The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

A History of Nazi Germany

William L. Shirer

Copyright

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Copyright © 1961, renewed 1989 by William L. Shirer

Cover art to the electronic edition copyright © 2011 by RosettaBooks, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or

mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from

the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Electronic edition published 2011 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.

ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795317002

I have often a bitter sorrow at the thought of the German people, which is so estimable in the individual

and so wretched in the generality…

—Goethe

Hitler was the fate of Germany and this fate could not be stayed.

—Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, Commander in Chief of the German

Army, 1938–41

A thousand years will pass and the guilt of Germany will not be erased.

—Hans Frank, Governor General of Poland, before he was hanged at Nuremberg

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it.

—Santayana

Contents

Foreword

Book One: The Rise of Adolf Hitler

1. Birth of the Third Reich

2. Birth of the Nazi Party

3. Versailles, Weimar and the Beer Hall Putsch

4. The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich

Book Two: Triumph and Consolidation

5. The Road to Power: 1925–31

6. The Last Days of the Republic: 1931–33

7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34

8. Life in the Third Reich: 1933–37

Book Three: The Road to War

9. The First Steps: 1934–37

10. Strange, Fateful Interlude: The Fall of Blomberg, Fritsch, Neurath and

Schacht

11. Anschluss: The Rape of Austria

12. The Road to Munich

13. Czechoslovakia Ceases to Exist

14. The Turn of Poland

15. The Nazi-Soviet Pact

16. The Last Days of Peace

17. The Launching of World War II

Book Four: War: Early Victories and the Turning Point

18. The Fall of Poland

19. Sitzkrieg in the West

20. The Conquest of Denmark and Norway

21. Victory in the West

22. Operation Sea Lion: The Thwarted Invasion of Britain

23. Barbarossa: The Turn of Russia

24. A Turn of the Tide

25. The Turn of the United States

26. The Great Turning Point: 1942—Stalingrad and El Alamein

Book Five: Beginning of the End

27. The New Order

28. The Fall of Mussolini

29. The Allied Invasion of Western Europe and the Attempt to Kill Hitler

Book Six: The Fall of the Third Reich

30. The Conquest of Germany

31. Goetterdaemmerung: The Last Days of the Third Reich

A Brief Epilogue

Afterword

Notes

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Index

FOREWORD

THOUGH I LIVED and worked in the Third Reich during the first half of its brief

life, watching at first hand Adolf Hitler consolidate his power as dictator of this

great but baffling nation and then lead it off to war and conquest, this personal

experience would not have led me to attempt to write this book had there not

occurred at the end of World War II an event unique in history.

This was the capture of most of the confidential archives of the German

government and all its branches, including those of the Foreign Office, the Army

and Navy, the National Socialist Party and Heinrich Himmler’s secret police.

Never before, I believe, has such a vast treasure fallen into the hands of

contemporary historians. Hitherto the archives of a great state, even when it was

defeated in war and its government overthrown by revolution, as happened to

Germany and Russia in 1918, were preserved by it, and only those documents

which served the interests of the subsequent ruling regime were ultimately

published.

The swift collapse of the Third Reich in the spring of 1945 resulted in the

surrender not only of a vast bulk of its secret papers but of other priceless

material such as private diaries, highly secret speeches, conference reports and

correspondence, and even transcripts of telephone conversations of the Nazi

leaders tapped by a special office set up by Hermann Goering in the Air

Ministry.

General Franz Halder, for instance, kept a voluminous diary, jotted down in

Gabelsberger shorthand not only from day to day but from hour to hour during

the day. It is a unique source of concise information for the period between

August 14, 1939, and September 24, 1942, when he was Chief of the Army

General Staff and in daily contact with Hitler and the other leaders of Nazi

Germany. It is the most revealing of the German diaries, but there are others of

great value, including those of Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda

and close party associate of Hitler, and of General Alfred Jodl, Chief of

Operations of the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW). There are

diaries of the OKW itself and of the Naval High Command. Indeed the sixty

thousand files of the German Naval Archives, which were captured at Schloss

Tambach near Coburg, contain practically all the signals, ships’ logs, diaries,

memoranda, etc., of the German Navy from April 1945, when they were found,

back to 1868, when the modern German Navy was founded.

The 485 tons of records of the German Foreign Office, captured by the U.S.

First Army in various castles and mines in the Harz Mountains just as they were

about to be burned on orders from Berlin, cover not only the period of the Third

Reich but go back through the Weimar Republic to the beginning of the Second

Reich of Bismarck. For many years after the war tons of Nazi documents lay

sealed in a large U.S. Army warehouse in Alexandria, Virginia, our government

showing no interest in even opening the packing cases to see what of historical

interest might lie within them. Finally in 1955, ten years after their capture,

thanks to the initiative of the American Historical Association and the generosity

of a couple of private foundations, the Alexandria papers were opened and a

pitifully small group of scholars, with an inadequate staff and equipment, went

to work to sift through them and photograph them before the government, which

was in a great hurry in the matter, returned them to Germany. They proved a rich

find.

So did such documents as the partial stenographic record of fifty-one “Fuehrer

Conferences” on the daily military situation as seen and discussed at Hitler’s

headquarters, and the fuller text of the Nazi warlord’s table talk with his old

party cronies and secretaries during the war; the first of these was rescued from

the charred remains of some of Hitler’s papers at Berchtesgaden by an

intelligence officer of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division, and the second was

found among Martin Bormann’s papers.

Hundreds of thousands of captured Nazi documents were hurriedly assembled

at Nuremberg as evidence in the trial of the major Nazi war criminals. While

covering the first part of that trial I collected stacks of mimeographed copies and

later the forty-two published volumes of testimony and documents,

supplemented by ten volumes of English translations of many important papers.

The text of other documents published in a fifteen-volume series on the twelve

subsequent Nuremberg trials was also of value, though many papers and much

testimony were omitted.

Finally, in addition to this unprecedented store of documents, there are the

records of the exhaustive interrogation of German military officers and party and

government officials and their subsequent testimony under oath at the various

postwar trials, which provide material the like of which was never available, I

believe, from such sources after previous wars.

I have not read, of course, all of this staggering amount of documentation—it

would be far beyond the power of a single individual. But I have worked my

way through a considerable part of it, slowed down, as all toilers in this rich

vineyard must be, by the lack of any suitable indexes.

It is quite remarkable how little those of us who were stationed in Germany

during the Nazi time, journalists and diplomats, really knew of what was going

on behind the façade of the Third Reich. A totalitarian dictatorship, by its very

nature, works in great secrecy and knows how to preserve that secrecy from the

prying eyes of outsiders. It was easy enough to record and describe the bare,

exciting and often revolting events in the Third Reich: Hitler’s accession to

power, the Reichstag fire, the Roehm Blood Purge, the Anschluss with Austria,

the surrender of Chamberlain at Munich, the occupation of Czechoslovakia, the

attacks on Poland, Scandinavia, the West, the Balkans and Russia, the horrors of

the Nazi occupation and of the concentration camps and the liquidation of the

Jews. But the fateful decisions secretly made, the intrigues, the treachery, the

motives and the aberrations which led up to them, the parts played by the

principal actors behind the scenes, the extent of the terror they exercised and

their technique of organizing it—all this and much more remained largely

hidden from us until the secret German papers turned up.

Some may think that it is much too early to try to write a history of the Third

Reich, that such a task should be left to a later generation of writers to whom

time has given perspective. I found this view especially prevalent in France

when I went to do some research there. Nothing more recent than the Napoleonic

era, I was told, should be tackled by writers of history.

There is much merit in this view. Most historians have waited fifty years or a

hundred, or more, before attempting to write an account of a country, an empire,

an era. But was this not principally because it took that long for the pertinent

documents to come to light and furnish them with the authentic material they

needed? And though perspective was gained, was not something lost because the

authors necessarily lacked a personal acquaintance with the life and the

atmosphere of the times and with the historical figures about which they wrote?

In the case of the Third Reich, and it is a unique case, almost all of the

documentary material became available at its fall, and it has been enriched by

the testimony of all the surviving leaders, military and civilian, in some instances

before their death by execution. With such incomparable sources so soon

available and with the memory of life in Nazi Germany and of the appearance

and behavior and nature of the men who ruled it, Adolf Hitler above all, still

fresh in my mind and bones, I decided, at any rate, to make an attempt to set

down the history of the rise and fall of the Third Reich.

“I lived through the whole war,” Thucydides remarks in his History of the

Peloponnesian War, one of the greatest works of history ever written, “being of

an age to comprehend events and giving my attention to them in order to know

the exact truth about them.”

I found it extremely difficult and not always possible to learn the exact truth

about Hitler’s Germany. The avalanche of documentary material helped one

further along the road to truth than would have seemed possible twenty years

ago, but its very vastness could often be confusing. And in all human records

and testimony there are bound to be baffling contradictions.

No doubt my own prejudices, which inevitably spring from my experience

and make-up, creep through the pages of this book from time to time. I detest

totalitarian dictatorships in principle and came to loathe this one the more I lived

through it and watched its ugly assault upon the human spirit. Nevertheless, in

this book I have tried to be severely objective, letting the facts speak for

themselves and noting the source for each. No incidents, scenes or quotations

stem from the imagination; all are based on documents, the testimony of

eyewitnesses or my own personal observation. In the half-dozen or so occasions

in which there is some speculation, where the facts are missing, this is plainly

labeled as such.

My interpretations, I have no doubt, will be disputed by many. That is

inevitable, since no man’s opinions are infallible. Those that I have ventured

here in order to add clarity and depth to this narrative are merely the best I could

come by from the evidence and from what knowledge and experience I have

had.

Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the

tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the

empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia.

The curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden

invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile and of rockets that can

be aimed to hit the moon.

In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the

old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by

suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last

long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests,

but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet.

Book One

THE RISE OF ADOLF HITLER

1

BIRTH OF THE THIRD REICH

ON THE VERY EVE of the birth of the Third Reich a feverish tension gripped

Berlin. The Weimar Republic, it seemed obvious to almost everyone, was about

to expire. For more than a year it had been fast crumbling. General Kurt von

Schleicher, who like his immediate predecessor, Franz von Papen, cared little for

the Republic and less for its democracy, and who, also like him, had ruled as

Chancellor by presidential decree without recourse to Parliament, had come to

the end of his rope after fifty-seven days in office.

On Saturday, January 28, 1933, he had been abruptly dismissed by the aging

President of the Republic, Field Marshal von Hindenburg. Adolf Hitler, leader of

the National Socialists, the largest political party in Germany, was demanding

for himself the chancellorship of the democratic Republic he had sworn to

destroy.

The wildest rumors of what might happen were rife in the capital that fateful

winter weekend, and the most alarming of them, as it happened, were not

without some foundation. There were reports that Schleicher, in collusion with

General Kurt von Hammerstein, the Commander in Chief of the Army, was

preparing a putsch with the support of the Potsdam garrison for the purpose of

arresting the President and establishing a military dictatorship. There was talk of

a Nazi putsch. The Berlin storm troopers, aided by Nazi sympathizers in the

police, were to seize the Wilhelmstrasse, where the President’s Palace and most

of the government ministries were located. There was talk also of a general

strike. On Sunday, January 29, a hundred thousand workers crowded into the

Lustgarten in the center of Berlin to demonstrate their opposition to making

Hitler Chancellor. One of their leaders attempted to get in touch with General

von Hammerstein to propose joint action by the Army and organized labor

should Hitler be named to head a new government.1 Once before, at the time of

the Kapp putsch in 1920, a general strike had saved the Republic after the

government had fled the capital.

Throughout most of the night from Sunday to Monday Hitler paced up and

down his room in the Kaiserhof hotel on the Reichskanzlerplatz, just down the

street from the Chancellery. 2 Despite his nervousness he was supremely

confident that his hour had struck. For nearly a month he had been secretly

negotiating with Papen and the other leaders of the conservative Right. He had

had to compromise. He could not have a purely Nazi government. But he could

be Chancellor of a coalition government whose members, eight out of eleven of

whom were not Nazis, agreed with him on the abolition of the democratic

Weimar regime. Only the aged, dour President had seemed to stand in his way.

As recently as January 26, two days before the advent of this crucial weekend,

the grizzly old Field Marshal had told General von Hammerstein that he had “no

intention whatsoever of making that Austrian corporal either Minister of Defense

or Chancellor of the Reich. ”3

Yet under the influence of his son, Major Oskar von Hindenburg, of Otto von

Meissner, the State Secretary to the President, of Papen and other members of

the palace camarilla, the President was finally weakening. He was eighty-six and

fading into senility. On the afternoon of Sunday, January 29, while Hitler was

having coffee and cakes with Goebbels and other aides, Hermann Goering,

President of the Reichstag and second to Hitler in the Nazi Party, burst in and

informed them categorically that on the morrow Hitler would be named

Chancellor.4

Shortly before noon on Monday, January 30, 1933, Hitler drove over to the

Chancellery for an interview with Hindenburg that was to prove fateful for

himself, for Germany and for the rest of the world. From a window in the

Kaiserhof, Goebbels, Roehm and other Nazi chiefs kept an anxious watch on the

door of the Chancellery, where the Fuehrer would shortly be coming out. “We

would see from his face whether he had succeeded or not,” Goebbels noted. For

even then they were not quite sure. “Our hearts are torn back and forth between

doubt, hope, joy and discouragement,” Goebbels jotted down in his diary. “We

have been disappointed too often for us to believe wholeheartedly in the great

miracle.” 5

A few moments later they witnessed the miracle. The man with the Charlie

Chaplin mustache, who had been a down-and-out tramp in Vienna in his youth,

an unknown soldier of World War I, a derelict in Munich in the first grim

postwar days, the somewhat comical leader of the Beer Hall Putsch, this

spellbinder who was not even German but Austrian, and who was only forty-

three years old, had just been administered the oath as Chancellor of the German

Reich.

He drove the hundred yards to the Kaiserhof and was soon with his old

cronies, Goebbels, Goering, Roehm and the other Brownshirts who had helped

him along the rocky, brawling path to power. “He says nothing, and all of us say

nothing,” Goebbels recorded, “but his eyes are full of tears.” 6

That evening from dusk until far past midnight the delirious Nazi storm

troopers marched in a massive torchlight parade to celebrate the victory. By the

tens of thousands, they emerged in disciplined columns from the depths of the

Tiergarten, passed under the triumphal arch of the Brandenburg Gate and down

the Wilhelmstrasse, their bands blaring the old martial airs to the thunderous

beating of the drums, their voices bawling the new Horst Wessel song and other

tunes that were as old as Germany, their jack boots beating a mighty rhythm on

the pavement, their torches held high and forming a ribbon of flame that

illuminated the night and kindled the hurrahs of the onlookers massed on the

sidewalks. From a window in the palace Hindenburg looked down upon the

marching throng, beating time to the military marches with his cane, apparently

pleased that at last he had picked a Chancellor who could arouse the people in a

traditionally German way. Whether the old man, in his dotage, had any inkling

of what he had unleashed that day is doubtful. A story, probably apocryphal,

soon spread over Berlin that in the midst of the parade he had turned to an old

general and said, “I didn’t know we had taken so many Russian prisoners.”

A stone’s throw down the Wilhelmstrasse Adolf Hitler stood at an open

window of the Chancellery, beside himself with excitement and joy, dancing up

and down, jerking his arm up continually in the Nazi salute, smiling and

laughing until his eyes were again full of tears.

One foreign observer watched the proceedings that evening with different

feelings. “The river of fire flowed past the French Embassy,” André François-

Poncet, the ambassador, wrote, “whence, with heavy heart and filled with

foreboding, I watched its luminous wake.” 7

Tired but happy, Goebbels arrived home that night at 3 A.M. Scribbling in his

diary before retiring, he wrote: “It is almost like a dream … a fairy tale … The

new Reich has been born. Fourteen years of work have been crowned with

victory. The German revolution has begun!” 8

The Third Reich which was born on January 30, 1933, Hitler boasted, would

endure for a thousand years, 9 and in Nazi parlance it was often referred to as the

“Thousand-Year Reich.” It lasted twelve years and four months, but in that

flicker of time, as history goes, it caused an eruption on this earth more violent

and shattering than any previously experienced, raising the German people to

heights of power they had not known in more than a millennium, making them at

one time the masters of Europe from the Atlantic to the Volga, from the North

Cape to the Mediterranean, and then plunging them to the depths of destruction

and desolation at the end of a world war which their nation had cold-bloodedly

provoked and during which it instituted a reign of terror over the conquered

peoples which, in its calculated butchery of human life and the human spirit,

outdid all the savage oppressions of the previous ages.

The man who founded the Third Reich, who ruled it ruthlessly and often with

uncommon shrewdness, who led it to such dizzy heights and to such a sorry end,

was a person of undoubted, if evil, genius. It is true that he found in the German

people, as a mysterious Providence and centuries of experience had molded them

up to that time, a natural instrument which he was able to shape to his own

sinister ends. But without Adolf Hitler, who was possessed of a demonic

personality, a granite will, uncanny instincts, a cold ruthlessness, a remarkable

intellect, a soaring imagination and—until toward the end, when, drunk with

power and success, he overreached himself—an amazing capacity to size up

people and situations, there almost certainly would never have been a Third

Reich.

“It is one of the great examples,” as Friedrich Meinecke, the eminent German

historian, said, “of the singular and incalculable power of personality in

historical life. ”10

To some Germans and, no doubt, to most foreigners it appeared that a

charlatan had come to power in Berlin. To the majority of Germans Hitler had—

or would shortly assume—the aura of a truly charismatic leader. They were to

follow him blindly, as if he possessed a divine judgment, for the next twelve

tempestuous years.

THE ADVENT OF ADOLF HITLER

Considering his origins and his early life, it would be difficult to imagine a

more unlikely figure to succeed to the mantle of Bismarck, the Hohenzollern

emperors and President Hindenburg than this singular Austrian of peasant stock

who was born at half past six on the evening of April 20, 1889, in the Gasthof

zum Pommer, a modest inn in the town of Braunau am Inn, across the border

from Bavaria.

The place of birth on the Austro–German frontier was to prove significant, for

early in his life, as a mere youth, Hitler became obsessed with the idea that there

should be no border between these two German-speaking peoples and that they

both belonged in the same Reich. So strong and enduring were his feelings that

at thirty-five, when he sat in a German prison dictating the book that would

become the blueprint for the Third Reich, his very first lines were concerned

with the symbolic significance of his birthplace. Mein Kampf begins with these

words:

Today it seems to me providential that fate should have chosen Braunau am Inn as my

birthplace. For this little town lies on the boundary between two German states which we of

the younger generation at least have made it our life-work to reunite by every means at our

disposal…. This little city on the border seems to me the symbol of a great mission.11

Adolf Hitler was the third son of the third marriage of a minor Austrian

customs official who had been born an illegitimate child and who for the first

thirty-nine years of his life bore his mother’s name, Schicklgruber. The name

Hitler appears in the maternal as well as the paternal line. Both Hitler’s

grandmother on his mother’s side and his grandfather on his father’s side were

named Hitler, or rather variants of it, for the family name was variously written

as Hiedler, Huetler, Huettler and Hitler. Adolf’s mother was his father’s second

cousin, and an episcopal dispensation had to be obtained for the marriage.

The forebears of the future German Fuehrer, on both sides, dwelt for

generations in the Waldviertel, a district in Lower Austria between the Danube

and the borders of Bohemia and Moravia. In my own Vienna days I sometimes

passed through it on my way to Prague or to Germany. It is a hilly, wooded

country of peasant villages and small farms, and though only some fifty miles

from Vienna it has a somewhat remote and impoverished air, as if the main

currents of Austrian life had passed it by. The inhabitants tend to be dour, like

the Czech peasants just to the north of them. Intermarriage is common, as in the

case of Hitler’s parents, and illegitimacy is frequent.

On the mother’s side there was a certain stability. For four generations Klara

Poelzl’s family remained on peasant holding Number 37 in the village of

Spital. 12 The story of Hitler’s paternal ancestors is quite different. The spelling

of the family name, as we have seen, changes; the place of residence also. There

is a spirit of restlessness among the Hitlers, an urge to move from one village to

the next, from one job to another, to avoid firm human ties and to follow a

certain bohemian life in relations with women.

Johann Georg Hiedler, Adolf’s grandfather, was a wandering miller, plying

his trade in one village after another in Lower Austria. Five months after his first

marriage, in 1824, a son was born, but the child and the mother did not survive.

Eighteen years later, while working in Duerenthal, he married a forty-seven-

year-old peasant woman from the village of Strones, Maria Anna Schicklgruber.

Five years before the marriage, on June 7, 1837, Maria had had an illegitimate

son whom she named Alois and who became Adolf Hitler’s father. It is most

probable that the father of Alois was Johann Hiedler, though conclusive

evidence is lacking. At any rate Johann eventually married the woman, but

contrary to the usual custom in such cases he did not trouble himself with

legitimizing the son after the marriage. The child grew up as Alois

Schicklgruber.

Anna died in 1847, whereupon Johann Hiedler vanished for thirty years, only

to reappear at the age of eighty-four in the town of Weitra in the Waldviertel, the

spelling of his name now changed to Hitler, to testify before a notary in the

presence of three witnesses that he was the father of Alois Schicklgruber. Why

the old man waited so long to take this step, or why he finally took it, is not

known from the available records. According to Heiden, Alois later confided to a

friend that it was done to help him obtain a share of an inheritance from an

uncle, a brother of the miller, who had raised the youth in his own household. 13

At any rate, this tardy recognition was made on June 6, 1876, and on November

23 the parish priest at Doellersheim, to whose office the notarized statement had

been forwarded, scratched out the name of Alois Schicklgruber in the baptismal

registry and wrote in its place that of Alois Hitler.

From that time on Adolf’s father was legally known as Alois Hitler, and the

name passed on naturally to his son. It was only during the 1930s that

enterprising journalists in Vienna, delving into the parish archives, discovered

the facts about Hitler’s ancestry and, disregarding old Johann Georg Hiedler’s

belated attempt to do right by a bastard son, tried to fasten on the Nazi leader the

name of Adolf Schicklgruber.

There are many weird twists of fate in the strange life of Adolf Hitler, but

none more odd than this one which took place thirteen years before his birth.

Had the eighty-four-year-old wandering miller not made his unexpected

reappearance to recognize the paternity of his thirty-nine-year-old son nearly

thirty years after the death of the mother, Adolf Hitler would have been born

Adolf Schicklgruber. There may not be much or anything in a name, but I have

heard Germans speculate whether Hitler could have become the master of

Germany had he been known to the world as Schicklgruber. It has a slightly

comic sound as it rolls off the tongue of a South German. Can one imagine the

frenzied German masses acclaiming a Schicklgruber with their thunderous

“Heils”? “Heil Schicklgruber!”? Not only was “Heil Hitler!” used as a

Wagnerian, paganlike chant by the multitude in the mystic pageantry of the

massive Nazi rallies, but it became the obligatory form of greeting between

Germans during the Third Reich, even on the telephone, where it replaced the

conventional “Hello.” “Heil Schicklgruber!”? It is a little difficult to imagine.*

Since the parents of Alois apparently never lived together, even after they

were married, the future father of Adolf Hitler grew up with his uncle, who

though a brother of Johann Georg Hiedler spelled his name differently, being

known as Johann von Nepomuk Huetler. In view of the undying hatred which

the Nazi Fuehrer would develop from youth on for the Czechs, whose nation he

ultimately destroyed, the Christian name is worthy of passing mention. Johann

von Nepomuk was the national saint of the Czech people and some historians

have seen in a Hitler’s being given this name an indication of Czech blood in the

family.

Alois Schicklgruber first learned the trade of shoemaker in the village of

Spital, but being restless, like his father, he soon set out to make his fortune in

Vienna. At eighteen he joined the border police in the Austrian customs service

near Salzburg, and on being promoted to the customs service itself nine years

later he married Anna Glasl-Hoerer, the adopted daughter of a customs official.

She brought him a small dowry and increased social status, as such things went

in the old Austro-Hungarian petty bureaucracy. But the marriage was not a

happy one. She was fourteen years older than he, of failing health, and she

remained childless. After sixteen years they were separated and three years later,

in 1883, she died.

Before the separation Alois, now legally known as Hitler, had taken up with a

young hotel cook, Franziska Matzelsberger, who bore him a son, named Alois,

in 1882. One month after the death of his wife he married the cook and three

months later she gave birth to a daughter, Angela. The second marriage did not

last long. Within a year Franziska was dead of tuberculosis. Six months later

Alois Hitler married for the third and last time.

The new bride, Klara Poelzl, who would shortly become the mother of Adolf

Hitler, was twenty-five, her husband forty-eight, and they had long known each

other. Klara came from Spital, the ancestral village of the Hitlers. Her

grandfather had been Johann von Nepomuk Huetler, with whom his nephew,

Alois Schicklgruber-Hitler, had grown up. Thus Alois and Klara were second

cousins and they found it necessary, as we have seen, to apply for episcopal

dispensation to permit the marriage.

It was a union which the customs official had first contemplated years before

when he had taken Klara into his childless home as a foster daughter during his

first marriage. The child had lived for years with the Schicklgrubers in Braunau,

and as the first wife ailed Alois seems to have given thought to marrying Klara

as soon as his wife died. His legitimation and his coming into an inheritance

from the uncle who was Klara’s grandfather occurred when the young girl was

sixteen, just old enough to legally marry. But, as we have seen, the wife lingered

on after the separation, and, perhaps because Alois in the meantime took up with

the cook Franziska Matzelsberger, Klara, at the age of twenty, left the household

and went to Vienna, where she obtained employment as a household servant.

She returned four years later to keep house for her cousin; Franziska too, in

the last months of her life, had moved out of her husband’s home. Alois Hitler

and Klara Poelzl were married on January 7, 1885, and some four months and

ten days later their first child, Gustav, was born. He died in infancy, as did the

second child, Ida, born in 1886. Adolf was the third child of this third marriage.

A younger brother, Edmund, born in 1894, lived only six years. The fifth and

last child, Paula, born in 1896, lived to survive her famous brother.

Adolf’s half-brother, Alois, and his half-sister, Angela, the children of

Franziska Matzelsberger, also lived to grow up. Angela, a handsome young

woman, married a revenue official named Raubal and after his death worked in

Vienna as a housekeeper and for a time, if Heiden’s information is correct, as a

cook in a Jewish charity kitchen.14 In 1928 Hitler brought her to Berchtesgaden

as his housekeeper, and thereafter one heard a great deal in Nazi circles of the

wondrous Viennese pastries and desserts she baked for him and for which he had

such a ravenous appetite. She left him in 1936 to marry a professor of

architecture in Dresden, and Hitler, by then Chancellor and dictator, was

resentful of her departure and declined to send a wedding present. She was the

only person in the family with whom, in his later years, he seems to have been

close—with one exception. Angela had a daughter, Geli Raubal, an attractive

young blond woman with whom, as we shall see, Hitler had the only truly deep

love affair of his life.

Adolf Hitler never liked to hear mention of his half-brother. Alois

Matzelsberger, later legitimized as Alois Hitler, became a waiter, and for many

years his life was full of difficulties with the law. Heiden records that at eighteen

the young man was sentenced to five months in jail for theft and at twenty

served another sentence of eight months on the same charge. He eventually

moved to Germany, only to become embroiled in further troubles. In 1924, while

Adolf Hitler was languishing in prison for having staged a political revolt in

Munich, Alois Hitler was sentenced to six months in prison by a Hamburg court

for bigamy. Thereafter, Heiden recounts, he moved on to England, where he

quickly established a family and then deserted it.15

The coming to power of the National Socialists brought better times to Alois

Hitler. He opened a Bierstube—a small beerhouse—in a suburb of Berlin,

moving it shortly before the war to the Wittenbergplatz in the capital’s

fashionable West End. It was much frequented by Nazi officials and during the

early part of the war when food was scarce it inevitably had a plentiful supply. I

used to drop in occasionally at that time. Alois was then nearing sixty, a portly,

simple, good-natured man with little physical resemblance to his famous half-

brother and in fact indistinguishable from dozens of other little pub keepers one

had seen in Germany and Austria. Business was good and, whatever his past, he

was now obviously enjoying the prosperous life. He had only one fear: that his

half-brother, in a moment of disgust or rage, might revoke his license.

Sometimes there was talk in the little beerhouse that the Chancellor and Fuehrer

of the Reich regretted this reminder of the humble nature of the Hitler family.

Alois himself, I remember, refused to be drawn into any talk whatsoever about

his half-brother—a wise precaution but frustrating to those of us who were

trying to learn all we could about the background of the man who by that time

had already set out to conquer Europe.

Except in Mein Kampf, where the sparse biographical material is often

misleading and the omissions monumental, Hitler rarely discussed—or permitted

discussion of in his presence—his family background and early life. We have

seen what the family background was. What was the early life?

THE EARLY LIFE OF ADOLF HITLER

The year his father retired from the customs service at the age of fifty-eight,

the six-year-old Adolf entered the public school in the village of Fischlham, a

short distance southwest of Linz. This was in 1895. For the next four or five

years the restless old pensioner moved from one village to another in the vicinity

of Linz. By the time the son was fifteen he could remember seven changes of

address and five different schools. For two years he attended classes at the

Benedictine monastery at Lambach, near which his father had purchased a farm.

There he sang in the choir, took singing lessons and, according to his own

account, 16 dreamed of one day taking holy orders. Finally the retired customs

official settled down for good in the village of Leonding, on the southern

outskirts of Linz, where the family occupied a modest house and garden.

At the age of eleven, Adolf was sent to the high school at Linz. This

represented a financial sacrifice for the father and indicated an ambition that the

son should follow in his father’s footsteps and become a civil servant. That,

however, was the last thing the youth would dream of.

“Then barely eleven years old,” Hitler later recounted, 17 “I was forced into

opposition (to my father) for the first time…. I did not want to become a civil

servant.”

The story of the bitter, unrelenting struggle of the boy, not yet in his teens,

against a hardened and, as he said, domineering father is one of the few

biographical items which Hitler sets down in great detail and with apparent

sincerity and truth in Mein Kampf. The conflict aroused the first manifestation of

that fierce, unbending will which later would carry him so far despite seemingly

insuperable obstacles and handicaps and which, confounding all those who stood

in his way, was to put an indelible stamp on Germany and Europe.

I did not want to become a civil servant, no, and again no. All attempts on my

father’s part to inspire me with love or pleasure in this profession by stories from

his own life accomplished the exact opposite. I … grew sick to my stomach at

the thought of sitting in an office, deprived of my liberty; ceasing to be master of

my own time and being compelled to force the content of my whole life into

paper forms that had to be filled out….

One day it became clear to me that I would become a painter, an artist … My

father was struck speechless.

“Painter? Artist?”

He doubted my sanity, or perhaps he thought he had heard wrong or

misunderstood me. But when he was clear on the subject, and particularly after

he felt the seriousness of my intention, he opposed it with all the determination

of his nature….

“Artist! No! Never as long as I live!” … My father would never depart from

his “Never!” And I intensified my “Nevertheless!” 18

One consequence of this encounter, Hitler later explained, was that he stopped

studying in school. “I thought that once my father saw how little progress I was

making at high school he would let me devote myself to my dream, whether he

liked it or not.” 19

This, written thirty-four years later, may be partly an excuse for his failure at

school. His marks in grade school had been uniformly good. But at the Linz high

school they were so poor that in the end, without obtaining the customary

certificate, he was forced to transfer to the state high school at Steyr, some

distance from Linz. He remained there but a short time and left before

graduating.

Hitler’s scholastic failure rankled in him in later life, when he heaped ridicule

on the academic “gentry,” their degrees and diplomas and their pedagogical airs.

Even in the last three or four years of his life, at Supreme Army Headquarters,

where he allowed himself to be overwhelmed with details of military strategy,

tactics and command, he would take an evening off to reminisce with his old

party cronies on the stupidity of the teachers he had had in his youth. Some of

these meanderings of this mad genius, now the Supreme Warlord personally

directing his vast armies from the Volga to the English Channel, have been

preserved.

When I think of the men who were my teachers, I realize that most of them

were slightly mad. The men who could be regarded as good teachers were

exceptional. It’s tragic to think that such people have the power to bar a young

man’s way.— March 3, 1942.20

I have the most unpleasant recollections of the teachers who taught me. Their

external appearance exuded uncleanliness; their collars were unkempt … They

were the product of a proletariat denuded of all personal independence of

thought, distinguished by unparalleled ignorance and most admirably fitted to

become the pillars of an effete system of government which, thank God, is now a

thing of the past.— April 12, 1942.21

When I recall my teachers at school, I realize that half of them were

abnormal…. We pupils of old Austria were brought up to respect old people and

women. But on our professors we had no mercy; they were our natural enemies.

The majority of them were somewhat mentally deranged, and quite a few ended

their days as honest-to-God lunatics! … I was in particular bad odor with the

teachers. I showed not the slightest aptitude for foreign languages—though I

might have, had not the teacher been a congenital idiot. I could not bear the sight

of him.— August 29, 1942.22

Our teachers were absolute tyrants. They had no sympathy with youth; their

one object was to stuff our brains and turn us into erudite apes like themselves. If

any pupil showed the slightest trace of originality, they persecuted him

relentlessly, and the only model pupils whom I have ever got to know have all

been failures in after-life.— September 7, 1942. 23

To his dying day, it is obvious, Hitler never forgave his teachers for the poor

marks they had given him—nor could he forget. But he could distort to a point

of grotesqueness.

The impression he made on his teachers, recollected after he had become a

world figure, has been briefly recorded. One of the few instructors Hitler seems

to have liked was Professor Theodor Gissinger, who strove to teach him science.

Gissinger later recalled, “As far as I was concerned, Hitler left neither a

favorable nor an unfavorable impression in Linz. He was by no means a leader

of the class. He was slender and erect, his face pallid and very thin, almost like

that of a consumptive, his gaze unusually open, his eyes brilliant.” 24

Professor Eduard Huemer, apparently the “congenital idiot” mentioned by

Hitler above—for he taught French—came to Munich in 1923 to testify for his

former pupil, who was then being tried for treason as the result of the Beer Hall

Putsch. Though he lauded Hitler’s aims and said that he wished from the bottom

of his heart to see him fulfill his ideals, he gave the following thumbnail portrait

of the young high-school student:

Hitler was certainly gifted, although only for particular subjects, but he lacked self-control

and, to say the least, he was considered argumentive, autocratic, self-opinionated and bad-

tempered, and unable to submit to school discipline. Nor was he industrious; otherwise he

would have achieved much better results, gifted as he was. 25

There was one teacher at the Linz high school who exercised a strong and, as it

turned out, a fateful influence on the young Adolf Hitler. This was a history

teacher, Dr. Leopold Poetsch, who came from the southern German-language

border region where it meets that of the South Slavs and whose experience with

the racial struggle there had made him a fanatical German nationalist. Before

coming to Linz he had taught at Marburg, which later, when the area was

transferred to Yugoslavia after the First World War, became Maribor.

Though Dr. Poetsch had given his pupil marks of only “fair” in history, he

was the only one of Hitler’s teachers to receive a warm tribute in Mein Kampf.

Hitler readily admitted his debt to this man.

It was perhaps decisive for my whole later life that good fortune gave me a history teacher

who understood, as few others did, this principle …—of retaining the essential and forgetting

the nonessential … In my teacher. Dr. Leopold Poetsch of the high school in Linz, this

requirement was fulfilled in a truly ideal manner. An old gentleman, kind but at the same time

firm, he was able not only to hold our attention by his dazzling eloquence but to carry us away

with him. Even today I think back with genuine emotion on this gray-haired man who, by the

fire of his words, sometimes made us forget the present; who, as if by magic, transported us

into times past and, out of the millennium mists of time, transformed dry historical facts into

vivid reality. There we sat, often aflame with enthusiasm, sometimes even moved to tears …

He used our budding national fanaticism as a means of educating us, frequently appealing to

our sense of national honor.

This teacher made history my favorite subject.

And indeed, though he had no such intention, it was then that I became a young

revolutionary. 26

Some thirty-five years later, in 1938, while touring Austria in triumph after he

had forced its annexation to the Third Reich, Chancellor Hitler stopped off at

Klagenfurt to see his old teacher, then in retirement. He was delighted to find

that the old gentleman had been a member of the underground Nazi S.S., which

had been outlawed during Austria’s independence. He conversed with him alone

for an hour and later confided to members of his party, “You cannot imagine

how much I owe to that old man. ”27

Alois Hitler died of a lung hemorrhage on January 3, 1903, at the age of sixty-

five. He was stricken while taking a morning walk and died a few moments later

in a nearby inn in the arms of a neighbor. When his thirteen-year-old son saw the

body of his father he broke down and wept.28

His mother, who was then forty-two, moved to a modest apartment in Urfahr,

a suburb of Linz, where she tried to keep herself and her two surviving children,

Adolf and Paula, on the meager savings and pension left her. She felt obligated,

as Hitler remarks in Mein Kampf, to continue his education in accordance with

his father’s wishes—“in other words,” as he puts it, “to have me study for the

civil servant’s career.” But though the young widow was indulgent to her son,

and he seems to have loved her dearly, he was “more than ever determined

absolutely,” he says, “not to undertake this career.” And so, despite a tender love

between mother and son, there was friction and Adolf continued to neglect his

studies.

“Then suddenly an illness came to my help and in a few weeks decided my

future and the eternal domestic quarrel.” 29

The lung ailment which Hitler suffered as he was nearing sixteen necessitated

his dropping out of school for at least a year. He was sent for a time to the family

village of Spital, where he recuperated at the home of his mother’s sister,

Theresa Schmidt, a peasant woman. On his recovery he returned briefly to the

state high school at Steyr. His last report, dated September 16, 1905, shows

marks of “adequate” in German, chemistry, physics, geometry and geometrical

drawing. In geography and history he was “satisfactory”; in free-hand drawing,

“excellent.” He felt so excited at the prospect of leaving school for good that for

the first and last time in his life he got drunk. As he remembered it in later years

he was picked up at dawn, lying on a country road outside of Steyr, by a

milkmaid and helped back to town, swearing he would never do it again.* In this

matter, at least, he was as good as his word, for he became a teetotaler, a

nonsmoker and a vegetarian to boot, at first out of necessity as a penniless

vagabond in Vienna and Munich, and later out of conviction.

The next two or three years Hitler often described as the happiest days of his

life.†. While his mother suggested—and other relatives urged—that he go to

work and learn a trade he contented himself with dreaming of his future as an

artist and with idling away the pleasant days along the Danube. He never forgot

the “downy softness” of those years from sixteen to nineteen when as a

“mother’s darling” he enjoyed the “hollowness of a comfortable life. ”30 Though

the ailing widow found it difficult to make ends meet on her meager income,

young Adolf declined to help out by getting a job. The idea of earning even his

own living by any kind of regular employment was repulsive to him and was to

remain so throughout his life.

What apparently made those last years of approaching manhood so happy for

Hitler was the freedom from having to work, which gave him the freedom to

brood, to dream, to spend his days roaming the city streets or the countryside

declaiming to his companion what was wrong with the world and how to right it,

and his evenings curled up with a book or standing in the rear of the opera house

in Linz or Vienna listening enraptured to the mystic, pagan works of Richard

Wagner.

A boyhood friend later remembered him as a pale, sickly, lanky youth who,

though usually shy and reticent, was capable of sudden bursts of hysterical anger

against those who disagreed with him. For four years he fancied himself deeply

in love with a handsome blond maiden named Stefanie, and though he often

gazed at her longingly as she strolled up and down the Landstrasse in Linz with

her mother he never made the slightest effort to meet her, preferring to keep her,

like so many other objects, in the shadowy world of his soaring fantasies.

Indeed, in the countless love poems which he wrote to her but never sent (one of

them was entitled “Hymn to the Beloved”) and which he insisted on reading to

his patient young friend, August Kubizek, * she became a damsel out of Die

Walkuerie, clad in a dark-blue flowing velvet gown, riding a white steed over the

flowering meadows.31

Although Hitler was determined to become an artist, preferably a painter or at

least an architect, he was already obsessed with politics at the age of sixteen. By

then he had developed a violent hatred for the Hapsburg monarchy and all the

non-German races in the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire over which it

ruled, and an equally violent love for everything German. At sixteen he had

become what he was to remain till his dying breath: a fanatical German

nationalist.

He appears to have had little of the carefree spirit of youth despite all the

loafing. The world’s problems weighed down on him. Kubizek later recalled,

“He saw everywhere only obstacles and hostility … He was always up against

something and at odds with the world … I never saw him take anything lightly

…”32

It was at this period that the young man who could not stand school became a

voracious reader, subscribing to the Library of Adult Education in Linz and

joining the Museum Society, whose books he borrowed in large numbers. His

young friend remembered him as always surrounded by books, of which his

favorites were works on German history and German mythology.33

Since Linz was a provincial town, it was not long before Vienna, the glittering

baroque capital of the empire, began to beckon a youth of such ambition and

imagination. In 1906, just after his seventeenth birthday, Hitler set out with

funds provided by his mother and other relations to spend two months in the

great metropolis. Though it was later to become the scene of his bitterest years

when, at times, he literally lived in the gutter, Vienna on this first visit enthralled

him. He roamed the streets for days, filled with excitement at the sight of the

imposing buildings along the Ring and in a continual state of ecstasy at what he

saw in the museums, the opera house, the theaters.

He also inquired about entering the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, and a year

later, in October 1907, he was back in the capital to take the entrance

examination as the first practical step in fulfilling his dream of becoming a

painter. He was eighteen and full of high hopes, but they were dashed. An entry

in the academy’s classification list tells the story.

The following took the test with insufficient results, or were not admitted …

Adolf Hitler, Braunau a. Inn, April 20, 1889, German, Catholic. Father civil

servant. 4 classes in High School. Few Heads. Test drawing unsatisfactory. 34

Hitler tried again the following year and this time his drawings were so poor

that he was not admitted to the test. For the ambitious young man this was, as he

later wrote, a bolt from the blue. He had been absolutely convinced that he

would be successful. According to his own account in Mein Kampf, Hitler

requested an explanation from the rector of the academy.

That gentleman assured me that the drawings I had submitted incontrovertibly

showed my unfitness for painting, and that my ability obviously lay in the field

of architecture; for me, he said, the Academy’s School of Painting was out of the

question, the place for me was at the School of Architecture. 35

The young Adolf was inclined to agree but quickly realized to his sorrow that

his failure to graduate from high school might well block his entry into the

architectural school.

In the meantime his mother was dying of cancer of the breast and he returned

to Linz. Since Adolf’s departure from school Klara Hitler and her relatives had

supported the young man for three years, and they could see nothing to show for

it. On December 21, 1908, as the town began to assume its festive Christmas

garb, Adolf Hitler’s mother died, and two days later she was buried at Leonding

beside her husband. To the nineteen-year-old youth

it was a dreadful blow … I had honored my father, but my mother I had loved … [Her]

death put a sudden end to all my highflown plans … Poverty and hard reality compelled me to

take a quick decision … I was faced with the problem of somehow making my own living.36

Somehow! He had no trade. He had always disdained manual labor. He had

never tried to earn a cent. But he was undaunted. Bidding his relatives farewell,

he declared that he would never return until he had made good.

With a suitcase full of clothes and underwear in my hand and an indomitable

will in my heart, I set out for Vienna. I too hoped to wrest from fate what my

father had accomplished fifty years before; I too hoped to become

“something”—but in no case a civil servant. 37

“THE SADDEST PERIOD OF MY LIFE”

The next four years, between 1909 and 1913, turned out to be a time of utter

misery and destitution for the conquering young man from Linz. In these last

fleeting years before the fall of the Hapsburgs and the end of the city as the

capital of an empire of fifty-two million people in the heart of Europe, Vienna

had a gaiety and charm that were unique among the capitals of the world. Not

only in its architecture, its sculpture, its music, but in the lighthearted, pleasure-

loving, cultivated spirit of its people, it breathed an atmosphere of the baroque

and the rococo that no other city of the West knew.

Set along the blue Danube beneath the wooded hills of the Wienerwald, which

were studded with yellow-green vineyards, it was a place of natural beauty that

captivated the visitor and made the Viennese believe that Providence had been

especially kind to them. Music filled the air, the towering music of gifted native

sons, the greatest Europe had known, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert,

and, in the last Indian-summer years, the gay, haunting waltzes of Vienna’s own

beloved Johann Strauss. To a people so blessed and so imprinted with the

baroque style of living, life itself was something of a dream and the good folk of

the city passed the pleasant days and nights of their lives waltzing and wining, in

light talk in the congenial coffeehouses, listening to music and viewing the

make-believe of theater and opera and operetta, in flirting and making love,

abandoning a large part of their lives to pleasure and to dreams.

To be sure, an empire had to be governed, an army and navy manned,

communications maintained, business transacted and labor done. But few in

Vienna worked overtime—or even full time—at such things.

There was a seamy side, of course. This city, like all others, had its poor: ill-

fed, ill-clothed and living in hovels. But as the greatest industrial center in

Central Europe as well as the capital of the empire, Vienna was prosperous, and

this prosperity spread among the people and sifted down. The great mass of the

lower middle class controlled the city politically; labor was organizing not only

trade unions but a powerful political party of its own, the Social Democrats.

There was a ferment in the life of the city, now grown to a population of two

million. Democracy was forcing out the ancient autocracy of the Hapsburgs,

education and culture were opening up to the masses so that by the time Hitler

came to Vienna in 1909 there was opportunity for a penniless young man either

to get a higher education or to earn a fairly decent living and, as one of a million

wage earners, to live under the civilizing spell which the capital cast over its

inhabitants. Was not his only friend, Kubizek, as poor and as obscure as himself,

already making a name for himself in the Academy of Music?

But the young Adolf did not pursue his ambition to enter the School of

Architecture. It was still open for him despite his lack of a high-school diploma

—young men who showed “special talent” were admitted without such a

certificate—but so far as is known he made no application. Nor was he interested

in learning a trade or in taking any kind of regular employment. Instead he

preferred to putter about at odd jobs: shoveling snow, beating carpets, carrying

bags outside the West Railroad Station, occasionally for a few days working as a

building laborer. In November 1909, less than a year after he arrived in Vienna

to “forestall fate,” he was forced to abandon a furnished room in the Simon

Denk Gasse, and for the next four years he lived in flophouses or in the almost

equally miserable quarters of the men’s hostel at 27 Meldemannstrasse in the

Twentieth District of Vienna, near the Danube, staving off hunger by

frequenting the charity soup kitchens of the city.

No wonder that nearly two decades later he could write:

To me Vienna, the city which to so many is the epitome of innocent pleasure, a

festive playground for merrymakers, represents, I am sorry to say, merely the

living memory of the saddest period of my life.

Even today this city can arouse in me nothing but dismal thoughts. For me the

name of this Phaeacial city represents five years of hardship and misery. Five

years in which I was forced to earn a living, first as a day laborer, then as a small

painter; a truly meager living which never sufficed to appease even my daily

hunger.38

Always, he says of these times, there was hunger.

Hunger was then my faithful bodyguard; he never left me for a moment and

partook of all I had … My life was a continual struggle with this pitiless

friend. 39

It never, however, drove him to the extremity of trying to find a regular job. As

he makes clear in Mein Kampf, he had the petty bourgeoisie’s gnawing fear of

sliding back into the ranks of the proletariat, of the manual laborers—a fear he

was later to exploit in building up the National Socialist Party on the broad

foundation of the hitherto leaderless, ill-paid, neglected white-collar class, whose

millions nourished the illusion that they were at least socially better off than the

“workers.”

Although Hitler says he eked out at least part of a living as “a small painter,”

he gives no details of this work in his autobiography except to remark that in the

years 1909 and 1910 he had so far improved his position that he no longer had to

work as a common laborer.

“By this time,” he says, “I was working independently as a small draftsman

and painter of water colors. ”40

This is somewhat misleading, as is so much else of a biographical nature in

Mein Kampf. Though the evidence of those who knew him at the time appears to

be scarcely more trustworthy, enough of it has been pieced together to give a

picture that is probably more accurate and certainly more complete. *

That Adolf Hitler was never a house painter, as his political opponents taunted

him with having been, is fairly certain. At least there is no evidence that he ever

followed such a trade. What he did was draw or paint crude little pictures of

Vienna, usually of some well-known landmark such as St. Stephen’s Cathedral,

the opera house, the Burgtheater, the Palace of Schoenbrunn or the Roman ruins

in Schoenbrunn Park. According to his acquaintances he copied them from older

works; apparently he could not draw from nature. They are rather stilted and

lifeless, like a beginning architect’s rough and careless sketches, and the human

figures he sometimes added are so bad as to remind one of a comic strip. I find a

note of my own made once after going through a portfolio of Hitler’s original

sketches: “Few faces. Crude. One almost ghoulish face.” To Heiden, “they stand

like tiny stuffed sacks outside the high, solemn palaces. ”41

Probably hundreds of these pitiful pieces were sold by Hitler to the petty

traders to ornament a wall, to dealers who used them to fill empty picture frames

on display and to furniture makers who sometimes tacked them to the backs of

cheap sofas and chairs after a fashion in Vienna in those days. Hitler could also

be more commercial. He often drew posters for shopkeepers advertising such

products as Teddy’s Perspiration Powder, and there was one, perhaps turned out

to make a little money at Christmas time, depicting Santa Claus selling brightly

colored candles, and another showing St. Stephen’s Gothic spire, which Hitler

never tired of copying, rising out of a mountain of soap cakes.

This was the extent of Hitler’s “artistic” achievement, yet to the end of his life

he considered himself an “artist.”

Bohemian he certainly looked in those vagabond years in Vienna. Those who

knew him then remembered later his long black shabby overcoat, which hung

down to his ankles and resembled a caftan and which had been given him by a

Hungarian Jewish old-clothes dealer, a fellow inmate of the dreary men’s hostel

who had befriended him. They remembered his greasy black derby, which he

wore the year round; his matted hair, brushed down over his forehead as in later

years and, in the back, hanging disheveled over his soiled collar, for he rarely

appeared to have had a haircut or a shave and the sides of his face and his chin

were usually covered with the black stubble of an incipient beard. If one can

believe Hanisch, who later became something of an artist, Hitler resembled “an

apparition such as rarely occurs among Christians.” 42

Unlike some of the shipwrecked young men with whom he lived, he had none

of the vices of youth. He neither smoked nor drank. He had nothing to do with

women—not, so far as can be learned, because of any abnormality but simply

because of an ingrained shyness.

“I believe,” Hitler remarked afterward in Mein Kampf, in one of his rare

flashes of humor, “that those who knew me in those days took me for an

eccentric.” 43

They remembered, as had his teachers, the strong, staring eyes that dominated

the face and expressed something embedded in the personality that did not jibe

with the miserable existence of the unwashed tramp. And they recalled that the

young man, for all his laziness when it came to physical labor, was a voracious

reader, spending much of his days and evenings devouring books.

At that time I read enormously and thoroughly. All the free time my work left me was

employed in my studies. In this way I forged in a few years’ time the foundations of a

knowledge from which I still draw nourishment today. 44

In Mein Kampf Hitler discourses at length on the art of reading.

By “reading,” to be sure, I mean perhaps something different than the average member of

our so-called “intelligentsia.”

I know people who “read” enormously … yet whom I would not describe as “well-read.”

True, they possess a mass of “knowledge,” but their brain is unable to organize and register

the material they have taken in … On the other hand, a man who possesses the art of correct

reading will … instinctively and immediately perceive everything which in his opinion is

worth permanently remembering, either because it is suited to his purpose or generally worth

knowing … The art of reading, as of learning, is this: … to retain the essential, to forget the

nonessential.* … Only this kind of reading has meaning and purpose … Viewed in this light,

my Vienna period was especially fertile and valuable.45

Valuable for what? Hitler’s answer is that from his reading and from his life

among the poor and disinherited of Vienna he learned all that he needed to know

in later life.

Vienna was and remained for me the hardest, though most thorough, school of my life. I

had set foot in this town while still half a boy and I left it a man, grown quiet and grave.

In this period there took shape within me a world picture and a philosophy which became

the granite foundation of all my acts. In addition to what I then created, I have had to learn

little; and I have had to alter nothing.46

What, then, had he learned in the school of those hard knocks which Vienna

had so generously provided? What were the ideas which he acquired there from

his reading and his experience and which, as he says, would remain essentially

unaltered to the end? That they were mostly shallow and shabby, often grotesque

and preposterous, and poisoned by outlandish prejudices will become obvious on

the most cursory examination. That they are important to this history, as they

were to the world, is equally obvious, for they were to form part of the

foundation for the Third Reich which this bookish vagrant was soon to build.

THE BUDDING IDEAS OF ADOLF HITLER

They were, with one exception, not original but picked up, raw, from the

churning maelstrom of Austrian politics and life in the first years of the

twentieth century. The Danube monarchy was dying of indigestion. For centuries

a minority of German–Austrians had ruled over the polyglot empire of a dozen

nationalities and stamped their language and their culture on it. But since 1848

their hold had been weakening. The minorities could not be digested. Austria

was not a melting pot. In the 1860s the Italians had broken away and in 1867 the

Hungarians had won equality with the Germans under a so-called Dual

Monarchy. Now, as the twentieth century began, the various Slav peoples—the

Czechs, the Slovaks, the Serbs, the Croats and the others—were demanding

equality and at least national autonomy. Austrian politics had become dominated

by the bitter quarrel of the nationalities.

But this was not all. There was social revolt too and this often transcended the

racial struggle. The disenfranchised lower classes were demanding the ballot,

and the workers were insisting on the right to organize trade unions and to strike

—not only for higher wages and better working conditions but to gain their

democratic political ends. Indeed a general strike had finally brought universal

manhood suffrage and with this the end of political dominance by the Austrian

Germans, who numbered but a third of the population of the Austrian half of the

empire.

To these developments Hitler, the fanatical young German–Austrian

nationalist from Linz, was bitterly opposed. To him the empire was sinking into

a “foul morass.” It could be saved only if the master race, the Germans,

reasserted their old absolute authority. The non-German races, especially the

Slavs and above all the Czechs, were an inferior people. It was up to the

Germans to rule them with an iron hand. The Parliament must be abolished and

an end put to all the democratic “nonsense.”

Though he took no part in politics, Hitler followed avidly the activities of the

three major political parties of old Austria: the Social Democrats, the Christian

Socialists and the Pan-German Nationalists. And there now began to sprout in

the mind of this unkempt frequenter of the soup kitchens a political shrewdness

which enabled him to see with amazing clarity the strengths and weaknesses of

contemporary political movements and which, as it matured, would make him

the master politician of Germany.

At first contact he developed a furious hatred for the party of the Social

Democrats. “What most repelled me,” he says, “was its hostile attitude toward

the struggle for the preservation of Germanism [and] its disgraceful courting of

the Slavic ‘comrade’ … In a few months I obtained what might have otherwise

required decades: an understanding of a pestilential whore,*. cloaking herself as

social virtue and brotherly love.” 47

And yet he was already intelligent enough to quench his feelings of rage

against this party of the working class in order to examine carefully the reasons

for its popular success. He concluded that there were several reasons, and years

later he was to remember them and utilize them in building up the National

Socialist Party of Germany.

One day, he recounts in Mein Kampf, he witnessed a mass demonstration of

Viennese workers. “For nearly two hours I stood there watching with bated

breath the gigantic human dragon slowly winding by. In oppressed anxiety I

finally left the place and sauntered homeward. ”48

At home he began to read the Social Democratic press, examine the speeches

of its leaders, study its organization, reflect on its psychology and political

techniques and ponder the results. He came to three conclusions which explained

to him the success of the Social Democrats: They knew how to create a mass

movement, without which any political party was useless; they had learned the

art of propaganda among the masses; and, finally, they knew the value of using

what he calls “spiritual and physical terror.”

This third lesson, though it was surely based on faulty observation and

compounded of his own immense prejudices, intrigued the young Hitler. Within

ten years he would put it to good use for his own ends.

I understood the infamous spiritual terror which this movement exerts, particularly on the

bourgeoisie, which is neither morally nor mentally equal to such attacks; at a given sign it

unleashes a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most

dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked persons break down … This is a tactic based on

precise calculation of all human weaknesses, and its result will lead to success with almost

mathematical certainty …

I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of physical terror toward the

individual and the masses … For while in the ranks of their supporters the victory achieved

seems a triumph of the justice of their own cause, the defeated adversary in most cases

despairs of the success of any further resistance.49

No more precise analysis of Nazi tactics, as Hitler was eventually to develop

them, was ever written.

There were two political parties which strongly attracted the fledgling Hitler

in Vienna, and to both of them he applied his growing power of shrewd, cold

analysis. His first allegiance, he says, was to the Pan-German Nationalist Party

founded by Georg Ritter von Schoenerer, who came from the same region near

Spital in Lower Austria as had Hitler’s family. The Pan-Germans at that time

were engaged in a last-ditch struggle for German supremacy in the multinational

empire. And though Hitler thought that Schoenerer was a “profound thinker” and

enthusiastically embraced his basic program of violent nationalism, anti-

Semitism, anti-socialism, union with Germany and opposition to the Hapsburgs

and the Holy See, he quickly sized up the causes for the party’s failure:

“This movement’s inadequate appreciation of the importance of the social

problem cost it the truly militant mass of the people; its entry into Parliament

took away its mighty impetus and burdened it with all the weaknesses peculiar to

this institution; the struggle against the Catholic Church … robbed it of countless

of the best elements that the nation can call its own. ”50

Though Hitler was to forget it when he came to power in Germany, one of the

lessons of his Vienna years which he stresses at great length in Mein Kampf is

the futility of a political party’s trying to oppose the churches. “Regardless of

how much room for criticism there was in any religious denomination,” he says,

in explaining why Schoenerer’s Los-von-Rom (Away from Rome) movement

was a tactical error, “a political party must never for a moment lose sight of the

fact that in all previous historical experience a purely political party has never

succeeded in producing a religious reformation. ”51

But it was the failure of the Pan-Germans to arouse the masses, their inability

to even understand the psychology of the common people, that to Hitler

constituted their biggest mistake. It is obvious from his recapitulation of the

ideas that began to form in his mind when he was not much past the age of

twenty-one that to him this was the cardinal error. He was not to repeat it when

he founded his own political movement.

There was another mistake of the Pan-Germans which Hitler was not to make.

That was the failure to win over the support of at least some of the powerful,

established institutions of the nation—if not the Church, then the Army, say, or

the cabinet or the head of state. Unless a political movement gained such

backing, the young man saw, it would be difficult if not impossible for it to

assume power. This support was precisely what Hitler had the shrewdness to

arrange for in the crucial January days of 1933 in Berlin and what alone made it

possible for him and his National Socialist Party to take over the rule of a great

nation.

There was one political leader in Vienna in Hitler’s time who understood this,

as well as the necessity of building a party on the foundation of the masses. This

was Dr. Karl Lueger, the burgomaster of Vienna and leader of the Christian

Social Party, who more than any other became Hitler’s political mentor, though

the two never met. Hitler always regarded him as “the greatest German mayor of

all times … a statesman greater than all the so-called ‘diplomats’ of the time …

If Dr. Karl Lueger had lived in Germany he would have been ranked among the

great minds of our people.” 52

There was, to be sure, little resemblance between Hitler as he later became

and this big, bluff, genial idol of the Viennese lower middle classes. It is true

that Lueger became the most powerful politician in Austria as the head of a party

which was drawn from the disgruntled petty bourgeoisie and which made

political capital, as Hitler later did, out of a raucous anti-Semitism. But Lueger,

who had risen from modest circumstances and worked his way through the

university, was a man of considerable intellectual attainments, and his

opponents, including the Jews, readily conceded that he was at heart a decent,

chivalrous, generous and tolerant man. Stefan Zweig, the eminent Austrian

Jewish writer, who was growing up in Vienna at this time, has testified that

Lueger never allowed his official anti-Semitism to stop him from being helpful

and friendly to the Jews. “His city administration,” Zweig recounted, “was

perfectly just and even typically democratic … The Jews who had trembled at

this triumph of the anti-Semitic party continued to live with the same rights and

esteem as always.” 53

This the young Hitler did not like, He thought Lueger was far too tolerant and

did not appreciate the racial problem of the Jews. He resented the mayor’s

failure to embrace Pan-Germanism and was skeptical of his Roman Catholic

clericalism and his loyalty to the Hapsburgs. Had not the old Emperor Franz-

Josef twice refused to sanction Lueger’s election as burgomaster?

But in the end Hitler was forced to acknowledge the genius of this man who

knew how to win the support of the masses, who understood modern social

problems and the importance of propaganda and oratory in swaying the

multitude. Hitler could not help but admire the way Lueger dealt with the

powerful Church—“his policy was fashioned with infinite shrewdness.” And,

finally, Lueger “was quick to make use of all available means for winning the

support of long-established institutions, so as to be able to derive the greatest

possible advantage for his movement from those old sources of power.” 54

Here in a nutshell were the ideas and techniques which Hitler was later to use

in constructing his own political party and in leading it to power in Germany.

His originality lay in his being the only politician of the Right to apply them to

the German scene after the First World War. It was then that the Nazi

movement, alone among the nationalist and conservative parties, gained a great

mass following and, having achieved this, won over” the support of the Army,

the President of the Republic and the associations of big business—three “long-

established institutions” of great power, which led to the chancellorship of

Germany. The lessons learned in Vienna proved useful indeed.

Dr. Karl Lueger had been a brilliant orator, but the Pan-German Party had

lacked effective public speakers. Hitler took notice of this and in Mein Kampf

makes much of the importance of oratory in politics.

The power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in

history rolling has from time immemorial been the magic power of the spoken word, and that

alone.

The broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech. All great

movements are popular movements, volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotional

sentiments, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or by the firebrand of the word

hurled among the masses; they are not the lemonade-like outpourings of the literary aesthetes

and drawing-room heroes. 55

Though refraining from actual participation in Austrian party politics, young

Hitler already was beginning to practice his oratory on the audiences which he

found in Vienna’s flophouses, soup kitchens and on its street corners. It was to

develop into a talent (as this author, who later was to listen to scores of his most

important speeches, can testify) more formidable than any other in the Germany

between the wars, and it was to contribute in a large measure to his astounding

success.

And finally in Hitler’s Vienna experience there were the Jews. In Linz, he

says, there had been few Jews. “At home I do not remember having heard the

word during my father’s lifetime.” At high school there was a Jewish boy—“but

we didn’t give the matter any thought … I even took them [the Jews] for

Germans.” 56

According to Hitler’s boyhood friend, this is not the truth. “When I first met

Adolf Hitler,” says August Kubizek, recalling their days together in Linz, “his

anti-Semitism was already pronounced … Hitler was already a confirmed anti-

Semite when he went to Vienna. And although his experiences in Vienna might

have deepened this feeling, they certainly did not give birth to it.” 57

“Then,” says Hitler, “I came to Vienna.”

Preoccupied by the abundance of my impressions … oppressed by the hardship of my own

lot, I gained at first no insight into the inner stratification of the people in this gigantic city.

Notwithstanding that Vienna in those days counted nearly two hundred thousand Jews among

its two million inhabitants, I did not see them … The Jew was still characterized for me by

nothing but his religion, and therefore on grounds of human tolerance I maintained my

rejection of religious attacks in this case as in others. Consequently the tone of the Viennese

anti-Semitic press seemed to me unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great nation.58

One day, Hitler recounts, he went strolling through the Inner City. “I suddenly

encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black side-locks. Is this a Jew?

was my first thought. For, to be sure, they had not looked like that in Linz. I

observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign

face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new

form: Is this a German?” 59

Hitler’s answer may be readily guessed. He claims, though, that before

answering he decided “to try to relieve my doubts by books.” He buried himself

in anti-Semitic literature, which had a large sale in Vienna at the time. Then he

took to the streets to observe the “phenomenon” more closely. “Wherever I

went,” he says, “I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they

became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity … Later I often grew

sick to the stomach from the smell of these caftan-wearers. ”60

Next, he says, he discovered the “moral stain on this ‘chosen people’ … Was

there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least

one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you

found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light—a

kike!” The Jews were largely responsible, he says he found, for prostitution and

the white-slave traffic. “When for the first time,” he relates, “I recognized the

Jew as the cold-hearted, shameless and calculating director of this revolting vice

traffic in the scum of the big city, a cold shudder ran down my back.” 61

There is a great deal of morbid sexuality in Hitler’s ravings about the Jews.

This was characteristic of Vienna’s anti-Semitic press of the time, as it later was

to be of the obscene Nuremberg weekly Der Stuermer, published by one of

Hitler’s favorite cronies, Julius Streicher, Nazi boss of Franconia, a noted pervert

and one of the most unsavory characters in the Third Reich. Mein Kampf is

sprinkled with lurid allusions to uncouth Jews seducing innocent Christian girls

and thus adulterating their blood. Hitler can write of the “nightmare vision of the

seduction of hundreds of thousands of girls by repulsive, crooked-legged Jew

bastards.” As Rudolf Olden has pointed out, one of the roots of Hitler’s anti-

Semitism may have been his tortured sexual envy. Though he was in his early

twenties, so far as is known-he had no relations of any kind with women during

his sojourn in Vienna.

“Gradually,” Hitler relates, “I began to hate them … For me this was the time

of the greatest spiritual upheaval I have ever had to go through. I had ceased to

be a weak-kneed cosmopolitan and become an anti-Semite.” 62

He was to remain a blind and fanatical one to the bitter end; his last testament,

written a few hours before his death, would contain a final blast against the Jews

as responsible for the war which he had started and which was now finishing

him and the Third Reich. This burning hatred, which was to infect so many

Germans in that empire, would lead ultimately to a massacre so horrible and on

such a scale as to leave an ugly scar on civilization that will surely last as long as

man on earth.

In the spring of 1913, Hitler left Vienna for good and went to live in Germany,

where his heart, he says, had always been. He was twenty-four and to everyone

except himself he must have seemed a total failure. He had not become a painter,

nor an architect. He had become nothing, so far as anyone could see, but a

vagabond—an eccentric, bookish one, to be sure. He had no friends, no family,

no job, no home. He had, however, one thing: an unquenchable confidence in

himself and a deep, burning sense of mission.

Probably he left Austria to escape military service. * This was not because he

was a coward but because he loathed the idea of serving in the ranks with Jews,

Slavs and other minority races of the empire. In Mein Kampf Hitler states that he

went to Munich in the spring of 1912, but this is an error. A police register lists

him as living in Vienna until May 1913.

His own stated reasons for leaving Austria are quite grandiose.

My inner revulsion toward the Hapsburg State steadily grew … I was repelled by the

conglomeration of races which the capital showed me, repelled by this whole mixture of

Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs, and Croats, and everywhere the eternal

mushroom of humanity—Jews, and more Jews. To me the giant city seemed the embodiment

of racial desecration … The longer I lived in this city the more my hatred grew for the foreign

mixture of peoples which had begun to corrode this old site of German culture … For all these

reasons a longing rose stronger and stronger in me to go at last whither since my childhood

secret desires and secret love had drawn me.63

His destiny in that land he loved so dearly was to be such as not even he, in

his wildest dreams, could have then imagined. He was, and would remain until

shortly before he became Chancellor, technically a foreigner, an Austrian, in the

German Reich. It is only as an Austrian who came of age in the last decade

before the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire, who failed to take root in its

civilized capital, who embraced all the preposterous prejudices and hates then

rife among its German-speaking extremists and who failed to grasp what was

decent and honest and honorable in the vast majority of his fellow citizens, were

they Czechs or Jews or Germans, poor or well off, artists or artisans, that Hitler

can be understood. It is doubtful if any German from the north, from the

Rhineland in the west, from East Prussia or even from Bavaria in the south could

have had in his blood and mind out of any possible experience exactly the

mixture of ingredients which propelled Adolf Hitler to the heights he eventually

reached. To be sure, there was added a liberal touch of unpredictable genius.

But in the spring of 1913 his genius had not yet shown. In Munich, as in

Vienna, he remained penniless, friendless and without a regular job. And then in

the summer of 1914 the war came, snatching him, like millions of others, into its

grim clutches. On August 3 he petitioned King Ludwig III of Bavaria for

permission to volunteer in a Bavarian regiment and it was granted.

This was the heaven-sent opportunity. Now the young vagabond could satisfy

not only his passion to serve his beloved adopted country in what he says he

believed was a fight for its existence—“to be or not to be”—but he could escape

from all the failures and frustrations of his personal life.

“To me,” he wrote in Mein Kampf, “those hours came as a deliverance from

the distress that had weighed upon me during the days of my youth. I am not

ashamed to say that, carried away by the enthusiasm of the moment, I sank down

on my knees and thanked Heaven out of the fullness of my heart for granting me

the good fortune of being permitted to live in such a time … For me, as for every

German, there now began the most memorable period of my life. Compared to

the events of this gigantic struggle all the past fell away into oblivion. ”64

For Hitler the past, with all its shabbiness, loneliness and disappointments,

was to remain in the shadows, though it shaped his mind and character forever

afterward. The war, which now would bring death to so many millions, brought

for him, at twenty-five, a new start in life.

* Hitler himself seems to have recognized this. In his youth he confided to the only boyhood

friend he had that nothing had ever pleased him as much as his father’s change of names. He

told August Kubizek that the name Schicklgruber “seemed to him so uncouth, so boorish,

apart from being so clumsy and unpractical. He found ‘Hiedler’ … too soft; but ‘Hitler’

sounded nice and was easy to remember.” (August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, p. 40.)

* He told this story on himself in one of his reminiscing moods on the evening of January 8–9,

1942, at Supreme Headquarters. ( Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p. 160.

†“These were the happiest days of my life and seemed to me almost a dream …” ( Mein

Kampf, p. 18.) In a letter dated August 4, 1933, six months after he became Chancellor, Hitler

wrote his boyhood friend, August Kubizek: “I should be very glad … to revive once more with

you those memories of the best years of my life.” (Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, p. 273.)

*Kubizek, who appears to have been the only friend Hitler ever had in his youth, has given in

his book, The Young Hitler I Knew, an interesting picture of his companion in the last four

years before, at the age of nineteen, he skidded down to the life of a vagabond in Vienna—a

portrait, incidentally, that not only fills a biographical gap in the life of the German Fuehrer

but corrects somewhat the hitherto prevalent impressions of his early character. Kubizek was

as unlike Hitler as can be imagined. He had a happy home in Linz, learned his father’s trade as

an upholsterer, worked diligently at it while studying music, was graduated with honors from

the Vienna Conservatory of Music and began a promising professional career as a conductor

and composer which was shattered by the First World War.

* See Das Ende des Hitler-Mythos, by Josef Greiner, who was personally acquainted with

Hitler during part of his Vienna days. See also Hitler the Pawn, by Rudolf Olden; Olden’s

book includes statements from Reinhold Hanisch, a Sudeten tramp who for a time was a

roommate of Hitler’s in the men’s hostel and who hawked some of his paintings. Konrad

Heiden, in Der Fuehrer, also quotes material from Hanisch, including the court records of a

lawsuit which Hitler brought against the tramp for cheating him out of a share of a painting

which Hanisch allegedly sold for him.

* The italics are Hitler’s.

* The word was cut out in the second and all subsequent editions of Mein Kampf, and the noun

“pestilence” substituted.

* Since 1910, when he was twenty-one, he had been subject to military service. According to

Heiden the Austrian authorities could not put their finger on him while he was in Vienna. They

finally located him in Munich and ordered him to report for examination in Linz. Josef

Greiner, in his Das Ende des Hitler-Mythos, publishes some of the correspondence between

Hitler and the Austrian military authorities in which Hitler denies that he went to Germany to

avoid Austrian military service. On the ground that he lacked funds, he requested to be

allowed to take his examination in Salzburg because of its nearness to Munich. He was

examined there on February 5, 1914, and found unfit for military or even auxiliary service on

account of poor health—apparently he still had a lung ailment His failure to report for military

service until the authorities finally located him at the age of twenty-four must have bothered

Hitler when his star rose in Germany. Greiner confirms a story that was current in anti-Nazi

circles when I was in Berlin that when the German troops occupied Austria in 1938 Hitler

ordered the Gestapo to find the official papers relating to his military service. The records in

Linz were searched in vain—to Hitler’s mounting fury. They had been removed by a member

of the local government, who, after the war, showed them to Greiner.

2

BIRTH OF THE NAZI PARTY

ON THE DARK AUTUMN Sunday of November 10, 1918, Adolf Hitler experienced

what out of the depths of his hatred and frustration he called the greatest villainy

of the century.* A pastor had come bearing unbelievable news for the wounded

soldiers in the military hospital at Pasewalk, a small Pomeranian town northeast

of Berlin, where Hitler was recovering from temporary blindness suffered in a

British gas attack a month before near Ypres.

That Sunday morning, the pastor informed them, the Kaiser had abdicated and

fled to Holland. The day before a republic had been proclaimed in Berlin. On the

morrow, November 11, an armistice would be signed at Compiègne in France.

The war had been lost. Germany was at the mercy of the victorious Allies. The

pastor began to sob.

“I could stand it no longer,” Hitler says in recounting the scene. “Everything

went black again before my eyes; I tottered and groped my way back to the

ward, threw myself on my bunk, and dug my burning head into my blanket and

pillow … So it had all been in vain. In vain all the sacrifices and privations; …

in vain the hours in which, with mortal fear clutching at our hearts, we

nevertheless did our duty; in vain the death of two millions who died … Had

they died for this? … Did all this happen only so that a gang of wretched

criminals could lay hands on the Fatherland?” 1

For the first time since he had stood at his mother’s grave, he says, he broke

down and wept. “I could not help it.” Like millions of his fellow countrymen

then and forever after, he could not accept the blunt and shattering fact that

Germany had been defeated on the battlefield and had lost the war.

Like millions of other Germans, too, Hitler had been a brave and courageous

soldier. Later he would be accused by some political opponents of having been a

coward in combat, but it must be said, in fairness, that there is no shred of

evidence in his record for such a charge. As a dispatch runner in the First

Company of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, he arrived at the

front toward the end of October 1914 after scarcely three months of training, and

his unit was decimated in four days of hard fighting at the first Battle of Ypres,

where the British halted the German drive to the Channel. According to a letter

Hitler wrote his Munich landlord, a tailor named Popp, his regiment was reduced

in four days of combat from 3,500 to 600 men; only thirty officers survived, and

four companies had to be dissolved.

During the war he was wounded twice, the first time on October 7, 1916, in

the Battle of the Somme, when he was hit in the leg. After hospitalization in

Germany he returned to the List Regiment—it was named after its original

commander—in March 1917 and, now promoted to corporal, fought in the Battle

of Arras and the third Battle of Ypres during that summer. His regiment was in

the thick of the fighting during the last all-out German offensive in the spring

and summer of 1918. On the night of October 13 he was caught in a heavy

British gas attack on a hill south of Werwick during the last Battle of Ypres. “I

stumbled back with burning eyes,” he relates, “taking with me my last report of

the war. A few hours later, my eyes had turned into glowing coals; it had grown

dark around me.” 2

He was twice decorated for bravery. In December 1914 he was awarded the

Iron Cross, Second Class, and in August 1918 he received the Iron Cross, First

Class, which was rarely given to a common soldier in the old Imperial Army.

One comrade in his unit testified that he won the coveted decoration for having

captured fifteen Englishmen single-handed; another said it was Frenchmen. The

official history of the List Regiment contains no word of any such exploit; it is

silent about the individual feats of many members who received decorations.

Whatever the reason, there is no doubt that Corporal Hitler earned the Iron

Cross, First Class. He wore it proudly to the end of his life.

And yet, as soldiers go, he was a peculiar fellow, as more than one of his

comrades remarked. No letters or presents from home came to him, as they did

to the others. He never asked for leave; he had not even a combat soldier’s

interest in women. He never grumbled, as did the bravest of men, about the filth,

the lice, the mud, the stench, of the front line. He was the impassioned warrior,

deadly serious at all times about the war’s aims and Germany’s manifest destiny.

“We all cursed him and found him intolerable,” one of the men in his

company later recalled. “There was this white crow among us that didn’t go

along with us when we damned the war to hell. ”3 Another man described him as

sitting “in the corner of our mess holding his head between his hands, in deep

contemplation. Suddenly he would leap up and, running about excitedly, say that

in spite of our big guns victory would be denied us, for the invisible foes of the

German people were a greater danger than the biggest cannon of the enemy.” 4

Whereupon he would launch into a vitriolic attack on these “invisible foes”—the

Jews and the Marxists. Had he not learned in Vienna that they were the source of

all evil?

And indeed had he not seen this for himself in the German homeland while

convalescing from his leg wound in the middle of the war? After his discharge

from the hospital at Beelitz, near Berlin, he had visited the capital and then gone

on to Munich. Everywhere he found “scoundrels” cursing the war and wishing

for its quick end. Slackers abounded, and who were they but Jews? “The

offices,” he found, “were filled with Jews. Nearly every clerk was a Jew and

nearly every Jew was a clerk … In the year 1916–17 nearly the whole

production was under control of Jewish finance … The Jew robbed the whole

nation and pressed it beneath his domination … I saw with horror a catastrophe

approaching …” 5 Hitler could not bear what he saw and was glad, he says, to

return to the front.

He could bear even less the disaster which befell his beloved Fatherland in

November 1918. To him, as to almost all Germans, it was “monstrous” and

undeserved. The German Army had not been defeated in the field. It had been

stabbed in the back by the traitors at home.

Thus emerged for Hitler, as for so many Germans, a fanatical belief in the

legend of the “stab in the back” which, more than anything else, was to

undermine the Weimar Republic and pave the way for Hitler’s ultimate triumph.

The legend was fraudulent. General Ludendorff, the actual leader of the High

Command, had insisted on September 28, 1918, on an armistice “at once,” and

his nominal superior, Field Marshal von Hindenburg, had supported him. At a

meeting of the Crown Council in Berlin on October 2 presided over by Kaiser

Wilhelm II, Hindenburg had reiterated the High Command’s demand for an

immediate truce. “The Army,” he said, “cannot wait forty-eight hours.” In a

letter written on the same day Hindenburg flatly stated that the military situation

made it imperative “to stop the fighting.” No mention was made of any “stab in

the back.” Only later did Germany’s great war hero subscribe to the myth. In a

hearing before the Committee of Inquiry of the National Assembly on November

18, 1919, a year after the war’s end, Hindenburg declared, “As an English

general has very truly said, the German Army was ‘stabbed in the back.’” *

In point of fact, the civilian government headed by Prince Max of Baden,

which had not been told of the worsening military situation by the High

Command until the end of September, held out for several weeks against

Ludendorff’s demand for an armistice.

One had to live in Germany between the wars to realize how widespread was

the acceptance of this incredible legend by the German people. The facts which

exposed its deceit lay all around. The Germans of the Right would not face them.

The culprits, they never ceased to bellow, were the “November criminals”—an

expression which Hitler hammered into the consciousness of the people. It

mattered not at all that the German Army, shrewdly and cowardly, had

maneuvered the republican government into signing the armistice which the

military leaders had insisted upon, and that it thereafter had advised the

government to accept the Peace Treaty of Versailles. Nor did it seem to count

that the Social Democratic Party had accepted power in 1918 only reluctantly

and only to preserve the nation from utter chaos which threatened to lead to

Bolshevism. It was not responsible for the German collapse. The blame for that

rested on the old order, which had held the power. * But millions of Germans

refused to concede this. They had, to find scapegoats for the defeat and for their

humiliation and misery. They easily convinced themselves that they had found

them in the “November criminals” who had signed the surrender and established

democratic government in the place of the old autocracy. The gullibility of the

Germans is a subject which Hitler often harps on in Mein Kampf. He was shortly

to take full advantage of it.

When the pastor had left the hospital in Pasewalk that evening of November

10, 1918, “there followed terrible days and even worse nights” for Adolf Hitler.

“I knew,” he says, “that all was lost. Only fools, liars and criminals could hope

for mercy from the enemy. In these nights hatred grew in me, hatred for those

responsible for this deed … Miserable and degenerate criminals! The more I

tried to achieve clarity on the monstrous event in this hour, the more the shame

of indignation and disgrace burned my brow. What was all the pain in my eyes

compared to this misery?”

And then: “My own fate became known to me. I decided to go into politics.” 6

As it turned out, this was a fateful decision for Hitler and for the world.

THE BEGINNING OF THE NAZI PARTY

The prospects for a political career in Germany for this thirty-year-old

Austrian without friends or funds, without a job, with no trade or profession or

any previous record of regular employment, with no experience whatsoever in

politics, were less than promising, and at first, for a brief moment, Hitler realized

it. “For days,” he says, “I wondered what could be done, but the end of every

meditation was the sober realization that I, nameless as I was, did not possess the

least basis for any useful action.” 7

He had returned to Munich at the end of November 1918, to find his adopted

city scarcely recognizable. Revolution had broken out here too. The Wittelsbach

King had also abdicated. Bavaria was in the hands of the Social Democrats, who

had set up a Bavarian “People’s State” under Kurt Eisner, a popular Jewish

writer who had been born in Berlin. On November 7, Eisner, a familiar figure in

Munich with his great gray beard, his pince-nez, his enormous black hat and his

diminutive size, had traipsed through the streets at the head of & few hundred

men and, without a shot being fired, had occupied the seat of parliament and

government and proclaimed a republic. Three months later he was assassinated

by a young right-wing officer, Count Anton Arco-Valley. The workers

thereupon set up a soviet republic, but this was short-lived. On May 1, 1919,

Regular Army troops dispatched from Berlin and Bavarian “free corps”

( Freikorps) volunteers entered Munich and overthrew the Communist regime,

massacring several hundred persons, including many non-Communists, in

revenge for the shooting of a dozen hostages by the soviet. Though a moderate

Social Democratic government under Johannes Hoffmann was nominally

restored for the time being, the real power in Bavarian politics passed to the

Right.

What was the Right in Bavaria at this chaotic time? It was the Regular Army,

the Reichswehr; it was the monarchists, who wished the Wittelbachs back. It was

a mass of conservatives who despised the democratic Republic established in

Berlin; and as time went on it was above all the great mob of demobilized

soldiers for whom the bottom had fallen out of the world in 1918, uprooted men

who could not find jobs or their way back to the peaceful society they had left in

1914, men grown tough and violent through war who could not shake

themselves from ingrained habit and who, as Hitler, who for a while was one of

them, would later say, “became revolutionaries who favored revolution for its

own sake and desired to see revolution established as a permanent condition.”

Armed free-corps bands sprang up all over Germany and were secretly

equipped by the Reichswehr. At first they were mainly used to fight the Poles

and the Balts on the disputed eastern frontiers, but soon they were backing plots

for the overthrow of the republican regime. In March 1920, one of them, the

notorious Ehrhardt Brigade, led by a freebooter, Captain Ehrhardt, occupied

Berlin and enabled Dr. Wolfgang Kapp, * a mediocre politician of the extreme

Right, to proclaim himself Chancellor. The Regular Army, under General von

Seeckt, had stood by while the President of the Republic and the government

fled in disarray to western Germany. Only a general strike by the trade unions

restored the republican government.

In Munich at the same time a different kind of military coup d’état was more

successful. On March 14, 1920, the Reichswehr overthrew the Hoffmann

Socialist government and installed a right-wing regime under Gustav von Kahr.

And now the Bavarian capital became a magnet for all those forces in Germany

which were determined to overthrow the Republic, set up an authoritarian

regime and repudiate the Diktat of Versailles. Here the condottieri of the free

corps, including the members of the Ehrhardt Brigade, found a refuge and a

welcome. Here General Ludendorff settled, along with a host of other

disgruntled, discharged Army officers.* Here were plotted the political murders,

among them that of Matthias Erzberger, the moderate Catholic politician who

had had the courage to sign the armistice when the generals backed out; and of

Walther Rathenau, the brilliant, cultured Foreign Minister, whom the extremists

hated for being a Jew and for carrying out the national government’s policy of

trying to fulfill at least some of the provisions of the Versailles Treaty.

It was in this fertile field in Munich that Adolf Hitler got his start.

When he had come back to Munich at the end of November 1918, he had

found that his battalion was in the hands of the “Soldiers’ Councils.” This was so

repellent to him, he says, that he decided “at once to leave as soon as possible.”

He spent the winter doing guard duty at a prisoner-of-war camp at Traunstein,

near the Austrian border. He was back in Munich in the spring. In Mein Kampf

he relates that he incurred the “disapproval” of the left-wing government and

claims that he avoided arrest only by the feat of aiming his carbine at three

“scoundrels” who had come to fetch him. Immediately after the Communist

regime was overthrown Hitler began what he terms his “first more or less

political activity.” This consisted of giving information to the commission of

inquiry set up by the 2nd Infantry Regiment to investigate those who shared

responsibility for the brief soviet regime in Munich.

Apparently Hitler’s service on this occasion was considered valuable enough

to lead the Army to give him further employment. He was assigned to a job in

the Press and News Bureau of the Political Department of the Army’s district

command. The German Army, contrary to its traditions, was now deep in

politics, especially in Bavaria, where at last it had established a government to

its liking. To further its conservative views it gave the soldiers courses of

“political instruction,” in one of which Adolf Hitler was an attentive pupil. One

day, according to his own story, he intervened during a lecture in which

someone had said a good word for the Jews. His anti-Semitic harangue

apparently so pleased his superior officers that he was soon posted to a Munich

regiment as an educational officer, a Bildungsoffizier, whose main task was to

combat dangerous ideas—pacifism, socialism, democracy; such was the Army’s

conception of its role in the democratic Republic it had sworn to serve.

This was an important break for Hitler, the first recognition he had won in the

field of politics he was now trying to enter. Above all, it gave him a chance to

try out his oratorical abilities—the first prerequisite, as he had always

maintained, of a successful politician. “All at once,” he says, “I was offered an

opportunity of speaking before a larger audience; and the thing that I had always

presumed from pure feeling without knowing it was now corroborated: I could

‘speak.’” The discovery pleased him greatly even if it came as no great surprise.

He had been afraid that his voice might have been permanently weakened by the

gassing he had suffered at the front. Now he found it had recovered sufficiently

to enable him to make himself heard “at least in every corner of the small squad

rooms.” 8 This was the beginning of a talent that was to make him easily the most

effective orator in Germany, with a magic power, after he took to radio, to sway

millions by his voice.

One day in September 1919, Hitler received orders from the Army’s Political

Department to have a look at a tiny political group in Munich which called itself

the German Workers’ Party. The military were suspicious of workers’ parties,

since they were predominantly Socialist or Communist, but this one, it was

believed, might be different. Hitler says it was “entirely unknown” to him. And

yet he knew one of the men who was scheduled to speak at the party’s meeting

which he had been assigned to investigate.

A few weeks before, in one of his Army educational courses, he had heard a

lecture by Gottfried Feder, a construction engineer and a crank in the field of

economics, who had become obsessed with the idea that “speculative” capital, as

opposed to “creative” and “productive” capital, was the root of much of

Germany’s economic trouble. He was for abolishing the first kind and in 1917

had formed an organization to achieve this purpose: the German Fighting

League for the Breaking of Interest Slavery. Hitler, ignorant of economics, was

much impressed by Feder’s lecture. He saw in Feder’s appeal for the “breaking

of interest slavery” one of the “essential premises for the foundation of a new

party.” In Feder’s lecture, he says, “I sensed a powerful slogan for this coming

struggle.” 9

But at first he did not sense any importance in the German Workers’ Party. He

went to its meeting because he was ordered to, and, after sitting through what he

thought was a dull session of some twenty-five persons gathered in a murky

room in the Sterneckerbräu beer cellar, he was not impressed. It was “a new

organization like so many others. This was a time,” he says, “in which anyone

who was not satisfied with developments … felt called upon to found a new

party. Everywhere these organizations sprang out of the ground, only to vanish

silently after a time. I judged the German Workers’ Party no differently.” 10 After

Feder had finished speaking Hitler was about to leave, when a “professor”

sprang up, questioned the soundness of Feder’s arguments and then proposed

that Bavaria should break away from Prussia and found a South German nation

with Austria. This was a popular notion in Munich at the time, but its expression

aroused Hitler to a fury and he rose to give “the learned gentleman,” as he later

recounted, a piece of his mind. This apparently was so violent that, according to

Hitler, the “professor” left the hall “like a wet poodle,” while the rest of the

audience looked at the unknown young speaker “with astonished faces.” One

man—Hitler says he did not catch his name—came leaping after him and

pressed a little booklet into his hands.

This man was Anton Drexler, a locksmith by trade, who may be said to have

been the actual founder of National Socialism. A sickly, bespectacled man,

lacking a formal education, with an independent but narrow and confused mind,

a poor writer and a worse speaker, Drexler was then employed in the Munich

railroad shops. On March 7, 1918, he had set up a “Committee of Independent

Workmen” to combat the Marxism of the free trade unions and to agitate for a

“just” peace for Germany. Actually, it was a branch of a larger movement

established in North Germany as the Association for the Promotion of Peace on

Working-Class Lines (the country was then and would continue to be until 1933

full of countless pressure groups with highfalutin titles).

Drexler never recruited more than forty members, and in January 1919 he

merged his committee with a similar group, the Political Workers’ Circle, led by

a newspaper reporter, one Karl Harrer. The new organization, which numbered

less than a hundred, was called the German Workers’ Party and Harrer was its

first chairman. Hitler, who has little to say in Mein Kampf of some of his early

comrades whose names are now forgotten, pays Harrer the tribute of being

“honest” and “certainly widely educated” but regrets that he lacked the

“oratorical gift.” Perhaps Harrer’s chief claim to fleeting fame is that he

stubbornly maintained that Hitler was a poor speaker, a judgment which riled the

Nazi leader ever after, as he makes plain in his autobiography. At any rate,

Drexler seems to have been the chief driving force in this small, unknown

German Workers’ Party.

The next morning Hitler turned to a perusal of the booklet which Drexler had

thrust into his hands. He describes the scene at length in Mein Kampf. It was 5

A.M. Hitler had awakened and, as he says was his custom, was reclining on his

cot in the barracks of the 2nd Infantry Regiment watching the mice nibble at the

bread crumbs which he invariably scattered on the floor the night before. “I had

known so much poverty in my life,” he muses, “that I was well able to imagine

the hunger and hence also the pleasure of the little creatures.” He remembered

the little pamphlet and began to read it. It was entitled “My Political

Awakening.” To Hitler’s surprise, it reflected a good many ideas which he

himself had acquired over the years. Drexler’s principal aim was to build a

political party which would be based on the masses of the working class but

which, unlike the Social Democrats, would be strongly nationalist. Drexler had

been a member of the patriotic Fatherland Front but had soon become

disillusioned with its middle-class spirit which seemed to have no contact at all

with the masses. In Vienna, as we have seen, Hitler had learned to scorn the

bourgeoisie for the same reason—its utter lack of concern with the working-

class families and their social problems. Drexler’s ideas, then, definitely

interested him.

Later that day Hitler was astonished to receive a postcard saying that he had

been accepted in the German Workers’ Party. “I didn’t know whether to be

angry or to laugh,” he remembered later. “I had no intention of joining a ready-

made party, but wanted to found one of my own. What they asked of me was

presumptuous and out of the question.” 11 He was about to say so in a letter when

“curiosity won out” and he decided to go to a committee meeting to which he

had been invited and explain in person his reasons for not joining “this absurd

little organization.”

The tavern in which the meeting was to take place was the Alte Rosenbad in the

Herrenstrasse, a very run-down place … I went through the ill-lit dining room in which not a

soul was sitting, opened the door to the back room, and there I was face to face with the

Committee. In the dim light of a grimy gas lamp four young people sat at a table, among them

the author of the little pamphlet, who at once greeted me most joyfully and bade me welcome

as a new member of the German Workers’ Party.

Really, I was somewhat taken aback. The minutes of the last meeting were read and the

secretary given a vote of confidence. Next came the treasury report—all in all the association

possessed seven marks and fifty pfennigs—for which the treasurer received a vote of

confidence. This too was entered in the minutes. Then the first chairman read the answers to a

letter from Kiel, one from Duesseldorf, and one from Berlin and everyone expressed approval.

Next a report was given on the incoming mail …

Terrible, terrible! This was club life of the worst manner and sort. Was I to join this

organization? 12

Yet there was something about these shabby men in the ill-lit back room that

attracted him: “the longing for a new movement which should be more than a

party in the previous sense of the word.” That evening he returned to the

barracks to “face the hardest question of my life: should I join?” Reason, he

admits, told him to decline. And yet … The very unimportance of the

organization would give a young man of energy and ideas an opportunity “for

real personal activity.” Hitler thought over what he could “bring to this task.”

That I was poor and without means seemed to me the most bearable part of it,

but it was harder that I was numbered among the nameless, that I was one of the

millions whom chance permits to live or summons out of existence without even

their closest neighbors condescending to take any notice of it. In addition, there

was the difficulty which inevitably arose from my lack of schooling.

After two days of agonized pondering and reflection, I finally came to the

conviction that I had to take this step.

It was the most decisive resolve of my life. From here there was and could be

no turning back. 13

Adolf Hitler was then and there enrolled as the seventh member of the

committee of the German Workers’ Party.

There were two members of this insignificant party who deserve mention at

this point; both were to prove important in the rise of Hitler. Captain Ernst

Roehm, on the staff of the Army’s District Command VII in Munich, had joined

the party before Hitler. He was a stocky, bull-necked, piggish-eyed, scar-faced

professional soldier—the upper part of his nose had been shot away in 1914—

with a flair for politics and a natural ability as an organizer. Like Hitler he was

possessed of a burning hatred for the democratic Republic and the “November

criminals” he held responsible for it. His aim was to re-create a strong nationalist

Germany and he believed with Hitler that this could be done only by a party

based on the lower classes, from which he himself, unlike most Regular Army

officers, had come. A tough, ruthless, driving man—albeit, like so many of the

early Nazis, a homosexual—he helped to organize the first Nazi strong-arm

squads which grew into the S.A., the army of storm troopers which he

commanded until his execution by Hitler in 1934. Roehm not only brought into

the budding party large numbers of ex-servicemen and free-corps volunteers,

who formed the backbone of the organization in its early years, but, as an officer

of the Army, which controlled Bavaria, he obtained for Hitler and his movement

the protection and sometimes the support of the authorities. Without this help,

Hitler probably could never have got a real start in his campaign to incite the

people to overthrow the Republic. Certainly he could not have got away with his

methods of terror and intimidation without the tolerance of the Bavarian

government and police.

Dietrich Eckart, twenty-one years older than Hitler, was often called the

spiritual founder of National Socialism. A witty journalist, a mediocre poet and

dramatist, he had translated Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and written a number of

unproduced plays. In Berlin for a time he had led, like Hitler in Vienna, the

bohemian vagrant’s life, become a drunkard, taken to morphine and, according

to Heiden, been confined to a mental institution, where he was finally able to

stage his dramas, using the inmates as actors. He had returned to his native

Bavaria at the war’s end and held forth before a circle of admirers at the

Brennessel wine cellar in Schwabling, the artists’ quarter in Munich, preaching

Aryan superiority and calling for the elimination of the Jews and the downfall of

the “swine” in Berlin.

“We need a fellow at the head,” Heiden, who was a working newspaperman in

Munich at the time, quotes Eckart as declaiming to the habitues of the

Brennessel wine cellar in 1919, “who can stand the sound of a machine gun. The

rabble need to get fear into their pants. We can’t use an officer, because the

people don’t respect them any more. The best would be a worker who knows

how to talk … He doesn’t need much brains … He must be a bachelor, then

we’ll get the women.” 14

What more natural than that the hard-drinking poet* should find in Adolf

Hitler the very man he was looking for? He became a close adviser to the rising

young man in the German Workers’ Party, lending him books, helping to

improve his German—both written and spoken—and introducing him to his

wide circle of friends, which included not only certain wealthy persons who

were induced to contribute to the party’s funds and Hitler’s living but such

future aides as Rudolf Hess and Alfred Rosenberg. Hitler’s admiration for Eckart

never flagged, and the last sentence of Mein Kampf is an expression of gratitude

to this erratic mentor: He was, says Hitler in concluding his book, “one of the

best, who devoted his life to the awakening of our people, in his writings and his

thoughts and finally in his deeds. ”15

Such was the weird assortment of misfits who founded National Socialism,

who unknowingly began to shape a movement which in thirteen years would

sweep the country, the strongest in Europe, and bring to Germany its Third

Reich. The confused locksmith Drexler provided the kernel, the drunken poet

Eckart some of the “spiritual” foundation, the economic crank Feder what passed

as an ideology, the homosexual Roehm the support of the Army and the war

veterans, but it was now the former tramp, Adolf Hitler, not quite thirty-one and

utterly unknown, who took the lead in building up what had been no more than a

back-room debating society into what would soon become a formidable political

party.

All the ideas which had been bubbling in his mind since the lonesome days of

hunger in Vienna now found an outlet, and an inner energy which had not been

observable in his make-up burst forth. He prodded his timid committee into

organizing bigger meetings. He personally typed out and distributed invitations.

Later he recalled how once, after he had distributed eighty of these, “we sat

waiting for the masses who were expected to appear. An hour late, the

‘chairman’ had to open the ‘meeting.’ We were again seven, the old seven.” 16

But he was not to be discouraged. He increased the number of invitations by

having them mimeographed. He collected a few marks to insert a notice of a

meeting in a local newspaper. “The success,” he says, “was positively amazing.

One hundred and eleven people were present.” Hitler was to make his first

“public” speech, following the main address by a “Munich professor.” Harrer,

nominal head of the party, objected. “This gentleman, who was certainly

otherwise honest,” Hitler relates, “just happened to be convinced that I might be

capable of doing certain things, but not of speaking. I spoke for thirty minutes,

and what before I had simply felt within me, without in any way knowing it, was

now proved by reality: I could speak! ”17 Hitler claims the audience was

“electrified” by his oratory and its enthusiasm proved by donations of three

hundred marks, which temporarily relieved the party of its financial worries.

At the start of 1920, Hitler took over the party’s propaganda, an activity to

which he had given much thought since he had observed its importance in the

Socialist and Christian Social parties in Vienna. He began immediately to

organize by far the biggest meeting ever dreamt of by the pitifully small party. It

was to be held on February 24, 1920, in the Festsaal of the famous Hofbräuhaus,

with a seating capacity of nearly two thousand. Hitler’s fellow committeemen

thought he was crazy. Harrer resigned in protest and was replaced by Drexler,

who remained skeptical* Hitler emphasizes that he personally conducted the

preparations. Indeed the event loomed so large for him that he concludes the first

volume of Mein Kampf with a description of it, because, he explains, it was the

occasion when “the party burst the narrow bonds of a small club and for the first

time exerted a determining influence on the mightiest factor of our time: public

opinion.”

Hitler was not even scheduled as the main speaker. This role was reserved for

a certain Dr. Johannes Dingfelder, a homeopathic physician, a crackpot who

contributed articles on economics to the newspapers under the pseudonym of

“Germanus Agricola,” and who was soon to be forgotten. His speech was

greeted with silence; then Hitler began to speak. As he describes the scene:

There was a hail of shouts, there were violent clashes in the hall, a handful of the most

faithful war comrades and other supporters battled with the disturbers … Communists and

Socialists … and only little by little were able to restore order. I was able to go on speaking.

After half an hour the applause slowly began to drown out the screaming and shouting …

When after nearly four hours the hall began to empty I knew that now the principles of the

movement which could no longer be forgotten were moving out among the German people. 18

In the course of his speech Hitler had enunciated for the first time the twenty-

five points of the program of the German Workers’ Party. They had been hastily

drawn up by Drexler, Feder and Hitler. Most of the heckling at Hitler had really

been directed against parts of the program which he read out, but he nevertheless

considered all the points as having been adopted and they became the official

program of the Nazi Party when its name was altered on April 1, 1920, to the

National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Indeed, for tactical reasons Hitler in

1926 declared them “unalterable.”

They are certainly a hodgepodge, a catchall for the workers, the lower middle

class and the peasants, and most of them were forgotten by the time the party

came to power. A good many writers on Germany have ridiculed them, and the

Nazi leader himself was later to be embarrassed when reminded of some of

them. Yet, as in the case of the main principles laid down in Mein Kampf, the

most important of them were carried out by the Third Reich, with consequences

disastrous to millions of people, inside and outside of Germany.

The very first point in the program demanded the union of all Germans in a

Greater Germany. Was this not exactly what Chancellor Hitler would insist on

and get when he annexed Austria and its six million Germans, when he took the

Sudetenland with its three million Germans? And was it not his demand for the

return of German Danzig and the other areas in Poland inhabited predominantly

by Germans which led to the German attack on Poland and brought on World

War II? And cannot it be added that it was one of the world’s misfortunes that so

many in the interwar years either ignored or laughed off the Nazi aims which

Hitler had taken the pains to put down in writing? Surely the anti-Semitic points

of the program promulgated in the Munich beer hall on the evening of February

24, 1920, constituted a dire warning. The Jews were to be denied office and even

citizenship in Germany and excluded from the press. All who had entered the

Reich after August 2, 1914, were to be expelled.

A good many paragraphs of the party program were obviously merely a

demagogic appeal to the mood of the lower classes at a time when they were in

bad straits and were sympathetic to radical and even socialist slogans. Point 11,

for example, demanded abolition of incomes unearned by work; Point 12, the

nationalization of trusts; Point 13, the sharing with the state of profits from large

industry; Point 14, the abolishing of land rents and speculation in land. Point 18

demanded the death penalty for traitors, usurers and profiteers, and Point 16,

calling for the maintenance of “a sound middle class,” insisted on the

communalization of department stores and their lease at cheap rates to small

traders. These demands had been put in at the insistence of Drexler and Feder,

who apparently really believed in the “socialism” of National Socialism. They

were the ideas which Hitler was to find embarrassing when the big industrialists

and landlords began to pour money into the party coffers, and of course nothing

was ever done about them.

There were, finally, two points of the program which Hitler would carry out as

soon as he became Chancellor. Point 2 demanded the abrogation of the treaties

of Versailles and St. Germain. The last point, number 25, insisted on “the

creation of a strong central power of the State.” This, like Points 1 and 2

demanding the union of all Germans in the Reich and the abolition of the peace

treaties, was put into the program at Hitler’s insistence and it showed how even

then, when his party was hardly known outside Munich, he was casting his eyes

on further horizons even at the risk of losing popular support in his own

bailiwick.

Separatism was very strong in Bavaria at the time and the Bavarians,

constantly at odds with the central government in Berlin, were demanding less,

not more, centralization, so that Bavaria could rule itself. In fact, this was what it

was doing at the moment; Berlin’s writ had very little authority in the states.

Hitler was looking ahead for power not only in Bavaria but eventually in the

Reich, and to hold and exercise that power a dictatorial regime such as he

already envisaged needed to constitute itself as a strong centralized authority,

doing away with the semiautonomous states which under the Weimar Republic,

as under the Hohenzollern Empire, enjoyed their own parliaments and

governments. One of his first acts after January 30, 1933, was to swiftly carry

out this final point in the party’s program which so few had noticed or taken

seriously. No one could say he had not given ample warning, in writing, from

the very beginning.

Inflammatory oratory and a radical, catchall program, important as they were

for a fledgling party out to attract attention and recruit mass support, were not

enough, and Hitler now turned his attention to providing more—much more. The

first signs of his peculiar genius began to appear and make themselves felt. What

the masses needed, he thought, were not only ideas—a few simple ideas, that is,

that he could ceaselessly hammer through their skulls—but symbols that would

win their faith, pageantry and color that would arouse them, and acts of violence

and terror, which if successful, would attract adherents (were not most Germans

drawn to the strong?) and give them a sense of power over the weak.

In Vienna, as we have seen, he was intrigued by what he called the “infamous

spiritual and physical terror” which he thought was employed by the Social

Democrats against their political opponents.* Now he turned it to good purpose

in his own anti-Socialist party. At first ex-servicemen were assigned to the

meetings to silence hecklers and, if necessary, toss them out. In the summer of

1920, soon after the party had added “National Socialist” to the name of the

“German Workers’ Party” and became the National Socialist German Workers’

Party, or N.S.D.A.P., as it was now to be familiarly known, Hitler organized a

bunch of roughneck war veterans into “strong-arm” squads, Ordnertruppe, under

the command of Emil Maurice, an ex-convict and watchmaker. On October 5,

1921, after camouflaging themselves for a short time as the “Gymnastic and

Sports Division” of the party to escape suppression by the Berlin government,

they were officially named the Sturmabteilung, from which the name S.A. came.

The storm troopers, outfitted in brown uniforms, were recruited largely from the

freebooters of the free corps and placed under the command of Johann Ulrich

Klintzich, an aide of the notorious Captain Ehrhardt, who had recently been

released from imprisonment in connection with the murder of Erzberger.

These uniformed rowdies, not content to keep order at Nazi meetings, soon

took to breaking up those of the other parties. Once in 1921 Hitler personally led

his storm troopers in an attack on a meeting which was to be addressed by a

Bavarian federalist by the name of Ballerstedt, who received a beating. For this

Hitler was sentenced to three months in jail, one of which he served. This was

his first experience in jail and he emerged from it somewhat of a martyr and

more popular than ever. “It’s all right,” Hitler boasted to the police. “We got

what we wanted. Ballerstedt did not speak.” As Hitler had told an audience some

months before, “The National Socialist Movement will in the future ruthlessly

prevent—if necessary by force—all meetings or lectures that are likely to

distract the minds of our fellow countrymen. ”19

In the summer of 1920 Hitler, the frustrated artist but now becoming the

master propagandist, came up with an inspiration which can only be described as

a stroke of genius. What the party lacked, he saw, was an emblem, a flag, a

symbol, which would express what the new organization stood for and appeal to

the imagination of the masses, who, as Hitler reasoned, must have some striking

banner to follow and to fight under. After much thought and innumerable

attempts at various designs he hit upon a flag with a red background and in the

middle a white disk on which was imprinted a black swastika. The hooked cross

—the hakenkreuz—of the swastika, borrowed though it was from more ancient

times, was to become a mighty and frightening symbol of the Nazi Party and

ultimately of Nazi Germany. Whence Hitler got the idea of using it for both the

flag and the insignia of the party he does not say in a lengthy dissertation on the

subject in Mein Kampf.

The hakenkreuz is as old, almost, as man on the planet. It has been found in

the ruins of Troy and of Egypt and China. I myself have seen it in ancient Hindu

and Buddhist relics in India. In more recent times it showed up as an official

emblem in such Baltic states as Estonia and Finland, where the men of the

German free corps saw it during the fighting of 1918–19. The Ehrhardt Brigade

had it painted on their steel helmets when they entered Berlin during the Kapp

putsch in 1920. Hitler had undoubtedly seen it in Austria in the emblems of one

or the other anti-Semitic parties and perhaps he was struck by it when the

Ehrhardt Brigade came to Munich. He says that numerous designs suggested to

him by party members invariably included a swastika and that a “dentist from

Sternberg” actually delivered a design for a flag that “was not bad at all and

quite close to my own.”

For the colors Hitler had of course rejected the black, red and gold of the

hated Weimar Republic. He declined to adopt the old imperial flag of red, white

and black, but he liked its colors not only because, he says, they form “the most

brilliant harmony in existence,” but because they were the colors of a Germany

for which he had fought. But they had to be given a new form, and so a swastika

was added.

Hitler reveled in his unique creation. “A symbol it really is! ” he exclaims in

Mein Kampf. “In red we see the social idea of the movement, in white the

nationalist idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of the

Aryan man.” 20

Soon the swastika armband was devised for the uniforms of the storm troopers

and the party members, and two years later Hitler designed the Nazi standards

which would be carried in the massive parades and would adorn the stages of the

mass meetings. Taken from old Roman designs, they consisted of a black metal

swastika on top with a silver wreath surmounted by an eagle, and, below, the

initials NSDAP on a metal rectangle from which hung cords with fringe and

tassels, a square swastika flag with “Deutschland Erwache.’ (Germany

Awake!)” emblazoned on it.

This may not have been “art,” but it was propaganda of the highest order. The

Nazis now had a symbol which no other party could match. The hooked cross

seemed to possess some mystic power of its own, to beckon to action in a new

direction the insecure lower middle classes which had been floundering in the

uncertainty of the first chaotic postwar years. They began to flock under its

banner.

ADVENT OF THE “FUEHRER”

In the summer of 1921 the rising young agitator who had shown such

surprising talents not only as an orator but as an organizer and a propagandist

took over the undisputed leadership of the party. In doing so, he gave his fellow

workers a first taste of the ruthlessness and tactical shrewdness with which he

was to gain so much success in more important crises later on.

Early in the summer Hitler had gone to Berlin to get in touch with North

German nationalist elements and to speak at the National Club, which was their

spiritual headquarters. He wanted to assess the possibilities of carrying his own

movement beyond the Bavarian borders into the rest of Germany. Perhaps he

could make some useful alliances for that purpose. While he was away the other

members of the committee of the Nazi Party decided the moment was opportune

to challenge his leadership. He had become too dictatorial for them. They

proposed some alliances themselves with similarly minded groups in South

Germany, especially with the “German Socialist Party” which a notorious Jew-

baiter, Julius Streicher, a bitter enemy and a rival of Hitler, was building up in

Nuremberg. The committee members were sure that if these groups, with their

ambitious leaders, could be merged with the Nazis, Hitler would be reduced in

size.

Sensing the threat to his position, Hitler hurried back to Munich to quell the

intrigues of these “foolish lunatics,” as he called them in Mein Kampf. He

offered to resign from the party. This was more than the party could afford, as

the other members of the committee quickly realized. Hitler was not only their

most powerful speaker but their best organizer and propagandist. Moreover, it

was he who was now bringing in most of the organization’s funds—from

collections at the mass meetings at which he spoke and from other sources as

well, including the Army. If he left, the budding Nazi Party would surely go to

pieces. The committee refused to accept his resignation. Hitler, reassured of the

strength of his position, now forced a complete capitulation on the other leaders.

He demanded dictatorial powers for himself as the party’s sole leader, the

abolition of the committee itself and an end to intrigues with other groups such

as Stretcher’s.

This was too much for the other committee members. Led by the party’s

founder, Anton Drexler, they drew up an indictment of the would-be dictator and

circulated it as a pamphlet. It was the most drastic accusation Hitler was ever

confronted with from the ranks of his own party—from those, that is, who had

firsthand knowledge of his character and how he operated.

A lust for power and personal ambition have caused Herr Adolf Hitler to return to his post

after his six weeks’ stay in Berlin, of which the purpose has not yet been disclosed. He regards

the time as ripe for bringing disunion and schism into our ranks by means of shadowy people

behind him, and thus to further the interests of the Jews and their friends. It grows more and

more clear that his purpose is simply to use the National Socialist party as a springboard for

his own immoral purposes, and to seize the leadership in order to force the Party onto a

different track at the psychological moment. This is most clearly shown by an ultimatum

which he sent to the Party leaders a few days ago, in which he demands, among other things,

that he shall have a sole and absolute dictatorship of the Party, and that the Committee,

including the locksmith Anton Drexler, the founder and leader of the Party, should retire….

And how does he carry on his campaign? Like a Jew. He twists every fact … National

Socialists! Make up your minds about such characters! Make no mistake. Hitler is a

demagogue … He believes himself capable … of filling you up with all kinds of tales that are

anything but the truth.21

Although weakened by a silly anti-Semitism (Hitler acting like a Jew!), the

charges were substantially true, but publicizing them did not get the rebels as far

as might be supposed. Hitler promptly brought a libel suit against the authors of

the pamphlet, and Drexler himself, at a public meeting, was forced to repudiate

it. In two special meetings of the party Hitler dictated his peace terms. The

statutes were changed to abolish the committee and give him dictatorial powers

as president. The humiliated Drexler was booted upstairs as honorary president,

and he soon passed out of the picture.* As Heiden says, it was the victory of the

Cavaliers over the Roundheads of the party. But it was more than that. Then and

there, in July 1921, was established the “leadership principle” which was to be

the law first of the Nazi Party and then of the Third Reich. The “Fuehrer” had

arrived on the German scene.

The “leader” now set to work to reorganize the party. The gloomy tap-room in

the back of the Sterneckerbräu, which to Hitler was more of “a funeral vault than

an office,” was given up and new offices in another tavern in the

Corneliusstrasse occupied. These were lighter and roomier. An old Adler

typewriter was purchased on the installment plan, and a safe, filing cabinets,

furniture, a telephone and a full-time paid secretary were gradually acquired.

Money was beginning to come in. Nearly a year before, in December of 1920,

the party had acquired a run-down newspaper badly in debt, the Voelkischer

Beobachter, an anti-Semitic gossip sheet which appeared twice a week. Exactly

where the sixty thousand marks for its purchase came from was a secret which

Hitler kept well, but it is known that Eckart and Roehm persuaded Major

General Ritter von Epp, Roehm’s commanding officer in the Reichswehr and

himself a member of the party, to raise the sum. Most likely it came from Army

secret funds. At the beginning of 1923 the Voelkischer Beobachter became a

daily, thus giving Hitler the prerequisite of all German political parties, a daily

newspaper in which to preach the party’s gospels. Running a daily political

journal required additional money, and this now came from what must have

seemed to some of the more proletarian roughnecks of the party like strange

sources. Frau Helene Bechstein, wife of the wealthy piano manufacturer, was

one. From their first meeting she took a liking to the young firebrand, inviting

him to stay at the Bechstein home when he was in Berlin, arranging parties in

which he could meet the affluent, and donating sizable sums to the movement.

Part of the money to finance the new daily came from a Frau Gertrud von

Seidlitz, a Balt, who owned stock in some prosperous Finnish paper mills.

In March 1923, a Harvard graduate, Ernst (Putzi) Hanfstaengl, whose mother

was American and whose cultivated and wealthy family owned an art-publishing

business in Munich, loaned the party one thousand dollars against a mortgage on

the Voelkischer Beobachter* This was a fabulous sum in marks in those

inflationary days and was of immense help to the party and its newspaper. But

the friendship of the Hanfstaengls extended beyond monetary help. It was one of

the first respectable families of means in Munich to open its doors to the

brawling young politician. Putzi became a good friend of Hitler, who eventually

made him chief of the Foreign Press Department of the party. An eccentric,

gangling man, whose sardonic wit somewhat compensated for his shallow mind,

Hanfstaengl was a virtuoso at the piano and on many an evening, even after his

friend came to power in Berlin, he would excuse himself from the company of

those of us who might be with him to answer a hasty summons from the Fuehrer.

It was said that his piano-playing—he pounded the instrument furiously—and

his clowning soothed Hitler and even cheered him up after a tiring day. Later

this strange but genial Harvard man, like some other early cronies of Hitler,

would have to flee the country for his life. *

Most of the men who were to become Hitler’s closest subordinates were now

in the party or would shortly enter it. Rudolf Hess joined in 1920. Son of a

German wholesale merchant domiciled in Egypt, Hess had spent the first

fourteen years of his life in that country and had then come to the Rhineland for

his education. During the war he served for a time in the List Regiment with

Hitler—though they did not become acquainted then—and after being twice

wounded became a flyer. He enrolled in the University of Munich after the war

as a student of economics but seems to have spent much of his time distributing

anti-Semitic pamphlets and fighting with the various armed bands then at loose

in Bavaria. He was in the thick of the firing when the soviet regime in Munich

was overthrown on May 1, 1919, and was wounded in the leg. One evening a

year later he went to hear Hitler speak, was carried away by his eloquence and

joined the party, and soon he became a close friend, a devoted follower and

secretary of the leader. It was he who introduced Hitler to the geopolitical ideas

of General Karl Haushofer, then a professor of geopolitics at the university.

Hess had stirred Hitler with a prize-winning essay which he wrote for a thesis,

entitled “How Must the Man Be Constituted Who Will Lead Germany Back to

Her Old Heights?”

Where all authority has vanished, only a man of the people can establish authority … The

deeper the dictator was originally rooted in the broad masses, the better he understands how to

treat them psychologically, the less the workers will distrust him, the more supporters he will

win among these most energetic ranks of the people. He himself has nothing in common with

the mass; like every great man he is all personality … When necessity commands, he does not

shrink before bloodshed. Great questions are always decided by blood and iron … In order to

reach his goal, he is prepared to trample on his closest friends … The lawgiver proceeds with

terrible hardness … As the need arises, he can trample them [the people] with the boots of a

grenadier …22

No wonder Hitler took to the young man. This was a portrait perhaps not of

the leader as he was at the moment but of the leader he wanted to become—and

did. For all his solemnity and studiousness, Hess remained a man of limited

intelligence, always receptive to crackpot ideas, which he could adopt with great

fanaticism. Until nearly the end, he would be one of Hitler’s most loyal and

trusted followers and one of the few who was not bitten by consuming personal

ambition.

Alfred Rosenberg, although he was often hailed as the “intellectual leader” of

the Nazi Party and indeed its “philosopher,” was also a man of mediocre

intelligence. Rosenberg may with some truth be put down as a Russian. Like a

good many Russian “intellectuals,” he was of Baltic German stock. The son of a

shoemaker, he was born January 12, 1893, at Reval (now Tallinn) in Estonia,

which had been a part of the Czarist Empire since 1721. He chose to study not in

Germany but in Russia and received a diploma in architecture from the

University of Moscow in 1917. He lived in Moscow through the days of the

Bolshevik revolution and it may be that, as some of his enemies in the Nazi

Party later said, he flirted with the idea of becoming a young Bolshevik

revolutionary. In February 1918, however, he returned to Reval, volunteered for

service in the German Army when it reached the city, was turned down as a

“Russian” and finally, at the end of 1918, made his way to Munich, where he

first became active in White Russian émigré circles.

Rosenberg then met Dietrich Eckart and through him Hitler, and joined the

party at the end of 1919. It was inevitable that a man who had actually received a

diploma in architecture would impress the man who had failed even to get into a

school of architecture. Hitler was also impressed by Rosenberg’s “learning,” and

he liked the young Balt’s hatred of the Jews and the Bolsheviks. Shortly before

Eckart died, toward the end of 1923, Hitler made Rosenberg editor of the

Voelkischer Beobachter, and for many years he continued to prop up this utterly

muddled man, this confused and shallow “philosopher,” as the intellectual

mentor of the Nazi movement and as one of its chief authorities on foreign

policy.

Like Rudolf Hess, Hermann Goering had also come to Munich some time

after the war ostensibly to study economics at the university, and he too had

come under the personal spell of Adolf Hitler. One of the nation’s great war

heroes, the last commander of the famed Richthofen Fighter Squadron, holder of

the Pour le Mérite, the highest war decoration in Germany, he found it even

more difficult than most war veterans to return to the humdrum existence of

peacetime civilian life. He became a transport pilot in Denmark for a time and

later in Sweden. One day he flew Count Eric von Rosen to the latter’s estate

some distance from Stockholm and while stopping over as a guest fell in love

with Countess Rosen’s sister, Carin von Kantzow, née Baroness Fock, one of

Sweden’s beauties. Some difficulties arose. Carin von Kantzow was epileptic

and was married and the mother of an eight-year-old son. But she was able to

have the marriage dissolved and marry the gallant young flyer. Possessed of

considerable means, she went with her new husband to Munich, where they lived

in some splendor and he dabbled in studies at the university.

But not for long. He met Hitler in 1921, joined the party, contributed

generously to its treasury (and to Hitler personally), threw his restless energy

into helping Roehm organize the storm troopers and a year later, in 1922, was

made commander of the S.A.

A swarm of lesser-known and, for the most part, more unsavory individuals

joined the circle around the party dictator. Max Amann, Hitler’s first sergeant in

the List Regiment, a tough, uncouth character but an able organizer, was named

business manager of the party and the Voelkischer Beobachter and quickly

brought order into the finances of both. As his personal bodyguard Hitler chose

Ulrich Graf, an amateur wrestler, a butcher’s apprentice and a renowned brawler.

As his “court photographer,” the only man who for years was permitted to

photograph him, Hitler had the lame Heinrich Hoffmann, whose loyalty was

doglike and profitable, making him in the end a millionaire. Another favorite

brawler was Christian Weber, a horse dealer, a former bouncer in a Munich dive

and a lusty beer drinker. Close to Hitler in these days was Hermann Esser, whose

oratory rivaled the leader’s and whose Jew-baiting articles in the Voelkischer

Beobachter were a leading feature of the party newspaper. He made no secret

that for a time he lived well off the generosity of some of his mistresses. A

notorious blackmailer, resorting to threats to “expose” even his own party

comrades who crossed him, Esser became so repulsive to some of the older and

more decent men in the movement that they demanded his expulsion. “I know

Esser is a scoundrel,” Hitler retorted in public, “but I shall hold on to him as long

as he can be of use to me.” 23 This was to be his attitude toward almost all of his

close collaborators, no matter how murky their past—or indeed their present.

Murderers, pimps, homosexual perverts, drug addicts or just plain rowdies were

all the same to him if they served his purposes.

He stood Julius Streicher, for example, almost to the end. This depraved

sadist, who started life as an elementary-school teacher, was one of the most

disreputable men around Hitler from 1922 until 1939, when his star finally

faded. A famous fornicator, as he boasted, who blackmailed even the husbands

of women who were his mistresses, he made his fame and fortune as a blindly

fanatical anti-Semite. His notorious weekly, Der Stuermer, thrived on lurid tales

of Jewish sexual crimes and Jewish “ritual murders”; its obscenity was

nauseating, even to many Nazis. Streicher was also a noted pornographist. He

became known as the “uncrowned King of Franconia” with the center of his

power in Nuremberg, where his word was law and where no one who crossed

him or displeased him was safe from prison and torture. Until I faced him

slumped in the dock at Nuremberg, on trial for his life as a war criminal, I never

saw him without a whip in his hand or in his belt, and he laughingly boasted of

the countless lashings he had meted out.

Such were the men whom Hitler gathered around him in the early years for his

drive to become dictator of a nation which had given the world a Luther, a Kant,

a Goethe and a Schiller, a Bach, a Beethoven and a Brahms.

On April 1, 1920, the day the German Workers’ Party became the National

Socialist German Workers’ Party—from which the abbreviated name “Nazi”

emerged—Hitler left the Army for good. Henceforth he would devote all of his

time to the Nazi Party, from which neither then nor later did he accept any

salary.

How, then, it might be asked, did Hitler live? His fellow party workers

themselves sometimes wondered. In the indictment which the rebel members of

the party committee drew up in July 1921, the question was bluntly posed: “If

any member asks him how he lives and what was his former profession, he

always becomes angry and excited. Up to now no answer has been supplied to

these questions. So his conscience cannot be clean, especially as his excessive

intercourse with ladies, to whom he often describes himself as ‘King of Munich,’

costs a great deal of money.”

Hitler answered the question during the subsequent libel action which he

brought against the authors of the pamphlet. To the question of the court as to

exactly how he lived, he replied, “If I speak for the National Socialist Party I

take no money for myself. But I also speak for other organizations … and then

of course I accept a fee. I also have my midday meal with various party

comrades in turn. I am further assisted to a modest extent by a few party

comrades.” 24

Probably this was very close to the truth. Such well-heeled friends as Dietrich

Eckart, Goering and Hanfstaengl undoubtedly “lent” him money to pay his rent,

purchase clothes and buy a meal. His wants were certainly modest. Until 1929

he occupied a two-room flat in a lower-middle-class district in the

Thierschstrasse near the River Isar. In the winter he wore an old trench coat—it

later became familiar to everyone in Germany from numerous photographs. In

the summer he often appeared in shorts, the Lederhosen which most Bavarians

donned in seasonable weather. In 1923 Eckart and Esser stumbled upon the

Platterhof, an inn near Berchtesgaden, as a summer retreat for Hitler and his

friends. Hitler fell in love with the lovely mountain country; it was here that he

later built the spacious villa, Berghof, which would be his home and where he

would spend much of his time until the war years.

There was, however, little time for rest and recreation in the stormy years

between 1921 and 1923. There was a party to build and to keep control of in the

face of jealous rivals as unscrupulous as himself. The N.S.D.A.P. was but one of

several right-wing movements in Bavaria struggling for public attention and

support, and beyond, in the rest of Germany, there were many others.

There was a dizzy succession of events and of constantly changing situations

for a politician to watch, to evaluate and to take advantage of. In April 1921 the

Allies had presented Germany the bill for reparations, a whopping 132 billion

gold marks—33 billion dollars—which the Germans howled they could not

possibly pay. The mark, normally valued at four to the dollar, had begun to fall;

by the summer of 1921 it had dropped to seventy-five, a year later to four

hundred, to the dollar Erzberger had been murdered in August 1921. In June

1922, there was an attempt to assassinate Philipp Scheidemann, the Socialist

who had proclaimed the Republic. The same month, June 24, Foreign Minister

Rathenau was shot dead in the street. In all three cases the assassins had been

men of the extreme Right. The shaky national government in Berlin finally

answered the challenge with a special Law for the Protection of the Republic,

which imposed severe penalties for political terrorism. Berlin demanded the

dissolution of the innumerable armed leagues and the end of political

gangsterism. The Bavarian government, even under the moderate Count

Lerchenfeld, who had replaced the extremist Kahr in 1921, was finding it

difficult to go along with the national regime in Berlin. When it attempted to

enforce the law against terrorism, the Bavarian Rightists, of whom Hitler was

now one of the acknowledged young leaders, organized a conspiracy to

overthrow Lerchenfeld and march on Berlin to bring down the Republic.

The fledgling democratic Weimar Republic was in deep trouble, its very

existence constantly threatened not only from the extreme Right but from the

extreme Left.

*The expression appeared in the first German edition of Mein Kampf, but was changed to

“revolution” in all subsequent editions.

* The attribution of the myth to an English general was hardly factual. Wheeler-Bennett, in

Wooden Titan: Hindenburg, has explained that, ironically, two British generals did have

something to do—inadvertently—with the perpetration of the false legend. “The first was

Maj.-Gen. Sir Frederick Maurice, whose book The Last Four Months, published in 1919, was

grossly misrepresented by reviewers in the German press as proving that the German Army

had been betrayed by the Socialists on the Home Front and not been defeated in the field.” The

General denied this interpretation in the German press, but to no avail. Ludendorff made use

of the reviews to convince Hindenburg. “The other officer,” says Wheeler-Bennett, “was Maj.-

Gen. Malcolm, head of the British Military Mission in Berlin. Ludendorff was dining with the

General one evening, and with his usual turgid eloquence was expatiating on how the High

Command had always suffered lack of support from the Civilian Government and how the

Revolution had betrayed the Army. In an effort to crystallize the meaning of Ludendorff’s

verbosity into a single sentence, General Malcolm asked him: ‘Do you mean, General, that

you were stabbed in the back?’ Ludendorff’s eyes lit up and he leapt upon the phrase like a

dog on a bone. ‘Stabbed in the back?’ he repeated. ‘Yes, that’s it exactly. We were stabbed in

the back.’”

*A few generals were courageous enough to say so. On August 23, 1924, the Frankfurter

Zeitung published an article by General Freiherr von Schoenaich analyzing the reasons for

Germany’s defeat. He came to “the irresistible conclusion that we owe our ruin to the

supremacy of our military authorities over civilian authorities … In fact, German militarism

simply committed suicide.” (Quoted by Telford Taylor in Sword and Swastika, p. 16.)

* Kapp was born in New York on July 24, 1868.

*At the war’s end Ludendorff fled to Sweden disguised in false whiskers and blue spectacles.

He returned to Germany in February 1919, writing his wife: “It would be the greatest stupidity

for the revolutionaries to allow us all to remain alive. Why, if ever I come to power again there

will be no pardon. Then with an easy conscience, I would have Ebert, Scheidemann and Co.

hanged, and watch them dangle.” (Margarine Ludendorff, Als ich Ludendorffs Frau war, p.

229.) Ebert was the first President and Scheidemann the first Chancellor of the Weimar

Republic. Ludendorff, though second-in-command to Hindenburg, had been the virtual

dictator of Germany for the last two years of the war.

* Eckart died of overdrinking in December 1923.

* Harrer also was opposed to Hitler’s violent anti-Semitism and believed that Hitler was

alienating the working-class masses. These were the real reasons why he resigned.

* See above, pp. 22–23.

* He left the party in 1923 but served as Vice-President of the Bavarian Diet from 1924 to

1928. In 1930 he became reconciled with Hitler, but he never returned to active politics. The

fate of all discoverers, as Heiden observed, overtook Drexler.

* In his memoirs, Unheard Witness, Hanfstaengl says that he was first steered to Hitler by an

American. This was Captain Truman Smith, then an assistant military attaché at the American

Embassy in Berlin. In November 1922 Smith was sent by the embassy to Munich to check on

an obscure political agitator by the name of Adolf Hitler and his newly founded National

Socialist Labor Party. For a young professional American Army officer, Captain Smith had a

remarkable bent for political analysis. In one week in Munich, November 15–22, he managed

to see Ludendorff, Crown Prince Rupprecht and a dozen political leaders in Bavaria, most of

whom told him that Hitler was a rising star and his movement a rapidly growing political

force. Smith lost no time in attending an outdoor Nazi rally at which Hitler spoke. “Never saw

such a sight in my life!” he scribbled in his diary immediately afterward. “Met Hitler,” he

wrote, “and he promises to talk to me Monday and explain his aims.” On the Monday, Smith

made his way to Hitler’s residence—“a little bare bedroom on the second floor of a run-down

house,” as he described it—and had a long talk with the future dictator, who was scarcely

known outside Munich. “A marvelous demagogue!” the assistant U.S. military attaché began

his diary that evening. “Have rarely listened to such a logical and fanatical man.” The date was

November 22, 1922.

Just before leaving for Berlin that evening Smith saw Hanfstaengl, told him of his meeting

with Hitler and advised him to take a look at the man. The Nazi leader was to address a rally

that evening and Captain Smith turned over his press ticket to Hanfstaengl. The latter, like so

many others, was overwhelmed by Hitler’s oratory, sought him out after the meeting and

quickly became a convert to Nazism.

Back in Berlin, which at that time took little notice of Hitler, Captain Smith wrote a

lengthy report which the embassy dispatched to Washington on November 25, 1922.

Considering when it was written, it is a remarkable document.

The most active political force in Bavaria at the present time [Smith wrote] is the National

Socialist Labor Party. Less a political party than a popular movement, it must be considered as

the Bavarian counterpart to the Italian fascisti … It has recently acquired a political influence

quite disproportionate to its actual numerical strength….

Adolf Hitler from the very first has been the dominating force in the movement, and the

personality of this man has undoubtedly been one of the most important factors contributing to

its success … His ability to influence a popular assembly is uncanny. In private conversation

he disclosed himself as a forceful and logical speaker, which, when tempered with a fanatical

earnestness, made a very deep impression on a neutral listener.

Colonel Smith, who later served as American military attaché in Berlin during the early

years of the Nazi regime, kindly placed his diary and notes of his trip to Munich at the disposal

of this writer. They have been invaluable in the preparation of this chapter.

* Hanfstaengl spent part of World War II in Washington, ostensibly as an interned enemy

alien but actually as an “adviser” to the United States government on Nazi Germany. This

final role of his life, which seemed so ludicrous to Americans who knew him and Nazi

Germany, must have amused him.

3

VERSAILLES, WEIMAR AND THE BEER HALL PUTSCH

To MOST MEN in the victorious Allied lands of the West, the proclamation of the

Republic in Berlin on November 9, 1918, had appeared to mark the dawn of a

new day for the German people and their nation. Woodrow Wilson, in the

exchange of notes which led to the armistice, had pressed for the abolition of the

Hohenzollern militarist autocracy, and the Germans had seemingly obliged him,

although reluctantly. The Kaiser had been forced to abdicate and to flee; the

monarchy was dissolved, all the dynasties in Germany were quickly done away

with, and republican government was proclaimed.

But proclaimed by accident! On the afternoon of November 9, the so-called

Majority Social Democrats under the leadership of Friedrich Ebert and Philipp

Scheidemann met in the Reichstag in Berlin following the resignation of the

Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden. They were sorely puzzled as to what to do.

Prince Max had just announced the abdication of the Kaiser. Ebert, a saddler by

trade, thought that one of Wilhelm’s sons—anyone except the dissolute Crown

Prince—might succeed him, for he favored a constitutional monarchy on the

British pattern. Ebert, though he led the Socialists, abhorred social revolution. “I

hate it like sin,” he had once declared.

But revolution was in the air in Berlin. The capital was paralyzed by a general

strike. Down the broad Unter den Linden, a few blocks from the Reichstag, the

Spartacists, led by the Left Socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht,

were preparing from their citadel in the Kaiser’s palace to proclaim a soviet

republic. When word of this reached the Socialists in the Reichstag they were

consternated. Something had to be done at once to forestall the Spartacists.

Scheidemann thought of something. Without consulting his comrades he dashed

to the window overlooking the Koenigsplatz, where a great throng had gathered,

stuck his head out and on his own, as if the idea had just popped into his head,

proclaimed the Republic! The saddle maker Ebert was furious. He had hoped,

somehow, to save the Hohenzollern monarchy.

Thus was the German Republic born, as if by a fluke. If the Socialists

themselves were not staunch republicans it could hardly be expected that the

conservatives would be. But the latter had abdicated their responsibility. They

and the Army leaders, Ludendorff and Hindenburg, had pushed political power

into the hands of the reluctant Social Democrats. In doing so they managed also

to place on the shoulders of these democratic working-class leaders apparent

responsibility for signing the surrender and ultimately the peace treaty, thus

laying on them the blame for Germany’s defeat and for whatever suffering a lost

war and a dictated peace might bring upon the German people. This was a

shabby trick, one which the merest child would be expected to see through, but

in Germany it worked. It doomed the Republic from the start.

Perhaps it need not have. In November 1918 the Social Democrats, holding

absolute power, might have quickly laid the foundation for a lasting democratic

Republic. But to have done so they would have had to suppress permanently, or

at least curb permanently, the forces which had propped up the Hohenzollern

Empire and which would not loyally accept a democratic Germany: the feudal

Junker landlords and other upper castes, the magnates who ruled over the great

industrial cartels, the roving condottieri of the free corps, the ranking officials of

the imperial civil service and, above all, the military caste and the members of

the General Staff. They would have had to break up many of the great estates,

which were wasteful and uneconomic, and the industrial monopolies and cartels,

and clean out the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the police, the universities and the

Army of all who would not loyally and honestly serve the new democratic

regime.

This the Social Democrats, who were mostly well-meaning trade-unionists

with the same habit of bowing to old, established authority which was ingrained

in Germans of other classes, could not bring themselves to do. Instead they

began by abdicating their authority to the force which had always been dominant

in modern Germany, the Army. For though it had been defeated on the

battlefield the Army still had hopes of maintaining itself at home and of

defeating the revolution. To achieve these ends it moved swiftly and boldly.

On the night of November 9, 1918, a few hours after the Republic had been

“proclaimed,” a telephone rang in the study of Ebert in the Reich Chancellery in

Berlin. It was a very special telephone, for it was linked with Supreme

Headquarters at Spa by a private and secret line. Ebert was alone. He picked up

the telephone. “Groener speaking,” a voice said. The former saddle maker, still

bewildered by the day’s events which had suddenly thrust into his unwilling

hands whatever political power remained in a crumbling Germany, was

impressed. General Wilhelm Groener was the successor of Ludendorff as First

Quartermaster General. Earlier on that very day at Spa it was he who, when

Field Marshal von Hindenburg faltered, had bluntly informed the Kaiser that he

no longer commanded the loyalty of his troops and must go—a brave act for

which the military caste never forgave him. Ebert and Groener had developed a

bond of mutual respect since 1916, when the General, then in charge of war

production, had worked closely with the Socialist leader. Early in November—a

few days before—they had conferred in Berlin on how to save the monarchy and

the Fatherland.

Now at the Fatherland’s lowest moment a secret telephone line brought them

together. Then and there the Socialist leader and the second-in-command of the

German Army made a pact which, though it would not be publicly known for

many years, was to determine the nation’s fate. Ebert agreed to put down

anarchy and Bolshevism and maintain the Army in all its tradition. Groener

thereupon pledged the support of the Army in helping the new government

establish itself and carry out its aims.

“Will the Field Marshal (Hindenburg) retain the command?” Ebert asked.

General Groener replied that he would.

“Convey to the Field Marshal the thanks of the government,” Ebert replied.1

The German Army was saved, but the Republic, on the very day of its birth,

was lost. The generals, with the honorable exception of Groener himself and but

few others, would never serve it loyally. In the end, led by Hindenburg, they

betrayed it to the Nazis.

At the moment, to be sure, the specter of what had just happened in Russia

haunted the minds of Ebert and his fellow Socialists. They did not want to

become the German Kerenskys. They did not want to be supplanted by the

Bolshevists. Everywhere in Germany the Soldiers’ and Workers’ Councils were

springing up and assuming power, as they had done in Russia. It was these

groups which on November 10 elected a Council of People’s Representatives,

with Ebert at its head, to govern Germany for the time being. In December the

first Soviet Congress of Germany met in Berlin. Composed of delegates from the

Soldiers’ and Workers’ Councils throughout the country, it demanded the

dismissal of Hindenburg, the abolition of the Regular Army and the substitution

of a civil guard whose officers would be elected by the men and which would be

under the supreme authority of the Council.

This was too much for Hindenburg and Groener. They declined to recognize

the authority of the Soviet Congress. Ebert himself did nothing to carry out its

demands. But the Army, fighting for its life, demanded more positive action

from the government it had agreed to support. Two days before Christmas the

People’s Marine Division, now under the control of the Communist Spartacists,

occupied the Wilhelmstrasse, broke into the Chancellery and cut its telephone

wires. The secret line to Army headquarters, however, continued to function and

over it Ebert appealed for help. The Army promised liberation by the Potsdam

garrison, but before it could arrive the mutinous sailors retired to their quarters in

the stables of the imperial palace, which the Spartacists still held.

The Spartacists, with Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the two most

effective agitators in Germany, at their head, continued to push for a soviet

republic. Their armed power in Berlin was mounting. On Christmas Eve the

Marine Division had easily repulsed an attempt by regular troops from Potsdam

to dislodge it from the imperial stables. Hindenburg and Groener pressed Ebert

to honor the pact between them and suppress the Bolshevists. This the Socialist

leader was only too glad to do. Two days after Christmas he appointed Gustav

Noske as Minister of National Defense, and from this appointment events

proceeded with a logic which all who knew the new Minister might have

expected.

Noske was a master butcher by trade who had worked his way up in the trade-

union movement and the Social Democratic Party, becoming a member of the

Reichstag in 1906, where he became recognized as the party’s expert on military

affairs. He also became recognized as a strong nationalist and as a strong man.

Prince Max of Baden had picked him to put down the naval mutiny at Kiel in the

first days of November and he had put it down. A stocky, square-jawed man of

great physical strength and energy, though of abbreviated intelligence—typical,

his enemies said, of his trade—Noske announced on his appointment as Defense

Minister that “someone must be the bloodhound.”

Early in January 1919 he struck. Between January 10 and 17—“Bloody

Week,” as it was called in Berlin for a time—regular and free-corps troops under

the direction of Noske and the command of General von Luettwitz* crushed the

Spartacists. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were captured and murdered

by officers of the Guard Cavalry Division.

As soon as the fighting in Berlin was over, elections were held throughout

Germany for the National Assembly, which was to draw up the new constitution.

The voting, which took place on January 19, 1919, revealed that the middle and

upper classes had regained some of their courage in the little more than two

months which had elapsed since the “revolution.” The Social Democrats (the

Majority and Independent Socialists), who had governed alone because no other

group would share the burden, received 13,800,000 votes out of 30,000,000 cast

and won 185 out of 421 seats in the Assembly, but this was considerably less

than a majority. Obviously the new Germany was not going to be built by the

working class alone. Two middle-class parties, the Center, representing the

political movement of the Roman Catholic Church, and the Democratic Party,

born of a fusion in December of the old Progressive Party and the left wing of

the National Liberals, polled 11,500,000 votes between them and obtained 166

seats in the Assembly. Both parties professed support for a moderate, democratic

Republic, though there was considerable sentiment for an eventual restoration of

the monarchy.

The Conservatives, some of whose leaders had gone into hiding in November

and others who, like Count von Westarp, had appealed to Ebert for protection,

showed that though reduced in numbers they were far from extinguished.

Rechristened the German National People’s Party, they polled over three million

votes and elected 44 deputies; their right-wing allies, the National Liberals, who

had changed their name to the German People’s Party, received nearly a million

and a half votes and won 19 seats. Though decidedly in the minority, the two

conservative parties had won enough seats in the Assembly to be vocal. Indeed,

no sooner had the Assembly met in Weimar on February 6, 1919, than the

leaders of these two groups sprang up to defend the name of Kaiser Wilhelm II

and the way he and his generals had conducted the war. Gustav Stresemann, the

head of the People’s Party, had not yet experienced what later seemed to many

to be a change of heart and mind. In 1919 he was still known as the man who

had been the Supreme Command’s mouthpiece in the Reichstag—“Ludendorff’s

young man,” as he was called—a violent supporter of the policy of annexation, a

fanatic for unrestricted submarine warfare.

The constitution which emerged from the Assembly after six months of debate

—it was passed on July 31, 1919, and ratified by the President on August 31—

was, on paper, the most liberal and democratic document of its kind the

twentieth century had seen, mechanically well-nigh perfect, full of ingenious and

admirable devices which seemed to guarantee the working of an almost flawless

democracy. The idea of cabinet government was borrowed from England and

France, of a strong popular President from the United States, of the referendum

from Switzerland. An elaborate and complicated system of proportional

representation and voting by lists was established in order to prevent the wasting

of votes and give small minorities a right to be represented in Parliament. *

The wording of the Weimar Constitution was sweet and eloquent to the ear of

any democratically minded man. The people were declared sovereign: “Political

power emanates from the people.” Men and women were given the vote at the

age of twenty. “All Germans are equal before the law … Personal liberty is

inviolable … Every German has a right … to express his opinion freely … All

Germans have the right to form associations or societies … All inhabitants of the

Reich enjoy complete liberty of belief and conscience …” No man in the world

would be more free than a German, no government more democratic and liberal

than his. On paper, at least.

THE SHADOW OF VERSAILLES

Before the drafting of the Weimar Constitution was finished an inevitable

event occurred which cast a spell of doom over it and the Republic which it was

to establish. This was the drawing up of the Treaty of Versailles. During the first

chaotic and riotous days of the peace and even after the deliberations of the

National Assembly got under way in Weimar the German people seemed to give

little thought to the consequences of their defeat. Or if they did, they appeared to

be smugly confident that having, as the Allies urged, got rid of the

Hohenzollerns, squelched the Bolshevists and set about forming a democratic,

republican government, they were entitled to a just peace based not on their

having lost the war but on President Wilson’s celebrated Fourteen Points.

German memories did not appear to stretch back as far as one year, to March

3, 1918, when the then victorious German Supreme Command had imposed on a

defeated Russia at Brest Litovsk a peace treaty which to a British historian,

writing two decades after the passions of war had cooled, was a “humiliation

without precedent or equal in modern history.” 2 It deprived Russia of a territory

nearly as large as Austria-Hungary and Turkey combined, with 56,000,000

inhabitants, or 32 per cent of her whole population; a third of her railway

mileage, 73 per cent of her total iron ore, 89 per cent of her total coal production;

and more than 5,000 factories and industrial plants. Moreover, Russia was

obliged to pay Germany an indemnity of six billion marks.

The day of reckoning arrived for the Germans in the late spring of 1919. The

terms of the Versailles Treaty, laid down by the Allies without negotiation with

Germany, were published in Berlin on May 7. They came as a staggering blow

to a people who had insisted on deluding themselves to the last moment. Angry

mass meetings were organized throughout the country to protest against the

treaty and to demand that Germany refuse to sign it. Scheidemann, who had

become Chancellor during the Weimar Assembly, cried, “May the hand wither

that signs this treaty!” On May 8 Ebert, who had become Provisional President,

and the government publicly branded the terms as “unrealizable and

unbearable.” The next day the German delegation at Versailles wrote the un

bending Clemenceau that such a treaty was “intolerable for any nation.”

What was so intolerable about it? It restored Alsace-Lorraine to France, a

parcel of territory to Belgium, a similar parcel in Schleswig to Denmark—after a

plebiscite—which Bismarck had taken from the Danes in the previous century

after defeating them in war. It gave back to the Poles the lands, some of them

only after a plebiscite, which the Germans had taken during the partition of

Poland. This was one of the stipulations which infuriated the Germans the most,

not only because they resented separating East Prussia from the Fatherland by a

corridor which gave Poland access to the sea, but because they despised the

Poles, whom they considered an inferior race. Scarcely less infuriating to the

Germans was that the treaty forced them to accept responsibility for starting the

war and demanded that they turn over to the Allies Kaiser Wilhelm II and some

eight hundred other “war criminals.”

Reparations were to be fixed later, but a first payment of five billion dollars in

gold marks was to be paid between 1919 and 1921, and certain deliveries in kind

—coal, ships, lumber, cattle, etc.—were to be made in lieu of cash reparations.

But what hurt most was that Versailles virtually disarmed Germany* and thus,

for the time being anyway, barred the way to German hegemony in Europe. And

yet the hated Treaty of Versailles, unlike that which Germany had imposed on

Russia, left the Reich geographically and economically largely intact and

preserved her political unity and her potential strength as a great nation.

The provisional government at Weimar, with the exception of Erzberger, who

urged acceptance of the treaty on the grounds that its terms could be easily

evaded, was strongly against accepting the Versailles Diktat, as it was now being

called. Behind the government stood the overwhelming majority of citizens,

from right to left.

And the Army? If the treaty were rejected, could the Army resist an inevitable

Allied attack from the west? Ebert put it up to the Supreme Command, which

had now moved its headquarters to Kolberg in Pomerania. On June 17 Field

Marshal von Hindenburg, prodded by General Groener, who saw that German

military resistance would be futile, replied:

In the event of a resumption of hostilities we can reconquer the province of Posen [in

Poland] and defend our frontiers in the east. In the west, however, we can scarcely count upon

being able to withstand a serious offensive on the part of the enemy in view of the numerical

superiority of the Entente and their ability to outflank us on both wings.

The success of the operation as a whole is therefore very doubtful, but as a soldier I cannot

help feeling that it were better to perish honorably than accept a disgraceful peace.

The concluding words of the revered Commander in Chief were in the best

German military tradition but their sincerity may be judged by knowledge of the

fact which the German people were unaware of—that Hindenburg had agreed

with Groener that to try to resist the Allies now would not only be hopeless but

might result in the destruction of the cherished officer corps of the Army and

indeed of Germany itself.

The Allies were now demanding a definite answer from Germany. On June

16, the day previous to Hindenburg’s written answer to Ebert, they had given the

Germans an ultimatum: Either the treaty must be accepted by June 24 or the

armistice agreement would be terminated and the Allied powers would “take

such steps as they think necessary to enforce their terms.”

Once again Ebert appealed to Groener. If the Supreme Command thought

there was the slightest possibility of successful military resistance to the Allies,

Ebert promised to try to secure the rejection of the treaty by the Assembly. But

he must have an answer immediately. The last day of the ultimatum, June 24,

had arrived. The cabinet was meeting at 4:30 P.M. to make its final decision.

Once more Hindenburg and Groener conferred. “You know as well as I do that

armed resistance is impossible,” the aging, worn Field Marshal said. But once

again, as at Spa on November 9, 1918, when he could not bring himself to tell

the Kaiser the final truth and left the unpleasant duty to Groener, he declined to

tell the truth to the Provisional President of the Republic. “You can give the

answer to the President as well as I can,” he said to Groener.3 And again the

courageous General took the final responsibility which belonged to the Field

Marshal, though he must have known that it would eventually make doubly sure

his being made a scapegoat for the officer corps. He telephoned the Supreme

Command’s view to the President.

Relieved at having the Army’s leaders take the responsibility—a fact that was

soon forgotten in Germany—the National Assembly approved the signing of the

peace treaty by a large majority and its decision was communicated to

Clemenceau a bare nineteen minutes before the Allied ultimatum ran out. Four

days later, on June 28, 1919, the treaty of peace was signed in the Hall of

Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles.

A HOUSE DIVIDED

From that day on Germany became a house divided.

The conservatives would accept neither the treaty of peace nor the Republic

which had ratified it. Nor, in the long run, would the Army—General Groener

excepted—though it had sworn to support the new democratic regime and had

itself made the final decision to sign at Versailles. Despite the November

“revolution,” the conservatives still held the economic power. They owned the

industries, the large estates and most of the country’s capital. Their wealth could

be used, and was, to subsidize political parties and a political press that would

strive from now on to undermine the Republic.

The Army began to circumvent the military restrictions of the peace treaty

before the ink on it was scarcely dry. And thanks to the timidity and

shortsightedness of the Socialist leaders, the officer corps managed not only to

maintain the Army in its old Prussian traditions, as we have seen, but to become

the real center of political power in the new Germany. The Army did not, until

the last days of the short-lived Republic, stake its fortunes on any one political

movement. But under General Hans von Seeckt, the brilliant creator of the

100,000-man Reichswehr, the Army, small as it was in numbers, became a state

within a state, exerting an increasing influence on the nation’s foreign and

domestic policies until a point was reached where the Republic’s continued

existence depended on the will of the officer corps.

As a state within a state it maintained its independence of the national

government. Under the Weimar Constitution the Army could have been

subordinated to the cabinet and Parliament, as the military establishments of the

other Western democracies were. But it was not. Nor was the officer corps

purged of its monarchist, antirepublican frame of mind. A few Socialist leaders

such as Scheidemann and Grzesinski urged “democratizing” the armed forces.

They saw the danger of handing the Army back to the officers of the old

authoritarian, imperialist tradition. But they were successfully opposed not only

by the generals but by their fellow Socialists, led by the Minister of Defense,

Noske. This proletarian minister of the Republic openly boasted that he wanted

to revive “the proud soldier memories of the World War.” The failure of the duly

elected government to build a new Army that would be faithful to its own

democratic spirit and subordinate to the cabinet and the Reichstag was a fatal

mistake for the Republic, as time would tell.

The failure to clean out the judiciary was another. The administrators of the

law became one of the centers of the counterrevolution, perverting justice for

reactionary political ends. “It is impossible to escape the conclusion,” the

historian Franz L. Neumann declared, “that political justice is the blackest page

in the life of the German Republic.” 4 After the Kapp putsch in 1920 the

government charged 705 persons with high treason; only one, the police

president of Berlin, received a sentence—five years of “honorary confinement.”

When the state of Prussia withdrew his pension the Supreme Court ordered it

restored. A German court in December 1926 awarded General von Luettwitz, the

military leader of the Kapp putsch, back payment of his pension to cover the

period when he was a rebel against the government and also the five years that

he was a fugitive from justice in Hungary.

Yet hundreds of German liberals were sentenced to long prison terms on

charges of treason because they revealed or denounced in the press or by speech

the Army’s constant violations of the Versailles Treaty. The treason laws were

ruthlessly applied to the supporters of the Republic; those on the Right who tried

to overthrow it, as Adolf Hitler was soon to learn, got off either free or with the

lightest of sentences. Even the assassins, if they were of the Right and their

victims democrats, were leniently treated by the courts or, as often happened,

helped to escape from the custody of the courts by Army officers and right-wing

extremists.

And so the mild Socialists, aided by the democrats and the Catholic Centrists,

were left to carry on the Republic, which tottered from its birth. They bore the

hatred, the abuse and sometimes the bullets of their opponents, who grew in

number and in resolve. “In the heart of the people,” cried Oswald Spengler, who

had skyrocketed to fame with his book The Decline of the West, “the Weimar

Constitution is already doomed.” Down in Bavaria the young firebrand Adolf

Hitler grasped the strength of the new nationalist, antidemocratic, antirepublican

tide. He began to ride it.

He was greatly aided by the course of events, two in particular: the fall of the

mark and the French occupation of the Ruhr. The mark, as we have seen, had

begun to slide in 1921, when it dropped to 75 to the dollar; the next year it fell to

400 and by the beginning of 1923 to 7,000. Already in the fall of 1922 the

German government had asked the Allies to grant a moratorium on reparation

payments. This the French government of Poincaré had bluntly refused. When

Germany defaulted in deliveries of timber, the hardheaded French Premier, who

had been the wartime President of France, ordered French troops to occupy the

Ruhr. The industrial heart of Germany, which, after the loss of Upper Silesia to

Poland, furnished the Reich with four fifths of its coal and steel production, was

cut off from the rest of the country.

This paralyzing blow to Germany’s economy united the people momentarily

as they had not been united since 1914. The workers of the Ruhr declared a

general strike and received financial support from the government in Berlin,

which called for a campaign of passive resistance. With the help of the Army,

sabotage and guerrilla warfare were organized. The French countered with

arrests, deportations and even death sentences. But not a wheel in the Ruhr

turned.

The strangulation of Germany’s economy hastened the final plunge of the

mark. On the occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923, it fell to 18,000 to the

dollar; by July 1 it had dropped to 160,000; by August 1 to a million. By

November, when Hitler thought his hour had struck, it took four billion marks to

buy a dollar, and thereafter the figures became trillions. German currency had

become utterly worthless. Purchasing power of salaries and wages was reduced

to zero. The life savings of the middle classes and the working classes were

wiped out. But something even more important was destroyed: the faith of the

people in the economic structure of German society. What good were the

standards and practices of such a society, which encouraged savings and

investment and solemnly promised a safe return from them and then defaulted?

Was this not a fraud upon the people?

And was not the democratic Republic, which had surrendered to the enemy

and accepted the burden of reparations, to blame for the disaster? Unfortunately

for its survival, the Republic did bear a responsibility. The inflation could have

been halted by merely balancing the budget—a difficult but not impossible feat.

Adequate taxation might have achieved this, but the new government did not

dare to tax adequately. After all, the cost of the war—164 billion marks—had

been met not even in part by direct taxation but 93 billions of it by war loans, 29

billions out of Treasury bills and the rest by increasing the issue of paper money.

Instead of drastically raising taxes on those who could pay, the republican

government actually reduced them in 1921.

From then on, goaded by the big industrialists and landlords, who stood to

gain though the masses of the people were financially ruined, the government

deliberately let the mark tumble in order to free the State of its public debts, to

escape from paying reparations and to sabotage the French in the Ruhr.

Moreover, the destruction of the currency enabled German heavy industry to

wipe out its indebtedness by refunding its obligations in worthless marks. The

General Staff, disguised as the “Truppenamt” (Office of Troops) to evade the

peace treaty which supposedly had outlawed it, took notice that the fall of the

mark wiped out the war debts and thus left Germany financially unencumbered

for a new war.

The masses of the people, however, did not realize how much the industrial

tycoons, the Army and the State were benefiting from the ruin of the currency.

All they knew was that a large bank account could not buy a straggly bunch of

carrots, a half peck of potatoes, a few ounces of sugar, a pound of flour. They

knew that as individuals they were bankrupt. And they knew hunger when it

gnawed at them, as it did daily. In their misery and hopelessness they made the

Republic the scapegoat for all that had happened.

Such times were heaven-sent for Adolf Hitler.

REVOLT IN BAVARIA

“The government calmly goes on printing these scraps of paper because, if it

stopped, that would be the end of the government,” he cried. “Because once the

printing presses stopped—and that is the prerequisite for the stabilization of the

mark—the swindle would at once be brought to light … Believe me, our misery

will increase. The scoundrel will get by. The reason: because the State itself has

become the biggest swindler and crook. A robbers’ state! … If the horrified

people notice that they can starve on billions, they must arrive at this conclusion:

we will no longer submit to a State which is built on the swindling idea of the

majority. We want a dictatorship …”5

No doubt the hardships and uncertainties of the wanton inflation were driving

millions of Germans toward that conclusion and Hitler was ready to lead them

on. In fact, he had begun to believe that the chaotic conditions of 1923 had

created an opportunity to overthrow the Republic which might not recur. But

certain difficulties lay in his way if he were himself to lead the

counterrevolution, and he was not much interested in it unless he was.

In the first place, the Nazi Party, though it was growing daily in numbers, was

far from being even the most important political movement in Bavaria, and

outside that state it was unknown. How could such a small party overthrow the

Republic? Hitler, who was not easily discouraged by odds against him, thought

he saw a way. He might unite under his leadership all the antirepublican,

nationalist forces in Bavaria. Then with the support of the Bavarian government,

the armed leagues and the Reichswehr stationed in Bavaria, he might lead a

march on Berlin—as Mussolini had marched on Rome the year before—and

bring the Weimar Republic down. Obviously Mussolini’s easy success had given

him food for thought.

The French occupation of the Ruhr, though it brought a renewal of German

hatred for the traditional enemy and thus revived the spirit of nationalism,

complicated Hitler’s task. It began to unify the German people behind the

republican government in Berlin which had chosen to defy France. This was the

last thing Hitler wanted. His aim was to do away with the Republic. France

could be taken care of after Germany had had its nationalist revolution and

established a dictatorship. Against a strong current of public opinion Hitler dared

to take an unpopular line: “No—not down with France, but down with the

traitors of the Fatherland, down with the November criminals! That must be our

slogan. ”6

All through the first months of 1923 Hitler dedicated himself to making the

slogan effective. In February, due largely to the organizational talents of Roehm,

four of the armed “patriotic leagues” of Bavaria joined with the Nazis to form

the so-called Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Vaterlaendischen Kampfverbaende

(Working Union of the Fatherland Fighting Leagues) under the political

leadership of Hitler. In September an even stronger group was established under

the name of the Deutscher Kampfbund (German Fighting Union), with Hitler

one of a triumvirate of leaders. This organization sprang from a great mass

meeting held at Nuremberg on September 2 to celebrate the anniversary of the

German defeat of France at Sedan in 1870. Most of the fascist-minded groups in

southern Germany were represented and Hitler received something of an ovation

after a violent speech against the national government. The objectives of the new

Kampfbund were openly stated: overthrow of the Republic and the tearing up of

the Treaty of Versailles.

At the Nuremberg meeting Hitler had stood in the reviewing stand next to

General Ludendorff during a parade of the demonstrators. This was not by

accident. For some time the young Nazi chief had been cultivating the war hero,

who had lent his famous name to the makers of the Kapp putsch in Berlin and

who, since he continued to encourage counterrevolution from the Right, might

be tempted to back an action which was beginning to germinate in Hitler’s mind.

The old General had no political sense; living now outside Munich, he did not

disguise his contempt for Bavarians, for Crown Prince Rupprecht, the Bavarian

pre tender, and for the Catholic Church in this most Catholic of all states in

Germany. All this Hitler knew, but it suited his purposes. He did not want

Ludendorff as the political leader of the nationalist counterrevolution, a role

which it was known the war hero was ambitious to assume. Hitler insisted on

that role for himself. But Ludendorff’s name, his renown in the officer corps and

among the conservatives throughout Germany would be an asset to a provincial

politician still largely unknown outside Bavaria. Hitler began to include

Ludendorff in his plans.

In the fall of 1923 the German Republic and the state of Bavaria reached a

point of crisis. On September 26, Gustav Stresemann, the Chancellor, announced

the end of passive resistance in the Ruhr and the resumption of German

reparation payments. This former mouthpiece of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, a

staunch conservative and, at heart, a monarchist, had come to the conclusion that

if Germany were to be saved, united and made strong again it must, at least for

the time being, accept the Republic, come to terms with the Allies and obtain a

period of tranquillity in which to regain its economic strength. To drift any

further would only end in civil war and perhaps in the final destruction of the

nation.

The abandonment of resistance to the French in the Ruhr and the resumption

of the burden of reparations touched off an outburst of anger and hysteria among

the German nationalists, and the Communists, who also had been growing in

strength, joined them in bitter denunciation of the Republic. Stresemann was

faced with serious revolt from both extreme Right and extreme Left. He had

anticipated it by having President Ebert declare a state of emergency on the very

day he announced the change of policy on the Ruhr and reparations. From

September 26, 1923, until February 1924, executive power in Germany under

the Emergency Act was placed in the hands of the Minister of Defense, Otto

Gessler, and of the Commander of the Army, General von Seeckt. In reality this

made the General and his Army virtual dictators of the Reich.

Bavaria was in no mood to accept such a solution. The Bavarian cabinet of

Eugen von Knilling proclaimed its own state of emergency on September 26 and

named the right-wing monarchist and former premier Gustav von Kahr as State

Commissioner with dictatorial powers. In Berlin it was feared that Bavaria might

secede from the Reich, restore the Wittelsbach monarchy and perhaps form a

South German union with Austria. A meeting of the cabinet was hastily

summoned by President Ebert, and General von Seeckt was invited to attend.

Ebert wanted to know where the Army stood. Seeckt bluntly told him. “The

Army, Mr. President, stands behind me. ”7

The icy words pronounced by the monocled, poker-faced Prussian

Commander in Chief did not, as might have been expected, dismay the German

President or his Chancellor. They had already recognized the Army’s position as

a state within the State and subject only to itself. Three years before, as we have

seen, when the Kapp forces had occupied Berlin and a similar appeal had been

made to Seeckt, the Army had stood not behind the Republic but behind the

General. The only question now, in 1923, was where Seeckt stood.

Fortunately for the Republic he now chose to stand behind it, not because he

believed in republican, democratic principles but because he saw that for the

moment the support of the existing regime was necessary for the preservation of

the Army, itself threatened by revolt in Bavaria and in the north, and for saving

Germany from a disastrous civil war. Seeckt knew that some of the leading

officers of the Army division in Munich were siding with the Bavarian

separatists. He knew of a conspiracy of the “Black Reichswehr” under Major

Buchrucker, a former General Staff officer, to occupy Berlin and turn the

republican government out. He now moved with cool precision and absolute

determination, to set the Army right and end the threat of civil war.

On the night of September 30, 1923, “Black Reichswehr” troops under the

command of Major Buchrucker seized three forts to the east of Berlin. Seeckt

ordered regular forces to besiege them, and after two days Buchrucker

surrendered. He was tried for high treason and actually sentenced to ten years of

fortress detention. The “Black Reichswehr,” which had been set up by Seeckt

himself under the cover name of Arbeitskommandos (Labor Commandos) to

provide secret reinforcements for the 100,000-man Reichswehr, was dissolved. *

Seeckt next turned his attention to the threats of Communist uprisings in

Saxony, Thuringia, Hamburg and the Ruhr. In suppressing the Left the loyalty of

the Army could be taken for granted. In Saxony the Socialist-Communist

government was arrested by the local Reichswehr commander and a Reich

Commissioner appointed to rule. In Hamburg and in the other areas the

Communists were quickly and severely squelched. It now seemed to Berlin that

the relatively easy suppression of the Bolshevists had robbed the conspirators in

Bavaria of the pretext that they were really acting to save the Republic from

Communism, and that they would now recognize the authority of the national

government. But it did not turn out that way.

Bavaria remained defiant of Berlin. It was now under the dictatorial control of

a triumvirate: Kahr, the State Commissioner, General Otto von Lossow,

commander of the Reichswehr in Bavaria, and Colonel Hans von Seisser, the

head of the state police. Kahr refused to recognize that President Ebert’s

proclamation of a state of emergency in Germany had any application in

Bavaria. He declined to carry out any orders from Berlin. When the national

government demanded the suppression of Hitler’s newspaper, the Voelkischer

Beobachter, because of its vitriolic attacks on the Republic in general and on

Seeckt, Stresemann and Gessler in particular, Kahr contemptuously refused.

A second order from Berlin to arrest three notorious leaders of some of the

armed bands in Bavaria, Captain Heiss, Captain Ehrhardt (the “hero” of the

Kapp putsch) and Lieutenant Rossbach (a friend of Roehm), was also ignored by

Kahr. Seeckt, his patience strained, ordered General von Lossow to suppress the

Nazi newspaper and arrest the three free-corps men. The General, himself a

Bavarian and a confused and weak officer who had been taken in by Hitler’s

eloquence and Kahr’s persuasiveness, hesitated to obey. On October 24 Seeckt

sacked him and appointed General Kress von Kressenstein in his place. Kahr,

however, would not take this kind of dictation from Berlin. He declared that

Lossow would retain the command of the Reichswehr in Bavaria and defying not

only Seeckt but the constitution, forced the officers and the men of the Army to

take a special oath of allegiance to the Bavarian government.

This, to Berlin, was not only political but military rebellion, and General von

Seeckt was now determined to put down both.8

He issued a plain warning to the Bavarian triumvirate and to Hitler and the

armed leagues that any rebellion on their part would be opposed by force. But

for the Nazi leader it was too late to draw back. His rabid followers were

demanding action. Lieutenant Wilhelm Brueckner, one of his S.A. commanders,

urged him to strike at once. “The day is coming,” he warned, “when I won’t be

able to hold the men back. If nothing happens now, they’ll run away from us.”

Hitler realized too that if Stresemann gained much more time and began to

succeed in his endeavor to restore tranquillity in the country, his own

opportunity would be lost. He pleaded with Kahr and Lossow to march on Berlin

before Berlin marched on Munich. And his suspicion grew that either the

triumvirate was losing heart or that it was planning a separatist coup without him

for the purpose of detaching Bavaria from the Reich. To this, Hitler, with his

fanatical ideas for a strong, nationalist, unified Reich, was unalterably opposed.

Kahr, Lossow and Seisser were beginning to lose heart after Seeckt’s warning.

They were not interested in a futile gesture that might destroy them. On

November 6 they informed the Kampfbund, of which Hitler was the leading

political figure, that they would not be hurried into precipitate action and that

they alone would decide when and how to act. This was a signal to Hitler that he

must seize the initiative himself. He did not possess the backing to carry out a

putsch alone. He would have to have the support of the Bavarian state, the Army

and the police—this was a lesson he had learned in his beggarly Vienna days.

Somehow he would have to put Kahr, Lossow and Seisser in a position where

they would have to act with him and from which there would be no turning back.

Boldness, even recklessness, was called for, and that Hitler now proved he had.

He decided to kidnap the triumvirate and force them to use their power at his

bidding.

The idea had first been proposed to Hitler by two refugees from Russia,

Rosenberg and Scheubner-Richter. The latter, who had ennobled himself with

his wife’s name and called himself Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, was a

dubious character who, like Rosenberg, had spent most of his life in the Russian

Baltic provinces and after the war made his way with other refugees from the

Soviet Union to Munich, where he joined the Nazi Party and became one of

Hitler’s close confidants.

On November 4, Germany’s Memorial Day ( Totengedenktag) would be

observed by a military parade in the heart of Munich, and it had been announced

in the press that not only the popular Crown Prince Rupprecht but Kahr, Lossow

and Seisser would take the salute of the troops from a stand in a narrow street

leading from the Feldherrnhalle. Scheubner-Richter and Rosenberg proposed to

Hitler that a few hundred storm troopers, transported by trucks, should converge

on the little street before the parading troops arrived and seal it off with machine

guns. Hitler would then mount the tribune, proclaim the revolution and at pistol

point prevail upon the notables to join it and help him lead it. The plan appealed

to Hitler and he enthusiastically endorsed it. But, on the appointed day, when

Rosenberg arrived early on the scene for purposes of reconnaissance he

discovered to his dismay that the narrow street was fully protected by a large

body of well-armed police. The plot, indeed the “revolution,” had to be

abandoned.

Actually it was merely postponed. A second plan was concocted, one that

could not be balked by the presence of a band of strategically located police. On

the night of November 10–11, the S.A. and the other armed bands of the

Kampfbund would be concentrated on the Froettmaninger Heath, just north of

Munich, and on the morning of the eleventh, the anniversary of the hated,

shameful armistice, would march into the city, seize strategic points, proclaim

the national revolution and present the hesitant Kahr, Lossow and Seisser with a

fait accompli.

At this point a not very important public announcement induced Hitler to drop

that plan and improvise a new one. A brief notice appeared in the press that, at

the request of some business organizations in Munich, Kahr would address a

meeting at the Buergerbräukeller, a large beer hall on the southeastern outskirts

of the city. The date was November 8, in the evening. The subject of the

Commissioner’s speech, the notice said, would be the program of the Bavarian

government. General von Lossow, Colonel von Seisser and other notables would

be present.

Two considerations led Hitler to a rash decision. The first was that he

suspected Kahr might use the meeting to announce the proclamation of Bavarian

independence and the restoration of the Wittelsbachs to the Bavarian throne. All

day long on November 8 Hitler tried in vain to see Kahr, who put him off until

the ninth. This only increased the Nazi leader’s suspicions. He must forestall

Kahr. Also, and this was the second consideration, the Buergerbräukeller

meeting provided the opportunity which had been missed on November 4: the

chance to rope in all three members of the triumvirate and at the point of a pistol

force them to join the Nazis in carrying out the revolution. Hitler decided to act

at once. Plans for the November 10 mobilization were called off; the storm

troops were hastily alerted for duty at the big beer hall.

THE BEER HALL PUTSCH

About a quarter to nine on the evening of November 8, 1923, after Kahr had

been speaking for half an hour to some three thousand thirsty burghers, seated at

roughhewn tables and quaffing their beer out of stone mugs in the Bavarian

fashion, S.A. troops surrounded the Buergerbräukeller and Hitler pushed forward

into the hall. While some of his men were mounting a machine gun in the

entrance, Hitler jumped up on a table and to attract attention fired a revolver shot

toward the ceiling. Kahr paused in his discourse. The audience turned around to

see what was the cause of the disturbance. Hitler, with the help of Hess and of

Ulrich Graf, the former butcher, amateur wrestler and brawler and now the

leader’s bodyguard, made his way to the platform. A police major tried to stop

him, but Hitler pointed his pistol at him and pushed on. Kahr, according to one

eyewitness, had now become “pale and confused.” He stepped back from the

rostrum and Hitler took his place.

“The National Revolution has begun!” Hitler shouted. “This building is

occupied by six hundred heavily armed men. No one may leave the hall. Unless

there is immediate quiet 1 shall have a machine gun posted in the gallery. The

Bavarian and Reich governments have been removed and a provisional national

government formed. The barracks of the Reichswehr and police are occupied.

The Army and the police are marching on the city under the swastika banner.”

This last was false; it was pure bluff. But in the confusion no one knew for

sure. Hitler’s revolver was real. It had gone off. The storm troopers with their

rifles and machine guns were real. Hitler now ordered Kahr, Lossow and Seisser

to follow him to a nearby private room off stage. Prodded by storm troopers, the

three highest officials of Bavaria did Hitler’s bidding while the crowd looked on

in amazement.

But with growing resentment too. Many businessmen still regarded Hitler as

something of an upstart. One of them shouted to the police, “Don’t be cowards

as in 1918. Shoot!” But the police, with their own chiefs so docile and the S.A.

taking over the hall, did not budge. Hitler had arranged for a Nazi spy at police

headquarters, Wilhelm Frick, to telephone the police on duty at the beer hall not

to interfere but merely to report. The crowd began to grow so sullen that Goering

felt it necessary to step to the rostrum and quiet them. “There is nothing to fear,”

he cried. “We have the friendliest intentions. For that matter, you’ve no cause to

grumble, you’ve got your beer!” And he informed them that in the next room a

new government was being formed.

It was, at the point of Adolf Hitler’s revolver. Once he had herded his

prisoners into the adjoining room, Hitler told them, “No one leaves this room

alive without my permission.” He then informed them they would all have key

jobs either in the Bavarian government or in the Reich government which he was

forming with Ludendorff. With Ludendorff? Earlier in the evening Hitler had

dispatched Scheubner-Richter to Lud-wigshoehe to fetch the renowned General,

who knew nothing of the Nazi conspiracy, to the beerhouse at once.

The three prisoners at first refused even to speak to Hitler. He continued to

harangue them. Each of them must join him in proclaiming the revolution and

the new governments; each must take the post he, Hitler, assigned them, or “he

has no right to exist.” Kahr was to be the Regent of Bavaria; Lossow, Minister of

the National Army; Seisser, Minister of the Reich Police. None of the three was

impressed at the prospect of such high office. They did not answer.

Their continued silence unnerved Hitler. Finally he waved his gun at them. “I

have four shots in my pistol! Three for my collaborators, if they abandon me.

The last bullet for myself!” Pointing the weapon to his forehead, he cried, “If I

am not victorious by tomorrow afternoon, I shall be a dead man!”

Kahr was not a very bright individual but he had physical courage. “Herr

Hitler,” he answered, “you can have me shot or shoot me yourself. Whether I die

or not is no matter.”

Seisser also spoke up. He reproached Hitler for breaking his word of honor

not to make a putsch against the police.

“Yes, I did,” Hitler replied. “Forgive me, but I had to for the sake of the

Fatherland.”

General von Lossow disdainfully maintained silence. But when Kahr started

to whisper to him, Hitler snapped, “Halt! No talking without my permission!”

He was getting nowhere with his own talk. Not one of the three men who held

the power of the Bavarian state in their hands had agreed to join him, even at

pistol point. The putsch wasn’t going according to plan. Then Hitler acted on a

sudden impulse. Without a further word, he dashed back into the hall, mounted

the tribune, faced the sullen crowd and announced that the members of the

triumvirate in the next room had joined him in forming a new national

government.

“The Bavarian Ministry,” he shouted, “is removed…. The government of the

November criminals and the Reich President are declared to be removed. A new

national government will be named this very day here in Munich. A German

National Army will be formed immediately … I propose that, until accounts

have been finally settled with the November criminals, the direction of policy in

the National Government be taken over by me. Ludendorff will take over the

leadership of the German National Army … The task of the provisional German

National Government is to organize the march on that sinful Babel, Berlin, and

save the German people … Tomorrow will find either a National Government in

Germany or us dead!”

Not for the first time and certainly not for the last, Hitler had told a masterful

lie, and it worked. When the gathering heard that Kahr, General von Lossow and

Police Chief von Seisser had joined Hitler its mood abruptly changed. There

were loud cheers, and the sound of them impressed the three men still locked up

in the little side room.

Scheubner-Richter now produced General Ludendorff, as if out of a hat. The

war hero was furious with Hitler for pulling such a complete surprise on him,

and when, once closeted in the side room, he learned that the former corporal

and not he was to be the dictator of Germany his resentment was compounded.

He spoke scarcely a word to the brash young man. But Hitler did not mind so

long as Ludendorff lent his famous name to the desperate undertaking and won

over the three recalcitrant Bavarian leaders who thus far had failed to respond to

his own exhortations and threats. This Ludendorff proceeded to do. It was now a

question of a great national cause, he said, and he advised the gentlemen to co-

operate. Awed by the attention of the generalissimo, the trio appeared to give in,

though later Lossow denied that he had agreed to place himself under

Ludendorff’s command. For a few minutes Kahr fussed over the question of

restoring the Wittelsbach monarchy, which was so dear to him. Finally he said

he would co-operate as the “King’s deputy.”

Ludendorff’s timely arrival had saved Hitler. Overjoyed at this lucky break,

he led the others back to the platform, where each made a brief speech and swore

loyalty to each other and to the new regime. The crowd leaped on chairs and

tables in a delirium of enthusiasm. Hitler beamed with joy. “He had a childlike,

frank expression of happiness that I shall never forget,” an eminent historian

who was present later declared. 9

Again mounting the rostrum, Hitler spoke his final word to the gathering:

I want now to fulfill the vow which I made to myself five years ago when I was a blind

cripple in the military hospital: to know neither rest nor peace until the November criminals

had been overthrown, until on the ruins of the wretched Germany of today there should have

arisen once more a Germany of power and greatness, of freedom and splendor.

This meeting began to break up. At the exits Hess, aided by storm troopers,

detained a number of Bavarian cabinet members and other notables who were

trying to slip out with the throng. Hitler kept his eye on Kahr, Lossow and

Seisser. Then news came of a clash between storm troopers of one of the

fighting leagues, the Bund Oberland, and regular troops at the Army Engineers’

barracks. Hitler decided to drive to the scene and settle the matter personally,

leaving the beer hall in charge of Ludendorff.

This turned out to be a fatal error. Lossow was the first to slip away. He

informed Ludendorff he must hurry to his office at Army headquarters to give

the necessary orders. When Scheubner-Richter objected, Ludendorff rejoined

stiffly, “I forbid you to doubt the word of a German officer.” Kahr and Seisser

vanished too.

Hitler, in high spirits, returned to the Buergerbräu to find that the birds had

flown the coop. This was the first blow of the evening and it stunned him. He

had confidently expected to find his “ministers” busy at their new tasks while

Ludendorff and Lossow worked out plans for the march on Berlin. But almost

nothing was being done. Not even Munich was being occupied by the

revolutionary forces. Roehm, at the head of a detachment of storm troopers from

another fighting league, the Reichs-kriegsflagge, had seized Army headquarters

at the War Ministry in the Schoenfeldstrasse but no other strategic centers were

occupied, not even the telegraph office, over whose wires news of the coup went

out to Berlin and orders came back, from General von Seeckt to the Army in

Bavaria, to suppress the putsch.

Though there were some defections among the junior officers and some of the

troops, whose sympathies were with Hitler and Roehm, the higher officers, led

by General von Danner, commander of the Munich garrison, not only were

prepared to carry out Seeckt’s command but were bitterly resentful of the

treatment meted out to General von Lossow. In the Army’s code a civilian who

pointed a revolver at a general deserved to be smitten by an officer’s side arms.

From headquarters at the 19th Infantry barracks, where Lossow had joined

Danner, messages went out to outlying garrisons to rush reinforcements to the

city. By dawn Regular Army troops had drawn a cordon around Roehm’s forces

in the War Ministry.

Before this action Hitler and Ludendorff joined Roehm at the ministry for a

time, to take stock of the situation. Roehm was shocked to find that no one

besides himself had taken military action and occupied the key centers. Hitler

tried desperately to re-establish contact with Lossow, Kahr and Seisser.

Messengers were dispatched to the 19th Infantry barracks in the name of

Ludendorff but they did not return. Poehner, the former Munich police chief and

now one of Hitler’s supporters, was sent with Major Huehnlein and a band of the

S.A. troopers to occupy police headquarters. They were promptly arrested there.

And what of Gustav von Kahr, the head of the Bavarian government? After

leaving the Buergerbräukeller he had quickly recovered his senses and his

courage. Not wishing to take any more chances on being made a prisoner of

Hitler and his rowdies, Kahr moved the government to Regens-burg. But not

before he had ordered placards posted throughout Munich carrying the following

proclamation:

The deception and perfidy of ambitious comrades have converted a demonstration in the

interests of national reawakening into a scene of disgusting violence. The declarations extorted

from myself, General von Lossow and Colonel Seisser at the point of the revolver are null and

void. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, as well as the fighting leagues Oberland

and Reichskriegsflagge, are dissolved.

VON KAHR

General State Commissioner

The triumph which earlier in the evening had seemed to Hitler so near and so

easily won was rapidly fading with the night. The basis for a successful political

revolution on which he had always insisted—the support of existing institutions

such as the Army, the police, the political group in power—was now crumbling.

Not even Ludendorff’s magic name, it was now clear, had won over the armed

forces of the state. Hitler suggested that perhaps the situation could be retrieved

if he and the General withdrew to the countryside near Rosenheim and rallied

the peasants behind the armed bands for an assault on Munich, but Ludendorff

promptly rejected the idea.

Or perhaps there was another way out which at least would avert disaster. On

first hearing of the putsch, Crown Prince Rupprecht, a bitter personal enemy of

Ludendorff, had issued a brief statement calling for its prompt suppression. Now

Hitler decided to appeal to the Prince to intercede with Lossow and Kahr and

obtain an honorable, peaceful settlement. A Lieutenant Neunzert, a friend of

Hitler and of Rupprecht, was hurried off at dawn to the Wittelsbach castle near

Berchtesgaden on the delicate mission. Unable to find an automobile, he had to

wait for a train and did not arrive at his destination until noon, at which hour

events were taking a turn not foreseen by Hitler nor dreamt of as possible by

Ludendorff.

Hitler had planned a putsch, not a civil war. Despite his feverish state of

excitement he was in sufficient control of himself to realize that he lacked the

strength to overcome the police and the Army. He had wanted to make a

revolution with the armed forces, not against them. Bloodthirsty though he had

been in his recent speeches and during the hours he held the Bavarian triumvirs

at gunpoint, he shrank from the idea of men united in their hatred of the

Republic shedding the blood of each other.

So did Ludendorff. He would, as he had told his wife, string up President

Ebert “and Co.” and gladly watch them dangle from the gallows. But he did not

wish to kill policemen and soldiers who, in Munich at least, believed with him in

the national counterrevolution.

To the wavering young Nazi leader Ludendorff now proposed a plan of his

own that might still bring them victory and yet avoid bloodshed. German

soldiers, even German police—who were mostly ex-soldiers—would never dare,

he was sure, to fire on the legendary commander who had led them to great

victories on both the Eastern and the Western fronts. He and Hitler would march

with their followers to the center of the city and take it over. Not only would the

police and the Army not dare to oppose him, he was certain; they would join him

and fight under his orders. Though somewhat skeptical, Hitler agreed. There

seemed no other way out. The Crown Prince, he noted, had not replied to his

plea for mediation.

Toward eleven o’clock on the morning of November 9, the anniversary of the

proclamation of the German Republic, Hitler and Ludendorff led a column of

some three thousand storm troopers out of the gardens of the Buergerbräukeller

and headed for the center of Munich. Beside them in the front rank marched

Goering, commander of the S.A., Scheubner-Richter, Rosenberg, Ulrich Graf,

Hitler’s bodyguard, and half a dozen other Nazi officials and leaders of the

Kampfbund. A swastika flag and a banner of the Bund Oberland were unfurled

at the head of the column. Not far behind the first ranks a truck chugged along,

loaded with machine guns and machine gunners. The storm troopers carried

carbines, slung over their shoulders, some with fixed bayonets. Hitler brandished

his revolver. Not a very formidable armed force, but Ludendorff, who had

commanded millions of Germany’s finest troops, apparently thought it sufficient

for his purposes.

A few hundred yards north of the beer cellar the rebels met their first obstacle.

On the Ludwig Bridge, which leads over the River Isar toward the center of the

city, stood a detachment of armed police barring the route. Goering sprang

forward and, addressing the police commander, threatened to shoot a number of

hostages he said he had in the rear of his column if the police fired on his men.

During the night Hess and others had rounded up a number of hostages,

including two cabinet members, for just such a contingency. Whether Goering

was bluffing or not, the police commander apparently believed he was not and

let the column file over the bridge unmolested.

At the Marienplatz the Nazi column encountered a large crowd which was

listening to an exhortation of Julius Streicher, the Jew-baiter from Nuremberg,

who had rushed to Munich at the first news of the putsch. Not wishing to be left

out of the revolution, he cut short his speech and joined the rebels, jumping into

step immediately behind Hitler.

Shortly after noon the marchers neared their objective, the War Ministry,

where Roehm and his storm troopers were surrounded by soldiers of the

Reichswehr. Neither besiegers nor besieged had yet fired a shot. Roehm and his

men were all ex-soldiers and they had many wartime comrades on the other side

of the barbed wire. Neither side had any heart for killing.

To reach the War Ministry and free Roehm, Hitler and Ludendorff now led

their column through the narrow Residenzstrasse, which, just beyond the

Feldherrnhalle, opens out into the spacious Odeonsplatz. At the end of the

gullylike street a detachment of police about one hundred strong, armed with

carbines, blocked the way. They were in a strategic spot and this time they did

not give way.

But once again the Nazis tried to talk their way through. One of them, the

faithful bodyguard Ulrich Graf, stepped forward and cried out to the police

officer in charge, “Don’t shoot! His Excellency Ludendorff is coming!” Even at

this crucial, perilous moment, a German revolutionary, even an old amateur

wrestler and professional bouncer, remembered to give a gentleman his proper

title. Hitler added another cry. “Surrender! Surrender!” he called out. But the

unknown police officer did not surrender. Apparently Ludendorff’s name had no

magic sound for him; this was the police, not the Army.

Which side fired first was never established. Each put the blame on the other.

One onlooker later testified that Hitler fired the first shot with his revolver.

Another thought that Streicher did, and more than one Nazi later told this author

that it was this deed which, more than any other, endeared him so long to Hitler.*

At any rate a shot was fired and in the next instant a volley of shots rang out

from both sides, spelling in that instant the doom of Hitler’s hopes. Scheubner-

Richter fell, mortally wounded. Goering went down with a serious wound in his

thigh. Within sixty seconds the firing stopped, but the street was already littered

with fallen bodies—sixteen Nazis and three police dead or dying, many more

wounded and the rest, including Hitler, clutching the pavement to save their

lives.

There was one exception, and had his example been followed, the day might

have had a different ending. Ludendorff did not fling himself to the ground.

Standing erect and proud in the best soldierly tradition, with his adjutant, Major

Streck, at his side, he marched calmly on between the muzzles of the police

rifles until he reached the Odeonsplatz. He must have seemed a lonely and

bizarre figure. Not one Nazi followed him. Not even the supreme leader, Adolf

Hitler.

The future Chancellor of the Third Reich was the first to scamper to safety.

He had locked his left arm with the right arm of Scheubner-Richter (a curious

but perhaps revealing gesture) as the column approached the police cordon, and

when the latter fell he pulled Hitler down to the pavement with him. Perhaps

Hitler thought he had been wounded; he suffered sharp pains which, it was found

later, came from a dislocated shoulder. But the fact remains that according to the

testimony of one of his own Nazi followers in the column, the physician Dr.

Walther Schulz, which was supported by several other witnesses, Hitler “was the

first to get up and turn back,” leaving his dead and wounded comrades lying in

the street. He was hustled into a waiting motorcar and spirited off to the country

home of the Hanfstaengls at Uffing, where Putzi’s wife and sister nursed him

and where, two days later, he was arrested.

Ludendorff was arrested on the spot. He was contemptuous of the rebels who

had not had the courage to march on with him, and so bitter against the Army for

not coming over to his side that he declared hence forth he would not recognize

a German officer nor ever again wear an officer’s uniform. The wounded

Goering was given first aid by the Jewish proprietor of a nearby bank into which

he had been carried and then smuggled across the frontier into Austria by his

wife and taken to a hospital in Innsbruck. Hess also fled to Austria. Roehm

surrendered at the War Ministry two hours after the collapse before the

Feldherrnhalle. Within a few days all the rebel leaders except Goering and Hess

were rounded up and jailed. The Nazi putsch had ended in a fiasco. The party

was dissolved. National Socialism, to all appearances, was dead. Its dictatorial

leader, who had run away at the first hail of bullets, seemed utterly discredited,

his meteoric political career at an end.

TRIAL FOR TREASON

As things turned out, that career was merely interrupted, and not for long.

Hitler was shrewd enough to see that his trial, far from finishing him, would

provide a new platform from which he could not only discredit the compromised

authorities who had arrested him but—and this was more important—for the

first time make his name known far beyond the confines of Bavaria and indeed

of Germany itself. He was well aware that correspondents of the world press as

well as of the leading German newspapers were flocking to Munich to cover the

trial, which began on February 26, 1924, before a special court sitting in the old

Infantry School in the Blutenburgstrasse. By the time it had ended twenty-four

days later Hitler had transformed defeat into triumph, made Kahr, Lossow and

Seisser share his guilt in the public mind to their ruin, impressed the German

people with his eloquence and the fervor of his nationalism, and emblazoned his

name on the front pages of the world.

Although Ludendorff was easily the most famous of the ten prisoners in the

dock, Hitler at once grabbed the limelight for himself. From beginning to end he

dominated the courtroom. Franz Guertner, the Bavarian Minister of Justice and

an old friend and protector of the Nazi leader, had seen to it that the judiciary

would be complacent and lenient. Hitler was allowed to interrupt as often as he

pleased, cross-examine witnesses at will and speak on his own behalf at any time

and at any length—his opening statement consumed four hours, but it was only

the first of many long harangues.

He did not intend to make the mistake of those who, when tried for complicity

in the Kapp putsch, had pleaded, as he later said, that “they knew nothing, had

intended nothing, wished nothing. That was what destroyed the bourgeois world

—that they had not the courage to stand by their act … to step before the judge

and say, ‘Yes, that was what we wanted to do; we wanted to destroy the State.’”

Now before the judges and the representatives of the world press in Munich,

Hitler proclaimed proudly, “I alone bear the responsibility. But I am not a

criminal because of that. If today I stand here as a revolutionary, it is as a

revolutionary against the revolution. There is no such thing as high treason

against the traitors of 1918.”

If there were, then the three men who headed the government, the Army and

the police in Bavaria and who had conspired with him against the national

government were equally guilty and should be in the dock beside him instead of

in the witness stand as his chief accusers. Shrewdly he turned the tables on the

uneasy, guilt-ridden triumvirs:

One thing was certain, Lossow, Kahr and Seisser had the same goal that we had—to get rid

of the Reich government … If our enterprise was actually high treason, then during the whole

period Lossow, Kahr and Seisser must have been committing high treason along with us, for

during all these weeks we talked of nothing but the aims of which we now stand accused.

The three men could scarcely deny this, for it was true. Kahr and Seisser were

no match for Hitler’s barbs. Only General von Lossow defended himself

defiantly. “I was no unemployed komitadji,” he reminded the court. “I occupied

a high position in the State.” And the General poured all the scorn of an old

Army officer on his former corporal, this unemployed upstart, whose

overpowering ambition had led him to try to dictate to the Army and the State.

How far this unscrupulous demagogue had come, he exclaimed, from the days,

not so far distant, when he had been willing to be merely “the drummer” in a

patriotic movement!

A drummer merely? Hitler knew how to answer that:

How petty are the thoughts of small men! Believe me, I do not regard the acquisition of a

minister’s portfolio as a thing worth striving for. I do not hold it worthy of a great man to

endeavor to go down in history just by becoming a minister. One might be in danger of being

buried beside other ministers. My aim from the first was a thousand times higher than

becoming a minister. I wanted to become the destroyer of Marxism. I am going to achieve this

task, and if I do, the title of Minister will be an absurdity so far as I am concerned.

He invoked the example of Wagner.

When I stood for the first time at the grave of Richard Wagner my heart overflowed with

pride in a man who had forbidden any such inscription as “Here lies Privy Councilor, Music

Director, His Excellency Baron Richard von Wagner.” I was proud that this man and so many

others in German history were content to give their names to history without titles. It was not

from modesty that I wanted to be a drummer in those days. That was the highest aspiration—

the rest is nothing.

He had been accused of wanting to jump from drummer to dictator. He would

not deny it. Fate had decreed it.

The man who is born to be a dictator is not compelled. He wills it. He is not driven

forward, but drives himself. There is nothing immodest about this. Is it immodest for a worker

to drive himself toward heavy labor? Is it presumptuous of a man with the high forehead of a

thinker to ponder through the nights till he gives the world an invention? The man who feels

called upon to govern a people has no right to say, “If you want me or summon me, I will co-

operate.” No! It is his duty to step forward.

Though he might be in the dock facing a long prison sentence for high treason

against his country, his confidence in himself, in the call to “govern a people,”

was undiminished. While in prison awaiting trial, he had already analyzed the

reasons for the failure of the putsch and had vowed that he would not commit the

same mistakes in the future. Recalling his thoughts thirteen years later after he

had achieved his goal, he told his old followers, assembled at the

Buergerbräukeller to celebrate the anniversary of the putsch, “I can calmly say

that it was the rashest decision of my life. When I think back on it today, I grow

dizzy … If today you saw one of our squads from the year 1923 marching by,

you would ask, ‘What workhouse have they escaped from?’ … But fate meant

well with us. It did not permit an action to succeed which, if it had succeeded,

would in the end have inevitably crashed as a result of the movement’s inner

immaturity in those days and its deficient organizational and intellectual

foundation … We recognized that it is not enough to overthrow the old State, but

that the new State must previously have been built up and be ready to one’s hand

… In 1933 it was no longer a question of overthrowing a State by an act of

violence; meanwhile the new State had been built up and all that remained to do

was to destroy the last remnants of the old State—and that took but a few hours.”

How to build the new Nazi State was already in his mind as he fenced with the

judges and his prosecutors during the trial. For one thing, he would have to have

the German Army with him, not against him, the next time. In his closing

address he played on the idea of reconciliation with the armed forces. There was

no word of reproach for the Army.

I believe that the hour will come when the masses, who today stand in the street with our

swastika banner, will unite with those who fired upon them … When I learned that it was the

Green police which fired, I was happy that it was not the Reichswehr which had stained the

record; the Reichswehr stands as untarnished as before. One day the hour will come when the

Reichswehr will stand at our side, officers and men.

It was an accurate prediction, but here the presiding judge intervened. “Herr

Hitler, you say that the Green police was stained. That I cannot permit.”

The accused paid not the slightest attention to the admonition. In a peroration

that held the audience in the courtroom spellbound Hitler spoke his final words:

The army we have formed is growing from day to day … I nourish the proud hope that one

day the hour will come when these rough companies will grow to battalions, the battalions to

regiments, the regiments to divisions, that the old cockade will be taken from the mud, that the

old flags will wave again, that there will be a reconciliation at the last great divine judgment

which we are prepared to face.

He turned his burning eyes directly on the judges.

For it is not you, gentlemen, who pass judgment on us. That judgment is spoken by the

eternal court of history. What judgment you will hand down I know. But that court will not ask

us, “Did you commit high treason or did you not?” That court will judge us, the Quartermaster

General of the old Army [Ludendorff], his officers and soldiers, as Germans who wanted only

the good of their own people and Fatherland, who wanted to fight and die. You may

pronounce us guilty a thousand times over, but the goddess of the eternal court of history will

smile and tear to tatters the brief of the state prosecutor and the sentence of this court. For she

acquits us. 10

The sentences, if not the verdicts, of the actual judges were, as Konrad Heiden

wrote, not so far from the judgment of history. Ludendorff was acquitted. Hitler

and the other accused were found guilty. But in the face of the law—Article 81

of the German Penal Code—which declared that “whosoever attempts to alter by

force the Constitution of the German Reich or of any German state shall be

punished by lifelong imprisonment,” Hitler was sentenced to five years’

imprisonment in the old fortress of Landsberg. Even then the lay judges

protested the severity of the sentence, but they were assured by the presiding

judge that the prisoner would be eligible for parole after he had served six

months. Efforts of the police to get Hitler deported as a foreigner—he still held

Austrian citizenship—came to nothing. The sentences were imposed on April 1,

1924. A little less than nine months later, on December 20, Hitler was released

from prison, free to resume his fight to overthrow the democratic state. The

consequences of committing high treason, if you were a man of the extreme

Right, were not unduly heavy, despite the law, and a good many antirepublicans

took notice of it.

The putsch, even though it was a fiasco, made Hitler a national figure and, in

the eyes of many, a patriot and a hero. Nazi propaganda soon transformed it into

one of the great legends of the movement. Each year, even after he came to

power, even after World War II broke out, Hitler returned on the evening of

November 8 to the beer hall in Munich to address his Old Guard comrades—the

alte Kaempfer, as they were called—who had followed the leader to what

seemed then such a grotesque disaster. In 1935 Hitler, the Chancellor, had the

bodies of the sixteen Nazis who had fallen in the brief encounter dug up and

placed in vaults in the Feldherrnhalle, which became a national shrine. Of them

Hitler said, in dedicating the memorial, “They now pass into German

immortality. Here they stand for Germany and keep guard over our people. Here

they lie as true witnesses to our movement.” He did not add, and no German

seemed to recall, that they were also the men whom Hitler had abandoned to

their dying when he had picked himself up from the pavement and ran away.

That summer of 1924 in the old fortress at Landsberg, high above the River

Lech, Adolf Hitler, who was treated as an honored guest, with a room of his own

and a splendid view, cleared out the visitors who flocked to pay him homage and

bring him gifts, summoned the faithful Rudolf Hess, who had finally returned to

Munich and received a sentence, and began to dictate to him chapter after

chapter of a book. *

* A year later General Freiherr Walther von Luettwitz, a reactionary officer of the old school,

would show how loyal he was to the Republic in general and to Noske in particular when he

led free-corps troops in the capture of Berlin in support of the Kapp putsch. Ebert, Noske and

the other members of the government were forced to flee at five in the morning of March 13,

1920. General von Seeckt, Chief of Staff of the Army and nominally subordinate to Noske, the

Minister of Defense, had refused to allow the Army to defend the Republic against Luettwitz

and Kapp. “This night has shown the bankruptcy of all my policy,” Noske cried out. “My faith

in the Officer Corps is shattered. You have all deserted me.” (Quoted by Wheeler-Bennett in

The Nemesis of Power, p. 77.)

* There were flaws, to be sure, and in the end some of them proved disastrous. The system of

proportional representation and voting by list may have prevented the wasting of votes, but it

also resulted in the multiplication of small splinter parties which eventually made a stable

majority in the Reichstag impossible and led to frequent changes in government. In the

national elections of 1930 some twenty-eight parties were listed.

The Republic might have been given greater stability had some of the ideas of Professor

Hugo Preuss, the principal drafter of the constitution, not been rejected. He proposed at

Weimar that Germany be made into a centralized state and that Prussia and the other single

states be dissolved and transformed into provinces. But the Assembly turned his proposals

down.

Finally, Article 48 of the constitution conferred upon the President dictatorial powers

during an emergency. The use made of this clause by Chancellors Bruening, von Papen and

von Schleicher under President Hindenburg enabled them to govern without approval of the

Reichstag and thus, even before the advent of Hitler, brought an end to democratic

parliamentary government in Germany.

* It restricted the Army to 100,000 long-term volunteers and prohibited it from having planes

or tanks. The General Staff was also outlawed. The Navy was reduced to little more than a

token force and forbidden to build submarines or vessels over 10,000 tons.

* The “Black Reichswehr” troops, numbering roughly twenty thousand, were stationed on the

eastern frontier to help guard it against the Poles in the turbulent days of 1920–23. The illicit

organization became notorious for its revival of the horrors of the medieval Femegerichte—

secret courts—which dealt arbitrary death sentences against Germans who revealed the

activities of the “Black Reichswehr” to the Allied Control Commission. Several of these brutal

murders reached the courts. At one trial the German Defense Minister, Otto Gessler, who had

succeeded Noske, denied any knowledge of the organization and insisted that it did not exist.

But when one of his questioners protested against such innocence Gessler cried, “He who

speaks of the ‘Black Reichswehr’ commits an act of high treason!”

* Some years later, in approving Streicher’s appointment as Nazi leader for Franconia over the

opposition of many party comrades, Hitler declared, “Perhaps there are one or two who don’t

like the shape of Comrade Streicher’s nose. But when he lay beside me that day on the

pavement by the Feldherrnhalle, I vowed to myself never to forsake him so long as he did not

forsake me.” (Heiden, Hitler: A Biography, p. 157. )

* Before the arrival of Hess, Emil Maurice, an ex-convict, a watchmaker and the first

commander of the Nazi “strong-arm” squads, took some preliminary dictation.

4

THE MIND OF HITLER AND THE ROOTS OF THE THIRD

REICH

HITLER WANTED TO CALL his book “Four and a Half Years of Struggle against

Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice,” but Max Amann, the hard-headed manager of

the Nazi publishing business, who was to bring it out, rebelled against such a

ponderous—and unsalable—title and shortened it to My Struggle ( Mein Kampf).

Amann was sorely disappointed in the contents. He had hoped, first, for a racy

personal story in which Hitler would recount his rise from an unknown “worker”

in Vienna to world renown. As we have seen, there was little autobiography in

the book. The Nazi business manager had also counted on an inside story of the

Beer Hall Putsch, the drama and double-dealing of which, he was sure, would

make good reading. But Hitler was too shrewd at this point, when the party

fortunes were at their lowest ebb, to rake over old coals.* There is scarcely a

word of the unsuccessful putsch in Mein Kampf.

The first volume was published in the autumn of 1925. A work of some four

hundred pages, it was priced at twelve marks (three dollars), about twice the

price of most books brought out in Germany at that time. It did not by any means

become an immediate best seller. Amann boasted that it sold 23,000 copies the

first year and that sales continued upward—a claim that was received with

skepticism in anti-Nazi circles.

Thanks to the Allied seizure in 1945 of the royalty statements of the Eher

Verlag, the Nazi publishing firm, the facts about the actual sale of Mein Kampf

can now be disclosed. In 1925 the book sold 9,473 copies, and thereafter for

three years the sales decreased annually. They slumped to 6,913 in 1926, to

5,607 in 1927 and to a mere 3,015 in 1928, counting both volumes. They were

up a little—to 7,664—in 1929, rose with the fortunes of the Nazi Party in 1930,

when an inexpensive one-volume edition at eight marks appeared, to 54,086,

dropped slightly to 50,808 the following year and jumped to 90, 351 in 1932.

Hitler’s royalties—his chief source of income from 1925 on—were

considerable when averaged over those first seven years. But they were nothing

compared to those received in 1933, the year he became Chancellor. In his first

year of office Mein Kampf sold a million copies, and Hitler’s income from the

royalties, which had been increased from 10 to 15 per cent after January 1, 1933,

was over one million marks (some $300,000), making him the most prosperous

author in Germany and for the first time a millionaire.* Except for the Bible, no

other book sold as well during the Nazi regime, when few family households felt

secure without a copy on the table. It was almost obligatory—and certainly

politic—to present a copy to a bride and groom at their wedding, and nearly

every school child received one on graduation from whatever school. By 1940,

the year after World War II broke out, six million copies of the Nazi bible had

been sold in Germany.1

Not every German who bought a copy of Mein Kampf necessarily read it. I

have heard many a Nazi stalwart complain that it was hard going and not a few

admit—in private—that they were never able to get through to the end of its 782

turgid pages. But it might be argued that had more non-Nazi Germans read it

before 1933 and had the foreign statesmen of the world perused it carefully

while there still was time, both Germany and the world might have been saved

from catastrophe. For whatever other accusations can be made against Adolf

Hitler, no one can accuse him of not putting down in writing exactly the kind of

Germany he intended to make if he ever came to power and the kind of world he

meant to create by armed German conquest. The blueprint of the Third Reich

and, what is more, of the barbaric New Order which Hitler inflicted on

conquered Europe in the triumphant years between 1939 and 1945 is set down in

all its appalling crudity at great length and in detail between the covers of this

revealing book.

As we have seen, Hitler’s basic ideas were formed in his early twenties in

Vienna, and we have his own word for it that he learned little afterward and

altered nothing in his thinking, † When he left Austria for Germany in 1913 at

the age of twenty-four, he was full of a burning passion for German nationalism,

a hatred for democracy, Marxism and the Jews and a certainty that Providence

had chosen the Aryans, especially the Germans, to be the master race.

In Mein Kampf he expanded his views and applied them specifically to the

problem of not only restoring a defeated and chaotic Germany to a place in the

sun greater than it had ever had before but making a new kind of state, one

which would be based on race and would include all Germans then living

outside the Reich’s frontiers, and in which would be established the absolute

dictatorship of the Leader—himself—with an array of smaller leaders taking

orders from above and giving them to those below. Thus the book contains, first,

an outline of the future German state and of the means by which it can one day

become “lord of the earth,” as the author puts it on the very last page; and,

second, a point of view, a conception of life, or, to use Hitler’s favorite German

word, a Weltanschauung. That this view of life would strike a normal mind of

the twentieth century as a grotesque hodgepodge concocted by a half-baked,

uneducated neurotic goes without saying. What makes it important is that it was

embraced so fanatically by so many millions of Germans and that if it led, as it

did, to their ultimate ruin it also led to the ruin of so many millions of innocent,

decent human beings inside and especially outside Germany.

Now, how was the new Reich to regain her position as a world power and then

go on to world mastery? Hitler pondered the question in the first volume, written

mostly when he was in prison in 1924, returning to it at greater length in Volume

Two, which was finished in 1926.

In the first place, there must be a reckoning with France, “the inexorable

mortal enemy of the German people.” The French aim, he said, would always be

to achieve a “dismembered and shattered Germany … a hodgepodge of little

states.” This was so self-evident, Hitler added, that “… if I were a Frenchman …

I could not and would not act any differently from Clemenceau. ” Therefore,

there must be “a final active reckoning with France … a last decisive struggle …

only then will we be able to end the eternal and essentially so fruitless struggle

between ourselves and France; presupposing, of course, that Germany actually

regards the destruction of France as only a means which will afterward enable

her finally to give our people the expansion made possible elsewhere. ”2

Expansion elsewhere? Where? In this manner Hitler leads to the core of his

ideas on German foreign policy which he was to attempt so faithfully to carry

out when he became ruler of the Reich. Germany, he said bluntly, must expand

in the East—largely at the expense of Russia.

In the first volume of Mein Kampf Hitler discoursed at length on this problem

of Lebensraum—living space—a subject which obsessed him to his dying

breath. The Hohenzollern Empire, he declared, had been mistaken in seeking

colonies in Africa. “Territorial policy cannot be fulfilled in the Cameroons but

today almost exclusively in Europe.” But the soil of Europe was already

occupied. True, Hitler recognized, “but nature has not reserved this soil for the

future possession of any particular nation or race; on the contrary, this soil exists

for the people which possesses the force to take it.” What if the present

possessors object? “Then the law of self-preservation goes into effect; and what

is refused to amicable methods, it is up to the fist to take. ”3

Acquisition of new soil, Hitler continued, in explaining the blindness of

German prewar foreign policy, “was possible only in the East … If land was

desired in Europe, it could be obtained by and large only at the expense of

Russia, and this meant that the new Reich must again set itself on the march

along the road of the Teutonic Knights of old, to obtain by the German sword

sod for the German plow and daily bread for the nation. ”4

As if he had not made himself entirely clear in the initial volume, Hitler

returned to the subject in the second one.

Only an adequate large space on this earth assures a nation of freedom of existence …

Without consideration of “traditions” and prejudices [the National Socialist movement] must

find the courage to gather our people and their strength for an advance along the road that will

lead this people from its present restricted living space to new land and soil … The National

Socialist movement must strive to eliminate the disproportion between our population and our

area—viewing this latter as a source of food as well as a basis for power politics … We must

hold unflinchingly to our aim … to secure for the German people the land and soil to which

they are entitled …5

How much land are the German people entitled to? The bourgeoisie, says

Hitler scornfully, “which does not possess a single creative political idea for the

future,” had been clamoring for the restoration of the 1914 German frontiers.

The demand for restoration of the frontiers of 1914 is a political absurdity of such

proportions and consequences as to make it seem a crime. Quite aside from the fact that the

Reich’s frontiers in 1914 were anything but logical. For in reality they were neither complete

in the sense of embracing the people of German nationality nor sensible with regard to

geomilitary expediency. They were not the result of a considered political action, but

momentary frontiers in a political struggle that was by no means concluded … With equal

right and in many cases with more right, some other sample year of German history could be

picked out, and the restoration of the conditions at that time declared to be the aim in foreign

affairs. 6

Hitler’s “sample year” would go back some six centuries, to when the

Germans were driving the Slavs back in the East. The push eastward must be

resumed. “Today we count eighty million Germans in Europe! This foreign

policy will be acknowledged as correct only if, after scarcely a hundred years,

there are two hundred and fifty million Germans on this continent.” 7 And all of

them within the borders of the new and expanded Reich.

Some other peoples, obviously, will have to make way for so many Germans.

What other peoples?

And so we National Socialists … take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We

stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze toward the land in

the East.

If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her

vassal border states. *8

Fate, Hitler remarks, was kind to Germany in this respect. It had handed over

Russia to Bolshevism, which, he says, really meant handing over Russia to the

Jews. “The giant empire in the East,” he exults, “is ripe for collapse. And the end

of Jewish rule in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state.” So the great

steppes to the East, Hitler implies, could be taken over easily on Russia’s

collapse without much cost in blood to the Germans.

Can anyone contend that the blueprint here is not clear and precise? France

will be destroyed, but that is secondary to the German drive eastward. First the

immediate lands to the East inhabited predominantly by Germans will be taken.

And what are these? Obviously Austria, the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia and

the western part of Poland, including Danzig. After that, Russia herself. Why

was the world so surprised, then, when Chancellor Hitler, a bare few years later,

set out to achieve these very ends?

On the nature of the future Nazi State, Hitler’s ideas in Mein Kampf are less

concise. He made it clear enough that there would be no “democratic nonsense”

and that the Third Reich would be ruled by the Fuehrerprinzip, the leadership

principle—that is, that it would be a dictatorship. There is almost nothing about

economics in the book. The subject bored Hitler and he never bothered to try to

learn something about it beyond toying with the crackpot ideas of Gottfried

Feder, the crank who was against “interest slavery.”

What interested Hitler was political power; economics could somehow take

care of itself.

The state has nothing at all to do with any definite economic conception or development …

The state is a racial organism and not an economic organization … The inner strength of a

state coincides only in the rarest cases with so-called economic prosperity; the latter, in

innumerable cases, seems to indicate the state’s approaching decline … Prussia demonstrates

with marvelous sharpness that not material qualities but ideal virtues alone make possible the

formation of a state. Only under their protection can economic life flourish. Always when in

Germany there was an upsurge of political power the economic conditions began to improve;

but always when economics became the sole content of our people’s life, stifling the ideal

virtues, the state collapsed and in a short time drew economic life with it … Never yet has a

state been founded by peaceful economic means …9

Therefore, as Hitler said in a speech in Munich in 1923, “no economic policy

is possible without a sword, no industrialization without power.” Beyond that

vague, crude philosophy and a passing reference in Mein Kampf to “economic

chambers,” “chambers of estates” and a “central economic parliament” which

“would keep the national economy functioning,” Hitler refrains from any

expression of opinion on the economic foundation of the Third Reich.

And though the very name of the Nazi Party proclaimed it as “socialist,”

Hitler was even more vague on the kind of “socialism” he envisaged for the new

Germany. This is not surprising in view of a definition of a “socialist” which he

gave in a speech on July 28, 1922:

Whoever is prepared to make the national cause his own to such an extent that he knows no

higher ideal than the welfare of his nation; whoever has understood our great national anthem,

“Deutschland ueber Alles,” to mean that nothing in the wide world surpasses in his eyes this

Germany, people and land—that man is a Socialist. 10

Considerable editorial advice and even pruning on the part of at least three

helpers could not prevent Hitler from meandering from one subject to another in

Mein Kampf. Rudolf Hess, who took most of the dictation first at Landsberg

prison and later at Haus Wachenfeld near Berchtesgaden, did his best to tidy up

the manuscript, but he was no man to stand up to the Leader. More successful in

this respect was Father Bernhard Stempfle, a former member of the Hieronymite

order and an anti-Semitic journalist of some notoriety in Bavaria. This strange

priest, of whom more will be heard in this history, corrected some of Hitler’s bad

grammar, straightened out what prose he could and crossed out a few passages

which he convinced the author were politically objectionable. The third adviser

was Josef Czerny, of Czech origin, who worked on the Nazi newspaper,

Voelkischer Beobachter, and whose anti-Jewish poetry endeared him to Hitler.

Czerny was instrumental in revising the first volume of Mein Kampf for its

second printing, in which certain embarrassing words and sentences were

eliminated or changed; and he went over carefully the proofs of Volume Two.

Nevertheless, most of the meanderings remained. Hitler insisted on airing his

thoughts at random on almost every conceivable subject, including culture,

education, the theater, the movies, the comics, art, literature, history, sex,

marriage, prostitution and syphilis. Indeed, on the subject of syphilis, Hitler

devotes ten turgid pages, declaring it is “the task of the nation—not just one

more task, ”* to eradicate it. To combat this dread disease Hitler demands that all

the propaganda resources of the nation be mobilized. “Everything,” he says,

“depends on the solution of this question.” The problem of syphilis and

prostitution must also be attacked, he states, by facilitating earlier marriages, and

he gives a foretaste of the eugenics of the Third Reich by insisting that “marriage

cannot be an end in itself, but must serve the one higher goal: the increase and

preservation of the species and the race. This alone is its meaning and its task.” 11

And so with this mention of the preservation of the species and of the race in

Mein Kampf we come to the second principal consideration: Hitler’s

Weltanschauung, his view of life, which some historians, especially in England,

have seen as a crude form of Darwinism but which in reality, as we shall see, has

its roots deep in German history and thought. Like Darwin but also like a whole

array of German philosophers, historians, kings, generals and statesmen, Hitler

saw all life as an eternal struggle and the world as a jungle where the fittest

survived and the strongest ruled—a “world where one creature feeds on the other

and where the death of the weaker implies the life of the stronger.”

Mein Kampf is studded with such pronouncements: “In the end only the urge

for self-preservation can conquer … Mankind has grown great in eternal

struggle, and only in eternal peace does it perish…. Nature … puts living

creatures on this globe and watches the free play of forces. She then confers the

master’s right on her favorite child, the strongest in courage and industry … The

stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own

greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel …” For Hitler the

preservation of culture “is bound up with the rigid law of necessity and the right

to victory of the best and strongest in the world. Those who want to live, let

them fight, and those who do not want to fight, in this world of eternal struggle,

do not deserve to live. Even if this were hard—that is how it is!” 12

And who is “nature’s favorite child, the strongest in courage and industry” on

whom Providence has conferred “the master’s right”? The Aryan. Here in Mein

Kampf we come to the kernel of the Nazi idea of race superiority, of the

conception of the master race, on which the Third Reich and Hitler’s New Order

in Europe were based.

All the human culture, all the results of art, science and technology that we see before us

today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan. This very fact admits of the

not unfounded inference that he alone was the founder of all higher humanity, therefore

representing the prototype of all that we understand by the word “man.” He is the Prometheus

of mankind from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has sprung at all times,

forever kindling anew that fire of knowledge which illumined the night of silent mysteries and

thus caused man to climb the path to mastery over the other beings of this earth … It was he

who laid the foundations and erected the walls of every great structure in human culture. 13

And how did the Aryan accomplish so much and become so supreme? Hitler’s

answer is: By trampling over others. Like so many German thinkers of the

nineteenth century, Hitler fairly revels in a sadism (and its opposite, masochism)

which foreign students of the German spirit have always found so difficult to

comprehend.

Thus, for the formation of higher cultures the existence of lower human types was one of

the most essential preconditions … It is certain that the first culture of humanity was based

less on the tamed animal than on the use of lower human beings. Only after the enslavement of

subject races did the same fate strike beasts. For first the conquered warrior drew the plow—

and only after him the horse. Hence it is no accident that the first cultures arose in places

where the Aryan, in his encounters with lower peoples, subjugated them and bent them to his

will … As long as he ruthlessly upheld the master attitude, not only did he remain master, but

also the preserver and increaser of culture.14

Then something happened which Hitler took as a warning to the Germans.

As soon as the subjected people began to raise themselves up and approach the level of

their conqueror, a phase of which probably was the use of his language, the barriers between

master and servant broke down.

But even worse than sharing the master’s language was something else.

The Aryan gave up the purity of his blood and, therefore, lost his sojourn in the paradise

which he had made for himself. He became submerged in a racial mixture and gradually lost

his cultural creativeness.

To the young Nazi leader this was the cardinal error.

Blood mixture and the resultant drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of

old cultures; for men do not perish as a result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of

resistance which is continued only in pure blood. All who are not of good race in this world

are chaff. 15

Chaff were the Jews and the Slavs, and in time, when he became dictator and

conqueror, Hitler would forbid the marriage of a German with any member of

these races, though a fourth-grade schoolmarm could have told him that there

was a great deal of Slavic blood in the Germans, especially in those who dwelt in

the eastern provinces. In carrying out his racial ideas, it must again be admitted,

Hitler was as good as his word. In the New Order which he began to impose on

the Slavs in the East during the war, the Czechs, the Poles, the Russians were—

and were to remain, if the grotesque New Order had endured—the hewers of

wood and the drawers of water for their German masters.

It was an easy step for a man as ignorant of history and anthropology as Hitler

to make of the Germans the modern Aryans—and thus the master race. To Hitler

the Germans are “the highest species of humanity on this earth” and will remain

so if they “occupy themselves not merely with the breeding of dogs, horses and

cats but also with care for the purity of their own blood.” 16

Hitler’s obsession with race leads to his advocacy of the “folkish” state.

Exactly what kind of state that was—or was intended to be—I never clearly

understood despite many rereadings of Mein Kampf and listening to dozens of

addresses on the subject by the Fuehrer himself, though more than once I heard

the dictator declare that it was the central point of his whole thinking. The

German word Volk cannot be translated accurately into English. Usually it is

rendered as “nation” or “people,” but in German there is a deeper and somewhat

different meaning that connotes a primitive, tribal community based on blood

and soil. In Mein Kampf Hitler has a difficult time trying to define the folkish

state, announcing, for example, on page 379 that he will clarify “the ‘folkish’

concept” only to shy away from any clarification and wander off on other

subjects for several pages. Finally he has a go at it:

In opposition to [the bourgeois and the Marxist-Jewish worlds], the folkish philosophy

finds the importance of mankind in its basic racial elements. In the state it sees only a means to

an end and construes its end as the preservation of the racial existence of man. Thus, it by, no

means believes in an equality of races, but along with their difference it recognizes their

higher or lesser value and feels itself obligated to promote the victory of the better and

stronger, and demand the subordination of the inferior and weaker in accordance with the

eternal will that dominates this universe. Thus, in principle, it serves the basic aristocratic idea

of nature and believes in the validity of this law down to the last individual. It sees not only

the different value of the races, but also the different value of individuals. From the mass it

extracts the importance of the individual personality and thus … it has an organizing effect. It

believes in the necessity of an idealization of humanity, in which alone it sees the premise for

the existence of humanity. But it cannot grant the right to existence even to an ethical idea if

this idea represents a danger for the racial life of the bearers of a higher ethics; for in a

bastardized and niggerized world all the concepts of the humanly beautiful and sublime, as

well as all ideas of an idealized future of our humanity, would be lost forever …

And so the folkish philosophy of life corresponds to the innermost will of nature, since it

restores that free play of forces which must lead to a continuous mutual higher breeding, until

at last the best of humanity, having achieved possession of this earth, will have a free path for

activity in domains which will lie partly above it and partly outside it.

We all sense that in the distant future humanity must be faced by problems which only a

highest race, become master people and supported by the means and possibilities of an entire

globe, will be equipped to overcome. 17

“Thus,” Hitler declares a little farther on, “the highest purpose of a folkish

state is concern for the preservation of those original racial elements which

bestow culture and create the beauty and dignity of a higher mankind.” 18 This

again leads him to a matter of eugenics:

The folkish state … must set race in the center of all life. It must take care to keep it pure

… It must see to it that only the healthy beget children; that there is only one disgrace: despite

one’s own sickness and deficiencies, to bring children into the world; and one highest honor:

to renounce doing so. And conversely it must be considered reprehensible to withhold healthy

children from the nation. Here the [folkish] state must act as guardian of a millennial future in

the face of which the wishes and the selfishness of the individual must appear as nothing and

submit … A folkish state must therefore begin by raising marriage from the level of a

continuous defilement of the race and give it the consecration of an institution which is called

upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape.19

Hitler’s fantastic conception of the folkish state leads to a good many other

wordy considerations which, if heeded, he says, will bring the Germans the

mastery of the earth—German domination has become an obsession with him.

At one point he argues that the failure to keep the Germanic race simon-pure

“has robbed us of world domination. If the German people had possessed that

herd unity which other peoples enjoyed, the German Reich today would

doubtless be mistress of the globe. ”20 Since a folkish state must be based on

race, “the German Reich must embrace all Germans”—this is a key point in his

argument, and one he did not forget nor fail to act upon when he came to power.

Since the folkish state is to be based “on the aristocratic idea of nature” it

follows that democracy is out of the question and must be replaced by the

Fuehrerprinzip. The authoritarianism of the Prussian Army is to be adopted by

the Third Reich: “authority of every leader downward and responsibility

upward.”

There must be no majority decisions, but only responsible persons … Surely every man

will have advisers by his side, but the decision will be made by one man* … only he alone

may possess the authority and the right to command … It will not be possible to dispense with

Parliament. But their councilors will then actually give counsel … In no chamber does a vote

ever take place. They are working institutions and not voting machines. This principle—

absolute responsibility unconditionally combined with absolute authority—will gradually

breed an elite of leaders such as today, in this era of irresponsible parliamentarianism, is

utterly inconceivable. 21

Such were the ideas of Adolf Hitler, set down in all their appalling crudeness

as he sat in Landsberg prison gazing out at a flowering orchard above the River

Lech, * or later, in 1925–26, as he reclined on the balcony of a comfortable inn at

Berchtesgaden and looked out across the towering Alps toward his native

Austria, dictating a torrent of words to his faithful Rudolf Hess and dreaming of

the Third Reich which he would build on the shoddy foundations we have seen,

and which he would rule with an iron hand. That one day he would build it and

rule it he had no doubts whatsoever, for he was possessed of that burning sense

of mission peculiar to so many geniuses who have sprouted, seemingly, from

nowhere and from nothing throughout the ages. He would unify a chosen people

who had never before been politically one. He would purify their race. He would

make them strong. He would make them lords of the earth.

A crude Darwinism? A sadistic fancy? An irresponsible egoism? A

megalomania? It was all of these in part. But it was something more. For the

mind and the passion of Hitler—all the aberrations that possessed his feverish

brain—had roots that lay deep in German experience and thought. Nazism and

the Third Reich, in fact, were but a logical continuation of German history.

THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF THE THIRD REICH

In the delirious days of the annual rallies of the Nazi Party at Nuremberg at

the beginning of September, I used to be accosted by a swarm of hawkers selling

a picture postcard on which were shown the portraits of Frederick the Great,

Bismarck, Hindenburg and Hitler. The inscription read: “What the King

conquered, the Prince formed, the Field Marshal defended, the Soldier saved and

unified.” Thus Hitler, the soldier, was portrayed not only as the savior and

unifier of Germany but as the successor of these celebrated figures who had

made the country great. The implication of the continuity of German history,

culminating in Hitler’s rule, was not lost upon the multitude. The very

expression “the Third Reich” also served to strengthen this concept. The First

Reich had been the medieval Holy Roman Empire; the Second Reich had been

that which was formed by Bismarck in 1871 after Prussia’s defeat of France.

Both had added glory to the German name. The Weimar Republic, as Nazi

propaganda had it, had dragged that fair name in the mud. The Third Reich

restored it, just as Hitler had promised. Hitler’s Germany, then, was depicted as

a logical development from all that had gone before—or at least of all that had

been glorious.

But the onetime Vienna vagabond, however littered his mind, knew enough

history to realize that there had been German failures in the past, failures that

must be set against the successes of France and Britain. He never forgot that by

the end of the Middle Ages, which had seen Britain and France emerge as

unified nations, Germany remained a crazy patchwork of some three hundred

individual states. It was this lack of national development which largely

determined the course of German history from the end of the Middle Ages to

midway in the nineteenth century and made it so different from that of the other

great nations of Western Europe.

To the lack of political and dynastic unity was added, in the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries, the disaster of religious differences which followed the

Reformation. There is not space in this book to recount adequately the immense

influence that Martin Luther, the Saxon peasant who became an Augustinian

monk and launched the German Reformation, had on the Germans and their

subsequent history. But it may be said, in passing, that this towering but erratic

genius, this savage anti-Semite and hater of Rome, who combined in his

tempestuous character so many of the best and the worst qualities of the German

—the coarseness, the boisterousness, the fanaticism, the intolerance, the

violence, but also the honesty, the simplicity, the self-scrutiny, the passion for

learning and for music and for poetry and for righteousness in the eyes of God—

left a mark on the life of the Germans, for both good and bad, more indelible,

more fateful, than was wrought by any other single individual before or since.

Through his sermons and his magnificent translation of the Bible, Luther created

the modern German language, aroused in the people not only a new Protestant

vision of Christianity but a fervent German nationalism and taught them, at least

in religion, the supremacy of the individual conscience. But tragically for them,

Luther’s siding with the princes in the peasant risings, which he had largely

inspired, and his passion for political autocracy ensured a mindless and

provincial political absolutism which reduced the vast majority of the German

people to poverty, to a horrible torpor and a demeaning subservience. Even

worse perhaps, it helped to perpetuate and indeed to sharpen the hopeless

divisions not only between classes but also between the various dynastic and

political groupings of the German people. It doomed for centuries the possibility

of the unification of Germany.

The Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which ended it,

brought the final catastrophe to Germany, a blow so devastating that the country

has never fully recovered from it. This was the last of Europe’s great religious

wars, but before it was over it had degenerated from a Protestant–Catholic

conflict into a confused dynastic struggle between the Catholic Austrian

Hapsburgs on the one side and the Catholic French Bourbons and the Swedish

Protestant monarchy on the other. In the savage fighting, Germany itself was laid

waste, the towns and countryside were devastated and ravished, the people

decimated. It has been estimated that one third of the German people perished in

this barbarous war.

The Peace of Westphalia was almost as disastrous to the future of Germany as

the war had been. The German princes, who had sided with France and Sweden,

were confirmed as absolute rulers of their little domains, some 350 of them, the

Emperor remaining merely as a figurehead so far as the German lands were

concerned. The surge of reform and enlightenment which had swept Germany at

the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries was

smothered. In that period the great free cities had enjoyed virtual independence;

feudalism was gone in them, the arts and commerce thrived. Even in the

countryside the German peasant had secured liberties far greater than those

enjoyed in England and France. Indeed, at the beginning of the sixteenth century

Germany could be said to be one of the fountains of European civilization.

Now, after the Peace of Westphalia, it was reduced to the barbarism of

Muscovy. Serfdom was reimposed, even introduced in areas where it had been

unknown. The towns lost their self-government. The peasants, the laborers, even

the middle-class burghers, were exploited to the limit by the princes, who held

them down in a degrading state of servitude. The pursuit of learning and the arts

all but ceased. The greedy rulers had no feeling for German nationalism and

patriotism and stamped out any manifestations of them in their subjects.

Civilization came to a standstill in Germany. The Reich, as one historian has put

it, “was artificially stabilized at a medieval level of confusion and weakness.” 22

Germany never recovered from this setback. Acceptance of autocracy, of

blind obedience to the petty tyrants who ruled as princes, became ingrained in

the German mind. The idea of democracy, of rule by parliament, which made

such rapid headway in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and

which exploded in France in 1789, did not sprout in Germany. This political

backwardness of the Germans, divided as they were into so many petty states

and isolated in them from the surging currents of European thought and

development, set Germany apart from and behind the other countries of the

West. There was no natural growth of a nation. This has to be borne in mind if

one is to comprehend the disastrous road this people subsequently took and the

warped state of mind which settled over it. In the end the German nation was

forged by naked force and held together by naked aggression.

Beyond the Elbe to the east lay Prussia. As the nineteenth century waned, this

century which had seen the sorry failure of the confused and timid liberals at

Frankfurt in 1848–49 to create a somewhat democratic, unified Germany,

Prussia took over the German destiny. For centuries this Germanic state had lain

outside the main stream of German historical development and culture. It

seemed almost as if it were a freak of history. Prussia had begun as the remote

frontier state of Brandenburg on the sandy wastes east of the Elbe which,

beginning with the eleventh century, had been slowly conquered from the Slavs.

Under Brandenburg’s ruling princes, the Hohenzollerns, who were little more

than military adventurers, the Slavs, mostly Poles, were gradually pushed back

along the Baltic. Those who resisted were either exterminated or made landless

serfs. The imperial law of the German Empire forbade the princes from

assuming royal titles, but in 1701 the Emperor acquiesced in the Elector

Frederick Ill’s being crowned King in Prussia at Koenigsberg.

By this time Prussia had pulled itself up by its own bootstraps to be one of the

ranking military powers of Europe. It had none of the resources of the others. Its

land was barren and bereft of minerals. The population was small. There were no

large towns, no industry and little culture. Even the nobility was poor, and the

landless peasants lived like cattle. Yet by a supreme act of will and a genius for

organization the Hohenzollerns managed to create a Spartan military state whose

well-drilled Army won one victory after another and whose Machiavellian

diplomacy of temporary alliances with whatever power seemed the strongest

brought constant additions to its territory.

There thus arose quite artificially a state born of no popular force nor even of

an idea except that of conquest, and held together by the absolute power of the

ruler, by a narrow-minded bureaucracy which did his bidding and by a ruthlessly

disciplined army. Two thirds and sometimes as much as five sixths of the annual

state revenue was expended on the Army, which became, under the King, the

state itself. “Prussia,” remarked Mirabeau, “is not a state with an army, but an

army with a state.” And the state, which was run with the efficiency and

soullessness of a factory, became all; the people were little more than cogs in the

machinery. Individuals were taught not only by the kings and the drill sergeants

but by the philosophers that their role in life was one of obedience, work,

sacrifice and duty. Even Kant preached that duty demands the suppression of

human feeling, and the Prussian poet Willibald Alexis gloried in the enslavement

of the people under the Hohenzollerns. To Lessing, who did not like it, “Prussia

was the most slavish country of Europe.”

The Junkers, who were to play such a vital role in modern Germany, were also

a unique product of Prussia. They were, as they said, a master race. It was they

who occupied the land conquered from the Slavs and who farmed it on large

estates worked by these Slavs, who became landless serfs quite different from

those in the West. There was an essential difference between the agrarian system

in Prussia and that of western Germany and Western Europe. In the latter, the

nobles, who owned most of the land, received rents or feudal dues from the

peasants, who though often kept in a state of serfdom had certain rights and

privileges and could, and did, gradually acquire their own land and civic

freedom. In the West, the peasants formed a solid part of the community; the

landlords, for all their drawbacks, developed in their leisure a cultivation which

led to, among other things, a civilized quality of life that could be seen in the

refinement of manners, of thought and of the arts.

The Prussian Junker was not a man of leisure. He worked hard at managing

his large estate, much as a factory manager does today. His landless laborers

were treated as virtual slaves. On his large properties he was the absolute lord.

There were no large towns nor any substantial middle class, as there were in the

West, whose civilizing influence might rub against him. In contrast to the

cultivated grand seigneur in the West, the Junker developed into a rude,

domineering, arrogant type of man, without cultivation or culture, aggressive,

conceited, ruthless, narrow-minded and given to a petty profit-seeking that some

German historians noted in the private life of Otto von Bismarck, the most

successful of the Junkers.

It was this political genius, this apostle of “blood and iron,” who between

1866 and 1871 brought an end to a divided Germany which had existed for

nearly a thousand years and, by force, replaced it with Greater Prussia, or what

might be called Prussian Germany. Bismarck’s unique creation is the Germany

we have known in our time, a problem child of Europe and the world for nearly

a century, a nation of gifted, vigorous people in which first this remarkable man

and then Kaiser Wilhelm II and finally Hitler, aided by a military caste and by

many a strange intellectual, succeeded in inculcating a lust for power and

domination, a passion for unbridled militarism, a contempt for democracy and

individual freedom and a longing for authority, for authoritarianism. Under such

a spell, this nation rose to great heights, fell and rose again, until it was

seemingly destroyed with the end of Hitler in the spring of 1945—it is perhaps

too early to speak of that with any certainty.

“The great questions of the day,” Bismarck declared on becoming Prime

Minister of Prussia in 1862, “will not be settled by resolutions and majority

votes—that was the mistake of the men of 1848 and 1849—but by blood and

iron.” That was exactly the way he proceeded to settle them, though it must be

said that he added a touch of diplomatic finesse, often of the most deceitful kind.

Bismarck’s aim was to destroy liberalism, bolster the power of conservatism—

that is, of the Junkers, the Army and the crown—and make Prussia, as against

Austria, the dominant power not only among the Germans but, if possible, in

Europe as well. “Germany looks not to Prussia’s liberalism,” he told the deputies

in the Prussian parliament, “but to her force.”

Bismarck first built up the Prussian Army and when the parliament refused to

vote the additional credits he merely raised them on his own and finally

dissolved the chamber. With a strengthened Army he then struck in three

successive wars. The first, against Denmark in 1864, brought the duchies of

Schleswig and Holstein under German rule. The second, against Austria in 1866,

had far-reaching consequences. Austria, which for centuries had been first

among the German states, was finally excluded from German affairs. It was not

allowed to join the North German Confederation which Bismarck now

proceeded to establish.

“In 1866,” the eminent German political scientist Wilhelm Roepke once

wrote, “Germany ceased to exist.” Prussia annexed outright all the German

states north of the Main which had fought against her, except Saxony; these

included Hanover, Hesse, Nassau, Frankfurt and the Elbe duchies. All the other

states north of the Main were forced into the North German Confederation.

Prussia, which now stretched from the Rhine to Koenigsberg, completely

dominated it, and within five years, with the defeat of Napoleon III’s France, the

southern German states, with the considerable kingdom of Bavaria in the lead,

would be drawn into Prussian Germany. 23

Bismarck’s crowning achievement, the creation of the Second Reich, came on

January 18, 1871, when King Wilhelm I of Prussia was proclaimed Emperor of

Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Germany had been unified by

Prussian armed force. It was now the greatest power on the Continent; its only

rival in Europe was England.

Yet there was a fatal flaw. The German Empire, as Treitschke said, was in

reality but an extension of Prussia. “Prussia,” he emphasized, “is the dominant

factor … The will of the Empire can be nothing but the will of the Prussian

state.” This was true, and it was to have disastrous consequences for the

Germans themselves. From 1871 to 1933 and indeed to Hitler’s end in 1945, the

course of German history as a consequence was to run, with the exception of the

interim of the Weimar Republic, in a straight line and with utter logic.

Despite the democratic façade put up by the establishment of the Reichstag,

whose members were elected by universal manhood suffrage, the German

Empire was in reality a militarist autocracy ruled by the King of Prussia, who

was also Emperor. The Reichstag possessed few powers; it was little more than a

debating society where the representatives of the people let off steam or

bargained for shoddy benefits for the classes they represented. The throne had

the power—by divine right. As late as 1910 Wilhelm II could proclaim that the

royal crown had been “granted by God’s Grace alone and not by parliaments,

popular assemblies and popular decision … Considering myself an instrument of

the Lord,” he added, “I go my way.”

He was not impeded by Parliament. The Chancellor he appointed was

responsible to him, not to the Reichstag. The assembly could not overthrow a

Chancellor nor keep him in office. That was the prerogative of the monarch.

Thus, in contrast to the development in other countries in the West, the idea of

democracy, of the people sovereign, of the supremacy of parliament, never got a

foothold in Germany, even after the twentieth century began. To be sure, the

Social Democrats, after years of persecution by Bismarck and the Emperor, had

become the largest single political party in the Reichstag by 1912. They loudly

demanded the establishment of a parliamentary democracy. But they were

ineffective. And, though the largest party, they were still a minority. The middle

classes, grown prosperous by the belated but staggering development of the

industrial revolution and dazzled by the success of Bismarck’s policy of force

and war, had traded for material gain any aspirations for political freedom they

may have had. * They accepted the Hohenzollern autocracy. They gladly

knuckled under to the Junker bureaucracy and they fervently embraced Prussian

militarism. Germany’s star had risen and they—almost all the people—were

eager to do what their masters asked to keep it high.

At the very end, Hitler, the Austrian, was one of them. To him Bismarck’s

Second Reich, despite its mistakes and its “terrifying forces of decay” was a

work of splendor in which the Germans at last had come into their own.

Was not Germany above all other countries a marvelous example of an empire which had

risen from foundations of a policy purely of power? Prussia, the germ cell of the Empire, came

into being through resplendent heroism and not through financial operations or commercial

deals, and the Reich itself in turn was only the glorious reward of aggressive political

leadership and the death-defying courage of its soldiers …

The very founding of the [Second] Reich seemed gilded by the magic of an event which

uplifted the entire nation. After a series of incomparable victories, a Reich was born for the

sons and grandsons—a reward for immortal heroism … This Reich, which did not owe its

existence to the trickery of parliamentary fractions, towered above the measure of other states

by the very exalted manner of its founding; for not in the cackling of a parliamentary battle of

words but in the thunder and rumbling of the front surrounding Paris was the solemn act

performed: a proclamation of our will, declaring that the Germans, princes and people, were

resolved in the future to constitute a Reich and once again to raise the imperial crown to

symbolic heights … No deserters and slackers were the founders of the Bismarckian state, but

the regiments at the front.

This unique birth and baptism of fire in themselves surrounded the Reich with a halo of

historic glory such as only the oldest states—and they but seldom—could boast.

And what an ascent now began!

Freedom on the outside provided daily bread within. The nation became rich in numbers

and earthly goods. The honor of the state, and with it that of the whole people, was protected

and shielded by an army which could point most visibly to the difference from the former

German Union.24

That was the Germany which Hitler resolved to restore. In Mein Kampf he

discourses at great length on what he believes are the reasons for its fall: its

tolerance of Jews and Marxists, the crass materialism and selfishness of the

middle class, the nefarious influence of the “cringers and lickspittles” around the

Hohenzollern throne, the “catastrophic German alliance policy” which linked

Germany to the degenerate Hapsburgs and the untrustworthy Italians instead of

with England, and the lack of a fundamental “social” and racial policy. These

were failures which, he promised, National Socialism would correct.

THE INTELLECTUAL ROOTS OF THE THIRD REICH

But aside from history, where did Hitler get his ideas? Though his opponents

inside and outside Germany were too busy, or too stupid, to take much notice of

it until it was too late, he had somehow absorbed, as had so many Germans, a

weird mixture of the irresponsible, megalomaniacal ideas which erupted from

German thinkers during the nineteenth century. Hitler, who often got them at

second hand through such a muddled pseudo philosopher as Alfred Rosenberg or

through his drunken poet friend Dietrich Eckart, embraced them with all the

feverish enthusiasm of a neophyte. What was worse, he resolved to put them into

practice if the opportunity should ever arise.

We have seen what they were as they thrashed about in Hitler’s mind: the

glorification of war and conquest and the absolute power of the authoritarian

state; the belief in the Aryans, or Germans, as the master race, and the hatred of

Jews and Slavs; the contempt for democracy and humanism. They are not

original with Hitler—though the means of applying them later proved to be.

They emanate from that odd assortment of erudite but unbalanced philosophers,

historians and teachers who captured the German mind during the century before

Hitler with consequences so disastrous, as it turned out, not only for the

Germans but for a large portion of mankind.

There had been among the Germans, to be sure, some of the most elevated

minds and spirits of the Western world—Leibnitz, Kant, Herder, Humboldt,

Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Bach and Beethoven—and they had made unique

contributions to the civilization of the West. But the German culture which

became dominant in the nineteenth century and which coincided with the rise of

Prussian Germany, continuing from Bismarck through Hitler, rests primarily on

Fichte and Hegel, to begin with, and then on Treitschke, Nietzsche, Richard

Wagner, and a host of lesser lights not the least of whom, strangely enough,

were a bizarre Frenchman and an eccentric Englishman. They succeeded in

establishing a spiritual break with the West; the breach has not been healed to

this day.

In 1807, following Prussia’s humiliating defeat by Napoleon at Jena, Johann

Gottlieb Fichte began his famous “Addresses to the German Nation” from the

podium of the University of Berlin, where he held the chair of philosophy. They

stirred and rallied a divided, defeated people and their resounding echoes could

still be heard in the Third Reich. Fichte’s teaching was heady wine for a

frustrated folk. To him the Latins, especially the French, and the Jews are the

decadent races. Only the Germans possess the possibility of regeneration. Their

language is the purest, the most original. Under them a new era in history would

blossom. It would reflect the order of the cosmos. It would be led by a small elite

which would be free of any moral restraints of a “private” nature. These are

some of the ideas we have seen Hitler putting down in Mein Kampf.

On Fichte’s death in 1814, he was succeeded by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

Hegel at the University of Berlin. This is the subtle and penetrating mind whose

dialectics inspired Marx and Lenin and thus contributed to the founding of

Communism and whose ringing glorification of the State as supreme in human

life paved the way for the Second and Third Reichs of Bismarck and Hitler. To

Hegel the State is all, or almost all. Among other things, he says, it is the highest

revelation of the “world spirit”; it is the “moral universe”; it is “the actuality of

the ethical idea … ethical mind … knowing and thinking itself”; the State “has

the supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member

of the State … for the right of the world spirit is above all special privileges …”

And the happiness of the individual on earth? Hegel replies that “world

history is no empire of happiness. The periods of happiness,” he declares, “are

the empty pages of history because they are the periods of agreement, without

conflict.” War is the great purifier. In Hegel’s view, it makes for “the ethical

health of peoples corrupted by a long peace, as the blowing of the winds

preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged

calm.”

No traditional conception of morals and ethics must disturb either the supreme

State or the “heroes” who lead it. “World history occupies a higher ground …

Moral claims which are irrelevant must not be brought into collision with world-

historical deeds and their accomplishments. The litany of private virtues—

modesty, humility, philanthropy and forbearance—must not be raised against

them … So mighty a form [the State] must trample down many an innocent

flower—crush to pieces many an object in its path.”

Hegel foresees such a State for Germany when she has recovered her God-

given genius. He predicts that “Germany’s hour” will come and that its mission

will be to regenerate the world. As one reads Hegel one realizes how much

inspiration Hitler, like Marx, drew from him, even if it was at second hand.

Above all else, Hegel in his theory of “heroes,” those great agents who are fated

by a mysterious Providence to carry out “the will of the world spirit,” seems to

have inspired Hitler, as we shall see at the end of this chapter, with his own

overpowering sense of mission.

Heinrich von Treitschke came later to the University of Berlin. From 1874

until his death in 1896 he was a professor of history there and a popular one, his

lectures being attended by large and enthusiastic gatherings which included not

only students but General Staff officers and officials of the Junker bureaucracy.

His influence on German thought in the last quarter of the century was enormous

and it continued through Wilhelm II’s day and indeed Hitler’s. Though he was a

Saxon, he became the great Prussianizer; he was more Prussian than the

Prussians. Like Hegel he glorifies the State and conceives of it as supreme, but

his attitude is more brutish: the people, the subjects, are to be little more than

slaves in the nation. “It does not matter what you think,” he exclaims, “so long

as you obey.”

And Treitschke outdoes Hegel in proclaiming war as the highest expression of

man. To him “martial glory is the basis of all the political virtues; in the rich

treasure of Germany’s glories the Prussian military glory is a jewel as precious

as the masterpieces of our poets and thinkers.” He holds that “to play blindly

with peace … has become the shame of the thought and morality of our age.”

War is not only a practical necessity, it is also a theoretical necessity, an exigency of logic.

The concept of the State implies the concept of war, for the essence of the State is power …

That war should ever be banished from the world is a hope not only absurd, but profoundly

immoral. It would involve the atrophy of many of the essential and sublime forces of the

human soul … A people which become attached to the chimerical hope of perpetual peace

finishes irremediably by decaying in its proud isolation …”

Nietzsche, like Goethe, held no high opinion of the German people,* and in

other ways, too, the outpourings of this megalomaniacal genius differ from those

of the chauvinistic German thinkers of the nineteenth century. Indeed, he

regarded most German philosophers, including Fichte and Hegel, as

“unconscious swindlers.” He poked fun at the “Tartuffery of old Kant. ” The

Germans, he wrote in Ecce Homo, “have no conception how vile they are,” and

he came to the conclusion that “wheresoever Germany penetrated, she ruins

culture.” He thought that Christians, as much as Jews, were responsible for the

“slave morality” prevalent in the world; he was never an anti-Semite. He was

sometimes fearful of Prussia’s future, and in his last years, before insanity closed

down his mind, he even toyed with the idea of European union and world

government.

Yet I think no one who lived in the Third Reich could have failed to be

impressed by Nietzsche’s influence on it. His books might be full, as Santayana

said, of “genial imbecility” and “boyish blasphemies.” Yet Nazi scribblers never

tired of extolling him. Hitler often visited the Nietzsche museum in Weimar and

publicized his veneration for the philosopher by posing for photographs of

himself staring in rapture at the bust of the great man.

There was some ground for this appropriation of Nietzsche as one of the

originators of the Nazi Weltanschauung. Had not the philosopher thundered

against democracy and parliaments, preached the will to power, praised war and

proclaimed the coming of the master race and the superman—and in the most

telling aphorisms? A Nazi could proudly quote him on almost every conceivable

subject, and did. On Christianity: “the one great curse, the one enormous and

innermost perversion … I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind … This

Christianity is no more than the typical teaching of the Socialists.” On the State,

power and the jungle world of man: “Society has never regarded virtue as

anything else than as a means to strength, power and order. The State [is]

unmorality organized … the will to war, to conquest and revenge … Society is

not entitled to exist for its own sake but only as a substructure and scaffolding,

by means of which a select race of beings may elevate themselves to their higher

duties … There is no such thing as the right to live, the right to work, or the right

to be happy: in this respect man is no different from the meanest worm.” * And

he exalted the superman as the beast of prey, “the magnificent blond brute,

avidly rampant for spoil and victory.”

And war? Here Nietzsche took the view of most of the other nineteenth-

century German thinkers. In the thundering Old Testament language in which

Thus Spake Zarathustra is written, the philosopher cries out: “Ye shall love

peace as a means to new war, and the short peace more than the long. You I

advise not to work, but to fight. You I advise not to peace but to victory … Ye

say it is the good cause which halloweth even war? I say unto you: it is the good

war which halloweth every cause. War and courage have done more great things

than charity.”

Finally there was Nietzsche’s prophecy of the coming elite who would rule

the world and from whom the superman would spring. In The Will to Power he

exclaims: “A daring and ruler race is building itself up … The aim should be to

prepare a transvaluation of values for a particularly strong kind of man, most

highly gifted in intellect and will. This man and the elite around him will

become the “lords of the earth.”

Such rantings from one of Germany’s most original minds must have struck a

responsive chord in Hitler’s littered mind. At any rate he appropriated them for

his own—not only the thoughts but the philosopher’s penchant for grotesque

exaggeration, and often his very words. “Lords of the Earth” is a familiar

expression in Mein Kampf. That in the end Hitler considered himself the

superman of Nietzsche’s prophecy cannot be doubted.

“Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know

Wagner,” Hitler used to say.* This may have been based on a partial

misconception of the great composer, for though Richard Wagner harbored a

fanatical hatred, as Hitler did, for the Jews, who he was convinced were out to

dominate the world with their money, and though he scorned parliaments and

democracy and the materialism and mediocrity of the bourgeoisie, he also

fervently hoped that the Germans, “with their special gifts,” would “become not

rulers, but ennoblers of the world.”

It was not his political writings, however, but his towering operas, recalling so

vividly the world of German antiquity with its heroic myths, its fighting pagan

gods and heroes, its demons and dragons, its blood feuds and primitive tribal

codes, its sense of destiny, of the splendor of love and life and the nobility of

death, which inspired the myths of modern Germany and gave it a Germanic

Weltanschauung which Hitler and the Nazis, with some justification, took over

as their own.

From his earliest days Hitler worshiped Wagner, and even as his life neared a

close, in the damp and dreary bunker at Army headquarters on the Russian front,

with his world and his dreams beginning to crack and crumble, he loved to

reminisce about all the times he had heard the great Wagnerian works, of what

they had meant to him and of the inspiration he had derived from the Bayreuth

Festival and from his countless visits to Haus Wahnfried, the composer’s home,

where Siegfried Wagner, the composer’s son, still lived with his English-born

wife, Winifred, who for a while was one of his revered friends.

“What joy each of Wagner’s works has given me!” Hitler exclaims on the

evening of January 24–25, 1942, soon after the first disastrous German defeats in

Russia, as he discourses to his generals and party cronies, Himmler among them,

in the depths of the underground shelter of Wolfsschanze at Rastenburg in East

Prussia. Outside there is snow and an arctic cold, the elements which he so hated

and feared and which had contributed to the first German military setback of the

war. But in the warmth of the bunker his thoughts on this night, at least, are on

one of the great inspirations of his life. “I remember,” he says, “my emotion the

first time I entered Wahnfried. To say I was moved is an understatement! At my

worst moments, they never ceased to sustain me, even Siegfried Wagner. I was

on Christian-name terms with them. I loved them all, and I also love Wahnfried

… The ten days of the Bayreuth season were always one of the blessed seasons

of my existence. And I rejoice at the idea that one day I shall be able to resume

the pilgrimage! … On the day following the end of the Bayreuth Festival … I’m

gripped by a great sadness—as when one strips the Christmas tree of its

ornaments.” 25

Though Hitler reiterated in his monologue that winter evening that to him

Tristan und Isolde was “Wagner’s masterpiece,” it is the stupendous Nibelungen

Ring, a series of four operas which was inspired by the great German epic myth,

Nibelungenlied, and on which the composer worked for the better part of twenty-

five years, that gave Germany and especially the Third Reich so much of its

primitive Germanic mythos. Often a people’s myths are the highest and truest

expression of its spirit and culture, and nowhere is this more true than in

Germany. Schelling even argued that “a nation comes into existence with its

mythology … The unity of its thinking, which means a collective philosophy,

[is] presented in its mythology; therefore its mythology contains the fate of the

nation.” And Max Mell, a contemporary poet, who wrote a modern version of

the Song of the Nibelungs, declared, “Today only little has remained of the

Greek gods that humanism wanted to implant so deeply into our culture … But

Siegfried and Kriemhild were always in the people’s soul!”

Siegfried and Kriemhild, Brunhild and Hagen—these are the ancient heroes

and heroines with whom so many modern Germans liked to identify themselves.

With them, and with the world of the barbaric, pagan Nibelungs—an irrational,

heroic, mystic world, beset by treachery, overwhelmed by violence, drowned in

blood, and culminating in the Goetterdaemmerung, the twilight of the gods, as

Valhalla, set on fire by Wotan after all his vicissitudes, goes up in flames in an

orgy of self-willed annihilation which has always fascinated the German mind

and answered some terrible longing in the German soul. These heroes, this

primitive, demonic world, were always, in Mell’s words, “in the people’s soul.”

In that German soul could be felt the struggle between the spirit of civilization

and the spirit of the Nibelungs, and in the time with which this history is

concerned the latter seemed to gain the upper hand. It is not at all surprising that

Hitler tried to emulate Wotan when in 1945 he willed the destruction of

Germany so that it might go down in flames with him.

Wagner, a man of staggering genius, an artist of incredible magnitude, stood

for much more than has been set down here. The conflict in the Ring operas

often revolves around the theme of greed for gold, which the composer equated

with the “tragedy of modern capitalism,” and which he saw, with horror, wiping

out the old virtues which had come down from an earlier day. Despite all his

pagan heroes he did not entirely despair of Christianity, as Nietzsche did. And he

had great compassion for the erring, warring human race. But Hitler was not

entirely wrong in saying that to understand Nazism one must first know Wagner.

Wagner had known, and been influenced by, first Schopenhauer and then

Nietzsche, though the latter quarreled with him because he thought his operas,

especially Parsifal, showed too much Christian renunciation. In the course of his

long and stormy life, Wagner came into contact with two other men, one a

Frenchman, the other an Englishman, who are important to this history not so

much for the impression they made on him, though in one case it was

considerable, as for their effect on the German mind, which they helped to direct

toward the coming of the Third Reich.

These individuals were Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French diplomat

and man of letters, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, one of the strangest

Englishmen who ever lived.

Neither man, be it said at once, was a mountebank. Both were men of

immense erudition, deep culture and wide experience of travel. Yet both

concocted racial doctrines so spurious that no people, not even their own, took

them seriously with the single exception of the Germans. To the Nazis their

questionable theories became gospel. It is probably no exaggeration to say, as I

have heard more than one follower of Hitler say, that Chamberlain was the

spiritual founder of the Third Reich. This singular Englishman, who came to see

in the Germans the master race, the hope of the future, worshiped Richard

Wagner, one of whose daughters he eventually married; he venerated first

Wilhelm II and finally Hitler and was the mentor of both. At the end of a

fantastic life he could hail the Austrian corporal—and this long before Hitler

came to power or had any prospect of it—as a being sent by God to lead the

German people out of the wilderness. Hitler, not unnaturally, regarded

Chamberlain as a prophet, as indeed he turned out to be.

What was it in the teaching of these two men that inoculated the Germans

with a madness on the question of race and German destiny?

Gobineau’s chief contribution was a four-volume work which was published

in Paris between 1853 and 1855, entitled Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races

Humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races). Ironically enough, this

French aristocrat, after serving as an officer in the Royal Guard, had started his

public career as chef de cabinet to Alexis de Tocqueville when the distinguished

author of Democracy in America served a brief term of office in 1848. He had

then gone to Hanover and Frankfurt as a diplomat and it was from his contact

with the Germans, rather than with De Tocqueville, that he derived his theories

on racial inequalities, though he once confessed that he wrote the volumes partly

to prove the superiority of his own aristocratic ancestry.

To Gobineau, as he stated in his dedication of the work to the King of

Hanover, the key to history and civilization was race. “The racial question

dominates all the other problems of history … the inequality of races suffices to

explain the whole unfolding of the destiny of peoples.” There were three

principal races, white, yellow and black, and the white was the superior.

“History,” he contended, “shows that all civilization flows from the white race,

that no civilization can exist without the co-operation of this race.” The jewel of

the white race was the Aryan, “this illustrious human family, the noblest among

the white race,” whose origins he traced back to Central Asia. Unfortunately,

Gobineau says, the contemporary Aryan suffered from intermixture with inferior

races, as one could see in the southern Europe of his time. However, in the

northwest, above a line running roughly along the Seine and east to Switzerland,

the Aryans, though far from simon-pure, still survived as a superior race. This

took in some of the French, all of the English and the Irish, the people of the

Low Countries and the Rhine and Hanover, and the Scandinavians. Gobineau

seemingly excluded the bulk of the Germans, who lived to the east and southeast

of his line—a fact which the Nazis glossed over when they embraced his

teachings.

Still, to Gobineau’s mind the Germans, or at least the West Germans, were

probably the best of all the Aryans, and this discovery the Nazis did not gloss

over. Wherever they went, the Germans, he found, brought improvement. This

was true even in the Roman Empire. The so-called barbaric German tribes who

conquered the Romans and broke up their empire did a distinct service to

civilization, for the Romans, by the time of the fourth century, were little better

than degenerate mongrels, while the Germans were relatively pure Aryans. “The

Aryan German,” he declared, “is a powerful creature … Everything he thinks,

says and does is thus of major importance.”

Gobineau’s ideas were quickly taken up in Germany. Wagner, whom the

Frenchman met in 1876 toward the close of his life (he died in 1882) espoused

them with enthusiasm, and soon Gobineau societies sprang up all over

Germany. *

THE STRANGE LIFE AND WORKS OF H. S. CHAMBERLAIN

Among the zealous members of the Gobineau Society in Germany was

Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose life and works constitute one of the most

fascinating ironies in the inexorable course of history which led to the rise and

fall of the Third Reich.

This son of an English admiral, nephew of a British field marshal, Sir Neville

Chamberlain, and of two British generals, and eventually son-in-law of Richard

Wagner, was born at Portsmouth in 1855. He was destined for the British Army

or Navy, but his delicate health made such a calling out of the question and he

was educated in France and Geneva, where French became his first language.

Between the ages of fifteen and nineteen fate brought him into touch with two

Germans and thereafter he was drawn irresistibly toward Germany, of which he

ultimately became a citizen and one of the foremost thinkers and in whose

language he wrote all of his many books, several of which had an almost

blinding influence on Wilhelm II, Adolf Hitler and countless lesser Germans.

In 1870, when he was fifteen, Chamberlain landed in the hands of a

remarkable tutor, Otto Kuntze, a Prussian of the Prussians, who for four years

imprinted on his receptive mind and sensitive soul the glories of militant,

conquering Prussia and also—apparently unmindful of the contrasts—of such

artists and poets as Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller and Wagner. At nineteen

Chamberlain fell madly in love with Anna Horst, also a Prussian, ten years his

senior and, like him, highly neurotic. In 1882, at the age of twenty-seven, he

journeyed from Geneva, where he had been immersed for three years in studies

of philosophy, natural history, physics, chemistry and medicine, to Bayreuth.

There he met Wagner who, as he says, became the sun of his life, and Cosima,

the composer’s wife, to whom he would remain passionately and slavishly

devoted all the rest of his days. From 1885, when he went with Anna Horst, who

had become his wife, to live for four years in Dresden, he became a German in

thought and in language, moving on to Vienna in 1889 for a decade and finally

in 1909 to Bayreuth, where he dwelt until his death in 1927. He divorced his

idolized Prussian wife in 1905, when she was sixty and even more mentally and

physically ill than he (the separation was so painful that he said it almost drove

him mad) and three years later he married Eva Wagner and settled down near

Wahnfried, where he could be near his wife’s mother, the revered, strong-willed

Cosima.

Hypersensitive and neurotic and subject to frequent nervous breakdowns,

Chamberlain was given to seeing demons who, by his own account, drove him

on relentlessly to seek new fields of study and get on with his prodigious

writings. One vision after another forced him to change from biology to botany

to the fine arts, to music, to philosophy, to biography to history. Once, in 1896,

when he was returning from Italy, the presence of a demon became so forceful

that he got off the train at Gardone, shut himself up in a hotel room for eight

days and, abandoning some work on music that he had contemplated, wrote

feverishly on a biological thesis until he had the germ of the theme that would

dominate all of his later works: race and history.

Whatever its blemishes, his mind had a vast sweep ranging over the fields of

literature, music, biology, botany, religion, history and politics. There was, as

Jean Réal26 has pointed out, a profound unity of inspiration in all his published

works and they had a remarkable coherence. Since he felt himself goaded on by

demons, his books (on Wagner, Goethe, Kant, Christianity and race) were

written in the grip of a terrible fever, a veritable trance, a state of self-induced

intoxication, so that, as he says in his autobiography, Lebenswege, he was often

unable to recognize them as his own work, because they surpassed his

expectations. Minds more balanced than his have subsequently demolished his

theories of race and much of his history, and to such a French scholar of

Germanism as Edmond Vermeil Chamberlain’s ideas were essentially “shoddy.”

Yet to the anti-Nazi German biographer of Hitler, Konrad Heiden, who deplored

the influence of his racial teachings, Chamberlain “was one of the most

astonishing talents in the history of the German mind, a mine of knowledge and

profound ideas.”

The book which most profoundly influenced that mind, which sent Wilhelm II

into ecstasies and provided the Nazis with their racial aberrations, was

Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (Grundlagen des Neunzehnten

Jahrhunderts) a work of some twelve hundred pages which Chamberlain, again

possessed of one of his “demons,” wrote in nineteen months between April 1,

1897, and October 31, 1898, in Vienna, and which was published in 1899.

As with Gobineau, whom he admired, Chamberlain found the key to history,

indeed the basis of civilization, to be race. To explain the nineteenth century,

that is, the contemporary world, one had to consider first what it had been

bequeathed from ancient times. Three things, said Chamberlain: Greek

philosophy and art, Roman law and the personality of Christ. There were also

three legatees: the Jews and the Germans, the “two pure races,” and the half-

breed Latins of the Mediterranean—“a chaos of peoples,” he called them. The

Germans alone deserved such a splendid heritage. They had, it is true, come into

history late, not until the thirteenth century. But even before that, in destroying

the Roman Empire, they had proved their worth. “It is not true,” he says, “that

the Teutonic barbarian conjured up the so-called ‘Night of the Middle Ages’;

this night followed rather upon the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the

raceless chaos of humanity which the dying Roman Empire had nurtured; but for

the Teuton, everlasting night would have settled upon the world.” At the time he

was writing he saw in the Teuton the only hope of the world.

Chamberlain included among the “Teutons” the Celts and the Slavs, though

the Teutons were the most important element. However, he is quite woolly in his

definitions and at one point declares that “whoever behaves as a Teuton is a

Teuton whatever his racial origin.” Perhaps here he was thinking of his own non-

German origin. Whatever he was, the Teuton, according to Chamberlain, was

“the soul of our culture. The importance of each nation as a living power today is

dependent upon the proportion of genuinely Teutonic blood in its population …

True history begins at the moment when the Teuton, with his masterful hand,

lays his grip upon the legacy of antiquity.”

And the Jews? The longest chapter in Foundations is devoted to them. As we

have seen, Chamberlain claimed that the Jews and the Teutons were the only

pure races left in the West. And in this chapter he condemns “stupid and

revolting anti-Semitism. ” The Jews, he says, are not “inferior” to the Teuton,

merely “different.” They have their own grandeur; they realize the “sacred duty”

of man to guard the purity of race. And yet as he proceeds to analyze the Jews,

Chamberlain slips into the very vulgar anti-Semitism which he condemns in

others and which leads, in the end, to the obscenities of Julius Streicher’s

caricatures of the Jews in Der Stuermer in Hitler’s time. Indeed a good deal of

the “philosophical” basis of Nazi anti-Semitism stems from this chapter.

The preposterousness of Chamberlain’s views is quickly evident. He has

declared that the personality of Christ is one of the three great bequests of

antiquity to modern civilization. He then sets out to “prove” that Jesus was not a

Jew. His Galilean origins, his inability to utter correctly the Aramaic gutturals,

are to Chamberlain “clear signs” that Jesus had “a large proportion of non-

Semitic blood.” He then makes a typically flat statement: “Whoever claimed that

Jesus was a Jew was either being stupid or telling a lie…. Jesus was not a Jew.”

What was he then? Chamberlain answers: Probably an Aryan! If not entirely

by blood, then unmistakably by reason of his moral and religious teaching, so

opposed to the “materialism and abstract formalism” of the Jewish religion. It

was natural then—or at least it was to Chamberlain—that Christ should become

“the God of the young Indo-European peoples overflowing with life,” and above

all the God of the Teuton, because “no other people was so well equipped as the

Teutonic to hear this divine voice.”

There follows what purports to be a detailed history of the Jewish race from

the time of the mixture of the Semite or Bedouin of the desert with the

roundheaded Hittite, who had a “Jewish nose,” and finally with the Amontes,

who were Aryans. Unfortunately the Aryan mixture—the Amorites, he says,

were tall, blond, magnificent—came too late to really improve the “corrupt”

Hebrew strain. From then on the Englishman, contradicting his whole theory of

the purity of the Jewish race, finds the Jews becoming a “negative” race, “a

bastardy,” so that the Aryans were justified in “denying” Israel. In fact, he

condemns the Aryans for giving the Jews “a halo of false glory.” He then finds

the Jews “lamentably lacking in true religion.”

Finally, for Chamberlain the way of salvation lies in the Teutons and their

culture, and of the Teutons the Germans are the highest-endowed, for they have

inherited the best qualities of the Greeks and the Indo-Aryans. This gives them

the right to be masters of the world. “God builds today upon the Germans

alone,” he wrote in another place. “This is the knowledge, the certain truth, that

has filled my soul for years.”

Publication of Foundations of the Nineteenth Century created something of a

sensation and brought this strange Englishman sudden fame in Germany.

Despite its frequent eloquence and its distinguished style—for Chamberlain was

a dedicated artist—the book was not easy reading. But it was soon taken up by

the upper classes, who seem to have found in it just what they wanted to believe.

Within ten years it had gone through eight editions and sold 60,000 copies and

by the time of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 it had reached a sale

of 100,000. It flourished again in the Nazi time and I remember an

announcement of its twenty-fourth edition in 1938, by which time it had sold

more than a quarter of a million copies.

Among its first and most enthusiastic readers was Kaiser Wilhelm II. He

invited Chamberlain to his palace at Potsdam and on their very first meeting a

friendship was formed that lasted to the end of the author’s life in 1927. An

extensive correspondence between the two followed. Some of the forty-three

letters which Chamberlain addressed to the Emperor (Wilhelm answered twenty-

three of them) were lengthy essays which the ruler used in several of his

bombastic speeches and statements. “It was God who sent your book to the

German people, and you personally to me,” the Kaiser wrote in one of his first

letters. Chamberlain’s obsequiousness, his exaggerated flattery, in these letters

can be nauseating. “Your Majesty and your subjects,” he wrote, “have been born

in a holy shrine,” and he informed Wilhelm that he had placed his portrait in his

study opposite one of Christ by Leonardo so that while he worked he often paced

up and down between the countenance of his Savior and his sovereign.

His servility did not prevent Chamberlain from continually proffering advice

to the headstrong, flamboyant monarch. In 1908 the popular opposition to

Wilhelm had reached such a climax that the Reichstag censored him for his

disastrous intervention in foreign affairs. But Chamberlain advised the Emperor

that public opinion was made by idiots and traitors and not to mind it,

whereupon Wilhelm replied that the two of them would stand together—“You

wield your pen; I my tongue (and) my broad sword.”

And always the Englishman reminded the Emperor of Germany’s mission and

its destiny. “Once Germany has achieved the power,” he wrote after the outbreak

of the First World War, “—and we may confidently expect her to achieve it—

she must immediately begin to carry out a scientific policy of genius. Augustus

undertook a systematic transformation of the world, and Germany must do the

same … Equipped with offensive and defensive weapons, organized as firmly

and flawlessly as the Army, superior to all in art, science, technology, industry,

commerce, finance, in every field, in short; teacher, helmsman, and pioneer of

the world, every man at his post, every man giving his utmost for the holy cause

—thus Germany … will conquer the world by inner superiority.”

For preaching such a glorious mission for his adopted country (he became a

naturalized German citizen in 1916, halfway through the war) Chamberlain

received from the Kaiser the Iron Cross.

But it was on the Third Reich, which did not arrive until six years after his

death but whose coming he foresaw, that this Englishman’s influence was the

greatest. His racial theories and his burning sense of the destiny of the Germans

and Germany were taken over by the Nazis, who acclaimed him as one of their

prophets. During the Hitler regime books, pamphlets and articles poured from

the presses extolling the “spiritual founder” of National Socialist Germany.

Rosenberg, as one of Hitler’s mentors, often tried to impart his enthusiasm for

the English philosopher to the Fuehrer. It is likely that Hitler first learned of

Chamberlain’s writings before he left Vienna, for they were popular among the

Pan-German and anti-Semitic groups whose literature he devoured so avidly in

those early days. Probably too he read some of Chamberlain’s chauvinistic

articles during the war. In Mein Kampf he expresses the regret that

Chamberlain’s observations were not more heeded during the Second Reich.

Chamberlain was one of the first intellectuals in Germany to see a great future

for Hitler—and new opportunities for the Germans if they followed him. Hitler

had met him in Bayreuth in 1923, and though ill, half paralyzed, and

disillusioned by Germany’s defeat and the fall of the Hohenzollern Empire—the

collapse of all his hopes and prophecies!—Chamberlain was swept off his feet

by the eloquent young Austrian. “You have mighty things to do,” he wrote Hitler

on the following day, “… My faith in Germanism had not wavered an instant,

though my hope—I confess—was at a low ebb. With one stroke you have

transformed the state of my soul. That in the hour of her deepest need Germany

gives birth to a Hitler proves her vitality; as do the influences that emanate from

him; for these two things—personality and influence—belong together … May

God protect you!”

This was at a time when Adolf Hitler, with his Charlie Chaplin mustache, his

rowdy manners and his violent, outlandish extremism, was still considered a

joke by most Germans. He had few followers then. But the hypnotic magnetism

of his personality worked like a charm on the aging, ill philosopher and renewed

his faith in the people he had chosen to join and exalt. Chamberlain became a

member of the budding Nazi Party and so far as his health would permit began

to write for its obscure publications. One of his articles, published in 1924,

hailed Hitler, who was then in jail, as destined by God to lead the German

people. Destiny had beckoned Wilhelm II, but he had failed; now there was

Adolf Hitler. This remarkable Englishman’s seventieth birthday, on September

5, 1925, was celebrated with five columns of encomiums in the Nazi Voelkischer

Beobachter, which hailed his Foundations as the “gospel of the Nazi

movement,” and he went to his grave sixteen months later—on January 11, 1927

—with high hope that all he had preached and prophesied would yet come true

under the divine guidance of this new German Messiah.

Aside from a prince representing Wilhelm II, who could not return to German

soil, Hitler was the only public figure at Chamberlain’s funeral. In reporting the

death of the Englishman the Voelkischer Beobachter said that the German

people had lost “one of the great armorers whose weapons have not yet found in

our day their fullest use.” Not the half-paralyzed old man, dying, not even Hitler,

nor anyone else in Germany, could have foreseen in that bleak January month of

1927, when the fortunes of the Nazi Party were at their lowest ebb, how soon,

how very soon, those weapons which the transplanted Englishman had forged

would be put to their fullest use, and with what fearful consequences.27

Yet Adolf Hitler had a mystical sense of his personal mission on earth in those

days, and even before. “From millions of men … one man must step forward,”

he wrote in Mein Kampf (the italics are his), “who with apodictic force will form

granite principles from the wavering idea-world of the broad masses and take up

the struggle for their sole correctness, until from the shifting waves of a free

thought-world there will arise a brazen cliff of solid unity in faith and will.” 28

He left no doubt in the minds of readers that he already considered himself

that one man. Mein Kampf is sprinkled with little essays on the role of the genius

who is picked by Providence to lead a great people, even though they may not at

first understand him or recognize his worth, out of their troubles to further

greatness. The reader is aware that Hitler is referring to himself and his present

situation. He is not yet recognized by the world for what he is sure he is, but that

has always been the fate of geniuses—in the beginning. “It nearly always takes

some stimulus to bring the genius on the scene,” he remarks. “The world then

resists and does not want to believe that the type, which apparently is identical

with it, is suddenly a very different being; a process which is repeated with every

eminent son of man … The spark of a genius,” he declares, “exists in the brain

of the truly creative man from the hour of his birth. True genius is always inborn

and never cultivated, let alone learned.” 29

Specifically, he thought, the great men who shaped history were a blend of the

practical politician and the thinker. “At long intervals in human history it may

occasionally happen that the politician is wedded to the theoretician. The more

profound this fusion, the greater are the obstacles opposing the work of the

politician. He no longer works for necessities which will be understood by the

first good shopkeeper, but for aims which only the fewest comprehend.

Therefore his life is torn between love and hate. The protest of the present,

which does not understand him, struggles with the recognition of posterity—for

which he also works. For the greater a man’s works are for the future, the less

the present can comprehend them; the harder his fight …” 30

These lines were written in 1924, when few understood what this man, then in

prison and discredited by the failure of his comic-opera putsch, had in mind to

do. But Hitler had no doubts himself. Whether he actually read Hegel or not is a

matter of dispute. But it is clear from his writings and speeches that he had some

acquaintance with the philosopher’s ideas, if only through discussions with his

early mentors Rosenberg, Eckart and Hess. One way or another Hegel’s famous

lectures at the University of Berlin must have caught his attention, as did

numerous dictums of Nietzsche. We have seen briefly* that Hegel developed a

theory of “heroes” which had great appeal to the German mind. In one of-the

Berlin lectures he discussed how the “will of the world spirit” is carried out by

“world-historical individuals.”

They may be called Heroes, inasmuch as they have derived their purposes and their

vocation, not from the calm regular course of things, sanctioned by the existing order; but

from a concealed fount, from that inner Spirit, still hidden beneath the surface, which impinges

on the outer world as on a shell and bursts it into pieces. Such were Alexander, Caesar,

Napoleon. They were practical, political men. But at the same time they were thinking men,

who had an insight into the requirements of the time—what was ripe for development. This

was the very Truth for their age, for their world … It was theirs to know this nascent principle,

the necessary, directly sequent step in progress, which their world was to take; to make this

their aim, and to expend their energy in promoting it. World-historical men—the Heroes of an

epoch—must therefore be recognized as its clear-sighted ones; their deeds, their words are the

best of their time. 31

Note the similarities between this and the above quotation from Mein Kampf.

The fusion of the politician and the thinker—that is what produces a hero, a

“world-historical figure,” an Alexander, a Caesar, a Napoleon. If there was in

him, as Hitler had now come to believe, the same fusion, might he not aspire to

their ranks?

In Hitler’s utterances there runs the theme that the supreme leader is above the

morals of ordinary man. Hegel and Nietzsche thought so too. We have seen

Hegel’s argument that “the private virtues” and “irrelevant moral claims” must

not stand in the way of the great rulers, nor must one be squeamish if the heroes,

in fulfilling their destiny, trample or “crush to pieces” many an innocent flower.

Nietzsche, with his grotesque exaggeration, goes much further.

The strong men, the masters, regain the pure conscience of a beast of prey; monsters filled

with joy, they can return from a fearful succession of murder, arson, rape and torture with the

same joy in their hearts, the same contentment in their souls as if they had indulged in some

student’s rag … When a man is capable of commanding, when he is by nature a “Master,”

when he is violent in act and gesture, of what importance are treaties to him? … To judge

morality properly, it must be replaced by two concepts borrowed from zoology: the taming of

a beast and the breeding of a specific species. 32

Such teachings, carried to their extremity by Nietzsche and applauded by a

host of lesser Germans, seem to have exerted a strong appeal on Hitler.* A

genius with a mission was above the law; he could not be bound by “bourgeois”

morals. Thus, when his time for action came, Hitler could justify the most

ruthless and cold-blooded deeds, the suppression of personal freedom, the brutal

practice of slave labor, the depravities of the concentration camp, the massacre

of his own followers in June 1934, the killing of war prisoners and the mass

slaughter of the Jews.

When Hitler emerged from Landsberg prison five days before Christmas,

1924, he found a situation which would have led almost any other man to retire

from public life. The Nazi Party and its press were banned; the former leaders

were feuding and falling away. He himself was forbidden to speak in public.

What was worse, he faced deportation to his native Austria; the Bavarian state

police had strongly recommended it in a report to the Ministry of the Interior.

Even many of his old comrades agreed with the general opinion that Hitler was

finished, that now he would fade away into oblivion as had so many other

provincial politicians who had enjoyed a brief moment of notoriety during the

strife-ridden years when it seemed that the Republic would totter. *

But the Republic had weathered the storms. It was beginning to thrive. While

Hitler was in prison a financial wizard by the name of Dr. Hjalmar Horace

Greeley Schacht had been called in to stabilize the currency, and he had

succeeded. The ruinous inflation was over. The burden of reparations was eased

by the Dawes Plan. Capital began to flow in from America. The economy was

rapidly recovering. Stresemann was succeeding in his policy of reconciliation

with the Allies. The French were getting out of the Ruhr. A security pact was

being discussed which would pave the way for a general European settlement

(Locarno) and bring Germany into the League of Nations. For the first time since

the defeat, after six years of tension, turmoil and depression, the German people

were beginning to have a normal life. Two weeks before Hitler was released

from Landsberg, the Social Democrats—the “November criminals,” as he called

them—had increased their vote by 30 per cent (to nearly eight million) in a

general election in which they had championed the Republic. The Nazis, in

league with northern racial groups under the name of the National Socialist

German Freedom movement, had seen their vote fall from nearly two million in

May 1924 to less than a million in December. Nazism appeared to be a dying

cause. It had mushroomed on the country’s misfortunes; now that the nation’s

outlook was suddenly bright it was rapidly withering away. Or so most Germans

and foreign observers believed.

But not Adolf Hitler. He was not easily discouraged. And he knew how to

wait. As he picked up the threads of his life in the little two-room apartment on

the top floor of 41 Thierschstrasse in Munich during the winter months of 1925

and then, when summer came, in various inns on the Obersalzberg above

Berchtesgaden, the contemplation of the misfortunes of the immediate past and

the eclipse of the present, served only to strengthen his resolve. Behind the

prison gates he had had time to range over in his mind not only his own past and

its triumphs and mistakes, but the tumultuous past of his German people and its

triumphs and errors. He saw both more clearly now. And there was born in him

anew a burning sense of mission—for himself and for Germany—from which all

doubts were excluded. In this exalted spirit he finished dictating the torrent of

words that would go into Volume One of Mein Kampf and went on immediately

to Volume Two. The blueprint of what the Almighty had called upon him to do

in this cataclysmic world and the philosophy, the Weltanschauung, that would

sustain it were set down in cold print for all to ponder. That philosophy, however

demented, had roots, as we have seen, deep in German life. The blueprint may

have seemed preposterous to most twentieth-century minds, even in Germany.

But it too possessed a certain logic. It held forth a vision. It offered, though few

saw this at the time, a continuation of German history. It pointed the way toward

a glorious German destiny.

* “It is useless,” he wrote at the end of the second volume, “to reopen wounds that seem

scarcely healed; … useless to speak of guilt regarding men who in the bottom of their hearts,

perhaps, were all devoted to their nation with equal love, and who only missed or failed to

understand the common road.” For a man so vindictive as Hitler, this showed unexpected

tolerance of those who had crushed his rebellion and jailed him; or, in view of what happened

later to Kahr and others who crossed him, it was perhaps more a display of will power—an

ability to restrain himself momentarily for tactical reasons. At any rate, he refrained from

recrimination.

* Like most writers, Hitler had his difficulties with the income tax collector—at least, as we

shall see, until he became the dictator of Germany.

* The italics are mine.

* The italics are Hitler’s.

* The italics are Hitler’s.

* “Without my imprisonment,” Hitler remarked long afterward, “Mein Kampf would never

have been written. That period gave me the chance of deepening various notions for which I

then had only an instinctive feeling … It’s from this time, too, that my conviction dates—a

thing that many of my supporters never understood—that we could no longer win power by

force. The state had had time to consolidate itself, and it had the weapons.” ( Hitler’s Secret

Conversations, p. 235.) The remark was made to some of his cronies at headquarters on the

Russian front on the night of February 3–4, 1942.

* In a sense the German working class made a similar trade. To combat socialism Bismarck

put through between 1883 and 1889 a program for social security far beyond anything known

in other countries. It included compulsory insurance for workers against old age, sickness,

accident and incapacity, and though organized by the State it was financed by employers and

employees. It cannot be said that it stopped the rise of the Social Democrats or the trade

unions, but it did have a profound influence on the working class in that it gradually made

them value security over political freedom and caused them to see in the State, however

conservative, a benefactor and a protector. Hitler, as we shall see, took full advantage of this

state of mind. In this, as in other matters, he learned much from Bismarck. “I studied

Bismarck’s socialist legislation,” Hitler remarks in Mein Kampf (p. 155), “in its intention,

struggle and success.”

* “I have often felt,” Goethe once said, “a bitter sorrow at the thought of the German people,

which is so estimable in the individual and so wretched in the generality. A comparison of the

German people with other peoples arouses a painful feeling, which I try to overcome in every

possible way.” (Conversation with H. Luden on December 13, 1813, in Goethes Gespraeche,

Auswahl Biedermann; quoted by Wilhelm Roepke in The Solution of the German Problem, p.

131.)

* Women, whom Nietzsche never had, he consigned to a distinctly inferior status, as did the

Nazis, who decreed that their place was in the kitchen and their chief role in life to beget

children for German warriors. Nietzsche put the idea this way: “Man shall be trained for war

and woman for the procreation of the warrior. All else is folly.” He went further. In Thus

Spake Zarathustra he exclaims: “Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip!”—which

prompted Bertrand Russell to quip, “Nine women out of ten would have got the whip away

from him, and he knew it, so he kept away from women …”

* My own recollection is confirmed by Otto Tolischus in his They Wanted War, p. 11.

* Though not in France.

* See above, p. 98.

* See above, pp. 86–87, for quotations from Mein Kampf.

* As late as 1929, Professor M. A. Gerothwohl, the editor of Lord D’Abernon’s diaries, wrote

a footnote to the ambassador’s account of the Beer Hall Putsch in which, after mention of

Hitler’s being sentenced to prison, he added: “He was finally released after six months and

bound over for the rest of his sentence, thereafter fading into oblivion.” Lord D’Abernon was

the British ambassador in Berlin from 1920 to 1926 and worked with great skill to strengthen

the Weimar Republic.

Book Two

TRIUMPH AND CONSOLIDATION

5

THE ROAD TO POWER: 1925–31

THE YEARS FROM 1925 until the coming of the depression in 1929 were lean

years for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement, but it is a measure of the man

that he persevered and never lost hope or confidence. Despite the excitability of

his nature, which often led to outbursts of hysteria, he had the patience to wait

and the shrewdness to realize that the climate of material prosperity and of a

feeling of relaxation which settled over Germany in those years was not

propitious for his purposes.

