The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  Some Frenchmen on the Right, no doubt, saw distinct advantages to a German victory. Most, however, simply underestimated the costs of defeat. It is unlikely that the French would have surrendered in such large numbers and in such an orderly fashion if they had not expected these costs to be comparatively light. The assumptions clearly were that, with the war seemingly over, they would soon be returned to their native land; and that any German occupation would be short lived. Some senior generals seem to have been more worried about a possible left-wing revolt at home than by the prospects of German occupation. These expectations were rooted in the more distant memories of 1871 rather than 1914. They were to be bitterly confounded. The French Left melted away. The Germans stayed.

  It is usually assumed that the mood in Britain was not so defeatist. Certainly, some British soldiers in France in 1940 refused to surrender even when ordered to do so. ‘Not fucking likely, you yellow bastard!’ was the furious reaction of one member of the 51st (Highland) Division when ordered to lay down his arms by an officer of the Kensington Regiment in June 1940. Yet this bellicose Scot was in a minority. Most of his comrades in the British Expeditionary Force saw little reason to fight to the death for France when the French themselves were manifestly so reluctant to do so. In British folk memory, the evacuation from the beaches at Dunkirk was a triumph. The German newsreels more accurately depicted it as a humiliating defeat. So chaotic was the British retreat – accompanied as it was by rumours of a ‘fifth column’ supposedly sabotaging the Allied effort behind the lines – that the shattered survivors had to be quarantined on their return for the sake of civilian morale. As Corporal W. R. Littlewood of the Royal Engineers put it: ‘We were beginning to think that the Germans were almost superhuman… At every turn [they] seemed to have the answers.’ Discipline came close to breaking down. One officer was shot in the face by one of his own battle-fatigued men. In Calais an old woman was gunned down by a soldier in the Queen Victoria’s Rifles in the belief that she was one of the ubiquitous fifth columnists, since the Germans were reputedly masters of disguise as well as of warfare. Belgian civilians suspected of spying – including farm labourers accused of mowing grass ‘in the formation of an arrow’ to guide Stuka pilots to British troop formations – were summarily shot, in scenes reminiscent of the German army’s conduct in the same region twenty-six years before. In the final frantic scramble for boats at Dunkirk, some French soldiers found themselves being fired on by their own allies. The most that can be said about Dunkirk is that the British were very lucky. Hitler made his first real mistake in stopping Rommel’s marauding panzers from finishing them off. The killing or capture of around 338,226 Allied troops – the total number evacuated in Operation Dynamo, of whom 110,000 were in fact French – would have been a devastating blow from which British morale might never have recovered. In the event, only 41,340 British servicemen ended up as prisoners.

  Just how vulnerable the morale of British troops was becomes clear when one considers their performance in other settings. Although Churchill was fond of phrases like ‘never surrender’, British troops as a rule did not fight to the death. In Crete in 1941 they failed to with stand a German parachute invasion, despite initially inflicting heavy casualties. The first campaigns in North Africa were also disappointing. Later, Churchill was especially troubled by the refusal of the garrison at Singapore – whom he had explicitly exhorted to fight to the last man – to hold out against what was in fact an outnumbered and very weary Japanese force (see Chapter 14). Even Alan Brooke, perhaps Churchill’s harshest critic, who took over as Chief of the Imperial General Staff in December 1941, was perturbed. His constant worry was that, as in the First World War, Churchill’s appetite for ‘subsidiary theatres’ of war would lead him to spread British forces too thinly and ‘fritter away our strength’ instead of concentrating force ‘at the vital point’. For this reason he was disinclined to give priority to Asia or any other theatre, having convinced himself that Britain must concentrate on the Mediterranean and North Africa. Nevertheless, he was appalled by the collapse of resistance in the Far East. ‘It is hard to see why a better defence is not being put up,’ he confided in his diary as the Japanese closed on Singapore. ‘I have during the last 10 years had an unpleasant feeling that the British Empire was decaying and that we were on a slippery slope. I wonder if I was right? I certainly never expected that we should fall to pieces as fast as we are.’ With the Japanese threatening to overrun Burma too, he became distraught: ‘Cannot work out why troops are not fighting better. If the army cannot fight better than it is doing at present we shall deserve to lose our Empire!’

  To be sure, unlike their French counterparts in 1940, British soldiers did not lay down their arms out of defeatism. In most cases, they were ordered to surrender because their officers saw no point in fighting on when a position became indefensible. The typical capture narrative in Anglophone war memoirs has the enemy completely surrounding a unit and the officer ordering his men to lay down their arms rather than ‘die pointlessly’. Yet despite the consolation of discretion’s being the better part of valour, British servicemen taken prisoner were often surprised by their own feelings of guilt; capture was not something they had been prepared for. Many Asian observers interpreted the reluctance of British officers to fight to the last man – and, indeed, the willingness of some officers to run for their lives if they saw a chance of escape – as evidence that the British had lost faith in their own imperial role. If Frenchmen were not ready to ‘die for Danzig’, their British counterparts were just as reluctant to perish for Penang.

