did. Instead, the French dogmatically insisted that the Ardennes were impassable and that Belgium was therefore the only real theatre. The French have always been blamed for this, but the underestimated Belgian angle of Germany’s eventual attack plan would prove just as brilliant as the Ardennes one. The Germans knew that the French were aghast at the idea of a second war again devastating French soil. They knew that their eagerness to rush out of their fortified positions to encounter the Germans in Belgian territory would lead them to catastrophe, just as much as the ‘left hook’ through the Ardennes.
The campaign was a disaster for the Allies and the scale of German success was so dizzying that it can never really be fully understood (9th May, quiet confidence; 15th May, despair). It could be argued that the French and British generals reflected their countries in their timorous enfeeblement: they had all fought in 1914–18 and were terrified of a repeat. The many months spent waiting for the German onslaught had drained away any élan they might once have had, the British commander Lord Gort deteriorating into a sort of glazed scout-master, obsessing about tiny details of uniform and supply. The Allies understood that each month they were themselves getting stronger and began to see the Germans as having hesitated too long (Chamberlain’s unfortunate April claim that Hitler had ‘missed the bus’). But, of course, the Germans were getting stronger too and re-equipping, retraining and absorbing the lessons of their heavy, real combat experience from Poland, the last factor perhaps the single most important difference between the two sides.
The disaster was universal and barely recordable in conventional newspaper terms. New technology (gliders and concrete-shattering explosives) destroyed Eben-Emael in a few minutes. Rotterdam was bombed with nearly 900 civilian dead, also in a few minutes. Having spent their time since the previous autumn building fortifications, the Allies indeed then left them behind to march into Belgium to crash into what they assumed to be the main German army in open fields, a strategy that would have been viewed as suicidal within weeks of the beginning of the previous war. French troops rushed up into Zeeland for just long enough accidentally to destroy much of Middelburg, where the town seems to have been evacuated with nobody turning off the gas supply, with shocking results. Meanwhile, the main attack came through the Ardennes and, as usual, the towns of Bouillon, Dinant and Sedan became the focus of the world, with the Meuse again failing to provide any real barrier. In a particular piece of hydrographic absurdity, a key lock outside Dinant could not be destroyed without making the Meuse water-level drop so much that it could be waded elsewhere. In other words, the Meuse was only a real barrier to people who liked gesturing at maps. Having broken through, the Germans raced all the way to the coast, refuelling their vehicles from abandoned French petrol stations.
The British were hustled backwards, almost as though running the historical gauntlet, in a humiliating scramble, through towns that had a generation before been bywords for resolute sacrifice – Le Cateau, Ypres, St-Quentin, Amiens. I was really disturbed that through my own ignorance at the time, I had mucked around in Cassel, enjoying its quirky hilltop location and endives, without realizing that it had been flattened in an almost forgotten British rearguard action. The defenders had the grim experience of seeing the German army arrive at the hill’s foot and then pour round it towards the coast.
Lord Gort was a terrible commander but he correctly embraced defeat and evacuation via Dunkirk, the single most important British decision of the war. The Channel ports became infernos. At night burning Calais could be seen from Dover. It could be argued that this showed the original ‘Mechelen’ German plan had been correct: first cut off Britain and then defeat France. As it turned out, the Germans had in fact committed simply a variant on the same mistake of 1914 – and, again, it would prove irreparable.
France had become what Léon Werth called, in his great account of the defeat 33 Days, ‘a kingdom of mattresses’ as cars and wagons festooned with them blocked roads everywhere, one stalled car backing up miles of traffic randomly strafed.2 Some eight million French eventually took to the road, deranged with terror from the stories of what had happened to the frozen Nord in 1914–18. One and a half million French soldiers went into POW camps. Ninety thousand French troops had been killed. Everyone was improvising as neither Germans nor French had begun to imagine such an outcome. The Germans set up an occupation regime in the Netherlands, took back Alsace-Lorraine (Alsace becoming part of Gau Westmark with Baden), absorbed Luxembourg (as part of Gau Moselland) and accidentally recreated much of the old Spanish Netherlands, clumping together Belgium, the Nord and the ports under military rule from Brussels. Coastal France and the country’s top half were occupied and a painfully illegitimate collaborationist government based in Vichy came into existence.
