The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

by William Shirer

  Since joining the League of Nations the Soviet Union had built up a certain moral force as the champion of peace and the leading opponent of fascist aggression. Now that moral capital had been utterly dissipated.

  Above all, by assenting to a shoddy deal with Nazi Germany, Stalin had given the signal for the commencement of a war that almost certainly would develop into a world conflict. This he certainly knew.* As things turned out, it was the greatest blunder of his life.

  * See p. 523.

  * The only source found for what happened at this meeting is in the unpublished diary of General Halder, Chief of the Army General Staff. It is the first entry, August 14, 1939. Halder kept his diary in Gabelsberger shorthand and it is an immensely valuable record of the most confidential military and political goings on in Nazi Germany from August 14, 1939, to September 24, 1942, when he was dismissed from his post. The Obersalzberg entry consists of Halder’s shorthand notes jotted down while Hitler spoke and a summary which he added at the end. It is strange that no American or British publisher has published the Halder diary. The writer had access to the German longhand version of it, transcribed by Halder himself, during the writing of this volume. Hitler’s daily record book confirms the date of this meeting and adds that besides the commanders in chief, Brauchitsch, Goering and Raeder, Dr. Todt, the engineer who built the West Wall, also was present.

  * Dahlerus told the Nuremberg tribunal on March 19, 1946, when he was on the stand as a witness for Goering, that the Field Marshal had assured the British businessmen “on his word of honor” that he would do everything in his power to avert war. But Goering’s state of mind at this time may have been more accurately expressed in a statement he made two days after seeing the British visitors. In boasting about the Luftwaffe’s air defenses, he said, “The Ruhr will not be subjected to a single bomb. If an enemy bomber reaches the Ruhr, my name is not Hermann Goering: you can call me Meier!”—a boast he was soon to rue.

  * Naujocks had a hand in the “Venlo Incident,” which will be recounted further on. He was involved in an undertaking to disguise German soldiers in Dutch and Belgian frontier guard uniforms at the time of the invasion of the West in May 1940. Early in the war, he managed a section of the S.D. which forged passports and while thus employed proposed “Operation Bernhard,” a fantastic plan to drop forged British banknotes over England. Heydrich eventually tired of him and forced him to serve in the ranks of an S.S. regiment in Russia, where he was wounded. In 1944 Naujocks turned up in Belgium as an economic administrator, but his principal job at that time appears to have been to carry out in Denmark the murder of a number of members of the Danish resistance movement. He probably deserted to the American Army in Belgium to save his neck. In fact, he had a charmed life. Held as a war criminal, he made a dramatic escape from a special camp in Germany for war criminals in 1946 and thus escaped trial. At the time of writing, he has never been apprehended or heard of. An account of his escape is given in Schaumburg-Lippe, Zwischen Krone und Kerker.

  * S.S. Oberfuehrer Dr. Mehlhorn, who administered the S.D. under Heydrich. Schellenberg, in his memoirs (The Labyrinth, pp. 48–50), recounts that Mehlhorn told him on August 26 that he had been put in charge of staging the faked attack at Gleiwitz but that Mehlhorn got out of it by feigning illness. Mehlhorn’s stomach grew stronger in later years. During the war he was a notable instigator of Gestapo terror in Poland.

  † The submarines sailed between August 19 and 23, the Graf Spee on the twenty-first and the Deutschland on the twenty-fourth.

  * The British government soon learned of this. On August 17 Sumner Welles, the U.S. Undersecretary of State, informed the British ambassador in Washington of Molotov’s suggestions to Schulenburg. The American ambassador in Moscow had wired them to Washington the day before and they were deadly accurate.11 Ambassador Steinhardt had seen Molotov on August 16.

  * It was signed in Berlin at 2 A.M. on Sunday, August 20.

