But the Poles did not come to Berlin; Schuschnigg’s and Hächa’s shadows loomed too large before Colonel Beck. To the steady urgings of the British and French, to which the Italians soon lent their voice, he responded that there was nothing to negotiate. On the morning of August 31 Henderson was informed that Hitler would issue the order to attack unless the Polish government consented by twelve o’clock to send a negotiator. Once again, as recently in Moscow, a struggle against the clock was waged with Polish indolence. Henderson tried, through two envoys, to change the minds of his Polish colleagues in Berlin. Ambassador Lipski received the visitors, as one of them reported, in his already partly evacuated office. He was “white as a sheet,” with trembling hands took the document offered him, stared absently at the German demands, and finally murmured that he could not understand what was written there; all he knew was that they must remain firm and that “even a Poland abandoned by her Allies is ready to fight and to die alone.”139 Death was Poland’s only idea. Nor was the content of the telegram that Beck sent to his ambassador in Berlin at 12:40 P.M. any different. It was a document of perplexity, and remarkable only for the coincidence in time. For at the very same minute Hitler signed “Directive Number 1 for the Conduct of the War.” A short while later he told the Italian ambassador that it was all over.140 The directive began:
Since all political possibilities have been exhausted of eliminating by peaceful means a situation on the eastern frontier which has become intolerable for Germany, I have decided on the solution by force.
The attack on Poland is to be conducted in consonance with the preparations made for Case White…. Day of Attack: September 1, 1939. Time of Attack: 4:45 a.m….
In the West it is essential to let the responsibility for initiating hostilities be placed unequivocally upon England and France. For the time being trivial border violations are to be opposed on a purely local basis. The neutrality of Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg and Switzerland, which we have guaranteed, is to be scrupulously observed….
At nine o’clock that night all radio stations broadcast the list of the German proposals to Poland, which had never been submitted to Poland herself. Approximately at the same time SS Sturmbannführer (Major) Alfred Naujocks staged a sham Polish attack on the German radio station at Gleiwitz, broadcast a brief proclamation, fired some pistol shots, and left behind the corpses of several concentration camp inmates. A few hours later, at dawn on September 1, the Polish commander of the fortress on the peninsula Westerplatte, near the harbor of Danzig, a Major Sucharski, reported: “At 4:45 A.M. the cruiser Schleswig Holstein opened fire upon the Westerplatte with all her guns. The bombardment is continuing.” Simultaneously, the troops emerged from their prepared positions all along the German-Polish border. No declaration of war was issued. The Second World War had begun.
Hitler, it is true, was still hoping to limit the conflict. Shortly before ten o’clock he drove to a session of the Reichstag at the Kroll Opera House. The streets were almost deserted; the few pedestrians watched silently as the car passed in which Hitler sat in a field-gray uniform. His speech to the Reichstag was brief, serious, and peculiarly flat. Once again he asseverated his love of peace and “endless patience.” Again he tried to arouse hopes in the West, evoked the new friendship with the Soviet Union, made some embarrassed remarks about his Italian ally, and finally heaped charge upon charge on the Polish government. After a wild flight of fancy about the number of border incidents in the preceding days, he declared that “tonight for the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our own territory. Since 5:45 A.M. we have been returning the fire, and from now on bombs will be met with bombs.” Henceforth, he wanted simply to be the first soldier of the Reich. “I have once more put on that coat that was most sacred and dear to me. I will not take it off again until victory is secured, or I will not survive the outcome.”
Hitler’s persistent hope of limiting the conflict to Poland was nourished chiefly by the hesitation of the Western powers. Contrary to their obligation under their alliance, they did not answer the German attack with an immediate declaration of war. The French government in particular resorted to a series of evasions: advice of the General Staff, a renewed attempt at mediation by Mussolini, the uncompleted evacuation of the big cities; and finally it tried to delay the beginning of the dreaded war by at least another few hours.141 Although England’s attitude was more determined, the gravity of the situation was fully realized. In Parliament Chamberlain declared on September 1: “Eighteen months ago I prayed that the responsibility would not fall upon me to ask this country to accept the awful arbitrament of war.” Now, he continued, he was on the point of demanding assurances from the German government that it would cease its aggressive action against Poland and withdraw its troops. When an MP angrily called out to ask whether a time limit had been set, the Prime Minister replied: “If the reply to this last warning is unfavorable—and I do not suggest it is likely to be otherwise—His Majesty’s Ambassador is instructed to ask for his passport. In that case we are ready.”142 But Hitler failed to hear the warning, or understood only that England, in spite of the clear terms of the alliance, was still ready to temporize. Initially, therefore, he did not even answer the British note of September 1. And while England and France engaged in complicated negotiations in order to arrive at a joint procedure, the German troops advanced tempestuously in Poland. It seems probable that these signs of weakness on the opposing side encouraged Hitler to rebuff Mussolini, who on September 2 enumerated the advantages of the situation and tried to persuade him to accept a solution by conference. “Danzig is already German,” he informed Hitler, “and Germany has in her hands pledges which guarantee her the greater part of her claims. Moreover, Germany has already had her ‘moral satisfaction.’ If she accepted the proposal for a conference she would achieve all her aims and at the same time avoid a war, which even now looks like becoming general and of extremely long duration.”
