On June 28 Schulenburg had a long talk with Molotov which proceeded, he told Berlin in a “secret and urgent” telegram, “in a friendly manner.” Nevertheless, when the German ambassador referred assuringly to the nonaggression treaties which Germany had just concluded with the Baltic States,* the Soviet Foreign Commissar tartly replied that “he must doubt the permanence of such treaties after the experiences which Poland had had.” Summing up the talk, Schulenburg concluded:
My impression is that the Soviet Government is greatly interested in learning our political views and in maintaining contact with us. Although there was no mistaking the strong distrust evident in all that Molotov said, he nevertheless described a normalization of relations with Germany as being desirable and possible.62
The ambassador requested telegraphic instructions as to his next move. Schulenburg was one of the last survivors of the Seeckt, Maltzan and Brockdorff-Rantzau school which had insisted on a German rapprochement with Soviet Russia after 1919 and which had brought it about at Rapallo. As his dispatches throughout 1939 make clear, he sincerely sought to restore the close relations which had existed during the Weimar Republic. But like so many other German career diplomats of the old school he little understood Hitler.
Suddenly on June 29 Hitler, from his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, ordered the talks with the Russians broken off.
Berchtesgaden, June 29, 1939
… The Fuehrer has decided as follows:
The Russians are to be informed that we have seen from their attitude that they are making the continuation of further talks dependent on the acceptance of the basis for our economic discussions as fixed in January. Since this basis was not acceptable to us, we would not be interested in a resumption of the economic discussions with Russia at present.
The Fuehrer has agreed that this answer be delayed for a few days.63
Actually, the substance of it was telegraphed to the German Embassy in Moscow the next day.
The Foreign Minister [Weizsaecker wired] … is of the opinion that in the political field enough has been said until further instructions and that for the moment the talks should not be taken up again by us.
Concerning the possible economic negotiations with the Russian Government, the deliberations here have not yet been concluded. In this field too you are requested for the time being to take no further action, but to await instructions.64
There is no clue in the secret German documents which explains Hitler’s sudden change of mind. The Russians already had begun to compromise on their proposals of January and February. And Schnurre had warned on June 15 that a breakdown in the economic negotiations would be a setback for Germany both economically and politically.
Nor could the rocky course of the Anglo–French–Soviet negotiations have so discouraged Hitler as to lead him to such a decision. He knew from the reports of the German Embassy in Moscow that Russia and the Western Powers were deadlocked over the question of guarantees to Poland, Rumania and the Baltic States. Poland and Rumania were happy to be guaranteed by Britain and France, which could scarcely help them in the event of German aggression except by the indirect means of setting up a Western front. But they refused to accept a Russian guarantee or even to allow for Soviet troops to pass through their territories to meet a German attack. Latvia, Estonia and Finland also stoutly declined to accept any Russian guarantee, an attitude which, as the German Foreign Office papers later revealed, was encouraged by Germany in the form of dire threats should they weaken in their resolve.
In this impasse Molotov suggested at the beginning of June that Great Britain send its Foreign Secretary to Moscow to take part in the negotiations. Apparently in the Russian view this would not only help to break the deadlock but would show that Britain was in earnest in arriving at an agreement with Russia. Lord Halifax declined to go.* Anthony Eden, who was at least a former Foreign Secretary, offered to go in his place, but Chamberlain turned him down. It was decided, instead, to send William Strang, a capable career official in the Foreign Office who had previously served in the Moscow Embassy and spoke Russian but was little known either in his own country or outside of it. The appointment of so subordinate an official to head such an important mission and to negotiate directly with Molotov and Stalin was a signal to the Russians, they later said, that Chamberlain still did not take very seriously the business of building an alliance to stop Hitler.
Strang arrived in Moscow on June 14, but though he participated in eleven Anglo–French meetings with Molotov, his appearance had little effect on the course of Anglo–Soviet negotiations. A fortnight later, on June 29, Russian suspicion and irritation was publicly displayed in an article in Pravda by Andrei Zhdanov under the headline, “British and French Governments Do Not Want a Treaty on the Basis of Equality for the Soviet Union.” Though purporting to write “as a private individual and not committing the Soviet Government,” Zhdanov was not only a member of the Politburo and president of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Soviet Parliament but, as Schulenburg emphasized to Berlin in reporting on the matter, “one of Stalin’s confidants [whose] article was doubtless written on orders from above.”
It seems to me [Zhdanov wrote] that the British and French Governments are not out for a real agreement acceptable to the U.S.S.R. but only for talks about an agreement in order to demonstrate before the public opinion of their own countries the alleged unyielding attitude of the U.S.S.R. and thus facilitate the conclusion of an agreement with the aggressors. The next few days will show whether this is so or not.66
Stalin’s distrust of Britain and France and his suspicion that the Western Allies might in the end make a deal with Hitler, as they had the year before at Munich, was thus publicized for all the world to ponder. Ambassador von der Schulenburg, pondering it, suggested to Berlin that one purpose of the article was “to lay the blame on Britain and France for the possible breakdown of the negotiations.”67
PLANS FOR TOTAL WAR
Still Adolf Hitler did not rise to the Russian bait. Perhaps it was because all during June he was busy at Berchtesgaden supervising the completion of military plans to invade Poland at the summer’s end.
