16

Going for Broke

I

After Munich things started to move fast. With the dismembered state of Czechoslovakia now friendless and, with its border fortifications lost, exposed, and at Germany’s mercy, the completion of the plans made in 1938 for its liquidation was only a matter of time. As we saw, that had been Hitler’s view even before he acceded to the Munich Agreement.

Beyond the rump of Czechoslovakia, German attention was immediately turned on Poland. There was no plan at this stage for invasion and conquest. The aim – soon proving illusory – was to bind Poland to Germany against Russia (thereby also blocking any possibility of an alliance with the French). At the same time, the intention was to reach agreement over Danzig and the Corridor (the land which Germany had been forced to cede to Poland in the Versailles Treaty of 1919, giving the Poles access to the sea but leaving East Prussia detached from the remainder of the Reich). Already by late October, Ribbentrop was proposing to settle all differences between Germany and Poland by an agreement for the return of Danzig together with railway and road passage through the Corridor – not in itself a novel idea – in return for a free port for Poland in the Danzig area and an extension of the non-aggression treaty to twenty-five years with a joint guarantee of frontiers.

The proposal met with a predictably stony response from the Polish government. The obduracy of the Poles, especially over Danzig, rapidly brought the first signs of Hitler’s own impatience, and an early indication of preparations to take Danzig by force. Hitler was nevertheless at this point more interested in a negotiated settlement with the Poles. Misleadingly informed by Ribbentrop of Polish readiness in principle to move to a new settlement of the Danzig question and the Corridor, he emphasized German-Polish friendship during his speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939. Some army leaders, a few days earlier, had been more belligerent. In contrast to their overriding fears of western intervention during the Sudeten crisis, a number of generals now argued that Britain and France would remain inactive – a direct reflection of the weakness of the western powers fully revealed at Munich – and that negotiations with the Poles should be abandoned in favour of military measures. A war against Poland, they claimed, would be popular among the troops and among the German people.

Ribbentrop, aided by Göring, played – for strategic reasons – the moderate on this occasion. For him, the main enemy was not Poland, but Britain. He countered that, through a premature attack in 1939 on Poland and Russia, Germany would become isolated, would forfeit its armaments advantage, and would most likely be forced by western strength to give up any territorial gains made. Instead, Germany needed to act together with Italy and Japan, retaining Polish neutrality until France had been dealt with and Britain at least isolated and denied all power on the Continent, if not militarily defeated. War by Germany and Italy to defeat France and leave Britain isolated had been the basis of the military directives laid down by Keitel, in line with Hitler’s instructions, in November 1938. The priority which Hitler accorded in January 1939 to the navy’s Z-Plan, for building a big battle-fleet directed squarely at British naval power, indicates that he was looking at this stage to an eventual showdown with the western powers as the prime military objective. The construction at the same time of an ‘East Wall’ – limited defensive fortifications for the event of possible conflict with Poland over Danzig – is a further pointer in that direction. Russia, and the eradication of Bolshevism, could wait. But neither Hitler nor anyone in his entourage expected war with Britain and France to come about in the way that it would do that autumn.

In the late autumn and winter of 1938–9, differing views about foreign-policy aims and methods existed within the German leadership. Long-term military preparations were directed towards eventual confrontation with the West, but it was well recognized that the armed forces were years away from being ready for any conflict with Britain and France. As in 1938, military leaders’ prime fear was confrontation being forced on Germany too soon through impetuous actions and an over-risky foreign policy. Göring and Ribbentrop were advocating diametrically opposed policies towards Britain. Göring’s hopes still rested on an expansive policy in south-eastern Europe, backed for the foreseeable future by an understanding with Britain. Ribbentrop, by now violently anti-British, was pinning his hopes on smoothing the problems on Germany’s eastern front and tightening the alliance with Italy and Japan to prepare the ground for a move against Britain as soon as was feasible. But at this stage, Göring’s star was temporarily on the wane and Ribbentrop’s usually clumsy diplomacy was meeting in most instances with little success. Hitler’s thoughts, whether or not influenced by Ribbentrop’s reasoning, were broadly consonant with those of his Foreign Minister. The coming showdown with Bolshevism, though certainly not displaced in Hitler’s own mind as the decisive struggle to be faced at some point in the future, had by now moved again into the shadows. But he was, as usual, content to keep his options open and await developments.

The one certainty was that developments would occur, thus providing the opportunity for German expansion. For there was no agency of power or influence in the Third Reich advocating drawing a line under the territorial gains already made. All power-groups were looking to further expansion – with or without war.

Military, strategic, and power-political arguments for expansion were underpinned by economic considerations. By late 1938, the pressures of the forced rearmament programme were making themselves acutely felt. The policy of ‘rearm, whatever the cost’ was now plainly showing itself to be sustainable only in the short term. Further expansion was necessary if the tensions built into the overheated armaments-driven economy were not to reach explosion point. By 1938–9, it was absolutely evident that further expansion could not be postponed indefinitely if the economic impasses were to be surmounted.

In early January 1939, the Reichsbank Directorate sent Hitler a submission, supported by eight signatories, demanding financial restraint to avoid the ‘threatening danger of inflation’. Hitler’s reaction was: ‘That is mutiny!’ Twelve days later, Schacht was sacked as President of the Reichsbank. But the Cassandra voices were not exaggerating. Nor would the problem go away by sacking Schacht. The insatiable demand for raw materials at the same time that consumer demand in the wake of the armaments boom was rising had left public finances in a desolate state.

Beyond the crisis in public finances, the labour shortage which had been growing rapidly since 1937 was by this time posing a real threat both to agriculture and to industry. The only remedy for the foreseeable future was the use of ‘foreign labourers’ that war and expansion would bring. The mounting economic problems confirmed for Hitler his diagnosis that Germany’s position could never be strengthened without territorial conquest.

II

Hitler’s regrets over the Munich Agreement and feeling that a chance had been lost to occupy the whole of Czechoslovakia at one fell swoop had grown rather than diminished during the last months of 1938. His impatience to act had mounted accordingly. He was determined not to be hemmed in by the western powers. He was more than ever convinced that they would not have fought for Czechoslovakia, and that they would and could do nothing to prevent Germany extending its dominance in central and eastern Europe. On the other hand, as he had indicated to Goebbels in October, he was certain that Britain would not concede German hegemony in Europe without a fight at some time. The setback which Munich had been in his eyes confirmed his view that war against the West was coming, probably sooner than he had once envisaged, and that there was no time to lose if Germany were to retain its advantage.

Already on 21 October 1938, only three weeks after the Munich settlement, Hitler had given the Wehrmacht a new directive to prepare for the ‘liquidation of remainder of the Czech state’. Why was Hitler so insistent on this? Politically it was not necessary. Indeed, the German leadership cannot fail to have recognized that an invasion of Czechoslovakia, tearing up the Munich Agreement and breaking solemn promises given only such a short time earlier, would inevitably have the most serious international repercussions.

Part of the answer is doubtless to be found in Hitler’s own personality and psychology. His Austrian background and dislike of Czechs since his youth was probably one element. Yet after occupation, the persecution of the Czechs was by no means as harsh as that subsequently meted out to the conquered Poles. And, following his victorious entry into Prague, Hitler showed remarkably little interest in the Czechs.

More important, certainly, was the feeling that he had been ‘cheated’ out of his triumph, his ‘unalterable wish’ altered by western politicians. ‘That fellow Chamberlain has spoiled my entry into Prague,’ he was overheard saying on his return to Berlin after the agreement at Munich the previous autumn. And yet, Goebbels’s diary entries show that Hitler had decided before Munich that he would temporarily concede to the western powers, but gobble up the rest of Czechoslovakia in due course, and that the acquisition of the Sudetenland would make that second stage easier. Though a rationalization of the position Hitler had been manoeuvred into, it indicates the acceptance by that date of a two-stage plan to acquire the whole of Czechoslovakia, and does not highlight vengeance as a motive.

There were other reasons for occupying the rump of Czechoslovakia that went beyond Hitler’s personal motivation. Economic considerations were of obvious importance. However pliant the Czechs were prepared to be, the fact remained that even after the transfer of October 1938, which brought major raw material deposits to the Reich, immense resources remained in Czecho-Slovakia (as the country, the meaningful hyphen inserted, was now officially called) and outside direct German control. The vast bulk of the industrial wealth and resources of the country lay in the old Czech heartlands of Bohemia and Moravia, not in the largely agricultural Slovakia. An estimated four-fifths of engineering, machine-tool construction, and electrical industries remained in the hands of the Czechs. Textiles, chemicals, and the glass industry were other significant industries that beckoned the Germans. Not least, the Skoda works produced locomotives and machinery as well as arms. Czecho-Slovakia also possessed large quantities of gold and foreign currency that could certainly help relieve some of the shortages of the Four-Year Plan. And a vast amount of equipment could be taken over and redeployed to the advantage of the German army. The Czech arsenal was easily the greatest among the smaller countries of central Europe. The Czech machine-guns, field-guns, and anti-aircraft guns were thought to be better than the German equivalents. They would all be taken over by the Reich, as well as the heavy guns built at the Skoda factories. It was subsequently estimated that enough arms had fallen into Hitler’s possession to equip a further twenty divisions.

But of even greater importance than direct economic gain and exploitation was the military-strategic position of what remained of CzechoSlovakia. As long as the Czechs retained some autonomy, and possession of extensive military equipment and industrial resources, potential difficulties from that quarter could not be ruled out in the event of German involvement in hostilities. More important still: possession of the rectangular, mountain-rimmed territories of Bohemia and Moravia on the south-eastern edge of the Reich offered a recognizable platform for further eastward expansion and military domination. The road to the Balkans was now open. Germany’s position against Poland was strengthened. And in the event of conflict in the west, the defences in the east were consolidated.

As late as December 1938, there was no indication that Hitler was preparing an imminent strike against the Czechs. There were hints, however, that the next moves in foreign policy would not be long delayed. Hitler told Ernst Neumann, the German leader in Memel (a seaport on the Baltic with a largely German population, which had been removed from Germany by the Versailles Treaty), on 17 December that annexation of Memelland would take place in the following March or April, and that he wanted no crisis in the area before then. On 13 February, Hitler let it be known to a few associates that he intended to take action against the Czechs in mid-March. German propaganda was adjusted accordingly. The French had already gleaned intelligence in early February that German action against Prague would take place in about six weeks.

Hitler’s meeting at the Berghof with the Polish Foreign Minister and strong man in the government, Józef Beck, on 5 January had proved, from the German point of view, disappointing. Hitler had tried to appear accommodating in laying down the need for Danzig to return to Germany, and for access routes across the Corridor to East Prussia. Beck implied that public opinion in Poland would prevent any concessions on Danzig. When Ribbentrop returned empty-handed from his visit to Warsaw on 26 January, indicating that the Poles were not to be moved, Hitler’s approach to Poland changed markedly.

