The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  A formal alliance between two powers that had spent the previous six years mutually vilifying each other in public, and had been the major backers of the two opposing sides in the Spanish Civil War, was unexpected, to say the least.175 However, there were strong reasons for the agreement on both sides. From Hitler’s point of view, it was necessary to secure Soviet acquiescence in the German invasion of Poland, otherwise the nightmare scenario of the invasion broadening out into a European war on two fronts began to look a distinct possibility. From Stalin’s perspective, it provided a respite and opened up the enticing prospect of Europe’s capitalist powers, Germany, France and Britain, fighting a war of mutual destruction between themselves. Moreover, while the published version of the Pact committed both states not to make war on each other for ten years, to settle disputes by negotiation or third-party arbitration, and to increase their trade with one another, its secret clauses allocated spheres of influence in East-Central Europe to Germany and the Soviet Union, under which Stalin would take over the eastern part of Poland, together with Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and Hitler the western part. The significance of these clauses was enormous. Both Hitler and Stalin realized that the Pact was unlikely to last the stipulated ten years. Indeed, it did not even last two. But in the longer run, the boundary it drew in Poland between the German and Soviet spheres was to prove permanent, while the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states was to last until near the end of the twentieth century.176

  There were other consequences of the Pact too. During the detailed negotiations, the German side raised the question of German political refugees in the Soviet Union. Stalin had no interest in protecting them; indeed he was deeply suspicious of foreigners of any kind who had found a home in Russia, and of many of the Russians who came into contact with them. So he agreed to send them back to the Third Reich. Some 4,000 German citizens were duly rounded up and handed over to the Gestapo by the Soviet authorities after the Pact had been signed. Between 1,000 and 1,200 were German Communists. Some, like Margarete Buber-Neumann, had already been imprisoned by Stalin’s secret police before being sent to a German concentration camp; her husband, Heinz Neumann, had been purged from the German Party leadership in 1932 for urging a united front with the Social Democrats against the Nazi threat; sent first to Spain, then Moscow, he had been arrested in 1937 and executed. His widow was deported directly from a Soviet labour camp to Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1940. For those German Communist exiles who were Jewish, an even worse fate was in store. The conductor and composer Hans Walter David was one of their number. Born in 1893, he had fled to Paris in 1933 then Moscow in 1935. He fell victim to Stalin’s great purge in 1937, and was sentenced to a labour camp in 1939 for allegedly spying for the Germans, an example of Stalin’s paranoid suspicion of foreigners in the Soviet Union. In April 1940, David was informed that his sentence had been commuted into one of deportation. He was handed over to the Germans on 2 May 1940, and murdered by the SS. In February 1940 a grateful German Embassy in Moscow thanked the Soviet authorities for their co-operation in locating and surrendering a large number of exiles like him.177

  Meanwhile, Communist parties all over Europe struggled to sell the Pact to their members, many of whom had joined in the first place because the party seemed to offer the best guarantee of carrying the fight against fascism to the enemy. Disorientation followed disbelief. Many felt betrayed. Yet before long, most Communists had come round to the idea that the Pact might not be such a bad thing after all. Years of schooling in party discipline, of supporting every twist and turn in party doctrine and policy, made it easy in the end to accept even this startling U-turn. Some thought it might even lead to the legalization of the Communist Party in Germany; many believed that a war between the capitalist powers was none of their business anyway; all revered Stalin as a great thinker and master of political tactics, a world genius who always knew best and whose decisions were always right.178 Some Nazis, too, were doubtful about the wisdom of the Pact. Anti-Communism was a central tenet of Nazi ideology, and now Hitler seemed to be betraying it. The morning after the Pact’s announcement, the front garden of the Brown House, the Nazi Party headquarters in Munich, was covered in Party badges thrown there in disgust by disgruntled Party members. Alfred Rosenberg, the arch-anti-Communist, blamed Ribbentrop’s ambition for the Pact. An alliance with Britain would have been preferable, he thought. Nevertheless, like most other Nazis, he was so inured to accepting Hitler’s every decision as above discussion that he acquiesced anyway. Many realized the rapprochement with the Soviet Union was purely tactical. ‘The Leader has made a brilliant move,’ wrote Goebbels admiringly in his diary.179

