‘The answer to the question of how the problem “Danzig and the Corridor” is to be solved is still the same among the general public: incorporation in the Reich? Yes. Through war? No.’
‘When starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory.’
‘In my life I’ve always gone for broke.’
For 20 April 1939, Hitler’s fiftieth birthday, Goebbels had orchestrated an astonishing extravaganza of the Führer cult. The lavish outpourings of adulation and sycophancy surpassed those of any previous ‘Führer’s Birthday’. The festivities had already begun on the afternoon of the 19th. In mid-evening, followed by a cavalcade of fifty limousines, Hitler was driven along the thronged seven kilometres of the newly opened ‘East-West Axis’, lit by flaming torches and bedecked with hundreds of banners, built as the main boulevard of the intended new capital of the Nazi empire, ‘Germania’. After Albert Speer had declared the new road open, Hitler returned to the Reich Chancellery, watching from the balcony, as Party deputations from all the Gaue wound their way in torchlight procession through the vast, cheering crowd assembled in Wilhelmsplatz. At midnight he was congratulated by all the members of his personal entourage, beginning with his secretaries. Speer, by now the firmly established court favourite, presented a delighted Hitler with a four-metre model of the gigantic triumphal arch that would crown the rebuilt Berlin. Captain Hans Baur, Hitler’s pilot, gave him a model of the four-engined Focke-Wulf 200 ‘Condor’, under construction to take service as the ‘Führer Machine’ in the summer. Row upon row of further gifts — marble-white nude statues, bronze casts, Meissen porcelain, oil-paintings (some valuable, including a Lenbach and even a Titian, but mostly the standard dreary exhibits found in the House of German Art in Munich), tapestries, rare coins, antique weapons, and a mass of other presents, many of them kitsch (like the cushions embroidered with Nazi emblems or ‘Heil mein Führer’) — were laid out on long tables in the hall where Bismarck had presided over the Berlin Congress of 1878. Hitler admired some, made fun of others, and ignored most.1
The central feature of the birthday itself was a mammoth display of the might and power of the Third Reich, calculated to show the western powers what faced them if they should tangle with the new Germany. The ambassadors of Britain, France, and the USA, recalled after the march into Czecho-Slovakia, were absent. The Poles had sent no delegation.2 The parade on the ‘East-West Axis’ began at 11a.m. and lasted almost five hours. His secretaries returned to the Reich Chancellery exhausted from the ‘dreadfully long’ show; but Hitler never tired of being the centre of attraction at propaganda displays, however long he had to stand with his arm raised.3 The entire parade was recorded on 10,000 metres of film. The image of Hitler the ‘statesman of genius’ had now to be complemented by the portrayal of the ‘future military leader, taking muster of his armed forces’.4
‘The Führer is feted like no other mortal has ever been,’ effused Goebbels.5 Hitler’s most adoring disciple was scarcely a rational judge. But, elaborately stage-managed though the entire razzmatazz had been, there was no denying Hitler’s genuine popularity — even near-deification by many — among the masses. What had been before 1933 bitterly anti-Nazi Communist and Socialist sub-cultures remained, despite terror and propaganda, still largely impervious to the Hitler adulation. Many Catholics, relatively immune throughout to Nazism’s appeal, and, in lesser measure, Protestant churchgoers had been alienated by the ‘Church Struggle’ (though Hitler was held less generally to blame than his subordinates, especially Rosenberg and Goebbels). Intellectuals might be disdainful of Hitler, old-fashioned, upper-class conservatives bemoan the vulgarity of the Nazis, and those with remaining shreds of liberal, humanitarian values feel appalled at the brutality of the regime, displayed in full during ‘Crystal Night’. Even so, Hitler was without doubt the most popular government head in Europe. The exiled Social Democratic leaders, analysing the Führer cult as reflected in the plethora of letters, poems, and other devotalia sent in by ordinary citizens and published in German newspapers around Hitler’s fiftieth birthday, admitted that the phenomenon could not be explained by propaganda alone. Hitler, a national leader arising from the lower ranks of society, had tapped a certain ‘naïve faith’ embedded in lengthy traditions of ‘heroic’ leadership. Internal terror and the readiness of the western powers to hand Hitler one success after another in foreign policy had undermined the scepticism of many waverers. The result was that, although there was much fear of war, belief in the Führer was extensive.6 ‘A great man, a genius, a person sent to us from heaven,’ was one seventeen-year-old girl’s naïve impression.7 She spoke for many.
Whatever the criticisms ordinary people had about everyday life in the Third Reich, its irritations and vexations, the cult constructed around the Führer represented an enormous force for integration. The daily reality of Nazi rule spawned much antagonism. Grandiose Party buildings, erected at vast cost, greatly affronted a hard-pressed and poorly housed working population in the big cities. Massive criticism continued to be heaped on the self-evident corruption, scandalous high-living, and arrogance of Party functionaries. And, though the ‘Church struggle’ had died down somewhat, compared with intensity of the years 1936 and 1937, the attritional conflict between Party anti-Church fanatics and the churchgoing population remained a source of repeated friction.8 But Hitler’s ‘successes’ offered a counter — a set of ‘achievements’, put forward as those of a national, not party, leader, in which almost any German could take pride. ‘I have overcome the chaos in Germany,’ claimed Hitler in his speech to the Reichstag on 28 April, ‘restored order, massively raised production in all areas of our national economy.’ His litany of what were advanced as his own, personal accomplishments, continued: ‘I have succeeded in completely bringing back into useful production the seven [!] million unemployed who were so dear to all our own hearts, in keeping the German peasant on his soil despite all difficulties and in rescuing it for him, in attaining the renewed flourishing of German trade, and in tremendously promoting transportation. I have not only politically united the German people, but also militarily rearmed them, and I have further attempted to tear up page for page that Treaty, which contained in its 448 articles the most base violations ever accorded to nations and human beings. I have given back to the Reich the provinces stolen from us in 1919. I have led back into the homeland the millions of deeply unhappy Germans who had been torn away from us. I have recreated the thousand-year historic unity of the German living-space, and I have attempted to do all this without spilling blood and without inflicting on my people or on others the suffering of war. I have managed this from my own strength, as one who twenty-one years ago was an unknown worker and soldier of my people.’9
People worried how long it could all last. But the contrast with the dark days of economic depression and national humiliation was scarcely credible. What had been achieved seemed staggering. Most people did not want to see it put at risk through external conflict. For those who did not dwell too long on the causes and consequences, one man alone appeared to have masterminded it all. For that man, what had been achieved so far was no more than a preparation for what was to come.
As what was to prove the last peacetime spring and summer wore on, Hitler’s subordinates were in no doubt about the difficulties at home, and their impact on large sections of the population. The SD had spoken of a ‘mood close to complete despair’ among the peasantry at the end of 1938 owing to the ‘flight from the land’ and ensuing massive labour shortage. The feeling of being crushed, the SD claimed, was partly reflected in resignation, partly in outright revolt against the farmers’ leaders.10 In the first months of 1939, the peasants’ mood was said to have deteriorated still further.11 In Bavaria, it had reportedly reached ‘boilingpoint’ (‘Siedehitze’).12 The SD concluded that the ‘production battle’ had passed its peak, and was now facing decline, with the extensification of agriculture, and threat to the ‘völkisch substance’.13 In fact, the whole economic expansion, the SD suggested, had now reached its limits. Further pressure on the work-force would result only in declining performance and production.14
‘Growing unrest and discontent’ as a consequence of living, working, and housing conditions was reported among the working class of one of the most industrialized regions, the Ruhr District, in early 1939.15 By summer, reports from the same area were pointing to the sharp rise in the cases of sickness among industrial workers in armaments factories and coal-mines — whether, as some claimed, from ‘lack of discipline’, or, more likely, from genuine overwork, or from a combination of both can only be surmised.16 By then, the labour situation was described as ‘catastrophic’.17 Yet sullen apathy, not rebelliousness, characterized a work-force worn down by intensified production demands.18 Even so, if the industrial working class was politically neutralized, its productive capacity had by all accounts reached its peak. This in itself posed an evident threat to any long-term preparations for war.
Hitler showed no interest in the details of economic difficulties pouring in from every part of the Reich. He was sensitive, as he had been in the mid 1930s, to the impact on morale, refusing in 1938 to entertain any rise in food prices.19 But he had become increasingly preoccupied with foreign policy. Domestic issues were largely pushed to one side. Decisions were left untaken; much business was postponed or neglected; access to him was difficult. Even Lammers, in the absence of cabinet meetings now the sole link with the various government ministers, had been forced to plead with the Führer’s chief adjutant, Wilhelm Brückner, on 21 October 1938 for a brief audience with Hitler to discuss urgent business since, because of the demands of foreign policy, he had managed only one short meeting with him since 4 September.20 The reports of the ‘Trustees of Labour’ (Treuhänder der Arbeit) had normally been passed to Lammers and often brought directly to Hitler’s attention in 1937. But in 1938–9, as the labour crisis became acute, Hitler was verbally informed of the content, emphasizing the seriousness of the mounting labour problems, on only one occasion (at the meeting with Lammers in early September 1938) and most of the reports, regarded as highly repetitive, were by now not even reaching Lammers.21
With regard to agriculture, Hitler’s disinterest was even more marked. He simply refused to accede to Darré’s repeated requests for an audience and did not respond to the Agriculture Minister’s bombardment of the Reich Chancellery with memoranda about the critical situation. Only in October 1940 was Hitler finally persuaded to comment on the intense bitterness in the farming community about the labour shortage. He replied that their complaints would be attended to after the war.22
This reflected a key feature of Hitler’s thinking: war as panacea. Whatever the difficulties, they would be — and could only be — resolved by war. He was certainly alert to the dangers of a collapse in his popularity, and the likely domestic crisis which would then occur.23 The fears of a repeat of 1918 were never far away.24 He even seemed to sense that his own massive popularity had shaky foundations. ‘Since I’ve been politically active, and especially since I’ve been leading the Reich,’ he told his audience of newspaper editors in November 1938, ‘I have had only successes… What would then happen if we were some time to experience failure? That, too, could happen, gentlemen.’25 But he was speaking here of the ‘intellectual strata’, for whom he felt in any case nothing but contempt. If he took cognizance at all of the reports of poor mood among industrial workers and farmers, they must merely have confirmed his view that he had been correct all along: only war and expansion could provide the answer to Germany’s problems.
It is, in fact, doubtful whether he would have believed the accounts of poor morale, even if he had read them. Even three years or so earlier, when his adjutant at the time, Fritz Wiedemann, had tried to summarize the content of negative opinion reports, Hitler had refused to listen, shouting: ‘The mood in the people is not bad, but good. I know that better. It’s made bad through such reports. I forbid such things in future.’26 On the day Poland was invaded he would say to members of the Reichstag: ‘Don’t anyone tell me that in his Gau or his district, or his constituency (Gruppe), or his cell the mood could at some point be bad. You are responsible for the mood.’27 In April 1939, he took the adulation of the crowds at his fiftieth birthday celebrations, which, he claimed, had given him new strength, as the true indication of the mood of the people.28 Following one extraordinary triumph upon another, his self-belief had by this time been magnified into full-blown megalomania. Even among his private guests at the Berghof, he frequently compared himself with Napoleon, Bismarck, and other great historical figures.29 The rebuilding programmes that constantly preoccupied him were envisaged as his own lasting monument — a testament of greatness like the buildings of the Pharaohs or Caesars.30 He felt he was walking with destiny. Such a mentality allowed little space for the daily worries and concerns of ordinary people. It was much the same when Schacht or Göring brought the deteriorating economic situation to his attention. Such problems were, in his view, a mere passing phenomemon, a temporary irritant of no significance compared with the grandeur of his vision and the magnitude of the struggle ahead. Conventional economics — however limited his understanding — would, he was certain, never solve the problems. The sword alone, as he had repeatedly advocated since the 1920s, would produce the solution: the conquest of the ‘living space’ needed for survival. The lands of the East would one day provide for Germany. There would be no economic problems then. The opportunities awaited. But they had to be grasped quickly. His enemies — he had said so after Munich — were puny. But they were gathering strength. There was no time to lose.
It was a bizarre mentality. But in the summer of 1939, such a mentality was driving Germany towards European war. All along the way, Hitler had pushed at open doors. Revanchism and revisionism had given him his platform. Foreign Ministry mandarins, captains of industry, and above all the leaders of the armed forces had done everything — in their own interest — to ‘work towards the Führer’ in destroying Versailles and Locarno, pushing for economic expansion, building up a war machine. The weakened and divided western powers had given way at every step. They had provided the international backcloth to the expansion of Hitler’s power, to the diplomatic triumphs cheered to the echo by millions. The exalting of Hitler’s prestige had in turn elevated him to a position where he was held in awe even by his close entourage. The Führer cult removed him more and more from criticism, undermined opposition, inordinately strengthened his own hand against those who had done everything to build him up but now found themselves sidelined or bypassed. The traditional national-conservative power-elites had helped to make Hitler. But he now towered above them.31 The major shifts in personnel in the army leadership and Foreign Ministry in February 1938, and the great foreign-policy triumphs that followed, had removed the last possible constraining influences. Surrounded by lackeys, yes-men, and time-servers, Hitler’s power was by this time absolute. He could decide over war and peace.32
Hitler made public the abrupt shift in policy towards Poland and Great Britain in his big Reichstag speech of 28 April 1939.
