Hitler was under no illusions about the struggle ahead. He told the senior military on 28 August 1939, before the war had even started, that it would be ‘difficult and perhaps hopeless’. Halder remarked that the Führer looked in very bad shape: ‘bleary-eyed, frail, his voice breaking, [and] muddled’. ‘Hitler,’ another witness recorded ‘made a nervous, tired impression’, with ‘distracted glances and movements’. When he explained the situation to the Reichstag, he received only weak ‘dutiful applause’. The more Britain seemed likely to intervene, the shriller Hitler became. ‘So long as I live,’ he vowed, ‘there will be no talk of capitulation.’ ‘If push comes to shove,’ he told Brauchitsch, ‘I will wage a two-front war.’229 On 30 August, he received Gauleiter Förster of Danzig to give him the last instructions for the capture of the city. Tension with Warsaw was whipped up in a final crescendo. An incident was manufactured by the SS on the border with Poland, in which an attack on the German radio station at Gleiwitz was faked.230 Hitler was going to roll the dice again.
15
The ‘Haves’ and the ‘Have-Nots’
On 1 September 1939, the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. That same day, Hitler spoke in the Reichstag in a carefully choreographed appearance. He was addressing two audiences. One was the German people. To them, the Führer sought to justify the decision for war, and to shore up morale. For this reason, Hitler promised ‘no privations for Germans which I will not immediately share’. He underlined his new role as ‘the first soldier of the German Reich’1 by donning a simple grey jacket. The other addressee was the western powers, whose intervention he was anxious to avert. To them, Hitler signalled that he had ‘no claims in the west’ and that ‘our Westwall’ was ‘the border of the Reich for all times’. He also stressed that there would be no ‘capitulation’. ‘I would like to reassure the world at large,’ he averred, that ‘there will never be another November 1918 in German history.’2 It was the first of several wartime speeches, which Hitler used carefully for messaging purposes over the next six years. ‘In wartime I must weigh every word as if it were gold,’ he said, ‘because the world is attentive and sensitive.’ Hitler now rationed his appearances. ‘It was dangerous,’ he remarked, ‘to make speeches without having a plausible reason for doing so.’3
The Polish campaign was a resounding success.4 Danzig was captured in a coup de main. German tanks quickly overran the border defences, and advanced rapidly into the heart of the country. The plan of attack had been drawn up by the military leadership, but with considerable input from Hitler.5 He had disguised the offensive preparations as defensive measures. Hitler himself planned the commando operation against the bridge at Dirschau down to the smallest detail. More importantly, he had also insisted the pincer movement from East Prussia would not merely be a limited push to secure the Corridor but a much larger ‘great pincer’ designed to trap as many Polish forces as possible.6 Hitler did not, however, interfere in the operational conduct of the campaign, though he insisted on being briefed twice daily by telephone. Instead, shortly after the start of hostilities, Hitler set off on the first of several much-heralded ‘frontline travels’ to underline his commitment to his men. These journeys were not entirely without risk, as they exposed the Führer to air attack and even friendly fire, but they were essentially propaganda stunts.7 Hitler popped up at bridges and fords, or in field hospitals, with each photo opportunity calculated to give an impression of dynamism and ubiquity. The Poles proved no push-over, inflicting nearly 50,000 casualties, about a quarter of them dead, and they even launched a serious counter-attack on the Bzura against the forces advancing on Warsaw from the south-west.8 A fortnight into the campaign Hitler was sufficiently worried to urge the Soviet Union to hasten its intervention. On 17 September, Stalin invaded Poland from the east, taking a lot of pressure off the Wehrmacht. Nazi and Soviet forces met at Brest-Litovsk. Soon Polish resistance collapsed. Ribbentrop set off to Moscow to sort out the final details of the respective zones of occupation. The Führer returned to Berlin in triumph.
