‘…Extensive shootings were planned in Poland and… especially the nobility and clergy were to be exterminated.’
‘…This matter has already been decided by the Führer.’
‘You are now the master race here. Nothing was yet built up through softness and weakness… That’s why I expect, just as our Führer Adolf Hitler expects from you, that you are disciplined, but stand together hard as Krupp steel. Don’t be soft, be merciless, and clear out everything that is not German and could hinder us in the work of construction.’
‘It was immaterial to him if some time in the future it were established that the methods to win this territory were not pretty or open to legal objection.’
In war Nazism came into its own.1 The Nazi Movement had been born out of a lost war. The experience of that war and erasing the stain of that defeat were at its heart. ‘National renewal’ and preparation for another war to establish the dominance in Europe which the first great war had failed to attain drove it forwards. Mobilizing the people in an attempt at perpetual re-creation of the ‘spirit of 1914’ was essential preparation for the new conflict.2 The keynote of the message was ‘struggle’. National survival — the future of the German people — its Leader had preached for fifteen years or more, could only be assured through acquiring ‘living-space’. And this could only be gained, he had repeatedly stated, ‘through the sword’.
Six years of Nazi rule had brought the ‘world-view’ that Hitler stood for into much sharper focus. Almost imperceptibly at first, restoration of territory taken away from Germany at Versailles had been transformed into a drive for expansion. Hitler had done more than any other individual to bring about this transformation. But it could not have been accomplished without the avid involvement of all ruling groups, but quite especially the armed forces’ leadership, in the push for massive and rapid rearmament. And all sections of the regime’s élites had supported expansion, baulking only at its speed and what were seen as the unnecessary dangers of conflict with the western powers. Meanwhile, with remarkably little direction from Hitler, other than — though this was crucial — to provide the green light for action at key moments, and sanction for what had been done, the aim of ‘racial purification’ had been greatly advanced. Traditional social prejudice and resentment had played its part. Widespread denunciation of fellow-citizens by ordinary Germans had kept the mill of discrimination and persecution turning. Obsession with ‘law and order’ easily slipped into an obsession with the exclusion of ‘troublemakers’ and ‘social outsiders’. Social hygiene fetishism translated readily into pressure for measures to improve ‘racial hygiene’.
Victims of social prejudice far from confined to inter-war Germany were readily to hand: prostitutes, homosexuals, Gypsies, habitual criminals, and others seen as sullying the image of the new society by begging, refusing work, or any sort of ‘antisocial’ behaviour. Beyond these, of course, were the Number One racial and social enemy: the Jews. Where Germany differed from other countries with regard to such ‘outsider’ groups was that licence was provided from the highest leadership in the land to every agency of control and power to look for radical solutions to ‘cleanse’ society, offering the widest scope for increasingly inhumane initiatives that could ignore, override, or bypass the constraints of legality. To serve their own organizational vested interests, those agencies most directly involved — the medical and health bureaucracy, legal authorities, and criminal police — did not hesitate to exploit the general remit of the Nazi state’s philosophy to lead the drive to rid society of ‘racial undesirables’, ‘elements harmful to the people’, and ‘community aliens’. Sterilization and eugenics programmes gained in attraction. Not least, as we have seen, the relentless persecution of the Jews, the foremost racial target, had produced even before the war distinct signs of the mentality which would lead to the gas chambers.
The war now brought the circumstances and opportunities for the dramatic radicalization of Nazism’s ideological crusade. Long-term goals seemed almost overnight to become attainable policy objectives. Persecution which had targeted usually disliked social minorities was now directed at an entire conquered and subjugated people. The Jews, a tiny proportion of the German population, were not only far more numerous in Poland, but were despised by many within their native land and were now the lowest of the low in the eyes of the brutal occupiers of the country.
As before the war, Hitler set the tone for the escalating barbarism, approved of it, and sanctioned it. But his own actions provide an inadequate explanation of such escalation. The accelerated disintegration of any semblance of collective government, the undermining of legality by an ever-encroaching and ever-expanding police executive, and the power-ambitions of an increasingly autonomous SS leadership all played important parts. These processes had developed between 1933 and 1939 in the Reich itself. They were now, once the occupation of Poland opened up new vistas, to acquire a new momentum altogether. The planners and organizers, theoreticians of domination, and technocrats of power in the SS leadership saw Poland as an experimental playground. They were granted a tabula rasa to undertake more or less what they wanted. The Führer’s ‘vision’ served as the legitimation they needed. Party leaders put in to run the civilian administration of the parts of Poland annexed to the Reich, backed by thrusting and ‘inventive’ civil servants, also saw themselves as ‘working towards the Führer’ in their efforts to bring about the speediest possible ‘Germanization’ of their territories. And the occupying army — officers and rank-and-file — imbued with deep-seated anti-Polish prejudice, also needed little encouragement in the ruthlessness with which the conquered Poles were subjugated.
The ideological radicalization fed back into the home front — one important manifestation being the unfolding of a ‘euthanasia action’ to eliminate the incurably sick, something which had been put on ice during the peacetime years, but which could now be attempted. And as the war went on in its early stages to produce almost unbelievable military triumphs in the West, so the options for ‘solving the Jewish Question’ and for tackling the still unresolved ‘Church struggle’ (which Hitler had wanted dampened down at the start of the war) appeared to open up.
But the key area was Poland. The ideological radicalization which took place there in the eighteen months following the German invasion was an essential precursor to the plans which unfolded in spring 1941 as preparation for the war which Hitler knew at some time he would fight: the war against Bolshevik Russia.
Towards nine o’clock on the evening of 3 September, Hitler boarded his special armoured train in Berlin’s Stettiner Bahnhof and left for the front. 3 For much of the following three weeks, the train — standing initially in Pomerania (Hinterpommern), then later in Upper Silesia — formed the first wartime ‘Führer Headquarters’. 4 Among Hitler’s accompaniment were two personal adjutants, for the most part Wilhelm Brückner and Julius Schaub, two secretaries (Christa Schroeder and Gerda Daranowski), two man-servants, his doctor, Karl Brandt (or sometimes his deputy, Hans-Karl von Hasselbach), and his four military adjutants (Rudolf Schmundt, Karl-Jesko von Puttkamer, Gerhard Engel, and Nicolaus von Below). 5 Behind Hitler’s carriage, the first on the train, containing his spacious ‘living-room’, sleeping compartment, and bathroom, together with compartments for his adjutants, was the command carriage that held communications equipment and a conference room for meetings with military leaders. In the next carriage Martin Bormann had his quarters.6 On the day of the invasion of Poland, he had informed Lammers that he would ‘continue permanently to belong to the Führer’s entourage’.7 From now on, he was never far from Hitler’s side — echoing the Führer’s wishes, and constantly reminding him of the need to keep up the ideological drive of the regime.
The Polish troops, ill-equipped for modern warfare, were from the outset no match for the invaders.8 Within the first two days, most aerodromes and almost the whole of the Polish air-force were wiped out.9 The Polish defences were rapidly overrun, the army swiftly in disarray. Already on 5 September Chief of Staff Haider noted: ‘Enemy practically defeated.’10 By the second week of fighting, German forces had advanced to the outskirts of Warsaw.11 Hitler seldom intervened in the military command.12 But he took the keenest interest in the progress of the war. He would leave his train most mornings by car to view a different part of the front line.13 His secretaries, left behind to spend boring days in the airless railway carriage parked in the glare of the blazing sun, tried to dissuade him from touring the battle scenes standing in his car, as he did in Germany.14 But Hitler was in his element. He was invigorated by war.
On 17 September, in the move which Hitler had impatiently awaited, Stalin’s army invaded Poland from the east. German generals, kept in the dark until then about the precise details of the demarcation line drawn up in the secret protocol to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, did not conceal their anger at having to withdraw from territories way beyond the agreed line that had cost casualties to capture. ‘A day of disgrace for the German political leadership’ was how Haider recorded it.15
Two days later, Hitler entered Danzig to indescribable scenes of jubilation. He took up accommodation for the next week in the Casino-Hotel at the adjacent resort of Zoppot.16 From there, on the 22nd and again on the 25th, he flew to the outskirts of Warsaw to view the devastation wrought on the city of a million souls by the bombing and shelling he had ordered. By 27 September, when the military commander of Warsaw eventually surrendered the city, he was back in Berlin, returning quietly with no prearranged hero’s reception.17 Poland no longer existed. An estimated 700,000 Polish soldiers were taken prisoners of war.18 Around 70,000 were killed in action, and a further 133,000 wounded.19 German fatalities numbered about 11,000, with 30,000 wounded, and a further 3,400 missing.20
Among the German dead was Colonel-General Werner von Fritsch, unexpectedly caught in heavy Polish fire on 22 September on an inspection of the front where his artillery regiment was fighting.21 Typical of the mentality of conservative nationalists who had deep reservations about Hitler but rejoiced in the territorial gains he had brought about, Fritsch had commented in his last letter from the front that victory in the war would bring ‘the united states of Central Europe in a strong continental block under Germany’s leadership’.22 Hitler scarcely reacted when informed of Fritsch’s death.23 Publicity was kept to a minimum.24 On the anniversary of Fritsch’s death a year later Hitler expressly banned any floral tributes.25
Territorial and political plans for Poland had not been finalized before the invasion. They were improvised and amended as events unfolded in September and October 1939. Hitler had, in fact, shown remarkably little interest in Poland before autumn 1938. As an Austrian, his main anti-Slav antipathies were directed at the Czechs, not the Poles. For Prussians, the age-old antagonisms revolving around the disputed territory on the eastern borders of the Reich tended in the opposite direction. In the face of traditional anti-Polish feeling in the Foreign Ministry and the army, Hitler had pushed through the pact with Poland in 1934 and repeatedly expressed admiration for the Polish head of state, until his death in 1935, Marshal Pilsudski, victor over the Red Army in 1920. Though the pact had obvious tactical value during the build-up of rearmament, and was presumed by many Nazi followers to be merely a ploy with limited life-span, Hitler’s preference continued in autumn 1938 and spring 1939, as we have seen, to have Poland as an ally (if now more or less as a German satellite). The British Guarantee had changed all that. But the new aim of destroying Poland by military force in summer 1939 was still not coupled with clear plans for the post-war future of the country. Neither in Mein Kampf nor in subsequent writings or speeches had Hitler had much to say about Poland. In his Second Book he had indicated that Poles ought to be removed from their property and the land given to ethnic Germans. He rigorously opposed, in this brief passage, the incorporation of Poles in the Reich (as had happened before 1914). ‘The völkisch state,’ he declared, ‘must on the contrary take the decision either to seal off these racially alien elements in order not again to allow the blood of our own people to be debased (zersetzen), or it must remove them forthwith and transfer the land (Grund und Boden) made available to our own people’s comrades.’26 Otherwise, there was remarkably little on Poland. The vast expanses of Russia, as he had often stated, were what he had in mind as the answer to Germany’s alleged ‘space problem.’ But Hitler had repeatedly shown that he was prepared to put off long-term ideological goals in favour of short-term advantage.
The pact concluded with the Soviet Union in August, and in particular its secret protocol agreeing to partition Poland, naturally altered the situation. ‘Living space’ further east dropped for the foreseeable future out of the equation. Any resettlement of populations and ethnic experimentation would now have to take place in the former territory of Poland, not farther east. Whether a Polish state should continue in existence had been left open in the secret protocol. A country divided among two occupying powers held little prospect of sustaining even a puppet state. However, the lack of immediate invasion by the Soviets and Hitler’s hope even at this point of persuading the West, faced with the fait accompli of a Polish defeat, to pull out of the war and strike a deal with him left German plans still uncertain.27
On 7 September Hitler had been ready to negotiate with the Poles, recognizing a rump Polish state (with territorial concessions to Germany and breaking of ties with Britain and France), together with an independent western Ukraine.28 Five days later he still favoured a quasi-autonomous Polish rump state with which he could negotiate a peace in the east, and thought of limiting territorial demands to Upper Silesia and the Corridor if the West stayed out.29 Another option advanced by Ribbentrop was a division between Germany and Russia, and the creation, out of the rump of Poland, of an autonomous Galician and Polish Ukraine — a proposal unlikely to commend itself to Moscow.30 The belated Soviet occupation of eastern Poland on 17 September in any case promptly ruled out this possibility. Hitler still left open the final shape of Poland in his Danzig speech on 19 September.31 During the next days, Stalin made plain his opposition to the existence of a Polish rump state. His initial preference for the demarcation line along the line of the Pissia, Narev, Vistula, and San rivers was then replaced by the proposal to exchange central Polish territories within the Soviet zone between the Vistula and Bug rivers for Lithuania. Once Hitler had accepted this proposal — the basis of the German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship signed on 28 September 1939 — the question of whether or not there would be a Polish rump state was in Berlin’s hands alone.32
Hitler was still contemplating the possibility of some form of Polish political entity at the end of the month.33 He held out the prospect of re-creating a truncated Polish state — though expressly ruling out any re-creation of the Poland of the Versailles settlement — for the last time in his Reichstag speech of 6 October, as part of his ‘peace offer’ to the West.34 But by then the provisional arrangements set up to administer occupied Poland had in effect already eliminated what remained of such a prospect. Even before the formality of Chamberlain’s rejection of the ‘peace offer’ on 12 October, they had created their own dynamic militating towards a rump Polish territory — the ‘General Government’, as it came to be known — alongside the substantial parts of the former Polish state to be incorporated in the Reich itself.
