While the Nazis decided that some categories of Poles would be spared—those in key economic sectors or occupations—and others “Germanized,” Jews were shown no mercy. They were simply eliminated. All Jews in the territories to be incorporated into the Reich were expelled and driven into the General Government. They left their homes, businesses, even their clothes behind, to be appropriated by Germans imported into the area. Many were killed by the militias and the Einsatzgruppen, shot, beaten to death, burned alive in schools or synagogues. For those who escaped that fate, no plans had been made in the General Government—or Berlin—for their settlement or survival. Ghettos sprang up in the major Polish cities, where in the following months, Jews died on the streets, shrunken by starvation or frozen, their bodies crumpled on sidewalks, as cold and rigid as gravestones. The first—and largest—ghetto was established in October–November in Warsaw; the Lodz ghetto in February 1940. Other ghettos and labor camps would open in other areas in roughly the same period. Most were located in or near cities with good transport facilities and were viewed as temporary holding areas or transit camps. Officially, the final solution was still forced immigration and would await further developments in the war.
While Heydrich’s forces pursued their ruthless objectives, army commanders were deeply mistrustful of the SS and its leaders, and only reluctantly agreed that the Einsatzgruppen be tasked with combating “all elements in foreign territory and behind the fighting troops that are hostile to the Reich and the German people.” Just exactly what this meant was unclear, but after observing the Einsatzgruppen in action and realizing just how little actual control the military exercised over these death squads, a number of army officers protested. Brauchitsch, commander-in-chief of the army, told the officers that it was the Führer’s policy and that he had selected the Einsatzgruppen to carry out certain “ethnic-political” tasks in the occupied territories that were beyond the providence of local army commanders. Confusion reigned.
Halder, the army’s chief of staff, noted in his war diary on September 10 that “an SS artillery unit . . . has herded Jews into a church and murdered them.” He tersely added: “A court martial has given them a one year prison sentence.” Other army commanders were appalled at the bestial behavior of the SS, and sought to court-martial men under their command for war crimes. One commander in Poland reported bluntly that the violence of the police units demonstrated “a totally inconceivable lack of human and moral feeling . . . a demeaning situation, which tarnished the honor of the entire German nation.” He recommended disbanding and dispersing “all the police units, including all their senior leaders, and all the directors of administrative offices in the General Government, and replacing them with sound and honorable men.” Nor was this disdain confined to the military leadership. General Johannes Blaskowitz, supreme commander in the East, was moved to report that “the attitude of the troops toward the SS and the police fluctuates between revulsion and hatred. Every soldier feels nauseated and repelled by the crimes being perpetrated in Poland by men representing the state authorities. The men fail to understand how such things . . . can go unpunished.”
To put an end to the arrests and courts-martial, Hitler intervened to make sure that those in the field understood that neither the Einsaztgruppen nor soldiers were to worry about the legality of their actions: everything was allowed. Himmler gave the order that when insurgents were encountered they were “to be shot on the spot.” And insurgents there were. The Poles organized guerrilla and saboteur groups to kill not only Wehrmacht troops but German civilians living in Poland. Outlandish stories in the Nazi press about Polish atrocities against the German minority were wildly exaggerated but not without some basis in fact. After the German seizure of Czechoslovakia, the Polish government had become concerned about German underground groups and self-defense militias and had shut down a number of German cultural and religious institutions. When the invasion came in 1939 they marched ten to fifteen thousand ethnic Germans away from the front, approximately two thousand of whom were killed by Polish civilians while trudging eastward.
