Other Germans knew the truth about their rulers, and they hated it. Of course, that’s not surprising, since Germany had given the world many men and women of principle. One man who dared to speak his mind was Martin Niemöller, the pastor of a church in a stylish suburb of Berlin. Niemöller had captained a German submarine in World War I and was a well-known military hero. In the early 1930s he supported Hitler but he soon grew disillusioned. He opposed the efforts of the Nazis to control the German churches. Although Nazis arrested him in 1937 for his open opposition to Hitler, and put him in concentration camps, he would later blame himself for having done too little.
After World War II Niemöller gave many speeches (about his pacifist beliefs), and he often ended with these words: “They came first for the Communists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me — and by that time no one was left to speak up.” He was accusing many, not himself alone.
The takeover, the killings, and the warping of a people are only part of the Nazi story in the 1930s. In Mein Kampf the gangster boss had promised war and conquests. As we’ll see in chapter 20, even as the Nazis reshaped Germany in the 1930s, they also started seizing nearby lands whose people spoke in German. They too were members of the master race.
When Hitler wasn’t in Berlin, he lived in a chalet in the German Alps. On an elevator cut through solid rock he could ascend to his private retreat on top of Obersaltzberg mountain. There he could gaze on other mountain peaks and ask himself what next for Germany and Europe. A Nazi slogan promised, “Today Germany, tomorrow the world.”
Now and then he must have thought about that other ruler, even more dominant than he was. Often in his speeches he had ranted about Stalin, but watching Stalin from afar he had learned some things, as Stalin also learned from him. Both of them knew the uses of giant lies, scapegoats, work camps, stomping boots, censors, hatred, purges, and terror. One demagogued on race and one on class, but what mattered most for both was power, complete control of humans in the mass. Stalin had said admiringly of Hitler, “What a lad!” Hitler would say of Stalin, “He’s a beast, but he’s a beast on the grand scale.” And “In his own way, he is a hell of a fellow!”
Chapter 20
We wage a wider, crueler war.
IN THOSE AWFUL YEARS, 1914–1918, many had imagined that the First World War would also be the last. It was “the war to end war.” But in the 1930s Europe, Africa, and the Far East lurched and skidded toward another war. Contempt for peace and world opinion spread like gasoline on water.
Trouble started on the eastern edge of Asia. In 1931, Japanese army units stationed in the southern corner of Manchuria took over all of this northern province of China. The order for this aggression hadn’t come from Tokyo; the army units acted on their own. The land grab nonetheless pleased many Japanese, and their government accepted Manchuria as an “independent” state. What was almost as bad, other nations reacted to the incident with a mildness as alarming as Japan’s aggressiveness. The League of Nations should have acted, but it didn’t want a war so it made only a tactful protest. Even that sufficed to make Japan flounce hotly out the League’s front door.
Only worse would follow. Japan desired to feed upon the trade of China, its huge and feeble neighbor. War between the two looked likely. A Japanese general remarked that any talk of not invading China was “like telling a man not to get involved with a woman when she is already pregnant by him.” In 1937 Japan invaded China. As before, the League condemned Japan, and it asked the Japanese to meet with other powers. Japan of course refused, and went on fighting. One by one it conquered China’s railroads and much of its fertile land and biggest cities. It ate up China, a western statesman said, “like an artichoke, leaf by leaf.” At Nanjing Japanese soldiers, under orders, slaughtered more than half the population.
A European country, meanwhile, confirmed the truth of what Japan was teaching: that the League could not preserve the peace. Italy was governed now by a flashy strongman, Benito Mussolini, who wore black shirts and white spats. He declared that in Italy he had “buried the putrid corpse of liberty,” and he boasted of imposing greatness on a people who loved art and life too much and warfare not enough. To be great, he said, a nation needs an empire. In 1935 he ordered that Italian troops invade what now is Ethiopia, in northeast Africa.
