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

by William L. Shirer

  * Or if not out of war, out of any serious participation in it. General Halder intimates this in a recapitulation of the “sequence of events” of August 25 in a diary entry made later, on August 28. Noting that at 1:30 P.M. on the twenty-fifth Hitler saw Henderson, Halder added: “Fuehrer would not take it amiss if England were to wage a sham war.”

  * Although Hitler’s standing orders, which had not been canceled, called for the attack on this day and hour and, as Halder said, were “automatic,” a number of German writers have reported that the Fuehrer gave specific orders a few minutes after 3 P.M. to launch Fall Weiss the following morning. (See Weizsaecker, Memoirs; Kordt, Wahn und Wirklichkeit; and Walther Hofer, War Premeditated, 1939.) Hofer says the order was given at 3:02 P.M. and cites as his source General von Vormann, who was present at the Chancellery when it was issued. No official record of this has been found in the German documents.

  † There was a secret protocol to this treaty which stated that the “European Power” mentioned in Article 1, whose aggression would bring about mutual military assistance, was Germany. This saved the British government from the disastrous step of having to declare war on the Soviet Union when the Red Army, in cahoots with the Germans, invaded eastern Poland.

  * Germany did not observe summer time, as did Great Britain. Therefore the one-hour difference in time between Berlin and London was canceled out.

  * It must be kept in mind that the “Polish provocations” which Hitler and Ribbentrop harped on in their meetings and diplomatic exchanges with the British, French, Russians and Italians during these days, and the news of which was published under flaming headlines in the controlled Nazi press, were almost entirely invented by the Germans. Most of the provoking in Poland was done, on orders from Berlin, by the Germans. The captured German documents are replete with evidence on this.

  † The day before, on August 24, Ciano had visited the King at his summer residence in Piedmont, and the aging ruler, who had been shunted to the sidelines by Mussolini, spoke contemptuously of the country’s armed services. “The Army is in a pitiful state,”. Ciano quotes him as saying. “Even the defense of our frontier is insufficient. He has made thirty-two inspections and is convinced that the French can go through it with great ease. The officers of the Italian Army are not qualified for the job, and our equipment is old and obsolete.” (Ciano Diaries, p. 127.)

  * In the German translation of Mussolini’s letter found in the Foreign Office archives after the war, and which I have used here, the word “Germany” has been crossed out here and the word “Poland” typed above it, making it read: “If Poland attacks …” In the Italian original, published after the war by the Italian government, the passage reads “Se la Germania attacca la Polonia.” It is strange that the Nazis falsified even the secret documents deposited in their official government archives.14

  † As if Mussolini’s letter were not bad enough medicine for Hitler, a number of German writers, mostly observers at first hand of the dramatic events of the last days of peace, have published an imaginary text of this letter of the Duce to the Fuehrer. Erich Kordt, one of the anti-Nazi conspirators, who was head of the secretariat at the Foreign Office, was the first to commit this faked version to print in his book, Wahn und Wirklichkeit, published in Stuttgart in 1947. Kordt dropped it in his second edition but other writers continued to copy it from the first edition. It shows up in Peter Kleist’s Zwischen Hitler und Stalin, published in 1950, and even in the English translation of Paul Schmidt’s memoirs published in New York and London in 1951. Yet the authentic text was published in Italy in 1946 and an English translation in the State Department’s Nazi–Soviet Relations in 1948. Dr. Schmidt, who was with Hitler when he received the letter from Attolico, quotes the letter as saying, “In one of the most painful moments of my life, I have to inform you that Italy is not ready for war. According to what the responsible heads of the services tell me, the gasoline supplies of the Italian Air Force are so low that they would last only for three weeks of fighting. The position is the same with regard to supplies for the Army, and supplies of raw materials … Please understand my situation.” For an amusing note on the faking of this letter, see Namier, In the Nazi Era, p. 5.

  * See above, pp. 517–18.

  * This caused added resentment in Berlin and some confusion in Rome which Ciano had to straighten out. Attolico told Ciano later he had deliberately insisted on complete deliveries before hostilities “in order to discourage the Germans from meeting our requests.” To deliver thirteen million tons of supplies in a few days was, of course, utterly impossible, and Mussolini apologized to Ambassador von Mackensen for the “misunderstanding,” remarking that “even the Almighty Himself could not transport such quantities here in a few days. It had never occurred to him to make such an absurd request”28

  * I.e., Hitler’s offer of August 25 to “guarantee” the British Empire.

  * “Ribbentrop knew nothing whatsoever about Dahlerus being sent,” Goering testified on the stand at Nuremberg. “I never discussed the matter of Dahlerus with Ribbentrop. He did not know at all that Dahlerus went back and forth between me and the British government.”37 But Goering kept Hitler informed.