He was confident that the good times would not last. So far as Germany was

concerned, he said, they depended not on her own strength but on that of others

—of America above all, from whose swollen coffers loans were pouring in to

make and keep Germany prosperous. Between 1924 and 1930 German

borrowing amounted to some seven billion dollars and most of it came from

American investors, who gave little thought to how the Germans might make

eventual repayment. The Germans gave even less thought to it.

The Republic borrowed to pay its reparations and to increase its vast social

services, which were the model of the world. The states, cities and municipalities

borrowed to finance not only needed improvements but building of airfields,

theaters, sport stadiums and fancy swimming pools. Industry, which had wiped

out its debts in the inflation, borrowed billions to retool and to rationalize its

productive processes. Its output, which in 1923 had dropped to 55 per cent of

that in 1913, rose to 122 per cent by 1927. For the first time since the war

unemployment fell below a million—to 650,000—in 1928. That year retail sales

were up 20 per cent over 1925 and the next year real wages reached a figure 10

per cent higher than four years before. The lower middle classes, all the millions

of shopkeepers and small-salaried folk on whom Hitler had to draw for his mass

support, shared in the general prosperity.

My own acquaintance with Germany began in those days. I was stationed in

Paris and occasionally in London at that time, and fascinating though those

capitals were to a young American happy to have escaped from the incredible

smugness and emptiness of the Calvin Coolidge era, they paled a little when one

came to Berlin and Munich. A wonderful ferment was working in Germany. Life

seemed more free, more modern, more exciting than in any place I had ever

seen. Nowhere else did the arts or the intellectual life seem so lively. In

contemporary writing, painting, architecture, in music and drama, there were

new currents and fine talents. And everywhere there was an accent on youth.

One sat up with the young people all night in the sidewalk cafés, the plush bars,

the summer camps, on a Rhineland steamer or in a smoke-filled artist’s studio

and talked endlessly about life. They were a healthy, carefree, sun-worshiping

lot, and they were filled with an enormous zest for living to the full and in

complete freedom. The old oppressive Prussian spirit seemed to be dead and

buried. Most Germans one met—politicians, writers, editors, artists, professors,

students, businessmen, labor leaders—struck you as being democratic, liberal,

even pacifist.

One scarcely heard of Hitler or the Nazis except as butts of jokes—usually in

connection with the Beer Hall Putsch, as it came to be known. In the elections of

May 20, 1928, the Nazi Party polled only 810,000 votes out of a total of thirty-

one million cast and had but a dozen of the Reichstag’s 491 members. The

conservative Nationalists also lost heavily, their vote falling from six million in

1924 to four million, and their seats in Parliament diminished from 103 to 73. In

contrast, the Social Democrats gained a million and a quarter votes in the 1928

elections, and their total poll of more than nine million, with 153 seats in the

Reichstag, made them easily the largest political party in Germany. Ten years

after the end of the war the German Republic seemed at last to have found its

feet.

The membership of the National Socialist Party in that anniversary year—

1928—was 108,000. Small as the figure was, it was slowly growing. A fortnight

after leaving prison at the end of 1924, Hitler had hurried to see Dr. Heinrich

Held, the Prime Minister of Bavaria and the head of the Catholic Bavarian

People’s Party. On the strength of his promise of good behavior (Hitler was still

on parole) Held had lifted the ban on the Nazi Party and its newspaper. “The

wild beast is checked,” Held told his Minister of Justice, Guertner. “We can

afford to loosen the chain.” The Bavarian Premier was one of the first, but by no

means the last, of Germany’s politicians to fall into this fatal error of judgment.

The Voelkischer Beobachter reappeared on February 26, 1925, with a long

editorial written by Hitler, entitled “A New Beginning.” The next day he spoke

at the first mass meeting of the resurrected Nazi Party in the Buergerbraükeller,

which he and his faithful followers had last seen on the morning of November 9,

a year and a half before, when they set out on their ill-fated march. Many of the

faithful were absent. Eckart and Scheubner-Richter were dead. Goering was in

exile. Ludendorff and Roehm had broken with the leader. Rosenberg, feuding

with Streicher and Esser, was sulking and stayed away. So did Gregor Strasser,

who with Ludendorff had led the National Socialist German Freedom movement

while Hitler was behind bars and the Nazi Party itself banned. When Hitler

asked Anton Drexler to preside at the meeting the old locksmith and founder of

the party told him to go to the devil. Nevertheless some four thousand followers

gathered in the beer hall to hear Hitler once again and he did not disappoint

them. His eloquence was as moving as ever. At the end of a two-hour harangue,

the crowd roared with applause. Despite the many desertions and the bleak

prospects, Hitler made it clear that he still considered himself the dictatorial

leader of the party. “I alone lead the movement, and no one can impose

conditions on me so long as I personally bear the responsibility,” he declared,

and added, “Once more I bear the whole responsibility for everything that occurs

in the movement.”

Hitler had gone to the meeting with his mind made up on two objectives

which he intended henceforth to pursue. One was to concentrate all power in his

own hands. The other was to re-establish the Nazi Party as a political

organization which would seek power exclusively through constitutional means.

He had explained the new tactics to one of his henchmen, Karl Ludecke, while

still in prison: “When I resume active work it will be necessary to pursue a new

policy. Instead of working to achieve power by armed coup, we shall have to

hold our noses and enter the Reichstag against the Catholic and Marxist

deputies. If outvoting them takes longer than outshooting them, at least the result

will be guaranteed by their own constitution. Any lawful process is slow …

Sooner or later we shall have a majority—and after that, Germany.” 1 On his

release from Landsberg, he had assured the Bavarian Premier that the Nazi Party

would henceforth act within the framework of the constitution.

But he allowed himself to be carried away by the enthusiasm of the crowd in

his reappearance at the Buergerbraükeller on February 27. His threats against the

State were scarcely veiled. The republican regime, as well as the Marxists and

the Jews, was “the enemy.” And in his peroration he had shouted, “To this

struggle of ours there are only two possible issues: either the enemy passes over

our bodies or we pass over theirs!”

The “wild beast,” in this, his first public appearance after his imprisonment,

did not seem “checked” at all. He was again threatening the State with violence,

despite his promise of good behavior. The government of Bavaria promptly

forbade him to speak again in public—a ban that was to last two years. The other

states followed suit. This was a heavy blow to a man whose oratory had brought

him so far. A silenced Hitler was a defeated Hitler, as ineffective as a handcuffed

pugilist in a ring. Or so most people thought.

But again they were wrong. They forgot that Hitler was an organizer as well

as a spellbinder. Curbing his ire at being forbidden to speak in public, he set to

work with furious intent to rebuild the National Socialist German Workers’

Party and to make of it an organization such as Germany had never seen before.

He meant to make it like the Army—a state within a state. The first job was to

attract dues-paying members. By the end of 1925 they numbered just 27,000.

The going was slow, but each year some progress was made: 49,000 members in

1926; 72,000 in 1927; 108,000 in 1928; 178,000 in 1929.

More important was the building up of an intricate party structure which

corresponded to the organization of the German government and indeed of

German society. The country was divided into districts, or Gaue, which

corresponded roughly with the thirty-four Reichstag electoral districts and at the

head of which was a gauleiter appointed by Hitler. There were an additional

seven Gaue for Austria, Danzig, the Saar and the Sudetenland in

Czechoslovakia. A Gau was divided into Kreise—circles—and presided over by

a Kreisleiter. The next smallest party unit was an Ortsgruppe—a local group—

and in the cities these were further subdivided into street cells and blocks.

The political organization of the Nazi Party was divided into two groups: P.O.

I, as it was known, designed to attack and undermine the government, and P.O.

II to establish a state within a state. Thus the second group had departments of

agriculture, justice, national economy, interior and labor—and, with an eye to

the future, of race and culture, and of engineering. P.O. I had departments of

foreign affairs and of labor unions and a Reich Press Office. The Propaganda

Division was a separate and elaborate office.

Though some of the party roughnecks, veterans of street fighting and

beerhouse brawls, opposed bringing women and children into the Nazi Party,

Hitler soon provided organizations for them too. The Hitler Youth took in

youngsters from fifteen to eighteen who had their own departments of culture,

schools, press, propaganda, “defense sports,” etc., and those from ten to fifteen

were enrolled in the Deutsches Jungvolk. For the girls there was the Bund

Deutscher Maedel and for the women the N. S. Frauenschaften. Students,

teachers, civil servants, doctors, lawyers, jurists—all had their separate

organizations, and there was a Nazi Kulturbund to attract the intellectuals and,

artists.

After considerable difficulties the S.A. was reorganized into an armed band of

several hundred thousand men to protect Nazi meetings, to break up the

meetings of others and to generally terrorize those who opposed Hitler. Some of

its leaders also hoped to see the S.A. supplant the Regular Army when Hitler

came to power. To prepare for this a special office under General Franz Ritter

von Epp was set up, called the Wehrpolitische Amt. Its five divisions concerned

themselves with such problems as external and internal defense policy, defense

forces, popular defense potential, and so on. But the brown-shirted S.A. never

became much more than a motley mob of brawlers. Many of its top leaders,

beginning with its chief, Roehm, were notorious homosexual perverts.

Lieutenant Edmund Heines, who led the Munich S.A., was not only a

homosexual but a convicted murderer. These two and dozens of others quarreled

and feuded as only men of unnatural sexual inclinations, with their peculiar

jealousies, can.

To have at hand a more dependable band Hitler created the S.S.—

Schutzstaffel—put their members in black uniforms similar to those worn by the

Italian Fascisti and made them swear a special oath of loyalty to him personally.

At first the S.S. was little more than a bodyguard for the Fuehrer. Its first leader

was a newspaperman named Berchtold. As he preferred the relative quiet of the

newsroom of the Voelkischer Beobachter to playing at cop and soldier, he was

replaced by one Erhard Heiden, a former police stool pigeon of unsavory

reputation. It was not until 1929 that Hitler found the man he was looking for as

the ideal leader of the S.S., in the person of a chicken farmer in the village of

Waldtrudering, near Munich, a mild-mannered fellow whom people mistook (as

did this author when he first met him) for a small-town schoolmaster and whose

name was Heinrich Himmler. When Himmler took over the S.S. it numbered

some two hundred men. By the time he finished his job with it, the S.S.

dominated Germany and was a name that struck terror throughout occupied

Europe.

At the top of the pyramid of the intricate party organization stood Adolf Hitler

with the highfalutin title of Partei-und-Oberster-S.A.-Fuehrer, Vorsitzender der

N.S.D.A.V.—which may be translated as “Supreme Leader of the Party and the

S.A., Chairman of the National Socialist German Labor Organization.” Directly

attached to his office was the Reich Directorate (Reichsleitung) which was made

up of the top bosses of the party and such useful officials as the “Reich

Treasurer” and the “Reich Business Manager.” Visiting the palatial Brown

House in Munich, the national headquarters of the party, during the last years of

the Republic, one got the impression that here indeed were the offices of a state

within a state. That, no doubt, was the impression Hitler wished to convey, for it

helped to undermine confidence, both domestic and foreign, in the actual

German State, which he was trying to overthrow.

But Hitler was intent on something more important than making an

impression. Three years after he came to power, in a speech to the “old fighters”

at the Buergerbraü on the anniversary evening of November 9, 1936, he

explained one of the objectives he had had in building the party up into such a

formidable and all-embracing organization. “We recognized,” he said, in

recalling the days when the party was being reformed after the putsch, “that it is

not enough to overthrow the old State, but that the new State must previously

have been built up and be practically ready to one’s hand…. In 1933 it was no

longer a question of overthrowing a state by an act of violence; meanwhile the

new State had been built up and all that there remained to do was to destroy the

last remnants of the old State—and that took but a few hours.” 2

An organization, however streamlined and efficient, is made up of erring

human beings, and in those years when Hitler was shaping his party to take over

Germany’s destiny he had his fill of troubles with his chief lieutenants, who

constantly quarreled not only among themselves but with him. He, who was so

monumentally intolerant by his very nature, was strangely tolerant of one human

condition—a man’s morals. No other party in Germany came near to attracting

so many shady characters. As we have seen, a conglomeration of pimps,

murderers, homosexuals, alcoholics and blackmailers flocked to the party as if to

a natural haven. Hitler did not care, as long as they were useful to him. When he

emerged from prison he found not only that they were at each other’s throats but

that there was a demand from the more prim and respectable leaders such as

Rosenberg and Ludendorff that the criminals and especially the perverts be

expelled from the movement. This Hitler frankly refused to do. “I do not

consider it to be the task of a political leader,” he wrote in his editorial, “A New

Beginning,” in the Voelkischer Beobachter of February 26, 1925, “to attempt to

improve upon, or even to fuse together, the human material lying ready to his

hand.”

By 1926, however, the charges and countercharges hurled by the Nazi

chieftains at one another became so embarrassing that Hitler set up a party court

to settle them and to prevent his comrades from washing their dirty linen in

public. This was known as the USCHLA, from Untersuchung-und-Schlichtungs-

Ausschuss—Committee for Investigation and Settlement. Its first head was a

former general, Heinemann, but he was unable to grasp the real purpose of the

court, which was not to pronounce judgment on those accused of common

crimes but to hush them up and see that they did not disturb party discipline or

the authority of the Leader. So the General was replaced by a more

understanding ex-officer, Major Walther Buch, who was given two assistants.

One was Ulrich Graf, the former butcher who had been Hitler’s bodyguard; the

other was Hans Frank, a young Nazi lawyer, of whom more will be heard later

when it comes time to recount his bloodthirstiness as Governor General of

occupied Poland, for which he paid on the gallows at Nuremberg. This fine

judicial triumvirate performed to the complete satisfaction of the Fuehrer. A

party leader might be accused of the most nefarious crime. Buch’s answer

invariably was, “Well, what of it?” What he wanted to know was whether it hurt

party discipline or offended the Fuehrer.

It took more than this party court, effective though it was in thousands of

instances, to keep the ambitious, throat-cutting, big Nazi fry in line. Often Hitler

had to intervene personally not only to keep a semblance of harmony but to

prevent his own throat from being cut.

While he had languished at Landsberg, a young man by the name of Gregor

Strasser had suddenly risen in the Nazi movement. A druggist by profession and

a Bavarian by birth, he was three years younger than Hitler; like him, he had

won the Iron Cross, First Class, and during the war he had risen from the ranks

to be a lieutenant. He had become a Nazi in 1920 and soon became the district

leader in Lower Bavaria. A big, stocky man, somewhat of a bon vivant, bursting

with energy, he developed into an effective public speaker more by the force of

his personality than by the oratorical gifts with which Hitler was endowed.

Moreover, he was a born organizer. Fiercely independent in spirit and mind,

Strasser refused to kowtow to Hitler or to take very seriously the Austrian’s

claims to be absolute dictator of the Nazi movement. This was to prove, in the

long run, a fatal handicap, as was his sincere enthusiasm for the “socialism” in

National Socialism.

Over the opposition of the imprisoned Hitler, Strasser joined Ludendorff and

Rosenberg in organizing a Nazi Voelkisch movement to contest the state and

national elections in the spring of 1924. In Bavaria the bloc polled enough votes

to make it the second largest party; in Germany, as we have seen, under the

name of the National Socialist German Freedom movement it won two million

votes and obtained thirty-two seats in the Reichstag, one of which went to

Strasser. Hitler took a dark view of the young man’s activities and an even

darker one of his successes. Strasser, for his part, was not disposed to accept

Hitler as the Lord, and he pointedly stayed away from the big rally in Munich on

February 27, 1925, which relaunched the Nazi Party.

If the movement was to become truly national, Hitler realized, it must get a

footing in the north, in Prussia, and above all in the citadel of the enemy, Berlin.

In the election of 1924 Strasser had campaigned in the north and made alliances

with ultranational groups there led by Albrecht von Graefe and Count Ernst zu

Reventlow. He thus had personal contacts and a certain following in this area

and he was the only Nazi leader who had. Two weeks after the February 27

meeting, Hitler swallowed his personal pique, sent for Strasser, induced him to

come back to the fold and proposed that he organize the Nazi Party in the north.

Strasser accepted. Here was an opportunity to exercise his talents without the

jealous, arrogant Leader being in a position to breathe down his neck.

Within a few months he had founded a newspaper in the capital, the Berliner

Arbeiterzeitung, edited by his brother, Otto Strasser, and a fortnightly newsletter,

the N. S. Briefe, which kept the party officials informed of the party line. And he

had laid the foundations for a political organization that stretched through

Prussia, Saxony, Hanover and the industrial Rhineland. A veritable dynamo,

Strasser traveled all over the north, addressing meetings, appointing district

leaders and setting up a party apparatus. Being a Reichstag deputy gave him two

immediate advantages over Hitler: he had a free pass on the railroads, so travel

was no expense to him or the party; and he enjoyed parliamentary immunity. No

authority could ban him from public speaking; no court could try him for

slandering anyone or anything he wanted to. As Heiden wrote sardonically,

“Free travel and free slander—Strasser had a big head start over his Fuehrer.”

As his secretary and editor of the N. S. Briefe Gregor Strasser took on a

twenty-eight-year-old Rhinelander named Paul Joseph Goebbels.

THE EMERGENCE OF PAUL JOSEPH GOEBBELS

This swarthy, dwarfish young man, with a crippled foot, a nimble mind and a

complicated and neurotic personality, was not a stranger to the Nazi movement.

He had discovered it in 1922 when he first heard Hitler speak in Munich, was

converted, and became a member of the party. But the movement did not really

discover him until three years later, when Gregor Strasser, hearing him speak,

decided that he could use a young man of such obvious talents. Goebbels at

twenty-eight was already an impassioned orator, a fanatical nationalist and, as

Strasser knew, possessed of a vituperative pen and, rare for Nazi leaders, a sound

university education. Heinrich Himmler had just resigned as Strasser’s secretary

to devote more of his time to raising chickens. Strasser appointed Goebbels in

his place. It was to prove a fateful choice.

Paul Joseph Goebbels was born on October 29, 1897, in Rheydt, a textile

center of some thirty thousand people in the Rhineland. His father, Fritz

Goebbels, was a foreman in a local textile plant. His mother, Maria Katharina

Odenhausen, was the daughter of a blacksmith. Both parents were pious

Catholics.

Through the Catholics, Joseph Goebbels received most of his education. He

attended a Catholic parochial grade school and then the Gymnasium in Rheydt.

A scholarship from the Catholic Albert Magnus Society enabled him to go on to

the university—in fact, to eight universities. Before he received his Ph.D. from

Heidelberg in 1921 at the age of twenty-four, he had studied at the universities

of Bonn, Freiburg, Wuerzburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, Munich and Berlin. In these

illustrious institutions—the flower of German higher learning—Goebbels had

concentrated on the study of philosophy, history, literature and art and had

continued his work in Latin and Greek.

He intended to become a writer. The year he received his doctorate he wrote

an autobiographical novel, Michael, which no publisher would take at the time,

and in the next couple of years he finished two plays, The Wanderer (about Jesus

Christ) and The Lonesome Guest, both in verse, which no producer would stage.*

He had no better luck in journalism. The great liberal daily, Berliner Tageblatt,

turned down the dozens of articles he submitted and his application for a

reporter’s job.

His personal life also was full of frustrations in the early days. Because he was

a cripple he could not serve in the war and thus was cheated of the experience

which seemed, at least in the beginning, so glorious for the young men of his

generation and which was a requisite for leadership in the Nazi Party. Goebbels

was not, as most people believed, born with a club foot. At the age of seven he

had suffered an attack of osteomyelitis, an inflammation of the bone marrow. An

operation on his left thigh was not successful and the left leg remained shorter

than the right and somewhat withered. This handicap, which forced him to walk

with a noticeable limp, riled him all the days of his life and was one of the

causes of his early embitterment. In desperation, during his university days and

during the brief period when he was an agitator against the French in the Ruhr,

he often passed himself off as a wounded war veteran.

Nor was he lucky in love, though all his life he mistook his philanderings,

which became notorious in his years of power, for great amours. His diaries for

1925–26, when he was twenty-eight and twenty-nine and just being launched

into Nazi politics by Strasser, are full of moonings over loved ones—of whom

he had several at a time. * Thus:

August 14, 1925: Alma wrote me a postcard from Bad Harzburg. The first sign of her since

that night. This teasing, charming Alma!

Received first letter from Else in Switzerland. Only Else dear can write like that … Soon I

am going to the Rhine for a week to be quite alone. Then Else will come … How happy I am

in anticipation!

August 15: In these days I must think so often of Anke … How wonderful it was to travel

with her. This wonderful wench!

I am yearning for Else. When shall I have her in my arms again?

Else dear, when shall I see you again?

Alma, you dear featherweight!

Anke, never can I forget you!

August 27: Three days on the Rhine … Not a word from Else … Is she angry with me?

How I pine for her! I am living in the same room as I did with her last Whitsuntide. What

thoughts! What feeling! Why doesn’t she come?

September 3:-Else is here! On Tuesday she returned from Switzerland—fat, buxom,

healthy, gay, only slightly tanned. She is very happy and in the best of spirits. She is good to

me, and gives me much joy.

October 14: Why did Anke have to leave me? … I just mustn’t think of these things.

December 21: There is a curse on me and the women. Woe to those who love me!

December 29: To Krefeld last night with Hess. Christmas celebration. A delightful,

beautiful girl from Franconia. She’s my type. Home with her through rain and storm. Au

revoir!

Else arrived.

February 6, 1926: I yearn for a sweet woman! Oh, torturing pain!

Goebbels never forgot “Anke”—Anke Helhorn, his first love, whom he had

met during his second semester at Freiburg. His diary is full of ravings about her

dark-blond beauty and his subsequent disillusionment when she left him. Later,

when he became Propaganda Minister, he revealed to friends, with typical vanity

and cynicism, why she had left him. “She betrayed me because the other guy had

more money and could afford to take her out to dinner and to shows. How

foolish of her! … Today she might be the wife of the Minister of Propaganda!

How frustrated she must feel!” Anke married and divorced “the other guy” and

in 1934 came to Berlin, where Goebbels got her a job on a magazine. 3

It was Strasser’s radicalism, his belief in the “socialism” of National

Socialism, which attracted the young Goebbels. Both wanted to build the party

on the proletariat. The diary of Goebbels is full of expressions of sympathy for

Communism at this time. “In the final analysis,” he wrote on October 23, 1925,

“it would be better for us to end our existence under Bolshevism than to endure

slavery under capitalism.” On January 31, 1926, he told himself in his diary: “I

think it is terrible that we [the Nazis] and the Communists are bashing in each

other’s heads … Where can we get together sometime with the leading

Communists?” It was at this time that he published an open letter to a

Communist leader assuring him that Nazism and Communism were really the

same thing. “You and I,” he declared, “are fighting one another, but we are not

really enemies.”

To Adolf Hitler this was rank heresy, and he watched with increasing

uneasiness the success of the Strasser brothers and Goebbels in building up a

vigorous, radical, proletarian wing of the party in the north. If left to themselves

these men might capture the party, and for objectives which Hitler violently

opposed. The inevitable showdown came in the fall of 1925 and in February of

the following year.

It was forced by Gregor Strasser and Goebbels over an issue which aroused a

good deal of feeling in Germany at that time. This was the proposal of the Social

Democrats and the Communists that the extensive estates and fortunes of the

deposed royal and princely families be expropriated and taken over by the

Republic. The question was to be settled by a plebiscite of the people, in

accordance with the Weimar Constitution. Strasser and Goebbels proposed that

the Nazi Party jump into the fray with the Communists and the Socialists and

support the campaign to expropriate the nobles.

Hitler was furious. Several of these former rulers had kicked in with

contributions to the party. Moreover, a number of big industrialists were

beginning to become financially interested in Hitler’s reborn movement

precisely because it promised to be effective in combating the Communists, the

Socialists and the trade unions. If Strasser and Goebbels got away with their

plans, Hitler’s sources of income would immediately dry up.

Before the Fuehrer could act, however, Strasser called a meeting of the

northern district party leaders in Hanover on November 22, 1925. Its purpose

was not only to put the northern branch of the Nazi Party behind the

expropriation drive but to launch a new economic program which would do

away with the “reactionary” twenty-five points that had been adopted back in

1920. The Strassers and Goebbels wanted to nationalize the big industries and

the big estates and substitute a chamber of corporations on fascist lines for the

Reichstag. Hitler declined to attend the meeting, but sent his faithful Gottfried

Feder to represent him and to squelch the rebels. Goebbels demanded that Feder

be thrown out—“We don’t want any stool pigeons!” he cried. Several leaders

who would later make their mark in the Third Reich were present—Bernhard

Rust, Erich Koch, Hans Kerrl and Robert Ley—but only Ley, the alcoholic

chemist who was leader of the Cologne district, supported Hitler. When Dr. Ley

and Feder argued that the meeting was out of order, that nothing could be done

without Hitler, the Supreme Leader, Goebbels shouted (according to Otto

Strasser, who was present), “I demand that the petty bourgeois Adolf Hitler be

expelled from the Nazi Party!”

The vituperative young Goebbels had come a long way since he had first fallen

under Hitler’s spell three years before—or so it must have seemed to Gregor

Strasser.

“At that moment I was reborn!” Goebbels exclaimed in recording his

impressions of the first time he heard Hitler speak, in the Circus Krone in

Munich in June 1922. “Now I knew which road to take … This was a

command!” He was even more ecstatic over Hitler’s behavior during the trial of

the Munich putschists. After the verdicts were in, Goebbels wrote the Fuehrer:

Like a rising star you appeared before our wondering eyes, you performed miracles to clear

our minds and, in a world of skepticism and desperation, gave us faith. You towered above the

masses, full of faith and certain of the future, and possessed by the will to free those masses

with your unlimited love for all those who believe in the new Reich. For the first time we saw

with shining eyes a man who tore off the mask from the faces distorted by greed, the faces of

mediocre parliamentary busybodies …

In the Munich court you grew before us to the greatness of the Fuehrer. What you said are

the greatest words spoken in Germany since Bismarck. You expressed more than your own

pain … You named the need of a whole generation, searching in confused longing for men and

task. What you said is the catechism of the new political belief, born out of the despair of a

collapsing, Godless world … We thank you. One day, Germany will thank you …

But now, a year and a half later, Goebbels’ idol had fallen. He had become a

“petty bourgeois” who deserved being booted out of the party. With only Ley

and Feder dissenting, the Hanover meeting adopted Strasser’s new party

program and approved the decision to join the Marxists in the plebiscite

campaign to deprive the former kings and princes of their possessions.

Hitler bided his time and then on February 14, 1926, struck back. He called a

meeting at Bamberg, in southern Germany, shrewdly picking a weekday, when it

was difficult for the northern leaders to get away from their jobs. In fact, only

Gregor Strasser and Goebbels were able to attend. They were greatly

outnumbered by Hitler’s hand-picked leaders in the south. And at the Fuehrer’s

insistence they were forced to capitulate and abandon their program. Such

German historians of Nazism as Heiden and Olden, and the non-German writers

who have been guided by them, have recounted that at the Bamberg meeting

Goebbels openly deserted Strasser and went over to Hitler. But the Goebbels

diaries, discovered after Heiden and Olden wrote their books, reveal that he did

not betray Strasser quite so abruptly. They show that Goebbels, though he joined

Strasser in surrendering to Hitler, thought the Fuehrer was utterly wrong, and

that, for the moment at least, he had no intention whatever of going over to him.

On February 15, the day after the Bamberg meeting, he confided to his diary:

Hitler talks for two hours. I feel as though someone had beaten me. What sort

of Hitler is this? A reactionary? Extremely awkward and unsteady. Completely

wrong on the Russian question. Italy and England are our natural allies!

Horrible! … We must annihilate Russia! … The question of the private property

of the nobility must not even be touched upon. Terrible! … I cannot utter a

word. I feel as though I’ve been hit over the head …

Certainly one of the great disappointments of my life. I no longer have

complete faith in Hitler. That is the terrible thing: my props have been taken

from under me.

To show where his loyalties stood, Goebbels went to the station with Strasser

and tried to console him. A week later, on February 23, he records: “Long

conference with Strasser. Result: we must not begrudge the Munich crowd their

Pyrrhic victory. We must begin again our fight for socialism.”

But Hitler had sized up the flamboyant young Rhinelander better than

Strasser. On March 29 Goebbels noted: “This morning a letter from Hitler. I

shall make a speech on April 8 at Munich.” He arrived there on April 7. “Hitler’s

car is waiting,” he recorded. “What a royal reception! I will speak at the historic

Buergerbräu.” The next day he did, from the same platform as the Leader. He

wrote it all down in his diary entry of April 8:

Hitler phones … His kindness in spite of Bamberg makes us feel ashamed … At 2 o’clock

we drive to the Buergerbräu. Hitler is already there. My heart is beating so wildly it is about to

burst. I enter the hall. Roaring welcome … And then I speak for two and a half hours …

People roar and shout. At the end Hitler embraces me. I feel happy … Hitler is always at my

side.

A few days later Goebbels surrendered completely. “April 13: Hitler spoke for

three hours. Brilliantly. He can make you doubt your own views. Italy and

England our allies. Russia wants to devour us … I love him … He has thought

everything through. His ideal: a just collectivism and individualism. As to soil—

everything belongs to the people. Production to be creative and individualistic.

Trusts, transport, etc., to be socialized … I am now at ease about him … I bow

to the greater man, to the political genius.”

When Goebbels left Munich on April 17 he was Hitler’s man and was to

remain his most loyal follower to his dying breath. On April 20 he wrote the

Fuehrer a birthday note: “Dear and revered Adolf Hitler! I have learned so much

from you … You have finally made me see the light …” And that night in his

diary: “He is thirty-seven years old. Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are

both great and simple. These are the characteristics of the genius.”

Goebbels spent a good part of the summer with Hitler at Berchtesgaden, and

his diary is full of further encomiums to the Leader. In August he publicly broke

with Strasser in an article in the Voelkischer Beobachter.

Only now do I recognize you for what you are: revolutionaries in speech but not in deed

[he told the Strassers and their followers] … Don’t talk so much about ideals and don’t fool

yourselves into believing that you are the inventors and protectors of these ideals … We are

not doing penance by standing solidly behind the Fuehrer. We … bow to him … with the

manly, unbroken pride of the ancient Norsemen who stand upright before their Germanic

feudal lord. We feel that he is greater than all of us, greater than you and I. He is the

instrument of the Divine Will that shapes history with fresh, creative passion.

Late in October 1926 Hitler made Goebbels Gauleiter of Berlin. He instructed

him to clean out the quarreling Brownshirt rowdies who had been hampering the

growth of the movement there and conquer the capital of Germany for National

Socialism. Berlin was “red.” The majority of its voters were Socialists and

Communists. Undaunted, Goebbels, who had just turned twenty-nine, and who

in a little more than a year’s time had risen from nothing to be one of the leading

lights of the Nazi Party, set out to fulfill his assignment in the great Babylonian

city.

AN INTERLUDE OF REST AND ROMANCE FOR ADOLF HITLER

The politically lean years for Adolf Hitler were, as he later said, the best years

of his personal life. Forbidden to speak in public until 1927, intent on finishing

Mein Kampf and plotting in his mind the future of the Nazi Party and of himself,

he spent most of his time on the Obersalzberg above the market village of

Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. It was a haven for rest and relaxation.

Hitler’s monologues at his headquarters at the front during the war, when late

at night he would relax with the old party comrades and his faithful women

secretaries and reminisce about past times, are full of nostalgic talk about what

this mountain retreat, where he established the only home he ever owned, meant

to him. “Yes,” he exclaimed during one of these sessions on the night of January

16–17, 1942, “there are so many links between Obersalzberg and me. So many

things were born there … I spent there the finest hours of my life … It is there

that all my great projects were conceived and ripened. I had hours of leisure in

those days, and how many charming friends!”

During the first three years after his release from prison Hitler lived in various

inns on the Obersalzberg and in that winter reminiscence in 1942 he talked for

an hour about them. He finally settled down in the Deutsche Haus, where he

spent the best part of two years and in which he finished dictating Mein Kampf.

He and his party cronies, he says, were “very fond of visiting the

Dreimaederlhaus, where there were always pretty girls. This,” he adds, “was a

great treat for me. There was one of them, especially, who was a real beauty.”

That evening in the headquarters bunker on the Russian front, Hitler made a

remark to his listeners that recalls two preoccupations he had during the pleasant

years at Berchtesgaden.

At this period [on the Obersalzberg] I knew a lot of women. Several of them became

attached to me. Why, then, didn’t I marry? To leave a wife behind me? At the slightest

imprudence, I ran the risk of going back to prison for six years. So there could be no question

of marriage for me. I therefore had to renounce certain opportunities that offered themselves.4

Hitler’s fear in the mid-Twenties of being sent back to prison or of being

deported was not without some foundation. He was still on parole. Had he

openly evaded the ban against his speaking in public the Bavarian government

might well have clapped him behind the bars again or sent him back over the

border to his native Austria. One reason that he had chosen the Obersalzberg as a

refuge was its proximity to the Austrian frontier; on a moment’s notice he could

have slipped over the line and evaded arrest by the German police. But to have

returned to Austria, voluntarily or by force, would have ruined his prospects. To

lessen the risk of deportation, Hitler formally renounced his Austrian citizenship

on April 7, 1925—a step that was promptly accepted by the Austrian

government. This, however, left him staatenlos, a man without a country. He

gave up his Austrian citizenship but he did not become a citizen of Germany.

This was a considerable handicap for a politician in the Reich. For one thing, he

could not be elected to office. He had publicly declared that he would never beg

the republican government for a citizenship which he felt should have been his

because of his services to Imperial Germany in the war. But all through the last

half of the 1920s, he secretly sought to have the Bavarian government make him

a German national. His efforts failed.

As to women and marriage, there was also some truth in what Hitler related

that evening of 1942. Contrary to the general opinion, he liked the company of

women, especially if they were beautiful. He returns to the subject time and

again in his table talk at Supreme Headquarters during the war. “What lovely

women there are in the world!” he exclaims to his cronies on the night of

January 25–26, 1942, and he gives several examples in his personal experience,

adding the boast, “In my youth in Vienna, I knew a lot of lovely women!”

Heiden has recounted some of his romantic yearnings of the early days: for a

Jenny Haug, whose brother was Hitler’s chauffeur and who passed as his

sweetheart in 1923; for the tall and stately Erna Hanfstaengl, sister of Putzi; for

Winifred Wagner, daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner. But it was with his niece

that Adolf Hitler had, so far as is known, the only deep love affair of his life.

In the summer of 1928 Hitler rented the villa Wachenfeld on the Obersalzberg

above Berchtesgaden for a hundred marks a month ($25) from the widow of a

Hamburg industrialist and induced his widowed half-sister, Angela Raubal, to

come from Vienna to keep house for him in the first home which he could call

his own. * Frau Raubal brought along her two daughters, Geli and Friedl. Geli

was twenty, with flowing blond hair, handsome features, a pleasant voice and a

sunny disposition which made her attractive to men. 5

Hitler soon fell in love with her. He took her everywhere, to meetings and

conferences, on long walks in the mountains and to the cafés and theaters in

Munich. When in 1929 he rented a luxurious nine-room apartment in the

Prinzregentenstrasse, one of the most fashionable thoroughfares in Munich, Geli

was given her own room in it. Gossip about the party leader and his beautiful

blond niece was inevitable in Munich and throughout Nazi circles in southern

Germany. Some of the more prim—or envious—leaders suggested that Hitler

cease showing off his youthful sweetheart in public, or that he marry her. Hitler

was furious at such talk and in one quarrel over the matter he fired the Gauleiter

of Wuerttemberg.

It is probable that Hitler intended to marry his niece. Early party comrades

who were close to him at that time subsequently told this author that a marriage

seemed inevitable. That Hitler was deeply in love with her they had no doubt.

Her own feelings are a matter of conjecture. That she was flattered by the

attentions of a man now becoming famous, and indeed enjoyed them, is obvious.

Whether she reciprocated her uncle’s love is not known; probably not, and in the

end certainly not. Some deep rift whose origins and nature have never been fully

ascertained grew between them. There has been much speculation but little

evidence. Each was apparently jealous of the other. She resented his attentions to

other women—to Winifred Wagner, among others. He suspected that she had

had a clandestine affair with Emil Maurice, the ex-convict who had been his

bodyguard. She objected too to her uncle’s tyranny over her. He did not want her

to be seen in the company of any man but himself. He forbade her to go to

Vienna to continue her singing lessons, squelching her ambition for a career on

the operatic stage. He wanted her for himself alone.

There are dark hints too that she was repelled by the masochistic inclinations

of her lover, that this brutal tyrant in politics yearned to be enslaved by the

woman he loved—a not uncommon urge in such men, according to the

sexologists. Heiden tells of a letter which Hitler wrote to his niece in 1929

confessing his deepest feelings in this regard. It fell into the hands of his

landlady’s son—with consequences which were tragic to more than one life.6

Whatever it was that darkened the love between the uncle and his niece, their

quarrels became more violent and at the end of the summer of 1931 Geli

announced that she was returning to Vienna to resume her voice studies. Hitler

forbade her to go. There was a scene between the two, witnessed by neighbors,

when Hitler left his Munich apartment to go to Hamburg on September 17, 1931.

The young girl was heard to cry to him from the window as her uncle was

getting into his car, “Then you won’t let me go to Vienna?” and he was heard to

respond, “No!”

The next morning Geli Raubal was found shot dead in her room. The state’s

attorney, after a thorough investigation, found that it was a suicide. The coroner

reported that a bullet had gone through her chest below the left shoulder and

penetrated the heart; it seemed beyond doubt that the shot was self-inflicted.

Yet for years afterward in Munich there was murky gossip that Geli Raubal

had been murdered—by Hitler in a rage, by Himmler to eliminate a situation that

had become embarrassing to the party. But no credible evidence ever turned up

to substantiate such rumors.

Hitler himself was struck down by grief. Gregor Strasser later recounted that

he had had to remain for the following two days and nights at Hitler’s side to

prevent him from taking his own life. A week after Geli’s burial in Vienna,

Hitler obtained special permission from the Austrian government to go there; he

spent an evening weeping at the grave. For months he was inconsolable.

Three weeks after the death of Geli, Hitler had his first interview with

Hindenburg. It was his first bid for the big stakes, for the chancellorship of the

Reich. His distraction on this momentous occasion—some of his friends said he

did not seem to be in full possession of his faculties during the conversation,

which went badly for the Nazi leader—was put down by those who knew him as

due to the shock of the loss of his beloved niece.

From this personal blow stemmed, I believe, an act of renunciation, his

decision to abstain from meat; at least, some of his closest henchmen seemed to

think so. To them he declared forever afterward that Geli Raubal was the only

woman he ever loved, and he always spoke of her with the deepest reverence—

and often in tears. Servants said that her room in the villa at Obersalzberg, even

after it was rebuilt and enlarged in the days of Hitler’s chancellorship, remained

as she had left it. In his own room there, and in the Chancellery in Berlin,

portraits* of the young woman always hung and when the anniversaries of her

birth and death came around each’ year flowers were placed around them.

For a brutal, cynical man who always seemed to be incapable of love of any

other human being, this passion of Hitler’s for the youthful Geli Raubal stands

out as one of the mysteries of his strange life. As with all mysteries, it cannot be

rationally explained, merely recounted. Thereafter, it is almost certain, Adolf

Hitler never seriously contemplated marriage until the day before he took his

own life fourteen years later.

The compromising letter from Hitler to his niece was retrieved from the

landlord’s son through the efforts of Father Bernhard Stempfle, the Hieronymite

Catholic priest and anti-Semitic journalist who had helped the Nazi leader in

tidying up Mein Kampf for publication. The money for its purchase, according to

Heiden, was supplied by Franz Xavier Schwarz, the party treasurer. Thus Father

Stempfle was one of the few persons who knew something of the secrets of

Hitler’s love for Geli Raubal. Apparently he did not keep his knowledge of the

affair entirely to himself. He was to pay for this lapse with his life when the

author of Mein Kampf became dictator of Germany and one day settled accounts

with some of his old friends.

The source of Hitler’s income during those personally comfortable years when

he acquired a villa at Obersalzberg and a luxurious apartment in Munich and

drove about in a flashy, chauffeured automobile, for which he paid 20,000 marks

($5,000), has never been established. But his income tax files, which turned up

after the war, shed some light on the subject.7 Until he became Chancellor and

had himself declared exempt from taxation, he was in continual conflict with the

tax authorities, and a considerable file accumulated in the Munich Finance

Office between 1925 and 1933.

That office notified him on May 1, 1925, that he had failed to file a return for

1924 or for the first quarter of 1925. Hitler replied, “I had no income in 1924

[when he was in prison], or in the first quarter of 1925. I have covered my living

expenses by raising a bank loan.” What about that $5,000 automobile? the tax

collector shot back. Hitler answered that he had raised a bank loan for that too.

In all his tax returns, Hitler listed his profession as “writer” and, as such,

attempted to justify a high proportion of his income as deductible expenses—he

doubtless was aware of the practice of writers everywhere. His first income tax

declaration, for the third quarter of 1925, listed a gross income of 11,231 R.M.,

deductible professional expenses of 6,540 R.M. and interest payments on loans

of 2,245 R.M., which left a net taxable income of 2,446 R.M.

In a three-page typewritten explanation Hitler defended his large deductions

for professional expenses, arguing that though a large part of them appeared to

be due to his political activities, such work provided him with the material he

needed as a political writer and also helped increase the sales of his book.

Without my political activity my name would be unknown, and I would be lacking

materials for the publication of a political work … Accordingly in my case as a political

writer, the expenses of my political activity, which is the necessary condition of my

professional writing as well as its assurance of financial success, cannot be regarded as subject

to taxation….

The Finance Office can see that out of the income from my book, for this period, only a

very small fraction was expended for myself; nowhere do I possess property or other capital

assets that I can call my own. * I restrict of necessity my personal wants so far that I am a

complete abstainer from alcohol and tobacco, take my meals in most modest restaurants, and

aside from my minimal apartment rent make no expenditures that are not chargeable to my

expenses as a political writer … Also the automobile is for me but a means to an end. It alone

makes it possible for me to accomplish my daily work.8

The Finance Office allowed but one half of the deductions, and when Hitler

appealed to the Review Board it upheld the original assessment. Thereafter only

one half of his expense deductions were allowed by the tax authorities. He

protested but paid.

The Nazi leader’s reported gross income in his tax returns correspond pretty

accurately to his royalties from Mein Kampf: 19,843 R.M. in 1925, 15,903 R.M.

in 1926, 11,494 R.M. in 1927, 11,818 R.M. in 1928 and 15,448 R.M. in 1929.

Since publishers’ books were subject to inspection by the tax office, Hitler could

not safely report an income less than his royalties. But what about other sources

of income? These were never reported. It was known that he demanded, and

received, a high fee for the many articles which he wrote in those days for the

impoverished Nazi press. There was much grumbling in party circles over the

high cost of Hitler. These items are absent from his tax declarations. As the

Twenties neared their end, money started to flow into the Nazi Party from a few

of the big Bavarian and Rhineland industrialists who were attracted by Hitler’s

opposition to the Marxists and the trade unions. Fritz Thyssen, head of the

German steel trust, the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel Works), and Emil

Kirdorf, the Ruhr coal king, contributed sizable sums. Often the money was

handed over directly to Hitler. How much he kept for himself will probably

never be known. But his scale of living in the last few years before he became

Chancellor indicates that not all of the money he received from his backers was

turned over to the party treasury.

To be sure, from 1925 to 1928 he complained of difficulty in meeting his

income tax payments; he was constantly in arrears and invariably asking for

further postponements. In September of 1926 he wrote the Finance Office: “At

the moment I am not in a position to pay the taxes; to cover my living expenses I

have had to raise a loan.” Later he claimed of that period that “for years I lived

on Tyrolean apples. It’s unbelievable what economies we had to make. Every

mark saved was for the party.” And between 1925 and 1928 he contended, to the

tax collector, that he was going ever deeper in debt. In 1926 he reported

expenditures of 31,209 R.M. against an income of 15,903 R.M. and stated the

deficit had been made up by further “bank loans.”

Then, miraculously, in 1929, though his declared income was considerably

less than in 1925, the item of interest on or repayment of loans disappears from

his tax declaration—and never reappears. As Professor Hale, on whose studies

the foregoing is based, remarked, “a financial miracle had been wrought and he

had liquidated his indebtedness. ”9

Hitler, it must be said in fairness, never seemed to care much about money—if

he had enough to live on comfortably and if he did not have to toil for it in

wages or a salary. At any rate, beginning with 1930, when his book royalties

suddenly tripled from the previous year to some $12,000 and money started

pouring in from big business, any personal financial worries he may have had

were over for good. He could now devote his fierce energies and all his talents to

the task of fulfilling his destiny. The time for his final drive for power, for the

dictatorship of a great nation, had arrived.

THE OPPORTUNITIES OF THE DEPRESSION

The depression which spread over the world like a great conflagration toward

the end of 1929 gave Adolf Hitler his opportunity, and he made the most of it.

Like most great revolutionaries he could thrive only in evil times, at first when

the masses were unemployed, hungry and desperate, and later when they were

intoxicated by war. Yet in one respect he was unique among history’s

revolutionaries: He intended to make his revolution after achieving political

power. There was to be no revolution to gain control of the State. That goal was

to be reached by mandate of the voters or by the consent of the rulers of the

nation—in short, by constitutional means. To get the votes Hitler had only to

take advantage of the times, which once more, as the Thirties began, saw the

German people plunged into despair; to obtain the support of those in power he

had to convince them that only he could rescue Germany from its disastrous

predicament. In the turbulent years from 1930 to 1933 the shrewd and daring

Nazi leader set out with renewed energy to obtain these twin objectives. In

retrospect it can be seen that events themselves and the weakness and confusion

of the handful of men who were bound by their oath to loyally defend the

democratic Republic which they governed played into Hitler’s hands. But this

was by no means foreseeable at the beginning of 1930.

Gustav Stresemann died on October 3, 1929. He had exhausted himself by his

strenuous labors, as Foreign Minister over the preceding six years, to restore

defeated Germany to the ranks of the big powers and to guide the German

people toward political and economic stability. His successes had been

prodigious. He had brought Germany into the League of Nations, negotiated the

Dawes Plan and the Young Plan which reduced reparations to a level which

Germany could easily pay, and in 1925 had been one of the chief architects of

the Pact of Locarno which brought Western Europe the first tranquillity its war-

weary, strife-ridden people had known in a generation.

Three weeks after Stresemann’s death, on October 24, the stock market in

Wall Street crashed. The results in Germany were soon felt—and disastrously.

The cornerstone of German prosperity had been loans from abroad, principally

from America, and world trade. When the flow of loans dried up and repayment

on the old ones became due the German financial structure was unable to stand

the strain. When world trade sagged following the general slump Germany was

unable to export enough to pay for essential imports of the raw materials and

food which she needed. Without exports, German industry could not keep its

plants going, and its production fell by almost half from 1929 to 1932. Millions

were thrown out of work. Thousands of small business enterprises went under.

In May of 1931 Austria’s biggest bank, the Kreditanstalt, collapsed, and this was

followed on July 13 by the failure of one of Germany’s principal banks, the

Darmstaedter und Nationalbank, which forced the government in Berlin to close

down all banks temporarily. Not even President Hoover’s initiative in

establishing a moratorium on all war debts, including German reparations, which

became effective on July 6, could stem the tide. The whole Western world was

stricken by forces which its leaders did not understand and which they felt were

beyond man’s control. How was it possible that suddenly there could be so much

poverty, so much human suffering, in the midst of so much plenty?

Hitler had predicted the catastrophe, but no more than any other politician did

he understand what had brought it about; perhaps he had less understanding than

most, since he was both ignorant of and uninterested in economics. But he was

not uninterested in or ignorant of the opportunities which the depression

suddenly gave him. The misery of the German people, their lives still scarred by

disastrous experience of the collapse of the mark less than ten years before, did

not arouse his compassion. On the contrary, in the darkest days of that period,

when the factories were silent, when the registered unemployed numbered over

six million and bread lines stretched for blocks in every city in the land, he could

write in the Nazi press: “Never in my life have I been so well disposed and

inwardly contented as in these days. For hard reality has opened the eyes of

millions of Germans to the unprecedented swindles, lies and betrayals of the

Marxist deceivers of the people. ”10 The suffering of his fellow Germans was not

something to waste time sympathizing with, but rather to transform, cold-

bloodedly and immediately, into political support for his own ambitions. This he

proceeded to do in the late summer of 1930.

Hermann Mueller, the last Social Democrat Chancellor of Germany and the

head of the last government based on a coalition of the democratic parties which

had sustained the Weimar Republic, had resigned in March 1930 because of a

dispute among the parties over the unemployment insurance fund. He had been

replaced by Heinrich Bruening, the parliamentary leader of the Catholic Center

Party, who had won the Iron Cross as a captain of a machine gun company

during the war and whose sober, conservative views in the Reichstag had

attracted the favorable attention of the Army and in particular of a general by the

name of Kurt von Schleicher, who was then quite unknown to the German

public. Schleicher, a vain, able, ambitious “desk officer,” already acknowledged

in military circles as a talented and unscrupulous intriguer, had suggested

Bruening’s name to President von Hindenburg. The new Chancellor, though he

may not have realized it fully, was the Army’s candidate. A man of sterling

personal character, unselfish, modest, honest, dedicated, somewhat austere in

nature, Bruening hoped to restore stable parliamentary government in Germany

and rescue the country from the growing slump and political chaos. It was the

tragedy of this well-meaning and democratically minded patriot that, in trying to

do so, he unwittingly dug the grave for German democracy and thus,

unintentionally, paved the way for the coming of Adolf Hitler.

Bruening was unable to induce a majority of the Reichstag to approve certain

measures in his financial program. He thereupon asked Hindenburg to invoke

Article 48 of the constitution and under its emergency powers approve his

financial bill by presidential decree. The chamber responded by voting a demand

for the withdrawal of the decree. Parliamentary government was breaking down

at a moment when the economic crisis made strong government imperative. In

an effort to find a way out of the impasse, Bruening requested the President in

July 1930 to dissolve the Reichstag. New elections were called for September

14. How Bruening expected to get a stable parliamentary majority in a new

election is a question that was never answered. But Hitler realized that his own

opportunity had come sooner than he expected.

The hard-pressed people were demanding a way out of their sorry

predicament. The millions of unemployed wanted jobs. The shopkeepers wanted

help. Some four million youths who had come of voting age since the last

election wanted some prospect of a future that would at least give them a living.

To all the millions of discontented Hitler in a whirlwind campaign offered what

seemed to them, in their misery, some measure of hope. He would make

Germany strong again, refuse to pay reparations, repudiate the Versailles Treaty,

stamp out corruption, bring the money barons to heel (especially if they were

Jews) and see to it that every German had a job and bread. To hopeless, hungry

men seeking not only relief but new faith and new gods, the appeal was not

without effect.

Though his hopes were high, Hitler was surprised on the night of September

14, 1930, when the election returns came in. Two years before, his party had

polled 810,000 votes and elected 12 members to the Reichstag. This time he had

counted on quadrupling the Nazi vote and securing perhaps 50 seats in

Parliament. But on this day the vote of the N.S.D.A.P. rose to 6,409,600,

entitling the party to 107 seats in the Reichstag and propelling it from the ninth

and smallest party in Parliament to the second largest.

At the other extreme, the Communists had also gained, from 3,265,000 votes

in 1928 to 4,592,000, with their representation in the Reichstag increased from

54 to 77. The moderate middle-class parties, with the exception of the Catholic

Center, lost over a million votes, as did the Social Democrats, despite the

addition of four million new voters at the polls. The vote of the right-wing

Nationalists of Hugenberg dropped from four to two million. It was clear that the

Nazis had captured millions of adherents from the other middle-class parties. It

was also clear that henceforth it would be more difficult than ever for Bruening

—or for anyone else—to command a stable majority in the Reichstag. Without

such a majority how could the Republic survive?

This was a question which on the morrow of the 1930 elections became of

increased interest to two pillars of the nation whose leaders had never really

accepted the Republic except as a passing misfortune in German history: the

Army and the world of the big industrialists and financiers. Flushed by his

success at the polls, Hitler now turned his attention toward winning over these

two powerful groups. Long ago in Vienna, as we have seen, he had learned from

the tactics of Mayor Karl Lueger the importance of bringing “powerful existing

institutions” over to one’s side.

A year before, on March 15, 1929, Hitler had made a speech in Munich in

which he appealed to the Army to reconsider its enmity toward National

Socialism and its support of the Republic.

The future does not lie with the parties of destruction, but rather with the parties who carry

in themselves the strength of the people, who are prepared and who wish to bind themselves to

this Army in-order to aid the Army someday in defending the interests of the people. In

contrast we still see the officers of our Army belatedly tormenting themselves with the

question as to how far one can go along with Social Democracy. But, my dear sirs, do you

really believe that you have anything in common with an ideology which stipulates the

dissolution of all that which is the basis of the existence of an army?

This was a skillful bid for the support of the officers of the Army which, as

most of them believed and as Hitler now repeated for the hundredth time, had

been stabbed in the back and betrayed by the very Republic which they were

now supporting and which, moreover, had no love for the military caste and all

that it stood for. And then in words which were prophetic of what he himself one

day would do, he warned the officers of what would happen to them if the

Marxists triumphed over the Nazis. Should that happen, he said,

You may write over the German Army: “The end of the German Army.” For then,

gentlemen, you must definitely become political…. You may then become hangmen of the

regime and political commissars, and if you do not behave your wife and child will be put

behind locked doors. And if you still do not behave, you will be thrown out and perhaps stood

up against a wall …11

Relatively few persons heard the speech, but in order to propagate it in Army

circles the Voelkischer Beobachter published it verbatim in a special Army

edition and it was discussed at length in the columns of a Nazi monthly

magazine, Deutscher Wehrgeist, a periodical devoted to military affairs which

had recently appeared.

In 1927 the Army had forbidden the recruitment of Nazis in the 100,000-man

Reichswehr and even banned their employment as civilians in the arsenals and

supply depots. But by the beginning of 1930 it became obvious that Nazi

propaganda was making headway in the Army, especially among the younger

officers, many of whom were attracted not only by Hitler’s fanatical nationalism

but by the prospects he held out for an Army restored to its old glory and size in

which there would be opportunities, now denied them in such a small military

force, to advance to higher rank.

The Nazi infiltration into the armed services became serious enough to

compel General Groener, now the Minister of Defense, to issue an order of the

day on January 22, 1930, which recalled a similar warning to the Army by

General von Seeckt on the eve of the Beer Hall Putsch seven years before. The

Nazis, he declared, were greedy for power. “They therefore woo the Wehrmacht.

In order to use it for the political aims of their party, they attempt to dazzle us

[into believing] that the National Socialists alone represent the truly national

power.” He requested the soldiers to refrain from politics and to “serve the state”

aloof from all party strife.

That some of the young Reichswehr officers were not refraining from politics,

or at least not from Nazi politics, came to light shortly afterward and aroused a

furor in Germany, dissension in the highest echelons of the officer corps, and

delight in the Nazi camp. In the spring of 1930 three young lieutenants, Ludin,

Scheringer and Wendt, of the garrison at Ulm were arrested for spreading Nazi

doctrines in the Army and for trying to induce their fellow officers to agree that

in the case of an armed Nazi revolt they would not fire on the rebels. This last

was high treason, but General Groener, not wishing to publicize the fact that

treason existed in the Army, attempted to hush up the affair by arranging for the

accused to be tried before a court-martial for a simple breach of discipline. The

defiance of Lieutenant Scheringer, who smuggled out an inflammatory article

for the Voelkischer Beobachter, made this impossible. A week after the Nazi

successes in the September elections of 1930, the three subalterns were arraigned

before the Supreme Court at Leipzig on charges of high treason. Among their

defenders were two rising Nazi lawyers, Hans Frank and Dr. Carl Sack. *

But it was neither the lawyers nor the accused who occupied the limelight at

the trial, but Adolf Hitler. He was called by Frank as a witness. His appearance

represented a calculated risk. It would be embarrassing to disown the three

lieutenants, whose activities were proof of the growth of Nazi sentiment in the

Army, which he did not want to discourage. It was embarrassing that Nazi

efforts to subvert the Army had been uncovered. And it was not helpful to his

present tactics that the prosecution had charged the Nazi Party with being a

revolutionary organization intent on overthrowing the government by force. To

deny that last charge, Hitler arranged with Frank to testify for the defense. But in

reality the Fuehrer had a much more important objective. That was, as leader of

a movement which had just scored a stunning popular triumph at the polls, to

assure the Army and especially its leading officers that National Socialism, far

from posing a threat to the Reichswehr, as the case of the Nazi subalterns

implied, was really its salvation and the salvation of Germany.

From this national forum which the witness box afforded, Hitler made good

use of all his forensic talents and his subtle sense of political strategy, and if his

masterly display was full of deceit, as it was, few in Germany, even among the

generals, seemed to be aware of it. Blandly Hitler assured the court (and the

Army officers) that neither the S.A. nor the party was fighting the Army. “I have

always held the view,” he declared, “that any attempt to replace the Army was

madness. None of us have any interest in replacing the Army … We will see to

it, when we have come to power, that out of the present Reichswehr a great

Army of the German people shall arise.”

And he reiterated to the court (and the generals) that the Nazi Party was

seeking to capture power only by constitutional means and that the young

officers were mistaken if they anticipated an armed revolt.

Our movement has no need of force. The time will come when the German nation will get

to know of our ideas; then thirty-five million Germans will stand behind me … When we do

possess constitutional rights, then we will form the State in the manner which we consider to

be the right one.

THE PRESIDENT OF THE COURT: This, too, by constitutional means?

HITLER: Yes.

But Hitler, though he was addressing mainly the Army and the other

conservative elements in Germany, had to consider the revolutionary fervor of

his own party followers. He could not let them down, as he had the three

accused. He therefore seized on the opportunity presented when the president of

the court recalled a statement of his in 1923, a month before his unsuccessful

putsch, that “heads will roll in the sand.” Did the Nazi leader repudiate that

utterance today?

I can assure you [Hitler replied] that when the National Socialist movement is victorious in

this struggle, then there will be a National Socialist Court of Justice too. Then the November

1918 revolution will be avenged and heads will roll!12

No one can say that Hitler did not give warning of what he would do if he

came to power, but the audience in the courtroom apparently welcomed it, for

they applauded the threat loudly and long, and though the presiding judge took

exception to the interruption neither he nor the public prosecutor made objection

to the remark. It made a sensational headline in newspapers throughout Germany

and in many outside. Lost in the excitement of Hitler’s utterances was the actual

case in hand. The three young officers, their zeal for National Socialism

disavowed by the Supreme Leader of National Socialism himself, were found

guilty of conspiracy to commit high treason and given the mild sentence of

eighteen months of fortress detention—in republican Germany the severe

sentences on this charge were reserved for those who supported the Republic. *

The month of September 1930 marked a turning point in the road that was

leading the Germans inexorably toward the Third Reich. The surprising success

of the Nazi Party in the national elections convinced not only millions of

ordinary people but many leaders in business and in the Army that perhaps here

was an upsurge that could not be stopped. They might not like the party’s

demagoguery and its vulgarity, but on the other hand it was arousing the old

feelings of German patriotism and nationalism which had been so muted during

the first ten years of the Republic. It promised to lead the German people away

from communism, socialism, trade-unionism and the futilities of democracy.

Above all, it had caught fire throughout the Reich. It was a success.

Because of this and of Hitler’s public assurances to the Army at the Leipzig

trial, some of the generals began to ponder whether National Socialism might

not be just what was needed to unify the people, restore the old Germany, make

the Army big and great once more and enable the nation to shake off the

shackles of the humiliating Treaty of Versailles. They had been pleased with

Hitler’s retort to the presiding judge of the Supreme Court, who had asked him

what he meant when he kept talking about the “German National Revolution.”

“This means,” Hitler had said, “exclusively the rescue of the enslaved German

nation we have today. Germany is bound hand and foot by the peace treaties …

The National Socialists do not regard these treaties as law, but as something

imposed upon Germany by constraint. We do not admit that future generations,

who are completely innocent, should be burdened by them. If we protest against

them with every means in our power, then we find ourselves on the path of

revolution.”

That was the view of the officer corps too. Some of its leading members had

bitterly criticized General Groener, the Minister of Defense, for allowing the

three subalterns to be tried by the Supreme Court. General Hans von Seeckt, the

recently deposed Commander in Chief and generally acknowledged as the

postwar genius of the German Army, the worthy successor of Scharnhorst and

Gneisenau, complained to Groener that it had weakened the spirit of solidarity

within the officer corps. Colonel Ludwig Beck, who was soon to become Chief

of Staff and later an even more important figure in this history but who in 1930

was the commander of the 5th Artillery Regiment at Ulm from which the three

lieutenants had come, not only protested vehemently to his superiors against

their arrest but testified in their defense at Leipzig.

Now that the trial was over and Hitler had spoken, the generals felt better

disposed toward a movement which they had previously regarded as a threat to

the Army. General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations of the Armed Forces High

Command during World War II, told the military tribunal at Nuremberg just

what the Nazi leader’s statement at Leipzig had meant to the officer corps. Until

that time, he said, the senior officers had believed Hitler was trying to undermine

the Army; now they were reassured. General von Seeckt himself, after his

election to the Reichstag in 1930, openly allied himself with Hitler for a while

and in 1932 urged his sister to vote for Hitler—instead of for his old chief,

Hindenburg—in the presidential elections.

The political blindness of the German Army officers, which was to prove so

fatal to them in the end, had begun to grow and to show.

The political ineptitude of the magnates of industry and finance was no less

than that of the generals and led to the mistaken belief that if they coughed up

large enough sums for Hitler he would be beholden to them and, if he ever came

to power, do their bidding. That the Austrian upstart, as many of them had

regarded him in the Twenties, might well take over the control of Germany

began to dawn on the business leaders after the sensational Nazi gains in the

September elections of 1930.

By 1931, Walther Funk testified at Nuremberg, “my industrial friends and I

were convinced that the Nazi Party would come to power in the not too distant

future.”

In the summer of that year Funk, a greasy, shifty-eyed, paunchy little man

whose face always reminded this writer of a frog, gave up a lucrative job as

editor of a leading German financial newspaper, the Berliner Boersenzeitung,

joined the Nazi Party and became a contact man between the party and a number

of important business leaders. He explained at Nuremberg that several of his

industrialist friends, especially those prominent in the big Rhineland mining

concerns, had urged him to join the Nazi movement “in order to persuade the

party to follow the course of private enterprise.”

At that time the leadership of the party held completely contradictory and confused views

on economic policy. I tried to accomplish my mission by personally impressing on the Fuehrer

and the party that private initiative, self-reliance of the businessman, the creative powers of

free enterprise, et cetera, be recognized as the basic economic policy of the party. The Fuehrer

personally stressed time and again during talks with me and industrial leaders to whom I had

introduced him, that he was an enemy of state economy and of so-called “planned economy”

and that he considered free enterprise and competition as absolutely necessary in order to gain

the highest possible production.13

Hitler, then, as his future Reichsbank president and Minister of Economics

says, was beginning to see the men in Germany who had the money, and he was

telling them more or less what they wanted to hear. The party needed large sums

to finance election campaigns, pay the bill for its widespread and intensified

propaganda, meet the payroll of hundreds of full-time officials and maintain the

private armies of the S.A. and the S.S., which by the end of 1930 numbered

more than 100,000 men—a larger force than the Reichswehr. The businessmen

and the bankers were not the only financial sources—the, party raised sizable

sums from dues, assessments, collections and the sale of party newspapers,

books and periodicals—but they were the largest. And the more money they

gave the Nazis, the less they would have for the other conservative parties which

they had been supporting hitherto.

“In the summer of 1931,” Otto Dietrich, Hitler’s press chief first for the party

and later for the Reich, relates, “the Fuehrer suddenly decided to concentrate

systematically on cultivating the influential industrial magnates.” 14

What magnates were they?

Their identity was a secret which was kept from all but the inner circle around

the Leader. The party had to play both sides of the tracks. It had to allow

Strasser, Goebbels and the crank Feder to beguile the masses with the cry that

the National Socialists were truly “socialists” and against the money barons. On

the other hand, money to keep the party going had to be wheedled out of those

who had an ample supply of it. Throughout the latter half of 1931, says Dietrich,

Hitler “traversed Germany from end to end, holding private interviews with

prominent [business] personalities.” So hush-hush were some of these meetings

that they had to be held “in some lonely forest glade. Privacy,” explains Dietrich,

“was absolutely imperative; the press must have no chance of doing mischief.

Success was the consequence.”

So was an almost comical zigzag in Nazi politics. Once in the fall of 1930

Strasser, Feder and Frick introduced a bill in the Reichstag on behalf of the Nazi

Party calling for a ceiling of 4 per cent on all interest rates, the expropriation of

the holdings of “the bank and stock exchange magnates” and of all “Eastern

Jews” without compensation, and the nationalization of the big banks. Hitler was

horrified; this was not only Bolshevism, it was financial suicide for the party. He

peremptorily ordered the party to withdraw the measure. Thereupon the

Communists reintroduced it, word for word. Hitler bade his party vote against it.

We know from the interrogations of Funk in the Nuremberg jail after the war

who some, at least, of the “influential industrial magnates” whom Hitler sought

out were. Emil Kirdorf, the union-hating coal baron who presided over a

political slush fund known as the “Ruhr Treasury” which was raised by the West

German mining interests, had been seduced by Hitler at the party congress in

1929. Fritz Thyssen, the head of the steel trust, who lived to regret his folly and

to write about it in a book called I Paid Hitler, was an even earlier contributor.

He had met the Nazi leader in Munich in 1923, been carried away by his

eloquence and forthwith made, through Ludendorff, an initial gift of 100,000

gold marks ($25,000) to the then obscure Nazi Party. Joining Thyssen was

Albert Voegler, also a power in the United Steel Works. In fact the coal and steel

interests were the principal sources of the funds that came from the industrialists

to help Hitler over his last hurdles to power in the period between 1930 and

1933.

But Funk named other industries and concerns whose directors did not want to

be left out in the cold should Hitler make it in the end. The list is a long one,

though far from complete, for Funk had a wretched memory by the time he

arrived for trial at Nuremberg. It included Georg von Schnitzler, a leading

director of I. G. Farben, the giant chemical cartel; August Rosterg and August

Diehn of the potash industry (Funk speaks of this industry’s “positive attitude

toward the Fuehrer”); Cuno of the Hamburg-Amerika line; the brown-coal

industry of central Germany; the Conti rubber interests; Otto Wolf, the powerful

Cologne industrialist; Baron Kurt von Schroeder, the Cologne banker, who was

to play a pivotal role in the final maneuver which hoisted Hitler to power;

several leading banks, among which were the Deutsche Bank, the Commerz und

Privat Bank, the Dresdener Bank, the Deutsche Kredit Gesellschaft; and

Germany’s largest insurance concern, the Allianz.

Wilhelm Keppler, one of Hitler’s economic advisers, brought in a number of

South German industrialists and also formed a peculiar society of businessmen

devoted to the S.S. chief, Himmler, called the Circle of Friends of the Economy

(Freundeskreis der Wirtschaft), which later became known as the Circle of

Friends of the Reichsfuehrer S.S., who was Himmler, and which raised millions

of marks for this particular gangster to pursue his “researches” into Aryan

origins. From the very beginning of his political career Hitler had been helped

financially—and socially—by Hugo Bruckman, the wealthy Munich publisher,

and by Carl Bechstein, the piano manufacturer, both of whose wives developed a

touching fondness for the rising young Nazi leader. It was in the Bechstein

mansion in Berlin that Hitler first met many of the business and Army leaders

and it was there that some of the decisive secret meetings took place which led

him finally to the chancellorship.

Not all German businessmen jumped on the Hitler bandwagon after the Nazi

election showing in 1930. Funk mentions that the big electric corporations

Siemens and A.E.G. stood aloof, as did the king of the munition makers, Krupp

von Bohlen und Halbach. Fritz Thyssen in his confessions declares that Krupp

was a “violent opponent” of Hitler and that as late as the day before Hindenburg

appointed him Chancellor Krupp urgently warned the old Field Marshal against

such a folly. However, Krupp soon saw the light and quickly became, in the

words of the repentant Thyssen, “a super Nazi. ”15

It is obvious, then, that in his final drive for power Hitler had considerable

financial backing from a fairly large chunk of the German business world. How

much the bankers and businessmen actually contributed to the Nazi Party in

those last three years before January 1933 has never been established. Funk says

it probably amounted to no more than “a couple of million marks.” Thyssen

estimates it at two millions a year; he says he himself personally gave one

million marks. But judged by the large sums which the party had at its disposal

in those days, though Goebbels complained it was never enough, the total gifts

from business were certainly larger than these estimates by many times. What

good they eventually did these politically childish men of the business world will

be seen later in this narrative. One of the most enthusiastic of them at this time—

as he was one of the most bitterly disillusioned of them afterward—was Dr.

Schacht, who resigned his presidency of the Reichsbank in 1930 because of his

opposition to the Young Plan, met Goering in that year and Hitler in 1931 and

for the next two years devoted all of his considerable abilities to bringing the

Fuehrer closer to his banker and industrialist friends and ever closer to the great

goal of the Chancellor’s seat. By 1932 this economic wizard, whose

responsibility for the coming of the Third Reich and for its early successes

proved to be so immeasurably great, was writing Hitler: “I have no doubt that

the present development of things can only lead to your becoming Chancellor …

Your movement is carried internally by so strong a truth and necessity that

victory cannot elude you long … No matter where my work may take me in the

near future, even if someday you should see me imprisoned in a fortress, you can

always count on me as your loyal supporter.” One of the two letters from which

these words are taken was signed: “With a vigorous ‘Heil.’”16

One “so strong a truth” of the Nazi movement, which Hitler had never made

any secret of, was that if the party ever took over Germany it would stamp out a

German’s personal freedom, including that of Dr. Schacht and his business

friends. It would be some time before the genial Reichsbank president, as he

would again become under Hitler, and his associates in industry and finance

would wake up to this. And since this history, like all history, is full of sublime

irony, it would not be too long a time before Dr. Schacht proved himself to be a

good prophet not only about Hitler’s chancellorship but about the Fuehrer’s

seeing him imprisoned, if not in a fortress then in a concentration camp, which

was worse, and not as Hitler’s “loyal supporter”—here he was wrong—but in an

opposite capacity.

Hitler had now, by the start of 1931, gathered around him in the party the little

band of fanatical, ruthless men who would help him in his final drive to power

and who, with one exception, would be at his side to help him sustain that power

during the years of the Third Reich, though another of them, who was closest of

all to him and perhaps the ablest and most brutish of the lot, would not survive,

even with his life, the second year of Nazi government. There were five who

stood above the other followers at this time. These were Gregor Strasser,

Roehm, Goering, Goebbels and Frick.

Goering had returned to Germany at the end of 1927, following a general

political amnesty which the. Communists had helped the parties of the Right put

through the Reichstag. In Sweden, where he had spent most of his exile since the

1923 putsch, he had been cured of addiction to narcotics at the Langbro Asylum

and when he was well had earned his living with a Swedish aircraft company.

The dashing, handsome World War ace had now grown corpulent but had lost

none of his energy or his zest for life. He settled down in a small but luxurious

bachelor’s flat in the Badischestrasse in Berlin (his epileptic wife, whom he

deeply loved, had contracted tuberculosis and remained, an invalid, in Sweden),

earned his living as adviser to aircraft companies and the German airline,

Lufthansa, and cultivated his social contacts. These contacts were considerable

and ranged from the former Crown Prince and Prince Philip of Hesse, who had

married Princess Mafalda, the daughter of the King of Italy, to Fritz Thyssen and

other barons of the business world, as well as to a number of prominent officers

of the Army.

These were the very connections which Hitler lacked but needed, and Goering

soon became active in introducing the Nazi leader to his friends and in

counteracting in upper-class circles the bad odor which some of the Brownshirt

ruffians exuded. In 1928 Hitler chose Goering as one of the twelve Nazi deputies

to represent the party in the Reichstag, of which he became President when the

Nazis became the largest party in 1932. It was in the official residence of the

Reichstag President that many of the meetings were held and intrigues hatched

which led to the party’s ultimate triumph, and it was here—to jump ahead in

time a little—that a plan was connived that helped Hitler to stay in power after

he became Chancellor: to set the Reichstag on fire.

Emst Roehm had broken with Hitler in 1925 and not long afterward gone off

to join the Bolivian Army as a lieutenant colonel. Toward the end of 1930 Hitler

appealed to him to return and take over again the leadership of the S.A., which

was getting out of hand. Its members, even its leaders, apparently believed in a

coming Nazi revolution by violence, and with increasing frequency they were

taking to the streets to molest and murder their political opponents. No election,

national, provincial or municipal, took place without savage battles in the

gutters.

Passing notice must here be taken of one of these encounters, for it provided

National Socialism with its greatest martyr. One of the neighborhood leaders of

the S.A. in Berlin was Horst Wessel, son of a Protestant chaplain, who had

forsaken his family and his studies and gone to live in a slum with a former

prostitute and devote his life to fighting for Nazism. Many anti-Nazis always

held that the youth earned his living as a pimp, though this charge may have

been exaggerated. Certainly he consorted with pimps and prostitutes. He was

murdered by some Communists in February 1930 and would have passed into

oblivion along with hundreds of other victims of both sides in the street wars had

it not been for the fact that he left behind a song whose words and tune he had

composed. This was the Horst Wessel song, which soon became the official song

of the Nazi party and later the second official anthem—after “Deutschland ueber

Alles”—of the Third Reich. Horst Wessel himself, thanks to Dr. Goebbels’

skillful propaganda, became one of the great hero legends of the movement,

hailed as a pure idealist who had given his life for the cause.

At the time Roehm took over the S.A., Gregor Strasser was undoubtedly the

Number Two man in the Nazi Party. A forceful speaker and a brilliant organizer,

he was the head of the party’s most important office, the Political Organization,

a post which gave him great influence among the provincial and local leaders

whose labors he supervised. With his genial Bavarian nature, he was the most

popular leader in the party next to Hitler, and, unlike the Fuehrer he enjoyed the

personal trust and even liking of most of his political opponents. There were a

good many at that time, within and without the party, who believed that Strasser

might well supplant the moody, incalculable Austrian leader. This view was

especially strong in the Reichswehr and in the President’s Palace.

Otto, Gregor Strasser’s brother, had fallen by the wayside. Unfortunately for

him, he had taken seriously not only the word “socialist” but the word “workers”

in the party’s official name of National Socialist German Workers’ Party. He

had supported certain strikes of the socialist trade unions and demanded that the

party come out for nationalization of industry. This of course was heresy to

Hitler, who accused Otto Strasser of professing the cardinal sins of “democracy

and liberalism.” On May 21 and 22, 1930, the Fuehrer had a showdown with his

rebellious subordinate and demanded complete submission. When Otto refused,

he was booted out of the party. He tried to form a truly national “socialist”

movement, the Union of Revolutionary National Socialists, which became

known only as the Black Front, but in the September elections it failed

completely to win any sizable number of Nazi votes away from Hitler.

Goebbels, the fourth member of the Big Five around Hitler, had remained an

enemy and rival of Gregor Strasser ever since their break in 1926. Two years

after that he had succeeded Strasser as propaganda chief of the party when the

latter was moved up to head the Political Organization. He had remained as

Gauleiter of Berlin, and his achievements in reorganizing the party there as well

as his talents for propaganda had favorably impressed the Fuehrer. His glib but

biting tongue and his nimble mind had not endeared him to Hitler’s other chief

lieutenants, who distrusted him. But the Nazi leader was quite content to see

strife among his principal subordinates, if only because it was a safeguard

against their conspiring together against his leadership. He never fully trusted

Strasser, but in the loyalty of Goebbels he had complete confidence; moreover,

the lame little fanatic was bubbling with ideas which were useful to him. Finally,

Goebbels’ talents as a rowdy journalist—he now had a Berlin newspaper of his

own, Der Angriff, to spout off in—and as a rabble-rousing orator were

invaluable to the party.

Wilhelm Frick, the fifth and last member of the group, was the only colorless

personality in it. He was a typical German civil servant. As a young police

officer in Munich before 1923 he had served as one of Hitler’s spies at police

headquarters, and the Fuehrer always felt grateful to him. Often he had taken on

the thankless tasks. On Hitler’s instigation he had become the first Nazi to hold

provincial office—in Thuringia—and later he became the leader of the Nazi

Party in the Reichstag. He was doggedly loyal, efficient and, because of the

façade of his retiring nature and suave manners, useful in contacts with wavering

officials in the republican government.

Some of the lesser men in the party in the early Thirties would subsequently

gain notoriety and frightening personal power in the Third Reich. Heinrich

Himmler, the poultry farmer, who, with his pince-nez, might be mistaken for a

mild, mediocre schoolmaster—he had a degree in agronomy from the Munich

Technische Hochschule—was gradually building up Hitler’s praetorian guard,

the black-coated S.S. But he worked under the shadow of Roehm, who was

commander of both the S.A. and the S.S., and he was little known, even in party

circles, outside his native Bavaria. There was Dr. Robert Ley, a chemist by

profession and a habitual drunkard, who was the Gauleiter of Cologne, and Hans

Frank, the bright young lawyer and leader of the party’s legal division. There

was Walther Darré, born in 1895 in the Argentine, an able agronomist who was

won over to National Socialism by Hess and whose book The Peasantry as the

Life Source of the Nordic Race brought him to Hitler’s attention and to a job as

head of the Agricultural Department of the party. Rudolf Hess himself,

personally unambitious and doggedly loyal to the Leader, held only the title of

private secretary to the Fuehrer. The second private secretary was one Martin

Bormann, a molelike man who preferred to burrow in the dark recesses of party

life to further his intrigues and who once had served a year in prison for

complicity in a political murder. The Reich Youth Leader was Baldur von

Schirach, a romantically minded young man and an energetic organizer, whose

mother was an American and whose great-grandfather, a Union officer, had lost

a leg at Bull Run; he told his American jailers at Nuremberg that he had become

an anti-Semite at the age of seventeen after reading a book called Eternal Jew,

by Henry Ford.

There was also Alfred Rosenberg, the ponderous, dim-witted Baltic pseudo

philosopher who, as we have seen, was one of Hitler’s earliest mentors and who

since the putsch of 1923 had poured out a stream of books and pamphlets of the

most muddled content and style, culminating in a 700-page work entitled The

Myth of the Twentieth Century. This was a ludicrous concoction of his half-

baked ideas on Nordic supremity palmed off as the fruit of what passed for

erudition in Nazi circles—a book which Hitler often said jokingly he had tried

unsuccessfully to read and which prompted Schirach, who fancied himself as a

writer, to remark once that Rosenberg was “a man who sold more copies of a

book no one ever read than any other author,” for in the first ten years after its

publication in 1930 it sold more than half a million copies. From the beginning

to the end Hitler always had a warm spot in his heart for this dull, stupid,

fumbling man, rewarding him with various party jobs such as editor of the

Voelkischer Beobachter and other Nazi publications and naming him as one of

the party’s deputies in the Reichstag in 1930, where he represented the

movement in the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Such was the conglomeration of men around the leader of the National

Socialists. In a normal society they surely would have stood out as a grotesque

assortment of misfits. But in the last chaotic days of the Republic they began to

appear to millions of befuddled Germans as saviors. And they had two

advantages over their opponents: They were led by a man who knew exactly

what he wanted and they were ruthless enough, and opportunist enough, to go to

any lengths to help him get it.

As the year of 1931 ran its uneasy course, with five million wage earners out

of work, the middle classes facing ruin, the farmers unable to meet their

mortgage payments, the Parliament paralyzed, the government floundering, the

eighty-four-year-old President fast sinking into the befuddlement of senility, a

confidence mounted in the breasts of the Nazi chieftains that they would not

have long to wait. As Gregor Strasser publicly boasted, “All that serves to

precipitate the catastrophe … is good, very good for us and our German

revolution.”

* Michael was finally published in 1929, after Goebbels had become nationally known as a

Nazi leader. The Wanderer reached the stage after Goebbels became Propaganda Minister and

the boss of the German theater. It had a short run.

* These early diaries, unearthed by Allied intelligence agents after the war, are a rich source of

information for this period of Goebbels life.

* Later he bought it and, after becoming Chancellor, rebuilt it on a vast and lavish scale,

changing the name from Haus Wachenfeld to Berghof.

* Painted after her death by Adolf Ziegler, Hitler’s favorite painter.

* The italics in this declaration are Hitler’s.

* Both of whom would end their lives on the gallows, Sack for his part in the conspiracy

against Hitler on July 20, 1944, and Frank for what he did on behalf of Hitler in Poland.

* Lieutenant Scheringer, embittered by what he considered Hitler’s betrayal, renounced the

Nazi Party while in prison and became a fanatical Communist. He was marked—as were so

many who crossed Hitler—for liquidation in the June 30, 1934, purge, but somehow escaped

and lived to see the end of Hitler. Lieutenant Ludin remained an enthusiastic Nazi, was elected

to the Reichstag in 1932, became a high officer in the S.A. and the S.S., and served as German

minister to the puppet state of Slovakia, where he was arrested at the time of the liberation and

executed by the Czechoslovaks.

6

THE LAST DAYS OF THE REPUBLIC: 1931–33

OUT OF THE TURMOIL and chaos of German life there now emerged a curious and

devious figure who, more than any other single individual, was destined to dig

the grave of the Republic—one who would serve briefly as its last Chancellor

and, ironically, in one of the final twists of his astonishing career desperately try

to save it, when it was too late. This was Kurt von Schleicher, whose name in

German means “intriguer” or “sneak.”

In 1931 he was a lieutenant general in the Army. * Born in 1882, he had

entered military service at eighteen as a subaltern in Hindenburg’s old regiment,

the 3rd Foot Guards, where he became a close friend of Oskar von Hindenburg,

the son of the Field Marshal and President. His second friendship proved almost

as valuable. This was with General Groener, who was impressed by his

brilliance as a student at the War Academy, and who, when he replaced

Ludendorff at Supreme Headquarters in 1918, brought along the young officer as

his adjutant. Primarily a “desk officer”—he had seen but a short period of

service on the Russian front—Schleicher remained thereafter close to the sources

of power in the Army and in the Weimar Republic, where his nimble mind,

affable manners and flair for politics impressed both the generals and the

politicians. Under General von Seeckt he played an increasingly important role

in helping to organize the illegal free corps and the equally illegal and highly

secret “Black Reichswehr,” and he was a key figure in the confidential

negotiations with Moscow which led to the camouflaged training of German

tank and air officers in Soviet Russia and in the establishment of German-run

arms factories there. A gifted manipulator, with a passion for intrigue, Schleicher

worked best under cover in the dark. Until the beginning of the Thirties his name

was unknown to the general public, but for some time previously it had been

attracting increasing notice in the Bendlerstrasse, where the War Ministry was,

and in the Wilhelmstrasse, where the government ministries were situated.

In January 1928 he had used his growing influence with President

Hindenburg, with whom he had become close through his friendship with Oskar,

to have his old chief, General Groener, appointed as Minister of Defense, the

first military man to hold that post during the Republic. Groener made

Schleicher his right-hand man in the ministry, putting him in charge of a new

office, the Ministry Bureau (Ministeramt), where he handled the political and

press affairs of the Army and Navy. “My cardinal in politics,” Groener called his

assistant and entrusted him with the Army’s relations with the other ministries

and the political leaders. In this position Schleicher not only was a power in the

officer corps but began to be a power in politics. In the Army he could make and

break the higher officers and began to do so, getting rid of General von

Blomberg, the second-in-command of the Army, in 1930 by a piece of trickery

and replacing him with an old friend from the 3rd Foot Guards, General von

Hammerstein. In the spring of the same year, as we have seen, he made his first

effort to select the Chancellor himself and, with the backing of the Army, talked

Hindenburg into appointing Heinrich Bruening to that post.

In achieving this political triumph Schleicher carried out what he thought

would be the first step in a grandiose scheme to make over the Republic, an idea

which had been forming for some time in his agile mind. He saw clearly enough

—as who didn’t?—the causes of the weakness of the Weimar regime. There

were too many political parties (in 1930 ten of them each polled over a million

votes) and they were too much at cross-purposes, too absorbed in looking after

the special economic and social interests they represented to be able to bury their

differences and form an enduring majority in the Reichstag that could back a

stable government capable of coping with the major crisis which confronted the

country at the beginning of the Thirties. Parliamentary government had become

a matter of what the Germans called Kuhhandel—cattle trading—with the

parties bargaining for special advantages for the groups which elected them, and

the national interests be damned. No wonder that when Bruening took over as

Chancellor on March 28, 1930, it had become impossible to achieve a majority

in the Reichstag for any policy—of the Left, the Center or the Right—and that

merely to carry on the business of government and do something about the

economic paralysis he had to resort to Article 48 of the constitution, which

permitted him in an emergency, if the President approved, to govern by decree.

This was exactly the way Schleicher wished the Chancellor to govern. It made

for strong government under the forceful hand of the President, who, after all

(Schleicher argued), through his popular election represented the will of the

people and was backed by the Army. If the democratically elected Reichstag

couldn’t provide stable government, then the democratically elected President

must. What the majority of Germans wanted, Schleicher was sure, was a

government that would take a firm stand and lead them out of their hopeless

plight. Actually, as the elections which Bruening called in September showed,

that was not what the majority of Germans wanted. Or at least they did not want

to be led out of the wilderness by the kind of government which Schleicher and

his friends in the Army and in the Presidential Palace had chosen.

In truth, Schleicher had committed two disastrous mistakes. By putting up

Bruening as Chancellor and encouraging him to rule by presidential decree, he

had cracked the foundation of the Army’s strength in the nation—its position

above politics, the abandonment of which would lead to its own and Germany’s

ruin. And he had made a bad miscalculation about the voters. When six and a

half million of them, against 810,000 two years before, voted for the Nazi Party

on September 14, 1930, the political General realized that he must take a new

tack. By the end of the year he was in touch with Roehm, who had just returned

from Bolivia, and with Gregor Strasser. This was the first serious contact

between the Nazis and those who held the political power in the Republic. In just

two years its development was to lead Adolf Hitler to his goal and General von

Schleicher to his fall and ultimate murder.

On October 10, 1931, three weeks after the suicide of his niece and sweetheart,

Geli Raubal, Hitler was received by President Hindenburg for the first time.

Schleicher, busy weaving a new web of intrigue, had made the appointment.

Earlier that autumn he had conferred with Hitler and arranged for him to see

both the Chancellor and the President. In the back of his mind, as well as that of

Bruening, was the question of what to do when Hindenburg’s seven-year term of

office came to an end in the spring of 1932. The Field Marshal would be eighty-

five then, and the periods when his mind was lucid were diminishing. Still, as

everyone realized, if he were not a candidate to succeed himself, Hitler, though

he was not legally a German citizen, might contrive to become one, run for the

office, win the election and become President.

During the summer the scholarly Chancellor had pondered long hours over the

desperate plight of Germany. He quite realized that his government had become

the most unpopular one the Republic had ever had. To cope with the depression

he had decreed lower wages and salaries as well as lower prices and had

clamped down severe restrictions on business, finance and the social services.

The “Hunger Chancellor” he had been called by both the Nazis and the

Communists. Yet he thought he saw a way out that in the end would re-establish

a stable, free, prosperous Germany. He would try to negotiate with the Allies a

cancellation of reparations, whose payment had been temporarily stopped by the

Hoover moratorium. In the disarmament conference scheduled to begin the

following year he would try either to get the Allies to honor their pledge in the

Versailles Treaty to disarm to the level of Germany or to allow Germany to

embark openly on a modest program of rearmament, which in fact, with his

connivance, and in secret, it had already started to do. Thus the last shackle of

the peace treaty would be thrown off and Germany would emerge as an equal

among the big powers. This would be not only a boon to the Republic but might

launch, Bruening thought, a new era of confidence in the Western world that

would put an end to the economic depression which had brought the German

people such misery. And it would take the wind out of the Nazi sails.

Bruening planned to move boldly on the home front too and to bring about by

agreement of all the major parties save the Communists a fundamental change in

the German constitution. He meant to restore the Hohenzollern monarchy. Even

if Hindenburg could be persuaded to run again, he could not be expected at his

age to live out another full term of seven years. Should he die in another year or

two, the way would still be open to Hitler to be elected President. To forestall

that, to assure permanency and stability in the office of head of state, Bruening

broached the following plan: The 1932 presidential elections would be called off

and Hindenburg’s term of office simply extended, as it could be, by a two-thirds

vote in the two houses of Parliament, the Reichstag and the Reichsrat. As soon

as that was achieved, he would propose that Parliament proclaim a monarchy

with the President as regent. On his death one of the sons of the Crown Prince

would be put on the Hohenzollern throne. This act too would take the wind out

of the Nazis; in fact Bruening was confident that it would mean their end as a

political force.

But the aged President was not interested. He, whose duty it had been as

Commander of the Imperial Army to tell the Kaiser on that dark fall day of

November 1918 at Spa that he must go, that the monarchy was at an end, would

not consider any Hohenzollern’s resuming the throne except the Emperor

himself, who still lived in exile at Doom, in Holland. When Bruening explained

to him that the Social Democrats and the trade unions, which with the greatest

reluctance had given some encouragement to his plan if only because it might

afford the last desperate chance of stopping Hitler, would not stand for the return

of either Wilhelm II or his eldest son and that moreover if the monarchy were

restored it must be a constitutional and democratic one on the lines of the British

model, the grizzly old Field Marshal was so outraged he summarily dismissed

his Chancellor from his presence. A week later he recalled him to inform him

that he would not stand for re-election.

In the meantime first Bruening and then Hindenburg had had their first

meeting with Adolf Hitler. Both talks went badly for the Nazi leader. He had not

yet recovered from the blow of Geli Raubal’s suicide; his mind wandered and he

was unsure of himself. To Bruening’s request for Nazi support for the

continuance in office of Hindenburg Hitler answered with a long tirade against

the Republic which left little doubt that he would not go along with the

Chancellor’s plans. With Hindenburg, Hitler was ill at ease. He tried to impress

the old gentleman with a long harangue but it fell flat. The President, at this first

meeting, was not impressed by the “Bohemian corporal,” as he called him, and

told Schleicher that such a man might become Minister of Posts but never

Chancellor—words which the Field Marshal would later have to eat.

Hitler, in a huff, hastened off to Bad Harzburg, where on the next day,

October 11, he joined a massive demonstration of the “National Opposition”

against the governments of Germany and Prussia. This was an assembly not so

much of the radical Right, represented by the National Socialists, as of the older,

conservative forces of reaction: Hugenberg’s German National Party, the right-

wing veterans’ private army, the Stahlhelm, the so-called Bismarck Youth, the

Junkers’ Agrarian League, and an odd assortment of old generals. But the Nazi

leader did not have his heart in the meeting. He despised the frock-coated, top-

hatted, be-medaled relics of the old regime, with whom, he saw, it might be

dangerous to associate a “revolutionary” movement like his own too closely. He

raced through his speech in a perfunctory manner and left the field before the

parade of the Stahlhelm, which, to his annoyance, had shown up in larger

numbers than the S.A. The Harzburg Front which was formed that day and

which represented an effort of the old-line conservatives to bring the Nazis into a

united front to begin a final assault on the Republic (it demanded the immediate

resignation of Bruening) was thus stillborn. Hitler had no intention of playing

second fiddle to these gentlemen whose minds, he thought, were buried in the

past to which he knew there was no return. He might use them for the moment if

they helped to undermine the Weimar regime and made available to him, as they

did, new financial sources. But he would not, in turn, be used by them. Within a

few days the Harzburg Front was facing collapse; the various elements of it were

once more at each other’s throats.

Except on one issue. Both Hugenberg and Hitler refused to agree to

Bruening’s proposal that Hindenburg’s term of office be prolonged. At the

beginning of 1932 the Chancellor renewed his effort to get them to change their

minds. With great difficulty he had prevailed on the President to agree to serving

further if Parliament prolonged his term and thus made it unnecessary for him to

have to shoulder the burden of a bitter election campaign. Now Bruening invited

Hitler to come to Berlin for fresh discussions. The telegram arrived while the

Fuehrer was conferring with Hess and Rosenberg in the editorial offices of the

Voelkischer Beobachter in Munich. Thrusting the paper into their faces, Hitler

cried, “Now I have them in my pocket! They have recognized me as a partner in

their negotiations. ”1

On January 7 Hitler conferred with Bruening and Schleicher, and there was a

further meeting on January 10. Bruening repeated his proposal that the Nazi

Party agree to prolonging Hindenburg’s term. If this were done, and as soon as

he had settled the problem of cancellation of reparations and equality of

armaments, he himself would retire. According to some sources—it is a disputed

point—Bruening held out a further bait: he offered to suggest Hitler’s name to

the President as his successor. 2

Hitler did not immediately give a definite reply. He adjourned to the

Kaiserhof hotel and took counsel with his advisers. Gregor Strasser was in favor

of accepting Bruening’s plan, arguing that if the Nazis forced an election

Hindenburg would win it. Goebbels and Roehm were for an outright rejection. In

his diary for January 7, Goebbels wrote: “The Presidency is not the issue.

Bruening merely wants to strengthen his own position indefinitely … The chess

game for power begins…. The chief thing is that we remain strong and make no

compromises.” The night before, he had written: “There is a man in the

organization that no one trusts … This is Gregor Strasser. ”3

Hitler himself saw no reason to strengthen Bruening’s hand and thus give the

Republic a further lease on life. But unlike the thickheaded Hugenberg, who

rejected the plan outright on January 12, Hitler was more subtle. He replied not

to the Chancellor but over his head to the President, declaring that he regarded

Bruening’s proposal as unconstitutional but that he would support Hindenburg’s

re-election if the Field Marshal would reject Bruening’s plan. To Otto von

Meissner, the nimble Secretary of State at the Presidential Chancellery, who had

zealously served in that capacity first the Socialist Ebert and then the

conservative Hindenburg and who was beginning to think of a third term in

office for himself with whoever the President might be—perhaps even Hitler?—

the Nazi leader, in a secret conversation at the Kaiserhof, offered to support

Hindenburg in the elections if he would first get rid of Bruening, name a

“National” government and decree new elections for the Reichstag and the

Prussian Diet.

To this Hindenburg would not agree. Nettled by the refusal of the Nazis and

the Nationalists, the latter his friends and supposed supporters, to agree to spare

him the strain of an election battle, Hindenburg agreed to run again. But to his

resentment against the nationalist parties was added a curious spleen against

Bruening, who he felt had handled the whole matter badly and who was now

forcing him into bitter conflict with the very nationalist forces which had elected

him President in 1925 against the liberal–Marxist candidates. Now he could win

only with the support of the Socialists and the trade unions, for whom he had

always had an undisguised contempt. A marked coolness sprang up in his

dealings with his Chancellor—“the best,” he had said not so long ago, “since

Bismarck.”

A coolness toward Bruening also came over the General who had propelled

him into the chancellorship. To Schleicher the austere Catholic leader had been a

disappointment after all. He had become the most unpopular Chancellor the

Republic had ever had. He had been unable to obtain a majority in the country;

he had failed to curb the Nazis or to win them over; he had bungled the problem

of keeping Hindenburg on. Therefore he must go—and perhaps with him

General Groener, Schleicher’s revered chief, who did not seem to grasp the ideas

for the future which he, Schleicher, had in mind. The scheming General was not

exactly in a hurry. Bruening and Groener, the two strong men of the government,

must remain in power until Hindenburg was re-elected; without their support the

old Field Marshal might not make it. After the elections their usefulness would

be over.

HITLER AGAINST HINDENBURG

There were a number of occasions in the career of Adolf Hitler when, faced

with a difficult decision, he seemed unable to make up his mind, and this was

one of them. The question he faced in January 1932 was: to run or not to run for

President? Hindenburg seemed unbeatable. The legendary hero would be

supported not only by many elements of the Right but by the democratic parties

which had been against him in the election of 1925 but which now saw him as

the savior of the Republic. To run against the Field Marshal and be beaten, as he

almost certainly would be—was that not to risk the reputation for invincibility

which the Nazis had been building up in one provincial election after another

since their spectacular triumph in the national poll in 1930? And yet, not to run

—was that not a confession of weakness, a demonstration of a lack of

confidence that National Socialism was on the threshold of power? There was

another consideration. Hitler was at the moment not even eligible to run. He was

not a German citizen.

Joseph Goebbels urged him to announce his candidacy. On January 19 they

journeyed to Munich together and that evening Goebbels recorded in his diary:

“Discussed the question of the presidency with the Fuehrer. No decision has yet

been reached. I pleaded strongly for his own candidacy.” For the next month the

diary of Goebbels reflected the ups and downs in Hitler’s mind. On January 31:

“The Fuehrer’s decision will be made on Wednesday. It can no longer be in

doubt.” On February 2 it seemed that he had made it. Goebbels noted: “He

decides to be a candidate himself.” But Goebbels adds that the decision will not

be made public until it is seen what the Social Democrats do. Next day the party

leaders assemble in Munich to hear Hitler’s decision. “They wait in vain,”

Goebbels grumbles. “Everyone,” he adds, “is nervous and strained.” That

evening the little propaganda chief seeks relief; he steals away to see Greta

Garbo in a movie and is “moved and shaken” by this “greatest living actress.”

Later that night “a number of old party comrades come to me. They are

depressed at the lack of a decision. They fear that the Fuehrer is waiting too

long.”

He may be waiting too long, but Hitler’s confidence in his ultimate triumph

does not weaken. One night in Munich, the diary records, the Fuehrer has a long

discussion with Goebbels on which post the latter will have in the Third Reich.

The Leader has in mind for him, Goebbels says, a “Ministry of Popular

Education which will deal with films, radio, art, culture and propaganda.” On

another evening Hitler has a long discussion with his architect, Professor Troost,

over plans for a “grandiose alteration of the national capital.” And Goebbels

adds: “The Fuehrer has his plans all finished. He speaks, acts and feels as if we

were already in power.”

But he does not speak yet as if he were anxious to run against Hindenburg. On

February 9, Goebbels records, “the Fuehrer is back in Berlin. More debates at

the Kaiserhof over the presidential election. Everything is left in suspense.”

Three days later Goebbels goes over his calculations of votes with the Fuehrer.

“It’s a risk,” he says, “but it must be taken.” Hitler goes off to Munich to think it

over still further.

In the end his mind is made up for him by Hindenburg. On February 15 the

aged President formally announces his candidacy. Goebbels is happy. “Now we

have a free hand. Now we need no longer hide our decision.” But Hitler does

hide it until February 22. At a meeting that day in the Kaiserhof “the Fuehrer

gives me permission,” Goebbels rejoices, “to announce his candidacy at the

Sport Palace tonight.”

It was a bitter and confusing campaign. In the Reichstag Goebbels branded

Hindenburg as “the candidate of the party of the deserters” and was expelled

from the chamber for insulting the President. In Berlin the nationalist Deutsche

Zeitung, which had backed Hindenburg’s election in 1925, now turned on him

vehemently. “The present issue,” it declared, “is whether the internationalist

traitors and pacifist swine, with the approval of Hindenburg, are to bring about

the final ruin of Germany.”

All the traditional loyalties of classes and parties were upset in the confusion

and heat of the electoral battle. To Hindenburg, a Protestant, a Prussian, a

conservative and a monarchist, went the support of the Socialists, the trade

unions, the Catholics of Bruening’s Center Party and the remnants of the liberal,

democratic middle-class parties. To Hitler, a Catholic, an Austrian, a former

tramp, a “national socialist,” a leader of the lower-middle-class masses, was

rallied, in addition to his own followers, the support of the upper-class

Protestants of the north, the conservative Junker agrarians and a number of

monarchists, including, at the last minute, the former Crown Prince himself. The

confusion was further compounded by the entrance of two other candidates,

neither of whom could hope to win but both of whom might poll enough votes to

prevent either of the leading contestants from obtaining the absolute majority

needed for election. The Nationalists put up Theodor Duesterberg, second-in-

command of the Stahlhelm (of which Hindenburg was the honorary

commander), a colorless former lieutenant colonel whom the Nazis, to their glee,

soon discovered to be the great-grandson of a Jew. The Communists, shouting

that the Social Democrats were “betraying the workers” by supporting

Hindenburg, ran their own candidate, Ernst Thaelmann, the party’s leader. It was

not the first time, nor the last, that the Communists, on orders from Moscow,

risked playing into Nazi hands.

Before the campaign was scarcely under way Hitler solved the problem of his

citizenship. On February 25 it was announced that the Nazi Minister of the

Interior of the state of Brunswick had named Herr Hitler an attaché of the

legation of Brunswick in Berlin. Through this comic-opera maneuver the Nazi

leader became automatically a citizen of Brunswick and hence of Germany and

was therefore eligible to run for President of the German Reich. Having leaped

over this little hurdle with ease, Hitler threw himself into the campaign with

furious energy, crisscrossing the country, addressing large crowds at scores of

mass meetings and whipping them up into a state of frenzy. Goebbels and

Strasser, the other two spellbinders of the party, followed a similar schedule. But

this was not all. They directed a propaganda campaign such as Germany had

never seen. They plastered the walls of the cities and towns with a million

screeching colored posters, distributed eight million pamphlets and twelve

million extra copies of their party newspapers, staged three thousand meetings a

day and, for the first time in a German election, made good use of films and

gramophone records, the latter spouting forth from loudspeakers on trucks.

Bruening also worked tirelessly to win the election for the aged President. For

once this fair-minded man was ruthless enough to reserve all radio time on the

government-controlled networks for his own side—a tactic which infuriated

Hitler. Hindenburg spoke only once, in a recorded broadcast on March 10, on the

eve of the polling. It was a dignified utterance, one of the few made during the

campaign, and it was effective.

Election of a party man, representing one-sided extremist views, who would consequently

have the majority of the people against him, would expose the Fatherland to serious

disturbances whose outcome would be incalculable. Duty commanded me to prevent this … If

I am defeated, I shall at least not have incurred the reproach that of my own accord I deserted

my post in an hour of crisis … I ask for no votes from those who do not wish to vote for me.

Those who voted for him fell .4 per cent short of the needed absolute majority.

When the polls closed on March 13, 1932, the results were:

Hindenburg 18,651,497 49.6%

Hitler

11,339,446 30.1%

Thaelmann 4,983,341 13.2%

Duesterberg 2,557,729 6.8%

The figures were a disappointment to both sides. The old President had led the

Nazi demagogue by over seven million votes but had just failed to win the

required absolute majority; this necessitated a second election, in which the

candidate receiving the most votes would be elected. Hitler had increased the

Nazi vote over 1930 by nearly five million—some 86 per cent—but he had been

left far behind Hindenburg. Late on the evening of the polling there was deep

despair at the Goebbels home in Berlin, where many of the party leaders had

gathered to listen to the results over the radio. “We’re beaten; terrible outlook,”

Goebbels wrote in his diary that night. “Party circles badly depressed and

dejected … We can save ourselves only by a clever stroke.”

But in the Voelkischer Beobachter the next morning Hitler announced: “The

first election campaign is over. The second has begun today. I shall lead it.”

Indeed, he campaigned as vigorously as before. Chartering a Junkers passenger

plane, he flew from one end of Germany to the other—a novelty in

electioneering at that time—addressing three or four big rallies a day in as many

cities. Shrewdly, he altered his tactics to attract more votes. In the first campaign

he had harped on the misery of the people, the impotence of the Republic. Now

he depicted a happy future for all Germans if he were elected: jobs for the

workers, higher prices for the farmers, more business for the businessmen, a big

Army for the militarists, and once in a speech at the Lustgarten in Berlin he

promised, “In the Third Reich every German girl will find a husband!”

The Nationalists withdrew Duesterberg from the race and appealed to their

followers to vote for Hitler. Again even the dissolute former Crown Prince,

Friedrich Wilhelm, fell into line. “I shall vote for Hitler,” he announced.

April 10, 1932, the day of the second election, was dark and rainy, and a

million fewer citizens cast their votes. The results announced late that night

were:

Hindenburg 19,359,983 53%

Hitler

13,418,547 36.8%

Thaelmann 3,706,759 10.2%

Though Hitler had increased his total vote by two million and Hindenburg had

gained only one million, the President was in by a clear, absolute majority. More

than half the German people had thus given expression to their belief in the

democratic Republic; they had decisively rejected the extremists of both Right

and Left. Or so they thought.

Hitler himself had much to ponder. He had made an impressive showing. He

had doubled the Nazi vote in two years. And yet a majority still eluded him—

and with it the political power he sought. Had he reached the end of this

particular road? In the party discussions that followed the April 10 poll, Strasser

frankly argued that this was indeed Hitler’s position. Strasser urged a deal with

those in power: with the President, with the government of Bruening and

General Groener, with the Army. Hitler distrusted his chief lieutenant but he did

not dismiss his idea. He had not forgotten one of the lessons of his Vienna days,

that to attain power one must win the support of some of the existing “powerful

institutions.”

Before he could make up his mind as to the next step, one of these “powerful

institutions,” the government of the Republic, struck him a blow.

For more than a year the Reich government and various state governments had

been coming into possession of documents which showed that a number of high

Nazi leaders, especially in the S.A., were preparing to take over Germany by

force and institute a reign of terror. On the eve of the first presidential elections

the S.A., now 400,000 strong, had been fully mobilized and had thrown a cordon

around Berlin. Though Captain Roehm, the S.A. chief, assured General von

Schleicher that the measure was merely “precautionary,” the Prussian police had

seized documents at Nazi headquarters in Berlin which made it pretty clear that

the S.A. meant to carry out a coup d’état on the following evening should Hitler

be elected President—such was Roehm’s hurry. Goebbels in a diary notation on

the night of March 11 had confirmed that something was afoot. “Talked over

instructions with the S.A. and S.S. commanders. Deep uneasiness is rife

everywhere. The word Putsch haunts the air.”

Both the national and the state governments were alarmed. On April 5

representatives of several of the states, led by Prussia and Bavaria, the two

largest, had demanded that the central government suppress the S.A. or else they

would do it themselves in their respective territories. Chancellor Bruening was

away from Berlin electioneering, but Groener, who received the delegates in his

capacity of Minister of the Interior and of Defense, promised action as soon as

Bruening returned, which was on April 10, the day of the second election.

Bruening and Groener thought they had good reasons for stamping out the S.A.

It would end the threat of civil war and might be a prelude to the end of Hitler as

a major factor in German politics. Certain of Hindenburg’s re-election by an

absolute majority, they felt that the voters were giving them a mandate to protect

the Republic against the threats of the Nazis to forcibly overthrow it. The time

had come to use force against force. Also, unless they acted vigorously, the

government would lose the support of the Social Democrats and the trade

unions, which were providing most of the votes for Hindenburg and the chief

backing for the continuance of Bruening’s government.

The cabinet met on April 10, in the midst of the polling, and decided to

immediately suppress Hitler’s private armies. There was some difficulty in

getting Hindenburg to sign the decree—Schleicher, who had first approved it,

began to whisper objections in the President’s ear—but he finally did so on April

13 and it was promulgated on April 14.

This was a stunning blow to the Nazis. Roehm and some of the hotheads in

the party urged resistance to the order. But Hitler, shrewder than his lieutenants,

ruled that it must be obeyed. This was no moment for armed rebellion. Besides,

there was interesting news about Schleicher. Goebbels noted it in his diary on

that very day, April 14: “We are informed that Schleicher does not approve

Groener’s action …” And later that day: “… a telephone call from a well-known

lady who is a close friend of General Schleicher. She says the General wants to

resign.” 4

Goebbels was interested but skeptical. “Perhaps,” he added, “it is only a

maneuver.” Neither he nor Hitler nor anyone else, certainly not Bruening and

most certainly not Groener, to whom Schleicher owed his rapid rise in the Army

and in the councils of government, had as yet surmised the infinite capacity for

treachery of the scheming political General. But they were soon to learn.

Even before the ban on the S.A. was promulgated, Schleicher, who had won

over the weak-minded commander of the Reichswehr, General von

Hammerstein, confidentially informed the commanders of the seven military

districts that the Army opposed the move. Next he persuaded Hindenburg to

write a cantankerous letter to Groener, on April 16, asking why the

Reichsbanner, the paramilitary organization of the Social Democrats, had not

been suppressed along with the S.A. Schleicher took a further step to undermine

his chief’s position. He inspired a malicious smear campaign against General

Groener, spreading tales that he was too ill to remain in office, that he had

become a convert to Marxism and even to pacifism and proclaiming that the

Defense Minister had disgraced the Army by having a child born five months

after his recent marriage—the baby, he told Hindenburg, had been nicknamed

“Nurmi” in Army circles, after the fleet Finnish runner of Olympic fame.

In the meantime, Schleicher renewed his contacts with the S.A. He held talks

with both Roehm, the S.A. chief, and Count von Helldorf, the S.A. leader of

Berlin. On April 26, Goebbels noted that Schleicher had informed Helldorff he

“wanted to change his course.” Two days later Schleicher saw Hitler, and

Goebbels reported that “the talk went off well.”

Even at this stage of the game it is evident that with regard to one question

Roehm and Schleicher were conspiring behind Hitler’s back. Both men wanted

the S.A. incorporated into the Army as a militia, a step to which the Fuehrer was

unalterably opposed. This was a matter over which Hitler had often quarreled

with his S.A. chief of staff, who saw the storm troopers as a potential military

force to strengthen the country, whereas Hitler regarded them as purely a

political force, a band to strike terror in the streets against his political opponents

and to keep up political enthusiasm in the Nazi ranks. But in his conversations

with the Nazi leaders, Schleicher had another objective in mind. He wanted the

S.A. attached to the Army, where he could control it; but he also wanted Hitler,

the only conservative nationalist with any mass following, in the government—

where he could control him. The Verbot of the S.A. hindered progress toward

both objectives.

By the end of the first week of May 1932, Schleicher’s intrigues reached one

of their climaxes. Goebbels notes on May 4 that “Hitler’s mines are beginning to

go off. First Groener and then Bruening must go.” On May 8, Goebbels reported

in his diary, Hitler had a “decisive conference with General Schleicher and with

some gentlemen close to the President. Everything goes well. Bruening will fall

in a few days. The President will withdraw his confidence in him.” He then

outlines the plan which Schleicher and the President’s camarilla had hatched

with Hitler: The Reichstag will be dissolved, a presidential cabinet will be

installed and all prohibitions against the S.A. and the Nazi Party lifted. To avoid

arousing Bruening’s suspicion of what is up, Goebbels adds, Hitler will keep

away from Berlin. Late that evening he spirits his chief away to Mecklenburg

and into virtual hiding.

For the Nazis, the presidential cabinet is regarded, Goebbels notes the next

day, as merely an “interim” affair. Such a “colorless” transitional government,

he says, “will clear the way for us. The weaker it is the easier we can do away

with it.” This, of course, is not the view of Schleicher, who already is dreaming

of a new government which will dispense with Parliament until the constitution

can be changed and which he will dominate. Already, it is clear, he and Hitler

believe they can each get the best of the other. But for the moment he has an ace

to play. He can assure the tired old President that he can offer what Bruening

could not: a government supported by Hitler and yet without the inconvenience

of having the fanatical demagogue in it.

So all was ready, and on May 10, two days after his meeting with Hitler and

the men around Hindenburg, Schleicher struck. The blow was delivered at the

Reichstag. General Groener rose to defend the banning of the S.A. and was

violently attacked by Goering. Ill with diabetes and sick at heart at the treachery

already wrought by Schleicher, the Defense Minister tried to defend himself as

best he could but he was overwhelmed by a torrent of abuse from the Nazi

benches. Exhausted and humiliated, he started to leave the chamber, only to run

into General von Schleicher, who informed him coldly that he “no longer

enjoyed the confidence of the Army and must resign.” Groener appealed to

Hindenburg, for whom he had loyally fronted—and taken the blame—when the

crucial moment had come, first, in 1918, to tell the Kaiser to go, and then, in

1919, to advise the republican government to sign the Versailles Treaty. But the

old Field Marshal, who had never ceased resenting his obligation to the younger

officer, replied that he “regretted” he could do nothing in the matter. On May 13,

bitter and disillusioned,* Groener resigned. That evening Goebbels recorded in

his diary: “We have news from General Schleicher. Everything is going

according to plan.”

The plan called for Bruening’s head next, and it was not long before the

conniving General was able to slip it on the block. Groener’s fall had been a

grave setback for the tottering Republic; almost alone among the military men he

had served it ably and devotedly, and there was no one else in the Army of his

stature and loyalty to replace him. But the stubborn, hard-working Bruening was

still a power. He had secured the backing of the majority of Germans for

Hindenburg’s re-election and, as he believed, for the continuance of the

Republic. He seemed to be on the eve of sensational successes in foreign policy

with regard to both the cancellation of reparations and equality of armament for

the Reich. But the aging President, as we have seen, had rewarded with a

remarkable coolness the Chancellor’s superhuman efforts in winning him a

further term of office. His attitude became more frigid when Bruening proposed

that the State take over a number of bankrupt Junker estates in East Prussia, after

generous compensation, and give them to the landless peasants. When

Hindenburg went off for the Easter holidays at the middle of May to Neudeck,

the East Prussian estate which the Junkers, with the financial help of the

industrialists, had given him as a present on his eightieth birthday, he got an

earful from his aristocratic neighbors, who clamored for the dismissal of a

Chancellor whom they now called “an agrarian Bolshevist.”

The Nazis, undoubtedly through Schleicher, learned before Bruening that the

Chancellor was on his way out. On May 18 Goebbels returned from Munich to

Berlin and, noting that the “Easter spirit” was still lingering, wrote in his diary:

“For Bruening alone winter seems to have set in. The funny thing is he doesn’t

realize it. He can’t find men for his cabinet. The rats are leaving the sinking

ship.” It might have been more accurate to say that the leading rat, far from

leaving the sinking ship of state, was merely making ready to put in a new

captain. The next day Goebbels recorded: “General Schleicher has refused to

take over the Ministry of Defense.” This was true but also not quite accurate.

Bruening had indeed made the request of Schleicher after upbraiding him for

undermining Groener. “I will,” Schleicher had replied, “but not in your

government. ”5

On May 19 Goebbels’ diary recorded: “Message from Schleicher. The list of

ministers is ready. For the transition period it is not so important.” Thus at least a

week in advance of Bruening the Nazis knew his goose was cooked. On Sunday,

May 29, Hindenburg summoned Bruening to his presence and abruptly asked for

his resignation, and on the following day it was given him.

Schleicher had triumphed. But not only Bruening had fallen; the democratic

Republic went down with him, though its death agonies would continue for

another eight months before the final coup de grâce was administered.

Bruening’s responsibility for its demise was not small. Though democratic at

heart, he had allowed himself to be maneuvered into a position where he had

perforce to rule much of the time by presidential decree without the consent of

Parliament. The provocation to take such a step admittedly had been great; the

politicians in their blindness had made it all but inevitable. As recently as May

12, though, he had been able to win a vote of confidence in the Reichstag for his

finance bill. But where Parliament could not agree he had relied on the authority

of the President to govern. Now that authority had been withdrawn. From now

on, from June 1932 to January 1933, it would be granted to two lesser men who,

though not Nazis, felt no urge to uphold a democratic Republic, at least as it was

presently constituted.

The political power in Germany no longer resided, as it had since the birth of

the Republic, in the people and in the body which expressed the people’s will,

the Reichstag. It was now concentrated in the hands of a senile, eighty-five-year-

old President and in those of a few shallow ambitious men around him who

shaped his weary, wandering mind. Hitler saw this very clearly, and it suited his

purposes. It seemed most unlikely that he would ever win a majority in

Parliament. Hindenburg’s new course offered him the only opportunity that was

left of coming to power. Not at the moment, to be sure, but soon.

He hurried back to Berlin from Oldenburg, where on May 29 the Nazis had

won an absolute majority in the election for the local diet. The next day he was

received by Hindenburg, who confirmed the points of the deal which the Nazi

leader had secretly worked out with Schleicher on May 8: the lifting of the ban

on the S.A., a presidential cabinet of Hindenburg’s own choosing, dissolution of

the Reichstag. Would Hitler support the new government? Hindenburg asked.

Hitler replied that he would. That evening of May 30, the Goebbels’ diary was

brought up to date: “Hitler’s talk with the President went well … V. Papen is

spoken of as Chancellor. But that interests us little. The important thing is that

the Reichstag is dissolved. Elections! Elections! Direct to the people! We are all

very happy.” 6

FIASCO OF FRANZ VON PAPEN

There now appeared briefly on the center of the stage an unexpected and

ludicrous figure. The man whom General von Schleicher foisted upon the

octogenarian President and who on June 1, 1932, was named Chancellor of

Germany was the fifty-three-year-old Franz von Papen, scion of an

impoverished family of the Westphalian nobility, a former General Staff officer,

a crack gentleman rider, an unsuccessful and amateurish Catholic Centrist

politician, a wealthy industrialist by marriage and little known to the public

except as a former military attaché in Washington who had been expelled during

the war for complicity in the planning of such sabotage as blowing up bridges

and railroad lines while the United States was neutral.

“The President’s choice met with incredulity,” wrote the French ambassador

in Berlin. “No one but smiled or tittered or laughed because Papen enjoyed the

peculiarity of being taken seriously by neither his friends nor his enemies … He

was reputed to be superficial, blundering, untrue, ambitious, vain, crafty and an

intriguer. ”7 To such a man—and M. François-Poncet was not exaggerating—

Hindenburg, at Schleicher’s prompting, had entrusted the fate of the floundering

Republic.

Papen had no political backing whatsoever. He was not even a member of the

Reichstag. The furthest he had got in politics was a seat in the Prussian Landtag.

On his appointment as Chancellor his own Center Party, indignant at the

treachery of Papen toward its leader, Bruening, unanimously expelled him from

the party. But the President had told him to form a government above parties,

and this he was able to do at once because Schleicher already had a list of

ministers at hand. It comprised what became known as the “barons’ cabinet.”

Five members were of the nobility, two were corporation directors, and one,

Franz Guertner, named Minister of Justice, had been Hitler’s protector in the

Bavarian government during the troubled days before and after the Beer Hall

Putsch. General von Schleicher was smoked out by Hindenburg from his

preferred position behind the scenes and made Minister of Defense. The

“barons’ cabinet” was received by much of the country as a joke, though the

stamina of a number of its members, Baron von Neurath, Baron von Eltz-Ru-

benach, Count Schwerin von Krosigk and Dr. Guertner, was such that they

lingered on at their posts far into the era of the Third Reich.

Papen’s first act was to honor Schleicher’s pact with Hitler. On June 4 he

dissolved the Reichstag and convoked new elections for July 31, and after some

prodding from the suspicious Nazis, he lifted the ban on the S.A. on June 15. A

wave of political violence and murder such as even Germany had not previously

seen immediately followed. The storm troopers swarmed the streets seeking

battle and blood and their challenge was often met, especially by the

Communists. In Prussia alone between June 1 and 20 there were 461 pitched

battles in the streets which cost eighty-two lives and seriously wounded four

hundred men. In July, thirty-eight Nazis and thirty Communists were listed

among the eighty-six persons killed in riots. On Sunday, July 10, eighteen

persons were done to death in the streets, and on the following Sunday, when the

Nazis, under police escort, staged a march through Altona, a working-class

suburb of Hamburg, nineteen persons were shot dead and 285 wounded. The

civil war which the barons’ cabinet had been called in to halt was growing

steadily worse. All the parties save the Nazis and the Communists demanded

that the government take action to restore order.

Papen responded by doing two things. He banned all political parades for the

fortnight prior to the July 31 elections. And he took a step which was aimed not

only at placating the Nazis but at destroying one of the few remaining pillars of

the democratic Republic. On July 20 he deposed the Prussian government and

appointed himself Reich Commissioner for Prussia. This was a daring move

toward the kind of authoritarian government he was seeking for the whole of

Germany. Papen’s excuse was that the Altona riots had shown the Prussian

government could not maintain law and order. He also charged, on “evidence”

hastily produced by Schleicher, that the Prussian authorities were in cahoots with

the Communists. When the Socialist ministers refused to be deposed except by

force, Papen obligingly supplied it.

Martial law was proclaimed in Berlin and General von Rundstedt, the local

Reichswehr commander, sent a lieutenant and a dozen men to make the

necessary arrests. This was a development which was not lost on the men of the

Right who had taken over the federal power, nor did it escape Hitler’s notice.

There was no need to worry any longer that the forces of the Left or even of the

democratic center would put up serious resistance to the overthrow of the

democratic system. In 1920 a general strike had saved the Republic from being

overthrown. Such a measure was debated now among the trade-union leaders

and the Socialists and rejected as too dangerous. Thus by deposing the

constitutional Prussian government Papen had driven another nail into the coffin

of the Weimar Republic. It had taken, as he boasted, only a squad of soldiers to

do it.

For their part, Hitler and his lieutenants were determined to bring down not

only the Republic but Papen and his barons too. Goebbels expressed the aim in

his diary on June 5: “We must disassociate ourselves at the earliest possible

moment from this transitional bourgeois cabinet.” When Papen saw Hitler for

the first time on June 9, the Nazi leader told him, “I regard your cabinet only as a

temporary solution and will continue my efforts to make my party the strongest

in the country. The chancellorship will then devolve on me.” 8

The Reichstag elections of July 31 were the third national elections held in

Germany within five months, but, far from being weary from so much

electioneering, the Nazis threw themselves into the campaign with more

fanaticism and force than ever before. Despite Hitler’s promise to Hindenburg

that the Nazis would support the Papen government, Goebbels unleashed bitter

attacks on the Minister of the Interior and as early as July 9 Hitler went to

Schleicher and complained bitterly of the government’s policies. From the size

of the crowds that turned out to see Hitler it was evident that the Nazis were

gaining ground. In one day, July 27, he spoke to 60,000 persons in Brandenburg,

to nearly as many in Potsdam, and that evening to 120,000 massed in the giant

Grunewald Stadium in Berlin while outside an additional 100,000 heard his

voice by loudspeaker.

The polling on July 31 brought a resounding victory for the National Socialist

Party. With 13,745,000 votes, the Nazis won 230 seats in the Reichstag, making

them easily the largest party in Parliament though still far short of a majority in a

house of 608 members. The Social Democrats, no doubt because of the timidity

shown by their leaders in Prussia, lost ten seats and were reduced to 133. The

working class was swinging over to the Communists, who gained 12 seats and

became the third largest party, with 89 members in the Reichstag. The Catholic

Center increased its strength somewhat, from 68 to 73 seats, but the other

middle-class parties and even Hugenberg’s German National Party, the only one

which had supported Papen in the election, were overwhelmed. Except for the

Catholics, the middle and upper classes, it was evident, had gone over to the

Nazis.

On August 2 Hitler took stock of his triumph at Tegernsee, near Munich,

where he conferred with his party leaders. Since the last Reichstag elections two

years before, the National Socialists had gained over seven million votes and

increased their representation in Parliament from 107 to 230. In the four years

since the 1928 elections, the Nazis had won some thirteen million new votes.

Yet the majority which would sweep the party into power still eluded Hitler. He

had won only 37 per cent of the total vote. The majority of Germans was still

against him.

Far into the night he deliberated with his lieutenants. Goebbels recorded the

results in his diary entry of August 2: “The Fuehrer faces difficult decisions.

Legal? With the Center?” With the Center the Nazis could form a majority in the

Reichstag. But to Goebbels this is “unthinkable.” Still, he notes, “the Fuehrer

comes to no final decision. The situation will take a little time to ripen.”

But not much. Hitler, flushed with his victory, though it was less than

decisive, was impatient. On August 4 he hurried to Berlin to see not Chancellor

von Papan, but General von Schleicher, and, as Goebbels noted, “to present his

demands. They will not be too moderate,” he added. On August 5, at the

Fuerstenberg barracks near Berlin, Hitler outlined his terms to General von

Schleicher: the chancellorship for himself; and for his party, the premiership of

Prussia, the Reich and Prussian Ministries of Interior, the Reich Ministries of

Justice, Economy, and Aviation, and a new ministry for Goebbels, that of

Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. As a sop to Schleicher, Hitler promised

him the Defense Ministry. Furthermore, Hitler said he would demand an

enabling act from the Reichstag authorizing him to rule by decree for a specified

period; if it were refused, the Reichstag would be “sent home.”

Hitler left the meeting convinced that he had won over Schleicher to his

program and hurried south in good spirits to his mountain retreat on the

Obersalzberg. Goebbels, always cynical in regard to the opposition and always

distrustful of the political General, was not so sure. “It is well to be skeptical

about further developments,” he confided to his diary on August 6 after he had

listened to the Leader’s optimistic report of his meeting with Schleicher.

Goebbels was sure of one thing, though: “Once we have the power we will never

give it up. They will have to carry our dead bodies out of the ministries.”

All was not as well as Hitler seemed to think. On August 8 Goebbels wrote:

“Telephone call from Berlin. It is full of rumors. The whole party is ready to

take over power. The S.A. men are leaving their places of work in order to make

themselves ready. The party leaders are preparing for the great hour. If all goes

well, fine. If things go badly there will be a terrible setback.” The next day

Strasser, Frick and Funk arrived at Obersalzberg with news that was not exactly

encouraging. Schleicher was turning again, like a worm. He was now insisting

that if Hitler got the chancellorship he must rule with the consent of the

Reichstag. Funk reported that his business friends were worried about the

prospects of a Nazi government. He had a message from Schacht confirming it.

Finally, the Wilhelmstrasse, the trio told Hitler, was worried about a Nazi

putsch.

This worry was not without foundation. Next day, August 10, Goebbels

learned that in Berlin the S.A. was “in a state of armed readiness … The S.A. is

throwing an ever stronger ring around Berlin … The Wilhelmstrasse is very

nervous about it. But that is the point of our mobilization.” On the following day

the Fuehrer could stand the waiting no longer. He set out by motorcar for Berlin.

He would make himself “scarce” there, Goebbels says, but on the other hand he

would be ready when he was called. When the call did not come he himself

requested to see the President. But first he had to see Schleicher and Papen.

This interview took place at noon on August 13. It was a stormy one.

Schleicher had slid away from his position of a week before. He supported

Papen in insisting that the most Hitler could hope for was the vice-

chancellorship. Hitler was outraged. He must be Chancellor or nothing. Papen

terminated the interview by saying he would leave the “final decision” up to

Hindenburg. *

Hitler retired in a huff to the nearby Kaiserhof. There at 3 P.M. a phone call

came from the President’s office. Someone—probably Goebbels, judging from

his diary—asked, “Has a decision already been made? If so, there is no point in

Hitler’s coming over.” The President, the Nazis were told, “wishes first to speak

to Hitler.”

The aging Field Marshal received the Nazi leader standing up and leaning on

his cane in his study, thus setting the icy tone for the interview. For a man in his

eighty-fifth year who only ten months before had suffered a complete mental

relapse lasting more than a week, Hindenburg was in a surprisingly lucid frame

of mind. He listened patiently while Hitler reiterated his demand for the

chancellorship and full power. Otto von Meissner, chief of the Presidential

Chancellery, and Goering, who had accompanied Hitler, were the only witnesses

to the conversation, and though Meissner is not a completely dependable source,

his affidavit at Nuremberg is the only firsthand testimony in existence of what

followed. It has a ring of truth.

Hindenburg replied that because of the tense situation he could not in good conscience risk

transferring the power of government to a new party such as the National Socialists, which did

not command a majority and which was intolerant, noisy and undisciplined.

At this point, Hindenburg, with a certain show of excitement, referred to several recent

occurrences—clashes between the Nazis and the police, acts of violence committed by Hitler’s

followers against those who were of a different opinion, excesses against Jews and other

illegal acts. All these incidents had strengthened him in his conviction that there were

numerous wild elements in the Party beyond control … After extended discussion Hindenburg

proposed to Hitler that he should declare himself ready to co-operate with the other parties, in

particular with the Right and Center, and that he should give up the one-sided idea that he

must have complete power. In co-operating with other parties, Hindenburg declared, he would

be able to show what he could achieve and improve upon. If he could show positive results, he

would acquire increasing and even dominating influence even in a coalition government.

Hindenburg stated that this also would be the best way to eliminate the widespread fear that a

National Socialist government would make ill use of its power and would suppress all other

viewpoints and gradually eliminate them. Hindenburg stated that he was ready to accept Hitler

and the representatives of his movement in a coalition government, the precise combination to

be a matter of negotiation, but that he could not take the responsibility of giving exclusive

power to Hitler alone … Hitler was adamant, however, in refusing to put himself in the

position of bargaining with the leaders of the other parties and in such manner to form a

coalition government.9

The discussion, then, ended without agreement, but not before the old

President, still standing, had delivered a stern lecture to the Nazi leader. In the

words of the official communiqué issued immediately afterward, Hindenburg

“regretted that Herr Hitler did not see himself in a position to support a national

government appointed with the confidence of the Reich President, as he had

agreed to do before the Reichstag elections.” In the view of the venerable

President, Hitler had broken his word, but let him beware of the future. “The

President,” the communiqué stated further, “gravely exhorted Herr Hitler to

conduct the opposition on the part of the N.S. Party in a chivalrous manner, and

to bear in mind his responsibility to the Fatherland and to the German people.”

The communiqué giving Hindenburg’s version of the meeting and insisting

that Hitler had demanded “complete control of the State” was published in such

a hurry that it caught Goebbels’ propaganda machine napping and did much

harm to Hitler’s cause, not only among the general public but among the Nazis

themselves. In vain did Hitler respond that he had not asked for “complete

power” but only for the chancellorship and a few ministries. Hindenburg’s word

was generally accepted.

In the meantime, the mobilized storm troopers were chafing at the bit. Hitler

called in their leaders and spoke to them that same evening. “It’s a difficult

task,” Goebbels noted. “Who knows if their formations can be held together?

Nothing is more difficult than to tell victory-flushed troops that victory has been

snatched out of their hand.” Late that night the little Doktor sought consolation

in the reading of the letters of Frederick the Great. Next day he raced off for a

vacation on the beaches of the Baltic. “Great hopelessness reigns among the

party comrades,” he wrote. He declined to leave his room even to speak with

them. “I don’t want to hear about politics for at least a week. I want only sun,

fight, air and peace.”

Hitler retired to the Obersalzberg to imbibe the same elements and ponder the

immediate future. As Goebbels said, “the first big chance has been missed.”

Hermann Rauschning, the then Nazi leader in Danzig, found the Fuehrer

brooding sullenly on his mountaintop. “We must be ruthless,” Hitler told him,

and launched into a tirade against Papen. But he had not lost hope. At times he

spoke as if he were already Chancellor. “My task is more difficult than

Bismarck’s,” he said. “I must first create the nation before even beginning to

tackle the national tasks before us.” But supposing the Nazis were suppressed by

a military dictatorship under Papen and Schleicher? Hitler abruptly asked

Rauschning whether Danzig, an independent city-state then under the protection

of the League of Nations, had an extradition agreement with Germany.

Rauschning did not at first understand the question, but it later became evident

that Hitler was looking for a place that might serve as an asylum.10 In his diary

Goebbels noted “rumors that the Fuehrer is to be arrested.” Yet even now, after

his rebuff by the Reich President and the government of Papen and Schleicher,

and despite his fears that his party might be outlawed, he was determined to stick

to his path of “legality.” He squelched all talk of a putsch by the S.A. Except for

occasional spells of depression he remained confident that he would achieve his

goal—not by force and scarcely by winning a parliamentary majority, but by the

means which had carried Schleicher and Papen to the top: by backstairs intrigue,

a game that two could play.

It was not long before he gave an example. On August 25 Goebbels conferred

with Hitler at Berchtesgaden and noted: “We have got into touch with the Center

Party, if only to bring pressure on our opponents.” Next day Goebbels was back

in Berlin, where he found that Schleicher had already found out “about our

feelers to the Center.” On the following day he went to see the General just to

make sure. He thought Schleicher appeared worried at the prospect of Hitler and

the Catholic Center getting together, for between them they commanded an

absolute majority in the Reichstag. As to Schleicher, Goebbels wrote: “I don’t

know what is genuine or false in him.”

The contacts with the Center Party, though never intended, as Goebbels said,

to be much more than a means of applying pressure on the Papen government,

paid off in a farcical event which now occurred in the Reichstag and which

marked the beginning of the end for the cavalryman Chancellor. When the

chamber convened on August 30 the Centrists joined the Nazis in electing

Goering President of the Reichstag. For the first time, then, a National Socialist

was in the chair when the Reichstag reconvened on September 12 to begin its

working session. Goering made the most of his opportunity. Chancellor von

Papen had obtained in advance from the President a decree for the dissolution of

the chamber—the first time that the death warrant of the Reichstag had been

signed before it met to transact business. But for this first working session he

neglected to bring it along. He had with him instead a speech outlining the

program of his government, having been assured that one of the Nationalist

deputies, in agreement with most of the other parties, would object to a vote on

the expected Communist motion for censure of the government. In this case a

single objection from any one of the 600-odd members was enough to postpone

a vote.

When Ernst Torgler, the Communist leader, introduced his motion as an

amendment to the order of the day, however, neither a Nationalist deputy nor

any other rose to object. Finally Frick asked for a half hour’s adjournment on

behalf of the Nazis.

“The situation was now serious,” Papen says in his memoirs, “and I had been

caught unawares.” He sent a messenger posthaste to the Chancellery to fetch the

dissolution order.

In the meantime Hitler conferred with his parliamentary party group in the

Reichstag President’s Palace across the street. The Nazis were in a dilemma, and

they were embarrassed. The Nationalists, they felt, had double-crossed them by

not moving to postpone the vote. Now Hitler’s party, in order to bring down the

Papen government, would have to vote with the Communists on a Communist

motion. Hitler decided to swallow the pill of such an unsavory association. He

ordered his deputies to vote for the Communist amendment and overthrow

Papen before the Chancellor could dissolve the Reichstag. To accomplish this, of

course, Goering, as presiding officer, would have to pull some fast and neat

tricks of parliamentary procedure. The former air ace, a man of daring and of

many abilities, as he was to prove on a larger stage later, was equal to the

occasion.

When the session reconvened Papen appeared with the familiar red dispatch

case which, by tradition, carried the dissolution order he had so hastily retrieved.

But when he requested the floor to read it, the President of the Reichstag

managed not to see him, though Papen, by now red-faced, was on his feet

brandishing the paper for all in the assembly to see. All but Goering. His smiling

face was turned the other way. He called for an immediate vote. By now Papen’s

countenance, according to eyewitnesses, had turned from red to white with

anger. He strode up to the President’s rostrum and plunked the dissolution order

on his desk. Goering took no notice of it and ordered the vote to proceed. Papen,

followed by his ministers, none of whom were members of the chamber, stalked

out. The deputies voted: 513 to 32 against the government. Only then did

Goering notice the piece of paper which had been thrust so angrily on his desk.

He read it to the assembly and ruled that since it had been countersigned by a

Chancellor who already had been voted out of office by a constitutional majority

it had no validity.

Which elements in Germany gained and which lost by this farcical incident,

and how much, was not immediately clear. That the dandy, Papen, had been

made a joke of there was no doubt; but then he had always been somewhat of a

joke, even, as Ambassador François-Poncet said, to his friends. That the

Reichstag had shown that the overwhelming majority of Germans opposed

Hindenburg’s hand-picked presidential government was clear enough. But in the

process had it not further sapped public confidence in the parliamentary system?

As for the Nazis, had they not again shown themselves to be not only

irresponsible but ready to connive even with the Communists to achieve their

ends? Moreover, were the citizens not weary of elections and did the Nazis not

face losing votes in the inevitable new election, the fourth within the year?

Gregor Strasser and even Frick thought that they did, and that such a loss might

be disastrous to the party.

Hitler, however, Goebbels reported that same evening, “was beside himself

with joy. Again he has made a clear, unmistakable decision.”

The Reichstag quickly recognized its dissolution, and new elections were set

for November 6. For the Nazis they presented certain difficulties. For one thing,

as Goebbels noted, the people were tired of political speeches and propaganda.

Even the party workers, as he admitted in his diary of October 15, had “become

very nervous as the result of these everlasting elections. They are overworked

…” Also there were financial difficulties. Big business and big finance were

swinging behind Papen, who had given them certain concessions. They were

becoming increasingly distrustful, as Funk had warned, of Hitler’s refusal to

cooperate with Hindenburg and with what seemed to them his growing

radicalism and his tendency to work even with the Communists, as the Reichstag

episode had shown. Goebbels took notice of this in his diary of October 15:

“Money is extraordinarily hard to obtain. All the gentlemen of ‘Property and

Education’ are standing by the government.”

A few days before the election the Nazis had joined the Communists in

staging a strike of the transport workers in Berlin, a strike disavowed by the

trade unions and the Socialists. This brought a further drying up of financial

sources among the businessmen just when the Nazi Party needed funds most to

make a whirlwind finish in the campaign. Goebbels noted lugubriously on

November 1: “Scarcity of money has become a chronic illness with us. We lack

enough to really carry out a big campaign. Many bourgeois circles have been

frightened off by our participation in the strike. Even many of our party

comrades are beginning to have their doubts.” On November 5, the eve of the

elections: “Last attack. Desperate drive of the party against defeat. We succeed

in getting 10,000 marks at the last minute. This will be thrown into the campaign

Saturday afternoon. We have done everything that could be done. Now let fate

decide.”

Fate, and the German electorate, decided on November 6 a number of things,

none of them conclusive for the future of the crumbling Republic. The Nazis lost

two million votes and 34 seats in the Reichstag, reducing them to 196 deputies.

The Communists gained three quarters of a million votes and the Social

Democrats lost the same number, with the result that the Communist seats rose

from 89 to 100 and the Socialist seats dropped from 133 to 121. The German

National Party, the sole one which had backed the government, won nearly a

million additional votes—obviously from the Nazis—and now had 52 seats

instead of 37. Though the National Socialists were still the largest party in the

country, the loss of two million votes was a severe setback. For the first time the

great Nazi tide was ebbing, and from a point far short of a majority. The legend

of invincibility had been shattered. Hitler was in a weaker position to bargain for

power than he had been since July.

Realizing this, Papen put aside what he calls his “personal distaste” for Hitler

and wrote him a letter on November 13 inviting him to “discuss the situation.”

But Hitler made so many conditions in his reply that Papen abandoned all hope

of obtaining an understanding with him. The Nazi leader’s intransigence did not

surprise the breezy, incompetent Chancellor, but a new course which his friend

and mentor, Schleicher, now proposed did surprise him. For the slippery

kingmaker had come to the conclusion that Papen’s usefulness, like that of

Bruening before him, had come to an end. New plans were sprouting in his

fertile mind. His good friend Papen must go. The President must be left

completely free to deal with the political parties, especially with the largest. He

urged Papen’s resignation, and on November 17 Papen and his cabinet resigned.

Hindenburg sent immediately for Hitler.

Their meeting on November 19 was less frigid than that of August 13. This

time the President offered chairs and allowed his caller to remain for over an

hour. Hindenburg presented Hitler with two choices: the chancellorship if he

could secure a workable majority in the Reichstag for a definite program, or the

vice-chancellorship under Papen in another presidential cabinet that would rule

by emergency decrees. Hitler saw the President again on the twenty-first and he

also exchanged several letters with Meissner. But there was no agreement. Hitler

could not get a workable majority in Parliament. Though the Center Party agreed

to support him on condition that he would not aspire to dictatorship, Hugenberg

withheld the co-operation of the Nationalists. Hitler therefore resumed his

demand for the chancellorship of a presidential government, but this the

President would not give him. If there was to be a cabinet governing by decree

Hindenburg preferred his friend Papen to head it. Hitler, he said in a letter on his

behalf dispatched by Meissner, could not be given such a post “because such a

cabinet is bound to develop into a party dictatorship…. I cannot take the

responsibility for this before my oath and my conscience. ”11

The old Field Marshal was more prophetic on the first point than on the

second. As for Hitler, once more he had knocked on the door of the Chancellery,

had seen it open a crack only to be slammed shut in his face.

This was just what Papen had expected, and when he and Schleicher went to

see Hindenburg on the evening of December 1 he was sure that he would be

reappointed Chancellor. Little did he suspect what the scheming General had

been up to. Schleicher had been in touch with Strasser and had suggested that if

the Nazis would not come into a Papen government perhaps they would join a

cabinet in which he himself were Chancellor. Hitler was asked to come to Berlin

for consultations with the General, and according to one version widely

publicized in the German press and later accepted by most historians, the

Fuehrer actually took the night train to Berlin from Munich but was hauled off in

the dead of the night by Goering at Jena and spirited away to Weimar for a

meeting of the top Nazi leaders. Actually the Nazi version of this incident is,

surprisingly, probably the more accurate. Goebbels’ diary for November 30

recounts that a telegram came for Hitler asking him to hurry to Berlin, but that

he decided to let Schleicher wait while he conferred with his comrades at

Weimar, where he was scheduled to open the campaign for the Thuringian

elections. At this conference, attended by the Big Five leaders, Goering,

Goebbels, Strasser, Frick and Hitler, on December 1, there was considerable

disagreement. Strasser, supported by Frick, urged at least Nazi toleration of a

Schleicher government, though he himself preferred joining it. Goering and

Goebbels argued strenuously against such a course and Hitler sided with them.

Next day Hitler advised a certain Major Ott, whom Schleicher had sent to him,

to counsel the General not to take the chancellorship, but it was too late.

Papen had been blandly unaware of the intrigue which Schleicher was

weaving behind his back. At the beginning of the meeting with the President on

December 1 he had confidently outlined his plans for the future. He should

continue as Chancellor, rule by decree and let the Reichstag go hang for a while

until he could “amend the constitution.” In effect, Papen wanted “amendments”

which would take the country back to the days of the empire and re-establish the

rule of the conservative classes. At his Nuremberg trial and in his memoirs he

admitted, as indeed he did to the Field Marshal, that his proposals involved “a

breach of the present constitution by the President,” but he assured Hindenburg

that “he might be justified in placing the welfare of the nation above his oath to

the constitution,” as, he added, Bismarck once had done “for the sake of the

country.” 13

To Papen’s great surprise, Schleicher broke in to object. He played upon the

aged President’s obvious reluctance to violate his oath to uphold the constitution,

if it could be avoided—and the General thought it could. He believed a

government which could command a majority in the Reichstag was possible if

he himself headed it. He was sure he could detach Strasser and at least sixty Nazi

deputies from Hitler. To this Nazi fraction he could add the middle-class parties

and the Social Democrats. He even thought the trade unions would support him.

Hindenburg was shocked at such an idea and, turning to Papen, asked him

then and there to go ahead with the forming of a new government. “Schleicher,”

says Papen, “appeared dumfounded.” They had a long argument after they had

left the President but could reach no agreement. As they parted, Schleicher, in

the famous words addressed to Luther as he set out for the fateful Diet of

Worms, said to Papen, “Little Monk, you have chosen a difficult path.”

How difficult it was Papen learned the next morning at nine o’clock at a

cabinet meeting which he had called.

Schleicher rose [Papen says] and declared that there was no possibility of carrying out the

directive that the President had given me. Any attempt to do so would reduce the country to

chaos. The police and the armed services could not guarantee to maintain transport and supply

services in the event of a general strike, nor would they be able to ensure law and order in the

event of a civil war. The General Staff had made a study in this respect and he had arranged

for Major Ott [its author] to place himself at the Cabinet’s disposal and present a report.13

Whereupon the General produced the major. If Schleicher’s remarks had

shaken’ Papen, the conveniently timed report of Major Eugen Ott (who would

later be Hitler’s ambassador to Tokyo) demolished him. Ott simply stated that

“the defense of the frontiers and the maintenance of order against both Nazis and

Communists was beyond the strength of the forces at the disposal of the federal

and state governments. It is therefore recommended that the Reich government

should abstain from declaring a state of emergency.” 14

To Papen’s pained surprise, the German Army which had once sent the Kaiser

packing and which more recently, at Schleicher’s instigation, had eliminated

General Groener and Chancellor Bruening, was now cashiering him. He went

immediately to Hindenburg with the news, hoping that the President would fire

Schleicher as Minister of Defense and retain Chancellor Papen—and indeed

proposing that he do so.

“My dear Papen,” the stout old President replied, “you will not think much of

me if I change my mind. But I am too old and have been through too much to

accept the responsibility for a civil war. Our only hope is to let Schleicher try his

luck.”

“Two great tears,” Papen swears, rolled down Hindenburg’s cheeks. A few

hours later, as the deposed Chancellor was clearing his desk, a photograph of the

President arrived for him with the inscription, “Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden! ” The

next day the President wrote him in his own handwriting of the “heavy heart” he

felt in relieving him of his post and reiterating that his confidence in him

“remains unshaken.” That was true and would shortly be proved.

On December 2 Kurt von Schleicher became Chancellor, the first general to

occupy that post since General Count Georg Leo von Caprivi de Caprara de

Montecuccoli, who had succeeded Bismarck in 1890. Schleicher’s tortuous

intrigues had at last brought him to the highest office at a moment when the

depression, which he little understood, was at its height; when the Weimar

Republic, which he had done so much to undermine, was already crumbling;

when no one any longer trusted him, not even the President, whom he had

manipulated so long. His days on the heights, it seemed obvious to almost

everyone but himself, were strictly numbered. The Nazis were sure of it.

Goebbels’ diary for December 2 included this entry: “Schleicher is named

Chancellor. He won’t last long.”

Papen thought so too. He was smarting from wounded vanity and thirsting for

revenge against his “friend and successor,” as he calls him in his memoirs. To

get Papen out of the way Schleicher offered him the Paris embassy, but he

declined. The President, Papen says, wanted him to remain in Berlin “within

reach.” That was the most strategic place to weave his own web of intrigues

against the archintriguer. Busy and agile as a spider, Papen set to work. As the

strife-ridden year of 1932 approached its end, Berlin was full of cabals, and of

cabals within cabals. Besides those of Papen and Schleicher, there was one at the

President’s Palace, where Hindenburg’s son, Oskar, and his State Secretary,

Meissner, held sway behind the throne. There was one at the Kaiserhof hotel,

where Hitler and the men around him were plotting not only for power but

against each other. Soon the webs of intrigue became so enmeshed that by New

Year’s, 1933, none of the cabalists was sure who was double-crossing whom.

But it would not take long for them to find out.

SCHLEICHER: THE LAST CHANCELLOR OF THE REPUBLIC

“I stayed in power only fifty-seven days,” Schleicher remarked once in the

hearing of the attentive French ambassador, “and on each and every one of them

I was betrayed fifty-seven times. Don’t ever speak to me of ‘German loyalty’!” 15

His own career and doings had certainly made him an authority on the subject.

He began his chancellorship by making Gregor Strasser an offer to become

Vice-Chancellor of Germany and Premier of Prussia. Having failed to get Hitler

to join his government, Schleicher now tried to split the Nazis by this bait to

Strasser. There was some reason to believe he might succeed. Strasser was the

Number Two man in the party, and among the left-wing element, which really

believed in a national socialism, he was more popular than Hitler. As leader of

the Party Organization he was in direct touch with all the provincial and local

leaders and seemingly had earned their loyalty. He was now convinced that

Hitler had brought the movement to a dead end. The more radical followers were

going over to the Communists. The party itself was financially bankrupt. In

November Fritz Thyssen had warned that he could make no further contributions

to the movement. There were simply no funds to meet the payroll of thousands

of party functionaries or to maintain the S.A., which alone cost two and a half

million marks a week. The printers of the extensive Nazi press were threatening

to stop the presses unless they received payment on overdue bills. Goebbels had

touched on this in his diary on November 11: “The financial situation of the

Berlin organization is hopeless. Nothing but debts and obligations.” And in

December he was regretting that party salaries would have to be cut. Finally, the

provincial elections in Thuringia on December 3, the day Schleicher called in

Strasser, revealed a loss of 40 per cent in the Nazi vote. It had become obvious,

at least to Strasser, that the Nazis would never obtain office through the ballot.

He therefore urged Hitler to abandon his “all or nothing” policy and take what

power he could by joining in a coalition with Schleicher. Otherwise, he feared,

the party would fall to pieces. He had been pressing this line for some months,

and Goebbels’ diary from midsummer to December is full of bitter references to

Strasser’s “disloyalty” to Hitler.

The showdown came on December 5 at a meeting of the party leaders at the

Kaiserhof in Berlin. Strasser demanded that the Nazis at least “tolerate” the

Schleicher government, and he was backed by Frick, who headed the Nazi bloc

in the Reichstag, many of whose members feared losing their seats and their

deputy’s salary if Hitler provoked any more elections. Goering and Goebbels

strenuously opposed Strasser and won Hitler to their side. Hitler would not

“tolerate” the Schleicher regime, but, it developed, he was still ready to

“negotiate” with it. For this task, however, he appointed Goering—he had

already heard, Goebbels reveals, of Strasser’s private talk with the Chancellor

two days before. On the seventh, Hitler and Strasser had a conversation at the

Kaiserhof that degenerated into a bitter quarrel. Hitler accused his chief

lieutenant of trying to stab him in the back, oust him from his leadership of the

party and break up the Nazi movement. Strasser heatedly denied this, swore that

he had been loyal but accused Hitler of leading the party to destruction.

Apparently he left unsaid a number of things that had been swelling within him

since 1925. Back at his room in the Excelsior Hotel he put them all in writing in

a letter to Hitler which ended with his resignation of all his offices in the party.

The letter, which reached Hitler on the eighth, fell, as Goebbels’ diary says,

“like a bombshell.” The atmosphere in the Kaiserhof was that of a graveyard.

“We are all dejected and depressed,” Goebbels noted. It was the greatest blow

Hitler had suffered since he rebuilt the party in 1925. Now, on the threshold of

power, his principal follower had deserted him and threatened to smash all he

had built up in seven years.

In the evening [Goebbels wrote], the Fuehrer comes to our home. It is difficult

to be cheerful. We are all depressed, above all because of the danger of the

whole party falling apart, and all our work having been in vain … Telephone call

from Dr. Ley. The situation in the party worsens from hour to hour. The Fuehrer

must return immediately to the Kaiserhof.

Goebbels was called to join him there at two o’clock in the morning. Strasser

had given his story to the morning newspapers, which were just then appearing

on the streets. Hitler’s reaction was described by Goebbels:

Treason! Treason! Treason!

For hours the Fuehrer paces up and down in the hotel room. He is embittered

and deeply wounded by this treachery. Finally he stops and says: If the party

once falls to pieces I’ll put an end to it all in three minutes with a pistol shot.

The party did not fall apart and Hitler did not shoot himself. Strasser might

have achieved both these ends, which would have radically altered the course of

history, but at the crucial moment he himself gave up. Frick, with Hitler’s

permission, had been searching all Berlin for him, it having been agreed that the

quarrel must somehow be patched over to rescue the party from disaster. But

Strasser, fed up with it all, had taken a train south for a vacation in sunny Italy.

Hitler, always at his best when he detected weakness in an opponent, struck

swiftly and hard. The Political Organization which Strasser had built up was

taken over by the Fuehrer himself, with Dr. Ley, the Gauleiter from Cologne, as

his staff chief. Strasser’s friends were purged and all party leaders convoked to

Berlin to sign a new declaration of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, which they did.

The wily Austrian had once more extricated himself from a tight fix that

might easily have proved disastrous. Gregor Strasser, whom so many had

thought to be a greater man than Hitler, was quickly destroyed. “A dead man,”

Goebbels called him in his diary notation of December 9. This was to become

literally true within two years when Hitler decided to settle accounts.

On December 10, a week after he had been tripped by General von Schleicher,

Franz von Papen began to spin his own web of intrigues. Following a speech that

evening to the exclusive Herrenklub, from whose aristocratic and wealthy

members he had recruited his short-lived cabinet, he had a private talk with

Baron Kurt von Schroeder, the Cologne banker who had contributed funds to the

National Socialist Party. He suggested that the financier arrange for him to see

Hitler on the sly. In his memoirs Papen claims that it was Schroeder who made

the suggestion but admits that he agreed. By a strange coincidence, Wilhelm

Keppler, Hitler’s economic adviser and one of his contact men with business

circles, made the same suggestion on behalf of the Nazi leader.

The two men, who had been at such odds only a few weeks before, met in

what they hoped was the greatest of secrecy at the home of Schroeder in

Cologne on the morning of January 4. Papen was surprised when a photographer

snapped him at the entrance, but gave it little thought until the next day. Hitler

was accompanied by Hess, Himmler and Keppler, but he left his aides in the

parlor and retired to Schroeder’s study, where he was closeted for two hours

with Papen and their host. Though the conversation started badly, with Hitler

complaining bitterly of the way Papen had treated the Nazis while Chancellor, it

soon developed to a point that was to prove fateful for both men and their

country. This was a crucial moment for the Nazi chief. By a superhuman effort

he had kept the party intact after Strasser’s defection. He had traveled up and

down the country addressing three and four meetings a day, exhorting the party

leaders to keep together behind him. But Nazi spirits remained at a low ebb, and

the party was financially bankrupt. Many were saying it was finished. Goebbels

had reflected the general feeling in his diary the last week of the year: “1932 has

brought us eternal bad luck … The past was difficult and the future looks dark

and gloomy; all prospects and hopes have quite disappeared.”

Hitler therefore was not nearly in so favorable a position to bargain for power

as he had been during the previous summer and autumn. But neither was Papen;

he was out of office. In their adversity, their minds met.

The terms on which they met are a matter of dispute. In his trial at Nuremberg

and in his memoirs Papen blandly maintained that, ever loyal to Schleicher, he

merely suggested to Hitler that he join the General’s government. In view,

however, of Papen’s long record of deceit, of his quite natural desire to present

himself in the most favorable light at Nuremberg and in his book, and of

subsequent events, it seems certain that Schroeder’s quite different account,

which was given at Nuremberg, is the more truthful one. The banker maintained

that what Papen suggested was the replacement of the Schleicher government by

a Hitler-Papen government in which the two of them would be coequal. But:

Hitler … said if he were made Chancellor it would be necessary for him to be the head of

the government but that supporters of Papen could go into his government as ministers when

they were willing to go along with him in his policy of changing many things. These changes

included elimination of Social Democrats, Communists and Jews from leading positions in

Germany and the restoration of order in public life. Von Papen and Hitler reached agreement

in principle … They agreed that further details would have to be worked out and that this

could be done in Berlin or some other convenient place. 16

And in the greatest secrecy, of course. But, to the consternation of Papen and

Hitler, the newspapers in Berlin came out with flaming headlines on the morning

of January 5 over accounts of the Cologne meeting, accompanied by editorial

blasts against Papen for his disloyalty to Schleicher. The wily General had

placed his spies with his usual acumen; one of them, Papen later learned, had

been that photographer who had snapped his picture as he entered Schroeder’s

home.

Besides his deal with Papen, Hitler got two other things out of the Cologne

meeting which were of great value to him. He learned from the ex-Chancellor

that Hindenburg had not given Schleicher power to dissolve the Reichstag. This

meant that the Nazis, with the help of the Communists, could overthrow the

General any time they wished. Secondly, out of the meeting came an

understanding that West German business interests would take over the debts of

the Nazi Party. Two days after the Cologne talks Goebbels noted “pleasing

progress in political developments” but still complained of the “bad financial

situation.” Ten days later, on January 16, he reported that the financial position

of the party had “fundamentally improved overnight.”

In the meantime Chancellor Schleicher went about—with an optimism that

was myopic, to say the least—trying to establish a stable government. On

December 15 he made a fireside broadcast to the nation begging his listeners to

forget that he was a general and assuring them that he was a supporter “neither

of capitalism nor of socialism” and that to him “concepts such as private

economy or planned economy have lost their terrors.” His principal task, he said,

was to provide work for the unemployed and get the country back on its

economic feet. There would be no tax increase, no more wage cuts. In fact, he

was canceling the last cut in wages and relief which Papen had made.

Furthermore, he was ending the agricultural quotas which Papen had established

for the benefit of the large landowners and instead was launching a scheme to

take 800,000 acres from the bankrupt Junker estates in the East and give them to

25,000 peasant families. Also prices of such essentials as coal and meat would

be kept down by rigid control.

This was a bid for the support of the very masses which he had hitherto

opposed or disregarded, and Schleicher followed it up with conversations with

the trade unions, to whose leaders he gave the impression that he envisaged a

future in which organized labor and the Army would be twin pillars of the

nation. But labor was not to be taken in by a man whom it profoundly

mistrusted, and it declined its co-operation.

The industrialists and the big landowners, on the other hand, rose up in arms

against the new Chancellor’s program, which they clamored was nothing less

than Bolshevism. The businessmen were aghast at Schleicher’s sudden

friendliness to the unions. The owners of large estates were infuriated at his

reduction of agricultural protection and livid at the prospect of his breaking up

the bankrupt estates in the East. On January 12 the Landbund, the association of

the larger farmers, bitterly attacked the government, and its leaders, two of

whom were Nazis, called on the President with their protests. Hindenburg, now a

Junker landowner himself, called his Chancellor to account. Schleicher’s answer

was to threaten to publish a secret Reichstag report on the Osthilfe (Eastern

Relief) loans—a scandal which, as everyone knew, implicated hundreds of the

oldest Junker families, who had waxed fat on unredeemed government “loans,”

and which indirectly involved even the President himself, since the East Prussian

estate which had been presented to him had been illegally deeded to his son to

escape inheritance taxes.

Despite the uproar among the industrialists and landowners and the coolness

of the trade unions, Schleicher remained unaccountably confident that all was

going well. On New Year’s Day, 1933, he and his cabinet called on the aged

President, who proceeded to express his gratitude that “the gravest hardships are

overcome and the upward path is now open to us.” On January 4, the day Papen

and Hitler were conferring in Cologne, the Chancellor arranged for Strasser, who

had returned from his holiday in the Italian sun, to see Hindenburg. The former

Number Two Nazi, when he saw the President a few days later, expressed

willingness to join the Schleicher cabinet. This move threw consternation into

the Nazi camp, which at the moment was pitched in the tiny state of Lippe,

where Hitler and all his principal aides were fighting furiously to score a local

election success in order to improve the Fuehrer’s bargaining position with

Papen. Goebbels recounts the arrival of Goering at midnight of January 13 with

the bad news of Strasser and of how the party chiefs had sat up all night

discussing it, agreeing that if he took office it would be a grave setback to the

party.

Schleicher thought so too, and on January 15 when Kurt von Schuschnigg,

then the Austrian Minister of Justice, visited him he assured him that “Herr

Hitler was no longer a problem, his movement had ceased to be a political

danger, and the whole problem had been solved, it was a thing of the past. ”17

But Strasser did not come into the cabinet, nor did the leader of the Nationalist

Party, Hugenberg, who on the day before, the fourteenth, had assured

Hindenburg that he would. Both men soon turned to Hitler, Strasser to be turned

down cold and Hugenberg with more success. On January 15, at the very

moment when Schleicher was gloating to Schusch-nigg about the end of Hitler,

the Nazis scored a local success in the elections of little Lippe. It was not much

of an achievement. The total vote was only 90,000, of which the Nazis obtained

38,000, or 39 per cent, an increase of some 17 per cent over their previous poll.

But, led by Goebbels, the Nazi leaders beat the drums over their “victory,” and

strangely enough it seems to have impressed a number of conservatives,

including the men behind Hindenburg, of whom the principal ones were State

Secretary Meissner and the President’s son, Oskar.

On the evening of January 22, these two gentlemen stole out of the

presidential quarters, grabbed a taxi, as Meissner says, to avoid being noticed

and drove to the suburban home of a hitherto unknown Nazi by the name of

Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was a friend of Papen—they had served together

on the Turkish front during the war. There they met Papen, Hitler, Goering and

Frick. According to Meissner, Oskar von Hindenburg had been opposed to any

truck with the Nazis up to this fateful evening. Hitler may have known this; at

any rate he insisted on having a talk with him “under four eyes,” and to

Meissner’s astonishment young Hindenburg assented and withdrew with Hitler

to another room, where they were closeted together for an hour. What Hitler said

to the President’s son, who was not noted for a brilliant mind or a strong

character, has never been revealed. It was generally believed in Nazi circles that

Hitler made both offers and threats, the latter consisting of hints to disclose to

the public Oskar’s involvement in the Osthilfe scandal and the tax evasion on the

Hindenburg estate. One can only judge the offers by the fact that a few months

later five thousand tax-free acres were added to the Hindenburg family property

at Neudeck and that in August 1934 Oskar was jumped from colonel to major

general in the Army.

At any rate there is no doubt that Hitler made a strong impression on the

President’s son. “In the taxi on the way back,” Meissner later recounted in his

affidavit at Nuremberg, “Oskar von Hindenburg was extremely silent, and the

only remark which he made was that it could not be helped—the Nazis had to be

taken into the government. My impression was that Hitler had succeeded in

getting him under his spell.”

It only remained for Hitler to cast the spell over the father. This admittedly

was more difficult, for whatever the old Field Marshal’s deficiencies of mind,

age had not softened his granite character. More difficult, but not impossible.

Papen, busy as a beaver, was working daily on the old man. And it was easy to

see that, for all his cunning, Schleicher was fast stumbling to a fall. He had failed

to win over the Nazis or to split them. He could get no backing from the

Nationalists, the Center or the Social Democrats.

On January 23, therefore, Schleicher went to see Hindenburg, admitted that he

could not find a majority in the Reichstag and demanded its dissolution and

emergency powers to rule by decree under Article 48 of the constitution.

According to Meissner, the General also asked for the “temporary elimination”

of the Reichstag and frankly acknowledged that he would have to transform his

government into “a military dictatorship. ”18 Despite all his devious plotting,

Schleicher was back where Papen had been early in December, but their roles

were now reversed. Then Papen had demanded emergency powers and

Schleicher had opposed him and proposed that he himself form a majority

government with the backing of the Nazis. Now the General was insisting on

dictatorial rule, and the sly fox Papen was assuring the Field Marshal that he

himself could corral Hitler for a government that would have a majority in the

Reichstag. Such are the ups and downs of rogues and intriguers!

Hindenburg, reminding Schleicher of the reasons he had given on December 2

for upsetting Papen, informed him that they still held good. He bade him return

to his task of finding a Reichstag majority. Schleicher was finished, and he knew

it. So did everyone else who was in on the secret. Goebbels, one of the few in on

it, commented the next day: “Schleicher will fall any moment, he who brought

down so many others.”

His end came finally and officially on January 28, when he called on the

President and tendered the resignation of his government. “I have already one

foot in the grave, and I am not sure that I shall not regret this action in heaven

later on,” Hindenburg told the disillusioned General. “After this breach of trust,

sir, I am not sure that you will go to heaven,” Schleicher replied, and quickly

faded out of German history.19

At noon of the same day Papen was entrusted by the President to explore the

possibilities of forming a government under Hitler “within the terms of the

constitution.” For a week this sly, ambitious man had been flirting with the idea

of double-crossing Hitler after all and becoming Chancellor again of a

presidential government backed by Hugenberg. On January 27 Goebbels noted:

“There is still the possibility that Papen will again be made Chancellor.” The day

before, Schleicher had sent the Commander in Chief of the Army, General von

Hammerstein, to the President to warn him against selecting Papen. In the maze

of intrigues with which Berlin was filled, Schleicher was at the last minute

plumping for Hitler to replace him. Hindenburg assured the Army commander

he had no intention of appointing “that Austrian corporal.”

The next day, Sunday, January 29, was a crucial one, with the conspirators

playing their last desperate hands and filling the capital with the most alarming

and conflicting rumors, not all of them groundless by any means. Once more

Schleicher dispatched the faithful Hammerstein to stir up the brew. The Army

chief sought out Hitler to warn him once again that Papen might leave him out in

the cold and that it might be wise for the Nazi leader to ally himself with the

fallen Chancellor and the Army. Hitler was not much interested. He returned to

the Kaiserhof to have cakes and coffee with his aides and it was at this repast

that Goering appeared with the tidings that the Fuehrer would be named

Chancellor on the morrow.

That night the Nazi chieftains were celebrating the momentous news at

Goebbels’ home on the Reichskanzlerplatz when another emissary from

Schleicher arrived with startling news. This was Werner von Alvensleben, a man

so given to conspiracy that when one did not exist he invented one. He informed

the jubilant party that Schleicher and Hammerstein had put the Potsdam garrison

on an alarm footing and were preparing to bundle the old President off to

Neudeck and establish a military dictatorship. This was a gross exaggeration. It

is possible that the two generals were playing with the idea but most certain that

they had not taken any action. The Nazis, however, became hysterical with

alarm. Goering hastened as fast as his bulk allowed across the square to alert the

President and Papen. What Hitler did he later described himself.

My immediate counteraction to this planned [military] putsch was to send for the

Commander of the Berlin S.A., Count von Helldorf, and through him to alert the whole S.A.

of Berlin. At the same time I instructed Major Wecke of the Police, whom I knew I could trust,

to prepare for a sudden seizure of the Wilhelmstrasse by six police battalions … Finally I

instructed General von Blomberg (who had been selected as Reichswehr Minister-elect) to

proceed at once, on arrival in Berlin at 8 A.M. on January 30, direct to the Old Gentleman to

be sworn in, and thus to be in a position, as Commander in Chief of the Reichswehr, to

suppress any possible attempts at a coup d’état. 20

Behind the backs of Schleicher and the Commander in Chief of the Army—

everything in this frenzied period was being done behind someone’s back—

General Werner von Blomberg had been summoned, not by Hitler, who was not

yet in power, but by Hindenburg and Papen from Geneva, where he was

representing Germany at the Disarmament Conference, to become the new

Minister of Defense in the Hitler-Papen cabinet. He was a man who, as Hitler

later said, already enjoyed his confidence and who had come under the spell of

his chief of staff in East Prussia, Colonel Walter von Reichenau, an outspoken

Nazi sympathizer. When Blomberg arrived in Berlin, early on the morning of

January 30, he was met at the station by two Army officers with conflicting

orders for him. A Major von Kuntzen, Hammerstein’s adjutant, commanded him

to report to the Commander in Chief of the Army. Colonel Oskar von

Hindenburg, adjutant to his father, ordered the bewildered Blomberg to report to

the President of the Republic. Blomberg went to the President, was immediately

sworn in as Defense Minister, and thus was given the authority not only to put

down any attempted coup by the Army but to see that the military supported the

new government, which a few hours later would be named. Hitler was always

grateful to the Army for accepting him at that crucial moment. Not long

afterward he told a party rally, “If in the days of our revolution the Army had not

stood on our side, then we would not be standing here today.” It was a

responsibility which would weigh heavily on the officer corps in the days to

come and which, in the end, they would more than regret.

On this wintry morning of January 30, 1933, the tragedy of the Weimar

Republic, of the bungling attempt for fourteen frustrating years of the Germans

to make democracy work, had come to an end—but not before, at the very last

moment, as the final curtain fell, a minor farce took place among the motley

group of conspirators gathered to bury the republican regime. Papen later

described it.

At about half-past ten the members of the proposed Cabinet met in my house and walked

across the garden to the Presidential palace, where we waited in Meissner’s office. Hitler

immediately renewed his complaints about not being appointed Commissioner for Prussia. He

felt that this severely restricted his power. I told him … the Prussian appointment could be left

until later. To this, Hitler replied that if his powers were to be thus limited, he must insist on

new Reichstag elections.

This produced a completely new situation and the debate became heated. Hugenberg, in

particular, objected to the idea, and Hitler tried to pacify him by stating that he would make no

changes in the Cabinet, whatever the result might be … By this time it was long past eleven

o’clock, the time that had been appointed for our interview with the President, and Meissner

asked me to end our discussion, as Hindenburg was not prepared to wait any longer.

We had had such a sudden clash of opinions that I was afraid our new coalition would

break up before it was born … At last we were shown in to the President and I made the

necessary formal introductions. Hindenburg made a short speech about the necessity of full

co-operation in the interests of the nation, and we were then sworn in. The Hitler cabinet had

been formed. 21

In this way, by way of the back door, by means of a shabby political deal with

the old-school reactionaries he privately detested, the former tramp from Vienna,

the derelict of the First World War, the violent revolutionary, became Chancellor

of the great nation.

To be sure, the National Socialists were in a decided minority in the

government; they had only three of the eleven posts in the cabinet and except for

the chancellorship these were not-key positions. Frick was Minister of the

Interior but he did not control the police as this minister did in most European

countries—the police in Germany were in the hands of the individual states. The

third Nazi cabinet member was Goering, but no specific office could be found

for him; he was named Minister without Portfolio, with the understanding that

he would become Minister of Aviation as soon as Germany had an air force.

Little noticed was the naming of Goering to be also Minister of the Interior of

Prussia, an office that controlled the Prussian police; for the moment public

attention was focused on the Reich cabinet. Goebbels’ name, to the surprise of

many, did not appear in it; momentarily he was left out in the cold.

The important ministries went to the conservatives, who were sure they had

lassoed the Nazis for their own ends: Neurath continued as Minister of Foreign

Affairs; Blomberg was Minister of Defense; Hugenberg took over the combined

Ministries of Economy and Agriculture; Seldte, the Stahlhelm leader, was made

Minister of Labor; the other ministries were left in the hands of nonparty

“experts” whom Papen had appointed eight months before. Papen himself was

Vice-Chancellor of the Reich and Premier of Prussia, and Hindenburg had

promised him that he would not receive the Chancellor except in the company of

the Vice-Chancellor. This unique position, he was sure, would enable him to put

a brake on the radical Nazi leader. But even more: This government was Papen’s

conception, his creation, and he was confident that with the help of the staunch

old President, who was his friend, admirer and protector, and with the knowing

support of his conservative colleagues, who outnumbered the obstreperous Nazis

eight to three, he would dominate it.

But this frivolous, conniving politician did not know Hitler—no one really

knew Hitler—nor did he comprehend the strength of the forces which had

spewed him up. Nor did Papen, or anyone else except Hitler, quite realize the

inexplicable weakness, that now bordered on paralysis, of existing institutions—

the Army, the churches, the trade unions, the political parties—or of the vast

non-Nazi middle class and the highly organized proletariat all of which, as

Papen mournfully observed much later, would “give up without a fight.”

No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility

for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolf Hitler.

The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to

unite against it. At the crest of their popular strength, in July 1932, the National

Socialists had attained but 37 per cent of the vote. But the 63 per cent of the

German people who expressed their opposition to Hitler were much too divided

and shortsighted to combine against a common danger which they must have

known would overwhelm them unless they united, however temporarily, to

stamp it out. The Communists, at the behest of Moscow, were committed to the

last to the silly idea of first destroying the Social Democrats, the Socialist trade

unions and what middle-class democratic forces there were, on the dubious

theory that although this would lead to a Nazi regime it would be only temporary

and would bring inevitably the collapse of capitalism, after which the

Communists would take over and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Fascism, in the Bolshevik Marxist view, represented the last stage of a dying

capitalism; after that, the Communist deluge!

Fourteen years of sharing political power in the Republic, of making all the

compromises that were necessary to maintain coalition governments, had sapped

the strength and the zeal of the Social Democrats until their party had become

little more than an opportunist pressure organization, determined to bargain for

concessions for the trade unions on which their strength largely rested. It might

be true, as some Socialists said, that fortune had not smiled on them: the

Communists, unscrupulous and undemocratic, had split the working class; the

depression had further hurt the Social Democrats, weakening the trade unions

and losing the party the support of millions of unemployed, who in their

desperation turned either to the Communists or the Nazis. But the tragedy of the

Social Democrats could not be explained fully by bad luck. They had had their

chance to take over Germany in November 1918 and to found a state based on

what they had always preached: social democracy. But they lacked the

decisiveness to do so. Now at the dawn of the third decade they were a tired,

defeatist party, dominated by old, well-meaning but mostly mediocre men. Loyal

to the Republic they were to the last, but in the end too confused, too timid to

take the great risks which alone could have preserved it, as they had shown by

their failure to act when Papen turned out a squad of soldiers to destroy

constitutional government in Prussia.

Between the Left and the Right, Germany lacked a politically powerful middle

class, which in other countries—in France, in England, in the United States—

had proved to be the backbone of democracy. In the first year of the Republic the

middle-class parties, the Democrats, the People’s Party, the Center, had polled a

total of twelve million votes, only two million less than the two Socialist groups.

But thereafter their strength had waned as their supporters gravitated toward

Hitler and the Nationalists. In 1919, the Democrats had elected 74 members to

the Reichstag; by 1932 they held just 2 seats. The strength of the People’s Party

fell from 62 seats in 1920 to 11 seats in 1932. Only the Catholic Center retained

its voting strength to the end. In the first republican elections in 1919 the Center

had 71 deputies in the Reichstag; in 1932 it had 70. But even more than the

Social Democrats, the Center Party since Bismarck’s time had been largely

opportunist, supporting whatever government made concessions to its special

interests. And though it seemed to be loyal to the Republic and to subscribe to its

democracy, its leaders, as we have seen, were negotiating with the Nazis to give

Hitler the chancellorship before they were outbid by Papen and the Nationalists.

If the German Republic was bereft of a middle-of-the-road political class, it

also lacked that stability provided in many other countries by a truly

conservative party. The German Nationalists at their peak in 1924 had polled six

million votes and sent 103 deputies to the Reichstag, in which they formed the

second largest party. But then, as at almost all times during the Weimar regime,

they refused to take a responsible position either in the government or in

opposition, the only exception being their participation in two short-lived

cabinets in the Twenties. What the German Right, whose vote went largely to

the Nationalists, wanted was an end to the Republic and a return to an imperialist

Germany in which all of their old privileges would be restored. Actually the

Republic had treated the Right both as individuals and as classes with the utmost

generosity and, considering their aim, with exceptional tolerance. It had, as we

have seen, allowed the Army to maintain a state within a state, the businessmen

and bankers to make large profits, the Junkers to keep their uneconomic estates

by means of government loans that were never repaid-and seldom used to

improve their land. Yet this generosity had won neither their gratitude nor their

loyalty to the Republic. With a narrowness, a prejudice, a blindness which in

retrospect seem inconceivable to this chronicler, they hammered away at the

foundations of the Republic until, in alliance with Hitler, they brought it down.

In the former Austrian vagabond the conservative classes thought they had

found a man who, while remaining their prisoner, would help them attain their

goals. The destruction of the Republic was only the first step. What they then

wanted was an authoritarian Germany which at home would put an end to

democratic “nonsense” and the power of the trade unions and in foreign affairs

undo the verdict of 1918, tear off the shackles of Versailles, rebuild a great

Army and with its military power restore the country to its place in the sun.

These were Hitler’s aims too. And though he brought what the conservatives had

lacked, a mass following, the Right was sure that he would remain in its pocket

—was he not outnumbered eight to three in the Reich cabinet? Such a

commanding position also would allow the conservatives, or so they thought, to

achieve their ends without the barbarism of unadulterated Nazism. Admittedly

they were decent, God-fearing men, according to their lights.

The Hohenzollern Empire had been built on the armed triumphs of Prussia,

the German Republic on the defeat by the Allies after a great war. But the Third

Reich owed nothing to the fortunes of war or to foreign influence. It was

inaugurated in peacetime, and peacefully, by the Germans themselves, out of

both their weaknesses and their strengths. The Germans imposed the Nazi

tyranny on themselves. Many of them, perhaps a majority, did not quite realize it

at that noon hour of January 30, 1933, when President Hindenburg, acting in a

perfectly constitutional manner, entrusted the chancellorship to Adolf Hitler.

But they were soon to learn.

* Equivalent to a major general in the U.S. Army.

* “Scorn and rage boil within me,” Groener wrote Schleicher a few months later (November

29), “because I have been deceived in you, my old friend, disciple, adopted son.” (See Gordon

A. Craig, “Reichswehr and National Socialism: The Policy of Wilhelm Groener,” Political

Science Quarterly, June 1948.)

* Papen, in his memoirs, does not mention Schleicher’s presence at this meeting, but it is clear

from other sources that he was there. It is an important point, in view of subsequent events.

7

THE NAZIFICATION OF GERMANY: 1933–34

THE THEORY WHICH HITLER had evolved in his vagabond days in Vienna and

never forgotten—that the way to power for a revolutionary movement was to

ally itself with some of the powerful institutions in the State—had now worked

out in practice pretty much as he had calculated. The President, backed by the

Army and the conservatives, had made him Chancellor. His political power,

though great, was, however, not complete. It was shared with these three sources

of authority, which had put him into office and which were outside and, to some

extent, distrustful of the National Socialist movement.

Hitler’s immediate task, therefore, was to quickly eliminate them from the

driver’s seat, make his party the exclusive master of the State and then with the

power of an authoritarian government and its police carry out the Nazi

revolution. He had been in office scarcely twenty-four hours when he made his

first decisive move, springing a trap on his gullible conservative “captors” and

setting in motion a chain of events which he either originated or controlled and

which at the end of six months would bring the complete Nazification of

Germany and his own elevation to dictator of the Reich, unified and

defederalized for the first time in German history.

Five hours after being sworn in, at 5 P.M. on January 30, 1933, Hitler held his

first cabinet meeting. The minutes of the session, which turned up at Nuremberg

among the hundreds of tons of captured secret documents, reveal how quickly

and adroitly Hitler, aided by the crafty Goering, began to take his conservative

colleagues for a ride. *1 Hindenburg had named Hitler to head not a presidential

cabinet but one based on a majority in the Reichstag. However, the Nazis and the

Nationalists, the only two parties represented in the government, had only 247

seats out of 583 in Parliament and thus lacked a majority. To attain it they

needed the backing of the Center Party with its 70 seats. In the very first hours of

the new government Hitler had dispatched Goering to talk with the Centrist

leaders, and now he reported to the cabinet that the Center was demanding

“certain concessions.” Goering therefore proposed that the Reichstag be

dissolved and new elections held, and Hitler agreed. Hugenberg, a man of

wooden mind for all his success in business, objected to taking the Center into

the government but on the other hand opposed new elections, well knowing that

the Nazis, with the resources of the State behind them, might win an absolute

majority at the polls and thus be in a position to dispense with his own services

and those of his conservative friends. He proposed simply suppressing the

Communist Party; with its 100 seats eliminated, the Nazis and the Nationalists

would have a majority. But Hitler would not go so far at the moment, and it was

finally agreed that the Chancellor himself would confer with the Center Party

leaders on the following morning and that if the talks were fruitless the cabinet

would then ask for new elections.

Hitler easily made them fruitless. At his request the Center leader, Monsignor

Kaas, submitted as a basis for discussion a list of questions which added up to a

demand that Hitler promise to govern constitutionally. But Hitler, tricking both

Kaas and his cabinet members, reported to the latter that the Center had made

impossible demands and that there was no chance of agreement. He therefore

proposed that the President be asked to dissolve the Reichstag and call new

elections. Hugenberg and Papen were trapped, but after a solemn assurance from

the Nazi leader that the cabinet would remain unchanged however the elections

turned out, they agreed to go along with him. New elections were set for March

5.

For the first time—in the last relatively free election Germany was to have—

the Nazi Party now could employ all the vast resources of the government to win

votes. Goebbels was jubilant. “Now it will be easy,” he wrote in his diary on

February 3, “to carry on the fight, for we can call on all the resources of the

State. Radio and press are at our disposal. We shall stage a masterpiece of

propaganda. And this time, naturally, there is no lack of money. ”2

The big businessmen, pleased with the new government that was going to put

the organized workers in their place and leave management to run its businesses

as it wished, were asked to cough up. This they agreed to do at a meeting on

February 20 at Goering’s Reichstag President’s Palace, at which Dr. Schacht

acted as host and Goering and Hitler laid down the line to a couple of dozen of

Germany’s leading magnates, including Krupp von Bohlen, who had become an

enthusiastic Nazi overnight, Bosch and Schnitzler of I. G. Farben, and Voegler,

head of the United Steel Works. The record of this secret meeting has been

preserved.

Hitler began a long speech with a sop to the industrialists. “Private

enterprise,” he said, “cannot be maintained in the age of democracy; it is

conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality …

All the worldly goods we possess we owe to the struggle of the chosen … We

must not forget that all the benefits of culture must be introduced more or less

with an iron fist.” He promised the businessmen that he would “eliminate” the

Marxists and restore the Wehrmacht (the latter was of special interest to such

industries as Krupp, United Steel and I. G. Farben, which stood to gain the most

from rearmament). “Now we stand before the last election,” Hitler concluded,

and he promised his listeners that “regardless of the outcome, there will be no

retreat.” If he did not win, he would stay in power “by other means … with other

weapons.” Goering, talking more to the immediate point, stressed the necessity

of “financial sacrifices” which “surely would be much easier for industry to bear

if it realized that the election of March fifth will surely be the last one for the

next ten years, probably even for the next hundred years.”

All this was made clear enough to the assembled industrialists and they

responded with enthusiasm to the promise of the end of the infernal elections, of

democracy and disarmament. Krupp, the munitions king, who, according to

Thyssen, had urged Hindenburg on January 29 not to appoint Hitler, jumped up

and expressed to the Chancellor the “gratitude” of the businessmen “for having

given us such a clear picture.” Dr. Schacht then passed the hat. “I collected three

million marks,” he recalled at Nuremberg.3

On January 31, 1933, the day after Hitler was named Chancellor, Goebbels

wrote in his diary: “In a conference with the Fuehrer we lay down the line for the

fight against the Red terror. For the moment we shall abstain from direct

countermeasures. The Bolshevik attempt at revolution must first burst into

flame. At the proper moment we shall strike.”

Despite increasing provocation by the Nazi authorities there was no sign of a

revolution, Communist or Socialist, bursting into flames as the electoral

campaign got under way. By the beginning of February the Hitler government

had banned all Communist meetings and shut down the Communist press. Social

Democrat rallies were either forbidden or broken up by the S.A. rowdies, and the

leading Socialist newspapers were continually suspended. Even the Catholic

Center Party did not escape the Nazi terror. Stegerwald, the leader of the

Catholic Trade Unions, was beaten by Brownshirts when he attempted to address

a meeting, and Bruening was obliged to seek police protection at another rally

after S.A. troopers had wounded a number of his followers. Altogether fifty-one

anti-Nazis were listed as murdered during the electoral campaign, and the Nazis

claimed that eighteen of their own number had been done to death.

Goering’s key position as Minister of the Interior of Prussia now began to be

noticed. Ignoring the restraining hand of Papen, who as Premier of Prussia was

supposedly above him, Goering removed hundreds of republican officials and

replaced them with Nazis, mostly S.A. and S.S. officers. He ordered the police to

avoid “at all costs” hostility to the S.A., the S.S. and the Stahlhelm but on the

other hand to show no mercy to those who were “hostile to the State.” He urged

the police “to make use of firearms” and warned that those who didn’t would be

punished. This was an outright call for the shooting down of all who opposed

Hitler by the police of a state (Prussia) which controlled two thirds of Germany.

Just to make sure that the job would be ruthlessly done, Goering on February 22

established an auxiliary police force of 50,000 men, of whom 40,000 were

drawn from the ranks of the S.A. and the S.S. and the rest from the Stahlhelm.

Police power in Prussia was thus largely carried out by Nazi thugs. It was a rash

German who appealed to such a “police” for protection against the Nazi

terrorists.

And yet despite all the terror the “Bolshevik revolution” which Goebbels,

Hitler and Goering were looking for failed to “burst into flames.” If it could not

be provoked, might it not have to be invented?

On February 24, Goering’s police raided the Karl Liebknecht Haus, the

Communist headquarters in Berlin. It had been abandoned some weeks before by

the Communist leaders, a number of whom had already gone underground or

quietly slipped off to Russia. But piles of propaganda pamphlets had been left in

the cellar and these were enough to enable Goering to announce in an official

communiqué that the seized “documents” proved that the Communists were

about to launch the revolution. The reaction of the public and even of some of

the conservatives in the government was one of skepticism. It was obvious that

something more sensational must be found to stampede the public before the

election took place on March 5.

THE REICHSTAG FIRE

On the evening of February 27, four of the most powerful men in Germany

were gathered at two separate dinners in Berlin. In the exclusive Herrenklub in

the Vosstrasse, Vice-Chancellor von Papen was entertaining President von

Hindenburg. Out at Goebbels’ home, Chancellor Hitler had arrived to dine en

famille. According to Goebbels, they were relaxing, playing music on the

gramophone and telling stories. “Suddenly,” he recounted later in his diary, “a

telephone call from Dr. Hanfstaengl: ‘The Reichstag is on fire!’ I am sure he is

telling a tall tale and decline even to mention it to the Fuehrer. ”4

But the diners at the Herrenklub were just around the corner from the

Reichstag.

Suddenly [Papen later wrote] we noticed a red glow through the windows and

heard sounds of shouting in the street. One of the servants came hurrying up to

me and whispered: “The Reichstag is on fire!” which I repeated to the President.

He got up and from the window we could see the dome of the Reichstag looking

as though it were illuminated by searchlights. Every now and again a burst of

flame and a swirl of smoke blurred the outline. 5

The Vice-Chancellor packed the aged President home in his own car and

hurried off to. the burning building. In the meantime Goebbels, according to his

account, had had second thoughts about Putzi Hanfstaengl’s “tall tale,” had

made some telephone calls and learned that the Reichstag was in flames. Within

a few seconds he and his Fuehrer were racing “at sixty miles an hour down the

Charlottenburger Chaussee toward the scene of the crime.”

That it was a crime, a Communist crime, they proclaimed at once on arrival at

the fire. Goering, sweating and puffing and quite beside himself with excitement,

was already there ahead of them declaiming to heaven, as Papen later recalled,

that “this is a Communist crime against the new government.” To the new

Gestapo chief, Rudolf Diels, Goering shouted, “This is the beginning of the

Communist revolution! We must not wait a minute. We will show no mercy.

Every Communist official must be shot, where he is found. Every Communist

deputy must this very night be strung up. ”6

The whole truth about the Reichstag fire will probably never be known.

Nearly all those who knew it are now dead, most of them slain by Hitler in the

months that followed. Even at Nuremberg the mystery could not be entirely

unraveled, though there is enough evidence to establish beyond a reasonable

doubt that it was the Nazis who planned the arson and carried it out for their own

political ends.

From Goering’s Reichstag President’s Palace an underground passage, built to

carry the central heating system, ran to the Reichstag building. Through this

tunnel Karl Ernst, a former hotel bellhop who had become the Berlin S.A.

leader, led a small detachment of storm troopers on the night of February 27 to

the Reichstag, where they scattered gasoline and self-igniting chemicals and then

made their way quickly back to the palace the way they had come. At the same

time a half-witted Dutch Communist with a passion for arson, Marinus van der

Lubbe, had made his way into the huge, darkened and to him unfamiliar building

and set some small fires of his own. This feeble-minded pyromaniac was a

godsend to the Nazis. He had been picked up by the S.A. a few days before after

having been overheard in a bar boasting that he had attempted to set fire to

several public buildings and that he was going to try the Reichstag next.

The coincidence that the Nazis had found a demented Communist arsonist

who was out to do exactly what they themselves had determined to do seems

incredible but is nevertheless supported by the evidence. The idea for the fire

almost certainly originated with Goebbels and Goering. Hans Gisevius, an

official in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior at the time, testified at Nuremberg

that “it was Goebbels who first thought of setting the Reichstag on fire,” and

Rudolf Diels, the Gestapo chief, added in an affidavit that “Goering knew

exactly how the fire was to be started” and had ordered him “to prepare, prior to

the fire, a list of people who were to be arrested immediately after it.” General

Franz Halder, Chief of the German General Staff during the early part of World

War II, recalled at Nuremberg how on one occasion Goering had boasted of his

deed.

At a luncheon on the birthday of the Fuehrer in 1942 the conversation turned to the topic of

the Reichstag building and its artistic value. I heard with my own ears when Goering

interrupted the conversation and shouted: “The only one who really knows about the Reichstag

is I, because I set it on fire!” With that he slapped his thigh with the flat of his hand. *

Van der Lubbe, it seems clear, was a dupe of the Nazis. He was encouraged to

try to set the Reichstag on fire. But the main job was to be done—without his

knowledge, of course—by the storm troopers. Indeed, it was established at the

subsequent trial at Leipzig that the Dutch half-wit did not possess the means to

set so vast a building on fire so quickly. Two and a half minutes after he entered,

the great central hall was fiercely burning. He had only his shirt for tinder. The

main fires, according to the testimony of experts at the trial, had been set with

considerable quantities of chemicals and gasoline. It was obvious that one man

could not have carried them into the building, nor would it have been possible

for him to start so many fires in so many scattered places in so short a time.

Van der Lubbe was arrested on the spot and Goering, as he afterward told the

court, wanted to hang him at once. The next day Ernst Torgler, parliamentary

leader of the Communists, gave himself up to the police when he heard that

Goering had implicated him, and a few days later Georgi Dimitroff, a Bulgarian

Communist who later became Prime Minister of Bulgaria, and two other

Bulgarian Communists, Popov and Tanev, were apprehended by the police.

Their subsequent trial before the Supreme Court at Leipzig turned into

something of a fiasco for the Nazis and especially for Goering, whom Dimitroff,

acting as his own lawyer, easily provoked into making a fool of himself in a

series of stinging cross-examinations. At one point, according to the court

record, Goering screamed at the Bulgarian, “Out with you, you scoundrel!”

JUDGE [to the police officer]: Take him away.

DIMITROFF [being led away by the police]: Are you afraid of my questions, Herr

Ministerpraesident?

GOERING: You wait until we get you outside this court, you scoundrel!

Torgler and the three Bulgarians were acquitted, though the German

Communist leader was immediately taken into “protective custody,” where he

remained until his death during the second war. Van der Lubbe was found guilty

and decapitated.7

The trial, despite the subserviency of the court to the Nazi authorities, cast a

great deal of suspicion on Goering and the Nazis, but it came too late to have

any practical effect. For Hitler had lost no time in exploiting the Reichstag fire to

the limit.

On the day following the fire, February 28, he prevailed on President

Hindenburg to sign a decree “for the Protection of the People and the State”

suspending the seven sections of the constitution which guaranteed individual

and civil liberties. Described as a “defensive measure against Communist acts of

violence endangering the state,” the decree laid down that:

Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion,

including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and

violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications;

and warrants for house searchers, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions

on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.

In addition, the decree authorized the Reich government to take over complete

power in the federal states when necessary and imposed the death sentence for a

number of crimes, including “serious disturbances of the peace” by armed

persons.8

Thus with one stroke Hitler was able not only to legally gag his opponents and

arrest them at his will but, by making the trumped-up Communist threat

“official,” as it were, to throw millions of the middle class and the peasantry into

a frenzy of fear that unless they voted for National Socialism at the elections a

week hence, the Bolsheviks might take over. Some four thousand Communist

officials and a great many Social Democrat and liberal leaders were arrested,

including members of the Reichstag, who, according to the law, were immune

from arrest. This was the first experience Germans had had with Nazi terror

backed up by the government. Truckloads of storm troopers roared through the

streets all over Germany, breaking into homes, rounding up victims and carting

them off to S.A. barracks, where they were tortured and beaten. The Communist

press and political meetings were suppressed; the Social Democrat newspapers

and many liberal journals were suspended and the meetings of the democratic

parties either banned or broken up. Only the Nazis and their Nationalist allies

were permitted to campaign unmolested.

With all the resources of the national and Prussian governments at their

disposal and with plenty of money from big business in their coffers, the Nazis

carried on an election propaganda such as Germany had never seen before. For

the first time the State-run radio carried the voices of Hitler, Goering and

Goebbels to every corner of the land. The streets, bedecked with swastika flags,

echoed to the tramp of the storm troopers. There were mass rallies, torchlight

parades, the din of loudspeakers in the squares. The billboards were plastered

with flamboyant Nazi posters and at night bonfires lit up the hills. The electorate

was in turn cajoled with promises of a German paradise, intimidated by the

brown terror in the streets and frightened by “revelations” about the Communist

“revolution.” The day after the Reichstag fire the Prussian government issued a

long statement declaring that it had found Communist “documents” proving:

Government buildings, museums, mansions and essential plants were to be

burned down … Women and children were to be sent in front of terrorist groups

… The burning of the Reichstag was to be the signal for a bloody insurrection

and civil war … It has been ascertained that today was to have seen throughout

Germany terrorist acts against individual persons, against private property, and

against the life and limb of the peaceful population, and also the beginning of

general civil war.

Publication of the “documents proving the Communist conspiracy” was

promised, but never made. The fact, however, that the Prussian government

itself vouched for their authenticity impressed many Germans.

The waverers were also impressed perhaps by Goering’s threats. At Frankfurt

on March 3, on the eve of the elections, he shouted:

Fellow Germans, my measures will not be crippled by any judicial thinking …

I don’t have to worry about justice; my mission is only to destroy and

exterminate, nothing more! … Certainly, I shall use the power of the State and

the police to the utmost, my dear Communists, so don’t draw any false

conclusions; but the struggle to the death, in which my fist will grasp your necks,

I shall lead with those down there—the Brownshirts. 9

Almost unheard was the voice of former Chancellor Bruening, who also spoke

out that day, proclaiming that his Center Party would resist any overthrow of the

constitution, demanding an investigation of the suspicious Reichstag fire and

calling on President Hindenburg “to protect the oppressed against their

oppressors.” Vain appeal! The aged President kept his silence. It was now time

for the people, in their convulsion, to speak.

On March 5, 1933, the day of the last democratic elections they were to know

during Hitler’s life, they spoke with their ballots. Despite all the terror and

intimidation, the majority of them rejected Hitler. The Nazis led the polling with

17,277,180 votes—an increase of some five and a half million, but it comprised

only 44 per cent of the total vote. A clear majority still eluded Hitler. All the

persecution and suppression of the previous weeks did not prevent the Center

Party from actually increasing its vote from 4,230,600 to 4,424,900; with its ally,

the Catholic Bavarian People’s Party, it obtained a total of five and a half million

votes. Even the Social Democrats held their position as the second largest party,

polling 7,181,629 votes, a drop of only 70,000. The Communists lost a million

supporters but still polled 4,848,058 votes. The Nationalists, led by Papen and

Hugenberg, were bitterly disappointed with their own showing, a vote of

3,136,760, a mere 8 per cent of the votes cast and a gain of less than 200,000.

Still, the Nationalists’ 52 seats, added to the 288 of the Nazis, gave the

government a majority of 16 in the Reichstag. This was enough, perhaps, to

carry on the day-to-day business of government but it was far short of the two-

thirds majority which Hitler needed to carry out a new, bold plan to establish his

dictatorship by consent of Parliament.

GLEICHSCHALTUNG: THE “CO-ORDINATION” OF THE REICH

The plan was deceptively simple and had the advantage of cloaking the

seizure of absolute power in legality. The Reichstag would be asked to pass an

“enabling act” conferring on Hitler’s cabinet exclusive legislative powers for

four years. Put even more simply, the German Parliament would be requested to

turn over its constitutional functions to Hitler and take a long vacation. But since

this necessitated a change in the constitution, a two-thirds majority was needed

to approve it.

How to obtain that majority was the main order of business at a cabinet

meeting on March 15, 1933, the minutes of which were produced at

Nuremberg. 10 Part of the problem would be solved by the “absence” of the

eighty-one Communist members of the Reichstag. Goering felt sure that the rest

of the problem could be easily disposed of “by refusing admittance to a few

Social Democrats.” Hitler was in a breezy, confident mood. After all, by the

decree of February 28, which he had induced Hindenburg to sign the day after

the Reichstag fire, he could arrest as many opposition deputies as was necessary

to assure his two-thirds majority. There was some question about the Catholic

Center, which was demanding guarantees, but the Chancellor was certain that

this party would go along with him. Hugenberg, the Nationalist leader, who had

no desire to put all the power in Hitler’s hands, demanded that the President be

authorized to participate in preparing laws decreed by the cabinet under the

enabling act. Dr. Meissner, the State Secretary in the Presidential Chancellery,

who had already committed his future to the Nazis, replied that “the

collaboration of the Reich President would not be necessary.” He was quick to

realize that Hitler had no wish to be tied down by the stubborn old President, as

the republican chancellors had been.

But Hitler wished, at this stage, to make a grandiose gesture to the aged Field

Marshal and to the Army and the nationalist conservatives as well, and in so

doing link his rowdy, revolutionary regime with Hindenburg’s venerable name

and with all the past military glories of Prussia. To accomplish this he and

Goebbels, who on March 13 became Minister of Propaganda, conceived a

master stroke. Hitler would open the new Reichstag, which he was about to

destroy, in the Garrison Church at Potsdam, the great shrine of Prussianism,

which aroused in so many Germans memories of imperial glories and grandeur,

for here lay buried the bones of Frederick the Great, here the Hohenzollern kings

had worshiped, here Hindenburg had first come in 1866 on a pilgrimage when he

returned as a young Guards officer from the Austro-Prussian War, a war which

had given Germany its first unification.

The date chosen for the ceremonial opening of the first Reichstag of the Third

Reich, March 21, was significant too, for it fell on the anniversary of the day on

which Bismarck had opened the first Reichstag of the Second Reich in 1871. As

the old field marshals, generals and admirals from imperial times gathered in

their resplendent uniforms in the Garrison Church, led by the former Crown

Prince and Field Marshal von Mackensen in the imposing dress and headgear of

the Death’s-Head Hussars, the shades of Frederick the Great and the Iron

Chancellor hovered over the assembly.

Hindenburg was visibly moved, and at one point in the ceremony Goebbels,

who was staging the performance and directing the broadcasting of it to the

nation, observed—and noted in his diary—that the old Field Marshal had tears in

his eyes. Flanked by Hitler, who appeared ill at ease in his formal cutaway

morning coat, the President, attired in field-gray uniform with the grand cordon

of the Black Eagle, and carrying a spiked helmet in one hand and his marshal’s

baton in the other, had marched slowly down the aisle, paused to salute the

empty seat of Kaiser Wilhelm II in the imperial gallery, and then in front of the

altar had read a brief speech giving his blessings to the new Hitler government.

May the old spirit of this celebrated shrine permeate the generation of today, may it liberate

us from selfishness and party strife and bring us together in national self-consciousness to

bless a proud and free Germany, united in herself.

Hitler’s reply was shrewdly designed to play on the sympathies and enlist the

confidence of the Old Order so glitteringly represented.

Neither the Kaiser nor the government nor the nation wanted the war. It was only the

collapse of the nation which compelled a weakened race to take upon itself, against its most

sacred convictions, the guilt for this war.

And then, turning to Hindenburg, who sat stiffly in his chair a few feet in front

of him:

By a unique unheaval in the last few weeks our national honor has been restored and,

thanks to your understanding, Herr Generalfeldmarschall, the union between the symbols of

the old greatness and the new strength has been celebrated. We pay you homage. A protective

Providence places you over the new forces of our nation.11

Hitler, with a show of deep humility toward the President he intended to rob

of his political power before the week was up, stepped down, bowed low to

Hindenburg and gripped his hand. There in the flashing lights of camera bulbs

and amid the clicking of movie cameras, which Goebbels had placed along with

microphones at strategic spots, was recorded for the nation and the world to see,

and to hear described, the solemn handclasp of the German Field Marshal and

the Austrian corporal uniting the new Germany with the old.

“After the dazzling pledge made by Hitler at Potsdam,” the French

ambassador, who was present at the scene, later wrote, “how could such men—

Hindenburg and his friends, the Junkers and monarchist barons, Hugenberg and

his German Nationalists, the officers of the Reichswehr—how could they fail to

dismiss the apprehension with which they had begun to view the excesses and

abuses of his party? Could they now hesitate to grant him their entire confidence,

to meet all his requests, to concede the full powers he claimed? ”12

The answer was given two days later, on March 23, in the Kroll Opera House

in Berlin, where the Reichstag convened. Before the house was the so-called

Enabling Act—the “Law for Removing the Distress of People and Reich ( Gesetz

zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich),” as it was officially called. Its five

brief paragraphs took the power of legislation, including control of the Reich

budget, approval of treaties with foreign states and the initiating of constitutional

amendments, away from Parliament and handed it over to the Reich cabinet for a

period of four years. Moreover, the act stipulated that the laws enacted by the

cabinet were to be drafted by the Chancellor and “might deviate from the

constitution.” No laws were to “affect the position of the Reichstag”—surely the

cruelest joke of all—and the powers of the President remained “undisturbed.” 13

Hitler reiterated these last two points in a speech of unexpected restraint to the

deputies assembled in the ornate opera house, which had long specialized in the

lighter operatic works and whose aisles were now lined with brown-shirted

storm troopers, whose scarred bully faces indicated that no nonsense would be

tolerated from the representatives of the people.

The government [Hitler promised] will make use of these powers only insofar as they are

essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures. Neither the existence of the Reichstag

nor that of the Reichsrat is menaced. The position and rights of the President remain unaltered

… The separate existence of the federal states will not be done away with. The rights of the

churches will not be diminished and their relationship to the State will not be modified. The

number of cases in which an internal necessity exists for having recourse to such a law is in

itself a limited one.

The fiery Nazi leader sounded quite moderate and almost modest; it was too

early in the life of the Third Reich for even the opposition members to know full

well the value of Hitler’s promises. Yet one of them, Otto Wells, leader of the

Social Democrats, a dozen of whose deputies had been “detained” by the police,

rose—amid the roar of the storm troopers outside yelling, “Full powers, or

else!”—to defy the would-be dictator. Speaking quietly and with great dignity,

Wells declared that the government might strip the Socialists of their power but

it could never strip them of their honor.

We German Social Democrats pledge ourselves solemnly in this historic hour to the

principles of humanity and justice, of freedom and socialism. No enabling act can give you the

power to destroy ideas which are eternal and indestructible.

Furious, Hitler jumped to his feet, and now the assembly received a real taste

of the man.

You come late, but yet you come! [he shouted] … You are no longer needed … The star of

Germany will rise and yours will sink. Your death knell has sounded…. I do not want your

votes. Germany will be free, but not through you! [Stormy applause.]

The Social Democrats, who bore a heavy responsibility for the weakening of

the Republic, would at least stick to their principles and go down—this one time

—defiantly. But not the Center Party, which once had successfully defied the

Iron Chancellor in the Kulturkampf. Monsignor Kaas, the party leader, had

demanded a written promise from Hitler that he would respect the President’s

power of veto. But though promised before the voting, it was never given.

Nevertheless the Center leader rose to announce that his party would vote for the

bill. Bruening remained silent. The vote was soon taken: 441 for, and 84 (all

Social Democrats) against. The Nazi deputies sprang to their feet shouting and

stamping deliriously and then, joined by the storm troopers, burst into the Horst

Wessel song, which soon would take its place alongside “Deutschland ueber

Alles” as one of the two national anthems:

Raise high the flags! Stand rank on rank together. Storm troopers march with steady, quiet

tread….

Thus was parliamentary democracy finally interred in Germany. Except for

the arrests of the Communists and some of the Social Democratic deputies, it

was all done quite legally, though accompanied by terror. Parliament had turned

over its constitutional authority to Hitler and thereby committed suicide, though

its body lingered on in an embalmed state to the very end of the Third Reich,

serving infrequently as a sounding board for some of Hitler’s thunderous

pronunciamentos, its members henceforth hand-picked by the Nazi Party, for

there were to be no more real elections. It was this Enabling Act alone which

formed the legal basis for Hitler’s dictatorship. From March 23, 1933, on, Hitler

was the dictator of the Reich, freed of any restraint by Parliament or, for all

practical purposes, by the weary old President. To be sure, much remained to be

done to bring the entire nation and all its institutions completely under the Nazi

heel, though, as we shall see, this also was accomplished with breathless speed

and with crudeness, trickery and brutality.

“The street gangs,” in the words of Alan Bullock, “had seized control of the

resources of a great modern State, the gutter had come to power.” But—as Hitler

never ceased to boast—“legally,” by an overwhelming vote of Parliament. The

Germans had no one to blame but themselves.

One by one, Germany’s most powerful institutions now began to surrender to

Hitler and to pass quietly, unprotestingly out of existence.

The states, which had stubbornly maintained their separate powers throughout

German history, were the first to fall. On the evening of March 9, two weeks

before the passage of the Enabling Act, General von Epp, on orders from Hitler

and Frick and with the help of a few storm troopers, turned out the government

of Bavaria and set up a Nazi regime. Within a week Reich Commissars were

appointed to take over in the other states, with the exception of Prussia, where

Goering was already firmly in the saddle. On March 31, Hitler and Frick, using

the Enabling Act for the first time, promulgated a law dissolving the diets of all

states except Prussia and ordering them reconstituted on the basis of the votes

cast in the last Reichstag election. Communist seats were not to be filled. But

this solution lasted only a week. The Chancellor, working at feverish haste,

issued a new law on April 7, appointing Reich Governors ( Reichs-staathaelter)

in all the states and empowering them to appoint and remove local governments,

dissolve the diets, and appoint and dismiss state officials and judges. Each of the

new governors was a Nazi and they were “required” to carry out “the general

policy laid down by the Reich Chancellor.”

Thus, within a fortnight of receiving full powers from the Reichstag, Hitler

had achieved what Bismarck, Wilhelm II and the Weimar Republic had never

dared to attempt: he had abolished the separate powers of the historic states and

made them subject to the central authority of the Reich, which was in his hands.

He had, for the first time in German history, really unified the Reich by

destroying its age-old federal character. On January 30, 1934, the first

anniversary of his becoming Chancellor, Hitler would formally complete the

task by means of a Law for the Reconstruction of the Reich. “Popular

assemblies” of the states were abolished, the sovereign powers of the states were

transferred to the Reich, all state governments were placed under the Reich

government and the state governors put under the administration of the Reich

Minister of the Interior. 14 As this Minister, Frick, explained it, “The state

governments from now on are merely administrative bodies of the Reich.”

The preamble to the law of January 30, 1934, proclaimed that it was

“promulgated with the unanimous vote of the Reichstag.” This was true, for by

this time all the political parties of Germany except the Nazis had been quickly

eliminated.

It cannot be said that they went down fighting. On May 19, 1933, the Social

Democrats—those who were not in jail or in exile—voted in the Reichstag

without a dissenting voice to approve Hitler’s foreign policy. Nine days before,

Goering’s police had seized the party’s buildings and newspapers and

confiscated its property. Nevertheless, the Socialists still tried to appease Hitler.

They denounced their comrades abroad who were attacking the Fuehrer. On June

19 they elected a new party committee, but three days later Frick put an end to

their attempts to compromise by dissolving the Social Democratic Party as

“subversive and inimical to the State.” Paul Lobe, the surviving leader, and

several of his party members in the Reichstag were arrested. The Communists,

of course, had already been suppressed.

This left the middle-class parties, but not for long. The Catholic Bavarian

People’s Party, whose government had been kicked out of office by the Nazi

coup on March 9, announced its own dissolution on July 4, and its ally, the

Center Party, which had defied Bismarck so strenuously and been a bulwark of

the Republic, followed suit the next day, leaving Germany for the first time in

the modern era without a Catholic political party—a fact which did not

discourage the Vatican from signing a concordat with Hitler’s government a

fortnight later. Stresemann’s old party, the People’s Party, committed hara-kiri

on the Fourth of July; the Democrats ( Staatspartei) had already done so a week

before.

And what of Hitler’s partner in government, the German National Party,

without whose support the former Austrian corporal could never have come

legally to power? Despite its closeness to Hindenburg, the Army, the Junkers

and big business and the debt owed to it by Hitler, it went the way of all other

parties and with the same meekness. On June 21 the police and the storm

troopers took over its offices throughout the country, and on June 29 Hugenberg,

the bristling party leader, who had helped boost Hitler into the Chancellery but

six months before, resigned from the government and his aides “voluntarily”

dissolved the party.

The Nazi Party alone remained, and on July 14 a law decreed:

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party constitutes the only political party in

Germany.

Whoever undertakes to maintain the organizational structure of another political party or to

form a new political party will be punished with penal servitude up to three years or with

imprisonment of from six months to three years, if the deed is not subject to a greater penalty

according to other regulations.15

The one-party totalitarian State had been achieved with scarcely a ripple of

opposition or defiance, and within four months after the Reichstag had abdicated

its democratic responsibilities.

The free trade unions, which, as we have seen, once had crushed the fascist

Kapp putsch by the simple means of declaring a general strike, were disposed of

as easily as the political parties and the states—though not until an elaborate

piece, of trickery had been practiced on them. For half a century May Day had

been the traditional day of celebration for the German—and European—worker.

To lull the workers and their leaders before it struck, the Nazi government

proclaimed May Day, 1933, as a national holiday, officially named it the “Day

of National Labor” and prepared to celebrate it as it had never been celebrated

before. The trade-union leaders were taken in by this surprising display of

friendliness toward the working class by the Nazis and enthusiastically co-

operated with the government and the party in making the day a success. Labor

leaders were flown to Berlin from all parts of Germany, thousands of banners

were unfurled acclaiming the Nazi regime’s solidarity with the worker, and out

at Tempelhof Field Goebbels prepared to stage the greatest mass demonstration

Germany had ever seen. Before the massive rally, Hitler himself received the

workers’ delegates, declaring, “You will see how untrue and unjust is the

statement that the revolution is directed against the German workers. On the

contrary.” Later in his speech to more than 100,000 workers at the airfield Hitler

pronounced the motto, “Honor work and respect the worker!” and promised that

May Day would be celebrated in honor of German labor “throughout the

centuries.”

Late that night Goebbels, after describing in his most purple prose the

tremendous enthusiasm of the workers for this May Day celebration which he

had so brilliantly staged, added a curious sentence in his diary: “Tomorrow we

shall occupy the trade-union buildings. There will be little resistance. ”*16

That is what happened. On May 2 the trade-union headquarters throughout the

country were occupied, union funds confiscated, the unions dissolved and the

leaders arrested. Many were beaten and lodged in concentration camps. Theodor

Leipart and Peter Grassmann, the chairmen of the Trade Union Confederation,

had openly pledged themselves to cooperate with the Nazi regime. No matter,

they were arrested. “The Lei-parts and Grassmanns,” said Dr. Robert Ley, the

alcoholic Cologne party boss who was assigned by Hitler to take over the unions

and establish the German Labor Front, “may hypocritically declare their

devotion to the Fuehrer as much as they like—but it is better that they should be

in prison.” And that is where they were put.

At first, though, both Hitler and Ley tried to assure the workers that their

rights would be protected. Said Ley in his first proclamation: “Workers! Your

institutions are sacred to us National Socialists. I myself am a poor peasant’s son

and understand poverty … I know the exploitation of anonymous capitalism.

Workers! I swear to you, we will not only keep everything that exists, we will

build up the protection and the rights of the workers still further.”

Within three weeks the hollowness of another Nazi promise was exposed

when Hitler decreed a law bringing an end to collective bargaining and

providing that henceforth “labor trustees,” appointed by him, would “regulate

labor contracts” and maintain “labor peace.” 18 Since the decisions of the trustees

were to be legally binding, the law, in effect, outlawed strikes. Ley promised “to

restore absolute leadership to the natural leader of a factory—that is, the

employer … Only the employer can decide. Many employers have for years had

to call for the ‘master in the house.’ Now they are once again to be the ‘master in

the house.’”

For the time being, business management was pleased. The generous

contributions which so many employers had made to the National Socialist

German Workers’ Party were paying off. Yet for business to prosper a certain

stability of society is necessary, and all through the spring and early summer law

and order were crumbling in Germany as the frenzied brown-shirted gangs

roamed the streets, arresting and beating up and sometimes murdering

whomever they pleased while the police looked on without lifting a nightstick.

The terror in the streets was not the result of the breakdown of the State’s

authority, as it had been in the French Revolution, but on the contrary was

carried out with the encouragement and often on the orders of the State, whose

authority in Germany had never been greater or more concentrated. Judges were

intimidated; they were afraid for their lives if they convicted and sentenced a

storm trooper even for cold-blooded murder. Hitler was now the law, as Goering

said, and as late as May and June 1933 the Fuehrer was declaiming that “the

National Socialist Revolution has not yet run its course” and that “it will be

victoriously completed only if a new German people is educated.” In Nazi

parlance, “educated” meant “intimidated”—to a point where all would accept

docilely the Nazi dictatorship and its barbarism. To Hitler, as he had publicly

declared a thousand times, the Jews were not Germans, and though he did not

exterminate them at once (only a relative few—a few thousand, that is—were

robbed, beaten or murdered during the first months), he issued laws excluding

them from public service, the universities and the professions. And on April 1,

1933, he proclaimed a national boycott of Jewish shops.

The businessmen, who had been so enthusiastic over the smashing of the

troublesome labor unions, now found that left-wing Nazis, who really believed

in the party’s socialism, were trying to take over the employers’ associations,

destroy the big department stores and nationalize industry. Thousands of ragged

Nazi Party officials descended on the business houses of those who had not

supported Hitler, threatening to seize them in some cases, and in others

demanding well-paying jobs in the management. Dr. Gottfried Feder, the

economic crank, now insisted that the party program be carried out—

nationalization of big business, profit sharing and the abolition of unearned

incomes and “interest slavery.” As if this were not enough to frighten the

businessmen, Walther Darré, who had just been named Minister of Agriculture,

threw the bankers into jitters by promising a big reduction in the capital debts of

the farmers and a cut in the interest rate on what remained to 2 per cent.

Why not? Hitler was, by midsummer of 1933, the master of Germany. He

could now carry out his program. Papen, for all his cunning, had been left high

and dry, and all his calculations that he and Hugenberg and the other defenders

of the Old Order, with their 8-to-3 majority in the cabinet against the Nazis,

could control Hitler and indeed use him for their own conservative ends, had

exploded in his face. He himself had been booted out of his post as Prime

Minister of Prussia and replaced by Goering. Papen remained Vice-Chancellor

in the Reich cabinet but, as he ruefully admitted later, “this position turned out to

be anomalous.” Hugenberg, the apostle of business and finance, was gone, his

party dissolved. Goebbels, the third most important man in the Nazi Party, had

been brought into the cabinet on March 13 as Minister of Popular Enlightenment

and Propaganda. Darré, regarded as a “radical,” as was Goebbels, was Minister

of Agriculture.

Dr. Hans Luther, the conservative president of the Reichsbank, the key post in

the German economic system, was fired by Hitler and packed off to Washington

as ambassador. Into his place, on March 17, 1933, stepped the jaunty Dr.

Schacht, the former head of the Reichsbank and devoted follower of Hitler, who

had seen the “truth and necessity” of Nazism. No single man in all of Germany

would be more helpful to Hitler in building up the economic strength of the

Third Reich and in furthering its rearmament for the Second World War than

Schacht, who later became also Minister of Economics and Plenipotentiary-

General for War Economy. It is true that shortly before the second war began he

turned against his idol, eventually relinquished or was fired from all his offices

and even joined those who were conspiring to assassinate Hitler. But by then it

was too late to stay the course of the Nazi leader to whom he had for so long

given his loyalty and lent his prestige and his manifest talents.

“NO SECOND REVOLUTION!”

Hitler had conquered Germany with the greatest of ease, but a number of

problems remained to be faced as summer came in 1933. There were at least five

major ones: preventing a second revolution; settling the uneasy relations

between the S.A. and the Army; getting the country out of its economic morass

and finding jobs for the six million unemployed; achieving equality of

armaments for Germany at the Disarmament Conference in Geneva and

accelerating the Reich’s secret rearming, which had begun during the last years

of the Republic; and deciding who should succeed the ailing Hindenburg when

he died.

It was Roehm, chief of the S.A., who coined the phrase “the second

revolution,” and who insisted that it be carried through. He was joined by

Goebbels, who in his diary of April 18, 1933, wrote: “Everyone among the

people is talking of a second revolution which must come. That means that the

first revolution is not at an end. Now we shall settle with the Reaktion. The

revolution must nowhere come to a halt.” 19

The Nazis had destroyed the Left, but the Right remained: big business and

finance, the aristocracy, the Junker landlords and the Prussian generals, who kept

tight rein over the Army. Roehm, Goebbels and the other “radicals” in the

movement wanted to liquidate them too. Roehm, whose storm troopers now

numbered some two million—twenty times as many as the troops in the Army—

sounded the warning in June:

One victory on the road of German revolution has been won … The S.A. and S.S., who

bear the great responsibility of having set the German revolution rolling, will not allow it to be

betrayed at the halfway mark … If the Philistines believe that the national revolution has

lasted too long … it is indeed high time that the national revolution should end and become a

National Socialist one … We shall continue our fight—with them or without them. And, if

necessary, against them … We are the incorruptible guarantors of the fulfillment of the

German revolution.20

And in August he added, in a speech, “There are still men in official positions

today who have not the least idea of the spirit of the revolution. We shall

ruthlessly get rid of them if they dare to put their reactionary ideas into practice.”

But Hitler had contrary thoughts. For him the Nazi socialist slogans had been

merely propaganda, means of winning over the masses on his way to power.

Now that he had the power he was uninterested in them. He needed time to

consolidate his position and that of the country. For the moment at least the

Right—business, the Army, the President—must be appeased. He did not intend

to bankrupt Germany and thus risk the very existence of his regime. There must

be no second revolution.

This he made plain to the S.A. and S.S. leaders themselves in a speech to them

on July 1. What was needed now in Germany, he said, was order. “I will

suppress every attempt to disturb the existing order as ruthlessly as I will deal

with the so-called second revolution, which would lead only to chaos.” He

repeated the warning to the Nazi state governors gathered in the Chancellery on

July 6:

The revolution is not a permanent state of affairs, and it must not be allowed to develop

into such a state. The stream of revolution released must be guided into the safe channel of

evolution … We must therefore not dismiss a businessman if he is a good businessman, even

if he is not yet a National Socialist, and especially not if the National Socialist who is to take

his place knows nothing about business. In business, ability must be the only standard …

History will not judge us according to whether we have removed and

imprisoned the largest number of economists, but according to whether we have

succeeded in providing work … The ideas of the program do not oblige us to act

like fools and upset everything, but to realize our trains of thought wisely and

carefully. In the long run our political power will be all the more secure, the

more we succeed in underpinning it economically. The state governors must

therefore see to it that no party organizations assume the functions of

government, dismiss individuals and make appointments to offices, to do which

the Reich government—and in regard to business, the Reich Minister of

Economics—is competent. 21

No more authoritative statement was ever made that the Nazi revolution was

political, not economic. To back up his words, Hitler dismissed a number of

Nazi “radicals” who had tried to seize control of the employers’ associations. He

restored Krupp von Bohlen and Fritz Thyssen to their positions of leadership in

them, dissolved the Combat League of Middle-Class Tradespeople, which had

annoyed the big department stores, and in place of Hugenberg named Dr. Karl

Schmitt as Minister of Economics. Schmitt was the most orthodox of

businessmen, director general of Allianz, Germany’s largest insurance company,

and he lost no time in putting an end to the schemes of the National Socialists

who had been naïve enough to take their party program seriously.

The disillusion among the rank-and-file Nazis, especially among the S.A.

storm troopers, who formed the large core of Hitler’s mass movement, was

great. Most of them had belonged to the ragged army of the dispossessed and the

unsatisfied. They were anticapitalist through experience and they believed that

the revolution which they had fought by brawling in the streets would bring

them loot and good jobs, either in business or in the government. Now their

hopes, after the heady excesses of the spring, were dashed. The old gang,

whether they were party members or not, were to keep the jobs and to keep

control of jobs. But this development was not the only reason for unrest in the

S.A.

The old quarrel between Hitler and Roehm about the position and purpose of

the S.A. cropped up again. From the earliest days of the Nazi movement Hitler

had insisted that the storm troopers were to be a political and not a military

force; they were to furnish the physical violence, the terror, by which the party

could bludgeon its way to political power. To Roehm, the S.A. had been not only

the backbone of the Nazi revolution but the nucleus of the future revolutionary

army which would be for Hitler what the French conscript armies were to

Napoleon after the French Revolution. It was time to sweep away the reactionary

Prussian generals—those “old clods,” as he contemptuously called them—and

form a revolutionary fighting force, a people’s army, led by himself and his

tough aides who had conquered the streets of Germany.

Nothing could be further from Hitler’s thoughts. He realized more clearly than

Roehm or any other Nazi that he could not have come to power without the

support or at least the toleration of the Army generals and that, for the time being

at least, his very survival at the helm depended in part on their continued

backing, since they still retained the physical power to remove him if they were

so minded. Also Hitler foresaw that the Army’s loyalty to him personally would

be needed at that crucial moment, which could not be far off, when the eighty-

six-year-old Hindenburg, the Commander in Chief, would pass on. Furthermore,

the Nazi leader was certain that only the officer corps, with all its martial

traditions and abilities, could achieve his goal of building up in a short space of

time a strong, disciplined armed force. The S.A. was but a mob—good enough

for street fighting but of little worth as a modern army. Moreover, its purpose

had now been served and from now on it must be eased tactfully out of the

picture. The views of Hitler and Roehm were irreconcilable, and from the

summer of 1933 to June 30 of the following year a struggle literally to the death

was to be fought between these two veterans of the Nazi movement who were

also close friends (Ernst Roehm was the only man whom Hitler addressed by the

familiar personal pronoun du).

Roehm expressed the deep sense of frustration in the ranks of the storm

troopers in a speech to fifteen thousand S.A. officers in the Sportpalast in Berlin

on November 5, 1933. “One often hears … that the S.A. had lost any reason for

existence,” he said, warning that it had not. But Hitler was adamant. “The

relation of the S.A. to the Army,” he had warned at Bad Godesberg on August

19, “must be the same as that of the political leadership.” And on September 23

at Nuremberg he spoke out even more clearly:

On this day we should particularly remember the part played by our Army, for we all know

well that if, in the days of our revolution, the Army had not stood on our side, then we should

not be standing here today. We can assure the Army that we shall never forget this, that we see

in them the bearers of the tradition of our glorious old Army, and that with all our heart and all

our powers we will support the spirit of this Army.

Some time before this, Hitler had secretly given the armed forces assurances

which had brought many of the higher officers to his side. On February 2, 1933,

three days after assuming office, he had made a two-hour address to the top

generals and admirals at the home of General von Hammerstein, the Army

Commander in Chief. Admiral Erich Raeder revealed at Nuremberg the tenor of

this first meeting of the Nazi Chancellor with the officer corps.22 Hitler, he said,

freed the military elite from its fears that the armed services might be called

upon to take part in a civil war and promised that the Army and Navy could now

devote themselves unhindered to the main task of quickly rearming the new

Germany. Admiral Raeder admitted that he was highly pleased at the prospect of

a new Navy, and General von Blomberg, whose hasty assumption of the office

of Minister of Defense on January 30, 1933, had stamped out any temptation on

the part of the Army to revolt against Hitler’s becoming Chancellor, declared

later in his unpublished memoirs that the Fuehrer opened up “a field of activities

holding great possibilities for the future.”

Further to augment the enthusiasm of the military leaders Hitler created, as

early as April 4, the Reich Defense Council to spur a new and secret rearmament

program. Three months later, on July 20, the Chancellor promulgated a new

Army Law, abolishing the jurisdiction of the civil courts over the military and

doing away with the elected representation of the rank and file, thus restoring to

the officer corps its ancient military prerogatives. A good many generals and

admirals began to see the Nazi revolution in a different and more favorable light.

As a sop to Roehm, Hitler named him—along with Rudolf Hess, the deputy

leader of the party—a member of the cabinet on December 1 and on New Year’s

Day, 1934, addressed to the S.A. chief a warm and friendly letter. While

reiterating that “the Army has to guarantee the protection of the nation against

the world beyond our frontiers,” he acknowledged that “the task of the S.A. is to

secure the victory of the National Socialist Revolution and the existence of the

National Socialist State” and that the success of the S.A. had been “primarily

due” to Roehm. The letter concluded:

At the close of the year of the National Socialist Revolution, therefore, I feel compelled to

thank you, my dear Ernst Roehm, for the imperishable services which you have rendered to

the National Socialist movement and the German people, and to assure you how very grateful

I am to fate that I am able to call such men as you my friends and fellow combatants.

In true friendship and grateful regard,

Your ADOLF HITLER23

The letter, employing the familiar du, was published in the chief Nazi daily paper, the

Voelkischer Beobachter, on January 2, 1934, and did much to ease for the moment the feelings

of resentment in the S.A. In the atmosphere of good feeling that prevailed over the Christmas

and New Year holidays, the rivalry between the S.A. and the Army and the clamor of the

radical Nazis for the “second revolution” was temporarily stilled.

THE BEGINNINGS OF NAZI FOREIGN POLICY

“It is no victory, for the enemies were lacking,” observed Oswald Spengler in

commenting on how easily Hitler had conquered and Nazified Germany in 1933.

“This seizure of power—” the author of The Decline of the West wrote early in

the year, “it is with misgiving that I see it celebrated each day with so much

noise. It would be better to save that for a day of real and definitive successes,

that is, in the foreign field. There are no others. ”24

The philosopher-historian, who for a brief moment was an idol of the Nazis

until a mutual disenchantment set in, was unduly impatient. Hitler had to

conquer Germany before he could set out to conquer the world. But once his

German opponents were liquidated—or had liquidated themselves—he lost no

time in turning to what had always interested him the most: foreign affairs.

Germany’s position in the world in the spring of 1933 could hardly have been

worse. The Third Reich was diplomatically isolated and militarily impotent. The

whole world had been revolted by Nazi excesses, especially the persecution of

the Jews. Germany’s neighbors, in particular France and Poland, were hostile

and suspicious, and as early as March 1933, following a Polish military

demonstration in Danzig, Marshal Pilsudski suggested to the French the

desirability of a joint preventive war against Germany. Even Mussolini, for all

his outward pose of welcoming the advent of a second fascist power, had not in

fact been enthusiastic about Hitler’s coming to power. The Fuehrer of a country

potentially so much stronger than Italy might soon put the Duce in the shade. A

rabidly Pan-German Reich would have designs on Austria and the Balkans,

where the Italian dictator had already staked out his claims. The hostility toward

Nazi Germany of the Soviet Union, which had been republican Germany’s one

friend in the years since 1921, was obvious. The Third Reich was indeed

friendless in a hostile world. And it was disarmed, or relatively so in comparison

with its highly armed neighbors.

The immediate strategy and tactics of Hitler’s foreign policy therefore were

dictated by the hard realities of Germany’s weak and isolated position. But,

ironically, this situation also provided natural goals which corresponded to his

own deepest desires and those of the vast majority of the German people: to get

rid of the shackles of Versailles without provoking sanctions, to rearm without

risking war. Only when he had achieved these dual short-term goals would he

have the freedom and the military power to pursue the long-term diplomacy

whose aims and methods he had set down so frankly and in such detail in Mein

Kampf.

The first thing to do, obviously, was to confound Germany’s adversaries in

Europe by preaching disarmament and peace and to keep a sharp eye for a

weakness in their collective armor. On May 17, 1933, before the Reichstag,

Hitler delivered his “Peace Speech,” one of the greatest of his career, a

masterpiece of deceptive propaganda that deeply moved the German people and

unified them behind him and which made a profound and favorable impression

on the outside world. The day before, President Roosevelt had sent a ringing

message to the chiefs of state of forty-four nations outlining the plans and hopes

of the United States for disarmament and peace and calling for the abolition of

all offensive weapons—bombers, tanks and mobile heavy artillery. Hitler was

quick to take up the President’s challenge and to make the most of it.

The proposal made by President Roosevelt, of which I learned last night, has earned the

warmest thanks of the German government. It is prepared to agree to this method of

overcoming the international crisis … The President’s proposal is a ray of comfort for all who

wish to co-operate in the maintenance of peace … Germany is entirely ready to renounce all

offensive weapons if the armed nations, on their side, will destroy their offensive weapons …

Germany would also be perfectly ready to disband her entire military establishment and

destroy the small amount of arms remaining to her, if the neighboring countries will do the

same … Germany is prepared to agree to any solemn pact of nonaggression, because she does

not think of attacking but only of acquiring security.

There was much else in the speech, whose moderateness and profession of

love for peace pleasantly surprised an uneasy world. Germany did not want war.

War was “unlimited madness.” It would “cause the collapse of the present social

and political order.” Nazi Germany had no wish to “Germanize” other peoples.

“The mentality of the last century, which led people to think that they would

make Germans out of Poles and Frenchmen, is alien to us … Frenchmen, Poles

and others are our neighbors, and we know that no event that is historically

conceivable can change this reality.”

There was one warning. Germany demanded equality of treatment with all

other nations, especially in armaments. If this was not to be obtained, Germany

would prefer to withdraw from both the Disarmament Conference and the

League of Nations.

The warning was forgotten amid the general rejoicing throughout the Western

world at Hitler’s unexpected reasonableness. The Times of London agreed that

Hitler’s claim for equality was “irrefutable.” The Daily Herald of London,

official organ of the Labor Party, demanded that Hitler be taken at his word. The

conservative weekly Spectator of London concluded that Hitler had grasped the

hand of Roosevelt and that this gesture provided new hope for a tormented

world. In Washington the President’s secretary was quoted by the official

German news bureau as saying, “The President was enthusiastic at Hitler’s

acceptance of his proposals.”

From the Nazi firebrand dictator had come not brutal threats, as so many had

expected, but sweetness and light. The world was enchanted. And in the

Reichstag even the Socialists’ deputies, those who were not in jail or in exile,

voted without dissent to make the assembly’s approval of Hitler’s foreign policy

declaration unanimous.

But Hitler’s warning was not an empty one, and when it became clear early in

October that the Allies would insist on an interval of eight years to bring their

armaments down to Germany’s level, he abruptly announced on October 14 that,

denied equality of rights by the other powers at Geneva, Germany was

immediately withdrawing from the Disarmament Conference and from the

League of Nations. At the same time he took three other steps: He dissolved the

Reichstag, announced that he would submit his decision to leave Geneva to a

national plebiscite and ordered General von Blomberg, the Minister of Defense,

to issue secret directives to the armed forces to resist an armed attack should the

League resort to sanctions.25

This precipitate action revealed the hollowness of the Hitler conciliatory

speech in the spring. It was Hitler’s first open gamble in foreign affairs. It meant

that from now on Nazi Germany intended to rearm itself in defiance of any

disarmament agreement and of Versailles. This was a calculated risk—also the

first of many—and Blomberg’s secret directive to the Army and Navy, which

came to light at Nuremberg, reveals not only that Hitler gambled with the

possibility of sanctions but that Germany’s position would have been hopeless

had they been applied.* In the West against France and in the East against

Poland and Czechoslovakia, the directive laid down definite defense lines which

the German forces were ordered “to hold as long as possible.” It is obvious from

Blomberg’s orders that the German generals, at least, had no illusions that the

defenses of the Reich could be held for any time at all.

This, then, was the first of many crises over a period that would extend for

three years—until after the Germans reoccupied the demilitarized left bank of

the Rhine in 1936—when the Allies could have applied sanctions, not for

Hitler’s leaving the Disarmament Conference and the League but for violations

of the disarmament provisions of Versailles which had been going on in

Germany for at least two years, even before Hitler. That the Allies at this time

could easily have overwhelmed Germany is as certain as it is that such an action

would have brought the end of the Third Reich in the very year of its birth. But

part of the genius of this one-time Austrian waif was that for a long time he

knew the mettle of his foreign adversaries as expertly and as uncannily as he had

sized up that of his opponents at home. In this crisis, as in those greater ones

which were to follow in rapid succession up to 1939, the victorious Allied

nations took no action, being too divided, too torpid, too blind to grasp the

nature or the direction of what was building up beyond the Rhine. On this,

Hitler’s calculations were eminently sound, as they had been and were to be in

regard to his own people. He knew well what the German people would say in

the plebiscite, which he fixed—along with new elections of a single-party Nazi

slate to the Reichstag—for November 12, 1933, the day after the anniversary of

the 1918 armistice, a black day that still rankled in German memories.

“See to it that this day,” he told an election rally at Breslau on November 4,

“shall later be recorded in the history of our people as a day of salvation—that

the record shall run: On an eleventh of November the German people formally

lost its honor; fifteen years later came a twelfth of November and then the

German people restored its honor to itself.” On the eve of the polling, November

11, the venerable Hindenburg added his support in a broadcast to the nation:

“Show tomorrow your firm national unity and your solidarity with the

government. Support with me and the Reich Chancellor the principle of equal

rights and of peace with honor, and show the world that we have recovered, and

with the help of God will maintain, German unity!”

The response of the German people, after fifteen years of frustration and of

resentment against the consequences of a lost war, was almost unanimous. Some

96 per cent of the registered voters cast their ballots and 95 per cent of these

approved Germany’s withdrawal from Geneva. The vote for the single Nazi list

for the Reichstag (which included Hugenberg and a half-dozen other non-Nazis)

was 92 per cent. Even at the Dachau concentration camp 2,154 out of 2,242

inmates voted for the government which had incarcerated them! It is true that in

many communities threats were made against those who failed to vote or who

voted the wrong way; and in some cases there was fear that anyone who cast his

vote against the regime might be detected and punished. Yet even with these

reservations the election, whose count at least was honest, was a staggering

victory for Adolf Hitler. There was no doubt that in defying the outside world as

he had done, he had the overwhelming support of the German people.

Three days after the plebiscite and election, Hitler sent for the new Polish

ambassador, Josef Lipski. At the end of their talk a joint communiqué was issued

which amazed not only the German public but the outside world. The Polish and

German governments agreed “to deal with the questions touching both countries

by means of direct negotiations and to renounce all application of force in their

relations with each other for the consolidation of European peace.”

Even more than France, Poland was the hated and despised enemy in the

minds of the Germans. To them the most heinous crime of the Versailles

peacemakers had been to separate East Prussia from the Reich by the Polish

Corridor, to detach Danzig and to give to the Poles the province of Posen and

part of Silesia, which, though predominantly Polish in population, had been

German territory since the days of the partition of Poland. No German statesmen

during the Republic had been willing to regard the Polish acquisitions as

permanent. Stresemann had refused even to consider an Eastern Locarno pact

with Poland to supplement the Locarno agreement for the West. And General

von Seeckt, father of the Reichswehr and arbiter of foreign policy during the first

years of the Republic, had advised the government as early as 1922, “Poland’s

existence is intolerable, incompatible with the essential conditions of Germany’s

life. Poland,” he insisted, “must go and will go.” Its obliteration, he added, “must

be one of the fundamental drives of German policy … With the disappearance of

Poland will fall one of the strongest pillars of the Versailles Peace, the

hegemony of France. ”26

Before Poland could be obliterated, Hitler saw, it must be separated from its

alliance with France. The course he now embarked on offered several immediate

advantages besides the ultimate one. By renouncing the use of force against

Poland he could strengthen his propaganda for peace and allay the suspicions

aroused in both Western and Eastern Europe by his hasty exit from Geneva. By

inducing the Poles to conduct direct negotiations he could bypass the League of

Nations and then weaken its authority. And he could not only deal a blow to the

League’s conception of “collective security” but undermine the French alliances

in Eastern Europe, of which Poland was the bastion. The German people, with

their traditional hatred of the Poles, might not understand, but to Hitler one of

the advantages of a dictatorship over democracy was that unpopular policies

which promised significant results ultimately could be pursued temporarily

without internal rumpus.

On January 26, 1934, four days before Hitler was to meet the Reichstag on the

first anniversary of his accession to power, announcement was made of the

signing of a ten-year nonaggression pact between Germany and Poland. From

that day on, Poland, which under the dictatorship of Marshal Pilsudski was itself

just eliminating the last vestiges of parliamentary democracy, began gradually to

detach itself from France, its protector since its rebirth in 1919, and to grow ever

closer to Nazi Germany. It was a path that was to lead to its destruction long

before the treaty of “friendship and nonaggression” ran out.

When Hitler addressed the Reichstag on January 30, 1934, he could look back

on a year of achievement without parallel in German history. Within twelve

months he had overthrown the Weimar Republic, substituted his personal

dictatorship for its democracy, destroyed all the political parties but his own,

smashed the state governments and their parliaments and unified and

defederalized the Reich, wiped out the labor unions, stamped out democratic

associations of any kind, driven the Jews out of public and professional life,

abolished freedom of speech and of the press, stifled the independence of the

courts and “co-ordinated” under Nazi rule the political, economic, cultural and

social life of an ancient and cultivated people. For all these accomplishments and

for his resolute action in foreign affairs, which took Germany out of the concert

of nations at Geneva, and proclaimed German insistence on being treated as an

equal among the great powers, he was backed, as the autumn plebiscite and

election had shown, by the overwhelming majority of the German people.

Yet as the second year of his dictatorship got under way clouds gathered on

the Nazi horizon.

THE BLOOD PURGE OF JUNE 30, 1934

The darkening of the sky was due to three unresolved problems, and they were

interrelated: the continued clamor of radical party and S.A. leaders for the

“second revolution”; the rivalry of the S.A. and the Army; and the question of

the succession to President Hindenburg, the sands of whose life at last began to

run out with the coming of spring.

Roehm, the chief of staff of the S.A., now swollen to two and a half million

storm troopers, had not been put off by Hitler’s gesture of appointing him to the

cabinet nor by the Fuehrer’s friendly personal letter on New Year’s Day. In

February he presented to the cabinet a lengthy memorandum proposing that the

S.A. should be made the foundation of a new People’s Army and that the armed

forces, the S.A. and S.S. and all veterans’ groups should be placed under a single

Ministry of Defense, over which—the implication was clear—he should preside.

No more revolting idea could be imagined by the officer corps, and its senior

members not only unanimously rejected the proposal but appealed to

Hindenburg to support them. The whole tradition of the military caste would be

destroyed if the roughneck Roehm and his brawling Brownshirts should get

control of the Army. Moreover, the generals were shocked by the tales, now

beginning to receive wide circulation, of the corruption and debauchery of the

homosexual clique around the S.A. chief. As General von Brauchitsch would

later testify, “rearmament was too serious and difficult a business to permit the

participation of peculators, drunkards and homosexuals.”

For the moment Hitler could not afford to offend the Army, and he gave no

support to Roehm’s proposal. Indeed, on February 21 he secretly told Anthony

Eden, who had come to Berlin to discuss the disarmament impasse, that he was

prepared to reduce the S.A. by two thirds and to agree to a system of inspection

to make sure that the remainder received neither military training nor arms—an

offer which, when it leaked out, further inflamed the bitterness of Roehm and the

S.A. As the summer of 1934 approached, the relations between the S.A. chief of

staff and the Army High Command continued to deteriorate. There were stormy

scenes in the cabinet between Roehm and General von Blomberg, and in March

the Minister of Defense protested to Hitler that the S.A. was secretly arming a

large force of special staff guards with heavy machine guns—which was not

only a threat against the Army but, General von Blomberg added, an act done so

publicly that it threatened Germany’s clandestine rearmament under the auspices

of the Reichswehr.

It is plain that at this juncture Hitler, unlike the headstrong Roehm and his

cronies, was thinking ahead to the day when the ailing Hindenburg would

breathe his last. He knew that the aged President as well as the Army and other

conservative forces in Germany were in favor of a restoration of the

Hohenzollern monarchy as soon as the Field Marshal had passed away. He

himself had other plans, and when early in April the news was secretly but

authoritatively conveyed to him and Blomberg from Neudeck that the

President’s days were numbered, he realized that a bold stroke must soon be

made. To ensure its success he would need the backing of the officer corps; to

obtain that support he was prepared to go to almost any length.

The occasion for confidential parleys with the Army soon presented itself. On

April 11 the Chancellor, accompanied by General von Blomberg and the

commanders in chief of the Army and the Navy, General Freiherr von Fritsch

and Admiral Raeder, set out on the cruiser Deutschland from Kiel for

Koenigsberg to attend the spring maneuvers in East Prussia. The Army and

Navy commanders were told of Hindenburg’s worsening condition and Hitler,

backed by the compliant Blomberg, bluntly proposed that he himself, with the

Reichswehr’s blessing, be the President’s successor. In return for the support of

the military, Hitler offered to suppress Roehm’s ambitions, drastically reduce the

S.A. and guarantee the Army and Navy that they would continue to be the sole

bearers of arms in the Third Reich. It is believed that Hitler also held out to

Fritsch and Raeder the prospect of an immense expansion of the Army and

Navy, if they were prepared to go along with him. With the fawning Raeder

there was no question but that he would, but Fritsch, a tougher man, had first to

consult his senior generals.

This consultation took place at Bad Nauheim on May 16, and after the “Pact

of the Deutschland” had been explained to them, the highest officers of the

German Army unanimously endorsed Hitler as the successor to President

Hindenburg. 27 For the Army this political decision was to prove of historic

significance. By voluntarily offering to put itself in the unrestrained hands of a

megalomaniacal dictator it was sealing its own fate. As for Hitler, the deal would

make his dictatorship supreme. With the stubborn Field Marshal out of the way,

with the prospect of the restoration of the Hohenzollerns snuffed out, with

himself as head of state as well as of government, he could go his way alone and

unhindered. The price he paid for this elevation to supreme power was paltry:

the sacrifice of the S.A. He did not need it, now that he had all the authority. It

was a raucous rabble that only embarrassed him. Hitler’s contempt for the

narrow minds of the generals must have risen sharply that spring. They could be

had, he must have thought, for surprisingly little. It was a judgment that he held,

unaltered, except for one bad moment in June, to the end—his end and theirs.

Yet, as summer came, Hitler’s troubles were far from over. An ominous

tension began to grip Berlin. Cries for the “second revolution” multiplied, and

not only Roehm and the storm troop leaders but Goebbels himself, in speeches

and in the press which he controlled, gave vent to them. From the conservative

Right, from the Junkers and big industrialists around Papen and Hindenburg,

came demands that a halt be called to the revolution, that the arbitrary arrests,

the persecution of the Jews, the attacks against the churches, the arrogant

behavior of the storm troopers be curbed, and that the general terror organized

by the Nazis come to an end.

Within the Nazi Party itself there was a new and ruthless struggle for power.

Roehm’s two most powerful enemies, Goering and Himmler, were uniting

against him. On April 1 Himmler, chief of the black-coated S.S., which was still

an arm of the S.A. and under Roehm’s command, was named by Goering to be

chief of the Prussian Gestapo, and he immediately began to build up a secret-

police empire of his own. Goering, who had been made a General der Infanterie

by Hindenburg the previous August (though he was Minister of Aviation), gladly

shed his shabby brown S.A. uniform for the more showy one of his new office,

and the change was symbolic: as a general and a member of a family from the

military caste, he quickly sided with the Army in its fight against Roehm and the

S.A. To protect himself in the jungle warfare which was now going on, Goering

also recruited his own personal police force, the Landespolizeigruppe General

Goering, several thousand men strong, which he concentrated in the former

Cadet School at Lichterfelde, where he had first entered the Army and which

was strategically located on the outskirts of Berlin.

Rumors of plots and counterplots added to the tension in the capital. General

von Schleicher, unable to bear a decent obscurity or to remember that he no

longer enjoyed the confidence of Hindenburg, the generals or the conservatives

and was therefore powerless, had begun to mix again in politics. He was in touch

with Roehm and Gregor Strasser and there were reports, some of which reached

Hitler, that he was busy trying to make a deal whereby he would become Vice-

Chancellor in place of his old enemy, Papen, Roehm would become Minister of

Defense and the S.A. would be amalgamated with the Army. Cabinet “lists”

circulated by the dozen in Berlin; in some of them Bruening was to be made

Foreign Minister and Strasser Minister of Economics. These reports had little

foundation but they were grist to the mill of Goering and Himmler, who,

desirous each for his own reasons to destroy Roehm and the S.A., and at the

same time to settle accounts with Schleicher and the disgruntled conservatives,

embroidered them and brought them to Hitler, who at any time needed little

prodding to have his suspicions aroused. What Goering and his Gestapo chief

had in mind was not only to purge the S.A. but to liquidate other opponents on

the Left and Right, including some who had opposed Hitler in the past and were

no longer politically active. At the end of May Bruening and Schleicher were

warned that they were marked for murder. The former slipped quietly out of the

country in disguise, the latter went off on a vacation to Bavaria but returned to

Berlin toward the end of June.

At the beginning of June, Hitler had a showdown with Roehm which,

according to his own account given to the Reichstag later, lasted for nearly five

hours and which “dragged on until midnight.” It was, Hitler said, his “last

attempt” to come to an understanding with his closest friend in the movement.

I informed him that I had the impression from countless rumors and numerous declarations

of faithful old party members and S.A. leaders that conscienceless elements were preparing a

national Bolshevist action that could bring nothing but untold misfortune to Germany … I

implored him for the last time to voluntarily abandon this madness and instead to lend his

authority to prevent a development that, in any event, could only end in disaster.

According to Hitler, Roehm left him with the “assurance that he would do

everything possible to put things right.” Actually, Hitler later claimed, Roehm

began “preparations to eliminate me personally.”

This was almost certainly untrue. Though the whole story of the purge, like

that of the Reichstag fire, will probably never be known, all the evidence that has

come to light indicates that the S.A. chief never plotted to put Hitler out of the

way. Unfortunately the captured archives shed no more light on the purge than

they do on the Reichstag fire; in both cases it is likely that all the incriminating

documents were destroyed on the orders of Goering.

Whatever was the real nature of the long conversation between the two Nazi

veterans, a day or two after it took place Hitler bade the S.A. go on leave for the

entire month of July, during which the storm troopers were prohibited from

wearing uniforms or engaging in parades or exercises. On June 7, Roehm

announced that he himself was going on sick leave but at the same time he

issued a defiant warning: “If the enemies of S.A. hope that the S.A. will not be

recalled, or will be recalled only in part after its leave, we may permit them to

enjoy this brief hope. They will receive their answer at such time and in such

form as appears necessary. The S.A. is and remains the destiny of Germany.”

Before he left Berlin Roehm invited Hitler to confer with the S.A. leaders at

the resort town of Wiessee, near Munich, on June 30. Hitler readily agreed and

indeed kept the appointment, though not in a manner which Roehm could

possibly have imagined. Perhaps not in a way, either, that Hitler himself at this

moment could foresee. For, as he later admitted to the Reichstag, he hesitated

“again and again before taking a final decision … I still cherished the secret

hope that I might be able to spare the movement and my S.A. the shame of such

a disagreement and that it might be possible to remove the mischief without

severe conflicts.”

“It must be confessed,” he added, “that the last days of May continuously

brought to light more and more disquieting facts.” But did they? Later Hitler

claimed that Roehm and his conspirators had made preparations to seize Berlin

and take him into custody. But if this were so why did all the S.A. leaders depart

from Berlin early in June, and—even more important—why did Hitler leave

Germany at this moment and thus provide an opportunity for the S.A. chiefs to

grab control of the State in his absence?

For on June 14 the Fuehrer flew to Venice to hold the first of many

conversations with his fellow fascist dictator, Mussolini. The meeting,

incidentally, did not go off well for the German leader, who, in his soiled

raincoat and battered soft hat, seemed ill at ease in the presence of the more

experienced Duce, resplendent in his glittering, bemedaled black Fascisti

uniform and inclined to be condescending to his visitor. Hitler returned to

Germany in a state of considerable irritation and called a meeting of his party

leaders in the little town of Gera in Thuringia for Sunday, June 17, to report on

his talks with Mussolini and to assess the worsening situation at home. As fate

would have it, another meeting took place on that Sunday in the old university

town of Marburg which attracted much more attention in Germany and indeed in

the world, and which helped bring the critical situation to a climax.

The dilettante Papen, who had been rudely shoved to the sidelines by Hitler

and Goering but who was still nominally Vice-Chancellor and still enjoyed the

confidence of Hindenburg, summoned enough courage to speak out publicly

against the excesses of the regime which he had done so much to foist on

Germany. In May he had seen the ailing President off to Neudeck—it was the

last time he was to see his protector alive—and the grizzly but enfeebled old

Field Marshal had said to him: “Things are going badly, Papen. See what you

can do to put them right.”

Thus encouraged, Papen had accepted an invitation to make an address at the

University of Marburg on June 17. The speech was largely written by one of his

personal advisers, Edgar Jung, a brilliant Munich lawyer and writer and a

Protestant, though certain ideas were furnished by one of the Vice-Chancellor’s

secretaries, Herbert von Bose, and by Erich Klausener, the leader of Catholic

Action—a collaboration that soon cost all three of them their lives. It was a

courageous utterance and, thanks to Jung, eloquent in style and dignified in tone.

It called for an end of the revolution, for a termination of the Nazi terror, for the

restoration of normal decencies and the return of some measure of freedom,

especially of freedom of the press. Addressing Dr. Goebbels, the Propaganda

Minister, Papen said:

Open manly discussions would be of more service to the German people than, for instance,

the present state of the German press. The government [must be] mindful of the old maxim,

“Only weaklings suffer no criticism” … Great men are not created by propaganda … If one

desires close contact and unity with the people, one must not underestimate their

understanding. One must not everlastingly keep them on leading strings … No organization,

no propaganda, however excellent, can alone maintain confidence in the long run. It is not by

incitement … and not by threats against the helpless part of the nation but only by talking

things over with people that confidence and devotion can be maintained. People treated as

morons, however, have no confidence to give away … It is time to join together in fraternal

friendship and respect for all our fellow countrymen, to avoid disturbing the labors of serious

men and to silence fanatics. 28

The speech, when it became known, was widely heralded in Germany, but it

fell like a bombshell on the little group of Nazi leaders gathered at Gera, and

Goebbels moved quickly to see that it became known as little as possible. He

forbade the broadcast of a recording of the speech scheduled for the same

evening as well as any reference to it in the press, and ordered the police to seize

copies of the Frankfurter Zeitung which were on the streets with a partial text.

But not even the absolute powers of the Propaganda Minister were sufficient to

keep the German people and the outside world from learning the contents of the

defiant address. The wily Papen had provided the foreign correspondents and

diplomats in Berlin with advance texts, and several thousand copies were hastily

run off on the presses of Papen’s newspaper, Germania, and secretly distributed.

On learning of the Marburg speech, Hitler was stung to fury. In a speech the

same afternoon at Gera he denounced the “pygmy who imagines he can stop,

with a few phrases, the gigantic renewal of a people’s life.” Papen was furious

too, at the suppression of his speech. He rushed to Hitler on June 20 and told him

he could not tolerate such a ban “by a junior minister,” insisted that he had

spoken “as a trustee for the President,” and then and there submitted his

resignation, adding a warning that he “would advise Hindenburg of this

immediately.” 29

This was a threat that obviously worried Hitler, for he was aware of reports

that the President was so displeased with the situation that he was considering

declaring martial law and handing over power to the Army. In order to size up

the seriousness of this danger to the very continuance of the Nazi regime, he

flew to Neudeck on the following day, June 21, to see Hindenburg. His reception

could only have increased his fears. He was met by General von Blomberg and

quickly saw that his Defense Minister’s usual lackeylike attitude toward him had

suddenly disappeared. Blomberg instead was now the stern Prussian general and

he brusquely informed Hitler that he was authorized by the Field Marshal to tell

him that unless the present state of tension in Germany was brought quickly to

an end the President would declare martial law and turn over the control of the

State to the Army. When Hitler was permitted to see Hindenburg for a few

minutes in the presence of Blomberg, the old President confirmed the ultimatum.

This was a disastrous turn of affairs for the Nazi Chancellor. Not only was his

plan to succeed the President in jeopardy; if the Army took over, that would be

the end of him and of Nazi government. Flying back to Berlin the same day he

must have reflected that he had only one choice to make if he were to survive.

He must honor his pact with the Army, suppress the S.A. and halt the

continuance of the revolution for which the storm troop leaders were pressing.

The Army, backed by the venerable President, it was obvious, would accept no

less.

And yet, in that last crucial week of June, Hitler hesitated—as least as to how

drastic to be with the S.A. chiefs to whom he owed so much. But now Goering

and Himmler helped him to make up his mind. They had already drawn up the

scores they wanted to settle, long lists of present and past enemies they wished

to liquidate. All they had to do was convince the Fuehrer of the enormity of the

“plot” against him and of the necessity for swift and ruthless action. According

to the testimony at Nuremberg of Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the Interior and

one of Hitler’s most faithful followers, it was Himmler who finally succeeded in

convincing Hitler that “Roehm wanted to start a putsch. The Fuehrer,” Frick

added, “ordered Himmler to suppress the putsch.” Himmler, he explained, was

instructed to put it down in Bavaria, and Goering in Berlin. 30

The Army prodded Hitler too and thereby incurred a responsibility for the

barbarity which was soon to take place. On June 25 General von Fritsch, the

Commander in Chief, put the Army in a state of alert, canceling all leaves and

confining the troops to barracks. On June 28 Roehm was expelled from the

German Officers’ League—a plain warning that the S.A. chief of staff was in for

trouble. And just to make sure that no one, Roehm above all, should have any

illusions about where the Army stood, Blomberg took the unprecedented step of

publishing a signed article on June 29 in the Voelkischer Beobachter, affirming

that “the Army … stands behind Adolf Hitler … who remains one of ours.”

The Army, then, was pressing for the purge, but it did not want to soil its own

hands. That must be done by Hitler, Goering and Himmler, with their black-

coated S.S. and Goering’s special police.

Hitler left Berlin on Thursday, June 28, for Essen to attend the wedding of a

local Nazi gauleiter, Josef Terboven. The trip and its purpose hardly suggest that

he felt a grave crisis to be imminent. On the same day Goering and Himmler

ordered special detachments of the S.S. and the “Goering Police” to hold

themselves in readiness. With Hitler out of town, they evidently felt free to act

on their own. The next day, the twenty-ninth, the Fuehrer made a tour of Labor

Service camps in Westphalia, returning in the afternoon to Godesberg on the

Rhine, where he put up at a hotel on the riverbank run by an old war comrade,

Dreesen. That evening Goebbels, who seems to have hesitated as to which camp

to join—he had been secretly in touch with Roehm—arrived in Godesberg, his

mind made up, and reported what Hitler later described as “threatening

intelligence” from Berlin. Karl Ernst, a former hotel bellhop and ex-bouncer in a

café frequented by homosexuals, whom Roehm had made leader of the Berlin

S.A., had alerted the storm troopers. Ernst, a handsome but not a bright young

man, believed then and for the remaining twenty-four hours or so of his life that

he was faced by a putsch from the Right, and he would die shouting proudly,

“Heil Hitler!”

Hitler later claimed that up to this moment, June 29, he had. decided merely to

“deprive the chief of staff [Roehm] of his office and for the time being keep him

in custody and arrest a number of S.A. leaders whose crimes were unquestioned

… and in an earnest appeal to the others, I would recall them to their duty.”

However, [he told the Reichstag on July 13] … at one o’clock in the night I received from

Berlin and Munich two urgent messages concerning alarm summonses: first, in Berlin an

alarm muster had been ordered for four P.M…. and at five P.M. action was to begin with a

surprise attack; the government buildings were to be occupied … Second, in Munich the alarm

summons had already been given to the S.A.; they had been ordered to assemble at nine

o’clock in the evening … That was mutiny! … In these circumstances I could make but one

decision … Only a ruthless and bloody intervention might still perhaps stifle the spread of the

revolt …

At two o’clock in the morning I flew to Munich.

Hitler never revealed from whom the “urgent messages” came but the

implication is that they were sent by Goering and Himmler. What is certain is

that they were highly exaggerated. In Berlin, S.A. Leader Ernst thought of

nothing more drastic than to drive to Bremen that Saturday with his bride to take

ship for a honeymoon at Madeira. And in the south, where the S.A.

“conspirators” were concentrated?

At the moment of 2 A.M. on June 30 when Hitler, with Goebbels at his side,

was taking off from Hangelar Airfield near Bonn, Captain Roehm and his S.A.

lieutenants were peacefully slumbering in their beds at the Hanslbauer Hotel at

Wiessee on the shores of the Tegernsee. Edmund Heines, the S.A.

Obergruppenfuehrer of Silesia, a convicted murderer, a notorious homosexual

with a girlish face on the brawny body of a piano mover, was in bed with a

young man. So far did the S.A. chiefs seem from staging a revolt that Roehm

had left his staff guards in Munich. There appeared to be plenty of carousing

among the S.A. leaders but no plotting.

Hitler and his small party (Otto Dietrich, his press chief, and Viktor Lutze, the

colorless but loyal S.A. leader of Hanover, had joined it) landed in Munich at 4

A.M. on Saturday, June 30, and found that some action already had been taken.

Major Walther Buch, head of USCHLA, the party court, and Adolf Wagner,

Bavarian Minister of the Interior, aided by such early cronies of Hitler as Emil

Maurice, the ex-convict and rival for Geli Raubal’s love, and Christian Weber,

the horse dealer and former cabaret bouncer, had arrested the Munich S.A.

leaders, including Obergruppenfuehrer Schneidhuber, who was also chief of

police in Munich. Hitler, who was now working himself up to a fine state of

hysteria, found the prisoners in the Ministry of the Interior. Striding up to

Schneidhuber, a former Army colonel, he tore off his Nazi insignia and cursed

him for his “treason.”

Shortly after dawn Hitler and his party sped out of Munich toward Wiessee in

a long column of cars. They found Roehm and his friends still fast asleep in the

Hanslbauer Hotel. The awakening was rude. Heines and his young male

companion were dragged out of bed, taken outside the hotel and summarily shot

on the orders of Hitler. The Fuehrer, according to Otto Dietrich’s account,

entered Roehm’s room alone, gave him a dressing down and ordered him to be

brought back to Munich and lodged in Stadelheim prison, where the S.A. chief

had served time after his participation with Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch in

1923. After fourteen stormy years the two friends, who more than any others

were responsible for the launching of the Third Reich, for its terror and its

degradation, who though they had often disagreed had stood together in the

moments of crisis and defeats and disappointments, had come to a parting of the

ways, and the scar-faced, brawling battler for Hitler and Nazism had come to the

end of his violent life.

Hitler, in a final act of what he apparently thought was grace, gave orders that

a pistol be left on the table of his old comrade. Roehm refused to make use of it.

“If I am to be killed, let Adolf do it himself,” he is reported to have said.

Thereupon two S.A. officers, according to the testimony of an eyewitness, a

police lieutenant, given twenty-three years later in a postwar trial at Munich in

May 1957, entered the cell and fired their revolvers at Roehm point-blank.

“Roehm wanted to say something,” said this witness, “but the S.S. officer

motioned him to shut up. Then Roehm stood at attention—he was stripped to the

waist—with his face full of contempt. ”* And so he died, violently as he had

lived, contemptuous of the friend he had helped propel to the heights no other

German had ever reached, and almost certainly, like hundreds of others who

were slaughtered that day—like Schneidhuber, who was reported to have cried,

“Gentlemen, I don’t know what this is all about, but shoot straight”—without

any clear idea of what was happening, or why, other than that it was an act of

treachery which he, who had lived so long with treachery and committed it so

often himself, had not expected from Adolf Hitler.

In Berlin, in the meantime, Goering and Himmler had been busy. Some 150

S.A. leaders were rounded up and stood against a wall of the Cadet School at

Lichterfelde and shot by firing squads of Himmler’s S.S. and Goering’s special

police.

Among them was Karl Ernst, whose honeymoon trip was interrupted by S.S.

gunmen as his car neared Bremen. His bride and his chauffeur were wounded; he

himself was knocked unconscious and flown back to Berlin for his execution.

The S.A. men were not the only ones to fall on that bloody summer weekend.

On the morning of June 30, a squad of S.S. men in mufti rang the doorbell at

General von Schleicher’s villa on the outskirts of Berlin. When the General

opened the door he was shot dead in his tracks, and when his wife, whom he had

married but eighteen months before—he had been a bachelor until then—

stepped forward, she too was slain on the spot. General Kurt von Bredow, a

close friend of Schleicher, met a similar fate the same evening. Gregor Strasser

was seized at his home in Berlin at noon on Saturday and dispatched a few hours

later in his cell in the Prinz Albrechtstrasse Gestapo jail on the personal orders of

Goering.

Papen was luckier. He escaped with his life. But his office was ransacked by

an S.S. squad, his principal secretary, Bose, shot down at his desk, his

confidential collaborator, Edgar Jung, who had been arrested a few days earlier

by the Gestapo, murdered in prison, another collaborator, Erich Klausener,

leader of Catholic Action, slain in his office in the Ministry of Communications,

and the rest of his staff, including his private secretary, Baroness Stotzingen,

carted off to concentration camp. When Papen went to protest to Goering, the

latter, who at that moment had no time for idle talk, “more or less,” he later

recalled, threw him out, placing him under house arrest at his villa, which was

surrounded by heavily armed S.S. men and where his telephone was cut and he

was forbidden to have any contact with the outside world—an added humiliation

which the Vice-Chancellor of Germany swallowed remarkably well. For within

less than a month he defiled himself by accepting from the Nazi murderers of his

friends a new assignment as German minister to Vienna, where the Nazis had

just slain Chancellor Dollfuss.

How many were slain in the purge was never definitely established. In his

Reichstag speech of July 13, Hitler announced that sixty-one persons were shot,

including nineteen “higher S.A. leaders,” that thirteen more died “resisting

arrest” and that three “committed suicide”—a total of seventy-seven. The White

Book of the Purge, published by émigrés in Paris, stated that 401 had been slain,

but it identified only 116 of them. At the Munich trial in 1957, the figure of

“more than 1,000” was given.

Many were killed out of pure vengeance for having opposed Hitler in the past,

others were murdered apparently because they knew too much, and at least one

because of mistaken identity. The body of Gustav von Kahr, whose suppression

of the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 we have already recounted, and who had long

since retired from politics, was found in a swamp near Dachau hacked to death,

apparently by pickaxes. Hitler had neither forgotten nor forgiven him. The body

of Father Bernhard Stempfle of the Hieronymite Order, who, it will be

remembered from earlier pages, helped edit Mein Kampf and later talked too

much, perhaps, about his knowledge of why Hitler’s love, Geli Raubal,

committed suicide, was found in the forest of Harlaching near Munich, his neck

broken and three shots in the heart. Heiden says the murder gang that killed him

was led by Emil Maurice, the ex-convict who had also made love to Geli Raubal.

Others who “knew too much” included three S.A. men who were believed to

have been accomplices of Ernst in setting the Reichstag on fire. They were

dispatched with Ernst.

One other murder deserves mention. At seven-twenty on the evening of June

30, Dr. Willi Schmid, the eminent music critic of the Muenchener Neueste

Nachrichten, a leading Munich daily newspaper, was playing the cello in his

study while his wife prepared supper and their three children, aged nine, eight

and two, played in the living room of their apartment in the Schackstrasse in

Munich. The doorbell rang, four S.S. men appeared and without explanation

took Dr. Schmid away. Four days later his body was returned in a coffin with

orders from the Gestapo not to open it in any circumstances. Dr. Willi Schmid,

who had never participated in politics, had been mistaken by the S.S. thugs for

Willi Schmidt, a local S.A. leader, who in the meantime had been arrested by

another S.S. detachment and shot.*

Was there a plot against Hitler at all? There is only his word for it, contained in

the official communiqués and in his Reichstag speech of July 13. He never

presented a shred of evidence. Roehm had made no secret of his ambition to see

the S.A. become the nucleus of the new Army and to head it himself. He had

certainly been in touch with Schleicher about the scheme, which they had first

discussed when the General was Chancellor. Probably, as Hitler stated, Gregor

Strasser “was brought in.” But such talks certainly did not constitute treason.

Hitler himself was in contact with Strasser and early in June, according to Otto

Strasser, offered him the post of Minister of Economics.

At first Hitler accused Roehm and Schleicher of having sought the backing of

a “foreign power”—obviously France—and charged that General von Bredow

was the intermediary in “foreign policy.” This was part of the indictment of them

as “traitors.” And though Hitler repeated the charges in his Reichstag speech and

spoke sarcastically of “a foreign diplomat [who could have been no other than

François-Poncet, the French ambassador] explaining that the meeting with

Schleicher and Roehm was of an entirely harmless character,” he was unable to

substantiate his accusations. It was crime enough, he said lamely, for any

responsible German in the Third Reich even to see foreign diplomats without his

knowledge.

When three traitors in Germany arrange … a meeting with a foreign statesman … and give

orders that no word of this meeting shall reach me, then I shall have such men shot dead even

when it should prove true that at such a consultation which was thus kept secret from me they

talked of nothing more than the weather, old coins and like topics.

When François-Poncet protested vigorously against the insinuation that he had

participated in the Roehm “plot” the German Foreign Office officially informed

the French government that the accusations were wholly without foundation and

that the Reich government hoped the ambassador would remain in his post.

Indeed, as this writer can testify, François-Poncet continued to remain on better

personal terms with Hitler than any other envoy from a democratic state.

In the first communiqués, especially in a blood-curdling eyewitness account

given the public by Otto Dietrich, the Fuehrer’s press chief, and even in Hitler’s

Reichstag speech, much was made of the depraved morals of Roehm and the

other S.A. leaders who were shot. Dietrich asserted that the scene of the arrest of

Heines, who was caught in bed at Wiessee with a young man, “defied

description,” and Hitler in addressing the surviving storm troop leaders in

Munich at noon on June 30, just after the first executions, declared that for their

corrupt morals alone these men deserved to die.

And yet Hitler had known all along, from the earliest days of the party, that a

large number of his closest and most important followers were sexual perverts

and convicted murderers. It was common talk, for instance, that Heines used to

send S.A. men scouring all over Germany to find him suitable male lovers.

These things Hitler had not only tolerated but defended; more than once he had

warned his party comrades against being too squeamish about a man’s personal

morals if he were a fanatical fighter for the movement. Now, on June 30, 1934,

he professed to be shocked by the moral degeneration of some of his oldest

lieutenants.

Most of the killing was over by Sunday afternoon, July 1, when Hitler, who

had flown back to Berlin from Munich the night before, was host at a tea party in

the gardens of the Chancellery. On Monday President Hindenburg thanked

Hitler for his “determined action and gallant personal intervention which have

nipped treason in the bud and rescued the German people from great danger.” He

also congratulated Goering for his “energetic and successful action” in

suppressing “high treason.” On Tuesday General von Blomberg expressed to the

Chancellor the congratulations of the cabinet, which proceeded to “legalize” the

slaughter as a necessary measure “for the defense of the State.” Blomberg also

issued an order of the day to the Army expressing the High Command’s

satisfaction with the turn of events and promising to establish “cordial relations

with the new S.A.”

It was natural, no doubt, that the Army should be pleased with the elimination

of its rival, the S.A., but what about the sense of honor, let alone of decency, of

an officer corps which not only condoned but openly praised a government for

carrying out a massacre without precedent in German history, during which two

of its leading officers, Generals von Schleicher and von Bredow, having been

branded as traitors, were coldbloodedly murdered? Only the voices of the eighty-

five-year-old Field Marshal von Mackensen and of General von Hammerstein,

the former Commander in Chief of the Army, were raised in protest against the

murder of their two fellow officers and the charges of treason which had been

the excuse for it.* This behavior of the corps was a black stain on the honor of

the Army; it was also a mark of its unbelievable shortsightedness.

In making common cause with the lawlessness, indeed the gangsterism, of

Hitler on June 30, 1934, the generals were putting themselves in a position in

which they could never oppose future acts of Nazi terrorism not only at home

but even when they were aimed across the frontiers, even when they were

committed against their own members. For the Army was backing Hitler’s claim

that he had become the law, or, as he put it in his Reichstag speech of July 13,

“If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of

justice, then all I can say is this: In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the

German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge [ oberster Gerichtsherr]

of the German people.” And Hitler added, for good measure, “Everyone must

know for all future time that if he raises his hand to strike the State, then certain

death is his lot.” This was a warning that was to catch up with the generals in ten

years almost to a day when at last the more desperate of them dared to raise their

hand to strike down their “supreme judge.”

Moreover, the officer corps only deluded itself in thinking that on June 30 it

got rid forever of the threat of the Nazi movement against its traditional

prerogatives and power. For in the place of the S.A. came the S.S. On July 26

the S.S., as a reward for carrying out the executions, was made independent of

the S.A., with Himmler—as its Reichsfuehrer—responsible only to Hitler. Soon

this much-better-disciplined and loyal force would become much more powerful

than the S.A. had ever been and as a rival to the Army would succeed where

Roehm’s ragged Brownshirts had failed.

For the moment, however, the generals were smugly confident. As Hitler

reiterated in his Reichstag address on July 13, the Army was to remain “the sole

bearer of arms.” At the High Command’s bidding, the Chancellor had got rid of

the S.A., which had dared to dispute that dictum. The time now came when the

Army had to carry out its part of the “Pact of the Deutschland. ”

THE DEATH OF HINDENBURG

All through the summer the seemingly indestructible Hindenburg had been

sinking and on August 2, at nine in the morning, he died in his eighty-seventh

year. At noon, three hours later, it was announced that according to a law

enacted by the cabinet on the preceding day the offices of Chancellor and

President had been combined and that Adolf Hitler had taken over the powers of

the head of state and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. The title of

President was abolished; Hitler would be known as Fuehrer and Reich

Chancellor. His dictatorship had become complete. To leave no loopholes Hitler

exacted from all officers and men of the armed forces an oath of allegiance—not

to Germany, not to the constitution, which he had violated by not calling for the

election of Hindenburg’s successor, but to himself. It read:

I swear by God this sacred oath, that I will render unconditional obedience to

Adolf Hitler, the Fuehrer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander

of the Armed Forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life at any

time for this oath.

From August 1934 on, the generals, who up to that time could have

overthrown the Nazi regime with ease had they so desired, thus tied themselves

to the person of Adolf Hitler, recognizing him as the highest legitimate authority

in the land and binding themselves to him by an oath of fealty which they felt

honor-bound to obey in all circumstances no matter how degrading to them and

the Fatherland. It was an oath which was to trouble the conscience of quite a few

high officers when their acknowledged leader set off on a path which they felt

could only lead to the nation’s destruction and which they opposed. It was also a

pledge which enabled an even greater number of officers to excuse themselves

from any personal responsibility for the unspeakable crimes which they carried

out on the orders of a Supreme Commander whose true nature they had seen for

themselves in the butchery of June 30. One of the appalling aberrations of the

German officer corps from this point on rose out of this conflict of “honor”—a

word which, as this author can testify by personal experience, was often on their

lips and of which they had such a curious concept. Later and often, by honoring

their oath they dishonored themselves as human beings and trod in the mud the

moral code of their corps.

When Hindenburg died, Dr. Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, officially

announced that no last will and testament of the Field Marshal had been found

and that it must be presumed there was none. But on August 15, four days before

the plebiscite in which the German people were asked to approve Hitler’s taking

over the President’s office, Hindenburg’s political testament turned up, delivered

to Hitler by none other than Papen. Its words of praise for Hitler provided strong

ammunition to Goebbels in the final days of the plebiscite campaign, and it was

reinforced on the eve of the voting by a broadcast of Colonel Oskar von

Hindenburg:

My father had himself seen in Adolf Hitler his own direct successor as head of the German

State, and I am acting according to my father’s intention when I call on all German men and

women to vote for the handing over of my father’s office to the Fuehrer and Reich

Chancellor.*

Almost certainly this was not true. For Hindenburg, on the best evidence

available, had recommended as his last wish a restoration of the monarchy after

his death. This part of the testament Adolf Hitler suppressed.

Some, if not all, of the mystery which cloaked the truth about the aged

President’s testament was cleared up after the war by Papen’s interrogation at

Nuremberg and later in his memoirs. And while Papen is not an unimpeachable

witness and may not have told all he knew, his testimony cannot be ignored. He

himself wrote the initial draft of Hindenburg’s last will, and, according to him, at

the Field Marshal’s request.

My draft [he says in his memoirs] recommended that after his death a constitutional

monarchy should be adopted, and I made a point of the inadvisability of combining the offices

of President and Chancellor. In order to avoid giving any offense to Hitler, there were also

certain approving references to some of the positive accomplishments of the Nazi regime.

Papen delivered his draft to Hindenburg in April 1934, he says.

A few days later he asked me to call on him again, and told me that he had decided not to

approve the document in the form I had suggested. He felt … that the nation as a whole should

make up its mind as to the form of State it desired. He therefore intended to regard the account

of his service as a testament, and his recommendations concerning the return of the monarchy

would be expressed, as his last wish, in a private letter to Hitler. This meant, of course, that the

whole point of my original suggestion had been lost, as the recommendation concerning the

monarchy was no longer addressed to the nation; a fact of which Hitler later took full

advantage.

No German was as well placed as Papen to observe how Hitler took the

advantage.

When I returned to Berlin after Hindenburg’s funeral at Tannenberg, Hitler rang me up. He

asked me if a political testament by Hindenburg existed, and if I knew where it was. I said that

I would ask Oskar von Hindenburg. “I should be obliged,” said Hitler, “if you would ensure

that this document comes into my possession as soon as possible.” I therefore told Kageneck,

my private secretary, to go to Neudeck and ask Hindenburg’s son if the testament still existed,

and whether I could have it to pass it on to Hitler. As I had not seen Hindenburg after he left

Berlin at the end of May, I had no idea whether he had destroyed the testament or not.

Oskar, who had not been able to find the important document immediately

after his father’s death, suddenly found it. That this could not have been a very

difficult feat was attested to by Count von der Schulenburg, Hindenburg’s

adjutant, in his testimony at Papen’s denazification trial. He revealed that the

President on May 11 signed two documents, his testament and his last wishes.

The first was addressed to “the German People” and the second to the “Reich

Chancellor.” When Hindenburg left Berlin on his last journey to Neudeck

Schulenburg took the papers with him. Papen says he did not know this at the

time. But in due course his secretary returned from Neudeck bringing two sealed

envelopes turned over to him by Oskar von Hindenburg.

On August 15 Papen delivered them to Hitler at Berchtesgaden.

Hitler read both documents with great care and discussed the contents with us. It was

obvious that Hindenburg’s recommendations in the document expressing his last wishes were

contrary to Hitler’s intentions. He therefore took advantage of the fact that the envelope bore

the address “Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler.” “These recommendations of the late President,”

he said, “are given to me personally. Later I shall decide if and when I shall permit their

publication.” In vain I begged him to publish both documents. The only one handed to his

press chief for publication was Hindenburg’s account of his service, in which he included

praise of Hitler.31

What happened to the second document recommending that not Hitler but a

Hohenzollern become head of state Papen does not say and perhaps does not

know. Since it has never turned up among the hundreds of tons of captured

secret Nazi documents it is likely that Hitler lost no time in destroying it.

Perhaps it would have made little difference if Hitler had been courageous and

honest enough to publish it. Even before Hindenburg’s death, he had made the

cabinet promulgate a law giving him the President’s powers. This was on August

1, the day before the Field Marshal died. That the “law” was illegal also made

little difference in a Germany where the former Austrian corporal had now

become the law itself. That it was illegal was obvious. On December 17, 1932,

during the Schleicher government, the Reichstag had passed by the necessary

two-thirds majority an amendment to the constitution providing that the

president of the High Court of Justice, instead of the Chancellor, should act as

President until a new election could be held. And while the Enabling Act, which

was the “legal” basis of Hitler’s dictatorship, gave the Chancellor the right to

make laws which deviated from the constitution, it specifically forbade him to

tamper with the institution of the Presidency.

But what mattered the law now? It mattered not to Papen, who cheerfully

went off to serve Hitler as minister in Vienna and smooth over the mess caused

by the murder of Chancellor Dollfuss by the Nazis. It mattered not to the

generals, who went eagerly to work to build up Hitler’s Army. It mattered not to

the industrialists, who turned enthusiastically to the profitable business of

rearmament. Conservatives of the old school, “decent” Germans like Baron von

Neurath in the Foreign Office and Dr. Schacht in the Reichsbank, did not resign.

No one resigned. In fact, Dr. Schacht took on the added duties of Minister of

Economics on August 2, the day Hitler seized the powers of the expiring

President.

And the German people? On August 19, some 95 per cent of those who had

registered went to the polls, and 90 per cent, more than thirty-eight million of

them, voted approval of Hitler’s usurpation of complete power. Only four and a

quarter million Germans had the courage—or the desire—to vote “No.”

No wonder that Hitler was in a confident mood when the Nazi Party Congress

assembled in Nuremberg on September 4. I watched him on the morning of the

next day stride like a conquering emperor down the center aisle of the great flag-

bedecked Luitpold Hall while the band blared forth “The Badenweiler March”

and thirty thousand hands were raised in the Nazi salute. A few moments later he

sat proudly in the center of the vast stage with folded arms and shining eyes as

Gauleiter Adolf Wagner of Bavaria read the Fuehrer’s proclamation.

The German form of life is definitely determined for the next thousand years. The Age of

Nerves of the nineteenth century has found its close with us. There will be no other revolution

in Germany for the next one thousand years!

Being mortal, he would not live a thousand years, but as long as he lived he

would rule this great people as the most powerful and ruthless autocrat they had

ever had. The venerable Hindenburg was no longer there to dispute his authority,

the Army was in his hands, bound to obedience by an oath no German soldier

would lightly break. Indeed, all Germany and all the Germans were in his

bloodstained hands now that the last recalcitrants had been done away with or

had disappeared for good.

“It is wonderful!” he exulted at Nuremberg to the foreign correspondents at

the end of the exhausting week of parades, speeches, pagan pageantry and the

most frenzied adulation for a public figure this writer had ever seen. Adolf Hitler

had come a long way from the gutters of Vienna. He was only forty-five, and

this was just the beginning. Even one returning to Germany for the first time

since the death of the Republic could see that, whatever his crimes against

humanity, Hitler had unleashed a dynamic force of incalculable proportions

which had long been pent up in the German people. To what purpose, he had

already made clear in the pages of Mein Kampf and in a hundred speeches which

had gone unnoticed or unheeded or been ridiculed by so many—by almost

everyone—within and especially without the Third Reich.

* This cabinet meeting, of course, was private, and, like most of the other conferences, many

of them taking place in the strictest secrecy, held by Hitler and his political and military aides

during the Third Reich, its proceedings and decisions were not accessible to the public until

the captured German documents were first perused during the Nuremberg trial.

A great many of these highly confidential discussions and the decisions emanating from

them—all regarded as state secrets—will henceforth be chronicled in this book, which, from

here to the end. largely rests on the documents which recorded them at the time. At the risk of

somewhat cluttering the pages with numbers indicating notes, these sources will be indicated.

No other history of a nation over a specific epoch has been so fully documented, I believe, as

that of the Third Reich, and to have left out reference to the documents, it seemed to the

author, would have greatly weakened whatever value this book may have as an authentic

historical record.

* Both in his interrogations and at his trial at Nuremberg, Goering denied to the last that he

had had any part in setting fire to the Reichstag.

* A document which came to light at Nuremberg shows that the Nazis had been planning for

some time to destroy the trade unions. A secret order dated April 21 and signed by Dr. Ley

contained detailed instructions for “co-ordinating” the unions on May 2. S.A. and S.S. troops

were to carry out the “occupation of trade-union properties” and to “take into protective

custody” all union leaders. Union funds were to be seized.17 The Christian (Catholic) Trade

Unions were not molested on May 2. Their end came on June 24.

*Some months previously, on May 11, Lord Hausham, the British Secretary of State for War,

had publicly warned that any attempt of Germany to rearm would be a breach of the peace

treaty and would be answered by sanctions, in accordance with the treaty. In Germany it was

thought that sanctions would mean armed invasion.

* The Munich trial in May 1957 was the first occasion on which actual eyewitnesses and

participants in the June 30, 1934, purge talked in public. During the Third Reich it would not

have been possible. Sepp Dietrich, whom this author recalls personally as one of the most

brutal men of the Third Reich, commanded Hitler’s S.S. Bodyguard in 1934 and directed the

executions in Stadelheim prison. Later a colonel general in the Waffen S.S. during the war, he

was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for complicity in the murder of American

prisoners of war during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. Released after ten years, he was

brought to Munich in 1957 and sentenced on May 14 to eighteen months in prison for his part

in the June 30, 1934, executions. His sentence and that of Michael Lippert, who was convicted

as being one of the two S.S. officers who actually killed Roehm, was the first punishment

given to the Nazi executioners who took part in the purge.

