by Ian Kershaw
The propaganda certainly had its effect. The fear of war with the western powers, while still widespread among the German population, was – at least until August – nowhere near as acute as it had been during the Sudeten crisis. People reasoned, with some justification (and backed up by the German press), that despite the guarantees for Poland, the West was hardly likely to fight for Danzig when it had given in over the Sudetenland.96 Many thought that Hitler had always pulled it off without bloodshed before, and would do so again.97 Some had a naïve belief in Hitler. One seventeen-year-old girl recalled much later how she and her friends had felt: ‘Rumours of an impending war were spreading steadily but we did not worry unduly. We were convinced that Hitler was a man of peace and would do everything he could to settle things peacefully.’98 Fears of war were nevertheless pervasive. The more general feeling was probably better summed up in the report from a small town in Upper Franconia at the end of July 1939: ‘The answer to the question of how the problem “Danzig and the Corridor” is to be solved is still the same among the general public: incorporation in the Reich? Yes. Through war? No.’99
But the anxiety about a general war over Danzig did not mean that there was reluctance to see military action against Poland undertaken – as long as the West could be kept out of it. Inciting hatred of the Poles through propaganda was pushing at an open door. ‘The mood of the people can be much more quickly whipped up against the Poles than against any other neighbouring people,’ commented the exiled Social Democratic organization, the Sopade. Many thought ‘it would serve the Poles right if they get it in the neck’.100 Other reports from the Sopade’s observers, whose anti-Nazi attitude needs no underlining, emphasize the impact the propaganda was having even among those hostile to the regime. Existing anti-Polish feelings were being massively sharpened. ‘An action against Poland would be greeted by the overwhelming mass of the German people,’ ran one report. ‘The Poles are enormously hated among the masses for what they did at the end of the War.’101 ‘If Hitler strikes out against the Poles, he will have a majority of the population behind him,’ commented another.102 In Danzig, too, where, not surprisingly, fear of a war was especially pronounced, the daily reports about ‘Polish terror’ were manufacturing antagonism among those who had never been ‘Pole haters’. Above all, no one, it was claimed, whatever their political standpoint, wanted a Polish Danzig; the conviction that Danzig was German was universal.103
The issue which the Danzig Nazis exploited to heighten the tension was the supervision of the Customs Office by Polish customs inspectors. These had indeed sometimes abused their position in the interests of increased Polish control over shipping. But there had been nothing serious, and matters could quite easily have been amicably resolved, or at least a modus vivendi reached, if that had been the intention. As it was, the customs officers were increasingly subjected to violent attacks.104 This had the desired effect of keeping the tension in the Free City at fever pitch. When the customs inspectors were informed on 4 August – in what turned out to be an initiative of an over-zealous German official – that they would not be allowed to carry out their duties and responded with a threat to close the port to foodstuffs, the local crisis threatened to boil over, and too soon. The Germans reluctantly backed down – as the international press noted.105 Forster was summoned to Berchtesgaden on 7 August and returned to announce that the Führer had reached the limits of his patience with the Poles, who were probably acting under pressure from London and Pans.106
This allegation was transmitted by Forster to Carl Burckhardt, the League of Nations High Commissioner in Danzig. Overlooking no possibility of trying to keep the West out of his war with Poland, Hitler was ready to use the representative of the detested League of Nations as his intermediary.107 On 10 August, during a dinner in honour of the departing Deputy Representative of Poland in Danzig, Tadeusz Perkowski, Burckhardt was summoned to the telephone to be told by Gauleiter Forster that Hitler wanted to see him on the Obersalzberg at 4p.m. next day and was sending his personal plane ready for departure early the following morning.108 Following a flight in which he was regaled by a euphoric Albert Forster with tales of beerhall fights with Communists during the ‘time of struggle’, Burckhardt landed in Salzburg and, after a quick snack, was driven up the spiralling road beyond the Berghof itself and up to the Eagle’s Nest (Adlerhorst), the recently built spectacular Tea House in the dizzy heights of the mountain peaks.109