By 26 October, through a series of decrees characterized by extraordinary haste and improvisation, Hitler brought the military administration of occupied Poland to an end, replacing it by civilian rule in the hands of tried and tested ‘Old Fighters’ of the Movement. Albert Forster, Gauleiter of Danzig, was made head of the new Reichsgau of Danzig-West Prussia. Arthur Greiser, former President of the Danzig Senate, was put in charge of the largest annexed area, Reichsgau Posen (or ‘Reichsgau Wartheland’, as it was soon to be renamed, though generally known simply as the ‘War-thegau’). Hans Frank, the Party’s legal chief, was appointed General Governor in the rump Polish territory.35 Other former Polish territory was added to the existing Gaue of East Prussia and Silesia. In each of the incorporated territories, most of all in the Wartheland, the boundaries fixed during the course of October enclosed sizeable areas which had never been part of the former Prussian provinces. The borders of the Reich were thereby extended some 150—200 kilometres to the east. Only in the Danzig area were ethnic Germans in the majority. Elsewhere in the incorporated territories the proportion of Germans in the population seldom reached much over 10 percent.36
It was imperialist conquest, not revisionism. The treatment of the people of the newly conquered territory was unprecedented, its modern forms of barbarism evoking, though in even more terrible fashion, the worst barbaric subjugations of bygone centuries. What was once Poland amounted in the primitive view of its new overlords to no more than a colonial territory in eastern Europe, its resources to be plundered at will, its people regarded — with the help of modern race theories overlaying old prejudice — as inferior human beings to be treated as brutally as thought fit.
In Germany itself, despite new economic restrictions, life went on during the Polish campaign much as normal.37 Berlin’s cafés, restaurants, and bars had been packed, as usual, on the first night of the war.38 On the evening that the British and French had declared war, William Shirer heard people saying that the ‘Polish thing’ would soon be over, and that the West would not move. ‘There were food cards and soap cards and you couldn’t get any petrol and at night it was difficult stumbling around in the blackout,’ he reported. ‘But the war in the east has seemed a bit far away to them.’39 A week later, fears of the conflagration in the west had not materialized. Leisure pursuits were not affected by the war raging in the east. Two hundred football matches were played in Germany that weekend. Berliners flocked to cinemas, to the opera to see Madame Butterfly and Tannhäuser, or to the State Theatre, where Goethe’s Iphigenie was playing.40 Shirer listened to a crowd of mainly women who had come out of the opera. They ‘seemed oblivious of the fact that a war was on, that German bombs and shells were falling on the women and children in Warsaw’, he observed.41 ‘I have still to find a German, even among those who don’t like the regime,’ he added on 20 September, ‘who sees anything wrong in the German destruction of Poland… As long as the Germans are successful and do not have to pull in their belts too much, this will not be an unpopular war.’42 Reports from the exiled Social Democrat leadership (the Sopade), resting on information filtered out from within Germany, told much the same tale.43 The propaganda version of a war forced on Germany was widely believed. So were lurid stories — mainly wild exaggeration — of Polish atrocities against the ethnic German minority in western Poland. Many approved of the ‘rigorous approach’ towards the Poles.44 This stance was given encouragement by letters sent home by soldiers. One, not exceptional, ran: ‘Anything more vile than Polish soldiers has never been seen in a war. They’ve taken hardly any prisoners. Those falling into their hands have been butchered in a horrible fashion, and the Polacks have been treated in such brotherly fashion by us.’45 People followed the military advance with keen interest.46 They rejoiced in the victory.47 But the military triumph in Poland was taken largely for granted. Hitler’s popularity was undiminished.48 Most people hoped that the West would now see sense, and that the war would then be over.
The terror unleashed from the first days of the invasion of Poland left the violence, persecution, and discrimination that had taken place in the Reich itself since 1933 — dreadful though that had been — completely in the shade.49 The orgy of atrocities was unleashed from above, exploiting in the initial stages the ethnic antagonism which Nazi agitation and propaganda had done much to incite. The radical, planned programme of ‘ethnic cleansing’ that followed was authorized by Hitler himself. But its instigation — everything points to this — almost certainly came from the SS leadership. The SS had readily recognized the opportunities there to be grasped from expansion. New possibilities for extending the tentacles of the police state had opened up with the Anschluß. Einsatzgruppen (task forces) of the Security Police had been used there for the first time. They had been deployed again in the Sudeten territory, then the rest of Czecho-Slovakia, where there was even greater scope for the SS’s attack on ‘enemies of the state’. The way was paved for the massive escalation of uncontrolled brutality in Poland. Once more, five (later six) Einsatzgruppen were sent into action. They interpreted most liberally their brief to shoot ‘hostages’ in recrimination for any show of hostility, or insurgents’ — seen as anyone giving the slightest indication of active opposition to the occupying forces. The need to sustain good relations with the Wehrmacht initially restricted the extent and arbitrariness of the shootings.50 It probably also at first constrained the ‘action’ aimed at liquidating the Polish nobility, clergy, and intelligentsia.51 This ‘action’ nevertheless claimed ultimately an estimated 60,000 victims.52 Plainly, with the occupation of Poland, the barbarities of the Einsatzgruppen had moved on to a new plane. The platform was established for what was subsequently to take place in the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941.53
There was no shortage of eager helpers among the ethnic Germans in the former Polish territories. The explosion of violence recalled, in hugely magnified fashion, the wild and barbarous treatment of ‘enemies of the state’ in Germany in spring 1933. But now, after six years of cumulative onslaught on every tenet of humane and civilized behaviour, and persistent indoctrination with chauvinistic hatred, the penned-in aggression could be let loose externally on a downtrodden and despised enemy.
There had been undoubted discrimination against the German minority — around 3 per cent of the total population — in pre-war Poland, mounting sharply during the summer crisis of 1939. The Germans had also been economically disadvantaged. The incorporation of Austria and the Sudeten-land had then raised expectations among the Germans in Poland of their own ‘return to the Reich’.54 And, in a climate of mounting ethnic conflict, Goebbels’s propaganda, grossly exaggerating or simply fabricating incidents of sporadic violence against the German minority (while of course keeping quiet about worse outrages on the German side), contributed immensely to inciting venomous antagonism towards the Poles.
For their part, immediately following the German invasion the Poles, reacting to real or alleged cases of sabotage by the German minority — taken to be a ‘fifth column’ — arrested some 10–15,000 ethnic Germans (1–2 percent of the German minority) and force-marched them eastwards.55 Though the brutality accompanying the marches was later hugely magnified for propaganda purposes, the prisoners were indeed often beaten, or otherwise maltreated, and subjected to violence by the local population as they passed through Polish towns and villages. In some cases, those unfit to walk any further were shot.56
Outrages against the minority German population occurred in numerous places. Most notoriously in Bromberg (Bydgoszcz), attacks on Germans on 3 September had the character of a local pogrom. Precisely how many died at Bromberg has never been satisfactorily established.57 For German propaganda, the attacks on ethnic Germans were exploited as an apparent justification for a policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’ that had surpassed in its first days anything that could be regarded as retaliation.58 The Germans claimed in November 1939 that 5,400 had been killed in the ‘September Murders’ (including what they dubbed the ‘Bromberg Bloody Sunday’). Then, in February 1940, on Hitler’s own instructions (it was later claimed) this was simply multiplied by around ten-fold and a figure of 58,000 German dead invented.59 The most reliable estimates put the total number of ethnic Germans killed in outrages, forced marches, bombing and shelling at around 4,000.60 Terrible though these atrocities were, they were more or less spontaneous outbursts of hatred that took place in the context of panic and fear following the German invasion. They did not remotely compare with, let alone provide any justification for, the calculated savagery of the treatment meted out by the German masters, directed at wiping out anything other than a slave existence for the Polish people.61
Some of the worst German atrocities in the weeks following the invasion were perpetrated by the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz (Ethnic German Self-Protection), a civilian militia established on Hitler’s directions in the first days of September and within little more than a week coming under the control of the SS.62 Himmler’s adjutant, Ludolf von Alvensleben, took over its organization, and later led the Selbstschutz in West Prussia, where the extent of its brutality stood out even in the horrific catalogue of misdeeds of the organization’s other branches.63 Tens of thousands of male ethnic Germans between seventeen and forty-five years of age served in the Selbst-schutz.64 Von Alvensleben told his recruits, at a meeting in Thorn on 16 October: ‘You are now the master race here. Nothing was yet built up through softness and weakness… That’s why I expect, just as our Führer Adolf Hitler expects from you, that you are disciplined, but stand together hard as Krupp steel. Don’t be soft, be merciless, and clear out everything that is not German and could hinder us in the work of construction.’65 Especially in West Prussia, where ethnic conflict had been at its fiercest, the Selbstschutz carried out untold numbers of ‘executions’ of Polish civilians. On 7 October, von Alvensleben reported that his units had taken the ‘sharpest measures’ against 4,247 former Polish citizens.66 When one subordinate Selbstschutz leader reported to von Alvensleben that no executions had been carried out that week, he was asked whether there were no more Poles left at all in his town.67 The Selbstschutz was eventually wound up — in West Prussia in November, and elsewhere by early 1940 — but only because its uncontrolled atrocities were becoming counter-productive on account of the resulting conflicts with the army and German civil authorities in the occupied areas.68
The rampaging actions of the Selbstschutz were only one element of the programme of radical ‘ethnic struggle’ (Volkstumskampf) designed by the SS leadership for the ‘new order’ in Poland. More systematic ‘ethnic cleansing’ operations, involving widespread liquidation of targeted groups, were mainly in the hands of the Security Police Einsatzgruppen, following in the wake of the military advance. Already at the end of the first week of the invasion, Heydrich was reported to be enraged — as, apparently, was Hitler too — at the legalities of the military courts, despite 200 executions a day. He was demanding shooting or hanging without trial. ‘The nobility, clerics, and Jews must be done away with (umgebracht),’ were his reported words.69 He repeated the same sentiments, referring to a general ‘ground cleansing’ (Flurbereinigung), to Haider’s Quartermaster-General Eduard Wagner some days later.70 Reports of atrocities were not long in arriving. By 10–11 September accounts were coming in of an SS massacre of Jews herded into a church, and of an SS shooting of large numbers of Jews.71 On 12 September Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, told Keitel that he had heard ‘that extensive shootings (Fusilierungen) were planned in Poland and that especially the nobility and clergy were to be exterminated (ausgerottet)’. Keitel replied ‘that this matter had already been decided by the Füihrer’.72 Chief of Staff Haider was already by then heard to have said that ‘it was the intention of the Führer and of Göring to annihilate (vernichten) and exterminate (auszurotten) the Polish people’, and that ‘the rest could not even be hinted at in writing’.73
What it amounted to — an all-out ‘ethnic cleansing’ programme — was explained by Heydrich to the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen on 21 September. The thinking was that the former German provinces would become German Gaue. Another Gau with a ‘foreign-speaking population’ (mit fremdsprachiger Bevölkerung) would be established, with its capital in Cracow. An ‘eastern wall’ would surround the German provinces, with the ‘foreign-speaking Gau’ forming a type of ‘no man’s land’ in front of it. The Reichsführer-SS was to be appointed Settlement Commissar for the East (an appointment of vital importance, giving Himmler immense, practically unrestricted powers in the east, confirmed by secret edict of Hitler on 7 October).74 ‘The deportation of Jews into the foreign-speaking Gau, expulsion over the demarcation-line has been approved by the Führer,’ Heydrich went on. The process was to be spread over a year. As regards ‘the solution of the Polish problem’, the 3 per cent at most of the Polish leadership in the occupied territories ‘had to be rendered harmless’ and put in concentration camps. The Einsatzgruppen were to draw up lists of significant leaders, and of various professional and middle-class groups (including teachers and priests) who were to be deported to the rump territory (soon to be known as the General Government). The ‘primitive Poles’ were to be used as migrant workers and gradually deported to the ‘foreign-speaking Gau’. Poles were to remain no more than seasonal and migrant workers, with their permanent homes in the Cracow region. Jews in urban areas were to be concentrated in ghettos, giving better possibilities of control and readiness for later deportation. Jews in rural areas were to be removed, and placed in towns. Jews were systematically to be transported by goods-train from German areas. Heydrich also envisaged the deportation to Poland of the Reich’s Jews, and of 30,000 Gypsies.75
