[b]16: THE LAST DAYS OF PEACE[/b]

 

 

THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT had not waited idly for the formal signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in Moscow. The announcement in Berlin on the late evening of August 21 that Ribbentrop was flying to Moscow to conclude a German-Russian agreement stirred the British cabinet to action. It met at 3 P.M. on the twenty-second and issued a communique stating categorically that a Soviet-Nazi nonaggression pact "would in no way affect their obligation to Poland, which they have repeatedly stated in public and which they are determined to fulfill." At the same time Parliament was summoned to meet on August 24 to pass the Emergency Powers (Defense) Bill, and certain precautionary mobilization measures were taken.

 

Though the cabinet statement was as clear as words could make it, Chamberlain wanted Hitler to have no doubts about it. Immediately after the cabinet meeting broke up he wrote a personal letter to the Fuehrer.

 

[quote]... Apparently the announcement of a German-Soviet Agreement is taken in some quarters in Berlin to indicate that intervention by Great Britain on behalf of Poland is no longer a contingency that need be reckoned with. No greater mistake could be made. Whatever may prove to be the nature of the German-Soviet Agreement, it cannot alter Great Britain's obligation to Poland ...

 

It has been alleged that, if His Majesty's Government had made their position more clear in 1914, the great catastrophe would have been avoided. Whether or not there is any force in that allegation, His Majesty's Government are resolved that on this occasion there shall be no such tragic misunderstanding.

 

If the case should arise, they are resolved, and prepared, to employ without delay all the forces at their command, and it is impossible to foresee the end of hostilities once engaged ... [1][/quote]

 

Having, as he added, "thus made our position perfectly clear," the Prime Minister again appealed to Hitler to seek a peaceful solution of his differences with Poland and once more offered the British government's co-operation in helping to obtain it.

 

The letter, which Ambassador Henderson, flying down from Berlin, delivered to Hitler shortly after 1 P.M. on August 23 at Berchtesgaden, threw the Nazi dictator into a violent rage. "Hitler was excitable and uncompromising," Henderson wired Lord Halifax. "His language was violent and exaggerated both as regards England and Poland." [2] Henderson's report of the meeting and the German Foreign Office memorandum on it -- the latter among the captured Nazi papers -- agree on the nature of Hitler's tirade. England, he stormed, was responsible for Poland's intransigence just as it had been responsible for Czechoslovakia's unreasonable attitude the year before. Tens of thousands of Volksdeutsche in Poland were being persecuted. There were even, he claimed, six cases of castration -- a subject that obsessed him. He could stand it no more. Any further persecution of Germans by the Poles would bring immediate action.

 

[quote]I contested every point [Henderson wired Halifax] and kept calling his statements inaccurate but the only effect was to launch him on some fresh tirade.[/quote]

 

Finally Hitler agreed to give a written answer to the Prime Minister's letter in two hours' time, and Henderson withdrew to Salzburg for a little respite. [i] Later in the afternoon Hitler sent for him and handed him his reply. In contrast to the first meeting, the Fuehrer, Henderson reported to London, "was quite calm and never raised his voice."

 

[quote]He was, he said [Henderson reported], fifty years old; he preferred war now to when he would be fifty-five or sixty.[/quote]

 

The megalomania of the German dictator, declaiming on his mountaintop, comes out even more forcibly in the German minutes of the meeting. After quoting him as preferring to make war at fifty rather than later, they add:

 

[quote]England [Hitler said] would do well to realize that as a front-line soldier he knew what war was and would utilize every means available. It was surely quite clear to everyone that the World War [i.e., 1914-1918] would not have been lost if he had been Chancellor at the time.[/quote]

 

Hitler's reply to Chamberlain was a mixture of all the stale lies and exaggerations which he had been bellowing to foreigners and his own people since the Poles dared to stand up to him. Germany, he said, did not seek a conflict with Great Britain. It had been prepared all along to discuss the questions of Danzig and the Corridor with the Poles "on the basis of a proposal of truly unparalleled magnanimity." But the unconditional guarantee of Poland by Britain had only encouraged the Poles "to unloosen a wave of appalling terrorism against the one and a half million German inhabitants living in Poland." Such "atrocities" he declared, "are terrible for the victims but intolerable for a Great Power such as the German Reich." Germany would no longer tolerate them.

 

Finally he took note of the Prime Minister's assurance that Great Britain would honor its commitments to Poland and assured him "that it can make no change in the determination of the Reich Government to safeguard the interests of the Reich ... Germany, if attacked by England, will be found prepared and determined." [3]

 

What had this exchange of letters accomplished? Hitler now had a solemn assurance from Chamberlain that Britain would go to war if Germany attacked Poland. The Prime Minister had the Fuehrer's word that it would make no difference. But, as the events of the next hectic eight days would show, neither man believed on August 23 that he had heard the last word from the other.

 

This was especially true of Hitler. Buoyed up by the good news from Moscow and confident that, despite what Chamberlain had just written him, Great Britain and, in its wake, France would have second thoughts about honoring their obligations to Poland after the defection of Russia, the Fuehrer on the evening of August 23, as Henderson was flying back to Berlin, set the date for the onslaught on Poland: Saturday, August 26, at 4:30 A.M.

 

"There will be no more orders regarding Y Day and X Hour," General Halder noted in his diary. "Everything is to roll automatically."

 

But the Chief of the Army General Staff was wrong. On August 25 two events occurred which made Adolf Hitler shrink back from the abyss less than twenty-four hours before his troops were scheduled to break across the Polish frontier. One originated in London, the other in Rome.

 

On the morning of August 25, Hitler, who on the previous day had returned to Berlin to welcome Ribbentrop back from Moscow and receive a firsthand report on the Russians, got off a letter to Mussolini. It contained a belated explanation as to why he had not been able to keep his Axis partner informed of his negotiations with the Soviet Union. (He had "no idea," he said, that they would go so far so fast.) And he declared that the Russo-German pact "must be regarded as the greatest possible gain for the Axis."

 

But the real purpose of the letter, whose text is among the captured documents, was to warn the Duce that a German attack on Poland was liable to take place at any moment, though Hitler refrained from giving his friend and ally the exact date which he had set. "In case of intolerable events in Poland," he said, "I shall act immediately ... In these circumstances no one can say what the next hour may bring." Hitler did not specifically ask for Italy's help. That was, by the terms of the Italo-German alliance, supposed to be automatic. He contented himself with expressing the hope for Italy's understanding. [4] Nevertheless, he was anxious for an immediate answer. The letter was telephoned by Ribbentrop personally to the German ambassador in Rome and reached the Duce at 3:20 P.M.

 

In the meantime, at 1:30 P.M., the Fuehrer had received Ambassador Henderson at the Chancellery. His resolve to destroy Poland had in no way lessened but he was more anxious than he had been two days before, when he had talked with Henderson at Berchtesgaden, to make one last attempt to keep Britain out of the war. [ii] The ambassador found the Fuehrer, as he reported to London, "absolutely calm and normal and [he] spoke with great earnestness and apparent sincerity." Despite all his experience of the past year Henderson could not, even at this late date, see through the "sincerity" of the German Leader. For what Hitler had to say was quite preposterous. He "accepted" the British Empire, he told the ambassador, and was ready "to pledge himself personally to its continued existence and to commit the power of the German Reich for this."

 

[quote]He desired [Hitler explained] to make a move toward England which should be as decisive as the move towards Russia ... The Fuehrer is ready to conclude agreements with England which would not only guarantee the existence of the British Empire in all circumstances so far as Germany is concerned, but would also if necessary assure the British Empire of German assistance regardless of where such assistance should be necessary.[/quote]

 

He would also be ready, he added, "to accept a reasonable limitation of armaments" and to regard the Reich's western frontiers as final. At one point, according to Henderson, Hitler lapsed into a typical display of sentimental hogwash, though the ambassador did not describe it as that when he recounted it in his dispatch to London. The Fuehrer stated

 

[quote]that he was by nature an artist, not a politician, and that once the Polish question was settled he would end his life as an artist and not as a warmonger.[/quote]

 

But the dictator ended on another note.

 

[quote]The Fuehrer repeated [says the verbal statement drawn up by the Germans for Henderson] that he is a man of great decisions ... and that this is his last offer. If they [the British government] reject these ideas, there will be war.[/quote]

 

In the course of the interview Hitler repeatedly pointed out that his "large comprehensive offer" to Britain, as he described it, was subject to one condition: that it would take effect only "after the solution of the German-Polish problem." When Henderson kept insisting that Britain could not consider his offer unless it meant at the same time a peaceful settlement with Poland, Hitler replied, "If you think it useless then do not send my offer at all."

 

However, the ambassador had scarcely returned to the embassy a few steps up the Wilhelmstrasse from the Chancellery before Dr. Schmidt was knocking at the door with a written copy of Hitler's remarks -- with considerable deletions -- coupled with a message from the Fuehrer begging Henderson to urge the British government "to take the offer very seriously" and suggesting that he himself fly to London with it, for which purpose a German plane would be at his disposal. [5]

 

It was rarely easy, as readers who have got this far in this book are aware, to penetrate the strange and fantastic workings of Hitler's fevered mind. His ridiculous "offer" of August 25 to guarantee the British Empire was obviously a brain storm of the moment, for he had not mentioned it two days before when he discussed Chamberlain's letter with Henderson and composed a reply to it. Even making allowances for the dictator's aberrations, it is difficult to believe that he himself took it as seriously as he made out to the British ambassador. Besides, how could the British government, as he requested, be asked, to take it "very seriously" when Chamberlain would scarcely have time to read it before the Nazi armies hurtled into Poland at dawn on the morrow -- the X Day which still held?

 

But behind the "offer," no doubt, was a serious purpose. Hitler apparently believed that Chamberlain, like Stalin, wanted an out by which he could keep his country out of war. [iii] He had purchased Stalin's benevolent neutrality two days before by offering Russia a free hand in Eastern Europe "from the Baltic to the Black Sea." Could he not buy Britain's nonintervention by assuring the Prime Minister that the Third Reich would never, like the Hohenzollern Germany, become a threat to the British Empire? What Hitler did not realize, nor Stalin -- to the latter's awful cost -- was that to Chamberlain, his eyes open at long last, Germany's domination of the European continent would be the greatest of all threats to the British Empire -- as indeed it would be to the Soviet Russian Empire. For centuries, as Hitler had noted in Mein Kampf, the first imperative of British foreign policy had been to prevent any single nation from dominating the Continent.

 

At 5:30 P.M. Hitler received the French ambassador but had little of importance to say to him beyond repeating that "Polish provocation of the Reich" could no longer be endured, that he would not attack France but that if France entered the conflict he would fight her to the end. Whereupon he started to dismiss the French envoy by rising from his chair. But Coulondre had something to say to the Fuehrer of the Third Reich and he insisted on saying it. He told him on his word of honor as a soldier that he had not the least doubt "that if Poland is attacked France will be at the side of Poland with all its forces."

 

"It is painful to me," Hitler replied, "to think of having to fight your country, but that does not depend on me. Please say that to Monsieur Daladier." [6]

 

It was now 6 P.M. of August 25 in Berlin. Tension in the capital had been building up all day. Since early afternoon all radio, telegraph and telephone communication with the outside world had been cut off on orders from the Wilhelmstrasse. The night before, the last of the British and French correspondents and nonofficial civilians had hurriedly left for the nearest frontier. During the day of the twenty-fifth, a Friday, it became known that the German Foreign Office had wired the embassies and consulates in Poland, France and Britain requesting that German citizens be asked to leave by the quickest route. My own diary notes for August 24-25 recall the feverish atmosphere in Berlin. The weather was warm and sultry and everyone seemed to be on edge. All through the sprawling city antiaircraft guns were being set up, and bombers flew continually overhead in the direction of Poland. "It looks like war," I scribbled on the evening of the twenty-fourth; "War is imminent," I repeated the next day, and on both nights, I remember, the Germans we saw in the Wilhelmstrasse whispered that Hitler had ordered the soldiers to march into Poland at dawn.

 

Their orders, we now know, were to attack at 4:30 on Saturday morning, August 26. [iv] And up until 6 P.M. on the twenty-fifth nothing that had happened during the day, certainly not the personal assurances of Ambassadors Henderson and Coulondre that Britain and France would surely honor their commitments to Poland, had budged Adolf Hitler from his resolve to go ahead with his aggression on schedule. But about 6 P.M., or shortly afterward, there arrived news from London and Rome that made this man of apparently unshakable will hesitate.

 

It is not quite clear from the confidential German records and the postwar testimony of the Wilhelmstrasse officials at just what time Hitler learned of the signing in London of the formal Anglo-Polish treaty which transformed Britain's unilateral guarantee of Poland into a pact of mutual assistance. [v] There is some evidence in Halder's diary and in the German Naval Register that the Wilhelmstrasse got wind at noon on August 25 that the pact would be signed during the day. The General Staff Chief notes that at 12 noon he got a call from OKW asking what was the latest deadline for postponement of the decision to attack and that he replied: 3 P.M. The Naval Register also mentions that news of the Anglo-Polish pact and of "information from the Duce" was received at noon.7 But this is impossible. Word from Mussolini did not arrive, according to a German notation on the document, until "about 6 P.M." And Hitler could not have learned of the signing of the Anglo-Polish treaty in London until about that time, since this event only took place at 5:35 P.M. -- and, at that, barely fifteen minutes after the Polish ambassador in London, Count Edward Raczynski, had received permission from his Foreign Minister in Warsaw over the telephone to affix his signature. [vi]

 

Whatever time he received it -- and around 6 P.M. is an accurate guess -- Hitler was moved by the news from London. This could well be Britain's answer to his "offer," the terms of which must have reached London by now. It meant that he had failed in his bid to buy off the British as he had bought off the Russians. Dr. Schmidt, who was in Hitler's office when the report arrived, remembered later that the Fuehrer, after reading it, sat brooding at his desk. [8]

 

[b]MUSSOLINI GETS COLD FEET[/b]

 

His brooding was interrupted very shortly by equally bad news from Rome. Throughout the afternoon the German dictator had waited with "unconcealed impatience," as Dr. Schmidt describes it, for the Duce's reply to his letter. The Italian ambassador, Attolico, was summoned to the Chancellery at 3 P.M., shortly after Henderson had departed, but he could only inform the Fuehrer that no answer had been received as yet. By this time Hitler's nerves were so strained that he sent Ribbentrop out to get Ciano on the long-distance telephone, but the Foreign Minister was unable to get through to him. Attolico, Schmidt says, was dismissed "with scant courtesy." [9]

 

For some days Hitler had been receiving warnings from Rome that his Axis partner might go back on him at the crucial moment of the attack on Poland, and this intelligence was not without foundation. No soener had Ciano returned from his disillusioning meetings with Hitler and Ribbentrop on August 11 to 13, than he set to work to turn Mussolini against the Germans -- an action which did not escape the watchful eyes of the German Embassy in Rome. The Fascist Foreign Minister's diary traces the ups and downs of his efforts to make the Italian dictator see the light and disassociate himself, in time, from Hitler's war, [10] On the evening of his return from Berchtesgaden on August 13, Ciano saw the Duce and after describing his talks with Hitler and Ribbentrop tried to convince his chief that the Germans "have betrayed us and lied to us" and "are dragging us into an adventure."

 

[quote]The Duce's reactions are varied [Ciano noted in his diary that night]. At first he agrees with me. Then he says that honor compels him to march with Germany. Finally, he states that he wants his part of the booty in Croatia and Dalmatia.

 

August 14. -- I find Mussolini worried. 1 do not hesitate to arouse in him every possible anti-German reaction by every means in my power. 1 speak to him of his diminished prestige and his playing the role of second fiddle. And, finally, 1 turn over to him documents which prove the bad faith of the Germans on the Polish question. The alliance was based on premises which they now deny; they are traitors and we must not have any scruples in ditching them. But Mussolini still has many scruples.