The speech, lasting two hours and twenty minutes, had been occasioned by a message sent by President Roosevelt a fortnight earlier.33 Prompted by the invasion of Czecho-Slovakia, and in direct response to the German dictator’s aggressive speech in Wilhelmshaven on 1 April, the President had appealed to Hitler to give an assurance that he would desist from any attack for the next twenty-five years on thirty named countries — mainly European, but also including Iraq, Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Iran. Were such an assurance to be given, the United States, declared Roosevelt, would play its part in working for disarmament and equal access to raw materials on world markets.34 Hitler was incensed by Roosevelt’s telegram. That it had been published in Washington before even being received in Berlin was taken as a slight. Hitler also thought it arrogant in tone.35 And the naming of the thirty countries allowed Hitler to claim that inquiries had been conducted in each, and that none felt threatened by Germany. Some, such as Syria, however, had been, he alleged, unable to reply, since they were deprived of freedom and under the military control of democratic states, while the Republic of Ireland, he asserted, feared aggression from Britain, not from Germany.36 Roosevelt’s raising of the disarmament issue (out of which Hitler had made such capital a few years earlier) handed him a further propaganda gift. With heavy sarcasm, he tore into Roosevelt, ‘answering’ his claims in twenty-one points, each cheered to the rafters by the assembled members of the Reichstag, roaring with laughter as he poured scorn on the President.37
He returned to the Reich Chancellery drenched in sweat, ready for the hot bath that had been prepared for him.38 Civil servants in the Foreign Ministry thought he had ‘lashed out’ (ausgekeilt) in all directions, which Hitler took as a compliment. Many German listeners to the broadcast thought it one of the best speeches he had made.39 William Shirer, the American journalist in Berlin, was inclined to agree: ‘Hitler was a superb actor today,’ he wrote.40 The performance was largely for internal consumption. The outside world — at least those countries that felt they had accommodated Hitler for too long — were less impressed.
Preceding the vaudeville, Hitler had chosen the occasion to renounce the Non-Aggression Pact with Poland and the Naval Agreement with Britain. Memoranda to this effect had been handed over by the German embassies in Warsaw and London to coincide with the timing of the speech. Hitler, repeating his admiration for the British Empire, his search for an understanding, and that his only demand on Britain was the return of the former German colonies, blamed the renunciation of the naval pact on Britain’s ‘encirclement policy’.41 In reality, he was complying with the interests of the German navy, which felt its construction plans restricted by the pact and had been pressing for some time for Hitler to renounce it.42 The intransigence of the Poles over Danzig and the Corridor, their mobilization in March — in Hitler’s eyes almost as big an affront as the Czech mobilization the previous May — and the alignment with Britain against Germany were given as reasons for the ending of the Polish pact.43 The reasons were scarcely regarded as compelling outside Germany.
Since the end of March, which had brought the British guarantee for Poland, followed soon afterwards by the announcement that there was to be a British-Polish mutual assistance treaty, Hitler had, in fact, given up on the Poles. The military directives of early April were recognition of this. The Poles, he acknowledged, were not going to concede to German demands without a fight. So they would have their fight. And they would be smashed. Only the timing and conditions remained to be determined.
Hitler’s new aggressive stance towards Poland was certain of a warm welcome throughout the regime’s leadership, even among those who had opposed the high risk on Czecho-Slovakia the previous summer, and among broad swathes of the German population. The traditional anti-Polish sentiment in the Foreign Ministry was reflected in the relish with which Weizsäcker had conveyed the news to the Poles in early April that Germany was ending all negotiations.44 Anti-Polish feeling in the military was also rampant. Military leaders — even those with little time for Hitler — were enthusiastic about a revision of the disputed borders with Poland where they had been cool about Czecho-Slovakia. Ordinary soldiers were raring to be let loose at the Poles.45 The commanders of the armed forces’ branches were, moreover, better integrated from the outset into the military planning on Poland than they had been in the early stages of the Sudeten crisis.46 Despite the British guarantee, they had greater confidence than the previous year in Hitler pulling off yet another coup, and fewer fears of western involvement.47
At a meeting in his study in the New Reich Chancellery on 23 May, Hitler outlined his thinking on Poland and on wider strategic issues to a small group of top military leaders. The main points of his speech were noted down by his Wehrmacht Adjutant Lieutenant-Colonel Rudolf Schmundt. It was a frank address, even if some points (according to the noted record) were left ambiguous. It held out the prospect not only of an attack on Poland, but also made clear that the more far-reaching aim was to prepare for an inevitable showdown with Britain. Unlike the meeting on 5 November 1937 that Hoßbach had recorded, there is no indication that the military commanders were caused serious disquiet by what they heard. As on that occasion, the meeting had been called to deal with questions of raw materials allocation, arising from the priority that had been given in January to the naval Z-Plan.48 As then, Hitler did not deal with such specifics, but launched into a broad assessment of strategy, this time regarding Poland and the West. Other countries, including the Soviet Union, were scarcely touched upon.
Significantly — and an indication that reports of the mounting difficulties had not passed him by — Hitler began by emphasizing the need to solve Germany’s economic problems. His answer was the one he had been rehearsing for over fifteen years, though it was now more plainly stated than it had been in his first speech to military leaders on being appointed Chancellor, over six years earlier. ‘This is not possible without “breaking in” to other countries or attacking other people’s possessions,’ he baldly stated. In characteristic vein he continued: ‘Living space proportionate to the greatness of the State is fundamental to every Power. One can do without it for a time, but sooner or later the problems will have to be solved by hook or by crook. The alternatives are rise or decline. In fifteen or twenty years’ time the solution will be forced upon us. No German statesman can shirk the problem for longer.’
He turned to Poland. The Poles would always stand on the side of Germany’s enemies. The Non-Aggression Treaty had not altered this in the least. He made his intentions brutally clear. ‘It is not Danzig that is at stake. For us it is a matter of expanding our living space in the East and making food supplies secure and also solving the problem of the Baltic States. Food supplies can only be obtained from thinly populated areas. Over and above fertility, thorough German cultivation will tremendously increase the produce. No other openings can be seen in Europe.’ Colonies were no answer, he averred, since they were always subject to blockade by sea. In the event of war with the West, the territories in the East would provide food and labour.
He moved from economic to strategic considerations. The problem of Poland could not be dissociated from the showdown with the West. The Poles would cave in to Russian pressure. And they would seek to exploit any German military involvement with the western powers. He drew the conclusion from this that it was necessary ‘to attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity. We cannot expect a repetition of Czechia. There will be war. Our task is to isolate Poland. Success in isolating her will be decisive.’ He reserved to himself, therefore, the timing of any strike. Simultaneous conflict with the West had to be avoided. Should it, however, come to that — Hitler revealed here his priorities — ‘then the fight must be primarily against England and France’. He repeated — directly contradicting himself, if Schmundt’s notes are accurate — that the attack on Poland would only be successful if the West were kept out of it, but if that proved impossible ‘it is better to fall upon the West and finish off Poland at the same time’.
For the first time, there was less than outright hostility in his comments about the Soviet Union. Economic relations would only be possible, he said, once political relations had improved — an oblique reference to comments made by the new Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov a few days earlier.49 He did not, as had previously been the case, rule out such an improvement. He even suggested that Russia might be disinterested in the destruction of Poland.
His main concern was the coming showdown with the West, particularly with Britain. He doubted the possibility of peaceful coexistence in the long run. So it was necessary to prepare for conflict. A contest over hegemony, he implied (as he had done privately to Goebbels earlier in the year), was unavoidable. ‘Therefore England is our enemy and the showdown with England is a matter of life and death.’ He speculated on what the showdown would be like — speculations not remote from what was to happen a year later. Holland and Belgium would have to be overrun. Declarations of neutrality would be ignored. Once France, too, was defeated (which he did not dwell upon as a major difficulty), the bases on the west coast would enable the Luftwaffe and U-boats to effect the blockade that would bring Britain to its knees. The war would be an all-out one: ‘We must then burn our boats and it will no longer be a question of right or wrong but of to be or not to be for 80 million people.’ A war of ten to fifteen years had to be reckoned with. A long war had, therefore, to be prepared for, even though every attempt would be made to deliver a surprise knock-out blow at the outset — possible only if Germany avoided ‘sliding into’ war with Britain as a result of Poland. Clearly, Hitler was here, too, envisaging the elimination of Poland before any conflict with the West took place.50
Decisive in the conflict with Britain — and here Hitler indirectly provided the answer on raw materials allocation, and showed himself at the same time strategically still locked in the past — would not be air-power but the destruction of the British fleet. How, exactly, this would be achieved was not clarified. A special operations staff of the armed forces was to be set up to prepare the ground in detail and keep Hitler informed. ‘The aim is always to bring England to its knees,’ he stated.
Only Göring responded at the end of the forthright, if rambling, address. Not surprisingly, he wanted to hear something concrete about the priorities for raw materials, and about the likely timing of the conflict with the West. Hitler replied, vaguely, that the branches of the armed forces would determine what was to be constructed. On naval requirements, however, he was adamant, as his remarks had indicated: ‘Nothing will be changed in the shipbuilding programme.’ To the relief of those present, who took it as an indication of when he envisaged the conflict with the West taking place, he stipulated that the rearmament programmes were to be targeted at 1943–4 — the same time-scale he had given in November 1937. But no one doubted that Hitler intended to attack Poland that very year.51
Throughout the spring and summer frenzied diplomatic efforts were made to try to isolate Poland and deter the western powers from becoming involved in what was intended as a localized conflict. On the day before Hitler’s address to his military leaders, Italy and Germany had signed the so-called ‘Pact of Steel’, meant to warn Britain and France off backing Poland.52 The Italians had been soured by being kept in the dark about the invasion of Czecho-Slovakia. ‘Every time Hitler occupies a country he sends me a message,’ Mussolini had lamented.53 But Ribbentrop had striven to mend fences. The Italian annexation of Albania in early April — partly to show the Germans they could do it too — had been applauded by Berlin. The Japanese, interested only in an anti-Soviet alliance and keen to avoid any commitments involving the West, adamantly refused to fall in with Ribbentrop’s grand plan and establish a tripartite pact.54 But the pompous German Foreign Minister — even Hitler described him as swollen-headed — duped the Italians into signing a bilateral military pact on the understanding that the Führer wanted peace for five years and expected the Poles to settle peacefully once they realized that support from the West would not be forthcoming.55
In the attempt to secure the assistance or benevolent neutrality of a number of smaller European countries and prevent them being drawn into the Anglo-French orbit, the German government had mixed success. In the west, Belgian neutrality — whatever Hitler’s plans to ignore it when it suited him — was shored up to keep the western powers from immediate proximity to Germany’s industrial heartlands. Every effort had been made in preceding years to promote trading links with the neutral countries of Scandinavia to sustain, above all, the vital imports of iron ore from Sweden and Norway.56 In the Baltic, Latvia and Estonia agreed non-aggression pacts. But in central Europe, diplomatic efforts had more patchy results. Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Turkey were unwilling to align themselves closely with Berlin. Turkey could not be prevented from siding officially with Britain. But even here, Turkey’s need for good relations with Germany meant a willingness to provide the vital supplies of chrome. Economic penetration of the Balkans had, moreover, ensured that copper and other minerals would be forthcoming from Yugoslavia. And persistent pressure had turned Romania into an economic satellite, sealed by treaty in late March 1939, more or less assuring Germany of crucial access to Romanian oil and wheat in the event of hostilities.57
The big question-mark concerned the Soviet Union. The regime’s antichrist it might be. But it held the key to the destruction of Poland. If the USSR could be prevented from linking hands with the West in the tripartite pact that Britain and France were half-heartedly working towards; better still, if the unthinkable — a pact between the Soviet Union and the Reich itself — could be brought about: then Poland would be totally isolated, at Germany’s mercy, the Anglo-French guarantees worthless, and Britain — the main opponent — hugely weakened. Such thoughts began to gestate in the mind of Hitler’s Foreign Minister in the spring of 1939.58 In the weeks that followed, it was Ribbentrop on the German side, rather than a hesitant Hitler, who took the initiative in seeking to explore all hints that the Russians might be interested in a rapprochement — hints that had been forthcoming since March.59
