The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  On 17 August, when the German army was carrying out manoeuvres on the River Elbe, two British captains from the embassy who had been invited as observers found that the younger German officers were ‘very self-confident and sure that the German Army could take on everyone’. Their generals and senior foreign ministry officials, however, were nervous that the invasion of Poland would bring about a European war. Hitler remained convinced that the British would not fight. In any case, he reasoned, his forthcoming pact with the Soviet Union would reassure those generals who feared a war on two fronts. But on 19 August, just in case the British and French declared war, Grossadmiral Erich Raeder ordered the fast battle-cruisers, known as ‘pocket battleships’, Deutschland and Graf Spee, as well as sixteen U-boats, to put to sea and head for the Atlantic.

  On 21 August at 11.30 hours, the German foreign ministry on the Wilhelmstrasse announced that a Soviet–German non-aggression pact was being proposed. When news of Stalin’s agreement to talks reached Hitler at the Berghof, his Alpine retreat at Berchtesgaden, he is supposed to have clenched his fists in victory and banged the table, declaring to his entourage: ‘I’ve got them! I’ve got them!’ ‘Germans in cafés were thrilled as they thought it would mean peace,’ observed a member of the British embassy staff. And the ambassador, Sir Nevile Henderson, reported to London soon afterwards that ‘the first impression in Berlin was one of immense relief… Once more the faith of the German people in the ability of Herr Hitler to obtain his objective without war was reaffirmed.’

  The British were shaken by the news, but for the French, who had counted far more on a pact with their traditional ally Russia, it was a bombshell. Ironically, Franco in Spain and the Japanese leadership were the most appalled. They felt betrayed, having received no warning that the instigator of the Anti-Comintern Pact was now seeking an alliance with Moscow. The government in Tokyo collapsed under the shock, but the news also represented a grave blow to Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalists.

  On 23 August, Ribbentrop made his historic flight to the Soviet capital. There were few sticking points in the negotiations as the two totalitarian regimes divided central Europe between them in a secret protocol. Stalin demanded all of Latvia, which Ribbentrop conceded after receiving Hitler’s prompt approval by telephone. Once both the public non-aggression pact and the secret protocols had been signed, Stalin proposed a toast to Hitler. He said to Ribbentrop that he knew ‘how much the German nation loves its Führer’.

  That same day, Sir Nevile Henderson had flown down to Berchtesgaden with a letter from Chamberlain in a last-ditch attempt to avoid war. But Hitler simply blamed the British for having encouraged the Poles to adopt an anti-German stance. Henderson, although an arch-appeaser, was finally convinced that ‘the corporal of the last war was even more anxious to prove what he could do as a conquering Generalissimo in the next’. That same night, Hitler issued orders for the army to prepare to invade Poland three days later.

  At 03.00 hours on 24 August, the British embassy in Berlin received a telegram from London with the codeword Rajah. Diplomats, some of them still in their pyjamas, began to burn secret papers. At midday a warning was issued to all British subjects to leave the country. The ambassador, although short of sleep from his journey to Berchtesgaden, still played bridge that evening with members of his staff.

  The following day, Henderson again saw Hitler, who had come up to Berlin. The Führer offered a pact with Britain once he had occupied Poland, but he was exasperated when Henderson said that to reach any agreement he would have to desist in his aggression and evacuate Czechoslovakia as well. Once again, Hitler made his declaration that, if there was to be war, it should come now and not when he was fifty-five or sixty. That evening, to Hitler’s genuine surprise and shock, the Anglo-Polish pact was formally signed.

  In Berlin, British diplomats assumed the worst. ‘We had moved all our personal luggage into the Embassy ballroom,’ one of them wrote, ‘which was now beginning to look like Victoria station after the arrival of a boat-train.’ German embassies and consulates in Britain, France and Poland were told to order German nationals to return to the Reich or move to a neutral country.

  On Saturday, 26 August, the German government cancelled the commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Tannenberg. But in fact this ceremony had been used to camouflage a massive concentration of troops in East Prussia. The old battleship Schleswig-Holstein had arrived off Danzig the day before, supposedly on a goodwill visit, but without any notification to the Polish government. Its magazines were filled with shells ready to bombard the Polish positions on the Westerplatte Peninsula near the estuary of the Vistula.

