Hitler

by Ian Kershaw

  However, just after noon on 26 March, instead of the desired visit by Beck, Lipski simply presented Ribbentrop with a memorandum representing the Polish Foreign Minister’s views. It flatly rejected the German proposals, reminding Ribbentrop for good measure of Hitler’s verbal assurance in his speech on 20 February 1938 that Poland’s rights and interests would be respected. Ribbentrop lost his temper. Going beyond his mandate from Hitler, he told Lipski that any Polish action against Danzig (of which there was no indication) would be treated as aggression against the Reich. The bullying attempt was lost on Lipski. He replied that any furtherance of German plans directed at the return of Danzig to the Reich meant war with Poland.

  By 27 March, meanwhile, Chamberlain, warned that a German strike against Poland might be imminent, was telling the British cabinet he was prepared to offer a unilateral commitment to Poland, aimed at stiffening Polish resolve and deterring Hitler. The policy that had been developing since the march into Prague found its expression in Chamberlain’s statement to the House of Commons on 31 March 1939: ‘In the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence, and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power.’

  This was followed, at the end of Beck’s visit to London on 4–6 April, by Chamberlain’s announcement to the House of Commons that Britain and Poland had agreed to sign a mutual assistance pact in the event of an attack ‘by a European power’.

  On hearing of the British Guarantee of 31 March, Hitler fell into a rage. He thumped his fist on the marble-topped table of his study in the Reich Chancellery. ‘I’ll brew them a devil’s potion,’ he fumed.

  Exactly what he had wanted to avoid had happened. He had expected the pressure on the Poles to work as easily as it had done in the case of the Czechs and the Slovaks. He had presumed the Poles would in due course see sense and yield Danzig and concede the extra-territorial routes through the Corridor. He had taken it for granted that Poland would then become a German satellite – an ally in any later attack on the Soviet Union. He had been determined to keep Poland out of Britain’s clutches. All of this was now upturned. Danzig would have to be taken by force. He had been thwarted by the British and spurned by the Poles. He would teach them a lesson.

  Or so he thought. In reality, Hitler’s over-confidence, impatience, and misreading of the impact of German aggression against Czecho-Slovakia had produced a fateful miscalculation.

  At the end of March Hitler had indicated to Brauchitsch, head of the army, that he would use force against Poland if diplomacy failed. Immediately, the branches of the armed forces began preparing drafts of their own operational plans. These were presented to Hitler in the huge ‘Führer type’ that he could read without glasses. He added a preamble on political aims. By 3 April the directive for ‘Case White’ (Fall Weiß) was ready. It was issued eight days later. Its first section, written by Hitler himself, began: ‘German relations with Poland continue to be based on the principles of avoiding any disturbances. Should Poland, however, change her policy towards Germany, which so far has been based on the same principles as our own, and adopt a threatening attitude towards Germany, a final settlement might become necessary in spite of the Treaty in force with Poland. The aim then will be to destroy Polish military strength, and create in the East a situation which satisfies the requirements of national defence. The Free State of Danzig will be proclaimed a part of the Reich territory by the outbreak of hostilities at the latest. The political leaders consider it their task in this case to isolate Poland if possible, that is to say, to limit the war to Poland only.’ The Wehrmacht had to be ready to carry out ‘Case White’ at any time after 1 September 1939.