From friendly overtures, the policy moved to pressure. Poland was to be excluded from any share in the spoils from the destruction of the Czech state. And turning Slovakia into a German puppet-state would intensify the threat to Poland’s southern border. Once the demolition of Czecho-Slovakia had taken place, therefore, the Germans hoped and expected the Poles to prove more cooperative. The failure of negotiations with the Poles had probably accelerated the decision to destroy the Czech state.

Around this time, according to Goebbels, Hitler spoke practically of nothing else but foreign policy. ‘He’s always pondering new plans,’ Goebbels noted. ‘A Napoleonic nature!’ The Propaganda Minister had already guessed what was in store when Hitler told him at the end of January he was going ‘to the mountain’ – to the Obersalzberg – to think about his next steps in foreign policy. ‘Perhaps Czechia is up for it again. The problem is after all only half solved,’ he wrote.

III

By the beginning of March, in the light of mounting Slovakian nationalist clamour (abetted by Germany) for full independence from Prague, the break-up of what was left of the state of Czecho-Slovakia looked to close observers of the scene to be a matter of time. When the Prague government deposed the Slovakian cabinet, sent police in to occupy government offices in Bratislava, and placed the former Prime Minister, Father Jozef Tiso, under house arrest, Hitler spotted his moment. On 10 March, he told Goebbels, Ribbentrop, and Keitel that he had decided to march in, smash the rump Czech state, and occupy Prague. The invasion was to take place five days later. ‘Our borders must stretch to the Carpathians,’ noted Goebbels. ‘The Führer shouts for joy. This game is dead certain.’

On 12 March orders were given to the army and Luftwaffe to be ready to enter Czecho-Slovakia at 6 a.m. on the 15th, but before then not to approach within ten kilometres of the border. German mobilization was by that stage so obvious that it seemed impossible that the Czechs were unaware of what was happening. The propaganda campaign against the Czechs had meanwhile been sharply stepped up. That evening, Tiso had been visited by German officials and invited to Berlin. The next day he met Hitler. He was told the historic hour of the Slovaks had arrived. If they did nothing, they would be swallowed up by Hungary. Tiso got the message. By the following noon, 14 March, back in Bratislava, he had the Slovak Assembly proclaim independence. The desired request for ‘protection’ was, however, only forthcoming a day later, after German warships on the Danube had trained their sights on the Slovakian government offices.

Goebbels listened again to Hitler unfolding his plans. The entire ‘action’ would be over within eight days. The Germans would already be in Prague within a day, their planes within two hours. No bloodshed was expected. ‘Then the Führer wants to fit in a lengthy period of political calm,’ wrote Goebbels, adding that he did not believe it, however enticing the prospect. A period of calm, he thought, was necessary. ‘Gradually, the nerves aren’t coping.’

On the morning of 14 March, the anticipated request came from Prague, seeking an audience of the Czech State President Dr Emil Hácha with Hitler. Hácha, a small, shy, somewhat unworldly, and also rather sickly man, in office since the previous November, arrived in Berlin during the course of the evening, after a five-hour train journey. Hitler kept him nervously waiting until midnight to increase the pressure upon him – ‘the old tested methods of political tactics’, as Goebbels put it. It was around 1 a.m. when, his face red from nervousness and anxiety, the Czech President was eventually ushered into the intimidating surroundings of Hitler’s grandiose ‘study’ in the New Reich Chancellery. A sizeable gathering, including Ribbentrop, the head of his personal staff Walther Hewel, Keitel, Weizsäcker, State Secretary Otto Meissner, Press Chief Otto Dietrich, and interpreter Paul Schmidt, were present. Göring, summoned back from holiday, was also there.

Hitler was at his most intimidating. He launched into a violent tirade against the Czechs and the ‘spirit of Beneš’ which, he claimed, still lived on. It was necessary in order to safeguard the Reich, he continued, to impose a protectorate over the remainder of Czecho-Slovakia. Hácha and Chvalkovský, the Czech Foreign Minister, who had accompanied the President to Berlin, sat stony-faced and motionless. The entry of German troops was ‘irreversible’, ranted Hitler. Keitel would confirm that they were already marching towards the Czech border, and would cross it at 6 a.m. Hácha said he wanted no bloodshed, and asked Hitler to halt the military build-up. Hitler refused: it was impossible; the troops were already mobilized. Göring intervened to add that his Luftwaffe would be over Prague by dawn, and it was in Hácha’s hands whether bombs fell on the beautiful city. At the threat, the Czech President fainted. He was revived by an injection from Hitler’s personal physician, Dr Morell.

Meanwhile, Prague could not be reached by telephone. Eventually, contact was made. The browbeaten President went immediately to the telephone and, on a crackly line, passed on his orders that Czech troops were not to open fire on the invading Germans. Just before 4 a.m., Hácha signed the declaration, placing the fate of his people in the hands of the Leader of the German Reich.

Overjoyed, Hitler went in to see his two secretaries, Christa Schroeder and Gerda Daranowski, who had been on duty that night. ‘So, children,’ he burst out, pointing to his cheeks, ‘each of you give me a kiss there and there … This is the happiest day of my life. What has been striven for in vain for centuries, I have been fortunate enough to bring about. I have achieved the union of Czechia with the Reich. Hácha has signed the agreement. I will go down as the greatest German in history.’

Two hours after Hácha had signed, the German army crossed the Czech borders and marched, on schedule, on Prague. By 9.00 a.m. the forward units entered the Czech capital, making slow progress on ice-bound roads, through mist and snow, the wintry weather providing an appropriate backcloth to the end of central Europe’s last, betrayed, democracy. The Czech troops, as ordered, remained in their barracks and handed over their weapons.

Hitler left Berlin at midday, travelling in his special train as far as Leipa, some sixty miles north of Prague, where he arrived during the afternoon. A fleet of Mercedes was waiting to take him and his entourage the remainder of the journey to Prague. It was snowing heavily, but he stood for much of the way, his arm outstretched to salute the unending columns of German soldiers they overtook. Unlike his triumphal entries into Austria and the Sudetenland, only a thin smattering of the population watched sullenly and helplessly from the side of the road. A few dared to greet with clenched fists as Hitler’s car passed by. But the streets were almost deserted by the time he arrived in Prague in the early evening and drove up to the Hradschin Castle, the ancient residence of the Kings of Bohemia. When the people of Prague awoke next morning, they saw Hitler’s standard fluttering on the castle. Twenty-four hours later he was gone. For the Czechs, six long years of subjugation had begun.

Hitler returned to Berlin, via Vienna, on 19 March, to the inevitable, and by now customary, triumphator’s reception. Despite the freezing temperatures, huge numbers turned out to welcome the hero. When Hitler descended from his train at the Görlitzer Bahnhof, Göring, tears in his eyes, greeted him with an address embarrassing even by the prevailing standards of sycophancy. Thousands cheered wildly as Hitler was driven to the Reich Chancellery. The experienced hand of Dr Goebbels had organized another massive spectacular. Searchlights formed a ‘tunnel of light’ along Unter den Linden. A brilliant display of fireworks followed. Hitler then appeared on the balcony of the Reich Chancellery, waving to the ecstatic crowd of his adoring subjects below.

The real response among the German people to the rape of CzechoSlovakia was, however, more mixed – in any event less euphoric – than that of the cheering multitudes, many of them galvanized by party activists, in Berlin. This time there had been no ‘home-coming’ of ethnic Germans into the Reich. The vague notion that Bohemia and Moravia had belonged to the ‘German living space’ for a thousand years left most people cold – certainly most north Germans who had traditionally had little or no connection with the Czech lands. For many, as one report from a Nazi District Leader put it, whatever the joy in the Führer’s ‘great deeds’ and the trust placed in him, ‘the needs and cares of daily life are so great that the mood is very quickly gloomy again’. There was a good deal of indifference, scepticism, and criticism, together with worries that war was a big step closer. ‘Was that necessary?’ many people asked. They remembered Hitler’s precise words following the Munich Agreement, that the Sudetenland had been his ‘last territorial demand’.

Hitler had been contemptuous of the western powers before the taking of Prague. He correctly judged that once more they would protest, but do nothing. However, everything points to the conclusion that he miscalculated the response of Britain and France afterthe invasion of Czecho-Slovakia. The initial reaction in London was one of shock and dismay at the cynical demolition of the Munich Agreement, despite the warnings the British government had received. Appeasement policy lay shattered in the ruins of the Czecho-Slovakian state. Hitler had broken his promise that he had no further territorial demands to make. And the conquest of Czecho-Slovakia had destroyed the fiction that Hitler’s policies were aimed at the uniting of German peoples in a single state. Hitler, it was now abundantly clear – a recognition at last and very late in the day – could not be trusted. He would stop at nothing.

Chamberlain’s speech in Birmingham on 17 March hinted at a new policy. ‘Is this the last attack upon a small State, or is it to be followed by others?’ he asked. ‘Is this, in fact, a step in the direction of an attempt to dominate the world by force?’ British public opinion was in no doubt. Hitler had united a country deeply divided over Munich. On all sides people were saying that war with Germany was both inevitable and necessary. Recruitment for the armed forces increased almost overnight. It was now clear both to the man in the street and to the government: Hitler had to be tackled.

The following day, 18 March, amid rumours circulating that Germany was threatening Romania, the British cabinet endorsed the Prime Minister’s recommendation of a fundamental change in policy. No reliance could any longer be placed on the assurances of the Nazi leaders, Chamberlain stated. The old policy of trying to come to terms with the dictatorships on the assumption that they had limited aims was no longer possible. The policy had shifted from trying to appease Hitler to attempting to deter him. In any new aggression, Germany would be faced at the outset with the choice of pulling back or going to war. The Prime Minister had little doubt as to where trouble might next flare up. ‘He thought that Poland was very likely the key to the situation … The time had now come for those who were threatened by German aggression (whether immediately or ultimately) to get together. We should enquire how far Poland was prepared to go along these lines.’ The British Guarantee to Poland and the genesis of the summer crisis which, this time, would end in war were foreshadowed in Chamberlain’s remarks.

Similar reactions were registered in Paris. Daladier let Chamberlain know that the French would speed up rearmament and resist any further aggression. The Americans were told that Daladier was determined to go to war should the Germans act against Danzig or Poland. Even strong advocates of appeasement were now saying enough was enough: there would not be another Munich.

IV

Before the Polish crisis unfolded, Hitler had one other triumph to register – though compared with what had gone before, it was a minor one. The incorporation of Memelland in the German Reich was now to prove the last annexation without bloodshed. After its removal from Germany in 1919, the Memel district, with a mainly German population but a sizeable Lithuanian minority, had been placed under French administration. The Lithuanians had marched in, forcing the withdrawal of the French occupying force there in January 1923. The following year, under international agreement, the Memel had gained a level of independence, but remained in effect a German enclave under Lithuanian tutelage.

Politically, the return of the territory to Germany was of no great significance. Even symbolically, it was of relatively little importance. Few ordinary Germans took more than a passing interest in the incorporation of such a remote fleck of territory into the Reich. But the acquisition of a port on the Baltic, with the possibility that Lithuania, too, might be turned into a German satellite, had strategic relevance. Alongside the subordination to German influence of Slovakia on the southern borders of Poland, it gave a further edge to German pressure on the Poles.

