The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

  By the time Ambassador Mackensen handed Mussolini Hitler’s letter at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome at 3:20 P.M. on August 25, the Duce, then, knew that the German attack on Poland was about to take place. Unlike Hitler, he was certain that Great Britain and France would immediately enter the war, with catastrophic consequences for Italy, whose Navy was no match for the British Mediterranean Fleet and whose Army would be overwhelmed by the French.† According to a dispatch which Mackensen got off to Berlin at 10:25 P.M. describing the meeting, Mussolini, after carefully reading the letter twice in his presence, declared that he was “in complete agreement” about the Nazi–Soviet Pact and that he realized that an “armed conflict with Poland could no longer be avoided.” Finally—“and this he emphasized expressly,” Mackensen reported—“he stood beside us unconditionally and with all his resources.”13

  But this was not what the Duce wrote the Fuehrer, unbeknownst to the German ambassador, the text of which was hurriedly telephoned by Ciano to Attolico, who had returned to his post in Berlin and who “about 6 P.M.” arrived at the Chancellery to deliver it in person to Adolf Hitler. It struck the Fuehrer, according to Schmidt, who was present, like a bombshell. After expressing his “complete approval” of the Nazi–Soviet Pact and his “understanding concerning Poland,” Mussolini came to the main point.

  As for the practical attitude of Italy in case of military action [Mussolini wrote, and the emphasis is his], my point of view is as follows:

  If Germany attacks Poland and the conflict remains localized, Italy will afford Germany every form of political and economic assistance which is requested of her.

  If Germany attacks Poland* and the latter’s allies open a counterattack against Germany, I inform you in advance that it will be opportune for me not to take the initiative in military operations in view of the present state of Italian war preparations, of which we have repeatedly and in good time informed you, Fuehrer, and Herr von Ribbentrop.

  Our intervention can, nevertheless, take place at once if Germany delivers to us immediately the military supplies and the raw materials to resist the attack which the French and English would predominantly direct against us.

  At our meetings the war was envisaged for 1942, and by that time I would have been ready on land, on sea and in the air, according to the plans which had been concerted.

  I am furthermore of the opinion that the purely military measures which have already been taken, and other measures to be taken later, will immobilize, in Europe and Africa, considerable French and British forces.

  I consider it my bounden duty as a loyal friend to tell you the whole truth and inform you beforehand about the real situation. Not to do so might have unpleasant consequences for us all. This is my view, and since within a short time I must summon the highest governmental bodies, I beg you to let me know yours.

  MUSSOLINl†15

  So though Russia was in the bag as a friendly neutral instead of a belligerent, Germany’s ally of the Pact of Steel was out of it—and this on the very day that Britain had seemed to commit herself irrevocably by signing a mutual-assistance pact with Poland against German aggression. Hitler read the Duce’s letter, told Attolico he would answer it immediately and icily dismissed the Italian envoy.

  “The Italians are behaving just as they did in 1914,” Dr. Schmidt overheard Hitler remark bitterly after Attolico had left, and that evening the Chancellery echoed with unkind words about the “disloyal Axis partner.” But words were not enough. The German Army was scheduled to hop off against Poland in nine hours, for it was now 6:30 P.M. of August 25 and the invasion was set to begin at 4:30 A.M. on August 26. The Nazi dictator had to decide at once whether, in view of the news from London and Rome, to go ahead with it or postpone or cancel it.

  Schmidt, accompanying Attolico out of Hitler’s study, bumped into General Keitel rushing to the presence of the Fuehrer. A few minutes later the General hurried out, crying excitedly to his adjutant, “The order to advance must be delayed again!”

  Hitler, pushed into a corner by Mussolini and Chamberlain, had swiftly made his decision. “Fuehrer considerably shaken,” Halder noted in his diary, and then continued:

  7:30 P.M.—Treaty between Poland and England ratified. No opening of hostilities. All troop movements to be stopped, even near the frontier if not otherwise possible.