  Army commanders had been divided over the merits of attacking Czecho-Slovakia only a few months earlier. Now, there was no sign of hesitation. The aims of the coming campaign to destroy Poland were outlined within a fortnight or so by Chief of the General Staff Halder to generals and General Staff officers. Oppositional hopes of staging a coup against Hitler the previous autumn, as the Sudeten crisis was reaching its denouement, had centred upon Halder. At the time, he had indeed been prepared to see Hitler assassinated. It was the same Halder who now evidently relished the prospect of easy and rapid victory over the Poles and envisaged subsequent conflict with the Soviet Union or the western powers. Halder told senior officers that ‘thanks to the outstanding, I might say, instinctively sure policy of the Führer’, the military situation in central Europe had changed fundamentally. As a consequence, the position of Poland had also significantly altered. Halder said he was certain he was speaking for many in his audience in commenting that with the ending of ‘friendly relations’ with Poland ‘a stone has fallen from the heart’. Poland was now to be ranked among Germany’s enemies. The rest of Halder’s address dealt with the need to destroy Poland ‘in record speed’. The British guarantee would not prevent this happening. He was contemptuous of the capabilities of the Polish army. It formed ‘no serious opponent’. He outlined in some detail the course the German attack would take, acknowledging cooperation with the SS and the occupation of the country by the paramilitary formations of the party. The aim, he repeated, was to ensure ‘that Poland as rapidly as possible was not only defeated, but liquidated’, whether France and Britain should intervene in the West (which on balance he deemed unlikely) or not. The attack had to be ‘crushing’. He concluded by looking beyond the Polish conflict: ‘We must be finished with Poland within three weeks, if possible already in a fortnight. Then it will depend on the Russians whether the eastern front becomes Europe’s fate or not. In any case, a victorious army, filled with the spirit of gigantic victories attained, will be ready either to confront Bolshevism or … to be hurled against the West …’

  On Poland, there was no divergence between Hitler and his Chief of the General Staff. Both wanted to smash Poland at breakneck speed, preferably in an isolated campaign but, if necessary, even with western intervention (though both thought this more improbable than probable). And both looked beyond Poland to a widening of the conflict, eastwards or westwards, at some point. Hitler could be satisfied. He need expect no problems this time from his army leaders.

  The contours for the summer crisis of 1939 had been drawn. It would end not with the desired limited conflict to destroy Poland, but with the major European powers locked in another continental war. This was in the first instance a consequence of Hitler’s miscalculation that spring. But, as Halder’s address to the generals indicated, it had not been Hitler’s miscalculation alone.

  V

  Following one extraordinary triumph upon another, Hitler’s self-belief had by this time been magnified into full-blown megalomania. Even among his private guests at the Berghof, he frequently compared himself with Napoleon, Bismarck, and other great historical figures. The rebuilding programmes that constantly preoccupied him were envisaged as his own lasting monument – a testament of greatness like the buildings of the pharaohs or Caesars. He felt he was walking with destiny. In the summer of 1939, such a mentality would drive Germany towards European war.

  Hitler made public the abrupt shift in policy towards Poland and Great Britain in his big Reichstag speech of 28 April 1939. The speech, lasting two hours and twenty minutes, had been occasioned by a message sent by President Roosevelt a fortnight earlier. Prompted by the invasion of Czecho-Slovakia, the President had appealed to Hitler to give an assurance that he would desist from any attack for the next twenty-five years on thirty named countries – mainly European, but also including Iraq, Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Iran. Were such an assurance to be given, the United States, declared Roosevelt, would play its part in working for disarmament and equal access to raw materials on world markets. Hitler was incensed by Roosevelt’s telegram. That it had been published in Washington before even being received in Berlin was taken as a slight. Hitl
er also thought it arrogant in tone. And the naming of the thirty countries allowed Hitler to claim that inquiries had been conducted in each, and that none felt threatened by Germany. Some, such as Syria, however, had been, he alleged, unable to reply, since they were deprived of freedom and under the military control of democratic states, while the Republic of Ireland, he asserted, feared aggression from Britain, not from Germany. Roosevelt’s raising of the disarmament issue (out of which Hitler had made such capital a few years earlier) handed him a further propaganda gift. With heavy sarcasm, he tore into Roosevelt, ‘answering’ his claims in twenty-one points, each cheered to the rafters by the assembled members of the Reichstag, roaring with laughter as he poured scorn on the President.