Hitler had been vindicated yet again, crowning two years of masterly manoeuvring in central and eastern Europe. Throughout the 1930s he prevented the Sudeten Germans from rebelling prematurely. Hitler had not responded to the Anglo-Czech ‘provocation’ in May 1938. Then he turned the Poles and the Hungarians against Prague in September of that year. Subsequently Hitler let loose the Slovaks on the Czechs, facilitating the seizure of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939. During all this time, he had also kept the great powers at arm’s length. In September 1939, he isolated Warsaw, securing the collaboration of Slovakia and the Soviet Union for his attack. Each of these moves had been a gamble and required strong nerves, and each time Hitler’s audacity had paid off.
His hope that the war could be localized, however, was quickly dashed. On 3 September 1939, Britain and France declared war. Hitler was not surprised, but he was deeply shaken. That same day, Unity Mitford attempted suicide in the Englischer Garten in Munich. It is not clear whether the outbreak of war was the immediate motivation, but the date and symbolism of her act makes it highly likely. Despite his many other commitments, Hitler arranged and paid for the necessary medical care.9 Unity’s despair epitomized the failure of Hitler’s British policy, with its assumption of common racial ground and reliance on go-betweens. As for the United States she remained neutral for now, but her fundamental antipathy to the Third Reich was not in doubt. Roosevelt’s public strictures were on record; in private he was beginning to talk about concrete ways in which he could prevent Hitler from breaking through to the Atlantic.10 The United States was already waging a cold war against largely imaginary Nazi subversion in Latin America, and indeed against the generally blameless German population there.11
If Hitler had succeeded militarily by late September 1939, the position was more ambivalent politically. He had frequently predicted, despite knowing better, that the western powers would not intervene, and he had promised that there would be no ‘two-front war’. Now he had one. The conflict was not popular at home.12 Most Germans wanted the Poles to be taught a lesson, and to see the return of territories lost to Poland at Versailles, but they had no appetite whatsoever for another war against Britain and France. They greeted the attack on Poland with reserve and the Allied declaration of war with alarm. There was no trace of the enthusiasm which greeted mobilization in 1914. The streets were dark and empty. Hitler was well aware of these sentiments, which he had first noted during the Sudeten crisis, had inveighed against on many occasions since, and which were being monitored in detail by the surveillance apparatus of the Sicherheitsdienst.13 Victory over Poland brought some relief, but popular anxiety about the threat from Britain and France persisted.
Hitler was therefore determined to take ownership of the Polish victory, which he used to buttress his domestic position and to inspire confidence in his future direction of the conflict against the western powers. His proprietorial feelings were exposed when Fritsch was killed on the front line near Warsaw. Hitler was infuriated by Jodl’s remark that ‘the Wehrmacht [had] lost its best soldier’, which he seems to have read as a challenge to his own status as ‘the first soldier’ of the Reich. Brauchitsch made matters worse by referring to Fritsch as the ‘creator of the new army’, another accolade that Hitler felt were rightfully his. The Führer’s insecurity and jealousy in these matters was revealed by his decision to keep the news of Fritsch’s death under wraps for some time, to deny him the trappings of martyrdom, and then by his absence at the memorial service. Throughout the next seven months, in fact, Hitler carefully curated his image as the victor in Poland, personally selecting photographs for publication and suppressing rival narratives from the army propaganda machine and other sources.14
The Führer was in no doubt who the main enemy was: Britain and the Jews. His speech to the Reichstag responding to the declaration of war by the western powers hardly mentioned France or the Poles. Instead, Hitler emphasized the continuity of Britain’s policy of a
‘balance of power’ in Europe in order to make the continent ‘defenceless’ in the face of the ‘ideology of British world domination’. After Spain, the Dutch and France, he continued, it was now Germany’s turn to suffer ‘the encirclement strategy pursued by Britain’, of which Warsaw had merely been an instrument. In his second proclamation to the eastern army serving in Poland, issued the same day that Chamberlain declared war, he listed Britain’s alleged pre-First World War ‘encirclement strategy’, well ahead of Polish treatment of the German minority as the casus belli.15