  8:35 P.M.—Keitel confirms. Canaris: Telephone restrictions lifted on England and France. Confirms development of events.

  The German Naval Register gives a more concise account of the postponement, along with the reasons:

  August 25:—Case White already started will be stopped at 20:30 (8:30 P.M.) because of changed political conditions. (Mutual-Assistance Pact England-Poland of August 25, noon, and information from Duce that he would be true to his word but has to ask for large supply of raw materials.)16

  Three of the chief defendants at Nuremberg submitted, under interrogation, their version of the postponement of the attack.17 Ribbentrop claimed that when he heard about the Anglo–Polish pact and “heard” that “military steps were being taken against Poland” (as if he didn’t know all along about the attack) he went “at once” to the Fuehrer and urged him to call off the invasion of Poland, to which “the Fuehrer at once agreed.” This is surely entirely untrue.

  But the testimony of Keitel and Goering at least seemed more honest. “I was suddenly called to Hitler at the Chancellery,” Keitel recounted on the stand at Nuremberg, “and he said to me, ‘Stop everything at once. Get Brauchitsch immediately. I need time for negotiations.’”

  That Hitler still believed at this late hour that he could negotiate his way out of his impasse was confirmed by Goering during a pretrial interrogation at Nuremberg.

  On the day that England gave her official guarantee to Poland the Fuehrer called me on the telephone and told me that he had stopped the planned invasion of Poland. I asked him whether this was just temporary or for good. He said, “No, I will have to see whether we can eliminate British intervention.”

  Though Mussolini’s last-minute defection was a heavy blow to Hitler, it is obvious from the above testimony that Britain’s action in signing a mutual-assistance treaty with Poland was the stronger influence in inducing the German leader to postpone the attack. Yet it is strange that after Ambassador Henderson on this very day had again warned him that Britain would fight if Poland were attacked and that after the British government had now solemnly given its word to that effect in a formal treaty, he still believed he could, as he told Goering, “eliminate British intervention.” It is likely that his experience with Chamberlain at Munich led him to believe that the Prime Minister again would capitulate if a way out could be concocted. But again it is strange that a man who had previously shown such insight into foreign politics did not know of the changes in Chamberlain and in the British position. After all, Hitler himself had provoked them.

  It took some doing to halt the German Army on the evening of August 25, for many units were already on the move. In East Prussia the order calling off the attack reached General Petzel’s I Corps at 9:37 P.M. and only the frantic efforts of several officers who were rushed out to the forward detachments succeeded in stopping the troops. The motorized columns of General von Kleist’s corps to the south had begun to move at dusk up to the Polish frontier. They were halted on the border by a staff officer who made a quick landing in a small scouting plane on the frontier. In a few sectors the orders did not arrive until after the shooting began, but since the Germans had been provoking incidents all along the border for several days the Polish General Staff apparently did not suspect what had really happened. It did report on August 26 that numerous “German bands” had crossed the border and attacked blockhouses and customs posts with machine guns and hand grenades and that “in one case it was a Regular Army detachment.”

  JOY AND CONFUSION OF THE “CONSPIRATORS”

  The news on the evening of August 25 that Hitler had called off the attack on Poland caused great jubi
lation among the conspiratorial members of the Abwehr. Colonel Oster gave Schacht and Gisevius the news, exclaiming, “The Fuehrer is done for,” and the next morning Admiral Canaris was even more in the clouds. “Hitler,” Canaris declared, “will never survive this blow. Peace has been saved for the next twenty years.” Both men thought there was no further need of bothering to overthrow the Nazi dictator; he was finished.