* Kate Eva Hoerlin, former wife of Willi Schmid, told the story of her husband’s murder in an

affidavit sworn on July 7, 1945, at Binghamton, N.Y. She became an American citizen in

1944. To hush up the atrocity Rudolf Hess himself visited the widow, apologized for the

“mistake” and secured for her a pension from the German government. The affidavit is given

in Nuremberg Document L-135, NCA, VII, pp. 883–90.

* The two senior officers continued their efforts to clear the names of Schleicher and Bredow,

and succeeded in getting Hitler, at a secret meeting of party and military leaders in Berlin on

January 3, 1935, to admit that the killing of the two generals had been “in error” and to

announce that their names would be restored to the honor rolls of their regiments. This

“rehabilitation” was never published in Germany, but the officer corps accepted it as such.

(See Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power, p. 337.)

* It is interesting and perhaps revealing that Hitler now promoted Oskar from colonel to major

general. See above, p. 181.

8

LIFE IN THE THIRD REICH: 1933–37

IT WAS AT THIS TIME, in the late summer of 1934, that I came to live and work in

the Third Reich. There was much that impressed, puzzled and troubled a foreign

observer about the new Germany. The overwhelming majority of Germans did

not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much

of their culture had been destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or

that their life and work had become regimented to a degree never before

experienced even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of

regimentation.

In the background, to be sure, there lurked the terror of the Gestapo and the

fear of the concentration camp for those who got out of line or who had been

Communists or Socialists or too liberal or too pacifist, or who were Jews. The

Blood Purge of June 30, 1934, was a warning of how ruthless the new leaders

could be. Yet the Nazi terror in the early years affected the lives of relatively few

Germans and a newly arrived observer was somewhat surprised to see that the

people of this country did not seem to feel that they were being cowed and held

down by an unscrupulous and brutal dictatorship. On the contrary, they

supported it with genuine enthusiasm. Somehow it imbued them with a new

hope and a new confidence and an astonishing faith in the future of their

country.

Hitler was liquidating the past, with all its frustrations and disappointments.

Step by step, and rapidly (as we shall see in detail later), he was freeing

Germany from the shackles of Versailles, confounding the victorious Allies and

making Germany militarily strong again. This was what most Germans wanted

and they were willing to make the sacrifices which the Leader demanded of

them to get it: the loss of personal freedom, a Spartan diet (“Guns before

Butter”) and hard work. By the autumn of 1936 the problem of unemployment

had been largely licked, almost everyone had a job again* and one heard workers

who had been deprived of their trade-union rights joking, over their full dinner

pails, that at least under Hitler there was no more freedom to starve.

“Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz! ” (The Common Interest before Self!) was a popular

Nazi slogan in those days, and though many a party leader, Goering above all,

was secretly enriching himself and the profits of business were mounting, there

was no doubt that the masses were taken in by the new “national socialism”

which ostensibly put the welfare of the community above one’s personal gain.

The racial laws which excluded the Jews from the German community

seemed to a foreign observer to be a shocking throwback to primitive times, but

since the Nazi racial theories exalted the Germans as the salt of the earth and the

master race they were far from being unpopular. A few Germans one met—

former Socialists or liberals or devout Christians from the old conservative

classes—were disgusted or even revolted by the persecution of the Jews, but

though they helped to alleviate hardship in a number of individual cases they did

nothing to help stem the tide. What could they do? They would often put the

question to you, and it was not an easy one to answer.

The Germans heard vaguely in their censored press and broadcasts of the

revulsion abroad but they noticed that it did not prevent foreigners from flocking

to the Third Reich and seemingly enjoying its hospitality. For Nazi Germany,

much more than Soviet Russia, was open for all the world to see. * The tourist

business thrived and brought in vast sums of badly needed foreign currency.

Apparently the Nazi leaders had nothing to hide. A foreigner, no matter how

anti-Nazi, could come to Germany and see and study what he liked—with the

exception of the concentration camps and, as in all countries, the military

installations. And many did. And many returned who if they were not converted

were at least rendered tolerant of the “new Germany” and believed that they had

seen, as they said, “positive achievements.” Even a man as perspicacious as

Lloyd George, who had led England to victory over Germany in 1918, and who

in that year had campaigned with an election slogan of “Hang the Kaiser” could

visit Hitler at Obersalzberg in 1936 and go away enchanted with the Fuehrer and

praise him publicly as “a great man” who had the vision and the will to solve a

modern nation’s social problems—above all, unemployment, a sore which still

festered in England and in regard to which the great wartime Liberal leader with

his program We Can Conquer Unemployment had found so little interest at

home.

The Olympic games held in Berlin in August 1936 afforded the Nazis a

golden opportunity to impress the world with the achievements of the Third

Reich, and they made the most of it. The signs “Juden unerwuenscht” (Jews Not

Welcome) were quietly hauled down from the shops, hotels, beer gardens and

places of public entertainment, the persecution of the Jews and of the two

Christian churches temporarily halted, and the country put on its best behavior.

No previous games had seen such a spectacular organization nor such a lavish

display of entertainment. Goering, Ribbentrop and Goebbels gave dazzling

parties for the foreign visitors—the Propaganda Minister’s “Italian Night” on the

Pfaueninsel near Wannsee gathered more than a thousand guests at dinner in a

scene that resembled the Arabian Nights. The visitors, especially those from

England and America, were greatly impressed by what they saw: apparently a

happy, healthy, friendly people united under Hitler—a far different picture, they

said, than they had got from reading the newspaper dispatches from Berlin.

And yet underneath the surface, hidden from the tourists during those splendid

late-summer Olympic days in Berlin and indeed overlooked by most Germans or

accepted by them with a startling passivity, there seemed to be—to a foreigner at

least—a degrading transformation of German life.

There was nothing hidden, of course, about the laws which Hitler decreed

against the Jews or about the government-sponsored persecution of these hapless

people. The so-called Nuremberg Laws of September 15, 1935, deprived the

Jews of German citizenship, confining them to the status of “subjects.” It also

forbade marriage between Jews and Aryans as well as extramarital relations

between them, and it prohibited Jews from employing female Aryan servants

under thirty-five years of age. In the next few years some thirteen decrees

supplementing the Nuremberg Laws would outlaw the Jew completely. But

already by the summer of 1936 when the Germany which was host to the

Olympic games was enchanting the visitors from the West, the Jews had been

excluded either by law or by Nazi terror—the latter often preceded the former—

from public and private employment to such an extent that at least one half of

them were without means of livelihood. In the first year of the Third Reich,

1933, they had been excluded from public office, the civil service, journalism,

radio, farming, teaching, the theater, the films; in 1934 they were kicked out of

the stock exchanges, and though the ban on their practicing the professions of

law and medicine or engaging in business did not come legally until 1938 they

were in practice removed from these fields by the time the first four-year period

of Nazi rule had come to an end.

Moreover, they were denied not only most of the amenities of life but often

even the necessities. In many a town the Jew found it difficult if not impossible

to purchase food. Over the doors of the grocery and butcher shops, the bakeries

and the dairies, were signs, “Jews Not Admitted.” In many communities Jews

could not procure milk even for their young children. Pharmacies would not sell

them drugs or medicine. Hotels would not give them a night’s lodging. And

always, wherever they went, were the taunting signs “Jews Strictly Forbidden in

This Town” or “Jews Enter This Place at Their Own Risk.” At a sharp bend in

the road near Ludwigshafen was a sign, “Drive Carefully! Sharp Curve! Jews 75

Miles an Hour!” *

Such was the plight of the Jews at about the time the Festival of the Olympics

was held in Germany. It was but the beginning of a road that would soon lead to

their extinction by massacre.

THE PERSECUTION OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

The Nazi war on the Christian churches began more moderately. Though

Hitler, nominally a Catholic, had inveighed against political Catholicism in Mein

Kampf and attacked both of the Christian churches for their failure to recognize

the racial problem, he had, as we have seen, warned in his book that “a political

party must never … lose sight of the fact that in all previous historical

experience a purely political party has never succeeded in producing a religious

reformation.” Article 24 of the party program had demanded “liberty for all

religious denominations in the State so far as they are not a danger to … the

moral feelings of the German race. The party stands for positive Christianity.” In

his speech of March 23, 1933, to the Reichstag when the legislative body of

Germany abandoned its functions to the dictator, Hitler paid tribute to the

Christian faiths as “essential elements for safeguarding the soul of the German

people,” promised to respect their rights, declared that his government’s

“ambition is a peaceful accord between Church and State” and added—with an

eye to the votes of the Catholic Center Party, which he received—that “we hope

to improve our friendly relations with the Holy See.”

Scarcely four months later, on July 20, the Nazi government concluded a

concordat with the Vatican in which it guaranteed the freedom of the Catholic

religion and the right of the Church “to regulate her own affairs.” The

agreement, signed on behalf of Germany by Papen and of the Holy See by the

then Papal Secretary of State, Monsignor Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII, was hardly

put to paper before it was being broken by the Nazi government. But coming as

it did at a moment when the first excesses of the new regime in Germany had

provoked world-wide revulsion, the concordat undoubtedly lent the Hitler

government much badly needed prestige. †

On July 25, five days after the ratification of the concordat, the German

government promulgated a sterilization law, which particularly offended the

Catholic Church. Five days later the first steps were taken to dissolve the

Catholic Youth League. During the next years thousands of Catholic priests,

nuns and lay leaders were arrested, many of them on trumped-up charges of

“immorality” or of “smuggling foreign currency.” Erich Klausener, leader of

Catholic Action, was, as we have seen, murdered in the June 30, 1934, purge.

Scores of Catholic publications were suppressed, and even the sanctity of the

confessional was violated by Gestapo agents. By the spring of 1937 the Catholic

hierarchy in Germany, which, like most of the Protestant clergy, had at first tried

to co-operate with the new regime, was thoroughly disillusioned. On March 14,

1937, Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical, “Mit Brennender Sorge” (With Burning

Sorrow), charging the Nazi government with “evasion” and “violation” of the

concordat and accusing it of sowing “the tares of suspicion, discord, hatred,

calumny, of secret and open fundamental hostility to Christ and His Church.” On

“the horizon of Germany” the Pope saw “the threatening storm clouds of

destructive religious wars … which have no other aim than … of extermination.”

The Reverend Martin Niemoeller had personally welcomed the coming to

power of the Nazis in 1933. In that year his autobiography, From U-Boat to

Pulpit, had been published. The story of how this submarine commander in the

First World War had become a prominent Protestant pastor was singled out for

special praise in the Nazi press and became a best seller. To Pastor Niemoeller,

as to many a Protestant clergyman, the fourteen years of the Republic had been,

as he said, “years of darkness” 1 and at the close of his autobiography he added a

note of satisfaction that the Nazi revolution had finally triumphed and that it had

brought about the “national revival” for which he himself had fought so long—

for a time in the free corps, from which so many Nazi leaders had come.

He was soon to experience a terrible disillusionment.

The Protestants in Germany, as in the United States, were a divided faith.

Only a very few—some 150,000 out of forty-five million of them—belonged to

the various Free Churches such as the Baptists and Methodists. The rest

belonged to twenty-eight Lutheran and Reformed Churches of which the largest

was the Church of the Old Prussian Union, with eighteen million members. With

the rise of National Socialism there came further divisions among the

Protestants. The more fanatical Nazis among them organized in 1932 “The

German Christians’ Faith Movement” of which the most vehement leader was a

certain Ludwig Mueller, army chaplain of the East Prussian Military District, a

devoted follower of Hitler who had first brought the Fuehrer together with

General von Blomberg when the latter commanded the district. The “German

Christians” ardently supported the Nazi doctrines of race and the leadership

principle and wanted them applied to a Reich Church which would bring all

Protestants into one all-embracing body. In 1933 the “German Christians” had

some three thousand out of a total of seventeen thousand pastors, though their

lay followers probably represented a larger percentage of churchgoers.

Opposed to the “German Christians” was another minority group which called

itself the “Confessional Church.” It had about the same number of pastors and

was eventually led by Niemoeller. It opposed the Nazification of the Protestant

churches, rejected the Nazi racial theories and denounced the anti-Christian

doctrines of Rosenberg and other Nazi leaders. In between lay the majority of

Protestants, who seemed too timid to join either of the two warring groups, who

sat on the fence and eventually, for the most part, landed in the arms of Hitler,

accepting his authority to intervene in church affairs and obeying his commands

without open protest.

It is difficult to understand the behavior of most German Protestants in the

first Nazi years unless one is aware of two things: their history and the influence

of Martin Luther.* The great founder of Protestantism was both a passionate

anti-Semite and a ferocious believer in absolute obedience to political authority.

He wanted Germany rid of the Jews and when they were sent away he advised

that they be deprived of “all their cash and jewels and silver and gold” and,

furthermore, “that their synagogues or schools be set on fire, that their houses be

broken up and destroyed … and they be put under a roof or stable, like the

gypsies … in misery and captivity as they incessantly lament and complain to

God about us”—advice that was literally followed four centuries later by Hitler,

Goering and Himmler.2

In what was perhaps the only popular revolt in German history, the peasant

uprising of 1525, Luther advised the princes to adopt the most ruthless measures

against the “mad dogs,” as he called the desperate, downtrodden peasants. Here,

as in his utterances about the Jews, Luther employed a coarseness and brutality

of language unequaled in German history until the Nazi time. The influence of

this towering figure extended down the generations in Germany, especially

among the Protestants. Among other results was the ease with which German

Protestantism became the instrument of royal and princely absolutism from the

sixteenth century until the kings and princes were overthrown in 1918. The

hereditary monarchs and petty rulers became the supreme bishops of the

Protestant Church in their lands. Thus in Prussia the Hohenzollern King was the

head of the Church. In no country with the exception of Czarist Russia did the

clergy become by tradition so completely servile to the political authority of the

State. Its members, with few exceptions, stood solidly behind the King, the

Junkers and the Army, and during the nineteenth century they dutifully opposed

the rising liberal and democratic movements. Even the Weimar Republic was

anathema to most Protestant pastors, not only because it had deposed the kings

and princes but because it drew its main support from the Catholics and the

Socialists. During the Reichstag elections one could not help but notice that the

Protestant clergy—Niemoeller was typical—quite openly supported the

Nationalist and even the Nazi enemies of the Republic. Like Niemoeller, most of

the pastors welcomed the advent of Adolf Hitler to the chancellorship in 1933.

They were soon to become acquainted with the very strong-arm Nazi tactics

which had swept Hitler to political power. In July 1933 representatives of the

Protestant churches had written a constitution for a new “Reich Church,” and it

was formally recognized by the Reichstag on July 14. Immediately there broke

out a heated struggle over the election of the first Reich Bishop. Hitler insisted

that his friend, Chaplain Mueller, whom he had appointed his adviser on

Protestant church affairs, be given this highest office. The leaders of the Church

Federation proposed an eminent divine, Pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh.

But they were naïve. The Nazi government intervened, dissolved a number of

provincial church organizations, suspended from office several leading

dignitaries of the Protestant churches, loosed the S.A. and the Gestapo on

recalcitrant clergymen—in fact, terrorized all who supported Bodelschwingh. On

the eve of the elections of delegates to the synod which would elect the Reich

Bishop, Hitler personally took to the radio to “urge” the election of “German

Christians” whose candidate Mueller was. The intimidation was highly

successful. Bodelschwingh in the meantime had been forced to withdraw his

candidacy, and the “elections” returned a majority of “German Christians,” who

in September at the synod in Wittenberg, where Luther had first defied Rome,

elected Mueller Reich Bishop.

But the new head of the Church, a heavy-handed man, was not able to

establish a unified Church or to completely Nazify the Protestant congregations.

On November 13, 1933, the day after the German people had overwhelmingly

backed Hitler in a national plebiscite, the “German Christians” staged a massive

rally in the Sportpalast in Berlin. A Dr. Reinhardt Krause, the Berlin district

leader of the sect, proposed the abandonment of the Old Testament, “with its

tales of cattle merchants and pimps” and the revision of the New Testament with

the teaching of Jesus “corresponding entirely with the demands of National

Socialism.” Resolutions were drawn up demanding “One People, One Reich,

One Faith,” requiring all pastors to take an oath of allegiance to Hitler and

insisting that all churches institute the Aryan paragraph and exclude converted

Jews. This was too much even for the timid Protestants who had declined to take

any part in the church war, and Bishop Mueller was forced to suspend Dr.

Krause and disavow him.

In reality the struggle between the Nazi government and the churches was the

age-old one of what to render unto Caesar and what to God. So far as the

Protestants were concerned, Hitler was insistent that if the Nazi “German

Christians” could not bring the evangelical churches into line under Reich

Bishop Mueller then the government itself would have to take over the direction

of the churches. He had always had a certain contempt for the Protestants, who,

though a tiny minority in his native Catholic Austria, comprised two thirds of the

citizens of Germany. “You can do anything you want with them,” he once

confided to his aides. “They will submit … they are insignificant little people,

submissive as dogs, and they sweat with embarrassment when you talk to

them. ”3 He was well aware that the resistance to the Nazification of the

Protestant churches came from a minority of pastors and an even smaller

minority of worshipers.

By the beginning of 1934, the disillusioned Pastor Niemoeller had become the

guiding spirit of the minority resistance in both the “Confessional Church” and

the Pastors’ Emergency League. At the General Synod in Barmen in May 1934,

and at a special meeting in Niemoeller’s Church of Jesus Christ at Dahlem, a

suburb of Berlin, in November, the “Confessional Church” declared itself to be

the legitimate Protestant Church of Germany and set up a provisional church

government. Thus there were now two groups—Reich Bishop Mueller’s and

Niemoeller’s—claiming to legally constitute the Church.

It was obvious that the former army chaplain, despite his closeness to Hitler,

had failed to integrate the Protestant churches, and at the end of 1935, after the

Gestapo had arrested seven hundred “Confessional Church” pastors, he resigned

his office and faded out of the picture. Already, in July 1935, Hitler had

appointed a Nazi lawyer friend, Dr. Hans Kerrl, to be Minister for Church

Affairs, with instructions to make a second attempt to co-ordinate the

Protestants. One of the milder Nazis and a somewhat cautious man, Kerrl at first

had considerable success. He succeeded not only in winning over the

conservative clergy, which constituted the majority, but in setting up a Church

Committee headed by the venerable Dr. Zoellner, who was respected by all

factions, to work out a general settlement. Though Niemoeller’s group co-

operated with the committee, it still maintained that it was the only legitimate

Church. When, in May 1936, it addressed a courteous but firm memorandum to

Hitler protesting against the anti-Christian tendencies of the regime, denouncing

the government’s anti-Semitism and demanding an end to State interference in

the churches, Frick, the Nazi Minister of the Interior, responded with ruthless

action. Hundreds of “Confessional Church” pastors were arrested, one of the

signers of the memorandum, Dr. Weissler, was murdered in the Sachsenhausen

concentration camp, the funds of the “Confessional Church” were confiscated

and it was forbidden to make collections.

On February 12, 1937, Dr. Zoellner resigned from the Church Committee—he

had been restrained by the Gestapo from visiting Luebeck, where nine Protestant

pastors had been arrested—complaining that his work had been sabotaged by the

Church Minister. Dr. Kerrl replied the next day in a speech to a group of

submissive churchmen. He accused the venerable Zoellner of failing to

appreciate the Nazi doctrine of Race, Blood and Soil, and clearly revealed the

government’s hostility to both Protestant and Catholic churches.

The party [Kerrl said] stands on the basis of Positive Christianity, and Positive

Christianity is National Socialism … National Socialism is the doing of God’s

will … God’s will reveals itself in German blood … Dr. Zoellner and Count

Galen [the Catholic bishop of Muenster] have tried to make clear to me that

Christianity consists in faith in Christ as the Son of God. That makes me laugh

… No, Christianity is not dependent upon the Apostle’s Creed … True

Christianity is represented by the party, and the German people are now called

by the party and especially by the Fuehrer to a real Christianity … The Fuehrer

is the herald of a new revelation.4

On the first of July, 1937, Dr. Niemoeller was arrested and confined to Moabit

prison in Berlin. On June 27 he had preached to the congregation, which always

overflowed his church at Dahlem, what was to be his last sermon in the Third

Reich. As if he had a foreboding of what was to come he said, “We have no

more thought of using our own powers to escape the arm of the authorities than

had the Apostles of old. No more are we ready to keep silent at man’s behest

when God commands us to speak. For it is, and must remain, the case that we

must obey God rather than man.”

After eight months in prison he was tried on March 2, 1938, before a

Sondergericht, one of the “Special Courts” set up by the Nazis to try offenders

against the State, and though acquitted of the main charge of “underhand attacks

against the State” was fined two thousand marks and sentenced to seven months’

imprisonment for “abuse of the pulpit” and holding collections in his church.

Since he had served more than this time, the court ordered his release, but he

was seized by the Gestapo as he was leaving the courtroom, placed in

“protective custody” and confined in concentration camps, first at

Sachsenhausen and then at Dachau, where he remained for seven years until

liberated by Allied troops.

Some 807 other pastors and leading laymen of the “Confessional Church”

were arrested in 1937, and hundreds more in the next couple of years. If the

resistance of the Niemoeller wing of the church was not completely broken, it

was certainly bent. As for the majority of Protestant pastors, they, like almost

everyone else in Germany, submitted in the face of Nazi terror. By the end of

1937 the highly respected Bishop Marahrens of Hanover was induced by Dr.

Kerrl to make a public declaration that must have seemed especially humiliating

to tougher men of God such as Niemoeller: “The National Socialist conception

of life is the national and political teaching which determines and characterizes

German manhood. As such, it is obligatory upon German Christians also.” In the

spring of 1938 Bishop Marahrens took the final step of ordering all pastors in his

diocese to swear a personal oath of allegiance to the Fuehrer. In a short time the

vast majority of Protestant clergymen took the oath, thus binding themselves

legally and morally to obey the commands of the dictator.

It would be misleading to give the impression that the persecution of

Protestants and Catholics by the Nazi State tore the German people asunder or

even greatly aroused the vast majority of them. It did not. A people who had so

lightly given up their political and cultural and economic freedoms were not,

except for a relatively few, going to die or even risk imprisonment to preserve

freedom of worship. What really aroused the Germans in the Thirties were the

glittering successes of Hitler in providing jobs, creating prosperity, restoring

Germany’s military might, and moving from one triumph to another in his

foreign policy. Not many Germans lost much sleep over the arrests of a few

thousand pastors and priests or over the quarreling of the various Protestant

sects. And even fewer paused to reflect that under the leadership of Rosenberg,

Bormann and Himmler, who were backed by Hitler, the Nazi regime intended

eventually to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old

paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi

extremists. As Bormann, one of the men closest to Hitler, said publicly in 1941,

“National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable.”

What the Hitler government envisioned for Germany was clearly set out in a

thirty-point program for the “National Reich Church” drawn up during the war

by Rosenberg, an outspoken pagan, who among his other offices held that of

“the Fuehrer’s Delegate for the Entire Intellectual and Philosophical Education

and Instruction for the National Socialist Party.” A few of its thirty articles

convey the essentials:

1. The National Reich Church of Germany categorically claims the exclusive right and the

exclusive power to control all churches within the borders of the Reich: it declares these to be

national churches of the German Reich.

5. The National Church is determined to exterminate irrevocably … the strange and foreign

Christian faiths imported into Germany in the ill-omened year 800.

7. The National Church has no scribes, pastors, chaplains or priests, but National Reich

orators are to speak in them.

13. The National Church demands immediate cessation of the publishing and dissemination

of the Bible in Germany …

14. The National Church declares that to it, and therefore to the German nation, it has been

decided that the Fuehrer’s Mein Kampf is the greatest of all documents. It … not only contains

the greatest but it embodies the purest and truest ethics for the present and future life of our

nation.

18. The National Church will clear away from its altars all crucifixes, Bibles and pictures

of saints.

19. On the altars there must be nothing but Mein Kampf (to the German nation and

therefore to God the most sacred book) and to the left of the altar a sword.

30. On the day of its foundation, the Christian Cross must be removed from all churches,

cathedrals and chapels … and it must be superseded by the only unconquerable symbol, the

swastika.5

THE NAZIFICATION OF CULTURE

On the evening of May 10, 1933, some four and a half months after Hitler

became Chancellor, there occurred in Berlin a scene which had not been

witnessed in the Western world since the late Middle Ages. At about midnight a

torchlight parade of thousands of students ended at a square on Unter den Linden

opposite the University of Berlin. Torches were put to a huge pile of books that

had been gathered there, and as the flames enveloped them more books were

thrown on the fire until some twenty thousand had been consumed. Similar

scenes took place in several other cities. The book burning had begun.

Many of the books tossed into the flames in Berlin that night by the joyous

students under the approving eye of Dr. Goebbels had been written by authors of

world reputation. They included, among German writers, Thomas and Heinrich

Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Jakob Wassermann, Arnold and Stefan Zweig, Erich

Maria Remarque, Walther Rathenau, Albert Einstein, Alfred Kerr and Hugo

Preuss, the last named being the scholar who had drafted the Weimar

Constitution. But not only the works of dozens of German writers were burned.

A good many foreign authors were also included: Jack London, Upton Sinclair,

Helen Keller, Margaret Sanger, H. G. Wells, Havelock Ellis, Arthur Schnitzler,

Freud, Gide, Zola, Proust. In the words of a student proclamation, any book was

condemned to the flames “which acts subversively on our future or strikes at the

root of German thought, the German home and the driving forces of our people.”

Dr. Goebbels, the new Propaganda Minister, who from now on was to put

German culture into a Nazi strait jacket, addressed the students as the burning

books turned to ashes. “The soul of the German people can again express itself.

These flames not only illuminate the final end of an old era; they also light up

the new.”

The new Nazi era of German culture was illuminated not only by the bonfires

of books and the more effective, if less symbolic, measures of proscribing the

sale or library circulation of hundreds of volumes and the publishing of many

new ones, but by the regimentation of culture on a scale which no modern

Western nation had ever experienced. As early as September 22, 1933, the Reich

Chamber of Culture had been set up by law under the direction of Dr. Goebbels.

Its purpose was defined, in the words of the law, as follows: “In order to pursue

a policy of German culture, it is necessary to gather together the creative artists

in all spheres into a unified organization under the leadership of the Reich. The

Reich must not only determine the lines of progress, mental and spiritual, but

also lead and organize the professions.”

Seven subchambers were established to guide and control every sphere of

cultural life: the Reich chambers of fine arts, music, the theater, literature, the

press, radio and the films. All persons engaged in these fields were obligated to

join their respective chambers, whose decisions and directives had the validity of

law. Among other powers, the chambers could expel—or refuse to accept—

members for “political unreliability,” which meant that those who were even

lukewarm about National Socialism could be, and usually were, excluded from

practicing their profession or art and thus deprived of a livelihood.

No one who lived in Germany in the Thirties, and who cared about such

matters, can ever forget the sickening decline of the cultural standards of a

people who had had such high ones for so long a time. This was inevitable, of

course, the moment the Nazi leaders decided that the arts, literature, the press,

radio and the films must serve exclusively the propaganda purposes of the new

regime and its outlandish philosophy. Not a single living German writer of any

importance, with the exception of Ernst Juenger and Ernst Wiechert in the earlier

years, was published in Germany during the Nazi time. Almost all of them, led

by Thomas Mann, emigrated; the few who remained were silent or were

silenced. Every manuscript of a book or a play had to be submitted to the

Propaganda Ministry before it could be approved for publication or production.

Music fared best, if only because it was the least political of the arts and

because the Germans had such a rich store of it from Bach through Beethoven

and Mozart to Brahms. But the playing of Mendelssohn was banned because he

was a Jew (the works of all Jewish composers were verboten) as was the music

of Germany’s leading modern composer, Paul Hindemith. Jews were quickly

weeded out of the great symphony orchestras and the opera. Unlike the writers,

most of the great figures of the German music world chose to remain in Nazi

Germany and indeed lent their names and their talent to the New Order. Wilhelm

Furtwaengler, one of the finest conductors of the century, remained. He was out

of favor for a year in 1934 because of his defense of Hindemith, but returned to

activity for the remaining years of Hitler’s rule. Richard Strauss, perhaps the

world’s leading living composer, remained and indeed for a time became

president of the Reich Music Chamber, lending his great name to Goebbels’

prostituting of culture. Walter Gieseking, the eminent pianist, spent much of his

time making tours in foreign countries which were organized or approved by the

Propaganda Minister to promote German “culture” abroad. But because the

musicians did not emigrate and because of Germany’s great treasure of classical

music, one could hear during the days of the Third Reich symphony music and

opera performed magnificently. In this the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and

the Berlin State Opera were pre-eminent. The excellent music fare did much to

make people forget the degradation of the other arts and of so much of life under

the Nazis.

The theater, it must be said, retained much of its excellence as long as it stuck

to classical plays. Max Reinhardt, of course, was gone, along with all other

Jewish producers, directors and actors. The Nazi playwrights were so ludicrously

bad that the public stayed away from their offerings, which invariably had short

runs. The president of the Reich Theater Chamber was one Hans Johst, an

unsuccessful playwright who once had publicly boasted that whenever someone

mentioned the word “culture” to him he wanted to reach for his revolver. But

even Johst and Goebbels, who determined what was played on the stage and who

played and directed it, were unable to prevent the German theater from giving

commendable and often moving performances of Goethe, Schiller and

Shakespeare.

Strangely enough, some of Shaw’s plays were permitted to be performed in

Nazi Germany—perhaps because he poked fun at Englishmen and lampooned

democracy and perhaps too because his wit and left-wing political views escaped

the Nazi mind.

Strangest of all was the case of Germany’s great playwright, Gerhart

Hauptmann. Because he had been an ardent Socialist his plays had been banned

from the imperial theaters during Kaiser Wilhelm II’s time. During the Republic

he had been the most popular playwright in Germany, and indeed he retained

that position in the Third Reich. His plays continued to be produced. I shall

never forget the scene at the close of the first night of his last play, The Daughter

of the Cathedral, when Hauptmann, a venerable figure with his flowing white

hair tumbling down over his black cape, strode out of the theater arm in arm with

Dr. Goebbels and Johst. He, like so many other eminent Germans, had made his

peace with Hitler, and Goebbels, a shrewd man, had made much effective

propaganda out of it, tirelessly reminding the German people and the outside

world that Germany’s greatest living playwright, a former Socialist and the

champion of the common man, had not only remained in the Third Reich but had

continued to write and have his plays produced.

How sincere or opportunistic or merely changeable this aging playwright was

may be gathered from what happened after the war. The American authorities,

believing that Hauptmann had served the Nazis too well, banned his plays from

the theaters in their sector in West Berlin. Whereupon the Russians invited him

to Berlin, welcomed him as a hero and staged a gala cycle of his plays in East

Berlin. And on October 6, 1945, Hauptmann sent a message to the Communist-

dominated “Kulturbund for the Democratic Revival of Germany” wishing it well

and expressing the hope that it would succeed in bringing about a “spiritual

rebirth” of the German people.

The Germany which had given the world a Duerer and a Cranach had not been

pre-eminent in the fine arts in modern times, though German expressionism in

painting and the Munich Bauhaus architecture were interesting and original

movements and German artists had participated in all the twentieth-century

evolutions and eruptions represented by impressionism, cubism and Dadaism.

To Hitler, who considered himself a genuine artist despite his early failures as

one in Vienna, all modern art was degenerate and senseless. In Mein Kampf he

had delivered a long tirade on the subject, and one of his first acts after coming

to power was to “cleanse” Germany of its “decadent” art and to attempt to

substitute a new “Germanic” art. Some 6,500 modern paintings—not only the

works of Germans such as Kokoschka and Grosz but those of Cézanne, Van

Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso and many others—were removed from German

museums.

What was to replace them was shown in the summer of 1937 when Hitler

formally opened the “House of German Art” in Munich in a drab, pseudoclassic

building which he had helped design and which he described as “unparalleled

and inimitable” in its architecture. In this first exhibition of Nazi art were

crammed some nine hundred works, selected from fifteen thousand submitted, of

the worst junk this writer has ever seen in any country. Hitler himself made the

final selection and, according to some of the party comrades who were with him

at the time, had become so incensed at some of the paintings accepted by the

Nazi jury presided over by Adolf Ziegler, a mediocre painter who was president

of the Reich Chamber of Art, * that he had not only ordered them thrown out but

had kicked holes with his jack boot through several of them. “I was always

determined,” he said in a long speech inaugurating the exhibition, “if fate ever

gave us power, not to discuss these matters [of artistic judgment] but to make

decisions.” And he had made them.

In his speech—it was delivered on July 18, 1937—he laid down the Nazi line

for “German art”:

Works of art that cannot be understood but need a swollen set of instructions to prove their

right to exist and find their way to neurotics who are receptive to such stupid or insolent

nonsense will no longer openly reach the German nation. Let no one have illusions! National

Socialism has set out to purge the German Reich and our people of all those influences

threatening its existence and character … With the opening of this exhibition has come the end

of artistic lunacy and with it the artistic pollution of our people …

And yet some Germans at least, especially in the art center of Germany which

Munich was, preferred to be artistically polluted. In another part of the city in a

ramshackle gallery that had to be reached through a narrow stairway was an

exhibition of “degenerate art” which Dr. Goebbels had organized to show the

people what Hitler was rescuing them from. It contained a splendid selection of

modern paintings—Kokoschka, Chagall and expressionist and impressionist

works. The day I visited it, after panting through the sprawling House of German

Art, it was crammed, with a long line forming down the creaking stairs and out

into the street. In fact, the crowds besieging it became so great that Dr.

Goebbels, incensed and embarrassed, soon closed it.

THE CONTROL OF PRESS, RADIO, FILMS

Every morning the editors of the Berlin daily newspapers and the

correspondents of those published elsewhere in the Reich gathered at the

Propaganda Ministry to be told by Dr. Goebbels or by one of his aides what

news to print and suppress, how to write the news and headline it, what

campaigns to call off or institute and what editorials were desired for the day. In

case of any misunderstanding a daily written directive was furnished along with

the oral instructions. For the smaller out-of-town papers and the periodicals the

directives were dispatched by telegram or by mail.

To be an editor in the Third Reich one had to be, in the first place, politically

and racially “clean.” The Reich Press Law of October 4, 1933, which made

journalism a “public vocation,” regulated by law, stipulated that all editors must

possess German citizenship, be of Aryan descent and not married to a Jew.

Section 14 of the Press Law ordered editors “to keep out of the newspapers

anything which in any manner is misleading to the public, mixes selfish aims

with community aims, tends to weaken the strength of the German Reich,

outwardly or inwardly, the common will of the German people, the defense of

Germany, its culture and economy … or offends the honor and dignity of

Germany”—an edict which, if it had been in effect before 1933, would have led

to the suppression of every Nazi editor and publication in the country. It now led

to the ousting of those journals and journalists who were not Nazi or who

declined to become so.

One of the first to be forced out of business was the Vossische Zeitung.

Founded in 1704 and numbering among its contributors in the past such names

as Frederick the Great, Lessing and Rathenau, it had become the leading

newspaper of Germany, comparable to the Times of London and the New York

Times. But it was liberal and it was owned by the House of Ullstein, a Jewish

firm. It went out of business on April 1, 1934, after 230 years of continuous

publication. The Berliner Tageblatt, another world-renowned liberal newspaper,

lingered on a little longer, until 1937, though its owner, Hans Lackmann-Mosses

a Jew, was forced to surrender his interest in the newspaper in the spring of

1933. Germany’s third great liberal newspaper, the Frankfurter Zeitung, also

continued to publish after divesting itself of its Jewish proprietor and editors.

Rudolf Kircher, its London correspondent, an Anglophile and a liberal, became

the editor and, like Karl Silex, editor of the conservative Deutsche Allgemeine

Zeitung of Berlin, who had also been a London correspondent, a Rhodes scholar,

a passionate admirer of the British and a liberal, served the Nazis well, often

becoming, as Otto Dietrich, the Reich press chief, once said of the former

“opposition papers,” “more papal than the Pope.” That the last three newspapers

survived was due partly to the influence of the German Foreign Office, which

wanted these internationally known journals as a kind of showpiece to impress

the outside world. They gave a respectability to Nazi Germany and at the same

time peddled its propaganda.

With all newspapers in Germany being told what to publish and how to write

the news and editorials, it was inevitable that a deadly conformity would come

over the nation’s press. Even a people so regimented and so given to accepting

authority became bored by the daily newspapers. Circulation declined even for

the leading Nazi daily newspapers such as the morning Voelkischer Beobachter

and the evening Der Angriff. And the total circulation of all journals fell off

steeply as one paper after another went under or was taken over by Nazi

publishers. In the first four years of the Third Reich the number of daily

newspapers declined from 3,607 to 2,671.

But the country’s loss of a free and varied press was the party’s gain—at least

financially. Max Amann, Hitler’s top sergeant during the First World War and

head of the Eher Verlag, the party’s publishing firm, became the financial

dictator of the German press. As Reich Leader for the Press and president of the

Press Chamber, he had the legal right to suppress any publication he pleased and

the consequent power to buy it up for a song. In a short time the Eher Verlag

became a gigantic publishing empire, probably the largest and most lucrative in

the world.*Despite the drop in sales of many Nazi publications, the daily

newspapers owned or controlled by the party or individual Nazis had two thirds

of the total daily circulation of twenty-five million by the time of the outbreak of

the second war. In an affidavit made at Nuremberg, Amann described how he

operated:

After the party came to power in 1933 … many of these concerns, such as the Ullstein

House, which were owned or controlled by Jewish interests, or by political or religious

interests hostile to the Nazi Party, found it expedient to sell their newspapers or assets to the

Eher concern. There was no free market for the sale of such properties and the Eher Verlag

was generally the only bidder. In this matter the Eher Verlag, together with publishing

concerns owned or controlled by it, expanded into a monopoly of the newspaper publishing

business in Germany … The party investment in these publishing enterprises became

financially very successful. It is a true statement to say that the basic purpose of the Nazi press

program was to eliminate all the press which was in opposition to the party.6

At one period in 1934 both Amann and Goebbels appealed to the obsequious

editors to make their papers less monotonous. Amann said he deplored “the

present far-reaching uniformity of the press, which is not a product of

government measures and does not conform to the will of the government.” One

rash editor, Ehm Welke of the weekly Gruene Post, made the mistake of taking

Amann and Goebbels seriously. He chided the Propaganda Ministry for its red

tape and for the heavy hand with which it held down the press and made it so

dull. His publication was promptly suspended for three months and he himself

dismissed by Goebbels and carted off to a concentration camp.

The radio and the motion pictures were also quickly harnessed to serve the

propaganda of the Nazi State. Goebbels had always seen in radio (television had

not yet come in) the chief instrument of propaganda in modern society and

through the Radio Department of his ministry and the Chamber of Radio he

gained complete control of broadcasting and shaped it to his own ends. His task

was made easier because in Germany, as in the other countries of Europe,

broadcasting was a monopoly owned and operated by the State. In 1933 the Nazi

government automatically found itself in possession of the Reich Broadcasting

Corporation.

The films remained in the hands of private firms but the Propaganda Ministry

and the Chamber of Films controlled every aspect of the industry, their task

being—in the words of an official commentary—“to lift the film industry out of

the sphere of liberal economic thoughts … and thus enable it to receive those

tasks which it has to fulfill in the National Socialist State.”

The result in both cases was to afflict the German people with radio programs

and motion pictures as inane and boring as were the contents of their daily

newspapers and periodicals. Even a public which usually submitted without

protest to being told what was good for it revolted. The customers stayed away

in droves from the Nazi films and jammed the houses which showed the few

foreign pictures (mostly B-grade Hollywood) which Goebbels permitted to be

exhibited on German screens. At one period in the mid-Thirties the hissing of

German films became so common that Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the

Interior, issued a stern warning against “treasonable behavior on the part of

cinema audiences.” Likewise the radio programs were so roundly criticized that

the president of the Radio Chamber, one Horst Dressler-Andress, declared that

such carping was “an insult to German culture” and would not be tolerated. In

those days, in the Thirties, a German listener could still turn his dial to a score of

foreign radio stations without, as happened later when the war began, risking

having his head chopped off. And perhaps quite a few did, though it was this

observer’s impression that as the years went by, Dr. Goebbels proved himself

right, in that the radio became by far the regime’s most effective means of

propaganda, doing more than any other single instrument of communication to

shape the German people to Hitler’s ends.

I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored

press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Germans I had daily

access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris and Zurich,

which arrived the day after publication, and though I listened regularly to the

BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many

hours a day in combing the German press, checking the German radio,

conferring with Nazi officials and going to party meetings. It was surprising and

sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to

learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi

sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a

certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived

for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape

the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda.

Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a

stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most

outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was

obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the

radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but

on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of

silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it

was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for

whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical

disregard for truth, said they were.

EDUCATION IN THE THIRD REICH

On April 30, 1934, Bernhard Rust, an Obergruppenfuehrer in the S.A.,

onetime Gauleiter of Hanover, a Nazi Party member and friend of Hitler since

the early Twenties, was named Reich Minister of Science, Education and

Popular Culture. In the bizarre, topsy-turvy world of National Socialism, Rust

was eminently fitted for his task. Since 1930 he had been an unemployed

provincial schoolmaster, having been dismissed in that year by the local

republican authorities at Hanover for certain manifestations of instability of

mind, though his fanatical Nazism may have been partly responsible for his

ouster. For Dr. Rust preached the Nazi gospel with the zeal of a Goebbels and

the fuzziness of a Rosenberg. Named Prussian Minister of Science, Art and

Education in February 1933, he boasted that he had succeeded overnight in

“liquidating the school as an institution of intellectual acrobatics.”

To such a mindless man was now entrusted dictatorial control over German

science, the public schools, the institutions of higher learning and the youth

organizations. For education in the Third Reich, as Hitler envisaged it, was not

to be confined to stuffy classrooms but to be furthered by a Spartan, political and

martial training in the successive youth groups and to reach its climax not so

much in the universities and engineering colleges, which absorbed but a small

minority, but first, at the age of eighteen, in compulsory labor service and then in

service, as conscripts, in the armed forces.

Hitler’s contempt for “professors” and the intellectual academic life had

peppered the pages of Mein Kampf, in which he had set down some of his ideas

on education. “The whole education by a national state,” he had written, “must

aim primarily not at the stuffing with mere knowledge but at building bodies

which are physically healthy to the core.” But, even more important, he had

stressed in his book the importance of winning over and then training the youth

in the service “of a new national state”—a subject he returned to often after he

became the German dictator. “When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over

to your side,’” he said in a speech on November 6, 1933, “I calmly say, ‘Your

child belongs to us already … What are you? You will pass on. Your

descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will

know nothing else but this new community.’” And on May 1, 1937, he declared,

“This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give

to youth its own education and its own upbringing.” It was not an idle boast; that

was precisely what was happening.

The German schools, from first grade through the universities, were quickly

Nazified. Textbooks were hastily rewritten, curricula were changed, Mein Kampf

was made—in the words of Der Deutsche Erzieher, official organ of the

educators—“our infallible pedagogical guiding star” and teachers who failed to

see the new light were cast out. Most instructors had been more or less Nazi in

sentiment when not outright party members. To strengthen their ideology they

were dispatched to special schools for intensive training in National Socialist

principles, emphasis being put on Hitler’s racial doctrines.

Every person in the teaching profession, from kindergarten through the

universities, was compelled to join the National Socialist Teachers’ League

which, by law, was held “responsible for the execution of the ideological and

political co-ordination of all teachers in accordance with the National Socialist

doctrine.” The Civil Service Act of 1937 required teachers to be “the executors

of the will of the party-supported State” and to be ready “at any time to defend

without reservation the National Socialist State.” An earlier decree had classified

them as civil servants and thus subject to the racial laws. Jews, of course, were

forbidden to teach. All teachers took an oath to “be loyal and obedient to Adolf

Hitler.” Later, no man could teach who had not first served in the S.A., the Labor

Service or the Hitler Youth. Candidates for instructorships in the universities had

to attend for six weeks an observation camp where their views and character

were studied by Nazi experts and reported to the Ministry of Education, which

issued licenses to teach based on the candidates’ political “reliability.”

Prior to 1933, the German public schools had been under the jurisdiction of

the local authorities and the universities under that of the individual states. Now

all were brought under the iron rule of the Reich Minister of Education. It was he

who also appointed the rectors and the deans of the universities, who formerly

had been elected by the full professors of the faculty. He also appointed the

leaders of the university students’ union, to which all students had to belong, and

of the lecturers union, comprising all instructors. The N.S. Association of

University Lecturers, under the tight leadership of old Nazi hands, was given a

decisive role in selecting who was to teach and to see that what they taught was

in accordance with Nazi theories.

The result of so much Nazification was catastrophic for German education

and for German learning. History was so falsified in the new textbooks and by

the teachers in their lectures that it became ludicrous. The teaching of the “racial

sciences,” exalting the Germans as the master race and the Jews as breeders of

almost all the evil there was in the world, was even more so. In the University of

Berlin alone, where so many great scholars had taught in the past, the new

rector, a storm trooper and by profession a veterinarian, instituted twenty-five

new courses in Rassenkunde—racial science—and by the time he had really

taken the university apart he had eighty-six courses connected with his own

profession.

The teaching of the natural sciences, in which Germany had been so pre-

eminent for generations, deteriorated rapidly. Great teachers such as Einstein and

Franck in physics, Haber, Willstaetter and Warburg in chemistry, were fired or

retired. Those who remained, many of them, were bitten by the Nazi aberrations

and attempted to apply them to pure science. They began to teach what they

called German physics, German chemistry, German mathematics. Indeed, in

1937 there appeared a journal called Deutsche Mathematik, and its first editorial

solemnly proclaimed that any idea that mathematics could be judged nonracially

carried “within itself the germs of destruction of German science.”

The hallucinations of these Nazi scientists became unbelievable, even to a

layman. “German Physics?” asked Professor Philipp Lenard of Heidelberg

University, who was one of the more learned and internationally respected

scientists of the Third Reich. “‘But,’ it will be replied, ‘science is and remains

international.’ It is false. In reality, science, like every other human product, is

racial and conditioned by blood.” Professor Rudolphe Tomaschek, director of

the Institute of Physics at Dresden, went further. “Modern Physics,” he wrote,

“is an instrument of [world] Jewry for the destruction of Nordic science … True

physics is the creation of the German spirit … In fact, all European science is the

fruit of Aryan, or, better, German thought.” Professor Johannes Stark, head of

the German National Institute of Physical Science, thought so too. It would be

found, he said, that the “founders of research in physics, and the great

discoverers from Galileo to Newton to the physical pioneers of our time, were

almost exclusively Aryan, predominantly of the Nordic race.”

There was also Professor Wilhelm Mueller, of the Technical College of

Aachen, who in a book entitled Jewry and Science saw a world-wide Jewish plot

to pollute science and thereby destroy civilization. To him Einstein, with his

theory of relativity, was the archvillain. The Einstein theory, on which so much

of modern physics is based, was to this singular Nazi professor “directed from

beginning to end toward the goal of transforming the living—that is, the non-

Jewish—world of living essence, born from a mother earth and bound up with

blood, and bewitching it into spectral abstraction in which all individual

differences of peoples and nations, and all inner limits of the races, are lost in

unreality, and in which only an unsubstantial diversity of geometric dimensions

survives which produces all events out of the compulsion of its godless

subjection to laws.” The world-wide acclaim given to Einstein on the publication

of his theory of relativity, Professor Mueller proclaimed, was really only a

rejoicing over “the approach of Jewish world rule which was to force down

German manhood irrevocably and eternally to the level of the lifeless slave.”

To Professor Ludwig Bieberback, of the University of Berlin, Einstein was

“an alien mountebank.” Even to Professor Lenard, “the Jew conspicuously lacks

understanding for the truth … being in this respect in contrast to the Aryan

research scientist with his careful and serious will to truth … Jewish physics is

thus a phantom and a phenomenon of degeneration of fundamental German

Physics.” 7

And yet from 1905 to 1931 ten German Jews had been awarded Nobel Prizes

for their contributions to science.

During the Second Reich, the university professors, like the Protestant clergy,

had given blind support to the conservative government and its expansionist

aims, and the lecture halls had been breeding grounds of virulent nationalism

and anti-Semitism. The Weimar Republic had insisted on complete academic

freedom, and one result had been that the vast majority of university teachers,

antiliberal, antidemocratic, anti-Semitic as they were, had helped to undermine

the democratic regime. Most professors were fanatical nationalists who wished

the return of a conservative, monarchical Germany. And though to many of

them, before 1933, the Nazis were too rowdy and violent to attract their

allegiance, their preachments helped prepare the ground for the coming of

Nazism. By 1932 the majority of students appeared to be enthusiastic for Hitler.

It was surprising to some how many members of the university faculties

knuckled under to the Nazification of higher learning after 1933. Though official

figures put the number of professors and instructors dismissed during the first

five years of the regime at 2,800—about one fourth of the total number—the

proportion of those who lost their posts through defying National Socialism was,

as Professor Wilhelm Roepke, himself dismissed from the University of

Marburg in 1933, said, “exceedingly small.” Though small, there were names

famous in the German academic world: Karl Jaspers, E. I. Gumbel, Theodor Litt,

Karl Barth, Julius Ebbinghaus and dozens of others. Most of them emigrated,

first to Switzerland, Holland and England and eventually to America. One of

them, Professor Theodor Lessing, who had fled to Czechoslovakia, was tracked

down by Nazi thugs and murdered in Marienbad on August 31, 1933.

A large majority of professors, however, remained at their posts, and as early

as the autumn of 1933 some 960 of them, led by such luminaries as Professor

Sauerbruch, the surgeon, Heidegger, the existentialist philosopher, and Pinder,

the art historian, took a public vow to support Hitler and the National Socialist

regime.

“It was a scene of prostitution,” Professor Roepke later wrote, “that has

stained the honorable history of German learning.” 8 And as Professor Julius

Ebbinghaus, looking back over the shambles in 1945, said, “The German

universities failed, while there was still time, to oppose publicly with all their

power the destruction of knowledge and of the democratic state. They failed to

keep the beacon of freedom and right burning during the night of tyranny. ”9

The cost of such failure was great. After six years of Nazification the number

of university students dropped by more than one half—from 127,920 to 58,325.

The decline in enrollment at the institutes of technology, from which Germany

got its scientists and engineers, was even greater—from 20,474 to 9,554.

Academic standards fell dizzily. By 1937 there was not only a shortage of young

men in the sciences and engineering but a decline in their qualifications. Long

before the outbreak of the war the chemical industry, busily helping to further

Nazi rearmament, was complaining through its organ, Die Chemische Industrie,

that Germany was losing its leadership in chemistry. Not only the national

economy but national defense itself was being jeopardized, it complained, and it

blamed the shortage of young scientists and their mediocre caliber on the poor

quality of the technical colleges.

Nazi Germany’s loss, as it turned out, was the free world’s gain, especially in

the race to be the first with the atom bomb. The story of the successful efforts of

Nazi leaders, led by Himmler, to hamstring the atomic-energy program is too

long and involved to be recounted here. It was one of the ironies of fate that the

development of the bomb in the United States owed so much to two men who

had been exiled because of race from the Nazi and Fascist dictatorships: Einstein

from Germany and Fermi from Italy.

To Adolf Hitler it was not so much the public schools, from which he himself

had dropped out so early in life, but the organizations of the Hitler Youth on

which he counted to educate the youth of Germany for the ends he had in mind.

In the years of the Nazi Party’s struggle for power the Hitler Youth movement

had not amounted to much. In 1932, the last year of the Republic, its total

enrollment was only 107,956, compared to some ten million youths who

belonged to the various organizations united in the Reich Committee of German

Youth Associations. In no country in the world had there been a youth

movement of such vitality and numbers as in republican Germany. Hitler,

realizing this, was determined to take it over and Nazify it.

His chief lieutenant for this task was a handsome young man of banal mind

but of great driving force, Baldur von Schirach, who, falling under Hitler’s spell,

had joined the party in 1925 at the age of eighteen and in 1931 had been named

Youth Leader of the Nazi Party. Among the scar-faced, brawling Brownshirts,

he had the curious look of an American college student, fresh and immature, and

this perhaps was due to his having had, as we have seen, American forebears

(including two signers of the Declaration of Independence). 10

Schirach was named “Youth Leader of the German Reich” in June 1933.

Aping the tactics of his elder party leaders, his first action was to send an armed

band of fifty husky Hitler Youth men to occupy the national offices of the Reich

Committee of German Youth Associations, where an old Prussian Army officer,

General Vogt, head of the committee, was put to rout. Schirach next took on one

of the most celebrated of German naval heroes, Admiral von Trotha, who had

been Chief of Staff of the High Seas Fleet in the First World War and who was

now president of the Youth Associations. The venerable admiral too was put to

flight and his position and organization were dissolved. Millions of dollars’

worth of property, chiefly in hundreds of youth hostels scattered throughout

Germany, was seized.

The concordat of July 20, 1933, had specifically provided for the unhindered

continuance of the Catholic Youth Association. On December 1, 1936, Hitler

decreed a law outlawing it and all other non-Nazi organizations for young

people.

… All of the German youth in the Reich is organized within the Hitler Youth.

The German youth, besides being reared within the family and schools, shall be educated

physically, intellectually and morally in the spirit of National Socialism … through the Hitler

Youth. 11

Schirach, whose office had formerly been subordinate to the Ministry of

Education, was made responsible directly to Hitler.

This half-baked young man of twenty-nine, who wrote maudlin verse in praise

of Hitler (“this genius grazing the stars”) and followed Rosenberg in his weird

paganism and Streicher in his virulent anti-Semitism, had become the dictator of

youth in the Third Reich.

From the age of six to eighteen, when conscription for the Labor Service and

the Army began, girls as well as boys were organized in the various cadres of the

Hitler Youth. Parents found guilty of trying to keep their children from joining

the organization were subject to heavy prison sentences even though, as in some

cases, they merely objected to having their daughters enter some of the services

where cases of pregnancy had reached scandalous proportions.

From the age of six to ten, a boy served a sort of apprenticeship for the Hitler

Youth as a Pimpf. Each youngster was given a performance book in which

would be recorded his progress through the entire Nazi youth movement,

including his ideological growth. At ten, after passing suitable tests in athletics,

camping and Nazified history, he graduated into the Jungvolk (“Young Folk”),

where he took the following oath:

In the presence of this blood banner, which represents our Fuehrer, I swear to devote all my

energies and my strength to the savior of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am willing and ready to

give up my life for him, so help me God.

At fourteen the boy entered the Hitler Youth proper and remained there until

he was eighteen, when he passed into the Labor Service and the Army. It was a

vast organization organized on paramilitary lines similar to the S.A. and in

which the youngsters approaching manhood received systematic training not

only in camping, sports and Nazi ideology but in soldiering. On many a weekend

in the environs of Berlin this writer would be interrupted in his picnicking by

Hitler Youths scrambling through the woods or over the heath, rifles at the ready

and heavy army packs on their backs.

Sometimes the young ladies would be playing at soldiering, too, for the Hitler

Youth movement did not neglect the maidens. From ten to fourteen, German

girls were enrolled as Jungmaedel—literally, “young maidens”—and they too

had a uniform, made up of a white blouse, full blue skirt, socks and heavy—and

most unfeminine—marching shoes. Their training was much like that of the boys

of the same age and included long marches on weekends with heavy packs and

the usual indoctrination in the Nazi philosophy. But emphasis was put on the

role of women in the Third Reich—to be, above all, healthy mothers of healthy

children. This was stressed even more when the girls became, at fourteen,

members of the B.D.M.—Bund Deutscher Maedel (League of German

Maidens).

At eighteen, several thousand of the girls in the B.D.M. (they remained in it

until 21) did a year’s service on the farms—their so-called Land Jahr, which was

equivalent to the Labor Service of the young men. Their task was to help both in

the house and in the fields. The girls lived sometimes in the farmhouses and

often in small camps in rural districts from which they were taken by truck early

each morning to the farms. Moral problems soon arose. The presence of a pretty

young city girl sometimes disrupted a peasant’s household, and angry

complaints from parents about their daughters’ having been made pregnant on

the farms began to be heard. But that wasn’t the only problem. Usually a girls’

camp was located near a Labor Service camp for young men. This juxtaposition

seems to have made for many pregnancies too. One couplet—a take-off on the

“Strength through Joy” movement of the Labor Front, but it applied especially to

the Land Jahr of the young maidens—went the rounds of Germany:

In the fields and on the heath

I lose Strength through Joy.

Similar moral problems also arose during the Household Year for Girls, in

which some half a million Hitler Youth maidens spent a year at domestic service

in a city household. Actually, the more sincere Nazis did not consider them

moral problems at all. On more than one occasion I listened to women leaders of

the B.D.M.—they were invariably of the plainer type and usually unmarried—

lecture their young charges on the moral and patriotic duty of bearing children

for Hitler’s Reich—within wedlock if possible, but without it if necessary.

By the end of 1938 the Hitler Youth numbered 7,728,259. Large as this

number was, obviously some four million youth had managed to stay out of the

organization, and in March 1939 the government issued a law conscripting all

youth into the Hitler Youth on the same basis as they were drafted into the

Army. Recalcitrant parents were warned that their children would be taken away

from them and put into orphanages or other homes unless they enrolled.

The final twist to education in the Third Reich came in the establishment of

three types of schools for the training of the elite: the Adolf Hitler Schools,

under the direction of the Hitler Youth, the National Political Institutes of

Education and the Order Castles—the last two under the aegis of the party. The

Adolf Hitler Schools took the most promising youngsters from the Jungvolk at

the age of twelve and gave them six years of intensive training for leadership in

the party and in the public services. The pupils lived at the school under Spartan

discipline and on graduation were eligible for the university. There were ten

such schools founded after 1937, the principal one being the Akademie at

Brunswick.

The purpose of the Political Institutes of Education was to restore the type of

education formerly given in the old Prussian military academies. This, according

to one official commentary, cultivated “the soldierly spirit, with its attributes of

courage, sense of duty and simplicity.” To this was added special training in

Nazi principles. The schools were under the supervision of the S.S., which

furnished the headmasters and most of the teachers. Three such schools were

established in 1933 and grew to thirty-one before the outbreak of the war, three

of them for women.

At the very top of the pyramid were the so-called Order Castles, the

Ordensburgen. In these, with their atmosphere of the castles of the Order of

Teutonic Knights of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were trained the elite

of the Nazi elite. The knightly order had been based on the principle of absolute

obedience to the Master, the Ordensmeister, and devoted to the German

conquest of the Slavic lands in the East and the enslavement of the natives. The

Nazi Order Castles had similar discipline and purposes. Only the most fanatical

young National Socialists were chosen, usually from the top ranks of the

graduates of the Adolf Hitler Schools and the Political Institutes. There were

four Castles, and a student attended successively all of them. The first of six

years was spent in one which specialized in the “racial sciences” and other

aspects of Nazi ideology. The emphasis was on mental training and discipline,

with physical training subordinated to it. This was reversed the second year at a

Castle where athletics and sports, including mountain climbing and parachute

jumping, came first. The third Castle, where the students spent the next year and

a half, offered political and military instruction. Finally, in the fourth and last

stage of his education, the student was sent for a year and a half to the

Ordensburg in Marienburg in East Prussia, near the Polish frontier. There, within

the walls of the very Order Castle which had been a stronghold of the Teutonic

Knights five centuries before, his political and military training was concentrated

on the Eastern question and Germany’s need (and right!) of expanding into the

Slavic lands in its eternal search for Lebensraum—an excellent preparation, as it

turned out and no doubt was meant to turn out, for the events of 1939 and

thereafter.

In such a manner were the youth trained for life and work and death in the

Third Reich. Though their minds were deliberately poisoned, their regular

schooling interrupted, their homes largely replaced so far as their rearing went,

the boys and the girls, the young men and women, seemed immensely happy,

filled with a zest for the life of a Hitler Youth. And there was no doubt that the

practice of bringing the children of all classes and walks of life together, where

those who had come from poverty or riches, from a laborer’s home or a

peasant’s or a businessman’s, or an aristocrat’s, shared common tasks, was good

and healthy in itself. In most cases it did no harm to a city boy and girl to spend

six months in the compulsory Labor Service, where they lived outdoors and

learned the value of manual labor and of getting along with those of different

backgrounds. No one who traveled up and down Germany in those days and

talked with the young in their camps and watched them work and play and sing

could fail to see that, however sinister the teaching, here was an incredibly

dynamic youth movement.

The young in the Third Reich were growing up to have strong and healthy

bodies, faith in the future of their country and in themselves and a sense of

fellowship and camaraderie that shattered all class and economic and social

barriers. I thought of that later, in the May days of 1940, when along the road

between Aachen and Brussels one saw the contrast between the German soldiers,

bronzed and clean-cut from a youth spent in the sunshine on an adequate diet,

and the first British war prisoners, with their hollow chests, round shoulders,

pasty complexions and bad teeth—tragic examples of the youth that England had

neglected so irresponsibly in the years between the wars.

THE FARMER IN THE THIRD REICH

When Hitler came to power in 1933 the farmer, as in most countries, was in

desperate straits. According to a writer in the Frankfurter Zeitung, his situation

was worse than at any time since the disastrous Peasants’ War of 1524–25

devastated the German land. Agricultural income in 1932–33 had fallen to a new

low, more than a billion marks below the worst postwar year, 1924–25. The

farmers were in debt to the amount of twelve billions, almost all of it incurred in

the last eight years. Interest on these debts took some 14 per cent of all farm

income, and to this was added a comparable burden in taxes and contributions to

social services.

“My party comrades, make yourselves clear about one thing: There is only

one last, one final last chance for the German peasantry,” Hitler warned at the

outset of his chancellorship, and in October 1933 he declared that “the ruin of

the German peasant will be the ruin of the German people.”

For years the Nazi Party had cultivated the backing of the farmers. Point 17 of

the “inalterable” party program promised them “land reform … a law for

confiscation without compensation of land for common purposes; abolition of

interest on farm loans, and prevention of all speculation in land.” Like most of

the other points of the program, the promises to the farmers were not kept—with

the exception of the last provision against land speculation. In 1938, after five

years of Nazi rule, land distribution remained more lopsided than in any other

country in the West. Figures published that year in the official Statistical Year

Book showed that the smallest two and a half million farms had less land than

the top. 1 per cent. The Nazi dictatorship, like the Socialist-bourgeois

governments of the Republic, did not dare to break up the immense feudal

estates of the Junkers, which lay to the east of the Elbe.

Nevertheless, the Nazi regime did inaugurate a sweeping new farm program

accompanied by much sentimental propaganda about “Blut und Boden” (Blood

and Soil) and the peasant’s being the salt of the earth and the chief hope of the

Third Reich. To carry it out Hitler appointed Walther Darré, one of the few party

leaders who, though he subscribed to most of the Nazi myths, knew his field

professionally and well. An outstanding agricultural specialist with suitable

academic training, he had served in the Agriculture Ministries of Prussia and the

Reich. Forced to leave them because of conflicts with his superiors, he retired to

his home in the Rhineland in 1929 and wrote a book entitled The Peasantry as

the Life Source of the Nordic Race. Such a title was bound to attract the attention

of the Nazis. Rudolf Hess brought Darré to Hitler, who was so impressed with

him that he commissioned him to draw up a suitable farm program for the party.

With Hugenberg’s dismissal in June 1933, Darré became Minister of Food

and Agriculture. By September he was ready with his plans to make over

German agriculture. Two basic laws promulgated in that month reorganized the

entire structure of production and marketing, with a view to ensuring higher

prices for farmers, and at the same time put the German peasant on a new

footing—accomplishing this, paradoxically, by putting him back on a very old

footing in which farms were entailed, as in feudal days, and the farmer and

successive inheritors compulsorily attached to their particular plot of soil

(provided they were Aryan Germans) to the end of time.

The Hereditary Farm Law of September 29, 1933, was a remarkable mixture

of pushing back the peasants to medieval days and of protecting them against the

abuses of the modern monetary age. All farms up to 308 acres (125 hectares)

which were capable of providing a decent living for a family were declared to be

hereditary estates subject to the ancient laws of entailment. They could not be

sold, divided, mortgaged or foreclosed for debts. Upon the death of the owner

they had to be passed on to the oldest or youngest son, in accordance with local

customs, or to the nearest male relative, who was obliged to provide a living and

an education for his brothers and sisters until they were of age. Only an Aryan

German citizen who could prove the purity of his blood back to 1800 could own

such a farm. And only such a man, the law stipulated, could bear the “honored

title” Bauer, or Peasant, which he forfeited if he broke the “peasant honor code”

or ceased, because of incapacity or otherwise, to actively farm. Thus the heavily

indebted German farmer, at the beginning of the Third Reich, was protected

from losing his property by foreclosures or from seeing it shrink in size (there

being no necessity to sell a piece of it to repay a debt), but at the same time he

was bound to the soil as irrevocably as the serfs of feudal times.

And every aspect of his life and work was strictly regulated by the Reich Food

Estate, which Darré established by a law of September 13, 1933, a vast

organization with authority over every conceivable branch of agricultural

production, marketing and processing, and which he himself headed in his

capacity of Reich Peasant Leader. Its chief objectives were two: to obtain stable

and profitable prices for the farmer and to make Germany self-sufficient in food.

How well did it succeed? In the beginning, certainly, the farmer, who for so

long had felt himself neglected in a State which seemed to be preoccupied with

the interests of business and labor, was flattered to be singled out for so much

attention and proclaimed a national hero and an honored citizen. He was more

pleased at the rise in prices which Darré obtained for him by simply arbitrarily

fixing them at a profitable level. In the first two years of Nazi rule wholesale

agricultural prices increased by 20 per cent (in vegetables, dairy products and

cattle the rise was a little more) but this advantage was partially offset by a

similar rise in the things which the farmer had to buy—above all in machinery

and fertilizer.

As for self-sufficiency in food, which was deemed necessary by the Nazi

leaders, who already, as we shall see, were plotting war, the goal was never

achieved, nor—given the quality and quantity of German soil in relation to its

population—could it ever be. The best the country could do, despite all Nazi

efforts in the much-advertised “Battle of Production,” was to reach 83 per cent

of self-sufficiency and it. was only by the conquest of foreign lands that the

Germans obtained enough food to enable them to hold out during the second war

as long as they did.

THE ECONOMY OF THE THIRD REICH

The foundation of Hitler’s success in the first years rested not only on his

triumphs in foreign affairs, which brought so many bloodless conquests, but on

Germany’s economic recovery, which in party circles and even among some

economists abroad was hailed as a miracle. And indeed it might have seemed so

to a good many people. Unemployment, the curse of the Twenties and early

Thirties, was reduced, as we have seen, from six million in 1932 to less than a

million four years later. National production rose 102 per cent from 1932 to

1937 and the national income was doubled. To an observer, Germany in the mid-

Thirties seemed like one vast beehive. The wheels of industry were humming

and everyone was as busy as a bee.

For the first year Nazi economic policies, which were largely determined by

Dr. Schacht—for Hitler was bored with economics, of which he had an almost

total ignorance—were devoted largely to putting the unemployed back to work

by means of greatly expanded public works and the stimulation of private

enterprise. Government credit was furnished by the creation of special

unemployment bills, and tax relief was generously given to firms which raised

their capital expenditures and increased employment.

But the real basis of Germany’s recovery was rearmament, to which the Nazi

regime directed the energies of business and labor—as well as of the generals—

from 1934 on. The whole German economy came to be known in Nazi parlance

as Wehrwirtschaft, or war economy, and it was deliberately designed to function

not only in time of war but during the peace that led to war. General Ludendorff,

in his book Total War (Der Totale Krieg) whose title was mistranslated into

English as The Nation at War, published in Germany in 1935, had stressed the

necessity of mobilizing the economy of the nation on the same totalitarian basis

as everything else in order to properly prepare for total war. It was not exactly a

new idea among the Germans, for in Prussia during the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries some five sevenths of the government’s revenue, as we have

seen, was spent on the Army and that nation’s whole economy was always

regarded as primarily an instrument not of the people’s welfare but of military

policy.

It was left to the Nazi regime to adapt Wehrwirtschaft to the third decade of

the twentieth century. The results were truthfully summed up by Major General

Georg Thomas, chief of the Military Economic Staff: “History will know only a

few examples of cases where a country has directed, even in peacetime, all its

economic forces deliberately and systematically toward the requirements of war,

as Germany was compelled to do in the period between the two World Wars. ”12

Germany, of course, was not “compelled” to prepare on such a scale for war

—that was a deliberate decision taken by Hitler. In the secret Defense Law of

May 21, 1935, he appointed Schacht Plenipotentiary-General for War Economy,

ordering him to “begin his work already in peacetime” and giving him the

authority to “direct the economic preparations for war.” The inimitable Dr.

Schacht had not waited until the spring of 1935 to start building up the German

economy for war. On September 30, 1934, less than two months after he had

become Minister of Economics, he submitted a report to the Fuehrer entitled

“Report on the State of Work for War-Economic Mobilization as of September

30, 1934,” in which he proudly stressed that his ministry “has been charged with

the economic preparation for war.” On May 3, 1935, four weeks before he was

made Plenipotentiary for War Economy, Schacht submitted a personal

memorandum to Hitler which began with the statement that “the

accomplishment of the armament program with speed and in quantity is the

[italics his] problem of German politics; everything else therefore should be

subordinate to this purpose …” Schacht explained to Hitler that since “armament

had to be camouflaged completely until March 16, 1935 [when Hitler announced

conscription for an army of thirty-six divisions], it was necessary to use the

printing press” to finance the first stages. He also pointed out with some glee

that the funds confiscated from the enemies of the State (mostly Jews) and others

taken from blocked foreign accounts had helped pay for Hitler’s guns. “Thus,”

he cracked, “our armaments are partially financed with the credits of our

political enemies.” 13

Though at his trial at Nuremberg he protested in all innocence against the

accusations that he had participated in the Nazi conspiracy to make aggressive

war—he had done just the contrary, he proclaimed—the fact remains that no

single person was as responsible as Schacht for Germany’s economic preparation

for the war which Hitler provoked in 1939. This was freely acknowledged by the

Army. On the occasion of Schacht’s sixtieth birthday the Army publication

Militaer-Wochenblatt in its issue of January 22, 1937, hailed him as “the man

who made the reconstruction of the Wehrmacht economically possible.” And it

added: “The Defense Force owes it to Schacht’s skill and great ability that, in

defiance of all currency difficulties, it has been able to grow up to its present

strength from an army of 100,000 men.”

All of Schacht’s admitted wizardry in finance was put to work to pay for

getting the Third Reich ready for war. Printing banknotes was merely one of his

devices. He manipulated the currency with such legerdemain that at one time it

was estimated by foreign economists to have 237 different values. He negotiated

amazingly profitable (for Germany) barter deals with dozens of countries and to

the astonishment of orthodox economists successfully demonstrated that the

more you owed a country the more business you did with it. His creation of

credit in a country that had little liquid capital and almost no financial reserves

was the work of genius, or—as some said—of a master manipulator. His

invention of the so-called “Mefo” bills was a good example. These were simply

bills created by the Reichsbank and guaranteed by the State and used to pay

armament manufacturers. The bills were accepted by all German banks and

ultimately discounted by the Reichsbank. Since they appeared neither in the

published statements of the national bank nor in the government’s budget they

helped maintain secrecy as to the extent of Germany’s rearmament. From 1935

to 1938 they were used exclusively to finance rearmament and amounted to a

total of twelve billion marks. In explaining them once to Hitler, Count Schwerin

von Krosigk, the harassed Minister of Finance, remarked that they were merely a

way of “printing money.” 14

In September 1936, with the inauguration of the Four-Year Plan under the

iron control of Goering, who replaced Schacht as economic dictator though he

was almost as ignorant of business as was Hitler, Germany went over to a total

war economy. The purpose of the plan was to make Germany self-sufficient in

four years, so that a wartime blockade would not stifle it. Imports were reduced

to a bare minimum, severe price and wage controls were introduced, dividends

restricted to 6 per cent, great factories set up to make synthetic rubber, textiles,

fuel and other products from Germany’s own sources of raw materials, and a

giant Hermann Goering Works established to make steel out of the local low-

grade ore. In short, the German economy was mobilized for war, and

businessmen, though their profits soared, became mere cogs in a war machine,

their work circumscribed by so many restrictions, by so many forms to fill out,

that Dr. Funk, who succeeded Schacht in 1937 as Minister of Economics and in

1939 as president of the Reichsbank, was forced to admit ruefully that “official

communications now make up more than one half of a German manufacturer’s

entire correspondence” and that “Germany’s export trade involves 40,000

separate transactions daily; yet for a single transaction as many as forty different

forms must be filled out.”

Buried under mountains of red tape, directed by the State as to what they

could produce, how much and at what price, burdened by increasing taxation and

milked by steep and never ending “special contributions” to the party, the

businessmen, who had welcomed Hitler’s regime so enthusiastically because

they expected it to destroy organized labor and allow an entrepreneur to practice

untrammeled free enterprise, became greatly disillusioned. One of them was

Fritz Thyssen, one of the earliest and biggest contributors to the party. Fleeing

Germany at the outbreak of the war, he recognized that the “Nazi regime has

ruined German industry.” And to all he met abroad he proclaimed, “What a fool

[ Dummkopf] I was! ”15

In the beginning, however, the businessmen fooled themselves into believing

that Nazi rule was the answer to all their prayers. To be sure, the “inalterable”

party program had sounded ominous to them with its promises of nationalization

of trusts, profit sharing in the wholesale trade, “communalization of department

stores and their lease at a cheap rate to small traders” (as Point 16 read), land

reform and the abolition of interest on mortgages. But the men of industry and

finance soon learned that Hitler had not the slightest intention of honoring a

single economic plank in the party program—the radical promises had been

thrown in merely to attract votes. For the first few months in 1933, a few party

radicals tried to get control of the business associations, take over the department

stores and institute a corporate state on lines which Mussolini was attempting to

establish. But they were quickly thrown out by Hitler and replaced by

conservative businessmen. Gottfried Feder, Hitler’s early mentor in economics,

the crank who wanted to abolish “interest slavery,” was given a post as

undersecretary in the Ministry of Economics, but his superior, Dr. Karl Schmitt,

the insurance magnate, who had spent his life lending money and collecting

interest, gave him nothing to do, and when Schacht took over the ministry he

dispensed with Feder’s services.

The little businessmen, who had been one of the party’s chief supports and

who expected great things from Chancellor Hitler, soon found themselves, many

of them, being exterminated and forced back into the ranks of wage earners.

Laws decreed in October 1937 simply dissolved all corporations with a capital

under $40,000 and forbade the establishment of new ones with a capital less than

$200,000. This quickly disposed of one fifth of all small business firms. On the

other hand the great cartels, which even the Republic had favored, were further

strengthened by the Nazis. In fact, under a law of July 15, 1933, they were made

compulsory. The Ministry of Economics was empowered to organize new

compulsory cartels or order firms to join existing ones.

The system of myriad business and trade associations organized during the

Republic was maintained by the Nazis, though under the basic law of February

27, 1934, they were reorganized on the streamlined leadership principle and put

under the control of the State. All businesses were forced to become members.

At the head of an incredibly complex structure was the Reich Economic

Chamber, whose leader was appointed by the State, and which controlled seven

national economic, groups, twenty-three economic chambers, one hundred

chambers of industry and commerce and the seventy chambers of handicrafts.

Amidst this labyrinthine organization and all the multitude of offices and

agencies of the Ministry of Economics and the Four-Year Plan and the Niagara

of thousands of special decrees and laws even the most astute businessman was

often lost, and special lawyers had to be employed to enable a firm to function.

The graft involved in finding one’s way to key officials who could make

decisions on which orders depended or in circumventing the endless rules and

regulations of the government and the trade associations became in the late

Thirties astronomical. “An economic necessity,” one businessman termed it to

this writer.

Despite his harassed life, however, the businessman made good profits. The

heavy industries, chief beneficiaries of rearmament, increased theirs from 2 per

cent in the boom year of 1926 to 6 ½ per cent in 1938, the last full year of peace.

Even the law limiting dividends to 6 per cent worked no hardship on the

companies themselves. Just the opposite. In theory, according to the law, any

amount above that had to be invested in government bonds—there was no

thought of confiscation. Actually most firms reinvested in their own businesses

the undistributed profits, which rose from 175 million marks in 1932 to five

billion marks in 1938, a year in which the total savings in the savings banks

amounted to only two billions, or less than half the undistributed profits, and in

which the distributed profits in form of dividends totaled only 1,200,000,000

marks. Besides his pleasant profits, the businessman was also cheered by the

way the workers had been put in their place under Hitler. There were no more

unreasonable wage demands. Actually, wages were reduced a little despite a 25

per cent rise in the cost of living. And above all, there were no costly strikes. In

fact, there were no strikes at all. Such manifestations of unruliness were verboten

in the Third Reich.

THE SERFDOM OF LABOR

Deprived of his trade unions, collective bargaining and the right to strike, the

German worker in the Third Reich became an industrial serf, bound to his

master, the employer, much as medieval peasants had been bound to the lord of

the manor. The so-called Labor Front, which in theory replaced the old trade

unions, did not represent the worker. According to the law of October 24, 1934,

which created it, it was “the organization of creative Germans of brain and fist.”

It took in not only wage and salary earners but also the employers and members

of the professions. It was in reality a vast propaganda organization and, as some

workers said, a gigantic fraud. Its aim, as stated in the law, was not to protect the

worker but “to create a true social and productive community of all Germans. Its

task is to see that every single individual should be able … to perform the

maximum of work.” The Labor Front was not an independent administrative

organization but, like almost every other group in Nazi Germany except the

Army, an integral part of the N.S.D.A.P., or, as its leader, Dr. Ley—the

“stammering drunkard,” to use Thyssen’s phrase—said, “an instrument of the

party.” Indeed, the October 24 law stipulated that its officials should come from

the ranks of the party, the former Nazi unions, the S.A. and the S.S.—and they

did.

Earlier, the Law Regulating National Labor of January 20, 1934, known as the

“Charter of Labor,” had put the worker in his place and raised the employer to

his old position of absolute master—subject, of course, to interference by the all-

powerful State. The employer became the “leader of the enterprise,” the

employees the “following,” or Gefolgschaft. Paragraph Two of the law set down

that “the leader of the enterprise makes the decisions for the employees and

laborers in all matters concerning the enterprise.” And just as in ancient times

the lord was supposed to be responsible for the welfare of his subjects so, under

the Nazi law, was the employer made “responsible for the well-being of the

employees and laborers.” In return, the law said, “the employees and laborers

owe him faithfulness”—that is, they were to work hard and long, and no back

talk or grumbling, even about wages.

Wages were set by so-called labor trustees, appointed by the Labor Front. In

practice, they set the rates according to the wishes of the employer—there was

no provision for the workers even to be consulted in such matters—though after

1936, when help became scarce in the armament industries and some employers

attempted to raise wages in order to attract men, wage scales were held down by

orders of the State. Hitler was quite frank about keeping wages low. “It has been

the iron principle of the National Socialist leadership,” he declared early in the

regime, “not to permit any rise in the hourly wage rates but to raise income

solely by an increase in performance. ”16 In a country where most wages were

based at least partly on piecework, this meant that a worker could hope to earn

more only by a speed-up and by longer hours.

Compared to the United States, and after allowances were made for the

difference in the cost of living and in social services, wages in Germany had

always been low. Under the Nazis they were slightly lower than before.

According to the Reich Statistical Office, they declined for skilled workers from

20.4 cents an hour in 1932, at the height of the depression, to 19.5 cents during

the middle of 1936. Wage scales for unskilled labor fell from 16.1 cents to 13

cents an hour. At the party congress in Nuremberg in 1936 Dr. Ley stated that

the average earnings of full-time workers in the Labor Front amounted to $6.95 a

week. The Reich Statistical Office put the figure for all German workers at

$6.29.

Although millions more had jobs, the share of all German workers in the

national income fell from 56.9 per cent in the depression year of 1932 to 53.6

per cent in the boom year of 1938. At the same time income from capital and

business rose from 17.4 per cent of the national income to 26.6 per cent. It is true

that because of much greater employment the total income from wages and

salaries grew from twenty-five billion marks to forty-two billions, an increase of

66 per cent. But income from capital and business rose much more steeply—by

146 per cent. All the propagandists in the Third Reich from Hitler on down were

accustomed to rant in their public speeches against the bourgeois and the

capitalist and proclaim their solidarity with the worker. But a sober study of the

official statistics, which perhaps few Germans bothered to make, revealed that

the much maligned capitalists, not the workers, benefited most from Nazi

policies.

Finally, the take-home pay of the German worker shrank. Besides stiff income

taxes, compulsory contributions to sickness, unemployment and disability

insurance, and Labor Front dues, the manual worker—like everyone else in Nazi

Germany—was constantly pressured to make increasingly large gifts to an

assortment of Nazi charities, the chief of which was Winterhilfe (Winter Relief).

Many a workman lost his job because he failed to contribute to Winterhilfe or

because his contribution was deemed too small. Such failure was termed by one

labor court, which upheld the dismissal of an employee without notice, “conduct

hostile to the community of the people … to be most strongly condemned.” In

the mid-Thirties it was estimated that taxes and contributions took from 15 to 35

per cent of a worker’s gross wage. Such a cut out of $6.95 a week did not leave a

great deal for rent and food and clothing and recreation.

As with the medieval serfs, the workers in Hitler’s Germany found themselves

being more and more bound to their place of labor, though here it was not the

employer who bound them but the State. We have seen how the peasant in the

Third Reich was bound to his land by the Hereditary Farm Law. Likewise the

agricultural laborer, by law, was attached to the land and forbidden to leave it for

work in the city. In practice, it must be said, this was one Nazi law which was

not obeyed; between 1933 and 1939 more than a million (1,300,000) farm

workers migrated to jobs in industry and trade. But for industrial laborers the law

was enforced. Various government decrees beginning with the law of May 15,

1934, severely restricted a worker’s freedom of movement from one job to

another. After June 1935 the state employment offices were given exclusive

control of employment; they determined who could be hired for what and where.

The “workbook” was introduced in February 1935, and eventually no worker

could be hired unless he possessed one. In it was kept a record of his skills and

employment. The workbook not only provided the State and the employer with

up-to-date data on every single employee in the nation but was used to tie a

worker to his bench. If he desired to leave for other employment his employer

could retain his workbook, which meant that he could not legally be employed

elsewhere. Finally, on June 22, 1938, a special decree issued by the Office of the

Four-Year Plan instituted labor conscription. It obliged every German to work

where the State assigned him. Workers who absented themselves from their jobs

without a very good excuse were subject to fine and imprisonment. There was, it

is obvious, another side to this coin. A worker thus conscripted could not be

fired by his employer without the consent of the government employment office.

He had job security, something he had rarely known during the Republic.

Tied down by so many controls at wages little above the subsistence level, the

German workers, like the Roman proletariat, were provided with circuses by

their rulers to divert attention from their miserable state. “We had to divert the

attention of the masses from material to moral values,” Dr. Ley once explained.

“It is more important to feed the souls of men than their stomachs.”

So he came up with an organization called Kraft durch Freude (“Strength

through Joy”). This provided what can only be called regimented leisure. In a

twentieth-century totalitarian dictatorship, as perhaps with older ones, it is

deemed necessary to control not only the working hours but the leisure hours of

the individual. This was what “Strength through Joy” did. In pre-Nazi days

Germany had tens of thousands of clubs devoted to everything from chess and

soccer to bird watching. Under the Nazis no organized social, sport or

recreational group was allowed to function except under the control and

direction of Kraft durch Freude.

To the ordinary German in the Third Reich this official all-embracing

recreational organization no doubt was better than nothing at all, if one could not

be trusted to be left to one’s own devices. It provided members of the Labor

Front, for instance, with dirt-cheap vacation trips on land and sea. Dr. Ley built

two 25,000-ton ships, one of which he named after himself, and chartered ten

others to handle ocean cruises for Kraft durch Freude. This writer once

participated in such a cruise; though life aboard was organized by Nazi leaders

to a point of excruciation (for him), the German workers seemed to have a good

time. And at bargain rates! A cruise to Madeira, for instance, cost only $25,

including rail fare to and from the German port, and other jaunts were equally

inexpensive. Beaches on the sea and on lakes were taken over for thousands of

summer vacationers—one at Ruegen on the Baltic, which was not completed by

the time the war came, called for hotel accommodations for twenty thousand

persons—and in winter special skiing excursions to the Bavarian Alps were

organized at a cost of $11 a week, including carfare, room and board, rental of

skis and lessons from a ski instructor.

Sports, every branch of which was controlled by the “Strength through Joy,”

were organized on a massive scale, more than seven million persons, according

to the official figures, participating in them annually. The organization also

made available at bargain rates tickets to the theater, the opera and concerts, thus

making available more high-brow entertainment to the laboring man, as Nazi

officials often boasted. Kraft durch Freude also had its own ninety-piece

symphony orchestra which continually toured the country, often playing in the

smaller places where good music was not usually available. Finally, the

organization took over the 200-odd adult education institutions which had

flourished during the Republic—a movement which had originated in

Scandinavia—and continued them, though adding a strong mixture of Nazi

ideology to the instruction.

In the end, of course, the workers paid for their circuses. The annual income

from dues to the Labor Front came to $160,000,000 in 1937 and passed the

$200,000,000 point by the time the war started, according to Dr. Ley—the

accounting was exceedingly vague, being handled not by the State but by the

Finance Office of the party, which never published its accounts. From the dues,

10 per cent was earmarked for Kraft durch Freude. But the fees paid by

individuals for vacation trips and entertainment, cheap as they were, amounted

in the year before the war to $1,250,000,000. There was another heavy cost to

the wage earner. As the largest single party organization in the country, with

twenty-five million members, the Labor Front became a swollen bureaucracy,

with tens of thousands of full-time employees. In fact, it was estimated that from

20 to 25 per cent of its income was absorbed by administration expense.

One particular swindle perpetrated by Hitler on the German workers deserves

passing mention. This had to do with the Volkswagen (the “People’s Car”)—a

brainstorm of the Fuehrer himself. Every German, or at least every German

workman, he said, should own an automobile,-just as in the United States.

Heretofore in this country where there was only one motorcar for every fifty

persons (compared to one for every five in America) the workman had used a

bicycle or public transportation to get about. Now Hitler decreed that a car

should be built for him to sell for only 990 marks—$396 at the official rate of

exchange. He himself, it was said, took a hand in the actual designing of the car,

which was done under the supervision of the Austrian automobile engineer Dr.

Ferdinand Porsche.

Since private industry could not turn out an automobile for $396, Hitler

ordered the State to build it and placed the Labor Front in charge of the project.

Dr. Ley’s organization promptly set out in 1938 to build at Fallersleben, near

Braunschweig, “the biggest automobile factory in the world,” with a capacity for

turning out a million and a half cars a year—“more than Ford,” the Nazi

propagandists said. The Labor Front advanced fifty million marks in capital. But

that was not the main financing. Dr. Ley’s ingenious plan was that the workers

themselves should furnish the capital by means of what became known as a

“pay-before-you-get-it” installment plan—five marks a week, or if a worker

thought he could afford it, ten or fifteen marks a week. When 750 marks had

been paid in, the buyer received an order number entitling him to a car as soon

as it could be turned out. Alas for the worker, not a single car was ever turned

out for any customer during the Third Reich. Tens of millions of marks were

paid in by the German wage earners, not a pfennig of which was ever to be

refunded. By the time the war started the Volkswagen factory turned to the

manufacture of goods more useful to the Army.

Swindled though he was in this instance and in many others, reduced, as we

have seen, to a sort of industrial serfdom on subsistence wages, and less prone

than any other segment of German society to subscribe to Nazism or to be taken

in by its ceaseless propaganda, the German worker, it is only fair to say, did not

appear to resent very bitterly his inferior status in the Third Reich. The great

German war machine that hurtled over the Polish border at dawn on September

1, 1939, could never have been fashioned without the very considerable

contribution that the German workman made to it. Regimented he was and

sometimes terrorized, but so was everyone else—and centuries of regimentation

had accustomed him, as it had all other Germans, to being told what to do.

Though it is perhaps unwise to attempt to generalize about such things, this

writer’s own impression of the workingman in Berlin and in the Ruhr was that

while he was somewhat cynical about the promises of the regime he had no more

hankering for revolt than anyone else in the Third Reich. Unorganized as he was

and lacking leadership, what could he do? A workman often put that question to

you.

But the greatest cause of his acceptance of his role in Nazi Germany was,

without any doubt at all, that he had a job again and the assurance that he would

keep it. An observer who had known something about his precarious

predicament during the Republic could understand why he did not seem to be

desperately concerned with the loss of political freedom and even of his trade

unions as long as he was employed full-time. In the past, for so many, for as

many as six million men and their families, such rights of free men in Germany

had been overshadowed, as he said, by the freedom to starve. In taking away that

last freedom, Hitler assured himself of the support of the working class, probably

the most skillful and industrious and disciplined in the Western world. It was a

backing given not to his half-baked ideology or to his evil intentions, as such,

but to what counted most: the production of goods for war.

JUSTICE IN THE THIRD REICH

From the very first weeks of 1933, when the massive and arbitrary arrests,

beatings and murders by those in power began, Germany under National

Socialism ceased to be a society based on law. “Hitler is the law!” the legal

lights of Nazi Germany proudly proclaimed, and Goering emphasized it when he

told the Prussian prosecutors on July 12, 1934, that “the law and the will of the

Fuehrer are one.” It was true. The law was what the dictator said it was and in

moments of crisis, as during the Blood Purge, he himself, as we have seen in his

speech to the Reichstag immediately after that bloody event, proclaimed that he

was the “supreme judge” of the German people, with power to do to death

whomever he pleased.

In the days of the Republic, most judges, like the majority of the Protestant

clergy and the university professors, had cordially disliked the Weimar regime

and in their decisions, as many thought, had written the blackest page in the life

of the German Republic, thus contributing to its fall. But at least under the

Weimar Constitution judges were independent, subject only to the law, protected

from arbitrary removal and bound at least in theory by Article 109 to safeguard

equality before the law. Most of them had been sympathetic to National

Socialism, but they were hardly prepared for the treatment they soon received

under its actual rule. The Civil Service law of April 7, 1933, was made

applicable to all magistrates and quickly rid the judiciary not only of Jews but of

those whose Nazism was deemed questionable, or, as the law stipulated, “who

indicated that he was no longer prepared to intercede at all times for the National

Socialist State.” To be sure, not many judges were eliminated by this law, but

they were warned where their duty lay. Just to make sure that they understood,

Dr. Hans Frank, Commissioner of Justice and Reich Law Leader, told the jurists

in 1936, “The National Socialist ideology is the foundation of all basic laws,

especially as explained in the party program and in the speeches of the Fuehrer.”

Dr. Frank went on to explain what he meant:

There is no independence of law against National Socialism. Say to yourselves at every

decision which you make: “How would the Fuehrer decide in my place?” In every decision

ask yourselves: “Is this decision compatible with the National Socialist conscience of the

German people?” Then you will have a firm iron foundation which, allied with the unity of the

National Socialist People’s State and with your recognition of the eternal nature of the will of

Adolf Hitler, will endow your own sphere of decision with the authority of the Third Reich,

and this for all time.17

That seemed plain enough, as did a new Civil Service law of the following

year (January 26, 1937), which called for the dismissal of all officials, including

judges, for “political unreliability.” Furthermore, all jurists were forced to join

the League of National Socialist German Jurists, in which they were often

lectured on the lines of Frank’s talk.

Some judges, however antirepublican they may have been, did not respond

avidly enough to the party line. In fact, a few of them, at least, attempted to base

their judgments on the law. One of the worst examples of this, from the Nazi

point of view, was the decision of the Reichsgericht, Germany’s Supreme Court,

to acquit on the basis of evidence three of the four Communist defendants in the

Reichstag fire trial in March 1934. (Only Van der Lübbe, the half-witted

Dutchman, who confessed, was found guilty.) This so incensed Hitler and

Goering that within a month, on April 24, 1934, the right to try cases of treason,

which heretofore had been under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Supreme

Court, was taken away from that august body and transferred to a new court, the

Volksgerichtshof, the People’s Court, which soon became the most dreaded

tribunal in the land. It consisted of two professional judges and five others

chosen from among party officials, the S.S. and the armed forces, thus giving the

latter a majority vote. There was no appeal from its decisions or sentences and

usually its sessions were held in camera. Occasionally, however, for propaganda

purposes when relatively light sentences were to be given, the foreign

correspondents were invited to attend.

Thus this writer once observed a case before the People’s Court in 1935. It

struck him more as a drumhead court-martial than a civil-court trial. The

proceedings were finished in a day, there was practically no opportunity to

present defense witnesses (if any had dared to appear in defense of one accused

of “treason”) and the arguments of the defense lawyers, who were “qualified”

Nazis, seemed weak to the point of ludicrousness. One got the impression from

reading the newspapers, which merely announced the verdicts, that most of the

unfortunate defendants (though not on the day I attended) received a death

sentence. No figures were ever published, though in December 1940 Roland

Freisler, the much-feared president of the People’s Court (who was killed during

the war when an American bomb demolished his courtroom during a trial)

claimed that “only four per cent of the accused were put to death.”

Established even earlier than the sinister People’s Court was the

Sondergericht, the Special Court, which took over from the ordinary courts cases

of political crime or, as the Law of March 21, 1933, which established the new

tribunal, put it, cases of “insidious attacks against the government.” The Special

Courts consisted of three judges, who invariably had to be trusted party

members, without a jury. A Nazi prosecutor had the choice of bringing action in

such cases before either an ordinary court or the Special Court, and invariably he

chose the latter, for obvious reasons. Defense lawyers before this court, as before

the Volksgerichtshof, had to be approved by Nazi officials. Sometimes even if

they were approved they fared badly. Thus the lawyers who attempted to

represent the widow of Dr. Klausener, the Catholic Action leader murdered in

the Blood Purge, in her suit for damages against the State were whisked off to

Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where they were kept until they formally

withdrew the action.

Hitler, and for some time Goering, had the right to quash criminal

proceedings. In the Nuremberg documents18 a case came to light in which the

Minister of Justice strongly recommended the prosecution of a high Gestapo

official and a group of S.A. men whom the evidence, he thought, plainly proved

guilty of the most shocking torture of inmates of a concentration camp. He sent

the evidence to Hitler. The Fuehrer ordered the prosecution dropped. Goering

too, in the beginning, had such power. Once in April 1934 he halted criminal

proceedings against a well-known businessman. It soon became known that the

defendant paid Goering some three million marks. As Gerhard F. Kramer, a

prominent lawyer in Berlin at the time, later commented, “It was impossible to

establish whether Goering blackmailed the industrialist or whether the

industrialist bribed the Prussian Prime Minister.” 19 What was established was

that Goering quashed the case.

On the other hand, Rudolf Hess, deputy of the Fuehrer, was empowered to

take “merciless action” against defendants who in his opinion got off with too

light sentences. A record of all court sentences of those found guilty of attacking

the party, the Fuehrer or the State were forwarded to Hess, who if he thought the

punishment too mild could take the “merciless” action. This usually consisted of

hauling the victims off to a concentration camp or having him bumped off.

Sometimes, it must be said, the judges of the Sondergericht did display some

spirit of independence and even devotion to the law. In such cases either Hess or

the Gestapo stepped in. Thus, as we have seen, when Pastor Niemoeller was

acquitted by the Special Court of the main charges against him and sentenced

only to a short term, which he had already served while awaiting trial, the

Gestapo snatched him as he was leaving the courtroom and carted him off to a

concentration camp.

For the Gestapo, like Hitler, was also the law. It originally was established for

Prussia by Goering on April 26, 1933, to replace Department IA of the old

Prussian political police. He had at first intended to designate it merely as the

Secret Police Office (Geheimes Polizei Amt) but the German initials GPA

sounded too much like the Russian GPU. An obscure post office employee who

had been asked to furnish a franking stamp for the new bureau suggested that it

be called the Geheime Staatspolizei, simply the “Secret State Police”—

GESTAPO for short—and thus unwittingly created a name the very mention of

which was to inspire terror first within Germany and then without.

In the beginning the Gestapo was little more than a personal instrument of

terror employed by Goering to arrest and murder opponents of the regime. It was

only in April 1934, when Goering appointed Himmler deputy chief of the

Prussian Secret Police, that the Gestapo began to expand as an arm of the S.S.

and, under the guiding genius of its new chief, the mild-mannered but sadistic

former chicken farmer, and of Reinhard Heydrich, a young man of diabolical

cast20 who was head of the S.S. Security Service, or S.D. (Sicherheitsdienst),

become such a scourge, with the power of life and death over every German.

As early as 1935 the Prussian Supreme Court of Administration, under Nazi

pressure, had ruled that the orders and actions of the Gestapo were not subject to

judicial review. The basic Gestapo law promulgated by the government on

February 10, 1936, put the secret police organization above the law. The courts

were not allowed to interfere with its activities in any way. As Dr. Werner Best,

one of Himmler’s right-hand men in the Gestapo, explained, “As long as the

police carries out the will of the leadership, it is acting legally.” 21

A cloak of “legality” was given to the arbitrary arrests and the incarceration of

victims in concentration camps. The term was Schutzhaft, or “protective

custody,” and its exercise was based on the Law of February 28, 1933, which, as

we have seen, suspended the clauses of the constitution which guaranteed civil

liberties. But protective custody did not protect a man from possible harm, as it

did in more civilized countries. It punished him by putting him behind barbed

wire.

The first concentration camps sprang up like mushrooms during Hitler’s first

year of power. By the end of 1933 there were some fifty of them, mainly set up

by the S.A. to give its victims a good beating and then ransom them to their

relatives or friends for as much as the traffic would bear. It was largely a crude

form of blackmail. Sometimes, however, the prisoners were murdered, usually

out of pure sadism and brutality. At the Nuremberg trial four such cases came to

light that took place in the spring of 1933 at the S.S. concentration camp at

Dachau, near Munich. In each instance a prisoner was cold-bloodedly murdered,

one by whipping, another by strangulation. Even the public prosecutor in

Munich protested.

Since after the Blood Purge of June 1934 there was no more resistance to the

Nazi regime, many Germans thought that the mass “protective custody” arrests

and the confinement of thousands in the concentration camps would cease. On

Christmas Eve, 1933, Hitler had announced an amnesty for twenty-seven

thousand inmates of the camps, but Goering and Himmler got around his orders

and only a few were actually released. Then Frick, the rubber-stamp bureaucrat

who was Minister of the Interior, had tried in April 1934 to reduce the abuses of

the Nazi thugs by issuing secret decrees placing restrictions on the wholesale use

of Schutzhaft arrests and reducing commitments to concentration camps, but

Himmler had persuaded him to drop the matter. The S.S. Fuehrer saw more

clearly than the Minister that the purpose of the concentration camps was not

only to punish enemies of the regime but by their very existence to terrorize the

people and deter them from even contemplating any resistance to Nazi rule.

Shortly after the Roehm purge, Hitler turned the concentration camps over to

the control of the S.S., which proceeded to organize them with the efficiency and

ruthlessness expected of this elite corps. Guard duty was given exclusively to the

Death’s-Head units ( Totenkopfverbaende) whose members were recruited from

the toughest Nazi elements, served an enlistment of twelve years and wore the

familiar skull-and-bones insignia on their black tunics. The commander of the

first Death’s-Head detachment and the first commander of the Dachau camp,

Theodor Eicke, was put in charge of all the concentration camps. The fly-by-

night ones were closed down and larger ones constructed, the chief of which

(until the war came, when they were expanded into occupied territory) were

Dachau near Munich, Buchenwald near Weimar, Sachsenhausen, which replaced

the Oranienburg camp of initial fame near Berlin, Ravensbrueck in Mecklenburg

(for women) and, after the occupation of Austria in 1938, Mauthausen near Linz

—names which, with Auschwitz, Belsec and Treblinka, which were later

established in Poland, were to become all too familiar to most of the world.

In them, before the end mercifully came, millions of hapless persons were

done to death and millions of others subjected to debasement and torture more

revolting than all but a few minds could imagine. But at the beginning—in the

Thirties—the population of the Nazi concentration camps in Germany probably

never numbered more than from twenty to thirty thousand at any one time, and

many of the horrors later invented and perpetrated by Himmler’s men were as

yet unknown. The extermination camps, the slave labor camps, the camps where

the inmates were used as guinea pigs for Nazi “medical research,” had to wait

for the war.

But the early camps were not exactly humane. I have before me a copy of the

regulations drawn up for Dachau on November 1, 1933, by its first commander,

Theodor Eicke, who when he became head of all the camps applied them

throughout.

Article 11. The following offenders, considered as agitators, will be hanged: Anyone who

… politicizes, holds inciting speeches and meetings, forms cliques, loiters around with others;

who for the purpose of supplying the propaganda of the opposition with atrocity stories,

collects true or false information about the concentration camp; receives such information,

buries it, talks about it to others, smuggles it out of the camp into the hands of foreign visitors,

etc.

Article 12. The following offenders, considered as mutineers, will be shot on the spot or

later hanged. Anyone attacking physically a guard or S.S. man, refusing to obey or to work

while on detail … or bawling, shouting, inciting or holding speeches while marching or at

work.

Milder sentences of two weeks’ solitary confinement and twenty-five lashings

were given “anyone making depreciatory remarks in a letter or other documents

about National Socialist leaders, the State and Government … [or] glorifying

Marxist or Liberal leaders of the old democratic parties.”

Allied with the Gestapo was the Security Service, the Sicherheitsdienst, or

S.D., which formed another set of initials that struck fear in the bosoms of all

Germans—and later of the occupied peoples. Originally formed by Himmler in

1932 as the intelligence branch of the S.S., and placed by him under the

direction of Reinhard Heydrich, later internationally renowned as “Hangman

Heydrich,” its initial function had been to watch over members of the party and

report any suspicious activity. In 1934 it became also the intelligence unit for the

secret police, and by 1938 a new law gave it this function for the entire Reich.

Under the expert hand of Heydrich, a former intelligence officer in the Navy

who had been cashiered by Admiral Raeder in 1931 at the age of twenty-six for

refusing to marry the daughter of a shipbuilder whom he had compromised, the

S.D. soon spread its net over the country, employing some 100,000 part-time

informers who were directed to snoop on every citizen in the land and report the

slightest remark or activity which was deemed inimical to Nazi rule. No one—if

he were not foolish—said or did anything that might be interpreted as “anti-

Nazi” without first taking precautions that it was not being recorded by hidden

S.D. microphones or overheard by an S.D. agent. Your son or your father or

your wife or your cousin or your best friend or your boss or your secretary might

be an informer for Heydrich’s organization; you never knew, and if you were

wise nothing was ever taken for granted.

The full-time sleuths of the S.D. probably never numbered more than three

thousand during the Thirties and most of them were recruited from the ranks of

the displaced young intellectuals—university graduates who had been unable to

find suitable jobs or any secure place in normal society. Thus among these

professional spies there was always the bizarre atmosphere of pedantry. They

had a grotesque interest in such side lines as the study of Teutonic archeology,

the skulls of the inferior races and the eugenics of a master race. A foreign

observer, however, found difficulty in making contacts with these odd men,

though Heydrich himself, an arrogant, icy and ruthless character, might

occasionally be seen at a Berlin night club surrounded by some of his blond

young thugs. They not only kept out of the spotlight because of the nature of

their work but, in 1934 and 1935 at least, because a number of them who had

spied on Roehm and his confederates in the S.A. were bumped off by a secret

band that called itself “Roehm’s Avengers” and took care to pin that label on the

bodies.

One of the interesting, if subordinate, tasks of the S.D. was to ascertain who

voted “No” in Hitler’s plebiscites. Among the numerous Nuremberg documents

is a secret report of the S.D. in Kochern on the plebiscite of April 10, 1938:

Copy is attached enumerating the persons who cast “No” votes or invalid votes at Kappel.

The control was affected in the following way: some members of the election committee

marked all the ballots with numbers. During the balloting a voters’ list was made up. The

ballots were handed out in numerical order, therefore it was possible afterward … to find out

the persons who cast “No” votes or invalid votes. The marking was done on the back of the

ballot with skimmed milk.

The ballot cast by the Protestant parson Alfred Wolfers is also enclosed. 22

On June 16, 1936, for the first time in German history, a unified police was

established for the whole of the Reich—previously the police had been

organized separately by each of the states—and Himmler was put in charge as

Chief of the German Police. This was tantamount to putting the police in the

hands of the S.S., which since its suppression of the Roehm “revolt” in 1934 had

been rapidly increasing its power. It had become not only the praetorian guard,

not only the single armed branch of the party, not only the elite from whose

ranks the future leaders of the new Germany were being chosen, but it now

possessed the police power. The Third Reich, as is inevitable in the development

of all totalitarian dictatorships, had become a police state.

GOVERNMENT IN THE THIRD REICH

Though the Weimar Republic was destroyed, the Weimar Constitution was

never formally abrogated by Hitler. Indeed—and ironically—Hitler based the

“legality” of his rule on the despised republican constitution. Thus thousands of

decreed laws—there were no others in the Third Reich—were explicitly based

on the emergency presidential decree of February 28, 1933, for the Protection of

the People and the State, which Hindenburg, under Article 48 of the constitution,

had signed. It will be remembered that the aged President was bamboozled into

signing the decree the day after the Reichstag fire when Hitler assured him that

there was grave danger of a Communist revolution. The decree, which

suspended all civil rights, remained in force throughout the time of the Third

Reich, enabling the Fuehrer to rule by a sort of continual martial law.

The Enabling Act too, which the Reichstag had voted on March 24, 1933, and

by which it handed over its legislative functions to the Nazi government, was the

second pillar in the “constitutionality” of Hitler’s rule. Each four years thereafter

it was dutifully prolonged for another four-year period by a rubber-stamp

Reichstag, for it never occurred to the dictator to abolish this once democratic

institution but only to make it nondemocratic. It met only a dozen times up to the

war, “enacted” only four laws, * held no debates or votes and never heard any

speeches except those made by Hitler.

After the first few months of 1933 serious discussions ceased in the cabinet,

its meetings became more and more infrequent after the death of Hindenburg in

August 1934, and after February 1938 the cabinet was never convened.

However, individual cabinet members held the considerable power of being

authorized to promulgate decrees which, with the Fuehrer’s approval,

automatically became laws. The Secret Cabinet Council (Geheimer

Kabinettsrat), set up with great fanfare in 1938, perhaps to impress Prime

Minister Chamberlain, existed only on paper. It never met once. The Reich

Defense Council (Reichsverteidigungsrat), established early in the regime as a

war-planning agency under the chairmanship of Hitler, met formally only twice,

though some of its working committees were exceedingly active.

Many cabinet functions were delegated to special agencies such as the Office

of the Deputy of the Fuehrer (Hess and later Martin Bormann), of the

Plenipotentiaries for War Economy (Schacht) and Administration (Frick), and of

the Delegate for the Four-Year Plan (Goering). In addition there were what was

known as the “supreme government agencies” and “national administrative

agencies,” many of them holdovers from the Republic. In all, there were some

42 executive agencies of the national government under the direct jurisdiction of

the Fuehrer.

The diets and governments of the separate states of Germany were, as we have

seen, abolished in the first year of the Nazi regime when the country was unified,

and governors for the states, which were reduced to provinces, were appointed

by Hitler. Local self-government, the only field in which the Germans had

seemed to be making genuine progress toward democracy, was also wiped out.

A series of laws decreed between 1933 and 1935 deprived the municipalities of

their local autonomy and brought them under the direct control of the Reich

Minister of the Interior, who appointed their mayors—if they had a population of

over 100,000—and reorganized them on the leadership principle. In towns under

100,000, the mayors were named by the provincial governors. For Berlin,

Hamburg and Vienna (after 1938, when Austria was occupied) Hitler reserved

the right to appoint the burgomasters.

The offices through which Hitler exercised his dictatorial powers consisted of

four chancelleries: those of the President (though the title had ceased to exist

after 1934), the Chancellor (the title was abandoned in 1939) and the party, and a

fourth known as the Chancellery of the Fuehrer which looked after his personal

affairs and carried out special tasks.

In truth, Hitler was bored by the details of day-to-day governing and after he

had consolidated his position following the death of Hindenburg he left them

largely to his aides. Old party comrades such as Goering, Goebbels, Himmler,

Ley and Schirach were given free rein to carve out their own empires of power

—and usually profit. Schacht was given a free hand at first to raise the money

for expanding government expenditures by whatever sleight of hand he could

think up. Whenever these men clashed over the division of power or spoils,

Hitler intervened. He did not mind these quarrels. Indeed, he often encouraged

them, because they added status to his position as supreme arbiter and prevented

any closing of the ranks against him. Thus he seemed to take delight at the

spectacle of three men competing with each other in foreign affairs: Neurath, the

Foreign Minister, Rosenberg, the head of the party’s Foreign Affairs

Department, and Ribbentrop, who had his own “Ribbentrop Bureau” which

dabbled in foreign policy. All three men were at loggerheads with each other and

Hitler kept them so by maintaining their rival offices until in the end he chose

the dull-witted Ribbentrop to become his Foreign Minister and carry out his

orders in foreign affairs.

Such was the government of the Third Reich, administered from top to bottom

on the so-called leadership principle by a vast and sprawling bureaucracy,

having little of the efficiency usually credited to the Germans, poisoned by graft,

beset by constant confusion and cutthroat rivalries augmented by the muddling

interference of party potentates and often rendered impotent by the terror of the

S.S.-Gestapo.

At the top of the swarming heap stood the onetime Austrian vagabond, now

become, with the exception of Stalin, the most powerful dictator on earth. As Dr.

Hans Frank reminded a convention of lawyers in the spring of 1936, “There is in

Germany today only one authority, and that is the authority of the Fuehrer.” 23

With that authority Hitler had quickly destroyed those who opposed him,

unified and Nazified the State, regimented the country’s institutions and culture,

suppressed individual freedom, abolished unemployment and set the wheels of

industry and commerce humming—no small achievement after only three or

four years in office. Now he turned—in fact, he already had turned—to the two

chief passions of his life: the shaping of Germany’s foreign policy toward war

and conquest and the creation of a mighty military machine which would enable

him to achieve his goal.

It is time now to turn to the story, more fully documented than that of any

other in modern history, of how this extraordinary man, at the head of so great

and powerful a nation, set out to attain his ends.

* From February 1933 to the spring of 1937, the number of registered unemployed fell from

six million to less than one million.

* Also, in contrast to the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany permitted all but a few thousand of its

citizens who were in the black book of the secret police to travel abroad, though this was

severely curtailed by currency restrictions because of the country’s lack of foreign exchange.

However, the currency restrictions were no more stringent than those for British citizens after

1945. The point is that the Nazi rulers did not seem to be worried that the average German

would be contaminated by anti-Nazism if he visited the democratic countries.

* The author was violently attacked in the German press and on the radio, and threatened with

expulsion, for having written a dispatch saying that some of these anti-Semitic signs were

being removed for the duration of the Olympic games.

† In an allocution to the Sacred College on June 2, 1945, Pope Pius XII defended the

concordat which he had signed, but described National Socialism, as he later came to know it,

as “the arrogant apostasy from Jesus Christ, the denial of His doctrine and of His work of

redemption, the cult of violence, the idolatry of race and blood, the overthrow of human

liberty and dignity.”

* To avoid any misunderstanding, it might be well to point out here that the author is a

Protestant.

* Ziegler owed his position to the happy circumstance that he had painted the portrait of Geli

Raubal.

* Amann’s own income skyrocketed from 108,000 marks in 1934 to 3,800,000 marks in 1942.

(Letter to the author from Professor Oron J. Hale, who has made a study of the surviving

records of the Nazi publishing firm.)

* The Reconstruction Law of January 30, 1934, and the three anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws of

September 15, 1935.

Book Three

THE ROAD TO WAR

9

THE FIRST STEPS: 1934–37

To TALK PEACE, to prepare secretly for war and to proceed with enough caution

in foreign policy and clandestine rearmament to avoid any preventive military

action against Germany by the Versailles powers—such were Hitler’s tactics

during the first two years.

He stumbled badly with the Nazi murder of the Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss

in Vienna on July 25, 1934. At noon on that day 154 members of the S.S.

Standarte 89, dressed in Austrian Army uniforms, broke into the Federal

Chancellery and shot Dollfuss in the throat at a range of two feet. A few blocks

away other Nazis seized the radio station and broadcast the news that Dollfuss

had resigned. Hitler received the tidings while listening to a performance of Das

Rheingold at the annual Wagner Festival at Bayreuth. They greatly excited him.

Friedelind Wagner, granddaughter of the great composer, who sat in the family

box nearby, was a witness. Two adjutants, Schaub and Brueckner, she later told,

kept receiving the news from Vienna on a telephone in the anteroom of her box

and then whispering it to Hitler.

After the performance the Fuehrer was most excited. This excitement mounted

as he told us the horrible news … Although he could scarcely wipe the delight

from his face Hitler carefully ordered dinner in the restaurant as usual.

“I must go across for an hour and show myself,” he said, “or people will think

I had something to do with this.” 1

They would not have been far from right. In the first paragraph of Mein

Kampf, it will be remembered, Hitler had written that the reunion of Austria and

Germany was a “task to be furthered with every means our lives long.” Soon

after becoming Chancellor he had appointed a Reichstag deputy, Theodor

Habicht, as inspector of the Austrian Nazi Party, and a little later he had set up

Alfred Frauenfeld, the self-exiled Austrian party leader, in Munich, whence he

broadcast nightly, inciting his comrades in Vienna to murder Dollfuss. For

months prior to July 1934 the Austrian Nazis, with weapons and dynamite

furnished by Germany, had instituted a reign of terror, blowing up railways,

power stations and government buildings and murdering supporters of the

Dollfuss clerical-fascist regime. Finally, Hitler had approved the formation of an

Austrian Legion, several thousand strong, which camped along the Austrian

border in Bavaria, ready to cross over and occupy the country at an opportune

moment.

Dollfuss died of his wounds at about 6 P.M., but the Nazi putsch, due largely to

the bungling of the conspirators who had seized the Chancellery, failed.

Government forces, led by Dr. Kurt von Schuschnigg, quickly regained control,

and the rebels, though promised safe-conduct to Germany through the

intervention of the German minister, were arrested and thirteen of them later

hanged. In the meantime Mussolini, to whom Hitler only a month before at their

meeting in Venice had promised to leave Austria alone, caused uneasiness in

Berlin by hastily mobilizing four divisions on the Brenner Pass.

Hitler quickly backed down. The news story prepared for the press by the

official German news agency, D.N.B., rejoicing at the fall of Dollfuss and

proclaiming the Greater Germany that must inevitably follow, was hastily

withdrawn at midnight and a new version substituted expressing regret at the

“cruel murder” and declaring that it was a purely Austrian affair. Habicht was

removed, the German minister in Vienna recalled and dismissed and Papen, who

had narrowly escaped Dollfuss’ fate just a month before during the Roehm

purge, was packed off to Vienna posthaste to restore, as Hitler directed him,

“normal and friendly relations.”

Hitler’s first joyous excitement had given way to fear. “We are faced with a

new Sarajevo!” Papen says he shouted at him when the two conferred about how

to overcome the crisis.2 But the Fuehrer had learned a lesson. The Nazi putsch in

Vienna, like the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923, had been premature.

Germany was not yet militarily strong enough to back up such a venture by

force. It was too isolated diplomatically. Even Fascist Italy had joined Britain

and France in insisting on Austria’s continued independence. Moreover, the

Soviet Union was showing interest for the first time in joining the West in an

Eastern Locarno which would discourage any moves of Germany in the East. In

the autumn it joined the League of Nations. The prospects for dividing the Great

Powers seemed dimmer than ever throughout the crucial year of 1934. All that

Hitler could do was to preach peace, get along with his secret rearmament and

wait and watch for opportunities.

Besides the Reichstag, Hitler had another means of communicating his peace

propaganda to the outside world: the foreign press, whose correspondents,

editors and publishers were constantly seeking interviews with him. There was

Ward Price, the monocled Englishman, and his newspaper, the London Daily

Mail, who were always ready at the drop of a hint to accommodate the German

dictator. So in August 1934, in another one of the series of interviews which

would continue up to the eve of the war, Hitler told Price—and his readers—that

“war will not come again,” that Germany had “a more profound impression than

any other of the evil that war causes,” that “Germany’s problems cannot be

settled by war.” 3 In the fall he repeated these glowing sentiments to Jean Goy, a

French war veterans’ leader and a member of the Chamber of Deputies, who

passed them on in an article in the Pans daily Le Matin. 4

THE BREACHING OF VERSAILLES

In the meantime Hitler pursued with unflagging energy his program of

building up the armed services and procuring arms for them. The Army was

ordered to treble its numerical strength—from 100,000 to 300,000 by October 1,

1934—and in April of that year General Ludwig Beck, Chief of the General

Staff, was given to understand that by April 1 of the following year the Fuehrer

would openly decree conscription and publicly repudiate the military restrictions

of the Versailles Treaty.5 Until then the utmost secrecy must be observed.

Goebbels was admonished never to allow the words “General Staff” to appear in

the press, since Versailles forbade the very existence of this organization. The

annual official rank list of the German Army ceased to be published after 1932

so that its swollen lists of officers would not give the game away to foreign

intelligence. General Keitel, chairman of the Working Committee of the Reich

Defense Council, admonished his aides-as early as May 22, 1933, “No document

must be lost, since otherwise enemy propaganda will make use of it. Matters

communicated orally cannot be proven; they can be denied.” 6

The Navy too was warned to keep its mouth shut. In June 1934 Raeder had a

long conversation with Hitler and noted down:

Fuehrer’s instructions: No mention must be made of a displacement of 25-26,000 tons, but

only of improved 10,000-ton ships … The Fuehrer demands complete secrecy on the

construction of the U-boats.7

For the Navy had commenced the construction of two battle cruisers of 26,000

tons (16,000 tons above the Versailles limit) which would eventually be known

as the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau. Submarines, the building of which

Versailles had prohibited, had been secretly constructed in Finland, Holland and

Spain during the German Republic, and recently Raeder had stored the frames

and parts of a dozen of them at Kiel. When he saw Hitler in November 1934 he

asked permission to assemble six of them by “the time of the critical situation in

the first quarter of 1935” (obviously he too knew what Hitler planned to do at

that time) but the Fuehrer merely replied that “he would tell me when the

situation demanded that the assembly should commence.” 8

At this meeting Raeder also pointed out that the new shipbuilding program

(not to mention the tripling of naval personnel) would take more money than he

had available, but Hitler told him not to worry. “In case of need, he will get Dr.

Ley to put 120–150 million from the Labor Front at the disposal of the Navy, as

the money would still benefit the workers.” 9 Thus the dues of the German

workers were to finance the naval program.

Goering too was busy those first two years, establishing the Air Force. As

Minister of Aviation—supposedly civil aviation—he put the manufacturers to

work designing warplanes. Training of military pilots began immediately under

the convenient camouflage of the League for Air Sports.

A visitor to the Ruhr and Rhineland industrial areas in those days might have

been struck by the intense activity of the armament works, especially those of

Krupp, chief German gunmakers for three quarters of a century, and I. G.

Farben, the great chemical trust. Although Krupp had been forbidden by the

Allies to continue in the armament business after 1919, the company had really

not been idle. As Krupp would boast in 1942, when the German armies occupied

most of Europe, “the basic principle of armament and turret design for tanks had

already been worked out in 1926 … Of the guns being used in 1939–41, the

most important ones were already fully complete in 1933.” Farben scientists had

saved Germany from early disaster in the First World War by the invention of a

process to make synthetic nitrates from air after the country’s normal supply of

nitrates from Chile was cut off by the British blockade. Now under Hitler the

trust set out to make Germany self-sufficient in two materials without which

modern war could not be fought: gasoline and rubber, both of which had had to

be imported. The problem of making synthetic gasoline from coal had actually

been solved by the company’s scientists in the mid-Twenties. After 1933, the

Nazi government gave I. G. Farben the go-ahead with orders to raise its

synthetic oil production to 300,000 tons a year by 1937. By that time the

company had also discovered how to make synthetic rubber from coal and other

products of which Germany had a sufficiency, and the first of four plants was set

up at Schkopau for large-scale production of buna, as the artificial rubber

became known. By the beginning of 1934, plans were approved by the Working

Committee of the Reich Defense Council for the mobilization of some 240,000

plants for war orders. By the end of that year rearmament, in all its phases, had

become so massive it was obvious that it could no longer be concealed from the

suspicious and uneasy powers of Versailles.

These powers, led by Great Britain, had been flirting with the idea of

recognizing a fait accompli, that is, German rearmament, which was not nearly

so secret as Hitler supposed. They would concede Hitler complete arms equality

in return for Germany’s joining in a general European settlement which would

include an Eastern Locarno and thus provide the Eastern countries, especially

Russia, Poland and Czechoslovakia, with the same security which the Western

nations enjoyed under the Locarno Treaty—and, of course, furnish Germany

with the same guarantees of security. In May of 1934 Sir John Simon, the British

Foreign Secretary, who was to be a good forerunner of Neville Chamberlain in

his inability to comprehend the mind of Adolf Hitler, actually proposed equality

of armaments to Germany. The French sharply rejected such an idea.

But the proposals for a general settlement, including equality of armaments

and an Eastern Locarno, were renewed jointly by the British and French

governments early in February 1935. The month before, on January 13, the

inhabitants of the Saar had voted overwhelmingly—477,000 to 48,000—to

return their little coal-rich territory to the Reich and Hitler had taken the

occasion to publicly proclaim that Germany had no further territorial claims on

France, which meant the abandoning of German claims on Alsace and Lorraine.

In the atmosphere of optimism and good will which the peaceful return of the

Saar and Hitler’s remarks engendered, the Anglo–French proposals were

formally presented to Hitler at the beginning of February 1935.

Hitler’s reply of February 14 was somewhat vague—and, from his viewpoint,

understandably so. He welcomed a plan which would leave Germany free to

rearm in the open. But he was evasive on Germany’s willingness to sign an

Eastern Locarno. That would be tying his hands in the main area where, as he

had always preached, Germany’s Lebensraum lay. Might not Britain be detached

in this matter from France, which with its mutual-assistance pacts with Poland,

Czechoslovakia and Rumania, was more interested in Eastern security? Hitler

must have thought so, for in his cautious reply he suggested that bilateral

discussions precede general talks and invited the British to come to Berlin for

preliminary discussions. Sir John Simon readily agreed, and a meeting was

arranged for March 6 in Berlin. Two days before that date the publication of a

British White Paper caused a great deal of simulated anger in the

Wilhelmstrasse. Actually the White Paper struck most foreign observers in

Berlin as a sober observation on Germany’s clandestine rearmament, the

acceleration of which had moved Britain to a modest increase of her own. But

Hitler was reported furious with it. Neurath informed Simon on the very eve of

his departure for Berlin that the Fuehrer had a “cold” and the talks would have to

be postponed.

Whether he had a cold or not, Hitler certainly had a brain storm. It would be

embarrassing to have Simon and Eden around if he transformed it into a bold

act. He thought he had found a pretext for dealing the Versailles Diktat a mortal

blow. The French government had just introduced a bill extending military

service from eighteen months to two years because of the shortage of youth born

during the First World War. On March 10, Hitler sent up a trial balloon to test

the mettle of the Allies. The accommodating Ward Price was called in and given

an interview with Goering, who told him officially what all the world knew, that

Germany had a military Air Force. Hitler confidently awaited the reaction in

London to this unilateral abrogation of Versailles. It was just what he expected.

Sir John Simon told the Commons that he still counted on going to Berlin.

A SATURDAY SURPRISE

On Saturday, March 16—most of Hitler’s surprises were reserved for

Saturdays—the Chancellor decreed a law establishing universal military service

and providing for a peacetime army of twelve corps and thirty-six divisions—

roughly half a million men. That was the end of the military restrictions of

Versailles—unless France and Britain took action. As Hitler had expected, they

protested but they did not act. Indeed, the British government hastened to ask

whether Hitler would still receive its Foreign Secretary—a query which the

dictator graciously answered in the affirmative.

Sunday, March 17, was a day of rejoicing and celebration in Germany. The

shackles of Versailles, symbol of Germany’s defeat and humiliation, had been

torn off. No matter how much a German might dislike Hitler and his gangster

rule, he had to admit that the Fuehrer had accomplished what no republican

government had ever dared attempt. To most Germans the nation’s honor had

been restored. That Sunday was also Heroes’ Memorial Day ( Heldengedenktag).

I went to the ceremony at noon at the State Opera House and there witnessed a

scene which Germany had not seen since 1914. The entire lower floor was a sea

of military uniforms, the faded gray uniforms and spiked helmets of the old

Imperial Army mingling with the attire of the new Army, including the sky-blue

uniforms of the Luftwaffe, which few had seen before. At Hitler’s side was Field

Marshal von Mackensen, the last surviving field marshal of the Kaiser’s Army,

colorfully attired in the uniform of the Death’s-Head Hussars. Strong lights

played on the stage, where young officers stood like marble statues holding

upright the nation’s war flags. Behind them on an enormous curtain hung an

immense silver-and-black Iron Cross. Ostensibly this was a ceremony to honor

Germany’s war dead. It turned out to be a jubilant celebration of the death of

Versailles and the rebirth of the conscript German Army.

The generals, one could see by their faces, were immensely pleased. Like

everyone else they had been taken by surprise, for Hitler, who had spent the

previous days at his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, had not bothered to

apprise them of his thoughts. According to General von Manstein’s later

testimony at Nuremberg, he and his commanding officer, of Wehrkreis III (the

Third Military District) in Berlin, General von Witzleben, first heard of Hitler’s

decision over the radio on March 16. The General Staff would have preferred a

smaller army to begin with.

The General Staff, had it been asked [Manstein testified], would have proposed twenty-one

divisions … The figure of thirty-six divisions was due to a spontaneous decision of Hitler.10

There now took place a series of empty gestures of warning to Hitler by the

other powers. The British, the French and the Italians met at Stresa on April 11,

condemned Germany’s action and reiterated their support of Austria’s

independence and the Locarno Treaty. The Council of the League of Nations at

Geneva also expressed its displeasure at Hitler’s precipitate action and duly

appointed a committee to suggest steps which might impede him the next time.

France, recognizing that Germany would never join an Eastern Locarno, hastily

signed a pact of mutual assistance with Russia, and Moscow made a similar

treaty with Czechoslovakia.

In the headlines this closing of ranks against Germany sounded somewhat

ominous and even impressed a number of men in the German Foreign Office and

in the Army, but apparently not Hitler. After all, he had gotten away with his

gamble. Still, it would not do to rest on his laurels. It was time, he decided, to

pull out the stops again on his love of peace and to see whether the new unity of

the powers arrayed against him might not be undermined and breached after all.

On the evening of May 21* he delivered another “peace” speech to the

Reichstag—perhaps the most eloquent and certainly one of the cleverest and

most misleading of his Reichstag orations this writer, who sat through most of

them, ever heard him make. Hitler was in a relaxed mood and exuded a spirit not

only of confidence but—to the surprise of his listeners—of tolerance and

conciliation. There was no resentment or defiance toward the nations which had

condemned his scrapping of the military clauses of Versailles. Instead there were

assurances that all he wanted was peace and understanding based on justice for

all. He rejected the very idea of war; it was senseless, it was useless, as well as a

horror.

The blood shed on the European continent in the course of the last three hundred

years bears no proportion to the national result of the events. In the end France

has remained France, Germany Germany, Poland Poland, and Italy Italy. What

dynastic egotism, political passion and patriotic blindness have attained in the

way of apparently far-reaching political changes by shedding rivers of blood has,

as regards national feeling, done no more than touched the skin of the nations. It

has not substantially altered their fundamental characters. If these states had

applied merely a fraction of their sacrifices to wiser purposes the success would

certainly have been greater and more permanent.

Germany, Hitler proclaimed, had not the slightest thought of conquering other

peoples.

Our racial theory regards every war for the subjection and domination of an

alien people as a proceeding which sooner or later changes and weakens the

victor internally, and eventually brings about his defeat … As there is no longer

any unoccupied space in Europe, every victory … can at best result in a

quantitative increase in the number of the inhabitants of a country. But if the

nations attach so much importance to that they can achieve it without tears in a

simpler and more natural way—[by] a sound social policy, by increasing the

readiness of a nation to have children.

No! National Socialist Germany wants peace because of its fundamental

convictions. And it wants peace also owing to the realization of the simple

primitive fact that no war would be likely essentially to alter the distress in

Europe … The principal effect of every war is to destroy the flower of the nation

…

Germany needs peace and desires peace!

He kept hammering away at the point. At the end he made thirteen specific

proposals for maintaining the peace which seemed so admirable that they created

a deep and favorable impression not only in Germany but in all of Europe. He

prefaced them with a reminder:

Germany has solemnly recognized and guaranteed France her frontiers as

determined after the Saar plebiscite … We thereby finally renounced all claims

to Alsace-Lorraine, a land for which we have fought two great wars … Without

taking the past into account Germany has concluded a nonaggression pact with

Poland … We shall adhere to it unconditionally…. We recognize Poland as the

home of a great and nationally conscious people.

As for Austria:

Germany neither intends nor wishes to interfere in the internal affairs of

Austria, to annex Austria, or to conclude an Anschluss.

Hitler’s thirteen points were quite comprehensive. Germany could not return to

Geneva until the League divested itself of the Versailles Treaty. When that was

done and full equality of all nations recognized, he implied, Germany would

rejoin the League. Germany, however, would “unconditionally respect” the

nonmilitary clauses of the Versailles Treaty, “including the territorial provisions.

In particular it will uphold and fulfill all obligations arising out of the Locarno

Treaty.” Hitler also pledged Germany to abide by the demilitarization of the

Rhineland. Though willing “at any time” to participate in a system of collective

security, Germany preferred bilateral agreements and was ready to conclude

nonaggression pacts with its neighbor states. It was also prepared to agree to

British and French proposals for supplementing the Locarno Treaty with an air

accord.

As for disarmament, Hitler was ready to go the limit:

The German government is ready to agree to any limitation which leads to

abolition of the heaviest arms, especially suited for aggression, such [as] the

heaviest artillery and the heaviest tanks … Germany declares herself ready to

agree to any limitation whatsoever of the caliber of artillery, battleships, cruisers

and torpedo boats. In like manner, the German government is ready to agree to

the limitation of tonnage for submarines, or to their complete abolition …

In this connection Hitler held out a special bait for Great Britain. He was

willing to limit the new German Navy to 35 per cent of the British naval forces;

that, he added, would still leave the Germans 15 per cent below the French in

naval tonnage. To the objections raised abroad that this would be only the

beginning of German demands, Hitler answered, “For Germany, this demand is

final and abiding.”

A little after ten in the evening, Hitler came to his peroration:

Whoever lights the torch of war in Europe can wish for nothing but chaos. We,

however, live in the firm conviction that in our time will be fulfilled not the

decline but the renaissance of the West. That Germany may make an

imperishable contribution to this great work is our proud hope and our

unshakable belief.11

These were honeyed words of peace, reason and conciliation, and in the

Western democracies of Europe, where the people and their governments

desperately yearned for the continuance of peace on any reasonable basis, on

almost any basis, they were lapped up. The most influential newspaper in the

British Isles, the Times of London, welcomed them with almost hysterical joy.

… The speech turns out to be reasonable, straightforward and comprehensive. No one who

reads it with an impartial mind can doubt that the points of policy laid down by Herr Hitler

may fairly constitute the basis of a complete settlement with Germany—a free, equal and

strong Germany instead of the prostrate Germany upon whom peace was imposed sixteen

years ago …

It is to be hoped that the speech will be taken everywhere as a sincere and well-considered

utterance meaning precisely what it says. 12

This great journal, one of the chief glories of English journalism, would play,

like the Chamberlain government, a dubious role in the disastrous British

appeasement of Hitler. But to this writer, at least, it had even less excuse than the

government, for in its Berlin correspondent, Norman Ebbutt, it had, until he was

expelled on August 16, 1937, a source of information about Hitler’s doings and

purposes that was much more revealing than that provided by other foreign

correspondents or foreign diplomats, including the British. Though much that he

wrote for the Times from Berlin in those days was not published,* as he often

complained to this writer and as was later confirmed, the Times editors must

have read all of his dispatches and have been in the position therefore of

knowing what was really going on in Nazi Germany and how hollow Hitler’s

grandiose promises were.

The British government, no less than the Times, was ready and anxious to

accept Hitler’s proposals as “sincere” and “well-considered”—especially the one

by which Germany would agree to a Navy 35 per cent the size of Britain’s.

Hitler had shrewdly thrown out a hint to Sir John Simon, when the British

Foreign Secretary and Eden made their postponed visit to him at the end of

March, that a naval agreement might easily be worked out between the two

powers which would guarantee English superiority. Now on May 21 he had

made a public and specific offer—a German fleet of only 35 per cent of the

tonnage of the British—and he had added in his speech some especially friendly

words for England. “Germany,” he had said, “has not the intention or the

necessity or the means to participate in any new naval rivalry”—an allusion,

which apparently was not lost on the English, to the days before 1914 when

Tirpitz, enthusiastically backed by Wilhelm II, was building up a high-seas fleet

to match England’s. “The German government,” continued Hitler, “recognizes

the overpowering vital importance, and therewith the justification, of a

dominating protection for the British Empire on the sea … The German

government has the straightforward intention to find and maintain a relationship

with the British people and state which will prevent for all time a repetition of

the only struggle there has been between the two nations.” Hitler had expressed

similar sentiments in Mein Kampf, where he had stressed that one of the Kaiser’s

greatest mistakes had been his enmity toward England and his absurd attempt to

rival the British in naval power.

With incredible naïveté and speed, the British government fell for Hitler’s

bait. Ribbentrop, who had now become Hitler’s messenger boy for foreign

errands, was invited to come to London in June for naval talks. Vain and

tactless, he told the British that Hitler’s offer was not subject to negotiation; they

must take it or leave it. The British took it. Without consulting their allies of the

Stresa front, France and Italy, which were also naval powers and much

concerned over German rearmament and German flouting of the military clauses

of Versailles, and without even informing the League of Nations, which was

supposed to uphold the 1919 peace treaties, they proceeded, for what they

thought was a private advantage, to wipe out the naval restrictions of Versailles.

For it was obvious to the most simple mind in Berlin that by agreeing to

Germany’s building a navy a third as large as the British, the London

government was giving Hitler free rein to build up a navy as fast as was

physically possible—one that would tax the capacity of his shipyards and steel

mills for at least ten years. It was thus not a limitation on German rearmament

but an encouragement to expand it, in the naval arm, as rapidly as Germany

could find the means to do so.

To add insult to the injury already done France, the British government, in

fulfillment of a promise to Hitler, refused to tell her closest ally what kind of

ships and how many Great Britain had agreed that Germany should build, except

that the German submarine tonnage—the building of submarines in Germany

was specifically forbidden by Versailles—would be 60 per cent of Britain’s and,

if exceptional circumstances arose, might be 100 per cent.13 Actually the Anglo–

German agreement authorized the Germans to build five battleships, whose

tonnage and armament would be greater than that of anything the British had

afloat, though the official figures were faked to deceive London—twenty-one

cruisers and sixty-four destroyers. Not all of them were built or completed by the

outbreak of the war, but enough of them, with the U-boats, were ready to cause

Britain disastrous losses in the first years of the second war.

Mussolini took due notice of the “perfidy of Albion.” Two could play at the

game of appeasing Hitler. Moreover, England’s cynical attitude of disregarding

the Versailles Treaty encouraged him in the belief that London might not take

too seriously the flouting of the Covenant of the League of Nations. On October

3, 1935, in defiance of the Covenant, his armies invaded the ancient mountain

kingdom of Abyssinia. The League, led by Great Britain and supported

halfheartedly by France, which saw that Germany was the greater danger in the

long run, promptly voted sanctions. But they were only partial sanctions, timidly

enforced. They did not prevent Mussolini from conquering Ethiopia but they did

destroy the friendship of Fascist Italy with Britain and France and bring an end

to the Stresa front against Nazi Germany.

Who stood the most to gain from this chain of events but Adolf Hitler? On

October 4, the day after the Italian invasion began, I spent the day in the

Wilhelmstrasse talking with a number of party and government officials. A diary

note that evening summed up how quickly and well the Germans had sized up

the situation:

The Wilhelmstrasse is delighted. Either Mussolini will stumble and get himself

so heavily involved in Africa that he will be greatly weakened in Europe,

whereupon Hitler can seize Austria, hitherto protected by the Duce; or he will

win, defying France and Britain, and thereupon be ripe for a tie-up with Hitler

against the Western democracies. Either way Hitler wins. 14

This would soon be demonstrated.

A COUP IN THE RHINELAND

In his Reichstag “peace” speech of May 21, 1935, which, as we have seen,

had so impressed the world and, above all, Great Britain, Hitler had mentioned

that “an element of legal insecurity” had been brought into the Locarno Pact as a

result of the mutual-assistance pact which had been signed between Russia and

France on March 2 in Paris and on March 14 in Moscow, but which up to the

end of the year had not been ratified by the French Parliament. The German

Foreign Office called this “element” to the attention of Paris in a formal note to

the French government.

On November 21, François-Poncet, the French ambassador, had a talk with

Hitler in which the Fuehrer launched “into a long tirade” against the Franco-

Soviet Pact. François-Poncet reported to Paris he was convinced that Hitler

intended to use the pact as an excuse to occupy the demilitarized zone of the

Rhineland. “Hitler’s sole hesitancy,” he added, “is now concerned with the

appropriate moment to act. ”15

François-Poncet, probably the best-informed ambassador in Berlin, knew what

he was talking about, though he was undoubtedly unaware that as early as the

previous spring, on May 2, nineteen days before Hitler’s assurances in the

Reichstag that he would respect the Locarno Pact and the territorial clauses of

Versailles, General von Blomberg had issued his first directive to the three

armed services to prepare plans for the reoccupation of the demilitarized

Rhineland. The code name Schulung was given to the operation, it was to be

“executed by a surprise blow at lightning speed” and its planning was to be so

secret that “only the very smallest number of officers should be informed.” In

fact, in the interests of secrecy, Blomberg wrote out the order in handwriting.16

On June 16 further discussion of the move into the Rhineland took place at the

tenth meeting of the Working Committee of the Reich Defense Council, during

which a Colonel Alfred Jodl, who had just become head of the Home Defense

Department, reported on the plans and emphasized the need for the strictest

secrecy. Nothing should be committed to writing that was not absolutely

necessary, he warned, and he added that “without exception such material must

be kept in safes.” 17

All through the winter of 1935–36 Hitler bided his time. France and Britain,

he could not help but note, were preoccupied with stopping Italy’s aggression in

Abyssinia, but Mussolini seemed to be getting by with it. Despite its much-

publicized sanctions, the League of Nations was proving itself impotent to halt a

determined aggressor. In Paris the French Parliament seemed to be in no hurry to

ratify the pact with the Soviet Union; the growing sentiment in the Right was all

against it. Apparently Hitler thought there was a good chance of the French

Chamber or Senate rejecting the alliance with Moscow. In that case he would

have to look for another excuse for Schulung. But the pact came before the

Chamber on February 11 and it was approved on the twenty-seventh by a vote of

353 to 164. Two days later, on March 1, Hitler reached his decision, somewhat

to the consternation of the generals, most of whom were convinced that the

French would make mincemeat of the small German forces which had been

gathered for the move into the Rhineland. Nevertheless, on the next day, March

2, 1936, in obedience to his master’s instructions, Blomberg issued formal orders

for the occupation of the Rhineland. It was, he told the senior commanders of the

armed forces, to be a “surprise move.” Blomberg expected it to be a “peaceful

operation.” If it turned out that it was not—that is, that the French would fight—

the Commander in Chief reserved the “right to decide on any military

countermeasures. ”18 Actually, as I learned six days later and as would be

confirmed from the testimony of the generals at Nuremberg, Blomberg already

had in mind what those countermeasures would be: a hasty retreat back over the

Rhine!

But the French, their nation already paralyzed by internal strife and the people

sinking into defeatism, did not know this when a small token force of German

troops paraded across the Rhine bridges at dawn on March 7 and entered the

demilitarized zone.* At 10 A.M. Neurath, the compliant Foreign Minister, called

in the ambassadors of France, Britain and Italy, apprised them of the news from

the Rhineland and handed them a formal note denouncing the Locarno Treaty,

which Hitler had just broken—and proposing new plans for peace! “Hitler struck

his adversary in the face,” François-Poncet wryly observed, “and as he did so

declared: ‘I bring you proposals for peace!’” 20

Indeed, two hours later the Fuehrer was standing at the rostrum of the

Reichstag before a delirious audience, expounding on his desire for peace and

his latest ideas of how to maintain it. I went over to the Kroll Opera House to see

the spectacle, which I shall never forget, for it was both fascinating and

gruesome. After a long harangue about the evils of Versailles and the threat of

Bolshevism, Hitler calmly announced that France’s pact with Russia had

invalidated the Locarno Treaty, which, unlike that of Versailles, Germany had

freely signed. The scene that followed I noted down in my diary that evening.

“Germany no longer feels bound by the Locarno Treaty [Hitler said]. In the

interest of the primitive rights of its people to the security of their frontier and

the safeguarding of their defense, the German government has re-established, as

from today, the absolute and unrestricted sovereignty of the Reich in the

demilitarized zone!”

Now the six hundred deputies, personal appointees all of Hitler, little men

with big bodies and bulging necks and cropped hair and pouched bellies and

brown uniforms and heavy boots … leap to their feet like automatons, their right

arms upstretched in the Nazi salute, and scream “Heils” … Hitler raises his hand

for silence…. He says in a deep, resonant voice, “Men of the German

Reichstag!” The silence is utter.

“In this historic hour, when, in the Reich’s western provinces, German troops

are at this minute marching into their future peacetime garrisons, we all unite in

two sacred vows.”

He can go no further. It is news to this “parliamentary” mob that German

soldiers are already on the move into the Rhineland. All the militarism in their

German blood surges to their heads. They spring, yelling and crying, to their feet

… Their hands are raised in slavish salute, their faces now contorted with

hysteria, their mouths wide open, shouting, shouting, their eyes, burning with

fanaticism, glued on the new god, the Messiah. The Messiah plays his role

superbly. His head lowered, as if in all humbleness, he waits patiently for

silence. Then his voice, still low, but choking with emotion, utters the two vows:

“First, we swear to yield to no force whatever in restoration of the honor of

our people … Secondly, we pledge that now, more than ever, we shall strive for

an understanding between the European peoples, especially for one with our

Western neighbor nations … We have no territorial demands to make in Europe!

… Germany will never break the peace!”

It was a long time before the cheering stopped … A few generals made their

way out. Behind their smiles, however, you could not help detecting a

nervousness … I ran into General von Blomberg … His face was white, his

cheeks twitching.21

And with reason. The Minister of Defense, who five days before had issued in

his own handwriting the order to march, was losing his nerve. The next day I

learned that he had given orders for his troops to withdraw across the Rhine

should the French move to oppose them. But the French never made the slightest

move. François-Poncet says that after his warning of the previous November, the

French High Command had asked the government what it would do in case the

ambassador proved right. The answer was, he says, that the government would

take the matter up with the League of Nations. 22 Actually, when the blow

occurred, * it was the French government which wanted to act and the French

General Staff which held back. “General Gamelin,” François-Poncet declares,

“advised that a war operation, however limited, entailed unpredictable risks and

could not be undertaken without decreeing a general mobilization.” 23 The most

General Gamelin, the Chief of the General Staff, would do—and did—was

concentrate thirteen divisions near the German frontier, but merely to reinforce

the Maginot Line. Even this was enough to throw a scare into the German High

Command. Blomberg, backed by Jodl and most of the officers at the top, wanted

to pull back the three battalions that had crossed the Rhine. As Jodl testified at

Nuremberg, “Considering the situation we were in, the French covering army

could have blown us to pieces.” 24

It could have—and had it, that almost certainly would have been the end of

Hitler, after which history might have taken quite a different and brighter turn

than it did, for the dictator could never have survived such a fiasco. Hitler

himself admitted as much. “A retreat on our part,” he conceded later, “would

have spelled collapse.” 25 It was Hitler’s iron nerves alone, which now, as during

many crises that lay ahead, saved the situation and, confounding the reluctant

generals, brought success. But it was no easy moment for him.

“The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland,” Paul Schmidt, his

interpreter, heard him later say, “were the most nerve-racking in my life. If the

French had then marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw

with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would

have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.” 26

Confident that the French would not march, he bluntly turned down all

suggestions for pulling back by the wavering High Command. General Beck,

Chief of the General Staff, wanted the Fuehrer to at least soften the blow by

proclaiming that he would not fortify the area west of the Rhine—a suggestion,

Jodl later testified, “which the Fuehrer turned down very bluntly”—for obvious

reasons, as we shall see.27 Blomberg’s proposal to withdraw, Hitler later told

General von Rundstedt, was nothing less than an act of cowardice.28

“What would have happened,” Hitler exclaimed in a bull session with his

cronies at headquarters on the evening of March 27, 1942, in recalling the

Rhineland coup, “if anybody other than myself had been at the head of the

Reich! Anyone you care to mention would have lost his nerve. I was obliged to

lie, and what saved us was my unshakable obstinacy and my amazing

aplomb.” 29

It was true, but it must also be recorded that he was aided not only by the

hesitations of the French but by the supineness of their British allies. The French

Foreign Minister, Pierre Etienne Flandin, flew to London on March 11 and

begged the British government to back France in a military counteraction in the

Rhineland. His pleas were unavailing. Britain would not risk war even though

Allied superiority over the Germans was overwhelming. As Lord Lothian

remarked, “The Germans, after all, are only going into their own back garden.”

Even before the French arrived in London, Anthony Eden, who had become

Foreign Secretary in the previous December, had told the House of Commons,

on March 9, “Occupation of the Rhineland by the Reichswehr deals a heavy

blow to the principle of the sanctity of treaties. Fortunately,” he added, “we have

no reason to suppose that Germany’s present action threatens hostilities. ”30

And yet France was entitled, under the terms of the Locarno Treaty, to take

military action against the presence of German troops in the demilitarized zone,

and Britain was obligated by that treaty to back her with her own armed forces.

The abortive London conversations were a confirmation to Hitler that he had

gotten away with his latest gamble.

The British not only shied away from the risk of war but once again they took

seriously the latest installment of Hitler’s “peace” proposals. In the notes handed

to the three ambassadors on March 7 and in his speech to the Reichstag, Hitler

had offered to sign a twenty-five-year nonaggression pact with Belgium and

France, to be guaranteed by Britain and Italy; to conclude similar nonaggression

pacts with Germany’s neighbors on the east; to agree to the demilitarization of

both sides of the Franco–German frontier; and, finally, to return to the League of

Nations. Hitler’s sincerity might have been judged by his proposal to

demilitarize both sides of the Franco–German border, since it would have forced

France to scrap her Maginot Line, her last protection against a surprise German

attack.

In London, the esteemed Times, while deploring Hitler’s precipitate action in

invading the Rhineland, headed its leading editorial “A Chance to Rebuild.”

In retrospect, it is easy to see that Hitler’s successful gamble in the Rhineland

brought him a victory more staggering and more fatal in its immense

consequences than could be comprehended at the time. At home it fortified his

popularity* and his power, raising them to heights which no German ruler of the

past had ever enjoyed. It assured his ascendancy over his generals, who had

hesitated and weakened at a moment of crisis when he had held firm. It taught

them that in foreign politics and even in military affairs his judgment was

superior to theirs. They had feared that the French would fight; he knew better.

And finally, and above all, the Rhineland occupation, small as it was as a

military operation, opened the way, as only Hitler (and Churchill, alone, in

England) seemed to realize, to vast new opportunities in a Europe which was not

only shaken but whose strategic situation was irrevocably changed by the

parading of three German battalions across the Rhine bridges.

Conversely, it is equally easy to see, in retrospect, that France’s failure to

repel the Wehrmacht battalions and Britain’s failure to back her in what would

have been nothing more than a police action was a disaster for the West from

which sprang all the later ones of even greater magnitude. In March 1936 the

two Western democracies were given their last chance to halt, without the risk of

a serious war, the rise of a militarized, aggressive, totalitarian Germany and, in

fact—as we have seen Hitler admitting—bring the Nazi dictator and his regime

tumbling down. They let the chance slip by.

For France, it was the beginning of the end. Her allies in the East, Russia,

Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Yugoslavia, suddenly were faced with the

fact that France would not fight against German aggression to preserve the

security system which the French government itself had taken the lead in so

laboriously building up. But more than that. These Eastern allies began to realize

that even if France were not so supine, she would soon not be able to lend them

much assistance because of Germany’s feverish construction of a West Wall

behind the Franco–German border. The erection of this fortress line, they saw,

would quickly change the strategic map of Europe, to their detriment. They

could scarcely expect a France which did not dare, with her one hundred

divisions, to repel three German battalions, to bleed her young manhood against

impregnable German fortifications while the Wehrmacht attacked in the East.

But even if the unexpected took place, it would be futile. Henceforth the French

could tie down in the West only a small part of the growing German Army. The

rest would be free for operations against Germany’s Eastern neighbors.

The value of the Rhineland fortifications to Hitler’s strategy was conveyed to

William C. Bullitt, the American ambassador to France, when he called on the

German Foreign Minister in Berlin on May 18, 1936.

Von Neurath said [Bullitt reported to the State Department] that it was the

policy of the German Government to do nothing active in foreign affairs until

“the Rhineland had been digested.” He explained that he meant that until the

German fortifications had been constructed on the French and Belgian frontiers,

the German Government would do everything possible to prevent rather than

encourage an outbreak by the Nazis in Austria and would pursue a quiet line

with regard to Czechoslovakia. “As soon as our fortifications are constructed and

the countries of Central Europe realize that France cannot enter German territory

at will, all those countries will begin to feel very differently about their foreign

policies and a new constellation will develop,” he said. 31

This development now began.

“As I stood at the grave of my predecessor [the murdered Dollfuss],” Dr.

Schuschnigg related in his memoirs, “I knew that in order to save Austrian

independence I had to embark on a course of appeasement … Everything had to

be avoided which could give Germany a pretext for intervention and everything

had to be done to secure in some way Hitler’s toleration of the status quo.” 32

The new and youthful Austrian Chancellor had been encouraged by Hitler’s

public declaration to the Reichstag on May 21, 1935, that “Germany neither

intends nor wishes to interfere in the internal affairs of Austria, to annex Austria

or to conclude an Anschluss”; and he had been reassured by the reiteration at

Stresa by Italy, France and Britain of their determination to help safeguard

Austria’s independence. Then Mussolini, Austria’s principal protector since

1933, had become bogged down in Abyssinia and had broken with France and

Britain. When the Germans marched into the Rhineland and began to fortify it,

Dr. Schuschnigg realized that some appeasement of Hitler was due. He began

negotiating a new treaty with the wily German minister in Vienna, Papen, who,

though the Nazis had come within an ace of murdering him during the June

purge, had nevertheless gone to work on his arrival in Austria in the late summer

of 1934, after the Nazi assassination of Dollfuss, to undermine Austria’s

independence and capture Hitler’s native land for the Leader. “National

Socialism must and will overpower the new Austrian ideology,” he had written

Hitler on July 27, 1935, in giving an account of his first year of service in

Vienna. 33

In its published text the Austro–German agreement signed on July 11, 1936,

seemed to show an unusual amount of generosity and tolerance on the part of

Hitler. Germany reaffirmed its recognition of Austria’s sovereignty and the

promise not to interfere in the internal affairs of its neighbor. In return, Austria

pledged that in its foreign policy it would always act on the principle that it

acknowledged itself to be “a German state.”

But there were secret clauses in the treaty,34 and in them Schuschnigg made

concessions which would lead him—and his little country—to their doom. He

agreed secretly to amnesty Nazi political prisoners in Austria and to appoint

representatives of the “so-called ‘National Opposition’”—a euphemism for

Nazis or Nazi sympathizers—to positions of “political responsibility.” This was

equivalent to allowing Hitler to set up a Trojan horse in Austria. Into it would

crawl shortly Seyss-Inquart, a Viennese lawyer, who will cut a certain figure in

the subsequent narrative.

Although Papen had obtained Hitler’s approval of the text of the treaty,

making a personal visit to Berlin for the purpose early in July, the Fuehrer was

furious with his envoy when the latter telephoned him on July 16 to notify him

that the agreement had been signed.

Hitler’s reaction astonished me [Papen later wrote]. Instead of expressing his gratification,

he broke into a flood of abuse. I had misled him, he said, into making exaggerated concessions

… The whole thing was a trap. 35

As it turned out, it was a trap for Schuschnigg, not for Hitler.

The signing of the Austro–German treaty was a sign that Mussolini had lost

his grip on Austria. It might have been expected that this would worsen the

relations between the two fascist dictators. But just the opposite occurred—due

to events which now, in 1936, played into Hitler’s hands.

On May 2, 1936, Italian forces entered the Abyssinian capital, Addis Ababa,

and on July 4 the League of Nations formally capitulated and called off its

sanctions against Italy. Two weeks later, on July 16, Franco staged a military

revolt in Spain and civil war broke out.

Hitler, as was his custom at that time of year, was taking in the opera at the

Wagner Festival at Bayreuth. On the night of July 22, after he had returned from

the theater, a German businessman from Morocco, accompanied by the local

Nazi leader, arrived in Bayreuth with an urgent letter from Franco. The rebel

leader needed planes and other assistance. Hitler immediately summoned

Goering and General von Blomberg, who happened to be in Bayreuth, and that

very evening the decision was taken to give support to the Spanish rebellion. 36

Though German aid to Franco never equaled that given by Italy, which

dispatched between sixty and seventy thousand troops as well as vast supplies of

arms and planes, it was considerable. The Germans estimated later that they

spent half a billion marks on the venture37 besides furnishing planes, tanks,

technicians and the Condor Legion, an Air Force unit which distinguished itself

by the obliteration of the Spanish town of Guernica and its civilian inhabitants.

Relative to Germany’s own massive rearmament it was not much, but it paid

handsome dividends to Hitler.

It gave France a third unfriendly fascist power on its borders. It exacerbated

the internal strife in France between Right and Left and thus weakened

Germany’s principal rival in the West. Above all it rendered impossible a

rapprochement of Britain and France with Italy, which the Paris and London

governments had hoped for after the termination of the Abyssinian War, and

thus drove Mussolini into the arms of Hitler.

From the very beginning the Fuehrer’s Spanish policy was shrewd, calculated

and far-seeing. A perusal of the captured German documents makes plain that

one of Hitler’s purposes was to prolong the Spanish Civil War in order to keep

the Western democracies and Italy at loggerheads and draw Mussolini toward

him. * As early as December 1936, Ulrich von Hassell, the German ambassador

in Rome, who had not yet achieved that recognition of Nazi aims and practices

which he later obtained and which would cost him his life, was reporting to the

Wilhelmstrasse:

The role played by the Spanish conflict as regards Italy’s relations with France

and England could be similar to that of the Abyssinian conflict, bringing out

clearly the actual, opposing interests of the powers and thus preventing Italy

from being drawn into the net of the Western powers and used for their

machinations. The struggle for dominant political influence in Spain lays bare

the natural opposition between Italy and France; at the same time the position of

Italy as a power in the western Mediterranean comes into competition with that

of Britain. All the more clearly will Italy recognize the advisability of

confronting the Western powers shoulder to shoulder with Germany.39

It was these circumstances which gave birth to the Rome–Berlin Axis. On

October 24, after conferences with Neurath in Berlin, Count Galeazzo Ciano,

Mussolini’s son-in-law and Foreign Minister, made the first of his many

pilgrimages to Berchtesgaden. He found the German dictator in a friendly and

expansive mood. Mussolini, Hitler declared, was “the leading statesman in the

world, to whom none may even remotely compare himself.” Together, Italy and

Germany could conquer not only “Bolshevism” but the West. Including

England! The British, Hitler thought, might eventually seek an accommodation

with a united Italy and Germany. If not, the two powers, acting together, could

easily dispose of her. “German and Italian rearmament,” Hitler reminded Ciano,

“is proceeding much more rapidly than rearmament can in England … In three

years Germany will be ready …”40

The date is interesting. Three years hence would be the fall of 1939.

In Berlin on October 21, Ciano and Neurath had signed a secret protocol

which outlined a common policy for Germany and Italy in foreign affairs. In a

speech at Milan a few days later (November 1) Mussolini publicly referred to it

without divulging the contents, as an agreement which constituted an “Axis”—

around which the other European powers “may work together.” It would become

a famous—and, for the Duce, a fatal—word.

With Mussolini in the bag, Hitler turned his attentions elsewhere. In August

1936 he had appointed Ribbentrop as German ambassador in London in an effort

to explore the possibility of a settlement with England—on his own terms.

Incompetent and lazy, vain as a peacock, arrogant and without humor,

Ribbentrop was the worst possible choice for such a post, as Goering realized.

“When I criticized Ribbentrop’s qualifications to handle British problems,” he

later declared, “the Fuehrer pointed out to me that Ribbentrop knew ‘Lord So

and So’ and ‘Minister So and So.’ To which I replied: ‘Yes, but the difficulty is

that they know Ribbentrop.’”41

It is true that Ribbentrop, unattractive a figure though he was, was not without

influential friends in London. Mrs. Simpson, the friend of the King, was believed

in Berlin to be one of these. But Ribbentrop’s initial efforts in his new post were

discouraging and in November he flew back to Berlin to conclude some non-

British business he had been dabbling in. On November 25 he signed the Anti-

Comintern Pact with Japan, in which, he told the correspondents (of whom this

writer was one) without batting an eye, Germany and Japan had joined together

to defend Western civilization. On the surface this pact seemed to be nothing

more than a propaganda trick by which Germany and Japan could win world

support by exploiting the universal dislike for Communism and the general

distrust of the Comintern. But in this treaty too there was a secret protocol,

specifically directed against Russia. In case of an unprovoked attack by the

Soviet Union against Germany or Japan, the two nations agreed to consult on

what measures to take “to safeguard their common interests” and also to “take

no measures which would tend to ease the situation of the Soviet Union.” It was

also agreed that neither nation would make any political treaties with Russia

contrary to the spirit of the agreement without mutual consent. 42

It would not be very long before Germany broke the agreement and accused

Japan—unjustifiably—of not observing it. But the pact did serve a certain

propaganda purpose among the world’s gullible and it brought together for the

first time the three have-not and aggressor nations. Italy signed it the following

year.

On January 30, 1937, Hitler addressed the Reichstag, proclaiming “the

withdrawal of the German signature” from the Versailles Treaty—an empty but

typical gesture, since the treaty was by now dead as a doornail—and reviewing

with pride the record of his four years in office. He could be pardoned for his

pride, for it was an impressive record in both domestic and foreign affairs. He

had, as we have seen, abolished unemployment, created a boom in business,

built up a powerful Army, Navy and Air Force, provided them with considerable

armaments and the promise of more on a massive scale. He had singlehandedly

broken the fetters of Versailles and bluffed his way into occupying the

Rhineland. Completely isolated at first, he had found a loyal ally in Mussolini

and another in Franco, and he had detached Poland from France. Most important

of all, perhaps, he had released the dynamic energy of the German people,

reawakening their confidence in the nation and their sense of its mission as a

great and expanding world power.

Everyone could see the contrast between this thriving, martial, boldly led new

Germany and the decadent democracies in the West, whose confusions and

vacillations seemed to increase with each new month of the calendar. Though

they were alarmed, Britain and France had not lifted a finger to prevent Hitler

from violating the peace treaty by rearming Germany and by reoccupying the

Rhineland; they had been unable to stop Mussolini in Abyssinia. And now, as

the year 1937 began, they were cutting a sorry figure by their futile gestures to

prevent Germany and Italy from determining the outcome of the Spanish Civil

War. Everyone knew what Italy and Germany were doing in Spain to assure

Franco’s victory. Yet the governments of London and Paris continued for years

to engage in empty diplomatic negotiations with Berlin and Rome to assure

“nonintervention” in Spain. It was a sport which seems to have amused the

German dictator and which certainly increased his contempt for the stumbling

political leaders of France and Britain—“little worms,” he would shortly call

them on a historic occasion when he again humbled the two Western

democracies with the greatest of ease.

Neither Great Britain and France, their governments and their peoples, nor the

majority of the German people seemed to realize as 1937 began that almost all

that Hitler had done in his first four years was a preparation for war. This writer

can testify from personal observation that right up to September 1, 1939, the

German people were convinced that Hitler would get what he wanted—and what

they wanted—without recourse to war. But among the elite who were running

Germany, or serving it in the key positions, there could have been no doubt what

Hitler’s objective was. As the four-year “trial” period of Nazi rule, as Hitler

called it, approached an end, Goering, who in September 1936 had been put in

charge of the Four-Year Plan, bluntly stated what was coming in a secret speech

to industrialists and high officials in Berlin.

The battle we are now approaching [he said] demands a colossal measure of production

capacity. No limit on rearmament can be visualized. The only alternatives are victory or

destruction … We live in a time when the final battle is in sight. We are already on the

threshold of mobilization and we are already at war. All that is lacking is the actual

shooting.43

Goering’s warning was given on December 17, 1936. Within eleven months,

as we shall shortly see, Hitler made his fateful and inalterable decision to go to

war.

1937: “NO SURPRISES”

In his address to the robots of the Reichstag on January 30, 1937, Hitler

proclaimed, “The time of so-called surprises has been ended.”

And in truth, there were no weekend surprises during 1937.* The year for

Germany was one of consolidation and further preparation for the objectives

which in November the Fuehrer would at last lay down to a handful of his

highest officers. It was a year devoted to forging armaments, training troops,

trying out the new Air Force in Spain, † developing ersatz gasoline and rubber,

cementing the Rome–Berlin Axis and watching for further weak spots in Paris,

London and Vienna.

All through the first months of 1937, Hitler sent important emissaries to Rome

to cultivate Mussolini. The Germans were somewhat uneasy over Italy’s

flirtation with Britain (on January 2 Ciano had signed a “gentleman’s

agreement” with the British government in which the two countries recognized

each other’s vital interests in the Mediterranean) and they realized that the

question of Austria was still a touchy subject in Rome. When Goering saw the

Duce on January 15 and bluntly spoke of the inevitability of the Anschluss with

Austria, the excitable Italian dictator, according to the German interpreter, Paul

Schmidt, shook his head violently, and Ambassador von Hassell reported to

Berlin that Goering’s statement on Austria “had met with a cool reception.” In

June Neurath hastened to assure the Duce that Germany would abide by its July

11 pact with Austria. Only in the case of an attempted restoration of the

Hapsburgs would the Germans take stern action.

Thus placated on Austria and still smarting from the opposition of France and

Britain to almost all of his ambitions—in Ethiopia, in Spain, in the

Mediterranean—Mussolini accepted an invitation from Hitler to visit Germany,

and on September 25, 1937, outfitted in a new uniform created especially for the

occasion, he crossed the Alps into the Third Reich. Feted and flattered as a

conquering hero by Hitler and his aides, Mussolini could not then know how

fateful a journey this was, the first of many to Hitler’s side which were to lead to

a progressive weakening of his own position and finally to a disastrous end.

Hitler’s purpose was not to engage in further diplomatic conversations with his

guest but to impress him with Germany’s strength and thus play on Mussolini’s

obsession to cast his lot with the winning side. The Duce was rushed from one

side of Germany to the other: to parades of the S.S. and the troops, to Army

maneuvers in Mecklenburg, to the roaring armament factories in the Ruhr.

His visit was climaxed by a celebration in Berlin on September 28 which

visibly impressed him. A gigantic crowd of one million persons was gathered on

the Maifeld to hear the two fascist dictators speak their pieces. Mussolini,

orating in German, was carried away by the deafening applause—and by Hitler’s

flattering words. The Duce, said the Fuehrer, was “one of those lonely men of

the ages on whom history is not tested, but who themselves are the makers of

history.” I remember that a severe thunderstorm broke over the field before

Mussolini had finished his oration and that in the confusion of the scattering

mob the S.S. security arrangements broke down and the proud Duce, drenched to

the skin and sorely put, was forced to make his way back to his headquarters

alone and as best he could. However, this untoward experience did not dampen

Mussolini’s enthusiasm to be a partner of this new, powerful Germany, and the

next day, after reviewing a military parade of Army, Navy and Air Force

detachments, he returned to Rome convinced that his future lay at the side of

Hitler.

It was not surprising, then, that a month later when Ribbentrop journeyed to

Rome to obtain Mussolini’s signature for the Anti-Comintern Pact, a ceremony

held on November 6, he was told by the Duce of Italy’s declining interest in the

independence of Austria. “Let events [in Austria] take their natural course,”

Mussolini said. This was the go-ahead for which Hitler had been waiting.

Another ruler became impressed by Nazi Germany’s growing power. When

Hitler broke the Locarno Treaty and, in occupying the Rhineland, placed

German troops on the Belgian border, King Leopold withdrew his country from

the Locarno Pact and from its alliance with Britain and France and proclaimed

that henceforth Belgium would follow a strict course of neutrality. This was a

serious blow to the collective defense of the West, but in April 1937 Britain and

France accepted it—an action for which they, as well as Belgium, would soon

pay dearly.

At the end of May the Wilhelmstrasse had watched with interest the

retirement of Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister of Great Britain and the

accession of Neville Chamberlain to that post. The Germans were pleased to

hear that the new British Prime Minister would take a more active part in foreign

affairs than had his predecessor and that he was determined to reach, if possible,

an understanding with Nazi Germany. What sort of understanding would be

acceptable to Hitler was outlined in a secret memorandum of November 10,

written by Baron von Weizsaecker, then head of the Political Department of the

German Foreign Office.

From England we want colonies and freedom of action in the East … The British need for

tranquillity is great. It would be profitable to find out what England would be willing to pay

for such tranquillity.45

An occasion for finding out what England would pay arose in November when

Lord Halifax, with Mr. Chamberlain’s enthusiastic approval, made the

pilgrimage to Berchtesgaden to see Hitler. On November 19 they held a long

conversation, and in the lengthy secret German memorandum on it drawn up by

the German Foreign Office46 three points emerge: Chamberlain was most

anxious for a settlement with Germany and proposed talks between the two

countries on a cabinet level; Britain wanted a general European settlement, in

return for which she was prepared to make concessions to Hitler as regards

colonies and Eastern Europe; Hitler was not greatly interested at the moment in

an Anglo–German accord.

In view of the rather negative outcome of the talk, it was surprising to the

Germans that the British seemed to be encouraged by it. * It would have been a

much greater surprise to the British government had it known of a highly secret

meeting which Hitler had held in Berlin with his military chiefs and his Foreign

Minister exactly fourteen days before his conversation with Lord Halifax.

THE FATEFUL DECISION OF NOVEMBER 5, 1937

An indication of things to come and of the preparations that must be made to

meet them had been given the commanders in chief of the three armed forces on

June 24, 1937, by Field Marshal von Blomberg in a directive marked “Top

Secret,” of which only four copies were made. 47 “The general political

situation,” the Minister of War and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces

informed the three service chiefs, “justifies the supposition that Germany need

not consider an attack from any side.” Neither the Western Powers nor Russia,

he said, had any desire for war, nor were they prepared for it.

“Nevertheless,” the directive continued, “the politically fluid world situation,

which does not preclude surprising incidents, demands constant preparedness for

war on the part of the German armed forces … to make possible the military

exploitation of politically favorable opportunities should they occur.

Preparations of the armed forces for a possible war in the mobilization period

1937–38 must be made with this in mind.”

What possible war, since Germany need not fear an attack “from any side”?

Blomberg was quite specific. There were two eventualities for war ( Kriegsfalle)

“for which plans are being drafted”:

I. War on two fronts with the main struggle in the West. (Strategic Concentration “Rot. ”)

II. War on two fronts with the main struggle in the Southeast. (Strategic Concentration

“Gruen. ”)

The “assumption” in the first case was that the French might stage a surprise

attack on Germany, in which case the Germans would employ their main forces

in the West. This operation was given the code name “Red” ( Rot. )*

For the second eventuality:

The war in the East can begin with a surprise German operation against

Czechoslovakia in order to parry the imminent attack of a superior enemy

coalition. The necessary conditions to justify such an action politically and in the

eyes of international law must be created beforehand. [Emphasis by Blomberg.]

Czechoslovakia, the directive stressed, must be “eliminated from the very

beginning” and occupied.

There were also three cases where “special preparations” were to be made:

I. Armed intervention against Austria. (Special Case “Otto.”)

II. Warlike complications with Red Spain. (Special Case “Richard.”)

III. England, Poland, Lithuania take part in a war against us. (Extension of

“Red/Green.”)

Case Otto is a code name that will appear with some frequency in these pages.

“Otto” stood for Otto of Hapsburg, the young pretender to the Austrian throne,

then living in Belgium. In Blomberg’s June directive Case Otto was summarized

as follows:

The object of this operation—armed intervention in Austria in the event of her

restoring the Monarchy—will be to compel Austria by armed force to give up a

restoration.

Making use of the domestic political dissension of the Austrian people, there

will be a march to this end in the general direction of Vienna, and any resistance

will be broken.

A note of caution, almost of despair, creeps into this revealing document at the

end. There are no illusions about Britain. “England,” it warns, “will employ all

her available economic and military resources against us.” Should she join

Poland and Lithuania, the directive acknowledges, “our military position would

be worsened to an unbearable, even hopeless, extent. The political leaders will

therefore do everything to keep these countries neutral, above all England.”

Although the directive was signed by Blomberg it is obvious that it came from

his master in the Reich Chancellery. To that nerve center of the Third Reich in

the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin there came on the afternoon of November 5, 1937,

to receive further elucidation from the Fuehrer six individuals: Field Marshal

von Blomberg, Minister of War and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces;

Colonel General Baron von Fritsch, Commander in Chief of the Army; Admiral

Dr. Raeder, Commander in Chief of the Navy; Colonel General Goering,

Commander in Chief of the Air Force; Baron von Neurath, Foreign Minister;

and Colonel Hossbach, military adjutant to the Fuehrer. Hossbach is not a

familiar name in these pages, nor will it become one. But in the darkening hours

of that November day the young colonel played an important role. He took notes

of what Hitler said and five days later wrote them up in a highly secret

memorandum, thus recording for history—his account showed up at Nuremberg

among the captured documents48—the decisive turning point in the life of the

Third Reich.

The meeting began at 4:15 P.M. and lasted until 8:30, with Hitler doing most of

the talking. What he had to say, he began, was the fruit of “thorough deliberation

and the experiences of four and a half years of power.” He explained that he

regarded the remarks he was about to make as of such importance that, in the

event of his death, they should be regarded as his last will and testament.

“The aim of German policy,” he said, “was to make secure and to preserve the

racial community and to enlarge it. It was therefore a question of space

[ Lebensraum].” The Germans, he laid it down, had “the right to a greater living

space than other peoples … Germany’s future was therefore wholly conditional

upon the solving of the need for space. ”*

Where? Not in some far-off African or Asian colonies, but in the heart of

Europe “in immediate proximity to the Reich.” The question for Germany was,

Where could she achieve the greatest gain at the lowest cost?

The history of all ages—the Roman Empire and the British Empire—had

proved that expansion could only be carried out by breaking down resistance and

taking risks; setbacks were inevitable. There had never … been spaces without a

master, and there were none today; the attacker always comes up against a

possessor.

Two “hate-inspired” countries, Hitler declared, stood in Germany’s way:

Britain and France. Both countries were opposed “to any further strengthening of

Germany’s position.” The Fuehrer did not believe that the British Empire was

“unshakable.” In fact, he saw many weaknesses in it, and he proceeded to

elaborate them: the troubles with Ireland and India, the rivalry with Japan in the

Far East and with Italy in the Mediterranean. France’s position, he thought, “was

more favorable than that of Britain … but France was going to be confronted

with internal political difficulties.” Nonetheless, Britain, France and Russia must

be considered as “power factors in our political calculations.”

Therefore:

Germany’s problem could be solved only by means of force, and this was

never without attendant risk … If one accepts as the basis of the following

exposition the resort to force, with its attendant risks, then there remain to be

answered the questions “when” and “where.” There were three cases to be dealt

with:

Case I: Period 1943–45

After this date only a change for the worse, from our point of view, could be

expected. The equipment of the Army, Navy and Airforce … was nearly

completed. Equipment and armament were modern; in further delay there lay the

danger of their obsolescence. In particular, the secrecy of “special weapons”

could not be preserved forever … Our relative strength would decrease in

relation to the rearmament … by the rest of the world … Besides, the world was

expecting our attack and was increasing its countermeasures from year to year. It

was while the rest of the world was increasing its defenses that we were obliged

to take the offensive.

Nobody knew today what the situation would be in the years 1943–45. One

thing only was certain, that we could not wait longer.

If the Fuehrer was still living, it was his unalterable resolve to solve

Germany’s problem of space at the latest by 1943–45. The necessity for action

before 1943–45 would arise in Cases II and III.

Case II

If internal strife in France should develop into such a domestic crisis as to

absorb the French Army completely and render it incapable of use for war

against Germany, then the time for action against the Czechs had come.

Case III

If France is so embroiled by a war with another state that she cannot

“proceed” against Germany….

Our first objective … must be to overthrow Czechoslovakia and Austria

simultaneously in order to remove the threat to our flank in any possible

operation against the West … If the Czechs were overthrown and a common

German–Hungarian frontier achieved, a neutral attitude on the part of Poland

could be the more certainly counted upon in the event of a Franco–German

conflict.

But what would France, Britain, Italy and Russia do? Hitler went into the

answer to that question in considerable detail. He believed “that almost certainly

Britain, and probably France, had already tacitly written off the Czechs.

Difficulties connected with the Empire and the prospect of being once more

entangled in a protracted European war were decisive considerations for Britain

against participation in a war against Germany. Britain’s attitude would certainly

not be without influence on that of France. An attack by France without British

support, and with the prospect of the offensive being brought to a standstill on

our western fortifications, was hardly probable. Nor was a French march through

Belgium and Holland without British support to be expected … It would of

course be necessary to maintain a strong defense on our western frontier during

the prosecution of our attack on the Czechs and Austria.”

Hitler then outlined some of the advantages of the “annexation of

Czechoslovakia and Austria”: better strategic frontiers for Germany, the freeing

of military forces “for other purposes,” acquisition of some twelve million

“Germans,” additional foodstuffs for five to six million Germans in the Reich,

and manpower for twelve new Army divisions.

He had forgotten to mention what Italy and Russia might do, and he now

returned to them. He doubted whether the Soviet Union would intervene, “in

view of Japan’s attitude.” Italy would not object “to the elimination of the

Czechs” but it was still a question as to her attitude if Austria was also taken. It

depended “essentially on whether the Duce were still alive.”

Hitler’s supposition for Case III was that France would become embroiled in a

war with Italy—a conflict that he counted upon. That was the reason, he

explained, for his policy in trying to prolong the Spanish Civil War; it kept Italy

embroiled with France and Britain. He saw a war between them “coming

definitely nearer.” In fact, he said, he was “resolved to take advantage of it,

whenever it happened, even as early as 1938”—which was just two months

away. He was certain that Italy, with a little German help in raw materials, could

stand off Britain and France.

If Germany made use of this war to settle the Czech and Austrian questions, it was to be

assumed that Britain—herself at war with Italy—would decide not to act against Germany.

Without British support, a warlike action by France against Germany was not to be expected.

The time for our attack on the Czechs and Austria must be made dependent on the course

of the Anglo–French–Italian war … This favorable situation … would not occur again … The

descent upon the Czechs would have to be carried out with “lightning speed.”

Thus as evening darkened Berlin on that autumn day of November 5, 1937—

the meeting broke up at eight-fifteen—the die was cast. Hitler had

communicated his irrevocable decision to go to war. To the handful of men who

would have to direct it there could no longer be any doubt. The dictator had said

it all ten years before in Mein Kampf, had said that Germany must have

Lebensraum in the East and must be prepared to use force to obtain it; but then

he had been only an obscure agitator and his book, as Field Marshal von

Blomberg later said, had been regarded by the soldiers—as by so many others—

as “a piece of propaganda” whose “large circulation was due to forced sales.”

But now the Wehrmacht chiefs and the Foreign Minister were confronted with

specific dates for actual aggression against two neighboring countries—an action

which they were sure would bring on a European war. They must be ready by

the following year, 1938, and at the latest by 1943–45.

The realization stunned them. Not, so far as the Hossbach records show,

because they were struck down by the immorality of their Leader’s proposals but

for more practical reasons: Germany was not ready for a big war; to provoke one

now would risk disaster.

On those grounds Blomberg, Fritsch and Neurath dared to speak up and

question the Fuehrer’s pronouncement. Within three months all of the three were

out of office and Hitler, relieved of their opposition, such as it was—and it was

the last he was to suffer in his presence during the Third Reich—set out on the

road of the conqueror to fulfill his destiny. In the beginning, it was an easier road

than he—or anyone else—had foreseen.

* Earlier that day Hitler had promulgated the secret Reich Defense Law, putting Dr. Schacht,

as we have seen, in charge of war economy and thoroughly reorganizing the armed forces. The

Reichswehr of Weimar days became the Wehrmacht. Hitler, as Fuehrer and Chancellor, was

Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces (Wehrmacht) and Blomberg, the Minister of

Defense, was designated as Minister of War with the additional title of Commander in Chief

of the Armed Forces—the only general in Germany who ever held that rank. Each of the three

services had its own commander in chief and its own general staff. The camouflage name of

“Truppenamt” in the Army was dropped for the real thing and its head, General Beck,

assumed the title of Chief of the General Staff. But this title did not denote what it did in the

Kaiser’s time, when the General Staff Chief was actually the Commander in Chief of the

German Army under the warlord.

* “I do my utmost, night after night, to keep out of the paper anything that might hurt their

[German] susceptibilities,” Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of the Times, wrote on May 23, 1937,

to his Geneva correspondent, H. G. Daniels, who had preceded Ebbutt in Berlin. “I can really

think of nothing that has been printed now for many months past to which they could possibly

take exception as unfair comment.” (John Evelyn Wrench, Geoffrey Dawson and Our Times. )

* According to Jodl’s testimony at Nuremberg, only three battalions crossed the Rhine,

making for Aachen, Trier and Saarbruecken, and only one division was employed in the

occupation of the entire territory. Allied intelligence estimates were considerably larger:

35,000 men, or approximately three divisions. Hitler commented later, “The fact was, I had

only four brigades. ”19

* Despite François-Poncet’s warning of the previous fall, Germany’s action apparently came

as a complete surprise to the French and British governments and their general staffs.

* On March 7 Hitler had dissolved the Reichstag and called for a new “election” and a

referendum on his move into the Rhineland. According to the official figures of the voting on

March 29, some 99 per cent of the 45,453,691 registered voters went to the polls, and 98.8 per

cent of them approved Hitler’s action. Foreign correspondents who visited the polling places

found some irregularities—especially, open instead of secret voting—and there was no doubt

that some Germans feared (with justification, as we have seen) that a Nein vote might be

discovered by the Gestapo. Dr. Hugo Eckener told this writer that on his new Zeppelin

Hindenburg, which Goebbels had ordered to cruise over German cities as a publicity stunt, the

Ja vote, which was announced by the Propaganda Minister as forty-two, outnumbered the total

number of persons aboard by two. Nevertheless, this observer, who covered the “election”

from one corner of the Reich to the other, has no doubt that the vote of approval for Hitler’s

coup was overwhelming. And why not? The junking of Versailles and the appearance of

German soldiers marching again into what was, after all, German territory were things that

almost all Germans naturally approved. The “No” vote was given as 540,211.

* More than a year later, on November 5, 1937, Hitler would reiterate his Spanish policy in a

confidential talk with his generals and his Foreign Minister. “A hundred per cent victory for

Franco,” he told them, was “not desirable from the German point of view. Rather we are

interested in a continuance of the war and in keeping up the tension in the Mediterranean.” 38

* Wilhelmstrasse officials used to say jokingly that Hitler pulled his surprises on Saturdays

because he had been told that British officials took the weekend off in the country.

† In his testimony at Nuremberg on March 14, 1946, Goering spoke proudly of the

opportunities which the Spanish Civil War gave for testing “my young Luftwaffe. With the

permission of the Fuehrer I sent a large part of my transport fleet and a number of

experimental fighter units, bombers and antiaircraft guns; and in that way I had an opportunity

to ascertain, under combat conditions, whether the material was equal to the task. In order that

the personnel, too, might gather a certain experience, I saw to it that there was a continuous

flow [so] that new people were constantly being sent and others recalled.” 44

* Chamberlain wrote in his diary: “The German visit [of Halifax] was from my point of view a

great success because it achieved its object, that of creating an atmosphere in which it is

possible to discuss with Germany the practical questions involved in a European settlement.”

(Keith Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamberlain, p. 332.)

Halifax himself seems to have been taken in by Hitler. In a written report to the Foreign

Office he said: “The German Chancellor and others gave the impression that they were not

likely to embark on adventures involving force or at least war.” To Chamberlain Halifax

reported orally, says Charles C. Tansill, that Hitler “was not bent on early adventures, partly

because they might be unprofitable, and partly because he was busy building up Germany

internally … Goering had assured him that not one drop of German blood would be shed in

Europe unless Germany was absolutely forced to do it. The Germans gave him [Halifax] the

impression … of intending to achieve their aims in orderly fashion.” (Tansill, Back Door to

War, pp. 365–66.)

* This is the first of many such code names for German military plans which we shall meet in

the ensuing narrative. The Germans used the word Fall, literally “Case” ( Fall Rot, Fall Gruen

— Case Red, Case Green—the code names for operations in the West and against

Czechoslovakia, respectively) and in the beginning, according to the arguments of the German

generals in Nuremberg, it was merely the designation commonly used by all military

commands for plans to cover hypothetical situations. But as will become obvious in the course

of these pages, the term, as the Germans used it, soon became a designation for a plan of

armed aggression. The word “Operation” would probably be a more accurate rendering of Fall

than the word “Case.” However, for the sake of convenience, the author will go along with the

word “Case.”

* From here on, the reader will note that what obviously is indirect discourse has been put

within quotation marks or in quotations in the form of extracts. Almost all the German records

of the remarks of Hitler and of others in private talks were written down in the third person as

indirect discourse, though frequently they abruptly slipped into direct, first-person discourse

without any change of punctuation. This question posed a problem for American English.

Because I wanted to preserve the accuracy of the original document and the exact wording

used or recorded, I decided it was best to refrain from tampering with these accounts by

rendering them into first-person direct discourse or by excluding them from within quotation

marks. In the latter case it would have looked as though I were indulging in liberal

paraphrasing when I was not.

It is largely a matter in the German records of verb tenses being changed by the actual

recorders from present to past and of changing the first-person pronoun to third-person. If this

is borne in mind there will not be, I believe, any confusion.

10

STRANGE, FATEFUL INTERLUDE: THE FALL OF

BLOMBERG, FRITSCH, NEURATH AND SCHACHT

THE DECISION TO USE armed force against Austria and Czechoslovakia even if it

involved Germany in a war with Great Britain and France, which Hitler laid

down on November 5, came as such a shock to his Foreign Minister that Baron

von Neurath, easygoing, complacent and morally weak though he was, suffered

several heart attacks.1

“I was extremely upset at Hitler’s speech,” he later told the Nuremberg

tribunal, “because it knocked the bottom out of the whole foreign policy which I

had consistently pursued.” 2 In this frame of mind, and despite his heart attacks,

he sought out General von Fritsch and General Beck, Chief of the General Staff,

two days later and discussed with them what could be done “to get Hitler to

change his ideas.” The impression on Beck of Hitler’s harangue, according to

Colonel Hossbach, who informed him of it, had been “shattering.” It was agreed

that Fritsch should again remonstrate with the Fuehrer at their next appointment,

pointing out to him the military considerations which made his plans

inadvisable, while Neurath would follow up by again stressing to Hitler the

political dangers. As for Beck, he immediately committed to paper a devastating

critique of Hitler’s plans, which apparently he showed to no one—the first sign

of a fatal flaw in the mind and character of this estimable general who at first

had welcomed the advent of Nazism and who, in the end, would give his life in

an abortive effort to destroy it.

General von Fritsch saw Hitler on November 9. There is no record of their

talk but it may be presumed that the Commander in Chief of the Army repeated

his military arguments against Hitler’s plans and that he got nowhere. The

Fuehrer was in no mood to brook opposition either from the generals or from his

Foreign Minister. He refused to receive Neurath and took off for a long rest at

his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden. It was not until the middle of January that

the stricken Neurath was able to arrange an appointment with the Leader.

On that occasion I tried to show him [Neurath later testified at Nuremberg] that his policy

would lead to a world war, and that I would have no part in it … I called his attention to the

danger of war and to the serious warnings of the generals … When despite all my arguments

he still held to his opinions I told him that he would have to find another Foreign Minister … 3

Though Neurath did not then know it, that was precisely what Hitler had

decided to do. In a fortnight he would celebrate the fifth anniversary of his

coming to power and he intended to mark it by cleaning house not only in the

Foreign Office but in the Army, those two citadels of upper-class “reaction”

which he secretly distrusted, which he felt had never completely accepted him

nor really understood his aims and which, as Blomberg, Fritsch and Neurath had

shown on the evening of November 5, stood in the way of realizing his

ambitions. The last two gentlemen in particular, and perhaps even the

accommodating Blomberg, to whom he owed so much, would have to follow the

inimitable Dr. Schacht into retirement.

For the crafty financier, the early enthusiast for Nazism and backer of Hitler,

had already fallen.

Schacht, as we have seen, had devoted his energies and his wizardry to

financing Hitler’s speedy rearmament. As Plenipotentiary for War Economy, as

well as Minister of Economics, he had concocted any number of fancy schemes,

including the use of the printing press, to raise the money for the new Army,

Navy and Air Force and to pay the armament bills. But there was a limit beyond

which the country could not go without becoming bankrupt, and by 1936 he

believed Germany was approaching that limit. He warned Hitler, Goering and

Blomberg, but to little avail, though the War Minister for a time sided with him.

With Goering’s appointment in September 1936 as Plenipotentiary for the Four-

Year Plan, a farfetched scheme to make Germany self-sufficient in four years—a

goal which Schacht regarded as impossible—the Luftwaffe chief became, in

fact, the economic dictator of Germany. To a man as vain and ambitious* and as

contemptuous of Goering’s ignorance of economics as Schacht was, this made

his own position untenable and after months of violent controversy between the

two strong-minded men Schacht asked the Fuehrer to place the further direction

of economic policies solely in his rival’s hand and to allow him to resign his post

in the cabinet. To add to his discouragement had been the attitude of many of the

nation’s leading industrialists and businessmen, who, as he later recounted,

“crowded into Goering’s anteroom in the hope of getting orders when I was still

trying to make the voice of reason heard. ”4

To make the voice of reason heard in the frenzied atmosphere of Nazi

Germany in 1937 was an impossible task, as Schacht realized, and after a further

exchange of blows with Goering during the summer in which he denounced as

unsound “your foreign-exchange policy, your policy regarding production and

your financial policy,” he traveled down to the Obersalzberg in August to submit

his formal resignation to Hitler. The Fuehrer was loath to accept it in view of the

unfavorable reaction both at home and abroad which the departure of Schacht

would almost certainly bring, but the battered Minister was adamant and Hitler

finally agreed to release him at the end of two months. On September 5 Schacht

went on leave, and his resignation was formally accepted on December 8.

At Hitler’s insistence Schacht remained in the cabinet as Minister without

Portfolio and retained the presidency of the Reichsbank, thus preserving

appearances and blunting the shock to German and world opinion. His influence

as a brake on Hitler’s feverish rearmament for war, however, had come to an

end, though by remaining in the cabinet and at the Reichsbank he continued to

lend the aura of his name and reputation to Hitler’s purposes. Indeed, he would

shortly endorse publicly and enthusiastically the Leader’s first gangster act of

naked aggression, for, like the generals and the other conservatives who had

played such a key role in turning over Germany to the Nazis, he was slow to

awaken to the facts of life.

Goering took over temporarily the Ministry of Economics, but one evening in

mid-January 1938 Hitler ran into Walther Funk at the opera in Berlin and

casually informed him that he would be Schacht’s successor. The official

appointment of this greasy, dwarfish, servile nonentity who, it will be

remembered, had played a certain role in interesting business leaders in Hitler in

the early Thirties, was held up, however. For there now burst upon the Third

Reich a two-headed crisis in the Army which was precipitated by, among all

things, certain matters pertaining to sex, both normal and abnormal, and which

played directly into the hands of Hitler, enabling him to deal a blow to the old

aristocratic military hierarchy from which it never recovered, with dire

consequences not only for the Army, which thereby lost the last vestiges of

independence which it had guarded so zealously during the Hohenzollern

Empire and the Republic, but eventually for Germany and the world.

THE FALL OF FIELD MARSHAL VON BLOMBERG

“What influence a woman, even without realizing it, can exert on the history

of a country and thereby on the world!” Colonel Alfred Jodl exclaimed in his

diary on January 26, 1938. “One has the feeling of living in a fateful hour for the

German people. ”5

The woman this brilliant young staff officer referred to was Fräulein Erna

Gruhn, and as the year 1937 approached its end she must have regarded herself

as the last person in Germany who could possibly propel, as Jodl declared, the

German people into a fateful crisis and exercise a profound influence on their

history. Perhaps only in the eerie, psychopathic world in which the inner circle

of the Third Reich moved at this time with such frenzy would it have been

possible.

Fräulein Gruhn was the secretary of Blomberg and toward the end of 1937 he

felt sufficiently enamored of her to suggest marriage. His first wife, the daughter

of a retired Army officer, whom he had married in 1904, had died in 1932. His

five children in the meantime had grown up (his youngest daughter had married

the oldest son of General Keitel, his protégé, in 1937) and, tiring of his

somewhat lonely widowerhood, he decided the time had come to remarry.

Realizing that for the senior officer of the German Army to wed a commoner

would not go down well with the haughty, aristocratic officer corps, he sought

out Goering for advice. Goering could see no objection to the marriage—had he

himself not married, after the death of his first wife, a divorced actress? There

was no place in the Third Reich for the stodgy social prejudices of the officer

corps. Goering not only approved what Blomberg had in mind; he declared

himself ready to smooth matters over with Hitler, if that were necessary, and to

help in any other way. As it happened, there was another way he could be

helpful. There was a rival lover involved, the Field Marshal confided. To

Goering that was no problem. Such nuisances in other cases had been carted off

to concentration camp. Probably out of consideration for the old-fashioned

morals of the Field Marshal, Goering, however, offered to ship the troublesome

rival off to South America, which he did.

Still, Blomberg felt troubled. On December 15, 1937, Jodl made a curious

entry in his diary: “The General Field Marshal [Blomberg] in a high state of

excitement. Reason not known. Apparently a personal matter. He retired for

eight days to an unknown place.” 6

On December 22 Blomberg reappeared to deliver the funeral oration for

General Ludendorff at the Feldherrnhalle in Munich. Hitler was there, but

declined to speak. The World War hero had refused to have anything to do with

him ever since he had fled from in front of the Feldherrnhalle after the volley of

bullets during the Beer Hall Putsch. After the funeral Blomberg broached the

matter of his proposed marriage to Hitler. The Fuehrer, to his relief, gave it his

blessing.

The wedding took place on January 12, 1938, and Hitler and Goering were

present as the principal witnesses. Hardly had the bridal pair taken off for Italy

on their honeymoon than the storm broke. The rigid officer corps might have

absorbed the shock of their Field Marshal marrying his stenographer, but they

were not prepared to accept his marriage to a woman with a past such as now

began to come to light in all its horrific details.

At first there were only rumors. Anonymous telephone calls began to be

received by stiff-necked generals from giggling girls, apparently calling from

unsavory cafés and night clubs, congratulating the Army for having accepted one

of their number. At police headquarters in Berlin a police inspector, checking on

the rumors, came upon a file marked “Erna Gruhn.” Horrified, he took it to the

police chief, Count von Helldorf.

The count, a roughneck veteran of the Freikorps and the brawling days of the

S.A., was horrified too. For the dossier showed that the bride of the Field

Marshal and Commander in Chief had a police record as a prostitute and had

been convicted of having posed for pornographic photographs. The young Frau

Field Marshal, it developed, had grown up in a massage salon run by her mother

which, as sometimes happened in Berlin, was merely a camouflage for a brothel.

It was obviously Helldorf’s duty to pass along the damaging dossier to his

superior, the chief of the German police, Himmler. But ardent Nazi though he

was, he had formerly been a member of the Army officer corps himself and had

absorbed some of its traditions. He knew that Himmler, who had been feuding

with the Army High Command for more than a year and was now coming to be

regarded by it as more of a sinister threat than Roehm had been, would use the

file to blackmail the Field Marshal and make him his tool against the

conservative generals. Courageously, Helldorf took the police papers to General

Keitel instead. He apparently was convinced that Keitel, who owed his recent

rise in the Army to Blomberg, to whom he was attached by family ties, would

arrange for the officer corps itself to handle the affair and also would warn his

chief of the peril he was in. But Keitel, an arrogant and ambitious man, though

of feeble mind and moral character, had no intention of risking his career by

getting into trouble with the party and the S.S. Instead of passing on the papers

to the Army chief, General von Fritsch, he gave them back to Helldorf with the

suggestion that he show them to Goering.

No one could have been more pleased to possess them than Goering, for it

was obvious that Blomberg now would have to go and logical, he thought, that

he himself should succeed him as Commander in Chief of the Wehrmacht—a

goal he had long had in mind. Blomberg interrupted his honeymoon in Italy to

return to Germany for the funeral of his mother and on January 20, still

unmindful of what was brewing, appeared at his office in the War Ministry to

resume his duties.

But not for long. On January 25 Goering brought the explosive documents to

Hitler, who had just returned from Berchtesgaden, and the Fuehrer blew up. His

Field Marshal had deceived him and made him, who was an official witness at

the wedding, look like a fool. Goering quickly agreed with him and at noon went

off to see Blomberg personally and break the news to him. The Field Marshal

appears to have been overwhelmed by the revelations about his bride and offered

to divorce her at once. But this, Goering politely explained, would not be

enough. The Army Command itself was demanding his resignation; as Jodl’s

diary of two days later reveals, the Chief of the General Staff, General Beck, had

informed Keitel that “one cannot tolerate the highest-ranking soldier marrying a

whore.” On January 25, Jodl learned through Keitel that Hitler had dismissed his

Field Marshal. Two days later the sixty-year-old fallen officer left Berlin for

Capri to resume his honeymoon.

To this idyllic island he was pursued by his naval adjutant, who provided the

final grotesque touch to this singular tragi-comedy. Admiral Raeder had

dispatched this aide, Lieutenant von Wangenheim, to demand of Blomberg that

for the sake of the honor of the officer corps he divorce his wife. The junior

naval officer was an arrogant and extremely zealous young man and when he

arrived in the presence of the honeymooning Field Marshal he exceeded his

instructions. Instead of asking for a divorce he suggested that his former chief do

the honorable thing, whereupon he attempted to thrust a revolver into

Blomberg’s hand. Despite his fall, however, the Field Marshal seemed to have

retained a zest for life—obviously he was still enamored of his bride

notwithstanding all that had happened. He declined to take the proffered

weapon, remarking, as he immediately wrote to Keitel, that he and the young

naval officer “apparently had quite different views and standards of life.” 7

After all, the Fuehrer had held out to him the prospect of further employment

at the highest level as soon as the storm blew over. According to Jodl’s diary,

Hitler told Blomberg during the interview in which he dismissed him that “as

soon as Germany’s hour comes, you will again be by my side, and everything

that has happened in the past will be forgotten.” 8 Indeed, Blomberg wrote in his

unpublished memoirs that Hitler, at their final meeting, promised him “with the

greatest emphasis” that he would be given the supreme command of the armed

forces in the event of war.9

Like so many other promises of Hitler, this one was not kept. Field Marshal

von Blomberg’s name was stricken forever from the Army rolls, and not even

when the war came and he offered his services was he restored to duty in any

capacity. After their return to Germany Blomberg and his wife settled in the

Bavarian village of Wiessee, where they lived in complete obscurity until the

end of the war. As was the case of a former English King of the same era he

remained to the end loyal to the wife who had brought his downfall. That end

came with his death on March 13, 1946, in Nuremberg jail, where he was

waiting, a pitiful, emaciated man, to testify in the trial.

THE FALL OF GENERAL FREIHERR WERNER VON FRITSCH

Colonel General Freiherr Werner von Fritsch, the Commander in Chief of the

Army and a gifted and unbending officer of the old school (“a typical General

Staff character,” Admiral Raeder called him) was the obvious candidate to

succeed Blomberg as Minister of War and Commander in Chief of the Armed

Forces. But Goering himself, as we have seen, had his eye on the top post, and

there were some who believed that he had deliberately pushed Blomberg into his

marriage with a woman whose unfortunate past he may have had prior

knowledge of, in order to clear the way for himself. If this was true, Blomberg

did not know it, for during his farewell interview with Hitler on January 27 he at

first suggested Goering as his successor. The Fuehrer, however, knew his old

Nazi henchman better than anyone else; Goering, he said, was too self-indulgent

and lacked both patience and diligence. Nor did he favor General von Fritsch,

whose opposition to his grandiose plans on November 5 he had not liked or

forgotten. Moreover, Fritsch’s hostility to the Nazi Party and especially to the

S.S. had never been concealed—a circumstance which not only had attracted the

attention of the Fuehrer but had provoked in Heinrich Himmler, the S.S. leader

and chief of police, a growing determination to overthrow this formidable

antagonist who led the Army. *

Himmler’s opportunity now came, or, rather, he created it by setting in motion

a frame-up so outrageous that it is difficult to believe that it could have happened

—at least in 1938—even in the gangster-ridden world of the S.S. and the

National Socialist Party, or that the German Army, which after all did have its

traditions, would have stood for it. Coming on the heels of the Blomberg

scandal, it set off a second and much more explosive bomb which rocked the

officer corps to its foundation and settled its fate.

On January 25, the day on which Goering was showing Hitler the police

record of Blomberg’s bride, he also spread before the Fuehrer an even more

damaging document. This had been conveniently provided by Himmler and his

principal aide, Heydrich, chief of the S.D., the S.S. Security Service, and it

purported to show that General von Fritsch had been guilty of homosexual

offenses under Section 175 of the German criminal code and that he had been

paying blackmail to an ex-convict since 1935 to hush the matter up. The Gestapo

papers seemed so conclusive that Hitler was inclined to believe the charge, and

Blomberg, perhaps venting his resentment at Fritsch for the severe attitude the

Army had taken toward him because of his marriage, did nothing to dissuade

him. Fritsch, he confided, was not a “woman’s man,” and he added that the

General, a lifelong bachelor, might well have “succumbed to weakness.”

Colonel Hossbach, the Fuehrer’s adjutant, who was present when the Gestapo

file was shown, was horrified and, in defiance of Hitler’s orders that he was to

say nothing to Fritsch, went immediately to the Army commander’s apartment to

inform him of the charge and to warn him of the dire trouble he was in.† The

taciturn Prussian nobleman was stupefied. “A lot of stinking lies!” he blurted

out. When he had calmed down he assured his brother officer on his word of

honor that the charges were utterly baseless. Early the next morning Hossbach,

fearless of the consequences, told Hitler of his meeting with Fritsch, reported the

General’s categorical denial of the accusations and urged that the Fuehrer give

him a hearing and the opportunity of personally denying his guilt.

To this Hitler, to Hossbach’s surprise, assented, and the Commander in Chief

of the German Army was summoned to the Chancellery late on the evening of

the same day. He was there to undergo an experience for which his long training

as an aristocrat, an officer and a gentleman had scarcely prepared him. The

meeting took place in the Chancellery library and this time Himmler as well as

Goering was present. After Hitler had summed up the charges, Fritsch gave his

word of honor as an officer that they were completely untrue. But such

assurances no longer had much value in the Third Reich and now Himmler, who

had been waiting for three years for this moment, introduced a shuffling,

degenerate-looking figure from a side door. He must have been one of the

strangest, if not the most disreputable, figures ever let into the offices of the

Chancellor of Germany. His name was Hans Schmidt and he had a long prison

record dating back to his first sentence to a boy’s reformatory. His chief

weakness, it developed, had been spying on homosexuals and then blackmailing

them. He now professed to recognize General von Fritsch as the Army officer

whom he had caught in a homosexual offense in a dark alley near the Potsdam

railroad station in Berlin with an underworld character by the name of “Bavarian

Joe.” * For years, Schmidt insisted to the three most powerful figures in

Germany, this officer had paid him blackmail to keep quiet, the payments only

ceasing when the law again clamped him behind the bars of a penitentiary.

General Freiherr von Fritsch was too outraged to answer. The spectacle of the

head of the German State, the successor of Hindenburg and the Hohenzollerns,

introducing such a shady character in such a place for such a purpose was too

much for him. His speechlessness only helped to convince Hitler that he was

guilty and the Fuehrer asked for his resignation. This Fritsch declined to give,

demanding in turn a trial by a military court of honor. But Hitler had no intention

of allowing the military caste to take over the case, at least for the moment. This

was a heaven-sent opportunity, which he would not let pass, to smash the

opposition of the generals who would not bend to his will and genius. He then

and there ordered Fritsch to go on indefinite leave, which was equivalent to his

suspension as Commander in Chief of the Army. The next day Hitler conferred

with Keitel about a successor not only to Blomberg but to Fritsch. Jodl, whose

chief source of information was Keitel, began sprinkling his diary with entries

which indicated that a drastic shake-up not only in the Army Command but in

the whole organization of the armed forces was being worked out which would

at last bring the military to heel.

Would the senior generals surrender their power, which though by no means

absolute was the last that remained outside the grip of Hitler? When Fritsch

returned to his apartment in the Bendlerstrasse from the ordeal in the

Chancellery library he conferred with General Beck, the Chief of the Army

General Staff. Some English historians10 have recounted that Beck urged him to

carry out a military putsch at once against the Hitler government, and that

Fritsch declined. But Wolfgang Foerster, the German biographer of Beck, who

had the General’s personal papers at his disposal, states merely that on the

fateful evening Beck saw first Hitler, who apprised him of the grave charges,

then Fritsch, who denied them, and that finally, late on the same evening, he

hurried back to Hitler to demand only that the Army commander be given a

chance to clear himself before a military court of honor. Beck too, his biographer

makes clear, had not yet attained that understanding of the rulers of the Third

Reich which was later to come to him—when it was too late. Some days later,

when it was also too late, when not only Blomberg and Fritsch were gone but

sixteen of the senior generals retired and forty-four others transferred to lesser

commands, Fritsch and his closest associates, of whom Beck was one, did

seriously consider military countermeasures. But they quickly abandoned such

dangerous thoughts. “It was clear to these men,” Foerster says, “that a military

putsch would mean civil war and was by no means sure of success.” Then, as

always, the German generals wanted to be sure of winning before taking any

great risks. They feared, as this German writer states, that not only would

Goering’s Air Force and Admiral Raeder’s Navy oppose them, since both

commanders were completely under the Fuehrer’s spell, but that the Army itself

might not fully support its fallen Commander in Chief.11

However, one last chance was given the ranking Army officers to deal a blow

in their turn to Hitler. A preliminary investigation conducted by the Army in

collaboration with the Ministry of Justice quickly established that General von

Fritsch was the innocent victim of a Gestapo frame-up initiated by Himmler and

Heydrich. It was found that the ex-convict Schmidt had indeed caught an Army

officer in an unnatural act in the shadows of the Potsdam Station and had

successfully blackmailed him for years. But his name was Frisch, not Fritsch,

and he was a bedridden retired cavalry officer listed in the Army rolls as

Rittmeister von Frisch. This the Gestapo had known, but it had arrested Schmidt

and threatened him with death unless he pointed the finger to the Commander in

Chief of the Army. The ailing Rittmeister also was taken into custody by the

secret police so as to prevent him from talking, but both he and Schmidt were

eventually wrested from the Gestapo’s clutches by the Army and kept in a safe

place until they could testify at the court-martial of Fritsch.

The old leaders of the Army were jubilant. Not only would their Commander

in Chief be vindicated and restored to his leadership of the Army. The

machinations of the S.S. and the Gestapo, of those two unscrupulous men,

Himmler and Heydrich, who held such unbridled power in the country, would be

exposed and they and the S.S. would go the way of Roehm and the S.A. four

years before. It would be a blow too to the party and to Hitler himself; it would

shake the foundations of the Third Reich so violently that the Fuehrer himself

might topple over. If he tried to cover up the crime, the Army itself, with a clear

conscience, now that the truth was known, would take matters in its own hands.

But once again, as so often in the past five years, the generals were outsmarted

by the former Austrian corporal and then utterly defeated by fate, which the

Leader, if not they, knew how to take advantage of for his own ends.

All through the last week of January 1938 a tension, reminiscent of that of late

June 1934, gripped Berlin. Again the capital seethed with rumors. Hitler had

dismissed the two top men in the Army, for reasons unknown. The generals were

in revolt. They were plotting a military putsch. Ambassador François-Poncet

heard that Fritsch, who had invited him to dinner for February 2 and then

canceled the invitation, had been arrested. There were reports that the Army

planned to surround the Reichstag, when it met to hear Hitler’s fifth-anniversary

speech on January 30, and arrest the entire Nazi government and its hand-picked

deputies. Credence of such reports grew when it was announced that the meeting

of the Reichstag had been indefinitely postponed. The German dictator was

obviously in difficulties. He had met his match at last in the unbending senior

generals of the German Army. Or so the latter must have thought, but they were

in error.

On February 4, 1938, the German cabinet met for what was to prove the last

time. Whatever difficulties Hitler had experienced, he now resolved them in a

manner which eliminated those who stood in his way, not only in the Army but

in the Foreign Office. A decree which he hastily put through the cabinet that day

and which was announced to the nation and the world on the radio shortly before

midnight began:

“From now on I take over personally the command of the whole armed

forces.”

As head of state, Hitler of course had been the Supreme Commander of the

Armed Forces, but now he took over Blomberg’s office of Commander in Chief

and abolished the War Ministry, over which the now moon-struck bridegroom

had also presided. In its place was created the organization which was to become

familiar to the world during World War II, the High Command of the Armed

Forces (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW), to which the three fighting

services, the Army, the Navy and the Air Force, were subordinated. Hitler was

its Supreme Commander, and under him was a chief of staff, with the high-

sounding title of “Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces”—a post

which went to the toady Keitel, who managed to keep it to the end.

To assuage the wounded feelings of Goering, who had been confident of

succeeding Blomberg, Hitler named him a Field Marshal, which made him the

ranking officer of the Reich and apparently pleased him no end. To calm the

uneasiness of the public, Hitler announced that Blomberg and Fritsch had

resigned “for reasons of health.” Thus Fritsch was got rid of once and for all

even before his trial by a military court of honor, which Hitler knew would

exonerate him. This seemed particularly outrageous to the senior generals but

there was nothing they could do about it, for they were sent into the discard in

the same decree. Sixteen of them, including Generals von Rundstedt, von Leeb,

von Witzleben, von Kluge and von Kleist, were relieved of their commands, and

forty-four others, who were regarded as less than enthusiastic in their devotion to

Nazism, were transferred.

As Fritsch’s successor to command the Army, Hitler, after some hesitation,

picked General Walther von Brauchitsch, who enjoyed a good reputation among

the generals but who was to prove as weak and as compliant as Blomberg when

it came to standing up to the mercurial temperament of Hitler. For a few days

during the crisis it appeared that a problem of sex would prove Brauchitsch’s

undoing as it had that of Blomberg and Fritsch. For this officer was on the point

of getting a divorce, an action frowned upon by the military aristocracy. The

ever curious Jodl noted the complication in his diary. On Sunday, January 30, he

recorded that Keitel had called in Brauchitsch’s son “in order to send him to his

mother (he is to get her assent to the divorce),” and a couple of days later he

reported a meeting of Brauchitsch and Keitel with Goering “for a discussion of

the family situation.” Goering, who seemed to have made himself an arbiter of

the sex difficulties of the generals, promised to look into the matter. On the same

day, Jodl further noted, “the son of Br. returns with a very dignified letter from

his mother.” The inference was that she would not stand in her husband’s way.

Nor would Goering and Hitler disapprove of a divorce, which the new

commander of the Army actually obtained a few months after assuming his new

post. For both of them knew that Frau Charlotte Schmidt, the woman he wanted

to marry, was, as Ulrich von Hassell said, “a two hundred per cent rabid Nazi.”

The marriage took place in the following autumn and was to prove, as Jodl

might have noted again, another instance of the influence of a woman on

history.*

Hitler’s house cleaning of February 4 was not confined to the generals. He

also swept Neurath out of the Foreign Office, replacing him with the shallow and

compliant Ribbentrop.† Two veteran career diplomats, Ulrich von Hassell, the

ambassador in Rome, and Herbert von Dirksen, the ambassador in Tokyo, were

relieved, as was Papen in Vienna. The weakling Funk was formally named as the

successor of Schacht as Minister of Economics.

The next day, February 5, there were screaming headlines in the Voelkischer

Beobachter: STRONGEST CONCENTRATION OF ALL POWERS IN THE FUEHRER’S

HANDS! For once, the leading daily Nazi newspaper did not exaggerate.

February 4, 1938, is a major turning point in the history of the Third Reich, a

milestone on its road to war. On that date the Nazi revolution, it might be said,

was completed. The last of the conservatives who stood in the way of Hitler’s

embarking upon the course which he had long determined to follow, once

Germany was sufficiently armed, were swept away. Blomberg, Fritsch and

Neurath had been put in office by Hindenburg and the old-school conservatives

to act as a brake upon Nazi excesses, and Schacht had joined them. But in the

struggle for control of the foreign and economic policy and the military power of

Germany they proved to be no match for Hitler. They had neither the moral

strength nor the political shrewdness to stand up to him, let alone to triumph

over him. Schacht quit. Neurath stepped aside. Blomberg, under pressure from

his own brother generals, resigned. Fritsch, though he was framed in gangster

fashion, accepted his dismissal without a gesture of defiance. Sixteen top

generals meekly accepted theirs—and his. There was talk in the officer corps of

a military putsch, but only talk. Hitler’s contempt for the Prussian officer caste,

which he held till the end of his life, proved quite justified. It had accepted with

scarcely a murmur the officially condoned murder of Generals von Schleicher

and von Bredow. It was swallowing supinely now the cashiering of its senior

officers. Was not Berlin swarming with younger generals eager to replace them,

eager to serve him? Where was the vaunted solidarity of the Army officers? Was

it not a myth?

For five years up to this winter day of February 4, 1938, the Army had

possessed the physical power to overthrow Hitler and the Third Reich. When it

learned on November 5, 1937, where he was leading it and the nation, why did it

not attempt to do so? Fritsch himself gave the answer after his fall. On Sunday,

December 18, 1938, he entertained the deposed Ambassador von Hassell at his

manor house at Achterberg, near Soltau, which the Army had put at his disposal

after his retirement. Hassell noted down in his diary “the substance of his

views”:

“This man—Hitler—is Germany’s destiny for good and for evil. If he now

goes over the abyss—which Fritsch believes he will—he will drag us all down

with him. There is nothing we can do.” 13

With foreign, economic and military policy concentrated in his hands and the

armed forces directly under his command, Hitler now proceeded on his way.

Having got rid of Fritsch without giving him the opportunity of clearing his

name, he belatedly afforded him the opportunity by setting up a military court of

honor to hear the case. Field Marshal Goering presided and at his side were the

commanders in chief of the Army and Navy, General von Brauchitsch and

Admiral Raeder, and two professional judges of the Supreme War Tribunal.

The trial, from which the press and the public were excluded, began in Berlin

on March 10, 1938, and was suddenly suspended before the day was over. Late

on the previous night news had come from Austria which sent the Fuehrer into

one of his greatest tantrums. * Field Marshal Goering and General von

Brauchitsch were urgently needed elsewhere.

* The astute French ambassador, François-Poncet, who knew him well, says in his book The

Fateful Years (p. 221) that at one time Schacht had hoped to succeed Hindenburg as President,

and even Hitler, “should things go ill with the Fuehrer.”

* On March 1, 1935, the day Germany took over the Saar, I stood next to Fritsch in the

reviewing stand at Saarbruecken for some time before the parade started. Although he scarcely

knew me, except as one of the many American correspondents in Berlin, he poured out a

running fire of sarcastic remarks about the S.S., the party and various Nazi leaders from Hitler

on down. He did not disguise his contempt for them all. See Berlin Diary, p. 27.

† This cost Hossbach his job two days later, but not, as some feared, his life. He was restored

to the Army General Staff, rose during the war to the rank of General of the Infantry and

commanded the Fourth Army on the Russian front until abruptly dismissed by Hitler by

telephone on January 28, 1945, for withdrawing his troops in defiance of the Fuehrer’s orders.

* The name is supplied by Gisevius in To the Bitter End, p. 229.

* According to Milton Shulman ( Defeat in the West, p. 10), Hitler himself intervened with the

first Frau von Brauchitsch in order to obtain her consent to the divorce and helped provide a

financial settlement for her, thus putting the Army Commander in Chief under personal

obligation to him. Shulman gives as his source a Canadian Army intelligence report.

† To divert attention from the military crisis and to save something of Neurath’s prestige both

at home and abroad, Hitler, at Goering’s suggestion, created the so-called Secret Cabinet

Council (Geheimer Kabinettsrat) whose purpose, said the Fuehrer’s February 4 decree, was to

furnish him “guidance in the conduct of foreign policy.” Neurath was appointed its president,

and its members included Keitel and the chiefs of the three armed services as well as the most

important members of the ordinary cabinet and of the party. Goebbels’ propaganda machine

gave it much fanfare, making it look as if it were a supercabinet and that Neurath actually had

been promoted. Actually the Secret Cabinet Council was pure fiction. It never existed. As

Goering testified at Nuremberg, “There was, to be sure, no such cabinet in existence, but the

expression would sound quite nice and everyone would imagine that it meant something … I

declare under oath that this Secret Cabinet Council never met at all, not even for a minute. ”12

* When Papen arrived at the Chancellery in Berlin thirty-six hours later he found Hitler still

“in a state bordering on hysteria.” (Papen, Memoirs, p. 428.)

11

ANSCHLUSS: THE RAPE OF AUSTRIA

TOWARD THE END OF 1937, due to a change of jobs from newspaper to radio

reporting, my headquarters were transferred from Berlin to Vienna, which I had

come to know as a youthful correspondent a decade before. Though I would

spend most of the period of the next three crucial years in Germany, my new

assignment, which was to cover continental Europe, gave me a certain

perspective of the Third Reich and, as it happened, set me down in those very

neighboring countries which were to be victims of Hitler’s aggression just prior

to and during the time the aggression took place. I roved back and forth in those

days between Germany and the country that for the moment was the object of

Hitler’s fury and so gathered a firsthand experience of the events which are now

to be described and which led inexorably to the greatest and bloodiest war in

man’s experience. Though we observed these happenings at first hand, it is

amazing how little we really knew of how they came about. The plottings and

maneuvers, the treachery, the fateful decisions and moments of indecision, and

the dramatic encounters of the principal participants which shaped the course of

events took place in secret beneath the surface, hidden from the prying eyes of

foreign diplomats, journalists and spies, and thus for years remained largely

unknown to all but a few who took part in them.

We have had to wait for the maze of secret documents and the testimony of

the surviving leading actors in the drama, most of whom were not free at the

time—many landed in Nazi concentration camps—to tell their story. What

follows, therefore, in the ensuing pages is based largely on the mass of factual

evidence which has been accumulated since 1945. But it was perhaps helpful for

a narrator of such a history as this to have been personally present at its main

crises and turning points. Thus, it happened that I was in Vienna on the

memorable night of March 11–12, 1938, when Austria ceased to exist.

For more than a month the beautiful baroque capital by the Danube, whose

inhabitants were more attractive, more genial, more gifted in enjoying life, such

as it was, than any people I had ever known, had been prey to deep anxieties. Dr.

Kurt von Schuschnigg, the Austrian Chancellor, would later recall the period

between February 12 and March 11 as “The Four Weeks’ Agony.” Since the

Austro–German agreement of July 11, 1936, in which Schuschnigg, in a secret

annex to the treaty, had made far-reaching concessions to the Austrian Nazis,*

Franz von Papen, Hitler’s special ambassador in Vienna, had been continuing his

labors to undermine the independence of Austria and bring about its union with

Nazi Germany. In a long report to the Fuehrer at the end of 1936, he had

reported on his progress and a year later had done the same, this time stressing

“that only by subjecting the Federal Chancellor [Schuschnigg] to the strongest

possible pressure can further progress be made.” 1 His advice, though scarcely

needed, was soon to be taken more literally than even he could conceive.

Throughout 1937, the Austrian Nazis, financed and egged on by Berlin, had

stepped up their campaign of terror. Bombings took place nearly every day in

some part of the country, and in the mountain provinces massive and often

violent Nazi demonstrations weakened the government’s position. Plans were

uncovered disclosing that Nazi thugs were preparing to bump off Schuschnigg as

they had his predecessor. Finally on January 25, 1938, Austrian police raided the

Vienna headquarters of a group called the Committee of Seven, which had been

set up to bring about peace between the Nazis and the Austrian government, but

which in reality served as the central office of the illegal Nazi underground.

There they found documents initialed by Rudolf Hess, the Fuehrer’s deputy,

which made it clear that the Austrian Nazis were to stage an open revolt in the

spring of 1938 and that when Schuschnigg attempted to put it down, the German

Army would enter Austria to prevent “German blood from being shed by

Germans.” According to Papen, one of the documents called for his own murder

or that of his military attaché, Lieutenant General Muff, by local Nazis so as to

provide an excuse for German intervention. 2

If the debonair Papen was less than amused to learn that he was marked—for

the second time—for assassination by Nazi roughnecks on orders from party

leaders in Berlin, he was also distressed by a telephone call which came to him

at the German Legation in Vienna on the evening of February 4. State Secretary

Hans Lammers was on the line from the Chancellery in Berlin to inform him that

his special mission in Austria had ended. He had been fired, along with Neurath,

Fritsch and several others.

“I was almost speechless with astonishment,” Papen later remembered.3 He

recovered sufficiently to realize that Hitler evidently had decided on more

drastic action in Austria, now that he had rid himself of Neurath, Fritsch and

Blomberg. In fact, Papen recovered sufficiently to decide to do “something

unusual for a diplomat,” as he put it. He resolved to deposit copies of all his

correspondence with Hitler “in a safe place,” which turned out to be Switzerland.

“The defamatory campaigns of the Third Reich,” he says, “were only too well

known to me.” As we have seen, they had almost cost him his life in June 1934.

Papen’s dismissal was also a warning to Schuschnigg. He had not fully trusted

the suave former cavalry officer, but he was quick to see that Hitler must have

something worse in mind than inflicting on him the wily ambassador, who at

least was a devout Catholic, as was he, and a gentleman. In the last few months

the course of European diplomacy had not favored Austria. Mussolini had drawn

closer to Hitler since the establishment of the Rome–Berlin Axis and was not so

concerned about maintaining the little country’s independence as he had been at

the time of the murder of Dollfuss, when he had rushed four divisions to the

Brenner Pass to frighten the Fuehrer. Neither Britain, freshly embarked under

Chamberlain upon a policy of appeasing Hitler, nor France, beset by grave

internal political strife, had recently shown much interest in defending Austria’s

independence should Hitler strike. And now, with Papen, had gone the

conservative leaders of the German Army and Foreign Office, who had

exercised some restraining influence on Hitler’s towering ambitions.

Schuschnigg, who was a narrow-minded man but, within his limits, an intelligent

one, and who was quite well informed, had few illusions about his worsening

situation. The time had come, as he felt it had come after the Nazis slew

Dollfuss, to further appease the German dictator.

Papen, discharged from office though he was, offered an opportunity. Never a

man to resent a slap in the face if it came from above, he had hurried to Hitler

the very day after his dismissal “to obtain some picture of what was going on.”

At Berchtesgaden on February 5, he found the Fuehrer “exhausted and distrait”

from his struggle with the generals. But Hitler’s recuperative powers were

considerable, and soon the cashiered envoy was interesting him in a proposal

that he had already broached to him a fortnight before when they had met in

Berlin: Why not have it out with Schuschnigg personally? Why not invite him to

come to Berchtesgaden for a personal talk? Hitler found the idea interesting.

Unmindful of the fact that he had just fired Papen, he ordered him to return to

Vienna and arrange the meeting.

Schuschnigg readily assented to it, but, weak as his position was, laid down

certain conditions. He must be informed in advance of the precise points which

Hitler wanted to discuss, and he must be assured beforehand that the agreement

of July 11, 1936, in which Germany promised to respect Austria’s independence

and not to interfere in her internal affairs, would be maintained. Furthermore, the

communiqué at the end of the meeting must reaffirm that both countries would

continue to abide by the 1936 treaty. Schuschnigg wanted to take no chances in

bearding the lion in his den. Papen hurried off to Obersalzberg to confer with

Hitler and returned with the Fuehrer’s assurance that the 1936 agreement would

remain unchanged and that he merely wanted to discuss “such

misunderstandings and points of friction as have persisted” since it was signed.

This was not as precise as the Austrian Chancellor had requested, but he said he

was satisfied with the answer. The meeting was set for the morning of February

12,* and on the evening of February 11 Schuschnigg, accompanied by his

Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, Guido Schmidt, set off by special train in the

strictest secrecy for Salzburg, whence he would drive by car over the border to

Hitler’s mountain retreat on the following morning. It was to prove a fateful

journey.

THE MEETING AT BERCHTESGADEN: FEBRUARY 12, 1938

Papen showed up at the frontier to greet his Austrian visitors and in the frosty

winter morning air seemed to be, Schuschnigg thought, “in the very best of

humor.” Hitler, he assured his guests, was in an excellent mood this day. And

then came the first warning note. The Fuehrer, Papen said genially, hoped Dr.

Schuschnigg would not mind the presence at the Berghof of three generals who

had arrived quite by chance: Keitel, the new Chief of OKW, Reichenau, who

commanded the Army forces on the Bavarian–Austrian frontier, and Sperrle,

who was in charge of the Air Force in this area.

Papen later remembered of his guests that this was “a piece of information

that seemed little to their taste.” Schuschnigg says he told the ambassador he

would not mind, especially since he had “not much choice in the matter.” A

Jesuit-trained intellectual, he was getting on his guard.

Even so, he was not prepared for what now took place. Hitler, wearing the

brown tunic of a storm trooper, with black trousers, and flanked by the three

generals, greeted the Austrian Chancellor and his aide on the steps of the villa.

Schuschnigg felt it was a friendly but formal greeting. In a few moments he

found himself alone with the German dictator in the spacious second-floor study

whose great picture windows looked out upon the stately, snow-capped Alps and

on Austria, the birthplace of both these men, beyond.

Kurt von Schuschnigg, forty-one years old, was, as all who have known him

would agree, a man of impeccable Old World Austrian manners, and it was not

unnatural for him to begin the conversation with a graceful tidbit about the

magnificent view, the fine weather that day, and a flattering word about this

room having been, no doubt, the scene of many decisive conferences. Adolf

Hitler cut him short: “We did not gather here to speak of the fine view or of the

weather.” Then the storm broke. As the Austrian Chancellor later testified, the

ensuing two-hour “conversation was somewhat unilateral.” *

You have done everything to avoid a friendly policy [Hitler fumed] … The

whole history of Austria is just one uninterrupted act of high treason. That was

so in the past and is no better today. This historical paradox must now reach its

long-overdue end. And I can tell you right now, Herr Schuschnigg, that I am

absolutely determined to make an end of all this. The German Reich is one of the

great powers, and nobody will raise his voice if it settles its border problems.

Shocked at Hitler’s outburst, the quiet-mannered Austrian Chancellor tried to

remain conciliatory and yet stand his ground. He said he differed from his host

on the question of Austria’s role in German history. “Austria’s contribution in

this respect,” he maintained, “is considerable.”

HITLER: Absolutely zero. I am telling you, absolutely zero. Every national idea

was sabotaged by Austria throughout history; and indeed all this sabotage was

the chief activity of the Hapsburgs and the Catholic Church.†

SCHUSCHNIGG: All the same, Herr Reichskanzler, many an Austrian

contribution cannot possibly be separated from the general picture of German

culture. Take for instance a man like Beethoven …

HITLER: Oh—Beethoven? Let me tell you that Beethoven came from the lower

Rhineland.

SCHUSCHNIGG: Yet Austria was the country of his choice, as it was for so

many others …

HITLER: That’s as may be. I am telling you once more that things cannot go on

in this way. I have a historic mission, and this mission I will fulfill because

Providence has destined me to do so … who is not with me will be crushed … I

have chosen the most difficult road that any German ever took; I have made the

greatest achievement in the history of Germany, greater than any other German.

And not by force, mind you. I am carried along by the love of my people …

SCHUSCHNIGG: Herr Reichskanzler, I am quite willing to believe that.

After an hour of this, Schuschnigg asked his antagonist to enumerate his

complaints. “We will do everything,” he said, “to remove obstacles to a better

understanding, as far as it is possible.”

HITLER: That is what you say, Herr Schuschnigg. But I am telling you that I am

going to solve the so-called Austrian problem one way or the other.

He then launched into a tirade against Austria for fortifying its border against

Germany, a charge that Schuschnigg denied.

HITLER: Listen, you don’t really think you can move a single stone in Austria

without my hearing about it the next day, do you? … I have only to give an

order, and in one single night all your ridiculous defense mechanisms will be

blown to bits. You don’t seriously believe that you can stop me for half an hour,

do you? … I would very much like to save Austria from such a fate, because

such an action would mean blood. After the Army, my S.A. and Austrian Legion

would move in, and nobody can stop their just revenge—not even I.

After these threats, Hitler reminded Schuschnigg (rudely addressing him

always by his name instead of by his title, as diplomatic courtesy called for) of

Austria’s isolation and consequent helplessness.

HITLER: Don’t think for one moment that anybody on earth is going to thwart

my decisions. Italy? I see eye to eye with Mussolini … England? England will

not move one finger for Austria … And France?

France, he said, could have stopped Germany in the Rhineland “and then we

would have had to retreat. But now it is too late for France.”

Finally:

HITLER: I give you once more, and for the last time, the opportunity to come to

terms, Herr Schuschnigg. Either we find a solution now or else events will take

their course … Think it over, Herr Schuschnigg, think it over well. I can only

wait until this afternoon …

What exactly were the German Chancellor’s terms? Schuschnigg asked. “We

can discuss that this afternoon,” Hitler said.

During lunch Hitler appeared to be, Schuschnigg observed somewhat to his

surprise, “in excellent spirits.” His monologue dwelt on horses and houses. He

was going to build the greatest skyscrapers the world had ever seen. “The

Americans will see,” he remarked to Schuschnigg, “that Germany is building

bigger and better buildings than the United States.” As for the harried Austrian

Chancellor, Papen noted that he appeared “worried and preoccupied.” A chain

cigarette smoker, he had not been allowed to smoke in Hitler’s presence. But

after coffee in an adjoining room, Hitler excused himself and Schuschnigg was

able for the first time to snatch a smoke. He was also able to tell his Foreign

Undersecretary, Guido Schmidt, the bad news. It was soon to grow worse.

After cooling their heels for two hours in a small anteroom, the two Austrians

were ushered into the presence of Ribbentrop, the new German Foreign

Minister, and of Papen. Ribbentrop presented them with a two-page typewritten

draft of an “agreement” and remarked that they were Hitler’s final demands and

that the Fuehrer would not permit discussion of them. They must be signed

forthwith. Schuschnigg says he felt relieved to have at least something definite

from Hitler. But as he perused the document his relief evaporated. For here was

a German ultimatum calling on him, in effect, to turn the Austrian government

over to the Nazis within one week.

The ban against the Austrian Nazi Party was to be lifted, all Nazis in jail were

to be amnestied and the pro-Nazi Viennese lawyer Dr. Seyss-Inquart was to be

made Minister of the Interior, with authority over the police and security.

Another pro-Nazi, Glaise-Horstenau, was to be appointed Minister of War, and

the Austrian and German armies were to establish closer relations by a number

of measures, including the systematic exchange of one hundred officers.

“Preparations will be made,” the final demand read, “for the assimilation of the

Austrian into the German economic system. For this purpose Dr. Fischboeck [a

pro-Nazi] will be appointed Minister of Finance.” 5

Schuschnigg, as he later wrote, realized at once that to accept the ultimatum

would mean the end of Austria’s independence.

Ribbentrop advised me to accept the demands at once. I protested, and referred him to my

previous agreement with von Papen, made prior to coming to Berchtesgaden, and made clear

to Ribbentrop that I was not prepared to be confronted with such unreasonable demands … 6

But was Schuschnigg prepared to accept them? That he was not prepared to be

confronted with them was obvious even to a dullard such as Ribbentrop. The

question was: Would he sign them? In this difficult and decisive moment the

young Austrian Chancellor began to weaken. He inquired lamely, according to

his own account, “whether we could count on the good will of Germany,

whether the Reich government had at least the intention to keep its side of the

bargain.” 7 He says he received an answer “in the affirmative.”

Then Papen went to work on him. The slippery ambassador admits to his

“amazement” when he read the ultimatum. It was an “unwarrantable interference

in Austrian sovereignty.” Schuschnigg says Papen apologized to him and

expressed his “complete surprise” at the terms. Nevertheless, he advised the

Austrian Chancellor to sign them.

He furthermore informed me that I could be assured that Hitler would take

care that, if I signed, and acceded to these demands, from that time on Germany

would remain loyal to this agreement and that there would be no further

difficulties for Austria.8

Schuschnigg, it would appear from the above statements, the last given in an

affidavit at Nuremberg, was not only weakening but letting his naïveté get the

best of him.

He had one last chance to make a stand. He was summoned again to Hitler.

He found the Fuehrer pacing excitedly up and down in his study.

HITLER: Herr Schuschnigg … here is the draft of the document. There is nothing to be

discussed. I will not change one single iota. You will either sign it as it is and fulfill my

demands within three days, or I will order the march into Austria.9

Schuschnigg capitulated. He told Hitler he was willing to sign. But he

reminded him that under the Austrian constitution only the President of the

Republic had the legal power to accept such an agreement and carry it out.

Therefore, while he was willing to appeal to the President to accept it, he could

give no guarantee.

“You have to guarantee it!” Hitler shouted.

“I could not possibly, Herr Reichskanzler,” Schuschnigg says he replied.10

At this answer [Schuschnigg later recounted] Hitler seemed to lose his self-

control. He ran to the doors, opened them, and shouted, “General Keitel!” Then

turning back to me, he said, “I shall have you called later. ”11

This was pure bluff, but the harassed Austrian Chancellor, who had been made

aware of the presence of the generals all day, did not perhaps know it. Papen

relates that Keitel told later of how Hitler greeted him with a broad grin when he

rushed in and asked for orders. “There are no orders,” Hitler chuckled. “I just

wanted to have you here.”

But Schuschnigg and Dr. Schmidt, waiting outside the Fuehrer’s study, were

impressed. Schmidt whispered that he would not be surprised if the both of them

were arrested within the next five minutes. Thirty minutes later Schuschnigg was

again ushered into the presence of Hitler.

I have decided to change my mind—for the first time in my life [Hitler said].

But I warn you this is your very last chance. I have given you three additional

days to carry out the agreement.12

That was the extent of the German dictator’s concessions, and though the

wording of the final draft was somewhat softened, the changes, as Schuschnigg

later testified, were inconsequential. Schuschnigg signed. It was Austria’s death

warrant.

The behavior of men under duress differs according to their character and is

often puzzling. That Schuschnigg, a veteran despite his comparative youth of the

rough and tumble of politics which had seen his predecessor murdered by the

Nazis, was a brave man few would doubt. Yet his capitulation to Hitler on

February 11, 1938, under the terrible threat of armed attack has left a residue of

unresolved doubts among his fellow countrymen and the observers and

historians of this fateful period. Was surrender necessary? Was there no

alternative? It would be a rash man who would argue that Britain and France, in

view of their subsequent behavior in the face of Hitler’s aggressions, might have

come to the aid of Austria had Hitler then and there marched in. But up to this

moment Hitler had not yet broken across the German borders nor had he

prepared his own people and the world for any such act of wanton aggression.

The German Army itself was scarcely prepared for a war should France and

Britain intervene. In a few weeks Austria, as a result of the Berchtesgaden

“agreement,” would be softened up by the local Nazis and German machinations

to a point where Hitler could take it with much less risk of foreign intervention

than on February 11. Schuschnigg himself, as he later wrote, recognized that

acceptance of Hitler’s terms meant “nothing else but the complete end of the

independence of the Austrian government.”

Perhaps he was in a daze from his ordeal. After signing away his country’s

independence at the point of a gun he indulged in a strange conversation with

Hitler which he himself later recorded in his book. “Does the Herr

Reichskanzler,” he asked, “believe that the various crises in the world today can

be solved in a peaceful manner?” The Fuehrer answered fatuously that they

could—“if my advice were followed.” Whereupon Schuschnigg said, apparently

with no sign of sarcasm, “At the moment the state of the world looks rather

promising, don’t you think?” 13

Such an utterance at such a moment seems incredible, but that is what the

beaten Austrian Chancellor says he said. Hitler had one more humiliation to

administer to him. When Schuschnigg suggested that in the press release of their

meeting mention be made that their discussion reaffirmed the July 1936

agreement, Hitler exclaimed, “Oh, no! First you have to fulfill the conditions of

our agreement. This is what is going to the press: ‘Today the Fuehrer and

Reichskanzler conferred with the Austrian Bundeskanzler at the Berghof.’ That’s

all.”

Declining the Fuehrer’s invitation to stay for dinner, Schuschnigg and

Schmidt drove down from the mountains to Salzburg. It was a gray and foggy

winter night. The ubiquitous Papen accompanied them as far as the frontier and

was somewhat uncomfortable in what he terms the “oppressive silence.” He

could not refrain from trying to cheer his Austrian friends up.

“Well, now,” he exclaimed to them, “you have seen what the Fuehrer can be

like at times! But the next time I am sure it will be different. You know, the

Fuehrer can be absolutely charming.” *

THE FOUR WEEKS’ AGONY: FEBRUARY 12–MARCH 11, 1938

Hitler had given Schuschnigg four days—until Tuesday, February 15—to

send him a “binding reply” that he would carry out the ultimatum, and an

additional three days—until February 18—to fulfill its specific terms.

Schuschnigg returned to Vienna on the morning of February 12 and immediately

sought out President Miklas. Wilhelm Miklas was a plodding, mediocre man of

whom the Viennese said that his chief accomplishment in life had been to father

a large brood of children. But there was in him a certain peasant solidity, and in

this crisis at the end of fifty-two years as a state official he was to display more

courage than any other Austrian. He was willing to make certain concessions to

Hitler such as amnestying the Austrian Nazis, but he balked at putting Seyss-

Inquart in charge of the police and the Army. Papen duly reported this to Berlin

on the evening of February 14. He said Schuschnigg hoped “to overcome the

resistance of the President by tomorrow.”

At 7:30 that same evening Hitler approved orders drawn up by General Keitel

to put military pressure on Austria.

Spread false, but quite credible news, which may lead to the conclusion of

military preparations against Austria.14

As a matter of fact, Schuschnigg had hardly departed from Berchtesgaden

when the Fuehrer began shamming military action in order to see that the

Austrian Chancellor did as he was told. Jodl jotted it all down in his diary.

February 13. In the afternoon General K[eitel] asks Admiral C[anaris]* and

myself to come to his apartment. He tells us that the Fuehrer’s order is that

military pressure by shamming military action should be kept up until the 15th.

Proposals for these measures are drafted and submitted to the Fuehrer by

telephone for approval.

February 14. The effect is quick and strong. In Austria the impression is

created that Germany is undertaking serious military preparations. 15

General Jodl was not exaggerating. Before the threat of armed invasion

President Miklas gave in and on the last day of grace, February 15, Schuschnigg

formally advised Ambassador von Papen that the Berchtesgaden agreement

would be carried out before February 18. On February 16 the Austrian

government announced a general amnesty for Nazis, including those convicted

in the murder of Dollfuss, and made public the reorganized cabinet, in which

Arthur Seyss-Inquart was named Minister of Security. The next day this Nazi

Minister hurried off to Berlin to see Hitler and receive his orders.

Seyss-Inquart, the first of the quislings, was a pleasant-mannered, intelligent

young Viennese lawyer who since 1918 had been possessed with a burning

desire to see Austria joined with Germany. This was a popular notion in the first

years after the war. Indeed, on November 12, 1918, the day after the armistice,

the Provisional National Assembly in Vienna, which had just overthrown the

Hapsburg monarchy and proclaimed the Austrian Republic, had tried to effect an

Anschluss by affirming that “German Austria is a component part of the German

Republic.” The victorious Allies had not allowed it and by the time Hitler came

to power in 1933 there was no doubt that the majority of Austrians were against

their little country’s joining with Nazi Germany. But to Seyss-Inquart, as he said

at his trial in Nuremberg, the Nazis stood unflinchingly for the Anschluss and for

this reason he gave them his support. He did not join the party and took no part

in its rowdy excesses. He played the role, rather, of a respectable front for the

Austrian Nazis, and after the July 1936 agreement, when he was appointed State

Councilor, he concentrated his efforts, aided by Papen and other German

officials and agents, in burrowing from within. Strangely, both Schuschnigg and

Miklas seem to have trusted him almost to the end. Later Miklas, a devout

Catholic as was Schuschnigg, confessed that he was favorably impressed by the

fact that Seyss was “a diligent churchgoer.” The man’s Catholicism and also the

circumstance that he, like Schuschnigg, had served in a Tyrolean Kaiserjaeger

regiment during the First World War, in which he was severely wounded, seems

to have been the basis of the trust which the Austrian Chancellor had for him.

Schuschnigg, unfortunately, had a fatal inability to judge a man on more

substantial grounds. Perhaps he thought he could keep his new Nazi Minister in

line by simple bribes. He himself tells in his book of the magic effect of $500 on

Seyss-Inquart a year before when he threatened to resign as State Councilor and

then reconsidered on the receipt of this paltry sum. But Hitler had the bigger

prizes to dazzle before the ambitious young lawyer, as Schuschnigg was soon to

learn.

On February 20 Hitler made his long-expected speech to the Reichstag, which

had been postponed from January 30 because of the Blomberg–Fritsch crisis and

his own machinations against Austria. Though he spoke warmly of

Schuschnigg’s “understanding” and of his “warmhearted willingness” to bring

about a closer understanding between Austria and Germany—a piece of humbug

which impressed Prime Minister Chamberlain—the Fuehrer issued a warning

which, however much lost on London, did not fall upon deaf ears in Vienna—

and in Prague.

Over ten million Germans live in two of the states adjoining our frontiers … There must be

no doubt about one thing. Political separation from the Reich may not lead to deprivation of

rights—that is, the general rights of self-determination. It is unbearable for a world power to

know there are racial comrades at its side who are constantly being afflicted with the severest

suffering for their sympathy or unity with the whole nation, its destiny and its

Weltanschauung. To the interests of the German Reich belong the protection of those German

peoples who are not in a position to secure along our frontiers their political and spiritual

freedom by their own efforts. 16

That was blunt, public notice that henceforth Hitler regarded the future of the

seven million Austrians and the three million Sudeten Germans in

Czechoslovakia as the affair of the Third Reich.

Schuschnigg answered Hitler four days later—on February 24—in a speech to

the Austrian Bundestag, whose members, like those of the German Reichstag,

were hand-picked by a one-party dictatorial regime. Though conciliatory toward

Germany, Schuschnigg emphasized that Austria had gone to the very limit of

concessions “where we must call a halt and say: ‘Thus far and no further.’”

Austria, he said, would never voluntarily give up its independence, and he ended

with a stirring call: “Red-White-Red [the Austrian national colors] until we’re

dead!” (The expression also rhymes in German.)

“The twenty-fourth of February,” Schuschnigg wrote after the war, “was for

me the crucial date.” He awaited anxiously the Fuehrer’s reaction to his defiant

speech. Papen telegraphed to Berlin the next day advising the Foreign Office

that the speech should not be taken too seriously. Schuschnigg, he said, had

expressed his rather strong nationalist feelings in order to retrieve his domestic

position; there were plots in Vienna to overthrow him because of his concessions

at Berchtesgaden. In the meantime, Papen informed Berlin, “the work of Seyss-

Inquart … is proceeding according to plan. ”17 The next day Papen, his long

years of devious work in Austria nearing fruition, took formal leave of the

Austrian Chancellor and set off for Kitzbuehl to do some skiing.

Hitler’s speech of February 20, which had been broadcast by the Austrian

radio network, had set off a series of massive Nazi demonstrations throughout

Austria. On February 24, during the broadcast of Schuschnigg’s reply, a wild

mob of twenty thousand Nazis in Graz had invaded the town square, torn down

the loudspeakers, hauled down the Austrian flag and raised the swastika banner

of Germany. With Seyss-Inquart in personal command of the police, no effort

was made to curb the Nazi outbreaks. Schuschnigg’s government was breaking

down. Not only political but economic chaos was setting in. There were large

withdrawals of accounts from the banks both from abroad and by the local

people. Cancellation of orders from uneasy foreign firms poured into Vienna.

The foreign tourists, one of the main props of the Austrian economy, were being

frightened away. Toscanini cabled from New York that he was canceling his

appearance at the Salzburg Festival, which drew tens of thousands of tourists

each summer, “because of political developments in Austria.” The situation was

becoming so desperate that Otto of Hapsburg, the exiled youthful pretender to

the throne, sent a letter from his home in Belgium and, as Schuschnigg later

revealed, implored him on his old oath of allegiance as a former officer of the

Imperial Army to appoint him as Chancellor if he thought such a step might save

Austria.

In his desperation Schuschnigg turned to the Austrian workers whose free

trade unions and political party, the Social Democrats, he had kept suppressed

after Dollfuss had brutally smashed them in 1934. These people had represented

42 per cent of the Austrian electorate, and if at any time during the past four

years the Chancellor had been able to see beyond the narrow horizons of his own

clerical-fascist dictatorship and had enlisted their support for a moderate, anti-

Nazi democratic coalition the Nazis, a relatively small minority, could have been

easily handled. But Schuschnigg had lacked the stature to take such a step. A

decent, upright man as a human being, he had become possessed, as had certain

others in Europe, with a contempt for Western democracy and a passion for

authoritarian one-party rule.

Out of the factories and the prisons, from which many of them recently had

been released along with the Nazis, the Social Democrats came in a body on

March 4 to respond to the Chancellor’s call. Despite all that had happened they

said they were ready to help the government defend the nation’s independence.

All they asked was what the Chancellor had already conceded to the Nazis: the

right to have their own political party and preach their own principles.

Schuschnigg agreed, but it was too late.

On March 3 the always well-informed General Jodl noted in his diary: “The

Austrian question is becoming critical. 100 officers shall be dispatched here. The

Fuehrer wants to see them personally. They should not see to it that the Austrian

armed forces will fight better against us, but rather that they do not fight at all.”

At this crucial moment, Schuschnigg decided to make one more final,

desperate move which he had been mulling over in his mind since the last days

of February when the Nazis began to take over in the provinces. He would hold a

plebiscite. He would ask the Austrian people whether they were for a “free,

independent, social, Christian and united Austria— Ja oder Nein? ”*

I felt that the moment for a clear decision had come [he wrote later]. It seemed

irresponsible to wait with fettered hands until, in the course of some weeks, we

should be gagged as well. The gamble now was for stakes which demanded the

ultimate and supreme effort. 19

Shortly after his return from Berchtesgaden, Schuschnigg had apprised

Mussolini, Austria’s protector, of Hitler’s threats and had received an immediate

reply from the Duce that Italy’s position on Austria remained unchanged. Now

on March 7 he sent his military attaché in Rome to Mussolini to inform him that

in view of events he “was probably going to have to resort to a plebiscite.” The

Italian dictator answered that it was a mistake—“C’ è un errore! ” He advised

Schuschnigg to hold to his previous course. Things were improving; an

impending relaxation of relations between Rome and London would do much to

ease the pressure. It was the last Schuschnigg ever heard from Mussolini.

On the evening of March 9, Schuschnigg announced in a speech at Innsbruck

that a plebiscite would be held in four days—on Sunday, March 13. The

unexpected news sent Adolf Hitler into a fit of fury. Jodl’s diary entry of March

10 described the initial reaction in Berlin:

By surprise and without consulting his Ministers, Schuschnigg ordered a plebiscite for

Sunday, March 13 …

Fuehrer is determined not to tolerate it. The same night, March 9 to 10, he calls for

Goering. General v. Reichenau is called back from Cairo Olympic Committee. General v.

Schobert [commander of the Munich Military District on the Austrian border] is ordered to

come, as well as [Austrian] Minister Glaise-Horstenau, who is … in the Palatinate …

Ribbentrop is being detained in London. Neurath takes over the Foreign Office.20

The next day, Thursday, March 10, there was a great bustle in Berlin. Hitler

had decided on a military occupation of Austria and there is no doubt that his

generals were taken by surprise. If Schuschnigg’s plebiscite on Sunday were to

be prevented by force the Army would have to move into Austria by Saturday,

and there were no plans for such a hasty move. Hitler summoned Keitel for 10

A.M., but before hurrying to the Fuehrer the General conferred with Jodl and

General Max von Viebahn, chief of the Fuehrungsstab (Operations Staff) of

OKW. The resourceful Jodl remembered Special Case Otto which had been

drawn up to counter an attempt to place Otto of Hapsburg on the Austrian

throne. Since it was the only plan that existed for military action against Austria,

Hitler decided it would have to do. “Prepare Case Otto,” he ordered.

Keitel raced back to OKW headquarters in the Bendlerstrasse to confer with

General Beck, Chief of the General Staff. When he asked for details of the Otto

plan, Beck replied, “We have prepared nothing, nothing has been done, nothing

at all.” Beck in turn was summoned to the Reich Chancellery. Seizing General

von Manstein, who was about to leave Berlin to take up a divisional post, he

drove with him over to see Hitler, who told them the Army must be ready to

march into Austria by Saturday. Neither of the generals offered any objection to

this proposal for armed aggression. They were merely concerned with the

difficulty of improvising military action on such short notice. Manstein,

returning to the Bendlerstrasse, set to work to draft the necessary orders,

finishing his task within five hours, at 6 P.M. At 6:30 P.M., according to Jodl’s

diary, mobilization orders went out to three Army corps and the Air Force. At 2

A.M. the next morning, March 11, Hitler issued Directive Number One for

Operation Otto. Such was his haste that he neglected to sign it, and his signature

was not obtained until 1 P.M.

TOP SECRET

1.

If other measures prove unsuccessful, I intend to invade Austria with

armed forces to establish constitutional conditions and to prevent further

outrages against the pro-German population.

2.

The whole operation will be directed by myself….

3.

The forces of the Army and Air Force detailed for this operation must be

ready for invasion on March 12, 1938, at the latest by 12:00 hours …

4.

The behavior of the troops must give the impression that we do not want

to wage war against our Austrian brothers…. Therefore any provocation is

to be avoided. If, however, resistance is offered it must be broken ruthlessly

by force of arms…. 21

A few hours later Jodl issued supplemental “top-secret” orders on behalf of

the Chief of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces:

1.

If Czechoslovakian troops or militia units are encountered in Austria,

they are to be regarded as hostile.

2.

The Italians are everywhere to be treated as friends, especially as

Mussolini has declared himself disinterested in the solution of the Austrian

question. 22

Hitler had been worried about Mussolini. On the afternoon of March 10, as

soon as he had decided on military invasion, he had sent off by special plane

Prince Philip of Hesse, with a letter to the Duce (dated March 11) informing him

of the action he contemplated and asking for the Italian dictator’s understanding.

The letter, a tissue of lies concerning his treatment of Schuschnigg and

conditions in Austria, which he assured the Duce were “approaching a state of

anarchy,” began with such a fraudulent argument that Hitler had it omitted when

the letter was later published in Germany. * He stated that Austria and

Czechoslovakia were plotting to restore the Hapsburgs and preparing “to throw

the weight of a mass of at least twenty million men against Germany.” He then

outlined his demands to Schuschnigg, which, he assured Mussolini, “were more

than moderate,” told of Schuschnigg’s failure to carry them out and spoke of the

“mockery” of “a so-called plebiscite.”

In my responsibility as Fuehrer and Chancellor of the German Reich and

likewise as a son of this soil, I can no longer remain passive in the face of these

developments.

I am now determined to restore law and order in my homeland and enable the

people to decide their own fate according to their judgment in an unmistakable,

clear and open manner….

Whatever the manner may be in which this plebiscite is to be carried out, I

now wish solemnly to assure Your Excellency, as the Duce of Fascist Italy:

1.

Consider this step only as one of national self-defense and therefore as an

act that any man of character would do in the same way, were he in my

position. You too, Excellency, could not act differently if the fate of Italians

were at stake….

2.

In a critical hour for Italy I proved to you the steadfastness of my

sympathy. Do not doubt that in the future there will be no change in this

respect.

3.

Whatever the consequences of the coming events may be, I have drawn a

definite boundary between Germany and France and now draw one just as

definite between Italy and us. It is the Brenner … *

Always in friendship, Yours, ADOLF HITLER23

THE COLLAPSE OF SCHUSCHNIGG

Unmindful of the feverish goings on over the border in the Third Reich, Dr.

Schuschnigg went to bed on the evening of March 10 firmly convinced, as he

later testified, that the plebiscite would be a success for Austria and that the

Nazis “would present no formidable obstacle.” † Indeed, that evening Dr. Seyss-

Inquart had assured him that he would support the plebiscite and even broadcast

a speech in its favor.

At half past five on the morning of Friday, March 11, the Austrian Chancellor

was wakened by the ringing of the telephone at his bedside. Dr. Skubl, the

Austrian chief of police, was speaking. The Germans had closed the border at

Salzburg, he said. Rail traffic between the two countries had been halted.

German troops were reported concentrating on the Austrian frontier.

By 6:15 Schuschnigg was on his way to his office at the Ballhausplatz, but he

decided to stop first at St. Stephen’s Cathedral. There in the first dim light of

dawn while early mass was being read he sat restlessly in his pew thinking of the

ominous message from the chief of police. “I was not quite sure what it meant,”

he later recalled. “I only knew that it would bring some change.” He gazed at the

candles burning in front of the image of Our Lady of Perpetual Succor, looked

furtively around and then made the sign of the cross, as countless Viennese had

done before this figure in past times of stress.

At the Chancellery all was quiet; not even any disturbing dispatches had

arrived during the night from Austria’s diplomats abroad. He called police

headquarters and asked that as a precautionary measure a police cordon be

thrown around the Inner City and the government buildings. He also convoked

his cabinet colleagues. Only Seyss-Inquart failed to show up. Schuschnigg could

not locate him anywhere. Actually the Nazi Minister was out at the Vienna

airport. Papen, summarily summoned to Berlin the night before, had departed by

special plane at 6 A.M. and Seyss had seen him off. Now the Number One

quisling was waiting for the Number Two—Glaise-Horstenau, like Seyss a

minister in Schuschnigg’s cabinet, like him already deep in treason, who was

due to arrive from Berlin with Hitler’s orders on what they were to do about the

plebiscite.

The orders were to call it off, and these were duly presented to Schuschnigg

by the two gentlemen at 10 A.M. along with the information that Hitler was

furious. After several hours of consultations with President Miklas, his cabinet

colleagues and Dr. Skubl, Schuschnigg agreed to cancel the plebiscite. The

police chief had reluctantly told him that the police, liberally sprinkled with

Nazis who had been restored to their posts in accordance with the Berchtesgaden

ultimatum, could no longer be counted on by the government. On the other hand,

Schuschnigg felt sure that the Army and the militia of the Patriotic Front—the

official authoritarian party in Austria—would fight. But at this crucial moment

Schuschnigg decided—he says, in fact, that his mind had long been made up on

the matter—that he would not offer resistance to Hitler if it meant spilling

German blood. Hitler was quite willing to do this, but Schuschnigg shrank back

from the very prospect.

At 2 P.M. he called in Seyss-Inquart and told him that he was calling off the

plebiscite. The gentle Judas immediately made for the telephone to inform

Goering in Berlin. But in the Nazi scheme of things one concession from a

yielding opponent must lead quickly to another. Goering and Hitler then and

there began raising the ante. The minute-by-minute account of how this was

done, of the threats and the swindles employed, was recorded—ironically

enough—by Goering’s own Forschungsamt, the “Institute for Research,” which

took down and transcribed twenty-seven telephone conversations from the Field

Marshal’s office beginning at 2:45 P.M. on March 11. The documents were found

in the German Air Ministry after the war and constitute an illuminating record of

how Austria’s fate was settled by telephone from Berlin during the next few

critical hours. 24

During Seyss’s first call to Goering at 2:45 P.M. the Field Marshal told him

that Schuschnigg’s cancellation of the plebiscite was not enough and that after

talking with Hitler he would call him back. This he did at 3:05. Schuschnigg, he

ordered, must resign, and Seyss-Inquart must be named Chancellor within two

hours. Goering also told Seyss then to “send the telegram to the Fuehrer, as

agreed upon.” This is the first mention of a telegram that was to pop up

throughout the frantic events of the next few hours and which would be used to

perpetrate the swindle by which Hitler justified his aggression to the German

people and to the foreign offices of the world.

Wilhelm Keppler, Hitler’s special agent in Austria, arriving in the afternoon

from Berlin to take charge in Papen’s absence, had shown Seyss-Inquart the text

of a telegram he was to send the Fuehrer. It requested the dispatch of German

troops to Austria to put down disorder. In his Nuremberg affidavit, Seyss

declared that he refused to send such a wire since there were no disorders.

Keppler, insisting that it would have to be done, hurried to the Austrian

Chancellery, where he was brazen enough to set up an emergency office along

with Seyss and Glaise-Horstenau. Why Schuschnigg allowed such interlopers

and traitors to establish themselves physically in the seat of the Austrian

government at this critical hour is incomprehensible, but he did. Later he

remembered the Chancellery as looking “like a disturbed beehive,” with Seyss-

Inquart and Glaise-Horstenau holding “court” in one corner “and around them a

busy coming and going of strange-looking men”; but apparently it never

occurred to the courteous but dazed Chancellor to throw them out.

He had made up his mind to yield to Hitler’s pressure and resign. While still

closeted with Seyss he had put through a telephone call to Mussolini, but the

Duce was not immediately available and a few minutes later Schuschnigg

canceled the call. To ask for Mussolini’s help, he decided, “would be a waste of

time.” Even Austria’s pompous protector was deserting her in the hour of need.

A few minutes later, when Schuschnigg was trying to talk President Miklas into

accepting his resignation, a message came from the Foreign Office: “The Italian

government declares that it could give no advice under the circumstances, in

case such advice should be asked for.” 25

President Wilhelm Miklas was not a great man, but he was a stubborn, upright

one. He reluctantly accepted Schuschnigg’s resignation but he refused to make

Seyss-Inquart his successor. “That is quite impossible,” he said. “We will not be

coerced.” He instructed Schuschnigg to inform the Germans that their ultimatum

was refused. 26

This was promptly reported by Seyss-Inquart to Goering at 5:30 P.M.

SEYSS-INQUART: The President has accepted the resignation [of Schuschnigg]

… I suggested he entrust the Chancellorship to me … but he would like to

entrust a man like Ender …

GOERING: Well, that won’t do! Under no circumstances! The President has to

be informed immediately that he has to turn the powers of the Federal

Chancellor over to you and to accept the cabinet as it was arranged.

There was an interruption at this point. Seyss-Inquart put a Dr. Muehlmann, a

shadowy Austrian Nazi whom Schuschnigg had noticed lurking in the

background at Berchtesgaden and who was a personal friend of Goering, on the

line.

MUEHLMANN: The President still refuses persistently to give his consent. We

three National Socialists went to speak to him personally … He would not even

let us see him. So far, it looks as if he were not willing to give in.

GOERING: Give me Seyss. [To Seyss] Now, remember the following: You go

immediately together with Lieutenant General Muff [the German military

attaché] and tell the President that if the conditions are not accepted

immediately, the troops which are already advancing to the frontier will march

in tonight along the whole line, and Austria will cease to exist … Tell him there

is no time now for any joke. The situation now is that tonight the invasion will

begin from all the corners of Austria. The invasion will be stopped and the

troops held on the border only if we are informed by seven-thirty that Miklas has

entrusted you with the Federal Chancellorship … Then call out the National

Socialists all over the country. They should now be in the streets. So remember,

a report must be given by seven-thirty. If Miklas could not understand it in four

hours, we shall make him understand it now in four minutes.

But still the resolute President held out.

At 6:30 Goering was back on the phone to Keppler and Seyss-Inquart. Both

reported that President Miklas refused to go along with them.

GOERING: Well, then, Seyss-Inquart has to dismiss him! Just go upstairs again

and tell him plainly that Seyss will call on the National Socialist guards and in

five minutes the troops will march in on my order.

After this order General Muff and Keppler presented to the President a second

military ultimatum threatening that if he did not yield within an hour, by 7:30,

German troops would march into Austria. “I informed the two gentlemen,”

Miklas testified later, “that I refused the ultimatum … and that Austria alone

determines who is to be the head of government.”

By this time the Austrian Nazis had gained control of the streets as well as of

the Chancellery. About six that evening, returning from the hospital where my

wife was fighting for her life after a difficult childbirth which had ended with a

Caesarean operation, I had emerged from the subway at the Karlsplatz to find

myself engulfed in a shouting, hysterical Nazi mob which was sweeping toward

the Inner City. These contorted faces I had seen before, at the Nuremberg party

rallies. They were yelling, “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler! Hang

Schuschnigg! Hang Schuschnigg!” The police, whom only a few hours before I

had seen disperse a small Nazi group without any trouble, were standing by,

grinning.

Schuschnigg heard the tramp and the shouts of the mob, and the sounds

impressed him. He hurried to the President’s office to make a final plea. But, he

says:

President Miklas was adamant. He would not appoint a Nazi as Austrian

Chancellor. On my insistence that he appoint Seyss-Inquart he said again: “You

all desert me now, all of you.” But I saw no other possibility than Seyss-Inquart.

With the little hope I had left I clung to all the promises he had made me, I clung

to his personal reputation as a practicing Catholic and an honest man. 27

Schuschnigg clung to his illusions to the last.

The fallen Chancellor then proposed that he make a farewell broadcast and

explain why he had resigned. He says that Miklas agreed, though the President

would later dispute it. It was the most moving broadcast I have ever heard. The

microphone was set up some five paces from where Dollfuss had been shot to

death by the Nazis.

… The German government [Schuschnigg said] today handed to President

Miklas an ultimatum, with a time limit, ordering him to nominate as Chancellor

a person designated by the German government … otherwise German troops

would invade Austria.

I declare before the world that the reports launched in Germany concerning

disorders by the workers, the shedding of streams of blood and the creation of a

situation beyond the control of the Austrian government are lies from A to Z.

President Miklas has asked me to tell the people of Austria that we have yielded

to force since we are not prepared even in this terrible hour to shed blood. We

have decided to order the troops to offer no resistance.*

So I take leave of the Austrian people with a German word of farewell, uttered

from the depth of my heart: God protect Austria!

The Chancellor might take leave but the stubborn President was not yet ready

to. Goering learned this when he phoned General Muff shortly after

Schuschnigg’s broadcast. “The best thing will be if Miklas resigns,” Goering

told him.

“Yes, but he won’t,” Muff rejoined. “It was very dramatic. I spoke to him

almost fifteen minutes. He declared that under no circumstances will he yield to

force.”

“So? He will not give in to force?” Goering could not believe the words.

“He does not yield to force,” the General repeated.

“So he just wants to be kicked out?”

“Yes,” said Muff. “He is staying put.”

“Well, with fourteen children,” Goering laughed, “a man has to stay put.

Anyway, tell Seyss to take over.”

There was still the matter of the telegram which Hitler wanted in order to

justify his invasion. The Fuehrer, according to Papen, who had joined him at the

Chancellery in Berlin, was now “in a state bordering on hysteria.” The stubborn

Austrian President was fouling up his plans. So was Seyss-Inquart, because of

his failure to send the telegram calling on Hitler to send troops into Austria to

quell disorder. Exasperated beyond enduring, Hitler flashed the invasion order at

8:45 P.M. on the evening of March 11.* Three minutes later, at 8:48, Goering was

on the phone to Keppler in Vienna.

Listen carefully. The following telegram should be sent here by Seyss-Inquart.

Take the notes.

“The provisional Austrian Government, which after the resignation of the

Schuschnigg Government considers it its task to establish peace and order in

Austria, sends to the German Government the urgent request to support it in the

task and to help it to prevent bloodshed. For this purpose it asks the German

Government to send German troops as soon as possible.”

Keppler assured the Field Marshal he would show Seyss-Inquart the text of the

“telegram” immediately.

“Well,” Goering said, “he does not even have to send the telegram. All he

needs to do is say ‘Agreed.’”

One hour later Keppler called back Berlin. “Tell the Field Marshal,” he said,

“that Seyss-Inquart agrees.” †

Thus it was that when I passed through Berlin the next day I found a

screaming headline in the Voelkischer Beobachter: GERMAN AUSTRIA SAVED

FROM CHAOS. There were incredible stories hatched up by Goebbels describing

Red disorders—fighting, shooting, pillaging—in the main streets of Vienna. And

there was the text of the telegram, issued by D.N.B., the official German news

agency, which said that it had been dispatched by Seyss-Inquart to Hitler the

night before. Actually two copies of the “telegram,” just as Goering had dictated

it, were found in the German Foreign Office archives at the end of the war.

Papen later explained how they got there. They were concocted, he says,

sometime later by the German Minister of Posts and Telegraph and deposited in

the government files.

Hitler had waited anxiously throughout the frenzied afternoon and evening not

only for President Miklas to capitulate but for some word from Mussolini. The

silence of Austria’s protector was becoming ominous. At 10:25 P.M. Prince

Philip of Hesse called the Chancellery from Rome. Hitler himself grabbed the

telephone. Goering’s technicians recorded the conversation that followed:

PRINCE: I have just come back from the Palazzo Venezia. The Duce accepted

the whole thing in a very friendly manner. He sends you his regards….

Schuschnigg gave him the news … Mussolini said that Austria would be

immaterial to him.

Hitler was beside himself with relief and joy.

HITLER: Then, please tell Mussolini I will never forget him for this!

PRINCE: Yes, sir.

HITLER: Never, never, never, no matter what happens! I am ready to make a quite

different agreement with him.

PRINCE: Yes, sir. I told him that too.

HITLER: As soon as the Austrian affair has been settled I shall be ready to go with him

through thick and thin—through anything!

PRINCE: Yes, my Fuehrer.

HITLER: Listen! I shall make any agreement. I am no longer in fear of the terrible position

which would have existed militarily in case we had gotten into a conflict. You may tell him

that I do thank him from the bottom of my heart. Never, never shall I forget it.

PRINCE: Yes, my Fuehrer.

HITLER: I shall never forget him for this, no matter what happens. If he should ever need

any help or be in any danger, he can be convinced that I shall stick to him whatever may

happen, even if the whole world gangs up on him.

PRINCE: Yes, my Fuehrer.

And what stand were Great Britain and France and the League of Nations

taking at this critical moment to halt Germany’s aggression against a peaceful

neighboring country? None. For the moment France was again without a

government. On Thursday, March 10, Premier Chautemps and his cabinet had

resigned. All through the crucial day of Friday, March 11, when Goering was

telephoning his ultimatums to Vienna, there was no one in Paris who could act.

It was not until the Anschluss had been proclaimed on the thirteenth that a

French government was formed under Léon Blum.

And Britain? On February 20, a week after Schuschnigg had capitulated at

Berchtesgaden, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden had resigned, principally

because of his opposition to further appeasement of Mussolini by Prime Minister

Chamberlain. He was replaced by Lord Halifax. This change was welcomed in

Berlin. So was Chamberlain’s statement to the Commons after the

Berchtesgaden ultimatum. The German Embassy in London reported fully on it

in a dispatch to Berlin on March 4. 31 Chamberlain was quoted as saying that

“what happened [at Berchtesgaden] was merely that two statesmen had agreed

upon certain measures for the improvement of relations between their two

countries … It appeared hardly possible to insist that just because two statesmen

had agreed on certain domestic changes in one of two countries—changes

desirable in the interest of relations between them—the one country had

renounced its independence in favor of the other. On the contrary, the Federal

Chancellor’s speech of February 24 contained nothing that might convey the

impression that the Federal Chancellor [Schuschnigg] himself believed in the

surrender of the independence of his country.”

In view of the fact that the British Legation in Vienna, as I myself learned at

the time, had provided Chamberlain with the details of Hitler’s Berchtesgaden

ultimatum to Schuschnigg, this speech, which was made to the Commons on

March 2, is astounding.* But it was pleasing to Hitler. He knew that he could

march into Austria without getting into complications with Britain. On March 9,

Ribbentrop, the new German Foreign Minister, had arrived in London to wind

up his affairs at the embassy, where he had been ambassador. He had long talks

with Chamberlain, Halifax, the King and the Archbishop of Canterbury. His

impressions of the British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, he reported

back to Berlin, were “very good.” After a long conference with Lord Halifax,

Ribbentrop reported directly to Hitler on March 10 as to what Britain would do

“if the Austrian question cannot be settled peacefully.” Basically he was

convinced from his London talks “that England will do nothing in regard to

Austria.” 33

On Friday, March 11, Ribbentrop was lunching at Downing Street with the

Prime Minister and his associates when a Foreign Office messenger broke in

with urgent dispatches for Chamberlain telling of the startling news from

Vienna. Only a few minutes before, Chamberlain had asked Ribbentrop to

inform the Fuehrer “of his sincere wish and firm determination to clear up

German-British relations.” Now, at the receipt of the sour news from Austria, the

statesmen adjourned to the Prime Minister’s study, where Chamberlain read to

the uncomfortable German Foreign Minister two telegrams from the British

Legation in Vienna telling of Hitler’s ultimatum. “The discussion,” Ribbentrop

reported to Hitler, “took place in a tense atmosphere and the usually calm Lord

Halifax was more excited than Chamberlain, who outwardly at least appeared

calm and cool-headed.” Ribbentrop expressed doubts about “the truth of the

reports” and this seems to have calmed down his British hosts, for “our leave-

taking,” he reported, “was entirely amiable, and even Halifax was calm

again.” 34*

Chamberlain’s reaction to the dispatches from Vienna was to instruct

Ambassador Henderson in Berlin to pen a note to Acting Foreign Minister von

Neurath stating that if the report of the German ultimatum to Austria was

correct, “His Majesty’s Government feel bound to register a protest in the

strongest terms.” 35 But a formal diplomatic protest at this late hour was the least

of Hitler’s worries. The next day, March 12, while German troops were

streaming into Austria, Neurath returned a contemptuous reply,36 declaring that

Austro–German relations were the exclusive concern of the German people and

not of the British government, and repeating the lies that there had been no

German ultimatum to Austria and that troops had been dispatched only in answer

to “urgent” appeals from the newly formed Austrian government. He referred the

British ambassador to the telegram, “already published in the German press.” †

Hitler’s only serious worry on the evening of March 11 had been over

Mussolini’s reaction to his aggression,‡ but there was some concern in Berlin too

as to what Czechoslovakia might do. However, the indefatigable Goering

quickly cleared this up. Busy though he was at the telephone directing the coup

in Vienna, he managed to slip over during the evening to the Haus der Flieger,

where he was official host to a thousand high-ranking officials and diplomats,

who were being entertained at a glittering soiree by the orchestra, the singers and

the ballet of the State Opera. When the Czech minister in Berlin, Dr. Mastny,

arrived at the gala fete he was immediately taken aside by the bemedaled Field

Marshal, who told him on his word of honor that Czechoslovakia had nothing to

fear from Germany, that the entry of the Reich’s troops into Austria was

“nothing more than a family affair” and that Hitler wanted to improve relations

with Prague. In return he asked for assurances that the Czechs would not

mobilize. Dr. Mastny left the reception, telephoned to his Foreign Minister in

Prague, and returned to the hall to tell Goering that his country was not

mobilizing and that Czechoslovakia had no intention of trying to interfere with

events in Austria. Goering was relieved and repeated his assurances, adding that

he was authorized to back them up by Hitler’s word too.

It may have been that even the astute Czech President, Eduard Beneš, did not

have time to realize that evening that Austria’s end meant Czechoslovakia’s as

well. There were some in Europe that weekend who thought the Czech

government was shortsighted, who argued that in view of the disastrous strategic

position in which Czechoslovakia would be left by the Nazi occupation of

Austria—with German troops surrounding her on three sides—and considering

too that her intervention to help save Austria might have brought Russia, France

and Britain, as well as the League of Nations, into a conflict with the Third

Reich which the Germans were in no condition to meet, the Czechs should have

acted on the night of March 11. But subsequent events, which shortly will be

chronicled here, surely demolish any such argument. A little later when the two

big Western democracies and the League had a better opportunity of stopping

Hitler they shrank from it. Anyway, at no time on the eventful day did

Schuschnigg make a formal appeal to London, Paris, Prague or Geneva. Perhaps,

as his memoirs indicate, he thought this would be a waste of time. President

Miklas, on the other hand, was under the impression, as he later testified, that the

Austrian government, which immediately had informed Paris and London of the

German ultimatum, was continuing “conversations” with the French and British

governments throughout the afternoon in order to ascertain their “frame of

mind.”

When it became clear that their “frame of mind” was to do nothing more than

utter empty protests President Miklas, a little before midnight, gave in. He

appointed Seyss-Inquart Chancellor and accepted his list of cabinet ministers. “I

was completely abandoned both at home and abroad,” he commented bitterly

later.

Having issued a grandiose proclamation to the German people in which he

justified his aggression with his usual contempt for the truth and promised that

the Austrian people would choose their future in “a real plebiscite”—Goebbels

read it over the German and Austrian radio stations at noon on March 12—Hitler

set off for his native land. He received a tumultuous welcome. At every village,

hastily decorated in his honor, there were cheering crowds. During the afternoon

he reached his first goal, Linz, where he had spent his school days. The reception

there was delirious and Hitler was deeply touched. The next day, after getting off

a telegram to Mussolini—“I shall never forget you for this!”—he laid a wreath

on the graves of his parents at Leonding and then returned to Linz to make a

speech:

When years ago I went forth from this town I bore within me precisely the same profession

of faith which today fills my heart. Judge the depth of my emotion when after so many years I

have been able to bring that profession of faith to its fulfillment. If Providence once called me

forth from this town to be the leader of the Reich, it must in so doing have charged me with a

mission, and that mission could only be to restore my dear homeland to the German Reich. I

have believed in this mission, I have lived and fought for it, and I believe I have now fulfilled

it.

On the afternoon of the twelfth, Seyss-Inquart, accompanied by Himmler, had

flown to Linz to meet Hitler and had proudly proclaimed that Article 88 of the

Treaty of St. Germain, which proclaimed Austria’s independence as inalienable

and made the League of Nations its guarantor, had been voided. To Hitler,

carried away by the enthusiasm of the Austrian crowds, this was not enough. He

ordered Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, an undersecretary in the Ministry of the Interior

who had been rushed by his Minister, Frick, to Vienna to draft a law making

Hitler President of Austria, to come at once to Linz. Somewhat to the surprise of

this legal expert, the Fuehrer instructed him, as he later deposed at Nuremberg,

to “draft a law providing for a total Anschluss. ” 39

This draft Stuckart presented to the newly formed Austrian government in

Vienna on Sunday, March 13, the day on which Schuschnigg’s plebiscite was to

have been held. President Miklas, as we have seen, refused to sign it, but Seyss-

Inquart, who had taken over the President’s powers, did and late that evening

flew back to Linz to present it to the Fuehrer. It proclaimed the end of Austria.

“Austria,” it began, “is a province of the German Reich.” Hitler shed tears of

joy, Seyss-Inquart later recalled. 40 The so-called Anschluss law was also

promulgated the same day at Linz by the German government and signed by

Hitler, Goering, Ribbentrop, Frick and Hess. It provided for “a free and secret

plebiscite” on April 10 in which the Austrians could determine “the question of

reunion with the German Reich.” The Reich Germans, Hitler announced on

March 18, were also to have a plebiscite on the Anschluss, along with new

elections to the Reichstag.

Hitler did not make his triumphal entry into Vienna, where he had lived so

long as a tramp, until the afternoon of Monday, March 14. He was delayed by

two unforeseen developments. Despite the delirium of the Austrians at the

prospect of seeing the Fuehrer in the capital, Himmler asked for an extra day to

perfect security arrangements. He was already carrying out the arrest of

thousands of “unreliables”—within a few weeks the number would reach 79,000

in Vienna alone. Also the vaunted German panzer units had broken down long

before they got within sight of Vienna’s hills. According to Jodl, some 70 per

cent of the armored vehicles were stranded on the road from Salzburg and

Passau to Vienna, though General Guderian, who commanded the panzer troops,

later contended that only 30 per cent of his forces became stalled. At any rate,

Hitler was furious at the delay. He remained in Vienna only overnight, putting

up at the Hotel Imperial.

Still, this triumphant return to the former imperial capital which he felt had

rejected him and condemned him in his youth to a starved and miserable gutter

life and which was now acclaiming him with such tumultuous jubilation could

not have failed to revive his spirits. The ubiquitous Papen, rushing by plane from

Berlin to Vienna to get in on the festivities, found Hitler in the reviewing stand

opposite the Hofburg, the ancient palace of the Hapsburgs. “I can only describe

him,” Papen later wrote, “as being in a state of ecstasy. ”*

He remained in this state during most of the next four weeks, when he

traversed Germany and Austria from one end to the other whipping up public

fervor for a big Ja vote in favor of the Anschluss. But in his exuberant speeches

he missed no opportunity to vilify Schuschnigg or to peddle the by now

shopworn lies about how the Anschluss was achieved. In his address to the

Reichstag on March 18 he asserted that Schuschnigg had “broken his word” by

his “election forgery,” adding that “only a crazy, blinded man” could have

behaved in such a manner. On March 25 at Koenigsberg the “election forgery”

had become in Hitler’s mind “this ridiculous comedy.” Letters had been found,

Hitler claimed, proving that Schuschnigg had deliberately double-crossed him by

seeking delays in augmenting the Berchtesgaden agreement until “a more

propitious hour to stir up foreign countries against Germany.”

In Koenigsberg Hitler also answered the taunts of the foreign press at his use

of brutal force and his trickery in having proclaimed the Anschluss without even

waiting for the decision of the plebiscite:

Certain foreign newspapers have said that we fell on Austria with brutal methods. I can

only say: even in death they cannot stop lying. I have in the course of my political struggle

won much love from my people, but when I crossed the former frontier [into Austria] there

met me such a stream of love as I have never experienced. Not as tyrants have we come, but as

liberators … Under the force of this impression I decided not to wait until April tenth but to

effect the unification forthwith …

If this sounded less than logical—or honest—to foreign ears, there is no doubt

that it made a great impression on the Germans. When at the conclusion of his

Reichstag speech Hitler implored, in a voice choked with emotion, “German

people, give me another four years so that I can now exploit the accomplished

union for the benefit of all!” he received an ovation so overwhelming that it

dwarfed all his former triumphs at this tribune.

The Fuehrer wound up his election campaign in Vienna on April 9, on the eve

of the polling. The man who had once tramped the pavements of this city as a

vagabond, unwashed and empty-bellied, who but four years before had assumed

in Germany the powers of the Hohenzollern kings and had now taken upon

himself those of the Hapsburg emperors, was full of a sense of God-given

mission.

I believe that it was God’s will to send a youth from here into the Reich, to let him grow

up, to raise him to be the leader of the nation so as to enable him to lead back his homeland

into the Reich.

There is a higher ordering and we all are nothing else than its agents. When on March 9

Herr Schuschnigg broke his agreement, then in that second I felt that now the call of

Providence had come to me. And that which then took place in three days was only

conceivable as the fulfillment of the wish and the will of this Providence.

In three days the Lord has smitten them! … And to me the grace was given on the day of

the betrayal to be able to unite my homeland with the Reich! …

I would now give thanks to Him who let me return to my homeland in order that I might

now lead it into my German Reich! Tomorrow may every German recognize the hour and

measure its import and bow in humility before the Almighty, who in a few weeks has wrought

a miracle upon us!

That a majority of Austrians, who undoubtedly would have said Ja to

Schuschnigg on March 13, would say the same to Hitler on April 10 was a

foregone conclusion. Many of them sincerely believed that ultimate union with

any kind of Germany, even a Nazi Germany, was a desirable and inevitable end,

that Austria, cut off from its vast Slavic and Hungarian hinterland in 1918, could

not in the long run exist decently by itself, that it could only survive as part of

the German Reich. In addition to these Austrians were the fanatical Nazis whose

ranks were swelling rapidly with jobseekers and jobholders attracted by success

and anxious to improve their position. Many Catholics in this overwhelmingly

Catholic country were undoubtedly swayed by a widely publicized statement of

Cardinal Innitzer welcoming Nazism to Austria and urging a Ja vote. *

In a fair and honest election in which the Social Democrats and Schuschnigg’s

Christian Socials would have had freedom to campaign openly the plebiscite, in

my opinion, might have been close. As it was, it took a very brave Austrian to

vote No. As in Germany, and not without reason, the voters feared that their

failure to cast an affirmative ballot might be found out. In the polling station

which I visited in Vienna that Sunday afternoon, wide slits in the corner of the

polling booths gave the Nazi election committee sitting a few feet away a good

view of how one voted. In the country districts few bothered—or dared—to cast

their ballots in the secrecy of the booth; they voted openly for all to see. I

happened to broadcast at seven-thirty that evening, a half hour after the polls had

closed, when few votes had yet been counted. A Nazi official assured me before

the broadcast that the Austrians were voting 99 per cent Ja. That was the figure

officially given later—99.08 per cent in Greater Germany, 99.75 in Austria.

And so Austria, as Austria, passed for a moment out of history, its very name

suppressed by the revengeful Austrian who had now joined it to Germany. The

ancient German word for Austria, Oesterreich, was abolished. Austria became

the Ostmark and soon even that name was dropped and Berlin administered the

country by Gaue (districts) which corresponded roughly to the historic Laender

such as Tyrol, Salzburg, Styria and Carinthia. Vienna became just another city of

the Reich, a provincial district administrative center, withering away. The former

Austrian tramp become dictator had wiped his native land off the map and

deprived its once glittering capital of its last shred of glory and importance.

Disillusionment among the Austrians was inevitable.

For the first few weeks the behavior of the Vienna Nazis was worse than

anything I had seen in Germany. There was an orgy of sadism. Day after day

large numbers of Jewish men and women could be seen scrubbing Schuschnigg

signs off the sidewalk and cleaning the gutters. While they worked on their

hands and knees with jeering storm troopers standing over them, crowds

gathered to taunt them. Hundreds of Jews, men and women, were picked off the

streets and put to work cleaning public latrines and the toilets of the barracks

where the S.A. and the S.S. were quartered. Tens of thousands more were jailed.

Their worldly possessions were confiscated or stolen. I myself, from our

apartment in the Plosslgasse, watched squads of S.S. men carting off silver,

tapestries, paintings and other loot from the Rothschild palace next door. Baron

Louis de Rothschild himself was later able to buy his way out of Vienna by

turning over his steel mills to the Hermann Goering Works. Perhaps half of the

city’s 180,000 Jews managed, by the time the war started, to purchase their

freedom to emigrate by handing over what they owned to the Nazis.