  † The text is published in Documents on British Foreign Policy, Third Series, Vol. VII, p. 283. It was omitted from all published British records until the above volume came out in 1954, an omission much commented upon by British historians. Dahlerus is not mentioned in the British Blue Book of documents concerning the outbreak of the war nor in Henderson’s Final Report nor even in Henderson’s book Failure of a Mission, though in the book the Swedish intermediary is referred to as “a source in touch with Goering.” In Henderson’s dispatches and in those from other members of the British Embassy which have now been published, Dahlerus and his activities play a fairly prominent part, as they do in various memoranda of the British Foreign Office.

  The role of this singular Swedish businessman in trying to save the peace was a well-kept secret and both the Wilhelmstrasse and Downing Street went to considerable lengths to keep his movements hidden from the correspondents and neutral diplomats, who, to the best of my knowledge, knew absolutely nothing of them until Dahlerus testified at Nuremberg on March 19, 1946. His book, The Last Attempt, was published in Swedish in 1945, at the end of the war, but the English edition did not come out until 1948 and there remained a further interval of six years before his role was officially confirmed, so to speak, by the documents in Vol. VII of the DBrFP series. The German Foreign Office documents for August do not mention Dahlerus, except in one routine memorandum reporting receipt of a message from the Lufthansa airline that “Dahlerus, a gentleman from the ‘Foreign Office,’” was arriving in Berlin August 26 on one of its planes. He does appear, however, in some later papers.

  *Presumably President Roosevelt’s message to Hitler on August 24 and 25 urging direct negotiations between Germany and Poland.

  † Dahlerus, it must be pointed out in all fairness, was not so pro-German as some of his messages seem to imply. On the night of this same Monday, after two hours with Goering at Luftwaffe headquarters at Oranienburg, he rang up Forbes to tell him, “German Army will be in final position of attack on Poland during night of Wednesday–Thursday, August 30–31.” Forbes got this intelligence off to London as quickly as possible.

  * “I proceeded to outshout Hitler,” Henderson wired Halifax the next day. “… I added a good deal more shouting at the top of my voice.”51 This temperamental display was not mentioned in earlier British documents.

  * General Halder put Hitler’s game succinctly in a diary entry of August 29: “Fuehrer hopes to drive wedge between British, French and Poles. Strategy: Raise a barrage of demographic and democratic demands … The Poles will come to Berlin on August 30. On August 31 the negotiations will blow up. On September 1, start to use force.”

  * Though couched in conciliatory terms, the British note was firm. His Majesty’s Government, it said, “reciprocated” the German
desire for improved relations, but “they could not sacrifice the interests of other friends in order to obtain that improvement.” They fully understood, it continued, that the German government could not “sacrifice Germany’s vital interests, but the Polish Government are in the same position.” The British government must make “an express reservation” regarding Hitler’s terms and, while urging direct negotiations between Berlin and Warsaw, considered that “it would be impracticable to establish contact so early as today.” (Text in British Blue Book, pp. 142–43.)

  † Ribbentrop, who, it seemed to this writer, cut the sorriest figure of all the chief defendants at the Nuremberg trial—and made the weakest defense—claimed on the stand that Hitler, who, he said, “personally dictated” the sixteen points, had “expressly forbidden me to let these proposals out of my hands.” Why, he did not say and was not asked on cross-examination. “Hitler told me,” Ribbentrop conceded, “that I might communicate to the British Ambassador only the substance of them, if I thought it advisable. I did a little more than that: I read all the proposals from the beginning to the end.”59 Dr. Schmidt denies that Ribbentrop read the text of the proposals in German so fast that it would have been impossible for Henderson to grasp them. He says the Foreign Minister did not “particularly hurry over them.” Henderson, Schmidt says, was “not exactly a master of German” and he might have been more effective in these crucial talks had he used his native language. Ribbentrop’s English was excellent, but he refused to speak it during these parleys.60

  * The text of the sixteen proposals was telegraphed to the German chargé d’affaires in London at 9:15 P.M. on August 30, four hours before Ribbentrop “gabbled” them to Henderson. But the German envoy in London was instructed that they were to “be kept strictly secret and not to be communicated to anyone else until further instructions.”61 Hitler in his note of the previous day, it will be remembered, had promised to place them at the disposal of the British government before the arrival of the Polish negotiator.

  * In a dispatch to Halifax filed at 5:15 A.M. (August 31), Henderson reported that he had also advised Lipski “in the very strongest terms” to “ring up” Ribbentrop and ask for the German proposals so that he could communicate them to the Polish government. Lipski said he would first have to talk with Warsaw. “The Polish Ambassador,” Henderson added, “promised to telephone at once to his Government, but he is so inert or so handicapped by instructions of his Government that I cannot rely on his action being very effective.”63

  *On the stand at Nuremberg Goering claimed that in turning over the text of Hitler’s “offer” to the British Embassy he was taking “an enormous risk, since the Fuehrer had forbidden this information being made public. Only I,” Goering told the tribunal, “could take that risk.”64

  † Even the levelheaded French ambassador supported his British colleague in this. Henderson had telephoned him at 9 A.M. to say that if the Poles did not agree by noon to sending a plenipotentiary to Berlin the German Army would begin its attack. Coulondre went immediately to the Polish Embassy and urged Lipski to telephone his government, asking authorization to make immediate contact with the Germans “as a plenipotentiary.” (French Yellow Book, French edition, pp. 366–67.)