  I I

  Hitler’s growing sense of urgency in the last days and weeks before the signing of the Pact derived not least from the fact that the invasion of Poland had already been fixed for 26 August 1939.180 In the meantime, Hitler had taken steps to avoid a build-up of the kind of ‘war psychosis’ that had made the mass of ordinary Germans so uneasy during the Czechoslovak crisis the previous summer. He made a point of carrying on in public as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on, going on a tour of his childhood haunts in Austria, visiting the Bayreuth Festival, taking part in a massive street parade of German art and culture in Munich and whiling away several weeks at his mountain retreat on the Obersalzberg. He announced that the annual Party Rally in Nuremberg would be a ‘Rally of Peace’ and would begin early in September (by which time he in fact envisaged that German armies would be marching across Poland). And he made a point of focusing public references to Poland on the position of Danzig. In reality this was a side-issue, no more than a pretext, if that. But from May onwards, Goebbels’s daily press instructions unfolded a hate campaign against Poland that made it seem as if the ethnic German inhabitants of the country, and above all of Danzig, were in constant, mortal and growing danger from violence meted out to them by Poles. ‘Ethnic Germans flee from Polish terror’, screamed the headlines. ‘German houses broken into with axes - Terrorized by Poles for weeks - Hundreds of refugees are arrested by the Poles’. Poles were allegedly murdering ethnic Germans, shooting at German passers-by in Danzig, and generally threatening to make their lives unbearable. Although the Polish government’s policy towards the ethnic German minority had been considerably less liberal and tolerant than that of its Czech counterpart, these stories were grotesque exaggerations if not pure invention. For their part, the Nazis who dominated the political scene in Danzig kept up the pressure by provoking the Poles and staging incidents for the German press to exploit, such as mounting violent attacks on Polish customs officers and spreading atrocity stories when the officers defended themselves.181

  But the barrage of propaganda let fly by Goebbels made it seem as if it was the Sudetenland all over again, and that the incorporation of Danzig into the Reich, coupled with some as yet undefined arrangement over the Polish Corridor, and perhaps brokered again by Britain and France, was what Hitler was after. Even the Social Democrats conceded that the Poles were despised and disliked by the vast majority of the German population, including workers, who saw them as dirty, backward, and cheap competition in the labour market. The clashes that had taken place in Silesia at the end of the First World War had lost none of their bitter resonances twenty years on. Yet the hope was general that the issue would be settled peacefully. ‘Danzig’, Social Democratic sympathizers were reported as thinking, ‘. . . is a purely German city after all. Who can have anything against Germany gathering it to itself again? The Danzig matter is basically much simpler than things were with Czechoslovakia.’ Surely England and France would understand that.182

  Such sentiments were common amongst supporters of the Nazis too. ‘None of us’, Melita Maschmann later recalled, ‘doubted that Hitler would avoid war if he could possibly contrive to do so.’183 He had, after all, done it so many times before. Hitler was a diplomatic genius, and they believed his assurances that he was a man of peace.184 Reporting on the attitude towa
rds the crisis shown by the rural population in the Bavarian district of Ebermannstadt, a local official concluded bluntly on 30 June 1939: ‘The desire for peace is stronger than the desire for war. Amongst the overwhelming majority of the population a solution to the Danzig question will therefore only find agreement if this happens in the same bloodless way as the previous annexations in the East have.’185 The idea that Hitler wanted a peaceful solution to the Danzig problem was not just intended to keep the anxieties of the domestic population at a minimum; on 11 August 1939 Hitler met the League of Nations High Commissioner in Danzig, the Swiss diplomat Carl Burckhardt, at the Obersalzberg, at his own request, to indicate his readiness to negotiate with the British. At the same time, he managed to spoil this calculated pose of reasonableness by shouting that he would destroy Poland completely if its government failed to comply with his demands.186