Hitler spoke little over a week later to Rosenberg of the Germanization and deportation programme to be carried out in Poland. The three weeks spent in Poland during the campaign had confirmed his ingrained racial prejudices. ‘The Poles,’ Rosenberg recalled him saying: ‘a thin Germanic layer, below that dreadful material. The Jews, the most horrible thing imaginable. The towns covered in dirt. He has learnt a lot in these weeks. Above all: if Poland had ruled for a few decades over the old parts of the Reich, everything would be lice-ridden (verlaust) and decayed. A clear, masterful hand was now needed to rule here.’ Hitler then referred, along similar lines to Heydrich’s address to his Einsatzgruppen chiefs, to his plans for the conquered Polish territories. ‘He wanted to divide the now established territory into three strips: 1. between the Vistula and the Bug: the entire Jewry (also from the Reich) along with all somehow unreliable elements. On the Vistula an invincible Eastern Wall — even stronger than in the West. 2. Along the previous border a broad belt of Germanization and colonization. Here there would be a great task for the entire people: to create a German granary, strong peasantry, to resettle there good Germans from all over the world. 3. Between, a Polish “form of state” (Staatlichkeit). Whether after decades the settlement belt could be pushed forward will have to be left to the future.’76
A few days later, Hitler spoke to Goebbels in similar vein. ‘The Führer’s judgement on the Poles is annihilatory (vernichtend),’ Goebbels recorded. ‘More animals than human beings… The filth of the Poles is unimaginable.’ Hitler wanted no assimilation. ‘They should be pushed into their reduced state’ — meaning the General Government — ‘and left entirely among themselves.’ If Henry the Lion — the mighty twelfth-century Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, who had resettled peasants on lands in northern and eastern Germany — had conquered the east, the result, given the scope of power available at the time, would have been a ‘slavified’ German mongrel-race, Hitler went on. ‘It’s all the better as it is. Now at least we know the laws of race and can act accordingly.’77
Hitler hinted in his Reichstag speech of 6 October, though in the vaguest terms for public consumption, at ‘cleansing work’ (Sanierungsarbeit) and massive ethnic resettlement as preparation for the ‘new order of ethnographical relations’ in former Poland.78 Only in confidential dealings with those in the regime’s leadership who needed to know — a characteristic technique of his rule not to spread information beyond essential limits — did Hitler speak frankly, as he had done to Rosenberg and Goebbels, about what was intended. At a meeting on 17 October in the Reich Chancellery attended by Keitel, Frank, Himmler, Heß, Bormann, Lammers, Frick, and the State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, Stuckart, Hitler outlined the draconian policy for Poland.79 The military should be happy to be freed from administrative responsibility. The General Government was not to become part of the Reich. It was not the task of the administration there to run it like a model province or to establish a sound economic and financial basis. The Polish intelligentsia were to be deprived of any chance to develop into a ruling class.80 The standard of living was to remain low: ‘We only want to get labour supplies from there.’ The administration there was to be given a free hand, independent of Berlin ministries. ‘We don’t want to do anything there that we do in the Reich,’ was ominously noted. Carrying out the work there would involve ‘a hard ethnic struggle (Volks-tumskampf) that will not permit any legal restrictions. The methods will not be compatible with our normal principles.’ Rule over the area would ‘allow us to purify the Reich area too of Jews and Polacks’. Cooperation of the General Government with the new Gaue of Posen and West Prussia was to take place only for resettlement purposes (through Himmler’s new role as Commissar for Settlement). ‘Cleverness and hardness in this ethnic struggle,’ Hitler ended, with usual recourse to national needs as justification, ‘must save us from again having to enter the fields of slaughter on account of this land.’81 ‘The devil’s work’, he called it.82
Hitler’s approval for what Heydrich had set in motion cannot be doubted.83 Referring back several months later to the chequered relations of the SS and police in Poland with the army leadership, Heydrich pointed out that the work of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland (as it had been in Austria and Czecho-Slovakia) was ‘in accordance with the special order of the Führer’. The ‘political activity’ carried out in Poland by the Reichsführer-SS, which had caused conflict with some of the army leadership, had followed ‘the directives of the Führer as well as the General Field Marshal’. He added ‘that the directives according to which the police deployment took place were extraordinarily radical (e.g. orders of liquidation for numerous sectors of the Polish leadership, going into thousands)’. Since the order was not passed on to army leaders, they had presumed that the police and SS were acting arbitrarily.84
Indeed, the army commanders on the ground in Poland had been given no explicit instructions about any mandate from Hitler for the murderous ‘ethnic cleansing’ policy of the SS and Security Police, though Brauchitsch, like Keitel, was well aware of what was intended.85 This was in itself characteristic of how the regime functioned, and of Hitler’s keenness — through keeping full knowledge to the smallest circle possible, and speaking for the most part even there in generalities, however draconian — to cloud his own responsibility. The army’s hands were far from unsullied by the atrocities in Poland. Brauchitsch’s proclamation to the Poles on 1 September had told them that the Wehrmacht did not regard the population as its enemy, and that all agreements on human rights would be upheld.86 But already in the first weeks of September numerous army reports recounted plundering, ‘arbitrary shootings’, ‘maltreatment of unarmed, rapes’, ‘burning of synagogues’, and massacres of Jews by soldiers of the Wehrmacht.87 The army leaders — even the most pro-Nazi among them — nevertheless regarded such repellent actions as serious lapses of discipline, not part of a consistent racially motivated policy of unremitting ‘cleansing’ to be furthered with all means possible, and sought to punish those involved through the military courts. (In fact, most were amnestied by Hitler through a decree on 4 October justifying German actions as retaliation ‘out of bitterness for the atrocities committed by the Poles’.)88 The commanders on the ground in Poland, harsh though their own military rule was, did not see the atrocities which they acknowledged among their own troops — in their view regrettable, if inevitable, side-effects of the military conquest of a bitter enemy and perceived ‘inferior’ people — as part of an exterminatory programme of ‘ethnic struggle’. Their approach, draconian though their treatment of the Poles was, differed strikingly from the thinking of Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich.
Gradually, in the second half of September the unease among army commanders in Poland at the savagery of the SS’s actions turned to unmistakable criticism.89 Awareness of this fed complaints from the Nazi leadership about the ‘lack of understanding’ in the army of what was required in the ‘ethnic struggle’.90 Hitler told Goebbels on 13 October that the military in Poland were ‘too soft and yielding’ and would be replaced as soon as possible by civil administration. ‘Only force is effective with the Poles,’ he added. ‘Asia begins in Poland.’91 On 17 October, in a step notably contributing to the extension of the SS’s autonomy, Hitler removed the SS and police from military jurisdiction.92 Two days later an unpublished decree stipulated that military administration of Poland would cease on 25 October, to be replaced by civilian rule. This had already been anticipated a fortnight earlier by Hitler’s decision to establish civilian administration in Danzig and West Prussia — a decision directly prompted, it seems, by Forster’s complaints about the army’s ‘lack of understanding’ for the measures being taken there.93
The transfer of responsibility from the army did little to affect the deteriorating relations between army and SS in Poland. The most forthright — and courageous — denunciations of the continuing horrendous outrages of the SS were made in written reports to Brauchitsch by Colonel-General Johannes Blaskowitz, following the ending of military administration the commander of the army in Poland.94 His reports condemned the ‘criminal atrocities, maltreatment, and plundering carried out by the SS, police, and administration’, castigating the ‘animal and pathological instincts’ of the SS which had brought the slaughter of tens of thousands of Jews and Poles. Blaskowitz feared ‘immeasurable brutalization and moral debasement’ if the SS were not brought under control — something, he said, which was increasingly impossible within Poland ‘since they can well believe themselves officially authorized and justified in committing any act of cruelty’. General Wilhelm Ulex, Commander in Chief of the southern section of the front, reported in similar vein.95.
The weak-kneed response of army Commander-in-Chief von Brauchitsch — in effect an apologia for the barbaric ‘ethnic cleansing’ policy authorized by Hitler — was fateful.96 It compromised the position of the army, and pointed the way to the accommodation between army and SS about the genocidal actions to be taken in the Soviet Union in 1941. Brauchitsch spoke of ‘regrettable mistakes’ (‘bedauerliche Miβgriffe’) in the ‘difficult solution’ of the ‘ethnic-political tasks’. After lengthy discussions with the Reichs-fiihrer-SS, he was confident that the future would bring a change. Criticism endangering the ‘unity and fighting power of the troops’ had to be prohibited. ‘The solution of ethnic-political tasks, necessary for securing German living space and ordered by the Führer, had necessarily to lead to otherwise unusual, harsh measures against the Polish population of the occupied area,’ he stated. ‘The necessarily accelerated execution of these tasks, caused by the imminently decisive struggle of the German people, naturally brought about a further intensification of these measures.’97 Doubtless anticipating the inevitable explosion at the inadequacies of the army, Brauchitsch did not even deliver Blaskowitz’s reports in person to Hitler. As he had done with Beck’s memorandum in July 1938, he passed on at least the first report on 18 November 1939 via Hitler’s army adjutant Gerhard Engel. At first there was little reaction. Then the expected ferocious denunciation of the ‘childish attitudes’ inevitably followed. ‘You can’t wage war with Salvation Army methods,’ Hitler raged.98
The inquiries Himmler had set in train following the army complaints predictably concluded that it was a matter only of ‘trivialities’.99 But the Reichsführer-SS was angered by the attacks. In March 1940 he eventually sought an opportunity to address the leaders of the army. He accepted responsibility for what had happened, though played down the reports, attributing the accounts of serious atrocities to rumour.100 According to the memory of one participant, General Weichs, he added that ‘he was prepared, in matters that seemed perhaps incomprehensible, to take on responsibility before the people and the world, since the person of the Führer could not be connected with these things’.101 Another participant, with more cause than most to take a keen interest in Himmler’s comments, General Ulex, recalled the Reichsführer-SS saying: ‘I do nothing that the Führer does not know about.’102
With the sanctioning of the liquidation programme at the core of the barbaric ‘ethnic cleansing’ drive in Poland, Hitler — and the regime he headed — had crossed the Rubicon. This was no longer a display of outright brutality at home that shocked — as had the massacre of the SA leadership in 1934, or even more so the November Pogrom against the Jews in 1938 — precisely because the structures and traditions of legality in the Reich, whatever the inroads made into them, had not been totally undermined. In what had once been Poland, the violence was unconstrained, systematic, and on a scale never witnessed within the Reich itself. Law, however draconian, counted for nothing. The police were given a free hand. Even the incorporated areas were treated for policing terms as outside the Reich.103 What was taking place in the conquered territories fell, to be sure, still far short of the all-out genocide that was to emerge during the Russian campaign in the summer of 1941. But it had near-genocidal traits. It was the training-ground for what was to follow.
Hitler’s remarks to Rosenberg and Goebbels illustrated how his own impressions of the Poles provided for him the self-justification for the drastic methods he had approved. He had unquestionably been strengthened in these attitudes by Himmler and Heydrich. Goebbels, too, played to Hitler’s prejudices in ventilating his own. In mid-October Goebbels told him of the preliminary work carried out on what was to become the nauseating antisemitic ‘documentary’ film Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew). Hitler listened with great interest. What Goebbels said to Hitler might be implied from his own reactions when he viewed the first pictures from what he called the ‘ghetto film’. The appearance of the degraded and downtrodden Jews, crushed under the Nazi yoke, had come to resemble the caricature that Goebbels’s own propaganda had produced. ‘Descriptions so terrible and brutal in detail that your blood clots in your veins,’ he commented. ‘You shrink back at the sight of such brutishness (Roheit). This Jewry must be annihilated (vernicbtet).’104 A fortnight or so later Goebbels showed Hitler the horrible ritual-slaughter scenes from the film, and reported on his own impressions — already pointing plainly in a genocidal direction — gleaned during his visit to the Lodz ghetto: ‘It’s indescribable. Those are no longer human beings. They are animals. So it’s not a humanitarian but a surgical task. Otherwise Europe will perish through the Jewish disease.’105
In a most literal sense, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, and other leading Nazis were ‘working towards the Führer’, whose authority allowed the realization of their own fantasies. The same was true of countless lesser figures in the racial experiment under way in the occupied territories. Academics — historians at the forefront — excelled themselves in justifying German hegemony in the east.106 Racial ‘experts’ in the Party set to work to construct the ‘scientific’ basis for the inferiority of the Poles.107 Armies of planners, moved to the east, started to let their imagination run riot in devising megalomaniac schemes for ethnic resettlement and social restructuring.108 Hitler had to do no more than provide the general licence for barbarism. There was no shortage of ready hands to put it into practice.
This began with the heads of the civil administration in occupied Poland. Forster in Danzig-West Prussia, Greiser in the Warthegau, and Frank in the General Government were trusted ‘Old Fighters’, hand-picked for the task by Hitler. They knew what was expected of them. Regular and precise directives were not necessary.