  Many German listeners to the broadcast thought it one of the best speeches he had made. William Shirer, the American journalist in Berlin, was inclined to agree: ‘Hitler was a superb actor today,’ he wrote. The performance was largely for internal consumption. The outside world – at least those countries that felt they had accommodated Hitler for too long – was less impressed.

  Preceding the vaudeville, Hitler had chosen the occasion to denounce the Non-Aggression Pact with Poland and the Naval Agreement with Britain. He blamed the renunciation of the naval pact on Britain’s ‘encirclement policy’. In reality, he was complying with the interests of the German navy, which felt its construction plans restricted by the agreement and had been pressing for some time for Hitler to denounce it. The intransigence of the Poles over Danzig and the Corridor, their mobilization in March, and the alignment with Britain against Germany were given as reasons for the ending of the Polish pact.

  Since the end of March, which had brought the British guarantee for Poland, followed soon afterwards by the announcement that there was to be a British-Polish mutual assistance treaty, Hitler had given up on the Poles. The military directives of early April were recognition of this. The Poles, he acknowledged, were not going to concede to German demands without a fight. So they would have their fight. And they would be smashed. Only the timing and conditions remained to be determined.

  At a meeting in his study in the New Reich Chancellery on 23 May, Hitler outlined his thinking on Poland and on wider strategic issues to a small group of top military leaders. He held out the prospect not only of an attack on Poland, but also made clear that the more far-reaching aim was to prepare for an inevitable showdown with Britain. Unlike the meeting on 5 November 1937 that Hoßbach had recorded, there is no indication that the military commanders were caused serious disquiet by what they heard. Hitler made his intentions brutally clear. ‘It is not Danzig that is at stake. For us it is a matter of expanding our living space in the East and making food supplies secure and also solving the problem of the Baltic States.’ It was necessary, he declared, ‘to attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity. We cannot expect a repetition of Czechia. There will be war. Our task is to isolate Poland. Success in isolating her will be decisive.’ He reserved to himself, therefore, the timing of any strike. Simultaneous conflict with the West had to be avoided. Should it, however, come to that – Hitler revealed here his priorities – ‘then the fight must be primarily against England and France’. The war would be an all-out one: ‘We must then burn our boats and it will no longer be a question of right or wrong but of to be or not to be for 80 million people.’ A war of ten to fifteen years had to be reckoned with. ‘The aim is always to bring England to its knees,’ he stated. To the relief of those present, who took it as an indication of when he envisaged the conflict with the West taking place, he stipulated that the rearmament programmes were to be targeted at 1943–4 – the same time-scale he had given in November 1937. But no one doubted that Hitler intended to attack Poland that very year.

  VI

  Throughout the spring and summer frenzied diplomatic efforts were made to try to isolate Poland and deter the western powers from becoming involved in what was intended as a localized conflict. On 22 May, Italy and Germany had signed the so-called ‘Pact of Steel’, meant to warn Britain and France off backing Poland. Ribbentrop had duped the Italians into signing the bilateral military pact on the understanding that the Führer wanted peace for five years and expected the Poles to settle peacefully once they realized that support from the West would not be forthcoming.

  In the attempt to secure the assistance or benevolent neutrality of a number of smaller European countries and prevent them being drawn into the Anglo-French orbit, the German government had mixed success. In the west, Belgian neutrality – whatever Hitler’s plans to ignore it when it suited him – was shored up to keep the Western powers from immediate proximity to Germany’s industrial heartlands. Every effort had been made in preceding years to promote trading links with the neutral countries of Scandinavia to sustain, above all, the vital imports of iron ore from Sweden. In the Baltic, Latvia and Estonia agreed non-aggression pacts. In central Europe, diplomatic efforts had more patchy results. Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Turkey were unwilling to align themselves closely with Berlin. But persistent pressure had turned Romania into an economic satellite, sealed by treaty in late March 1939, more or less assuring Germany of crucial access to Romanian oil and wheat in the event of hostilities.