This lucrative trade in human freedom was handled by a special organization

set up under the S.S. by Heydrich, the “Office for Jewish Emigration,” which

became the sole Nazi agency authorized to issue permits to Jews to leave the

country. Administered from the beginning to the end by an Austrian Nazi, a

native of Hitler’s home town of Linz by the name of Karl Adolf Eichmann, it

was to become eventually an agency not of emigration but of extermination and

to organize the slaughter of more than four million persons, mostly Jews.

Himmler and Heydrich also took advantage of their stay in Austria during the

first weeks of the Anschluss to set up a huge concentration camp at Mauthausen,

on the north bank of the Danube near Enns. It was too much trouble to continue

to transport thousands of Austrians to the concentration camps of Germany.

Austria, Himmler decided, needed one of its own. Before the Third Reich

tumbled to its fall the non-Austrian prisoners were to outnumber the local

inmates and Mauthausen was to achieve the dubious record as the German

concentration camp (the extermination camps in the East were something else)

with the largest number of officially listed executions—35,318 in the six and a

half years of its existence.

Despite the Gestapo terror led by Himmler and Heydrich after the Anschluss

Germans flocked by the hundreds of thousands to Austria, where they could pay

with their marks for sumptuous meals not available in Germany for years and for

bargain-priced vacations amid Austria’s matchless mountains and lakes. German

businessmen and bankers poured in to buy up the concerns of dispossessed Jews

and anti-Nazis at a fraction of their value. Among the smiling visitors was the

inimitable Dr. Schacht, who, despite his quarrels with Hitler, was still a minister

(without portfolio) in the Reich cabinet, still the president of the Reichsbank, and

who was overjoyed with the Anschluss. Arriving to take over the Austrian

National Bank on behalf of the Reichsbank even before the plebiscite, he

addressed the staff of the Austrian bank on March 21. Ridiculing the foreign

press for criticizing Hitler’s methods of effecting the union, Dr. Schacht stoutly

defended the methods, arguing that the Anschluss was “the consequence of

countless perfidies and brutal acts of violence which foreign countries have

practiced against us.

“Thank God … Adolf Hitler has created a communion of German will and

German thought. He bolstered it up with the newly strengthened Wehrmacht and

he then finally gave the external form to the inner union between Germany and

Austria….

“Not a single person will find a future with us who is not wholeheartedly for

Adolf Hitler … The Reichsbank will always be nothing but National Socialist or

I shall cease to be its manager.”

Whereupon Dr. Schacht administered to the Austrian staff an oath to be

“faithful and obedient to the Fuehrer.”

“A scoundrel he who breaks it!” Dr. Schacht cried, and then led his audience

in the bellowing of a triple “Sieg Heil! ”42

In the meantime Dr. Schuschnigg had been arrested and subjected to treatment

so degrading that it is difficult to believe that it was not prescribed by Hitler

himself. Kept under house arrest from March 12 until May 28, during which

time the Gestapo contrived to prevent him from getting any sleep by the most

petty devices, he was then taken to Gestapo headquarters at the Hotel Metropole

in Vienna, where he was incarcerated in a tiny room on the fifth floor for the

next seventeen months. There, with the towel issued to him for his personal use,

he was forced to clean the quarters, washbasins, slop buckets and latrines of the

S.S. guards and perform other various menial tasks thought up by the Gestapo.

By March 11, the first anniversary of his fall, he had lost fifty-eight pounds, but

the S.S. doctor reported that his condition was excellent. The years of solitary

confinement and then of life “among the living dead” in some of the worst of the

German concentration camps such as Dachau and Sachsenhausen that followed

have been described by Dr. Schuschnigg in his book.*

Shortly after his arrest he was allowed to marry by proxy the former Countess

Vera Czernin, whose marriage had been annulled by an ecclesiastical court, † and

in the last war years she was permitted to share his existence in the concentration

camps along with their child, who was born in 1941. How they survived the

nightmare of imprisonment is a miracle. Toward the end they were joined by a

number of other distinguished victims of Hitler’s wrath such as Dr. Schacht,

Léon Blum, the former French Premier, and Madame Blum, Pastor Niemoeller,

a host of high-ranking generals and Prince Philip of Hesse, whose wife, Princess

Mafalda, the daughter of the King of Italy, had been done to death by the S.S. at

Buchenwald in 1944 as part of the Fuehrer’s revenge for Victor Emmanuel’s

desertion to the Allied side.

On May 1, 1945, the eminent group of prisoners, who had been hastily

evacuated from Dachau and transported southward to keep them from being

liberated by the Americans advancing from the West, arrived at a village high in

the mountains of southern Tyrol. The Gestapo officers showed Schuschnigg a

list of those who, on Himmler’s orders, were to be done away with before they

fell into the hands of the Allies. Schuschnigg noted his own name and that of his

wife, “neatly printed.” His spirits fell. To have survived so much so long—and

then to be bumped off at the last minute!

On May 4, however, Schuschnigg was able to write in his diary:

At two o’clock this afternoon, alarm! The Americans! An American detachment takes over

the hotel. We are free!

Without firing a shot and without interference from Great Britain, France and

Russia, whose military forces could have overwhelmed him, Hitler had added

seven million subjects to the Reich and gained a strategic position of immense

value to his future plans. Not only did his armies flank Czechoslovakia on three

sides but he now possessed in Vienna the gateway to Southeast Europe. As the

capital of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, Vienna had long stood at the center

of the communications and the trading systems of Central and Southeast Europe.

Now that nerve center was in German hands.

Perhaps most important to Hitler was the demonstration again that neither

Britain nor France would lift a finger to stop him. On March 14 Chamberlain

had addressed the Commons on Hitler’s fait accompli in Austria, and the

German Embassy in London had got off to Berlin a succession of urgent

telegrams on the course of the debate. There was not much for Hitler to fear.

“The hard fact is,” Chamberlain declared, “that nothing could have arrested what

actually has happened [in Austria]—unless this country and other countries had

been prepared to use force.”

The British Prime Minister, it became clear to Hitler, was unwilling not only

to employ force but even to concert with the other Big Powers about halting

Germany’s future moves. On March 17 the Soviet government had proposed a

conference of powers, within or without the League of Nations, to consider

means of seeing that there was no further German aggression. Chamberlain took

a chilly view of any such meeting and on March 24, in the House of Commons,

publicly rejected it. “The inevitable consequence of any such action,” he said,

“would be to aggravate the tendency towards the establishment of exclusive

groups of nations which must … be inimical to the prospects of European

peace.” Apparently he overlooked, or did not take seriously, the Rome–Berlin

Axis or the tripartite Anti-Comintern Pact of Germany, Italy and Japan.

In the same speech Chamberlain announced a decision of his government

which must have been even more pleasing to Hitler. He bluntly rejected the

suggestion not only that Britain should give a guarantee to come to the aid of

Czechoslovakia in case she were attacked but also that Britain should support

France if the French were called upon to implement their obligations under the

Franco–Czech pact. This forthright statement eased Hitler’s problems

considerably. He now knew that Britain would also stand by when he took on his

next victim. If Britain held back would not France also? As his secret papers of

the next few months make clear, he was sure of it. And he knew that, by the

terms of the Russian pacts with France and Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union

was not obliged to come to the aid of the Czechs until the French moved first.

Such knowledge was all that he needed to enable him to go ahead at once with

his plans.

The reluctant German generals, Hitler could assume after the success of the

Anschluss, would no longer stand in his way. If he had any doubts at all on this,

they were removed by the denouement of the Fritsch affair.

As we have seen,* General von Fritsch’s trial before a military court of honor

on charges of homosexualism had been abruptly suspended on its opening day,

March 10, when Field Marshal Goering and the commanders of the Army and

Navy were convoked by Hitler to handle more urgent affairs in connection with

Austria. The trial resumed on March 17, but in view of what had happened in the

interval it was bound to be anti-climactic. A few weeks before, the senior

generals had been confident that when the military court exposed the

unbelievable machinations of Himmler and Heydrich against Fritsch not only

would their fallen Commander in Chief be restored to his post in the Army but

the S.S., perhaps even the Third Reich, possibly even Adolf Hitler, would be

shaken to a fall. Vain and empty hope! On February 4, as has been recounted,

Hitler had smashed the dreams of the old officer corps by taking over command

of the armed forces himself and cashiering Fritsch and most of the high-ranking

generals around him. Now he had conquered Austria without a shot. After this

astounding triumph, nobody in Germany, not even the old generals, had much

thought for General von Fritsch.

True, he was quickly cleared. After some browbeating from Goering, who

could now pose as the fairest of judges, the blackmailing ex-convict, Schmidt,

broke down in court and confessed that the Gestapo had threatened his life

unless he implicated General von Fritsch—a threat, incidentally, which was

carried out anyway a few days later—and that the similarity of names between

Fritsch and Rittmeister von Frisch, whom he had actually blackmailed for

homosexualism, had led to the frame-up. No attempt was made by Fritsch or the

Army to expose the Gestapo’s real role, nor the personal guilt of Himmler and

Heydrich in cooking up the false charges. On the second day, March 18, the trial

was concluded with the inevitable verdict: “Proven not guilty as charged, and

acquitted.”

It was a personal exoneration for General von Fritsch but it did not restore him

to his command, nor the Army to its former position of some independence in

the Third Reich. Since the trial was held in camera, the public knew nothing of it

or of the issues involved. On March 25 Hitler sent a telegram to Fritsch

congratulating him on his “recovery of health.” That was all.

The deposed General, who had declined to point an accusing finger at

Himmler in court, now made a final futile gesture. He challenged the Gestapo

chief to a duel. The challenge, drawn up in strict accordance with the old

military code of honor by General Beck himself, was given to General von

Rundstedt, as the senior ranking Army officer, to deliver to the head of the S.S.

But Rundstedt got cold feet, carried it around in his pocket for weeks and in the

end forgot it.

General von Fritsch, and all he stood for, soon faded out of German life. But

what did he stand for in the end? In December he was writing his friend

Baroness Margot von Schutzbar a letter which indicated the pathetic confusion

into which he, like so many of the other generals, had fallen.

It is really strange that so many people should regard the future with increasing fears, in

spite of the Fuehrer’s indisputable successes during the past years …

Soon after the war I came to the conclusion that we should have to be victorious in three

battles if Germany were to become powerful again:

1.

The battle against the working class—Hitler has won this.

2.

Against the Catholic Church, perhaps better expressed against Ultramontanism, and

3.

Against the Jews.

We are in the midst of these battles and the one against the Jews is the most difficult. I

hope everyone realizes the intricacies of this campaign. 43

On August 7, 1939, as the war clouds darkened, he wrote the Baroness: “For

me there is, neither in peace nor in war, any part in Herr Hitler’s Germany. I

shall accompany my regiment only as a target, because I cannot stay at home.”

That is what he did. On August 11, 1938, he had been named colonel in chief

of his old regiment, the 12th Artillery Regiment, a purely honorary title. On

September 22, 1939, he was the target of a Polish machine gunner before

beleaguered Warsaw, and four days later he was buried with full military honors

in Berlin on a cold, rainy, dark morning, one of the dreariest days, according to

my diary, I ever lived through in the capital.

With Fritsch’s discharge as Commander in Chief of the German Army twenty

months before, Hitler had won, as we have seen, a complete victory over the last

citadel of possible opposition in Germany, the old, traditional Army officer

caste. Now, in the spring of 1938, by his clever coup in Austria, he had further

established his hold on the Army, demonstrating his bold leadership and

emphasizing that he alone would make the decisions in foreign policy and that it

was the Army’s role merely to supply the force, or the threat of force. Moreover,

he had given the Army, without the sacrifice of a man, a strategic position which

rendered Czechoslovakia militarily indefensible. There was no time to lose in

taking advantage of it.

On April 21, eleven days after the Nazi plebiscite on Austria, Hitler called in

General Keitel, Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces, to discuss

Case Green.

* Which happened to be the fourth anniversary of the slaughter of the Austrian Social

Democrats by the Dollfuss government, of which Schuschnigg was a member. On February

12, 1934, seventeen thousand government troops and fascist militia had turned artillery on the

workers’ flats in Vienna, killing a thousand men, women and children and wounding three or

four thousand more. Democratic political freedom was stamped out and Austria thereafter was

ruled first by Dollfuss and then by Schuschnigg as a clerical-fascist dictatorship. It was

certainly milder than the Nazi variety, as those of us who worked in both Berlin and Vienna in

those days can testify. Nevertheless it deprived the Austrian people of their political freedom

and subjected them to more repression than they had known under the Hapsburgs in the last

decades of the monarchy. The author has discussed this more fully in Midcentury Journey.

* Later Dr. Schuschnigg wrote down from memory an account of what he calls the

“significant passages” of the one-sided conversation, and though it is therefore not a verbatim

record it rings true to anyone who has heard and studied Hitler’s countless utterances and its

substance is verified not only by all that happened subsequently but by others who were

present at the Berghof that day, notably Papen, Jodl and Guido Schmidt. I have followed

Schuschnigg’s account given in his book Austrian Requiem and in his Nuremberg affidavit on

the meeting.4

† It is evident that Hitler’s warped version of Austro–German history, which, as we have seen

in earlier chapters, was picked up in his youth at Linz and Vienna, remained unchanged.

* Papen’s version (see his Memoirs, p. 420) is somewhat different, but that of Schuschnigg

rings more true.

* Wilhelm Canaris was head of the Intelligence Bureau (Abwehr) of OKW.

* According to the testimony of President Miklas during a trial of an Austrian Nazi in Vienna

after the war, the plebiscite was suggested to Schuschnigg by France. Papen in his memoirs

suggests that the French minister in Vienna, M. Puaux, a close personal friend of the

Chancellor, was the “father of the plebiscite idea.” He concedes, however, that Schuschnigg

certainly adopted it on his own responsibility. 18

* The stricken passages were found after the war in the archives of the Italian Foreign

Ministry.

* Drawing the frontier at the Brenner was a sop to Mussolini. It meant that Hitler would not be

asking for the return of the southern Tyrol, which was taken from Austria and awarded to Italy

at Versailles.

† In all fairness, it should be pointed out that Schuschnigg’s plebiscite was scarcely more free

or democratic than those perpetrated by Hitler in Germany. Since there had been no free

elections in Austria since 1933, there were no up-to-date polling lists. Only those persons

above twenty-four were eligible to vote. Only four days’ notice of the plebiscite had been

given to the public, so there was no time for campaigning even if the opposition groups, the

Nazis and the Social Democrats, had been free to do so. The Social Democrats undoubtedly

would have voted Ja, since they regarded Schuschnigg as a lesser evil than Hitler and

moreover had been promised the restoration of political freedom. There is no question that

their vote would have given Schuschnigg a victory.

* In his postwar testimony already referred to, Miklas denied that he asked Schuschnigg to say

any such thing or that he even agreed that the broadcast should be made. Contrary to what the

retiring Chancellor said, the President was not yet ready to yield to force. “Things have not

gone so far that we must capitulate,” he says he told Schuschnigg. He had just turned down the

second German ultimatum. He was standing firm. But Schuschnigg’s broadcast did help to

undermine his position and force his hand. As we shall see, the obstinate old President held

out for several hours more before capitulating. On March 13, he refused to sign the Anschluss

law snuffing out Austria’s independent existence which Seyss-Inquart, at Hitler’s insistence,

promulgated. Though he surrendered the functions of his office to the Nazi Chancellor for as

long as he was prevented from carrying them out, he maintained that he never formally

resigned as President. “It would have been too cowardly,” he later explained to a Vienna court.

This did not prevent Seyss-Inquart from announcing officially on March 13 that “the

President, upon request of the Chancellor,” had “resigned from his office” and that his

“affairs” were transferred to the Chancellor.28

* Marked “Top Secret” and identified as Directive No. 2 of Operation Otto, it read in part:

“The demands of the German ultimatum to the Austrian government have not been fulfilled …

To avoid further bloodshed in Austrian cities, the entry of the German armed forces into

Austria will commence, according to Directive No. 1, at daybreak of March 12. I expect the

set objectives to be reached by exerting all forces to the full as quickly as possible. (Signed)

Adolf Hitler. ”29

† Actually, Seyss-Inquart tried until long after midnight to get Hitler to call off the German

invasion. A German Foreign Office memorandum reveals that at 2:10 A.M. on March 12

General Muff telephoned Berlin and stated that on the instructions of Chancellor Seyss-Inquart

he was requesting that “the alerted troops should remain on, but not cross, the border.”

Keppler also came on the telephone to support the request. General Muff, a decent man and an

officer of the old school, seems to have been embarrassed by his role in Vienna. When he was

informed by Berlin that Hitler declined to halt his troops he replied that he “regretted this

message. ”30

* In his testimony at Nuremberg Guido Schmidt swore that both he and Schuschnigg informed

the envoys of the “Big Powers” of Hitler’s ultimatum “in detail.” 32 Moreover, the Vienna

correspondents of the Times and the Daily Telegraph of London, to my knowledge, also

telephoned their respective newspapers a full and accurate report.

* Churchill has given an amusing description of this luncheon in The Gathering Storm (pp.

271–72).

† The lies were repeated in a circular telegram dispatched by Baron von Weizsaecker of the

Foreign Office March 12 to German envoys abroad for “information and orientation of your

conversations.” Weizsaecker stated that Schuschnigg’s declaration concerning a German

ultimatum “was sheer fabrication” and went on to inform his diplomats abroad: “The truth was

that the question of sending military forces … was first raised in the well-known telegram of

the newly formed Austrian government. In view of the imminent danger of civil war, the

Reich government decided to comply with this appeal. ”37 Thus the German Foreign Office

lied not only to foreign diplomats but to its own. In a long and ineffectual book written after

the war Weizsaecker, like so many other Germans who served Hitler, maintained that he was

anti-Nazi all along.

‡ In his testimony at Nuremberg on August 9, 1946, Field Marshal von Manstein emphasized

that “at the time when Hitler gave us the orders for Austria his chief worry was not so much

that there might be interference on the part of the Western Powers, but his only worry was as

to how Italy would behave, because it appeared that Italy always sided with Austria and the

Hapsburgs.” 38

* Yet underneath the ecstasy, and unnoticed by the shallow Papen, there may have burned in

Hitler a feeling of revenge for a city and a people which had not appreciated him as a young

man and which at heart he despised. This in part may have accounted for his brief stay.

Though a few weeks later he would publicly say to the burgomaster of Vienna, “Be assured

that this city is in my eyes a pearl—I will bring it into a setting which is worthy of it,” this was

probably more electioneering propaganda than an expression of his inner feelings. These

feelings were revealed to Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi Governor and Gauleiter of Vienna

during the war, at a heated meeting at the Berghof in 1943. Describing it during his testimony

at Nuremberg, Schirach said:

Then the Fuehrer began with, I might say, incredible and unlimited hatred to speak against

the people of Vienna…. At four o’clock in the morning Hitler suddenly said something which

I should now like to repeat for historical reasons. He said: “Vienna should never have been

admitted into the Union of the Greater Germany.” Hitler never loved Vienna. He hated its

people. 41

Papen’s own festive spirits on March 14 were spoiled that same day when he learned that

Wilhelm von Ketteler, his close friend and aide at the German Legation, had disappeared

under circumstances which indicated foul play by the Gestapo. Three years before, another

friend and collaborator at the legation, Baron Tschirschky, had fled to England to escape

certain death from the S.S. At the end of April Ketteler’s body was fished out of the Danube,

where Gestapo thugs in Vienna had thrown it after murdering him.

* A few months later, on October 8, the cardinal’s palace opposite St. Stephen’s Cathedral was

sacked by Nazi hooligans. Too late Innitzer had learned what National Socialism was, and had

spoken out in a sermon against the Nazi persecution of his Church.

* Austrian Requiem.

† At this time Schuschnigg was a widower.

* See previous chapter.

12

THE ROAD TO MUNICH

CASE GREEN WAS THE CODE NAME of the plan for a surprise attack on

Czechoslovakia. It had first been drawn up, as we have seen, on June 24, 1937,

by Field Marshal von Blomberg, and Hitler had elaborated on it in his lecture to

the generals on November 5, admonishing them that “the descent upon the

Czechs” would have to be “carried out with lightning speed” and that it might

take place “as early as 1938.”*

Obviously, the easy conquest of Austria now made Case Green a matter of

some urgency; the plan must be brought up to date and preparations for carrying

it out begun. It was for this purpose that Hitler summoned Keitel on April 21,

1938. On the following day, Major Rudolf Schmundt, the Fuehrer’s new military

aide, prepared a summary of the discussion, which was divided into three parts:

“political aspects,” “military conclusions” and “propaganda.” 1

Hitler rejected the “idea of strategic attack out of the blue without cause or

possibility of justification” because of “hostile world opinion which might lead

to a critical situation.” He thought a second alternative, “action after a period of

diplomatic discussions which gradually lead to a crisis and to war,” was

“undesirable because Czech (Green) security measures will have been taken.”

The Fuehrer preferred, at the moment at least, a third alternative: “Lightning

action based on an incident (for example, the murder of the German minister in

the course of an anti-German demonstration).” † Such an “incident,” it will be

remembered, was at one time planned to justify a German invasion of Austria,

when Papen was to have been the victim. In Hitler’s gangster world German

envoys abroad were certainly expendable.

The German warlord, as he now was—since he had taken over personal

command of the armed forces—emphasized to General Keitel the necessity of

speed in the operations.

The first four days of military action are, politically speaking, decisive. In the

absence of outstanding military successes, a European crisis is certain to rise.

Faits accomplis must convince foreign powers of the hopelessness of military

intervention.

As for the propaganda side of the war, it was not yet time to call in Dr.

Goebbels. Hitler merely discussed leaflets “for the conduct of the Germans in

Czechoslovakia” and those which would contain “threats to intimidate the

Czechs.”

The Republic of Czechoslovakia, which Hitler was now determined to destroy,

was the creation of the peace treaties, so hateful to the Germans, after the First

World War. It was also the handiwork of two remarkable Czech intellectuals,

Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, a self-educated son of a coachman, who became a

noted savant and the country’s first President; and Eduard Beneš, son of a

peasant, who worked his way through the University of Prague and three French

institutions of higher learning, and who after serving almost continually as

Foreign Minister became the second President on the retirement of Masaryk in

1935. Carved out of the Hapsburg Empire, which in the sixteenth century had

acquired the ancient Kingdom of Bohemia, Czechoslovakia developed during

the years that followed its founding in 1918 into the most democratic,

progressive, enlightened and prosperous state in Central Europe.

But by its very make-up of several different nationalities it was gripped from

the beginning by a domestic problem which over twenty years it had not been

able entirely to solve. This was the question of its minorities. Within the country

lived one million Hungarians, half a million Ruthenians and three and a quarter

million Sudeten Germans. These peoples looked longingly toward their

“mother” countries, Hungary, Russia, and Germany respectively, though the

Sudeteners had never belonged to the German Reich (except as a part of the

loosely formed Holy Roman Empire) but only to Austria. At the least, these

minorities desired more autonomy than they had been given.

Even the Slovaks, who formed a quarter of the ten million Czechoslovaks,

wanted some measure of autonomy. Although racially and linguistically closely

related to the Czechs, the Slovaks had developed differently—historically,

culturally and economically—largely due to their centuries-old domination by

Hungary. An agreement between Czech and Slovak émigrés in America signed

in Pittsburgh on May 30, 1918, had provided for the Slovaks’ having their own

government, parliament and courts. But the government in Prague had not felt

bound by this agreement and had not kept it.

To be sure, compared to minorities in most other countries even in the West,

even in America, those in Czechoslovakia were not badly off. They enjoyed not

only full democratic and civil rights—including the right to vote—but to a

certain extent were given their own schools and allowed to maintain their own

cultural institutions. Leaders of the minority political parties often served as

ministers in the central government. Nevertheless, the Czechs, not fully

recovered from the effects of centuries of oppression by the Austrians, left a

great deal to be desired in solving the minorities problem. They were often

chauvinistic and frequently tactless. I recall from my own earlier visits to the

country the deep resentment in Slovakia against the imprisonment of Dr. Vojtech

Tuka, at that time a respected professor, who had been sentenced to fifteen

years’ confinement “for treason,” though it was doubtful that he was guilty of

more than working for Slovak autonomy. Above all, the minority groups felt that

the Czechoslovak government had not honored the promises made by Masaryk

and Beneš to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to establish a cantonal system

similar to that of Switzerland.

Ironically enough, in view of what is now to be set down here, the Sudeten

Germans had fared tolerably well in the Czechoslovak state—certainly better

than any other minority in the country and better than the German minorities in

Poland or in Fascist Italy. They resented the petty tyrannies of local Czech

officials and the discrimination against them that sometimes occurred in Prague.

They found it difficult to adjust to the loss of their former dominance in

Bohemia and Moravia under the Hapsburgs. But lying in compact groups along

the northwestern and southwestern parts of the new Republic, where most of the

industry of the country was concentrated, they prospered and as the years went

by they gradually reached a state of relative harmony with the Czechs,

continuing always to press for more autonomy and more respect for their

linguistic and cultural rights. Until the rise of Hitler, there was no serious

political movement which asked for more. The Social Democrats and other

democratic parties received most of the Sudeten votes.

Then in 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor, the virus of National Socialism

struck the Sudeten Germans. In that year was formed the Sudeten German Party

(S.D.P.) under the leadership of a mild-mannered gymnastics teacher by the

name of Konrad Henlein. By 1935, the party was being secretly subsidized by

the German Foreign Office to the amount of 15,000 marks a month.2 Within a

couple of years it had captured the majority of the Sudeten Germans, only the

Social Democrats and the Communists remaining outside it. By the time of the

Anschluss Henlein’s party, which for three years had been taking its orders from

Berlin, was ready to do the bidding of Adolf Hitler.

To receive this bidding, Henlein sped to Berlin a fortnight after the annexation

of Austria and on March 28 was closeted with Hitler for three hours, Ribbentrop

and Hess also being present. Hitler’s instructions, as revealed in a Foreign Office

memorandum, were that “demands should be made by the Sudeten German

Party which are unacceptable to the Czech government.” As Henlein himself

summarized the Fuehrer’s views, “We must always demand so much that we can

never be satisfied. ”3

Thus, the plight of the German minority in Czechoslovakia was for Hitler

merely a pretext, as Danzig was to be a year later in regard to Poland, for

cooking up a stew in a land he coveted, undermining it, confusing and

misleading its friends and concealing his real purpose. What that purpose was he

had made clear in his November 5 harangue to the military leaders and in the

initial directives of Case Green: to destroy the Czechoslovak state and to grab its

territories and inhabitants for the Third Reich. Despite what had happened in

Austria, the leaders of France and Great Britain did not grasp this. All through

the spring and summer, indeed almost to the end, Prime Minister Chamberlain

and Premier Daladier apparently sincerely believed, along with most of the rest

of the world, that all Hitler wanted was justice for his kinsfolk in

Czechoslovakia.

In fact, as the spring days grew warmer the British and French governments

went out of their way to pressure the Czech government to grant far-reaching

concessions to the Sudeten Germans. On May 3 the new German ambassador in

London, Herbert von Dirksen, was reporting to Berlin that Lord Halifax had

informed him of a démarche the British government would shortly make in

Prague “which would aim at inducing Beneš to show the utmost measure of

accommodation to the Sudeten Germans. ”4 Four days later, on May 7, the

British and French ministers in Prague made their démarche, urging the Czech

government “to go to the utmost limit,” as the German minister reported to

Berlin, to meet the Sudeten demands. Hitler and Ribbentrop seemed quite

pleased to find that the British and French governments were so concerned with

aiding them.

Concealment of German aims, however, was more than ever necessary at this

stage. On May 12 Henlein paid a secret visit to the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin and

received instructions from Ribbentrop on how to bamboozle the British when he

arrived in London that evening to see Sir Robert Vansittart, chief diplomatic

adviser to the Foreign Secretary, and other British officials. A memorandum by

Weizsaecker laid down the line to be taken: “Henlein will deny in London that

he is acting on instructions from Berlin … Finally, Henlein will speak of the

progressive disintegration of the Czech political structure, in order to discourage

those circles which consider that their intervention on behalf of this structure

may still be of use.” 5 On the same day the German minister in Prague was

wiring Ribbentrop about the need of precaution to cover his legation in its work

of handing over money and instructions to the Sudeten German Party.

Hugh R. Wilson, the American ambassador in Berlin, called on Weizsaecker

on May 14 to discuss the Sudeten crisis and was told of German fears that Czech

authorities were deliberately provoking a European crisis in order to try to

prevent the “disintegration of Czechoslovakia.” Two days later, on May 16,

Major Schmundt got off an urgent and “most secret” telegram to OKW

headquarters on behalf of Hitler, who was resting at Obersalzberg, asking how

many divisions on the Czech frontier were “ready to march within twelve hours,

in the case of mobilization.” Lieutenant Colonel Zeitzler, of the OKW staff,

replied immediately, “Twelve.” This did not satisfy Hitler. “Please send the

numbers of the divisions,” he asked. And the answer came back, listing ten

infantry divisions by their numbers and adding one armored and one mountain

division. 6

Hitler was getting restless for action. The next day, the seventeenth, he was

inquiring of OKW for precise information on the fortifications which the Czechs

had constructed in the Sudeten mountains on their borders. These were known as

the Czech Maginot Line. Zeitzler replied from Berlin on the same day with a

long and “most secret” telegram informing the Fuehrer in considerable detail of

the Czech defense works. He made it clear that they were fairly formidable.7

THE FIRST CRISIS: MAY 1938

The weekend which began on Friday, May 20, developed into a critical one

and would later be remembered as the “May crisis.” During the ensuing forty-

eight hours, the governments in London, Paris, Prague and Moscow were

panicked into the belief that Europe stood nearer to war than it had at any time

since the summer of 1914. This may have been largely due to the possibility that

new plans for a German attack on Czechoslovakia, which were drawn up for

Hitler by OKW and presented to him on that Friday, leaked out. At any rate, it

was believed at least in Prague and London that Hitler was about to launch

aggression against Czechoslovakia. In this belief the Czechs began to mobilize

and Britain, France and Russia displayed a firmness and a unity in the face of

what their governments feared to be an imminent German threat which they

were not to show again until a new world war had almost destroyed them.

On Friday, May 20, General Keitel dispatched to Hitler at the Obersalzberg a

new draft of Case Green which he and his staff had been working on since the

Fuehrer had laid down the general lines for it in their meeting on April 21. In an

obsequious letter to the Leader attached to the new plan, Keitel explained that it

took into account “the situation created by the incorporation of Austria into the

German Reich” and that it would not be discussed with the commanders in chief

of the three armed services until “you, my Fuehrer,” approved it and signed it.

The new directive for “Green,” dated Berlin, May 20, 1938, is an interesting

and significant document. It is a model of the kind of Nazi planning for

aggression with which the world later became acquainted.

It is not my intention [it began] to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the

immediate future without provocation, unless an unavoidable development … within

[emphasis in the original] Czechoslovakia forces the issue, or political events in Europe create

a particularly favorable opportunity which may perhaps never recur. 8

Three “political possibilities for commencing the operation” are considered.

The first, “a sudden attack without convenient outward excuse,” is rejected.

Operations preferably will be launched, either:

(a) after a period of increasing diplomatic controversies and tension linked

with military preparations, which will be exploited so as to shift the war guilt on

the enemy.

(b) by lightning action as the result of a serious incident which will subject

Germany to unbearable provocation and which, in the eyes of at least a part of

world opinion, affords the moral justification for military measures.

Case (b) is more favorable, both from a military and a political point of view.

As for the military operation itself, it was to attain such a success within four

days that it would “demonstrate to enemy states which may wish to intervene the

hopelessness of the Czech military position and also provide an incentive to

those states which have territorial claims upon Czechoslovakia to join in

immediately against her.” Those states were Hungary and Poland, and the plan

counted on their intervention. Whether France would honor its obligations to the

Czechs was considered doubtful, but “attempts by Russia to give

Czechoslovakia military support are to be expected.”

The German High Command, or at least Keitel and Hitler, were so confident

that the French would not fight that only a “minimum strength is to be provided

as a rear cover in the west” and it was emphasized that “the whole weight of all

forces must be employed in the invasion of Czechoslovakia.” The “task of the

bulk of the Army,” aided by the Luftwaffe, was “to smash the Czechoslovak

Army and to occupy Bohemia and Moravia as quickly as possible.”

It was to be total war, and for the first time in the planning of German soldiers

the value of what the directive calls “propaganda warfare” and “economic

warfare” is emphasized and their employment woven into the over-all military

plan of attack.

Propaganda warfare [emphasis in the original] must on the one hand

intimidate the Czechs by means of threats and wear down their power of

resistance; on the other hand it must give the national minorities indications as to

how to support our military operations and influence the neutrals in our favor.

Economic warfare has the task of employing all available economic resources

to hasten the final collapse of the Czechs … In the course of military operations

it is important to help to increase the total economic war effort by rapidly

collecting information about important factories and setting them going again as

soon as possible. For this reason the sparing—as far as military operations

permit—of Czech industrial and engineering establishments may be of decisive

importance to us.

This model for Nazi aggression was to remain essentially unchanged and to be

used with staggering success until an aroused world much later woke up to it.

Shortly after noon on May 20, the German minister in Prague sent an “urgent

and most secret” wire to Berlin reporting that the Czech Foreign Minister had

just informed him by telephone that his government was “perturbed by reports of

concentration of [German] troops in Saxony. ” He had replied, he said, “that

there were absolutely no grounds for anxiety,” but he requested Berlin to inform

him immediately what, if anything, was up.

This was the first of a series of feverish diplomatic exchanges that weekend

which shook Europe with a fear that Hitler was about to move again and that this

time a general war would follow. The basis for the information received by

British and Czech intelligence that German troops were concentrating on the

Czech border has never, so far as I know, come to light. To a Europe still under

the shock of the German military occupation of Austria there were several straws

in the wind. On May 19 a newspaper in Leipzig had published a report of

German troop movements. Henlein, the Sudeten Fuehrer, had announced the

breaking off of his party’s negotiations with the Czech government on May 9

and it was known that on his return from London on the fourteenth he had

stopped off at Berchtesgaden to see Hitler and that he was still there. There were

shooting affrays in the Sudetenland. And all through May Dr. Goebbels’

propaganda war—featuring wild stories of “Czech terror” against the Sudeten

Germans—had been stepped up. The tension seemed to be reaching a climax.

Though there was some movement of German troops in connection with

spring maneuvers, particularly in the eastern regions, no evidence was ever

found from the captured German documents indicating any sudden, new

concentration of armed forces on the Czech border at this moment. On the

contrary, two German Foreign Office papers dated May 21 contain confidential

assurances to the Wilhelmstrasse from Colonel Jodl of the OKW that there had

been no such concentrations either in Silesia or in Lower Austria. There had

been nothing, Jodl asserted in messages not intended for foreign perusal, “apart

from peacetime maneuvers.” 9 It was not that the Czech border was denuded of

German troops. As we have seen, on May 16 Hitler had been informed by OKW,

in answer to his urgent request for information, that there were twelve German

divisions on the Czech frontier “ready to march within twelve hours.”

Could it have been that Czech or British intelligence got wind of the telegrams

which exchanged this information? And that they learned of the new directive

for “Green” which Keitel dispatched for Hitler’s approval on May 20? For on

the next day the Czech Chief of Staff, General Krejci, told the German military

attaché in Prague, Colonel Toussaint, that he had “irrefutable proof that in

Saxony a concentration of from eight to ten [German] divisions had taken

place.” 10 The figures on the number of divisions were not far from correct, even

if the information on the manner of their deployment was somewhat inaccurate.

At any rate, on the afternoon of May 20, following an emergency cabinet session

at Hradschin Palace in Prague presided over by President Beneš, the Czechs

decided on an immediate partial mobilization. One class was called to the colors

and certain technical reservists were mobilized. The Czech government, in

contrast to the Austrian two months before, did not intend to give up without a

fight.

The Czech mobilization, partial though it was, sent Adolf Hitler into a fit of

fury, and his feelings were not assuaged by the dispatches that arrived for him at

Obersalzberg from the German Foreign Office in Berlin telling of continual calls

by the British and French ambassadors warning Germany that aggression against

Czechoslovakia meant a European war.

The Germans had never been subjected to such strenuous and persistent

diplomatic pressure as the British employed on this weekend. Sir Nevile

Henderson, the British ambassador, who had been sent to Berlin by Prime

Minister Chamberlain to apply his skills as a professional diplomat to the

appeasement of Hitler and who applied them to the utmost, called repeatedly at

the German Foreign Office to inquire about German troop movements and to

advise caution. There is no doubt that he was egged on by Lord Halifax and the

British Foreign Office, for Henderson, a suave, debonair diplomat, had little

sympathy with the Czechs, as all who knew him in Berlin were aware. He saw

Ribbentrop twice on May 21 and on the next day, though it was a Sunday, called

on State Secretary von Weizsaecker—Ribbentrop having been hastily convoked

to Hitler’s presence at Obersalzberg—to deliver a personal message from

Halifax stressing the gravity of the situation. In London, the British Foreign

Secretary also called in the German ambassador on the Sabbath and emphasized

how grave the moment was.

In all these British communications the Germans did not fail to note, as

Ambassador von Dirksen pointed out in a dispatch after seeing Halifax, that the

British government, while certain that France would go to the aid of

Czechoslovakia, did not affirm that Britain would too. The furthest the British

would go was to warn, as Dirksen says Halifax did, that “in the event of a

European conflict it was impossible to foresee whether Britain would not be

drawn into it. ”11 As a matter of fact, this was as far as Chamberlain’s

government would ever go—until it was too late to stop Hitler. It was this

writer’s impression in Berlin from that moment until the end that had

Chamberlain frankly told Hitler that Britain would do what it ultimately did in

the face of Nazi aggression, the Fuehrer would never have embarked on the

adventures which brought on the Second World War—an impression which has

been immensely strengthened by the study of the secret German documents. This

was the well-meaning Prime Minister’s fatal mistake.

Adolf Hitler, brooding fitfully in his mountain retreat above Berchtesgaden,

felt deeply humiliated by the Czechs and by the support given them in London,

Paris and even Moscow, and nothing could have put the German dictator in a

blacker, uglier mood. His fury was all the more intense because he was accused,

prematurely, of being on the point of committing an aggression which he indeed

intended to commit. That very weekend he had gone over the new plan for

“Green” submitted by Keitel. But it could not be carried out at once. Swallowing

his pride, he ordered the Foreign Office in Berlin to inform the Czech envoy on

Monday, May 23, that Germany had no aggressive intentions toward

Czechoslovakia and that the reports of German troop concentrations on her

borders were without foundation. In Prague, London, Paris and Moscow the

government leaders breathed a sigh of relief. The crisis had been mastered.

Hitler had been given a lesson. He must now know he could not get away with

aggression as easily as he had done in Austria.

Little did these statesmen know the Nazi dictator.

After sulking at Obersalzberg a few more days, during which there grew

within him a burning rage to get even with Czechoslovakia and particularly with

President Beneš, who, he believed, had deliberately humiliated him, he suddenly

appeared in Berlin on May 28 and convoked the ranking officers of the

Wehrmacht to the Chancellery to hear a momentous decision. He himself told of

it in a speech to the Reichstag eight months later:

I resolved to solve once and for all, and this radically, the Sudeten question. On May 28, I

ordered:

1.

That preparations should be made for military action against this state by October 2.

2.

That the construction of our western defenses should be greatly extended and

speeded up …

The immediate mobilization of 96 divisions was planned, to begin with … 12

To his assembled confederates, Goering, Keitel, Brauchitsch, Beck, Admiral

Raeder, Ribbentrop and Neurath, he thundered, “It is my unshakable will that

Czechoslovakia shall be wiped off the map!” 13 Case Green was again brought

out and again revised.

Jodl’s diary traces what had been going on in Hitler’s feverish, vindictive

mind.

The intention of the Fuehrer not to activate the Czech problem as yet is

changed because of the Czech strategic troop concentration of May 21, which

occurs without any German threat and without the slightest cause for it. Because

of Germany’s self-restraint, its consequences lead to a loss of prestige of the

Fuehrer, which he is not willing to take again. Therefore, the new directive for

“Green” is issued on May 30.14

The details of the new directive on Case Green which Hitler signed on May 30

do not differ essentially from those of the version submitted to Hitler nine days

before. But there are two significant changes. Instead of the opening sentence of

May 21, which read: “It is not my intention to smash Czechoslovakia in the near

future,” the new directive began: “It is my unalterable decision to smash

Czechoslovakia by military action in the near future. ”

What the “near future” meant was explained by Keitel in a covering letter.

“Green’s execution,” he ordered, “must be assured by October 1, 1938, at the

latest.” 15

It was a date which Hitler would adhere to through thick and thin, through

crisis after crisis, and at the brink of war, without flinching.

WAVERING OF THE GENERALS

After noting in his diary on May 30 that Hitler had signed the new directive

for “Green” and that because of its demand for “an immediate breakthrough into

Czechoslovakia right on X Day … the previous intentions of the Army must be

changed considerably,” Jodl added the following sentence:

The whole contrast becomes acute once more between the Fuehrer’s intuition

that we must do it this year and the opinion of the Army that we cannot do it as

yet because most certainly the Western powers will interfere and we are not as

yet equal to them. 16

The perceptive Wehrmacht staff officer had put his finger on a new rift

between Hitler and some of the highest-ranking generals of the Army. The

opposition to the Fuehrer’s grandiose plans for aggression was led by General

Ludwig Beck, Chief of the Army General Staff, who henceforth would assume

the leadership of such resistance as there was to Hitler in the Third Reich. Later

this sensitive, intelligent, decent but indecisive general would base his struggle

against the Nazi dictator on broad grounds. As late as the spring of 1938,

however, after more than four years of National Socialism, Beck opposed the

Fuehrer only on the narrower professional grounds that Germany was not yet

strong enough to take on the Western Powers and perhaps Russia as well.

Beck, as we have seen, had welcomed Hitler’s coming to power and had

publicly acclaimed the Fuehrer for re-establishing the conscript German Army in

defiance of Versailles. As far back as 1930, it will be remembered from earlier

pages, Beck, then an obscure regimental commander, had gone out of his way to

defend three of his subalterns on a treason charge that they were fomenting

Nazism in the armed forces and, in fact, had testified in their favor before the

Supreme Court after Hitler had appeared on the stand and warned that when he

came to power “heads would roll.” It was not the Fuehrer’s aggression against

Austria—which Beck had supported—but the rolling of General von Fritsch’s

head after the Gestapo frame-up which seems to have cleared his mind. Swept of

its cobwebs it began to perceive that Hitler’s policy of deliberately risking war

with Britain, France and Russia against the advice of the top generals would, if

carried out, be the ruin of Germany.

Beck had got wind of Hitler’s meeting with Keitel on April 21 in which the

Wehrmacht was instructed to hasten plans for attacking Czechoslovakia, and on

May 5 he wrote out the first of a series of memoranda for General von

Brauchitsch, the new Commander in Chief of the Army, strenuously opposing

any such action. 17 They are brilliant papers, blunt as to unpleasant facts and full

of solid reasoning and logic. Although Beck overestimated the strength of will of

Britain and France, the political shrewdness of their leaders and the power of the

French Army, and in the end proved wrong on the outcome of the Czech

problem, his long-range predictions turned out, so far as Germany was

concerned, to be deadly accurate.

Beck was convinced, he wrote in his May 5 memorandum, that a German

attack on Czechoslovakia would provoke a European war in which Britain,

France and Russia would oppose Germany and in which the United States would

be the arsenal of the Western democracies. Germany simply could not win such

a war. Its lack of raw materials alone made victory impossible. In fact, he

contended, Germany’s “military-economic situation is worse than it was in

1917–18,” when the collapse of the Kaiser’s armies began.

On May 28, Beck was among the generals convoked to the Reich Chancellery

after the “May crisis” to hear Hitler storm that he intended to wipe

Czechoslovakia off the map the coming autumn. He took careful notes of the

Fuehrer’s harangue and two days later, on the very day that Hitler was signing

the new directive for “Green,” which fixed the date for the attack as October 1,

penned another and sharper memorandum to Brauchitsch criticizing Hitler’s

program point by point. To make sure that his cautious Commander in Chief

fully understood it, Beck read it to him personally. At the end he emphasized to

the unhappy and somewhat shallow Brauchitsch that there was a crisis in the

“top military hierarchy” which had already led to anarchy and that if it was not

mastered the fate of the Army, indeed of Germany, would be “black.” A few

days later, on June 3, Beck got off another memorandum to Brauchitsch in

which he declared that the new directive for “Green” was “militarily unsound”

and that the Army General Staff rejected it.

Hitler, however, pressed forward with it. The captured “Green” file discloses

how frenzied he grew as the summer proceeded. The usual autumn troop

maneuvers, he orders, must be moved forward so that the Army will be in trim

for the attack. Special exercises must be held “in the taking of fortifications by

surprise attack.” General Keitel is informed that “the Fuehrer repeatedly

emphasized the necessity of pressing forward more rapidly the fortification work

in the west.” On June 9, Hitler asks for more information on Czech armament

and receives immediately a detailed report on every conceivable weapon, large

and small, used by the Czechs. On the same day he asks, “Are the Czech

fortifications still occupied in reduced strength?” In his mountain retreat, where

he is spending the summer, surrounded by his toadies, his spirits rise and fall as

he toys with war. On June 18 he issues a new “General Guiding Directive” to

“Green.”

There is no danger of a preventive war against Germany … I will decide to

take action against Czechoslovakia only if I am firmly convinced … that France

will not march and that therefore England will not intervene.

On July 7, however, Hitler is laying down “considerations” of what to do if

France and Britain intervene. “The prime consideration,” he says, “is to hold the

western fortifications” until Czechoslovakia is smashed and troops can be rushed

to the Western front. The fact that there are no troops available to hold the

western fortifications does not intrude itself upon his feverish thinking. He

advises that “Russia is most likely to intervene” and by now he is not so sure that

Poland may not too. These eventualities must be met, but he does not say how.

Apparently Hitler, somewhat isolated at Obersalzberg, has not yet heard the

rumblings of dissent in the upper echelons of the Army General Staff. Despite

Beck’s pestering of Brauchitsch with his memoranda, the General Staff Chief

began to realize by midsummer that his unstable Commander in Chief was not

bringing his opinions to the notice of the Fuehrer. By the middle of July Beck

therefore determined to make one last desperate effort to bring matters to a head,

one way or the other. On July 16 he penned his last memorandum to

Brauchitsch. He demanded that the Army tell Hitler to halt his preparations for

war.

In full consciousness of the magnitude of such a step but also of my

responsibilities I feel it my duty to urgently ask that the Supreme Commander of

the Armed Forces [Hitler] call off his preparations for war, and abandon the

intention of solving the Czech question by force until the military situation is

fundamentally changed. For the present I consider it hopeless, and this view is

shared by all the higher officers of the General Staff.

Beck took his memorandum personally to Brauchitsch and augmented it orally

with further proposals for unified action on the part of the Army generals should

Hitler prove recalcitrant. Specifically, he proposed that in that case the ranking

generals should all resign at once. And for the first time in the Third Reich, he

raised a question which later haunted the Nuremberg trials: Did an officer have a

higher allegiance than the one to the Fuehrer? At Nuremberg dozens of generals

excused their war crimes by answering in the negative. They had to obey orders,

they said. But Beck on July 16 held a different view, which he was to press,

unsuccessfully for the most part, to the end. There were “limits,” he said, to

one’s allegiance to the Supreme Commander where conscience, knowledge and

responsibility forbade carrying out an order. The generals, he felt, had reached

those limits. If Hitler insisted on war, they should resign in a body. In that case,

he argued, a war was impossible, since there would be nobody to lead the

armies.

The Chief of the German Army General Staff was now aroused as he had

never been before in his lifetime. The scales were falling from his eyes. What

was at stake for the German nation, he saw at last, was more than just the

thwarting of a hysterical head of state bent, out of pique, on attacking a small

neighboring nation at the risk of a big war. The whole folly of the Third Reich,

its tyranny, its terror, its corruption, its contempt for the old Christian virtues,

suddenly dawned on this once pro-Nazi general. Three days later, on July 19, he

went again to Brauchitsch to speak of this revelation.

Not only, he insisted, must the generals go on strike to prevent Hitler from

starting a war, but they must help clean up the Third Reich. The German people

and the Fuehrer himself must be freed from the terror of the S.S. and the Nazi

party bosses. A state and society ruled by law must be restored. Beck summed

up his reform program:

For the Fuehrer, against war, against boss rule, peace with the Church, free expression of

opinion, an end to the Cheka terror, restoration of justice, reduction of contributions to the

party by one half, no more building of palaces, housing for the common people and more

Prussian probity and simplicity.

Beck was too naïve politically to realize that Hitler, more than any other

single man, was responsible for the very conditions in Germany which now

revolted him. However, Beck’s immediate task was to continue to browbeat the

hesitant Brauchitsch into presenting an ultimatum on behalf of the Army to

Hitler calling on him to stop his preparations for war. To further this purpose he

arranged a secret meeting of the commanding generals for August 4. He

prepared a ringing speech that the Army Commander in Chief was to read,

rallying the senior generals behind him in a common insistence that there be no

Nazi adventures leading to armed conflict. Alas for Beck, Brauchitsch lacked the

courage to read it. Beck had to be content with reading his own memorandum of

July 16, which left a deep impression on most of the generals. But no decisive

action was taken and the meeting of the top brass of the German Army broke up

without their having had the courage to call Hitler to count, as their predecessors

once had done with the Hohenzollern emperors and the Reich Chancellors.

Brauchitsch did summon up enough courage to show Beck’s July 16

memorandum to Hitler. Hitler’s response was to call in not the resisting ranking

generals, who were behind it, but the officers just below them, the Army and Air

Force staff chiefs of various commands who formed a younger set on which he

believed he could count after he had treated it to his persuasive oratory.

Summoned to the Berghof on August 10—Hitler had scarcely budged from his

mountain villa all summer—they were treated after dinner to a speech that,

according to Jodl, who was present and who described it in his faithful diary,

lasted nearly three hours. But on this occasion the eloquence of the Fuehrer was

not so persuasive as he had hoped. Both Jodl and Manstein, who was also

present, later told of “a most serious and unpleasant clash” between General von

Wietersheim and Hitler. Wietersheim was the ranking officer at the gathering

and as designate chief of staff of the Army of the West under General Wilhelm

Adam he dared to speak up about the key problem which Hitler and the OKW

were dodging: that with almost all of the military forces committed to the blow

against Czechoslovakia, Germany was defenseless in the west and would be

overrun by the French. In fact, he reported, the West Wall could not be held for

more than three weeks.

The Fuehrer [Jodl recounted in his diary] becomes furious and flames up,

bursting into the remark that in such a case the whole Army would not be good

for anything. “I say to you, Herr General [Hitler shouted back], the position will

be held not only for three weeks but for three years! ”18

With what, he did not say. On August 4, General Adam had reported to the

meeting of senior generals that in the west he would have only five active

divisions and that they would be overwhelmed by the French. Wietersheim

presumably gave the same figure to Hitler, but the Fuehrer would not listen.

Jodl, keen staff officer though he was, was now so much under the spell of the

Leader that he left the meeting deeply depressed that the generals did not seem

to understand Hitler’s genius.

The cause of this despondent opinion [Wietersheim’s], which unfortunately is

held very widely within the Army General Staff, is based on various grounds.

First of all, it [the General Staff] is restrained by old memories and feels itself

responsible for political decisions instead of obeying and carrying out its

military assignments. Admittedly it does the last with traditional devotion but the

vigor of the soul is lacking because in the end it does not believe in the genius of

the Fuehrer. And one does perhaps compare him with Charles XII.

And just as certain as water flows downhill there stems from this defeatism

[ Miesmacherei] not only an immense political damage—for everyone is talking

about the opposition between the opinions of the generals and those of the

Fuehrer—but a danger for the morale of the troops. But I have no doubt that the

Fuehrer will be able to boost the morale of the people when the right moment

comes. 19

Jodl might have added that Hitler would be able, too, to quell revolt among the

generals. As Manstein told the tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946, this meeting was

the last at which Hitler permitted any questions or discussions from the

military. 20 At the Jueterbog military review on August 15, Hitler reiterated to the

generals that he was determined “to solve the Czech question by force” and no

officer dared—or was permitted—to say a word to oppose him.

Beck saw that he was defeated, largely by the spinelessness of his own brother

officers, and on August 18 he resigned as Chief of the Army General Staff. He

tried to induce Brauchitsch to follow suit, but the Army commander was now

coming under Hitler’s hypnotic power, no doubt aided by the Nazi enthusiasms

of the woman who was about to become his second wife. * As Hassell said of

him, “Brauchitsch hitches his collar a notch higher and says: ‘I am a soldier; it is

my duty to obey.’”21

Ordinarily the resignation of a chief of the Army General Staff in the midst of

a crisis, and especially of one so highly respected as was General Beck, would

have caused a storm in military circles and even given rise to repercussions

abroad. But here again Hitler showed his craftiness. Though he accepted Beck’s

resignation at once, and with great relief, he forbade any mention of it in the

press or even in the official government and military gazettes and ordered the

retired General and his fellow officers to keep it to themselves. It would not do

to let the British and French governments get wind of dissension at the top of the

German Army at this critical juncture and it is possible that Paris and London

did not hear of the matter until the end of October, when it was officially

announced in Berlin. Had they heard, one could speculate, history might have

taken a different turning; the appeasement of the Fuehrer might not have been

carried so far.

Beck himself, out of a sense of patriotism and loyalty to the Army, made no

effort to bring the news of his quitting to the public’s attention. He was

disillusioned, though, that not a single general officer among those who had

agreed with him and backed him in his opposition to war felt called upon to

follow his example and resign. He did not try to persuade them. He was, as

Hassell later said of him, “pure Clausewitz, without a spark of Bluecher or

Yorck” 22—a man of principles and thought, but not of action. He felt that

Brauchitsch, as Commander in Chief of the Army, had let him down at a

decisive moment in German history, and this embittered him. Beck’s biographer

and friend noted years later the General’s “deep bitterness” whenever he spoke

of his old commander. On such occasions he would shake with emotion and

mutter, “Brauchitsch left me in the lurch.” 23

Beck’s successor as Chief of the Army General Staff—though his appointment

was kept a secret by Hitler for several weeks, until the end of the crisis—was

Franz Halder, fifty-four years old, who came from an old Bavarian military

family and whose father had been a general. Himself trained as an artilleryman,

he had served as a young officer on the staff of Crown Prince Rupprecht in the

First World War. Though a friend of Roehm in the first postwar Munich days,

which might have made him somewhat suspect in Berlin, he had risen rapidly in

the Army and for the past year had served as Beck’s deputy. In fact, Beck

recommended him to Brauchitsch as his successor, for he was certain that his

deputy shared his views.

Halder became the first Bavarian and the first Catholic ever to become Chief

of the German General Staff—a severe break with the old Protestant Prussian

tradition of the officer corps. A man of wide intellectual interests, with a special

bent for mathematics and botany (my own first impression of him was that he

looked like a university professor of mathematics or science) and a devout

Christian, there was no doubt that he had the mind and the spirit to be a true

successor to Beck. The question was whether, like his departed chief, he lacked

the knack of taking decisive action at the proper moment. And whether, if he did

not lack it, at that moment he had the character to disregard his oath of

allegiance to the Fuehrer and move resolutely against him. For Halder, like

Beck, though not at first a member of a growing conspiracy against Hitler, knew

about it and apparently, again like Beck, was willing to back it. As the new Chief

of the General Staff, he became the key figure in the first serious plot to

overthrow the dictator of the Third Reich.

BIRTH OF A CONSPIRACY AGAINST HITLER

After five and a half years of National Socialism it was evident to the few

Germans who opposed Hitler that only the Army possessed the physical strength

to overthrow him. The workers, the middle and upper classes, even if they had

wanted to, had no means of doing it. They had no organization outside of the

Nazi party groups and they were, of course, unarmed. Though much would later

be written about the German “resistance” movement, it remained from the

beginning to the end a small and feeble thing, led, to be sure, by a handful of

courageous and decent men, but lacking followers.

The very maintenance of its bare existence was, admittedly, difficult in a

police state dominated by terror and spying. Moreover, how could a tiny group

—or even a large group, had there been one—rise up in revolt against the

machine guns, the tanks, the flame throwers of the S.S.?

In the beginning, what opposition there was to Hitler sprang from among the

civilians; the generals, as we have seen, were only too pleased with a system

which had shattered the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty and given them the

heady and traditional task of building up a great army once again. Ironically, the

principal civilians who emerged to lead the opposition had served the Fuehrer in

important posts, most of them with an initial enthusiasm for Nazism which

dampened only when it began to dawn on them in 1937 that Hitler was leading

Germany toward a war which it was almost sure to lose.

One of the earliest of these to see the light was Carl Goerdeler, the mayor of

Leipzig, who, first appointed Price Controller by Bruening, had continued in that

job for three years under Hitler. A conservative and a monarchist at heart, a

devout Protestant, able, energetic and intelligent, but also indiscreet and

headstrong, he broke with the Nazis in 1936 over their anti-Semitism and their

frenzied rearmament and, resigning both his posts, went to work with heart and

soul in opposition to Hitler. One of his first acts was to journey to France,

England and the United States in 1937 to discreetly warn of the peril of Nazi

Germany.

The light came a little later to two other eventual conspirators, Johannes

Popitz, Prussian Minister of Finance, and Dr. Schacht. Both had received the

Nazi Party’s highest decoration, the Golden Badge of Honor, for their services in

shaping Germany’s economy for war purposes. Both had begun to wake up to

what Hitler’s real goal was in 1938. Neither of them seems to have been fully

trusted by the inner circle of the opposition because of their past and their

character. Schacht was too opportunist, and Hassell remarked in his diary that

the Reichsbank president had a capacity “for talking one way and acting

another,” an opinion, he says, that was shared by Generals Beck and von Fritsch.

Popitz was brilliant but unstable. A fine Greek scholar as well as eminent

economist, he, along with General Beck and Hassell, was a member of the

Wednesday Club, a group of sixteen intellectuals who gathered once a week to

discuss philosophy, history, art, science and literature and who as time went on

—or ran out—formed one of the centers of the opposition.

Ulrich von Hassell became a sort of foreign-affairs adviser to the resistance

leaders. His dispatches as ambassador in Rome during the Abyssinian War and

the Spanish Civil War, as we have seen, had been full of advice to Berlin on how

to keep Italy embroiled with France and Britain and therefore on the side of

Germany. Later he came to fear that war with France and Britain would be fatal

to Germany and that even a German alliance with Italy would be too. Far too

cultivated to have anything but contempt for the vulgarism of National

Socialism, he did not, however, voluntarily give up serving the regime. He was

kicked out of the diplomatic service in the big military, political and Foreign

Office shake-up which Hitler engineered on February 4, 1938. A member of an

old Hanover noble family, married to the daughter of Grand Admiral von

Tirpitz, the founder of the German Navy, and a gentleman of the old school to

his finger tips, Hassell, like so many others of his class, seems to have needed

the shock of being cast out by the Nazis before he became much interested in

doing anything to bring them down. Once this had happened, this sensitive,

intelligent, uneasy man devoted himself to that task and in the end, as we shall

see, sacrificed his life to it, meeting a barbarous end.

There were others, lesser known and mostly younger, who had opposed the

Nazis from the beginning and who gradually came together to form various

resistance circles. One of the leading intellects of one group was Ewald von

Kleist, a gentleman farmer and a descendant of the great poet. He worked

closely with Ernst Niekisch, a former Social Democrat and editor of Widerstand

(Resistance), and with Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a young lawyer, who was the

great-grandson of Queen Victoria’s private physician and confidential adviser,

Baron von Stockmar. There were former trade-union leaders such as Julius

Leber, Jakob Kaiser and Wilhelm Leuschner. Two Gestapo officials, Artur

Nebe, the head of the criminal police, and Bernd Gisevius, a young career police

officer, became valuable aides as the conspiracies developed. The latter became

the darling of the American prosecution at Nuremberg and wrote a book which

sheds much light on the anti-Hitler plots, though most historians take the book

and the author with more than a grain of salt.

There were a number of sons of venerable families in Germany: Count

Helmuth von Moltke, great-grandnephew of the famous Field Marshal, who later

formed a resistance group of young idealists known as the Kreisau Circle; Count

Albrecht Bernstorff, nephew of the German ambassador in Washington during

the First World War; Freiherr Karl Ludwig von Guttenberg, editor of a fearless

Catholic monthly; and Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a descendant of eminent

Protestant clergymen on both sides of his family, who regarded Hitler as

Antichrist and who believed it a Christian duty to “eliminate him.”

Nearly all of these brave men would persevere until, after being caught and

tortured, they were executed by rope or by ax or merely murdered by the S.S.

For a good long time this tiny nucleus of civilian resistance had little success

in interesting the Army in its work. As Field Marshal von Blomberg testified at

Nuremberg, “Before 1938–39 German generals did not oppose Hitler. There was

no reason to oppose him, since he produced the results they desired.” There was

some contact between Goerdeler and General von Hammerstein, but the former

Commander in Chief of the German Army had been in retirement since 1934

and had little influence among the active generals. Early in the regime

Schlabrendorff had got in touch with Colonel Hans Oster, chief assistant to

Admiral Canaris in the Abwehr, the Intelligence Bureau of OKW, and found him

to be not only a staunch anti-Nazi but willing to try to bridge the gulf between

the military and civilians. However, it was not until the winter of 1937–38, when

the generals were subjected to the successive shocks engendered by Hitler’s

decision to go to war, his shake-up of the military command, which he himself

took over, and his shabby treatment of General von Fritsch, that some of them

became aware of the danger to Germany of the Nazi dictator. The resignation of

General Beck toward the end of August 1938, as the Czech crisis grew more

menacing, provided a further awakening, and though none of his fellow officers

followed him into retirement as he had hoped, it immediately became evident

that the fallen Chief of the General Staff was the one person around whom both

the recalcitrant generals and the civilian resistance leaders could rally. Both

groups respected and trusted him.

Another consideration became evident to both of them. To stop Hitler, force

would now be necessary, and only the Army possessed it. But who in the Army

could muster it? Not Hammerstein and not even Beck, since they were in

retirement. What was needed, it was realized, was to bring in generals who at the

moment had actual command of troops in and around Berlin and who thus could

act effectively on short notice. General Halder, the new Chief of the Army

General Staff, had no actual forces under his command. General von Brauchitsch

had the whole Army, but he was not fully trusted. His authority would be useful

but he could be brought in only, the conspirators felt, at the last minute.

As it happened, certain key generals who were willing to help were quickly

discovered and initiated into the budding conspiracy. Three of them held

commands which were vital to the success of the venture: General Erwin von

Witzleben, commander of the all-important Wehrkreis III, which comprised

Berlin and the surrounding areas; General Count Erich von Brockdorff-Ahlefeld,

commander of the Potsdam garrison, which was made up of the 23rd Infantry

Division; and General Erich Hoepner, who commanded an armored division in

Thuringia which could, if necessary, repulse any S.S. troops attempting to

relieve Berlin from Munich.

The plan of the conspirators, as it developed toward the end of August, was to

seize Hitler as soon as he had issued the final order to attack Czechoslovakia and

hale him before one of his own People’s Courts on the charge that he had tried

recklessly to hurl Germany into a European war and was therefore no longer

competent to govern. In the meantime, for a short interim, there would be a

military dictatorship followed by a provisional government presided over by

some eminent civilian. In due course a conservative democratic government

would be formed.

There were two considerations on which the success of the coup depended and

which involved the two key conspirators, General Halder and General Beck. The

first was timing. Halder had arranged with OKW that he personally be given

forty-eight hours’ notice of Hitler’s final order to attack Czechoslovakia. This

would give him the time to put the plot into execution before the troops could

cross the Czech frontier. Thus he would be able not only to arrest Hitler but to

prevent the fatal step that would lead to war.

The second factor was that Beck must be able to convince the generals

beforehand and the German people later (during the proposed trial of Hitler) that

an attack on Czechoslovakia would bring in Britain and France and thus

precipitate a European war, for which Germany was not prepared and which it

would certainly lose. This had been the burden of his memoranda all summer

and it was the basis of all that he was now prepared to do: to preserve Germany

from a European conflict which he believed would destroy her—by

overthrowing Hitler.

Alas for Beck, and for the future of most of the world, it was Hitler and not

the recently resigned Chief of the General Staff who proved to have the

shrewder view of the possibilities of a big war. Beck, a cultivated European with

a sense of history, could not conceive that Britain and France would willfully

sacrifice their self-interest by not intervening in case of a German attack on

Czechoslovakia. He had a sense of history but not of contemporary politics.

Hitler had. For some time now he had felt himself reinforced in his judgment

that Prime Minister Chamberlain would sacrifice the Czechs rather than go to

war and that, in such a case, France would not fulfill her treaty obligations to

Prague.

The Wilhelmstrasse had not failed to notice dispatches published in the New

York newspapers as far back as May 14 in which their London correspondents

had reported an “off-the-record” luncheon talk with Chamberlain at Lady

Astor’s. The British Prime Minister, the journalists reported, had said that

neither Britain nor France nor probably Russia would come to the aid of

Czechoslovakia in the case of a German attack, that the Czech state could not

exist in its present form and that Britain favored, in the interest of peace, turning

over the Sudetenland to Germany. Despite angry questions in the House of

Commons, the Germans noted, Chamberlain had not denied the veracity of the

American dispatches.

On June 1, the Prime Minister had spoken, partly off the record, to British

correspondents, and two days later the Times had published the first of its leaders

which were to help undermine the Czech position; it had urged the Czech

government to grant “self-determination” to the country’s minorities “even if it

should mean their secession from Czechoslovakia” and for the first time it had

suggested plebiscites as a means of determining what the Sudetens and the

others desired. A few days later the German Embassy in London informed

Berlin that the Times editorial was based on Chamberlain’s off-the-record

remarks and that it reflected his views. On June 8 Ambassador von Dirksen told

the Wilhelmstrasse that the Chamberlain government would be willing to see the

Sudeten areas separated from Czechoslovakia providing it was done after a

plebiscite and “not interrupted by forcible measures on the part of Germany. ”24

All this must have been pleasing for Hitler to hear. The news from Moscow

also was not bad. By the end of June Friedrich Werner Count von der

Schulenburg, the German ambassador to Russia, was advising Berlin that the

Soviet Union was “hardly likely to march in defense of a bourgeois state,” i.e.,

Czechoslovakia.25 By August 3, Ribbentrop was informing the major German

diplomatic missions abroad that there was little fear of intervention over

Czechoslovakia by Britain, France or Russia.26

It was on that day, August 3, that Chamberlain had packed off Lord Runciman

to Czechoslovakia on a curious mission to act as a “mediator” in the Sudeten

crisis. I happened to be in Prague the day of his arrival and after attending his

press conference and talking with members of his party remarked in my diary

that “Runciman’s whole mission smells.” Its very announcement in the House of

Commons on July 26 had been accompanied by a piece of prevaricating by

Chamberlain himself which must have been unique in the experience of the

British Parliament. The Prime Minister had said that he was sending Runciman

“in response to a request from the government of Czechoslovakia.” The truth

was that Runciman had been forced down the throat of the Czech government by

Chamberlain. But there was an underlying and bigger falsehood. Everyone,

including Chamberlain, knew that Runciman’s mission to “mediate” between the

Czech government and the Sudeten leaders was impossible and absurd. They

knew that Henlein, the Sudeten leader, was not a free agent and could not

negotiate, and that the dispute now was between Prague and Berlin. My diary

notes for the first evening and subsequent days make it clear that the Czechs

knew perfectly well that Runciman had been sent by Chamberlain to pave the

way for the handing over of the Sudetenland to Hitler. It was a shabby

diplomatic trick.

And now the summer of 1938 was almost over. Runciman puttered about in

the Sudetenland and in Prague, making ever more friendly gestures to the

Sudeten Germans and increasing demands on the Czech government to grant

them what they wanted. Hitler, his generals and his Foreign Minister were

frantically busy. On August 23, the Fuehrer entertained aboard the liner Patria in

Kiel Bay during naval maneuvers the Regent of Hungary, Admiral Horthy, and

the members of the Hungarian government. If they wanted to get in on the Czech

feast, Hitler told them, they must hurry. “He who wants to sit at the table,” he

put it, “must at least help in the kitchen. ”27 The Italian ambassador, Bernardo

Attolico, was also a guest on the ship. But when he pressed Ribbentrop for the

date of “the German move against Czechoslovakia” so that Mussolini could be

prepared, the German Foreign Minister gave an evasive answer. The Germans, it

was plain, did not quite trust the discretion of their Fascist ally. Of Poland they

were now sure. All through the summer Ambassador von Moltke in Warsaw was

reporting to Berlin that not only would Poland decline to help Czechoslovakia by

allowing Russia to send troops and planes through or over her territory but

Colonel Józef Beck, the Polish Foreign Minister, was casting covetous eyes on a

slice of Czech territory, the Teschen area. Beck already was exhibiting that fatal

shortsightedness, so widely shared in Europe that summer, which in the end

would prove more disastrous than he could possibly imagine.

At OKW (the High Command of the Armed Forces) and at OKH (the High

Command of the Army) there was incessant activity. Final plans were being

drawn up to have the armed forces ready for the push-off into Czechoslovakia by

October 1. On August 24, Colonel Jodl at OKW wrote an urgent memorandum

for Hitler stressing that “the fixing of the exact time for the ‘incident’ which will

give Germany provocation for military intervention is most important.” The

timing of X Day, he explained, depended on it.

No advance measures [he went on] may be taken before X minus 1 for which

there is not an innocent explanation, as otherwise we shall appear to have

manufactured the incident…. If for technical reasons the evening hours should

be considered desirable for the incident, then the following day cannot be X

Day, but it must be the day after that … It is the purpose of these notes to point

out what a great interest the Wehrmacht has in the incident and that it must be

informed of the Fuehrer’s intention in good time—insofar as the Abwehr Section

is not also charged with organizing the incident. 28

The expert preparations for the onslaught on Czechoslovakia were obviously

in fine shape by the summer’s end. But what about the defense of the west,

should the French honor their word to the Czechs and attack? On August 26

Hitler set off for a tour of the western fortifications accompanied by Jodl, Dr.

Todt, the engineer in charge of building the West Wall, Himmler and various

party officials. On August 27 General Wilhelm Adam, a blunt and able Bavarian

who was in command of the west, joined the party and in the next couple of days

witnessed how intoxicated the Fuehrer became at the triumphal reception he was

given by the Rhinelanders. Adam himself was not impressed; in fact, he was

alarmed, and on the twenty-ninth in a surprising scene in Hitler’s private car he

abruptly demanded to speak with the Fuehrer alone. Not without sneers,

according to the General’s later report, Hitler dismissed Himmler and his other

party cronies. Adam did not waste words. He declared that despite all the fanfare

about the West Wall he could not possibly hold it with the troops at his disposal.

Hitler became hysterical and launched into a long harangue about how he had

made Germany stronger than Britain and France together.

“The man who doesn’t hold these fortifications,” Hitler shouted, “is a

scoundrel!” *

Nevertheless doubts on this score were rising in the minds of generals other

than Adam. On September 3, Hitler convoked the chiefs of OKW and OKH,

Keitel and Brauchitsch, to the Berghof. Field units, it was agreed, were to be

moved into position along the Czech border on September 28. But OKW must

know when X Day was by noon on September 27. Hitler was not satisfied with

the operational plan for “Green” and ordered that it be changed in several

respects. From the notes of this meeting kept by Major Schmundt it is clear that

Brauchitsch at least—for Keitel was too much the toady to speak up—again

raised the question of how they were going to hold out in the west. Hitler fobbed

him off with the assurance that he had given orders for speeding up the western

fortifications. 30

On September 8 General Heinrich von Stuelpnagel saw Jodl and the latter

noted in his diary the General’s pessimism regarding the military position in the

west. It was becoming clear to both of them that Hitler, his spirits whipped up by

the fanaticism of the Nuremberg Party Rally, which had just opened, was going

ahead with the invasion of Czechoslovakia whether France intervened or not. “I

must admit,” wrote the usually optimistic Jodl, “that I am worried too.”

The next day, September 9, Hitler convoked Keitel, Brauchitsch and Halder to

Nuremberg for a conference which began at 10 P.M., lasted until 4 o’clock the

next morning and, as Keitel later confided to Jodl, who in turn confided it to his

diary, was exceedingly stormy. Halder found himself in the ticklish position—

for the key man in the plot to overthrow Hitler the moment he gave the word to

attack—of having to explain in great detail the General Staff’s plan for the

campaign in Czechoslovakia, and in the uncomfortable position, as it developed,

of seeing Hitler tear it to shreds and dress down not only him but Brauchitsch for

their timidity and their military incapabilities. 31 Keitel, Jodl noted on the

thirteenth, was “terribly shaken” by his experience at Nuremberg and by the

evidence of “defeatism” at the top of the German Army.

Accusations are made to the Fuehrer about the defeatism in the High

Command of the Army … Keitel declares that he will not tolerate any officer in

OKW indulging in criticism, unsteady thoughts and defeatism … The Fuehrer

knows that the Commander of the Army [Brauchitsch] has asked his

commanding generals to support him in order to open the Fuehrer’s eyes about

the adventure which he has resolved to risk. He himself [Brauchitsch] has no

more influence with the Fuehrer.

Thus a cold and frosty atmosphere prevailed in Nuremberg and it is highly

unfortunate that the Fuehrer has the whole nation behind him with the exception

of the leading generals of the Army.

All of this greatly saddened the aspiring young Jodl, who had hitched his star

to Hitler.

Only by actions can [these generals] honorably repair the damage which they

have caused through lack of strength of mind and lack of obedience. It is the

same problem as in 1914. There is only one example of disobedience in the

Army and that is of the generals and in the end it springs from their arrogance.

They can no longer believe and no longer obey because they do not recognize

the Fuehrer’s genius. Many of them still see in him the corporal of the World

War but not the greatest statesman since Bismarck.32

In his talk with Jodl on September 8, General von Stuelpnagel, who held the

post of Oberquartiermeister I in the Army High Command, and who was in on

the Halder conspiracy, had asked for written assurances from OKW that the

Army High Command would receive notice of Hitler’s order for the attack on

Czechoslovakia five days in advance. Jodl had answered that because of the

uncertainties of the weather two days’ notice was all that could be guaranteed.

This, however, was enough for the conspirators.

But they needed assurances of another kind—whether, after all, they had been

right in their assumption that Britain and France would go to war against

Germany if Hitler carried out his resolve to attack Czechoslovakia. For this

purpose they had decided to send trustworthy agents to London not only to find

out what the British government intended to do but, if necessary, to try to

influence its decision by informing it that Hitler had decided to attack the Czechs

on a certain date in the fall, and that the General Staff, which knew the date,

opposed it and was prepared to take the most decisive action to prevent it if

Britain stood firm against Hitler to the last.

The first such emissary of the plotters, selected by Colonel Oster of the

Abwehr, was Ewald von Kleist, who arrived in London on August 18.

Ambassador Henderson in Berlin, who was already anxious to give Hitler

whatever he wanted in Czechoslovakia, advised the British Foreign Office that

“it would be unwise for him [Kleist] to be received in official quarters.” *

Nevertheless Sir Robert Vansittart, chief diplomatic adviser to the Foreign

Secretary and one of the leading opponents in London of the appeasement of

Hitler, saw Kleist on the afternoon of his arrival, and Winston Churchill, still in

the political wilderness in Britain, received him the next day. To both men, who

were impressed by their visitor’s sobriety and sincerity, Kleist repeated what he

had been instructed to tell, stressing that Hitler had set a date for aggression

against the Czechs and that the generals, most of whom opposed him, would act,

but that further British appeasement of Hitler would cut the ground from under

their feet. If Britain and France would declare publicly that they would not stand

idly by while Hitler threw his armies into Czechoslovakia and if some prominent

British statesmen would issue a solemn warning to Germany of the

consequences of Nazi aggression, then the German generals, for their part,

would act to stop Hitler.34

Churchill gave Kleist a ringing letter to take back to Germany to bolster his

colleagues:

I am sure that the crossing of the frontier of Czechoslovakia by German armies

or aviation in force will bring about renewal of the World War. I am as certain as

I was at the end of July, 1914, that England will march with France … Do not, I

pray you, be misled upon this point … †

Vansittart took Kleist’s warning seriously enough to submit immediately a

report on it to both the British Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary, and

though Chamberlain, writing to Lord Halifax, said he was inclined “to discount a

good deal of what he [Kleist] says,” he added: “I don’t feel sure that we ought

not to do something.” 36 What he did was to summon Ambassador Henderson, in

the wake of some publicity, to London on August 28 “for consultations.”

He instructed his ambassador in Berlin to do two things: convey a sober

warning to Hitler and, secondly, prepare secretly a “personal contact” between

himself and the Fuehrer. According to his own story, Henderson persuaded the

Prime Minister to drop the first request. 37 As for the second, Henderson was

only too glad to try to carry it out.*

This was the first step toward Munich and Hitler’s greatest bloodless victory.

Ignorant of this turning in Chamberlain’s course, the conspirators in Berlin

made further attempts to warn the British government. On August 21, Colonel

Oster sent an agent to inform the British military attaché in Berlin of Hitler’s

intention to invade Czechoslovakia at the end of September. “If by firm action

abroad Hitler can be forced at the eleventh hour to renounce his present

intentions, he will be unable to survive the blow,” he told the British. “Similarly,

if it comes to war the immediate intervention by France and England will bring

about the downfall of the regime.” Sir Nevile Henderson dutifully forwarded this

warning to London, but described it “as clearly biased and largely propaganda.”

The blinkers on the eyes of the debonair British ambassador seemed to grow

larger and thicker as the crisis mounted.

General Halder had a feeling that the conspirators were not getting their

message through effectively enough to the British, and on September 2 he sent

his own emissary, a retired Army officer, Lieutenant Colonel Hans Boehm-

Tettelbach, to London to make contact with the British War Office and Military

Intelligence. Though, according to his own story, the colonel saw several

important personages in London, he does not seem to have made much of an

impression on them.

Finally, the plotters resorted to using the German Foreign Office and the

embassy in London in a last desperate effort to induce the British to remain firm.

Counselor of the embassy and chargé d’affaires was Theodor Kordt, whose

younger brother, Erich, was chief of Ribbentrop’s secretariat in the German

Foreign Office. The brothers were protégés of Baron von Weizsaecker, the

principal State Secretary and undoubtedly the brains of the Foreign Office, a

man who after the war made a great fuss of his alleged anti-Nazism but who

served Hitler and Ribbentrop well almost to the end. It is clear, however, from

captured Foreign Office documents, that at this time he opposed aggression

against Czechoslovakia on the same grounds as those of the generals: that it

would lead to a lost war. With Weizsaecker’s connivance, and after

consultations with Beck, Halder and Goerdeler, it was agreed that Theodor

Kordt should sound a last warning to Downing Street. As counselor of the

embassy his visits to the British authorities would not be suspect.

The information he brought on the evening of September 5 to Sir Horace

Wilson, Chamberlain’s confidential adviser, seemed so important and urgent that

this official spirited him by a back way to Downing Street and the chambers of

the British Foreign Secretary. There he bluntly informed Lord Halifax that Hitler

was planning to order a general mobilization on September 16, that the attack on

Czechoslovakia had been fixed for October 1 at the latest, that the German Army

was preparing to strike against Hitler the moment the final order for attack was

given and that it would succeed if Britain and France held firm. Halifax was also

warned that Hitler’s speech closing the Nuremberg Party Rally on September 12

would be explosive and might precipitate a showdown over Czechoslovakia and

that that would be the moment for Britain to stand up against the dictator.39

Kordt, too, despite his continuous personal contact with Downing Street and

his frankness on this occasion with the Foreign Secretary, did not know what

was in the London wind. But he got a good idea, as did everyone else, two days

later, on September 7, when the Times of London published a famous leader:

It might be worth while for the Czechoslovak Government to consider whether they should

exclude altogether the project, which has found favor in some quarters, of making

Czechoslovakia a more homogeneous State by the secession of that fringe of alien populations

who are contiguous to the nation with which they are united by race … The advantages to

Czechoslovakia of becoming a homogeneous State might conceivably outweigh the obvious

disadvantages of losing the Sudeten German district of the borderland.

There was no mention in the editorial of the obvious fact that by ceding the

Sudetenland to Germany the Czechs would lose both the natural mountain

defenses of Bohemia and their “Maginot Line” of fortifications and be

henceforth defenseless against Nazi Germany.

Though the British Foreign Office was quick to deny that the Times leader

represented the views of the government, Kordt telegraphed Berlin the next day

that it was possible that “it derived from a suggestion which reached the Times

editorial staff from the Prime Minister’s entourage.” Possible indeed!

In these crisis-ridden years that have followed World War II it is difficult to

recall the dark and almost unbearable tension that gripped the capitals of Europe

as the Nuremberg Party Rally, which had begun on September 6, approached its

climax on September 12, when Hitler was scheduled to make his closing speech

and expected to proclaim to the world his final decision for peace or war with

Czechoslovakia. I was in Prague, the focus of the crisis, that week, and it seemed

strange that the Czech capital, despite the violence unleashed by the Germans in

the Sudetenland, the threats from Berlin, the pressure of the British and French

governments to yield, and the fear that they might leave Czechoslovakia in the

lurch, was the calmest of all—at least outwardly.

On September 5, President Beneš, realizing that a decisive step on his part

was necessary to save the peace, convoked the Sudeten leaders Kundt and

Sebekovsky to Hradschin Palace and told them to write out their full demands.

Whatever they were he would accept them. “My God,” exclaimed the deputy

Sudeten leader, Karl Hermann Frank, the next day, “they have given us

everything.” But that was the last thing the Sudeten politicians and their bosses

in Berlin wanted. On September 7 Henlein, on instructions from Germany, broke

off all negotiations with the Czech government. A shabby excuse about alleged

Czech police excesses at Moravská-Ostrava was given.

On September 10, Goering made a bellicose speech at the Nuremberg Party

Rally. “A petty segment of Europe is harassing the human race … This

miserable pygmy race [the Czechs] is oppressing a cultured people, and behind it

is Moscow and the eternal mask of the Jew devil.” But Beneš’ broadcast of the

same day took no notice of Goering’s diatribe; it was a quiet and dignified

appeal for calm, good will and mutual trust.

Underneath the surface, though, the Czechs were tense. I ran into Dr. Beneš in

the hall of the Czech Broadcasting House after his broadcast and noted that his

face was grave and that he seemed to be fully aware of the terrible position he

was in. The Wilson railroad station and the airport were full of Jews scrambling

desperately to find transportation to safer parts. That weekend gas masks were

distributed to the populace. The word from Paris was that the French

government was beginning to panic at the prospect of war, and the London

dispatches indicated that Chamberlain was contemplating desperate measures to

meet Hitler’s demands—at the expense of the Czechs, of course.

And so all Europe waited for Hitler’s word on September 12 from Nuremberg.

Though brutal and bombastic, and dripping with venom against the Czech state

and especially against the Czech President, the Fuehrer’s speech, made to a

delirious mass of Nazi fanatics gathered in the huge stadium on the last night of

the party rally, was not a declaration of war. He reserved his decision—publicly

at least, for, as we know from the captured German documents, he had already

set October 1 for the attack across the Czech frontier. He simply demanded that

the Czech government give “justice” to the Sudeten Germans. If it didn’t,

Germany would have to see to it that it did.

The repercussions to Hitler’s outburst were considerable. In the Sudetenland it

inspired a revolt which after two days of savage fighting the Czech government

put down by rushing in troops and declaring martial law. Henlein slipped over

the border to Germany proclaiming that the only solution now was the ceding of

the Sudeten areas to Germany.

This was the solution which, as we have seen, was gaining favor in London,

but before it could be furthered the agreement of France had to be obtained. The

day following Hitler’s speech, September 13, the French cabinet sat all day,

remaining hopelessly divided on whether it should honor its obligations to

Czechoslovakia in case of a German attack, which it believed imminent. That

evening the British ambassador in Paris, Sir Eric Phipps, was fetched from the

Opéra Comique for an urgent conference with Prime Minister Daladier. The

latter appealed to Chamberlain to try at once to make the best bargain he could

with the German dictator.

Mr. Chamberlain, it may be surmised, needed little urging. At eleven o’clock

that same night the British Prime Minister got off an urgent message to Hitler:

In view of the increasingly critical situation I propose to come over at once to see you with

a view to trying to find a peaceful solution. I propose to come across by air and am ready to

start tomorrow.

Please indicate earliest time at which you can see me and suggest place of meeting. I

should be grateful for a very early reply.40

Two hours before, the German chargé d’affaires in London, Theodor Kordt,

had wired Berlin that Chamberlain’s press secretary had informed him that the

Prime Minister “was prepared to examine far-reaching German proposals,

including plebiscite, to take part in carrying them out, and to advocate them in

public.” 41

The surrender that was to culminate in Munich had begun.

CHAMBERLAIN AT BERCHTESGADEN: SEPTEMBER 15, 1938

“Good heavens!” (“Ich bin vom Himmel gefallen! ”) Hitler exclaimed when he

read Chamberlain’s message. 42 He was astounded but highly pleased that the

man who presided over the destinies of the mighty British Empire should come

pleading to him, and flattered that a man who was sixty-nine years old and had

never traveled in an airplane before should make the long seven hours’ flight to

Berchtesgaden at the farthest extremity of Germany. Hitler had not had even the

grace to suggest a meeting place on the Rhine, which would have shortened the

trip by half.

Whatever the enthusiasm of the English,* who seemed to believe that the

Prime Minister was making the long journey to do what Mr. Asquith and Sir

Edward Grey had failed to do in 1914—warn Germany that any aggression

against a small power would bring not only France but Britain into war against it

—Hitler realized, as the confidential German papers and subsequent events

make clear, that Chamberlain’s action was a godsend to him. Already apprised

by the German Embassy in London that the British leader was prepared to

advocate “far-reaching German proposals,” the Fuehrer felt fairly certain that

Chamberlain’s visit was a further assurance that, as he had believed all along,

Britain and France would not intervene on behalf of Czechoslovakia. The Prime

Minister had not been with him more than an hour or so before this estimate of

the situation became a certainty.

In the beginning there was a diplomatic skirmish, though Hitler, as was his

custom, did most of the talking. 43 Chamberlain had landed at the Munich airport

at noon on September 15, driven in an open car to the railroad station and there

boarded a special train for the three-hour rail journey to Berchtesgaden. He did

not fail to notice train after train of German troops and artillery passing on the

opposite track. Hitler did not meet his train at Berchtesgaden, but waited on the

top steps of the Berghof to greet his distinguished visitor. It had begun to rain,

Dr. Schmidt, the German interpreter, later remembered, the sky darkened and

clouds hid the mountains. It was now 4 P.M. and Chamberlain had been on his

way since dawn.

After tea Hitler and Chamberlain mounted the steps to Hitler’s study on the

second floor, the very room where the dictator had received Schuschnigg seven

months before. At the urging of Ambassador Henderson, Ribbentrop was left out

of the conversation, an exclusion which so irritated the vain Foreign Minister

that the next day he refused to give Schmidt’s notes on the conference to the

Prime Minister—a singular but typical discourtesy—and Chamberlain thereafter

was forced to rely on his memory of what he and Hitler had said.

Hitler began the conversation, as he did his speeches, with a long harangue

about all that he had done for the German people, for peace, and for an Anglo–

German rapprochement. There was now one problem he was determined to

solve “one way or another.” The three million Germans in Czechoslovakia must

“return” to the Reich. *

He did not wish [as Schmidt’s official account puts it] that any doubts should arise as to his

absolute determination not to tolerate any longer that a small, second-rate country should treat

the mighty thousand-year-old German Reich as something inferior … He was forty-nine years

old, and if Germany were to become involved in a world war over the Czechoslovak question,

he wished to lead his country through the crisis in the full strength of manhood … He would,

of course, be sorry if a world war should result from this problem. This danger, however, was

incapable of making him falter in his determination … He would face any war, even a world

war, for this. The rest of the world might do what it liked. He would not yield one single step.

Chamberlain, who had scarcely been able to get a word in, was a man of

immense patience, but there were limits to it. At this juncture he interrupted to

say, “If the Fuehrer is determined to settle this matter by force without waiting

even for a discussion between ourselves, why did he let me come? I have wasted

my time.”

The German dictator was not accustomed to such an interruption—no German

at this date would dare to make one—and Chamberlain’s retort appears to have

had its effect. Hitler calmed down. He thought they could go “into the question

whether perhaps a peaceful settlement was still possible after all.” And then he

sprang his proposal.

Would Britain agree to a secession of the Sudeten region, or would she not?

… A secession on the basis of the right of self-determination?

The proposal did not shock Chamberlain. Indeed, he expressed satisfaction

that they “had now got down to the crux of the matter.” According to

Chamberlain’s own account, from memory, he replied that he could not commit

himself until he had consulted his cabinet and the French. According to

Schmidt’s version, taken from his own shorthand notes made while he was

interpreting, Chamberlain did say that, but added that “he could state personally

that he recognized the principle of the detachment of the Sudeten areas … He

wished to return to England to report to the Government and secure their

approval of his personal attitude. ”

From this surrender at Berchtesgaden, all else ensued.

That it came as no surprise to the Germans is obvious. At the very moment of

the Berchtesgaden meeting Henlein was penning a secret letter to Hitler from

Eger, dated September 15, just before he fled across the border to Germany:

MY FUEHRER:

I informed the British [Runciman] delegation yesterday that the basis for

further negotiations could … only be the achievement of a union with the Reich.

It is probable that Chamberlain will propose such a union. 44

The next day, September 16, the German Foreign Office sent confidential

telegrams to its embassies in Washington and several other capitals.

Fuehrer told Chamberlain yesterday he was finally resolved to put an end in

one way or another to the intolerable conditions in Sudetenland within a very

short time. Autonomy for Sudeten Germans is no longer being considered, but

only cession of the region to Germany. Chamberlain has indicated personal

approval. He is now consulting British Cabinet and is in communication with

Paris. Further meeting between Fuehrer and Chamberlain planned for very near

future. 45

Toward the end of their conference Chamberlain had extracted a promise from

Hitler that he would take no military action until they had again conferred. In

this period the Prime Minister had great confidence in the Fuehrer’s word,

remarking privately a day or two later, “In spite of the hardness and ruthlessness

I thought I saw in his face, I got the impression that here was a man who could

be relied upon when he had given his word.” 46

While the British leader was entertaining these comforting illusions Hitler

went ahead with his military and political plans for the invasion of

Czechoslovakia. Colonel Jodl, on behalf of OKW, worked out with the

Propaganda Ministry what he described in his diary as “joint preparations for

refutation of our own violations of international law.” It was to be a rough war,

at least on the part of the Germans, and Dr. Goebbels’ job was to justify Nazi

excesses. The plan for his lies was worked out in great detail.47 On September

17 Hitler assigned an OKW staff officer to help Henlein, who was now operating

from new headquarters at a castle at Dondorf, outside Bayreuth, to organize the

Sudeten Free Corps. It was to be armed with Austrian weapons and its orders

from the Fuehrer were to maintain “disturbances and clashes” with the Czechs.

September 18, a day on which Chamberlain occupied himself with rallying his

cabinet and the French to his policy of surrender, was a busy one for Hitler and

his generals. The jumping-off schedule for five armies, the Second, Eighth,

Tenth, Twelfth and Fourteenth, comprising thirty-six divisions, including three

armored, was sent out. Hitler also confirmed the selection of the commanding

officers for ten armies. General Adam, despite his obstreperousness, was left in

over-all command in the west. Surprisingly, two of the plotters were recalled

from retirement and named to lead armies: General Beck the First Army, and

General von Hammer-stein the Fourth Army.

Political preparations for the final blow against Czechoslovakia also

continued. The captured German Foreign Office documents abound with reports

of increasing German pressure on Hungary and Poland to get in on the spoils.

Even the Slovaks were brought in to stir up the brew. On September 20 Henlein

urged them to formulate their demands for autonomy “more sharply.” On the

same day Hitler received Prime Minister Imredy and Foreign Minister Kanya of

Hungary and gave them a dressing down for the hesitancy shown in Budapest. A

Foreign Office memorandum gives a lengthy report on the meeting.

First of all, the Fuehrer reproached the Hungarian gentlemen for the undecided

attitude of Hungary. He, the Fuehrer, was determined to settle the Czech

question even at the risk of a world war … He was convinced [however] that

neither England nor France would intervene. It was Hungary’s last opportunity

to join in. If she did not, he would not be in a position to put in a word for

Hungarian interests. In his opinion, the best thing would be to destroy

Czechoslovakia …

He presented two demands to the Hungarians: (1) that Hungary should make

an immediate demand for a plebiscite in the territories which she claimed, and

(2) that she should not guarantee any proposed new frontiers for

Czechoslovakia.48

Come what might with Chamberlain, Hitler, as he made clear to the

Hungarians, had no intention of allowing even a rump Czechoslovakia to long

exist. As to the British Prime Minister:

The Fuehrer declared that he would present the German demands to

Chamberlain with brutal frankness. In his opinion, action by the Army would

provide the only satisfactory solution. There was, however, a danger of the

Czechs submitting to every demand.

It was a danger that was to haunt the dictator in all the subsequent meetings

with the unsuspecting British Prime Minister.

Egged on by Berlin, the Polish government on September 21 demanded of the

Czechs a plebiscite in the Teschen district, where there was a large Polish

minority, and moved troops to the frontier of the area. The next day the

Hungarian government followed suit. On that day, too, September 22, the

Sudeten Free Corps, supported by German S.S. detachments, occupied the Czech

frontier towns of Asch and Eger, which jutted into German territory.

September 22, in fact, was a tense day throughout Europe, for on that morning

Chamberlain had again set out for Germany to confer with Hitler. It is now

necessary to glance briefly at what the Prime Minister had been up to in London

during the interval between his visits to the Fuehrer.

On his return to London on the evening of September 16, Chamberlain called

a cabinet meeting to acquaint his ministers with Hitler’s demands. Lord

Runciman was summoned from Prague to make his recommendations. They

were astonishing. Runciman, in his zeal to appease the Germans, went further

than Hitler. He advocated transferring the predominantly Sudeten territories to

Germany without bothering about a plebiscite. He strongly recommended the

stifling of all criticism of Germany in Czechoslovakia “by parties or persons”

through legal measures. He demanded that Czechoslovakia, even though

deprived of her mountain barrier and fortifications—and thus left helpless—

should nevertheless “so remodel her foreign relations as to give assurances to her

neighbors that she will in no circumstances attack them or enter into any

aggressive action against them arising from obligations to other States.” For

even Runciman to be concerned at this hour with the danger of aggression from

a rump Czech state against Nazi Germany seems incredible, but his fantastic

recommendations apparently made a deep impression on the British cabinet and

bolstered Chamberlain’s intention to meet Hitler’s demands.*

Premier Daladier and his Foreign Minister, Georges Bonnet, arrived in London

on September 18, for consultations with the British cabinet. No thought was

given to bringing the Czechs in. The British and the French, anxious to avoid

war at any cost, lost little time in agreeing on joint proposals which the Czechs

would have to accept. All territories inhabited more than 50 per cent by Sudeten

Germans must be turned over to Germany to assure “the maintenance of peace

and the safety of Czechoslovakia’s vital interests.” In return Britain and France

agreed to join in “an international guarantee of the new boundaries … against

unprovoked aggression.” Such a guarantee would supplant the mutual-assistance

treaties which the Czech state had with France and Russia. This was an easy way

out for the French, and led by Bonnet, who, as the course of events would show,

was determined to outdo Chamberlain in the appeasement of Hitler, they seized

upon it. And then there was the cant.

Both the French and British governments [they told the Czechs in a formal

note] recognize how great is the sacrifice thus required of the Czechoslovak

Government in the cause of peace. But because that cause is common both to

Europe in general and in particular to Czechoslovakia herself they have felt it

their duty jointly to set forth frankly the conditions essential to secure it.

Also, they were in a hurry. The German dictator could not wait.

The Prime Minister must resume conversations with Herr Hitler not later than

Wednesday [September 22], and earlier if possible. We therefore feel we must

ask for your reply at the earliest possible moment.49

And so at noon on September 19 the British and French ministers in Prague

jointly presented the Anglo–French proposals to the Czech government. They

were rejected the next day in a dignified note which explained—prophetically—

that to accept them would put Czechoslovakia “sooner or later under the

complete domination of Germany.” After reminding France of her treaty

obligations and also of the consequences to the French position in Europe should

the Czechs yield, the reply offered to submit the whole Sudeten question to

arbitration under the terms of the German–Czech treaty of October 16, 1925. *

But the British and French were in no mood to allow such a matter as the

sanctity of treaties to interfere with the course they had set. No sooner was the

note of rejection received by the Anglo–French envoys in Prague at 5 P.M. on the

twentieth than the British minister, Sir Basil Newton, warned the Czech Foreign

Minister, Dr. Kamil Krofta, that if the Czech government adhered to it Britain

would disinterest herself in the fate of the country. M. de Lacroix, the French

minister, associated himself with this statement on behalf of France.

In London and Paris, in the meantime, the Czech note was received with ill

grace. Chamberlain called a meeting of his inner cabinet and a telephone link

with Paris was set up for conversations with Daladier and Bonnet throughout the

evening. It was agreed that both governments should subject Prague to further

pressure. The Czechs must be told that if they held out they could expect no help

from France or Britain.

By this time President Beneš realized that he was being deserted by his

supposed friends. He made one final effort to rally at least France. Shortly after 8

P.M. on the twentieth he had Dr. Krofta put the vital question to Lacroix: Would

France honor her word to Czechoslovakia in case of a German attack or would

she not? And when at 2:15 on the morning of September 21 Newton and Lacroix

got Beneš out of bed, bade him withdraw his note of rejection and declared that

unless this were done and the Anglo–French proposals were accepted

Czechoslovakia would have to fight Germany alone, the President asked the

French minister to put it in writing. Probably he had already given up, but he had

an eye on history, †

All through the next day, September 21, Beneš, aching from fatigue, from the

lack of sleep and from the contemplation of treachery and disaster, consulted

with his cabinet, party leaders and the Army High Command. They had shown

courage in the face of enemy threats but they began to crumble at the desertion

of their friends and allies. What about Russia? As it happened, the Soviet

Foreign Commissar, Litvinov, was making a speech that very day at Geneva

reiterating that the Soviet Union would stand by its treaty with Czechoslovakia.

Beneš called in the Russian minister in Prague, who backed up what his Foreign

Commissar had said. Alas for the Czechs, they realized that the pact with Russia

called for the Soviets to come to their aid on condition that France did the same.

And France had reneged.

Late in the afternoon of September 21, the Czech government capitulated and

accepted the Anglo–French plan. “We had no other choice, because we were left

alone,” a government communiqué explained bitterly. Privately, Beneš put it

more succinctly: “We have been basely betrayed.” The next day the cabinet

resigned and General Jan Sirovy, the Inspector General of the Army, became the

head of a new “government of national concentration.”

CHAMBERLAIN AT GODESBERG: SEPTEMBER 22–23

Though Chamberlain was bringing to Hitler all that he had asked for at their

Berchtesgaden meeting, both men were uneasy as they met at the little Rhine

town of Godesberg on the afternoon of September 22. The German chargé

d’affaires, after seeing the Prime Minister off at the London airport, had rushed

off a wire to Berlin: “Chamberlain and his party have left under a heavy load of

anxiety … Unquestionably opposition is growing to Chamberlain’s policy.”

Hitler was in a highly nervous state. On the morning of the twenty-second I

was having breakfast on the terrace of the Hotel Dreesen, where the talks were to

take place, when Hitler strode past on his way down to the riverbank to inspect

his yacht. He seemed to have a peculiar tic. Every few steps he cocked his right

shoulder nervously, his left leg snapping up as he did so. He had ugly, black

patches under his eyes. He seemed to be, as I noted in my diary that evening, on

the edge of a nervous breakdown. “Teppichfresser! ” muttered my German

companion, an editor who secretly despised the Nazis. And he explained that

Hitler had been in such a maniacal mood over the Czechs the last few days that

on more than one occasion he had lost control of himself completely, hurling

himself to the floor and chewing the edge of the carpet. Hence the term “carpet

eater.” The evening before, while talking with some of the party hacks at the

Dreesen, I had heard the expression applied to the Fuehrer—in whispers, of

course. 50

Despite his misgivings about the growing opposition to his policies at home,

Mr. Chamberlain appeared to be in excellent spirits when he arrived at

Godesberg and drove through streets decorated not only with the swastika but

with the Union Jack to his headquarters at the Petershof, a castlelike hotel on the

summit of the Petersberg, high above the opposite (right) bank of the Rhine. He

had come to fulfill everything that Hitler had demanded at Berchtesgaden, and

even more. There remained only the details to work out and for this purpose he

had brought along, in addition to Sir Horace Wilson and William Strang (the

latter a Foreign Office expert on Eastern Europe), the head of the drafting and

legal department of the Foreign Office, Sir William Malkin.

Late in the afternoon the Prime Minister crossed the Rhine by ferry to the

Hotel Dreesen* where Hitler awaited him. For once, at the start at least,

Chamberlain did all the talking. For what must have been more than an hour,

judging by Dr. Schmidt’s lengthy notes of the meeting,51 the Prime Minister,

after explaining that following “laborious negotiations” he had won over not

only the British and French cabinets but the Czech government to accept the

Fuehrer’s demands, proceeded to outline in great detail the means by which they

could be implemented. Accepting Runciman’s advice, he was now prepared to

see the Sudetenland turned over to Germany without a plebiscite. As to the

mixed areas, their future could be determined by a commission of three

members, a German, a Czech and one neutral. Furthermore, Czechoslovakia’s

mutual-assistance treaties with France and Russia, which were so distasteful to

the Fuehrer, would be replaced by an international guarantee against an

unprovoked attack on Czechoslovakia, which in the future “would have to be

completely neutral.”

It all seemed so simple, so reasonable, so logical to the peace-loving British

businessman become British Prime Minister. He paused with evident self-

satisfaction, as one eyewitness recorded, for Hitler’s reaction.

“Do I understand that the British, French and Czech governments have agreed

to the transfer of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia to Germany?” Hitler

asked. † He was astounded as he later told Chamberlain, that the concessions to

him had gone so far and so fast.

“Yes,” replied the Prime Minister, smiling.

“I am terribly sorry,” Hitler said, “but after the events of the last few days, this

plan is no longer of any use.”

Chamberlain, Dr. Schmidt later remembered, sat up with a start. His owllike

face flushed with surprise and anger. But apparently not with resentment that

Hitler had deceived him, that Hitler, like a common blackmailer, was upping his

demands at the very moment they were being accepted. The Prime Minister

described his own feelings at this moment in a report to the Commons a few

days later:

I do not want the House to think that Hitler was deliberately deceiving me—I

do not think so for one moment—but, for me, I expected that when I got back to

Godesberg I had only to discuss quietly with him the proposals that I had

brought with me; and it was a profound shock to me when I was told … that

these proposals were not acceptable …

Chamberlain saw the house of peace which he had so “laboriously” built up at

the expense of the Czechs collapsing like a stack of cards. He was, he told Hitler,

“both disappointed and puzzled. He could rightly say that the Fuehrer had got

from him what he had demanded.”

In order to achieve this he [Chamberlain] had risked his whole political career

… He was being accused by certain circles in Great Britain of having sold and

betrayed Czechoslovakia, of having yielded to the dictators, and on leaving

England that morning he actually had been booed.

But the Fuehrer was unmoved by the personal plight of the British Prime

Minister. The Sudeten area, he demanded, must be occupied by Germany at

once. The problem “must be completely and finally solved by October first, at

the latest.” He had a map handy to indicate what territories must be ceded

immediately.

And so, his mind “full of foreboding,” as he later told the Commons,

Chamberlain withdrew across the Rhine “to consider what I was to do.” There

seemed so little hope that evening that after he had consulted with his own

cabinet colleagues and with members of the French government by telephone it

was agreed that London and Paris should inform the Czech government the next

day that they could not “continue to take the responsibility of advising them not

to mobilize.” *

At 7:20 that evening General Keitel telephoned Army headquarters from

Godesberg: “Date (of X Day) cannot yet be ascertained. Continue preparations

according to plan. If Case Green occurs, it will not be before September 30. If it

occurs sooner, it will probably be improvised.” 53

For Adolf Hitler himself was caught in a dilemma. Though Chamberlain did

not know it, the Fuehrer’s real objective, as he had laid it down in his OKW

directive after the May crisis, was “to destroy Czechoslovakia by military

action.” To accept the Anglo–French plan, which the Czechs already had agreed

to, however reluctantly, would not only give Hitler his Sudeten Germans but

would effectively destroy the Czech state, since it would be left defenseless. But

it would not be by military action, and the Fuehrer was determined not only to

humiliate President Beneš and the Czech government, which had so offended

him in May, but to expose the spinelessness of the Western powers. For that, at

least a military occupation was necessary. It could be bloodless, as was the

military occupation of Austria, but it must take place. He must have at least that

much revenge on the upstart Czechs.

There was no further contact between the two men on the evening of

September 22. But after sleeping on the problem and spending the early morning

pacing his balcony overlooking the Rhine, Chamberlain sat down following

breakfast and wrote a letter to Hitler. He would submit the new German

demands to the Czechs but he did not think they would be accepted. In fact, he

had no doubt that the Czechs would forcibly resist an immediate occupation by

German troops. But he was willing to suggest to Prague, since all parties had

agreed on the transfer of the Sudeten area to Germany, that the Sudeten Germans

themselves maintain law and order in their area until it was turned over to the

Reich.

To such a compromise Hitler would not listen. After keeping the Prime

Minister waiting throughout most of the day he finally replied by note with a

bitter tirade, again rehearsing all the wrongs the Czechs had done to Germans,

again refusing to modify his position and concluding that war “now appears to

be the case.” Chamberlain’s answer was brief. He asked Hitler to put his new

demands in writing, “together with a map,” and undertook “as mediator” to send

them to Prague. “I do not see that I can perform any further service here,” he

concluded. “I propose therefore to return to England.”

Before doing so he came over once again to the Dreesen for a final meeting

with Hitler which began at 10:30 on the evening of September 23. Hitler

presented his demands in the form of a memorandum with an accompanying

map. Chamberlain found himself confronted with a new time limit. The Czechs

were to begin the evacuation of the ceded territory by 8 A.M. on September 26—

two days hence—and complete it by September 28.

“But this is nothing less than an ultimatum!” Chamberlain exclaimed.

“Nothing of the sort,” Hitler shot back. When Chamberlain retorted that the

German word Diktat applied to it, Hitler answered, “It is not a Diktat at all.

Look, the document is headed by the word ‘Memorandum.’”

At this moment an adjutant brought in an urgent message for the Fuehrer. He

glanced at it and tossed it to Schmidt, who was interpreting. “Read this to Mr.

Chamberlain.”

Schmidt did. “Beneš has just announced over the radio a general mobilization

in Czechoslovakia.”

The room, Schmidt recalled afterward, was deadly still. Then Hitler spoke:

“Now, of course, the whole affair is settled. The Czechs will not dream of ceding

any territory to Germany.”

Chamberlain, according to the Schmidt minutes, disagreed. In fact, there

followed a furious argument.

The Czechs had mobilized first [said Hitler]. Chamberlain contradicted this.

Germany had mobilized first … The Fuehrer denied that Germany had

mobilized.

And so the talks continued into the early-morning hours. Finally, after

Chamberlain had inquired whether the German memorandum “was really his last

word” and Hitler had replied that it was indeed, the Prime Minister answered

that there was no point in continuing the conversations. He had done his utmost;

his efforts had failed. He was going away with a heavy heart, for the hopes with

which he had come to Germany were destroyed.

The German dictator did not want Chamberlain to get off the hook. He

responded with a “concession.”

“You are one of the few men for whom I have ever done such a thing,” he said

breezily. “I am prepared to set one single date for the Czech evacuation—

October first—if that will facilitate your task.” And so saying, he took a pencil

and changed the dates himself. This, of course, was no concession at all. October

1 had been X Day all along. *

But it seems to have impressed the Prime Minister. “He fully appreciated,”

Schmidt recorded him as saying, “the Fuehrer’s consideration on the point.”

Nevertheless, he added, he was not in a position to accept or reject the proposals;

he could only transmit them.

The ice, however, had been broken, and as the meeting broke up at 1:30 A.M.

the two men seemed, despite all that had happened, to be closer together

personally than at any time since they had first met. I myself, from a vantage

point twenty-five feet away in the porter’s booth, where I had set up a temporary

broadcasting studio, watched them say their farewells near the door of the hotel.

I was struck by their cordiality to each other. Schmidt took down the words

which I could not hear.

Chamberlain bid a hearty farewell to the Fuehrer. He said he had the feeling

that a relationship of confidence had grown up between himself and the Fuehrer

as a result of the conversations of the last few days…. He did not cease to hope

that the present difficult crisis would be overcome, and then he would be glad to

discuss other problems still outstanding with the Fuehrer in the same spirit.

The Fuehrer thanked Chamberlain for his words and told him that he had

similar hopes. As he had already stated several times, the Czech problem was the

last territorial demand which he had to make in Europe.

This renunciation of further land grabs seems to have impressed the departing

Prime Minister too, for in his subsequent report to the House of Commons he

stressed that Hitler had made it “with great earnestness.”

When Chamberlain arrived at his hotel toward 2 A.M. he was asked by a

journalist, “Is the position hopeless, sir?”

“I would not like to say that,” the Prime Minister answered. “It is up to the

Czechs now.” 55

It did not occur to him, it is evident, that it was up to the Germans, with their

outrageous demands, too.

In fact, no sooner had the Prime Minister returned to London on September 24

than he attempted to do the very thing he had informed Hitler he would not do:

persuade the British cabinet to accept the new Nazi demands. But now he ran

into unexpected opposition. Duff Cooper, the First Lord of the Admiralty, firmly

opposed him. Surprisingly, so did Lord Halifax, though very reluctantly.

Chamberlain could not carry his cabinet. Nor could he persuade the French

government, which on the twenty-fourth rejected the Godesberg memorandum

and on the same day ordered a partial mobilization.

When the French ministers, headed by Premier Daladier, arrived in London on

Sunday, September 25, the two governments were apprised of the formal

rejection of the Godesberg proposals by the Czech government. * There was

nothing for the French to do but affirm that they would honor their word and

come to the aid of Czechoslovakia if attacked. But they had to know what

Britain would do. Finally cornered, or so it seemed, Chamberlain agreed to

inform Hitler that if France became engaged in war with Germany as a result of

her treaty obligations to the Czechs, Britain would feel obliged to support her.

But first he would make one last appeal to the German dictator. Hitler was

scheduled to make a speech at the Sportpalast in Berlin on September 26. In

order to induce him not to burn his bridges Chamberlain once again dashed off a

personal letter to Hitler and on the afternoon of the twenty-sixth rushed it to

Berlin by his faithful aide, Sir Horace Wilson, who sped to the German capital

by special plane.

On the departure of Chamberlain from the Dreesen in the early-morning hours

of September 24, the Germans had been plunged into gloom. Now that war

seemed to face them, some of them, at least, did not like it. I lingered in the hotel

lobby for some time over a late supper. Goering, Goebbels, Ribbentrop, General

Keitel and lesser men stood around earnestly talking. They seemed dazed at the

prospect of war.

In Berlin later that day I found hopes reviving. In the Wilhelmstrasse the

feeling was that since Chamberlain, with all the authority of the British Prime

Minister, had agreed to present Hitler’s new demands to Prague, it must be

assumed that the British leader supported Hitler’s proposals. As we have seen,

the assumption was quite correct—so far as it went.

Sunday, September 25, was a lovely day of Indian summer in Berlin, warm

and sunny, and since it undoubtedly would be the last such weekend that

autumn, half of the population flocked to the lakes and woods that surround the

capital. Despite reports of Hitler’s rage at hearing that the Godesberg ultimatum

was being rejected in Paris, London and Prague, there was no feeling of great

crisis, certainly no war fever, in Berlin. “Hard to believe there will be war,” I

noted in my diary that evening. *

On the Monday following there was a sudden change for the worse. At 5 P.M.

Sir Horace Wilson, accompanied by Ambassador Henderson and Ivone

Kirkpatrick, First Secretary of the British Embassy, arrived at the Chancellery

bearing Chamberlain’s letter. 57 They found Hitler in an ugly mood—probably he

was already working himself down to a proper level for his Sportpalast speech

three hours hence.

When Dr. Schmidt began to translate the letter, which stated that the Czech

government had informed the Prime Minister that the Godesberg memorandum

was “wholly unacceptable,” just as he had warned at Godesberg, Hitler,

according to Schmidt, suddenly leaped up, shouting, “There’s no sense at all in

negotiating further!” and bounded for the door.58

It was a painful scene, says the German interpreter. “For the first and only

time in my presence, Hitler completely lost his head.” And according to the

British present, the Fuehrer, who soon stamped back to his chair, kept further

interrupting the reading of the letter by screaming, “The Germans are being

treated like niggers … On October first I shall have Czechoslovakia where I

want her. If France and England decide to strike, let them … I do not care a

pfennig.”

Chamberlain had proposed that since the Czechs were willing to give Hitler

what he wanted, the Sudeten areas, a meeting of Czech and German

representatives be called immediately to settle “by agreement the way in which

the territory is to be handed over.” He added that he was willing to have British

representatives sit in at the meeting. Hitler’s response was that he would

negotiate details with the Czechs if they accepted in advance the Godesberg

memorandum (which they had just rejected) and agreed to a German occupation

of the Sudetenland by October 1. He must have an affirmative reply, he said,

within forty-four hours—by 2 P.M. on September 28.

That evening Hitler burned his bridges, or so it seemed to those of us who

listened in amazement to his mad outburst at the jammed Sportpalast in Berlin.

Shouting and shrieking in the worst paroxysm I had ever seen him in, he

venomously hurled personal insults at “Herr Beneš,” declared that the issue of

war or peace was now up to the Czech President and that, in any case, he would

have the Sudetenland by October 1. Carried away as he was by his angry torrent

of words and the ringing cheers of the crowd, he was shrewd enough to throw a

sop to the British Prime Minister. He thanked him for his efforts for peace and

reiterated that this was his last territorial claim in Europe. “We want no Czechs!”

he muttered contemptuously.

Throughout the harangue I sat in a balcony just above Hitler, trying with no

great success to broadcast a running translation of his words. That night in my

diary I noted:

… For the first time in all the years I’ve observed him he seemed tonight to

have completely lost control of himself. When he sat down, Goebbels sprang up

and shouted into the microphone: “One thing is sure: 1918 will never be

repeated!” Hitler looked up to him, a wild, eager expression in his eyes, as if

those were the words which he had been searching for all evening and hadn’t

quite found. He leaped to his feet and with a fanatical fire in his eyes that I shall

never forget brought his right hand, after a grand sweep, pounding down on the

table, and yelled with all the power in his mighty lungs: “Ja! ” Then he slumped

into his chair exhausted.

He was fully recovered when he received Sir Horace Wilson for the second

time the next noon, September 27. The special envoy, a man with no diplomatic

training but who was as anxious as the Prime Minister, if not more so, to give

Hitler the Sudetenland if the dictator would only accept it peacefully, called

Hitler’s attention to a special statement issued by Chamberlain in London shortly

after midnight in response to the Fuehrer’s Sportpalast speech. In view of the

Chancellor’s lack of faith in Czech promises, the British government,

Chamberlain said, would regard itself “as morally responsible” for seeing that

the Czech promises were carried out “fairly, fully and with all reasonable

promptitude.” He trusted that the Chancellor would not reject this proposal.

But Hitler showed no interest in it. He had, he said, no further message for

Mr. Chamberlain. It was now up to the Czechs. They could accept or reject his

demands. If they rejected them, he shouted angrily, “I shall destroy

Czechoslovakia!” He kept repeating the threat with obvious relish.

Apparently that was too much even for the accommodating Wilson, who rose

to his feet and said, “In that case, I am entrusted by the Prime Minister to make

the following statement: ‘If France, in fulfillment of her treaty obligations,

should become actively engaged in hostilities against Germany, the United

Kingdom would feel obliged to support France.’”

“I can only take note of that position,” Hitler replied with some heat. “It

means that if France elects to attack Germany, England will feel obliged to

attack her also.”

When Sir Horace replied that he had not said that, that it was up to Hitler,

after all, whether there would be peace or war, the Fuehrer, working himself up

by now to a fine lather, shouted, “If France and England strike, let them do so!

It’s a matter of complete indifference to me. Today is Tuesday; by next Monday

we shall be at war.”

According to Schmidt’s official notes on the meeting, Wilson apparently

wished to continue the conversation, but was advised by Ambassador Henderson

to desist. This did not prevent the inexperienced special envoy from getting in a

word with the Fuehrer alone as the meeting broke up. “I shall try to make these

Czechs sensible,” * he assured Hitler, and the latter replied that he “would

welcome that.” Perhaps, the Fuehrer must have thought, Chamberlain could still

be coaxed to go further in making the Czechs “sensible.” That evening, in fact,

he sat down and dictated to the Prime Minister a shrewdly worded letter.

There were well-grounded reasons for writing it. Much had happened in

Berlin—and elsewhere—during that day, September 27.

At 1 P.M., shortly after Wilson’s departure, Hitler issued a “most secret” order

directing assault units comprising some twenty-one reinforced regiments, or

seven divisions, to move forward from their training areas to the jumping-off

points on the Czech frontier. “They must be ready,” said the order, “to begin

action against ‘Green’ on September 30, the decision having been made one day

previously by twelve noon.” A few hours later a further concealed mobilization

was ordered by the Fuehrer. Among other measures, five new divisions were

mobilized for the west.59

But even as Hitler went ahead with his military moves, there were

developments during the day which made him hesitate. In order to stir up some

war fever among the populace Hitler ordered a parade of a motorized division

through the capital at dusk—an hour when hundreds of thousands of Berliners

would be pouring out of their offices onto the streets. It turned out to be a

terrible fiasco—at least for the Supreme Commander. The good people of Berlin

simply did not want to be reminded of war. In my diary that night I noted down

the surprising scene.

I went out to the corner of the Linden where the column [of troops] was

turning down the Wilhelmstrasse, expecting to see a tremendous demonstration.

I pictured the scenes I had read of in 1914 when the cheering throngs on this

same street tossed flowers at the marching soldiers, and the girls ran up and

kissed them … But today they ducked into the subways, refused to look on, and

the handful that did stood at the curb in utter silence … It has been the most

striking demonstration against war I’ve ever seen.

At the urging of a policeman I walked down the Wilhelmstrasse to the

Reichskanzlerplatz, where Hitler stood on a balcony of the Chancellery

reviewing the troops.

… There weren’t two hundred people there. Hitler looked grim, then angry,

and soon went inside, leaving his troops to parade by unreviewed. What I’ve

seen tonight almost rekindles a little faith in the German people. They are dead

set against war.

Within the Chancellery there was further bad news—this from abroad. There

was a dispatch from Budapest saying that Yugoslavia and Rumania had

informed the Hungarian government that they would move against Hungary

militarily if she attacked Czechoslovakia. That would spread the war to the

Balkans, something Hitler did not want.

The news from Paris was graver. From the German military attaché there

came a telegram marked “Very Urgent” and addressed not only to the Foreign

Ministry but to OKW and the General Staff. It warned that France’s partial

mobilization was so much like a total one “that I reckon with the completion of

the deployment of the first 65 divisions on the German frontier by the sixth day

of mobilization.” Against such a force the Germans had, as Hitler knew, barely a

dozen divisions, half of them reserve units of doubtful value. Furthermore, wired

the German military attaché, “it appears probable that in the event of belligerent

measures by Germany … an immediate attack will take place, in all probability

from Lower Alsace and from Lorraine in the direction of Mainz. ”

Finally, this German officer informed Berlin, the Italians were doing

absolutely nothing to pin down French troops on the Franco–Italian frontier. 60

Mussolini, the valiant ally, seemed to be letting Hitler down in a crucial hour.

And then, the President of the United States and the King of Sweden were

butting in. The day before, on the twenty-sixth, Roosevelt had addressed an

appeal to Hitler to help keep the peace, and though Hitler had answered it within

twenty-four hours, saying that peace depended solely on the Czechs, there came

another message from the American President during the course of this day,

Wednesday the twenty-seventh, suggesting an immediate conference of all the

nations directly interested and implying that if war broke out the world would

hold Hitler responsible.61

The King of Sweden, staunch friend of Germany, as he had proved during the

1914–18 war, was more frank. During the afternoon a dispatch arrived in Berlin

from the German minister in Stockholm saying that the King had hastily

summoned him and told him that unless Hitler extended his time limit of

October 1 by ten days world war would inevitably break out, Germany would be

solely to blame for it and moreover just as inevitably would lose it “in view of

the present combination of the Powers.” In the cool, neutral air of Stockholm,

the shrewd King was able to assess at least the military situation more

objectively than the heads of government in Berlin, London and Paris.

President Roosevelt, as perhaps was necessary in view of American sentiment,

had weakened his two appeals for peace by stressing that the United States

would not intervene in a war nor even assume any obligations “in the conduct of

the present negotiations.” The German ambassador in Washington, Hans

Dieckhoff, therefore thought it necessary to get off a “very urgent” cable to

Berlin during the day. He warned that if Hitler resorted to force and was opposed

by Britain he had reason to assume “that the whole weight of the United States

[would] be thrown into the scale on the side of Britain.” And the ambassador,

usually a timid man when it came to standing up to the Fuehrer, added, “I

consider it my duty to emphasize this very strongly.” He did not want the

German government to stumble into the same mistaken assumptions it had made

about America in 1914.

And Prague? Was there any sign of weakening there? In the evening came a

telegram from Colonel Toussaint, the German military attaché, to OKW: “Calm

in Prague. Last mobilization measures carried out … Total estimated call-up is

1,000,000; field army 800,000 …”62 That was as many trained men as Germany

had for two fronts. Together the Czechs and the French outnumbered the

Germans by more than two to one.

Faced with these facts and developments and no doubt mindful of Wilson’s

parting words and of Chamberlain’s character and of Chamberlain’s utter fear of

war, Hitler sat down early on that evening of September 27 to dictate a letter to

the Prime Minister. Dr. Schmidt, who was called in to translate it into English,

got the feeling that the dictator was shrinking back “from the extreme step.”

Whether Hitler knew that the order was going out that evening for the

mobilization of the British fleet cannot be established. Admiral Raeder arranged

to see the Fuehrer at 10 P.M., and it is possible that the German Navy learned of

the British move, which was made at 8 P.M. and publicly announced at 11:38

P.M., and that Raeder informed Hitler by telephone. At any rate, when the

Admiral arrived he appealed to the Fuehrer not to go to war.

What Hitler did know at this moment was that Prague was defiant, Paris

rapidly mobilizing, London stiffening, his own people apathetic, his leading

generals dead against him, and that his ultimatum on the Godesberg proposals

expired at 2 P.M. the next day.

His letter was beautifully calculated to appeal to Chamberlain. Moderate in

tone, it denied that his proposals would “rob Czechoslovakia of every guarantee

of its existence” or that his troops would fail to stop at the demarcation lines. He

was ready to negotiate details with the Czechs; he was ready to “give a formal

guarantee for the remainder of Czechoslovakia.” The Czechs were holding out

simply because they hoped, with the help of England and France, to start a

European war. Nevertheless, he did not slam the door on the last hopes of peace.

I must leave it to your judgment [he concluded] whether, in view of these

facts, you consider that you should continue your effort … to spoil such

maneuvers and bring the Government in Prague to reason at the very last hour. 63

THE ELEVENTH HOUR

Hitler’s letter, telegraphed urgently to London, reached Chamberlain at 10:30

on the night of September 27. It came at the end of a busy day for the Prime

Minister.

The disquieting news which Sir Horace Wilson, who arrived in London early

in the afternoon, brought from his second conference with Hitler spurred

Chamberlain and his inner cabinet to action. It was decided to mobilize the fleet,

call up the Auxiliary Air Force and declare a state of emergency. Already

trenches were being dug in the parks and squares for protection against bombing,

and the evacuation of London’s school children had begun.

Also, the Prime Minister promptly sent off a message to President Beneš in

Prague warning that his information from Berlin “makes it clear that the German

Army will receive orders to cross the Czechoslovak frontier immediately if, by

tomorrow [September 28] at 2 P.M. the Czechoslovak Government have not

accepted the German conditions.” But having honorably warned the Czechs,

Chamberlain could not refrain from admonishing them, in the last part of his

message, “that Bohemia would be overrun by the German Army and nothing

which another Power or Powers could do would be able to save your country and

your people from such a fate. This remains true whatever the result of a world

war might be.”

Thus Chamberlain was putting the responsibility for peace or war no longer

on Hitler but on Beneš. And he was giving a military opinion which even the

German generals, as we have seen, held as irresponsible. However, he did add, at

the end of his message, that he would not assume the responsibility of telling the

Czechs what they must now do. It was up to them.

But was it? Beneš had not had time to reply to the telegram when a second

one arrived in which Chamberlain did endeavor to tell the Czech government

what to do. He proposed that the Czechs accept a limited German military

occupation on October 1—of Egerland and Asch, outside the Czech

fortifications—and that a German–Czech–British boundary commission then

quickly establish the rest of the areas to be turned over to the Germans. * And the

Prime Minister added a further warning:

The only alternative to this plan would be an invasion and a dismemberment

of the country by force, and Czechoslovakia, though a conflict might arise which

would lead to incalculable loss of life, could not be reconstituted in her frontiers

whatever the result of the conflict may be. 64

The Czechs were thus warned by their friends (France associated herself with

these latest proposals) that even if they and their allies defeated the Germans in a

war, Czechoslovakia would have to give up the Sudetenland to Germany. The

inference was plain: Why plunge Europe into a war, since the Sudetenland is lost

to you anyway?

This business out of the way, the Prime Minister broadcast to the nation at

8:30 P.M.:

How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches …

here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we

know nothing! …

Hitler had got the “substance of what he wanted.” Britain had offered to

guarantee that the Czechs would accept it and carry it out.

I would not hesitate to pay even a third visit to Germany if I thought it would

do any good …

However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a big

and powerful neighbor, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the

whole British Empire in a war simply on her account. If we have to fight it must

be on larger issues than that …

I am myself a man of peace to the very depths of my soul. Armed conflict

between nations is a nightmare to me; but, if I were convinced that any nation

had made up its mind to dominate the world by fear of force, I should feel that it

must be resisted. Under such a domination, life for people who believe in liberty

would not be worth living; but war is a fearful thing, and we must be very clear,

before we embark on it, that it is really the great issues that are at stake.

Wheeler-Bennett has recorded that after listening to this broadcast most people

in Britain went to bed that night believing that Britain and Germany would be at

war within twenty-four hours.65 But the good people did not know what was

happening at Downing Street still later that evening.

At 10:30 P.M. came Hitler’s letter. It was a straw which the Prime Minister

eagerly grasped. To the Fuehrer he replied:

After reading your letter, I feel certain that you can get all essentials without

war, and without delay. I am ready to come to Berlin myself at once to discuss

arrangements for transfer with you and representatives of the Czech

Government, together with representatives of France and Italy, if you desire. I

feel convinced we can reach agreement in a week. I cannot believe that you will

take responsibility of starting a world war which may end civilization for the

sake of a few days delay in settling this long-standing problem.66

A telegram also went out to Mussolini asking him to urge the Fuehrer’s

acceptance of this plan and to agree to being represented at the suggested

meeting.

The idea of a conference had been in the back of the Prime Minister’s mind

for some time. As far back as July, Sir Nevile Henderson had suggested it on his

own in a dispatch to London. He had proposed that four powers, Germany, Italy,

Britain and France, settle the Sudeten problem. But both the ambassador and the

Prime Minister had been reminded by the British Foreign Office that it would be

difficult to exclude other powers from participating in such a conference.67 The

“other powers” were Russia, which had a pact of mutual assistance with Prague,

and Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain had returned from Godesberg convinced—

quite correctly—that Hitler would never consent to any meeting which included

the Soviet Union. Nor did the Prime Minister himself desire the presence of the

Russians. Though it was obvious to the smallest mind in Britain that in case of

war with Germany, Soviet participation on the side of the West would be of

immense value, as Churchill repeatedly tried to point out to the head of the

British government, this was a view which seems to have escaped the Prime

Minister. He had, as we have seen, turned down the Russian proposal for a

conference after the Anschluss to discuss means of opposing further German

aggression. Despite Moscow’s guarantee to Czechoslovakia and the fact that

right up to this moment Litvinov was proclaiming that Russia would honor it,

Chamberlain had no intention of allowing the Soviets to interfere with his

resolve to keep the peace by giving Hitler the Sudetenland.

But until Wednesday, September 28, he had not yet gone so far in his thinking

as to exclude the Czechs from a conference. Indeed, on the twenty-fifth, after

Prague had rejected Hitler’s Godesberg demands, the Prime Minister had called

in Jan Masaryk, the Czech ambassador in London, and proposed that

Czechoslovakia should agree to negotiations at “an international conference in

which Germany, Czechoslovakia and other powers could participate.” On the

following day the Czech government had accepted the idea. And, as we have just

seen, in his message to Hitler late on the night of the twenty-seventh

Chamberlain had specified that “representatives of Czechoslovakia” should be

included in his proposed conference of Germany, Italy, France and Great Britain.

“BLACK WEDNESDAY” AND THE HALDER PLOT AGAINST

HITLER

Deep gloom hung over Berlin, Prague, London and Paris as “Black

Wednesday,” September 28, dawned. War seemed inevitable.

“A Great War can hardly be avoided any longer,” Jodl quoted Goering as

saying that morning. “It may last seven years, and we will win it. ”68

In London the digging of trenches, the evacuation of school children, the

emptying of hospitals, continued. In Paris there was a scramble for the choked

trains leaving the city, and the motor traffic out of the capital was jammed. There

were similar scenes in western Germany. Jodl jotted in his diary that morning

reports of German refugees fleeing from the border regions. At 2 P.M. Hitler’s

time limit for Czechoslovakia’s acceptance of the Godesberg proposals would

run out. There was no sign from Prague that they would be accepted. There

were, however, certain other signs: great activity in the Wilhelmstrasse; a frantic

coming and going of the French, British and Italian ambassadors. But of these

the general public and indeed the German generals remained ignorant.

To some of the generals and to General Halder, Chief of the General Staff,

above all, the time had come to carry out their plot to remove Hitler and save the

Fatherland from plunging into a European war which they felt it was doomed to

lose. All through September the conspirators, according to the later accounts of

the survivors, * had been busy working out their plans.

General Halder was in close touch with Colonel Oster and his chief at the

Abwehr, Admiral Canaris, who tried to keep him abreast of Hitler’s political

moves and of foreign intelligence. The plotters, as we have seen, had warned

London of Hitler’s resolve to attack Czechoslovakia by the end of September

and had begged the British government to make clear that Britain, along with

France, would answer German aggression by armed force. For some months

General von Witzleben, who commanded the Berlin Military District, and who

would have to furnish most of the troops to carry out the coup, had been hesitant

because he suspected that London and Paris had secretly given Hitler a free hand

in the East and would therefore not go to war over Czechoslovakia—a view

shared by several other generals and one which Hitler and Ribbentrop had

encouraged. If this were true, the plot to depose Hitler, in the opinion of generals

such as Witzleben and Halder, was senseless. For, at this stage of the Third

Reich, they were concerned only with getting rid of the Fuehrer in order to avert

a European war which Germany had no chance of winning. If there were really

no risk of a big war, if Chamberlain were going to give Hitler what he wanted in

Czechoslovakia without a war, then they saw no point in trying to carry out a

revolt.

To assure the generals that Britain and France meant business, Colonel Oster

and Gisevius arranged for General Halder and General von Witzleben to meet

Schacht, who, besides having prestige with the military hierarchy as the man

who financed German rearmament and who still was in the cabinet, was

considered an expert on British affairs. Schacht assured them that the British

would fight if Hitler resorted to arms against the Czechs.

The news that had reached Erich Kordt, one of the conspirators, in the

German Foreign Office late on the night of September 13, that Chamberlain

urgently proposed “to come over at once by air” to seek a peaceful solution of

the Czech crisis, had caused consternation in the camp of the plotters. They had

counted on Hitler’s returning to Berlin from the Nuremberg Party Rally on the

fourteenth and, according to Kordt, had planned to carry out the putsch on that

day or the next. But the Fuehrer did not return to the capital.* Instead, he went to

Munich and on the fourteenth continued on to Berchtesgaden, where he awaited

the visit of the British Prime Minister the next day.

There were double grounds for the feeling of utter frustration among the

plotters. Their plans could be carried out only if Hitler were in Berlin, and they

had been confident that, since the Nuremberg rally had only sharpened the

Czech crisis, he would certainly return immediately to the capital. In the second

place, although some of the members of the conspiracy complacently assumed,

as did the people of Britain, that Chamberlain was flying to Berchtesgaden to

warn Hitler not to make the mistake that Wilhelm II had made in 1914 as to what

Great Britain would do in the case of German aggression, Kordt knew better. He

had seen the text of Chamberlain’s urgent message explaining to Hitler that he

wanted to see him “with a view to trying to find a peaceful solution.”

Furthermore, he had seen the telegram from his brother, Theodor Kordt,

counselor of the German Embassy in London, that day, confiding that the Prime

Minister was prepared to go a long way to meet Hitler’s demands in the

Sudetenland. †

“The effect on our plans,” says Kordt, “was bound to be disastrous. It would

have been absurd to stage a putsch to overthrow Hitler at a moment when the

British Prime Minister was coming to Germany to discuss with Hitler ‘the peace

of the world.’”

However, on the evening of September 15, according to Erich Kordt, Dr. Paul

Schmidt, who was in on the conspiracy, and who, as we have seen, acted as sole

interpreter—and sole witness—at the Hitler–Chamberlain talk, informed him

“by prearranged code” that the Fuehrer was still determined to conquer the

whole of Czechoslovakia and that he had put forward to Chamberlain impossible

demands “in the hope that they would be refused.” This intelligence revived the

spirits of the conspirators. Kordt informed Colonel Oster of it the same evening

and it was decided to go ahead with the plans as soon as Hitler returned to

Berlin. “But first of all,” Oster said, “we must get the bird back into his cage in

Berlin.”

The bird flew back to his “cage” from the Godesberg talks on the afternoon of

September 24. On the morning of “Black Wednesday,” the twenty-eighth, Hitler

had been in Berlin for nearly four days. On the twenty-sixth he apparently had

burned his bridges in his outburst at the Sportpalast. On the twenty-seventh he

had sent Sir Horace Wilson back to London empty-handed, and the British

government’s reaction had been to mobilize the fleet and warn Prague to expect

an immediate German attack. During the day he had also, as we have seen,

ordered the “assault units” to take their combat positions on the Czech frontier

and be ready for “action” on September 30—three days hence.

What were the conspirators waiting for? All the conditions they themselves

had set had now been fulfilled. Hitler was in Berlin. He was determined to go to

war. He had set the date for the attack on Czechoslovakia as September 30—two

days away now. Either the putsch must be made at once, or it would be too late

to overthrow the dictator and stop the war.

Kordt declares that during the day of September 27 the plotters set a definite

date for action: September 29. Gisevius, in his testimony on the stand at

Nuremberg and also in his book, claims that the generals—Halder and Witzleben

—decided to act immediately on September 28 after they got a copy of Hitler’s

“defiant letter” with its “insulting demand” to Chamberlain of the night before.

Oster received a copy of this defiant letter [Gisevius says] late that night [September 27],

and on the morning of September 28 I took the copy to Witzleben. Witzleben went to Halder

with it. Now, at last, the Chief of the General Staff had his desired, unequivocal proof that

Hitler was not bluffing, that he wanted war.

Tears of indignation ran down Halder’s cheeks … Witzleben insisted that now it was time

to take action. He persuaded Halder to go to see Brauchitsch. After a while Halder returned to

say that he had good news: Brauchitsch was also outraged and would probably take part in the

Putsch. 70

But either the text of the letter had been altered in the copying or the generals

misunderstood it, for, as we have seen, it was so moderate in tone, so full of

promises to “negotiate details with the Czechs” and to “give a formal guarantee

for the remainder of Czechoslovakia,” so conciliatory in suggesting to

Chamberlain that he might continue his efforts, that the Prime Minister, after

reading it, had immediately telegraphed Hitler suggesting a Big-Power

conference to settle the details and at the same time wired Mussolini asking his

support for such a proposal.

Of this eleventh-hour effort at appeasement the generals apparently had no

knowledge, but General von Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chief of the Army,

may have had some inkling. According to Gisevius, Witzleben telephoned

Brauchitsch from Halder’s office, told him that all was ready and pleaded with

him to lead the revolt himself. But the Army commander was noncommittal. He

informed Halder and Witzleben that he would first have to go over to the

Fuehrer’s Chancellery to see for himself whether the generals had assessed the

situation correctly. Gisevius says that Witzleben rushed back to his military

headquarters.

“Gisevius,” he declared excitedly, “the time has come!”

At eleven o’clock that morning of September 28 the phone rang at Kordt’s

desk in the Foreign Office. Ciano was on the line from Rome and wanted

urgently to speak to the German Foreign Minister. Ribbentrop was not available

—he was at the Reich Chancellery—so the Italian Foreign Minister asked to be

put through to his ambassador, Bernardo Attolico. The Germans listened in and

recorded the call. It developed that Mussolini, and not his son-in-law, wanted to

do the talking.

MUSSOLINI: This is the Duce speaking. Can you hear me?

ATTOLICO: Yes, I hear you.

MUSSOLINI: Ask immediately for an interview with the Chancellor. Tell him

the British government asked me through Lord Perth* to mediate in the Sudeten

question. The point of difference is very small. Tell the Chancellor that I and

Fascist Italy stand behind him. He must decide. But tell him I favor accepting the

suggestion. You hear me?

ATTOLICO: Yes, I hear you.

MUSSOLINI: Hurry! 71

Out of breath, his face flushed with excitement (as Dr. Schmidt, the interpreter,

noted), Ambassador Attolico arrived at the Chancellery to find that the French

ambassador was already closeted with Hitler. M. François-Poncet had had a hard

time getting there. Very late the night before, Bonnet, the French Foreign

Minister, who was now intent on going Chamberlain one better, had telephoned

his ambassador in Berlin and instructed him to see Hitler at the earliest possible

moment and present a French proposal for surrendering the Sudetenland which

went much further than the British plan. Whereas the Prime Minister’s proposal,

delivered to Hitler at 11 P.M. on September 27, offered Hitler the occupation of

Zone I of the Sudetenland by October 1—a mere token occupation of a tiny

enclave—the French now proposed to hand over three large zones, which

comprised most of the disputed territory, by October 1.

It was a tempting offer, but the French ambassador had great difficulty in

making it. He phoned at 8 A.M. on September 28 for an appointment with the

Chancellor and when no response had been received by ten o’clock rushed his

military attaché off to the Army General Staff to inform the German generals of

the offer which he was as yet unable to deliver. He enlisted the aid of the British

ambassador. Sir Nevile Henderson, who was only too ready to oblige anyone

who might help prevent a war—at any cost—telephoned Goering, and the Field

Marshal said he would try to make the appointment. As a matter of fact,

Henderson was trying to make one for himself, for he had been instructed to

present to Hitler “a final personal message from the Prime Minister,” the one

which Chamberlain had drafted late the night before,* assuring Hitler that he

could get everything he wanted “without war, and without delay,” and proposing

a conference of the powers to work out the details. 72

Hitler received François-Poncet at 11:15 A.M. The ambassador found him

nervous and tense. Brandishing a map which he had hastily drawn up and which

showed the large chunks of Czech territory which Czechoslovakia’s principal

ally was now prepared to hand over to Hitler on a platter, the French ambassador

urged the Fuehrer to accept the French proposals and spare Europe from war.

Despite Ribbentrop’s negative comments, which François-Poncet says he dealt

“roundly” with, Hitler was impressed—especially, as Dr. Schmidt noted, by the

ambassador’s map, with its generous markings.

At 11:40 the interview was suddenly interrupted by a messenger who

announced that Attolico had just arrived with an urgent message for the Fuehrer

from Mussolini. Hitler left the room, with Schmidt, to greet the panting Italian

ambassador.

“I have an urgent message to you from the Duce!” Attolico, who had a

naturally hoarse voice, shouted from some distance off.73 After delivering it, he

added that Mussolini begged the Fuehrer to refrain from mobilization.

It was at this moment, says Schmidt, the only surviving eyewitness of the

scene, that the decision for peace was made. It was now just noon, two hours

before the time limit on Hitler’s ultimatum to the Czechs ran out.

“Tell the Duce,” Hitler said, with obvious relief, to Attolico, “that I accept his

proposal. ”74

The rest of the day was anticlimactic. Ambassador Henderson followed

Attolico and François-Poncet to the Fuehrer’s presence.

“At the request of my great friend and ally, Mussolini,” Hitler told Henderson,

“I have postponed mobilizing my troops for twenty-four hours.” † He would give

his decision on other matters, such as the proposed conference of the powers,

after he had again consulted Mussolini.75

There followed much telephoning between Berlin and Rome—Schmidt says

the two fascist dictators talked directly once. A few minutes before 2 P.M. on

September 28, just as his ultimatum was to expire, Hitler made up his mind and

invitations were hastily issued to the heads of government of Great Britain,

France and Italy to meet the Fuehrer at Munich at noon on the following day to

settle the Czech question. No invitation was sent to Prague or Moscow. Russia,

the coguarantor of Czechoslovakia’s integrity in case of a German attack, was

not to be allowed to interfere. The Czechs were not even asked to be present at

their own death sentence.

In his memoirs Sir Nevile Henderson gave most of the credit for saving the

peace at this moment to Mussolini, and in this he has been backed by most of the

historians who have written of this chapter in European history.* But surely this

is being overgenerous. Italy was the weakest of the Big Powers in Europe and

her military strength was so negligible that the German generals, as their papers

make clear, treated it as a joke. Great Britain and France were the only powers

that counted in German calculations. And it was the British Prime Minister who,

from the start, had sought to convince Hitler that he could get the Sudetenland

without a war. Chamberlain, not Mussolini, made Munich possible, and thus

preserved the peace for exactly eleven months. The cost of such a feat to his own

country and to its allies and friends will be considered later, but it was, by any

accounting, as it turned out, almost beyond bearing.

At five minutes to three on “Black Wednesday,” which now appeared less dark

than it had in the bleak morning hours, the British Prime Minister had begun to

address the House of Commons in London, giving a detailed account of the

Czech crisis and of the part which he and his government had played in trying to

solve it. The situation he depicted was still uncertain, but it had improved.

Mussolini, he said, had succeeded in getting Hitler to postpone mobilization for

twenty-four hours. It was now 4:15, and Chamberlain had been speaking for an

hour and twenty minutes and was nearing the end of his speech. At this point he

was interrupted. Sir John Simon, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, passed him a

paper which had been handed down to the Treasury front bench by Lord Halifax,

who had been sitting in the peers’ gallery.

Whatever view honorable members may have had about Signor Mussolini

[Chamberlain was saying] I believe that everyone will welcome his gesture …

for peace.

The Prime Minister paused, glanced at the paper, and smiled.

That is not all. I have something further to say to the House yet. I have now

been informed by Herr Hitler that he invites me to meet him at Munich

tomorrow morning. He has also invited Signor Mussolini and Monsieur

Daladier. Signor Mussolini has accepted and I have no doubt Monsieur Daladier

will accept. I need not say what my answer will be …

There was no need. The ancient chamber, the Mother of Parliaments, reacted

with a mass hysteria without precedent in its long history. There was wild

shouting and a wild throwing of order papers into the air and many were in tears

and one voice was heard above the tumult which seemed to express the deep

sentiments of all: “Thank God for the Prime Minister!”

Jan Masaryk, the Czech minister, the son of the founding father of the

Czechoslovak Republic, looked on from the diplomatic gallery, unable to believe

his eyes. Later he called on the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary in

Downing Street to find out whether his country, which would have to make all

the sacrifices, would be invited to Munich. Chamberlain and Halifax answered

that it would not, that Hitler would not stand for it. Masaryk gazed at the two

God-fearing Englishmen and struggled to keep control of himself.

“If you have sacrificed my nation to preserve the peace of the world,” he

finally said, “I will be the first to applaud you. But if not, gentlemen, God help

your souls! ”76

And what of the conspirators, the generals and the civilians, General Halder

and General von Witzleben, Schacht and Gisevius and Kordt, and the rest, who

shortly before noon on that fateful day had believed, as Witzleben said, that their

time had come? The answer can be given briefly in their own words—spoken

much later when all was over and they were anxious to prove to the world how

opposed they had been to Hitler and his catastrophic follies which had brought

Germany to utter ruin after a long and murderous war.

Neville Chamberlain, they all claimed, was the villain! By agreeing to come to

Munich he had forced them at the very last minute to call off their plans to

overthrow Hitler and the Nazi regime!

On February 25, 1946, as the long Nuremberg trial neared its end, General

Halder was interrogated privately by Captain Sam Harris, a young New York

attorney on the staff of the American prosecution.

It had been planned [Halder said] to occupy by military force the Reich

Chancellery and those government offices, particularly ministries, which were

administered by party members and close supporters of Hitler, with the express

intention of avoiding bloodshed and then trying the group before the whole

German nation … On the day [September 28] Witzleben came to see me in my

office during the noon hour. We discussed the matter. He requested that I give

him the order of execution. We discussed other details—how much time he

needed, etc. During this discussion, the news came that the British Prime

Minister and the French Premier had agreed to come to Hitler for further talks.

This happened in the presence of Witzleben. I therefore took back the order of

execution because, owing to this fact, the entire basis for the action had been

taken away …

We were firmly convinced that we would be successful. But now came Mr.

Chamberlain and with one stroke the danger of war was averted … The critical

hour for force was avoided … One could only wait in case a new chance should

come …

“Do I understand you to say that if Chamberlain had not come to Munich,

your plan would have been executed, and Hitler would have been deposed?”

asked Captain Harris.

“I can only say the plan would have been executed,” General Halder replied.

“I do not know if it would have been successful.” 77

Dr. Schacht, who at Nuremberg and in his postwar books clearly exaggerated

the importance of his role in the various conspiracies against Hitler, also blamed

Chamberlain for the failure of the Germans to carry out the plot on September

28:

It is quite clear from the later course of history that this first attempt at a coup

d’etat by Witzleben and myself was the only one which could have brought a

real turning point in Germany’s fate. It was the only attempt which was planned

and prepared in good time … In the autumn of 1938 it was still possible to count

on bringing Hitler to trial before the Supreme Court, but all subsequent efforts to

get rid of him necessarily involved attempts on his life … I had made

preparations for a coup d’etat in good time and I had brought them to within an

ace of success. History had decided against me. The intervention of foreign

statesmen was something I could not possibly have taken into account.78

And Gisevius, who was Schacht’s stoutest champion on the witness stand at

Nuremberg, added:

The impossible had happened. Chamberlain and Daladier were flying to

Munich. Our revolt was done for. For a few hours I went on imagining that we

could revolt anyway. But Witzleben soon demonstrated to me that the troops

would never revolt against the victorious Fuehrer … Chamberlain saved Hitler.79

Did he? Or was this merely an excuse of the German civilians and generals for

their failure to act?

In his interrogation at Nuremberg Halder explained to Captain Harris that

there were three conditions for a successful “revolutionary action”:

The first condition is a clear and resolute leadership. The second condition is

the readiness of the masses of the people to follow the idea of the revolution.

The third condition is the right choice of time. According to our views, the first

condition of a clear resolute leadership was there. The second condition we

thought fulfilled too, because … the German people did not want war. Therefore

the nation was ready to consent to a revolutionary act for fear of war. The third

condition—the right choice of time—was good because we had to expect within

forty-eight hours the order for carrying out a military action. Therefore we were

firmly convinced that we would be successful.

But now came Mr. Chamberlain and with one stroke the danger of war was

avoided.

One can doubt that General Halder’s first condition was ever fulfilled, as he

claimed. For had there been “clear and resolute leadership” why should the

generals have hesitated for four days? They had on tap the military force to

easily sweep Hitler and his regime aside: Witzleben had a whole army corps—

the IIIrd—in and around Berlin, Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt had a crack infantry

division in nearby Potsdam, Hoefner had a panzer division to the south, and the

two ranking police officers in the capital, Count von Helldorf and Count von der

Schulenburg, had a large force of well-armed police to help out. All of these

officers, according to the plotters themselves, were but waiting for the word

from Halder to spring into action with overwhelming armed force. And the

population of Berlin, scared to death that Hitler was about to bring on a war,

would have—so far as this writer could, at first hand, judge them—

spontaneously backed the coup.

Whether Halder and Witzleben would have finally acted had Chamberlain not

agreed to come to Munich is a question that can never be answered with any

degree of finality. Given the peculiar attitude of these generals at this time which

made them concerned with overthrowing Hitler not in order to bring an end to

the tyranny and terror of his regime but merely to avert a lost war, it is possible

that they might have acted had not the Munich Conference been arranged. The

information necessary to establish how well the plot was hatched, how ready the

armed forces were to march and how near Halder and Witzleben really came to

giving the order to act has so far been lacking. We have only the Statements of a

handful of participants who after the war were anxious to prove their opposition

to National Socialism, and what they have said and written in self-defense is

often conflicting and confusing. *

If, as the conspirators claim, their plans were on the point of being carried out,

the announcement of Chamberlain’s trip to Munich certainly cut the ground

from underneath their feet. The generals could scarcely have arrested Hitler and

tried him as a war criminal when it was obvious that he was about to achieve an

important conquest without war.

What is certain among all these uncertainties—and here Dr. Schacht must be

conceded his point—is that such a golden opportunity never again presented

itself to the German opposition to dispose of Hitler, bring a swift end to the

Third Reich and save Germany and the world from war. The Germans, if one

may risk a generalization, have a weakness for blaming foreigners for their

failures. The responsibility of Chamberlain and Halifax, of Daladier and Bonnet,

for Munich and thus for all the disastrous consequences which ensued is

overwhelming. But they may be pardoned to some extent for not taking very

seriously the warnings of a “revolt” of a group of German generals and civilians

most of whom had served Hitler with great ability up to this moment. They, or at

least some of their advisers in London and Paris, may have recalled the bleak

facts of recent German history: that the Army had helped put the former

Austrian corporal into power, had been delighted at the opportunities he gave it

to rearm, had apparently not objected to the destruction of individual freedom

under National Socialism or done anything about the murder of its own General

von Schleicher or the removal, on a dastardly frame-up, of its commanding

officer, General von Fritsch; and—recently—had gone along with the rape of

Austria, indeed had supplied the military force to carry it out. Whatever blame

may be heaped on the archappeasers in London and Paris, and great it

undoubtedly is, the fact remains that the German generals themselves, and their

civilian coconspirators, failed at an opportune moment to act on their own.

THE SURRENDER AT MUNICH: SEPTEMBER 29–30, 1938

In this baroque Bavarian city where in the murky back rooms of rundown

little cafés he had made his lowly start as a politician and in whose streets he had

suffered the fiasco of the Beer Hall Putsch, Adolf Hitler greeted, like a

conqueror, the heads of governments of Great Britain, France and Italy at half

past noon on September 29.

Very early that morning he had gone to Kufstein on the former Austro–

German frontier to meet Mussolini and set up a basis for common action at the

conference. In the train coming up to Munich Hitler was in a bellicose mood,

explaining to the Duce over maps how he intended to “liquidate”

Czechoslovakia. Either the talks beginning that day must be immediately

successful, he said, or he would resort to arms. “Besides,” Ciano, who was

present, quotes the Fuehrer as adding, “the time will come when we shall have to

fight side by side against France and England.” Mussolini agreed. 80

Chamberlain made no similar effort to see Daladier beforehand to work out a

joint strategy for the two Western democracies with which to confront the two

fascist dictators. Indeed, it became evident to many of us in contact with the

British and French delegations in Munich as the day progressed that

Chamberlain had come to Munich absolutely determined that no one, certainly

not the Czechs and not even the French, should stand in the way of his reaching

a quick agreement with Hitler. * In the case of Daladier, who went around all day

as if in a daze, no precaution was necessary, but the determined Prime Minister

took no risks.

The talks, which began at 12:45 P.M. in the so-called Fuehrerhaus in the

Koenigsplatz, were anticlimactic and constituted little more than a mere

formality of rendering to Hitler exactly what he wanted when he wanted it. Dr.

Schmidt, the indomitable interpreter, who was called upon to function in three

languages, German, French and English, noticed from the beginning “an

atmosphere of general good will.” Ambassador Henderson later remembered that

“at no stage of the conversations did they become heated.” No one presided. The

proceedings unfolded informally, and judging by the German minutes of the

meeting82 which came to light after the war, the British Prime Minister and the

French Premier fairly fell over themselves to agree with Hitler. Even when he

made the following opening statement:

He had now declared in his speech at the Sportpalast that he would in any case

march in on October 1. He had received the answer that this action would have

the character of an act of violence. Hence the task arose to absolve this action

from such a character. Action must, however, be taken at once.

The conferees got down to business when Mussolini, speaking third in turn—

Daladier was left to the last—said that “in order to bring about a practical

solution of the problem” he had brought with him a definite written proposal. Its

origins are interesting and remained unknown to Chamberlain, I believe, to his

death. From the memoirs of François-Poncet and Henderson it is obvious that

they too were ignorant of them. In fact, the story only became known long after

the violent deaths of the two dictators.

What the Duce now fobbed off as his own compromise plan had been hastily

drafted the day before in the German Foreign Office in Berlin by Goering,

Neurath and Weizsaecker behind the back of Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop,

whose judgment the three men did not trust. Goering took it to Hitler, who said it

might do, and then it was hurriedly translated into French by Dr. Schmidt and

passed along to the Italian ambassador, Attolico, who telephoned the text of it to

the Italian dictator in Rome just before he entrained for Munich. Thus it was that

the “Italian proposals,” which provided the informal conference not only with its

sole agenda but with the basic terms which eventually became the Munich

Agreement, were in fact German proposals concocted in Berlin. *

This must have seemed fairly obvious from the text, which closely followed

Hitler’s rejected Godesberg demands; but it was not obvious to Daladier and

Chamberlain or to their ambassadors in Berlin, who now attended them. The

Premier, according to the German minutes, “welcomed the Duce’s proposal,

which had been made in an objective and realistic spirit,” and the Prime Minister

“also welcomed the Duce’s proposal and declared that he himself had conceived

of a solution on the lines of this proposal.” As for Ambassador Henderson, as he

later wrote, he thought Mussolini “had tactfully put forward as his own a

combination of Hitler’s and the Anglo–French proposals”; while Ambassador

François-Poncet got the impression that the conferees were working on a British

memorandum “drawn up by Horace Wilson. ”83 So easily were the British and

French statesmen and diplomats, bent on appeasement at any cost, deceived!

With the “Italian” proposals so warmly welcomed by all present, there

remained but a few details to iron out. Chamberlain, as perhaps might have been

expected from an ex-businessman and former Chancellor of the Exchequer,

wanted to know who would compensate the Czech government for the public

property which would pass to Germany in the Sudetenland. Hitler, who,

according to François-Poncet, appeared somewhat pale and worried, and

annoyed because he could not follow, as Mussolini could, the talk in French and

English, replied heatedly there would be no compensation. When the Prime

Minister objected to the stipulation that the Czechs moving out of the

Sudetenland could not even take their cattle (this had been one of the Godesberg

demands)—exclaiming, “Does this mean that the farmers will be expelled but

that their cattle will be retained?”—Hitler exploded.

“Our time is too valuable to be wasted on such trivialities!” he shouted at

Chamberlain. 84 The Prime Minister dropped the matter.

He did insist at first that a Czech representative ought to be present, or at least,

as he put it, be “available.” His country, he said, “could naturally undertake no

guarantee that the [Sudeten] territory would be evacuated by October 10 [as

Mussolini had proposed] if no assurance of this was forthcoming from the Czech

government.” Daladier gave him lukewarm support. The French government, he

said, “would in no wise tolerate procrastination in this matter by the Czech

government,” but he thought “the presence of a Czech representative, who could

be consulted, if necessary, would be an advantage.”

But Hitler was adamant. He would permit no Czechs in his presence. Daladier

meekly gave in, but Chamberlain finally won a small concession. It was agreed

that a Czech representative might make himself available “in the next room,” as

the Prime Minister proposed.

And indeed during the afternoon session two Czech representatives, Dr.

Vojtech Mastny, the Czech minister in Berlin, and Dr. Hubert Masarik, from the

Prague Foreign Office, did arrive and were coolly ushered into an adjoining

room. There, after they had been left from 2 P.M. to 7 to cool their heels, the roof

figuratively fell in on them. At the latter hour Frank Ashton-Gwatkin, who had

been a member of the Runciman mission and was now on Chamberlain’s staff,

came to break the bad news to them. A general agreement had been reached, the

details of which he could not yet give to them; but it was much “harsher” than

the Franco–British proposals. When Masarik asked if the Czechs couldn’t be

heard, the Englishman answered, as the Czech representative later reported to his

government, “that I seemed to ignore how difficult was the situation of the Great

Powers, and that I could not understand how hard it had been to negotiate with

Hitler.”

At 10 P.M. the two unhappy Czechs were taken to Sir Horace Wilson, the

Prime Minister’s faithful adviser. On behalf of Chamberlain, Wilson informed

them of the main points in the four-power agreement and handed them a map of

the Sudeten areas which were to be evacuated by the Czechs at once. When the

two envoys attempted to protest, the British official cut them short. He had

nothing more to say, he stated, and promptly left the room. The Czechs

continued to protest to Ashton-Gwatkin, who had remained with them, but to no

avail.

“If you do not accept,” he admonished them, as he prepared to go, “you will

have to settle your affairs with the Germans absolutely alone. Perhaps the French

may tell you this more gently, but you can believe me that they share our views.

They are disinterested.”

This was the truth, wretched though it must have sounded to the two Czech

emissaries. Shortly after 1 A.M. on September 30* Hitler, Chamberlain, Mussolini

and Daladier, in that order, affixed their signatures to the Munich Agreement

providing for the German Army to begin its march into Czechoslovakia on

October 1, as the Fuehrer had always said it would, and to complete the

occupation of the Sudetenland by October 10. Hitler had got what had been

refused him at Godesberg.

There remained the painful matter—painful at least to the victims—of

informing the Czechs of what they had to give up and how soon. Hitler and

Mussolini were not interested in this part of the ceremony and withdrew, leaving

the task to the representatives of Czechoslovakia’s ally, France, and of Great

Britain. The scene was vividly described by Masarik, in his official report to the

Czech Foreign Office.

At 1:30 A.M. we were taken into the hall where the conference had been held.

There were present Mr. Chamberlain, M. Daladier, Sir Horace Wilson, M. Léger

[secretary general of the French Foreign Office], Mr. Ashton-Gwatkin, Dr.

Mastny and myself. The atmosphere was oppressive; sentence was about to be

passed. The French, obviously nervous, seemed anxious to preserve French

prestige before the court. Mr. Chamberlain, in a long introductory speech,

referred to the Agreement and gave the text to Dr. Mastny …

The Czechs began to ask several questions, but

Mr. Chamberlain was yawning continuously, without making any effort to

conceal his yawns. I asked MM. Daladier and Léger whether they expected a

declaration or answer of our Government to the Agreement. M. Daladier was

noticeably nervous. M. Léger replied that the four statesmen had not much time.

He added hurriedly and with superficial casualness that no answer was required

from us, that they regarded the plan as accepted, that our Government had that

very day, at the latest at 3 P.M., to send its representative to Berlin to the sitting

of the Commission, and finally that the Czechoslovak officer who was to be sent

would have to be in Berlin on Saturday in order to fix the details for the

evacuation of the first zone. The atmosphere, he said, was beginning to become

dangerous for the whole world.

He spoke to us harshly enough. This was a Frenchman … Mr. Chamberlain

did not conceal his weariness. They gave us a second slightly corrected map.

Then they finished with us, and we could go. 86

I remember from that fateful night the light of victory in Hitler’s eyes as he

strutted down the broad steps of the Fuehrerhaus after the meeting, the cockiness

of Mussolini, laced in his special militia uniform, the yawns of Chamberlain and

his air of pleasant sleepiness as he returned to the Regina Palace Hotel.

Daladier [I wrote in my diary that night], on the other hand, looked a

completely beaten and broken man. He came over to the Regina to say good-bye

to Chamberlain…. Someone asked, or started to ask: “Monsieur le Président, are

you satisfied with the agreement?” He turned as if to say something, but he was

too tired and defeated and the words did not come out and he stumbled out the

door in silence. 87

Chamberlain was not through conferring with Hitler about the peace of the

world. Early the next morning, September 30, refreshed by a few hours of sleep

and pleased with his labors of the previous day, he sought out the Fuehrer at his

private apartment in Munich to discuss further the state of Europe and to secure

a small concession which he apparently thought would improve his political

position at home.

According to Dr. Schmidt, who acted as interpreter and who was the sole

witness of this unexpected meeting, Hitler was pale and moody. He listened

absent-mindedly as the exuberant head of the British government expressed his

confidence that Germany would “adopt a generous attitude in the

implementation of the Munich Agreement” and renewed his hope that the

Czechs would not be “so unreasonable as to make difficulties” and that, if they

did make them, Hitler would not bomb Prague “with the dreadful losses among

the civilian population which it would entail.” This was only the beginning of a

long and rambling discourse which would seem incredible coming from a British

Prime Minister, even one who had made so abject a surrender to the German

dictator the night before, had it not been recorded by Dr. Schmidt in an official

Foreign Office memorandum. Even today, when one reads this captured

document, it seems difficult to believe.

But the British leader’s opening remarks were only the prelude to what was to

come. After what must have seemed to the morose German dictator an

interminable exposition by Chamberlain in proposing further cooperation in

bringing an end to the Spanish Civil War (which German and Italian

“volunteers” were winning for Franco), in furthering disarmament, world

economic prosperity, political peace in Europe and even a solution of the

Russian problem, the Prime Minister drew out of his pocket a sheet of paper on

which he had written something which he hoped they would both sign and

release for immediate publication.

We, the German Fuehrer and Chancellor, and the British Prime Minister [it

read], have had a further meeting today and are agreed in recognizing that the

question of Anglo–German relations is of the first importance for the two

countries and for Europe.

We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo–German Naval

Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with

one another again.

We are resolved that the method of consultation shall be the method adopted

to deal with any other questions that may concern our two countries, and we are

determined to continue our efforts to remove possible sources of difference, and

thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe.

Hitler read the declaration and quickly signed it, much to Chamberlain’s

satisfaction, as Dr. Schmidt noted in his official report. The interpreter’s

impression was that the Fuehrer agreed to it “with a certain reluctance … only to

please Chamberlain,” who, he recounts further, “thanked the Fuehrer warmly …

and underlined the great psychological effect which he expected from this

document.”

The deluded British Prime Minister did not know, of course, that, as the secret

German and Italian documents would reveal much later, Hitler and Mussolini

had already agreed at this very meeting in Munich that in time they would have

to fight “side by side” against Great Britain. Nor, as we shall shortly see, did he

divine much else that already was fermenting in Hitler’s lugubrious mind. 88

Chamberlain returned to London—as did Daladier to Paris—in triumph.

Brandishing the declaration which he had signed with Hitler, the jubilant Prime

Minister faced a large crowd that pressed into Downing Street. After listening to

shouts of “Good old Neville!” and a lusty singing of “For He’s a Jolly Good

Fellow,” Chamberlain smilingly spoke a few words from a second-story window

in Number 10.

“My good friends,” he said, “this is the second time in our history that there

has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor.* I believe it

is peace in our time.”

The Times declared that “no conqueror returning from a victory on the

battlefield has come adorned with nobler laurels.” There was a spontaneous

movement to raise a “National Fund of Thanksgiving” in Chamberlain’s honor,

which he graciously turned down. Only Duff Cooper, the First Lord of the

Admiralty, resigned from the cabinet, and when in the ensuing Commons debate

Winston Churchill, still a voice in the wilderness, began to utter his memorable

words, “We have sustained a total, unmitigated defeat,” he was forced to pause,

as he later recorded, until the storm of protest against such a remark had

subsided.

The mood in Prague was naturally quite different. At 6:20 A.M. on September

30, the German chargé d’affaires had routed the Czech Foreign Minister, Dr.

Krofta, out of bed and handed him the text of the Munich Agreement together

with a request that Czechoslovakia send two representatives to the first meeting

of the “International Commission,” which was to supervise the execution of the

accord, at 5 P.M. in Berlin.

For President Beneš, who conferred all morning at the Hradschin Palace with

the political and military leaders, there was no alternative but to submit. Britain

and France had not only deserted his country but would now back Hitler in the

use of armed force should he turn down the terms of Munich. At ten minutes to

one, Czechoslovakia surrendered, “under protest to the world,” as the official

statement put it. “We were abandoned. We stand alone,” General Sirovy, the

new Premier, explained bitterly in a broadcast to the Czechoslovak people at 5

P.M.

To the very last Britain and France maintained their pressure on the country

they had seduced and betrayed. During the day the British, French and Italian

ministers went to see Dr. Krofta to make sure that there was no last-minute

revolt of the Czechs against the surrender. The German chargé, Dr. Hencke, in a

dispatch to Berlin described the scene.

The French Minister’s attempt to address words of condolence to Krofta was

cut short by the Foreign Minister’s remark: “We have been forced into this

situation; now everything is at an end; today it is our turn, tomorrow it will be

the turn of others.” The British Minister succeeded with difficulty in saying that

Chamberlain had done his utmost; he received the same answer as the French

Minister. The Foreign Minister was a completely broken man and intimated only

one wish: that the three Ministers should quickly leave the room. 89

President Beneš resigned on October 5 on the insistence of Berlin and, when it

became evident that his life was in danger, flew to England and exile. He was

replaced provisionally by General Sirovy. On November 30, Dr. Emil Hácha, the

Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a well-intentioned but weak and senile man

of sixty-six, was selected by the National Assembly to be President of what

remained of Czecho-Slovakia, which was now officially spelled with a hyphen.

What Chamberlain and Daladier at Munich had neglected to give Germany in

Czechoslovakia the so-called “International Commission” proceeded to hand

over. This hastily formed body consisted of the Italian, British and French

ambassadors and the Czech minister in Berlin and Baron von Weizsaecker, the

State Secretary in the German Foreign Office. Every dispute over additional

territory for the Germans was settled in their favor, more than once under the

threat from Hitler and OKW to resort to armed force. Finally, on October 13, the

commission voted to dispense with the plebiscites which the Munich Agreement

had called for in the disputed regions. There was no need for them.

The Poles and the Hungarians, after threatening military action against the

helpless nation, now swept down, like vultures, to get a slice of Czechoslovak

territory. Poland, at the insistence of Foreign Minister Józef Beck, who for the

next twelve months will be a leading character in this narrative, took some 650

square miles of territory around Teschen, comprising a population of 228,000

inhabitants, of whom 133,000 were Czechs. Hungary got a larger slice in the

award meted out on November 2 by Ribbentrop and Ciano: 7,500 square miles,

with a population of 500,000 Magyars and 272,000 Slovaks.

Moreover, the truncated and now defenseless country was forced by Berlin to

install a pro-German government of obvious fascist tendencies. It was clear that

from now on the Czechoslovak nation existed at the mercy of the Leader of the

Third Reich.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF MUNICH

Under the terms of the Munich Agreement Hitler got substantially what he

had demanded at Godesberg, and the “International Commission,” bowing to his

threats, gave him considerably more. The final settlement of November 20,

1938, forced Czechoslovakia to cede to Germany 11,000square miles of territory

in which dwelt 2,800,000 Sudeten Germans and 800,000 Czechs. Within this

area lay all the vast Czech fortifications which hitherto had formed the most

formidable defensive line in Europe, with the possible exception of the Maginot

Line in France.

But that was not all. Czechoslovakia’s entire system of rail, road, telephone

and telegraph communications was disrupted. According to German figures, the

dismembered country lost 66 per cent of its coal, 80 per cent of its lignite, 86 per

cent of its chemicals, 80 per cent of its cement, 80 per cent of its textiles, 70 per

cent of its iron and steel, 70 per cent of its electric power and 40 per cent of its

timber. A prosperous industrial nation was split up and bankrupted overnight.

No wonder that Jodl could write joyfully in his diary on the night of Munich:

The Pact of Munich is signed. Czechoslovakia as a power is out … The genius of the

Fuehrer and his determination not to shun even a World War have again won the victory

without the use of force. The hope remains that the incredulous, the weak and the doubtful

people have been converted, and will remain that way. 90

Many of the doubtful were converted and the few who were not were plunged

into despair. The generals such as Beck, Halder and Witzleben and their civilian

advisers had again been proved wrong. Hitler had got what he wanted, had

achieved another great conquest, without firing a shot. His prestige soared to

new heights. No one who was in Germany in the days after Munich, as this

writer was, can forget the rapture of the German people. They were relieved that

war had been averted; they were elated and swollen with pride at Hitler’s

bloodless victory, not only over Czechoslovakia but over Great Britain and

France. Within the short space of six months, they reminded you, Hitler had

conquered Austria and the Sudetenland, adding ten million inhabitants to the

Third Reich and a vast strategic territory which opened the way for German

domination of southeastern Europe. And without the loss of a single German

life! With the instinct of a genius rare in German history he had divined not only

the weaknesses of the smaller states in Central Europe but those of the two

principal Western democracies, Britain and France, and forced them to bend to

his will. He had invented and used with staggering success a new strategy and

technique of political warfare, which made actual war unnecessary.

In scarcely four and a half years this man of lowly origins had catapulted a

disarmed, chaotic, nearly bankrupt Germany, the weakest of the big powers in

Europe, to a position where she was regarded as the mightiest nation of the Old

World, before which all the others, Britain even and France, trembled. At no step

in this dizzy ascent had the victorious powers of Versailles dared to try to stop

her, even when they had the power to do so. Indeed at Munich, which registered

the greatest conquest of all, Britain and France had gone out of their way to

support her. And what must have amazed Hitler most of all—it certainly

astounded General Beck, Hassell and others in their small circle of opposition—

was that none of the men who dominated the governments of Britain and France

(“little worms,” as the Fuehrer contemptuously spoke of them in private after

Munich) realized the consequences of their inability to react with any force to

one after the other of the Nazi leader’s aggressive moves.

Winston Churchill, in England, alone seemed to understand. No one stated the

consequences of Munich more succinctly than he in his speech to the Commons

of October 5:

We have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat … We are in the midst of a disaster of the

first magnitude. The road down the Danube … the road to the Black Sea has been opened …

All the countries of Mittel Europa and the Danube valley, one after another, will be drawn in

the vast system of Nazi politics … radiating from Berlin … And do not suppose that this is the

end. It is only the beginning …

But Churchill was not in the government and his words went unheeded.

Was the Franco–British surrender at Munich necessary? Was Adolf Hitler not

bluffing?

The answer, paradoxically, to both questions, we now know, is No. All the

generals close to Hitler who survived the war agree that had it not been for

Munich Hitler would have attacked Czechoslovakia on October 1, 1938, and

they presume that, whatever momentary hesitations there might have been in

London, Paris and Moscow, in the end Britain, France and Russia would have

been drawn into the war.

And—what is most important to this history at this point—the German

generals agree unanimously that Germany would have lost the war, and in short

order. The argument of the supporters of Chamberlain and Daladier—and they

were in the great majority at the time—that Munich saved the West not only

from war but from defeat in war and, incidentally, preserved London and Paris

from being wiped out by the Luftwaffe’s murderous bombing has been

impressively refuted, so far as concern the last two points, by those in a position

to know best: the German generals, and especially those generals who were

closest to Hitler and who supported him from beginning to end the most

fanatically.

The leading light among the latter was General Keitel, chief of OKW, toady to

Hitler and constantly at his side. When asked on the stand at the Nuremberg trial

what the reaction of the German generals was to Munich he replied:

We were extraordinarily happy that it had not come to a military operation because … we

had always been of the opinion that our means of attack against the frontier fortifications of

Czechoslovakia were insufficient. From a purely military point of view we lacked the means

for an attack which involved the piercing of the frontier fortifications.91

It has always been assumed by Allied military experts that the German Army

would have romped through Czechoslovakia. But to the testimony of Keitel that

this would not have been the case must be added that of Field Marshal von

Manstein, who became one of the most brilliant of the German field

commanders. When he, in his turn, testified at Nuremberg (unlike Keitel and

Jodl, he was not on trial for his life) on the German position at the time of

Munich, he explained:

If a war had broken out, neither our western border nor our Polish frontier could really

have been effectively defended by us, and there is no doubt whatsoever that had

Czechoslovakia defended herself, we would have been held up by her fortifications, for we did

not have the means to break through.92*

Jodl, the “brains” of OKW, put it this way when he took the stand in his own

defense at Nuremberg:

It was out of the question, with five fighting divisions and seven reserve

divisions in the western fortifications, which were nothing but a large

construction site, to hold out against 100 French divisions. That was militarily

impossible. 93

If, as these German generals concede, Hitler’s army lacked the means of

penetrating the Czech fortifications, and Germany, in the face of France’s

overwhelming strength in the west, was in a “militarily impossible” situation,

and further, since, as we have seen, there was such grave dissension among the

generals that the Chief of the Army General Staff was prepared to overthrow the

Fuehrer in order to avert a hopeless war—why, then, did not the French and

British general staffs know this? Or did they? And if they did, how could the

heads of government of Britain and France be forced at Munich into sacrificing

so much of their nations’ vital interests? In seeking answers to such questions we

confront one of the mysteries of the Munich time which has not yet been cleared

up. Even Churchill, concerned as he is with military affairs, scarcely touches on

it in his massive memoirs.

It is inconceivable that the British and French general staffs and the two

governments did not know of the opposition of the German Army General Staff

to a European war. For, as already noted here, the conspirators in Berlin warned

the British of this through at least four channels in August and September and, as

we know, the matter came to the attention of Chamberlain himself. By early

September Paris and London must have learned of the resignation of General

Beck and of the obvious consequences to the German Army of the rebellion of

its most eminent and gifted leader.

It was generally conceded in Berlin at this time that British and French

military intelligence was fairly good. It is extremely difficult to believe that the

military chiefs in London and Paris did not know of the obvious weaknesses of

the German Army and Air Force and of their inability to fight a two-front war.

What doubts could the Chief of Staff of the French Army, General Gamelin,

have—despite his inbred caution, which was monumental—that with nearly one

hundred divisions he could overwhelm the five regular and seven reserve

German divisions in the west and sweep easily and swiftly deep into Germany?

On the whole, as he later recounted, 94 Gamelin had few doubts. On September

12, the day on which Hitler was thundering his threats against Czechoslovakia at

the closing session of the Nuremberg rally, the French generalissimo had assured

Premier Daladier that if war came “the democratic nations would dictate the

peace.” He says he backed it up with a letter expressing the reasons for his

optimism. On September 26, at the height of the Czech crisis following the

Godesberg meeting, Gamelin, who had accompanied the French government

leaders to London, repeated his assurances to Chamberlain and tried to

substantiate them with an analysis of the military situation calculated to buck up

not only the British Prime Minister but his own wavering Premier. In this

attempt, apparently, he failed. Finally, just before Daladier flew to Munich,

Gamelin outlined to him the limits of territorial concessions in the Sudetenland

which could be made without endangering French security. The main Czech

fortifications, as well as the rail trunk lines, certain strategic branch lines and the

principal defense industries must not be given to Germany. Above all, he added,

the Germans must not be permitted to cut off the Moravian Gap. Good advice, if

Czechoslovakia was to be of any use to France in a war with Germany, but, as

we have seen, Daladier was not the man to act on it.

A good deal was said at the time of Munich that one reason for Chamberlain’s

surrender was his fear that London would be obliterated by German bombing,

and there is no doubt that the French were jittery at the awful prospect of their

beautiful capital being destroyed from the air. But from what is now known of

the Luftwaffe’s strength at this moment, the Londoners and the Parisians, as well

as the Prime Minister and the Premier, were unduly alarmed. The German Air

Force, like the Army, was concentrated against Czechoslovakia and therefore,

like the Army, was incapable of serious action in the West. Even if a few

German bombers could have been spared to attack London and Paris it is highly

doubtful that they would have reached their targets. Weak as the British and

French fighter defenses were, the Germans could not have given their bombers

fighter protection, if they had had the planes. Their fighter bases were too far

away.

It has also been argued—most positively by Ambassadors François-Poncet

and Henderson—that Munich gave the two Western democracies nearly a year

to catch up with the Germans in rearmament. The facts belie such an argument.

As Churchill, backed up by every serious Allied military historian, has written,

“The year’s breathing space said to be ‘gained’ by Munich left Britain and

France in a much worse position compared to Hitler’s Germany than they had

been at the Munich crisis.” 95 As we shall see, all the German military

calculations a year later bear this out, and subsequent events, of course, remove

any doubts whatsoever.

In retrospect, and with the knowledge we now have from the secret German

documents and from the postwar testimony of the Germans themselves, the

following summing up, which was impossible to make in the days of Munich,

may be given:

Germany was in no position to go to war on October 1, 1938, against

Czechoslovakia and France and Britain, not to mention Russia. Had she done so,

she would have been quickly and easily defeated, and that would have been the

end of Hitler and the Third Reich. If a European war had been averted at the last

moment by the intercession of the German Army, Hitler might have been

overthrown by Halder and Witzleben and their confederates carrying out their

plan to arrest him as soon as he had given the final order for the attack on

Czechoslovakia.

By publicly boasting that he would march into the Sudetenland by October 1

“in any case,” Hitler had put himself far out on a limb. He was in the “untenable

position” which General Beck had foreseen. Had he, after all his categorical

threats and declarations, tried to crawl back from the limb on his own, he

scarcely could have survived for long, dictatorships being what they are and his

dictatorship, in particular, being what it was. It would have been extremely

difficult, if not impossible, for him to have backed down, and had he tried to do

so his loss of prestige in Europe, among his own people and, above all, with his

generals would, most likely, have proved fatal.

Chamberlain’s stubborn, fanatical insistence on giving Hitler what he wanted,

his trips to Berchtesgaden and Godesberg and finally the fateful journey to

Munich rescued Hitler from his limb and strengthened his position in Europe, in

Germany, in the Army, beyond anything that could have been imagined a few

weeks before. It also added immeasurably to the power of the Third Reich vis-à-

vis the Western democracies and the Soviet Union.

For France, Munich was a disaster, and it is beyond understanding that this

was not fully realized in Paris. Her military position in Europe was destroyed.

Because her Army, when the Reich was fully mobilized, could never be much

more than half the size of that of Germany, which had nearly twice her

population, and because her ability to produce arms was also less, France had

laboriously built up her alliances with the smaller powers in the East on the other

flank of Germany—and of Italy: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia and

Rumania, which, together, had the military potential of a Big Power. The loss

now of thirty-five well-trained, well-armed Czech divisions, deployed behind

their strong mountain fortifications and holding down an even larger German

force, was a crippling one to the French Army. But that was not all. After

Munich how could France’s remaining allies in Eastern Europe have any

confidence in her written word? What value now were alliances with France?

The answer in Warsaw, Bucharest and Belgrade was: Not much; and there was a

scramble in these capitals to make the best deal possible, while there was still

time, with the Nazi conqueror.

And if not a scramble, there was a stir in Moscow. Though the Soviet Union

was militarily allied to both Czechoslovakia and France, the French government

had gone along with Germany and Britain, without protest, in excluding Russia

from Munich. It was a snub which Stalin did not forget and which was to cost

the two Western democracies dearly in the months to come. On October 3, four

days after Munich, the counselor of the German Embassy in Moscow, Werner

von Tippelskirch, reported to Berlin on the “consequences” of Munich for Soviet

policy. He thought Stalin “would draw conclusions”; he was certain the Soviet

Union would “reconsider her foreign policy,” become less friendly to her ally

France and “more positive” toward Germany. As a matter of fact, the German

diplomat thought that “the present circumstances offer favorable opportunities

for a new and wider German economic agreement with the Soviet Union.” 96

This is the first mention in the secret German archives of a change in the wind

that now began to stir, however faintly, over Berlin and Moscow and which,

within a year, would have momentous consequences.

Despite his staggering victory and the humiliation he administered not only to

Czechoslovakia but to the Western democracies, Hitler was disappointed with

the results of Munich. “That fellow [Chamberlain],” Schacht heard him exclaim

to his S.S. entourage on his return to Berlin, “has spoiled my entry into

Prague!” 97 That was what he really had wanted all along, as he had constantly

confided to his generals since his lecture to them on November 5 of the previous

year. The conquest of Austria and Czechoslovakia, he had explained then, was to

be but the preliminary for a major drive for Lebensraum in the East and a

military settlement with France in the West. As he had told the Hungarian Prime

Minister on September 20, the best thing was “to destroy Czechoslovakia.” This,

he had said, would “provide the only satisfactory solution.” He was only afraid

of the “danger” that the Czechs might submit to all of his demands.*

Now Mr. Chamberlain, grasping his much-publicized umbrella, had come to

Munich and forced the Czechs to submit to all his demands and thereby had

deprived him of his military conquest. Such, it is evident from the record, were

Hitler’s tortuous thoughts after Munich. “It was clear to me from the first

moment,” he later confided to his generals, “that I could not be satisfied with the

Sudeten-German territory. That was only a partial solution. ”98

A few days after Munich the German dictator set in motion plans to achieve a

total solution.

† The parentheses are in the original.

* General von Brauchitsch received his divorce during the summer and on September 24

married Frau Charlotte Schmidt.

* Hitler, according to Jodl’s diary, used the word Hundsfott, a stronger word. 29 Telford

Taylor, in Sword and Swastika, gives a fuller account based on General Adam’s unpublished

memoirs.

* According to a German Foreign Office memorandum of August 6, Henderson, at a private

party, had remarked to the Germans present “that Great Britain would not think of risking

even one sailor or airman for Czechoslovakia, and that any reasonable solution would be

agreed to so long as it were not attempted by force.” 33

† Kleist returned to Berlin on August 23 and showed Churchill’s letter to Beck, Halder,

Hammerstein, Canaris, Oster and others in the plot. In Nemesis of Power (p. 413), Wheeler-

Bennett writes that, according to private information given him after the war by Fabian von

Schlabrendorff, Canaris made two copies of the letter, one for himself and one for Beck, and

Kleist hid the original in his country house at Schmenzin in Pomerania. It was discovered

there by the Gestapo after the July 20, 1944, attempt on Hitler’s life and contributed to Kleist’s

death sentence before a People’s Court, which was passed and carried out on April 16, 1945.

Actually the contents of Churchill’s letter became known to the German authorities much

sooner than the conspirators could have imagined. I found it in a German Foreign Office

memorandum which, though undated, is known to have been submitted on September 6, 1938.

It is marked: “Extract from a letter of Winston Churchill to a German confidant. ”35

* “I honestly believe,” the ambassador had written Lord Halifax from Berlin on July 18, “the

moment has come for Prague to get a real twist of the screw … If Beneš cannot satisfy

Henlein, he can satisfy no Sudeten leader … We have got to be disagreeable to the Czechs.” 38

It seems inconceivable that even Henderson did not know by this time that Henlein was a mere

tool of Hitler and had been ordered by him to keep increasing his demands to such an extent

that Beneš could not possibly “satisfy” him.

* Even the severest critics of Chamberlain’s foreign policy in the British press and in

Parliament warmly applauded the Prime Minister for going to Berchtesgaden. The Poet

Laureate, John Masefield, composed a poem, a paean of praise, entitled “Neville

Chamberlain,” which was published in the Times September 16.

* Both in his talk with Hitler and in his report to the Commons, Chamberlain, whose

knowledge of German history does not appear to have been very wide, accepted this false use

of the word “return.” The Sudeten Germans had belonged to Austria, but never to Germany.

* Though the main points of Runciman’s recommendations were presented to the cabinet on

the evening of September 16, the report itself was not officially made until the twenty-first,

and not published until the twenty-eighth, when events had made it only of academic interest.

Wheeler-Bennett points out that certain parts of the report give the impression of having been

written after September 21. When Runciman left Prague on the morning of September 16, no

one, not even Hitler or the Sudeten leaders, had gone so far as to suggest that the Sudetenland

be turned over to Germany without a plebiscite. (Wheeler-Bennett, Munich, pp. 111–12. The

text of the Runciman report is in the British White Paper, Cmd. 5847, No. 1.)

* It is worth noting that neither the British nor the French government published the text of

this Czech note when they later, issued the documents justifying their policies which led up to

Munich.

† The treachery of Bonnet at this juncture is too involved to be related in a history of

Germany. Among other things, he contrived to convince the French and British cabinet

ministers of the falsehood that the Czech government wanted the French to state they would

not fight for Czechoslovakia so that it would have a good excuse for capitulating. For the

story, see Wheeler-Bennett’s Munich; Herbert Ripka, Munich, Before and After; Pertinax, The

Grave Diggers of France.

* It was from this hotel, run by Herr Dreesen, an early Nazi crony of Hitler, that the Fuehrer

had set out on the night of June 29–30, 1934, to kill Roehm and carry out the Blood Purge.

The Nazi leader had often sought out the hotel as a place of refuge where he could collect his

thoughts and resolve his hesitations.

† Hitler knew that the Czechs had accepted the Anglo–French proposals. Jodl noted in his

diary that at 11:30 A.M. on September 21, the day before Chamberlain arrived in Godesberg,

he had received a telephone call from the Fuehrer’s adjutant: “The Fuehrer has received news

five minutes ago that Prague is said to have accepted unconditionally.” At 12:45 Jodl noted,

“Department heads are informed to continue preparation for ‘Green,’ but nevertheless to get

ready for everything necessary for a peaceful penetration. ”52 It is possible, however, that

Hitler did not know the terms of the Anglo–French plan until the Prime Minister explained

them to him.

* Czech mobilization began at 10:30 P.M. on September 23.

* The memorandum called for the withdrawal of all Czech armed forces, including the police,

etc., by October 1 from large areas indicated on a map with red shading. A plebiscite was to

determine the future of further areas shaded in green. All military installations in the evacuated

territories were to be left intact. All commercial and transport materials, “especially the rolling

stock of the railway system,” were to be handed over to the Germans undamaged. “Finally, no

foodstuffs, goods, cattle, raw material, etc., are to be removed. ”54 The hundreds of thousands

of Czechs in the Sudetenland were not to be allowed to take with them even their household

goods or the family cow.

* The Czech reply is a moving and prophetic document. The Godesberg proposals, it said,

“deprive us of every safeguard for our national existence. ”56

* At the conclusion of the Godesberg talks, the British and French correspondents—and the

chief European correspondent of the New York Times, who was an English citizen—had

scurried off for the French, Belgian and Dutch frontiers, none of them wishing to be interned

in case of war.

* Wilson’s assurance is given in English in the original of Schmidt’s German notes.

* These proposals were also transmitted by Ambassador Henderson to the German Foreign

Office at 11 P.M. with the request that they be immediately submitted to Hitler.

* These include firsthand accounts by Halder, Gisevius and Schacht.69 Each of them contains

much that is confusing and contradictory, and on some points they contradict each other. It

must be remembered that all three of these men, who had begun by serving the Nazi regime,

were anxious after the war to prove their opposition to Hitler and their love of peace.

Erich Kordt, chief of Ribbentrop’s secretariat in the Foreign Office, also was an important

participant in the plot who survived the war. At Nuremberg he drew up a long memorandum

about events in September 1938, which was made available to this writer.

* There is considerable confusion among the historians and even among the conspirators about

Hitler’s whereabouts on September 13 and 14. Churchill, basing his account on a

memorandum of General Halder, states that Hitler arrived in Berlin from Berchtesgaden “on

the morning of September 14” and that Halder and Witzleben, on learning of it, “decided to

strike at 8 that same evening.” They called the operation off, according to this account, when

they learned at 4 P.M. that Chamberlain was flying to Berchtesgaden. (Churchill, The

Gathering Storm, p. 312.) But Halder’s memory—and hence Churchill’s account—is certainly

in error. Hitler’s daily schedule book, now in the Library of Congress, has several entries

showing that he spent the thirteenth and fourteenth in Munich, where, among other things, he

conferred with Ribbentrop at Bormann’s home and visited the Sonnenwinkel, a cabaret,

departing for the Obersalzberg at the end of the day of the fourteenth.

* The British ambassador in Rome.

† As we have seen, Hitler already had mobilized all the troops available.

* Alan Bullock ( Hitler—A Study in Tyranny, p. 428) says: “Almost certainly it was

Mussolini’s intervention which turned the scale.”

* For example, the explanation for the failure of the revolt given by General Georg Thomas,

the brilliant chief of the Economic and Armaments Branch of OKW, and one of the

conspirators: “The execution of this enterprise was unfortunately frustrated because, according

to the view of the commanding general appointed for the task [Witzleben], the younger

officers were found to be unreliable for a political action of this kind.” See his paper,

“Gedanken und Ereignisse,” published in the December 1945 number of the Schweizerische

Monatshefte.

* At 6:45 the evening before, Chamberlain had sent a message to President Beneš informing

him officially of the meeting at Munich. “I shall have the interests of Czechoslovakia,” he

stated, “fully in mind … I go there [to Munich] with the intention of trying to find

accommodation between the positions of the German and Czechoslovak governments.” Beneš

had immediately replied, “I beg that nothing may be done at Munich without Czechoslovakia

being heard.” 81

* Erich Kordt recounted the German origins of Mussolini’s proposals in his testimony before

U.S. Military Tribunal IV at Nuremberg on June 4, 1948, in the case of U.S.A. v. Ernst

Weizsaecker. Documents on German Foreign Policy, II, p. 1005, gives a summary from the

official trial transcript. Kordt also tells the story in his book Wahn und Wirklichkeit, pp. 129–

31. Dr. Schmidt ( Hitler’s Interpreter, p. 111) substantiates Kordt’s account and remarks that

translating the Duce’s proposals “was easy” because he had already translated them the day

before in Berlin. Ciano, the Italian Foreign Minister, in a diary entry of September 29–30 from

Munich, tells of Mussolini producing his document “which in fact had been telephoned to us

by our Embassy the previous evening, as expressing the desires of the German Government.”

( Ciano’s Hidden Diary, 1937–38, p. 167.)

* The agreement was dated September 29, though not actually signed until the early-morning

hours of September 30. It stipulated that the German occupation “of the predominantly

German territory” should be carried out by German troops in four stages, from October 1

through October 7. The remaining territory, after being delimited by the “International

Commission,” would be occupied “by October 10.” The commission was to consist of

representatives of the four Big Powers and Czechoslovakia. Britain, France and Italy agreed

“that the evacuation of the territory shall be completed by October 10, without any existing

installations having been destroyed, and that the Czechoslovak Government will be held

responsible for carrying out the evacuation without damage to the said installations.”

Further, the “International Commission” would arrange for plebiscites, “not later than the

end of November,” in the regions where the ethnographical character was in doubt and would

make the final determination of the new frontiers. In an annex to the accord, Britain and

France declared that “they stand by their offer … relating to an international guarantee of the

new boundaries of the Czechoslovak State against unprovoked aggression. When the question

of the Polish and Hungarian minorities … has been settled, Germany and Italy, for their part,

will give a guarantee to Czechoslovakia. ”85

The pledge of plebiscites was never carried out. Neither Germany nor Italy ever gave the

guarantee to Czechoslovakia against aggression, even after the matter of the Polish and

Hungarian minorities was settled, and, as we shall see, Britain and France declined to honor

their guarantee.

* The reference is to Disraeli’s return from the Congress of Berlin in 1878.

* Even Hitler became at least partly convinced of this after he had inspected the Czech fortress

line. He later told Dr. Carl Burckhardt, League of Nations High Commissioner of Danzig,

“When after Munich we were in a position to examine Czechoslovak military strength from

within, what we saw of it greatly disturbed us; we had run a serious danger. The plan prepared

by the Czech generals was formidable. I now understand why my generals urged restraint.”

(Pertinax, The Grave Diggers of France, p. 5.)

13

CZECHOSLOVAKIA CEASES TO EXIST

WITHIN TEN DAYS of affixing his signature to the Munich Agreement—before

even the peaceful military occupation of the Sudetenland had been completed—

Adolf Hitler got off an urgent top-secret message to General Keitel, Chief of

OKW.

1. What reinforcements are necessary in the present situation to break all

Czech resistance in Bohemia and Moravia?

2. How much time is required for the regrouping or moving up of new forces?

3. How much time will be required for the same purpose if it is executed after

the intended demobilization and return measures?

4. How much time would be required to achieve the state of readiness of

October 1?1

Keitel shot back to the Fuehrer on October 11 a telegram giving detailed

answers. Not much time and not very many reinforcements would be necessary.

There were already twenty-four divisions, including three armored and four

motorized, in the Sudeten area. “OKW believes,” Keitel stated, “that it would be

possible to commence operations without reinforcements, in view of the present

signs of weakness in Czech resistance.” 2

Thus assured, Hitler communicated his thoughts to his military chiefs ten days

later.

TOP SECRET Berlin, October 21, 1938

The future tasks for the armed forces and the preparations for the conduct of

war resulting from these tasks will be laid down by me in a later directive.

Until this directive comes into force the armed forces must be prepared at all

times for the following eventualities:

1.

The securing of the frontiers of Germany.

2.

The liquidation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia.

3.

The occupation of the Memel district.

Memel, a Baltic port of some forty thousand inhabitants, had been lost by

Germany to Lithuania after Versailles. Since Lithuania was smaller and weaker

than Austria and Czechoslovakia, the seizure of the town presented no problem

to the Wehrmacht and in this directive Hitler merely mentioned that it would be

“annexed.” As for Czechoslovakia:

It must be possible to smash at any time the remainder of Czechoslovakia if

her policy should become hostile toward Germany.

The preparations to be made by the armed forces for this contingency will be

considerably smaller in extent than those for “Green”; they must, however,

guarantee a considerably higher state of preparedness since planned mobilization

measures have been dispensed with. The organization, order of battle and state

of readiness of the units earmarked for that purpose are in peacetime to be so

arranged for a surprise assault that Czechoslovakia herself will be deprived of all

possibility of organized resistance. The object is the swift occupation of

Bohemia and Moravia and the cutting off of Slovakia.3

Slovakia, of course, could be cut off by political means, which might make the

use of German troops unnecessary. For this purpose the German Foreign Office

was put to work. All through the first days of October, Ribbentrop and his aides

urged the Hungarians to press for their share of the spoils in Slovakia. But when

Hungary, which hardly needed German prodding to whet its greedy appetite,

spoke of taking Slovakia outright, the Wilhelmstrasse put its foot down. It had

other plans for the future of this land. The Prague government had already,

immediately after Munich, granted Slovakia a far-reaching autonomy. The

German Foreign Office advised “tolerating” this solution for the moment. But

for the future the German thinking was summed up by Dr. Ernst Woermann,

director of the Political Department of the Foreign Office, in a memorandum of

October 7. “An independent Slovakia,” he wrote, “would be weak

constitutionally and would therefore best further the German need for

penetration and settlement in the East. ”4

Here is a new turning point for the Third Reich. For the first time Hitler is on

the verge of setting out to conquer non-Germanic lands. Over the last six weeks

he had been assuring Chamberlain, in private and in public, that the Sudetenland

was his last territorial demand in Europe. And though the British Prime Minister

was gullible almost beyond comprehension in accepting Hitler’s word, there was

some ground for his believing that the German dictator would halt when he had

digested the Germans who previously had dwelt outside the Reich’s frontier and

were now within it. Had not the Fuehrer repeatedly said that he wanted no

Czechs in the Third Reich? Had he not in Mein Kampf and in countless public

speeches reiterated the Nazi theory that a Germany, to be strong, must be

racially pure and therefore must not take in foreign, and especially Slav,

peoples? He had. But also—and perhaps this was forgotten in London—he had

preached in many a turgid page in Mein Kampf that Germany’s future lay in

conquering Lebensraum in the East. For more than a millennium this space had

been occupied by the Slavs.

THE WEEK OF THE BROKEN GLASS

In the autumn of 1938 another turning point for Nazi Germany was reached. It

took place during what was later called in party circles the “Week of the Broken

Glass.”

On November 7, a seventeen-year-old German Jewish refugee by the name of

Herschel Grynszpan shot and mortally wounded the third secretary of the

German Embassy in Paris, Ernst vom Rath. The youth’s father had been among

ten thousand Jews deported to Poland in boxcars shortly before, and it was to

revenge this and the general persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany that he went

to the German Embassy intending to kill the ambassador, Count Johannes von

Welczeck. But the young third secretary was sent out to see what he wanted, and

was shot. There was irony in Rath’s death, because he had been shadowed by the

Gestapo as a result of his anti-Nazi attitude; for one thing, he had never shared

the anti-Semitic aberrations of the rulers of his country.

On the night of November 9–10, shortly after the party bosses, led by Hitler

and Goering, had concluded the annual celebration of the Beer Hall Putsch in

Munich, the worst pogrom that had yet taken place in the Third Reich occurred.

According to Dr. Goebbels and the German press, which he controlled, it was a

“spontaneous” demonstration of the German people in reaction to the news of

the murder in Paris. But after the war, documents came to light which show how

“spontaneous” it was.5 They are among the most illuminating—and gruesome—

secret papers of the prewar Nazi era.

On the evening of November 9, according to a secret report made by the chief

party judge, Major Walther Buch, Dr. Goebbels issued instructions that

“spontaneous demonstrations” were to be “organized and executed” during the

night. But the real organizer was Reinhard Heydrich, the sinister thirty-four-

year-old Number Two man, after Himmler, in the S.S., who ran the Security

Service (S.D.) and the Gestapo. His teletyped orders during the evening are

among the captured German documents.

At 1:20 A.M. on November 10 he flashed an urgent teletype message to all

headquarters and stations of the state police and the S.D. instructing them to get

together with party and S.S. leaders “to discuss the organization of the

demonstrations.”

a. Only such measures should be taken which do not involve danger to

German life or property. (For instance synagogues are to be burned down only

when there is no danger of fire to the surroundings.)*

b. Business and private apartments of Jews may be destroyed but not

looted….

d…. 2. The demonstrations which are going to take place should not be

hindered by the police …

5. As many Jews, especially rich ones, are to be arrested as can be

accommodated in the existing prisons … Upon their arrest, the appropriate

concentration camps should be contacted immediately, in order to confine them

in these camps as soon as possible.

It was a night of horror throughout Germany. Synagogues, Jewish homes and

shops went up in flames and several Jews, men, women and children, were shot

or otherwise slain while trying to escape burning to death. A preliminary

confidential report was made by Heydrich to Goering on the following day,

November 11.

The extent of the destruction of Jewish shops and houses cannot yet be verified

by figures … 815 shops destroyed, 171 dwelling houses set on fire or destroyed

only indicate a fraction of the actual damage so far as arson is concerned … 119

synagogues were set on fire, and another 76 completely destroyed … 20,000

Jews were arrested. 36 deaths were reported and those seriously injured were

also numbered at 36. Those killed and injured are Jews….

The ultimate number of murders of Jews that night is believed to have been

several times the preliminary figure. Heydrich himself a day after his

preliminary report gave the number of Jewish shops looted as 7,500. There were

also some cases of rape, which Major Buch’s party court, judging by its own

report, considered worse than murder, since they violated the Nuremberg racial

laws which forbade sexual intercourse between Gentiles and Jews. Such

offenders were expelled from the party and turned over to the civil courts. Party

members who simply murdered Jews “cannot be punished,” Major Buch argued,

since they had merely carried out orders. On that point he was quite blunt. “The

public, down to the last man,” he wrote, “realizes that political drives like those

of November 9 were organized and directed by the party, whether this is

admitted or not.” *

Murder and arson and pillage were not the only tribulations suffered by

innocent German Jews as the result of the murder of Rath in Paris. The Jews had

to pay for the destruction of their own property. Insurance monies due them were

confiscated by the State. Moreover, they were subjected, collectively, to a fine of

one billion marks as punishment, as Goering put it, “for their abominable crimes,

etc.” These additional penalties were assessed at a grotesque meeting of a dozen

German cabinet ministers and ranking officials presided over by the corpulent

Field Marshal on November 12, a partial stenographic record of which survives.

A number of German insurance firms faced bankruptcy if they were to make

good the policies on gutted buildings (most of which, though they harbored

Jewish shops, were owned by Gentiles) and damaged goods. The destruction in

broken window glass alone came to five million marks ($1,250,000) as a Herr

Hilgard, who had been called in to speak for the insurance companies, reminded

Goering; and most of the glass replacements would have to be imported from

abroad in foreign exchange, of which Germany was very short.

“This cannot continue!” exclaimed Goering, who, among other things, was the

czar of the German economy. “We won’t be able to last, with all this.

Impossible!” And turning to Heydrich, he shouted, “I wish you had killed two

hundred Jews instead of destroying so many valuables! ”*

“Thirty-five were killed,” Heydrich answered, in self-defense.

Not all the conversation, of which the partial stenographic record runs to ten

thousand words, was so deadly serious. Goering and Goebbels had a lot of fun

arguing about subjecting the Jews to further indignities. The Propaganda

Minister said the Jews would be made to clean up and level off the debris of the

synagogues; the sites would then be turned into parking lots. He insisted that the

Jews be excluded from everything: schools, theaters, movies, resorts, public

beaches, parks, even from the German forests. He proposed that there be special

railway coaches and compartments for the Jews, but that they be made available

only after all Aryans were seated.

“Well, if the train is overcrowded,” Goering laughed, “we’ll kick the Jew out

and make him sit all alone all the way in the toilet.”

When Goebbels, in all seriousness, demanded that the Jews be forbidden to

enter the forests, Goering replied, “We shall give the Jews a certain part of the

forest and see to it that various animals that look damned much like Jews—the

elk has a crooked nose like theirs—get there also and become acclimated.”

In such talk, and much more like it, did the leaders of the Third Reich while

away the time in the crucial year of 1938.

But the question of who was to pay for the 25 million marks’ worth of damage

caused by a pogrom instigated and organized by the State was a fairly serious

one, especially to Goering, who now had become responsible for the economic

well-being of Nazi Germany. Hilgard, on behalf of the insurance companies,

pointed out that if their policies were not honored to the Jews, the confidence of

the people, both at home and abroad, in German insurance would be forfeited.

On the other hand, he did not see how many of the smaller companies could pay

up without going broke.

This problem was quickly solved by Goering. The insurance companies would

pay the Jews in full, but the sums would be confiscated by the State and the

insurers reimbursed for a part of their losses. This did not satisfy Herr Hilgard,

who, judging by the record of the meeting, must have felt that he had fallen in

with a bunch of lunatics.

GOERING: The Jew shall get the refund from the insurance company but the

refund will be confiscated. There will remain some profit for the insurance

companies, since they won’t have to make good for all the damage. Herr

Hilgard, you may consider yourself damned lucky.

HILGARD: I have no reason to. The fact that we won’t have to pay for all the

damage, you call a profit!

The Field Marshal was not accustomed to such talk and he quickly squelched

the bewildered businessman.

GOERING: Just a moment! If you are legally bound to pay five millions and all

of a sudden an angel in my somewhat corpulent shape appears before you and

tells you that you may keep one million, for heaven’s sake isn’t that a profit? I

should like to go fifty-fifty with you, or whatever you call it. I have only to look

at you. Your whole body seethes with satisfaction. You are getting a big rake-

off!

The insurance executive was slow to see the point.

HILGARD: All the insurance companies are the losers. That is so, and remains

so. Nobody can tell me differently.

GOERING: Then why don’t you take care of it that a few windows less are

being smashed!

The Field Marshal had had enough of this commercial-minded man. Herr

Hilgard was dismissed, disappearing into the limbo of history.

A representative of the Foreign Office dared to suggest that American public

opinion be considered in taking further measures against the Jews. * This inspired

an outburst from Goering: “That country of scoundrels! … That gangster state!”

After further lengthy discussion it was agreed to solve the Jewish question in

the following manner: eliminate the Jews from the German economy; transfer all

Jewish business enterprises and property, including jewelry and works of art, to

Aryan hands with some compensation in bonds from which the Jews could use

the interest but not the capital. The matter of excluding Jews from schools,

resorts, parks, forests, etc., and of either expelling them after they had been

deprived of all their property or confining them to German ghettos where they

would be impressed as forced labor, was left for further consideration by a

committee.

As Heydrich put it toward the close of the meeting: “In spite of the

elimination of the Jews from economic life, the main problem remains, namely,

to kick the Jew out of Germany.” Count Schwerin von Krosigk, the Minister of

Finance, the former Rhodes scholar who prided himself on representing the

“traditional and decent Germany” in the Nazi government, agreed “that we will

have to do everything to shove the Jews into foreign countries.” As for the

ghettos, this German nobleman said meekly, “I don’t imagine the prospect of the

ghetto is very nice. The idea of the ghetto is not a very agreeable one.”

At 2:30 P.M.—after nearly four hours—Goering brought the meeting to a

close.

I shall close the meeting with these words: German Jewry shall, as punishment

for their abominable crimes, et cetera, have to make a contribution for one

billion marks. That will work. The swine won’t commit another murder.

Incidentally, I would like to say that I would not like to be a Jew in Germany.

Much worse was to be inflicted on the Jews by this man and this State and its

Fuehrer in the course of time, and a brief time it turned out to be. On the

flaming, riotous night of November 9, 1938, the Third Reich had deliberately

turned down a dark and savage road from which there was to be no return. A

good many Jews had been murdered and tortured and robbed before, but these

crimes, except for those which took place in the concentration camps, had been

committed mostly by brown-shirted rowdies acting out of their own sadism and

greed while the State authorities looked on, or looked the other way. Now the

German government itself had organized and carried out a vast pogrom. The

killings, the looting, the burning of synagogues and houses and shops on the

night of November 9 were its doing. So were the official decrees, duly published

in the official gazette, the Reichsgesetzblatt—three of them on the day of

Goering’s meeting—which fined the Jewish community a billion marks,

eliminated them from the economy, robbed them of what was left of their

property and drove them toward the ghetto—and worse.

World opinion was shocked and revolted by such barbarity in a nation which

boasted a centuries-old Christian and humanist culture. Hitler, in turn, was

enraged by the world reaction and convinced himself that it merely proved the

power and scope of “the Jewish world conspiracy.”

In retrospect, it is easy to see that the horrors inflicted upon the Jews of

Germany on November 9 and the harsh and brutal measures taken against them

immediately afterward were portents of a fatal weakening which in the end

would bring the dictator, his regime and his nation down in utter ruin. The

evidences of Hitler’s megalomania we have seen permeating hundreds of pages

of this narrative. But until now he had usually been able to hold it in check at

critical stages in his rise and in that of his country. At such moments his genius

for acting not only boldly, but usually only after a careful calculation of the

consequences, had won him one crashing success after another. But now, as

November 9 and its aftermath clearly showed, Hitler was losing his self-control.

His megalomania was getting the upper hand. The stenographic record of the

Goering meeting on November 12 reveals that it was Hitler who, in the final

analysis, was responsible for the holocaust of that November evening; it was he

who gave the necessary approval to launch it; he who pressed Goering to go

ahead with the elimination of the Jews from German life. From now on the

absolute master of the Third Reich would show little of that restraint which had

saved him so often before. And though his genius and that of his country would

lead to further startling conquests, the poisonous seeds of eventual self-

destruction for the dictator and his land had now been sown.

Hitler’s sickness was contagious; the nation was catching it, as if it were a

virus. Individually, as this writer can testify from personal experience, many

Germans were as horrified by the November 9 inferno as were Americans and

Englishmen and other foreigners. But neither the leaders of the Christian

churches nor the generals nor any other representatives of the “good” Germany

spoke out at once in open protest. They bowed to what General von Fritsch

called “the inevitable,” or “Germany’s destiny.”

The atmosphere of Munich soon was dissipated. At Saarbruecken, at Weimar,

at Munich, Hitler delivered petulant speeches that fall warning the outside world

and particularly the British to mind their own business and to quit concerning

themselves “with the fate of Germans within the frontiers of the Reich.” That

fate, he thundered, was exclusively Germany’s affair. It could not be long before

even Neville Chamberlain would be awakened to the nature of the German

government which he had gone so far to appease. Gradually, as the eventful year

of 1938 gave way to ominous 1939, the Prime Minister got wind of what the

Fuehrer whom he had tried so hard to personally accommodate in the interest of

European peace was up to behind the scenes. *

Not long after Munich Ribbentrop journeyed to Rome. His mind was “fixed”

on war, Ciano noted in his diary of October 28.9

The Fuehrer [the German Foreign Minister told Mussolini and Ciano] is convinced that we

must inevitably count on a war with the Western democracies in the course of a few years,

perhaps three or four … The Czech crisis has shown our power! We have the advantage of the

initiative and are masters of the situation. We cannot be attacked. The military situation is

excellent: as from September [1939] we could face a war with the great democracies.*

To the young Italian Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop was “vain, frivolous, and

loquacious,” and in so describing him in his diary he added, “The Duce says you

only have to look at his head to see that he has a small brain.” The German

Foreign Minister had come to Rome to persuade Mussolini to sign a military

alliance between Germany, Japan and Italy, a draft of which had been given the

Italians at Munich; but Mussolini stalled for time. He was not yet ready, Ciano

noted, to shut the door on Britain and France.

Hitler himself toyed that autumn with the idea of trying to detach France from

her ally over the Channel. When on October 18 he received the French

ambassador, François-Poncet, for a farewell visit in the eerie fastness of Eagle’s

Nest, high above Berchtesgaden on a mountaintop. † he broke out into a bitter

attack on Great Britain. The ambassador found the Fuehrer pale, his face drawn

with fatigue, but not too tired to inveigh against Albion. Britain re-echoed “with

threats and calls to arms.” She was selfish and took on “superior” airs. It was the

British who were destroying the spirit of Munich. And so on. France was

different. Hitler said he wanted more friendly and close relations with her. To

prove it, he was willing to sign at once a pact of friendship, guaranteeing their

present frontiers (and thus again renouncing any German claims to Alsace-

Lorraine) and proposing to settle any future differences by consultation.

The pact was duly signed in Paris on December 6, 1938, by the German and

French foreign ministers. France, by that time, had somewhat recovered from the

defeatist panic of the Munich days. The writer happened to be in Paris on the day

the paper was signed and noted the frosty atmosphere. When Ribbentrop drove

through the streets they were completely deserted, and several cabinet ministers

and other leading figures in the French political and literary worlds, including

the eminent presidents of the Senate and the Chamber, MM. Jeanneney and

Herriot respectively, refused to attend the social functions accorded the Nazi

visitor.

From this meeting of Bonnet and Ribbentrop stemmed a misunderstanding

which was to play a certain part in future events. The German Foreign Minister

claimed that Bonnet had assured him that after Munich France was no longer

interested in Eastern Europe and he subsequently interpreted this as meaning that

the French would give Germany a free hand in this region, especially in regard

to rump Czechoslovakia and Poland. Bonnet denied this. According to Schmidt’s

minutes of the meeting, Bonnet declared, in answer to Ribbentrop’s demand that

Germany’s sphere of influence in the East be recognized, that “conditions had

changed fundamentally since Munich. ”11 This ambiguous remark was soon

stretched by the slippery German Foreign Minister into the flat statement, which

he passed along to Hitler, that “at Paris Bonnet had declared he was no longer

interested in questions concerning the East.” France’s swift surrender at Munich

had already convinced the Fuehrer of this. It was not quite true.

SLOVAKIA “WINS” ITS “INDEPENDENCE”

What had happened to the German guarantee of the rest of Czechoslovakia

which Hitler had solemnly promised at Munich to give? When the new French

ambassador in Berlin, Robert Coulondre, inquired of Weizsaecker on December

21, 1938, the State Secretary replied that the destiny of Czechoslovakia lay in

the hands of Germany and that he rejected the idea of a British–French

guarantee. As far back as October 14, when the new Czech Foreign Minister,

František Chvalkovsky, had come humbly begging for crumbs at the hand of

Hitler in Munich and had inquired whether Germany was going to join Britain

and France in the guarantee of his country’s shrunken frontiers, the Fuehrer

replied sneeringly that “the British and French guarantees were worthless … and

that the only effective guarantee was that by Germany.” 12

Yet, as 1939 began, it was still not forthcoming. The reason was simple. The

Fuehrer had no intention of giving it. Such a guarantee would have interfered

with the plans which he had begun to lay immediately after Munich. Soon there

would be no Czechoslovakia to guarantee. To start with, Slovakia would be

induced to break away.

A few days after Munich, on October 17, Goering had received two Slovak

leaders, Ferdinand Durcansky and Mach, and the leader of the German minority

in Slovakia, Franz Karmasin. Durcansky, who was Deputy Prime Minister of the

newly appointed autonomous Slovakia, assured the Field Marshal that what the

Slovaks really wanted was “complete independence, with very close political,

economic and military ties with Germany.” In a secret Foreign Office

memorandum of the same date it was noted that Goering had decided that

independence for Slovakia must be supported. “A Czech State minus Slovakia is

even more completely at our mercy. Air base in Slovakia for operation against

the East very important. ”13 Such were Goering’s thoughts on the matter in mid-

October.

We must here attempt to follow a double thread in the German plan: to detach

Slovakia from Prague, and to prepare for the liquidation of what remained of the

state by the military occupation of the Czech lands, Bohemia and Moravia. On

October 21, 1938, as we have seen, Hitler had directed the Wehrmacht to be

ready to carry out that liquidation. * On December 17, General Keitel issued what

he called a “supplement to Directive of October 21”:

TOP SECRET

With reference to the “liquidation of the Rump Czech State,” the Fuehrer has given the

following orders:

The operation is to be prepared on the assumption that no resistance worth mentioning is to

be expected.

To the outside world it must clearly appear that it is merely a peaceful action and not a

warlike undertaking.

The action must therefore be carried out by the peacetime armed forces only, without

reinforcement by mobilization … 14

Try as it might to please Hitler, the new pro-German government of

Czechoslovakia began to realize as the new year began that the country’s goose

was cooked. Just before Christmas, 1938, the Czech cabinet, in order to further

appease the Fuehrer, had dissolved the Communist Party and suspended all

Jewish teachers in German schools. On January 12, 1939, Foreign Minister

Chvalkovsky, in a message to the German Foreign Office, stressed that his

government “will endeavor to prove its loyalty and good will by far-reaching

fulfillment of Germany’s wishes.” On the same day he brought to the attention

of the German chargé in Prague the spreading rumors “that the incorporation of

Czechoslovakia into the Reich was imminent. ”15

To see if even the pieces could be saved Chvalkovsky finally prevailed upon

Hitler to receive him in Berlin on January 21. It turned out to be a painful scene,

though not as painful for the Czechs as one that would shortly follow. The Czech

Foreign Minister groveled before the mighty German dictator, who was in one of

his most bullying moods. Czechoslovakia, said Hitler, had been saved from

catastrophe by “Germany’s moderation.” Nevertheless, unless the Czechs

showed a different spirit, he would “annihilate” them. They must forget their

“history,” which was “schoolboy nonsense,” and do as the Germans bade. That

was their only salvation. Specifically, Czechoslovakia must leave the League of

Nations, drastically reduce the size of her Army—“because it did not count

anyway”—join the Anti-Comintern Pact, accept German direction of her foreign

policy, make a preferential trade agreement with Germany, one condition of

which was that no new Czech industries could be established without German

consent,* dismiss all officials and editors not friendly to the Reich and, finally,

outlaw the Jews, as Germany had done under its Nuremberg Laws. (“With us,

the Jews will be destroyed,” Hitler told his visitor.) On the same day

Chvalkovsky received further demands from Ribbentrop, who threatened

“catastrophic consequences” unless the Czechs immediately mended their ways

and did as they were told. The German Foreign Minister, so much the lackey in

the presence of Hitler but a boor and a bully with anyone over whom he had the

upper hand, bade Chvalkovsky not to mention the new German demands to the

British and French but just to go ahead and carry them out. 17

And to do so without worrying about any German guarantee of the Czech

frontiers! Apparently there had been little worry about this in Paris and London.

Four months had gone by since Munich, and still Hitler had not honored his

word to add Germany’s guarantee to that given by Britain and France. Finally on

February 8 an Anglo–French note verbale was presented in Berlin stating that

the two governments “would now be glad to learn the views of the German

Government as to the best way of giving effect to the understanding reached at

Munich in regard to the guarantee of Czechoslovakia.” 18

Hitler himself, as the captured German Foreign Office documents establish,

drafted the reply, which was not made until February 28. It said that the time had

not yet come for a German guarantee. Germany would have to “await first a

clarification of the internal development of Czechoslovakia. ”19

The Fuehrer already was shaping that “internal development” toward an

obvious end. On February 12 he received at the Chancellery in Berlin Dr.

Vojtech Tuka, one of the Slovak leaders, whose long imprisonment had

embittered him against the Czechs.† Addressing Hitler as “my Fuehrer,” as the

secret German memorandum of the talk emphasizes, Dr. Tuka begged the

German dictator to make Slovakia independent and free. “I lay the destiny of my

people in your hands, my Fuehrer,” he declared. “My people await their

complete liberation from you.”

Hitler’s reply was somewhat evasive. He said that unfortunately he had not

understood the Slovak problem. Had he known the Slovaks wanted to be

independent he would have arranged it at Munich. It would be “a comfort to him

to know that Slovakia was independent … He could guarantee an independent

Slovakia at any time, even today …” These were comforting words to Professor

Tuka too. 20 “This,” he said later, “was the greatest day of my life.”

The curtain on the next act of the Czechoslovak tragedy could now go up. By

another one of those ironies with which this narrative history is so full, it was the

Czechs in Prague who forced the curtain up a little prematurely. By the

beginning of March 1939 they were caught in a terrible dilemma. The separatist

movements in Slovakia and Ruthenia, fomented, as we have seen, by the

German government (and in Ruthenia also by Hungary, which was hungry to

annex that little land) had reached such a state that unless they were squelched

Czechoslovakia would break up. In that case Hitler would surely occupy Prague.

If the separatists were put down by the central government, then the Fuehrer, just

as certainly, would take advantage of the resulting disturbance to also march into

Prague.

The Czech government, after much hesitation and only after the provocation

became unbearable, chose the second alternative. On March 6, Dr. Hácha, the

President of Czechoslovakia, dismissed the autonomous Ruthenian government

from office, and on the night of March 9–10 the autonomous Slovakian

government. The next day he ordered the arrest of Monsignor Tiso, the Slovak

Premier, Dr. Tuka and Durcansky and proclaimed martial law in Slovakia. The

one courageous move of this government, which had become so servile to

Berlin, quickly turned into a disaster which destroyed it.

The swift action by the tottering Prague government caught Berlin by surprise.

Goering had gone off to sunny San Remo for a vacation. Hitler was on the point

of leaving for Vienna to celebrate the first anniversary of the Anschluss. But

now the master improviser went feverishly to work. On March 11, he decided to

take Bohemia and Moravia by ultimatum. The text was drafted that day on

Hitler’s orders by General Keitel and sent to the German Foreign Office. It

called upon the Czechs to submit to military occupation without resistance.21 For

the moment, however, it remained a “top military secret.”

It was now time for Hitler to “liberate” Slovakia. Karol Sidor, who had

represented the autonomous Slovak government at Prague, was named by

President Hácha to be the new Premier of it in place of Monsignor Tiso.

Returning to Bratislava, the Slovak seat of government, on Saturday, March 11,

Sidor called a meeting of his new cabinet. At ten o’clock in the evening the

session of the Slovak government was interrupted by strange and unexpected

visitors. Seyss-Inquart, the quisling Nazi Governor of Austria, and Josef

Buerckel, the Nazi Gauleiter of Austria, accompanied by five German generals,

pushed their way into the meeting and told the cabinet ministers to proclaim the

independence of Slovakia at once. Unless they did, Hitler, who had decided to

settle the question of Slovakia definitely and now, would disinterest himself in

the fate of Slovakia. 22

Sidor, who opposed severing all links with the Czechs, stalled for time, but the

next morning Monsignor Tiso, who had escaped from a monastery where he

supposedly was under house arrest, demanded a cabinet meeting, though he was

no longer himself in the cabinet. To forestall further interruptions by high

German officials and generals, Sidor called the meeting in his own apartment,

and when this became unsafe—for German storm troopers were taking over the

town—he adjourned it to the offices of a local newspaper. There Tiso informed

him that he had just received a telegram from Buerckel inviting him to go at

once to see the Fuehrer in Berlin. If he refused the invitation, Buerckel

threatened, two German divisions across the Danube from Bratislava would

march in and Slovakia would be divided up between Germany and Hungary.

Arriving in Vienna the next morning, Monday, March 13, with the intention of

proceeding to Berlin by train, the chubby little prelate* was packed into a plane

by the Germans and flown to the presence of Hitler. For the Fuehrer, there was

no time to waste.

When Tiso and Durcansky arrived at the Chancellery in Berlin at 7:40 on the

evening of March 13, they found Hitler flanked not only by Ribbentrop but by

his two top generals, Brauchitsch, Commander in Chief of the German Army,

and Keitel, Chief of OKW. Though they may not have realized it, the Slovaks

also found the Fuehrer in a characteristic mood. Here again, thanks to the

captured confidential minutes of the meeting, we may peer into the weird mind

of the German dictator, rapidly giving way to megalomania, and watch him

spinning his fantastic lies and uttering his dire threats in a manner and to an

extent which he no doubt was sure would never come to public attention.23

“Czechoslovakia,” he said, “owed it only to Germany that she had not been

mutilated further.” The Reich had exhibited “the greatest self-control.” Yet the

Czechs had not appreciated this. “During recent weeks,” he went on, working

himself up easily to a fine lather, “conditions have become impossible. The old

Beneš spirit has come to life again.”

The Slovaks had also disappointed him. After Munich he had “fallen out”

with his friends the Hungarians by not permitting them to grab Slovakia. He had

thought Slovakia wanted to be independent.

He had now summoned Tiso in order to clear up this question in a very short

time. * … The question was: Did Slovakia want to lead an independent existence

or not? … It was a question not of days but of hours. If Slovakia wished to

become independent he would support and even guarantee it … If she hesitated

or refused to be separated from Prague, he would leave the fate of Slovakia to

events for which he was no longer responsible.

At this point, the German minutes reveal, Ribbentrop “handed to the Fuehrer a

report just received announcing Hungarian troop movements on the Slovak

frontier. The Fuehrer read this report, told Tiso of its contents, and expressed the

hope that Slovakia would reach a decision soon.”

Tiso did not give his decision then. He asked the Fuehrer to “pardon him if,

under the impact of the Chancellor’s words, he could make no definite decision

at once.” But the Slovaks, he quickly added, “would prove themselves worthy of

the Fuehrer’s benevolence.”

This they did in a conference which continued far into the night at the Foreign

Ministry. According to the Nuremberg testimony of Keppler, who had been

Hitler’s secret agent in Bratislava, as he had been the year before in Vienna on

the eve of the Anschluss, the Germans helped Tiso draft a telegram, which the

“Premier” was to send as soon as he returned to Bratislava, proclaiming

Slovakia’s independence and urgently requesting the Fuehrer to take over the

protection of the new state.24 It is reminiscent of the “telegram” dictated by

Goering just a year before in which Seyss-Inquart was to appeal to Hitler to send

German troops to Austria. By this time the Nazi “telegram” technique had been

perfected. The telegram, considerably abridged, was duly dispatched by Tiso on

March 16, and Hitler immediately replied that he would be glad to “take over the

protection of the Slovak State.”

At the Foreign Office that night Ribbentrop also drafted the Slovak

proclamation of “independence” and had it translated into Slovak in time for

Tiso to take it back to Bratislava, where the “Premier” read it—in slightly altered

form, as one German agent reported—to Parliament on the following day,

Tuesday, March 14. Attempts by several Slovak deputies to at least discuss it

were squelched by Karmasin, the leader of the German minority, who warned

that German troops would occupy the country if there was any delay in

proclaiming independence. Faced with this threat the doubting deputies gave in.

Thus was “independent” Slovakia born on March 14, 1939. Though British

diplomatic representatives were quick to inform London as to the manner of its

birth, Chamberlain, as we shall see, was just as quick to use Slovakia’s

“secession” as an excuse for Britain not to honor its guarantee of Czechoslovakia

after Hitler, on that very evening, March 14, acted to finish what had been left

undone at Munich.

The life of the Czechoslovak Republic of Masaryk and Beneš had now run

out. And once again the harassed leaders in Prague played into Hitler’s hands to

set up the final act of their country’s tragedy. The aging, bewildered President

Hácha asked to be received by the Fuehrer. * Hitler graciously consented. It gave

him an opportunity to set the stage for one of the most brazen acts of his entire

career.

Consider how well the dictator had already arranged the set as he waited on

the afternoon of March 14 for the President of Czechoslovakia to arrive. The

proclamations of independence of Slovakia and Ruthenia, which he had so

skillfully engineered, left Prague with only the Czech core of Bohemia and

Moravia. Had not Czechoslovakia in reality ceased to exist—the nation whose

frontiers Britain and France had guaranteed against aggression? Chamberlain

and Daladier, his partners at Munich where the guarantee had been solemnly

given, already had their “out.” That they would take it he had no doubt—and he

was right. That disposed of any danger of foreign intervention. But to make

doubly sure—to see to it that his next move looked quite legal and legitimate by

the vague standards of international law, at least on paper—he would force the

weak and senile Hácha, who had begged to see him, to accept the very solution

which he had intended to achieve by military force. And in so doing he could

make it appear—he, who, alone in Europe, had mastered the new technique of

bloodless conquest, as the Anschluss and Munich had proved—that the President

of Czechoslovakia had actually and formally asked for it. The niceties of

“legality,” which he had perfected so well in taking over power in Germany,

would be preserved in the conquest of a non-Germanic land.

Hitler had also set the stage to fool the German and other gullible people in

Europe. For several days now German provocateurs had been trying to stir up

trouble in various Czech towns, Prague, Bruenn and Iglau. They had not had

much success because, as the German Legation in Prague reported, the Czech

“police have been instructed to take no action against Germans, even in cases of

provocation. ”26 But this failure did not prevent Dr. Goebbels from whipping up

the German press into a frenzy over invented acts of terror by the Czechs against

the poor Germans. As the French ambassador, M. Coulondre, informed Paris,

they were the same stories with the same headlines which Dr. Goebbels had

concocted during the Sudeten crisis—down to the pregnant German woman

struck down by Czech beasts and the general “Blutbad” (“blood bath”) to which

the defenseless Germans were being subjected by the Czech barbarians. Hitler

could assure the proud German people that their kinsmen would not remain

unprotected for long.

Such was the situation and such were Hitler’s plans, we now know from the

German archives, as the train bearing President Hácha and his Foreign Minister,

Chvalkovsky, drew into the Anhalt Station in Berlin at 10:40 on the evening of

March 14. Because of a heart condition the President had been unable to fly.

THE ORDEAL OF DR. HÁCHA

The German protocol was perfect. The Czech President was accorded all the

formal honors due to a head of state. There was a military guard of honor at the

station, where the German Foreign Minister himself greeted the distinguished

visitor and slipped his daughter a fine bouquet of flowers. At the swank Adlon

Hotel, where the party was put up in the best suite, there were chocolates for

Miss Hácha—a personal gift of Adolf Hitler, who believed that everyone else

shared his craving for sweets. And when the aged President and his Foreign

Minister arrived at the Chancellery he was given a salute by an S.S. guard of

honor.

They were not summoned to Hitler’s presence until 1:15 A.M. Hácha must

have known what was in store for him. Before his train had left Czech territory

he learned from Prague that German troops had already occupied Moravská-

Ostrava, an important Czech industrial town, and were poised all along the

perimeter of Bohemia and Moravia to strike. And he saw at once, as he entered

the Fuehrer’s study in the early-morning hour, that, besides Ribbentrop and

Weizsaecker, Field Marshal Goering, who had been urgently recalled from his

holiday at San Remo, and General Keitel stood at Hitler’s side. Most probably,

as he went into this lion’s den, he did not notice that Hitler’s physician, the

quack Dr. Theodor Morell, was on tap. But the doctor was, and for good reason.

The secret German minutes of the meeting reveal a pitiful scene at the very

outset. The unhappy Dr. Hácha, despite his background as a respected judge of

the Supreme Court, shed all human dignity by groveling before the swaggering

German Fuehrer. Perhaps the President thought that only in this way could he

appeal to Hitler’s generosity and save something for his people; but regardless of

his motive, his words, as the Germans recorded them for their confidential

archives, nauseate the reader even so long afterward as today. He himself, Hácha

assured Hitler, had never mixed in politics. He had rarely seen the founders of

the Czechoslovak Republic, Masaryk and Beneš, and what he had seen of them

he did not like. Their regime, he said, was “alien” to him—“so alien that

immediately after the change of regime [after Munich] he had asked himself

whether it was a good thing for Czechoslovakia to be an independent state at

all.”

He was convinced that the destiny of Czechoslovakia lay in the Fuehrer’s hands, and he

believed it was in safekeeping in such hands … Then he came to what affected him most, the

fate of his people. He felt that it was precisely the Fuehrer who would understand his holding

the view that Czechoslovakia had the right to live a national life … Czechoslovakia was being

blamed because there still existed many supporters of the Beneš system … The Government

was trying by every means to silence them. This was about all he had to say.

Adolf Hitler then said all there was to say. After rehearsing all the alleged

wrongs which the Czechoslovakia of Masaryk and Beneš had done to Germans

and Germany, and reiterating that unfortunately the Czechs had not changed

since Munich, he came to the point.

He had come to the conclusion that this journey by the President, despite his advanced

years, might be of great benefit to his country because it was only a matter of hours now

before Germany intervened … He harbored no enmity against any nation … That the Rump

State of Czechoslovakia existed at all was attributable only to his loyal attitude … In the

autumn he had not wished to draw the final conclusions because he had thought a coexistence

possible, but he had left no doubt that if the Beneš tendencies did not disappear completely he

would destroy this state completely.

They had not disappeared, and he gave “examples.”

And so last Sunday, March 12, the die was cast … He had given the order for the invasion

by the German troops and for the incorporation of Czechoslovakia into the German Reich. *

“Hácha and Chvalkovsky,” noted Dr. Schmidt, “sat as though turned to stone.

Only their eyes showed that they were alive.” But Hitler was not quite through.

He must humble his guests with threats of Teutonic terror.

The German Army [Hitler continued] had already marched in today, and at a

barracks where resistance was offered it had been ruthlessly broken.

Tomorrow morning at six o’clock the German Army was to enter Czechia

from all sides and the German Air Force would occupy the Czech airfields.

There were two possibilities. The first was that the entry of German troops might

develop into fighting. In that case, resistance would be broken by brute force.

The other possibility was that the entry of the German troops would take place in

a peaceful manner, in which case it would be easy for the Fuehrer to accord

Czechoslovakia a generous way of life of her own, autonomy, and a certain

measure of national freedom.

He was doing all this not from hatred but in order to protect Germany. If last

autumn Czechoslovakia had not given in, the Czech people would have been

exterminated. No one would have prevented him doing it. If it came to a fight …

in two days the Czech Army would cease to exist. Naturally, some Germans

would be killed too and this would engender a hatred which would compel him,

in self-preservation, not to concede autonomy. The world would not care a jot

about this. He sympathized with the Czech people when he read the foreign

press. It gave him the impression which might be summed up in the German

proverb: “The Moor has done his duty; the Moor can go.” …

That was why he had asked Hácha to come here. This was the last good turn

he could render the Czech people … Perhaps Hácha’s visit might prevent the

worst …

The hours were passing. At six o’clock the troops would march in. He was

almost ashamed to say it, but for every Czech battalion there was a German

division. He would like now to advise him [Hácha] to withdraw with

Chvalkovsky and discuss what was to be done.

What was to be done? The broken old President did not have to withdraw to

decide that. He told Hitler at once, “The position is quite clear. Resistance would

be folly.” But how, he asked—since it was now a little after 2 A.M.—could he, in

the space of four hours, arrange to restrain the whole Czech people from offering

resistance? The Fuehrer replied that he had better consult with his companions.

The German military machine was already in motion and could not be stopped.

Hácha should get in touch at once with Prague. “It was a grave decision,” the

German minutes report Hitler as saying, “but he saw dawning the possibility of a

long period of peace between the two peoples. Should the decision be otherwise,

he saw the annihilation of Czechoslovakia.”

With these words, he dismissed his guests for the time being. It was 2:15 A.M.

In an adjoining room Goering and Ribbentrop stepped up the pressure on the two

victims. According to the French ambassador, who in an official dispatch to

Paris depicted the scene as he got it from what he believed to be an authentic

source, Hácha and Chvalkovsky protested against the outrage to their nation.

They declared they would not sign the document of surrender. Were they to do

so they would be forever cursed by their people.

The German ministers [Goering and Ribbentrop] were pitiless [M. Coulondre

wrote in his dispatch]. They literally hunted Dr. Hácha and M. Chvalkovsky

round the table on which the documents were lying, thrusting them continually

before them, pushing pens into their hands, incessantly repeating that if they

continued in their refusal, half of Prague would lie in ruins from bombing within

two hours, and that this would be only the beginning. Hundreds of bombers were

waiting the order to take off, and they would receive that order at six in the

morning if the signatures were not forthcoming.*

At this point, Dr. Schmidt, who seems to have managed to be present

whenever and wherever the drama of the Third Reich reached a climax, heard

Goering shouting for Dr. Morell.

“Hácha has fainted!” Goering cried out.

For a moment the Nazi bullies feared that the prostrate Czech President might

die on their hands and, as Schmidt says, “that the whole world will say tomorrow

that he was murdered at the Chancellery.” Dr. Morell’s specialty was injections

—much later he would almost kill Hitler with them—and he now applied the

needle to Dr. Hácha and brought him back to consciousness. The President was

revived sufficiently to be able to grasp the telephone which the Germans thrust

into his hand and talk to his government in Prague over a special line which

Ribbentrop had ordered rigged up. He apprised the Czech cabinet of what had

happened and advised surrender. Then, somewhat further restored by a second

injection from the needle of Dr. Morell, the President of the expiring Republic

stumbled back into the presence of Adolf Hitler to sign his country’s death

warrant. It was now five minutes to four in the morning of March 15, 1939.

The text had been prepared “beforehand by Hitler,” Schmidt recounts, and

during Hácha’s fainting spells the German interpreter had been busy copying the

official communiqué, which had also been written up “beforehand,” and which

Hácha and Chvalkovsky were also forced to sign. It read as follows:

Berlin, March 15, 1939

At their request, the Fuehrer today received the Czechoslovak President, Dr.

Hácha, and the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister, Dr. Chvalkovsky, in Berlin in

the presence of Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop. At the meeting the serious

situation created by the events of recent weeks in the present Czechoslovak

territory was examined with complete frankness.

The conviction was unanimously expressed on both sides that the aim of all

efforts must be the safeguarding of calm, order and peace in this part of Central

Europe. The Czechoslovak President declared that, in order to serve this object

and to achieve ultimate pacification, he confidently placed the fate of the Czech

people and country in the hands of the Fuehrer of the German Reich. The

Fuehrer accepted this declaration and expressed his intention of taking the Czech

people under the protection of the German Reich and of guaranteeing them an

autonomous development of their ethnic life as suited to their character.

Hitler’s chicanery had reached, perhaps, its summit.

According to one of his woman secretaries, Hitler rushed from the signing

into his office, embraced all the women present and exclaimed, “Children! This

is the greatest day of my life! I shall go down in history as the greatest German!”

It did not occur to him—how could it?—that the end of Czechoslovakia might

be the beginning of the end of Germany. From this dawn of March 15, 1939—

the Ides of March—the road to war, to defeat, to disaster, as we now know,

stretched just ahead. It would be a short road and as straight as a line could be.

And once on it, and hurtling down it, Hitler, like Alexander and Napoleon before

him, could not stop.28

At 6 A.M. on March 15 German troops poured into Bohemia and Moravia.

They met no resistance, and by evening Hitler was able to make the triumphant

entry into Prague which he felt Chamberlain had cheated him of at Munich.

Before leaving Berlin he had issued a grandiose proclamation to the German

people, repeating the tiresome lies about the “wild excesses” and “terror” of the

Czechs which he had been forced to bring an end to, and proudly proclaiming,

“Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist!”

That night he slept in Hradschin Castle, the ancient seat of the kings of

Bohemia high above the River Moldau where more recently the despised

Masaryk and Beneš had lived and worked for the first democracy Central Europe

had ever known. The Fuehrer’s revenge was complete, and that it was sweet he

showed in the series of proclamations which he issued. He had paid off all the

burning resentments against the Czechs which had obsessed him as an Austrian

in his vagabond days in Vienna three decades before and which had flamed

anew when Beneš dared to oppose him, the all-powerful German dictator, over

the past year.

The next day, from Hradschin Castle, he proclaimed the Protectorate of

Bohemia and Moravia, which though it professed to provide “autonomy and

self-government” for the Czechs brought them, by its very language, completely

under the German heel. All power was given to the “Reich Protector” and to his

Secretary of State and his Head of the Civil Administration, who were to be

appointed by the Fuehrer. To placate outraged public opinion in Britain and

France, Hitler brought the “moderate” Neurath out of cold storage and named

him Protector. * The two top Sudeten leaders, Konrad Henlein and the gangster

Karl Hermann Frank, were given an opportunity to get revenge on the Czechs by

being appointed Head of the Civil Administration and Secretary of State

respectively. It was not long before Himmler, as boss of the German police, got

a stranglehold on the protectorate. To do his work, he made the notorious Frank

chief of police of the protectorate and ranking S.S. officer. *

For a thousand years [Hitler said in his proclamation of the protectorate] the provinces of

Bohemia and Moravia formed part of the Lebensraum of the German people …

Czechoslovakia showed its inherent inability to survive and has therefore now fallen a victim

to actual dissolution. The German Reich cannot tolerate continuous disturbances in these areas

… Therefore the German Reich, in keeping with the law of self-preservation, is now resolved

to intervene decisively to rebuild the foundations of a reasonable order in Central Europe. For

in the thousand years of its history it has already proved that, thanks to the greatness and the

qualities of the German people, it alone is called upon to undertake this task.

A long night of German savagery now settled over Prague and the Czech

lands.

On March 16, Hitler took Slovakia too under his benevolent protection in

response to a “telegram,” actually composed in Berlin, as we have seen, from

Premier Tiso. German troops quickly entered Slovakia to do the “protecting.”

On March 18, Hitler was in Vienna to approve the “Treaty of Protection,” which,

as signed on March 23 in Berlin by Ribbentrop and Dr. Tuka, contained a secret

protocol giving Germany exclusive rights to exploit the Slovak economy.30

As for Ruthenia, which had formed the eastern tip of Czechoslovakia, its

independence as the “Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine,” proclaimed on March 14,

lasted just twenty-four hours. Its appeal to Hitler for “protection” was in vain.

Hitler had already awarded this territory to Hungary. In the captured Foreign

Office archives there is an interesting letter in the handwriting of Miklós Horthy,

Regent of Hungary, addressed to Adolf Hitler on March 13.

YOUR EXCELLENCY: Heartfelt thanks! 1 cannot express how happy I am, for

this headwater region [Ruthenia] is for Hungary—I dislike using big words—a

vital question.… We are tackling the matter with enthusiasm. The plans are

already laid. On Thursday, the 16th, a frontier incident will take place, to be

followed Saturday by the big thrust. 31

As things turned out, there was no need for an “incident.” Hungarian troops

simply moved into Ruthenia at 6 A.M. on March 15, timing their entry with that

of the Germans to the west, and on the following day the territory was formally

annexed by Hungary.

Thus by the end of the day of March 15, which had started in Berlin at 1:15

A.M. when Hácha arrived at the Chancellery, Czechoslovakia, as Hitler said, had

ceased to exist.

Neither Britain nor France made the slightest move to save it, though at

Munich they had solemnly guaranteed Czechoslovakia against aggression.

Since that meeting not only Hitler but Mussolini had reached the conclusion

that the British had become so weak and their Prime Minister, as a consequence,

so accommodating that they need pay little further attention to London. On

January 11, 1939, Chamberlain, accompanied by Lord Halifax, had journeyed to

Rome to seek improvement in Anglo-Italian relations. This writer happened to

be at the station in Rome when the two Englishmen arrived and noted in his

diary the “fine smirk” on Mussolini’s face as he greeted his guests. “When

Mussolini passed me,” I noted as the party left the station, “he was joking with

his son-in-law [Ciano], passing wisecracks.” 32 I could not, of course, catch what

he was saying, but later Ciano, in his diary, revealed the gist of it.

Arrival of Chamberlain. [Ciano wrote on January 11 and 12] … How far apart we are from

these people! It is another world. We were talking about it after dinner with the Duce. “These

men are not made of the same stuff,” he was saying, “as the Francis Drakes and the other

magnificent adventurers who created the Empire. These, after all, are the tired sons of a long

line of rich men, and they will lose their Empire.”

The British do not want to fight. They try to draw back as slowly as possible, but they do

not fight … Our conversations with the British have ended. Nothing was accomplished. I have

telephoned Ribbentrop that the visit was “a big lemonade” [a farce]….

I accompanied the Duce to the station on the departure of Chamberlain [Ciano wrote on

January 14]…. Chamberlain’s eyes filled with tears when the train started moving and his

countrymen began singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” “What is this little song?” the

Duce asked. 33

Though during the Sudeten crisis Hitler had been solicitous of Chamberlain’s

views, there is not a word in the captured German papers to indicate that

thereafter he cared a whit what the Prime Minister thought of his destroying the

rest of Czechoslovakia despite the British guarantee—and, for that matter,

despite the Munich Agreement. On March 14, as Hitler waited in Berlin to

humble Hácha, and as angry questions were raised in the House of Commons in

London about Germany’s engineering Slovakia’s “secession” and about its

effect on Britain’s guarantee to Prague against aggression, Chamberlain replied

heatedly, “No such aggression has taken place.”

But the next day, March 15, after it had taken place, the Prime Minister used

the proclamation of Slovakia’s “independence” as an excuse not to honor his

country’s word. “The effect of this declaration,” he explained, “put an end by

internal disruption to the State whose frontier we had proposed to guarantee. His

Majesty’s Government cannot accordingly hold themselves any longer bound by

this obligation.”

Hitler’s strategy had thus worked to perfection. He had given Chamberlain his

out and the Prime Minister had taken it.

It is interesting that the Prime Minister did not even wish to accuse Hitler of

breaking his word. “I have so often heard charges of breach of faith bandied

about which did not seem to me to be founded upon sufficient premises,” he

said, “that I do not wish to associate myself today with any charges of that

character.” He had not one word of reproach for the Fuehrer, not even for his

treatment of Hácha and the shabby swindle which obviously—even if the details

were still unknown—had been perpetrated at the Reich Chancellery on the early

morning of this day, March 15.

No wonder that the British protest that day, if it could be called that, * was so

tepid, and that the Germans treated it—and subsequent Anglo–French

complaints—with so much arrogance and contempt.

His Majesty’s Government have no desire to interfere unnecessarily in a matter with which

other Governments may be more directly concerned…. They are, however, as the German

Government will surely appreciate, deeply concerned for the success of all efforts to restore

confidence and a relaxation of tension in Europe. They would deplore any action in Central

Europe which would cause a setback to the growth of this general confidence … 34

There was not a word in this note, which was delivered on March 15 by

Ambassador Henderson to Ribbentrop as an official message from Lord Halifax,

about the specific events of the day.

The French were at least specific. Robert Coulondre, the new ambassador of

France in Berlin, shared neither his British colleague’s illusions about Nazism

nor Henderson’s disdain of the Czechs. On the morning of the fifteenth he

demanded an interview with Ribbentrop, but the vain and vindictive German

Foreign Minister was already on his way to Prague, intending to share in Hitler’s

humiliation of a beaten people. State Secretary von Weizsaecker received

Coulondre, instead, at noon. The ambassador lost no time in saying what

Chamberlain and Henderson were not yet ready to say: that by its military

intervention in Bohemia and Moravia, Germany had violated both the Munich

Agreement and the Franco–German declaration of December 6. Baron von

Weizsaecker, who later was to insist that he had been stoutly anti-Nazi all along,

was in an arrogant mood that would have done credit to Ribbentrop. According

to his own memorandum of the meeting,

I spoke rather sharply to the Ambassador and told him not to mention the

Munich Agreement, which he alleged had been violated, and not to give us any

lectures … I told him that in view of the agreement reached last night with the

Czech government I could see no reason for any démarche by the French

ambassador … and that I was sure he would find fresh instructions when he

returned to his Embassy, and these would set his mind at rest. 35

Three days later, on March 18, when the British and French governments, in

deference to outraged public opinion at home, finally got around to making

formal protests to the Reich, Weizsaecker fairly outdid his master, Ribbentrop,

in his insolence—again on his own evidence. In a memorandum found in the

German Foreign Office files, he tells with evident glee how he refused even to

accept the formal French note of protest.

I immediately replaced the Note in its envelope and thrust it back at the

Ambassador with the remark that I categorically refused to accept from him any

protest regarding the Czecho-Slovak affair. Nor would I take note of the

communication, and I would advise M. Coulondre to urge his government to

revise the draft … 36

Coulondre, unlike Henderson at this period, was not an envoy who could be

browbeaten by the Germans. He retorted that his government’s note had been

written after due consideration and that he had no intention of asking for it to be

revised. When the State Secretary continued to refuse to accept the document,

the ambassador reminded him of common diplomatic practice and insisted that

France had a perfect right to make known its views to the German government.

Finally Weizsaecker, according to his own account, left the note lying on his

desk, explaining that he “would regard it as transmitted to us through the post.”

But before he arrived at this impudent gesture, he got the following off his mind:

From the legal point of view there existed a Declaration which had come about between the

Fuehrer and the President of the Czecho-Slovak State. The Czech President, at his own

request, had come to Berlin and had then immediately declared that he wished to place the fate

of his country in the Fuehrer’s hands. 1 could not imagine that the French Government were

more Catholic than the Pope and intended meddling in things which had been duly settled

between Berlin and Prague.*

Weizsaecker behaved quite differently to the accommodating British

ambassador, who transmitted his government’s protest late on the afternoon of

March 18. Great Britain now held that it could not “but regard the events of the

past few days as a complete repudiation of the Munich Agreement” and that the

“German military actions” were “devoid of any basis of legality.” Weizsaecker,

in recording it, noted that the British note did not go as far in this respect as the

French protest, which said that France “would not recognize the legality of the

German occupation.”

Henderson had gone to see Weizsaecker on March 17 to inform him of his

recall to London for “consultations” and, according to the State Secretary, had

sounded him out “for arguments which he could give Chamberlain for use

against the latter’s political opposition … Henderson explained that there was no

direct British interest in the Czechoslovak territory. His—Henderson’s—

anxieties were more for the future. ”37

Even Hitler’s destruction of Czechoslovakia apparently had not awakened the

British ambassador to the nature of the government he was accredited to, nor did

he seem aware of what was happening that day to the government which he

represented.

For, suddenly and unexpectedly, Neville Chamberlain, on March 17, two days

after Hitler extinguished Czechoslovakia, had experienced a great awakening. It

had not come without some prodding. Greatly to his surprise, most of the British

press (even the Times, but not the Daily Mail) and the House of Commons had

reacted violently to Hitler’s latest aggression. More serious, many of his own

backers in Parliament and half of the cabinet had revolted against any further

appeasement of Hitler. Lord Halifax, especially, as the German ambassador

informed Berlin, had insisted that the Prime Minister recognize what had

happened and abruptly change his course. 38 It dawned on Chamberlain that his

own position as head of government and leader of the Conservative Party was in

jeopardy.

His radical change of mind came abruptly. As late as the evening of March 16,

Sir John Simon, on behalf of the government, had made a speech in the

Commons which was so cynical in regard to the Czechs, and so much in the

“Munich spirit,” that according to press accounts it aroused the House to “a pitch

of anger rarely seen.” The next day, on the eve of his seventieth birthday,

Chamberlain was scheduled to make a speech in his home city of Birmingham.

He had drafted an address on domestic matters with special emphasis on the

social services. On the afternoon train going up to Birmingham, according to an

account given this writer by French diplomatic sources, Chamberlain finally

made his decision. He jettisoned his prepared speech and quickly jotted down

notes for one of quite a different kind.

To all of Britain and indeed to large parts of the world, for the speech was

broadcast, Chamberlain apologized for “the very restrained and cautious …

somewhat cool and objective statement” which he had felt obliged to make in

the Commons two days before. “I hope to correct that statement tonight,” he

said.

The Prime Minister at last saw that Adolf Hitler had deceived him. He

recapitulated the Fuehrer’s various assurances that the Sudetenland had been his

last territorial demand in Europe and that he “wanted no Czechs.” Now Hitler

had gone back on them—“he has taken the law into his own hands.”

Now we are told that this seizure of territory has been necessitated by disturbances in

Czechoslovakia…. If there were disorders, were they not fomented from without? … Is this

the end of an old adventure or is it the beginning of a new? Is this the last attack upon a small

State or is it to be followed by others? Is this, in effect, a step in the direction of an attempt to

dominate the world by force? … While I am not prepared to engage this country by new and

unspecified commitments operating under conditions which cannot now be foreseen, yet no

greater mistake could be made than to suppose that because it believes war to be a senseless

and cruel thing, this nation has so lost its fiber that it will not take part to the utmost of its

power in resisting such a challenge if it ever were made.

This was an abrupt and fateful turning point for Chamberlain and for Britain,

and Hitler was so warned the very next day by the astute German ambassador in

London. “It would be wrong,” Herbert von Dirksen notified the German Foreign

Office in a lengthy report on March 18, “to cherish any illusions that a

fundamental change has not taken place in Britain’s attitude to Germany.” 39

It was obvious to anyone who had read Mein Kampf, who glanced at a map

and saw the new positions of the German Army in Slovakia, who had wind of

certain German diplomatic moves since Munich, or who had pondered the

dynamics of Hitler’s bloodless conquests of Austria and Czechoslovakia in the

past twelve months, just which of the “small states” would be next on the

Fuehrer’s list. Chamberlain, like almost everyone else, knew perfectly well.

On March 31, sixteen days after Hitler entered Prague, the Prime Minister told

the House of Commons:

In the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence and which the

Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His

Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all

support in their power. They have given the Polish Government an assurance to this effect. I

may add that the French Government have authorized me to make it plain that they stand in

the same position in this matter.

The turn of Poland had come.

* The parentheses are in the original.

* Major Buch’s report gives an authentic picture of justice in the Third Reich. “In the

following cases of killing Jews,” one part reads, “proceedings were suspended or minor

punishments were pronounced.” He then cites a large number of such “cases,” giving the

names of the murdered and the murderers. “Party Member Fruehling, August, because of

shooting of the Jewish couple Goldberg and because of shooting of the Jew Sinasohn … Party

Members Behring, Willi, and Heike, Josef, because of the shooting of the Jew Rosenbaum and

the Jewess Zwienicki … Party Members Schmidt, Heinrich, and Meckler, Ernst, because of

drowning the Jew Ilsoffer …,” etc.

* When asked during cross-examination by Mr. Justice Jackson at Nuremberg whether he had

actually said this, Goering replied, “Yes, this was said in a moment of bad temper and

excitement … It was not meant seriously.” 6

* The American ambassador in Berlin, Hugh Wilson, was recalled by President Roosevelt on

November 14, two days after Goering’s meeting, “for consultations,” and never returned to his

post. The German ambassador in Washington, Hans Dieckhoff, who on that day reported to

Berlin that “a hurricane is raging here” as the result of the German pogrom, was recalled on

November 18 and likewise never returned. On November 30, Hans Thomsen, the German

chargé d’affaires in Washington, advised Berlin by code that “in view of the strained relations

and the lack of security for secret material” in the embassy, the “secret political files” be

removed to Berlin. “The files,” he said, “are so bulky that they cannot be destroyed quickly

enough should the necessity arise. ”7

* On January 28, 1939, Lord Halifax secretly warned President Roosevelt that “as early as

November 1938, there were indications which gradually became more definite that Hitler was

planning a further foreign adventure for the spring of 1939.” The British Foreign Secretary

said that “reports indicate that Hitler, encouraged by Ribbentrop, Himmler and others, is

considering an attack on the Western Powers as a preliminary to subsequent action in the

East. ”8

* A German version of Ribbentrop’s talk with Ciano in Rome on October 28, drawn up by Dr.

Schmidt, confirms Ribbentrop’s bellicose attitude and quotes him as saying that Germany and

Italy must prepare for “armed conflict with the Western democracies … here and now.” At

this meeting Ribbentrop also assured Ciano that Munich had revealed the strength of the

isolationists in the U.S.A. “so that there is nothing to fear from America.” 10

† This fantastic retreat, built at great cost over three years, was difficult to reach. Ten miles of

a hairpin road, cut into the mountainside, led up to a long underground passageway, drilled

into the rock, from which an elevator carried one 370 feet to the cabin perched at an elevation

of over 6,000 feet on the summit of a mountain. It afforded a breath-taking panorama of the

Alps. Salzburg could be seen in the distance. Describing it later, François-Poncet wondered,

“Was this edifice the work of a normal mind or of one tormented by megalomania and haunted

by visions of domination and solitude?”

* On November 24, Hitler issued another secret directive instructing the Wehrmacht to make

preparations for the military occupation of Danzig, but that will be taken up later. Already the

Fuehrer was looking beyond the final conquest of Czechoslovakia.

* Hitler also demanded that the Czechoslovak National Bank turn over part of its gold reserve

to the Reichsbank. The sum requested was 391.2 million Czech crowns in gold. On February

18 Goering wrote the German Foreign Office: “In view of the increasingly difficult currency

position, I must insist most strongly that the 30 to 40 million Reichsmarks in gold [from the

Czech National Bank] which are involved come into our possession very shortly; they are

urgently required for the execution of important orders of the Fuehrer. ”16

† See above, p. 359.

* Monsignor Tiso, as this writer recalls him, was almost as broad as he was high. He was an

enormous eater. “When I get worked up,” he once told Dr. Paul Schmidt, “I eat half a pound

of ham, and that soothes my nerves.” He was to die on the gallows. Arrested by American

Army authorities on June 8, 1945, and turned over to the newly restored Czechoslovakia, he

was condemned to death on April 15, 1947, after a trial lasting four months, and was executed

on April 18.

* Italics in the original German minutes.

* There is a difference of opinion on this point. Some historians have contended that the

Germans forced Hácha to come to Berlin. They probably base this contention on a dispatch of

the French ambassador in Berlin, who said he had learned this “from a reliable source.” But

the German Foreign Office documents, subsequently discovered, make it clear that the

initiative came from Hácha. He first requested an interview with Hitler on March 13, through

the German Legation in Prague, and repeated the request on the morning of the fourteenth.

Hitler agreed to it that afternoon.25

* The emphasis is in the German original.

* On the stand in Nuremberg, Goering admitted that he told Hácha, “I should be sorry if I had

to bomb beautiful Prague.” He really didn’t intend to carry out the threat—“that would not

have been necessary,” he explained. “But a point like that, I thought, might serve as an

argument and accelerate the whole matter.” 27

* On the stand at Nuremberg, Neurath stated that he was taken by “complete surprise” when

Hitler named him Protector, and that he had “misgivings” about taking the job. However, he

says, he took it when Hitler explained that by this appointment he wanted to assure Britain and

France “that he did not wish to carry on a policy hostile to Czechoslovakia.” 29

* It might be of interest to skip ahead here and note what happened to some of the characters

in the drama just recounted. Frank was sentenced to death by a postwar Czech court and

publicly hanged near Prague on May 22, 1946. Henlein committed suicide after his arrest by

Czech resistance forces in 1945. Chvalkovsky, who became the representative of the

protectorate in Berlin, was killed in an Allied bombing there in 1944. Hácha was arrested by

the Czechs on May 14, 1945, but died before he could be tried.

* On March 16 Chamberlain told the Commons that “so far” no protest had been lodged with

the German government.

* Coulondre’s version of the interview is given in the French Yellow Book (No. 78, pp. 102–3,

in the French edition). He confirms Weizsaecker’s account. Later, at his trial in Nuremberg,

the State Secretary argued that in his memoranda of such meetings he had purposely

exaggerated his Nazi sentiments in order to cover his real anti-Nazi activities. But Coulondre’s

account of the meeting is only one piece of evidence that Weizsaecker did not exaggerate at

all.

14

THE TURN OF POLAND

ON OCTOBER 24, 1938, less than a month after Munich, Ribbentrop was host to

Józef Lipski, the Polish ambassador in Berlin, at a three-hour lunch at the Grand

Hotel in Berchtesgaden. Poland, like Germany and indeed in connivance with

her, had just seized a strip of Czech territory. The luncheon talk proceeded, as a

German Foreign Office memorandum stressed, “in a very friendly atmosphere. ”1

Nevertheless, the Nazi Foreign Minister lost little time in getting down to

business. The time had come, he said, for a general settlement between Poland

and Germany. It was necessary, first of all, he continued, “to speak with Poland

about Danzig.” It should “revert” to Germany. Also, Ribbentrop said, the Reich

wished to build a super motor highway and a double-track railroad across the

Polish Corridor to connect Germany with Danzig and East Prussia. Both would

have to enjoy extraterritorial rights. Finally, Hitler wished Poland to join the

Anti-Comintern Pact against Russia. In return for all these concessions,

Germany would be willing to extend the Polish–German treaty by from ten to

twenty years and guarantee Poland’s frontiers.

Ribbentrop emphasized he was broaching these problems “in strict

confidence.” He suggested that the ambassador make his report to Foreign

Minister Beck “orally—since otherwise there was great danger of its leaking out,

especially to the press.” Lipski promised to report to Warsaw but warned

Ribbentrop that personally he saw “no possibility” of the return of Danzig to

Germany. He further reminded the German Foreign Minister of two recent

occasions—November 5, 1937, and January 14, 1938—when Hitler had

personally assured the Poles that he would not support any change in the Danzig

Statute.2 Ribbentrop replied that he did not wish an answer now, but advised the

Poles “to think it over.”

The government in Warsaw did not need much time to collect its thoughts. A

week later, on October 31, Foreign Minister Beck dispatched detailed

instructions to his ambassador in Berlin on how to answer the Germans. But it

was not until November 19 that the latter was able to secure an interview with

Ribbentrop—the Nazis obviously wanted the Poles to consider well their

response. It was negative. As a gesture of understanding, Poland was willing to

replace the League of Nations’ guarantee of Danzig with a German–Polish

agreement about the status of the Free City.

“Any other solution,” Beck wrote in a memorandum which Lipski read to

Ribbentrop, “and in particular any attempt to incorporate the Free City into the

Reich, must inevitably lead to conflict.” And he added that Marshal Pilsudski,

the late dictator of Poland, had warned the Germans in 1934, during the

negotiations for a nonaggression pact, that “the Danzig question was a sure

criterion for estimating Germany’s intentions toward Poland.”

Such a reply was not to Ribbentrop’s taste. “He regretted the position taken by

Beck” and advised the Poles that it was “worth the trouble to give serious

consideration to the German proposals. ”3

Hitler’s response to Poland’s rebuff on Danzig was more drastic. On

November 24, five days after the Ribbentrop-Lipski meeting, he issued another

directive to the commanders in chief of the armed forces.

TOP SECRET

The Fuehrer has ordered: Apart from the three contingencies mentioned in the instructions

of 10/21/38* preparations are also to be made to enable the Free State of Danzig to be

occupied by German troops by surprise.

The preparations will be made on the following basis: Condition is a quasi-revolutionary

occupation of Danzig, exploiting a politically favorable situation, not a war against Poland. †

…

The troops to be employed for this purpose must not simultaneously be earmarked for the

occupation of the Memelland, so that both operations can, if necessary, take place

simultaneously. The Navy will support the Army’s operation by attack from the sea … The

plans of the branches of the armed forces are to be submitted by January 10, 1939.

Though Beck had just warned that an attempt by Germany to take Danzig

would lead “inevitably” to conflict, Hitler now convinced himself that it could

be done without a war. Local Nazis controlled Danzig and they took their orders,

as had the Sudeteners, from Berlin. It would not be difficult to stir up a “quasi-

revolutionary” situation there.

Thus, as 1938 approached its end, the year that had seen the bloodless

occupation of Austria and the Sudetenland, Hitler was preoccupied with further

conquest: the remainder of Czechoslovakia, Memel, and Danzig. It had been

easy to humble Schuschnigg and Beneš. Now it was Józef Beck’s turn.

Yet, when the Fuehrer received the Polish Foreign Minister at Berchtesgaden

shortly after New Year’s—on January 5, 1939—he was not yet prepared to give

him the treatment which he had meted out to Schuschnigg and was shortly to

apply to President Hácha. The rest of Czechoslovakia would have to be

liquidated first. Hitler, as the secret Polish and German minutes of the meeting

make clear, was in one of his more conciliatory moods. He was “quite ready,” he

began, “to be at Beck’s service.” Was there anything “special,” he asked, on the

Polish Foreign Minister’s mind? Beck replied that Danzig was on his mind. It

became obvious that it had also been on Hitler’s.

“Danzig is German,” the Fuehrer reminded his guest, “will always remain

German, and will sooner or later become part of Germany.” He could give the

assurance, however, that “no fait accompli would be engineered in Danzig.”

He wanted Danzig and he wanted a German highway and railroad across the

Corridor. If he and Beck would “depart from old patterns and seek solutions

along entirely new lines,” he was sure they could reach an agreement which

would do justice to both countries.

Beck was not so sure. Though, as he confided to Ribbentrop the next day, he

did not want to be too blunt with the Fuehrer, he had replied that “the Danzig

problem was a very difficult one.” He did not see in the Chancellor’s suggestion

any “equivalent” for Poland. Hitler thereupon pointed out the “great advantage”

to Poland “of having her frontier with Germany, including the Corridor, secured

by treaty.” This apparently did not impress Beck, but in the end he agreed to

think the problem over further. 4

After mulling it over that night, the Polish Foreign Minister had a talk with

Ribbentrop the next day in Munich. He requested him to inform the Fuehrer that

whereas all his previous talks with the Germans had filled him with optimism, he

was today, after his meeting with Hitler, “for the first time in a pessimistic

mood.” Particularly in regard to Danzig, as it had been raised by the Chancellor,

he “saw no possibility whatever of agreement.” 5

It had taken Colonel Beck, like so many others who have figured in these

pages, some time to awaken and to arrive at such a pessimistic view. Like most

Poles, he was violently anti-Russian. Moreover, he disliked the French, for

whom he had nursed a grudge since 1923, when, as Polish military attaché in

Paris, he had been expelled for allegedly selling documents relating to the

French Army. Perhaps it had been natural for this man, who had become Polish

Foreign Minister in November 1932, to turn to Germany. For the Nazi

dictatorship he had felt a warm sympathy from the beginning, and over the past

six years he had striven to bring his country closer to the Third Reich and to

weaken its traditional ties with France.

Of all the countries that lay on the borders of Germany, Poland had, in the long

run, the most to fear. Of all the countries, it had been the most blind to the

German danger. No other provision of the Versailles Treaty had been resented

by the Germans as much as that which established the Corridor, giving Poland

access to the sea—and cutting off East Prussia from the Reich. The detachment

of the old Hanseatic port of Danzig from Germany and its creation as a free city

under the supervision of the League of Nations, but dominated economically by

Poland, had equally outraged German public opinion. Even the weak and

peaceful Weimar Republic had never accepted what it regarded as the Polish

mutilation of the German Reich. As far back as 1922, General von Seeckt, as we

have seen,* had defined the German Army’s attitude.

Poland’s existence is intolerable and incompatible with the essential conditions of

Germany’s life. Poland must go and will go—as a result of her own internal weaknesses and

of action by Russia—with our aid … The obliteration of Poland must be one of the

fundamental drives of German policy … [and] is attainable by means of, and with the help of,

Russia.

Prophetic words!

The Germans forgot—or perhaps did not wish to remember—that almost all

of the German land awarded Poland at Versailles, including the provinces of

Posen and Polish Pomerania (Pomorze), which formed the Corridor, had been

grabbed by Prussia at the time of the partitions when Prussia, Russia and Austria

had destroyed the Polish nation. For more than a millennium it had been

inhabited by Poles—and, to a large extent, it still was.

No nation re-created by Versailles had had such a rough time as Poland. In the

first turbulent years of its rebirth it had waged aggressive war against Russia,

Lithuania, Germany and even Czechoslovakia—in the last instance over the

coal-rich Teschen area. Deprived of their political freedom for a century and a

half and thus without modern experience in self-rule, the Poles were unable to

establish stable government or to begin to solve their economic and agrarian

problems. In 1926 Marshal Pilsudski, the hero of the 1918 revolution, had

marched on Warsaw, seized control of the government and, though an old-time

Socialist, had gradually replaced a chaotic democratic regime with his own

dictatorship. One of his last acts, before his death in 1935, was to sign a treaty of

nonaggression with Hitler. This took place on January 26, 1934, and, as has been

recounted,† was one of the first steps in the undermining of France’s system of

alliances with Germany’s Eastern neighbors and in the weakening of the League

of Nations and its concept of collective security. After Pilsudski’s death, Poland

was largely governed by a small band of “colonels,” leaders of Pilsudski’s old

Polish Legion which had fought against Russia during the First World War. At

the head of these was Marshal Smigly-Rydz, a capable soldier but in no way a

statesman. Foreign policy drifted into the hands of Colonel Beck. From 1934 on,

it became increasingly pro-German.

This was bound to be a policy of suicide. And indeed when one considers

Poland’s position in post-Versailles Europe it is difficult to escape the

conclusion that the Poles in the nineteen thirties, as on occasions in the centuries

before, were driven by some fateful flaw in their national character toward self-

destruction and that in this period, as sometimes formerly, they were their own

worst enemies. As long as Danzig and the Corridor existed as they were, there

could be no lasting peace between Poland and Nazi Germany. Nor was Poland

strong enough to afford the luxury of being at odds with both her giant

neighbors, Russia and Germany. Her relations with the Soviet Union had been

uniformly bad since 1920, when Poland had attacked Russia, already weakened

by the World War and the civil war, and a savage conflict had followed. *

Seizing an opportunity to gain the friendship of a country so stoutly anti-

Russian and at the same time to detach her from Geneva and Paris, thus

undermining the system of Versailles, Hitler had taken the initiative in bringing

about the Polish–German pact of 1934. It was not a popular move in Germany.

The German Army, which had been pro-Russian and anti-Polish since the days

of Seeckt, resented it. But it served Hitler admirably for the time being. Poland’s

sympathetic friendship helped him to get first things done first: the reoccupation

of the Rhineland, the destruction of independent Austria and Czechoslovakia. On

all of these steps, which strengthened Germany, weakened the West and

threatened the East, Beck and his fellow colonels in Warsaw looked on

benevolently and with utter and inexplicable blindness.

If the Polish Foreign Minister at the very start of the new year had, as he said,

been plunged into a pessimistic mood by Hitler’s demands, his spirits sank much

lower with the coming of spring. Though in his anniversary speech to the

Reichstag on January 30, 1939, Hitler spoke in warm terms of “the friendship

between Germany and Poland” and declared that it was “one of the reassuring

factors in the political life in Europe,” Ribbentrop had talked with more

frankness when he paid a state visit to Warsaw four days before. He again raised

with Beck the question of Hitler’s demands concerning Danzig and

communications through the Corridor, insisting that they were “extremely

moderate.” But neither on these questions nor on his insistence that Poland join

the Anti-Comintern Pact against the Soviet Union did the German Foreign

Minister get a satisfactory answer. 6 Colonel Beck was becoming wary of his

friends. As a matter of fact, he was beginning to squirm. On February 26, the

German ambassador in Warsaw informed Berlin that Beck had taken the

initiative in getting himself invited to visit London at the end of March and that

he might go on to Paris afterward. Though it was late in the day, Poland, as

Moltke put it in his dispatch, “desires to get in touch with the Western

democracies … [for] fear that a conflict might arise with Germany over

Danzig. ”7 With Beck too, as with so many others who had tried to appease the

ravenous appetite of Adolf Hitler, the scales were falling from the eyes.

They fell completely and forever on March 15 when Hitler occupied Bohemia

and Moravia and sent his troops to protect “independent” Slovakia. Poland woke

up that morning to find itself flanked in the south along the Slovak border, as it

already was in the north on the frontiers of Pomerania and East Prussia, by the

German Army. Its military position had overnight become untenable.

March 21, 1939, is a day to be remembered in the story of Europe’s march

toward war.

There was intense diplomatic activity that day in Berlin, Warsaw and London.

The President of the French Republic, accompanied by Foreign Minister Bonnet,

arrived in the British capital for a state visit. To the French Chamberlain

suggested that their two countries join Poland and the Soviet Union in a formal

declaration stating that the four nations would consult immediately about steps

to halt further aggression in Europe. Three days before, Litvinov had proposed—

as he had just a year before, after the Anschluss—a European conference, this

time of France, Britain, Poland, Russia, Rumania and Turkey, which would join

together to stop Hitler. But the British Prime Minister had found the idea

“premature.” He was highly distrustful of Moscow and thought a “declaration”

by the four powers, including the Soviet Union, was as far as he could go. *

His proposal was presented to Beck in Warsaw by the British ambassador on

the same day, March 21, and received a somewhat cool reception, as far as

including the Russians was concerned. The Polish Foreign Minister was even

more distrustful of the Soviet Union than Chamberlain and, moreover, shared the

Prime Minister’s views about the worthlessness of Russian military aid. He was

to hold these views, unflinchingly, right up to the moment of disaster.

But the most fateful event of this day of March 21 for Poland took place in

Berlin. Ribbentrop invited the Polish ambassador to call on him at noon. For the

first time, as Lipski noted in a subsequent report, the Foreign Minister was not

only cool toward him but aggressive. The Fuehrer, he warned, “was becoming

increasingly amazed at Poland’s attitude.” Germany wanted a satisfactory reply

to her demands for Danzig and a highway and railroad through the Corridor.

This was a condition for continued friendly Polish–German relations. “Poland

must realize,” Ribbentrop laid it down, “that she could not take a middle course

between Russia and Germany.” Her only salvation was “a reasonable

relationship with Germany and her Fuehrer.” That included a joint “anti-Soviet

policy.” Moreover, the Fuehrer desired Beck “to pay an early visit to Berlin.” In

the meantime, Ribbentrop strongly advised the Polish ambassador to hurry to

Warsaw and explain to his Foreign Minister in person what the situation was.

“He advised,” Lipski informed Beck, “that the talk [with Hitler] should not be

delayed, lest the Chancellor should come to the conclusion that Poland was

rejecting all his offers.” 8

A SLIGHT AGGRESSION BY THE BY

Before leaving the Wilhelmstrasse, Lipski had asked Ribbentrop whether he

could tell him anything about his conversation with the Foreign Minister of

Lithuania. The German replied that they had discussed the Memel question,

“which called for a solution.”

As a matter of fact, Ribbentrop had received the Lithuanian Foreign Minister,

Juozas Urbays, who was passing through Berlin after a trip to Rome, on the

previous day and demanded that Lithuania hand back the Memel district to

Germany forthwith. Otherwise “the Fuehrer would act with lightning speed.”

The Lithuanians, he warned, must not deceive themselves by expecting “some

kind of help from abroad.” 9

Actually, some months before, on December 12, 1938, the French ambassador

and the British chargé d’affaires had called the attention of the German

government to reports that the German population of Memel was planning a

revolt and had asked it to use its influence to see that the Memel Statute,

guaranteed by both Britain and France, was respected. The Foreign Office reply

had expressed “surprise and astonishment” at the Anglo–French démarche, and

Ribbentrop had ordered that if there were any further such steps the two

embassies should be told “that we had really expected that the French and

British would finally become tired of meddling in Germany’s affairs.” 10

For some time the German government and particularly the party and S.S.

leaders had been organizing the Germans of Memel along lines with which we

are now familiar from the Austrian and Sudeten affairs. The German armed

forces had also been called in to co-operate and, as we have seen,* three weeks

after Munich Hitler had ordered his military chiefs to prepare, along with the

liquidation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia, the occupation of Memel. Since

the Navy had had no opportunity for glory in the march-in to landlocked Austria

and Sudetenland, Hitler decided that Memel should be taken from the sea. In

November, naval plans for the venture were drawn up under the code name

“Transport Exercise Stettin.” Hitler and Admiral Raeder were so keen on this

little display of naval might that they actually put to sea from Swinemuende

aboard the pocket battleship Deutschland for Memel on March 22, exactly a

week after the Fuehrer’s triumphant entry into Prague, before defenseless

Lithuania had time to capitulate to a German ultimatum.

On March 21, Weizsaecker, who much later would proclaim his distaste for

the brutality of Nazi methods, notified the Lithuanian government that “there

was no time to lose” and that its plenipotentiaries must come to Berlin “by

special plane tomorrow” to sign away to Germany the district of Memel. The

Lithuanians had obediently arrived late in the afternoon of March 22, but despite

German pressure administered in person by Ribbentrop, egged on by a seasick

Hitler aboard his battleship at sea, they took their time about capitulating. Twice

during the night, the captured German documents reveal, the Fuehrer got off

urgent radiograms from the Deutschland to Ribbentrop asking whether the

Lithuanians had surrendered, as requested. The dictator and his Admiral had to

know whether they must shoot their way into the port of Memel. Finally, at 1:30

A.M. on March 23, Ribbentrop was able to transmit by radio to his master the

news that the Lithuanians had signed.11

At 2:30 in the afternoon of the twenty-third, Hitler made another of his

triumphant entries into a newly occupied city and at the Stadttheater in Memel

again addressed a delirious “liberated” German throng. Another provision of the

Versailles Treaty had been torn up. Another bloodless conquest had been made.

Although the Fuehrer could not know it, it was to be the last.

THE HEAT ON POLAND

The German annexation of the Memelland came as “a very unpleasant

surprise” to the Polish government, as the German ambassador to Poland, Hans-

Adolf von Moltke, reported to Berlin from Warsaw on the following day. “The

main reason for this,” he added, “is that it is generally feared that now it will be

the turn of Danzig and the Corridor. ”12 He also informed the German Foreign

Office that Polish reservists were being called up. The next day, March 25,

Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, reported that Poland had mobilized three

classes and was concentrating troops around Danzig. General Keitel did not

believe this showed “any aggressive intentions on the part of the Poles,” but the

Army General Staff, he noted, “took a somewhat more serious view. ”13

Hitler returned to Berlin from Memel on March 24 and on the next day had a

long talk with General von Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chief of the Army.

From the latter’s confidential memorandum of the conversation it appears that

the Leader had not yet made up his mind exactly how to proceed against

Poland.14 In fact, his turbulent brain seemed to be full of contradictions.

Ambassador Lipski was due back on the next day, March 26, and the Fuehrer did

not want to see him.

Lipski will return from Warsaw on Sunday, March 26 [Brauchitsch noted]. He was

commissioned to ask whether Poland would be prepared to come to some terms with regard to

Danzig. The Fuehrer left during the night of March 25: he does not wish to be here when

Lipski returns. Ribbentrop shall negotiate at first. The Fuehrer does not wish, though, to solve

the Danzig problem by force. He would not like to drive Poland into the arms of Great Britain

by doing so.

A military occupation of Danzig would have to be taken into consideration only if Lipski

gives a hint that the Polish Government could not take the responsibility toward their own

people to cede Danzig voluntarily and the solution would be made easier for them by a fait

accompli.

This is an interesting insight into Hitler’s mind and character at this moment.

Three months before, he had personally assured Beck that there would be no

German fait accompli in Danzig. Yet he remembered that the Polish Foreign

Minister had stressed that the Polish people would never stand for turning over

Danzig to Germany. If the Germans merely seized it, would not this fait

accompli make it easier for the Polish government to accept it? Hitherto Hitler

had been a genius at sizing up the weaknesses of his foreign opponents and

taking advantage of them, but here, for almost the first time, his judgment has

begun to falter. The “colonels” who governed Poland were a mediocre and

muddling lot, but the last thing they wanted, or would accept, was a fait

accompli in Danzig.

The Free City was uppermost in Hitler’s mind, but he was also thinking

beyond it, just as he had done in regard to Czechoslovakia after Munich had

given him the Sudetenland.

For the time being [Brauchitsch noted], the Fuehrer does not intend to solve the Polish

question. However, it should be worked on. A solution in the near future would have to be

based on especially favorable political conditions. In that case Poland shall be knocked down

so completely that it need not be taken into account as a political factor for the next few

decades. The Fuehrer has in mind as such a solution a borderline advanced from the eastern

border of East Prussia to the eastern tip of Upper Silesia.

Brauchitsch well knew what that border signified. It was Germany’s prewar

eastern frontier, which Versailles had destroyed, and which had prevailed as

long as there was no Poland.

If Hitler had any doubts as to what the Polish reply would be they were

dissipated when Ambassador Lipski returned to Berlin on Sunday, March 26,

and presented his country’s answer in the form of a written memorandum. 15

Ribbentrop read it at once, rejected it, stormed about Polish mobilization

measures and warned the envoy “of possible consequences.” He also declared

that any violation of Danzig territory by Polish troops would be regarded as

aggression against the Reich.

Poland’s written response, while couched in conciliatory language, was a firm

rejection of the German demands. It expressed willingness to discuss further

means of facilitating German rail and road traffic across the Corridor but refused

to consider making such communications extraterritorial. As for Danzig, Poland

was willing to replace the League of Nations status by a Polish–German

guarantee but not to see the Free City become a part of Germany.

Nazi Germany by this time was not accustomed to see a smaller nation turning

down its demands, and Ribbentrop remarked to Lipski that “it reminded him of

certain risky steps taken by another state”—an obvious reference to

Czechoslovakia, which Poland had helped Hitler to dismember. It must have

been equally obvious to Lipski, when he was summoned again to the Foreign

Office the next day by Ribbentrop, that the Third Reich would now resort to the

same tactics against Poland which had been used so successfully against Austria

and Czechoslovakia. The Nazi Foreign Minister raged at the alleged persecution

of the German minority in Poland, which, he said, had created “a disastrous

impression in Germany.”

In conclusion, the [German] Foreign Minister remarked that he could no longer understand

the Polish Government … The proposals transmitted yesterday by the Polish Ambassador

could not be regarded as a basis for a settlement. Relations between the two countries were

therefore rapidly deteriorating.16

Warsaw was not so easily intimidated as Vienna and Prague. The next day,

March 28, Beck sent for the German ambassador and told him, in answer to

Ribbentrop’s declaration that a Polish coup against Danzig would signify a casus

belli, that he in turn was forced to state that any attempt by Germany or the Nazi

Danzig Senate to alter the status of the Free City would be regarded by Poland as

a casus belli.

“You want to negotiate at the point of a bayonet!” exclaimed the ambassador.

“This is your own method,” Beck replied. 17

The reawakened Polish Foreign Minister could afford to stand up to Berlin

more firmly than Beneš had been able to do, for he knew that the British

government, which a year before had been anxious to help Hitler obtain his

demands against Czechoslovakia, was now taking precisely the opposite course

in regard to Poland. Beck himself had torpedoed the British proposal for a four-

power declaration, declaring that Poland refused to associate itself with Russia in

any manner. Instead, on March 22, he had suggested to Sir Howard Kennard, the

British ambassador in Warsaw, the immediate conclusion of a secret Anglo–

Polish agreement for consultation in case of a threatened attack by a third power.