  * By now, that is before noon of August 31, Henderson, striving desperately for peace at almost any price, had convinced himself that the German terms were quite reasonable and even moderate. And though Ribbentrop had told him the previous midnight that the German proposals were “out of date, since no Polish emissary had arrived,” and though the Polish government had not yet even seen them, and though they were, in sum, a hoax, Henderson kept urging Halifax all day to put pressure on the Poles to send a plenipotentiary, as Hitler had demanded, and kept stressing the reasonableness of the Fuehrer’s sixteen points.

  At 12:30 P.M. (on August 31) Henderson wired Halifax “urging” him to “insist” to Poland that Lipski ask the German government for the German proposals for urgent communication to his government “with a view to dispatching a plenipotentiary. The terms sound moderate to me,” Henderson contended. “This is no Munich … Poland will never get such good terms again …”

  At the same time Henderson wrote a long letter to Halifax: “… The German proposals do not endanger the independence of Poland … She is likely to get a worse deal later …”

  Still keeping at it, Henderson wired Halifax at 12:30 A.M. on September 1, four hours before the German attack was scheduled to begin (though he did not know this): “German proposals … are not unreasonable … I submit that on German offer war would be completely unjustifiable.” He urged again that the British government pressure the Poles “in unmistakable language” to state “their intention to send a plenipotentiary to Berlin.”

  The British ambassador in Warsaw took a different view. He wired to Halifax on August 31: “H. M. Ambassador at Berlin appears to consider German terms reasonable. I fear that I cannot agree with him from point of view of Warsaw.”65

  † There was another somewhat weird diplomatic episode this last day of peace which deserves a footnote. Dahlerus returned from the visit with Lipski to the British Embassy, where from Henderson’s office he put through at midday a telephone call to Sir Horace Wilson at the British Foreign Office in London. He told Wilson that the German proposals were “extremely liberal” but that the Polish ambassador had just rejected them. “It is clear,” he said, “that the Poles are obstructing the possibilities of negotiations.”

  At this moment Wilson heard certain noises on the long-distance line which sounded to him as though the Germans were listening in. He tried to end the conversation, but Dahlerus persisted in rambling on about the unreasonableness of the Poles. “I again told Dahlerus,” Sir Horace noted in a Foreign Office memorandum, “to shut up, but as he did not I put down the receiver.”

  Wilson reported this indiscretion, committed in the very office of H. M. Ambassador in Berlin, to his superiors. At 1 P.M., less than an hour later, Halifax wired Henderson in code: “You really must be careful of use of telephone. D’s conversation [Dahlerus was always referred to in the messages between the Foreign Office and the Berlin Embassy as “D”] at midday from Embassy was most indiscreet and has certainly been heard by the Germans.”66

  * The emphasis is in the original German text.

  * A marginal note in the directive clears up this ambiguous point—“Thus, Atlantic forces will for the time being remain in a waiting position.”

  * He may have drafted it that evening but he did not send it to London until 3:45 P.M. the next day, nearly twelve hours after the German attack on Poland had begun. It followed several of his telegrams, which like it were telephoned to London—so that transmission was simultaneous—reporting the outbreak of hostilities. It read: “Mutual distrust of Germans and Poles is so complete that I do not feel I can usefully acquiesce [sic] in any further suggestions from here, which would only once again be outstripped by events or lead to nothing as the result of methods followed or of considerations of honor and prestige.

  “Last hope lies in inflexible determination on our part to resist force by force.”77

  † Since friends who have read this section have expressed doubts about this writer’s objectivity in dealing with Henderson, perhaps another’s view of the British ambassador in Berlin should be given. Sir L. B. Namier, the British historian, has summed up Henderson as follows: “Conceited, vain, self-opinionated, rigidly adhering to his preconceived ideas, he poured out telegrams, dispatches and letters in unbelievable numbers and of formidable length, repeating a hundred times the same ill-founded views and ideas. Obtuse enough to be a menace and not stupid enough to be innocuous, he proved un homme néfaste.” (Namier, In the Nazi Era, p. 162.)

  * See above, pp. 518–20.

  * The speech in Polish had been outlined by Heydrich to Naujocks. It contained inflammatory statements against Germany and declared that the Poles were attacking. See above, p. 519.

  † The “Polish attack
” at Gleiwitz was used by Hitler in his speech to the Reichstag the next day and was cited as justification for the Nazi aggression by Ribbentrop, Weizsaecker and other members of the Foreign Office in their propaganda. The New York Times and other newspapers reported it, as well as similar incidents, in their issues of September 1, 1939. It remains only to be added that according to the testimony at Nuremberg of General Lahousen, of the Abwehr, all the S.S. men who wore Polish uniforms in the simulated attacks that evening were, as the General put it, “put out of the way.”78