  The British at home nevertheless lived to fight another day, even if they had left a large part of their army’s weaponry on the beaches between Nieuport and Gravelines. For, whatever the state of their soldiers’ morale, they still enjoyed two advantages. The first was maritime. For all the setbacks on land, the Royal Navy still had the upper hand at sea. Their fleet was roughly three and a half times larger than Hitler’s.* True, the English Channel is not wide – just twenty-one miles separate Dover from Cape Gris-Nez, the nearest France comes to England. Yet it would have been a colossal gamble, even for such a risk-taker as Hitler, to send a German invasion force across this slender gap. The second British advantage was in the air, though here the advantage was much smaller. Served up to the House of Commons on August 20, 1940, Churchill’s tribute to Fighter Command – ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few’ – remains one his most memorable utterances. At the time, however, pilots joked that it was an allusion to the size of their unpaid mess bills. Churchill’s own private secretaries felt the speech ‘seemed to drag’ because it contained ‘less oratory than usual’. His phrase ‘the few’ implied that the Royal Air Force was outnumbered by the Luftwaffe; and indeed that was what British intelligence believed at the time. In reality, the RAF had a narrow edge. On August 9, just before the Germans launched their crucial offensive against Britain’s air defences, the RAF had 1,032 fighters. The German fighters available for the attack numbered 1,011. Moreover, the RAF had 1,400 trained pilots, several hundred more than the Luftwaffe, and they proved more than a match for the Germans in skill and courage. Britain was at last out-producing Germany when it came to aircraft. During the crucial months from June until September, 1,900 new fighters were churned out by British factories, compared with 775 in Germany. Just as they had in the years of appeasement, the British overestimated the Germans – by a factor of around seven in the case of pilot strength. The Germans also overestimated themselves. Göring was sure that half of all British fighters had been destroyed by the end of August; in fact Fighter Command’s operational strength at that point was only slightly less than it had been when the battle had commenced. By broadening the scope of their targets to include ports and industrial centres, the Germans threw away their chance of inflicting a decisive blow on RAF command and control capabilities.

  Figure 11.1 The Battle of Britain, July 10–October 31, 1940r />
  As late as December, Goebbels could still gloat that the war was ‘militarily as good as won’. In reality the technical advantage conferred by radar, combined with the judicious leadership of Air Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, meant that total German losses (including bombers) were nearly twice the British (1,733 to 915). Every week until October 9 the RAF consistently shot down more German planes than they lost in combat (see Figure 11.1).

  The British fought on, then, partly because they could. They also fought on because it was becoming more apparent with every passing day that the price of capitulation to Hitler was much higher than many Frenchmen had assumed. The French were in fact comparatively fortunate. Like the inhabitants of the other West European countries the Nazis occupied, the majority of French people were regarded as ‘worthy of life’. (Indeed some, notably the Dutch, were judged to be essentially a Germanic people.) What that meant in practice was that they would be economically exploited, but not murdered – unless, that is, they happened to be Jewish. France became the milch cow of the German war economy, to be plundered ruthlessly for materials, manufactures and labour, to say nothing of the countless works of art the Nazi leaders looted from public and private collections. But there was no thought that France should cease to be France. Indeed, occupied Paris became the preferred destination for Wehrmacht and SS officers on leave or in need of a cushy posting. This was not a fate Londoners were eager to share; on the other hand, it was not unendurable. For that reason, relatively few Frenchmen and women opted for active resistance to German rule until the tide of war had turned. ‘Collaboration’ is a term of abuse, but it covers a host of sins, both venial and cardinal, ranging from the readiness of eminent writers to carry on with their trade under the new dispensation,* to the active involvement of some French officials in the deportation of French Jews to their deaths.

  The story to the East was very different. There, the indigenous populations were regarded by Nazi theorists as racially inferior and an obstacle to the expansion of German ‘living space’. The blitzkrieg against Poland was accompanied by horrific brutality against prisoners and civilians. This was not spontaneous, but carefully premeditated. It revealed for the first time the true and hideous face of Hitler’s empire.

  ‘LET CHAOS FLOURISH’

  Berchtesgaden was Hitler’s mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps, where he and selected members of the master race could hatch their plans for conquest in a suitably grandiose setting. In 1926, as an obscure political agitator just out of jail, he had retired there to dictate the second half of Mein Kampf, with its seminal pledge to lead the German Volk ‘from its present restricted living space to new land and soil… tak[ing] up where we broke off six hundred years ago and turn[ing] our gaze towards the land in the East’. Shortly after he became Reich Chancellor in 1933 – by which time the book had become a belated bestseller – he used his royalties to buy a house at Obersalzberg, which became the ‘Berghof’, literally his ‘mountain court’. Over the next few years, locals were forced to sell four square miles of land in the vicinity so that a complex of residences and administrative buildings could be built as a summer playground for the inner circle of the Third Reich. It wasa telling illustration of what ‘living space’ meant in practice.

