by Ian Kershaw
Throughout Germany, people went about their daily business as normal. But the normality was deceptive. All minds now were fixed on the likelihood of war. A brief war, with scarcely any losses, and confined to Poland, was one thing. But war with the West, which so many with memories of the Great War of 1914–18 had dreaded for years, now seemed almost certain. There was now no mood like that of August 1914, no ‘hurrah-patriotism’. The faces of the people told of their anxiety, fears, worries, and resigned acceptance of what they were being faced with. ‘Everybody against the war,’ wrote the American correspondent William Shirer on 31 August. ‘How can a country go into a major war with a population so dead against it?’ he asked.282 ‘Trust in the Führer will now probably be subjected to its hardest acid test,’ ran a report from the Upper Franconian district of Ebermannstadt. ‘The overwhelming proportion of people’s comrades expects from him the prevention of the war, if otherwise impossible even at the cost of Danzig and the Corridor.’283
How accurate such a report was as a reflection of public opinion cannot be ascertained. The question is in any case irrelevant. Ordinary citizens, whatever their fears, were powerless to affect the course of events. While many of them were fitfully sleeping in the hope that even now, at the eleventh hour and beyond, some miracle would preserve peace, the first shots were fired and bombs dropped near Dirschau at 4.30a.m. And just over quarter of an hour later in Danzig harbour the elderly German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, now a sea-cadet training-ship, focused its heavy guns on the fortified Polish munitions depot on the Westerplatte and opened fire.284
By late afternoon the army leadership reported: ‘Our troops have crossed the frontier everywhere and are sweeping on toward their objectives of the day, checked only slightly by the Polish forces thrown against them.’285 In Danzig itself, the purported objective of the conflict between Germany and Poland, border posts and public buildings manned by Poles had been attacked at dawn. The League of Nations High Commissioner had been forced to leave, and the swastika banner raised over his building.286 Gauleiter Albert Forster proclaimed Danzig’s reincorporation in the Reich.287 In the turmoil of the first day of hostilities, probably few people in Germany took much notice.
On a grey, overcast morning Shirer had found the few people on the streets apathetic.288 There were not many cheers from those thinly lining the pavements when Hitler drove to the Reichstag shortly before 10a.m. A hundred or so deputies had been called up to serve in the army. But Göring saw to it that there were no empty spaces when Hitler spoke. The vacancies were simply filled by drafting in Party functionaries.289 Hitler, now wearing Wehrmacht uniform, was on less than top form. He sounded strained. There was less cheering than usual.290 After a lengthy justification of the alleged need for Germany’s military action, he declared: ‘Poland has now last night for the first time fired on our territory through regular soldiers. Since 5.45a.m.’ – he meant 4.45a.m. – ‘the fire has been returned. And from now on bomb will be met with bomb.’291
Hitler had still not given up hope that the British could be kept out of the conflict. On his return from the Reichstag he had Göring summon Dahlerus to make a last attempt.292 But he wanted no outside intercession, no repeat of Munich. Mussolini, under the influence of Ciano and Attolico, and unhappy at Italy’s humiliation at being unable to offer military support, had been trying for some days to arrange a peace conference. He was now desperate, fearing attack on Italy from Britain and France, to stop the war spreading.293 Before seeing Dahlerus, Hitler sent the Duce a telegram explicitly stating that he did not want his mediation.294 Then Dahlerus arrived. He found Hitler in a nervous state. The odour from his mouth was so strong that Dahlerus was tempted to move back a step or two. Hitler was at his most implacable. He was determined to break Polish resistance ‘and to annihilate (vernichten) the Polish people’, he told Dahlerus. In the next breath he added that he was prepared for further negotiations if the British wanted them. Again the threat followed, in ever more hysterical tones. It was in British interests to avoid a fight with him. But if Britain chose to fight, she would pay dearly. He would fight for one, two, ten years if necessary.295