  * No official minutes of Hitler’s harangue have been found, but several records of it, two of them made by high-ranking officers from notes jotted down during the meeting, have come to light. One by Admiral Hermann Boehm, Chief of the High Seas Fleet, was submitted at Nuremberg in Admiral Raeder’s defense and is published in the original German in TMWC, XLI, pp. 16–25. General Halder made voluminous notes in his unique Gabelsberger shorthand, and an English translation of them from his diary entry of August 22 is published in DGFP, VII, pp. 557–59. The chief document of the session used by the prosecution as evidence in the Nuremberg trial was an unsigned memorandum in two parts from the OKW files which were captured by American troops at Saalfelden in the Austrian Tyrol. It is printed in English translation in NC A, III, pp. 581–86 (Nuremberg Document 798-PS), 665–66 (N.D. 1014-PS). and also in DGFP, VII, pp. 200–6. The original German text of the two-part memorandum is, of course, in the TMWC volumes. It makes Hitler’s language somewhat more lively than do Admiral Boehm and General Halder. But all three versions are similar in content and there can be no doubt of their authenticity. At Nuremberg there was some doubt about a fourth account of Hitler’s speech, listed as N.D. C-3 (NCA, VII, pp. 752–54), and though it was referred to in the proceedings the prosecution did not submit it in evidence. While it undoubtedly rings true, it may have been embellished a little by persons who were not present at the meeting at the Berghof. In piecing together Hitler’s remarks I have used the records of Boehm and Halder and the unsigned memorandum submitted at Nuremberg as evidence.

  * “Dirty dog.”

  † According to the account in Nuremberg Document C-3, (see footnote above, p. 529), Goering jumped up on the table and gave “bloodthirsty thanks and bloody promises. He danced around like a savage. The few doubtful ones remained silent.” This description greatly nettled Goering during an interrogation at Nuremberg on August 28-and 29, 1945. “I dispute the fact that I stood on the table,” Goering said. “I want you to know that the speech was made in the great hall of Hitler’s private house. I did not have the habit of jumping on tables in private homes. That would have been an attitude completely inconsistent with that of a German officer.”

  “Well, the fact is,” Colonel John H. Amen, the American interrogator, said at this point, “mat you led the applause after the speech, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but not on the table,” Goering rejoined.27

  *“A humiliating experience,” Strang had called it in a dispatch to the Foreign Office on July 20.28

  * The timing is important. Molotov did not receive the Nazi proposal that Ribbentrop come to Moscow until the evening of August 15. (See above, p. 520.) And though he did not accept it definitely he did hint that Russia would be interested in a nonaggression pact with Germany, which of course would have made negotiation of a military alliance with France and Britain superfluous. The best conclusion this writer can come to is that, as of August 14, when Voroshilov demanded an “unequivocal answer” to the question of allowing Soviet troops to meet the Germans in Poland, the Kremlin still had an open mind as to which side to join. Unfortunately the Russian documents, which could clear up this crucial question, have not been published. At any rate, Stalin does not seem to have made his final decision until the afternoon of August 19. (See above, p. 526.)

  * Lloyd George, in a speech in the Commons on April 3, four days after Chamberlain’s unilateral guarantee to Poland had been announced, had urged the British government to make such a condition. “If we are going in without the help of Russia we are walking into a trap. It is the only country whose armies can get there [to Poland]…. I cannot understand why, before committing ourselves to this tremendous enterprise, we did not secure beforehand the adhesion of Russia … If Russia has not been brought into this matter because of certain feelings the Poles have that they do not want the Russians there, it is for us to declare the conditions, and unless the Poles are prepared to accept the only conditions with which we can successfully help them, the responsibility must be theirs.”

  * At a session
of the military delegates the morning before, on August 21, Voroshilov had demanded the indefinite adjournment of the talks on the excuse that he and his colleagues would be busy with the autumn maneuvers. To the Anglo–French protests at such a delay the Marshal had answered, “The intentions of the Soviet Delegation were, and still are, to agree on the organization of military co-operation of the armed forces of the three parties … The U.S.S.R., not having a common frontier with Germany, can give help to France, Britain, Poland and Rumania, only on condition that her troops are given rights of passage across Polish and Rumanian territory … The Soviet forces cannot co-operate with the armed forces of Britain and France if they are not allowed onto Polish and Rumanian territory … The Soviet Military Delegation cannot picture to itself how the governments and general staffs of Britain and France, in sending their missions to the U.S.S.R…. could not have given them some directives on such an elementary matter … This can only show that mere are reasons to doubt their desire to come to serious and effective co-operation with the U.S.S.R.”