On 20 March, Ribbentrop subjected the Lithuanian Foreign Minister, Joseph Urbšys, to the usual bullying tactics. Kowno would be bombed, he threatened, if Germany’s demand for the immediate return of the Memel were not met. Urbšys returned the next day, 21 March, to Kowno. The Lithuanians were in no mood for a fight. A Lithuanian delegation was sent to Berlin to arrange the details. ‘If you apply a bit of pressure, things happen,’ noted Goebbels, with satisfaction.

Hitler left Berlin the following afternoon, 22 March, for Swinemünde, where, along with Raeder, he boarded the cruiser Deutschland. Late that evening, Ribbentrop and Urbšys agreed terms for the formal transfer of the Memel district to Germany. Hitler’s decree was signed the next morning, 23 March. He was back in Berlin by noon next day. This time, he dispensed with the hero’s return. Triumphal entries to Berlin could not be allowed to become so frequent that they were routine.

Wasting no time, Ribbentrop had pushed Ambassador Lipski on 21 March to arrange a visit to Berlin by Beck. He indicated that Hitler was losing patience, and that the German press was straining at the leash to be turned loose on the Poles. He repeated the requests about Danzig and the Corridor. In return, Poland might be tempted by the exploitation of Slovakia and the Ukraine.

But the Poles were not prepared to act according to the script. Beck, noting Chamberlain’s Birmingham speech, secretly put out feelers to London for a bilateral agreement with Britain. Meanwhile, the Poles mobilized their troops. On 25 March, Hitler still indicated that he did not want to solve the Danzig question by force to avoid driving the Poles into the arms of the British. He had remarked to Goebbels the previous evening that he hoped the Poles would respond to pressure, ‘but we must bite into the sour apple and guarantee Poland’s borders’.

However, just after noon on 26 March, instead of the desired visit by Beck, Lipski simply presented Ribbentrop with a memorandum representing the Polish Foreign Minister’s views. It flatly rejected the German proposals, reminding Ribbentrop for good measure of Hitler’s verbal assurance in his speech on 20 February 1938 that Poland’s rights and interests would be respected. Ribbentrop lost his temper. Going beyond his mandate from Hitler, he told Lipski that any Polish action against Danzig (of which there was no indication) would be treated as aggression against the Reich. The bullying attempt was lost on Lipski. He replied that any furtherance of German plans directed at the return of Danzig to the Reich meant war with Poland.

By 27 March, meanwhile, Chamberlain, warned that a German strike against Poland might be imminent, was telling the British cabinet he was prepared to offer a unilateral commitment to Poland, aimed at stiffening Polish resolve and deterring Hitler. The policy that had been developing since the march into Prague found its expression in Chamberlain’s statement to the House of Commons on 31 March 1939: ‘In the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence, and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power.’

This was followed, at the end of Beck’s visit to London on 4–6 April, by Chamberlain’s announcement to the House of Commons that Britain and Poland had agreed to sign a mutual assistance pact in the event of an attack ‘by a European power’.

On hearing of the British Guarantee of 31 March, Hitler fell into a rage. He thumped his fist on the marble-topped table of his study in the Reich Chancellery. ‘I’ll brew them a devil’s potion,’ he fumed.

Exactly what he had wanted to avoid had happened. He had expected the pressure on the Poles to work as easily as it had done in the case of the Czechs and the Slovaks. He had presumed the Poles would in due course see sense and yield Danzig and concede the extra-territorial routes through the Corridor. He had taken it for granted that Poland would then become a German satellite – an ally in any later attack on the Soviet Union. He had been determined to keep Poland out of Britain’s clutches. All of this was now upturned. Danzig would have to be taken by force. He had been thwarted by the British and spurned by the Poles. He would teach them a lesson.

Or so he thought. In reality, Hitler’s over-confidence, impatience, and misreading of the impact of German aggression against Czecho-Slovakia had produced a fateful miscalculation.

At the end of March Hitler had indicated to Brauchitsch, head of the army, that he would use force against Poland if diplomacy failed. Immediately, the branches of the armed forces began preparing drafts of their own operational plans. These were presented to Hitler in the huge ‘Führer type’ that he could read without glasses. He added a preamble on political aims. By 3 April the directive for ‘Case White’ (Fall Weiß) was ready. It was issued eight days later. Its first section, written by Hitler himself, began: ‘German relations with Poland continue to be based on the principles of avoiding any disturbances. Should Poland, however, change her policy towards Germany, which so far has been based on the same principles as our own, and adopt a threatening attitude towards Germany, a final settlement might become necessary in spite of the Treaty in force with Poland. The aim then will be to destroy Polish military strength, and create in the East a situation which satisfies the requirements of national defence. The Free State of Danzig will be proclaimed a part of the Reich territory by the outbreak of hostilities at the latest. The political leaders consider it their task in this case to isolate Poland if possible, that is to say, to limit the war to Poland only.’ The Wehrmacht had to be ready to carry out ‘Case White’ at any time after 1 September 1939.

Army commanders had been divided over the merits of attacking Czecho-Slovakia only a few months earlier. Now, there was no sign of hesitation. The aims of the coming campaign to destroy Poland were outlined within a fortnight or so by Chief of the General Staff Halder to generals and General Staff officers. Oppositional hopes of staging a coup against Hitler the previous autumn, as the Sudeten crisis was reaching its denouement, had centred upon Halder. At the time, he had indeed been prepared to see Hitler assassinated. It was the same Halder who now evidently relished the prospect of easy and rapid victory over the Poles and envisaged subsequent conflict with the Soviet Union or the western powers. Halder told senior officers that ‘thanks to the outstanding, I might say, instinctively sure policy of the Führer’, the military situation in central Europe had changed fundamentally. As a consequence, the position of Poland had also significantly altered. Halder said he was certain he was speaking for many in his audience in commenting that with the ending of ‘friendly relations’ with Poland ‘a stone has fallen from the heart’. Poland was now to be ranked among Germany’s enemies. The rest of Halder’s address dealt with the need to destroy Poland ‘in record speed’. The British guarantee would not prevent this happening. He was contemptuous of the capabilities of the Polish army. It formed ‘no serious opponent’. He outlined in some detail the course the German attack would take, acknowledging cooperation with the SS and the occupation of the country by the paramilitary formations of the party. The aim, he repeated, was to ensure ‘that Poland as rapidly as possible was not only defeated, but liquidated’, whether France and Britain should intervene in the West (which on balance he deemed unlikely) or not. The attack had to be ‘crushing’. He concluded by looking beyond the Polish conflict: ‘We must be finished with Poland within three weeks, if possible already in a fortnight. Then it will depend on the Russians whether the eastern front becomes Europe’s fate or not. In any case, a victorious army, filled with the spirit of gigantic victories attained, will be ready either to confront Bolshevism or … to be hurled against the West …’

On Poland, there was no divergence between Hitler and his Chief of the General Staff. Both wanted to smash Poland at breakneck speed, preferably in an isolated campaign but, if necessary, even with western intervention (though both thought this more improbable than probable). And both looked beyond Poland to a widening of the conflict, eastwards or westwards, at some point. Hitler could be satisfied. He need expect no problems this time from his army leaders.

The contours for the summer crisis of 1939 had been drawn. It would end not with the desired limited conflict to destroy Poland, but with the major European powers locked in another continental war. This was in the first instance a consequence of Hitler’s miscalculation that spring. But, as Halder’s address to the generals indicated, it had not been Hitler’s miscalculation alone.

V

Following one extraordinary triumph upon another, Hitler’s self-belief had by this time been magnified into full-blown megalomania. Even among his private guests at the Berghof, he frequently compared himself with Napoleon, Bismarck, and other great historical figures. The rebuilding programmes that constantly preoccupied him were envisaged as his own lasting monument – a testament of greatness like the buildings of the pharaohs or Caesars. He felt he was walking with destiny. In the summer of 1939, such a mentality would drive Germany towards European war.

Hitler made public the abrupt shift in policy towards Poland and Great Britain in his big Reichstag speech of 28 April 1939. The speech, lasting two hours and twenty minutes, had been occasioned by a message sent by President Roosevelt a fortnight earlier. Prompted by the invasion of Czecho-Slovakia, the President had appealed to Hitler to give an assurance that he would desist from any attack for the next twenty-five years on thirty named countries – mainly European, but also including Iraq, Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Iran. Were such an assurance to be given, the United States, declared Roosevelt, would play its part in working for disarmament and equal access to raw materials on world markets. Hitler was incensed by Roosevelt’s telegram. That it had been published in Washington before even being received in Berlin was taken as a slight. Hitler also thought it arrogant in tone. And the naming of the thirty countries allowed Hitler to claim that inquiries had been conducted in each, and that none felt threatened by Germany. Some, such as Syria, however, had been, he alleged, unable to reply, since they were deprived of freedom and under the military control of democratic states, while the Republic of Ireland, he asserted, feared aggression from Britain, not from Germany. Roosevelt’s raising of the disarmament issue (out of which Hitler had made such capital a few years earlier) handed him a further propaganda gift. With heavy sarcasm, he tore into Roosevelt, ‘answering’ his claims in twenty-one points, each cheered to the rafters by the assembled members of the Reichstag, roaring with laughter as he poured scorn on the President.

Many German listeners to the broadcast thought it one of the best speeches he had made. William Shirer, the American journalist in Berlin, was inclined to agree: ‘Hitler was a superb actor today,’ he wrote. The performance was largely for internal consumption. The outside world – at least those countries that felt they had accommodated Hitler for too long – was less impressed.

Preceding the vaudeville, Hitler had chosen the occasion to denounce the Non-Aggression Pact with Poland and the Naval Agreement with Britain. He blamed the renunciation of the naval pact on Britain’s ‘encirclement policy’. In reality, he was complying with the interests of the German navy, which felt its construction plans restricted by the agreement and had been pressing for some time for Hitler to denounce it. The intransigence of the Poles over Danzig and the Corridor, their mobilization in March, and the alignment with Britain against Germany were given as reasons for the ending of the Polish pact.

Since the end of March, which had brought the British guarantee for Poland, followed soon afterwards by the announcement that there was to be a British-Polish mutual assistance treaty, Hitler had given up on the Poles. The military directives of early April were recognition of this. The Poles, he acknowledged, were not going to concede to German demands without a fight. So they would have their fight. And they would be smashed. Only the timing and conditions remained to be determined.