The Warthegau provides clear illustration of the ways ‘working towards the Führer’ — anticipating Hitler’s presumed wishes and intentions — translated into ever more radical actions. Hitler’s man in Posen, head of the civil administration in ‘Reichsgau Wartheland’ (as it was officially known from January 1940 onwards), was Arthur Greiser. For Greiser, a native of the Posen area, the way to Hitler had been the classical one. As with Hitler himself, the war had been a formative experience. He identified completely with the ‘front-soldier’ mentality. Defeat and the loss of his home province left a searing mark on him. Service in the Freikorps was followed by years where he scraped by, earning a living as best he could, including running boat-rides round Danzig harbour.109 His resentment at his parlous financial situation doubtless helped drive him further into the völkisch camp, then on into the Nazi Party. He was apparently unemployed when, in 1929, he was attracted to what he later called ‘the solution of the great social question’ — unquestionably synonymous in his mind with the ‘ethnic question’ in the former Prussian provinces. He believed that ‘in the chaos of party politics, only Hitler was capable of this solution’.110
Greiser was clever and ambitious enough to work his way through the intrigues of the Danzig Party to become Forster’s deputy and President of the Senate in the Free City, surviving scandals about financial corruption, his membership of a Freemasons’ Lodge in the 1920s, and the stormy break-up of his first marriage. Greiser’s survival owed not a little to his good connections with Himmler. He was also already prepared to do anything to retain favour with Hitler. ‘For this favour,’ recalled Carl Burck-hardt, ‘no price was too high. A wish expressed by Hitler counted for even more than an order.’111 When appointed by Hitler Reich Governor and Gauleiter of the Warthegau, Greiser’s ‘gratitude knew no bounds’, according to one contemporary.112 He lost no opportunity to emphasize ‘that he was persona gratissima with the Führer’, and also had the ear of the Reichsführer-SS.113 He saw his task as working to put into practice the Führer’s ‘heroic vision’ for the Germanization of the Warthegau, to turn it into the ‘model Gau’ of the ‘New Order’. He was given full scope to do so.
The combined headship of state and party in the incorporated area, following the structure used in the ‘Ostmark’ and Sudetenland, provided far greater influence for the Party than was the case in the ‘Old Reich’.114 Greiser met any obstacles by pointing to ‘the special plenipotentiary powers personally given to me by the Führer’ which, he claimed, according to his mandate had to be more extensive than in other areas of the Reich.115
Greiser demanded of his own subordinates that they be ‘brutal, harsh, and again harsh’ in the ‘ethnic struggle’.116 Brutality reproduced itself; it became the norm. Leniency was banned. The climate in the Warthegau can be gauged from the directive of the head of the constabulary (not the dreaded Security Police) in one district of the Posen province. Speaking of what he called the ‘Polacks’, he laid down that he did not ‘want to see any officer showing mildness to such elements’.117 The same constabulary chief added, some months later: ‘The Pole is for us an enemy and I expect from every officer… that he acts accordingly. The Poles must feel that they do not have the right to put themselves on the same level as a people of culture.’118 This ethos was passed on to and adopted by practically every one of the 25,000 or so police and 22,500 members of the civil administration — mostly drawn from the Reich — who controlled the Warthegau.119
Hitler’s attitude towards policy in the incorporated territories was typical. He placed great value on giving his Gauleiter the ‘necessary freedom of action’ to carry out their difficult tasks. He stressed ‘that he only demanded a report from the Gauleiter after ten years that their area was German, that is purely German. He would not ask about the methods they had used to make the area German, and it was immaterial to him if some time in the future it were established that the methods to win this territory were not pretty (unschön) or open to legal objection.’120 The inevitable consequence of this broad mandate — though it was alleged that it ran counter to Hitler’s intention — was competition between Greiser and his arch-rival Forster to be the first to announce that his Gau was fully Germanized.121 Greiser and Forster went about meeting this aim in different ways. While, to Himmler’s intense irritation, Forster swept as many Poles in his area as possible into the third group of the Deutsche Volksliste (German Ethnic List), giving them German citizenship on approval (constantly subject, that is, to revocation), Greiser pushed fanatically and ruthlessly for complete apartheid — the maximum separation of the two ethnic groups.122 While Forster frequently clashed with Himmler, Greiser gave full support to the policies of the Reichsführer-SS, and worked in the closest cooperation with the Higher SS-and-Police Chief in the Warthegau, Wilhelm Koppe.
The Warthegau turned years of indescribable torment for the subjugated people into the nearest approximation to a vision of the ‘New Order’ in the east. The vast deportation and resettlement programmes, the ruthless eradication of Polish cultural influence, the mass-closing of Catholic churches and arrests or murder of clergy, the eviction of Poles from their property, and the scarcely believable levels of discrimination against the majority Polish population — always accompanied by the threat of summary execution — were carried out under the aegis of Greiser and Koppe with little need to involve Hitler. Not least, the vicious drive by the same pairing to rid their Germanized area of the lowest of the low — the Jewish minority in the Warthegau — was to form a vital link in the chain that would lead by late 1941 to the ‘Final Solution’.123
The rapidity with which the geographical divisions and administrative structure for the occupied territories of former Poland had been improvised, the free hand given to Party bosses, the widespread autonomy which the police had obtained, and the complete absence of legal constraint, had created a power free-for-all in the ‘wild east’. But where conflict among the occupying authorities was most endemic, as in the General Government, the greatest concentration of power was plainly revealed to lie in the hands of the Security Police, represented by the Higher SS-and-Police Chief, backed by Himmler and Heydrich. Himmler’s ‘Black Order’, under the Reichs-fuhrer’s extended powers as Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of Germandom, and mandated by Hitler’s to ‘cleanse’ the east, had come into its own in the new occupied territories. The unlimited power that war and occupation had brought, and the lessons in barbarism rapidly learnt in former Poland, would be put to immediate use during the onslaught on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941.
Meanwhile, within the Reich itself the beginning of the war had also marked a vital step in the descent into modern barbarism. Here, too, Hitler now authorized mass murder.
Parallel to the murders in occupied Poland, it was an irreversible advance in the direction of genocide. The programme — euphemistically called the ‘euthanasia action’ — to kill the mentally ill and others incurably sick that he launched in autumn 1939 was to provide a gangway to the vaster extermination programme to come. And, like the destruction of European Jewry, it was evidently linked in his own mind with the war that, he was certain, would bring the fulfilment of his ideological ‘mission’.
It was some time in October that Hitler had one of his secretaries type, on his own headed notepaper and backdated to 1 September 1939 — the day that the war had begun — the single sentence: ‘Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr med. Brandt are commissioned with the responsibility of extending the authority of specified doctors so that, after critical assessment of their condition, those adjudged incurably ill can be granted mercy-death.’ He took a pen and signed his name below this lapidary, open-ended death-sentence.124
By this time, the killing of mental patients, already authorized verbally by Hitler, was well under way. It suited neither Hitler’s style nor his instinct to transmit lethal orders in writing. The reason he did so on this one and only occasion was because of the difficulties, in a land where the writ of law was still presumed to run, already being encountered by those attempting, without any obvious authority, to build an organization in conditions of secrecy to implement a murderous mandate.125 Even then, knowledge of Hitler’s written authorization was confined to as few persons as possible. It was ten months later, on 27 August 1940, before even the Reich Minister of Justice, Franz Gürtner, faced with growing criticism of the illegality of what was inevitably leaking more and more into the open, was shown a facsimile of it.126
Indeed, there was no basis of legality for what was taking place. Hitler explicitly refused to have a ‘euthanasia’ law, rejecting the prospect of a cumbersome bureaucracy and legal constraints.127 Even according to the legal theories of the time, Hitler’s mandate could not be regarded as a formal Führer decree and did not, therefore, possess the character of law.128 But an order from the Führer, whatever its legal status, was nonetheless seen as binding.129 That applied also to Reich Justice Minister Gürtner. Once he had seen with his own eyes that Hitler’s will stood behind the liquidation of the mentally sick, and that it was not the work of Party underlings operating without authority, he gave up his attempts on legal grounds to block or regulate the killings.130 To a courageous district judge, Lothar Kreyssig, who had written frank protest letters to him about the crass illegality of the action, and on being shown Hitler’s authorization had exclaimed that even on the basis of positivist legal theory wrong could not be turned into right, Gürtner gave a simple reply: ‘If you cannot recognize the will of the Führer as a source of law, as a basis of law, then you cannot remain a judge.’ Kreyssig’s notice of retirement followed soon afterwards.131
The exchange between Gürtner and Kreyssig shows how far the acceptance of ‘Führer power’ had undermined the essence of law. The genesis of the ‘euthanasia action’ that Hitler authorized in writing in October 1939 provides, beyond that, a classic example of the way ‘working towards the Führer’ converted an ideological goal into realizable policy.
Hitler was indispensable to the process. His well-aired views from the 1920s on ‘euthanasia’ served after 1933 as an encouragement to those, most notably represented in the National Socialist Doctors’ League but by no means confined to fanatical Nazis, anxious to act on the ‘problem’ of what they described as the ‘ballast’ of society (Ballastexistenzen),132
The notion of the ‘destruction of life not worth living’ (‘Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens’) had already been the subject of much public debate following the publication in 1920 of a tract by the lawyer Professor Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Dr Alfred Hoche — neither of them a National Socialist — demanding the killing of the incurably sick and insane on request of relatives or the decision of a commission comprising two doctors and two lawyers who had thoroughly investigated the circumstances of a particular case. Among the reasons given for such a policy — later to be voiced by the Nazis — was the need to avoid having to spend money otherwise available for ‘productive’ purposes on the care of those deemed to be no more than a social burden.133
Doctors had, however, overwhelmingly rejected euthanasia during the Weimar era. Psychiatrists began by doing the same, despite arguments already being aired that money spent upon ‘idiots’ could be put to better use. As professional conditions in psychiatry deteriorated, as pychiatrists’ public standing declined — they were often regarded as second-class doctors — and as conditions in the asylums drastically worsened in the wake of severe cuts in public spending by the early 1930s, radical suggestions for reducing the cost of institutionalized support of the mentally ill gained ground. But it was recognized that the public climate for such changes was still not propitious.
Hitler’s takeover of power changed that climate — and opened up new possibilities to the medical profession. Some leading psychiatrists were more than ready to exploit them. Hitler’s presumed intentions provided guidelines for their endeavours, even if the time was still not deemed right to introduce the programme they wanted. Above all, Hitler’s role was decisive in 1938–9 in providing approval for every step that extended into the full ‘euthanasia’ programme from the autumn of 1939 onwards. Without that approval, it is plain, and without the ideological drive that he embodied, there would have been no ‘euthanasia action’.
But the mentality which led to the killing of the mentally sick was no creation of Hitler. Building on foundations firmly laid, especially in the wake of the catastrophic public funding cuts during the Depression years, the erection of the dictatorship had provided licence to the medical and pyschiatric professions after 1933 to think the unthinkable. Minority views, constrained even in a failing democracy, could now become mainstream. The process gathered pace. By 1939, doctors and nurses attached to the asylums were aware of what was required. So was the medical bureaucracy which oiled the wheels of the killing machinery.134 The climate of opinion among the general public was by this time also not unfavourable. Though there were strong feelings against euthanasia, particularly among those attached to the Churches, others were in favour — notably, it seems, in the case of mentally ill or disabled children — or at least passively prepared to accept it.135
Finally, but not least, the point at which, coinciding with the outbreak of war, a secret programme of mass murder could be implemented would have been unimaginable without the progressive erosion of legality and disintegration of formal structures of government that had taken place since 1933.
Hitler had given a strong indication of his own thoughts on how to deal with the incurably ill in Mein Kampf, where he advocated their sterilization. His remarks were made in the context of a diatribe on the need to eradicate sexually transmitted diseases from society. He wanted no half-measures. ‘It is a half-measure,’ he wrote, ‘to let incurably sick people steadily contaminate the remaining healthy ones… The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the clearest reason… If necessary, the incurably sick will be pitilessly segregated — a barbaric measure for the unfortunate who is struck by it, but a blessing for his fellow men and posterity.’136
For Hitler, typically, when he spoke at the Nuremberg Party Rally in 1929 about how the weakest in society should be handled, the economic argument used by the eugenics lobby in the medical profession and others weighed less heavily than questions of ‘racial hygiene’ and the ‘future maintenance of our ethnic strength (Volkskraft), indeed of our ethnic nationhood (unseres Volkstums) altogether’.137 ‘If Germany were to have a million children a year,’ he declared, ‘and do away with (beseitigen) 700,000–800,000 of the weakest of them, the result would finally be perhaps even a rise in strength.’138 This implied racial engineering through mass murder, justified through social-Darwinist ideology, not ‘euthanasia’ in the conventional sense as the voluntary release from terminal illness.
According to the comments of his doctor, Karl Brandt, in his post-war trial, Hitler was known to favour involuntary euthanasia at the latest from 1933 onwards.139 Lammers, too, later recalled Hitler musing on the killing of mental patients in 1933 during discussions on the ‘Sterilization Law’.140 But in 1933, German public opinion was nowhere near prepared for such a drastic step. The Nazi regime could not contemplate introducing as controversial a measure as compulsory ‘euthanasia’ for the incurably sick, certain at the very least at that time to provoke the condemnation of the Catholic Church.