Within the Soviet leadership, the entrenched belief that the West wanted to encourage German aggression in the East (that is, against the USSR), the recognition that following Munich collective security was dead, the need to head off any aggressive intent from the Japanese in the east, and above all the desperate need to buy time to secure defences for the onslaught thought certain to come at some time, pushed — if for a considerable time only tentatively — in the same direction.60 However, Stalin kept his options open. Not until August was the door finally closed on a pact with the foot-dragging western powers.61
Stalin’s speech to the Communist Party Congress on 10 March, attacking the appeasement policy of the West as encouragement of German aggression against the Soviet Union, and declaring his unwillingness to ‘pull the chestnuts out of the fire’ for the benefit of capitalist powers, had been taken by Ribbentrop, so he later claimed, as a hint that an opportunity might be opening up. He showed the speech to Hitler, asking for authorization to check what Stalin wanted. Hitler was hesitant. He wanted to await developments.62 Ribbentrop nevertheless put out cautious feelers. The unofficial response was encouraging. But Ribbentrop thought Hitler would disapprove, and did not bring it to his attention.63 By mid-April, however, the Soviet Ambassador was remarking to Weizsäcker that ideological differences should not hinder better relations.64 Still there was no response from Hitler. He remained unconvinced when Gustav Hilger, a long-serving diplomat in the German Embassy in Moscow, was brought to the Berghof to explain that the dismissal of the Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov (who had been associated with retaining close ties with the West, partly through a spell as Soviet Ambassador to the USA, and was moreover a Jew), and his replacement by Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s right-hand man, had to be seen as a sign that the Soviet dictator was looking for an agreement with Germany.65
Again it was Ribbentrop who was stirred by the suggestion.66 He heard around the same time from the German ambassador in Moscow, Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, that the Soviet Union was interested in a rapprochement with Germany.67 He scented a coup which would dramatically turn the tables on Britain, the country which had dared to spurn him — a coup that would also win him glory and favour in the Führer’s eyes, and his place in history as the architect of Germany’s triumph. Hitler for his part thought that Russian economic difficulties and the chance spotted by ‘the wily fox’ Stalin to remove any threat from Poland to the Soviet western borders were at the back of any opening towards Germany. His own interests were to isolate Poland and deter Britain.68
Ribbentrop was now able to persuade Hitler to agree to the Soviet requests for resumption of trade negotiations with Moscow, which had been broken off the previous February.69 Molotov told Schulenburg, however, that a ‘political basis’ would have to be found before talks could be resumed. He left unclear what he had in mind.70 Hitler again poured cold water on Ribbentrop’s eagerness to begin political talks. Weizsäcker’s view was that the Foreign Minister’s notions of offering mediation in the Soviet conflict with Japan and hinting at partition of Poland would be rejected ‘with a peal of Tartar laughter’.71 Deep suspicions on both sides led to relations cooling again throughout June. Molotov continued to stonewall and keep his options open. Desultory economic discussions were just kept alive. But at the end of June, Hitler, irritated by the difficulties raised by the Soviets in the trade discussions, ordered the ending of all talks.72 This time the Soviets took the initiative. Within three weeks they were letting it be known that trade talks could be resumed, and that the prospects for an economic agreement were favourable.73 This was the signal Berlin had been waiting for. Schulenburg in Moscow was ordered to ‘pick up the threads again’.74
Four days later, Ribbentrop’s Russian expert in the Foreign Ministry’s Trade Department, Karl Schnurre, invited the Soviet Chargé d’Affaires Georgei Astakhov and trade representative Evengy Babarin to dinner in Berlin. Acting under detailed instructions from the Foreign Minister himself, he indicated that the trade agreement could be accompanied by a political understanding between Germany and the Soviet Union, taking into account their mutual territorial interests. The response was encouraging.75 Within three days Ribbentrop was directing Schulenburg to put the same points directly to Molotov. Schnurre wrote himself to Schulenburg: ‘Politically, the problem of Russia is being dealt with here with extreme urgency.’ He was in daily contact with Ribbentrop, he stated, who in turn was in constant touch with the Führer. Ribbentrop was concerned to obtain a breakthrough in the Russian question, to disturb Soviet — British negotiations, but also to bring about an understanding with Germany. ‘Hence the haste with which we sent you the last instructions.’76 Molotov was non-committal and somewhat negative when he met Schulenburg on 3 August. But two days later, through his informal contacts with Schnurre, Astakhov was letting Riobentrop know that the Soviet government was seriously interested in the ‘improvement of mutual relations’, and willing to contemplate political negotiations.77
Towards the end of July, Hitler, Ribbentrop, and Weizsäcker had devised the basis of an agreement with the Soviet Union involving the partition of Poland and the Baltic states.78 Hints about such an arrangement were dropped to Molotov during his meeting with Schulenburg on 3 August.79 But Stalin was in no rush. And by now he had learned what the Germans were up to, and the broad timing of the intended action against the Poles.80 But for Hitler there was not a moment to lose. The attack on Poland could not be delayed. Autumn rains, he told Count Ciano in mid-August, would turn the roads into a morass and Poland into ‘one vast swamp… completely unsuitable for any military operations’. The strike had to come by the end of the month.81
Hitler, meanwhile, did everything possible to obscure what he had in mind to the general public in Germany and to the outside world. He had told the NSDAP’s press agency in mid-July to publish the dates of the ‘Reich Party Rally of Peace’ — longer than ever before, and scheduled to take place at Nuremberg on 2-II September 1939. It was also announced that he would attend a huge gathering, expected to attract 100,000 people, on 27 August to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Tannenberg.82 By then, detailed military plans to launch the attack to destroy Poland no later than 1 September had been in existence for several weeks.83
Remarkably, for the best part of three months during this summer of high drama, with Europe teetering on the brink of war, Hitler was almost entirely absent from the seat of government in Berlin. Much of the time, as always, when not at his alpine eyrie above Berchtesgaden, he was travelling around Germany. Early in June he visited the construction site of the Volkswagen factory at Fallersleben, where he had laid the foundation stone a year or so earlier. From there it was on to Vienna, to the ‘Reich Theatre Week’, where he saw the première of Richard Strauss’s Friedenstag, regaling his adjutants with stories of his visits to the opera and theatre there thirty years earlier, and lecturing them on the splendours of Viennese architecture. Before leaving, he visited the grave of his niece, Geli Raubal (who had shot herself in mysterious circumstances in his Munich flat in 1931). He flew on to Linz, where he criticized new worker flats because they lacked the balconies he deemed essential in every apartment. From there he was driven to Berchtesgaden via Lambach, Hafeld, and Fischlham — some of the places associated with his childhood and where he had first attended school.84
At the beginning of July, he was in Rechlin in Mecklenburg, inspecting new aircraft prototypes, including the He 176, the first rocket-propelled plane, with a speed of almost 1,000 kilometres an hour. Whenever he expressed particular interest, Göring told him that everything would be done to ensure it would soon be ready for service. No one dared explain that their deployment lay in the distant future.85
Then in the middle of the month Hitler attended an extraordinary four-day spectacular in Munich, the ‘Rally of German Art 1939’, culminating in a huge parade with massive floats and extravagant costumes of bygone ages to illustrate 2,000 years of German cultural achievement.86 Less than a week later he paid his regular visit to the Bayreuth festival. At Haus Wahnfried, in the annexe that the Wagner family had set aside specially for his use, Hitler felt relaxed. There he was ‘Uncle Wolf, as he had been known by the Wagners since his early days in politics. While in Bayreuth, looking self-conscious in his white dinner-jacket, he attended performances of Der fliegende Holländer, Tristan und Isolde, Die Walküre, and Götterdämmerung, greeting the crowds as usual from the window on the first floor.87
There was also a second reunion (following their meeting the previous year in Linz) with his boyhood friend August Kubizek. They spoke of the old days in Linz and Vienna, going to Wagner operas together. Kubizek sheepishly asked Hitler to sign dozens of autographs to take back for his acquaintances. Hitler obliged. The overawed Kubizek, the archetypal local-government officer of a sleepy small town, carefully blotted every signature. They went out for a while, reminiscing in the gathering dusk by Wagner’s grave. Then Hitler took Kubizek on a tour of Haus Wahnfried. Kubizek reminded his former friend of the Rienzi episode in Linz all those years ago. (Wagner’s early opera, based on the story of a fourteenth-century ‘tribune of the people’ in Rome, had so excited Hitler that late at night, after the performance, he had hauled his friend up the Freinberg, a hill on the edge of Linz, and regaled him about the meaning of what they had seen.) Hitler recounted the tale to Winifried Wagner, ending by saying, with a great deal more pathos than truth: ‘That’s when it began.’ Hitler probably believed his own myth. Kubizek certainly did. Emotional and impressionable as he always had been, and now a well-established victim of the Führer cult, he departed with tears in his eyes. Shortly afterwards, he heard the crowds cheering as Hitler left.88
Hitler spent most of August at the Berghof. Other than when he had important visitors to see, daily life there retained its usual patterns. The routine was more relaxed than in Berlin, but its rituals were equally fixed and tedious. Lengthy midday meals, dominated by the sound of Hitler’s voice, the arrival of the press reports (typed in large letters on the special ‘Führer typewriter’, and usually necessitating the household to search for the misplaced reading glasses that he refused to be seen wearing in public), walks down the hill to the ‘Tea House’ for afternoon tea or coffee and cakes (usually producing further monologues on favourite themes), an evening snack followed by a film and more late-night talk for those unable to escape. Magda Goebbels told Ciano of her boredom. ‘It is always Hitler who talks!’ he recalled her saying. ‘He can be Führer as much as he likes, but he always repeats himself and bores his guests.’89
If less so than in Berlin, strict formalities were still observed. The atmosphere was stuffy, especially in Hitler’s presence. Only Eva Braun’s sister, Gretl, lightened it somewhat, even smoking (which was much frowned upon), flirting with the orderlies, and determined to have fun whatever dampening effect the Führer might have on things. What little humour otherwise surfaced was often in dubious taste in the male-dominated household, where the women in attendance, including Eva Braun, served mainly as decoration. But in general, the tone was one of extreme politeness, with much kissing of hands, and expressions of ‘Gnädige Frau’.90 Despite Nazi mockery of the bourgeoisie, life at the Berghof was imbued with the intensely bourgeois manners and fashions of the arriviste Dictator.
Hitler’s lengthy absence from Berlin, while European peace hung by a thread, illustrates how far the disintegration of anything resembling a conventional central government had gone. Few ministers were permitted to see Hitler. Even the usual privileged few had dwindled in number. Goebbels — the most hated man in Germany according to Rosenberg (who, as the Party’s self-professed ideological ‘expert’ was himself detested so much for his radical attacks on the Christian Churches, and ought to have been a good judge) — was still out of favour following his affair with Lida Baarova.91 Göring had not recovered the ground he had lost since Munich.92 Speer enjoyed the special status of the protégé. He spent much of the summer at Berchtesgaden.93 But most of the time he was indulging Hitler’s passion for architecture, not discussing details of foreign policy. Hitler’s ‘advisers’ on the only issue of real consequence, the question of war and peace, were now largely confined to Ribbentrop, even more hawkish, if anything, than he had been the previous summer, and the military leaders. On the crucial matters of foreign policy, Ribbentrop — when not represented through the head of his personal staff, Walther Hewel, far more liked by the Dictator and everyone else than the preening Foreign Minister himself — largely had the field to himself. The second man at the Foreign Ministry, Weizsäcker, left to mind the shop while his boss absented himself from Berlin, claimed not to have seen Hitler, even from a distance, between May and the middle of August. What the Dictator was up to on the Obersalzberg was difficult to fathom in Berlin, Weizsäcker added.94
The personalization of government in the hands of one man — amounting in this case to concentration of power to determine over war or peace — was as good as complete.
Danzig, allegedly the issue dragging Europe towards war, was in reality no more than a pawn in the German game being played from Berchtesgaden. Gauleiter Albert Forster — a thirty-seven-year-old former Franconian bank clerk who had learnt some of his early political lessons under Julius Streicher and had been leader of the NSDAP in Danzig since 1930 — had received detailed instructions from Hitler on a number of occasions throughout the summer on how to keep tension simmering without allowing it to boil over. As had been the case in the Sudetenland the previous year, it was important not to force the issue too soon.95 Local issues had to chime exactly with the timing determined by Hitler. Incidents were to be manufactured to display to the population in the Reich, and to the world outside, the alleged injustices perpetrated by the Poles against the Germans in Danzig. Instances of mistreatment — most of them contrived, some genuine — of the German minority in other parts of Poland, too, provided regular fodder for an orchestrated propaganda campaign which, again analogous to that against the Czechs in 1938, had been screaming its banner headlines about the iniquities of the Poles since May.
