Hardly listening to Dahlerus, Hitler launched into a tirade against the British, becoming more and more excited as he spoke. He listened to Dahlerus’s report, but it only seemed to provoke him to greater fury. He stalked up and down the room, then, suddenly stopping, he began another rant. Hitler’s voice was blurred, and his behavior that of a completely abnormal person. He spoke in staccato phrases: “If there should be war, then I shall build U-boats, build U-boats, U-boats, U-boats.” His voice became more indistinct and finally one could not follow him at all. Then he pulled himself together, raised his voice as though addressing a large audience, and shrieked: “I shall build aeroplanes, build aeroplanes, aeroplanes, aeroplanes, and I shall annihilate my enemies.” Finally, his rage subsided, and after a few moments he walked up to Dahlerus and said: “Herr Dahlerus, you who know England so well, can you give me any reason for my perpetual failure to come to an agreement with her?” When Dahlerus, choosing his words with care, suggested that it was the English people’s lack of confidence in Hitler personally and in the Nazi regime, “Hitler flung out his right arm, striking his breast with his left hand, and exclaimed: ‘Idiots, have I ever told a lie in my life?’ ”
Despite the feverish diplomatic activity in late August, a sense of resignation hung over the governments of Europe. War seemed inevitable. Attolico, the tireless Italian ambassador, made one last desperate attempt on August 31, urging Hitler to reconsider Mussolini’s offer to mediate, but Hitler again refused. It was too late. Just after noon that day, he had issued Directive No. 1 for the conduct of the war. One and a half million troops that had been waiting anxiously for days began to move into their forward positions near the Polish frontier, ready to launch the war Hitler was determined to have. The attack on Poland was to commence at 4:45 a.m. During the night Heydrich’s SD was to stage “incidents” along the German-Polish border, code-named Operation Himmler. The most elaborate of these ruses was a “Polish” raid on the German radio facility at Gleiwitz in Silesia. For the Gleiwitz attack, Heydrich produced several condemned prisoners from the concentration camps—“canned goods,” as he referred to them—dressed them in Polish uniforms, provided by German counterintelligence, and transported them to the deserted Gleiwitz station. They were given a fatal injection, shot, and their bodies left strewn about the station. Before slipping away, the SD operatives screamed Polish nationalist slogans into a microphone while sounds of a struggle could be heard in the background. The German press was invited to cover the “Polish” raid, and news of this “dire violation of Germany territory,” one of over twenty in the past week, was broadcast over the radio later that night. The Gleiwitz incident convinced hardly anyone beyond the frontiers of the Reich, but it served its purpose, allowing the regime to portray—however transparently false—the massive assault that followed as an act of self-defense against a rapacious Poland.
* * *
At 4:17 a.m. on September 1, 1939, the German cruiser Schleswig-Holstein, moored in Danzig harbor on a “courtesy visit,” opened fire on the Polish military installation on the Westerplatte, a small peninsula that guarded the entrance to the harbor. The shelling was intense and Polish resistance fierce. At virtually the same time sixty divisions of German troops smashed into Poland from the north, south, and west, while fleets of Luftwaffe aircraft roared into Polish airspace to bomb airfields, munitions dumps, communications centers, and other military targets. Throughout the night German radio broadcast terse reports from the front, each indicating the rapid advance of German forces.
At 10 a.m. the following morning Hitler left the Reich Chancellery for the Kroll Opera House, where he would address a special session of the Reichstag. Berlin’s usually teeming streets were virtually deserted; only a few civilians stopped to watch in silence as the Führer’s car swept past. Scattered shouts of “Heil Hitler” pierced the gloomy quiet, but most Berliners, standing behind an unnecessary cordon of SA and SS troopers, simply stared, wordless, as the Führer passed by. That glum reaction was a reflection of the country’s dark mood. “Everybody against the war,” Shirer noted on August 31. “People talking openly. How can a country go into a major war with a population so dead set against it.”
