The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

by William Shirer

  He chided the generals for their doubts when he made his “hard decisions” to leave the League of Nations, decree conscription, occupy the Rhineland, fortify it and seize Austria. “The number of people who put trust in me,” he said, “was very small.”

  “The next step,” he declared in describing his conquests with a cynicism which it is unfortunate that Chamberlain never heard, “was Bohemia, Moravia and Poland.”

  It was clear to me from the first moment that I could not be satisfied with the Sudeten-German territory. That was only a partial solution. The decision to march into Bohemia was made. Then followed the establishment of the Protectorate and with that the basis for the conquest of Poland was laid, but I was not quite clear at that time whether I should start first against the East and then against the West, or vice versa. By the pressure of events it came first to the fight against Poland. One might accuse me of wanting to fight and fight again. In struggle I see the fate of all beings. Nobody can avoid fighting if he does not want to go under.

  The increasing number of [German] people required a larger Lebensraum. My goal was to create a rational relation between the number of people and the space for them to live in. The fight must start here. No nation can evade the solution of this problem. Otherwise it must yield and gradually go down … No calculated cleverness is of any help here: solution only with the sword. A people unable to produce the strength to fight must withdraw …

  The trouble with the German leaders of the past, Hitler said, including Bismarck and Moltke, was “insufficient hardness. The solution was possible only by attacking a country at a favorable moment.” Failure to realize this brought on the 1914 war “on several fronts. It did not bring a solution of the problem.”

  Today [Hitler went on] the second act of this drama is being written. For the first time in sixty-seven years we do not have a two-front war to wage … But no one can know how long that will remain so … Basically I did not organize the armed forces in order not to strike. The decision to strike was always in me.

  Thoughts of the present blessings of a one-front war brought the Fuehrer to the question of Russia.

  Russia is at present not dangerous. It is weakened by many internal conditions. Moreover, we have the treaty with Russia. Treaties, however, are kept only as long as they serve a purpose. Russia will keep it only as long as Russia herself considers it to be to her benefit … Russia still has far-reaching goals, above all the strengthening of her position in the Baltic. We can oppose Russia only when we are free in the West.

  As for Italy, all depended on Mussolini, “whose death can alter everything … Just as the death of Stalin, so the death of the Duce can bring danger to us. How easily the death of a statesman can come I myself have experienced recently.” Hitler did not think that the United States was yet dangerous—“because of her neutrality laws”—nor that her aid to the Allies yet amounted to much. Still, time was working for the enemy. “The moment is favorable now; in six months it might not be so any more.” Therefore:

  My decision is unchangeable. I shall attack France and England at the most favorable and earliest moment. Breach of the neutrality of Belgium and Holland is of no importance. No one will question that when we have won. We shall not justify the breach of neutrality as idiotically as in 1914.

  The attack in the West, Hitler told his generals, meant “the end of the World War, not just a single action. It concerns not just a single question but the existence or nonexistence of the nation.” Then he swung into his peroration.

  The spirit of the great men of our history must hearten us all. Fate demands from us no more than from the great men of German history. As long as I live I shall think only of the victory of my people. I shall shrink from nothing and shall annihilate everyone who is opposed to me … I want to annihilate the enemy!

  It was a telling speech and so far as is known not a single general raised his voice either to express the doubts which almost all the Army commanders shared about the success of an offensive at this time or to question the immorality of attacking Belgium and Holland, whose neutrality and borders the German government had solemnly guaranteed. According to some of the generals present Hitler’s remarks about the poor spirit in the top echelons of the Army and the General Staff were much stronger than in the above account.

  Later that day, at 6 P.M., the Nazi warlord sent again for Brauchitsch and Halder and to the former—the General Staff Chief was kept waiting outside the Fuehrer’s office like a bad boy—delivered a stern lecture on the “spirit of Zossen.” The Army High Command (OKH) was shot through with “defeatism,” Hitler charged, and Halder’s General Staff had a “stiff-necked attitude which kept it from falling in with the Fuehrer.” The beaten Brauchitsch, according to his own account given much later on the stand at Nuremberg, offered his resignation, but Hitler rejected it, reminding him sharply, as the Commander in Chief remembered, “that I had to fulfill my duty and obligation just like every other soldier.” That evening Halder scribbled a shorthand note in his diary: “A day of crisis!”32

  In many ways November 23, 1939, was a milestone. It marked Hitler’s final, decisive triumph over the Army, which in the First World War had shunted Emperor Wilhelm II aside and assumed supreme political as well as military authority in Germany. From that day on the onetime Austrian corporal considered not only his political but his military judgment superior to that of his generals and therefore refused to listen to their advice or permit their criticism—with results ultimately disastrous to all.

  “A breach had occurred,” Brauchitsch told the Nuremberg tribunal in describing the events of November 23, “which was later closed but was never completely mended.”