The propaganda certainly had its effect. The fear of war with the western powers, while still widespread among the German population, was — at least until August — nowhere near as acute as it had been during the Sudeten crisis. People reasoned, with some justification (and backed up by the German press), that despite the guarantees for Poland, the West was hardly likely to fight for Danzig when it had given in over the Sudetenland.96 Many thought that Hitler had always pulled it off without bloodshed before, and would do so again.97 Some had a naïve belief in Hitler. One seventeen-year-old girl recalled much later how she and her friends had felt: ‘Rumours of an impending war were spreading steadily but we did not worry unduly. We were convinced that Hitler was a man of peace and would do everything he could to settle things peacefully.’98 Fears of war were nevertheless pervasive. The more general feeling was probably better summed up in the report from a small town in Upper Franconia at the end of July 1939: ‘The answer to the question of how the problem “Danzig and the Corridor” is to be solved is still the same among the general public: incorporation in the Reich? Yes. Through war? No.’99
But the anxiety about a general war over Danzig did not mean that there was reluctance to see military action against Poland undertaken — as long as the West could be kept out of it. Inciting hatred of the Poles through propaganda was pushing at an open door. ‘The mood of the people can be much more quickly whipped up against the Poles than against any other neighbouring people,’ commented the exiled Social Democratic organization, the Sopade. Many thought ‘it would serve the Poles right if they get it in the neck’.100 Other reports from the Sopade’s observers, whose anti-Nazi attitude needs no underlining, emphasize the impact the propaganda was having even among those hostile to the regime. Existing anti-Polish feelings were being massively sharpened. ‘An action against Poland would be greeted by the overwhelming mass of the German people,’ ran one report. ‘The Poles are enormously hated among the masses for what they did at the end of the War.’101 ‘If Hitler strikes out against the Poles, he will have a majority of the population behind him,’ commented another.102 In Danzig, too, where, not surprisingly, fear of a war was especially pronounced, the daily reports about ‘Polish terror’ were manufacturing antagonism among those who had never been ‘Pole haters’. Above all, no one, it was claimed, whatever their political standpoint, wanted a Polish Danzig; the conviction that Danzig was German was universal.103
The issue which the Danzig Nazis exploited to heighten the tension was the supervision of the Customs Office by Polish customs inspectors. These had indeed sometimes abused their position in the interests of increased Polish control over shipping. But there had been nothing serious, and matters could quite easily have been amicably resolved, or at least a modus vivendi reached, if that had been the intention. As it was, the customs officers were increasingly subjected to violent attacks.104 This had the desired effect of keeping the tension in the Free City at fever pitch. When the customs inspectors were informed on 4 August — in what turned out to be an initiative of an over-zealous German official — that they would not be allowed to carry out their duties and responded with a threat to close the port to foodstuffs, the local crisis threatened to boil over, and too soon. The Germans reluctantly backed down — as the international press noted.105 Forster was summoned to Berchtesgaden on 7 August and returned to announce that the Führer had reached the limits of his patience with the Poles, who were probably acting under pressure from London and Pans.106
This allegation was transmitted by Forster to Carl Burckhardt, the League of Nations High Commissioner in Danzig. Overlooking no possibility of trying to keep the West out of his war with Poland, Hitler was ready to use the representative of the detested League of Nations as his intermediary.107 On 10 August, during a dinner in honour of the departing Deputy Representative of Poland in Danzig, Tadeusz Perkowski, Burckhardt was summoned to the telephone to be told by Gauleiter Forster that Hitler wanted to see him on the Obersalzberg at 4p.m. next day and was sending his personal plane ready for departure early the following morning.108 Following a flight in which he was regaled by a euphoric Albert Forster with tales of beerhall fights with Communists during the ‘time of struggle’, Burckhardt landed in Salzburg and, after a quick snack, was driven up the spiralling road beyond the Berghof itself and up to the Eagle’s Nest (Adlerhorst), the recently built spectacular Tea House in the dizzy heights of the mountain peaks.109
Hitler was not fond of the Eagle’s Nest and seldom went up there. He complained that the air was too thin at that height, and bad for his blood pressure.110 He worried about an accident on the roads Bormann had had constructed up the sheer mountainside, and about a failure of the lift that had to carry its passengers from the huge, marble-faced hall cut inside the rock to the summit of the mountain, more than 150 feet above.111 But this was an important visit. Hitler wanted to impress Burckhardt with the dramatic view over the mountain tops, invoking the image of distant majesty, of the dictator of Germany as lord of all he surveyed.112
The imperious image had been somewhat dented just after Burckhardt arrived, when one of the serving staff had managed to drop a heavy armchair on Hitler’s foot and had him hopping in pain.113 But he quickly recovered to play every register in driving home to Burckhardt — and through him to the western powers — the modesty and reasonableness of his claims on Poland and the futility of western support. It was a calculated attempt to keep the West out of the coming conflict. His voice rose in a crescendo of anger one moment, fell to feigned sadness and resignation the next. The threats gave way to hopes even at this stage of an arrangement with Britain. Almost speechless with rage, he denounced press suggestions that he had lost his nerve and been forced to give way over the issue of the Polish customs officers. His voice rising until he was shouting, he screamed his response to Polish ultimata: if the smallest incident should take place, he would smash the Poles without warning so that not a trace of Poland remained. If that meant general war, then so be it. He would not fight like Wilhelm II, held back by his conscience, but ruthlessly to the bitter end. He poured out, as usual, an array of facts and figures to demonstrate Germany’s superiority in armaments. He could hold the western line, thanks to his fortifications, with seventy-four divisions. The rest of his forces would be hurled against Poland, which would be liquidated within three weeks. All he wanted was land in the east to feed Germany, and a single colony for timber. International trade offered no basis of security. Germany had to live from its own resources. That was the only issue; the rest nonsense. He emphasized more than once that he wanted nothing of the West, but demanded only a free hand in the East. He was ready, he said, to negotiate, but not when he was insulted and confronted with ultimata. He accused Britain and France of interference in the reasonable proposals he had made to the Poles. Now the Poles had taken up a position that blocked any agreement once and for all. His generals, hesitant the previous year, were this time raring to be let loose against the Poles.
Hitler took Burckhardt outside on to the terrace. He had had enough turmoil, he intimated. He needed the peace and quiet that he found there. Burckhardt enjoined that this lay in his hands more than any other person’s. This was not so, replied Hitler in a low voice. If he knew that England and France were inciting Poland to war, he would prefer war ‘this year rather than next’ But he was coming to the point of Burckhardt’s visit. Were the Poles to leave Danzig in peace, he could wait. He was prepared for a pact with Britain, guaranteeing British possessions. For him, he repeated, it was a matter of grain and timber. He was ready for negotiations on this issue. ‘But it will be another matter if they revile me and cover me with ridicule as in May last. I do not bluff. If the slightest thing happens in Danzig or to our minorities I shall hit hard.’ Again shifting from threats to apparent reason, he suggested that a German-speaking Englishman, possibly General Ironside — tall, handsome, and dashing, but ‘more bluff and brawn than brain’, who had been dispatched to Poland by the British government for a time in July — should go to Berlin.114
Burckhardt, as intended, rapidly passed on to the British and French governments the gist of his talks with Hitler.115 The dictator had seemed much older than when he had last met him, two years earlier, Burckhardt told his British and French contacts, and had been nervous, even anxious.116 ‘Hitler apparently undecided, rather distracted, rather aged,’ was the laconic comment of Sir Alexander Cadogan, head of the Foreign Office.117 No conclusions were drawn from Burckhardt’s report other than to urge restraint on the Poles.118
While Hitler and Burckhardt were meeting at the Eagle’s Nest on the Kehlstein, another meeting was taking place only a few miles away, in Ribbentrop’s newly acquired splendrous residence overlooking the lake in Fuschl, not far from Salzburg. Count Ciano, resplendent in uniform, was learning from the German Foreign Minister, dressed, to his visitors’ surprise, in casual civilian dress, that the Italians had been deceived for months about Hitler’s intentions. The atmosphere was icy. Ribbentrop told Ciano that the ‘merciless destruction of Poland by Germany’ was inevitable. The conflict would not become a general one. Were Britain and France to intervene, they would be doomed to defeat. But his information ‘and above all his psychological knowledge’ of Britain, he insisted, made him rule out any intervention. Ciano found him unreasoning and obstinate. Discussion with him was pointless. He evaded all requests for details of Germany’s plans by saying ‘all decisions were still locked in the Führer’s impenetrable bosom’. Dinner passed without a word. Ciano left after ten hours of discussion, greatly depressed, sure ‘that he intends to provoke the conflict and will oppose any initiative which might have the effect of solving the present crisis peacefully’.119 Ciano added in his diary: ‘The decision to fight is implacable. He [Ribbentrop] rejects any solution which might give satisfaction to Germany and avoid the struggle.’120
The impression was reinforced when Ciano met Hitler at the Berghof the next day. Among the reasons put forward for the need to act, most of which echoed the points that had been made by Ribbentrop, Hitler again revealed the extent to which he was affected by matters of prestige. He claimed that Germany, as a great nation, could not tolerate the continued provocation by Poland ‘without losing prestige’. He was convinced that the conflict would be localized, that Britain and France, whatever noises they were making, would not go to war. It would be necessary one day to fight the western democracies. But he thought it ‘out of the question that this struggle can begin now’.121 Ciano noted that he realized immediately ‘that there is no longer anything that can be done. He has decided to strike, and strike he will.’122
Important news came through for Hitler at the very time that he was underlining to the disenchanted Ciano his determination to attack Poland no later than the end of August: the Russians were prepared to begin talks in Moscow, including the position of Poland. A beaming Ribbentrop took the telephone call at the Berghof. Hitler was summoned from the meeting with Ciano, and rejoined it in high spirits to report the breakthrough.123 The way was now open.
The idea seems initially to have been to send Hans Frank, the Nazis’ chief legal expert, who had been involved in the talks producing the Axis in 1936, to Moscow to conduct negotiations.124 But by 14 August Hitler had decided to send Ribbentrop.125 A flurry of diplomatic activity — Ribbentrop pressing with maximum urgency for the earliest possible agreement, Molotov cannily prevaricating until it was evident that Soviet interest in the Anglo-French mission was dead — unfolded during the following days.126 The text of a trade treaty, under which German manufactured goods worth 200 million Reich Marks would be exchanged each year for an equivalent amount of Soviet raw materials, was agreed.127 Finally, on the evening of 19 August, the chattering teleprinter gave Hitler and Ribbentrop, waiting anxiously at the Berghof, the news they wanted: Stalin was willing to sign a non-aggression pact without delay.128
Only the proposed date of Ribbentrop’s visit — 26 August — posed serious problems. It was the date Hitler had set for the invasion of Poland.129 Hitler could not wait that long. On 20 August, he decided to intervene personally. He telegraphed a message to Stalin, via the German Embassy in Moscow, requesting the reception of Ribbentrop, armed with full powers to sign a pact, on the 22nd or 23rd.130 Hitler’s intervention made a difference. But once more Stalin and Molotov made Hitler sweat it out. The tension at the Berghof was almost unbearable. It was more than twenty-four hours later, on the evening of 21 August, before the message came through. Stalin had agreed. Ribbentrop was expected in Moscow in two days’ time, on 23 August. Hitler slapped himself on the knee in delight. Champagne all round was ordered — though Hitler did not touch any. ‘That will really land them in the soup,’ he declared, referring to the western powers.131
The news, announced just before midnight, struck like a bombshell. Most German citizens, once they had adjusted to the surprise, felt simply a sense of relief. The understanding with the unlikely new friends in the east had eliminated the threat of encirclement and a war on two fronts.132 Older army leaders, schooled in the tradition of Seeckt’s Reichswehr of good relations with Russia, felt the same way. Most presumed that Poland would now not dare to fight, and that the conflict would be resolved in much the same way as the Sudeten crisis of the previous year.133 But reactions were mixed, even among the Nazi leadership. ‘We’re on top again. Now we can sleep more easily,’ recorded a delighted Goebbels.134 ‘The question of Bolshevism is for the moment of secondary importance,’ he later added, saying that was the Führer’s view, too. ‘We’re in need and eat then like the devil eats flies.’135
For the dyed-in-the-wool old anti-Bolshevik Alfred Rosenberg, who hailed from the Baltic and had personal experience of conditions at the time of the Russian Revolution, the response was predictably different. ‘A moral loss of respect in the light of our by now twenty-year long struggle,’ was how he described the pact. Even so, he was prepared to attribute Hitler’s 180-degree shift — the U-turn of all time — to necessity, and blamed Ribbentrop, whom he believed occupied the post of Foreign Minister that ought to have been his own, for destroying any hopes of the desired alliance with Britain.136 In his dismay at the pact, but ready as always to place his trust in the Führer’s judgement, Rosenberg undoubtedly spoke for most ‘old fighters’ of the Party.137 A good number of SA men, veterans of many a street fight with the Communists, had even less sympathy with the dramatic change of course. Voices were heard that it was about time that Mein Kampf was taken out of the bookshops since Hitler was now doing the exact opposite of what he had written.138 Heinrich Hoffmann, according to his later account, raised the reactions of the Party faithful with Hitler. ‘My Party members know and trust me; they know I will never depart from my basic principles, and they will realize that the ultimate aim of this latest gambit is to remove the Eastern danger,’ Hitler is said to have replied. But next morning the garden of the Brown House was reportedly littered with badges discarded by disillusioned Party members.139
Abroad, Goebbels remarked, the announcement of the imminent non-aggression pact was ‘the great world sensation’.140 But the response was not that which Hitler and Ribbentrop had hoped for. The Poles’ fatalistic reaction was that the pact would change nothing.141 In Paris, where the news of the Soviet-German pact hit especially hard, the French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet, fearing a German–Soviet entente against Poland, pondered whether it was now better to press the Poles into compromise with Hitler in order to win time for France to prepare its defences.142 But eventually, after dithering for two days, the French government agreed that France would remain true to its obligations.143 The British cabinet, meeting on the afternoon of 22 August, was unmoved by the dramatic news, even if MPs were asking searching questions about the failure of British intelligence. The Foreign Secretary coolly, if absurdly, dismissed the pact as perhaps of not very great importance.144 Instructions went out to embassies that Britain’s obligations to Poland remained unaltered. Sir Nevile Henderson’s suggestion of a personal letter from the Prime Minister to Hitler, warning him of Britain’s determination to stick by Poland, was taken up.145
Meanwhile, in excellent mood on account of his latest triumph, Hitler prepared, on the morning of 22 August, to address all the armed forces’ leaders on his plans for Poland. The meeting, at the Berghof, had been arranged before the news from Moscow had come through.146 Hitler’s aim was to convince the generals of the need to attack Poland without delay.147 The diplomatic coup, by now in the public domain, can only have boosted his self-confidence. It certainly weakened any potential criticism from his audience.