 

On the next day. Ciano talked it out with Mussolini for six hours.

 

[quote]August 15. -- The Duce ... is convinced that we must not march blindly with the Germans. However ... he wants time to prepare the break with Germany ... He is more and more convinced that the democracies will fight ... This time it means war. And we cannot engage in war because our plight does not permit us to do so.

 

August 18. -- A conversation with the Duce in the morning; his usual shifting feelings. He still thinks it possible that the democracies will not march and that Germany might do good business cheaply, from which business he does not want to be excluded. Then, too, he fears Hitler's rage. He believes that a denunciation of the pact or something like it might induce Hitler to abandon the Polish question in order to square accounts with Italy. All this makes him nervous and disturbed.

 

August 20. -- The Duce made an about-face. He wants to support Germany at any cost in the conflict which is now close at hand ... Conference between Mussolini, myself, and Attolico. [The ambassador had returned from Berlin to Rome for consultations.] This is the substance: It is already too late to go back on the Germans ... The press of the whole world would say that Italy is cowardly ... I try to debate the matter but it is useless now. Mussolini holds very stubbornly to his idea . . .

 

August 21. --  Today I have spoken very clearly ... When 1 entered the room Mussolini confirmed his decision to go along with the Germans. "You, Duce, cannot and must not do it . .. I went to Salzburg in order to adopt a common line of action. 1 found myself face to face with a Diktat. The Germans, not ourselves, have betrayed the alliance ... Tear up the pact. Throw it in Hitler's face! ..."[/quote]

 

The upshot of this conference was that Ciano should seek a meeting with Ribbentrop for the next day at the Brenner and inform him that Italy would stay out of a conflict provoked by a German attack on Poland. Ribbentrop was not available for several hours when Ciano put in a call for him at noon, but at 5:30 he finally came on the line. The Nazi Foreign Minister could not give Ciano an immediate answer about meeting on the Brenner on such quick notice, because he was "waiting for an important message from Moscow" and would cal1 back later. This he did at 10:30 P.M.

 

[quote]August 22. -- Last evening at 10:30 a new act opened [Ciano recorded in his diary]. Ribbentrop telephoned that he would prefer to see me in Innsbruck rather than at the frontier, because he was to leave later for Moscow to sign a political pact with the Soviet Government.[/quote]

 

This was news, and of the most startling kind, to Ciano and Mussolini. They decided that a meeting of the two foreign ministers "would no longer be timely." Once more their German ally had shown its contempt for them by not letting them know about the deal with Moscow.

 

The hesitations of the Duce, the anti-German feelings of Ciano and the possibility that Italy might. crawl out of its obligations under Article III of the Pact of Steel, which called for the automatic participation in war of one party if the other party "became involved in hostilities with another Power," became known in Berlin before Ribbentrop set off for Moscow on August 22.

 

On August 20, Count Massimo Magistrati, the Italian charge d'affaires in Berlin, called on Weizsaecker at the Foreign Office and revealed "an Italian state of mind which, although it does not surprise me," the State Secretary informed Ribbentrop in a confidential memorandum, [11] "must in my opinion definitely be considered." What Magistrati brought to the attention of Weizsaecker was that since Germany had not adhered to the terms of the alliance, which cal1ed for close contact and consultation on major questions, and had treated its conflict with Poland as an exclusively German problem, "Germany was thus forgoing Italy's armed assistance." And if contrary to the German view the Polish conflict developed into a big war, Italy did not consider that the "prerequisites" of the alliance existed. In brief, Italy was seeking an out.

 

Two days later, on August 23, a further warning was received in Berlin from Ambassador Hans Georg von Mackensen in Rome. He wrote to Weizsaecker on what had been happening "behind the scenes." The letter, according to a marginal note in Weizsaecker's handwriting on the captured document, was "submitted to the Fuehrer." It must have opened his eyes. The Italian position, following a series of meetings between Mussolini, Ciano and Attolico, was, Mackensen reported, that if Germany invaded Poland she would violate the Pact of Steel, which was based on an agreement to refrain from war until 1942. Furthermore, contrary to the German view, Mussolini was sure that if Germany attacked Poland both Britain and France would intervene -- "and the United States too after a few months." While Germany remained on the defensive in the west the French and British,

 

[quote]in the Duce's opinion, would descend on Italy with all the forces at their disposal. In this situation Italy would have to bear the whole brunt of the war in order to give the Reich the opportunity of liquidating the affair in the East ... [12][/quote]

 

It was with these warnings in mind that Hitler got off his letter to Mussolini on the morning of August 25 and waited all day, with mounting impatience, for an answer. Shortly after midnight of the day before, Ribbentrop, after an evening recounting to the Fuehrer the details of his triumph in Moscow, rang up Ciano to warn him, "at the instigation of the Fuehrer," of the "extreme gravity of the situation due to Polish provocations." [vii] A note by Weizsaecker reveals that the call was made to "prevent the Italians from being able to speak of unexpected developments."

 

By the time Ambassador Mackensen handed Mussolini Hitler's letter at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome at 3:20 P.M. on August 25, the Duce, then, knew that the German attack on Poland was about to take place. Unlike Hitler, he was certain that Great Britain and France would immediately enter the war, with catastrophic consequences for Italy, whose Navy was no match for the British Mediterranean Fleet and whose Army would be overwhelmed by the French. [viii] According to a dispatch which Mackensen got off to Berlin at 10:25 P.M. describing the meeting, Mussolini, after carefully reading the letter twice in his presence, declared that he was "in complete agreement" about the Nazi-Soviet Pact and that he realized that an "armed conflict with Poland could no longer be avoided." Finally -- "and this he emphasized expressly," Mackensen reported -- "he stood beside us unconditionally and with all his resources."  [13]

 

But this was not what the Duce wrote the Fuehrer, unbeknownst to the German ambassador, the text of which was hurriedly telephoned by Ciano to Attolico, who had returned to his post in Berlin and who "about 6 P.M." arrived at the Chancellery to deliver it in person to Adolf Hitler. It struck the Fuehrer, according to Schmidt, who was present, like a bombshell. After expressing his "complete approval" of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and his "understanding concerning Poland," Mussolini came to the main point.

 

[quote]As for the practical attitude of Italy in case of military action (Mussolini wrote, and the emphasis is his], my point of view is as follows:

 

If Germany attacks Poland and the conflict remains localized, Italy will afford Germany every form of political and economic assistance which is requested of her.

 

If Germany attacks Poland [ix] and the latter's allies open a counterattack against Germany, I inform you in advance that it will be opportune for me not to take the initiative in military operations in view of the present state of Italian war preparations, of which we have repeatedly and in good time informed you, Fuehrer, and Herr von Ribbentrop.

 

Our intervention can, nevertheless, take place at once if Germany delivers to us immediately the military supplies and the raw materials to resist the attack which the French and English would predominantly direct against us.

 

At our meetings the war was envisaged for 1942, and by that time I would have been ready on land, on sea and in the air, according to the plans which had been concerted.

 

I am furthermore of the opinion that the purely military measures which have already been taken, and other measures to be taken later, will immobilize, in Europe and Africa, considerable French and British forces.

 

I consider it my bounden duty as a loyal friend to tell you the whole truth and inform you beforehand about the real situation. Not to do so might have unpleasant consequences for us all. This is my view, and since within a short time I must summon the highest governmental bodies, I beg you to let me know yours.

 

MUSSOLINI [ix] [15][/quote]

 

So though Russia was in the bag as a friendly neutral instead of a belligerent, Germany's ally of the Pact of Steel was out of it -- and this on the very day that Britain had seemed to commit herself irrevocably by signing a mutual-assistance pact with Poland against German aggression. Hitler read the Duce's letter, told Attolico he would answer it immediately and icily dismissed the Italian envoy.

 

"The Italians are behaving just as they did in 1914," Dr. Schmidt overheard Hitler remark bitterly after Attolico had left, and that evening the Chancellery echoed with unkind words about the "disloyal Axis partner." But words were not enough. The German Army was scheduled to hop off against Poland in nine hours, for it was now 6:30 P.M. of August 25 and the invasion was set to begin at 4:30 A.M. on August 26. The Nazi dictator had to decide at once whether, in view of the news from London and Rome, to go ahead with it or postpone or cancel it.

 

Schmidt, accompanying Attolico out of Hitler's study, bumped into General Keitel rushing to the presence of the Fuehrer. A few minutes later the General hurried out, crying excitedly to his adjutant, "The order to advance must be delayed again!"

 

Hitler, pushed into a comer by Mussolini and Chamberlain, had swiftly made his decision. "Fuehrer considerably shaken," Halder noted in his diary, and then continued:

 

[quote]7:30 P.M. -- Treaty between Poland and England ratified. No opening of hostilities. All troop movements to be stopped, even near the frontier if not otherwise possible.

 

8:35 P.M. -- Keitel confirms. Canaris: Telephone restrictions lifted on England and France. Confirms development of events.[/quote]

 

The German Naval Register gives a more concise account of the postponement, along with the reasons:

 

[quote]August 25: -- Case White already started will be stopped at 20:30 (8:30 P.M.) because of changed political conditions. (Mutual-Assistance Pact England-Poland of August 25, noon, and information from Duce that he would be true to his word but has to ask for large supply of raw materials.) [16][/quote]

 

Three of the chief defendants at Nuremberg submitted, under interrogation, their version of the postponement of the attack. [17] Ribbentrop claimed that when he heard about the Anglo-Polish pact and "heard" that "military steps were being taken against Poland" (as if he didn't know all along about the attack) he went "at once" to the Fuehrer and urged him to call off the invasion of Poland, to which "the Fuehrer at once agreed." This is surely entirely untrue.

 

But the testimony of Keitel and Goering at least seemed more honest. "I was suddenly called to Hitler at the Chancellery," Keitel recounted on the stand at Nuremberg, "and he said to me, 'Stop everything at once. Get Brauchitsch immediately. I need time for negotiations.'"

 

That Hitler still believed at this late hour that he could negotiate his way out of his impasse was confirmed by Goering during a pretrial interrogation at Nuremberg.

 

[quote]On the day that England gave her official guarantee to Poland the Fuehrer called me on the telephone and told me that he had stopped the planned invasion of Poland. I asked him whether this was just temporary or for good. He said, "No, I will have to see whether we can eliminate British intervention."[/quote]

 

Though Mussolini's last-minute defection was a heavy blow to Hitler, it is obvious from the above testimony that Britain's action in signing a mutual-assistance treaty with Poland was the stronger influence in inducing the German leader to postpone the attack. Yet it is strange that after Ambassador Henderson on this very day had again warned him that Britain would fight if Poland were attacked and that after the British government had now solemnly given its word to that effect in a formal treaty, he still believed he could, as he told Goering, "eliminate British intervention." It is likely that his experience with Chamberlain at Munich led him to believe that the Prime Minister again would capitulate if a way out could be concocted. But again it is strange that a man who had previously shown such insight into foreign politics did not know of the changes in Chamberlain and in the British position. After all, Hitler himself had provoked them.

 

It took some doing to halt the German Army on the evening of August 25, for many units were already on the move. In East Prussia the order calling off the attack reached General Petzel's I Corps at 9:37 P.M. and only the frantic efforts of several officers who were rushed out to the forward detachments succeeded in stopping the troops. The motorized columns of General von Kleist's corps to the south had begun to move at dusk up to the Polish frontier. They were halted on the border by a staff officer who made a quick landing in a small scouting plane on the frontier. In a few sectors the orders did not arrive until after the shooting began, but since the Germans had been provoking incidents all along the border for several days the Polish General Staff apparently did not suspect what had really happened. It did report on August 26 that numerous "German bands" had crossed the border and attacked blockhouses and customs posts with machine guns and hand grenades and that "in one case it was a Regular Army detachment."

 

[b]JOY AND CONFUSION OF THE "CONSPIRATORS"[/b]

 

The news on the evening of August 25 that Hitler had called off the attack on Poland caused great jubilation among the conspiratorial members of the Abwehr. Colonel Oster gave Schacht and Gisevius the news, exclaiming, "The Fuehrer is done for," and the next morning Admiral Canaris was even more in the clouds. "Hitler," Canaris declared, "will never survive this blow. Peace has been saved for the next twenty years." Both men thought there was no further need of bothering to overthrow the Nazi dictator; he was finished.

 

For several weeks as the fateful summer approached its end the conspirators, as they conceived themselves, had again been busy, though with what purpose exactly it is difficult to comprehend. Goerdeler, Adam von Trott, Helmuth von Moltke, Fabian von Schlabrendorff and Rudolf Pechel had all made the pilgrimage to London and there had informed not only Chamberlain and Halifax but Churchill and other British leaders that Hitler planned to attack Poland at the end of August. These German opponents of the Fuehrer could see for themselves that Britain, right up to its umbrella-carrying Chamberlain, had changed since the days of Munich, and that the one condition they themselves had made the year before to their resolve to get rid of Hitler, namely that Britain and France declare they would oppose any further Nazi aggression by armed force, had now been fulfilled. What more did they want? It is not clear from the records they have left, and one gathers the impression that they did not quite know themselves. Well-meaning though they were, they were gripped by utter confusion and a paralyzing sense of futility. Hitler's hold on Germany -- on the Army, the police, the government, the people -- was too complete to be loosened or undermined by anything they could think of doing.

 

On August 15, Hassell visited Dr. Schacht at his new bachelor quarters in Berlin. The dismissed Minister of Economics had just returned from a six-month journey to India and Burma. "Schacht's view is," Hassell wrote in his diary, "that we can do nothing but keep our eyes open and wait, that things will follow their inevitable course." Hassell himself told Gisevius the same day, according to his own diary entry, that he "too was in favor of postponing direct action for the moment."

 

But what "direct action" was there to be put off? General Halder, keen as Hitler to smash Poland, was not at the moment interested in getting rid of the dictator. General von Witzleben, who was to have led the troops in the overthrow of the Fuehrer the year before, was now in command of an army group in the west and was, therefore, in no position to act in Berlin, even if he had wished to. But did he have any such wish? Gisevius visited him at his headquarters, found him listening to the BHC radio news from London and soon realized that the General was interested merely in finding out what was going on.

 

As for General Halder, he was preoccupied with last-minute plans for the onslaught on Poland, to the exclusion of any treasonable thoughts about getting rid of Hitler. When interrogated after the war -- on February 26, 1946 -- at Nuremberg, he was exceedingly fuzzy about why he and the other supposed enemies of the Nazi regime had done nothing in the last days of August to depose the Fuehrer and thus save Germany from involvement in war. "There was no possibility," he said. Why? Because General von Witzleben had been transferred to the west. Without Witzleben the Army could not act.

 

What about the German people? When Captain Sam Harris, the American interrogator, reminding Halder that he had said the German people were opposed to war, asked, "If Hitler were irrevocably committed to war, why couldn't you count on the support of the people before the invasion of Poland?" Halder replied, "You must excuse me if I smile. If I hear the word 'irrevocably' connected with Hitler, I must say that nothing was irrevocable." And the General Staff Chief went on to explain that as late as August 22, after Hitler had revealed to his generals at the meeting on the Obersalzberg his "irrevocable" resolve to attack Poland and fight the West if necessary, he himself did not believe that the Fuehrer would do what he said he would do. [18] In the light of Halder's own diary entries for this period, this is an astonishing statement indeed. But it is typical not only of Halder but of most of the other conspirators.

 

Where was General Beck, Halder's predecessor as Chief of the Army General Staff and the acknowledged leader of the conspirators? According to Gisevius, Beck wrote a letter to General von Brauchitsch but the Army Commander in Chief did not even acknowledge it. Next, Gisevius says, Beck had a long talk with Halder, who agreed with him that a big war would be the ruin of Germany but thought "Hitler would never permit a world war" and that therefore there was no need at the moment to try to overthrow him. [19]

 

On August 14, Hassell dined alone with Beck, and recorded their feeling of frustration in his diary.