Efforts to rein in the Einsatzgruppen were ineffectual, and for the most part the army simply looked the other way—or joined in. Murder and torture were not confined to the ideologically trained SS. To clarify matters, Hitler on October 4 issued an amnesty for those whom the army wished to punish—as far as Hitler and hence the law was concerned there were no war crimes in Poland. Torture, looting, and public humiliation of Jews were rampant and were not only tolerated but were seen, unofficially of course, almost as an entertainment for the troops. Orthodox Jews, with their distinctive beards and side locks, were the victims of choice. They were whipped, forced to smear feces on each other, to jump, crawl, clean excrement with prayer shawls, dance around a bonfire of burning Torah scrolls; some had the Star of David carved on their foreheads. The “beard game” was by far the most popular: beards and side locks were cut or torn, roots and all, from their heads, much to the delight of the laughing soldiers gathered around. Carefree men out on a spree. They took photographs and sent them home.
Despite these radical steps and the genocidal language in which they were swathed, Hitler’s plans were at this point still in flux. The solution to the Jewish problem in 1939 was still officially immigration, but with the Reich now in control of more than two million Jews, this was no longer a realistic option. It was at this time that the idea of a “Jewish reservation” somewhere in occupied Poland was discussed. The scheme seems to have been tentatively approved by Göring and Himmler but was dropped when no agreement could be reached on the location of such an installation. Hans Frank, the governor of the General Government, complained that his territory, which was the most likely site, was already being turned into a dumping ground for undesirables and could not handle a major influx of Jews. In addition to the millions of Polish Jews, the regime was now contemplating transporting Jews from Bohemia-Moravia and Austria to the General Government. The newly appointed Gauleiter of Danzig–West Prussia and the Wartheland were already conducting brutal deportations of Jews in a feverish competition to be the first to declare themselves as “judenrein” (free of Jews).
But where could they go? The Nazi authorities tried at first to push them into Russian-occupied eastern Poland or force them into the General Government. But this was obviously not an acceptable long-term solution. With the Reich now in control of Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia, and much of Poland, Heydrich and his SD specialists were facing a mounting crisis of their own making. Hitler charged Himmler with direction of overall racial policy in the East, but in practice much of that authority was delegated to Heydrich. The goal of the forced expulsions in 1939–40 was the creation of “a new ethnographic order” in Europe through forced population movements to create more racially homogeneous territories. Central to Heydrich’s mission, as Hitler explained it to him, was to arrange “the liquidation of various circles of the Polish leadership,” which would run “into the thousands.” The “driving force” behind the Polish resistance, Hitler believed, was the intelligentsia and it must, therefore, be eliminated—a view enthusiastically shared by Stalin. On the eve of the invasion, the army leadership acquiesced to SS plans to arrest up to thirty thousand Poles, overwhelmingly civilians, and Heydrich ordered his men to prepare to liquidate them. But that was only a beginning. As the Nazis assumed control of Poland, they discovered that fulfilling Hitler’s vision of “a new ethnographic order” in occupied Europe was an extraordinarily complex undertaking.
Groping for options, the SS considered another possible solution: the transport of Europe’s Jews to somewhere in Africa, where the French colony of Madagascar seemed like an ideal destination. During the 1930s Poland and France had discussed the possibility of deporting Poland’s unwanted Jews to the French colony off Africa’s eastern coast. With its primitive conditions—few settlements, hospitals, and basic infrastructure, its hostile equatorial climate, its fevers and diseases—life in Madagascar would be unbea
rable for European Jews. It was a death sentence. Such plans had come to nothing, but in 1940 the Nazis revived the idea. In May, Himmler wrote a memorandum for Hitler on the “Treatment of Foreign Nationals in the East,” in which he stated: “I hope to see the concept of Jews completely obliterated, with the possibility of a large migration of all Jews to Africa or else in a colony.” In pursuance of this option, SS specialists drafted numerous memoranda on issues of international law and transport, but the logistical problems were ultimately deemed insurmountable. Mass deportations, ghettoization, even murder were now on the agenda. The Nazis were still seeking a “final solution” to the “Jewish problem,” but it was becoming increasingly clear that for the Germans, the East had become a morally distinct area of operations. Traditional codes of conduct, of law, of morality were left behind on the border.