Addressing the Reichstag, an edgy Hitler declared that “this night for the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our own territory. We have been returning fire since 5:45,” he declared, confusing the time of the attack. “Henceforth, bomb will be met with bomb.” He appeared that morning for the first time in a gray military tunic, which, he proclaimed, “has always been the most holy and dear to me. I shall not take it off again until after victory is ours or—I shall not live to see the day.” He had labored for months, he said, to resolve the Polish situation peacefully, as he had done with Austria, the Sudetenland, and Bohemia-Moravia, but the intransigence of the Polish leadership had frustrated that effort and led to the present crisis.
He was at pains to reassure Britain and France that Germany was not “pursuing any interests in the West,” and “I repeat this here, that we desire nothing of them. We shall never demand anything of them. I have assured them the border separating France and Germany is a final one. Time and time again I have offered friendship, and if necessary close cooperation, to England. But love cannot remain a one sided affair. It must be met by the other side.” He was resolved to meet whatever challenges that might confront him, to suffer any hardship, to make any sacrifice. He would also “demand sacrifice from the German Volk, even the ultimate sacrifice should there be need.” He had a right to do this, he proclaimed, “because today I am as willing as I was before to make any personal sacrifice. I am asking of no German man more than I myself was ready to do through four years.” Then, recapitulating a theme that had been a leitmotif of National Socialism’s appeal since its earliest days in the beer halls of Munich and that would resound shrilly throughout the war, he declared: “There will never be another November 1918 in German history.”
As the Wehrmacht ground relentlessly toward Warsaw, using a combination of armor and airpower to devastate the overmatched Poles, Attolico made yet another effort to convince the Führer that Mussolini was prepared to convene a conference, an offer he had already made only forty-eight hours before. The Duce remained confident that he could bring the British onboard. But Hitler was not interested. Just as he expected, the Western powers were hesitating to take action, and if they did make a military move, it would be merely a face-saving, symbolic gesture before retiring. Meanwhile, the British cautiously indicated that they would be prepared to discuss Danzig, the Corridor, and other issues, but insisted that no talks could begin until German troops halted their aggressive action and withdrew from Polish territory. Still convinced that Britain would not fight, Hitler dismissed Mussolini’s offer out of hand.
Then on September 2, the British informed Berlin that Ambassador Henderson would appear at the Foreign Office the following morning at nine to deliver an urgent communication from His Majesty’s Government. The German government, it read, had failed to respond to Britain’s message of September 1, calling for a cessation of military operations and a withdrawal of German forces from Poland. Instead, Germany had intensified its onslaught, and as a consequence, London had been compelled to draw a grim conclusion. “If His Majesty’s Government has not received satisfactory assurances of the cessation of all aggressive action against Poland, and the withdrawal of German troops from that country, by 11 o’clock British Summer Time, from that time a state of war will exist between Great Britain and Germany.”
Interpreter Schmidt hurried to the Reich Chancellery to report the contents of the message to Hitler. He found the Führer at his desk and Ribbentrop standing to his right at the window. “As I came in, both looked up expectantly. I stopped at some distance from Hitler’s desk and then slowly translated the British ultimatum. There was complete silence when I finished. Hitler sat as though petrified, staring before him. . . . After some time, which to me appeared an eternity, he turned to Ribbentrop,
who, completely paralyzed, had remained standing by the window. ‘What now?’ asked Hitler,” glaring at his foreign minister. Ribbentrop had no answer except to mutter, “I assume that the French will hand in a similar ultimatum within the hour.” He was correct.
Despite repeated warnings that Britain would honor its obligation to Poland if Germany attacked, the ultimatum came as a shock. Hitler, spurred on by Ribbentrop, had for the first time badly miscalculated. His vaunted intuition had failed him. He was certain that the pact with Russia would deter the Western Powers from intervening and that they would fold, as they had done before over rearmament, the Rhineland, the Anschluss, and Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain and Daladier were “little worms” and had neither the courage nor the fortitude to thwart German ambitions. “I know,” Hitler told his generals. “I saw them at Munich.” The war against Poland, which Hitler was determined to have, was to have been a localized war, fought in the East, while Britain and France stood aside. That set of strategic assumptions was now in peril, and Hitler was compelled to confront the prospect of war in both the East and West.
