[b]19: SITZKRIEG IN THE WEST[/b]

 

 

NOTHING MUCH had happened there. Hardly a shot had been fired. The German man in the street was beginning to call it the "sit-down war" -- Sitzkrieg. In the West it would soon be dubbed the "phony war." Here was "the strongest army in the world [the French]," as the British General J. F. C. Fuller would put it, "facing no more than twenty-six [German] divisions, sitting still and sheltering behind steel and concrete while a quixotically valiant ally was being exterminated!" [1]

Were the Germans surprised? Hardly. In Halder's very first diary entry, that of August 14, the Chief of the Army General Staff had composed a detailed estimate of the situation in the West if Germany attacked Poland. He considered a French offensive "not very likely." He was sure that France would not send its army through Belgium "against Belgian wishes." His conclusion was that the French would remain on the defensive. On September 7, with the Polish Army already doomed, Halder, as has been noted, was already occupied with plans to transfer German divisions to the west.

 

That evening he noted down the results of a conference which Brauchitsch had had during the afternoon with Hitler.

 

[quote]Operation in the West not yet clear. Some indications that there is no real intention of waging a war ... French cabinet lacks heroic caliber. Also from Britain first hints of sobering reflection.[/quote]

 

Two days later Hitler issued Directive No. 3 for the Conduct of the War, ordering arrangements to be made for Army and Air Force units to be sent from Poland to the west. But not necessarily to fight. "Even after the irresolute opening of hostilities by Great Britain ... and France my express command," the directive laid it down, "must be obtained in each of the following cases: Every time our ground forces [or] ... one of our planes cross the western borders; [and] for every air attack on Britain." [2]

 

What had France and Britain promised Poland to do in case she were attacked? The British guarantee was general. But the French was specific. It was laid down in the Franco-Polish Military Convention of May 19, 1939. In this it was agreed that the French would "progressively launch offensive operations against limited objectives toward the third day after General Mobilization Day." General mobilization had been proclaimed September 1. But further, it was agreed that "as soon as the principal German effort develops against Poland, France will launch an offensive action against Germany with the bulk of her forces, starting on the fifteenth day after the first day of the general French mobilization." When the Deputy Chief of the Polish General Staff, Colonel J aklincz, had asked how many French troops would be available for this major offensive, General Gamelin had replied that there would be about thirty-five to thirty-eight divisions. [3]

 

But by August 23, as the German attack on Poland became imminent, the timid French generalissimo was telling his government, as we have seen, [i] that he could not possibly mount a serious offensive "in less than about two years ... in 1941-2" -- assuming, he had added, that France by that time had the "help of British troops and American equipment."

 

In the first weeks of the war, to be sure, Britain had pitifully few troops to send to France. By October 11, three weeks after the fighting was over in Poland, it had four divisions -- 158,000 men -- in France. "A symbolic contribution," Churchill called it, and Fuller noted that the first British casualty -- a corporal shot dead on patrol -- did not occur until December 9. "So bloodless a war," Fuller comments, "had not been seen since the Battles of Molinella and Zagonara." [ii]

 

In retrospect at Nuremberg the German generals agreed that by failing to attack in the West during the Polish campaign the Western Allies had missed a golden opportunity.

 

[quote]The success against Poland was only possible [said General Halder] by almost completely baring our Western border. If the French had seen the logic of the situation and had used the engagement of the German forces in Poland, they would have been able to cross the Rhine without our being able to prevent it and would have threatened the Ruhr area, which was the most decisive factor of the German conduct of the war. [4]

 

.... If we did not collapse in 1939 [said General Jodi] that was due only to the fact that during the Polish campaign the approximately 110 French and British divisions in the West were held completely inactive against the 23 German divisions. [5][/quote]

 

And General Keitel, Chief of the OKW, added this testimony:

 

[quote]We soldiers had always expected an attack by France during the Polish campaign, and were very surprised that nothing happened ... A French attack would have encountered only a German military screen, not a real defense. [6][/quote]

 

Why then did not the French Army (the first two British divisions were not deployed until the first week of October), which had overwhelming superiority over the German forces in the west, attack, as General Gamelin and the French government had promised in writing it would?

 

There were many reasons: the defeatism in the French High Command, the government and the people; the memories of how France had been bled white in the First World War and a determination not to suffer such slaughter again if it could be avoided; the realization by mid-September that the Polish armies were so badly defeated that the Germans would soon be able to move superior forces to the west and thus probably wipe out any initial French advances; the fear of German superiority in arms and in the air. Indeed, the French government had insisted from the start that the British Air Force should not bomb targets in Germany for fear of reprisal on French factories, though an all-out bombing of the Ruhr, the industrial heart of the Reich, might well have been disastrous to the Germans. It was the one great worry of the German generals in September, as many of them later admitted.

 

Fundamentally the answer to the question of why France did not attack Germany in September was probably best stated by Churchill. "This battle," he wrote, "had been lost some years before." [7] At Munich in 1938; at the time of the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936; the year before when Hitler proclaimed a conscript army in defiance of Versailles. The price of those sorry Allied failures to act had now to be paid, though it seems to have been thought in Paris and London that payment might somehow be evaded by inaction.

 

At sea there was action.

 

The German Navy was not put under such wraps as the Army in the west, and during the first week of hostilities it sank eleven British ships with a total tonnage of 64,595 tons, which was nearly half the weekly tonnage sunk at the peak of German submarine warfare in April 1917 when Great Britain had been brought to the brink of disaster. British losses tapered off thereafter: 53,561 tons the second week, 12,750 the third week and only 4,646 the fourth week -- for a total during September of twenty-six ships of 135,552 tons sunk by U-boats and three ships of 16,488 tons by mines. [iii]

 

There was a reason, unknown to the British, for the sharp tapering off. On September 7, Admiral Raeder had a long conference with Hitler. The Fuehrer, jubilant over his initial victories in Poland and the failure of the French to attack in the west, advised the Navy to go more slowly. France was showing "political and military restraint"; the British were proving "hesitant." In view of this situation it was decided that submarines in the Atlantic would spare all passenger ships without exception and refrain altogether from attacking the French, and that the pocket battleships Deutschland in the North Atlantic and the Graf Spee in the South Atlantic should withdraw to their "waiting" stations for the time being. The "general policy," Raeder noted in his diary, would be "to exercise restraint until the political situation in the West has become clearer, which will take about a week." [8]

 

[b]THE SINKING OF THE ATHENIA[/b]

 

There was one other decision agreed upon by Hitler and Raeder at the meeting on September 7. The Admiral noted it in his diary: "No attempt shall be made to solve the Athenia affair until the submarines return home."

 

The war at sea, as we have noted, had begun ten hours after Britain's declaration of war when the British liner Athenia, jammed with some 1,400 passengers, was torpedoed without warning at 9 P.M. on September 3 some two hundred miles west of the Hebrides, with the loss of 112 lives, including twenty-eight Americans. The German Propaganda Ministry checked the first reports from London with the Naval High Command, was told that there were no U-boats in the vicinity and promptly denied that the ship had been sunk by the Germans. The disaster was most embarrassing to Hitler and the Naval Command and at first they did not believe the British reports. Strict orders had been given to all submarine commanders to observe the Hague Convention, which forbade attacking a ship without warning. Since all U-boats maintained radio silence, there was no means of immediately checking what had happened. [iv] That did not prevent the controlled Nazi press from charging, within a couple of days, that the British had torpedoed their own ship in order to provoke the United States into coming into the war.

 

The Wilhelmstrasse was indeed concerned with American reaction to a disaster that had caused the deaths of twenty-eight United States citizens. The day after the sinking Weizsaecker sent for the American charge, Alexander Kirk, and denied that a German submarine had done it. No German craft was in the vicinity, he emphasized. That evening, according to his later testimony at Nuremberg, the State Secretary sought out Raeder, reminded him of how the German sinking of the Lusitania during the First World War had helped bring America into it and urged that "everything should be done" to avoid provoking the United States. The Admiral assured him that "no German U-boat could have been involved." [9]

 

At the urging of Ribbentrop, Admiral Raeder invited the American naval attache to come to see him on September 16 and stated that he had now received reports from all the submarines, "as a result of which it was definitely established that the Athenia had not been sunk by a German U-boat." He asked him to so inform his government, which the attache promptly did. [v][10]

 

The Grand Admiral had not quite told the truth. Not all the submarines which were at sea on September 3 had yet returned to port. Among those that had not was the U-30, commanded by Oberleutnant Lemp, which did not dock in home waters until September 27. It was met by Admiral Karl Doenitz, commander of submarines, who years later at Nuremberg described the meeting and finally revealed the truth about who sank the Athenia.

 

[quote]I met the captain, Oberleutnant Lemp, on the lockside at Wilhelmshaven as the boat was entering harbor, and he asked permission to speak to me in private. I noticed immediately that he was looking very unhappy and he told me at once that he thought he was responsible for the sinking of the Athenia in the North Channel area. In accordance with my previous instructions he had been keeping a sharp lookout for possible armed merchant cruisers in the approaches to the British Isles, and had torpedoed a ship he afterward identified as the Athenia from wireless broadcasts, under the impression that she was an armed merchant cruiser on patrol ...

 

I dispatched Lemp at once by air to report to the Naval War Staff (SKL) at Berlin; in the meantime I ordered complete secrecy as a provisional measure. Later the same day, or early on the following day, I received an order from Kapitaen zur See Fricke that:

 

1. The affair was to be kept a total secret.

 

2. The High Command of the Navy (OKM) considered that a court-martial was not necessary, as they were satisfied that the captain had acted in good faith.

 

3. Political explanations would be handled by OKM. [vi]

 

I had had no part whatsoever in the political events in which the Fuehrer claimed that no U-boat had sunk the Athenia. [11][/quote]

 

But Doenitz, who must have suspected the truth all along, for otherwise he would not have been at the dock to greet the returning U-30, did have a part in altering the submarine's log and his own diary so as to erase any telltale evidence of the truth. In fact, as he admitted at Nuremberg, he himself ordered any mention of the Athenia stricken from the U-30's log and deleted it from his own diary. He swore the vessel's crew to absolute secrecy. [vii]

 

The military high commands of all nations no doubt have skeletons in their closets during the course of war, and it was understandable if not laudable that Hitler, as Admiral Raeder testified at Nuremberg, insisted that the Athenia affair be kept secret, especially since the Naval Command had acted in good faith in at first denying German responsibility and would have been greatly embarrassed to have to admit it later. But Hitler did not stop there. On the evening of Sunday, October 22, Propaganda Minister Goebbels personally took to the air -- this writer well remembers the broadcast -- and accused Churchill of having sunk the Athenia. The next day the official Nazi newspaper, the Voelkischer Beobachter, ran a front-page story under the headline CHURCHILL SANK THE "ATHENIA" and stating that the First Lord of the Admiralty had planted a time bomb in the ship's hold. At Nuremberg it was established that the Fuehrer had personally ordered the broadcast and the article -- and also that though Raeder, Doenitz and Weizsaecker were highly displeased at such a brazen lie, they dared not do anything about it. [13]

 

This spinelessness on the part of the admirals and the self-styled anti-Nazi leader in the Foreign Office, which was fully shared by the generals, whenever the demonic Nazi warlord cracked down, was to lead to one of the darkest pages in German history.

 

[b]HITLER PROPOSES PEACE[/b]

 

"Tonight the press talks openly of peace," I noted in my diary September 20. "All the Germans I've talked to today are dead sure we shall have peace within a month. They are in high spirits."

 

The afternoon before at the ornate Guild Hall in Danzig I had heard Hitler make his first speech since his Reichstag address of September 1 started off the war. Though he was in a rage because he had been balked from making this speech at Warsaw, whose garrison still gallantly held out, and dripped venom every time he mentioned Great Britain, he made a slight gesture toward peace. "I have no war aims against Britain and France," he said. "My sympathies are with the French poilu. What he is fighting for he does not know." And he called upon the Almighty, "who now has blessed our arms, to give other peoples comprehension of how useless this war will be ... and to cause reflection on the blessings of peace."