So the League now faced another test, and here again it failed. The members merely voted economic penalties for Italy, and even these lacked bite. (When Mussolini said that yes he would mind having his oil supply cut off, the League did as he wished!) Like the Japanese, Mussolini flounced — no, strutted — from the League. He proceeded with his war, using bombs and gas against a people mainly armed with spears, and when he won he trumpeted the founding of another Roman Empire.
Of all the awful portents of the great disaster that was soon to come, Hitler was the worst. Even in the 1920s he had made his plans quite clear. How fast he moved when he had taken power! In 1933, he pulled his country from the League of Nations. In 1935 he startled everyone by announcing that despite the Versailles Treaty, Germany would rearm. Britain, France, and even Italy protested, but Hitler knew what he could get away with. He built an army, and the biggest air force in the world, and he signed agreements with Japan and Italy that linked this outlaw trio in a union called the Axis.
Once, twice, thrice, he grabbed. He started with the Rhineland, a German province that the Versailles peace accords had made a disarmed buffer region shielding France from Germany. In 1936 Hitler boldly sent in troops — what few he had as yet — and took the Rhineland. Naturally, the major powers waxed indignant. France alone could easily have stopped him at this point but lacked the will. When the League of Nations council asked for talks, Hitler blandly answered that he wanted only peace and had “no territorial claims.”
That statement proved a lie. Hitler badly wanted Austria. For one thing he had been born there, and for another Austria was German-speaking, so its rightful place, he said, was with Germany, the nation of the master race. When Austrians discovered that a Nazi underground had planned a coup, intending to unite their country with Germany, the chancellor of Austria went to see the Leader. Far from offering excuses, Hitler shouted at the man. He told the Austrian to sign a list of Hitler’s demands, or “I will order the march into Austria.”
He signed, but Hitler sent his soldiers to the Austro-German border just the same. The Austrian leader asked Britain, France, and Italy to back him, but they wouldn’t. When the Austrian telephoned Mussolini, who by now was Hitler’s lackey, he refused to come to the telephone. Hitler coolly moved his troops across the border into Austria. He ran a plebiscite in Austria on joining Germany, and 99.75 percent voted yes.
Soon it was another neighbor’s turn to be embraced by Hitler. Small and democratic Czechoslovakia lay in the very heart of Europe. Now, after Germany took Austria, it all but encircled western Czechoslovakia. The people of the little country were mostly Slavs, who spoke Slovakian or Czech, but German-speaking people lived in Sudetenland, some hills along the German border. Hitler now began to clamor that the Slavic majority terrorized this German minority and had killed them by the thousands. He demanded that Czechoslovakia cede Sudetenland to Germany.
This demand produced a crisis, for a nation’s life was in the balance. Sudetenland held vital forts and mountain passes; if those were seized, the Czechs would be defenseless on that border. And losing land would be a gross humiliation. Then Hitler toughened his demands. He seemed to threaten to take over not Sudetenland alone but all of Czechoslovakia.
Now France and Britain faced this question: should they go to war to stymie Hitler? They didn’t want to go to war — not for Czechs, and certainly not then. British generals said that fighting Ge
rmany before you strengthened Britain’s air force would be like charging a tiger before you load your rifle.
With tension at its peak, Hitler, Mussolini, and the French and British leaders met in Munich. Showing what a decent chap he was, Hitler said all right, he’d take only Sudetenland, not all of Czechoslovakia. Happy to avoid a war, the French and British leaders signed the peace accord. To save their faces, though, they guaranteed support of what was left of Czechoslovakia. When they got back home to France and Britain they were met with cheers. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, told an English crowd that he had brought “peace with honor…peace for our time.”
So Hitler gulped Sudetenland, while two neighbors, Hungary and Poland, snapped chunks of eastern Czechoslovakia that he tossed them. It looked as if the rest of the little nation might be safe. Not so. In early 1939 German troops marched in and seized the rest of Czechoslovakia. Despite their promise, France and Britain stood aside and watched.
It now was clear to all that Hitler was a mortal threat to those around him. But no one knew, not even he, that all-out war was only half a year away.