The generals arrived mainly by plane, landing in Salzburg, Munich, or on the small airfield near Berchtesgaden, from where they were driven during the course of the morning to the Obersalzberg.148 They were dressed in civilian clothing in order not to arouse particular attention — an objective not best furthered by Göring turning up in outlandish hunting garb.149 General Liebmann had met Papen on the way through Salzburg. Papen told him that he had spoken with Hitler the previous evening, warning him not to risk war with England, where the chances of winning would be under 50 per cent. He had the feeling that his arguments had made no impression at all.150 Around fifty officers (including the Führer’s adjutants) had assembled in the Great Hall of the Berghof by the time that Hitler began his address at noon.151 Ribbentrop was also present.152 The generals were seated on rows of chairs. Hitler, leaning on the grand piano, spoke with barely a glance at the sparse notes he clutched in his left hand.153 No minutes were taken. Those listening were explicitly told not to make any record of the proceedings.154 One or two of those present, including Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, ignored the instruction and surreptiously jotted down the main points. Others, including Chief of Staff Colonel-General Halder and Admiral-General Boehm, thought what they heard was so important that they hastily compiled a summary of what had gone on later that day.155
‘It was clear to me that a conflict with Poland had to come sooner or later,’ began Hitler. ‘I had already made this decision in the spring, but I thought that I would first turn against the West in a few years, and only after that against the East.’ Circumstances had caused him to change his thinking, he went on. He pointed in the first instance to his own importance to the situation. Making no concessions to false modesty, he claimed: ‘Essentially all depends on me, on my existence, because of my political talents. Furthermore, the fact that probably no one will ever again have the confidence of the whole German people as I have. There will probably never again in the future be a man with more authority than I have. My existence is therefore a factor of great value. But I can be eliminated at any time by a criminal or a lunatic.’ He also emphasized the personal role of Mussolini and Franco, whereas Britain and France lacked any ‘outstanding personality’. He briefly alluded to Germany’s economic difficulties as a further argument for not delaying action. ‘It is easy for us to make decisions. We have nothing to lose; we have everything to gain. Because of our restrictions (Einschränkungen) our economic situation is such that we can only hold out for a few more years. Göring can confirm this. We have no other choice. We must act.’ He reviewed the constellation of international forces, concluding: ‘All these favourable circumstances will no longer prevail in two or three years’ time. No one knows how much longer I shall live. Therefore, better a conflict now.’
In typical vein, he continued. It was better to test German arms now. The Polish situation had become intolerable. The initiative could not be handed to others. There was a danger of losing prestige. The high probability was that the West would not intervene. There was a risk, but it was the task of the politician as much as the general to confront risk with iron resolve. He had done this in the past, notably in the recovery of the Rhineland in 1936, and always been proved right. The risk had to be taken. ‘We are faced,’ he stated with his usual apocalyptic dualism, ‘with the harsh alternatives of striking or of certain annihilation sooner or later.’ He compared the relative arms strength of Germany and the western powers. He concluded that Britain was in no position to help Poland. Nor was there any interest in Britain in a long war. The West had vested its hopes in enmity between Germany and Russia. ‘The enemy did not reckon with my great strength of purpose,’ he boasted. ‘Our enemies are small worms (kleine Würmchen). I saw them in Munich.’ The pact with Russia would be signed within two days. ‘Now Poland is in the position in which I want her.’ There need be no fear of a blockade. The East would provide the necessary grain, cattle, coal, lead, and zinc. His only fear, Hitler said, in obvious allusion to Munich, was ‘that at the last moment some swine or other will yet submit to me a plan for mediation’. Hinting at what was in his mind following the destruction of Poland, he added that the political objective went further. ‘A start has been made on the destruction of England’s hegemony. The way will be open for the soldiers after I have made the political preparations.’ Göring thanked Hitler, assuring him that the Wehrmacht would do its duty, and around 1.30p.m. the meeting broke up for a light lunch on the terrace.156
After the lunch break, Hitler spoke again for about an hour, partly about operational details.157 His broader remarks were now largely aimed at boosting fighting morale. Style and diction were inimitable, the sentiments brutally social-Darwinist. He repeated the need for ‘iron determination’. The would be ‘no shrinking back from anything’. It was a ‘life and death struggle’. The destruction of Poland, even if war in the West were to break out, was the priority, and had to be settled quickly in view of the season. The aim was, he stated, somewhat unclearly, if with evident menace, ‘to eliminate active forces (Beseitigung der lebendigen Kräfte), not to reach a definite line’.158 He would provide a propaganda pretext for beginning the war, however implausible. He ended by summarizing his philosophy: ‘The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth or not. When starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory. Close your hearts to pity. Act brutally. Eighty million people must obtain what is their right. Their existence must be made secure. The stronger man is right. The greatest harshness.’159
The reactions of Hitler’s audience were mixed. Some three months later General Liebmann, certainly no Hitler admirer, recalled his own feelings. He had heard some effective speeches by Hitler, he wrote, but this one lacked all objectivity and was full of illusions. ‘Its bragging and brash tone was downright repulsive. One had the feeling that here a man spoke who had lost all feeling of responsibility and any clear conception of what a victorious war signified, and who, with unsurpassed wantonness, was determined to leap into the dark.’ He thought that many, who left with grave faces or expressions of black humour, felt like he did.160
Probably this was the case. But if the generals were not enthused by what Hitler had to say, they posed no objections. The mood was largely fatalistic, resigned. After the war, Liebmann tried to summarize the broad impact of the speech. The assembled generals, he commented, were certain that the picture was less rosy than Hitler’s description. But they took the view that it was too late for objections, and simply hoped things would turn out well.161 No one spoke out against Hitler.162 Brauchitsch, who ought to have replied if anyone were to do so, said nothing. Any objections on his part, in Liebmann’s view, could only have been made as representing all the generals. Evidently he doubted whether Brauchitsch could have spoken for all. In any case, he thought such objections would have to have been raised by spring. By August it was too late. Liebmann added one other telling point. For Hitler it was only a matter of a war against Poland. And the army felt up to that.163
The disastrous collapse in the army’s power since the first weeks of 1938 could not have been more apparent. Its still lamented former head, Werner von Fritsch, had remarked to Ulrich von Hassell some months earlier: ‘This man — Hitler — is Germany’s fate for good or evil. If it’s now into the abyss, he’ll drag us all with him. There’s nothing to be done.’164 It was an indication of the capitulation of the Wehrmacht leadership to Hitler’s will. Hitler’s own comments after the meeting indicated that, on the eve of war, he had little confidence in and much contempt for his generals.165
Towards the end of his speech, Hitler had broken off momentarily to wish his Foreign Minister success in Moscow. Ribbentrop left at that point to fly to Berlin. In mid-evening, he then flew in Hitler’s private Condor to Königsberg and, after a restless and nervous night preparing notes for the negotiations, from there, next morning, on to the Russian capital.166 So large was his retinue of around thirty persons (including Heinrich Hoffmann, to ensure the historic moment was captured on film, and do the profits of his family concern no harm in the process) that a second Condor was needed.167 Within two hours of landing, Ribbentrop was in the Kremlin. Attended by Schulenburg (the German Ambassador in Moscow), he was taken to a long room where, to his surprise, not just Molotov, but Stalin himself, awaited him. Ribbentrop began by stating Germany’s wish for new relations on a lasting basis with the Soviet Union. Stalin replied that, though the two countries had ‘poured buckets of filth’ over each other for years, there was no obstacle to ending the quarrel. Discussion quickly moved to delineation of spheres of influence. Stalin staked the USSR’s claim to Finland, much of the territory of the Baltic states, and Bessarabia. Ribbentrop predictably brought up Poland, and the need for a demarcation line between the Soviet Union and Germany. This — to run along the rivers Vistula, San, and Bug — was swiftly agreed. Progress towards concluding a non-aggression pact was rapid. The territorial changes to accompany it, carving up eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union, were contained in a secret protocol. The only delay occurred when Stalin’s claims to the Latvian ports of Libau (Liepaja) and Windau (Ventspils) held up matters for a while. Ribbentrop felt he had to consult.168
Nervously waiting at the Berghof, Hitler had by then already had the Moscow embassy telephoned to inquire about progress at the talks.169 He paced impatiently up and down on the terrace as the sky silhouetted the Unterberg in striking colours of turquoise, then violet, then fiery red. Below remarked that it pointed to a bloody war. If so, replied Hitler, the sooner the better. The more time passed, the bloodier the war would be.170
Within minutes there was a call from Moscow. Ribbentrop assured Hitler that the talks were going well, but asked about the Latvian ports. Inside half an hour Hitler had consulted a map and telephoned his reply: ‘Yes, agreed.’171 The last obstacle was removed. Back at the Kremlin in late evening there was a celebratory supper. Vodka and Crimean sparkling wine lubricated the already effervescent mood of mutual self-congratulation. Among the toasts was one proposed by Stalin to Hitler.172 The texts of the Pact and Protocol had been drawn up in the meantime. Though dated 23 August, they were finally signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov well after midnight.173 Hitler and Goebbels had been half-watching a film, still too nervous about what was happening in Moscow to enjoy it. Finally, around 1a.m. Ribbentrop telephoned again: complete success. Hitler congratulated him.174 ‘That will hit like a bombshell,’ he remarked.175
In fact, the impact abroad was somewhat lessened through the earlier announcement that an agreement was imminent.176 Even so, the implications were obvious. ‘A black day,’ noted Sir Alexander Cadogan at the British Foreign Office.177 Harold Nicolson, a critic of the Chamberlain government, felt ‘stunned’.178 ‘A partition of Poland seems inevitable,’ remarked the Conservative MP Chips Channon. ‘I cannot bear to think that our world is crumbling to ruins.’179 ‘Everybody is agreed that war is unthinkable… but the gulf between the British and the Hitlerian viewpoints is so wide that it really seems all but unavoidable,’ commented Collin Brooks, a journalist with strong Conservative connections, adding: ‘The engines of destruction may become so many and so terrible that there will be no war for generations.’180
The Comintern, meanwhile, consoled the shocked members of its constituent Communist parties by interpreting the Pact as the only avenue open to the USSR, given the appeasement of Hitler by the western democracies. There was renewed advocacy of a popular front against Hitlerian aggression, accompanied by the remarkable illusion that the chances of preventing war and rallying Germans to overthrow Hitler might have been enhanced.181 Falling immediately and predictably in line with Moscow, the exiled leadership of the German Communist Party greeted the Pact as ‘a successful act of peace on the part of the Soviet Union’, contributing to the defusing of the international situation.182
Relief as well as satisfaction was reflected in Hitler’s warm welcome for Ribbentrop on the latter’s return next day to Berlin.183 While his Foreign Minister had been in Moscow, Hitler had begun to think that Britain might after all fight.184 Now, he was confident that prospect had been ruled out.
While Ribbentrop had been on his way to Moscow, Sir Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador in Berlin, was flying to Berchtesgaden to deliver the letter composed by the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, following the cabinet meeting on 22 August. In his letter, Chamberlain emphasized his conviction ‘that war between our two peoples would be the greatest calamity that could occur’. But he left Hitler in no doubt about the British position. A German–Soviet agreement would not alter Great Britain’s obligation to Poland. Britain was, however, ready, if a peaceful atmosphere could be created, to discuss all problems affecting relations with Germany. And Britain was anxious for Poland and Germany to cease their polemics and incitement in order to allow direct discussions between the two countries on the reciprocal treatment of minorities.185
Accompanied by Weizsäcker and Hewel, Henderson arrived at the Berghof at 1p.m. on 23 August. Hitler was at his most aggressive. ‘He made no long speeches but his language was violent and exaggerated both as regards England and Poland,’ Henderson reported.186 The German Chancellor launched into a series of wild tirades about British support of the Czechs the previous year, and now of the Poles, and how he had wanted only friendship with Britain. He claimed Britain’s ‘blank cheque’ to Poland ruled out negotiations. He was recriminatory, threatening, and totally unyielding. He finally agreed to reply to Chamberlain within two hours.187
On return to Salzburg, Henderson was rapidly recalled to the Berghof. This time the meeting was shorter — under half an hour. Hitler was now calmer, but adamant that he would attack Poland if another German were to be maltreated there. War would be all Britain’s fault. ‘England’ (as he invariably called Britain) ‘was determined to destroy and exterminate Germany,’ he went on. He was now fifty years old. He preferred war at this point than in five or ten years’ time.188 Henderson countered that talk of extermination was absurd. Hitler replied that England was fighting for lesser races, whereas he was fighting only for Germany. This time the Germans would fight to the last man. It would have been different in 1914 had he been Chancellor then. His repeated offers of friendship to Britain had been contemptuously rejected. He had come to the conclusion that England and Germany could never agree. England had now forced him into the pact with Russia. Henderson stated that war seemed inevitable if Hitler maintained his direct action against Poland. Hitler ended by declaring that only a complete change of British policy towards Germany could convince him of the desire for good relations.189 The written reply to Chamberlain that he handed to Henderson was couched in much the same vein. It contained the threat — clear in implication if not expression — to order general mobilization, were Britain and France to mobilize their own forces.190
Hitler’s tirades were, as so often, theatricals. They were a play-acted attempt to break the British Guarantee to Poland by a calculated demonstration of verbal brutality. As soon as Henderson had left, Hitler slapped his thigh — his usual expression of self-congratulation — and exclaimed to Weizsäcker: ‘Chamberlain won’t survive this discussion. His cabinet will fall this evening.’191
Chamberlain’s government was still there next day. Hitler’s belief in his own powers had outstripped realistic assessment. His comment revealed how out of touch he was with the mood of the British government, now fully backed by public opinion, by this time. He was puzzled, therefore, the following day by the low-key response in Britain to the Soviet Pact, and irritated by the speeches made in Parliament by Chamberlain and Halifax reasserting Britain’s resolve to uphold its obligations to Poland.192 Within twenty-four hours Ribbentrop had persuaded him, since wielding the big stick had produced little effect, to dangle the carrot.193
At 12.45p.m. on 25 August, Henderson was informed that Hitler wished to see him at 1.30p.m. in the Reich Chancellery. The meeting lasted over an hour. Ribbentrop and the interpreter Paul Schmidt were also present. Hitler was far calmer than he had been in Berchtesgaden. He criticized Chamberlain’s speech. But he was prepared to make Britain, he said, ‘a large comprehensive offer’ and pledge himself to maintain the continued existence of the British Empire once the Polish problem had been solved as a matter of urgency.194 Hitler was so anxious that his ‘offer’ be immediately and seriously considered that he suggested that Henderson fly to London, and put a plane at his disposal. Henderson stated that the offer would only be considered if it meant a negotiated settlement of the Polish question. Hitler refused to guarantee this. Hitler ended the interview with pathos: he was by nature an artist not a politician, and once the Polish question were settled he would end his life as an artist.195 Henderson flew next morning to London.196 Goebbels expected little to come from it.197
The ‘offer’ to Britain was, in fact, no more than a ruse, another — and by now increasingly desperate — attempt to detach Britain from support for Poland, and prevent the intended localized war from becoming a general European war. How honest Hitler’s ‘offer’ was can be judged from the fact that at the very time that Henderson was talking in the Reich Chancellery, final preparations were being made for the start of ‘Case White’ next morning, Saturday, 26 August, at 4.30a.m.198 While Henderson was flying to London in the plane Hitler had put at his disposal, the attack on Poland was meant to be under way. By the time the British government had considered his ‘offer’, the Wehrmacht ought to have been making devastating inroads into Poland. It would have been another fait accompli.199 As he had told his generals on 22 August, this time he was not going to be deprived of his war through last-minute negotiations.