Dahlerus’s reports of such hysteria could cut no ice in London.296 Nor did an official approach on the evening of 2 September, inviting Sir Horace Wilson to Berlin for talks with Hitler and Ribbentrop. Wilson replied straightforwardly that German troops had first to be withdrawn from Polish territory. Otherwise Britain would fight.297 This was only to repeat the message which the British Ambassador had already passed to Ribbentrop the previous evening.298 No reply to that message was received.299 At 9a.m. on 3 September, Henderson handed the British ultimatum to the interpreter Paul Schmidt, in place of Ribbentrop, who had been unwilling to meet the British Ambassador.300 Unless assurances were forthcoming by 11a.m. that Germany was prepared to end its military action and withdraw from Polish soil, the ultimatum read, ‘a state of war will exist between the two countries as from that hour’.301 No such assurances were forthcoming. ‘Consequently,’ Chamberlain broadcast to the British people then immediately afterwards repeated in the House of Commons, ‘this country is at war with Germany.’302 The French declaration of war followed that afternoon at 5p.m.303
Hitler had led Germany into the general European war he had wanted to avoid for several more years. Military ‘insiders’ thought the army, 2.3 million strong, through the rapidity of the rearmament programme, was less prepared for a major war than it had been in 1914.304 Hitler was fighting the war allied with the Soviet Union, the ideological arch-enemy. And he was at war with Great Britain, the would-be ‘friend’ he had for years tried to woo. Despite all warnings, his plans – at every turn backed by his warmongering Foreign Minister – had been predicated upon his assumption that Britain would not enter the war – though he had shown himself undeterred even by that eventuality. It was little wonder that, if Paul Schmidt’s account is to believed, when Hitler received the British ultimatum on the morning of 3 September, he angrily turned to Ribbentrop and asked: ‘What now?’305
VI
‘Responsibility for this terrible catastrophe lies on the shoulders of one man,’ Chamberlain had told the House of Commons on 1 September, ‘the German Chancellor, who has not hesitated to plunge the world into misery in order to serve his own senseless ambitions.’306 It was an understandable over-simplification. Such a personalized view necessarily left out the sins of omission and commission by others – including the British government and its French allies – which had assisted in enabling Hitler to accumulate such a unique basis of power that his actions could determine the fate of Europe.
Internationally, Hitler’s combination of bullying and blackmail could not have worked but for the fragility of the post-war European settlement. The Treaty of Versailles was ‘the blackmailer’s lucky find’.307 It had given Hitler the basis for his rising demands, accelerating drastically in 1938–9. It had provided the platform for ethnic unrest, that Hitler could easily exploit, in the cauldron of central and eastern Europe. Not least, it had left an uneasy guilt-complex in the West, especially in Britain. Hitler might rant and exaggerate; his methods might be repellent; but was there not some truth in what he was claiming? The western governments, though Britain more than France, backed by their war-weary populations, anxious more than all-else to do everything possible to avoid a new conflagration, their traditional diplomacy no match for unprecedented techniques of lying and threatening, thought so, and went out of their way to placate Hitler. The blackmailer simply increased his demands, as blackmailers do. By the time the western powers fully realized what they were up against, they were no longer in any position to bring the ‘mad dog’ to heel.
Within Germany, Hitler’s personal power had expanded after 1933 at the expense of other power-groups – notably the army – until it was absolute and unchallenged. The year 1938, beginning with the near-showdown with the army over the Blomberg–Fritsch affair, crossing the triumph of the Anschluß, and ending with peace just
about saved at Munich – but no thanks to the German army or to those in powerful positions in the regime who opposed Hitler – brought vital steps in this process.
