by Geert Mak
‘By then my brother Heinrich had been promoted to lieutenant in the same regiment. What he had really hoped to do was study medieval history. But the Nazis had already politicised the curriculum, so he was having none of it. For him the regiment was a kind of intellectual island, you could call it a form of internal emigration. And there were more people for whom the Wehrmacht, strangely enough, served as a kind of refuge.
‘Did we have doubts about what we were doing? Some talking did go on within the Wehrmacht, but that wasn't very common. As a young soldier, I never talked to my comrades in the barracks about the things I heard at home. There was some serious criticism of the brutal actions of the SA and SS, though. Constitutional law was a part of Prussia. But you must understand: we were very young, in those years our lives were a mixture of light-heartedness and deadly earnest. It only dawned on us quite gradually that, ethically speaking as well, we now found ourselves on a battlefield, in the midst of a moral dilemma we could hardly deal with. In 1941, for example, the army leaders ordered us to advance so far in the direction of Moscow that, by mid-December, we finally broke down and froze where we were. We received orders from on high to defend positions that anyone in their right mind could see were indefensible. Could we actually pass along such orders to people for whom we were responsible? And even though we didn't know much about the crimes that had been committed, one thing was clear by then: by performing our duty, we ourselves had become an instrument of evil. That is the situation in which we finally found ourselves.
‘Later, in October 1942, my friend Axel von dem Bussche saw with his own eyes how defenceless Jews were shot and killed, far behind the lines of battle. When he rejoined the regiment, he told me about it. He gradually arrived at the decision to make an attempt on Hitler's life, and to offer up his own life if need be. Through other friends of ours we established contact with Count Claus von Stauffenberg. It was his idea that a perfect opportunity would present itself in December 1943, during the presentation of the new Wehrmacht uniforms in Berlin. As a young, heavily decorated officer, Axel Bussche would present Hitler with the new uniforms, and would then blow himself up along with the Führer. I arranged the travel documents and the contact with Count Stauffenberg. But, twenty-four hours before the ceremony was to take place, the British carried out an air raid and the whole thing was cancelled. To be honest, it was a miracle that the Gestapo never got wind of that first planned assassination attempt by the Stauffenberg group.
‘But, anyway, in 1939 things had not yet reached that point. Right before the war started, I was at home recovering from an operation. Suddenly I received a summons from my unit, I was to report for duty right away. Three days before it all began, Heinrich and I marched together from the barracks to the railway station. The mood was completely different from all the stories you hear about the outbreak of the First World War. There wasn't a trace of popular enthusiasm. It all went quite secretively, in low spirits, quite literally by Nacht und Nebel, Night and Fog. We were put off the train close to Poland, and early in the morning of 1 September, 1939, they sent us across the border.
‘I knew almost nothing about the country I was entering. In the papers I had read about ethnic tensions, and that there was disagreement concerning the status of Danzig. That was it. Later on in my life, as politician and president of West Germany, my major political theme – besides continuing concern about the DDR, of course – was the restoration of good relations between Germany and Poland. But, as a soldier, it didn't mean much to me.
‘I don't remember passing a border post or anything. I do remember the quiet, oppressive atmosphere. That mood only changed on the evening of the second day, when I heard the loud crack of rifle fire and we ran up against our first Polish troops. It was close to the railway embankment at Klonowo, in the woods around Tuchel Heath. Heinrich was a few hundred metres from where I stood. He was the first officer in our regiment to be killed.
‘We buried him the next morning, along with the others, at the edge of those woods. That whole night I held watch beside him, beside my beloved brother.
‘My mother wrote: “Can God allow one man to call down this whole catastrophe on Germany and the whole of Europe? And our sons? I am not prepared to sacrifice one of them for this war. Our family circle, the endless luxury of having children, all our pride – from the last war, I still know what that means: all gone. Then life continues and what was ours never, never comes back. New people come along who never knew the ones we were so proud of.”
‘She wrote that two days before he was killed.’