Already on 12 August, Hitler had set the likely date of the 26th for the invasion of Poland.200 This had been reaffirmed as the probable start of ‘Case White’ at the meeting with military leaders on 22 August.201 Schmundt picked up Hitler’s decision confirming this the following afternoon, while Ribbentrop was in Moscow, and after seeing Henderson at the Berghof.202 Goebbels learnt on the morning of the 25th that the mobilization was due to take place that afternoon. At midday, Hitler then gave him propaganda instructions, emphasizing that Germany had been given no choice but to fight against the Poles, and preparing the people for a war, if necessary lasting ‘months and years’.203 Telephone communications between Berlin and London and Paris were cut off for several hours that afternoon. The Tannenberg celebrations and Party Rally were abruptly cancelled. Airports were closed from 26 August. Food rationing was introduced as from 27 August.204 By midday on the 25th, however, even while Hitler was giving propaganda directives to Goebbels, Keitel’s office was telephoning Halder to find out what was the latest time for the march-order, since there might have to be a postponement. The answer was given: no later than 3p.m. The final order was delayed at 1.30p.m. because Henderson was at that time in the Reich Chancellery. It was then further held back in the hope that Mussolini would have replied to Hitler’s communication of earlier that morning. Under pressure from the military timetable, but anxious for news from Rome, Hitler put the attack on hold for an hour. Finally, without awaiting Mussolini’s answer, but able to wait no longer, Hitler gave the order at 3.02p.m. Directives for mobilization were passed to the various troop commanders during the afternoon.205 Then, amazingly, within five hours the order was cancelled.206 To a great deal of muttering from army leaders about incompetence, the complex machinery of invasion was halted just in time.207
Mussolini’s reply had arrived at 5.45p.m. At 7.30p.m. Brauchitsch telephoned Halder to rescind the invasion order.208 A shaken Hitler had changed his mind.
On 24 August Hitler had prepared a lengthy letter for Mussolini, justifying the alliance with the Soviet Union, and indicating that a strike against Poland was imminent.209 The letter was delivered by the German Ambassador in Rome on the morning of the 25th.210 Mussolini’s answer gave the overconfident Hitler an enormous shock. The Duce did not beat about the bush: Italy was in no position to offer military assistance at the present time.211 Hitler icily dismissed Attolico, the Italian Ambassador. ‘The Italians are behaving just like they did in 1914,’ Paul Schmidt heard Hitler remark.212
‘That alters the entire situation,’ judged Goebbels. ‘The Führer ponders and contemplates. That’s a serious blow for him.’213 For an hour, the Reich Chancellery rang with comments of disgust at the Axis partner. The word ‘treachery’ was on many lips.214 Brauchitsch was hurriedly summoned. When he arrived, around seven that evening, he told Hitler there was still time to halt the attack, and recommended doing so to gain time for the Dictator’s ‘political game’ (‘politisches Spiel’). Hitler immediately took up the suggestion. Vormann was dispatched at 7.45p.m. with a frantic order to Halder to halt the start of hostilities.215 Keitel emerged from Hitler’s room to tell an adjutant: ‘The march order must be rescinded immediately.’216
Another piece of bad news arrived for Hitler at much the same time. Minutes before the news from Rome had arrived, Hitler had heard from the French Ambassador Robert Coulondre, that the French, too, were determined to stick by their obligations to Poland.217 This in itself was not critical. Hitler was confident that the French could be kept out of the war, if London did not enter.218 Then Ribbentrop arrived to tell him that the military alliance between Great Britain and Poland agreed on 6 April had been signed late that afternoon.219 This had happened after Hitler had made his ‘offer’ to Henderson. Having just signed the alliance, it must have been plain even to Hitler that Britain was unlikely to break it the very next day.220 Yesterday’s hero, Ribbentrop, now found himself all at once out of favour and, in the midst of a foreign-policy crisis on which peace hinged, was not in evidence for over two days.221 Hitler turned again to the Foreign Minister’s great rival, Göring.222
Immediately, Göring inquired whether the cancellation of the invasion was permanent. ‘No. I will have to see whether we can eliminate England’s intervention,’ was the reply.223 When Göring’s personal emissary, his Swedish friend the industrialist Birger Dahlems, already in London to belabour Lord Halifax with similar vague offers of German good intent that Henderson would shortly bring via the official route, eventually managed, with much difficulty, to place a telephone call to Berlin, he was asked to report back to the Field Marshal the following evening.224
In the meantime, Hitler wrote again to Mussolini, who had indicated that lack of matériel prevented Italy from joining Germany’s war, to ask what precisely was needed.225 The reply next day brought a deliberately impossible list of demands. Hitler could do nothing but tell Mussolini that he had understanding for Italy’s position, hoped for propaganda support, but would not hold back from solving the eastern question even at the risk of the involvement of the West.226 Mussolini, ‘really out of his wits’, was left vainly proposing that there should be a political solution.227 Hitler’s rage was directed at the King of Italy, not at his friend, the Italian dictator. He was glad, he said, that there was no longer a monarchy in Germany.228
The mood in the Reich Chancellery had not been improved by the message from Daladier on 26 August underlining France’s solidarity with Poland.229 Things at the hub of the German government seemed chaotic. No one had a clear idea of what was going on. Hewel, head of Ribbentrop’s personal staff, though with different views to those of his boss, warned Hitler not to underestimate the British. He was a better judge of that than his Minister, he asserted. Hitler angrily broke off the discussion. Brauchitsch thought Hitler did not know what he should do.230
Dahlerus certainly found him in a highly agitated state when he was taken towards midnight to the Reich Chancellery. He had brought with him a letter from Lord Halifax, indicating in non-committal terms that negotiations were possible if force were not used against Poland.231 It added in reality nothing to that which Chamberlain had already stated in his letter of 22 August.232 It made an impact on Göring, but Hitler did not even look at the letter before launching into a lengthy diatribe, working himself into a nervous frenzy, marching up and down the room, his eyes staring, his voice at one moment indistinct, hurling out facts and figures about the strength of the German armed forces, the next moment shouting as if addressing a party meeting, threatening to annihilate his enemies, giving Dahlerus the impression of someone ‘completely abnormal’.233 Eventually, Hitler calmed down enough to list the points of the offer which he wanted Dahlerus to take to London. Germany wanted a pact or alliance with Britain, would guarantee the Polish borders, and defend the British Empire (even against Italy, Göring added). Britain was to help Germany acquire Danzig and the Corridor, and have Germany’s colonies returned. Guarantees were to be provided for the German minority in Poland.234 Hitler had altered the stakes in a bid to break British backing for Poland. In contrast to the ‘offer’ made to Henderson, the alliance with Britain now appeared to be available before any settlement with Poland.
Dahlerus took the message to London next morning, 27 August. The response was cool and sceptical. Dahlerus was sent back to report that Britain was willing to reach an agreement with Germany, but would not break its guarantee to Poland. Following direct negotiations between Germany and Poland on borders and minorities, the results would require international guarantee. Colonies could be returned in due course, but not under threat of war. The offer to defend the British Empire was rejected.235 Astonishingly, to Dahlems, back in Berlin late that evening, Hitler accepted the terms, as long as the Poles had been immediately instructed to contact Germany and begin negotiations.236 Halifax made sure this was done. In Warsaw, Beck agreed to begin negotiations.237 Meanwhile, the German mobilization, which had never been cancelled along with the invasion, rolled on.238 On the very day of Dahlerus’s shuttling, the Abwehr had word that the new date for the attack was 31 August.239 Next day, before Henderson arrived back in Berlin to bring the official British response, Brauchitsch informed Halder that Hitler had provisionally fixed the invasion for 1 September.240
As Henderson was setting out for Berlin, Hitler was addressing a meeting of SS and Party leaders in the Reich Chancellery. Himmler, Heydrich, Bormann, and Goebbels were among those present. Whatever his state of mind, Hitler could expect nothing but enthusiastic backing from this grouping for whatever hard line he wished to take. He told them he was determined to have the eastern question settled one way or the other. He posed a minimal demand of the return of Danzig and the settling of the Corridor issue. The maximum demand depended upon the military situation. He could not retreat from the minimalist position, and would attain it. ‘It has already become a question of honour,’ Goebbels noted.241 If the minimum demands were not met, ‘then war: brutal!’ The war would be hard, and Hitler did not even rule out eventual failure. But, Halder recorded him saying, ‘as long as I am alive, there will be no talk of capitulation’. The agreement with the Soviets had been widely misunderstood in the Party. It was nothing but ‘a pact with Satan to cast out the Devil’, Hitler declared. He looked worn and haggard to Halder, speaking in a breaking voice. It was said he kept himself completely surrounded by his SS advisers.242
Henderson handed Hitler a translation of the British reply to his ‘offer’ of 25 August at 10.30p.m. that evening, the 28th. Ribbentrop and Schmidt were there.243 Hitler and Henderson spoke for over an hour. For once, Hitler neither interrupted, nor harangued Henderson. He was, according to the British Ambassador, polite, reasonable, and not angered by what he read.244 The ‘friendly atmosphere’ noted by Henderson was so only in relative terms. Hitler still spoke of annihilating Poland.245 The British reply did not in substance extend beyond the informal answer that Dahlems had conveyed (and had been composed after Hitler’s response to that initiative was known).246 The British government insisted upon a prior settlement of the differences between Germany and Poland. Britain had already gained assurances of Poland’s willingness to negotiate. Depending upon the outcome of any settlement and how it was reached, Britain was prepared to work towards a lasting understanding with Germany. But the obligation to Poland would be honoured.247 Hitler promised a written reply the next day.248
Goebbels quickly learned that Hitler was not satisfied with what he had seen.249 The Propaganda Minister nonetheless thought he detected a weakening of the British stance, a greater readiness to negotiate. The Führer, he commented, now wanted a plebiscite in the Corridor under international control. He hoped through this device to prise London away from Warsaw ‘and to find an occasion to strike’.250 Hitler planned to ponder his reply overnight, and come up, Himmler noted, with a ‘masterpiece of diplomacy (ein Meisterstück an Diplomatie)’ that would put the British on the spot.251
At 7.15p.m. on the evening of 29 August, Henderson, sporting as usual a dark red carnation in the buttonhole of his pin-striped suit, passed down the darkened Wilhelmstraße — Berlin was undergoing experimental blackouts — through a silent, but not hostile, crowd of 300–400 Berliners, to be received at the Reich Chancellery as on the previous night with a roll of drums and guard of honour.252 Otto Meissner, whose role as head of the so-called Presidential Chancellery was largely representational, and Wilhelm Brückner, the chief adjutant, escorted him to Hitler. Ribbentrop was also present. Hitler was in a less amenable mood than on the previous evening. He gave Henderson his reply. He had again raised the price — exactly as Henlein had been ordered to do in the Sudetenland the previous year, so that it was impossible to meet it. Hitler now demanded the arrival of a Polish emissary with full powers by the following day, Wednesday 30 August. Even the pliant Henderson, protesting at the impossible time-limit for the arrival of the Polish emissary, said it sounded like an ultimatum.253 Hitler replied that his generals were pressing him for a decision. They were unwilling to lose any more time because of the onset of the rainy season in Poland.254 Henderson told Hitler that the success or failure of any talks with Poland depended upon his good will, or lack of it. The choice was his. But any attempt to use force against Poland would inevitably result in conflict with Britain.255 Henderson’s telegram to the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, early the following afternoon, stated: ‘If Herr Hitler is allowed to continue to have the initiative, it seems to me that [the] result can only be either war or once again victory for him by a display of force and encouragement thereby to pursue the same course again next year or the year after.’256
When Henderson had left, the Italian Ambassador Attolico was ushered in. He had come to tell Hitler that Mussolini was prepared to intercede with Britain if required. The last thing Hitler wanted, as he had made clear to his generals at the meeting on 22 August, was a last-minute intercession to bring about a new Munich — least of all from the partner who had just announced that he could not stand by the pact so recently signed. Hitler coldly told Attolico that direct negotiations with Britain were in hand and that he had already declared his readiness to accept a Polish negotiator.257