But the idea did not disappear from view. In 1933 a published lengthy memorandum on National Socialist penal law, whose author was the Prussian Minister of Justice, Hanns Kerrl, did not classify voluntary euthanasia, certified by two doctors, as a criminal offence. Kerrl also stated that it would not be an offence, were the state ‘legally to order the elimination from life of incurably mentally sick by official organs’.141 The hierarchy of the Catholic Church responded in predictably hostile manner (though in an unpublished memorandum).142 In 1935, Gürtner’s published report on the work of the commission set up to review the penal code, in direct contrast to Kerrl’s line of interpretation, then appeared to rule out explicitly the prospect of any legalization of the killing of the mentally sick.143 However, Hitler’s own position was indicated in his reply in 1935 to the Reich Doctors’ Leader Gerhard Wagner (who was instrumental in the drive to introduce an anti-Jewish ‘Blood Law’). Evidently, Wagner was pressing for radical measures to bring about the ‘destruction of life not worth living’. Hitler reportedly told him that he would ‘take up and carry out the questions of euthanasia’ in the event of a war. He was ‘of the opinion that such a problem could be more smoothly and easily carried out in war’, and that resistance, as was to be expected from the Churches, would then have less of an impact than in peacetime. He intended, therefore, ‘in the event of a war radically to solve the problem of the mental asylums’.144
For the next three years, Hitler had little involvement with the ‘euthanasia’ issue. Others were more active. Evidently encouraged by Hitler’s remarks that he did intend, once the opportunity presented itself through the war for which the regime was preparing, to introduce a ‘euthanasia programme’, Reich Doctors’ Leader Wagner pushed forward discussions on how the population should be prepared for such action. Calculations were published on the cost of upkeep of the mentally sick and hereditarily ill, instilling the impression of what could be done for the good of the people with vast resources now being ‘wasted’ on ‘useless’ lives. Cameras were sent into the asylums to produce scenes to horrify the German public and convince them of the need to eliminate those portrayed as the dregs of society for the good of the whole population.145 The National Socialist Racial and Political Office(NS-Rasse und Politisches Amt) produced five silent films of this kind between 1935 and 1937·146 Hitler himself liked one of them, Erbkrank (Hereditarily Ill), made in 1936, so much that he commissioned a sequel with sound, Opfer der Vergangenheit (Victims of the Past) and had the film shown in all German cinemas in 1937.147
From 1936 onwards, the Churches were forced to transfer the patients in the sanatoria they ran into asylums controlled by the state.148 These had already had their budgets slashed as the overcrowding grew, and the quality of the staff deteriorated.149 Rumours circulated that the Reich Ministry of the Interior was pondering the drastic reduction of food-rations for asylum patients in the event of war.150 In the SS organ Das Schwarze Korps a reader’s letter in 1937 demanding a law to permit the killing of mentally retarded children, if their parents gave consent, was accompanied by a commentary advocating a law ‘that helps nature to its right’. The view that there was no right to kill, the paper declared, could be countered by stating that there was a hundred times less right to defy nature by keeping alive ‘what was not born to life’.151 It was to take away nothing from a seriously brain-damaged child to ‘extinguish its light of life’. The ‘child-euthanasia’ programme was presaged in such sentiments. Murder in the asylums was in the air. It was a matter of time and occasion until it was implemented.
In the interim, the ‘Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP’, the agency which would come to run the ‘euthanasia action’ from 1939 onwards, was doing all it could to expand its own power-base in the political jungle of the Third Reich. Despite its impressive name, the Führer Chancellery had little actual power. Hitler had set it up at the end of 1934 to deal with correspondence from Party members directed to himself as head of the NSDAP. It was officially meant to serve as the agency to keep the Führer in direct touch with the concerns of his people.152 Much of the correspondence, as Hitler himself made clear, was a matter of trivial complaints, petty grievances, and minor personal squabbles of Party members. But a vast number of letters to Hitler did pour in after 1933 — around a quarter of a million a year in the later 1930s.153 And, to preserve the fiction of the Führer listening to the cares of his people, many of them needed attention.
Hitler put the Führer Chancellery under the control of Philipp Bouhler — a member of the Party’s Reichsleitung (Reich Leadership) since 1933, a quiet, bureaucratic type but intensely loyal and deferential. Tenacious and efficient, Bouhler had been in no small measure responsible for setting up the Party’s administrative organization after its refoundation in 1925.154 At the time of his appointment he was thirty-five years old, somewhat owlish-looking with round, black horn-rimmed spectacles and swept-back hair. His soft-voiced and polite manner was unusual in the Nazi leadership. He was a quiet man behind the scenes who, at another time in another place, might have become a company secretary. But Bouhler, still bearing a walking disability — and perhaps psychological scars — from the serious injuries to his legs sustained towards the end of the war which had prevented him from pursuing an officer’s career in the army as his father had done, was ambitious.155 He was also, whatever his introverted mannerisms, ideologically fanatical. And exploiting his direct connections with Hitler, the vagueness of his remit, and the randomness of the business that came the way of the organization he headed, he was now able to expand his own little empire — treading on numerous toes along the way. By the time the Führer Chancellery moved in 1936 into new accommodation close to the Reich Chancellery, it consisted of six departments, and the original twenty-six employees had almost doubled, increasing five-fold by 1942.156 Of the various departments, the most important was Department (Amt) II (from 1939 Main Department — Hauptamt) headed by Bouhler’s deputy, Viktor Brack. This Department itself covered a wide range of heterogeneous business but, in its section ‘IIb’, under Hans Hefelmann, was responsible for handling petitions relating to the Reich Ministry of the Interior, including sensitive issues touching on the competence of the health department of the Ministry.157 Brack, five years younger than Bouhler, was, if anything, even more ambitious than his boss. He had a classical Nazi background: völkisch upbringing, Freikorps, participation in the Beerhall Putsch, study of agricultural economics at the Technische Hochschule in Munich, student activism, entry into the Party and SS at the age of twenty-five in 1929. His father was Frau Himmler’s doctor. He himself acted for a time as Himmler’s chauffeur.158 Brack was ideologically attuned to what was wanted. And he was ready to grasp an opportunity when he saw one.
This came some time in the first months of 1939. Around that time the father of a severely handicapped child — born blind, with no left forearm and a deformed leg — in Pomßen, near Leipzig, sent in a petition to Hitler, asking for the child to be released through mercy-killing. The petition arrived in Hefelmann’s office in the Führer Chancellery.159 Hefelmann did not consider involving either the Reich Ministry of the interior or the Reich Ministry of Justice. He thought it should be taken to Hitler himself, to see how the Führer thought it should be handled.160 This was probably in May or June 1939. Hitler sent his doctor, Karl Brandt, to the University of Leipzig Children’s Clinic, to consult the child’s doctors with the mandate, and, if the position was as the father had described it, to authorize the doctors in his name to carry out euthanasia.161 This was done towards the end of July 1939. Soon after Brandt’s return, he was verbally empowered by Hitler, as was Bouhler, to take similar action should other cases arise. (The case of the child from Pomßen was evidently not an isolated instance around this time.)162 Whether Hitler took this step unprompted, or whether it followed a suggestion from Brandt or the ambitious Bouhler is not known. But between February and May 1939 Hefelmann, on Brandt’s instructions, carried out discussions with doctors known to be sympathetic and eventually set up a camouflaged organization that was given the title ‘Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Suffering’ [Reich sausschufißzur wissenschaftlichen Erfassung erb — und anlagebed-ingter schwerer Leiden’). Between 5,000 and 8,000 children are estimated to have been put to death, mostly with injections of the barbiturate luminal, under its aegis.163
In July Hitler told Lammers, Bormann, and Dr Leonardo Conti (recently appointed Reich Health Leader and State Secretary for Health in the Reich Ministry of the Interior) that he favoured mercy-killing for seriously ill mental patients. Better use of hospitals, doctors, and nursing staff could be made in war, he stated. Conti was commissioned to investigate the feasibility of such a programme.164 By then, war was looming. Hitler’s own comments showed that he continued to see a ‘euthanasia programme’ in the context of war. By that time, too, Hitler had probably received the evaluation commissioned around the start of the year by Brack from Dr Joseph Mayer, Professor of Moral Theology at the University of Paderborn. Hitler had been uneasy about likely reaction of the Churches in the event of the introduction of a ‘euthanasia programme’. He imagined both the Catholic and Protestant Churches would outrightly oppose it. Mayer, who in 1927 had published a tract in favour of the legal sterilization of the mentally sick, was now asked to assess the attitude of the Catholic Church. He sided with the right of the state to take the lives of the mentally ill. Though this was against orthodox Catholic teaching, Mayer left the impression that unequivocal opposition from the Churches was not to be expected. This was the conclusion which Hitler apparently drew, following further discreet inquiry.165 The biggest internal obstacle to such a programme appeared to be surmountable. The programme could go ahead.
The organization, set up to deal with the ‘euthanasia’ of children, was to hand. Brack had heard indirectly of Hitler’s instructions to Conti at the July meeting.166 Spotting his chance, but needing to act without delay, if control were not to be lost to Conti and the Reich Ministry of the Interior, he had Hefelmann draw up a short statistical memorandum on the asylums and took it to Bouhler. The head of the Führer Chancellery had little difficulty in persuading Hitler to extend the authorization he had earlier granted to himself and Brandt to deal with the children’s ‘euthanasia’. It was in August 1939 that Hitler told Bouhler that he wanted the strictest secrecy maintained, and ‘a completely unbureaucratic solution of this problem’. The Reich Ministry of the Interior should be kept out of it as far as possible.167
Shortly after this, a sizeable number of doctors were summoned to a meeting in the Reich Chancellery to seek their views on such a programme. They were overwhelmingly in favour and ready to cooperate. They suggested that around 60,000 patients might be ‘eligible’.168 The number involved meant there was a serious problem about maintaining secrecy. Once more, camouflaged organizations were needed. Three were set up to distribute questionnaires to the asylums (the Reich Association of Asylums), handle personnel and finance matters (Community Foundation for the Care of Asylums), and organize transport (Community Patients’ Transport). They were based, under Brack’s direction, in an unpretentious villa in Berlin-Charlottenburg, Tiergartenstraße 4, from which the entire ‘euthanasia action’ drew its code-name ‘T4’. Apart from Bouhler, Brandt, and Brack the organization comprised 114 persons.169
Plainly, the construction of such an organization and the implementation of its gruesome task needed more than simply the verbal authorization that had sufficed for the children’s ‘euthanasia’ up to then. This is what prompted Hitler’s almost casual written authorization some weeks later, backdated (as we noted) to I September. This formless empowering, and the way the Führer Chancellery had been able, without the ministries of state even being informed, to expropriate control over a programme calculated to bring the deaths of tens of thousands in an action lacking any basis in law, is the clearest indication of how far internal structures of government had been deformed and superseded by executive agencies devoted to implementing what they saw as the will of the Führer. The cloak-and-dagger secrecy — some leading figures, including Brack, even worked with false names — highlighted the illegality of what was taking place.170 The regime had taken the step into outright criminality.
The medical staff of the asylums selected their own patients for inclusion in the ‘euthanasia action’. They, too, were ‘working towards the Führer’, whether or not this was their overt motivation. Patients included had their names marked with a red cross. Those to be spared had a blue ‘minus’ sign against their names.171 The killing, mostly by carbon monoxide gas administered by doctors under no compulsion to participate, was carried out in selected asylums, the most notorious of which were Grafeneck, Hadamar, Bernburg, Brandenburg, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein.172
Alongside the T4 ‘action’, the Gauleiter of Pomerania, Franz Schwede-Coburg, rapidly alerted to the new possibilities, worked closely with the SS in October 1939 to ‘clear’ the asylums near the coastal towns of Stralsund, Swinemünde, and Stettin to make space for ethnic Germans from the Baltic region (and for an SS barracks at Stralsund). Patients were removed from the asylums, transported to Neustadt, not far from Danzig, and shot by squads of SS men. Gauleiter Erich Koch was quick to follow suit, arranging to pay for the costs of ‘evacuating’ 1,558 patients from asylums in his Gau of East Prussia, liquidated by an SS squad provided by Wilhelm Koppe, newly appointed Police Chief in Gauleiter Arthur Greiser’s Reichsgau Posen. This was the ‘Sonderkommando Lange’, which was soon put to use in Greiser’s own Gau, deploying prototype mobile gas-vans to kill the mentally sick in this part of annexed Poland. By mid-1940, these regional ‘actions’ had claimed the lives of an estimated 10,000 victims.173
By the time ‘Aktion-T4’ was halted — as secretly as it had begun — in August 1941, the target-figure laid down by the doctors in the late summer had been surpassed. In the T4 ‘action’ alone by this date, between 70,000 and 90,000 patients are reckoned to have fallen victim to Hitler’s ‘euthanasia programme’.174 Since the killings were neither confined to the T4 ‘action’, nor ended with the halt to that ‘action’ in 1941, the total number of victims of Nazism’s drive to liquidate the mentally ill may have been close on double that number.175
Was there the will to halt the already advanced rupture of civilization and descent into modern barbarism that had so swiftly broken new ground since the start of the war? And even if there were the will, could anything be done?