 

On September 26, the day before Warsaw fell, the German press and radio launched a big peace offensive. The line, 1recorded in my diary, was: "Why do France and Britain want to fight now? Nothing to fight about. Germany wants nothing in the West."

 

A couple of days later, Russia, fast devouring its share of Poland, joined in the peace offensive. Along with the signing of the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, with its secret clauses dividing up Eastern Europe, Molotov and Ribbentrop concocted and signed at Moscow on September 28 a ringing declaration for peace.

 

The governments of Germany and Russia, it said, after having

 

[quote]definitely settled the problems arising from the disintegration of the Polish state and created a firm foundation for a lasting peace in Eastern Europe, mutually express their conviction that it would serve the true interests of all peoples to put an end to the state of war between Germany and England and France. Both governments will therefore direct their common efforts ... toward attaining this goal as soon as possible.

 

Should, however, the efforts of the two governments remain fruitless, this would demonstrate the fact that England and France are responsible for the continuation of the war ...[/quote]

 

Did Hitler want peace, or did he want to continue the war and, with Soviet help, push the responsibility for its continuance on the Western Allies? Perhaps he did not quite know himself, although he was pretty certain.

 

On September 26 he had a long talk with Dahlerus, who had by no means given up the quest for peace. Two days before, the indefatigable Swede had seen his old friend Ogilvie Forbes at Oslo, where the former counselor of the Berlin embassy was now serving in a similar capacity in the British Legation in the Norwegian capital. Dahlerus reported to Hitler, according to a confidential memorandum of Dr. Schmidt, [14] that Forbes had told him the British government was looking for peace. The only question was: How could the British save face?

 

"If the British actually want peace," Hitler replied, "they can have it in two weeks -- without losing face."

 

They would have to reconcile themselves, said the Fuehrer, to the fact "that Poland cannot rise again." Beyond that he was prepared, he declared, to guarantee the status quo "of the rest of Europe," including guarantees of the "security" of Britain, France and the Low Countries. There followed a discussion of how to launch the peace talks. Hitler suggested that Mussolini do it. Dahlerus thought the Queen of the Netherlands might be more "neutral." Goering, who was also present, suggested that representatives of Britain and Germany first meet secretly in Holland and then, if they made progress, the Queen could invite both countries to armistice talks. Hitler, who several times professed himself as skeptical regarding "the British will to peace," finally agreed to the Swede's proposal that he "go to England the very next day in order to send out feelers in the direction indicated."

 

"The British can have peace if they want it," Hitler told Dahlerus as he left, "but they will have to hurry."

 

That was one trend in the Fuehrer's thinking. He expressed another to his generals. The day before, on September 25, an entry in Halder's diary mentions receipt of "word on Fuehrer's plan to attack in the West." On September 27, the day after he had assured Dahlerus that he was ready to make peace with Britain, Hitler convoked the commanders in chief of the Wehrmacht to the Chancellery and informed them of his decision to "attack in the West as soon as possible, since the Franco-British army is not yet prepared." According to Brauchitsch he even set a date for the attack: November 12. [15] No doubt Hitler was fired that day by the news that Warsaw had finally capitulated. He probably thought that France, at least, could be brought to her knees as easily as Poland, though two days later Halder made a diary note to "explain" to the Fuehrer that "technique of Polish campaign no recipe for the West. No good against a well-knit army."

 

Perhaps Ciano penetrated Hitler's mind best when he had a long talk with the Chancellor in Berlin on October 1. The young Italian Foreign Minister, who by now thoroughly detested the Germans but had to keep up appearances, found the Fuehrer in a confident mood. As he outlined his plans, his eyes "flashed in a sinister fashion whenever he talked about his ways and means of fighting," Ciano observed. Summing up his impressions, the Italian visitor wrote:

 

[quote]... Today to offer his people a solid peace after a great victory is perhaps an aim which still tempts Hitler. But if in order to reach it he had to sacrifice, even to the smallest degree, what seems to him the legitimate fruits of his victory, he would then a thousand times prefer battle. [viii] [16][/quote]

 

To me as I sat in the Reichstag beginning at noon on October 6 and listened to Hitler utter his appeal for peace, it seemed like an old gramophone record being replayed for the fifth or sixth time. How often before I had heard him from this same rostrum, after his latest conquest, and in the same apparent tone of earnestness and sincerity, propose what sounded -- if you overlooked his latest victim -- like a decent and reasonable peace. He did so again this crisp, sunny autumn day, with his usual eloquence and hypocrisy. It was a long speech -- one of the most lengthy public utterances he ever made -- but toward the end, after more than an hour of typical distortions of history and a boastful account of the feat of German arms in Poland ("this ridiculous state") he came to his proposals for peace and the reasons therefore.

 

[quote]My chief endeavor has been to rid our relations with France of all trace of ill will and render them tolerable for both nations ... Germany has no further claims against France ... I have refused even to mention the problem of Alsace-Lorraine ... I have always expressed to France my desire to bury forever our ancient enmity and bring together these two nations, both of which have such glorious pasts ...[/quote]

 

And Britain?

 

[quote]I have devoted no less effort to the achievement of Anglo-German understanding, nay, more than that, of an Anglo-German friendship. At no time and in no place have I ever acted contrary to British interests ... I believe even today that there can only be real peace in Europe and throughout the world if Germany and England come to an understanding.[/quote]

 

And peace?

 

[quote]Why should this war in the West be fought? For restoration of Poland? Poland of the Versailles Treaty will never rise again ... The question of re-establishment of the Polish State is a problem which will not be solved by war in the West but exclusively by Russia and Germany ... It would be senseless to annihilate millions of men and to destroy property worth millions in order to reconstruct a State which at its very birth was termed an abortion by all those not of Polish extraction.

 

What other reason exists? ...

 

If this war is really to be waged only in order to give Germany a new regime ... then millions of human lives will be sacrificed in vain ... No, this war in the West cannot settle any problems ...[/quote]

 

There were problems to be solved. Hitler trotted out a whole list of them: "formation of a Polish State" (which he had already agreed with the Russians should not exist); "solution and settlement of the Jewish problem"; colonies for Germany; revival of international trade; "an unconditionally guaranteed peace"; reduction of armaments; "regulation of air warfare, poison gas, submarines, etc."; and settlement of minority problems in Europe.

 

To "achieve these great ends" he proposed a conference of the leading European nations "after the most thorough preparation."

 

[quote]It is impossible [he continued] that such a conference, which is to determine the fate of this continent for many years to come, could carry on its deliberations while cannon are thundering or mobilized armies are bringing pressure to bear upon it.

 

If, however, these problems must be solved sooner or later, then it would be more sensible to tackle the solution before millions of men are first uselessly sent to death and billions of riches destroyed. Continuation of the present state of affairs in the West is unthinkable. Each day will soon demand increasing sacrifices ... The national wealth of Europe will be scattered in the form of shells and the vigor of every nation will be sapped on the battlefields ...

 

One thing is certain. In the course of world history there have never been two victors, but very often only losers. May those peoples and their leaders who are of the same opinion now make their reply. And let those who consider war to be the better solution reject my outstretched hand.[/quote]

 

He was thinking of Churchill.

 

[quote]If, however, the opinions of Messrs. Churchill and followers should prevail, this statement will have been my last. Then we shall fight ... There will never be another November, 1918, in German history.[/quote]

 

It seemed to me highly doubtful, as I wrote in my diary on my return from the Reichstag, that the British and French would listen to these vague proposals "for five minutes." But the Germans were optimistic. On my way to broadcast that evening I picked up an early edition of Hitler's own paper, the Voelkischer Beobachter. The flamboyant headlines said:

 

[quote]GERMANY'S WILL FOR PEACE -- NO WAR AIMS AGAINST FRANCE AND ENGLAND  -- NO MORE REVISION CLAIMS EXCEPT COLONIES -- REDUCTION OF ARMAMENTS --  CO-OPERATION WITH ALL NATIONS OF EUROPE -- PROPOSAL FOR A CONFERENCE[/quote]

 

The Wilhelmstrasse, it is now known from the secret German documents, was encouraged to believe by the reports it was getting from Paris through the Spanish and Italian ambassadors there that the French had no stomach for continuing the war. As early as September 8, the Spanish ambassador was tipping the Germans off that Bonnet, "in view of the great unpopularity of the war in France, is endeavoring to bring about an understanding as soon as the operations in Poland are concluded. There are certain indications that he is in contact with Mussolini to that end." [17]

 

On October 2, Attolico handed Weizsaecker the text of the latest message from the Italian ambassador in Paris, stating that the majority of the French cabinet were in favor of a peace conference and it was now mainly a question of "enabling France and England to save face." Apparently, though, Premier Daladier did not belong to the majority. [ix] [18]

 

This was good intelligence. On October 7, Daladier answered Hitler. He declared that France would not lay down her arms until guarantees for a "real peace and general security" were obtained. But Hitler was more interested in hearing from Chamberlain than from the French Premier. On October 10, on the occasion of a brief address at the Sportpalast inaugurating Winterhilfe, Winter Relief, he again stressed his "readiness for peace." Germany, he added, "has no cause for war against the Western Powers."

 

Chamberlain's reply came on October 12. It was a cold douche to the German people, if not to Hitler. [x] Addressing the House of Commons, the Prime Minister termed Hitler's proposals "vague and uncertain" and noted that "they contain no suggestions for righting the wrongs done to Czechoslovakia and Poland." No reliance, he said, could be put on the promises "of the present German Government." If it wanted peace, "acts  -- not words alone -- must be forthcoming." He called for "convincing proof' from Hitler that he really wanted peace.

 

The man of Munich could no longer be fooled by Hitler's promises. The next day, October 13, an official German statement declared that Chamberlain, by turning down Hitler's offer of peace, had deliberately chosen war. Now the Nazi dictator had his excuse.

 

Actually, as we now know from the captured German documents, Hitler had not waited for the Prime Minister's reply before ordering preparations for an immediate assault in the West. On October 10 he called in his military chiefs, read them a long memorandum on the state of the war and the world and threw at them Directive No. 6 for the Conduct of the War. [20]

 

The Fuehrer's insistence toward the end of September that an attack be mounted in the West as soon as possible had thrown the Army High Command into a fit. Brauchitsch and Halder, aided by several other generals, had consorted to prove to the Leader that an immediate offensive was out of the question. It would take several months, they said, to refit the tanks used in Poland. General Thomas furnished figures to show that Germany had a monthly steel deficit of 600,000 tons. General von Stuelpnagel, the Quartermaster General, reported there was ammunition on hand only "for about one third of our divisions for fourteen combat days" -- certainly not long enough to win a battle against the French. But the Fuehrer would not listen to his Army Commander in Chief and his Chief of the General Staff when they presented a formal report to him on Army deficiencies on October 7. General Jodl, the leading yes man on OKW, next to Keitel, warned Halder "that a very severe crisis is in the making" because of the Army's opposition to an offensive in the West and that the Fuehrer was "bitter because the soldiers do not obey him."

 

It was against this background that Hitler convoked the generals at 11 A.M. on October 10. They were not asked for their advice. Directive No. 6, dated the day before, told them what to do:

 

[quote]TOP SECRET

 

If it should become apparent in the near future that England, and under England's leadership, also France, are not willing to make an end of the war, I am determined to act vigorously and aggressively without great delay ...

 

Therefore I give the following orders:

 

a. Preparations are to be made for an attacking operation ... through the areas of Luxembourg, Belgium and Holland. This attack must be carried out ... at as early a date as possible.