Hitler had been displeased at Henderson’s response to his reply to the British government. He now called in Göring to send Dahlerus once more on the unofficial route to let the British know the gist of the ‘generous’ terms he was proposing to offer the Poles — return of Danzig to Germany, and a plebiscite on the Corridor (with Germany to be given a ‘corridor through the Corridor’ if the result went Poland’s way). By 5a.m. on 30 August, Dahlerus was again heading for London in a German military plane.258 An hour earlier Henderson had already conveyed Lord Halifax’s unsurprising response, that the German request for the Polish emissary to appear that very day was unreasonable.259
During the day, while talking of peace Hitler prepared for war. In the morning he instructed Albert Forster, a week earlier declared Head of State in Danzig, on the action to be taken in the Free City at the outbreak of hostilities.260 Later, he signed the decree to establish a Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich with wide powers to promulgate decrees. Chaired by Göring, its other members were Heß as Deputy Leader of the Party, Frick as plenipotentiary for Reich administration, Funk as plenipotentiary for the economy, Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery, and Keitel, chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht.261 It had the appearance of a ‘war cabinet’ to administer the Reich while Hitler preoccupied himself with military matters. In reality, the fragmentation of Reich government had gone too far for that. Hitler’s own interest in preventing any centralized body operating as a possible check on his own power was to mean that the Ministerial Council was destined not to bring even a limited resurrection of collective government.262
Hitler spent much of the day working on his ‘proposals’ to be put to the Polish negotiator who, predictably, never arrived. From the outset it had not been a serious suggestion. But when Henderson returned to the Reich Chancellery at midnight to present the British reply to Hitler’s communication of the previous evening, he encountered Ribbentrop in a highly nervous state and in a vile temper. Diplomatic niceties were scarcely preserved. At one point it seemed to the interpreter Paul Schmidt — in attendance though Henderson, as usual, insisted on speaking his less than perfect German — that the German Foreign Minister and the British Ambassador were going to come to blows.263 After Ribbentrop had read out Hitler’s ‘proposals’ at breakneck speed, so that Henderson was unable to note them down, he refused — on Hitler’s express orders — to let the British Ambassador read the document, then hurled it on the table stating that it was now out of date (überholt), since no Polish emissary had arrived in Berlin by midnight.264 Henderson reported to Halifax ‘that Herr von Ribbentrop’s whole demeanour during an unpleasant interview was aping Herr Hitler at his worst’.265 In retrospect, Henderson thought that Ribbentrop ‘was wilfully throwing away the last chance of a peaceful solution’.266
There had, in fact, been no ‘last chance’… No Polish emissary had been expected. Ribbentrop was concerned precisely not to hand over terms which the British might have passed to the Poles, who might have been prepared to discuss them. Hitler had needed his ‘generous suggestion over the regulation of the Danzig and Corridor Question’, as Schmidt later heard him say, as ‘an alibi, especially for the German people, to show them that I have done everything to preserve peace’.267 Immediately following Henderson’s audience with Ribbentrop, Hitler had told Goebbels that he wanted the document published ‘at a suitable opportunity’.268 It was arranged for a radio broadcast that evening.269 By then, Göring had heard, unsurprisingly, from his intermediary Dahlerus that there was no further movement in London: the British government insisted, as it had throughout, on peaceful settlement of the Polish question before there could be any negotiations towards a better relationship between Britain and Germany.270
The army had been told on 30 August to make all preparations for attack on 1 September at 4.30a.m. If negotiations in London required a postponement, notification would be given before 3p.m. next day. But 2 September was the last day possible for a strike.271 At 6.30a.m. on the morning of 31 August, within hours of Henderson’s departure from the Reich Chancellery after hearing the terms of the German ‘offer’ to Poland, Halder learnt that Hitler had given the order to attack on 1 September — a day before the deadline ran out.272 For some reason, Göring, on behalf of the Luftwaffe, had objected to having the timing set for 4.30a.m.273 By 12.40p.m. the order directive had been completed and signed by Hitler.274 At 1.50p.m. — still well before the possible cancellation point of 3p.m. — the order was confirmed to go ahead, with the starting time changed to 4.45a.m. ‘Armed intervention by Western powers now said to be unavoidable,’ noted Halder. ‘In spite of this, Führer has decided to strike.’275
When informed that Ribbentrop had arrived at the Reich Chancellery, Hitler told him he had given the order, and that ‘things were rolling (die Sache rolle)’. Ribbentrop wished him luck.276 ‘It looks as if the die is finally cast,’ wrote Goebbels.277
After making his decision, Hitler cut himself off from external contact.278 He refused to see the Polish Ambassador, Jozef Lipski, later in the afternoon. Ribbentrop did see him a little later. But hearing that the Ambassador carried no plenipotentiary powers to negotiate he immediately terminated the interview. Lipski returned to find telephone lines to Warsaw had been cut off.279
At 9p.m. the German radio broadcast Hitler’s ‘sixteen-point proposal’ which Ribbentrop had so crassly presented to Henderson at midnight.280 By 10.30p.m. the first reports were coming in of a number of serious border incidents, including an armed ‘Polish’ assault on the German radio station at Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia. These had been planned for weeks by Heydrich’s office, using SS men dressed in Polish uniforms to carry out the attacks. To increase the semblance of authenticity, a number of concentration-camp inmates killed by lethal injections and carried to the sites provided the bodies required.281
Throughout Germany, people went about their daily business as normal. But the normality was deceptive. All minds now were fixed on the likelihood of war. A brief war, with scarcely any losses, and confined to Poland, was one thing. But war with the West, which so many with memories of the Great War of 1914–18 had dreaded for years, now seemed almost certain. There was now no mood like that of August 1914, no ‘hurrah-patriotism’. The faces of the people told of their anxiety, fears, worries, and resigned acceptance of what they were being faced with. ‘Everybody against the war,’ wrote the American correspondent William Shirer on 31 August. ‘How can a country go into a major war with a population so dead against it?’ he asked.282 ‘Trust in the Führer will now probably be subjected to its hardest acid test,’ ran a report from the Upper Franconian district of Ebermannstadt. ‘The overwhelming proportion of people’s comrades expects from him the prevention of the war, if otherwise impossible even at the cost of Danzig and the Corridor.’283
How accurate such a report was as a reflection of public opinion cannot be ascertained. The question is in any case irrelevant. Ordinary citizens, whatever their fears, were powerless to affect the course of events. While many of them were fitfully sleeping in the hope that even now, at the eleventh hour and beyond, some miracle would preserve peace, the first shots were fired and bombs dropped near Dirschau at 4.30a.m. And just over quarter of an hour later in Danzig harbour the elderly German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, now a sea-cadet training-ship, focused its heavy guns on the fortified Polish munitions depot on the Westerplatte and opened fire.284
By late afternoon the army leadership reported: ‘Our troops have crossed the frontier everywhere and are sweeping on toward their objectives of the day, checked only slightly by the Polish forces thrown against them.’285 In Danzig itself, the purported objective of the conflict between Germany and Poland, border posts and public buildings manned by Poles had been attacked at dawn. The League of Nations High Commissioner had been forced to leave, and the swastika banner raised over his building.286 Gauleiter Albert Forster proclaimed Danzig’s reincorporation in the Reich.287 In the turmoil of the first day of hostilities, probably few people in Germany took much notice.
On a grey, overcast morning Shirer had found the few people on the streets apathetic.288 There were not many cheers from those thinly lining the pavements when Hitler drove to the Reichstag shortly before 10a.m. A hundred or so deputies had been called up to serve in the army. But Göring saw to it that there were no empty spaces when Hitler spoke. The vacancies were simply filled by drafting in Party functionaries.289 Hitler, now wearing Wehrmacht uniform, was on less than top form. He sounded strained. There was less cheering than usual.290 After a lengthy justification of the alleged need for Germany’s military action, he declared: ‘Poland has now last night for the first time fired on our territory through regular soldiers. Since 5.45a.m.’ — he meant 4.45a.m. — ‘the fire has been returned. And from now on bomb will be met with bomb.’291
Hitler had still not given up hope that the British could be kept out of the conflict. On his return from the Reichstag he had Göring summon Dahlerus to make a last attempt.292 But he wanted no outside intercession, no repeat of Munich. Mussolini, under the influence of Ciano and Attolico, and unhappy at Italy’s humiliation at being unable to offer military support, had been trying for some days to arrange a peace conference. He was now desperate, fearing attack on Italy from Britain and France, to stop the war spreading.293 Before seeing Dahlerus, Hitler sent the Duce a telegram explicitly stating that he did not want his mediation.294 Then Dahlerus arrived. He found Hitler in a nervous state. The odour from his mouth was so strong that Dahlerus was tempted to move back a step or two. Hitler was at his most implacable. He was determined to break Polish resistance ‘and to annihilate (vernichten) the Polish people’, he told Dahlerus. In the next breath he added that he was prepared for further negotiations if the British wanted them. Again the threat followed, in ever more hysterical tones. It was in British interests to avoid a fight with him. But if Britain chose to fight, she would pay dearly. He would fight for one, two, ten years if necessary.295
Dahlerus’s reports of such hysteria could cut no ice in London.296 Nor did an official approach on the evening of 2 September, inviting Sir Horace Wilson to Berlin for talks with Hitler and Ribbentrop. Wilson replied straightforwardly that German troops had first to be withdrawn from Polish territory. Otherwise Britain would fight.297 This was only to repeat the message which the British Ambassador had already passed to Ribbentrop the previous evening.298 No reply to that message was received.299 At 9a.m. on 3 September, Henderson handed the British ultimatum to the interpreter Paul Schmidt, in place of Ribbentrop, who had been unwilling to meet the British Ambassador.300 Unless assurances were forthcoming by 11a.m. that Germany was prepared to end its military action and withdraw from Polish soil, the ultimatum read, ‘a state of war will exist between the two countries as from that hour’.301 No such assurances were forthcoming. ‘Consequently,’ Chamberlain broadcast to the British people then immediately afterwards repeated in the House of Commons, ‘this country is at war with Germany.’302 The French declaration of war followed that afternoon at 5p.m.303
Hitler had led Germany into the general European war he had wanted to avoid for several more years. Military ‘insiders’ thought the army, 2.3 million strong, through the rapidity of the rearmament programme, was less prepared for a major war than it had been in 1914.304 Hitler was fighting the war allied with the Soviet Union, the ideological arch-enemy. And he was at war with Great Britain, the would-be ‘friend’ he had for years tried to woo. Despite all warnings, his plans — at every turn backed by his warmongering Foreign Minister — had been predicated upon his assumption that Britain would not enter the war — though he had shown himself undeterred even by that eventuality. It was little wonder that, if Paul Schmidt’s account is to believed, when Hitler received the British ultimatum on the morning of 3 September, he angrily turned to Ribbentrop and asked: ‘What now?’305
‘Responsibility for this terrible catastrophe lies on the shoulders of one man,’ Chamberlain had told the House of Commons on 1 September, ‘the German Chancellor, who has not hesitated to plunge the world into misery in order to serve his own senseless ambitions.’306 It was an understandable over-simplification. Such a personalized view necessarily left out the sins of omission and commission by others — including the British government and its French allies — which had assisted in enabling Hitler to accumulate such a unique basis of power that his actions could determine the fate of Europe.
Internationally, Hitler’s combination of bullying and blackmail could not have worked but for the fragility of the post-war European settlement. The Treaty of Versailles was ‘the blackmailer’s lucky find’.307 It had given Hitler the basis for his rising demands, accelerating drastically in 1938–9. It had provided the platform for ethnic unrest, that Hitler could easily exploit, in the cauldron of central and eastern Europe. Not least, it had left an uneasy guilt-complex in the West, especially in Britain. Hitler might rant and exaggerate; his methods might be repellent; but was there not some truth in what he was claiming? The western governments, though Britain more than France, backed by their war-weary populations, anxious more than all-else to do everything possible to avoid a new conflagration, their traditional diplomacy no match for unprecedented techniques of lying and threatening, thought so, and went out of their way to placate Hitler. The blackmailer simply increased his demands, as blackmailers do. By the time the western powers fully realized what they were up against, they were no longer in any position to bring the ‘mad dog’ to heel.