At a meeting in his study in the New Reich Chancellery on 23 May, Hitler outlined his thinking on Poland and on wider strategic issues to a small group of top military leaders. He held out the prospect not only of an attack on Poland, but also made clear that the more far-reaching aim was to prepare for an inevitable showdown with Britain. Unlike the meeting on 5 November 1937 that Hoßbach had recorded, there is no indication that the military commanders were caused serious disquiet by what they heard. Hitler made his intentions brutally clear. ‘It is not Danzig that is at stake. For us it is a matter of expanding our living space in the East and making food supplies secure and also solving the problem of the Baltic States.’ It was necessary, he declared, ‘to attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity. We cannot expect a repetition of Czechia. There will be war. Our task is to isolate Poland. Success in isolating her will be decisive.’ He reserved to himself, therefore, the timing of any strike. Simultaneous conflict with the West had to be avoided. Should it, however, come to that – Hitler revealed here his priorities – ‘then the fight must be primarily against England and France’. The war would be an all-out one: ‘We must then burn our boats and it will no longer be a question of right or wrong but of to be or not to be for 80 million people.’ A war of ten to fifteen years had to be reckoned with. ‘The aim is always to bring England to its knees,’ he stated. To the relief of those present, who took it as an indication of when he envisaged the conflict with the West taking place, he stipulated that the rearmament programmes were to be targeted at 1943–4 – the same time-scale he had given in November 1937. But no one doubted that Hitler intended to attack Poland that very year.

VI

Throughout the spring and summer frenzied diplomatic efforts were made to try to isolate Poland and deter the western powers from becoming involved in what was intended as a localized conflict. On 22 May, Italy and Germany had signed the so-called ‘Pact of Steel’, meant to warn Britain and France off backing Poland. Ribbentrop had duped the Italians into signing the bilateral military pact on the understanding that the Führer wanted peace for five years and expected the Poles to settle peacefully once they realized that support from the West would not be forthcoming.

In the attempt to secure the assistance or benevolent neutrality of a number of smaller European countries and prevent them being drawn into the Anglo-French orbit, the German government had mixed success. In the west, Belgian neutrality – whatever Hitler’s plans to ignore it when it suited him – was shored up to keep the Western powers from immediate proximity to Germany’s industrial heartlands. Every effort had been made in preceding years to promote trading links with the neutral countries of Scandinavia to sustain, above all, the vital imports of iron ore from Sweden. In the Baltic, Latvia and Estonia agreed non-aggression pacts. In central Europe, diplomatic efforts had more patchy results. Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Turkey were unwilling to align themselves closely with Berlin. But persistent pressure had turned Romania into an economic satellite, sealed by treaty in late March 1939, more or less assuring Germany of crucial access to Romanian oil and wheat in the event of hostilities.

The big question-mark concerned the Soviet Union. The regime’s anti-christ it might be. But it held the key to the destruction of Poland. If the USSR could be prevented from linking hands with the West in the tripartite pact that Britain and France were half-heartedly working towards; better still, if the unthinkable – a pact between the Soviet Union and the Reich itself – could be brought about: then Poland would be totally isolated, at Germany’s mercy, the Anglo-French guarantees worthless, and Britain – the main opponent – hugely weakened. Such thoughts began to gestate in the mind of Hitler’s Foreign Minister in the spring of 1939. In the weeks that followed, it was Ribbentrop on the German side, rather than a hesitant Hitler, who took the initiative in seeking to explore all hints that the Russians might be interested in a rapprochement – hints that had been forthcoming since March.

Within the Soviet leadership, the entrenched belief that the West wanted to encourage German aggression in the east (that is, against the USSR), the recognition that following Munich collective security was dead, the need to head off any aggressive intent from the Japanese in the east, and above all the desperate need to buy time to secure defences for the onslaught thought certain to come at some time, pushed – if for a considerable time only tentatively – in the same direction.

Stalin’s speech to the Communist Party Congress on 10 March, attacking the appeasement policy of the West as encouragement of German aggression against the Soviet Union, and declaring his unwillingness to ‘pull the chestnuts out of the fire’ for the benefit of capitalist powers, had been taken by Ribbentrop as a hint that an opportunity might be opening up. By mid-April the Soviet Ambassador was remarking to Weizsäcker that ideological differences should not hinder better relations. Then, Gustav Hilger, a long-serving diplomat in the German Embassy in Moscow, was brought to the Berghof to explain that the dismissal, on 3 May, of the Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov (who had been associated with retaining close ties with the West, partly through a spell as Soviet Ambassador to the USA, and was moreover a Jew), and his replacement by Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s right-hand man, had to be seen as a sign that the Soviet dictator was looking for an agreement with Germany.

Around the same time, Ribbentrop heard from the German Ambassador in Moscow, Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, that the Soviet Union was interested in a rapprochement with Germany. He scented a coup which would dramatically turn the tables on Britain, the country which had dared to spurn him – a coup that would also win him glory and favour in the Führer’s eyes, and his place in history as the architect of Germany’s triumph. Hitler for his part thought that Russian economic difficulties and the chance spotted by ‘the wily fox’ Stalin to remove any threat from Poland to the Soviet western borders were at the back of any opening towards Germany. His own interests were to isolate Poland and deter Britain.

Ribbentrop was now able to persuade Hitler to agree to the Soviet requests for resumption of trade negotiations with Moscow, which had been broken off the previous February. Molotov told Schulenburg, however, that a ‘political basis’ would have to be found before talks could be resumed. He left unclear what he had in mind. Deep suspicions on both sides led to relations cooling again throughout June. Molotov continued to stonewall and keep his options open. Desultory economic discussions were just kept alive. But at the end of June, Hitler, irritated by the difficulties raised by the Soviets in the trade discussions, ordered the ending of all talks. This time the Soviets took the initiative. Within three weeks they were letting it be known that trade talks could be resumed, and that the prospects for an economic agreement were favourable. This was the signal Berlin had been waiting for. Schulenburg in Moscow was ordered to ‘pick up the threads again’.

On 26 June, Ribbentrop’s Russian expert in the Foreign Ministry’s Trade Department, Karl Schnurre, indicated to the Soviet Chargé d’Affaires Georgi Astakhov and trade representative Evgeny Babarin that the trade agreement could be accompanied by a political understanding between Germany and the Soviet Union, taking into account their mutual territorial interests. The response was encouraging. Molotov was non-committal and somewhat negative when he met Schulenburg on 3 August. But two days later, Astakhov was letting Ribbentrop know that the Soviet government was seriously interested in the ‘improvement of mutual relations’, and willing to contemplate political negotiations.

Towards the end of July, Hitler, Ribbentrop, and Weizsäcker had devised the basis of an agreement with the Soviet Union involving the partition of Poland and the Baltic states. Hints about such an arrangement were dropped to Molotov during his meeting with Schulenburg on 3 August. Stalin was in no rush. He had learned what the Germans were up to, and the broad timing of the intended action against the Poles. But for Hitler there was not a moment to lose. The attack on Poland could not be delayed. Autumn rains, he told Count Ciano in mid-August, would turn the roads into a morass and Poland into ‘one vast swamp … completely unsuitable for any military operations’. The strike had to come by the end of the month.

VII

Remarkably, for the best part of three months during this summer of high drama, with Europe teetering on the brink of war, Hitler was almost entirely absent from the seat of government in Berlin. Much of the time, as always, when not at his alpine eyrie above Berchtesgaden, he was travelling around Germany. Early in June he visited the construction site of the Volkswagen factory at Fallersleben, where he had laid the foundation stone a year or so earlier. From there it was on to Vienna, to the ‘Reich Theatre Week’, where he saw the premiere of Richard Strauß’s Friedenstag, regaling his adjutants with stories of his visits to the opera and theatre there thirty years earlier, and lecturing them on the splendours of Viennese architecture. Before leaving, he visited the grave of his niece, Geli Raubal. He flew on to Linz, where he criticized new worker flats because they lacked the balconies he deemed essential in every apartment. From there he was driven to Berchtesgaden via Lambach, Hafeld, and Fischlham – some of the places associated with his childhood and where he had first attended school.

At the beginning of July, he was in Rechlin in Mecklenburg, inspecting new aircraft prototypes, including the He 176, the first rocket-propelled plane, with a speed of almost 1,000 kilometres an hour. Then in the middle of the month he attended an extraordinary four-day spectacular in Munich, the ‘Rally of German Art 1939’, culminating in a huge parade with massive floats and extravagant costumes of bygone ages to illustrate 2,000 years of German cultural achievement. Less than a week later he paid his regular visit to the Bayreuth festival. At Haus Wahnfried, in the annexe that the Wagner family had set aside specially for his use, Hitler felt relaxed. There he was ‘Uncle Wolf ’, as he had been known by the Wagners since his early days in politics. While in Bayreuth, looking self-conscious in his white dinner-jacket, he attended performances of Der fliegende Holländer, Tristan und Isolde, Die Walküre, and Götterdämmerung, greeting the crowds as usual from the window on the first floor.

There was also a second reunion (following their meeting the previous year in Linz) with his boyhood friend August Kubizek. They spoke of the old days in Linz and Vienna, going to Wagner operas together. Kubizek sheepishly asked Hitler to sign dozens of autographs to take back for his acquaintances. Hitler obliged. The overawed Kubizek, the archetypal local-government officer of a sleepy small town, carefully blotted every signature. They went out for a while, reminiscing in the gathering dusk by Wagner’s grave. Then Hitler took Kubizek on a tour of Haus Wahnfried. Kubizek reminded his former friend of the Rienzi episode in Linz all those years ago. (Wagner’s early opera, based on the story of a fourteenth-century ‘tribune of the people’ in Rome, had so excited Hitler that late at night, after the performance, he had hauled his friend up the Freinberg, a hill on the edge of Linz, and regaled him about the meaning of what they had seen.) Hitler recounted the tale to Winifried Wagner, ending by saying, with a great deal more pathos than truth: ‘That’s when it began.’ Hitler probably believed his own myth. Kubizek certainly did. Emotional and impressionable as he always had been, and now a well-established victim of the Führer cult, he departed with tears in his eyes. Shortly afterwards, he heard the crowds cheering as Hitler left.

Hitler spent most of August at the Berghof. Other than when he had important visitors to see, daily life there retained its usual patterns. Magda Goebbels told Ciano of her boredom. ‘It is always Hitler who talks!’ he recalled her saying. ‘He can be Führer as much as he likes, but he always repeats himself and bores his guests.’

If less so than in Berlin, strict formalities were still observed. The atmosphere was stuffy, especially in Hitler’s presence. Only Eva Braun’s sister, Gretl, lightened it somewhat, even smoking (which was much frowned upon), flirting with the orderlies, and determined to have fun whatever dampening effect the Führer might have on things. What little humour otherwise surfaced was often in dubious taste in the male-dominated household, where the women in attendance, including Eva Braun, served mainly as decoration. But in general, the tone was one of extreme politeness, with much kissing of hands, and expressions of ‘Gnädige Frau’. Despite Nazi mockery of the bourgeoisie, life at the Berghof was imbued with the intensely bourgeois manners and fashions of the arriviste Dictator.