  The logic of the Marshal’s military argument was sound and the failure of the French and especially the British governments to answer it would prove disastrous. But to have repeated it—with all the rest of the statement—on this late date, August 21, when Voroshilov could not have been ignorant of Stalin’s decision of August 19, was deceitful.

  * The wording of the essential articles is almost identical to that of a Soviet draft which Molotov handed Schulenburg on August 19 and which Hitler, in his telegram to Stalin, said he accepted. The Russian draft had specified that the nonaggression treaty would be valid only if a “special protocol” were signed simultaneously and made an integral part of the pact.34

  According to Friedrich Gaus, who participated at the evening meeting, a high-falutin preamble which Ribbentrop wanted to insert stressing the formation of friendly Soviet–German relations was thrown out at the insistence of Stalin. The Soviet dictator complained that “the Soviet government could not suddenly present to the public assurances of friendship after they had been covered with pails of manure by the Nazi government for six years.”35

  * Article VII provided for the treaty to enter into force immediately upon signature. Formal ratification in two such totalitarian states was, to be sure, a mere formality. But it would take a few days. Hitler had insisted on this provision.

  * And of Polish diplomacy too. Ambassador Noël reported Foreign Minister Beck’s reaction to the signing of the Nazi–Soviet Pact in a dispatch to Paris: “Beck is quite unperturbed and does not seem in the slightest worried. He believes that, in substance, very little has changed.”

  † Despite many warnings, as we have seen, that Hitler was courting the Kremlin. On June 1, M. Coulondre, the French ambassador in Berlin, had informed Bonnet, the French Foreign Minister, that Russia was looming larger and larger in Hitler’s thoughts. “Hitler will risk war,” Coulondre wrote, “if he does not have to fight Russia. On the other hand, if he knows he has to fight her too he will draw back rather than expose his country, his party and himself to ruin.” The ambassador urged the prompt conclusion of the Anglo–French negotiations in Moscow and advised Paris that the British ambassador in Berlin had made a similar appeal to his government in London. (French Yellow Book, Fr. ed., pp. 180–81.)

  On August 15, both Coulondre and Henderson saw Weizsaecker at the Foreign Office. The British ambassador informed London that the State Secretary was confident that the Soviet Union “would in the end join in sharing the Polish spoils.” (British Blue Book, p. 91.) And Coulondre, after his talk with Weizsaecker, wired Paris: “It is necessary at all costs to come to some solution of the Russian talks as soon as possible.” (French Yellow Book, p. 282.)

  Throughout June and July, Laurence Steinhardt, the American ambassador in Moscow, had also sent warnings of an impending Soviet–Nazi deal, which President Roosevelt passed on to the British, French and Polish embassies. As early as July 5, when Soviet Ambassador Constantine Oumansky left for a leave in Russia, he carried with him a message from Roosevelt to Stalin “that if his government joined up with Hitler, it was as certain as that the night followed day that as soon as Hitler had conquered France he would turn on Russia.” (Joseph E. Davies, Mission to Moscow, p. 450.) The President’s warning was cabled to Steinhardt with instructions to repeat it to Molotov, which the ambassador did on August 16. (U.S. Diplomatic Papers, 1939, I, pp. 296–99.)

  * Years before, Hitler had written prophetically in Mein Kampf: “The very fact of the conclusion of an alliance with Russia embodies a plan for the next war. Its outcome would be the end of Germany.” (See p. 660 of the Houghton Mifflin edition, 1943.)