Given Hitler’s outright dominance and unassailable position within the regime, significant change could by this time, autumn 1939, be brought about only through his deposition or assassination. This basic truth had been finally grasped the previous summer, during the Sudeten crisis, by those individuals in high-ranking places in the military, Foreign Ministry, and elsewhere close to the levers of power who had tentatively felt their way towards radical opposition to the regime. For long even some of these individuals had tended to exempt Hitler from the criticism they levelled at others, especially Himmler, Heydrich, and the Gestapo. But by now they were aware that without change at the very top, there would be no change at all. This realization started to forge tighter links between the disparate individuals and groups concerned. Oster, backed by his boss, the enigmatic Canaris, was the driving-force in making the Abwehr the centre of an oppositional network, building on the contacts made and relationships forged the previous summer. Oster placed his most trusted associate, and implacably opposed to Hitler, Lieutenant-Colonel Helmuth Groscurth, as liaison with Chief of Staff Haider at the headquarters of the Army High Command in Zossen, just south of Berlin. He encouraged Weizsäcker to appoint, as the Foreign Office’s liaison at army headquarters, another opponent of the regime, Rittmeister (Major in the Cavalry) Hasso von Etzdorf. This was probably done on the initiative of Erich Kordt, head of the Ministerial Bureau who continued, under Weizsäcker’s protection, to make the Foreign Office another centre of oppositional contacts, placing sympathizers (including his brother, Theo) in embassies abroad. Oster also appointed to his own staff another individual who would play an energetic role in extending and deepening oppositional contacts while officially gathering foreign intelligence: the able and well-connected lawyer Hans Doh-nanyi, for some years a close associate of Reich Justice Minister Gürtner, and who had helped clear former Commander-in-Chief of the Army Fritsch of the trumped-up charges of homosexual relations that had been laid against him. Dohnanyi would regularly drive Oster during autumn 1939 — dismal weeks for those opposed to Hitler — to see the man whom practically all who hoped to see an early end to the Nazi regime regarded as the patron of the oppositional groups, former Chief of the General Staff, Ludwig Beck.176 Gradually, something beginning to resemble a fundamental, conspiratorial resistance movement among, necessarily, existing or former ‘servants’ of the regime was in the process of emerging.177 The dilemma for those individuals, mostly national-conservative in inclination, patriots all, in contemplating the unseating of the head of state was great, and even more acute now that Germany was at war.
The autumn of 1939 would provide a crucial testing-time for the national-conservative resistance. In the end, they would resign themselves to failure. At the centre of their concern was not in the first instance the bestiality in Poland (though the detailed reports of the abominations there certainly served to cement oppositional feeling and the sense of urgency, both for moral reasons and out of a sense of national shame, at the need to be rid of Hitler and his henchmen who were responsible for such criminal acts).178 Nor was it the ‘euthanasia action’. Of the mass murder in the asylums they had not for months any real inkling. At any rate, it was not voiced as a matter of prime concern. The key issue for them, as it had been for two years or so, was the certainty that Hitler was leading Germany to catastrophe through engaging in war with the western powers. Preventing a calamitous attack on France and Britain, and ending the war, was vital. This issue came to a head in the autumn of 1939, when Hitler was determined to press on with an early attack on the West. But even before Hitler pulled back — because of poor weather conditions — from such a risky venture in the autumn and winter, then went on the following spring to gain unimaginable military successes in the western campaign, the fragility, weakness, and divisions of the nascent resistance had been fully laid bare. No attempt to remove Hitler had been made.179
Hitler could by late 1939 be brought down in only one of two ways: a coup d’état from above, meaning a strike from within the regime’s leadership from those with access to power and military might; or, something which the Dictator never ruled out, an assassination attempt from below, by a maverick individual operating entirely alone, outside any of the known — by now tiny, fragmented, and utterly powerless — left-wing underground resistance groups which could so easily be infiltrated by the Gestapo.180 While generals and leading civil servants pondered whether they might act, but lacked the will and determination to do so, one man with no access to the corridors of power, no political links, and no hard-and-fast ideology, a Swabian joiner by the name of Georg Elser, did act. In early November 1939 Elser would come closer to destroying Hitler than anyone until July 1944. Only luck would save the Dictator on this occasion. And Elser’s motives, built on the naïvety of elemental feeling rather than arising from the tortured consciences of the better-read and more knowledgeable, would mirror not the interests of those in high places but, without doubt, concerns of countless ordinary Germans at the time. We will return to them shortly.
For Hitler, the swift and comprehensive demolition of Poland did not signal a victory to sit upon and await developments. Certainly, he hoped that the West, having now witnessed the might of the Wehrmacht in action, would — from his point of view — see sense, and come to terms with Germany. The peace feelers that he put out in September and October were couched in this vein. As Weizsäcker — reckoning the chances of peace to be no higher than 20 per cent — put it early in October, summarizing what he understood as Hitler’s desired outcome, in the somewhat unlikely event that London might agree to a settlement at the expense of Poland, Germany ‘would be spared the awkward decision on how England could be militarily forced down’.181 The western powers had done absolutely nothing militarily to help Poland.182 Perhaps they could now be persuaded to accept the fait accompli, agree to a relatively generous victor’s peace, and end the war, giving him the return of former German colonies and, especially, the free hand in the east that he had always demanded.183 Had the western powers complied with such proposals — and further overtures to Britain would be made during 1940 — it would merely have deferred the inevitable conflict that Hitler had reckoned with since 1937. As it was, Hitler, though his overtures were serious enough, had few expectations that Britain would show interest in a settlement, particularly once the British cabinet had announced that it was preparing for a war that would last at least three years. He was sure that the western powers would try to hold out as long as possible, until their armaments programmes were complete.184 That would mark a danger-point for Germany. Though — a view not shared by his generals — he held the French military in some contempt, he had a high esteem of British resilience and fighting-power.185 And behind the British, there was always the threat (which at this time he did not rate highly) that in due course the Americans would intervene. So there was no time to lose. On the very day after his return to Berlin, with the shells still raining down on Warsaw, Hitler told his military leaders to prepare for an attack on the West that very autumn.186
‘Militarily,’ he declared, ‘time, especially in the psychological and material sense, works against us.’ Victory over Poland had brought a growth in prestige. But, he went on, ‘all historical successes come to nothing when they are not continued’. Meanwhile, Germany’s enemies were improving their military capacity. If they were to reach the borders of the Reich, it would be too late for a counter-attack. They could destroy the Ruhr. ‘Therefore, no delay until the enemy arrives, but, should peaceful efforts fail, direct assault in the West.’ He derided the French who, he said, ‘have less value than the Poles’. The British, however, ‘are deciders’. It was, therefore, ‘essential that immediate plans for an attack against France be prepared’. The defeat of France, it was plainly inferred, would force Britain to terms. Hitler brought out obvious objections to an early strike. The rainy season would arrive within a few weeks. The air-force would be better in spring. ‘But we cannot wait,’ he insisted. If a settlement with Chamberlain were not possible, he would ‘smash the enemy until he collapses’. The goal was ‘to bring England to its knees; to destroy France’.187 His favoured time for carrying out the attack was the end of October.188 The Commanders-in-Chief — even Göring — were taken aback. But none protested. Hitler casually threw his notes into the fire when he had finished speaking.189
Two days later, Hitler told Rosenberg that he would propose a major peace conference (together with an armistice and demobilization) to regulate all matters rationally. Rosenberg asked whether he intended to prosecute the war in the West. ‘Naturally,’ replied Hitler. The Maginot Line, Rosenberg recorded him saying, was no longer a deterrent. If the English did not want peace, he would attack them with all means available ‘and annihilate (vernichten) them’ — again, his favourite phrase.190
Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag on 6 October indeed held out, as he had indicated to Rosenberg, the prospect of a conference of the leading nations to settle Europe’s problems of peace and security.191 But a starting-point was that the division of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union was to remain. There would be no re-creation of the Poland of the Versailles settlement.192 It would be peace on Hitler’s terms, with no concessions on what he had won. He painted a lurid picture of death and destruction if the western powers should decline his ‘offer’. He blamed the warmongering on ‘a certain Jewish-international capitalism and journalism’, implying in particular Churchill and his supporters.193 If Churchill’s view should prevail, he concluded, then Germany would fight. Riding one of his main hobby-horses, he added: A November 1918 will never be repeated in German history.’194 The speech amounted to an olive-branch clenched in a mailed fist.
Hitler’s ‘offer’ was dismissed by Chamberlain in a speech in the House of Commons six days later.195 It was what Hitler had expected. He had not waited. On the very day of his Reichstag speech, he stressed to Brauchitsch and Haider that a decisive move in the north-west was necessary to prevent a French advance that autumn through Belgium, threatening the Ruhr.196 Two days later Brauchitsch was informed that Hitler had provisionally set 25 November as the date of attack.197 One general, Colonel-General Ritter von Leeb, noted in his diary that day that there was evidently a serious intent to carry out ‘this mad attack’, breaching the neutrality of Holland, Belgium, and Luxemburg, which meant that the Reichstag speech had been ‘merely lying to the German people’.198 On this same day, 9 October, Hitler completed a lengthy memorandum that he had worked on for two nights, outlining and justifying his plans for an attack on the West. He had specifically prepared it because of his awareness of opposition to the idea in the army leadership.199 Again, he emphasized that time was of the essence. The attack could not begin soon enough. The aim was the complete military defeat of the western powers.200 He read out the memorandum at a meeting with his military leaders on 10 October.201 Its contents were embodied in ‘Directive No.6 for the Conduct of War’ issued later that day (though dated 9 October), stating Hitler’s determination ‘without letting much time pass by’ to take offensive action.202
When Hitler heard on 12 October of Chamberlain’s rejection of his ‘peace offer’, he made no effort — as Weizsäcker thought might still have been possible — to probe for feasible openings to defuse the situation, but lost no time in announcing, even without waiting for the full text of Chamberlain’s speech, that Britain had spurned the hand of peace and that, consequently, the war continued.203 On 16 October Hitler told Brauchitsch he had given up hope of coming to an agreement with the West. ‘The British,’ he said, ‘will be ready to talk only after defeats. We must get at them as quickly as possible.’ He reckoned with a date between 15 and 20 November.204 Within a matter of days, Hitler had brought this date forward and now fixed ‘Case Yellow’, as the attack on the West had been code-named, for 12 November.205
Speaking to his generals, Hitler confined himself largely to military objectives. To his trusted circle, and to Party leaders, he was more expressive. Goebbels found him high in confidence on 11 October. Germany’s defeat in the last war, he stated, was solely attributable to treachery. This time traitors would not be spared.206 He responded to Chamberlain’s dismissal of his ‘peace offer’ by stating that he was glad that he could now ‘go for England’ (‘gegen England losgehern’). He had given up almost all hope of peace. ‘The English will have to learn the hard way,’ he stated.207
He was in similar mood when he addressed the Reichs — and Gauleiter in a two-hour speech on 21 October. He reckoned war with the West was unavoidable. There was no other choice. But at its end would be ‘the great and all-embracing (umfassende) German people’s Reich (Volksreich)’208 He would, Hitler told his Party leaders, unleash his major assault on the West — and on England itself — within a fortnight or so. He would use all methods available, including attacks on cities. After defeating England and France he would again turn to the East. Then — an allusion to the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages — he would create a Germany as of old, incorporating Belgium and Switzerland.209 Hitler was evidently still thinking along such lines when he told Goebbels a few days later he had earmarked Burgundy for the resettlement of the South Tyroleans. ‘He’s already distributing French provinces,’ noted the Propaganda Minister. ‘He hurries far ahead of all steps of development. Just like every genius.’210
On 6 November Goebbels was again listening to Hitler’s views on the war. ‘He’s of the opinion that England has to get a knock-out blow. That’s right. England’s power is now simply a myth, not a reality any longer. All the more reason why it must be smashed. Before then there will be no peace in the world. The military say we’re not ready. But no army will ever be ready. That’s not the point. It’s a question of being more ready than the others. And that’s the case… The strike against the western powers will not have to wait much longer.’ ‘Perhaps,’ added Goebbels, ‘the Führer will succeed sooner than we all think in annulling the Peace of Westphalia. With that his historic life will be crowned.’211 Goebbels thought the decision to go ahead was imminent.212
All the signs are that the pressure for an early strike against the West came directly from Hitler, without initiation or prompting from other quarters. That it received the support of Goebbels and the Party leadership was axiomatic. Within the military, as Goebbels’s comments hinted, it was a different matter. Hitler could reckon with the backing — or at least lack of objection — of Raeder, Commander-in-Chief of the Navy.213 And whatever his private anxieties, Göring would never deviate in public from Hitler’s line.214 But, as Hitler recognized, the decision to attack the West already in the autumn set him once more on a collision course with the army leadership, spearheaded by Brauchitsch and Haider. On 14 October, primed by Weiz-säcker about Hitler’s reaction to Chamberlain’s speech rejecting his ‘peace offer’, the head of the army and his Chief of Staff met to discuss the consequences. Haider noted three possibilities: attack, wait, ‘fundamental changes’. None offered prospects of decisive success, least of all the last one ‘since it is essentially negative and tends to render us vulnerable’.215 The qualifying remarks were made by Brauchitsch. The weak, ultra-cautious, and tradition-bound Commander-in-Chief of the army could not look beyond conventional attempts to dissuade Hitler from what he thought was a disastrous course of action. But he was evidently responding to a suggestion floated by Haider, following his discussions with Weizsäcker the previous day, to have Hitler arrested at the moment of the order for attack on the West.216 The cryptic third possibility signified then no less than the extraordinary fact that in the early stages of a major war the two highest representatives of the army were airing the possibility of a form of coup d’état involving the removal of Hitler as head of state.217