Hitler’s lengthy absence from Berlin, while European peace hung by a thread, illustrates how far the disintegration of anything resembling a conventional central government had gone. Few ministers were permitted to see him. Even the usual privileged few had dwindled in number. Goebbels was still out of favour following his affair with Lida Baarova. Göring had not recovered the ground he had lost since Munich. Speer enjoyed the special status of the protégé. He spent much of the summer at Berchtesgaden. But most of the time he was indulging Hitler’s passion for architecture, not discussing details of foreign policy. Hitler’s ‘advisers’ on the only issue of real consequence, the question of war and peace, were now largely confined to Ribbentrop, even more hawkish, if anything, than he had been the previous summer, and the military leaders. On the crucial matters of foreign policy, Ribbentrop – when not represented through the head of his personal staff, Walther Hewel, far more liked by the dictator and everyone else than the preening Foreign Minister himself – largely had the field to himself. The second man at the Foreign Ministry, Weizsäcker, left to mind the shop while his boss absented himself from Berlin, claimed not to have seen Hitler, even from a distance, between May and the middle of August. What the Dictator was up to on the Obersalzberg was difficult to fathom in Berlin, Weizäcker added.

The personalization of government in the hands of one man – amounting in this case to concentration of power to determine over war or peace – was as good as complete.

VIII

Danzig, allegedly the issue dragging Europe towards war, was in reality no more than a pawn in the German game being played from Berchtesgaden. Gauleiter Albert Forster – a thirty-seven-year-old former Franconian bank clerk who had learnt some of his early political lessons under Julius Streicher and had been leader of the NSDAP in Danzig since 1930 – had received detailed instructions from Hitler on a number of occasions throughout the summer on how to keep tension simmering without allowing it to boil over. As had been the case in the Sudetenland the previous year, it was important not to force the issue too soon. Local issues had to chime exactly with the timing determined by Hitler. Incidents were to be manufactured to display to the population in the Reich, and to the world outside, the alleged injustices perpetrated by the Poles against the Germans in Danzig. Instances of mistreatment – most of them contrived, some genuine – of the German minority in other parts of Poland, too, provided regular fodder for an orchestrated propaganda campaign which, again analogous to that against the Czechs in 1938, had been screaming its banner headlines about the iniquities of the Poles since May.

The propaganda certainly had its effect. The fear of war with the western powers, while still widespread among the German population, was – at least until August – nowhere near as acute as it had been during the Sudeten crisis. People reasoned, with some justification (and backed up by the German press), that despite the guarantees for Poland, the West was hardly likely to fight for Danzig when it had given in over the Sudetenland. Many thought that Hitler had always pulled it off without bloodshed before, and would do so again. Fears of war were nevertheless pervasive. The more general feeling was probably better summed up in the report from a small town in Upper Franconia at the end of July 1939: ‘The answer to the question of how the problem “Danzig and the Corridor” is to be solved is still the same among the general public: incorporation in the Reich? Yes. Through war? No.’

But the anxiety about a general war over Danzig did not mean that there was reluctance to see military action against Poland undertaken – as long as the West could be kept out of it. Inciting hatred of the Poles through propaganda was pushing at an open door. ‘The mood of the people can be much more quickly whipped up against the Poles than against any other neighbouring people,’ commented the exiled Social Democratic organization, the Sopade. Many thought ‘it would serve the Poles right if they get it in the neck’. Above all, no one, it was claimed, whatever their political standpoint, wanted a Polish Danzig; the conviction that Danzig was German was universal.

The issue which the Danzig Nazis exploited to heighten the tension was the supervision of the Customs Office by Polish customs inspectors. When the customs inspectors were informed on 4 August – in what turned out to be an initiative of an over-zealous German official – that they would not be allowed to carry out their duties and responded with a threat to close the port to foodstuffs, the local crisis threatened to boil over, and too soon. The Germans reluctantly backed down – as the international press noted. Forster was summoned to Berchtesgaden on 7 August and returned to announce that the Führer had reached the limits of his patience with the Poles, who were probably acting under pressure from London and Paris.

This allegation was transmitted by Forster to Carl Burckhardt, the League of Nations High Commissioner in Danzig. Overlooking no possibility of trying to keep the West out of his war with Poland, Hitler was ready to use the representative of the detested League of Nations as his intermediary. On 10 August, Burckhardt was summoned to the telephone to be told by Gauleiter Forster that Hitler wanted to see him on the Obersalzberg at 4 p.m. next day and was sending his personal plane ready for departure early the following morning. Following a flight in which he was regaled by a euphoric Albert Forster with tales of beerhall fights with Communists during the ‘time of struggle’, Burckhardt landed in Salzburg and, after a quick snack, was driven up the spiralling road beyond the Berghof itself and up to the ‘Eagle’s Nest’, the recently built spectacular ‘Tea House’ in the dizzy heights of the mountain peaks.

Hitler was not fond of the ‘Eagle’s Nest’ and seldom went up there. He complained that the air was too thin at that height, and bad for his blood pressure. He worried about an accident on the roads Bormann had had constructed up the sheer mountainside, and about a failure of the lift that had to carry its passengers from the huge, marble-faced hall cut inside the rock to the summit of the mountain, more than 150 feet above. But this was an important visit. Hitler wanted to impress Burckhardt with the dramatic view over the mountain tops, invoking the image of distant majesty, of the Dictator of Germany as lord of all he surveyed.

He played every register in driving home to Burckhardt – and through him to the western powers – the modesty and reasonableness of his claims on Poland and the futility of western support. Almost speechless with rage, he denounced press suggestions that he had lost his nerve and been forced to give way over the issue of the Polish customs officers. His voice rising until he was shouting, he screamed his response to Polish ultimata: if the smallest incident should take place, he would smash the Poles without warning so that not a trace of Poland remained. If that meant general war, then so be it. Germany had to live from its own resources. That was the only issue; the rest nonsense. He accused Britain and France of interference in the reasonable proposals he had made to the Poles. Now the Poles had taken up a position that blocked any agreement once and for all. His generals, hesitant the previous year, were this time raring to be let loose against the Poles.

Burckhardt, as intended, rapidly passed on to the British and French governments the gist of his talks with Hitler. They drew no conclusions from the report other than to urge restraint on the Poles.

While Hitler and Burckhardt were meeting at the ‘Eagle’s Nest’ on the Kehlstein, another meeting was taking place only a few miles away, in Ribbentrop’s newly acquired splendrous residence overlooking the lake in Fuschl, not far from Salzburg. Count Ciano, resplendent in uniform, was learning from the German Foreign Minister that the Italians had been deceived for months about Hitler’s intentions. The atmosphere was icy. Ribbentrop told Ciano that the ‘merciless destruction of Poland by Germany’ was inevitable. The conflict would not become a general one. Were Britain and France to intervene, they would be doomed to defeat. But his information ‘and above all his psychological knowledge’ of Britain, he insisted, made him rule out any intervention. Ciano found him unreasoning and obstinate: ‘The decision to fight is implacable. He [Ribbentrop] rejects any solution which might give satisfaction to Germany and avoid the struggle.’

The impression was reinforced when Ciano visited the Berghof next day. Hitler was convinced that the conflict would be localized, that Britain and France, whatever noises they were making, would not go to war. It would be necessary one day to fight the western democracies. But he thought it ‘out of the question that this struggle can begin now’. Ciano noted: ‘He has decided to strike, and strike he will.’

Important news came through for Hitler at the very time that he was underlining to the disenchanted Ciano his determination to attack Poland no later than the end of August: the Russians were prepared to begin talks in Moscow, including the position of Poland. A beaming Ribbentrop took the telephone call at the Berghof. Hitler was summoned from the meeting with Ciano, and rejoined it in high spirits to report the breakthrough. The way was now open.

A flurry of diplomatic activity – Ribbentrop pressing with maximum urgency for the earliest possible agreement, Molotov cannily prevaricating until it was evident that Soviet interest in the Anglo-French mission was dead – unfolded during the following days. The text of a trade treaty, under which German manufactured goods worth 200 million Reich Marks would be exchanged each year for an equivalent amount of Soviet raw materials, was agreed. Finally, on the evening of 19 August, the chattering teleprinter gave Hitler and Ribbentrop, waiting anxiously at the Berghof, the news they wanted: Stalin was willing to sign a non-aggression pact without delay.

Only the proposed date of Ribbentrop’s visit – 26 August – posed serious problems. It was the date Hitler had set for the invasion of Poland. Hitler could not wait that long. On 20 August, he decided to intervene personally. He telegraphed a message to Stalin, via the German Embassy in Moscow, requesting the reception of Ribbentrop, armed with full powers to sign a pact, on the 22nd or 23rd. Hitler’s intervention made a difference. But once more Stalin and Molotov made Hitler sweat it out. The tension at the Berghof was almost unbearable. It was more than twenty-four hours later, on the evening of 21 August, before the message came through. Stalin had agreed. Ribbentrop was expected in Moscow in two days’ time, on 23 August. Hitler slapped himself on the knee in delight. Champagne all round was ordered – though Hitler did not touch any. ‘That will really land them in the soup,’ he declared, referring to the western powers.

‘We’re on top again. Now we can sleep more easily,’ recorded a delighted Goebbels. ‘The question of Bolshevism is for the moment of secondary importance,’ he later added, saying that was the Führer’s view, too. ‘We’re in need and eat then like the devil eats flies.’ Abroad, Goebbels remarked, the announcement of the imminent non-aggression pact was ‘the great world sensation’. But the response was not that which Hitler and Ribbentrop had hoped for. The Poles’ fatalistic reaction was that the pact would change nothing. In Paris, where the news of the Soviet-German pact hit especially hard, the French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet, fearing a German-Soviet entente against Poland, pondered whether it was now better to press the Poles into compromise with Hitler in order to win time for France to prepare its defences. But eventually, after dithering for two days, the French government agreed that France would remain true to its obligations. The British cabinet, meeting on the afternoon of 22 August, was unmoved by the dramatic news, even if MPs were asking searching questions about the failure of British intelligence. The Foreign Secretary coolly, if absurdly, dismissed the pact as perhaps of not very great importance. Instructions went out to embassies that Britain’s obligations to Poland remained unaltered. Sir Nevile Henderson’s suggestion of a personal letter from the Prime Minister to Hitler, warning him of Britain’s determination to stick by Poland, was taken up.

Meanwhile, in excellent mood on account of his latest triumph, Hitler prepared, on the morning of 22 August, to address all the armed forces’ leaders on his plans for Poland. The meeting, at the Berghof, had been arranged before the news from Moscow had come through. Hitler’s aim was to convince the generals of the need to attack Poland without delay. The diplomatic coup, by now in the public domain, can only have boosted his self-confidence. It certainly weakened any potential criticism from his audience.

Around fifty officers had assembled in the Great Hall of the Berghof by the time that Hitler began his address at noon. ‘It was clear to me that a conflict with Poland had to come sooner or later,’ began Hitler. ‘I had already made this decision in the spring, but I thought that I would first turn against the West in a few years, and only after that against the East.’ Circumstances had caused him to change his thinking, he went on. He pointed in the first instance to his own importance to the situation. Making no concessions to false modesty, he claimed: ‘Essentially all depends on me, on my existence, because of my political talents. Furthermore, the fact that probably no one will ever again have the confidence of the whole German people as I have. There will probably never again in the future be a man with more authority than I have. My existence is therefore a factor of great value. But I can be eliminated at any time by a criminal or a lunatic.’ He also emphasized the personal role of Mussolini and Franco, whereas Britain and France lacked any ‘outstanding personality’. He briefly alluded to Germany’s economic difficulties as a further argument for not delaying action. ‘It is easy for us to make decisions. We have nothing to lose; we have everything to gain. Because of our restrictions our economic situation is such that we can only hold out for a few more years. Göring can confirm this. We have no other choice. We must act.’ He reviewed the constellation of international forces, concluding: ‘All these favourable circumstances will no longer prevail in two or three years’ time. No one knows how much longer I shall live. Therefore, better a conflict now.’