His spirits soon revived as reports from the front brought news of rapid advances and German victories. Polish forces fought tenaciously but were hopelessly overmatched. The Poles possessed few tanks or motorized vehicles—the Germans could count on a fifteen-to-one advantage—and the small Polish air force, equipped with obsolete aircraft, was vastly outnumbered by Göring’s modern Luftwaffe. It was destroyed in a matter of days, leaving German dive-bombers free to terrorize Polish towns and cities—and anything that moved on the rails and roadways. Despite Hitler’s assurances to the contrary, the Luftwaffe made little distinction between military and civilian targets. It was a rout.
On September 6, Cracow fell with virtually no resistance. The Corridor was taken by September 8 and the remnants of the Polish army had been pushed back into Warsaw, where they were encircled. For days German bombers pulverized the near-defenseless city, reducing it to a desolate landscape of shattered buildings and rubble-filled streets. The unnerving howl of the Stuka dive-bombers and the shrill whistling of bombs falling from the sky offered a chilling preview of an utterly new kind of war. On September 17, the date the French had promised to launch their counteroffensive (they did not), the Red Army swept into eastern Poland, taking up positions agreed to in the pact with the Reich. A demarcation line between Russian and German troops was established, and a formal treaty setting the new borders of what had been Poland was signed on September 28. Poland had been partitioned three times in the last half of the eighteenth century by Prussia, Russia, and Habsburg Austria. The Nazi-Soviet partition marked the fourth. The Russians proved as ruthless as their German allies, killing fifty thousand Poles and sending more than a million, including elements of the Polish intelligentsia—to prisons in the Soviet Union, where they were executed and deposited in mass graves.
The destruction of the Polish military was quick and decisive; organized fighting ceased by the close of September. No surrender was signed but all combat ended on October 6. In a month of combat, the Polish army had suffered 65,000 men killed and 130,000 wounded, while the Wehrmacht had lost 16,000 dead and 20,000 wounded. That was only the beginning. Before the invasion, Hitler had instructed his troops that this was to be a different sort of war, a war shorn of all previous notions of combat. The old rules of engagement would not be applied. “Genghis Khan had millions of women and men killed by his own will and with a light heart. History sees him only as a great state-builder. . . . I have sent my Death’s Head [SS] units to the east with the order to kill without mercy men, women and children of the Polish race or language. Only in such a way shall we win the Lebensraum we need.”
Moving into Poland along with regular troops were special SS commando units, Einsatzgruppen, charged with orders to carry out Hitler’s racial wishes. First deployed in Austria and Czechoslovakia, they had served a limited policing function; in Poland they took on a far more extensive and sinister role. Seven Einsatzgruppen were created, numbering about 2,700 men in all. Each was attached to one of the seven armies operating in Poland. Their official mission was to secure the army’s rear, which meant policing conquered territory and battling insurgents, but wholesale murder was their primary activity. They were “ideological soldiers” of the Third Reich, laying the foundations of the new racial order in Europe. Although technically subordinate to the army, these ideologically schooled death squads acted largely on their own, receiving direction from Reinhard Heydrich in his capacity as head of the newly created Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshhauptamt, RSHA). Himmler placed the RSHA in charge of all German police forces in Germany and in the occupied territories and selected Heydrich, his longtime deputy, to lead it. It was the cold-blooded Heydrich who presided over the tidal wave of terror that crashed over Poland in 1939 and who, two years later, would be the prime architect of the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish problem” in Europe.
Initially, the Nazis planned to “cleanse” those areas of Poland to be annexed to the Reich. The regime created two new states, Danzig–West Prussia and the Wartheland, both incorporated into the Greater German Reich, while the borders of Silesia and East Prussia were also pushed eastward. Poles, Gypsies, and Jews were to be removed, deported to a third region, the newly created General Government of Poland. The General Government, established in an area consisting of the Polish province of Lublin as well as parts of Cracow, the seat of its new government, and Warsaw, was not to be integrated into the Reich but was to be ruled as a colony, with a German governor. All three of these territories were governed by hard-line Nazis, and each was determined to display his ideological zeal.