  In Berlin that weekend, the population revelled in the glorious weather. The beaches along the Grunewald shore of the Wannsee were packed with sunbathers and swimmers. They seemed oblivious to the threat of war, despite the announcement that rationing would be introduced. At the British embassy, the staff began drinking up the stocks of champagne in the cellar. They had noted the greatly increased number of troops on the streets, many of them wearing newly issued yellow jackboots, whose leather had not yet been blackened with polish.

  The start of the invasion had been planned for that day, but Hitler, taken off balance by Britain and France’s resolution to support Poland, had postponed it the evening before. He was still hoping for signs of British vacillation. Embarrassingly, a unit of Brandenburger commandos, who did not receive the cancellation order in time, had advanced into Poland to seize a key bridge. The Poles assumed that this was a Nazi provocation rather than a predatory action for invasion.

  Hitler, still hoping to put the blame on Poland for the invasion, pretended to agree to negotiations, with Britain and France and also with Poland. But a black farce ensued. He refused to present any terms for the Polish government to discuss, he would not invite an emissary from Warsaw and he set a time limit of midnight on 30 August. He also rejected an offer from Mussolini’s government to mediate. On 28 August, he again ordered the army to be ready to invade on the morning of 1 September.

  Ribbentrop, meanwhile, made himself unavailable to both the Polish and British ambassadors. It accorded with his habitual posture of gazing in an aloof manner into the middle distance, ignoring those around him as if they were not worthy to share his thoughts. He finally agreed to see Henderson at midnight on 30 August, just as the uncommunicated peace terms expired. Henderson demanded to know what these terms were. Ribbentrop ‘produced a lengthy document’, Henderson reported, ‘which he read out to me in German, or rather gabbled through to me as fast as he could, in a tone of the utmost annoyance… When he had finished, I accordingly asked him to let me see it. Herr von Ribbentrop refused categorically, threw the document with a contemptuous gesture on the table and said that it was now out of date since no Polish Emissary had arrived at Berlin by midnight.’ The next day, Hitler issued Directive No. 1 for Operation White, the invasion of Poland, which had been prepared over the previous five months.

  In Paris, there was a grim resignation, with the memory of more than a million dead in the previous conflict. In Britain, the mass evacuation of children from London had been announced for 1 September, but the majority of the population still believed that the Nazi leader was bluffing. The Poles had no such illusions; yet there were no signs of panic in Warsaw, only determination.

  The Nazis’ final attempt to manufacture a casus belli was truly representative of their methods. This act of black propaganda had been planned and organized by Reinhard Heydrich, deputy to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. Heydrich had carefully selected a group of his most trusted SS men. They would fake an attack both on a German customs post and on the radio station near the border town of Gleiwitz, then put out a message in Polish. The SS would shoot some drugged prisoners from Sachsenhausen concentration camp dressed in Polish uniforms, and leave their bodies as evidence.* On the afternoon of 31 August, Heydrich telephoned the officer he had put in charge of the project to give the c
oded phrase to launch the operation: ‘Grandmother dead!’ It was chillingly symbolic that the first victims of the Second World War in Europe should have been concentration camp prisoners murdered for a lie.

  2

  ‘The Wholesale Destruction of Poland’

  SEPTEMBER–DECEMBER 1939

  In the early hours of 1 September 1939, German forces stood ready to cross the Polish frontier. For all except veterans of the First World War, it would be their first experience of battle. Like most soldiers, they pondered in the isolation of darkness on their chances of survival and whether they would disgrace themselves. As they waited to start their engines, a panzer commander on the border of Silesia described his ghostly surroundings: ‘The dark forest, full moon and a light ground mist provide a fantastical scene.’

  At 04.45 hours, the first shells fired came from the sea near Danzig. The Schleswig-Holstein, a veteran of the 1916 Battle of Jutland, had moved during the pre-dawn darkness into position off the Westerplatte Peninsula. It opened fire on the Polish fortress with its 280mm main armament. A company of Kriegsmarine assault troops, who had been hidden aboard the Schleswig-Holstein, later stormed ashore but were bloodily repelled. In Danzig itself, Polish volunteers rushed to defend the central post office on the Heveliusplatz, but they stood little chance against the Nazi stormtroopers, SS and regular forces smuggled into the city. Almost all the Polish survivors were executed after the battle.

