Hitler

by Ian Kershaw

  Not just external circumstances, but also his personal psyche, pushed him forwards, compelled the risk. Hitler’s reply on 29 August, when Göring suggested it was not necessary to ‘go for broke’, was, therefore, absolutely in character: ‘In my life I’ve always gone for broke.’ There was, for him, no other choice.

  17

  Licensing Barbarism

  I

  Hitler’s ‘mission’ since he entered politics had been to undo the stain of defeat and humiliation in 1918 by destroying Germany’s enemies – internal and external – and restoring national greatness. This ‘mission’, he had plainly stated on many occasions during the 1920s, could only be accomplished through ‘the sword’. It meant war for supremacy. The risk could not be avoided. ‘Germany will either be a world power, or there will be no Germany,’ he had written in Mein Kampf. Nothing had changed over the years in his fanatical belief in this ‘mission’.

  In war Nazism came into its own. The Nazi Movement had been born out of a lost war. As with Hitler personally, the experience of that war and erasing the stain of that defeat were at its heart. ‘National renewal’ and preparation for another war to establish the dominance in Europe which the first great war had failed to attain drove it forwards. The new war now brought the circumstances and opportunities for the dramatic radicalization of Nazism’s ideological crusade. Long-term goals seemed almost overnight to become attainable policy objectives. Persecution which had targeted usually disliked social minorities was now directed at an entire conquered and subjugated people. The Jews, a tiny proportion of the German population, were not only far more numerous in Poland, but were despised by many within their native land and were now the lowest of the low in the eyes of the brutal occupiers of the country.

  As before the war, Hitler set the tone for the escalating barbarism, approved of it, and sanctioned it. But his own actions provide an inadequate explanation of such escalation. The accelerated disintegration of any semblance of collective government, the undermining of legality by an ever-encroaching and ever-expanding police executive, and the power-ambitions of an increasingly autonomous SS leadership all played important parts. These processes had developed between 1933 and 1939 in the Reich itself. They were now, once the occupation of Poland opened up new vistas, to acquire a new momentum altogether. The planners and organizers, theoreticians of domination, and technocrats of power in the SS leadership saw Poland as an experimental playground. They were granted a tabula rasa to undertake more or less what they wanted. The Führer’s ‘vision’ served as the legitimation they needed. Party leaders put in to run the civilian administration of the parts of Poland annexed to the Reich, backed by thrusting and ‘inventive’ civil servants, also saw themselves as ‘working towards the Führer’ in their efforts to bring about the speediest possible ‘Germanization’ of their territories. And the occupying army – officers and rank-and-file – imbued with deep-seated anti-Polish prejudice, also needed little encouragement in the ruthlessness with which the conquered Poles were subjugated.

  The ideological radicalization which took place in Poland in the eighteen months following the German invasion was an essential precursor to the plans which would unfold in spring 1941 as preparation for the war which Hitler knew at some time he would fight: the war against Bolshevik Russia.

  Towards nine o’clock on the evening of 3 September, Hitler had boarded his special armoured train in Berlin’s Stettiner Bahnhof and left for the front. For much of the following three weeks, the train – standing initially in Pomerania (Hinterpommern), then later in Upper Silesia – formed the first wartime ‘Führer Headquarters’. Among Hitler’s accompaniment were two personal adjutants, for the most part Wilhelm Brückner and Julius Schaub, two secretaries (Christa Schroeder and Gerda Daranowski), two manservants, his doctor, Karl Brandt (or sometimes his deputy, Hans-Karl von Hasselbach), and his four military adjutants (Rudolf Schmundt, Karl-Jesko von Puttkamer, Gerhard Engel, and Nicolaus von Below). Behind Hitler’s carriage, the first on the train, containing his spacious ‘living room’, sleeping compartment, and bathroom, together with compartments for his adjutants, was the command carriage that held communications equipment and a conference room for meetings with military leaders. In the next carriage Martin Bormann had his quarters. On the day of the invasion of Poland, he had informed Lammers that he would ‘continue permanently to belong to the Führer’s entourage’. From now on, he was never far from Hitler’s side – echoing the Führer’s wishes, and constantly reminding him of the need to keep up the ideological drive of the regime.