Late in August 1939, Hitler and the Russian ruler, Stalin, shocked the world. In sight of all they signed a nonaggression pact. It looked as if the two, the leaders of the ultraright and ultraleft, had turned from foes to friends. Of course, they were not friends at all, and Hitler still was planning to demolish Russia, as had long been his dream. But he wanted Stalin to stay neutral for the moment while he crushed another neighbor, one whose luck it was to live between these brutes. Stalin, being half afraid of Hitler, was glad to come to terms.
Turning Points of World War II
A week later, waves of German planes flew eastward into Poland, shot up airplanes on the ground, blasted roads and railroads, and flattened some of Warsaw. A German training ship on a “goodwill mission” shelled a seaside Polish fort. “Panzer” (Panther) tanks stormed Polish lines and rumbled deep inside the country. Absurdly out of date, the Poles had only one brigade of tanks but twelve brigades of horsemen, armed with swords. The Germans quickly conquered half of Poland.
Meanwhile, Stalin made no protest. He and Hitler had agreed on Germany’s attack in secret clauses of their nonaggression pact. In return, the Germans now allowed the Russians to take over eastern Poland, which Russia had surrendered near the end of World War I. Just as Czechoslovakia had disappeared, so did Poland, once again partitioned into air.
In Poland, Hitler had employed a new and crushing kind of warfare called “blitzkrieg,” or lightning war. World War I had been a stalemate on the western front because defenses were so strong, thanks to trenches and machine guns. In World War II, however, thanks to tanks and planes, armies on the offense had the edge, and everything went fast. Tanks would race a thousand miles across the plains and sands. Bomber planes would streak across the sea at night, then return in time for breakfast. Between dawn and dusk a country might change hands.
Until his Polish onslaught, whenever Hitler bullied, France and Britain dithered. Not this time. Within two days from when he blitzed the Poles, the British and the French declared war on Germany. That this time they would fight him may have come to Hitler as a rude surprise. To this day no one knows if he had planned to take them on, or simply blundered into widespread war.
AND NOW THAT war, the worst the world has ever known, was under way. The fighting would continue for six years, and spread across much more of the earth than World War I had done. Here we have only sufficient canvas to let us sketch the great events.
For seven months in 1939–40 no all-out war took place. France and Britain were not ready. Germany was busy still in Poland and glad to spend the winter making plans and training troops. Someone named these months of waiting in suspense the “phony war.”
In spring, however, Hitler sent his armies into battle. Wanting northern navy bases, the Germans conquered Norway and Denmark. Soon after this, the House of Commons, Britain’s legislature, held tense debates. Britons wanted something more than caution, so as leader of the government they chose the bold and able Winston Churchill.
Now the Germans struck again, and hard. In May of 1940 German armies hit the Netherlands and Belgium. As in World War I, they were really aiming at France. British, French, Dutch, and Belgian armies waited for the Germans. However, they were ill prepared for blitzkrieg, and Hitler’s tanks and bombers stunned them. The Germans split the Allied front in two and surrounded Allied armies in the north. The Dutch and many French and Belgian troops surrendered.
The British troops, however, and some French and Belgian forces retreated. They reached the English Channel at a French seaport, Dunkerque (or Dunkirk), from which Britain was only fifty miles away. Could Britain somehow save them? Strangely, Hitler held his tanks back, leaving only planes to block his enemies’ escape. From England, tugboats, naval vessels, motorboats, paddle steamers, fishing boats, and yachts set out to save the troops. For a week these little boats, defended by the British air force, crossed the Channel many times. They rescued a third of a million men.
With Belgium and the Netherlands in hand, and Britain shoved aside, Germany could concentrate on France. Back in the early 1930s France’s generals had prepared for a defensive war, the kind they’d known in World War I. For nearly ninety miles along their German border they had built a massive chain of forts, the Maginot Line. As the Titanic had been thought unsinkable, these forts were thought impregnable. Just north and west of the Line were Belgium’s wooded Ardennes hills. The French saw these as a part of their defenses and were sure that German tanks could not get through them.