The high probability was that the West would not intervene, he went on. There was a risk, but the risk had to be taken. ‘We are faced,’ he stated with his usual apocalyptic dualism, ‘with the harsh alternatives of striking or of certain annihilation sooner or later.’ He compared the relative arms strength of Germany and the western powers. He concluded that Britain was in no position to help Poland. Nor was there any interest in Britain in a long war. The West had vested its hopes in enmity between Germany and Russia. ‘The enemy did not reckon with my great strength of purpose,’ he boasted. He had seen only puny figures in Munich. The pact with Russia would be signed within two days. ‘Now Poland is in the position in which I want her.’ There need be no fear of a blockade. The East would provide the necessary grain, cattle, coal, lead, and zinc. His only fear, Hitler said, in obvious allusion to Munich, was ‘that at the last moment some swine or other will yet submit to me a plan for mediation’. He would provide a propaganda pretext for beginning the war, however implausible. He ended by summarizing his philosophy: ‘The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth or not. When starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory. Close your hearts to pity. Act brutally. Eighty million people must obtain what is their right. Their existence must be made secure. The stronger man is right.’

If the generals were not enthused by what Hitler had to say, they posed no objections. The mood was largely fatalistic, resigned. The disastrous collapse in the army’s power since the first weeks of 1938 could not have been more apparent. Its still lamented former head, Werner von Fritsch, had remarked to Ulrich von Hassell some months earlier: ‘This man – Hitler – is Germany’s fate for good or evil. If it’s now into the abyss, he’ll drag us all with him. There’s nothing to be done.’ It was an indication of the capitulation of the Wehrmacht leadership to Hitler’s will. Hitler’s own comments after the meeting indicated that, on the eve of war, he had little confidence in and much contempt for his generals.

Towards the end of his speech, Hitler had broken off momentarily to wish his Foreign Minister success in Moscow. Ribbentrop left at that point to fly to Berlin. In mid-evening, he then flew in Hitler’s private Condor to Königsberg and, after a restless and nervous night preparing notes for the negotiations, from there, next morning, on to the Russian capital. Within two hours of landing, Ribbentrop was in the Kremlin. Attended by Schulenburg (the German Ambassador in Moscow), he was taken to a long room where, to his surprise, not just Molotov, but Stalin himself, awaited him. Ribbentrop began by stating Germany’s wish for new relations on a lasting basis with the Soviet Union. Stalin replied that, though the two countries had ‘poured buckets of filth’ over each other for years, there was no obstacle to ending the quarrel. Discussion quickly moved to delineation of spheres of influence. Stalin staked the USSR’s claim to Finland, much of the territory of the Baltic states, and Bessarabia. Ribbentrop predictably brought up Poland, and the need for a demarcation line between the Soviet Union and Germany. This – to run along the rivers Vistula, San, and Bug – was swiftly agreed. Progress towards concluding a non-aggression pact was rapid. The territorial changes to accompany it, carving up eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union, were contained in a secret protocol. The only delay occurred when Stalin’s claims to the Latvian ports of Libau (Liepaja) and Windau (Ventspils) held up matters for a while. Ribbentrop felt he had to consult.

Nervously waiting at the Berghof, Hitler had by then already had the Moscow embassy telephoned to inquire about progress at the talks. He paced impatiently up and down on the terrace as the sky silhouetted the Unterberg in striking colours of turquoise, then violet, then fiery red. Below remarked that it pointed to a bloody war. If so, replied Hitler, the sooner the better. The more time passed, the bloodier the war would be.

Within minutes there was a call from Moscow. Ribbentrop assured Hitler that the talks were going well, but asked about the Latvian ports. Inside half an hour Hitler had consulted a map and telephoned his reply: ‘Yes, agreed.’ The last obstacle was removed. Back at the Kremlin in late evening there was a celebratory supper. Vodka and Crimean sparkling wine lubricated the already effervescent mood of mutual self-congratulation. Among the toasts was one proposed by Stalin to Hitler. The texts of the Pact and Protocol had been drawn up in the meantime. Though dated 23 August, they were finally signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov well after midnight. Hitler and Goebbels had been half-watching a film, still too nervous about what was happening in Moscow to enjoy it. Finally, around 1 a.m., Ribbentrop telephoned again: complete success. Hitler congratulated him. ‘That will hit like a bombshell,’ he remarked.

Relief as well as satisfaction was reflected in Hitler’s warm welcome for Ribbentrop on the latter’s return next day to Berlin. While his Foreign Minister had been in Moscow, Hitler had begun to think that Britain might after all fight. Now, he was confident that prospect had been ruled out.

IX

While Ribbentrop had been on his way to Moscow, Sir Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador in Berlin, was flying to Berchtesgaden to deliver the letter composed by the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, following the cabinet meeting on 22 August. In his letter, Chamberlain emphasized his conviction ‘that war between our two peoples would be the greatest calamity that could occur’. But he left Hitler in no doubt about the British position. A German-Soviet agreement would not alter Great Britain’s obligation to Poland. Britain was, however, ready, if a peaceful atmosphere could be created, to discuss all problems affecting relations with Germany. And Britain was anxious for Poland and Germany to cease their polemics and incitement in order to allow direct discussions between the two countries on the reciprocal treatment of minorities.

Accompanied by Weizsäcker and Hewel, Henderson arrived at the Berghof at 1 p.m. on 23 August. Hitler was at his most aggressive. ‘He made no long speeches but his language was violent and exaggerated both as regards England and Poland,’ Henderson reported. The German Chancellor launched into a series of wild tirades about British support of the Czechs the previous year, and now of the Poles, and how he had wanted only friendship with Britain. He claimed Britain’s ‘blank cheque’ to Poland ruled out negotiations. He was recriminatory, threatening, and totally unyielding. He finally agreed to reply to Chamberlain within two hours.

On return to Salzburg, Henderson was rapidly recalled to the Berghof. This time the meeting was shorter – under half an hour. Hitler was now calmer, but adamant that he would attack Poland if another German were to be maltreated there. War would be all Britain’s fault. ‘England’ (as he invariably called Britain) ‘was determined to destroy and exterminate Germany,’ he went on. He was now fifty years old. He preferred war at this point than in five or ten years’ time. Henderson countered that talk of extermination was absurd. Hitler replied that England was fighting for lesser races, whereas he was fighting only for Germany. This time the Germans would fight to the last man. It would have been different in 1914 had he been Chancellor then. His repeated offers of friendship to Britain had been contemptuously rejected. He had come to the conclusion that England and Germany could never agree. England had now forced him into the pact with Russia. Henderson stated that war seemed inevitable if Hitler maintained his direct action against Poland. Hitler ended by declaring that only a complete change of British policy towards Germany could convince him of the desire for good relations. The written reply to Chamberlain that he handed to Henderson was couched in much the same vein. It contained the threat – clear in implication if not expression – to order general mobilization, were Britain and France to mobilize their own forces.

Hitler’s tirades were, as so often, theatricals. They were a play-acted attempt to break the British Guarantee to Poland by a calculated demonstration of verbal brutality. As soon as Henderson had left, Hitler slapped his thigh – his usual expression of self-congratulation – and exclaimed to Weizsäcker: ‘Chamberlain won’t survive this discussion. His cabinet will fall this evening.’

Chamberlain’s government was still there next day. Hitler’s belief in his own powers had outstripped realistic assessment. His commment revealed how out of touch he was with the mood of the British government, now fully backed by public opinion, by this time. He was puzzled, therefore, the following day by the low-key response in Britain to the Soviet Pact, and irritated by the speeches made in Parliament by Chamberlain and Halifax reasserting Britain’s resolve to uphold its obligations to Poland. Within twenty-four hours Ribbentrop had persuaded him, since wielding the big stick had produced little effect, to dangle the carrot.

At 12.45 p.m. on 25 August, Henderson was informed that Hitler wished to see him at 1.30 p.m. in the Reich Chancellery. The meeting lasted over an hour. Ribbentrop and the interpreter Paul Schmidt were also present. Hitler was far calmer than he had been in Berchtesgaden. He criticized Chamberlain’s speech. But he was prepared to make Britain, he said, ‘a large comprehensive offer’ and pledge himself to maintain the continued existence of the British Empire once the Polish problem had been solved as a matter of urgency. Hitler was so anxious that his ‘offer’ be immediately and seriously considered that he suggested that Henderson fly to London, and put a plane at his disposal. Henderson left next morning.

The ‘offer’ to Britain was, in fact, no more than a ruse, another – and by now increasingly desperate – attempt to detach Britain from support for Poland, and prevent the intended localized war from becoming a general European war. How honest Hitler’s ‘offer’ was can be judged from the fact that at the very time that Henderson was talking in the Reich Chancellery, final preparations were being made for the start of ‘Case White’ next morning, Saturday, 26 August, at 4.30 a.m.

Already on 12 August, Hitler had set the likely date of the 26th for the invasion of Poland. Goebbels learnt on the morning of the 25th that the mobilization was due to take place that afternoon. At midday, Hitler then gave him propaganda instructions, emphasizing that Germany had been given no choice but to fight against the Poles, and preparing the people for a war, if necessary lasting ‘months and years’. Telephone communications between Berlin and London and Paris were cut off for several hours that afternoon. The Tannenberg celebrations and Party Rally were abruptly cancelled. Airports were closed from 26 August. Food rationing was introduced as from 27 August. By midday on the 25th, however, even while Hitler was giving propaganda directives to Goebbels, Keitel’s office was telephoning Halder to find out what was the latest time for the march-order, since there might have to be a postponement. The answer was given: no later than 3 p.m. The final order was delayed at 1.30 p.m. because Henderson was at that time in the Reich Chancellery. It was then further held back in the hope that Mussolini would have replied to Hitler’s communication of earlier that morning. Under pressure from the military timetable, but anxious for news from Rome, Hitler put the attack on hold for an hour. Finally, without receiving Mussolini’s answer, but able to wait no longer, Hitler gave the order at 3.02 p.m. Directives for mobilization were passed to the various troop commanders during the afternoon. Then, amazingly, within five hours the order was cancelled. To a great deal of muttering from army leaders about incompetence, the complex machinery of invasion was halted just in time.

Mussolini’s reply had arrived at 5.45 p.m. At 7.30 p.m. Brauchitsch telephoned Halder to rescind the invasion order. A shaken Hitler had changed his mind.