 

[quote]Beck [is] a most cultured, attractive and intelligent man. Unfortunately, he has a very low opinion of the leading people in the Army. For that reason he could see no place there where we could gain a foothold. He is firmly convinced of the vicious character of the policies of the Third Reich. [20][/quote]

 

The convictions of Beck -- and of the others around him -- were high and noble, but as Adolf Hitler prepared to hurl Germany into war not one of these estimable Germans did anything to halt him. The task was obviously difficult and perhaps, at this late hour, impossible to fulfill. But they did not even attempt it.

 

General Thomas, perhaps, tried. Following up his memorandum to Keitel which he had personally read to the OKW Chief at the middle of August, [x] he called on him again on Sunday, August 27, and, according to his own account, "handed him graphically illustrated statistical evidence ... [which] demonstrated clearly the tremendous military-economic superiority of the Western Powers and the tribulation we would face." Keitel, with unaccustomed courage, showed the material to Hitler, who replied that he did not share General Thomas' "anxiety over the danger of a world war, especially since he had now got the Soviet Union on his side." [21]

 

Thus ended the attempts of the "conspirators" to prevent Hitler from launching World War II, except for the feeble last-minute efforts of Dr. Schacht, of which the canny financier made much in his own defense at the Nuremberg trial. On his return from India in August he wrote letters to Hitler, Goering and Ribbentrop -- at the fateful moment none of the opposition leaders seem to have gone beyond writing letters and memoranda -- but, to his "very great surprise," as he said later, received no replies. Next he decided to go to Zossen, a few miles southeast of Berlin, where the Army High Command had set up headquarters for the Polish campaign, and personally confront General von Brauchitsch. To tell him what? On the witness stand at Nuremberg Schacht explained that he intended to tell the Army chief that it would be unconstitutional for Germany to go to war without the approval of the Reichstag! It was therefore the duty of the Army Commander in Chief to respect his oath to the constitution!

 

Alas, Dr. Schacht never got to see Brauchitsch. He was warned by Canaris that if he came to Zossen the Army commander "would probably have us arrested immediately" -- a fate that did not seem attractive to this former supporter of Hitler. [22] But the real reason Schacht did not go to Zossen on his ridiculous errand (it would have been child's play for Hitler to get the rubber-stamp Reichstag to approve his war had he wanted to bother with such a formality) was stated by Gisevius when he took the witness stand on behalf of Schacht at Nuremberg. It seems that Schacht planned to go to Zossen on August 25 and called off the trip when Hitler on that evening called off the attack on Poland scheduled for the next day. Three days later, according to the testimony of Gisevius, Schacht again decided to carry out his mission at Zossen but Canaris informed him it was too late. [23] It wasn't that the "conspirators" missed the bus; they never arrived at the bus station to try to catch it.

 

As ineffective as the handful of anti-Nazi Germans in staying Hitler's hand were the various neutral world leaders who now appealed to the Fuehrer to avert war. On August 24, President Roosevelt sent urgent messages to Hitler and the President of Poland pressing them to settle their differences without resorting to arms. President Moscicki, in a dignified reply the following day, reminded Roosevelt that it was not Poland which was "formulating demands and demanding concessions" but that nevertheless it was willing to settle its disputes with Germany by direct negotiation or by conciliation, as the American President had urged. Hitler did not reply (Roosevelt had reminded him that he had not answered the President's appeal to him of last April) and on the next day, August 25, Roosevelt sent a second message, informing Hitler of Moscicki's conciliatory response, and beseeching him to "agree to the pacific means of settlement accepted by the Government of Poland."

 

To the second letter there was no answer either, although on the evening of August 26 Weizsaecker summoned the American charge d'affaires in Berlin, Alexander C. Kirk, and asked him to tell the President that the Fuehrer had received the two telegrams and had placed them "in the hands of the Foreign Minister for consideration by the government."

 

The Pope took to the air on August 24 to make a broadcast appeal for peace, beseeching "by the blood of Christ ... the strong [to] hear us that they may not become weak through injustice ... [and] if they desire that their power may not be a destruction." On the afternoon of August 31 the Pope sent identical notes to the governments of Germany, Poland, Italy and the two Western Powers "beseeching, in the name of God, the German and Polish Governments ... to avoid any incident," begging the British, French and Italian governments to support his appeal and adding:

 

[quote]The Pope is unwilling to abandon hope that pending negotiations may lead to a just pacific solution.[/quote]

 

His Holiness, like almost everyone else in the world, did not realize that the "pending negotiations" were but a propaganda trick by Hitler to justify his aggression. Actually, as shortly will be shown, there were no bona fide negotiations, pending or otherwise, on that last afternoon of the peace.

 

A few days earlier, on August 23, the King of the Belgians, in the name of the rulers of the "Oslo" powers (Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Finland and the three Scandinavian states), had also broadcast a moving appeal for peace, calling "on the men who are responsible for the course of events to submit their disputes and their claims to open negotiation." On August 28 the King of the Belgians and the Queen of the Netherlands jointly offered their good offices "in the hope of averting war." [24]

 

Noble in form and in intent as all these neutral appeals were, there is something unreal and pathetic about them when reread today. It was as if the President of the United States, the Pope and the rulers of the small Northern European democracies lived on a different planet from that of the Third Reich and had no more understanding of what was going on in Berlin than of what might be transpiring on Mars. This ignorance of the mind and character and purposes of Adolf Hitler, and indeed of the Germans, who, with a few exceptions, were ready to follow him blindly no matter where nor how, regardless of morals, ethics, honor, or the Christian concept of humanity, was to cost the peoples led by Roosevelt and the monarchs of Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Norway and Denmark dearly in the months to come.

 

Those of us who were in Berlin during those last few tense days of peace and who were attempting to report the news to the outside world knew very little either of what was going on in the Wilhelmstrasse, where the Chancellery and the Foreign Office were, or in the Bendlerstrasse, where the military had their offices. We followed as best we could the frantic comings and goings in the Wilhelmstrasse. We sifted daily an avalanche of rumors, tips and "plants." We caught the mood of the people in the street and of the government officials, party leaders, diplomats and soldiers of our acquaintance. But what was said at Ambassador Henderson's frequent and often stormy interviews with Hitler and Ribbentrop, what was written between Hitler and Chamberlain, between Hitler and Mussolini, between Hitler and Stalin, what was talked about between Ribbentrop and Molotov and between Ribbentrop and Ciano, what was contained in all the secret, coded dispatches humming over the wires between the stumbling, harassed diplomats and foreign-office officials, and all the moves which the military chiefs were planning or making -- of all this we and the general public remained almost completely ignorant at the time.

 

A few things, of course, we, and the public, knew. The Nazi-Soviet Pact was trumpeted to the skies by the Germans, though the secret protocol dividing up Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe remained unknown until after the war. We knew that even before it was signed Henderson had flown to Berchtesgaden to emphasize to Hitler that the pact would not prevent Britain from honoring its guarantee to Poland. As the last week of August began we felt in Berlin that war was inevitable  -- unless there was another Munich -- and that it would come within a few days. By August 25 the last of the British and French civilians had skipped out. The next day the big Nazi rally at Tannenberg scheduled for August 27, at which Hitler was to have spoken, was publicly called off, as was the annual party convention at Nuremberg (the "Party Rally of Peace," Hitler had officially called it), due to convene the first week of September. On August 27 the government announced that rationing of food, soap, shoes, textiles and coal would begin on the following day. This announcement, I remember, above all others, woke up the German people to the imminence of war, and their grumbling about it was very audible. On Monday, August 28, the Berliners watched troops pouring through the city toward the east. They were being transported in moving vans, grocery trucks and every other sort of vehicle that could be scraped up.

 

That too must have alerted the man in the street as to what was up. The weekend, I remember, had been hot and sultry and most of the Berliners, regardless of how near war was, had betaken themselves to the lakes and the woods which surround the capital. Returning to the city Sunday evening, they learned from the radio that there had been a secret, unofficial meeting of the Reichstag at the Chancellery. A D.N.B. communique stated that the "Fuehrer outlined the gravity of the situation" -- this was the first the German public had been told by Hitler that the hour was grave. No details of the meeting were given and no one outside of the Reichstag members and of Hitler's entourage could know of the mood the Nazi dictator was in that day. Halder's diary of August 28 supplied -- much later -- one account, given him by Colonel Oster of the Abwehr.

 

[quote]Conference at Reich Chancellery at 5:30 P.M. Reichstag and several Party notables ... Situation very grave. Determined to solve Eastern question one way or another. Minimum demands: return of Danzig, settling of Corridor question. Maximum demands: "Depending on military situation." If minimum demands not satisfied, then war: Brutal! He will himself be on front line. The Duce's attitude served our best interests.

 

War very difficult, perhaps hopeless; "As long as I am alive there will be no talk of capitulation." Soviet Pact widely misunderstood by Party. A pact with Satan to cast out the Devil ... "Applause on proper cues, but thin."

 

Personal impression of Fuehrer: exhausted, haggard, croaking voice, preoccupied. "Keeps himself completely surrounded now by his S.S. advisers."[/quote]

 

In Berlin too a foreign observer could watch the way the press, under Goebbels' expert direction, was swindling the gullible German people. For six years, since the Nazi "co-ordination" of the daily newspapers, which had meant the destruction of a free press, the citizens had been cut off from the truth of what was going on in the world. For a time the Swiss German-language newspapers from Zurich and Basel could be purchased at the leading newsstands in Germany and these presented objective news. But in recent years their sale in the Reich had been either prohibited or limited to a few copies. For Germans who could read English or French, there were occasionally a few copies of the London and Paris journals available, though not enough to reach more than a handful of persons.

 

"How completely isolated a world the German people live in," I noted in my diary on August 10, 1939. "A glance at the newspapers yesterday and today, reminds you of it." I had returned to Germany from a brief leave in Washington, New York and Paris, and coming up in the train from my home in Switzerland two days before I had bought a batch of Berlin and Rhineland newspapers. They quickly propelled one back to the cockeyed world of Nazism, which was as unlike the world I had just left as if it had been on another planet. I noted further on August 10, after I had arrived in Berlin:

 

[quote]Whereas all the rest of the world considers that the peace is about to be broken by Germany, that it is Germany that is threatening to attack Poland ... here in Germany, in the world the local newspapers create, the very reverse is maintained ... What the Nazi papers are proclaiming is this: that it is Poland which is disturbing the peace of Europe; Poland which is threatening Germany with armed invasion ...

 

 

"POLAND, LOOK OUT!" warns the B.Z. headline, adding: "ANSWER TO POLAND, THE RUNNER-AMOK [AMOKLAUFFER] AGAINST PEACE AND RIGHT IN EUROPE!"

 

Or the headline in Der Fuehrer, daily paper of Karlsruhe, which I bought on the train: "WARSAW THREATENS BOMBARDMENT OF DANZIG -- UNBELIEVABLE AGITATION OF THE POLISH ARCHMADNESS[POLNISCHEN GROESSENWAHSN]!"

 

You ask: But the German people can't possibly believe these lies? Then you talk to them. So many do.[/quote]

 

By Saturday, August 26, the date originally set by Hitler for the attack on Poland, Goebbels' press campaign had reached its climax. I noted in my diary some of the headlines.

 

[quote]The B.Z.: "COMPLETE CHAOS IN POLAND -- GERMAN FAMILIES FLEE -- POLISH SOLDIERS PUSH TO EDGE OF GERMAN BORDER!" The 12-Uhr Blatt: "THIS PLAYING WITH FIRE GOING TOO FAR -- THREE GERMAN PASSENGER PLANES SHOT AT BY POLES -- IN CORRIDOR MANY GERMAN FARMHOUSES IN FLAMES!"[/quote]

 

On my way to Broadcast House at midnight I picked up the Sunday edition (August 27) of the Voelkischer Beobachter. Across the whole top of the front page were inch-high headlines:

 

[quote]WHOLE OF POLAND IN WAR FEVER! 1,500,000 MEN MOBILIZED! UNINTERRUPTED TROOP TRANSPORT TOWARD THE FRONTIER! CHAOS IN UPPER SILESIA![/quote]

 

There was no mention, of course, of any German mobilization, though, as we have seen, Germany had been mobilized for a fortnight.

 

[b]THE LAST SIX DAYS OF PEACE[/b]

 

After recovering from the cold douche of Mussolini's letter which had arrived early in the evening of August 25 and which, along with the news of the signing of the Anglo-Polish alliance, had caused him to postpone the attack on Poland scheduled for the next day, Hitler got off a curt note to the Duce asking him "what implements of war and raw materials you require and within what time" in order that Italy could "enter a major European conflict." The letter was telephoned by Ribbentrop personally to the German ambassador in Rome at 7 :40 P.M. and handed to the Italian dictator at 9: 30 P.M. [25]

 

The next morning, in Rome, Mussolini had a meeting with the chiefs of the Italian armed services to draw up a list of his minimum requirements for a war lasting twelve months. In the words of Ciano, who helped draw it up, it was "enough to kill a bull -- if a bull could read it." [26] It included seven million tons of petroleum, six million tons of coal, two million tons of steel, one million tons of timber and a long list of other items down to 600 tons of molybdenum, 400 tons of titanium, and twenty tons of zirconium. In addition Mussolini demanded 150 antiaircraft batteries to protect the Italian industrial area in the north, which was but a few minutes' flying time from French air bases, a circumstance which he reminded Hitler of in a letter which he now composed. This message was telephoned by Ciano to Attolico in Berlin shortly after noon on August 26 and immediately delivered to Hitler. [27]

 

It contained more than a swollen list of materials needed. By now the deflated Fascist leader was obviously determined to wriggle out of his obligations to the Third Reich, and the Fuehrer, after reading this second letter, could no longer have the slightest doubt of it.

 

[quote]FUEHRER [Mussolini wrote his comrade], I would not have sent you this list, or else it would have contained a smaller number of items and much lower figures, if 1had had the time agreed upon beforehand to accumulate stocks and to speed up the tempo of autarchy.

 

It is my duty to tell you that unless I am certain of receiving these supplies, the sacrifices I should call on the Italian people to make ... could well be in vain and could compromise your cause along with my own.[/quote]

 

On his own hook, Ambassador Attolico, who was opposed to war, and especially to Italy's joining Germany in it if it came, emphasized to Hitler, when he delivered the message, "that all material must be in Italy before the beginning of hostilities" and that this demand was "decisive." [xi]

 

Mussolini was still hoping for another Munich. He added a paragraph to his note, declaring that if the Fuehrer thought there was still "any possibility whatsoever of a solution in the political field" he was ready, as before, to give his German colleague his full support. Despite their close personal relations and their Pact of Steel and all the noisy demonstrations of solidarity they had given in the past years, the fact remains that even at this eleventh hour Hitler had not confided to Mussolini his true aim, the destruction of Poland, and that the Italian partner remained quite ignorant of it. Only at the end of this day, the twenty-sixth, was this gulf between them finally bridged.

 

Within three hours on August 26, Hitler sent a long reply to the Duce's message. Ribbentrop again telephoned it, at 3:08 P.M., to Ambassador von Mackensen in Rome, who rushed it to Mussolini shortly after 5 P.M. While some of Italy's requirements such as coal and steel, Hitler said, could be met in full, many others could not. In any case, Attolico's insistence that the materials must be supplied before the outbreak of hostilities was "impossible."

 

And now, finally, Hitler took his friend and ally into his confidence as to his real and immediate aims.

 

[quote]As neither France nor Britain can achieve any decisive successes in the West, and as Germany, as a result of the Agreement with Russia, will have all her forces free in the East after the defeat of Poland ... I do not shrink from solving the Eastern question even at the risk of complications in the West.

 

Duce, I understand your position, and would only ask you to try to achieve the pinning down of Anglo-French forces by active propaganda and suitable military demonstrations such as you have already proposed to me. [29][/quote]

 

This is the first evidence in the German documents that, twenty-four hours after he had canceled the onslaught on Poland, Hitler had recovered his confidence and was going ahead with his plans, "even at the risk" of war with the West.