  The big question-mark concerned the Soviet Union. The regime’s anti-christ it might be. But it held the key to the destruction of Poland. If the USSR could be prevented from linking hands with the West in the tripartite pact that Britain and France were half-heartedly working towards; better still, if the unthinkable – a pact between the Soviet Union and the Reich itself – could be brought about: then Poland would be totally isolated, at Germany’s mercy, the Anglo-French guarantees worthless, and Britain – the main opponent – hugely weakened. Such thoughts began to gestate in the mind of Hitler’s Foreign Minister in the spring of 1939. In the weeks that followed, it was Ribbentrop on the German side, rather than a hesitant Hitler, who took the initiative in seeking to explore all hints that the Russians might be interested in a rapprochement – hints that had been forthcoming since March.

  Within the Soviet leadership, the entrenched belief that the West wanted to encourage German aggression in the east (that is, against the USSR), the recognition that following Munich collective security was dead, the need to head off any aggressive intent from the Japanese in the east, and above all the desperate need to buy time to secure defences for the onslaught thought certain to come at some time, pushed – if for a considerable time only tentatively – in the same direction.

  Stalin’s speech to the Communist Party Congress on 10 March, attacking the appeasement policy of the West as encouragement of German aggression against the Soviet Union, and declaring his unwillingness to ‘pull the chestnuts out of the fire’ for the benefit of capitalist powers, had been taken by Ribbentrop as a hint that an opportunity might be opening up. By mid-April the Soviet Ambassador was remarking to Weizsäcker that ideological differences should not hinder better relations. Then, Gustav Hilger, a long-serving diplomat in the German Embassy in Moscow, was brought to the Berghof to explain that the dismissal, on 3 May, of the Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov (who had been associated with retaining close ties with the West, partly through a spell as Soviet Ambassador to the USA, and was moreover a Jew), and his replacement by Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s right-hand man, had to be seen as a sign that the Soviet dictator was looking for an agreement with Germany.

  Around the same time, Ribbentrop heard from the German Ambassador in Moscow, Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, that the Soviet Union was interested in a rapprochement with Germany. He scented a coup which would dramatically turn the tables on Britain, the country which had dared to spurn him – a coup that would also win him glory and favour in the Führer’s eyes, and his place in history as the architect of Germany’s triumph. Hitler for his part thought that Russian economic difficulties and the chance spotted by ‘the wily fox’ Stalin to remove any threat from Poland to the Soviet western borders were at the back of any
opening towards Germany. His own interests were to isolate Poland and deter Britain.

  Ribbentrop was now able to persuade Hitler to agree to the Soviet requests for resumption of trade negotiations with Moscow, which had been broken off the previous February. Molotov told Schulenburg, however, that a ‘political basis’ would have to be found before talks could be resumed. He left unclear what he had in mind. Deep suspicions on both sides led to relations cooling again throughout June. Molotov continued to stonewall and keep his options open. Desultory economic discussions were just kept alive. But at the end of June, Hitler, irritated by the difficulties raised by the Soviets in the trade discussions, ordered the ending of all talks. This time the Soviets took the initiative. Within three weeks they were letting it be known that trade talks could be resumed, and that the prospects for an economic agreement were favourable. This was the signal Berlin had been waiting for. Schulenburg in Moscow was ordered to ‘pick up the threads again’.

  On 26 June, Ribbentrop’s Russian expert in the Foreign Ministry’s Trade Department, Karl Schnurre, indicated to the Soviet Chargé d’Affaires Georgi Astakhov and trade representative Evgeny Babarin that the trade agreement could be accompanied by a political understanding between Germany and the Soviet Union, taking into account their mutual territorial interests. The response was encouraging. Molotov was non-committal and somewhat negative when he met Schulenburg on 3 August. But two days later, Astakhov was letting Ribbentrop know that the Soviet government was seriously interested in the ‘improvement of mutual relations’, and willing to contemplate political negotiations.