However, just as one might guess, instead of butting at the line of forts the Germans skirted it. Tanks and all, they plunged right through the Ardennes. The French fought poorly, and this time Paris toppled into German hands. Only then did the Germans storm and take the vaunted Maginot Line, but from the rear. On July 10, the French gave in. Hitler made them sign the papers of surrender on the very spot in France where, at the end of World War I, the defeated Germans had surrendered. The French collapse amazed the world, which wondered how, in but a month, so great a power had fallen.
At the end of World War I, Hitler had been a corporal. Since taking power, however, his army rank had risen. When his minister of war married a prostitute, Hitler fired him. He also fired his commanding general, falsely claiming he was gay. Then he named himself commander in chief. And so, in World War II, it was Hitler who made the big decisions for the Germans. He was quick to fire or even shoot a cautious general, and with utter confidence he made brilliant moves and ghastly blunders.
A year from when the war began, Britain was his only opposition and he had to swat that irritating fly. Only then could he destroy the Jews, subdue the Slavs, and conquer “living room” for Germany. All that lay between his troops and Britain was the narrow Channel, but if he was going to cross it he would need control of the air. His air force chief assured him that his planes could wipe out Britain’s in about five weeks. In August 1940 German planes began the air assault.
Germany had nearly twice as many planes, but Britain’s planes were better. Britain also had a new detection system, radar. By measuring the time it took for a radio wave to travel to an object and then bounce back, radar enabled the British to “sight” approaching German planes. The “Battle of Britain” lasted from August through October. Several thousand British and British Empire pilots, with a scattering of Poles, Czechs, French, and Belgians, more than held their own against the Germans. But German bombs gave British towns, especially London, a pounding worse than anything the world had ever seen.
Hitler hoped to shatter British spirits, but their morale held firm. On a day when German bombs shook London for six hours, the London Times reported the appearance in an air raid shelter of a crested grebe, an uncommon bird. Raucous British soldiers everywhere sang this ditty about Hitler and his leading colleagues, to the tune of “The Colonel Bogey March”: “HITler has only got one ball / GOERing
has two but very small / HIMMler has something sim’lar / As for Goebbels he’s no balls at all.”
In the end, Hitler reckoned that he couldn’t win the battle over Britain, and he canceled the invasion.
Meanwhile, Allied spies performed a useful feat. For highest-level messages, the Germans used a code machine they called Enigma. Poles and Britons got their hands on one and smuggled it to England. They discovered how it worked, and learned to read the code. Decoding called for brilliant math and cleverness in making use of small mistakes the Germans made when putting words in code. Unknowingly, the German typists helped decoders by starting messages with “Heil Hitler!” For the Allies, knowing German plans was priceless.
Hitler’s partner, Mussolini, proved less than useful. Only when he was sure that Germany had conquered France did Mussolini, hoping to make hay while the sun shone, send in bumbling and unneeded troops. He then invaded Greece, across the Adriatic Sea from Italy. Looking for an easy win, he found only disaster. The Greeks attacked his forces in their rugged hills and drove them out, and Hitler had to send in German troops to clean up Mussolini’s mess. Shortly after this fiasco, British planes surprised the Italian fleet at its naval base and sank three battleships at their moorings.
Also thanks to Italy, the war now reached another continent. In North Africa Italy owned a colony, Libya, and Britain treated Egypt as a military base. Side by side these countries stretched for endless miles across the desert, making them a perfect battleground for tanks. From Libya, Italian forces struck at Egypt, whereupon the British, using troops from India, pushed them back and captured 130,000 men. So Hitler had to help his ally once again. He sent down panzer tanks and his ablest general, Erwin Rommel. The British (and Australians and Poles) were waiting for him. Since Enigma had been cracked, they had read the Germans’ coded orders. But Rommel pushed them nearly back to Egypt just the same.
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