 

The same evening, August 26, Mussolini made somewhat of an effort to still dissuade him. He wrote again to the Fuehrer, Ciano again telephoned it to Attolico and it reached the Reich Chancellery just before 7 P.M.

 

[quote]FUEHRER:

 

I believe that the misunderstanding into which Attolico involuntarily fell was cleared up immediately ... That which I asked of you, except for the antiaircraft batteries, was to be delivered in the course of twelve months. But even though the misunderstanding has been cleared up, it is evident that it is impossible for you to assist me materially in filling the large gaps which the wars in Ethiopia and Spain have made in Italian armaments.

 

I will therefore adopt the attitude which you advise, at least during the initial phase of the conflict, thereby immobilizing the maximum Franco- British forces, as is already happening, while I shall speed up military preparations to the utmost possible extent.[/quote]

 

But the anguished Duce -- anguished at cutting such a sorry figure at such a crucial moment -- still thought that the possibilities of another Munich should be looked into.

 

[quote]... I venture to insist anew [he continued] and not at all from considerations of a pacifist character foreign to my nature, but by reason of the interests of our two peoples and our two regimes, on the opportunity for a political solution which I regard as still possible and such a one as will give full moral and material satisfaction to Germany. [30][/quote]

 

The Italian dictator was, as the records now make clear, striving for peace because he was not ready for war. But his role greatly disturbed him. "I leave you to imagine," he declared to Hitler in this last of the exchange of messages on August 26, "my state of mind in finding myself compelled by forces beyond my control not to afford you real solidarity at the moment of action." Ciano noted in his diary after this busy day that "the Duce is really out of his wits. His military instinct and his sense of honor were leading him to war. Reason has now stopped him. But this hurts him very much ... Now he has had to confront the hard truth. And this, for the Duce, is a great blow."

 

After such a plentiful exchange of letters, Hitler was now resigned to Mussolini's leaving him in the lurch. Late on the night of August 26 he got off one more note to his Axis partner. It was dispatched by telegram from Berlin at 12: 10 A.M. on August 27 and reached Mussolini that morning at 9 o'clock.

 

[quote]DUCE:

 

I have received your communication on your final attitude. I respect the reasons and motives which led you to take this decision. In certain circumstances it can nevertheless work out well.

 

In my opinion, however, the prerequisite is that, at least until the outbreak of the struggle, the world should have no idea of the attitude Italy intends to adopt. I therefore cordially request you to support my struggle psychologically with your press or by other means. I would also ask you, Duce, if you possibly can, by demonstrative military measures, at least to compel Britain and France to tie down certain of their forces, or at all events to leave them in uncertainty.

 

But, Duce, the most important thing is this: If, as I have said, it should come to a major war, the issue in the East will be decided before the two Western Powers can score a success. Then, this winter, at latest in the spring, I shall attack in the West with forces which will be at least equal to those of France and Britain ...

 

I must now ask a great favor of you, Duce. In this difficult struggle you and your people can best help me by sending me Italian workers, for both industrial and agricultural purposes ... In specially commending this request of mine to your generosity, I thank you for all the efforts you have made for our common cause.

 

ADOLF HITLER [31][/quote]

 

The Duce replied meekly late in the afternoon that the world would "not know before the outbreak of hostilities what the attitude of Italy is" -- he would keep the secret well. He would also tie down as many Anglo-French military and naval forces as possible and he would send Hitler the Italian workers he requested. [32] Earlier in the day he had repeated to Ambassador von Mackensen "in forceful terms," as the latter reported to Berlin, "that he still believed it possible to attain all our objectives without resort to war" and had added that he would again bring this aspect up in his letter to the Fuehrer. [33] But he did not. For the moment he seemed too discouraged to even mention it again.

 

Although France would provide almost the entire Allied army on Germany's western border if war were suddenly to come, and although, in the initial weeks, it would far outnumber the German forces there, Hitler seemed unconcerned as August began to run out about what the French would do. On August 26, Premier Daladier dispatched to him a moving and eloquent letter reminding him of what France would do; it would fight if Poland were attacked.

 

[quote]Unless you attribute to the French people [Daladier wrote] a conception of national honor less high than that which I myself recognize in the German people, you cannot doubt that France will be true to her solemn promises to other nations, such as Poland ...[/quote]

 

After appealing to Hitler to seek a pacific solution of his dispute with Poland, Daladier added:

 

[quote]If the blood of France and of Germany flows again, as it did twenty-five years ago, in a longer and even more murderous war, each of the two peoples will fight with confidence in its own victory, but the most certain victors will be the forces of destruction and barbarism. [34] [/quote]

 

Ambassador Coulondre, in presenting the Premier's letter, added a passionate verbal and personal appeal of his own, adjuring Hitler "in the name of humanity and for the repose of his own conscience not to let pass this last chance of a peaceful solution." But the ambassador had the "sadness" to report to Paris that Daladier's letter had not moved the Fuehrer -- "he stands pat."

 

Hitler's reply to the French Premier the next day was cleverly calculated to play on the reluctance of Frenchmen to "die for Danzig," though he did not use the phrase -- that was left for the French appeasers. Germany had renounced all territorial claims on France after the return of the Saar, Hitler declared; there was therefore no reason why they should go to war. If they did, it was not his fault and it would be "very painful" to him.

 

That was the extent of the diplomatic contact between Germany and France during the last week of peace. Coulondre did not see Hitler after the meeting on August 26 until all was over. The country that concerned the German Chancellor the most at this juncture was Great Britain. As Hitler had told Goering on the evening of August 25, when he postponed the move into Poland, he wanted to see whether he could "eliminate British intervention."

 

[b]GERMANY AND GREAT BRITAIN AT THE ELEVENTH HOUR[/b]

 

"Fuehrer considerably shaken," General Halder had noted in his diary on August 25 after the news from Rome and London had induced Hitler to draw back from the precipice of war. But the next afternoon the General Staff Chief noticed an abrupt change in the Leader. "Fuehrer very calm and clear," he jotted down in his diary at 3:22 P.M. There was a reason for this and the General's journal gives it. "Get everything ready for morning of 7th Mobilization Day. Attack starts September 1." The order was telephoned by Hitler to the Army High Command.

 

Hitler, then, would have his war with Poland. That was settled. In the meantime he would do everything he could to keep the British out. Halder's diary notes convey the thinking of the Fuehrer and his entourage during the decisive day of August 26.

 

[quote]Rumor has it that England is disposed to consider comprehensive proposal. [xii] Details when Henderson returns. According to another rumor England stresses that she herself must declare that Poland's vital interests are threatened. In France more and more representations to the government against war ...

 

Plan: We demand Danzig, corridor through Corridor, and plebiscite on the same basis as Saar. England will perhaps accept. Poland probably not. Wedge between them. [35][/quote]

 

The emphasis is Halder's and there is no doubt that it accurately reflects up to a point what was in Hitler's mind. He would contrive to drive a wedge between Poland and Britain and give Chamberlain an excuse to get out of his pledge to Warsaw. Having ordered the Army to be ready to march on September I, he waited to hear from London about his grandiose offer to "guarantee" the British Empire.

 

He now had two contacts with the British government outside of the German Embassy in London, whose ambassador (Dirksen) was on leave, and which played no part in the frenzied eleventh-hour negotiations. One contact was official, through Ambassador Henderson, who had flown to London in a special German plane on the morning of Saturday, August 26, with the Fuehrer's proposals. The other was unofficial, surreptitious and, as it turned out, quite amateurish, through Goering's Swedish friend, the peripatetic Birger Dahlerus, who had flown to London from Berlin with a message for the British government from the Luftwaffe chief on the previous day.

 

"At this time," Goering related later during an interrogation at Nuremberg, "I was in touch with Halifax by a special courier outside the regular diplomatic channels." [xiii] [36] It was to the British Foreign Secretary in London that the Swedish "courier" made his way at 6:30 P.M. on Friday, August 25. Dahlerus had been summoned to Berlin from Stockholm the day before by Goering, who informed him that despite the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which had been signed the preceding night, Germany wanted an "understanding" with Great Britain. He put one of his own planes at the Swede's disposal so that he could rush to London to apprise Lord Halifax of this remarkable fact.

 

The Foreign Secretary, who an hour before had signed the Anglo- Polish mutual-assistance pact, thanked Dahlerus for his efforts and informed him that Henderson had just conferred with Hitler in Berlin and was flying to London with the Fuehrer's latest proposals and that since official channels of communication between Berlin and London had now been reopened he did not think the services of the Swedish intermediary would be needed any longer. But they soon proved to be. Telephoning Goering later that evening to report on his conference with Halifax, Dahlerus was informed by the Field Marshal that the situation had deteriorated as the result of the signing of the Anglo-Polish treaty and that probably only a conference between representatives of Britain and Germany could save the peace. As he later testified at Nuremberg, Goering, like Mussolini, had in mind another Munich.

 

Late the same night the indefatigable Swede informed the British Foreign Office of his talk with Goering, and the next morning he was invited to confer again with Halifax. This time he persuaded the British Foreign Secretary to write a letter to Goering, whom he described as the one German who might prevent war. Couched in general terms, the letter was brief and noncommittal. It merely reiterated Britain's desire to reach a peaceful settlement and stressed the need "to have a few days" to achieve it. [xiv]

 

Nevertheless it struck the fat Field Marshal as being of the "greatest importance." Dahlerus had delivered it to him that evening (August 26), as he was traveling in his special train to his Luftwaffe headquarters at Oranienburg outside Berlin. The train was stopped at the next station, an automobile was commandeered and the two men raced to the Chancellery, where they arrived at midnight. The Chancellery was dark. Hitler had gone to bed. But Goering insisted on arousing him. Up to this moment Dahlerus, like so many others, believed that Hitler was not an unreasonable man and that he might accept a peaceful settlement, as he had the year before at Munich. The Swede was now to confront for the first time the weird fantasies and the terrible "temper of the charismatic dictator. [38] It was a shattering experience.

 

Hitler took no notice of the letter which Dahlerus had brought from Halifax and which had seemed important enough to Goering to have the Fuehrer waked up in the middle of the night. Instead, for twenty minutes he lectured the Swede on his early struggles, his great achievements and all his attempts to come to an understanding with the British. Next, when Dahlerus had got in a word about his having once lived in England as a worker, the Chancellor questioned him about the strange island and its strange people whom he had tried so vainly to understand. There followed a long and somewhat technical lecture on Germany's military might. By this time, Dahlerus says, he thought his visit "would not prove useful." In the end, however, the Swede seized an opportunity to tell his host something about the British as he had come to know them.

 

[quote]Hitler listened without interrupting me ... but then suddenly got up, and, becoming very excited and nervous, walked up and down saying, as though to himself, that Germany was irresistible ... Suddenly he stopped in the middle of the room and stood there staring. His voice was blurred, and his behavior that of a completely abnormal person. He spoke in staccato phrases: "If there should be war, then 1 shall build V-boats, build V-boats, V-boats, V-boats, V-boats." His voice became more indistinct and finally one could not follow him at all. Then he pulled himself together, raised his voice as though addressing a large audience and shrieked: "I shall build airplanes, build airplanes, airplanes, airplanes, and 1 shall annihilate my enemies." He seemed more like a phantom from a storybook than a real person. I stared at him in amazement and turned to see how Goering was reacting, but he did not turn a hair.[/quote]

 

Finally the excited Chancellor strode up to his guest and said, "Herr Dahlerus, you who know England so well, can you give me any reason for my perpetual failure to come to an agreement with her?" Dahlerus confesses that he "hesitated at first" to answer but then replied that in his personal opinion the British "lack of confidence in him and in his Government was the reason."

 

"Idiots!" Dahlerus says Hitler stormed back, flinging out his right arm and striking his breast with his left hand. "Have I ever told a lie in my life?"

 

The Nazi dictator thereupon calmed down, there was a discussion of Hitler's proposals made through Henderson and it was finally settled that Dahlerus should fly back to London with a further offer to the British government. Goering objected to committing it to writing and the accommodating Swede was told he must, instead, commit it to memory. It contained six points:

 

1. Germany wanted a pact or alliance with Britain.

 

2. Britain was to help Germany obtain Danzig and the Corridor, but Poland was to have a free harbor in Danzig, to retain the Baltic port of Gdynia and a corridor to it.

 

3. Germany would guarantee the new Polish frontiers.

 

4. Germany was to have her colonies, or their equivalent, returned to her.

 

5. Guarantees were to be given for the German minority in Poland.

 

6. Germany was to pledge herself to defend the British Empire.

 

With these proposals imprinted in his memory, Dahlerus flew to London on the morning of Sunday, August 27, and shortly after noon was whisked by a roundabout route so as to avoid the snooping press reporters and ushered into the presence of Chamberlain, Lord Halifax, Sir Horace Wilson and Sir Alexander Cadogan. It was obvious that the British government now took the Swedish courier quite seriously.

 

He had brought with him some hastily scribbled notes jotted down in the plane describing his meeting with Hitler and Goering the night before. In these notes he assured the two leading members of the British cabinet who now scanned his memorandum that during the interview Hitler had been "calm and composed." Although no record of this extraordinary Sabbath meeting has been found in the Foreign Office archives, it has been reconstructed in the volume of Foreign Office papers (Volume VII, Third Series) from data furnished by Lord Halifax and Cadogan and from the emissary's memorandum. The British version differs somewhat from that given by Dahlerus in his book and at Nuremberg, but taking the various accounts together what follows seems as accurate a report as we shall ever get.

 

Chamberlain and Halifax saw at once that they were faced with two sets of proposals from Hitler, the one given to Henderson and the other now brought by Dahlerus, and that they differed. Whereas the first had proposed to guarantee the British Empire after Hitler had settled accounts with Poland, the second seemed to suggest that the Fuehrer was ready to negotiate through the British for the return of Danzig and the Corridor, after which he would "guarantee" Poland's new boundaries. This was an old refrain to Chamberlain, after his disillusioning experiences with Hitler over Czechoslovakia, and he was skeptical of the Fuehrer's offer as Dahlerus outlined it. He told the Swede that he saw "no prospect of a settlement on these terms; the Poles might concede Danzig, but they would fight rather than surrender the Corridor."

 

Finally it was agreed that Dahlerus should return to Berlin immediately with an initial and unofficial reply to Hitler and report back to London on Hitler's reception of it before the official response was drawn up and sent to Berlin with Henderson the next evening. As Halifax put it (according to the British version), "the issues might be somewhat confused as a result of these informal and secret communications through M. Dahlerus. It was [therefore] desirable to make it clear that when Dahlerus returned to Berlin that night he went, not to carry the answer of His Majesty's Government, but rather to prepare the way for the main communication" which Henderson would bring. [39]

 

So important had this unknown Swedish businessman become as an intermediary in the negotiations between the governments of the two most powerful nations in Europe that, according to his own account, he told the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary at this critical juncture that "they should keep Henderson in London until Monday [the next day] so that the answer could be given after they had been informed how Hitler regarded the English standpoint." [40]

 

And what was the English standpoint, as Dahlerus was to present it to Hitler? There is some confusion about it. According to Halifax's own rough notes of his verbal instructions to Dahlerus, the British standpoint was merely this:

 

[quote]i. Solemn assurance of desire for good understanding between G. and Gt.B. [The initials are Halifax's.] Not a single member of the Govt. who thinks different. ii. Gt.B. bound to honor her obligations to Poland. iii. German- Polish differences must be settled peacefully. [41][/quote]

 

According to Dahlerus, the unofficial British reply entrusted to him was more comprehensive.