The differences between the two army leaders were nonetheless wide. And nothing flowed from the discussion in the direction of an embryonic plan to unseat Hitler. Brauchitsch attempted, within the bounds of orthodoxy, to have favoured generals such as Reichenau and Rundstedt try to influence Hitler to change his mind — a fruitless enterprise.218 Haider went further. By early November he was, if anything, still more convinced that direct action against Hitler was necessary to prevent the imminent catastrophe. In this, his views were coming to correspond with the small numbers of radical opponents of the regime in the Foreign Ministry and in the Abwehr who were now actively contemplating measures to remove Hitler.219
In the last weeks of October various notions of deposing Hitler — often unrealistic or scarcely thought through — were furtively pondered by the tiny, disparate, only loosely connected oppositional groups. Goerdeler and his main contacts — Hassell, Beck, and Popitz — were one such cluster, weighing up for a time whether a transitional government headed by Göring (whose reluctance to engage in war with Britain was known to them) might be an option.220 This cluster, through Beck, forged loose links with the group based in the Abwehr — Oster, Dohnanyi, Gisevius, and Groscurth. The latter worked out a plan of action for a coup, involving the arrest of Hitler (perhaps declaring him mentally ill), along with Himmler, Heydrich, Ribbentrop, Göring, Goebbels, and other leading Nazis.221 Encouraged by their chief, Admiral Canaris, and driven on by Oster, the Abwehr group attempted, though with little success, to gain backing for their ideas from selected officers at General Staff headquarters in Zossen. Their ambivalence about Haider meant that they did not approach him directly. Moreover, they knew nothing of the thoughts he had aired to Brauchitsch on 14 October.222 A third set of individuals sharing the view that Hitler had to be removed and war with the West prevented centred on Weizsäcker in the Foreign Ministry, and was chiefly represented by Erich Kordt, who was able to utilize his position as head of Ribbentrop’s Ministerial Bureau to foster contacts at home and abroad.223 As we have noted, this grouping had contact to the Abwehr group and to known sympathizers in the General Staff — mainly staff officers, though at this point not Haider himself — through Weizsäcker’s army liaison, Legation Secretary Hasso von Etzdorf.224
Haider himself (and his most immediate friend and subordinate General Otto von Stülpnagel) came round to the idea of a putsch by the end of the month, after Hitler had confirmed his intention of a strike on 12 November.225 Haider sent Stülpnagel to take surreptitious soundings among selected generals about their likely response to a coup. The findings were not encouraging. While army-group commanders such as Bock and Rundstedt were opposed to an offensive against the West, they rejected the idea of a putsch, partly on the grounds that they were themselves unsure whether they would retain the backing of their subordinate officers. In addition, Haider established to his own satisfaction, based on a ‘sample’ of public opinion drawn from the father of his chauffeur and a few others, that the German people supported Hitler and were not ready for a putsch.226 Haider’s hesitancy reflected his own deep uncertainty about the moral as well as security aspect of a strike against the head of state and supreme commander of the armed forces. Others took a bolder stance. But, though loosely bonded through parallel thoughts of getting rid of Hitler, the different oppositional clusters had no coherent, unified, and agreed plan for action. Nor, while now accepting Haider’s readiness to act, was there full confidence in the determination of the Chief of Staff, on whom practically everything depended, to see it through.227
This was the position around noon on 5 November when Brauchitsch nervously made his way through the corridors of the Reich Chancellery to confront Hitler directly about the decision to attack the West. If the attack were to go ahead on schedule on 12 November, the order to make operational preparations had to be confirmed to the Supreme Commander of the Army by 1p.m. on the fifth. Among the oppositional groups, the hope was that Brauchitsch could finally be persuaded to go along with a putsch if Hitler, as was to be expected, held firm to his decision for an attack. Haider waited in the ante-room while Brauchitsch and Hitler conferred together. Keitel joined them some while later. The meeting was a fiasco. It lasted no longer than twenty minutes. Brauchitsch hesitantly began to tell Hitler that preparations were not sufficiently advanced for an offensive against the West which, therefore, had every chance of proving catastrophic. He went on to back up his argument by pointing out that the infantry had shown morale and technical weaknesses in the attack on Poland, and that the discipline of officers and men had often been lacking. The Front showed similar symptoms to those of 1917–18, he claimed. This was a bad mistake by Brauchitsch. It diverted from the main issue, and, as Brauchitsch could have anticipated, it provoked Hitler into a furious outburst. He wanted concrete evidence, he fumed, and demanded to know how many death-sentences had been carried out. He did not believe Brauchitsch, and would fly the next night to the Front to see for himself. Then he dismissed Brauchitsch’s main point. The army was unprepared, he asserted, because it did not want to fight. The weather would still be bad in the spring — and furthermore bad for the enemy too. He knew the ‘spirit of Zossen’, he raged, and would destroy it. Almost shaking with anger, Hitler marched out of the room, slamming the door, leaving the head of the army speechless, trembling, face as white as chalk, and broken.228
‘Any sober discussion of these things is impossible with him,’ Haider commented, in something of an understatement.229 But for Haider the impact of the meeting went further. Talk of destroying the ‘spirit of Zossen’ suggested to the Chief of Staff that Hitler knew of the plot to unseat him. The Gestapo could turn up in Zossen any time. Haider returned in panic to his headquarters and ordered the destruction of all papers relating to the conspiracy.230 Next day he told Groscurth that the attack in the West would be carried out. There was nothing to be done. ‘Very depressing impression,’ recorded Groscurth.231
Hitler had given the order for the offensive at 1.30p.m. on 5 November, soon after his interview with Brauchitsch.232 Two days later the attack was postponed because of poor weather.233 But the chance to strike against Hitler had been lost. The circumstances would not be as favourable for several years. The order for the attack, meant to be the moment to undertake the proposed coup, had come and gone. Brauchitsch, badly shaken by his audience with Hitler, had indicated that he would do nothing, though would not try to hinder a putsch. Canaris, approached by Haider, was disgusted at the suggestion that he should instigate Hitler’s assassination. Other than this suggestion that someone else might take over responsibility for the dirty work, Haider now did little. The moment had passed. He gradually pulled back from the opposition’s plans. In the end, he lacked the will, determination, and courage to act. The Abwehr group did not give up. But they acknowledged diminishing prospects of success. Oster’s soundings with Witzleben, then with Leeb, Bock, and Rundstedt, produced mixed results.234 The truth was that the army was divided. Some generals opposed Hitler. But there were more who backed him. And below the high command, there were junior officers, let alone the rank-and-file, whose reactions to any attempt to stop Hitler dead in his tracks were uncertain. Throughout the conflict with the army leadership, Hitler continued to hold the whip-hand. And he had not yielded in the slightest. Despite repeated postponements because of bad weather — twenty-nine in all — he had not cancelled his offensive against the West.235 Divisions, distrust, fragmentation, but above all a lack of resolve had prevented the oppositional groups — especially the key figures in the military — from acting.
The plotters in the Abwehr, Foreign Ministry, and General Staff head-quarters were as astonished as all other Germans when they heard of an attack on Hitler’s life that had taken place in the Bürgerbräukeller on the evening of 8 November 1939. They thought it might have come from someone within their own ranks, or been carried out by dissident Nazis, or some other set of opponents — Communists, clerics, or ‘reactionaries’ — and that Hitler had been tipped off in time.236 In fact, Hitler, sitting in the compartment of his special train and discussing with Goebbels how the showdown with the clergy would have to await the end of the war, was wholly unaware of what had happened until his journey to Berlin was interrupted at Nuremberg with the news. His first reaction was that the report must be wrong.237 According to Goebbels, he thought it was a ‘hoax’ (‘Mystifikatiorn’).238 The official version was soon put out that the British Secret Service was behind the assassination attempt, and that the perpetrator was ‘a creature’ of Otto Strasser.239 The capture next day of the British agents Major R.H. Stevens and Captain S. Payne Best on the Dutch border was used by propaganda to underpin this far-fetched interpretation.240
The truth was less elaborate — but all the more stunning. The attempt had been carried out by a single person, an ordinary German, a man from the working class, acting without the help or knowledge of anyone else.241 Where generals had hesitated, he had tried to blow up Hitler to save Germany and Europe from even greater disaster.
His name was George Elser. He was a joiner from Königsbronn in Württemberg.242 At the time that he attempted to kill Hitler he was thirty-six years old, small in stature, with dark, wavy hair brushed back. Those who knew him — they were not many — thought well of him. He was a loner with few friends — quiet, reserved, industrious, and a perfectionist in his work. He had little education to speak of, did not read books, and scarcely bothered with newspapers. Even in the days immediately preceding his assassination attempt, he took so little interest in the news that he did not realize that because of the pressing business of the war — these were, as we have seen, precisely the days when the decision for the western offensive was taken, then rescinded — Hitler had pulled out of giving his usual address to the ‘Old Fighters’ on the anniversary of the Beerhall Putsch, and was to be replaced by Heß. The bomb-attack would, therefore, have been unnecessary. But Elser knew nothing of this, nor of Hitler’s decision then to give the speech after all. Elser was, remarkably enough, not really interested in politics. He took no part in political discussions, and was not ideologically well-versed. He had, it is true, joined the Communist Roter Frontkämpferbund (Red Front Fighters’ League), and had been a member of the woodworkers’ union, but he had taken an active role in neither. Before 1933 he had supported the KPD in elections, but because in his view it stood for improving the lot of the working classes, not on account of an ideological programme. After 1933 he said he had observed the deterioration in the living-standard of the working class, and restrictions on its freedom. He noticed the anger among workers at the regime. He took part in discussions with workmates about poor conditions, and shared their views. He also shared their anxieties about the coming war which they all expected in the autumn of 1938. After the Munich Agreement he remained convinced, he said, ‘that Germany would make further demands of other countries and annex other countries and that therefore a war would be unavoidable’. Prompted by no one, he began to be obsessed by ways of improving the condition of workers and preventing war. He concluded that only the ‘elimination’ (Beseitigung) of the regime’s leadership — by which he meant Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels — would bring this about. The idea would not leave him. In autumn 1938 he decided that he himself would undertake ‘the elimination of the leadership’.243
He read in the newspapers that the next gathering of Party leaders would be in the Bürgerbräukeller in early November and travelled to Munich to assess the possibilities for what he had in mind. The security problems were not great. (Security for the events was left to the Party, not to the police.) He worked out that the best method would be to place a time-bomb in the pillar behind the dais where Hitler would stand. During the next months he stole explosives from the armaments factory where he was currently working, and designed the mechanism for his time-bomb. In early April he travelled again from Königsbronn to Munich and returned to the Bürgerbräukeller. This time he reconnoitred more carefully, making detailed sketches and taking precise measurements. His new work, at a quarry, now enabled him to steal dynamite. In the next weeks he constructed a model of the bomb in the most minute detail and carried out a practical test with the exploding mechanism in his parents’ garden. At the beginning of August he returned to Munich. Between then and early November he hid over thirty times during the night in the Bürgerbräukeller, working on hollowing out a cavity in the selected pillar and leaving by a side-door early next morning. So meticulous was he that he even lined the cavity with tin to prevent any hollow sound, should anyone tap on the pillar, or damage the bomb-mechanism by nailing up decorations. The bomb was in place, and set, by 6 November. Elser was leaving nothing to chance. He returned on the night of 7 November to make sure it was functioning properly. He pressed his ear to the side of the pillar, and heard the ticking. Nothing had gone wrong. Next morning he left Munich for Konstanz, en route — as he thought — to Switzerland, and safety.244
That evening, as always on 8 November, the ‘Old Guard’ of the Party assembled. Hitler had announced the previous day that he would, after all, give his annual address.245 Usually, this lasted from about 8.30p.m. until about ten o’clock. It had already been announced that, in the circumstances of the war, this year’s meeting would begin earlier and that the two-day commemoration of the Putsch would be shortened.246 Hitler began his speech soon after his arrival in the Bürgerbräukeller, at 8.10p.m., and finished at 9.07p.m. The speech itself was one long tirade against Britain, highly sarcastic in tone, well tailored to his raucous audience of Party fanatics.247 Hitler normally spent some time after his speech chatting to the Movement’s ‘Old Fighters’. This time, escorted by a good number of Party bigwigs, he left immediately for the station to take the 9.31p.m. train back to Berlin.248
At twenty past nine the pillar immediately behind the dais where Hitler had stood minutes earlier, and part of the roof directly above, were ripped apart by Elser’s bomb. Eight persons were killed in the blast, a further sixty-three injured, sixteen of them seriously.249 Hitler had been gone no more than ten minutes when the bomb went off.