  Nazi banners appeared on public buildings, and church bells rang while priests, teachers and other prominent Poles in the city were rounded up as well as Jews. Work on the nearby Stutthof concentration camp was to be speeded up to accommodate the influx of new prisoners. Later in the war, Stutthof would supply the bodies for the experiments in the Danzig Anatomical Medical Institute to process human corpses for leather and soap.

  Hitler’s postponement of the invasion by six days had given the Wehrmacht the opportunity to mobilize and deploy twenty-one more infantry divisions and two extra motorized divisions. Altogether the German army now mustered almost three million men, 400,000 horses and 200,000 ve hicles. One and a half million troops had moved to the Polish frontier, many with blank cartridges on the pretext that they were on manoeuvres. There was no further uncertainty about their mission once they were instructed to load ball ammunition instead.

  Poland’s forces, in stark contrast, were not fully deployed because the British and French governments had warned Warsaw that a premature call-up might give Hitler the excuse to attack. The Poles had delayed the order for general mobilization until 28 August, but then cancelled it again the next day when the British and French ambassadors urged them to hold back in the last-minute hope of negotiations. It was finally issued once more on 30 August. These changes caused chaos. Only about a third of Poland’s 1.3 million badly armed soldiers were in position on 1 September.

  Their only hope was to resist until the French could launch their promised offensive in the west. General Maurice Gamelin, the commander-in-chief, had guaranteed on 19 May that the French army would come with ‘the bulk of its forces’ no later than the fifteenth day after his government ordered mobilization. But time as well as geography was against the Poles. It would not take the Germans long to reach their heartland from East Prussia in the north, Pomerania and Silesia in the west and German-dominated Slovakia in the south. Having no knowledge of the secret protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the Polish government did not attempt to defend its eastern frontier in strength. The idea of a double in vasion coordinated between the Nazi and Soviet governments still seemed to represent a political paradox too far.

  At 04.50 hours on 1 September, as German troops waited for the moment of attack they heard the roar of aircraft coming from behind. And as the waves of Stukas, Messerschmitts and Heinkels passed over their heads, they cheered in the knowledge that the Luftwaffe was about to hit Polish airfields in a pre-emptive strike. German soldiers had been told by their officers that the Poles would fight back with underhand tactics, using civilian sharpshooters and sabotage. Polish Jews were said to be ‘friendly to the Bolsheviks and German-haters’.

  The Wehrmacht’s plan was to invade Poland simultaneously from the north, west and east. Its advance was to be ‘swift and ruthless’, using both armoured columns and the Luftwaffe to catch the Poles before they could establish proper lines of defence. Army Group North’s formations attacked from Pomerania and East Prussia. Its priorities were to link up across the Danzig Corridor and advance south-eastwards on Warsaw. Army Group South commanded by Generaloberst Gerd von Rundstedt was to advance rapidly from southern Silesia towards Warsaw on a broader front. The intention was for the two army groups to cut off the bulk of the Polish army west of the Vistula. The Tenth Army, forming the centre of the southern sickle, had the greatest number of motorized formations. To its right, the Fourteenth Army would advance towards Kraków, while three mountain divisions, a panzer division, a motorized division and three Slovak divisions attacked north from the German puppet-state of Slovakia.

  In central Berlin on the morning of the invasion, SS guards lined the Wilhelmstrasse and the Pariser Platz as Hitler made his way from the Reichschancellery to the Kroll Opera House. This is where the Reichstag sat after the notorious fire which had burned out the parliament building less than a month after the Nazis came to power in 1933. He claimed that his reasonable demands on Poland, those which he had been careful never to present to Warsaw, had been rejected. This ‘sixteen-point peace plan’ was published that day in a cynical attempt to demonstrate that the Warsaw government was responsible for the conflict. To great cheers, he announced the return of Danzig to the Reich. Dr Carl Jakob Burckhardt, the League of Nations high commissioner in the Free City, was forced to leave.