 

[quote]Naturally, Point 6, the offer to defend the British Empire, was rejected. Similarly they did not want to have any discussion on colonies as long as Germany was mobilized. With regard to the Polish boundaries, they wanted them to be guaranteed by the five great powers. Concerning the Corridor, they proposed that negotiations with Poland be undertaken immediately. As to the first point [of Hitler's proposals] England was willing in principle to come to an agreement with Germany. [42]

 

Dahlerus flew back to Berlin Sunday evening and saw Goering shortly before midnight. The Field Marshal did not consider the British reply "very favorable." But after seeing Hitler at midnight, Goering rang up Dahlerus at his hotel at 1 A.M. and said that the Chancellor would "accept the English standpoint" provided the official version to be brought by Henderson Monday evening was in agreement with it.

 

Goering was pleased, and Dahlerus even more so. The Swede woke up Sir George Ogilvie Forbes, the counselor of the British Embassy, at 2 A.M. to give him the glad tidings. Not only to do that but -- such had his position become, at least in his own mind -- to advise the British government what to say in its official reply. That note, which Henderson would be bringing later on this Monday, August 28, must contain an undertaking, Dahlerus emphasized, that Britain would persuade Poland to negotiate with Germany directly and immediately.

 

[quote]Dahlerus has just telephoned [read a later dispatch from Forbes on August 28] from Goering's office following suggestions which he considers most important:

 

1. British reply to Hitler should not contain any reference to Roosevelt plan. [xv]

 

2. Hitler suspects Poles will try to avoid negotiations. Reply should therefore contain clear statement that the Poles have been strongly advised to immediately establish contact with Germany and negotiate. [xvi] [43]

 

Throughout the day the now confident Swede not only heaped advice on Forbes, who dutifully wired it to London, but himself telephoned the British Foreign Office with a message for Halifax containing further suggestions.

 

At this critical moment in world history the amateur Swedish diplomat had indeed become the pivotal point between Berlin and London. At 2 P.M. on August 28, Halifax, who had been apprised both from his Berlin embassy and from Dahlerus' telephone call to the Foreign Office of the Swede's urgent advice, wired the British ambassador in Warsaw, Sir Howard Kennard, to see Foreign Minister Beck "at once" and get him to authorize the British government to inform Hitler "that Poland is ready to enter at once into direct discussion with Germany." The Foreign Secretary was in a hurry. He wanted to include the authorization in the official reply to Hitler which Henderson was waiting to carry back to Berlin this same day. He urged his ambassador in Warsaw to telephone Beck's reply. Late in the afternoon Beck gave the requested authorization and it was hastily inserted in the British note. [44]

 

Henderson arrived back in Berlin with it on the evening of August 28, and after being received at the Chancellery by an S.S. guard of honor, which presented arms and rolled its drums (the formal diplomatic pretensions were preserved to the end), he was ushered into the presence of Hitler, to whom he handed a German translation of the note, at 10:30 P.M. The Chancellor read it at once.

 

The British government "entirely agreed" with him, the communication said, that there must "first" be a settlement of the differences between Germany and Poland. "Everything, however," it added, "turns upon the nature of the settlement and the method by which it is to be reached." On this matter, the note said, the Chancellor had been "silent." Hitler's offer. to "guarantee" the British Empire was gently declined. The British government "could not, for any advantage offered to Great Britain, acquiesce in a settlement which put in jeopardy the independence of a State to whom they had given their guarantee."

 

That guarantee would be honored, but because the British government was "scrupulous" concerning its obligations to Poland the Chancellor must not think it was not anxious for an equitable settlement.

 

[quote]It follows that the next step should be the initiation of direct discussions between the German and Polish Governments on a basis ... of safeguarding Poland's essential interests and the securing of the settlement by an international guarantee.

 

They [the British government] have already received a definite assurance from the Polish Government that they are prepared to enter into discussions on this basis, and H. M. Government hope the German Government would also be willing to agree to this course.

 

... A just settlement ... between Germany and Poland may open the way to world peace. Failure to reach it would ruin the hopes of an understanding between Germany and Great Britain, would bring the two countries into conflict and might well plunge the whole world into war. Such an outcome would be a calamity without parallel in history. [45][/quote]

 

When Hitler had finished reading the communication, Henderson began to elaborate on it from notes, he told the Fuehrer, which he had made during his conversations with Chamberlain and Halifax. It was the only meeting with Hitler, he said later, in which he, the ambassador, did most of the talking. The gist of his remarks was that Britain wanted Germany's friendship, it wanted peace, but it would fight if Hitler attacked Poland. The Fuehrer, who was by no means silent, replied by expatiating on the crimes of Poland and on his own "generous" offers for a peaceful settlement with her, which would not be repeated. In fact today "nothing less than the return of Danzig and the whole of the Corridor would satisfy him, together with a rectification in Silesia, where ninety per cent of the population voted for Germany at the postwar plebiscite." This was not true nor was Hitler's rejoinder a moment later that a million Germans had been driven out of the Corridor after 1918. There had been only 385,000 Germans there, according to the German census of 1910, but by this time, of course, the Nazi dictator expected everyone to swallow his lies. For the last time in his crumbling mission to Berlin, the British ambassador swallowed a good deal, for, as he declared in his Final Report, "Herr Hitler on this occasion was again friendly and reasonable and appeared to be not dissatisfied with the answer which I had brought to him."

 

"In the end I asked him two straight questions," Henderson wired London at 2:35 A.M. in a long dispatch describing the interview. [46]

 

[quote]Was he willing to negotiate direct with the Poles, and was he ready to discuss the question of an exchange of populations? He replied in the affirmative as regards the latter (though I have no doubt that he was thinking at the same time of a rectification of frontiers).[/quote]

 

As to the first point, he would first have to give "careful consideration" to the whole British note. At this point, Henderson recounted in his dispatch, the Chancellor turned to Ribbentrop and said, "We must summon Goering to discuss it with him." Hitler promised a written reply to the British communication on the next day, Tuesday, August 29.

 

"Conversation was conducted," Henderson emphasized to Halifax, "in quite a friendly atmosphere in spite of absolute firmness on both sides." Probably Henderson, despite all of his personal experience with his host, did not quite appreciate why Hitler had made the atmosphere so friendly. The Fuehrer was still resolved to go to war that very weekend against Poland; he was still hopeful, despite all the British government and Henderson had said, of keeping Britain out of it.

 

Apparently, Hitler, encouraged by the obsequious and ignorant Ribbentrop, simply could not believe that the British meant what they said, though he said he did.

 

The next day Henderson added a postscript to his long dispatch.

 

[quote]Hitler insisted that he was not bluffing, and that people would make a big mistake jf they believed that he was. I replied that I was fully aware of the fact and that we were not bluffing either. Herr Hitler stated that he fully realized that. [47][/quote]

 

He said so, but did he realize it? For in his reply on August 29 he deliberately tried to trick the British government in a way which he must have thought would enable him to eat his cake and have it too.

 

The British reply and Hitler's first reaction to it generated a burst of optimism in Berlin, especially in Goering's camp, where the inimitable Dahlerus now spent most of his time. At 1:30 in the morning of August 29 the Swede received a telephone call from one of the Field Marshal's adjutants, who was calling from the Chancellery, where Hitler, Ribbentrop and Goering had pondered the British note after Henderson's departure. The word to Dahlerus from his German friend was that the British reply "was highly satisfactory and that there was every hope that the threat of war was past."

 

Dahlerus conveyed the good news by long-distance telephone to the British Foreign Office later that morning, informing Halifax that "Hitler and Goering considered that there was now a definite possibility of a peaceful settlement." At 10:50 A.M. Dahlerus saw Goering, who greeted him effusively, pumped his hand warmly and exclaimed, "There will be peace! Peace is secured!" Fortified with such happy assurances, the Swedish courier made immediately for the British Embassy to let Henderson, whom he had not yet personally met, in on the glad tidings. According to the ambassador's dispatch describing this encounter, Dahlerus reported that the Germans were highly optimistic. They "agreed" with the "main point" of the British reply. Hitler, Dahlerus said, was asking "only" for Danzig and the Corridor -- not the whole Corridor but just a small one along the railroad tracks to Danzig. In fact, Dahlerus reported, the Fuehrer was prepared to be "most reasonable. He would go a long way to meet the Poles." [48]

 

Sir Nevile Henderson, on whom some light was finally dawning, was not so sure. He told his visitor, according to the latter, that one could not believe a word that Hitler said and the same went for Dahlerus' friend, Hermann Goering, who had lied to the ambassador "heaps of times." Hitler, in the opinion of Henderson, was playing a dishonest and ruthless game.

 

But the Swede, now at the very center of affairs, could not be persuaded  -- his awakening was to come even after Henderson's. Just to make sure that the ambassador's inexplicable pessimism did not jeopardize his own efforts, he again telephoned the British Foreign Office at 7:10 P.M. to leave a message for Halifax that there would be "no difficulties in the German reply." But, advised the Swede, the British government should tell the Poles "to behave properly." [49]

 

Five minutes later, at 7: 15 o'clock on the evening of August 29, Henderson arrived at the Chancellery to receive from the Fuehrer Germany's actual reply. It soon became evident how hollow had been the optimism of Goering and his Swedish friend. The meeting, as the ambassador advised Halifax immediately afterward, "was of a stormy character and Herr Hitler was far less reasonable than yesterday."

 

The formal, written German note itself reiterated the Reich's desire for friendship with Great Britain but emphasized that "it could not be bought at the price of a renunciation of vital German interests." After a long and familiar rehearsal of Polish misdeeds, provocations and "barbaric actions of maltreatment which cry to heaven," the note presented Hitler's demands officially and in writing for the first time: return of Danzig and the Corridor, and the safeguarding of Germans in Poland. To eliminate "present conditions," it added, "there no longer remain days, still less weeks, but perhaps only hours."

 

Germany, the communication continued, could no longer share the British view that a solution could be reached by direct negotiations with Poland. However, "solely" to please the British government and in the interests of Anglo-German friendship, Germany was ready "to accept the British proposal and enter into direct negotiations" with Poland. "In the event of a territorial rearrangement in Poland," the German government could not give guarantees without the agreement of the Soviet Union. (The British government, of course, did not know of the secret protocol of the Nazi-Soviet Pact dividing up Poland.) "For the rest, in making these proposals," the note declared, "the German Government never had any intention of touching Poland's vital interests or questioning the existence of an independent Polish State."

 

And then, at the very end, came the trap.

 

[quote]The German Government accordingly agree to accept the British Government's offer of their good offices in securing the dispatch to Berlin of a Polish emissary with full powers. They count on the arrival of this emissary on Wednesday, August 30, 1939.

 

The German Government will immediately draw up proposals for a solution acceptable to themselves and will, if possible, place these at the disposal of the British Government before the arrival of the Polish negotiator. [50][/quote]

 

Henderson read through the note while Hitler and Ribbentrop watched him and said nothing until he came to the passage saying that the Germans expected the arrival of a Polish emissary with full powers on the following day.

 

"That sounds like an ultimatum," he commented, but Hitler and Ribbentrop strenuously denied it. They merely wished to stress, they said, "the urgency of the moment when two fully mobilized armies were standing face to face."

 

The ambassador, no doubt mindful of the reception accorded by Hitler to Schuschnigg and Hacha, says he asked whether if a Polish plenipotentiary did come he would be "well received" and the discussions "conducted on a footing of complete equality."

 

"Of course," Hitler answered.

 

There followed an acrimonious discussion provoked at one point by Hitler's "gratuitous" remark, as Henderson put it, that the ambassador did not "care a row of pins" how many Germans were being slaughtered in Poland. To this Henderson says he made a "heated retort." [xvii]

 

"I left the Reich Chancellery that evening filled with the gloomiest forebodings," Henderson recounted later in his memoirs, though he does not seem to have mentioned this in his dispatches which he got off to London that night. "My soldiers," Hitler had told him, "are asking me, 'Yes or no?'" They had already lost a week and they could not afford to lose another "lest the rainy season in Poland be added to their enemies."

 

Nevertheless it is evident from the ambassador's official reports and from his book that he did not quite comprehend the nature of Hitler's trap until the next day, when another trap was sprung and the Fuehrer's trickery became clear. The dictator's game seems quite obvious from the text of his formal note. He demanded on the evening of August 29 that an emissary with full powers to negotiate show up in Berlin the next day. There can be no doubt that he had in mind inflicting on him the treatment he had accorded the Austrian Chancellor and the Czechoslovak President under what he thought were similar circumstances. If the Poles, as he was quite sure, did not rush the emissary to Berlin, or even if they did and the negotiator declined to accept Hitler's terms, then Poland could be blamed for refusing a "peaceful settlement" and Britain and France might be induced not to come to its aid when attacked. Primitive, but simple and clear. [xviii]

 

But on the night of August 29 Henderson did not see it so clearly. While he was still working on his dispatches to London describing his meeting with Hitler he invited the Polish ambassador to come over to the embassy. He filled him in on the German note and his talk with Hitler and, by his own account, "impressed on him the need for immediate action. I implored him, in Poland's own interests, to urge his Government to nominate without any delay someone to represent them in the proposed negotiations." [52]

 

In the London Foreign Office, heads were cooler. At 2 A.M. on August 29, Halifax, after pondering the German reply and Henderson's account of the meeting with Hitler, wired the ambassador that while careful consideration would be given the German note, it was "of course unreasonable to expect that we can produce a Polish representative in Berlin today, and German Government must not expect this." [53] The diplomats and Foreign Office officials were now laboring frantically around the clock and Henderson conveyed this message to the WiIhelmstrasse at 4: 30 A.M.

 

He conveyed four further messages from London during the day, August 30. One was a personal note from Chamberlain to Hitler advising him that the German reply was being considered "with all urgency" and that it would be answered later in the afternoon. In the meantime the Prime Minister urged the German government, as he said he had the Polish government, to avoid frontier incidents. For the rest, he "welcomed the evidence in the exchanges of views which are taking place of the desire for an Anglo-German understanding." [54] The second message was in similar terms from Halifax. A third from the Foreign Secretary spoke of reports of German sabotage in Poland and asked the Germans to refrain from such activities. The fourth message from Halifax, dispatched at 6:50 P.M., reflected a stiffening of both the Foreign Office and the British ambassador in Berlin.

 

On further reflection, Henderson had got off a wire to London earlier in the day:

 

[quote]While I still recommend that the Polish Government should swallow this eleventh-hour effort to establish direct contact with Hitler, even if it be only to convince the world that they were prepared to make their own sacrifice for preservation of peace, one can only conclude from the German reply that Hitler is determined to achieve his ends by so-called peaceful fair means if he can, but by force if he cannot. [55][/quote]

 

By this time even Henderson had no more stomach for another Munich. The Poles had never considered one -- for themselves. At 10 A.M. that morning of August 30, the British ambassador in Warsaw had wired Halifax that he felt sure "that it would be impossible to induce the Polish Government to send M. Beck or any other representative immediately to Berlin to discuss a settlement on the basis proposed by Hitler. They would sooner fight and perish rather than submit to such humiliation, especially after the examples of Czechoslovakia, Lithuania and Austria." He suggested that if negotiations were to be "between equals" they must take place in some neutral country. [56]

 

His own stiffening attitude thus reinforced from his ambassadors in Berlin and Warsaw, Halifax wired Henderson that the British government could not "advise" the Poles to comply with Hitler's demand that an emissary with full powers come to Berlin. It was, said the Foreign Secretary, "wholly unreasonable."

 

[quote]Could you not suggest [Halifax added] to German Government that they adopt the normal procedure, when their proposals are ready, of inviting the Polish Ambassador to call and handing proposals to him for transmission to Warsaw and inviting suggestions as to conduct of negotiations. [57][/quote]

 

The promised British reply to Hitler's latest note was delivered to Ribbentrop by Henderson at midnight on August 30-31. There now ensued a highly dramatic meeting which Dr. Schmidt, the only observer present, later described as "the stormiest 1 have ever experienced during my twenty-three years as interpreter." [58]

 

"I must tell you," the ambassador wired Halifax immediately afterward, "that Ribbentrop's whole demeanor during an unpleasant interview was aping Hitler at his worst." And in his Final Report three weeks later Henderson recalled the German Foreign Minister's "intense hostility, which increased in violence as I made each communication in turn. He kept leaping from his chair in a state of great excitement and asking if I had anything more to say. I kept replying that I had." According to Schmidt, Henderson was also aroused from his chair. At one point, says this sole eyewitness, both men leaped from their seats and glared at each other so angrily that the German interpreter thought they were coming to blows.