Hitler also stressed the ideological dimension of the war, which pitted Germany against the ‘Jewish-democratic world enemy’, and the ‘capitalist war mongers of England and her satellites’.16 The Jews, Hitler claimed, had manipulated the ‘British people’ into war with Germany in order to maintain the international capitalist order–run by a ‘plutocratic and democratic ruling class’–against the social aspirations of the Third Reich.17 Hitler would have been confirmed in this view by the fact that Chaim Weizmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress and head of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, had written to Chamberlain on the eve of war–29 August 1939–to tell him that ‘the Jews stand by Great Britain and will fight on the side of the democracies’, and ‘place ourselves, in matters big and small, under the co-ordinating direction of his Majesty’s Government’; this letter was published in The Times three days after Britain declared war. Of course, Weizmann was only responding to Hitler’s own repeated declarations of war on the Jews and in any case did not represent all Jews.18
For all these reasons, Hitler waged war against the Jews from the very start of hostilities. This was partly because the outbreak of war meant that, from his point of view, the removal of the remaining 300,000 Jews in the Reich had to be accelerated; partly because the defeat of Poland brought several million additional Jews under his control; but mainly because he saw international Jewry as the directing mind behind the enemy coalition. Such was Hitler’s fear that Jews constituted a fifth column in Germany that he ordered the confiscation of all Jewish telephones. In late September 1939, he instructed Heydrich that any territories taken from Poland were to be cleared of Jews, all of whom were to be concentrated in a reservation near Lublin. A week later, Hitler said that German Jews should be resettled ‘between Bug and Vistula’,19 and during the following month some were indeed transported there. Hitler did not necessarily watch over every stage of the implementation of anti-Jewish policy, but he was certainly responsible for its broad outlines. Towards the end of the year, Bormann stated clearly that all such measures undertaken by Himmler’s SS were to be agreed with the Führer.20
Equally important to Hitler as the armed campaign against Britain and the Jews was the international propaganda struggle to discredit enemy narratives and to promote those of the Third Reich. The Führer was determined here not to repeat the failures of the First World War. On 8 September, he issued a decree giving Ribbentrop control of external propaganda.21 It was an important victory for the Foreign Office over Goebbels and it reflected Hitler’s desire for coordination between the foreign messaging of the regime and its foreign policy, especially with regard to neutrals. ‘Propaganda,’ Hitler stated, ‘is an important instrument with which the leadership can promote and strengthen one’s own will to win and to destroy the will to win and morale of the enemy.’ He attached so much importance to this work that he compared the possible destruction of the propaganda machine to the loss of ‘certain parts of the Wehrmacht’.22 Central to this endeavour was the ‘enlightenment’ of the outside world about the nefarious nature of international Jewry, to which end the anti-Semitic ‘World Service’ was translated into eight languages.23 At the same time, at Hitler’s express request, Nazi broadcasts in Arabic targeted alleged British imperial atrocities in Palestine in September 1939.24
Even at this early stage, therefore, the nature of the war was becoming clear. It was Hitler’s response to the German predicament at the heart of Europe, an attempt to escape what he saw as her historic encirclement and subjugation. Now that he had given up all hopes of a British alliance, and of accommodation with Anglo-America, his language shifted from that of Nordic solidarity to that of a global class conflict in which he substituted nations for the classic Marxist social categories. The United States and the British Empire, on this reading, were the ‘haves’, the lords of all they surveyed. The Germans, by contrast, were firmly among the ‘have-nots’, ground down by the forces of ‘plutocracy’, which were determined to extirpate the contagious social model of the Nazi Volksstaat. They would have to redress the unjust global distribution of living space by force. The Führer also emphasized the ideological conflict between democracy and dictatorship. Finally, Hitler saw the struggle as a cosmic racial conflict, not just–most obviously–between Germans and Jews, but also an inter-Aryan civil war, between Teutons and Anglo-Saxons.