  In London, once certain clarifications had been obtained on the facts of the invasion, Chamberlain issued the order for general mobilization. In the course of the previous ten days, Britain had been taking initial steps to prepare for war. Chamberlain had not wanted full mobilization because that might provoke a chain reaction in Europe, as had happened in 1914. Anti-aircraft and coastal defences had been the first priority. Attitudes had changed dramatically as soon as news of the German invasion arrived. Nobody now could believe that Hitler was bluffing. The mood in the country and in the House of Commons was much more determined than before the Munich crisis of the previous year. The Cabinet and the foreign office nevertheless took most of the day to draft an ultimatum to Hitler demanding that he withdraw his troops from Poland. Yet even when finished, it did not read like a full ultimatum because it lacked a cut-off point.

  After the French council of ministers had received a report from their ambassador Robert Coulondre in Berlin, Daladier gave the order for full mobilization the next day. ‘The actual word for “war” is not uttered in the course of the meeting,’ one of those present noted. It was referred to only by euphemisms. Instructions for the evacuation of children from both capitals were also issued. There was a widespread expectation that hostilities would commence with massive bombing raids. A blackout was imposed from that evening in both capitals.

  In Paris, news of the invasion had come as a shock, since hopes had risen over previous days that a European conflict could be avoided. Georges Bonnet, the foreign minister and most extreme appeaser of all, blamed the Poles for their ‘stupid and obstinate attitude’. He still wanted to bring in Mussolini as mediator for another Munich-style agreement. But the ‘mobilisation générale’ continued, with trains full of reservists pulling out of the Gare de l’Est in Paris towards Metz and Strasbourg.

  Not surprisingly, the Polish government in Warsaw began to fear that the Allies had once again lost their nerve. Even politicians in London suspected from the imprecise note and the lack of time limit that Chamberlain might yet try to evade the commitment to Poland. But Britain and France were following the conventional diplomatic route, almost as if to emphasize their difference to the proponent of undeclared Blitzkrieg.

  In Be
rlin, the night of 1 September remained unusually hot. Moonlight illuminated the darkened streets of the Reich capital now under blackout in case of Polish air raids. Another form of blackout was also imposed. Goebbels introduced a law making it a serious crime to listen to a foreign radio station. Ribbentrop refused to see the British and French ambassadors together, so at 21.20 hours Henderson delivered his note demanding an immediate withdrawal of German forces from Poland. Coulondre delivered the French version half an hour later. Hitler, perhaps encouraged by the unrobust phrasing of the notes, remained convinced that both their governments would still back off at the last moment.

  The next day, staff at the British embassy bade farewell to their German servants, before moving into the Adlon Hotel just round the corner. A certain diplomatic limbo seemed to ensue in all three capitals. Suspicions of renewed appeasement resurfaced again in London, but the delay was due to a request from the French who said they needed more time to mobilize their reservists and evacuate civilians. Both governments were convinced of the need to act together, but Georges Bonnet and his allies still struggled to put off the fateful moment. Unfortunately, the famously indecisive Daladier allowed Bonnet to continue to foster notions of an international conference with the Fascist government in Rome. Bonnet rang London to urge British support, but both Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, and Chamberlain, insisted that no discussions could take place while German troops remained on Polish territory. Halifax also rang the Italian foreign minister, Count Ciano, to remove any doubt on the matter.

  The failure to impose a time limit on the vague ultimatum had brought on a Cabinet crisis in London towards the end of that afternoon. Chamberlain and Halifax explained the need to stay alongside the French, which meant that the final decision lay with them. But the sceptics, backed up by the chiefs of staff who were present, rejected this logic. They feared that, without a firm British initiative, the French would not move. A time limit had to be imposed. Chamberlain was even more shaken by his reception in the House of Commons less than three hours later. His explanation for the delay in declaring war was heard in a hostile silence. Then, when Arthur Greenwood, acting as the Labour Party’s leader, rose to reply, even staunch Conservatives were heard to call out: ‘Speak for England!’ Greenwood made it quite clear that Chamberlain should answer to the House the very next morning.