 

But what is important for history is not the grotesqueness of this meeting between the German Minister for Foreign Affairs and His Majesty's Ambassador in Berlin at midnight of August 30-31, but a development, during the tempestuous interview, which produced Hitler's final act of trickery and completed, when it was too late, the education of Sir Nevile Henderson insofar as the Third Reich was concerned.

 

Ribbentrop scarcely glanced at the British reply or listened to Henderson's attempted explanation of it.  [xix] When Henderson ventured to ask for the German proposals for a Polish settlement, which had been promised the British in Hitler's last note, Ribbentrop retorted contemptuously that it was now too late since the Polish emissary had not arrived by midnight. However, the Germans had drawn up proposals and Ribbentrop now proceeded to read them.

 

He read them in German "at top speed, or rather gabbled to me as fast as he could, in a tone of utmost annoyance," Henderson reported.

 

[quote]Of the sixteen articles 1 was able to gather the gist of six or seven, but it would have been quite impossible to guarantee even the exact accuracy of these without a careful study of the text itself. When he had finished I accordingly asked him to let me see it. Ribbentrop refused categorically, threw the document with a contemptuous gesture on the table and said that it was now out of date since no Polish emissary had arrived by midnight. [xx][/quote]

 

It may have been out of date, since the Germans chose to make it so, but what is important is that these German "proposals" were never meant to be taken seriously or indeed to be taken al all. In fact they were a hoax. They were a sham to fool the German people and, if possible, world opinion into believing that Hitler had attempted at the last minute to reach a reasonable settlement of his claims against Poland. The Fuehrer admitted as much. Dr. Schmidt later heard him say, "I needed an alibi, especially with the German people, to show them that I had done everything to maintain peace. This explains my generous offer about the settlement of the Danzig and Corridor questions." [xxi]

 

Compared to his demands of recent days, they were generous, astonishingly so. In them Hitler demanded only that Danzig be returned to Germany. The future of the Corridor would be decided by a plebiscite, and then only after a period of twelve months when tempers had calmed down. Poland would keep the port of Gdynia. Whoever received the Corridor in the plebiscite would grant the other party extraterritorial highway and railroad routes through it -- this was a reversion to his "offer" of the previous spring. There was to be an exchange of populations and full rights accorded to nationals of one country in the other.

 

One may speculate that had these proposals been offered seriously they would undoubtedly have formed at least the basis of negotiations between Germany and Poland and might well have spared the world its second great war in a generation. They were broadcast to the German people at 9 P.M. on August 31, eight and one half hours after Hitler had issued the final orders for the attack on Poland, and, so far as I could judge in Berlin, they succeeded in their aim of fooling the German people. They certainly fooled this writer, who was deeply impressed by their reasonableness when he heard them over the radio, and who said so in his broadcast to America on that last night of the peace.

 

Henderson returned to His Majesty's Embassy that night of August 30-31, convinced, as he later said, "that the last hope for peace had vanished." Still, he kept trying. He roused the Polish ambassador out of bed at 2 A.M., invited him to hurry over to the embassy, gave him "an objective and studiously moderate account" of his conversation with Ribbentrop, mentioned the cession of Danzig and the plebiscite in the Corridor as the two main points in the German proposals, stated that so far as he could gather "they were not too unreasonable" and suggested that Lipski recommend to his government that they should propose at once a meeting between Field Marshals Smigly-Rydz and Goering. "I felt obliged to add," says Henderson, "that I could not conceive of the success of any negotiations if they were conducted by Herr von Ribbentrop." [xxii] [62]

 

In the meantime the tireless Dahlerus had not been inactive. At 10 P.M. on August 29, Goering had summoned him to his home and informed him of the "unsatisfactory course" of the meeting just finished between Hitler, Ribbentrop and Henderson. The corpulent Field Marshal was in one of his hysterical moods and treated his Swedish friend to a violent outburst against the Poles and the British. Then he calmed down, assured his visitor that the Fuehrer was already at work drawing up a "magnanimous" ("grosszuegig") offer to Poland in which the only clear-cut demand would be the return of Danzig and generously leaving the future of the Corridor to be decided by a plebiscite "under international control." Dahlerus mildly inquired about the size of the plebiscite area, whereupon Goering tore a page out of an old atlas and with colored pencils shaded off the "Polish" and "German" parts, including in the latter not only prewar Prussian Poland but the industrial city of Lodz, which was sixty miles east of the 1914 frontier. The Swedish interloper could not help but notice the "rapidity and the recklessness" with which such important decisions were made in the Third Reich. However, he agreed to Goering's request that he fly immediately back to London, emphasize to the British government that Hitler still wanted peace and hint that as proof of it the Fuehrer was already drawing up a most generous offer to Poland.

 

Dahlerus, who seems to have been incapable of fatigue, flew off to London at 4 A.M. August 30 and, changing cars several times on the drive in from Heston to the city to throw the newspaper reporters off the track (apparently no journalist even knew of his existence), arrived at Downing Street at 10: 30 A.M., where he was immediately received by Chamberlain, Halifax, Wilson and Cadogan.

 

But by now the three British architects of Munich (Cadogan, a permanent Foreign Office official, had always been impervious to Nazi charms) could no longer be taken in by Hitler and Goering, nor were they much impressed by Dahlerus' efforts. The well-meaning Swede found them "highly mistrustful" of both Nazi leaders and "inclined to assume that nothing would now prevent Hitler from declaring war on Poland." Moreover, the British government, it was made plain to the Swedish mediator, had not fallen for Hitler's trickery in demanding that a Polish plenipotentiary show up in Berlin within twenty-four hours.

 

But Dahlerus, like Henderson in Berlin, kept on trying. He telephoned Goering in Berlin, suggested that the Polish-German delegates meet "outside Germany" and received the summary answer that "Hitler was in Berlin" and the meeting would have to take place there.

 

So the Swedish go-between accomplished nothing by this flight. By midnight he was back in Berlin, where, it must be said, he had another opportunity to be at least helpful. He reached Goering's headquarters at half past midnight to find the Luftwaffe chief once more in an expansive mood. The Fuehrer, said Goering, had just handed Henderson through Ribbentrop a "democratic, fair and workable offer" to Poland. Dahlerus, who seems to have been sobered by his meeting in Downing Street, called up Forbes at the British Embassy to check and learned that Ribbentrop had "gabbled" the terms so fast that Henderson had not been able to fully grasp them and that the ambassador had been refused a copy of the text. Dahlerus says he told Goering that this was no way "to treat the ambassador of an empire like Great Britain" and suggested that the Field Marshal, who had a copy of the sixteen points, permit him to telephone the text to the British Embassy. After some hesitation Goering acquiesced.  [xxiii]

 

In such a way, at the instigation of an unknown Swedish businessman in connivance with the chief of the Air Force, were Hitler and Ribbentrop circumvented and the British informed of the German "proposals" to Poland. Perhaps by this time the Field Marshal, who was by no means unintelligent or inexperienced in the handling of foreign affairs, saw more quickly than the Fuehrer and his fawning Foreign Minister certain advantages which might be gained by finally letting the British in on the secret.

 

To make doubly sure that. Henderson got it correctly, Goering dispatched Dahlerus to the British Embassy at 10 A.M. of Thursday, August 31, with a typed copy of the sixteen points. Henderson was still trying to persuade the Polish ambassador to establish the "desired contact" with the Germans. At 8 A.M. he had once more urged this on Lipski, this time over the telephone, warning him that unless Poland acted by noon there would be war. [xxiv] Shortly after Dahlerus had arrived with the text of the German proposals, Henderson dispatched him, along with Forbes, to the Polish Embassy. Lipski, who had never heard of Dahlerus, was somewhat confused at meeting the Swede -- he was by this time, like most of the key diplomats in Berlin, strained and dead tired -- and became irritated when Dahlerus urged him to go immediately to Goering and accept the Fuehrer's offer. Requesting the Swede to dictate the sixteen points to a secretary in an adjoining room, he expressed his annoyance to Forbes for bringing in a "stranger" at this late date on so serious a matter. The harassed Polish ambassador must have been depressed too at the pressure which Henderson was bringing on him and his government to negotiate immediately on the basis of an offer which he had just received quite unofficially and surreptitiously, but which the British envoy, as he had told Lipski the night before, thought was not "on the whole too unreasonable." [xxv] He did not know that Henderson's view was not endorsed by Downing Street. What he did know was that he had no intention of taking the advice of an unknown Swede, even though he had been sent to him by the British ambassador, and of going to Goering to accept Hitler's "offer," even if he had been empowered to do so, which he was not. [xxvi]

 

[b]THE LAST DAY OF PEACE[/b]

 

Having got the Germans and Poles to agree to direct negotiations, as they thought, the British and French governments, though highly skeptical of Hitler, had concentrated their efforts on trying to bring such talks about. In this Britain took the lead, supported diplomatically in Berlin and especially in Warsaw by France. Although the British did not advise the Poles to accept Hitler's ultimatum and fetch an emissary with full powers to Berlin on August 30, holding that such a demand was, as Halifax had wired Henderson, "wholly unreasonable," they did urge Colonel Beck to declare that he was prepared to negotiate with Berlin "without delay." This was the substance of a message which Halifax got off to his ambassador in Warsaw late on the night of August 30. Kennard was to inform Beck of the contents of the British note to Germany which Henderson was presenting to Ribbentrop, assure him that Britain would stand by its commitments to Poland, but stress the importance of Poland's agreeing to direct discussions with Germany at once.

 

[quote]We regard it as most important [Halifax telegraphed] from the point of view of the internal situation in Germany and of world opinion that, so long as the German Government profess themselves ready to negotiate, no opportunity should be given them for placing the blame for a conflict on Poland. [67][/quote]

 

Kennard saw Beck at midnight and the Polish Foreign Minister promised to consult his government and give him a "considered reply" by midday on August 31. Kennard's dispatch describing this interview reached the British Foreign Office at 8 A.M. and Halifax was not entirely satisfied with it. At noon -- it was now the last day of August -- he wired Kennard that he should "concert" with his French colleague in Warsaw (Leon Noel, the French ambassador) and suggest to the Polish government

 

[quote]that they should now make known to the German Government, preferably direct, but if not, through us, that they have been made aware of our last reply to German Government and that they confirm their acceptance of the principle of direct discussions.

 

French Government fear that German Government might take advantage of silence on part of Polish Government. [68][/quote]

 

Lord Halifax was still uneasy about his Polish allies, and less than two hours later, at 1:45 P.M., he again wired Kennard:

 

[quote]Please at once inform Polish Government and advise them, in view of fact that they have accepted principle of direct discussions, immediately to instruct Polish Ambassador in Berlin to say to German Government that, if latter have any proposals, he is ready to transmit them to his Government so that they may at once consider them and make suggestions for early discussions. [69] [/quote]

 

But shortly before this telegram was dispatched, Beck, in response to the demarche of the midnight before, had already informed the British ambassador in a written note that the Polish government "confirm their readiness ... for a direct exchange of views with the German Government" and had orally assured him that he was instructing Lipski to seek an interview with Ribbentrop to say that "Poland had accepted the British proposals." When Kennard asked Beck what Lipski would do if Ribbentrop handed over the German proposals, the Foreign Minister replied that his ambassador in Berlin would not be authorized to accept them as, "in view of past experience, it might be accompanied by some sort of an ultimatum." The important thing, said Beck, was to re-establish contact "and then details should be discussed as to where, with whom and on what basis negotiations should be commenced." In the light of the "past experience" which the once pro-Nazi Polish Foreign Minister mentioned, this was not an unreasonable view. Beck added, Kennard wired London, that "if invited to go to Berlin he would of course not go, as he had no intention of being treated like President Hacha." [70]

 

Actually Beck did not send to Lipski quite those instructions. Instead of saying that Poland "accepted" the British proposals, Lipski was told to tell the Germans that Poland "was favorably considering" the British suggestions and would make a formal reply "during the next few hours at the latest."

 

There was more to Beck's instructions to Lipski than that and the Germans, having solved the Polish ciphers, knew it.

 

For a simple and good reason that will soon become apparent, the Germans were not anxious to receive the Polish ambassador in Berlin. It was too late. At 1 P.M., a few minutes after he had received his telegraphic instructions from Warsaw, Lipski requested an interview with Ribbentrop for the purpose of presenting a communication from his government. After cooling his heels for a couple of hours he received a telephone call from Weizsaecker asking, on behalf of the German Foreign Minister, whether he was coming as an emissary with full power "or in some other capacity."

 

"I replied," Lipski reported later in his final report, [71] "that I was asking for an interview as Ambassador, to present a declaration from my Government."

 

Another long wait followed. At 5 P.M. Attolico called on Ribbentrop and communicated the "urgent desire of the Duce" that the Fuehrer should receive Lipski "to establish in this way at least the minimum contact necessary for the avoidance of a final breach." The German Foreign Minister promised to "transmit" the Duce's wishes to the Fuehrer. [72]

 

This was not the first call the Italian ambassador had made in the Wilhelmstrasse on this last day of August in order to try to save the peace. At 9 that morning Attolico had advised Rome that the situation was "desperate" and that unless "something new comes up there will be war in a few hours." In Rome Mussolini and Ciano put their heads together to find something new. The first result was that Ciano telephoned Halifax to say that Mussolini could not intervene unless he were able to produce for Hitler a "fat prize: Danzig." The British Foreign Secretary did not rise to the bait. He told Ciano the first thing to be done was to establish direct contact between the Germans and the Poles through Lipski.

 

Thus at 11:30 A.M. Attolico saw Weizsaecker at the German Foreign Office and apprised him that Mussolini was in contact with London and had suggested the return of Danzig as a first step toward a German-Polish settlement, and that the Duce needed a certain "margin of time" to perfect his plan for peace. In the meantime, couldn't the German government receive Lipski?

 

Lipski was received by Ribbentrop at 6: 15 P.M., more than five hours after he had requested the interview. It did not last long. The ambassador, despite his fatigue and his worn nerves, behaved with dignity. He read to the Nazi Foreign Minister a written communication.

 

[quote]Last night the Polish Government were informed by the British Government of an exchange of views with the Reich Government as to a possibility of direct negotiations between the Polish and German Governments.

 

The Polish Government are favorably considering the British Government's suggestion, and will make them a formal reply on the subject during the next few hours.[/quote]

 

"I added," said Lipski later, "that I had been trying to present this declaration since 1 P.M." When Ribbentrop asked him whether he had come as an emissary empowered to negotiate, the ambassador replied that, "for the time being," he had only been instructed to remit the communication which he had just read, whereupon he handed it to the Foreign Minister. He had expected, Ribbentrop said, that Lipski would come as a "fully empowered delegate," and when the ambassador again declared that he had no such role he was dismissed. Ribbentrop said he would inform the Fuehrer. [73]

 

"On my return to the embassy," Lipski later related, "I found myself unable to communicate with Warsaw, as the Germans had cut my telephone."