 

b. The purpose will be to defeat as strong a part of the French operational army as possible, as well as allies fighting by its side, and at the same time to gain as large an area as possible in Holland, Belgium and northern France as a base for conducting a promising air and sea war against England ...

 

I request the Commanders in Chief to give me, as soon as possible, detailed reports of their plans on the basis of this directive and to keep me currently informed ...[/quote]

 

The secret memorandum, also dated October 9, which Hitler read out to his military chiefs before presenting them the directive is one of the most impressive papers the former Austrian corporal ever wrote. It showed not only a grasp of history, from the German viewpoint, and of military strategy and tactics which is remarkable but, as a little later would be proved, a prophetic sense of how the war in the West would develop and with what results. The struggle between Germany and the Western Powers, which, he said, had been going on since the dissolution of the First German Reich by the Treaty of Muenster (Westphalia) in 1648 "would have to be fought out one way or the other." However, after the great victory in Poland, "there would be no objection to ending the war immediately" providing the gains in Poland were not "jeopardized."

 

[quote]It is not the object of this memorandum to study the possibilities in this direction or even to take them into consideration. I shall confine myself exclusively to the other case: the necessity to continue the fight ... The German war aim is the final military dispatch of the West, that is, the destruction of the power and ability of the Western Powers ever again to be able to oppose the state consolidation and further development of the German people in Europe.

 

As far as the outside world is concerned, this eternal aim will have to undergo various propaganda adjustments ... This does not alter the war aim. It is and remains the destruction of our Western enemies.[/quote]

 

The generals had objected to haste in taking the offensive in the West. Time, however, he told them, was on the enemy's side. The Polish victories, he reminded them, were possible because Germany really had only one front. That situation still held -- but for how long?

 

[quote]By no treaty or pact can a lasting neutrality of Soviet Russia be insured with certainty. At present all reasons speak against Russia's departure from neutrality. In eight months, one year, or even several years, this may be altered. The trifling significance of treaties has been proved on all sides in recent years. The greatest safeguard against any Russian attack lies ... in a prompt demonstration of German strength.[/quote]

 

As for Italy, the "hope of Italian support for Germany" was dependent largely on whether Mussolini lived and on whether there were further German successes to entice the Duce. Here too time was a factor, as it was with Belgium and Holland, which could be compelled by Britain and France to give up their neutrality -- something Germany could not afford to wait for. Even with the United States, "time is to be viewed as working against Germany."

 

There were great dangers to Germany, Hitler admitted, in a long war, and he enumerated several of them. Friendly and unfriendly neutrals (he seems to have been thinking mainly of Russia, Italy and the U.S.A.) might be drawn to the opposite side, as they were in the First World War. Also, he said, Germany's "limited food and raw -- material basis" would make it difficult to find "the means for carrying on the war." The greatest danger, he said, was the vulnerability of the Ruhr. If this heart of German industrial production were hit, it would "lead to the collapse of the German war economy and thus of the capacity to resist."

 

It must be admitted that in this memorandum the former corporal showed an astonishing grasp of military strategy and tactics, accompanied though it was by a typical lack of morals. There are several pages about the new tactics developed by the tanks and planes in Poland, and a detailed analysis of how these tactics can work in the West and just where. The chief thing, he said, was to avoid the positional warfare of 1914-18. The armored divisions must be used for the crucial breakthrough.

 

[quote]They are not to be lost among the maze of endless rows of houses in Belgian towns. It is not necessary for them to attack towns at all, but ... to maintain the flow of the army's advance, to prevent fronts from becoming stable by massed drives through identified weakly held positions.[/quote]

 

This was a deadly accurate forecast of how the war in the West would be fought, and when one reads it one wonders why no one on the Allied side had similar insights.

 

This goes too for Hitler's strategy. "The only possible area of attack," he said, was through Luxembourg, Belgium and Holland. There must be two military objectives first in mind: to destroy the Dutch, Belgian, French and British armies and thereby to gain positions on the Channel and the North Sea from which the Luftwaffe could be "brutally employed" against Britain.

 

Above all, he said, returning to tactics, improvise!

 

[quote]The peculiar nature of this campaign may make it necessary to resort to improvisations to the utmost, to concentrate attacking or defending forces at certain points in more than normal proportion (for example, tank or antitank forces) and in subnormal concentrations at others.[/quote]

 

As for the time of the attack, Hitler told his reluctant generals, "the start cannot take place too early. It is to take place in all circumstances (if at all possible) this autumn."

 

The German admirals, unlike the generals, had not needed any prodding from Hitler to take the offensive, outmatched though their Navy was by the British. In fact all through the last days of September and the first days of October Raeder pleaded with the Fuehrer to take the wraps off the Navy. This was gradually done. On September 17 a German U-boat torpedoed the British aircraft carrier Courageous off southwest Ireland. On September 27 Raeder ordered the pocket battleships Deutschland and Graf Spee to leave their waiting areas and start attacking British shipping. By the middle of October they had accounted for seven British merchantmen and taken in prize the American ship City of Flint.

 

On October 14, the German U-boat U-47, commanded by Oberleutnant Guenther Prien, penetrated the seemingly impenetrable defenses of Scapa Flow, the great British naval base, and torpedoed and sank the battleship Royal Oak as it lay at anchor, with a loss of 786 officers and men. It was a notable achievement, exploited to the full by Dr. Goebbels in his propaganda, and it enhanced the Navy in the mind of Hitler.

 

The generals remained, however, a problem. Despite his long and considered memorandum to them and the issuance of Directive No. 6 to get ready for an imminent attack in the West, they stalled. It wasn't that they had any moral scruples against violating Belgium and Holland; they simply were highly doubtful of success at this time. There was one exception.

 

General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, commander of Army Group C opposing the French on the Rhine and along the Maginot Line, not only was skeptical of victory in the West; he, alone so far as the available records reveal, opposed attacking neutral Belgium and Holland at least partly on moral grounds. The day after Hitler's meeting with the generals, on October 11, Leeb composed a long memorandum himself, which he sent to Brauchitsch and other generals. The whole world, he wrote, would turn against Germany,

 

[quote]which for the second time within 25 years assaults neutral Belgium! Germany, whose government solemnly vouched for and promised the preservation of and respect for this neutrality only a few weeks ago![/quote]

 

Finally, after detailing military arguments against an attack in the West, he appealed for peace. "The entire nation," he said, "is longing for peace." [21]

 

But Hitler by this time was longing for war, for battle, and he was fed up with what he thought to be the unpardonable timidity of his generals. On October 14 Brauchitsch and Halder put their heads together in a lengthy conference. The Army chief saw "three possibilities: Attack. Wait and see. Fundamental changes." Halder noted them in his diary that day and, after the war, explained that "fundamental changes" meant "the removal of Hitler." But the weak Brauchitsch thought such a drastic measure was "essentially negative and tends to render us vulnerable." They decided that none of the three possibilities offered "prospects of decisive successes." The only thing to do was to work further on Hitler.

 

Brauchitsch saw the Fuehrer again on October 17, but his arguments, he told Halder, were without effect. The situation was "hopeless." Hitler informed him curtly, as Halder wrote in his diary that day, that "the British will be ready to talk only after a beating. We must get at them as quickly as possible. Date between November 15 and 20 at the latest."

 

There were further conferences with the Nazi warlord, who finally laid down the law to the generals on October 27. After a ceremony conferring on fourteen of them the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, the Fuehrer got down to the business of the attack in the West. When Brauchitsch tried to argue that the Army would not be ready for a month, not before November 26, Hitler answered that this was "much too late." The attack, he ordered, would begin on November 12. Brauchitsch and Halder retired from the meeting feeling battered and defeated. That night they tried to console one another. "Brauchitsch tired and dejected," Halder noted in his diary.

 

[quote]THE ZOSSEN "CONSPIRACY" TO OVERTHROW HITLER[/quote]

 

The time had now come for the conspirators to spring to action once more, or so they thought. The unhappy Brauchitsch and Halder were faced with the stern alternatives of either carrying out the third of the "possibilities" they had seen on October 14 -- the removal of Hitler -- or organizing an attack in the West which they thought would be disastrous for Germany. Both the military and civilian "plotters," suddenly come to life, were urging the first alternative.

 

They had already been balked once since the start of the war. General von Hammerstein, recalled temporarily from his long retirement on the eve of the attack on Poland, had been given a command in the west. During the first week of the war he had urged Hitler to visit his headquarters in order to show that he was not neglecting that front while conquering Poland. Actually Hammerstein, an implacable foe of Hitler, planned to arrest him. Fabian von Schlabrendorff had already tipped Ogilvie Forbes on this plot the day Britain declared war, on September 3, at a hasty meeting in the Ad Ion Hotel in Berlin. But the Fuehrer had smelled a rat, had declined to visit the former Commander in Chief of the Army and shortly thereafter had sacked him. [22]

 

The conspirators continued to maintain contact with the British. Having failed to take any action to prevent Hitler from destroying Poland, they had concentrated their efforts on trying to keep the war from spreading to the West. The civilian members realized that, more than before, the Army was the only organization in the Reich which possessed the means of stopping Hitler: its power and importance had vastly increased with general mobilization and the lightning victory in Poland. But its expanded size, as Halder tried to explain to the civilians, also was a handicap. The officers' ranks had been swollen with reserve officers many of whom were fanatical Nazis; and the mass of the troops were thoroughly indoctrinated with Nazism. It would be difficult, Halder pointed out -- he was a great man to emphasize difficulties, whether to friend or foe -- to find an army formation which could be trusted to move against the Fuehrer.

 

There was another consideration which the generals pointed out and which the men in mufti fully appreciated. If they were to stage a revolt against Hitler with the accompanying confusion in the Army as well as the country, might not the British and French take advantage of it to break through in the west, occupy Germany and mete out a harsh peace to the German people -- even though they had got rid of their criminal leader? It was necessary therefore to keep in contact with the British in order to come to a clear understanding that the Allies would not take such an advantage of a German anti-Nazi coup.

 

Several channels were used. One was developed through the Vatican by Dr. Josef Mueller, a leading Munich lawyer, a devout Catholic, a man of such great physical bulk and tremendous energy and toughness that he had been dubbed in his youth "Joe the Ox"-Ochsensepp. Early in October, with the connivance of Colonel Oster of the Abwehr, Mueller had journeyed to Rome and at the Vatican had established contact with the British minister to the Holy See. According to German sources, he succeeded in obtaining not only an assurance from the British but the agreement of the Pope to act as an intermediary between a new anti-Nazi German regime and Britain. [23]

 

The other contact was in Berne, Switzerland. There Weizsaecker had installed Theodor Kordt, until recently the German charge in London, as an attache in the German Legation and it was in the Swiss capital that he saw on occasion an Englishman, Dr. Philip Conwell-Evans, whose professorship at the German University of Koenigsberg had made him both an expert on Nazism and to some extent a sympathizer with it. In the latter part of October Conwell-Evans brought to Kordt what the latter later described as a solemn promise by Chamberlain to deal justly and understandingly with a future anti-Nazi German government. Actually the Britisher had only brought extracts from Chamberlain's speech to the Commons in which, while rejecting Hitler's peace proposals, the Prime Minister had declared that Britain had no desire to "exclude from her rightful place in Europe a Germany which will live in amity and confidence with other nations." Though this statement and others in the speech of a friendly nature toward the German people had been broadcast from London and presumably picked up by the conspirators, they hailed the "pledge" brought by the unofficial British representative to Berne as of the utmost importance. With this and the British assurances they thought they had through the Vatican, the conspirators turned hopefully to the German generals. Hopefully, but also desperately. "Our only hope of salvation," Weizsaecker told Hassell on October 17, "lies in a military coup d'etat. But how?"

 

Time was short. The German attack through Belgium and Holland was scheduled to begin on November 12. The plot had to be carried out before that date. As Hassell warned the others, it would be impossible to get a "decent peace" after Germany had violated Belgium.