Allied strategy against the Third Reich in 1939 rested on blockading Germany and bringing the full weight of the combined British, French and (in effect) American economies to bear on the Reich. There was no immediate ground offensive, and instead of massive air-raids on German cities and factories, British and French aircraft dropped leaflets in what was still a largely political and ‘phoney’ war. The war at sea, by contrast, was waged with vigour from the start as the Allies sought to strangle Germany, and Hitler tried to keep their fingers off his throat. Considerable thought was given to the task of choking off German supplies of oil and iron ore.25 Time was to expose the British and French strategy as complacent, but at the time it appeared compelling. The figures seemed to tell a clear story. Taken together, the economies of the British and French empires were easily twice the size of that of Germany, even before the United States was taken into account.26 Their demographic potential, particularly if colonial possessions were taken into account, was also considerably larger.27 It was only a matter of time before this huge potential was converted into raw military power and hurled against the Reich. On the face of it, the war with the west–even without the blockade–was a contest Germany simply could not win.
Hitler was painfully aware of all this, as his constant rhetoric about the ability of the Reich to outlast another blockade showed. Moreover, for all his public bluster about the decadence of the British, he retained a healthy respect for their spirit and racial quality. The Führer’s sense of Germany’s weakness was widely shared not only by the population at large but also by the military leadership. It was particularly marked in the Kriegsmarine, whose inferiority was so crushing that Admiral Raeder reacted to the outbreak of war by suggesting that it could only hope ‘to die with decency’ so as ‘to provide the basis for a later rebuilding’ of German naval power.28 Later that month, he warned Hitler that he did not yet have enough submarines to starve out Britain. The army was in better shape, but its superiority over the combined French and British forces, once fully mobilized and deployed, was by no means clear. Likewise, the Luftwaffe enjoyed only a slight and eroding advantage over the RAF in quantity and quality of pilots and aircraft. Indeed, Hitler remained obsessed with the threat of allied air attack on German cities and especially on his exposed western industrial heartlands in the Ruhr. The Luftwaffe, by contrast, did not yet have the range to strike at England; it was still a purely tactical air force.29
The Führer’s options in 1939 were limited. German society was already very highly mobilized.30 The Allies would soon catch up as the outbreak of war ended the comparative advantage of dictatorship, namely the higher level of peacetime military and psychological mobilization. Besides, the blockade not merely restricted Germany’s access to raw materials and foodstuffs, but also unplugged her from the world economy, which now became an instrument of the Allied war effort. One way or the other, as Keitel told the head of the War Economics Office, General Thomas, ‘The Führer himself has recognized that we cannot last out a war of long duration. The war must be finished rapidly.’31
Faced with these realities, Hit
ler took some radical decisions with respect to the economy. All pretence of competing with the west in terms of consumption was abandoned. ‘One cannot win the war against England with cookers and washing machines,’ he told General Karl Becker, the head of army procurement in early November 1939.32 Plans for social housing were largely deferred until the end of the war. Plan Z, the attempt to challenge the ‘big ships’ of the Royal Navy and the United States, was shelved at the start of the war. Hitler decided to concentrate on submarines instead. In late September, Hitler queried the need to continue construction of Germany’s first aircraft carrier, the Graf Zeppelin, though he was dissuaded from halting it by Raeder.33 With the army, the emphasis was not so much on tanks as on artillery and ammunition production, which suggests that Hitler was not expecting a Blitzkrieg but a long hard slog in the west.
Strategically, Hitler’s was concerned to mitigate the effects of encirclement and the blockade. He stepped up efforts to bring Italy into the war as soon as possible. Hitler also pursued closer relations with Japan, principally with a view to keeping the US fleet tied up in the Pacific.34 In late September 1939, as the Polish campaign was drawing to a close, Hitler received a delegation of visiting Japanese military. He told them that their two countries were the only two great powers in the world which had no clashing interests. The primary basis of German-Japanese collaboration, in other words, was not their mutual antagonism to the Soviet Union and communism, but their shared hostility to the Anglo-American world order.
Hitler’s most useful partner, in fact, proved to be Stalin.35 The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact provided the Third Reich with the strategic depth and access to grain and oil with which to defy the blockade. Raeder even wanted to ask the Russians for bases from which to harass British shipping, and Hitler agreed to send the request to Moscow via Ribbentrop.36 That said, Hitler did not regard the agreement as more than an expedient. He never denied his ideological differences with the Soviet Union, or took back anything that he had said, but he did stress the geopolitical common ground against London.37 The confrontation with the west left him with little choice.
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