 

The questions of Weizsaecker and Ribbentrop as to the ambassador's status as a negotiator were purely formal, with an eye, no doubt, for the record, for ever since noon, when Lipski's communication had been received by telegram from Warsaw, the Germans had known that he was not coming, as they had demanded, as a plenipotentiary. They had decoded the telegram immediately. A copy had been sent to Goering, who showed it to Dahlerus and instructed him to take it posthaste to Henderson so that the British government, as the Field Marshal later explained on the stand at Nuremberg, "should find out as quickly as possible how intransigent the Polish attitude was." Goering read to the tribunal the secret instructions to Lipski, which were that the ambassador should refrain from conducting official negotiations "under any circumstances" and should insist that he had "no plenipotentiary powers" and that he was merely empowered to deliver the official communication of his government. In his testimony, the Field Marshal made much of this during his vain effort to convince the Nuremberg judges that Poland had "sabotaged" Hitler's last bid for peace and that, as he said, he, Goering, did not want war and had done everything he could to prevent it. But Goering's veracity was only a shade above Ribbentrop's and one example of this was his further assertion to the court that only after Lipski's visit to the Wilhelmstrasse at 6: 15 P.M. on August 31 did Hitler decide "on invasion the next day."

 

The truth was quite otherwise. In fact, all these scrambling eleventh-hour moves of the weary and exhausted diplomats, and of the overwrought men who directed them on the afternoon and evening of that last day of August 1939, were but a flailing of the air, completely futile, and, in the case of the Germans, entirely and purposely deceptive.

 

For at half after noon on August 31, before Lord Halifax had urged the Poles to be more accommodating and before Lipski had called on Ribbentrop and before the Germans had made publicly known their "generous" proposals to Poland and before Mussolini had tried to intervene, Adolf Hitler had taken his final decision and issued the decisive order that was to throw the planet into its bloodiest war.

 

[quote]SUPREME COMMANDER OF THE ARMED FORCES

 

MOST SECRET

 

Berlin, August 31, 1939

 

Directive No. 1 for the Conduct of the War

 

1. Now that all the political possibilities of disposing by peaceful means of a situation on the Eastern Frontier which is intolerable for Germany are exhausted, I have determined on a solution by force. [xxvii]

 

2. The attack on Poland is to be carried out in accordance with the preparations made for Case White, with the alterations which result, where the Army is concerned, from the fact that it has in the meantime almost completed its dispositions.

 

Allotment of tasks and the operational target remain unchanged.

 

Date of attack: September 1, 1939.

 

Time of attack: 4:45 A.M. [Inserted in red pencil.]

 

This timing also applies to the operation at Gdynia, Bay of Danzig and the Dirschau Bridge.

 

3. In the West it is important that the responsibility for the opening of hostilities should rest squarely on England and France. For the time being insignificant frontier violations should be met by purely local action.

 

The neutrality of Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland, to which we have given assurances, must be scrupulously observed.

 

On land, the German Western Frontier is not to be crossed without my express permission.

 

A t sea, the same applies for all warlike actions or actions which could be regarded as such. [xxviii]

 

4. If Britain and France open hostilities against Germany, it is the task of the Wehrmacht formations operating in the West to conserve their forces as much as possible and thus maintain the conditions for a victorious conclusion of the operations against Poland. Within these limits enemy forces and their military-economic resources are to be damaged as much as possible. Orders to go over to the attack I reserve, in any case, to myself.

 

The Army will hold the West Wall and make preparations to prevent its being outflanked in the north through violation of Belgian or Dutch territory by the Western powers ...

 

The Navy will carry on warfare against merchant shipping, directed mainly at England ... The Air Force is, in the first place, to prevent the French and British Air Forces from attacking the German Army and the German Lebensraum.

 

In conducting the war against England, preparations are to be made for the use of the Luftwaffe in disrupting British supplies by sea, the armaments industry, and the transport of troops to France. A favorable opportunity is to be taken for an effective attack on massed British naval units, especially against battleships and aircraft carriers. Attacks against London are reserved for my decision.

 

Preparations are to be made for attacks against the British mainland, bearing in mind that partial success with insufficient forces is in all circumstances to be avoided.

 

 

ADOLF HITLER [74] [/quote]

Shortly after noon on August 31, then, Hitler formally and in writing directed the attack on Poland to begin at dawn the next day. As his first war directive indicates, he was still not quite sure what Britain and France would duo He would refrain from attacking them first. If they took hostile action, he was prepared to meet it. Perhaps, as Halder had indicated in his diary entry of August 28, the British would go through the motions of honoring their obligation to Poland and "wage a sham war." If so, the Fuehrer would not take it "amiss."

 

Probably the Nazi dictator made his fateful decision a little earlier than 12:30 P.M. on the last day of August. At 6:40 P.M. on the previous day Halder jotted in his diary a communication from Lieutenant Colonel Curt Siewert, adjutant of General von Brauchitsch: "Make all preparations so that attack can begin at 4: 30 A.M. on September 1. Should negotiations in London require postponement, then September 2. In that case we shall be notified before 3 P.M. tomorrow .... Fuehrer: either September 1 or 2. All off after September 2." Because of the autumn rains, the attack had to begin at once or be called off altogether.

 

Very early on the morning of August 31, while Hitler still claimed he was waiting for the Polish emissary, the German Army received its orders. At 6:30 A.M. Halder jotted down: "Word from the Reich Chancellery that jump-off order has been given for September 1." At 11 :30: "Gen. Stuelpnagel reports on fixing of time of attack for 0445 [4:45 A.M.]. Intervention of West said to be unavoidable; in spite of this Fuehrer has decided to attack." An hour later the formal Directive No. 1 was issued.

 

There was, I remember, an eerie atmosphere that day in Berlin; everyone seemed to be going around in a daze. At 7:25 in the morning Weizsaecker had telephoned Ulrich von Hassell, one of the "conspirators," and asked him to hurry over to see him. The State Secretary saw only one last hope: that Henderson should persuade Lipski and his government to send a Polish plenipotentiary at once or at least to announce the intention of dispatching one. Could the unemployed Hassell see his friend Henderson at once and also Goering to this end? Hassell tried. He saw Henderson twice and Goering once. But veteran diplomat and, now, anti-Nazi that he was, he did not seem to realize that events had outstripped such puny efforts. Nor did he grasp the extent of his own confusions and of those of Weizsaecker and all the "good" Germans who, of course, wanted peace -- on German terms. For it must have been obvious to them on August 31 that there would be war unless either Hitler or the Poles backed down, and that there was not the slightest possibility of the one or the other capitulating. And yet, as Hassell's diary entry for this day makes clear, he expected the Poles to back down and to follow the same disastrous route which the Austrians and Czechs had taken.

 

When Henderson tried to point out to Hassell that the "chief difficulty" was in German methods, in the way they were trying to order the Poles around "like stupid little boys," Hassell retorted "that the persistent silence of the Poles was also objectionable." He added that "everything depended on Lipski putting in an appearance -- not to ask questions but to declare his willingness to negotiate." Even to Hassell the Poles, who were threatened with imminent attack on trumped-up Nazi charges, were not supposed to ask questions. And when the former ambassador summed up his "final conclusions" about the outbreak of the war, though he blamed Hitler and Ribbentrop for "knowingly taking the risk of war with the Western Powers," he also heaped much responsibility on the Poles and even on the British and French. "The Poles, for their part," he wrote, "with Polish conceit and Slavic aimlessness, confident of English and French support, had missed every remaining chance of avoiding war." One can only ask what chance they missed except to surrender to Hitler's full demands. "The Government in London," Hassell added, " ... gave up the race in the very last days and adopted a kind of devil-may-care attitude. France went through the same stages, only with much more hesitation. Mussolini did all in his power to avoid war." [75] If an educated, cultivated and experienced diplomat such as Hassell could be so woolly in his thinking is it any wonder that it was easy for Hitler to take in the mass of the German people?

 

There now followed during the waning afternoon of the last day of peace a somewhat grotesque interlude. In view of what is now known about the decisions of the day it might have been thought that the Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe, which was to carry out far-flung air operations against Poland beginning at dawn on the morrow, would be a very busy Field Marshal. On the contrary. Dahlerus took him out to lunch at the Hotel Esplanade and plied him with good food and drink. The cognac was of such high quality that Goering insisted on lugging away two bottles of it when he left. Having got the Field Marshal into the proper humor, Dahlerus proposed that he invite Henderson for a talk. After receiving Hitler's permission, he did so, inviting him and Forbes to his house for tea at 5 P.M. Dahlerus (whose presence is not mentioned by Henderson in his Final Report or in his book) says that he suggested that Goering, on behalf of Germany, meet a Polish emissary in Holland and that Henderson promised to submit the proposal to London. The British ambassador's version of the tea talk, given in his Final Report, was that Goering "talked for two hours of the iniquities of the Poles and about Herr Hitler's and his own desire for friendship with England. It was a conversation which led to nowhere ... My general impression was that it constituted a final but forlorn effort on his part to detach Britain from the Poles ... I augured the worst from the fact that he was in a position at such a moment to give me so much of his time ... He could scarcely have afforded at such a moment to spare time in conversation if it did not mean that everything down to the last detail was now ready for action."

 

The third and most piquant description of this bizarre tea party was given by Forbes in answer to a questionnaire from Goering's lawyer at Nuremberg.

 

[quote] The atmosphere was negative and desperate, though friendly ... Goering's statement to the British ambassador was: If the Poles should not give in, Germany would crush them like lice, and if Britain should decide to declare war, he would regret it greatly, but it would be most imprudent of Britain. [76][/quote]

 

Later in the evening Henderson, according to his own account, drafted a dispatch to London saying "that it would be quite useless for me to make any further suggestions since they would now only be outstripped by events and that the only course remaining to us was to show our inflexible determination to resist force by force." [xxix]

 

Sir Nevile Henderson's disillusionment seemed complete. Despite all his strenuous efforts over the years to appease the insatiable Nazi dictator, his mission to Germany, as he called it, had failed. In the fading hours of August's last day this shallow, debonair Englishman whose personal diplomacy in Berlin had been so disastrously blind tried to face up to the shattering collapse of his vain hopes and abortive plans. And though he would suffer one more typical, incredible lapse the next day, the first day of war, an ancient truth was dawning on him: that there were times and circumstances when, as he at last said, force must be met by force. [xxx]

 

As darkness settled over Europe on the evening of August 31, 1939, and a million and a half German troops began moving forward to their final positions on the Polish border for the jump-off at dawn, all that remained for Hitler to do was to perpetrate some propaganda trickery to prepare the German people for the shock of aggressive war.

 

The people were in need of the treatment which Hitler, abetted by Goebbels and Himmler, had become so expert in applying. I had been about in the streets of Berlin, talking with the ordinary people, and that morning noted in my diary: "Everybody against the war. People talking openly. How can a country go into a major war with a population so dead against it?" Despite all my experience in the Third Reich I asked such a naive question! Hitler knew the answer very well. Had he not the week before on his Bavarian mountaintop promised the generals that he would "give a propagandist reason for starting the war" and admonished them not to "mind whether it was plausible or not"? "The victor," he had told them, "will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory."

 

At 9 P.M., as we have seen, all German radio stations broadcast the Fuehrer's Polish peace proposals which, as they were read over the air, seemed so reasonable to this misled correspondent. The fact that Hitler had never presented them to the Poles nor even, except in a vague and unofficial manner, to the British, and then less than twenty-four hours before, was brushed over. In fact, in a lengthy statement explaining to the German people how their government had exhausted every diplomatic means to preserve the peace the Chancellor, no doubt aided by Goebbels, showed that he had lost none of his touch for masterly deceit. After the British government on August 28, it said, had offered its mediation between Germany and Poland, the German government on the next day had replied that,

 

[quote]in spite of being skeptical of the desire of the Polish Government to come to an understanding, they declared themselves ready in the interests of peace to accept the British mediation or suggestion ... They considered it necessary ... if the danger of a catastrophe was to be avoided that action must be taken readily and without delay. They declared themselves ready to receive a personage appointed by the Polish Government up to the evening of August 30, with the proviso that the latter was empowered not only to discuss but to conduct and conclude negotiations.

 

Instead of a statement regarding the arrival of an authorized personage, the first answer the Government of the Reich received to their readiness for an understanding was the news of the Polish mobilization ...

 

The Reich Government cannot be expected continually not only to emphasize their willingness to start negotiations, but actually to be ready to do so, while being from the Polish side merely put off with empty subterfuges and meaningless  -- declarations.

 

It has once more been made clear as a result of a demarche which has meanwhile been made by the Polish Ambassador that the latter himself has no plenary powers either to enter into any discussion or even to negotiate.

 

The Fuehrer and the German Government have thus waited two days in vain for the arrival of a Polish negotiator.

 

In these circumstances the German Government regard their proposals as having this time too been ... rejected, although they considered that these proposals, in the form in which they were made known to the British Government also, were more than loyal, fair and practicable.[/quote]

 

Good propaganda, to be effective, as Hitler and Goebbels had learned from experience, needs more than words. It needs deeds, however much they may have to be fabricated. Having convinced the German people (and of this the writer can testify from personal observation) that the Poles had rejected the Fuehrer's generous peace offer, there remained only the concocting of a deed which would "prove" that not Germany but Poland had attacked first.

 

For this last shady business, it will be remembered, the Germans, at Hitler's direction, had made careful preparation. [xxxi] For six days Alfred Naujocks, the intellectual S.S. ruffian, had been waiting at Gleiwitz on the Polish border to carry out a simulated Polish attack on the German radio station there. The plan had been revised. S.S. men outfitted in Polish Army uniforms were to do the shooting, and drugged concentration camp inmates were to be left dying as "casualties" -- this last delectable part of the operation had, as we have seen, the expressive code name "Canned Goods." There were to be several such faked "Polish attacks" but the principal one was to be on the radio station at Gleiwitz.

 

[quote]At noon on August 31 [Naujocks related in his Nuremberg affidavit] I received from Heydrich the code word for the attack which was to take place at 8 o'clock that evening. Heydrich said: "In order to carry out this attack report to Mueller for Canned Goods." I did this and gave Mueller instructions to deliver the man near the radio station. I received this man and had him laid down at the entrance to the station. He was alive but completely unconscious. I tried to open his eyes. I could not recognize by his eyes that he was alive, only by his breathing. I did not see the gun wounds but a lot of blood was smeared across his face. He was in civilian clothes.

 

We seized the radio station, as ordered, broadcast a speech of three to four minutes over an emergency transmitter, [xxxii] fired some pistol shots and left. [xxxiii][/quote]

 

Berlin that evening was largely shut off from the outside world, except for outgoing press dispatches and broadcasts which reported the Fuehrer's "offer" to Poland and the German allegations of Polish "attacks" on German territory. I tried to get through on the telephone to Warsaw, London and Paris but was told that communications with these capitals were cut. Berlin itself was quite normal in appearance. There had been no evacuation of women and children, as there had been in Paris and London, nor any sandbagging of storefront windows, as was reported from the other capitals. Toward 4 A.M. on September 1, after my last broadcast, I drove back from Broadcasting House to the Adlon Hotel. There was no traffic. The houses were dark. The people were asleep and perhaps -- for all I knew -- had gone to bed hoping for the best, for peace.

 

Hitler himself had been in fine fettle all day. At 6 P.M. on August 31 General Halder noted in his diary, "Fuehrer calm; has slept well ... Decision against evacuation [in the west] shows that he expects France and England will not take action." [xxxiv]

 

Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr in OKW and one of the key anti- Nazi conspirators, was in a different mood. Though Hitler was carrying Germany into war, an action which the Canaris circle had supposedly sworn to prevent by getting rid of the dictator, there was no conspiracy in being now that the moment for it had arrived.

 

Later in the afternoon Gisevius had been summoned to OKW headquarters by Colonel Oster. This nerve center of Germany's military might was humming with activity. Canaris drew Gisevius down a dimly lit corridor. In a voice choked with emotion he said:

 

"This means the end of Germany." [81]

 

_______________

 

[b]Notes:[/b]

 

i. "Hardly had the door shut on the Ambassador," Weizsaecker, who was present,  later noted, "than Hitler slapped himself on the thigh, laughed and said: 'Chamberlain  won't survive that conversation; his Cabinet will fall this evening.''' (Weizsaecker, Memoirs, p. 203.)