  The Polish troops, ill-equipped for modern warfare, were from the outset no match for the invaders. Within the first two days, most aerodromes and almost the whole of the Polish air force were wiped out. The Polish defences were rapidly overrun, the army swiftly in disarray. Already on 5 September Chief of Staff Halder noted: ‘Enemy practically defeated.’ By the second week of fighting, German forces had advanced to the outskirts of Warsaw. Hitler seldom intervened in the military command. But he took the keenest interest in the progress of the war. He would leave his train most mornings by car to view a different part of the front line. His secretaries, left behind to spend boring days in the airless railway carriage parked in the glare of the blazing sun, tried to dissuade him from touring the battle scenes standing in his car, as he did in Germany. But Hitler was in his element. He was invigorated by war.

  On 19 September, Hitler entered Danzig to indescribable scenes of jubilation. He took up accommodation for the next week in the Casino-Hotel at the adjacent resort of Zoppot. From there, on the 22nd and again on the 25th, he flew to the outskirts of Warsaw to view the devastation wrought on the city of a million souls by the bombing and shelling he had ordered. By 27 September, when the military commander of Warsaw eventually surrendered the city, he was back in Berlin, returning quietly with no prearranged hero’s reception. Poland no longer existed. An estimated 700,000 Polish soldiers were taken prisoners of war. Around 70,000 were killed in action, and a further 133,000 wounded. German fatalities numbered about 11,000, with 30,000 wounded, and a further 3,400 missing.

  Territorial and political plans for Poland were improvised and amended as events unfolded in September and October 1939. On 7 September he had been ready to negotiate with the Poles, recognizing a rump Polish state (with territorial concessions to Germany and breaking of ties with Britain and France), together with an independent western Ukraine. Five days later he still favoured a quasi-autonomous Polish rump state with which he could negotiate a peace in the east, and thought of limiting territorial demands to Upper Silesia and the Corridor if the West stayed out. Another option advanced by Ribbentrop was a division between Germany and Russia, and the creation, out of the rump of Poland, of an autonomous Galician and Polish Ukraine – a proposal unlikely to commend itself to Moscow. The belated Soviet occupation of eastern Poland on 17 September in any case promptly ruled out this possibility. Hitler still left open the final shape of Poland in his Danzig speech on 19 September. During the next days, Stalin made plain his opposition to the existence of a Polish rump state. His initial preference for the demarcation line along the line of the Pissia, Narev, Vistula, and San rivers was then replaced by the proposal to exchange central Polish territories within the Soviet zone between the Vistula and Bug rivers for Lithuania. Once Hitler had accepted this proposal – the basis of the German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship signed on 28 September 1939 – the question of whether or not there would be a Polish rump state was in Berlin’s hands alone.

  Hitler was still contemplating the possibility of some form of Polish political entity at the end of the month. He held out the prospect of recreating a truncated Polish state – though expressly ruling out any recreation of the Poland of the Versailles settlement – for the last time in his Reichstag speech of 6 October, as part of his ‘peace offer’ to the West. But by then the provisional arrangements set up to administer occupied Poland had in effect already eliminated what remained of su
ch a prospect. Even before the formality of Chamberlain’s rejection of the ‘peace offer’ on 12 October, they had created their own dynamic militating towards a rump Polish territory – the ‘General Government’, as it came to be known – alongside the substantial parts of the former Polish state to be incorporated in the Reich itself.