During the night hours of September 2 England at last decided to forgo joint action with France. Ambassador Henderson was told to deliver to the German Foreign Minister at 9 A.M. Sunday an ultimatum that would expire at 11 A.M. Ribbentrop did not receive Henderson personally; in his place he sent his chief interpreter, Dr. Paul Schmidt. Schmidt has described the scene when he brought the British note to the chancellery. Hitler’s antechamber was so crowded with members of the cabinet and party leaders that he had difficulty making his way through the throng. When he entered Hitler’s office, he saw Hitler sitting at his desk, while Ribbentrop stood by the window.
Both looked up tensely when they caught sight of me. I stopped some distance from Hitler’s desk and slowly translated the British government’s ultimatum. When I finished there was dead silence….
Hitler sat immobile, staring into space. He was not stunned, as was later asserted, nor did he rant, as others claimed. He sat absolutely silent and unraoving. After an interval, which seemed an eternity to me, he turned to Ribbentrop, who had remained standing frozen by the window. “What now?” Hitler asked his Foreign Minister with a furious glare, as if to say that Ribbentrop had misinformed him about the probable reaction of the British. Ribbentrop replied in a muted voice: “I assume that within the hour the French will hand us a similar ultimatum.”143
When Ambassador Coulondre called on the German Foreign Minister toward noon, England was already at war with the Reich. The French ultimatum corresponded to the British one with the exception of one significant detail. As though even now the government in Paris shrank from using the word “war,” it threatened, if Germany refused to withdraw her troops from Poland at once, to fulfill those “contractual obligations which France has undertaken toward Poland and which are known to the German government.” When Coulondre returned to his embassy, he burst into tears in the presence of his associates.144
But England, too, had difficulty adjusting to the reality of war. In desperation Poland waited for military aid, or at least some relief; when she realized that
she was without actual assistance, it was far too late. The ponderousness of the British responses was, however, not simply a matter of temperament or of inadequate military preparation. The guarantee for Poland had never been popular in England. There was no traditional friendship between the two countries, and Poland was regarded as one of those dictatorial regimes that merely showed up the constriction and oppressiveness of authoritarian government, but not the glamour and allure of power.145 When in the early days of September an opposition conservative urged a member of the cabinet to provide help for Poland and mentioned the plan then being discussed, of setting fire to the Black Forest with incendiary bombs, he was answered: “Oh, we can’t do that, that’s private property. Next you’ll be insisting that we bomb the Ruhr region.”
France, for her part, had pledged to launch an offensive with from thirty-five to thirty-eight divisions by the sixteenth day of the war. But the country was psychologically fixed on defense and incapable of planning an offensive. General Jodi declared at Nuremberg: “If we did not collapse in 1939, that was only because the approximately one hundred and ten French and English divisions in the West, which during the campaign in Poland were facing twenty-five German divisions, remained completely inactive.”146
Under these circumstances the modernized German armies were able to overrun Poland in a single victorious onslaught. To their perfection and smoothly functioning impetus the opposing side would offer, as was later admitted, mere gestures of “touching absurdity.” The co-operation of hitherto unknown swarms of armored formations with motorized infantry units and the dominant air force, whose Stuks plummeted with deafening screams upon their targets, the precision of the intelligence and supply system—all the might of this advancing, mechanized colossus—left the Poles little more than their courage. Beck had declared with assurance that his country’s forces were “organized for a flexible, delaying war of movement. There will be great surprises.” But the real significance of this campaign was that the Second World War was, so to speak, fighting against the First. Nowhere was the disproportion so evident as in the cavalry attack on Tuchel Heath, when a Polish mounted unit rode its horses against German tanks.
As early as the morning of September 5 General Halder noted after a military conference: “Enemy as good as beaten.” On September 6 Cracow fell; a day later the Warsaw government fled to Lublin; and in still another day the German advance units reached the Polish capital. All organized resistance began to collapse. In two great pincer movements initiated on September 9 the remnants of the Polish forces were encircled and slowly crushed. Eight days later, when the campaign was nearly ended, the Soviet Union fell upon the already overwhelmed country from the East—having first prepared an elaborate legalistic and diplomatic smoke screen to shield her from the charge of aggression. On September 18 the German and Soviet troops met in Brest-Litovsk. The first blitzkrieg was over. When Warsaw fell a few days later, Hitler ordered all the bells in Germany to be rung for a week, every day between noon and one o’clock.