But, alarmed by German troop movements adjacent to Danzig and the Corridor

and by British intelligence concerning German demands on Poland (which the

tricky Beck had denied to the British), Chamberlain and Halifax wanted to go

further than mere “consultations.”

On the evening of March 30, Kennard presented to Beck an Anglo–French

proposal for mutual-assistance pacts in case of German aggression. * But even

this step was overtaken by events. Fresh reports of the possibility of an imminent

German attack on Poland prompted the British government on the same evening

to ask Beck whether he had any objection to an interim unilateral British

guarantee of Poland’s independence. Chamberlain had to know by the morrow,

as he wished to answer a parliamentary question on the subject. Beck—his sense

of relief may be imagined—had no objection. In fact, he told Kennard, he

“agreed without hesitation.” 19

The next day, March 31, as we have seen, Chamberlain made his historic

declaration in the House of Commons that Britain and France “would lend the

Polish Government all support in their power” if Poland were attacked and

resisted.†

To anyone in Berlin that weekend when March 1939 came to an end, as this

writer happened to be, the sudden British unilateral guarantee of Poland seemed

incomprehensible, however welcome it might be in the lands to the west and the

east of Germany. Time after time, as we have seen, in 1936 when the Germans

marched into the demilitarized Rhineland, in 1938 when they took Austria and

threatened a European war to take the Sudetenland, even a fortnight before,

when they grabbed Czechoslovakia, Great Britain and France, backed by Russia,

could have taken action to stop Hitler at very little cost to themselves. But the

peace-hungry Chamberlain had shied away from such moves. Not only that: he

had gone out of his way, he had risked, as he said, his political career to help

Adolf Hitler get what he wanted in the neighboring lands. He had done nothing

to save the independence of Austria. He had consorted with the German dictator

to destroy the independence of Czechoslovakia, the only truly democratic nation

on Germany’s eastern borders and the only one which was a friend of the West

and which supported the League of Nations and the idea of collective security.

He had not even considered the military value to the West of Czechoslovakia’s

thirty-five well-trained, well-armed divisions entrenched behind their strong

mountain fortifications at a time when Britain could put only two divisions in

France and when the German Army was incapable of fighting on two fronts and,

according to the German generals, even incapable of penetrating the Czech

defenses.

Now overnight, in his understandably bitter reaction to Hitler’s occupation of

the rest of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain, after having deliberately and recklessly

thrown so much away, had undertaken to unilaterally guarantee an Eastern

country run by a junta of politically inept “colonels” who up to this moment had

closely collaborated with Hitler, who like hyenas had joined the Germans in the

carving up of Czechoslovakia and whose country had been rendered militarily

indefensible by the very German conquests which Britain and Poland had helped

the Reich to achieve.* And he had taken this eleventh-hour risk without

bothering to enlist the aid of Russia, whose proposals for joint action against

further Nazi aggression he had twice turned down within the year.

Finally, he had done exactly what for more than a year he had stoutly asserted

that Britain would never do: he had left to another nation the decision whether

his country would go to war.

Nevertheless, the Prime Minister’s precipitate step, belated as it was,

presented Adolf Hitler with an entirely new situation. From now on, apparently,

Britain would stand in the way of his committing further aggression. He could

no longer use the technique of taking one nation at a time while the Western

democracies stood aside debating what to do. Moreover, Chamberlain’s move

appeared to be the first serious step toward forming a coalition of powers against

Germany which, unless it were successfully countered, might bring again that

very encirclement which had been the nightmare of the Reich since Bismarck.

CASE WHITE

The news of Chamberlain’s guarantee of Poland threw the German dictator

into one of his characteristic rages. He happened to be with Admiral Canaris,

chief of the Abwehr, and according to the latter he stormed about the room,

pounding his fists on the marble table top, his face contorted with fury, and

shouting against the British, “I’ll cook them a stew they’ll choke on! ”22

The next day, April 1, he spoke at Wilhelmshaven at the launching of the

battleship Tirpitz and was in such a belligerent mood that apparently he did not

quite trust himself, for at the last moment he ordered that the direct radio

broadcast of his speech be canceled; he directed that it be re-broadcast later from

recordings, which could be edited.* Even the re-broadcast version was spotted

with warnings to Britain and Poland.

If they [the Western Allies] expect the Germany of today to sit patiently by until the very

last day while they create satellite States and set them against Germany, then they are

mistaking the Germany of today for the Germany of before the war.

He who declares himself ready to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for these powers must

realize he burns his fingers….

When they say in other countries that they will arm and will keep arming still more, I can

tell those statesmen only this: “Me you will never tire out!” I am determined to continue on

this road.

Hitler, as his cancellation of the direct broadcast showed, was cautious enough

not to provoke foreign opinion too much. It was reported in Berlin that day that

he would denounce the Anglo–German naval treaty as his first reply to

Chamberlain. But in his speech he merely declared that if Great Britain no

longer wished to adhere to it, Germany “would accept this very calmly.”

As so often before, Hitler ended on an old familiar note of peace: “Germany

has no intention of attacking other people … Out of this conviction I decided

three weeks ago to name the coming party rally the ‘Party Convention of

Peace’”—a slogan, which as the summer of 1939 developed, became more and

more ironic.

That was for public consumption. In the greatest of secrecy Hitler gave his

real answer to Chamberlain and Colonel Beck two days later, on April 3. It was

contained in a top-secret directive to the armed forces, of which only five copies

were made, inaugurating “Case White.” This was a code name which was to

loom large in the subsequent history of the world.

TOP SECRET

Case White

The present attitude of Poland requires … the initiation of military preparations to remove,

if necessary, any threat from this direction forever.

1. Political Requirements and Aims

… The aim will be to destroy Polish military strength and create in the East a situation

which satisfies the requirements of national defense. The Free State of Danzig will be

proclaimed a part of the Reich territory at the outbreak of hostilities, at the latest.

The political leaders consider it their task in this case to isolate Poland if possible, that is to

say, to limit the war to Poland only.

The development of increasing internal crises in France and the resulting British

cautiousness might produce such a situation in the not too distant future.

Intervention by Russia … cannot be expected to be of any use to Poland … Italy’s attitude

is determined by the Rome–Berlin Axis.

2. Military Conclusions

The great objectives in the building up of the German armed forces will continue to be

determined by the antagonism of the Western democracies. “Case White” constitutes only a

precautionary complement to these preparations …

The isolation of Poland will be all the more easily maintained, even after the outbreak of

hostilities, if we succeed in starting the war with sudden, heavy blows and in gaining rapid

successes …

3. Tasks of the Armed Forces

The task of the Wehrmacht is to destroy the Polish armed forces. To this end a surprise

attack is to be aimed at and prepared.

As for Danzig:

Surprise occupation of Danzig may become possible independently of “Case

White” by exploiting a favorable political situation … Occupation by the Army

will be carried out from East Prussia. The Navy will support the action of the

Army by intervention from the sea.

Case White is a lengthy document with several “enclosures,” “annexes” and

“special orders,” most of which were reissued as a whole on April 11 and of

course added to later as the time for hostilities’ approached. But already on April

3, Hitler appended the following directives to Case White:

1.

Preparations must be made in such a way that the operation can be

carried out at any time from September 1, 1939, onward.

As in the case of the date Hitler gave long in advance for getting the

Sudetenland—October 1, 1938—this more important date of September 1,

1939, would also be kept.

2.

The High Command of the Armed Forces [OKW] is charged with

drawing up a precise timetable for “Case White” and is to arrange for

synchronized timing between the three branches of the Wehrmacht.

3.

The plans of the branches of the Wehrmacht and the details for the

timetable must be submitted to OKW by May 1, 1939. 23

The question now was whether Hitler could wear down the Poles to the point

of accepting his demands, as he had done with the Austrians and (with

Chamberlain’s help) the Czechs, or whether Poland would hold its ground and

resist Nazi aggression if it came, and if so, with what. This writer spent the first

week of April in Poland in search of answers. They were, as far as he could see,

that the Poles would not give in to Hitler’s threats, would fight if their land were

invaded, but that militarily and politically they were in a disastrous position.

Their Air Force was obsolete, their Army cumbersome, their strategic position—

surrounded by the Germans on three sides—almost hopeless. Moreover, the

strengthening of Germany’s West Wall made an Anglo–French offensive against

Germany in case Poland were attacked extremely difficult. And finally it became

obvious that the headstrong Polish “colonels” would never consent to receiving

Russian help even if the Germans were at the gates of Warsaw.

Events now moved quickly. On April 6 Colonel Beck signed an agreement

with Great Britain in London transforming the unilateral British guarantee into a

temporary pact of mutual assistance. A permanent treaty, it was announced,

would be signed as soon as the details had been worked out.

The next day, April 7, Mussolini sent his troops into Albania and added the

conquest of that mountainous little country to that of Ethiopia. It gave him a

springboard against Greece and Yugoslavia and in the tense atmosphere of

Europe served to make more jittery the small countries which dared to defy the

Axis. As the German Foreign Office papers make clear, it was done with the

complete approval of Germany, which was informed of the step in advance. On

April 13, France and Britain countered with a guarantee to Greece and Rumania.

The two sides were beginning to line up. In the middle of April, Goering arrived

in Rome and much to Ribbentrop’s annoyance had two long talks with

Mussolini, on the fifteenth and sixteenth. 24 They agreed that they “needed two or

three years” to prepare for “a general conflict,” but Goering declared that if war

came sooner “the Axis was in a very strong position” and “could defeat any

likely opponents.”

Mention was made of an appeal from President Roosevelt which had arrived

in Rome and Berlin on April 15. The Duce, according to Ciano, had at first

refused to read it and Goering declared that it was not worth answering.

Mussolini thought it “a result of infantile paralysis,” but Goering’s impression

was that “Roosevelt was suffering from an incipient mental disease.” In his

telegram to Hitler and Mussolini the President of the United States had

addressed a blunt question:

Are you willing to give assurance that your armed forces will not attack or

invade the territory of the following independent nations?

There had followed a list of thirty-one countries, including Poland, the Baltic

States, Russia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Britain. The

President hoped that such a guarantee of nonaggression could be given for “ten

years at the least” or “a quarter of a century, if we dare look that far ahead.” If it

were given, he promised American participation in world-wide “discussions” to

relieve the world from “the crushing burden of armament” and to open up

avenues of international trade.

“You have repeatedly asserted,” he reminded Hitler, “that you and the

German people have no desire for war. If this is true there need be no war.”

In the light of what now is known, this seemed like a naïve appeal, but the

Fuehrer found it embarrassing enough to let it be known that he would reply to it

—not directly, but in a speech to a specially convoked session of the Reichstag

on April 28.

In the meantime, as the captured German Foreign Office papers reveal, the

Wilhelmstrasse in a circular telegram of April 17 put two questions of its own to

all the states mentioned by Roosevelt except Poland, Russia, Britain and France:

Did they feel themselves in any way threatened by Germany? Had they

authorized Roosevelt to make his proposal?

“We are in no doubt,” Ribbentrop wired his various envoys in the countries

concerned, “that both questions will be answered in the negative, but

nevertheless, for special reasons, we should like to have authentic confirmation

at once.” The “special reasons” would become evident when Hitler spoke on

April 28.

By April 22 the German Foreign Office was able to draw up a report for the

Fuehrer that most of the countries, including Yugoslavia, Belgium, Denmark,

Norway, the Netherlands and Luxembourg “have answered both questions in the

negative”—a reply which would soon show what an innocent view their

governments took of the Third Reich. From Rumania, however, came a tart

answer that the “Reich Government were themselves in a position to know

whether a threat might arise.” Little Latvia up in the Baltic did not at first

understand what answer was expected of it, but the Foreign Office soon put it

right. On April 18 Weizsaecker rang up his minister in Riga

to tell him we were unable to understand the answer of the Latvian Foreign

Minister to our question about the Roosevelt telegram. While practically all the

other governments have already answered, and naturally in the negative, M.

Munters treated this ridiculous American propaganda as a question on which he

wished to consult his cabinet. If M. Munters did not answer “no” to our question

right away, we should have to add Latvia to those countries which made

themselves into willing accomplices of Mr. Roosevelt. I said that I assumed that

a word on these lines by Herr von Kotze [the German minister] would be enough

to obtain the obvious answer from him.25

It was.

HITLER’S REPLY TO ROOSEVELT

The replies were potent ammunition for Hitler, and he made masterly use of

them as he swung into his speech to the Reichstag on the pleasant spring day of

April 28, 1939. It was, I believe, the longest major public speech he ever made,

taking more than two hours to deliver. In many ways, especially in the power of

its appeal to Germans and to the friends of Nazi Germany abroad, it was

probably the most brilliant oration he ever gave, certainly the greatest this writer

ever heard from him. For sheer eloquence, craftiness, irony, sarcasm and

hypocrisy, it reached a new level that he was never to approach again. And

though prepared for German ears, it was broadcast not only on all German radio

stations but on hundreds of others throughout the world; in the United States it

was carried by the major networks. Never before or afterward was there such a

world-wide audience as he had that day.*

The speech began, after the usual introductory dissertation on the iniquities of

Versailles and the many injustices and long suffering heaped upon the German

people by it, with an answer first to Great Britain and Poland which shook an

uneasy Europe.

After declaring his feeling of admiration and friendship for England and then

attacking it for its distrust of him and its new “policy of encirclement” of

Germany, he denounced the Anglo–German Naval Treaty of 1935. “The basis

for it,” he said, “has been removed.”

Likewise with Poland. He made known his proposal to Poland concerning

Danzig and the Corridor (which had been kept secret), called it “the greatest

imaginable concession in the interests of European peace” and informed the

Reichstag that the Polish government had rejected this “one and only offer.”

I have regretted this incomprehensible attitude of the Polish Government … The worst is that

now Poland, like Czechoslovakia a year ago, believes, under pressure of a lying international

campaign, that it must call up troops, although Germany has not called up a single man and

had not thought of proceeding in any way against Poland. This is in itself very regrettable, and

posterity will one day decide whether it was really right to refuse this suggestion, made this

once by me … a truly unique compromise …

Reports that Germany intended to attack Poland, Hitler went on, were “mere

inventions of the international press.” (Not one of the tens of millions of persons

listening could know that only three weeks before he had given written orders to

his armed forces to prepare for the destruction of Poland by September 1, “at the

latest.”) The inventions of the press, he continued, had led Poland to make its

agreement with Great Britain which, “under certain circumstances, would

compel Poland to take military action against Germany.” Therefore, Poland had

broken the Polish–German nonaggression pact! “Therefore, I look upon the

agreement … as having been unilaterally infringed by Poland and thereby no

longer in existence.”

Having himself unilaterally torn up two formal treaties, Hitler then told the

Reichstag that he was willing to negotiate replacements for them! “I can but

welcome such an idea,” he exclaimed. “No one would be happier than I at the

prospect.” This was an old trick he had pulled often before when he had broken a

treaty, as we have seen, but though he probably did not know it, it would no

longer work.

Hitler next turned to President Roosevelt, and here the German dictator

reached the summit of his oratory. To a normal ear, to be sure, it reeked with

hypocrisy and deception. But to the hand-picked members of the Reichstag, and

to millions of Germans, its masterly sarcasm and irony were a delight. The

paunchy deputies rocked with raucous laughter as the Fuehrer uttered with

increasing effect his seemingly endless ridicule of the American President. One

by one he took up the points of Roosevelt’s telegram, paused, almost smiled, and

then, like a schoolmaster, uttered in a low voice one word, “Answer”—and gave

it. (This writer can still, in his mind, see Hitler pausing time after time to say

quietly, “Antwort,” while above the rostrum in the President’s chair Goering

tried ineffectually to stifle a snicker and the members of the Reichstag prepared,

as soon as the Antwort was given, to roar and laugh.)

Mr. Roosevelt declares that it is clear to him that all international problems can be solved at

the council table.

Answer: … I would be very happy if these problems could really find their solution at the

council table. My skepticism, however, is based on the fact that it was America herself who

gave sharpest expression to her mistrust in the effectiveness of conferences. For the greatest

conference of all time was the League of Nations … representing all the peoples of the world,

created in accordance with the will of an American President. The first State, however, that

shrank from this endeavor was the United States … It was not until after years of purposeless

participation that I resolved to follow the example of America….

The freedom of North America was not achieved at the conference table any more than the

conflict between the North and the South was decided there. I will say nothing about the

innumerable struggles which finally led to the subjugation of the North American continent as

a whole.

I mention all this only in order to show that your view, Mr. Roosevelt, although

undoubtedly deserving of all honor, finds no confirmation in the history of your own country

or of the rest of the world.

Germany, Hitler reminded the President, had once gone to a conference—at

Versailles—not to discuss but to be told what to do: its representatives “were

subjected to even greater degradations than can ever have been inflicted on the

chieftains of the Sioux tribes.”

Hitler finally got to the core of his answer to the President’s request that he

give assurances not to attack any of thirty-one nations.

Answer: How has Mr. Roosevelt learned which nations consider themselves

threatened by German policy and which do not? Or is Mr. Roosevelt in a

position, in spite of the enormous amount of work which must rest upon him in

his own country, to recognize of his own accord all these inner spiritual and

mental impressions of other peoples and their governments?

Finally, Mr. Roosevelt asks that assurance be given him that the German

armed forces will not attack, and above all, not invade the territory or

possessions of the following independent nations …

Hitler then read out slowly the name of each country and as he intoned the

names, I remember, the laughter in the Reichstag grew. Not one member, no one

in Berlin, I believe, including this writer, noticed that he slyly left out Poland.

Hitler now pulled the ace out of the pack, or so he must have thought.

Answer: I have taken the trouble to ascertain from the States mentioned,

firstly, whether they feel themselves threatened, and secondly and above all,

whether this inquiry by the American President was addressed to us at their

suggestion, or at any rate, with their consent.

The reply was in all cases negative … It is true that I could not cause inquiries

to be made of certain of the States and nations mentioned because they

themselves—as for example, Syria—are at present not in possession of their

freedom, but are occupied and consequently deprived of their rights by the

military agents of democratic States.

Apart from this fact, however, all States bordering on Germany have received

much more binding assurances … than Mr. Roosevelt asked from me in his

curious telegram….

I must draw Mr. Roosevelt’s attention to one or two historical errors. He mentioned

Ireland, for instance, and asks for a statement that Germany will not attack Ireland. Now, I

have just read a speech by De Valera, the Irish Taoiseach, * in which, strangely enough, and

contrary to Mr. Roosevelt’s opinion, he does not charge Germany with oppressing Ireland but

he reproaches England with subjecting Ireland to continuous aggression …

In the same way, the fact has obviously escaped Mr. Roosevelt’s notice that Palestine is at

present occupied not by German troops but by the English; and that the country is having its

liberty restricted by the most brutal resort to force …

Nevertheless, said Hitler, he was prepared “to give each of the States named

an assurance of the kind desired by Mr. Roosevelt.” But more than that! His eyes

lit up.

I should not like to let this opportunity pass without giving above all to the President of the

United States an assurance regarding those territories which would, after all, give him most

cause for apprehension, namely the United States itself and the other States of the American

continent.

I here solemnly declare that all the assertions which have been circulated in any way

concerning an intended German attack or invasion on or in American territory are rank frauds

and gross untruths, quite apart from the fact that such assertions, as far as the military

possibilities are concerned, could have their origin only in a stupid imagination.

The Reichstag rocked with laughter; Hitler did not crack a smile, maintaining

with great effect his solemn mien.

And then came the peroration—the most eloquent for German ears, I believe,

he ever made.

Mr. Roosevelt! I fully understand that the vastness of your nation and the immense wealth

of your country allow you to feel responsible for the history of the whole world and for the

history of all nations. I, sir, am placed in a much more modest and smaller sphere …

I once took over a State which was faced by complete ruin, thanks to its trust in the

promises of the rest of the world and to the bad regime of democratic governments … I have

conquered chaos in Germany, re-established order and enormously increased production …

developed traffic, caused mighty roads to be built and canals to be dug, called into being

gigantic new factories and at the same time endeavored to further the education and culture of

our people.

I have succeeded in finding useful work once more for the whole of the seven million

unemployed … Not only have I united the German people politically, but I have also rearmed

them. I have also endeavored to destroy sheet by sheet that treaty which in its four hundred

and forty-eight articles contains the vilest oppression which peoples and human beings have

ever been expected to put up with.

I have brought back to the Reich provinces stolen from us in 1919. I have led back to their

native country millions of Germans who were torn away from us and were in misery … and,

Mr. Roosevelt, without spilling blood and without bringing to my people, and consequently to

others, the misery of war …

You, Mr. Roosevelt, have a much easier task in comparison. You became President of the

United States in 1933 when I became Chancellor of the Reich. From the very outset you

stepped to the head of one of the largest and wealthiest States in the world … Conditions

prevailing in your country are on such a large scale that you can find time and leisure to give

your attention to universal problems … Your concerns and suggestions cover a much larger

and wider area than mine, because my world, Mr. Roosevelt, in which Providence has placed

me and for which I am therefore obliged to work, is unfortunately much smaller, although for

me it is more precious than anything else, for it is limited to my people!

I believe however that this is the way in which I can be of the most service to that for

which we are all concerned, namely, the justice, well-being, progress and peace of the whole

community.

In the hoodwinking of the German people, this speech was Hitler’s greatest

masterpiece. But as one traveled about Europe in the proceeding days it was easy

to see that, unlike a number of Hitler’s previous orations, this one no longer

fooled the people or the governments abroad. In contrast to the Germans, they

were able to see through the maze of deceptions. And they realized that the

German Fuehrer, for all his masterful oratory, though scoring off Roosevelt, had

not really answered the President’s fundamental questions: Had he finished with

aggression? Would he attack Poland?

As it turned out, this was the last great peacetime public speech of Hitler’s

life. The former Austrian waif had come as far in this world as was possible by

the genius of his oratory. From now on he was to try to make his niche in history

as a warrior.

Retiring for the summer to his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, Hitler did

not publicly respond to the Polish answer to him which was given on May 5 in a

speech by Colonel Beck to Parliament and in an official government

memorandum presented to Germany on that date. The Polish statement and

Beck’s speech constituted a dignified, conciliatory but also firm reply.

It is clear [it. said] that negotiations, in which one State formulates demands

and the other is obliged to accept those demands unaltered, are not negotiations.

THE INTERVENTION OF RUSSIA: I

In his speech to the Reichstag on April 28, Hitler had omitted his customary

attack on the Soviet Union. There was not a word about Russia. Colonel Beck, in

his reply, had mentioned “various other hints” made by Germany “which went

much further than the subjects of discussion” and reserved the right “to return to

this matter, if necessary”—a veiled but obvious reference to Germany’s previous

efforts to induce Poland to join the Anti-Comintern Pact against Russia. Though

Beck did not know it, nor did Chamberlain, those anti-Russian efforts were now

being abandoned. Fresh ideas were beginning to germinate in Berlin and

Moscow.

It is difficult to ascertain exactly when the first moves were made in the two

capitals toward an understanding between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union

which was to lead to such immense consequences for the world. One of the first

slight changes in the wind, as has already been noted,* took place as far back as

October 3, 1938, four days after Munich, when the counselor of the German

Embassy in Moscow informed Berlin that Stalin would draw certain conclusions

from the Sudeten settlement, from which he had been excluded, and might well

become “more positive” toward Germany. The diplomat strongly advocated a

“wider” economic collaboration between the two countries and renewed his

appeal in a second dispatch a week later. 27 Toward the end of October, the

German ambassador in Moscow, Friedrich Werner Count von der Schulenburg,

notified the German Foreign Office that it was his “intention in the immediate

future to approach Molotov, the Chairman of the Council of the People’s

Commissars, in an attempt to reach a settlement of the questions disturbing

German–Soviet relations.” 28 The ambassador would hardly have conceived such

an intention on his own, in view of Hitler’s previous extremely hostile attitude

toward Moscow. The hint must have come from Berlin.

That it did becomes clear from a study of the captured Foreign Office

archives. The first step, in the German view, was to improve trade between the

two countries. A Foreign Office memorandum of November 4, 1938, reveals “an

emphatic demand from Field Marshal Goering’s office at least to try to

reactivate our Russian trade, especially insofar as Russian raw materials are

concerned.” 29 The Russo–German economic agreements expired at the end of

the year and the Wilhelmstrasse files are full of material showing the ups and

downs experienced in negotiating a renewal. The two sides were highly

suspicious of each other but were vaguely drawing closer together. On

December 22, there were lengthy talks in Moscow between Russian trade

officials and Germany’s crack economic troubleshooter, Julius Schnurre.

Shortly after the New Year, the Soviet ambassador in Berlin, Alexei

Merekalov, made one of his infrequent trips to the Wilhelmstrasse to inform it

“of the Soviet Union’s desire to begin a new era in German–Soviet economic

relations.” And for a few weeks there were promising talks, but by February

1939 they had pretty much broken down, ostensibly over whether the main

negotiations should be conducted in Moscow or Berlin. But the real reason was

revealed in a memorandum of the director of the Economic Policy Department

of the German Foreign Office on March 11, 1939: Though Germany was hungry

for Russia’s raw materials and Goering was constantly demanding that they be

obtained, the Reich simply could not supply the Soviet Union with the goods

which would have to be exchanged. The director thought the “rupture of

negotiations” was “extremely regrettable in view of Germany’s raw-materials

position.” 30

But if the first attempt to draw nearer in their economic relations had failed for

the time being, there were other straws in the wind. On March 10, 1939, Stalin

made a long speech at the first session of the Eighteenth Party Congress in

Moscow. Three days later the attentive Schulenburg filed a long report on it to

Berlin. He thought it “noteworthy that Stalin’s irony and criticism were directed

in considerably sharper degree against Britain than against the so-called

aggressor States, and in particular, Germany.” The ambassador underlined

Stalin’s remarks that “the weakness of the democratic powers … was evident

from the fact that they had abandoned the principle of collective security and had

turned to a policy of nonintervention and neutrality. Underlying this policy was

the wish to divert the aggressor States to other victims.” And he quoted further

the Soviet dictator’s accusations that the Western Allies were

pushing the Germans further eastward, promising them an easy prey and saying: “Just start a

war with the Bolsheviks, everything else will take care of itself. This looks very much like

encouragement … It looks as if the purpose … was to engender the fury of the Soviet Union

against Germany … and to provoke a conflict with Germany without apparent reasons….

In conclusion Stalin formulated the guiding principles:

1.

To continue to pursue a policy of peace and consolidation of economic relations

with all countries.

2.

… Not to let our country be drawn into conflict by warmongers, whose custom it is

to let others pull their chestnuts out of the fire. 31

This was a plain warning from the man who made all the ultimate decisions in Russia that

the Soviet Union did not intend to be maneuvered into a war with Nazi Germany in order to

spare Britain and France; and if it was ignored in London, it was at least noticed in Berlin.*

Still, it is evident from Stalin’s speech and from the various diplomatic

exchanges which shortly took place that Soviet foreign policy, while cautious,

was still very much open. Three days after the Nazi occupation of

Czechoslovakia on March 15, the Russian government proposed, as we have

seen,* a six-power conference to discuss means of preventing further aggression,

and Chamberlain turned it down as “premature. ”† That was on March 18. Two

days later an official communiqué in Moscow, which the German ambassador

there hurriedly wired to Berlin, denied that the Soviet Union had offered Poland

and Rumania assistance “in the event of their becoming the victims of

aggression.” Reason: “Neither Poland nor Rumania had approached the Soviet

government for assistance or informed [it] of any danger threatening them. ”34

The British government’s unilateral guarantee of Poland of March 31 may

have helped to convince Stalin that Great Britain preferred an alliance with the

Poles to one with the Russians and that Chamberlain was intent, as he had been

at the time of Munich, on keeping the Soviet Union out of the European concert

of powers.35

In this situation the Germans and Italians began to glimpse certain

opportunities. Goering, who now had an important influence on Hitler in foreign

affairs, saw Mussolini in Rome on April 16 and called the Duce’s attention to

Stalin’s recent speech to the Communist Party Congress. He had been impressed

by the Soviet dictator’s statement that “the Russians would not allow themselves

to be used as cannon fodder for the capitalist powers.” He said he “would ask the

Fuehrer whether it would not be possible to put out feelers cautiously to Russia

… with a view to rapprochement. ” And he reminded Mussolini that there had

been “absolutely no mention of Russia in the Fuehrer’s latest speeches.” The

Duce, according to the confidential German memorandum of the meeting,

warmly welcomed the idea of a rapprochement of the Axis Powers with the

Soviet Union. The Italian dictator too had sensed a change in Moscow; he

thought a rapprochement could be “effected with comparative ease.”

The object [said Mussolini] would be to induce Russia to react coolly and

unfavorably to Britain’s efforts at encirclement, on the lines of Stalin’s speech

… Moreover, in their ideological struggle against plutocracy and capitalism the

Axis Powers had, to a certain extent, the same objectives as the Russian

regime.36

This was a radical turn in Axis policy, and no doubt it would have surprised

Chamberlain had he learned of it. Perhaps it would have surprised Litvinov too.

On the very day of this discussion between Goering and Mussolini, April 16,

the Soviet Foreign Commissar received the British ambassador in Moscow and

made a formal proposal for a triple pact of mutual assistance between Great

Britain, France and the Soviet Union. It called for a military convention between

the three powers to enforce the pact and a guarantee by the signatories, to be

joined by Poland, if it desired, of all the nations in Central and Eastern Europe

which felt themselves menaced by Nazi Germany. It was Litvinov’s last bid for

an alliance against the Third Reich, and the Russian Foreign Minister, who had

staked his career on a policy of stopping Hitler by collective action, must have

thought that at last he would succeed in uniting the Western democracies with

Russia for that purpose. As Churchill said in a speech on May 4, complaining

that the Russian offer had not yet been accepted in London, “there is no means

of maintaining an Eastern front against Nazi aggression without the active aid of

Russia.” No other power in Eastern Europe, certainly not Poland, possessed the

military strength to maintain a front in that region. Yet the Russian proposal

caused consternation in London and Paris.

Even before it was rejected, however, Stalin made his first serious move to

play the other side of the street.

The day after Litvinov made his far-reaching offer to the British ambassador in

Moscow, on April 17, the Soviet ambassador in Berlin paid a visit to

Weizsaecker at the German Foreign Office. It was the first call, the State

Secretary noted in a memorandum, that Merekalov had made on him since he

assumed his post nearly a year before. After some preliminary remarks about

German–Russian economic relations, the ambassador turned to politics and

asked me point-blank [Weizsaecker wrote] what I thought of German–Russian

relations … The Ambassador spoke somewhat as follows:

Russian policy had always followed a straight course. Ideological differences

had had very little adverse effect on relations between Russia and Italy and need

not disturb those with Germany either. Russia had not exploited the present

friction between Germany and the Western democracies against us, neither did

she wish to do that. As far as Russia was concerned, there was no reason why

she should not live on a normal footing with us, and out of normal relations

could grow increasingly improved relations.

With this remark, toward which he had been steering the conversation, M.

Merekalov ended the talk. He intends to visit Moscow in a day or two. 37

In the Russian capital, to which the Soviet ambassador returned, there was

something up.

It came out on May 3. On that date, tucked away on the back page of the

Soviet newspapers in a column called “News in Brief,” appeared a small item:

“M. Litvinov has been released from the Office of Foreign Commissar at his

own request.” He was replaced by Vyacheslav Molotov, Chairman of the

Council of the People’s Commissars.

The German chargé d’affaires reported the change to Berlin the next day.

The sudden change has caused the greatest surprise here, as Litvinov was in the midst of

negotiations with the British delegation, had appeared in close proximity to Stalin at the

parade on May 1 …

Since Litvinov had received the British Ambassador as recently as May 2 and had even

been mentioned in the press yesterday as a guest of honor at the parade, it seems that his

dismissal must be due to a spontaneous decision by Stalin…. At the last Party Congress Stalin

urged caution lest the Soviet Union be dragged into conflicts. Molotov, who is not a Jew, has

the reputation of being the “most intimate friend and closest collaborator” of Stalin. His

appointment is obviously intended to provide a guarantee that foreign policy will be conducted

strictly on lines laid down by Stalin. 38

The significance of Litvinov’s abrupt dismissal was obvious to all. It meant a

sharp and violent turning in Soviet foreign policy. Litvinov had been the

archapostle of collective security, of strengthening the power of the League of

Nations, of seeking Russian security against Nazi Germany by a military alliance

with Great Britain and France. Chamberlain’s hesitations about such an alliance

were fatal to the Russian Foreign Commissar. In Stalin’s judgment—and his was

the only one which counted in Moscow—Litvinov’s policies had failed.

Moreover, they threatened to land the Soviet Union in a war with Germany

which the Western democracies might well contrive to stay out of. It was time,

Stalin concluded, to try a new tack.* If Chamberlain could appease Hitler, could

not the Russian dictator? The fact that Litvinov, a Jew, was replaced by

Molotov, who, as the German Embassy had emphasized in its dispatch to Berlin,

was not, might be expected to have a certain impact in high Nazi circles.

To see that the significance of the change was not lost on the Germans, Georgi

Astakhov, the Soviet chargé d’affaires, brought the matter up on May 5 when he

conferred with Dr. Julius Schnurre, the German Foreign Office expert on East

European economic affairs.

Astakhov touched upon the dismissal of Litvinov [Schnurre reported] and tried … to learn

whether this event would cause a change in our attitude toward the Soviet Union. He stressed

the great importance of the personality of Molotov, who was by no means a specialist in

foreign policy but who would have all the greater importance for future Soviet foreign

policy. 39

The chargé also invited the Germans to resume the trade negotiations which

had been broken off in February.

The British government did not reply until May 8 to the Soviet proposals of

April 16 for a military alliance. The response was a virtual rejection. It

strengthened suspicions in Moscow that Chamberlain was not willing to make a

military pact with Russia to prevent Hitler from taking Poland.

It is not surprising, then, that the Russians intensified their approach to the

Germans. On May 17 Astakhov again saw Schnurre at the Foreign Office and

after discussing problems of trade turned to larger matters.

Astakhov stated [Schnurre reported] that there were no conflicts in foreign

policy between Germany and the Soviet Union and that therefore there was no

reason for any enmity between the two countries. It was true that in the Soviet

Union there was a distinct feeling of being menaced by Germany. It would

undoubtedly be possible to eliminate this feeling of being menaced and the

distrust in Moscow … In reply to my incidental question he commented on the

Anglo–Soviet negotiations to the effect that, as they stood at the moment, the

result desired by Britain would hardly materialize. 40

Three days later, on May 20, Ambassador von der Schulenburg had a long talk

with Molotov in Moscow. The newly appointed Commissar for Foreign Affairs

was in a “most friendly” mood and informed the German envoy that economic

negotiations between the two countries could be resumed if the necessary

political bases for them were created. This was a new approach from the

Kremlin but it was made cautiously by the cagey Molotov. When Schulenburg

asked him what he meant by “political bases” the Russian replied that this was

something both governments would have to think about. All the ambassador’s

efforts to draw out the wily Foreign Commissar were in vain. “He is known,”

Schulenburg reminded Berlin, “for his somewhat stubborn manner.” On his way

out of the Russian Foreign Office, the ambassador dropped in on Vladimir

Potemkin, the Soviet Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and told him he

had not been able to find out what Molotov wanted of a political nature. “I asked

Herr Potemkin,” Schulenburg reported, “to find out.” 41

The renewed contacts between Berlin and Moscow did not escape the

watchful eyes of the French ambassador in the German capital. As early as May

7, four days after Litvinov’s dismissal, M. Coulondre was informing the French

Foreign Minister that, according to information given him by a close confidant

of the Fuehrer, Germany was seeking an understanding with Russia which would

result in, among other things, a fourth partition of Poland. Two days later the

French ambassador got off another telegram to Paris telling of new rumors in

Berlin “that Germany had made, or was going to make, to Russia proposals

aimed at a partition of Poland. ”42

THE PACT OF STEEL

Although the top brass of the Wehrmacht had a low opinion of Italian military

power, Hitler now pressed for a military alliance with Italy, which Mussolini had

been in no hurry to conclude. Staff talks between the two high commands began

in April and Keitel reported to OKW his “impression” that neither the Italian

fighting services nor Italian rearmament were in very good shape. A war, he

thought, would have to be decided quickly, or the Italians would be out of it.43

By mid-April, as his diary shows, 44 Ciano was alarmed by increasing signs

that Germany might attack Poland at any moment and precipitate a European

war for which Italy was not prepared. When, on April 20, Ambassador Attolico

in Berlin wired Rome that German action against Poland was “imminent” Ciano

urged him to hasten arrangements for his meeting with Ribbentrop so that Italy

would not be caught napping.

The two foreign ministers met at Milan on May 6. Ciano had arrived with

written instructions from Mussolini to emphasize to the Germans that Italy

wished to avoid war for at least three years. To the Italian’s surprise, Ribbentrop

agreed that Germany wished to keep the peace for that long too. In fact, Ciano

found the German Foreign Minister “for the first time” in a “pleasantly calm

state of mind.” They reviewed the situation in Europe, agreed on improving Axis

relations with the Soviet Union and adjourned for a gala dinner.

When after dinner Mussolini telephoned to see how the talks had gone, and

Ciano replied that they had gone well, the Duce had a sudden brain storm. He

asked his son-in-law to release to the press a communiqué saying that Germany

and Italy had decided to conclude a military alliance. Ribbentrop at first

hesitated. He finally agreed to put the matter up to Hitler, and the Fuehrer, when

reached by telephone, readily agreed to Mussolini’s suggestion. 45

Thus, on a sudden impulse, after more than a year of hesitation, Mussolini

committed himself irrevocably to Hitler’s fortunes. This was one of the first

signs that the Italian dictator, like the German, was beginning to lose that iron

self-control which up until this year of 1939 had enabled them both to pursue

their own national interests with ice-cold clarity. The consequences for

Mussolini would soon prove disastrous.

The “Pact of Steel,” as it came to be known, was duly signed with

considerable pomp at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin on May 22. Ciano had

bestowed on Ribbentrop the Collar of the Annunziata, which not only made

Goering furious but, as the Italian Foreign Minister noticed, brought tears to his

eyes. In fact, the plump Field Marshal had made quite a scene, complaining that

the collar really should have been awarded to him since it was he who had really

promoted the alliance.

“I promised Mackensen [the German ambassador in Rome],” Ciano reported,

“that I would try to get Goering a collar.”

Ciano found Hitler looking “very well, quite serene, less aggressive,” though

he seemed a little older and his eyes more deeply wrinkled, probably from lack

of sleep.* The Fuehrer was in the best of spirits as he watched the two foreign

ministers sign the document.

It was a bluntly worded military alliance and its aggressive nature was

underlined by a sentence in the preamble which Hitler had insisted on putting in

declaring that the two nations, “united by the inner affinity of their ideologies …

are resolved to act side by side and with united forces to secure their living

space. ” The core of the treaty was Article III.

If contrary to the wishes and hopes of the High Contracting Parties it should

happen that one of them became involved in warlike complications with another

Power or Powers, the other High Contracting Party would immediately come to

its assistance as an ally and support it with all its military forces on land, at sea

and in the air.

Article V provided that in the event of war neither nation would conclude a

separate armistice or peace. 46

In the beginning, as it would turn out, Mussolini did not honor the first, nor, at

the end, did Italy abide by the second.

HITLER BURNS HIS BOATS: MAY 23, 1939

The day after the signing of the Pact of Steel, on May 23, Hitler summoned

his military chiefs to the study in the Chancellery in Berlin and told them bluntly

that further successes could not be won without the shedding of blood and that

war therefore was inevitable.

This was a somewhat larger gathering than a similar one on November 5,

1937, when the Fuehrer had first imparted his decision to go to war to the

commanders in chief of the three armed services.* Altogether fourteen officers

were present, including Field Marshal Goering, Grand Admiral Raeder (as he

now was), General von Brauchitsch, General Halder, General Keitel, General

Erhard Milch, Inspector General of the Luftwaffe, and Rear Admiral Otto

Schniewind, naval Chief of Staff. The Fuehrer’s adjutant, Lieutenant Colonel

Rudolf Schmundt, was also present and, luckily for history, took notes. His

minutes of the meeting are among the captured German documents. Apparently

Hitler’s words on this occasion were regarded as such a top secret that no copies

of the minutes were made; the one we have is in Schmundt’s own handwriting.47

It is one of the most revealing and important of the secret papers which depict

Hitler’s road to war. Here, before the handful of men who will have to direct the

military forces in an armed conflict, Hitler cuts through his own propaganda and

diplomatic deceit and utters the truth about why he must attack Poland and, if

necessary, take on Great Britain and France as well. He predicts with uncanny

accuracy the course the war will take—at least in its first year. And yet for all its

bluntness his discourse—for the dictator did all the talking—discloses more

uncertainty and confusion of mind than he has shown up to this point. Above all,

Britain and the British continue to baffle him, as they did to the end of his life.

But about the coming of war and his aims in launching it he is clear and

precise, and no general or admiral could have left the Chancellery on May 23

without knowing exactly what was coming at the summer’s end. Germany’s

economic problems, he began, could only be solved by obtaining more

Lebensraum in Europe, and “this is impossible without invading other countries

or attacking other people’s possessions.”

Further successes can no longer be attained without the shedding of blood …

Danzig is not the subject of the dispute at all. It is a question of expanding our living space

in the East, of securing our food supplies and also of solving the problem of the Baltic

States…. There is no other possibility in Europe…. If fate forces us into a showdown with the

West it is invaluable to possess a large area in the East. In wartime we shall be even less able

to rely on record harvests than in peacetime.

Besides, Hitler adds, the population of non-German territories in the East will

be available as a source of labor—an early hint of the slave labor program he

was later to put into effect. The choice of the first victim was obvious.

There is no question of sparing Poland and we are left with the decision:

To attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity.*

We cannot expect a repetition of the Czech affair. There will be war. Our task is

to isolate Poland. Success in isolating her will be decisive.

So there will be war. With an “isolated” Poland alone? Here the Fuehrer is not

so clear. In fact, he becomes confused and contradictory. He must reserve to

himself, he says, the final order to strike.

It must not come to a simultaneous showdown with the West—France and

England.

If it is not certain that a German–Polish conflict will not lead to war with the

West, then the fight must be primarily against England and France.

Fundamentally therefore: Conflict with Poland—beginning with an attack on

Poland—will only be successful if the West keeps out of it.

If that is not possible it is better to fall upon the West and to finish off Poland

at the same time.

In the face of such rapid-fire contradictions the generals must have winced,

perhaps prying their monocles loose, though there is no evidence in the

Schmundt minutes that this happened or that anyone in the select audience even

dared to ask a question to straighten matters out.

Hitler next turned to Russia. “It is not ruled out,” he said, “that Russia might

disinterest herself in the destruction of Poland.” On the other hand, if the Soviet

Union allied herself to Britain and France, that “would lead me to attack England

and France with a few devastating blows.” That would mean committing the

same mistake Wilhelm II made in 1914, but though in this lecture Hitler drew

several lessons from the World War he did not draw this one. His thoughts now

turned toward Great Britain.

The Fuehrer doubts the possibility of a peaceful settlement with England. It is

necessary to be prepared for the showdown. England sees in our development

the establishment of a hegemony which would weaken England. Therefore

England is our enemy, and the conflict with England is a matter of life and

death.

What will this conflict be like? †

England cannot finish off Germany with a few powerful blows and force us

down. It is of decisive importance for England to carry the war as near as

possible to the Ruhr. French blood will not be spared. (West Wall! ) The duration

of our existence is dependent on possession of the Ruhr.

Having decided to follow the Kaiser in one mistake—attacking France and

England if they lined up with Russia—Hitler now announced that he would

follow the Emperor in another matter which eventually had proved disastrous to

Germany.

The Dutch and Belgian air bases must be militarily occupied. Declarations of

neutrality can be ignored. If England wants to intervene in the Polish war, we

must make a lightning attack on Holland. We must aim at establishing a new line

of defense on Dutch territory as far as the Zuyder Zee. The war with England

and France will be a war of life and death.

The idea that we can get off cheaply is dangerous; there is no such possibility.

We must then burn our boats and it will no longer be a question of right or

wrong but of to be or not to be for eighty million people.

Though he had just announced that Germany would attack Poland “at the first

suitable opportunity” and though his listeners knew that almost all of Germany’s

military strength was being concentrated on that objective, Hitler, as he rambled

on, could not keep his thoughts off Great Britain.

“England,” he emphasized, “is the driving force against Germany.”

Whereupon he discussed her strengths and weaknesses.

The Britisher himself is proud, brave, tough, dogged and a gifted organizer.

He knows how to exploit every new development. He has the love of adventure

and the courage of the Nordic race …

England is a world power in herself. Constant for three hundred years.

Increased by alliances. This power is not only something concrete but must also

be considered as psychological force, embracing the entire world.

Add to this immeasurable wealth and the solvency that goes with it.

Geopolitical security and protection by a strong sea power and courageous air

force.

But Britain, Hitler reminded his hearers, also had her weaknesses, and he

proceeded to enumerate them.

If in the last war we had had two more battleships and two more cruisers and

had begun the Battle of Jutland in the morning, the British fleet would have been

defeated and England brought to her knees.* It would have meant the end of the

World War. In former times … to conquer England it was necessary to invade

her. England could feed herself. Today she no longer can.

The moment England is cut off from her supplies she is forced to capitulate.

Imports of food and fuel oil are dependent on naval protection.

Luftwaffe attacks on England will not force her to capitulate. But if the fleet is

annihilated instant capitulation results. There is no doubt that a surprise attack

might lead to a quick decision.

A surprise attack with what? Surely Admiral Raeder must have thought that

Hitler was talking through his hat. Under the so-called Z Plan, promulgated at

the end of 1938, German naval strength would only begin to approach that of the

British by 1945. At the moment, in the spring of 1939, Germany did not have the

heavy ships to sink the British Navy, even by a surprise attack.

Perhaps Britain could be brought down by other means. Here Hitler came

down to earth again and outlined a strategic plan which a year later, in fact,

would be carried out with amazing success.

The aim must be to deal the enemy a smashing or a finally decisive blow right

at the start. Considerations of right or wrong, or of treaties, do not enter into the

matter. This will be possible only when we do not “slide” into a war with

England on account of Poland.

Preparations must be made for a long war as well as for a surprise attack, and

every possible intervention by England on the Continent must be smashed.

The Army must occupy the positions important for the fleet and the

Luftwaffe. If we succeed in occupying and securing Holland and Belgium, as

well as defeating France, the basis for a successful war against England has been

created.

The Luftwaffe can then closely blockade England from western France and

the fleet undertake the wider blockade with submarines.

That is precisely what would be done a little more than a year later. Another

decisive strategic plan, which the Fuehrer emphasized on May 23, would also be

carried out. At the beginning of the last war, had the German Army executed a

wheeling movement toward the Channel ports instead of toward Paris, the end,

he said, would have been different. Perhaps it would have been. At any rate he

would try it in 1940.

“The aim,” Hitler concluded, apparently forgetting all about Poland for the

moment, “will always be to force England to her knees.”

There was one final consideration.

Secrecy is the decisive prerequisite for success. Our objectives must be kept

secret from both Italy and Japan.

Even Hitler’s own Army General Staff, whose Chief, General Halder, sat there

listening, was not to be trusted entirely. “Our studies,” the Fuehrer laid down,

“must not be left to the General Staff. Secrecy would then no longer be assured.”

He ordered that a small planning staff in OKW be set up to work out the military

plans.

On May 23, 1939, then, Hitler, as he himself said, burned his boats. There

would be war. Germany needed Lebensraum in the East. To get it Poland would

be attacked at the first opportunity. Danzig had nothing to do with it. That was

merely an excuse. Britain stood in the way; she was the real driving force against

Germany. Very well, she would be taken on too, and France. It would be a life-

and-death struggle.

When the Fuehrer had first outlined his plans for aggression to the military

chiefs, on November 5, 1937, Field Marshal von Blomberg and General von

Fritsch had protested—at least on the grounds that Germany was too weak to

fight a European war.* During the following summer General Beck had resigned

as Chief of the Army General Staff for the same reason. But on May 23, 1939,

not a single general or admiral, so far as the record shows, raised his voice to

question the wisdom of Hitler’s course.

Their job, as they saw it, was not to question but to blindly obey. Already they

had been applying their considerable talents to working out plans for military

aggression. On May 7, Colonel Guenther Blumentritt of the Army General Staff,

who with Generals von Rundstedt and von Manstein formed a small “Working

Staff,” submitted an estimate of the situation for Case White. Actually it was a

plan for the conquest of Poland. It was an imaginative and daring plan, and it

would be followed with very few changes. 48

Admiral Raeder came through with naval plans for Case White in a top-secret

directive signed May 16.49 Since Poland had only a few miles of coast on the

Baltic west of Danzig and possessed only a small navy, no difficulties were

expected. France and Britain were the Admiral’s chief concern. The entrance to

the Baltic was to be protected by submarines, and the two pocket battleships and

the two battleships, with the “remaining” submarines, were to prepare for “war

in the Atlantic.” According to the instructions of the Fuehrer, the Navy had to be

prepared to carry out its part of “White” by September 1 but Raeder urged his

commanders to hasten plans because “due to the latest political developments”

action might come sooner.50

As May 1939 came to an end German preparations for going to war by the

end of the summer were well along. The great armament works were humming,

turning out guns, tanks, planes and warships. The able staffs of the Army, Navy

and Air Force had reached the final stage of planning. The ranks were being

swelled by new men called up for “summer training.” Hitler could be pleased

with what he had accomplished.

The day after the Fuehrer’s lecture to the military chiefs, on May 24, General

Georg Thomas, head of the Economic and Armaments Branch of OKW,

summed up that accomplishment in a confidential lecture to the staff of the

Foreign Office. Whereas it had taken the Imperial Army, Thomas reminded his

listeners, sixteen years—from 1898 to 1914—to increase its strength from forty-

three to fifty divisions, the Army of the Third Reich had jumped from seven to

fifty-one divisions in just four years. Among them were five heavy armored

divisions and four light ones, a “modern battle cavalry” such as no other nation

possessed. The Navy had built up from practically nothing a fleet of two

battleships of 26,000 tons, * two heavy cruisers, seventeen destroyers and forty-

seven submarines. It had already launched two battleships of 35,000 tons, one

aircraft carrier, four heavy cruisers, five destroyers and seven submarines, and

was planning to launch a great many more ships. From absolutely nothing, the

Luftwaffe had built up a force of twenty-one squadrons with a personnel of

260,000 men. The armament industry, General Thomas said, was already

producing more than it had during the peak of the last war and its output in most

fields far exceeded that of any other country. In fact, total German rearmament,

the General declared, was “probably unique in the world.”

Formidable as German military power was becoming at the beginning of the

summer of 1939, the prospect of success in the war which Hitler was planning

for the early fall depended on what kind of a war it was. Germany was still not

strong enough, and probably would never be, to take on France, Britain and

Russia in addition to Poland. As the fateful summer commenced, all depended

on the Fuehrer’s ability to limit the war—above all, to keep Russia from forming

the military alliance with the West which Litvinov, just before his fall, had

proposed and which Chamberlain, though he had at first seemed to reject it, was,

by May’s end, again mulling over.

THE INTERVENTION OF RUSSIA: II

In a debate in the House of Commons on May 19, the British Prime Minister

had again taken a cool and even disdainful view, as Churchill thought, of the

Russian proposals. Somewhat wearily he had explained to the House that “there

is a sort of veil, a sort of wall, between the two Governments which it is

extremely difficult to penetrate.” Churchill, on the other hand, backed by Lloyd

George, argued that Moscow had made “a fair offer … more simple, more direct,

more effective” than Chamberlain’s own proposals. He begged His Majesty’s

Government “to get some brutal truths into their heads. Without an effective

Eastern front, there can be no satisfactory defense in the West, and without

Russia there can be no effective Eastern front.”

Bowing to the storm of criticism from all sides, Chamberlain on May 27

finally instructed the British ambassador in Moscow to agree to begin

discussions of a pact of mutual assistance, a military convention and guarantees

to the countries threatened by Hitler.* Ambassador von Dirksen in London

advised the German Foreign Office that the British government had taken the

step “with the greatest reluctance.” Furthermore, Dirksen divulged what was

perhaps the primary reason for Chamberlain’s move. The British Foreign Office,

he reported urgently to Berlin, had got wind of “German feelers in Moscow” and

was “afraid that Germany might succeed in keeping Soviet Russia neutral or

even inducing her to adopt benevolent neutrality. That would have meant the

complete collapse of the encirclement action. ”53

On the last day of May, Molotov made his first public speech as Commissar

for Foreign Affairs in an address to the Supreme Council of the U.S.S.R. He

castigated the Western democracies for their hesitation and declared that if they

were serious in joining Russia to stop aggression they must get down to brass

tacks and come to an agreement on three main points:

1.

Conclude a tripartite mutual-assistance pact of a purely defensive

character.

2.

Guarantee the states of Central and Eastern Europe, including all

European states bordering on the Soviet Union.

3.

Conclude a definite agreement on the form and scope of the immediate

and effective aid to be afforded each other and the smaller states threatened

by aggression.

Molotov also declared that the talks with the West did not mean that Russia

would forego “business relations on a practical footing” with Germany and Italy.

In fact, he said that “it was not out of the question” that commercial negotiations

with Germany could be resumed. Ambassador von der Schulenburg, in reporting

the speech to Berlin, pointed out that Molotov had indicated that Russia was still

prepared to conclude a treaty with Britain and France “on condition that all her

demands are accepted,” but that it was now evident from the address that it

would take a long time before any real agreement was reached. He pointed out

that Molotov had “avoided sallies against Germany and showed readiness to

continue the talks begun in Berlin and Moscow. ”54

This readiness was now suddenly shared by Hitler in Berlin.

During the last ten days of May, Hitler and his advisers blew hot and cold over

the thorny question of making advances to Moscow in order to thwart the

Anglo–Russian negotiations. It was felt in Berlin that Molotov in his talk with

Ambassador von der Schulenburg on May 20* had thrown cold water on

Germany’s approaches, and on the following day, May 21, Weizsaecker wired

the ambassador that in view of what the Foreign Commissar had said “we must

now sit tight and wait to see if the Russians will speak more openly. ”55

But Hitler, having fixed September 1 for his attack on Poland, could not

afford to sit tight. On or about May 25, Weizsaecker and Friedrich Gaus, director

of the Legal Department of the German Foreign Office, were summoned to

Ribbentrop’s country house at Sonnenburg and, according to Gaus’s affidavit

submitted at Nuremberg, † informed that the Fuehrer wanted “to establish more

tolerable relations between Germany and the Soviet Union.” Draft instructions to

Schulenburg were drawn up by Ribbentrop outlining in considerable detail the

new line he was to take with Molotov, whom he was asked to see “as soon as

possible.” This draft is among the captured German Foreign Office documents. 56

It was shown to Hitler, according to a notation on the document, on May 26. It

is a revealing paper. It discloses that by this date the German Foreign Office was

convinced that the Anglo–Russian negotiations would be successfully concluded

unless Germany intervened decisively. Ribbentrop therefore proposed that

Schulenburg tell Molotov the following:

A real opposition of interests in foreign affairs does not exist between Germany and Soviet

Russia … The time has come to consider a pacification and normalization of German–Soviet

Russian foreign relations … The Italo–German alliance is not directed against the Soviet

Union. It is exclusively directed against the Anglo–French combination …

If against our wishes it should come to hostilities with Poland, we are firmly convinced that

even this need not in any way lead to a clash of interests with Soviet Russia. We can even go

so far as to say that when settling the German–Polish question—in whatever way this is done

—we would take Russian interests into account as far as possible.

Next the danger to Russia of an alliance with Great Britain was to be pointed

up.

We are unable to see what could really induce the Soviet Union to play an

active part in the game of the British policy of encirclement … This would mean

Russia undertaking a one-sided liability without any really valuable British quid

pro quo … Britain is by no means in a position to offer Russia a really valuable

quid pro quo, no matter how the treaties may be formulated. All assistance in

Europe is rendered impossible by the West Wall … We are therefore convinced

that Britain will once more remain faithful to her traditional policy of letting

other powers pull her chestnuts out of the fire.

Schulenburg also was to emphasize that Germany had “no aggressive

intentions against Russia.” Finally, he was instructed to tell Molotov that

Germany was ready to discuss with the Soviet Union not only economic

questions but “a return to normal in political relations.”

Hitler thought the draft went too far and ordered it held up. The Fuehrer,

according to Gaus, had been impressed by Chamberlain’s optimistic statement of

two days before, May 24, when the Prime Minister had told the House of

Commons that as the result of new British proposals he hoped that full

agreement with Russia could be reached “at an early date.” What Hitler feared

was a rebuff. He did not abandon the idea of a rapprochement with Moscow but

decided that for the time being a more cautious approach would be best.

The backing and filling which took place in the Fuehrer’s mind during the last

week of May is documented in the captured German Foreign Office papers. On

or about the twenty-fifth—the exact day is not quite certain—he had suddenly

come out for pushing talks with the Soviet Union in order to thwart the Anglo–

Russian negotiations. Schulenburg was to see Molotov at once for that purpose.

But Ribbentrop’s instructions to him, which were shown Hitler on the twenty-

sixth, were never sent. The Fuehrer canceled them. That evening Weizsaecker

wired Schulenburg advising him to maintain an “attitude of complete reserve—

you personally should not make any move until further notice. ”57

This telegram and a letter which the State Secretary wrote the ambassador in

Moscow on May 27 but did not mail until May 30, when a significant postscript

was added, go far to explaining the hesitations in Berlin.58 Weizsaecker, writing

on the twenty-seventh, informed Schulenburg that it was the opinion in Berlin

that an Anglo–Russian agreement would “not be easy to prevent” and that

Germany hesitated to intervene decisively against it for fear of provoking “a peal

of Tartar laughter” in Moscow. Also, the State Secretary revealed, both Japan

and Italy had been cool toward Germany’s proposed move in Moscow, and the

reserve of her allies had helped to influence the decision in Berlin to sit tight.

“Thus,” he concluded, “we now want to wait and see how deeply Moscow and

Paris–London mutually engage themselves.”

For some reason Weizsaecker did not post his letter at once; perhaps he felt

that Hitler had not yet tally made up his mind. When he did mail it on May 30,

he added a postscript:

P.S. To my above lines I must add that, with the approval of the Fuehrer, an

approach is nonetheless now to be made to the Russians, though a very much

modified one, and this by means of a conversation which I am to hold today with

the Russian chargé d’affaires.

This talk with Georgi Astakhov did not get very far, but it represented for the

Germans a new start. Weizsaecker’s pretext for calling in the Russian chargé

was to discuss the future of the Soviet trade delegation in Prague, which the

Russians were anxious to maintain. Around this subject the two diplomats

sparred to find out what was in each other’s mind. Weizsaecker said he agreed

with Molotov that political and economic questions could not be entirely

separated and expressed interest in the “normalization of relations between

Soviet Russia and Germany.” Astakhov asserted that Molotov had no “intention

of barring the door against further Russo–German discussions.”

Cautious as both men were, the Germans were encouraged. At 10:40 o’clock

that evening of May 30 Weizsaecker got off a “most urgent” telegram59 to

Schulenburg in Moscow:

Contrary to the tactics hitherto planned we have now, after all, decided to

make a certain degree of contact with the Soviet Union. *

It may have been that a long secret memorandum which Mussolini penned to

Hitler on May 30 strengthened the Fuehrer’s resolve to turn to the Soviet Union,

however cautiously. As the summer commenced, the Duce’s doubts mounted as

to the advisability of an early conflict. He was convinced, he wrote Hitler, that

“war between the plutocratic, self-seeking conservative nations” and the Axis

was “inevitable.” But—“Italy requires a period of preparation which may extend

until the end of 1942 … Only from 1943 onward will an effort by war have the

greatest prospects of success.” After enumerating several reasons why “Italy

needs a period of peace,” the Duce concluded: “For all these reasons Italy does

not wish to hasten a European war, although she is convinced of the inevitability

of such a war.” 60

Hitler, who had not taken his good friend and ally into his confidence about

the date of September 1 which he had set for attacking Poland, replied that he

had read the secret memorandum “with the greatest interest” and suggested that

the two leaders meet for discussions sometime in the future. In the meantime the

Fuehrer decided to see if a crack could be made in the Kremlin wall. All through

June preliminary talks concerning a new trade agreement were held in Moscow

between the German Embassy and Anastas Mikoyan, the Russian Commissar for

Foreign Trade.

The Soviet government was still highly suspicious of Berlin. As Schulenburg

reported toward the end of the month (June 27), the Kremlin believed the

Germans, in pressing for a trade agreement, wished to torpedo the Russian

negotiations with Britain and France. “They are afraid,” he wired Berlin, “that as

soon as we have gained this advantage we might let the negotiations peter

out.” 61

On June 28 Schulenburg had a long talk with Molotov which proceeded, he

told Berlin in a “secret and urgent” telegram, “in a friendly manner.”

Nevertheless, when the German ambassador referred assuringly to the

nonaggression treaties which Germany had just concluded with the Baltic

States,* the Soviet Foreign Commissar tartly replied that “he must doubt the

permanence of such treaties after the experiences which Poland had had.”

Summing up the talk, Schulenburg concluded:

My impression is that the Soviet Government is greatly interested in learning

our political views and in maintaining contact with us. Although there was no

mistaking the strong distrust evident in all that Molotov said, he nevertheless

described a normalization of relations with Germany as being desirable and

possible.62

The ambassador requested telegraphic instructions as to his next move.

Schulenburg was one of the last survivors of the Seeckt, Maltzan and

Brockdorff-Rantzau school which had insisted on a German rapprochement with

Soviet Russia after 1919 and which had brought it about at Rapallo. As his

dispatches throughout 1939 make clear, he sincerely sought to restore the close

relations which had existed during the Weimar Republic. But like so many other

German career diplomats of the old school he little understood Hitler.

Suddenly on June 29 Hitler, from his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden,

ordered the talks with the Russians broken off.

Berchtesgaden, June 29, 1939

… The Fuehrer has decided as follows:

The Russians are to be informed that we have seen from their attitude that

they are making the continuation of further talks dependent on the acceptance of

the basis for our economic discussions as fixed in January. Since this basis was

not acceptable to us, we would not be interested in a resumption of the economic

discussions with Russia at present.

The Fuehrer has agreed that this answer be delayed for a few days. 63

Actually, the substance of it was telegraphed to the German Embassy in

Moscow the next day.

The Foreign Minister [Weizsaecker wired] … is of the opinion that in the

political field enough has been said until further instructions and that for the

moment the talks should not be taken up again by us.

Concerning the possible economic negotiations with the Russian Government,

the deliberations here have not yet been concluded. In this field too you are

requested for the time being to take no further action, but to await instructions.64

There is no clue in the secret German documents which explains Hitler’s

sudden change of mind. The Russians already had begun to compromise on their

proposals of January and February. And Schnurre had warned on June 15 that a

breakdown in the economic negotiations would be a setback for Germany both

economically and politically.

Nor could the rocky course of the Anglo–French–Soviet negotiations have so

discouraged Hitler as to lead him to such a decision. He knew from the reports of

the German Embassy in Moscow that Russia and the Western Powers were

deadlocked over the question of guarantees to Poland, Rumania and the Baltic

States. Poland and Rumania were happy to be guaranteed by Britain and France,

which could scarcely help them in the event of German aggression except by the

indirect means of setting up a Western front. But they refused to accept a

Russian guarantee or even to allow for Soviet troops to pass through their

territories to meet a German attack. Latvia, Estonia and Finland also stoutly

declined to accept any Russian guarantee, an attitude which, as the German

Foreign Office papers later revealed, was encouraged by Germany in the form of

dire threats should they weaken in their resolve.

In this impasse Molotov suggested at the beginning of June that Great Britain

send its Foreign Secretary to Moscow to take part in the negotiations.

Apparently in the Russian view this would not only help to break the deadlock

but would show that Britain was in earnest in arriving at an agreement with

Russia. Lord Halifax declined to go.* Anthony Eden, who was at least a former

Foreign Secretary, offered to go in his place, but Chamberlain turned him down.

It was decided, instead, to send William Strang, a capable career official in the

Foreign Office who had previously served in the Moscow Embassy and spoke

Russian but was little known either in his own country or outside of it. The

appointment of so subordinate an official to head such an important mission and

to negotiate directly with Molotov and Stalin was a signal to the Russians, they

later said, that Chamberlain still did not take very seriously the business of

building an alliance to stop Hitler.

Strang arrived in Moscow on June 14, but though he participated in eleven

Anglo–French meetings with Molotov, his appearance had little effect on the

course of Anglo–Soviet negotiations. A fortnight later, on June 29, Russian

suspicion and irritation was publicly displayed in an article in Pravda by Andrei

Zhdanov under the headline, “British and French Governments Do Not Want a

Treaty on the Basis of Equality for the Soviet Union.” Though purporting to

write “as a private individual and not committing the Soviet Government,”

Zhdanov was not only a member of the Politburo and president of the Foreign

Affairs Committee of the Soviet Parliament but, as Schulenburg emphasized to

Berlin in reporting on the matter, “one of Stalin’s confidants [whose] article was

doubtless written on orders from above.”

It seems to me [Zhdanov wrote] that the British and French Governments are

not out for a real agreement acceptable to the U.S.S.R. but only for talks about

an agreement in order to demonstrate before the public opinion of their own

countries the alleged unyielding attitude of the U.S.S.R. and thus facilitate the

conclusion of an agreement with the aggressors. The next few days will show

whether this is so or not.66

Stalin’s distrust of Britain and France and his suspicion that the Western Allies

might in the end make a deal with Hitler, as they had the year before at Munich,

was thus publicized for all the world to ponder. Ambassador von der

Schulenburg, pondering it, suggested to Berlin that one purpose of the article

was “to lay the blame on Britain and France for the possible breakdown of the

negotiations.” 67

PLANS FOR TOTAL WAR

Still Adolf Hitler did not rise to the Russian bait. Perhaps it was because all

during June he was busy at Berchtesgaden supervising the completion of

military plans to invade Poland at the summer’s end.

By June 15 he had General von Brauchitsch’s top-secret plan for the

operations of the Army against Poland. 68 “The object of the operation,” the

Commander in Chief of the Army, echoing his master, declared, “is to destroy

the Polish armed forces. The political leadership demands that the war should be

begun by heavy surprise blows and lead to quick successes. The intention of the

Army High Command is to prevent a regular mobilization and concentration of

the Polish Army by a surprise invasion of Polish territory and to destroy the

mass of the Polish Army, which is expected to be west of the Vistula-Narew

line, by a concentric attack from Silesia on the one side and from Pomerania-

East Prussia on the other.”

To carry out his plan, Brauchitsch set up two army groups—Army Group

South, consisting of the Eighth, Tenth and Fourteenth armies, and Army Group

North, made up of the Third and Fourth armies. The southern army group, under

the command of General von Rundstedt, was to attack from Silesia “in the

general direction of Warsaw, scatter opposing Polish forces and occupy as early

as possible with forces as strong as possible the Vistula on both sides of Warsaw

with the aim of destroying the Polish forces still holding out in western Poland in

co-operation with Army Group North.” The first mission of the latter group was

“to establish connection between the Reich and East Prussia” by driving across

the Corridor. Detailed objectives of the various armies were outlined as well as

those for the Air Force and Navy. Danzig, said Brauchitsch, would be declared

German territory on the first day of hostilities and would be secured by local

forces under German command.

A supplemental directive issued at the same time stipulated that the order of

deployment for “White” would be put into operation on August 20. “All

preparations,” it laid down, “must be concluded by that date.” 69

A week later, on June 22, General Keitel submitted to Hitler a “preliminary

timetable for Case White.” 70 The Fuehrer, after studying it, agreed with it “in the

main” but ordered that “so as not to disquiet the population by calling up

reserves on a larger scale than usual … civilian establishments, employers or

other private persons who make inquiries should be told that men are being

called up for the autumn maneuvers.” Also Hitler stipulated that “for reasons of

security, the clearing of hospitals in the frontier area which the Supreme

Command of the Army proposed should take place from the middle of July must

not be carried out.”

The war which Hitler was planning to launch would be total war and would

require not only military mobilization but a total mobilization of all the resources

of the nation. To co-ordinate this immense effort a meeting of the Reich Defense

Council was convoked the next day, on June 23, under the chairmanship of

Goering. Some thirty-five ranking officials, civil and military, including Keitel,

Raeder, Halder, Thomas and Milch for the armed forces and the Ministers of the

Interior, Economics, Finance and Transport, as well as Himmler, were present. It

was only the second meeting of the Council but, as Goering explained, the body

was convoked only to make the most important decisions and he left no doubt in

the minds of his hearers, as the captured secret minutes of the session reveal, that

war was near and that much remained to be done about manpower for industry

and agriculture and about many other matters relating to total mobilization.71

Goering informed the Council that Hitler had decided to draft some seven

million men. To augment the labor supply Dr. Funk, the Minister of Economics,

was to arrange “what work is to be given to prisoners of war and to the inmates

of prisons and concentration camps. ” Himmler chimed in to say that “greater use

will be made of the concentration camps in wartime.” And Goering added that

“hundreds of thousands of workers from the Czech protectorate are to be

employed under supervision in Germany, particularly in agriculture, and housed

in hutments.” Already, it was obvious, the Nazi program for slave labor was

taking shape.

Dr. Frick, the Minister of the Interior, promised to “save labor in the public

administration” and enlivened the proceedings by admitting that under the Nazi

regime the number of bureaucrats had increased “from twenty to forty fold—an

impossible state of affairs.” A committee was set up to correct this lamentable

situation.

An even more pessimistic report was made by Colonel Rudolf Gercke, chief

of the Transport Department of the Army General Staff. “In the transportation

sphere,” he declared bluntly, “Germany is at the moment not ready for war. ”

Whether the German transportation facilities would be equal to their task

depended, of course, on whether the war was confined to Poland. If it had to be

fought in the West against France and Great Britain it was feared that the

transport system would simply not be adequate. In July two emergency meetings

of the Defense Council were called “in order to bring the West Wall, by August

25 at the latest, into the optimum condition of preparedness with the material

that can be obtained by that time by an extreme effort.” High officials of Krupp

and the steel cartel were enlisted to try to scrape up the necessary metal to

complete the armament of the western fortifications. For on their impregnancy,

the Germans knew, depended whether the Anglo–French armies would be

inclined to mount a serious attack on western Germany while the Wehrmacht

was preoccupied in Poland.

Though Hitler, with unusual frankness, had told his generals on May 23 that

Danzig was not the cause of the dispute with Poland at all, it seemed for a few

weeks at midsummer that the Free City might be the powder keg which any day

would set off the explosion of war. For some time the Germans had been

smuggling into Danzig arms and Regular Army officers to train the local defense

guard in their use. * The arms and officers came in across the border from East

Prussia, and in order to keep closer watch on them the Poles increased the

number of their customs officials and frontier guards. The local Danzig

authorities, now operating exclusively on orders from Berlin, countered by

trying to prevent the Polish officials from carrying out their duties.

The conflict reached a crisis on August 4 when the Polish diplomatic

representative in Danzig informed the local authorities that the Polish customs

inspectors had been given orders to carry out their functions “with arms” and

that any attempt by the Danzigers to hamper them would be regarded “as an act

of violence” against Polish officials, and that in such a case the Polish

government would “retaliate without delay against the Free City.”

This was a further sign to Hitler that the Poles could not be intimidated and it

was reinforced by the opinion of the German ambassador in Warsaw, who on

July 6 telegraphed Berlin that there was “hardly any doubt” that Poland would

fight “if there was a clear violation” of her rights in Danzig. We know from a

marginal note on the telegram in Ribbentrop’s handwriting that it was shown the

Fuehrer. 73

Hitler was furious. The next day, August 7, he summoned Albert Forster, the

Nazi Gauleiter of Danzig, to Berchtesgaden and told him that he had reached the

extreme limit of his patience with the Poles. Angry notes were exchanged

between Berlin and Warsaw—so violent in tone that neither side dared to make

them public. On the ninth, the Reich government warned Poland that a repetition

of its ultimatum to Danzig “would lead to an aggravation of German–Polish

relations … for which the German Government must disclaim all responsibility.”

The next day the Polish government, replied tartly

that they will continue to react as hitherto to any attempt by the authorities of the Free City

to impair the rights and interests which Poland enjoys in Danzig, and will do so by such means

and measures as they alone may deem appropriate, and that they will regard any intervention

by the Reich Government … as an act of aggression.74

No small nation which stood in Hitler’s way had ever used such language.

When on the following day, August 11, the Fuehrer received Carl Burckhardt, a

Swiss, who was League of Nations High Commissioner at Danzig and who had

gone more than halfway to meet the German demands there, he was in an ugly

mood. He told his visitor that “if the slightest thing was attempted by the Poles,

he would fall upon them like lightning with all the powerful arms at his disposal,

of which the Poles had not the slightest idea.”

M. Burckhardt said [the High Commissioner later reported] that that would

lead to a general conflict. Herr Hitler replied that if he had to make war he would

rather do it today than tomorrow, that he would not conduct it like the Germany

of Wilhelm II, who had always had scruples about the full use of every weapon,

and that he would fight without mercy up to the extreme limit.75

Against whom? Against Poland certainly. Against Britain and France, if

necessary. Against Russia too? With regard to the Soviet Union, Hitler had

finally made up his mind.

THE INTERVENTION OF RUSSIA: III

A fresh initiative had come from the Russians.

On July 18, E. Babarin, the Soviet trade representative in Berlin, accompanied

by two aides, called on Julius Schnurre at the German Foreign Office and

informed him that Russia would like to extend and intensify German–Soviet

economic relations. He brought along a detailed memorandum for a trade

agreement calling for a greatly increased exchange of goods between the two

countries and declared that if a few differences between the two parties were

clarified he was empowered to sign a trade treaty in Berlin. The Germans, as Dr.

Schnurre’s confidential memorandum of the meeting shows, were rather pleased.

Such a treaty, Schnurre noted, “will not fail to have its effect at least in Poland

and Britain. ”76 Four days later, on July 22, the Russian press announced in

Moscow that Soviet–German trade negotiations had been resumed in Berlin.

On the same day Weizsaecker rather exuberantly wired Ambassador von der

Schulenburg in Moscow some interesting new instructions. As to the trade

negotiations, he informed the ambassador, “we will act here in a markedly

forthcoming manner, since a conclusion, and this at the earliest possible

moment, is desired here for general reasons. As far as the purely political aspect

of our conversations with the Russians is concerned,” he added, “we regard the

period of waiting stipulated for you in our telegram [of June 30]* as having

expired. You are therefore empowered to pick up the threads again there,

without in any way pressing the matter.” 77

They were, in fact, picked up four days later, on July 26, in Berlin. Dr.

Schnurre was instructed by Ribbentrop to dine Astakhov, the Soviet chargé, and

Babarin at a swank Berlin restaurant and sound them out. The two Russians

needed little sounding. As Schnurre noted in his confidential memorandum of

the meeting, “the Russians stayed until about 12:30 A.M.” and talked “in a very

lively and interested manner about the political and economic problems of

interest to us.”

Astakhov, with the warm approval of Babarin, declared that a Soviet–German

political rapprochement corresponded to the vital interests of the two countries.

In Moscow, he said, they had never quite understood why Nazi Germany had

been so antagonistic to the Soviet Union. The German diplomat, in response,

explained that “German policy in the East had now taken an entirely different

course.”

On our part there could be no question of menacing the Soviet Union. Our

aims were in an entirely different direction … German policy was aimed at

Britain … I could imagine a far-reaching arrangement of mutual interests with

due consideration for vital Russian problems.

However, this possibility would be barred the moment the Soviet Union

aligned itself with Britain against Germany. The time for an understanding

between Germany and the Soviet Union was opportune now, but would no

longer be so after the conclusion of a pact with London.

What could Britain offer Russia? At best, participation in a European war and

the hostility of Germany. What could we offer against this? Neutrality and

keeping out of a possible European conflict and, if Moscow wished, a German–

Russian understanding on mutual interests which, just as in former times, would

work out to the advantage of both countries … Controversial problems [between

Germany and Russia] did not, in my opinion, exist anywhere along the line from

the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and to the Far East. In addition, despite all the

divergencies in their views of life, there was one thing common to the ideology

of Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union: opposition to the capitalist democracies

in the West. 78

Thus in the late-evening hours of July 26 in a small Berlin restaurant over

good food and wine partaken by second-string diplomats was Germany’s first

serious bid for a deal with Soviet Russia made. The new line which Schnurre

took had been given him by Ribbentrop himself. Astakhov was pleased to hear

it. He promised Schnurre that he would report it at once to Moscow.

In the Wilhelmstrasse the Germans waited impatiently to see what the reaction

in the Soviet capital would be. Three days later, on July 29, Weizsaecker sent a

secret dispatch by courier to Schulenburg in Moscow.

It would be important for us to know whether the remarks made to Astakhov

and Babarin have met with any response in Moscow. If you see an opportunity

of arranging a further conversation with Molotov, please sound him out on the

same lines. If this results in Molotov abandoning the reserve he has so far

maintained you could go a step further … This applies in particular to the Polish

problem. We would be prepared, however the Polish problem may develop … to

safeguard all Soviet interests and to come to an understanding with the

Government in Moscow. In the Baltic question, too, if the talks took a positive

course, the idea could be advanced of so adjusting our attitude to the Baltic

States as to respect vital Soviet interests in the Baltic Sea.79

Two days later, on July 31, the State Secretary wired Schulenburg “urgent and

secret”:

With reference to our dispatch of July 29, arriving in Moscow by courier today:

Please report by telegram the date and time of your next interview with

Molotov as soon as it is fixed.

We are anxious for an early interview.80

For the first time a note of urgency crept into the dispatches from Berlin to

Moscow.

There was good reason for Berlin’s sense of urgency. On July 23, France and

Britain had finally agreed to Russia’s proposal that military-staff talks be held at

once to draw up a military convention which would spell out specifically how

Hitler’s armies were to be met by the three nations. Although Chamberlain did

not announce this agreement until July 31, when he made it to the House of

Commons, the Germans got wind of it earlier. On July 28 Ambassador von

Welczeck in Paris wired Berlin that he had learned from “an unusually well-

informed source” that France and Britain were dispatching military missions to

Moscow and that the French group would be headed by General Doumenc,

whom he described as being “a particularly capable officer” and a former

Deputy Chief of Staff under General Maxime Weygand. 81 It was the German

ambassador’s impression, as he stated in a supplementary dispatch two days

later, that Paris and London had agreed to military-staff talks as a last means of

preventing the adjournment of the Moscow negotiations. 82

It was a well-founded impression. As the confidential British Foreign Office

papers make clear, the political talks in Moscow had reached an impasse by the

last week in July largely over the impossibility of reaching a definition of

“indirect aggression.” To the British and French the Russian interpretation of

that term was so broad that it might be used to justify Soviet intervention in

Finland and the Baltic States even if there were no serious Nazi threat, and to

this London at least—the French were prepared to be more accommodating—

would not agree.

Also, on June 2 the Russians had insisted that a military agreement setting

down in detail the “methods, form and extent” of the military help which the

three countries were to give each other should come into force at the same time

as the mutual-assistance pact itself. The Western Powers, which did not think

highly of Russia’s military prowess, * tried to put Molotov off. They would only

agree to starting staff talks after the political agreement had been signed. But the

Russians were adamant. When the British tried to strike a bargain, offering on

July 17 to begin staff conversations at once if the Soviet Union would yield on

its insistence on signing political and military agreements simultaneously and

also—for good measure—accept the British definition of “indirect aggression,”

Molotov answered with a blunt rejection. Unless the French and British agreed

to political and military agreements in one package, he said, there was no point

in continuing the negotiations. This Russian threat to end the talks caused

consternation in Paris, which seems to have been more acutely aware than

London of the course of Soviet–Nazi flirtations, and it was largely due to French

pressure that the British government, on August 23, while refusing to accept the

Russian proposals on “indirect aggression,” reluctantly agreed to negotiate a

military convention.84

Chamberlain was less than lukewarm to the whole business of staff talks. *On

August 1 Ambassador von Dirksen in London informed Berlin that the military

negotiations with the Russians were “regarded skeptically” in British

government circles.

This is borne out [he wrote] by the composition of the British Military

Mission. † The Admiral … is practically on the retired list and was never on the

Naval Staff. The General is also purely a combat officer. The Air Marshal is

outstanding as a pilot and an instructor, but not as a strategist. This seems to

indicate that the task of the Military Mission is rather to ascertain the fighting

value of the Soviet forces than to conclude agreements on operations … The

Wehrmacht attachés are agreed in observing a surprising skepticism in British

military circles about the forthcoming talks with the Soviet armed forces. 86

Indeed, so skeptical was the British government that it neglected to give

Admiral Drax written authority to negotiate—an oversight, if it was that, which

Marshal Voroshilov complained about when the staff officers first met. The

Admiral’s credentials did not arrive until August 21, when they were no longer

of use.

But if Admiral Drax had no written credentials he certainly had secret written

instructions as to the course he was to take in the military talks in Moscow. As

the British Foreign Office papers much later revealed, the Admiral was

admonished to “go very slowly with the [military] conversations, watching the

progress of the political negotiations,” until a political agreement had been

concluded.87 It was explained to him that confidential military information could

not be imparted to the Russians until the political pact was signed.

But since the political conversations had been suspended on August 2 and

Molotov had made it clear that he would not assent to their being renewed until

the military talks had made some progress, the conclusion can scarcely be

escaped that the Chamberlain government was quite prepared to take its time in

spelling out the military obligations of each country in the proposed mutual-

assistance pact.* In fact the confidential British Foreign Office documents leave

little doubt that, by the beginning of August, Chamberlain and Halifax had

almost given up hope of reaching an agreement with the Soviet Union to stop

Hitler but thought that if they stretched out the staff negotiations in Moscow this

might somehow deter the German dictator from taking, during the next four

weeks, the fatal step toward war. †

In contrast to the British and French, the Russians placed on their military

mission the highest officers of their armed forces: Marshal Voroshilov, who was

Commissar for Defense, General Shaposhnikov, Chief of the General Staff of

the Red Army, and the commanders in chief of the Navy and Air Force. The

Russians could not help noting that whereas the British had sent the Chief of the

Imperial General Staff, General Sir Edmund Ironside, to Warsaw in July for

military talks with the Polish General Staff, they did not consider sending this

ranking British officer to Moscow.

It cannot be said that the Anglo–French military missions were exactly rushed

to Moscow. A plane would have got them there in a day. But they were sent on a

slow boat—a passenger-cargo vessel—which took as long to get them to Russia

as the Queen Mary could have conveyed them to America. They sailed for

Leningrad on August 5 and did not arrive in Moscow until August 11.

By that time it was too late. Hitler had beaten them to it.

While the British and French military officers were waiting for their slow boat

to Leningrad the Germans were acting swiftly. August 3 was a crucial day in

Berlin and Moscow.

At 12:58 P.M. on that day Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, who invariably

left the sending of telegrams to State Secretary von Weizsaecker, got off on his

own a wire marked “Secret—Most Urgent” to Schulenburg in Moscow.

Yesterday I had a lengthy conversation with Astakhov, on which a telegram

follows.

I expressed the German wish for remolding German–Russian relations and

stated that from the Baltic to the Black Sea there was no problem which could

not be solved to our mutual satisfaction. In response to Astakhov’s desire for

more concrete conversations on topical questions … I declared myself ready for

such conversations if the Soviet Government would inform me through

Astakhov that they also desired to place German–Russian relations on a new and

definitive basis. 89

It was known at the Foreign Office that Schulenburg was seeing Molotov later

in the day. An hour after Ribbentrop’s telegram was dispatched, Weizsaecker

got off one of his own, also marked “Secret—Most Urgent.”

In view of the political situation and in the interests of speed, we are anxious,

without prejudice to your conversation with Molotov today, to continue in more

concrete terms in Berlin the conversations on harmonizing German–Soviet

intentions. To this end Schnurre will receive Astakhov today and will tell him

that we would be ready for a continuation on more concrete terms.90

Though Ribbentrop’s sudden desire for “concrete” talks on everything from

the Baltic to the Black Sea must have surprised the Russians—at one point, as he

informed Schulenburg in his following telegram which was sent at 3:47 P.M., he

“dropped a gentle hint [to Astakhov] at our coming to an understanding with

Russia on the fate of Poland”—the Foreign Minister emphasized to his

ambassador in Moscow that he had told the Russian chargé that “we were in no

hurry.” 91

This was bluff, and the sharp-minded Soviet chargé called it when he saw

Schnurre at the Foreign Office at 12:45 P.M. He remarked that while Schnurre

seemed to be in a hurry, the German Foreign Minister the previous day “had

shown no such urgency.” Schnurre rose to the occasion.

I told M. Astakhov [he noted in a secret memorandum]92 that though the

Foreign Minister last night had not shown any urgency to the Soviet

Government, we nevertheless thought it expedient to make use of the next few

days* for continuing the conversations in order to establish a basis as quickly as

possible.

For the Germans, then, it had come down to a matter of the next few days.

Astakhov told Schnurre that he had received “a provisional answer” from

Molotov to the German suggestions. It was largely negative. While Moscow too

desired an improvement in relations, “Molotov said,” he reported, “that so far

nothing concrete was known of Germany’s attitude.”

The Soviet Foreign Commissar conveyed his ideas directly to Schulenburg in

Moscow that evening. The ambassador reported in a long dispatch filed shortly

after midnight93 that in a talk lasting an hour and a quarter Molotov had

“abandoned his habitual reserve and appeared unusually open.” There seems no

doubt of that. For after Schulenburg had reiterated Germany’s view that no

differences existed between the two countries “from the Baltic to the Black Sea”

and reaffirmed the German wish to “come to an understanding,” the unbending

Russian Minister enumerated some of the hostile acts that the Reich had

committed against the Soviet Union: the Anti-Comintern Pact, support of Japan

against Russia and the exclusion of the Soviets from Munich.

“How,” asked Molotov, “could the new German statements be reconciled with

these three points? Proofs of a changed attitude of the German Government were

for the present still lacking.”

Schulenburg seems to have been somewhat discouraged.

My general impression [he telegraphed Berlin] is that the Soviet Government

are at present determined to conclude an agreement with Britain and France, if

they fulfill all Soviet wishes … I believe that my statements made an impression

on Molotov; it will nevertheless require considerable effort on our part to cause a

reversal in the Soviet Government’s course.

Knowledgeable though the veteran German diplomat was about Russian

affairs, he obviously overestimated the progress in Moscow of the British and

French negotiators. Nor did he yet realize the lengths to which Berlin was now

prepared to go to make the “considerable effort” which he thought was necessary

to reverse the course of Soviet diplomacy.

In the Wilhelmstrasse confidence grew that this could be accomplished. With

Russia neutralized, Britain and France either would not fight for Poland or, if

they did, would easily be held on the western fortifications until the Poles were

quickly liquidated and the German Army could turn its full strength on the West.

The astute French chargé d’affaires in Berlin, Jacques Tarbé de St.-Hardouin,

noticed the change of atmosphere in the German capital. On the very day,

August 3, when there was so much Soviet–German diplomatic activity in Berlin

and Moscow, he reported to Paris: “In the course of the last week a very definite

change in the political atmosphere has been observed in Berlin … The period of

embarrassment, hesitation, inclination to temporization or even to appeasement

has been succeeded among the Nazi leaders by a new phase.” 94

THE HESITATION OF GERMANY’S ALLIES

It was different with Germany’s allies, Italy and Hungary. As the summer

progressed, the governments in Budapest and Rome became increasingly fearful

that their countries would be drawn into Hitler’s war on Germany’s side.

On July 24 Count Teleki, Premier of Hungary, addressed identical letters to

Hitler and Mussolini informing them that “in the event of a general conflict

Hungary will make her policy conform to the policy of the Axis.” Having gone

so far, he then pulled back. On the same day he wrote the two dictators a second

letter stating that “in order to prevent any possible misinterpretation of my letter

of July 24, I … repeat that Hungary could not, on moral grounds, be in a position

to take armed action against Poland.” 95

The second letter from Budapest threw Hitler into one of his accustomed

rages. When he received Count Csáky, the Hungarian Foreign Minister, at

Obersalzberg on August 8, in the presence of Ribbentrop, he opened the

conversation by stating that he had been “shocked” at the Hungarian Prime

Minister’s letter. He emphasized, according to the confidential memorandum

drawn up for the Foreign Office, that he had never expected help from Hungary

—or from any other state—“in the event of a German–Polish conflict.” Count

Teleki’s letter, he added, “was impossible.” And he reminded his Hungarian

guest that it was due to Germany’s generosity that Hungary had been able to

regain so much territory at the expense of Czechoslovakia. Were Germany to be

defeated in war, he said, “Hungary would be automatically smashed too.”

The German memorandum of this conversation, which is among the captured

Foreign Office documents, reveals Hitler’s state of mind as the fateful month of

August got under way. Poland, he said, presented no military problem at all for

Germany. Nevertheless, he was reckoning from the start with a war on two

fronts. “No power in the world,” he boasted, “could penetrate Germany’s

western fortifications. Nobody in all my life has been able to frighten me, and

that goes for Britain. Nor will I succumb to the oft-predicted nervous

breakdown.” As for Russia:

The Soviet Government would not fight against us … The Soviets would not repeat the

Czar’s mistake and bleed to death for Britain. They would, however, try to enrich themselves,

possibly at the expense of the Baltic States or Poland, without engaging in military action

themselves.

So effective was Hitler’s harangue that at the end of a second talk held the

same day Count Csáky requested him “to regard the two letters written by Teleki

as not having been written.” He said he would also make the same request of

Mussolini.

For some weeks the Duce had been worrying and fretting about the danger of

the Fuehrer dragging Italy into war. Attolico, his ambassador in Berlin, had been

sending increasingly alarming reports about Hitler’s determination to attack

Poland.* Since early June Mussolini had been pressing for another meeting with

Hitler and in July it was fixed for August 4 at the Brenner. On July 24 he

presented to Hitler through Attolico “certain basic principles” for their

discussion. If the Fuehrer considered war “inevitable,” then Italy would stand by

her side. But the Duce reminded him that a war with Poland could not be

localized; it would become a European conflict. Mussolini did not think that this

was the time for the Axis to start such a war. He proposed instead “a

constructive peaceful policy over several years,” with Germany settling her

differences with Poland and Italy hers with France by diplomatic negotiation. He

went further. He suggested another international conference of the Big Powers. 97

The Fuehrer’s reaction, as Ciano noted in his diary on July 26, was

unfavorable, and Mussolini decided it might be best to postpone his meeting

with Hitler. 98 He proposed instead, on August 7, that the foreign ministers of the

two countries meet immediately. Ciano’s diary notes during these days indicate

the growing uneasiness in Rome. On August 6 he wrote:

We must find some way out. By following the Germans we shall go to war

and enter it under the least favorable conditions for the Axis, and especially for

Italy. Our gold reserves are reduced to almost nothing, as well as our stocks of

metals… We must avoid war. I propose to the Duce the idea of my meeting with

Ribbentrop … during which I would attempt to continue discussion of

Mussolini’s project for a world conference.

August 9.—Ribbentrop has approved the idea of our meeting. I decided to

leave tomorrow night in order to meet him at Salzburg. The Duce is anxious that

I prove to the Germans, by documentary evidence, that the outbreak of war at

this time would be folly.

August 10.—The Duce is more than ever convinced of the necessity of

delaying the conflict. He himself has worked out the outline of a report

concerning the meeting at Salzburg which ends with an allusion to international

negotiations to settle the problems that so dangerously disturb European life.

Before letting me go he recommends that I shall frankly inform the Germans

that we must avoid a conflict with Poland since it will be impossible to localize

it, and a general war would be disastrous for everybody.99

Armed with such commendable but, in the circumstances, naïve thoughts and

recommendations, the youthful Fascist Foreign Minister set out for Germany,

where during the next three days—August 11, 12 and 13—he received from

Ribbentrop and especially from Hitler the shock of his life.

CIANO AT SALZBURG AND OBERSALZBERG: AUGUST 11, 12, 13

For some ten hours on August 11, Ciano conferred with Ribbentrop at the

latter’s estate at Fuschl, outside Salzburg, which the Nazi Foreign Minister had

taken from an Austrian monarchist who, conveniently, had been put away in a

concentration camp. The hot-blooded Italian found the atmosphere, as he later

reported, cold and gloomy. During dinner at the White Horse Inn at St.

Wolfgang not a word was exchanged between the two. It was scarcely necessary.

Ribbentrop had informed his visitor earlier in the day that the decision to attack

Poland was implacable.

“Well, Ribbentrop,” Ciano says he asked, “what do you want? The Corridor

or Danzig?”

“Not that any more,” Ribbentrop replied, gazing at him with his cold, metallic

eyes. “We want war!”

Ciano’s arguments that a Polish conflict could not be localized, that if Poland

were attacked the Western democracies would fight, were bluntly rejected. The

day before Christmas Eve four years later—1943—when Ciano lay in Cell 27 of

the Verona jail waiting execution at the instigation of the Germans, he still

remembered that chilling day of August 11 at Fuschl and Salzburg. Ribbentrop,

he wrote in his very last diary entry on December 23, 1943, had bet him “during

one of those gloomy meals at the Oesterreichischer Hof in Salzburg” a collection

of old German armor against an Italian painting that France and Britain would

remain neutral—a bet, he remarks ruefully, which was never paid. 100

Ciano moved on to Obersalzberg, where Hitler during two meetings on

August 12 and 13 reiterated that France and Britain would not fight. In contrast

to the Nazi Foreign Minister, the Fuehrer was cordial, but he was equally

implacable in his determination to go to war. This is evident not only from

Ciano’s reports but from the confidential German minutes of the meeting, which

are among the captured documents. 101 The Italian Minister found Hitler standing

before a large table covered with military staff maps. He began by explaining the

strength of Germany’s West Wall. It was, he said, impenetrable. Besides, he

added scornfully, Britain could put only three divisions into France. France

would have considerably more, but since Poland would be defeated “in a very

short time,” Germany could then concentrate 100 divisions in the west “for the

life-and-death struggle which would then commence.”

But would it? A few moments later, annoyed by Ciano’s initial response, the

Fuehrer was contradicting himself. The Italian Minister, as he had promised

himself, spoke up to Hitler. According to the German minutes, he expressed

“Italy’s great surprise at the entirely unexpected gravity of the situation.”

Germany, he complained, had not kept her ally informed. “On the contrary,” he

said, “the Reich Foreign Minister had stated [at Milan and Berlin in May] that

the Danzig question would be settled in due course.” When Ciano went on to

declare that a conflict with Poland would spread into a European war his host

interrupted to say that he differed.

“I personally,” said Hitler, “am absolutely convinced that the Western

democracies will, in the last resort, recoil from unleashing a general war.” To

which Ciano replied (the German minutes add) “that he hoped the Fuehrer would

prove right but he did not believe it.” The Italian Foreign Minister then outlined

in great detail Italy’s weaknesses, and from his tale of woe, as the Germans

recorded it, Hitler must have been finally convinced that Italy would be of little

help to him in the coming war. * One of Mussolini’s reasons, Ciano said, for

wanting to postpone the war was that he “attached great importance to holding,

according to plan, the World Exhibition of 1942”—a remark that must have

astounded the Fuehrer, lost as he was in his military maps and calculations. He

must have been equally astounded when Ciano naively produced the text of a

communiqué, which he urged to be published, stating that the meeting of the

Axis ministers had “reaffirmed the peaceful intentions of their governments” and

their belief that peace could be maintained “through normal diplomatic

negotiations.” Ciano explained that the Duce had in mind a peace conference of

the chief European nations but that out of deference to “the Fuehrer’s

misgivings” he would settle for ordinary diplomatic negotiations.

Hitler did not, the first day, turn down completely the idea of a conference but

reminded Ciano that “Russia could no longer be excluded from future meetings

of the powers.” This was the first mention of the Soviet Union but it was not the

last.

Finally when Ciano tried to pin his host down as to the date of the attack on

Poland Hitler replied that because of the autumn rains, which would render

useless his armored and motorized divisions in a country with few paved roads,

the “settlement with Poland would have to be made one way or the other by the

end of August.”

At last Ciano had the date. Or the last possible date, for a moment later Hitler

was storming that if the Poles offered any fresh provocation he was determined

“to attack Poland within forty-eight hours.” Therefore, he added, “a move

against Poland must be expected any moment.” That outburst ended the first

day’s talks except for Hitler’s promise to think over the Italian proposals.

Having given them twenty-four hours’ thought, he told Ciano the next day

that it would be better if no communiqué of any kind were issued about their

talks.* Because of the expected bad weather in the fall

it was of decisive importance, firstly [he said], that within the shortest possible time Poland

should make her intentions plain, and secondly, that no further acts of provocation of any sort

should be tolerated by Germany.

When Ciano inquired as to “what the shortest possible time” was, Hitler

replied, “By the end of August at the latest.” While it would take only a

fortnight, he explained, to defeat Poland, the “final liquidation” would require a

further two to four weeks—a remarkable forecast of timing, as it turned out.

Finally, at the end, Hitler uttered his customary flattery of Mussolini, whom

Ciano must have convinced him he could no longer count on. He personally felt

fortunate, he declared, “to live at a time when, apart from himself, there was

another statesman living who would stand out in history as a great and unique

figure. It was a source of great personal happiness that he could be a friend of

this man. When the hour struck for the common fight he would always be found

at the side of the Duce, come what may.”

However much the strutting Mussolini might be impressed by such words, his

son-in-law was not. “I return to Rome,” he wrote in his diary on August 13, after

the second meeting with Hitler, “completely disgusted with the Germans, with

their leader, with their way of doing things. They have betrayed us and lied to us.

Now they are dragging us into an adventure which we have not wanted and

which might compromise the regime and the country as a whole.”

But Italy at the moment was the least of Hitler’s concerns. His thoughts were

concentrating on Russia. Toward the end of the meeting with Ciano, on August

12, a “telegram from Moscow,” as the German minutes put it, was handed to the

Fuehrer. The conversation was interrupted for a few moments while Hitler and

Ribbentrop perused it. They then informed Ciano of its contents.

“The Russians,” Hitler said, “have agreed to a German political negotiator

being sent to Moscow.”

* The three “contingencies” were the liquidation of the rest of Czechoslovakia, occupation of

Memel and protection of the Reich’s frontiers.

† Italics in the original.

* As a result of that war, Poland pushed its eastern boundary 150 miles east of the

ethnographic Curzon Line, at the expense of the Soviet Union—a frontier which transferred

four and a half million Ukrainians and one and a half million White Russians to Polish rule.

Thus Poland’s western and eastern borders were unacceptable to Germany and Russia

respectively—a fact which seems to have been lost sight of in the Western democracies when

Berlin and Moscow began to draw together in the summer of 1939.

* “I must confess,” Chamberlain wrote in a private letter on March 26, “to the most profound

distrust of Russia. I have no belief whatever in her ability to maintain an effective offensive,

even if she wanted to. And I distrust her motives … Moreover, she is both hated and suspected

by many of the smaller states, notably by Poland, Rumania and Finland.” (Feiling The Life of

Neville Chamberlain, p. 603.)

* In the telegram of instructions to Kennard18 it was made clear that Russia was to be left out

in the cold. “It is becoming clear,” it said, “that our attempts to consolidate the situation will

be frustrated if the Soviet Union is openly associated with the initiation of the scheme. Recent

telegrams from a number of His Majesty’s Missions abroad have warned us that the inclusion

of Russia would not only jeopardise the success of our constructive effort but also tend to

consolidate the relations of the parties to the Anti-Comintern Pact, as well as excite anxiety

among a number of friendly governments.”

* Chamberlain could not have been ignorant of Poland’s military weakness. Colonel Sword,

the British military attaché in Warsaw, had sent to London a week before, on March 22, a long

report on the disastrous strategic position of Poland, “bounded on. three sides by Germany,”

and on the deficiencies of the Polish armed forces, especially in modern arms and

equipment. 20

On April 6, while Colonel Beck was in London discussing a mutual-assistance pact,

Colonel Sword and also the British air attaché in Warsaw, Group Captain Vachell, sent fresh

reports which were even less hopeful. Vachell emphasized that during the next twelve months

the Polish Air Force would have “no more than about 600 aircraft, many of which are no

match for German aircraft.” Sword reported that the Polish Army and Air Force were both so

lacking in modern equipment that they could put up only a limited resistance to an all-out

German attack. Ambassador Kennard, summing up his attachés’ reports, informed London

that the Poles would be unable to defend the Corridor or the western frontier against Germany

and would have to fall back on the Vistula in the heart of Poland. “A friendly Russia,” he

added, was “thus of paramount importance” for Poland.21

* Actually, the relay of the broadcast to the American radio networks was cut off after Hitler

had begun to speak. This led to reports in New York that he had been assassinated. I was in the

control room of the short-wave section of the German Broadcasting Company in Berlin,

looking after the relay to the Columbia Broadcasting System in New York, when the broadcast

was suddenly shut off. To my protests, German officials answered that the order had come

from Hitler himself. Within fifteen minutes CBS was telephoning me from New York to check

on the assassination report. I could easily deny it because through an open telephone circuit to

Wilhelmshaven I could hear Hitler shouting his speech. It would have been difficult to shoot

the Fuehrer that day because he spoke behind a bulletproof glass enclosure.

* On the day of the speech Weizsaecker wired Hans Thomsen, German chargé in Washington,

instructing him to give the Fuehrer’s address the widest possible publicity in the United States

and assuring him that extra funds would be provided for the purpose. On May 1 Thomsen

replied, “Interest in speech surpasses anything so far known. I have therefore directed that the

English text printed here is to be sent … to tens of thousands of addressees of all classes and

callings, in accordance with the agreed plan. Claim for costs to follow. ”26

* Hitler was careful to use the Gaelic word for Prime Minister.

* Though an Associated Press dispatch from Moscow (published in the New York Times

March 12) reported that Stalin’s condemnation of efforts to embroil Russia in a war with

Germany had led to talk in diplomatic circles in Moscow of the possibility of a rapprochement

between the Soviet Union and Germany, Sir William Seeds, the British ambassador,

apparently did not participate in any such talk. In his dispatch reporting Stalin’s speech Seeds

made no mention of such a possibility. One Western diplomat, Joseph E. Davies, former

American ambassador in Moscow, who was now stationed in Brussels, did draw the proper

conclusions from Stalin’s speech. “It is a most significant statement,” he noted in his diary on

March 11. “It bears the earmarks of a definite warning to the British and French governments

that the Soviets are getting tired of ‘nonrealistic’ opposition to the aggressors. This … is really

ominous for the negotiations … between the British Foreign Office and the Soviet Union. It

certainly is the most significant danger signal that I have yet seen.” On March 21 he wrote to

Senator Key Pittman: “… Hitler is making a desperate effort to alienate Stalin from France

and Britain. Unless the British and French wake up, I am afraid he will succeed.” 32

† In explaining to the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, on March 19 why the

Russian proposal for a conference, preferably at Bucharest, was “not acceptable,” Lord

Halifax said that no Minister of the Crown could be spared for the moment to go to Bucharest.

It is obvious that this rebuff soured the Russians in the subsequent negotiations with the

British and French. Maisky later told Robert Booth by, a Conservative M.P., that the rejection

of the Russian proposal had been “another smashing blow at the policy of effective collective

security” and that it had decided the fate of Litvinov. 33

* If some credence can be cautiously given to the published journal of Litvinov ( Notes for a

Journal), Stalin had been contemplating such a change since Munich, from which the Soviet

Union had been excluded. Toward the end of 1938, according to an entry in this journal, Stalin

told Litvinov that “we are prepared to come to an agreement with the Germans … and also to

render Poland harmless.” In January 1939 the Foreign Commissar noted: “It would appear

they have decided to remove me.” In the same entry he reveals that all his communications

with the Soviet Embassy in Berlin must now go through Stalin and that Ambassador

Merekalov, on Stalin’s instructions, is about to begin negotiations with Weizsaecker in order

to let Hitler know “in effect: ‘We couldn’t come to an agreement until now, but now we can.’”

The Journal is a somewhat dubious book. Professor Edward Hallen Carr, a British authority

on the Soviet Union, investigated it and found that though undoubtedly it had been touched up

to a point where some of it was “pure fiction,” a large part of it fairly represents Litvinov’s

outlook.

* Ciano’s diary for May 22 is full of titbits about Hitler and his weird entourage. Frau

Goebbels complained that the Fuehrer kept his friends up all night and exclaimed, “It is

always Hitler who talks! He repeats himself and bores his guests.” Ciano also heard hints “of

the Fuehrer’s tender feelings for a beautiful girl. She is twenty years old, with beautiful quiet

eyes, regular features and a magnificent body. Her name is Sigrid von Lappus. They see each

other frequently and intimately.” ( The Ciano Diaries, p. 85.) Ciano, a great man with the

ladies himself, was obviously intrigued. Apparently he had not yet heard of Eva Braun,

Hitler’s mistress, who was rarely permitted at this time to come to Berlin.

* Emphasis in the original.

† Emphasis in the original.

* Hitler’s understanding of the Battle of Jutland was obviously faulty.

* In giving these tonnages for German battleships, General Thomas was deceiving even the

Foreign Office. An interesting German naval document51 dated more than a year before,

February 18, 1938, notes that false figures on battleship tonnage had been furnished the British

government under the Anglo–German naval agreement. It states that the actual tonnage of the

26,000-ton ships was 31,300 tons; that of the 35,000-ton battleships (the top level in the

British and American navies) was actually 41,700 tons. It is a curious example of Nazi deceit.

* On May 27, the British ambassador and the French chargé d’affaires in Moscow presented

Molotov with an Anglo–French draft of the proposed pact. To the surprise of the Western

envoys, Molotov took a very cool view of it.52

† The affidavit was rejected as evidence by the tribunal and is not published in the Nazi

Conspiracy and Aggression or Trial of the Major War Criminals volumes of the Nuremberg

evidence. This does not detract from its authenticity. All material dealing with Nazi–Soviet

collaboration during this period was handled gingerly by the tribunal, one of whose four

judges was a Russian.

* In Nazi–Soviet Relations, a volume of German Foreign Office documents on that subject

published by the U.S. State Department in 1949, the English translation of the telegram came

out much stronger. The key sentence was given as: “We have now decided to undertake

definite negotiations with the Soviet Union.” This has led many historians, including

Churchill, to conclude that this telegram of May 30 marked the decisive turning point in

Hitler’s efforts to make a deal with Moscow. That turning point came later. As Weizsaecker

pointed out in the May 30 postscript to his letter to Schulenburg, the German approach, which

Hitler had approved, was to be “a very much modified one.”

* To try to forestall an Anglo–French-Russian guarantee of Latvia and Estonia, which

bordered on the Soviet Union, Germany had hastily signed nonaggression pacts with these two

Baltic States on June 7. Even before this, on May 31, Germany had pushed through a similar

pact with Denmark, which, considering recent events, appears to have given the Danes an

astonishing sense of security.

* According to the British Foreign Office papers, Halifax told Maisky on June 8 that he had

thought of suggesting to the Prime Minister that he should go to Moscow, “but it was really

impossible to get away.” Maisky, on June 12, after Strang had left, suggested to Halifax that it

would be a good idea for the Foreign Secretary to go to Moscow “when things were quieter,”

but Halifax again stressed the impossibility of his being absent from London “for the

present. ”65

* On June 19 the High Command of the Army had informed the Foreign Office that 168

German Army officers “have been granted permission to travel through the Free State of

Danzig in civilian clothes on a tour for study purposes.” Early in July General Keitel inquired

of the Foreign Office “whether it is politically advisable to show in public the twelve light and

four heavy guns which are in Danzig and to let exercises be carried out with them, or whether

it is better to conceal the presence of these guns.” 72 How the Germans succeeded in

smuggling in heavy artillery past the Polish inspectors is not revealed in the German papers.

* The British High Command, like the German later, grossly underestimated the potential

strength of the Red Army. This may have been due in large part to the reports it received from

its military attachés in Moscow. On March 6, for instance, Colonel Firebrace, the military

attaché, and Wing Commander Hallawell, the air attaché, had filed long reports to London to

the effect that while the defensive capabilities of the Red Army and Air Force were

considerable they were incapable of mounting a serious offensive. Hallawell thought that the

Russian Air Force, “like the Army, is likely to be brought to a standstill as much by the

collapse of essential services as by enemy action.” Firebrace found that the purge of higher

officers had severely weakened the Red Army. But he did point out to London that “the Red

Army considers war inevitable and is undoubtedly being strenuously prepared for it. ”83

* Strang, negotiating with Molotov in Moscow, was even cooler. “It is, indeed, extraordinary,”

he wrote the Foreign Office on July 20, “that we should be expected to talk military secrets

with the Soviet Government before we are sure that they will be our allies.”

The Russian view was just the opposite and was put by Molotov to the Anglo–French

negotiators on July 27: “The important point was to see how many divisions each party would

contribute to the common cause and where they would be located. ”85 Before the Russians

committed themselves politically they wanted to know how much military help they could

expect from the West.

† The British mission consisted of Admiral Sir Reginald Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, who had

been Commander in Chief, Plymouth, 1935–1938, Air Marshal Sir Charles Burnett and Major

General Heywood.

* A conclusion reached by Arnold Toynbee and his collaborators in their book, The Eve of

War, 1939, based largely on the British Foreign Office documents.

† On August 16, Air Marshal Sir Charles Burnett wrote to London from Moscow: “I

understand it is me Government’s policy to prolong negotiations as long as possible if we

cannot get acceptance of a treaty.” Seeds, the British ambassador in Moscow, had wired

London on July 24, the day after his government agreed to staff talks: “I am not optimistic as

to the success of military conversations, nor do I think they can in any case be rapidly

concluded, but to begin with them now would give a healthy shock to the Axis Powers and a

fillip to our friends, while they might be prolonged sufficiently to tide over the next dangerous

few months. ”88 In view of what Anglo–French intelligence knew of the meetings of Molotov

with the German ambassador, of German efforts to interest Russia in a new partition of Poland

—which Coulondre had warned Paris of as early as May 7, of massive German troop

concentrations on the Polish border, and of Hitler’s intentions, this British trust in stalling in

Moscow is somewhat startling.

*Emphasis in the original document.

* Typical was a vivid report Attolico sent of a talk he had with Ribbentrop on July 6. If Poland

dared to attack Danzig, the Nazi Foreign Minister told him, Germany would settle the Danzig

question in forty-eight hours—at Warsaw! If France were to intervene over Danzig, and so

precipitate a general war, let her; Germany would like nothing better. France would be

“annihilated”; Britain, if she stirred, would be bringing destruction on the British Empire.

Russia? There was going to be a Russian-German treaty, and Russia was not going to march.

America? One speech of the Fuehrer’s had been enough to rout Roosevelt; and Americans

would not stir anyway. Fear of Japan would keep America quiet.

I listened [Attolico reported] in wondering silence, while Ribbentrop drew this picture of

the war ad usum Germaniae which his imagination has now established indelibly in his head

… He can see nothing but his version—which is a really amazing one—of an assured German

victory in every field and against all comers … At the end, I observed that, according to my

understanding, there was complete agreement between the Duce and the Fuehrer that Italy and

Germany were preparing for a war that was not to be immediate.96

But the astute Attolico did not believe that at all. All through July his dispatches warned of

imminent German action in Poland.

* At one point, Ribbentrop, with obvious exasperation, told Ciano, “We don’t need you!”; to

which Ciano replied, “The future will show.” (From General Halder’s unpublished diary, entry

of August 14.102 Halder says he got it through Weizsaecker.)

* Though the German minutes explicitly state that Ciano agreed with Hitler “that no

communiqué should be issued at the conclusion of the conversation,” the Germans

immediately double-crossed their Italian ally. D.N.B., the official German news agency, issued

a communiqué two hours after Ciano’s departure and without any consultation whatever with

the Italians, that the talks had covered all the problems of the day—with particular attention to

Danzig—and had resulted in a “hundred per cent” agreement. So much so, the communiqué

added, that not a single problem had been left in suspense, and therefore there would be no

further meetings, because there was no occasion for them. Attolico was furious. He protested

to the Germans, accusing them of bad faith. He tipped off Henderson that war was imminent.

And in an angry dispatch to Rome he described the German communique as “Machiavellian,”

pointed out that it was deliberately done to bind Italy to Germany after the latter’s attack on

Poland and pleaded that Mussolini should be firm with Hitler in demanding German

fulfillment of the “consultation” provisions of the Pact of Steel and under these provisions

insist on a month’s grace to settle the Danzig question through diplomatic channels.103

15

THE NAZI-SOVIET PACT

THE “TELEGRAM FROM Moscow” whose contents Hitler disclosed to Ciano at

Obersalzberg on the afternoon of August 12 appears to have been, like certain

previous “telegrams” which have figured in this narrative, of doubtful origin. No

such wire from the Russian capital has been found in the German archives.

Schulenburg did send a telegram to Berlin from Moscow on the twelfth, but it

merely reported the arrival of the Franco–British military missions and the

friendly toasts exchanged between the Russians and their guests.

Yet there was some basis for the “telegram” with which Hitler and Ribbentrop

had so obviously tried to impress Ciano. On August 12 a teleprint was sent to

Obersalzberg from the Wilhelmstrasse reporting the results of a call which the

Russian chargé had made on Schnurre in Berlin on that day. Astakhov informed

the Foreign Office official that Molotov was now ready to discuss the questions

raised by the Germans, including Poland and other political matters. The Soviet

government proposed Moscow as the place of these negotiations. But, Astakhov

made it clear, they were not to be hurried. He stressed, Schnurre noted in his

report, which apparently was rushed to Obersalzberg, “that the chief emphasis in

his instructions from Molotov lay in the phrase ‘by degrees’ … The discussions

could be undertaken only by degrees. ”1

But Adolf Hitler could not wait for negotiations with Russia “by degrees.” As

he had just revealed to a shocked Ciano, he had set the last possible date for the

onslaught on Poland for September 1, and it was now almost the middle of

August. If he were to successfully sabotage the Anglo–French parleys with the

Russians and swing his own deal with Stalin, it had to be done quickly—not by

stages but in one big leap.

Monday, August 14, was another crucial day. While Ambassador von der

Schulenburg, who obviously had not yet been taken fully into the confidence of

Hitler and Ribbentrop, was writing Weizsaecker from Moscow advising him that

Molotov was “a strange man and a difficult character” and that “I am still of the

opinion that any hasty measures in our relations with the Soviet Union should be

avoided,” he was being sent a “most urgent” telegram from Berlin. 2 It came from

Ribbentrop and it was dispatched from the Wilhelmstrasse (the Foreign Minister

was still at Fuschl) at 10:53 P.M. on August 14. It directed the German

ambassador to call upon Molotov and read him a long communication

“verbatim.”

This, finally, was Hitler’s great bid. German–Russian relations, said

Ribbentrop, had “come to a historic turning point … There exist no real conflicts

of interests between Germany and Russia … It has gone well with both countries

previously when they were friends and badly when they were enemies.”

The crisis which has been produced in Polish–German relations by English policy

[Ribbentrop continued] and the attempts at an alliance which are bound up with that policy,

make a speedy clarification of German–Russian relations necessary. Otherwise matters …

might take a turn which would deprive both Governments of the possibility of restoring

German–Russian friendship and in due course clarifying jointly territorial questions in Eastern

Europe. The leadership of both countries, therefore, should not allow the situation to drift, but

should take action at the proper time. It would be fatal if, through mutual ignorance of views

and intentions, the two peoples should finally drift apart.

The German Foreign Minister, “in the name of the Fuehrer,” was therefore

prepared to act in proper time.

As we have been informed, the Soviet Government also feel the desire for a clarification of

German–Russian relations. Since, however, according to previous experience this clarification

can be achieved only slowly through the usual diplomatic channels, I am prepared to make a

short visit to Moscow in order, in the name of the Fuehrer, to set forth the Fuehrer’s views to

M. Stalin. In my view, only through such a direct discussion can a change be brought about,

and it should not be impossible thereby to lay the foundations for a final settlement of

German–Russian relations.

The British Foreign Secretary had not been willing to go to Moscow, but now

the German Foreign Minister was not only willing but anxious to go—a contrast

which the Nazis calculated quite correctly would make an impression on the

suspicious Stalin.* The Germans saw that it was highly important to get their

message through to the Russian dictator himself. Ribbentrop therefore added an

“annex” to his urgent telegram.

I request [Ribbentrop advised Schulenburg] that you do not give M. Molotov these

instructions in writing, but that they reach M. Stalin in as exact a form as possible and I

authorize you, if the occasion arises, to request from M. Molotov on my behalf an audience

with M. Stalin, so that you may be able to make this important communication directly to him

also. In addition to a conference with Molotov, a detailed discussion with Stalin would be a

condition for my making the trip.3

There was a scarcely disguised bait in the Foreign Minister’s proposal which

the Germans, not without reason, must have thought the Kremlin would rise to.

Reiterating that “there is no question between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea

which cannot be settled to the complete satisfaction of both counties,”

Ribbentrop specified “the Baltic States, Poland, southeastern questions, etc.”

And he spoke of the necessity of “clarifying jointly territorial questions of

Eastern Europe.”

Germany was ready to divide up Eastern Europe, including Poland, with the

Soviet Union. This was a bid which Britain and France could not—and,

obviously, if they could, would not—match. And having made it, Hitler,

apparently confident that it would not be turned down, once more—on the same

day, August 14—called in the commanders in chief of his armed forces to listen

to him lecture on the plans and prospects for war.

THE MILITARY CONFERENCE AT OBERSALZBERG: AUGUST 14*

“The great drama,” Hitler told his select listeners, “is now approaching its

climax.” While political and military successes could not be had without taking

risks, he was certain that Great Britain and France would not fight. For one

thing, Britain “has no leaders of real caliber. The men I got to know at Munich

are not the kind that start a new world war.” As at previous meetings with his

military chiefs, the Fuehrer could not keep his mind off England and he spoke in

considerable detail of her strengths and weaknesses, especially the latter.

England [Halder noted down the words], unlike in 1914, will not allow herself

to blunder into a war lasting for years … Such is the fate of rich countries … Not

even England has the money nowadays to fight a world war. What should

England fight for? You don’t get yourself killed for an ally.

What military measures, Hitler asked, could Britain and France undertake?

Drive against the West Wall unlikely [he answered]. A northward swing

through Belgium and Holland will not bring speedy victory. None of this would

help the Poles.

All these factors argue against England and France entering the war … There

is nothing to force them into it. The men of Munich will not take the risk …

English and French general staffs take a very sober view of the prospects of an

armed conflict and advise against it….

All this supports the conviction that while England may talk big, even recall

her Ambassador, perhaps put a complete embargo on trade, she is sure not to

resort to armed intervention in the conflict.

So Poland, probably, could be taken on alone, but she would have to be

defeated “within a week or two,” Hitler explained, so that the world could be

convinced of her collapse and not try to save her.

Hitler was not quite ready to tell his generals just how far he was going that

very day to make a deal with Russia, though it would have immensely pleased

them, convinced as they were that Germany could not fight a major war on two

fronts. But he told them enough to whet their appetite for more.

“Russia,” he said, “is not in the least disposed to pull chestnuts out of the

fire.” He explained the “loose contacts” with Moscow which had started with the

trade negotiations. He was now considering whether “a negotiator should go to

Moscow and whether this should be a prominent figure.” The Soviet Union, he

declared, felt under no obligation to the West. The Russians understood the

destruction of Poland. They were interested in a “delimitation of spheres of

interest.” The Fuehrer was “inclined to meet them halfway.”

In all of Halder’s voluminous shorthand notes on the meeting there is no

mention that he, the Chief of the Army’s General Staff, or General von

Brauchitsch, its Commander in Chief, or Goering questioned the Fuehrer’s

course in leading Germany into a European conflict—for despite Hitler’s

confidence it was by no means certain that France and Britain would not fight

nor that Russia would stay out. In fact, exactly a week before, Goering had

received a direct warning that the British would certainly fight if Germany

attacked Poland.

Early in July a Swedish friend of his, Birger Dahlerus, had tried to convince

him that British public opinion would not stand for further Nazi aggression and

when the Luftwaffe chief expressed his doubts had arranged for him to meet

privately with a group of seven British businessmen on August 7 in Schleswig-

Holstein, near the Danish border, where Dahlerus had a house. The British

businessmen, both orally and in a written memorandum, did their best to

persuade Goering that Great Britain would stand by its treaty obligations with

Poland should Germany attack. Whether they succeeded is doubtful, though

Dahlerus, a businessman himself, thought so.* This curious Swede, who was to

play a certain role as a peacemaker between Germany and Britain in the next

hectic weeks, certainly had high connections in Berlin and London. He had

access to Downing Street, where on July 20 he had been received by Lord

Halifax, with whom he discussed the coming meeting of British businessmen

with Goering; and soon he would be called in by Hitler and Chamberlain

themselves. But, though well-meaning in his quest to save the peace, he was

naïve and, as a diplomat, dreadfully amateurish. Years later at Nuremberg, Sir

David Maxwell-Fyfe, in a devastating cross-examination, led the Swedish

diplomatic interloper to admit sadly that he had been badly misled by Goering

and Hitler.4

And why did not General Halder, who had been the ringleader in the plot

eleven months before to remove Hitler, speak up on August 14 to oppose the

Fuehrer’s determination to go to war? Or, if he thought that useless, why did he

not renew plans to get rid of the dictator on the same grounds as just before

Munich: that a war now would be disastrous for Germany? Much later, in his

interrogation at Nuremberg, Halder would explain that even at mid-August 1939

he simply did not believe that Hitler would, in the end, risk war, regardless of

what he said. 5 Also, a diary entry of August 15, the day after the meeting with

Hitler at the Berghof, shows that Halder did not believe that France and Britain

would risk war either.

As for Brauchitsch, he was not the man to question what the Fuehrer planned

to do. Hassell, who on August 15 learned of the military conference at the

Obersalzberg from Gisevius, got word through to the Army chief that he was

“absolutely convinced” that Britain and France would intervene if Germany

invaded Poland. “Nothing can be done with him,” Hassell noted sadly in his

diary. “Either he is afraid or he doesn’t understand what it is all about….

Nothing is to be hoped for from the generals … Only a few have kept clear

heads: Halder, Canaris, Thomas. ”6

Only General Thomas, the brilliant head of the Economic and Armaments

Branch of OKW, dared to openly challenge the Fuehrer. A few days after the

August 14 military conference, following a discussion with the now largely

inactive conspirators Goerdeler, Beck and Schacht, General Thomas drew up a

memorandum and personally read it to General Keitel, the Chief of OKW. A

quick war and a quick peace were a complete illusion, he argued. An attack on

Poland would unleash a world war and Germany lacked the raw materials and

the food supplies to fight it. But Keitel, whose only ideas were those he absorbed

from Hitler, scoffed at the very idea of a big war. Britain was too decadent,

France too degenerate, America too uninterested, to fight for Poland, he said.7

And so as the second half of August 1939 began, the German military chiefs

pushed forward with their plans to annihilate Poland and to protect the western

Reich just in case the democracies, contrary to all evidence, did intervene. On

August 15 the annual Nuremberg Party Rally, which Hitler on April 1 had

proclaimed as the “Party Rally of Peace” and which was scheduled to begin the

first week in September, was secretly canceled. A quarter of a million men were

called up for the armies of the west. Advance mobilization orders to the railways

were given. Plans were made to move Army headquarters to Zossen, east of

Berlin. And on the same day, August 15, the Navy reported that the pocket

battleships Graf Spee and Deutschland and twenty-one submarines were ready to

sail for their stations in the Atlantic.

On August 17 General Halder made a strange entry in his diary: “Canaris

checked with Section I [Operations]. Himmler, Heydrich, Obersalzberg: 150

Polish uniforms with accessories for Upper Silesia. ”

What did it mean? It was only after the war that it became clear. It concerned

one of the most bizarre incidents ever arranged by the Nazis. Just as Hitler and

his Army chiefs, it will be remembered, had considered cooking up an

“incident,” such as the assassination of the German minister, in order to justify

their invading Austria and Czechoslovakia, so now they concerned themselves,

as time began to run out, with concocting an incident which would, at least in

their opinion, justify before the world the planned aggression against Poland.

The code name was “Operation Himmler” and the idea was quite simple—and

crude. The S.S.-Gestapo would stage a faked attack on the German radio station

at Gleiwitz, near the Polish border, using condemned concentration camp

inmates outfitted in Polish Army uniforms. Thus Poland could be blamed for

attacking Germany. Early in August Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr

Section of OKW, had received an order from Hitler himself to deliver to

Himmler and Heydrich 150 Polish uniforms and some Polish small arms. This

struck him as a strange business and on August 17 he asked General Keitel about

it. While the spineless OKW Chief declared he did not think much of “actions of

this kind,” he nevertheless told the Admiral that “nothing could be done,” since

the order had come from the Fuehrer.8 Repelled though he was, Canaris obeyed

his instructions and turned the uniforms over to Heydrich.

The chief of the S.D. chose as the man to carry out the operation a young S.S.

secret-service veteran by the name of Alfred Helmut Naujocks. This was not the

first of such assignments given this weird individual nor would it be the last.

Early in March of 1939, shortly before the German occupation of

Czechoslovakia, Naujocks, at Heydrich’s instigation, had busied himself running

explosives into Slovakia, where they were used, as he later testified, to “create

incidents.”

Alfred Naujocks was a typical product of the S.S.-Gestapo, a sort of

intellectual gangster. He had studied engineering at Kiel University, where he

got his first taste of brawling with anti-Nazis; on one occasion he had his nose

bashed in by Communists. He had joined the S.S. in 1931 and was attached to

the S.D. from its inception in 1934. Like so many other young men around

Heydrich he dabbled in what passed as intellectual pursuits in the S.S.

—“history” and “philosophy” especially—while rapidly emerging as a tough

young man (Skorzeny was another) who could be entrusted with the carrying out

of the less savory projects dreamed up by Himmler and Heydrich.* On October

19, 1944, Naujocks deserted to the Americans and at Nuremberg a year later

made a number of sworn affidavits, in one of which he preserved for history the

account of the “incident” which Hitler used to justify his attack on Poland.

On or about August 10, 1939, the chief of the S.D., Heydrich, personally ordered me to

simulate an attack on the radio station near Gleiwitz near the Polish border [Naujocks related

in an affidavit signed in Nuremberg November 20, 1945] and to make it appear that the

attacking force consisted of Poles. Heydrich said: “Practical proof is needed for these attacks

of the Poles for the foreign press as well as for German propaganda.” …

My instructions were to seize the radio station and to hold it long enough to permit a

Polish-speaking German who would be put at my disposal to broadcast a speech in Polish.

Heydrich told me that this speech should state that the time had come for conflict between

Germans and Poles … Heydrich also told me that he expected an attack on Poland by

Germany in a few days.

I went to Gleiwitz and waited there fourteen days … Between the 25th and 31st of August,

I went to see Heinrich Mueller, head of the Gestapo, who was then nearby at Oppeln. In my

presence, Mueller discussed with a man named Mehlhorn* plans for another border incident,

in which it should be made to appear that Polish soldiers were attacking German troops …

Mueller stated that he had 12 to 13 condemned criminals who were to be dressed in Polish

uniforms and left dead on the ground of the scene of the incident to show they had been killed

while attacking. For this purpose they were to be given fatal injections by a doctor employed

by Heydrich. Then they were also to be given gunshot wounds. After the incident members of

the press and other persons were to be taken to the spot of the incident …

Mueller told me he had an order from Heydrich to make one of those criminals available to

me for the action at Gleiwitz. The code name by which he referred to these criminals was

“Canned Goods.” 9

While Himmler, Heydrich and Mueller, at Hitler’s command, were arranging

for the use of “Canned Goods” to fake an excuse for Germany’s aggression

against Poland, the Fuehrer made his first decisive move to deploy his armed

forces for a possibly bigger war. On August 19—another fateful day—orders to

sail were issued to the German Navy. Twenty-one submarines were directed to

put out for positions north and northwest of the British Isles, the pocket

battleship Graf Spee to depart for waters off the Brazilian coast and her sister

ship, the Deutschland, to take a position athwart the British sea lanes in the

North Atlantic. †

The date of the order to dispatch the warships for possible action against

Britain is significant. For on August 19, after a hectic week of frantic appeals

from Berlin, the Soviet government finally gave Hitler the answer he wanted.

THE NAZI-SOVIET TALKS: AUGUST 15–21, 1939

Ambassador von der Schulenburg saw Molotov at 8 P.M. on August 15 and, as

instructed, read to him Ribbentrop’s urgent telegram stating that the Reich

Foreign Minister was prepared to come to Moscow to settle Soviet–German

relations. According to a “most urgent, secret” telegram which the German

envoy got off to Berlin later that night, the Soviet Foreign Commissar received

the information “with the greatest interest” and “warmly welcomed German

intentions of improving relations with the Soviet Union.” However, expert

diplomatic poker player that he was, Molotov gave no sign of being in a hurry.

Such a trip as Ribbentrop proposed, he suggested, “required adequate

preparation in order that the exchange of opinions might lead to results.”

What results? The wily Russian dropped some hints. Would the German

government, he asked, be interested in a nonaggression pact between the two

countries? Would it be prepared to use its influence with Japan to improve

‘Soviet-Japanese relations and “eliminate border conflicts”?—a reference to an

undeclared war which had raged all summer on the Manchurian-Mongolian

frontier. Finally, Molotov asked, how did Germany feel about a joint guarantee

of the Baltic States?

All such matters, he concluded, “must be discussed in concrete terms so that,

should the German Foreign Minister come here, it will not be a matter of an

exchange of opinions but of making concrete decisions.” And he stressed again

that “adequate preparation of the problems is indispensable. ”10

The first suggestion, then, for a Nazi–Soviet nonaggression pact came from

the Russians—at the very moment they were negotiating with France and Great

Britain to go to war, if necessary, to oppose further German aggression. * Hitler

was more than willing to discuss such a pact “in concrete terms,” since its

conclusion would keep Russia out of the war and enable him to attack Poland

without fear of Soviet intervention. And with Russia out of the conflict he was

convinced that Britain and France would get cold feet.

Molotov’s suggestions were just what he had hoped for; they were more

specific and went further than anything which he had dared to propose. There

was only one difficulty. With August running out he could not wait for the slow

Soviet tempo which was indicated by Molotov’s insistence on “adequate

preparation” for the Foreign Minister’s visit to Moscow. Schulenburg’s report on

his conversation with Molotov was telephoned by the Wilhelmstrasse to

Ribbentrop at Fuschl at 6:40 A.M. on August 16 and he hurried across the

mountain to seek further instruction from the Fuehrer at Obersalzberg. By early

afternoon they had drawn up a reply to Molotov and it was rushed off on the

teleprinter to Weizsaecker in Berlin with instructions to wire it “most urgent” to

Moscow immediately.12

The Nazi dictator accepted the Soviet suggestions unconditionally.

Schulenburg was directed by Ribbentrop to see Molotov again and inform him

that Germany is prepared to conclude a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union and, if the

Soviet Government so desire, one which would be undenounceable for a term of twenty-five

years. Further, Germany is ready to guarantee the Baltic States jointly with the Soviet Union.

Finally, Germany is prepared to exercise influence for an improvement and consolidation of

Russian–Japanese relations.

All pretense was now dropped that the Reich government was not in a hurry to

conclude a deal with Moscow.

The Fuehrer [Ribbentrop’s telegram continued] is of the opinion that, in view

of the present situation and of the possibility of the occurrence any day of

serious events (please at this point explain to M. Molotov that Germany is

determined not to endure Polish provocation indefinitely), a basic and rapid

clarification of German–Russian relations, and of each country’s attitude to the

questions of the moment, is desirable.

For these reasons I am prepared to come by airplane to Moscow at any time

after Friday, August 18, to deal, on the basis of full powers from the Fuehrer,

with the entire complex of German—Russian relations and, if the occasion

arises, to sign the appropriate treaties.

Again Ribbentrop added an “annex” of personal instructions to his

ambassador.

I request that you again read these instructions word for word to Molotov and

ask for the views of the Russian Government and of M. Stalin immediately.

Entirely confidentially, it is added for your guidance that it would be of very

special interest to us if my Moscow trip could take place at the end of this week

or the beginning of next week.

The next day, on their mountaintop, Hitler and Ribbentrop waited impatiently

for the response from Moscow. Telegraphic communication between Berlin and

Moscow was by no means instantaneous—a condition of affairs which did not

seem to be realized in the rarefied atmosphere of the Bavarian Alps. By noon of

the seventeenth, Ribbentrop was wiring Schulenburg “most urgent” requesting

“a report by telegram regarding the time when you made your request to be

received by Molotov and the time for which the conversation has been

arranged.” 13 By dinnertime the harassed ambassador was replying, also “most

urgent,” that he had only received the Foreign Minister’s telegram at eleven the

night before, that it was by then too late to conduct any diplomatic business and

that first thing in the morning of today, August 17, he had made an appointment

with Molotov for 8 P.M.14

For the now frantic Nazi leaders it turned out to be a disappointing meeting.

Conscious of Hitler’s eagerness and no doubt fully aware of the reasons for it,

the Russian Foreign Commissar played with the Germans, teasing and taunting

them. After Schulenburg had read to him Ribbentrop’s telegram, Molotov,

taking little note of its contents, produced the Soviet government’s written reply

to the Reich Foreign Minister’s first communication of August 15.

Beginning acidly with a reminder of the Nazi government’s previous hostility

to Soviet Russia, it explained “that until very recently the Soviet Government

have proceeded on the assumption that the German Government are seeking

occasion for clashes with the Soviet Union … Not to mention the fact that the

German Government, by means of the so-called Anti-Comintern Pact, were

endeavoring to create, and have created, the united front of a number of States

against the Soviet Union.” It was for this reason, the note explained, that Russia

“was participating in the organization of a defensive front against [German]

aggression.”

If, however [the note continued], the German Government now undertake a change from

the old policy in the direction of a serious improvement in political relations with the Soviet

Union, the Soviet Government can only welcome such a change, and are, for their part,

prepared to revise their policy in the sense of a serious improvement in respect of Germany.

But, the Russian note insisted, it must be “by serious and practical steps”—not

in one big leap, as Ribbentrop proposed. What steps?

The first step: conclusion of a trade and credit agreement. The second step, “to

be taken shortly thereafter”: conclusion of a nonaggression pact.

Simultaneously with the second step, the Soviets demanded the “conclusion of

a special protocol defining the interests of the contracting parties in this or that

question of foreign policy.” This was more than a hint that in regard to dividing

up Eastern Europe at least, Moscow was receptive to the German view that a

deal was possible.

As for the proposed visit of Ribbentrop, Molotov declared that the Soviet

government was “highly gratified” with the idea, “since the dispatch of such an

eminent politician and statesman emphasized how serious were the intentions of

the German Government. This stood,” he added, “in noteworthy contrast to

England, which, in the person of Strang, had sent only an official of second-class

rank to Moscow. However, the journey by the German Foreign Minister required

thorough preparation. The Soviet Government did not like the publicity that such

a journey would cause. They preferred to do practical work without much

fuss.” 15

Molotov made no mention of Ribbentrop’s urgent, specific proposal that he

come to Moscow over the weekend, and Schulenburg, perhaps somewhat taken

aback by the course of the interview, did not press the matter.

The next day, after the ambassador’s report had been received, Ribbentrop

did. Hitler, it is obvious, was now growing desperate. From his summer

headquarters on the Obersalzberg there went out on the evening of August 18 a

further “most urgent” telegram to Schulenburg signed by Ribbentrop. It arrived

at the German Embassy in Moscow at 5:45 A.M. on the nineteenth and directed

the ambassador to “arrange immediately another conversation with M. Molotov

and do everything possible to see that it takes place without any delay.” There

was no time to lose. “I ask you,” Ribbentrop wired, “to speak to M. Molotov as

follows”:

… We, too, under normal circumstances, would naturally be ready to pursue a realignment

of German–Russian relations through diplomatic channels, and to carry it out in the customary

way. But the present unusual situation makes it necessary, in the opinion of the Fuehrer, to

employ a different method which would lead to quick results.

German–Polish relations are becoming more acute from day to day. We have to take into

account that incidents might occur any day that would make the outbreak of open conflict

unavoidable … The Fuehrer considers it necessary that we be not taken by surprise by the

outbreak of a German–Polish conflict while we are striving for a clarification of German–

Russian relations. He therefore considers a previous clarification necessary, if only to be able

to take into account Russian interests in case of such a conflict, which would, of course, be

difficult without such a clarification.

The ambassador was to say that the “first stage” in the consultations

mentioned by Molotov, the conclusion of the trade agreement, had been

concluded in Berlin this very day (August 18) and that it was now time to

“attack” the second stage. To do this the German Foreign Minister proposed his

“immediate departure for Moscow,” to which he would come “with full powers

from the Fuehrer, authorizing me to settle fully and conclusively the total

complex of problems.” In Moscow, Ribbentrop added, he would “be in a

position … to take Russian wishes into account.”

What wishes? The Germans now no longer beat around the bush.

I should also be in a position [Ribbentrop continued] to sign a special protocol regulating

the interests of both parties in questions of foreign policy of one kind or another; for instance,

the settlement of spheres of interest in the Baltic area. Such a settlement will only be possible,

however, in an oral discussion.

This time the ambassador must not take a Russian “No.”

Please emphasize [Ribbentrop concluded] that German foreign policy has today reached a

historic turning point … Please press for a rapid realization of my journey and oppose

appropriately any fresh Russian objections. In this connection you must keep in mind the

decisive fact that an early outbreak of open German–Polish conflict is possible and that we,

therefore, have the greatest interest in having my visit to Moscow take place immediately.16

August 19 was the decisive day. Orders for the German submarines and

pocket battleships to sail for British waters were being held up until word came

from Moscow. The warships would have to get off at once if they were to reach

their appointed stations by Hitler’s target date for the beginning of the war,

September 1—only thirteen days away. The two great army groups designated

for the onslaught on Poland would have to be deployed immediately.

The tension in Berlin and especially on the Obersalzberg, where Hitler and

Ribbentrop waited nervously for Moscow’s decision, was becoming almost

unbearable. The Foreign Office dispatches and memoranda that day disclosed

the jittery feelings in the Wilhelmstrasse. Dr. Schnurre reported that the

discussions with the Russians on the trade agreement had ended the previous

evening “with complete agreement” but that the Soviets were stalling on signing

it. The signature, he said, was to have taken place at noon this day, August 19,

but at noon the Russians had telephoned saying they had to await instructions

from Moscow. “It is obvious,” Schnurre reported, “that they have received

instructions from Moscow to delay the conclusion of the treaty for political

reasons.” 17 From the Obersalzberg, Ribbentrop wired Schulenburg “most

urgent” to be sure to report anything Molotov said or any sign of “Russian

intentions” by telegram, but the only wire received from the ambassador during

the day was the text of a denial by Tass, the Soviet news agency, in Moscow that

the negotiations between the Russian and Anglo–French military delegations had

become snarled over the Far East. However, the Tass démenti added that there

were differences between the delegations on “entirely different matters.” This

was a signal to Hitler that there was still time—and hope.

And then at 7:10 P.M. on August 19 came the anxiously awaited telegram:

SECRET

MOST URGENT

The Soviet Government agree to the Reich Foreign Minister coming to Moscow one week

after the announcement of the signature of the economic agreement. Molotov stated that if the

conclusion of the economic agreement is made public tomorrow, the Reich Foreign Minister

could arrive in Moscow on August 26 or 27.

Molotov handed me a draft of a nonaggression pact.

A detailed account of the two conversations I had with Molotov today, as well as the text

of the Soviet draft, follows by telegram at once.

SCHULENBURG18

The first talk in the Kremlin, which began at 2 P.M. on the nineteenth and

lasted an hour, did not, the ambassador reported, go very well. The Russians, it

seemed, could not be stampeded into receiving Hitler’s Foreign Minister.

“Molotov persisted in his opinion,” Schulenburg wired, “that for the present it

was not possible even approximately to fix the time of the journey since

thorough preparations would be required … To the reasons I repeatedly and very

emphatically advanced for the need of haste, Molotov rejoined that, so far, not

even the first step—the concluding of the economic agreement—had been taken.

First of all, the economic agreement had to be signed and published, and achieve

its effect abroad. Then would come the turn of the nonaggression pact and

protocol.

“Molotov remained apparently unaffected by my protests, so that the first

conversation closed with a declaration by Molotov that he had imparted to me

the views of the Soviet Government and had nothing to add to them.”

But he had something, shortly.

“Hardly half an hour after the conversation had ended,” Schulenburg reported,

“Molotov sent me word asking me to call on him again at the Kremlin at 4:30

P.M. He apologized for putting me to the trouble and explained that he had

reported to the Soviet Government.”

Whereupon the Foreign Commissar handed the surprised but happy

ambassador a draft of the nonaggression pact and told him that Ribbentrop could

arrive in Moscow on August 26 or 27 if the trade treaty were signed and made

public tomorrow.

“Molotov did not give reasons,” Schulenburg added in his telegram, “for his

sudden change of mind. I assume that Stalin intervened.” 19

The assumption was undoubtedly correct. According to Churchill, the Soviet

intention to sign a pact with Germany was announced to the Politburo by Stalin

on the evening of August 19. 20 A little earlier that day—between 3 P.M. and 4:30

P.M.—it is clear from Schulenburg’s dispatch, he Had communicated his fateful

decision to Molotov.

Exactly three years later, in August 1942, “in the early hours of the morning,”

as Churchill later reported, the Soviet dictator gave to the British Prime Minister,

then on a mission to Moscow, some of the reasons for his brazen move.21

We formed the impression [said Stalin] that the British and French Governments were not

resolved to go to war if Poland were attacked, but that they hoped the diplomatic line-up of

Britain, France and Russia would deter Hitler. We were sure it would not. “How many

divisions,” Stalin had asked, “will France send against Germany on mobilization?” The

answer was: “About a hundred.” He then asked: “How many will England send?” The answer

was: “Two, and two more later.” “Ah, two, and two more later,” Stalin had repeated. “Do you

know,” he asked, “how many divisions we shall have to put on the Russian front if we go to

war with Germany?” There was a pause. “More than three hundred.”

In his dispatch reporting the outcome of his conversations with Molotov on

August 19, Schulenburg had added that his attempt to induce the Foreign

Commissar to accept an earlier date for Ribbentrop’s journey to Moscow “was,

unfortunately, unsuccessful.”

But for the Germans it had to be made successful. The whole timetable for the

invasion of Poland, indeed the question of whether the attack could take place at

all in the brief interval before the autumn rains, depended upon it. If Ribbentrop

were not received in Moscow before August 26 or 27 and then if the Russians

stalled a bit, as the Germans feared, the target date of September 1 could not be

kept.

At this crucial stage, Adolf Hitler himself intervened with Stalin. Swallowing

his pride, he personally begged the Soviet dictator, whom he had so often and for

so long maligned, to receive his Foreign Minister in Moscow at once. His

telegram to Stalin was rushed off to Moscow at 6:45 P.M. on Sunday, August 20,

just twelve hours after the receipt of Schulenburg’s dispatch. The Fuehrer

instructed the ambassador to hand it to Molotov “at once.”

M. STALIN, MOSCOW,

I sincerely welcome the signing of the new German–Soviet Commercial Agreement as the

first step in the reshaping of German–Soviet relations.*

The conclusion of a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union means to me the

establishment of German policy for a long time. Germany thereby resumes a political course

that was beneficial to both States during bygone centuries …

I accept the draft of the nonaggression pact that your Foreign Minister, M. Molotov,

handed over, but consider it urgently necessary to clarify the questions connected with it as

soon as possible.

The substance of the supplementary protocol desired by the Soviet Union can, I am

convinced, be clarified in the shortest possible time if a responsible German statesman can

come to Moscow himself to negotiate. Otherwise the Government of the Reich are not clear as

to how the supplementary protocol could be cleared up and settled in a short time.

The tension between Germany and Poland has become intolerable … A crisis may arise

any day. Germany is determined from now on to look after the interests of the Reich with all

the means at her disposal.

In my opinion, it is desirable in view of the intentions of the two States to enter into a new

relationship to each other, not to lose any time. I therefore again propose that you receive my

Foreign Minister on Tuesday, August 22, but at the latest on Wednesday, August 23. The

Reich Foreign Minister has the fullest powers to draw up and sign the nonaggression pact as

well as the protocol. A longer stay by the Foreign Minister in Moscow than one to two days at

most is impossible in view of the international situation. I should be glad to receive your early

answer.

ADOLF HITLER22

During the next twenty-four hours, from the evening of Sunday, August 20,

when Hitler’s appeal to Stalin went out over the wires to Moscow, until the

following evening, the Fuehrer was in a state bordering on collapse. He could

not sleep. In the middle of the night he telephoned Goering to tell of his worries

about Stalin’s reaction to his message and to fret over the delays in Moscow. At

3 A.M. on the twenty-first, the Foreign Office received a “most urgent” wire from

Schulenburg saying that Hitler’s telegram, of which Weizsaecker had advised

him earlier, had not yet arrived. “Official telegrams from Berlin to Moscow,” the

ambassador reminded the Foreign Office, “take four to five hours, inclusive of

two hours’ difference in time. To this must be added the time for deciphering.” 23

At 10:15 A.M. on Monday, August 21, the anxious Ribbentrop got off an urgent

wire to Schulenburg: “Please do your utmost to ensure that the journey

materializes. Date as in telegram. ”24 Shortly after noon, the ambassador advised

Berlin: “I am to see Molotov at 3 P.M. today.” 25

Finally, at 9:35 P.M. on August 21, Stalin’s reply came over the wires in

Berlin.

TO THE CHANCELLOR OF THE GERMAN REICH,

A. HITLER:

I thank you for the letter. I hope that the German–Soviet nonaggression pact will bring

about a decided turn for the better in the political relations between our countries.

The peoples of our countries need peaceful relations with each other. The assent of the

German Government to the conclusion of a nonaggression pact provides the foundation for

eliminating the political tension and for the establishment of peace and collaboration between

our countries.

The Soviet Government have instructed me to inform you that they agree to Herr von

Ribbentrop’s arriving in Moscow on August 23.

J. STALIN26

For sheer cynicism the Nazi dictator had met his match in the Soviet despot.

The way was now open to them to get together to dot the i’s and cross the t’s on

one of the crudest deals of this shabby epoch.

Stalin’s reply was transmitted to the Fuehrer at the Berghof at 10:30 P.M. A

few minutes later, this writer remembers—shortly after 11 P.M.—a musical

program on the German radio was suddenly interrupted and a voice came on to

announce, “The Reich government and the Soviet government have agreed to

conclude a pact of nonaggression with each other. The Reich Minister for

Foreign Affairs will arrive in Moscow on Wednesday, August 23, for the

conclusion of the negotiations.”

The next day, August 22, 1939, Hitler, having been assured by Stalin himself

that Russia would be a friendly neutral, once more convoked his top military

commanders to the Obersalzberg, lectured them on his own greatness and on the

need for them to wage war brutally and without pity and apprised them that he

probably would order the attack on Poland to begin four days hence, on

Saturday, August 26—six days ahead of schedule. Stalin, the Fuehrer’s mortal

enemy, had made this possible.

THE MILITARY CONFERENCE OF AUGUST 22, 1939

The generals found Hitler in one of his most arrogant and uncompromising

moods. * “I have called you together,” he told them, “to give you a picture of the

political situation in order that you may have some insight into the individual

factors on which I have based my irrevocable decision to act and in order to

strengthen your confidence. After that we shall discuss military details.” First of

all, he said, there were two personal considerations.

My own personality and that of Mussolini.

Essentially, all depends on me, on my existence, because of my political talents.

Furthermore, the fact that probably no one will ever again have the confidence of the whole

German people as 1 have. There will probably never again in the future be a man with more

authority than I have. My existence is therefore a factor of great value. But I can be eliminated

at any time by a criminal or a lunatic.

The second personal factor is the Duce. His existence is also decisive. If something happens

to him, Italy’s loyalty to the alliance will no longer be certain. The Italian Court is

fundamentally opposed to the Duce.

Franco too was a help. He would assure Spain’s “benevolent neutrality.” As

for “the other side,” he assured his listeners, “there is no outstanding personality

in England or France.”

For what must have been a period of several hours, broken only by a late

lunch, the demonic dictator rambled on, and there is no evidence from the

records that a single general, admiral or Air Force commander dared to interrupt

him to question his judgment or even to challenge his lies. He had made his

decision in the spring, he said, that a conflict with Poland was inevitable, but he

had thought that first he would turn against the West. In that case, however, it

became “clear” to him that Poland would attack Germany. Therefore she must

be liquidated now.

The time to fight a war, anyway, had come.

For us it is easy to make the decision. We have nothing to lose; we can only gain. Our

economic situation is such that we cannot hold out more than a few years. Goering can

confirm this. We have no other choice, we must act …

Besides the personal factor, the political situation is favorable to us; in the Mediterranean,

rivalry among Italy, France and England; in the Orient, tension …

England is in great danger. France’s position has also deteriorated. Decline in birth rate …

Yugoslavia carries the germ of collapse … Rumania is weaker than before … Since Kemal’s

death, Turkey has been ruled by small minds, unsteady, weak men.

All these fortunate circumstances will not prevail in two to three years. No one knows how

long I shall live. Therefore a showdown, which it would not be safe to put off for four to five

years, had better take place now.

Such was the Nazi Leader’s fervid reasoning.

He thought it “highly probable” that the West would not fight, but the risk

nevertheless had to be accepted. Had he not taken risks—in occupying the

Rhineland when the generals wanted to pull back, in taking Austria, the

Sudetenland and the rest of Czechoslovakia? “Hannibal at Cannae, Frederick the

Great at Leuthen, and Hindenburg and Ludendorff at Tannenberg, ” he said,

“took chances. So now we also must take risks which can only be mastered by

iron determination.” There must be no weakening.

It has done much damage that many reluctant Germans in high places spoke and wrote to

Englishmen after the solution of the Czech question. The Fuehrer carried his point when you

lost your nerve and capitulated too soon.

Halder, Witzleben and Thomas and perhaps other generals who had been in

on the Munich conspiracy must have winced at this. Hitler obviously knew more

than they had realized.

At any rate, it was now time for them all to show their fighting qualities.

Hitler had created Greater Germany, he reminded them, “by political bluff.” It

had now become necessary to “test the military machine. The Army must

experience actual battle before the big final showdown in the West.” Poland

offered such an opportunity.

Coming back to England and France:

The West has only two possibilities to fight against us:

1. Blockade: It will not be effective because of our self-sufficiency and our

sources of aid in the East.

2. Attack from the West from the Maginot Line. I consider this impossible.

Another possibility is the violation of Dutch, Belgium and Swiss neutrality.

England and France will not violate the neutrality of these countries. Actually

they cannot help Poland.

Would it be a long war?

No one is counting on a long war. If Herr von Brauchitsch had told me that I would need

four years to conquer Poland I would have replied, It cannot be done. It is nonsense to say that

England wants to wage a long war.

Having disposed, to his own satisfaction, at least, of Poland, Britain and

France, Hitler pulled out his ace card. He turned to Russia.

The enemy had another hope, that Russia would become our enemy after the conquest of

Poland. The enemy did not count on my great power of resolution. Our enemies are little

worms. I saw them at Munich.

I was convinced that Stalin would never accept the English offer. Only a blind optimist

could believe that Stalin would be so crazy as not to see through England’s intentions. Russia

has no interest in maintaining Poland … Litvinov’s dismissal was decisive. It came to me like

a cannon shot as a sign of a change in Moscow toward the Western Powers.

I brought about the change toward Russia gradually. In connection with the commercial

treaty we got into political conversations. Finally a proposition came from the Russians for a

nonaggression treaty. Four days ago I took a special step which brought it about that Russia

announced yesterday that she is ready to sign. The personal contact with Stalin is established.

The day after tomorrow Ribbentrop will conclude the treaty. Now Poland is in the position in

which I wanted her … A beginning has been made for the destruction of England’s hegemony.

The way is open for the soldier, now that I have made the political preparations.

The way would be open for the soldiers, that is, if Chamberlain didn’t pull

another Munich. “I am only afraid,” Hitler told his warriors, “that some

Schweinehund* will make a proposal for mediation.”

At this point the meeting broke up for lunch, but not until Goering had

expressed thanks to the Fuehrer for pointing the way and had assured him that

the armed services would do their duty.†

The afternoon lecture was devoted by Hitler mainly to bucking up his military

chiefs and trying to steel them for the task ahead. The rough jottings of all three

records of the talk indicate its nature.

The most iron determination on our part. No shrinking back from anything. Everyone must

hold the view that we have been determined to fight the Western powers right from the start. A

life-and-death struggle…. A long period of peace would not do us any good … A manly

bearing … We have the better men … On the opposite side they are weaker … In 1918 the

nation collapsed because the spiritual prerequisites were insufficient. Frederick the Great

endured only because of his fortitude.

The destruction of Poland has priority. The aim is to eliminate active forces, not to reach a

definite line. Even if war breaks out in the West, the destruction of Poland remains the primary

objective. A quick decision, in view of the season.

I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war—never mind whether it is plausible

or not. The victor will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and

waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory.

Close your hearts to pity! Act brutally! Eighty million people must obtain what is their

right … The stronger man is right … Be harsh and remorseless! Be steeled against all signs of

compassion! … Whoever has pondered over this world order knows that its meaning lies in

the success of the best by means of force…

Having thundered such Nietzschean exhortations, the Fuehrer, who had

worked himself up to a fine fit of Teutonic fury, calmed down and delivered a

few directives for the campaign ahead. Speed was essential. He had “unshakable

faith” in the German soldier. If any crises developed they would be due solely to

the commanders’ losing their nerve. The first aim was to drive wedges from the

southeast to the Vistula, and from the north to the Narew and the Vistula.

Military operations, he insisted, must not be influenced by what he might do

with Poland after her defeat. As to that he was vague. The new German frontier,

he said, would be based on “sound principles.” Possibly he would set up a small

Polish buffer state between Germany and Russia.

The order for the start of hostilities, Hitler concluded, would be given later,

probably for Saturday morning, August 26.

The next day, the twenty-third, after a meeting of the OKW section chiefs,

General Halder noted in his diary: “Y Day definitely set for the 26th (Saturday).”

ALLIED STALEMATE IN MOSCOW

By the middle of August the military conversations in Moscow between the

Western democracies and the Soviet Union had come to a virtual standstill—and

for this the intransigence of the Poles was largely to blame. The Anglo–French

military missions, it will be remembered, after taking a slow boat to Leningrad,

had arrived in Moscow on August 11, exactly one week after the frustrated Mr.

Strang had left the Russian capital, obviously relieved to be able to turn over to

the generals and admirals the difficult and unpleasant job of trying to negotiate

with the Russians. *

What now had to be worked out hurriedly was a military convention which

would spell out in detail just how and where, and with what, Nazi armed force

could be met. But as the confidential British minutes of the day-to-day military

conversations and the reports of the British negotiators reveal29 the Anglo–

French military team had been sent to Moscow to discuss not details but rather

“general principles.” The Russians, however, insisted on getting down at once to

hard, specific and—in the Allied view—awkward facts, and Voroshilov’s

response to the Allied declaration of principles made at the first meeting by

General Doumenc was that they were “too abstract and immaterial and do not

oblige anyone to do anything … We are not gathered here,” he declared coolly,

“to make abstract declarations, but to work out a complete military convention.”

The Soviet Marshal posed some very definite questions: Was there any treaty

which defined what action Poland would take? How many British troops could

reinforce the French Army on the outbreak of the war? What would Belgium do?

The answers he got were not very reassuring. Doumenc said he had no

knowledge of Polish plans. General Heywood answered that the British

envisaged “a first contingent of sixteen divisions, ready for service in the early

stages of a war, followed later by a second contingent of sixteen divisions.”

Pressed by Voroshilov to reveal how many British troops there would be

immediately on the outbreak of war, Heywood replied, “At the moment there are

five regular divisions and one mechanized division in England.” These paltry

figures came as an unpleasant surprise to the Russians, who were prepared, they

said, to deploy 120 infantry divisions against an aggressor in the west at the very

outbreak of hostilities.

As for Belgium, General Doumenc answered the Russian question by saying

that “French troops cannot enter unless and until they are asked to, but France is

ready to answer any call.”

This reply led to the crucial question before the military negotiators in

Moscow and one which the British and French had been anxious to avoid.

During the very first meeting and again at a critical session on August 14,

Marshal Voroshilov insisted that the essential question was whether Poland was

willing to permit Soviet troops to enter her territory to meet the Germans. If not,

how could the Allies prevent the German Army from quickly overrunning

Poland? Specifically—on the fourteenth—he asked, “Do the British and French

general staffs think that the Red Army can move across Poland, and in particular

through the Vilna gap and across Galicia in order to make contact with the

enemy?”

This was the core of the matter. As Seeds wired London, the Russians had

now

raised the fundamental problem, on which the military talks will succeed or fail and which

has indeed been at the bottom of all our difficulties since the very beginning of the political

conversations, namely, how to reach any useful agreement with the Soviet Union as long as

this country’s neighbors maintain a sort of boycott which is only to be broken … when it is too

late.

If the question came up—and how could it help coming up?—Admiral Drax

had been instructed by the British government on how to handle it. The

instructions, revealed in the confidential British papers, seem unbelievably naïve

when read today. The “line of argument” he was to take in view of the refusal of

Poland and Rumania “even to consider plans for possible co-operation” was:

An invasion of Poland and Rumania would greatly alter their outlook. Moreover, it would

be greatly to Russia’s disadvantage that Germany should occupy a position right up to the

Russian frontier … It is in Russia’s own interest therefore that she should have plans ready to

help both Poland and Rumania should these countries be invaded.

If the Russians propose that the British and French governments should communicate to

the Polish, Roumanian or Baltic States proposals involving co-operation with the Soviet

Government or General Staff, the Delegation should not commit themselves but refer home.

And this is what they did.

At the August 14 session Voroshilov demanded “straightforward answers” to

his questions. “Without an exact and unequivocal answer,” he said, “continuance

of the military conversations would be useless … The Soviet Military Mission,”

he added, “cannot recommend to its Government to take part in an enterprise so

obviously doomed to failure.”

From Paris General Gamelin counseled General Doumenc to try to steer the

Russians off the subject. But they were not to be put off. 30

The meeting of August 14, as General Doumenc later reported, was dramatic.

The British and French delegates were cornered and they knew it. They tried to

evade the issue as best they could. Drax and Doumenc asserted they were sure

the Poles and Rumanians would ask for Russian aid as soon as they were

attacked. Doumenc was confident they would “implore the Marshal to support

them.” Drax thought it was “inconceivable” that they should not ask for Soviet

help. He added—not very diplomatically, it would seem—that “if they did not

ask for help when necessary and allow themselves to be overrun, it may be

expected that they would become German provinces.” This was the last thing the

Russians wanted, for it meant the presence of the Nazi armies on the Soviet

border, and Voroshilov made a special point of the Admiral’s unfortunate

remark.

Finally, the uncomfortable Anglo–French representatives contended that

Voroshilov had raised political questions which they were not competent to

handle. Drax declared that since Poland was a sovereign state, its government

would first have to sanction the entry of Russian troops. But since this was a

political matter, it would have to be settled by the governments. He suggested

that the Soviet government put its questions to the Polish government. The

Russian delegation agreed that this was a political matter. But it insisted that the

British and French governments must put the question to the Poles and pressure

them to come to reason.

Were the Russians, in view of their dealings with the Germans at this moment,

negotiating in good faith with the Franco–British military representatives? Or

did they, as the British and French foreign offices, not to mention Admiral Drax,

later concluded, insist on the right to deploy their troops through Poland merely

to stall the talks until they saw whether they could make a deal with Hitler?*

In the beginning, the British and French confidential sources reveal, the

Western Allies did think that the Soviet military delegation was negotiating in

good faith—in fact, that it took its job much too seriously. On August 13, after

two days of staff talks, Ambassador Seeds wired London that the Russian

military chiefs seemed really “to be out for business.” As a result, Admiral

Drax’s instructions to “go very slowly” were changed and on August 15 he was

told by the British government to support Doumenc in bringing the military talks

to a conclusion “as soon as possible.” His restrictions on confiding confidential

military information to the Russians were partially lifted.

Unlike the British Admiral’s original instructions to stall, those given General

Doumenc by Premier Daladier personally had been to try to conclude a military

convention with Russia at the earliest possible moment. Despite British fears of

leaks to the Germans, Doumenc on the second day of the meetings had confided

to the Russians such “highly secret figures,” as he termed them, on the strength

of the French Army that the Soviet members promised “to forget” them as soon

as the meeting was concluded.

As late as August 17, after he and Drax had waited vainly for three days for

instructions from their governments as to how to reply to the Polish question,

General Doumenc telegraphed Paris: “The U.S.S.R. wants a military pact … She

does not want us to give her a piece of paper without substantial undertakings.

Marshal Voroshilov has stated that all problems … would be tackled without

difficulty as soon as what he called the crucial question was settled.” Doumenc

strongly urged Paris to get Warsaw to agree to accepting Russian help.

Contrary to a widespread belief at the time, not only in Moscow but in the

Western capitals, that the British and French governments did nothing to induce

the Poles to agree to Soviet troops meeting the Germans on Polish soil, it is clear

from documents recently released that London and Paris went quite far—but not

quite far enough. It is also clear that the Poles reacted with unbelievable

stupidity. 31

On August 18, after the first Anglo–French attempt was made in Warsaw to

open the eyes of the Poles, Foreign Minister Beck told the French ambassador,

Léon Noël, that the Russians were “of no military value,” and General

Stachiewicz, Chief of the Polish General Staff, backed him up by declaring that

he saw “no benefit to be gained by Red Army troops operating in Poland.”

The next day both the British and French ambassadors saw Beck again and

urged him to agree to the Russian proposal. The Polish Foreign Minister stalled,

but promised to give them a formal reply the next day. The Anglo–French

démarche in Warsaw came as the result of a conversation earlier on the

nineteenth in Paris between Bonnet, the French Foreign Minister, and the British

chargé d’affaires. Somewhat to the Briton’s surprise, this archappeaser of Hitler

was now quite aroused at the prospect of losing Russia as an ally because of

Polish stubbornness.

It would be disastrous [Bonnet told him] if, in consequence of a Polish refusal, the Russian

negotiations were to break down … It was an untenable position for the Poles to take up in

refusing the only immediate efficacious help that could reach them in the event of a German

attack. It would put the British and French Governments in an almost impossible position if

we had to ask our respective countries to go to war in defense of Poland, which had refused

this help.

If this were so—and there is no doubt that it was—why then did not the

British and French governments at this crucial moment put the ultimate pressure

on Warsaw and simply say that unless the Polish government agreed to accept

Russian help Britain and France could see no use of themselves going to war to

aid Poland? The formal Anglo–Polish mutual-security treaty had not yet been

signed. Could Warsaw’s acceptance of Russian military backing not be made a

condition of concluding that pact?*

In his talk with the British chargé in Paris on August 19, Bonnet suggested

this, but the government in London frowned upon such a “maneuver,” as

Downing Street called it. To such an extreme Chamberlain and Halifax would

not go.

On the morning of August 20 the Polish Chief of Staff informed the British

military attaché in Warsaw that “in no case would the admission of Soviet troops

into Poland be agreed to.” And that evening Beck formally rejected the Anglo–

French request. The same evening Halifax, through his ambassador in Warsaw,

urged the Polish Foreign Minister to reconsider, emphasizing in strong terms that

the Polish stand was “wrecking” the military talks in Moscow. But Beck was

obdurate. “I do not admit,” he told the French ambassador, “that there can be any

kind of discussion whatsoever concerning the use of part of our territory by

foreign troops. We have not got a military agreement with the U.S.S.R. We do

not want one.”

Desperate at such a display of blind stubbornness on the part of the Polish

government, Premier Daladier, according to an account he gave to the French

Constituent Assembly on July 18, 1946, took matters in his own hands. After

once more appealing to the Poles to be realistic, he telegraphed General

Doumenc on the morning of August 21 authorizing him to sign a military

convention with Russia on the best terms he could get, with the provision,

however, that it must be approved by the French government. The French

ambassador, Paul-Emile Naggiar, was at the same time instructed by Bonnet,

according to the latter’s subsequent account, to tell Molotov that France agreed

“in principle” to the passage of Soviet troops through Poland if the Germans

attacked.

But this was only an idle gesture, as long as the Poles had not agreed—and, as

we know now, a futile gesture in view of the state of Russo–German dealings.

Doumenc did not receive Daladier’s telegram until late in the evening of August

21. When he brought it to the attention of Voroshilov on the evening of the next

day—the eve of Ribbentrop’s departure for Moscow—the Soviet Marshal was

highly skeptical. He demanded to see the French General’s authorization for

saying—as Doumenc had—that the French government had empowered him to

sign a military pact permitting the passage of Russian troops through Poland.

Doumenc, obviously, declined. Voroshilov next wanted to know what the British

response was and whether the consent of Poland had been obtained. These were

embarrassing questions and Doumenc merely answered that he had no

information.

But neither the questions nor the answers had by this time any reality. They

were being put too late. Ribbentrop was already on his way to Moscow. The trip

had been announced publicly the night before, and also its purpose: to conclude

a nonaggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Voroshilov, who seems to have developed a genuine liking for the French

General, tried gently to let him know that their contacts were about to end.

I fear one thing [Voroshilov said]. The French and English sides have allowed

the political and military discussions to drag on too long. That is why we must

not exclude the possibility, during this time, of certain political events. *

RIBBENTROP IN MOSCOW: AUGUST 23, 1939

Those “certain political events” now took place.

Armed with full powers in writing from Hitler to conclude a nonaggression

treaty “and other agreements” with the Soviet Union, which would become

effective as soon as they were signed, Ribbentrop set off by plane for Moscow

on August 22. The large German party spent the night at Koenigsberg in East

Prussia, where the Nazi Foreign Minister, according to Dr. Schmidt, worked

throughout the night, constantly telephoning to Berlin and Berchtesgaden and

making copious notes for his talks with Stalin and Molotov.

The two large Condor transport planes carrying the German delegation arrived

in Moscow at noon on August 23, and after a hasty meal at the embassy

Ribbentrop hurried off to the Kremlin to confront the Soviet dictator and his

Foreign Commissar. This first meeting lasted three hours and, as Ribbentrop

advised Hitler by “most urgent” wire, it went well for the Germans. 32 Judging by

the Foreign Minister’s dispatch, there was no trouble at all in reaching

agreement on the terms of a nonaggression pact which would keep the Soviet

Union out of Hitler’s war. In fact the only difficulty, he reported, was a distinctly

minor one concerning the division of spoils. The Russians, he said, were

demanding that Germany recognize the small ports of Libau and Windau in

Latvia “as being in their sphere of interest.” Since all of Latvia was to be placed

on the Soviet side of the line dividing the interests of the two powers, this

demand presented no problem and Hitler quickly agreed. Ribbentrop also

advised the Fuehrer after the first conference that “the signing of a secret

protocol on the delimitation of mutual spheres of interest in the whole Eastern

area is contemplated.”

The whole works—the nonaggression treaty and the secret protocol—were

signed at a second meeting at the Kremlin later that evening. So easily had the

Germans and Russians come to agreement that this convivial session, which

lasted into the small hours of the following morning, was taken up mostly not by

any hard bargaining but with a warm and friendly discussion of the state of the

world, country by country, and with the inevitable, effusive toasts customary at

gala gatherings in the Kremlin. A secret German memorandum by a member of

the German delegation who was present has recorded the incredible scene.33

To Stalin’s questions about the ambitions of Germany’s partners, Italy and

Japan, Ribbentrop gave breezy, reassuring answers. As to England the Soviet

dictator and the Nazi Foreign Minister, who was now on his best behavior, found

themselves at once in accord. The British military mission in Moscow, Stalin

confided to his guest, “had never told the Soviet government what it really

wanted.” Ribbentrop responded by emphasizing that Britain had always tried to

disrupt good relations between Germany and the Soviet Union. “England is

weak,” he boasted, “and wants to let others fight for her presumptuous claim to

world dominion.”

“Stalin eagerly concurred,” says the German memorandum, and he remarked:

“If England dominated the world, that was due to the stupidity of the other

countries that always let themselves be bluffed.”

By this time the Soviet ruler and Hitler’s Foreign Minister were getting along

so splendidly that mention of the Anti-Comintern Pact no longer embarrassed

them. Ribbentrop explained again that the pact had been directed not against

Russia but against the Western democracies. Stalin interposed to remark that

“the Anti-Comintern had in fact frightened principally the City of London [i.e.,

the British financiers] and the English shopkeepers.”

At this juncture, the German memorandum reveals, Ribbentrop felt himself in

such good humor at Stalin’s accommodating manner that he even tried to crack a

joke or two—a remarkable feat for so humorless a man.

The Reich Foreign Minister [the memorandum continues] remarked jokingly that M. Stalin

was surely less frightened by the Anti-Comintern Pact than the City of London and the English

shopkeepers. What the German people thought of this matter was evident from a joke, which

had originated with the Berliners, well known for their wit and humor, that Stalin will yet join

the Anti-Comintern Pact himself.

Finally the Nazi Foreign Minister dwelt on how warmly the German people

welcomed an understanding with Russia. “M. Stalin replied,” says the German

record, “that he really believed this. The Germans desired peace.”

Such hokum grew worse as the time for toasts arrived.

M. Stalin spontaneously proposed a toast to the Fuehrer:

“I know how much the German nation loves its Fuehrer. I should therefore like to drink to

his health.”

M. Molotov drank to the health of the Reich Foreign Minister … MM. Molotov and Stalin

drank repeatedly to the Nonaggression Pact, the new era of German–Russian relations, and to

the German nation.

The Reich Foreign Minister in turn proposed a toast to M. Stalin, toasts to the Soviet

Government, and to a favorable development of relations between Germany and the Soviet

Union.

And yet despite such warm exchanges between those who until recently had

been such mortal enemies, Stalin appears to have had mental reservations about

the Nazis’ keeping the pact. As Ribbentrop was leaving, he took him aside and

said, “The Soviet Government take the new pact very seriously. He could

guarantee on his word of honor that the Soviet Union would not betray its

partner.”

What had the new partners signed?

The published treaty carried an undertaking that neither power would attack

the other. Should one of them become “the object of belligerent action” by a

third power, the other party would “in no manner lend its support to this Third

Power.” Nor would either Germany or Russia “join any grouping of Powers

whatsoever which is aimed directly or indirectly at the other Party.” *

Thus Hitler got what he specifically wanted: an immediate agreement by the

Soviet Union not to join Britain and France if they honored their treaty

obligations to come to the aid of Poland in case she were attacked. *

The price he paid was set down in the “Secret Additional Protocol” to the

treaty:

On the occasion of the signature of the Nonaggression Treaty between Germany and the

Soviet Union the undersigned plenipotentiaries discussed in strictly confidential conversations

the question of the delimitation of their respective spheres of interest in Eastern Europe.

1. In the event of a territorial and political transformation in the territories belonging to the

Baltic States (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), the northern frontier of Lithuania shall

represent the frontier of the spheres of interest both of Germany and the U.S.S.R.

2. In the event of a territorial and political transformation of the territories belonging to the

Polish State, the spheres of interest of both Germany and the U.S.S.R. shall be bounded

approximately by the line of the rivers Narew, Vistula and San.

The question whether the interests of both Parties make the maintenance of an independent

Polish State appear desirable and how the frontiers of this State should be drawn can be

definitely determined only in the course of further political developments.

In any case both Governments will resolve this question by means of a friendly

understanding.

Once again Germany and Russia, as in the days of the German kings and

Russian emperors, had agreed to partition Poland. And Hitler had given Stalin a

free hand in the eastern Baltic.

Finally, in Southeastern Europe, the Russians emphasized their interest in

Bessarabia, which the Soviet Union had lost to Rumania in 1919, and the

Germans declared their disinterest in this territory—a concession Ribbentrop

later was to regret.

“This protocol,” the document concluded, “will be treated by both parties as

strictly secret.” 36

As a matter of fact, its contents became known only after the war with the

capture of the secret German archives.

On the following day, August 24, while the jubilant Ribbentrop was winging

his way back to Berlin, the Allied military missions in Moscow requested to see

Voroshilov. Admiral Drax had actually sent an urgent letter to the Marshal

requesting his views on the continuation of their talks.

Voroshilov gave them to the British and French military staffs at 1 P.M. the

next day, August 25. “In view of the changed political situation,” he said, “no

useful purpose can be served in continuing the conversations.”

Two years later, when German troops were pouring into Russia in violation of

the pact, Stalin would still justify his odious deal with Hitler, made behind the

backs of the Anglo–French military delegations which had come to negotiate in

Moscow. “We secured peace for our country for one and a half years,” he

boasted in a broadcast to the Russian people on July 3, 1941, “as well as an

opportunity of preparing our forces for defense if fascist Germany risked

attacking our country in defiance of the pact. This was a definite gain for our

country and a loss for fascist Germany.”

But was it? The point has been debated ever since. That the sordid, secret deal

gave Stalin the same breathing space— peredyshka—which Czar Alexander I

had secured from Napoleon at Tilsit in 1807 and Lenin from the Germans at

Brest Litovsk in 1917 was obvious. Within a short time it also gave the Soviet

Union an advanced defensive position against Germany beyond the existing

Russian frontiers, including bases in the Baltic States and Finland—at the

expense of the Poles, Latvians, Estonians and Finns. And most important of all,

as the official Soviet History of Diplomacy later emphasized, it assured the

Kremlin that if Russia were later attacked by Germany the Western Powers

would already be irrevocably committed against the Third Reich and the Soviet

Union would not stand alone against the German might as Stalin had feared

throughout the summer of 1939.

All this undoubtedly is true. But there is another side to the argument. By the

time Hitler got around to attacking Russia, the armies of Poland and France and

the British Expeditionary Force on the Continent had been destroyed and

Germany had the resources of all of Europe to draw upon and no Western front

to tie her hands. All through 1941, 1942 and 1943 Stalin was to complain bitterly

that there was no second front in Europe against Germany and that Russia was

forced to bear the brunt of containing almost the entire German Army. In 1939–

40, there was a Western front to draw off the German forces. And Poland could

not have been overrun in a fortnight if the Russians had backed her instead of

stabbing her in the back. Moreover, there might not have been any war at all if

Hitler had known he must take on Russia as well as Poland, England and France.

Even the politically timid German generals, if one can judge from their later

testimony at Nuremberg, might have put their foot down against embarking on

war against such a formidable coalition. Toward the end of May, according to

the French ambassador in Berlin, both Keitel and Brauchitsch had warned Hitler

that Germany had little chance of winning a war in which Russia participated on

the enemy side.

No statesmen, not even dictators, can foretell the course of events over the

long run. It is arguable, as Churchill has argued, that cold-blooded as Stalin’s

move was in making a deal with Hitler, it was also “at the moment realistic in a

high degree. ”37 Stalin’s first and primary consideration, as was that of any other

head of government, was his nation’s security. He was convinced in the summer

of 1939, as he later told Churchill, that Hitler was going to war. He was

determined that Russia should not be maneuvered into the disastrous position of

having to face the German Army alone. If a foolproof alliance with the West

proved impossible, then why not turn to Hitler, who suddenly was knocking at

his door?

By the end of July 1939, Stalin had become convinced, it is obvious, not only

that France and Britain did not want a binding alliance but that the objective of

the Chamberlain government in Britain was to induce Hitler to make his wars in

Eastern Europe. He seems to have been intensely skeptical that Britain would

honor its guarantee to Poland any more than France had kept its obligations to

Czechoslovakia. And everything that had happened in the West for the past two

years tended to increase his suspicions: the rejection by Chamberlain of Soviet

proposals, after the Anschluss and after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia,

for conferences to draw up plans to halt further Nazi aggression; Chamberlain’s

appeasement of Hitler at Munich, from which Russia had been excluded; the

delays and hesitations of Chamberlain in negotiating a defensive alliance against

Germany as the fateful summer days of 1939 ticked by.

One thing was certain—to almost everyone but Chamberlain. The bankruptcy

of Anglo–French diplomacy, which had faltered and tottered whenever Hitler

made a move, was now complete. * Step by step, the two Western democracies

had retreated: when Hitler defied them by declaring conscription in 1935, when

he occupied the Rhineland in 1936, when he took Austria in 1938 and in the

same year demanded and got the Sudeten-land; and they had sat by weakly when

he occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. With the Soviet Union

on their side, they still might have dissuaded the German dictator from launching

war or, if that failed, have fairly quickly defeated him in an armed conflict. But

they had allowed this last opportunity to slip out of their hands.† Now, at the

worst possible time in the worst possible circumstances, they were committed to

come to the aid of Poland when she was attacked.

The recriminations in London and Paris against the double-dealing of Stalin

were loud and bitter. The Soviet despot for years had cried out at the “fascist

beasts” and called for all peace-loving states to band together to halt Nazi

aggression. Now he had made himself an accessory to it. The Kremlin could

argue, as it did, that the Soviet Union had only done what Britain and France had

done the year before at Munich: bought peace and the time to rearm against

Germany at the expense of a small state. If Chamberlain was right and honorable

in appeasing Hitler in September 1938 by sacrificing Czechoslovakia, was Stalin

wrong and dishonorable in appeasing the Fuehrer a year later at the expense of

Poland, which had shunned Soviet help anyway?

Stalin’s cynical and secret deal with Hitler to divide up Poland and to obtain a

free hand to gobble up Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Bessarabia was not known

outside Berlin and Moscow, but it would soon become evident from Soviet acts,

and it would shock most of the world even at this late date. The Russians might

say, as they did, that they were only repossessing territories which had been

taken away from them at the end of the First World War. But the peoples of

these lands were not Russian and had shown no desire to return to Russia. Only

force, which the Soviets had eschewed in the heyday of Litvinov, could make

them return.

Since joining the League of Nations the Soviet Union had built up a certain

moral force as the champion of peace and the leading opponent of fascist

aggression. Now that moral capital had been utterly dissipated.

Above all, by assenting to a shoddy deal with Nazi Germany, Stalin had given

the signal for the commencement of a war that almost certainly would develop

into a world conflict. This he certainly knew.* As things turned out, it was the

greatest blunder of his life.

* See p. 523.

* The only source found for what happened at this meeting is in the unpublished diary of

General Halder, Chief of the Army General Staff. It is the first entry, August 14, 1939. Halder

kept his diary in Gabelsberger shorthand and it is an immensely valuable record of the most

confidential military and political goings on in Nazi Germany from August 14, 1939, to

September 24, 1942, when he was dismissed from his post. The Obersalzberg entry consists of

Halder’s shorthand notes jotted down while Hitler spoke and a summary which he added at the

end. It is strange that no American or British publisher has published the Halder diary. The

writer had access to the German longhand version of it, transcribed by Halder himself, during

the writing of this volume. Hitler’s daily record book confirms the date of this meeting and

adds that besides the commanders in chief, Brauchitsch, Goering and Raeder, Dr. Todt, the

engineer who built the West Wall, also was present.

* Dahlerus told the Nuremberg tribunal on March 19, 1946, when he was on the stand as a

witness for Goering, that the Field Marshal had assured the British businessmen “on his word

of honor” that he would do everything in his power to avert war. But Goering’s state of mind

at this time may have been more accurately expressed in a statement he made two days after

seeing the British visitors. In boasting about the Luftwaffe’s air defenses, he said, “The Ruhr

will not be subjected to a single bomb. If an enemy bomber reaches the Ruhr, my name is not

Hermann Goering: you can call me Meier!”—a boast he was soon to rue.

* Naujocks had a hand in the “Venlo Incident,” which will be recounted further on. He was

involved in an undertaking to disguise German soldiers in Dutch and Belgian frontier guard

uniforms at the time of the invasion of the West in May 1940. Early in the war, he managed a

section of the S.D. which forged passports and while thus employed proposed “Operation

Bernhard,” a fantastic plan to drop forged British banknotes over England. Heydrich

eventually tired of him and forced him to serve in the ranks of an S.S. regiment in Russia,

where he was wounded. In 1944 Naujocks turned up in Belgium as an economic administrator,

but his principal job at that time appears to have been to carry out in Denmark the murder of a

number of members of the Danish resistance movement. He probably deserted to the

American Army in Belgium to save his neck. In fact, he had a charmed life. Held as a war

criminal, he made a dramatic escape from a special camp in Germany for war criminals in

1946 and thus escaped trial. At the time of writing, he has never been apprehended or heard of.

An account of his escape is given in Schaumburg-Lippe, Zwischen Krone und Kerker.

* S.S. Oberfuehrer Dr. Mehlhorn, who administered the S.D. under Heydrich. Schellenberg, in

his memoirs ( The Labyrinth, pp. 48–50), recounts that Mehlhorn told him on August 26 that

he had been put in charge of staging the faked attack at Gleiwitz but that Mehlhorn got out of

it by feigning illness. Mehlhorn’s stomach grew stronger in later years. During the war he was

a notable instigator of Gestapo terror in Poland.

† The submarines sailed between August 19 and 23, the Graf Spee on the twenty-first and the

Deutschland on the twenty-fourth.

* The British government soon learned of this. On August 17 Sumner Welles, the U.S.

Undersecretary of State, informed the British ambassador in Washington of Molotov’s

suggestions to Schulenburg. The American ambassador in Moscow had wired them to

Washington the day before and they were deadly accurate.11 Ambassador Steinhardt had seen

Molotov on August 16.

* It was signed in Berlin at 2 A.M. on Sunday, August 20.

* No official minutes of Hitler’s harangue have been found, but several records of it, two of

them made by high-ranking officers from notes jotted down during the meeting, have come to

light. One by Admiral Hermann Boehm, Chief of the High Seas Fleet, was submitted at

Nuremberg in Admiral Raeder’s defense and is published in the original German in TMWC,

XLI, pp. 16–25. General Halder made voluminous notes in his unique Gabelsberger shorthand,

and an English translation of them from his diary entry of August 22 is published in DGFP,

VII, pp. 557–59. The chief document of the session used by the prosecution as evidence in the

Nuremberg trial was an unsigned memorandum in two parts from the OKW files which were

captured by American troops at Saalfelden in the Austrian Tyrol. It is printed in English

translation in NC A, III, pp. 581–86 (Nuremberg Document 798-PS), 665–66 (N.D. 1014-PS).

and also in DGFP, VII, pp. 200–6. The original German text of the two-part memorandum is,

of course, in the TMWC volumes. It makes Hitler’s language somewhat more lively than do

Admiral Boehm and General Halder. But all three versions are similar in content and there can

be no doubt of their authenticity. At Nuremberg there was some doubt about a fourth account

of Hitler’s speech, listed as N.D. C-3 ( NCA, VII, pp. 752–54), and though it was referred to in

the proceedings the prosecution did not submit it in evidence. While it undoubtedly rings true,

it may have been embellished a little by persons who were not present at the meeting at the

Berghof. In piecing together Hitler’s remarks I have used the records of Boehm and Halder

and the unsigned memorandum submitted at Nuremberg as evidence.

* “Dirty dog.”

† According to the account in Nuremberg Document C-3, (see footnote above, p. 529),

Goering jumped up on the table and gave “bloodthirsty thanks and bloody promises. He

danced around like a savage. The few doubtful ones remained silent.” This description greatly

nettled Goering during an interrogation at Nuremberg on August 28-and 29, 1945. “I dispute

the fact that I stood on the table,” Goering said. “I want you to know that the speech was made

in the great hall of Hitler’s private house. I did not have the habit of jumping on tables in

private homes. That would have been an attitude completely inconsistent with that of a

German officer.”

“Well, the fact is,” Colonel John H. Amen, the American interrogator, said at this point,

“mat you led the applause after the speech, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but not on the table,” Goering rejoined. 27

*“A humiliating experience,” Strang had called it in a dispatch to the Foreign Office on July

20. 28

* The timing is important. Molotov did not receive the Nazi proposal that Ribbentrop come to

Moscow until the evening of August 15. (See above, p. 520.) And though he did not accept it

definitely he did hint that Russia would be interested in a nonaggression pact with Germany,

which of course would have made negotiation of a military alliance with France and Britain

superfluous. The best conclusion this writer can come to is that, as of August 14, when

Voroshilov demanded an “unequivocal answer” to the question of allowing Soviet troops to

meet the Germans in Poland, the Kremlin still had an open mind as to which side to join.

Unfortunately the Russian documents, which could clear up this crucial question, have not

been published. At any rate, Stalin does not seem to have made his final decision until the

afternoon of August 19. (See above, p. 526.)

* Lloyd George, in a speech in the Commons on April 3, four days after Chamberlain’s

unilateral guarantee to Poland had been announced, had urged the British government to make

such a condition. “If we are going in without the help of Russia we are walking into a trap. It

is the only country whose armies can get there [to Poland]…. I cannot understand why, before

committing ourselves to this tremendous enterprise, we did not secure beforehand the adhesion

of Russia … If Russia has not been brought into this matter because of certain feelings the

Poles have that they do not want the Russians there, it is for us to declare the conditions, and

unless the Poles are prepared to accept the only conditions with which we can successfully

help them, the responsibility must be theirs.”

* At a session of the military delegates the morning before, on August 21, Voroshilov had

demanded the indefinite adjournment of the talks on the excuse that he and his colleagues

would be busy with the autumn maneuvers. To the Anglo–French protests at such a delay the

Marshal had answered, “The intentions of the Soviet Delegation were, and still are, to agree on

the organization of military co-operation of the armed forces of the three parties … The

U.S.S.R., not having a common frontier with Germany, can give help to France, Britain,

Poland and Rumania, only on condition that her troops are given rights of passage across

Polish and Rumanian territory … The Soviet forces cannot co-operate with the armed forces

of Britain and France if they are not allowed onto Polish and Rumanian territory … The Soviet

Military Delegation cannot picture to itself how the governments and general staffs of Britain

and France, in sending their missions to the U.S.S.R…. could not have given them some

directives on such an elementary matter … This can only show that mere are reasons to doubt

their desire to come to serious and effective co-operation with the U.S.S.R.”

The logic of the Marshal’s military argument was sound and the failure of the French and

especially the British governments to answer it would prove disastrous. But to have repeated it

—with all the rest of the statement—on this late date, August 21, when Voroshilov could not

have been ignorant of Stalin’s decision of August 19, was deceitful.

* The wording of the essential articles is almost identical to that of a Soviet draft which

Molotov handed Schulenburg on August 19 and which Hitler, in his telegram to Stalin, said he

accepted. The Russian draft had specified that the nonaggression treaty would be valid only if

a “special protocol” were signed simultaneously and made an integral part of the pact. 34

According to Friedrich Gaus, who participated at the evening meeting, a high-falutin

preamble which Ribbentrop wanted to insert stressing the formation of friendly Soviet–

German relations was thrown out at the insistence of Stalin. The Soviet dictator complained

that “the Soviet government could not suddenly present to the public assurances of friendship

after they had been covered with pails of manure by the Nazi government for six years. ”35

* Article VII provided for the treaty to enter into force immediately upon signature. Formal

ratification in two such totalitarian states was, to be sure, a mere formality. But it would take a

few days. Hitler had insisted on this provision.

* And of Polish diplomacy too. Ambassador Noël reported Foreign Minister Beck’s reaction

to the signing of the Nazi–Soviet Pact in a dispatch to Paris: “Beck is quite unperturbed and

does not seem in the slightest worried. He believes that, in substance, very little has changed.”

† Despite many warnings, as we have seen, that Hitler was courting the Kremlin. On June 1,

M. Coulondre, the French ambassador in Berlin, had informed Bonnet, the French Foreign

Minister, that Russia was looming larger and larger in Hitler’s thoughts. “Hitler will risk war,”

Coulondre wrote, “if he does not have to fight Russia. On the other hand, if he knows he has to

fight her too he will draw back rather than expose his country, his party and himself to ruin.”

The ambassador urged the prompt conclusion of the Anglo–French negotiations in Moscow

and advised Paris that the British ambassador in Berlin had made a similar appeal to his

government in London. ( French Yellow Book, Fr. ed., pp. 180–81.)

On August 15, both Coulondre and Henderson saw Weizsaecker at the Foreign Office. The

British ambassador informed London that the State Secretary was confident that the Soviet

Union “would in the end join in sharing the Polish spoils.” ( British Blue Book, p. 91.) And

Coulondre, after his talk with Weizsaecker, wired Paris: “It is necessary at all costs to come to

some solution of the Russian talks as soon as possible.” ( French Yellow Book, p. 282.)

Throughout June and July, Laurence Steinhardt, the American ambassador in Moscow, had

also sent warnings of an impending Soviet–Nazi deal, which President Roosevelt passed on to

the British, French and Polish embassies. As early as July 5, when Soviet Ambassador

Constantine Oumansky left for a leave in Russia, he carried with him a message from

Roosevelt to Stalin “that if his government joined up with Hitler, it was as certain as that the

night followed day that as soon as Hitler had conquered France he would turn on Russia.”

(Joseph E. Davies, Mission to Moscow, p. 450.) The President’s warning was cabled to

Steinhardt with instructions to repeat it to Molotov, which the ambassador did on August 16.

(U.S. Diplomatic Papers, 1939, I, pp. 296–99.)

* Years before, Hitler had written prophetically in Mein Kampf: “The very fact of the

conclusion of an alliance with Russia embodies a plan for the next war. Its outcome would be

the end of Germany.” (See p. 660 of the Houghton Mifflin edition, 1943.)

16

THE LAST DAYS OF PEACE

THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT had not waited idly for the formal signing of the

Nazi–Soviet Pact in Moscow. The announcement in Berlin on the late evening of

August 21 that Ribbentrop was flying to Moscow to conclude a German–

Russian agreement stirred the British cabinet to action. It met at 3 P.M. on the

twenty-second and issued a communiqué stating categorically that a Soviet–Nazi

nonaggression pact “would in no way affect their obligation to Poland, which

they have repeatedly stated in public and which they are determined to fulfill.”

At the same time Parliament was summoned to meet on August 24 to pass the

Emergency Powers (Defense) Bill, and certain precautionary mobilization

measures were taken.

Though the cabinet statement was as clear as words could make it,

Chamberlain wanted Hitler to have no doubts about it. Immediately after the

cabinet meeting broke up he wrote a personal letter to the Fuehrer.

… Apparently the announcement of a German–Soviet Agreement is taken in some quarters

in Berlin to indicate that intervention by Great Britain on behalf of Poland is no longer a

contingency that need be reckoned with. No greater mistake could be made. Whatever may

prove to be the nature of the German–Soviet Agreement, it cannot alter Great Britain’s

obligation to Poland …

It has been alleged that, if His Majesty’s Government had made their position more clear in

1914, the great catastrophe would have been avoided. Whether or not there is any force in that

allegation, His Majesty’s Government are resolved that on this occasion there shall be no such

tragic misunderstanding.

If the case should arise, they are resolved, and prepared, to employ without delay all the

forces at their command, and it is impossible to foresee the end of hostilities once engaged …1

Having, as he added, “thus made our position perfectly clear,” the Prime

Minister again appealed to Hitler to seek a peaceful solution of his differences

with Poland and once more offered the British government’s co-operation in

helping to obtain it.

The letter, which Ambassador Henderson, flying down from Berlin, delivered

to Hitler shortly after 1 P.M. on August 23 at Berchtesgaden, threw the Nazi

dictator into a violent rage. “Hitler was excitable and uncompromising,”

Henderson wired Lord Halifax. “His language was violent and exaggerated both

as regards England and Poland.” 2 Henderson’s report of the meeting and the

German Foreign Office memorandum on it—the latter among the captured Nazi

papers—agree on the nature of Hitler’s tirade. England, he stormed, was

responsible for Poland’s intransigence just as it had been responsible for

Czechoslovakia’s unreasonable attitude the year before. Tens of thousands of

Volksdeutsche in Poland were being persecuted. There were even, he claimed,

six cases of castration—a subject that obsessed him. He could stand it no more.

Any further persecution of Germans by the Poles would bring immediate action.

I contested every point [Henderson wired Halifax] and kept calling his statements

inaccurate but the only effect was to launch him on some fresh tirade.

Finally Hitler agreed to give a written answer to the Prime Minister’s letter in

two hours’ time, and Henderson withdrew to Salzburg for a little respite. * Later

in the afternoon Hitler sent for him and handed him his reply. In contrast to the

first meeting, the Fuehrer, Henderson reported to London, “was quite calm and

never raised his voice.”

He was, he said [Henderson reported], fifty years old; he preferred war now to when he

would be fifty-five or sixty.

The megalomania of the German dictator, declaiming on his mountain-top,

comes out even more forcibly in the German minutes of the meeting. After

quoting him as preferring to make war at fifty rather than later, they add:

England [Hitler said] would do well to realize that as a front-line soldier he knew what war

was and would utilize every means available. It was surely quite clear to everyone that the

World War [i.e., 1914–1918] would not have been lost if he had been Chancellor at the time.

Hitler’s reply to Chamberlain was a mixture of all the stale lies and

exaggerations which he had been bellowing to foreigners and his own people

since the Poles dared to stand up to him. Germany, he said, did not seek a

conflict with Great Britain. It had been prepared all along to discuss the

questions of Danzig and the Corridor with the Poles “on the basis of a proposal

of truly unparalleled magnanimity.” But the unconditional guarantee of Poland

by Britain had only encouraged the Poles “to unloosen a wave of appalling

terrorism against the one and a half million German inhabitants living in

Poland.” Such “atrocities” he declared, “are terrible for the victims but

intolerable for a Great Power such as the German Reich.” Germany would no

longer tolerate them.

Finally he took note of the Prime Minister’s assurance that Great Britain

would honor its commitments to Poland and assured him “that it can make no

change in the determination of the Reich Government to safeguard the interests

of the Reich … Germany, if attacked by England, will be found prepared and

determined. ”3

What had this exchange of letters accomplished? Hitler now had a solemn

assurance from Chamberlain that Britain would go to war if Germany attacked

Poland. The Prime Minister had the Fuehrer’s word that it would make no

difference. But, as the events of the next hectic eight days would show, neither

man believed on August 23 that he had heard the last word from the other.

This was especially true of Hitler. Buoyed up by the good news from Moscow

and confident that, despite what Chamberlain had just written him, Great Britain

and, in its wake, France would have second thoughts about honoring their

obligations to Poland after the defection of Russia, the Fuehrer on the evening of

August 23, as Henderson was flying back to Berlin, set the date for the onslaught

on Poland: Saturday, August 26, at 4:30 A.M.

“There will be no more orders regarding Y Day and X Hour,” General Halder

noted in his diary. “Everything is to roll automatically. ”

But the Chief of the Army General Staff was wrong. On August 25 two events

occurred which made Adolf Hitler shrink back from the abyss less than twenty-

four hours before his troops were scheduled to break across the Polish frontier.

One originated in London, the other in Rome.

On the morning of August 25, Hitler, who on the previous day had returned to

Berlin to welcome Ribbentrop back from Moscow and receive a firsthand report

on the Russians, got off a letter to Mussolini. It contained a belated explanation

as to why he had not been able to keep his Axis partner informed of his

negotiations with the Soviet Union. (He had “no idea,” he said, that they would

go so far so fast.) And he declared that the Russo–German pact “must be

regarded as the greatest possible gain for the Axis.”

But the real purpose of the letter, whose text is among the captured

documents, was to warn the Duce that a German attack on Poland was liable to

take place at any moment, though Hitler refrained from giving his friend and ally

the exact date which he had set. “In case of intolerable events in Poland,” he

said, “I shall act immediately … In these circumstances no one can say what the

next hour may bring.” Hitler did not specifically ask for Italy’s help. That was,

by the terms of the Italo–German alliance, supposed to be automatic. He

contented himself with expressing the hope for Italy’s understanding. 4

Nevertheless, he was anxious for an immediate answer. The letter was

telephoned by Ribbentrop personally to the German ambassador in Rome and

reached the Duce at 3:20 P.M.

In the meantime, at 1:30 P.M., the Fuehrer had received Ambassador

Henderson at the Chancellery. His resolve to destroy Poland had in no way

lessened but he was more anxious than he had been two days before, when he

had talked with Henderson at Berchtesgaden, to make one last attempt to keep

Britain out of the war.* The ambassador found the Fuehrer, as he reported to

London, “absolutely calm and normal and [he] spoke with great earnestness and

apparent sincerity.” Despite all his experience of the past year Henderson could

not, even at this late date, see through the “sincerity” of the German Leader. For

what Hitler had to say was quite preposterous. He “accepted” the British Empire,

he told the ambassador, and was ready “to pledge himself personally to its

continued existence and to commit the power of the German Reich for this.”

He desired [Hitler explained] to make a move toward England which should be as decisive

as the move towards Russia … The Fuehrer is ready to conclude agreements with England

which would not only guarantee the existence of the British Empire in all circumstances so far

as Germany is concerned, but would also if necessary assure the British Empire of German

assistance regardless of where such assistance should be necessary.

He would also be ready, he added, “to accept a reasonable limitation of

armaments” and to regard the Reich’s western frontiers as final. At one point,

according to Henderson, Hitler lapsed into a typical display of sentimental

hogwash, though the ambassador did not describe it as that when he recounted it

in his dispatch to London. The Fuehrer stated

that he was by nature an artist, not a politician, and that once the Polish question was

settled he would end his life as an artist and not as a warmonger.

But the dictator ended on another note.

The Fuehrer repeated [says the verbal statement drawn up by the Germans for Henderson]

that he is a man of great decisions … and that this is his last offer. If they [the British

government] reject these ideas, there will be war.

In the course of the interview Hitler repeatedly pointed out that his “large

comprehensive offer” to Britain, as he described it, was subject to one condition:

that it would take effect only “after the solution of the German–Polish problem.”

When Henderson kept insisting that Britain could not consider his offer unless it

meant at the same time a peaceful settlement with Poland, Hitler replied, “If you

think it useless then do not send my offer at all.”

However, the ambassador had scarcely returned to the embassy a few steps up

the Wilhelmstrasse from the Chancellery before Dr. Schmidt was knocking at

the door with a written copy of Hitler’s remarks—with considerable deletions—

coupled with a message from the Fuehrer begging Henderson to urge the British

government “to take the offer very seriously” and suggesting that he himself fly

to London with it, for which purpose a German plane would be at his disposal. 5

It was rarely easy, as readers who have got this far in this book are aware, to

penetrate the strange and fantastic workings of Hitler’s fevered mind. His

ridiculous “offer” of August 25 to guarantee the British Empire was obviously a

brain storm of the moment, for he had not mentioned it two days before when he

discussed Chamberlain’s letter with Henderson and composed a reply to it. Even

making allowances for the dictator’s aberrations, it is difficult to believe that he

himself took it as seriously as he made out to the British ambassador. Besides,

how could the British government, as he requested, be asked to take it “very

seriously” when Chamberlain would scarcely have time to read it before the

Nazi armies hurtled into Poland at dawn on the morrow—the X Day which still

held?

But behind the “offer,” no doubt, was a serious purpose. Hitler apparently

believed that Chamberlain, like Stalin, wanted an out by which he could keep his

country out of war. * He had purchased Stalin’s benevolent neutrality two days

before by offering Russia a free hand in Eastern Europe “from the Baltic to the

Black Sea. ” Could he not buy Britain’s nonintervention by assuring the Prime

Minister that the Third Reich would never, like the Hohenzollern Germany,

become a threat to the British Empire? What Hitler did not realize, nor Stalin—

to the latter’s awful cost—was that to Chamberlain, his eyes open at long last,

Germany’s domination of the European continent would be the greatest of all

threats to the British Empire—as indeed it would be to the Soviet Russian

Empire. For centuries, as Hitler had noted in Mein Kampf, the first imperative of

British foreign policy had been to prevent any single nation from dominating the

Continent.

At 5:30 P.M. Hitler received the French ambassador but had little of

importance to say to him beyond repeating that “Polish provocation of the

Reich” could no longer be endured, that he would not attack France but that if

France entered the conflict he would fight her to the end. Whereupon he started

to dismiss the French envoy by rising from his chair. But Coulondre had

something to say to the Fuehrer of the Third Reich and he insisted on saying it.

He told him on his word of honor as a soldier that he had not the least doubt

“that if Poland is attacked France will be at the side of Poland with all its

forces.”

“It is painful to me,” Hitler replied, “to think of having to fight your country,

but that does not depend on me. Please say that to Monsieur Daladier.” 6

It was now 6 P.M. of August 25 in Berlin. Tension in the capital had been

building up all day. Since early afternoon all radio, telegraph and telephone

communication with the outside world had been cut off on orders from the

Wilhelmstrasse. The night before, the last of the British and French

correspondents and nonofficial civilians had hurriedly left for the nearest

frontier. During the day of the twenty-fifth, a Friday, it became known that the

German Foreign Office had wired the embassies and consulates in Poland,

France and Britain requesting that German citizens be asked to leave by the

quickest route. My own diary notes for August 24–25 recall the feverish

atmosphere in Berlin. The weather was warm and sultry and everyone seemed to

be on edge. All through the sprawling city antiaircraft guns were being set up,

and bombers flew continually overhead in the direction of Poland. “It looks like

war,” I scribbled on the evening of the twenty-fourth; “War is imminent,” I

repeated the next day, and on both nights, I remember, the Germans we saw in

the Wilhelmstrasse whispered that Hitler had ordered the soldiers to march into

Poland at dawn.

Their orders, we now know, were to attack at 4:30 on Saturday morning,

August 26. * And up until 6 P.M. on the twenty-fifth nothing that had happened

during the day, certainly not the personal assurances of Ambassadors Henderson

and Coulondre that Britain and France would surely honor their commitments to

Poland, had budged Adolf Hitler from his resolve to go ahead with his

aggression on schedule. But about 6 P.M., or shortly afterward, there arrived news

from London and Rome that made this man of apparently unshakable will

hesitate.

It is not quite clear from the confidential German records and the postwar

testimony of the Wilhelmstrasse officials at just what time Hitler learned of the

signing in London of the formal Anglo–Polish treaty which transformed

Britain’s unilateral guarantee of Poland into a pact of mutual assistance. † There

is some evidence in Halder’s diary and in the German Naval Register that the

Wilhelmstrasse got wind at noon on August 25 that the pact would be signed

during the day. The General Staff Chief notes that at 12 noon he got a call from

OKW asking what was the latest deadline for postponement of the decision to

attack and that he replied: 3 P.M. The Naval Register also mentions that news of

the Anglo–Polish pact and of “information from the Duce” was received at

noon. 7 But this is impossible. Word from Mussolini did not arrive, according to

a German notation on the document, until “about 6 P.M.” And Hitler could not

have learned of the signing of the Anglo–Polish treaty in London until about that

time, since this event only took place at 5:35 P.M.—and, at that, barely fifteen

minutes after the Polish ambassador in London, Count Edward Raczyński, had

received permission from his Foreign Minister in Warsaw over the telephone to

affix his signature.*

Whatever time he received it—and around 6 P.M. is an accurate guess—Hitler

was moved by the news from London. This could well be Britain’s answer to his

“offer,” the terms of which must have reached London by now. It meant that he

had failed in his bid to buy off the British as he had bought off the Russians. Dr.

Schmidt, who was in Hitler’s office when the report arrived, remembered later

that the Fuehrer, after reading it, sat brooding at his desk. 8

MUSSOLINI GETS COLD FEET

His brooding was interrupted very shortly by equally bad news from Rome.

Throughout the afternoon the German dictator had waited with “unconcealed

impatience,” as Dr. Schmidt describes it, for the Duce’s reply to his letter. The

Italian ambassador, Attolico, was summoned to the Chancellery at 3 P.M., shortly

after Henderson had departed, but he could only inform the Fuehrer that no

answer had been received as yet. By this time Hitler’s nerves were so strained

that he sent Ribbentrop out to get Ciano on the long-distance telephone, but the

Foreign Minister was unable to get through to him. Attolico, Schmidt says, was

dismissed “with scant courtesy.” 9

For some days Hitler had been receiving warnings from Rome that his Axis

partner might go back on him at the crucial moment of the attack on Poland, and

this intelligence was not without foundation. No sooner had Ciano returned from

his disillusioning meetings with Hitler and Ribbentrop on August 11 to 13, than

he set to work to turn Mussolini against the Germans—an action which did not

escape the watchful eyes of the German Embassy in Rome. The Fascist Foreign

Minister’s diary traces the ups and downs of his efforts to make the Italian

dictator see the light and disassociate himself, in time, from Hitler’s war. 10 On

the evening of his return from Berchtesgaden on August 13, Ciano saw the Duce

and after describing his talks with Hitler and Ribbentrop tried to convince his

chief that the Germans “have betrayed us and lied to us” and “are dragging us

into an adventure.”

The Duce’s reactions are varied [Ciano noted in his diary that night]. At first he agrees with

me. Then he says that honor compels him to march with Germany. Finally, he states that he

wants his part of the booty in Croatia and Dalmatia.

August 14.—I find Mussolini worried. I do not hesitate to arouse in him every possible

anti-German reaction by every means in my power. I speak to him of his diminished prestige

and his playing the role of second fiddle. And, finally, I turn over to him documents which

prove the bad faith of the Germans on the Polish question. The alliance was based on premises

which they now deny; they are traitors and we must not have any scruples in ditching them.

But Mussolini still has many scruples.

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

August 15.—The Duce … is convinced that we must not march blindly with the Germans.

However … he wants time to prepare the break with Germany … He is more and more

convinced that the democracies will fight … This time it means war. And we cannot engage in

war because our plight does not permit us to do so.

August 18.—A conversation with the Duce in the morning; his usual shifting feelings. He

still thinks it possible that the democracies will not march and that Germany might do good

business cheaply, from which business he does not want to be excluded. Then, too, he fears

Hitler’s rage. He believes that a denunciation of the pact or something like it might induce

Hitler to abandon the Polish question in order to square accounts with Italy. All this makes

him nervous and disturbed.

August 20.—The Duce made an about-face. He wants to support Germany at any cost in

the conflict which is now close at hand … Conference between Mussolini, myself, and

Attolico. [The ambassador had returned from Berlin to Rome for consultations.] This is the

substance: It is already too late to go back on the Germans … The press of the whole world

would say that Italy is cowardly … I try to debate the matter but it is useless now. Mussolini

holds very stubbornly to his idea …

August 21.—Today I have spoken very clearly … When I entered the room Mussolini

confirmed his decision to go along with the Germans. “You, Duce, cannot and must not do it

… I went to Salzburg in order to adopt a common line of action. I found myself face to face

with a Diktat. The Germans, not ourselves, have betrayed the alliance … Tear up the pact.

Throw it in Hitler’s face! …”

The upshot of this conference was that Ciano should seek a meeting with

Ribbentrop for the next day at the Brenner and inform him that Italy would stay

out of a conflict provoked by a German attack on Poland. Ribbentrop was not

available for several hours when Ciano put in a call for him at noon, but at 5:30

he finally came on the line. The Nazi Foreign Minister could not give Ciano an

immediate answer about meeting on the Brenner on such quick notice, because

he was “waiting for an important message from Moscow” and would call back

later. This he did at 10:30 P.M.

August 22.—Last evening at 10:30 a new act opened [Ciano recorded in his diary].

Ribbentrop telephoned that he would prefer to see me in Innsbruck rather than at the frontier,

because he was to leave later for Moscow to sign a political pact with the Soviet Government.

This was news, and of the most startling kind, to Ciano and Mussolini. They

decided that a meeting of the two foreign ministers “would no longer be timely.”

Once more their German ally had shown its contempt for them by not letting

them know about the deal with Moscow.

The hesitations of the Duce, the anti-German feelings of Ciano and the

possibility that Italy might, crawl out of its obligations under Article III of the

Pact of Steel, which called for the automatic participation in war of one party if

the other party “became involved in hostilities with another Power,” became

known in Berlin before Ribbentrop set off for Moscow on August 22.

On August 20, Count Massimo Magistrati, the Italian chargé d’affaires in

Berlin, called on Weizsaecker at the Foreign Office and revealed “an Italian state

of mind which, although it does not surprise me,” the State Secretary informed

Ribbentrop in a confidential memorandum,11 “must in my opinion definitely be

considered.” What Magistrati brought to the attention of Weizsaecker was that

since Germany had not adhered to the terms of the alliance, which called for

close contact and consultation on major questions, and had treated its conflict

with Poland as an exclusively German problem, “Germany was thus forgoing

Italy’s armed assistance.” And if contrary to the German view the Polish conflict

developed into a big war, Italy did not consider that the “prerequisites” of the

alliance existed. In brief, Italy was seeking an out.

Two days later, on August 23, a further warning was received in Berlin from

Ambassador Hans Georg von Mackensen in Rome. He wrote to Weizsaecker on

what had been happening “behind the scenes.” The letter, according to a

marginal note in Weizsaecker’s handwriting on the captured document, was

“submitted to the Fuehrer.” It must have opened his eyes. The Italian position,

following a series of meetings between Mussolini, Ciano and Attolico, was,

Mackensen reported, that if Germany invaded Poland she would violate the Pact

of Steel, which was based on an agreement to refrain from war until 1942.

Furthermore, contrary to the German view, Mussolini was sure that if Germany

attacked Poland both Britain and France would intervene—“and the United

States too after a few months.” While Germany remained on the defensive in the

west the French and British,

in the Duce’s opinion, would descend on Italy with all the forces at their disposal. In this,

situation Italy would have to bear the whole brunt of the war in order to give the Reich the

opportunity of liquidating the affair in the East …12

It was with these warnings in mind that Hitler got off his letter to Mussolini

on the morning of August 25 and waited all day, with mounting impatience, for

an answer. Shortly after midnight of the day before, Ribbentrop, after an evening

recounting to the Fuehrer the details of his triumph in Moscow, rang up Ciano to

warn him, “at the instigation of the Fuehrer,” of the “extreme gravity of the

situation due to Polish provocations. ”* A note by Weizsaecker reveals that the

call was made to “prevent the Italians from being able to speak of unexpected

developments.”

By the time Ambassador Mackensen handed Mussolini Hitler’s letter at the

Palazzo Venezia in Rome at 3:20 P.M. on August 25, the Duce, then, knew that

the German attack on Poland was about to take place. Unlike Hitler, he was

certain that Great Britain and France would immediately enter the war, with

catastrophic consequences for Italy, whose Navy was no match for the British

Mediterranean Fleet and whose Army would be overwhelmed by the French. †

According to a dispatch which Mackensen got off to Berlin at 10:25 P.M.

describing the meeting, Mussolini, after carefully reading the letter twice in his

presence, declared that he was “in complete agreement” about the Nazi–Soviet

Pact and that he realized that an “armed conflict with Poland could no longer be

avoided.” Finally—“and this he emphasized expressly,” Mackensen reported

—“he stood beside us unconditionally and with all his resources.” 13

But this was not what the Duce wrote the Fuehrer, unbeknownst to the

German ambassador, the text of which was hurriedly telephoned by Ciano to

Attolico, who had returned to his post in Berlin and who “about 6 P.M.” arrived

at the Chancellery to deliver it in person to Adolf Hitler. It struck the Fuehrer,

according to Schmidt, who was present, like a bombshell. After expressing his

“complete approval” of the Nazi–Soviet Pact and his “understanding concerning

Poland,” Mussolini came to the main point.

As for the practical attitude of Italy in case of military action [Mussolini wrote, and the

emphasis is his], my point of view is as follows:

If Germany attacks Poland and the conflict remains localized, Italy will afford Germany

every form of political and economic assistance which is requested of her.

If Germany attacks Poland* and the latter’s allies open a counterattack against Germany, I

inform you in advance that it will be opportune for me not to take the initiative in military

operations in view of the present state of Italian war preparations, of which we have

repeatedly and in good time informed you, Fuehrer, and Herr von Ribbentrop.

Our intervention can, nevertheless, take place at once if Germany delivers to us

immediately the military supplies and the raw materials to resist the attack which the French

and English would predominantly direct against us.

At our meetings the war was envisaged for 1942, and by that time I would have been ready

on land, on sea and in the air, according to the plans which had been concerted.

I am furthermore of the opinion that the purely military measures which have already been

taken, and other measures to be taken later, will immobilize, in Europe and Africa,

considerable French and British forces.

I consider it my bounden duty as a loyal friend to tell you the whole truth and inform you

beforehand about the real situation. Not to do so might have unpleasant consequences for us

all. This is my view, and since within a short time I must summon the highest governmental

bodies, I beg you to let me know yours.

MUSSOLINl†15

So though Russia was in the bag as a friendly neutral instead of a belligerent,

Germany’s ally of the Pact of Steel was out of it—and this on the very day that

Britain had seemed to commit herself irrevocably by signing a mutual-assistance

pact with Poland against German aggression. Hitler read the Duce’s letter, told

Attolico he would answer it immediately and icily dismissed the Italian envoy.

“The Italians are behaving just as they did in 1914,” Dr. Schmidt overheard

Hitler remark bitterly after Attolico had left, and that evening the Chancellery

echoed with unkind words about the “disloyal Axis partner.” But words were not

enough. The German Army was scheduled to hop off against Poland in nine

hours, for it was now 6:30 P.M. of August 25 and the invasion was set to begin at

4:30 A.M. on August 26. The Nazi dictator had to decide at once whether, in view

of the news from London and Rome, to go ahead with it or postpone or cancel it.

Schmidt, accompanying Attolico out of Hitler’s study, bumped into General

Keitel rushing to the presence of the Fuehrer. A few minutes later the General

hurried out, crying excitedly to his adjutant, “The order to advance must be

delayed again!”

Hitler, pushed into a corner by Mussolini and Chamberlain, had swiftly made

his decision. “Fuehrer considerably shaken,” Halder noted in his diary, and then

continued:

7:30 P.M.—Treaty between Poland and England ratified. No opening of hostilities. All

troop movements to be stopped, even near the frontier if not otherwise possible.

8:35 P.M.—Keitel confirms. Canaris: Telephone restrictions lifted on England and France.

Confirms development of events.

The German Naval Register gives a more concise account of the

postponement, along with the reasons:

August 25:—Case White already started will be stopped at 20:30 (8:30 P.M.) because of

changed political conditions. (Mutual-Assistance Pact England-Poland of August 25, noon,

and information from Duce that he would be true to his word but has to ask for large supply of

raw materials. )16

Three of the chief defendants at Nuremberg submitted, under interrogation,

their version of the postponement of the attack.17 Ribbentrop claimed that when

he heard about the Anglo–Polish pact and “heard” that “military steps were

being taken against Poland” (as if he didn’t know all along about the attack) he

went “at once” to the Fuehrer and urged him to call off the invasion of Poland, to

which “the Fuehrer at once agreed.” This is surely entirely untrue.

But the testimony of Keitel and Goering at least seemed more honest. “I was

suddenly called to Hitler at the Chancellery,” Keitel recounted on the stand at

Nuremberg, “and he said to me, ‘Stop everything at once. Get Brauchitsch

immediately. I need time for negotiations.’”

That Hitler still believed at this late hour that he could negotiate his way out

of his impasse was confirmed by Goering during a pretrial interrogation at

Nuremberg.

On the day that England gave her official guarantee to Poland the Fuehrer called me on the

telephone and told me that he had stopped the planned invasion of Poland. I asked him

whether this was just temporary or for good. He said, “No, I will have to see whether we can

eliminate British intervention.”

Though Mussolini’s last-minute defection was a heavy blow to Hitler, it is

obvious from the above testimony that Britain’s action in signing a mutual-

assistance treaty with Poland was the stronger influence in inducing the German

leader to postpone the attack. Yet it is strange that after Ambassador Henderson

on this very day had again warned him that Britain would fight if Poland were

attacked and that after the British government had now solemnly given its word

to that effect in a formal treaty, he still believed he could, as he told Goering,

“eliminate British intervention.” It is likely that his experience with Chamberlain

at Munich led him to believe that the Prime Minister again would capitulate if a

way out could be concocted. But again it is strange that a man who had

previously shown such insight into foreign politics did not know of the changes

in Chamberlain and in the British position. After all, Hitler himself had provoked

them.

It took some doing to halt the German Army on the evening of August 25, for

many units were already on the move. In East Prussia the order calling off the

attack reached General Petzel’s I Corps at 9:37 P.M. and only the frantic efforts

of several officers who were rushed out to the forward detachments succeeded in

stopping the troops. The motorized columns of General von Kleist’s corps to the

south had begun to move at dusk up to the Polish frontier. They were halted on

the border by a staff officer who made a quick landing in a small scouting plane

on the frontier. In a few sectors the orders did not arrive until after the shooting

began, but since the Germans had been provoking incidents all along the border

for several days the Polish General Staff apparently did not suspect what had

really happened. It did report on August 26 that numerous “German bands” had

crossed the border and attacked blockhouses and customs posts with machine

guns and hand grenades and that “in one case it was a Regular Army

detachment.”

JOY AND CONFUSION OF THE “CONSPIRATORS”

The news on the evening of August 25 that Hitler had called off the attack on

Poland caused great jubilation among the conspiratorial members of the Abwehr.

Colonel Oster gave Schacht and Gisevius the news, exclaiming, “The Fuehrer is

done for,” and the next morning Admiral Canaris was even more in the clouds.

“Hitler,” Canaris declared, “will never survive this blow. Peace has been saved

for the next twenty years.” Both men thought there was no further need of

bothering to overthrow the Nazi dictator; he was finished.

For several weeks as the fateful summer approached its end the conspirators,

as they conceived themselves, had again been busy, though with what purpose

exactly it is difficult to comprehend. Goerdeler, Adam von Trott, Helmuth von

Moltke, Fabian von Schlabrendorff and Rudolf Pechel had all made the

pilgrimage to London and there had informed not only Chamberlain and Halifax

but Churchill and other British leaders that Hitler planned to attack Poland at the

end of August. These German opponents of the Fuehrer could see for themselves

that Britain, right up to its umbrella-carrying Chamberlain, had changed since

the days of Munich, and that the one condition they themselves had made the

year before to their resolve to get rid of Hitler, namely that Britain and France

declare they would oppose any further Nazi aggression by armed force, had now

been fulfilled. What more did they want? It is not clear from the records they

have left, and one gathers the impression that they did not quite know

themselves. Well-meaning though they were, they were gripped by utter

confusion and a paralyzing sense of futility. Hitler’s hold on Germany—on the

Army, the police, the government, the people—was too complete to be loosened

or undermined by anything they could think of doing.

On August 15, Hassell visited Dr. Schacht at his new bachelor quarters in

Berlin. The dismissed Minister of Economics had just returned from a six-month

journey to India and Burma. “Schacht’s view is,” Hassell wrote in his diary,

“that we can do nothing but keep our eyes open and wait, that things will follow

their inevitable course.” Hassell himself told Gisevius the same day, according

to his own diary entry, that he “too was in favor of postponing direct action for

the moment.”

But what “direct action” was there to be put off? General Halder, keen as

Hitler to smash Poland, was not at the moment interested in getting rid of the

dictator. General von Witzleben, who was to have led the troops in the

overthrow of the Fuehrer the year before, was now in command of an army

group in the west and was, therefore, in no position to act in Berlin, even if he

had wished to. But did he have any such wish? Gisevius visited him at his

headquarters, found him listening to the BBC radio news from London and soon

realized that the General was interested merely in finding out what was going on.

As for General Halder, he was preoccupied with last-minute plans for the

onslaught on Poland, to the exclusion of any treasonable thoughts about getting

rid of Hitler. When interrogated after the war—on February 26, 1946—at

Nuremberg, he was exceedingly fuzzy about why he and the other supposed

enemies of the Nazi regime had done nothing in the last days of August to

depose the Fuehrer and thus save Germany from involvement in war. “There

was no possibility,” he said. Why? Because General von Witzleben had been

transferred to the west. Without Witzleben the Army could not act.

What about the German people? When Captain Sam Harris, the American

interrogator, reminding Halder that he had said the German people were opposed

to war, asked, “If Hitler were irrevocably committed to war, why couldn’t you

count on the support of the people before the invasion of Poland?” Halder

replied, “You must excuse me if I smile. If I hear the word ‘irrevocably’

connected with Hitler, I must say that nothing was irrevocable.” And the General

Staff Chief went on to explain that as late as August 22, after Hitler had revealed

to his generals at the meeting on the Obersalzberg his “irrevocable” resolve to

attack Poland and fight the West if necessary, he himself did not believe that the

Fuehrer would do what he said he would do.18 In the light of Halder’s own diary

entries for this period, this is an astonishing statement indeed. But it is typical

not only of Halder but of most of the other conspirators.

Where was General Beck, Halder’s predecessor as Chief of the Army General

Staff and the acknowledged leader of the conspirators? According to Gisevius,

Beck wrote a letter to General von Brauchitsch but the Army Commander in

Chief did not even acknowledge it. Next, Gisevius says, Beck had a long talk

with Halder, who agreed with him that a big war would be the ruin of Germany

but thought “Hitler would never permit a world war” and that therefore there

was no need at the moment to try to overthrow him. 19

On August 14, Hassell dined alone with Beck, and recorded their feeling of

frustration in his diary.

Beck [is] a most cultured, attractive and intelligent man. Unfortunately, he has a very low

opinion of the leading people in the Army. For that reason he could see no place there where

we could gain a foothold. He is firmly convinced of the vicious character of the policies of the

Third Reich.20

The convictions of Beck—and of the others around him—were high and

noble, but as Adolf Hitler prepared to hurl Germany into war not one of these

estimable Germans did anything to halt him. The task was obviously difficult

and perhaps, at this late hour, impossible to fulfill. But they did not even attempt

it.

General Thomas, perhaps, tried. Following up his memorandum to Keitel

which he had personally read to the OKW Chief at the middle of August, * he

called on him again on Sunday, August 27, and, according to his own account,

“handed him graphically illustrated statistical evidence … [which] demonstrated

clearly the tremendous military-economic superiority of the Western Powers and

the tribulation we would face.” Keitel, with unaccustomed courage, showed the

material to Hitler, who replied that he did not share General Thomas’ “anxiety

over the danger of a world war, especially since he had now got the Soviet

Union on his side.” 21

Thus ended the attempts of the “conspirators” to prevent Hitler from

launching World War II, except for the feeble last-minute efforts of Dr. Schacht,

of which the canny financier made much in his own defense at the Nuremberg

trial. On his return from India in August he wrote letters to Hitler, Goering and

Ribbentrop—at the fateful moment none of the opposition leaders seem to have

gone beyond writing letters and memoranda—but, to his “very great surprise,”

as he said later, received no replies. Next he decided to go to Zossen, a few miles

southeast of Berlin, where the Army High Command had set up headquarters for

the Polish campaign, and personally confront General von Brauchitsch. To tell

him what? On the witness stand at Nuremberg Schacht explained that he

intended to tell the Army chief that it would be unconstitutional for Germany to

go to war without the approval of the Reichstag! It was therefore the duty of the

Army Commander in Chief to respect his oath to the constitution!

Alas, Dr. Schacht never got to see Brauchitsch. He was warned by Canaris

that if he came to Zossen the Army commander “would probably have us

arrested immediately”—a fate that did not seem attractive to this former

supporter of Hitler. 22 But the real reason Schacht did not go to Zossen on his

ridiculous errand (it would have been child’s play for Hitler to get the rubber-

stamp Reichstag to approve his war had he wanted to bother with such a

formality) was stated by Gisevius when he took the witness stand on behalf of

Schacht at Nuremberg. It seems that Schacht planned to go to Zossen on August

25 and called off the trip when Hitler on that evening called off the attack on

Poland scheduled for the next day. Three days later, according to the testimony

of Gisevius, Schacht again decided to carry out his mission at Zossen but

Canaris informed him it was too late.23 It wasn’t that the “conspirators” missed

the bus; they never arrived at the bus station to try to catch it.

As ineffective as the handful of anti-Nazi Germans in staying Hitler’s hand

were the various neutral world leaders who now appealed to the Fuehrer to avert

war. On August 24, President Roosevelt sent urgent messages to Hitler and the

President of Poland pressing them to settle their differences without resorting to

arms. President Mościcki, in a dignified reply the following day, reminded

Roosevelt that it was not Poland which was “formulating demands and

demanding concessions” but that nevertheless it was willing to settle its disputes

with Germany by direct negotiation or by conciliation, as the American

President had urged. Hitler did not reply (Roosevelt had reminded him that he

had not answered the President’s appeal to him of last April) and on the next

day, August 25, Roosevelt sent a second message, informing Hitler of

Mościcki’s conciliatory response, and beseeching him to “agree to the pacific

means of settlement accepted by the Government of Poland.”

To the second letter there was no answer either, although on the evening of

August 26 Weizsaecker summoned the American chargé d’affaires in Berlin,

Alexander C. Kirk, and asked him to tell the President that the Fuehrer had

received the two telegrams and had placed them “in the hands of the Foreign

Minister for consideration by the government.”

The Pope took to the air on August 24 to make a broadcast appeal for peace,

beseeching “by the blood of Christ … the strong [to] hear us that they may not

become weak through injustice … [and] if they desire that their power may not

be a destruction.” On the afternoon of August 31 the Pope sent identical notes to

the governments of Germany, Poland, Italy and the two Western Powers

“beseeching, in the name of God, the German and Polish Governments … to

avoid any incident,” begging the British, French and Italian governments to

support his appeal and adding:

The Pope is unwilling to abandon hope that pending negotiations may lead to

a just pacific solution.

His Holiness, like almost everyone else in the world, did not realize that the

“pending negotiations” were but a propaganda trick by Hitler to justify his

aggression. Actually, as shortly will be shown, there were no bona fide

negotiations, pending or otherwise, on that last afternoon of the peace.

A few days earlier, on August 23, the King of the Belgians, in the name of the

rulers of the “Oslo” powers (Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Finland and the three Scandinavian states), had also broadcast a moving appeal for

peace, calling “on the men who are responsible for the course of events to

submit their disputes and their claims to open negotiation.” On August 28 the

King of the Belgians and the Queen of the Netherlands jointly offered their good

offices “in the hope of averting war.” 24

Noble in form and in intent as all these neutral appeals were, there is

something unreal and pathetic about them when reread today. It was as if the

President of the United States, the Pope and the rulers of the small Northern

European democracies lived on a different planet from that of the Third Reich

and had no more understanding of what was going on in Berlin than of what

might be transpiring on Mars. This ignorance of the mind and character and

purposes of Adolf Hitler, and indeed of the Germans, who, with a few

exceptions, were ready to follow him blindly no matter where nor how,

regardless of morals, ethics, honor, or the Christian concept of humanity, was to

cost the peoples led by Roosevelt and the monarchs of Belgium, Holland,

Luxembourg, Norway and Denmark dearly in the months to come.

Those of us who were in Berlin during those last few tense days of peace and

who were attempting to report the news to the outside world knew very little

either of what was going on in the Wilhelmstrasse, where the Chancellery and

the Foreign Office were, or in the Bendlerstrasse, where the military had their

offices. We followed as best we could the frantic comings and goings in the

Wilhelmstrasse. We sifted daily an avalanche of rumors, tips and “plants.” We

caught the mood of the people in the street and of the government officials, party

leaders, diplomats and soldiers of our acquaintance. But what was said at

Ambassador Henderson’s frequent and often stormy interviews with Hitler and

Ribbentrop, what was written between Hitler and Chamberlain, between Hitler

and Mussolini, between Hitler and Stalin, what was talked about between

Ribbentrop and Molotov and between Ribbentrop and Ciano, what was

contained in all the secret, coded dispatches humming over the wires between

the stumbling, harassed diplomats and foreign-office officials, and all the moves

which the military chiefs were planning or making—of all this we and the

general public remained almost completely ignorant at the time.

A few things, of course, we, and the public, knew. The Nazi–Soviet Pact was

trumpeted to the skies by the Germans, though the secret protocol dividing up

Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe remained unknown until after the war. We

knew that even before it was signed Henderson had flown to Berchtesgaden to

emphasize to Hitler that the pact would not prevent Britain from honoring its

guarantee to Poland. As the last week of August began we felt in Berlin that war

was inevitable—unless there was another Munich—and that it would come

within a few days. By August 25 the last of the British and French civilians had

skipped out. The next day the big Nazi rally at Tannenberg scheduled for August

27, at which Hitler was to have spoken, was publicly called off, as was the

annual party convention at Nuremberg (the “Party Rally of Peace,” Hitler had

officially called it), due to convene the first week of September. On August 27

the government announced that rationing of food, soap, shoes, textiles and coal

would begin on the following day. This announcement, I remember, above all

others, woke up the German people to the imminence of war, and their

grumbling about it was very audible. On Monday, August 28, the Berliners

watched troops pouring through the city toward the east. They were being

transported in moving vans, grocery trucks and every other sort of vehicle that

could be scraped up.

That too must have alerted the man in the street as to what was up. The

weekend, I remember, had been hot and sultry and most of the Berliners,

regardless of how near war was, had betaken themselves to the lakes and the

woods which surround the capital. Returning to the city Sunday evening, they

learned from the radio that there had been a secret, unofficial meeting of the

Reichstag at the Chancellery. A D.N.B, communiqué stated that the “Fuehrer

outlined the gravity of the situation”—this was the first the German public had

been told by Hitler that the hour was grave. No details of the meeting were given

and no one outside of the Reichstag members and of Hitler’s entourage could

know of the mood the Nazi dictator was in that day. Halder’s diary of August 28

supplied—much later—one account, given him by Colonel Oster of the Abwehr.

Conference at Reich Chancellery at 5:30 P.M. Reichstag and several Party notables …

Situation very grave. Determined to solve Eastern question one way or another. Minimum

demands: return of Danzig, settling of Corridor question. Maximum demands: “Depending on

military situation.” If minimum demands not satisfied, then war: Brutal! He will himself be on

front line. The Duce’s attitude served our best interests.

War very difficult, perhaps hopeless; “As long as I am alive there will be no talk of

capitulation.” Soviet Pact widely misunderstood by Party. A pact with Satan to cast out the

Devil … “Applause on proper cues, but thin.”

Personal impression of Fuehrer: exhausted, haggard, croaking voice, preoccupied. “Keeps

himself completely surrounded now by his S.S. advisers.”

In Berlin too a foreign observer could watch the way the press, under

Goebbels’ expert direction, was swindling the gullible German people. For six

years, since the Nazi “co-ordination” of the daily newspapers, which had meant

the destruction of a free press, the citizens had been cut off from the truth of

what was going on in the world. For a time the Swiss German-language

newspapers from Zurich and Basel could be purchased at the leading newsstands

in Germany and these presented objective news. But in recent years their sale in

the Reich had been either prohibited or limited to a few copies. For Germans

who could read English or French, there were occasionally a few copies of the

London and Paris journals available, though not enough to reach more than a

handful of persons.

“How completely isolated a world the German people live in,” I noted in my

diary on August 10, 1939. “A glance at the newspapers yesterday and today

reminds you of it.” I had returned to Germany from a brief leave in Washington,

New York and Paris, and coming up in the train from my home in Switzerland

two days before I had bought a batch of Berlin and Rhineland newspapers. They

quickly propelled one back to the cockeyed world of Nazism, which was as

unlike the world I had just left as if it had been on another planet. I noted further

on August 10, after I had arrived in Berlin:

Whereas all the rest of the world considers that the peace is about to be broken by

Germany, that it is Germany that is threatening to attack Poland … here in Germany, in the

world the local newspapers create, the very reverse is maintained … What the Nazi papers are

proclaiming is this: that it is Poland which is disturbing the peace of Europe; Poland which is

threatening Germany with armed invasion …

“POLAND, LOOK OUT!” warns the B.Z. headline, adding: “ANSWER TO POLAND,

THE RUNNER-AMOK [AMOKLÄUFFER] AGAINST PEACE AND RIGHT IN

EUROPE!”

Or the headline in Der Fuehrer, daily paper of Karlsruhe, which I bought on the train:

“WARSAW

THREATENS

BOMBARDMENT

OF

DANZIG—UNBELIEVABLE

AGITATION OF THE POLISH ARCHMADNESS [POLNISCHEN GROESSEN-

WAHSN]!”

You ask: But the German people can’t possibly believe these lies? Then you talk to them.

So many do.

By Saturday, August 26, the date originally set by Hitler for the attack on

Poland, Goebbels’ press campaign had reached its climax. I noted in my diary

some of the headlines.

The B.Z.: “COMPLETE CHAOS IN POLAND—GERMAN FAMILIES FLEE—POLISH

SOLDIERS PUSH TO EDGE OF GERMAN BORDER!” The 12-Uhr Blatt: “THIS

PLAYING WITH FIRE GOING TOO FAR—THREE GERMAN PASSENGER PLANES

SHOT AT BY POLES—IN CORRIDOR MANY GERMAN FARMHOUSES IN FLAMES!”

On my way to Broadcast House at midnight I picked up the Sunday edition

(August 27) of the Voelkischer Beobachter. Across the whole top of the front

page were inch-high headlines:

WHOLE OF POLAND IN WAR FEVER! 1,500,000 MEN MOBILIZED!

UNINTERRUPTED TROOP TRANSPORT TOWARD THE FRONTIER!

CHAOS IN UPPER SILESIA!

There was no mention, of course, of any German mobilization, though, as we have seen,

Germany had been mobilized for a fortnight.

THE LAST SIX DAYS OF PEACE

After recovering from the cold douche of Mussolini’s letter which had arrived

early in the evening of August 25 and which, along with the news of the signing

of the Anglo–Polish alliance, had caused him to postpone the attack on Poland

scheduled for the next day, Hitler got off a curt note to the Duce asking him

“what implements of war and raw materials you require and within what time”

in order that Italy could “enter a major European conflict.” The letter was

telephoned by Ribbentrop personally to the German ambassador in Rome at 7:40

P.M. and handed to the Italian dictator at 9:30 P.M. 25

The next morning, in Rome, Mussolini had a meeting with the chiefs of the

Italian armed services to draw up a list of his minimum requirements for a war

lasting twelve months. In the words of Ciano, who helped draw it up, it was

“enough to kill a bull—if a bull could read it. ”26 It included seven million tons

of petroleum, six million tons of coal, two million tons of steel, one million tons

of timber and a long list of other items down to 600 tons of molybdenum, 400

tons of titanium, and twenty tons of zirconium. In addition Mussolini demanded

150 antiaircraft batteries to protect the Italian industrial area in the north, which

was but a few minutes’ flying time from French air bases, a circumstance which

he reminded Hitler of in a letter which he now composed. This message was

telephoned by Ciano to Attolico in Berlin shortly after noon on August 26 and

immediately delivered to Hitler. 27

It contained more than a swollen list of materials needed. By now the deflated

Fascist leader was obviously determined to wriggle out of his obligations to the

Third Reich, and the Fuehrer, after reading this second letter, could no longer

have the slightest doubt of it.

FUEHRER [Mussolini wrote his comrade], I would not have sent you this list, or else it

would have contained a smaller number of items and much lower figures, if I had had the time

agreed upon beforehand to accumulate stocks and to speed up the tempo of autarchy.

It is my duty to tell you that unless I am certain of receiving these supplies, the sacrifices I

should call on the Italian people to make … could well be in vain and could compromise your

cause along with my own.

On his own hook, Ambassador Attolico, who was opposed to war, and

especially to Italy’s joining Germany in it if it came, emphasized to Hitler, when

he delivered the message, “that all material must be in Italy before the beginning

of hostilities” and that this demand was “decisive. ”*

Mussolini was still hoping for another Munich. He added a paragraph to his

note, declaring that if the Fuehrer thought there was still “any possibility

whatsoever of a solution in the political field” he was ready, as before, to give

his German colleague his full support. Despite their close personal relations and

their Pact of Steel and all the noisy demonstrations of solidarity they had given

in the past years, the fact remains that even at this eleventh hour Hitler had not

confided to Mussolini his true aim, the destruction of Poland, and that the Italian

partner remained quite ignorant of it. Only at the end of this day, the twenty-

sixth, was this gulf between them finally bridged.

Within three hours on August 26, Hitler sent a long reply to the Duce’s

message. Ribbentrop again telephoned it, at 3:08 P.M., to Ambassador von

Mackensen in Rome, who rushed it to Mussolini shortly after 5 P.M. While some

of Italy’s requirements such as coal and steel, Hitler said, could be met in full,

many others could not. In any case, Attolico’s insistence that the materials must

be supplied before the outbreak of hostilities was “impossible.”

And now, finally, Hitler took his friend and ally into his confidence as to his

real and immediate aims.

As neither France nor Britain can achieve any decisive successes in the West, and as

Germany, as a result of the Agreement with Russia, will have all her forces free in the East

after the defeat of Poland … I do not shrink from solving the Eastern question even at the risk

of complications in the West.

Duce, I understand your position, and would only ask you to try to achieve the pinning

down of Anglo–French forces by active propaganda and suitable military demonstrations such

as you have already proposed to me.29

This is the first evidence in the German documents that, twenty-four hours

after he had canceled the onslaught on Poland, Hitler had recovered his

confidence and was going ahead with his plans, “even at the risk” of war with

the West.

The same evening, August 26, Mussolini made somewhat of an effort to still

dissuade him. He wrote again to the Fuehrer, Ciano again telephoned it to

Attolico and it reached the Reich Chancellery just before 7 P.M.

FUEHRER:

I believe that the misunderstanding into which Attolico involuntarily fell was cleared up

immediately … That which I asked of you, except for the antiaircraft batteries, was to be

delivered in the course of twelve months. But even though the misunderstanding has been

cleared up, it is evident that it is impossible for you to assist me materially in filling the large

gaps which the wars in Ethiopia and Spain have made in Italian armaments.

I will therefore adopt the attitude which you advise, at least during the initial phase of the

conflict, thereby immobilizing the maximum Franco–British forces, as is already happening,

while I shall speed up military preparations to the utmost possible extent.

But the anguished Duce—anguished at cutting such a sorry figure at such a

crucial moment—still thought that the possibilities of another Munich should be

looked into.

… I venture to insist anew [he continued] and not at all from considerations of a pacifist

character foreign to my nature, but by reason of the interests of our two peoples and our two

regimes, on the opportunity for a political solution which I regard as still possible and such a

one as will give full moral and material satisfaction to Germany. 30

The Italian dictator was, as the records now make clear, striving for peace

because he was not ready for war. But his role greatly disturbed him. “I leave

you to imagine,” he declared to Hitler in this last of the exchange of messages on

August 26, “my state of mind in finding myself compelled by forces beyond my

control not to afford you real solidarity at the moment of action.” Ciano noted in

his diary after this busy day that “the Duce is really out of his wits. His military

instinct and his sense of honor were leading him to war. Reason has now stopped

him. But this hurts him very much … Now he has had to confront the hard truth.

And this, for the Duce, is a great blow.”

After such a plentiful exchange of letters, Hitler was now resigned to

Mussolini’s leaving him in the lurch. Late on the night of August 26 he got off

one more note to his Axis partner. It was dispatched by telegram from Berlin at

12:10 A.M. on August 27 and reached Mussolini that morning at 9 o’clock.

DUCE:

I have received your communication on your final attitude. I respect the reasons and

motives which led you to take this decision. In certain circumstances it can nevertheless work

out well.

In my opinion, however, the prerequisite is that, at least until the outbreak of the struggle,

the world should have no idea of the attitude Italy intends to adopt. I therefore cordially

request you to support my struggle psychologically with your press or by other means. I would

also ask you, Duce, if you possibly can, by demonstrative military measures, at least to compel

Britain and France to tie down certain of their forces, or at all events to leave them in

uncertainty.

But, Duce, the most important thing is this: If, as I have said, it should come to a major

war, the issue in the East will be decided before the two Western Powers can score a success.

Then, this winter, at latest in the spring, I shall attack in the West with forces which will be at

least equal to those of France and Britain …

I must now ask a great favor of you, Duce. In this difficult struggle you and your people

can best help me by sending me Italian workers, for both industrial and agricultural purposes

… In specially commending this request of mine to your generosity, I thank you for all the

efforts you have made for our common cause.

ADOLF HITLER31

The Duce replied meekly late in the afternoon that the world would “not know

before the outbreak of hostilities what the attitude of Italy is”—he would keep

the secret well. He would also tie down as many Anglo–French military and

naval forces as possible and he would send Hitler the Italian workers he

requested.32 Earlier in the day he had repeated to Ambassador von Mackensen

“in forceful terms,” as the latter reported to Berlin, “that he still believed it

possible to attain all our objectives without resort to war” and had added that he

would again bring this aspect up in his letter to the Fuehrer. 33 But he did not. For

the moment he seemed too discouraged to even mention it again.

Although France would provide almost the entire Allied army on Germany’s

western border if war were suddenly to come, and although, in the initial weeks,

it would far outnumber the German forces there, Hitler seemed unconcerned as

August began to run out about what the French would do. On August 26,

Premier Daladier dispatched to him a moving and eloquent letter reminding him

of what France would do; it would fight if Poland were attacked.

Unless you attribute to the French people [Daladier wrote] a conception of national honor

less high than that which I myself recognize in the German people, you cannot doubt that

France will be true to her solemn promises to other nations, such as Poland …

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

Daladier added:

If the blood of France and of Germany flows again, as it did twenty-five years ago, in a

longer and even more murderous war, each of the two peoples will fight with confidence in its

own victory, but the most certain victors will be the forces of destruction and barbarism.34

Ambassador Coulondre, in presenting the Premier’s letter, added a passionate

verbal and personal appeal of his own, adjuring Hitler “in the name of humanity

and for the repose of his own conscience not to let pass this last chance of a

peaceful solution.” But the ambassador had the “sadness” to report to Paris that

Daladier’s letter had not moved the Fuehrer—“he stands pat.”

Hitler’s reply to the French Premier the next day was cleverly calculated to

play on the reluctance of Frenchmen to “die for Danzig,” though he did not use

the phrase—that was left for the French appeasers. Germany had renounced all

territorial claims on France after the return of the Saar, Hitler declared; there was

therefore no reason why they should go to war. If they did, it was not his fault

and it would be “very painful” to him.

That was the extent of the diplomatic contact between Germany and France

during the last week of peace. Coulondre did not see Hitler after the meeting on

August 26 until all was over. The country that concerned the German Chancellor

the most at this juncture was Great Britain. As Hitler had told Goering on the

evening of August 25, when he postponed the move into Poland, he wanted to

see whether he could “eliminate British intervention.”

GERMANY AND GREAT BRITAIN AT THE ELEVENTH HOUR

“Fuehrer considerably shaken,” General Halder had noted in his diary on

August 25 after the news from Rome and London had induced Hitler to draw

back from the precipice of war. But the next afternoon the General Staff Chief

noticed an abrupt change in the Leader. “Fuehrer very calm and clear,” he jotted

down in his diary at 3:22 P.M. There was a reason for this and the General’s

journal gives it. “Get everything ready for morning of 7th Mobilization Day.

Attack starts September 1.” The order was telephoned by Hitler to the Army

High Command.

Hitler, then, would have his war with Poland. That was settled. In the

meantime he would do everything he could to keep the British out. Halder’s

diary notes convey the thinking of the Fuehrer and his entourage during the

decisive day of August 26.

Rumor has it that England is disposed to consider comprehensive proposal.* Details when

Henderson returns. According to another rumor England stresses that she herself must declare

that Poland’s vital interests are threatened. In France more and more representations to the

government against war …

Plan: We demand Danzig, corridor through Corridor, and plebiscite on the same basis as

Saar. England will perhaps accept. Poland probably not. Wedge between them.35

The emphasis is Halder’s and there is no doubt that it accurately reflects up to

a point what was in Hitler’s mind. He would contrive to drive a wedge between

Poland and Britain and give Chamberlain an excuse to get out of his pledge to

Warsaw. Having ordered the Army to be ready to march on September 1, he

waited to hear from London about his grandiose offer to “guarantee” the British

Empire.

He now had two contacts with the British government outside of the German

Embassy in London, whose ambassador (Dirksen) was on leave, and which

played no part in the frenzied eleventh-hour negotiations. One contact was

official, through Ambassador Henderson, who had flown to London in a special

German plane on the morning of Saturday, August 26, with the Fuehrer’s

proposals. The other was unofficial, surreptitious and, as it turned out, quite

amateurish, through Goering’s Swedish friend, the peripatetic Birger Dahlerus,

who had flown to London from Berlin with a message for the British

government from the Luftwaffe chief on the previous day.

“At this time,” Goering related later during an interrogation at Nuremberg, “I

was in touch with Halifax by a special courier outside the regular diplomatic

channels.” *36 It was to the British Foreign Secretary in London that the Swedish

“courier” made his way at 6:30 P.M. on Friday, August 25. Dahlerus had been

summoned to Berlin from Stockholm the day before by Goering, who informed

him that despite the Nazi–Soviet Pact, which had been signed the preceding

night, Germany wanted an “understanding” with Great Britain. He put one of his

own planes at the Swede’s disposal so that he could rush to London to apprise

Lord Halifax of this remarkable fact.

The Foreign Secretary, who an hour before had signed the Anglo–Polish

mutual-assistance pact, thanked Dahlerus for his efforts and informed him that

Henderson had just conferred with Hitler in Berlin and was flying to London

with the Fuehrer’s latest proposals and that since official channels of

communication between Berlin and London had now been reopened he did not

think the services of the Swedish intermediary would be needed any longer. But

they soon proved to be. Telephoning Goering later that evening to report on his

conference with Halifax, Dahlerus was informed by the Field Marshal that the

situation had deteriorated as the result of the signing of the Anglo–Polish treaty

and that probably only a conference between representatives of Britain and

Germany could save the peace. As he later testified at Nuremberg, Goering, like

Mussolini, had in mind another Munich.

Late the same night the indefatigable Swede informed the British Foreign

Office of his talk with Goering, and the next morning he was invited to confer

again with Halifax. This time he persuaded the British Foreign Secretary to write

a letter to Goering, whom he described as the one German who might prevent

war. Couched in general terms, the letter was brief and noncommittal. It merely

reiterated Britain’s desire to reach a peaceful settlement and stressed the need “to

have a few days” to achieve it.†

Nevertheless it struck the fat Field Marshal as being of the “greatest

importance.” Dahlerus had delivered it to him that evening (August 26), as he

was traveling in his special train to his Luftwaffe headquarters at Oranienburg

outside Berlin. The train was stopped at the next station, an automobile was

commandeered and the two men raced to the Chancellery, where they arrived at

midnight. The Chancellery was dark. Hitler had gone to bed. But Goering

insisted on arousing him. Up to this moment Dahlerus, like so many others,

believed that Hitler was not an unreasonable man and that he might accept a

peaceful settlement, as he had the year before at Munich. The Swede was now to

confront for the first time the weird fantasies and the terrible temper of the

charismatic dictator.38 It was a shattering experience.

Hitler took no notice of the letter which Dahlerus had brought from Halifax

and which had seemed important enough to Goering to have the Fuehrer waked

up in the middle of the night. Instead, for twenty minutes he lectured the Swede

on his early struggles, his great achievements and all his attempts to come to an

understanding with the British. Next, when Dahlerus had got in a word about his

having once lived in England as a worker, the Chancellor questioned him about

the strange island and its strange people whom he had tried so vainly to

understand. There followed a long and somewhat technical lecture on

Germany’s military might. By this time, Dahlerus says, he thought his visit

“would not prove useful.” In the end, however, the Swede seized an opportunity

to tell his host something about the British as he had come to know them.

Hitler listened without interrupting me … but then suddenly got up, and,

becoming very excited and nervous, walked up and down saying, as though to

himself, that Germany was irresistible … Suddenly he stopped in the middle of

the room and stood there staring. His voice was blurred, and his behavior that of

a completely abnormal person. He spoke in staccato phrases: “If there should be

war, then I shall build U-boats, build U-boats, U-boats, U-boats, U-boats.” His

voice became more indistinct and finally one could not follow him at all. Then

he pulled himself together, raised his voice as though addressing a large

audience and shrieked: “I shall build airplanes, build airplanes, airplanes,

airplanes, and I shall annihilate my enemies.” He seemed more like a phantom

from a storybook than a real person. I stared at him in amazement and turned to

see how Goering was reacting, but he did not turn a hair.

Finally the excited Chancellor strode up to his guest and said, “Herr Dahlerus,

you who know England so well, can you give me any reason for my perpetual

failure to come to an agreement with her?” Dahlerus confesses that he “hesitated

at first” to answer but then replied that in his personal opinion the British “lack

of confidence in him and in his Government was the reason.”

“Idiots!” Dahlerus says Hitler stormed back, flinging out his right arm and

striking his breast with his left hand. “Have I ever told a lie in my life?”

The Nazi dictator thereupon calmed down, there was a discussion of Hitler’s

proposals made through Henderson and it was finally settled that Dahlerus

should fly back to London with a further offer to the British government.

Goering objected to committing it to writing and the accommodating Swede was

told he must, instead, commit it to memory. It contained six points:

1.

Germany wanted a pact or alliance with Britain.

2. Britain was to help Germany obtain Danzig and the Corridor, but Poland

was to have a free harbor in Danzig, to retain the Baltic port of Gdynia and

a corridor to it.

3. Germany would guarantee the new Polish frontiers.

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

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

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

With these proposals imprinted in his memory, Dahlerus flew to London on

the morning of Sunday, August 27, and shortly after noon was whisked by a

roundabout route so as to avoid the snooping press reporters and ushered into the

presence of Chamberlain, Lord Halifax, Sir Horace Wilson and Sir Alexander

Cadogan. It was obvious that the British government now took the Swedish

courier quite seriously.

He had brought with him some hastily scribbled notes jotted down in the

plane describing his meeting with Hitler and Goering the night before. In these

notes he assured the two leading members of the British cabinet who now

scanned his memorandum that during the interview Hitler had been “calm and

composed.” Although no record of this extraordinary Sabbath meeting has been

found in the Foreign Office archives, it has been reconstructed in the volume of

Foreign Office papers (Volume VII, Third Series) from data furnished by Lord

Halifax and Cadogan and from the emissary’s memorandum. The British version

differs somewhat from that given by Dahlerus in his book and at Nuremberg, but

taking the various accounts together what follows seems as accurate a report as

we shall ever get.

Chamberlain and Halifax saw at once that they were faced with two sets of

proposals from Hitler, the one given to Henderson and the other now brought by

Dahlerus, and that they differed. Whereas the first had proposed to guarantee the

British Empire after Hitler had settled accounts with Poland, the second seemed

to suggest that the Fuehrer was ready to negotiate through the British for the

return of Danzig and the Corridor, after which he would “guarantee” Poland’s

new boundaries. This was an old refrain to Chamberlain, after his disillusioning

experiences with Hitler over Czechoslovakia, and he was skeptical of the

Fuehrer’s offer as Dahlerus outlined it. He told the Swede that he saw “no

prospect of a settlement on these terms; the Poles might concede Danzig, but

they would fight rather than surrender the Corridor.”

Finally it was agreed that Dahlerus should return to Berlin immediately with

an initial and unofficial reply to Hitler and report back to London on Hitler’s

reception of it before the official response was drawn up and sent to Berlin with

Henderson the next evening. As Halifax put it (according to the British version),

“the issues might be somewhat confused as a result of these informal and secret

communications through M. Dahlerus. It was [therefore] desirable to make it

clear that when Dahlerus returned to Berlin that night he went, not to carry the

answer of His Majesty’s Government, but rather to prepare the way for the main

communication” which Henderson would bring. 39

So important had this unknown Swedish businessman become as an

intermediary in the negotiations between the governments of the two most

powerful nations in Europe that, according to his own account, he told the Prime

Minister and the Foreign Secretary at this critical juncture that “they should keep

Henderson in London until Monday [the next day] so that the answer could be

given after they had been informed how Hitler regarded the English

standpoint.” 40

And what was the English standpoint, as Dahlerus was to present it to Hitler?

There is some confusion about it. According to Halifax’s own rough notes of his

verbal instructions to Dahlerus, the British standpoint was merely this:

i. Solemn assurance of desire for good understanding between G. and Gt.B. [The initials

are Halifax’s.] Not a single member of the Govt. who thinks different. ii. Gt.B. bound to honor

her obligations to Poland. iii. German–Polish differences must be settled peacefully. 41

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

comprehensive.

Naturally, Point 6, the offer to defend the British Empire, was rejected. Similarly they did

not want to have any discussion on colonies as long as Germany was mobilized. With regard

to the Polish boundaries, they wanted them to be guaranteed by the five great powers.

Concerning the Corridor, they proposed that negotiations with Poland be undertaken

immediately. As to the first point [of Hitler’s proposals] England was willing in principle to

come to an agreement with Germany.42

Dahlerus flew back to Berlin Sunday evening and saw Goering shortly before

midnight. The Field Marshal did not consider the British reply “very favorable.”

But after seeing Hitler at midnight, Goering rang up Dahlerus at his hotel at 1

A.M. and said that the Chancellor would “accept the English standpoint” provided

the official version to be brought by Henderson Monday evening was in

agreement with it.

Goering was pleased, and Dahlerus even more so. The Swede woke up Sir

George Ogilvie Forbes, the counselor of the British Embassy, at 2 A.M. to give

him the glad tidings. Not only to do that but—such had his position become, at

least in his own mind—to advise the British government what to say in its

official reply. That note, which Henderson would be bringing later on this

Monday, August 28, must contain an undertaking, Dahlerus emphasized, that

Britain would persuade Poland to negotiate with Germany directly and

immediately.

Dahlerus has just telephoned [read a later dispatch from Forbes on August 28] from

Goering’s office following suggestions which he considers most important.

1. British reply to Hitler should not contain any reference to Roosevelt plan. *

2. Hitler suspects Poles will try to avoid negotiations. Reply should therefore contain clear

statement that the Poles have been strongly advised to immediately establish contact with

Germany and negotiate. †43

Throughout the day the now confident Swede not only heaped advice on

Forbes, who dutifully wired it to London, but himself telephoned the British

Foreign Office with a message for Halifax containing further suggestions.

At this critical moment in world history the amateur Swedish diplomat had

indeed become the pivotal point between Berlin and London. At 2 P.M. on

August 28, Halifax, who had been apprised both from his Berlin embassy and

from Dahlerus’ telephone call to the Foreign Office of the Swede’s urgent

advice, wired the British ambassador in Warsaw, Sir Howard Kennard, to see

Foreign Minister Beck “at once” and get him to authorize the British government

to inform Hitler “that Poland is ready to enter at once into direct discussion with

Germany.” The Foreign Secretary was in a hurry. He wanted to include the

authorization in the official reply to Hitler which Henderson was waiting to carry

back to Berlin this same day. He urged his ambassador in Warsaw to telephone

Beck’s reply. Late in the afternoon Beck gave the requested authorization and it

was hastily inserted in the British note.44

Henderson arrived back in Berlin with it on the evening of August 28, and

after being received at the Chancellery by an S.S. guard of honor, which

presented arms and rolled its drums (the formal diplomatic pretensions were

preserved to the end), he was ushered into the presence of Hitler, to whom he

handed a German translation of the note, at 10:30 P.M. The Chancellor read it at

once.

The British government “entirely agreed” with him, the communication said,

that there must “first” be a settlement of the differences between Germany and

Poland. “Everything, however,” it added, “turns upon the nature of the

settlement and the method by which it is to be reached.” On this matter, the note

said, the Chancellor had been “silent.” Hitler’s offer to “guarantee” the British

Empire was gently declined. The British government “could not, for any

advantage offered to Great Britain, acquiesce in a settlement which put in

jeopardy the independence of a State to whom they had given their guarantee.”

That guarantee would be honored, but because the British government was

“scrupulous” concerning its obligations to Poland the Chancellor must not think

it was not anxious for an equitable settlement.

It follows that the next step should be the initiation of direct discussions between the

German and Polish Governments on a basis … of safeguarding Poland’s essential interests and

the securing of the settlement by an international guarantee.

They [the British government] have already received a definite assurance from the Polish

Government that they are prepared to enter into discussions on this basis, and H. M.

Government hope the German Government would also be willing to agree to this course.

… A just settlement … between Germany and Poland may open the way to world peace.

Failure to reach it would ruin the hopes of an understanding between Germany and Great

Britain, would bring the two countries into conflict and might well plunge the whole world

into war. Such an outcome would be a calamity without parallel in history.45

When Hitler had finished reading the communication, Henderson began to

elaborate on it from notes, he told the Fuehrer, which he had made during his

conversations with Chamberlain and Halifax. It was the only meeting with

Hitler, he said later, in which he, the ambassador, did most of the talking. The

gist of his remarks was that Britain wanted Germany’s friendship, it wanted

peace, but it would fight if Hitler attacked Poland. The Fuehrer, who was by no

means silent, replied by expatiating on the crimes of Poland and on his own

“generous” offers for a peaceful settlement with her, which would not be

repeated. In fact today “nothing less than the return of Danzig and the whole of

the Corridor would satisfy him, together with a rectification in Silesia, where

ninety per cent of the population voted for Germany at the postwar plebiscite.”

This was not true nor was Hitler’s rejoinder a moment later that a million

Germans had been driven out of the Corridor after 1918. There had been only

385,000 Germans there, according to the German census of 1910, but by this

time, of course, the Nazi dictator expected everyone to swallow his lies. For the

last time in his crumbling mission to Berlin, the British ambassador swallowed a

good deal, for, as he declared in his Final Report, “Herr Hitler on this occasion

was again friendly and reasonable and appeared to be not dissatisfied with the

answer which I had brought to him.”

“In the end I asked him two straight questions,” Henderson wired London at

2:35 A.M. in a long dispatch describing the interview.46

Was he willing to negotiate direct with the Poles, and was he ready to discuss the question

of an exchange of populations? He replied in the affirmative as regards the latter (though I

have no doubt that he was thinking at the same time of a rectification of frontiers).

As to the first point, he would first have to give “careful consideration” to the

whole British note. At this point, Henderson recounted in his dispatch, the

Chancellor turned to Ribbentrop and said, “We must summon Goering to discuss

it with him.” Hitler promised a written reply to the British communication on the

next day, Tuesday, August 29.

“Conversation was conducted,” Henderson emphasized to Halifax, “in quite a

friendly atmosphere in spite of absolute firmness on both sides.” Probably

Henderson, despite all of his personal experience with his host, did not quite

appreciate why Hitler had made the atmosphere so friendly. The Fuehrer was

still resolved to go to war that very weekend against Poland; he was still hopeful,

despite all the British government and Henderson had said, of keeping Britain

out of it.

Apparently, Hitler, encouraged by the obsequious and ignorant Ribbentrop,

simply could not believe that the British meant what they said, though he said he

did.

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

Hitler insisted that he was not bluffing, and that people would make a big mistake if they

believed that he was. I replied that I was fully aware of the fact and that we were not bluffing

either. Herr Hitler stated that he fully realized that.47

He said so, but did he realize it? For in his reply on August 29 he deliberately

tried to trick the British government in a way which he must have thought would

enable him to eat his cake and have it too.

The British reply and Hitler’s first reaction to it generated a burst of optimism

in Berlin, especially in Goering’s camp, where the inimitable Dahlerus now

spent most of his time. At 1:30 in the morning of August 29 the Swede received

a telephone call from one of the Field Marshal’s adjutants, who was calling from

the Chancellery, where Hitler, Ribbentrop and Goering had pondered the British

note after Henderson’s departure. The word to Dahlerus from his German friend

was that the British reply “was highly satisfactory and that there was every hope

that the threat of war was past.”

Dahlerus conveyed the good news by long-distance telephone to the British

Foreign Office later that morning, informing Halifax that “Hitler and Goering

considered that there was now a definite possibility of a peaceful settlement.” At

10:50 A.M. Dahlerus saw Goering, who greeted him effusively, pumped his hand

warmly and exclaimed, “There will be peace! Peace is secured!” Fortified with

such happy assurances, the Swedish courier made immediately for the British

Embassy to let Henderson, whom he had not yet personally met, in on the glad

tidings. According to the ambassador’s dispatch describing this encounter,

Dahlerus reported that the Germans were highly optimistic. They “agreed” with

the “main point” of the British reply. Hitler, Dahlerus said, was asking “only”

for Danzig and the Corridor—not the whole Corridor but just a small one along

the railroad tracks to Danzig. In fact, Dahlerus reported, the Fuehrer was

prepared to be “most reasonable. He would go a long way to meet the Poles. ”48

Sir Nevile Henderson, on whom some light was finally dawning, was not so

sure. He told his visitor, according to the latter, that one could not believe a word

that Hitler said and the same went for Dahlerus’ friend, Hermann Goering, who

had lied to the ambassador “heaps of times.” Hitler, in the opinion of Henderson,

was playing a dishonest and ruthless game.

But the Swede, now at the very center of affairs, could not be persuaded—his

awakening was to come even after Henderson’s. Just to make sure that the

ambassador’s inexplicable pessimism did not jeopardize his own efforts, he

again telephoned the British Foreign Office at 7:10 P.M. to leave a message for

Halifax that there would be “no difficulties in the German reply.” But, advised

the Swede, the British government should tell the Poles “to behave properly.” 49

Five minutes later, at 7:15 o’clock on the evening of August 29, Henderson

arrived at the Chancellery to receive from the Fuehrer Germany’s actual reply. It

soon became evident how hollow had been the optimism of Goering and his

Swedish friend. The meeting, as the ambassador advised Halifax immediately

afterward, “was of a stormy character and Herr Hitler was far less reasonable

than yesterday.”

The formal, written German note itself reiterated the Reich’s desire for

friendship with Great Britain but emphasized that “it could not be bought at the

price of a renunciation of vital German interests.” After a long and familiar

rehearsal of Polish misdeeds, provocations and “barbaric actions of maltreatment

which cry to heaven,” the note presented Hitler’s demands officially and in

writing for the first time: return of Danzig and the Corridor, and the safeguarding

of Germans in Poland. To eliminate “present conditions,” it added, “there no

longer remain days, still less weeks, but perhaps only hours.”

Germany, the communication continued, could no longer share the British

view that a solution could be reached by direct negotiations with Poland.

However, “solely” to please the British government and in the interests of

Anglo–German friendship, Germany was ready “to accept the British proposal

and enter into direct negotiations” with Poland. “In the event of a territorial

rearrangement in Poland,” the German government could not give guarantees

without the agreement of the Soviet Union. (The British government, of course,

did not know of the secret protocol of the Nazi–Soviet Pact dividing up Poland.)

“For the rest, in making these proposals,” the note declared, “the German

Government never had any intention of touching Poland’s vital interests or

questioning the existence of an independent Polish State.”

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

The German Government accordingly agree to accept the British Government’s offer of

their good offices in securing the dispatch to Berlin of a Polish emissary with full powers.

They count on the arrival of this emissary on Wednesday, August 30, 1939.

The German Government will immediately draw up proposals for a solution acceptable to

themselves and will, if possible, place these at the disposal of the British Government before

the arrival of the Polish negotiator.50

Henderson read through the note while Hitler and Ribbentrop watched him

and said nothing until he came to the passage saying that the Germans expected

the arrival of a Polish emissary with full powers on the following day.

“That sounds like an ultimatum,” he commented, but Hitler and Ribbentrop

strenuously denied it. They merely wished to stress, they said, “the urgency of

the moment when two fully mobilized armies were standing face to face.”

The ambassador, no doubt mindful of the reception accorded by Hitler to

Schuschnigg and Hácha, says he asked whether if a Polish plenipotentiary did

come he would be “well received” and the discussions “conducted on a footing

of complete equality.”

“Of course,” Hitler answered.

There followed an acrimonious discussion provoked at one point by Hitler’s

“gratuitous” remark, as Henderson put it, that the ambassador did not “care a

row of pins” how many Germans were being slaughtered in Poland. To this

Henderson says he made a “heated retort.” *

“I left the Reich Chancellery that evening filled with the gloomiest

forebodings,” Henderson recounted later in his memoirs, though he does not

seem to have mentioned this in his dispatches which he got off to London that

night. “My soldiers,” Hitler had told him, “are asking me, ‘Yes or no?’” They

had already lost a week and they could not afford to lose another “lest the rainy

season in Poland be added to their enemies.”

Nevertheless it is evident from the ambassador’s official reports and from his

book that he did not quite comprehend the nature of Hitler’s trap until the next

day, when another trap was sprung and the Fuehrer’s trickery became clear. The

dictator’s game seems quite obvious from the text of his formal note. He

demanded on the evening of August 29 that an emissary with full powers to

negotiate show up in Berlin the next day. There can be no doubt that he had in

mind inflicting on him the treatment he had accorded the Austrian Chancellor

and the Czechoslovak President under what he thought were similar

circumstances. If the Poles, as he was quite sure, did not rush the emissary to

Berlin, or even if they did and the negotiator declined to accept Hitler’s terms,

then Poland could be blamed for refusing a “peaceful settlement” and Britain

and France might be induced not to come to its aid when attacked. Primitive, but

simple and clear. *

But on the night of August 29 Henderson did not see it so clearly. While he

was still working on his dispatches to London describing his meeting with Hitler

he invited the Polish ambassador to come over to the embassy. He filled him in

on the German note and his talk with Hitler and, by his own account, “impressed

on him the need for immediate action. I implored him, in Poland’s own interests,

to urge his Government to nominate without any delay someone to represent

them in the proposed negotiations.” 52

In the London Foreign Office, heads were cooler. At 2 A.M. on August 29,

Halifax, after pondering the German reply and Henderson’s account of the

meeting with Hitler, wired the ambassador that while careful consideration

would be given the German note, it was “of course unreasonable to expect that

we can produce a Polish representative in Berlin today, and German Government

must not expect this. ”53 The diplomats and Foreign Office officials were now

laboring frantically around the clock and Henderson conveyed this message to

the Wilhelmstrasse at 4:30 A.M.

He conveyed four further messages from London during the day, August 30.

One was a personal note from Chamberlain to Hitler advising him that the

German reply was being considered “with all urgency” and that it would be

answered later in the afternoon. In the meantime the Prime Minister urged the

German government, as he said he had the Polish government, to avoid frontier

incidents. For the rest, he “welcomed the evidence in the exchanges of views

which are taking place of the desire for an Anglo–German understanding.” 54 The

second message was in similar terms from Halifax. A third from the Foreign

Secretary spoke of reports of German sabotage in Poland and asked the Germans

to refrain from such activities. The fourth message from Halifax, dispatched at

6:50 P.M., reflected a stiffening of both the Foreign Office and the British

ambassador in Berlin.

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

day:

While I still recommend that the Polish Government should swallow this eleventh-hour

effort to establish direct contact with Hitler, even if it be only to convince the world that they

were prepared to make their own sacrifice for preservation of peace, one can only conclude

from the German reply that Hitler is determined to achieve his ends by so-called peaceful fair

means if he can, but by force if he cannot. 55

By this time even Henderson had no more stomach for another Munich. The

Poles had never considered one—for themselves. At 10 A.M. that morning of

August 30, the British ambassador in Warsaw had wired Halifax that he felt sure

“that it would be impossible to induce the Polish Government to send M. Beck

or any other representative immediately to Berlin to discuss a settlement on the

basis proposed by Hitler. They would sooner fight and perish rather than submit

to such humiliation, especially after the examples of Czechoslovakia, Lithuania

and Austria.” He suggested that if negotiations were to be “between equals” they

must take place in some neutral country. 56

His own stiffening attitude thus reinforced from his ambassadors in Berlin and

Warsaw, Halifax wired Henderson that the British government could not

“advise” the Poles to comply with Hitler’s demand that an emissary with full

powers come to Berlin. It was, said the Foreign Secretary, “wholly

unreasonable.”

Could you not suggest [Halifax added] to German Government that they adopt the normal

procedure, when their proposals are ready, of inviting the Polish Ambassador to call and

handing proposals to him for transmission to Warsaw and inviting suggestions as to conduct of

negotiations. 57

The promised British reply to Hitler’s latest note was delivered to Ribbentrop

by Henderson at midnight on August 30–31. There now ensued a highly

dramatic meeting which Dr. Schmidt, the only observer present, later described

as “the stormiest I have ever experienced during my twenty-three years as

interpreter.” 58

“I must tell you,” the ambassador wired Halifax immediately afterward, “that

Ribbentrop’s whole demeanor during an unpleasant interview was aping Hitler

at his worst.” And in his Final Report three weeks later Henderson recalled the

German Foreign Minister’s “intense hostility, which increased in violence as I

made each communication in turn. He kept leaping from his chair in a state of

great excitement and asking if I had anything more to say. I kept replying that I

had.” According to Schmidt, Henderson was also aroused from his chair. At one

point, says this sole eyewitness, both men leaped from their seats and glared at

each other so angrily that the German interpreter thought they were coming to

blows.

But what is important for history is not the grotesqueness of this meeting

between the German Minister for Foreign Affairs and His Majesty’s

Ambassador in Berlin at midnight of August 30–31, but a development, during

the tempestuous interview, which produced Hitler’s final act of trickery and

completed, when it was too late, the education of Sir Nevile Henderson insofar

as the Third Reich was concerned.

Ribbentrop scarcely glanced at the British reply or listened to Henderson’s

attempted explanation of it.* When Henderson ventured to ask for the German

proposals for a Polish settlement, which had been promised the British in

Hitler’s last note, Ribbentrop retorted contemptuously that it was now too late

since the Polish emissary had not arrived by midnight. However, the Germans

had drawn up proposals and Ribbentrop now proceeded to read them.

He read them in German “at top speed, or rather gabbled to me as fast as he

could, in a tone of utmost annoyance,” Henderson reported.

Of the sixteen articles I was able to gather the gist of six or seven, but it would

have been quite impossible to guarantee even the exact accuracy of these without

a careful study of the text itself. When he had finished I accordingly asked him

to let me see it. Ribbentrop refused categorically, threw the document with a

contemptuous gesture on the table and said that it was now out of date since no

Polish emissary had arrived by midnight.†

It may have been out of date, since the Germans chose to make it so, but what

is important is that these German “proposals” were never meant to be taken

seriously or indeed to be taken at all. In fact they were a hoax. They were a sham

to fool the German people and, if possible, world opinion into believing that

Hitler had attempted at the last minute to reach a reasonable settlement of his

claims against Poland. The Fuehrer admitted as much. Dr. Schmidt later heard

him say, “I needed an alibi, especially with the German people, to show them

that I had done everything to maintain peace. This explains my generous offer

about the settlement of the Danzig and Corridor questions. ”*

Compared to his demands of recent days, they were generous, astonishingly

so. In them Hitler demanded only that Danzig be returned to Germany. The

future of the Corridor would be decided by a plebiscite, and then only after a

period of twelve months when tempers had calmed down. Poland would keep

the port of Gdynia. Whoever received the Corridor in the plebiscite would grant

the other party extraterritorial highway and railroad routes through it—this was a

reversion to his “offer” of the previous spring. There was to be an exchange of

populations and full rights accorded to nationals of one country in the other.

One may speculate that had these proposals been offered seriously they would

undoubtedly have formed at least the basis of negotiations between Germany

and Poland and might well have spared the world its second great war in a

generation. They were broadcast to the German people at 9 P.M. on August 31,

eight and one half hours after Hitler had issued the final orders for the attack on

Poland, and, so far as I could judge in Berlin, they succeeded in their aim of

fooling the German people. They certainly fooled this writer, who was deeply

impressed by their reasonableness when he heard them over the radio, and who

said so in his broadcast to America on that last night of the peace.

Henderson returned to His Majesty’s Embassy that night of August 30–31,

convinced, as he later said, “that the last hope for peace had vanished.” Still, he

kept trying. He roused the Polish ambassador out of bed at 2 A.M., invited him to

hurry over to the embassy, gave him “an objective and studiously moderate

account” of his conversation with Ribbentrop, mentioned the cession of Danzig

and the plebiscite in the Corridor as the two main points in the German

proposals, stated that so far as he could gather “they were not too unreasonable”

and suggested that Lipski recommend to his government that they should

propose at once a meeting between Field Marshals Smigly-Rydz and Goering. “I

felt obliged to add,” says Henderson, “that 1 could not conceive of the success of

any negotiations if they were conducted by Herr von Ribbentrop. ”*62

In the meantime the tireless Dahlerus had not been inactive. At 10 P.M. on

August 29, Goering had summoned him to his home and informed him of the

“unsatisfactory course” of the meeting just finished between Hitler, Ribbentrop

and Henderson. The corpulent Field Marshal was in one of his hysterical moods

and treated his Swedish friend to a violent outburst against the Poles and the

British. Then he calmed down, assured his visitor that the Fuehrer was already at

work drawing up a “magnanimous” ( “grosszuegig” ) offer to Poland in which

the only clear-cut demand would be the return of Danzig and generously leaving

the future of the Corridor to be decided by a plebiscite “under international

control.” Dahlerus mildly inquired about the size of the plebiscite area,

whereupon Goering tore a page out of an old atlas and with colored pencils

shaded off the “Polish” and “German” parts, including in the latter not only

prewar Prussian Poland but the industrial city of Lódź, which was sixty miles

east of the 1914 frontier. The Swedish interloper could not help but notice the

“rapidity and the recklessness” with which such important decisions were made

in the Third Reich. However, he agreed to Goering’s request that he fly

immediately back to London, emphasize to the British government that Hitler

still wanted peace and hint that as proof of it the Fuehrer was already drawing up

a most generous offer to Poland.

Dahlerus, who seems to have been incapable of fatigue, flew off to London at

4 A.M. August 30 and, changing cars several times on the drive in from Heston to

the city to throw the newspaper reporters off the track (apparently no journalist

even knew of his existence), arrived at Downing Street at 10:30 A.M., where he

was immediately received by Chamberlain, Halifax, Wilson and Cadogan.

But by now the three British architects of Munich (Cadogan, a permanent

Foreign Office official, had always been impervious to Nazi charms) could no

longer be taken in by Hitler and Goering, nor were they much impressed by

Dahlerus’ efforts. The well-meaning Swede found them “highly mistrustful” of

both Nazi leaders and “inclined to assume that nothing would now prevent Hitler

from declaring war on Poland.” Moreover, the British government, it was made

plain to the Swedish mediator, had not fallen for Hitler’s trickery in demanding

that a Polish plenipotentiary show up in Berlin within twenty-four hours.

But Dahlerus, like Henderson in Berlin, kept on trying. He telephoned

Goering in Berlin, suggested that the Polish–German delegates meet “outside

Germany” and received the summary answer that “Hitler was in Berlin” and the

meeting would have to take place there.

So the Swedish go-between accomplished nothing by this flight. By midnight

he was back in Berlin, where, it must be said, he had another opportunity to be at

least helpful. He reached Goering’s headquarters at half past midnight to find the

Luftwaffe chief once more in an expansive mood. The Fuehrer, said Goering,

had just handed Henderson through Ribbentrop a “democratic, fair and workable

offer” to Poland. Dahlerus, who seems to have been sobered by his meeting in

Downing Street, called up Forbes at the British Embassy to check and learned

that Ribbentrop had “gabbled” the terms so fast that Henderson had not been

able to fully grasp them and that the ambassador had been refused a copy of the

text. Dahlerus says he told Goering that this was no way “to treat the ambassador

of an empire like Great Britain” and suggested that the Field Marshal, who had a

copy of the sixteen points, permit him to telephone the text to the British

Embassy. After some hesitation Goering acquiesced.*

In such a way, at the instigation of an unknown Swedish businessman in

connivance with the chief of the Air Force, were Hitler and Ribbentrop

circumvented and the British informed of the German “proposals” to Poland.

Perhaps by this time the Field Marshal, who was by no means unintelligent or

inexperienced in the handling of foreign affairs, saw more quickly than the

Fuehrer and his fawning Foreign Minister certain advantages which might be

gained by finally letting the British in on the secret.

To make doubly sure that Henderson got it correctly, Goering dispatched

Dahlerus to the British Embassy at 10 A.M. of Thursday, August 31, with a typed

copy of the sixteen points. Henderson was still trying to persuade the Polish

ambassador to establish the “desired contact” with the Germans. At 8 A.M. he

had once more urged this on Lipski, this time over the telephone, warning him

that unless Poland acted by noon there would be war. † Shortly after Dahlerus

had arrived with the text of the German proposals, Henderson dispatched him,

along with Forbes, to the Polish Embassy. Lipski, who had never heard of

Dahlerus, was somewhat confused at meeting the Swede—he was by this time,

like most of the key diplomats in Berlin, strained and dead tired—and became

irritated when Dahlerus urged him to go immediately to Goering and accept the

Fuehrer’s offer. Requesting the Swede to dictate the sixteen points to a secretary

in an adjoining room, he expressed his annoyance to Forbes for bringing in a

“stranger” at this late date on so serious a matter. The harassed Polish

ambassador must have been depressed too at the pressure which Henderson was

bringing on him and his government to negotiate immediately on the basis of an

offer which he had just received quite unofficially and surreptitiously, but which

the British envoy, as he had told Lipski the night before, thought was not “on the

whole too unreasonable.” * He did not know that Henderson’s view was not

endorsed by Downing Street. What he did know was that he had no intention of

taking the advice of an unknown Swede, even though he had been sent to him by

the British ambassador, and of going to Goering to accept Hitler’s “offer,” even

if he had been empowered to do so, which he was not.†

THE LAST DAY OF PEACE

Having got the Germans and Poles to agree to direct negotiations, as they

thought, the British and French governments, though highly skeptical of Hitler,

had concentrated their efforts on trying to bring such talks about. In this Britain

took the lead, supported diplomatically in Berlin and especially in Warsaw by

France. Although the British did not advise the Poles to accept Hitler’s

ultimatum and fetch an emissary with full powers to Berlin on August 30,

holding that such a demand was, as Halifax had wired Henderson, “wholly

unreasonable,” they did urge Colonel Beck to declare that he was prepared to

negotiate with Berlin “without delay.” This was the substance of a message

which Halifax got off to his ambassador in Warsaw late on the night of August

30. Kennard was to inform Beck of the contents of the British note to Germany

which Henderson was presenting to Ribbentrop, assure him that Britain would

stand by its commitments to Poland, but stress the importance of Poland’s

agreeing to direct discussions with Germany at once.

We regard it as most important [Halifax telegraphed] from the point of view of the internal

situation in Germany and of world opinion that, so long as the German Government profess

themselves ready to negotiate, no opportunity should be given them for placing the blame for a

conflict on Poland.67

Kennard saw Beck at midnight and the Polish Foreign Minister promised to

consult his government and give him a “considered reply” by midday on August

31. Kennard’s dispatch describing this interview reached the British Foreign

Office at 8 A.M. and Halifax was not entirely satisfied with it. At noon—it was

now the last day of August—he wired Kennard that he should “concert” with his

French colleague in Warsaw (Léon Nöel, the French ambassador) and suggest to

the Polish government

that they should now make known to the German Government, preferably direct, but if not,

through us, that they have been made aware of our last reply to German Government and that

they confirm their acceptance of the principle of direct discussions.