As war loomed in 1939, a number of individuals who had begun to establish contact with each other the previous year and whose disparate approaches and aims would eventually coalesce into the 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life – nationalists, with access to the levers of power, horrified at the madness of the risks being taken to court war – had warned the West of the dictator’s plans. Colonel Oster of the Abwehr had leaked vital information. Lieutenant-Colonel Gerhard Graf von Schwerin had tried to encourage a greater show of British belligerence to undermine Hitler’s claims that Britain would not fight. Adam von Trott zu Solz, former Oxford Rhodes scholar with a wide circle of friends in high places in Britain, had attempted – reflecting Weizsäcker’s views – to suggest a deal restoring Czech independence but acceding to German claims over Danzig and the Corridor. The attempts of Hitler’s opponents fell on stony ground. The mood in Britain had changed drastically following the march into Czecho-Slovakia. There was too much suspicion of motives, too few certainties that there was any coherent ‘opposition’ (which there was not), too little clarity of how, if at all, Hitler was to be replaced. Well-intentioned though the efforts were, it was hardly surprising that nothing came of them.308
Within Germany in the last days of peace, the conservative opponents of Hitler were uncoordinated, unclear about what was happening, and uncertain how to act themselves. An example was their behaviour when Hitler rescinded his order to attack on 26 August, just hours after it had been given. Hans-Bernd Gisevius, one-time Gestapo officer but by now radically opposed to Hitler, went straight to Schacht, and both had the news confirmed by General Thomas, head of office of the War Economy (Wehrwirtschaft). All three now thought the time was ripe to persuade Halder and Brauchitsch to intervene by deposing Hitler. Whether any scheme involving Brauchitsch had a hope of success is highly doubtful. But the matter was never even broached. Oster, second to none in his detestation of the regime, and his boss Canaris thought a putsch would prove unnecessary. Their misunderstanding of political realities was breathtaking. A supreme warlord who rescinds such a decisive order as that over war and peace within a few hours was finished, ran their wildly over-optimistic view.309 Canaris added: ‘He’ll never recover from this blow. Peace has been saved for twenty years.’310 Armed with such ‘insights’, Hitler’s opponents did nothing.
Nor, unless the army leadership could have been stirred into action, could they have achieved anything. But the army leadership, as we have seen, was weakened and divided. We noted something of the feeling among the generals after Hitler’s speech at the Berghof on 22 August. The mood was much the same in the tense days that followed. Some leading officers thought Hitler’s optimism about the non-intervention of the West was likely to prove false. Others still thought the conflict could be localized. Most were sceptical, anxious even, but fatalistic and in depressed frame of mind. Resignation, not gung-ho enthusiasm for war, prevailed. But it was no platform for opposition.311 Compliance, even if reluctant on the part of some generals, was all that was needed. Hitler remained unhindered by any action such as that which Beck had mooted at the height of the Sudeten crisis the previous year, by any threat of refusal to collaborate in the destruction of Poland.
Close to the epicentre of power in the Reich, but following a line that differed from that of both Hitler and Ribbentrop, was Göring, now attempting something of a comeback after months in the doldrums. Over the summer he had tried through three intermediaries – the Swedish millionaire Axel Wenner-Gren, his own deputy in the Four-Year Plan organization Helmut Wohltat, and, as we have seen, Birger Dahlerus, also a Swede – to coax the British into negotiations.312 Predictably, nothing had come of such moves. The mood in the British government was not amenable to initiatives resting on major concessions to Germany, based on unclear authority, and leaving Hitler’s power untouched, the future potential for aggression undiminished. Göring was certainly anxious to avoid war with Britain, at least until Germany was ready for the big showdown. His entire political thinking over the previous years had rested on a rapprochement with Britain. This strategy was faced with imminent ruin, a development which Göring blamed exclusively on Ribbentrop. But, ultimately, Göring had no real alternative to offer Hitler. His informal approaches were no more successful than Hitler’s threats in severing the British from the Poles. Nor did he have the will to stand up against Hitler. For all the differences in emphasis, Göring remained Hitler’s man through and through.313