  Moreover, Hitler’s harangue to the generals that autumn day put a complete damper on any ideas Halder and Brauchitsch might have had, however tepidly, to overthrow the Nazi dictator. He had warned them that he would “annihilate” anyone who stood in his way, and Halder says Hitler had specifically added that he would suppress any opposition to him on the General Staff “with brutal force.” Halder, for the moment at least, was not the man to stand up to such terrible threats. When four days later, on November 27, General Thomas went to see him, at the prompting of Schacht and Popitz, and urged him to keep after Brauchitsch to take action against the Fuehrer (“Hitler has to be removed!” Halder later remembered Thomas as saying), the General Staff Chief reminded him of all the “difficulties.” He was not yet sure, he said, that Brauchitsch “would take part actively in a coup d’état.”33

  A few days later Halder gave Goerdeler the most ludicrous reasons for not going on with the plans to get rid of the Nazi dictator. Hassell noted them down in his diary. Besides the fact that “one does not rebel when face to face with the enemy,” Halder added, according to Hassell, the following points: “We ought to give Hitler this last chance to deliver the German people from the slavery of English capitalism … There is no great man available … The opposition has not yet matured enough … One could not be sure of the younger officers.” Hassell himself appealed to Admiral Canaris, one of the original conspirators, to go ahead, but got nowhere. “He has given up hope of resistance from the generals,” the former ambassador confided to his diary on November 30, “and thinks it would be useless to try anything more along this line.” A little later Hassell noted that “Halder and Brauchitsch are nothing more than caddies to Hitler.”34

  NAZI TERROR IN POLAND: FIRST PHASE

  Not many days after the German attack on Poland my diary began to fill with items about the Nazi terror in the conquered land. Later one would learn that many another diary was filling with them too. Hassell on October 19 reported hearing of “the shocking bestialities of the S.S., especially toward the Jews.” A little later he was confiding to his diary a story told by a German landlord in the province of Posen.

  The last thing he had seen there was a drunken district Party leader who had ordered the prison opened; he had shot five whores, and attempted to rape two others.35
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  On October 18, Halder wrote down in his diary the main points of a talk he had had with General Eduard Wagner, the Quartermaster General, who had conferred with Hitler that day about the future of Poland. That future was to be grim.

  We have no intention of rebuilding Poland … Not to be a model state by German standards. Polish intelligentsia must be prevented from establishing itself as a governing class. Low standard of living must be conserved. Cheap slaves …

  Total disorganization must be created! The Reich will give the Governor General the means to carry out this devilish plan.

  The Reich did.

  A brief account of the beginning of Nazi terror in Poland, as disclosed by the captured German documents and the evidence at the various Nuremberg trials, may now be given. It was but a forerunner to dark and terrible deeds that would eventually be inflicted by the Germans on all the conquered peoples. But from first to last it was worse in Poland than anyplace else. Here Nazi barbarism reached an incredible depth.

  Just before the attack on Poland was launched, Hitler had told his generals at the conference on the Obersalzberg on August 22 that things would happen “which would not be to the taste of German generals” and he warned them that they “should not interfere in such matters but restrict themselves to their military duties.” He knew whereof he spoke. Both in Berlin and in Poland this writer soon was being overwhelmed with reports of Nazi massacres. So were the generals. On September 10, with the Polish campaign in full swing, Halder noted in his diary an example which soon became widely known in Berlin. Some toughs belonging to an S.S. artillery regiment, having worked fifty Jews all day on a job of bridge repairing, herded them into a synagogue and, as Halder put it, “massacred them.” Even General von Kuechler, the commander of the Third Army, who was later to have few qualms, refused to confirm the light sentences of the court-martial meted out to the murderers—one year in prison—on the ground that they were too lenient. But the Army Commander in Chief, Brauchitsch, quashed the sentences altogether though not until Himmler had intervened, with the excuse that they came under a “general amnesty.”

  The German generals, upright Christians that they considered themselves to be, found the situation embarrassing. On September 12 there was a meeting on the Fuehrer’s railroad train between Keitel and Admiral Canaris at which the latter protested against the atrocities in Poland. The lackey Chief of OKW curtly replied that “the Fuehrer has already decided on this matter.” If the Army wanted “no part in these occurrences it would have to accept the S.S. and Gestapo as rivals”—that is, it would have to accept S.S. commissars in each military unit “to carry out the exterminations.”

  I pointed out to General Keitel [Canaris wrote in his diary, which was produced at Nuremberg] that I knew that extensive executions were planned in Poland and that particularly the nobility and the clergy were to be exterminated. Eventually the world would hold the Wehrmacht responsible for these deeds.36

  Himmler was too clever to let the generals wiggle out of part of the responsibility. On September 19 Heydrich, Himmler’s chief assistant, paid a visit to the Army High Command and told General Wagner of S.S. plans for the “housecleaning of [Polish] Jews, intelligentsia, clergy and the nobility.” Halder’s reaction to such plans was put down in his diary after Wagner had reported to him:

  Army insists that “housecleaning” be deferred until Army has withdrawn and the country has been turned over to civil administration. Early December.