French Government fear that German Government might take advantage of silence on part

of Polish Government.68

Lord Halifax was still uneasy about his Polish allies, and less than two hours

later, at 1:45 P.M., he again wired Kennard:

Please at once inform Polish Government and advise them, in view of fact that

they have accepted principle of direct discussions, immediately to instruct Polish

Ambassador in Berlin to say to German Government that, if latter have any

proposals, he is ready to transmit them to his Government so that they may at

once consider them and make suggestions for early discussions.69

But shortly before this telegram was dispatched, Beck, in response to the

démarche of the midnight before, had already informed the British ambassador

in a written note that the Polish government “confirm their readiness … for a

direct exchange of views with the German Government” and had orally assured

him that he was instructing Lipski to seek an interview with Ribbentrop to say

that “Poland had accepted the British proposals.” When Kennard asked Beck

what Lipski would do if Ribbentrop handed over the German proposals, the

Foreign Minister replied that his ambassador in Berlin would not be authorized

to accept them as, “in view of past experience, it might be accompanied by some

sort of an ultimatum.” The important thing, said Beck, was to re-establish

contact “and then details should be discussed as to where, with whom and on

what basis negotiations should be commenced.” In the light of the “past

experience” which the once pro-Nazi Polish Foreign Minister mentioned, this

was not an unreasonable view. Beck added, Kennard wired London, that “if

invited to go to Berlin he would of course not go, as he had no intention of being

treated like President Hácha.” 70

Actually Beck did not send to Lipski quite those instructions. Instead of

saying that Poland “accepted” the British proposals, Lipski was told to tell the

Germans that Poland “was favorably considering” the British suggestions and

would make a formal reply “during the next few hours at the latest.”

There was more to Beck’s instructions to Lipski than that and the Germans,

having solved the Polish ciphers, knew it.

For a simple and good reason that will soon become apparent, the Germans

were not anxious to receive the Polish ambassador in Berlin. It was too late. At 1

P.M., a few minutes after he had received his telegraphic instructions from

Warsaw, Lipski requested an interview with Ribbentrop for the purpose of

presenting a communication from his government. After cooling his heels for a

couple of hours he received a telephone call from Weizsaecker asking, on behalf

of the German Foreign Minister, whether he was coming as an emissary with full

power “or in some other capacity.”

“I replied,” Lipski reported later in his final report,71 “that I was asking for an

interview as Ambassador, to present a declaration from my Government.”

Another long wait followed. At 5 P.M. Attolico called on Ribbentrop and

communicated the “urgent desire of the Duce” that the Fuehrer should receive

Lipski “to establish in this way at least the minimum contact necessary for the

avoidance of a final breach.” The German Foreign Minister promised to

“transmit” the Duce’s wishes to the Fuehrer.72

This was not the first call the Italian ambassador had made in the

Wilhelmstrasse on this last day of August in order to try to save the peace. At 9

that morning Attolico had advised Rome that the situation was “desperate” and

that unless “something new comes up there will be war in a few hours.” In Rome

Mussolini and Ciano put their heads together to find something new. The first

result was that Ciano telephoned Halifax to say that Mussolini could not

intervene unless he were able to produce for Hitler a “fat prize: Danzig.” The

British Foreign Secretary did not rise to the bait. He told Ciano the first thing to

be done was to establish direct contact between the Germans and the Poles

through Lipski.

Thus at 11:30 A.M. Attolico saw Weizsaecker at the German Foreign Office

and apprised him that Mussolini was in contact with London and had suggested

the return of Danzig as a first step toward a German–Polish settlement, and that

the Duce needed a certain “margin of time” to perfect his plan for peace. In the

meantime, couldn’t the German government receive Lipski?

Lipski was received by Ribbentrop at 6:15 P.M., more than five hours after he

had requested the interview. It did not last long. The ambassador, despite his

fatigue and his worn nerves, behaved with dignity. He read to the Nazi Foreign

Minister a written communication.

Last night the Polish Government were informed by the British Government of an

exchange of views with the Reich Government as to a possibility of direct negotiations

between the Polish and German Governments.

The Polish Government are favorably considering the British Government’s suggestion,

and will make them a formal reply on the subject during the next few hours.

“I added,” said Lipski later, “that I had been trying to present this declaration

since 1 P.M.” When Ribbentrop asked him whether he had come as an emissary

empowered to negotiate, the ambassador replied that, “for the time being,” he

had only been instructed to remit the communication which he had just read,

whereupon he handed it to the Foreign Minister. He had expected, Ribbentrop

said, that Lipski would come as a “fully empowered delegate,” and when the

ambassador again declared that he had no such role he was dismissed.

Ribbentrop said he would inform the Fuehrer.73

“On my return to the embassy,” Lipski later related, “I found myself unable to

communicate with Warsaw, as the Germans had cut my telephone.”

The questions of Weizsaecker and Ribbentrop as to the ambassador’s status as

a negotiator were purely formal, with an eye, no doubt, for the record, for ever

since noon, when Lipski’s communication had been received by telegram from

Warsaw, the Germans had known that he was not coming, as they had

demanded, as a plenipotentiary. They had decoded the telegram immediately. A

copy had been sent to Goering, who showed it to Dahlerus and instructed him to

take it posthaste to Henderson so that the British government, as the Field

Marshal later explained on the stand at Nuremberg, “should find out as quickly

as possible how intransigent the Polish attitude was.” Goering read to the

tribunal the secret instructions to Lipski, which were that the ambassador should

refrain from conducting official negotiations “under any circumstances” and

should insist that he had “no plenipotentiary powers” and that he was merely

empowered to deliver the official communication of his government. In his

testimony, the Field Marshal made much of this during his vain effort to

convince the Nuremberg judges that Poland had “sabotaged” Hitler’s last bid for

peace and that, as he said, he, Goering, did not want war and had done

everything he could to prevent it. But Goering’s veracity was only a shade above

Ribbentrop’s and one example of this was his further assertion to the court that

only after Lipski’s visit to the Wilhelmstrasse at 6:15 P.M. on August 31 did

Hitler decide “on invasion the next day.”

The truth was quite otherwise. In fact, all these scrambling eleventh-hour

moves of the weary and exhausted diplomats, and of the overwrought men who

directed them on the afternoon and evening of that last day of August 1939, were

but a flailing of the air, completely futile, and, in the case of the Germans,

entirely and purposely deceptive.

For at half after noon on August 31, before Lord Halifax had urged the Poles

to be more accommodating and before Lipski had called on Ribbentrop and

before the Germans had made publicly known their “generous” proposals to

Poland and before Mussolini had tried to intervene, Adolf Hitler had taken his

final decision and issued the decisive order that was to throw the planet into its

bloodiest war.

SUPREME COMMANDER OF THE ARMED FORCES

MOST SECRET

Berlin, August 31, 1939

Directive No. 1 for the Conduct of the War

1. Now that all the political possibilities of disposing by peaceful means of a

situation on the Eastern Frontier which is intolerable for Germany are exhausted,

I have determined on a solution by force. *

2. The attack on Poland is to be carried out in accordance with the

preparations made for Case White, with the alterations which result, where the

Army is concerned, from the fact that it has in the meantime almost completed

its dispositions.

Allotment of tasks and the operational target remain unchanged.

Date of attack: September 1, 1939.

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

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

Dirschau Bridge.

3. In the West it is important that the responsibility for the opening of

hostilities should rest squarely on England and France. For the time being

insignificant frontier violations should be met by purely local action.

The neutrality of Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland, to which

we have given assurances, must be scrupulously observed.

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

permission.

At sea, the same applies for all warlike actions or actions which could be

regarded as such.*

4. If Britain and France open hostilities against Germany, it is the task of the

Wehrmacht formations operating in the West to conserve their forces as much as

possible and thus maintain the conditions for a victorious conclusion of the

operations against Poland. Within these limits enemy forces and their military-

economic resources are to be damaged as much as possible. Orders to go over to

the attack I reserve, in any case, to myself.

The Army will hold the West Wall and make preparations to prevent its being

outflanked in the north through violation of Belgian or Dutch territory by the

Western powers …

The Navy will carry on warfare against merchant shipping, directed mainly at

England … The Air Force is, in the first place, to prevent the French and British

Air Forces from attacking the German Army and the German Lebensraum.

In conducting the war against England, preparations are to be made for the use

of the Luftwaffe in disrupting British supplies by sea, the armaments industry,

and the transport of troops to France. A favorable opportunity is to be taken for

an effective attack on massed British naval units, especially against battleships

and aircraft carriers. Attacks against London are reserved for my decision.

Preparations are to be made for attacks against the British mainland, bearing

in mind that partial success with insufficient forces is in all circumstances to be

avoided.

ADOLF HITLER74

Shortly after noon on August 31, then, Hitler formally and in writing directed

the attack on Poland to begin at dawn the next day. As his first war directive

indicates, he was still not quite sure what Britain and France would do. He

would refrain from attacking them first. If they took hostile action, he was

prepared to meet it. Perhaps, as Halder had indicated in his diary entry of August

28, the British would go through the motions of honoring their obligation to

Poland and “wage a sham war.” If so, the Fuehrer would not take it “amiss.”

Probably the Nazi dictator made his fateful decision a little earlier than 12:30

P.M. on the last day of August. At 6:40 P.M. on the previous day Halder jotted in

his diary a communication from Lieutenant Colonel Curt Siewert, adjutant of

General von Brauchitsch: “Make all preparations so that attack can begin at 4:30

A.M. on September 1. Should negotiations in London require postponement, then

September 2. In that case we shall be notified before 3 P.M. tomorrow….

Fuehrer: either September 1 or 2. All off after September 2.” Because of the

autumn rains, the attack had to begin at once or be called off altogether.

Very early on the morning of August 31, while Hitler still claimed he was

waiting for the Polish emissary, the German Army received its orders. At 6:30

A.M. Halder jotted down: “Word from the Reich Chancellery that jump-off order

has been given for September 1.” At 11:30: “Gen. Stuelpnagel reports on fixing

of time of attack for 0445 [4:45 A.M.]. Intervention of West said to be

unavoidable; in spite of this Fuehrer has decided to attack.” An hour later the

formal Directive No. 1 was issued.

There was, I remember, an eerie atmosphere that day in Berlin; everyone

seemed to be going around in a daze. At 7:25 in the morning Weizsaecker had

telephoned Ulrich von Hassell, one of the “conspirators,” and asked him to hurry

over to see him. The State Secretary saw only one last hope: that Henderson

should persuade Lipski and his government to send a Polish plenipotentiary at

once or at least to announce the intention of dispatching one. Could the

unemployed Hassell see his friend Henderson at once and also Goering to this

end? Hassell tried. He saw Henderson twice and Goering once. But veteran

diplomat and, now, anti-Nazi that he was, he did not seem to realize that events

had outstripped such puny efforts. Nor did he grasp the extent of his own

confusions and of those of Weizsaecker and all the “good” Germans who, of

course, wanted peace—on German terms. For it must have been obvious to them

on August 31 that there would be war unless either Hitler or the Poles backed

down, and that there was not the slightest possibility of the one or the other

capitulating. And yet, as Hassell’s diary entry for this day makes clear, he

expected the Poles to back down and to follow the same disastrous route which

the Austrians and Czechs had taken.

When Henderson tried to point out to Hassell that the “chief difficulty” was in

German methods, in the way they were trying to order the Poles around “like

stupid little boys,” Hassell retorted “that the persistent silence of the Poles was

also objectionable.” He added that “everything depended on Lipski putting in an

appearance—not to ask questions but to declare his willingness to negotiate.”

Even to Hassell the Poles, who were threatened with imminent attack on

trumped-up Nazi charges, were not supposed to ask questions. And when the

former ambassador summed up his “final conclusions” about the outbreak of the

war, though he blamed Hitler and Ribbentrop for “knowingly taking the risk of

war with the Western Powers,” he also heaped much responsibility on the Poles

and even on the British and French. “The Poles, for their part,” he wrote, “with

Polish conceit and Slavic aimlessness, confident of English and French support,

had missed every remaining chance of avoiding war.” One can only ask what

chance they missed except to surrender to Hitler’s full demands. “The

Government in London,” Hassell added, “… gave up the race in the very last

days and adopted a kind of devil-may-care attitude. France went through the

same stages, only with much more hesitation. Mussolini did all in his power to

avoid war. ”75 If an educated, cultivated and experienced diplomat such as

Hassell could be so woolly in his thinking is it any wonder that it was easy for

Hitler to take in the mass of the German people?

There now followed during the waning afternoon of the last day of peace a

somewhat grotesque interlude. In view of what is now known about the

decisions of the day it might have been thought that the Commander in Chief of

the Luftwaffe, which was to carry out far-flung air operations against Poland

beginning at dawn on the morrow, would be a very busy Field Marshal. On the

contrary. Dahlerus took him out to lunch at the Hotel Esplanade and plied him

with good food and drink. The cognac was of such high quality that Goering

insisted on lugging away two bottles of it when he left. Having got the Field

Marshal into the proper humor, Dahlerus proposed that he invite Henderson for a

talk. After receiving Hitler’s permission, he did so, inviting him and Forbes to

his house for tea at 5 P.M. Dahlerus (whose presence is not mentioned by

Henderson in his Final Report or in his book) says that he suggested that

Goering, on behalf of Germany, meet a Polish emissary in Holland and that

Henderson promised to submit the proposal to London. The British

ambassador’s version of the tea talk, given in his Final Report, was that Goering

“talked for two hours of the iniquities of the Poles and about Herr Hitler’s and

his own desire for friendship with England. It was a conversation which led to

nowhere … My general impression was that it constituted a final but forlorn

effort on his part to detach Britain from the Poles … I augured the worst from

the fact that he was in a position at such a moment to give me so much of his

time … He could scarcely have afforded at such a moment to spare time in

conversation if it did not mean that everything down to the last detail was now

ready for action.”

The third and most piquant description of this bizarre tea party was given by

Forbes in answer to a questionnaire from Goering’s lawyer at Nuremberg.

The atmosphere was negative and desperate, though friendly … Goering’s statement to the

British ambassador was: If the Poles should not give in, Germany would crush them like lice,

and if Britain should decide to declare war, he would regret it greatly, but it would be most

imprudent of Britain. 76

Later in the evening Henderson, according to his own account, drafted a

dispatch to London saying “that it would be quite useless for me to make any

further suggestions since they would now only be outstripped by events and that

the only course remaining to us was to show our inflexible determination to

resist force by force. ”*

Sir Nevile Henderson’s disillusionment seemed complete. Despite all his

strenuous efforts over the years to appease the insatiable Nazi dictator, his

mission to Germany, as he called it, had failed. In the fading hours of August’s

last day this shallow, debonair Englishman whose personal diplomacy in Berlin

had been so disastrously blind tried to face up to the shattering collapse of his

vain hopes and abortive plans. And though he would suffer one more typical,

incredible lapse the next day, the first day of war, an ancient truth was dawning

on him: that there were times and circumstances when, as he at last said, force

must be met by force. †

As darkness settled over Europe on the evening of August 31, 1939, and a

million and a half German troops began moving forward to their final positions

on the Polish border for the jump-off at dawn, all that remained for Hitler to do

was to perpetrate some propaganda trickery to prepare the German people for the

shock of aggressive war.

The people were in need of the treatment which Hitler, abetted by Goebbels

and Himmler, had become so expert in applying. I had been about in the streets

of Berlin, talking with the ordinary people, and that morning noted in my diary:

“Everybody against the war. People talking openly. How can a country go into a

major war with a population so dead against it?” Despite all my experience in

the Third Reich I asked such a naïve question! Hitler knew the answer very well.

Had he not the week before on his Bavarian mountaintop promised the generals

that he would “give a propagandist reason for starting the war” and admonished

them not to “mind whether it was plausible or not”? “The victor,” he had told

them, “will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting

and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory.”

At 9 P.M., as we have seen, all German radio stations broadcast the Fuehrer’s

Polish peace proposals which, as they were read over the air, seemed so

reasonable to this misled correspondent. The fact that Hitler had never presented

them to the Poles nor even, except in a vague and unofficial manner, to the

British, and then less than twenty-four hours before, was brushed over. In fact, in

a lengthy statement explaining to the German people how their government had

exhausted every diplomatic means to preserve the peace the Chancellor, no

doubt aided by Goebbels, showed that he had lost none of his touch for masterly

deceit. After the British government on August 28, it said, had offered its

mediation between Germany and Poland, the German government on the next

day had replied that,

in spite of being skeptical of the desire of the Polish Government to come to an

understanding, they declared themselves ready in the interests of peace to accept the British

mediation or suggestion … They considered it necessary … if the danger of a catastrophe was

to be avoided that action must be taken readily and without delay. They declared themselves

ready to receive a personage appointed by the Polish Government up to the evening of August

30, with the proviso that the latter was empowered not only to discuss but to conduct and

conclude negotiations.

Instead of a statement regarding the arrival of an authorized personage, the first answer the

Government of the Reich received to their readiness for an understanding was the news of the

Polish mobilization …

The Reich Government cannot be expected continually not only to emphasize their

willingness to start negotiations, but actually to be ready to do so, while being from the Polish

side merely put off with empty subterfuges and meaningless declarations.

It has once more been made clear as a result of a démarche which has meanwhile been

made by the Polish Ambassador that the latter himself has no plenary powers either to enter

into any discussion or even to negotiate.

The Fuehrer and the German Government have thus waited two days in vain for the arrival

of a Polish negotiator.

In these circumstances the German Government regard their proposals as having this time

too been … rejected, although they considered that these proposals, in the form in which they

were made known to the British Government also, were more than loyal, fair and practicable.

Good propaganda, to be effective, as Hitler and Goebbels had learned from

experience, needs more than words. It needs deeds, however much they may

have to be fabricated. Having convinced the German people (and of this the

writer can testify from personal observation) that the Poles had rejected the

Fuehrer’s generous peace offer, there remained only the concocting of a deed

which would “prove” that not Germany but Poland had attacked first.

For this last shady business, it will be remembered, the Germans, at Hitler’s

direction, had made careful preparation.* For six days Alfred Naujocks, the

intellectual S.S. ruffian, had been waiting at Gleiwitz on the Polish border to

carry out a simulated Polish attack on the German radio station there. The plan

had been revised. S.S. men outfitted in Polish Army uniforms were to do the

shooting, and drugged concentration camp inmates were to be left dying as

“casualties”—this last delectable part of the operation had, as we have seen, the

expressive code name “Canned Goods.” There were to be several such faked

“Polish attacks” but the principal one was to be on the radio station at Gleiwitz.

At noon on August 31 [Naujocks related in his Nuremberg affidavit] I received from

Heydrich the code word for the attack which was to take place at 8 o’clock that evening.

Heydrich said: “In order to carry out this attack report to Mueller for Canned Goods.” I did

this and gave Mueller instructions to deliver the man near the radio station. I received this man

and had him laid down at the entrance to the station. He was alive but completely unconscious.

I tried to open his eyes. I could not recognize by his eyes that he was alive, only by his

breathing. I did not see the gun wounds but a lot of blood was smeared across his face. He was

in civilian clothes.

We seized the radio station, as ordered, broadcast a speech of three to four minutes over an

emergency transmitter, * fired some pistol shots and left. †79

Berlin that evening was largely shut off from the outside world, except for

outgoing press dispatches and broadcasts which reported the Fuehrer’s “offer” to

Poland and the German allegations of Polish “attacks” on German territory. I

tried to get through on the telephone to Warsaw, London and Paris but was told

that communications with these capitals were cut. Berlin itself was quite normal

in appearance. There had been no evacuation of women and children, as there

had been in Paris and London, nor any sandbagging of storefront windows, as

was reported from the other capitals. Toward 4 A.M. on September 1, after my

last broadcast, I drove back from Broadcasting House to the Adlon Hotel. There

was no traffic. The houses were dark. The people were asleep and perhaps—for

all I knew—had gone to bed hoping for the best, for peace.

Hitler himself had been in fine fettle all day. At 6 P.M. on August 31 General

Halder noted in his diary, “Fuehrer calm; has slept well … Decision against

evacuation [in the west] shows that he expects France and England will not take

action.” *

Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr in OKW and one of the key anti-Nazi

conspirators, was in a different mood. Though Hitler was carrying Germany into

war, an action which the Canaris circle had supposedly sworn to prevent by

getting rid of the dictator, there was no conspiracy in being now that the moment

for it had arrived.

Later in the afternoon Gisevius had been summoned to OKW headquarters by

Colonel Oster. This nerve center of Germany’s military might was humming

with activity. Canaris drew Gisevius down a dimly lit corridor. In a voice choked

with emotion he said:

“This means the end of Germany.” 81

* “Hardly had the door shut on the Ambassador,” Weizsaecker, who was present, later noted,

“than Hitler slapped himself on the thigh, laughed and said: ‘Chamberlain won’t survive that

conversation; his Cabinet will fall this evening.’” (Weizsaecker, Memoirs, p. 203.)

* According to Erich Kordt ( Wahn und Wirklichkeit, p. 192) Hitler was so excited by his

triumph in Moscow that on the morning of August 25 he asked his press bureau for news of

the cabinet crises in Paris and London. He thought both governments must fall. He was

brought down to earth by being told of the firm speeches of Chamberlain and Halifax in

Parliament the day before.

* Or if not out of war, out of any serious participation in it. General Halder intimates this in a

recapitulation of the “sequence of events” of August 25 in a diary entry made later, on August

28. Noting that at 1:30 P.M. on the twenty-fifth Hitler saw Henderson, Halder added: “Fuehrer

would not take it amiss if England were to wage a sham war.”

* Although Hitler’s standing orders, which had not been canceled, called for the attack on this

day and hour and, as Halder said, were “automatic,” a number of German writers have

reported that the Fuehrer gave specific orders a few minutes after 3 P.M. to launch Fall Weiss

the following morning. (See Weizsaecker, Memoirs; Kordt, Wahn und Wirklichkeit; and

Walther Hofer, War Premeditated, 1939.) Hofer says the order was given at 3:02 P.M. and

cites as his source General von Vormann, who was present at the Chancellery when it was

issued. No official record of this has been found in the German documents.

† There was a secret protocol to this treaty which stated that the “European Power” mentioned

in Article 1, whose aggression would bring about mutual military assistance, was Germany.

This saved the British government from the disastrous step of having to declare war on the

Soviet Union when the Red Army, in cahoots with the Germans, invaded eastern Poland.

* Germany did not observe summer time, as did Great Britain. Therefore the one-hour

difference in time between Berlin and London was canceled out.

* It must be kept in mind that the “Polish provocations” which Hitler and Ribbentrop harped

on in their meetings and diplomatic exchanges with the British, French, Russians and Italians

during these days, and the news of which was published under flaming headlines in the

controlled Nazi press, were almost entirely invented by the Germans. Most of the provoking in

Poland was done, on orders from Berlin, by the Germans. The captured German documents

are replete with evidence on this.

† The day before, on August 24, Ciano had visited the King at his summer residence in

Piedmont, and the aging ruler, who had been shunted to the sidelines by Mussolini, spoke

contemptuously of the country’s armed services. “The Army is in a pitiful state,”. Ciano

quotes him as saying. “Even the defense of our frontier is insufficient. He has made thirty-two

inspections and is convinced that the French can go through it with great ease. The officers of

the Italian Army are not qualified for the job, and our equipment is old and obsolete.” ( Ciano

Diaries, p. 127. )

* In the German translation of Mussolini’s letter found in the Foreign Office archives after the

war, and which I have used here, the word “Germany” has been crossed out here and the word

“Poland” typed above it, making it read: “If Poland attacks …” In the Italian original,

published after the war by the Italian government, the passage reads “Se la Germania attacca

la Polonia. ” It is strange that the Nazis falsified even the secret documents deposited in their

official government archives. 14

† As if Mussolini’s letter were not bad enough medicine for Hitler, a number of German

writers, mostly observers at first hand of the dramatic events of the last days of peace, have

published an imaginary text of this letter of the Duce to the Fuehrer. Erich Kordt, one of the

anti-Nazi conspirators, who was head of the secretariat at the Foreign Office, was the first to

commit this faked version to print in his book, Wahn und Wirklichkeit, published in Stuttgart

in 1947. Kordt dropped it in his second edition but other writers continued to copy it from the

first edition. It shows up in Peter Kleist’s Zwischen Hitler und Stalin, published in 1950, and

even in the English translation of Paul Schmidt’s memoirs published in New York and London

in 1951. Yet the authentic text was published in Italy in 1946 and an English translation in the

State Department’s Nazi–Soviet Relations in 1948. Dr. Schmidt, who was with Hitler when he

received the letter from Attolico, quotes the letter as saying, “In one of the most painful

moments of my life, I have to inform you that Italy is not ready for war. According to what the

responsible heads of the services tell me, the gasoline supplies of the Italian Air Force are so

low that they would last only for three weeks of fighting. The position is the same with regard

to supplies for the Army, and supplies of raw materials … Please understand my situation.”

For an amusing note on the faking of this letter, see Namier, In the Nazi Era, p. 5.

* See above, pp. 517–18.

* This caused added resentment in Berlin and some confusion in Rome which Ciano had to

straighten out. Attolico told Ciano later he had deliberately insisted on complete deliveries

before hostilities “in order to discourage the Germans from meeting our requests.” To deliver

thirteen million tons of supplies in a few days was, of course, utterly impossible, and

Mussolini apologized to Ambassador von Mackensen for the “misunderstanding,” remarking

that “even the Almighty Himself could not transport such quantities here in a few days. It had

never occurred to him to make such an absurd request” 28

* I.e., Hitler’s offer of August 25 to “guarantee” the British Empire.

* “Ribbentrop knew nothing whatsoever about Dahlerus being sent,” Goering testified on the

stand at Nuremberg. “I never discussed the matter of Dahlerus with Ribbentrop. He did not

know at all that Dahlerus went back and forth between me and the British government. ”37 But

Goering kept Hitler informed.

† The text is published in Documents on British Foreign Policy, Third Series, Vol. VII, p. 283.

It was omitted from all published British records until the above volume came out in 1954, an

omission much commented upon by British historians. Dahlerus is not mentioned in the

British Blue Book of documents concerning the outbreak of the war nor in Henderson’s Final

Report nor even in Henderson’s book Failure of a Mission, though in the book the Swedish

intermediary is referred to as “a source in touch with Goering.” In Henderson’s dispatches and

in those from other members of the British Embassy which have now been published,

Dahlerus and his activities play a fairly prominent part, as they do in various memoranda of

the British Foreign Office.

The role of this singular Swedish businessman in trying to save the peace was a well-kept

secret and both the Wilhelmstrasse and Downing Street went to considerable lengths to keep

his movements hidden from the correspondents and neutral diplomats, who, to the best of my

knowledge, knew absolutely nothing of them until Dahlerus testified at Nuremberg on March

19, 1946. His book, The Last Attempt, was published in Swedish in 1945, at the end of the

war, but the English edition did not come out until 1948 and there remained a further interval

of six years before his role was officially confirmed, so to speak, by the documents in Vol. VII

of the DBrFP series. The German Foreign Office documents for August do not mention

Dahlerus, except in one routine memorandum reporting receipt of a message from the

Lufthansa airline that “Dahlerus, a gentleman from the ‘Foreign Office,’” was arriving in

Berlin August 26 on one of its planes. He does appear, however, in some later papers.

*Presumably President Roosevelt’s message to Hitler on August 24 and 25 urging direct

negotiations between Germany and Poland.

† Dahlerus, it must be pointed out in all fairness, was not so pro-German as some of his

messages seem to imply. On the night of this same Monday, after two hours with Goering at

Luftwaffe headquarters at Oranienburg, he rang up Forbes to tell him, “German Army will be

in final position of attack on Poland during night of Wednesday–Thursday, August 30–31.”

Forbes got this intelligence off to London as quickly as possible.

* “I proceeded to outshout Hitler,” Henderson wired Halifax the next day. “… I added a good

deal more shouting at the top of my voice. ”51 This temperamental display was not mentioned

in earlier British documents.

* General Halder put Hitler’s game succinctly in a diary entry of August 29: “Fuehrer hopes to

drive wedge between British, French and Poles. Strategy: Raise a barrage of demographic and

democratic demands … The Poles will come to Berlin on August 30. On August 31 the

negotiations will blow up. On September 1, start to use force.”

* Though couched in conciliatory terms, the British note was firm. His Majesty’s Government,

it said, “reciprocated” the German desire for improved relations, but “they could not sacrifice

the interests of other friends in order to obtain that improvement.” They fully understood, it

continued, that the German government could not “sacrifice Germany’s vital interests, but the

Polish Government are in the same position.” The British government must make “an express

reservation” regarding Hitler’s terms and, while urging direct negotiations between Berlin and

Warsaw, considered that “it would be impracticable to establish contact so early as today.”

(Text in British Blue Book, pp. 142–43.)

† Ribbentrop, who, it seemed to this writer, cut the sorriest figure of all the chief defendants at

the Nuremberg trial—and made the weakest defense—claimed on the stand that Hitler, who,

he said, “personally dictated” the sixteen points, had “expressly forbidden me to let these

proposals out of my hands.” Why, he did not say and was not asked on cross-examination.

“Hitler told me,” Ribbentrop conceded, “that I might communicate to the British Ambassador

only the substance of them, if I thought it advisable. I did a little more than that: I read all the

proposals from the beginning to the end.” 59 Dr. Schmidt denies that Ribbentrop read the text

of the proposals in German so fast that it would have been impossible for Henderson to grasp

them. He says the Foreign Minister did not “particularly hurry over them.” Henderson,

Schmidt says, was “not exactly a master of German” and he might have been more effective in

these crucial talks had he used his native language. Ribbentrop’s English was excellent, but he

refused to speak it during these parleys.60

* The text of the sixteen proposals was telegraphed to the German chargé d’affaires in London

at 9:15 P.M. on August 30, four hours before Ribbentrop “gabbled” them to Henderson. But

the German envoy in London was instructed that they were to “be kept strictly secret and not

to be communicated to anyone else until further instructions. ”61 Hitler in his note of the

previous day, it will be remembered, had promised to place them at the disposal of the British

government before the arrival of the Polish negotiator.

* In a dispatch to Halifax filed at 5:15 A.M. (August 31), Henderson reported that he had also

advised Lipski “in the very strongest terms” to “ring up” Ribbentrop and ask for the German

proposals so that he could communicate them to the Polish government. Lipski said he would

first have to talk with Warsaw. “The Polish Ambassador,” Henderson added, “promised to

telephone at once to his Government, but he is so inert or so handicapped by instructions of his

Government that I cannot rely on his action being very effective. ”63

*On the stand at Nuremberg Goering claimed that in turning over the text of Hitler’s “offer” to

the British Embassy he was taking “an enormous risk, since the Fuehrer had forbidden this

information being made public. Only I,” Goering told the tribunal, “could take that risk. ”64

† Even the levelheaded French ambassador supported his British colleague in this. Henderson

had telephoned him at 9 A.M. to say that if the Poles did not agree by noon to sending a

plenipotentiary to Berlin the German Army would begin its attack. Coulondre went

immediately to the Polish Embassy and urged Lipski to telephone his government, asking

authorization to make immediate contact with the Germans “as a plenipotentiary.” ( French

Yellow Book, French edition, pp. 366–67.)

* By now, that is before noon of August 31, Henderson, striving desperately for peace at

almost any price, had convinced himself that the German terms were quite reasonable and

even moderate. And though Ribbentrop had told him the previous midnight that the German

proposals were “out of date, since no Polish emissary had arrived,” and though the Polish

government had not yet even seen them, and though they were, in sum, a hoax, Henderson

kept urging Halifax all day to put pressure on the Poles to send a plenipotentiary, as Hitler had

demanded, and kept stressing the reasonableness of the Fuehrer’s sixteen points.

At 12:30 P.M. (on August 31) Henderson wired Halifax “urging” him to “insist” to Poland

that Lipski ask the German government for the German proposals for urgent communication to

his government “with a view to dispatching a plenipotentiary. The terms sound moderate to

me,” Henderson contended. “This is no Munich … Poland will never get such good terms

again …”

At the same time Henderson wrote a long letter to Halifax: “… The German proposals do

not endanger the independence of Poland … She is likely to get a worse deal later …”

Still keeping at it, Henderson wired Halifax at 12:30 A.M. on September 1, four hours

before the German attack was scheduled to begin (though he did not know this): “German

proposals … are not unreasonable … I submit that on German offer war would be completely

unjustifiable.” He urged again that the British government pressure the Poles “in unmistakable

language” to state “their intention to send a plenipotentiary to Berlin.”

The British ambassador in Warsaw took a different view. He wired to Halifax on August

31: “H. M. Ambassador at Berlin appears to consider German terms reasonable. I fear that I

cannot agree with him from point of view of Warsaw. ”65

† There was another somewhat weird diplomatic episode this last day of peace which deserves

a footnote. Dahlerus returned from the visit with Lipski to the British Embassy, where from

Henderson’s office he put through at midday a telephone call to Sir Horace Wilson at the

British Foreign Office in London. He told Wilson that the German proposals were “extremely

liberal” but that the Polish ambassador had just rejected them. “It is clear,” he said, “that the

Poles are obstructing the possibilities of negotiations.”

At this moment Wilson heard certain noises on the long-distance line which sounded to

him as though the Germans were listening in. He tried to end the conversation, but Dahlerus

persisted in rambling on about the unreasonableness of the Poles. “I again told Dahlerus,” Sir

Horace noted in a Foreign Office memorandum, “to shut up, but as he did not I put down the

receiver.”

Wilson reported this indiscretion, committed in the very office of H. M. Ambassador in

Berlin, to his superiors. At 1 P.M., less than an hour later, Halifax wired Henderson in code:

“You really must be careful of use of telephone. D’s conversation [Dahlerus was always

referred to in the messages between the Foreign Office and the Berlin Embassy as “D”] at

midday from Embassy was most indiscreet and has certainly been heard by the Germans.” 66

* The emphasis is in the original German text.

* A marginal note in the directive clears up this ambiguous point—“Thus, Atlantic forces will

for the time being remain in a waiting position.”

* He may have drafted it that evening but he did not send it to London until 3:45 P.M. the next

day, nearly twelve hours after the German attack on Poland had begun. It followed several of

his telegrams, which like it were telephoned to London—so that transmission was

simultaneous—reporting the outbreak of hostilities. It read: “Mutual distrust of Germans and

Poles is so complete that I do not feel I can usefully acquiesce [ sic] in any further suggestions

from here, which would only once again be outstripped by events or lead to nothing as the

result of methods followed or of considerations of honor and prestige.

“Last hope lies in inflexible determination on our part to resist force by force.” 77

† Since friends who have read this section have expressed doubts about this writer’s

objectivity in dealing with Henderson, perhaps another’s view of the British ambassador in

Berlin should be given. Sir L. B. Namier, the British historian, has summed up Henderson as

follows: “Conceited, vain, self-opinionated, rigidly adhering to his preconceived ideas, he

poured out telegrams, dispatches and letters in unbelievable numbers and of formidable length,

repeating a hundred times the same ill-founded views and ideas. Obtuse enough to be a

menace and not stupid enough to be innocuous, he proved un homme néfaste. ” (Namier, In the

Nazi Era, p. 162.)

* See above, pp. 518–20.

* The speech in Polish had been outlined by Heydrich to Naujocks. It contained inflammatory

statements against Germany and declared that the Poles were attacking. See above, p. 519.

† The “Polish attack” at Gleiwitz was used by Hitler in his speech to the Reichstag the next

day and was cited as justification for the Nazi aggression by Ribbentrop, Weizsaecker and

other members of the Foreign Office in their propaganda. The New York Times and other

newspapers reported it, as well as similar incidents, in their issues of September 1, 1939. It

remains only to be added that according to the testimony at Nuremberg of General Lahousen,

of the Abwehr, all the S.S. men who wore Polish uniforms in the simulated attacks that

evening were, as the General put it, “put out of the way.” 78

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

France.

Berlin, August 31, 1939

I thank you for your telegram of August 27. You may rest assured that my attitude toward

Britain and my desire to avoid another war between our peoples remain unchanged. It depends

on Britain, however,’ whether my wishes for the future development of German-British

relations can be realized.

ADOLF HITLER80

This is the first mention of the former King of England, but by no means the last, in the

captured German documents. Subsequently, for a time, as will be recorded further on, the

Duke of Windsor loomed large in certain calculations of Hitler and Ribbentrop.

17

THE LAUNCHING OF WORLD WAR II

AT DAYBREAK on September 1, 1939, the very date which Hitler had set in his

first directive for “Case White” back on April 3, the German armies poured

across the Polish frontier and converged on Warsaw from the north, south and

west.

Overhead German warplanes roared toward their targets: Polish troop

columns and ammunition dumps, bridges, railroads and open cities. Within a few

minutes they were giving the Poles, soldiers and civilians alike, the first taste of

sudden death and destruction from the skies ever experienced on any great scale

on the earth and thereby inaugurating a terror which would become dreadfully

familiar to hundreds of millions of men, women and children in Europe and Asia

during the next six years, and whose shadow, after the nuclear bombs came,

would haunt all mankind with the threat of utter extinction.

It was a gray, somewhat sultry morning in Berlin, with clouds hanging low

over the city, giving it some protection from hostile bombers, which were feared

but never came.

The people in the streets, I noticed, were apathetic despite the immensity of

the news which had greeted them from their radios and from the extra editions of

the morning newspapers. * Across the street from the Adlon Hotel the morning

shift of laborers had gone to work on the new I. G. Farben building just as if

nothing had happened, and when newsboys came by shouting their extras no one

laid down his tools to buy one. Perhaps, it occurred to me, the German people

were simply dazed at waking up on this first morning of September to find

themselves in a war which they had been sure the Fuehrer somehow would

avoid. They could not quite believe it, now that it had come.

What a contrast, one could not help thinking, between this gray apathy and the

way the Germans had gone to war in 1914. Then there had been a wild

enthusiasm. The crowds in the streets had staged delirious demonstrations,

tossed flowers at the marching troops and frantically cheered the Kaiser and

Supreme Warlord, Wilhelm II.

There were no such demonstrations this time for the troops or for the Nazi

warlord, who shortly before 10 A.M. drove from the Chancellery to the Reichstag

through empty streets to address the nation on the momentous happenings which

he himself, deliberately and cold-bloodedly, had just provoked. Even the robot

members of the Reichstag, party hacks, for the most part, whom Hitler had

appointed, failed to respond with much enthusiasm as the dictator launched into

his explanation of why Germany found itself on this morning engaged in war.

There was far less cheering than on previous and less important occasions when

the Leader had declaimed from this tribune in the ornate hall of the Kroll Opera

House.

Though truculent at times he seemed strangely on the defensive, and

throughout the speech, I thought as I listened, ran a curious strain, as though he

himself were dazed at the fix he had got himself into and felt a little desperate

about it. His explanation of why his Italian ally had reneged on its automatic

obligations to come to his aid did not seem to go over even with this hand-

picked audience.

I should like [he said] here above all to thank Italy, which throughout has supported us, but

you will understand that for the carrying out of this struggle we do not intend to appeal for

foreign help. We will carry out this task ourselves.

Having lied so often on his way to power and in his consolidation of power,

Hitler could not refrain at this serious moment in history from thundering a few

more lies to the gullible German people in justification of his wanton act.

You know the endless attempts I made for a peaceful clarification and understanding of the

problem of Austria, and later of the problem of the Sudetenland, Bohemia and Moravia. It was

all in vain …

In my talks with Polish statesmen … I formulated at last the German proposals and …

there is nothing more modest or loyal than these proposals. I should like to say this to the

world. I alone was in the position to make such proposals, for I know very well that in doing

so I brought myself into opposition to millions of Germans. These proposals have been

refused….

For two whole days I sat with my Government and waited to see whether it was convenient

for the Polish Government to send a plenipotentiary or not … But I am wrongly judged if my

love of peace and my patience are mistaken for weakness or even cowardice … I can no

longer find any willingness on the part of the Polish Government to conduct serious

negotiations with us … I have therefore resolved to speak to Poland in the same language that

Poland for months past has used toward us …

This night for the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our own territory. Since 5:45

A.M. we have been returning the fire, and from now on bombs will be met with bombs.

Thus was the faked German attack on the German radio station at Gleiwitz,

which, as we have seen, was carried out by S.S. men in Polish uniforms under

the direction of Naujocks, used by the Chancellor of Germany as justification of

his cold-blooded aggression against Poland. And indeed in its first communiqués

the German High Command referred to its military operations as a

“counterattack.” Even Weizsaecker did his best to perpetrate this shabby

swindle. During the day he got off a circular telegram from the Foreign Office to

all German diplomatic missions abroad advising them on the line they were to

take.

In defense against Polish attacks, German troops moved into action against Poland at dawn

today. This action is for the present not to be described as war, but merely as engagements

which have been brought about by Polish attacks.1

Even the German soldiers, who could see for themselves who had done the

attacking on the Polish border, were bombarded with Hitler’s lie. In a grandiose

proclamation to the German Army on September 1, the Fuehrer said:

The Polish State has refused the peaceful settlement of relations which I desired, and has

appealed to arms … A series of violations of the frontier, intolerable to a great Power, prove

that Poland is no longer willing to respect the frontier of the Reich.

In order to put an end to this lunacy, I have no other choice than to meet force with force

from now on.

Only once that day did Hitler utter the truth.

I am asking of no German man [he told the Reichstag] more than I myself was ready

throughout four years to do … I am from now on just the first soldier of the German Reich. I

have once more put on that coat that was most sacred and dear to me. I will not take it off

again until victory is secured, or I will not survive the outcome.

In the end, this once, he would prove as good as his word. But no German I

met in Berlin that day noticed that what the Leader was saying quite bluntly was

that he could not face, not take, defeat should it come.

In his speech Hitler named Goering as his successor should anything happen

to him. Hess, he added, would be next in line. “Should anything happen to

Hess,” Hitler advised, “then by law the Senate will be called and will choose

from its midst the most worthy—that is to say, the bravest—successor.” What

law? What Senate? Neither existed!

Hitler’s relatively subdued manner at the Reichstag gave way to another and

uglier mood as soon as he had returned to the Chancellery. The ubiquitous

Dahlerus, in tow of Goering, found him there in an “exceedingly nervous and

very agitated” state.

He told me [the Swedish mediator later testified] he had all along suspected that England

wanted the war. He told me further that he would crush Poland and annex the whole country

…

He grew more and more excited, and began to wave his arms as he shouted in my face: “If

England wants to fight for a year, I shall fight for a year; if England wants to fight two years, I

shall fight two years …” He paused and then yelled, his voice rising to a shrill scream and his

arms milling wildly: “If England wants to fight for three years, I shall fight for three years …”

The movements of his body now began to follow those of his arms, and when he finally

bellowed: “Und wenn es erforderlich ist, will ich zehn Jahre kaempfen” (“And if necessary, I

will fight for ten years”) he brandished his fist and bent down so that it nearly touched the

floor. 2

Yet for all his hysteria Hitler was by no means convinced that he would have

to fight Great Britain at all. It was now past noon, German armored columns

were already several miles inside Poland and advancing rapidly and most of

Poland’s cities, including Warsaw, had been bombed with considerable civilian

casualties. But there was not a word from London or Paris that Britain and

France were in any hurry to honor their word to Poland.

Their course seemed clear, but Dahlerus and Henderson appeared to be doing

their best to confuse it.

At 10:30 A.M. the British ambassador telephoned a message to Halifax.

I understand [he said] that the Poles blew up the Dirschau bridge during the night. * And

that fighting took place with the Danzigers. On receipt of this news, Hitler gave orders for the

Poles to be driven back from the border line and to Goering for destruction of the Polish Air

Force along the frontier.

Only at the end of his dispatch did Henderson add:

This information comes from Goering himself.

Hitler may ask to see me after Reichstag as a last effort to save the peace. 3

What peace? Peace for Britain? For six hours Germany had been waging war

—with all its military might—against Britain’s ally.

Hitler did not send for Henderson after his Reichstag speech, and the

ambassador, who had accommodatingly passed along to London Goering’s lies

about the Poles beginning the attack, became discouraged—but not completely

discouraged. At 10:50 A.M. he telephoned a further message to Halifax. A new

idea had sprung up in his fertile but confused mind.

I feel it my duty [he reported], however little prospect there may be of its realization, to

express the belief that the only possible hope now for peace would be for Marshal Smigly-

Rydz to announce his readiness to come immediately to Germany to discuss as soldier and

plenipotentiary the whole question with Field Marshal Goering.4

It does not seem to have occurred to this singular British ambassador that

Marshal Smigly-Rydz might have his hands full trying to repel the massive and

unprovoked German attack, or that if he could break off and did come to Berlin

as a “plenipotentiary” it would be equivalent, under the circumstances, to

surrender. The Poles might be quickly beaten but they would not surrender.

Dahlerus was even more active than Henderson during this first day of the

German attack on Poland. At 8 A.M. he had gone to see Goering, who told him

that “war had broken out because the Poles had attacked the radio station at

Gleiwitz and blown up a bridge near Dirschau.” The Swede immediately rang up

the Foreign Office in London with the news.

“I informed somebody,” he later testified in cross-examination at Nuremberg,

“that according to the information I had received the Poles had attacked, and

they naturally wondered what was happening to me when I gave that

information.” 5 But after all, it was only what H. M. Ambassador in Berlin would

be telephoning a couple of hours later.

A confidential British Foreign Office memorandum records the Swede’s call

at 9:05 A.M. Aping Goering, Dahlerus insisted to London that “the Poles are

sabotaging everything,” and that he had “evidence they never meant to attempt

to negotiate. ”6

At half after noon Dahlerus was on the long-distance phone again to the

Foreign Office in London, and this time got Cadogan. He again blamed the Poles

for sabotaging the peace by blowing the Dirschau bridge and suggested that he

once again fly to London with Forbes. But the stern and unappeasing Cadogan

had had about enough of Dahlerus now that the war which he had tried to

prevent had come. He told the Swede that “nothing could now be done.”

But Cadogan was merely the permanent Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs,

not even a member of the cabinet. Dahlerus insisted that his request be submitted

to the cabinet itself, informing Cadogan haughtily that he would ring back in an

hour. This he did, and got his answer.

Any idea of mediation [Cadogan said] while German troops are invading Poland is quite

out of the question. The only way in which a world war can be stopped is (one) that hostilities

be suspended, and (two) that German troops be immediately withdrawn from Polish territory. 7

At 10 A.M. the Polish ambassador in London, Count Raczyński, had called on

Lord Halifax and officially communicated to him the news of the German

aggression, adding that “it was a plain case as provided for by the treaty.” The

Foreign Secretary answered that he had no doubt of the facts. At 10:50 he

summoned the German chargé d’affaires, Theodor Kordt, to the Foreign Office

and asked him if he had any information. Kordt replied that he had neither

information about a German attack on Poland nor any instructions. Halifax then

declared that the reports which he had received “create a very serious situation.”

But further than that he did not go. Kordt telephoned this information to Berlin

at 11:45 A.M.

By noon, then, Hitler had reason to hope that Britain, though it considered the

situation serious, might not go to war after all. But the hope was soon to be

dashed.

At 7:15 P.M. a member of the British Embassy in Berlin telephoned the

German Foreign Office and requested Ribbentrop to receive Henderson and

Coulondre “on a matter of urgency as soon as possible.” The French Embassy

made a similar request a few minutes later. Ribbentrop, having declined to meet

the two ambassadors together, received Henderson at 9 P.M. and Coulondre an

hour later. From the British ambassador he was handed a formal note from the

British government.

… Unless the German Government are prepared [it said] to give His Majesty’s

Government satisfactory assurances that the German Government have suspended all

aggressive action against Poland and are prepared promptly to withdraw their forces from

Polish territory, His Majesty’s Government will without hesitation fulfill their obligation to

Poland. 8

The French communication was in identical words.

To both ambassadors Ribbentrop replied that he would transmit their notes to

Hitler, whereupon he launched into a lengthy dissertation declaring that “there

was no question of German aggression” but of Polish aggression and repeating

the by now somewhat stale he that “regular” Polish troops had attacked German

soil on the previous day. Still, the diplomatic niceties were maintained. Sir

Nevile Henderson did not fail to note in his dispatch that night describing the

meeting that Ribbentrop had been “courteous and polite.” As the ambassador

prepared to take his leave an argument arose as to whether the German Foreign

Minister had gabbled the text of the German “proposals” to Poland at their

stormy meeting two evenings before. Henderson said he had; Ribbentrop said he

had read them “slowly and clearly and even given oral explanations of the main

points so that he could suppose Henderson had understood everything.” It was

an argument that would never be settled—but what difference did it make now? 9

On the night of September 1, as the German armies penetrated further into

Poland and the Luftwaffe bombed and bombed, Hitler knew from the Anglo–

French notes that unless he stopped his armies and quickly withdrew them—

which was unthinkable—he had a world war on his hands. Or did he still hope

that night that his luck—his Munich luck—might hold? For his friend Mussolini,

frightened by the advent of war and fearing that an overwhelming Anglo–French

naval and military force might strike against Italy, was desperately trying to

arrange another Munich.

THE LAST-MINUTE INTERVENTION OF MUSSOLINI

As late as August 26, it will be remembered, the Duce, in ducking out of

Italy’s obligations under the Pact of Steel, had insisted to the Fuehrer that there

was still a possibility of “a political solution” which would give “full moral and

material satisfaction to Germany. ”* Hitler had not bothered to argue the matter

with his friend and ally, and this had discouraged the junior partner in the Axis.

Nevertheless on August 31, as we have seen, Mussolini and Ciano, after being

advised by their ambassador in Berlin that the situation had become desperate,

had urged Hitler at least to see the Polish ambassador, Lipski, and had informed

him that they were trying to get the British government to agree to the return of

Danzig “as a first step” in peace negotiations. †

But it was too late for Hitler to be tempted by such small bait. Danzig was a

mere pretense, as the Fuehrer had told his generals. What he wanted was to

destroy Poland. But the Duce did not know this. On the morning of September 1,

he himself was confronted with the choice of immediately declaring Italy’s

neutrality or risking an attack by Britain and France. Ciano’s diary entries make

clear what a nightmare this prospect was for his deflated father-in-law. ‡

Early on the morning of September 1 the unhappy Italian dictator personally

telephoned Ambassador Attolico in Berlin and, in the words of Ciano, “urged

him to entreat Hitler to send him a telegram releasing him from the obligations

of the alliance.” 11 The Fuehrer quickly and even graciously obliged. Just before

he left for the Reichstag, at 9:40 A.M., he got off a telegram to his friend which

was telephoned through to the German Embassy in Rome to save time.

DUCE:

I thank you most cordially for the diplomatic and political support which you have been

giving recently to Germany and her just cause. I am convinced that we can carry out the task

imposed upon us with the military forces of Germany. I do not therefore expect to need Italy’s

military support in these circumstances. I also thank you, Duce, for everything which you will

do in future for the common cause of Fascism and National Socialism.

ADOLF HITLER*12

At 12:45 P.M., after having addressed the Reichstag and after having,

apparently, recovered from the effects of his outburst to Dahlerus, Hitler was

moved to send a further message to Mussolini. Declaring that he had been

prepared to solve the Polish problem “by negotiation” and that “for two whole

days I have waited in vain for a Polish negotiator” and that “last night alone

there were fourteen more cases of frontier violation” and that consequently he

had “now decided to answer force with force,” he again expressed his gratitude

to his welshing partner.

I thank you, Duce, for all your efforts. I thank you in particular also for your offers of

mediation. But from the start I was skeptical about these attempts because the Polish

Government, if they had had even the slightest intention of solving the matter amicably, could

have done so at any time. But they refused …

For this reason, Duce, I did not want to expose you to the danger of assuming the role of

mediator which, in view of the Polish Government’s intransigent attitude, would in all

probability have been in vain …

ADOLF HITLER13

But Mussolini, prompted by Ciano, made one last desperate effort to expose

himself to the danger of being a mediator. Already on the previous day, shortly

after noon, Ciano had proposed to the British and French ambassadors in Rome

that, if their governments agreed, Mussolini would invite Germany to a

conference on September 5 for the purpose of “examining the clauses of the

Treaty of Versailles which are the cause of the present troubles.”

It might have been thought that the news of the German invasion of Poland

the next morning would have rendered Mussolini’s proposal superfluous. But to

the Italian’s surprise Georges Bonnet, the French Foreign Minister and master

appeaser, telephoned François-Poncet, who was now the ambassador of France

in Rome, at 11:45 A.M. on September 1 and asked him to tell Ciano that the

French government welcomed such a conference provided that it did not try to

deal with problems of countries not represented and that it did not restrict itself

to seeking “partial and provisional solutions for limited and immediate

problems.” Bonnet made no mention of any withdrawal of German troops or

even of their halting, as a condition for such a conference.14*

But the British were insistent upon that condition and succeeded in carrying

the badly divided French cabinet along with them so that identical warning notes

could be delivered in Berlin on the evening of September 1. Since the text of

those notes giving notice that Britain and France would go to war unless the

German troops were withdrawn from Poland was made public the same evening,

it is interesting that Mussolini, now clutching desperately at every straw—or

even at straws which were not there—went ahead the next morning in a further

appeal to Hitler just as if he, the Duce, did not take the Anglo–French warnings

at face value.

September 2, as Henderson noted in his Final Report, was a day of suspense.†

He and Coulondre waited anxiously for Hitler’s reply to their notes, but none

came. Shortly after midday Attolico, somewhat out of breath, arrived at the

British Embassy and told Henderson he must know one thing immediately: Was

the British note of the previous evening an ultimatum or not?

“I told him,” Henderson later wrote, “that I had been authorized to tell the

Minister of Foreign Affairs if he had asked me—which he had not done—that it

was not an ultimatum but a warning.” 16

Having received his answer, the Italian ambassador hastened down the

Wilhelmstrasse to the German Foreign Office. Attolico had arrived at 10 o’clock

that morning at the Wilhelmstrasse with a communication from Mussolini and,

being told that Ribbentrop was unwell, handed it to Weizsaecker.

September 2,1939

For purposes of information, Italy wishes to make known, naturally leaving any decision to

the Fuehrer, that she still has the possibility of getting France, Britain and Poland to agree to a

conference on the following bases:

1. An armistice, which leaves the armies where [emphasis in the original] they now are.

2. Convening of the conference within two to three days.

3. Settlement of the Polish–German dispute, which, as matters stand today, would certainly

be favorable to Germany.

The idea, which originally emanated from the Duce, is now supported particularly by

France.*

Danzig is already German, and Germany has already in her hands pledges which guarantee

her the greater part of her claims. Moreover, Germany has already had her “moral

satisfaction.” If she accepted the proposal for a conference she would achieve all her aims and

at the same time avoid a war, which even now looks like becoming general and of extremely

long duration.

The Duce does not want to insist, but it is of the greatest moment to him that the above

should be immediately brought to the attention of Herr von Ribbentrop and the Fuehrer. 17

No wonder that when Ribbentrop, who had quickly recovered from his

indisposition, saw Attolico at 12:30 P.M., he pointed out that the Duce’s proposal

could not be “reconciled” with the Anglo–French notes of the evening before,

which had “the character of an ultimatum.”

The Italian ambassador, who was as anxious as his chief to avoid a world war

and certainly more sincere, interrupted Ribbentrop to say that the British and

French declarations “had been superseded by the latest communication from the

Duce.” Attolico, of course, had no authority whatsoever to make such a

statement, which was not true, but at this late hour he probably thought he could

lose nothing by being reckless. When the German Foreign Minister expressed

his doubts, Attolico stuck to his view.

The French and British declarations [he said] no longer came into consideration. Count

Ciano had telephoned only at 8:30 this morning, that is to say at a time when the declarations

had already been given out on the radio in Italy. It followed that the two declarations must be

considered as superseded. Count Ciano stated moreover that France in particular was greatly

in favor of the Duce’s proposal. The pressure comes at the moment from France but England

will follow. 18

Ribbentrop remained skeptical. He had just discussed Mussolini’s proposal

with Hitler, he said, and what the Fuehrer wanted to know was: Were the Anglo–

French notes ultimata? The Foreign Minister finally agreed to Attolico’s

suggestion that the Italian envoy should immediately consult Henderson and

Coulondre to find out.

That was the reason for Attolico’s call at the British Embassy. “I can still see

Attolico, no longer in his first youth,” Schmidt, who acted as interpreter, wrote

later, “running out of Ribbentrop’s room and down the steps to consult

Henderson and Coulondre … A half hour later Attolico came running back, as

breathless as he had left. ”19

Regaining his breath, the Italian ambassador reported that Henderson had just

told him the British note was not an ultimatum. Ribbentrop replied that while “a

German reply to the Anglo–French declarations could only be negative the

Fuehrer was examining the Duce’s proposals and, if Rome confirmed that there

had been no question of an ultimatum in the Anglo–French declaration, would

draft an answer in a day or two.” When Attolico pressed for an earlier answer,

Ribbentrop finally agreed to reply by noon the next day, Sunday, September 3.

Meantime in Rome Mussolini’s hopes were being smashed. At 2 P.M. Ciano

received the British and French ambassadors and in their presence telephoned to

both Halifax and Bonnet and informed them of Attolico’s talks with the German

Foreign Minister. Bonnet was effusive as usual and, according to his own

account (in the French Yellow Book), warmly thanked Ciano for his efforts on

behalf of peace. Halifax was sterner. He confirmed that the British note was not

an ultimatum—one marvels at the splitting of hairs among the statesmen over a

single word, for the Anglo–French declarations spoke for themselves

unequivocably—but added that in his own view the British could not accept

Mussolini’s proposal for a conference unless the German armies withdrew from

Poland, a matter on which Bonnet again was silent. Halifax promised to

telephone Ciano the decision of the British cabinet on that.

The decision came shortly after 7 P.M. Britain accepted the Duce’s offer on

condition that Hitler pull back his troops to the German frontier. The Italian

Foreign Minister realized that Hitler would never accept this and that “nothing

more could be done,” as he put it in his diary.

It isn’t my business [he added] to give Hitler advice that he would reject decisively and

maybe with contempt. I tell this to Halifax, to the two ambassadors and to the Duce, and

finally I telephone to Berlin that unless the Germans advise us to the contrary we shall let the

conversations lapse. The last note of hope has died.20

And so at 8:50 P.M. on September 2 the weary and crushed Attolico once more

made his way to the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin. This time Ribbentrop received

him in the Chancellery, where he was in conference with Hitler. A captured

Foreign Office memo records the scene.

The Italian Ambassador brought the Foreign Minister the information that the British were

not prepared to enter into negotiations on the basis of the Italian proposal of mediation. The

British demanded, before starting negotiations, the immediate withdrawal of all German troops

from the occupied Polish areas and from Danzig …

In conclusion the Italian Ambassador stated that the Duce now considered his mediation

proposal as no longer in being. The Foreign Minister received the communication from the

Italian Ambassador without comment. 21

Not a word of thanks to the tireless Attolico for all his efforts! Only the

contempt of silence toward an ally who was trying to cheat Germany of its

Polish spoils.

The last slight possibility of averting World War II had now been exhausted.

This apparently was obvious to all except one actor in the drama. At 9 P.M. the

pusillanimous Bonnet telephoned Ciano, confirmed once more that the French

note to Germany did not have the “character of an ultimatum” and reiterated that

the French government was prepared to wait until noon of September 3—the

next day—for a German response. However, “in order for the conference to

achieve favorable results,” Bonnet told Ciano, the French government agreed

with the British that German troops must “evacuate” Poland. This was the first

time Bonnet had mentioned this—and now only because the British had insisted

upon it. Ciano replied that he did not think the Reich government would accept

this condition. But Bonnet would not give up. He sought during the night a final

escape from France’s obligations to the now battered and beleaguered Poland.

Ciano recounts this bizarre move in the first paragraph of his diary entry for

September 3.

During the night I was awakened by the Ministry because Bonnet had asked Guariglia [the

Italian ambassador in Paris] if we could not at least obtain a symbolic withdrawal of German

forces from Poland … I throw the proposal in the wastebasket without informing the Duce.

But this shows that France is moving toward the great test without enthusiasm and full of

uncertainty.22

THE POLISH WAR BECOMES WORLD WAR II

Sunday, September 3, 1939, in Berlin was a lovely, end-of-the-summer day.

The sun was shining, the air was balmy—“the sort of day,” I noted in my diary,

“the Berliner loves to spend in the woods or on the lakes nearby.”

As it dawned a telegram arrived at the British Embassy from Lord Halifax for

Sir Nevile Henderson, instructing him to seek an interview with the German

Foreign Minister at 9 A.M. and convey a communication the text of which was

then given.

The Chamberlain government had reached the end of the road. Some thirty-

two hours before, it had informed Hitler that unless Germany withdrew its troops

from Poland, Britain would go to war. There had been no answer, and now the

British government was determined to make good its word. On the previous day

it had feared, as Charles Corbin, the French ambassador in London, had

informed the hesitant Bonnet at 2:30 P.M., that Hitler was deliberately delaying

his reply in order to grab as much Polish territory as possible, after which,

having secured Danzig, the Corridor and other areas, he might make a

“magnanimous” peace proposal based on his sixteen points of August 31.23

To avoid that trap Halifax had proposed to the French that unless the German

government gave a favorable reply within a few hours to the Anglo–French

communications of September 1, the two Western nations should declare

themselves at war with Germany. Following a British cabinet meeting on the

afternoon of September 2, when a definite decision was made, Halifax suggested

specifically that the two allies present an ultimatum to Berlin that very midnight

which would expire at 6 A.M. on September 3.24 Bonnet would not hear of any

such precipitate action.

Indeed, the badly divided French cabinet had had a difficult time over the past

week reaching a decision to honor France’s obligations to Poland—and to

Britain—in the first place. On the dark day of August 23, overwhelmed by the

news that Ribbentrop had arrived in Moscow to conclude a Nazi–Soviet

nonaggression pact, Bonnet had persuaded Daladier to call a meeting of the

Council of National Defense to consider what France should do.* Besides

Premier Daladier and Bonnet, it was attended by the ministers of the three armed

services, General Gamelin, the chiefs of the Navy and Air Force and four

additional generals—twelve in all.

The minutes state that Daladier posed three questions:

1. Can France remain inactive while Poland and Rumania (or one of them) are being wiped

off the map of Europe?

2. What means has she of opposing it?

3. What measures should be taken now?

Bonnet himself, after explaining the grave turn of events, posed a question

which was to remain uppermost in his mind to the last:

Taking stock of the situation, had we better remain faithful to our engagements and enter

the war forthwith, or should we reconsider our attitude and profit by the respite thus gained?

… The answer to this question is essentially of a military character.

When thus handed the ball, Gamelin and Admiral Darlan answered

that the Army and Navy were ready. In the early stages of the conflict they can do little against

Germany. But the French mobilization by itself would bring some relief to Poland by tying

down some considerable German units at our frontier.

… General Gamelin, asked how long Poland and Rumania could resist, says that he

believes Poland would honorably resist, which would prevent the bulk of the German forces

from turning against France before next spring; by then Great Britain would be by her side.*

After a great deal of talk the French finally reached a decision, which was

duly recorded in the minutes of the meeting.

In the course of the discussion it is pointed out that if we are stronger a few months hence,

Germany will have gained even more, for she will have the Polish and Rumanian resources at

her disposal.

Therefore France has no choice.

The only solution … is to adhere to our engagements to Poland assumed before

negotiations were started with the U.S.S.R.

Having made up its mind, the French government began to act. Following this

meeting on August 23, the alerte was sounded, which placed all frontier troops

in their war stations. The next day 360,000 reservists were called up. On August

31 the cabinet published a communiqué saying France would “firmly fulfill” its

obligations. And the next day, the first day of the German attack on Poland,

Bonnet was persuaded by Halifax to associate France with Britain in the warning

to Berlin that both countries would honor their word to their ally.

But on September 2, when the British pressed for an ultimatum to be

presented to Hitler at midnight, General Gamelin and the French General Staff

held back. After all, it was the French who alone would have to do the fighting if

the Germans immediately attacked in the West. There would not be a single

British trooper to aid them. The General Staff insisted on a further forty-eight

hours in which to carry out the general mobilization unhindered.

At 6 P.M. Halifax telephoned Sir Eric Phipps, the British ambassador in Paris:

“Forty-eight hours is impossible for British Government. The French attitude is

very embarrassing to H. M. Government.”

It was to become dangerously so a couple of hours later when Chamberlain

rose to address a House of Commons whose majority of members, regardless of

party, was impatient at the British delay in honoring its obligations. Their

patience became almost exhausted after the Prime Minister spoke. He informed

the House that no reply had yet come from Berlin. Unless it did, and contained a

German assurance of withdrawal from Poland, the government would “be bound

to take action.” If the Germans did agree to withdraw, the British government, he

said, would “be willing to regard the position as being the same as it was before

the German forces crossed the Polish frontier.” In the meantime, he said, the

government was in communication with France about a time limit to their

warning to Germany.

After thirty-nine hours of war in Poland the House of Commons was in no

mood for such dilatory tactics. A smell of Munich seemed to emanate from the

government bench. “Speak for England!” cried Leopold Amery from the

Conservative benches as the acting leader of the Labor Opposition, Arthur

Greenwood, got up to talk.

“I wonder how long we are prepared to vacillate,” said Greenwood, “at a time

when Britain and all that Britain stands for, and human civilization, are in peril

… We must march with the French …”

That was the trouble. It was proving difficult at this moment to get the French

to march. But so disturbed was Chamberlain at the angry mood of the House that

he intervened in the sharp debate to plead that it took time to synchronize

“thoughts and actions” by telephone with Paris. “I should be horrified if the

House thought for one moment,” he added, “that the statement that I have made

to them betrayed the slightest weakening either of this Government or of the

French Government.” He said he understood the French government was “in

session at this moment” and that a communication would be received from it “in

the next few hours.” At any rate, he tried to assure the aroused members, “I

anticipate that there is only one answer I shall be able to give the House

tomorrow … and I trust the House … will believe me that I speak in complete

good faith …”

The inexorable approach of the greatest ordeal in British history was

announced, as Namier later wrote, “in a singularly halting manner.”

Chamberlain well understood, as the confidential British papers make clear,

that he was in deep trouble with his own people and that at this critical moment

for his country his own government was in danger of being overthrown.

As soon as he left the Commons he rang up Daladier. The time is recorded as

9:50 P.M. and Cadogan, listening in, made a minute of it for the record.

CHAMBERLAIN: The situation here is very grave … There has been an angry scene in

the House … if France were to insist on forty-eight hours to run from midday tomorrow, it

would be impossible for the Government to hold the situation here.

The Prime Minister said he quite realized that it is France who must bear the burden of a

German attack. But he was convinced some step must be taken this evening.

He proposed a compromise … An ultimatum at 8 A.M. tomorrow … expiring at noon….

Daladier replied that unless British bombers were ready to act at once it would be better for

French to delay, if possible, for some hours attacks on German armies.

Less than an hour later, at 10:30 P.M., Halifax rang up Bonnet. He urged the

French to agree to the British compromise, an ultimatum to be presented in

Berlin at 8 A.M. on the morrow (September 3) and to expire at noon. The French

Foreign Minister not only would not agree, he protested to Halifax that the

British insistence on such speed would create a “deplorable impression.” He

demanded that London wait at least until noon before presenting any ultimatum

to Hitler.

HALIFAX: It is impossible for H. M. Government to wait until that hour … It is

very doubtful whether the [British] Government could hold the position here.

The House of Commons was to meet at noon, on Sunday, September 3, and it

was obvious to Chamberlain and Halifax from the mood of Saturday evening’s

session that in order to survive they would have to give Parliament the answer it

demanded. At 2 o’clock the next morning the French ambassador in London,

Corbin, warned Bonnet that the Chamberlain cabinet risked overthrow if it could

not give Parliament definite word. Halifax, at the close of his telephone

conversation with Bonnet, therefore informed him that Britain proposed “to act

on its own.”

The telegram of Halifax to Henderson reached Berlin about 4 A.M. * The

communication he was to make to the German government at 9 A.M. on Sunday,

September 3, recalled the British note of September 1 in which Great Britain

declared its intention of fulfilling its obligations to Poland unless German troops

were promptly withdrawn.

Although this communication [it continued] was made more than 24 hours ago, no reply

has been received but German attacks upon Poland have been continued and intensified. I have

accordingly the honor to inform you that, unless not later than 11 A.M., British summer time,

today September 3, satisfactory assurances to the above effect have been given by the German

Government and have reached His Majesty’s Government in London, a state of war will exist

between the two countries as from that hour.26*

In the early predawn Sabbath hours Henderson found it difficult to make

contact with the Wilhelmstrasse. He was told that Ribbentrop would not be

“available” at 9 A.M. on the Sunday but that he could leave his communication

with the official interpreter, Dr. Schmidt.

On this historic day Dr. Schmidt overslept, and, rushing to the Foreign Office

by taxi, he saw the British ambassador already mounting the steps to the Foreign

Office as he arrived. Ducking in by a side door, Schmidt managed to slip into

Ribbentrop’s office just at the stroke of 9 o’clock, in time to receive Henderson

on the dot. “He came in looking very serious,” Schmidt later recounted, “shook

hands, but declined my invitation to be seated, remaining solemnly standing in

the middle of the room. ”28 He read out the British ultimatum, handed Schmidt a

copy, and bade him goodby.

The official interpreter hastened down the Wilhelmstrasse to the Chancellery

with the document. Outside the Fuehrer’s office he found most members of the

cabinet and several ranking party officials collected about and “anxiously

awaiting” his news.

When I entered the next room [Schmidt later recounted] Hitler was sitting at his desk and

Ribbentrop stood by the window. Both looked up expectantly as I came in. I stopped at some

distance from Hitler’s desk, and then slowly translated the British ultimatum. When I finished

there was complete silence.

Hitler sat immobile, gazing before him … After an interval which seemed an age, he turned

to Ribbentrop, who had remained standing by the window. “What now?” asked Hitler with a

savage look, as though implying that his Foreign Minister had misled him about England’s

probable reaction.

Ribbentrop answered quietly: “I assume that the French will hand in a similar ultimatum

within the hour.” 29

His duty performed, Schmidt withdrew, stopping in the outer room to apprise

the others of what had happened. They too were silent for a moment. Then:

Goering turned to me and said: “If we lose this war, then God have mercy on

us!”

Goebbels stood in a corner by himself, downcast and self-absorbed.

Everywhere in the room I saw looks of grave concern. 30

In the meantime the inimitable Dahlerus had been making his last amateurish

effort to avoid the inevitable. At 8 A.M. Forbes had informed him of the British

ultimatum which was being presented an hour later. He hastened out to

Luftwaffe headquarters to see Goering and, according to his later account on the

stand at Nuremberg, appealed to him to see to it that the German reply to the

ultimatum was “reasonable.” He further suggested that the Field Marshal

himself, before 11 o’clock, declare himself prepared to fly to London “to

negotiate.” In his book the Swedish businessman claims that Goering accepted

the suggestion and telephoned to Hitler, who also agreed. There is no mention of

this in the German papers, and Dr. Schmidt makes it clear that Goering, a few

minutes after 9 o’clock, was not at his headquarters but at the Chancellery in the

Fuehrer’s anteroom.

At any rate, there is no doubt that the Swedish intermediary telephoned the

British Foreign Office—not once but twice. In the first call, at 10:15 A.M., he

took it upon himself to inform the British government that the German reply to

its ultimatum was “on the way” and that the Germans were still “most anxious to

satisfy the British Government and to give satisfactory assurances not to violate

the independence of Poland.”(!) He hoped London would consider Hitler’s

response “in the most favorable light. ”31

Half an hour later, at 10:50 A.M.—ten minutes before the ultimatum ran out—

Dahlerus was once more on the long-distance line to the Foreign Office in

London, this time to present his proposal that Goering, with Hitler’s assent, fly

immediately to the British capital. He did not realize that it was past time for

such diplomatic antics, but he was soon made to. He was given an

uncompromising answer from Halifax. His proposal could not be entertained.

The German government had been asked a definite question, “and presumably

they would be sending a definite answer.” H. M. Government could not wait for

further discussion with Goering.32

Whereupon Dahlerus hung up and disappeared into the limbo of history until

he reappeared, briefly, after the war at Nuremberg—and in his book—to recount

his bizarre attempt to save world peace.* He had meant well, he had striven for

peace; for a few moments he had found himself in the center of the dazzling

stage of world history. But as happened to almost everyone else, the confusion

had been too great for him to see clearly; and as he would admit at Nuremberg,

he had at no time realized how much he had been taken in by the Germans.

Shortly after 11 A.M., when the time limit in the British ultimatum had run out,

Ribbentrop, who had declined to see the British ambassador two hours before,

sent for him in order to hand him Germany’s reply. The German government, it

said, refused “to receive or accept, let alone to fulfill” the British ultimatum.

There followed a lengthy and shabby propaganda statement obviously hastily

concocted by Hitler and Ribbentrop during the intervening two hours. Designed

to fool the easily fooled German people, it rehearsed all the lies with which we

are now familiar, including the one about the Polish “attacks” on German

territory, blamed Britain for all that had happened, and rejected attempts “to

force Germany to recall their forces which are lined up for the defense of the

Reich.” It declared, falsely, that Germany had accepted Mussolini’s eleventh-

hour proposals for peace and pointed out that Britain had rejected them. And

after all of Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler it accused the British

government of “preaching the destruction and extermination of the German

people.” *

Henderson read the document (“this completely false representation of

events,” as he later called it) and remarked “It would be left to history to judge

where the blame really lay.” Ribbentrop retorted that “history had already

proved the facts.”

I was standing in the Wilhelmstrasse before the Chancellery about noon when

the loudspeakers suddenly announced that Great Britain had declared herself at

war with Germany.† Some 250 people—no more—were standing there in the

sun. They listened attentively to the announcement. When it was finished, there

was not a murmur. They just stood there. Stunned. It was difficult for them to

comprehend that Hitler had led them into a world war.

Soon, though it was the Sabbath, the newsboys were crying their extras. In

fact, I noticed, they were giving the papers away. I took one. It was the Deutsche

Allgemeine Zeitung, its headlines marching in large type across the page:

BRITISH ULTIMATUM TURNED DOWN

ENGLAND DECLARES A STATE OF WAR WITH GERMANY

BRITISH NOTE DEMANDS WITHDRAWAL OF OUR TROOPS IN THE

EAST

THE FUEHRER LEAVING TODAY FOR THE FRONT

The headline over the official account read as though it had been dictated by

Ribbentrop.

GERMAN MEMORANDUM PROVES ENGLAND’S GUILT

“Proved” though it may have been to a people as easily swindled as the

Germans, it aroused no ill feelings toward the British during the day. When I

passed the British Embassy, from whose premises Henderson and his staff were

moving to the Hotel Adlon around the corner, a lone Schupo paced up and down

before the building. He had nothing to do but saunter back and forth.

The French held out a little longer. Bonnet played for time until the last

moment, clinging stubbornly to the hope that Mussolini might still swing a deal

with Hitler which would let France off the hook. He even pleaded with the

Belgian ambassador to get King Leopold to use his influence with Mussolini to

influence Hitler. All day Saturday, September 2, he argued with his own cabinet,

as he did with the British, that he had “promised” Ciano to wait until noon of

September 3 for the German answer to the Anglo–French warning notes of

September 1, and that he could not go back on his word. He had, to be sure,

given this assurance to the Italian Foreign Minister over the phone—but not until

9 o’clock on the evening of September 2.* By that time the Duce’s proposal for a

conference was as dead as stone, as Ciano had tried to tell him. And by that

hour, too, the British were pleading with him to present a joint ultimatum to

Berlin at midnight.

Shortly before midnight on September 2, the French government finally

reached a decision. At precisely midnight, Bonnet wired Coulondre at Berlin that

in the morning he would forward the terms of a “new démarche” to be made “at

noon to the Wilhelmstrasse.” †

This he did, at 10:20 A.M. on Sunday, September 3—forty minutes before the

British ultimatum ran out. The French ultimatum was similarly worded except

that in case of a negative reply France declared that she would fulfill her

obligations to Poland “which are known to the German government”—even at

this final juncture Bonnet held out against a formal declaration of war.

In the official French Yellow Book the text of the French ultimatum wired to

Coulondre gives 5 P.M. as the time limit for the German response. But this was

not the hour set in the original telegram. At 8:45 A.M. Ambassador Phipps had

notified Halifax from Paris: “Bonnet tells me French time limit will only expire

at 5 o’clock Monday morning [September 4].” That was the time given in

Bonnet’s telegram.

Though it represented a concession wrung by Daladier early Sunday morning

from the French General Staff, which had insisted on a full forty-eight hours

from the time the ultimatum was given Berlin at noon, it still irritated the British

government, whose displeasure was communicated to Paris in no uncertain

terms during the forenoon. Premier Daladier therefore made one last appeal to

the military. He called in General Colston, of the General Staff, at 11:30 A.M. and

urged a shorter deadline. The General reluctantly agreed to move it up by twelve

hours to 5 P.M.

Thus it was that just as Coulondre was leaving the French Embassy in Berlin

for the Wilhelmstrasse, Bonnet got through to him on the telephone and

instructed him to make the necessary change in the zero hour.34

Ribbentrop was not available to the French ambassador at the noon hour. He

was taking part in a little ceremony at the Chancellery, where the new Soviet

ambassador, Alexander Shkvarzev, was being warmly received by the Fuehrer—

an occasion that lent a bizarre note to this historic Sabbath in Berlin. Coulondre,

insistent on following the letter of his instructions to call at the Wilhelmstrasse at

precisely twelve noon, was therefore received by Weizsaecker. To the

ambassador’s inquiry as to whether the State Secretary was empowered to give a

“satisfactory” answer to the French, Weizsaecker replied that he was not in a

position to give him “any kind of reply.”

There now followed at this solemn moment a minor diplomatic comedy.

When Coulondre attempted to treat Weizsaecker’s response as the negative

German reply which he fully anticipated and to hand to the State Secretary

France’s formal ultimatum, the latter declined to accept it. He suggested that the

ambassador “be good enough to be patient a little longer and see the Foreign

Minister personally.” Thus rebuffed—and not for the first time—Coulondre

cooled his heels for nearly half an hour. At 12:30 P.M. he was conducted to the

Chancellery to see Ribbentrop.35

Though the Nazi Foreign Minister knew what the ambassador’s mission was,

he could not let the opportunity, the very last such one, slip by without treating

the French envoy to one of his customary prevarications of history. After

remarking that Mussolini, in presenting his last-minute peace proposal, had

emphasized that France approved it, Ribbentrop declared that “Germany had

informed the Duce yesterday that she also was prepared to agree to the proposal.

Later in the day,” Ribbentrop added, “the Duce reported that his proposal had

been wrecked by the intransigence of the British Government.”

But Coulondre, over the past months, had heard enough of Ribbentrop’s

falsifications. After listening a little longer to the Nazi Foreign Minister, who

had gone on to say that he would regret it if France followed Great Britain and

that Germany had no intention of attacking France, the ambassador got in the

question he had come to ask: Did the Foreign Minister’s remarks mean that the

response of the German government to the French communication of September

1 was negative?

“Ja,” replied Ribbentrop.

The ambassador then handed the Foreign Minister France’s ultimatum,

prefacing it with a remark that “for the last time” he must emphasize the “heavy

responsibility of the Reich Government” in attacking Poland “without a

declaration of war” and in refusing the Anglo–French request that German

troops be withdrawn.

“Then France will be the aggressor,” Ribbentrop said.

“History will be the judge of that,” Coulondre replied.

On that Sunday in Berlin all the participants in the final act of the drama

seemed intent on calling upon the judgment of history.

Although France was mobilizing an army which would have overwhelming

superiority for the time being over the German forces in the west, it was Great

Britain, whose army at the moment was negligible, which loomed in Hitler’s

feverish mind as the main enemy and as the antagonist who was almost entirely

responsible for the pass in which he found himself as September 3, 1939, began

to wane and pass into history. This was made clear in the two grandiose

proclamations which he issued during the afternoon to the German people and to

the Army of the West. His bitter resentment and hysterical anger at the British

burst forth.

Great Britain [he said in an “Appeal to the German People”] has for centuries pursued the

aim of rendering the peoples of Europe defenseless against the British policy of world

conquest … [and] claimed the right to attack on threadbare pretexts and destroy that European

state which at the moment seemed most dangerous …

We ourselves have been witnesses of the policy of encirclement … carried on by Great

Britain against Germany since before the war … The British war inciters … oppressed the

German people under the Versailles Diktat …

Soldiers of the Western Army! [Hitler said in an appeal to the troops who for many weeks

could only face the French Army] … Great Britain has pursued the policy of Germany’s

encirclement … The British Government, driven on by those warmongers whom we knew in

the last war, have resolved to let fall their mask and to proclaim war on a threadbare pretext …

There was not a word about France.

In London at six minutes past noon, Chamberlain addressed the House of

Commons and informed it that Britain was now at war with Germany. Though

Hitler, on September 1, had forbidden listening to foreign broadcasts on the pain

of death, we picked up in Berlin the words of the Prime Minister as quoted over

the BBC. To those of us who had seen him risking his political life at Godesberg

and Munich to appease Hitler, his words were poignant.

This is a sad day for all of us, and to none is it sadder than to me. Everything that I have

worked for, everything that I have believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins.

There is only one thing left for me to do: that is, to devote what strength and powers I have to

forwarding the victory of the cause for which we have to sacrifice so much … I trust I may

live to see the day when Hitlerism has been destroyed and a liberated Europe has been re-

established.

Chamberlain was fated not to live to see that day. He died, a broken man—

though still a member of the cabinet—on November 9, 1940. In view of all that

has been written about him in these pages it seems only fitting to quote what was

said of him by Churchill, whom he had excluded from the affairs of the British

nation for so long and who on May 10, 1940, succeeded him as Prime Minister.

Paying tribute to his memory in the Commons on November 12, 1940, Churchill

said:

… It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be

contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a

wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these

wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely

among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart—the love of peace, the toil

for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril and certainly in utter

disdain of popularity or clamor.

His diplomacy having failed to keep Britain and France out of the war, Hitler

turned his attention during the afternoon of September 3 to military matters. He

issued Top-Secret Directive No. 2 for the Conduct of the War. Despite the

Anglo–French war declarations, it said, “the German war objective remains for

the time being the speedy and victorious conclusion of the operations against

Poland … In the West the opening of hostilities is to be left to the enemy …

Against Britain, naval offensive operations are permitted.” The Luftwaffe was

not to attack even British naval forces unless the British opened similar attacks

on German targets—and then only “if prospects of success are particularly

favorable.” The conversion of the whole of German industry to “war economy”

was ordered.36

At 9 o’clock in the evening Hitler and Ribbentrop left Berlin in separate

special trains for General Headquarters in the East. But not before they had made

two more diplomatic moves. Britain and France were now at war with Germany.

But there were the two other great European powers, whose support had made

Hitler’s venture possible, to consider: Italy, the ally, which had reneged at the

last moment, and Soviet Russia, which, though distrusted by the Nazi dictator,

had obliged him by making his gamble on war seem worth the taking.

Just before leaving the capital, Hitler got off another letter to Mussolini. It was

dispatched by wire at 8:51 P.M., nine minutes before the Fuehrer’s special train

pulled out of the station. Though not entirely frank nor devoid of deceit it gives

the best picture we shall probably ever have of the mind of Adolf Hitler as he set

out for the first time from the darkened capital of the Third Reich to assume his

role as Supreme German Warlord. It is among the captured Nazi papers.

DUCE:

I must first thank you for your last attempt at mediation. I would have been ready to accept,

but only on condition that some possibility could have been found to give me certain

guarantees that the conference would be successful. For the German troops have been engaged

for two days in an extraordinarily rapid advance into Poland. It would have been impossible to

allow blood which was there sacrificed to be squandered through diplomatic intrigue.

Nevertheless, I believe that a way could have been found if England had not been

determined from the outset to let it come to war in any case. I did not yield to England’s

threats because, Duce, I no longer believe that peace could have been maintained for more

than six months or, shall we say, a year. In these circumstances, I considered that the present

moment was, in spite of everything, more suitable for making a stand.

… The Polish Army will collapse in a very short time. Whether it would have been

possible to achieve this quick success in another year or two is, I must say, very doubtful in

my opinion. England and France would have gone on arming their allies to such an extent that

the decisive technical superiority of the German Wehrmacht could not have been in evidence

in the same way. I am aware, Duce, that the struggle in which I am engaging is a struggle for

life and death … But I am also aware that such a struggle cannot in the end be avoided, and

that the moment for resistance must be chosen with icy deliberation so that the likelihood of

success is assured; and in this success, Duce, my faith is as firm as a rock.

Next came words of warning to Mussolini.

You kindly assured me recently that you believe you can help in some fields. I accept this

in advance with sincere thanks. But I also believe that, even if we now march down separate

paths, destiny will yet bind us one to the other. If National Socialist Germany were to be

destroyed by the Western democracies, Fascist Italy also would face a hard future. I personally

was always aware that the futures of our two regimes were bound up, and I know that you,

Duce, are of exactly the same opinion.

After recounting the initial German victories in Poland, Hitler concluded:

… In the West I shall remain on the defensive. France can shed her blood there first. The

moment will then come when we can pit ourselves there also against the enemy with the

whole strength of the nation.

Please accept once more my thanks, Duce, for all the support you have given me in the

past, and which I ask you not to refuse me in the future either.

ADOLF HITLER37

Hitler’s disappointment that Italy did not honor her word, even after Britain

and France had honored theirs by declaring war on this day, was kept under tight

control. A friendly Italy, even though nonbelligerent, could still be helpful to

him.

But even more helpful could be Russia.

Already on the first day of the German attack on Poland the Soviet

government, as the secret Nazi papers would later reveal, had rendered the

German Luftwaffe a signal service. Very early on that morning the Chief of the

General Staff of the Air Force, General Hans Jeschonnek, had rung up the

German Embassy in Moscow to say that in order to give his pilots navigational

aid in the bombing of Poland—“urgent navigation tests,” he called it—he would

appreciate it if the Russian radio station at Minsk would continually identify

itself. By afternoon Ambassador von der Schulenburg was able to inform Berlin

that the Soviet government was “prepared to meet your wishes.” The Russians

agreed to introduce a station identification as often as possible in the programs

over their transmitter and to extend the broadcasting time of the Minsk station by

two hours so as to aid the German flyers late at night. 38

But as they prepared to leave Berlin late on September 3 Hitler and

Ribbentrop had in mind much more substantial Russian military help for their

conquest of Poland. At 6:50 P.M., Ribbentrop got off a “most urgent” telegram to

the embassy in Moscow. It was marked “Top Secret” and began: “Exclusive for

the Ambassador. For the Head of Mission or his representative personally.

Special security handling. To be decoded by himself. Most secret.”

In the greatest of secrecy the Germans invited the Soviet Union to join in the

attack on Poland!

We definitely expect to have beaten the Polish Army decisively in a few weeks. We should

then keep the territory that was fixed at Moscow as a German sphere of interest under military

occupation. We should naturally, however, for military reasons, have to continue to take action

against such Polish military forces as are at that time located in the Polish territory belonging

to the Russian sphere of interest.

Please discuss this at once with Molotov and see if the Soviet Union does not consider it

desirable for Russian forces to move at the proper time against Polish forces in the Russian

sphere of interest and for their part to occupy this territory. In our estimation this would be not

only a relief for us, but also be in the sense of the Moscow agreements and in the Soviet

interest as well. 39

That such a cynical move by the Soviet Union would be a “relief” to Hitler

and Ribbentrop is obvious. It would not only avoid misunderstandings and

friction between the Germans and the Russians in dividing up the spoils but

would take some of the onus of the Nazi aggression in Poland off Germany and

place it on the Soviet Union. If they shared the booty, why should they not share

the blame?

The most gloomy German of any consequence in Berlin that Sunday noon

after it became known that Britain was in the war was Grand Admiral Erich

Raeder, Commander in Chief of the German Navy. For him the war had come

four or five years too soon. By 1944–45, the Navy’s Z Plan would have been

completed, giving Germany a sizable fleet with which to confront the British.

But this was September 3, 1939, and Raeder knew, even if Hitler wouldn’t listen

to him, that he had neither the surface ships nor even the submarines to wage

effective war against Great Britain.

Confiding to his diary, the Admiral wrote:

Today the war against France and England broke out, the war which, according to the

Fuehrer’s previous assertions, we had no need to expect before 1944. The Fuehrer believed up

to the last minute that it could be avoided, even if this meant postponing a final settlement of

the Polish question….

As far as the Navy is concerned, obviously it is in no way very adequately equipped for the

great struggle with Great Britain … the submarine arm is still much too weak to have any

decisive effect on the war. The surface forces, moreover, are so inferior in number and

strength to those of the British Fleet that, even at full strength, they can do no more than show

that they know how to die gallantly …40

Nevertheless at 9 P.M. on September 3,1939, at the moment Hitler was

departing Berlin, the German Navy struck. Without warning, the submarine U-

30 torpedoed and sank the British liner Athenia some two hundred miles west of

the Hebrides as it was en route from Liverpool to Montreal with 1,400

passengers, of whom 112, including twenty-eight Americans, lost their lives.

World War II had begun.

* Hitler’s proclamation to the Army announcing the opening of hostilities was broadcast over

me German radio at 5:40 A.M., and the newspaper extras were on the street shortly after. See

below, p. 599.

* The German operation to seize the Dirschau bridge over the Vistula before the Poles could

blow it up had been planned early in the summer and appears constantly in the papers for

“Case White.” It was specifically ordered in Hitler’s Directive No. 1 on August 31. Actually

the operation failed, partly because early-morning fog hampered the dropping of paratroopers

who were to seize the bridge. The Poles succeeded in blowing it up just in time.

* See above, pp. 566–67.

† See above, p. 588.

‡ Actually Mussolini’s decision was conveyed to Britain the night before. At 11:15 P.M. on

August 31 the Foreign Office received a message from Sir Percy Loraine in Rome: “Decision

of the Italian Government is taken. Italy will not fight against either England or France … This

communication made to me by Ciano at 21:15 [9:15 P.M.] under seal of secrecy.” 10

That evening the Italians had been given a scare by the British cutting off all telephone

communication with Rome after 8 P.M. Ciano feared it might be the prelude to an Anglo–

French attack.

* At 4:30 P.M., following a meeting of the Council of Ministers in Rome, the Italian radio

broadcast the Council’s announcement “to the Italian people that Italy will take no initiative in

the way of military operations.” Immediately afterward Hitler’s message to Mussolini

releasing Italy from its obligations was broadcast.

* Twice during the afternoon of September 1, Bonnet instructed Noël, the French ambassador

in Warsaw, to ask Beck if Poland would accept the Italian proposal for a conference. Later that

evening he received his reply: “We are in the midst of war as the result of unprovoked

aggression. It is no longer a question of a conference but of common action which the Allies

should take to resist.” Bonnet’s messages and Beck’s reply are in the French Yellow Book.

The British government did not associate itself with Bonnet’s efforts. A Foreign Office

memorandum signed by R. M. Makins notes that the British government “was neither

consulted nor informed of this démarche. ”15

† The previous afternoon, on instructions from Halifax, Henderson had burned his ciphers and

confidential documents and officially requested the United States chargé d’affaires “to be

good enough to take charge of British interests in the event of war.” ( British Blue Book, p. 21.)

* Ciano claims that the note was sent as the result of “French pressure.” ( Ciano Diaries, p.

136.) But this is surely misleading. Though Bonnet was doing all he could to get a conference,

Mussolini was pushing the proposal even more desperately.

* The minutes of the meeting, drawn up by General Decamp, chief of Premier Daladier’s

military cabinet, came to light at the Riom trial. The paper was never submitted to other

members of the meeting for correction, and General Gamelin in his book, Servir, claims it was

so abbreviated as to be misleading. Still, even the timid generalissimo confirms its main

outlines.

* In his book, Servir, Gamelin admits that he hesitated to call attention to some of France’s

military weaknesses because he did not trust Bonnet. He quotes Daladier as later telling him,

“You did right. If you had exposed them, the Germans would have known about them the next

day.”

Gamelin also claimed (in his book) that he did point out at this conference the weakness of

France’s military position. He says he explained that if Germany “annihilated Poland” and

then threw her whole weight against the French, France would be in a “difficult” situation. “In

this case,” he said, “it would no longer be possible for France to enter upon the struggle … By

spring, with the help of British troops and American equipment I hoped we should be in a

position to fight a defensive battle (of course if necessary). I added that we could not hope for

victory except in a long war. It had always been my opinion that we should not be able to

assume the offensive in less than about two years … that is, in 1941–2.”

The French generalissimo’s timid views explain a good deal of subsequent history.

* The Foreign Secretary had sent Henderson two warning telegrams during the night. The

first, dispatched at 11:50 P.M., read:

I may have to send you instructions tonight to make an immediate communication to the

German Government. Please be ready to act. You had better warn the Minister for Foreign

Affairs that you may have to ask to see him at any moment.

It would seem from this telegram that the British government had not quite made up its

mind to go it alone despite the French. But thirty-five minutes later, at 12:25 A.M. on

September 3, Halifax wired Henderson:

You should ask for an appointment with M.F.A. [Minister for Foreign Affairs] at 9 A.M.

Sunday morning. Instructions will follow. 25

The decisive telegram from Halifax is dated 5 A.M., London time. Henderson, in his Final

Report, says he received it 4 A.M.

* Halifax sent an additional wire, also dated 5 A.M., informing the ambassador that Coulondre

“will not make a similar communication to the German Government until midday today

(Sunday).” He did not know what the French time limit would be but thought it “likely” to be

anything between six and nine hours.27

* He reappeared for a moment on September 24 when he met with Forbes at Oslo “to

ascertain,” as he told the Nuremberg tribunal before he was shut off, “if there was still a

possibility of averting a world war. ”33

* So shoddy was this hastily prepared note that it ended with this sentence: “The intention,

communicated to us by order of the British Government by Mr. King-Hall, of carrying the

destruction of the German people even further than was done through the Versailles Treaty, is

taken note of by us, and we shall therefore answer any aggressive action on the part of

England with the same weapons and in the same form.” The British government had, of

course, never presented to Germany any intentions of Stephen King-Hall, a retired naval

officer, whose newsletters were a purely private venture. In fact, Henderson had protested to

the Foreign Office against the circulation of King-Hall’s publication in Germany and the

British government had requested the editor to desist.

† In London at 11:15 A.M. Halifax had handed the German chargé d’affaires a formal note

stating that since no German assurances had been received by 11 A.M., “I have the honor to

inform you that a state of war exists between the two countries as from 11 A.M. today,

September 3.”

* See above, p. 608.

† But even after that, it will be remembered, Bonnet made a last-minute effort to keep France

out of the war by proposing, during the night, to the Italians that they get Hitler to make a

“symbolic” withdrawal from Poland.

Book Four

WAR: EARLY VICTORIES AND THE TURNING POINT

18

THE FALL OF POLAND

AT TEN O’CLOCK on the morning of September 5, 1939, General Halder had a

talk with General von Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chief of the German

Army, and General von Bock, who led Army Group North. After sizing up the

situation as it looked to them at the beginning of the fifth day of the German

attack on Poland they agreed, as Halder wrote in his diary, that “the enemy is

practically beaten.”

By the evening of the previous day the battle for the Corridor had ended with

the junction of General von Kluge’s Fourth Army, pushing eastward from

Pomerania, and General von Kuechler’s Third Army, driving westward from

East Prussia. It was in this battle that General Heinz Guderian first made a name

for himself with his tanks. At one point, racing east across the Corridor, they had

been counterattacked by the Pomorska Brigade of cavalry, and this writer,

coming upon the scene a few days later, saw the sickening evidence of the

carnage. It was symbolic of the brief Polish campaign.

Horses against tanks! The cavalryman’s long lance against the tank’s long

cannon! Brave and valiant and foolhardy though they were, the Poles were

simply overwhelmed by the German onslaught. This was their—and the world’s

—first experience of the blitzkrieg: the sudden surprise attack; the fighter planes

and bombers roaring overhead, reconnoitering, attacking, spreading flame and

terror; the Stukas screaming as they dove; the tanks, whole divisions of them,

breaking through and thrusting forward thirty or forty miles in a day; self-

propelled, rapid-firing heavy guns rolling forty miles an hour down even the

rutty Polish roads; the incredible speed of even the infantry, of the whole vast

army of a million and a half men on motorized wheels, directed and co-ordinated

through a maze of electronic communications consisting of intricate radio,

telephone and telegraphic networks. This was a monstrous mechanized

juggernaut such as the earth had never seen.

Within forty-eight hours the Polish Air Force was destroyed, most of its five

hundred first-line planes having been blown up by German bombing on their

home airfields before they could take off. Installations were burned and most of

the ground crews were killed or wounded. Cracow, the second city of Poland,

fell on September 6. That night the Polish government fled from Warsaw to

Lublin. The next day Halder busied himself with plans to begin transferring

troops to the Western front, though he could detect no activity there. On the

afternoon of September 8 the 4th Panzer Division reached the outskirts of the

Polish capital, while directly south of the city, rolling up from Silesia and

Slovakia, Reichenau’s Tenth Army captured Kielce and List’s Fourteenth Army

arrived at Sandomierz, at the junction of the Vistula and San rivers.

In one week the Polish Army had been vanquished. Most of its thirty-five

divisions—all that there had been time to mobilize—had been either shattered or

caught in a vast pincers movement that closed in around Warsaw. There now

remained for the Germans the “second phase”: tightening the noose around the

dazed and disorganized Polish units which were surrounded and destroying

them, and completing a second and larger pincers movement a hundred miles to

the east which would trap the remaining Polish formations west of Brest Litovsk

and the River Bug.

This phase began September 9 and ended on September 17. The left wing of

Bock’s Army Group North headed for Brest Litovsk, which Guderian’s XIXth

Corps reached on the fourteenth and captured two days later. On September 17 it

met patrols of List’s Fourteenth Army fifty miles south of Brest Litovsk at

Wlodawa, closing the second great pincers there. The “counterattack,” as

Guderian later observed, had come to a “definite conclusion” on September 17.

All Polish forces, except for a handful on the Russian border, were surrounded.

Pockets of Polish troops in the Warsaw triangle and farther west near Posen held

out valiantly, but they were doomed. The Polish government, or what was left of

it, after being unceasingly bombed and strafed by the Luftwaffe reached a

village on the Rumanian frontier on the fifteenth. For it and the proud nation all

was over, except the dying in the ranks of the units which still, with incredible

fortitude, held out.

It was now time for the Russians to move in on the stricken country to grab a

share of the spoils.

THE RUSSIANS INVADE POLAND

The Kremlin in Moscow, like every other seat of government, had been taken by

surprise at the rapidity with which the German armies hurtled through Poland.

On September 5 Molotov, in giving a formal written reply to the Nazi suggestion

that Russia attack Poland from the east, stated that this would be done “at a

suitable time” but that “this time has not yet come.” He thought that “excessive

haste” might injure the Soviet “cause” but he insisted that even though the

Germans got there first they must scrupulously observe the “line of

demarcation” in Poland agreed upon in the secret clauses of the Nazi–Soviet

Pact.1 Russian suspicion of the Germans was already evident. So was the feeling

in the Kremlin that the German conquest of Poland might take quite a long time.

But shortly after midnight of September 8, after a German armored division

had reached the outskirts of Warsaw, Ribbentrop wired “urgent” a “top secret”

message to Schulenburg in Moscow stating that operations in Poland were

“progressing even beyond our expectations” and that in these circumstances

Germany would like to know the “military intentions of the Soviet

Government.” 2 By 4:10 P.M. the next day Molotov had replied that Russia would

move militarily “within the next few days.” Earlier in the day the Soviet Foreign

Commissar had officially congratulated the Germans “on the entry of German

troops into Warsaw. ”3

On September 10, Molotov and Ambassador von der Schulenburg got into a

fine snafu. After declaring that the Soviet government had been taken

“completely by surprise by the unexpectedly rapid German military successes”

and that the Soviet Union was consequently in “a difficult situation,” the Foreign

Commissar touched on the excuse which the Kremlin would have to give for its

own aggression in Poland. This was, as Schulenburg wired Berlin “most urgent”

and “top secret,”

that Poland was falling apart and that it was necessary for the Soviet Union, in consequence, to

come to the aid of the Ukrainians and the White Russians “threatened” by Germany. This

argument [said Molotov] was necessary to make the intervention of the Soviet Union plausible

to the masses and at the same time avoid giving the Soviet Union the appearance of an

aggressor.

Furthermore, Molotov complained that General von Brauchitsch had just been

quoted by D.N.B, as saying that “military action was no longer necessary on the

German eastern border.” If that were so, if the war was over, Russia, said

Molotov, “could not start a new war.” He was very displeased about the whole

situation. 4 To further complicate matters he summoned Schulenburg to the

Kremlin on September 14 and after informing him that the Red Army would

march sooner than they had anticipated demanded to know when Warsaw would

fall. In order to justify their move the Russians must wait on the capture of the

Polish capital.5

The Commissar had raised some embarrassing questions. When would

Warsaw fall? How did the Germans like being blamed for Russian intervention?

On the evening of September 15 Ribbentrop dispatched a “most urgent,” a “top

secret” message to Molotov through the German ambassador, answering them.

Warsaw, he said, would be occupied “in the next few days.” Germany would

“welcome the Soviet military operation now.” As to the Russian excuse blaming

Germany for it, this “was out of the question … contrary to the true German

intentions … would be in contradiction to the arrangements made in Moscow

and finally … would make the two States appear as enemies before the whole

world.” He ended by asking the Soviet government to set “the day and the hour”

for their attack on Poland. 6

This was done the next evening and two dispatches of Schulenburg, which are

among the captured German papers, telling how it was done give a revealing

picture of the Kremlin’s deceit.

I saw Molotov at 6 P.M. [Schulenburg wired on September 16]. Molotov declared that

military intervention by the Soviet Union was imminent—perhaps even tomorrow or the day

after. Stalin was at present in consultation with the military leaders …

Molotov added that … the Soviet Government intended to justify its procedure as follows:

The Polish State had disintegrated and no longer existed; therefore, all agreements concluded

with Poland were void: third powers might try to profit by the chaos which had arisen; the

Soviet Government considered itself obligated to intervene to protect its Ukrainian and White

Russian brothers and make it possible for these unfortunate people to work in peace.

Since Germany could be the only possible “third power” in question,

Schulenburg objected.

Molotov conceded that the proposed argument of the Soviet Government contained a note

that was jarring to German sensibilities but asked us in view of the difficult situation of the

Soviet Government not to stumble over this piece of straw. The Soviet Government

unfortunately saw no possibility of any other motivation, since the Soviet Union had

heretofore not bothered about the plight of its minorities in Poland and had to justify abroad, in

some way or other, its present intervention. 7

At 5:20 P.M. on September 17, Schulenburg got off another “most urgent” and

“top secret” wire to Berlin.

Stalin received me at 2 o’clock … and declared that the Red Army would cross the Soviet

border at 6 o’clock … Soviet planes would begin today to bomb the district east of Lwów

(Lemberg).

When Schulenburg objected to three points in the Soviet communiqué the

Russian dictator “with the utmost readiness” altered the text.8

Thus it was that on the shabby pretext that because Poland had ceased to exist

and therefore the Polish–Soviet nonaggression pact had also ceased to exist and

because it was necessary to protect its own interests and those of the Ukrainian

and White Russian minorities, the Soviet Union trampled over a prostrate Poland

beginning on the morning of September 17. To add insult to injury the Polish

ambassador in Moscow was informed that Russia would maintain strict

neutrality in the Polish conflict! The next day, September 18, Soviet troops met

the Germans at Brest Litovsk, where exactly twenty-one years before a newborn

Bolshevik government had gone back on its country’s ties with the Western

Allies and had received from the German Army, and accepted, separate peace

terms of great harshness.

And yet though they were now accomplices of Nazi Germany in wiping

ancient Poland off the map, the Russians were at once distrustful of their new

comrades. At his meeting with the German ambassador on the eve of the Soviet

aggression, Stalin had expressed his doubts, as Schulenburg duly notified Berlin,

whether the German High Command would stand by the Moscow agreements

and withdraw to the line that had been agreed upon. The ambassador tried to

reassure him but apparently with no great success. “In view of Stalin’s well-

known attitude of mistrust,” Schulenburg wired Berlin, “I would be gratified if I

were authorized to make a further declaration of such a nature as to remove his

last doubts. ”9 The next day, September 19, Ribbentrop telegraphed the

ambassador authorizing him to “tell Stalin that the agreements which I made at

Moscow will, of course, be kept, and that they are regarded by us as the

foundation stone of the new friendly relations between Germany and the Soviet

Union.” 10

Nevertheless friction between the two unnatural partners continued. On

September 17 there was disagreement over the text of a joint communiqué which

would “justify” the Russo–German destruction of Poland. Stalin objected to the

German version because “it presented the facts all too frankly.” Whereupon he

wrote out his own version, a masterpiece of subterfuge, and forced the Germans

to accept it. It stated that the joint aim of Germany and Russia was “to restore

peace and order in Poland, which has been destroyed by the disintegration of the

Polish State, and to help the Polish people to establish new conditions for its

political life.” For cynicism Hitler had met his match in Stalin.

At first both dictators seem to have considered setting up a rump Polish state

on the order of Napoleon’s Grand Duchy of Warsaw in order to mollify world

public opinion. But on September 19 Molotov disclosed that the Bolsheviks

were having second thoughts on that. After angrily protesting to Schulenburg

that the German generals were disregarding the Moscow agreement by trying to

grab territory that should go to Russia, he came to the main point.

Molotov hinted [Schulenburg wired Berlin] that the original inclination entertained by the

Soviet Government and Stalin personally to permit the existence of a residual Poland had

given way to the inclination to partition Poland along the Pissa–Narew–Vistula–San Line. The

Soviet Government wishes to commence negotiations on this matter at once.11

Thus the initiative to partition Poland completely, to deny the Polish people

any independent existence of their own whatsoever, came from the Russians.

But the Germans did not need much urging to agree. On September 23

Ribbentrop wired Schulenburg instructing him to tell Molotov that the “Russian

idea of a border line along the well-known four-rivers line coincides with the

view of the Reich Government.” He proposed to again fly to Moscow to work

out the details of that as well as of “the definitive structure of the Polish area. ”12

Stalin now took personal charge of the negotiations, and his German allies

learned, as his British and American allies later would also learn, what a tough,

cynical and opportunistic bargainer he was. The Soviet dictator summoned

Schulenburg to the Kremlin at 8 P.M. on September 25 and the ambassador’s

dispatch later that evening warned Berlin of some stern realities and of some

chickens that were coming home to roost.

Stalin stated … he considered it wrong to leave an independent residual Poland. He

proposed that from the territory to the east of the demarcation line, all the Province of Warsaw

which extends to the Bug should be added to our share. In return we should waive our claim to

Lithuania.

Stalin … added that if we consented, the Soviet Union would immediately take up the

solution of the problem of the Baltic countries in accordance with the [secret] Protocol of

August 23, and expected in this matter the unstinting support of the German Government.

Stalin expressly indicated Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, but did not mention Finland.13

This was a shrewd and hard bargain. Stalin was offering to trade two Polish

provinces, which the Germans had already captured, for the Baltic States. He

was taking advantage of the great service he had rendered Hitler—making it

possible for him to attack Poland—to get everything he could for Russia while

the getting was good. Moreover, he was proposing that the Germans take over

the mass of the Polish people. As a Russian, he well knew what centuries of

history had taught: that the Poles would never peacefully submit to the loss of

their independence. Let them be a headache for the Germans, not the Russians!

In the meantime he would get the Baltic States, which had been taken from

Russia after the First World War and whose geographical position offered the

Soviet Union great protection against surprise attack by his German ally.

Ribbentrop arrived by plane in Moscow for the second time at 6 P.M. on

September 28, and before proceeding to the Kremlin he had time to read two

telegrams from Berlin which apprised him of what the Russians were up to.

They were messages forwarded from the German minister at Tallinn, who

reported that the Estonian government had just informed him that the Soviet

Union had demanded, “under the gravest threat of imminent attack,” military

and air bases in Estonia.14 Later that night, after a long conference with Stalin

and Molotov, Ribbentrop wired Hitler that “this very night” a pact was being

concluded which would put two Red Army divisions and an Air Force brigade

“on Estonian territory, without, however, abolishing the Estonian system of

government at this time.” But the Fuehrer, an experienced hand at this sort of

thing, knew how fleeting Estonia’s time would be. The very next day Ribbentrop

was informed that Hitler had ordered the evacuation of the 86,000

Volksdeutsche in Estonia and Latvia.15

Stalin was presenting his bill and Hitler, for the time being at least, had to pay

it. He was instantly abandoning not only Estonia but Latvia, both of which, he

had agreed in the Nazi–Soviet Pact, belonged in the Soviet sphere of interest.

Before the day was up he was also giving up Lithuania, on Germany’s

northeastern border, which, according to the secret clauses of the Moscow Pact,

belonged in the Reich’s sphere.

Stalin had presented the Germans two choices in the meeting with Ribbentrop,

which began at 10 P.M. on September 27 and lasted until 1 A.M. They were, as he

had suggested to Schulenburg on the twenty-fifth: acceptance of the original line

of demarcation in Poland along the Pissa, Narew, Vistula and San rivers, with

Germany getting Lithuania; or yielding Lithuania to Russia in return for more

Polish territory (the province of Lublin and the lands to the east of Warsaw)

which would give the Germans almost all of the Polish people. Stalin strongly

urged the second choice and Ribbentrop in a long telegram to Hitler filed at 4

A.M. on September 28 put it up to Hitler, who agreed.

Dividing up Eastern Europe took quite a bit of intricate drawing of maps, and

after three and a half more hours of negotiations on the afternoon of September

28, followed by a state banquet at the Kremlin, Stalin and Molotov excused

themselves in order to confer with a Latvian delegation they had summoned to

Moscow. Ribbentrop dashed off to the opera house to take in an act of Swan

Lake, returning to the Kremlin at midnight for further consultations about maps

and other things. At 5 A.M. Molotov and Ribbentrop put their signatures to a new

pact officially called the “German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty”

while Stalin once more beamed on, as a German official later reported, “with

obvious satisfaction. ”* He had reason to.17

The Treaty itself, which was made public, announced the boundary of the

“respective national interests” of the two countries in “the former Polish state”

and stated that within their acquired territories they would re-establish “peace

and order” and “assure the people living there a peaceful life in keeping with

their national character.”

But, as with the previous Nazi–Soviet deal, there were “secret protocols”—

three of them, of which two contained the meat of the agreement. One added

Lithuania to the Soviet “sphere of influence,” and the provinces of Lublin and

Eastern Warsaw to the German. The second was short and to the point.

Both parties will tolerate in their territories no Polish agitation which affects the territories

of the other party. They will suppress in their territories all beginnings of such agitation and

inform each other concerning suitable measures for this purpose.

So Poland, like Austria and Czechoslovakia before it, disappeared from the

map of Europe. But this time Adolf Hitler was aided and abetted in his

obliteration of a country by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which had

posed for so long as the champion of the oppressed peoples. This was the fourth

partition of Poland by Germany and Russia* (Austria had participated in the

others), and while it lasted it was to be by far the most ruthless and pitiless. In

the secret protocol of September 28 † Hitler and Stalin agreed to institute in

Poland a regime of terror designed to brutally suppress Polish freedom, culture

and national life.

Hitler fought and won the war in Poland, but the greater winner was Stalin,

whose troops scarcely fired a shot. ‡ The Soviet Union got nearly half of Poland

and a stranglehold on the Baltic States. It blocked Germany more solidly than

ever from two of its main long-term objectives: Ukrainian wheat and Rumanian

oil, both badly needed if Germany was to survive the British blockade. Even

Poland’s oil region of Borislav–Drogobycz, which Hitler desired, was claimed

successfully by Stalin, who graciously agreed to sell the Germans the equivalent

of the area’s annual production.

Why did Hitler pay such a high price to the Russians? It is true that he had

agreed to it in August in order to keep the Soviet Union out of the Allied camp

and out of the war. But he had never been a stickler for keeping agreements and

now, with Poland conquered by an incomparable feat of German arms, he might

have been expected to welsh, as the Army urged, on the August 23 pact. If Stalin

objected, the Fuehrer could threaten him with attack by the most powerful army

in the world, as the Polish campaign had just proved it to be. Or could he? Not

while the British and French stood at arms in the West. To deal with Britain and

France he must keep his rear free. This, as subsequent utterances of his would

make clear, was the reason why he allowed Stalin to strike such a hard bargain.

But he did not forget the Soviet dictator’s harsh dealings as he now turned his

attention to the Western front.

* This official, Andor Hencke, Understate Secretary in the Foreign Office, who had served for

many years in the embassy at Moscow, wrote a detailed and amusing account of the talks. It

was the only German record made of the second day’s conferences. 16

* Arnold Toynbee, in his various writings, calls it the fifth partition.

† Though signed at 5 A.M. September 29, the treaty is officially dated September 28.

‡ German casualties in Poland were officially given as 10,572 killed, 30,322 wounded and

3,400 missing.

19

SITZKRIEG IN THE WEST

NOTHING MUCH had happened there. Hardly a shot had been fired. The German

man in the street was beginning to call it the “sit-down war”— Sitzkrieg. In the

West it would soon be dubbed the “phony war.” Here was “the strongest army in

the world [the French],” as the British General J. F. C. Fuller would put it,

“facing no more than twenty-six [German] divisions, sitting still and sheltering

behind steel and concrete while a quixotically valiant ally was being

exterminated! ”1

Were the Germans surprised? Hardly. In Halder’s very first diary entry, that of

August 14, the Chief of the Army General Staff had composed a detailed

estimate of the situation in the West if Germany attacked Poland. He considered

a French offensive “not very likely.” He was sure that France would not send its

army through Belgium “against Belgian wishes.” His conclusion was that the

French would remain on the defensive. On September 7, with the Polish Army

already doomed, Halder, as has been noted, was already occupied with plans to

transfer German divisions to the west.

That evening he noted down the results of a conference which Brauchitsch

had had during the afternoon with Hitler.

Operation in the West not yet clear. Some indications that there is no real intention of

waging a war … French cabinet lacks heroic caliber. Also from Britain first hints of sobering

reflection.

Two days later Hitler issued Directive No. 3 for the Conduct of the War,

ordering arrangements to be made for Army and Air Force units to be sent from

Poland to the west. But not necessarily to fight. “Even after the irresolute

opening of hostilities by Great Britain … and France my express command,” the

directive laid it down, “must be obtained in each of the following cases: Every

time our ground forces [or] … one of our planes cross the western borders; [and]

for every air attack on Britain.” 2

What had France and Britain promised Poland to do in case she were

attacked? The British guarantee was general. But the French was specific. It was

laid down in the Franco-Polish Military Convention of May 19, 1939. In this it

was agreed that the French would “progressively launch offensive operations

against limited objectives toward the third day after General Mobilization Day.”

General mobilization had been proclaimed September 1. But further, it was

agreed that “as soon as the principal German effort develops against Poland,

France will launch an offensive action against Germany with the bulk of her

forces, starting on the fifteenth day after the first day of the general French

mobilization.” When the Deputy Chief of the Polish General Staff, Colonel

Jaklincz, had asked how many French troops would be available for this major

offensive, General Gamelin had replied that there would be about thirty-five to

thirty-eight divisions. 3

But by August 23, as the German attack on Poland became imminent, the

timid French generalissimo was telling his government, as we have seen,* that

he could not possibly mount a serious offensive “in less than about two years …

in 1941–2”—assuming, he had added, that France by that time had the “help of

British troops and American equipment.”

In the first weeks of the war, to be sure, Britain had pitifully few troops to

send to France. By October 11, three weeks after the fighting was over in

Poland, it had four divisions—158,000 men—in France. “A symbolic

contribution,” Churchill called it, and Fuller noted that the first British casualty

—a corporal shot dead on patrol—did not occur until December 9. “So bloodless

a war,” Fuller comments, “had not been seen since the Battles of Molinella and

Zagonara.” †

In retrospect at Nuremberg the German generals agreed that by failing to

attack in the West during the Polish campaign the Western Allies had missed a

golden opportunity.

The success against Poland was only possible [said General Halder] by almost completely

baring our Western border. If the French had seen the logic of the situation and had used the

engagement of the German forces in Poland, they would have been able to cross the Rhine

without our being able to prevent it and would have threatened the Ruhr area, which was the

most decisive factor of the German conduct of the war.4

…. If we did not collapse in 1939 [said General Jodl] that was due only to the fact that

during the Polish campaign the approximately 110 French and British divisions in the West

were held completely inactive against the 23 German divisions. 5

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

We soldiers had always expected an attack by France during the Polish campaign, and were

very surprised that nothing happened … A French attack would have encountered only a

German military screen, not a real defense.6

Why then did not the French Army (the first two British divisions were not

deployed until the first week of October), which had overwhelming superiority

over the German forces in the west, attack, as General Gamelin and the French

government had promised in writing it would?

There were many reasons: the defeatism in the French High Command, the

government and the people; the memories of how France had been bled white in

the First World War and a determination not to suffer such slaughter again if it

could be avoided; the realization by mid-September that the Polish armies were

so badly defeated that the Germans would soon be able to move superior forces

to the west and thus probably wipe out any initial French advances; the fear of

German superiority in arms and in the air. Indeed, the French government had

insisted from the start that the British Air Force should not bomb targets in

Germany for fear of reprisal on French factories, though an all-out bombing of

the Ruhr, the industrial heart of the Reich, might well have been disastrous to the

Germans. It was the one great worry of the German generals in September, as

many of them later admitted.

Fundamentally the answer to the question of why France did not attack

Germany in September was probably best stated by Churchill. “This battle,” he

wrote, “had been lost some years before.” 7 At Munich in 1938; at the time of the

reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936; the year before when Hitler proclaimed a

conscript army in defiance of Versailles. The price of those sorry Allied failures

to act had now to be paid, though it seems to have been thought in Paris and

London that payment might somehow be evaded by inaction.

At sea there was action.

The German Navy was not put under such wraps as the Army in the west, and

during the first week of hostilities it sank eleven British ships with a total

tonnage of 64,595 tons, which was nearly half the weekly tonnage sunk at the

peak of German submarine warfare in April 1917 when Great Britain had been

brought to the brink of disaster. British losses tapered off thereafter: 53,561 tons

the second week, 12,750 the third week and only 4,646 the fourth week—for a

total during September of twenty-six ships of 135,552 tons sunk by U-boats and

three ships of 16,488 tons by mines. *

There was a reason, unknown to the British, for the sharp tapering off. On

September 7, Admiral Raeder had a long conference with Hitler. The Fuehrer,

jubilant over his initial victories in Poland and the failure of the French to attack

in the west, advised the Navy to go more slowly. France was showing “political

and military restraint”; the British were proving “hesitant.” In view of this

situation it was decided that submarines in the Atlantic would spare all passenger

ships without exception and refrain altogether from attacking the French, and

that the pocket battleships Deutschland in the North Atlantic and the Graf Spee

in the South Atlantic should withdraw to their “waiting” stations for the time

being. The “general policy,” Raeder noted in his diary, would be “to exercise

restraint until the political situation in the West has become clearer, which will

take about a week. ”8

THE SINKING OF THE ATHENIA

There was one other decision agreed upon by Hitler and Raeder at the meeting

on September 7. The Admiral noted it in his diary: “No attempt shall be made to

solve the Athenia affair until the submarines return home.”

The war at sea, as we have noted, had begun ten hours after Britain’s

declaration of war when the British liner Athenia, jammed with some 1,400

passengers, was torpedoed without warning at 9 P.M. on September 3 some two

hundred miles west of the Hebrides, with the loss of 112 Uves, including twenty-

eight Americans. The German Propaganda Ministry checked the first reports

from London with the Naval High Command, was told that there were no U-

boats in the vicinity and promptly denied that the ship had been sunk by the

Germans. The disaster was most embarrassing to Hitler and the Naval Command

and at first they did not believe the British reports. Strict orders had been given

to all submarine commanders to observe the Hague Convention, which forbade

attacking a ship without warning. Since all U-boats maintained radio silence,

there was no means of immediately checking what had happened.* That did not

prevent the controlled Nazi press from charging, within a couple of days, that the

British had torpedoed their own ship in order to provoke the United States into

coming into the war.

The Wilhelmstrasse was indeed concerned with American reaction to a

disaster that had caused the deaths of twenty-eight United States citizens. The

day after the sinking Weizsaecker sent for the American chargé, Alexander Kirk,

and denied that a German submarine had done it. No German craft was in the

vicinity, he emphasized. That evening, according to his later testimony at

Nuremberg, the State Secretary sought out Raeder, reminded him of how the

German sinking of the Lusitania during the First World War had helped bring

America into it and urged that “everything should be done” to avoid provoking

the United States. The Admiral assured him that “no German U-boat could have

been involved.” 9

At the urging of Ribbentrop, Admiral Raeder invited the American naval

attaché to come to see him on September 16 and stated that he had now received

reports from all the submarines, “as a result of which it was definitely

established that the Athenia had not been sunk by a German U-boat.” He asked

him to so inform his government, which the attaché promptly did.†10

The Grand Admiral had not quite told the truth. Not all the submarines which

were at sea on September 3 had yet returned to port. Among those that had not

was the U-30, commanded by Oberleutnant Lemp, which did not dock in home

waters until September 27. It was met by Admiral Karl Doenitz, commander of

submarines, who years later at Nuremberg described the meeting and finally

revealed the truth about who sank the Athenia.

I met the captain, Oberleutnant Lemp, on the lockside at Wilhelmshaven as the boat was

entering harbor, and he asked permission to speak to me in private. I noticed immediately that

he was looking very unhappy and he told me at once that he thought he was responsible for the

sinking of the Athenia in the North Channel area. In accordance with my previous instructions

he had been keeping a sharp lookout for possible armed merchant cruisers in the approaches to

the British Isles, and had torpedoed a ship he afterward identified as the Athenia from wireless

broadcasts, under the impression that she was an armed merchant cruiser on patrol …

I dispatched Lemp at once by air to report to the Naval War Staff (SKL) at Berlin; in the

meantime I ordered complete secrecy as a provisional measure. Later the same day, or early on

the following day, I received an order from Kapitaen zur See Fricke that:

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

2. The High Command of the Navy (OKM) considered that a court-martial was not

necessary, as they were satisfied that the captain had acted in good faith.

3. Political explanations would be handled by OKM.*

I had had no part whatsoever in the political events in which the Fuehrer claimed that no U-

boat had sunk the Athenia. 11

But Doenitz, who must have suspected the truth all along, for otherwise he

would not have been at the dock to greet the returning U-30, did have a part in

altering the submarine’s log and his own diary so as to erase any telltale

evidence of the truth. In fact, as he admitted at Nuremberg, he himself ordered

any mention of the Athenia stricken from the U-30’s log and deleted it from his

own diary. He swore the vessel’s crew to absolute secrecy. †

The military high commands of all nations no doubt have skeletons in their

closets during the course of war, and it was understandable if not laudable that

Hitler, as Admiral Raeder testified at Nuremberg, insisted that the Athenia affair

be kept secret, especially since the Naval Command had acted in good faith in at

first denying German responsibility and would have been greatly embarrassed to

have to admit it later. But Hitler did not stop there. On the evening of Sunday,

October 22, Propaganda Minister Goebbels personally took to the air—this

writer well remembers the broadcast—and accused Churchill of having sunk the

Athenia. The next day the official Nazi newspaper, the Voelkischer Beobachter,

ran a frontpage story under the headline CHURCHILL SANK THE “ATHENIA” and

stating that the First Lord of the Admiralty had planted a time bomb in the ship’s

hold. At Nuremberg it was established that the Fuehrer had personally ordered

the broadcast and the article—and also that though Raeder, Doenitz and

Weizsaecker were highly displeased at such a brazen lie, they dared not do

anything about it. 13

This spinelessness on the part of the admirals and the self-styled anti-Nazi

leader in the Foreign Office, which was fully shared by the generals, whenever

the demonic Nazi warlord cracked down, was to lead to one of the darkest pages

in German history.

HITLER PROPOSES PEACE

“Tonight the press talks openly of peace,” I noted in my diary September 20.

“All the Germans I’ve talked to today are dead sure we shall have peace within a

month. They are in high spirits.”

The afternoon before at the ornate Guild Hall in Danzig I had heard Hitler

make his first speech since his Reichstag address of September 1 started off the

war. Though he was in a rage because he had been balked from making this

speech at Warsaw, whose garrison still gallantly held out, and dripped venom

every time he mentioned Great Britain, he made a slight gesture toward peace. “I

have no war aims against Britain and France,” he said. “My sympathies are with

the French poilu. What he is fighting for he does not know.” And he called upon

the Almighty, “who now has blessed our arms, to give other peoples

comprehension of how useless this war will be … and to cause reflection on the

blessings of peace.”

On September 26, the day before Warsaw fell, the German press and radio

launched a big peace offensive. The line, I recorded in my diary, was: “Why do

France and Britain want to fight now? Nothing to fight about. Germany wants

nothing in the West.”

A couple of days later, Russia, fast devouring its share of Poland, joined in the

peace offensive. Along with the signing of the German–Soviet Boundary and

Friendship Treaty, with its secret clauses dividing up Eastern Europe, Molotov

and Ribbentrop concocted and signed at Moscow on September 28 a ringing

declaration for peace.

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

definitely settled the problems arising from the disintegration of the Polish state and

created a firm foundation for a lasting peace in Eastern Europe, mutually express their

conviction that it would serve the true interests of all peoples to put an end to the state of war

between Germany and England and France. Both governments will therefore direct their

common efforts … toward attaining this goal as soon as possible.

Should, however, the efforts of the two governments remain fruitless, this would

demonstrate the fact that England and France are responsible for the continuation of the war

…

Did Hitler want peace, or did he want to continue the war and, with Soviet

help, push the responsibility for its continuance on the Western Allies? Perhaps

he did not quite know himself, although he was pretty certain.

On September 26 he had a long talk with Dahlerus, who had by no means

given up the quest for peace. Two days before, the indefatigable Swede had seen

his old friend Ogilvie Forbes at Oslo, where the former counselor of the Berlin

embassy was now serving in a similar capacity in the British Legation in the

Norwegian capital. Dahlerus reported to Hitler, according to a confidential

memorandum of Dr. Schmidt,14 that Forbes had told him the British government

was looking for peace. The only question was: How could the British save face?

“If the British actually want peace,” Hitler replied, “they can have it in two

weeks—without losing face.”

They would have to reconcile themselves, said the Fuehrer, to the fact “that

Poland cannot rise again.” Beyond that he was prepared, he declared, to

guarantee the status quo “of the rest of Europe,” including guarantees of the

“security” of Britain, France and the Low Countries. There followed a

discussion of how to launch the peace talks. Hitler suggested that Mussolini do

it. Dahlerus thought the Queen of the Netherlands might be more “neutral.”

Goering, who was also present, suggested that representatives of Britain and

Germany first meet secretly in Holland and then, if they made progress, the

Queen could invite both countries to armistice talks. Hitler, who several times

professed himself as skeptical regarding “the British will to peace,” finally

agreed to the Swede’s proposal that he “go to England the very next day in order

to send out feelers in the direction indicated.”

“The British can have peace if they want it,” Hitler told Dahlerus as he left,

“but they will have to hurry.”

That was one trend in the Fuehrer’s thinking. He expressed another to his

generals. The day before, on September 25, an entry in Halder’s diary mentions

receipt of “word on Fuehrer’s plan to attack in the West.” On September 27, the

day after he had assured Dahlerus that he was ready to make peace with Britain,

Hitler convoked the commanders in chief of the Wehrmacht to the Chancellery

and informed them of his decision to “attack in the West as soon as possible,

since the Franco–British army is not yet prepared.” According to Brauchitsch he

even set a date for the attack: November 12. 15 No doubt Hitler was fired that day

by the news that Warsaw had finally capitulated. He probably thought that

France, at least, could be brought to her knees as easily as Poland, though two

days later Halder made a diary note to “explain” to the Fuehrer that “technique

of Polish campaign no recipe for the West. No good against a well-knit army.”

Perhaps Ciano penetrated Hitler’s mind best when he had a long talk with the

Chancellor in Berlin on October 1. The young Italian Foreign Minister, who by

now thoroughly detested the Germans but had to keep up appearances, found the

Fuehrer in a confident mood. As he outlined his plans, his eyes “flashed in a

sinister fashion whenever he talked about his ways and means of fighting,”

Ciano observed. Summing up his impressions, the Italian visitor wrote:

… Today to offer his people a solid peace after a great victory is perhaps an

aim which still tempts Hitler. But if in order to reach it he had to sacrifice, even

to the smallest degree, what seems to him the legitimate fruits of his victory, he

would then a thousand times prefer battle. *16

To me as I sat in the Reichstag beginning at noon on October 6 and listened to

Hitler utter his appeal for peace, it seemed like an old gramophone record being

replayed for the fifth or sixth time. How often before I had heard him from this

same rostrum, after his latest conquest, and in the same apparent tone of

earnestness and sincerity, propose what sounded—if you overlooked his latest

victim—like a decent and reasonable peace. He did so again this crisp, sunny

autumn day, with his usual eloquence and hypocrisy. It was a long speech—one

of the most lengthy public utterances he ever made—but toward the end, after

more than an hour of typical distortions of history and a boastful account of the

feat of German arms in Poland (“this ridiculous state”) he came to his proposals

for peace and the reasons therefore.

My chief endeavor has been to rid our relations with France of all trace of ill will and

render them tolerable for both nations … Germany has no further claims against France … I

have refused even to mention the problem of Alsace-Lorraine … I have always expressed to

France my desire to bury forever our ancient enmity and bring together these two nations, both

of which have such glorious pasts …

And Britain?

I have devoted no less effort to the achievement of Anglo–German understanding, nay,

more than that, of an Anglo–German friendship. At no time and in no place have I ever acted

contrary to British interests … I believe even today that there can only be real peace in Europe

and throughout the world if Germany and England come to an understanding.

And peace?

Why should this war in the West be fought? For restoration of Poland? Poland of the

Versailles Treaty will never rise again … The question of re-establishment of the Polish State

is a problem which will not be solved by war in the West but exclusively by Russia and

Germany … It would be senseless to annihilate millions of men and to destroy property worth

millions in order to reconstruct a State which at its very birth was termed an abortion by all

those not of Polish extraction.

What other reason exists? …

If this war is really to be waged only in order to give Germany a new regime … then

millions of human lives will be sacrificed in vain … No, this war in the West cannot settle any

problems …

There were problems to be solved. Hitler trotted out a whole list of them: “formation of a

Polish State” (which he had already agreed with the Russians should not exist); “solution and

settlement of the Jewish problem”; colonies for Germany; revival of international trade; “an

unconditionally guaranteed peace”; reduction of armaments; “regulation of air warfare, poison

gas, submarines, etc.”; and settlement of minority problems in Europe.

To “achieve these great ends” he proposed a conference of the leading European nations

“after the most thorough preparation.”

It is impossible [he continued] that such a conference, which is to determine the fate of this

continent for many years to come, could carry on its deliberations while cannon are thundering

or mobilized armies are bringing pressure to bear upon it.

If, however, these problems must be solved sooner or later, then it would be more sensible

to tackle the solution before millions of men are first uselessly sent to death and billions of

riches destroyed. Continuation of the present state of affairs in the West is unthinkable. Each

day will soon demand increasing sacrifices … The national wealth of Europe will be scattered

in the form of shells and the vigor of every nation will be sapped on the battlefields …

One thing is certain. In the course of world history there have never been two victors, but

very often only losers. May those peoples and their leaders who are of the same opinion now

make their reply. And let those who consider war to be the better solution reject my

outstretched hand.

He was thinking of Churchill.

If, however, the opinions of Messrs. Churchill and followers should prevail, this statement

will have been my last. Then we shall fight … There will never be another November, 1918,

in German history.

It seemed to me highly doubtful, as I wrote in my diary on my return from the Reichstag,

that the British and French would listen to these vague proposals “for five minutes.” But the

Germans were optimistic. On my way to broadcast that evening I picked up an early edition of

Hitler’s own paper, the Voelkischer Beobachter. The flamboyant headlines said:

GERMANY’S WILL FOR PEACE—NO WAR AIMS AGAINST FRANCE AND

ENGLAND—NO MORE REVISION CLAIMS EXCEPT COLONIES—REDUCTION OF

ARMAMENTS—CO-OPERATION WITH ALL NATIONS OF EUROPE—PROPOSAL

FOR A CONFERENCE

The Wilhelmstrasse, it is now known from the secret German documents, was

encouraged to believe by the reports it was getting from Paris through the

Spanish and Italian ambassadors there that the French had no stomach for

continuing the war. As early as September 8, the Spanish ambassador was

tipping the Germans off that Bonnet, “in view of the great unpopularity of the

war in France, is endeavoring to bring about an understanding as soon as the

operations in Poland are concluded. There are certain indications that he is in

contact with Mussolini to that end. ”17

On October 2, Attolico handed Weizsaecker the text of the latest message

from the Italian ambassador in Paris, stating that the majority of the French

cabinet were in favor of a peace conference and it was now mainly a question of

“enabling France and England to save face.” Apparently, though, Premier

Daladier did not belong to the majority.*18

This was good intelligence. On October 7, Daladier answered Hitler. He

declared that France would not lay down her arms until guarantees for a “real

peace and general security” were obtained. But Hitler was more interested in

hearing from Chamberlain than from the French Premier. On October 10, on the

occasion of a brief address at the Sportpalast inaugurating Winterhilfe, Winter

Relief, he again stressed his “readiness for peace.” Germany, he added, “has no

cause for war against the Western Powers.”

Chamberlain’s reply came on October 12. It was a cold douche to the German

people, if not to Hitler.† Addressing the House of Commons, the Prime Minister

termed Hitler’s proposals “vague and uncertain” and noted that “they contain no

suggestions for righting the wrongs done to Czechoslovakia and Poland.” No

reliance, he said, could be put on the promises “of the present German

Government.” If it wanted peace, “acts—not words alone—must be

forthcoming.” He called for “convincing proof” from Hitler that he really wanted

peace.

The man of Munich could no longer be fooled by Hitler’s promises. The next

day, October 13, an official German statement declared that Chamberlain, by

turning down Hitler’s offer of peace, had deliberately chosen war. Now the Nazi

dictator had his excuse.

Actually, as we now know from the captured German documents, Hitler had

not waited for the Prime Minister’s reply before ordering preparations for an

immediate assault in the West. On October 10 he called in his military chiefs,

read them a long memorandum on the state of the war and the world and threw

at them Directive No. 6 for the Conduct of the War.20

The Fuehrer’s insistence toward the end of September that an attack be

mounted in the West as soon as possible had thrown the Army High Command

into a fit. Brauchitsch and Halder, aided by several other generals, had consorted

to prove to the Leader that an immediate offensive was out of the question. It

would take several months, they said, to refit the tanks used in Poland. General

Thomas furnished figures to show that Germany had a monthly steel deficit of

600,000 tons. General von Stuelpnagel, the Quartermaster General, reported

there was ammunition on hand only “for about one third of our divisions for

fourteen combat days”—certainly not long enough to win a battle against the

French. But the Fuehrer would not listen to his Army Commander in Chief and

his Chief of the General Staff when they presented a formal report to him on

Army deficiencies on October 7. General Jodl, the leading yes man on OKW,

next to Keitel, warned Halder “that a very severe crisis is in the making” because

of the Army’s opposition to an offensive in the West and that the Fuehrer was

“bitter because the soldiers do not obey him.”

It was against this background that Hitler convoked the generals at 11 A.M. on

October 10. They were not asked for their advice. Directive No. 6, dated the day

before, told them what to do:

TOP SECRET

If it should become apparent in the near future that England, and under England’s

leadership, also France, are not willing to make an end of the war, I am determined to act

vigorously and aggressively without great delay …

Therefore I give the following orders:

a. Preparations are to be made for an attacking operation … through the areas of

Luxembourg, Belgium and Holland. This attack must be carried out … at as early a date as

possible.

b. The purpose will be to defeat as strong a part of the French operational army as possible,

as well as allies fighting by its side, and at the same time to gain as large an area as possible in

Holland, Belgium and northern France as a base for conducting a promising air and sea war

against England …

I request the Commanders in Chief to give me, as soon as possible, detailed reports of their

plans on the basis of this directive and to keep me currently informed …

The secret memorandum, also dated October 9, which Hitler read out to his

military chiefs before presenting them the directive is one of the most impressive

papers the former Austrian corporal ever wrote. It showed not only a grasp of

history, from the German viewpoint, and of military strategy and tactics which is

remarkable but, as a little later would be proved, a prophetic sense of how the

war in the West would develop and with what results. The struggle between

Germany and the Western Powers, which, he said, had been going on since the

dissolution of the First German Reich by the Treaty of Muenster (Westphalia) in

1648 “would have to be fought out one way or the other.” However, after the

great victory in Poland, “there would be no objection to ending the war

immediately” providing the gains in Poland were not “jeopardized.”

It is not the object of this memorandum to study the possibilities in this direction or even to

take them into consideration. I shall confine myself exclusively to the other case: the necessity

to continue the fight … The German war aim is the final military dispatch of the West, that is,

the destruction of the power and ability of the Western Powers ever again to be able to oppose

the state consolidation and further development of the German people in Europe.

As far as the outside world is concerned, this eternal aim will have to undergo various

propaganda adjustments … This does not alter the war aim. It is and remains the destruction of

our Western enemies.

The generals had objected to haste in taking the offensive in the West. Time,

however, he told them, was on the enemy’s side. The Polish victories, he

reminded them, were possible because Germany really had only one front. That

situation still held—but for how long?

By no treaty or pact can a lasting neutrality of Soviet Russia be insured with certainty. At

present all reasons speak against Russia’s departure from neutrality. In eight months, one year,

or even several years, this may be altered. The trifling significance of treaties has been proved

on all sides in recent years. The greatest safeguard against any Russian attack lies … in a

prompt demonstration of German strength.

As for Italy, the “hope of Italian support for Germany” was dependent largely

on whether Mussolini lived and on whether there were further German successes

to entice the Duce. Here too time was a factor, as it was with Belgium and

Holland, which could be compelled by Britain and France to give up their

neutrality—something Germany could not afford to wait for. Even with the

United States, “time is to be viewed as working against Germany.”

There were great dangers to Germany, Hitler admitted, in a long war, and he

enumerated several of them. Friendly and unfriendly neutrals (he seems to have

been thinking mainly of Russia, Italy and the U.S.A.) might be drawn to the

opposite side, as they were in the First World War. Also, he said, Germany’s

“limited food and raw-material basis” would make it difficult to find “the means

for carrying on the war.” The greatest danger, he said, was the vulnerability of

the Ruhr. If this heart of German industrial production were hit, it would “lead to

the collapse of the German war economy and thus of the capacity to resist.”

It must be admitted that in this memorandum the former corporal showed an

astonishing grasp of military strategy and tactics, accompanied though it was by

a typical lack of morals. There are several pages about the new tactics developed

by the tanks and planes in Poland, and a detailed analysis of how these tactics

can work in the West and just where. The chief thing, he said, was to avoid the

positional warfare of 1914–18. The armored divisions must be used for the

crucial breakthrough.

They are not to be lost among the maze of endless rows of houses in Belgian towns. It is

not necessary for them to attack towns at all, but … to maintain the flow of the army’s

advance, to prevent fronts from becoming stable by massed drives through identified weakly

held positions.

This was a deadly accurate forecast of how the war in the West would be

fought, and when one reads it one wonders why no one on the Allied side had

similar insights.

This goes too for Hitler’s strategy. “The only possible area of attack,” he said,

was through Luxembourg, Belgium and Holland. There must be two military

objectives first in mind: to destroy the Dutch, Belgian, French and British armies

and thereby to gain positions on the Channel and the North Sea from which the

Luftwaffe could be “brutally employed” against Britain.

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

The peculiar nature of this campaign may make it necessary to resort to improvisations to

the utmost, to concentrate attacking or defending forces at certain points in more than normal

proportion (for example, tank or antitank forces) and in subnormal concentrations at others.

As for the time of the attack, Hitler told his reluctant generals, “the start

cannot take place too early. It is to take place in all circumstances (if at all

possible) this autumn.”

The German admirals, unlike the generals, had not needed any prodding from

Hitler to take the offensive, outmatched though their Navy was by the British. In

fact all through the last days of September and the first days of October Raeder

pleaded with the Fuehrer to take the wraps off the Navy. This was gradually

done. On September 17 a German U-boat torpedoed the British aircraft carrier

Courageous off southwest Ireland. On September 27 Raeder ordered the pocket

battleships Deutschland and Graf Spee to leave their waiting areas and start

attacking British shipping. By the middle of October they had accounted for

seven British merchantmen and taken in prize the American ship City of Flint.

On October 14, the German U-boat U-47, commanded by Oberleutnant

Guenther Prien, penetrated the seemingly impenetrable defenses of Scapa Flow,

the great British naval base, and torpedoed and sank the battleship Royal Oak as

it lay at anchor, with a loss of 786 officers and men. It was a notable

achievement, exploited to the full by Dr. Goebbels in his propaganda, and it

enhanced the Navy in the mind of Hitler.

The generals remained, however, a problem. Despite his long and considered

memorandum to them and the issuance of Directive No. 6 to get ready for an

imminent attack in the West, they stalled. It wasn’t that they had any moral

scruples against violating Belgium and Holland; they simply were highly

doubtful of success at this time. There was one exception.

General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, commander of Army Group C opposing the

French on the Rhine and along the Maginot Line, not only was skeptical of

victory in the West; he, alone so far as the available records reveal, opposed

attacking neutral Belgium and Holland at least partly on moral grounds. The day

after Hitler’s meeting with the generals, on October 11, Leeb composed a long

memorandum himself, which he sent to Brauchitsch and other generals. The

whole world, he wrote, would turn against Germany,

which for the second time within 25 years assaults neutral Belgium! Germany, whose

government solemnly vouched for and promised the preservation of and respect for this

neutrality only a few weeks ago!

Finally, after detailing military arguments against an attack in the West, he

appealed for peace. “The entire nation,” he said, “is longing for peace.” 21

But Hitler by this time was longing for war, for battle, and he was fed up with

what he thought to be the unpardonable timidity of his generals. On October 14

Brauchitsch and Halder put their heads together in a lengthy conference. The

Army chief saw “three possibilities: Attack. Wait and see. Fundamental

changes.” Halder noted them in his diary that day and, after the war, explained

that “fundamental changes” meant “the removal of Hitler.” But the weak

Brauchitsch thought such a drastic measure was “essentially negative and tends

to render us vulnerable.” They decided that none of the three possibilities offered

“prospects of decisive successes.” The only thing to do was to work further on

Hitler.

Brauchitsch saw the Fuehrer again on October 17, but his arguments, he told

Halder, were without effect. The situation was “hopeless.” Hitler informed him

curtly, as Halder wrote in his diary that day, that “the British will be ready to talk

only after a beating. We must get at them as quickly as possible. Date between

November 15 and 20 at the latest.”

There were further conferences with the Nazi warlord, who finally laid down

the law to the generals on October 27. After a ceremony conferring on fourteen

of them the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, the Fuehrer got down to the

business of the attack in the West. When Brauchitsch tried to argue that the

Army would not be ready for a month, not before November 26, Hitler answered

that this was “much too late.” The attack, he ordered, would begin on November

12. Brauchitsch and Halder retired from the meeting feeling battered and

defeated. That night they tried to console one another. “Brauchitsch tired and

dejected,” Halder noted in his diary.

THE ZOSSEN “CONSPIRACY” TO OVERTHROW HITLER

The time had now come for the conspirators to spring to action once more, or

so they thought. The unhappy Brauchitsch and Halder were faced with the stern

alternatives of either carrying out the third of the “possibilities” they had seen on

October 14—the removal of Hitler—or organizing an attack in the West which

they thought would be disastrous for Germany. Both the military and civilian

“plotters,” suddenly come to life, were urging the first alternative.

They had already been balked once since the start of the war. General von

Hammerstein, recalled temporarily from his long retirement on the eve of the

attack on Poland, had been given a command in the west. During the first week

of the war he had urged Hitler to visit his headquarters in order to show that he

was not neglecting that front while conquering Poland. Actually Hammerstein,

an implacable foe of Hitler, planned to arrest him. Fabian von Schlabrendorff

had already tipped Ogilvie Forbes on this plot the day Britain declared war, on

September 3, at a hasty meeting in the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. But the Fuehrer

had smelled a rat, had declined to visit the former Commander in Chief of the

Army and shortly thereafter had sacked him. 22

The conspirators continued to maintain contact with the British. Having failed

to take any action to prevent Hitler from destroying Poland, they had

concentrated their efforts on trying to keep the war from spreading to the West.

The civilian members realized that, more than before, the Army was the only

organization in the Reich which possessed the means of stopping Hitler: its

power and importance had vastly increased with general mobilization and the

lightning victory in Poland. But its expanded size, as Halder tried to explain to

the civilians, also was a handicap. The officers’ ranks had been swollen with

reserve officers many of whom were fanatical Nazis; and the mass of the troops

were thoroughly indoctrinated with Nazism. It would be difficult, Halder pointed

out—he was a great man to emphasize difficulties, whether to friend or foe—to

find an army formation which could be trusted to move against the Fuehrer.

There was another consideration which the generals pointed out and which the

men in mufti fully appreciated. If they were to stage a revolt against Hitler with

the accompanying confusion in the Army as well as the country, might not the

British and French take advantage of it to break through in the west, occupy

Germany and mete out a harsh peace to the German people—even though they

had got rid of their criminal leader? It was necessary therefore to keep in contact

with the British in order to come to a clear understanding that the Allies would

not take such an advantage of a German anti-Nazi coup.

Several channels were used. One was developed through the Vatican by Dr.

Josef Mueller, a leading Munich lawyer, a devout Catholic, a man of such great

physical bulk and tremendous energy and toughness that he had been dubbed in

his youth “Joe the Ox”— Ochsensepp. Early in October, with the connivance of

Colonel Oster of the Abwehr, Mueller had journeyed to Rome and at the Vatican

had established contact with the British minister to the Holy See. According to

German sources, he succeeded in obtaining not only an assurance from the

British but the agreement of the Pope to act as an intermediary between a new

anti-Nazi German regime and Britain. 23

The other contact was in Berne, Switzerland. There Weizsaecker had installed

Theodor Kordt, until recently the German chargé in London, as an attaché in the

German Legation and it was in the Swiss capital that he saw on occasion an

Englishman, Dr. Philip Conwell-Evans, whose professorship at the German

University of Koenigsberg had made him both an expert on Nazism and to some

extent a sympathizer with it. In the latter part of October Conwell-Evans brought

to Kordt what the latter later described as a solemn promise by Chamberlain to

deal justly and understandingly with a future anti-Nazi German government.

Actually the Britisher had only brought extracts from Chamberlain’s speech to

the Commons in which, while rejecting Hitler’s peace proposals, the Prime

Minister had declared that Britain had no desire to “exclude from her rightful

place in Europe a Germany which will live in amity and confidence with other

nations.” Though this statement and others in the speech of a friendly nature

toward the German people had been broadcast from London and presumably

picked up by the conspirators, they hailed the “pledge” brought by the unofficial

British representative to Berne as of the utmost importance. With this and the

British assurances they thought they had through the Vatican, the conspirators

turned hopefully to the German generals. Hopefully, but also desperately. “Our

only hope of salvation,” Weizsaecker told Hassell on October 17, “lies in a

military coup d’état. But how?”

Time was short. The German attack through Belgium and Holland was

scheduled to begin on November 12. The plot had to be carried out before that

date. As Hassell warned the others, it would be impossible to get a “decent

peace” after Germany had violated Belgium.

There are several accounts from the participants as to what happened next, or

rather why nothing much happened, and they are conflicting and confusing.

General Halder, the Chief of the Army General Staff, was again the key figure,

as he had been at the time of Munich. But he blew hot and cold, was hesitant and

confused. In his interrogation at Nuremberg he explained that the “Field Army”

could not stage the revolt because it had a “fully armed enemy in front of it.” He

says he appealed to the “Home Army,” which was not up against the enemy, to

act but the most he could get from its commander, General Friedrich (Fritz)

Fromm, was an understanding that “as a soldier” 24 he would execute any order

from Brauchitsch.

But Brauchitsch was even more wishy-washy than his General Staff Chief. “If

Brauchitsch hasn’t enough force of character,” General Beck told Halder, “to

make a decision, then you must make the decision and present him with a fait

accompli. ” But Halder insisted that since Brauchitsch was the Commander in

Chief of the Army, the final responsibility was his. Thus the buck was

continually passed. “Halder,” Hassell mourned in his diary at the end of October,

“is not equal to the situation either in caliber or in authority.” As for Brauchitsch,

he was, as Beck said, “a sixth-grader.” Still the conspirators, led this time by

General Thomas, the economic expert of the Army, and Colonel Oster of the

Abwehr, worked on Halder, who finally agreed, they thought, to stage a putsch

as soon as Hitler gave the final order for the attack in the West. Halder himself

says it was still conditional on Brauchitsch’s making the final decision. At any

rate, on November 3, according to Colonel Hans Groscurth of OKW, a confidant

of both Halder and Oster, Halder sent word to General Beck and Goerdeler, two

of the chief conspirators, to hold themselves in readiness from November 5 on.

Zossen, the headquarters of both the Army Command and the General Staff,

became a hotbed of conspiratorial activity.

November 5 was a key date. On that day the movement of troops to their

jump-off points opposite Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg was to begin. Also

on that day, Brauchitsch had an appointment for a showdown with Hitler. He

and Halder had visited the top army commands in the west on November 2 and 3

and fortified themselves with the negative opinions of the field commanders.

“None of the higher headquarters,” Halder confided to his diary, “thinks the

offensive … has any prospect of success.” Thus amply supplied with arguments

from the generals on the Western front as well as his own and Halder’s and

Thomas’, which were assembled in a memorandum, and carrying for good

measure a “countermemorandum,” as Halder calls it, replying to Hitler’s

memorandum of October 9, the Commander in Chief of the German Army drove

over to the Chancellery in Berlin on November 5 determined to talk the Fuehrer

out of his offensive in the West. If Brauchitsch were unsuccessful, he would then

join the conspiracy to remove the dictator—or so the conspirators understood.

They were in a high state of excitement—and optimism. Goerdeler, according to

Gisevius, was already drawing up a cabinet list for the provisional anti-Nazi

government and had to be restrained by the more sober Beck. Schacht alone was

highly skeptical. “Just you watch,” he warned. “Hitler will smell a rat and won’t

make any decision at all tomorrow.”

They were all, as usual, wrong.

Brauchitsch, as might have been expected, got nowhere with his memoranda

or his reports from the front-line commanders or his own arguments. When he

stressed the bad weather in the West at this time of year, Hitler retorted that it

was as bad for the enemy as for the Germans and moreover that it might be no

better in the spring. Finally in desperation the spineless Army chief informed the

Fuehrer that the morale of the troops in the west was similar to that in 1917–18,

when there was defeatism, insubordination and even mutiny in the German

Army.

At hearing this, Hitler, according to Halder (whose diary is the principal

source for this highly secret meeting), flew into a rage. “In what units,” he

demanded to know, “have there been any cases of lack of discipline? What

happened? Where?” He would fly there himself tomorrow. Poor Brauchitsch, as

Halder notes, had deliberately exaggerated “in order to deter Hitler,” and he now

felt the full force of the Leader’s uncontrolled wrath. “What action has been

taken by the Army Command?” the Fuehrer shouted. “How many death

sentences have been carried out?” The truth was, Hitler stormed, that “the Army

did not want to fight.”

“Any further conversation was impossible,” Brauchitsch told the tribunal at

Nuremberg in recalling his unhappy experience. “So I left.” Others remembered

that he staggered into headquarters at Zossen, eighteen miles away, in such a

state of shock that he was unable at first to give a coherent account of what had

happened.

That was the end of the “Zossen Conspiracy.” It had failed as ignobly as the

“Halder Plot” at the time of Munich. Each time the conditions laid down by the

plotters in order to enable them to act had been fulfilled. This time Hitler had

stuck to his decision to attack on November 12. In fact, after the stricken

Brauchitsch had left his presence he had the order reconfirmed by telephone to

Zossen. When Halder asked that it be sent in writing, he was immediately

obliged. Thus the conspirators had in writing the evidence which they had said

they needed in order to overthrow Hitler—the order for an attack which they

thought would bring disaster to Germany. But they did nothing further except to

panic. There was a great scramble to burn incriminating papers and cover up

traces. Only Colonel Oster seems to have kept his head. He sent a warning to the

Belgian and Dutch legations in Berlin to expect an attack on the morning of

November 12. 25 Then he set out for the Western front on a fruitless expedition to

see if he could again interest General von Witzleben in bumping off Hitler. The

generals, Witzleben included, knew when they were beaten. The former corporal

had once again triumphed over them with the greatest of ease. A few days later

Rundstedt, commanding Army Group A, called in his corps and divisional

commanders to discuss details of the attack. While still doubting its success he

advised his generals to bury their doubts. “The Army,” he said, “has been given

its task, and it will fulfill that task!”

The day after provoking Brauchitsch to the edge of a nervous breakdown

Hitler busied himself with composing the texts of proclamations to the Dutch

and Belgian people justifying his attack on them. Halder noted the pretext:

“French march into Belgium.”

But on the next day, November 7, to the relief of the generals, Hitler

postponed the date of the attack.

TOP SECRET

Berlin, November 7, 1939

… The Fuehrer and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, after hearing reports on the

meteorological and the railway transport situation, has ordered:

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

9, 1939.

KEITEL

This was the first of fourteen postponements ordered by Hitler throughout the

fall and winter, copies of which were found in the OKW archives at the end of

the war.26 They show that at no time did the Fuehrer abandon for one moment

his decision to attack in the West; he merely put off the date from week to week.

On November 9, the attack was postponed to November 19; on November 13, to

November 22; and so on, with five or six days’ notice being given each time,

and usually the weather stated as the reason. Probably the Fuehrer was, to some

extent, deferring to the generals. Probably he got it through his head that the

Army was not ready. Certainly the strategic and tactical plans had not been fully

worked out, for he was always tinkering with them.

There may have been other reasons for Hitler’s first postponement of the

offensive. On November 7, the day the decision was made, the Germans had

been considerably embarrassed by a joint declaration of the King of the Belgians

and the Queen of the Netherlands, offering, “before the war in Western Europe

begins in full violence,” to mediate a peace. In such circumstances it would have

been difficult to convince anyone, as Hitler was attempting to do in the

proclamations he was drafting, that the German Army was moving into the two

Low Countries because it had learned the French Army was about to march into

Belgium.

Also Hitler may have got wind that his attack on the neutral little country of

Belgium would not have the benefit of surprise, on which he had counted. At the

end of October, Goerdeler had journeyed to Brussels with a secret message from

Weizsaecker urging the German ambassador, Buelow-Schwante, to privately

warn the King of the “extreme gravity of the situation.” This the ambassador did

and shortly thereafter King Leopold rushed to The Hague to consult with the

Queen and draw up their declaration. But the Belgians had more specific

information. Some of it came from Oster, as we have seen. On November 8,

Buelow-Schwante wired Berlin a warning that King Leopold had told the Dutch

Queen that he had “exact information” of a German military build-up on the

Belgian frontier which pointed toward a German offensive through Belgium “in

two or three days. ”27

Then on the evening of November 8 and the afternoon of the following day

there occurred two strange events—a bomb explosion that just missed killing

Hitler and the kidnaping by the S.S. of two British agents in Holland near the

German border—which at first distracted the Nazi warlord from his plans for

attacking the West and yet in the end bolstered his prestige in Germany while

frightening the Zossen conspirators, who actually had nothing to do with either

happening.

A NAZI KIDNAPING AND A BEERHOUSE BOMB

Twelve minutes after Hitler had finished making his annual speech, on the

evening of November 8, to the “Old Guard” party cronies at the

Buergerbräukeller in Munich in commemoration of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, a

shorter speech than usual, a bomb which had been planted in a pillar directly

behind the speaker’s platform exploded, killing seven persons and wounding

sixty-three others. By that time all the important Nazi leaders, with Hitler at their

head, had hurriedly left the premises, though it had been their custom in former

years to linger over their beers and reminisce with old party comrades about the

early putsch.

The next morning Hitler’s own paper, the Voelkischer Beobachter, alone

carried the story of the attempt on the Fuehrer’s life. It blamed the “British

Secret Service” and even Chamberlain for the foul deed. “The attempted

‘assassination,’” I wrote that evening in my diary, “undoubtedly will buck up

public opinion behind Hitler and stir up hatred of England … Most of us think it

smells of another Reichstag fire. ”

What connection could the British secret service have with it, outside of

Goebbels feverish mind? An attempt was made at once to connect them. An hour

or two after the bomb went off in Munich, Heinrich Himmler, chief of the S.S.

and the Gestapo, telephoned to one of his rising young S.S. subordinates, Walter

Schellenberg, at Duesseldorf and ordered him by command of the Fuehrer, to

cross the border into Holland the next day and kidnap two British secret-service

agents with whom Schellenberg had been in contact.

Himmler’s order led to one of the most bizarre incidents of the war. For more

than a month Schellenberg, who, like Alfred Naujocks, was a university-

educated intellectual gangster, had been seeing in Holland two British

intelligence officers, Captain S. Payne Best and Major R. H. Stevens. To them

he posed as “Major Schaemmel,” an anti-Nazi officer in OKW (Schellenberg

took the name from a living major) and gave a convincing story of how the

German generals were determined to overthrow Hitler. What they wanted from

the British, he said, were assurances that the London government would deal

fairly with the new anti-Nazi regime. Since the British had heard from other

sources (as we have seen) of a German military conspiracy, whose members

wanted the same kind of assurances, London was interested in developing

further contacts with “Major Schaemmel.” Best and Stevens provided him with a

small radio transmitter and receiving set; there were numerous ensuing

communications over the wireless and further meetings in various Dutch towns.

By November 7, when the two parties met at Venlo, a Dutch town on the

German frontier, the British agents were able to give “Schaemmel” a rather

vague message from London to the leaders of the German resistance stating in

general terms the basis for a just peace with an anti-Nazi regime. It was agreed

that “Schaemmel” should bring one of these leaders, a German general, to Venlo

the next day, to begin definitive negotiations. This meeting was put off to the

ninth.

Up to this moment the objectives of the two sides were clear. The British were

trying to establish direct contact with the German military putschists in order to

encourage and aid them. Himmler was attempting to find out through the British

who the German plotters were and what their connection was with the enemy

secret service. That Himmler and Hitler were already suspicious of some of the

generals as well as of men like Oster and Canaris of the Abwehr is clear. But

now on the night of November 8, Hitler and Himmler found need of a new

objective: Kidnap Best and Stevens and blame these two British secret-service

agents for the Buergerbräu bombing!

A familiar character now entered the scene. Alfred Naujocks, who had staged

the “Polish attack” on the German radio station at Gleiwitz, showed up in

command of a dozen Security Service (S.D.) toughs to help Schellenberg carry

out the kidnaping. The deed came off nicely. At 4 P.M. on November 9, while

Schellenberg sipped an apéritif on the terrace of a café at Venlo, waiting for a

rendezvous with Best and Stevens, the two British agents drove up in their

Buick, parked it behind the café, and then ran into a hail of bullets from an S.S.

car filled with Naujock’s ruffians. Lieutenant Klop, a Dutch intelligence officer,

who had always accompanied the British pair in their talks with Schellenberg,

fell mortally wounded. Best and Stevens were tossed into the S.S. car “like

bundles of hay,” as Schellenberg later remembered, along with the wounded

Klop, and driven speedily across the border into Germany.*28

And so on November 21 Himmler announced to the public that the

assassination plot against Hitler at the Buergerbräukeller had been solved. It was

done at the instigation of the British Intelligence Service, two of whose leaders,

Stevens and Best, had been arrested “on the Dutch–German frontier” on the day

following the bombing. The actual perpetrator was given as Georg Elser, a

German Communist carpenter residing in Munich.

Himmler’s detailed account of the crime sounded “fishy” to me, as I wrote in

my diary the same day. But his accomplishment was very real. “What Himmler

and his gang are up to, obviously,” I jotted down, “is to convince the gullible

German people that the British government tried to win the war by murdering

Hitler and his chief aides.”

The mystery of who arranged the bombing has never been completely cleared

up. Elser, though not the half-wit that was Marinus van der Lubbe of the

Reichstag fire, was a man of limited intelligence though quite sincere. He not

only pleaded guilty to making and setting off the bomb, he boasted of it. Though

of course he had never met Best and Stevens prior to the attempt, he did make

the former’s acquaintance during long years at the Sachsenhausen concentration

camp. There he told the Englishman a long and involved—and not always

logical—story.

One day in October at the Dachau concentration camp, where he had been

incarcerated since midsummer as a Communist sympathizer, he related, he had

been summoned to the office of the camp commandant, where he was introduced

to two strangers. They explained the necessity of doing away with some of the

Fuehrer’s “traitorous” followers by exploding a bomb in the Buergerbräukeller

immediately after Hitler had made his customary address on the evening of

November 8 and had left the hall. The bomb was to be planted in a pillar behind

the speakers’ platform. Since Elser was a skilled cabinetmaker and electrician

and a tinkerer, they suggested that he was the man to do the job. If he did, they

would arrange for his escape to Switzerland and for a large sum of money to

keep him in comfort there. As a token of their seriousness they promised him

better treatment in the camp in the meanwhile: better food, civilian clothes,

plenty of cigarettes—for he was a chain smoker—and a carpenter’s bench and

tools. There Elser constructed a crude but efficient bomb with an eight-day

alarm-clock mechanism and a contraption by which the weapon could also be

detonated by an electric switch. Elser asserted that he was taken one night early

in November to the beer cellar, where he installed his gadget in the well-placed

pillar.

On the evening of November 8, at about the time the bomb was set to go off,

he was taken by his accomplices, he said, to the Swiss frontier, given a sum of

money and—interestingly—a picture postcard of the interior of the beer hall,

with the pillar in which he had placed his bomb marked with a cross. But instead

of being helped across the frontier—and this seems to have surprised the dim-

witted fellow—he was nabbed by the Gestapo, postcard and all. Later he was

coached by the Gestapo to implicate Best and Stevens at the coming state trial,

in which he would be made the center of attention. *

The trial never came off. We know now that Himmler, for reasons best known

to himself, didn’t dare to have a trial. We also know—now—that Elser lived on

at Sachsenhausen and then Dachau concentration camps, being accorded,

apparently on the express orders of Hitler, who had personally gained so much

from the bombing, quite humane treatment under the circumstances. But

Himmler kept his eye on him to the last. It would not do to let the carpenter

survive the war and live to tell his tale. Shortly before the war ended, on April

16, 1945, the Gestapo announced that Georg Elser had been killed in an Allied

bombing attack the previous day. We know now that the Gestapo murdered

him. 30

HITLER TALKS TO HIS GENERALS

Having escaped assassination, or so it was made to seem, and quelled defiance

among his generals, Hitler went ahead with his plans for the big attack in the

West. On November 20, he issued Directive No. 8 for the Conduct of the War,

ordering the maintenance of the “state of alert” so as to “exploit favorable

weather conditions immediately,” and laying down plans for the destruction of

Holland and Belgium. And then to put courage in the fainthearted and arouse

them to the proper pitch he thought necessary on the eve of great battles, he

summoned the commanding generals and General Staff officers to the

Chancellery at noon on November 23.

It was one of the most revealing of the secret pep talks to his principal military

chiefs, and thanks to the Allied discovery of some of the OKW files at Flensburg

it has been preserved in the form of notes taken by an unidentified participant.31

The purpose of this conference [Hitler began] is to give you an idea of the

world of my thoughts, which govern me in the face of future events, and to tell

you my decisions.

His mind was full of the past, the present and the future, and to this limited

group he spoke with brutal frankness and great eloquence, giving a magnificent

résumé of all that had gone on in his warped but fertile brain and predicting with

deadly accuracy the shape of things to come. But it seems difficult to imagine

that anyone who heard it could have had any further doubts that the man who

now held the fate of Germany—and the world—in his hands had become beyond

question a dangerous megalomaniac.

I had a clear recognition of the probable course of historical events [he said in discussing

his early struggles] and the firm will to make brutal decisions … As the last factor I must

name my own person in all modesty: irreplaceable. Neither a military man nor a civilian could

replace me. Assassination attempts may be repeated. I am convinced of the powers of my

intellect and of decision … No one has ever achieved what I have achieved … I have led the

German people to a great height, even if the world does hate us now … The fate of the Reich

depends only on me. I shall act accordingly.

He chided the generals for their doubts when he made his “hard decisions” to

leave the League of Nations, decree conscription, occupy the Rhineland, fortify

it and seize Austria. “The number of people who put trust in me,” he said, “was

very small.”

“The next step,” he declared in describing his conquests with a cynicism

which it is unfortunate that Chamberlain never heard, “was Bohemia, Moravia

and Poland. ”

It was clear to me from the first moment that I could not be satisfied with the Sudeten-

German territory. That was only a partial solution. The decision to march into Bohemia was

made. Then followed the establishment of the Protectorate and with that the basis for the

conquest of Poland was laid, but I was not quite clear at that time whether I should start first

against the East and then against the West, or vice versa. By the pressure of events it came

first to the fight against Poland. One might accuse me of wanting to fight and fight again. In

struggle I see the fate of all beings. Nobody can avoid fighting if he does not want to go under.

The increasing number of [German] people required a larger Lebensraum. My goal was to

create a rational relation between the number of people and the space for them to live in. The

fight must start here. No nation can evade the solution of this problem. Otherwise it must yield

and gradually go down … No calculated cleverness is of any help here: solution only with the

sword. A people unable to produce the strength to fight must withdraw …

The trouble with the German leaders of the past, Hitler said, including

Bismarck and Moltke, was “insufficient hardness. The solution was possible

only by attacking a country at a favorable moment.” Failure to realize this

brought on the 1914 war “on several fronts. It did not bring a solution of the

problem.”

Today [Hitler went on] the second act of this drama is being written. For the first time in

sixty-seven years we do not have a two-front war to wage … But no one can know how long

that will remain so … Basically I did not organize the armed forces in order not to strike. The

decision to strike was always in me.

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

the question of Russia.

Russia is at present not dangerous. It is weakened by many internal conditions. Moreover,

we have the treaty with Russia. Treaties, however, are kept only as long as they serve a

purpose. Russia will keep it only as long as Russia herself considers it to be to her benefit …

Russia still has far-reaching goals, above all the strengthening of her position in the Baltic. We

can oppose Russia only when we are free in the West.

As for Italy, all depended on Mussolini, “whose death can alter everything …

Just as the death of Stalin, so the death of the Duce can bring danger to us. How

easily the death of a statesman can come I myself have experienced recently.”

Hitler did not think that the United States was yet dangerous—“because of her

neutrality laws”—nor that her aid to the Allies yet amounted to much. Still, time

was working for the enemy. “The moment is favorable now; in six months it

might not be so any more.” Therefore:

My decision is unchangeable. I shall attack France and England at the most favorable and

earliest moment. Breach of the neutrality of Belgium and Holland is of no importance. No one

will question that when we have won. We shall not justify the breach of neutrality as

idiotically as in 1914.

The attack in the West, Hitler told his generals, meant “the end of the World

War, not just a single action. It concerns not just a single question but the

existence or nonexistence of the nation.” Then he swung into his peroration.

The spirit of the great men of our history must hearten us all. Fate demands from us no

more than from the great men of German history. As long as I live I shall think only of the

victory of my people. I shall shrink from nothing and shall annihilate everyone who is opposed

to me … I want to annihilate the enemy!

It was a telling speech and so far as is known not a single general raised his

voice either to express the doubts which almost all the Army commanders shared

about the success of an offensive at this time or to question the immorality of

attacking Belgium and Holland, whose neutrality and borders the German

government had solemnly guaranteed. According to some of the generals present

Hitler’s remarks about the poor spirit in the top echelons of the Army and the

General Staff were much stronger than in the above account.

Later that day, at 6 P.M., the Nazi warlord sent again for Brauchitsch and

Halder and to the former—the General Staff Chief was kept waiting outside the

Fuehrer’s office like a bad boy—delivered a stern lecture on the “spirit of

Zossen.” The Army High Command (OKH) was shot through with “defeatism,”

Hitler charged, and Halder’s General Staff had a “stiff-necked attitude which

kept it from falling in with the Fuehrer.” The beaten Brauchitsch, according to

his own account given much later on the stand at Nuremberg, offered his

resignation, but Hitler rejected it, reminding him sharply, as the Commander in

Chief remembered, “that I had to fulfill my duty and obligation just like every

other soldier.” That evening Halder scribbled a shorthand note in his diary: “A

day of crisis! ”32

In many ways November 23, 1939, was a milestone. It marked Hitler’s final,

decisive triumph over the Army, which in the First World War had shunted

Emperor Wilhelm II aside and assumed supreme political as well as military

authority in Germany. From that day on the onetime Austrian corporal

considered not only his political but his military judgment superior to that of his

generals and therefore refused to listen to their advice or permit their criticism—

with results ultimately disastrous to all.

“A breach had occurred,” Brauchitsch told the Nuremberg tribunal in

describing the events of November 23, “which was later closed but was never

completely mended.”

Moreover, Hitler’s harangue to the generals that autumn day put a complete

damper on any ideas Halder and Brauchitsch might have had, however tepidly,

to overthrow the Nazi dictator. He had warned them that he would “annihilate”

anyone who stood in his way, and Halder says Hitler had specifically added that

he would suppress any opposition to him on the General Staff “with brutal

force.” Halder, for the moment at least, was not the man to stand up to such

terrible threats. When four days later, on November 27, General Thomas went to

see him, at the prompting of Schacht and Popitz, and urged him to keep after

Brauchitsch to take action against the Fuehrer (“Hitler has to be removed!”

Halder later remembered Thomas as saying), the General Staff Chief reminded

him of all the “difficulties.” He was not yet sure, he said, that Brauchitsch

“would take part actively in a coup d’état. ”33

A few days later Halder gave Goerdeler the most ludicrous reasons for not

going on with the plans to get rid of the Nazi dictator. Hassell noted them down

in his diary. Besides the fact that “one does not rebel when face to face with the

enemy,” Halder added, according to Hassell, the following points: “We ought to

give Hitler this last chance to deliver the German people from the slavery of

English capitalism … There is no great man available … The opposition has not

yet matured enough … One could not be sure of the younger officers.” Hassell

himself appealed to Admiral Canaris, one of the original conspirators, to go

ahead, but got nowhere. “He has given up hope of resistance from the generals,”

the former ambassador confided to his diary on November 30, “and thinks it

would be useless to try anything more along this line.” A little later Hassell

noted that “Halder and Brauchitsch are nothing more than caddies to Hitler. ”34

NAZI TERROR IN POLAND: FIRST PHASE

Not many days after the German attack on Poland my diary began to fill with

items about the Nazi terror in the conquered land. Later one would learn that

many another diary was filling with them too. Hassell on October 19 reported

hearing of “the shocking bestialities of the S.S., especially toward the Jews.” A

little later he was confiding to his diary a story told by a German landlord in the

province of Posen.

The last thing he had seen there was a drunken district Party leader who had ordered the

prison opened; he had shot five whores, and attempted to rape two others. 35

On October 18, Halder wrote down in his diary the main points of a talk he

had had with General Eduard Wagner, the Quartermaster General, who had

conferred with Hitler that day about the future of Poland. That future was to be

grim.

We have no intention of rebuilding Poland … Not to be a model state by German

standards. Polish intelligentsia must be prevented from establishing itself as a governing class.

Low standard of living must be conserved. Cheap slaves …

Total disorganization must be created! The Reich will give the Governor General the

means to carry out this devilish plan.

The Reich did.

A brief account of the beginning of Nazi terror in Poland, as disclosed by the

captured German documents and the evidence at the various Nuremberg trials,

may now be given. It was but a forerunner to dark and terrible deeds that would

eventually be inflicted by the Germans on all the conquered peoples. But from

first to last it was worse in Poland than anyplace else. Here Nazi barbarism

reached an incredible depth.

Just before the attack on Poland was launched, Hitler had told his generals at

the conference on the Obersalzberg on August 22 that things would happen

“which would not be to the taste of German generals” and he warned them that

they “should not interfere in such matters but restrict themselves to their military

duties.” He knew whereof he spoke. Both in Berlin and in Poland this writer

soon was being overwhelmed with reports of Nazi massacres. So were the

generals. On September 10, with the Polish campaign in full swing, Halder noted

in his diary an example which soon became widely known in Berlin. Some

toughs belonging to an S.S. artillery regiment, having worked fifty Jews all day

on a job of bridge repairing, herded them into a synagogue and, as Halder put it,

“massacred them.” Even General von Kuechler, the commander of the Third

Army, who was later to have few qualms, refused to confirm the light sentences

of the court-martial meted out to the murderers—one year in prison—on the

ground that they were too lenient. But the Army Commander in Chief,

Brauchitsch, quashed the sentences altogether though not until Himmler had

intervened, with the excuse that they came under a “general amnesty.”

The German generals, upright Christians that they considered themselves to

be, found the situation embarrassing. On September 12 there was a meeting on

the Fuehrer’s railroad train between Keitel and Admiral Canaris at which the

latter protested against the atrocities in Poland. The lackey Chief of OKW curtly

replied that “the Fuehrer has already decided on this matter.” If the Army wanted

“no part in these occurrences it would have to accept the S.S. and Gestapo as

rivals”—that is, it would have to accept S.S. commissars in each military unit “to

carry out the exterminations.”

I pointed out to General Keitel [Canaris wrote in his diary, which was produced at

Nuremberg] that I knew that extensive executions were planned in Poland and that particularly

the nobility and the clergy were to be exterminated. Eventually the world would hold the

Wehrmacht responsible for these deeds. 36

Himmler was too clever to let the generals wiggle out of part of the

responsibility. On September 19 Heydrich, Himmler’s chief assistant, paid a

visit to the Army High Command and told General Wagner of S.S. plans for the

“housecleaning of [Polish] Jews, intelligentsia, clergy and the nobility.” Halder’s

reaction to such plans was put down in his diary after Wagner had reported to

him:

Army insists that “housecleaning” be deferred until Army has withdrawn and the country

has been turned over to civil administration. Early December.

This brief diary entry by the Chief of the Army General Staff provides a key

to the understanding of the morals of the German generals. They were not going

to seriously oppose the “housecleaning”—that is, the wiping out of the Polish

Jews, intelligentsia, clergy and nobility. They were merely going to ask that it be

“deferred” until they got out of Poland and could escape the responsibility. And,

of course, foreign public opinion must be considered. As Halder jotted down in

his diary the next day, after a long conference with Brauchitsch about the

“housecleaning” in Poland:

Nothing must occur which would afford foreign countries an opportunity to launch any sort

of atrocity propaganda based on such incidents. Catholic clergy! Impractical at this time.

The next day, September 21, Heydrich forwarded to the Army High

Command a copy of his initial “housecleaning” plans. As a first step the Jews

were to be herded into the cities (where it would be easy to round them up for

liquidation). “The final solution,” he declared, would take some time to achieve

and must be kept “strictly secret,” but no general who read the confidential

memorandum could have doubted that the “final solution” was extermination. 37

Within two years, when it came time to carry it out, it would become one of the

most sinister code names bandied about by high German officials to cover one of

the most hideous Nazi crimes of the war.

What was left of Poland after Russia seized her share in the east and Germany

formally annexed her former provinces and some additional territory in the west

was designated by a decree of the Fuehrer of October 12 as the General

Government of Poland and Hans Frank appointed as its Governor General, with

Seyss-Inquart, the Viennese quisling, as his deputy. Frank was a typical example

of the Nazi intellectual gangster. He had joined the party in 1927, soon after his

graduation from law school, and quickly made a reputation as the legal light of

the movement. Nimble-minded, energetic, well read not only in the law but in

general literature, devoted to the arts and especially to music, he became a power

in the legal profession after the Nazis assumed office, serving first as Bavarian

Minister of Justice, then Reichsminister without Portfolio and president of the

Academy of Law and of the German Bar Association. A dark, dapper, bouncy

fellow, father of five children, his intelligence and cultivation partly offset his

primitive fanaticism and up to this time made him one of the least repulsive of

the men around Hitler. But behind the civilized veneer of the man lay the cold

killer. The forty-two-volume journal he kept of his life and works, which showed

up at Nuremberg, * was one of the most terrifying documents to come out of the

dark Nazi world, portraying the author as an icy, efficient, ruthless, bloodthirsty

man. Apparently it omitted none of his barbaric utterances.

“The Poles,” he declared the day after he took his new job, “shall be the slaves

of the German Reich.” When once he heard that Neurath, the “Protector” of

Bohemia, had put up posters announcing the execution of seven Czech

university students, Frank exclaimed to a Nazi journalist, “If I wished to order

that one should hang up posters about every seven Poles shot, there would not be

enough forests in Poland with which to make the paper for these posters. ”38

Himmler and Heydrich were assigned by Hitler to liquidate the Jews. Frank’s

job, besides squeezing food and supplies and forced labor out of Poland, was to

liquidate the intelligentsia. The Nazis had a beautiful code name for this

operation:

“Extraordinary

Pacification

Action”

( Ausserordentliche

Befriedigungsaktion, or “AB Action,” as it came to be known). It took some time

for Frank to get it going. It was not until the following late spring, when the big

German offensive in the West took the attention of the world from Poland, that

he began to achieve results. By May 30, as his own journal shows, he could

boast in a pep talk to his police aides of good progress—the lives of “some

thousands” of Polish intellectuals taken, or about to be taken.

“I pray you, gentlemen,” he asked, “to take the most rigorous measures

possible to help us in this task.” Confidentially he added that these were “the

Fuehrer’s orders.” Hitler, he said, had expressed it this way:

“The men capable of leadership in Poland must be liquidated. Those following them …

must be eliminated in their turn. There is no need to burden the Reich with this … no need to

send these elements to Reich concentration camps.”

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

At the meeting, as Frank noted in his journal, the chief of the Security Police

gave a progress report. About two thousand men and several hundred women, he

said, had been apprehended “at the beginning of the Extraordinary Pacification

Action.” Most of them already had been “summarily sentenced”—a Nazi

euphemism for liquidation. A second batch of intellectuals was now being

rounded up “for summary sentence.” Altogether “about 3,500 persons,” the most

dangerous of the Polish intelligentsia, would thus be taken care of.40

Frank did not neglect the Jews, even if the Gestapo had filched the direct task

of extermination away from him. His journal is full of his thoughts and

accomplishments on the subject. On October 7, 1940, it records a speech he

made that day to a Nazi assembly in Poland summing up his first year of effort.

My dear Comrades! … I could not eliminate all lice and Jews in only one year. [“Public

amused,” he notes down at this point.] But in the course of time, and if you help me, this end

will be attained.41

A fortnight before Christmas of the following year, Frank closed a cabinet

session at Cracow, his headquarters, by saying:

As far as the Jews are concerned, I want to tell you quite frankly that they must be done

away with in one way or another … Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all feeling of

pity. We must annihilate the Jews.

It was difficult, he admitted, to “shoot or poison the three and a half million Jews in the

General Government, but we shall be able to take measures which will lead, somehow, to their

annihilation.” This was an accurate prediction.42

The hounding of Jews and Poles from the homes which they and their families

had dwelt in for generations began as soon as the fighting in Poland was over.

On October 7, the day after his “peace speech” in the Reichstag, Hitler appointed

Himmler to be the head of a new organization, the Reich Commissariat for the

Strengthening of German Nationhood, or R.K.F.D.V., for short. It was to carry

out the deportation of Poles and Jews first from the Polish provinces annexed

outright by Germany and replace them by Germans and Volksdeutsche, the latter

being Germans of foreign nationality who were streaming in from the threatened

Baltic lands and various outlying parts of Poland. Halder had heard of the plan a

fortnight before, noting in his diary that “for every German moving into these

territories, two people will be expelled to Poland.”

On October 9, two days after assuming the latest of his posts, Himmler

decreed that 550,000 of the 650,000 Jews living in the annexed Polish provinces,

together with all Poles not fit for “assimilation,” should be moved into the

territory of the General Government, east of the Vistula River. Within a year

1,200,000 Poles and 300,000 Jews had been uprooted and driven to the east. But

only 497.000 Volksdeutsche had been settled in their place. This was a little

better than Halder’s ratio: three Poles and Jews expelled to one German settled

in their stead.

It was an unusually severe winter, that of 1939–40, as this writer remembers,

with heavy snows, and the “resettlement,” carried out in zero weather and often

during blizzards, actually cost more Jewish and Polish lives than had been lost to

Nazi firing squads and gallows. Himmler himself may be cited as authority.

Addressing the S.S. Leibstandarte the following summer after the fall of France,

he drew a comparison between the deportations which his men were beginning

to carry out in the West with what had been accomplished in the East.

[It] happened in Poland in weather forty degrees below zero, where we had to haul away

thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands; where we had to have the toughness—

you should hear this, but also forget it immediately—to shoot thousands of leading Poles …

Gentlemen, it is much easier in many cases to go into combat with a company than to suppress

an obstructive population of low cultural level, or to carry out executions or to haul away

people or to evict crying and hysterical women. 43

Already on February 21, 1940, S.S. Oberfuehrer Richard Gluecks, the head of

the Concentration Camp Inspectorate, scouting around near Cracow, had

informed Himmler that he had found a “suitable site” for a new “quarantine

camp” at Auschwitz, a somewhat forlorn and marshy town of twelve thousand

inhabitants in which was situated, besides some factories, a former Austrian

cavalry barracks. Work was commenced immediately and on June 14 Auschwitz

was officially opened as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners

whom the Germans wished to treat with special harshness. It was soon to

become a much more sinister place. In the meantime the directors of I. G.

Farben, the great German chemical trust, had discovered Auschwitz as a

“suitable” site for a new synthetic coal-oil and rubber plant. There not only the

construction of new buildings but the operation of the new plant would have the

benefit of cheap slave labor.

To superintend the new camp and the supply of slave labor for I. G. Farben

there arrived at Auschwitz in the spring of 1940 a gang of the most choice

ruffians in the S.S., among them Josef Kramer, who would later become known

to the British public as the “Beast of Belsen,” and Rudolf Franz Hoess, a

convicted murderer who had served five years in prison—he spent most of his

adult life as first a convict and then a jailer—and who in 1946, at the age of

forty-six, would boast at Nuremberg that at Auschwitz he had superintended the

extermination of two and a half million persons, not counting another half

million who had been allowed to “succumb to starvation.”

For Auschwitz was soon destined to become the most famous of the

extermination camps— Vernichtungslager—which must be distinguished from

the concentration camps, where a few did survive. It is not without significance

for an understanding of the Germans, even the most respectable Germans, under

Hitler, that such a distinguished, internationally known firm as I. G. Farben,

whose directors were honored as being among the leading businessmen of

Germany, God-fearing men all, should deliberately choose this death camp as a

suitable place for profitable operations.

FRICTION BETWEEN THE TOTALITARIANS

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

Sharp exchanges at various levels took place over several differences: the

failure of the Germans to carry out the evacuation of the Volksdeutsche from

Italian South Tyrol, which had been agreed upon the previous June; failure of the

Germans to supply Italy with a million tons of coal a month; failure of the

Italians to ignore the British blockade and supply Germany with raw materials

brought through it; Italy’s thriving trade with Britain and France, including the

sale to them of war materials; Ciano’s increasingly anti-German sentiments.

Mussolini, as usual, blew hot and cold, and Ciano recorded his waverings in

his diary. On November 9, the Duce had trouble composing a telegram to Hitler

congratulating him on his escape from assassination.

He wanted it to be warm, but not too warm, because in his judgment no Italian feels any

great joy over the fact that Hitler escaped death—least of all the Duce.

November 20…. For Mussolini the idea of Hitler’s waging war, and, worse still, winning it,

is altogether unbearable.

The day after Christmas the Duce was expressing a “desire for a German

defeat” and instructing Ciano to secretly inform Belgium and Holland that they

were about to be attacked. * But by New Year’s Eve he was talking again of

jumping into the war on Hitler’s side.

The chief cause of friction between the two Axis Powers was Germany’s pro-

Russian policy. On November 30, 1939, the Soviet Red Army had attacked

Finland and Hitler had been placed in a most humiliating position. Driven out of

the Baltic as the price of his pact with Stalin, forced to hurriedly evacuate the

German families who had lived there for centuries, he now had to officially

condone Russia’s unprovoked attack on a little country which had close ties with

Germany and whose very independence as a non-Communist nation had been

won from the Soviet Union largely by the intervention of regular German troops

in 1918.* It was a bitter pill to swallow, but he swallowed it. Strict instructions

were given to German diplomatic missions abroad and to the German press and

radio to support Russia’s aggression and avoid expressing any sympathy with

the Finns.

This may have been the last straw with Mussolini, who had to cope with anti-

German demonstrations throughout Italy. At any rate, shortly after the New

Year, 1940, on January 3, he unburdened himself in a long letter to the Fuehrer.

Never before, and certainly never afterward, was the Duce so frank with Hitler

or so ready to give such sharp and unpleasant advice.

He was “profoundly convinced,” he said, that Germany, even if assisted by

Italy, could never bring Britain and France “to their knees or even divide them.

To believe that is to delude oneself. The United States would not permit a total

defeat of the democracies.” Therefore, now that Hitler had secured his eastern

frontier, was it necessary “to risk all—including the regime—and sacrifice the

flower of German generations” in order to try to defeat them? Peace could be

had, Mussolini suggested, if Germany would allow the existence of “a modest,

disarmed Poland, which is exclusively Polish. Unless you are irrevocably

resolved to prosecute the war to a finish,” he added, “I believe that the creation

of a Polish state … would be an element that would resolve the war and

constitute a condition sufficient for the peace.”

But it was Germany’s deal with Russia which chiefly concerned the Italian

dictator.

… Without striking a blow, Russia has in Poland and the Baltic profited from the war. But

I, a born revolutionist, tell you that you cannot permanently sacrifice the principles of your

Revolution to the tactical exigencies of a certain political moment … It is my duty to add that

one further step in your relations with Moscow would have catastrophic repercussions in Italy

…45

Mussolini’s letter not only was a warning to Hitler of the degeneration of

Italo–German relations but it hit a vulnerable target: the Fuehrer’s honeymoon

with Soviet Russia, which was beginning to get on the nerves of both parties. It

had enabled him to launch his war and destroy Poland. It had even given him

other benefits. The captured German papers reveal, for instance, one of the best-

kept secrets of the war: the Soviet Union’s help in providing ports on the Arctic,

the Black Sea and the Pacific through which Germany could import badly

needed raw materials otherwise shut off by the British blockade.

On November 10, 1939, Molotov even agreed to the Soviet government’s

paying the freight charges on all such goods carried over the Russian railways. 46

Refueling and repair facilities were provided German ships, including

submarines, at the Arctic port of Teriberka, east of Murmansk—Molotov

thought the latter port “was not isolated enough,” whereas Teriberka was “more

suited because it was more remote and not visited by foreign ships.” 47

All through the autumn and early winter of 1939 Moscow and Berlin

negotiated for increased trade between the two countries. By the end of October

Russian deliveries of raw stuffs, especially grain and oil, to Germany were

considerable, but the Germans wanted more. However, they were learning that in

economics, as well as politics, the Soviets were shrewd and hard bargainers. On

November 1, Field Marshal Goering, Grand Admiral Raeder and Colonel

General Keitel, “independently of each other,” as Weizsaecker noted, protested

to the German Foreign Office that the Russians were demanding too much

German war material. A month later Keitel was again complaining to

Weizsaecker that Russian requirements for German products, especially machine

tools for manufacturing munitions, were “growing more and more voluminous

and unreasonable. ”48

But if Germany wanted food and oil from Russia, it would have to pay for

them in the goods Moscow needed and wanted. So desperate was the blockaded

Reich for these necessities from Russia that later, on March 30, 1940, at a crucial

moment, Hitler ordered that delivery of war material to the Russians should have

priority even over that to the German armed forces. *50 At one point the

Germans threw in the unfinished heavy cruiser Luetzow as part of current

payments to Moscow. Earlier, on December 15, Admiral Raeder proposed

selling the plans and drawings for the Bismarck, the world’s biggest battleship

(45,000 tons), then building, to the Russians if they paid “a very high price. ”51

By the end of 1939 Stalin himself was personally participating in the

negotiations at Moscow with the German trade delegation. The German

economists found him a formidable trader. In the captured Wilhelmstrasse

papers there are long and detailed memoranda of three memorable meetings with

the awesome Soviet dictator, who had a grasp of detail that stunned the

Germans. Stalin, they found, could not be bluffed or cheated but could be

terribly demanding, and at times, as Dr. Schnurre, one of the Nazi negotiators,

reported to Berlin, he “became quite agitated.” The Soviet Union, Stalin

reminded the Germans, had “rendered a very great service to Germany [and] had

made enemies by rendering this assistance.” In return it expected some

consideration from Berlin. At one conference at the Kremlin on New Year’s

Eve, 1939–40,

Stalin characterized the total price of the airplanes as out of the question. It represented a

multiplication of the actual prices. If Germany did not wish to deliver the airplanes, he would

have preferred to have this openly stated.

At a midnight meeting in the Kremlin on February 8

Stalin requested the Germans to propose suitable prices and not to set them too high, as had

happened before. As examples were mentioned the total price of 300 million Reichsmarks for

airplanes and the German valuation of the cruiser Luetzow at 150 million RM. One should not

take advantage of the Soviet Union’s good nature.52

On February 11, 1940, an intricate trade agreement was finally signed in

Moscow providing for an exchange of goods, during the ensuing eighteen

months, of a minimum worth of 640 million Reichsmarks. This was in addition

to the trade agreed upon during the previous August amounting to roughly 150

millions a year. Russia was to get, besides the cruiser Luetzow and the plans of

the Bismarck, heavy naval guns and other gear and some thirty of Germany’s

latest warplanes, including the Messerschmitt fighters 109 and 110 and the Ju-88

dive bombers. In addition the Soviets were to receive machines for their oil and

electric industries, locomotives, turbines, generators, Diesel engines, ships,

machine tools and samples of German artillery, tanks, explosives, chemical-

warfare equipment and so on.53

What the Germans got the first year was recorded by OKW—one million tons

of cereals, half a million tons of wheat, 900,000 tons of oil, 100,000 tons of

cotton, 500,000 tons of phosphates, considerable amounts of numerous other

vital raw materials and the transit of a million tons of soybeans from

Manchuria. 54

Back in Berlin, Dr. Schnurre, the Foreign Office’s economic expert, who had

masterminded the trade negotiations for Germany in Moscow, drew up a long

memorandum on what he had gained for the Reich. Besides the desperately

needed raw materials which Russia would supply, Stalin, he said, had promised

“generous help” in acting “as a buyer of metals and raw materials in third

countries.”

The Agreement [Schnurre concluded] means a wide-open door to the East for us … The

effects of the British blockade will be decisively weakened. 55

This was one reason why Hitler swallowed his pride, supported Russia’s

aggression against Finland, which was very unpopular in Germany, and accepted

the threat of Soviet troops and airmen setting up bases in the three Baltic

countries (to be eventually used against whom but Germany?). Stalin was

helping him to surmount the British blockade. But more important than that,

Stalin still afforded him the opportunity of fighting a one-front war, of

concentrating all his military might in the west for a knockout blow against

France and Britain and the overrunning of Belgium and Holland, after which—

well, Hitler had already told his generals what he had in mind.

As early as October 17, 1939, with the Polish campaign scarcely over, he had

reminded Keitel that Polish territory

is important to us from a military point of view as an advanced jumping-off point and for

strategic concentration of troops. To that end the railroads, roads and communication channels

are to be kept in order. 56

As the momentous year of 1939 approached its end Hitler realized, as he had

told his generals in his memorandum of October 9, that Soviet neutrality could

not be counted on forever. In eight months or a year, he had said, things might

change. And in his harangue to them on November 23 he had emphasized that

“we can oppose Russia only when we are free in the West.” This was a thought

which never left his restless mind.

The fateful year faded into history in a curious and even eerie atmosphere.

Though there was world war, there was no fighting on land, and in the skies the

big bombers carried only propaganda pamphlets, and badly written ones at that.

Only at sea was there actual warfare. U-boats continued to take their toll of

British and sometimes neutral shipping in the cruel, icy northern Atlantic.

In the South Atlantic the Graf Spee, one of Germany’s three pocket

battleships, had emerged from its waiting area and in three months had sunk nine

British cargo vessels totaling 50,000 tons. Then, a fortnight before the first

Christmas of the war, on December 14, 1939, the German public was electrified

by the news, splashed in flaming headlines and in bulletins flashed over the

radio, of a great victory at sea. The Graf Spee, it was said, had engaged three

British cruisers on the previous day four hundred miles off Montevideo and put

them out of action. But elation soon turned to puzzlement. Three days later the

press announced that the pocket battleship had scuttled herself in the Plate

estuary just outside the Uruguayan capital. What kind of a victory was that? On

December 21, the High Command of the Navy announced that the Graf Spee’s

commander, Captain Hans Langsdorff, had “followed his ship” and thus

“fulfilled like a fighter and hero the expectations of his Fuehrer, the German

people and the Navy.”

The wretched German people were never told that the Graf Spee had been

severely damaged by the three British cruisers, which it outgunned,* that it had

had to put into Montevideo for repairs, that the Uruguayan government, in

accordance with international law, had allowed it to remain for only seventy-two

hours, which was not enough, that the “hero,” Captain Langsdorff, rather than

risk further battle with the British with his crippled ship, had therefore scuttled

it, and that he himself, instead of going down with her, had shot himself two

days afterward in a lonely hotel room in Buenos Aires. Nor were they told, of

course, that, as General Jodl jotted in his diary on December 18, the Fuehrer was

“very angry about the scuttling of Graf Spee without a fight” and sent for

Admiral Raeder, to whom he gave a dressing down. 57

On December 12, Hitler issued another top-secret directive postponing the

attack in the West and stipulating that a fresh decision would not be made until

December 27 and that the earliest date for “A Day” would be January 1, 1940.

He advised that Christmas leaves could therefore be granted. According to my

diary, Christmas, the high point of the year for Germans, was a bleak one in

Berlin that winter, with few presents exchanged, Spartan food, the menfolk

away, the streets blacked out, the shutters and curtains drawn tight, and everyone

grumbling about the war, the food and the cold.

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

Best wishes [Hitler wired] for your personal well-being as well as for the prosperous future

of the peoples of the friendly Soviet Union.

To which Stalin replied:

The friendship of the peoples of Germany and the Soviet Union, cemented by blood, has

every reason to be lasting and firm.

In Berlin Ambassador von Hassell used the holidays to confer with his fellow

conspirators, Popitz, Goerdeler and General Beck, and on December 30 recorded

in his diary the latest plan. It was

to have a number of divisions stop in Berlin “in transit from west to east.” Then Witzleben

was to appear in Berlin and dissolve the S.S. On the basis of this action Beck would go to

Zossen and take the supreme command from Brauchitsch’s hands. A doctor would declare

Hitler incapable of continuing in office, whereupon he would be taken into custody. Then an

appeal would be made to the people along these lines: prevention of further S.S. atrocities,

restoration of decency and Christian morality, continuation of the war, but readiness for peace

on a reasonable basis …

But it was all unreal; all talk. And so confused were the “plotters” that Hassell

devoted a long patch of his diary to the consideration of whether they should

retain Goering or not!

Goering himself, along with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Ley and other party

leaders, used the New Year to issue grandiose proclamations. Ley said, “The

Fuehrer is always right! Obey the Fuehrer!” The Fuehrer himself proclaimed that

not he but “the Jewish and capitalistic warmongers” had started the war and

went on:

United within the country, economically prepared and militarily armed to the highest

degree, we enter this most decisive year in German history … May the year 1940 bring the

decision. It will be, whatever happens, our victory.

On December 27 he had again postponed the attack in the West “by at least a

fortnight.” On January 10 he ordered it definitely set for January 17 “fifteen

minutes before sunrise—8:16 A.M.” The Air Force was to begin its attack on

January 14, three days in advance, its task being to destroy enemy airfields in

France, but not in Belgium and Holland. The two little neutral countries were to

be kept guessing about their fate until the last moment.

But on January 13 the Nazi warlord suddenly postponed the onslaught again

“on account of the meteorological situation.” The captured OKW file on D Day

in the West is thereafter silent until May 7. Weather may have played a part in

the calling off of the attack on January 13. But we now know that two other

events were mainly responsible—an unfortunate forced landing of a very special

German military plane in Belgium on January 10 and a new opportunity that

now appeared to the north.

On the very day, January 10, that Hitler had ordered the attack through

Belgium and Holland to begin on the seventeenth, a German military plane

flying from Muenster to Cologne became lost in the clouds over Belgium and

was forced to land near Mechelen-sur-Meuse. In it was Major Helmut

Reinberger, an important Luftwaffe staff officer, and in his briefcase were the

German plans, complete with maps, for the attack in the West. As Belgian

soldiers closed in, the major made for some nearby bushes and lit a fire to the

contents of his briefcase. Attracted by this interesting phenomenon the Belgian

soldiers stamped out the flames and retrieved what was left. Taken to military

quarters nearby, Reinberger, in a desperate gesture, grabbed the partly burned

papers, which a Belgian officer had placed on a table, and threw them into a

lighted stove. The Belgian officer quickly snatched them out.

Reinberger promptly reported to Luftwaffe headquarters in Berlin through his

embassy in Brussels that he had succeeded in burning down the papers to

“insignificant fragments, the size of the palm of his hand.” But in Berlin there

was consternation in high quarters. Jodl immediately reported to Hitler “on what

the enemy may or may not know.” But he did not know himself. “If enemy is in

possession of all the files,” he confided to his diary on January 12, after seeing

the Fuehrer, “the situation is catastrophic.” That evening Ribbentrop sent a

“most urgent” wire to the German Embassy in Brussels asking for an immediate

report on the “destruction of the courier baggage.” On the morning of January

13, Jodl’s diary reveals, there was a conference of Goering with his air attaché in

Brussels, who had flown posthaste back to Berlin, and the top Luftwaffe brass.

“Result: Dispatch case burned for certain,” Jodl recorded.

But this was whistling in the dark, as Jodl’s journal makes clear. At 1 P.M. it

noted: “Order to Gen. Halder by telephone: All movements to stop.”

The same day, the thirteenth, the German ambassador in Brussels was

urgently informing Berlin of considerable Belgian troop movements “as a result

of alarming reports received by the Belgian General Staff.” The next day the

ambassador got off another “most urgent” message to Berlin: The Belgians were

ordering “Phase D,” the next-to-the-last step in mobilization, and calling up two

new classes. The reason, he thought, was “reports of German troop movements

on the Belgian and Dutch frontiers as well as the content of the partly unburned

courier mail found on the German Air Force officer.”

By the evening of January 15 doubts had risen in the minds of the top brass in

Berlin whether Major Reinberger had really destroyed the incriminating

documents as he had claimed. They were “presumably burned,” Jodl remarked

after another conference on the matter. But on January 17 the Belgian Foreign

Minister, Paul-Henri Spaak, sent for the German ambassador and told him flatly,

as the latter promptly reported to Berlin, that

the plane which made an emergency landing on January 10 had put into Belgian hands a

document of the most extraordinary and serious nature, which contained clear proof of an

intention to attack. It was not just an operations plan, but an attack order worked out in every

detail, in which only the time remained to be inserted.

The Germans were never quite sure whether Spaak was not bluffing. On the

Allied side—the British and French general staffs were given copies of the

German plan—there was a tendency to view the German papers as a “plant.”

Churchill says he vigorously opposed this interpretation and laments that nothing

was done about this grave warning. What is certain is that on January 13, the day

after Hitler was informed of the affair, he postponed the attack and that by the

time it again came up for decision in the spring the whole strategic plan had been

fundamentally changed.58

But the forced landing in Belgium—and the bad weather—were not the only

reasons for putting off the attack. Plans for a daring German assault on two other

little neutral states farther to the north had in the meantime been ripening in

Berlin and now took priority. The phony war, so far as the Germans were

concerned, was coming to an end with the approach of spring.

† On October 9 this writer journeyed by rail up the east bank of the Rhine where for a hundred

miles it forms the Franco–German frontier and noted in his diary: “No sign of war and the

train crew told me not a shot had been fired on this front since the war began … We could see

the French bunkers and at many places great mats behind which the French were building

fortifications. Identical picture on the German side. The troops … went about their business in

full sight and range of each other … The Germans were hauling up guns and supplies on the

railroad line, but the French did not disturb them. Queer kind of war.” ( Berlin Diary, p. 234.)

* Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, disclosed the general figures in the House of

Commons on September 26. He gives the corrected official figures in his memoirs. He also

told the House that six or seven U-boats had been sunk, but actually, as he also notes in his

book, the figure was later learned to be only two.

Churchill’s speech was marked by an amusing anecdote in which he told how a U-boat

commander had signaled him personally the position of a British ship he had just sunk and

urged that rescue should be sent. “I was in some doubt to what address I should direct a reply,”

Churchill said. “However, he is now in our hands.” But he wasn’t. This writer interviewed the

submarine skipper, Captain Herbert Schultze, in Berlin two days later in a broadcast to

America. He produced from his logbook his message to Churchill. (See Churchill, The

Gathering Storm, pp. 436–37; Berlin Diary, pp. 225–27.)

* The next day, September 4, all U-boats were signaled: “By order of the Fuehrer, on no

account are operations to be carried out against passenger steamers, even when under escort.”

† Apparently not in code. A copy of the naval attaché’s cable to Washington showed up in the

German naval papers at Nuremberg.

* The italics are the Admiral’s.

† The officers, including Lemp, and some of the crew were transferred to the U-110 and went

down with her on May 9, 1941. One member of the crew was wounded by aircraft fire a few

days after the sinking of the Athenia. He was disembarked at Reykjavik, Iceland, under pledge

of the strictest secrecy, later taken to a POW camp in Canada, and after the war signed an

affidavit giving the facts. The Germans appear to have been worried that he would “talk,” but

he didn’t until the war’s end.12

* Mussolini did not share Hitler’s confidence in victory, which Ciano reported to him. He

thought the British and French “would hold firm … Why hide it?” Ciano wrote in his diary

October 3, “he [Mussolini] is somewhat bitter about Hitler’s sudden rise to fame.” ( Ciano

Diaries, p. 155.)

* A little later, on November 16, the Italians informed the Germans that according to their

information from Paris, “Marshal Pétain is regarded as the advocate of a peace policy in

France … If the question of peace should become more acute in France, Pétain will play a

role.” 19 This appears to be the first indication to the Germans that Pétain might prove useful

to them later on.

† The day before, on October 11, there had been a peace riot in Berlin. Early in the morning a

broadcast on the Berlin radio wave length announced that the British government had fallen

and that there would be an immediate armistice. There was great rejoicing in the capital as the

rumor spread. Old women in the vegetable markets tossed their cabbages into the air, wrecked

their stands in sheer joy and made for the nearest pub to toast the peace with Schnaps.

* According to the official Dutch account, which came to light after the war, the British car,

with Stevens, Best and Klop in it, was towed by the Germans across the frontier, which was

only 125 feet away. Starting on November 10, the next day, the Dutch government made nine

written requests at frequent intervals for the return of Klop and the Dutch chauffeur of the car

and also demanded a German investigation of this violation of Dutch neutrality. No reply was

ever made until May 10, when Hitler justified his attack on the Netherlands partly on the

grounds that the Venlo affair had proven the complicity of the Dutch with the British secret

service. Klop died from his wounds a few days later. Best and Stevens survived five years in

Nazi concentration camps. 29

* Later at Dachau Elser told a similar story to Pastor Niemoeller, who since has stated his

personal conviction that the bombing was sanctioned by Hitler to increase his own popularity

and stir up the war fever of the people. It is only fair to add that Gisevius, archenemy of Hitler,

Himmler and Schellenberg, believes—as he testified at Nuremberg and in his book—that Elser

really attempted to kill Hitler and that there were no Nazi accomplices. Schellenberg, who is

less reliable, states that though he was suspicious at first of Himmler and Heydrich, he later

concluded, after questioning the carpenter and after reading interrogations made while Elser

was first drugged and then hypnotized, that it was a case of a genuine attempt at assassination.

* It was found in May 1945 by Lieutenant Walter Stein of the U.S. Seventh Army in Frank’s

apartment at the hotel Berghof near Neuhaus in Bavaria.

* Ciano conveyed the warning to the Belgian ambassador in Rome on January 2, noting the

action in his diary. According to Weizsaecker the Germans intercepted two coded telegrams

from the ambassador to Brussels containing the Italian warning and deciphered them.44

* On October 9, 1918—this is a little-known, ludicrous tidbit of history—the Finnish Diet,

under the impression that Germany was winning the war, elected by a vote of 75 to 25 Prince

Friedrich Karl of Hesse to be King of Finland. Allied victory a month later put an end to this

fantastic episode.

* After the conquest of France and the lowlands, Goering informed General Thomas, the

economic chief of OKW, “that the Fuehrer desired punctual delivery to the Russians only until

the spring of 1941. Later on,” he added, “we would have no further interest in completely

satisfying the Russian demands.” 49

* The day before the scuttling Goebbels had made the German press play up a faked dispatch

from Montevideo saying the Graf Spee had suffered only “superficial damage” and that British

reports that it had been severely crippled were “pure lies.”

20

THE CONQUEST OF DENMARK AND NORWAY

THE INNOCENT-SOUNDING code name for the latest plan of German aggression

was Weseruebung, or “Weser Exercise.” Its origins and development were

unique, quite unlike those for unprovoked attack that have filled so large a part

of this narrative. It was not the brain child of Hitler, as were all the others, but of

an ambitious admiral and a muddled Nazi party hack. It was the only act of

German military aggression in which the German Navy played the decisive role.

It was also the only one for which OKW did the planning and co-ordinating of

the three armed services. In fact, the Army High Command and its General Staff

were not even consulted, much to their annoyance, and Goering was not brought

into the picture until the last moment—a slight that infuriated the corpulent chief

of the Luftwaffe.

The German Navy had long had its eyes on the north. Germany had no direct

access to the wide ocean, a geographical fact which had been imprinted on the

minds of its naval officers during the First World War. A tight British net across

the narrow North Sea, from the Shetland Islands to the coast of Norway,

maintained by a mine barrage and a patrol of ships, had bottled up the powerful

Imperial Navy, seriously hampered the attempts of U-boats to break out into the

North Atlantic, and kept German merchant shipping off the seas. The German

High Seas Fleet never reached the high seas. The British naval blockade stifled

Imperial Germany in the first war. Between the wars the handful of German

naval officers who commanded the country’s modestly sized Navy pondered this

experience and this geographical fact and came to the conclusion that in any

future war with Britain, Germany must try to gain bases in Norway, which

would break the British blockade line across the North Sea, open up the broad

ocean to German surface and undersea vessels and indeed offer an opportunity

for the Reich to reverse the tables and mount an effective blockade of the British

Isles.

It was not surprising, then, that at the outbreak of war in 1939 Admiral Rolf

Carls, the third-ranking officer in the German Navy and a forceful personality,

should start peppering Admiral Raeder, as the latter noted in his diary and

testified at Nuremberg, with letters suggesting “the importance of an occupation

of the Norwegian coast by Germany.” 1 Raeder needed little urging and on

October 3, at the end of the Polish campaign, sent a confidential questionnaire to

the Naval War Staff asking it to ascertain the possibility of gaining “bases in

Norway under the combined pressure of Russia and Germany.” Ribbentrop was

consulted about Moscow’s attitude and replied that “far-reaching support may be

expected” from that source. Raeder told his staff that Hitler must be informed as

soon as possible about the “possibilities.” 2

On October 10, in the course of a lengthy report to the Fuehrer on naval

operations, Raeder suggested the importance of obtaining naval bases in

Norway, if necessary with the help of Russia. This—so far as the confidential

records show—was the first time the Navy had directly called the matter to the

attention of Hitler. Raeder says the Leader “saw at once the significance of the

Norwegian problem.” He asked him to leave his notes on the subject and

promised to give the question some thought. But at the moment the Nazi warlord

was preoccupied with launching his attack in the West and with overcoming the

hesitations of his generals.* Norway apparently slipped out of his mind.3

But it came back in two months—for three reasons.

One was the advent of winter. Germany’s very existence depended upon the

import of iron ore from Sweden. For the first war year the Germans were

counting on eleven million tons of it out of a total annual consumption of fifteen

million tons. During the warm-weather months this ore was transported from

northern Sweden down the Gulf of Bothnia and across the Baltic to Germany,

and presented no problem even in wartime, since the Baltic was effectively

barred to British submarines and surface ships. But in the wintertime this

shipping lane could not be used because of thick ice. During the cold months the

Swedish ore had to be shipped by rail to the nearby Norwegian port of Narvik

and brought down the Norwegian coast by ship to Germany. For almost the

entire journey German ore vessels could sail within Norway’s territorial waters

and thereby escape destruction by British naval vessels and bombers.

Thus, as Hitler at first pointed out to the Navy, a neutral Norway had its

advantages. It enabled Germany to obtain its lifeblood of iron ore without

interference from Britain.

In London, Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, perceived this at once

and in the very first weeks of the war attempted to persuade the cabinet to allow

him to lay mines in Norwegian territorial waters in order to stop the German iron

traffic. But Chamberlain and Halifax were most reluctant to violate Norwegian

neutrality, and the proposal was for the time being dropped.4

Russia’s attack on Finland on November 30, 1939, radically changed the

situation in Scandinavia, immensely increasing its strategic importance to both

the Western Allies and Germany. France and Britain began to organize an

expeditionary force in Scotland to be sent to the aid of the gallant Finns, who,

defying all predictions, held out stubbornly against the onslaughts of the Red

Army. But it could reach Finland only through Norway and Sweden, and the

Germans at once saw that if Allied troops were granted, or took, transit across

the northern part of the two Scandinavian lands enough of them would remain,

on the excuse of maintaining communications, to completely cut off Germany’s

supply of Swedish iron ore. * Moreover, the Western Allies would outflank the

Reich on the north. Admiral Raeder was not backward in reminding Hitler of

these threats.

The chief of the German Navy had now found in Norway itself a valuable ally

for his designs in the person of Major Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Quisling, whose

name would soon become a synonym in almost all languages for a traitor.

THE EMERGENCE OF VIDKUN QUISLING

Quisling had begun life honorably enough. Born in 1887 of peasant stock, he

had graduated first in his class at the Norwegian Military Academy and while

still in his twenties had been sent to Petrograd as military attaché. For his

services in looking after British interests after diplomatic relations were broken

with the Bolshevik government, Great Britain awarded him the C.B.E. At this

time he was both pro-British and pro-Bolshevik. He remained in Soviet Russia

for some time as assistant to Fridtjof Nansen, the great Norwegian explorer and

humanitarian, in Russian relief work.

So impressed had the young Norwegian Army officer been by the success of

the Communists in Russia that when he returned to Oslo he offered his services

to the Labor Party, which at that time was a member of the Comintern. He

proposed that he establish a “Red Guard,” but the Labor Party was suspicious of

him and his project and turned him down. He then veered to the opposite

extreme. After serving as Minister of Defense from 1931 to 1933, he founded in

May of the latter year a fascist party called Nasjonal Samling—National Union

—appropriating the ideology and tactics of the Nazis, who had just come to

power in Germany. But Nazism did not thrive in the fertile democratic soil of

Norway. Quisling was unable even to get himself elected to Parliament.

Defeated at the polls by his own people, he turned to Nazi Germany.

There he established contact with Alfred Rosenberg, the befuddled official

philosopher of the Nazi movement, among whose jobs was that of chief of the

party’s Office for Foreign Affairs. This Baltic dolt, one of Hitler’s earliest

mentors, thought he saw possibilities in the Norwegian officer, for one of

Rosenberg’s pet fantasies was the establishment of a great Nordic Empire from

which the Jews and other “impure” races would be excluded and which

eventually would dominate the world under Nazi German leadership. From 1933

on, he kept in touch with Quisling and heaped on him his nonsensical philosophy

and propaganda.

In June 1939, as the war clouds gathered over Europe, Quisling took the

occasion of his attendance at a convention of the Nordic Society at Luebeck to

ask Rosenberg for something more than ideological support. According to the

latter’s confidential reports, which were produced at Nuremberg, Quisling

warned Rosenberg of the danger of Britain’s getting control of Norway in the

event of war and of the advantages to Germany of occupying it. He asked for

some substantial aid for his party and press. Rosenberg, a great composer of

memoranda, dashed out three of them for Hitler, Goering and Ribbentrop, but

the three top men appear to have ignored them—no one in Germany took the

“official philosopher” very seriously. Rosenberg himself was able to arrange at

least for a fortnight’s training course in Germany in August for twenty-five of

Quisling’s husky storm troopers.

During the first months of the war Admiral Raeder—or so he testified at

Nuremberg—had no contact with Rosenberg, whom he scarcely knew, and none

with Quisling, of whom he had never heard. But immediately after the Russian

attack on Finland Raeder began to get reports from his naval attaché at Oslo,

Captain Richard Schreiber, of imminent Allied landings in Norway. He

mentioned these to Hitler on December 8 and advised him flatly, “It is important

to occupy Norway.” 5

Shortly afterward Rosenberg dashed off a memorandum (undated) to Admiral

Raeder “regarding visit of Privy Councilor Quisling—Norway.” The Norwegian

conspirator had arrived in Berlin and Rosenberg thought Raeder ought to be told

who he was and what he was up to. Quisling, he said, had many sympathizers

among key officers in the Norwegian Army and, as proof, had shown him a

recent letter from Colonel Konrad Sundlo, the commanding officer at Narvik,

characterizing Norway’s Prime Minister as a “blockhead” and one of his chief

ministers as “an old soak” and declaring his willingness to “risk his bones for the

national uprising.” Later Colonel Sundlo did not risk his bones to defend his

country against aggression.

Actually, Rosenberg informed Raeder, Quisling had a plan for a coup. It must

have fallen upon sympathetic ears in Berlin, for it was copied from the

Anschluss. A number of Quisling’s storm troopers would be hurriedly trained in

Germany “by experienced and diehard National Socialists who are practiced in

such operations.” The pupils, once back in Norway, would seize strategic points

in Oslo,

and at the same time the German Navy with contingents of the German Army will have to put

in an appearance at a prearranged bay outside Oslo in answer to a special summons from the

new Norwegian Government.

It was the Anschluss tactic all over again, with Quisling playing the part of

Seyss-Inquart.

Quisling has no doubt [Rosenberg added] that such a coup … would meet with the

approval of those sections of the Army with which he now has connections … As regards the

King, he believes that he would accept such a fait accompli.

Quisling’s estimate of the number of German troops needed for the operation coincides

with the German estimates. 6

Admiral Raeder saw Quisling on December 11, the meeting being arranged

through Rosenberg by one Viljam Hagelin, a Norwegian businessman whose

affairs kept him largely in Germany and who was Quisling’s chief liaison there.

Hagelin and Quisling told Raeder a mouthful and he duly recorded it in the

confidential naval archives.

Quisling stated … a British landing is planned in the vicinity of Stavanger, and

Christiansand is proposed as a possible British base. The present Norwegian Government as

well as the Parliament and the whole foreign policy are controlled by the well-known Jew,

Hambro [Carl Hambro, the President of the Storting], a great friend of Hore-Belisha … The

dangers to Germany arising from a British occupation were depicted in great detail …

To anticipate a British move, Quisling proposed to place “the necessary bases

at the disposal of the German Armed Forces. In the whole coastal area men in

important positions (railway, post office, communications) have already been

bought for this purpose.” He and Hagelin had come to Berlin to establish “clear-

cut relations with Germany for the future … Conferences are desired for

discussion of combined action, transfer of troops to Oslo, etc.” 7

Raeder, as he later testified at Nuremberg, was impressed and told his two

visitors that he would confer with the Fuehrer and inform them of the results.

This he did the next day at a meeting at which Keitel and Jodl were also present.

The Navy Commander in Chief (whose report on this conference is among the

captured documents) informed Hitler that Quisling had made “a reliable

impression” on him. He then outlined the main points the Norwegians had made,

emphasizing Quisling’s “good connections with officers in the Norwegian

Army” and his readiness “to take over the government by a political coup and

ask Germany for aid.” All present agreed that a British occupation of Norway

could not be countenanced, but Raeder, become suddenly cautious, pointed out

that a German occupation “would naturally occasion strong British

countermeasures … and the German Navy is not yet prepared to cope with them

for any length of time. In the event of occupation this is a weak spot.” On the

other hand, Raeder suggested that OKW

be permitted to make plans with Quisling for preparing and executing the occupation either:

a. by friendly methods, i.e., the German Armed Forces are called upon by Norway, or

b. by force.

Hitler was not quite ready to go so far at the moment. He replied that he first

wanted to speak to Quisling personally “in order to form an impression of him. ”8

This he did the very next day, December 14, Raeder personally escorting the

two Norwegian traitors to the Chancellery. Although no record of this meeting

has been found, Quisling obviously impressed the German dictator,* as he had

the Navy chief, for that evening Hitler ordered OKW to work out a draft plan in

consultation with Quisling. Halder heard that it would also include action against

Denmark. 10

Hitler saw Quisling again on December 16 and 18, despite his preoccupation

with the bad news about the Graf Spee. The naval setback, however, seems to

have added to his cautiousness about a Scandinavian adventure which would

depend first of all on the Navy. According to Rosenberg, the Fuehrer

emphasized to his visitor that “the most preferable attitude for Norway would be

… complete neutrality.” However, if the British were preparing to enter Norway

the Germans would have to beat them to it. In the meantime he would provide

Quisling with funds to combat British propaganda and strengthen his own pro-

German movement. An initial sum of 200,000 gold marks was allotted in

January, with the promise of 10,000 pounds sterling per month for three months

beginning on March 15. 11

Shortly before Christmas Rosenberg dispatched a special agent, Hans-

Wilhelm Scheidt, to Norway to work with Quisling, and over the holidays the

handful of officers at OKW who were in the know began working on “Study

North,” as the plans were first called. In the Navy opinion was divided. Raeder

was convinced that Britain intended to move into Norway in the near future. The

Operations Division of the Naval War Staff disagreed, and in its confidential war

diary for January 13, 1940, their differences were aired.12

The Operations Division does not believe an imminent British occupation of Norway is

probable … [It] considers, however, that an occupation of Norway by Germany, if no British

action is to be feared, would be a dangerous undertaking.

The Naval War Staff therefore concluded “that the most favorable solution is

definitely the maintenance of the status quo” and emphasized that this would

permit the continued use of Norwegian territorial waters for the ore traffic “in

perfect safety.”

Hitler was displeased with both the hesitations of the Navy and the results of

Study North, which OKW presented to him the middle of January. On January

27 he had Keitel issue a top-secret directive stating that further work on “North”

be continued under the Fuehrer’s “personal and immediate supervision” and

directing Keitel to take charge of all preparations. A small working staff

composed of one representative from each of the three armed services was to be

set up in OKW and henceforth the operation was to have the code name

Weseruebung. 13

This step seems to have marked the end of the Fuehrer’s hesitations about

occupying Norway, but if there were any lingering doubts in his mind they were

dispelled by an incident which occurred in Norwegian waters on February 17.

An auxiliary supply ship of the Graf Spee, the Altmark, had managed to slip

back through the British blockade and on February 14 was discovered by a

British scouting plane proceeding southward in Norwegian territorial waters

toward Germany. The British government knew that aboard it were three

hundred captured British seamen from the ships sunk by the Graf Spee. They

were being taken to Germany as prisoners of war. Norwegian naval officers had

made a cursory inspection of the Altmark, found that it had no prisoners aboard

and was unarmed, and given it clearance to proceed on to Germany. Now

Churchill, who knew otherwise, personally ordered a British destroyer flotilla to

go into Norwegian waters, board the German vessel and liberate the prisoners.

The British destroyer Cossack, commanded by Captain Philip Vian, carried

out the mission on the night of February 16–17 in Jösing Fjord, where the

Altmark had sought safety. After a scuffle in which four Germans were killed

and five wounded, the British boarding party liberated 299 seamen, who had

been locked in storerooms and in an empty oil tank to avoid their detection by

the Norwegians.

The Norwegian government made a vehement protest to Britain about this

violation of its territorial waters, but Chamberlain replied in the Commons that

Norway itself had violated international law by allowing its waters to be used by

the Germans to convey British prisoners to a German prison.

For Hitler this was the last straw. It convinced him that the Norwegians would

not seriously oppose a British display of force in their own territorial waters. He

was also furious, as Jodl noted in his diary, that the members of the Graf Spee

crew aboard the Altmark had not put up a suffer fight—“no resistance, no British

losses.” On February 19, Jodl’s diary discloses, Hitler “pressed energetically”

for the completion of plans for Weseruebung. “Equip ships. Put units in

readiness,” he told Jodl. They still lacked an officer to lead the enterprise and

Jodl reminded Hitler that it was time to appoint a general and his staff for this

purpose.

Keitel suggested an officer who had fought with General von der Goltz’s

division in Finland at the end of the First World War, General Nikolaus von

Falkenhorst, who now commanded an army corps in the west, and Hitler, who

had overlooked the little matter of a commander for the northern adventure,

immediately sent for him. Though the General came from an old Silesian

military family by the name of Jastrzembski, which he had changed to

Falkenhorst (in German, “falcon’s eyrie”), he was personally unknown to the

Fuehrer.

Falkenhorst later described in an interrogation at Nuremberg their first

meeting at the Chancellery on the morning of February 21, which was not

without its amusing aspects. Falkenhorst had never even heard of the “North”

operation and this was the first time he had faced the Nazi warlord, who

apparently did not awe him as he had all the other generals.

I was made to sit down [he recounted at Nuremberg]. Then I had to tell the Fuehrer about

the operations in Finland in 1918 … He said: “Sit down and just tell me how it was,” and I

did.

Then we got up and he led me to a table that was covered with maps. He said: “… The

Reich Government has knowledge that the British intend to make a landing in Norway …”

Falkenhorst said he got the impression from Hitler that it was the Altmark

incident which had influenced the Leader the most to “carry out the plan now.”

And the General, to his surprise, found himself appointed then and there to do

the carrying out as commander in chief. The Army, Hitler added, would put five

divisions at his disposal. The idea was to seize the main Norwegian ports.

At noon the warlord dismissed Falkenhorst and told him to report back at 5

P.M. with his plans for the occupation of Norway.

I went out and bought a Baedeker, a travel guide [Falkenhorst explained at Nuremberg], in

order to find out just what Norway was like. I didn’t have any idea … Then I went to my hotel

room and I worked on this Baedeker … At 5 P.M. I went back to the Fuehrer. 14

The General’s plans, worked out from an old Baedeker—he was never shown

the plans worked out by OKW—were, as can be imagined, somewhat sketchy,

but they seem to have satisfied Hitler. One division was to be allotted to each of

Norway’s five principal harbors, Oslo, Stavanger, Bergen, Trondheim and

Narvik. “There wasn’t much else you could do,” Falkenhorst said later, “because

they were the large harbors.” After being sworn to secrecy and urged “to hurry

up,” the General was again dismissed and thereupon set to work.

Of all these goings on, Brauchitsch and Halder, busy preparing the offensive

on the Western front, were largely ignorant until Falkenhorst called on the Army

General Staff Chief on February 26 and demanded some troops, especially

mountain units, to carry out his operation. Halder was not very co-operative; in

fact, he was indignant and asked for more information on what was up and what

was needed. “Not a single word on this matter has been exchanged between the

Fuehrer and Brauchitsch,” Halder exclaimed in his diary. “That must be

recorded for the history of the war!”

However, Hitler, full of contempt as he was for the old-line generals and

especially for his General Staff Chief, was not to be put off. On March 29 he

enthusiastically approved Falkenhorst’s plans, including his acquisition of two

mountain divisions, and moreover declared that more troops would be necessary

because he wanted “a strong force at Copenhagen.” Denmark had definitely been

added to the list of Hitler’s victims; the Air Force had its eyes on bases there to

be used against Britain.

The next day, March 1, Hitler issued the formal directive for Weser Exercise.

MOST SECRET

TOP SECRET

The development of the situation in Scandinavia requires the making of all preparations for

the occupation of Denmark and Norway. This operation should prevent British encroachment

on Scandinavia and the Baltic. Further it should guarantee our ore base in Sweden and give

our Navy and the Air Force a wider starting line against Britain …

In view of our military and political power in comparison with that of the Scandinavian

States, the force to be employed in “Weser Exercise” will be kept as small as possible. The

numerical weakness will be balanced by daring actions and surprise execution.

On principle, we will do our utmost to make the operation appear as a peaceful occupation,

the object of which is the military protection of the neutrality of the Scandinavian States.

Corresponding demands will be transmitted to the Governments at the beginning of the

occupation. If necessary, demonstrations by the Navy and Air Force will provide the necessary

emphasis. If, in spite of this, resistance should be met, all military means will be used to crush

it … The crossing of the Danish border and the landings in Norway must take place

simultaneously …

It is most important that the Scandinavian States as well as the Western opponents should

be taken by surprise … The troops may be acquainted with the actual objectives only after

putting to sea …15

That very evening, March 1, there was “fury” at the Army High Command,

Jodl reported, because of Hitler’s demands for troops for the northern operation.

The next day Goering “raged” at Keitel and went to complain to Hitler. The fat

Field Marshal was furious at having been left out of the secret so long and

because the Luftwaffe had been put under Falkenhorst’s command. Threatened

by a serious jurisdictional dispute, Hitler convoked the heads of the three armed

services to the Chancellery on March 5 to smooth matters out, but it was

difficult.

Field Marshal [Goering] vents his spleen [Jodl wrote in his diary] because he was not

consulted beforehand. He dominates the discussion and tries to prove that all previous

preparations are good for nothing.

The Fuehrer mollified him by some small concessions, and plans raced

forward. As early as February 21, according to his diary, Halder had got the

impression that the attack on Denmark and Norway would not begin until after

the offensive in the West had been launched and “carried to a certain point.”

Hitler himself had been in doubt which operation to begin first and raised the

question with Jodl on February 26. Jodl’s advice was to keep the two operations

quite separate and Hitler agreed, “if it were possible.”

On March 3 he decided that Weser Exercise would precede “Case Yellow”

(the code name for attack in the West) and expressed “very sharply” to Jodl “the

necessity of prompt and strong action in Norway.” By this time the courageous

but outmanned and outgunned Finnish Army was facing disaster from a massive

Russian offensive and there were well-founded reports that the Anglo–French

expeditionary corps was about to embark from its bases in Scotland for Norway

and march across that country and Sweden to Finland to try to save the Finns. *

The threat of this was the main reason for Hitler’s hurry.

But on March 12 the Russo–Finnish War suddenly ended with Finland

accepting Russia’s harsh terms for peace. While this was generally welcomed in

Berlin because it freed Germany from its unpopular championship of the

Russians against the Finns and also brought an end, for the moment, of the

Soviet drive to take over the Baltic, it nevertheless embarrassed Hitler so far as

his own Scandinavian venture was concerned. As Jodl confided to his diary, it

made the “motivation” for the occupation of Norway and Denmark “difficult.”

“Conclusion of peace between Finland and Russia,” he noted on March 12,

“deprives England, but us too, of any political basis to occupy Norway.”

In fact, Hitler was now hard put to find an excuse. On March 13 the faithful

Jodl recorded that the Fuehrer was “still looking for some justification.” The

next day: “Fuehrer has not yet decided how to justify the ‘Weser Exercise.’” To

make matters worse, Admiral Raeder began to get cold feet. He was “in doubt

whether it was still important to play at preventive war (?) in Norway.” 16

For the moment Hitler hesitated. Two other problems had in the meantime

arisen: (1) how to handle Sumner Welles, the United States Undersecretary of

State, who had arrived in Berlin March 1 on a mission from President Roosevelt

to see if there was any chance of ending the war before the slaughter began in

the West; and (2) how to placate the neglected, offended Italian ally. Hitler had

not yet bothered to answer Mussolini’s defiant letter of January 3, and relations

between Berlin and Rome had distinctly cooled. Now Sumner Welles, the

Germans believed, and with some reason, had come to Europe to try to detach

Italy from the creaky Axis and persuade her, at any event, not to enter the war on

Germany’s side if the conflict continued. Various warnings had reached Berlin

from Rome that it was time something were done to keep the sulking Duce in

line.

HITLER MEETS WITH SUMNER WELLES AND MUSSOLINI

Hitler’s ignorance of the United States, as well as that of Goering and

Ribbentrop, was abysmal. * And though their policy at this time was to try to

keep America out of the war, they, like their predecessors in Berlin in 1914, did

not take the Yankee nation seriously as even a potential military power. As early

as October 1,1939, the German military attaché in Washington, General

Friedrich von Boetticher, advised OKW in Berlin not to worry about any

possible American expeditionary force in Europe. On December 1 he further

informed his military superiors in Berlin that American armament was simply

inadequate “for an aggressive war policy” and added that the General Staff in

Washington “in contrast to the State Department’s sterile policy of hatred and

the impulsive policy of Roosevelt—often based on an overestimation of

American military power—still has understanding for Germany and her conduct

of the war.” In his first dispatch Boetticher had noted that “Lindbergh and the

famous flyer Rickenbacker” were advocating keeping America out of the war.

By December 1, however, despite his low estimate of American military power,

he warned OKW that “the United States will still enter the war if it considers

that the Western Hemisphere is threatened. ”18

Hans Thomsen, the German chargé d’affaires in Washington, did his best to

impart some facts about the U.S.A. to his ignorant Foreign Minister in Berlin.

On September 18, as the Polish campaign neared its end, he warned the

Wilhelmstrasse that “the sympathies of the overwhelming majority of the

American people are with our enemies, and America is convinced of Germany’s

war guilt.” In the same dispatch he pointed out the dire consequences of any

attempts by Germany to carry out sabotage in America and requested that there

be no such sabotage “in any manner whatsoever.” 19

The request evidently was not taken very seriously in Berlin, for on January

25, 1940, Thomsen was wiring Berlin:

I have learned that a German–American, von Hausberger, and a German citizen, Walter,

both of New York, are alleged to be planning acts of sabotage against the American armament

industry by direction of the German Abwehr. Von Hausberger is supposed to have detonators

hidden in his dwelling.

Thomsen asked Berlin to desist, declaring that

there is no surer way of driving America into the war than by resorting again to a course of

action which drove America into the ranks of our enemies once before in the World War and,

incidentally, did not in the least impede the war industries of the United States.

Besides, he added, “both individuals are unfitted in every respect to act as

agents of the Abwehr. ”*

Since November 1938, when Roosevelt had recalled the American

ambassador in Berlin in protest against the officially sponsored Nazi pogrom

against the Jews, neither country had been represented in the other by an

ambassador. Trade had dwindled to a mere trickle, largely as the result of

American boycotts, and was now completely shut down by the British blockade.

On November 4, 1939, the arms embargo was lifted, following votes in the

Senate and the House, thus opening the way for the United States to supply the

Western Allies with arms. It was against this background of rapidly deteriorating

relations that Sumner Welles arrived in Berlin on March 1, 1940.

The day before, on February 29—it was a leap year—Hitler had taken the

unusual step of issuing a secret “Directive for the Conversations with Mr.

Sumner Welles.” 20 It called for “reserve” on the German side and advised that

“as far as possible Mr. Welles be allowed to do the talking.” It then laid down

five points for the guidance of all the top officials who were to receive the

special American envoy. The principal German argument was to be that

Germany had not declared war on Britain and France but vice versa; that the

Fuehrer had offered them peace in October and that they had rejected it; that

Germany accepted the challenge; that the war aims of Britain and France were

“the destruction of the German State,” and that Germany therefore had no

alternative but to continue the war.

A discussion [Hitler concluded] of concrete political questions, such as the question of a

future Polish state, is to be avoided as much as possible. In case [he] brings up subjects of this

kind, the reply should be that such questions are decided by me. It is self-evident that it is

entirely out of the question to discuss the subject of Austria and the Protectorate of Bohemia

and Moravia …

All statements are to be avoided which could be interpreted … to mean that Germany is in

any way interested at present in discussing possibilities of peace. 1 request, rather, that Mr.

Sumner Welles not be given the slightest reason to doubt that Germany is determined to end

this war victoriously …

Not only Ribbentrop and Goering but the Leader himself followed the

directive to a letter when they saw Welles separately on March 1, 3 and 2,

respectively. Judging by the’ lengthy minutes of the talks kept by Dr. Schmidt

(which are among the captured documents), the American diplomat, a somewhat

taciturn and cynical man, must have got the impression that he had landed in a

lunatic asylum—if he could believe his ears. Each of the Big Three Nazis

bombarded Welles with the most grotesque perversions of history, in which facts

were fantastically twisted and even the simplest of words lost all meaning. *

Hitler, who on March 1 had issued his directive for Weseruebung, received

Welles the next day and insisted that the Allied war aim was “annihilation,” that

of Germany “peace.” He lectured his visitor on all he had done to maintain peace

with England and France.

Shortly before the outbreak of the war the British Ambassador had sat exactly where

Sumner Welles was now sitting, and the Fuehrer had made him the greatest offer of his life.

All his offers to the British had been rejected and now Britain was out to

destroy Germany. Hitler therefore believed “that the conflict would have to be

fought to a finish … there was no other solution than a life-and-death struggle.”

No wonder that Welles confided to Weizsaecker and repeated to Goering that

if Germany were determined to win a military victory in the West then his trip to

Europe “was pointless … and there was nothing more for him to say. ”21†

Though he had emphasized in his talks with the Germans that what he heard

from the European statesmen on this trip was for the ears of Roosevelt only,

Welles thought it wise to be sufficiently indiscreet to tell both Hitler and

Goering that he had had a “long, constructive and helpful” talk with Mussolini

and that the Duce thought “there was still a possibility of bringing about a firm

and lasting peace in Europe.” If these were the Italian dictator’s thoughts, then it

was time, the Germans realized, to correct them. Peace yes, but only after a

resounding German victory in the West.

Hitler’s failure to answer Mussolini’s letter of January 3 had filled the Duce

with mounting annoyance. All through the month Ambassador Attolico was

inquiring of Ribbentrop when a reply might be expected and hinting that Italy’s

relations with France and Britain—and their trade, to boot—were improving.

This trade, which included Italian sales of war materials, aggravated the

Germans, who constantly protested in Rome that it was unduly aiding the

Western Allies. Ambassador von Mackensen kept reporting his “grave anxieties”

to his friend Weizsaecker and the latter himself was afraid that Mussolini’s

unanswered letter, if it were “disregarded” much longer, would give the Duce

“freedom of action”—he and Italy might be lost for good. 23

Then on March 1 Hitler received a break. The British announced that they

were cutting off shipments of German coal by sea via Rotterdam to Italy. This

was a heavy blow to the Italian economy and threw the Duce into a rage against

the British and warmed his feelings toward the Germans, who promptly

promised to find the means of delivering their coal by rail. Taking advantage of

this circumstance, Hitler got off a long letter to Mussolini on March 8, which

Ribbentrop delivered personally in Rome two days later.24

It made no apologies for its belatedness, but was cordial in tone and went into

considerable detail about the Fuehrer’s thoughts and policies on almost every

conceivable subject, being more wordy than any previous letter of Hitler’s to his

Italian partner. It defended the Nazi alliance with Russia, the abandonment of the

Finns, the failure to leave even a rump Poland.

If I had withdrawn the German troops from the General Government this would not have

brought about a pacification of Poland, but a hideous chaos. And the Church would not have

been able to exercise its function in praise of the Lord, but the priests would have had their

heads chopped off …

As for the visit of Sumner Welles, Hitler continued, it had achieved nothing.

He was still determined to attack in the West. He realized “that the coming battle

will not be a walkover but the fiercest struggle in Germany’s history … a battle

for life or death.”

And then Hitler made his pitch to Mussolini to get into the war.

I believe, Duce, that there can be no doubt that the outcome of this war will also decide the

future of Italy … You will some day be confronted by the very opponents who are fighting

Germany today … I, too, see the destinies of our two countries, our peoples, our revolutions

and our regimes indissolubly joined with each other …

And, finally, let me assure you that in spite of everything I believe that sooner or later fate

will force us after all to fight side by side, that is, that you will likewise not escape this clash

of arms, no matter how the individual aspects of the situation may develop today, and that

your place will then more than ever be at our side, just as mine will be at yours.

Mussolini was flattered by the letter and at once assured Ribbentrop that he

agreed that his place was at Hitler’s side “on the firing line.” The Nazi Foreign

Minister, on his part, lost no time in buttering up his host. The Fuehrer, he said,

was “deeply aroused by the latest British measures to block the shipment of coal

from Germany to Italy by sea.” How much coal did the Italians need? From

500,000 to 700,000 tons a month, Mussolini replied. Germany was now

prepared, Ribbentrop answered glibly, to furnish a million tons a month and

would provide most of the cars to haul it.

There were two lengthy meetings between the two, with Ciano present, on

March 11 and 12, and Dr. Schmidt’s shorthand minutes reveal that Ribbentrop

was at his most flatulent.25 Though there were more important things to talk

about, he produced captured Polish diplomatic dispatches from the Western

capitals to show “the monstrous war guilt of the United States. ”

The Foreign Minister explained that these documents showed specifically the sinister role

of the American Ambassadors Bullitt [Paris], Kennedy [London] and Drexel Biddle [Warsaw]

… They gave an intimation of the machinations of that Jewish-plutocratic clique whose

influence, through Morgan and Rockefeller, reached all the way up to Roosevelt.

For several hours the arrogant Nazi Foreign Minister raved on, displaying his

customary ignorance of world affairs, emphasizing the common destiny of the

two fascist nations and stressing that Hitler would soon attack in the West, “beat

the French Army in the course of the summer” and drive the British from the

Continent “before fall.” Mussolini mostly listened, only occasionally interjecting

a remark whose sarcasm apparently escaped the Nazi Minister. When, for

example, Ribbentrop pompously declared that “Stalin had renounced the idea of

world revolution,” the Duce retorted, according to Schmidt’s notes, “Do you

really believe that?” When Ribbentrop explained that “there was not a single

German soldier who did not believe that victory would be won this year,”

Mussolini interjected, “That is an extremely interesting remark.” That evening

Ciano noted in his diary:

After the interview, when we were left alone, Mussolini says that he does not believe in the

German offensive nor in a complete German success.

The Italian dictator had promised to give his own views at the meeting the

next day and Ribbentrop was somewhat uneasy as to what they might be, wiring

Hitler that he had been unable to obtain a “hint as to the Duce’s thoughts.”

He need not have worried. The next day Mussolini was a completely different

man. He had quite suddenly, as Schmidt noted, “turned completely prowar.” It

was not a question, he told his visitor, of whether Italy would enter the war on

Germany’s side, but when. The question of timing was “extremely delicate, for

he ought not to intervene until all his preparations were complete, so as not to

burden his partner.”

In any event he had to state at this time with all distinctness that Italy was in no position

financially to sustain a long war. He could not afford to spend a billion lire a day, as England

and France were doing.

This remark seems to have set Ribbentrop back for a moment and he tried to

pin the Duce down on a date for Italy’s entry into the war, but the latter was

wary of committing himself. “The moment would come,” he said, “when a

definition of Italy’s relations with France and England, i.e., a break with these

countries, would occur.” It would be easy, he added, to “provoke” such a

rupture. Though he persisted, Ribbentrop could not get a definite date.

Obviously Hitler himself would have to intervene personally for that. The Nazi

Foreign Minister thereupon suggested a meeting at the Brenner between the two

men for the latter part of March, after the nineteenth, to which Mussolini readily

agreed. Ribbentrop, incidentally, had not breathed a word about Hitler’s plans to

occupy Denmark and Norway. There were some secrets you did not mention to

an ally, even while pressing for it to join you.

Though he had not succeeded in getting Mussolini to agree to a date,

Ribbentrop had lured the Duce into a commitment to enter the war. “If he

wanted to reinforce the Axis,” Ciano lamented in his diary, “he has succeeded.”

When Sumner Welles, after visiting Berlin, Paris and London, returned to Rome

and saw Mussolini again on March 16, he found him a changed man.

He seemed to have thrown off some great weight [Welles wrote later] … I have often

wondered whether, during the two weeks which had elapsed since my first visit to Rome, he

had not determined to cross the Rubicon, and during Ribbentrop’s visit had not decided to

force Italy into the war. 26

Welles need not have wondered.

As soon as Ribbentrop had departed Rome in his special train the anguished

Italian dictator was prey to second thoughts. “He fears,” Ciano jotted in his diary

on March 12, “that he has gone too far in his commitment to fight against the

Allies. He would now like to dissuade Hitler from his land offensive, and this he

hopes to achieve at the meeting at the Brenner Pass. ” But Ciano, limited as he

was, knew better. “It cannot be denied,” he added in his diary, “that the Duce is

fascinated by Hitler, a fascination which involves something deeply rooted in his

makeup. The Fuehrer will get more out of the Duce than Ribbentrop was able to

get.” This was true—with reservations, as shortly will be seen.

No sooner had he returned to Berlin than Ribbentrop telephoned Ciano—on

March 13—asking that the Brenner meeting be set earlier than contemplated, for

March 18. “The Germans are unbearable,” Mussolini exploded. “They don’t

give one time to breathe or to think matters over.” Nevertheless, he agreed to the

date.

The Duce was nervous [Ciano recorded in his diary that day]. Until now he has lived under

the illusion that a real war would not be waged. The prospect of an imminent clash in which he

might remain an outsider disturbs him and, to use his words, humiliates him.27

It was snowing when the respective trains of the two dictators drew in on the

morning of March 18, 1940, at the little frontier station at the Brenner Pass

below the lofty snow-mantled Alps. The meeting, as a sop to Mussolini, took

place in the Duce’s private railroad car, but Hitler did almost all the talking.

Ciano summed up the conference in his diary that evening.

The conference is more a monologue … Hitler talks all the time … Mussolini listens to

him with interest and with deference. He speaks little and confirms his intention to move with

Germany. He reserves to himself only the choice of the right moment.

He realized, Mussolini said, when he was finally able to get in a word, that it

was “impossible to remain neutral until the end of the war.” Co-operation with

England and France was “inconceivable. We hate them. Therefore Italy’s entry

into the war is inevitable.” Hitler had spent more than an hour trying to convince

him of that—if Italy did not want to be left out in the cold and, as he added,

become “a second-rate power.” 28 But having answered the main question to the

Fuehrer’s satisfaction, the Duce immediately began to hedge.

The great problem, however, was the date … One condition for this would have to be

fulfilled. Italy would have to be “very well prepared” … Italy’s financial position did not

allow her to wage a protracted war …

He was asking the Fuehrer whether there would be any danger for Germany if the offensive

were delayed. He did not believe there was such a danger … he would [then] have finished his

military preparations in three to four months, and would not be in the embarrassing position of

seeing his comrade fighting and himself limited to making demonstrations … He wanted to do

something more and he was not now in a position to do it.

The Nazi warlord had no intention of postponing his attack in the West and

said so. But he had a “few theoretical ideas” which might solve Mussolini’s

difficulty of making a frontal attack on mountainous southern France, since that

conflict, he realized, “would cost a great deal of blood.” Why not, he suggested,

supply a strong Italian force which together with German troops would advance

along the Swiss frontier toward the Rhone Valley “in order to turn the Franco–

Italian Alpine front from the rear.” Before this, of course, the main German

armies would have rolled back the French and British in the north. Hitler was

obviously trying to make it easy for the Italians.

When the enemy has been smashed [in northern France] the moment would come [Hitler

continued] for Italy to intervene actively, not at the most difficult point on the Alpine front,

but elsewhere …

The war will be decided in France. Once France is disposed of, Italy will be mistress of the

Mediterranean and England will have to make peace.

Mussolini, it must be said, was not slow at seizing upon this glittering

prospect of getting so much after the Germans had done all the hard fighting.

The Duce replied that once Germany had made a victorious advance he would intervene

immediately … he would lose no time … when the Allies were so shaken by the German

attack that it needed only a second blow to bring them to their knees.

On the other hand,

If Germany’s progress was slow, the Duce said that then he would wait.

This crude, cowardly bargain seems not to have unduly bothered Hitler. If

Mussolini was personally attracted to him, as Ciano said, by “something deeply

rooted in his make-up,” it might be said that the attraction was mutual, for the

same mysterious reasons. Disloyal as he had been to some of his closest

associates, a number of whom he had had murdered, such as Roehm and

Strasser, Hitler maintained a strange and unusual loyalty to his ridiculous Italian

partner that did not weaken, that indeed was strengthened when adversity and

then disaster overtook the strutting, sawdust Roman Caesar. It is one of the

interesting paradoxes of this narrative.

At any rate, for what it was worth—and few Germans besides Hitler,

especially among the generals, thought it was worth very much—Italy’s entrance

into the war had now at last been solemnly promised. The Nazi warlord could

turn his thoughts again to new and imminent conquests. Of the most imminent

one—in the north—he did not breathe a word to his friend and ally.

THE CONSPIRATORS AGAIN FRUSTRATED

Once more the anti-Nazi plotters tried to persuade the generals to depose the

Leader—this time before he could launch his new aggression in the north, of

which they had got wind. What the civilian conspirators again wanted was

assurance from the British government that it would make peace with an anti-

Nazi German regime, and, being what they were, they were insistent that in any

settlement the new Reich government be allowed to keep most of Hitler’s

territorial gains: Austria, the Sudetenland and the 1914 frontier in Poland,

though this last had only been obtained in the past by the wiping out of the

Polish nation.

It was with such a proposal that Hassell, with considerable personal courage,

journeyed to Arosa, Switzerland, on February 21,1940, to confer with a British

contact whom he calls “Mr. X” in his diary and who was a certain J. Lonsdale

Bryans. They conferred in the greatest secrecy at four meetings on February 22

and 23. Bryans, who had cut a certain figure in the diplomatic society of Rome,

was another of those self-appointed and somewhat amateurish negotiators for

peace who have turned up in this narrative. He had contacts in Downing Street,

and Hassell, once they had met, was personally impressed by him. After the

fiasco of the attempt of Major Stevens and Captain Best in Holland to get in

touch with the German conspirators, the British were somewhat skeptical of the

whole business, and when Bryans pressed Hassell for some reliable information

as to whom he was speaking for the German envoy became cagey.

“I am not in a position to name the men who are backing me,” Hassell

retorted. “I can only assure you that a statement from Halifax would get to the

right people.” 29

Hassell then outlined the views of the German “opposition”: it was realized

that Hitler had to be overthrown “before major military operations are

undertaken”; that this must be “an exclusively German affair”; that there must be

“some authoritative English statement” about how a new anti-Nazi regime in

Berlin would be treated and that “the principal obstacle to any change in regime

is the story of 1918, that is, German anxiety lest things develop as they did then,

after the Kaiser was sacrificed.” Hassell and his friends wanted guarantees that if

they got rid of Hitler Germany would be treated more generously than it was

after the Germans had got rid of Wilhelm II.

He thereupon handed over to Bryans a memorandum which he himself had

drawn up in English. It is a wooly document, though full of noble sentiments

about a future world based “on the principles of Christian ethics, justice and law,

social welfare and liberty of thought and conscience.” The greatest danger of

continuing “this mad war,” Hassell wrote, was “a bolshevization of Europe”—he

considered that worse than the continuance of Nazism. And his main condition

for peace was that the new Germany be left with almost all of Hitler’s conquests,

which he enumerated. The German acquisition of Austria and the Sudetenland

could not even be discussed in any proposed peace; and Germany would have to

have the 1914 frontier with Poland, which, of course, though he did not say so,

was actually the 1914 frontier with Russia, since Poland had not been allowed to

exist in 1914.

Bryans agreed that speedy action was necessary in view of the imminence of

the German offensive in the West and promised to deliver Hassell’s

memorandum to Lord Halifax. Hassell returned to Berlin to acquaint his fellow

plotters with his latest move. Although they hoped for the best from Hassell’s

“Mr. X” they were more concerned at the moment with the so-called “X Report”

which Hans von Dohnanyi, one of the members of the group in the Abwehr, had

drawn up on the basis of Dr. Mueller’s contact with the British at the Vatican. *

It declared that the Pope was ready to intervene with Britain for reasonable

peace terms with a new anti-Nazi German government, and it is a measure of the

views of these opponents of Hitler that one of their terms, which they claimed

the Holy Father would back, was “the settlement of the Eastern question in favor

of Germany.” The demonic Nazi dictator had obtained a settlement in the East

“in favor of Germany” by armed aggression; the good German conspirators

wanted the same thing handed to them by the British with the Pope’s blessings.

The X Report loomed very large in the minds of the plotters that winter of

1939–40. At the end of October General Thomas had shown it to Brauchitsch

with the intention of bucking up the Army Commander in Chief in his efforts to

dissuade Hitler from launching the offensive in the West that fall. But

Brauchitsch did not appreciate such encouragement. In fact, he threatened to

have General Thomas arrested if he brought the matter up again. It was “plain

high treason,” he barked at him.

Now, with a fresh Nazi aggression in the offing, Thomas took the X Report to

General Halder in the hope that he might act on it. But this was a vain hope. As

the General Staff Chief told Goerdeler, one of the most active of the conspirators

—who had also begged him to take the lead, since the spineless Brauchitsch

would not—he could not at this time justify breaking his oath as a soldier to the

Fuehrer. Besides:

England and France had declared war on us, and one had to see it through. A peace of

compromise was senseless. Only in the greatest emergency could one take the action desired

by Goerdeler.

“Also, doch! ” exclaimed Hassell in his diary on April 6, 1940, in recounting

Halder’s state of mind as explained to him by Goerdeler. “Halder,” the diarist

added, “who had begun to weep during the discussion of his responsibility, gave

the impression of a weak man with shattered nerves.”

The accuracy of such an impression is to be doubted. When one goes over

Halder’s diary for the first week of April, cluttered as it is with hundreds of

detailed entries about preparations for the gigantic offensive in the West, which

he was helping to mastermind, this writer at least gets the impression that the

General Staff Chief was in a buoyant mood as he conferred with the field

commanders and checked the final plans for the greatest and most daring

military operation in German history. There is no hint in his journal of

treasonable thoughts or of any wrestling with his conscience. Though he has

misgivings about the attack on Denmark and Norway, they are based purely on

military grounds, and there is not a word of moral doubt about Nazi aggression

against the four small neutral countries whose frontiers Germany had solemnly

guaranteed and whom Halder knew Germany was about to attack, and against

two of whom, Belgium and Holland, he himself had taken a leading part in

drafting the plans.

So ended the. latest attempt of the “good Germans” to oust Hitler before it

was too late. It was the last opportunity they would have to obtain a generous

peace. The generals, as Brauchitsch and Halder had made clear, were not

interested in a negotiated peace. They were thinking now, as was the Fuehrer, of

a dictated peace—dictated after German victory. Not until the chances of that

had gone glimmering did they seriously return to their old and treasonable

thoughts, which had been so strong at Munich and at Zossen, of removing their

mad dictator. This state of mind and character must be remembered in view of

subsequent events and of subsequent spinning of myths.

THE TAKING OF DENMARK AND NORWAY

Hitler’s preparations for the conquest of Denmark and Norway have been

called by many writers one of the best-kept secrets of the war, but it has seemed

to this author that the two Scandinavian countries and even the British were

caught napping not because they were not warned of what was coming but

because they did not believe the warnings in time.

Ten days before disaster struck, Colonel Oster of the Abwehr warned a close

friend of his, Colonel J. G. Sas, the Dutch military attaché in Berlin, of the

German plans for Weseruebung and Sas immediately informed the Danish naval

attaché, Captain Kjölsen. 30 But the complacent Danish government would not

believe its own naval attaché, and when on April 4 the Danish minister in Berlin

sent Kjölsen scurrying to Copenhagen to repeat the warning in person his

intelligence was still not taken seriously. Even on the eve of catastrophe, on the

evening of March 8, after news had been received of the torpedoing of a German

transport laden with troops off the south coast of Norway—just north of

Denmark—and the Danes had seen with their own eyes a great German naval

armada sailing north between their islands, the King of Denmark had dismissed

with a smile a remark at the dinner table that his country was in danger.

“He really didn’t believe that,” a Guards officer who was present later

reported. In fact, this officer related, the King had proceeded after dinner to the

Royal Theater in a “confident and happy” frame of mind.31

Already in March the Norwegian government had received warnings from its

legation in Berlin and from the Swedes about a German concentration of troops

and naval vessels in the North Sea and Baltic ports and on April 5 definite

intelligence arrived from Berlin of imminent German landings on the southern

coast of Norway. But the complacent cabinet in Oslo remained skeptical. Not

even on the seventh, when several large German war vessels were sighted

proceeding up the Norwegian coast and reports arrived of British planes strafing

a German battle fleet off the mouth of the Skagerrak, not even on April 8, when

the British Admiralty informed the Legation of Norway in London that a strong

German naval force had been discovered approaching Narvik and the

newspapers in Oslo were reporting that German soldiers rescued from the

transport Rio de Janeiro, torpedoed that day off the Norwegian coast at Lillesand

by a Polish submarine, had declared they were en route to Bergen to help defend

it against the British—not even then did the Norwegian government consider it

necessary to take such obvious steps as mobilizing the Army, fully manning the

forts guarding the harbors, blocking the airfield runways, or, most important of

all, mining the easily mined narrow water approaches to the capital and the main

cities. Had it done these things history might have taken a different turning.

Ominous news, as Churchill puts it, had begun filtering into London by the

first of April, and on April 3 the British War Cabinet discussed the latest

intelligence, above all from Stockholm, which told of the Germans collecting

sizable military forces in its northern ports with the objective of moving into

Scandinavia. But the news does not seem to have been taken very seriously. Two

days later, on April 5, when the first wave of German naval supply ships was

already at sea, Prime Minister Chamberlain proclaimed in a speech that Hitler,

by failing to attack in the West when the British and French were unprepared,

had “missed the bus”—a phrase he was very shortly to rue.*

The British government at this moment, according to Churchill, was inclined

to believe that the German build-up in the Baltic and North Sea ports was being

done merely to enable Hitler to deliver a counterstroke in case the British, in

mining Norwegian waters to cut off the ore shipments from Narvik, also

occupied that port and perhaps others to the south.

As a matter of fact, the British government was contemplating such an

occupation. After seven months of frustration Churchill, First Lord of the

Admiralty, had finally succeeded in getting the approval of the War Cabinet and

the Allied Supreme War Council to mine the Norwegian Leads on April 8—an

action called “Wilfred.” Since it seemed likely that the Germans would react

violently to the mortal blow of having their iron ore shipments from Narvik

blocked, it was decided that a small Anglo–French force should be dispatched to

Narvik and advance to the nearby Swedish frontier. Other contingents would be

landed at Trondheim, Bergen and Stavanger farther south in order, as Churchill

explained, “to deny these bases to the enemy.” This was known as “Plan R-4.” 32

Thus during the first week of April, while German troops were being loaded

on various warships for the passage to Norway, British troops, though in much

fewer numbers, were being embarked on transports in the Clyde and on cruisers

in the Forth for the same destination.

On the afternoon of April 2, Hitler, after a long conference with Goering,

Raeder and Falkenhorst, issued a formal directive ordering Weseruebung to

begin at 5:15 A.M. on April 9. At the same time he issued another directive

stipulating that “the escape of the Kings of Denmark and Norway from their

countries at the time of the occupation must be prevented by all means. ”33 Also

on the same day OKW let the Foreign Office in on the secret. A lengthy

directive was presented to Ribbentrop instructing him to prepare the diplomatic

measures for inducing Denmark and Norway to surrender without a fight as soon

as the German armed forces had arrived and to concoct some kind of

justification for Hitler’s latest aggression.34

But trickery was not to be confined to the Foreign Office. The Navy was also

to make use of it. On April 3, with the departure of the first vessels, Jodl

reflected in his diary on the problem of how deceit could be used to hoodwink

the Norwegians in case they became suspicious of the presence of so many

German men-of-war in their vicinity. Actually this little matter had already been

worked out by the Navy. It had instructed its warships and transports to try to

pass as British craft—even if it were necessary to fly the Union Jack! Secret

German naval commands laid down detailed orders for “Deception and

Camouflage in the Invasion of Norway.” 35

MOST SECRET

Behavior During Entrance into the Harbor

All ships darkened … The disguise as British craft must be kept as long as possible. All

challenges in Morse by Norwegian ships will be answered in English. In answer, something

like the following will be chosen:

“Calling at Bergen for a short visit. No hostile intent.”

… Challenges to be answered with names of British warships:

Koeln— H.M.S. Cairo.

Koenigsberg—H.M.S. Calcutta…. (etc.)

Arrangements are to be made to enable British war flags to be illuminated …

For Bergen … Following is laid down as guiding principle should one of our own units

find itself compelled to answer the challenge of passing craft: To challenge: (in case of The

Koeln) H.M.S. Cairo.

To order to stop: “(1) Please repeat last signal. (2) Impossible to understand your signal.”

In case of a warning shot: “Stop firing. British ship. Good friend.”

In case of an inquiry as to destination and purpose: “Going Bergen. Chasing German

steamers. ”*

And so on April 9, 1940, at 5:20 A.M. precisely (4:20 A.M. in Denmark), an

hour before dawn, the German envoys at Copenhagen and Oslo, having routed

the respective foreign ministers out of bed exactly twenty minutes before

(Ribbentrop had insisted on a strict timetable in co-ordination with the arrival at

that hour of the German troops), presented to the Danish and Norwegian

governments a German ultimatum demanding that they accept on the instant, and

without resistance, the “protection of the Reich.” The ultimatum was perhaps the

most brazen document yet composed by Hitler and Ribbentrop, who were such

masters and by now so experienced in diplomatic deceit. 37

After declaring that the Reich had come to the aid of Denmark and Norway to

protect them against an Anglo–French occupation, the memorandum stated:

The German troops therefore do not set foot on Norwegian soil as enemies. The German

High Command does not intend to make use of the points occupied by German troops as bases

for operations against England as long as it is not forced to … On the contrary, German

military operations aim exclusively at protecting the north against the proposed occupation of

Norwegian bases by Anglo–French forces …

… In the spirit of the good relations between Germany and Norway which have existed

hitherto, the Reich Government declares to the Royal Norwegian Government that Germany

has no intention of infringing by her measures the territorial integrity and political

independence of the Kingdom of Norway now or in the future …

The Reich Government therefore expects that the Norwegian Government and the

Norwegian people will … offer no resistance to it. Any resistance would have to be, and

would be, broken by all possible means … and would therefore lead only to absolutely useless

bloodshed….

German expectations proved justified as regards Denmark but not Norway.

This became known in the Wilhelmstrasse with the receipt of the first urgent

messages from the respective ministers to those countries. The German envoy in

Copenhagen wired Ribbentrop at 8:34 A.M. that the Danes had “accepted all our

demands [though] registering a protest.” Minister Curt Bräuer in Oslo had a

quite different report to make. At 5:52 A.M., just thirty-two minutes after he had

delivered the German ultimatum, he wired Berlin the quick response of the

Norwegian government: “We will not submit voluntarily: the struggle is already

under way.” 38

The arrogant Ribbentrop was outraged.* At 10:55 he wired Bräuer “most

urgent”: “You will once more impress on the Government there that Norwegian

resistance is completely senseless.”

This the unhappy German envoy could no longer do. The Norwegian King,

government and members of Parliament had by this time fled the capital for the

mountains in the north. However hopeless the odds, they were determined to

resist. In fact, resistance had already begun in some places, though not in all,

with the arrival of German ships out of the night.

The Danes were in a more hopeless position. Their pleasant little island

country was incapable of defense. It was too small, too flat, and the largest part,

Jutland, lay open by land to Hitler’s panzers. There were no mountains for the

King and the government to flee to as there were in Norway, nor could any help

be expected from Britain. It has been said that the Danes were too civilized to

fight in such circumstances; at any rate, they did not. General W. W. Pryor, the

Army Commander in Chief, almost alone pleaded for resistance, but he was

overruled by Premier Thorvald Stauning, Foreign Minister Edvard Munch, and

the King, who, when the bad news began coming in on April 8, refused his pleas

for mobilization. For reasons which remain obscure to this writer, even after an

investigation in Copenhagen, the Navy never fired a shot, either from its ships or

from its shore batteries, even when German troop ships passed under the noses

of its guns and could have been blown to bits. The Army fought a few

skirmishes in Jutland, the Royal Guard fired a few shots around the royal palace

in the capital and suffered a few men wounded. By the time the Danes had

finished their hearty breakfasts it was all over. The King, on the advice of his

government but against that of General Pryor, capitulated and ordered what

slight resistance there was to cease.

The plans to take Denmark by surprise and deceit, as the captured German

Army records show, had been prepared with meticulous care. General Kurt

Himer, chief of staff of the task force for Denmark, had arrived by train in

civilian clothes in Copenhagen on April 7 to reconnoiter the capital and make

the necessary arrangements for a suitable pier to dock the troopship Hansestadt

Danzig and a truck to handle the moving of a few supplies and a radio

transmitter. The commander of the battalion—all that was considered necessary

to capture a great city—had also been in Copenhagen in civilian clothes a couple

of days before to get the layout of the land.

It was not so strange, therefore, that the plans of the General and the battalion

major were carried out with scarcely a hitch. The troopship arrived off

Copenhagen shortly before dawn, passed without challenge the guns of the fort

guarding the harbor and those of the Danish patrol vessels and tied up neatly at

the Langelinie Pier in the heart of the city, only a stone’s throw from the Citadel,

the headquarters of the Danish Army, and but a short distance from Amalienborg

Palace, where the King resided. Both were quickly seized by the lone battalion

with no resistance worth mentioning.

Upstairs in the palace, amidst the rattle of scattered shots, the King conferred

with his ministers. The latter were all for nonresistance. Only General Pryor

begged to be allowed to put up a fight. At the very least he demanded that the

King should leave for the nearest military camp at Høvelte to escape capture.

But the King agreed with his ministers. The monarch, according to one

eyewitness, asked “whether our soldiers had fought long enough”—and Pryor

retorted that they had not.*39

General Himer became restless at the delay. He telephoned headquarters for

the combined operation, which had been set up at Hamburg—the Danish

authorities had not thought of cutting the telephone lines to Germany—and,

according to his own story,40 asked for some bombers to zoom over Copenhagen

“in order to force the Danes to accept.” The conversation was in code and the

Luftwaffe understood that Himer was calling for an actual bombing, which it

promised to carry out forthwith—an error which was finally corrected just in

time. General Himer says the bombers “roaring over the Danish capital did not

fail to make their impression: the Government accepted the German requests.”

There was some difficulty in finding means of broadcasting the government’s

capitulation to the Danish troops, because the local radio stations were not yet on

the air at such an early hour. This was solved by broadcasting it on the Danish

wave length over the transmitter which the German battalion had brought along

with it and for which General Himer had thoughtfully dug up a truck to haul it to

the Citadel.

At 2 o’clock that afternoon General Himer, accompanied by the German

minister, Cecil von Renthe-Fink, called on the King of Denmark, who was no

longer sovereign but did not yet realize it. Himer left a record of the interview in

the secret Army archives.

The seventy-year-old King appeared inwardly shattered, although he preserved outward

appearances perfectly and maintained absolute dignity during the audience. His whole body

trembled. He declared that he and his government would do everything possible to keep peace

and order in the country and to eliminate any friction between the German troops and the

country. He wished to spare his country further misfortune and misery.

General Himer replied that personally he very much regretted coming to the King on such a

mission, but that he was only doing his duty as a soldier … We came as friends, etc. When the

King then asked whether he might keep his bodyguard, General Himer replied … that the

Fuehrer would doubtless permit him to retain them. He had no doubt about it.

The King was visibly relieved at hearing this. During the course of the audience … the

King became more at ease, and at its conclusion addressed General Himer with the words:

“General, may I, as an old soldier, tell you something? As soldier to soldier? You Germans

have done the incredible again! One must admit that it is magnificent work!”

For nearly four years, until the tide of war had changed, the Danish King and

his people, a good-natured, civilized and happy-go-lucky race, offered very little

trouble to the Germans. Denmark became known as the “model protectorate.”

The monarch, the government, the courts, even the Parliament and the press,

were at first allowed a surprising amount of freedom by their conquerors. Not

even Denmark’s seven thousand Jews were molested—for a time. But the

Danes, later than most of the other conquered peoples, finally came to the

realization that further “loyal co-operation,” as they called it, with their Teutonic

tyrants, whose brutality increased with the years and with the worsening fortunes

of war, was impossible—if they were to retain any shred of self-respect and

honor. They also began to see that Germany might not win the war after all and

that little Denmark was not inexorably condemned, as so many had feared at

first, to be a vassal state in Hitler’s unspeakable New Order. Then resistance

began.

THE NORWEGIANS RESIST

It began in Norway from the outset, though certainly not everywhere. At

Narvik, the port and railhead of the iron ore line from Sweden, Colonel Konrad

Sundlo, in command of the local garrison, who, as we have seen, was a fanatical

follower of Quisling, * surrendered to the Germans without firing a shot. The

naval commander was of a different caliber. With the approach of ten German

destroyers at the mouth of the long fjord, the Eidsvold, one of two ancient

ironclads in the harbor, fired a warning shot and signaled to the destroyers to

identify themselves. Rear Admiral Fritz Bonte, commanding the German

destroyer flotilla, answered by sending an officer in a launch to the Norwegian

vessel to demand surrender. There now followed a bit of German treachery,

though German naval officers later defended it with the argument that in war

necessity knows no law. When the officer in the launch signaled the German

Admiral that the Norwegians had said they would resist, Bonte waited only until

his launch got out of the way and then quickly blew up the Eidsvold with

torpedoes. The second Norwegian ironclad, the Norge, then opened fire but was

quickly dispatched. Three hundred Norwegian sailors—almost the entire crews

of the two vessels—perished. By 8 A.M. Narvik was in the hands of the Germans,

taken by ten destroyers which had slipped through a formidable British fleet, and

occupied by a mere two battalions of Nazi troops under the command of

Brigadier General Eduard Dietl, an old Bavarian crony of Hitler since the days

of the Beer Hall Putsch, who was to prove himself a resourceful and courageous

commander when the going at Narvik got rough, as it did beginning the next

day.

Trondheim, halfway down the long Norwegian west coast, was taken by the

Germans almost as easily. The harbor batteries failed to fire on the German

naval ships, led by the heavy cruiser Hipper, as they came up the long fjord, and

the troops aboard that ship and four destroyers were conveniently disembarked

at the city’s piers without interference. Some forts held out for a few hours and

the nearby airfield at Vaernes for two days, but this resistance did not affect the

occupation of a fine harbor suitable for the largest naval ships as well as

submarines and the railhead of a line that ran across north-central Norway to

Sweden and over which the Germans expected, and with reason, to receive

supplies should the British cut them off at sea.

Bergen, the second port and city of Norway, lying some three hundred miles

down the coast from Trondheim and connected with Oslo, the capital, by

railway, put up some resistance. The batteries guarding the harbor badly

damaged the cruiser Koenigsberg and an auxiliary ship, but troops from other

vessels landed safely and occupied the city before noon. It was at Bergen that the

first direct British aid for the stunned Norwegians arrived. In the afternoon

fifteen naval dive bombers sank the Koenigsberg, the first ship of that size ever

to go down as the result of an air attack. Outside the harbor the British had a

powerful fleet of four cruisers and seven destroyers which could have

overwhelmed the smaller German naval force. It was about to enter the harbor

when it received orders from the Admiralty to cancel the attack because of the

risk of mines and bombing from the air, a decision which Churchill, who

concurred in it, later regretted. This was the first sign of caution and of half

measures which would cost the British dearly in the next crucial days.

Sola airfield, near the port of Stavanger on the southwest coast, was taken by

German parachute troops after the Norwegian machine gun emplacements—

there was no real antiaircraft protection—were silenced. This was Norway’s

biggest airfield and strategically of the highest importance to the Luftwaffe,

since from here bombers could range not only against the British fleet along the

Norwegian coast but against the chief British naval bases in northern Britain. Its

seizure gave the Germans immediate air superiority in Norway and spelled the

doom of any attempt by the British to land sizable forces.

Kristiansand on the south coast put up considerable resistance to the Germans,

its shore batteries twice driving off a German fleet led by the light cruiser

Karlsruhe. But the forts were quickly reduced by Luftwaffe bombing and the

port was occupied by midafternoon. The Karlsruhe, however, on leaving port

that evening was torpedoed by a British submarine and so badly damaged that it

had to be sunk.

By noon, then, or shortly afterward, the five principal Norwegian cities and

ports and the one big airfield along the west and south coasts that ran for 1,500

miles from the Skagerrak to the Arctic were in German hands. They had been

taken by a handful of troops conveyed by a Navy vastly inferior to that of the

British. Daring, deceit and surprise had brought Hitler a resounding victory at

very little cost.

But at Oslo, the main prize, his military force and his diplomacy had run into

unexpected trouble.

All through the chilly night of April 8–9, a gay welcoming party from the

German Legation, led by Captain Schreiber, the naval attaché, and joined

occasionally by the busy Dr. Bräuer, the minister, stood at the quayside in Oslo

Harbor waiting for the arrival of a German fleet and troop transports. A junior

German naval attaché was darting about the bay in a motorboat waiting to act as

pilot for the fleet, headed by the pocket battleship Leutzow (its name changed

from Deutschland because Hitler did not want to risk losing a ship by that name)

and the brand-new heavy cruiser Bluecher, flagship of the squadron.

They waited in vain. The big ships never arrived. They had been challenged at

the entrance to the fifty-mile-long Oslo Fjord by the Norwegian mine layer Olav

Trygverson, which sank a German torpedo boat and damaged the light cruiser

Emden. After landing a small force to subdue the shore batteries the German

squadron, however, continued on its way up the fjord. At a point some fifteen

miles south of Oslo where the waters narrowed to fifteen miles, further trouble

developed. Here stood the ancient fortress of Oskarsborg, whose defenders were

more alert than the Germans suspected. Just before dawn the fort’s 28-centimeter

Krupp guns opened fire on the Luetzow and the Bluecher, and torpedoes were

also launched from the shore. The 10,000-ton Bluecher, ablaze and torn by the

explosions of its ammunition, went down, with the loss of 1,600 men, including

several Gestapo and administrative officials (and all their papers) who were to

arrest the King and the government and take over the administration of the

capital. The Luetzow was also damaged but not completely disabled. Rear

Admiral Oskar Kummetz, commander of the squadron, and General Erwin

Engelbrecht, who led the 163rd Infantry Division, who were on the Bluecher,

managed to swim ashore, where they were made prisoners by the Norwegians.

Whereupon the crippled German fleet turned back for the moment to lick its

wounds. It had failed in its mission to take the main German objective, the

capital of Norway. It did not get there until the next day.

Oslo, in fact, fell to little more than a phantom German force dropped from

the air at the local, undefended airport. The catastrophic news from the other

seaports and the pounding of the guns fifteen miles down the Oslo Fjord had sent

the Norwegian royal family, the government and members of Parliament

scurrying on a special train from the capital at 9:30 A.M. for Hamar, eighty miles

to the north. Twenty motor trucks laden with the gold of the Bank of Norway

and three more with the secret papers of the Foreign Office got away at the same

hour. Thus the gallant action of the garrison at Oskarsborg had foiled Hitler’s

plans to get his hands on the Norwegian King, government and gold.

But Oslo was left in complete bewilderment. There were some Norwegian

troops there, but they were not put into a state for defense. Above all, nothing

was done to block the airport at nearby Fornebu, which could have been done

with a few old automobiles parked along the runway and about the field. Late on

the previous night Captain Spiller, the German air attaché in Oslo, had stationed

himself there to welcome the airborne troops, which were to come in after the

Navy had reached the city. When the ships failed to arrive a frantic radio

message was sent from the legation to Berlin apprising it of the unexpected and

unhappy situation. The response was immediate. Soon parachute and airborne

infantry troops were being landed at Fornebu. By noon about five companies had

been assembled. As they were only lightly armed, the available Norwegian

troops in the capital could have easily destroyed them. But for reasons never yet

made clear—so great was the confusion in Oslo—they were not mustered, much

less deployed, and the token German infantry force marched into the capital

behind a blaring, if makeshift, military band. Thus the last of Norway’s cities

fell. But not Norway; not yet.

On the afternoon of April 9, the Storting, the Norwegian Parliament, met at

Hamar with only five of the two hundred members missing, but adjourned at

7:30 P.M. when news was received that German troops were approaching and

moved on to Elverum, a few miles to the east toward the Swedish border. Dr.

Bräuer, pressed by Ribbentrop, was demanding an immediate audience with the

King, and the Norwegian Prime Minister had assented on condition that German

troops withdraw to a safe distance south. This the German minister would not

agree to.

Indeed, at this moment a further piece of Nazi treachery was in the making.

Captain Spiller, the air attaché, had set out from the Fornebu airport for Hamar

with two companies of German parachutists to capture the recalcitrant King and

government. It seemed to them more of a lark than anything else. Since

Norwegian troops had not fired a shot to prevent the German entry into Oslo,

Spiller expected no resistance at Hamar. In fact the two companies, traveling on

commandeered autobuses, were making a pleasant sightseeing jaunt of it. But

they did not reckon with a Norwegian Army officer who acted quite unlike so

many of the others. Colonel Ruge, Inspector General of Infantry, who had

accompanied the King northward, had insisted on providing some sort of

protection to the fugitive government and had set up a roadblock near Hamar

with two battalions of infantry which he had hastily rounded up. The German

buses were stopped and in a skirmish which followed Spiller was mortally

wounded. After suffering further casualties the Germans fell back all the way to

Oslo.

The next day, Dr. Bräuer set out from Oslo alone along the same road to see

the King. An old-school professional diplomat, the German minister did not

relish his role, but Ribbentrop had kept after him relentlessly to talk the King

and the government into surrender. Bräuer’s difficult task had been further

complicated by certain political events which had just taken place in Oslo. On

the preceding evening Quisling had finally bestirred himself, once the capital

was firmly in German hands, stormed into the radio station and broadcast a

proclamation naming himself as head of a new government and ordering all

Norwegian resistance to the Germans to halt immediately. Though Bräuer could

not yet grasp it—and Berlin could never, even later, understand it—this

treasonable act doomed the German efforts to induce Norway to surrender. And

paradoxically, though it was a moment of national shame for the Norwegian

people, the treason of Quisling rallied the stunned Norwegians to a resistance

which was to become formidable and heroic.

Dr. Bräuer met Haakon VII, the only king in the twentieth century who had

been elected to the throne by popular vote and the first monarch Norway had had

of its own for five centuries, * in a schoolhouse at the little town of Elverum at 3

P.M. on April 10. From a talk this writer later had with the monarch and from a

perusal of both the Norwegian records and Dr. Bräuer’s secret report (which is

among the captured German Foreign Office documents) it is possible to give an

account of what happened. After considerable reluctance the King had agreed to

receive the German envoy in the presence of his Foreign Minister, Dr. Halvdan

Koht. When Bräuer insisted on seeing Haakon at first alone the King, with the

agreement of Koht, finally consented.

The German minister, acting on instructions, alternately flattered and tried to

intimidate the King. Germany wanted to preserve the dynasty. It was merely

asking Haakon to do what his brother had done the day before in Copenhagen. It

was folly to resist the Wehrmacht. Only useless slaughter for the Norwegians

would ensue. The King was asked to approve the government of Quisling and

return to Oslo. Haakon, a salty, democratic man and a great stickler, even at this

disastrous moment, for constitutional procedure, tried to explain to the German

diplomat that in Norway the King did not make political decisions; that was

exclusively the business of the government, which he would now consult. Koht

then joined the conversation and it was agreed that the government’s answer

would be telephoned to Bräuer at some point on his way back to Oslo.

For Haakon, who, though he could not. make the political decision could

surely influence it, there was but one answer to the Germans. Retiring to a

modest inn in the village of Nybergsund near Elverum—just in case the

Germans, with Bräuer gone, tried to capture him in another surprise attack—he

assembled the members of the government as Council of State.

… For my part [he told them] I cannot accept the German demands. It would conflict with

all that I have considered to be my duty as King of Norway since I came to this country nearly

thirty-five years ago … I do not want the decision of the government to be influenced by or

based upon this statement. But … I cannot appoint Quisling Prime Minister, a man in whom I

know neither our people … nor its representatives in the Storting have any confidence at all.

If therefore the government should decide to accept the German demands—and I fully

understand the reasons in favor of it, considering the impending danger of war in which so

many young Norwegians will have to give their lives—if so, abdication will be the only

course open to me. 41

The government, though there may have been some waverers up to this

moment, could not be less courageous than the King, and it quickly rallied

behind him. By the time Brauer got to Eidsvold, halfway back to Oslo, Koht was

on the telephone line to him with the Norwegian reply. The German minister

telephoned it immediately to the legation in Oslo, where it was sped to Berlin.

The King will name no government headed by Quisling and this decision was made upon

the unanimous advice of the Government. To my specific question, Foreign Minister Koht

replied: “Resistance will continue as long as possible.” 42

That evening from a feeble little rural radio station nearby, the only means of

communication to the outside world available, the Norwegian government flung

down the gauntlet to the mighty Third Reich. It announced its decision not to

accept the German demands and called upon the people—there were only three

million of them—to resist the invaders. The King formally associated himself

with the appeal.

But the Nazi conquerors could not quite bring themselves to believe that the

Norwegians meant what they said. Two more attempts were made to dissuade

the King. On the morning of April 11 an emissary of Quisling, a Captain Irgens,

arrived to urge the monarch to return to the capital. He promised that Quisling

would serve him loyally. His proposal was dismissed with silent contempt.

In the afternoon an urgent message came from Bräuer, requesting a further

audience with the King to talk over “certain proposals.” The hard-pressed

German envoy had been instructed by Ribbentrop to tell the monarch that he

“wanted to give the Norwegian people one last chance of a reasonable

agreement.” * This time Dr. Koht, after consulting the King, replied that if the

German minister had “certain proposals” he could communicate them to the

Foreign Minister.

The Nazi reaction to this rebuff by such a small and now helpless country was

immediate and in character. The Germans had failed, first, to capture the King

and the members of the government and, then, to persuade them to surrender.

Now the Germans tried to kill them. Late on April 11, the Luftwaffe was sent

out to give the village of Nybergsund the full treatment. The Nazi flyers

demolished it with explosive and incendiary bombs and then machine-gunned

those who tried to escape the burning ruins. The Germans apparently believed at

first that they had succeeded in massacring the King and the members of the

government. The diary of a German airman, later captured in northern Norway,

had this entry for April 11: “Nybergsund. Oslo Regierung. Alles vernichtet. ”

(Oslo government. Completely wiped out.)

The village had been, but not the King and the government. With the approach

of the Nazi bombers they had taken refuge in a nearby wood. Standing in snow

up to their knees, they had watched the Luftwaffe reduce the modest cottages of

the hamlet to ruins. They now faced a choice of either moving on to the nearby

Swedish border and asylum in neutral Sweden or pushing north into their own

mountains, still deep in the spring snow. They decided to move on up the rugged

Gudbrands Valley, which led past Hamar and Lillehammer and through the

mountains to Åndalsnes on the northwest coast, a hundred miles southwest of

Trondheim. Along the route they might organize the still dazed and scattered

Norwegian forces for further resistance. And there was some hope that British

troops might eventually arrive to help them.

THE BATTLES FOR NORWAY

In the far north at Narvik the British Navy already had reacted sharply to the

surprise German occupation. It had been, as Churchill, who was in charge of it,

admitted, “completely outwitted” by the Germans. Now in the north at least, out

of range of the German land-based bombers, it went over to the offensive. On

the morning of April 10, twenty-four hours after ten German destroyers had

taken Narvik and disembarked Dietl’s troops, a force of five British destroyers

entered Narvik harbor, sank two of the five German destroyers then in the port,

damaged the other three and sank all the German cargo vessels except one. In

this action the German naval commander, Rear Admiral Bonte, was killed. On

leaving the harbor, however, the British ships ran into the five remaining

German destroyers emerging from nearby fjords. The German craft were heavier

gunned and sank one British destroyer, forced the beaching of another on which

the British commander, Captain Warburton-Lee, was mortally wounded, and

damaged a third. Three of the five British destroyers managed to make the open

sea where, in retiring, they sank a large German freighter, laden with

ammunition, which was approaching the port.