 

ii. According to Erich Kordt (Wahn und Wirklichkeit, p. 192) Hitler was so excited  by his triumph in Moscow that on the morning of August 25 he asked his press  bureau for news of the cabinet crises in Paris and London. He thought both  governments must fall. He was brought down to earth by being told of the firm  speeches of Chamberlain and Halifax in Parliament the day before.

 

iii. Or if not out of war, out of any serious participation in it. General Halder intimates  this in a recapitulation of the "sequence of events" of August 25 in a diary  entry made later, on August 28. Noting that at I :30 P.M. on the twenty-fifth Hitler  saw Henderson, Halder added: "Fuehrer would not take it amiss if England were to  wage a sham war."

 

 

iv. Although Hitler's standing orders, which had not been canceled, called for the attack on this day and hour and, as Halder said, were "automatic," a number of German writers have reported that the Fuehrer gave specific orders a few minutes after 3 P.M. to launch Fall Weiss the following morning. (See Weizsaecker, Memoirs; Kordt, Wahn und Wirklichkeit; and Walther Hofer, War Premeditated, 1939.) Hofer says the order was given at 3:02 P.M. and cites as his source General von Vormann, who was present at the Chancellery when it was issued. No official record of this has been found in the German documents.

 

v. There was a secret protocol to this treaty which stated that the "European Power" mentioned in Article 1, whose aggression would bring about mutual military assistance, was Germany. This saved the British government from the disastrous step of having to declare war on the Soviet Union when the Red Army, in cahoots with the Germans, invaded eastern Poland.

 

 

 

vi. Germany did not observe summer time, as did Great Britain. Therefore the one-hour difference in time between Berlin and London was canceled out.

 

 

vii. It must be kept in mind that the "Polish provocations" which Hitler and Ribbentrop harped on in their meetings and diplomatic exchanges with the British, French, Russians and Italians during these days, and the news of which was published under flaming headlines in the controlled Nazi press, were almost entirely invented by the Germans. Most of the provoking in Poland was done, on orders from Berlin, by the Germans. The captured German documents are replete with evidence on this.

 

viii. The day before, on August 24, Ciano had visited the King at his summer residence in Piedmont, and the aging ruler, who had been shunted to the sidelines by Mussolini, spoke contemptuously of the country's armed services. 'The Army is in a pitiful state," Ciano quotes him as saying. "Even the defense of our frontier is insufficient. He has made thirty-two inspections and is convinced that the French can go through it with great ease. The officers of the Italian Army are not qualified for the job, and our equipment is old and obsolete." (Ciano Diaries, p. 127.)

 

ix. In the German translation of Mussolini's letter found in the Foreign Office archives after the war, and which I have used here, the word "Germany" has been crossed out here and the word "Poland" typed above it, making it read: "If Poland attacks ... " In the Italian original, published after the war by the Italian government, the passage reads "Se la Germania attacca la Polonia." It is strange that the Nazis falsified even the secret documents deposited in their official government archives. [14]

 

x. As if Mussolini's letter were not bad enough medicine for Hitler, a number of German writers, mostly observers at first hand of the dramatic events of the last days of peace, have published an imaginary text of this letter of the Duce to the Fuehrer. Erich Kordt, one of the anti-Nazi conspirators, who was head of the secretariat at the Foreign Office, was the first to commit this faked version to print in his book, Wahn und Wirklichkeit, published in Stuttgart in 1947. Kordt dropped it in his second edition but other writers continued to copy it from the first edition. It shows up in Peter Kleist's Zwischen Hitler und Stalin, published in 1950, and even in the English translation of Paul Schmidt's memoirs published in New York and London in 1951. Yet the authentic text was 'published in Italy in 1946 and an English translation in the State Department's Nazi-Soviet Relations in 1948. Dr. Schmidt, who was with Hitler when he received the letter from Attolico, quotes the letter as saying, "In one of the most painful moments of my life, I have to inform you that Italy is not ready for war. According to what the responsible heads of  the services tell me, the gasoline supplies of the Italian Air Force are so low that  they would last only for three weeks of fighting. The position is the same with  regard to supplies for the Army, and supplies of raw materials ... Please understand  my situation." For an amusing note on the faking of this letter, see Namier,  In the Nazi Era, p. 5.

 

xi. See above, pp. 517-18.

 

xii. This caused added resentment in Berlin and some confusion in Rome which  Ciano had to straighten out. Attolico told Ciano later he had deliberately insisted  on complete deliveries before hostilities "in order to discourage the Germans from  meeting our requests." To deliver thirteen million tons of supplies in a few days  was, of course, utterly impossible, and Mussolini apologized to Ambassador von  Mackensen for the "misunderstanding," remarking that "even the Almighty Himself  could not transport such quantities here in a few days. It had never occurred to him  to make such an absurd request.'' [28]

 

xiii. I.e., Hitler's offer of August 25 to "guarantee" the British Empire.

 

xiv. "Ribbentrop knew nothing whatsoever about Dahlerus being sent," Goering testified on the stand at Nuremberg. "I never discussed the matter of Dahlerus with Ribbentrop. He did not know at all that Dahlerus went back and forth between me and the British government." [37] But Goering kept Hitler informed.

 

xv. The text is published in Documents on British Foreign Policy, Third Series, Vol. VII, p. 283. It was omitted from all published British records until the above volume came out in 1954, an omission much commented upon by British historians. Dahlerus is not mentioned in the British Blue Book of documents concerning the outbreak of the war nor in Henderson's Final Report nor even in Henderson's book Failure of a Mission, though in the book the Swedish intermediary is referred to as "a source in touch with Goering." In Henderson's dispatches and in those from other members of the British Embassy which have now been published, Dahlerus and his activities playa fairly prominent part, as they do in various memoranda of the British Foreign Office.

 

The role of this singular Swedish businessman in trying to save the peace was a well-kept secret and both the Wilhelmstrasse and Downing Street went to con  siderable lengths to keep his movements hidden from the correspondents and neutral  diplomats, who, to the best of my knowledge, knew absolutely nothing of them  until Dahlerus testified at Nuremberg on March 19, 1946. His book, The Last  Attempt, was published in Swedish in 1945, at the end of the war, but the English  edition did not come out until 1948 and there remained a further interval of six  years before his role was officially confirmed, so to speak, by the documents in Vol.  VII of the DBrFP series. The German Foreign Office documents for August do not  mention Dahlerus, except in one routine memorandum reporting receipt of a  message from the Lufthansa airline that "Dahlerus, a gentleman from the 'Foreign  Office,''' was arriving in Berlin August 26 on one of its planes. He does appear,  however, in some later papers.

 

 

xvi. Presumably President Roosevelt's message to Hitler on August 24 and 25 urging direct negotiations between Germany and Poland.

 

xvii. Dahlerus, it must be pointed out in all fairness, was not so pro-German as some of his messages seem to imply. On the night of this same Monday, after two hours with Goering at Luftwaffe headquarters at Oranienburg, he rang up Forbes to tell him, "German Army will be in final position of attack on Poland during night of Wednesday-Thursday, August 30-31." Forbes got this intelligence off to London as quickly as possible.

 

 

xviii. "I proceeded to outshout Hitler," Henderson wired Halifax the next day. " ... I  added a good deal more shouting at the top of my voice." [51] This temperamental  display was not mentioned in earlier British documents.

 

xix. General Halder put Hitler's game succinctly in a diary entry of August 29:  "Fuehrer hopes to drive wedge between British, French and Poles. Strategy: Raise  a barrage of demographic and democratic demands ... The Poles will come to  Berlin on August 30. On August 31 the negotiations will blow up. On September 1,  start to use force."

 

xx. Though couched in conciliatory terms, the British note was firm. His Majesty's Government, it said, "reciprocated" the German desire for improved relations, but "they could not sacrifice the interests of other friends in order to obtain that improvement." They fully understood, it continued, that the German government could not "sacrifice Germany's vital interests, but the Polish Government are in the same position." The British government must make "an express reservation" regarding Hitler's terms and, while urging direct negotiations between Berlin and Warsaw, considered that "it would be impracticable to establish contact so early as today." (Text in British Blue Book, pp. 142-43.)

 

xxi. Ribbentrop, who, it seemed to this writer, cut the sorriest figure of all the chief defendants at the Nuremberg trial -- and made the weakest defense -- claimed on the stand that Hitler, who, he said, "personally dictated" the sixteen points, had "expressly forbidden me to let these proposals out of my hands." Why, he did not say and was not asked on cross-examination. "Hitler told me," Ribbentrop conceded, "that I might communicate to the British Ambassador only the substance of them, if I thought it advisable. I did a little more than that: I read all the proposals from the beginning to the end." [59] Dr. Schmidt denies that Ribbentrop read the text of the proposals in German so fast that it would have been impossible for Henderson to grasp them. He says the Foreign Minister did not "particularly hurry over them." Henderson, Schmidt says, was "not exactly a master of German" and he might have been more effective in these crucial talks had he used his native language. Ribbentrop's English was excellent, but he refused to speak it during these parleys. [60]

 

xxii. The text of the sixteen proposals was telegraphed to the German charge d'affaires in London at 9: 15 P.M. on August 30, four hours before Ribbentrop "gabbled" them to Henderson. But the German envoy in London was instructed that they were to "be kept strictly secret and not to be communicated to anyone else until further instructions." [61] Hitler in his note of the previous day, it will be remembered, had promised to place them at the disposal of the British government before the arrival of the Polish negotiator.

 

 

xxiii. In a dispatch to Halifax filed at 5: 15 A.M. (August 31), Henderson reported that  he had also advised Lipski "in the very strongest terms" to "ring up" Ribbentrop  and ask for the German proposals so that he could communicate them to the  Polish government. Lipski said he would first have to talk with Warsaw. "The  Polish Ambassador," Henderson added, "promised to telephone at once to his Government, but he is so inert or so handicapped by instructions of his Government  that I cannot rely on his action being very effective." [63]

 

xxiv. On the stand at Nuremberg Goering claimed that in turning over the text of Hitler's "offer" to the British Embassy he was taking "an enormous risk. since the Fuehrer had forbidden this information being made public. Only I," Goering told the tribunal, "could take that risk." [64]

 

xxv. Even the levelheaded French ambassador supported his British colleague in this. Henderson had telephoned him at 9 A.M. to say that if the Poles did not agree by noon to sending a plenipotentiary to Berlin the German Army would begin its attack. Coulondre went immediately to the Polish Embassy and urged Lipski to telephone his government, asking authorization to make immediate contact with the Germans "as a plenipotentiary." (French Yellow Book, French edition, pp. 366-67.)

 

 

xxvi. By now, that is before noon of August 31, Henderson, striving desperately for peace at almost any price, had convinced himself that the German terms were quite reasonable and even moderate. And though Ribbentrop had told him the previous midnight that the German proposals were "out of date, since no Polish emissary had arrived," and though the Polish government had not yet even seen them, and though they were, in sum, a hoax, Henderson kept urging Halifax all day to put pressure on the Poles to send a plenipotentiary, as Hitler had demanded, and kept stressing the reasonableness of the Fuehrer's sixteen points.

 

At 12:30 P.M. (on August 31) Henderson wired Halifax "urging" him to "insist" to Poland that Lipski ask the German government for the German proposals for urgent communication to his government "with a view to dispatching a plenipotentiary. The terms sound moderate to me," Henderson contended. "This is no Munich ... Poland will never get such good terms again ... "

 

At the same time Henderson wrote a long letter to Halifax: " ... The German proposals do not endanger the independence of Poland ... She is likely to get a worse deal later ..."

 

Still keeping at it, Henderson wired Halifax at 12:30 A.M. on September I, four hours before the German attack was scheduled to begin (though he did not know this): "German proposals ... are not unreasonable ... I submit that on German offer war would be completely unjustifiable." He urged again that the British government pressure the Poles "in unmistakable language" to state "their intention to send a plenipotentiary to Berlin."

 

The British ambassador in Warsaw took a different view. He wired to Halifax on August 31: "H. M. Ambassador at Berlin appears to consider German terms reasonable. I fear that I cannot agree with him from point of view of Warsaw." [65]

 

xxvii. There was another somewhat weird diplomatic episode this last day of peace which deserves a footnote. Dahlerus returned from the visit with Lipski to the British Embassy, where from Henderson's office he put through at midday a telephone call to Sir Horace Wilson at the British Foreign Office in London. He told Wilson that the German proposals were "extremely liberal" but that the Polish ambassador had just rejected them. "It is clear," he said, "that the Poles are obstructing the possibilities of negotiations."

 

At this moment Wilson heard certain noises on the long-distance line which sounded to him as though the Germans were listening in. He tried to end the conversation, but Dahlerus persisted in rambling on about the unreasonableness of the Poles. "I again told Dahlerus," Sir Horace noted in a Foreign Office memorandum," to shut up, but as he did not I put down the receiver."

 

Wilson reported this indiscretion, committed in the very office of H. M. Ambassador in Berlin, to his superiors. At I P.M., less than an hour later, Halifax wired Henderson in code: "You really must be careful of use of telephone. D's conversation [Dahlerus was always referred to in the messages between the Foreign Office and the Berlin Embassy as "D") at midday from Embassy was most indiscreet and has certainly been heard by the Germans." [66]

 

 

xviii. The emphasis is in the original German text.

 

xix. A marginal note in the directive clears up this ambiguous point -- "Thus, Atlantic  forces will for the time being remain in a waiting position."

 

xxx. He may have drafted it that evening but he did not send it to London until 3:45 P.M. the next day, nearly twelve hours after the German attack on Poland had begun. It followed several of his telegrams, which like it were telephoned to London -- so that transmission was simultaneous -- reporting the outbreak of hostilities. It read: "Mutual distrust of Germans and Poles is so complete that I do not feel I can usefully acquiesce [sic] in any further suggestions from here, which would only once again be outstripped by events or lead to nothing as the result of methods followed or of considerations of honor and prestige.

 

"Last hope lies in inflexible determination on our part to resist force by force." [77]

 

xxxi. Since friends who have read this section have expressed doubts about this writer's objectivity in dealing with Henderson, perhaps another's view of the British ambassador in Berlin should be given. Sir L. B. Namier, the British historian, has summed up Henderson as follows: "Conceited, vain, self-opinionated, rigidly adhering to his preconceived ideas, he poured out telegrams, dispatches and letters in unbelievable numbers and of formidable length, repeating a hundred times the same ill-founded views and ideas. Obtuse enough to be a menace and not stupid enough to be innocuous, he proved un homme nefaste." (Namier, In the Nazi Era, p. 162.)

 

 

 

xxxii. See above, pp. 518-20.

 

xxxiii. The speech in Polish had been outlined by Heydrich to Naujocks. It contained inflammatory statements against Germany and declared that the Poles were attacking. See above, p. 519.

 

xxxiv. The "Polish attack" at Gleiwitz was used by Hitler in his speech to the Reichstag the next day and was cited as justification for the Nazi aggression by Ribbentrop, Weizsaecker and other members of the Foreign Office in their propaganda. The New York Times and other newspapers reported it, as well as similar incidents, in their issues of September 1, 1939. It remains only to be added that according to the testimony at Nuremberg of General Lahousen, of the Abwehr, all the S.S. men who wore Polish uniforms in the simulated attacks that evening were, as the General put it, "put out of the way." [78]

 

xxxv. During the day Hitler found time to send a telegram to the Duke of Windsor at  Antibes, France.

 

[quote]Berlin, August 31, 1939

 

I thank you for your telegram of August 27. You may rest assured that my attitude toward Britain and my desire to avoid another war between our peoples remain unchanged. It depends on Britain, however, whether my wishes for the future development of German-British relations can be realized.

 

ADOLF HITLER [80][/quote]

 

This is the first mention of the former King of England, but by no means the last, in the captured German documents. Subsequently, for a time, as will be recorded further on, the Duke of Windsor loomed large in certain calculations of Hitler and Ribbentrop.

 

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