A peaceful landscape becomes a battlefield, and after a while it is as though it never happened. I drive along the N43 from Sedan towards the sea, past gently rolling fields of yellow rape, through little villages, house after house tucked away behind deep, lush gardens. The chestnuts are in bloom, the cows are up to their bellies in buttercups. This road sprang up like a little stream somewhere close to Luxembourg, and now it meanders through fields and shy Inspector Maigret towns: an intersection, a hôtel de ville, a train station, three cafés, a hotel close to the station, a bakery. The houses all date from that hazy architectural period between 1880–1920. They are sooty and weathered, they have seen all of Europe passing by.
At 8 p.m. I stop at Longuyon. The streets are filled with puddles, the trees still dripping from the spring shower. Swallows buzz the rooftops, the pigeons coo between the houses, a church bell chimes clearly, once. A fisherman walks along the gravel on the riverside. The earth in the kitchen gardens smells rich, the beans are well on their way. From the café comes a roar of laughter.
Who would want to go to war on an evening like this? ‘Why die for Danzig?’ the French asked themselves in September 1939, and during the glorious spring days of 1940 their reluctance was even greater. They did not doubt the strength of their army, they were not resigned beforehand to defeat, but they were scared to death of seeing 1914–18 repeat itself. For more than two decades, their brothers, fathers and uncles had been talking about the trenches and the burning and thundering battlefields. Seven out of ten French soldiers had experienced Verdun first-hand.
La dernière des ders was what the French called the First World War, the last of the last. In winter 1939, when the war was already raging on paper but not yet in real life, they were hoping for la Marne Blanche, a diplomatic and platonic replay of the last war, but this time without passion or bloodshed. In Longuyon a war memorial of the falling-soldier-with-flag type had been erected as early as 1919, bearing 500 names – the city numbered 7,000 – and no one wanted to see a single name added to that. In the end, there would be another 150 names.
Close to Longuyon lie the chilly corridors of Fort Fermont, thirty metres below ground. The fort was a vital link in the Maginot Line, the French wall that stretched from Basle all the way past Luxembourg to protect the country from the Huns to the east. Here you can see the dream of the 1916 foot soldier: a super-trench with bedrooms, canteens, workshops, an electric railway, secret trapdoors, sick bays, bakeries and even a cinema to help against the claustrophobia. Sealed off from the outside world, 700 men could stick it out here for months on end. On a shelf is a radio covered in mould, plastered in white flakes.
The whole structure is dominated by the thought of winning the previous war. The same could be said of France's leaders of that day: they, too, were men of yesterday and the day before. The French commander-in-chief, General Maurice Gamelin – sometimes referred to as ‘General Gagamelin’ – was sixty-seven. His successor, General Maxime Weygand, was well into his seventies, and Marshal Pétain, at the moment of his appointment as vice-premier, was eighty-four.
While the Wehrmacht's young staff members were busy developing all kinds of new weapons systems and tactics, nothing was happening in France. Around 1937, the Luftwaffe possessed more than a thousand Messerschmitt fighter planes, faster than anything belonging to either France or Britain. In that same year, a report to the French senate's defence committee said: ‘The
German air force is in a position to fly over France with complete impunity.’ The enormous opportunities provided by the tank, the unparalleled possibilities for the dive bomber on the field of battle; the French army staff could not be bothered. Tanks do not change the tenets of war, General Pétain said reassuringly in 1939. After Major Charles de Gaulle entered a plea for the development of a modern and mechanised army in his book Vers l'armée de métier, his promotion to the rank of colonel was postponed for three years. André Maginot's life's work proved to be a huge, useless war monument. The wall stopped abruptly at the Belgian border – building had been halted due to lack of funds – and the Germans had only to march around it.
The doors, valves, lights, levers and wheels at Fermont are still fully operational. Above the fort, amid the grazing cows, an iron trapdoor opens several times a day. The barrel of a cannon appears and revolves a few times. Everything about this mechanism and the fort has something tragic about it, like the clipper ship: the absolute cutting edge, yet nothing but a grave error in judgement, because the premise had already become a thing of the past.
And then one had the Germans. For ten whole months in 1916 they had tried fruitlessly to take Verdun. In 1940, it took them less than a day. How could that have been?
First there was the principle of ‘loser wins all’. The very fact that the German Army had been so greatly reduced by the Treaty of Versailles forced the generals to build up the most efficient army with the fewest possible troops. Every invention that might be of use was tried out. In this way, Germany, thanks to Versailles, had laid the foundation for an ultramodern air force as early as 1931.
Four years later, with the help of Wernher von Braun, the army launched the twentieth century's first rocket. It reached an altitude of two kilometres.
The Germans had also learned from their diplomatic mistakes. The danger of a new war on two fronts was, at least for the time being, skilfully ruled out. Out of the blue, Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, signed a pact in Moscow in August of 1939. Among Stalin's staff Ribbentrop had felt ‘as thoroughly at ease as among my own party members’. The Soviets sent a few hundred Jewish and anti-fascist refugees back to Germany as a token of goodwill. In mid-November, Molotov and the members of his delegation were welcomed in turn at Berlin's Anhalter Bahnhof to the solemn strains of the ‘Internationale’. Under normal circumstances, simply playing that melody was enough to obtain a one-way ticket to Dachau, but now the entire Nazi elite stood to attention. Workers waved red handkerchiefs from the windows of a neighbouring factory.
It was only in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact finally emerged. (As late as 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev was still denying its existence.) In those protocols, both superpowers’ European spheres of influence were carefully delineated. The Soviet Union was to have its way in part of Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Bessarabia. Germany could go ahead in the rest of Poland, and in Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia and Greece. Strictly speaking, it was a non-aggression pact. In actual fact, it was a pact of pure aggression, a thoroughly worked-out scenario for the upcoming wars of conquest.
Within weeks of the invasion on 1 September, 1939, Poland had been conquered, divided, plundered and terrorised by the Germans and the Soviets. The west of the country was absorbed into the Great German Empire, the areas around Warsaw, Krakow, Radom and Lublin were transformed into SS country. This ‘General Government of Poland’ was to be the area to which, soon enough, all Poles, Jews and other ‘non-German elements’ would be deported, and which would be ‘governed’ by the SS.
Western Europe was still in a state of partial slumber. Belgium, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries cherished their neutrality. To describe winter 1939, the British later coined the term ‘the phony war’, a hazy state somewhere between peace and battle, the silence before what was coming. The French would have liked nothing more than to have that calm last forever. They indignantly rejected a proposal from Churchill to block supplies into the Ruhr by filling the Rhine with mines: to do that would only lead to war. At some spots along the front their soldiers had even put up signs: ‘DON'T SHOOT PLEASE, WE WON'T SHOOT EITHER!’ The British and the French did, however, assemble a joint force of 100,000 troops in March 1940 to help the Finns against the Soviet Union. This decision, in the analysis of the distinguished British war historian A.J.P. Taylor, defied all rational explanation. The very idea of starting a war with the Soviet Union while the Allies had already declared war on Germany, he noted, was complete and utter madness, unless, of course, there was something very different behind it: a conscious attempt, for example, to channel this nascent war in an anti-Bolshevik direction, and to forget and end as quickly as possible the conflict with Germany. Whatever the background, the campaign came too late and led to nothing. The Finns capitulated in the month the Franco-British force was raised.
In the end it was Hitler who broke the silence. On 9 April, 1940, he invaded Denmark and Norway. For the British, this came as a hideous surprise. All winter, they themselves had been working on a similar plan of attack. Neutral Norway was of vital importance to the German war industry; in winter, all major ore shipments from Sweden left from Norwegian ports. As soon as Churchill became secretary of the navy in September 1939, he proposed the idea of a surprise conquest of the Norwegian ports and the blocking of German shipping routes with mines. The British intended to carry out their plans in early April. Admiral Erich Raeder, Churchill's German counterpart, had come up with the same idea in October: an attack on Norway to secure its ports. The Germans won, only because they were faster and better organised. The British landed in wintry Norway without skis and equipped only with tourist maps of the country. ‘Missed the bus!’ was what enraged Members of Parliament shouted at Chamberlain. The fiasco cost him his position as prime minister, and cleared the way for Churchill.
The strategy of Hitler's great offensive was highly reminiscent of the old Schlieffen Plan. Just as they had in 1914, the German armies swung like a scythe through north-western Europe, but this time the swathe was much wider and cut straight through the Low Countries. Hitler could easily have followed the ‘platonic way’ of the French, eternally prolonging the phony war of the British and ultimately ridding himself of the entire Polish question by means of negotiation. But that was not his way. His ultimate goal lay to the east: the creation of German Lebensraum in Poland and the Soviet Union. But to make sure that Germany would not again become caught in a war on two fronts, he first had to make short work of France and the Low Countries.
At 3.15 a.m. on 10 May, the first shots rang out: at the Dutch border station of Nieuweschans the guards were eliminated, to allow a German armoured train to roll unobstructed towards Groningen. Paratroopers landed behind the lines to seize vital positions in the Hague and Rotterdam. The Dutch government had dismissed as ‘alarmist’ the emphatic warnings of a resistance group within the Abwehr, the German intelligence service. Here and there the Germans met with stout resistance, but the Dutch – who had not experienced a war on their own territory for more than 150 years – were generally in a state of shock. They had always thought of their country as a kind of Switzerland, neutral and inviolable. By flooding strategic strips of land in the case of an emergency, they thought, this corner of the continent could be converted into an island like Britain. On that day, however, the Dutch realised that their special position in Europe – half inside, half outside – was gone for good.
Alongside that was the non-militaristic character of the Netherlands. The concept of an ‘enemy’ was completely new for many. The writer Anton Coolen described the great trouble to which his neighbours in North Brabant province went to give direction to a couple of German soldiers. ‘They crowded hurriedly and willingly around the car, craning their necks to understand the question in German … A few women came out of the house carrying trays with steaming cups
of coffee, they brought them to the Germans, who folded up their maps and laughed.’
I found a letter that my own grandfather sent to his daughter, my mother, shortly after the German invasion. ‘The garden looks lovely at the moment, the violets are already blooming,’ he wrote. ‘Now I sit in my office like a king. And I'm going to practise resigning myself to the new situation. Practise being content with all that overcomes you.’
On Tuesday, 14 May, Rotterdam was bombed, the third great Luftwaffe bombardment after Guernica and Warsaw. Most of the inner city was reduced to rubble. About 900 inhabitants were killed. That afternoon – the Germans had threatened to do the same to Utrecht – General Henri Winkelman capitulated. His army had been at war for precisely five days.
King Leopold III of Belgium capitulated two weeks later. By that time at least 1.5 million Belgians were fleeing to France. The king's decision created a breach in France's northern defences, and the French 1st Army's positions around Lille were suddenly no longer tenable.
At the same time, a grave conflict arose between the king and his ministers that would continue until after the war. For the Belgian government, the country's neutrality had always been a political given, a matter of sensible opportunism imposed by the configuration of power within Europe. But now they were ready to fight to the death. For Leopold, however, neutrality was a sacred principle, a line of behaviour that corresponded to his most basic sensibilities. He was obsessed with one thing only: preventing a repetition of 1914. Every ruined street, every dead soldier was, in his view, one too many. Unlike the assertive Dutch queen, Wilhelmina (who had retreated to England) he saw no sense in continuing the European war. ‘France will go down fighting, perhaps within only a few days. Britain will continue the fight in its colonies and at sea. I choose the more difficult path.’ After 28 May, the Belgian king considered himself Hitler's prisoner of war.