At noon on April 13 the British, this time with the battleship Warspite, a

survivor of the First World War Battle of Jutland, leading a flotilla of destroyers,

returned to Narvik and wiped out the remaining German war vessels. Vice-

Admiral W. J. Whitworth, the commanding officer, in wirelessing the Admiralty

of his action urged that since the German troops on shore had been stunned and

disorganized—Dietl and his men had in fact taken to the hills—Narvik be

occupied at once “by the main landing force.” Unfortunately for the Allies, the

British Army commander, Major General P. J. Mackesy, was an exceedingly

cautious officer and, arriving the very next day with an advance contingent of

three infantry battalions, decided not to risk a landing at Narvik but to disembark

his troops at Harstad, thirty-five miles to the north, which was in the hands of the

Norwegians. This was a costly error.

In the light of the fact that they had prepared a small expeditionary corps for

Norway, the British were unaccountably slow in getting their troops under way.

On the afternoon of April 8, after news was received of the movement of

German fleet units up the Norwegian coast, the British Navy hurriedly

disembarked the troops that had already been loaded on shipboard for the

possible occupation of Stavanger, Bergen, Trondheim and Narvik, on the ground

that every ship would be needed for naval action. By the time the British land

forces were re-embarked all those port cities were in German hands. And by the

time they reached central Norway they were doomed, as were the British naval

ships which were to cover them, by the Luftwaffe’s control of the air.

By April 20, one British brigade, reinforced by three battalions of French

Chasseurs Alpins, had been landed at Namsos, a small port eighty miles

northeast of Trondheim, and a second British brigade had been put ashore at

Åndalsnes, a hundred miles to the southwest of Trondheim, which was thus to be

attacked from north and south. But lacking field artillery, antiaircraft guns and

air support, their bases pounded night and day by German bombers which

blocked the further landing of supplies or reinforcements, neither force ever

seriously threatened Trondheim. The Åndalsnes brigade, after meeting a

Norwegian unit at Dombas, a rail junction sixty miles to the east, abandoned the

proposed attack northward toward Trondheim and pushed southeast down the

Gudbrandsdal in order to aid the Norwegian troops which, under the energetic

command of Colonel Ruge, had been slowing up the main German drive coming

up the valley from Oslo.

At Lillehammer, north of Hamar, the first engagement of the war between

British and German troops took place on April 21, but it was no match. The ship

laden with the British brigade’s artillery had been sunk and there were only rifles

and machine guns with which to oppose a strong German force armed with

artillery and light tanks. Even worse, the British infantry, lacking air support,

was incessantly pounded by Luftwaffe planes operating from nearby Norwegian

airfields. Lillehammer fell after a twenty-four-hour battle and the British and

Norwegian forces began a retreat of 140 miles up the valley railway to

Åndalsnes, halting here and there to fight a rear-guard action-which slowed the

Germans but never stopped them. On the nights of April 30 and May 1 the

British forces were evacuated from Åndalsnes and on May 2 the Anglo–French

contingent from Namsos, considerable feats in themselves, for both harbors were

blazing shambles from continuous German bombing. On the night of April 29

the King of Norway and the members of his government were taken aboard the

British cruiser Glasgow at Molde, across the Romsdals-fjord from Åndalsnes,

itself also a shambles from Luftwaffe bombing, and conveyed to Tromsö, far

above the Arctic Circle and north of Narvik, where on May Day the provisional

capital was set up.

By then the southern half of Norway, comprising all the cities and main

towns, had been irretrievably lost. But northern Norway seemed secure. On May

28 an Allied force of 25,000 men, including two brigades of Norwegians, a

brigade of Poles and two battalions of the French Foreign Legion, had driven the

greatly outnumbered Germans out of Narvik. There seemed no reason to doubt

that Hitler would be deprived of both his iron ore and his objective of occupying

all of Norway and making the Norwegian government capitulate. But by this

time the Wehrmacht had struck with stunning force on the Western front and

every Allied soldier was needed to plug the gap. Narvik was abandoned, the

Allied troops were hastily re-embarked, and General Died, who had held out in a

wild mountainous tract near the Swedish border, reoccupied the port on June 8

and four days later accepted the surrender of the persevering and gallant Colonel

Ruge and his bewildered, resentful Norwegian troops, who felt they had been

left in the lurch by the British. King Haakon and his government were taken

aboard the cruiser Devonshire at Tromsö on June 7 and departed for London and

five years of bitter exile.* In Berlin Dietl was promoted to Major General,

awarded the Ritterkreuz and hailed by Hitler as the Sieger von Narvik.

Despite his amazing successes the Fuehrer had had his bad moments during

the Norwegian campaign. General Jodl’s diary is crammed with terse entries

recounting a succession of the warlord’s nervous crises. “Terrible excitement,”

he noted on April 14 after news had been received of the wiping out of the

German naval forces at Narvik. On April 17 Hitler had a fit of hysteria about the

loss of Narvik; he demanded that General Dietl’s troops there be evacuated by

air—an impossibility. “Each piece of bad news,” Jodl scribbled that day in his

diary, “leads to the worst fears.” And two days later: “Renewed crisis. Political

action has failed. Envoy Bräuer is recalled. According to the Fuehrer, force has

to be used …† The conferences at the Chancellery in Berlin that day, April 19,

became so embittered, with the heads of the three services blaming each other

for the delays, that even the lackey Keitel stalked out of the room. “Chaos of

leadership is again threatening,” Jodl noted. And on April 22 he added: “Fuehrer

is increasingly worried about the English landings.”

On April 23 the slow progress of the German forces moving up from Oslo

toward Trondheim and Åndalsnes caused the “excitement to grow,” as Jodl put

it, but the next day the news was better and from that day it continued to grow

more rosy. By the twenty-sixth the warlord was in such fine fettle that at 3:30 in

the morning, during an all-night session with his military advisers, he told them

he intended to start “Yellow” between May 1 and 7. “Yellow” was the code

name for the attack in the West across Holland and Belgium. Though on April

29 Hitler was again “worried about Trondheim,” the next day he was “happy

with joy” at the news that a battle group from Oslo had reached the city. He

could at last turn his attention back to the West. On May 1 he ordered that

preparations for the big attack there be ready by May 5.

The Wehrmacht commanders—Goering, Brauchitsch, Halder, Keitel, Jodl,

Raeder and the rest—had for the first time had a foretaste during the Norwegian

campaign of how their demonic Leader cracked under the strain of even minor

setbacks in battle. It was a weakness which would grow on him when, after a

series of further astonishing military successes, the tide of war changed, and it

would contribute mightily to the eventual debacle of the Third Reich.

Still, any way one looked at it, the quick conquest of Denmark and Norway

had been an important victory for Hitler and a discouraging defeat for the

British. It secured the winter iron ore route, gave added protection to the

entrance to the Baltic, allowed the daring German Navy to break out into the

North Atlantic and provided them with excellent port facilities there for

submarines and surface ships in the sea war against Britain. It brought Hitler air

bases hundreds of miles closer to the main enemy. And perhaps most important

of all it immensely enhanced the military prestige of the Third Reich and

correspondingly diminished that of the Western Allies. Nazi Germany seemed

invincible. Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and now Denmark and Norway had

succumbed easily to Hitler’s force, or threat of force, and not even the help of

two major allies in the West had been, in the latter cases, of the slightest avail.

The wave of the future, as an eminent American woman wrote, seemed to

belong to Hitler and Nazism.

For the remaining neutral states Hitler’s latest conquest was also a terrifying

lesson. Obviously neutrality no longer offered protection to the little democratic

nations trying to survive in a totalitarian-dominated world. Finland had just

found that out, and now Norway and Denmark. They had themselves to blame

for being so blind, for declining to accept in good time—before the actual

aggression—the help of friendly world powers.

I trust this fact [Churchill told Commons on April 11] will be meditated upon by other

countries who may tomorrow, or a week hence, or a month hence, find themselves the victims

of an equally elaborately worked-out staff plan for their destruction and enslavement.45

He was obviously thinking of Holland and Belgium, but even in their case,

though there would be a month of grace, no such meditation began.*

There were military lessons, too, to be learned from Hitler’s lightning

conquest of the two Scandinavian countries. The most significant was the

importance of air power and its superiority over naval power when land bases

for bombers and fighters were near. Hardly less important was an old lesson, that

victory often goes to the daring and the imaginative. The German Navy and Air

Force had been both, and Dietl at Narvik had shown a resourcefulness of the

German Army which the Allies had lacked.

There was one military result of the Scandinavian adventure which could not

be evaluated at once, if only because it was not possible to look very far into the

future. The losses in men in Norway on both sides were light. The Germans

suffered 1,317 killed, 2,375 missing and 1,604 wounded, a total of 5,296

casualties; those of the Norwegians, French and British were slightly less than

5,000. The British lost one aircraft carrier, one cruiser and seven destroyers and

the Poles and the French one destroyer each. German naval losses were

comparably much heavier: ten out of twenty destroyers, three of eight cruisers,

while the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the pocket battleship

Luetzow were damaged so severely that they were out of action for several

months. Hitler had no fleet worthy of mention for the coming events of the

summer. When the time to invade Britain came, as it did so shortly, this proved

to be an insurmountable handicap.

The possible consequences of the severe crippling of the German Navy,

however, did not enter the Fuehrer’s thoughts as, at the beginning of May, with

Denmark and Norway now added to his long list of conquests, he worked with

his eager generals—for they had now shed their misgivings of the previous

autumn—on the last-minute preparations for what they were confident would be

the greatest conquest of all.

* It was on October 10 that Hitler had called in his military chiefs, read them a long

memorandum on the necessity of an immediate attack in the West and handed them Directive

No. 6 ordering preparations for an offensive through Belgium and Holland. (See above, pp.

644–46.)

* It was a correct assumption. It is now known that the Allied Supreme War Council, meeting

in Paris on February 5; 1940, decided that in sending an expeditionary force to Finland the

Swedish iron fields should be occupied by troops landed at Narvik, which was but a short

distance from the mines. (See the author’s The Challenge of Scandinavia, pp. 115–16n.)

Churchill remarks that at the meeting it was decided “incidentally to get control of the

Gullivare ore-field.” ( The Gathering Storm, p. 560.)

* He had not impressed the German minister in Oslo, Dr. Curt Bräuer, who twice in December

warned Berlin that Quisling “need not be taken seriously … his influence and prospects are …

very slight.” 9 For his frankness and reluctance to play Hitler’s game, the minister was quickly

to pay.

* On March 7 General Ironside, Chief of the British General Staff, informed Marshal

Mannerheim that an Allied expeditionary force of 57,000 men was ready to come to the aid of

the Finns and that the first division, of 15,000 troops, could reach Finland by the end of March

if Norway and Sweden would allow them transit. Actually five days before, on March 2, as

Mannerheim knew, both Norway and Sweden had again turned down the Franco–British

request for transit privileges. This did not prevent Premier Daladier on March 8 from scolding

the Finns for not officially asking for Allied troops and from intimating that the Allied forces

would be sent regardless of Norwegian and Swedish protests. But Mannerheim was not to be

fooled, and, having advised his government to sue for peace while the Finnish Army was still

intact and undefeated, he approved the immediate dispatch of a peace delegation to Moscow

on March 8. The Finnish Commander in Chief seems to have been skeptical of the French zeal

for fighting on the Finnish front rather than on their own front in France. (See The Memoirs of

Marshal Mannerheim. )

One can only speculate on the utter confusion which would have resulted among the

belligerents had the Franco–British expeditionary corps ever arrived in Finland and fought the

Russians. In little more than a year Germany would be at war with Russia, in which case the

enemies in the West would have been allies in the East!

* Examples of Hitler’s weird views on America have been given in earlier chapters, but in the

captured Foreign Office documents there is a revealing paper on the Fuehrer’s state of mind at

this very moment. On March 12 Hitler had a long talk with Colin Ross, a German “expert” on

the United States, who had recently returned from a lecture trip in America, where he had

contributed his mite to Nazi propaganda. When Ross remarked that an “imperialist tendency”

prevailed in the United States, Hitler asked (according to the shorthand notes of Dr. Schmidt)

“whether this imperialist tendency did not strengthen the desire for the Anschluss of Canada to

the United States, and thus produce an anti-English attitude.”

It must be admitted that Hitler’s advisers on the U.S.A. were not very helpful in shedding

light on their subject. At this same interview, Ross, in trying to answer Hitler’s questions as to

why America was so anti-German, gave the following answers, among others:

… An additional factor in hatred against Germany … is the monstrous power of Jewry,

directing with a really fantastic cleverness and organizational skill the struggle against

everything German and National Socialist …

Colin Ross then talked about Roosevelt, whom he believes to be an enemy of the Fuehrer

for reasons of pure personal jealousy and also on account of his personal lust for power … He

had come to power the same year as the Fuehrer and he had to watch the latter carrying out his

great plans, while he, Roosevelt … had not reached his goal. He too had ideas of dictatorship

which in some respects were very similar to National Socialist ideas. Yet precisely this

realization that the Fuehrer had attained his goal, while he had not, gave to his pathological

ambition the desire to act upon the stage of world history as the Fuehrer’s rival …

After Herr Colin Ross had taken his leave, the Fuehrer remarked that Ross was a very

intelligent man who certainly had many good ideas. 17

* Weizsaecker replied that Canaris himself had assured him that neither of the men mentioned

by Thomsen was an agent of the Abwehr. But no good secret service admits these things.

Other Foreign Office papers reveal that on January 24 an Abwehr agent left Buenos Aires with

instructions to report to Fritz von Hausberger at Weehawken, N.J., “for instructions in our

speciality.” Another agent had been sent from the same place to New York in December to

gather information on American aircraft factories and arms shipments to the Allies. Thomsen

himself reported on February 20 the arrival of Baron Konstantin von Maydell, a Baltic

German of Estonian citizenship, who had told the German Embassy in Washington that he was

on a sabotage mission for the Abwehr.

* “Before God and the world,” Goering exclaimed to Welles, “he, the Field Marshal, could

state that Germany had not desired the war. It had been forced upon her … But what was

Germany to do when the others wanted to destroy her?”

† A quite unofficial American peacemaker was also in Berlin at this time: James D. Mooney, a

vice-president of General Motors. He had been in Berlin, as I recall, shortly before or after the

outbreak of the war, trying like that other amateur in diplomacy, Dahlerus, though without the

latter’s connections to save the peace. The day after Welles left Berlin, on March 4, 1940,

Hitler received Mooney, who told him, according to a captured German record of the meeting,

that President Roosevelt was “more friendly and sympathetic” to Germany “than was

generally believed in Berlin” and that the President was prepared to act as “moderator” in

bringing the belligerents together. Hitler merely repeated what he had told Welles two days

before.

On March 11 Thomsen sent to Berlin a confidential memorandum prepared for him by an

unnamed American informant declaring that Mooney “was more or less pro-German.” The

General Motors executive was certainly taken in by the Germans. Thomsen’s memorandum

states that Mooney had informed Roosevelt on the basis of an earlier talk with Hitler that the

Fuehrer “was desirous of peace and wished to prevent the bloodshed of a spring campaign.”

Hans Dieckhoff, the recalled German ambassador to the United States, who was whiling away

his time in Berlin, saw Mooney immediately after the latter’s interview with Hitler and

reported to the Foreign Office that the American businessman was “rather verbose” and that “I

cannot believe that the Mooney initiative has any great importance.” 22

* See above, p. 648.

* The first three German supply ships had sailed for Narvik at 2 A.M. on April 3. Germany’s

largest tanker left Murmansk for Narvik on April 6, with the connivance of the Russians, who

obligingly furnished the cargo of oil.

* On the stand at Nuremberg, Grand Admiral Raeder justified such tactics on the ground that

they were a legitimate “ruse of war against which, from the legal point of view, no objection

can be made.” 36

* This writer had rarely seen the Nazi Foreign Minister more insufferable than he was that

morning. He strutted into a specially convoked press conference at the Foreign Office, garbed

in a flashy field-gray uniform and looking, I noted in my diary, “as if he owned the earth.” He

snapped, “The Fuehrer has given his answer … Germany has occupied Danish and Norwegian

soil in order to protect those countries from the Allies, and will defend their true neutrality

until the end of the war. Thus an honored part of Europe has been saved from certain

downfall.”

The Berlin press was also something to see that day. The Boersen Zeitung: “England goes

cold-bloodedly over the dead bodies of small peoples. Germany protects the weak states from

the English highway robbers … Norway ought to see the righteousness of Germany’s action,

which was taken to ensure the freedom of the Norwegian people.” Hitler’s own paper, the

Voelkischer Beobachter, carried this banner line: GERMANY SAVES SCANDINAVIA!

* Total Danish casualties throughout the realm were thirteen killed and twenty-three wounded.

The Germans suffered some twenty casualties.

* See above, p. 676.

* Norway had been a part of Denmark for four centuries and of Sweden for a further century,

regaining its complete independence only in 1905, when it broke away from its union with

Sweden and the people elected Prince Carl of Denmark as King of Norway. He assumed the

name of Haakon VII. Haakon VI had died in 1380. Haakon VII was a brother of Christian X

of Denmark, who surrendered so promptly to the Germans on the morning of April 9, 1940.

* There is an ominous hint of further treachery in Ribbentrop’s secret instructions. Bräuer was

told to try to arrange the meeting “at a point between Oslo and the King’s present place of

residence. For obvious reasons he, Bräuer, would have to discuss this move fully with General

von Falkenhorst and would then also have to inform the latter of the meeting place agreed

upon.” Gaus, who telephoned Ribbentrop’s instructions, reported that “Herr Bräuer clearly

understood the meaning of the instructions.” One cannot help but think that had the King gone

to this meeting, Falkenhorst’s troops would have grabbed him. 43

* Quisling did not last long in his first attempt to govern Norway. Six days after he had

proclaimed himself Prime Minister, on April 15, the Germans kicked him out and appointed

an Administrative Council of six leading Norwegian citizens, including Bishop Eivind

Berggrav, head of the Lutheran Church of Norway, and Paal Berg, the President of the

Supreme Court. It was mostly the doing of Berg, an eminent and scrappy jurist who later

became the secret head of the Norwegian resistance movement. On April 24 Hitler appointed

Josef Terboven, a tough young Nazi gauleiter, to be Reich Commissar for Norway, and it was

he who actually governed the country, with increasing brutality, during the occupation.

Bräuer, who had opposed Quisling from the beginning, was recalled on April 17, retired from

the diplomatic service, and sent to the Western front as a soldier. The Germans reinstated

Quisling as Prime Minister in 1942, but though his unpopularity among the people was

immense, his power was nil despite his best efforts to serve his German masters.

At the end of the war Quisling was tried for treason and after an exhaustive trial sentenced

to death and executed on October 24, 1945. Terboven committed suicide rather than face

capture. Knut Hamsun, the great Norwegian novelist, who had openly collaborated with the

Germans, singing their praises, was indicted for treason, but the charges were dropped on the

grounds of his old age and senility. He was, however, tried and convicted for “profiting from

the Nazi regime,” and fined $65,000. He died on February 19, 1952, at the age of ninety-three.

General von Falkenhorst was tried as a war criminal before a mixed British and Norwegian

military court on charges of having handed over captured Allied commandos to the S.S. for

execution. He was sentenced to death on August 2, 1946, but the sentence was commuted to

life imprisonment.

† On April 13, General von Falkenhorst, no doubt goaded by Hitler, who was in a fury

because of Norwegian resistance, signed an order providing for taking as hostages twenty of

the most distinguished citizens of Oslo, including Bishop Berggrav and Paal Berg, who, in the

words of Minister Bräuer, “were to be shot in the event of the continued resistance or

attempted sabotage. ”44

* The Swedes, caught between Russia in Finland and the Baltic countries and Germany in

possession of adjoining Denmark and Norway, meditated and decided there was no choice

except to cling to their precarious neutrality and go down fighting if they were attacked. They

had placated the Soviet Union by refusing to allow Allied troops transit to Finland, and now

under great pressure they placated Germany. Though Sweden had sent an impressive stock of

arms to Finland, it refused to sell Norway either arms or gasoline when it was attacked. All

through April the Germans demanded that Sweden allow the transit of troops to Narvik to

relieve Dietl, but this was refused until the end of hostilities, although a train of medical

personnel and supplies was allowed through. On June 19, fearing a direct attack by Germany,

Sweden gave in to Hitler’s pressure and agreed to permit the transport over Swedish railways

of Nazi troops and war material to Norway on condition that the number of troops moving in

each direction should balance so that the German garrisons in Norway would not be

strengthened by the arrangement.

This was of immense help to Germany. By transporting fresh troops and war material by

land through Sweden Hitler avoided the risk of having them sunk at sea by the British. In the

first six months of the accord, some 140,000 German troops in Norway were exchanged and

the German forces there greatly strengthened by supplies. Later, just before the German

onslaught on Russia, Sweden permitted the Nazi High Command to transport an entire army

division, fully armed, from Norway across Sweden to Finland to be used to attack the Soviet

Union. What it had refused the Allies the year before it accorded to Nazi Germany. For details

of German pressure on Sweden and for the text of the exchange of letters between King

Gustav V and Hitler, see Documents on German Foreign Policy, IX. The author has covered

the subject more thoroughly in The Challenge of Scandinavia.

21

VICTORY IN THE WEST

SHORTLY AFTER DAWN on the fine spring day of May 10, 1940, the ambassador

of Belgium and the minister of the Netherlands in Berlin were summoned to the

Wilhelmstrasse and informed by Ribbentrop that German troops were entering

their countries to safeguard their neutrality against an imminent attack by the

Anglo–French armies—the same shabby excuse that had been made just a month

before with Denmark and Norway. A formal German ultimatum called upon the

two governments to see to it that no resistance was offered. If it were, it would

be crushed by all means and the responsibility for the bloodshed would “be

borne exclusively by the Royal Belgian and the Royal Netherlands

Government.”

In Brussels and The Hague, as previously in Copenhagen and Oslo, the

German envoys made their way to the respective foreign offices with similar

messages. Ironically enough, the bearer of the ultimatum in The Hague was

Count Julius von Zech-Burkersroda, the German minister, who was a son-in-law

of Bethmann-Hollweg, the Kaiser’s Chancellor, who in 1914 had publicly called

Germany’s guarantee of Belgian neutrality, which the Hohenzollern Reich had

just violated, “a scrap of paper.”

At the Foreign Ministry in Brussels, while German bombers roared overhead

and the explosion of their bombs on nearby airfields rattled the windows,

Buelow-Schwante, the German ambassador, started to take a paper from his

pocket as he entered the Foreign Minister’s office. Paul-Henri Spaak stopped

him.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Ambassador. I will speak first.”

The German Army [Spaak said, not attempting to hold back his feeling of outrage] has just

attacked our country. This is the second time in twenty-five years that Germany has committed

a criminal aggression against a neutral and loyal Belgium. What has happened is perhaps even

more odious than the aggression of 1914. No ultimatum, no note, no protest of any kind has

ever been placed before the Belgian Government. It is through the attack itself that Belgium

has learned that Germany has violated the undertakings given by her … The German Reich

will be held responsible by history. Belgium is resolved to defend herself.

The unhappy German diplomat then began to read the formal German

ultimatum, but Spaak cut him short. “Hand me the document,” he said. “I should

like to spare you so painful a task.” 1

The Third Reich had given the two small Low Countries guarantees of their

neutrality almost without number. The independence and neutrality of Belgium

had been guaranteed “perpetually” by the five great European powers in 1839, a

pact that was observed for seventy-five years until Germany broke it in 1914.

The Weimar Republic had promised never to take up arms against Belgium, and

Hitler, after he came to power, continually reaffirmed that policy and gave

similar assurances to the Netherlands. On January 30, 1937, after he had

repudiated the Locarno Treaty, the Nazi Chancellor publicly proclaimed:

The German Government has further given the assurance to Belgium and Holland that it is

prepared to recognize and to guarantee the inviolability and neutrality of these territories.

Frightened by the remilitarization of the Third Reich and its reoccupation of

the Rhineland in the spring of 1936, Belgium, which wisely had abandoned

neutrality after 1918, again sought refuge in it. On April 24, 1937, Britain and

France released her from the obligations of Locarno and on October 13 of that

year Germany officially and solemnly confirmed

its determination that in no circumstances will it impair the inviolability and integrity [of

Belgium] and that it will at all times respect Belgian territory … and [be] prepared to assist

Belgium should she be subjected to an attack …

From that day on there is a familiar counterpoint in Hitler’s solemn public

assurances to the Low Countries and his private admonitions to his generals. On

August 24, 1938, in regard to one of the papers drawn up for him for Case

Green, the plan for the attack on Czechoslovakia, he spoke of the “extraordinary

advantage” to Germany if Belgium and Holland were occupied and asked the

Army’s opinion “as to the conditions under which an occupation of this area

could be carried out and how long it would take.” On April 28, 1939, in his reply

to Roosevelt, Hitler again stressed the “binding declarations” which he had given

to the Netherlands and Belgium, among others. Less than a month later, on May

23, the Fuehrer, as has been noted, was telling his generals that “the Dutch and

Belgian air bases must be occupied by armed force … with lightning speed.

Declarations of neutrality must be ignored.”

He had not yet started his war, but his plans were ready. On August 22, a

week before he launched the war by attacking Poland, he conferred with his

generals about the “possibility” of violating Dutch and Belgian neutrality.

“England and France,” he said, “will not violate the neutrality of these

countries.” Four days later, on August 26, he ordered his envoys in Brussels and

The Hague to inform the respective governments that in the event of an outbreak

of war “Germany will in no circumstances impair the inviolability of Belgium

and Holland,” an assurance which he repeated publicly on October 6, after the

conclusion of the Polish campaign. The very next day, October 7, General von

Brauchitsch advised his army group commanders, at Hitler’s prompting,

to make all preparations for immediate invasion of Dutch and Belgian territory, if the political

situation so demands.2

Two days later, on October 9, in Directive No. 6, Hitler ordered:

Preparations are to be made for an attacking operation … through Luxembourg, Belgium

and Holland. This attack must be carried out as soon and as forcefully as possible … The

object of this attack is to acquire as great an area of Holland, Belgium and northern France as

possible. 3

The Belgians and Dutch, of course, were not privy to Hitler’s secret orders.

Nevertheless they did receive warnings of what was in store for them. A number

of them have already been noted: Colonel Oster, one of the anti-Nazi

conspirators, warned the Dutch and Belgian military attachés in Berlin on

November 5 to expect the German attack on November 12, which was then the

target date. At the end of October Goerdeler, another one of the conspirators, had

gone to Brussels at the instigation of Weizsaecker, to warn the Belgians of an

imminent attack. And shortly after the New Year, on January 10, 1940, Hitler’s

plans for the offensive in the West had fallen into the hands of the Belgians

when an officer carrying them had made a forced landing in Belgium.*

By that time the Dutch and Belgian general staffs knew from their own border

intelligence that the Germans were concentrating some fifty divisions on their

frontiers. They also had the benefit of an unusual source of information in the

German capital. This “source” was Colonel G. J. Sas, the Netherland’s military

attaché in Berlin. Sas was a close personal friend of Colonel Oster and often

dined with him at the latter’s home in the secluded suburb of Zehlendorf—a

practice facilitated, once the war broke out, by the blackout, whose cover

enabled a number of persons in Berlin at that time, German and foreign, to get

about on various subversive missions without much fear of detection. It was Sas

whom Oster tipped off early in November about the German onslaught then set

for November 12, and he gave the attaché a new warning in January. The fact

that neither attack came off somewhat lessened the credibility of Sas in The

Hague and in Brussels, where the fact that Hitler had actually set dates for his

aggression and then postponed them naturally was not known. However the ten

days’ warning that Sas got through Oster of the invasion of Norway and

Denmark and his prediction of the exact date seems to have restored his prestige

at home.

On May 3, Oster told Sas flatly that the German attack in the West through the

Netherlands and Belgium would begin on May 10, and the military attaché

promptly informed his government. The next day The Hague received

confirmation of this from its envoy at the Vatican. The Dutch immediately

passed the word along to the Belgians. May 5 was a Sunday and as the week

began to unfold it became pretty obvious to all of us in Berlin that the blow in

the West would fall within a few days. Tension mounted in the capital. By May

8 I was cabling my New York office to hold one of our correspondents in

Amsterdam instead of shipping him off to Norway, where the war had ended

anyway, and that evening the military censors allowed me to hint in my

broadcast that there would soon be action in the West, including Holland and

Belgium.

On the evening of May 9 Oster and Sas dined together for what would prove

the last time. The German officer confirmed that the final order had been given

to launch the attack in the West at dawn the next day. Just to make sure that

there were no last-minute changes Oster dropped by OKW headquarters in the

Bendlerstrasse after dinner. There had been no changes. “The swine has gone to

the Western front,” Oster told Sas. The “swine” was Hitler. Sas informed the

Belgian military attaché and then went to his own legation and put through a call

to The Hague. A special code for this moment already had been arranged and

Sas spoke some seemingly innocuous words which conveyed the message

“Tomorrow, at dawn. Hold tight! ”4

Strangely enough, the two Big Powers in the West, Britain and France, were

caught napping. Their general staffs discounted the alarming reports from

Brussels and The Hague. London itself was preoccupied with a three-day cabinet

crisis which was resolved only on the evening of May 10 by the replacement of

Chamberlain by Churchill as Prime Minister. The first the French and British

headquarters heard of the German onslaught was when the peace of the spring

predawn was broken by the roar of German bombers and the screech of Stuka

dive bombers overhead, followed shortly afterward, as daylight broke, by frantic

appeals for help from the Dutch and Belgian governments which had held the

Allies at arm’s length for eight months instead of concerting with them for a

common defense.

Nevertheless the Allied plan to meet the main German attack in Belgium went

ahead for the first couple of days almost without a hitch. A great Anglo–French

army rushed northeastward from the Franco–Belgian border to man the main

Belgian defense line along the Dyle and Meuse rivers east of Brussels. As it

happened, this was just what the German High Command wanted. This massive

Allied wheeling movement played directly into its hands. Though they did not

know it the Anglo–French armies sped directly into a trap that, when sprung,

would soon prove to be utterly disastrous.

THE RIVAL PLANS

The original German plan of attack in the West had been drastically changed

since it fell into the hands of the Belgians and, as the Germans suspected, of the

French and British, in January. Fall Gelb (Case Yellow), as the operation was

called, had been hastily concocted in the fall of 1939 by the Army High

Command under the pressure of Hitler’s order to launch the offensive in the

West by mid-November. There is much dispute among military historians and

indeed among the German generals themselves whether this first plan was a

modified version of the old Schlieffen plan or not; Halder and Guderian have

maintained that it was. It called for the main German drive on the right flank

through Belgium and northern France, with the object of occupying the Channel

ports. It fell short of the famous Schlieffen plan, which had failed by an ace of

success in 1914 and which provided not only for the capture of the Channel ports

but for a continuation of a great wheeling movement which would bring the

German right-wing armies through Belgium and northern France and across the

Seine, after which they would turn east below Paris and encircle and destroy the

remaining French forces. Its purpose had been to quickly put an end to armed

French resistance so that Germany, in 1914. could then turn on Russia with the

great bulk of its military might.

But in 1939–40 Hitler did not have to worry about a Russian front.

Nevertheless his objective was more limited. In the first phase of the campaign,

at any rate, he planned not to knock out the French Army but to roll it back and

occupy the Channel coast, thus cutting off Britain from its ally and at the same

time securing air and naval bases from which he could harass and blockade the

British Isles. It is obvious from his various harangues to the generals at this time

that he thought that after such a defeat Britain and France would be inclined to

make peace and leave him free to turn his attention once more to the East.

Even before the original plan for Fall Gelb had fallen into the hands of the

enemy it was anticipated by the Allied Supreme Command. On November 17

the Allied Supreme War Council, meeting in Paris, had adopted “Plan D,”

which, in the event of a German attack through Belgium, called for the French

First and Ninth armies and the British Expeditionary Force to dash forward to

the principal Belgian defense line on the Dyle and Meuse rivers from Antwerp

through Louvain, Namur and Givet to Mézières. A few days before, the French

and British general staffs, in a series of secret meetings with the Belgian High

Command, had received the latter’s assurance that it would strengthen the

defenses on that line and make its main stand there. But the Belgians, still

clinging to the illusions of neutrality which fortified their hope that they yet

might be spared involvement in war, would not go further. The British chiefs of

staff argued that there would not be time to deploy the Allied forces so far

forward once the Germans had a tacked, but they went along with Plan D at the

urging of General Gamelin.

At the end of November the Allies added a scheme to rush General Henri

Giraud’s Seventh Army up the Channel coast to help the Dutch north of

Antwerp in case the Netherlands was also attacked. Thus a German attempt to

sweep through Belgium—and perhaps Holland—to flank the Maginot Line

would be met very early in the game by the entire B.E.F., the bulk of the French

Army, the twenty-two divisions of the Belgians and the ten divisions of the

Dutch—a force numerically equal, as it turned out, to that of the Germans.

It was to avoid such a head-on clash and at the same time to trap the British

and French armies that would speed forward so far that General Erich von

Manstein (born Lewinski), chief of staff of Rundstedt’s Army Group A on the

Western front, proposed a radical change in Fall Gelb. Manstein was a gifted

and imaginative staff officer of relatively junior rank, but during the winter he

succeeded in getting his bold idea put before Hitler over the initial opposition of

Brauchitsch, Halder and a number of other generals. Manstein’s proposal was

that the main German assault should be launched in the center through the

Ardennes with a massive armored force which would then cross the Meuse just

north of Sedan and break out into the open country and race to the Channel at

Abbeville.

Hitler, always attracted by daring and even reckless solutions, was interested.

Rundstedt pushed the idea relentlessly not only because he believed in it but

because it would give his Army Group A the decisive role in the offensive.

Although Halder’s personal dislike of Manstein and certain professional

jealousies among some of the generals who outranked him led to Manstein’s

transfer from his staff post to the command of an infantry corps at the end of

January, he had an opportunity to expound his unorthodox views to Hitler

personally at a dinner given for a number of new corps commanders in Berlin on

February 17. He argued that an armored strike through the Ardennes would hit

the Allies where they least expected it, since their generals probably, like most

of the Germans, considered this hilly, wooded country unsuitable for tanks. A

feint by the right wing of the German forces would bring the British and French

armies rushing pell-mell into Belgium. Then by cracking through the French at

Sedan and heading west along the north bank of the Somme for the Channel, the

Germans would entrap the major Anglo–French forces as well as the Belgian

Army.

It was a daring plan, not without its risks, as several generals, including Jodl,

emphasized. But by now Hitler, who considered himself a military genius,

practically believed that it was his own idea and his enthusiasm for it mounted.

Halder, who had at first dismissed it as a crackpot idea, also began to embrace it

and indeed, with the help of his General Staff officers, considerably improved it.

On February 24, 1940, it was formally adopted in a new OKW directive and the

generals were told to redeploy their troops by March 7. Somewhere along the

line, incidentally, the plan for the conquest of the Netherlands, which had been

dropped from Fall Gelb in a revision on October 29, 1939, was reinstated on

November 14 at the urging of the Luftwaffe, which wanted the Dutch airfields

for use against Britain and which offered to supply a large batch of airborne

troops for this minor but somewhat complicated operation. On such

considerations are the fates of little nations sometimes decided.5

And so as the campaign in Norway approached its victorious conclusion and

the first warm days of the beginning of May arrived, the Germans, with the most

powerful army the world had ever seen up to that moment, stood poised to strike

in the West. In mere numbers the two sides were evenly matched—136 German

divisions against 135 divisions of the French, British, Belgian and Dutch. The

defenders had the advantage of vast defensive fortifications: the impenetrable

Maginot Line in the south, the extensive line of Belgian forts in the middle and

fortified water lines in Holland in the north. Even in the number of tanks, the

Allies matched the Germans. But they had not concentrated them as had the

latter. And because of the aberration of the Dutch and Belgians for neutrality

there had been no staff consultations by which the defenders could pool their

plans and resources to the best advantage. The Germans had a unified command,

the initiative of the attacker, no moral scruples against aggression, a contagious

confidence in themselves and a daring plan. They had had experience in battle in

Poland. There they had tested their new tactics and their new weapons in

combat. They knew the value of the dive bomber and the mass use of tanks. And

they knew, as Hitler had never ceased to point out, that the French, though they

would be defending their own soil, had no heart in what lay ahead.

Notwithstanding their confidence and determination, the German High

Command, as the secret records make clear, suffered some moments of panic as

the zero hour drew near—or at least Hitler, the Supreme Commander, did.

General Jodl jotted them down in his diary. Hitler ordered several last-minute

postponements of the jump-off, which on May 1 he had set for May 5. On May 3

he put it off until May 6 on account of the weather but perhaps also in part

because the Foreign Office didn’t think his proposed justification for violating

the neutrality of Belgium and Holland was good enough. The next day he set

May 7 as X Day and on the following day postponed it again until Wednesday,

May 8. “Fuehrer has finished justification for Case Yellow,” Jodl noted.

Belgium and the Netherlands were to be accused of having acted most

unneutrally.

May 7. Fuehrer railroad train was scheduled to leave Finkenkrug at 16:38 hours [Jodl’s

diary continued]. But weather remains uncertain and therefore the order [for the attack] is

rescinded … Fuehrer greatly agitated about new postponement as there is danger of treachery.

Talk of the Belgian Envoy to the Vatican with Brussels permits the deduction that treason has

been committed by a German personality who left Berlin for Rome on April 29 …

May 8. Alarming news from Holland. Canceling of furloughs, evacuations, roadblocks,

other mobilization methods … Fuehrer does not want to wait any longer. Goering wants

postponement until the 10th, at least … Fuehrer is very agitated; then he consents to

postponement until May 10, which he says is against his intuition. But not one day longer …

May 9. Fuehrer decides on attack for May 10 for sure. Departure with Fuehrer train at

17:00 hours from Finkenkrug. After report that weather situation will be favorable on the 10th,

the code word “Danzig” is given at 21:00 hours.

Hitler, accompanied by Keitel, Jodl and others of the OKW staff, arrived at

headquarters, which he had named Felsennest (Eyrie), near Muenstereifel just as

dawn was breaking on May 10. Twenty-five miles to the west German forces

were hurtling over the Belgian frontier. Along a front of 175 miles, from the

North Sea to the Maginot Line, Nazi troops broke across the borders of three

small neutral states, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, in brutal violation of

the German word, solemnly and repeatedly given.

THE SIX WEEKS’ WAR: MAY 10–JUNE 25, 1940

For the Dutch it was a five-day war, and indeed in that brief period the fate of

Belgium, France and the British Expeditionary Force was sealed. For the

Germans everything went according to the book, or even better than the book, in

the unfolding both of strategy and of tactics. Their success exceeded the fondest

hopes of Hitler. His generals were confounded by the lightning rapidity and the

extent of their own victories. As for the Allied leaders, they were quickly

paralyzed by developments they had not faintly expected and could not—in the

utter confusion that ensued—comprehend.

Winston Churchill himself, who had taken over as Prime Minister on the first

day of battle, was dumfounded. He was awakened at half past seven on the

morning of May 15 by a telephone call from Premier Paul Reynaud in Paris,

who told him in an excited voice, “We have been defeated! We are beaten!”

Churchill refused to believe it. The great French Army vanquished in a week? It

was impossible. “I did not comprehend,” he wrote later, “the violence of the

revolution effected since the last war by the incursion of a mass of fast-moving

armor.” 6

Tanks—seven divisions of them concentrated at one point, the weakest

position in the Western defenses, for the big breakthrough—that was what did it.

That and the Stuka dive bombers and the parachutists and the airborne troops

who landed far behind the Allied lines or on the top of their seemingly

impregnable forts and wrought havoc.

And yet we who were in Berlin wondered why these German tactics should

have come as such a shattering surprise to the Allied leaders. Had not Hitler’s

troops demonstrated their effectiveness in the campaign against Poland? There

the great breakthroughs which had surrounded or destroyed the Polish armies

within a week had been achieved by the massing of armor after the Stukas had

softened up resistance. Parachutists and airborne troops had not done well in

Poland even on the very limited scale with which they were used; they had failed

to capture intact the key bridges. But in Norway, a month before the onslaught in

the West, they had been prodigious, capturing Oslo and all the airfields, and

reinforcing the isolated small groups that had been landed by sea at Stavanger,

Bergen, Trondheim and Narvik and thereby enabling them to hold out. Hadn’t

the Allied commanders studied these campaigns and learned then-lessons?

THE CONQUEST OF THE NETHERLANDS

Only one division of panzers could be spared by the Germans for the conquest

of the Netherlands, which was accomplished in five days largely by parachutists

and by troops landed by air transports behind the great flooded water lines which

many in Berlin had believed would hold the Germans up for weeks. To the

bewildered Dutch was reserved the experience of being subjected to the first

large-scale airborne attack in the history of warfare. Considering their

unpreparedness for such an ordeal and the complete surprise by which they were

taken they did better than was realized at the time.

The first objective of the Germans was to land a strong force by air on the

flying fields near The Hague, occupy the capital at once and capture the Queen

and the government, as they had tried to do just a month before with the

Norwegians. But at The Hague, as at Oslo, the plan failed, though due to

different circumstances. Recovering from their initial surprise and confusion,

Dutch infantry, supported by artillery, was able to drive the Germans—two

regiments strong—from the three airfields surrounding The Hague by the

evening of May 10. This saved the capital and the government momentarily, but

it tied down the Dutch reserves, which were desperately needed elsewhere.

The key to the German plan was the seizure by airborne troops of the bridges

just south of Rotterdam over the Nieuwe Maas and those farther southeast over

the two estuaries of the Maas (Meuse) at Dordrecht and Moerdijk. It was over

these bridges that General Georg von Kuechler’s Eighteenth Army driving from

the German border nearly a hundred miles away hoped to force his way into

Fortress Holland. In no other way could this entrenched place, lying behind

formidable water barriers and comprising The Hague, Amsterdam, Utretcht,

Rotterdam and Leyden, be taken easily and quickly.

The bridges were seized on the morning of May 10 by airborne units—

including one company that landed on the river at Rotterdam in antiquated

seaplanes—before the surprised Dutch guards could blow them. Desperate

efforts were made by improvised Netherlands units to drive the Germans away

and they almost succeeded. But the Germans hung on tenuously until the

morning of May 12, when the one armored division assigned to Kuechler

arrived, having smashed through the Grebbe–Peel Line, a fortified front to the

east strengthened by a number of water barriers, on which the Dutch had hoped

to hold out for several days.

There was some hope that the Germans might be stopped short of the

Moerdijk bridges by General Giraud’s French Seventh Army, which had raced

up from the Channel and reached Tilburg on the afternoon of May 11. But the

French, like the hard-pressed Dutch, lacked air support, armor, and antitank and

antiaircraft guns, and were easily pushed back to Breda. This opened the way for

the German 9th Panzer Division to cross the bridges at Moerdijk and Dordrecht

and, on the afternoon of May 12, arrive at the south bank of the Nieuwe Maas

across from Rotterdam, where the German airborne troops still held the bridges.

But the tanks could not get across the Rotterdam bridges. The Dutch in the

meantime had sealed them off at the northern ends. By the morning of May 14,

then, the situation for the Netherlands was desperate but not hopeless. Fortress

Holland had not been cracked. The strong German airborne forces around The

Hague had been either captured or dispersed into nearby villages. Rotterdam still

held. The German High Command, anxious to pull the armored division and

supporting troops out of Holland to exploit a new opportunity which had just

been opened to the south in France, was not happy. Indeed, on the morning of

the fourteenth Hitler issued Directive No. 11 stating: “The power of resistance of

the Dutch Army has proved to be stronger than was anticipated. Political as well

as military considerations require that this resistance be broken speedily. ” How?

He commanded that detachments of the Air Force be taken from the Sixth Army

front in Belgium “to facilitate the rapid conquest of Fortress Holland.” 7

Specifically he and Goering ordered a heavy bombing of Rotterdam. The

Dutch would be induced to surrender by a dose of Nazi terror—the kind that had

been applied the autumn before at beleaguered Warsaw.

On the morning of May 14 a German staff officer from the XXXIXth Corps

had crossed the bridge at Rotterdam under a white flag and demanded the

surrender of the city. He warned that unless it capitulated it would be bombed.

While surrender negotiations were under way—a Dutch officer had come to

German headquarters near the bridge to discuss the details and was returning

with the German terms—bombers appeared and wiped out the heart of the great

city. Some eight hundred persons, almost entirely civilians, were massacred,

several thousand wounded and 78,000 made homeless.* This bit of treachery,

this act of calculated ruthlessness, would long be remembered by the Dutch,

though at Nuremberg both Goering and Kesselring of the Luftwaffe defended it

on the grounds that Rotterdam was not an open city but stoutly defended by the

Dutch. Both denied that they knew that surrender negotiations were going on

when they dispatched the bombers, though there is strong evidence from German

Army archives that they did. *9 At any rate, OKW made no excuses at the time. I

myself heard over the Berlin radio on the evening of May 14 a special OKW

communiqué:

Under the tremendous impression of the attacks of German dive bombers and the imminent

attack of German tanks, the city of Rotterdam has capitulated and thus saved itself from

destruction.

Rotterdam surrendered, and then the Dutch armed forces. Queen Wilhelmina

and the government members had fled to London on two British destroyers. At

dusk on May 14 General H. G. Winkelmann, the Commander in Chief of the

Dutch forces, ordered his troops to lay down their arms and at 11 A.M. on the

next day he signed the official capitulation. Within five days it was all over. The

fighting, that is. For five years a night of savage German terror would henceforth

darken this raped, civilized little land.

THE FALL OF BELGIUM AND THE TRAPPING OF THE ANGLO–

FRENCH ARMIES

By the time the Dutch had surrendered, the die was cast for Belgium, France

and the British Expeditionary Force. May 14, though it was only the fifth day of

the attack, was the fatal day. The previous evening German armor had secured

four bridgeheads across the steeply banked and heavily wooded Meuse River

from Dinant to Sedan, captured the latter city, which had been the scene of

Napoleon III’s surrender to Moltke in 1870 and the end of the Third Empire, and

gravely threatened the center of the Allied lines and the hinge on which the

flower of the British and French armies had so quickly wheeled into Belgium.

The next day, May 14, the avalanche broke. An army of tanks unprecedented

in warfare for size, concentration, mobility and striking power, which when it

had started through the Ardennes Forest from the German frontier on May 10

stretched in three columns back for a hundred miles far behind the Rhine, broke

through the French Ninth and Second armies and headed swiftly for the Channel,

behind the Allied forces in Belgium. This was a formidable and frightening

juggernaut. Preceded by waves of Stuka dive bombers, which softened up the

French defensive positions, swarming with combat engineers who launched

rubber boats and threw up pontoon bridges to get across the rivers and canals,

each panzer division possessed of its own self-propelled artillery and of one

brigade of motorized infantry, and the armored corps closely followed by

divisions of motorized infantry to hold the positions opened up by the tanks, this

phalanx of steel and fire could not be stopped by any means in the hands of the

bewildered defenders. On both sides of Dinant on the Meuse the French gave

way to General Hermann Hoth’s XVth Armored Corps, one of whose two tank

divisions was commanded by a daring young brigadier general, Erwin Rommel.

Farther south along the river, at Monthermé, the same pattern was being

executed by General Georg-Hans Reinhardt’s XLIst Armored Corps of two tank

divisions.

But it was around Sedan, of disastrous memory to the French, that the greatest

blow fell. Here on the morning of May 14 two tank divisions of General Heinz

Guderian’s XIXth Armored Corps* poured across a hastily constructed pontoon

bridge set up during the night over the Meuse and struck toward the west.

Though French armor and British bombers tried desperately to destroy the

bridge—forty of seventy-one R.A.F. planes were shot down in one single attack,

mostly by flak, and seventy French tanks were destroyed—they could not

damage it. By evening the German bridgehead at Sedan was thirty miles wide

and fifteen miles deep and the French forces in the vital center of the Allied line

were shattered. Those who were not surrounded and made prisoners were in

disorderly retreat. The Franco–British armies to the north, as well as the twenty-

two divisions of Belgians, were placed in dire danger of being cut off.

The first couple of days had gone fairly well for the Allies, or so they thought.

To Churchill, plunging with new zest into his fresh responsibilities as Prime

Minister, “up until the night of the twelfth,” as he later wrote, “there was no

reason to suppose that the operations were not going well. ”10 Gamelin, the

generalissimo of the Allied forces, was highly pleased with the situation. The

evening before, the best and largest part of the French forces, the First, Seventh

and Ninth armies, along with the B.E.F., nine divisions strong under Lord Gort,

had joined the Belgians, as planned, on a strong defensive line running along the

Dyle River from Antwerp through Louvain to Wavre and thence across the

Gembloux gap to Namur and south along the Meuse to Sedan. Between the

formidable Belgian fortress of Namur and Antwerp, on a front of only sixty

miles, the Allies actually outnumbered the oncoming Germans, having some

thirty-six divisions against the twenty in Reichenau’s Sixth Army.

The Belgians, though they had fought well along the reaches of their northeast

frontier, had not held out there as long as had been expected, certainly not as

long as in 1914. They, like the Dutch to the north of them, had simply not been

able to cope with the revolutionary new tactics of the Wehrmacht. Here, as in

Holland, the Germans seized the vital bridges by the daring use of a handful of

specially trained troops landed silently at dawn in gliders. They overpowered the

guards at two of the three bridges over the Albert Canal behind Maastricht

before the defenders could throw the switches that were supposed to blow them.

They had even greater success in capturing Fort Eben Emael, which

commanded the junction of the Meuse River and the Albert Canal. This modern,

strategically located fortress was regarded by both the Allies and the Germans as

the most impregnable fortification in Europe, stronger than anything the French

had built in the Maginot Line or the Germans in the West Wall. Constructed in a

series of steel-and-concrete galleries deep underground, its gun turrets protected

by heavy armor and manned by 1,200 men, it was expected to hold out

indefinitely against the pounding of the heaviest bombs and artillery shells. It

fell in thirty hours to eighty German soldiers who under the command of a

sergeant had landed in nine gliders on its roof and whose total casualties

amounted to six killed and nineteen wounded. In Berlin, I remember, OKW

made the enterprise look very mysterious, announcing in a special communiqué

on the evening of May 11 that Fort Eben Emael had been taken by a “new

method of attack,” an announcement that caused rumors to spread—and Dr.

Goebbels was delighted to fan them—that the Germans had a deadly new “secret

weapon,” perhaps a nerve gas that temporarily paralyzed the defenders.

The truth was much more prosaic. With their usual flair for minute

preparation, the Germans during the winter of 1939–40 had erected at

Hildesheim a replica of the fort and of the bridges across the Albert Canal and

had trained some four hundred glider troops on how to take them. Three groups

were to capture the three bridges, the fourth Eben Emael. This last unit of eighty

men landed on the top of the fortress and placed a specially prepared “hollow”

explosive in the armored gun turrets which not only put them out of action but

spread flames and gas in the chambers below. Portable flame throwers were also

used at the gun portals and observation openings. Within an hour the Germans

were able to penetrate the upper galleries, render the light and heavy guns of the

great fort useless and blind its observation posts. Belgian infantry behind the

fortification tried vainly to dislodge the tiny band of attackers but they were

driven off by Stuka attacks and by reinforcements of parachutists. By the

morning of May 11 advance panzer units, which had raced over the two intact

bridges to the north, arrived at the fort and surrounded it, and, after further Stuka

bombings and hand-to-hand fighting in the underground tunnels, a white flag

was hoisted at noon and the 1,200 dazed Belgian defenders filed out and

surrendered.11

This feat, along with the capture of the bridges and the violence of the attack

mounted by General von Reichenau’s Sixth Army, which was sustained by

General Hoepner’s XVIth Armored Corps of two tank divisions and one

mechanized infantry division, convinced the Allied High Command that now, as

in 1914, the brunt of the German offensive was being carried out by the enemy’s

right wing and that they had taken the proper means to stop it. In fact, as late as

the evening of May 15 the Belgian, British and French forces were holding firm

on the Dyle line from Antwerp to Namur.

This was just what the German High Command wanted. It had now become

possible for it to spring the Manstein plan and deliver the haymaker in the

center. General Halder, the Chief of the Army General Staff, saw the situation—

and his opportunities—very clearly on the evening of May 13.

North of Namur [he wrote in his diary] we can count on a completed concentration of some

24 British and French and about 15 Belgian divisions. Against this our Sixth Army has 15

divisions on the front and six in reserve … We are strong enough there to fend off any enemy

attack. No need to bring up any more forces. South of Namur we face a weaker enemy. About

half our strength. Outcome of Meuse attack will decide if, when and where we will be able to

exploit this superiority. The enemy has no force worth mentioning behind this front.

No force worth mentioning behind this front, which, the next day, was

broken?

On May 16 Prime Minister Churchill flew to Paris to find out. By the

afternoon, when he drove to the Quai d’Orsay to see Premier Reynaud and

General Gamelin, German spearheads were sixty miles west of Sedan, rolling

along the undefended open country. Nothing very much stood between them and

Paris, or between them and the Channel, but Churchill did not know this.

“Where is the strategic reserve?” he asked Gamelin and, breaking into French,

“Où est la masse de manœuvre? ” The Commander in Chief of the Allied armies

turned to him with a shake of the head and a shrug and answered, “Aucune—

there is none. ”*

“I was dumfounded,” Churchill later related. It was unheard of that a great

army, when attacked, held no troops in reserve. “I admit,” says Churchill, “that

this was one of the greatest surprises I have had in my life. ”12

It was scarcely less a surprise to the German High Command, or at least to

Hitler and the generals at OKW if not to Halder. Twice during this campaign in

the West, which the Fuehrer himself directed, he hesitated. The first occasion

was on May 17 when a crisis of nerves overcame him. That morning Guderian,

who was a third of the way to the Channel with his panzer corps, received an

order to halt in his tracks. Intelligence had been received from the Luftwaffe that

the French were mounting a great counterattack to cut off the thin armored

German wedges which extended westward from Sedan. Hitler conferred hastily

with his Army Commander in Chief, Brauchitsch, and with Halder. He was

certain that a serious French threat was developing from the south. Rundstedt,

commander of Army Group A, the main force which had launched the

breakthrough over the Meuse, backed him up when they conferred later in the

day. He expected, he said, “a great surprise counteroffensive by strong French

forces from the Verdun and Châlons-sur-Marne areas.” The specter of a second

Marne rose in Hitler’s feverish mind. “I am keeping an eye on this,” he wrote

Mussolini the next day. “The miracle of the Marne of 1914 will not be

repeated!” 13

A very unpleasant day [Halder noted in his diary the evening of May 17]. The Fuehrer is

terribly nervous. He is worried over his own success, will risk nothing and insists on

restraining us. Puts forward the excuse that it is all because of his concern with the left flank

… [He] has brought only bewilderment and doubts.

The Nazi warlord showed no improvement during the next day despite the

avalanche of news about the French collapse. Halder recorded the crisis in his

diary of the eighteenth:

The Fuehrer has an unaccountable worry about the south flank. He rages and screams that

we are on the way to ruining the whole operation and that We are courting the danger of a

defeat. He won’t have any part in continuing the drive westward, let alone southwest, and

clings always to the idea of a thrust to the northwest. This is the subject of a most unpleasant

dispute between the Fuehrer on the one side and Brauchitsch and me on the other.

General Jodl of OKW, for whom the Fuehrer was nearly always right, also

noted the discord at the top.

Day of great tension [he wrote on the eighteenth]. The Commander in Chief of the Army

[Brauchitsch] has not carried out the intention of building up as quickly as possible a new

flanking position to the south … Brauchitsch and Halder are called immediately and ordered

peremptorily to adopt the necessary measures immediately.

But Halder had been right; the French had no forces with which to stage a

counterattack from the south. And though the panzer divisions, chafing at the bit

as they were, received orders to do no more than proceed with “a reconnaissance

in force” this was all they needed to press toward the Channel. By the morning

of May 19 a mighty wedge of seven armored divisions, driving relentlessly

westward north of the Somme River past the storied scenes of battle of the First

World War, was only some fifty miles from the Channel. On the evening of May

20, to the surprise of Hitler’s headquarters, the 2nd Panzer Division reached

Abbeville at the mouth of the Somme. The Belgians, the B.E.F. and three French

armies were trapped.

Fuehrer is beside himself with joy [Jodl scribbled in his diary that night]. Talks in words of

highest appreciation of the German Army and its leadership. Is working on the peace treaty,

which shall express the tenor: return of territory robbed over the last 400 years from the

German people, and of other values …

A special memorandum is in the files containing the emotion-choked words of the Fuehrer

when receiving the telephone report from the Commander in Chief of the Army about the

capture of Abbeville.

The only hope of the Allies to extricate themselves from this disastrous

encirclement was for the armies in Belgium to immediately turn southwest,

disengage themselves from the German Sixth Army attacking them there, fight

their way across the German armored wedge that stretched across northern

France to the sea and join up with fresh French forces pushing northward from

the Somme. This was in fact what General Gamelin ordered on the morning of

May 19, but he was replaced that evening by General Maxime Weygand, who

immediately canceled the order. Weygand, who had a formidable military

reputation gained in the First World War, wanted to confer first with the Allied

commanders in Belgium before deciding what to do. As a result, three days were

lost before Weygand came up with precisely the same plan as his predecessor.

The delay proved costly. There were still forty French, British and Belgian

battle-tested divisions in the north, and had they struck south across the thin

armored German line on May 19 as Gamelin ordered, they might have

succeeded in breaking through. By the time they moved, communications

between the various national commands had become chaotic and the several

Allied armies, hard pressed as they were, began to act at cross-purposes. At any

rate, the Weygand plan existed only in the General’s mind; no French troops

ever moved up from the Somme.

In the meantime the German High Command had thrown in all the infantry

troops that could be rushed up to strengthen the armored gap and enlarge it. By

May 24 Guderian’s tanks, driving up the Channel from Abbeville, had captured

Boulogne and surrounded Calais, the two main ports, and reached Gravelines,

some twenty miles down the coast from Dunkirk. The front in Belgium had

moved southwestward as the Allies attempted to detach themselves there. By the

24th, then, the British, French and Belgian armies in the north were compressed

into a relatively small triangle with its base along the Channel from Gravelines

to Terneuzen and its apex at Valenciennes, some seventy miles inland. There

was now no hope of breaking out of the trap. The only hope, and it seemed a

slim one, was possible evacuation by sea from Dunkirk.

It was at this juncture, on May 24, that the German armor, now within sight of

Dunkirk and poised along the Aa Canal between Gravelines and St.-Omer for

the final kill, received a strange—and to the soldiers in the field inexplicable—

order to halt their advance. It was the first of the German High Command’s

major mistakes in World War II and became a subject of violent controversy, not

only between the German generals themselves but among the military historians,

as to who was responsible and why. We shall return to that question in a moment

in the light of a mass of material now available. Whatever the reasons for this

stop order, it provided a miraculous reprieve to the Allies, and especially to the

British, leading as it did to the miracle of Dunkirk. But it did not save the

Belgians.

THE CAPITULATION OF KING LEOPOLD

King Leopold III of the Belgians surrendered early on the morning of May 28.

The headstrong young ruler, who had taken his country out of its alliance with

France and Britain into a foolish neutrality, who had refused to restore the

alliance even during the months when he knew the Germans were preparing a

massive assault across his border, who at the last moment, after Hitler had

struck, called on the French and British for military succor and received it, now

deserted them in a desperate hour, opening the dyke for German divisions to

pour through on the flank of the sorely pressed Anglo–French troops. Moreover,

he did it, as Churchill told the Commons on June 4, “without prior consultation,

with the least possible notice, without the advice of his ministers and upon his

own personal act.”

Actually he did it against the unanimous advice of his government, which he

was constitutionally sworn to follow. At 5 A.M. on May 25 there was a

showdown meeting at the King’s headquarters between the monarch and three

members of the cabinet, including the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister.

They urged him for the last time not to surrender personally and become a

prisoner of the Germans, for if he did he “would be degraded to the role of

Hacha” in Prague. They also reminded him that he was head of state as well as

Commander in Chief, and that if matters came to the worst he could exercise his

first office in exile, as the Queen of Holland and the King of Norway had

decided to do, until eventual Allied victory came.

“I have decided to stay,” Leopold answered. “The cause of the Allies is

lost. ”14

At 5 P.M. on May 27 he dispatched General Derousseaux, Deputy Chief of the

Belgian General Staff, to the Germans to ask for a truce. At 10 o’clock the

General brought back the German terms: “The Fuehrer demands that arms be

laid down unconditionally.” The King accepted unconditional surrender at 11

P.M. and proposed that fighting cease at 4 A.M., which it did.

Leopold’s capitulation was angrily denounced by Premier Reynaud of France

in a violent broadcast, and Belgian Premier Pierlot, also broadcasting from Paris

but in a more dignified tone, informed the Belgian people that the King had

acted against the unanimous advice of the government, broken his links with the

people and was no longer in a position to govern, and that the Belgian

government in exile would continue the struggle. Churchill when he spoke in the

House on May 28 reserved judgment on Leopold’s action but on June 4 joined in

the general criticism.

The controversy raged long after the war was over. Leopold’s defenders, and

there were many in and outside Belgium, believed that he had done the right and

honorable thing in sharing the fate of his soldiers and of the Belgian people. And

they made much of the claim that the King acted not as chief of state but as

Commander in Chief of the Belgian Army in surrendering.

That the battered Belgian troops were in desperate straits by May 27 there is

no dispute. Valiantly they had agreed to extend their front in order to free the

British and French to fight their way south. And that extended front was fast

collapsing though the Belgians fought doggedly. Also Leopold was not told that

on May 26 Lord Gort had received orders from London to withdraw to Dunkirk

and save what he could of the B.E.F. That is one side of the argument, but there

is another. The Belgian Army was under the over-all Allied Command and

Leopold made a separate peace without consulting it. In his defense it has been

pointed out that on May 27 at 12:30 P.M. he telegraphed Gort that he soon would

“be forced to capitulate to avoid a collapse.” But the British commander, who

was extremely busy and constantly on the move, did not receive it. He later

testified that he first heard of the surrender only shortly after 11 P.M. on May 27

and found himself “suddenly faced with an open gap of twenty miles between

Ypres and the sea through which enemy armored forces might reach the

beaches. ”15 To General Weygand, who was the King s superior military

commander, the news arrived by telegram from French liaison at Belgian

headquarters a little after 6 P.M. and it hit him, he later said, “like a bolt out of the

blue. There had been no warning …” 16

Finally, even as Commander in Chief of the armed forces, Leopold in this

constitutional, democratic monarchy was bound to accept the advice of his

government. Neither in that role nor certainly as chief of state did he have the

authority to surrender on his own. In the end the Belgian people, as was proper,

passed judgment on their sovereign. He was not recalled to the throne from

Switzerland, where he took refuge at the war’s end, until five years after it was

over. When the call came, on July 20, 1950, after 57 per cent of those voting in a

referendum had approved it, his return provoked such a violent reaction among

the populace that civil war threatened to break out. He soon abdicated in favor of

his son.

Whatever may be said of Leopold’s behavior, there should be no dispute—

though there has been*—about the magnificent way his Army fought. For a few

days in May I followed Reichenau’s Sixth Army through Belgium and saw for

myself the tenacity with which the Belgians struggled against insuperable odds.

Not once did they break under the unmerciful and unopposed bombing of the

Luftwaffe or when the German armor tried to cut through them. This could not

be said of certain other Allied troops in that campaign. The Belgians held out for

eighteen days and would have held out much longer had not they, like the B.E.F.

and the French northern armies, been caught in a trap which was not of their

making.

MIRACLE AT DUNKIRK

Ever since May 20, when Guderian’s tanks broke through to Abbeville on the

sea, the British Admiralty, on the personal orders of Churchill, had been

rounding up shipping for a possible evacuation of the B.E.F. and other Allied

forces from the Channel ports. Noncombatant personnel and other “useless

mouths” began to be ferried across the narrow sea to England at once. By May

24, as we have seen, the Belgian front to the north was near collapse, and to the

south the German armor, striking up the coast from Abbeville, after taking

Boulogne and enveloping Calais, had reached the Aa Canal only twenty miles

from Dunkirk. In between were caught the Belgian Army, the nine divisions of

the B.E.F. and ten divisions of the French First Army. Though the terrain on the

southern end of the pocket was bad tank country, being crisscrossed with canals,

ditches and flooded areas, Guderian’s and Reinhardt’s panzer corps already had

five bridgeheads across the main barrier, the Aa Canal, between Gravelines on

the sea and St.-Omer, and were poised for the knockout blow which would

hammer the Allied armies against the anvil of the advancing German Sixth and

Eighteenth armies pushing down from the northeast and utterly destroy them.

Suddenly on the evening of May 24 came the peremptory order from the High

Command, issued at the insistence of Hitler with the prompting of Rundstedt and

Goering but over the violent objections of Brauchitsch and Halder, that the tank

forces should halt on the canal line and attempt no further advance. This

furnished Lord Gort an unexpected and vital reprieve which he and the British

Navy and Air Force made the most of and which, as Rundstedt later perceived

and said, led “to one of the great turning points of the war.”

How did this inexplicable stop order on the threshold of what seemed certain

to be the greatest German victory of the campaign come about? What were the

reasons for it? And who was responsible? The questions have provoked one of

the greatest arguments of the war, among the German generals involved and

among the historians. The generals, led by Rundstedt and Halder, have put the

blame exclusively on Hitler. Churchill added further fuel to the controversy in

the second volume of his war memoirs by contending that the initiative for the

order came from Rundstedt and not Hitler and citing as evidence the war diaries

of Rundstedt’s own headquarters. In the maze of conflicting and contradictory

testimony it has been difficult to ascertain the facts. In the course of preparing

this chapter the author wrote General Halder himself for further elucidation and

promptly received a courteous and detailed reply. On the basis of this and much

other evidence now in, certain conclusions may be drawn and the controversy

settled, if not conclusively, at least fairly convincingly.

As for responsibility for the famous order, Rundstedt, despite his later

assertions to the contrary, must share it with Hitler. The Fuehrer visited the

General’s Army Group A headquarters at Charleville on the morning of May 24.

Rundstedt proposed that the panzer divisions on the canal line before Dunkirk be

halted until more infantry could be brought up. * Hitler agreed, observing that

the armor should be conserved for later operations against the French south of

the Somme. Moreover, he declared that if the pocket in which the Allies were

entrapped became too small it would hamper the activities of the Luftwaffe.

Probably Rundstedt, with the approval of the Fuehrer, issued the stop order at

once, for Churchill notes that the B.E.F. intercepted a German radio message

giving orders to that effect at 11:42 that morning. 17 Hitler and Rundstedt were at

that moment in conference.

At any rate, that evening Hitler issued the formal order from OKW, both Jodl

and Halder noting it in their diaries. The General Staff Chief was most unhappy.

Our left wing, consisting of armor and motorized forces [he wrote in his diary], will thus be

stopped dead in its tracks on the direct orders of the Fuehrer! Finishing off the encircled

enemy army is to be left to the Air Force!

This exclamation mark of contempt indicates that Goering had intervened

with Hitler, and it is now known that he did. He offered to liquidate the

entrapped enemy troops with his Air Force alone! The reasons for his ambitious

and vain proposal were given the writer in the letter from Halder on July 19,

1957.

During the following days [i.e., after May 24] it became known that Hitler’s decision was

mainly influenced by Goering. To the dictator the rapid movement of the Army, whose risks

and prospects of success he did not understand because of his lack of military schooling,

became almost sinister. He was constantly oppressed by a feeling of anxiety that a reversal

loomed …

Goering, who knew his Fuehrer well, took advantage of this anxiety. He offered to fight the

rest of the great battle of encirclement alone with his Luftwaffe, thus eliminating the risk of

having to use the valuable panzer formations. He made this proposal … for a reason which

was characteristic of the unscrupulously ambitious Goering. He wanted to secure for his Air

Force, after the surprisingly smooth operations of the Army up to then, the decisive final act in

the great battle and thus gain the glory of success before the whole world.

General Halder then tells in his letter of an account given him by Brauchitsch

after a talk which the latter had with the Luftwaffe Generals Milch and

Kesselring in Nuremberg jail in January 1946, in which the Air Force officers

declared

that Goering at that time [May 1940] emphasized to Hitler that if the great victory in battle

then developing could be claimed exclusively by the Army generals, the prestige of the

Fuehrer in the German homeland would be damaged beyond repair. That could be prevented

only if the Luftwaffe and not the Army carried out the decisive battle.

It is fairly clear, then, that Hitler’s idea, prompted by Goering and Rundstedt

but strenuously opposed by Brauchitsch and Halder, was to let the Air Force and

Bock’s Army Group B, which, without any armor to speak of, was slowly

driving back the Belgians and British southwest to the Channel, mop up the

enemy troops in the pocket. Rundstedt’s Army Group A, with some seven tank

divisions, halted on the water lines west and south of Dunkirk, would merely

stand pat and keep the enemy hemmed in. But neither the Luftwaffe nor Bock’s

army group proved able to achieve their objectives. On the morning of May 26,

Halder was fuming in his diary that “these orders from the top just make no

sense … The tanks are stopped as if they were paralyzed.”

Finally, on the evening of May 26, Hitler rescinded the stop order and agreed

that, in view of Bock’s slow advance in Belgium and the movement of transports

off the coast, the armored forces could resume their advance on Dunkirk. By

then it was late; the cornered enemy had had time to strengthen his defenses and

behind them was beginning to slip away to sea.

We now know that there were political reasons too for Hitler’s fatal order.

Halder had noted in his diary on May 25, a day, he says, that started “off with

one of those painful wrangles between Brauchitsch and the Fuehrer on the next

moves in the battle of encirclement,” that

now political command has formed the fixed idea that the battle of decision must not be

fought on Flemish soil, but rather in northern France.

This entry puzzled me and when I wrote to the former General Staff Chief I

asked him if he could recall Hitler’s political reasons for wanting to finish this

battle in northern France rather than in Belgium. Halder recalled them very well.

“According to my still quite lively memory,” he replied, “Hitler, in our talks at

the time, supported his reasons for the stop order with two main lines of thought.

The first were military reasons: the unsuitable nature of the terrain for tanks, the

resulting high losses which would weaken the impending attack on the rest of

France, and so on.” Then, writes Halder, the Fuehrer cited

a second reason which he knew that we, as soldiers, could not argue against since it was

political and not military.

This second reason was that for political reasons he did not want the decisive final battle,

which inevitably would cause great damage to the population, to take place in territory

inhabited by the Flemish people. He had the intention, he said, of making an independent

National Socialist region out of the territory inhabited by the German-descended Flemish,

thereby binding them close to Germany. His supporters on Flemish soil had been active in this

direction for a long time; he had promised them to keep their land free from the damage of

war. If he did not keep this promise now, their confidence in him would be severely damaged.

That would be a political disadvantage for Germany which he, as the politically responsible

leader, must avoid.

Absurd? If this seems to be another of Hitler’s sudden aberrations (Halder

writes that he and Brauchitsch were “not convinced by this reasoning”), other

political consideration which he confided to other generals were more sane—and

important. Describing after the war Hitler’s meeting with Rundstedt on May 24,

General Guenther Blumentritt, the latter’s chief of operations, told Liddell Hart,

the British military writer:

Hitler was in very good humor … and gave us his opinion that the war would be finished in

six weeks. After that he wished to conclude a reasonable peace with France and then the way

would be free for an agreement with Britain …

He then astonished us by speaking with admiration of the British Empire, of the necessity

for its existence, and of the civilization that Britain had brought into the world … He said that

all he wanted from Britain was that she should acknowledge Germany’s position on the

continent. The return of Germany’s colonies would be desirable but not essential … He

concluded by saying that his aim was to make peace with Britain on a basis that she would

regard as compatible with her honor to accept. 18

Such thoughts Hitler was to express often during the next few weeks to his

generals, to Ciano and Mussolini and finally in public. Ciano was astonished a

month later to find the Nazi dictator, then at the zenith of his success, harping

about the importance of maintaining the British Empire as “a factor in world,

equilibrium,” 19 and on July 13 Halder, in his diary, described the Fuehrer as

sorely puzzled over Britain’s failure to accept peace. To bring England to her

knees by force, he told his generals that day, “would not benefit Germany …

only Japan, the United States and others.”

It may be, then, though some doubt it, that Hitler restrained his armored forces

before Dunkirk in order to spare Britain a bitter humiliation and thereby

facilitate a peace settlement. It would have to be, as he said, a peace in which the

British left Germany free to turn once more eastward, this time against Russia.

London would have to recognize, as he also said, the Third Reich’s domination

of the Continent. For the next couple of months Hitler would be confident that

such a peace was within his grasp. No more now than in all the years before did

he comprehend the character of the British nation or the kind of world its leaders

and its people were determined to fight for—to the end.

Nor did he and his generals, ignorant of the sea as they were—and remained

—dream that the sea-minded British could evacuate a third of a million men

from a small battered port and from the exposed beaches right under their noses.

At three minutes before seven on the evening of May 26, shortly after Hitler’s

stop order had been canceled, the British Admiralty signaled the beginning of

“Operation Dynamo, ” as the Dunkirk evacuation was called. That night the

German armor resumed its attack on the port from the west and south, but now

the panzers found it hard going. Lord Gort had had time to deploy against them

three infantry divisions with heavy artillery support. The tanks made little

progress. In the meantime the evacuation began. An armada of 850 vessels of all

sizes, shapes and methods of propulsion, from cruisers and destroyers to small

sailboats and Dutch skoots, many of them manned by civilian volunteers from

the English coastal towns, converged on Dunkirk. The first day, May 27, they

took off 7,669 troops; the next day, 17,804; the following day, 47,310; and on

May 30, 53,823, for a total of 126,606 during the first four days. This was far

more than the Admiralty had hoped to get out. When the operation began it

counted on evacuating only about 45,000 men in the two days’ time it then

thought it would have.

It was not until this fourth day of Operation Dynamo, on May 30, that the

German High Command woke up to what was happening. For four days the

communiqués of OKW had been reiterating that the encircled enemy armies

were doomed. A communiqué of May 29, which I noted in my diary, stated

flatly: “The fate of the French army in Artois is sealed … The British army,

which has been compressed into the territory … around Dunkirk, is also going to

its destruction before our concentric attack.”

But it wasn’t; it was going to sea. Without its heavy arms and equipment, to

be sure, but with the certainty that the men would live to fight another day.

As late as the morning of May 30, Halder confided confidentially in his diary

that “the disintegration of the enemy which we have encircled continues.” Some

of the British, he conceded, were “fighting with tooth and nail:” the others were

“fleeing to the coast and trying to get across the Channel on anything that floats.

Le Débâcle,” he concluded, alluding to Zola’s famous novel of the French

collapse in the Franco–Prussian War.

By afternoon, after a session with Brauchitsch, the General Staff Chief had

awakened to the significance of the swarms of miserable little boats on which

the British were fleeing.

Brauchitsch is angry … The pocket would have been closed at the coast if only our armor

had not been held back. The bad weather has grounded the Luftwaffe and we must now stand

by and watch countless thousands of the enemy get away to England right under our noses.

That was, in fact, what they watched. Despite increased pressure which was

immediately applied by the Germans on all sides of the pocket, the British lines

held and more troops were evacuated. The next day, May 31, was the biggest

day of all. Some 68,000 men were embarked for England, a third of them from

the beaches, the rest from the Dunkirk harbor. A total of 194,620 men had now

been taken out, more than four times the number originally hoped for.

Where was the famed Luftwaffe? Part of the time, as Halder noted, it was

grounded by bad weather. The rest of the time it encountered unexpected

opposition from the Royal Air Force, which from bases just across the Channel

successfully challenged it for the first time. * Though outnumbered, the new

British Spitfires proved more than a match for the Messerschmitts and they

mowed down the cumbersome German bombers. On a few occasions Goering’s

planes arrived over Dunkirk between British sorties and did such extensive

damage to the port that for a time it was unusable and the troops had to be lifted

exclusively from the beaches. The Luftwaffe also pressed several strong attacks

on the shipping and accounted for most of the 243—out of 861—vessels sunk.

But it failed to achieve what Goering had promised Hitler: the annihilation of the

B.E.F. On June 1, when it carried out its heaviest attack (and suffered its

heaviest losses—each side lost thirty planes), sinking three British destroyers

and a number of small transports, the second-highest day’s total was evacuated

—64,429 men. By dawn of the next day, only 4,000 British troops remained in

the perimeter, protected by 100,000 French who now manned the defenses.

Medium German artillery had in the meantime come within range and

daytime evacuation operations had to be abandoned. The Luftwaffe at that time

did not operate after dark and during the nights of June 2 and 3 the remainder of

the B.E.F. and 60,000 French troops were successfully brought out. Dunkirk,

still defended stubbornly by 40,000 French soldiers, held out until the morning

of June 4. By that day 338,226 British and French soldiers had escaped the

German clutches. They were no longer an army; most of them, understandably,

were for the moment in a pitiful shape. But they were battle-tried; they knew that

if properly armed and adequately covered from the air they could stand up to the

Germans. Most of them, when the balance in armament was achieved, would

prove it—and on beaches not far down the Channel coast from where they had

been rescued.

A deliverance Dunkirk was to the British. But Churchill reminded them in the

House on June 4 that “wars are not won by evacuations.” The predicament of

Great Britain was indeed grim, more dangerous than it had been since the

Norman landings nearly a millennium before. It had no army to defend the

islands. The Air Force had been greatly weakened in France. Only the Navy

remained, and the Norwegian campaign had shown how vulnerable the big

fighting ships were to land-based aircraft. Now the Luftwaffe bombers were

based but five or ten minutes away across the narrow Channel. France, to be

sure, still held out below the Somme and the Aisne. But its best troops and

armament had been lost in Belgium and in northern France, its small and

obsolescent Air Force had been largely destroyed, and its two most illustrious

generals, Marshal Pétain and General Weygand, who now began to dominate the

shaky government, had no more stomach for battle against such a superior foe.

These dismal facts were very much on the mind of Winston Churchill when

he rose in the House of Commons on June 4, 1940, while the last transports from

Dunkirk were being unloaded, determined, as he wrote later, to show not only

his own people but the world—and especially the U.S.A.—“that our resolve to

fight on was based on serious grounds.” It was on this occasion that he uttered

his famous peroration, which will be long remembered and will surely rank with

the greatest ever made down the ages:

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall

into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail.

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight in the seas and oceans, we

shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our

island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing

grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never

surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it

were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the

British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all

its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.

THE COLLAPSE OF FRANCE

The determination of the British to fight on does not seem to have troubled

Hitler’s thoughts. He was sure they would see the light after he had finished off

France, which he now proceeded to do. The morning after Dunkirk fell, on June

5, the Germans launched a massive assault on the Somme and soon they were

attacking in overwhelming strength all along a 400-mile front that stretched

across France from Abbeville to the Upper Rhine. The French were doomed.

Against 143 German divisions, including ten armored, they could deploy only 65

divisions, most of them second-rate, for the best units and most of the armor had

been expended in Belgium. Little was left of the weak French Air Force. The

British could contribute but one infantry division, which had been in the Saar,

and parts of an armored division. The R.A.F. could spare few planes for this

battle unless it were to leave the British Isles themselves defenseless. Finally, the

French High Command, now dominated by Pétain and Weygand, had become

sodden with defeatism. Nevertheless some French units fought with great

bravery and tenacity, temporarily stopping even the German armor here and

there, and standing up resolutely to the incessant pounding of the Luftwaffe.

But it was an unequal struggle. In “victorious confusion,” as Telford Taylor

has aptly put it, the German troops surged across France like a tidal wave, the

confusion coming because there were so many of them and they were moving so

fast and often getting in each other’s way. 20 On June 10 the French government

hastily departed Paris and on June 14 the great city, the glory of France, which

was undefended, was occupied by General von Kuechler’s Eighteenth Army.

The swastika was immediately hoisted on the Eiffel Tower. On June 16, Premier

Reynaud, Whose government had fled to Bordeaux, resigned and was replaced

by Pétain, who the next day asked the Germans, through the Spanish

ambassador, for an armistice.* Hitler replied the same day that he would first

have to consult his ally, Mussolini. For this strutting warrior, after making sure

that the French armies were hopelessly beaten, had, like a jackal, hopped into the

war on June 10, to try to get in on the spoils.

THE DUCE PLUNGES HIS SMALL DAGGER INTO FRANCE’S BACK

Despite his preoccupation with the unfolding of the Battle of the West, Hitler

had found time to write Mussolini at surprisingly frequent intervals, keeping him

informed of the mounting German victories.

After the first letter on May 7, apprising the Duce that he was attacking

Belgium and Holland “to ensure their neutrality” and saying he would keep his

friend informed of his progress so that the Duce could make his own decisions in

time, there were further ones on May 13, 18 and 25, each more detailed and

enthusiastic than the other.22 Though the generals, as Halder’s diary confirms,

couldn’t have cared less what Italy did—whether it came into the war or not—

the Fuehrer for some reason attached importance to Italian intervention. As soon

as the Netherlands and Belgium had surrendered and the Anglo–French northern

armies had been smashed and the surviving British troops began taking to the

boats at Dunkirk, Mussolini decided to slither into the war. He informed Hitler

by letter On May 30 that the date would be June 5. Hitler replied immediately

that he was “most profoundly moved.”

If there could still be anything which could strengthen my unshakable belief in the

victorious outcome of this war [Hitler wrote on May 31] it was your statement … The mere

fact of your entering the war is an element calculated to deal the front of our enemies a

staggering blow.

The Fuehrer asked his ally, however, to postpone his date for three days—he

wanted to knock out the rest of the French Air Force first, he said—and

Mussolini obliged by setting it back five days, to June 10. Hostilities, the Duce

said, would begin the following day.

They did not amount to much. By June 18, when Hitler summoned his junior

partner to Munich to discuss an armistice with France, some thirty-two Italian

divisions, after a week of “fighting,” had been unable to budge a scanty French

force of six divisions on the Alpine front and farther south along the Riviera,

though the defenders were now threatened by assault in the rear from the

Germans sweeping down the Rhone Valley. * On June 21 Ciano noted in his

diary:

Mussolini is quite humiliated because our troops have not moved a step forward. Even

today they have not succeeded in advancing and have halted in front of the first French

fortification which put up some resistance.23

The hollowness of Mussolini’s boasted military might was exposed at the very

beginning and this put the deflated Italian dictator in a dour mood as he and

Ciano set out by train on the evening of June 17 to confer with Hitler about the

armistice with France.

Mussolini dissatisfied [Ciano wrote in his diary]. This sudden peace disquiets him. During

the trip we speak at length in order to clarify conditions under which the armistice is to be

granted to the French. The Duce … would like to go so far as the total occupation of French

territory and demands the surrender of the French fleet. But he is aware that his opinion has

only a consultative value. The war has been won by Hitler without any active military

participation on the part of Italy, and it is Hitler who will have the last word. This naturally

disturbs and saddens Mussolini.

The mildness of the Fuehrer’s “last word” came as a distinct shock to the

Italians when they conferred with the Nazi warlord at the Fuehrerhaus at Munich

where Chamberlain and Daladier had been so accommodating to the two

dictators regarding Czechoslovakia less than two years before. The secret

German memorandum of the meeting24 makes clear that Hitler was determined

above all not to allow the French fleet to fall into the hands of the British. He

was also concerned lest the French government flee to North Africa or to

London and continue the war. For that reason the armistice terms—the final

terms of peace might be something else—would have to be moderate, designed

to keep “a French government functioning on French soil” and “the French fleet

neutralized.” He abruptly dismissed Mussolini’s demands for the Italian

occupation of the Rhone Valley, including Toulon (the great French

Mediterranean naval base, where most of the fleet was concentrated) and

Marseilles, and the disarmament of Corsica, Tunisia and Djibouti. The last town,

the gateway to Italian-held Ethiopia, was thrown in by Ciano, the German notes

say, “in an undertone.”

Even the bellicose Ribbentrop, Ciano found, was “exceptionally moderate and

calm, and in favor of peace.” The warrior Mussolini was “very much

embarrassed,” his son-in-law noted.

He feels that his role is secondary … In truth, the Duce fears that the hour of peace is

growing near and sees fading once again that unattainable dream of his life: glory on the field

of battle. 25

Mussolini was unable even to get Hitler to agree to joint armistice

negotiations with the French. The Fuehrer was not going to share his triumph at

a very historic spot (he declined to name it to his friend) with this Johnny-come-

lately. But he promised the Duce that his armistice with France would not come

into effect until the French had also signed one with Italy.

Mussolini left Munich bitter and frustrated, but Ciano had been very favorably

impressed by a side of Hitler which his diaries make clear he had not previously

seen or suspected.

From all that he [Hitler] says [he wrote in his diary as they returned to Rome] it is clear that

he wants to act quickly to end it all. Hitler is now the gambler, who has made a big scoop and

would like to get up from the table, risking nothing more. Today he speaks with a reserve and

a perspicacity which, after such a victory, are really astonishing. I cannot be accused of

excessive tenderness toward him, but today I truly admire him.26

THE SECOND ARMISTICE AT COMPIEGNE

I followed the German Army into Paris that June, always the loveliest of

months in the majestic capital, which was now stricken, and on June 19 got wind

of where Hitler was going to lay down his terms for the armistice which Pétain

had requested two days before. It was to be on the same spot where the German

Empire had capitulated to France and her allies on November 11, 1918: in the

little clearing in the woods at Compiègne. There the Nazi warlord would get his

revenge, and the place itself would add to the sweetness of it for him. On May

20, a bare ten days after the great offensive in the West had started and on the

day the German tanks reached Abbeville, the idea had come to him. Jodl noted it

in his diary that day: “Fuehrer is working on the peace treaty … First

negotiations in the Forest of Compiègne.” Late on the afternoon of June 19 I

drove out there and found German Army engineers demolishing the wall of the

museum where the old wagon-lit of Marshal Foch, in which the 1918 armistice

was signed, had been preserved. By the time I left, the engineers, working with

pneumatic drills, had torn the wall down and were pulling the car out to the

tracks in the center of the clearing on the exact spot, they said, where it had

stood at 5 A.M. on November 11,1918, when at the dictation of Foch the German

emissaries put their signatures to the armistice.

And so it was that on the afternoon of June 21 I stood by the edge of the forest

at Compiègne to observe the latest and greatest of Hitler’s triumphs, of which, in

the course of my work, I had seen so many over the last turbulent years. It was

one of the loveliest summer days I ever remember in France. A warm June sun

beat down on the stately trees—elms, oaks, cypresses and pines—casting

pleasant shadows on the wooded avenues leading to the little circular clearing.

At 3:15 P.M. precisely, Hitler arrived in his big Mercedes, accompanied by

Goering, Brauchitsch, Keitel, Raeder, Ribbentrop and Hess, all in their various

uniforms, and Goering, the lone Field Marshal of the Reich, fiddling with his

field marshal’s baton. They alighted from their automobiles some two hundred

yards away, in front of the Alsace-Lorraine statue, which was draped with

German war flags so that the Fuehrer could not see (though I remembered from

previous visits in happier days) the large sword, the sword of the victorious

Allies of 1918, sticking through a limp eagle representing the German Empire of

the Hohenzollerns. Hitler glanced at the monument and strode on.

I observed his face [I wrote in my diary]. It was grave, solemn, yet brimming with revenge.

There was also in it, as in his springy step, a note of the triumphant conqueror, the defier of the

world. There was something else … a sort of scornful, inner joy at being present at this great

reversal of fate—a reversal he himself had wrought.

When he reached the little opening in the forest and his personal standard had

been run up in the center of it, his attention was attracted by a great granite block

which stood some three feet above the ground.

Hitler, followed by the others, walks slowly over to it [I am quoting my diary], steps up,

and reads the inscription engraved (in French) in great high letters:

“HERE ON THE ELEVENTH OF NOVEMBER 1918 SUCCUMBED THE CRIMINAL

PRIDE OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE—VANQUISHED BY THE FREE PEOPLES WHICH

IT TRIED TO ENSLAVE.”

Hitler reads it and Goering reads it. They all read it, standing there in the June sun and the

silence. I look for the expression in Hitler’s face. I am but fifty yards from him and see him

through my glasses as though he were directly in front of me. I have seen that face many times

at the great moments of his life. But today! It is afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph.

He steps off the monument and contrives to make even this gesture a master-piece of

contempt. He glances back at it, contemptuous, angry—angry, you almost feel, because he

cannot wipe out the awful, provoking lettering with one sweep of his high Prussian boot.* He

glances slowly around the clearing, and now, as his eyes meet ours, you grasp the depth of his

hatred. But there is triumph there too—revengeful, triumphant hate. Suddenly, as though his

face were not giving quite complete expression to his feelings, he throws his whole body into

harmony with his mood. He swiftly snaps his hands on his hips, arches his shoulders, plants

his feet wide apart. It is a magnificent gesture of defiance, of burning contempt for this place

now and all that it has stood for in the twenty-two years since it witnessed the humbling of the

German Empire.

Hitler and his party then entered the armistice railway car, the Fuehrer seating

himself in the chair occupied by Foch in 1918. Five minutes later the French

delegation arrived, headed by General Charles Huntziger, commander of the

Second Army at Sedan, and made up of an admiral, an Air Force general and

one civilian, Léon Noël, the former ambassador to Poland, who was now

witnessing his second debacle wrought by German arms. They looked shattered,

but retained a tragic dignity. They had not been told that they would be led to

this proud French shrine to undergo such a humiliation, and the shock was no

doubt just what Hitler had calculated. As Halder wrote in his diary that evening

after being given an eyewitness account by Brauchitsch:

The French had no warning that they would be handed the terms at the very site of the

negotiations in 1918. They were apparently shaken by this arrangement and at first inclined to

be sullen.

Perhaps it was natural, even for a German so cultivated as Halder, or

Brauchitsch, to mistake solemn dignity for sullenness. The French, one saw at

once, were certainly dazed. Yet, contrary to the reports at the time, they tried, as

we now know from the official German minutes of the meetings found among

the captured Nazi secret papers, 27 to soften the harsher portions of the Fuehrer’s

terms and to eliminate those which they thought were dishonorable. But they

tried in vain.

Hitler and his entourage left the wagon-lit as soon as General Keitel had read

the preamble of the armistice terms to the French, leaving the negotiations in the

hands of his OKW Chief, but allowing him no leeway in departing from the

conditions which he himself had laid down.

Huntziger told the Germans at once, as soon as he had read them, that they

were “hard and merciless,” much worse than those which France had handed

Germany here in 1918. Moreover, if “another country beyond the Alps, which

had not defeated France (Huntziger was too contemptuous of Italy even to name

her), advanced similar demands France would in no circumstances submit. She

would fight to the bitter end … It was therefore impossible for him to put his

signature to the German armistice agreement …”

General Jodl, the Number Two officer at OKW, who presided temporarily at

this moment, had not expected such defiant words from a hopelessly beaten foe

and replied that though he could not help express his “understanding” for what

Huntziger had said about the Italians nevertheless he had no power to change the

Fuehrer’s terms. All he could do, he said, was “to give explanations and clear up

obscure points.” The French would have to take the armistice document or leave

it, as it was.

The Germans had been annoyed that the French delegation had arrived

without authority to conclude an armistice except with the express agreement of

the government at Bordeaux. By a miracle of engineering and perhaps with some

luck they succeeded in setting up a telephone connection from the old sleeping

car right through the battle lines, where the fighting still continued, to Bordeaux.

The French delegates were authorized to use it to transmit the text of the

armistice terms and to discuss it with their government. Dr. Schmidt, who served

as interpreter, was directed to listen in on the tapped conversations from an

Army communications van a few yards away behind a clump of trees. The next

day I myself contrived to hear the German recording of part of the conversation

between Huntziger and General Weygand.

To the credit of the latter, who bears a grave responsibility for French

defeatism and the final surrender and the break with Britain, it must be recorded

that he at least strenuously objected to many of the German demands. One of the

most odious of them obligated the French to turn over to the Reich all anti-Nazi

German refugees in France and in her territories. Weygand called this

dishonorable in view of the French tradition of the right of asylum, but when it

was discussed the next day the arrogant Keitel would not listen to its being

deleted. “The German émigrés,” he shouted, were “the greatest warmongers.”

They had “betrayed their own people.” They must be handed over “at all costs.”

The French made no protest against a clause which stated that all their nationals

caught fighting with another country against Germany would be treated as

“francs-tireurs”—that is, immediately shot. This was aimed against De Gaulle,

who was already trying to organize a Free French force in Britain, and both

Weygand and Keitel knew it was a crude violation of the primitive rules of war.

Nor did the French question a paragraph which provided for all prisoners of war

to remain in captivity until the conclusion of peace. Weygand was sure the

British would be conquered within three weeks and the French POWs thereafter

released. Thus he condemned a million and a half Frenchmen to war prison

camps for five years.

The crux of the armistice treaty was the disposal of the French Navy.

Churchill, as France tottered, had offered to release her from her pledge not to

make a separate peace if the French Navy were directed to sail for British ports.

Hitler was determined that this should not take place; he fully realized, as he told

Mussolini on June 18, that it would immeasurably strengthen Britain. With so

much at stake he had to make a concession, or at least a promise, to the beaten

foe. The armistice agreement stipulated that the French fleet would be

demobilized and disarmed and the ships laid up in their home ports. In return for

this

the German Government solemnly declares to the French Government that it does not intend

to use for its own purposes in the war the French fleet which is in ports under German

supervision. Furthermore, they solemnly and expressly declare that they have no intention of

raising any claim to the French war fleet at the time of the conclusion of peace.

Like almost all of Hitler’s promises, this one too would be broken.

Finally, Hitler left the French government an unoccupied zone in the south

and southeast in which it ostensibly was free to govern. This was an astute move.

It would not only divide France itself geographically and administratively; it

would make difficult if not impossible the formation of a French government-in-

exile and quash any plans of the politicians in Bordeaux to move the seat of

government to French North Africa—a design which almost succeeded, being

defeated in the end not by the Germans but by the French defeatists: Pétain,

Weygand, Laval and their supporters. Moreover, Hitler knew that the men who

had now seized control of the French government at Bordeaux were enemies of

French democracy and might be expected to be co-operative in helping him set

up the Nazi New Order in Europe.

Yet on the second day of the armistice negotiations at Compiègne the French

delegates continued to bicker and delay. One reason for the delay was that

Huntziger insisted that Weygand give him not an authorization to sign but an

order—no one in France wanted to take the responsibility. Finally, at 6:30 P.M.

Keitel issued an ultimatum. The French must accept or reject the German

armistice terms within an hour. Within the hour the French government

capitulated. At 6:50 P.M. on June 22, 1940, Huntziger and Keitel signed the

armistice treaty.*

I listened to the last scene as it was picked up by the hidden microphones in

the wagon-lit. Just before he signed, the French General, his voice quivering,

said he wished to make a personal statement. I took it down in French, as he

spoke.

I declare that the French Government has ordered me to sign these terms of armistice …

Forced by the fate of arms to cease the struggle in which we were engaged on the side of the

Allies, France sees imposed on her very hard conditions. France has the right to expect in the

future negotiations that Germany show a spirit which will permit the two great neighboring

countries to live and work in peace.

Those negotiations—for a peace treaty—would never take place, but the spirit

which the Nazi Third Reich would have shown, if they had, soon became

evident as the occupation became harsher and the pressure on the servile Pétain

regime increased. France was now destined to become a German vassal, as

Pétain, Weygand and Laval apparently believed—and accepted.

A light rain began to fall as the delegates left the armistice car and drove

away. Down the road through the woods you could see an unbroken line of

refugees making their way home on weary feet, on bicycles, on carts, a few

fortunate ones on old trucks. I walked out to the clearing. A gang of German

Army engineers, shouting lustily, had already started to move the old wagon-lit.

“Where to?” I asked.

“To Berlin,” they said. *

The Franco–Italian armistice was signed in Rome two days later. Mussolini

was able to occupy only what his troops had conquered, which meant a few

hundred yards of French territory, and to impose a fifty-mile demilitarized zone

opposite him in France and Tunisia. The armistice was signed at 7:35 P.M. on

June 24. Six hours later the guns in France lapsed into silence.

France, which had held out unbeaten for four years the last time, was out of

the war after six weeks. German troops stood guard over most of Europe, from

the North Cape above the Arctic Circle to Bordeaux, from the English Channel

to the River Bug in eastern Poland. Adolf Hitler had reached the pinnacle. The

former Austrian waif, who had been the first to unite the Germans in a truly

national State, this corporal of the First World War, had now become the

greatest of German conquerors. All that stood between him and the

establishment of German hegemony in Europe under his dictatorship was one

indomitable Englishman, Winston Churchill, and the determined people

Churchill led, who did not recognize defeat when it stared them in the face and

who now stood alone, virtually unarmed, their island home besieged by the

mightiest military machine the world had ever seen.

HITLER PLAYS FOR PEACE

Ten days after the German onslaught on the West began, on the evening

German tanks reached Abbeville, General Jodl, after describing in his diary how

the Fuehrer was “beside himself with joy,” added: “… is working on the peace

treaty … Britain can get a separate peace any time after restitution of the

colonies.” That was May 20. For several weeks thereafter Hitler seems to have

had no doubts that, with France knocked out, Britain would be anxious to make

peace. His terms, from the German point of view, seemed most generous,

considering the beating the British had taken in Norway and in France. He had

expounded them to General von Rundstedt on May 24, expressing his admiration

of the British Empire and stressing the “necessity” for its existence. All he

wanted from London, he said, was a free hand on the Continent.

So certain was he that the British would agree to this that even after the fall of

France he made no plans for continuing the war against Britain, and the vaunted

General Staff, which supposedly planned with Prussian thoroughness for every

contingency far in advance, did not bother to furnish him any. Halder, the Chief

of the General Staff, made no mention of the subject at this time in his

voluminous diary entries. He was more disturbed about Russian threats in the

Balkans and the Baltic than about the British.

Indeed, why should Great Britain fight on alone against helpless odds?

Especially when it could get a peace that would leave it, unlike France, Poland

and all the other defeated lands, unscathed, intact and free? This was a question

asked everywhere except in Downing Street, where, as Churchill later revealed,

it was never even discussed, because the answer was taken for granted. 28 But the

German dictator did not know this, and when Churchill began to state it publicly

—that Britain was not quitting—Hitler apparently did not believe it. Not even

when on June 4, after the evacuation from Dunkirk, the Prime Minister had

made his resounding speech about fighting on in the hills and on the beaches; not

even when on June 18, after Pétain had asked for an armistice, Churchill

reiterated in the Commons Britain’s “inflexible resolve to continue the war” and

in another one of his eloquent and memorable perorations concluded:

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British

Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say: “This was their finest

hour.”

These could be merely soaring words from a gifted orator, and so Hitler, a

dazzling orator himself, must have thought. He must have been encouraged too

by soundings in neutral capitals and by the appeals for ending the war that now

emanated from them. On June 28 a confidential message arrived for Hitler from

the Pope—analogous communications were addressed to Mussolini and

Churchill—offering his mediation for “a just and honorable peace” and declaring

that before initiating this step he wished to ascertain confidentially how it would

be received.29 The King of Sweden was also active in proposing peace to both

London and Berlin.

In the United States the German Embassy, under the direction of Hans

Thomsen, the chargé d’affaires, was spending every dollar it could lay its hands

on to support the isolationists in keeping America out of the war and thus

discourage Britain from continuing it. The captured German Foreign Office

documents are full of messages from Thomsen reporting on the embassy’s

efforts to sway American public opinion in Hitler’s favor. The party conventions

were being held that summer and Thomsen was bending every effort to influence

their foreign-policy planks, especially that of the Republicans.

On June 12, for example, he cabled Berlin in code “most urgent, top secret”

that a “well-known Republican Congressman,” who was working “closely” with

the German Embassy, had offered, for $3,000, to invite fifty isolationist

Republican Congressmen to the Republican convention “so that they may work

on the delegates in favor of an isolationist foreign policy.” The same individual,

Thomsen reported, wanted $30,000 to help pay for full-page advertisements in

the American newspapers, to be headed “Keep America Out of the War!” *30

The next day Thomsen was wiring Berlin about a new project he said he was

negotiating through an American literary agent to have five well-known

American writers write books “from which I await great results.” For this project

he needed $20,000, a sum Ribbentrop okayed a few days later. †31

One of Hitler’s first public utterances about his hopes for peace with Britain

had been given Karl von Wiegand, a Hearst correspondent, and published in the

New York Journal-American on June 14. A fortnight later Thomsen informed

the German Foreign Office that he had printed 100,000 extra copies of the

interview and that

I was able furthermore through a confidential agent to induce the isolationist Representative

Thorkelson [Republican of Montana] to have the Fuehrer interview inserted in the

Congressional Record of June 22. This assures the interview once more the widest

distribution.33

The Nazi Embassy in Washington grasped at every straw. At one point during

the summer its press attaché was forwarding what he said was a suggestion of

Fulton Lewis, Jr., the radio commentator, whom he described as an admirer of

“Germany and the Fuehrer and a highly respected American journalist.”

The Fuehrer should address telegrams to Roosevelt … reading approximately as follows:

“You, Mr. Roosevelt, have repeatedly appealed to me and always expressed the wish that a

sanguinary war be avoided. I did not declare war on England; on the contrary I always stressed

that I did not wish to destroy the British Empire. My repeated requests to Churchill to be

reasonable and to arrive at an honorable peace treaty were stubbornly rejected by Churchill. I

am aware that England will suffer severely when I order total war to be launched against the

British Isles. I ask you therefore to approach Churchill on your part and prevail upon him to

abandon his senseless obstinacy.” Lewis added that Roosevelt would, of course, make a rude

and spiteful reply; that would make no difference. Such an appeal would surely make a

profound impression on the North American people and especially in South America …34

Adolf Hitler did not take Mr. Lewis’ purported advice, but the Foreign Office

in Berlin cabled to ask how important the radio commentator was in America.

Thomsen replied that Lewis had “enjoyed a particular success of late … [but

that] on the other hand, in contrast to some leading American commentators, no

political importance is to be attached to L. ”*35

Churchill himself, as he related later in his memoirs, was somewhat troubled

by the peace feelers emanating through Sweden, the United States and the

Vatican and, convinced that Hitler was trying to make the most of them, took

stern measures to counter them. Informed that the German chargé in

Washington, Thomsen, had been attempting to talk with the British ambassador

there, he cabled that “Lord Lothian should be told on no account to make any

reply to the German Chargé d’Affaires’ message.” 36

To the King of Sweden, who had urged Great Britain to accept a peace

settlement, the grim Prime Minister drafted a strong reply.

… Before any such requests or proposals could even be considered, it would be necessary

that effective guarantees by deeds, not words, should be forthcoming from Germany which

would ensure the restoration of the free and independent life of Czechoslovakia, Poland,

Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and above all, France …*37

That was the nub of Churchill’s case and apparently no one in London dreamt

of compromising it by concluding a peace that would preserve Britain but

permanently enslave the countries Hitler had conquered. But this was not

comprehended in Berlin, where, as I recall those summer days, everyone,

especially in the Wilhelmstrasse and the Bendlerstrasse, was confident that the

war was as good as over.

All through the last fortnight of June and the first days of July, Hitler waited

for word from London that the British government was ready to throw in the

sponge and conclude peace. On July 1 he told the new Italian ambassador, Dino

Alfieri,* that he “could not conceive of anyone in England still seriously

believing in victory. ”38 Nothing had been done in the High Command about

continuing the war against Britain.

But the next day, July 2, the first directive on that subject was finally issued

by OKW. It was a hesitant order.

The Fuehrer and Supreme Commander has decided:

That a landing in England is possible, providing that air superiority can be attained and

certain other necessary conditions fulfilled. The date of commencement is still undecided. All

preparations to be begun immediately.

Hitler’s lukewarm feeling about the operation and his belief that it would not

be necessary is reflected in the concluding paragraph of the directive.

All preparations must be undertaken on the basis that the invasion is still only a plan, and

has not yet been decided upon.39

When Ciano saw the Fuehrer in Berlin on July 7, he got the impression, as he

noted in his diary, that the Nazi warlord was having trouble making up his mind.

He is rather inclined to continue the struggle and to unleash a storm of wrath and of steel

upon the English. But the final decision has not been reached, and it is for this reason that he is

delaying his speech, of which, as he himself puts it, he wants to weigh every word. 40

On July 11 Hitler began assembling his military chiefs on the Obersalzberg to

see how they felt about the matter. Admiral Raeder, whose Navy would have to

ferry an invading army across the Channel, had a long talk with the Fuehrer on

that date. Neither of them was eager to come to grips with the problem—in fact,

they spent most of their time together discussing the matter of developing the

naval bases at Trondheim and Narvik in Norway.

The Supreme Commander, judging by Raeder’s confidential report of the

meeting, 41 was in a subdued mood. He asked the Admiral whether he thought his

planned speech to the Reichstag “would be effective.” Raeder replied that it

would be, especially if it were preceded by a “concentrated” bombing attack on

Britain. The Admiral, who reminded his chief that the R.A.F. was carrying out

“damaging attacks” on the principal German naval bases at Wilhelmshaven,

Hamburg and Kiel, thought the Luftwaffe ought to get busy’ immediately on

Britain. But on the question of invasion, the Navy Commander in Chief was

distinctly cool. He urgently advised that it be attempted “only as a last resort to

force Britain to sue for peace.”

He [Raeder] is convinced that Britain can be made to ask for peace simply by cutting off

her import trade by means of submarine warfare, air attacks on convoys and heavy air attacks

on her main centers….

The C. in C, Navy [Raeder], cannot for his part therefore advocate an invasion of Britain as

he did in the case of Norway …

Whereupon the Admiral launched into a long and detailed explanation of all

the difficulties involved in such an invasion, which must have been most

discouraging to Hitler. Discouraging but perhaps also convincing. For Raeder

reports that “the Fuehrer also views invasion as a last resort.”

Two days later, on July 13, the generals arrived at the Berghof above

Berchtesgaden to confer with the Supreme Commander. They found him still

baffled by the British. “The Fuehrer,” Halder jotted in his diary that evening, “is

obsessed with the question why England does not yet want to take the road to

peace.” But now, for the first time, one of the reasons had begun to dawn on

him. Halder noted it.

He sees, just as we do, the solution of this question in the fact that England is still setting

her hope in Russia. Thus he too expects that England will have to be compelled by force to

make peace. He does not like to do such a thing, however. Reasons: If we smash England

militarily, the British Empire will disintegrate. Germany, however, would not profit from this.

With German blood we would achieve something from which only Japan, America and others

will derive profit.

On the same day, July 13, Hitler wrote Mussolini, declining with thanks the

Duce’s offer to furnish Italian troops and aircraft for the invasion of Britain. It is

clear from this letter that the Fuehrer was at last beginning to make up his mind.

The strange British simply wouldn’t listen to reason.

I have made to Britain so many offers of agreement, even of co-operation, and have been

treated so shabbily [he wrote] that I am now convinced that any new appeal to reason would

meet with a similar rejection. For in that country at present it is not reason that rules …42

Three days later, on July 16, the warlord finally reached a decision. He issued

“Directive No. 16 on the Preparation of a Landing Operation against England. ”43

TOP SECRET

Fuehrer’s Headquarters

July 16, 1940

Since England, despite her militarily hopeless situation, still shows no sign of willingness

to come to terms, I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England, and if

necessary to carry it out.

The aim of this operation is to eliminate the English homeland as a base for the carrying on

of the war against Germany, and, if it should become necessary, to occupy it completely.

The code name for the assault was to be “Sea Lion.” Preparations for it were

to be completed by mid-August.

“If necessary to carry it out. ” Despite his growing instinct that it would be

necessary, he was not quite sure, as the directive shows. The “if” was still a big

one as Adolf Hitler rose in the Reichstag on the evening of July 19 to make his

final peace offer to Britain. It was the last of his great Reichstag speeches and

the last of so many in this place down the years that this writer would hear. It

was also one of his best. I put down my impressions of it that same evening.

The Hitler we saw in the Reichstag tonight was the conqueror and conscious of it, and yet

so wonderful an actor, so magnificent a handler of the German mind, that he mixed superbly

the full confidence of the conqueror with the humbleness which always goes down so well

with the masses when they know a man is on top. His voice was lower tonight; he rarely

shouted as he usually does; and he did not once cry out hysterically as I’ve seen him do so

often from this rostrum.

To be sure, his long speech was swollen with falsifications of history and

liberally sprinkled with personal insults of Churchill. But it was moderate in

tone, considering the glittering circumstances, and shrewdly conceived to win

the support not only of his own people but of the neutrals and to give the masses

in England something to think about.

From Britain [he said] I now hear only a single cry—not of the people but of the politicians

—that the war must go on! I do not know whether these politicians already have a correct idea

of what the continuation of this struggle will be like. They do, it is true, declare that they will

carry on with the war and that, even if Great Britain should perish, they would carry on from

Canada. I can hardly believe that they mean by this that the people of Britain are to go to

Canada. Presumably only those gentlemen interested in the continuation of their war will go

there. The people, I am afraid, will have to remain in Britain and … will certainly regard the

war with other eyes than their so-called leaders in Canada.

Believe me, gentlemen, I feel a deep disgust for this type of unscrupulous politician who

wrecks whole nations. It almost causes me pain to think that I should have been selected by

fate to deal the final blow to the structure which these men have already set tottering … Mr.

Churchill … no doubt will already be in Canada, where the money and children of those

principally interested in the war have already been sent. For millions of other people, however,

great suffering will begin. Mr. Churchill ought perhaps, for once, to believe me when I

prophesy that a great Empire will be destroyed—an Empire which it was never my intention to

destroy or even to harm …

Having thus tilted at the dogged Prime Minister and attempted to detach the

British people from him, Hitler came to the point of his lengthy speech.

In this hour I feel it to be my duty before my own conscience to appeal once more to reason

and common sense in Great Britain as much as elsewhere. I consider myself in a position to

make this appeal since I am not the vanquished begging favors, but the victor speaking in the

name of reason.

I can see no reason why this war must go on. *

He was not more specific than that. He made no concrete suggestions for

peace terms, no mention of what was to happen to the hundred million people

now under the Nazi yoke in the conquered countries. But there were few if any

in the Reichstag that evening who believed that it was necessary at this stage to

go into the details. I mingled with a good many officials and officers at the close

of the session and not one of them had the slightest doubt, as they said, that the

British would accept what they really believed was a very generous and even

magnanimous offer from the Fuehrer. They were not for long to be deceived.

I drove directly to the Rundfunk to make a broadcast report of the speech to

the United States. I had hardly arrived at Broadcasting House when I picked up a

BBC broadcast in German from London. It was giving the British answer to

Hitler already—within the hour. It was a determined No! *

Junior officers from the High Command and officials from various ministries

were sitting around the room listening with rapt attention. Their faces fell. They

could not believe their ears. “Can you make it out?” one of them shouted to me.

He seemed dazed. “Can you understand those British fools?” he continued to

bellow. “To turn down peace now? They’re crazy!”

The same evening Ciano† heard the reaction to the crazy English on a much

higher level in Berlin than mine. “Late in the evening,” he noted in his diary,

“when the first cold English reactions to the speech arrive, a sense of ill-

concealed disappointment spreads among the Germans.” The effect on

Mussolini, according to Ciano, was just the opposite.

He … defines it “a much too cunning speech.” He fears that the English may find in it a

pretext to begin negotiations. That would be sad for Mussolini, because now more than ever he

wants war. 44

The Duce, as Churchill later remarked, “need not have fretted himself. He was

not to be denied all the war he wanted.” 45

“As a maneuver calculated to rally the German people for the fight against

Britain,” I wrote in my diary that night, “Hitler’s speech was a masterpiece. For

the German people will now say: ‘Hitler offers England peace, and no strings

attached. He says he sees no reason why this war should go on. If it does, it’s

England’s fault.’”

And was that not the principal reason for giving it, three days after he had

issued Directive No. 16 to prepare the invasion of Britain? He admitted as much

—beforehand—to two Italian confidants, Alfieri and Ciano. On July 1 he had

told the ambassador:

… It was always a good tactic to make the enemy responsible in the eyes of public opinion

in Germany and abroad for the future course of events. This strengthened one’s own morale

and weakened that of the enemy. An operation such as the one Germany was planning would

be very bloody … Therefore one must convince public opinion that everything had first been

done to avoid this horror …

In his speech of October 6 [when he had offered peace to the West at the conclusion of the

Polish campaign—W.L.S.] he had likewise been guided by the thought of making the

opposing side responsible for all subsequent developments. He had thereby won the war, as it

were, before it had really started. Now again he intended for psychological reasons to buttress

morale, so to speak, for the action about to be taken. 46

A week later, on July 8, Hitler confided to Ciano that

he would stage another demonstration so that in case the war should continue—which he

thought was the only real possibility that came into question—he might achieve a

psychological effect among the English people … Perhaps it would be possible by a skillful

appeal to the English people to isolate the English Government still further in England.47

It did not prove possible. The speech of July 19 worked with the German

people, but not with the British. On July 22 Lord Halifax in a broadcast made the

rejection of Hitler’s peace offer official. Though it had been expected, it

somehow jolted the Wilhelmstrasse, where I found many angry faces that

afternoon. “Lord Halifax,” the official government spokesman told us, “has

refused to accept the peace offer of the Fuehrer. Gentlemen, there will be war!”

It was easier said than done. In truth neither Hitler, the High Command nor

the general staffs of the Army, Navy and Air Force had ever seriously

considered how a war with Great Britain could be fought and won. Now in the

midsummer of 1940 they did not know what to do with their glittering success;

they had no plans and scarcely any will for exploiting the greatest military

victories in the history of their soldiering nation. This is one of the great

paradoxes of the Third Reich. At the very moment when Hitler stood at the

zenith of his military power, with most of the European Continent at his feet, his

victorious armies stretched from the Pyrenees to the Arctic Circle, from the

Atlantic to beyond the Vistula, rested now and ready for further action, he had

no idea how to go on and bring the war to a victorious conclusion. Nor had his

generals, twelve of whom now bandied field marshals’ batons.

There is, of course, a reason for this, although it was not clear to us at the

time. The Germans, despite their vaunted military talents, lacked any grand

strategic concept. Their horizons were limited—they had always been limited—

to land warfare against the neighboring nations on the European Continent.

Hitler himself had a horror of the sea* and his great captains almost a total

ignorance of it. They were land-minded, not sea-minded. And though their

armies could have crushed in a week the feeble land forces of Britain if they had

only been able to come to grips with them, even the narrow waters of the Dover

Straits which separated the two—so narrow that you can see across to the

opposite shore—loomed in their minds, as the splendid summer began to wane,

as an obstacle they knew not how to overcome.

There was of course another alternative open to the Germans. They might

bring Britain down by striking across the Mediterranean with their Italian ally,

taking Gibraltar at its western opening and in the east driving on from Italy’s

bases in North Africa through Egypt and over the canal to Iran, severing one of

the Empire’s main life lines. But this necessitated vast operations overseas at

distances far from home bases, and in 1940 it seemed beyond the scope of the

German imagination.

Thus at the height of dizzy success Hitler and his captains hesitated. They had

not thought out the next step and how it was to be carried through. This fateful

neglect would prove to be one of the great turning points of the war and indeed

of the short life of the Third Reich and of the meteoric career of Adolf Hitler.

Failure, after so many stupendous victories, was now to set in. But this, to be

sure, could not be foreseen as beleaguered Britain, now holding out alone, girded

herself with what small means she had for the German onslaught at the

summer’s end.

* It was first reported and long believed that from 25,000 to 30,000 Dutch were killed, and this

is the figure given in the 1953 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. However, at

Nuremberg the Dutch government gave the figure as 814 killed. 8

* There were no criminal convictions at Nuremberg for the bombing of Rotterdam.

* The two armored corps of Reinhardt and Guderian made up General Ewald von Kleist’s

panzer group, which consisted of five tank divisions and three motorized infantry divisions.

* After the war Gamelin stated that his reply was not “There is none,” but “There is no longer

any.” ( L’Aurore, Paris, November 21, 1949.)

* From, among others, General Sir Alan Brooke, who commanded the British IInd Corps and

later became Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Stoff. See Sir

Arthur Bryant, The Turn of the Tide, based on Alanbrooke’s diaries.

* This fact, established from the records of Rundstedt’s own headquarters, did not prevent the

General from making several statements after the war which put the blame entirely on Hitler.

“If I had had my way,” he told Major Milton Shulman, a Canadian intelligence officer, “the

English would not have got off so lightly at Dunkirk. But my hands were tied by direct orders

from Hitler himself. While the English were clambering into the ships off the beaches, I was

kept uselessly outside the port unable to move … I sat outside the town, watching the English

escape, while my tanks and infantry were prohibited from moving. This incredible blunder

was due to Hitler’s personal idea of generalship.” (Shulman, Defeat in the West, pp. 42–43.)

To a commission of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg on June 20, 1946

(mimeographed transcript, p. 1490), Rundstedt added: “That was a very big mistake of the

Commander … How angry we leaders were at that time is indescribable.” Rundstedt made

similar declarations to Liddell Hart ( The German Generals Talk, pp. 112–13) and to the

Nuremberg Military Tribunal in the trial of United States v. Leeb (pp. 3350–53, 3931–32, of

the mimeographed transcript).

Telford Taylor in The March of Conquest and Major L. F. Ellis in The War in France and

Flanders, 1939–40 have analyzed the German Army records of the incident and drawn

conclusions that somewhat differ. Ellis’ book is the official British account of the campaign

and contains both British and German documents. Taylor, who spent four years as an

American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, is an authority on the German documents.

* A good many of the exhausted Tommies on the beaches, who underwent severe bombings,

were not aware of this, since the air clashes were often above the clouds or some distance

away. They knew only that they had been bombed and strafed all the way back from eastern

Belgium to Dunkirk, and they felt their Air Force had let them down. When they reached the

home ports some of them insulted men in the blue R.A.F. uniforms. Churchill was much

aggrieved at this and went out of his way to put them right when he spoke in the House on

June 4. The deliverance at Dunkirk, he said, “was gained by the Air Force.”

* On this day, June 17, 1940, the exiled Kaiser sent from Doorn, in occupied Holland, a

telegram of congratulations to Hitler, whom he had for so long scorned as a vulgar upstart. It

was found among the captured Nazi papers.

Under the deeply moving impression of the capitulation of France I congratulate you and

the whole German Wehrmacht on the mighty victory granted by God, in the words of the

Emperor Wilhelm the Great in 1870: “What a turn of events brought about by divine

dispensation.”

In all German hearts there echoes the Leuthen chorale sung by the victors of Leuthen, the

soldiers of the Great King: “Now thank we all our God!”

Hitler, who believed that the mighty victory was due more to himself than to God, drafted a restrained

reply, but whether it was ever sent is not indicated in the documents.21

The Fuehrer had been furious a little earlier when he learned that a German unit which

overran Doorn had posted a guard of honor around the exiled Emperor’s residence. Hitler

ordered the guard removed and Doorn posted as out of bounds to all German soldiers.

Wilhelm II died at Doorn on June 4, 1941, and was buried there. His death, Hassell noted in

his diary (p. 200), “went almost unnoticed” in Germany. Hitler and Goebbels saw to that.

* The defeatist French High Command forbade any offensive action against Italy. On June 14

a French naval squadron bombarded factories, oil tanks and refineries near Genoa, but

Admiral Darlan prohibited any further action of this kind. When the R.A.F. tried to send

bombers from the airfield at Marseilles to attack Milan and Turin the French drove trucks onto

the field and prevented the planes from taking off.

* It was blown up three days later, at Hitler’s command.

* It was stipulated that it would go into effect as soon as the France—Italian armistice was

signed, and that hostilities would cease six hours after that event.

* It arrived there July 8. Ironically, it was destroyed in an Allied bombing of Berlin later in the

war.

* Such an advertisement appeared in the New York Times June 25, 1940.

† By July 5, 1940, Thomsen had become so apprehensive about his payments that he cabled

Berlin for permission to destroy all receipts and accounts:

The payments … are made to the recipients through trusted go-betweens, but in the

circumstances it is obvious that no receipts can be expected … Such receipts or memoranda

would fall into the hands of the American Secret Service if the Embassy were suddenly to be

seized by American authorities, and despite all camouflage, by the fact of their existence

alone, they would mean political ruin and have other grave consequences for our political

friends, who are probably known to our enemies …

I therefore request that the Embassy be authorized to destroy these receipts and statements

and henceforth dispense with making them, as also with keeping accounts of such payments.

This telegraphic report has been destroyed. 32

* The doings of the German Embassy in Washington at this period, as disclosed in its own

dispatches which are published in Documents on German Foreign Policy, would furnish the

material for a revealing book. One is struck by me tendency of the German diplomats to tell

the Nazi dictator pretty much what he wanted to hear—a practice common among

representatives of totalitarian lands. Two officers of OKW told me in Berlin that the High

Command, or at least the General Staff, was highly suspicious of the objectivity of the reports

from the Washington embassy and that they had established their own military intelligence in

the United States.

They were not served very well by General Friedrich von Boetticher, the German military

attaché in Washington, if one can judge by his dispatches included in the DGFP volumes. He

never tired of warning OKW and the general staffs of the Army and Air Force to whom his

messages were addressed, that America was controlled by the Jews and the Freemasons, which

was exactly what Hitler thought. Boetticher also overestimated the influence of the

isolationists in American politics, especially of Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, who emerges in

his dispatches as his great hero. An extract or two indicates the tenor of his reports.

July 20, 1940: … As the exponent of the Jews, who especially through Freemasonry

control the broad masses of the American people, Roosevelt wants England to continue

fighting and the war to be prolonged … The circle about Lindbergh has become aware of this

development and now tries at least to impede the fatal control of American policy by the Jews

… I have repeatedly reported on the mean and vicious campaign against Lindbergh, whom the

Jews fear as their most potent adversary … [ DGFP, X, pp. 254–55.]

August 6, 1940: … The background of Lindbergh’s re-emergence in public and the

campaign against him.

The Jewish element now controls key positions in the American armed forces, after having

in the last weeks filled the posts of Secretary of War, Assistant Secretary of War, and

Secretary of the Navy with subservient individuals and attached a leading and very influential

Jew, “Colonel” Julius Ochs-Adler, as secretary to the Secretary of War.

The forces opposing the Jewish element and the present policy of the United States have

been mentioned in my reports, taking account also of the importance of the General Staff. The

greatly gifted Lindbergh, whose connections reach very far, is much the most important of

them all. The Jewish element and Roosevelt fear the spiritual and, particularly, the moral

superiority and purity of this man.

On Sunday [August 4] Lindbergh delivered a blow that will hurt the Jews. He … stressed

that America should strive for sincere collaboration with Germany with a view to peace and

the preservation of Western culture. Several hours later, the aged General Pershing, who has

long been a puppet in the hands of Roosevelt, which means of the Jews, read over the radio a

declaration, foisted upon him by the wire-pullers, to the effect that America would be

imperiled by England’s defeat …

The chorus of the Jewish element casting suspicion on Lindbergh in the press, and his

denunciation by a Senator … Lucas, who spoke against Lindbergh over the radio Monday

night at Roosevelt’s behest … as a “fifth columnist,” that is, a traitor, merely serve to

underline the fear of the spiritual power of this man, about whose progress I have reported

since the beginning of the war and in whose great importance for future German–American

relations I believe. [ DGFP, X, pp. 413–15.]

On September 18, Thomsen, in a further report, gave an account of a confidential

conversation he said had taken place between Lindbergh and several American General Staff

officers. Lindbergh gave it as his opinion that England would soon collapse before German air

attacks. The General Staff officers, however, held that Germany’s air strength was not

sufficient to force a decision. ( DGFP, X, pp. 41315.)

On October 19, 1938, three weeks after Munich, Lindbergh had been awarded—and had

accepted—the “Service Cross of the German Eagle with Star.” This was, I believe, the second

highest German decoration, usually conferred on distinguished foreigners who, in the official

words of the citations, “deserved well of the Reich.”

* There are in the DGFP volumes several dispatches to the German Foreign Office about

alleged contacts with various British diplomats and personages, sometimes direct, sometimes

through neutrals such as the Franco Spaniards. Prince Max von Hohenlohe, the Sudeten-

German Anglophile, reported to Berlin on his conversations with the British minister in

Switzerland, Sir David Kelly, and with the Aga Khan. He claimed the latter had asked him to

relay the following message to the Fuehrer:

The Khedive of Egypt, who is also here, had agreed with him that on the day when the

Fuehrer puts up for the night in Windsor, they would drink a bottle of champagne together …

If Germany or Italy were thinking of taking over India, he would place himself at our disposal

… The struggle against England was not a struggle against the English people but against the

Jews. Churchill had been for years in their pay and the King was too weak and limited … If he

were to go with these ideas to England, Churchill would lock him up…. [ DGFP, X, pp. 294–

95.]

It must be kept in mind that these are German reports and may not be true at all, but they

are what Hitler had to go on. The Nazi plan to enlist the Duke of Windsor, indeed the plot to

kidnap him and then try to use him, as disclosed in the Foreign Office secret papers, is noted

later.

* Attolico had been replaced by Alfieri at the instigation of Ribbentrop in May.

* There was a colorful scene and one unprecedented in German history when Hitler suddenly

broke off his speech in the middle to award field marshals’ batons to twelve generals and a

special king-size one to Goering, who was given the newly created rank of Reich Marshal of

the Greater German Reich, which put him above all the others. He was also awarded the

Grand Cross of the Iron Cross, the only one given during the entire war. Halder was passed

over in this avalanche of field marshal awards, being merely promoted one grade, from

lieutenant general to general. This promiscuous award of field-marshalships—the Kaiser had

named only five field marshals from the officer corps during all of World War I and not even

Ludendorff had been made one—undoubtedly helped to stifle any latent opposition to Hitler

among the generals such as had threatened to remove him on at least three occasions in the

past. In achieving this and in debasing the value of the highest military rank by raising so

many to it, Hitler acted shrewdly to tighten his hold over the generals. Nine Army generals

were promoted to field marshal: Brauchitsch, Keitel, Rundstedt, Bock, Leeb, List, Kluge,

Witzleben and Reichenau; and three Luftwaffe officers: Milch, Kesselring and Sperrle.

* Churchill later declared that this immediate and brusque rejection of Hitler’s peace offer was

made “by the BBC without any prompting from H. M. Government as soon as Hitler’s speech

was heard over the radio.” (Churchill, Their Finest Hour, p. 260.)

† The Italian Foreign Minister had behaved like a clown during the Reichstag session, bobbing

up and down like a jack-in-the-box to give the Fascist salute every time Hitler paused for

breath. I also noticed Quisling, a pig-eyed little man, crouching in a corner seat in the first

balcony. He had come to Berlin to beg the Fuehrer to reinstate him in power in Oslo.

* “On land I am a hero, but on water I am a coward,” he told Rundstedt once. (Shulman,

Defeat in the West, p. 50.)

22

OPERATION SEA LION: THE THWARTED INVASION OF

BRITAIN

“THE FINAL GERMAN VICTORY over England is now only a question of time,”

General Jodl, Chief of Operations at OKW, wrote on June 30, 1940. “Enemy

offensive operations on a large scale are no longer possible.”

Hitler’s favorite strategist was in a confident and complacent mood. France

had capitulated the week before, leaving Britain alone and apparently helpless.

On June 15 Hitler had informed the generals that he wanted the Army partially

demobilized—from 160 to 120 divisions. “The assumption behind this,” Halder

noted in his diary that day, “is that the task of the Army is fulfilled. The Air

Force and Navy will be given the mission of carrying on alone the war against

England.”

In truth, the Army showed little interest in it. Nor was the Fuehrer himself

much concerned. On June 17 Colonel Walter Warlimont, Jodl’s deputy,

informed the Navy that “with regard to the landing in Britain, the Fuehrer … has

not up to now expressed such an intention … Therefore, even at this time, no

preparatory work of any kind [has] been carried out in OKW.” 1 Four days later,

on June 21, at the very moment Hitler was entering the armistice car at

Compiègne to humble the French, the Navy was informed that the “Army

General Staff is not concerning itself with the question of England. Considers

execution impossible. Does not know how operation is to be conducted from

southern area … General Staff rejects the operation. ”2

None of the gifted planners in any of the three German armed services knew

how Britain was to be invaded, though it was the Navy, not unnaturally, which

had first given the matter some thought. As far back as November 15, 1939,

when Hitler was trying vainly to buck up his generals to launch an attack in the

West, Raeder instructed the Naval War Staff to examine “the possibility of

invading England, a possibility arising if certain conditions are fulfilled by the

further course of the war. ”3 It was the first time in history that any German

military staff had been asked even to consider such an action. It seems likely that

Raeder took this step largely because he wanted to anticipate any sudden

aberration of his unpredictable Leader. There is no record that Hitler was

consulted or knew anything about it. The furthest his thoughts went at this time

was to get airfields and naval bases in Holland, Belgium and France for the

tightening of the blockade against the British Isles.

By December 1939, the Army and Luftwaffe high commands were also giving

some thought to the problem of invading Britain. Rather nebulous ideas of the

three services were exchanged, but they did not get very far. In January 1940,

the Navy and Air Force rejected an Army plan as unrealistic. To the Navy it did

not take into account British naval power; to the Luftwaffe it underestimated the

R.A.F. “In conclusion,” remarked the Luftwaffe General Staff in a

communication to OKH, “a combined operation with a landing in England as its

object must be rejected. ”4 Later, as we shall see, Goering and his aides were to

take a quite contrary view.

The first mention in the German records that Hitler was even facing the

possibility of invading Britain was on May 21, the day after the armored forces

drove through to the sea at Abbeville. Raeder discussed “in private” with the

Fuehrer “the possibility of a later landing in England.” The source of this

information is Admiral Raeder,5 whose Navy was not sharing in the glory of the

astounding victories of the Army and Air Force in the West and who,

understandably, was seeking means of bringing his service back into the picture.

But Hitler’s thoughts were on the battle of encirclement to the north and on the

Somme front then forming to the south. He did not trouble his generals with

matters beyond these two immediate tasks.

The naval officers, however, with little else to do, continued to study the

problem of invasion, and by May 27 Rear Admiral Kurt Fricke, Chief of the

Naval War Staff Operations Division, came up with a fresh plan entitled Studie

England. Preliminary work was also begun on rounding up shipping and

developing landing craft, the latter of which the Germany Navy was entirely

bereft. In this connection Dr. Gottfried Feder, the economic crank who had

helped Hitler draft the party program in the early Munich days and who was now

a State Secretary in the Ministry of Economics, where his crackpot ideas were

given short shrift, produced plans for what he called a “war crocodile.” This was

a sort of self-propelled barge made of concrete which could carry a company of

two hundred men with full equipment or several tanks or pieces of artillery, roll

up on any beach and provide cover for the disembarking troops and vehicles. It

was taken quite seriously by the Naval Command and even by Halder, who

mentioned it in his diary, and was discussed at length by Hitler and Raeder on

June 20. But nothing came of it in the end.

To the admirals nothing seemed to be coming of an invasion of the British

Isles as June approached its end. Following his appearance at Compiègne on

June 21, Hitler went off with some old cronies to do the sights of Paris briefly*

and then to visit the battlefields, not of this war but of the first war, where he had

served as a dispatch runner. With him was his tough top sergeant of those days,

Max Amann, now a millionaire Nazi publisher. The future course of the war—

specifically, how to continue the fight against Britain—seemed the least of his

concerns, or perhaps it was merely that he believed that this little matter was

already settled, since the British would now come to “reason” and make peace.

Hitler did not return to his new headquarters, Tannenberg, west of

Freudenstadt in the Black Forest, until the twenty-ninth of June. The next day,

coming down to earth, he mulled over Jodl’s paper on what to do next. It was

entitled “The Continuation of the War against England. ”6 Though Jodl was

second only to Keitel at OKW in his fanatical belief in the Fuehrer’s genius, he

was, when left alone, usually a prudent strategist. But now he shared the general

view at Supreme Headquarters that the war was won and almost over. If Britain

didn’t realize it, a little more force would have to be supplied to remind her. For

the “siege” of England, his memorandum proposed three steps: intensification of

the German air and sea war against British shipping, storage depots, factories

and the R.A.F.; “terror attacks against the centers of population”; “a landing of

troops with the objective of occupying England.”

Jodl recognized that “the fight against the British Air Force must have top

priority.” But, on the whole, he thought this as well as other aspects of the

assault could be carried out with little trouble.

Together with propaganda and periodic terror attacks, announced as reprisals,

this increasing weakening of the basis of food supply will paralyze and finally

break the will of the people to resist, and thereby force its government to

capitulate. †

As for a landing, it could

only be contemplated after Germany has gained control of the air. A landing, therefore, should

not have as its objective the military conquest of England, a task that could be left to the Air

Force and Navy. Its aim should rather be to administer the deathblow [ Todesstoss] to an

England already economically paralyzed and no longer capable of fighting in the air, if this is

still necessary. ‡

However, thought Jodl, all this might not be necessary.

Since England can no longer fight for victory, but only for the preservation of its

possessions and its world prestige she should, according to all predictions. be inclined to make

peace when she learns that she can still get it now at relatively little cost.

This was what Hitler thought too and he immediately set to work on his peace

speech for the Reichstag. In the meantime, as we have seen, he ordered (July 2)

some preliminary planning for a landing and on July 16, when no word of

“reason” had come from London, issued Directive No. 16 for Sea Lion. At last,

after more than six weeks of hesitation, it was decided to invade Britain, “if

necessary.” This, as Hitler and his generals belatedly began to realize, would

have to be a major military operation, not without its risks and depending for

success on whether the Luftwaffe and the Navy could prepare the way for the

troops against a far superior British Navy and a by no means negligible enemy

Air Force.

Was Sea Lion a serious plan? And was it seriously intended that it should be

carried out?

To this day many have doubted it and they have been reinforced in their

opinions by the chorus from the German generals after the war. Rundstedt, who

was in command of the invasion, told Allied investigators in 1945:

The proposed invasion of England was nonsense, because adequate ships were not

available … We looked upon the whole thing as a sort of game because it was obvious that no

invasion was possible when our Navy was not in a position to cover a crossing of the Channel

or carry reinforcements. Nor was the German Air Force capable of taking on these functions if

the Navy failed … I was always very skeptical about the whole affair … I have a feeling that

the Fuehrer never really wanted to invade England. He never had sufficient courage … He

definitely hoped that the English would make peace …7

Blumentritt, Rundstedt’s chief of operations, expressed similar views to

Liddell Hart after the war, claiming that “among ourselves we talked of it [Sea

Lion] as a bluff.” 8

I myself spent a few days at the middle of August on the Channel, snooping

about from Antwerp to Boulogne in search of the invasion army. On August 15,

at Calais and at Cap Gris-Nez, we saw swarms of German bombers and fighters

heading over the Channel toward England on what turned out to be the first

massive air assault. And while it was evident that the Luftwaffe was going all

out, the lack of shipping and especially of invasion barges in the ports and in the

canals and rivers behind them left me with the impression that the Germans were

bluffing. They simply did not have the means, so far as I could see, of getting

their troops across the Channel.

But one reporter can see very little of a war and we know now that the

Germans did not begin to assemble the invasion fleet until September 1. As for

the generals, anyone who read their interrogations or listened to them on cross-

examination at the Nuremberg trials learned to take their postwar testimony with

more than a grain of salt. * The trickiness of man’s memory is always

considerable and the German generals were no exception to this rule. Also they

had many axes to grind, one of the foremost being to discredit Hitler’s military

leadership. Indeed, their principal theme, expounded at dreary length in their

memoirs and in their interrogations and trial testimony, was that if they had been

left to make the decisions Hitler never would have led the Third Reich to defeat.

Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for posterity and the truth, the

mountainous secret German military files leave no doubt that Hitler’s plan to

invade Britain in the early fall of 1940 was deadly serious and that, though given

to many hesitations, the Nazi dictator seriously intended to carry it out if there

were any reasonable chance of success. Its ultimate fate was settled not by any

lack of determination or effort but by the fortunes of war, which now, for the

first time, began to turn against him.

On July 17, the day after Directive No. 16 was issued to prepare the invasion

and two days before the Fuehrer’s “peace” speech in the Reichstag, the Army

High Command (OKH) allocated the forces for Sea Lion and ordered thirteen

picked divisions to the jumping-off places on the Channel coast for the first

wave of the invasion. On the same day the Army Command completed its

detailed plan for a landing on a broad front on the south coast of England.

The main thrust here, as in the Battle of France, would be carried out by Field

Marshal von Rundstedt (as he would be titled on July 19) as commander of

Army Group A. Six infantry divisions of General Ernst Busch’s Sixteenth Army

were to embark from the Pas de Calais and hit the beaches between Ramsgate

and Bexhill. Four divisions of General Adolf Strauss’s Ninth Army would cross

the Channel from the area of Le Havre and land between Brighton and the Isle of

Wight. Farther to the west three divisions of Field Marshal von Reichenau’s

Sixth Army (from Field Marshal von Bock’s Army Group B), taking off from

the Cherbourg peninsula, would be put ashore in Lyme Bay, between Weymouth

and Lyme Regis. Altogether 90,000 men would form the first wave; by the third

day the High Command planned on putting ashore a total of 260,000 men.

Airborne forces would help out after being dropped at Lyme Bay and other

areas. An armored force of no less than six panzer divisions, reinforced by three

motorized divisions, would follow in the second wave and in a few days it was

planned to have ashore a total of thirty-nine divisions plus two airborne

divisions.

Their task was as follows. After the bridgeheads had been secured, the

divisions of Army Group A in the southeast would push forward to the first

objective, a line running between Gravesend and Southampton. Reichenau’s

Sixth Army would advance north to Bristol, cutting off Devon and Cornwall.

The second objective would be a line between Maldon on the east coast north of

the Thames estuary to the Severn River, blocking off Wales. “Heavy battles with

strong British forces” were expected to develop at about the time the Germans

reached their first objective. But they would be quickly won, London

surrounded, and the drive northward resumed.9 Brauchitsch told Raeder on July

17 that the whole operation would be finished in a month and would be

relatively easy. *10

But Raeder and the Naval High Command were skeptical. An operation of

such size on such a broad front—it stretched over two hundred miles from

Ramsgate to Lyme Bay—was simply beyond the means of the German Navy to

convoy and protect. Raeder so informed OKW two days later and brought it up

again on July 21 when Hitler summoned him, Brauchitsch and General Hans

Jeschonnek (Chief of the Luftwaffe General Staff) to a meeting in Berlin. The

Fuehrer was still confused about “what is going on in England.” He appreciated

the Navy’s difficulties but stressed the importance of ending the war as soon as

possible. For the invasion forty divisions would be necessary, he said, and the

“main operation” would have to be completed by September 15. On the whole

the warlord was in an optimistic mood despite Churchill’s refusal at that very

moment to heed his peace appeal.

England’s situation is hopeless [Halder noted Hitler as saying]. The war has been won by

us. A reversal of the prospects of success is impossible. 11

But the Navy, faced with the appalling task of transporting a large army across

the choppy Channel in the face of a vastly stronger British Navy and of an

enemy Air Force that seemed still rather active, was not so sure. On July 29 the

Naval War Staff drew up a memorandum advising “against undertaking the

operation this year” and proposing that “it be considered in May 1941 or

thereafter.” 12

Hitler, however, insisted on considering it on July 31, 1940, when he again

summoned his military chiefs, this time to his villa on the Obersalzberg. Besides

Raeder, Keitel and Jodl were there from OKW and Brauchitsch and Halder from

the Army High Command. The Grand Admiral, as he now was, did most of the

talking. He was not in a very hopeful mood.

September 15, he said, would be the earliest date for Sea Lion to begin, and

then only if there were no “unforeseen circumstances due to the weather or the

enemy.” When Hitler inquired about the weather problem Raeder responded

with a lecture on the subject that grew quite eloquent and certainly forbidding.

Except for the first fortnight in October the weather, he explained, was

“generally bad” in the Channel and the North Sea; light fog came in the middle

of that month and heavy fog at the end. But that was only part of the weather

problem. “The operation,” he declared, “can be carried out only if the sea is

calm. ” If the water were rough, the barges would sink and even the big ships

would be helpless, since they could not unload supplies. The Admiral grew

gloomier with every minute that he contemplated what lay ahead.

Even if the first wave crosses successfully [he went on] under favorable weather

conditions, there is no guarantee that the same favorable weather will carry through the second

and third waves … As a matter of fact, we must realize that no traffic worth mentioning will

be able to cross for several days, until certain harbors can be utilized.

That would leave the Army in a fine pickle, stranded on the beaches without

supplies and reinforcements. Raeder now came to the main point of the

differences between the Army and the Navy. The Army wanted a broad front

from the Straits of Dover to Lyme Bay. But the Navy simply couldn’t provide

the ships necessary for such an operation against the expected strong reaction of

the British Navy and Air Force. Raeder therefore argued strongly that the front

be shortened—to run only from the Dover Straits to Eastbourne. The Admiral

saved his clincher for the end.

“All things considered,” he said, “the best time for the operation would be

May 1941. ”

But Hitler did not want to wait that long. He conceded that “naturally” there

was nothing they could do about the weather. But they had to consider the

consequences of losing time. The German Navy would not be any stronger vis-à-

vis the British Navy by spring. The British Army at the moment was in poor

shape. But give it another eight to ten months and it would have from thirty to

thirty-five divisions, which was a considerable force in the restricted area of the

proposed invasion. Therefore his decision (according to the confidential notes

made by both Raeder and Halder)13 was as follows:

Diversions in Africa should be studied. But the decisive result can be achieved only by an

attack on England. An attempt must therefore be made to prepare the operation for September

15, 1940 … The decision as to whether the operation is to take place in September or is to be

delayed until May 1941, will be made after the Air Force has made concentrated attacks on

southern England for one week. If the effect of the air attacks is such that the enemy air force,

harbors and naval forces, etc. are heavily damaged. Operation Sea Lion will be carried out in

1940. Otherwise it is to be postponed until May 1941.

All now depended on the Luftwaffe.

The next day, August 1, Hitler issued as a consequence two directives from

OKW, one signed by himself, the other by Keitel.

Fuehrer’s Headquarters

August 1, 1940

TOP SECRET

Directive No. 17 for the Conduct of Air and Naval Warfare against England

In order to establish the conditions necessary for the final conquest of England, I intend to

continue the air and naval war against the English homeland more intensively than heretofore.

To this end I issue the following orders:

1. The German Air Force is to overcome the British Air Force with all means at its disposal

and as soon as possible …

2. After gaining temporary or local air superiority the air war is to be carried out against

harbors, especially against establishments connected with food supply … Attacks on the

harbors of the south coast are to be undertaken on the smallest scale possible, in view of our

intended operations….

4. The Luftwaffe is to stand by in force for Operation Sea Lion.

5. I reserve for myself the decision on terror attacks as a means of reprisal.

6. The intensified air war may commence on or after August 6 … The Navy is authorized

to begin the projected intensified naval warfare at the same time.

ADOLF HITLER14

The directive signed by Keitel on behalf of Hitler the same day read in part:

TOP SECRET

Operation Sea Lion

The C. in C., Navy, having reported on July 31 that the necessary preparations for Sea Lion

could not be completed before September 15, the Fuehrer has ordered:

Preparations for Sea Lion are to be continued and completed by the Army and Air Force by

September 15.

Eight to fourteen days after the launching of the air offensive against Britain, scheduled to

begin about August 5, the Fuehrer will decide whether the invasion will take place this year or

not; his decision will depend largely on the outcome of the air offensive …

In spite of the Navy’s warning that it can guarantee only the defense of a narrow strip of

coast (as far west as Eastbourne), preparations are to be continued for the attack on a broad

basis, as originally planned …15

The last paragraph only served to inflame the feud between the Army and

Navy over the question of a long or a short invasion front. A fortnight before, the

Naval War Staff had estimated that to fulfill the demands of the Army for

landing 100,000 men with equipment and supplies in the first wave, along a 200-

mile front from Ramsgate to Lyme Bay, would necessitate rounding up 1,722

barges, 1,161 motorboats, 471 tugs and 155 transports. Even if it were possible

to assemble such a vast amount of shipping, Raeder told Hitler on July 25, it

would wreck the German economy, since taking away so many barges and tugs

would destroy the whole inland-waterway transportation system, on which the

economic life of the country largely depended.16 At any rate, Raeder made it

clear, the protection of such an armada trying to supply such a broad front

against the certain attacks of the British Navy and Air Force was beyond the

powers of the German naval forces. At one point the Naval War Staff warned the

Army that if it insisted on the broad front, the Navy might lose all of its ships.

But the Army persisted. Overestimating British strength as it did, it argued

that to land on a narrow front would confront the attackers with a “superior”

British land force. On August 7 there was a showdown between the two services

when Halder met his opposite number in the Navy, Admiral Schniewind, the

Chief of the Naval War Staff. There was a sharp and dramatic clash.

“I utterly reject the Navy’s proposal,” the Army General Staff Chief, usually a

very calm man, fumed. “From the point of view of the Army I regard it as

complete suicide. I might just as well put the troops that have landed straight

through a sausage machine!”

According to the Naval War Staff’s record of the meeting* Schniewind

replied that it would be “equally suicidal” to attempt to transport the troops for

such a broad front as the Army desired, “in view of British naval supremacy.”

It was a cruel dilemma. If a broad front with the large number of troops to

man it was attempted, the whole German expedition might be sunk at sea by the

British Navy. If a short front, with correspondingly fewer troops, was adopted,

the invaders might be hurled back into the sea by the British Army. On August

10 Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chief of the Army, informed OKW that he

“could not accept” a landing between Folkestone and Eastbourne. However, he

was willing, albeit “very reluctantly,” to abandon the landing at Lyme Bay in

order to shorten the front and meet the Navy halfway.

This was not enough for the hardheaded admirals, and their caution and

stubbornness were beginning to have an effect at OKW. On August 13 Jodl

drafted an “appreciation” of the situation, laying down five conditions for the

success of Sea Lion that seemingly would have struck the generals and admirals

as almost ludicrous had their dilemma not been so serious. First, he said, the

British Navy would have to be eliminated from the south coast, and second, the

R.A.F. would have to be eliminated from the British skies. The other conditions

concerned the landing of troops in a strength and with a rapidity that were

obviously far beyond the Navy’s powers. If these conditions were not fulfilled,

he considered the landing “an act of desperation which would have to be carried

out in a desperate situation, but which we have no cause to carry out now.” 17

If the Navy’s fears were spreading to Jodl, the OKW Operations Chief’s

hesitations were having their effect on Hitler. All through the war the Fuehrer

leaned much more heavily on Jodl than on the Chief of OKW, the spineless,

dull-minded Keitel. It is not surprising, then, that on August 13, when Raeder

saw the Supreme Commander in Berlin and requested a decision on the broad

versus the narrow front, Hitler was inclined to agree with the Navy on the

smaller operation. He promised to make a definite ruling the next day after he

had seen the Commander in Chief of the Army.18 After hearing Brauchitsch’s

views on the fourteenth, Hitler finally made up his mind, and on the sixteenth an

OKW directive signed by Keitel declared that the Fuehrer had decided to

abandon the landing in Lyme Bay, which Reichenau’s Sixth Army was to have

made. Preparations for landings on the narrower front on September 15 were to

be continued, but now, for the first time, the Fuehrer’s own doubts crept into a

secret directive. “Final orders,” it added, “will not be given until the situation is

clear.” The new order, however, was somewhat of a compromise. For a further

directive that day enlarged the narrower front.

Main crossing to be on narrow front. Simultaneous landing of four to five thousand troops

at Brighton by motorboats and the same number of airborne troops at Deal-Ramsgate. In

addition, on D-minus-1 Day the Luftwaffe is to make a strong attack on London, which would

cause the population to flee from the city and block the roads. 19

Although Halder on August 23 was scribbling a shorthand note in his diary

that “on this basis, an attack has no chance of success this year,” a directive on

August 27 over Keitel’s signature laid down final plans for landings in four main

areas on the south coast between Folkestone and Selsey Bill, just east of

Portsmouth, with the first objective, as before, a line running between

Portsmouth and the Thames, east of London at Gravesend, to be reached as soon

as the beachheads had been connected and organized and the troops could strike

north. At the same time orders were given to get ready to carry out certain

deception maneuvers, of which the principal one was “Autumn Journey”

( Herbstreise). This called for a large-scale feint against Britain’s east coast,

where, as has been noted, Churchill and his military advisers were still expecting

the main invasion blow to fall. For this purpose four large liners, including

Germany’s largest, Europa and Bremen, and ten additional transports, escorted

by four cruisers, were to put out from the southern Norwegian ports and the

Heligoland Bight on D-minus-2 Day and head for the English coast between

Aberdeen and Newcastle. The transports would be empty and the whole

expedition would turn back as darkness fell, repeating the maneuver the next

day. 20

On August 30 Brauchitsch gave out a lengthy order of instructions for the

landings, but the generals who received it must have wondered how much heart

their Army chief now had in the undertaking. He entitled it “Instruction for the

Preparation of Operation Sea Lion”—rather late in the game to be ordering

preparations for an operation that he commanded must be carried out from

September 15. “The order for execution,” he added, “depends on the political

situation”—a condition that must have puzzled the unpolitical generals.21

On September 1 the movement of shipping from Germany’s North Sea ports

toward the embarkation harbors on the Channel began, and two days later, on

September 3, came a further directive from OKW.

The earliest day for the sailing of the invasion fleet has been fixed as September 20, and

that of the landing for September 21.

Orders for the launching of the attack will be given D-minus-10 Day, presumably therefore

on September 11.

Final commands will be given at the latest on D-minus-3 Day, at midday.

All preparations must remain liable to cancellation 24 hours before zero hour.

KEITEL22

This sounded like business. But the sound was deceptive. On September 6

Raeder had another long session with Hitler. “The Fuehrer’s decision to land in

England,” the Admiral recorded in the Naval Staff War Diary that night, “is still

by no means settled, as he is firmly convinced that Britain’s defeat will be

achieved even without the ‘landing.’” Actually, as Raeder’s long recording of

the talk shows, the Fuehrer discoursed at length about almost everything except

Sea Lion: about Norway, Gibraltar, Suez, “the problem of the U.S.A.,” the

treatment of the French colonies and his fantastic views about the establishment

of a “North Germanic Union. ”23

If Churchill and his military chiefs had only got wind of this remarkable

conference the code word “Cromwell” might not have been sent out in England

on the evening of the next day, September 7, signifying “Invasion imminent”

and causing no end of confusion, the endless ringing of church bells by the

Home Guard, the blowing of several bridges by Royal Engineers and the

needless casualties suffered by those stumbling over hastily laid mines.*

But on the late afternoon of Saturday, September 7, the Germans had begun

their first massive bombing of London, carried out by 625 bombers protected by

648 fighters. It was the most devastating attack from the air ever delivered up to

that day on a city—the bombings of Warsaw and Rotterdam were pinpricks

beside it—and by early evening the whole dock-side area of the great city was a

mass of flames and every railway line to the south, so vital to the defense against

invasion, was blocked. In the circumstances, many in London believed that this

murderous bombing was the prelude to immediate German landings, and it was

because of this more than anything else that the alert, “Invasion imminent,” was

sent out. As will shortly be seen, this savage bombing of London on September

7, though setting off a premature warning and causing much damage, marked a

decisive turning point in the Battle of Britain, the first great decisive struggle in

the air the earth had ever experienced, which was now rapidly approaching its

climax.

The time for Hitler to make his fatal decision to launch the invasion or not to

launch it was also drawing near. It was to be made, as the September 3 directive

stipulated, on September 11, giving the armed services ten days to carry out the

preliminaries. But on the tenth Hitler decided to postpone his decision until the

fourteenth. There seem to have been at least two reasons for the delay. One was

the belief at OKW that the bombing of London was causing so much destruction,

both to property and to British morale, that an invasion might not be necessary.†

The other reason arose from the difficulties the German Navy was beginning

to experience in assembling its shipping. Besides the weather, which the naval

authorities reported on September 10 as being “completely abnormal and

unstable,” the R.A.F., which Goering had promised to destroy, and the British

Navy were increasingly interfering with the concentration of the invasion fleet.

That same day the Naval War Staff warned of the “danger” of British air and

naval attacks on German transport movements, which it said had “undoubtedly

been successful.” Two days later, on September 12, H.Q. of Naval Group West

sent an ominous message to Berlin:

Interruptions caused by the enemy’s air forces, long-range artillery and light naval forces

have, for the first time, assumed major significance. The harbors at Ostend, Dunkirk, Calais

and Boulogne cannot be used as night anchorages for shipping because of the danger of

English bombings and shelling. Units of the British Fleet are now able to operate almost

unmolested in the Channel. Owing to these difficulties further delays are expected in the

assembly of the invasion fleet.

The next day matters grew worse. British light naval forces bombarded the

chief Channel invasion ports, Ostend, Calais, Boulogne and Cherbourg, while

the R.A.F. sank eighty barges in Ostend Harbor. In Berlin that day Hitler

conferred with his service chiefs at lunch. He thought the air war was going very

well and declared that he had no intention of running the risk of invasion.24 In

fact, Jodl got the impression from the Fuehrer’s remarks that he had “apparently

decided to abandon Sea Lion completely,” an impression which was accurate for

that day, as Hitler confirmed the following day—when, however, he again

changed his mind.

Both Raeder and Halder have left confidential notes of the meeting of the

Fuehrer with his commanders in chief in Berlin on September 14.25 The Admiral

managed to slip Hitler a memorandum before the session opened, setting forth

the Navy’s opinion that

the present air situation does not provide conditions for carrying out the operation [Sea Lion],

as the risk is still too great.

At the beginning of the conference, the Nazi warlord displayed a somewhat

negative mood and his thoughts were marred by contradictions. He would not

give the order to launch the invasion, but neither would he call it off as, Raeder

noted in the Naval War Diary, “he apparently had planned to do on September

13.”

What were the reasons for his latest change of mind? Halder recorded them in

some detail.

A successful landing [the Fuehrer argued] followed by an occupation would end the war in

a short time. England would starve. A landing need not necessarily be carried out within a

specified time … But a long war is not desirable. We have already achieved everything that

we need.

British hopes in Russia and America, Hitler said, had not materialized. Russia

was not going to bleed for Britain. America’s rearmament would not be fully

effective until 1945. As for the moment, the “quickest solution would be a

landing in England. The Navy has achieved the necessary conditions. The

operations of the Luftwaffe are above all praise. Four or five days of decent

weather would bring the decisive results … We have a good chance of bringing

England to her knees.”

What was wrong, then? Why hesitate any longer in launching the invasion?

The trouble was, Hitler conceded:

The enemy recovers again and again … Enemy fighters have not yet been completely

eliminated. Our own reports of successes do not give a completely reliable picture, although

the enemy has been severely damaged.

On the whole, then, Hitler declared, “in spite of all of our successes the

prerequisite conditions for Operation Sea Lion have not yet been realized. ” (The

emphasis is Halder’s.)

Hitler summed up his reflections.

1. Successful landing means victory, but for this we must obtain complete air superiority.

2. Bad weather has so far prevented our attaining complete air superiority.

3. All other factors are in order.

Decision therefore: The operation will not be renounced yet.

Having come to that negative conclusion, Hitler thereupon gave way to

soaring hopes that the Luftwaffe might still bring off the victory that so

tantalizingly and so narrowly continued to evade him. “The air attacks up to

now,” he said, “have had a tremendous effect, though perhaps chiefly on the

nerves. Even if victory in the air is only achieved in ten or twelve days the

English may yet be seized by mass hysteria.”

To help bring that about, Jeschonnek of the Air Force begged to be allowed to

bomb London’s residential districts, since, he said, there was no sign of “mass

panic” in London while these areas were being spared. Admiral Raeder

enthusiastically supported some terror bombing. Hitler, however, thought

concentration on military objectives was more important. “Bombing with the

object of causing a mass panic,” he said, “must be left to the last.”

Admiral Raeder’s enthusiasm for terror bombing seems to have been due

mainly to his lack of enthusiasm for the landings. He now intervened to stress

again the “great risks” involved. The situation in the air, he pointed out, could

hardly improve before the projected dates of September 24–27 for the landing;

therefore they must be abandoned “until October 8 or 24.”

But this was practically to call off the invasion altogether, as Hitler realized,

and he ruled that he would hold up his decision on the landings only until

September 17—three days hence—so that they still might take place on

September 27. If not feasible then, he would have to think about the October

dates. A Supreme Command directive was thereupon issued.

Berlin

September 14, 1940

TOP SECRET

… The Fuehrer has decided:

The start of Operation Sea Lion is again postponed. A new order follows September 17. All

preparations are to be continued.

The air attacks against London are to be continued and the target area expanded against

military and other vital installations (e.g., railway stations).

Terror attacks against purely residential areas are reserved for use as an ultimate means of

pressure.26

Thus though Hitler had put off for three days a decision on the invasion he

had by no means abandoned it. Give the Luftwaffe another few days to finish off

the R.A.F. and demoralize London, and the landing then could take place. It

would bring final victory. So once again all depended on Goering’s vaunted Air

Force. It would make, in fact, its supreme effort the very next day.

The Navy’s opinion of the Luftwaffe, however, grew hourly worse. On the

evening of the crucial conference in Berlin the German Naval War Staff reported

severe R.A.F. bombings of the invasion ports, from Antwerp to Boulogne.

… In Antwerp … considerable casualties are inflicted on transports—five transport

steamers in port heavily damaged; one barge sunk, two cranes destroyed, an ammunition train

blown up, several sheds burning.

The next night was even worse, the Navy reporting “strong enemy air attacks

on the entire coastal area between Le Havre and Antwerp.” An S.O.S. was sent

out by the sailors for more antiaircraft protection of the invasion ports. On

September 17 the Naval Staff reported:

The R.A.F. are still by no means defeated: on the contrary they are showing increasing

activity in their attacks on the Channel ports and in their mounting interference with the

assembly movements.*27

That night there was a full moon and the British night bombers made the most

of it. The German Naval War Staff reported “very considerable losses” of the

shipping which now jammed the invasion ports. At Dunkirk eighty-four barges

were sunk or damaged, and from Cherbourg to Den Helder the Navy reported,

among other depressing items, a 500-ton ammunition store blown up, a rations

depot burned out, various steamers and torpedo boats sunk and many casualties

to personnel suffered. This severe bombing plus bombardment from heavy guns

across the Channel made it necessary, the Navy Staff reported, to disperse the

naval and transport vessels already concentrated on the Channel and to stop

further movement of shipping to the invasion ports.

Otherwise [it said] with energetic enemy action such casualties will occur in the course of

time that the execution of the operation on the scale previously envisaged will in any case be

problematic. 28

It had already become so.

In the German Naval War Diary there is a laconic entry for September 17.

The enemy Air Force is still by no means defeated. On the contrary, it shows increasing

activity. The weather situation as a whole does not permit us to expect a period of calm … The

Fuehrer therefore decides to postpone “Sea Lion” indefinitely. 29

The emphasis is the Navy’s.

Adolf Hitler, after so many years of dazzling successes, had at last met failure.

For nearly a month thereafter the pretense was kept up that the invasion might

still take place that autumn, but it was a case of whistling in the dark. On

September 19 the Fuehrer formally ordered the further assembling of the

invasion fleet to be stopped and the shipping already in the ports to be dispersed

“so that the loss of shipping space caused by enemy air attacks may be reduced

to a minimum.”

But it was impossible to maintain even a dispersed armada and all the troops

and guns and tanks and supplies that had been assembled to cross over the

Channel for an invasion that had been postponed indefinitely. “This state of

affairs,” Halder exclaimed in his diary September 28, “dragging out the

continued existence of Sea Lion, is unbearable.” When Ciano and Mussolini met

the Fuehrer on the Brenner on October 4, the Italian Foreign Minister observed

in his diary that “there is no longer any talk about a landing in the British Isles.”

Hitler’s setback put his partner, Mussolini, in the best mood he had been in for

ages. “Rarely have I seen the Duce in such good humor … as at the Brenner Pass

today,” Ciano noted. 30

Already both the Navy and the Army were pressing the Fuehrer for a decision

to call off Sea Lion altogether. The Army General Staff pointed out to him that

the holding of the troops on the Channel “under constant British air attacks led to

continual casualties.”

Finally on October 12, the Nazi warlord formally admitted failure and called

off the invasion until spring, if then. A formal directive was issued.

Fuehrer’s Headquarters

October 12, 1940

TOP SECRET

The Fuehrer has decided that from now on until the spring, preparations for “Sea Lion”

shall be continued solely for the purpose of maintaining political and military pressure on

England.

Should the invasion be reconsidered in the spring or early summer of 1941, orders for a

renewal of operational readiness will be issued later …

The Army was commanded to release its Sea Lion formations “for other

duties or for employment on other fronts.” The Navy was instructed to “take all

measures to release personnel and shipping space.” But both services were to

camouflage their moves. “The British,” Hitler laid it down, “must continue to

believe that we are preparing an attack on a broad front. ”31

What had happened to make Adolf Hitler finally give in?

Two things: the fatal course of the Battle of Britain in the air, and the turning

of his thoughts once more eastward, to Russia.

THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN

Goering’s great air offensive against Britain, Operation Eagle ( Adlerangriffe),

had been launched on August 15 with the objective of driving the British Air

Force from the skies and thus achieving the one condition on which the

launching of the invasion depended. The fat Reich Marshal, as he now was, had

no doubts about victory. By mid-July he was confident that British fighter

defenses in southern England could be smashed within four days by an all-out

assault, thus opening the way for the invasion. To destroy the R.A.F. completely

would take a little longer, Goering told the Army High Command: from two to

four weeks. 32 In fact, the bemedaled German Air Force chief thought that the

Luftwaffe alone could bring Britain to her knees and that an invasion by land

forces probably would not be necessary.

To obtain this mighty objective he had three great air fleets ( Luftflotten):

Number 2 under Field Marshal Kesselring, operating from the Low Countries

and northern France, Number 3 under Field Marshal Sperrle, based on northern

France, and Number 5 under General Stumpft, stationed in Norway and

Denmark. The first two had a total of 929 fighters, 875 bombers and 316 dive

bombers; Number 5 was much smaller, with 123 bombers and 34 twin-engined

ME-110 fighters. Against this vast force the R.A.F. had for the air defense of the

realm at the beginning of August between 700 and 800 fighters.

Throughout July the Luftwaffe gradually stepped up its attacks on British

shipping in the Channel and on Britain’s southern ports. This was a probing

operation. Though it was necessary to clear the narrow waters of British ships

before an invasion could begin, the main object of these preliminary air assaults

was to lure the British fighters to battle. This failed. The R.A.F. Command

shrewdly declined to commit more than a fraction of its fighters, and as a result

considerable damage was done to shipping and to some of the ports. Four

destroyers and eighteen merchant ships were sunk, but this preliminary sparring

cost the Luftwaffe 296 aircraft destroyed and 135 damaged. The R.A.F. lost 148

fighters.

On August 12, Goering gave orders to launch Eagle the next day. As a curtain

raiser heavy attacks were made on the twelfth on enemy radar stations, five of

which were actually hit and damaged and one knocked out, but the Germans at

this stage did not realize how vital to Britain’s defenses radar was and did not

pursue the attack. On the thirteenth and fourteenth the Germans put in the air

some 1,500 aircraft, mostly against R.A.F. fighter fields, and though they

claimed five of them had been “completely destroyed” the damage was actually

negligible and the Luftwaffe lost forty-seven planes against thirteen for the

R.A.F.*

August 15 brought the first great battle in the skies. The Germans threw in the

bulk of their planes from all three air fleets, flying 801 bombing and 1,149

fighter sorties. Luftflotten 5, operating from Scandinavia, met disaster. By

sending some 800 planes in a massive attack on the south coast the Germans had

expected to find the northeast coast defenseless. But a force of a hundred

bombers, escorted by thirty-four twin-engined ME-110 fighters, was surprised

by seven squadrons of Hurricanes and Spitfires as it approached the Tyneside

and severely mauled. Thirty German planes, mostly bombers, were shot down

without loss to the defenders. That was the end of Air Fleet 5 in the Battle of

Britain. It never returned to it.

In the south of England that day the Germans were more successful. They

launched four massive attacks, one of which was able to penetrate almost to

London. Four aircraft factories at Croydon were hit and five R.A.F. fighter fields

damaged. In all, the Germans lost seventy-five planes, against thirty-four for the

R.A.F.* At this rate, despite their numerical superiority, the Germans could

scarcely hope to drive the R.A.F. from the skies.

Now Goering made the first of his two tactical errors. The skill of British

Fighter Command in committing its planes to battle against vastly superior

attacking forces was based on its shrewd use of radar. From the moment they

took off from their bases in Western Europe the German aircraft were spotted on

British radar screens, and their course so accurately plotted that Fighter

Command knew exactly where and when they could best be attacked. This was

something new in warfare and it puzzled the Germans, who were far behind the

British in the development and use of this electronic device.

We realized [Adolf Galland, the famous German fighter ace, later testified] that the R.A.F.

fighter squadrons must be controlled from the ground by some new procedure because we

heard commands skillfully and accurately directing Spitfires and Hurricanes on to German

formations … For us this radar and fighter control was a surprise and a very bitter one. 33

Yet the attack on British radar stations which on August 12 had been so

damaging had not been continued and on August 15, the day of his first major

setback, Goering called them off entirely, declaring: “It is doubtful whether there

is any point in continuing the attacks on radar stations, since not one of those

attacked has so far been put out of action.”

A second key to the successful defense of the skies over southern England

was the sector station. This was the underground nerve center from which the

Hurricanes and Spitfires were guided by radiotelephone into battle on the basis

of the latest intelligence from radar, from ground observation posts and from

pilots in the air. The Germans, as Galland noted, could hear the constant chatter

over the air waves between the sector stations and the pilots aloft and finally

began to understand the importance of these ground control centers. On August

24 they switched their tactics to the destruction of the sector stations, seven of

which on the airfields around London were crucial to the protection of the south

of England and of the capital itself. This was a blow against the very vitals of

Britain’s air defenses.

Until that day the battle had appeared to be going against the Luftwaffe. On

August 17 it lost seventy-one aircraft against the R.A.F.’s twenty-seven. The

slow Stuka dive bomber, which had helped to pave the way for the Army’s

victories in Poland and in the West, was proving to be a sitting duck for British

fighters and on that day, August 17, was withdrawn by Goering from the battle,

reducing the German bombing force by a third. Between August 19 and 23 there

was a five-day lull in the air due to bad weather. Goering, reviewing the situation

at Karinhall, his country show place near Berlin, on the nineteenth, ordered that

as soon as the weather improved, the Luftwaffe was to concentrate its attacks

exclusively on the Royal Air Force.

“We have reached the decisive period of the air war against England,” he

declared. “The vital task is the defeat of the enemy air force. Our first aim is to

destroy the enemy’s fighters. ”34

From August 24 to September 6 the Germans sent over an average of a

thousand planes a day to achieve this end. For once the Reich Marshal was right.

The Battle of Britain had entered its decisive stage. Though the R.A.F. pilots,

already strained from a month of flying several sorties a day, put up a valiant

fight, the German preponderance in sheer numbers began to tell. Five forward

fighter fields in the south of England were extensively damaged and, what was

worse, six of the seven key sector stations were so severely bombed that the

whole communications system seemed to be on the verge of being knocked out.

This threatened disaster to Britain.

Worst of all, the pace was beginning to tell on the R.A.F. fighter defense. In

the crucial fortnight between August 23 and September 6 the British lost 466

fighters destroyed or badly damaged, and though they did not know it at the time

the Luftwaffe losses were less: 385 aircraft, of which 214 were fighters and 138

bombers. Moreover, the R.A.F. had lost 103 pilots killed and 128 seriously

wounded—a quarter of all those available.

“The scales,” as Churchill later wrote, “had tilted against Fighter Command

… There was much anxiety.” A few more weeks of this and Britain would have

had no organized defense of its skies. The invasion would almost certainly

succeed.

And then suddenly Goering made his second tactical error, this one

comparable in its consequences to Hitler’s calling off the armored attack on

Dunkirk on May 24. It saved the battered, reeling R.A.F. and marked one of the

major turning points of history’s first great battle in the air.

With the British fighter defense suffering losses in the air and on the ground

which it could not for long sustain, the Luftwaffe switched its attack on

September 7 to massive night bombings of London. The R.A.F. fighters were

reprieved.

What had happened in the German camp to cause this change in tactics which

was destined to prove so fatal to the ambitions of Hitler and Goering? The

answer is full of irony.

To begin with, there was a minor navigational error by the pilots of a dozen

German bombers on the night of August 23. Directed to drop their loads on

aircraft factories and oil tanks on the outskirts of London, they missed their mark

and dropped bombs on the center of the capital, blowing up some homes and

killing some civilians. The British thought it was deliberate and as retaliation

bombed Berlin the next evening.

It didn’t amount to much. There was a dense cloud cover over Berlin that

night and only about half of the eighty-one R.A.F. bombers dispatched found the

target. Material damage was negligible. But the effect on German morale was

tremendous. For this was the first time that bombs had ever fallen on Berlin.

The Berliners are stunned [I wrote in my diary the next day, August 26]. They did not think

it could ever happen. When this war began, Goering assured them it couldn’t … They believed

him. Their disillusionment today therefore is all the greater. You have to see their faces to

measure it.

Berlin was well defended by two great rings of antiaircraft and for three hours

while the visiting bombers droned above the clouds, which prevented the

hundreds of searchlight batteries from picking them up, the flak fire was the

most intense I had ever seen. But not a single plane was brought down. The

British also dropped a few leaflets saying that “the war which Hitler started will

go on, and it will last as long as Hitler does.” This was good propaganda, but the

thud of exploding bombs was better.

The R.A.F. came over in greater force on the night of August 28–29 and, as I

noted in my diary, “for the first time killed Germans in the capital of the Reich. ”

The official count was ten killed and twenty-nine wounded. The Nazi bigwigs

were outraged. Goebbels, who had ordered the press to publish only a few lines

on the first attack, now gave instructions to cry out at the “brutality” of the

British flyers in attacking the defenseless women and children of Berlin. Most of

the capital’s dailies carried the same headline: COWARDLY BRITISH ATTACK. Two

nights later, after the third raid, the headlines read: BRITISH AIR PIRATES OVER

BERLIN!

The main effect of a week of constant British night bombings [I wrote in my diary on

September 1] has been to spread great disillusionment among the people and sow doubt in

their minds … Actually the bombings have not been very deadly.

September 1 was the first anniversary of the beginning of the war. I noted the

mood of the people, aside from their frayed nerves at having been robbed of

their sleep and frightened by the surprise bombings and the terrific din of the

flak.

In this year German arms have achieved victories never equaled even in the brilliant

military history of this aggressive, militaristic nation. And yet the war is not yet over or won.

And it was on this aspect that people’s minds were concentrated today. They long for peace.

And they want it before the winter comes.

Hitler deemed it necessary to address them on September 4 on the occasion of

the opening of the Winterhilfe campaign at the Sportpalast. His appearance there

was kept secret to the last moment, apparently out of fear that enemy planes

might take advantage of the cloud cover and break up the meeting, though it was

held in the afternoon, an hour before dark.

I have rarely seen the Nazi dictator in a more sarcastic mood or so given to

what the German people regarded as humor, though Hitler was essentially a

humorless man. He described Churchill as “that noted war correspondent.” For

“a character like Duff Cooper,” he said, “there is no word in conventional

German. Only the Bavarians have a word that adequately describes this type of

man, and that is Krampfhenne,” which might be translated as “a nervous old

hen.”

The babbling of Mr. Churchill or of Mr. Eden [he said]—reverence for old age forbids the

mention of Mr. Chamberlain—doesn’t mean a thing to the German people. At best, it makes

them laugh.

And Hitler proceeded to make his audience, which consisted mostly of women

nurses and social workers, laugh—and then applaud hysterically. He was faced

with the problem of answering two questions uppermost in the minds of the

German people: When would Britain be invaded, and what would be done about

the night bombings of Berlin and other German cities? As to the first:

In England they’re filled with curiosity and keep asking, “Why doesn’t he come?” Be

calm. Be calm. He’s coming! He’s coming!

His listeners found that crack very funny, but they also believed that it was an

unequivocal pledge. As to the bombings, he began by a typical falsification and

ended with a dire threat:

Just now … Mr. Churchill is demonstrating his new brain child, the night air raid. Mr.

Churchill is carrying out these raids not because they promise to be highly effective, but

because his Air Force cannot fly over Germany in daylight … whereas German planes are

over English soil every day … Whenever the Englishman sees a light, he drops a bomb … on

residential districts, farms and villages.

And then came the threat.

For three months I did not answer because I believed that such madness would be stopped.

Mr. Churchill took this for a sign of weakness. We are now answering night for night.

When the British Air Force drops two or three or four thousand kilograms of bombs, then

we will in one night drop 150-, 230-, 300- or 400,000 kilograms.

At this point, according to my diary, Hitler had to pause because of the

hysterical applause of the German women listeners.

“When they declare,” Hitler continued, “that they will increase their attacks

on our cities, then we will raze their cities to the ground.” At this, I noted, the

young ladies were quite beside themselves and applauded phrenetically. When

they had recovered, he added, “We will stop the handiwork of these night air

pirates, so help us God!”

On hearing this, I also noted, “the young German women hopped to their feet

and, their breasts heaving, screamed their approval!”

“The hour will come,” Hitler concluded, “when one of us will break, and it

will not be National Socialist Germany!” At this, I finally noted, “the raving

maidens kept their heads sufficiently to break their wild shouts of joy with a

chorus of ‘Never! Never!’”

Ciano in Rome, listening to the broadcast, which was made from records some

hours later, confessed to being perplexed. “Hitler must be nervous,” he

concluded.35

His nerves were a factor in the fatal decision to switch the Luftwaffe’s

winning daylight attacks on the R.A.F. to massive night bombings of London.

This was a political as well as a military decision, made in part to revenge the

bombings of Berlin and other German cities (which were but pinpricks

compared to what the Luftwaffe was doing to Britain’s cities) and to destroy the

will of the British to resist by razing their capital. If it succeeded, and Hitler and

Goebbels had no doubt it would, an invasion might not be necessary.

And so on the late afternoon of September 7 the great air attack on London

began. The Germans threw in, as we have seen,* 625 bombers and 648 fighters.

At about 5 P.M. that Saturday the first wave of 320 bombers, protected by every

fighter the Germans had, flew up the Thames and began to drop their bombs on

Woolwich Arsenal, various gas works, power stations, depots and mile upon

mile of docks. The whole vast area was soon a mass of flames. At one locality,

Silvertown, the population was surrounded by fire and had to be evacuated by

water. At 8:10 P.M., after dark, a second wave of 250 bombers arrived and

resumed the attack, which was kept up by successive waves until dawn at 4:30

on Sunday morning. The next evening at 7:30, the attack was renewed by two

hundred bombers and continued throughout the night. Some 842 persons were

killed and 2,347 wounded, according to the official British historian, during

these first two nights, and vast damage was inflicted on the sprawling city. 36 The

assault went on all the following week, night after night.†

And then, stimulated by its successes, or what it thought were such, the

Luftwaffe decided to carry out a great daylight assault on the battered, burning

capital. This led on Sunday, September 15, to one of the decisive battles of the

war.

Some two hundred German bombers, escorted by three times as many

fighters, appeared over the Channel about midday, headed for London. Fighter

Command had watched the assembling of the attackers on its radar screens and

was ready. The Germans were intercepted before they approached the capital,

and though some planes got through, many were dispersed and others shot down

before they could deliver their bomb load. Two hours later an even stronger

German formation returned and was routed. Though the British claimed to have

shot down 185 Luftwaffe planes, the actual figure, as learned after the war from

the Berlin archives, was much lower—fifty-six, but thirty-four of these were

bombers. The R.A.F. lost only twenty-six aircraft.

The day had shown that the Luftwaffe could not for the moment, anyway,

now that it had given Fighter Command a week to recover, carry out a successful

major daylight attack on Britain. That being so, the prospect of an effective

landing was dim. September 15 therefore was a turning point, “the crux,” as

Churchill later judged, of the Battle of Britain. Though Goering the next day, in

ordering a change of tactics that provided for the use of bombers in daylight no

longer to bomb but merely to serve as decoys for British fighters, boasted that

the enemy’s fighters “ought to be finished off within four or five days, ”37 Hitler

and the Army and Navy commanders knew better and two days after the

decisive air battle, on September 17, as has been noted, the Fuehrer called off

Sea Lion indefinitely.

Although London was to take a terrible pounding for fifty-seven consecutive

nights from September 7 to November 3 from a daily average of two hundred

bombers, so that it seemed certain to Churchill, as he later revealed, that the city

would soon be reduced to a rubble heap, and though most of Britain’s other

cities, Coventry above all, were to suffer great damage throughout that grim fall

and winter, British morale did not collapse nor armament production fall off, as

Hitler had so confidently expected. Just the opposite. Aircraft factories in

England, one of the prime targets of the Luftwaffe bombers, actually

outproduced the Germans in 1940 by 9,924 to 8,070 planes. Hitler’s bomber

losses over England had been so severe that they could never be made up, and in

fact the Luftwaffe, as the German confidential records make clear, never fully

recovered from the blow it received in the skies over Britain that late summer

and fall.

The German Navy, crippled by the losses off Norway in the early spring, was

unable, as its chiefs admitted all along, to provide the sea power for an invasion

of Britain. Without this, and without air supremacy, the German Army was

helpless to move across the narrow Channel waters. For the first time in the war

Hitler had been stopped, his plans of further conquest frustrated, and just at the

moment, as we have seen, when he was certain that final victory had been

achieved.

He had never conceived—nor had anyone else up to that time—that a decisive

battle could be decided in the air. Nor perhaps did he yet realize as the dark

winter settled over Europe that a handful of British fighter pilots, by thwarting

his invasion, had preserved England as a great base for the possible reconquest

of the Continent from the west at a later date. His thoughts were perforce turning

elsewhere; in fact, as we shall see, had already turned.

Britain was saved. For nearly a thousand years it had successfully defended

itself by sea power. Just in time, its leaders, a very few of them, despite all the

bungling (of which these pages have been so replete) in the interwar years, had

recognized that air power had become decisive in the mid-twentieth century and

the little fighter plane and its pilot the chief shield for defense. As Churchill told

the Commons in another memorable peroration on August 20, when the battle in

the skies still raged and its outcome was in doubt, “never in the field of human

conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

IF THE INVASION HAD SUCCEEDED

The Nazi German occupation of Britain would not have been a gentle affair.

The captured German papers leave no doubt of that. On September 9

Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chief of the Army, signed a directive providing

that “the able-bodied male population between the ages of seventeen and forty-

five [in Britain] will, unless the local situation calls for an exceptional ruling, be

interned and dispatched to the Continent.” Orders to this effect were sent out a

few days later by the Quartermaster General, in OKH, to the Ninth and Sixteenth

armies, which were assembled for the invasion. In no other conquered country,

not even in Poland, had the Germans begun with such a drastic step.

Brauchitsch’s instructions were headed “Orders Concerning the Organization

and Function of Military Government in England” and went into considerable

detail. They seem designed to ensure the systematic plunder of the island and the

terrorization of its inhabitants. A special “Military Economic Staff England” was

set up on July 27 to achieve the first aim. Everything but normal household

stocks was to be confiscated at once. Hostages would be taken. Anybody posting

a placard the Germans didn’t like would be liable to immediate execution, and a

similar penalty was provided for those who failed to turn in firearms or radio sets

within twenty-four hours.

But the real terror was to be meted out by Himmler and the S.S. For this the

dreaded R.S.H.A., * under Heydrich, was put in charge. The man who was

designated to direct its activities on the spot from London was a certain S.S.

colonel, Professor Dr. Franz Six, another of the peculiar intellectual gangsters

who in the Nazi time were somehow attracted to the service of Himmler’s secret

police. Professor Six had left his post as dean of the economic faculty of Berlin

University to join Heydrich’s S.D., where he specialized in “scientific matters,”

the weirder side of which cast such a spell over the bespectacled Heinrich

Himmler and his fellow thugs. What the British people missed by not having Dr.

Six in their presence may be judged by his later career in Russia, where he was

active in the S.S. Einsatzgruppen, which distinguished themselves in wholesale

massacres there, one of the professor’s specialties being to ferret out captured

Soviet political commissars for execution. *

On August 1, the R.S.H.A. captured archives reveal, Goering told Heydrich to

get busy. The S.S. Security Police and the S.D. (Security Service) were to

commence their activities simultaneously with the military invasion in order to seize and

combat effectively the numerous important organizations and societies in England which are

hostile to Germany.

On September 17, which, ironically, was the date on which Hitler postponed

the invasion indefinitely, Professor Six was formally appointed to his new post

in England by Heydrich and told:

Your task is to combat, with the requisite means, all anti-German organizations,

institutions, and opposition groups which can be seized in England, to prevent the removal of

all available material and to centralize and safeguard it for future exploitation. I designate

London as the location of your headquarters … and I authorize you to set up small

Einsatzgruppen in other parts of Great Britain as the situation dictates and the necessity arises.

Actually, already in August Heydrich had organized six Einsatzkommando for

Britain which were to operate from headquarters in London, Bristol,

Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Edinburgh—or in Glasgow, if the Forth

Bridge was found blown up. They were to carry out Nazi terror; to begin with,

they were to arrest all those on the “Special Search List, G.B. [Great Britain],”

which in May had been hurriedly and carelessly compiled by Walter

Schellenberg, another one of Himmler’s bright young university graduates, who

was then chief of Amt (Bureau) IV E—Counterespionage—of R.S.H.A. Or so

Schellenberg later claimed, though at this time he was mainly occupied in

Lisbon, Portugal, on a bizarre mission to kidnap the Duke of Windsor.

The Special Search List, G.B. ( die Sonderfahndungsliste, G.B. ) is among the

more amusing “invasion” documents found in the Himmler papers, though of

course it was not meant to be. It contains the names of some 2,300 prominent

persons in Great Britain, not all of them English, whom the Gestapo thought it

important to incarcerate at once. Churchill is there, naturally, along with

members of the cabinet and other well-known politicians of all parties. Leading

editors, publishers and reporters, including two former Times correspondents in

Berlin, Norman Ebbutt and Douglas Reed, whose dispatches had displeased the

Nazis, are on the list. British authors claim special attention. Shaw’s name is

conspicuously absent, but H. G. Wells is there along with such writers as

Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, J. B. Priestley, Stephen Spender,

C. P. Snow, Noel Coward, Rebecca West, Sir Philip Gibbs and Norman Angeli.

The scholars were not omitted either. Among them: Gilbert Murray, Bertrand

Russell, Harold Laski, Beatrice Webb and J. B. S. Haldane.

The Gestapo also intended to take advantage of its sojourn in England to

round up both foreign and German émigrés. Paderewski, Freud* and Chaim

Weizmann were on its list, as well as Beneš, the President, and Jan Masaryk, the

Foreign Minister, of the Czechoslovak government in exile. Of the German

refugees there were, among many others, two former personal friends of Hitler

who had turned on him: Hermann Rauschning and Putzi Hanfstaengl. Many

English names were so badly misspelled as to make them almost unrecognizable

and sometimes bizarre identifications were attached, as the one for Lady

Bonham Carter, who was also listed as “Lady Carter-Bonham” and described not

only as “born, Violet Asquith,” but as “an Encirclement lady politician.” After

each name was marked the bureau of R.S.H.A. which was to handle that person.

Churchill was to be placed in the hands of Amt VI—Foreign Intelligence—but

most were to be handed over to Amt IV—the Gestapo. †

This Nazi Black Book actually formed a supplement to a supposedly highly

secret handbook called Informationsheft, which Schellenberg also claims to have

written, and whose purpose seems to have been to aid the conquerors in looting

Britain and stamping out anti-German institutions there. It is even more amusing

than the Search List. Among the dangerous institutions, besides the Masonic

lodges and Jewish organizations, which deserved “special attention” by

R.S.H.A., were the “public schools” (in England, the private schools), the

Church of England, which was described as “a powerful tool of British imperial

politics,” and the Boy Scouts, which was put down as “an excellent source of

information for the British Intelligence Service.” Its revered leader and founder,

Lord Baden-Powell, was to be immediately arrested.

Had the invasion been attempted the Germans would not have been received

gently by the British. Churchill later confessed that he had often wondered what

would have happened. Of this much he was certain:

The massacre would have been on both sides grim and great. There would have been

neither mercy nor quarter. They would have used terror, and we were prepared to go all

lengths. 38

He does not say specifically to what lengths, but Peter Fleming in his book on

Sea Lion gives one of them. The British had decided, he says, as a last resort and

if all other conventional methods of defense failed, to attack the German

beachheads with mustard gas, sprayed from low-flying airplanes. It was a

painful decision, taken not without much soul searching at the highest level; and

as Fleming comments, the decision was “surrounded by secrecy at the time and

ever since.” 39

This particular massacre on which Churchill speculates, the unleashing of this

kind of terror which the Gestapo planned, did not take place at this time in this

place—for reasons which have been set down in this chapter. But in less than a

year, in another part of Europe, the Germans were to unleash horrors on a scale

never before experienced.

Already, even before the invasion of Britain was abandoned, Adolf Hitler had

come to a decision. He would turn on Russia in the following spring.

POSTSCRIPT: THE NAZI PLOT TO KIDNAP THE DUKE AND

DUCHESS OF WINDSOR

More amusing than important, but not without its insight into the ludicrous

side of the rulers of the Third Reich that summer of their great conquests, is the

story of the Nazi plot to kidnap the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and induce

the former King of England to work with Hitler for a peace settlement with

Great Britain. The evolution of the fantastic plan is told at length in the captured

German Foreign Office documents40 and touched on by Walter Schellenberg, the

youthful S.S.-S.D. chief who was designated to carry it out, in his memoirs. 41

The idea, Schellenberg was told by Ribbentrop, was Hitler’s. The Nazi

Foreign Minister embraced it with all the enthusiasm to which his abysmal

ignorance often drove him, and the German Foreign Office and its diplomatic

representatives in Spain and Portugal were forced to waste a great deal of time

on it during the climactic summer of 1940.

After the fall of France in June 1940, the Duke, who had been a member of

the British military mission with the French Army High Command, made his

way with the Duchess to Spain to escape capture by the Germans. On June 23

the German ambassador in Madrid, Eberhard von Stohrer, a career diplomat,

telegraphed Berlin:

The Spanish Foreign Minister requests advice with regard to the treatment of the Duke and

Duchess of Windsor who were to arrive in Madrid today, apparently en route to England by

way of Lisbon. The Foreign Minister assumes that we might perhaps be interested in detaining

the Duke here and possibly establishing contact with him. Please telegraph instructions.

Ribbentrop shot back instructions by wire the next day. He suggested that the

Windsors be “detained for a couple of weeks in Spain” but warned that it must

not appear “that the suggestion came from Germany.” On the following day,

June 25, Stohrer replied: “The [Spanish] Foreign Minister promised me to do

everything possible to detain Windsor here for a time.” The Foreign Minister,

Colonel Juan Beigbeder y Atienza, saw the Duke and reported on his talk to the

German ambassador, who informed Berlin by “top secret” telegram of July 2

that Windsor would not return to England unless his wife were recognized as a

member of the royal family and he himself given a position of importance.

Otherwise he would settle in Spain in a castle promised him by the Franco

government.

Windsor has expressed himself to the Foreign Minister and other acquaintances [the

ambassador added] against Churchill and against this war.

The Windsors proceeded to Lisbon early in July and on July 11 the German

minister there informed Ribbentrop that the Duke had been named Governor of

the Bahamas but “intends to postpone his departure there as long as possible …

in hope of a turn of events favorable to him.”

He is convinced [the minister added] that if he had remained on the throne war would have

been avoided, and he characterized himself as a firm supporter of a peaceful arrangement with

Germany. The Duke definitely believes that continued severe bombing would make England

ready for peace.

This intelligence spurred the arrogant German Foreign Minister to get off

from his special train at Fuschl a telegram marked “Very Urgent, Top Secret” to

the German Embassy in Madrid late on the evening of the same day, July 11. He

wanted the Duke to be prevented from going to the Bahamas by being brought

back to Spain, preferably by his Spanish friends. “After their return to Spain,”

Ribbentrop advised, “the Duke and his wife must be persuaded or compelled to

remain on Spanish territory.” If necessary Spain could “intern” him as an

English officer and treat him “as a military fugitive.”

At a suitable occasion [Ribbentrop further advised] the Duke must be informed that

Germany wants peace with the English people, that the Churchill clique stands in the way of

it, and that it would be a good thing if the Duke would hold himself in readiness for further

developments. Germany is determined to force England to peace by every means of power and

upon this happening would be prepared to accommodate any desire expressed by the Duke,

especially with a view to the assumption of the English throne by the Duke and Duchess. If the

Duke should have other plans, but be prepared to co-operate in the establishment of good

relations between Germany and England, we would likewise be prepared to assure him and his

wife of a subsistence which would permit him … to lead a life suitable for a king. *

The fatuous Nazi Minister, whose experience as German ambassador in

London had taught him little about the English, added that he had information

that the “British Secret Service” was going to “do away” with the Duke as soon

as it got him to the Bahamas.

The next day, July 12, the German ambassador in Madrid saw Ramón Serrano

Suñer, Spanish Minister of the Interior and brother-in-law of Franco, who

promised to get the Generalissimo in on the plot and carry out the following

plan. The Spanish government would send to Lisbon an old friend of the Duke,

Miguel Primo de Rivera, Madrid leader of the Falange and son of a former

Spanish dictator. Rivera would invite the Duke to Spain for some hunting and

also to confer with the government about Anglo-Spanish relations. Suñer would

inform the Duke about the British secret-service plot to bump him off.

The Minister [the German ambassador informed Berlin] will then add an invitation to the

Duke and Duchess to accept Spanish hospitality, and possibly financial assistance as well.

Possibly also the departure of the Duke could be prevented in some other way. In this whole

plan we remain completely in the background.

Rivera, according to the German papers, returned from Lisbon to Madrid after

his first visit with the Windsors on July 16 and brought a message to the Spanish

Foreign Minister, who passed it along to the German ambassador, who, in turn,

flashed it to Berlin. Churchill, the message said, had designated the Duke as

Governor of the Bahamas “in a very cool and categorical letter” and ordered him

to proceed to his post at once. Should he fail to do so, “Churchill has threatened

Windsor with a court-martial.” The Spanish government agreed, the dispatch

added, “to warn the Duke most urgently once more against taking up the post.”

Rivera was back from a second visit to Lisbon on July 22, and the next day

the German ambassador in Madrid duly reported on his findings in a “most

urgent, top secret” telegram to Ribbentrop.

He had two long conversations with the Duke of Windsor; at the last one the Duchess was

present also. The Duke expressed himself very freely … Politically he was more and more

distant from the King and the present British Government. The Duke and Duchess have less

fear of the King, who was quite foolish, than of the shrewd Queen, who was intriguing

skillfully against the Duke and particularly against the Duchess.

The Duke was considering making a public statement … disavowing present English

policy and breaking with his brother … The Duke and Duchess said they very much desired to

return to Spain.

To facilitate this, the ambassador had arranged with Suñer, the telegram

added, to send another Spanish emissary to Portugal “to persuade the Duke to

leave Lisbon, as if for a long excursion in an automobile, and then to cross the

border at a place which has been arranged, where the Spanish secret police will

see that there is a safe crossing of the frontier.”

Two days later the ambassador added further information from Rivera in an

“urgent and strictly confidential” telegram to Ribbentrop.

When he gave the Duke the advice not to go to the Bahamas, but to return to Spain, since

the Duke was likely to be called upon to play an important role in English policy and possibly

to ascend the English throne, both the Duke and Duchess gave evidence of astonishment. Both

… replied that according to the English constitution this would not be possible after the

abdication. When the confidential emissary then expressed his expectation that the course of

the war might bring about changes even in the English constitution, the Duchess especially

became very pensive.

In this dispatch the German ambassador reminded Ribbentrop that Rivera did

not know of “any German interest in the matter.” The young Spaniard apparently

believed he was acting for his own government.

By the last week in July, the Nazi plan to kidnap the Windsors had been

drawn up. Walter Schellenberg was assigned personally by Hitler to carry it out.

He had flown from Berlin to Madrid, conferred with the German ambassador

there, and gone on to Portugal to begin work. On July 26 the ambassador was

able to file a long “most urgent and top secret” dispatch to Ribbentrop outlining

the plot.

… A firm intention by the Duke and Duchess to return to Spain can be assumed. To

strengthen this intention the second confidential emissary was sent off today with a letter to

the Duke very skillfully composed; as an enclosure to it was attached the very precisely

prepared plan for carrying out the crossing of the frontier.

According to this plan the Duke and his wife should set out officially for a summer

vacation in the mountains at a place near the Spanish frontier, in order to cross over at a

precisely designated place at a particular time in the course of a hunting trip. Since the Duke is

without passports, the Portuguese frontier official in charge there will be won over.

At the time set according to plan, the first confidential emissary [Primo de Rivera] is to be

staying at the frontier with Spanish forces suitably placed in order to guarantee safety.

Schellenberg, with his group, is operating out of Lisbon in closest relation to the same

purpose.

For this purpose, the journey to the place of the summer vacation, as well as the vacation

itself, will be shadowed with the help of a trustworthy Portuguese police chief …

At the exact moment of the crossing of the frontier as scheduled the Schellenberg group is

to take over the security arrangements on the Portuguese side of the frontier and continue thus

into Spain as a direct escort which is to be unobtrusively changed from time to time.

For the security of the entire plan, the [Spanish] Minister has selected another confidential

agent, a woman, who can make contact if necessary with the second confidential agent and can

also, if necessary, get information to the Schellenberg group.

In case there should be an emergency as a result of action by the British Intelligence

Service preparations are being made whereby the Duke and Duchess can reach Spain by plane.

In this case, as in the execution of the first plan, the chief requisite is to obtain willingness to

leave by psychologically adroit influence upon the pronounced English mentality of the Duke,

without giving the impression of flight, through exploiting anxiety about the British

Intelligence Service and the prospect of free political activity from Spanish soil.

In addition to the protection in Lisbon, it is being considered in case of necessity to induce

willingness to leave by a suitable scare maneuver to be charged to the British Intelligence

Service.

Such was the Nazi plan to kidnap the Windsors. It had a typical German

clumsiness, and it was handicapped by the customary German inability to

understand “the English mentality of the Duke.”

The “scare maneuvers” were duly carried out by Schellenberg. One night he

arranged for some stone-throwing against the windows of the Windsors’ villa

and then circulated rumors among the servants that it had been done by the

“British Secret Service.” He had a bouquet delivered to the Duchess with a card:

“Beware of the machinations of the British Secret Service. From a Portuguese

friend who has your interests at heart.” And in an official report to Berlin he

reported that “a firing of shots (harmless breaking of the bedroom window)

scheduled for the night of July 30 was omitted, since the psychological effect on

the Duchess would only have been to increase her desire to depart.”

Time was getting short. On July 30 Schellenberg reported the arrival in

Lisbon of Sir Walter Monckton, an old friend of the Duke and an important

official in the British government. His mission was obviously to get the

Windsors speeding toward the Bahamas as soon as possible. On the same day

the German ambassador in Madrid was telegraphing Ribbentrop “most urgent,

top secret” that a German agent in Lisbon had just informed him that the Duke

and Duchess were planning to depart on August 1—two days hence. In view of

this information he asked Ribbentrop “whether we should not, to some extent,

emerge from our reserve.” According to German intelligence, the ambassador

continued, the Duke had expressed to his host, the Portuguese banker Ricardo do

Espirito Santo Silva, “a desire to come in contact with the Fuehrer.” Why not

arrange for a meeting between Windsor and Hitler?

The next day, July 31, the ambassador was again wiring Ribbentrop “most

urgent and top secret,” telling him that according to the Spanish emissary, who

had just returned from seeing the Windsors in Lisbon, the Duke and Duchess,

while “strongly impressed by reports of English intrigues against them and the

danger of their personal safety,” apparently were planning to sail on August 1,

though Windsor was trying “to conceal the true date.” The Spanish Minister of

the Interior, the ambassador added, was going to make “a last effort to prevent

the Duke and Duchess from leaving.”

The news that the Windsors might be leaving so soon alarmed Ribbentrop and

from his special train at Fuschl he got off a “most urgent, top secret” telegram to

the German minister in Lisbon late on the afternoon of the same day, July 31. He

asked that the Duke be informed through his Portuguese banker host of the

following:

Basically Germany wants peace with the English people. The Churchill clique stands in the

way of this peace. Following the rejection of the Fuehrer’s last appeal to reason, Germany is

now determined to force England to make peace by every means in her power. It would be a

good thing if the Duke were to keep himself prepared for further developments. In such case

Germany would be willing to co-operate most closely with the Duke and to clear the way for

any desire expressed by the Duke and Duchess … Should the Duke and Duchess have other

intentions, but be ready to collaborate in the establishment of a good relationship between

Germany and England, Germany is likewise prepared to co-operate with the Duke and to

arrange the future of the Ducal couple in accordance with their wishes. The Portuguese

confidant, with whom the Duke is living, should make the most earnest effort to prevent his

departure tomorrow, since reliable reports are in our possession to the effect that Churchill

intends to get the Duke into his power in the Bahamas in order to keep him there permanently,

and also because the establishment of contact at an appropriate moment with the Duke on the

Bahama Islands would present the greatest difficulty for us …

The German Foreign Minister’s urgent message reached the legation in

Lisbon shortly before midnight. The German minister saw Senhor Espirito Santo

Silva during the course of the night and urged him to pass the word on to his

distinguished guest. This the banker did on the morning of August 1 and

according to a dispatch of the legation the Duke was deeply impressed.

The Duke paid tribute to the Fuehrer’s desire for peace, which was in complete agreement

with his own point of view. He was firmly convinced that if he had been King it would never

have come to war. To the appeal made to him to co-operate at a suitable time in the

establishment of peace he agreed gladly. However, at the present time he must follow the

official orders of his Government. Disobedience would disclose his intentions prematurely,

bring about a scandal, and deprive him of his prestige in England. He was also convinced that

the present moment was too early for him to come forward, since there was as yet no

inclination in England for an approach to Germany. However, as soon as this frame of mind

changed he would be ready to return immediately … Either England would yet call upon him,

which he considered to be entirely possible, or Germany would express the desire to negotiate

with him. In both cases he was prepared for any personal sacrifice and would make himself

available without the slightest personal ambition.

He would remain in continuing communication with his previous host and had agreed with

him upon a code word, upon receiving which he would immediately come back over.

To the consternation of the Germans, the Duke and Duchess sailed on the

evening of August 1 on the American liner Excalibur. In a final report on the

failure of his mission made in a long telegram “to the Foreign Minister

[Ribbentrop] personally” on the following day, Schellenberg declared that he

had done everything possible right up to the last moment to prevent the

departure. A brother of Franco, who was the Spanish ambassador in Lisbon, was

prevailed upon to make a last-minute appeal to the Windsors not to go. The

automobile carrying the ducal baggage was “sabotaged,” Schellenberg claimed,

so that the luggage arrived at the ship late. The Germans spread rumors that a

time bomb had been planted aboard the ship. Portuguese officials delayed the

sailing time until they had searched the liner from top to bottom.

Nevertheless, the Windsors departed that evening. The Nazi plot had failed.

Schellenberg, in his final report to Ribbentrop, blamed it on the influence of

Monckton, on the collapse of “the Spanish plan” and on “the Duke’s mentality.”

There is one last paper on the plot in the captured files of the German Foreign

Minister. On August 15 the German minister in Lisbon wired Berlin: “The

confidant has just received a telegram from the Duke from Bermuda, asking him

to send a communication as soon as action was advisable. Should any answer be

made?”

No answer has been found in the Wilhelmstrasse papers. By the middle of

August, Hitler had decided to conquer Great Britain by armed force. There was

no need to find a new King for England. The island, like all the other conquered

territory, would be ruled from Berlin. Or so Hitler thought.

So much for this curious tale, as told by the secret German documents and

added to by Schellenberg, who was the least reliable of men—though it is

difficult to believe that he invented his own role, which he admits was a

ridiculous one, out of whole cloth.

In a statement made through his London solicitors on August 1, 1957, after

the German documents were released for publication, the Duke branded the

communications between Ribbentrop and the German ambassadors in Spain and

Portugal as “complete fabrications and, in part, gross distortions of the truth.”

Windsor explained that while in Lisbon in 1940, waiting to sail for the Bahamas,

“certain people,” whom he discovered to be pro-Nazi sympathizers, made

definite efforts to persuade him to return to Spain and not assume his post as

governor.

“It was even suggested to me that there would be a personal risk to the

Duchess and myself if we were to proceed to the Bahamas,” he said. “At no time

did I ever entertain any thought of complying with such a suggestion, which I

treated with the contempt it deserved.”

The British Foreign Office issued a formal statement declaring that the Duke

never wavered in his loyalty to Great Britain during the war.42

* And to gaze down at the tomb of Napoleon at the Invalides. “That,” he told his faithful

photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, “was the greatest and finest moment of my life.”

† The emphasis is Jodl’s.

‡ Jodl also suggested the possibility of “extending the war to the periphery”—that is, attacking

the British Empire with the help not only of Italy but of Japan, Spain and Russia.

* Even so astute a military critic as Liddell Hart neglected always to do so, and this neglect

mars his book The German Generals Talk. Talk they did, but not always with very good

memories or even very truthfully.

* German intelligence overestimated British strength on the ground throughout July, August

and September by about eight divisions. Early in July the German General Staff estimated

British strength at from fifteen to twenty divisions “of fighting value.” Actually there were

twenty-nine divisions in England at this time but not more than half a dozen of much “fighting

value,” as they had practically no armor or artillery. But contrary to widespread belief at the

time, which has lingered to this day, the British Army by the middle of September would have

been a match for the German divisions then allocated for the first wave of invasion. By that

time it had ready to meet an attack on the south coast a force of sixteen well-trained divisions,

of which three were armored, with four divisions plus an armored brigade covering the east

coast from the Thames to the Wash. This represented a remarkable recovery after the debacle

at Dunkirk, which had left Britain virtually defenseless on land in June.

British intelligence of the German plans was extremely faulty and for the first three months

of the invasion threat almost completely wrong. Throughout the summer, Churchill and his

military advisers remained convinced that the Germans would make their main landing

attempt on the east coast and it was here that the bulk of the British land forces were

concentrated until September.

* In his diary entry that evening Halder did not quote himself as above. He declared, however,

that “the talk led only to the confirmation of an unbridgeable gap.” The Navy, he said, was

“afraid of the British High Seas Fleet and maintained that a defense against this danger by the

Luftwaffe was impossible.” Obviously by this time the German Navy, if not the Army, had

few illusions about the striking power of Goering’s Air Force.

* Churchill says that neither he nor the chiefs of staff were “aware” that the decisive code

word Cromwell had been given. It was sent out by Headquarters of the Home Forces. ( Their

Finest Hour, p. 312.) But four days later, on September 11, the Prime Minister did broadcast a

warning that if the invasion were going to take place it could not “be long delayed. Therefore,”

he said, “we must regard the next week or so as a very important period in our history. It ranks

with the days when the Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel, and Drake was

finishing his game of bowls; or when Nelson stood between us and Napoleon’s Grand Army at

Boulogne.”

† The Germans were greatly impressed by reports from the embassy in Washington, which

relayed information received there from London and embroidered on it. The American

General Staff was said to believe that Britain couldn’t hold out much longer. According to

Lieutenant Colonel von Lossberg ( Im Wehrmacht Fuehrungsstab, p. 91) Hitler seriously

expected a revolution to break out in Britain. Lossberg was an Army representative on OKW.

* On September 16, according to a German authority, R.A.F. bombers surprised a large

invasion training exercise and inflicted heavy losses in men and landing vessels. This gave rise

to many reports in Germany and elsewhere on the Continent that the Germans had actually

attempted a landing and been repulsed by the British. (Georg W. Feuchter, Geschichte des

Luftkriegs, p. 176.) I heard such a “report” on the night of September 16 in Geneva,

Switzerland, where I was taking a few days off. On September 18 and again on the next day I

saw two long ambulance trains unloading wounded soldiers in the suburbs of Berlin. From the

bandages, I concluded the wounds were mostly burns. There had been no fighting anywhere

for three months on land.

On September 21, confidential German Navy papers recorded that 21 transports and 214

barges—some 12 per cent of the total assembled for the invasion—had been lost or damaged.

( Fuehrer Conferences on Naval Affairs, p. 102.)

* The Luftwaffe claimed 134 British craft against a loss of 34. From that date on both sides

grossly overestimated the damage they did the other.

* In London that evening an official communiqué reported 182 German planes shot down and

43 more probably destroyed. This gave a great fillip to British morale in general and to that of

the hard-pressed fighter pilots in particular.

† At this time night defenses had not yet been perfected and the German losses were

negligible.

* R.S.H.A., the initials of the Reich Central Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt),

which, as has been noted, took over control in 1939 of the Gestapo, the Criminal Police and

the Security Service, or S.D.

* Dr. Six was sentenced in 1948 at Nuremberg as a war criminal to twenty years in prison, but

was released in 1952.

* The famous psychoanalyst had died in London in 1939.

† A number of Americans are on the arrest list, including Bernard Baruch, John Gunther, Paul

Robeson, Louis Fischer, Daniel de Luce (the A.P. correspondent, who is listed under the D’s

as “Daniel, de Luce—U.S.A. correspondent”) and M. W. Fodor, the Chicago Daily News

correspondent, who was well known for his anti-Nazi writings.

* Fifty million Swiss francs, deposited in Switzerland, Ribbentrop told Schellenberg, adding

that “the Fuehrer is quite ready to go to a higher figure.”

23

BARBAROSSA: THE TURN OF RUSSIA

WHILE HITLER WAS BUSY that summer of 1940 directing the conquest of the

West, Stalin was taking advantage of the Fuehrer’s preoccupations by moving

into the Baltic States and reaching down into the Balkans.

On the surface all was friendly between the two great dictatorships. Molotov,

acting for Stalin, lost no opportunity to praise and flatter the Germans on every

occasion of a new act of aggression or a fresh conquest. When Germany invaded

Norway and Denmark on April 9, 1940, the Soviet Foreign Commissar hastened

to tell Ambassador von der Schulenburg in Moscow that very morning that “the

Soviet Government understood the measures which were forced on Germany.”

“We wish Germany,” said Molotov, “complete success in her defensive

measures. ”1

A month later, when the German ambassador called on Molotov to inform

him officially of the Wehrmacht’s attack in the West, which Ribbentrop had

instructed his envoy to explain “was forced upon Germany by the impending

Anglo–French push on the Ruhr by way of Belgium and Holland,” the Soviet

statesman again expressed his pleasure. “Molotov received the communication

in an understanding spirit,” Schulenburg wired Berlin, “and added that he

realized that Germany must protect herself against Anglo–French attack. He had

no doubt of our success.” 2

On June 17, the day France asked for an armistice, Molotov summoned

Schulenburg to his office “and expressed the warmest congratulations of the

Soviet Government on the splendid success of the German Wehrmacht.”

The Foreign Commissar had something else to say, and this did not sound

quite so pleasant in German ears. He informed the German envoy, as the latter

wired Berlin “most urgent,” of “the Soviet action against the Baltic States,”

adding—and one can almost see the gleam in Molotov’s eyes—“that it had

become necessary to put an end to all the intrigues by which England and France

had tried to sow discord and mistrust between Germany and the Soviet Union in

the Baltic States.” 3 To put an end to such “discord” the Soviet government,

Molotov added, had dispatched “special emissaries” to the three Baltic countries.

They were, in fact, three of Stalin’s best hatchetmen: Dekanozov, who was sent

to Lithuania; Vishinsky, to Latvia; Zhdanov, to Estonia.

They carried out their assignments with the thoroughness which one would

expect from this trio, especially the latter two individuals. Already on June 14,

the day German troops entered Paris, the Soviet government had sent a nine-

hour ultimatum to Lithuania demanding the resignation of its government, the

arrest of some of its key officials and the right to send in as many Red Army

troops as it pleased. Though the Lithuanian government accepted the ultimatum,

Moscow deemed its acceptance “unsatisfactory,” and the next day, June 15,

Soviet troops occupied the country, the only one of the Baltic States to border on

Germany. During the next couple of days similar Soviet ultimatums were

dispatched to Latvia and Estonia, after which they were similarly overrun by the

Red Army.

Stalin could be as crude and as ruthless in these matters as Hitler—and even

more cynical. The press having been suppressed, the political leaders arrested

and all parties but the Communist declared illegal, “elections” were staged by

the Russians in all three countries on July 14, and after the respective

parliaments thus “elected” had voted for the incorporation of their lands into the

Soviet Union, the Supreme Soviet (Parliament) of Russia “admitted” them into

the motherland: Lithuania on August 3, Latvia on August 5, Estonia on August

6.

Adolf Hitler was humiliated, but, busy as he was trying to organize the

invasion of Britain, could do nothing about it. The letters from the envoys of the

three Baltic States in Berlin protesting Russian aggression were returned to them

by order of Ribbentrop. To further humble the Germans Molotov brusquely told

them on August 11 to “liquidate” their legations in Kaunas, Riga and Tallinn

within a fortnight and close down their Baltic consulates by September 1.

The seizure of the Baltic States did not satisfy Stalin’s appetite. The

surprisingly quick collapse of the Anglo–French armies spurred him on to get as

much as he could while the getting was good. He obviously thought there was

little time to lose. On June 23, the day after the French formally capitulated and

signed the armistice at Compiègne, Molotov again called in the Nazi ambassador

in Moscow and told him that “the solution of the Bessarabian question brooked

no further delay. The Soviet government was determined to use force, should the

Rumanian government decline a peaceful agreement.” It expected Germany,

Molotov added, “not to hinder but to support the Soviets in their action.”

Moreover, “the Soviet claim likewise extended to Bucovina. ”4 Bessarabia had

been taken by Rumania from Russia at the end of the First World War, but

Bucovina had never belonged to it, having been under Austria until Rumania

grabbed it in 1919. At the negotiations in Moscow for the Nazi–Soviet Pact,

Ribbentrop, as he now reminded Hitler, who had questioned him about it, had

been forced to give Bessarabia to the Russian sphere of interest. But he had

never given away Bucovina.

There was some alarm in Berlin, which spread to OKW headquarters in the

West. The Wehrmacht was desperately dependent on Rumanian oil and

Germany needed the foodstuffs and fodder it also got from this Balkan country.

These would be lost if the Red Army occupied Rumania. Some time back, on

May 23, at the height of the Battle of France, the Rumanian General Staff had

sent an S.O.S. to OKW informing it that Soviet troops were concentrating on the

border. Jodl summed up the reac.ion at Hitler’s headquarters in his diary the next

day: “Situation in East becomes threatening because of Russian concentration of

force against Bessarabia. ”

On the night of June 26 Russia delivered an ultimatum to Rumania demanding

the ceding to it of Bessarabia and northern Bucovina and insisting on a reply the

next day. Ribbentrop, in panic, dashed off instructions from his special train to

his minister in Bucharest telling him to advise the Rumanian government to

yield, which it did on June 27. Soviet troops marched into the newly acquired

territories the next day and Berlin breathed a sigh of relief that at least the rich

sources of oil and food had not been cut off by Russia’s grabbing the whole of

Rumania.

It is clear from his acts and from the secret German papers that though Stalin

was out to get all he could in Eastern Europe while the Germans were tied down

in the West, he did not wish or contemplate a break with Hitler.

Toward the end of June Churchill had tried to warn Stalin in a personal letter

of the danger of the German conquests to Russia as well as to Britain.5 The

Soviet dictator did not bother to answer; probably, like almost everyone else, he

thought Britain was finished. So he tattled to the Germans what the British

government was up to. Sir Stafford Cripps, a left-wing Labor Party leader,

whom the Prime Minister had rushed to Moscow as the new British ambassador

in the hope of striking a more responsive chord among the Bolsheviks—a forlorn

hope, as he later ruefully admitted—was received by Stalin early in July in an

interview that Churchill described as “formal and frigid.” On July 13 Molotov,

on Stalin’s instructions, handed the German ambassador a written memorandum

of this confidential conversation.

It is an interesting document. It reveals, as no other source does, the severe

limitations of the Soviet dictator in his cold calculations of foreign affairs.

Schulenburg sped it to Berlin “most urgent” and, of course, “secret,” and

Ribbentrop was so grateful for its contents that he told the Soviet government he

“greatly appreciated this information.” Cripps had pressed Stalin, the

memorandum said, for his attitude on this principal question, among others:

The British Government was convinced that Germany was striving for hegemony in

Europe … This was dangerous to the Soviet Union as well as England. Therefore both

countries ought to agree on a common policy of self-protection against Germany and on the

re-establishment of the European balance of power …

Stalin’s answers are given as follows:

He did not see any danger of the hegemony of any one country in Europe and still less any

danger that Europe might be engulfed by Germany. Stalin observed the policy of Germany,

and knew several leading German statesmen well. He had not discovered any desire on their

part to engulf European countries. Stalin was not of the opinion that German military

successes menaced the Soviet Union and her friendly relations with Germany …6

Such staggering smugness, such abysmal ignorance leave one breathless. The

Russian tyrant did not know, of course, the secrets of Hitler’s turgid mind, but

the Fuehrer’s past behavior, his known ambitions and the unexpectedly rapid

Nazi conquests ought to have been enough to warn him of the dire danger the

Soviet Union was now in. But, incomprehensibly, they were not enough.

From the captured Nazi documents and from the testimony of many leading

German figures in the great drama that was being played over the vast expanse

of Western Europe that year, it is plain that at the very moment of Stalin’s

monumental complacency Hitler had in fact been mulling over in his mind the

idea of turning on the Soviet Union and destroying her.

The basic idea went back much further, at least fifteen years—to Mein Kampf.

And so we National Socialists [Hitler wrote] take up where we broke off six hundred years

ago. We stop the endless German movement toward the south and west of Europe and turn our

gaze toward the lands of the East … When we speak of new territory in Europe today we must

think principally of Russia and her border vassal states. Destiny itself seems to wish to point

out the way to us here … This colossal empire in the East is ripe for dissolution, and the end of

the Jewish domination in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state.7

This idea lay like bedrock in Hitler’s mind, and his pact with Stalin had not

changed it at all, but merely postponed acting on it. And but briefly. In fact, less

than two months after the deal was signed and had been utilized to destroy

Poland the Fuehrer instructed the Army that the conquered Polish territory was

to be regarded “as an assembly area for future German operations.” The date was

October 18, 1939, and Halder recorded it that day in his diary.

Five weeks later, on November 23, when he harangued his reluctant generals

about attacking in the West, Russia was by no means out of his mind. “We can

oppose Russia,” he declared, “only when we are free in the West. ” At that time

the two-front war, the nightmare of German generals for a century, was very

much on Hitler’s mind, and he spoke of it at length on this occasion. He would

not repeat the mistake of former German rulers; he would continue to see to it

that the Army had one front at a time.

It was only natural, then, that with the fall of France, the chasing of the British

Army across the Channel and the prospects of Britain’s imminent collapse,

Hitler’s thoughts should turn once again to Russia. For he now supposed himself

to be free in the West and thereby to have achieved the one condition he had laid

down in order to be in a position to “oppose Russia.” The rapidity with which

Stalin seized the Baltic States and the two Rumanian provinces in June spurred

Hitler to a decision.

The moment of its making can now be traced. Jodl says that the “fundamental

decision” was taken “as far back as during the Western Campaign.” 8 Colonel

Walter Warlimont, Jodl’s deputy at OKW, remembers that on July 29 Jodl

announced at a meeting of Operations Staff officers that “Hitler intended to

attack the U.S.S.R. in the spring of 1941.” Sometime previous to this meeting,

Jodl related, Hitler had told Keitel “that he intended to launch the attack against

the U.S.S.R. during the fall of 1940.” But this was too much even for Keitel and

he had argued Hitler out of it by contending that not only the bad weather in the

autumn but the difficulties of transferring the bulk of the Army from the West to

the East made it impossible. By the time of this conference on July 29,

Warlimont relates, “the date for the intended attack [against Russia] had been

moved back to the spring of 1941. ”9

Only a week before, we know from Halder’s diary, 10 the Fuehrer had still held

to a possible campaign in Russia for the autumn if Britain were not invaded. At a

military conference in Berlin on July 21 he told Brauchitsch to get busy on the

preparations for it. That the Army Commander in Chief and his General Staff

already had given the problem some thought—but not enough thought—is

evident from his response to Hitler. Brauchitsch told the Leader that the

campaign “would last four to six weeks” and that the aim would be “to defeat

the Russian Army or at least to occupy enough Russian territory so that Soviet

bombers could not reach Berlin or the Silesian industrial area while, on the other

hand, the Luftwaffe bombers could reach all important objectives in the Soviet

Union.” Brauchitsch thought that from eighty to a hundred German divisions

could do the job; he assessed Russian strength as “fifty to seventy-five good

divisions.” Halder’s notes on what Brauchitsch told him of the meeting show

that Hitler had been stung by Stalin’s grabs in the East, that he thought the

Soviet dictator was “coquetting with England” in order to encourage her to hold

out, but that he had seen no signs that Russia was preparing to enter the war

against Germany.

At a further conference at the Berghof on the last day of July 1940, the

receding prospects of an invasion of Britain prompted Hitler to announce for the

first time to his Army chiefs his decision on Russia. Halder was personally

present this time and jotted down his shorthand notes of exactly what the

warlord said.11 They reveal not only that Hitler had made a definite decision to

attack Russia in the following spring but that he had already worked out in his

mind the major strategic aims.

Britain’s hope [Hitler said] lies in Russia and America. If that hope in Russia is destroyed

then it will be destroyed for America too because elimination of Russia will enormously

increase Japan’s power in the Far East.

The more he thought of it the more convinced he was, Hitler said, that

Britain’s stubborn determination to continue the war was due to its counting on

the Soviet Union.

Something strange [he explained] has happened in Britain! The British were already

completely down. * Now they are back on their feet. Intercepted conversations. Russia

unpleasantly disturbed by the swift developments in Western Europe.

Russia needs only to hint to England that she does not wish to see Germany too strong and

the English, like a drowning man, will regain hope that the situation in six to eight months will

have completely changed.

But if Russia is smashed, Britain’s last hope will be shattered. Then Germany will be

master of Europe and the Balkans.

Decision: In view of these considerations Russia must be liquidated. Spring, 1941.

The sooner Russia is smashed, the better.†

The Nazi warlord then elaborated on his strategic plans which, it was obvious

to the generals, had been ripening in his mind for some time despite all his

preoccupations with the fighting in the West. The operation, he said, would be

worth carrying out only if its aim was to shatter the Soviet nation in one great

blow. Conquering a lot of Russian territory would not be enough. “Wiping out of

the very power to exist of Russia! That is the goal!” Hitler emphasized. There

would be two initial drives: one in the south to Kiev and the Dnieper River, the

second in the north up through the Baltic States and then toward Moscow. There

the two armies would make a junction. After that a special operation, if

necessary, to secure the Baku oil fields. The very thought of such new conquests

excited Hitler; he already had in mind what he would do with them. He would

annex outright, he said, the Ukraine, White Russia and the Baltic States and

extend Finland’s territory to the White Sea. For the whole operation he would

allot 120 divisions, keeping sixty divisions for the defense of the West and

Scandinavia. The attack, he laid it down, would begin in May 1941 and would

take five months to carry through. It would be finished by winter. He would have

preferred, he said, to do it this year but this had not proved possible.

The next day, August 1, Halder went to work on the plans with his General

Staff. Though he would later claim to have opposed the whole idea of an attack

on Russia as insane, his diary entry for this day discloses him full of enthusiasm

as he applied himself to the challenging new task.

Planning now went ahead with typical German thoroughness on three levels:

that of the Army General Staff, of Warlimont’s Operations Staff at OKW, of

General Thomas’ Economic and Armaments Branch of OKW. Thomas was

instructed on August 14 by Goering that Hitler desired deliveries of ordered

goods to the Russians “only till spring of 1941.” * In the meantime his office was

to make a detailed survey of Soviet industry, transportation and oil centers both

as a guide to targets and later on as an aid for administering Russia.

A few days before, on August 9, Warlimont had got out his first directive for

preparing the deployment areas in the East for the jump-off against the Russians.

The code name for this was Aufbau Ost—“Build-up East.” On August 26, Hitler

ordered ten infantry and two armored divisions to be sent from the West to

Poland. The panzer units, he stipulated, were to be concentrated in southeastern

Poland so that they could intervene to protect the Rumanian oil fields.13 The

transfer of large bodies of troops to the East† could not be done without exciting

Stalin’s easily aroused suspicions if he learned of it, and the Germans went to

great lengths to see that he didn’t. Since some movements were bound to be

detected, General Ernst Koestring, the German military attaché in Moscow, was

instructed to inform the Soviet General Staff that it was merely a question of

replacing older men, who were being released to industry, by younger men. On

September 6, Jodl got out a directive outlining in considerable detail the means

of camouflage and deception. “These regroupings,” he laid it down, “must not

create the impression in Russia that we are preparing an offensive in the East.” 14

So that the armed services should not rest on their laurels after the great

victories of the summer, Hitler issued on November 12, 1940, a comprehensive

top-secret directive outlining new military tasks all over Europe and beyond. We

shall come back to some of them. What concerns us here is that portion dealing

with the Soviet Union.

Political discussions have been initiated with the aim of clarifying Russia’s attitude for the

time being. Irrespective of the results of these discussions, all preparations for the East which

have already been verbally ordered will be continued. Instructions on this will follow, as soon

as the general outline of the Army’s operational plans have been submitted to, and approved

by, me. 15

As a matter of fact, on that very day, November 12, Molotov arrived in Berlin

to continue with Hitler himself those political discussions.

MOLOTOV IN BERLIN

Relations between Berlin and Moscow had for some months been souring. It

was one thing for Stalin and Hitler to double-cross third parties, but quite

another when they began to double-cross each other. Hitler had been helpless to

prevent the Russians from grabbing the Baltic States and the two Rumanian

provinces of Bessarabia and northern Bucovina, and his frustration only added to

his growing resentment. The Russian drive westward would have to be stopped

and first of all in Rumania, whose oil resources were of vital importance to a

Germany which, because of the British blockade, could no longer import

petroleum by sea.

To complicate Hitler’s problem, Hungary and Bulgaria too demanded slices of

Rumanian territory. Hungary, in fact, as the summer of 1940 approached its end,

prepared to go to war in order to win back Transylvania, which Rumania had

taken from her after the First World War. Such a war, Hitler realized, would cut

off Germany from her main source of crude oil and probably bring the Russians

in to occupy all of Rumania and rob the Reich permanently of Rumanian oil.

By August 28 the situation had become so threatening that Hitler ordered five

panzer and three motorized divisions plus parachute and airborne troops to make

ready to seize the Rumanian oil fields on September 1.16 That same day he

conferred with Ribbentrop and Ciano at the Berghof and then dispatched them to

Vienna, where they were to lay down the law to the foreign ministers of

Hungary and Rumania and make them accept Axis arbitration. This mission was

accomplished without much trouble after Ribbentrop had browbeaten both sides.

On August 30 at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna the Hungarians and Rumanians

accepted the Axis settlement. When Mihai Manoilescu, the Rumanian Foreign

Minister, saw the map stipulating that about one half of Transylvania should go

to Hungary, he fainted, falling across the table at which the signing of the

agreement was taking place, and regaining consciousness only after physicians

had worked over him with camphor.*17 Ostensibly for her reasonableness but

really to give Hitler a legal excuse for his further plans, Rumania received from

Germany and Italy a guarantee of what was left of her territory. *

Light on the Fuehrer’s further plans came to his intimates three weeks later.

On September 20, in a top-secret directive, Hitler ordered the sending of

“military missions” to Rumania.

To the world their tasks will be to guide friendly Rumania in organizing and instructing her

forces.

The real tasks—which must not become apparent either to the Rumanians or to our own

troops—will be:

To protect the oil district …

To prepare for deployment from Rumanian bases of German and Rumanian forces in case

a war with Soviet Russia is forced upon us. 18

That would take care of the southern flank of a new front he was beginning to

picture in his mind.

The Vienna award and especially the German guarantee of Rumania’s

remaining territory went down badly in Moscow, which had not been consulted.

When Schulenburg called on Molotov on September 1 to present a windy

memorandum from Ribbentrop attempting to explain—and justify—what had

taken place in Vienna, the Foreign Commissar, the ambassador reported, “was

reserved, in contrast to his usual manner.” He was not too reserved, however, to

lodge a strong verbal protest. He accused the German government of violating

Article III of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, which called for consultation, and of

presenting Russia with “accomplished facts” which conflicted with German

assurances about “questions of common interests.” 19 The thieves, as is almost

inevitable in such cases, had begun to quarrel over the spoils.

Recriminations became more heated in the following days. On September 3

Ribbentrop telegraphed a long memorandum to Moscow denying that Germany

had violated the Moscow Pact and accusing Russia of having done just that by

gobbling up the Baltic States and two Rumanian provinces without consulting

Berlin. The memorandum was couched in strong language and the Russians

replied to it on September 21 with equally stern words—by this time both sides

were putting their cases in writing. The Soviet answer reiterated that Germany

had broken the pact, warned that Russia still had many interests in Rumania and

concluded with a sarcastic proposal that if the article calling for consultation

involved “certain inconveniences and restrictions” for the Reich the Soviet

government was ready to amend or delete this clause of the treaty. 20

The Kremlin’s suspicions of Hitler were further aroused by two events in

September. On the sixteenth, Ribbentrop wired Schulenburg to call on Molotov

and “casually” inform him that German reinforcements for northern Norway

were going to be sent by way of Finland. A few days later, on September 25, the

Nazi Foreign Minister got off another telegram to the embassy in Moscow, this

time addressed to the chargé, Schulenburg having returned to Germany on leave.

It was a most confidential message, being marked “Strictly Secret—State

Secret,” and directing that its instructions were to be carried out only if on the

next day the chargé received from Berlin by wire or telephone a special code

word. 21

He was to inform Molotov that “in the next few days” Japan, Italy and

Germany were going to sign in Berlin a military alliance. It was not to be

directed against Russia—a specific article would say that.

This alliance [Ribbentrop stated] is directed exclusively against American warmongers. To

be sure this is, as usual, not expressly stated in the treaty, but can be unmistakably inferred

from its terms … Its exclusive purpose is to bring the elements pressing for America’s entry

into the war to their senses by conclusively demonstrating to them that if they enter the present

struggle they will automatically have to deal with the three great powers as adversaries. 22

The chilly Soviet Foreign Commissar, whose suspicions of the Germans were

now growing like flowers in June, was highly skeptical when Werner von

Tippelskirch, the chargé, brought him this news on the evening of September 26.

He said immediately, with that pedantic attention to detail which so annoyed all

with whom he negotiated, friend or foe, that according to Article IV of the

Moscow Pact the Soviet government was entitled to see the text of this tripartite

military alliance before it was signed, including, he added, the text of “any secret

protocols.”

Molotov also wanted to know more about the German agreement with Finland

for the transport of troops through that country, which he had heard of mostly

through the press, he said, including a United Press dispatch from Berlin. During

the last three days, Molotov added, Moscow had received reports of the landing

of German forces in at least three Finnish ports, “without having been informed

thereof by Germany.”

The Soviet Government [Molotov continued] wished to receive the text of the agreement

on the passage of troops through Finland, including its secret portions … and to be informed

as to the object of the agreement, against whom it was directed, and the purposes that were

being served thereby.23

The Russians had to be mollified—even the obtuse Ribbentrop could see that

—and on October 2 he telegraphed to Moscow what he said was the text of the

agreement with Finland. He also reiterated that the Tripartite Pact, which in the

meantime had been signed, * was not directed against the Soviet Union and

solemnly declared that “there were no secret protocols nor any other secret

agreements. ”24 After instructing Tippelskirch on October 7 to inform Molotov

“incidentally” that a German “military mission” was being sent to Rumania and

after receiving Molotov’s skeptical reaction to this further news (“How many

troops are you sending to Rumania?” the Foreign Commissar had demanded to

know), 25 Ribbentrop on October 13 got off a long letter to Stalin in an attempt to

quiet Soviet uneasiness about Germany.26

It is, as might be expected, a fatuous and at the same time arrogant epistle,

abounding in nonsense and lies and subterfuge. England is blamed for the war

and all its aftermaths thus far, but one thing is sure: “The war as such has been

won by us. It is only a question of how long it will be before England … admits

to collapse.” The German moves against Russia in Finland and Rumania as well

as the Tripartite Pact are explained as really a boon to Russia. In the meantime

British diplomacy and British secret agents are trying to stir up trouble between

Russia and Germany. To frustrate them, why not send Molotov to Berlin,

Ribbentrop asked Stalin, so that the Fuehrer could “explain personally his views

regarding the future molding of relations between our two countries”?

Ribbentrop gave a sly hint what those views were: nothing less than dividing

up the world among the four totalitarian powers.

It appears to be the mission of the Four Powers [he said]— the Soviet Union,

Italy, Japan and Germany—to adopt a long-range policy …by delimitation of

their interests on a world-wide scale.

The emphasis is Ribbentrop’s.

There was some delay in the German Embassy in Moscow in getting this

letter to its destination, which made Ribbentrop livid with rage and inspired an

angry telegram from him to Schulenburg demanding to know why his letter had

not been delivered until the seventeenth and why, “in keeping with the

importance of its contents,” it was not delivered to Stalin personally—

Schulenburg had handed it to Molotov.27 Stalin replied on October 22, in a

remarkably cordial tone. “Molotov admits,” he wrote, “that he is under

obligation to pay you a visit in Berlin. He hereby accepts your invitation.” 28

Stalin’s geniality must have been only a mask. Schulenburg wired Berlin a few

days later that the Russians were protesting the refusal of Germany to deliver

war material while at the same time shipping arms to Finland. “This is the first

time,” Schulenburg advised Berlin, “that our deliveries of arms to Finland have

been mentioned by the Soviets. ”29

A dark, drizzling day, and Molotov arrived, his reception being extremely stiff and formal.

Driving up the Linden to the Soviet Embassy, he looked to me like a plugging, provincial

schoolmaster. But to have survived in the cutthroat competition of the Kremlin he must have

something. The Germans talk glibly of letting Moscow have that old Russian dream, the

Bosporus and the Dardanelles, while they will take the rest of the Balkans: Rumania,

Yugoslavia and Bulgaria …

Thus began my diary entry in Berlin on November 12, 1940. The glib talk of

the Germans was accurate enough, as far as it went. Today we know much more

about this strange and—as it turned out—fateful meeting, thanks to the capture

of the Foreign Office documents, in which one finds the confidential German

minutes of the two-day sessions, all but one of them kept by the ubiquitous Dr.

Schmidt.*30

At the first meeting between the two foreign ministers, during the forenoon of

November 12, Ribbentrop was in one of his most vapid and arrogant moods but

Molotov quickly saw through him and sized up what the German game was.

“England,” Ribbentrop began, “is beaten and it is only a question of time when

she will finally admit her defeat … The beginning of the end has now arrived for

the British Empire.” The British, it was true, were hoping for aid from America,

but “the entry of the United States into the war is of no consequence at all for

Germany. Germany and Italy will never again allow an Anglo-Saxon to land on

the European Continent … This is no military problem at all … The Axis

Powers are, therefore, not considering how they can win the war, but rather how

rapidly they can end the war which is already won.”

This being so, Ribbentrop explained, the time had come for the four powers,

Russia, Germany, Italy and Japan, to define their “spheres of interest.” The

Fuehrer, he said, had concluded that all four countries would naturally expand

“in a southerly direction.” Japan had already turned south, as had Italy, while

Germany, after the establishment of the “New Order” in Western Europe, would

find her additional Lebensraum in (of all places!) “Central Africa.” Ribbentrop

said he “wondered” if Russia would also not “turn to the south for the natural

outlet to the open sea which was so important for her.”

“Which sea?” Molotov interjected icily.

This was an awkward but crucial question, as the Germans would learn during

the next thirty-six hours of ceaseless conversations with this stubborn, prosaic,

precise Bolshevik. The interruption floored Ribbentrop for a moment and he

could not think of an answer. Instead, he rambled on about “the great changes

that would take place all over the world after the war” and gabbled that the

important thing was that “both partners to the German–Russian pact had together

done some good business” and “would continue to do some business.” But when

Molotov insisted on an answer to his simple question, Ribbentrop finally replied

by suggesting that “in the long run the most advantageous access to the sea for

Russia could be found in the direction of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea. ”

Molotov sat there, says Dr. Schmidt, who was present taking notes, “with an

impenetrable expression.” 31 He said very little, except to comment at the end

that “precision and vigilance” were necessary in delimiting spheres of interest,

“particularly between Germany and Russia.” The wily Soviet negotiator was

saving his ammunition for Hitler, whom he saw in the afternoon. For the all-

powerful Nazi warlord it turned out to be quite a surprising, nerve-racking,

frustrating and even unique experience.

Hitler was just as vague as his Foreign Minister and even more grandiose. As

soon as the weather improved, he began by saying, Germany would strike “the

final blow against England.” There was, to be sure, “the problem of America.”

But the United States could not “endanger the freedom of other nations before

1970 or 1980 … It had no business either in Europe, in Africa or in Asia”—an

assertion which Molotov broke in to say he was in agreement with. But he was

not in agreement with much else that Hitler said. After the Nazi leader had

finished a lengthy exposition of pleasant generalities, stressing that there were no

fundamental differences between the two countries in the pursuit of their

respective aspirations and in their common drive toward “access to the ocean,”

Molotov replied that “the statements of the Fuehrer had been of a general

nature.” He would now, he said, set forth the ideas of Stalin, who on his

departure from Moscow had given him “exact instructions.” Whereupon he

hurled the book at the German dictator who, as the minutes make clear, was

scarcely prepared for it.

“The questions hailed down upon Hitler,” Schmidt afterward recalled. “No

foreign visitor had ever spoken to him in this way in my presence. ”32

What was Germany up to in Finland? Molotov wanted to know. What was the

meaning of the New Order in Europe and in Asia, and what role would the

U.S.S.R. be given in it? What was the “significance” of the Tripartite Pact?

“Moreover,” he continued, “there are issues to be clarified regarding Russia’s

Balkan and Black Sea interests with respect to Bulgaria, Rumania and Turkey.”

He would like, he said, to hear some answers and “explanations.”

Hitler, perhaps for the first time in his life, was too taken aback to answer. He

proposed that they adjourn “in view of a possible air-raid alarm,” promising to

go into a detailed discussion the next day.

A showdown had been postponed but not prevented, and the next morning

when Hitler and Molotov resumed their talks the Russian Commissar was

relentless. To begin with, about Finland, over which the two men soon became

embroiled in a bitter and caustic dispute. Molotov demanded that Germany get

its troops out of Finland. Hitler denied that “Finland was occupied by German

troops.” They were merely being sent through Finland to Norway. But he

wanted to know “whether Russia intended to go to war against Finland.”

According to the German minutes, Molotov “answered this question somewhat

evasively,” and Hitler was not satisfied.

“There must be no war in the Baltic,” Hitler insisted. “It would put a heavy

strain on German–Russian relations,” a threat which he added to a moment later

by saying that such a strain might bring “unforeseeable consequences.” What

more did the Soviet Union want in Finland, anyway? Hitler wanted to know, and

his visitor answered that it wanted a “settlement on the same scale as in

Bessarabia” —which meant outright annexation. Hitler’s reaction to this must

have perturbed even the imperturbable Russian, who hastened to ask the

Fuehrer’s “opinion on that.”

The dictator in turn was somewhat evasive, replying that he could only repeat

that “there must be no war with Finland because such a conflict might have far-

reaching repercussions.”

“A new factor has been introduced into the discussion by this position,”

Molotov retorted.

So heated had the dispute become that Ribbentrop, who must have become

thoroughly frightened by this time, broke in to say, according to the German

minutes, “that there was actually no reason at all for making an issue of the

Finnish question. Perhaps it was merely a misunderstanding.”

Hitler took advantage of this timely intervention to quickly change the subject.

Could not the Russians be tempted by the unlimited plunder soon to be available

with the collapse of the British Empire?

“Let us turn to more important problems,” he said.

After the conquest of England [he declared] the British Empire would be apportioned as a

gigantic world-wide estate in bankruptcy of forty million square kilometers. In this bankrupt

estate there would be for Russia access to the ice-free and really open ocean. Thus far, a

minority of forty-five million Englishmen had ruled six hundred million inhabitants of the

British Empire. He was about to crush this minority … Under these circumstances there arose

world-wide perspectives … All the countries which could possibly be interested in the

bankrupt estate would have to stop all controversies among themselves and concern

themselves exclusively with the partition of the British Empire. This applied to Germany,

France, Italy, Russia and Japan.

The chilly, impassive Russian guest did not appear to be moved by such

glittering “world-wide perspectives,” nor was he as convinced as the Germans—

a point he later rubbed in—that the British Empire would soon be there for the

taking. He wanted, he said, to discuss problems “closer to Europe.” Turkey, for

instance, and Bulgaria and Rumania.

“The Soviet Government,” he said, “is of the opinion that the German

guarantee of Rumania is aimed against the interests of Soviet Russia—if one

may express oneself so bluntly.” He had been expressing himself bluntly all day,

to the growing annoyance of his hosts, and now he pressed on. He demanded

that Germany “revoke” this guarantee. Hitler declined.

All right, Molotov persisted, in view of Moscow’s interest in the Straits, what

would Germany say “if Russia gave Bulgaria … a guarantee under exactly the

same conditions as Germany and Italy had given one to Rumania”?

One can almost see Hitler’s dark frown. He inquired whether Bulgaria had

asked for such a guarantee, as had Rumania? “He (the Fuehrer),” the German

memorandum quotes him as adding, “did not know of any request by Bulgaria.”

At any rate, he would first have to consult Mussolini before giving the Russians

a more definite answer to their question. And he added ominously that if

Germany “were perchance looking for sources of friction with Russia, she would

not need the Straits for that.”

But the Fuehrer, usually so talkative, had no more stomach for talk with this

impossible Russian.

“At this point in the conversation,” say the German minutes, “the Fuehrer

called attention to the late hour and stated that in view of the possibility of

English air attacks it would be better to break off the talk now, since the main

issues had probably been sufficiently discussed.”

That night Molotov gave a gala banquet to his hosts at the Russian Embassy

on Unter den Linden. Hitler, apparently exhausted and still irritated by the

afternoon’s ordeal, did not put in an appearance.

The British did. I had wondered why their bombers had not appeared over

Berlin, as they had almost every recent night, to remind the Soviet Commissar

on his first evening in the capital that, whatever the Germans told him, Britain

was still in the war, and kicking. Some of us, I confess, had waited hopefully for

the planes, but they had not come. Officials in the Wilhelmstrasse, who had

feared the worst, were visibly relieved. But not for long.

On the evening of November 13, the British came over early. * It gets dark in

Berlin about 4 P.M. at this time of year, and shortly after 9 o’clock the air-raid

sirens began to whine and then you could hear the thunder of the flak guns and,

in between, the hum of the bombers overhead. According to Dr. Schmidt, who

was at the banquet in the Soviet Embassy, Molotov had just proposed a friendly

toast and Ribbentrop had risen to his feet to reply when the air-raid warning was

sounded and the guests scattered to shelter. I remember the hurrying and

scurrying down the Linden and around the corner at the Wilhelmstrasse as

Germans and Russians made for the underground shelter of the Foreign

Ministry. Some of the officials, Dr. Schmidt among them, ducked into the Adlon

Hotel, from in front of which some of us were watching, and were unable to get

to the impromptu meeting which the two foreign ministers now held in the

underground depths of the Foreign Office. The minutes of this meeting were

therefore taken, in the enforced absence of Dr. Schmidt, by Gustav Hilger,

counselor of the German Embassy in Moscow, who had acted as one of the

interpreters during the conference.

While the British bombers cruised overhead in the night and the antiaircraft

guns fired away ineffectively at them, the slippery Nazi Foreign Minister tried

one last time to take the Russians in. Out of his pocket he pulled a draft of an

agreement which, in substance, transformed the Tripartite Pact into a four-power

pact, with Russia as the fourth member. Molotov listened patiently while

Ribbentrop read it through.

Article II was the core. In it Germany, Italy, Japan and the Soviet Union

undertook “to respect each other’s natural spheres of influence.” Any disputes

concerning them would be settled “in an amicable way.” The two fascist

countries and Japan agreed to “recognize the present extent of the possessions of

the Soviet Union and will respect it.” All four countries, in Article III, agreed not

to join or support any combination “directed against one of the Four Powers.”

The agreement itself, Ribbentrop proposed, would be made public, but not, of

course, its secret protocols, which he next proceeded to read. The most important

one defined each country’s “territorial aspirations.” Russia’s was to “center

south of the national territory of the Soviet Union in the direction of the Indian

Ocean.”

Molotov did not rise to the bait. The proposed treaty was obviously an attempt

to divert Russia from its historic pressure westward, down the Baltic, into the

Balkans and through the Straits to the Mediterranean, where inevitably it would

clash with the greedy designs of Germany and Italy. The U.S.S.R. was not, at

least at the moment, interested in the Indian Ocean, which lay far away. What it

was interested in at the moment, Molotov replied, was Europe and the Turkish

Straits. “Consequently,” he added, “paper agreements will not suffice for the

Soviet Union; she would have to insist on effective guarantees of her security.”

The questions which interested the Soviet Union [he elaborated] concerned not only

Turkey but Bulgaria … But the fate of Rumania and Hungary was also of interest to the

U.S.S.R. and could not be immaterial to her under any circumstances. It would further interest

the Soviet Government to learn what the Axis contemplated with regard to Yugoslavia and

Greece, and likewise, what Germany intended with regard to Poland … The Soviet

Government was also interested in the question of Swedish neutrality … Besides, there existed

the question of the passages out of the Baltic Sea …

The untiring, poker-faced Soviet Foreign Commissar left nothing out and

Ribbentrop, who felt himself being buried under the avalanche of questions—for

at this point Molotov said he would “appreciate it” if his guest made answer to

them—protested that he was being “interrogated too closely.”

He could only repeat again and again [he replied weakly] that the decisive question was

whether the Soviet Union was prepared and in a position to co-operate with us in the great

liquidation of the British Empire.

Molotov was ready with a cutting retort. Hilger duly noted it in the minutes.

In his reply Molotov stated that the Germans were assuming that the war against England

had already actually been won. If therefore [as Hitler had maintained] Germany was waging a

life-and-death struggle against England, he could only construe this as meaning that Germany

was fighting “for life” and England “for death.”

This sarcasm may have gone over the head of Ribbentrop, a man of

monumental denseness, but Molotov took no chances. To the German’s constant

reiteration that Britain was finished, the Commissar finally replied, “If that is so,

why are we in this shelter, and whose are these bombs which fall?” *

From this wearing experience with Moscow’s tough bargainer and from

further evidence that came a fortnight later of Stalin’s increasingly rapacious

appetite, Hitler drew his final conclusions.

It must be set down here that the Soviet dictator, his subsequent claims to the

contrary notwithstanding, now accepted Hitler’s offer to join the fascist camp,

though at a stiffer price than had been offered in Berlin. On November 26,

scarcely two weeks after Molotov had returned from Germany, he informed the

German ambassador in Moscow that Russia was prepared to join the four-power

pact, subject to the following conditions:

1. That German troops are immediately withdrawn from Finland, which … belongs to the

Soviet Union’s sphere of influence …

2. That within the next few months the security of the Soviet Union in the Straits is assured

by the conclusion of a mutual-assistance pact between the U.S.S.R. and Bulgaria … and by the

establishment of a base for land and naval forces by the Soviet Union within range of the

Bosporus and the Dardanelles by means of a long-term lease.

3. That the area south of Batum and Baku in the general direction of the Persian Gulf is

recognized as the center of the aspirations of the Soviet Union.

4. That Japan renounce her rights to concessions for coal and oil in northern Sakhalin. 33

In all Stalin asked for five, instead of two, secret protocols embodying his new

proposals and, for good measure, asked that, should Turkey prove difficult about

Russian bases controlling the Straits, the four powers take military measures

against her.

The proposals constituted a price higher than Hitler was willing even to

consider. He had tried to keep Russia out of Europe, but now Stalin was

demanding Finland, Bulgaria, control of the Straits and, in effect, the Arabian

and Persian oil fields, which normally supplied Europe with most of its oil. The

Russians did not even mention the Indian Ocean, which the Fuehrer had tried to

fob off as the center of “aspirations” for the U.S.S.R.

“Stalin is clever and cunning,” Hitler told his top military chiefs. “He

demands more and more. He’s a cold-blooded blackmailer. A German victory

has become unbearable for Russia. Therefore: she must be brought to her knees

as soon as possible.” 34

The great cold-blooded Nazi blackmailer had met his match, and the

realization infuriated him. At the beginning of December he told Halder to bring

him the Army General Staff’s plan for the onslaught on the Soviet Union. On

December 5 Halder and Brauchitsch dutifully brought it to him, and at the end of

a four-hour conference he approved it. Both the captured OKW War Diary and

Halder’s own confidential journal contain a report on this crucial meeting.35 The

Nazi warlord stressed that the Red Army must be broken through both north and

south of the Pripet Marshes, surrounded and annihilated “as in Poland.”

Moscow, he told Halder, “was not important.” The important thing was to

destroy the “life force” of Russia. Rumania and Finland were to join in the

attack, but not Hungary. General Dietl’s mountain division at Narvik was to be

transported across northern Sweden to Finland for an attack on the Soviet arctic

region. * Altogether some “120 to 130 divisions” were allotted for the big

campaign.

In its report on this conference, as in previous references to the plan to attack

Russia, General Halder’s diary employs the code name “Otto.” Less than a

fortnight later, on December 18, 1940, the code name by which it will go down

in history was substituted. On this day Hitler crossed the Rubicon. He issued

Directive No. 21. It was headed “Operation Barbarossa. ” It began:

TOP SECRET

The Fuehrer’s Headquarters

December 18, 1940

The German Armed Forces must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign

before the end of the war against England. † For this purpose the Army will have to employ all

available units with the reservation that the occupied territories will have to be safeguarded

against surprise attacks …

Preparations … are to be completed by May 15, 1941. Great caution has to be exercised

that the intention of an attack will not be recognized.

So the target date was mid-May of the following spring. The “general

purpose” of Operation Barbarossa Hitler laid down as follows:

The mass of the Russian Army in western Russia is to be destroyed in daring operations by

driving forward deep armored wedges, and the retreat of intact, battle-ready troops into the

wide spaces of Russia is to be prevented. The ultimate objective of the operation is to establish

a defense line against Asiatic Russia from a line running from the Volga River to Archangel.

Hitler’s directive then went into considerable detail about the main lines of

attack. * The roles of Rumania and Finland were defined. They were to provide

the jumping-off areas for attacks on the extreme north and south flanks as well

as troops to aid the German forces in these operations. Finland’s position was

especially important. Various Finnish–German armies were to advance on

Leningrad and the Lake Ladoga area, cut the Murmansk rail line, secure the

Petsamo nickel mines and occupy the Russian ice-free ports on the Arctic

Ocean. Much depended, Hitler admitted, on whether Sweden would permit the

transit of German troops from Norway, but he correctly predicted that the

Swedes would be accommodating in this.

The main operations were to be divided, Hitler explained, by the Pripet

Marshes. The major blow would be delivered north of the swamps with two

whole army groups. One would advance up the Baltic States to Leningrad. The

other, farther south, would drive through White Russia and then swing north to

join the first group, thus trapping what was left of the Soviet forces trying to

retreat from the Baltic. Only then, Hitler laid it down, must an offensive against

Moscow be undertaken. The Russian capital, which a fortnight before had

seemed “unimportant” to Hitler, now assumed more significance. “The capture

of this city,” he wrote, “means a decisive political and economic victory, beyond

the fall of the country’s most important railroad junction.” And he pointed out

that Moscow was not only the main communications center of Russia but its

principal producer of armaments.

A third army group would drive south of the marshes through the Ukraine

toward Kiev, its principal objective being to roll up and destroy the Soviet forces

there west of the Dnieper River. Farther south German–Rumanian troops would

protect the flank of the main operation and advance toward Odessa and thence

along the Black Sea. Thereafter the Donets basin, where 60 per cent of Soviet

industry was concentrated, would be taken.

Such was Hitler’s grandiose plan, completed just before the Christmas

holidays of 1940, and so well prepared that no essential changes would be made

in it. In order to secure secrecy, only nine copies of the directive were made, one

for each of the three armed services and the rest to be guarded at OKW

headquarters. Even the top field commanders, the directive makes clear, were to

be told that the plan was merely for “precaution, in case Russia should change

her previous attitude toward us.” And Hitler instructed that the number of

officers in the secret “be kept as small as possible. Otherwise the danger exists

that our preparations will become known and the gravest political and military

disadvantages result.”

There is no evidence that the generals in the Army’s High Command objected

to Hitler’s decision to turn on the Soviet Union, whose loyal fulfillment of the

pact with Germany had made possible their victories in Poland and the West.

Later Halder would write derisively of “Hitler’s Russian adventure” and claim

the Army leaders were against it from the beginning. 37 But there is not a word in

his voluminous diary entries for December 1940 which supports him in this.

Indeed, he gives the impression of being full of genuine enthusiasm for the

“adventure,” which he himself, as Chief of the General Staff, had the main

responsibility for planning.

At any rate, for Hitler the die was cast, and, though he did not know it, his

ultimate fate sealed, by this decision of December 18,1940. Relieved to have

made up his mind at last, as he later revealed, he went off to celebrate the

Christmas holidays with the troops and flyers along the English Channel—as far

as it was possible for him to get from Russia. Out of his mind too—as far as

possible—must have been any thoughts of Charles XII of Sweden and of

Napoleon Bonaparte, who after so many glorious conquests not unlike his own,

had met disaster in the vast depths of the Russian steppes. How could they be

much in his mind? By now, as the record shortly will show, the one-time Vienna

waif regarded himself as the greatest conqueror the world had ever seen.

Egomania, that fatal disease of all conquerors, was taking hold.

SIX MONTHS OF FRUSTRATION

And yet, after all the tumultuous victories of the spring and early summer of

1940, there had been a frustrating six months for the Nazi conqueror. Not only

the final triumph over Britain eluded him but opportunities to deal her a mortal

blow in the Mediterranean had been thrown away.

Two days after Christmas Grand Admiral Raeder saw Hitler in Berlin, but he

had little Yuletide cheer to offer. “The threat to Britain in the entire eastern

Mediterranean, the Near East and in North Africa, ” he told the Fuehrer, “has

been eliminated … The decisive action in the Mediterranean for which we had

hoped therefore is no longer possible.” 38

Adolf Hitler, balked by a shifty Franco, by the ineptitude of Mussolini and

even by the senility of Marshal Pétain, had really missed the bus in the

Mediterranean. Disaster had struck the Italian ally in the Egyptian desert and

now in December confronted it in the snowy mountains of Albania. These

untoward happenings were also turning points in the war and in the course of

history of the Third Reich. They had come about not only because of the

weaknesses of Germany’s friends and allies, but, in part, because of the Nazi

warlord’s incapacity to grasp the larger, intercontinental strategy that was called

for and that Raeder and even Goering had urged upon him.

Twice in September 1940, on the sixth and the twenty-sixth, the Grand

Admiral attempted to open up new vistas in the Fuehrer’s mind now that the

direct attack on England seemed out of the question. For the second conference

Raeder cornered Hitler alone and, without the Army and Air Force officers to

muddle the conversation, gave his chief a lengthy lecture on naval strategy and

the importance of getting at Britain in other places than over the English

Channel.

The British [Raeder said] have always considered the Mediterranean the pivot of their

world Empire … Italy, surrounded by British power, is fast becoming the main target of attack

… The Italians have not yet realized the danger when they refuse our help. Germany,

however, must wage war against Great Britain with all the means at her disposal and without

delay, before the United States is able to intervene effectively. For this reason the

Mediterranean question must be cleared up during the winter months.

Cleared up how? The Admiral then got down to brass tacks.

Gibraltar must be taken. The Canary Islands must be secured by the Air Force.

The Suez Canal must be taken.

After Suez, Raeder painted a rosy picture of what then would logically ensue.

An advance from Suez through Palestine and Syria as far as Turkey is necessary. If we

reach that point, Turkey will be in our power. The Russian problem will then appear in a

different light … It is doubtful whether an advance against Russia from the north will be

necessary.

Having in his mind driven the British out of the Mediterranean and put Turkey

and Russia in Germany’s power, Raeder went on to complete the picture.

Correctly predicting that Britain, supported by the U.S.A. and the Gaullist

forces, eventually would try to get a foothold on Northwest Africa as a basis for

subsequent war against the Axis, the Admiral urged that Germany and Vichy

France forestall this by securing this strategically important region themselves.

According to Raeder, Hitler agreed with his “general trend of thought” but

added that he would have to talk matters over first with Mussolini, Franco and

Pétain.39 This he proceeded to do, though only after much time was lost. He

arranged to see the Spanish dictator on October 23, Pétain, who was now the

head of a collaborationist government at Vichy, the next day, and the Duce a few

days thereafter.

Franco, who owed his triumph in the Spanish Civil War to the massive

military aid of Italy and Germany, had, like all his fellow dictators, an inordinate

appetite for spoils, especially if they could be gained cheaply. In June, at the

moment of France’s fall, he had hastily informed Hitler that Spain would enter

the war in return for being given most of the vast French African empire,

including Morocco and western Algeria, and provided that Germany supplied

Spain liberally with arms, gasoline and foodstuffs. 40 It was to give Franco the

opportunity to redeem this promise that the Fuehrer arrived in his special train at

the Franco-Spanish border town of Hendaye on October 23. But much had

happened in the intervening months—Britain had stoutly held out, for one thing

—and Hitler was in for an unpleasant surprise.

The crafty Spaniard was not impressed by the Fuehrer’s boast that “England

already is decisively beaten,” nor was he satisfied with Hitler’s promise to give

Spain territorial compensation in French North Africa “to the extent to which it

would be possible to cover France’s losses from British colonies.” Franco

wanted the French African empire, with no strings attached. Hitler’s proposal

was that Spain enter the war in January 1941, but Franco pointed out the dangers

of such precipitate action. Hitler wanted the Spaniards to attack Gibraltar on

January 10, with the help of German specialists who had taken the Belgian fort

of Eben Emael from the air. Franco replied, with typical Spanish pride, that

Gibraltar would have to be taken by Spaniards “alone.” And so the two dictators

wrangled—for nine hours. According to Dr. Schmidt, who was present here too,

Franco spoke on and on in a monotonous singsong voice and Hitler became

increasingly exasperated, once springing up, as he had done with Chamberlain,

to exclaim that there was no point in continuing the conversations. 41

“Rather than go through that again,” he later told Mussolini, in recounting his

ordeal with the Caudillo, “I would prefer to have three or four teeth yanked

out.” 42

After nine hours, with time out for dinner in Hitler’s special dining car, the

talks broke up late in the evening without Franco’s having definitely committed

himself to come into the war. Hitler left Ribbentrop behind that night to continue

the parley with Serrano Suñer, the Spanish Foreign Minister, and to try to get the

Spaniards to sign something, at least an agreement to drive the British out of

Gibraltar and close to them the western Mediterranean—but to no avail. “That

ungrateful coward!” Ribbentrop cursed to Schmidt about Franco the next

morning. “He owes us everything and now won’t join us! ”43

Hitler’s meeting with Pétain at Montoire the next day went off better. But this

was because the aging, defeatist Marshal, the hero of Verdun in the First World

War and the perpetrator of the French surrender in the Second, agreed to

France’s collaboration with her conqueror in one last effort to bring Britain, the

late ally, to her knees. In fact, he assented to put down in writing this odious

deal.

The Axis Powers and France have an identical interest in seeing the defeat of England

accomplished as soon as possible. Consequently, the French Government will support, within

the limits of its ability, the measures which the Axis Powers may take to this end. 44

In return for this treacherous act, France was to be given in the “New Europe”

“the place to which she is entitled,” and in Africa she was to receive from the

fascist dictators compensation from the British Empire for whatever territory she

was forced to cede to others. Both parties agreed to keep the pact “absolutely

secret. ”*

Despite Pétain’s dishonorable but vital concessions, Hitler was not satisfied.

According to Dr. Schmidt, he had wanted more—nothing less than France’s

active participation in the war against Britain. On the long journey back to

Munich the official interpreter found the Fuehrer disappointed and depressed

with the results of his trip. He was to become even more so in Florence, where

he arrived on the morning of October 28 to see Mussolini.

They had conferred but three weeks before, on October 4, at the Brenner Pass.

Hitler, as usual, had done most of the talking, giving one of his dazzling tours

d’horizon in which was not included any mention that he was sending troops to

Rumania, which Italy also coveted. When the Duce learned of this a few days

later he was indignant.

Hitler always faces me with a fait accompli [he fumed to Ciano]. This time I am going to

pay him back in his own coin. He will find out from the newspapers that I have occupied

Greece. In this way the equilibrium will be re-established.45

The Duce’s ambitions in the Balkans were as rabid as Hitler’s and cut across

them so that as far back as the middle of August the Germans had warned Rome

against any adventures in Yugoslavia and Greece. “It is a complete order to halt

all along the line,” Ciano noted in his diary on August 17. Mussolini scrapped,

for the moment anyway, his plans for further martial glory in the Balkans and

confirmed this in a humble letter to Hitler of August 27. But the prospect of a

quick, easy conquest of Greece, which would compensate to some extent for his

partner’s glittering victories, proved too big a temptation for the strutting Fascist

Caesar to resist, false though the prospect was.

On October 22 he set the date for a surprise Italian assault on Greece for

October 28 and on the same day wrote Hitler a letter (predated October 19)

alluding to his contemplated action but making it vague as to the exact nature

and date. He feared, Ciano noted that day in his diary, that the Fuehrer might

“order” him to halt. Hitler and Ribbentrop got wind of the Duce’s plans while

they were returning in their respective special trains from France, and at the

Fuehrer’s orders the Nazi Foreign Minister stopped at the first station in

Germany to telephone Ciano in Rome and urge an immediate meeting of the

Axis leaders. Mussolini suggested October 28 at Florence and, when his German

visitor alighted from the train on the morning of that day, greeted him, his chin

up and his eyes full of glee: “Fuehrer, we are on the march! Victorious Italian

troops crossed the Greco-Albanian frontier at dawn today!” 46

According to all accounts, Mussolini greatly enjoyed this revenge on his

friend for all the previous occasions when the Nazi dictator had marched into a

country without previously confiding to his Italian ally. Hitler was furious. This

rash act against a sturdy foe at the worst possible time of year threatened to upset

the applecart in the Balkans. The Fuehrer, as he wrote Mussolini a little later,

had sped to Florence in the hope of preventing it, but he had arrived too late.

According to Schmidt, who was present, the Nazi leader managed to control his

rage.

Hitler went north that afternoon [Schmidt later wrote] with bitterness in his heart. He had

been frustrated three times—at Hendaye, at Montoire, and now in Italy. In the lengthy winter

evenings of the next few years these long, exacting journeys were a constantly recurring theme

of bitter reproaches against ungrateful and unreliable friends, Axis partners and “deceiving”

Frenchmen.47

Nevertheless he had to do something to prosecute the war against the British,

now that the invasion of Britain had proved impossible. Hardly had the Fuehrer

returned to Berlin before the need to act was further impressed upon him by the

fiasco of the Duce’s armies in Greece. Within a week, the “victorious” Italian

attack there had been turned into a rout. On November 4 Hitler called a war

conference at the Chancellery in Berlin to which he summoned Brauchitsch and

Halder from the Army and Keitel and Jodl from OKW. Thanks to Halder’s diary

and a captured copy of Jodl’s report to the Navy on the conference, we know the

warlord’s decisions, which were embodied in Directive No. 18 issued by Hitler

on November 12, the text of which is among the Nuremberg records.48

The German Navy’s influence on Hitler’s strategy became evident, as did the

necessity for doing something about the faltering Italian ally. Halder noted the

Fuehrer’s “lack of confidence” in Italian leadership. As a result it was decided

not to send any German troops to Libya until Marshal Rodolfo Graziani’s army,

which in September had advanced sixty miles into Egypt to Sidi Barrâni, had

reached Mersa Matrûh, a further seventy-five miles along the coast, which was

not expected before Christmas, if then. In the meantime plans were to be made to

send a few dive bombers to Egypt to attack the British fleet in Alexandria and

mine the Suez Canal.

As for Greece, the Italian attack there, Hitler admitted to his generals, had

been a “regrettable blunder” and unfortunately had endangered Germany’s

position in the Balkans. The British by occupying Crete and Lemnos had

achieved air bases from which they could easily bomb the Rumanian oil fields

and by sending troops to the Greek mainland threatened the whole German

position in the Balkans. To counter this danger Hitler ordered the Army to

prepare immediately plans to invade Greece through Bulgaria with a force of at

least ten divisions which would be sent first to Rumania. “It is anticipated,” he

said, “that Russia will remain neutral.”

But it was in regard to destroying Britain’s position in the western

Mediterranean that most of the conference of November 4 and most of the

ensuing Directive No. 18 was devoted.

Gibraltar will be taken [said the directive] and the Straits closed.

The British will be prevented from gaining a foothold at another point of the Iberian

peninsula or the Atlantic islands.

“Felix” was to be the code name for the taking of Gibraltar and the Spanish

Canary Islands and the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands. The Navy was also to

study the possibility of occupying Portugal’s Madeira and the Azores. Portugal

itself might have to be occupied. “Operation Isabella” would be the cover name

for that, and three German divisions would be assembled on the Spanish–

Portuguese frontier to carry it out.

Finally, units of the French fleet and some troops were to be released so that

France could defend her possessions in Northwest Africa against the British and

De Gaulle. “From this initial task,” Hitler said in his directive, “France’s

participation in the war against England can develop fully.”

Hitler’s new plans, as enunciated to the generals on November 4 and laid

down in the directive a week later, went into considerable military detail—

especially on how Gibraltar was to be taken by a daring German stroke—and

apparently they impressed his Army chiefs as bold and shrewd. But in reality

they were half measures which could not possibly achieve their objectives, and

they were based partly on his deceiving his own generals. He assured them on

November 4, Halder noted, that he had just received Franco’s renewed promise

to join Germany in the war, but this, as we have seen, was not quite true. The

objectives of driving the British out of the Mediterranean were sound, but the

forces allotted to the task were quite insufficient, especially in view of Italy’s

weaknesses.

The Naval War Staff pointed this out in a toughly worded memorandum

which Raeder gave Hitler on November 14.49 The Italian disaster in Greece—

Mussolini’s troops had now been hurled back into Albania and were still

retreating—had not only greatly improved Britain’s strategic position in the

Mediterranean, the sailors pointed out, but enhanced British prestige throughout

the world. As for the Italian attack on Egypt, the Navy told Hitler flatly: “Italy

will never carry out the Egyptian offensive. * The Italian leadership is wretched.

They have no understanding of the situation. The Italian armed forces have

neither the leadership nor the military efficiency to carry the required operations

in the Mediterranean area to a successful conclusion with the necessary speed

and decision.”

Therefore, the Navy concluded, this task must be carried out by Germany. The

“fight for the African area,” it warned Hitler, is “the foremost strategic objective

of German warfare as a whole … It is of decisive importance for the outcome of

the war. ”

But the Nazi dictator was not convinced. He had never been able to envisage

the war in the Mediterranean and North Africa as anything but secondary to his

main objective. As Admiral Raeder elaborated to him the Navy’s strategic

conceptions in their meeting on November 14, Hitler retorted that he was “still

inclined toward a demonstration with Russia.” 50 In fact, he was more inclined

than ever, for Molotov had just departed Berlin that morning after so arousing

the Fuehrer’s ire. When the Admiral next saw his chief a couple of days after

Christmas to report on how the bus had been missed in the Mediterranean, Hitler

was not unduly perturbed. To Raeder’s argument that the victory of Britain over

the Italians in Egypt† and the increasing material aid which she was receiving

from America necessitated the concentration of all German resources to bring

the British down, and that Barbarossa ought to be postponed until “the

overthrow of Britain,” Hitler turned an almost deaf ear.

“In view of present political developments and especially Russia’s

interference in Balkan affairs,” Hitler said, “it is necessary to eliminate at all

costs the last enemy remaining on the Continent before coming to grips with

Britain.” From now on to the bitter end he would stick fanatically to this

fundamental strategy.

As a sop to his naval chief, Hitler promised to “try once more to influence

Franco” so that the attack against Gibraltar could be made and the Mediterranean

closed to the British fleet. Actually, he had already dropped the whole idea. On

December 11 he had quietly ordered, “Operation Felix will not be carried out as

the political conditions no longer exist.” Nagged by his own Navy and by the

Italians to keep after Franco, Hitler made one final effort, though it was painful

to him. On February 6, 1941, he addressed a long letter to the Spanish dictator.

… About one thing, Caudillo, there must be clarity: we are fighting a battle of life and

death and cannot at this time make any gifts …

The battle which Germany and Italy are fighting will determine the destiny of Spain as

well. Only in the case of our victory will your present regime continue to exist.51

Unfortunately for the Axis, the letter reached the Caudillo on the very day that

Marshal Graziani’s last forces in Cyrenaica had been wiped out by the British

south of Benghazi. Little wonder that when Franco got around to replying—on

February 26, 1941—though protesting his “absolute loyalty” to the Axis, he

reminded the Nazi leader that recent developments had left “the circumstances

of October far behind” and that their understanding of that time had become

“outmoded.”

For one of the very few times in his stormy life, Adolf Hitler conceded defeat.

“The long and short of the tedious Spanish rigmarole,” he wrote Mussolini, “is

that Spain does not want to enter the war and will not enter it. This is extremely

tiresome since it means that for the moment the possibility of striking at Britain

in the simplest manner, in her Mediterranean possessions, is eliminated.”

Italy, not Spain, however, was the key to defeating Britain in the

Mediterranean, but the Duce’s creaky empire was not equal to the task of doing

it alone and Hitler was not wise enough to give her the means, which he had, to

accomplish it. The possibility of striking at Britain either directly across the

Channel or indirectly across the broader Mediterranean, he now confessed, had

been eliminated “for the moment.” Though this was frustrating, the

acknowledgment of it brought Hitler relief. He could now turn to matters nearer

his heart and mind.

On January 8–9, 1941, he held a council of war at the Berghof above

Berchtesgaden, which now lay deep in the winter’s snow. The mountain air

seems to have cleared his mind, and once more, as the lengthy confidential

reports of the meeting by Admiral Raeder and General Halder52 disclose, his

thoughts ranged far and wide as he outlined his grand strategy to his military

chiefs. His optimism had returned.

The Fuehrer [Raeder noted] is firmly convinced that the situation in Europe can no longer

develop unfavorably for Germany even if we should lose the whole of North Africa. Our

position in Europe is so firmly established that the outcome cannot possibly be to our

disadvantage … The British can hope to win the war only by beating us on the Continent. The

Fuehrer is convinced that this is impossible.

It was true, he conceded, that the direct invasion of Britain was “not feasible

unless she is crippled to a considerable degree and Germany has complete air

superiority.” The Navy and Air Force, he said, must concentrate on attacking her

shipping lanes and thereby cut off her supplies. Such attacks, he thought, “might

lead to victory as early as July or August.” In the meantime, he said, “Germany

must make herself so strong on the Continent that we can handle a further war

against England (and America).” The parentheses are Halder’s and their

enclosure is significant. This is the first mention in the captured German records

that Hitler—at the beginning of 1941—is facing up to the possibility of the entry

of the United States into the war against him.

The Nazi warlord then took up the various strategic areas and problems and

outlined what he intended to do about them.

The Fuehrer is of the opinion [Raeder wrote] that it is vital for the outcome of the war that

Italy does not collapse … He is determined to … prevent Italy from losing North Africa … It

would mean a great loss of prestige to the Axis powers … He is [therefore] determined to give

them support.

At this point he cautioned his military leaders about divulging German plans.

He does not wish to inform the Italians of our plans. There is great danger that the Royal

Family is transmitting intelligence to Britain! !*

Support for Italy, Hitler declared, would consist of antitank formations and

some Luftwaffe squadrons for Libya. More important, he would dispatch an

army corps of two and a half divisions to buck up the retreating Italians in

Albania—into which the Greeks had now pushed them. In connection with this,

“Operation Marita”† would be pushed. The transfer of troops from Rumania to

Bulgaria, he ordered, must begin at once so that Marita could commence on

March 26. Hitler also spoke at some length of the need to be ready to carry out

“Operation Attila”—the German cover names seem almost endless—which he

had outlined in a directive of December 10, 1940. This was a plan to occupy the

rest of France and seize the French fleet at Toulon. He thought now it might

have to be carried out soon. “If France becomes troublesome,” he declared, “she

will have to be crushed completely.” This would have been a crude violation of

the Compiègne armistice, but no general or admiral, so far as Halder and Raeder

noted—or at least recorded—raised the question.

It was at this war conference that Hitler described Stalin as “a cold-blooded

blackmailer” and informed his commanders that Russia would have to be

brought to her knees “as soon as possible.”

If the U.S.A. and Russia should enter the war against Germany [Hitler said, and it was the

second time he mentioned that possibility for America], the situation would become very

complicated. Hence any possibility for such a threat to develop must be eliminated at the very

beginning. If the Russian threat were removed, we could wage war on Britain indefinitely. If

Russia collapsed, Japan would be greatly relieved: this in turn would mean increased danger to

the U.S.A.

Such were the thoughts of the German dictator on global strategy as 1941 got

under way. Two days after the war council, on January 11, he embodied them in

Directive No. 22. German reinforcements for Tripoli were to move under

“Operation Sunflower”; those for Albania under “Operation Alpine Violets. ” 54

“THE WORLD WILL HOLD ITS BREATH!”

Mussolini was summoned by Hitler to the Berghof for January 19 and 20.

Shaken and humiliated by the Italian debacles in Egypt and Greece, he had no

stomach for this journey. Ciano found him “frowning and nervous” when he

boarded his special train, fearful that Hitler, Ribbentrop and the German generals

would be insultingly condescending. To make matters worse the Duce took

along General Alfredo Guzzoni, Assistant Chief of Staff, whom Ciano in his

diary described as a mediocre man with a big paunch and a little dyed wig and

whom, he thought, it would be positively humiliating to present to the Germans.

To his surprise and relief, Mussolini found Hitler, who came down to the

snow-covered platform of the little station at Puch to greet him, both tactful and

cordial and there were no reproaches for Italy’s sorry record on the battlefields.

He also found his host, as Ciano noted in his diary, in a very anti-Russian mood.

For more than two hours on the second day Hitler lectured his Italian guests and

an assembly of generals from both countries, and a secret report on it prepared

by General Jodl55 confirms that while the Fuehrer was anxious to be helpful to

the Italians in Albania and Libya, his principal thoughts were on Russia.

I don’t see great danger coming from America [Hitler said] even if she should enter the

war. The much greater danger is the gigantic block of Russia. Though we have very favorable

political and economic agreements with Russia, I prefer to rely on powerful means at my

disposal.

Though he hinted at what he intended to do with his “powerful means,” he did

not disclose his plans to his partner. These, however, were sufficiently far along

to enable the Chief of the Army General Staff, who was responsible for working

out the details, to present them to the Supreme Commander at a meeting in

Berlin a fortnight later.

This war conference, attended by the top generals of OKW and of the Army

High Command (OKH), lasted from noon until 6 P.M. on February 3. And though

General Halder, who outlined the Army General Staff’s plans, contended later in

his book56 that he and Brauchitsch raised doubts about their own assessment of

Soviet military strength and in general opposed Barbarossa as an “adventure,”

there is not a word in his own diary entry made the same evening or in the highly

secret OKW memorandum of the meeting57 that supports this contention.

Indeed, they disclose Halder to have made at first a businesslike estimate of the

opposing forces, calculating that while the enemy would have approximately

155 divisions, German strength would be about the same and, as Halder

reported, “far superior in quality.” Later, when catastrophe set in, Halder and his

fellow generals realized that their intelligence on the Red Army had been

fantastically faulty. But on February 3, 1941, they did not suspect that. In fact, so

convincing was Halder’s report on respective strengths and on the strategy to be

employed to annihilate the Red armies* that Hitler at the end not only expressed

agreement “on the whole” but was so excited by the prospects which the General

Staff Chief had raised that he exclaimed:

“When Barbarossa commences, the world will hold its breath and make no

comment! ”

He could scarcely wait for it to commence. Impatiently he ordered the

operation map and the plan of deployment of forces to be sent to him “as soon as

possible.”

BALKAN PRELUDE

Before Barbarossa could get under way in the spring the southern flank, which

lay in the Balkans, had to be secured and built up. By the third week in February

1941, the Germans had massed a formidable army of 680,000 troops in

Rumania, which bordered the Ukraine for three hundred miles between the

Polish border and the Black Sea. 58 But to the south, Greece still held the Italians

at bay and Berlin had reason to believe that British troops from Libya would

soon be landed there. Hitler, as the minutes of his numerous conferences at this

period make clear, feared that an Allied front above Salonika might be formed

which would be more troublesome to Germany than a similar one had been in

the First World War, since it would give the British a base from which to bomb

the Rumanian oil fields. Moreover, it would jeopardize Barbarossa. In fact, the

danger had been foreseen as far back as December 1940, when the first directive

for Operation Marita had been issued providing for a strong German attack on

Greece through Bulgaria with troops assembled in Rumania.

Bulgaria, whose wrong guess as to the victors in the first war had cost her

dearly, now made a similar miscalculation. Believing Hitler’s assurances that he

had already won the war and bedazzled by the prospect of obtaining Greek

territory to the south which would give her access to the Aegean Sea, her

government agreed to participate in Marita—at least to the extent of allowing

passage of German troops. An agreement to this effect was made secretly on

February 8, 1941, between Field Marshal List and the Bulgarian General Staff. 59

On the night of February 28 German Army units crossed the Danube from

Rumania and took up strategic positions in Bulgaria, which the next day joined

the Tripartite Pact.

The hardier Yugoslavs were not quite so accommodating. But their

stubbornness only spurred on the Germans to bring them into camp too. On

March 4–5, the Regent, Prince Paul, was summoned in great secrecy to the

Berghof by the Fuehrer, given the usual threats and, in addition, offered the bribe

of Salonika. On March 25, the Yugoslav Premier, Dragisha Cvetković, and

Foreign Minister Aleksander Cincar-Marković, having slipped surreptitiously

out of Belgrade the night before to avoid hostile demonstrations or even

kidnaping, arrived at Vienna, where in the presence of Hitler and Ribbentrop

they signed up Yugoslavia to the Tripartite Pact. Hitler was highly pleased and

told Ciano that this would facilitate his attack on Greece. Before leaving Vienna

the Yugoslav leaders were given two letters from Ribbentrop confirming

Germany’s “determination” to respect “the sovereignty and territorial integrity

of Yugoslavia at all times” and promising that the Axis would not demand

transit rights for its troops across Yugoslavia “during this war. ”60 Both

agreements were broken by Hitler in what even for him was record time.

The Yugoslav ministers had no sooner returned to Belgrade than they, the

government and the Prince Regent were overthrown on the night of March 26–

27, by a popular uprising led by a number of top Air Force officers and

supported by most of the Army. The youthful heir to the throne, Peter, who had

escaped from the surveillance of regency officials by sliding down a rain pipe,

was declared King, and though the new regime of General Dušan Simović

immediately offered to sign a nonaggression pact with Germany, it was obvious

in Berlin that it would not accept the puppet status for Yugoslavia which the

Fuehrer had assigned. During the delirious celebrations in Belgrade, in which a

crowd spat on the German minister’s car, the Serbs had shown where their

sympathies lay.

The coup in Belgrade threw Adolf Hitler into one of the wildest rages of his

entire life. He took it as a personal affront and in his fury made sudden decisions

which would prove utterly disastrous to the fortunes of the Third Reich.

He hurriedly summoned his military chieftains to the Chancellery in Berlin on

March 27—the meeting was so hastily called that Brauchitsch, Halder and

Ribbentrop arrived late—and raged about the revenge he would take on the

Yugoslavs. The Belgrade coup, he said, had endangered both Marita and, even

more, Barbarossa. He was therefore determined, “without waiting for possible

declarations of loyalty of the new government, to destroy Yugoslavia militarily

and as a nation. No diplomatic inquiries will be made,” he ordered, “and no

ultimatums presented.” Yugoslavia, he added, would be crushed with

“unmerciful harshness.” He ordered Goering then and there to “destroy Belgrade

in attacks by waves,” with bombers operating from Hungarian air bases. He

issued Directive No. 2561 for the immediate invasion of Yugoslavia and told

Keitel and Jodl to work out that very evening the military plans. He instructed

Ribbentrop to advise Hungary, Rumania and Italy that they would all get a slice

of Yugoslavia, which would be divided up among them, except for a small

Croatian puppet state. *

And then, according to an underlined passage in the top-secret OKW notes of

the meeting, 62 Hitler announced the most fateful decision of all.

“The beginning of the Barbarossa operation” he told his generals, “will have

to be postponed up to four weeks. ”†

This postponement of the attack on Russia in order that the Nazi warlord

might vent his personal spite against a small Balkan country which had dared to

defy him was probably the most catastrophic single decision in Hitler’s career. It

is hardly too much to say that by making it that March afternoon in the

Chancellery in Berlin during a moment of convulsive rage he tossed away his

last golden opportunity to win the war and to make of the Third Reich, which he

had created with such stunning if barbarous genius, the greatest empire in

German history and himself the master of Europe. Field Marshal von

Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chief of the German Army, and General Halder,

the gifted Chief of the General Staff, were to recall it with deep bitterness but

also with more understanding of its consequences than they showed at the

moment of its making, when later the deep snow and subzero temperatures of

Russia hit them three or four weeks short of what they thought they needed for

final victory. For ever afterward they and their fellow generals would blame that

hasty, ill-advised decision of a vain and infuriated man for all the disasters that

ensued.

Military Directive No. 25, which the Supreme Commander issued to his

generals before the meeting broke up, was a typical Hitlerian document.

The military putsch in Yugoslavia has altered the political situation in the Balkans.

Yugoslavia, in spite of her protestations of loyalty, must be considered for the time being as an

enemy and therefore crushed as speedily as possible.

It is my intention to force my way into Yugoslavia … and to annihilate the Yugoslav Army

…

Jodl, as Chief of the Operations Staff of OKW, was told to prepare the plans

that very night. “I worked the whole night at the Reich Chancellery,” Jodl later

told the Nuremberg tribunal. “At four o’clock in the morning of March 28, I put

an aide-mémoire into the hand of General von Rintelen, our liaison officer with

the Italian High Command.” 63

For Mussolini, whose sagging armies in Albania were in danger of being

taken in the rear by the Yugoslavs, had to be told immediately of the German

operational plans and asked to co-operate with them. To make sure that the Duce

understood what was expected of him and without waiting for General Jodl to

concoct the military plans, Hitler dashed off a letter at midnight of the twenty-

seventh and ordered it wired to Rome immediately so that it would reach

Mussolini that same night.64

DUCE, events force me to give you by this quickest means my estimation of the situation

and the consequences which may result from it.