By June 15 he had General von Brauchitsch’s top-secret plan for the operations of the Army against Poland.68 “The object of the operation,” the Commander in Chief of the Army, echoing his master, declared, “is to destroy the Polish armed forces. The political leadership demands that the war should be begun by heavy surprise blows and lead to quick successes. The intention of the Army High Command is to prevent a regular mobilization and concentration of the Polish Army by a surprise invasion of Polish territory and to destroy the mass of the Polish Army, which is expected to be west of the Vistula-Narew line, by a concentric attack from Silesia on the one side and from Pomerania-East Prussia on the other.”
To carry out his plan, Brauchitsch set up two army groups—Army Group South, consisting of the Eighth, Tenth and Fourteenth armies, and Army Group North, made up of the Third and Fourth armies. The southern army group, under the command of General von Rundstedt, was to attack from Silesia “in the general direction of Warsaw, scatter opposing Polish forces and occupy as early as possible with forces as strong as possible the Vistula on both sides of Warsaw with the aim of destroying the Polish forces still holding out in western Poland in co-operation with Army Group North.” The first mission of the latter group was “to establish connection between the Reich and East Prussia” by driving across the Corridor. Detailed objectives of the various armies were outlined as well as those for the Air Force and Navy. Danzig, said Brauchitsch, would be declared German territory on the first day of hostilities and would be secured by local forces under German command.
A supplemental directive issued at the same time stipulated that the order of deployment for “White” would be put into operation on August 20. “All preparations,” it laid down, “must be concluded by that date.”69
A week later, on June 22, General Keitel submitted to Hitler a “p
reliminary timetable for Case White.”70 The Fuehrer, after studying it, agreed with it “in the main” but ordered that “so as not to disquiet the population by calling up reserves on a larger scale than usual … civilian establishments, employers or other private persons who make inquiries should be told that men are being called up for the autumn maneuvers.” Also Hitler stipulated that “for reasons of security, the clearing of hospitals in the frontier area which the Supreme Command of the Army proposed should take place from the middle of July must not be carried out.”
The war which Hitler was planning to launch would be total war and would require not only military mobilization but a total mobilization of all the resources of the nation. To co-ordinate this immense effort a meeting of the Reich Defense Council was convoked the next day, on June 23, under the chairmanship of Goering. Some thirty-five ranking officials, civil and military, including Keitel, Raeder, Halder, Thomas and Milch for the armed forces and the Ministers of the Interior, Economics, Finance and Transport, as well as Himmler, were present. It was only the second meeting of the Council but, as Goering explained, the body was convoked only to make the most important decisions and he left no doubt in the minds of his hearers, as the captured secret minutes of the session reveal, that war was near and that much remained to be done about manpower for industry and agriculture and about many other matters relating to total mobilization.71
Goering informed the Council that Hitler had decided to draft some seven million men. To augment the labor supply Dr. Funk, the Minister of Economics, was to arrange “what work is to be given to prisoners of war and to the inmates of prisons and concentration camps.” Himmler chimed in to say that “greater use will be made of the concentration camps in wartime.” And Goering added that “hundreds of thousands of workers from the Czech protectorate are to be employed under supervision in Germany, particularly in agriculture, and housed in hutments.” Already, it was obvious, the Nazi program for slave labor was taking shape.
Dr. Frick, the Minister of the Interior, promised to “save labor in the public administration” and enlivened the proceedings by admitting that under the Nazi regime the number of bureaucrats had increased “from twenty to forty fold—an impossible state of affairs.” A committee was set up to correct this lamentable situation.
An even more pessimistic report was made by Colonel Rudolf Gercke, chief of the Transport Department of the Army General Staff. “In the transportation sphere,” he declared bluntly, “Germany is at the moment not ready for war.”
Whether the German transportation facilities would be equal to their task depended, of course, on whether the war was confined to Poland. If it had to be fought in the West against France and Great Britain it was feared that the transport system would simply not be adequate. In July two emergency meetings of the Defense Council were called “in order to bring the West Wall, by August 25 at the latest, into the optimum condition of preparedness with the material that can be obtained by that time by an extreme effort.” High officials of Krupp and the steel cartel were enlisted to try to scrape up the necessary metal to complete the armament of the western fortifications. For on their impregnancy, the Germans knew, depended whether the Anglo–French armies would be inclined to mount a serious attack on western Germany while the Wehrmacht was preoccupied in Poland.