  For several weeks as the fateful summer approached its end the conspirators, as they conceived themselves, had again been busy, though with what purpose exactly it is difficult to comprehend. Goerdeler, Adam von Trott, Helmuth von Moltke, Fabian von Schlabrendorff and Rudolf Pechel had all made the pilgrimage to London and there had informed not only Chamberlain and Halifax but Churchill and other British leaders that Hitler planned to attack Poland at the end of August. These German opponents of the Fuehrer could see for themselves that Britain, right up to its umbrella-carrying Chamberlain, had changed since the days of Munich, and that the one condition they themselves had made the year before to their resolve to get rid of Hitler, namely that Britain and France declare they would oppose any further Nazi aggression by armed force, had now been fulfilled. What more did they want? It is not clear from the records they have left, and one gathers the impression that they did not quite know themselves. Well-meaning though they were, they were gripped by utter confusion and a paralyzing sense of futility. Hitler’s hold on Germany—on the Army, the police, the government, the people—was too complete to be loosened or undermined by anything they could think of doing.

  On August 15, Hassell visited Dr. Schacht at his new bachelor quarters in Berlin. The dismissed Minister of Economics had just returned from a six-month journey to India and Burma. “Schacht’s view is,” Hassell wrote in his diary, “that we can do nothing but keep our eyes open and wait, that things will follow their inevitable course.” Hassell himself told Gisevius the same day, according to his own diary entry, that he “too was in favor of postponing direct action for the moment.”

  But what “direct action” was there to be put off? General Halder, keen as Hitler to smash Poland, was not at the moment interested in getting rid of the dictator. General von Witzleben, who was to have led the troops in the overthrow of the Fuehrer the year before, was now in command of an army group in the west and was, therefore, in no position to act in Berlin, even if he had wished to. But did he have any such wish? Gisevius visited him at his headquarters, found him listening to the BBC radio news from London and soon realized that the General was interested merely in finding out what was going on.

  As for General Halder, he was preoccupied with last-minute plans for the onslaught on Poland, to the exclusion of any treasonable thoughts about getting rid of Hitler. When interrogated after the war—on February 26, 1946—at Nuremberg, he was exceedingly fuzzy about why he and the other supposed enemies of the Nazi regime had done nothing in the last days of August to depose the Fuehrer and thus save Germany from involvement in war. “There was no possibility,” he said. Why? Because General von Witzleben had been transferred to the west. Without Witzleben the Army could not act.

  What about the German people? When Captain Sam Harris, the American interrogator, reminding Halder that he had said the German people were opposed to war, asked, “If Hitler were irrevocably committed to war, why couldn’t you count on the support of the people before the invasion of Poland?” Halder replied, “You must excuse me if I smile. If I hear the word ‘irrevocably’ connected with Hitler, I must say that nothing was irrevocable.” And the General Staff Chief went on to explain that as late as August 22, after Hitler had revealed to his generals at the meeting on the Obersalzberg his “irrevocable” resolve to attack Poland and fight the West if necessary, he himself did not believe that the Fuehrer would do what he said he would do.18 In the light of Halder’s own diary entries for this period, this is an astonishing statement indeed. But it is typical not only of Halder but of most of the other conspirators.

  Where was General Beck, Halder’s predecessor as Chief of the Army General Staff and the acknowledged leader of the conspirators? According to Gisevius, Beck wrote a letter to General von Brauchitsch but the Army Commander in Chief did not even acknowledge it. Next, Gisevius says, Beck had a long talk with Halder, who agreed with him that a big war would be the ruin of Germany but thought “Hitler would never permit a world war” and that therefore there was no need at the moment to try to overthrow him.19

  On August 14, Hassell dined alone with Beck, and recorded their feeling of frustration in his diary.

  Beck [is] a most cultured, attractive and intelligent man. Unfortunately, he has a very low opinion of the leading people in the Army. For that reason he could see no place there where we could gain a foothold. He is firmly convinced of the vicious character of the policies of the Third Reich.20

  The convictions of Beck—and of the others around him—were high and noble, but as Adolf Hitler prepared to hurl Germany into war not one of these estimable Germans did anything to halt him. The task was obviously difficult and perhaps, at this late hour, impossible to fulfill. But they did not even attempt it.