Vichy was meant to represent a victory for common sense, sharing with Britain a realistic end to the war, conceding the inevitable after such a total defeat. Its officials ranted about France’s military failure being the result of ‘the nation’s pacifist schoolteachers’. When the war in fact carried on, Vichy was suddenly left as an embarrassment to itself, clung to by exhausted and demoralized French citizens, but with none of the panoply of Catholic quietism it had been intended to embody: merely collaborationist rather than realistic. In Belgium, Leopold III had taken the same disastrous decision – assuming that he was falling in with a new sensibleness but, as it proved, instead trapping himself on the collaborationist side of the lines. Vichy printed banknotes with the compelling slogan Industrial labour and farm labour: the two breasts of the republic and experimented with the idea that Pétain’s France would be Ceres to Hitler’s Germany’s Vulcan, a metaphor that does not bear thinking about further. It never stabilized but perhaps marginally shielded some of its citizens sometimes from the unfolding horrors across the new Empire.
With German failure to win the Battle of Britain, almost the entire region covered by this book became a prisoner of events it could not control, even the German areas. The one exception was Switzerland, where in July 1940 a solemn parade was held by General Guisan in the same meadow where in 1291 the cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden had formed their historic association, at which he declared that Switzerland would resist invasion and would never surrender. The Swiss were probably lucky – with Britain undefeated and the invasion of the USSR the following summer, there was never an opportunity for Hitler to focus on Switzerland. Swiss seriousness remains impressive and maintained a justly less tainted form of ‘Germandom’, despite some grim compromises.
The whole of the rest of the Third Reich’s existence became from late 1940 onwards, as we can now see, a series of chaotic improvisations, vicious lashings out and gigantic labour squads. It was only consistent in its relentless hunt for Jews, who hid as best they could, but with each twenty-four hours, over weeks, months and years, bringing a chance of betrayal. The Nazi Empire remained squarely German and unable to convince more than fringe figures in the western occupied areas to collaborate wholeheartedly, although there was plenty of opportunistic ratisme. But for the rest of 1940 and 1941 and perhaps later, the Third Reich seemed to be the permanent future and most lost hope.
The road to Strasbourg
I was once flying from London’s City Airport to the clumsily named Basle-Mulhouse-Freiburg Airport, a frequent occurrence while researching this book. It was summer and cloudless and the small plane kept at a height where the landscape was almost hallucinatorily clear below. It was like one of Louis XIV’s map tables in Lille. Almost the whole of Kent could be seen in one go, as a sort of fine matting of fields with the towns as black, sparkling bits of crust (black I assume as a side effect of each building’s
shadow). I could see the town where I grew up in west Kent and the town in east Kent where some close relatives lived. Several times a year we used to drive over there, along seemingly endless hilly, winding little roads, snaking through hop fields and orchards, in a car that was a wheeled prison cell of bickering, recrimination and occasional actual fights between the three of us children on the back seat, curses from the front and the invariable, stylish flourish of either me or my younger sister vomiting everywhere. And there, from the aeroplane, this Winder family Anabasis was shown as door-to-door a journey of about three feet.
As the plane droned on though, the scene became much more serious. I could see the coastal towns, Deal, Dover and Folkestone, and the Strait of Dover (the Pas de Calais). On the far side, the distinctive shapes of Dunkirk, Calais and Boulogne eerily complied with their appearance on maps. It was a genuinely frightening sight – the strait is just not very wide and, thinking about the summer of 1940, the history of the world hung on its existence and on the decisions and balances in technology, shipping, foresight, accident that kept it an effective barrier.
The Anglo-French military catastrophe doomed Europe to a new Dark Age – millions of lives ended under previously unimaginable circumstances as a result of the pitiful Anglo-French bungling and timidity that ended the one serious opportunity to defeat the Third Reich before it got far worse. All over northern France innumerable, mostly unrecorded acts of defiance or determination by small groups of French and British troops slowed up the Germans sufficiently to allow some 340,000 Allied soldiers to get out of Dunkirk and make it possible for the war to continue, but victory would now take another nearly five years and come at a staggering cost.