Hitler was not fond of the Eagle’s Nest and seldom went up there. He complained that the air was too thin at that height, and bad for his blood pressure.110 He worried about an accident on the roads Bormann had had constructed up the sheer mountainside, and about a failure of the lift that had to carry its passengers from the huge, marble-faced hall cut inside the rock to the summit of the mountain, more than 150 feet above.111 But this was an important visit. Hitler wanted to impress Burckhardt with the dramatic view over the mountain tops, invoking the image of distant majesty, of the dictator of Germany as lord of all he surveyed.112
The imperious image had been somewhat dented just after Burckhardt arrived, when one of the serving staff had managed to drop a heavy armchair on Hitler’s foot and had him hopping in pain.113 But he quickly recovered to play every register in driving home to Burckhardt – and through him to the western powers – the modesty and reasonableness of his claims on Poland and the futility of western support. It was a calculated attempt to keep the West out of the coming conflict. His voice rose in a crescendo of anger one moment, fell to feigned sadness and resignation the next. The threats gave way to hopes even at this stage of an arrangement with Britain. Almost speechless with rage, he denounced press suggestions that he had lost his nerve and been forced to give way over the issue of the Polish customs officers. His voice rising until he was shouting, he screamed his response to Polish ultimata: if the smallest incident should take place, he would smash the Poles without warning so that not a trace of Poland remained. If that meant general war, then so be it. He would not fight like Wilhelm II, held back by his conscience, but ruthlessly to the bitter end. He poured out, as usual, an array of facts and figures to demonstrate Germany’s superiority in armaments. He could hold the western line, thanks to his fortifications, with seventy-four divisions. The rest of his forces would be hurled against Poland, which would be liquidated within three weeks. All he wanted was land in the east to feed Germany, and a single colony for timber. International trade offered no basis of security. Germany had to live from its own resources. That was the only issue; the rest nonsense. He emphasized more than once that he wanted nothing of the West, but demanded only a free hand in the East. He was ready, he said, to negotiate, but not when he was insulted and confronted with ultimata. He accused Britain and France of interference in the reasonable proposals he had made to the Poles. Now the Poles had taken up a position that blocked any agreement once and for all. His generals, hesitant the previous year, were this time raring to be let loose against the Poles.
Hitler took Burckhardt outside on to the terrace. He had had enough turmoil, he intimated. He needed the peace and quiet that he found there. Burckhardt enjoined that this lay in his hands more than any other person’s. This was not so, replied Hitler in a low voice. If he knew that England and France were inciting Poland to war, he would prefer war ‘this year rather than next’ But he was coming to the point of Burckhardt’s visit. Were the Poles to leave Danzig in peace, he could wait. He was prepared for a pact with Britain, guaranteeing British possessions. For him, he repeated, it was a matter of grain and timber. He was ready for negotiations on this issue. ‘But it will be another matter if they revile me and cover me with ridicule as in May last. I do not bluff. If the slightest thing happens in Danzig or to our minorities I shall hit hard.’ Again shifting from threats to apparent reason, he suggested that a German-speaking Englishman, possibly General Ironside – tall, handsome, and dashing, but ‘more bluff and brawn than brain’, who had been dispatched to Poland by the British
government for a time in July – should go to Berlin.114
Burckhardt, as intended, rapidly passed on to the British and French governments the gist of his talks with Hitler.115 The dictator had seemed much older than when he had last met him, two years earlier, Burckhardt told his British and French contacts, and had been nervous, even anxious.116 ‘Hitler apparently undecided, rather distracted, rather aged,’ was the laconic comment of Sir Alexander Cadogan, head of the Foreign Office.117 No conclusions were drawn from Burckhardt’s report other than to urge restraint on the Poles.118