In the fall of 1939 and the months that followed, international attention to these ominous developments and Nazi attempts to establish a new racial order in Poland tended to recede, overshadowed by military events in the West. The speed of the German onslaught was stunning, and Blitzkrieg, lightning war, entered into the world’s military lexicon. Mechanized warfare—the use of tanks in combination with aircraft, especially the Stuka dive-bombers and their uncanny, howling shriek—heralded a new epoch of warfare. Yet, for all the cutting-edge technology of the Wehrmacht, the German advance into Poland in 1939 was carried forward by some 300,000 horses, and most German soldiers marched in on foot, much as Napoleon’s army had done more than a century before. Heavy reliance on horses would characterize all major German operations in the Second World War.
For Hitler, the campaign against Poland was a splendid success, just as he had predicted, and the British and French, beyond a declaration of war, had not intervened. Yet the war in Poland did not come without costs. The Poles fought courageously; their casualties in the German conflict reached over 70,000 deaths and another 50,000 resisting the Russians. But the assault on Poland had also taken a surprisingly stiff toll on the victorious Wehrmacht, which suffered 41,000 casualties, killed and wounded.
In October Stalin surprised both Hitler and the Western powers by sending the Red Army into neighboring Finland. Stalin wished to secure his northern flank, and the city of Leningrad was particularly vulnerable, lying only miles from the Finnish border. Soviet troops entered the snowbound landscape of dense woods and swamps in October, and although they vastly outnumbered the Finns, their progress was glacially slow. The Finns, donning white uniforms and skis, proved masters of winter warfare, inflicting serious casualties on the Russians. For his heroic defense against overwhelming odds, the Finnish general Carl Gustav Mannerheim became something of a hero in Western Europe, hailed in Britain and France. Some in Parliament, especially Churchill, loudly advocated sending troops and supplies to Mannerheim across northern Scandinavia, but Chamberlain wisely demurred.
Hitler, who had not been informed of Stalin’s plans in advance, found himself in an uncomfortable position. He yearned to aid the Finns, but due to the Nazi-Soviet pact, he could not. The lackluster performance of the Red Army in the snows of Finland confirmed his low opinion of the Soviet military power. What could one expect of a military establishment so thoroughly honeycombed by Communist commissars? It was a view widely shared by military staffs all over Europe.
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HITLER TURNS WEST
While these developments were unfolding in the East, world attention was focused on the war in the West, or rather the peculiar absence of it. Germany was officially at war with England and France, but no military operations were under way along the Western Front—only a brief incursion into the Saar by the French and the occasional exchange of gunfire along the border. All was, indeed, quiet on the Western Front. It was a strange situation, dubbed by the English the “Phoney War” or “Bore War,” by the French the “Drôle de Guerre,” or Strange War, and by the Germans the “Sitzkrieg,” the Sitting War. Brimming with confidence, Hitler offered a new “peace initiative,” and a brief flurry of diplomatic activity followed, but no progress was made toward a settlement. The Western Allies, much to Hitler’s dismay, stubbornly continued to insist that a German withdrawal from Poland was the sine qua non for talks, and, of course, Hitler was not about to relinquish what he had gained. Poland was to be the launching pad for an eventual assault on the Soviet Union and, equally important, was fast becoming a laboratory for Nazi racial policy.
Although the military leadership was cautious, an emboldened Hitler was impatient. The shooting had barely stopped in Poland when he ordered the High Command to begin preparing for an immediate offensive in Western Europe. Planning was to be completed by November 5, less than a month away, and X-Day was to be November 12. His commanders were shocked. They had anticipated a protracted period of defensive warfare in the West that would allow them time to regroup and repair their equipment, to replenish their stocks of weapons, and to integrate fresh troops into the line units. In addition to the human casualties, the Wehrmacht had lost some 300 armored vehicles, 370 heavy guns, and 5,000 other military vehicles in Poland. All Hitler’s top commanders were convinced that a war against the combined forces of Britain and France would end in disaster. Generals Gerd von Rundstedt, commander of an army group in Poland, Franz Halder, chief of staff of the army, Heinz Guderian, the respected advocate of armored combat and a corps commander in Poland, and Commander-in-Chief of the Army Walther von Brauchitsch were all convinced that a war against the combined forces of Britain and France would be folly. The Allies could put more troops in the field than the Germans, and unlike the Poles, the British and French were well armed, well trained, and competently led. France possessed the largest army west of the Soviet Union and was considered the best in Europe. General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, commander of German forces in the West during the Polish campaign, was enormously relieved that the French had not launched an attack on his forces—they could have walked into the Ruhr, he claimed—and believed an offensive now against the British and French would be a catastrophe.