  By 26 October, through a series of decrees characterized by extraordinary haste and improvisation, Hitler brought the military administration of occupied Poland to an end, replacing it by civilian rule in the hands of tried and tested ‘Old Fighters’ of the Movement. Albert Forster, Gauleiter of Danzig, was made head of the new Reichsgau of Danzig-West Prussia. Arthur Greiser, former President of the Danzig Senate, was put in charge of the largest annexed area, Reichsgau Posen (or ‘ReichsgauWartheland’, as it was soon to be renamed, though generally known simply as the ‘Warthegau’). Hans Frank, the party’s legal chief, was appointed General Governor in the rump Polish territory. Other former Polish territory was added to the existing Gaue of East Prussia and Silesia. In each of the incorporated territories, most of all in the Wartheland, the boundaries fixed during the course of October enclosed sizeable areas which had never been part of the former Prussian provinces. The borders of the Reich were thereby extended some 150–200 kilometres to the east. Only in the Danzig area were ethnic Germans in the majority. Elsewhere in the incorporated territories the proportion of Germans in the population seldom reached much over 10 per cent.

  It was imperialist conquest, not revisionism. The treatment of the people of the newly conquered territory was unprecedented, its modern forms of barbarism evoking, though in even more terrible fashion, the worst barbaric subjugations of bygone centuries. What was once Poland amounted in the primitive view of its new overlords to no more than a colonial territory in eastern Europe, its resources to be plundered at will, its people regarded – with the help of modern race theories overlaying old prejudice – as inferior human beings to be treated as brutally as thought fit.

  II

  The terror unleashed from the first days of the invasion of Poland left the violence, persecution, and discrimination that had taken place in the Reich itself since 1933 – dreadful though that had been – completely in the shade. The orgy of atrocities was unleashed from above, exploiting in the initial stages the ethnic antagonism which Nazi agitation and propaganda had done much to incite. The radical, planned programme of ‘ethnic cleansing’ that followed was authorized by Hitler himself. But its instigation – everything points to this – almost certainly came from the SS leadership. The SS had readily recognized the opportunities there to be grasped from expansion. New possibilities for extending the tentacles of the police state had opened up with the Anschluß. Einsatzgruppen (task forces) of the Security Police had been used there for the first time. They had been deployed again in the Sudeten territory, then the rest of Czecho-Slovakia, where there was even greater scope for the SS’s attack on ‘enemies of the state’. The way was paved for the massive escalation of uncontrolled brutality in Poland. Once more, five (later six) Einsatzgruppen were sent into action. They interpreted most liberally their brief to shoot ‘hostages’ in recrimination for any show of hostility, or ‘insurgents’ – seen as anyone giving the slightest indication of active opposition to the occupying forces. The need to sustain good relations with the Wehrmacht initially restricted the extent and arbitrariness of the shootings. It probably also at first constrained the ‘action’ aimed at liquidating the Polish nobility, clergy, and intelligentsia. This ‘action’ nevertheless claimed ultimately an estimated 60,000 victims. Plainly, with the occupation of Poland, the barbarities of the Einsatzgruppen had moved on to a new plane. The platform was established for what was subsequently to take place in the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941.

  There was no shortage of eager helpers among the ethnic Germans in the former Polish territories. The explosion of violence recalled, in hugely magnified fashion, the wild and barbarous treatment of ‘enemies of the state’ in Germany in spring 1933. But now, after six years of cumulative onslaught on every tenet of humane and civilized behaviour, and persistent indoctrination with chauvinistic hatred, the penned-in aggression could be let loose externally on a downtrodden and despised enemy.

  Some of the worst German atrocities in the weeks following the invasion were perpetrated by the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz (Ethnic German Self-Protection), a civilian militia established on Hitler’s directions in the first days of September and within little more than a week coming under the control of the SS. Himmler’s adjutant, Ludolf von Alvensleben, took over its organization, and later led the Selbstschutz in West Prussia, where the extent of its brutality stood out even in the horrific catalogue of misdeeds of the organization’s other branches. Especially in West Prussia, where ethnic conflict had been at its fiercest, the Selbstschutz carried out untold numbers of ‘executions’ of Polish civilians. The Selbstschutz was eventually wound up – in West Prussia in November, and elsewhere by early 1940 – but only because its uncontrolled atrocities were becoming counter-productive on account of the resulting conflicts with the army and German civil authorities in the occupied areas.