Within Germany, Hitler’s personal power had expanded after 1933 at the expense of other power-groups — notably the army — until it was absolute and unchallenged. The year 1938, beginning with the near-showdown with the army over the Blomberg–Fritsch affair, crossing the triumph of the Anschluß, and ending with peace just about saved at Munich — but no thanks to the German army or to those in powerful positions in the regime who opposed Hitler — brought vital steps in this process.
As war loomed in 1939, a number of individuals who had begun to establish contact with each other the previous year and whose disparate approaches and aims would eventually coalesce into the 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life — nationalists, with access to the levers of power, horrified at the madness of the risks being taken to court war — had warned the West of the dictator’s plans. Colonel Oster of the Abwehr had leaked vital information. Lieutenant-Colonel Gerhard Graf von Schwerin had tried to encourage a greater show of British belligerence to undermine Hitler’s claims that Britain would not fight. Adam von Trott zu Solz, former Oxford Rhodes scholar with a wide circle of friends in high places in Britain, had attempted — reflecting Weizsäcker’s views — to suggest a deal restoring Czech independence but acceding to German claims over Danzig and the Corridor. The attempts of Hitler’s opponents fell on stony ground. The mood in Britain had changed drastically following the march into Czecho-Slovakia. There was too much suspicion of motives, too few certainties that there was any coherent ‘opposition’ (which there was not), too little clarity of how, if at all, Hitler was to be replaced. Well-intentioned though the efforts were, it was hardly surprising that nothing came of them.308
Within Germany in the last days of peace, the conservative opponents of Hitler were uncoordinated, unclear about what was happening, and uncertain how to act themselves. An example was their behaviour when Hitler rescinded his order to attack on 26 August, just hours after it had been given. Hans-Bernd Gisevius, one-time Gestapo officer but by now radically opposed to Hitler, went straight to Schacht, and both had the news confirmed by General Thomas, head of office of the War Economy (Wehrwirtschaft). All three now thought the time was ripe to persuade Halder and Brauchitsch to intervene by deposing Hitler. Whether any scheme involving Brauchitsch had a hope of success is highly doubtful. But the matter was never even broached. Oster, second to none in his detestation of the regime, and his boss Canaris thought a putsch would prove unnecessary. Their misunderstanding of political realities was breathtaking. A supreme warlord who rescinds such a decisive order as that over war and peace within a few hours was finished, ran their wildly over-optimistic view.309 Canaris added: ‘He’ll never recover from this blow. Peace has been saved for twenty years.’310 Armed with such ‘insights’, Hitler’s opponents did nothing.
Nor, unless the army leadership could have been stirred into action, could they have achieved anything. But the army leadership, as we have seen, was weakened and divided. We noted something of the feeling among the generals after Hitler’s speech at the Berghof on 22 August. The mood was much the same in the tense days that followed. Some leading officers thought Hitler’s optimism about the non-intervention of the West was likely to prove false. Others still thought the conflict could be localized. Most were sceptical, anxious even, but fatalistic and in depressed frame of mind. Resignation, not gung-ho enthusiasm for war, prevailed. But it was no platform for opposition.311 Compliance, even if reluctant on the part of some generals, was all that was needed. Hitler remained unhindered by any action such as that which Beck had mooted at the height of the Sudeten crisis the previous year, by any threat of refusal to collaborate in the destruction of Poland.
Close to the epicentre of power in the Reich, but following a line that differed from that of both Hitler and Ribbentrop, was Göring, now attempting something of a comeback after months in the doldrums. Over the summer he had tried through three intermediaries — the Swedish millionaire Axel Wenner-Gren, his own deputy in the Four-Year Plan organization Helmut Wohltat, and, as we have seen, Birger Dahlerus, also a Swede — to coax the British into negotiations.312 Predictably, nothing had come of such moves. The mood in the British government was not amenable to initiatives resting on major concessions to Germany, based on unclear authority, and leaving Hitler’s power untouched, the future potential for aggression undiminished. Göring was certainly anxious to avoid war with Britain, at least until Germany was ready for the big showdown. His entire political thinking over the previous years had rested on a rapprochement with Britain. This strategy was faced with imminent ruin, a development which Göring blamed exclusively on Ribbentrop. But, ultimately, Göring had no real alternative to offer Hitler. His informal approaches were no more successful than Hitler’s threats in severing the British from the Poles. Nor did he have the will to stand up against Hitler. For all the differences in emphasis, Göring remained Hitler’s man through and through.313
Göring was scarcely alone in blaming the war not on Hitler, but on Ribbentrop. It was the view, among others, of Dahlerus, Hassell, Hewel, Papen, Weizsäcker, and the British Ambassador Henderson.314 Unquestionably, Ribbentrop’s self-certainty, derived from his ‘understanding’ of the British and his absolute conviction that in the end they would not fight over Poland, helped to influence Hitler in his miscalculation.315 Despite the impression he tried to leave behind in his memoirs, Ribbentrop had — as in the previous year — been an outright warmonger, his crass aggression fuelled by smouldering resentment at his treatment in Britain. Alongside Goebbels and Himmler he could always be relied upon to egg on Hitler. While he acted, as always, as an amplifier, it is — given the domineering assertiveness of Hitler and his own fawning subservience — difficult to imagine Ribbentrop as the moving force. Hitler’s liaison officer with army command, Nikolaus von Vormann, had in retrospect no doubts about the relationship: ‘Hitler did not believe in a war with the western powers because he did not want to believe in it. From the difference in character and on the basis of the entire atmosphere in the Führer headquarters’ — he evidently meant, since he was writing of the last days before the war, the Reich Chancellery — he concluded ‘that the initiative rested with Hitler and that the essentially submissive (weiche) Ribbentrop, who in any case represented no opinion of his own, thought it appropriate and expedient to reinforce him in this view’.316
Hitler decided. That much is clear. The fracturing of any semblance of collective government over the previous six years left him in the position where he determined alone. No one doubted — the suffocating effect of years of the expanding Führer cult had seen to that — that he had the right to decide, and that his decisions were to be implemented. His style was not to listen to differing or conflicting advice, weigh up the pros and cons, and arrive at a conclusion. He would ponder things overnight, hit on what he saw as a solution, and put it forward for acclaim.317 Or he would expound his ideas in endless monologues until he had convinced himself that they were right.318 In the critical days, he saw a good deal of Ribbentrop, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, and Bormann. Other leading figures in the Party, government ministers, even court favourites like Speer, had little or no contact with him.319 He was naturally also in constant touch with the Wehrmacht leadership. But while Goebbels, for instance, only learnt at second hand about military plans, leaders of the armed forces often had less than full information, or were belatedly told, about diplomatic developments. The cabinet, of course, never met. Schacht, still nominally a member of that non-functioning body as Reich Minister without Portfolio, had notions of insisting on it being summoned, since constitutionally any declaration of war had to be preceded by cabinet consultation.320 It was an empty hope, rapidly discarded. Whichever way one viewed it, and remarkable for a complex modern state, there was no government beyond Hitler and whichever individuals he chose to confer with at a particular time. Hitler was the only link of the component parts of the regime. Only in his presence could the key steps be taken. But those admitted to his presence, apart from his usual entourage of secretaries, adjutants, and the like, were for the most part officers needing operational guidelines or those like Ribbentrop or Goebbels who thought like he did and were dependent on him. Internal government of the Reich had become Führer autocracy.
For those in proximity to Hitler, the personalized decision-making meant anything but consistency, clarity, and rationality. On the contrary: it brought bewildering improvisation, rapid changes of course, uncertainty. Hitler was living off his nerves. That conveyed itself to others around him. ‘He was no man of logic or reason (Raison),’ reflected Ernst von Weizsäcker almost a decade later. This showed, he went on, in the ‘bizarre zigzag’ of his intentions and actions in those last days of peace: ‘On 22 August Hitler indicated in an address to his generals that he was firmly determined to start war in a few days whether or not it remained localized; the day after he reckoned with it being localized, but he could also conduct a European war.’ With the Moscow Pact, according to Weizsäcker, Hitler ‘crossed the Rubicon’. ‘By the 25th at midday he took the West on board; on the 25th in the evening he withdrew the order for attack that had already been given for fear that England would march, but Italy would not. On 31 August neither matters to him any more; he orders the attack on Poland although he knows that nothing has altered, namely that Italy remains out of it and England has firmly promised assistance to the Poles. On 3 September, finally, Hitler is surprised by the British-French declaration of war and at first clueless.’321 Hitler, Weizsäcker went on to remark, with some insight, was the prisoner of his own actions. The wagon had begun in the spring to roll towards the abyss. In the last days of August, Hitler ‘could hardly have turned the carriage around without being thrown off himself’.322
External pressures of the course he had embarked upon met Hitler’s personal psychology at this point. At the age of fifty, men frequently ruminate on the ambitions they had, and how the time to fulfil them is running out. For Hitler, a man with an extraordinary ego and ambitions to go down in history as the greatest German of all time, and a hypochondriac already prepossessed with his own approaching death, the sense of ageing, of youthful vigour disappearing, of no time to lose was hugely magnified. He had more than hinted as much on 23 August, as we noted, to the British Ambassador, Nevile Henderson.323 To his own entourage, at the evening meal a few days later, he had said: ‘I’m now fifty years old, still in full possession of my strength. The problems must be solved by me, and I can wait no longer. In a few years I will be physically and perhaps mentally, too, no longer up to it.’324 The grandiose parades on 20 April had been held to demonstrate Germany’s military strength to the world. To Hitler the celebrations of his fiftieth birthday had merely reminded him how old he was getting.325
Between the Hoßbach meeting in November 1937 and the outbreak of war at the start of September 1939, Hitler had constantly felt time closing in on him, under pressure to act lest the conditions became more disadvantageous. He had thought of war against the West around 1943–5, against the Soviet Union — though no time-scale was ever given — at some point after that. He had never thought of avoiding war. On the contrary: reliving the lost first great war made him predicate everything on victory in the second great war to come. Germany’s future, he had never doubted and had said so on innumerable occasions, could only be determined through war. In the dualistic way in which he always thought, victory would ensure survival, defeat would mean total eradication — the end of the German people. War — the essence of the Nazi system which had developed under his leadership — was for Hitler inevitable. Only the timing and the direction were at issue. And there was no time to wait. Starting from his own strange premisses, given Germany’s strained resources and the rapid strides forward in rearmament by Britain and France, there was a certain contorted logic in what he said.326 Time was running out on the options for Hitler’s war.
This strong driving-force in Hitler’s mentality was compounded by other strands of his extraordinary psychological make-up. The years of spectacular successes — all attributed by Hitler to the ‘triumph of the will’ — and the undiluted adulation and sycophancy that surrounded him at every turn, the Führer cult on which the ‘system’ was built, had by now completely erased in him what little sense of his own limitations had been present. This led him to a calamitous over-estimation of his own abilities, coupled with an extreme denigration of those — particularly in the military — who argued more rationally for greater caution. It went hand in hand with an equally disastrous refusal to contemplate compromise, let alone retreat, as other than a sign of weakness. The experience of the war and its traumatic outcome had doubtless cemented this characteristic. It was certainly there in his early political career, for instance at the time of the attempted putsch in Munich in 1923. But it must have had deeper roots. Pyschologists might have answers. At any rate the behaviour trait, increasingly dangerous as Hitler’s power expanded to threaten the peace of Europe, was redolent of the spoilt child turned into the would-be macho-man. His inability to comprehend the unwillingness of the British government to yield to his threats produced tantrums of frustrated rage.327 The certainty that he would get his way through bullying turned into blind fury whenever his bluff was called. The purchase he placed on his own image and standing was narcissistic in the extreme. The number of times he recalled the Czech mobilization of May 1938, then the Polish mobilization of March 1939, as a slight on his prestige was telling. A heightened thirst for revenge was the lasting consequence. Then the rescinding of the order to attack Poland on 26 August, much criticized as a sign of incompetence by the military, he took as a defeat in the eyes of his generals, feeling his prestige threatened.328 The result was increased impatience to remedy this by a new order at the earliest possible moment, from which there would be no retreat, without any alteration to the diplomatic situation. On a broader scale, the same applies to Hitler’s reaction to the Munich Settlement the previous year. All his actions during the Polish crisis can be seen as a response to the defeat he felt he had suffered personally in agreeing to pull back at the end of September 1938. His comment to his generals that he wanted at all costs to prevent ‘some swine’ from interceding this time; his determination to prevent Mussolini mediating; and his increase of the stakes to avoid negotiation at the last were all reflections of his ‘Munich syndrome’.
Not just external circumstances, but also his personal psyche, pushed him forwards, compelled the risk. Hitler’s reply on 29 August, when Göring suggested it was not necessary to ‘go for broke’, was, therefore, absolutely in character: ‘In my life I’ve always gone for broke.’329 There was, for him, no other choice.
The gambler has to think he will win. Hitler’s dismay on 3 September at hearing of the British ultimatum quickly gave way to the necessary optimism. Goebbels was with him that evening. Hitler went over the military situation. The Führer ‘believes in a potato-war (Kartoffelkrieg) in the West,’ he wrote. Hearing that Churchill, long seen in Berlin as the leading western warmonger, had been called into the British cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty, Goebbels was not so sure.330