He attributed his salvation to the work of ‘Providence’ — a sign that he was to fulfil the task destiny had laid out for him.250 In its headline on 10 November, the Völkischer Beobachter called it ‘the miraculous salvation of the Führer’.251 There was, in fact, nothing providential or miraculous about it. It was pure luck. Hitler’s reasons for returning without delay to Berlin were genuine enough. The decision to attack the West had been temporarily postponed on 7 November, with a final decision set for the 9th. Hitler had to be back in the Reich Chancellery by then. It was more important than reminiscing about old times with Party stalwarts in the Bürgerbräukeller.252 Elser could have known nothing about the reasons for the curtailment of Hitler’s quick trip to Munich. It was mere chance that the Swabian joiner did not succeed where the generals had failed even to mount an attempt. Whether the generals would then have acted, had Elser’s attempt been successful, and once the main object of their putsch plans had been removed, is open to question. But with Elser’s failure, the possibility of more ‘moderate’ forces taking over and pulling back from the brink of all-out war with the West had gone.
Elser himself was already under arrest at the customs post near Konstanz when the bomb went off. He had been picked up trying to cross the Swiss border illegally. It seemed a routine arrest. Only some hours after the explosion did the border officials begin to realize that the contents of Georg Elser’s pockets, including a postcard of the Bürgerbräukeller, linked him with the assassination attempt on Hitler. On 14 November, Elser confessed. A few days later he gave a full account of his actions, and the motives behind them. He was interned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and treated, remarkably, as a privileged prisoner. Probably Hitler, who continued to believe that Elser was the front-man of an international conspiracy, intended a post-war show-trial to incriminate the British Secret Service. At the end of 1944 or in early 1945 Elser was brought to Dachau. There was to be no show-trial. With the war as good as lost, Elser had no more value to the regime. Shortly before the Americans liberated Dachau, he was taken out and killed.253
Elser had acted alone. But the concerns which had motivated him — worries about living-standards, anxieties about extending the war — were widespread in the autumn of 1939. Reports abounded of unrest in the working class around that time. The War Economy Decree of 4 September had brought an instant worsening of living standards, higher taxes, abolition of higher rates for overtime and weekend work, and other restrictions. A wage-freeze had followed.254 Industrial indiscipline, including absenteeism and refusal of overtime, eventually forced the regime to back down.255 But longer hours, rises in food prices, and an acute coal shortage affected the poorer in society most of all that autumn. And for those stepping out of line, increased police presence in factories was a constant reminder of the threat of the labour camp.256
Euphoria over the victory in Poland had soon faded. Alongside the daily worries were those of an extension of the war. The ‘Phoney War’ (as American journalists dubbed the autumn and winter months of 1939—40), with no action from the West, raised hopes. Above all else most people wanted the war to be over. In his anxieties about the war, Elser spoke for many. He was on far less sure ground with his attribution of blame for the war to the Nazi leadership. The signs are that propaganda had been successful in persuading most ordinary Germans that the western powers were to blame for the prolongation of a war which Hitler had done all he could to avoid.257 Whatever criticisms — and they were many and bitter — people had of the Party and the regime, Hitler still retained his massive popularity. The view of one Munich upper-class conservative, antagonized above all by the assault on Christianity, that there was no one in the city who did not regret the failure of Elser’s attempt, was no more than wishful thinking.258 Few would have applauded a successful assassination attempt. Vast numbers would have been appalled. The chances of a backlash, and a new ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend, would have been great. As it was, the failure of the attempt brought, as could be expected, a new, great upsurge of support for Hitler, accompanied by feelings of intense hatred for Britain, held to be behind the bomb-attack. Not only internal reports stressed that ‘the devotion to the Führer has deepened still further’.259 The underground opponents of the regime also acknowledged that Elser’s bomb had brought a ‘strengthening of determination’. People were saying that if the attempt had been successful it would have resulted in internal confusion, benefit to Germany’s enemies, loss of the war, worse misery than was caused by Versailles, and the upturning of everything achieved since 1933.260
Hitler’s hold over Germany was as strong as ever. The failure of those in positions of power to move against him and the repercussions of Elser’s bomb-attack demonstrated that his authority was unchallengeable from within the regime’s élites and that he was still immensely popular with the masses. He played on this latter point when he addressed a gathering of around 200 commanding generals and other senior Wehrmacht officers in the Reich Chancellery at noon on 23 November.
Hitler’s speech was remarkable for its frankness. In the light of the conflict with the army leadership in the previous weeks, its aim was to convince the generals of the need to attack the West without delay. First of all he paraded before his audience the successes of the previous years. Then he came to the conflict with Poland. He was, he said, reproached that he wanted to ‘fight and fight again’. His next words represented the core of his philosophy: ‘In fighting (Kampf) I see the fate of all creatures. Nobody can avoid fighting if he does not want to go under.’261 This led him into the struggle for Lebensraum. Again reiterating words which he had repeatedly preached in the late 1920s, he was adamant: ‘Solution only with the sword.’ The people lacking the strength to fight must yield. The struggle now, he went on, was different than it had been 100 years earlier. ‘Today we can speak of a racial struggle.’ This had a self-evident material dimension. It was a struggle, he added, for oil-fields, rubber, and mineral wealth.262
He went on to review the strategic position. Germany no longer faced a war on two fronts. The West front stood open. But no one knew for how long. He had long pondered whether to strike in the East first, then in the West. ‘Basically I did not organize the armed forces in order not to strike. The decision to strike was always in me.’263 The Polish front could now be held by a few divisions — something long held scarcely attainable. The question was how long Germany could sustain the position in the West. He spoke openly of future policy towards the Soviet Union. Russia, he stated, was currently not dangerous, and was preoccupied with the Baltic. ‘We can oppose Russia only when we are free in the West. Further, Russia is seeking to increase her influence in the Balkans and is striving toward the Persian Gulf. That is also the goal of our foreign policy.’264 He moved on to Italy. There, he said, everything depended on Mussolini. ‘Italy will not attack until Germany has taken the offensive against France. Just as the death of Stalin, so the death of the Duce can bring danger to us.’ ‘How easily the death of a statesman can come about,’ he remarked with reference to Elser’s near-miss: ‘I have myself experienced that recently.’265 After his tour d’horizon he reached the characteristic conclusion: ‘Everything is determined by the fact that the moment is favourable now; in six months it might not be so any more.’266
He turned to his own role. ‘As the last factor I must in all modesty describe my own person: irreplaceable. Neither a military man nor a civilian could replace me. Attempts at assassination may be repeated. I am convinced of my powers of intellect and of decision. Wars are always ended only by the annihilation of the opponent. Anyone who believes differently is irresponsible. Time is working for our adversaries. Now there is a relationship of forces which can never be more propitious for us, but which can only deteriorate. The enemy will not make peace when the relationship of forces is unfavourable for us. No compromises. Hardness towards ourselves. I shall strike and not capitulate. The fate of the Reich depends only on me.’267
He underlined Germany’s military superiority over Britain and France. He flattered the armed forces’ leadership that it was better than that of 1914. But there was unmistakable criticism of army leaders. While there was express praise for the navy, the Luftwaffe, and the army’s achievements in Poland, Hitler — in a barbed comment directed straight at Brauchitsch — remarked that he could not ‘bear to hear people say the army is not in good order. Everything lies in the hands of the military leader. I can do anything with the German soldier if he is well led.’268
Internal conditions also favoured an early strike, he went on. Revolution from within was impossible. And behind the army stood the strongest armaments industry in the world. But Germany had an Achilles’ heel: the Ruhr. An advance by Britain and France through Belgium and Holland would imperil the Reich. Once the French army had marched into Belgium it would be too late.269 He put forward another argument for breaching Dutch and Belgian neutrality. Laying mines off the English coast to bring about a blockade could only be done through occupation of Belgium and Holland. He compared himself — as he would do throughout the war — with Frederick the Great. ‘Prussia owes its rise to the heroism of one man. Even there,’ Hitler declared, an aside aimed at his army leaders, ‘the closest advisers were disposed to capitulation. Everything depended on Frederick the Great.’270 Hitler said he was now gambling all he had achieved on victory. At stake was who was to dominate Europe in the future.271 His decision was unalterable, Hitler went on. ‘I shall attack France and England at the most favourable and earliest moment. Breach of the neutrality of Belgium and Holland is of no importance. No one will question that when we have won… I consider it possible to end the war only by means of an attack… The whole thing means the end of the World War, not just a single action. It is a matter of not just a single question but of the existence or non-existence of the nation.’272 Hitler demanded that the ‘spirit of determination’ be passed on to the lower ranks.273
His final point was the psychological readiness of the German people. He would return to stress this five years later when justifying to his generals the need to go to war in 1939. At that time he would say it was impossible to preserve enthusiasm and readiness for self-sacrifice as if it could be corked up in a bottle.274 This was not merely a retrospective reflection. With an eye on the possible deterioration of the backing he had from the German people, he now told the military: ‘I want to annihilate the enemy. Behind me stands the German people, whose morale can only grow worse.’275 Here, too, Hitler saw no possibility of waiting. Time was not on Germany’s side. Hitler ended with a rhetorical flourish — and with a prophecy: ‘If we come through this struggle victoriously — and we shall come through it — our time will go down in the history of our people. I shall stand or fall in this struggle. I shall never survive the defeat of my people. No capitulation to the outside, no revolution from within.’276
That evening, at 6p.m., Hitler summoned Brauchitsch and Haider to see him. He berated them once more with the failings of the army leadership, threatening to root out the ‘spirit of Zossen’ and crush any opposition from the General Staff. Brauchitsch offered his resignation. Hitler refused it. Brauchitsch, he said, should do his duty.277 Hitler had no need to go further. His speech earlier in the day, with its scarcely veiled criticism of army leaders set against praise for the Luftwaffe and navy, and its threats to destroy any opposing him, had offended some generals. But it had cowed them. None had protested at what Hitler had said. Afterwards, they complained in private but only Guderian could be prevailed upon to voice, and then in mild terms, a few days later their disquiet at Hitler’s evident distrust. The radicals in the opposition had meanwhile given up on Haider. And Brauchitsch had been reduced to a withdrawn depressive, prepared to take Hitler’s insults and still accept responsibility for the western offensive that he inwardly opposed.278
Hitler had been right in his speech: no revolution could be expected from within. Heydrich’s police-state ruled that out. But it was not only a matter of repression. Alongside the ruthlessness of the regime towards internal opponents stood the widespread basic consensus reaching across most of society behind much of what the regime had undertaken and, in particular, what were taken to be the remarkable achievements of Hitler himself. This was embodied in the extraordinary adulation of the Leader. Hitler enjoyed a level of popularity exceeded by no other political leader at the time. He was correct in saying that he had the German people — certainly an overwhelming majority of the German people — behind him. This had strengthened him inordinately in his conflicts with the army, and had weakened the resolve of oppositional groups on many occasions. By the end of 1939 his supremacy was assured. Elser’s bomb had merely brought a renewed demonstration of his popularity. Meanwhile, the internal opposition was resigned to being unable to act. The navy and Luftwaffe were behind Hitler. The army leadership would, whatever its reservations, fulfil its duty. The division of the generals, coupled with their pronounced sense of duty even when they held a course of action to be disastrous, was Hitler’s strength.
Nothing could stop the western offensive. Hitler was by now obsessed with ‘beating England’.279 It was purely a matter of when, not if, the attack on the West would take place. After further short-term postponements, the last of them in mid-January, on 16 January 1940 Hitler finally put it off until the spring.280
The war was set to continue, and to widen. Also set to escalate was the barbarism that was an intrinsic part of it. At home the killings in the asylums were mounting into a full-scale programme of mass murder. In Poland, the grandiose resettlement schemes presided over by Himmler and Heydrich were seeing the brutal uprooting and deportation of tens of thousands of Poles and Jews into the ‘dumping-ground’ of the General Government.281 Not least, the centre-point of the ‘racial cleansing’ mania, the ‘removal’ of the Jews, was farther from solution than ever now that over 2 million Polish Jews had fallen into the hands of the Nazis. In December Goebbels reported to Hitler on his recent visit to Poland. The Führer, he recorded, listened carefully to his account and agreed with his views on the ‘Jewish and Polish question’. ‘The Jewish danger must be banished from us. But in a few generations it will reappear. There’s no panacea.’282
Evidently, no ‘complete solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’ was yet in sight. The constant quest to find such a ‘panacea’ by Nazi underlings working directly or indirectly ‘towards the Führer’ would nevertheless ensure that, in the conquered and subjugated territories of the east, a ‘solution’ would gradually begin to emerge before long.