  16

  THE LAST DAYS OF PEACE

  THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT had not waited idly for the formal signing of the Nazi–Soviet Pact in Moscow. The announcement in Berlin on the late evening of August 21 that Ribbentrop was flying to Moscow to conclude a German–Russian agreement stirred the British cabinet to action. It met at 3 P.M. on the twenty-second and issued a communiqué stating categorically that a Soviet–Nazi nonaggression pact “would in no way affect their obligation to Poland, which they have repeatedly stated in public and which they are determined to fulfill.” At the same time Parliament was summoned to meet on August 24 to pass the Emergency Powers (Defense) Bill, and certain precautionary mobilization measures were taken.

  Though the cabinet statement was as clear as words could make it, Chamberlain wanted Hitler to have no doubts about it. Immediately after the cabinet meeting broke up he wrote a personal letter to the Fuehrer.

  … Apparently the announcement of a German–Soviet Agreement is taken in some quarters in Berlin to indicate that intervention by Great Britain on behalf of Poland is no longer a contingency that need be reckoned with. No greater mistake could be made. Whatever may prove to be the nature of the German–Soviet Agreement, it cannot alter Great Britain’s obligation to Poland …

  It has been alleged that, if His Majesty’s Government had made their position more clear in 1914, the great catastrophe would have been avoided. Whether or not there is any force in that allegation, His Majesty’s Government are resolved that on this occasion there shall be no such tragic misunderstanding.

  If the case should arise, they are resolved, and prepared, to employ without delay all the forces at their command, and it is impossible to foresee the end of hostilities once engaged …1

  Having, as he added, “thus made our position perfectly clear,” the Prime Minister again appealed to Hitler to seek a peaceful solution of his differences with Poland and once more offered the British government’s co-operation in helping to obtain it.

  The letter, which Ambassador Henderson, flying down from Berlin, delivered to Hitler shortly after 1 P.M. on August 23 at Berchtesgaden, threw the Nazi dictator into a violent rage. “Hitler was excitable and uncompromising,” Henderson wired Lord Halifax. “His language was violent and exaggerated both as regards England and Poland.”2 Henderson’s report of the meeting and the German Foreign Office memorandum on it—the latter among the captured Nazi papers—agree on the nature of Hitler’s tirade. England, he stormed, was responsible for Poland’s intransigence just as it had been responsible for Czechoslovakia’s unreasonable attitude the year before. Tens of thousands of Volksdeutsche in Poland were being persecuted. There were even, he claimed, six cases of castration—a subject that obsessed him. He could stand it no more. Any further persecution of Germans by the Poles would bring immediate action.

  I contested every point [Henderson wired Halifax] and kept calling his statements inaccurate but the only effect was to launch him on some fresh tirade.

  Finally Hitler agreed to give a written answer to the Prime Minister’s letter in two hours’ time, and Henderson withdrew to Salzburg for a little respite.* Later in the afternoon Hitler sent for him and handed him his reply. In contrast to the first meeting, the Fuehrer, Henderson reported to London, “was quite calm and never raised his voice.”r />
  He was, he said [Henderson reported], fifty years old; he preferred war now to when he would be fifty-five or sixty.

  The megalomania of the German dictator, declaiming on his mountain-top, comes out even more forcibly in the German minutes of the meeting. After quoting him as preferring to make war at fifty rather than later, they add:

  England [Hitler said] would do well to realize that as a front-line soldier he knew what war was and would utilize every means available. It was surely quite clear to everyone that the World War [i.e., 1914–1918] would not have been lost if he had been Chancellor at the time.

  Hitler’s reply to Chamberlain was a mixture of all the stale lies and exaggerations which he had been bellowing to foreigners and his own people since the Poles dared to stand up to him. Germany, he said, did not seek a conflict with Great Britain. It had been prepared all along to discuss the questions of Danzig and the Corridor with the Poles “on the basis of a proposal of truly unparalleled magnanimity.” But the unconditional guarantee of Poland by Britain had only encouraged the Poles “to unloosen a wave of appalling terrorism against the one and a half million German inhabitants living in Poland.” Such “atrocities” he declared, “are terrible for the victims but intolerable for a Great Power such as the German Reich.” Germany would no longer tolerate them.