On 24 August Hitler had prepared a lengthy letter for Mussolini, justifying the alliance with the Soviet Union, and indicating that a strike against Poland was imminent. The letter was delivered by the German Ambassador in Rome on the morning of the 25th. Mussolini’s answer gave the over-confident Hitler an enormous shock. The Duce did not beat about the bush: Italy was in no position to offer military assistance at the present time. Hitler icily dismissed Attolico, the Italian Ambassador. ‘The Italians are behaving just like they did in 1914,’ Paul Schmidt heard Hitler remark. ‘That alters the entire situation,’ judged Goebbels. ‘The Führer ponders and contemplates. That’s a serious blow for him.’ For an hour, the Reich Chancellery rang with comments of disgust at the Axis partner. The word ‘treachery’ was on many lips. Brauchitsch was hurriedly summoned. When he arrived, around seven that evening, he told Hitler there was still time to halt the attack, and recommended doing so to gain time for the Dictator’s ‘political game’. Hitler immediately took up the suggestion. At 7.45 p.m. a frantic order was dispatched to Halder to halt the start of hostilities. Keitel emerged from Hitler’s room to tell an adjutant: ‘The march-order must be rescinded immediately.’

Another piece of bad news arrived for Hitler at much the same time. Minutes before the news from Rome had arrived, Hitler had heard from the French Ambassador, Robert Coulondre, that the French, too, were determined to stick by their obligations to Poland. This in itself was not critical. Hitler was confident that the French could be kept out of the war, if London did not enter. Then Ribbentrop arrived to tell him that the military alliance between Great Britain and Poland agreed on 6 April had been signed late that afternoon. This had happened after Hitler had made his ‘offer’ to Henderson. Having just signed the alliance, it must have been plain even to Hitler that Britain was unlikely to break it the very next day. Yesterday’s hero, Ribbentrop, now found himself all at once out of favour and, in the midst of a foreign-policy crisis on which peace hinged, was not in evidence for over two days. Hitler turned again to the Foreign Minister’s great rival, Göring.

Immediately, Göring inquired whether the cancellation of the invasion was permanent. ‘No. I will have to see whether we can eliminate England’s intervention,’ was the reply. When Göring’s personal emissary, his Swedish friend, the industrialist Birger Dahlerus, already in London to belabour Lord Halifax with similar vague offers of German good intent that Henderson would shortly bring via the official route, eventually managed, with much difficulty, to place a telephone call to Berlin, he was asked to report back to the Field-Marshal the following evening.

The mood in the Reich Chancellery had not been improved by the message from Daladier on 26 August underlining France’s solidarity with Poland. Things at the hub of the German government seemed chaotic. No one had a clear idea of what was going on. Hewel, head of Ribbentrop’s personal staff, though with different views from those of his boss, warned Hitler not to underestimate the British. He was a better judge of that than his Minister, he asserted. Hitler angrily broke off the discussion. Brauchitsch thought Hitler did not know what he should do.

Dahlerus certainly found him in a highly agitated state when he was taken towards midnight to the Reich Chancellery. He had brought with him a letter from Lord Halifax, indicating in non-committal terms that negotiations were possible if force were not used against Poland. It added in reality nothing to that which Chamberlain had already stated in his letter of 22 August. It made an impact on Göring, but Hitler did not even look at the letter before launching into a lengthy diatribe, working himself into a nervous frenzy, marching up and down the room, his eyes staring, his voice at one moment indistinct, hurling out facts and figures about the strength of the German armed forces, the next moment shouting as if addressing a party meeting, threatening to annihilate his enemies, giving Dahlerus the impression of someone ‘completely abnormal’. Eventually, Hitler calmed down enough to list the points of the offer which he wanted Dahlerus to take to London. Germany wanted a pact or alliance with Britain, would guarantee the Polish borders, and defend the British Empire (even against Italy, Göring added). Britain was to help Germany acquire Danzig and the Corridor, and have Germany’s colonies returned. Guarantees were to be provided for the German minority in Poland. Hitler had altered the stakes in a bid to break British backing for Poland. In contrast to the ‘offer’ made to Henderson, the alliance with Britain now appeared to be available before any settlement with Poland.

Dahlerus took the message to London next morning, 27 August. The response was cool and sceptical. Dahlerus was sent back to report that Britain was willing to reach an agreement with Germany, but would not break its guarantee to Poland. Following direct negotiations between Germany and Poland on borders and minorities, the results would require international guarantee. Colonies could be returned in due course, but not under threat of war. The offer to defend the British Empire was rejected. Astonishingly, to Dahlerus, back in Berlin late that evening, Hitler accepted the terms, as long as the Poles had been immediately instructed to contact Germany and begin negotiations. Halifax made sure this was done. In Warsaw, Beck agreed to begin negotiations. Meanwhile, the German mobilization, which had never been cancelled along with the invasion, rolled on. Before Henderson arrived back in Berlin to bring the official British response, Brauchitsch informed Halder that Hitler had provisionally fixed the new date for the attack as 1 September.

Henderson handed Hitler a translation of the British reply to his ‘offer’ of 25 August at 10.30 p.m. that evening, the 28th. Ribbentrop and Schmidt were there. Hitler and Henderson spoke for over an hour. For once, Hitler neither interrupted, nor harangued Henderson. He was, according to the British Ambassador, polite, reasonable, and not angered by what he read. The ‘friendly atmosphere’ noted by Henderson was so only in relative terms. Hitler still spoke of annihilating Poland. The British reply did not in substance extend beyond the informal answer that Dahlerus had conveyed (and had been composed after Hitler’s response to that initiative was known). The British government insisted upon a prior settlement of the differences between Germany and Poland. Britain had already gained assurances of Poland’s willingness to negotiate. Depending upon the outcome of any settlement and how it was reached, Britain was prepared to work towards a lasting understanding with Germany. But the obligation to Poland would be honoured. Hitler promised a written reply the next day.

At 7.15 p.m. on the evening of 29 August, Henderson, sporting as usual a dark red carnation in the buttonhole of his pin-striped suit, passed down the darkened Wilhelmstraße – Berlin was undergoing experimental blackouts – through a silent, but not hostile, crowd of 300–400 Berliners, to be received at the Reich Chancellery as on the previous night with a roll of drums and guard of honour. Otto Meissner, whose role as head of the so-called Presidential Chancellery was largely representational, and Wilhelm Brückner, the chief adjutant, escorted him to Hitler. Ribbentrop was also present. Hitler was in a less amenable mood than on the previous evening. He gave Henderson his reply. He had again raised the price – exactly as Henlein had been ordered to do in the Sudetenland the previous year, so that it was impossible to meet it. Hitler now demanded the arrival of a Polish emissary with full powers by the following day, Wednesday, 30 August. Even the pliant Henderson, protesting at the impossible time-limit for the arrival of the Polish emissary, said it sounded like an ultimatum. Hitler replied that his generals were pressing him for a decision. They were unwilling to lose any more time because of the onset of the rainy season in Poland. Henderson told Hitler that any attempt to use force against Poland would inevitably result in conflict with Britain.

When Henderson had left, the Italian Ambassador Attolico was ushered in. He had come to tell Hitler that Mussolini was prepared to intercede with Britain if required. The last thing Hitler wanted, as he had made clear to his generals at the meeting on 22 August, was a last-minute intercession to bring about a new Munich – least of all from the partner who had just announced that he could not stand by the pact so recently signed. Hitler coldly told Attolico that direct negotiations with Britain were in hand and that he had already declared his readiness to accept a Polish negotiator.

Hitler had been displeased at Henderson’s response to his reply to the British government. He now called in Göring to send Dahlerus once more on the unofficial route to let the British know the gist of the ‘generous’ terms he was proposing to offer the Poles – return of Danzig to Germany, and a plebiscite on the Corridor (with Germany to be given a ‘corridor through the Corridor’ if the result went Poland’s way). By 5 a.m. on 30 August, Dahlerus was again heading for London in a German military plane. An hour earlier Henderson had already conveyed Lord Halifax’s unsurprising response, that the German request for the Polish emissary to appear that very day was unreasonable.

During the day, while talking of peace Hitler prepared for war. In the morning he instructed Albert Forster, a week earlier declared Head of State in Danzig, on the action to be taken in the Free City at the outbreak of hostilities. Later, he signed the decree to establish a Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich with wide powers to promulgate decrees. Chaired by Göring, its other members were Heß as Deputy Leader of the Party, Frick as plenipotentiary for Reich administration, Funk as plenipotentiary for the economy, Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery, and Keitel, chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht. It had the appearance of a ‘war cabinet’ to administer the Reich while Hitler preoccupied himself with military matters. In reality, the fragmentation of Reich government had gone too far for that. Hitler’s own interest in preventing any centralized body operating as a possible check on his own power was to mean that the Ministerial Council was destined not to bring even a limited resurrection of collective government.

Hitler spent much of the day working on his ‘proposals’ to be put to the Polish negotiator who, predictably, never arrived. From the outset it had not been a serious suggestion. But when Henderson returned to the Reich Chancellery at midnight to present the British reply to Hitler’s communication of the previous evening, he encountered Ribbentrop in a highly nervous state and in a vile temper. Diplomatic niceties were scarcely preserved. After Ribbentrop had read out Hitler’s ‘proposals’ at breakneck speed, so that Henderson was unable to note them down, he refused – on Hitler’s express orders – to let the British Ambassador read the document, then hurled it on the table stating that it was now out of date, since no Polish emissary had arrived in Berlin by midnight. In retrospect, Henderson thought that Ribbentrop ‘was wilfully throwing away the last chance of a peaceful solution’.

There had, in fact, been no ‘last chance’. No Polish emissary had been expected. Ribbentrop was concerned precisely not to hand over terms which the British might have passed to the Poles, who might have been prepared to discuss them. Hitler had needed his ‘generous suggestion over the regulation of the Danzig and Corridor Question’, as Schmidt later heard him say, as ‘an alibi, especially for the German people, to show them that I have done everything to preserve peace’.

The army had been told on 30 August to make all preparations for attack on 1 September at 4.30 a.m. If negotiations in London required a postponement, notification would be given before 3 p.m. next day. ‘Armed intervention by Western powers now said to be unavoidable,’ noted Halder. ‘In spite of this, Führer has decided to strike.’

When informed that Ribbentrop had arrived at the Reich Chancellery, Hitler told him he had given the order, and that ‘things were rolling’. Ribbentrop wished him luck. ‘It looks as if the die is finally cast,’ wrote Goebbels.

After making his decision, Hitler cut himself off from external contact. He refused to see the Polish Ambassador, Jozef Lipski, later in the afternoon. Ribbentrop did see him a little later. But hearing that the Ambassador carried no plenipotentiary powers to negotiate, he immediately terminated the interview. Lipski returned to find telephone lines to Warsaw had been cut off.

At 9 p.m. the German radio broadcast Hitler’s ‘sixteen-point proposal’ which Ribbentrop had so crassly presented to Henderson at midnight. By 10.30 p.m. the first reports were coming in of a number of serious border incidents, including an armed ‘Polish’ assault on the German radio station at Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia. These had been planned for weeks by Heydrich’s office, using SS men dressed in Polish uniforms to carry out the attacks. To increase the semblance of authenticity, a number of concentration-camp inmates killed by lethal injections and carried to the sites provided the bodies required.