While Hitler and Burckhardt were meeting at the Eagle’s Nest on the Kehlstein, another meeting was taking place only a few miles away, in Ribbentrop’s newly acquired splendrous residence overlooking the lake in Fuschl, not far from Salzburg. Count Ciano, resplendent in uniform, was learning from the German Foreign Minister, dressed, to his visitors’ surprise, in casual civilian dress, that the Italians had been deceived for months about Hitler’s intentions. The atmosphere was icy. Ribbentrop told Ciano that the ‘merciless destruction of Poland by Germany’ was inevitable. The conflict would not become a general one. Were Britain and France to intervene, they would be doomed to defeat. But his information ‘and above all his psychological knowledge’ of Britain, he insisted, made him rule out any intervention. Ciano found him unreasoning and obstinate. Discussion with him was pointless. He evaded all requests for details of Germany’s plans by saying ‘all decisions were still locked in the Führer’s impenetrable bosom’. Dinner passed without a word. Ciano left after ten hours of discussion, greatly depressed, sure ‘that he intends to provoke the conflict and will oppose any initiative which might have the effect of solving the present crisis peacefully’.119 Ciano added in his diary: ‘The decision to fight is implacable. He [Ribbentrop] rejects any solution which might give satisfaction to Germany and avoid the struggle.’120
The impression was reinforced when Ciano met Hitler at the Berghof the next day. Among the reasons put forward for the need to act, most of which echoed the points that had been made by Ribbentrop, Hitler again revealed the extent to which he was affected by matters of prestige. He claimed that Germany, as a great nation, could not tolerate the continued provocation by Poland ‘without losing prestige’. He was convinced that the conflict would be localized, that Britain and France, whatever noises they were making, would not go to war. It would be necessary one day to fight the western democracies. But he thought it ‘out of the question that this struggle can begin now’.121 Ciano noted that he realized immediately ‘that there is no longer anything that can be done. He has decided to strike, and strike he will.’122
Important news came through for Hitler at the very time that he was underlining to the disenchanted Ciano his determination to attack Poland no later than the end of August: the Russians were prepared to begin talks in Moscow, including the position of Poland. A beaming Ribbentrop took the telephone call at the Berghof. Hitler was summoned from the meeting with Ciano, and rejoined it in high spirits to report the breakthrough.123 The way was now open.
The idea seems initially to have been to send Hans Frank, the Nazis’ chief legal expert, who had been involved in the talks producing the Axis in 1936, to Moscow to conduct negotiations.124 But by 14 August Hitler had decided to send Ribbentrop.125 A flurry of diplomatic activity – Ribbentrop pressing with maximum urgency for the earliest possible agreement, Molotov cannily prevaricating until it was evident that Soviet interest in the Anglo-French mission was dead – unfolded during the following days.126 The text of a trade treaty, under which German manufactured goods worth 200 million Reich Marks would be exchanged each year for an equivalent amount of Soviet raw materials, was agreed.127 Finally, on the evening of 19 August, the chattering teleprinter gave Hitler and Ribbentrop, waiting anxiously at the Berghof, the news they wanted: Stalin was willing to sign a non-aggression pact without delay.128
Only the proposed date of Ribbentrop’s visit – 26 August – posed serious problems. It was the date Hitler had set for the invasion of Poland.129 Hitler could not wait that long. On 20 August, he decided to intervene personally. He telegraphed a message to Stalin, via the German Embassy in Moscow, requesting the reception of Ribbentrop, armed with full powers to sign a pact, on the 22nd or 23rd.130 Hitler’s intervention made a difference. But once more Stalin and Molotov made Hitler sweat it out. The tension at the Berghof was almost unbearable. It was more than twenty-four hours later, on the evening of 21 August, before the message came through. Stalin had agreed. Ribbentrop was expected in Moscow in two days’ time, on 23 August. Hitler slapped himself on the knee in delight. Champagne all round was ordered – though Hitler did not touch any. ‘That will really land them in the soup,’ he declared, referring to the western powers.131
The news, announced just before midnight, struck like a bombshell. Most German citizens, once they had adjusted to the surprise, felt simply a sense of relief. The understanding with the unlikely new friends in the east had eliminated the threat of encirclement and a war on two fronts.132 Older army leaders, schooled in the tradition of Seeckt’s Reichswehr of good relations with Russia, felt the same way. Most presumed that Poland would now not dare to fight, and that the conflict would be resolved in much the same way as the Sudeten crisis of the previous year.133 But reactions were mixed, even among the Nazi leadership. ‘We’re on top again. Now we can sleep more easily,’ recorded a delighted Goebbels.134 ‘The question of Bolshevism is for the moment of secondary importance,’ he later added, saying that was the Führer’s view, too. ‘We’re in need and eat then like the devil eats flies.’135