Hitler appointed Himmler Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Folkdom, a new title that gave him responsibility for Nazi racial policy in the occupied territories. Himmler delegated that authority to Heydrich and the RSHA, where specialists were already at work on finding a solution to the “Jewish question.” In a memorandum drafted on September 19, 1939, entitled “The Jewish Question in the Occupied Territories,” Heydrich laid out the foundations of Nazi policy. In those territories annexed to the Reich all non-Germans were to be expelled, a racial cleansing in preparation for future settlement by Germans. This meant evacuating thousands of Slavs and all Jews, consistent with prewar Nazi racial policy. But the very nature of “immigration” had undergone a radical change. It was one thing to insist on forced immigration, but where would the dispossessed go? Little thought had been devoted to this dimension of the evacuation program, and, symptomatically, little uniformity existed in SS policy on the ground.
Along with the Einsatzgruppen, Hitler established an Ethnic German Self-Defense Militia, which was, if anything, more independent and even more brutal than the Einsatzgruppen. As the leader of one such militia proclaimed to his troops: “You are now the master race here . . . don’t be soft, be merciless, and clear out everything that is not German and could hinder us in the work of construction.” Acting on their own, these militias carried out mass shootings of Polish civilians throughout the country. In one month alone, the militia massacred 2,000 Poles—men, women, and children—in Klammer; 10,000 Poles and Jews were herded by militia units to Mniszek, where they were lined up on the edge of gravel pits and shot. Aided by German soldiers, the militia marched another 8,000 into the woods near Karlshof and mowed them down. Of the 65,000 Poles and Jews murdered in the last quarter of 1939, roughly half were murdered by the militias.
Not to be outdone, the Einsatzgruppen took up their charge with stunning savagery. In Bydgoszcz they slaughtered 900 Poles and Jews; in Katowice another 750 including women and children; in the Bydgozca area, 5,000; in Zloczew, a small town in western Poland, they murdered nearly 200 people. These were not exceptional cases. Sometimes the Einsatzgruppen and army troops claimed to be responding to “provocation” from Polish saboteurs and guerrillas and would then inflict merciless retribution. This pattern of alleged provocation and savage reprisal
would characterize German operations in the East, although as the fury of war intensified, no provocation was necessary to prompt German brutality. In all, Heydrich’s henchmen slaughtered some 50,000 Poles, not including the 61,000 professors, schoolteachers, police, administrators, army officers, clergy, and other groups considered to compose the country’s intelligentsia.
Poland was to be left in a state of devastation, not to be rebuilt for the duration of the war. The ravaged country was to be kept in a primitive condition, its population reduced to the status of second-class citizens or, in the case of Jews, slaves. In the following months the Germans unleashed a torrent of restrictions and prohibitions on the native Polish population. Poles were forbidden to use public beaches, swimming pools, or visit municipal gardens. Polish universities closed; Polish social and cultural organizations were dissolved; Polish military uniforms and decorations could not be worn in public; all adults were required to salute Germans wearing military uniforms and to remove their hats in the presence of Nazi officials; Poles were required to sit in the back of buses, train carriages, and other public conveyances. Their food rations were cut—“a lower race needs less food,” Robert Ley, head of the German Labor Front, declared—and thousands of Polish homes, especially in the countryside, were seized, their owners evicted at a moment’s notice (thirty minutes or less) to make room for German settlers imported from the Baltic.
All of these restrictions and more applied to the Jews. Poland’s large Jewish community offered an easy target. Poland was home to Europe’s largest Jewish community, and from the beginning of the Polish campaign, Jews were singled out for especially ruthless treatment. Jews were forced to flee across the demarcation line into Soviet-held territory, while a pitiless bloodbath engulfed those left behind. In many areas the Einsatzgruppen killed Jews wherever they found them. In Bedzin, one unit burned down the local synagogue and killed about five hundred Jews in two days of terror. In Dynow, near the San River, an Einsatzgruppe consisting of SS personnel and members of the Order Police, burned alive a dozen Jews in the local synagogue, then shot another 60 in a nearby forest. Similar killing operations were conducted in neighboring villages. By September 20 the unit had murdered 560 Jews in the vicinity.
The Third Reich Page 56