  None of Hitler’s diplomatic moves had much of an effect on the stance taken by the other international players in this deadly game, not even his announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. The Polish government had always been suspicious and resentful of the Soviet Union, with which Poland had fought a bitter war in the early 1920s, so from this point of view the Pact made little difference. The events in Danzig and similar disturbances in Silesia only stiffened the Poles’ resolve to resist any kind of deal, given the fact that it would deliver them up to Germany just as the Munich Agreement had delivered up the Czechs. But in any case a deal seemed unlikely. Both the British and the French governments insisted that the Nazi-Soviet Pact could not alter their decision to stand by Poland, as Chamberlain told Hitler in a letter couriered to him at the Obersalzberg by the generally pro-German British Ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson on 23 August 1939. Receiving the letter, Hitler subjected Henderson to a wild tirade against the British, who were, he shouted accusingly, determined to exterminate Germany altogether in the interests of inferior races. On 25 August 1939, however, back in Berlin, Hitler took a different tack, offering Henderson in sweeping if rather vague terms a general settlement with Britain once the Polish question was solved. While Henderson flew back to London for consultations, Hitler learned that the British had just signed a military alliance with Poland. Ribbentrop’s poor reputation in Britain was clearly frustrating his attempt to win Chamberlain round. Sidelining his Foreign Minister for the moment, Hitler turned to Goring, who had always enjoyed a better reputation in London. Göring’s Swedish friend Birger Dahlerus was sent to take further soundings in the British capital. They elicited the response, delivered by Henderson on 28 August 1939, that the British government was willing to guarantee peacefully negotiated German-Polish boundaries and to support the return of the German overseas colonies mandated to the League of Nations in the 1919 Peace Settlement, but that the British were still committed to back Poland by force of arms should the Germans invade.187

  On 22 August 1939, Hitler summoned top commanders of the armed forces to the Obersalzberg to tell them the invasion was going ahead. They arrived in civilian clothing so as to avoid suspicion. The Pact with Stalin was about to be signed, and he was in a confident mood. He had already decided in the spring that he was going to invade Poland, he said. ‘I first thought I would turn against the West in a few years, and only after that against the East. But the sequence of these things cannot be fixed.’ The Polish situation had become intolerable. The moment to strike had come. ‘England and France have undertaken obligations which neither is in a position to fulfil. There is no real rearmament in England, but only propaganda.’ Thus there would be no general war if he invaded Poland. The risks for the Western democracies were too great. At the same time, the conquest of the East would open up supplies of grain and raw materials which would frustrate any future attempt at a blockade. ‘A start has been made on the destruction of England’s hegemony.’ ‘Our enemies’, he added, ‘are tiny little worms. I came to know them in Munich.’188 Over lunch, a number of the officers present had let their disquiet at these sentiments become apparent. Many of them felt that Hitler was deceiving himself when he claimed that Britain and France would not intervene. To stiffen their resolve, Hitler addressed them again in the afternoon. ‘Everyone’, he told them, ‘must hold the view that we have been determined to fight the western Powers from the start. A life and death struggle.’ The Western leaders were ‘weaker men’. Even if they declared war, there was little they could do in the short run. ‘The destruction of Poland remains the priority,’ he concluded.189

  Hitler in fact continued to believe that the British would not intervene; the long-term threat of American power, he thought, would drive them towards an alliance with Germany.190 But the intention, which he made clear to the generals at this time, of launching the invasion on 26 August was unexpectedly frustrated by Mussolini, who felt affronted that despite all the assurances contained in the Pact of Steel, Hitler had chosen not to take him fully into his confidence over Poland. The news of the planned invasion, communicated to Ciano by Ribbentrop earlier in the month, had come as a complete surprise to the Italians. On 24 August 1939 Hitler had written to Mussolini personally asking for Italian backing. The troops had already been given their marching orders on 25 August 1939, when Mussolini’s reply arrived at the Reich Chancellery: German airports had already been closed, the annual Nuremberg Rally cancelled, and food rationing introduced with effect from 27 August 1939. Mussolini told Hitler that Italy was not in a position to offer any military assistance in the event of a war. ‘The Italians are behaving just like they did in 1914,’ fumed Hitler. He cancelled the marching orders, and the invasion ground to a halt just before it reached the Polish border.191