  General Thomas, perhaps, tried. Following up his memorandum to Keitel which he had personally read to the OKW Chief at the middle of August,* he called on him again on Sunday, August 27, and, according to his own account, “handed him graphically illustrated statistical evidence … [which] demonstrated clearly the tremendous military-economic superiority of the Western Powers and the tribulation we would face.” Keitel, with unaccustomed courage, showed the material to Hitler, who replied that he did not share General Thomas’ “anxiety over the danger of a world war, especially since he had now got the Soviet Union on his side.”21

  Thus ended the attempts of the “conspirators” to prevent Hitler from launching World War II, except for the feeble last-minute efforts of Dr. Schacht, of which the canny financier made much in his own defense at the Nuremberg trial. On his return from India in August he wrote letters to Hitler, Goering and Ribbentrop—at the fateful moment none of the opposition leaders seem to have gone beyond writing letters and memoranda—but, to his “very great surprise,” as he said later, received no replies. Next he decided to go to Zossen, a few miles southeast of Berlin, where the Army High Command had set up headquarters for the Polish campaign, and personally confront General von Brauchitsch. To tell him what? On the witness stand at Nuremberg Schacht explained that he intended to tell the Army chief that it would be unconstitutional for Germany to go to war without the approval of the Reichstag! It was therefore the duty of the Army Commander in Chief to respect his oath to the constitution!

  Alas, Dr. Schacht never got to see Brauchitsch. He was warned by Canaris that if he came to Zossen the Army commander “would probably have us arrested immediately”—a fate that did not seem attractive to this former supporter of Hitler.22 But the real reason Schacht did not go to Zossen on his ridiculous errand (it would have been child’s play for Hitler to get the rubber-stamp Reichstag to approve his war had he wanted to bother with such a formality) was stated by Gisevius when he took the witness stand on behalf of Schacht at Nuremberg. It seems that Schacht planned to go to Zossen on August 25 and called off the trip when Hitler on that evening called off the attack on Poland scheduled for the next day. Three days later, according to the testimony of Gisevius, Schacht again decided to carry out his mission at Zossen but Canaris informed him it was too late.23 It wasn’t that the “conspirators” missed the bus; they never arrived at the bus station to try to catch it.

  As ineffective as the handful of anti-Nazi Germans in staying Hitler’s hand were the various neutral world leaders who now appealed to the Fuehrer to avert war. On August 24, President Roosevelt sent urgent messages to Hitler and the President of Poland pressing them to settle their differences without resorting to arms. President Mościcki, in a dignified reply the following day, reminded Roosevelt that it was not Poland which was “formulating demands and demanding concessions” but tha
t nevertheless it was willing to settle its disputes with Germany by direct negotiation or by conciliation, as the American President had urged. Hitler did not reply (Roosevelt had reminded him that he had not answered the President’s appeal to him of last April) and on the next day, August 25, Roosevelt sent a second message, informing Hitler of Mościcki’s conciliatory response, and beseeching him to “agree to the pacific means of settlement accepted by the Government of Poland.”

  To the second letter there was no answer either, although on the evening of August 26 Weizsaecker summoned the American chargé d’affaires in Berlin, Alexander C. Kirk, and asked him to tell the President that the Fuehrer had received the two telegrams and had placed them “in the hands of the Foreign Minister for consideration by the government.”

  The Pope took to the air on August 24 to make a broadcast appeal for peace, beseeching “by the blood of Christ … the strong [to] hear us that they may not become weak through injustice … [and] if they desire that their power may not be a destruction.” On the afternoon of August 31 the Pope sent identical notes to the governments of Germany, Poland, Italy and the two Western Powers “beseeching, in the name of God, the German and Polish Governments … to avoid any incident,” begging the British, French and Italian governments to support his appeal and adding: