Hitler went on to sketch out some ideas for a successful war against Britain. He justified this by basically doubting ‘whether a peaceful settlement with England is possible . . . England sees in our development the establishment of a hegemony that would weaken England. Thus England is our enemy and the showdown with England will be a matter of life and death.’ As Britain would not be able to defeat Germany quickly, it would, together with France, support Belgian and Dutch neutrality, but in fact try to use these countries as a base for an attack on the Ruhr. As far as Hitler was concerned, this meant that ‘if England decides to attack us during the Polish war, we must quickly invade Holland’. In the final analysis, Britain could be defeated only by cutting off its supply lines by sea, in other words by using the German navy, supported by Luftwaffe units operating from advance bases in western Europe.
In preparing for war the Wehrmacht leadership should, if possible, aim ‘at inflicting a heavy blow or even a knock-out blow right at the start’. ‘Rights, wrongs and treaties are unimportant’. However, to be on the safe side, they ought to prepare for ‘a long war as well as a surprise attack, destroying England’s prospect of allies on the continent’. Hitler’s hopes rested on such a surprise attack: ‘If we can occupy Holland and Belgium and defeat France we shall have created the basis for a successful war against England.’ Finally, in response to a query from Göring, Hitler ordered that the Wehrmacht branches should each determine what armaments they wanted. But the naval shipbuilding programme should remain unaltered and ‘the armaments programmes . . . be geared to 1943 and 1944’.
In this speech Hitler was evidently talking about three different wars: first, a rapid preventive war against Poland at the next available opportunity, if possible without intervention by the western powers; secondly, a war against the western powers, ideally from around 1943/44 onwards, beginning with a preventive strike against the Netherlands (and Belgium). However, at the start of his speech, Hitler had talked about a period of fifteen or twenty years for finally solving the ‘problem of living space’. When he later spoke of the ‘eastern area’ that was going to be conquered as being useful for a conflict with the western powers, he was evidently thinking of Polish territory, but probably also of the Baltic states. However, in talking about the conquest of further living space in fifteen to twenty years’ time he was certainly not referring to these territories. One can only conclude that he wanted to gain this living space at the expense of the Soviet Union, using Japan as an ally. However, he made only vague comments on this future war.
Developments in the armaments sector were one of the vital factors influencing Hitler’s war plans during these months. For during 1939 it became clear that the enormous increase in armaments production Hitler had ordered in October 1938 had once again exceeded the available raw materials and foreign exchange.59
Brauchitsch approached Hitler directly in February, in order ‘dutifully’ to report ‘that, in view of these circumstances, I am not in a position to rearm the army to the extent and within the time span you require’.60 Hitler replied on 3 March that ‘rearming the army’ was ‘to be regarded as a political priority’.61 On 15 April, Brauchitsch concluded in a report that the shortage of steel was preventing the army from equipping itself with modern offensive weapons. To underline the devastating consequences Brauchitsch compared the situation with that in 1914, when the imperial army had failed to secure a rapid and decisive victory because parliament had not approved the sums urgently needed for armaments.62 A few weeks later, he added that the rationing of non-ferrous metals amounted to ‘the end of the army’s rearmament’.63
On 24 May, Georg Thomas, the head of the army’s armaments office, gave a lecture to Foreign Ministry officials in which he made an unvarnished comparison between the armaments expenditure of the democratic countries Britain, France, and the United States on the one hand, and the Axis powers, Germany and Italy, on the other. According to him, the western powers were not only spending two billion RM more in the current economic year, but – and this was the most alarming point – ‘were in a far better position to increase their spending than Germany and Italy’. At the moment Britain and France were spending 12 and 17 per cent of national income respectively on armaments, Germany 23 per cent, the United States only 2 per cent.64
Moreover, there was another warning note. At the end of May, Britain introduced conscription;65 within a few years it would be in a position to build up a considerable military reserve, thereby massively strengthening its land forces. In response to a request from Hitler for a survey of the projected state of German rearmament on 1 April and 1 October 1940, the Army Weapons Office reported, on the basis of detailed figures, that, because of the shortage of raw materials, in a few months’ time the munitions programme would collapse. Nor was there any sign of improvement.66
Thus, Hitler knew that it would be impossible to fight a lengthy war in 1939/40, However, the Army was in a position to survive a short war, if necessary against the western powers, with some prospect of success. Contrary to his observations in May 1939, when Hitler told his generals that the ideal time for a war against the western powers would be 1943/44, he seems, during the summer, to have come to the conclusion that such a long wait would not have any decisive advantages. He was increasingly coming to accept that the western powers would intervene in the event of an attack on Poland; indeed, he may have concluded that this would be better than postponing for several more years a conflict that he in any case believed inevitable.67
Summer performances
During the three months before the outbreak of war, Hitler conspicuously avoided Berlin; instead, he spent most of his time on the Obersalzberg and in Munich; as usual, he attended the Bayreuth Festival, and went on a number of trips within ‘Greater Germany’. His summer programme during 1939 was totally geared towards conveying the impression to the world and his people of a cultured and relaxed dictator, but also one who was self-confident. His public statements tended to be statesmanlike; he kept emphasizing, not only in words but also through demonstrative gestures, Germany’s military strength and readiness to repel all attacks from abroad. He left anti-British propaganda, which from the end of May increasingly superseded anti-Polish rhetoric,68 largely to his propaganda minister. Behind this facade Hitler was preparing for the war against Poland.
On 2 June Hitler arranged an impressive military parade in Berlin, lasting two hours, in honour of the state visit of the King of Yugoslavia and his wife.69 Two days later, on 4 June, he visited the ‘Greater German Reich Warriors’ Day’ in Kassel, to reassure 500,000 veterans of the First World War that ‘even if British encirclement policy has remained the same as before that war, Germany’s defence policy has fundamentally changed!’ Hitler confirmed his policy of ‘educating the population in soldierly values and making it adopt a soldierly attitude as a matter of principle’. The press was recommended to use the speech as a ‘means of further strengthening the nation’s military preparedness and military consciousness’.70
On 6 June, he took the parade in Berlin of the Condor Legion returning from Spain. In his address he openly stated that he had decided to commit troops to the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, thereby admitting that, three years earlier, he had misled the international community about his Spanish policy. If the ‘international warmongers should ever achieve their aim of attacking the German Reich’, he insisted, they would meet with ‘resistance of a kind of which the propagandists of encirclement appear not to have the faintest notion’.71
His began his relaxed summer programme a few days later with a trip to Vienna. On 10 June, he attended a performance of the opera Friedenstag at the Vienna State Opera on the occasion of the 75th birthday of its composer, Richard Strauss, and the following day a performance at the Burgtheater. After these two performances he spent the remainder of the two evenings in the company of artists. On 12 June, he visited the grave of his niece, Geli, in the Vienna Central Cemetery, and then flew on to Li
nz, from where he made a detour to Hafeld, where the Hitler family had lived for some time in the 1890s; he also visited his former primary school in Fischlham before returning to the Obersalzberg.72
Hitler’s summer programme also, however, included overt demonstrations of Germany’s political and military strength. On 23 June, Britain sent the German government a memorandum, making it clear that Hitler’s unilateral repudiation of the 1935 Naval Agreement at the end of April was contrary to the terms of the Agreement, which could only be changed or abrogated with the consent of both parties.73 Hitler responded two days later in a speech at a reception for Italian veterans, which was also published in the press. He declared himself convinced ‘that we shall defeat any attempt by the democracies and capitalist plutocrats to prepare the fate they may imagine they have in store for us through the common strength of our two nations and revolutions, through the strength of our common ideals, our courage, and our determination’.74
These tough words were accompanied by the continuing anti-British propaganda campaign that the regime had begun at the end of May and continued into July.75 The ‘high point’ of this campaign was a series of leading articles that Goebbels published in the Völkischer Beobachter, as well as a number of his high-profile speeches, above all a speech in mid-June in Danzig.76 Apart from that, topics addressed included Germany’s ‘lack of space’, the alleged ‘encirclement’, as well as the ‘blank cheque’ that Britain had given to Poland, the arrogance of the old imperialist nations, possessing a surplus of land, compared with the young, rising, ‘have not’ powers, and in general, the moral responsibility for war that Britain and the western powers were acquiring as a result of their behaviour.77
Behind the scenes, Hitler urged Goebbels not to ease up on the anti-British campaign, trying to convince him of the effectiveness of his threats to foreign nations. At the beginning of July, he told him: ‘Work up hatred against England. The German people must come to see it as the core of the opposition to us. Then we can more easily wear it down. The Führer is hoping to have ten more years. His aim is to wipe out the Peace of Westphalia.’ And, a few days later, Hitler commented: ‘We must put pressure on the Poles by making some more quiet preparations. They will lose their nerve at the decisive moment. England will be ground down by incessant propaganda.’78 In response to pamphlets sent to various Germans by the British politician and journalist Stephen King Hall, Hitler got Goebbels to publish a reply in the Völkischer Beobachter, which he edited himself.79
Apart from that, Hitler devoted himself to his usual summer pleasures. On 16 July, as in the previous two years, he gave an address in Munich on the occasion of German Art Day, spending a few days in the city. Then, after inspecting the progress of building work on the Party’s parade ground in Nuremberg, from 25 July onwards he attended the Bayreuth Festival, as he did every year.80 There he spent time sorting out the Goebbelses’ marriage. For, in the meantime, Magda had been having an affair with Goebbels’s state secretary, Karl Hanke, a liaison which Goebbels was not prepared to tolerate. Magda put the case to Hitler, who decided, as he had in the Baarova case, that the couple had to stay together at all costs.81 After the end of the Festival he returned to the Obersalzberg for the next three weeks.
Based in his summer residence, Hitler set about trying to secure a pretext for war with Poland by creating a crisis over the status of Danzig. He had told his generals in May that the conflict was not going to be about Danzig, but about living space. However, he believed that, in order to provoke a war, rather than threatening the integrity of Poland itself, it would be better to challenge the privileges given to Poles within the ‘Free City’ under the complicated arrangements made at the end of the First World War. The long-standing differences between the two countries over the authority exercised by Polish customs inspectors in the city were now to provide the pretext for provoking Poland. The Reich government was portrayed as the defender of the ‘German city’, Danzig, just as, in the previous year, it had used the alleged subjugation of the Sudeten Germans to further its anti-Czech policy. Underlying this was the assumption that the western powers would not want to get involved in a war with Germany arising from a dispute over obscure legal quibbles. Hitler was calculating that, once war had broken out and Poland had been defeated within a few weeks, the western powers would in the end accept a fait accompli.82
At the beginning of August, the Danzig authorities escalated the customs dispute, but then very quickly had to backtrack.83 German propaganda now intensified its attacks on Poland having, during the previous months, tended to treat the conflict with Warsaw more as a byproduct of British ‘encirclement policy’.84 From 7 to 9 August, the Gauleiter of Danzig, Albert Forster, was staying at the Berghof, where Hitler gave him detailed instructions about what to do next. The result of this meeting was a note sent by the Foreign Ministry to the Polish government on 9 August, stating that the most recent development in the customs dispute was seriously compromising German–Polish relations. This was an indication that the Reich government now intended to intervene massively in the relations between Poland and the Free City.85 On the evening of 9 August, Hitler travelled from the Berghof to nearby Salzburg to attend a festival performance of Don Giovanni.86 Gauleiter Forster flew back to Danzig, where, on the following day, he gave a tub-thumping speech in the Langer Markt demanding: ‘We want to return to the Reich’.87
On the same day, Hitler invited the League of Nations High Commissioner for Danzig, Carl Burckhardt, to come to Berchtesgaden the following day, in order to convey a message to the western powers about the crisis he had just provoked. He received his visitor in the Eagle’s Nest, his luxurious Tea House, 1,800 metres up on the Kehlstein, near the Berghof. There, against the imposing backdrop of the Berchtesgaden Alps, he endeavoured to impress Burckhardt with a mixture of furious threats and apparent willingness to negotiate in a rational manner.88 Burckhardt noted down one of Hitler’s key remarks: ‘Everything I am doing is directed against Russia; if the West is too stupid and too blind to understand this, I shall be compelled to come to terms with the Russians, to defeat the West, and then, after its defeat, to turn against the Soviet Union with all my forces. I need the Ukraine, so that we can’t be starved out, as in the last war.’89 Burckhardt passed on the essential points of the meeting to the French and British foreign ministries, which evidently did not feel the need to offer an immediate response.
On 12 August, Hitler received Ciano on the Obersalzberg.90 He began the meeting by talking at length about the Reich’s military situation and concluded by saying that ‘at the present moment, the rapid liquidation’ of Poland could ‘only be beneficial for the inevitable conflict with the western democracies’. Ciano showed considerable surprise at his host’s determination to go to war. There had been no mention of imminent war either during Ribbentrop’s visit to Milan or during Ciano’s stay in Berlin on the occasion of the signing of the Pact of Steel (both meetings had been in May). Accordingly, Mussolini had geared his plans for a war with the West, which was naturally ‘unavoidable’, to occur in two or three years’ time; this would undoubtedly be a more favourable juncture from the Italian point of view. Ciano spent the rest of the meeting explaining to Hitler in detail how inadequately Italy was prepared for war. Hitler, however, emphasized even more how committed he was to war. In response to the ‘next Polish provocation’ he would use the opportunity ‘to attack Poland within 48 hours and in this way solve the problem’. Ciano, however, concentrated on outlining a proposal of Mussolini’s for international consultations in order to resolve the European conflicts that were threatening peace. As regards the war Hitler was planning to launch in less than three weeks, the two allies could not have been further apart.
That also became apparent when the discussions were continued the following day. Hitler stuck to his aim of attacking Poland as soon as possible (he now gave the end of August as the preferred date) and of following the ‘old Germanic path to the East’. Ciano ‘thanked the Führ
er for his exceptionally lucid statement of the situation’, adding that Mussolini would ‘presumably not have to make a decision, since the Führer had said that he was convinced that the conflict with Poland could be localized’. This was a diplomatic way of saying that Italy would not be joining Germany in the event of war with Poland.91
Getting the generals on board for war
On 14 August, Hitler once again gave a speech fully geared to the coming war to the commanders-in-chief on the Obersalzberg.92 Referring to Stalin’s speech of 10 March 1939, Hitler told them that Russia was not prepared to ‘pull [the West’s] chestnuts out of the fire’ and would thus not intervene in a war. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Belgium would remain neutral. Italy had ‘no interest in a major conflict’; but wanted to revise its borders. Victory for the democracies would mean the ‘destruction’ of Italy.93 Thus Britain and France would have to bear the whole burden of a war with Germany. An attack on Germany’s western frontier between Basle and Saarbrücken would be useless. Hitler exuded confidence: ‘The brains of Munich [he meant Chamberlain and Daladier, P.L.] won’t take the risk.’ Had England given it assurances, ‘Poland would be being much bolder.’ However, Hitler was worried – he was naturally thinking of Munich – that the British might complicate ‘the final settlement by making offers at the last moment’. In any event, the Germans had to show the world they were ready for war. They would have ‘sorted out Poland within 6–8 weeks’, even if Britain intervened. However, Hitler kept reassuring the generals that this would not happen.
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