 

There are several accounts from the participants as to what happened next, or rather why nothing much happened, and they are conflicting and confusing. General Halder, the Chief of the Army General Staff, was again the key figure, as he had been at the time of Munich. But he blew hot and cold, was hesitant and confused. In his interrogation at Nuremberg he explained that the "Field Army" could not stage the revolt because it had a "fully armed enemy in front of it." He says he appealed to the "Home Army," which was not up against the enemy, to act but the most he could get from its commander, General Friedrich (Fritz) Fromm, was an understanding that "as a soldier"24 he would execute any order from Brauchitsch.

 

But Brauchitsch was even more wishy-washy than his General Staff Chief. "If Brauchitsch hasn't enough force of character," General Beck told Halder, "to make a decision, then you must make the decision and present him with a fait accompli." But Halder insisted that since Brauchitsch was the Commander in Chief of the Army, the final responsibility was his. Thus the buck was continually passed. "Halder," Hassell mourned in his diary at the end of October, "is not equal to the situation either in caliber or in authority." As for Brauchitsch, he was, as Beck said, "a sixth-grader." Still the conspirators, led this time by General Thomas, the economic expert of the Army, and Colonel Oster of the Abwehr, worked on Halder, who finally agreed, they thought, to stage a putsch as soon as Hitler gave the final order for the attack in the West. Halder himself says it was still conditional on Brauchitsch's making the final decision. At any rate, on November 3, according to Colonel Hans Groscurth of OKW, a confidant of both Halder and Oster, Halder sent word to General Beck and Goerdeler, two of the chief conspirators, to hold themselves in readiness from November 5 on. Zossen, the headquarters of both the Army Command and the General Staff, became a hotbed of conspiratorial activity.

 

November 5 was a key date. On that day the movement of troops to their jump-off points opposite Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg was to begin. Also on that day, Brauchitsch had an appointment for a showdown with Hitler. He and Halder had visited the top army commands in the west on November 2 and 3 and fortified themselves with the negative opinions of the field commanders. "None of the higher headquarters," Halder confided to his diary, "thinks the offensive ... has any prospect of success." Thus amply supplied with arguments from the generals on the Western front as well as his own and Halder's and Thomas', which were assembled in a memorandum, and carrying for good measure a "countermemorandum," as Halder calls it, replying to Hitler's memorandum of October 9, the Commander in Chief of the German Army drove over to the Chancellery in Berlin on November 5 determined to talk the Fuehrer out of his offensive in the West. If Brauchitsch were unsuccessful, he would then join the conspiracy to remove the dictator -- or so the conspirators understood. They were in a high state of excitement -- and optimism. Goerdeler, according to Gisevius, was already drawing up a cabinet list for the provisional anti-Nazi government and had to be restrained by the more sober Beck. Schacht alone was highly skeptical. "Just you watch," he warned. "Hitler will smell a rat and won't make any decision at all tomorrow."

 

They were all, as usual, wrong.

 

Brauchitsch, as might have been expected, got nowhere with his memoranda or his reports from the front-line commanders or his own arguments. When he stressed the bad weather in the West at this time of year, Hitler retorted that it was as bad for the enemy as for the Germans and moreover that it might be no better in the spring. Finally in desperation the spineless Army chief informed the Fuehrer that the morale of the troops in the west was similar to that in 1917-18, when there was defeatism, insubordination and even mutiny in the German Army.

 

At hearing this, Hitler, according to Halder (whose diary is the principal source for this highly secret meeting), flew into a rage. "In what units," he demanded to know, "have there been any cases of lack of discipline? What happened? Where?" He would fly there himself tomorrow. Poor Brauchitsch, as Halder notes, had deliberately exaggerated "in order to deter Hitler," and he now felt the full force of the Leader's uncontrolled wrath. "What action has been taken by the Army Command?" the Fuehrer shouted. "How many death sentences have been carried out?" The truth was, Hitler stormed, that "the Army did not want to fight."

 

"Any further conversation was impossible," Brauchitsch told the tribunal at Nuremberg in recalling his unhappy experience. "So I left." Others remembered that he staggered into headquarters at Zossen, eighteen miles away, in such a state of shock that he was unable at first to give a coherent account of what had happened.

 

That was the end of the "Zossen Conspiracy." It had failed as ignobly as the "Halder Plot" at the time of Munich. Each time the conditions laid down by the plotters in order to enable them to act had been fulfilled. This time Hitler had stuck to his decision to attack on November 12. In fact, after the stricken Brauchitsch had left his presence he had the order reconfirmed by telephone to Zossen. When Halder asked that it be sent in writing, he was immediately obliged. Thus the conspirators had in writing the evidence which they had said they needed in order to overthrow Hitler -- the order for an attack which they thought would bring disaster to Germany. But they did nothing further except to panic. There was a great scramble to burn incriminating papers and cover up traces. Only Colonel Oster seems to have kept his head. He sent a warning to the Belgian and Dutch legations in Berlin to expect an attack on the morning of November 12. [25] Then he set out for the Western front on a fruitless expedition to see if he could again interest General von Witzleben in bumping off Hitler. The generals, Witzleben included, knew when they were beaten. The former corporal had once again triumphed over them with the greatest of ease. A few days later Rundstedt, commanding Army Group A, called in his corps and divisional commanders to discuss details of the attack. While still doubting its success he advised his generals to bury their doubts. "The Army," he said, "has been given its task, and it will fulfill that task!"

 

The day after provoking Brauchitsch to the edge of a nervous breakdown Hitler busied himself with composing the texts of proclamations to the Dutch and Belgian people justifying his attack on them. Halder noted the pretext: "French march into Belgium."

 

But on the next day, November 7, to the relief of the generals, Hitler postponed the date of the attack.

 

[quote]TOP SECRET

 

Berlin, November 7, 1939

 

The Fuehrer and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, after hearing reports on the meteorological and the railway transport situation, has ordered:

 

A-day is postponed by three days. The next decision will be made at 6 P.M. on November 9, 1939.

 

KEITEL[/quote]

 

This was the first of fourteen postponements ordered by Hitler throughout the fall and winter, copies of which were found in the OKW archives at the end of the war. ~IJ They show that at no time did the Fuehrer abandon for one moment his decision to attack in the West; he merely put off the date from week to week. On November 9, the attack was postponed to November 19; on November 13, to November 22; and so on, with five or six days' notice being given each time, and usually the weather stated as the reason. Probably the Fuehrer was, to some extent, deferring to the generals. Probably he got it through his head that the Army was not ready. Certainly the strategic and tactical plans had not been fully worked out, for he was always tinkering with them.

 

There may have been other reasons for Hitler's first postponement of the offensive. On November 7, the day the decision was made, the Germans had been considerably embarrassed by a joint declaration of the King of the Belgians and the Queen of the Netherlands, offering, "before the war in Western Europe begins in full violence," to mediate a peace. In such circumstances it would have been difficult to convince anyone, as Hitler was attempting to do in the proclamations he was drafting, that the German Army was moving into the two Low Countries because it had learned the French Army was about to march into Belgium.

 

Also Hitler may have got wind that his attack on the neutral little country of Belgium would not have the benefit of surprise, on which he had counted. At the end of October, Goerdeler had journeyed to Brussels with a secret message from Weizsaecker urging the German ambassador, Buelow-Schwante, to privately warn the King of the "extreme gravity of the situation." This the ambassador did and shortly thereafter King Leopold rushed to The Hague to consult with the Queen and draw up their declaration. But the Belgians had more specific information. Some of it came from Oster, as we have seen. On November 8, Buelow-Schwante wired Berlin a warning that King Leopold had told the Dutch Queen that he had "exact information" of a German military build-up on the Belgian frontier which pointed toward a German offensive through Belgium "in two or three days." [27]

 

Then on the evening of November 8 and the afternoon of the following day there occurred two strange events -- a bomb explosion that just missed killing Hitler and the kidnapping by the S.S. of two British agents in Holland near the German border -- which at first distracted the Nazi warlord from his plans for attacking the West and yet in the end bolstered his prestige in Germany while frightening the Zossen conspirators, who actually had nothing to do with either happening.

 

[b]A NAZI KIDNAPING AND A BEERHOUSE BOMB[/b]

 

Twelve minutes after Hitler had finished making his annual speech, on the evening of November 8, to the "Old Guard" party cronies at the Buergerbraukeller in Munich in commemoration of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, a shorter speech than usual, a bomb which had been planted in a pillar directly behind the speaker's platform exploded, killing seven persons and wounding sixty-three others. By that time all the important Nazi leaders, with Hitler at their head, had hurriedly left the premises, though it had been their custom in former years to linger over their beers and reminisce with old party comrades about the early putsch.

 

The next morning Hitler's own paper, the Voelkischer Beobachter, alone carried the story of the attempt on the Fuehrer's life. It blamed the "British Secret Service" and even Chamberlain for the foul deed. "The attempted 'assassination,' " I wrote that evening in my diary, "undoubtedly will buck up public opinion behind Hitler and stir up hatred of England ... Most of us think it smells of another Reichstag fire."

 

What connection could the British secret service have with it, outside of Goebbel's feverish mind? An attempt was made at once to connect them. An hour or two after the bomb went off in Munich, Heinrich Himmler, chief of the S.S. and the Gestapo, telephoned to one of his rising young S.S. subordinates, Walter Schellenberg, at Duesseldorf and ordered him by command of the Fuehrer, to cross the border into Holland the next day and kidnap two British secret-service agents with whom Schellenberg had been in contact.

 

Himmler's order led to one of the most bizarre incidents of the war. For more than a month Schellenberg, who, like Alfred Naujocks, was a university-educated intellectual gangster, had been seeing in Holland two British intelligence officers, Captain S. Payne Best and Major R. H. Stevens. To them he posed as "Major Schaemmel," an anti-Nazi officer in OKW (Schellenberg took the name from a living major) and gave a convincing story of how the German generals were determined to overthrow Hitler. What they wanted from the British, he said, were assurances that the London government would deal fairly with the new anti-Nazi regime. Since the British had heard from other sources (as we have seen) of a German military conspiracy, whose members wanted the same kind of assurances, London was interested in developing further contacts with "Major Schaemmel." Best and Stevens provided him with a small radio transmitter and receiving set; there were numerous ensuing communications over the wireless and further meetings in various Dutch towns. By November 7, when the two parties met at Venlo, a Dutch town on the German frontier, the British agents were able to give "Schaemmel" a rather vague message from London to the leaders of the German resistance stating in general terms the basis for a just peace with an anti-Nazi regime. It was agreed that "Schaemmel" should bring one of these leaders, a German general, to Venlo the next day, to begin definitive negotiations. This meeting was put off to the ninth.

 

Up to this moment the objectives of the two sides were clear. The British were trying to establish direct contact with the German military putschists in order to encourage and aid them. Himmler was attempting to find out through the British who the German plotters were and what their connection was with the enemy secret service. That Himmler and Hitler were already suspicious of some of the generals as well as of men like Oster and Canans of the Abwehr is clear. But now on the night of November 8, Hitler and Himmler found need of a new objective: Kidnap Best and Stevens and blame these two British secret-service agents for the Buergerbrau bombing!

 

A familiar character now entered the scene. Alfred Naujocks, who had staged the "Polish attack" on the German radio station at Gleiwitz, showed up in command of a dozen Security Service (S.D.) toughs to help Schellenberg carry out the kidnaping. The deed came off nicely. At 4 P.M. on November 9, while Schellenberg sipped an aperitif on the terrace of a cafe at Venlo, waiting for a rendezvous with Best and Stevens, the two British agents drove up in their Buick, parked it behind the cafe, and then ran into a hail of bullets from an S.S. car filled with Naujock's ruffians. Lieutenant Klop, a Dutch intelligence officer, who had always accompanied the British pair in their talks with Schellenberg, fell mortally wounded. Best and Stevens were tossed into the S.S. car "like bundles of hay," as Schellenberg later remembered, along with the wounded Klop, and driven speedily across the border into Germany. [28]

 

And so on November 21 Himmler announced to the public that the assassination plot against Hitler at the Buergerbraukeller had been solved. It was done at the instigation of the British Intelligence Service, two of whose leaders, Stevens and Best, had been arrested "on the Dutch-German frontier" on the day following the bombing. The actual perpetrator was given as Georg Elser, a German Communist carpenter residing in Munich.