Göring was scarcely alone in blaming the war not on Hitler, but on Ribbentrop. It was the view, among others, of Dahlerus, Hassell, Hewel, Papen, Weizsäcker, and the British Ambassador Henderson.314 Unquestionably, Ribbentrop’s self-certainty, derived from his ‘understanding’ of the British and his absolute conviction that in the end they would not fight over Poland, helped to influence Hitler in his miscalculation.315 Despite the impression he tried to leave behind in his memoirs, Ribbentrop had – as in the previous year – been an outright warmonger, his crass aggression fuelled by smouldering resentment at his treatment in Britain. Alongside Goebbels and Himmler he could always be relied upon to egg on Hitler. While he acted, as always, as an amplifier, it is – given the domineering assertiveness of Hitler and his own fawning subservience – difficult to imagine Ribbentrop as the moving force. Hitler’s liaison officer with army command, Nikolaus von Vormann, had in retrospect no doubts about the relationship: ‘Hitler did not believe in a war with the western powers because he did not want to believe in it. From the difference in character and on the basis of the entire atmosphere in the Führer headquarters’ – he evidently meant, since he was writing of the last days before the war, the Reich Chancellery – he concluded ‘that the initiative rested with Hitler and that the essentially submissive (weiche) Ribbentrop, who in any case represented no opinion of his own, thought it appropriate and expedient to reinforce him in this view’.316
Hitler decided. That much is clear. The fracturing of any semblance of collective government over the previous six years left him in the position where he determined alone. No one doubted – the suffocating effect of years of the expanding Führer cult had seen to that – that he had the right to decide, and that his decisions were to be implemented. His style was not to listen to differing or conflicting advice, weigh up the pros and cons, and arrive at a conclusion. He would ponder things overnight, hit on what he saw as a solution, and put it forward for acclaim.317 Or he would expound his ideas in endless monologues until he had convinced himself that they were right.318 In the critical days, he saw a good deal of Ribbentrop, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, and Bormann. Other leading figures in the Party, government ministers, even court favourites like Speer, had little or no contact with him.319 He was naturally also in constant touch with the Wehrmacht leadership. But while Goebbels, for instance, only learnt at second hand about military plans, leaders of the armed forces often had less than full information, or were belatedly told, about diplomatic developments. The cabinet, of course, never met. Schacht, still nominally a member of that non-functioning body as Reich Minister without Portfolio, had notions of insisting on it being summoned, since constitutionally any declaration of war had to be preceded by cabinet consultation.320 It was an empty hope, rapidly discarded. Whichever way one viewed it, and remarkable for a complex modern state, there was no government beyond Hitler and whichever individuals he chose to confer with at a particular time. Hitler was the only link of the component parts of the regime. Only in his presence could the key steps be taken. But those admitted to his presence, apart from his usual entourage of secretaries, adjutants, and the like, were for the most part officers needing operational guidelines or those like Ribbentrop or Goebbels who thought like he did and were dependent on him. Internal government of the Reich had become Führer autocracy.
For those in proximity to Hitler, the personalized decision-
making meant anything but consistency, clarity, and rationality. On the contrary: it brought bewildering improvisation, rapid changes of course, uncertainty. Hitler was living off his nerves. That conveyed itself to others around him. ‘He was no man of logic or reason (Raison),’ reflected Ernst von Weizsäcker almost a decade later. This showed, he went on, in the ‘bizarre zigzag’ of his intentions and actions in those last days of peace: ‘On 22 August Hitler indicated in an address to his generals that he was firmly determined to start war in a few days whether or not it remained localized; the day after he reckoned with it being localized, but he could also conduct a European war.’ With the Moscow Pact, according to Weizsäcker, Hitler ‘crossed the Rubicon’. ‘By the 25th at midday he took the West on board; on the 25th in the evening he withdrew the order for attack that had already been given for fear that England would march, but Italy would not. On 31 August neither matters to him any more; he orders the attack on Poland although he knows that nothing has altered, namely that Italy remains out of it and England has firmly promised assistance to the Poles. On 3 September, finally, Hitler is surprised by the British-French declaration of war and at first clueless.’321 Hitler, Weizsäcker went on to remark, with some insight, was the prisoner of his own actions. The wagon had begun in the spring to roll towards the abyss. In the last days of August, Hitler ‘could hardly have turned the carriage around without being thrown off himself’.322