  The rampaging actions of the Selbstschutz were only one element of the programme of radical ‘ethnic struggle’ designed by the SS leadership for the ‘new order’ in Poland. More systematic ‘ethnic cleansing’ operations, involving widespread liquidation of targeted groups, were mainly in the hands of the Security Police Einsatzgruppen, following in the wake of the military advance. Already at the end of the first week of the invasion, Heydrich was reported to be enraged – as, apparently, was Hitler too – at the legalities of the military courts, despite 200 executions a day. He was demanding shooting or hanging without trial. ‘The nobility, clerics, and Jews must be done away with,’ were his reported words. He repeated the same sentiments, referring to a general ‘ground cleansing’, to Halder’s Quartermaster-General Eduard Wagner some days later. Reports of atrocities were not long in arriving. By 10–11 September accounts were coming in of an SS massacre of Jews herded into a church, and of an SS shooting of large numbers of Jews. On 12 September Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, told Keitel that he had heard ‘that extensive shootings were planned in Poland and that especially the nobility and clergy were to be exterminated’. Keitel replied ‘that this matter had already been decided by the Führer’. Chief of Staff Halder was already by then heard to have said that ‘it was the intention of the Führer and of Göring to annihilate and exterminate the Polish people’, and that ‘the rest could not even be hinted at in writing’.

  What it amounted to – an all-out ‘ethnic cleansing’ programme – was explained by Heydrich to the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen on 21 September. The thinking was that the former German provinces would become German Gaue. Another Gau with a ‘foreign-speaking population’ would be established, with its capital in Cracow. An ‘eastern wall’ would surround the German provinces, with the ‘foreign-speaking Gau’ forming a type of ‘no man’s land’ in front of it. The Reichsführer-SS was to be appointed Settlement Commissar for the East (an appointment of vital importance, giving Himmler immense, practically unrestricted powers in the east, confirmed by secret edict of Hitler on 7 October). ‘The deportation of Jews into the foreign-speaking Gau, expulsion over the demarcation-line has been approved by the Führer,’ Heydrich went on. The process was to be spread over a year. As regards ‘the solution of the Polish problem’, the 3 per cent at most of the Polish leadership in the occupied territories ‘had to be rendered harmless’ and put in concentration camps. The Einsatzgruppen were to draw up lists of significant leaders, and of various professional and middle-class groups (including teachers and priests) who were to be deported to the designated ‘dumping-ground’ of the General Government. The ‘primitive Poles’ were to be used as migrant workers and gradually deported to the ‘foreign-speaking Gau’. Jews in rural areas were to be removed, and placed in towns. Jews were systematically to be transport
ed by goods-train from German areas. Heydrich also envisaged the deportation to Poland of the Reich’s Jews, and of 30,000 gypsies.

  Hitler spoke little over a week later to Rosenberg of the Germanization and deportation programme to be carried out in Poland. The three weeks spent in Poland during the campaign had confirmed his ingrained racial prejudices. ‘The Poles,’ Rosenberg recalled him saying: ‘a thin Germanic layer, below that dreadful material. The Jews, the most horrible thing imaginable. The towns covered in dirt. He has learnt a lot in these weeks. Above all: if Poland had ruled for a few decades over the old parts of the Reich, everything would be lice-ridden and decayed. A clear, masterful hand was now needed to rule here.’ Hitler then referred, along similar lines to Heydrich’s address to his Einsatzgruppen chiefs, to his plans for the conquered Polish territories. ‘He wanted to divide the now established territory into three strips: 1. between the Vistula and the Bug: the entire Jewry (also from the Reich) along with all somehow unreliable elements. On the Vistula an invincible Eastern Wall – even stronger than in the West. 2. Along the previous border a broad belt of Germanization and colonization. Here there would be a great task for the entire people: to create a German granary, strong peasantry, to resettle there good Germans from all over the world. 3. Between, a Polish “form of state”. Whether after decades the settlement belt could be pushed forward will have to be left to the future.’