These views were reinforced by General Eduard Wagner, the army’s chief supply officer, and General Georg Thomas, head of the High Command’s economic section, who reported that the Polish campaign had seriously depleted the army’s reserves of fuel and ammunition and that Germany’s industrial base could not produce enough chemicals and steel for adequate supplies of gunpowder and artillery shells until 1941. Wagner also noted that half the tanks used in the Polish campaign were not yet repaired and would not be operational until 1940, maybe 1941. As Halder recorded in his war diary on November 3, “none [his emphasis] of the top commanders believes that the attack ordered by High Command promises success. A decisive success for the ground forces cannot be expected.”
When the generals presented their objections to the Führer on November 4, they found that “discussion with him about these things [was] absolutely impossible.” He accused the commanders of cowardice and held their foot-dragging responsible for the slow tempo of rearmament. When, at a subsequent meeting, Brauchitsch suggested that morale troubles among the troops in the West had surfaced and that “there are signs of a lack of discipline like we saw in 1917–1918,” Hitler flew into a blistering rage. He would go there himself, he bellowed, and confront the troublemakers. “He would have them shot.” Brauchitsch’s story was a complete fabrication—there was no morale problem among the troops. He had concocted this yarn in hopes that it would give Hitler pause and add to the arguments against an immediate attack in the West.
The generals, singly or in groups, met with Hitler over the following days and weeks, and left each of these encounters deeply troubled. As in 1938, a small number of army leaders began to contemplate “making a fundamental change,” by which they meant removing Hitler from power. Even Brauchitsch and Halder were involved, though the center of the nascent conspiracy was Admiral Canaris’s counterintelligence agency (the Abwehr), where Colonels Hans Oster and Helmuth Groscurth, long d
isillusioned by Nazi radicalism, were most active. They were also in contact with conservative civilian leaders, especially former Leipzig mayor Carl Goerdeler, Hjalmar Schacht, and retired general Ludwig Beck about forming a new post-Hitler government. Those discussions meandered through the winter months, as one postponement after another delayed the offensive again and again. There were eleven postponements between November and April, most due to weather, and while the generals were relieved that Germany had been spared certain calamity in the West, the repeated delays also took the edge off the embryonic conspiracy. As in 1938 nothing came of their plans.
Despite the disturbing outcome of their meetings with Hitler, the army’s staff did produce an operational plan for an offensive in the West. The first version of Case Yellow called for a major thrust through Belgium and Holland, followed by a direct assault on French and British forces in northern France, then a drive south to Paris. The operation bore a striking resemblance to the Schlieffen Plan of 1914, and although the plan would be modified over the winter months, its central feature remained a massive assault through the Low Countries. By December, however, an important shift in German thinking was under way. The basic premise of Case Yellow was that once German troops launched their offensive, British and French forces would rush to prearranged defensive positions in Holland and Belgium to meet the German onslaught. There the decisive battle would take place. The French left substantial numbers of troops marshaled behind the Maginot Line, the elaborate string of fortifications constructed along the Franco-German border, while fewer, mostly reserve units, were deployed to guard the Luxembourg border and the Ardennes Forest. The Maginot Line was considered impregnable, and the dense forest and narrow, winding roads of the Ardennes made an attack there virtually impossible.
The Third Reich Page 57