The question nevertheless remains whether he felt unclouded satisfaction at the rapid military triumph or whether, through all the cheering and all the pealing of bells, he had not recognized that victory was already eluding him. His grand design was turned upside down. He was fighting on the wrong front, not against the East, as he might have been able to persuade himself during the far too brief Polish campaign, but henceforth against the West. For nearly twenty years all this thinking and talking had been determined by a diametrically opposite idea. Now his nervous restiveness, his arrogance, and the corrupting effect of great successes had overriden all rational considerations and finally destroyed the “Fascist” constellation. He was “at war with the conservatives before he had defeated the revolutionaries.”147 There are some indications that he was already aware of this most fatal of errors during those early days of victory. His entourage has spoken of fits of pessimism and sudden attacks of anxiety: “He would have been glad to draw his head out of the noose.”148 Shortly after the war with England became a certainty, he remarked to Rudolf Hess: “All my work is now disintegrating. My book was written for nothing.” Occasionally he compared himself to Martin Luther, who had no more wanted to fight against Rome than he himself against England. Then again, he would muster all the casual knowledge about England he had picked up to persuade himself of England’s weakness and democratic decadence. Or he would try to quiet his apprehensions by speaking of a “sham war,” by which the British government was formally satisfying an unpopular duty to an ally. As soon as Poland was finished, he had declared at the end of August: “We’ll hold a great peace conference with the Western powers.” Now Poland was finished and he was hoping for just that.
It is within this context that we must see Hitler’s attempts, immediately after the Polish campaign and later, in conjunction with the defeat of France, to wage the war against England lackadaisically and halfheartedly. The propaganda threats were louder than the actual blows; it was for this that the British coined the phrase “phony war.” For almost two years Hitler’s conduct of the war was partly governed by the effort to set the topsy-turvy constellation back on its feet again, to return to the design that he had frivolously abandoned. He tried repeatedly, but in vain.
A few weeks before the outbreak of the war—on July 22, 1939—he had said to Admiral Donitz that on no account must a war with England be allowed to develop; a war with England would mean nothing less than “finis Germaniae.”149
Now he was at war with England.
Interpolation III
The Wrong War
The horoscope of the times does not point to peace but to war.
Adolf Hitler
In regard to the Second World War there can be no question about whose was the guilt. Hitler’s conduct throughout the crisis, his highhandedness, his urge to bring things to a head and plunge into catastrophe, so shaped events that any wish to compromise on the part of the Western powers was bound to come to nothing. Who caused the war is a question that cannot be seriously raised. Hitler’s policy during the preceding years, in the strict sense his entire career, was oriented toward war. Without war his actions would have lacked goal and consistency, and Hitler would not have been the man he was.
He had said that war was “the ultimate goal of politics.” That sentence must be taken as one of the key premises of his world view. In many passages in his writings, speeches, and conversations he repeatedly developed the underlying train of thought: the aim of politics was to guarantee a people’s Lebensraum; the requisite living space had from time immemorial been conquered and held only by struggle; consequently, politics was a kind of permanent warfare, and armed conflict was only its actualization and maximum intensification. War was, as Hitler formulated it, the “strongest and most classic manifestation” of politics and indeed of life itself. In pacifism, on the other hand, human beings would necessarily fade away and “be replaced by animals” who more obediently conformed to the law of nature. “As long as the earth turns around the sun,” he declared in solemn, half-poetic accents to Bulgarian Ambassador Dragonoff, “as long as there are cold and warmth, fertility and infertility, storm and sunshine, so long will struggle continue, among men and among nations…. If people lived in the Garden of Eden they would rot. What mankind has become, it has become through struggle.” And during the war he maintained to his table companions that a peace of more than twenty-five years would do great harm to a nation.1
In these mythologizing realms of his thought, the lust for conquest, the desire for fame, or revolutionary beliefs were not sufficient reason for unleashing a war. Hitler actually called it “a crime” to wage war for the acquisition of raw materials. Only the issue of living space permitted resort to arms. But in its purest form war was independent even of this factor, and sprang solely from the almighty primal law of death and life, of gain at the expense of others. War was an ineradicable atavism: “War is the most natural, the most ordinary thing. War is a constant
; war is everywhere. There is no beginning, there is no conclusion of peace. War is life. All struggle is war. War is the primal condition.”2 Unmoved by friendships, ideologies, and present alliances, he occasionally told his table companions that some distant day, when Mussolini’s reforestation program had taken effect, it might be necessary to wage war against Italy, too.
These ideas also make it clear why National Socialism had no utopian concept, but only a vision. Hitler called the notion of a grand, comprehensive order of peace “ridiculous.” Even his dreams of empire did not culminate in the panorama of a harmonious age; they were filled with the clash of arms, riot, and tumult. No matter how far Germany’s power might one day stretch, somewhere sooner or later it would come upon a bleeding, fought-over frontier where the race would have been hardened and a constant selection of the best would be taking place. This cranky fixation on the idea of war once again showed, far beyond the Social-Darwinist starting point, the degree to which Hitler and National Socialism were a product of the First World War. It had molded their sentiments, their practical handling of power, and their ideology. The World War, Hitler repeated incessantly, had never stopped for him. To him, as to that whole generation, the idea of peace seemed curiously stale and unpleasant. It was certainly not a theme to arouse their imaginations, which were fascinated rather by struggle and hostility. Soon after the end of the struggle for power, shortly after the domestic opponents had been eliminated, Goebbels told a foreign diplomat that “he often thought back full of longing to those earlier times when there were always opportunities for combat.” A member of Hitler’s most intimate entourage spoke of his “pathologically militant nature.” So dominant was this urge that ultimately it crushed and devoured everything else, including Hitler’s long demonstrated political genius.
Hitler Page 90