 

Himmler's detailed account of the crime sounded "fishy" to me, as I wrote in my diary the same day. But his accomplishment was very real. "What Himmler and his gang are up to, obviously," I jotted down, "is to convince the gullible German people that the British government tried to win the war by murdering Hitler and his chief aides."

 

The mystery of who arranged the bombing has never been completely cleared up. Elser, though not the half-wit that was Marinus van der Lubbe of the Reichstag fire, was a man of limited intelligence though quite sincere. He not only pleaded guilty to making and setting off the bomb, he boasted of it. Though of course he had never met Best and Stevens prior to the attempt, he did make the former's acquaintance during long years at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. There he told the Englishman a long and involved -- and not always logical -- story.

 

One day in October at the Dachau concentration camp, where he had been incarcerated since midsummer as a Communist sympathizer, he related, he had been summoned to the office of the camp commandant, where he was introduced to two strangers. They explained the necessity of doing away with some of the Fuehrer's "traitorous" followers by exploding a bomb in the Buergerbraukeller immediately after Hitler had made his customary address on the evening of November 8 and had left the hall. The bomb was to be planted in a pillar behind the speakers' platform. Since Elser was a skilled cabinetmaker and electrician and a tinkerer, they suggested that he was the man to do the job. If he did, they would arrange for his escape to Switzerland and for a large sum of money to keep him in comfort there. As a token of their seriousness they promised him better treatment in the camp in the meanwhile: better food, civilian clothes, plenty of cigarettes -- for he was a chain smoker -- and a carpenter's bench and tools. There Elser constructed a crude but efficient bomb with an eight-day alarm-clock mechanism and a contraption by which the weapon could also be detonated by an electric switch. Elser asserted that he was taken one night early in November to the beer cellar, where he installed his gadget in the well-placed pillar.

 

On the evening of November 8, at about the time the bomb was set to go off, he was taken by his accomplices, he said, to the Swiss frontier, given a sum of money and -- interestingly -- a picture postcard of the interior of the beer hall, with the pillar in which he had placed his bomb marked with a cross. But instead of being helped across the frontier -- and this seems to have surprised the dim-witted fellow -- he was nabbed by the Gestapo, postcard and all. Later he was coached by the Gestapo to implicate Best and Stevens at the coming state trial, in which he would be made the center of attention. [xi]

 

The trial never came off. We know now that Himmler, for reasons best known to himself, didn't dare to have a trial. We also know -- now -- that Elser lived on at Sachsenhausen and then Dachau concentration camps, being accorded, apparently on the express orders of Hitler, who had personally gained so much from the bombing, quite humane treatment under the circumstances. But Himmler kept his eye on him to the last. It would not do to let the carpenter survive the war and live to tell his tale. Shortly before the war ended, on April 16, 1945, the Gestapo announced that Georg Elser had been killed in an Allied bombing attack the previous day. We know now that the Gestapo murdered him. [30]

 

[b]HITLER TALKS TO HIS GENERALS[/b]

 

Having escaped assassination, or so it was made to seem, and quelled defiance among his generals, Hitler went ahead with his plans for the big attack in the West. On November 20, he issued Directive No. 8 for the Conduct of the War, ordering the maintenance of the "state of alert" so as to "exploit favorable weather conditions immediately," and laying down plans for the destruction of Holland and Belgium. And then to put courage in the fainthearted and arouse them to the proper pitch he thought necessary on the eve of great battles, he summoned the commanding generals and General Staff officers to the Chancellery at noon on November 23.

 

It was one of the most revealing of the secret pep talks to his principal military chiefs, and thanks to the Allied discovery of some of the OKW files at Flensburg it has been preserved in the form of notes taken by an unidentified participant. [31]

 

[quote]The purpose of this conference [Hitler began] is to give you an idea of the world of my thoughts, which govern me in the face of future events, and to tell you my decisions.[/quote]

 

His mind was full of the past, the present and the future, and to this limited group he spoke with brutal frankness and great eloquence, giving a magnificent resume of all that had gone on in his warped but fertile brain and predicting with deadly accuracy the shape of things to come. But it seems difficult to imagine that anyone who heard it could have had any further doubts that the man who now held the fate of Germany -- and the world -- in his hands had become beyond question a dangerous megalomaniac.

 

[quote]I had a clear recognition of the probable course of historical events [he said in discussing his early struggles] and the firm will to make brutal decisions ... As the last factor I must name my own person in all modesty: irreplaceable. Neither a military man nor a civilian could replace me. Assassination attempts may be repeated. I am convinced of the powers of my intellect and of decision ... No one has ever achieved what I have achieved ... I have led the German people to a great height, even if the world does hate us now .. The fate of the Reich depends only on me. I shall act accordingly.[/quote]

 

He chided the generals for their doubts when he made his "hard decisions" to leave the League of Nations, decree conscription, occupy the Rhineland, fortify it and seize Austria. "The number of people who put trust in me," he said, "was very small."

 

"The next step," he declared in describing his conquests with a cynicism which it is unfortunate that Chamberlain never heard, "was Bohemia, Moravia and Poland."

 

[quote]It was clear to me from the first moment that I could not be satisfied with the Sudeten-German territory. That was only a partial solution. The decision to march into Bohemia was made. Then followed the establishment of the Protectorate and with that the basis for the conquest of Poland was laid, but I was not quite clear at that time whether I should start first against the East and then against the West, or vice versa. By the pressure of events it came first to the fight against Poland. One might accuse me of wanting to fight and fight again. In struggle I see the fate of all beings. Nobody can avoid fighting if he does not want to go under.

 

The increasing number of [German] people required a larger Lebensraum. My goal was to create a rational relation between the number of people and the space for them to live in. The fight must start here. No nation can evade the solution of this problem. Otherwise it must yield and gradually go down ... No calculated cleverness is of any help here: solution only with the sword. A people unable to produce the strength to fight must withdraw ... [/quote]

 

The trouble with the German leaders of the past, Hitler said, including Bismarck and Moltke, was "insufficient hardness. The solution was possible only by attacking a country at a favorable moment." Failure to realize this brought on the 1914 war "on several fronts. It did not bring a solution of the problem."

 

[quote]Today [Hitler went on] the second act of this drama is being written. For the first time in sixty-seven years we do not have a two-front war to wage ... But no one can know how long that will remain so ... Basically I did not organize the armed forces in order not to strike. The decision to strike was always in me.[/quote]

 

Thoughts of the present blessings of a one-front war brought the Fuehrer to the question of Russia.

 

[quote]Russia is at present not dangerous. It is weakened by many internal conditions. Moreover, we have the treaty with Russia. Treaties, however, are kept only as long as they serve a purpose. Russia will keep it only as long as Russia herself considers it to be to her benefit ... Russia still has far-reaching goals, above all the strengthening of her position in the Baltic. We can oppose Russia only when we are free in the West.[/quote]

 

As for Italy, all depended on Mussolini, "whose death can alter everything ... Just as the death of Stalin, so the death of the Duce can bring danger to us. How easily the death of a statesman can come I myself have experienced recently." Hitler did not think that the United States was yet dangerous -- "because of her neutrality laws" -- nor that her aid to the Allies yet amounted to much. Still, time was working for the enemy. "The moment is favorable now; in six months it might not be so any more." Therefore:

 

[quote]My decision is unchangeable. I shall attack France and England at the most favorable and earliest moment. Breach of the neutrality of Belgium and Holland is of no importance. No one will question that when we have won. We shall not justify the breach of neutrality as idiotically as in 1914.[/quote]

 

The attack in the West, Hitler told his generals, meant "the end of the World War, not just a single action. It concerns not just a single question but the existence or nonexistence of the nation." Then he swung into his peroration.

 

[quote]The spirit of the great men of our history must hearten us all. Fate demands from us no more than from the great men of German history. As long as I live I shall think only of the victory of my people. I shall shrink from nothing and shall annihilate everyone who is opposed to me ... I want to annihilate the enemy![/quote]

 

It was a telling speech and so far as is known not a single general raised his voice either to express the doubts which almost all the Army commanders shared about the success of an offensive at this time or to question the immorality of attacking Belgium and Holland, whose neutrality and borders the German government had solemnly guaranteed. According to some of the generals present Hitler's remarks about the poor spirit in the top echelons of the Army and the General Staff were much stronger than in the above account.

 

Later that day, at 6 P.M., the Nazi warlord sent again for Brauchitsch and Halder and to the former -- the General Staff Chief was kept waiting outside the Fuehrer's office like a bad boy -- delivered a stern lecture on the "spirit of Zossen." The Army High Command (OKH) was shot through with "defeatism," Hitler charged, and Halder's General Staff had a "stiff-necked attitude which kept it from falling in with the Fuehrer." The beaten Brauchitsch, according to his own account given much later on the stand at Nuremberg, offered his resignation, but Hitler rejected it, reminding him sharply, as the Commander in Chief remembered, "that I had to fulfill my duty and obligation just like every other soldier." That evening Halder scribbled a shorthand note in his diary: "A day of crisis!" [32]

 

In many ways November 23,1939, was a milestone. It marked Hitler's final, decisive triumph over the Army, which in the First World War had shunted Emperor Wilhelm II aside and assumed supreme political as well as military authority in Germany. From that day on the onetime Austrian corporal considered not only his political but his military judgment superior to that of his generals and therefore refused to listen to their advice or permit their criticism -- with results ultimately disastrous to all.

 

"A breach had occurred," Brauchitsch told the Nuremberg tribunal in describing the events of November 23, "which was later closed but was never completely mended."

 

Moreover, Hitler's harangue to the generals that autumn day put a complete damper on any ideas Halder and Brauchitsch might have had, however tepidly, to overthrow the Nazi dictator. He had warned them that he would "annihilate" anyone who stood in his way, and Halder says Hitler had specifically added that he would suppress any opposition to him on the General Staff "with brutal force." Halder, for the moment at least, was not the man to stand up to such terrible threats. When four days later, on November 27, General Thomas went to see him, at the prompting of Schacht and Popitz, and urged him to keep after Brauchitsch to take action against the Fuehrer ("Hitler has to be removed!" Halder later remembered Thomas as saying), the General Staff Chief reminded him of all the "difficulties." He was not yet sure, he said, that Brauchitsch "would take part actively in a coup d'etat." [33]

 

A few days later Halder gave Goerdeler the most ludicrous reasons for not going on with the plans to get rid of the Nazi dictator. Hassell noted them down in his diary. Besides the fact that "one does not rebel when face to face with the enemy," Halder added, according to Hassell, the following points: "We ought to give Hitler this last chance to deliver the German people from the slavery of English capitalism ... There is no great man available ... The opposition has not yet matured enough ... One could not be sure of the younger officers." Hassell himself appealed to Admiral Canaris, one of the original conspirators, to go ahead, but got nowhere. "He has given up hope of resistance from the generals," the former ambassador confided to his diary on November 30, "and thinks it would be useless to try anything more along this line." A little later Hassell noted that "Halder and Brauchitsch are nothing more than caddies to Hitler." [34]

 

[b]NAZI TERROR IN POLAND: FIRST PHASE[/b]

 

Not many days after the German attack on Poland my diary began to fill with items about the Nazi terror in the conquered land. Later one would learn that many another diary was filling with them too. Hassell on October 19 reported hearing of "the shocking bestialities of the S.S., especially toward the Jews." A little later he was confiding to his diary a story told by a German landlord in the province of Posen.