For the dyed-in-the-wool old anti-Bolshevik Alfred Rosenberg, who hailed from the Baltic and had personal experience of conditions at the time of the Russian Revolution, the response was predictably different. ‘A moral loss of respect in the light of our by now twenty-year long struggle,’ was how he described the pact. Even so, he was prepared to attribute Hitler’s 180-degree shift – the U-turn of all time – to necessity, and blamed Ribbentrop, whom he believed occupied the post of Foreign Minister that ought to have been his own, for destroying any hopes of the desired alliance with Britain.136 In his dismay at the pact, but ready as always to place his trust in the Führer’s judgement, Rosenberg undoubtedly spoke for most ‘old fighters’ of the Party.137 A good number of SA men, veterans of many a street fight with the Communists, had even less sympathy with the dramatic change of course. Voices were heard that it was about time that Mein Kampf was taken out of the bookshops since Hitler was now doing the exact opposite of what he had written.138 Heinrich Hoffmann, according to his later account, raised the reactions of the Party faithful with Hitler. ‘My Party members know and trust me; they know I will never depart from my basic principles, and they will realize that the ultimate aim of this latest gambit is to remove the Eastern danger,’ Hitler is said to have replied. But next morning the garden of the Brown House was reportedly littered with badges discarded by disillusioned Party members.139
Abroad, Goebbels remarked, the announcement of the imminent non-aggression pact was ‘the great world sensation’.140 But the response was not that which Hitler and Ribbentrop had hoped for. The Poles’ fatalistic reaction was that the pact would change nothing.141 In Paris, where the news of the Soviet-German pact hit especially hard, the French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet, fearing a German–Soviet entente against Poland, pondered whether it was now better to press the Poles into compromise with Hitler in order to win time for France to prepare its defences.142 But eventually, after dithering for two days, the French government agreed that France would remain true to its obligations.143 The British cabinet, meeting on the afternoon of 22 August, was unmoved by the dramatic news, even if MPs were asking searching questions about the failure of British intelligence. The Foreign Secretary coolly, if absurdly, dismissed the pact as perhaps of not very great importance.144 Instructions went out to embassies that Britain’s obligations to Poland remained unaltered. Sir Nevile Henderson’s
suggestion of a personal letter from the Prime Minister to Hitler, warning him of Britain’s determination to stick by Poland, was taken up.145
Meanwhile, in excellent mood on account of his latest triumph, Hitler prepared, on the morning of 22 August, to address all the armed forces’ leaders on his plans for Poland. The meeting, at the Berghof, had been arranged before the news from Moscow had come through.146 Hitler’s aim was to convince the generals of the need to attack Poland without delay.147 The diplomatic coup, by now in the public domain, can only have boosted his self-confidence. It certainly weakened any potential criticism from his audience.
The generals arrived mainly by plane, landing in Salzburg, Munich, or on the small airfield near Berchtesgaden, from where they were driven during the course of the morning to the Obersalzberg.148 They were dressed in civilian clothing in order not to arouse particular attention – an objective not best furthered by Göring turning up in outlandish hunting garb.149 General Liebmann had met Papen on the way through Salzburg. Papen told him that he had spoken with Hitler the previous evening, warning him not to risk war with England, where the chances of winning would be under 50 per cent. He had the feeling that his arguments had made no impression at all.150 Around fifty officers (including the Führer’s adjutants) had assembled in the Great Hall of the Berghof by the time that Hitler began his address at noon.151 Ribbentrop was also present.152 The generals were seated on rows of chairs. Hitler, leaning on the grand piano, spoke with barely a glance at the sparse notes he clutched in his left hand.153 No minutes were taken. Those listening were explicitly told not to make any record of the proceedings.154 One or two of those present, including Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, ignored the instruction and surreptiously jotted down the main points. Others, including Chief of Staff Colonel-General Halder and Admiral-General Boehm, thought what they heard was so important that they hastily compiled a summary of what had gone on later that day.155