  It was at the Bergh of that Hitler had chosen to meet Neville Chamberlain when the latter came to broker the Czech cession of the Sudetenland. A year later, on August 22, 1939, it was the scene of a very different meeting, between Hitler and his military leaders. The notes made by one of those present make it clear what Hitler intended to achieve after the Polish army had been defeated:

  Destruction of Poland in the foreground. The aim is elimination of living forces, not the arrival at a certain line. Even if the war should break out in the west, the destruction of Poland shall be the primary objective… Have no pity. Brutal attitude. Eighty million [German] people shall get what is their right. Their existence has to be secured. The strongest has the right. Greatest severity.

  As Hitler told senior Nazis in October of that year, it was not Germany’s mission to bring order to Poland but rather to let ‘chaos flourish’. But this was chaos with a purpose. Ever since Mein Kampf, Hitler had conceived of the Nazi empire in terms of both murder and resettlement. Inferior races would be killed or expelled in order to make room for German colonists who would go forth and multiply. The aim was nothing less than to redraw the ethnic map of Europe, turning what had once been the fantasies of racial theorists into a horrific reality. In his diary, Goebbels defined Hitler’s aim as ‘annihilating’ (vernichtend). Halder, the Chief of the General Staff, believed that ‘it was the intention of the Führer and Göring to destroy and eliminate the Polish people’. There was, Hitler said, to be a ‘harsh racial struggle’ without ‘legal restrictions’. Not all Poles were to be killed, however. In the words of Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Main Security Office: ‘The little people we want to spare, but the nobles, priests and Jews must be killed.’ The aim was to decapitate Polish society – and to reduce the survivors to the status of a ‘helot race’, little better than slaves.

  Prior to the invasion of Poland, the SS created five special Security Police units known as Einsatzgruppen (‘Special Task Forces’).* Their role was to deal with ‘all anti-German elements in hostile country behind the troops in combat’. Even before the Germans marched into Poland, they had drawn up a list of 30,000 people they intended to arrest. Within the brief period of military rule – from the Polish surrender on September 28 until October 25 – between 16,000 and 20,000 Poles were summarily executed, most of them victims of the Einsatzgruppen. Members of the aristocracy, the professions, the intelligentsia and the clergy were the principal targets. Following Hitler’s call in his Reichstag speech of October 6 for a ‘new order of ethnographic relationships’, ordinary Poles were to be expelled from Danzig, West Prussia, Posen and eastern Upper Silesia, all of which Hitler now restored to the Reich,* and resettled in the rump ‘Government-General for the Occupied Polish Territories’. Families were given as little as twenty minutes to quit their homes; they were allowed to take no more than hand luggage and, as a rule, 20 zlotysin cash. No effort was made to rehouse them; many were simply dumped along the railroad. Such was the fate of roughly one in every ten of the inhabitants of those territories annexed to the Reich. Exceptions were made for around 1.6 million Masurians, Kashubes and so-called Wasserpolen of Silesia, all of whom were deemed racially acceptable and allowed to remain. In addition, around five million ‘indigestible’ Poles were retained temporarily as agricultural workers.

  The job of realizing Hitler’s vision in the new Government-General fell to a Bavarian named Hans Frank, who had been among the Nazis’ earliest recruits from the legal profession. Aged thirty-nine when he installed himself in the historic Wawel Castle in Kraków, Frank was immediately gripped by delusions of grandeur. He told his wife she was to be the ‘queen of Poland’, though in practice he was in charge of only the four districts of Kraków, Radom, Warsaw and Lublin. The Government-General was to become ‘the first colonial territory of the German nation’. Like so many of those who became Hitler’s accomplices in mass murder, Frank considered himself to be a man of sophisticated sensibilities. He kept on the Polish curators at the Wawel to maintain what he now regarded as his personal art collection. When the Italian war correspondent Curzio Malaparte visited Frank’s court he found him

  sitting on his high stiff-backed chair as if he were… on the throne of the Jagellons and Sobieskis. He appeared to be fully persuaded that the Great Polish traditions of royalty and chivalry were being revived in him. His black glossy hair was brushed back revealing a high ivory-white forehead. A slight film of sweat covered his face, and by the light of the large Dutch lamps and the silver candlesticks that ranged along the table and were reflected in the Bohemian glass and Saxon china, his face shone as if it were wrapped in a cellophane mask. ‘My one ambition’, said Frank, thrusting himself back against his chair by propping his hands
against the edge of the table, ‘is to elevate the Polish people to the honour of European civilization.’

  In reality, he was about to plunge them into an abyss of barbarism.

  The Jagellonian University in Kraków is one of Central Europe’s most ancient seats of learning. Founded in 1364, it had been Nicolaus Copernicus’s Alma Mater. On November 6, 1939 the occupying authorities invited the faculty of the university to a lecture by one Obersturmbannführer Müller. It was a trap. At gunpoint 183 of them were herded into trucks and deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Though they were subsequently released, this was a harbinger of the fate Frank intended for the Polish intelligentsia. The next summer, under the so-called Extraordinary Pacification Programme (AB-Aktion), 3,500 more intellectuals were rounded up and shot in a forest outside Warsaw. By the end of 1940, the total number of victims of this campaign had reached 50,000.