 

[quote]The last thing he had seen there was a drunken district Party leader who had ordered the prison opened; he had shot five whores, and attempted to rape two others. [35][/quote]

 

On October 18, Halder wrote down in his diary the main points of a talk he had had with General Eduard Wagner, the Quartermaster General, who had conferred with Hitler that day about the future of Poland. That future was to be grim.

 

[quote]We have no intention of rebuilding Poland ... Not to be a model state by German standards. Polish intelligentsia must be prevented from establishing itself as a governing class. Low standard of living must be conserved. Cheap slaves ...

 

Total disorganization must be created! The Reich will give the Governor General the means to carry out this devilish plan.[/quote]

 

The Reich did.

 

A brief account of the beginning of Nazi terror in Poland, as disclosed by the captured German documents and the evidence at the various Nuremberg trials, may now be given. It was but a forerunner to dark and terrible deeds that would eventually be inflicted by the Germans on all the conquered peoples. But from first to last it was worse in Poland than anyplace else. Here Nazi barbarism reached an incredible depth.

 

Just before the attack on Poland was launched, Hitler had told his generals at the conference on the Obersalzberg on August 22 that things would happen "which would not be to the taste of German generals" and he warned them that they "should not interfere in such matters but restrict themselves to their military duties." He knew whereof he spoke. Both in Berlin and in Poland this writer soon was being overwhelmed with reports of Nazi massacres. So were the generals. On September 10, with the Polish campaign in full swing, Halder noted in his diary an example which soon became widely known in Berlin. Some toughs belonging to an S.S. artillery regiment, having worked fifty Jews all day on a job of bridge repairing, herded them into a synagogue and, as Halder put it, "massacred them." Even General von Kuechler, the commander of the Third Army, who was later to have few qualms, refused to confirm the light sentences of the court-martial meted out to the murderers -- one year in prison -- on the ground that they were too lenient. But the Army Commander in Chief, Brauchitsch, quashed the sentences altogether though not until Himmler had intervened, with the excuse that they came under a "general amnesty."

 

The German generals, upright Christians that they considered themselves to be, found the situation embarrassing. On September 12 there was a meeting on the Fuehrer's railroad train between Keitel and Admiral Canaris at which the latter protested against the atrocities in Poland. The lackey Chief of OKW curtly replied that "the Fuehrer has already decided on this matter." If the Army wanted "no part in these occurrences it would have to accept the S.S. and Gestapo as rivals" -- that is, it would have to accept S.S. commissars in each military unit "to carry out the exterminations."

 

[quote]I pointed out to General Keitel [Canaris wrote in his diary, which was produced at Nuremberg] that I knew that extensive executions were planned in Poland and that particularly the nobility and the clergy were to be exterminated. Eventually the world would hold the Wehrmacht responsible for these deeds. [36][/quote]

 

Himmler was too clever to let the generals wiggle out of part of the responsibility. On September 19 Heydrich, Himmler's chief assistant, paid a visit to the Army High Command and told General Wagner of S.S. plans for the "housecleaning of [Polish] Jews, intelligentsia, clergy and the nobility." Halder's reaction to such plans was put down in his diary after Wagner had reported to him:

 

[quote]Army insists that "housecleaning" be deferred until Army has withdrawn and the country has been turned over to civil administration. Early December.[/quote]

 

This brief diary entry by the Chief of the Army General Staff provides a key to the understanding of the morals of the German generals. They were not going to seriously oppose the "housecleaning" -- that is, the wiping out of the Polish Jews, intelligentsia, clergy and nobility. They were merely going to ask that it be "deferred" until they got out of Poland and could escape the responsibility. And, of course, foreign public opinion must be considered. As Halder jotted down in his diary the next day, after a long conference with Brauchitsch about the "housecleaning" in Poland:

 

[quote]Nothing must occur which would afford foreign countries an opportunity to launch any sort of atrocity propaganda based on such incidents. Catholic clergy! Impractical at this time.[/quote]

 

The next day, September 21, Heydrich forwarded to the Army High Command a copy of his initial "housecleaning" plans. As a first step the Jews were to be herded into the cities (where it would be easy to round them up for liquidation). "The final solution," he declared, would take some time to achieve and must be kept "strictly secret," but no general who read the confidential memorandum could have doubted that the "final solution" was extermination. [37] Within two years, when it came time to carry it out, it would become one of the most sinister code names bandied about by high German officials to cover one of the most hideous Nazi crimes of the war.

 

What was left of Poland after Russia seized her share in the east and Germany formally annexed her former provinces and some additional territory in the west was designated by a decree of the Fuehrer of October 12 as the General Government of Poland and Hans Frank appointed as its Governor General, with Seyss-Inquart, the Viennese quisling, as his deputy. Frank was a typical example of the Nazi intellectual gangster. He had joined the party in 1927, soon after his graduation from law school, and quickly made a reputation as the legal light of the movement. Nimble-minded, energetic, well read not only in the law but in general literature, devoted to the arts and especially to music, he became a power in the legal profession after the Nazis assumed office, serving first as Bavarian Minister of Justice, then Reichsminister without Portfolio and president of the Academy of Law and of the German Bar Association. A dark, dapper, bouncy fellow, father of five children, his intelligence and cultivation partly offset his primitive fanaticism and up to this time made him one of the least repulsive of the men around Hitler. But behind the civilized veneer of the man lay the cold killer. The forty-two-volume journal he kept of his life and works, which showed up at Nuremberg, [xii] was one of the most terrifying documents to come out of the dark Nazi world, portraying the author as an icy, efficient, ruthless, bloodthirsty man. Apparently it omitted none of his barbaric utterances.

 

"The Poles," he declared the day after he took his new job, "shall be the slaves of the German Reich." When once he heard that Neurath, the "Protector" of Bohemia, had put up posters announcing the execution of seven Czech university students, Frank exclaimed to a Nazi journalist, "If I wished to order that one should hang up posters about every seven Poles shot, there would not be enough forests in Poland with which to make the paper for these posters." [38]

 

Himmler and Heydrich were assigned by Hitler to liquidate the Jews. Frank's job, besides squeezing food and supplies and forced labor out of Poland, was to liquidate the intelligentsia. The Nazis had a beautiful code name for this operation: "Extraordinary Pacification Action" (Ausserordenliche Befriedigungsaktion, or "AB Action," as it came to be known). It took some time for Frank to get it going. It was not until the following late spring, when the big German offensive in the West took the attention of the world from Poland, that he began to achieve results. By May 30, as his own journal shows, he could boast in a pep talk to his police aides of good progress -- the lives of "some thousands" of Polish intellectuals taken, or about to be taken.

 

"I pray you, gentlemen," he asked, "to take the most rigorous measures possible to help us in this task." Confidentially he added that these were "the Fuehrer's orders." Hitler, he said, had expressed it this way:

 

[quote]"The men capable of leadership in Poland must be liquidated. Those following them ... must be eliminated in their turn. There is no need to burden the Reich with this ... no need to send these elements to Reich concentration camps."[/quote]

 

They would be put out of the way, he said, right there in Poland. [39]

 

At the meeting, as Frank noted in his journal, the chief of the Security Police gave a progress report. About two thousand men and several hundred women, he said, had been apprehended "at the beginning of the Extraordinary Pacification Action." Most of them already had been "summarily sentenced" -- a Nazi euphemism for liquidation. A second batch of intellectuals was now being rounded up "for summary sentence." Altogether "about 3,500 persons," the most dangerous of the Polish intelligentsia, would thus be taken care of. [40]

 

Frank did not neglect the Jews, even if the Gestapo had filched the direct task of extermination away from him. His journal is full of his thoughts and accomplishments on the subject. On October 7, 1940, it records a speech he made that day to a Nazi assembly in Poland summing up his first year of effort.

 

[quote]My dear Comrades! ... I could not eliminate all lice and Jews in only one year. ["Public amused," he notes down at this point.] But in the course of time, and if you help me, this end will be attained. [41][/quote]

 

A fortnight before Christmas of the following year, Frank closed a cabinet session at Cracow, his headquarters, by saying:

 

[quote]As far as the Jews are concerned, I want to tell you quite frankly that they must be done away with in one way or another ... Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all feeling of pity. We must annihilate the Jews.[/quote]

 

It was difficult, he admitted, to "shoot or poison the three and a half million Jews in the General Government, but we shall be able to take measures which will lead, somehow, to their annihilation." This was an accurate prediction. [42]

 

The hounding of Jews and Poles from the homes which they and their families had dwelt in for generations began as soon as the fighting in Poland was over. On October 7, the day after his "peace speech" in the Reichstag, Hitler appointed Himmler to be the head of a new organization, the Reich Commissariat for the Strengthening of German Nationhood, or R.K.F.D.V., for short. It was to carry out the deportation of Poles and Jews first from the Polish provinces annexed outright by Germany and replace them by Germans and Volksdeutsche, the latter being Germans of foreign nationality who were streaming in from the threatened Baltic lands and various outlying parts of Poland. Halder had heard of the plan a fortnight before, noting in his diary that "for every German moving into these territories, two people will be expelled to Poland."

 

On October 9, two days after assuming the latest of his posts, Himmler decreed that 550,000 of the 650,000 Jews living in the annexed Polish provinces, together with all Poles not fit for "assimilation," should be moved into the territory of the General Government, east of the Vistula River. Within a year 1,200,000 Poles and 300,000 Jews had been uprooted and driven to the east. But only 497,000 Volksdeutsche had been settled in their place. This was a little better than Halder's ratio: three Poles and Jews expelled to one German settled in their stead.

 

It was an unusually severe winter, that of 1939-40, as this writer remembers, with heavy snows, and the "resettlement," carried out in zero weather and often during blizzards, actually cost more Jewish and Polish lives than had been lost to Nazi firing squads and gallows. Himmler himself may be cited as authority. Addressing the S.S. Leibstandarte the following summer after the fall of France, he drew a comparison between the deportations which his men were beginning to carry out in the West with what had been accomplished in the East.

 

[quote][It] happened in Poland in weather forty degrees below zero, where we had to haul away thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands; where we had to have the toughness -- you should hear this, but also forget it immediately  -- to shoot thousands of leading Poles ... Gentlemen, it is much easier in many cases to go into combat with a company than to suppress an obstructive population of low cultural level, or to carry out executions or to haul away people or to evict crying and hysterical women. [43][/quote]

 

Already on February 21, 1940, S.S. Oberfuehrer Richard Gluecks, the head of the Concentration Camp Inspectorate, scouting around near Cracow, had informed Himmler that he had found a "suitable site" for a new "quarantine camp" at Auschwitz, a somewhat forlorn and marshy town of twelve thousand inhabitants in which was situated, besides some factories, a former Austrian cavalry barracks. Work was commenced immediately and on June 14 Auschwitz was officially opened as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners whom the Germans wished to treat with special harshness. It was soon to become a much more sinister place. In the meantime the directors of I. G. Farben, the great German chemical trust, had discovered Auschwitz as a "suitable" site for a new synthetic coal-oil and rubber plant. There not only the construction of new buildings but the operation of the new plant would have the benefit of cheap slave labor.

 

To superintend the new camp and the supply of slave labor for I. G. Farben there arrived at Auschwitz in the spring of 1940 a gang of the most choice ruffians in the S.S., among them Josef Kramer, who would later become known to the British public as the "Beast of Belsen," and Rudolf Franz Hoess, a convicted murderer who had served five years in prison -- he spent most of his adult life as first a convict and then a jailer  -- and who in 1946, at the age of forty-six, would boast at Nuremberg that at Auschwitz he had superintended the extermination of two and a half million persons, not counting another half million who had been allowed to "succumb to starvation."