Throughout Germany, people went about their daily business as normal. But the normality was deceptive. All minds now were fixed on the likelihood of war. A brief war, with scarcely any losses, and confined to Poland, was one thing. But war with the West, which so many with memories of the Great War of 1914–18 had dreaded for years, now seemed almost certain. There was now no mood like that of August 1914, no ‘hurrah-patriotism’. The faces of the people told of their anxiety, fears, worries, and resigned acceptance of what they were being faced with. ‘Everybody against the war,’ wrote the American correspondent William Shirer on 31 August. ‘How can a country go into a major war with a population so dead against it?’ he asked. ‘Trust in the Führer will now probably be subjected to its hardest acid test,’ ran a report from the Upper Franconian district of Ebermannstadt. ‘The overwhelming proportion of people’s comrades expects from him the prevention of the war, if otherwise impossible even at the cost of Danzig and the Corridor.’

How accurate such a report was as a reflection of public opinion cannot be ascertained. The question is in any case irrelevant. Ordinary citizens, whatever their fears, were powerless to affect the course of events. While many of them were fitfully sleeping in the hope that even now, at the eleventh hour and beyond, some miracle would preserve peace, the first shots were fired and bombs dropped near Dirschau at 4.30 a.m. And just over quarter of an hour later in Danzig harbour the elderly German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, now a sea-cadet trainingship, focused its heavy guns on the fortified Polish munitions depot on the Westerplatte and opened fire.

By late afternoon the army leadership reported: ‘Our troops have crossed the frontier everywhere and are sweeping on toward their objectives of the day, checked only slightly by the Polish forces thrown against them.’ In Danzig itself, the purported objective of the conflict between Germany and Poland, border posts and public buildings manned by Poles had been attacked at dawn. The League of Nations High Commissioner had been forced to leave, and the swastika banner raised over his building. Gauleiter Albert Forster proclaimed Danzig’s reincorporation in the Reich. In the turmoil of the first day of hostilities, probably few people in Germany took much notice.

On a grey, overcast morning Shirer had found the few people on the streets apathetic. There were not many cheers from those thinly lining the pavements when Hitler drove to the Reichstag shortly before 10 a.m. A hundred or so deputies had been called up to serve in the army. But Göring saw to it that there were no empty spaces when Hitler spoke. The vacancies were simply filled by drafting in party functionaries. Hitler, now wearing Wehrmacht uniform, was on less than top form. He sounded strained. There was less cheering than usual. After a lengthy justification of the alleged need for Germany’s military action, he declared: ‘Poland has now last night for the first time fired on our territory through regular soldiers. Since 5.45 a.m.’ – he meant 4.45 a.m. – ‘the fire has been returned. And from now on bomb will be met with bomb.’

Hitler had still not given up hope that the British could be kept out of the conflict. On his return from the Reichstag he had Göring summon Dahlerus to make a last attempt. But he wanted no outside intercession, no repeat of Munich. Mussolini, under the influence of Ciano and Attolico, and unhappy at Italy’s humiliation at being unable to offer military support, had been trying for some days to arrange a peace conference. He was now desperate, fearing attack on Italy from Britain and France, to stop the war spreading. Before seeing Dahlerus, Hitler sent the Duce a telegram explicitly stating that he did not want his mediation. Then Dahlerus arrived. He found Hitler in a nervous state. The odour from his mouth was so strong that Dahlerus was tempted to move back a step or two. Hitler was at his most implacable. He was determined to break Polish resistance ‘and to annihilate the Polish people’, he told Dahlerus. In the next breath he added that he was prepared for further negotiations if the British wanted them. Again the threat followed, in ever more hysterical tones. It was in British interests to avoid a fight with him. But if Britain chose to fight, she would pay dearly. He would fight for one, two, ten years if necessary.

Dahlerus’s reports of such hysteria could cut no ice in London. Nor did an official approach on the evening of 2 September, inviting Sir Horace Wilson to Berlin for talks with Hitler and Ribbentrop. Wilson replied straightforwardly that German troops had first to be withdrawn from Polish territory. Otherwise Britain would fight. This was only to repeat the message which the British Ambassador had already passed to Ribbentrop the previous evening. No reply to that message was received. At 9 a.m. on 3 September, Henderson handed the British ultimatum to the interpreter Paul Schmidt, in place of Ribbentrop, who had been unwilling to meet the British Ambassador. Unless assurances were forthcoming by 11 a.m. that Germany was prepared to end its military action and withdraw from Polish soil, the ultimatum read, ‘a state of war will exist between the two countries as from that hour’. No such assurances were forthcoming. ‘Consequently,’ Chamberlain broadcast to the British people and immediately afterwards repeated in the House of Commons, ‘this country is at war with Germany.’ The French declaration of war followed that afternoon at 5 p.m.

Hitler had led Germany into the general European war he had wanted to avoid for several more years. Military ‘insiders’ thought the army, 2.3 million strong, through the rapidity of the rearmament programme, was less prepared for a major war than it had been in 1914. Hitler was fighting the war allied with the Soviet Union, the ideological arch-enemy. And he was at war with Great Britain, the would-be ‘friend’ he had for years tried to woo. Despite all warnings, his plans – at every turn backed by his warmongering Foreign Minister – had been predicated upon his assumption that Britain would not enter the war, though he had shown himself undeterred even by that eventuality. It was little wonder that, if Paul Schmidt’s account is to be believed, when Hitler received the British ultimatum on the morning of 3 September, he angrily turned to Ribbentrop and asked: ‘What now?’

X

‘Responsibility for this terrible catastrophe lies on the shoulders of one man,’ Chamberlain had told the House of Commons on 1 September, ‘the German Chancellor, who has not hesitated to plunge the world into misery in order to serve his own senseless ambitions.’ It was an understandable over-simplication. Such a personalized view necessarily left out the sins of omission and commission by others – including the British government and its French allies – which had assisted in enabling Hitler to accumulate such a unique basis of power that his actions could determine the fate of Europe.

Internationally, Hitler’s combination of bullying and blackmail could not have worked but for the fragility of the post-war European settlement. The Treaty of Versailles had given Hitler the basis for his rising demands, accelerating drastically in 1938–9. It had provided the platform for ethnic unrest that Hitler could easily exploit in the cauldron of central and eastern Europe. Not least, it had left an uneasy guilt-complex in the West, especially in Britain. Hitler might rant and exaggerate; his methods might be repellent; but was there not some truth in what he was claiming? The western governments, backed by their war-weary populations, anxious more than all else to do everything possible to avoid a new conflagration, their traditional diplomacy no match for unprecedented techniques of lying and threatening, thought so, and went out of their way to placate Hitler. By the time the western powers fully realized what they were up against, they were no longer in any position to bring the ‘mad dog’ to heel.

Within Germany, the fracturing of any semblance of collective government over the previous six years left Hitler in the position where he determined alone. No one doubted – the suffocating effect of years of the expanding Führer cult had seen to that – that he had the right to decide, and that his decisions were to be implemented. In the critical days, he saw a good deal of Ribbentrop, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, and Bormann. Other leading figures in the party, government ministers, even court favourites like Speer, had little or no contact with him. He was naturally also in constant touch with the Wehrmacht leadership. But while Goebbels, for instance, only learnt at second hand about military plans, leaders of the armed forces often had less than full information, or were belatedly told, about diplomatic developments. The cabinet, of course, never met. Remarkable for a complex modern state, there was no government beyond Hitler and whichever individuals he chose to confer with at a particular time. Hitler was the only link of the component parts of the regime. Only in his presence could the key steps be taken. But those admitted to his presence, apart from his usual entourage of secretaries, adjutants, and the like, were for the most part officers needing operational guidelines or those like Ribbentrop or Goebbels who thought like he did and were dependent on him. Internal government of the Reich had become Führer autocracy.

For those in proximity to Hitler, the personalized decision-making meant anything but consistency, clarity, and rationality. On the contrary: it brought bewildering improvisation, rapid changes of course, uncertainty. Hitler was living off his nerves. That conveyed itself to others around him. External pressures of the course he had embarked upon met Hitler’s personal psychology at this point. At the age of fifty, men frequently ruminate on the ambitions they had, and how the time to fulfil them is running out. For Hitler, a man with an extraordinary ego and ambitions to go down in history as the greatest German of all time, and a hypochondriac already prepossessed with his own approaching death, the sense of ageing, of youthful vigour disappearing, of no time to lose was hugely magnified.

Hitler had felt time closing in on him, under pressure to act lest the conditions became more disadvantageous. He had thought of war against the West around 1943–5, against the Soviet Union – though no time-scale was ever given – at some point after that. He had never thought of avoiding war. On the contrary: reliving the lost first great war made him predicate everything on victory in the second great war to come. Germany’s future, he had never doubted and had said so on innumerable occasions, could only be determined through war. In the dualistic way in which he always thought, victory would ensure survival, defeat would mean total eradication – the end of the German people. War was for Hitler inevitable. Only the timing and the direction were at issue. And there was no time to wait. Starting from his own strange premisses, given Germany’s strained resources and the rapid strides forward in rearmament by Britain and France, there was a certain contorted logic in what he said. Time was running out on the options for Hitler’s war.

This strong driving-force in Hitler’s mentality was compounded by other strands of his extraordinary psychological make-up. The years of spectacular successes – all attributed by Hitler to the ‘triumph of the will’ – and the undiluted adulation and sycophancy that surrounded him at every turn, the Führer cult on which the ‘system’ was built, had by now completely erased in him what little sense of his own limitations had been present. This led him to a calamitous over-estimation of his own abilities, coupled with an extreme denigration of those – particularly in the military – who argued more rationally for greater caution. It went hand in hand with an equally disastrous refusal to contemplate compromise, let alone retreat, as other than a sign of weakness. The experience of the war and its traumatic outcome had doubtless cemented this characteristic. It was certainly there in his early political career, for instance at the time of the attempted putsch in Munich in 1923. But it must have had deeper roots. Psychologists might have answers. At any rate the behaviour trait, increasingly dangerous as Hitler’s power expanded to threaten the peace of Europe, was redolent of the spoilt child turned into the would-be macho-man. His inability to comprehend the unwillingness of the British government to yield to his threats produced tantrums of frustrated rage. The certainty that he would get his way through bullying turned into blind fury whenever his bluff was called. The purchase he placed on his own image and standing was narcissistic in the extreme. The number of times he recalled the Czech mobilization of May 1938, then the Polish mobilization of March 1939, as a slight on his prestige was telling. A heightened thirst for revenge was the lasting consequence. Then the rescinding of the order to attack Poland on 26 August, much criticized as a sign of incompetence by the military, he took as a defeat in the eyes of his generals, feeling his prestige threatened. The result was increased impatience to remedy this by a new order at the earliest possible moment, from which there would be no retreat.

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.