  This brief diary entry by the Chief of the Army General Staff provides a key to the understanding of the morals of the German generals. They were not going to seriously oppose the “housecleaning”—that is, the wiping out of the Polish Jews, intelligentsia, clergy and nobility. They were merely going to ask that it be “deferred” until they got out of Poland and could escape the responsibility. And, of course, foreign public opinion must be considered. As Halder jotted down in his diary the next day, after a long conference with Brauchitsch about the “housecleaning” in Poland:

  Nothing must occur which would afford foreign countries an opportunity to launch any sort of atrocity propaganda based on such incidents. Catholic clergy! Impractical at this time.

  The next day, September 21, Heydrich forwarded to the Army High Command a copy of his initial “housecleaning” plans. As a first step the Jews were to be herded into the cities (where it would be easy to round them up for liquidation). “The final solution,” he declared, would take some time to achieve and must be kept “strictly secret,” but no general who read the confidential memorandum could have doubted that the “final solution” was extermination.37 Within two years, when it came time to carry it out, it would become one of the most sinister code names bandied about by high German officials to cover one of the most hideous Nazi crimes of the war.

  What was left of Poland after Russia seized her share in the east and Germany formally annexed her former provinces and some additional territory in the west was designated by a decree of the Fuehrer of October 12 as the General Government of Poland and Hans Frank appointed as its Governor General, with Seyss-Inquart, the Viennese quisling, as his deputy. Frank was a typical example of the Nazi intellectual gangster. He had joined the party in 1927, soon after his graduation from law school, and quickly made a reputation as the legal light of the movement. Nimble-minded, energetic, well read not only in the law but in general literature, devoted to the arts and especially to music, he became a power in the legal profession after the Nazis assumed office, serving first as Bavarian Minister of Justice, then Reichsminister without Portfolio and president of the Academy of Law and of the German Bar Association. A dark, dapper, bouncy fellow, father of five children, his intelligence and cultivation partly offset his primitive fanaticism and up to this time made him one of the least repulsive of the men around Hitler. But behind the civilized veneer of the man lay the cold killer. The forty-two-volume journal he kept of his life and works, which showed up at Nuremberg,* was one of the most terrifying documents to come out of the dark Nazi world, portraying the author as an icy, efficient, ruthless, bloodthirsty man. Apparently it omitted none of his barbaric utterances.

  “The Poles,” he declared the day after he took his new job, “shall be the slaves of the German Reich.” When once he heard that Neurath, the “Protector” of Bohemia, had put up posters announcing the execution of seven Czech university students, Frank exclaimed to a Nazi journalist, “If I wished to order that one should hang up posters about every seven Poles shot, there would not be enough forests in Poland with which to make the paper for these posters.”38

  Himmler and Heydrich were assigned by Hitler to liquidate the Jews. Frank’s job, besides squeezing food and supplies and forced labor out of Poland, was to liquidate the intelligentsia. The Nazis had a beautiful code name for this operation: “Extraordinary Pacification Action” (Ausserordentliche Befriedigungsaktion, or “AB Action,” as it came to be known). It took some time for Frank to get it going. It was not until the following late spring, when the big German offensive in the West took the attention of the world from Poland, that he began to achieve results. By May 30, as his own journal shows, he could boast in a pep talk to his police aides of good progress—the lives of “some thousands” of Polish intellectuals taken, or about to be taken.

  “I pray you, gentlemen,” he asked, “to take the most rigorous measures possible to help us in this task.” Confidentially he added that these were “the Fuehrer’s orders.” Hitler, he said, had expressed it this way:

  “The men capable of leadership in Poland must be liquidated. Those following them … must be eliminated in their turn. There is no need to burden the Reich with this … no need to send these elements to Reich concentration camps.”

  They would be put out of the way, he said, right there in Poland.39

  At the meeting, as Frank noted in his journal, the chief of the Security Police gave a progress report. About two thousand men and several hundred women, he said, had been apprehended �
��at the beginning of the Extraordinary Pacification Action.” Most of them already had been “summarily sentenced”—a Nazi euphemism for liquidation. A second batch of intellectuals was now being rounded up “for summary sentence.” Altogether “about 3,500 persons,” the most dangerous of the Polish intelligentsia, would thus be taken care of.40

  Frank did not neglect the Jews, even if the Gestapo had filched the direct task of extermination away from him. His journal is full of his thoughts and accomplishments on the subject. On October 7, 1940, it records a speech he made that day to a Nazi assembly in Poland summing up his first year of effort.

  My dear Comrades! … I could not eliminate all lice and Jews in only one year. [“Public amused,” he notes down at this point.] But in the course of time, and if you help me, this end will be attained.41

  A fortnight before Christmas of the following year, Frank closed a cabinet session at Cracow, his headquarters, by saying:

  As far as the Jews are concerned, I want to tell you quite frankly that they must be done away with in one way or another … Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all feeling of pity. We must annihilate the Jews.