 

For Auschwitz was soon destined to become the most famous of the extermination camps -- Vernichtungslager -- which must be distinguished from the concentration camps, where a few did survive. It is not without significance for an understanding of the Germans, even the most respectable Germans, under Hitler, that such a distinguished, internationally known firm as I. G. Farben, whose directors were honored as being among the leading businessmen of Germany, God-fearing men all, should deliberately choose this death camp as a suitable place for profitable operations.

 

[b]FRICTION BETWEEN THE TOTALITARIANS[/b]

 

The Rome-Berlin Axis became squeaky that first fall of the war.

 

Sharp exchanges at various levels took place over several differences: the failure of the Germans to carry out the evacuation of the Volksdeutsche from Italian South Tyrol, which had been agreed upon the previous June; failure of the Germans to supply Italy with a million tons of coal a month; failure of the Italians to ignore the British blockade and supply Germany with raw materials brought through it; Italy's thriving trade with Britain and France, including the sale to them of war materials; Ciano's increasingly anti-German sentiments.

 

Mussolini, as usual, blew hot and cold, and Ciano recorded his waverings in his diary. On November 9, the Duce had trouble composing a telegram to Hitler congratulating him on his escape from assassination.

 

[quote]He wanted it to be warm, but not too warm, because in his judgment no Italian feels any great joy over the fact that Hitler escaped death -- least of all the Duce.

 

November 20 .... For Mussolini the idea of Hitler's waging war, and, worse still, winning it, is altogether unbearable.[/quote]

 

The day after Christmas the Duce was expressing a "desire for a German defeat" and instructing Ciano to secretly inform Belgium and Holland that they were about to be attacked. [xiii] But by New Year's Eve he was talking again of jumping into the war on Hitler's side.

 

The chief cause of friction between the two Axis Powers was Germany's pro-Russian policy. On November 30, 1939, the Soviet Red Army had attacked Finland and Hitler had been placed in a most humiliating position. Driven out of the Baltic as the price of his pact with Stalin, forced to hurriedly evacuate the German families who had lived there for centuries, he now had to officially condone Russia's unprovoked attack on a little country which had close ties with Germany and whose very independence as a non-Communist nation had been won from the Soviet Union largely by the intervention of regular German troops in 1918. [xiv] It was a bitter pill to swallow, but he swallowed it. Strict instructions were given to German diplomatic missions abroad and to the German press and radio to support Russia's aggression and avoid expressing any sympathy with the Finns.

 

This may have been the last straw with Mussolini, who had to cope with anti-German demonstrations throughout Italy. At any rate, shortly after the New Year, 1940, on January 3, he unburdened himself in a long letter to the Fuehrer. Never before, and certainly never afterward, was the Duce so frank with Hitler or so ready to give such sharp and unpleasant advice.

 

He was "profoundly convinced," he said, that Germany, even if assisted by Italy, could never bring Britain and France "to their knees or even divide them. To believe that is to delude oneself. The United States would not permit a total defeat of the democracies." Therefore, now that Hitler had secured his eastern frontier, was it necessary "to risk all -- including the regime -- and sacrifice the flower of German generations" in order to try to defeat them? Peace could be had, Mussolini suggested, if Germany would allow the existence of "a modest, disarmed Poland, which is exclusively Polish. Unless you are irrevocably resolved to prosecute the war to a finish," he added, "I believe that the creation of a Polish state ... would be an element that would resolve the war and constitute a condition sufficient for the peace."

 

But it was Germany's deal with Russia which chiefly concerned the Italian dictator.

 

[quote]... Without striking a blow, Russia has in Poland and the Baltic profited from the war. But I, a born revolutionist, tell you that you cannot permanently sacrifice the principles of your Revolution to the tactical exigencies of a certain political moment ... It is my duty to add that one further step in your relations with Moscow would have catastrophic repercussions in Italy ... [45][/quote]

 

Mussolini's letter not only was a warning to Hitler of the degeneration of Italo-German relations but it hit a vulnerable target: the Fuehrer's honeymoon with Soviet Russia, which was beginning to get on the nerves of both parties. It had enabled him to launch his war and destroy Poland. It had even given him other benefits. The captured German papers reveal, for instance, one of the best-kept secrets of the war: the Soviet Union's help in providing ports on the Arctic, the Black Sea and the Pacific through which Germany could import badly needed raw materials otherwise shut off by the British blockade.

 

On November 10, 1939, Molotov even agreed to the Soviet government's paying the freight charges on all such goods carried over the Russian railways. [46] Refueling and repair facilities were provided German ships, including submarines, at the Arctic port of Teriberka, east of Murmansk-Molotov thought the latter port "was not isolated enough," whereas Teriberka was "more suited because it was more remote and not visited by foreign ships." [47]

 

All through the autumn and early winter of 1939 Moscow and Berlin negotiated for increased trade between the two countries. By the end of October Russian deliveries of raw stuffs, especially grain and oil, to Germany were considerable, but the Germans wanted more. However, they were learning that in economics, as well as politics, the Soviets were shrewd and hard bargainers. On November 1, Field Marshal Goering, Grand Admiral Raeder and Colonel General Keitel, "independently of each other," as Weizsaecker noted, protested to the German Foreign Office that the Russians were demanding too much German war material. A month later Keitel was again complaining to Weizsaecker that Russian requirements for German products, especially machine tools for manufacturing munitions, were "growing more and more voluminous and unreasonable. " [48]

 

But if Germany wanted food and oil from Russia, it would have to pay for them in the goods Moscow needed and wanted. So desperate was the blockaded Reich for these necessities from Russia that later, on March 30, 1940, at a crucial moment, Hitler ordered that delivery of war material to the Russians should have priority even over that to the German armed forces. [xv] [50] At one point the Germans threw in the unfinished heavy cruiser Luetzow as part of current payments to Moscow. Earlier, on December 15, Admiral Raeder proposed selling the plans and drawings for the Bismarck, the world's biggest battleship (45,000 tons), then building, to the Russians if they paid "a very high price." [51]

 

By the end of 1939 Stalin himself was personally participating in the negotiations at Moscow with the German trade delegation. The German economists found him a formidable trader. In the captured Wilhelmstrasse papers there are long and detailed memoranda of three memorable meetings with the awesome Soviet dictator, who had a grasp of detail that stunned the Germans. Stalin, they found, could not be bluffed or cheated but could be terribly demanding, and at times, as Dr. Schnurre, one of the Nazi negotiators, reported to Berlin, he "became quite agitated." The Soviet Union, Stalin reminded the Germans, had "rendered a very great service to Germany [and] had made enemies by rendering this assistance." In return it expected some consideration from Berlin. At one conference at the Kremlin on New Year's Eve, 1939-40,

 

[quote]Stalin characterized the total price of the airplanes as out of the question. It represented a multiplication of the actual prices. If Germany did not wish to deliver the airplanes. he would have preferred to have this openly stated.[/quote]

 

At a midnight meeting in the Kremlin on February 8

 

[quote]Stalin requested the Germans to propose suitable prices and not to set them too high, as had happened before. As examples were mentioned the total price of 300 million Reichsmarks for airplanes and the German valuation of the cruiser Luetzow at 150 million RM. One should not take advantage of the Soviet Union's good nature. [52][/quote]

 

On February 11, 1940, an intricate trade agreement was finally signed in Moscow providing for an exchange of goods, during the ensuing eighteen months, of a minimum worth of 640 million Reichsmarks. This was in addition to the trade agreed upon during the previous August amounting to roughly 150 millions a year. Russia was to get, besides the cruiser Luetzow and the plans of the Bismarck, heavy naval guns and other gear and some thirty of Germany's latest warplanes, including the Messerschmitt fighters 109 and 110 and the Ju-88 dive bombers. In addition the Soviets were to receive machines for their oil and electric industries, locomotives, turbines, generators, Diesel engines, ships, machine tools and samples of German artillery, tanks, explosives, chemical-warfare equipment and so on. [53]

 

What the Germans got the first year was recorded by OKW -- one million tons of cereals, half a million tons of wheat, 900,000 tons of oil, 100,000 tons of cotton, 500,000 tons of phosphates, considerable amounts of numerous other vital raw materials and the transit of a million tons of soybeans from Manchuria. [54]

 

Back in Berlin, Dr. Schnurre, the Foreign Office's economic expert, who had masterminded the trade negotiations for Germany in Moscow, drew up a long memorandum on what he had gained for the Reich. Besides the desperately needed raw materials which Russia would supply, Stalin, be said, bad promised "generous help" in acting "as a buyer of metals and raw materials in third countries."

 

[quote]The Agreement [Schnurre concluded] means a wide-open door to the East for us ... The effects of the British blockade will be decisively weakened. [55][/quote]

 

This was one reason why Hitler swallowed his pride, supported Russia's aggression against Finland, which was very unpopular in Germany, and accepted the threat of Soviet troops and airmen setting up bases in the three Baltic countries (to be eventually used against whom but Germany?). Stalin was helping him to surmount the British blockade. But more important than that, Stalin still afforded him the opportunity of fighting a one-front war, of concentrating all his military might in the west for a knockout blow against France and Britain and the overrunning of Belgium and Holland, after which -- well, Hitler had already told his generals what he had in mind.

 

As early as October 17, 1939, with the Polish campaign scarcely over, he had reminded Keitel that Polish territory

 

[quote]is important to us from a military point of view as an advanced jumping-off point and for strategic concentration of troops. To that end the railroads, roads and communication channels are to be kept in order. [56][/quote]

 

As the momentous year of 1939 approached its end Hitler realized, as he had told his generals in his memorandum of October 9, that Soviet neutrality could not be counted on forever. In eight months or a year, he had said, things might change. And in his harangue to them on November 23 he had emphasized that "we can oppose Russia only when we are free in the West." This was a thought which never left his restless mind.

 

The fateful year faded into history in a curious and even eerie atmosphere. Though there was world war, there was no fighting on land, and in the skies the big bombers carried only propaganda pamphlets, and badly written ones at that. Only at sea was there actual warfare. U-boats continued to take their toll of British and sometimes neutral shipping in the cruel, icy northern Atlantic.

 

In the South Atlantic the Graf Spee, one of Germany's three pocket battleships, had emerged from its waiting area and in three months had sunk nine British cargo vessels totaling 50,000 tons. Then, a fortnight before the first Christmas of the war, on December 14, 1939, the German public was electri·fied by the news, splashed in flaming headlines and in bulletins flashed over the radio, of a great victory at sea. The Graf Spee, it was said, had engaged three British cruisers on the previous day four hundred miles off Montevideo and put them out of action. But elation soon turned to puzzlement. Three days later the press announced that the pocket battleship had scuttled herself in the Plate estuary just outside the Uruguayan capital. What kind of a victory was that? On December 21, the High Command of the Navy announced that the Graf Spee's commander, Captain Hans Langsdorff, had "followed his ship" and thus "fulfilled like a fighter and hero the expectations of his Fuehrer, the German people and the Navy."

 

The wretched German people were never told that the Graf Spee had been severely damaged by the three British cruisers, which it outgunned, [xvi] that it had had to put into Montevideo for repairs, that the Uruguayan government, in accordance with international law, had allowed it to remain for only seventy-two hours, which was not enough, that the "hero," Captain Langsdorff, rather than risk further battle with the British with his crippled ship, had therefore scuttled it, and that he himself, instead of going down with her, had shot himself two days afterward in a lonely hotel room in Buenos Aires. Nor were they told, of course, that, as General Jodl jotted in his diary on December 18, the Fuehrer was "very angry about the scuttling of Graf Spee without a fight" and sent for Admiral Raeder, to whom he gave a dressing down. [57]

 

On December 12, Hitler issued another top-secret directive postponing the attack in the West and stipulating that a fresh decision would not be made until December 27 and that the earliest date for "A Day" would be January 1, 1940. He advised that Christmas leaves could therefore be granted. According to my diary, Christmas, the high point of the year for Germans, was a bleak one in Berlin that winter, with few presents exchanged, Spartan food, the menfolk away, the streets blacked out, the shutters and curtains drawn tight, and everyone grumbling about the war, the food and the cold.