Though Hitler, with unusual frankness, had told his generals on May 23 that Danzig was not the cause of the dispute with Poland at all, it seemed for a few weeks at midsummer that the Free City might be the powder keg which any day would set off the explosion of war. For some time the Germans had been smuggling into Danzig arms and Regular Army officers to train the local defense guard in their use.* The arms and officers came in across the border from East Prussia, and in order to keep closer watch on them the Poles increased the number of their customs officials and frontier guards. The local Danzig authorities, now operating exclusively on orders from Berlin, countered by trying to prevent the Polish officials from carrying out their duties.
The conflict reached a crisis on August 4 when the Polish diplomatic representative in Danzig informed the local authorities that the Polish customs inspectors had been given orders to carry out their functions “with arms” and that any attempt by the Danzigers to hamper them would be regarded “as an act of violence” against Polish officials, and that in such a case the Polish government would “retaliate without delay against the Free City.”
This was a further sign to Hitler that the Poles could not be intimidated and it was reinforced by the opinion of the German ambassador in Warsaw, who on July 6 telegraphed Berlin that there was “hardly any doubt” that Poland would fight “if there was a clear violation” of her rights in Danzig. We know from a marginal note on the telegram in Ribbentrop’s handwriting that it was shown the Fuehrer.73
Hitler was furious. The next day, August 7, he summoned Albert Forster, the Nazi Gauleiter of Danzig, to Berchtesgaden and told him that he had reached the extreme limit of his patience with the Poles. Angry notes were exchanged between Berlin and Warsaw—so violent in tone that neither side dared to make them public. On the ninth, the Reich government warned Poland that a repetition of its ultimatum to Danzig “would lead to an aggravation of German–Polish relations … for which the German Government must disclaim all responsibility.” The next day the Polish government, replied tartly
that they will continue to react as hitherto to any attempt by the authorities of the Free City to impair the rights and interests which Poland enjoys in Danzig, and will do so by such means and measures as they alone may deem appropriate, and that they will regard any intervention by the Reich Government … as an act of aggression.74
No small nation which stood in Hitler’s way had ever used such language. When on the following day, August 11, the Fuehrer received Carl Burckhardt, a Swiss, who was League of Nations High Commissioner at Danzig and who had gone more than halfway to meet the German demands there, he was in an ugly mood. He told his visitor that “if the slightest thing was attempted by the Poles, he would fall upon them like lightning with all the powerful arms at his disposal, of which the Poles had not the slightest idea.”
M. Burckhardt said [the High Commissioner later reported] that that would lead to a general conflict. Herr Hitler replied that if he had to make war he would rather do it today than tomorrow, that he would not conduct it like the Germany of Wilhelm II, who had always had scruples about the full use of every weapon, and that he would fight without mercy up to the extreme limit.75
Against whom? Against Poland certainly. Against Britain and France, if necessary. Against Russia too? With regard to the Soviet Union, Hitler had finally made up his mind.
THE INTERVENTION OF RUSSIA: III
A fresh initiative had come from the Russians.
On July 18, E. Babarin, the Soviet trade representative in Berlin, accompanied by two aides, called on Julius Schnurre at the German Foreign Office and informed him that Russia would like to extend and intensify German–Soviet economic relations. He brought along a detailed memorandum for a trade agreement calling for a greatly increased exchange of goods between the two countries and declared that if a few differences between the two parties were clarified he was empowered to sign a trade treaty in Berlin. The Germans, as Dr. Schnurre’s confidential memorandum of the meeting shows, were rather pleased. Such a treaty, Schnurre noted, “will not fail to have its effect at least in Poland and Britain.”76 Four days later, on July 22, the Russian press announced in Moscow that Soviet–German trade negotiations had been resumed in Berlin.
On the same day Weizsaecker rather exuberantly wired Ambassador von der Schulenburg in Moscow some interesting new instructions. As to the trade negotiations, he informed the ambassador, “we will act here in a markedly forthcoming manner, since a conclusion, and this at the earliest possible moment, is desired here for general reasons. As far as the purely political aspect of our conversations with the Russians is concerned,” he added, “we regard the period of waitin
g stipulated for you in our telegram [of June 30]* as having expired. You are therefore empowered to pick up the threads again there, without in any way pressing the matter.”77
They were, in fact, picked up four days later, on July 26, in Berlin. Dr. Schnurre was instructed by Ribbentrop to dine Astakhov, the Soviet chargé, and Babarin at a swank Berlin restaurant and sound them out. The two Russians needed little sounding. As Schnurre noted in his confidential memorandum of the meeting, “the Russians stayed until about 12:30 A.M.” and talked “in a very lively and interested manner about the political and economic problems of interest to us.”
Astakhov, with the warm approval of Babarin, declared that a Soviet–German political rapprochement corresponded to the vital interests of the two countries. In Moscow, he said, they had never quite understood why Nazi Germany had been so antagonistic to the Soviet Union. The German diplomat, in response, explained that “German policy in the East had now taken an entirely different course.”
On our part there could be no question of menacing the Soviet Union. Our aims were in an entirely different direction … German policy was aimed at Britain … I could imagine a far-reaching arrangement of mutual interests with due consideration for vital Russian problems.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany Page 79