  The endgame was now under way. Overcoming his fury at the Italians, who compounded their offence by offering to call a conference with the British and the French to impose a settlement on the lines of the Munich Agreement, Hitler made a last effort to secure Anglo-French neutrality. Further meetings with Henderson failed to budge the British on the crucial issue of their guarantee to Poland in the event of armed conflict. Much of what Hitler had to say, including the offer of a plebiscite in the Corridor coupled with the return of Danzig to Germany, was no more than window-dressing designed to assure the German public that he had made every effort to maintain peace. When Ribbentrop communicated the offer to Henderson in the Reich Chancellery at midnight on 29 August 1939, he read it out at a speed too great for the ambassador to make proper notes, then flung it on the table saying it was out of date anyway. The interpreter at the meeting later reported that the atmosphere had been so bad he thought the two men would come to blows. Hitler had his offer broadcast on German radio on the evening of 30 August 1939, blaming the British and the Poles, who had been asked at the last minute to send an emissary to Berlin, for its failure. By this time, the army had been given a fresh set of orders to march into Poland in the early hours of 1 September 1939.192

  Acting according to plans arranged some time before by Heydrich, SS men in civilian clothing staged a mock assault on the German radio station at Gleiwitz, in Upper Silesia. Its staff were replaced by another detachment from the SS. Evidence of the Poles’ supposedly murderous assault was provided by two concentration camp inmates from Sachsenhausen, killed by lethal injections and dumped at the radio station to be photographed by the German media. The orders, approved by Hitler personally, referred to the bodies as ‘canned goods’. A third man, Franz Honiok, a pro-Polish German citizen, was arrested on 30 August 1939 as someone who could be plausibly identified as a Polish irregular, and taken out of the police gaol by the SS at Gleiwitz the next day. He was put to sleep with an injection, placed inside the radio station, and, still unconscious, shot dead. To lend further authenticity to the action, the Polish-speaking SS men shouted anti-German slogans into the microphone before leaving. Normally the radio station was only used for emergency weather forecasts, so hardly anybody was listening. Elsewhere, two other border incidents were staged by SS men dressed in Polish army uniforms. As one SS man came out of a German custom
s house that he had just helped smash to pieces, he stumbled over several dead bodies wearing Polish uniforms. Their heads, he reported later, were shaven, their faces had been beaten to make them unrecognizable, and their bodies were completely rigid.193

  At a quarter to five on the morning of 1 September 1939 the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish garrison and ammunition depot at the Westerplatte, a peninsula off the Vistula estuary which commanded the entrance to Danzig’s harbour, and Stuka dive-bombers passed low over the city. Polish railway and postal officials were attacked by local German police units and shooting broke out in a number of places. Albert Forster, the Nazi Party Regional Leader in Danzig, put the League of Nations commissioner Burckhardt under house arrest and then gave him two hours to leave. Burckhardt packed his bags and drove off to Lithuania. All along the border between Poland and Germany, units of the German armed forces raised the customs barriers and drove through into Polish territory, while planes of the German air force flew into Polish airspace laden with bombs to drop on Poland’s railways, roads and bridges, army bases, towns and cities. At ten in the morning, Hitler addressed a hastily summoned Reichstag. Exhausted and overwrought by the frantic negotiations of the previous days, Hitler was nervous and confused, stumbling over his words several times and making an unusually hesitant impression. The Poles had committed no fewer than fourteen serious violations of the border the previous night, he said (alluding to the incidents staged by Heydrich’s men). Retaliation was necessary for these and other outrages. ‘Henceforth, bomb will be avenged with bomb. He who fights with poison shall be fought with poison gas. He who distances himself from the rules of a humane conduct of warfare can only expect us to take the same step.’ After the speech was over, the deputies solemnly voted to incorporate Danzig into the Reich. But not before Hitler had sounded a note that was not only full of foreboding but also replete with prophecy. He was ready to make any sacrifice, he said. ‘I now wish to be nothing other than the first soldier of the German Reich. Therefore I have put on that tunic which has always been the most holy and dear to me. I shall not take it off again until after victory is ours, or - I shall not live to see the day!’ Suicide in the event of defeat was already at the back of his mind.194