 

There was an exchange of Christmas greetings between Hitler and Stalin.

 

[quote]Best wishes [Hitler wired] for your personal well-being as well as for the prosperous future of the peoples of the friendly Soviet Union.[/quote]

 

To which Stalin replied:

 

[quote]The friendship of the peoples of Germany and the Soviet Union, cemented by blood, has every reason to be lasting and firm.[/quote]

 

In Berlin Ambassador von Hassell used the holidays to confer with his fellow conspirators, Popitz, Goerdeler and General Beck, and on December 30 recorded in his diary the latest plan. It was

 

[quote]to have a number of divisions stop in Berlin "in transit from west to east." Then Witzleben was to appear in Berlin and dissolve the S.S. On the basis of this action Beck would go to Zossen and take the supreme command from Brauchitsch's hands. A doctor would declare Hitler incapable of continuing in office, whereupon he would be taken into custody. Then an appeal would be made to the people along these lines: prevention of further S.S. atrocities, restoration of decency and Christian morality, continuation of the war, but readiness for peace on a reasonable basis ...[/quote]

 

But it was all unreal; all talk. And so confused were the "plotters" that Hassell devoted a long patch of his diary to the consideration of whether they should retain Goering or not!

 

Goering himself, along with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Ley and other party leaders, used the New Year to issue grandiose proclamations. Ley said, "The Fuehrer is always right! Obey the Fuehrer!" The Fuehrer himself proclaimed that not he but "the Jewish and capitalistic warmongers" had started the war and went on:

 

[quote]United within the country, economically prepared and militarily armed to the highest degree, we enter this most decisive year in German history ... May the year 1940 bring the decision. It will be, whatever happens, our victory.[/quote]

 

On December 27 he had again postponed the attack in the West "by at least a fortnight." On January 10 he ordered it definitely set for January 17 "fifteen minutes before sunrise -- 8: 16 A.M." The Air Force was to begin its attack on January 14, three days in advance, its task being to destroy enemy airfields in France, but not in Belgium and Holland. The two little neutral countries were to be kept guessing about their fate until the last moment.

 

But on January 13 the Nazi warlord suddenly postponed the onslaught again "on account of the meteorological situation." The captured OKW file on D Day in the West is thereafter silent until May 7. Weather may have played a part in the calling off of the attack on January 13. But we now know that two other events were mainly responsible -- an unfortunate forced landing of a very special German military plane in Belgium on January 10 and a new opportunity that now appeared to the north.

 

On the very day, January 10, that Hitler had ordered the attack through Belgium and Holland to begin on the seventeenth, a German military plane flying from Muenster to Cologne became lost in the clouds over Belgium and was forced to land near Mechelen-sur-Meuse. In it was Major Helmut Reinberger, an important Luftwaffe staff officer, and in his briefcase were the German plans, complete with maps, for the attack in the West. As Belgian soldiers closed in, the major made for some nearby bushes and lit a fire to the contents of his briefcase. Attracted by this interesting phenomenon the Belgian soldiers stamped out the flames and retrieved what was left. Taken to military quarters nearby, Reinberger, in a desperate gesture, grabbed the partly burned papers, which a Belgian officer had placed on a table, and threw them into a lighted stove. The Belgian officer quickly snatched them out.

 

Reinberger promptly reported to Luftwaffe headquarters in Berlin through his embassy in Brussels that he had succeeded in burning down the papers to "insignificant fragments, the size of the palm of his hand." But in Berlin there was consternation in high quarters. Jodl immediately reported to Hitler "on what the enemy mayor may not know." But he did not know himself. "If enemy is in possession of all the files," he confided to his diary on January 12, after seeing the Fuehrer, "the situation is catastrophic." That evening Ribbentrop sent a "most urgent" wire to the German Embassy in Brussels asking for an immediate report on the "destruction of the courier baggage." On the morning of January 13, JodI's diary reveals, there was a conference of Goering with his air attache in Brussels, who had flown posthaste back to Berlin, and the top Luftwaffe brass. "Result: Dispatch case burned for certain," Jodi recorded.

 

But this was whistling in the dark, as Jodi's journal makes clear. At 1 P.M. it noted: "Order to Gen. Halder by telephone: All movements to stop."

 

The same day, the thirteenth, the German ambassador in Brussels was urgently informing Berlin of considerable Belgian troop movements "as a result of alarming reports received by the Belgian General Staff." The next day the ambassador got off another "most urgent" message to Berlin: The Belgians were ordering "Phase D," the next-to-the-last step in mobilization, and calling up two new classes. The reason, he thought, was "reports of German troop movements on the Belgian and Dutch frontiers as well as the content of the partly unburned courier mail found on the German Air Force officer."

 

By the evening of January 15 doubts had risen in the minds of the top brass in Berlin whether Major Reinberger had really destroyed the incriminating documents as he had claimed. They were "presumably burned," Jodl remarked after another conference on the matter. But on January 17 the Belgian Foreign Minister, Paul-Henri Spaak, sent for the German ambassador and told him flatly, as the latter promptly reported to Berlin, that

 

[quote]the plane which made an emergency landing on January 10 had put into Belgian hands a document of the most extraordinary and serious nature, which contained clear proof of an intention to attack. It was not just an operations plan, but an attack order worked out in every detail, in which only the time remained to be inserted.[/quote]

 

The Germans were never quite sure whether Spaak was not bluffing. On the Allied side -- the British and French general staffs were given copies of the German plan -- there was a tendency to view the German papers as a "plant." Churchill says he vigorously opposed this interpretation and laments that nothing was done about this grave warning. What is certain is that on January 13, the day after Hitler was informed of the affair, he postponed the attack and that by the time it again came up for decision in the spring the whole strategic plan had been fundamentally changed. [58]

 

But the forced landing in Belgium -- and the bad weather -- were not the only reasons for putting off the attack. Plans for a daring German assault on two other little neutral states farther to the north had in the meantime been ripening in Berlin and now took priority. The phony war, so far as the Germans were concerned, was coming to an end with the approach of spring.

 

_______________

 

[b]Notes:[/b]

 

i. See above, p. 610n.

 

ii. On October 9 this writer journeyed by rail up the east bank of the Rhine where for a hundred miles it forms the Franco-German frontier and noted in his diary: "No sign of war and the train crew told me not a shot had been fired on this front since the war began ... We could see the French bunkers and at many places great mats behind which the French were building fortifications. Identical picture on the German side. The troops ... went about their business in full sight and range of each other ... The Germans were hauling up guns and supplies on the railroad line, but the French did not disturb them. Queer kind of war." (Berlin Diary, p. 234.)

 

 

iii. Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, disclosed the general figures in the House of Commons on September 26. He gives the corrected official figures in his memoirs. He also told the House that six or seven U-boats had been sunk, but actually, as he also notes in his book, the figure was later learned to be only two.

 

Churchill's speech was marked by an amusing anecdote in which he told how a U-boat commander had signaled him personally the position of a British ship he had just sunk and urged that rescue should be sent. "I was in some doubt to what address I should direct a reply," Churchill said. "However, he is now in our hands." But he wasn't. This writer interviewed the submarine skipper, Captain Herbert Schultze, in Berlin two days later in a broadcast to America. He produced from his logbook his message to Churchill. (See Churchill, The Gathering Storm, pp. 436-37; Berlin Diary, pp. 225-27.)

 

 

iv. The next day, September 4, all U-boats were signaled: "By order of the Fuehrer, on no account are operations to be carried out against passenger steamers, even when under escort."

 

v. Apparently not in code. A copy of the naval attache's cable to Washington showed up in the German naval papers at Nuremberg.

 

 

vi. The italics are the Admiral's.

 

vii.  The officers, including Lemp, and some of the crew were transferred to the U-110 and went down with her on May 9, 1941. One member of the crew was wounded by aircraft fire a few days after the sinking of the Athenia. He was disembarked at Reykjavik, Iceland, under pledge of the strictest secrecy, later taken to a POW camp in Canada, and after the war signed an affidavit giving the facts. The Germans appear to have been worried that he would "talk," but he didn't until the war's end. [12]

 

 

viii. Mussolini did not share Hitler's confidence in victory, which Ciano reported to  him. He thought the British and French "would hold firm ... Why hide it?"  Ciano wrote in his diary October 3, "he [Mussolini] is somewhat bitter about Hitler's  sudden rise to fame." (Ciano Diaries, p. 155.)

 

ix. A little later, on November 16, the Italians informed the Germans that according to their information from Paris, "Marshal Petain is regarded as the advocate of a peace policy in France ... If the question of peace should become more acute in France, Petain will playa role." [19] This appears to be the first indication to the Germans that Petain might prove useful to them later on.

 

x. The day before, on October II, there had been a peace riot in Berlin. Early in the morning a broadcast on the Berlin radio wave length announced that the British government had fallen and that there would be an immediate armistice. There was great rejoicing in the capital as the rumor spread. Old women in the vegetable markets tossed their cabbages into the air, wrecked their stands in sheer joy and made for the nearest pub to toast the peace with Schnaps.

 

 

xi. According to the official Dutch account, which came to light after the war, the  British car, with Stevens, Best and Klop in it, was towed by the Germans across the  frontier, which was only 125 feet away. Starting on November 10, the next day,  the Dutch government made nine written requests at frequent intervals for the  return of Klop and the Dutch chauffeur of the car and also demanded a German  investigation of this violation of Dutch neutrality. No reply was ever made until  May 10, when Hitler justified his attack on the Netherlands partly on the grounds  that the Venlo affair had proven the complicity of the Dutch with the British secret  service. Klop died from his wounds a few days later. Best and Stevens survived five  years in Nazi concentration camps. [29]

 

 

xii. Later at Dachau Elser told a similar story to Pastor NiemoelIer, who since has stated his personal conviction that the bombing was sanctioned by Hitler to increase his own popularity and stir up the war fever of the people. It is only. fair to add that Gisevius, archenemy of Hitler, Himmler and Schellenberg, believes -- as he testified at Nuremberg and in his book -- that Elser realIy attempted to kill Hitler and that there were no Nazi accomplices. Schellenberg, who is less reliable, states that though he was suspicious at first of Himmler and Heydrich, he later concluded, after questioning the carpenter and after reading interrogations made while Elser was first drugged and then hypnotized, that it was a case of a genuine attempt at assassination.

 

xiii. It was found in May 1945 by Lieutenant Walter Stein of the U.S. Seventh  Army in Frank's apartment at the hotel Berghof near Neuhaus in Bavaria.

 

xiv. Ciano conveyed the warning to the Belgian ambassador in Rome on January 2,  noting the action in his diary. According to Weizsaecker the Germans intercepted  two coded telegrams from the ambassador to Brussels containing the Italian warning  and deciphered them. [44]

 

xv. On October 9, 1918 -- this is a little-known, ludicrous tidbit of history -- the  Finnish Diet, under the impression that Germany was winning the war, elected by  a vote of 75 to 25 Prince Friedrich Karl of Hesse to be King of Finland. Allied  victory a month later put an end to this fantastic episode.

 

xvi. After the conquest of France and the lowlands, Goering informed General  Thomas, the economic chief of OKW, "that the Fuehrer desired punctual delivery  to the Russians only until the spring of 1941. Later on," he added, "we would have  no further interest in completely satisfying the Russian demands." [49]

 

xvii. The day before the scuttling Goebbels had made the German press play up a faked  dispatch from Montevideo saying the Graf Spee had suffered only "superficial  damage" and that British reports that it had been severely crippled were "pure lies."

 

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