From the beginning I have regarded Yugoslavia as a dangerous factor in the controversy

with Greece … For this reason I have done everything honestly to bring Yugoslavia into our

community … Unfortunately these endeavors did not meet with success … Today’s reports

leave no doubt as to the imminent turn in the foreign policy of Yugoslavia.

Therefore I have already arranged for all necessary measures … with military means. Now,

I would cordially request you, Duce, not to undertake any further operations in Albania in the

course of the next few days. I consider it necessary that you should cover and screen the most

important passes from Yugoslavia into Albania with all available forces.

… I also consider it necessary, Duce, that you should reinforce your forces on the Italian-

Yugoslav front with all available means and with utmost speed.

I also consider it necessary, Duce, that everything which we do and order be shrouded in

absolute secrecy … These measures will completely lose their value should they become

known … Duce, should secrecy be observed, then … I have no doubt that we will both

achieve a success no less than the success in Norway a year ago. This is my unshaken

conviction.

Accept my heartfelt and friendly greetings,

Yours,

ADOLF HITLER

For this short-range objective, the Nazi warlord was again right in his

prediction, but he seems to have had no inkling how costly his successful

revenge on Yugoslavia would be in the long run. At dawn on April 6, his armies

in overwhelming strength fell on Yugoslavia and Greece, smashing across the

frontiers of Bulgaria, Hungary and Germany itself with all their armor and

advancing rapidly against poorly armed defenders dazed by the usual

preliminary bombing from the Luftwaffe.

Belgrade itself, as Hitler ordered, was razed to the ground. For three

successive days and nights Goering’s bombers ranged over the little capital at

rooftop level—for the city had no antiaircraft guns—killing 17,000 civilians,

wounding many more and reducing the place to a mass of smoldering rubble.

“Operation Punishment,” Hitler called it, and he obviously was satisfied that his

commands had been so effectively carried out. The Yugoslavs, who had not had

time to mobilize their tough little army and whose General Staff made the

mistake of trying to defend the whole country, were overwhelmed. On April 13

German and Hungarian troops entered what was left of Belgrade and on the

seventeenth the remnants of the Yugoslav Army, still twenty-eight divisions

strong, surrendered at Sarajevo, the King and the Prime Minister escaping by

plane to Greece.

The Greeks, who had humiliated the Italians in six months of fighting, could

not stand up to Field Marshal List’s Twelfth Army of fifteen divisions, four of

which were armored. The British had hurriedly sent to Greece some four

divisions from Libya—53,000 men in all—but they, like the Greeks, were

overwhelmed by the German panzers and by the murderous strikes of the

Luftwaffe. The northern Greek armies surrendered to the Germans and—bitter

pill—to the Italians on April 23. Four days later Nazi tanks rattled into Athens

and hoisted the swastika over the Acropolis. By this time the British were

desperately trying once again to evacuate their troops by sea—a minor Dunkirk

and almost as successful.

By the end of April—in three weeks—it was all over except for Crete, which

was taken by the Germans from the British in an airborne assault toward the end

of May. Where Mussolini had failed so miserably all winter, Hitler had

succeeded in a few days in the spring. Though the Duce was relieved to be

pulled off the hook, he was humiliated that it had to be done by the Germans.

Nor were his feelings assuaged by Italy’s disappointing share in the Yugoslav

spoils, which Hitler now began to divide up.*

The Balkans was not the only place where the Fuehrer pulled his muddling

junior partner off the hook. After the annihilation of the Italian armies in Libya

Hitler, although reluctantly, had finally consented to sending a light armored

division and some Luftwaffe units to North Africa, where he arranged for

General Erwin Rommel to be in over-all command of the Italo–German forces.

Rommel, a dashing, resourceful tank officer, who had distinguished himself as

commander of a panzer division in the Battle of France, was a type of general

whom the British had not previously met in the North African desert and he was

to prove an immense problem to them for two years. But he was not the only

problem. The sizable army and air force which the British had sent to Greece

from Libya had greatly weakened them in the desert. At first they were not

unduly worried, not even after their intelligence reported the arrival of German

armored units in Tripolitania at the end of February. But they should have been.

Rommel, with his German panzer division and two Italian divisions, one of

which was armored, struck suddenly at Cyrenaica on the last day of March. In

twelve days he recaptured the province, invested Tobruk and reached Bardia, a

few miles from the Egyptian border. The entire British position in Egypt and the

Suez was again threatened; in fact, with the Germans and Italians in Greece the

British hold on the eastern Mediterranean had become gravely endangered.

Another spring, the second of the war, had brought more dazzling German

victories, and the predicament of Britain, which now held out alone, battered at

home by nightly Luftwaffe bombings, its armies overseas chased out of Greece

and Cyrenaica, seemed darker and more hopeless than ever before. Its prestige,

so important in a life-and-death struggle where propaganda was so potent a

weapon, especially in influencing the United States and Russia, had sunk to a

new low point. *

Hitler was not slow or backward in taking advantage of this in a victory

speech to the Reichstag in Berlin on May 4. It consisted mostly of a venomous

and sarcastic personal attack on Churchill as the instigator (along with the Jews)

of the war and as the man who was masterminding the losing of it.

He is the most bloodthirsty or amateurish strategist in history … For over five years this

man has been chasing around Europe like a madman in search of something that he could set

on fire … As a soldier he is a bad politician and as a politician an equally bad soldier … The

gift Mr. Churchill possesses is the gift to lie with a pious expression on his face and to distort

the truth until finally glorious victories are made of the most terrible defeats … Churchill, one

of the most hopeless dabblers in strategy, thus managed [in Yugoslavia and Greece] to lose

two theaters of war at one single blow. In any other country he would be court-martialed …

His abnormal state of mind can only be explained as symptomatic either of a paralytic disease

or of a drunkard’s ravings …

As to the Yugoslavian coup which had provoked him to such fury, Hitler

made no attempt to hide his true feelings.

We were all stunned by that coup, carried through by a handful of bribed conspirators …

You will understand, gentlemen, that when I heard this I at once gave orders to attack

Yugoslavia. To treat the German Reich in this way is impossible …

Arrogant though he was over his spring victories and especially those over the

British, Hitler did not fully realize what a blow they had been to Britain nor how

desperate was the predicament of the Empire. On the very day he was addressing

the Reichstag, Churchill was writing President Roosevelt about the grave

consequences of the loss of Egypt and the Middle East and pleading for America

to enter the war. The Prime Minister was in one of the darkest moods he was to

know throughout the war.

I adjure you, Mr. President [he wrote], not to underestimate the gravity of the consequences

which may follow from a Middle-East collapse.66

The German Navy urged the Fuehrer to make the most of this situation. To

further improve matters for the Axis, the newly appointed premier of Iraq,

Rashid Ali, who was pro-German, had led an attack against the British airbase of

Habbaniya, outside Bagdad, and appealed to Hitler for aid in driving the British

out of the country. This was at the beginning of May. With Crete conquered by

May 27, Admiral Raeder, who had always been lukewarm to Barbarossa,

appealed to Hitler on May 30 to prepare a decisive offensive against Egypt and

Suez, and Rommel, eager to continue his advance as soon as he had received

reinforcements, sent similar pleas from North Africa. “This stroke,” Raeder told

the Fuehrer, “would be more deadly to the British Empire than the capture of

London!” A week later the Admiral handed Hitler a memorandum prepared by

the Operations Division of the Naval War Staff which warned that, while

Barbarossa “naturally stands in the foreground of the OKW leadership, it must

under no circumstances lead to the abandonment of, or to delay in, the conduct

of the war in the Mediterranean. ” 67

But the Fuehrer already had made up his mind; in fact, he had not changed it

since the Christmas holidays when he had promulgated Barbarossa and told

Admiral Raeder that Russia must be “eliminated first.” His landlocked mind

simply did not comprehend the larger strategy advocated by the Navy. Even

before Raeder and the Naval Staff pleaded with him at the end of May he laid

down the law in Directive No. 30 issued on May 25. 68 He ordered a military

mission, a few planes and some arms to be dispatched to Bagdad to help Iraq. “I

have decided,” he said, “to encourage developments in the Middle East by

supporting Iraq.” But he saw no further than this small, inadequate step. As for

the larger, bold strategy championed by the admirals and Rommel, he declared:

Whether—and if so, by what means—it would be possible afterward to launch an offensive

against the Suez Canal and eventually oust the British finally from their position between the

Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf cannot be decided until Operation Barbarossa is

completed.

The destruction of the Soviet Union came first; all else must wait. This, we

can now see, was a staggering blunder. At this moment, the end of May 1941,

Hitler, with the use of only a fraction of his forces, could have dealt the British

Empire a crushing blow, perhaps a fatal one. No one realized this better than the

hard-pressed Churchill. In his message to President Roosevelt on May 4, he had

admitted that, were Egypt and the Middle East to be lost, the continuation of the

war “would be a hard, long and bleak proposition,” even if the United States

entered the conflict. But Hitler did not understand this. His blindness is all the

more incomprehensible because his Balkan campaign had delayed the

commencement of Barbarossa by several weeks and thereby jeopardized it. The

conquest of Russia would have to be accomplished in a shorter space of time

than originally planned. For there was an inexorable deadline: the Russian

winter, which had defeated Charles XII and Napoleon. That gave the Germans

only six months to overrun, before the onset of winter, an immense country that

had never been conquered from the west. And though June had arrived, the vast

army which had been turned southeast into Yugoslavia and Greece had to be

brought back great distances to the Soviet frontier over unpaved roads and run-

down single-track railway lines that were woefully inadequate to handle so

swarming a traffic.

The delay, as things turned out, was fatal. Defenders of Hitler’s military

genius have contended that the Balkan campaign did not set back the timetable

for Barbarossa appreciably and that in any case the postponement was largely

due to the late thaw that year which left the roads in Eastern Europe deep in mud

until mid-June. But the testimony of the key German generals is otherwise. Field

Marshal Friedrich Paulus, whose name will always be associated with

Stalingrad, and who at this time was the chief planner of the Russian campaign

on the Army General Staff, testified on the stand at Nuremberg that Hitler’s

decision to destroy Yugoslavia postponed the beginning of Barbarossa by “about

five weeks. ”69 The Naval War Diary gives the same length of time.70 Field

Marshal von Rundstedt, who led Army Group South in Russia, told Allied

interrogators after the war that because of the Balkan campaign “we began at

least four weeks late. That,” he added, “was a very costly delay.” 71

At any rate, on April 30, when his armies had completed their conquest of

Yugoslavia and Greece, Hitler set the new date for Barbarossa. It was to begin

on June 22, 1941. 72

THE PLANNING OF THE TERROR

No holds were to be barred in the taking of Russia. Hitler insisted that the

generals understand this very clearly. Early in March 1941, he convoked the

chiefs of the three armed services and the key Army field commanders and laid

down the law. Halder took down his words.73

The war against Russia [Hitler said] will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly

fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted

with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. All officers will have to rid

themselves of obsolete ideologies. I know that the necessity for such means of waging war is

beyond the comprehension of you generals but … I insist absolutely that my orders be

executed without contradiction. The commissars are the bearers of ideologies directly opposed

to National Socialism. Therefore the commissars will be liquidated. German soldiers guilty of

breaking international law … will be excused. Russia has not participated in the Hague

Convention and therefore has no rights under it.

Thus was the so-called “Commissar Order” issued; it was to be much

discussed at the Nuremberg trial when the great moral question was posed to the

German generals whether they should have obeyed the orders of the Fuehrer to

commit war crimes or obeyed their own consciences.*

According to Halder, as he later remembered it, the generals were outraged at

this order and, as soon as the meeting was over, protested to their Commander in

Chief, Brauchitsch. This spineless Field Marshal* promised that he would “fight

against this order in the form it was given.” Later, Halder swears, Brauchitsch

informed OKW in writing that the officers of the Army “could never execute

such orders.” But did he?

In his testimony on direct examination at Nuremberg Brauchitsch admitted

that he took no such action with Hitler “because nothing in the world could

change his attitude.” What the head of the Army did, he told the tribunal, was to

issue a written order that “discipline in the Army was to be strictly observed

along the lines and regulations that applied in the past.”

“You did not give any order directly referring to the Commissar Order?” Lord

Justice Lawrence, the peppery president of the tribunal, asked Brauchitsch.

“No,” he replied. “I could not rescind the order directly. ”75

The old-line Army officers, with their Prussian traditions, were given further

occasion to struggle with their consciences by subsequent directives issued in the

name of the Fuehrer by General Keitel on May 13. The principal one limited the

functions of German courts-martial. They were to give way to a more primitive

form of law.

Punishable offenses committed by enemy civilians [in Russia] do not, until further notice,

come any longer under the jurisdiction of the courts-martial …

Persons suspected of criminal action will be brought at once before an officer. This officer

will decide whether they are to be shot.

With regard to offenses committed against enemy civilians by members of the Wehrmacht,

prosecution is not obligatory even where the deed is at the same time a military crime or

offense.†

The Army was told to go easy on such offenders, remembering in each case

all the harm done to Germany since 1918 by the “Bolsheviki.” Courts-martial of

German soldiers would be justified only if “maintenance of discipline or security

of the Forces call for such a measure.” At any rate, the directive concluded,

“only those court sentences are confirmed which are in accordance with the

political intentions of the High Command. ”76 The directive was to “be treated as

‘most secret.’”‡

A second directive of the same date signed by Keitel on behalf of Hitler

entrusted Himmler with “special tasks” for the preparation of the political

administration in Russia—“tasks,” it said, “which result from the struggle which

has to be carried out between two opposing political systems.” The Nazi secret-

police sadist was delegated to act “independently” of the Army, “under his own

responsibility.” The generals well knew what the designation of Himmler for

“special tasks” meant, though they denied that they did when they took the stand

at Nuremberg. Furthermore, the directive said, the occupied areas in Russia were

to be sealed off while Himmler went to work. Not even the “highest personalities

of the Government and Party,” Hitler stipulated, were to be allowed to have a

look. The same directive named Goering for the “exploitation of the country and

the securing of its economic assets for use by German industry.” Incidentally,

Hitler also declared in this order that as soon as military operations were

concluded Russia would be “divided up into individual states with governments

of their own.” 78

Just how this would be done was to be worked out by Alfred Rosenberg, the

befuddled Balt and officially the leading Nazi thinker, who had been, as we have

seen, one of Hitler’s early mentors in the Munich days. On April 20 the Fuehrer

appointed him “Commissioner for the Central Control of Questions Connected

with the East-European Region” and immediately this Nazi dolt, with a positive

genius for misunderstanding history, even the history of Russia, where he was

born and educated, went to work to build his castles in his once native land.

Rosenberg’s voluminous files were captured intact; like his books, they make

dreary reading and will not be allowed to impede this narrative, though

occasionally they must be referred to because they disclose some of Hitler’s

plans for Russia.

By early May, Rosenberg had drawn up his first wordy blueprint for what

promised to be the greatest German conquest in history. To begin with,

European Russia was to be divided up into so-called Reich Commissariats.

Russian Poland would become a German protectorate called Ostland, the

Ukraine “an independent state in alliance with Germany,” Caucasia, with its rich

oil fields, would be ruled by a German “plenipotentiary,” and the three Baltic

States and White Russia would form a German protectorate preparatory to being

annexed outright to the Greater German Reich. This last feat, Rosenberg

explained in one of the endless memoranda which he showered on Hitler and the

generals in order, as he said, to elucidate “the historical and racial conditions”

for his decisions, would be accomplished by Germanizing the racially

assimilable Balts and “banishing the undesirable elements.” In Latvia and

Estonia, he cautioned, “banishment on a large scale will have to be envisaged.”

Those driven out would be replaced by Germans, preferably war veterans. “The

Baltic Sea,” he ordained, “must become a Germanic inland sea.” 79

Two days before the troops jumped off, Rosenberg addressed his closest

collaborators who were to take over the rule of Russia.

The job of feeding the German people [he said] stands at the top of the list of Germany’s

claims on the East. The southern [Russian] territories will have to serve … for the feeding of

the German people.

We see absolutely no reason for any obligation on our part to feed also the Russian people

with the products of that surplus territory. We know that this is a harsh necessity, bare of any

feelings … The future will hold very hard years in store for the Russians.80

Very hard years indeed, since the Germans were deliberately planning to

starve to death millions of them!

Goering, who had been placed in charge of the economic exploitation of the

Soviet Union, made this even clearer than Rosenberg did. In a long directive of

May 23, 1941, his Economic Staff, East, laid it down that the surplus food from

Russia’s black-earth belt in the south must not be diverted to the people in the

industrial areas, where, in any case, the industries would be destroyed. The

workers and their families in these regions would simply be left to starve—or, if

they could, to emigrate to Siberia. Russia’s great food production must go to the

Germans.

The German Administration in these territories [the directive declared] may well attempt to

mitigate the consequences of the famine which undoubtedly will take place and to accelerate

the return to primitive agricultural conditions. However, these measures will not avert famine.

Any attempt to save the population there from death by starvation by importing surpluses from

the black-soil zone would be at the expense of supplies to Europe. It would reduce Germany’s

staying power in the war, and would undermine Germany’s and Europe’s power to resist the

blockade. This must be clearly and absolutely understood. 81

How many Russian civilians would die as the result of this deliberate German

policy? A meeting of state secretaries on May 2 had already given a general

answer. “There is no doubt,” a secret memorandum of the conference declared,

“that as a result, many millions of persons will be starved to death if we take out

of the country the things necessary for us.” 82- And Goering had said, and

Rosenberg, that they would be taken out—that much had to be “clearly and

absolutely understood.”

Did any German, even one single German, protest against this planned

ruthlessness, this well-thought-out scheme to put millions of human beings to

death by starvation? In all the memoranda concerning the German directives for

the spoliation of Russia, there is no mention of anyone’s objecting—as at least

some of the generals did in regard to the Commissar Order. These plans were not

merely wild and evil fantasies of distorted minds and souls of men such as

Hitler, Goering, Himmler and Rosenberg. For weeks and months, it is evident

from the records, hundreds of German officials toiled away at their desks in the

cheerful light of the warm spring days, adding up figures and composing

memoranda which coldly calculated the massacre of millions. By starvation, in

this case. Heinrich Himmler, the mild-faced ex-chicken farmer, also sat at his

desk at S.S. headquarters in Berlin those days, gazing through his pince-nez at

plans for the massacre of other millions in a quicker and more violent way.

Well pleased with the labors of his busy minions, both military and civilian, in

planning the onslaught on the Soviet Union, her destruction, her exploitation and

the mass murder of her citizenry, Hitler on April 30 set the date for the attack—

June 22—made his victory speech in the Reichstag on May 4 and then retired to

his favorite haunt, the Berghof above Berchtesgaden, where he could gaze at the

splendor of the Alpine mountains, their peaks still covered with spring snow, and

contemplate his next conquest, the greatest of all, at which, as he had told his

generals, the world would hold its breath.

It was here on the night of Saturday, May 10, 1941, that he received strange

and unexpected news which shook him to the bone and forced him, as it did

almost everyone else in the Western world, to take his mind for the moment off

the war. His closest personal confidant, the deputy leader of the Nazi Party, the

second in line to succeed him after Goering, the man who had been his devoted

and fanatically loyal follower since 1921 and, since Roehm’s murder, the nearest

there was to a friend, had literally flown the coop and on his own gone to parley

with the enemy!

THE FLIGHT OF RUDOLF HESS

The first report late that evening of May 10 that Rudolf Hess had taken off

alone for Scotland in a Messerschmitt-110 fighter plane hit Hitler, as Dr.

Schmidt recalled, “as though a bomb had struck the Berghof.” 83 General Keitel

found the Fuehrer pacing up and down his spacious study pointing a finger at his

forehead and mumbling that Hess must have been crazy. 84 “I’ve got to talk to

Goering right away,” Hitler shouted. The next morning there was an agitated

powwow with Goering and all the party gauleiter as they sought to “figure

out”—the words are Keitel’s—how to present this embarrassing event to the

German public and to the world. Their task was not made easier, Keitel later

testified, by the British at first keeping silent about their visitor, and for a time

Hitler and his conferees hoped that perhaps Hess had run out of gasoline and

fallen into the chilly North Sea and drowned.

The Fuehrer’s first information had come in a somewhat incoherent letter

from Hess which was delivered by courier a few hours after he took off at 5:45

P.M. on May 10 from Augsburg. “I can’t recognize Hess in it. It’s a different

person. Something must have happened to him—some mental disturbance,”

Hitler told Keitel. But the Fuehrer was also suspicious. Messerschmitt, from

whose company airfield Hess had taken off, was ordered arrested, as were

dozens of men on the deputy leader’s staff.

If Hitler was mystified by Hess’s abrupt departure, so was Churchill by his

unexpected arrival. * Stalin was highly suspicious. For the duration of the war,

the bizarre incident remained a mystery, and it was cleared up only at the

Nuremberg trial, in which Hess was one of the defendants. The facts may be

briefly set down.

Hess, always a muddled man though not so doltish as Rosenberg, flew on his

own to Britain under the delusion that he could arrange a peace settlement.

Though deluded, he was sincere—there seems to be no reason to doubt that. He

had met the Duke of Hamilton at the Olympic games in Berlin in 1936, and it

was within twelve miles of the Duke’s home in Scotland—so efficient was his

navigation—that he baled out of his Messerschmitt, parachuted safely to the

ground and asked a farmer to take him to the Scottish lord. As it happened,

Hamilton, a wing commander in the R.A.F., was on duty that Saturday evening

at a sector operations room and had spotted the Messerschmitt plane off the

coast as it came in to make a landfall shortly after 10 P.M. An hour later it was

reported to him that the plane had crashed in flames, that the pilot, who had

baled out and who gave his name as Alfred Horn, had claimed to be on a

“special mission” to see the Duke of Hamilton. This meeting was arranged by

British authorities for the next morning.

To the Duke, Hess explained that he was on “a mission of humanity and that

the Fuehrer did not want to defeat England and wished to stop the fighting.” The

fact, Hess said, that this was his fourth attempt to fly to Britain—on the three

other tries, he had had to turn back because of weather—and that he was, after

all, a Reich cabinet minister, showed “his sincerity and Germany’s willingness

for peace.” In this interview, as in later ones with others, Hess was not backward

in asserting that Germany would win the war and that if it continued the plight of

the British would be terrible. Therefore, his hosts had better take advantage of

his presence and negotiate peace. So confident was this Nazi fanatic that the

British would sit down and parley with him, that he asked the Duke to request

“the King to give him ‘parole,’ as he had come unarmed and of his own free

will.” 85 Later he demanded that he be treated with the respect due to a cabinet

member.

The subsequent talks, with one exception, were conducted on the British side

by Ivone Kirkpatrick, the knowing former First Secretary of the British Embassy

in Berlin, whose confidential reports were later made available at Nuremberg. 86

To this sophisticated student of Nazi Germany Hess, after parroting Hitler’s

explanations of all the Nazi aggressions, from Austria to Scandinavia and the

Lowlands, and having insisted that Britain was responsible for the war and

would certainly lose it if she didn’t bring a stop to it now, divulged his proposals

for peace. They were none other than those which Hitler had urged on

Chamberlain—unsuccessfully—on the eve of his attack on Poland: namely, that

Britain should give Germany a free hand in Europe in return for Germany’s

giving Britain “a completely free hand in the Empire.” The former German

colonies would have to be returned and of course Britain would have to make

peace with Italy.

Finally, as we were leaving the room [Kirkpatrick reported], Hess delivered a parting shot.

He had forgotten, he declared, to emphasize that the proposal could only be considered on the

understanding that it was negotiated by Germany with an English government other than the

present one. Mr. Churchill, who had planned the war since 1936, and his colleagues who had

lent themselves to his war policy, were not persons with whom the Fuehrer could negotiate.

For a German who had got so far in the jungle warfare within the Nazi Party

and then within the Third Reich, Rudolf Hess, as all who knew him could testify,

was singularly naïve. He had expected, it is evident from the record of these

interviews, to be received immediately as a serious negotiator—if not by

Churchill, then by the “opposition party,” of which he thought the Duke of

Hamilton was one of the leaders. When his contacts with British officialdom

continued to be restricted to Kirkpatrick, he grew bellicose and threatening. At

an interview on May 14, he pictured to the skeptical diplomat the dire

consequences to Britain if she continued the war. There would soon be, he said,

a terrible and absolutely complete blockade of the British Isles.

It was fruitless [Kirkpatrick was told by Hess] for anyone here to imagine that England

could capitulate and that the war could be waged from the Empire. It was Hitler’s intention, in

such an eventuality, to continue the blockade of England … so that we would have to face the

deliberate starvation of the population of these islands.

Hess urged that the conversations, which he had risked so much to bring

about, get under way at once. “His own flight,” as explained to Kirkpatrick,

“was intended to give us a chance of opening conversations without loss of

prestige. If we rejected this chance it would be clear proof that we desire no

understanding with Germany, and Hitler would be entitled—in fact, it would be

his duty—to destroy us utterly and to keep us after the war in a state of

permanent subjection.” Hess insisted that the number of negotiators be kept

small.

As a Reich Minister he could not place himself in the position of being a lone individual

subjected to a crossfire of comment and questions from a large number of persons.

On this ridiculous note, the conversations ended, so far as Kirkpatrick was

concerned. But—surprisingly—the British cabinet, according to Churchill, 87

“invited” Lord Simon to interview Hess on June 10. According to the Nazi

deputy leader’s lawyer at Nuremberg, Simon promised that he would bring

Hess’s peace proposals to the attention of the British government.*88

Hess’s motives are clear. He sincerely wanted peace with Britain. He had not

the shadow of doubt that Germany would win the war and destroy the United

Kingdom unless peace were concluded at once. There were, to be sure, other

motives. The war had brought his personal eclipse. Running the Nazi Party as

Hitler’s deputy during the war was dull business and no longer very important.

What mattered in Germany now was running the war and foreign affairs. These

were the things which engaged the attention of the Fuehrer to the exclusion of

almost all else, and which put the limelight on Goering, Ribbentrop, Himmler,

Goebbels and the generals. Hess felt frustrated and jealous. How better restore

his old position with his beloved Leader and in the country than by pulling off a

brilliant and daring stroke of statesmanship such as singlehandedly arranging

peace between Germany and Britain?

Finally, the beetle-browed deputy leader, like some of the other Nazi bigwigs

—Hitler himself and Himmler—had come to have an abiding belief in astrology.

At Nuremberg he confided to the American prison psychiatrist, Dr. Douglas M.

Kelley, that late in 1940 one of his astrologers had read in the stars that he was

ordained to bring about peace. He also related how his old mentor, Professor

Haushofer, the Munich Geopolitiker, had seen him in a dream striding through

the tapestried halls of English castles, bringing peace between the two great

“Nordic” nations. 90 For a man who had never escaped from mental adolescence,

this was heady stuff and no doubt helped impel Hess to undertake his weird

mission to England.

At Nuremberg one of the British prosecutors suggested still another reason:

that Hess flew to England to try to arrange a peace settlement so that Germany

would have only a one-front war to fight when she attacked the Soviet Union.

The Russian prosecutor told the tribunal that he was sure of it. And so was

Joseph Stalin, whose mighty suspicions at this critical time seem to have been

concentrated not on Germany, as they should have been, but on Great Britain.

The arrival of Hess in Scotland convinced him that there was some deep plot

being hatched between Churchill and Hitler which would give Germany the

same freedom to strike the Soviet Union which the Russian dictator had given

her to assault Poland and the West. When three years later the British Prime

Minister, then on his second visit to Moscow, tried to convince Stalin of the

truth, he simply did not believe it. It is fairly clear from the interrogations

conducted by Kirkpatrick, who tried to draw the Nazi leader out on Hitler’s

intentions regarding Russia, that either Hess did not know of Barbarossa or, if he

did, did not know that it was imminent.

The days following Hess’s sudden departure were among the most

embarrassing of Hitler’s life. He realized that the prestige of his regime had been

severely damaged by the flight of his closest collaborator. How was it to be

explained to the German people and the outside world? The questioning of the

arrested members of Hess’s entourage convinced the Fuehrer that there had been

no disloyalty toward him and certainly no plot, and that his trusted lieutenant had

simply cracked up. It was decided at the Berghof, after the British had confirmed

Hess’s arrival, to offer this explanation to the public. Soon the German press was

dutifully publishing brief accounts that this once great star of National Socialism

had become “a deluded, deranged and muddled idealist, ridden with

hallucinations traceable to World War [I] injuries.”

It seemed [said the official press communiqué] that Party Comrade Hess lived in a state of

hallucination, as a result of which he felt he could bring about an understanding between

England and Germany … This, however, will have no effect on the continuance of the war,

which has been forced on the German people.

Privately, Hitler gave orders to have Hess shot at once if he returned, * and

publicly he stripped his old comrade of all his offices, replacing him as deputy

leader of the party by Martin Bormann, a more sinister and conniving character.

The Fuehrer hoped that the bizarre episode would be forgotten as soon as

possible; his own thoughts quickly turned again to the attack on Russia, which

was not far off.

THE PLIGHT OF THE KREMLIN

Despite all the evidence of Hitler’s intentions—the build-up of German forces

in eastern Poland, the presence of a million Nazi troops in the nearby Balkans,

the Wehrmacht’s conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece and its occupation of

Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary—the men in the Kremlin, Stalin above all, stark

realists though they were reputed to be and had been, blindly hoped that Russia

somehow would still escape the Nazi tyrant’s wrath. Their natural suspicions, of

course, could not help but feed on the bare facts, nor could their growing

resentment at Hitler’s moves in southeastern Europe be suppressed. There is,

however, something unreal, almost unbelievable, quite grotesque, in the

diplomatic exchanges between Moscow and Berlin in these spring weeks

(exhaustively recorded in the captured Nazi documents), in which the Germans

tried clumsily to deceive the Kremlin to the last and the Soviet leaders seemed

unable to fully grasp reality and act on it in time.

Though they several times protested the entry of German troops into Rumania

and Bulgaria and then the attack on Yugoslavia and Greece as a violation of the

Nazi–Soviet Pact and a threat to Russian “security interests,” the Soviets went

out of their way to appease Berlin as the date for the German attack approached.

Stalin personally took the lead in this. On April 13, 1941, Ambassador von der

Schulenburg telegraphed an interesting dispatch to Berlin recounting how on the

departure of the Japanese Foreign Minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, that evening from

Moscow, Stalin had shown “a remarkably friendly manner” not only to the

Japanese but to the Germans. At the railroad station

Stalin publicly asked for me [Schulenburg wired] … and threw his arm around my shoulders:

“We must remain friends and you must now do everything to that end!” Somewhat later Stalin

turned to the acting German Military Attaché, Colonel Krebs, first made sure that he was a

German, and then said to him: “We will remain friends with you—through thick and thin!” 91

Three days later the German chargé in Moscow, Tippelskirch, wired Berlin

stressing that the demonstration at the station showed Stalin’s friendliness

toward Germany and that this was especially important “in view of the

persistently circulating rumors of an imminent conflict between Germany and

the Soviet Union.” 92 The day before, Tippelskirch had informed Berlin that the

Kremlin had accepted “unconditionally,” after months of wrangling, the German

proposals for the settlement of the border between the two countries from the

Igorka River to the Baltic Sea. “The compliant attitude of the Soviet

Government,” he said, “seems very remarkable.” 93 In view of what was brewing

in Berlin, it surely was.

In supplying blockaded Germany with important raw materials, the Soviet

government continued to be equally compliant. On April 5, 1941, Schnurre, in

charge of trade negotiations with Moscow, reported jubilantly to his Nazi

masters that after the slowdown in Russian deliveries in January and February

1941, due to the “cooling off of political relations,” they had risen “by leaps and

bounds in March, especially in grains, petroleum, manganese ore and the

nonferrous and precious metals.”

Transit traffic through Siberia [he added] is proceeding favorably as usual. At our request

the Soviet Government even put a special freight train for rubber at our disposal at the

Manchurian border. 94

Six weeks later, on May 15, Schnurre was reporting that the obliging Russians

had put on several special freight trains so that 4,000 tons of badly needed raw

rubber could be delivered to Germany over the Siberian railway.

The quantities of raw materials contracted for are being delivered punctually by the

Russians, despite the heavy burden this imposes on them … I am under the impression that we

could make economic demands on Moscow which would even go beyond the scope of the

treaty of January 10, demands designed to secure German food and raw-material requirements

beyond the extent now contracted for. 95

German deliveries of machinery to Russia were falling behind, Schnurre

observed, but he did not seem to mind, if the Russians didn’t. However, he was

disturbed on May 15 by another factor. “Great difficulties are created,” he

complained, “by the countless rumors of an imminent German–Russian

conflict,” for which he blamed German official sources. Amazingly, the

“difficulties,” Schnurre explained in a lengthy memorandum to the Foreign

Office, did not come from Russia but from German industrial firms, which, he

said, were trying “to withdraw” from their contracts with the Russians.

Hitler, it must be noted here, was doing his best to contradict the rumors, but

at the same time he was busy trying to convince his generals and top officials

that Germany was in growing danger of being attacked by Russia. Though the

generals, from their own military intelligence, knew better, so hypnotic was

Hitler’s spell over them that even after the war Halder, Brauchitsch, Manstein

and others (though not Paulus, who seems to have been more honest) contended

that a Soviet military build-up on the Polish frontier had become very

threatening by the beginning of the summer.

Count von der Schulenburg, who had come home from Moscow on a brief

leave, saw Hitler in Berlin on April 28 and tried to convince him of Russia’s

peaceful intentions. “Russia,” he attempted to explain, “is very apprehensive at

the rumors predicting a German attack on Russia. I cannot believe,” he added,

“that Russia will ever attack Germany … If Stalin was unable to go with

England and France in 1939 when both were still strong, he will certainly not

make such a decision today, when France is destroyed and England badly

battered. On the contrary, I am convinced that Stalin is prepared to make even

further concessions to us.”

The Fuehrer feigned skepticism. He had been “forewarned,” he said, “by

events in Serbia … What devil had possessed the Russians,” he asked, “to

conclude the friendship pact with Yugoslavia? ” * He did not believe, it was true,

he said, that “Russia could be brought to attack Germany.” Nevertheless, he

concluded, he was obliged “to be careful.” Hitler did not tell his ambassador to

the Soviet Union what plans he had in store for that country, and Schulenburg,

an honest, decent German of the old school, remained ignorant of them to the

last.

Stalin, too, but not of the signs, or of the warnings, of what Hitler was up to.

On April 22 the Soviet government formally protested eighty instances of border

violations by Nazi planes which it said had taken place between March 27 and

April 18, providing detailed accounts of each. In one case, it said, in a German

reconnaissance plane which landed near Rovno on April 15 there was found a

camera, rolls of exposed film and a torn topographical map of the western

districts of the U.S.S.R., “all of which give evidence of the purpose of the crew

of this airplane.” Even in protesting the Russians were conciliatory. They had

given the border troops, the note said, “the order not to fire on German planes

flying over Soviet territory so long as such flights do not occur frequently.” 97

Stalin made further conciliatory moves early in May. To please Hitler he

expelled the diplomatic representatives in Moscow of Belgium, Norway, Greece

and even Yugoslavia and closed their legations. He recognized the pro-Nazi

government of Rashid Ali in Iraq. He kept the Soviet press under the strictest

restraint in order to avoid provoking Germany.

These manifestations [Schulenburg wired Berlin on May 12] of the intention of the Stalin

Government are calculated … to relieve the tension between the Soviet Union and Germany

and to create a better atmosphere for the future. We must bear in mind that Stalin personally

has always advocated a friendly relationship between Germany and the Soviet Union.98

Though Stalin had long been the absolute dictator of the Soviet Union this

was the first mention by Schulenburg in his dispatches of the term “Stalin

Government.” There was good reason. On May 6 Stalin had personally taken

over as Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, or Prime Minister,

replacing Molotov, who remained as Foreign Commissar. This was the first time

the all-powerful secretary of the Communist Party had taken government office

and the general world reaction was that it meant the situation had become so

serious for the Soviet Union, especially in its relations with Nazi Germany, that

only Stalin could deal with it as the nominal as well as the actual head of

government. This interpretation was obvious, but there was another which was

not so clear but which the astute German ambassador in Moscow promptly

pointed out to Berlin.

Stalin, he reported, was displeased with the deterioration of German–Soviet

relations and blamed Molotov’s clumsy diplomacy for much of it.

In my opinion [Schulenburg said] it may be assumed with certainty that Stalin has set

himself a foreign-policy goal of overwhelming importance … which he hopes to attain by his

personal efforts. I firmly believe that in an international situation which he considers serious,

Stalin has set himself the goal of preserving the Soviet Union from a conflict with Germany.99

Did the crafty Soviet dictator not realize by now—the middle of May 1941—

that this was an impossible goal, that there was nothing, short of an abject

surrender to Hitler, that he could do to attain it? He surely knew the significance

of Hitler’s conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece, of the presence of large masses

of German troops in Rumania and Hungary on his southwest borders, of the

Wehrmacht build-up on his western frontier in Poland. The persistent rumors in

Moscow itself surely reached him. By the beginning of May what Schulenburg

called in a dispatch on the second day of that month “rumors of an imminent

German–Russian military showdown” were so rife in the Soviet capital that he

and his officials in the German Embassy were having difficulty in combating

them.

Please bear in mind [he advised Berlin] that attempts to counteract these rumors here in

Moscow must necessarily remain ineffectual if such rumors incessantly reach here from

Germany, and if every traveler who comes to Moscow, or travels through Moscow, not only

brings these rumors along, but can even confirm them by citing facts. 100

The veteran ambassador was getting suspicious himself. He was instructed by

Berlin to continue to deny the rumors, and to spread it about that not only was

there no concentration of German troops on Russia’s frontiers but that actually

considerable forces (eight divisions, he was told for his “personal information”)

were being transferred from “east to west. ”101 Perhaps these instructions only

confirmed the ambassador’s uneasiness, since by this time the press throughout

the world was beginning to trumpet the German military build-up along the

Soviet borders.

But long before this, Stalin had received specific warnings of Hitler’s plans,

and apparently paid no attention to them. The most serious one came from the

government of the United States.

Early in January 1941, the U.S. commercial attaché in Berlin, Sam E. Woods,

had sent a confidential report to the State Department stating that he had learned

from trustworthy German sources that Hitler was making plans to attack Russia

in the spring. It was a long and detailed message, outlining the General Staff

plan of attack (which proved to be quite accurate) and the preparations being

made for the economic exploitation of the Soviet Union, once it was conquered. *

Secretary of State Cordell Hull thought at first that Woods had been victim of

a German “plant.” He called in J. Edgar Hoover. The F.B.I, head read the report

and judged it authentic. Woods had named some of his sources, both in various

ministries in Berlin and in the German General Staff, and on being checked they

were adjudged in Washington to be men who ought to know what was up and

anti-Nazi enough to tattle. Despite the strained relations then existing between

the American and Soviet governments Hull decided to inform the Russians,

requesting Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles to communicate the

substance of the report to Ambassador Constantine Oumansky. This was done on

March 20.

Mr. Oumansky turned very white [Welles later wrote]. He was silent for a moment and

then merely said: “I fully realize the gravity of the message you have given me. My

government will be grateful for your confidence and I will inform it immediately of our

conversation. ”102

If it was grateful, indeed if it ever believed this timely intelligence, it never

communicated any inkling to the American government. In fact, as Secretary

Hull has related in his memoirs, Moscow grew more hostile and truculent

because America’s support of Britain made it impossible to supply Russia with

all the materials it demanded. Nevertheless, according to Hull, the State

Department, having received dispatches from its legations in Bucharest and

Stockholm the first week in June stating that Germany would invade Russia

within a fortnight, forwarded copies of them to Ambassador Steinhardt in

Moscow, who turned them over to Molotov.

Churchill too sought to warn Stalin. On April 3 he asked his ambassador in

Moscow, Sir Stafford Cripps, to deliver a personal note to the dictator pointing

out the significance to Russia of German troop movements in southern Poland

which he had learned of through a British agent. Cripps’ delay in delivering the

message still vexed Churchill when he wrote about the incident years later in his

memoirs. 103

Before the end of April, Cripps knew the date set for the German attack, and

the Germans knew he knew it. On April 24, the German naval attaché in

Moscow sent a curt message to the Navy High Command in Berlin:

The British Ambassador predicts June 22 as the day of the outbreak of the

war. 104 *

This message, which is among the captured Nazi papers, was recorded in the

German Naval Diary on the same day, with an exclamation point added at the

end. 105 The admirals were surprised at the accuracy of the British envoy’s

prediction. The poor naval attaché, who, like the ambassador in Moscow, had

not been let in on the secret, added in his dispatch that it was “manifestly

absurd.”

Molotov must have thought so too. A month later, on May 22, he received

Schulenburg to discuss various matters. “He was as amiable, self-assured and

well-informed as ever,” the ambassador reported to Berlin, and again

emphasized that Stalin and Molotov, “the two strongest men in the Soviet

Union,” were striving “above all” to avoid a conflict with Germany. 106

On one point the usually perspicacious ambassador couldn’t have been more

wrong. Molotov, at this juncture, was certainly not “well-informed.” But neither

was the ambassador.

The extent to which the Russian Foreign Commissar was ill-informed was

given public expression on June 14, 1941, just a week before the German blow

fell. Molotov called in Schulenburg that evening and handed him the text of a

Tass statement which, he said, was being broadcast that very night and published

in the newspapers the next morning.107 Blaming Cripps personally for the

“widespread rumors of ‘an impending war between the U.S.S.R. and Germany’

in the English and foreign press,” this official statement of the Soviet

government branded them as an “obvious absurdity … a clumsy propaganda

maneuver of the forces arrayed against the Soviet Union and Germany.” It

added:

In the opinion of Soviet circles the rumors of the intention of Germany … to launch an

attack against the Soviet Union are completely without foundation.

Even the recent German troop movements from the Balkans to the Soviet

frontiers were explained in the communiqué as “having no connection with

Soviet–German relations.” As for the rumors saying that Russia would attack

Germany, they were “false and provocative.”

The irony of the Tass communiqué on behalf of the Soviet government is

enhanced by two German moves, one on the day of its publication, June 15, the

other on the next day.

From Venice, where he was conferring with Ciano, Ribbentrop sent a secret

message on June 15 to Budapest warning the Hungarian government “to take

steps to secure its frontiers.”

In view of the heavy concentration of Russian troops at the German eastern border, the

Fuehrer will probably be compelled, by the beginning of July at the latest, to clarify German–

Russian relations and in this connection to make certain demands. 108

The Germans were tipping off the Hungarians, but not their principal ally.

When Ciano the next day, during a gondola ride on the canals of Venice, asked

Ribbentrop about the rumors of a German attack on Russia, the Nazi Foreign

Minister replied:

“Dear Ciano, I cannot tell you anything as yet because every decision is locked in the

impenetrable bosom of the Fuehrer. However, one thing is certain: if we attack them, the

Russia of Stalin will be erased from the map within eight weeks.” *

While the Kremlin was smugly preparing to broadcast to the world on June

14, 1941, that the rumors of a German attack on Russia were an “obvious

absurdity,” Adolf Hitler that very day was having his final big war conference on

Barbarossa with the leading officers of the Wehrmacht. The timetable for the

massing of troops in the East and their deployment to the jumping-off positions

had been put in operation on May 22. A revised version of the timetable was

issued a few days later. 109 It is a long and detailed document and shows that by

the beginning of June not only were all plans for the onslaught on Russia

complete but the vast and complicated movement of troops, artillery, armor,

planes, ships and supplies was well under way and on schedule. A brief item in

the Naval War Diary for May 29 states: “The preparatory movements of

warships for Barbarossa has begun.” Talks with the general staffs of Rumania,

Hungary and Finland—the last country anxious now to win back what had been

taken from her by the Russians in the winter war—were completed. On June 9

from Berchtesgaden Hitler sent out an order convoking the commanders in chief

of the three Armed Services and the top field generals for a final all-day meeting

on Barbarossa in Berlin on June 14.

Despite the enormity of the task, not only Hitler but his generals were in a

confident mood as they went over last-minute details of the most gigantic

military operation in history—an all-out attack on a front stretching some 1,500

miles from the Arctic Ocean at Petsamo to the Black Sea. The night before,

Brauchitsch had returned to Berlin from an inspection of the build-up in the East.

Halder noted in his diary that the Army Commander in Chief was highly

pleased. Officers and men, he said, were in top shape and ready.

This last military powwow on June 14 lasted from 11 A.M. until 6:30 P.M. It

was broken by lunch at 2 P.M., at which Hitler gave his generals yet another of

his fiery, eve-of-the-battle pep talks. 110 According to Halder, it was “a

comprehensive political speech,” with Hitler stressing that he had to attack

Russia because her fall would force England to “give up.” But the bloodthirsty

Fuehrer must have emphasized something else even more. Keitel told about it

during direct examination on the stand at Nuremberg.

The main theme was that this was the decisive battle between two ideologies and that the

practices which we knew as soldiers—the only correct ones under international law—had to

be measured by completely different standards.

Hitler thereupon, said Keitel, gave various orders for carrying out an

unprecedented terror in Russia by “brutal means.”

“Did you, or did any other generals, raise objections to these orders?” asked

Keitel’s own attorney.

“No. I personally made no remonstrances,” the General replied. Nor did any

of the other generals, he added.*

It is almost inconceivable but nevertheless true that the men in the Kremlin, for

all the reputation they had of being suspicious, crafty and hardheaded, and

despite all the evidence and all the warnings that stared them in the face, did not

realize right up to the last moment that they were to be hit, and with a force

which would almost destroy their nation.

At 9:30 on the pleasant summer evening of June 21, 1941, nine hours before

the German attack was scheduled to begin, Molotov received the German

ambassador at his office in the Kremlin and delivered his “final fatuity.” * After

mentioning further border violations by German aircraft, which he said he had

instructed the Soviet ambassador in Berlin to bring to the attention of

Ribbentrop, Molotov turned to another subject, which Schulenburg described in

an urgent telegram to the Wilhelmstrasse that same night:

There were a number of indications [Molotov had told him] that the German Government

was dissatisfied with the Soviet Government. Rumors were even current that a war was

impending between Germany and the Soviet Union … The Soviet Government was unable to

understand the reasons for Germany’s dissatisfaction … He would appreciate it if I could tell

him what had brought about the present situation in German–Soviet relations.

I replied [Schulenburg added] that I could not answer his questions, as I lacked the

pertinent information.111

He was soon to get it.

For on its way to him over the air waves between Berlin and Moscow was a

long coded radio message from Ribbentrop, dated June 21, 1941, marked “Very

Urgent, State Secret, For the Ambassador Personally,” which began:

Upon receipt of this telegram, all of the cipher material still there is to be destroyed. The

radio set is to be put out of commission.

Please inform Herr Molotov at once that you have an urgent communication to make to

him … Then please make the following declaration to him.

It was a familiar declaration, strewn with all the shopworn lies and

fabrications at which Hitler and Ribbentrop had become so expert and which

they had concocted so often before to justify each fresh act of unprovoked

aggression. Perhaps—at least such is the impression this writer gets in rereading

it—it somewhat topped all the previous ones for sheer effrontery and deceit.

While Germany had loyally abided by the Nazi–Soviet Pact, it said, Russia had

repeatedly broken it. The U.S.S.R. had practiced “sabotage, terrorism and

espionage” against Germany. It had “combated the German attempt to set up a

stable order in Europe.” It had conspired with Britain “for an attack against the

German troops in Rumania and Bulgaria. ” By concentrating “all available

Russian forces on a long front from the Baltic to the Black Sea,” it had

“menaced” the Reich.

Reports received the last few days [it went on] eliminate the last remaining doubts as to the

aggressive character of this Russian concentration … In addition, there are reports from

England regarding the negotiations of Ambassador Cripps for still closer political and military

collaboration between England and the Soviet Union.

To sum up, the Government of the Reich declares, therefore, that the Soviet Government,

contrary to the obligations it assumed,

1. has not only continued, but even intensified its attempts to undermine Germany and

Europe;

2. has adopted a more and more anti-German foreign policy;

3. has concentrated all its forces in readiness at the German border. Thereby the Soviet

Government has broken its treaties with Germany and is about to attack Germany from the

rear in its struggle for life. The Fuehrer has therefore ordered the German Armed Forces to

oppose this threat with all the means at their disposal.112

“Please do not enter into any discussion of this communication,” Ribbentrop

advised his ambassador at the end. What could the shaken and disillusioned

Schulenburg, who had devoted the best years of his life to improving German–

Russian relations and who knew that the attack on the Soviet Union was

unprovoked and without justification, say? Arriving back at the Kremlin just as

dawn was breaking, he contented himself with reading the German declaration.*

Molotov, stunned at last, listened in silence to the end and then said:

“It is war. Do you believe that we deserved that?”

At the same hour of daybreak a similar scene was taking place in the

Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin. All afternoon on June 21, the Soviet ambassador,

Vladimir Dekanozov, had been telephoning the Foreign Office asking for an

appointment with Ribbentrop so that he could deliver his little protest against

further border violations by German planes. He was told that the Nazi Foreign

Minister was “out of town.” Then at 2 A.M. on the twenty-second he was

informed that Ribbentrop would receive him at 4 A.M. at the Foreign Office.

There the envoy, who had been a deputy foreign commissar, a hatchetman for

Stalin and the troubleshooter who had arranged the taking over of Lithuania,

received, like Molotov in Moscow, the shock of his life. Dr. Schmidt, who was

present, has described the scene.

I had never seen Ribbentrop so excited as he was in the five minutes before Dekanozov’s

arrival. He walked up and down his room like a caged animal …

Dekanozov was shown in and, obviously not guessing anything was amiss, held out his

hand to Ribbentrop. We sat down and … Dekanozov proceeded to put on behalf of his

Government certain questions that needed clarification. But he had hardly begun before

Ribbentrop, with a stony expression, interrupted, saying: “That’s not the question now” …

The arrogant Nazi Foreign Minister thereupon explained what the question

was, gave the ambassador a copy of the memorandum which Schulenburg at that

moment was reading out to Molotov, and informed him that German troops were

at that instant taking “military countermeasures” on the Soviet frontier. The

startled Soviet envoy, says Schmidt, “recovered his composure quickly and

expressed his deep regret” at the developments, for which he blamed Germany.

“He rose, bowed perfunctorily and left the room without shaking hands.” 113

The Nazi–Soviet honeymoon was over. At 3:30 A.M. on June 22, 1941, a half

hour before the closing diplomatic formalities in the Kremlin and the

Wilhelmstrasse, the roar of Hitler’s guns along hundreds of miles of front had

blasted it forever.

There was one other diplomatic prelude to the cannonade. On the afternoon of

June 21, Hitler sat down at his desk in his new underground headquarters,

Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair), near Rastenburg in a gloomy forest of East Prussia,

and dictated a long letter to Mussolini. As in the preparation of all his other

aggressions he had not trusted his good friend and chief ally enough to let him in

on his secret until the last moment. Now, at the eleventh hour, he did. His letter

is the most revealing and authentic evidence we have of the reasons for his

taking this fatal step, which for so long puzzled the outside world and which was

to pave the way for his end and that of the Third Reich. The letter, to be sure, is

full of Hitler’s customary lies and evasions which he tried to fob off even on his

friends. But beneath them, and between them, there emerges his fundamental

reasoning and his true—if mistaken—estimate of the world situation as the

summer of 1941, the second of the war, officially began.

DUCE!

I am writing this letter to you at a moment when months of anxious deliberation and

continuous nerve-racking waiting are ending in the hardest decision of my life.

The situation:* England has lost this war. Like a drowning person, she grasps at every

straw. Nevertheless, some of her hopes are naturally not without a certain logic … The

destruction of France … has directed the glances of the British warmongers continually to the

place from which they tried to start the war: to Soviet Russia.

Both countries, Soviet Russia and England, are equally interested in a Europe … rendered

prostrate by a long war. Behind these two countries stands the North American Union goading

them on….

Hitler next explained that with large Soviet military forces in his rear he could

never assemble the strength—“particularly in the air”—to make the all-out

attack on Britain which would bring her down.

Really, all available Russian forces are at our border … If circumstances should give me

cause to employ the German Air Force against England, there is danger that Russia will then

begin its strategy of extortion, to which I would have to yield in silence simply from a feeling

of air inferiority … England will be all the less ready for peace for it will be able to pin its

hopes on the Russian partner. Indeed this hope must naturally grow with the progress in

preparedness of the Russian armed forces. And behind this is the mass delivery of war

material from America which they hope to get in 1942 …

I have therefore, after constantly racking my brains, finally reached the decision to cut the

noose before it can be drawn tight … My over-all view is now as follows:

1. France is, as ever, not to be trusted.

2. North Africa itself, insofar as your colonies, Duce, are concerned, is probably out of

danger until fall.

3. Spain is irresolute and—I am afraid—will take sides only when the outcome of the war

is decided …

5. An attack on Egypt before autumn is out of the question …

6. Whether or not America enters the war is a matter of indifference, inasmuch as she

supports our enemy with all the power she is able to mobilize.

7. The situation in England itself is bad; the provision of food and raw materials is growing

steadily more difficult. The martial spirit to make war, after all, lives only on hopes. These

hopes are based solely on two assumptions: Russia and America. We have no chance of

eliminating America. But it does lie in our power to exclude Russia. The elimination of Russia

means, at the same time, a tremendous relief for Japan in East Asia, and thereby the possibility

of a much stronger threat to American activities through Japanese intervention.

I have decided under these circumstances to put an end to the hypocritical performance in

the Kremlin.

Germany, Hitler said, would not need any Italian troops in Russia. (He was

not going to share the glory of conquering Russia any more than he had shared

the conquest of France.) But Italy, he declared, could “give decisive aid” by

strengthening its forces in North Africa and by preparing “to march into France

in case of a French violation of the treaty.” This was a fine bait for the land-

hungry Duce.

So far as the air war on England is concerned, we shall, for a time, remain on the defensive

…

As for the war in the East, Duce, it will surely be difficult, but I do not entertain a second’s

doubt as to its great success. I hope, above all, that it will then be possible for us to secure a

common food-supply base in the Ukraine which will furnish us such additional supplies as we

may need in the future.

Then came the excuse for not tipping off his partner earlier.

If I waited until this moment, Duce, to send you this information, it is because the final

decision itself will not be made until 7 o’clock tonight …

Whatever may come, Duce, our situation cannot become worse as a result of this step; it

can only improve … Should England nevertheless not draw any conclusions from the hard

facts, then we can, with our rear secured, apply ourselves with increased strength to the

dispatching of our enemy.

Finally Hitler described his great feeling of relief at having finally made up

his mind.

… Let me say one more thing, Duce. Since I struggled through to this decision, I again feel

spiritually free. The partnership with the Soviet Union, in spite of the complete sincerity of our

efforts to bring about a final conciliation, was nevertheless often very irksome to me, for in

some way or other it seemed to me to be a break with my whole origin, my concepts and my

former obligations. I am happy now to be relieved of these mental agonies.

With hearty and comradely greetings,

Your

ADOLF HITLER114

At 3 o’clock in the morning of June 22, a bare half hour before the German

troops jumped off, Ambassador von Bismarck awakened Ciano in Rome to

deliver Hitler’s long missive, which the Italian Foreign Minister then telephoned

to Mussolini, who was resting at his summer place at Riccione. It was not the

first time that the Duce had been wakened from his sleep in the middle of the

night by a message from his Axis partner, and he resented it. “Not even I disturb

my servants at night,” Mussolini fretted to Ciano, “but the Germans make me

jump out of bed at any hour without the least consideration.” 115 Nevertheless, as

soon as Mussolini had rubbed the sleep from his eyes he gave orders for an

immediate declaration of war on the Soviet Union. He was now completely a

prisoner of the Germans. He knew it and resented it. “I hope for only one thing,”

he told Ciano, “that in this war in the East the Germans lose a lot of feathers.” 116

Still, he realized that his own future now depended wholly on German arms. The

Germans would win in Russia, he was sure, but he hoped that at least they would

get a bloody nose.

He could not know, nor did he suspect, nor did anyone else in the West, on

either side, that they would get much worse. On Sunday morning, June 22, the

day Napoleon had crossed the Niemen in 1812 on his way to Moscow, and

exactly a year after Napoleon’s country, France, had capitulated at Compiègne,

Adolf Hitler’s armored, mechanized and hitherto invincible armies poured across

the Niemen and various other rivers and penetrated swiftly into Russia. The Red

Army, despite all the warnings and the warning signs, was, as General Halder

noted in his diary the first day, “tactically surprised along the entire front. ”* All

the first bridges were captured intact. In fact, says Halder, at most places along

the border the Russians were not even deployed for action and were overrun

before they could organize resistance. Hundreds of Soviet planes were destroyed

on the flying fields. † Within a few days tens of thousands of prisoners began to

pour in; whole armies were quickly encircled. It seemed like the Feldzug in

Polen all over again.

“It is hardly too much to say,” the usually cautious Halder noted in his diary

on July 3 after going over the latest General Staff reports, “that the Feldzug

against Russia has been won in fourteen days.” In a matter of weeks, he added, it

would all be over.

* Halder uses the English word “down” here in the German text.

† The emphasis in the report is Halder’s.

* In his report on this Thomas stresses how punctual Soviet deliveries of goods to Germany

were at this time. In fact, he says, they continued to be “right up to the start of the attack,” and

observes, not without amusement, that “even during the last few days, shipments of India

rubber from the Far East were completed [by the Russians] over express transit trains”—

presumably over the Trans-Siberian Railway. 12

† The Germans had kept only seven divisions in Poland, two of which were transferred to the

West during the spring campaign. The troops there, Halder cracked, were scarcely enough to

maintain the customs service. If Stalin had attacked Germany in June 1940, the Red Army

probably could have got to Berlin before any serious resistance was organized.

* It cost King Carol his throne. On September 6 he abdicated in favor of his eighteen-year-old

son, Michael, and fled with his red-haired mistress, Magda Lupescu, in a ten-car special train

filled with what might be described as “loot” across Yugoslavia to Switzerland. General Ion

Antonescu, chief of the fascist “Iron Guard” and a friend of Hitler, became dictator.

* Minus southern Dobrudja, which Rumania was forced to cede to Bulgaria.

* It was signed in Berlin on September 27, 1940, in a comic-opera setting and ceremony

which I have described elsewhere ( Berlin Diary, pp. 532–37). In Articles 1 and 2, respectively,

Japan recognized “the leadership of Germany and Italy in the establishment of a new order in

Europe,” and the two countries recognized Japan’s leadership for the same in Greater East

Asia. Article 3 provided for mutual assistance should any one of the powers be attacked by the

United States, though America was not specifically mentioned, only defined. To me, as I

wrote in my diary that day in Berlin, the most significant thing about the pact was that it meant

that Hitler was now reconciled to a long war. Ciano, who signed the pact for Italy, came to the

same conclusion ( Ciano Diaries, p. 296). Also, despite the disclaimer, the pact was, and was

meant to be, a warning to the Soviet Union.

* Their accuracy on this occasion was later confirmed by Stalin, though not intentionally.

Churchill says he received an account of Molotov’s talks in Berlin from Stalin in August 1942

“which in no essential differs from the German record,” though it was “more pithy.”

(Churchill, Their Finest Hour, pp. 585–86.)

* Churchill says the air raid was timed for this occasion. “We had heard of the conference

beforehand,” he later wrote, “and though not invited to join in the discussion did not wish to

be entirely left out of the proceedings.” (Churchill, Their Finest Hour, p. 584.)

* Molotov’s parting shot is given by Churchill, to whom it was related by Stalin later in the

war. (Churchill, Their Finest Hour, p. 586.)

* Sweden, which had refused transit to the Allies during the Russo–Finnish War, permitted

this fully armed division to pass through. Hungary, of course, later joined in the war against

Russia.

† The italics are Hitler’s.

* A good many historians have contended that Hitler in this first Barbarossa directive did not

go into detail, a misunderstanding due probably to the extremely abbreviated version given in

English translation in the NCA volumes. But the complete German text given in TMWC,

XXVI, pp. 47–52 discloses the full details, thus revealing how far advanced the German

military plans were at this early date. 36

* Although they did not learn the contents of the secret accord at Montoire, both Churchill and

Roosevelt suspected the worst. The King of England sent through American channels a

personal appeal to Pétain asking him not to take sides against Britain. President Roosevelt’s

message to the Marshal was stern and toughly worded and warned him of the dire

consequences of Vichy France’s betraying Britain. (See William L. Langer, Our Vichy

Gamble, p. 97. To write this book, Professor Langer had access to German documents that

eleven years later have not been released by the British and American governments.)

* The Navy’s italics.

† By this time a ramshackle British desert force of one armored division, an Indian infantry

division, two infantry brigades and a Royal Tank regiment—31,000 men in all—had driven an

Italian force three times as large out of Egypt and captured 38,000 prisoners at a cost of 133

killed, 387 wounded and 8 missing. The British counteroffensive, under the over-all command

of General Sir Archibald Wavell, had begun on December 7 and in four days Marshal

Graziani’s army was routed. What had started as a five-day limited counterattack continued

until February 7, by which time the British had pushed clear across Cyrenaica, a distance of

500 miles, annihilated the entire Italian army of ten divisions in Libya, taken 130,000

prisoners, 1,240 guns and 500 tanks and lost themselves 500 killed, 1,373 wounded and 55

missing. To the skeptical British military writer General J. F. Fuller it was “one of the most

audacious campaigns ever fought.” (Fuller, The Second World War, p. 98.)

The Italian Navy had also been dealt a lethal blow. On the night of November 11–12,

bombers from the British carrier Illustrious (which the Luftwaffe claimed to have sunk)

attacked the Italian fleet at anchor at Taranto and put out of action for many months three

battleships and two cruisers. “A black day,” Ciano began his diary on November 12. “The

British, without warning, have sunk the dreadnought Cavour and seriously damaged the

battleships Littorio and Duilio. ”

* The italics and double exclamation points are Raeder’s.

† Operation Marita was promulgated in Directive No. 20 on December 13, 1940. It called for

an army of twenty-four divisions to be assembled in Rumania and to descend on Greece

through Bulgaria as soon as favorable weather set in. It was signed by Hitler. 53

* The strategy was essentially that laid down in Directive No. 21 of December 18, 1940.

Again in comments to Brauchitsch and Halder, Hitler emphasized the importance of “wiping

out large sections of the enemy” instead of forcing them to retreat. And he stressed that “the

main aim [his emphasis] is to gain possession of the Baltic States and Leningrad.”

* “The war against Yugoslavia should be very popular in Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria,” Hitler

sneered. He said he would give the Banat to Hungary, Macedonia to Bulgaria and the Adriatic

coast to Italy.

† It had originally been set for May 15 in the first Barbarossa directive of December 18, 1940.

* On April 12, 1941, six days after the launching of his attack, Hitler issued a secret directive

dividing up Yugoslavia among Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria. Croatia was created as.

an autonomous puppet state. The Fuehrer helped himself liberally, Germany taking territory

contiguous to the old Austria and keeping under its occupation all of old Serbia as well as the

copper- and coal-mining districts. Italy’s grab was left somewhat vague, but it did not amount

to much.65

* Charles A. Lindbergh, the hero flyer, who had seemed to this writer to have fallen with

startling naïveté, during his visits to Germany, to Nazi propaganda boasts, was already

consigning Britain to defeat in his speeches to large and enthusiastic audiences in America. On

April 23, 1941, at the moment of the Nazi victories in the Balkans and North Africa, he

addressed 30,000 persons in New York at the first mass meeting of the newly formed America

First Committee. “The British government,” he said, “has one last desperate plan: … To

persuade us to send another American Expeditionary Force to Europe and to share with

England militarily, as well as financially, the fiasco of this war.” He condemned England for

having “encouraged the smaller nations of Europe to fight against hopeless odds.” Apparently

it did not occur to this man that Yugoslavia and Greece, which Hitler had just crushed, were

brutally attacked without provocation, and that they had instinctively tried to defend

themselves because they had a sense of honor and because they had courage even in the face

of hopeless odds. On April 28 Lindbergh resigned his commission as a colonel in the U.S.

Army Air Corps Reserve after President Roosevelt on the twenty-fifth had publicly branded

him as a defeatist and an appeaser. The Secretary of War accepted the resignation.

* “It was the first time I found myself involved in a conflict between my soldierly conceptions

and my duty to obey,” Field Marshal von Manstein declared on the stand at Nuremberg in

discussing the Commissar Order. “Actually, I ought to have obeyed, but I said to myself that

as a soldier I could not possibly co-operate in a thing like that. I told the Commander of the

Army Group under which I served at that time … that I would not carry out such an order,

which was against the honor of a soldier.” 74

As a matter of record, the order, of course, was carried out on a large scale.

* “A man of straw,” Hitler later called him. ( Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p. 153.)

† The emphasis is in the original order.

‡ On July 27, 1941, Keitel ordered all copies of this directive of May 13 concerning courts-

martial destroyed, though “the validity of the directive,” he stipulated, “is not affected by the

destruction of the copies.” The July 27 order, he added, “would itself be destroyed.” But

copies of both survived and turned up at Nuremberg to haunt the High Command.

Four days before, on July 23, Keitel had issued another order marked “Top Secret”:

On July 22, the Fuehrer after receiving the Commander of the Army [Brauchitsch] issued

the following order:

In view of the vast size of the occupied areas in the East, the forces available for

establishing security will be sufficient only if all resistance is punished not by legal

prosecution of the guilty, but by the spreading of such terror by the occupying forces as is

alone appropriate to eradicate every inclination to resist amongst the population. 77

* Churchill has graphically described how he received the news late that Saturday night while

visiting in the country and how at first he thought it too fantastic to believe. ( The Grand

Alliance, pp. 50–55.)

* At Nuremberg Hess told the tribunal that Lord Simon had introduced himself to him as “Dr.

Guthrie” and had declared, “I come with the authority of the Government and I shall be

willing to discuss with you as far as seems good anything you would wish to state for the

information of the Government. ”89

* Hess, a sorry, broken figure at Nuremberg, where for a part of the trial he faked total

amnesia (his mind had certainly been shattered), outlived Hitler. He was sentenced to life

imprisonment by the International Tribunal, escaping the death sentence largely due to his

mental collapse. I have described his appearance there in End of a Berlin Diary.

The British treated him as a prisoner of war, releasing him on October 10, 1945, so that he

could stand trial at Nuremberg. During his captivity in England, he complained bitterly at

being denied “full diplomatic privileges,” which he constantly demanded, and his none too

balanced mind began to deteriorate and he had long stretches of amnesia. He told Dr. Kelley,

however, that he twice tried to kill himself during his internment. He became convinced, he

said, that the British were trying to poison him.

* On April 5, the day before the German attack on Yugoslavia, the Soviet government had

hastily concluded a “Treaty of Nonaggression and Friendship” with the new Yugoslav

government, apparently in a frantic attempt to head off Hitler. Molotov had informed

Schulenburg of it the night before and the ambassador had exclaimed that “the moment was

very unfortunate” and had tried, unsuccessfully, to argue the Russians into at least postponing

the signing of the treaty.96

* Sam Woods, a genial extrovert whose grasp of world politics and history was not striking,

seems to those of us who knew him and liked him the last man in the American Embassy in

Berlin likely to have come by such crucial intelligence. Some of his colleagues in the embassy

still doubt that he did. But Cordell Hull has confirmed it in his memoirs and disclosed the

details. Woods, the late Secretary of State relates, had a German friend, an anti-Nazi, who had

contacts high in the ministries, the Reichsbank and the Nazi Party. As early as August 1940,

this friend informed Woods of conferences taking place at Hitler’s headquarters concerning

preparations for an attack on the Soviet Union. From then on this informant kept the

commercial attaché au courant of what was transpiring both at the General Staff and among

those planning the economic spoliation of Russia. To avoid detection, Woods met his

informant in various movie houses in Berlin and in the darkness received scribbled notes from

him. (See The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, II, pp. 967–68.)

I left Berlin in December 1940. George Kennan, the most brilliant Foreign Service officer

at the embassy, who remained there, informs me that the embassy learned from several

sources of the coming attack on Russia. Two or three weeks before the assault, he says, our

consul at Koenigsberg, Kuykendall, relayed a report specifying correctly the exact day it

would begin.

* This is from the last diary entry of Ciano, made on December 23, 1943, in Cell 27 of the

Verona jail, a few days before he was executed. He added that the Italian government learned

of the German invasion of Russia a half hour after it began. (Ciano Diaries, p. 583.)

* Hassell confirms this. Writing in his diary two days later, June 16, he remarks: “Brauchitsch

and Halder have already agreed to Hitler’s tactics [in Russia]. Thus the Army must assume the

onus of the murders and burnings which up to now have been confined to the S.S.”

At first the anti-Nazi “conspirators” had naively believed that Hitler’s terror orders for

Russia might shock the generals into joining an anti-Nazi revolt. But by June 16 Hassell

himself is disillusioned. His diary entry for that date begins:

A series of conferences with Popitz, Goerdeler, Beck and Oster to consider whether certain

orders which the Army commanders have received (but which they have not as yet issued)

might suffice to open the eyes of the military leaders to the nature of the regime for which they

are fighting. These orders concern brutal … measures the troops are to take against the

Bolsheviks when Russia is invaded.

We came to the conclusion that nothing was to be hoped for now … They [the generals]

delude themselves … Hopeless sergeant majors! [ The Von Hassell Diaries, pp. 198–99.]

* The expression is Churchill’s.

* Thus ended the veteran ambassador’s diplomatic career. Returning to Germany and forced to

retire, he joined the opposition circle led by General Beck, Goerdeler, Hassell and others and

for a time was marked to become Foreign Minister of an anti-Hitler regime. Hassell reported

Schulenburg in 1943 as being willing to cross the Russian lines in order to talk with Stalin

about a negotiated peace with an anti-Nazi government in Germany. ( The Von Hassell Diaries,

pp. 321–22.) Schulenburg was arrested and imprisoned after the July 1944 plot against Hitler

and executed by the Gestapo on November 10.

* Hitler’s emphasis.

* There is a curious notation in Halder’s diary that first day. After mentioning that at noon the

Russian radio stations, which the Germans were monitoring, had come back on the air he

writes: “They have asked Japan to mediate the political and economic differences between

Russia and Germany, and remain in active contact with the German Foreign Office.” Did

Stalin believe—nine hours after the attack—that he somehow might get it called off?

† General Guenther Blumentritt, chief of staff of the Fourth Army, later recalled that a little

after midnight on the twenty-first, when the German artillery had already zeroed on its targets,

the Berlin-Moscow express train chugged through the German lines on the Bug and across the

river into Brest Litovsk “without incident.” It struck him as a “weird moment.” Almost equally

weird to him was that the Russian artillery did not respond even when the assault began. “The

Russians,” he subsequently wrote, “were taken entirely by surprise on our front.” As dawn

broke German signal stations picked up the Red Army radio networks. “We are being fired on.

What shall we do?” Blumentritt quotes one Russian message as saying. Back came the answer

from headquarters: “You must be insane. And why is your signal not in code?” ( The Fatal

Decisions, edited by Seymour Freidin and William Richardson.)

24

A TURN OF THE TIDE

BY THE BEGINNING of autumn 1941, Hitler believed that Russia was finished.

Within three weeks of the opening of the campaign, Field Marshal von Bock’s

Army Group Center, with thirty infantry divisions and fifteen panzer or

motorized divisions, had pushed 450 miles from Bialystok to Smolensk.

Moscow lay but 200 miles farther east along the high road which Napoleon had

taken in 1812. To the north Field Marshal von Leeb’s army group, twenty-one

infantry and six armored divisions strong, was moving rapidly up through the

Baltic States toward Leningrad. To the south Field Marshal von Rundstedt’s

army group of twenty-five infantry, four motorized, four mountain and five

panzer divisions was advancing toward the Dnieper River and Kiev, capital of

the fertile Ukraine, which Hitler coveted.

So planmaessig (according to plan), as the OKW communiqués put it, was the

German progress along a thousand-mile front from the Baltic to the Black Sea,

and so confident was the Nazi dictator that it would continue at an accelerated

pace as one Soviet army after another was surrounded or dispersed, that on July

14, a bare three weeks after the invasion had begun, he issued a directive

advising that the strength of the Army could be “considerably reduced in the

near future” and that armament production would be concentrated on naval ships

and Luftwaffe planes, especially the latter, for the conduct of the war against the

last remaining enemy, Britain, and—he added—“against America should the

case arise. ”1 By the end of September he instructed the High Command to

prepare to disband forty infantry divisions so that this additional manpower

could be utilized by industry.2

Russia’s two greatest cities, Leningrad, which Peter the Great had built as the

capital on the Baltic, and Moscow, the ancient and now Bolshevik capital,

seemed to Hitler about to fall. On September 18 he issued strict orders: “A

capitulation of Leningrad or Moscow is not to be accepted, even if offered.” 3

What was to happen to them he made clear to his commanders in a directive of

September 29:

The Fuehrer has decided to have St. Petersburg [Leningrad] wiped off the face of the

earth* The further existence of this large city is of no interest once Soviet Russia is

overthrown …

The intention is to close in on the city and raze it to the ground by artillery and by

continuous air attack …

Requests that the city be taken over will be turned down, for the problem of the survival of

the population and of supplying it with food is one which cannot and should not be solved by

us. In this war for existence we have no interest in keeping even part of this great city’s

population. †4

That same week, on October 3, Hitler returned to Berlin and in an address to

the German people proclaimed the collapse of the Soviet Union. “I declare

today, and I declare it without any reservation,” he said, “that the enemy in the

East has been struck down and will never rise again … Behind our troops there

already lies a territory twice the size of the German Reich when I came to power

in 1933.”

When on October 8, Orel, a key city south of Moscow, fell, Hitler sent his

press chief, Otto Dietrich, flying back to Berlin, to tell the correspondents of the

world’s leading newspapers there the next day that the last intact Soviet armies,

those of Marshal Timoshenko, defending Moscow, were locked in two steel

German pockets before the capital; that the southern armies of Marshal Budënny

were routed and dispersed; and that sixty to seventy divisions of Marshal

Voroshilov’s army were surrounded in Leningrad.

“For all military purposes,” Dietrich concluded smugly, “Soviet Russia is

done with. The British dream of a two-front war is dead.”

These public boasts of Hitler and Dietrich were, to say the least, premature. ‡

In reality the Russians, despite the surprise with which they were taken on June

22, their subsequent heavy losses in men and equipment, their rapid withdrawal

and the entrapment of some of their best armies, had begun in July to put up a

mounting resistance such as the Wehrmacht had never encountered before.

Halder’s diary and the reports of such front-line commanders as General

Guderian, who led a large panzer group on the central front, began to be

peppered—and then laden—with accounts of severe fighting, desperate Russian

stands and counterattacks and heavy casualties to German as well as Soviet

troops.

“The conduct of the Russian troops,” General Blumentritt wrote later, “even

in this first battle [for Minsk] was in striking contrast to the behavior of the Poles

and the Western Allies in defeat. Even when encircled the Russians stood their

ground and fought.” 5 And there proved to be more of them, and with better

equipment, than Adolf Hitler had dreamed was possible. Fresh Soviet divisions

which German intelligence had no inkling of were continually being thrown into

battle. “It is becoming ever clearer,” Halder wrote in his diary on August 11,

“that we underestimated the strength of the Russian colossus not only in the

economic and transportation sphere but above all in the military. At the

beginning we reckoned with some 200 enemy divisions and we have already

identified 360. When a dozen of them are destroyed the Russians throw in

another dozen. On this broad expanse our front is too thin. It has no depth. As a

result, the repeated enemy attacks often meet with some success.” Rundstedt put

it bluntly to Allied interrogators after the war. “I realized,” he said, “soon after

the attack was begun that everything that had been written about Russia was

nonsense.”

Several generals, Guderian, Blumentritt and Sepp Dietrich among them, have

left reports expressing astonishment at their first encounter with the Russian T-

34 tank, of which they had not previously heard and which was so heavily

armored that the shells from the German antitank guns bounced harmlessly off

it. The appearance of this panzer, Blumentritt said later, marked the beginning of

what came to be called the “tank terror.” Also, for the first time in the war; the

Germans did not have the benefit of overwhelming superiority in the air to

protect their ground troops and scout ahead. Despite the heavy losses on the

ground in the first day of the campaign and in early combat, Soviet fighter

planes kept appearing, like the fresh divisions, out of nowhere. Moreover, the

swiftness of the German advance and the lack of suitable airfields in Russia left

the German fighter bases too far back to provide effective cover at the front. “At

several stages in the advance,” General von Kleist later reported, “my panzer

forces were handicapped through lack of cover overhead.” 6

There was another German miscalculation about the Russians which Kleist

mentioned to Liddell Hart and which, of course, was shared by most of the other

peoples of the West that summer.

“Hopes of victory,” Kleist said, “were largely built on the prospect that the

invasion would produce a political upheaval in Russia … Too high hopes were

built on the belief that Stalin would be overthrown by his own people if he

suffered heavy defeats. The belief was fostered by the Fuehrer’s political

advisers.” 7

Indeed Hitler had told Jodl, “We have only to kick in the door and the whole

rotten structure will come crashing down.”

The opportunity to kick in the door seemed to the Fuehrer to be at hand

halfway through July when there occurred the first great controversy over

strategy in the German High Command and led to a decision by the Fuehrer,

over the protests of most of the top generals, which Halder thought proved to be

“the greatest strategic blunder of the Eastern campaign.” The issue was simple

but fundamental. Should Bock’s Army Group Center, the most powerful and so

far the most successful of the three main German armies, push on the two

hundred miles to Moscow from Smolensk, which it had reached on July 16? Or

should the original plan, which Hitler had laid down in the December 18

directive, and which called for the main thrusts on the north and south flanks, be

adhered to? In other words, was Moscow the prize goal, or Leningrad and the

Ukraine?

The Army High Command, led by Brauchitsch and Halder and supported by

Bock, whose central army group was moving up the main highway to Moscow,

and by Guderian, whose panzer forces were leading it, insisted on an all-out

drive for the Soviet capital. There was much more to their argument than merely

stressing the psychological value of capturing the enemy capital. Moscow, they

pointed out to Hitler, was a vital source of armament production and, even more

important, the center of the Russian transportation and communications system.

Take it, and the Soviets would not only be deprived of an essential source of

arms but would be unable to move troops and supplies to the distant fronts,

which thereafter would weaken, wither and collapse.

But there was a final conclusive argument which the generals advanced to the

former corporal who was now their Supreme Commander. All their intelligence

reports showed that the main Russian forces were now being concentrated before

Moscow for an all-out defense of the capital. Just east of Smolensk a Soviet

army of half a million men, which had extricated itself from Bock’s double

envelopment, was digging in to bar further German progress toward the capital.

The center of gravity of Russian strength [Halder wrote in a report prepared

for the Allies immediately after the war]8 was therefore in front of Army Group

Center …

The General Staff had been brought up with the idea that it must be the aim of

an operation to defeat the military power of the enemy, and it therefore

considered the next and most pressing task to be to defeat the forces of

Timoshenko by concentrating all available forces at Army Group Center, to

advance on Moscow, to take this nerve center of enemy resistance and to destroy

the new enemy formations. The assembly for this attack had to be carried out as

soon as possible because the season was advanced. Army Group North was in

the meantime to fulfill its original mission and to try to contact the Finns. Army

Group South was to advance farther East to tie down the strongest possible

enemy force.

… After oral discussions between the General Staff and the Supreme

Command [OKW] had failed, the Commander in Chief of the Army

[Brauchitsch] submitted a memorandum of the General Staff to Hitler.

This, we learn from Halder’s diary, was done on August 18. “The effect,” says

Halder, “was explosive.” Hitler had his hungry eyes on the food belt and

industrial areas of the Ukraine and on the Russian oil fields just beyond in the

Caucasus. Besides, he thought he saw a golden opportunity to entrap Budënny’s

armies east of the Dnieper beyond Kiev, which still held out. He also wanted to

capture Leningrad and join up with the Finns in the north. To accomplish these

twin aims, several infantry and panzer divisions from Army Group Center would

have to be detached and sent north and especially south. Moscow could wait.

On August 21, Hitler hurled a new directive at his rebellious General Staff.

Halder copied it out word for word in his diary the next day.

The proposals of the Army for the continuation of the operations in the East do not accord

with my intentions.

The most important objective to attain before the onset of winter is not the capture of

Moscow but the taking of the Crimea, the industrial and coal-mining areas of the Donets basin

and the cutting off of Russian oil supplies from the Caucasus. In the north it is the locking up

of Leningrad and the union with the Finns.

The Soviet Fifth Army on the Dnieper in the south, whose stubborn resistance

had annoyed Hitler for several days, must, he laid it down, be utterly destroyed,

the Ukraine and the Crimea occupied, Leningrad surrounded and a junction with

the Finns achieved. “Only then,” he concluded, “will the conditions be created

whereby Timoshenko’s army can be attacked and successfully defeated.”

Thus [commented Halder bitterly] the aim of defeating decisively the Russian armies in

front of Moscow was subordinated to the desire to obtain a valuable industrial area and to

advance in the direction of Russian oil … Hitler now became obsessed with the idea of

capturing both Leningrad and Stalingrad, for he persuaded himself that if these two “holy

cities of Communism” were to fall, Russia would collapse.

To add insult to injury to the field marshals and the generals who did not

appreciate his strategic genius, Hitler sent what Halder called a

“countermemorandum” (to that of the Army of the eighteenth), which the

General Staff Chief described as “full of insults,” such as stating that the Army

High Command was full of “minds fossilized in out-of-date theories.”

“Unbearable! Unheard of! The limit!” Halder snorted in his diary the next

day. He conferred all afternoon and evening with Field Marshal von Brauchitsch

about the Fuehrer’s “inadmissible” mixing into the business of the Army High

Command and General Staff, finally proposing that the head of the Army and he

himself resign their posts. “Brauchitsch refused,” Halder noted, “because it

wouldn’t be practical and would change nothing.” The gutless Field Marshal had

already, as on so many other occasions, capitulated to the onetime corporal.

When General Guderian arrived at the Fuehrer’s headquarters the next day,

August 23, and was egged on by Halder to try to talk Hitler out of his disastrous

decision, though the hard-bitten panzer leader needed no urging, he was met by

Brauchitsch. “I forbid you,” the Army Commander in Chief said, “to mention

the question of Moscow to the Fuehrer. The operation to the south has been

ordered. The problem now is simply how it is to be carried out. Discussion is

pointless.”

Nevertheless, when Guderian was ushered into the presence of Hitler—neither

Brauchitsch nor Halder accompanied him—he disobeyed orders and argued as

strongly as he could for the immediate assault on Moscow.

Hitler let me speak to the end [Guderian later wrote]. He then described in detail the

considerations which had led him to make a different decision. He said that the raw materials

and agriculture of the Ukraine were vitally necessary for the future prosecution of the war. He

spoke of the need of neutralizing the Crimea, “that Soviet aircraft carrier for attacking the

Roumanian oil fields.” For the first time I heard him use the phrase: “My generals know

nothing about the economic aspects of war.” … He had given strict orders that the attack on

Kiev was to be the immediate strategic objective and all actions were to be carried out with

that in mind. I here saw for the first time a spectacle with which I was later to become very

familiar: all those present—Keitel, Jodl and others—nodded in agreement with every sentence

that Hitler uttered, while I was left alone with my point of view … 9

But Halder had at no point in the previous discussions nodded his agreement.

When Guderian saw him the next day and reported his failure to get Hitler to

change his mind, he says the General Staff Chief “to my amazement suffered a

complete nervous collapse, which led him to make accusations and imputations

which were utterly unjustified.” *

This was the most severe crisis in the German military High Command since

the beginning of the war. Worse were to follow, with adversity.

In itself Rundstedt’s offensive in the south, made possible by the

reinforcement of Guderian’s panzer forces and infantry divisions withdrawn

from the central front, was, as Guderian put it, a great tactical victory. Kiev itself

fell on September 19—German units had already penetrated 150 miles beyond it

—and on the twenty-sixth the Battle of Kiev ended with the encirclement and

surrender of 665,000 Russian prisoners, according to the German claim. To

Hitler it was “the greatest battle in the history of the world,” but though it was a

singular achievement some of his generals were more skeptical of its strategic

significance. Bock’s armorless army group in the center had been forced to cool

its heels for two months along the Desna River just beyond Smolensk. The

autumn rains, which would turn the Russian roads into quagmires, were drawing

near. And after them—the winter, the cold and the snow.

THE GREAT DRIVE ON MOSCOW

Reluctantly Hitler gave in to the urging of Brauchitsch, Halder and Bock and

consented to the resumption of the drive on Moscow. But too late! Halder saw

him on the afternoon of September 5 and now the Fuehrer, his mind made up,

was in a hurry to get to the Kremlin. “Get started on the central front within

eight to ten days,” the Supreme Commander ordered. (“Impossible!” Halder

exclaimed in his diary.) “Encircle them, beat and destroy them,” Hitler added,

promising to return to Army Group Center Guderian’s panzer group, then still

heavily engaged in the Ukraine, and add Reinhardt’s tank corps from the

Leningrad front. But it was not until the beginning of October that the armored

forces could be brought back, refitted and made ready. On October 2 the great

offensive was finally launched. “Typhoon” was the code name. A mighty wind,

a cyclone, was to hit the Russians, destroy their last fighting forces before

Moscow and bring the Soviet Union tumbling down.

But here again the Nazi dictator became a victim of his megalomania. Taking

the Russian capital before winter came was not enough. He gave orders that

Field Marshal von Leeb in the north was at the same time to capture Leningrad,

make contact with the Finns beyond the city and drive on and cut the Murmansk

railway. Also, at the same time, Rundstedt was to clear the Black Sea coast, take

Rostov, seize the Maikop oil fields and push forward to Stalingrad on the Volga,

thus severing Stalin’s last link with the Caucasus. When Rundstedt tried to

explain to Hitler that this meant an advance of more than four hundred miles

beyond the Dnieper, with his left flank dangerously exposed, the Supreme

Commander told him that the Russians in the south were now incapable of

offering serious resistance. Rundstedt, who says that he “laughed aloud” at such

ridiculous orders, was soon to find the contrary.

The German drive along the old road which Napoleon had taken to Moscow at

first rolled along with all the fury of a typhoon. In the first fortnight of October,

in what later Blumentritt called a “textbook battle,” the Germans encircled two

Soviet armies between Vyazma and Bryansk and claimed to have taken 650,000

prisoners along with 5,000 guns and 1,200 tanks. By October 20 German

armored spearheads were within forty miles of Moscow and the Soviet

ministries and foreign embassies were hastily evacuating to Kuibyshev on the

Volga. Even the sober Halder, who had fallen off his horse and broken a

collarbone and was temporarily hospitalized, now believed that with bold

leadership and favorable weather Moscow could be taken before the severe

Russian winter set in.

The fall rains, however, had commenced. Rasputitza, the period of mud, set

in. The great army, moving on wheels, was slowed down and often forced to

halt. Tanks had to be withdrawn from battle to pull guns and ammunition trucks

out of the mire. Chains and couplings for this job were lacking and bundles of

rope had to be dropped by Luftwaffe transport planes which were badly needed

for lifting other military supplies. The rains began in mid-October and, as

Guderian later remembered, “the next few weeks were dominated by the mud.”

General Blumentritt, chief of staff of Field Marshal von Kluge’s Fourth Army,

which was in the thick of the battle for Moscow, has vividly described the

predicament.

The infantryman slithers in the mud, while many teams of horses are needed to drag each

gun forward. All wheeled vehicles sink up to their axles in the slime. Even tractors can only

move with great difficulty. A large portion of our heavy artillery was soon stuck fast … The

strain that all this caused our already exhausted troops can perhaps be imagined. 10

For the first time there crept into the diary of Halder and the reports of

Guderian, Blumentritt and other German generals signs of doubt and then of

despair. It spread to the lower officers and the troops in the field—or perhaps it

stemmed from them. “And now, when Moscow was already almost in sight,”

Blumentritt recalled, “the mood both of commanders and troops began to

change. Enemy resistance stiffened and the fighting became more bitter … Many

of our companies were reduced to a mere sixty or seventy men.” There was a

shortage of serviceable artillery and tanks. “Winter,” he says, “was about to

begin, but there was no sign of winter clothing … Far behind the front the first

partisan units were beginning to make their presence felt in the vast forests and

swamps. Supply columns were frequently ambushed …”

Now, Blumentritt remembered, the ghosts of the Grand Army, which had

taken this same road to Moscow, and the memory of Napoleon’s fate began to

haunt the dreams of the Nazi conquerors. The German generals began to read, or

reread, Caulaincourt’s grim account of the French conqueror’s disastrous winter

in Russia in 1812.

Far to the south, where the weather was a little warmer but the rain and the

mud were just as bad, things were not going well either. Kleist’s tanks had

entered Rostov at the mouth of the Don on November 21 amidst much fanfare

from Dr. Goebbels’ propaganda band that the “gateway to the Caucasus” had

been opened. It did not remain open very long. Both Kleist and Rundstedt

realized that Rostov could not be held. Five days later the Russians retook it and

the Germans, attacked on both the northern and southern flanks, were in

headlong retreat back fifty miles to the Mius River where Kleist and Rundstedt

had wished in the first place to establish a winter line.

The retreat from Rostov is another little turning point in the history of the

Third Reich. Here was the first time that any Nazi army had ever suffered a

major setback. “Our misfortunes began with Rostov,” Guderian afterward

commented; “that was the writing on the wall.” It cost Field Marshal von

Rundstedt, the senior officer in the German Army, his command. As he was

retreating to the Mius:

Suddenly an order came to me [he subsequently told Allied interrogators] from the

Fuehrer: “Remain where you are, and retreat no further.” I immediately wired back: “It is

madness to attempt to hold. In the first place the troops cannot do it and in the second place if

they do not retreat they will be destroyed. I repeat that this order be rescinded or that you find

someone else.” That same night the Fuehrer’s reply arrived: “I am acceding to your request.

Please give up your command.”

“I then,” said Rundstedt, “went home.” *11

This mania for ordering distant troops to stand fast no matter what their peril

perhaps saved the German Army from complete collapse in the shattering

months ahead, though many generals dispute it, but it was to lead to Stalingrad

and other disasters and to help seal Hitler’s fate.

Heavy snows and subzero temperatures came early that winter in Russia.

Guderian noted the first snow on the night of October 6–7, just as the drive on

Moscow was being resumed. It reminded him to ask headquarters again for

winter clothing, especially for heavy boots and heavy wool socks. On October

12 he recorded the snow as still falling. On November 3 came the first cold

wave, the thermometer dropping below the freezing point and continuing to fall.

By the seventh Guderian was reporting the first “severe cases of frostbite” in his

ranks and on the thirteenth that the temperature had fallen to 8 degrees below

zero, Fahrenheit, and that the lack of winter clothing “was becoming

increasingly felt.” The bitter cold affected guns and machines as well as men.

Ice was causing a lot of trouble [Guderian wrote] since the calks for the tank tracks had not

yet arrived. The cold made the telescopic sights useless. In order to start the engines of the

tanks fires had to be lit beneath them. Fuel was freezing on occasions and the oil became

viscous … Each regiment [of the 112th Infantry Division] had already lost some 500 men

from frostbite. As a result of the cold the machine guns were no longer able to fire and our 37-

mm. antitank guns had proved ineffective against the [Russian] T-34 tank.12

“The result,” says Guderian, “was a panic which reached as far back as

Bogorodsk. This was the first time that such a thing had occurred during the

Russian campaign, and it was a warning that the combat ability of our infantry

was at an end.”

But not only of the infantry. On November 21 Halder scribbled in his diary

that Guderian had telephoned to say that his panzer troops “had reached their

end.” This tough, aggressive tank commander admits that on this very day he

decided to visit the commander of Army Group Center, Bock, and request that

the orders he had received be changed, since he “could see no way of carrying

them out.” He was in a deep mood of depression, writing on the same day:

The icy cold, the lack of shelter, the shortage of clothing, the heavy losses of men and

equipment, the wretched state of our fuel supplies—all this makes the duties of a commander a

misery, and the longer it goes on the more I am crushed by the enormous responsibility I have

to bear. 13

In retrospect Guderian added:

Only he who saw the endless expanse of Russian snow during this winter of our misery and

felt the icy wind that blew across it, burying in snow every object in its path; who drove for

hour after hour through that no-man’s land only at last to find too thin shelter with

insufficiently clothed, half-starved men; and who also saw by contrast the well-fed, warmly

clad and fresh Siberians, fully equipped for winter fighting … can truly judge the events which

now occurred.14

Those events may now be briefly narrated, but not without first stressing one

point: terrible as the Russian winter was and granted that the Soviet troops were

naturally better prepared for it than the German, the main factor in what is now

to be set down was not the weather but the fierce fighting of the Red Army

troops and their indomitable will not to give up. The diary of Halder and the

reports of the field commanders, which constantly express amazement at the

extent and severity of Russian attacks and counterattacks and despair at the

German setbacks and losses, are proof of That. The Nazi generals could not

understand why the Russians, considering the nature of their tyrannical regime

and the disastrous effects of the first German blows, did not collapse, as had the

French and so many others with less excuse.

“With amazement and disappointment,” Blumentritt wrote, “we discovered in

late October and early November that the beaten Russians seemed quite unaware

that as a military force they had almost ceased to exist.” Guderian tells of

meeting an old retired Czarist general at Orel on the road to Moscow.

“If only you had come twenty years ago [he told the panzer General], we should have

welcomed you with open arms. But now it’s too late. We were just beginning to get on our

feet, and now you arrive and throw us back twenty years so that we will have to start from the

beginning all over again. Now we are fighting for Russia and in that cause we are all

united. ”15

Yet, as November approached its end amidst fresh blizzards and continued

subzero temperatures, Moscow seemed within grasp to Hitler and most of his

generals. North, south and west of the capital German armies had reached points

within twenty to thirty miles of their goal. To Hitler poring over the map at his

headquarters far off in East Prussia the last stretch seemed no distance at all. His

armies had advanced five hundred miles; they had only twenty to thirty miles to

go. “One final heave,” he told Jodl in mid-November, “and we shall triumph.”

On the telephone to Halder on November 22, Field Marshal von Bock, directing

Army Group Center in its final push for Moscow, compared the situation to the

Battle of the Marne, “where the last battalion thrown in decided the battle.”

Despite increased enemy resistance Bock told the General Staff Chief he

believed “everything was attainable.” By the last day of November he was

literally throwing in his last battalion. The final all-out attack on the heart of the

Soviet Union was set for the next day, December 1, 1941.

It stumbled on a steely resistance. The greatest tank force ever concentrated

on one front: General Hoepner’s Fourth Tank Group and General Hermann

Hoth’s Third Tank Group just north of Moscow and driving south, Guderian’s

Second Panzer Army just to the south of the capital and pushing north from

Tula, Kluge’s great Fourth Army in the middle and fighting its way due east

through the forests that surrounded the city—on this formidable array were

pinned Hitler’s high hopes. By December 2 a reconnaissance battalion of the

258th Infantry Division had penetrated to Khimki, a suburb of Moscow, within

sight of the spires of the Kremlin, but was driven out the next morning by a few

Russian tanks and a motley force of hastily mobilized workers from the city’s

factories. This was the nearest the German troops ever got to Moscow; it was

their first and last glimpse of the Kremlin.

Already on the evening of December 1, Bock, who was now suffering severe

stomach cramps, had telephoned Halder to say that he could no longer “operate”

with his weakened troops. The General Staff Chief had tried to cheer him on.

“One must try,” he said, “to bring the enemy down by a last expenditure of

force. If that proves impossible then we will have to draw new conclusions.” The

next day Halder jotted in his diary: “Enemy resistance has reached its peak.” On

the following day, December 3, Bock was again on the phone to the Chief of the

General Staff, who noted his message in his diary:

Spearheads of the Fourth Army again pulled back because the flanks could not come

forward … The moment must be faced when the strength of our troops is at an end.

When Bock spoke for the first time of going over to the defensive Halder tried

to remind him that “the best defense was to stick to the attack.”

It was easier said than done, in view of the Russians and the weather. The next

day, December 4, Guderian, whose Second Panzer Army had been halted in its

attempt to take Moscow from the south, reported that the thermometer had fallen

to 31 degrees below zero. The next day it dropped another five degrees. His

tanks, he said, were “almost immobilized” and he was threatened on his flanks

and in the rear north of Tula.

December 5 was the critical day. Everywhere along the 200-mile semicircular

front around Moscow the Germans had been stopped. By evening Guderian was

notifying Bock that he was not only stopped but must pull back, and Bock was

telephoning Halder that “his strength was at an end,” and Brauchitsch was telling

his Chief of the General Staff in despair that he was quitting as Commander in

Chief of the Army. It was a dark and bitter day for the German generals.

This was the first time [Guderian later wrote] that I had to take a decision of this sort, and

none was more difficult … Our attack on Moscow had broken down. All the sacrifices and

endurance of our brave troops had been in vain. We had suffered a grievous defeat.16

At Kluge’s Fourth Army headquarters, Blumentritt, the chief of staff, realized

that the turning point had been reached. Recalling it later, he wrote: “Our hopes

of knocking Russia out of the war in 1941 had been dashed at the very last

minute.”

The next day, December 6, General Georgi Zhukov, who had replaced

Marshal Timoshenko as commander of the central front but six weeks before,

struck. On the 200-mile front before Moscow he unleashed seven armies and

two cavalry corps—100 divisions in all—consisting of troops that were either

fresh or battle-tried and were equipped and trained to fight in the bitter cold and

the deep snow. The blow which this relatively unknown general now delivered

with such a formidable force of infantry, artillery, tanks, cavalry and planes,

which Hitler had not faintly suspected existed, was so sudden and so shattering

that the German Army and the Third Reich never fully recovered from it. For a

few weeks during the rest of that cold and bitter December and on into January it

seemed that the beaten and retreating German armies, their front continually

pierced by Soviet breakthroughs, might disintegrate and perish in the Russian

snows, as had Napoleon’s Grand Army just 130 years before. At several crucial

moments it came very close to that. Perhaps it was Hitler’s granite will and

determination and certainly it was the fortitude of the German soldier that saved

the armies of the Third Reich from a complete debacle.

But the failure was great. The Red armies had been crippled but not destroyed.

Moscow had not been taken, nor Leningrad nor Stalingrad nor the oil fields of

the Caucasus; and the lifelines to Britain and America, to the north and to the

south, remained open. For the first time in more than two years of unbroken

military victories the armies of Hitler were retreating before a superior force.

That was not all. The failure was greater than that. Halder realized this, at least

later. “The myth of the invincibility of the German Army,” he wrote, “was

broken.” There would be more German victories in Russia when another

summer came around, but they could never restore the myth. December 6, 1941,

then, is another turning point in the short history of the Third Reich and one of

the most fateful ones. Hitler’s power had reached its zenith; from now on it was

to decline, sapped by the growing counterblows of the nations against which he

had chosen to make aggressive war.

A drastic shake-up in the German High Command and among the field

commanders now took place. As the armies fell back over the icy roads and

snowy fields before the Soviet counteroffensive, the heads of the German

generals began to roll. Rundstedt, as we have already seen, was relieved of

command of the southern armies because he had been forced to retreat from

Rostov. Field Marshal von Bock’s stomach pains became worse with the

setbacks in December and he was replaced on December 18 by Field Marshal

von Kluge, whose battered Fourth Army was being pushed back, forever, from

the vicinity of Moscow. Even the dashing General Guderian, the originator of

massive armored warfare which had so revolutionized modern battle, was

cashiered—on Christmas Day—for ordering a retreat without permission from

above. General Hoepner, an equally brilliant tank commander, whose Fourth

Armored Group had come within sight of Moscow on the north and then been

pushed back, was abruptly dismissed by Hitler on the same grounds, stripped of

his rank and forbidden to wear a uniform. General Hans Count von Sponeck,

who had received the Ritterkreuz for leading the airborne landings at The Hague

the year before, received a severer chastisement for pulling back one division of

his corps in the Crimea on December 29 after Russian troops had landed by sea

behind him. He was not only summarily stripped of his rank but imprisoned,

court-martialed and, at the insistence of Hitler, sentenced to death.*

Even the obsequious Keitel was in trouble with the Supreme Commander.

Even he had enough sense to see during the first days of December that a general

withdrawal around Moscow was necessary in order to avert disaster. But when

he got up enough courage to say so to Hitler the latter turned on him and gave

him a tongue-lashing, shouting that he was a “blockhead.” Jodl found the

unhappy OKW Chief a little later sitting at a desk writing out his resignation, a

revolver at one side. Jodl quietly removed the weapon and persuaded Keitel—

apparently without too much difficulty—to stay on and to continue to swallow

the Fuehrer’s insults, which he did, with amazing endurance, to the very end. 17

The strain of leading an army which could not always win under a Supreme

Commander who insisted that it always do had brought about renewed heart

attacks for Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, and by the time Zhukov’s

counteroffensive began he was determined to step down as Commander in Chief.

He returned to headquarters from a trip to the receding front on December 15

and Halder found him “very beaten down.” “Brauchitsch no longer sees any way

out,” Halder noted in his diary, “for the rescue of the Army from its desperate

position.” The head of the Army was at the end of his rope. He had asked Hitler

on December 7 to relieve him and he renewed the request on December 17. It

was formally granted two days later. What the Fuehrer really thought of the man

he himself had named to head the Army he told to Goebbels three months later.

The Fuehrer spoke of him [Brauchitsch] only in terms of contempt [Goebbels wrote in his

diary on March 20, 1942]. A vain, cowardly wretch … and a nincompoop. 18

To his cronies Hitler said of Brauchitsch, “He’s no soldier; he’s a man of

straw. If Brauchitsch had remained at his post only for another few weeks, things

would have ended in catastrophe. ”19

There was some speculation in Army circles as to who would succeed

Brauchitsch, but it was as wide of the mark as the speculation years before as to

who would succeed Hindenburg. On December 19 Hitler called in Halder and

informed him that he himself was taking over as Commander in Chief of the

Army. Halder could stay on as Chief of the General Staff if he wanted to—and

he wanted to. But from now on, Hitler made it clear, he was personally running

the Army, as he ran almost everything else in Germany.

This little matter of operational command [Hitler told him] is something

anyone can do. The task of the Commander in Chief of the Army is to train the

Army in a National Socialist way. I know of no general who could do that, as I

want it done. Consequently, I’ve decided to take over command of the Army

myself.20

Hitler’s triumph over the Prussian officer corps was thus completed. The

former Vienna vagabond and ex-corporal was now head of state, Minister of

War, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces and Commander in Chief of the

Army. The generals, as Halder complained—in his diary—were now merely

postmen purveying Hitler’s orders based on Hitler’s singular conception of

strategy.

Actually the megalomaniacal dictator soon would make himself something

even greater, legalizing a power never before held by any man—emperor, king

or president—in the experience of the German Reichs. On April 26, 1942, he

had his rubber-stamp Reichstag pass a law which gave him absolute power of

life and death over every German and simply suspended any laws which might

stand in the way of this. The words of the law have to be read to be believed.

… In the present war, in which the German people are faced with a struggle for their

existence or their annihilation, the Fuehrer must have all the rights postulated by him which

serve to further or achieve victory. Therefore—without being bound by existing legal

regulations—in his capacity as Leader of the nation, Supreme Commander of the Armed

Forces, Head of Government and supreme executive chief, as Supreme Justice and Leader of

the Party—the Fuehrer must be in a position to force with all means at his disposal every

German, if necessary, whether he be common soldier or officer, low or high official or judge,

leading or subordinate official of the party, worker or employer—to fulfill his duties. In case

of violation of these duties, the Fuehrer is entitled after conscientious examination, regardless

of so-called well-deserved rights, to mete out due punishment and to remove the offender from

his post, rank and position without introducing prescribed procedures. 21

Truly Adolf Hitler had become not only the Leader of Germany but the Law.

Not even in medieval times nor further back in the barbarous tribal days had any

German arrogated such tyrannical power, nominal and legal as well as actual, to

himself.

But even without this added authority, Hitler was absolute master of the

Army, of which he had now assumed direct command. Ruthlessly he moved that

bitter winter to stem the retreat of his beaten armies and to save them from the

fate of Napoleon’s troops along the same frozen, snowbound roads back from

Moscow. He forbade any further withdrawals. The German generals have long

debated the merits of his stubborn stand—whether it saved the troops from

complete disaster or whether it compounded the inevitable heavy losses. Most of

the commanders have contended that if they had been given freedom to pull

back when their position became untenable they could have saved many men

and much equipment and been in a better position to re-form and even

counterattack. As it was, whole divisions were frequently overrun or surrounded

and cut to pieces when a timely withdrawal would have saved them.

And yet some of the generals later reluctantly admitted that Hitler’s iron will

in insisting that the armies stand and fight was his greatest accomplishment of

the war in that it probably did save his armies from completely disintegrating in

the snow. This view is best summed up by General Blumentritt.

Hitler’s fanatical order that the troops must hold fast regardless in every position and in the

most impossible circumstances was undoubtedly correct. Hitler realized instinctively that any

retreat across the snow and ice must, within a few days, lead to the dissolution of the front and

that if this happened the Wehrmacht would suffer the same fate that had befallen the Grande

Armée … The withdrawal could only be carried out across the open country since the roads

and tracks were blocked with snow. After a few nights this would prove too much for the

troops, who would simply lie down and die wherever they found themselves. There were no

prepared positions in the rear into which they could be withdrawn, nor any sort of line to

which they could hold on.22

General von Tippelskirch, a corps commander, agreed.

It was Hitler’s one great achievement. At that critical moment the troops were

remembering what they had heard about Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, and living under

the shadow of it. If they had once begun a retreat, it might have turned into a panic flight.23

There was panic in the German Army, not only at the front but far in the rear

at headquarters, and it is graphically recorded in Halder’s diary. “Very difficult

day!” he begins his journal on Christmas Day, 1941, and thereafter into the new

year he repeats the words at the head of many a day’s entry as he describes each

fresh Russian breakthrough and the serious situation of the various armies.

December 29. Another critical day! … Dramatic long-distance telephone talk between

Fuehrer and Kluge. Fuehrer forbids further withdrawal of northern wing of 4th Army. Very

bad crisis by 9th Army where apparently the commanders have lost their heads. At noon an

excited call from Kluge. 9th Army wishes to withdraw behind Rzhev …

January 2, 1942. A day of wild fighting! … Grave crisis by 4th and 9th Armies … Russian

breakthrough north of Maloyaroslavets tears the front wide open and it’s difficult to see at the

moment how front can be restored … This situation leads Kluge to demand withdrawal of

sagging front. Very stormy argument with Fuehrer, who however holds to his stand: The front

will remain where it is regardless of consequences …

January 3. The situation has become more critical as the result of the breakthrough

between Maloyaroslavets and Borovsk. Kuebler* and Bock very excited and demand withdrawal on the north front, which is crumbling. Again a dramatic scene by Fuehrer, who

doubts courage of generals to make hard decisions. But troops simply don’t hold their ground

when it’s 30 below zero. Fuehrer orders: He will personally decide if any more withdrawals

necessary….

Not the Fuehrer but the Russian Army was by now deciding such matters.

Hitler could force the German troops to stand fast and die, but he could no more

stop the Soviet advance than King Canute could prevent the tides from coming

in. At one moment of panic some of the High Command officers suggested that

perhaps the situation could be retrieved by the employment of poison gas.

“Colonel Ochsner tries to talk me into beginning gas warfare against the

Russians,” Halder noted in his diary on January 7. Perhaps it was too cold. At

any rate nothing came of the suggestion.

January 8 was “a very critical day,” as Halder noted in his journal. “The

breakthrough at Sukhinichi [southwest of Moscow] is becoming unbearable for

Kluge. He is consequently insisting on withdrawing the 4th Army front.” All day

long the Field Marshal was on the phone to Hitler and Halder insisting on it.

Finally, in the evening the Fuehrer reluctantly consented. Kluge was given

permission to withdraw “step by step in order to protect his communications.”

Step by step and sometimes more rapidly throughout that grim winter the

German armies, which had planned to celebrate Christmas in Moscow, were

driven back or forced by Russian encirclements and breakthroughs to retreat. By

the end of February they found themselves from 75 to 200 miles from the

capital. By the end of that freezing month Halder was noting in his diary the cost

in men of the misfired Russian adventure. Total losses up to February 28, he

wrote down, were 1,005,636, or 31 per cent of his entire force. Of these 202,251

had been killed, 725,642 wounded and 46,511 were missing. (Casualties from

frostbite were 112,627.) This did not include the heavy losses among the

Hungarians, Rumanians and Italians in Russia.

With the coming of the spring thaws a lull came over the long front and Hitler

and Halder began making plans for bringing up fresh troops and more tanks and

guns to resume the offensive—at least on part of the front. Never again would

they have the strength to attack all along the vast battle line. The bitter winter’s

toll and above all Zhukov’s counteroffensive doomed that hope.

But Hitler, we now know, had realized long before that his gamble of

conquering Russia—not only in six months but ever—had failed. In a diary entry

of November 19, 1941, General Halder notes a long “lecture” of the Fuehrer to

several officers of the High Command. Though his armies are only a few miles

from Moscow and still driving hard to capture it, Hitler has abandoned hopes of

striking Russia down this year and has already turned his thoughts to next year.

Halder jotted down the Leader’s ideas.

Goals for next year. First of all the Caucasus. Objective: Russia’s southern borders. Time:

March to April. In the north after the close of this year’s campaign, Vologda or Gorki, * but

only at the end of May.

Further goals for next year must remain open. They will depend on the capacity of our

railroads. The question of later building an “East Wall” also remains open.

No East Wall would be necessary if the Soviet Union were to be destroyed.

Halder seems to have mulled over that as he listened to the Supreme

Commander go on.

On the whole [he concluded] one gets the impression that Hitler recognizes now that

neither side can destroy the other and that this will lead to peace negotiations.

This must have been a rude awakening for the Nazi conqueror who six weeks

before in Berlin had made a broadcast declaring “without any reservation” that

Russia had been “struck down and would never rise again.” His plans had been

wrecked, his hopes doomed. They were further dashed a fortnight later, on

December 6, when his troops began to be beaten back from the suburbs of

Moscow.

The next day, Sunday, December 7, 1941, an event occurred on the other side

of the round earth that transformed the European war, which he had so lightly

provoked, into a world war, which, though he could not know it, would seal his

fate and that of the Third Reich. Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor. The

next day† Hitler hurried back by train to Berlin from his headquarters at

Wolfsschanze. He had made a solemn secret promise to Japan and the time had

come to keep it—or break it.

* Emphasis in the original.

† A few weeks later Goering told Ciano, “This year between twenty and thirty million persons

will die of hunger in Russia. Perhaps it is well that it should be so, for certain nations must be

decimated. But even if it were not, nothing can be done about it. It is obvious that if humanity

is condemned to die of hunger, the last to die will be our two peoples … In the camps for

Russian prisoners they have begun to eat each other.” ( Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers, pp. 464–

65.)

‡ Not as premature, however, as the warnings of the American General Staff, which in July

had confidentially informed American editors and Washington correspondents that the

collapse of the Soviet Union was only a matter of a few weeks. It is not surprising that the

declarations of Hitler and Dr. Dietrich early in October 1941 were widely believed in the

United States and Britain as well as in Germany and elsewhere.

* Halder, in his diary of August 24, gives quite a different version. He accuses Guderian of

“irresponsibly” changing his mind after seeing Hitler and muses how useless it is to try to

change a man’s character. If he suffered, as Guderian alleges, “a complete nervous collapse,”

his pedantic diary notes that day indicate that he quickly recovered.

* “Groesste Aufregung (greatest excitement) by the Fuehrer,” Halder noted in his diary on

November 30 in describing Rundstedt’s retreat to the Mius and Hitler’s dismissal of the Field

Marshal. “The Fuehrer calls in Brauchitsch and hurls reproaches and abuse at him.” Halder

had begun his diary that day by noting the figures of German casualties up to November 26.

“Total losses of the Eastern armies (not counting the sick), 743,112 officers and men—23 per

cent of the entire force of 3.2 million.”

On December 1, Halder recorded the replacement of Rundstedt by Reichenau, who still

commanded the Sixth Army, which he had led in France and which had been having a hard

time of it to the north of Kleist’s armored divisions, which were retreating from Rostov.

“Reichenau phones the Fuehrer,” Halder wrote, “and asks permission to withdraw tonight

to the Mius line. Permission is given. So we are exactly where we were yesterday. But time

and strength have been sacrificed and Rundstedt lost.

“The health of Brauchitsch,” he added, “as the result of the continuing excitement is again

causing anxiety.” On November 10 Halder had recorded that the Army chief had suffered a

severe heart attack.

* He was not executed until after the July 1944 plot against Hitler, in which he was in no way

involved.

* General Kuebler had replaced Kluge on December 26 as commander of the Fourth Army

when the latter took over Army Group Center. Though a tough soldier, he stood the strain only

three weeks and then was relieved by General Heinrici.

* Vologda, 300 miles northeast of Moscow, controlled the railway to Archangel. Gorki is 300

miles due east of the capital.

† Hitler’s movements and whereabouts are noted in his daily calendar book, which is among

the captured documents.

25

THE TURN OF THE UNITED STATES

ADOLF HITLER’S reckless promise to Japan had been made during a series of

talks in Berlin with Yosuke Matsuoka, the pro-Axis Japanese Foreign Minister,

in the spring of 1941 just before the German attack on Russia. The captured

German minutes of the meetings enable us to trace the development of another

one of Hitler’s monumental miscalculations. They and other Nazi documents of

the period show the Fuehrer too ignorant, Goering too arrogant and Ribbentrop

too stupid to comprehend the potential military strength of the United States—a

blunder which had been made in Germany during the First World War by

Wilhelm II, Hindenburg and Ludendorff.

There was a basic contradiction from the beginning in Hitler’s policy toward

America. Though he had only contempt for her military prowess he endeavored

during the first two years of the conflict to keep her out of the war. This, as we

have seen, was the main task of the German Embassy in Washington, which

went to great lengths, including the bribing of Congressmen, attempting to

subsidize writers and aiding the America First Committee, to support the

American isolationists and thus help to keep America from joining Germany’s

enemies in the war.

That the United States, as long as it was led by President Roosevelt, stood in

the way of Hitler’s grandiose plans for world conquest and the dividing up of the

planet among the Tripartite powers the Nazi dictator fully understood, as his

various private utterances make clear. The American Republic, he saw, would

have to be dealt with eventually and, as he said, “severely.” But one nation at a

time. That had been the secret of his successful strategy thus far. The turn of

America would come, but only after Great Britain and the Soviet Union had

been struck down. Then, with the aid of Japan and Italy, he would deal with the

upstart Americans, who, isolated and alone, would easily succumb to the power

of the victorious Axis.

Japan was the key to Hitler’s efforts to keep America out of the war until

Germany was ready to take her on. Japan, as Ribbentrop pointed out to

Mussolini on March 11, 1940, possessed the counterweight to the United States

which would prevent the Americans from trying to intervene in Europe against

Germany as they had in the first war.1

In their wartime dealings with the Japanese, Hitler and Ribbentrop at first

stressed the importance of not provoking the United States to abandon her

neutrality. By the beginning of 1941 they were exceedingly anxious to draw

Japan into the war, not against America, not even against Russia, which they

were shortly to attack, but against Britain, which had refused to give in even

when apparently beaten. Early in 1941 German pressure on Japan was stepped

up. On February 23, Ribbentrop received at his stolen estate at Fuschl, near

Salzburg, the fiery and hot-tempered Japanese ambassador, General Hiroshi

Oshima, who had often impressed this observer as more Nazi than the Nazis.

Though the war, Ribbentrop told his guest, was already won, Japan should come

in “as soon as possible—in its own interest,” and seize Britain’s empire in Asia.

A surprise intervention by Japan [he continued] was bound to keep America out of the war.

America, which at present is not armed and would hesitate to expose her Navy to any risks

west of Hawaii, could do this even less in such a case. If Japan would otherwise respect the

American interests, there would not even be the possibility for Roosevelt to use the argument

of lost prestige to make war plausible to the Americans. It was very unlikely that America

would declare war if it had to stand by while Japan took the Philippines.

But even if the United States did get involved, Ribbentrop declared, “this

would not endanger the final victory of the countries of the Three-Power Pact.”

The Japanese fleet would easily defeat the American fleet and the war would be

brought rapidly to an end with the fall of both Britain and America. This was

heady stuff for the fire-eating Japanese envoy and Ribbentrop poured it on. He

advised the Japanese to be firm and “use plain language” in their current

negotiations in Washington.

Only if the U.S. realized that they were confronting firm determination would they hold

back. The people in the U.S…. were not willing to sacrifice their sons, and therefore were

against any entry into the war. The American people felt instinctively that they were being

drawn into war for no reason by Roosevelt and the Jewish wire-pullers. Therefore our policies

with the U.S. should be plain and firm …

The Nazi Foreign Minister had one warning to give, the one that had failed so

dismally with Franco.

If Germany should ever weaken, Japan would find itself confronted by a world coalition

within a short time. We were all in the same boat. The fate of both countries was being

determined now for centuries to come … A defeat of Germany would also mean the end of the

Japanese imperialist idea.2

To acquaint his military commanders and the top men in the Foreign Office

with his new Japanese policy, Hitler issued on March 5, 1941, a top-secret

directive entitled “Basic Order No. 24 Regarding Collaboration with Japan. ”3

It must be the aim of the collaboration based on the Three-Power Pact to induce Japan as

soon as possible to take active measures in the Far East. Strong British forces will thereby be

tied down, and the center of gravity of the interests of the United States will be diverted to the

Pacific …

The common aim of the conduct of war is to be stressed as forcing England to her knees

quickly and thereby keeping the United States out of the war.

The seizure of Singapore as the key British position in the Far East would mean a decisive

success for the entire conduct of war of the Three Powers. *

Hitler also urged the Japanese seizure of other British naval bases and even

American bases “if the entry of the United States into the war cannot be

prevented.” He concluded by ordering that “the Japanese must not be given any

intimation of the Barbarossa operation.” The Japanese ally, like the Italian ally,

was to be used to further German ambitions, but neither government would be

taken into the Fuehrer’s confidence regarding his intention to attack Russia.

A fortnight later, on March 18, at a conference with Hitler, Keitel and Jodl,

Admiral Raeder strongly urged that Japan be pressed to attack Singapore. The

opportunity would never again be so favorable, Raeder explained, what with

“the whole English fleet contained, the unpreparedness of the U.S.A. for war

against Japan and the inferiority of the U.S. fleet compared to the Japanese.” The

capture of Singapore, the Admiral said, would “solve all the other Asiatic

questions regarding the U.S.A. and England” and would of course enable Japan

to avoid war with America, if she wished. There was only one hitch, the Admiral

opined, and mention of it must have made Hitler frown. According to naval

intelligence, Raeder warned, Japan would move against the British in Southeast

Asia only “if Germany proceeds to land in England.” There is no record in the

Navy minutes of this meeting indicating what reply Hitler made to this remark.

Raeder certainly knew that the Supreme Commander had neither plans nor hopes

for a landing in England this year. Raeder said something else that the Fuehrer

did not respond to. He “recommended” that Matsuoka “be advised regarding the

designs on Russia.” 4

The Japanese Foreign Minister was now on his way to Berlin via Siberia and

Moscow, uttering bellicose pro-Axis statements, as Secretary of State Hull put

it,† along the route. His arrival in the German capital on March 26 came at an

awkward moment for Hitler, for that night the pro-German Yugoslav

government was overthrown in the Belgrade coup and the Fuehrer was so busy

improvising plans to crush the obstreperous Balkan country that he had to

postpone seeing the Japanese visitor until the afternoon of the twenty-seventh.

Ribbentrop saw him in the morning, playing over, so to speak, the old

gramophone records reserved for such guests on such occasions, though

managing to be even more fatuous than usual and not allowing the dapper little

Matsuoka to get in a word. The lengthy confidential minutes drawn up by Dr.

Schmidt (and now among the captured Foreign Office papers) leave no doubt of

that. 5 “The war has already been definitely won by the Axis,” Ribbentrop

announced, “and it is only a question of time before England admits it.” In the

next breath he was urging a “quick attack upon Singapore” because it would be

“a very decisive factor in the speedy overthrow of England.” In the face of such

a contradiction the diminutive Japanese visitor did not bat an eye. “He sat there

inscrutably,” Schmidt later remembered, “in no way revealing how these curious

remarks impressed him. ”6

As to America—

There was no doubt [Ribbentrop said] that the British would long since have abandoned the

war if Roosevelt had not always given Churchill new hope … The Three-Power Pact had

above all had the goal of frightening America … and of keeping it out of the war … America

had to be prevented by all possible means from taking an active part in the war and from

making its aid to England too effective … The capture of Singapore would perhaps be most

likely to keep America out of the war because the United States could scarcely risk sending its

fleet into Japanese waters … Roosevelt would be in a very difficult position …

Though Hitler had laid it down that Matsuoka must not be told about the

impending German attack on Russia—a necessary precaution to keep the news

from leaking out, but nevertheless, as we shall see, one that would have

disastrous consequences for Germany—Ribbentrop did drop several broad hints.

Relations with the Soviet Union, he told his visitor, were correct but not very

friendly. Moreover, should Russia threaten Germany, “the Fuehrer would crush

Russia.” The Fuehrer was convinced, he added, that if it came to war “there

would be in a few months no more Russia.”

Matsuoka, says Schmidt, blinked at this and looked alarmed, whereupon

Ribbentrop hastened to assure him that he did not believe that “Stalin would

pursue an unwise policy.” At this juncture, says Schmidt, Ribbentrop was called

away by Hitler to discuss the Yugoslav crisis and failed even to return for the

official lunch which he was supposed to tender the distinguished visitor.

In the afternoon Hitler, having determined to smash another country

(Yugoslavia), worked on the Japanese Foreign Minister. “England has already

lost the war,” he began. “It is only a matter of having the intelligence to admit

it.” Still, the British were grasping at two straws: Russia and America. Toward

the Soviet Union Hitler was more circumspect than Ribbentrop had been. He did

not believe, he said, that the danger of a war with Russia would arise. After all,

Germany had some 160 to 170 divisions “for defense against Russia.” As to the

United States:

America was confronted by three possibilities: she could arm herself, she could assist

England, or she could wage war on another front. If she helped England she could not arm

herself. If she abandoned England the latter would be destroyed and America would then find

herself fighting the powers of the Three-Power Pact alone. In no case, however, could

America wage war on another front.

Therefore, the Fuehrer concluded, “never in the human imagination” could

there be a better opportunity for the Japanese to strike in the Pacific than now.

“Such a moment,” he said, laying it on as thickly as he could, “would never

return. It was unique in history.” Matsuoka agreed, but reminded Hitler that

unfortunately he “did not control Japan. At the moment he could make no pledge

on behalf of the Japanese Empire that it would take action.”

But Hitler, being absolute dictator, could make a pledge and he made it to

Japan—quite casually and without being asked to—on April 4, after Matsuoka

had returned to Berlin from seeing Mussolini.* This second meeting took place

on the eve of the Nazi attack on two more innocent countries, Yugoslavia and

Greece, and the Fuehrer, thirsting for further easy conquests and for revenge on

Belgrade, was in one of his warlike moods. While he considered war with the

United States “undesirable,” he said, he had “already included it in his

calculations.” But he did not think much of America’s military power. †

Germany had made her preparations so that no American could land in Europe. Germany

would wage a vigorous war against America with U-boats and the Luftwaffe, and with her

greater experience … would be more than a match for America, entirely apart from the fact

that German soldiers were, obviously, far superior to the Americans.

This boast led him to make the fateful pledge. Schmidt recorded it in his

minutes:

If Japan got into a conflict with the United States, Germany on her part would take the

necessary steps at once.

From Schmidt’s notes it is evident that Matsuoka did not quite grasp the

significance of what the Fuehrer was promising, so Hitler said it again.

Germany, as he had said, would promptly take part in case of a conflict between Japan and

America.*

Hitler paid dearly not only for this assurance, so casually given, but for his

deceit in not telling the Japanese about his intention to attack Russia as soon as

the Balkans were occupied. Somewhat coyly Matsuoka had asked Ribbentrop

during a talk on March 28 whether on his return trip he “should remain in

Moscow in order to negotiate with the Russians on the Nonaggression Pact or

the Treaty of Neutrality.” The dull-witted Nazi Foreign Minister had replied

smugly that Matsuoka “if possible should not bring up the question in Moscow

since it probably would not altogether fit into the framework of the present

situation.” He did not quite grasp the significance of what was up. But by the

next day it had penetrated his wooden mind and he began the conversations that

day by referring to it. First of all he threw in, as casually as Hitler would do on

April 4, a German guarantee that if Russia attacked Japan “Germany would

strike immediately.” He wanted to give this assurance, he said, “so that Japan

could push southward toward Singapore without fear of any complications with

Russia.” When Matsuoka finally admitted that while in Moscow on his way to

Berlin he himself had proposed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union and

hinted that the Russians were favorably inclined toward it, Ribbentrop’s mind

again became somewhat of a blank. He merely advised that Matsuoka handle the

problem in a “superficial way.”

But as soon as the Nipponese Foreign Minister was back in Moscow on his

trip home, he signed a treaty of neutrality with Stalin which, as Ambassador von

der Schulenburg, who foresaw its consequences, wired Berlin, provided for each

country to remain neutral in case the other got involved in the war. This was one

treaty—it was signed on April 13—which Japan honored to the very last despite

subsequent German exhortations that she disregard it. For before the summer of

1941 was out the Nazis would be begging the Japanese to attack not Singapore

or Manila but Vladivostok!

At first, however, Hitler did not grasp the significance of the Russo–Japanese

Neutrality Pact. On April 20 he told Admiral Raeder, who inquired about it, that

it had been made “with Germany’s acquiescence” and that he welcomed it

“because Japan is now restrained from taking action against Vladivostok and

should be induced to attack Singapore instead. ”*7 At this stage Hitler was

confident Germany could destroy Russia during the summer. He did not want

Japan to share in this mighty feat any more than he had desired that Italy should

share in the conquest of France. And he was absolutely confident that Japanese

help would not be needed. Ribbentrop, echoing his master’s thoughts, had told

Matsuoka on March 29 that if Russia forced Germany “to strike” he would

“consider it proper if the Japanese Army were prevented from attacking Russia.”

But the views of Hitler and Ribbentrop on this matter changed very suddenly

and quite drastically scarcely three months later. Six days after the Nazi armies

were flung into Russia, on June 28, 1941, Ribbentrop was cabling the German

ambassador in Tokyo, General Eugen Ott, to do everything he could to get the

Japanese to promptly attack Soviet Russia in the rear. Ott was advised to appeal

to the Japanese appetite for spoils and also to argue that this was the best way of

keeping America neutral.

It may be expected [Ribbentrop explained] that the rapid defeat of Soviet Russia—

especially should Japan take action in the East—will prove the best argument to convince the

United States of the utter futility of entering the war on the side of a Great Britain entirely

isolated and confronted by the most powerful alliance in the world.8

Matsuoka was in favor of immediately turning on Russia, but his views were

not accepted by the government in Tokyo, whose attitude seemed to be that if

the Germans were rapidly defeating the Russians, as they claimed, they needed

no help from the Japanese. However, Tokyo was not so sure about a lightning

Nazi victory and this was the real reason for its stand.

But Ribbentrop persisted. On July 10, when the German offensive in Russia

was really beginning to roll and even Halder, as we have seen, thought that

victory already had been won, the Nazi Foreign Minister got off from his special

train on the Eastern front a new and stronger cable to his ambassador in Tokyo.

Since Russia, as reported by the Japanese ambassador in Moscow, is in effect

close to collapse … it is simply impossible that Japan does not solve the matter

of Vladivostok and the Siberian area as soon as her military preparations are

completed …

I ask you to employ all available means in further insisting upon Japan’s entry

into the war against Russia at the soonest possible date … The sooner this entry

is effected, the better it is. The natural objective still remains that we and Japan

join hands on the Trans-Siberian railroad before winter starts. 9

Such a giddy prospect did not turn the head of even the militaristic Japanese

government. Four days later Ambassador Ott replied that he was doing his best

to persuade the Japanese to attack Russia as soon as possible, that Matsuoka was

all for it, but that he, Ott, had to fight against “great obstacles” in the Tokyo

cabinet. 10 As a matter of fact the fire-eating Matsuoka was soon forced out of the

cabinet. With his departure, Germany lost, for the time being, its best friend, and

though, as we shall see, closer relations were later restored between Berlin and

Tokyo they never became close enough to convince the Japanese of the wisdom

of helping Germany in the war against Russia. Once more Hitler had been bested

at his own game by a wily ally. *

“AVOID INCIDENTS WITH THE U.S.A.!”

With Japan stubbornly refusing to help pull Hitler’s chestnuts out of the fire in

Russia—the Japanese had their own chestnuts roasting—it became all the more

important to Germany that the United States be kept out of the war until the

Soviet Union had been conquered, as the Fuehrer was confident that summer of

1941 it would be before winter came.

The German Navy had long chafed under the restraints which Hitler had

imposed on its efforts to curtail American shipments to Britain and to cope with

the increasing belligerency of U.S. warships toward German U-boats and surface

craft operating in the Atlantic. The Nazi admirals, looking further afield than

Hitler’s landlocked mind was capable of doing, had almost from the first

regarded America’s entry into the war as inevitable and they had urged the

Supreme Commander to prepare for it. Immediately after the fall of France in

June 1940, Admiral Raeder, backed by Goering, had urged Hitler to seize not

only French West Africa but, more important, the Atlantic islands, including

Iceland, the Azores and the Canaries, to prevent the United States from

occupying them. Hitler had expressed interest, but he first wanted to invade

England and conquer Russia. Then the upstart Americans, their position

rendered hopeless, would be taken care of. A top-secret memorandum of Major

Freiherr von Falkenstein, of the General Staff, discloses Hitler’s views at the end

of the summer in 1940.

The Fuehrer is at present occupied with the question of the occupation of the Atlantic

Islands with a view to the prosecution of war against America at a later date. Deliberations on

this subject are being embarked on here. 13

It was not a question, then, of whether or not Hitler intended to go to war

against the United States but of the date he would choose to embark on it. By the

following spring the date was beginning to sprout in the Fuehrer’s mind. On

May 22, 1941, Admiral Raeder conferred with the Supreme Commander and

reported ruefully that the Navy “must reject the idea of occupying the Azores.” It

simply didn’t have the strength. But by this time Hitler had warmed to the

project and, according to Raeder’s confidential notes, 14 replied:

The Fuehrer is still in favor of occupying the Azores in order to be able to operate long-

range bombers from there against the U.S.A. The occasion for this may arise by autumn.*

After the fall of the Soviet Union, that is. The turn of the United States would

come then. He put this clearly to Raeder when the Admiral saw him just two

months later, on July 25, when the offensive in Russia was in full swing. “After

the Eastern campaign,” Raeder notes him as saying, “he reserves the right to take

severe action against the U.S.A.” 15 But until then, Hitler emphasized to his Navy

chief, he wanted “to avoid having the U.S.A. declare war … out of consideration

for the Army, which is involved in heavy combat.”

Raeder was not satisfied with this stand. In fact, his diary accounts of his

meetings with Hitler, which one can now peruse in the captured documents,

show his growing impatience at the wraps which the Fuehrer had placed on the

German Navy. At every interview he sought to change the Leader’s mind.

Early that year, on February 4, Raeder submitted a memorandum to Hitler in

which the Navy expressed strong doubts about the value of continued American

neutrality, as it was working out, to Germany. In fact the admirals argued that

America’s entry into the war might even prove “advantageous for the German

war effort” if Japan thereby became a belligerent on the side of the Axis. 16 But

the Nazi dictator was not impressed by the argument.

Raeder was greatly discouraged. The Battle of the Atlantic was at its height

and Germany was not winning it. American supplies under the Lend-Lease

agreement were pouring into Britain. The Pan-American Neutrality Patrol was

making it more and more difficult for the U-boats to be effective. All this Raeder

pointed out to Hitler, but without much effect. He saw the Leader again on

March 18 and reported that U.S. warships were escorting American convoys

bound for Britain as far as Iceland. He demanded authority to attack them

without warning. He asked that something be done to prevent the U.S.A. from

gaining a foothold in French West Africa. This possibility, he said, “was most

dangerous.” Hitler listened and said he would discuss these matters with the

Foreign Office (of all places!), which was one way of putting the admirals off. 17

All through the spring and early summer he continued to put them off. On

April 20 he refused to listen to Raeder’s pleas “for warfare against merchant

ships of the U.S.A., according to prize regulations.” 18 The first recorded clash

between American and German war vessels had occurred on April 10 when the

U.S. destroyer Niblack dropped depth charges on a German U-boat which

showed signs of attacking. On May 22 Raeder was back at the Berghof with a

long memorandum suggesting countermeasures to President Roosevelt’s

unfriendly acts, but he could not move his Supreme Commander.

The Fuehrer [the Admiral noted] considers the attitude of the President of the United States

still undecided. Under no circumstances does he wish to cause incidents which would result in

U.S. entry into the war. 19

There was all the more reason to avoid such incidents when the campaign in

Russia began, and on June 21, the day before the attack commenced, Hitler

emphasized this to Raeder. The Grand Admiral had given him a glowing account

of how the U-253, spotting the U.S. battleship Texas and an accompanying

destroyer within the blockade zone in the North Atlantic proclaimed by

Germany, had “chased and attempted to attack them” and had added that “where

the U.S.A. is concerned firm measures are always more effective than apparent

yielding.” The Fuehrer agreed with the principle but not with the specific action

and once more he admonished the Navy.

The Fuehrer declares in detail that until Operation Barbarossa is well under way he wishes

to avoid any incident with the U.S.A. After a few weeks the situation will become clearer, and

can be expected to have a favorable effect on the U.S.A. and Japan. America will have less

inclination to enter the war due to the threat from Japan which will then increase. If possible,

therefore, in the next weeks all attacks on naval vessels in the closed area should cease.

When Raeder attempted to argue that at night it was difficult to distinguish

enemy from neutral warships Hitler cut him short by instructing him to issue

new orders to avoid incidents with America. As a result the Navy chief sent out

orders the same night calling off attacks on any naval vessels “inside or outside

the closed area” unless they were definitely identified as British. A similar order

was given the Luftwaffe. 20

On July 9, President Roosevelt announced that American forces were taking

over the occupation of Iceland from the British. The reaction in Berlin was

immediate and violent. Ribbentrop cabled Tokyo that “this intrusion of

American military forces in support of England into a territory which has been

officially proclaimed by us to be a combat area is in itself an aggression against

Germany and Europe.” 21

Raeder hurried to Wolfsschanze, from where the Fuehrer was directing his

armies in Russia. He wanted a decision, he said, on “whether the occupation of

Iceland by the U.S.A. is to be considered as an entry into the war, or as an act of

provocation which should be ignored.” As for the German Navy, it considered

the American landings in Iceland an act of war and in a two-page memorandum

it reminded the Fuehrer of all the other acts of “aggression” against Germany

committed by the Roosevelt government. Moreover, the Navy demanded the

right to sink American freighters in the convoy area and to attack U.S. warships

if the occasion required it.* Hitler refused.

The Fuehrer explains in detail [Raeder’s report on the meeting declares] that

he is most anxious to postpone the United States’ entry into the war for another

one or two months. On the one hand the Eastern campaign must be carried on

with the entire Air Force … which he does not wish to divert even in part; on the

other hand, a victorious campaign on the Eastern front will have a tremendous

effect on the whole situation and probably on the attitude of the U.S.A.

Therefore for the time being he does not wish the existing instructions changed,

but rather wants to be sure that incidents will be avoided.

When Raeder argued that his naval commanders could not be held responsible

for “a mistake” if American ships were hit, Hitler retorted that at least in regard

to war vessels the Navy had better “definitely establish” that they were enemy

craft before attacking. To make sure that the admirals understood him correctly

the Fuehrer issued a specific order on July 19 stipulating that “in the extended

zone of operations U.S. merchant ships, whether single or sailing in English or

American convoys and if recognized as such before resort to arms, are not to be

attacked.” Within the blockade area, which was also recognized by the United

States as being out of bounds, American vessels could be attacked, but Hitler

specifically laid it down in this order that this war zone “did not include the

U.S.A.-Iceland sea route.” The underlining was Hitler’s.22

But “mistakes,” as Raeder said, were bound to occur. On May 21 a U-boat

had sunk the American freighter Robin Moor en route to South Africa and at a

place well outside the German blockade zone. Two more American merchant

vessels were torpedoed toward the end of the summer. On September 4 a

German submarine fired two torpedoes at the U.S. destroyer Greer, both

missing. A week later, on September 11, Roosevelt reacted to this attack in a

speech in which he announced that he had given orders to the Navy to “shoot on

sight” and warned that Axis warships entering the American defense zone did so

“at their peril.”

The speech incensed Berlin. In the Nazi press Roosevelt was attacked as

“Warmonger Number One.” Ribbentrop recalled at Nuremberg that Hitler “was

greatly excited.” However, by the time Admiral Raeder arrived at the

Wolfsschanze headquarters on the Eastern front on the afternoon of September

17 to urge a drastic retaliation to the “shoot-on-sight” order, the Fuehrer had

calmed down. To the Admiral’s plea that the German Navy at last be released

from the restrictions against attacking American ships the Supreme Commander

again gave a firm No.

[Since] it appears that the end of September will bring the great decision in the Russian

campaign [Raeder’s record of the conversation declares], the Fuehrer requests that care be

taken to avoid any incidents in the war on merchant shipping before about the middle of

October.

“Therefore,” Raeder noted sadly, “the Commander in Chief, Navy, and the

Commanding Admiral, Submarines [Doenitz], withdraw their suggestions. The

submarines are to be informed of the reason for temporarily keeping to the old

orders.” 23 In view of the circumstances, Hitler was certainly behaving with

unaccustomed restraint. But admittedly it was more difficult for the young U-

boat commanders, operating in the stormy waters of the North Atlantic and

constantly harassed by increasingly effective British antisubmarine measures in

which U.S. war vessels sometimes joined, to restrain themselves. Hitler had told

Raeder in July that he would never call a submarine skipper to account if he sank

an American ship “by mistake.” On November 9, in his annual address to the

Nazi Old Guard at the familiar beer cellar in Munich, he answered Roosevelt’s

speech.

President Roosevelt has ordered his ships to shoot the moment they sight German ships. I

have ordered German ships not to shoot when they sight American vessels, but to defend

themselves when attacked. I will have any German officer court-martialed who fails to defend

himself.

And on November 13 he issued a new directive ordering that while

engagements with American warships were to be avoided as far as possible

German submarines must defend themselves against attack.24

They had, of course, already done that. On the night of October 16–17, the

U.S. destroyer Kearny, coming to the aid of a convoy which was being attacked

by German submarines, dropped depth charges on one of them, which retaliated

by torpedoing it. Eleven men of the crew were killed. These were the first

American casualties in the undeclared war with Germany. *More were to quickly

follow. On October 31, the U.S. destroyer Reuben James was torpedoed and

sunk while on convoy duty, with the loss of 100 men of 145 in its crew,

including all its seven officers. Thus, long before the final formalities of

declaring war, a shooting war had begun.

JAPAN PLAYS ITS OWN GAME

Japan, as we have seen, had been assigned by Hitler the role not of bringing

the United States into the war but of keeping her, at least for the time being, out

of it. He knew that if the Japanese took Singapore and threatened India this

would not only be a severe blow to the British but would divert America’s

attention—and some of her energies—from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Even

after he began begging the Japanese to attack Vladivostok he saw in this a means

not only to help him bring Russia down but to further pressure the United States

into remaining neutral. Strangely enough, it never seems to have occurred to him

or to anyone else in Germany until very late that Japan had her own fish to fry

and that the Japanese might be fearful of embarking on a grand offensive in

Southeast Asia against the British and Dutch, not to mention attacking Russia in

the rear, until they had secured their own rear by destroying the United States

Pacific Fleet. True, the Nazi conqueror had promised Matsuoka that Germany

would go to war with America if Japan did, but Matsuoka was no longer in the

government, and, besides, Hitler had constantly nagged the Japanese to avoid a

direct conflict with America and concentrate on Britain and the Soviet Union,

whose resistance was preventing him from winning the war. It did not dawn on

the Nazi rulers that Japan might give first priority to a direct challenge to the

United States.

Not that Berlin wanted the Japanese and Americans to reach an understanding.

That would defeat the main purpose of the Tripartite Pact, which was to frighten

the Americans into staying out of the war. For once Ribbentrop probably gave an

honest and accurate appraisal of the Fuehrer’s thoughts on this when he told an

interrogator at Nuremberg:

He [Hitler] was afraid that if an arrangement were made between the United States and

Japan this would mean, so to speak, the back free for America, and the unexpected attack or

entry into the war by the United States would come quicker … He was worried about an

agreement because there were certain groups in Japan who wanted to come to an arrangement

with America. 25

One member of such a group was Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura, who arrived

in Washington in February 1941 as the new Japanese ambassador and whose

series of confidential conversations with Cordell Hull which began in March,

with the aim of settling peacefully the differences between the two countries,

and which continued right up to the end, gave considerable worry to Berlin. *

In fact, the Germans did their best to sabotage the Washington talks. As early

as May 15, 1941, Weizsaecker submitted a memorandum to Ribbentrop pointing

out that “any political treaty between Japan and the United States is undesirable

at the present” and arguing that unless it were prevented Japan might be lost to

the Axis.26 General Ott, the Nazi ambassador in Tokyo, called frequently at the

Foreign Office, to warn against the Hull–Nomura negotiations. When, in spite of

this, they continued, the Germans switched to a new maneuver of trying to

induce the Japanese to make as a condition for their continuation that the United

States abandon its aid to Britain and its hostile policies toward Germany. 27

That was in May. The summer brought a change. In July Hitler was concerned

mainly with badgering Japan into attacking the Soviet Union, and that month

Secretary Hull broke off the talks with Nomura because the Japanese had

invaded French Indochina. They were resumed toward the middle of August

when the Japanese government proposed a personal meeting between Premier

Prince Konoye and President Roosevelt for the purpose of arriving at a peaceful

settlement. This did not please Berlin at all and the indefatigable Ott was soon at

the Tokyo Foreign Office expressing Nazi displeasure with this turn of events.

Both Foreign Minister Admiral Toyoda and Vice-Minister Amau told him

blandly that the proposed Konoye–Roosevelt talks would merely advance the

purpose of the Tripartite Pact, which they reminded him was “to prevent

American participation in the war. ”28

In the autumn, as the Hull–Nomura talks continued, the Wilhelmstrasse

switched back to the old tactics of the spring. It insisted in Tokyo that Nomura

be instructed to warn the United States that if it continued its unfriendly acts

toward the European Axis Germany and Italy might have to declare war, and

that in this case Japan, under the terms of the Tripartite Pact, would have to join

them. Hitler still did not want America in the war; the move was made, in fact,

to bluff Washington into staying out while at the same time affording some relief

from American belligerency in the Atlantic.

Secretary Hull learned immediately of this new German pressure, thanks to

“Magic,” as it was called, which since the end of 1940 had enabled the American

government to decode intercepted Japanese cable and wireless messages in

Tokyo’s most secret ciphers—not only those sent to and from Washington but

those to and from Berlin and other capitals. The German demand was cabled by

Toyoda to Nomura on October 16, 1941, along with instructions to present a

watered-down version to Hull. 29

That day the Konoye government fell and was replaced by a military cabinet

headed by the hotheaded, belligerent General Hideki Tojo. In Berlin General

Oshima, a warrior of similar cast, hastened to the Wilhelmstrasse to explain the

good news to the German government. Tojo’s appearance at the post as Premier

meant, the ambassador said, that Japan would draw closer to its Axis partners

and that the talks in Washington would cease. Whether on purpose or not, he

neglected to tell his Nazi friends what the consequences of the cessation of those

talks must be, and that Tojo’s appointment therefore meant a good deal more

than they suspected: namely, that his new government was determined to go to

war with the United States unless the Washington negotiations swiftly ended

with President Roosevelt accepting the Japanese terms for a free hand—not to

attack Russia but to occupy Southeast Asia. This course had never entered the

minds of Ribbentrop and Hitler, who still envisaged Japan as useful and helpful

to German interests only if she attacked Siberia and Singapore and frightened

Washington into worrying about the Pacific and staying out of the war. The

Fuehrer and, of course, his doltish Foreign Minister had never understood that

the failure of the Nomura-Hull negotiations in Washington, which they so

greatly desired, would bring the very result they had been trying to avoid until

the time was ripe: America’s entry into the world conflict.*

The sands were now rapidly running out.

On November 15 Saburo Kurusu arrived in Washington as a special

ambassador to aid Nomura in the negotiations, but Secretary Hull soon sensed

that the diplomat, who as the Japanese envoy in Berlin had signed the Tripartite

Pact and was somewhat pro-German, had brought no fresh proposals with him.

His purpose, Hull thought, was to try to persuade Washington to accept the

Japanese terms at once or, if that failed, to lull the American government with

talk until Japan was ready to strike a heavy surprise blow.30 On November 19

came the ominous “Winds” message to Nomura from Tokyo, which Hull’s

cryptographers promptly deciphered. If the Japanese newscaster on the short-

wave Tokyo broadcast, which the Embassy picked up daily, inserted the words

“East wind, rain,” that would mean that the Japanese government had decided on

war with America. Nomura was instructed, on receipt of the “Winds” warning,

to destroy all his codes and confidential papers.

Now Berlin awoke to what was up. The day before the “Winds” message, on

November 18, Ribbentrop was somewhat surprised to receive a request from

Tokyo asking Germany to sign a treaty in which the two nations would agree not

to conclude a separate peace with common enemies. Just which enemies the

Japanese meant was not clear, but the Nazi Foreign Minister obviously hoped

that Russia was the first of them. He agreed “in principle” to the proposal,

apparently in the comforting belief that Japan at last was about to honor its

vague promises to hit the Soviet Union in Siberia. This was most welcome and

timely, for the resistance of the Red Army on the broad front was becoming

formidable and the Russian winter was setting in—much earlier than had been

anticipated. A Japanese attack on Vladivostok and the Pacific maritime

provinces might provide that extra ounce of pressure which would bring a Soviet

collapse.

Ribbentrop was swiftly disillusioned. On November 23 Ambassador Ott wired

him from Tokyo that all indications were that the Japanese were moving south

with the intention of occupying Thailand and the Dutch-held Borneo oil fields,

and that the Japanese government wanted to know if Germany would make

common cause with her if she were to start a war. This information plainly

meant that Japan would not strike against Russia but was contemplating “starting

a war” with the Netherlands and Britain in the South Pacific which well might

embroil her in an armed conflict with the United States. But Ribbentrop and Ott

did not grasp the last point. Their exchanges of telegrams during these days

show that though they now realized, to their disappointment, that Japan would

not attack Russia they believed that her move southward would be against the

possessions of the Dutch and British and not those of the United States. Uncle

Sam, as Hitler desired, would be kept on the sidelines until his time came.31

Nazi misapprehensions were due in large part to the failure at this juncture of

the Japanese to take the German government into their confidence as to their

fateful decisions regarding America. Secretary Hull, thanks to the “Magic” code

breaker, was much better informed. As early as November 5 he knew that the

new Foreign Minister, Shigenori Togo, had wired Nomura setting a deadline of

November 25 for the signing of an agreement—on Japan’s terms—with the

American government. The final Japanese proposals were delivered in

Washington on November 20. Hull and Roosevelt knew they were final because

two days later “Magic” decoded for them a message from Togo to Nomura and

Kurusu which said so, while extending the deadline to November 29.

There are reasons beyond your ability to guess [Togo wired his ambassadors] why we

wanted to settle Japanese-American relations by the 25th. But if the signing can be completed

by the 29th … we have decided to wait until that date. This time we mean it, that the deadline

absolutely cannot be changed. After that things are automatically going to happen.32

November 25, 1941, is a crucial date.

On that day the Japanese carrier task force sailed for Pearl Harbor. In

Washington Hull went to the White House to warn the War Council of the

danger confronting the country from Japan and to stress to the U.S. Army and

Navy chiefs the possibility of Japanese surprise attacks. In Berlin that day there

was a somewhat grotesque ceremony in which the three Axis Powers, amid

much pomp and ceremony, renewed the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936—an

empty gesture which, as some Germans noted, did absolutely nothing to get

Japan into the war against Russia but which afforded the pompous Ribbentrop an

opportunity to denounce Roosevelt as the “chief culprit of this war” and to shed

crocodile tears for the “truthful, religious … American people” betrayed by such

an irresponsible leader.

The Nazi Foreign Minister seems to have become intoxicated by his own

words. He called in Oshima on the evening of November 28, following a lengthy

council of war earlier that day presided over by Hitler, and gave the Japanese

ambassador the impression that the German attitude toward the United States, as

Oshima promptly radioed Tokyo, had “considerably stiffened.” Hitler’s policy of

doing everything possible to keep America out of the war until Germany was

ready to take her on seemed about to be jettisoned. Suddenly Ribbentrop was

urging the Japanese to go to war against the United States as well as Britain and

promising the backing of the Third Reich. After warning Oshima that “if Japan

hesitates … all the military might of Britain and the United States will be

concentrated against Japan”—a rather silly thesis as long as the European war

continued—Ribbentrop added:

As Hitler said today, there are fundamental differences in the very right to exist between

Germany and Japan and the United States. We have received advice to the effect that there is

practically no hope of the Japanese-U.S. negotiations being concluded successfully because

the United States is putting up a stiff front.

If this is indeed the fact of the case, and if Japan reaches a decision to fight Britain and the

United States, I am confident that that not only will be in the interest of Germany and Japan

jointly, but would bring about favorable results for Japan herself.

The ambassador, a tense little man, was agreeably surprised. But he wanted to

be sure he understood correctly.

“Is Your Excellency,” he asked, “indicating that a state of actual war is to be

established between Germany and the United States?”

Ribbentrop hesitated. Perhaps he had gone too far. “Roosevelt is a fanatic,” he

replied, “so it is impossible to tell what he would do.”

This seemed a strange and unsatisfactory answer to Oshima in view of what

the Foreign Minister had said just before, and toward the end of the talk he

insisted on coming back to the main point. What would Germany do if the war

were actually extended to “countries which have been aiding Britain”?

Should Japan become engaged in a war against the United States [Ribbentrop replied]

Germany, of course, would join the war immediately. There is absolutely no possibility of

Germany’s entering into a separate peace with the United States under such circumstances.

The Fuehrer is determined on that point. 33

This was the flat guarantee for which the Japanese government had been

waiting. True, Hitler had given a similar one in the spring to Matsuoka, but it

seemed to have been forgotten during the intervening period when he had

become vexed at Japan’s refusal to join in the war on Russia. All that remained

now, so far as the Japanese were concerned, was to get the Germans to put their

assurance in writing. General Oshima joyfully filed his report to Tokyo on

November 29. Fresh instructions reached him in Berlin the next day. The

Washington talks, he was informed, “now stand ruptured—broken.”

Will Your Honor [the message directed] therefore immediately interview Chancellor

HITLER and Foreign Minister RIBBENTROP and confidentially communicate to them a

summary of developments. Say to them that lately England and the United States have taken a

provocative attitude, both of them. Say that they are planning to move military forces into

various places in East Asia and that we will inevitably have to counter by also moving troops.

Say very secretly to them that there is extreme danger that war may suddenly break out

between Japan and the Anglo-Saxon nations through some clash of arms and add that the time

of the breaking out of that war may come quicker than anyone dreams. *34

The Japanese carrier fleet was now well on its way to Pearl Harbor. Tokyo

was in a hurry to get Germany to sign. On the same day that Oshima was

receiving his new instructions, November 30, the Japanese Foreign Minister was

conferring with the German ambassador in Tokyo, to whom he emphasized that

the Washington talks had broken down because Japan refused to accede to

American demands that she abandon the Tripartite Pact. The Japanese hoped the

Germans would appreciate this sacrifice in a common cause.

“Grave decisions are at stake,” Togo told General Ott. “The United States is

seriously preparing for war … Japan is not afraid of a breakdown in negotiations

and she hopes that in that case Germany and Italy, according to the Three-Power

Agreement, will stand at her side.”

I answered [Ott radioed Berlin] that there could be no doubt about Germany’s

future position. Japanese Foreign Minister thereupon stated that he understood

from my words that Germany in such a case would consider her relationship to

Japan as that of a community of fate. I answered, according to my opinion,

Germany was certainly ready to have mutual agreement between the two

countries on this situation. 35

ON THE EVE OF PEARL HARBOR

General Oshima was a great lover of German–Austrian classical music and

despite the gravity and tenseness of the situation he took off for Austria to enjoy

a Mozart festival. But he was not permitted to listen to the great Austrian

composer’s lovely music for long. An urgent call on December 1 brought him

rushing back to his embassy in Berlin, where he found new instructions to get

busy and sign up Germany on the dotted line. There was no time to lose.

And now, when cornered, Ribbentrop stalled. Apparently realizing fully for

the first time the consequences of his rash promises to the Japanese, the Nazi

Foreign Minister grew exceedingly cool and evasive. He told Oshima late on the

evening of December 1 that he would first have to consult the Fuehrer before

making any definite commitment. The Japanese ambassador returned to the

Wilhelmstrasse on Wednesday, the third, to press his case but again Ribbentrop

put him off. To Oshima’s pleas that the situation had become extremely critical

the Foreign Minister replied that while he personally was for a written agreement

the matter would have to wait until the Fuehrer returned from headquarters later

in the week. Actually, as Ciano noted in his diary, not without a sign of glee,

Hitler had flown to the southern front in Russia to see General von Kleist,

“whose armies continue to fall back under the pressure of an unexpected

offensive.”

The Japanese, by this time, had also turned to Mussolini, who was not at any

front. On December 3 the Japanese ambassador in Rome called on the Duce and

formally asked Italy to declare war on the United States, in accordance with the

Tripartite Pact, as soon as the conflict with America should begin. The

ambassador also wanted a treaty specifying that there would be no separate

peace. The Japanese interpreter, Ciano noted in his diary, “was trembling like a

leaf.” As for the Duce, he was “pleased” to comply, after consultation with

Berlin.

The German capital, Ciano found the next day, had grown extremely cautious.

Maybe they will go ahead [he began his diary on December 4] because they can’t do

otherwise, but the idea of provoking American intervention is less and less liked by the

Germans. Mussolini, on the other hand, is happy about it.

Regardless of Ribbentrop’s opinion, which Hitler, surprisingly, still paid some

attention to, the decision as to whether Germany would give a formal guarantee

to Japan could be taken only by the Nazi warlord himself. During the night of

December 4–5 the Foreign Minister apparently got the Fuehrer’s go-ahead and at

3 A.M. he handed General Oshima a draft of the requested treaty in which

Germany would join Japan in war against the United States and agree not to

make a separate peace. Having taken the fateful plunge and followed his Leader

in reversing a policy that had been clung to stubbornly for two years, he could

not refrain from seeing that his Italian ally promptly followed suit.

A night interrupted by Ribbentrop’s restiveness [Ciano began his diary on December 5].

After having delayed two days he now hasn’t a minute to lose in answering the Japanese, and

at 3 o’clock in the morning he sends [Ambassador] Mackensen to my house to submit a plan

for a Tripartite Pact of Japanese intervention and the promise not to make a separate peace.

They wanted me to wake up the Duce, but I did not do it, and the Duce was very pleased.

The Japanese had a draft treaty, approved by both Hitler and Mussolini, but

they did not yet have it signed, and this worried them. They suspected that the

Fuehrer was stalling because he wanted a quid pro quo: if Germany joined Japan

in the war against the United States, Japan would have to join Germany in the

war against Russia. In his telegram of instructions to Oshima on November 30,

the Japanese Foreign Minister had given some advice on how to handle this

ticklish problem if the Germans and Italians raised it.

If [they] question you about our attitude toward the Soviet, say that we have already

clarified our attitude toward the Russians in our statement of last July. Say that by our present

moves southward we do not mean to relax our pressure against the Soviet and that if Russia

joins hands tighter with England and the United States and resists us with hostilities, we are

ready to turn upon her with all our might. However, right now, it is to our advantage to stress

the south and for the time being we would prefer to refrain from any direct moves in the

north. 36

December 6 came. Zhukov that very day launched his counteroffensive in

front of Moscow and the German armies reeled back in the snow and bitter cold.

There was all the more reason for Hitler to demand his quid pro quo. On this

question there was great uneasiness in the Foreign Office in Tokyo. The naval

task force was now within flying distance of Pearl Harbor for its carrier planes.

So far—miraculously—it had not been discovered by American ships or aircraft.

But it might be any moment. A long message was being radioed from Tokyo to

Nomura and Kurusu in Washington instructing them to call on Secretary Hull at

precisely 1 P.M. the next day, Sunday, December 7, to present Japan’s rejection

of the latest American proposals, and stressing that the negotiations were “de

facto ruptured.” In desperation Tokyo turned to Berlin for a written guarantee of

German support. The Japanese warlords still did not trust the Germans enough to

inform them of the blow against the United States which would fall the next day.

But they were more worried than ever that Hitler would refrain from giving his

guarantee unless Japan agreed to take on not only the United States and Great

Britain but the Soviet Union as well. In this predicament Togo got off a long

message to Ambassador Oshima in Berlin urging him to somehow stall the

Germans on the Russian matter and not to give in unless it became absolutely

necessary. Deluded though they were about their ability to deal with the

Americans and the British, the Japanese generals and admirals retained enough

sense to realize that they could not fight the Russians at the same time—even

with German help. Togo’s instructions to Oshima on that fateful Saturday,

December 6, which are among the intercepted messages decoded by Secretary

Hull’s expert decipherers, give an interesting insight into the diplomacy

practiced by the Nipponese with the Third Reich at the eleventh hour.

We would like to avoid … an armed clash with Russia until strategic circumstances permit

it; so get the German government to understand this position of ours and negotiate with them

so that at least for the present they will not insist upon exchanging diplomatic notes on this

question.

Explain to them at considerable length that insofar as American materials being shipped to

Soviet Russia … they are neither of high quality nor of large quantity, and that in case we start

our war with the United States we will capture all American ships destined for Soviet Russia.

Please endeavor to come to an understanding on this line.

However, should Ribbentrop insist upon our giving a guarantee in this matter, since in that

case we shall have no other recourse, make a … statement to the effect that we would, as a

matter of principle, prevent war materials from being shipped from the United States to Soviet

Russia via Japanese waters, and get them to agree to a procedure permitting the addition of a

statement to the effect that so long as strategic reasons continue to make it necessary for us to

keep Soviet Russia from fighting Japan (what I mean is that we cannot capture Soviet ships)

we cannot carry this out thoroughly.

In case the German government refuses to agree with [the above] and makes their approval

of this question absolutely conditional upon our participation in the war and upon our

concluding a treaty against making a separate peace, we have no way but to postpone the

conclusion of such a treaty. 37

The Japanese need not have worried so much. For reasons unknown to the

Tokyo militarists, or to anyone else, and which defy logic and understanding,

Hitler did not insist on Japan’s taking on Russia along with the United States and

Britain, though if he had the course of the war conceivably might have been

different.

At any rate, the Japanese on this Saturday evening of December 6, 1941, were

determined to strike a telling blow against the United States in the Pacific,

though no one in Washington or Berlin knew just where or even exactly when.

That morning the British Admiralty had tipped off the American government

that a large Japanese invasion fleet had been observed heading across the Gulf of

Siam for the Isthmus of Kra, which indicated that the Nipponese were striking

first at Thailand and perhaps Malaya. At 9 P.M. President Roosevelt got off a

personal message to the Emperor of Japan imploring him to join him in finding

“ways of dispelling the dark clouds” and at the same time warning him that a

thrust of the Japanese military forces into Southeast Asia would create a

situation that was “unthinkable.” At the Navy Department, intelligence officers

drew up their latest report on the location of the major warships of the Japanese

Navy. It listed most of them as being in home ports, including all the carriers and

other warships of the task force which at that very moment had steamed to

within three hundred miles of Pearl Harbor and was tuning up its bombers to

take off at dawn.

On that Saturday evening too the Navy Department informed the President

and Mr. Hull that the Japanese Embassy was destroying its codes. It had first had

to decipher Togo’s long message, which had dribbled in all afternoon in fourteen

parts. The Navy decoders were also deciphering it as fast as it came in and by

9:30 P.M. a naval officer was at the White House with translations of the first

thirteen parts. Mr. Roosevelt, who was with Harry Hopkins in the study, read it

and said, “This means war.” But exactly when and just where, the message did

not say and the President did not know. Even Admiral Nomura did not know.

Nor far off in Eastern Europe did Adolf Hitler. He knew less than Roosevelt.

HITLER DECLARES WAR

The Japanese onslaught on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor at 7:30 A.M.

(local time) on Sunday, December 7, 1941, caught Berlin as completely by

surprise as it did Washington. Though Hitler had made an oral promise to

Matsuoka that Germany would join Japan in a war against the United States and

Ribbentrop had made another to Ambassador Oshima, the assurance had not yet

been signed and the Japanese had not breathed a word to the Germans about

Pearl Harbor. * Besides, at this moment, Hitler was fully occupied trying to rally

his faltering generals and retreating troops in Russia.

Night had fallen in Berlin when the foreign-broadcast monitoring service first

picked up the news of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. When an official of the

Foreign Office Press Department telephoned Ribbentrop the world-shaking news

he at first refused to believe it and was extremely angry at being disturbed. The

report was “probably a propaganda trick of the enemy,” he said, and ordered that

he be left undisturbed until morning.38 So probably Ribbentrop, for once, told

the truth when he testified on the stand at Nuremberg that “this attack came as a

complete surprise to us. We had considered the possibility of Japan’s attacking

Singapore or perhaps Hong Kong, but we never considered an attack on the

United States as being to our advantage. ”39 However, contrary to what he told

the tribunal, he was exceedingly happy about it. Or so he struck Ciano.

A night telephone call from Ribbentrop [Ciano began his diary on December 8]. He is

joyful over the Japanese attack on the United States. He is so happy, in fact, that I can’t but

congratulate him, even though I am not so sure about the advantage … Mussolini was [also]

happy. For a long time now he has been in favor of clarifying the position between America

and the Axis.

At 1 P.M. on Monday, December 8, General Oshima went to the Wilhelmstrasse to get

Ribbentrop to clarify Germany’s position. He demanded a formal declaration of war on the

United States “at once.”

Ribbentrop replied [Oshima radioed Tokyo] that Hitler was then in the midst of a

conference at general headquarters discussing how the formalities of declaring war could be

carried out so as to make a good impression on the German people, and that he would transmit

your wish to him at once and do whatever he was able to have it carried out promptly.

The Nazi Foreign Minister also informed the ambassador, according to the

latter’s message to Tokyo, that on that very morning of the eighth “Hitler issued

orders to the German Navy to attack American ships whenever and wherever

they may meet them.” 40 But the dictator stalled on a declaration of war.†

The Fuehrer, according to the notation in his daily calendar book, hurried back

to Berlin on the night of December 8, arriving there at 11 o’clock the next

morning. Ribbentrop claimed at Nuremberg that he pointed out to the Leader

that Germany did not necessarily have to declare war on America under the

terms of the Tripartite Pact, since Japan was obviously the aggressor.

The text of the Tripartite Pact bound us to assist Japan only in case of an attack against

Japan herself. I went to see the Fuehrer, explained the legal aspect of the situation and told him

that, although we welcomed a new ally against England, it meant we had a new opponent to

deal with as well … if we declared war on the United States.

I told him that according to the stipulation of the Three-Power Pact, since Japan had

attacked, we would not have to declare war, formally. The Fuehrer thought this matter over

quite a while and then he gave me a very clear decision. “If we don’t stand on the side of

Japan,” he said, “the Pact is politically dead. But that is not the main reason. The chief reason

is that the United States already is shooting against our ships. They have been a forceful factor

in this war and through their actions have already created a situation of war.”

The Fuehrer was of the opinion at that moment that it was quite evident that the United

States would now make war against Germany. Therefore he ordered me to hand over the

passports to the American representative. 42

This was a decision that Roosevelt and Hull in Washington had been

confidently waiting for. There had been some pressure on them to have Congress

declare war on Germany and Italy on December 8 when that step was taken

against Japan. But they had decided to wait. The bombing at Pearl Harbor had

taken them off one hook and certain information in their possession led them to

believe that the headstrong Nazi dictator would take them off a second hook. *

They had pondered the intercepted message of Ambassador Oshima from Berlin

to Tokyo on November 29* in which Ribbentrop had assured the Japanese that

Germany would join Japan if she became “engaged” in a war against the United

States. There was nothing in that assurance which made German aid conditional

upon who was the aggressor. It was a blank check and the Americans had no

doubt that the Japanese were now clamoring in Berlin that it be honored.

It was honored, but only after the Nazi warlord again hesitated. He had

convoked the Reichstag to meet on December 9, the day of his arrival in Berlin,

but he postponed it for two days, until the eleventh. Apparently, as Ribbentrop

later reported, he had made up his mind. He was fed up with the attacks made by

Roosevelt on him and on Nazism; his patience was exhausted by the warlike acts

of the U.S. Navy against German U-boats in the Atlantic, about which Raeder

had continually nagged him for nearly a year. He had a growing hatred for

America and Americans and, what was worse for him in the long run, a growing

tendency to disastrously underestimate the potential strength of the United

States. †

At the same time he grossly overestimated Japan’s military power. In fact, he

seems to have believed that once the Japanese, whose Navy he believed to be the

most powerful in the world, had disposed of the British and Americans in the

Pacific, they would turn on Russia and thus help him finish his great conquest in

the East. He actually told some of his followers a few months later that he

thought Japan’s entry into the war had been “of exceptional value to us, if only

because of the date chosen.”

It was, in effect, at the moment when the surprises of the Russian winter were

pressing most heavily on the morale of our people, and when everybody in

Germany was oppressed by the certainty that sooner or later the United States

would come into the conflict. Japanese intervention therefore was, from our

point of view, most opportune.43

There is also no doubt that Japan’s sneaky and mighty blow against the

American fleet at Pearl Harbor kindled his admiration—and all the more so

because it was the kind of “surprise” he had been so proud of pulling off so often

himself. He expressed this to Ambassador Oshima on December 14 when he

awarded him the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the German Eagle in

gold:

You gave the right declaration of war! This method is the only proper one.

It corresponded, he said, to his “own system.”

That is, to negotiate as long as possible. But if one sees that the other is interested only in

putting one off, in shaming and humiliating one, and is not willing to come to an agreement,

then one should strike—indeed, as hard as possible—and not waste time declaring war. It was

heartwarming to him to hear of the first operations of the Japanese. He himself negotiated with

infinite patience at times, for example, with Poland and also with Russia. When he then

realized that the other did not want to come to an agreement, he struck suddenly and without

formalities. He would continue to go this way in the future.44

There was one other reason for Hitler’s deciding in such haste to add the

United States to the formidable list of his enemies. Dr. Schmidt, who was in and

out of the Chancellery and Foreign Office that week, put his finger on it: “I got

the impression,” he later wrote, “that, with his inveterate desire for prestige,

Hitler, who was expecting an American declaration of war, wanted to get his

declaration in first. ”45 The Nazi warlord confirmed this in his speech to the

Reichstag on December 11.

“We will always strike first,” he told the cheering deputies. “We will always

deal the first blow!”

Indeed, Berlin was so fearful on December 10 that America might declare war

first that Ribbentrop sternly admonished Thomsen, the German chargé in

Washington, about committing any indiscretion which might tip off the State

Department to what Hitler planned to do on the following day. In a long

radiogram on the tenth the Nazi Foreign Minister filed the text of the declaration

he would make in Berlin to the U.S. chargé d’affaires at precisely 2:30 P.M. on

December 11. Thomsen was instructed to call on Hull exactly one hour later, at

3:30 P.M. (Berlin time), hand the Secretary of State a copy of the declaration, ask

for his passport and turn over Germany’s diplomatic representation to

Switzerland. At the end of the message Ribbentrop warned Thomsen not to have

any contact with the State Department before delivering his note. “We wish to

avoid under all circumstances,” the warning said, “that the Government there

beats us to such a step.”

Whatever hesitations led Hitler to postpone the Reichstag session by two days,

it is evident from the captured exchange of messages between the

Wilhelmstrasse and the German Embassy in Washington, and from other

Foreign Office papers, that the Fuehrer actually made his fateful decision to

declare war on the United States on December 9, the day he arrived in the capital

from headquarters on the Russian front. The Nazi dictator appears to have

wanted the two extra days not for further reflection but to prepare carefully his

Reichstag speech so that it would make the proper impression on the German

people, of whose memories of America’s decisive role in the First World War

Hitler was quite aware.

Hans Dieckhoff, who was still officially the German ambassador to the United

States but who had been cooling his heels in the Wilhelmstrasse ever since both

countries withdrew their chief envoys in the autumn of 1938, was put to work on

December 9 to draw up a long list of Roosevelt’s anti-German activities for the

Fuehrer’s Reichstag address. *

Also on December 9 Thomsen in Washington was instructed to burn his secret

codes and confidential papers. “Measures carried out as ordered,” he flashed to

Berlin at 11:30 A.M. on that day. For the first time he became aware of what was

going on in Berlin and during the evening tipped the Wilhelmstrasse that

apparently the American government knew too. “Believed here,” he said, “that

within twenty-four hours Germany will declare war on the United States or at

least break off diplomatic relations.” †

HITLER IN THE REICHSTAG: DECEMBER 11

Hitler’s address on December 11 to the robots of the Reichstag in defense of

his declaration of war on the United States was devoted mainly to hurling

personal insults at Franklin D. Roosevelt, to charging that the President had

provoked war in order to cover up the failures of the New Deal and to

thundering that “this man alone,” backed by the millionaires and the Jews, was

“responsible for the Second World War.” All the accumulated, pent-up

resentment at a man who had stood from the first in his way toward world

dominion, who had continually taunted him, who had provided massive aid to

Britain at a moment when it seemed that battered island nation would fall, and

whose Navy was frustrating him in the Atlantic burst forth in violent wrath.

Permit me to define my attitude to that other world, which has its representative in that man

who, while our soldiers are fighting in snow and ice, very tactfully likes to make his chats

from the fireside, the man who is the main culprit of this war …

I will pass over the insulting attacks made by this so-called President against me. That he

calls me a gangster is uninteresting. After all, this expression was not coined in Europe but in

America, no doubt because such gangsters are lacking here. Apart from this, I cannot be

insulted by Roosevelt, for I consider him mad, just as Wilson was … First he incites war, then

falsifies the causes, then odiously wraps himself in a cloak of Christian hypocrisy and slowly

but surely leads mankind to war, not without calling God to witness the honesty of his attack

—in the approved manner of an old Freemason …

Roosevelt has been guilty of a series of the worst crimes against international law. Illegal

seizure of ships and other property of German and Italian nationals was coupled with the threat

to, and looting of, those who were deprived of their liberty by being interned. Roosevelt’s ever

increasing attacks finally went so far that he ordered the American Navy to attack everywhere

ships under the German and Italian flags, and to sink them—this in gross violation of

international law. American ministers boasted of having destroyed German submarines in this

criminal way. German and Italian merchant ships were attacked by American cruisers,

captured and their crews imprisoned.

In this way the sincere efforts of Germany and Italy to prevent an extension of the war and

to maintain relations with the United States in spite of the unbearable provocations which have

been carried on for years by President Roosevelt have been frustrated …

What was Roosevelt’s motive “to intensify anti-German feeling to the pitch of

war”? Hitler asked. He gave two explanations.

I understand only too well that a world-wide distance separates Roosevelt’s ideas and my

ideas. Roosevelt comes from a rich family and belongs to the class whose path is smoothed in

the democracies. I was only the child of a small, poor family and had to fight my way by work

and industry. When the Great War came Roosevelt occupied a position where he got to know

only its pleasant consequences, enjoyed by those who do business while others bleed. I was

only one of those who carried out orders as an ordinary soldier, and naturally returned from

the war just as poor as I was in the autumn of 1914. I shared the fate of millions, and Franklin

Roosevelt only the fate of the so-called Upper Ten Thousand.

After the war Roosevelt tried his hand at financial speculations. He made profits out of

inflation, out of the misery of others, while I … lay in a hospital …

Hitler continued at some length with this singular comparison before he

reached his second point, that Roosevelt had reverted to war to escape the

consequences of his failure as President.

National Socialism came to power in Germany in the same year as Roosevelt was elected

President … He took over a state in a very poor economic condition, and I took over the Reich

faced with complete ruin, thanks to democracy …

While an unprecedented revival of economic life, culture and art took place in Germany

under National Socialist leadership, President Roosevelt did not succeed in bringing about

even the slightest improvement in his own country … This is not surprising if one bears in

mind that the men he had called to support him, or rather, the men who had called him,

belonged to the Jewish element, whose interests are all for disintegration and never for order

…

Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation was all wrong. There can be no doubt that a continuation

of this economic policy would have undone this President in peacetime, in spite of all his

dialectical skill. In a European state he would surely have come eventually before a state court

on a charge of deliberate waste of the national wealth; and he would scarcely have escaped at

the hands of a civil court on a charge of criminal business methods.

Hitler knew that this assessment of the New Deal was shared, in part at least,

by the American isolationists and a considerable portion of the business

community and he sought to make the most of it, ignorant of the fact that on

Pearl Harbor Day these groups, like all others in America, had rallied to the

support of their country.

This fact was realized [he continued, alluding to these groups] and fully appreciated by

many Americans, including some of high standing. A threatening opposition was gathering

over the head of this man. He guessed that the only salvation for him lay in diverting public

attention from home to foreign policy … He was strengthened in this by the Jews around him

… The full diabolical meanness of Jewry rallied around this man, and he stretched out his

hands.

Thus began the increasing efforts of the American President to create conflicts … For years

this man harbored one desire—that a conflict should break out somewhere in the world.

There followed a long recital of Roosevelt’s efforts in this direction,

beginning with the “quarantine” speech in Chicago in 1937. “Now he

[Roosevelt] is seized,” Hitler cried at one point, “with fear that if peace is

brought about in Europe his squandering of millions of money on armaments

will be looked upon as plain fraud, since nobody will attack America—and then

he himself must provoke this attack upon his country.”

The Nazi dictator seemed relieved that the break had come and he sought to

share his sense of relief with the German people.

I think you have all found it a relief now that, at last, one State has been the first to take the

step of protesting against this historically unique and shameless ill treatment of truth and of

right … The fact that the Japanese Government, which has been negotiating for years with this

man, has at last become tired of being mocked by him in such an unworthy way fills us all, the

German people and, I think, all other decent people in the world, with deep satisfaction … The

President of the United States ought finally to understand—I say this only because of his

limited intellect—that we know that the aim of his struggle is to destroy one state after another

…

As for the German nation, it needs charity neither from Mr. Roosevelt nor from Mr.

Churchill, let alone from Mr. Eden. It wants only its rights! It will secure for itself this right to

live even if thousands of Churchills and Roosevelts conspire against it …

I have therefore arranged for passports to be handed to the American chargé d’affaires

today, and the following—46

At this point the deputies of the Reichstag leaped to their feet cheering, and

the Fuehrer’s words were drowned in the bedlam.

Shortly afterward, at 2:30 P.M., Ribbentrop, in one of his most frigid poses,

received Leland Morris, the American chargé d’affaires in Berlin, and while

keeping him standing read out Germany’s declaration of war, handed him a copy

and icily dismissed him.

… Although Germany for her part [said the declaration] has always strictly observed the

rules of international law in her dealings with the United States throughout the present war, the

Government of the United States has finally proceeded to overt acts of war against Germany.

It has, therefore, virtually created a state of war.

The Reich Government therefore breaks off all diplomatic relations with the United States

and declares that under these circumstances brought about by President Roosevelt, Germany

too considers herself to be at war with the United States, as from today. 47

The final act in the day’s drama was the signing of a tripartite agreement by

Germany, Italy and Japan declaring “their unshakable determination not to lay

down arms until the joint war against the United States and England reaches a

successful conclusion” and not to conclude a separate peace.

Adolf Hitler, who a bare six months before had faced only a beleaguered

Britain in a war which seemed to him as good as won, now, by deliberate choice,

had arrayed against him the three greatest industrial powers in the world in a

struggle in which military might depended largely, in the long run, on economic

strength. Those three enemy countries together also had a great preponderance of

manpower over the three Axis nations. Neither Hitler nor his generals nor his

admirals seem to have weighed those sobering facts on that eventful December

day as the year 1941 drew toward a close.

General Halder, the intelligent Chief of the General Staff, did not even note in

his diary on December 11 that Germany had declared war on the United States.

He mentioned only that in the evening he attended a lecture by a naval captain

on the “background of the Japanese-American sea war.” The rest of his diary,

understandably perhaps, was taken up with the continued bad news from most

sectors of the hard-pressed Russian front. There was no room in his thoughts for

an eventual day when his weakened armies might also have to confront fresh

troops from the New World.

Admiral Raeder actually welcomed Hitler’s move. He conferred with the

Fuehrer on the following day, December 12. “The situation in the Atlantic, ” he

assured him, “will be eased by Japan’s successful intervention.” And warming

up to his subject he added:

Reports have already been received of the transfer of some [American] battleships from the

Atlantic to the Pacific. It is certain that light forces, especially destroyers, will be required in

increased numbers in the Pacific. The need for transport ships will be very great, so that a

withdrawal of American merchant ships from the Atlantic can be expected. The strain on

British merchant shipping will increase.

Hitler, having taken his plunge, and with such reckless bravado, now suddenly

was prey to doubts. He had some questions to put to the Grand Admiral. Did he

“believe that the enemy will in the near future take steps to occupy the Azores,

the Cape Verdes and perhaps even to attack Dakar, in order to win back prestige

lost as the result of the setbacks in the Pacific?” Raeder did not think so.

The U.S. [he answered] will have to concentrate all her strength in the Pacific during the

next few months. Britain will not want to run any risks after her severe losses of big ships.* It

is hardly likely that transport tonnage is available for such occupation tasks or for bringing up

supplies.

Hitler had a more important question to pose. “Is there any possibility,” he

asked, “that the U.S.A. and Britain will abandon East Asia for a time in order to

crush Germany and Italy first?” Here again the Grand Admiral was reassuring.

It is improbable [he answered] that the enemy will give up East Asia even temporarily; by

so doing Britain would endanger India very seriously, and the U.S. cannot withdraw her fleet

from the Pacific as long as the Japanese fleet has the upper hand.

Raeder further tried to cheer up the Fuehrer by informing him that six “large”

submarines were to proceed “as quickly as possible” to the east coast of the

United States.48

With the situation in Russia being what it was, not to mention that in North

Africa, where Rommel was also retreating, the thoughts of the German Supreme

Commander and his military chiefs quickly turned from the new enemy, which

they were sure would have its hands full in the Pacific far away. Their thoughts

were not to return to it before another year had passed, the most fateful year of

the war, in which the great turning point would come—irrevocably deciding not

only the outcome of the conflict which all through 1941 the Germans had

believed almost over, almost won, but the fate of the Third Reich, whose

astounding early victories had raised it so quickly to such a giddy height and

which Hitler sincerely believed—and said—would flourish for a thousand years.

Halder’s scribblings in his diary grew ominous as New Year’s, 1942, drew

near.

“Another dark day!” he began his journal on December 30, 1941, and again

on the last day of the year. The Chief of the German General Staff had a

presentiment of terrible things to come.

* The italics are Hitler’s.

* Hull made the remark to the new Japanese ambassador in Washington, Admiral Nomura, in

the presence of Mr. Roosevelt on March 14. Nomura replied that Matsuoka “talked loudly for

home consumption because he was ambitious politically.” ( The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, II,

pp. 900–01.)

* Mussolini had told him, he informed Hitler, that “America was the Number One enemy, and

Soviet Russia came only in second place.”

† Or of anything else about the United States. His weird conception of America—by this time

Hitler had come to believe his own Nazi propaganda—was given further exposition in a talk,

he had with Mussolini at the Russian front late in August 1941. “The Fuehrer,” the Italian

records quote him indirectly as saying, “gave a detailed account of the Jewish clique which

surrounds Roosevelt and exploits the American people. He stated that he could not, for

anything in the world, live in a country like the U.S.A., whose conceptions of life are inspired

by the most grasping commercialism and which does not love any of the loftiest expressions of

the human spirit such as music.” ( Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers, pp. 449–52.)

* The author’s italics.

* News of the signing in Moscow of the Soviet-Japanese neutrality pact caused considerable

alarm in Washington, where Roosevelt and Hull were inclined to take a view similar to

Hitler’s—namely, that the treaty would release Japanese forces earmarked for a possible war

with Russia for action farther south against British and perhaps American possessions.

Sherwood discloses that on April 13, when the news of the conclusion of the pact was

received, the President scrapped a plan for launching aggressive action by U.S. naval ships

against German U-boats in the western Atlantic. A new order called merely for American

warships to report movements of German naval vessels west of Iceland, not to shoot at them.

It was considered that the new Japanese—Soviet neutrality agreement made the situation in

the Pacific too dangerous to risk too much in the Atlantic. (Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and

Hopkins, p. 291.)

* Ribbentrop kept trying all that fall and several times during the next two years to induce the

Japanese to fall upon Russia from the rear, but each time the Tokyo government replied

politely, in effect, “So sorry, please.”

Hitler himself remained hopeful all through the summer. On August 26 he told Raeder he

was “convinced that Japan will carry out the attack on Vladivostok as soon as forces have

been assembled. The present aloofness can be explained by the fact that the assembling of

forces is to be accomplished undisturbed, and the attack is to come as a surprise. ”11

The Japanese archives reveal how Tokyo evaded the Germans on this embarrassing

question. When, for instance, on August 19 Ambassador Ott asked the Japanese Vice-Minister

of Foreign Affairs about Japan’s intervention against Russia, the latter replied, “For Japan to

do a thing like attacking Russia would be a very serious question and would require profound

reflection.” When on August 30 Ott, who by now was a very irritated ambassador, asked

Foreign Minister Admiral Toyoda, “Is there any possibility that Japan may participate in the

Russo–German war?” Toyoda replied, “Japan’s preparations are now making headway, and it

will take more time for their completion. ”12

* The Germans had no long-range bombers capable of reaching the American coast from the

Azores—much less getting back—and it is a sign of the warping of Hitler’s mind by this time

that he conjured up the nonexistent “long-range bombers.”

* It might be noted here that on the stand at Nuremberg Admiral Raeder insisted that he did

everything possible to avoid provoking the United States into war.

* “History has recorded who fired the first shot,” Roosevelt declared in reference to this

incident in a Navy Day speech on October 27. In all fairness it would seem that in dropping

depth charges the United States fired the first shot. According to the confidential German

Navy records this was not the first such occasion. The official U.S. naval historian confirms

that as early as April 10 the Niblack (see above, p. 880) attacked a U-boat with depth charges.

(Samuel Eliot Morison, History of the United States Naval Operations in World War II, Vol. I,

p. 57.)

* “I credit Nomura,” Hull wrote later in his memoirs, “with having been honestly sincere in

trying to avoid war between his country and mine.” ( The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, II, p. 987.)

* Prince Konoye’s postwar memoirs reveal that as early as August 4 he was forced to agree to

a demand of the Army that if, in his proposed meeting with Roosevelt, the President did not

accept Japan’s terms, he would walk out of the meeting “with a determination to make war on

the United States.” (Hull, Memoirs, pp. 1025–26.)

* Hull says that he received a copy of this message through “Magic.” Thus Washington, as

well as Berlin, knew by the last day of November that the Japanese might strike against the

United States “quicker than anyone dreamt.” (Hull, Memoirs, p. 1092.)

* It was long believed by many that Hitler knew in advance the exact hour of the attack on

Pearl Harbor, but I have been unable to find a single scrap of evidence in the secret German

papers to substantiate it.

† In Tokyo at the same time Foreign Minister Togo was telling Ambassador Ott, “The

Japanese Government expects that now Germany too will speedily declare war on the United

States. ”41

* My own impression in Washington at that moment was that it might be difficult for

President Roosevelt to get Congress to declare war on Germany. There seemed to be a strong

feeling in both Houses as well as in the Army and Navy that the country ought to concentrate

its efforts on defeating Japan and not take on the additional burden of fighting Germany at the

same time.

Hans Thomsen, the German chargé in Washington, who, like all the other Nazi envoys

abroad, was usually kept ignorant of what Hitler and Ribbentrop were conniving, reported this

sentiment to Berlin. Immediately after the President’s speech to Congress on the morning of

December 8 calling for a declaration of war on Japan Thomsen radioed Berlin: “The fact that

he [Roosevelt] did not mention Germany and Italy with one word shows that he will try at first

to avoid sharpening the situation in the Atlantic.” On the evening of the same day Thomsen

got off another dispatch on the subject: “Whether Roosevelt will demand declaration of war on

Germany and Italy is uncertain. From the standpoint of the American military leaders it would

be logical to avoid everything which could lead to a two-front war.” In several dispatches just

prior to Pearl Harbor the German chargé had emphasized that the United States simply was not

prepared for a two-front war. On December 4 he had radioed the revelations in the Chicago

Tribune of the “war plans of the American High Command on preparations and prospects for

defeating Germany and her allies.”

Report confirms [he said] that full participation of America in war is not to be expected

before July, 1943. Military measures against Japan are of defensive character.

In his message to Berlin on the evening of December 8, Thomsen stressed that Pearl

Harbor was certain to bring relief to Germany from America’s belligerent activities in the

Atlantic.

War with Japan [he reported] means transferring of all energy to America’s own

rearmament, a corresponding shrinking of Lend-Lease help and a shifting of all activity to the

Pacific.

For the exchange of dispatches between the Wilhelmstrasse and the German Embassy in

Washington during this period, I am indebted to the State Department, which gave me access

to them. They will be published later in the Documents on German Foreign Policy series.

† See above, p. 888.

† “I don’t see much future for the Americans,” he told his cronies a month later during a

monologue at headquarters on January 7, 1942. “It’s a decayed country. And they have their

racial problem, and the problem of social inequalities … My feelings against Americanism are

feelings of hatred and deep repugnance … Everything about the behavior of American society

reveals that it’s half Judaized, and the other half Negrified. How can one expect a State like

that to hold together—a country where everything is built on the dollar.” ( Hitler’s Secret

Conversations, p. 155.)

* Dieckhoff, whom Hassell thought “temperamentally submissive,” had drawn up just a week

before at the request of Ribbentrop a long memorandum entitled “Principles for Influencing

American Public Opinion.” Among his eleven principles were: “Real danger to America is

Roosevelt himself … Influence of Jews on Roosevelt (Frankfurter, Baruch, Benjamin Cohen,

Samuel Rosenman, Henry Morgenthau, etc.) … The slogan for every American mother must

be: “I didn’t raise my boy to die for Britain!” (From the Foreign Office papers, not yet

published.) Some Americans in the State Department and in our embassy in Berlin thought

rather highly of Dieckhoff and believed him to be anti-Nazi. My own feeling was that he

lacked the guts to be. He served Hitler to the end—from 1943 to 1945 as the Nazi ambassador

to Franco Spain.

† Thomsen also urged Berlin to arrest the American correspondents there in retaliation for the

arrest of a handful of German newsmen in the United States. A Foreign Office memorandum

signed by Undersecretary Ernst on December 10 declares that all American correspondents in

Germany were ordered arrested as “a reprisal.” Excepted was Guido Enderis, chief

correspondent in Berlin of the New York Times, “because,” Woermann wrote, “of his proved

friendliness to Germany.” This may be unfair to the late Enderis, who was in ill health at the

time and who mainly for that reason perhaps was not arrested.

* Two days before, on December 10, Japanese planes had sunk two British battleships, the

Prince of Wales and the Repulse, off the coast of Malaya. Coupled with the crippling

American losses in battleships at Pearl Harbor on December 7, this blow gave the Japanese

fleet complete supremacy in the Pacific, the China Sea and the Indian Ocean. “In all the war,”

Churchill wrote later of the loss of the two great ships, “I never received a more direct shock.”

26

THE GREAT TURNING POINT: 1942—

STALINGRAD AND EL ALAMEIN

THE CONSPIRATORS COME BACK TO LIFE

THE SEVERE SETBACK to Hitler’s armies in Russia during the winter of 1941–42

and the cashiering of a number of field marshals and top generals ignited the

hopes of the anti-Nazi conspirators again.

They had been unable to interest the leading commanders in a revolt as long

as their armies were smashing to one easy victory after another and the glory of

German arms and of the German Reich was soaring to the heavens. But now the

proud and hitherto invincible soldiers were falling back in the snow and bitter

cold before an enemy which had proved their match; casualties in six months

had passed the million mark; and a host of the most renowned generals were

being summarily dismissed, some of them, such as Hoepner and Sponeck,

publicly disgraced, and most of the others humiliated and made scapegoats of by

the ruthless dictator. *

“The time is almost ripe,” Hassell concluded hopefully in his diary on

December 21, 1941. He and his fellow conspirators were sure that the Prussian

officer corps would react not only to their shabby treatment but to the madness

of their Supreme Commander in leading them and their armies to the brink of

disaster in the Russian winter. The plotters had long been convinced, as we have

seen, that only the generals, in command of troops, had the physical power to

overthrow the Nazi tyrant. Now was their chance before it was too late. Timing

was all-important. The war, they saw, after the reverses in Russia and the entry

of America into the conflict, could no longer be won. But neither was it yet lost.

An anti-Nazi government in Berlin could still get peace terms, they thought,

which would leave Germany a major power and, perhaps, with at least some of

Hitler’s gains, such as Austria, the Sudetenland and western Poland.

These thoughts had been very much in their minds at the end of the summer of

1941, even when the prospect of destroying the Soviet Union was still good. The

text of the Atlantic Charter, which Churchill and Roosevelt had drawn up on

August 19, had come as a heavy blow to them, especially Point 8, which had

stipulated that Germany would have to be disarmed after the war pending a

general disarmament agreement. To Hassell, Goerdeler, Beck and the other

members of their opposition circle this meant that the Allies had no intention of

distinguishing between Nazi and anti-Nazi Germans and was “proof,” as Hassell

put it, “that England and America are not fighting only against Hitler but also

want to smash Germany and render her defenseless.” Indeed, to this aristocratic

former ambassador, now deep in treason against Hitler but determined to get as

much as possible for a Germany without Hitler, Point 8, as he noted in his

journal, “destroys every reasonable chance for peace. ”2

Disillusioned though they were by the Atlantic Charter, the conspirators seem

to have been spurred to action by its promulgation, if only because it impressed

them with the necessity of doing away with Hitler while there was yet time for

an anti-Nazi regime to bargain advantageously for peace for a Germany which

still held most of Europe. They were not adverse to using Hitler’s conquests to

obtain the most favorable terms for their country. The upshot of a series of talks

in Berlin during the last days of August between Hassell, Popitz, Oster,

Dohnanyi and General Friedrich Olbricht, chief of staff of the Home Army, was

that the “German patriots,” as they called themselves, would make “very

moderate demands” of the Allies but, to quote Hassell again, “there are certain

claims from which they could not desist.” What the demands and claims were he

does not say; one gathers from other entries in his diary that they amounted to an

insistence on Germany’s 1914 frontiers in the East plus Austria and the

Sudetenland.

But time pressed. After a final conference with his confederates at the end of

August, Hassell wrote in his diary: “They were unanimously convinced that it

would soon be too late. When our chances for victory are obviously gone or only

very slim, there will be nothing more to be done. ”3

There had been some effort to induce key generals on the Eastern front to

arrest Hitler during the summer campaign in Russia. But though it inevitably

proved ineffectual because the great captains were naturally too absorbed in their

initial stunning victories to give any thought to overthrowing the man who had

given them the opportunity to achieve them, it did plant some seeds among the

military minds that would eventually sprout.

The center of the conspiracy in the Army that summer was in the headquarters

of Field Marshal von Bock, whose Army Group Center was driving on Moscow.

Major General Henning von Tresckow of Bock’s staff, whose early enthusiasm

for National Socialism had so soured as to land him in the ranks of the plotters,

was the ringleader, and he was assisted by Fabian von Schlabrendorff, his

A.D.C., and by two fellow conspirators whom they had planted on Bock as

A.D.C.s, Count Hans von Hardenberg and Count Heinrich von Lehndorff, both

scions of old and prominent German families. * One of their self-appointed tasks

was to work on the Field Marshal and to persuade him to arrest Hitler on one of

his visits to the army group’s headquarters. But Bock was hard to work on.

Though professing to loathe Nazism he had advanced too far under it and was

much too vain and ambitious to take any chances at this stage of the game. Once

when Tresckow tried to point out to him that the Fuehrer was leading the country

to disaster, Bock shouted, “I do not allow the Fuehrer to be attacked! ”4

Tresckow and his young aide were discouraged but not daunted. They decided

to act on their own. When on August 4, 1941, the Fuehrer visited the army

group’s headquarters at Borisov they planned to seize him as he was driving

from the airfield to Bock’s quarters. But the plotters were still amateurs at this

time and had not counted on the Fuehrer’s security arrangements. Surrounded by

his own S.S. bodyguards and declining to use one of the army group’s

automobiles to drive in from the airfield—he had sent ahead his own fleet of cars

for this purpose—he gave the two officers no opportunity of getting near him.

This fiasco—apparently there were others like it—taught the plotters who were

in the Army some lessons. The first was that to get their hands on Hitler was no

easy job; he was always well guarded. Another was that to seize him and arrest

him might not solve the problem, since the key generals were too cowardly or

too confused about their oaths of allegiance to help the opposition to carry on

from there. It was about this time, the fall of 1941, that some of the young

officers in the Army, many of them civilians in uniform like Schlabrendorff,

reluctantly came to the conclusion that the simplest and perhaps the only

solution was to kill Hitler. Then the timid generals, released from their personal

oaths to the Leader, would go along with the new regime and give it the support

of the Army.

But the ringleaders in Berlin were not yet ready to go so far. They were

concocting an idiotic plan called “isolated action,” which for some reason they

thought would satisfy the consciences of the generals about breaking their

personal oaths to the Fuehrer and at the same time enable them to rid the Reich

of Hitler. It is difficult, even today, to follow their minds in this, but the idea was

that the top military commanders, both in the East and in the West, would

simply, on a prearranged signal, refuse to obey the orders of Hitler as

Commander in Chief of the Army. This of course would have been breaking

their oath of obedience to the Fuehrer, but the sophists in Berlin pretended not to

see that. They explained, at any event, that the real purpose of the scheme was to

create confusion, in the midst of which Beck, with the help of detachments of the

Home Army in Berlin, would seize power, depose Hitler and outlaw National

Socialism.

The Home Army, however, was scarcely a military force but more a motley

collection of recruits doing a little basic training before being shipped as

replacements to the front. Some top generals in Russia or in the occupation

zones who had seasoned troops at their command would have to be won over if

the venture were really to succeed. One of them, who had been in on the Halder

plot to arrest Hitler at the time of Munich, seemed a natural choice. This was

Field Marshal von Witzleben, who was now Commander in Chief in the West.

To initiate him and also General Alexander von Falkenhausen, the military

commander in Belgium, into the new scheme of things Hassell was sent by the

conspirators in mid-January 1942 to confer with the two generals. Already under

surveillance by the Gestapo, the former ambassador used the “cover” of a lecture

tour, addressing groups of German officers and occupation officials on the

subject of “Living Space and Imperialism.” In between lectures he conferred

privately with Falkenhausen in Brussels and Witzleben in Paris, receiving a

favorable impression of both of them, especially of the latter.

Shunted to the sidelines in France while his fellow field marshals were

fighting great battles in Russia, Witzleben was thirsting for action. He told

Hassell that the idea of “isolated action” was Utopian. Direct action to overthrow

Hitler was the only solution and he was willing to play a leading part. Probably

the best time to strike would be during the summer of 1942 when the German

offensive in Russia was resumed. To prepare for The Day he intended to be in

top physical trim and would have a minor operation to put him in shape.

Unfortunately for the Field Marshal and his coconspirators this decision had

disastrous consequences. Like Frederick the Great—and many others—

Witzleben was troubled by hemorrhoids.* The operation to correct this painful

and annoying condition was a routine case of surgery, to be sure, but when

Witzleben took a brief sick leave in the spring to have it done, Hitler took

advantage of the situation to retire the Field Marshal from active service,

replacing him with Rundstedt, who had no stomach for conspiring against the

Leader who had so recently treated him so shabbily. Thus the plotters found their

chief hope in the Army to be a Field Marshal without any troops at his

command. Without soldiers no new regime could be established.

The leaders of the conspiracy were greatly disheartened. They kept meeting

clandestinely and plotting, but they could not overcome their discouragement. “It

seems at the moment,” Hassell noted at the end of February 1942, after one of

the innumerable meetings, “that nothing can be done about Hitler.” 5

A great deal could be done, however, about straightening out their ideas

concerning the kind of government they wanted for Germany after Hitler finally

was deposed and about strengthening their helter-skelter and so far quite

ineffectual organization so that it could take over that government when the time

came.

Most of the resistance leaders, being conservative and well on in years,

wanted, for one thing, a restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy. But for a

long time they could not agree on which Hohenzollern prince to hoist on the

throne. Popitz, one of the leading civilians in the ring, wanted the Crown Prince,

who was anathema to most of the others. Schacht favored the oldest son of the

Crown Prince, Prince Wilhelm, and Goerdeler the youngest surviving son of

Wilhelm II, Prince Oskar of Prussia. All were in accord that the Kaiser’s fourth

son, Prince August Wilhelm, or “Auwi,” as he was nicknamed, was out of the

question since he was a fanatical Nazi and a Gruppenfuehrer in the S.S.

By the summer of 1941, however, there was more or less agreement that the

most suitable candidate for the throne was Louis-Ferdinand, the second and

oldest surviving son of the Crown Prince. * Then just thirty-three, a veteran of

five years in the Ford factory at Dearborn, a working employee of the Lufthansa

airlines and in contact and in sympathy with the plotters, this personable young

man had finally emerged as the most desirable of the Hohenzollerns. He

understood the twentieth century, was democratic and intelligent. Moreover, he

had an attractive, sensible and courageous wife in Princess Kira, a former

Russian Grand Duchess, and—an important point for the conspirators at this

stage—he was a personal friend of President Roosevelt, who had invited the

couple to stay in the White House during their American honeymoon in 1938.

Hassell and some of his friends were not absolutely convinced that Louis-

Ferdinand was an ideal choice. “He lacks many qualities he cannot get along

without,” Hassell commented wryly in his diary at Christmas time, 1941. But he

went along with the others.

Hassell’s chief interest was in the form and nature of the future German

government, and early the year before he had drawn up, after consultation with

General Beck, Goerdeler and Popitz, a program for its interim stage, which he

refined in a further draft at the end of 1941.6 It restored individual freedom and

pending the adoption of a permanent constitution provided for the supreme

power to rest in the hands of a regent, who, as head of state, would appoint a

government and a Council of State. It was all rather authoritarian and Goerdeler

and the few trade-union representatives among the conspirators didn’t like it,

proposing instead an immediate plebiscite so that the interim regime would have

popular backing and give proof of its democratic character. But for the lack of

something better Hassell’s plan was generally accepted at least as a statement of

principles until it was superseded by a liberal and enlightened program drawn up

in 1943 under pressure from the Kreisau Circle, led by Count Helmuth von

Moltke.

Finally that spring of 1942 the conspirators formally adopted a leader. They

had all acknowledged General Beck as such not only because of his intelligence

and character but also because of his prestige among the generals, his good name

in the country and his reputation abroad. However, they had been so

lackadaisical in organizing that they had never actually put him in charge. A

few, like Hassell, though full of admiration and respect for the former General

Staff Chief, had some doubts about him.

“The principal difficulty with Beck,” Hassell wrote in his diary shortly before

Christmas, 1941, “is that he is very theoretical. As Popitz says, a man of tactics

but little will power.” This judgment, as it turned out, was not an ungrounded

one and this quirk in the General’s temperament and character, this surprising

lack of a will to act, was to prove tragic and disastrous in the end.

Nevertheless in March 1942, after a good many secret meetings, the plotters

decided, as Hassell reported, that “Beck must hold the strings,” and at the end of

the month, as the ambassador further noted, “Beck was formally adopted as the

head of our group. ”7

Still, the conspiracy remained nebulous and the air of unreality which

surrounded even the most active members of it from the first hangs over their

endless talk as one tries to follow it at this stage in the records they have left.

Hitler, they knew that spring, was planning to resume the offensive in Russia as

soon as the ground was dry. This, they felt, could only plunge Germany farther

toward the abyss. And yet, though they talked much, they did nothing. On March

28, 1942, Hassell sat in his country house at Ebenhausen and began his diary:

During the last days in Berlin I had detailed discussions with Jessen,* Beck and Goerdeler.

Prospects not very good.8

How could they be very good? Without even any plans to act. Now. While

there was still time.

It was Adolf Hitler who at this unfolding of spring, the third of the war, had

plans—and the fierce will to try to carry them out.

THE LAST GREAT GERMAN OFFENSIVES OF THE WAR

Although the Fuehrer’s folly in refusing to allow the German armies in Russia

to retreat in time had led to heavy losses in men and arms, to the demoralization

of many commands and to a situation which for a few weeks in January and

February 1942 threatened to end in utter catastrophe, there is little doubt that

Hitler’s fanatical determination to hold on and to stand and fight also helped to

stem the Soviet tide. The traditional courage and endurance of the German

soldiers did the rest.

By February 20 the Russian offensive from the Baltic to the Black Sea had run

out of steam and at the end of March the season of deep mud set in, bringing a

relative quiet to the long and bloody front. Both sides were exhausted. A

German Army report of March 30, 1942, revealed what a terrible toll had been

paid in the winter fighting. Of a total of 162 combat divisions in the East, only

eight were ready for offensive missions. The sixteen armored divisions had

between them only 140 serviceable tanks—less than the normal number for one

division. 9

While the troops were resting and refitting—indeed long before that, while

they were still retreating in the midwinter snows—Hitler, who was now

Commander in Chief of the Army as well as Supreme Commander of the Armed

Forces, had been busy with plans for the coming summer’s offensive. They were

not as ambitious as those of the previous year. By now he had sense enough to

see that he could not destroy all of the Red armies in a single campaign. This

summer he would concentrate the bulk of his forces in the south, conquer the

Caucasus oil fields, the Donets industrial basin and the wheat fields of the Kuban

and take Stalingrad on the Volga. This would accomplish several prime

objectives. It would deprive the Soviets of the oil and much of the food and

industry they desperately needed to carry on the war, while giving the Germans

the oil and the food resources they were almost as badly in need of.

“If I do not get the oil of Maikop and Grozny,” Hitler told General Paulus, the

commander of the ill-fated Sixth Army, just before the summer offensive began,

“then I must end this war.” 10

Stalin could have said almost the same thing. He too had to have the oil of the

Caucasus to stay in the war. That was where the significance of Stalingrad came

in. German possession of it would block the last main route via the Caspian Sea

and the Volga River over which the oil, as long as the Russians held the wells,

could reach central Russia.

Besides oil to propel his planes and tanks and trucks, Hitler needed men to fill

out his thinned ranks. Total casualties at the end of the winter fighting were

1,167,835, exclusive of the sick, and there were not enough replacements

available to make up for such losses. The High Command turned to Germany’s

allies—or, rather, satellites—for additional troops. During the winter General

Keitel had scurried off to Budapest and Bucharest to drum up Hungarian and

Rumanian soldiers—whole divisions of them—for the coming summer. Goering

and finally Hitler himself appealed to Mussolini for Italian formations.

Goering arrived in Rome at the end of January 1942 to line up Italian

reinforcements for Russia, assuring Mussolini that the Soviet Union would be

defeated in 1942 and that Great Britain would lay down her arms in 1943. Ciano

found the fat, bemedaled Reich Marshal insufferable. “As usual he is bloated and

overbearing,” the Italian Foreign Minister noted in his diary on February 2. Two

days later:

Goering leaves Rome. We had dinner at the Excelsior Hotel, and during the dinner Goering

talked of little else but the jewels he owned. In fact, he had some beautiful rings on his fingers

… On the way to the station he wore a great sable coat, something between what automobile

drivers wore in 1906 and what a high-grade prostitute wears to the opera. 11

The corruption and corrosion of the Number Two man in the Third Reich was

making steady progress.

Mussolini promised Goering to send two Italian divisions to Russia in March

if the Germans would give them artillery, but his concern about his ally’s defeats

on the Eastern front grew to such proportions that Hitler decided it was time for

another meeting to explain how strong Germany still was.

This took place on April 29 and 30 at Salzburg, where the Duce and Ciano

and their party were put up in the baroque Palace of Klessheim, once the seat of

the prince-bishops and now redecorated with hangings, furniture and carpets

from France, for which the Italian Foreign Minister suspected the Germans “did

not pay too much.” Ciano found the Fuehrer looking tired. “The winter months

in Russia have borne heavily upon him,” he noted in his diary. “I see for the first

time that he has many gray hairs.” *

There followed the usual German recital sizing up the general situation, with

Ribbentrop and Hitler assuring their Italian guests that all was well—in Russia,

in North Africa, in the West and on the high seas. The coming offensive in the

East, they confided, would be directed against the Caucasus oil fields.

When Russia’s sources of oil are exhausted [Ribbentrop said] she will be brought to her

knees. Then the British … will bow in order to save what remains of the mauled Empire …

America is a big bluff …

Ciano, listening more or less patiently to his opposite number, got the

impression, however, that in regard to what the United States might eventually

do it was the Germans who were bluffing and that in reality, when they thought

of it, “they feel shivers running down their spines.”

It was the Fuehrer who, as always, did most of the talking.

Hitler talks, talks, talks [Ciano wrote in his diary]. Mussolini suffers—he, who is in the

habit of talking himself, and who, instead, practically has to keep quiet. On the second day,

after lunch, when everything had been said, Hitler talked uninterruptedly for an hour and forty

minutes. He omitted absolutely no argument: war and peace, religion and philosophy, art and

history. Mussolini automatically looked at his wrist watch … The Germans—poor people—

have to take it every day, and I am certain there isn’t a gesture, a word or a pause, which they

don’t know by heart. General Jodl, after an epic struggle, finally went to sleep on the divan.

Keitel was reeling, but he succeeded in keeping his head up. He was too close to Hitler to let

himself go …12

Despite the avalanche of talk or perhaps because of it, Hitler got the promise

of more Italian cannon fodder for the Russian front. So successful were he and

Keitel with all the satellites that the German High Command calculated it would

have 52 “Allied” divisions available for the summer’s task—27 Rumanian, 13

Hungarian, 9 Italian, 2 Slovak and one Spanish. This was one quarter of the

combined Axis force in the East. Of the 41 fresh divisions which were to

reinforce the southern part of the front, where the main German blow would fall,

one half—or 21 divisions—were Hungarian (10), Italian (6) and Rumanian (5).

Halder and most of the other generals did not like to stake so much on so many

“foreign” divisions whose fighting qualities, in their opinion, were, to put it

mildly, questionable. But because of their own shortage of manpower they

reluctantly accepted this aid, and this decision was shortly to contribute to the

disaster which ensued.

At first, that summer of 1942, the fortunes of the Axis prospered. Even before

the jump-off toward the Caucasus and Stalingrad a sensational victory was

scored in North Africa. On May 27,1942, General Rommel had resumed his

offensive in the desert. * Striking swiftly with his famed Afrika Korps (two

armored divisions and a motorized infantry division) and eight Italian divisions,

of which one was armored, he soon had the British desert army reeling back

toward the Egyptian frontier. On June 21 he captured Tobruk, the key to the

British defenses, which in 1941 had held out for nine months until relieved, and

two days later he entered Egypt. By the end of June he was at El Alamein, sixty-

five miles from Alexandria and the delta of the Nile. It seemed to many a startled

Allied statesman, poring over a map, that nothing could now prevent Rommel

from delivering a fatal blow to the British by conquering Egypt and then, if he

were reinforced, sweeping on northeast to capture the great oil fields of the

Middle East and then to the Caucasus to meet the German armies in Russia,

which already were beginning their advance toward that region from the north.

It was one of the darkest moments of the war for the Allies and

correspondingly one of the brightest for the Axis. But Hitler, as we have seen,

had never understood global warfare. He did not know how to exploit Rommel’s

surprising African success. He awarded the daring leader of the Afrika Korps a

field marshal’s baton but he did not send him supplies or reinforcements.* Under

the nagging of Admiral Raeder and the urging of Rommel, the Fuehrer had only

reluctantly agreed to send the Afrika Korps and a small German air force to

Libya in the first place. But he had done this only to prevent an Italian collapse

in North Africa, not because he foresaw the importance of conquering Egypt.

The key to that conquest actually was the small island of Malta, lying in the

Mediterranean between Sicily and the Axis bases in Libya. It was from this

British bastion that bombers, submarines and surface craft wrought havoc on

German and Italian vessels carrying supplies and men to North Africa. In August

1941 some 35 per cent of Rommel’s supplies and reinforcements were sunk; in

October, 63 per cent. By November 9 Ciano was writing sadly in his diary:

Since September 19 we had given up trying to get convoys through to Libya; every attempt

had been paid for at a high price … Tonight we tried it again. A convoy of seven ships left,

accompanied by two ten-thousand-ton cruisers and ten destroyers … All—I mean all—our

ships were sunk … The British returned to their ports [at Malta] after having slaughtered us.13

Belatedly the Germans diverted several U-boats from the Battle of the

Atlantic to the Mediterranean and Kesselring was given additional squadrons of

planes for the bases in Sicily. It was decided to neutralize Malta and destroy, if

possible, the British fleet in the eastern Mediterranean. Success was immediate.

By the end of 1941 the British had lost three battleships, an aircraft carrier, two

cruisers and several destroyers and submarines, and what was left of their fleet

was driven to Egyptian bases. Malta had been battered by German bombers day

and night for weeks. As a result Axis supplies got through—in January not a ton

of shipping was lost—and Rommel was able to build up his forces for the big

push into Egypt.

In March Admiral Raeder talked Hitler into approving plans not only for

Rommel’s offensive toward the Nile (Operation Aïda) but for the capture of

Malta by parachute troops (Operation Hercules). The drive from Libya was to

begin at the end of May and Malta was to be assaulted in mid-July. But on June

15, while Rommel was in the midst of his initial successes, Hitler postponed the

attack on Malta. He could spare neither troops nor planes from the Russian front,

he explained to Raeder. A few weeks later he postponed Hercules again, saying

it could wait until after the summer offensive in the East had been completed and

Rommel had conquered Egypt. 14 Malta could be kept quiet in the meantime, he

advised, by continued bombing.

But it was not kept quiet and for this failure either to neutralize it or to capture

it the Germans would shortly pay a high price. A large British convoy got

through to the besieged island on June 16, and though several warships and

freighters were lost this put Malta back in business. Spitfires were flown to the

island from the U.S. aircraft carrier Wasp and soon drove the attacking

Luftwaffe bombers from the skies. Rommel felt the effect. Three quarters of his

supply ships thereafter were sunk.

He had reached El Alamein with just thirteen operational tanks. * “Our

strength,” he wrote in his diary on July 3, “has faded away.” And at a moment

when the Pyramids were almost in sight, and beyond—the great prize of Egypt

and Suez! This was another opportunity lost, and one of the last which Hitler

would be afforded by Providence and the fortunes of war.

THE GERMAN SUMMER OFFENSIVE IN RUSSIA: 1942

By the end of the summer of 1942 Adolf Hitler seemed to be once more on

top of the world. German U-boats were sinking 700,000 tons of British-

American shipping a month in the Atlantic—more than could be replaced in the

booming shipyards of the United States, Canada and Scotland. Though the

Fuehrer had denuded his forces in the West of most of their troops and tanks and

planes in order to finish with Russia, there was no sign that summer that the

British and Americans were strong enough to make even a small landing from

across the Channel. They had not even risked trying to occupy French-held

Northwest Africa, though the weakened French, of divided loyalties, had nothing

much with which to stop them even if they attempted to, and the Germans

nothing at all except a few submarines and a handful of planes based in Italy and

Tripoli.

The British Navy and Air Force had been unable to prevent Germany’s two

battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen

from dashing up the English Channel in full daylight and making their way

safely home from Brest. * Hitler had feared that the British and Americans would

certainly try to occupy northern Norway—that was why he had insisted on the

dash from Brest so that the three heavy ships there could be used for the defense

of Norwegian waters. “Norway,” he told Raeder at the end of January 1942, “is

the zone of destiny.” It had to be defended at all costs. As it turned out, there was

no need. The Anglo–Americans had other plans for their limited forces in the

West.

On the map the sum of Hitler’s conquests by September 1942 looked

staggering. The Mediterranean had become practically an Axis lake, with

Germany and Italy holding most of the northern shore from Spain to Turkey and

the southern shore from Tunisia to within sixty miles of the Nile. In fact,

German troops now stood guard from the Norwegian North Cape on the Arctic

Ocean to Egypt, from the Atlantic at Brest to the southern reaches of the Volga

River on the border of Central Asia.

German troops of the Sixth Army had reached the Volga just north of

Stalingrad on August 23. Two days before, the swastika had been hoisted on

Mount Elbrus, the highest peak (18,481 feet) in the Caucasus Mountains. The

Maikop oil fields, producing annually two and a half million tons of oil, had

been captured on August 8, though the Germans found them almost completely

destroyed, and by the twenty-fifth Kleist’s tanks had arrived at Mozdok, only

fifty miles from the main Soviet oil center around Grozny and a bare hundred

miles from the Caspian Sea. On the thirty-first Hitler was urging Field Marshal

List, commander of the armies in the Caucasus, to scrape up all available forces

for the final push to Grozny so that he “could get his hands on the oil fields.” On

that last day of August, too, Rommel launched his offensive at El Alamein with

every hope of breaking through to the Nile.

Although Hitler was never satisfied with the performance of his generals—he

had sacked Field Marshal von Bock, who commanded the whole southern

offensive, on July 13 and, as Halder’s diary reveals, had constantly nagged and

cursed most of the other commanders as well as the General Staff for not

advancing fast enough—he now believed that the decisive victory was in his

grasp. He ordered the Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army to swing north

along the Volga, after Stalingrad was taken, in a vast encircling movement

which would enable him eventually to advance on central Russia and Moscow

from the east as well as from the west. He believed the Russians were finished

and Halder tells of him at this moment talking of pushing with part of his forces

through Iran to the Persian Gulf. 15 Soon he would link up with the Japanese in

the Indian Ocean. He had no doubt of the accuracy of a German intelligence

report on September 9 that the Russians had used up all their reserves on the

entire front. In a conference with Admiral Raeder at the end of August his

thoughts were already turning from Russia, which he said he now regarded as a

“blockadeproof Lebensraum,” to the British and Americans, who would soon, he

was sure, be brought “to the point of discussing peace terms.” 16

And yet, as General Kurt Zeitzler later recalled, appearances even then, rosy

as they were, were deceptive. Almost all the generals in the field, as well as

those on the General Staff, saw flaws in the pretty picture. They could be

summed up: the Germans simply didn’t have the resources—the men or the guns

or the tanks or the planes or the means of transportation—to reach the objectives

Hitler had insisted on setting. When Rommel tried to tell this to the warlord in

respect to Egypt, Hitler ordered him to go on sick leave in the mountains of the

Semmering. When Halder and Field Marshal List attempted to do the same in

regard to the Russian front, they were cashiered.

Even the rankest amateur strategist could see the growing danger to the

German armies in southern Russia as Soviet resistance stiffened in the Caucasus

and at Stalingrad and the season of the autumn rains approached. The long

northern flank of the Sixth Army was dangerously exposed along the line of the

upper Don for 350 miles from Stalingrad to Voronezh. Here Hitler had stationed

three satellite armies: the Hungarian Second, south of Voronezh; the Italian

Eighth, farther southeast; and the Rumanian Third, on the right at the bend of the

Don just west of Stalingrad. Because of the bitter hostility of Rumanians and

Hungarians to each other their armies had to be separated by the Italians. In the

steppes south of Stalingrad there was a fourth satellite army, the Rumanian

Fourth. Aside from their doubtful fighting qualities, all these armies were

inadequately equipped, lacking armored power, heavy artillery and mobility.

Furthermore, they were spread out very thinly. The Rumanian Third Army held

a front of 105 miles with only sixty-nine battalions. But these “allied” armies

were all Hitler had. There were not enough German units to fill the gap. And

since he believed, as he told Halder, that the Russians were “finished,” he did

not unduly worry about this exposed and lengthy Don flank.

Yet it was the key to maintaining both the Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzer

Army at Stalingrad and Army Group A in the Caucasus. Should the Don flank

collapse not only would the German forces at Stalingrad be threatened with

encirclement but those in the Caucasus would be cut off. Once more the Nazi

warlord had gambled. It was not his first gamble of the summer’s campaign.

On July 23, at the height of the offensive, he had made another. The Russians

were in full retreat between the Donets and upper-Don rivers, falling rapidly

back toward Stalingrad to the east and toward the lower Don to the south. A

decision had to be made. Should the German forces concentrate on taking

Stalingrad and blocking the Volga River, or should they deliver their main blow

in the Caucasus in quest of Russian oil? Earlier in the month Hitler had pondered

this crucial question but had been unable to make up his mind. At first, the smell

of oil had tempted him most, and on July 13 he had detached the Fourth Panzer

Army from Army Group B, which had been driving down the Don toward the

river’s bend and Stalingrad just beyond, and sent it south to help Kleist’s First

Panzer Army get over the lower Don near Rostov and on into the Caucasus

toward the oil fields. At that moment the Fourth Panzer Army probably could

have raced on to Stalingrad, which was then largely undefended, and easily

captured it. By the time Hitler realized his mistake it was too late, and then he

compounded his error. When the Fourth Panzer Army was shifted back toward

Stalingrad a fortnight later, the Russians had recovered sufficiently to be able to

check it; and its departure from the Caucasus front left Kleist too weak to

complete his drive to the Grozny oil fields. *

The shifting of this powerful armored unit back to the drive on Stalingrad was

one result of the fatal decision which Hitler made on July 23. His fanatical

determination to take both Stalingrad and the Caucasus at the same time, against

the advice of Halder and the field commanders, who did not believe it could be

done, was embodied in Directive No. 45, which became famous in the annals of

the German Army. It was one of the most fateful of Hitler’s moves in the war,

for in the end, and in a very short time, it resulted in his failing to achieve either

objective and led to the most humiliating defeat in the history of German arms,

making certain that he could never win the war and that the days of the

thousand-year Third Reich were numbered.

General Halder was appalled, and there was a stormy scene at “Werewolf”

headquarters in the Ukraine near Vinnitsa to which Hitler had moved on July 16

in order to be nearer the front. The Chief of the General Staff urged that the main

forces be concentrated on the taking of Stalingrad and tried to explain that the

German Army simply did not possess the strength to carry out two powerful

offensives in two different directions. When Hitler retorted that the Russians

were “finished,” Halder attempted to convince him that, according to the Army’s

own intelligence, this was far from the case.

The continual underestimation of enemy possibilities [Halder noted sadly in his diary that

evening] takes on grotesque forms and is becoming dangerous. Serious work has become

impossible here. Pathological reaction to momentary impressions and a complete lack of

capacity to assess the situation and its possibilities give this so-called “leadership” a most

peculiar character.

Later the Chief of the General Staff, whose own days at his post were now

numbered, would come back to this scene and write:

Hitler’s decisions had ceased to have anything in common with the principles of strategy

and operations as they have been recognized for generations past. They were the product of a

violent nature following its momentary impulses, which recognized no limits to possibility and

which made its wish-dreams the father of its acts …17

As to what he called the Supreme Commander’s “pathological over-

estimation of his own strength and criminal underestimation of the enemy’s,”

Halder later told a story:

Once when a quite objective report was read to him showing that still in 1942 Stalin would

be able to muster from one to one and a quarter million fresh troops in the region north of

Stalingrad and west of the Volga, not to mention half a million men in the Caucasus, and

which provided proof that Russian output of front-line tanks amounted to at least 1,200 a

month, Hitler flew at the man who was reading with clenched fists and foam in the corners of

his mouth and forbade him to read any more of such idiotic twaddle.18

“You didn’t have to have the gift of a prophet,” says Halder, “to foresee what

would happen when Stalin unleashed those million and a half troops against

Stalingrad and the Don flank. * I pointed this out to Hitler very clearly. The result

was the dismissal of the Chief of the Army General Staff.”

This took place on September 24. Already on the ninth, upon being told by

Keitel that Field Marshal List, who had the over-all command of the armies in

the Caucasus, had been sacked, Halder learned that he would be the next to go.

The Fuehrer, he was told, had become convinced that he “was no longer equal to

the psychic demands of his position.” Hitler explained this in greater detail to his

General Staff Chief at their farewell meeting on the twenty-fourth.

“You and I have been suffering from nerves. Half of my nervous exhaustion is

due to you. It is not worth it to go on. We need National Socialist ardor now, not

professional ability. I cannot expect this of an officer of the old school such as

you.”

“So spoke,” Halder commented later, “not a responsible warlord but a

political fanatic.” 19

And so departed Franz Halder. He was not without his faults, which were

similar to those of his predecessor, General Beck, in that his mind was often

confused and his will to action paralyzed. And though he had often stood up to

Hitler, however ineffectually, he had also, like all of the other Army officers

who enjoyed high rank during World War II, gone along with him and for a long

time abetted his outrageous aggressions and his conquests. Yet he had retained

some of the virtues of more civilized times. He was the last of the old-school

General Staff chiefs that the Army of the Third Reich would have.* He was

replaced by General Kurt Zeitzler, a younger officer of a different stripe who

was serving as chief of staff to Rundstedt in the West, and who endured in the

post, which once—especially in the First World War—had been the highest and

most powerful in the German Army, as little more than the Fuehrer’s office boy

until the attempt against the dictator’s life in July 1944.†

A change in General Staff chiefs did not change the situation of the German

Army, whose twin drives on Stalingrad and the Caucasus had now been halted

by stiffening Soviet resistance itself. All through October bitter street fighting

continued in Stalingrad itself. The Germans made some progress, from building

to building, but with staggering losses, for the rubble of a great city, as everyone

who has experienced modern warfare knows, gives many opportunities for

stubborn and prolonged defense and the Russians, disputing desperately every

foot of the debris, made the most of them. Though Halder and then his successor

warned Hitler that the troops in Stalingrad were becoming exhausted, the

Supreme Commander insisted that they push on. Fresh divisions were thrown in

and were soon ground to pieces in the inferno.

Instead of a means to an end—the end had already been achieved when

German formations reached the western banks of the Volga north and south of

the city and cut off the river’s traffic—Stalingrad had become an end in itself.

To Hitler its capture was now a question of personal prestige. When even

Zeitzler got up enough nerve to suggest to the Fuehrer that in view of the danger

to the long northern flank along the Don the Sixth Army should be withdrawn

from Stalingrad to the elbow of the Don, Hitler flew into a fury. “Where the

German soldier sets foot, there he remains!” he stormed.

Despite the hard going and the severe losses, General Paulus, commander of

the Sixth Army, informed Hitler by radio on October 25 that he expected to

complete the capture of Stalingrad at the latest by November 10. Cheered up by

this assurance, Hitler issued orders the next day that the Sixth Army and the

Fourth Panzer Army, which was fighting south of the city, should prepare to

push north and south along the Volga as soon as Stalingrad had fallen.

It was not that Hitler was ignorant of the threat to the Don flank. The OKW

diaries make clear that it caused him considerable worry. The point is that he did

not take it seriously enough and that, as a consequence, he did nothing to avert it.

Indeed, so confident was he that the situation was well in hand that on the last

day of October he, the staff of OKW and the Army General Staff abandoned

their headquarters at Vinnitsa in the Ukraine and returned to Wolfsschanze at

Rastenburg. The Fuehrer had practically convinced himself that if there were to

be any Soviet winter offensive at all it would come on the central and northern

fronts. He could handle that better from his quarters in East Prussia.

Hardly had he returned there when bad news reached him from another and

more distant front. Field Marshal Rommel’s Afrika Korps was in trouble.

THE FIRST BLOW: EL ALAMEIN AND THE ANGLO–AMERICAN

LANDINGS

The Desert Fox, as he was called on both sides of the front, had resumed his

offensive at El Alamein on August 31 with the intention of rolling up the British

Eighth Army and driving on to Alexandria and the Nile. There was a violent

battle in the scorching heat on the 40-mile desert front between the sea and the

Qattara Depression, but Rommel could not quite make it and on September 3 he

broke off the fighting and went over to the defensive. At long last the British

army in Egypt had received strong reinforcements in men, guns, tanks and

planes (many of the last two from America). It had also received on August 15

two new commanders: an eccentric but gifted general named Sir Bernard Law

Montgomery, who took over the Eighth Army, and General Sir Harold

Alexander, who was to prove to be a skillful strategist and a brilliant

administrator and who now assumed the post of Commander in Chief in the

Middle East.

Shortly after his setback Rommel had gone on sick leave on the Semmering in

the mountains below Vienna to receive a cure for an infected nose and a swollen

liver, and it was there that on the afternoon of October 24 he received a

telephone call from Hitler. “Rommel, the news from Africa sounds bad. The

situation seems somewhat obscure. Nobody appears to know what has happened

to General Stumme.* Do you feel capable of returning to Africa and taking over

there again? ”20 Though a sick man, Rommel agreed to return immediately.

By the time he got back to headquarters west of El Alamein on the following

evening, the battle, which Montgomery had launched at 9:40 P.M. on October 23,

was already lost. The Eighth Army had too many guns, tanks and planes, and

though the Italian–German lines still held and Rommel made desperate efforts to

shift his battered divisions to stem the various attacks and even to counterattack

he realized that his situation was hopeless. He had no reserves: of men, or tanks

or oil. The R.A.F., for once, had complete command of the skies and was

pounding his troops and armor and remaining supply dumps mercilessly.

On November 2, Montgomery’s infantry and armor broke through on the

southern sector of the front and began to overrun the Italian divisions there. That

evening Rommel radioed Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia two thousand

miles away that he could no longer hold out and that he intended to withdraw,

while there was still the opportunity, to the Fûka position forty miles to the west.

He had already commenced to do so when a long message came over the air

the next day from the Supreme warlord:

TO FIELD MARSHAL ROMMEL:

I and the German people are watching the heroic defensive battle waged in Egypt with

faithful trust in your powers of leadership and in the bravery of the German-Italian troops

under your command. In the situation in which you now find yourself, there can be no other

consideration save that of holding fast, of not retreating one step, of throwing every gun and

every man into the battle … You can show your troops no other way than that which leads to

victory or to death.

ADOLF HITLER21

This idiotic order meant, if obeyed, that the Italo–German armies were

condemned to swift annihilation and for the first time in Africa, Bayerlein says,

Rommel did not know what to do. After a brief struggle with his conscience he

decided, over the protests of General Ritter von Thoma, the actual commander of

the German Afrika Korps, who said he was withdrawing in any case, † to obey

his Supreme Commander. “I finally compelled myself to take this decision,”

Rommel wrote later in his diary, “because I myself have always demanded

unconditional obedience from my soldiers and I therefore wished to accept this

principle for myself.” Later, as a subsequent diary entry declares, he learned

better.

Reluctantly Rommel gave the order to halt the withdrawal and at the same

time sent off a courier by plane to Hitler to try to explain to him that unless he

were permitted to fall back immediately all would be lost. But events were

already making that trip unnecessary. On the evening of November 4, at the risk

of being court-martialed for disobedience, Rommel decided to save what was

left of his forces and retreat to Fûka. Only the remnants of the armored and

motorized units could be extricated. The foot soldiers, mostly Italian, were left

behind to surrender, as indeed the bulk of them already had done. * On November

5 came a curt message from the Fuehrer: “I agree to the withdrawal of your army

into the Fûka position.” But that position already had been overrun by

Montgomery’s tanks. Within fifteen days Rommel had fallen back seven

hundred miles to beyond Benghazi with the remnants of his African army—

some 25,000 Italians, 10,000 Germans and sixty tanks—and there was no

opportunity to stop even there.

This was the beginning of the end for Adolf Hitler, the most decisive battle of

the war yet won by his enemies, though a second and even more decisive one

was just about to begin on the snowy steppes of southern Russia. But before it

did, the Fuehrer was to hear further bad news from North Africa which spelled

the doom of the Axis in that part of the world.

Already on November 3, when the first reports had come in of Rommel’s

disaster, the Fuehrer’s headquarters had received word that an Allied armada had

been sighted assembling at Gibraltar. No one at OKW could make out what it

might be up to. Hitler was inclined to think it was merely another heavily

guarded convoy for Malta. This is interesting because more than a fortnight

earlier, on October 15, the OKW staff chiefs had discussed several reports about

an imminent “Anglo-Saxon landing” in West Africa. The intelligence apparently

came from Rome, for Ciano a week before, on October 9, noted in his diary after

a talk with the chief of the military secret service that “the Anglo–Saxons are

preparing to land in force in North Africa.” The news depressed Ciano; he

foresaw—correctly, as it turned out—that this would lead inevitably to a direct

Allied assault on Italy.

Hitler, preoccupied as he was with the failure of the Russians to cease their

infernal resistance, did not take this first intelligence very seriously. At a

meeting of OKW on October 15, Jodl suggested that Vichy France be permitted

to send reinforcements to North Africa so that the French could repel any

Anglo–American landings. The Fuehrer, according to the OKW Diary, turned

the suggestion down because it might ruffle the Italians, who were jealous of any

move to strengthen France. At the Supreme Commander’s headquarters the

matter appears to have been forgotten until November 3. But on that day,

although German agents on the Spanish side of Gibraltar had reported seeing a

great Anglo–American fleet gathering there, Hitler was too busy rallying

Rommel at El Alamein to bother with what appeared to him to be merely another

convoy for Malta.

On November 5, OKW was informed that one British naval force had sailed

out of Gibraltar headed east. But it was not until the morning of November 7,

twelve hours before American and British troops began landing in North Africa,

that Hitler gave the latest intelligence from Gibraltar some thought. The

forenoon reports received at his headquarters in East Prussia were that British

naval forces in Gibraltar and a vast fleet of transports and warships from the

Atlantic had joined up and were steaming east into the Mediterranean. There was

a long discussion among the staff officers and the Fuehrer. What did it all mean?

What was the objective of such a large naval force? Hitler was now inclined to

believe, he said, that the Western Allies might be attempting a major landing

with some four or five divisions at Tripoli or Benghazi in order to catch Rommel

in the rear. Admiral Krancke, the naval liaison officer at OKW, declared that

there could not be more than two enemy divisions at the most. Even so!

Something had to be done. Hitler asked that the Luftwaffe in the Mediterranean

be immediately reinforced but was told this was impossible “for the moment.”

Judging by the OKW Diary all that Hitler did that morning was to notify

Rundstedt, Commander in Chief in the West, to be ready to carry out “Anton.”

This was the code word for the occupation of the rest of France.

Whereupon the Supreme Commander, heedless of this ominous news or of the

plight of Rommel, who would be trapped if the Anglo–Americans landed behind

him, or of the latest intelligence warning of an imminent Russian

counteroffensive on the Don in the rear of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad,

entrained after lunch on November 7 for Munich, where on the next evening he

was scheduled to deliver his annual speech to his old party cronies gathered to

celebrate the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch! *

The politician in him, as Halder noted, had got the upper hand of the soldier at

a critical moment in the war. Supreme Headquarters in East Prussia was left in

charge of a colonel, one Freiherr Treusch von Buttlar-Brandenfels. Generals

Keitel and Jodl, the chief officers of OKW, went along to participate in the

beerhouse festivities. There is something weird and batty about such goings on

that take the Supreme warlord, who by now was insisting on directing the war on

far-flung fronts down to the divisional or regimental or even battalion level,

thousands of miles from the battlefields on an unimportant political errand at a

moment when the house is beginning to fall in. A change in the man, a

corrosion, a deterioration has set in, as it already had with Goering who, though

his once all-powerful Luftwaffe had been steadily declining, was becoming more

and more attached to his jewels and his toy trains, with little time to spare for the

ugly realities of a prolonged and increasingly bitter war.

Anglo–American troops under General Eisenhower hit the beaches of Morocco

and Algeria at 1:30 A.M. on November 8, 1942, and at 5:30 Ribbentrop was on

the phone from Munich to Ciano in Rome to give him the news.

He was rather nervous [Ciano wrote in his diary] and wanted to know what we intended to

do. I must confess that, having been caught unawares, I was too sleepy to give a very

satisfactory answer.

The Italian Foreign Minister learned from the German Embassy that the

officials there were “literally terrified by the blow.”

Hitler’s special train from East Prussia did not arrive in Munich until 3:40 that

afternoon and the first reports he got about the Allied landings in Northwest

Africa were optimistic. 22 Everywhere the French, he was told, were putting up

stubborn resistance, and at Algiers and Oran they had repulsed the landing

attempts. In Algeria, Germany’s friend, Admiral Darlan, was organizing the

defense with the approval of the Vichy regime. Hitler’s first reactions were

confused. He ordered the garrison at Crete, which was quite outside the new

theater of war, immediately strengthened, explaining that such a step was as

important as sending reinforcements to Africa. He instructed the Gestapo to

bring Generals Weygand and Giraud* to Vichy and to keep them under

surveillance. He asked Field Marshal von Rundstedt to set in action Anton but

not to cross the line of demarcation in France until he had further orders. And he

requested Ciano† and Pierre Laval, who was now Premier of Vichy France, to

meet him in Munich the next day.

For about twenty-four hours Hitler toyed with the idea of trying to make an

alliance with France in order to bring her into the war against Britain and

America and, at the moment, to strengthen the resolve of the Pétain government

to oppose the Allied landings in North Africa. He probably was encouraged in

this by the action of Pétain in breaking off diplomatic relations with the United

States on the morning of Sunday, November 8, and by the aged French

Marshal’s statement to the U.S. chargé d’affaires that his forces would resist the

Anglo–American invasion. The OKW Diary for that Sunday emphasizes that

Hitler was preoccupied with working out “a far-reaching collaboration with the

French.” That evening the German representative in Vichy, Krug von Nidda,

submitted a proposal to Pétain for a close alliance between Germany and

France.23

By the next day, following his speech to the party veterans, in which he

proclaimed that Stalingrad was “firmly in German hands,” the Fuehrer had

changed his mind. He told Ciano he had no illusions about the French desire to

fight and that he had decided on “the total occupation of France, a landing in

Corsica, a bridgehead in Tunisia.” This decision, though not the timing, was

communicated to Laval when he arrived in Munich by car on November 10. This

traitorous Frenchman promptly promised to urge Pétain to accede to the

Fuehrer’s wishes but suggested that the Germans go ahead with their plans

without waiting for the senile old Marshal’s approval, which Hitler fully

intended to do. Ciano has left a description of the Vichy Premier, who was

executed for treason after the war.

Laval, with his white tie and middle-class French peasant attire, is very much out of place

in the great salon among so many uniforms. He tries to speak in a familiar tone about his trip

and his long sleep in the car, but his words go unheeded. Hitler treats him with frigid courtesy

…

The poor man could not even imagine the fait accompli that the Germans were to place

before him. Not a word was said to Laval about the impending action—that the orders to

occupy France were being given while he was smoking his cigarette and conversing with

various people in the next room. Von Ribbentrop told me that Laval would be informed only

the next morning at 8 o’clock that on account of information received during the night Hitler

had been obliged to proceed to the total occupation of the country.24

The orders for the seizure of unoccupied France, in clear violation of the

armistice agreement, were given by Hitler at 8:30 P.M. on November 10 and

carried out the next morning without any other incident than a futile protest by

Pétain. The Italians occupied Corsica, and German planes began flying in troops

to seize French-held Tunisia before Eisenhower’s forces could get there.

There was one further—and typical—piece of Hitlerian deceit. On November

13 the Fuehrer assured Pétain that neither the Germans nor the Italians would

occupy the naval base at Toulon, where the French fleet had been tied up since

the armistice. On November 25 the OKW Diary recorded that Hitler had decided

to carry out “Lila” as soon as possible.* This was the code word for the

occupation of Toulon and the capture of the French fleet. On the morning of the

twenty-seventh German troops attacked the naval port, but French sailors held

them up long enough to allow the crews, on the orders of Admiral de Laborde, to

scuttle the ships. The French fleet was thus lost to the Axis, which badly needed

its warships in the Mediterranean, but it was denied also to the Allies, to whom it

would have been a most valuable addition.

Hitler won the race against Eisenhower to seize Tunisia, but it was a doubtful

victory. At his insistence nearly a quarter of a million German and Italian troops

were poured in to hold this bridgehead. If the Fuehrer had sent one fifth as many

troops and tanks to Rommel a few months before, the Desert Fox most probably

would have been beyond the Nile by now, the Anglo–American landing in

Northwest Africa could not have taken place and the Mediterranean would have

been irretrievably lost to the Allies, thus securing the soft undercover of the Axis

belly. As it was, every soldier and tank and gun rushed by Hitler to Tunisia that

winter as well as the remnants of the Afrika Korps would be lost by the end of

the spring and more German troops would be marched into prisoner-of-war

cages than at Stalingrad, to which we must now return.*

DISASTER AT STALINGRAD

Hitler and the principal generals of OKW were lingering on in the pleasant

Alpine surroundings of Berchtesgaden when the first news of the Russian

counteroffensive on the Don reached them a few hours after it had been

launched in a blizzard at dawn on November 19. Though a Soviet attack in this

region had been expected it was not believed at OKW that it would amount to

enough to warrant Hitler and his chief military advisers, Keitel and Jodl,

hurrying back to headquarters in East Prussia after the Fuehrer’s ringing

beerhouse speech to the old party comrades in Munich on the evening of

November 8. So they had puttered about on the Obersalzberg taking in the

mountain air.

Their peace and quiet was abruptly broken by an urgent telephone call from

General Zeitzler, the new Chief of the Army General Staff, who had remained

behind at Rastenburg. He had what the OKW Diary recorded as “alarming

news.” In the very first hours of the attack an overwhelming Russian armored

force had broken clean through the Rumanian Third Army between

Serafimovich and Kletskaya on the Don just northwest of Stalingrad. South of

the besieged city other powerful Soviet forces were attacking strongly against

the German Fourth Panzer Army and the Rumanian Fourth Army and

threatening to pierce their fronts.

The Russian objective was obvious to anyone who looked at a map and

especially obvious to Zeitzler who, from Army intelligence, knew that the

enemy had massed thirteen armies, with thousands of tanks, in the south to

achieve it. The Russians were clearly driving in great strength from the north and

the south to cut off Stalingrad and to force the German Sixth Army there to

either beat a hasty retreat to the west or see itself surrounded. Zeitzler later

contended that as soon as he saw what was happening he urged Hitler to permit

the Sixth Army to withdraw from Stalingrad to the Don bend, where the broken

front could be restored. The mere suggestion threw the Fuehrer into a tantrum.

“I won’t leave the Volga! I won’t go back from the Volga!” he shouted, and

that was that. This decision, taken in such a fit of frenzy, led promptly to

disaster. The Fuehrer personally ordered the Sixth Army to stand fast around

Stalingrad.25

Hitler and his staff returned to headquarters on November 22. By this time,

the fourth day of the attack, the news was catastrophic. The two Soviet forces

from the north and south had met at Kalach, forty miles west of Stalingrad on the

Don bend. In the evening a wireless message arrived from General Paulus,

commander of the Sixth Army, confirming that his troops were now surrounded.

Hitler promptly radioed back, telling Paulus to move his headquarters into the

city and form a hedgehog defense. The Sixth Army would be supplied by air

until it could be relieved.

But this was futile talk. There were now twenty German and two Rumanian

divisions cut off at Stalingrad. Paulus radioed that they would need a minimum

of 750 tons of supplies a day flown in. This was far beyond the capacity of the

Luftwaffe, which lacked the required number of transport planes. Even if they

had been available, not all of them could have got through in the blizzardy

weather and over an area where the Russians had now established fighter

superiority. Nevertheless, Goering assured Hitler that the Air Force could do the

job. It never began to.

The relief of the Sixth Army was a more practical and encouraging possibility.

On November 25 Hitler had recalled Field Marshal von Manstein, the most

gifted of his field commanders, from the Leningrad front and put him in charge

of a newly created formation, Army Group Don. His assignment was to push

through from the southwest and relieve the Sixth Army at Stalingrad.

But now the Fuehrer imposed impossible conditions on his new commander.

Manstein tried to explain to him that the only chance of success lay in the Sixth

Army’s breaking out of Stalingrad to the west while his own forces, led by the

Fourth Panzer Army, pressed northeast against the Russian armies which lay

between the two German forces. But once again Hitler refused to draw back

from the Volga. The Sixth Army must remain in Stalingrad and Manstein must

fight his way to it there.

This, as Manstein tried to argue with the Supreme warlord, could not be done.

The Russians were too strong. Nevertheless, with a heavy heart, Manstein

launched his attack on December 12. It was called, appropriately, “Operation

Winter Gale,” for the full fury of the Russian winter had now hit the southern

steppes, piling up the snow in drifts and dropping the temperature below zero. At

first the offensive made good progress, the Fourth Panzer Army, under General

Hoth, driving northeast up both sides of the railroad from Kotelnikovski toward

Stalingrad, some seventy-five miles away. By December 19 it had advanced to

within some forty miles of the southern perimeter of the city; by the twenty-first

it was within thirty miles, and across the snowy steppes the besieged troops of

the Sixth Army could see at night the signal flares of their rescuers.

At this moment, according to the later testimony of the German generals, a

breakout from Stalingrad of the Sixth Army toward the advancing lines of the

Fourth Panzer Army would almost certainly have succeeded. But once again

Hitler forbade it. On December 21, Zeitzler had wrung permission from the

Leader for the troops of Paulus to break out provided they also held on to

Stalingrad. This piece of foolishness, the General Staff Chief says, nearly drove

him insane.

“On the following evening,” Zeitzler related later, “I begged Hitler to

authorize the breakout. I pointed out that this was absolutely our last chance to

save the two hundred thousand men of Paulus’ army.”

Hitler would not give way. In vain I described to him conditions inside the so-called

fortress: the despair of the starving soldiers, their loss of confidence in the Supreme

Command, the wounded expiring for lack of proper attention while thousands froze to death.

He remained as impervious to arguments of this sort as to those others which I had advanced.

In the face of increasing Russian resistance in front of him and on his flanks

General Hoth lacked the strength to negotiate that last thirty miles to Stalingrad.

He believed that if the Sixth Army broke out he could still make a junction with

it and then both forces could withdraw to Kotelnikovski. This at least would save

a couple of hundred thousand German lives. * Probably for a day or two—

between December 21 and 23—this could have been done, but by the latter date

it had become impossible. For unknown to Hoth the Red Army had struck

farther north and was now endangering the left flank of Manstein’s whole Army

Group Don. On the night of December 22, Manstein telephoned Hoth to prepare

himself for drastic new orders. The next day they came. Hoth was to abandon his

drive on Stalingrad, dispatch one of his three panzer divisions to the Don front

on the north, and defend himself where he was and with what he had left as well

as he could.

The attempt to relieve Stalingrad had failed.

Manstein’s drastic new orders had come as the result of alarming news that

reached him on December 17. On the morning of that day a Soviet army had

broken through the Italian Eighth Army farther up the Don at Boguchar and by

evening opened a gap twenty-seven miles deep. Within three days the hole was

ninety miles wide, the Italians were fleeing in panic and the Rumanian Third

Army to the south, which already had been badly pummeled on the opening day

of the Russian offensive on November 19, was also disintegrating. No wonder

Manstein had had to take part of Hoth’s armored forces to help stem the gap. A

chain reaction followed.

Not only the Don armies fell back but also Hoth’s forces, which had come so

close to Stalingrad. These retreats in turn endangered the German Army in the

Caucasus, which would be cut off if the Russians reached Rostov on the Sea of

Azov. A day or two after Christmas Zeitzler pointed out to Hitler, “Unless you

order a withdrawal from the Caucasus now, we shall soon have a second

Stalingrad on our hands.” Reluctantly the Supreme Commander issued the

necessary instructions on December 29 to Kleist’s Army Group A, which

comprised the First Panzer and Seventeenth armies, and which had failed in its

mission to grab the rich oil fields of Grozny. It too began a long retreat after

having been within sight of its goal.

The reverses of the Germans in Russia and of the Italo–German armies in

North Africa stirred Mussolini to thought. Hitler had invited him to come to

Salzburg for a talk around the middle of December and the ailing Duce, now on

a strict diet for stomach disorders, had accepted, though, as he told Ciano, he

would go on one condition only: that he take his meals alone “because he does

not want a lot of ravenous Germans to notice that he is compelled to live on rice

and milk.”

The time had come, Mussolini decided, to tell Hitler to cut his losses in the

East, make some sort of deal with Stalin and concentrate Axis strength on

defending the rest of North Africa, the Balkans and Western Europe. “Nineteen

forty-three will be the year of the Anglo–American effort,” he told Ciano. Hitler

was unable to leave his Eastern headquarters in order to meet Mussolini, so

Ciano made the long journey to Rastenburg on December 18 on his behalf,

repeating to the Nazi leader the Duce’s proposals. Hitler scorned them and

assured the Italian Foreign Minister that without at all weakening the Russian

front he could send additional forces to North Africa, which must, he said, be

held. Ciano found German spirits at a low ebb at headquarters, despite Hitler’s

confident assurances.

The atmosphere is heavy. To the bad news there should perhaps be added the sadness of

that humid forest and the boredom of collective living in the barracks … No one tries to

conceal from me the unhappiness over the news of the breakthrough on the Russian front.

There were open attempts to put the blame on us.

At that very moment the survivors of the Italian Eighth Army on the Don were scurrying for

their lives, and when one member of Ciano’s party asked an OKW officer whether the Italians

had suffered heavy losses he was told, “No losses at all: they are running.” 26

The German troops in the Caucasus and on the Don, if not running, were

getting out as quickly as they could to avoid being cut off. Each day, as the year

1943 began, they withdrew a little farther from Stalingrad. The time had now

come for the Russians to finish off the Germans there. But first they gave the

doomed soldiers of the Sixth Army an opportunity to save their lives.

On the morning of January 8, 1943, three young Red Army officers, bearing a

white flag, entered the German lines on the northern perimeter of Stalingrad and

presented General Paulus with an ultimatum from General Rokossovski,

commander of the Soviet forces on the Don front. After reminding him that his

army was cut off and could not be relieved or kept supplied from the air, the note

said:

The situation of your troops is desperate. They are suffering from hunger, sickness and

cold. The cruel Russian winter has scarcely yet begun. Hard frosts, cold winds and blizzards

still lie ahead. Your soldiers are unprovided with winter clothing and are living in appalling

sanitary conditions … Your situation is hopeless, and any further resistance senseless.

In view of [this] and in order to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, we propose that you accept

the following terms of surrender …

They were honorable terms. All prisoners would be given “normal rations.”

The wounded, sick and frostbitten would receive medical treatment. All

prisoners could retain their badges of rank, decorations and personal belongings.

Paulus was given twenty-four hours to reply.

He immediately radioed the text of the ultimatum to Hitler and asked for

freedom of action. His request was curtly dismissed by the Supreme warlord.

Twenty-four hours after the expiration of the time limit on the demand for

surrender, on the morning of January 10, the Russians opened the last phase of

the Battle of Stalingrad with an artillery bombardment from five thousand guns.

The fighting was bitter and bloody. Both sides fought with incredible bravery

and recklessness over the frozen wasteland of the city’s rubble—but not for

long. Within six days the German pocket had been reduced by half, to an area

fifteen miles long and nine miles deep at its widest. By January 24 it had been

split in two and the last small emergency airstrip lost. The planes which had

brought in some supplies, especially medicines for the sick and wounded, and

which had flown out 29,000 hospital cases, could no longer land.

Once more the Russians gave their courageous enemy a chance to surrender.

Soviet emissaries arrived at the German lines on January 24 with a new offer.

Again Paulus, torn between his duty to obey the mad Fuehrer and his obligation

to save his own surviving troops from annihilation, appealed to Hitler.

Troops without ammunition [he radioed on the twenty-fourth] or food … Effective

command no longer possible … 18,000 wounded without any supplies or dressings or drugs

… Further defense senseless. Collapse inevitable. Army requests immediate permission to

surrender in order to save lives of remaining troops.

Hitler’s answer has been preserved.

Surrender is forbidden. Sixth Army will hold their positions to the last man and the last

round and by their heroic endurance will make an unforgettable contribution toward the

establishment of a defensive front and the salvation of the Western world.

The Western world! It was a bitter pill for the men of the Sixth Army who had

fought against that world in France and Flanders but a short time ago.

Further resistance was not only senseless and futile but impossible, and as the

month of January 1943 approached its end the epic battle wore itself out,

expiring like the flame of an expended candle which sputters and dies. By

January 28 what was left of a once great army was split into three small pockets,

in the southern one of which General Paulus had his headquarters in the cellar of

the ruins of the once thriving Univermag department store. According to one

eyewitness the commander in chief sat on his camp bed in a darkened corner in a

state of near collapse.

He was scarcely in the mood, nor were his soldiers, to appreciate the flood of

congratulatory radiograms that now began to pour in. Goering, who had whiled

away a good part of the winter in sunny Italy, strutting about in his great fur coat

and fingering his jewels, sent a radio message on January 28.

The fight put up by the Sixth Army will go down in history, and future generations will

speak proudly of a Langemarck of daredeviltry, an Alcázar of tenacity, a Narvik of courage

and a Stalingrad of self-sacrifice.

Nor were they cheered when on the last evening, January 30, 1943, the tenth

anniversary of the Nazis’ coming to power, they listened to the fat Reich

Marshal’s bombastic broadcast.

A thousand years hence Germans will speak of this battle [of Stalingrad] with reverence

and awe, and will remember that in spite of everything Germany’s ultimate victory was

decided there … In years to come it will be said of the heroic battle on the Volga: When you

come to Germany, say that you have seen us lying at Stalingrad, as our honor and our leaders

ordained that we should, for the greater glory of Germany.

The glory and the horrible agony of the Sixth Army had now come to an end.

On January 30, Paulus radioed Hitler: “Final collapse cannot be delayed more

than twenty-four hours.”

This signal prompted the Supreme Commander to shower a series of

promotions on the doomed officers in Stalingrad, apparently in the hope that

such honors would strengthen their resolve to die gloriously at their bloody

posts. “There is no record in military history of a German Field Marshal being

taken prisoner,” Hitler remarked to Jodl, and thereupon conferred on Paulus, by

radio, the coveted marshal’s baton. Some 117 other officers were jumped up a

grade. It was a macabre gesture.

The end itself was anticlimactic. Late on the last day of January Paulus got off

his final message to headquarters.

The Sixth Army, true to their oath and conscious of the lofty importance of their mission,

have held their position to the last man and the last round for Fuehrer and Fatherland unto the

end.

At 7:45 P.M. the radio operator at Sixth Army headquarters sent a last message

on his own: “The Russians are at the door of our bunker. We are destroying our

equipment.” He added the letters “CL”—the international wireless code

signifying “This station will no longer transmit.”

There was no last-minute fighting at headquarters. Paulus and his staff did not

hold out to the last man. A squad of Russians led by a junior officer peered into

the commander in chief’s darkened hole in the cellar. The Russians demanded

surrender and the Sixth Army’s chief of staff, General Schmidt, accepted. Paulus

sat dejected on his camp bed. When Schmidt addressed him—“May I ask the

Field Marshal if there is anything more to be said?”—Paulus was too weary to

answer.

Farther north a small German pocket, containing all that was left of two

panzer and four infantry divisions, still held out in the ruins of a tractor factory.

On the night of February 1 it received a message from Hitler’s headquarters.

The German people expect you to do your duty exactly as did the troops holding the

southern fortress. Every day and every hour that you continue to fight facilitates the building

of a new front.

Just before noon on February 2, this group surrendered after a last message to

the Supreme Commander: “… Have fought to the last man against vastly

superior forces. Long live Germany!”

Silence at last settled on the snow-covered, blood-spattered shambles of the

battlefield. At 2:46 P.M. on February 2 a German reconnaissance plane flew high

over the city and radioed back: “No sign of any fighting at Stalingrad.”

By that time 91,000 German soldiers, including twenty-four generals, half-

starved, frostbitten, many of them wounded, all of them dazed and broken, were

hobbling over the ice and snow, clutching their blood-caked blankets over their

heads against the 24-degrees-below-zero cold toward the dreary, frozen prisoner-

of-war camps of Siberia. Except for some 20,000 Rumanians and the 29,000

wounded who had been evacuated by air they were all that was left of a

conquering army that had numbered 285,000 men two months before. The rest

had been slaughtered. And of those 91,000 Germans who began the weary march

into captivity that winter day, only 5,000 were destined ever to see the

Fatherland again. *

Meanwhile back in the well-heated headquarters in East Prussia the Nazi

warlord, whose stubbornness and stupidity were responsible for this disaster,

berated his generals at Stalingrad for not knowing how and when to die. The

records of a conference held by Hitler at OKW with his generals on February 1

survive and shed enlightenment on the nature of the German dictator at this

trying period in his life and that of his Army and country.

They have surrendered there—formally and absolutely. Otherwise they would have closed

ranks, formed a hedgehog, and shot themselves with their last bullet … The man [Paulus]

should have shot himself just as the old commanders who threw themselves on their swords

when they saw that the cause was lost … Even Varus gave his slave the order: “Now kill me!”

Hitler’s venom toward Paulus for deciding to live became more poisonous as

he ranted on.

You have to imagine: he’ll be brought to Moscow—and imagine that rat-trap there. There

he will sign anything. He’ll make confessions, make proclamations—you’ll see. They will

now walk down the slope of spiritual bankruptcy to its lowest depths … You’ll see—it won’t

be a week before Seydlitz and Schmidt and even Paulus are talking over the radio† … They

are going to be put into the Liublanka, and there the rats will eat them. How can one be so

cowardly? I don’t understand it …

What is life? Life is the Nation. The individual must die anyway. Beyond the life of the

individual is the Nation. But how can anyone be afraid of this moment of death, with which he

can free himself from this misery, if his duty doesn’t chain him to this Vale of Tears. Na!

… So many people have to die, and then a man like that besmirches the heroism of so

many others at the last minute. He could have freed himself from all sorrow and ascended into

eternity and national immortality, but he prefers to go to Moscow! …

What hurts me most, personally, is that I still promoted him to field marshal. I wanted to

give him this final satisfaction. That’s the last field marshal I shall appoint in this war. You

mustn’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.27

There followed a brief exchange between Hitler and General Zeitzler on how

to break the news of the surrender to the German people. On February 3, three

days after the act, OKW issued a special communiqué:

The battle of Stalingrad has ended. True to their oath to fight to the last breath, the Sixth

Army under the exemplary leadership of Field Marshal Paulus has been overcome by the

superiority of the enemy and by the unfavorable circumstances confronting our forces.

The reading of the communiqué over the German radio was preceded by the

roll of muffled drums and followed by the playing of the second movement of

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Hitler proclaimed four days of national mourning.

All theaters, movies and variety halls were closed until it was over.

Stalingrad, wrote Walter Goerlitz, the German historian, in his work on the

General Staff, “was a second Jena and was certainly the greatest defeat that a

German army had ever undergone.” 28

But it was more than that. Coupled with El Alamein and the British-American

landings in North Africa it marked the great turning point in World War II. The

high tide of Nazi conquest which had rolled over most of Europe to the frontier

of Asia on the Volga and in Africa almost to the Nile had now begun to ebb and

it would never flow back again. The time of the great Nazi blitz offensives, with

thousands of tanks and planes spreading terror in the ranks of the enemy armies

and cutting them to pieces, had come to an end. There would be, to be sure,

desperate local thrusts—at Kharkov in the spring of 1943, in the Ardennes at

Christmas time in 1944—but they formed part of a defensive struggle which the

Germans were to carry out with great tenacity and valor during the next two—

and last—years of the war. The initiative had passed from Hitler’s hands, never

to return. It was his enemies who seized it now, and held it. And not only on land

but in the air. Already on the night of May 30, 1942, the British had carried out

their first one-thousand-plane bombing of Cologne, and more followed on other

cities during the eventful summer. For the first time the civilian German people,

like the German soldiers at Stalingrad and El Alamein, were to experience the

horrors which their armed forces had inflicted on others up to now.

And finally, in the snows of Stalingrad and in the burning sands of the North

African desert, a great and terrible Nazi dream was destroyed. Not only was the

Third Reich doomed by the disasters to Paulus and Rommel but also the

gruesome and grotesque so-called New Order which Hitler and his S.S. thugs

had been busy setting up in the conquered lands. Before we turn to the final

chapter, the fall of the Third Reich, it might be well to pause and see what this

New Order was like—in theory and in barbarous practice—and what this ancient

and civilized continent of Europe barely escaped after a brief nightmare of

experiencing its first horrors. It must necessarily be for this book, as it was for

the good Europeans who lived through it, or were massacred before it ended, the

darkest chapter of all in the history of the Third Reich.

* Among those retired, it will be recalled, were Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, the

Commander in Chief of the Army, and Field Marshals von Rundstedt and von Bock, who led

the southern and central army groups, respectively, and General Guderian, the genius of the

panzer corps. The commander of the army group in the north, Field Marshal von Leeb, soon

followed, being relieved of his post on January 18, 1942. The day before, Field Marshal von

Reichenau, who had taken over Rundstedt’s command, died of a stroke. General Udet of the

Luftwaffe shot himself to death on November 17, 1941. Moreover, some thirty-five corps and

divisional commanders were replaced during the winter retreat.

This, of course, was only a beginning. Field Marshal von Manstein summed up at

Nuremberg what happened to the generals when they started losing battles or finally got up

enough courage to oppose Hitler. “Of seventeen field marshals,” he told the tribunal, “ten were

sent home during the war and three lost their lives as a result of July 20, 1944 [the plot against

Hitler—W.L.S.]. Only one field marshal managed to get through the war and keep his

position. Of thirty-six full generals [ Generalobersten] eighteen were sent home, and five died

as a result of July 20 or were dishonorably discharged. Only three full generals survived the

war in their positions.” 1

* Lehndorff was executed by the Nazis on September 4, 1944.

* The Prussian King often complained about this malady, which he found hampered his

mental facilities as well as his physical activities.

* Prince Wilhelm, the oldest son, had died of battle wounds in France on May 26, 1940.

* Jens Peter Jessen, a professor of economics at the University of Berlin, was one of the brains

of the circle. He had become an ardent Nazi during the period between 1931 and 1933 and was

one of the few genuine intellectuals in the party. He was quickly disillusioned after 1933 and

soon became a fanatical anti-Nazi. Arrested for complicity in the July 20, 1944, plot against

Hitler, he was executed at the Ploetzensee prison in Berlin in November of that year.

* Goebbels had seen Hitler a month before at headquarters and expressed shock in his diary at

his ailing. “1 noted that he has already become quite gray … He told me he has had to fight off

severe attacks of giddiness … The Fuehrer this time truly worries me.” He had, Goebbels

added, a “physical revulsion against frost and snow … What worries and torments the Fuehrer

most is that the country is still covered with snow …” ( The Goebbels Diaries, pp. 131–37.)

* In a savage series of battles with the British in November and December 1941, Rommel’s

forces had been driven back clear across Cyrenaica to the El Agheila line at its western

borders. But bounding back with his customary resilience in January 1942, Rommel

recaptured half of the ground lost, in a swift seventeen-day campaign which brought him back

to El Gazala, from where the new drive of the end of May 1942 began.

* Hitler’s naming Rommel a field marshal the day after the capture of Tobruk caused

Mussolini “much pain” because, as Ciano noted, it accentuated “the German character of the

battle.” The Duce left immediately for Libya to grab some honors for himself, believing that

he could enter Alexandria, Ciano says, “in fifteen days.” On July 2 he contacted Hitler by wire

about “the question of the future political government of Egypt,” proposing Rommel as the

military commander and an Italian as “civilian delegate.” Hitler replied that he did not

consider the matter “urgent.” ( Ciano Diaries, pp. 502–04.)

“Mussolini was waiting impatiently in Derna [behind the front],” General Fritz Bayerlein,

chief of staff to Rommel, later recalled, “for the day when he might take the salute at a parade

of Axis tanks beneath the shadow of the Pyramids.” ( The Fatal Decisions, ed. Freidin and

Richardson, p. 103.)

* According to General Bayerlein’s postwar testimony. He probably exaggerated his losses.

Allied intelligence gave Rommel 125 tanks.

* This had taken place on February 11–12, 1942, and had caught the British by surprise. Only

weak naval and aircraft forces were rounded up in time to attack the German fleet and they

inflicted little damage. “Vice-Admiral Ciliax [who led the dash],” commented the Times of

London, “has succeeded where the Duke of Medina Sidonia failed … Nothing more

mortifying to the pride of sea power has happened in Home Waters since the 17th Century.”

* Kleist confirmed this to Liddell Hart: “The Fourth Panzer Army … could have taken

Stalingrad without a fight at the end of July, but was diverted south to help me in crossing the

Don. I did not need its aid, and it merely congested the roads I was using. When it turned north

again a fortnight later the Russians had gathered just sufficient forces at Stalingrad to check

it.” By that time Kleist needed the additional tank force. “We could have reached our goal [the

Grozny oil] if my forces had not been drawn away … to help the attack on Stalingrad,” he

added. (Liddell Hart, The German Generals Talk, pp. 169–71.)

* Halder relates that “quite by accident” he came across in the Ukraine about that time a book

about Stalin’s defeat of General Denikin between the Don bend and Stalingrad during the

Russian Civil War. He says the situation then was very similar to that of 1942 and that Stalin

exploited “masterfully” Denikin’s weak defenses along the Don. “Hence,” he adds, “came the

changing of the name of the city from ‘Tsaritsyn’ to ‘Stalingrad.’”

* The sacking of Halder was a loss not only to the Army but to historians of the Third Reich,

for his invaluable diary ends on September 24, 1942. He was eventually arrested, placed in the

concentration camp at Dachau along with such illustrious prisoners as Schuschnigg and

Schacht and liberated by U.S. forces at Niederdorf, South Tyrol, on April 28, 1945. Since

then, up to the time of writing, he has collaborated with the U.S. Army in a number of military

historical studies of World War II. His generosity to this writer in answering queries and

pointing out sources has already been noted.

† The faithful and fanatically loyal General Jodl, Chief of Operations at OKW, also was in

Hitler’s doghouse at this time. He had opposed the sacking of Field Marshal List and General

Halder and his defense of them sent Hitler into such a rage that for months he refused to shake

hands with Jodl or dine with him or any other staff officer. Hitler was on the point of firing

Jodl at the end of January 1943 and replacing him with General Paulus, but it was too late.

Paulus, as we shall shortly see, was no longer available.

* Stumme, who was acting commander in the absence of Rommel, had died of a heart attack

the first night of the British offensive while fleeing on foot over the desert from a British

patrol that had almost captured him.

† The next day, November 4—after telling Bayerlein, “Hitler’s order is a piece of unparalleled

madness. I can’t go along with this any longer”—General von Thoma donned a clean uniform,

with the insignia of his rank and his decorations, stood by his burning tank until a British unit

arrived, surrendered and in the evening dined with Montgomery at his headquarters mess.

* Rommel’s losses at El Alamein were 59,000 killed, wounded and captured, of whom 34,000

were Germans, out of a total force of 96,000 men.

* I learn from Hitler’s captured daily calendar book that the celebration had been moved from

the old Buergerbräukeller, where the putsch had taken place, to a more elegant beer hall in

Munich, the Loewenbräukeller. The Buergerbräukeller, it will be remembered, had been

wrecked by a time bomb which had just missed killing the Fuehrer on the night of November

8, 1939.

* General Giraud at that moment was arriving in Algiers. He had escaped from a German

POW camp and settled in the south of France, where he was taken off by a British submarine

on November 5 and brought to Gibraltar to confer with Eisenhower just before the landings.

† “During the night,” Ciano wrote in his diary on November 9, “Ribbentrop telephoned. Either

the Duce or I must go to Munich as soon as possible. Laval will also be there. I wake up the

Duce. He is not very anxious to leave, especially since he is not feeling very well. I shall go.”

* It is only fair to point out that Hitler strongly suspected, not without reason, that the French

fleet might try to sail for Algeria and join the Allies. Despite his treacherous dealings with the

Germans and his violent hatred of the British, Admiral Darlan, who happened to be visiting an

ailing son at Algiers, had been pressed into service by Eisenhower as French commander in

North Africa not only because he seemed to be the only officer who could get the French

Army and Navy to cease resisting the Anglo–American landings but also in the hope that he

could get the admiral commanding in Tunisia to oppose the German landings there and also

induce the French fleet in Toulon to make a dash for North Africa. The hopes proved vain,

although Darlan tried. To his message ordering Admiral de Laborde to bring the fleet over

from Toulon he received an answer in one expressive—if indelicate—word: “Merde. ” (See the

Procès du M. Pétain.)

* Some 125,000 Germans, according to General Eisenhower, out of a total of 240,000 Axis

troops, the rest being Italian. This number includes only those who surrendered during the last

week of the campaign—May 5 to 12, 1943. ( Crusade in Europe, p. 156.)

* In his postwar memoirs, Field Marshal von Manstein says that on December 19, in

disobedience to Hitler’s orders, he actually directed the Sixth Army to begin to break out of

Stalingrad to the southwest and make a junction with the Fourth Panzer Army. He publishes

the text of the directive. But it contained certain reservations and Paulus, who still was under

orders from Hitler not to break out, must have been greatly confused by it. “This,” declares

Manstein, “was our one and only chance of saving the Sixth Army.” (Manstein, Lost Victories,

pp. 336–41, 562–63.)

* According to the figure given by the Bonn government in 1958. Many of the prisoners died

during an epidemic of typhus in the following spring.

† Hitler was correct in his forecast, except for the timing. By July of the following summer

Paulus and Seydlitz, who became the leaders of the so-called National Committee of Free

Germany, did take to the air over the Moscow radio to urge the Army to eliminate Hitler.

Book Five

BEGINNING OF THE END

27

THE NEW ORDER

NO COMPREHENSIVE BLUEPRINT for the New Order was ever drawn up, but it is

clear from the captured documents and from what took place that Hitler knew

very well what he wanted it to be: a Nazi-ruled Europe whose resources would

be exploited for the profit of Germany, whose people would be made the slaves

of the German master race and whose “undesirable elements”—above all, the

Jews, but also many Slavs in the East, especially the intelligentsia among them

—would be exterminated.

The Jews and the Slavic peoples were the Untermenschen—subhumans. To

Hitler they had no right to live, except as some of them, among the Slavs, might

be needed to toil in the fields and the mines as slaves of their German masters.

Not only were the great cities of the East, Moscow, Leningrad and Warsaw, to

be permanently erased* but the culture of the Russians and Poles and other Slavs

was to be stamped out and formal education denied them. Their thriving

industries were to be dismantled and shipped to Germany and the people

themselves confined to the pursuits of agriculture so that they could grow food

for Germans, being allowed to keep for themselves just enough to subsist on.

Europe itself, as the Nazi leaders put it, must be made “Jew-free.”

“What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest,”

declared Heinrich Himmler on October 4, 1943, in a confidential address to his

S.S. officers at Posen. By this time Himmler, as chief of the S.S. and the entire

police apparatus of the Third Reich, was next to Hitler in importance, holding

the power of life and death not only over eighty million Germans but over twice

that many conquered people.

What the nations [Himmler continued] can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we

will take, if necessary by kidnaping their children and raising them here with us. Whether

nations live in prosperity or starve to death like cattle interests me only in so far as we need

them as slaves to our Kultur; otherwise it is of no interest to me.

Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an antitank

ditch interests me only in so far as the antitank ditch for Germany is finished …1

Long before Himmler’s Posen speech in 1943 (to which we shall return, for it

covers other aspects of the New Order) the Nazi chiefs had laid down their

thoughts and plans for enslaving the people of the East.

By October 15, 1940, Hitler had decided on the future of the Czechs, the first

Slavic people he had conquered. One half of them were to be “assimilated,”

mostly by shipping them as slave labor to Germany. The other half,

“particularly” the intellectuals, were simply to be, in the words of a secret report

on the subject, “eliminated. ”2

A fortnight before, on October 2, the Fuehrer had clarified his thoughts about

the fate of the Poles, the second of the Slavic peoples to be conquered. His

faithful secretary, Martin Bormann, has left a long memorandum on the Nazi

plans, which Hitler outlined to Hans Frank, the Governor General of rump

Poland, and to other officials.3

The Poles [Hitler “emphasized”] are especially born for low labor … There can be no

question of improvement for them. It is necessary to keep the standard of life low in Poland

and it must not be permitted to rise … The Poles are lazy and it is necessary to use compulsion

to make them work … The Government General [of Poland] should be used by us merely as a

source of unskilled labor … Every year the laborers needed by the Reich could be procured

from there.

As for the Polish priests,

they will preach what we want them to preach. If any priest acts differently, we shall make

short work of him. The task of the priest is to keep the Poles quiet, stupid and dull-witted.

There were two other classes of Poles to be dealt with and the Nazi dictator

did not neglect mention of them.

It is indispensable to bear in mind that the Polish gentry must cease to exist; however cruel

this may sound, they must be exterminated wherever they are …

There should be one master only for the Poles, the German. Two masters, side by side,

cannot and must not exist. Therefore, all representatives of the Polish intelligentsia are to be

exterminated. This sounds cruel, but such is the law of life.

This obsession of the Germans with the idea that they were the master race

and that the Slavic peoples must be their slaves was especially virulent in regard

to Russia. Erich Koch, the roughneck Reich Commissar for the Ukraine,

expressed it in a speech at Kiev on March 5, 1943.

We are the Master Race and must govern hard but just … I will draw the very last out of

this country. I did not come to spread bliss … The population must work, work, and work

again … We definitely did not come here to give out manna. We have come here to create the

basis for victory.

We are a master race, which must remember that the lowliest German worker is racially

and biologically a thousand times more valuable than the population here.4

Nearly a year before, on July 23, 1942, when the German armies in Russia

were nearing the Volga and the oil fields of the Caucasus, Martin Bormann,

Hitler’s party secretary and, by now, right-hand man, wrote a long letter to

Rosenberg reiterating the Fuehrer’s views on the subject. The letter was summed

up by an official in Rosenberg’s ministry:

The Slavs are to work for us. In so far as we don’t need them, they may die. Therefore

compulsory vaccination and German health services are superfluous. The fertility of the Slavs

is undesirable. They may use contraceptives or practice abortion—the more the better.

Education is dangerous. It is enough if they can count up to 100…. Every educated person is a

future enemy. Religion we leave to them as a means of diversion. As for food they won’t get

any more than is absolutely necessary. We are the masters. We come first. 5

When the German troops first entered Russia they were in many places hailed

as liberators by a population long ground down and terrorized by Stalin’s

tyranny. There were, in the beginning, wholesale desertions among the Russian

soldiers. Especially in the Baltic, which had been under Soviet occupation but a

short time, and in the Ukraine, where an incipient independence movement had

never been quite stamped out, many were happy to be freed from the Soviet

yoke—even by the Germans.

There were a few in Berlin who believed that if Hitler played his cards

shrewdly, treating the population with consideration and promising relief from

Bolshevik practices (by granting religious and economic freedom and making

true co-operatives out of the collectivized farms) and eventual self-government,

the Russian people could be won over. They might then not only co-operate with

the Germans in the occupied regions but in the unoccupied ones strive for

liberation from Stalin’s harsh rule. If this were done, it was argued, the

Bolshevik regime itself might collapse and the Red Army disintegrate, as the

Czarist armies had done in 1917.

But the savagery of the Nazi occupation and the obvious aims of the German

conquerors, often publicly proclaimed, to plunder the Russian lands, enslave

their peoples and colonize the East with Germans soon destroyed any possibility

of such a development.

No one summed up this disastrous policy and all the opportunities it destroyed

better than a German himself, Dr. Otto Bräutigam, a career diplomat and the

deputy leader of the Political Department of Rosenberg’s newly created Ministry

for the Occupied Eastern Territories. In a bitter confidential report to his

superiors on October 25, 1942, Bräutigam dared to pinpoint the Nazi mistakes in

Russia.

In the Soviet Union we found on our arrival a population weary of Bolshevism, which

waited longingly for new slogans holding out the prospect of a better future for them. It was

Germany’s duty to find such slogans, but they remained unuttered. The population greeted us

with joy as liberators and placed themselves at our disposal.

Actually, there was a slogan but the Russian people soon saw through it.

With the inherent instinct of the Eastern peoples [Bräutigam continued], the primitive man

soon found out that for Germany the slogan “Liberation from Bolshevism” was only a pretext

to enslave the Eastern peoples according to her own methods … The worker and peasant soon

perceived that Germany did not regard them as partners of equal rights but considered them

only as the objective of her political and economic aims … With unequaled presumption, we

put aside all political knowledge and … treat the peoples of the occupied Eastern territories as

“Second-Class Whites” to whom Providence has merely assigned the task of serving as slaves

for Germany …

There were two other developments, Bräutigam declared, which had turned

the Russians against the Germans: the barbaric treatment of Soviet prisoners of

war and the shanghaiing of Russian men and women for slave labor.

It is no longer a secret from friend or foe that hundreds of thousands of Russian prisoners

of war have died of hunger or cold in our camps … We now experience the grotesque picture

of having to recruit millions of laborers from the occupied Eastern territories after prisoners of

war have died of hunger like flies …

In the prevailing limitless abuse of the Slavic humanity, “recruiting” methods were used

which probably have their origin only in the blackest periods of the slave traffic. A regular

man hunt was inaugurated. Without consideration of health or age the people were shipped to

Germany …*

German policy and practice in Russia had “brought about the enormous

resistance of the Eastern peoples,” this official concluded.

Our policy has forced both Bolshevists and Russian nationalists into a common front

against us. The Russian fights today with exceptional bravery and self-sacrifice for nothing

more or less than recognition of his human dignity.

Closing his thirteen-page memorandum on a positive note Dr. Bräutigam

asked for a complete change of policy. “The Russian people,” he argued, “must

be told something concrete about their future.” 6

But this was a voice in the Nazi wilderness. Hitler, as we have seen, already

had laid down, before the attack began, his directives on what would be done

with Russia and the Russians* and he was not a man who could be persuaded by

any living German to change them by one iota.

On July 16, 1941, less than a month after the commencement of the Russian

campaign but when it was already evident from the initial German successes that

a large slice of the Soviet Union would soon be within grasp, Hitler convoked

Goering, Keitel, Rosenberg, Bormann and Lammers (the last, head of the Reich

Chancellery) to his headquarters in East Prussia to remind them of his aims in

the newly conquered land. At last his goal so clearly stated in Mein Kampf of

securing a vast German Lebensraum in Russia was in sight and it is clear from

the confidential memorandum of the meeting drawn up by Bormann (which

showed up at Nuremberg)7 that he wanted his chief lieutenants to understand

well what he intended to do with it. His intentions, he admonished, must

however not be “publicized.”

There is no need for that [Hitler said] but the main thing is that we ourselves know what we

want … Nobody must be able to recognize that it initiates a final settlement. This need not

prevent our taking all necessary measures—shooting, resettling, etc.—and we shall take them.

In principle, Hitler continued,

we now have to face the task of cutting up the cake according to our needs in order to be able:

first, to dominate it;

second, to administer it;

third, to exploit it.

He did not mind, he said, that the Russians had ordered partisan warfare

behind the German lines; “it enables us to eradicate everyone who opposes us.”

In general, Hitler explained, Germany would dominate the Russian territory

up to the Urals. None but Germans would be permitted to carry weapons in that

vast space. Then Hitler went over specifically what would be done with various

slices of the Russian cake.

The entire Baltic country will have to be incorporated into Germany … The Crimea has to

be evacuated by all foreigners and settled by Germans only, [becoming] Reich territory … The

Kola Peninsula will be taken by Germany because of the large nickel mines there. The

annexation of Finland as a federated state should be prepared with caution … The Fuehrer will

raze Leningrad to the ground and then hand it over to the Finns.

The Baku oil fields, Hitler ordered, would become a “German concession”

and the German colonies on the Volga would be annexed outright. When it came

to a discussion as to which Nazi leaders would administer the new territory a

violent quarrel broke out.

Rosenberg states he intends to use Captain von Petersdorff, owing to his special merits;

general consternation; general rejections. The Fuehrer and the Reich Marshal [Goering] both

emphasize there was no doubt that Von Petersdorff was insane.

There was also an argument on the best methods of policing the conquered

Russian people. Hitler suggested the German police be equipped with armored

cars. Goering doubted that they would be necessary. His planes could “drop

bombs in case of riots,” he said.

Naturally [Goering added] this giant area would have to be pacified as quickly as possible.

The best solution would be to shoot anybody who looked sideways. *

Goering, as head of the Four-Year Plan, was also put in charge of the

economic exploitation of Russia. † “Plunder” would be a better word, as Goering

made clear in a speech to the Nazi commissioners for the occupied territories on

August 6, 1942. “It used to be called plundering,” he said. “But today things

have become more humane. In spite of that, I intend to plunder and to do it

thoroughly.” 8 On this, at least, he was as good as his word, not only in Russia

but throughout Nazi-conquered Europe. It was all part of the New Order.

THE NAZI PLUNDER OF EUROPE

The total amount of loot will never be known; it has proved beyond man’s

capacity to accurately compute. But some figures are available, many of them

from the Germans themselves. They show with what Germanic thoroughness the

instructions which Goering once gave to his subordinates were carried out.

Whenever you come across anything that may be needed by the German people, you must

be after it like a bloodhound. It must be taken out … and brought to Germany.9

A great deal was taken out, not only in goods and services but in banknotes

and gold. Whenever Hitler occupied a country, his financial agents seized the

gold and foreign holdings of its national bank. That was a mere beginning.

Staggering “occupation costs” were immediately assessed. By the end of

February 1944, Count Schwerin von Krosigk, the Nazi Minister of Finance, put

the total take from such payments at some 48 billion marks (roughly

$12,000,000,000), of which France, which was milked heavier than any other

conquered country, furnished more than half. By the end of the war, receipts

from occupation assessments amounted to an estimated 60 billion marks

($15,000,000,000).

France was forced to pay 31.5 billions of this total, its annual contributions of

more than 7 billions coming to over four times the yearly sums which Germany

had paid in reparations under the Dawes and Young plans after the first war—a

tribute which had seemed such a heinous crime to Hitler. In addition the Bank of

France was forced to grant “credits” to Germany totaling 4.5 billion marks and

the French government to pay a further half billion in “fines.” At Nuremberg it

was estimated that the Germans extracted in occupation costs and “credits” two

thirds of Belgium’s national income and a similar percentage from the

Netherlands. Altogether, according to a study by the U.S. Strategic Bombing

Survey, Germany extracted in tribute from the conquered nations a total of 104

billion marks ($26,000,000,000). *

But the goods seized and transported to the Reich without even the formality

of payment can never possibly be estimated. Figures kept pouring in at

Nuremberg until they overwhelmed one; but no expert, so far as I know, was

ever able to straighten them out and compute totals. In France, for example, it

was estimated that the Germans carted off (as “levies in kind”) 9 million tons of

cereals, 75 per cent of the total production of oats, 80 per cent of oil, 74 per cent

of steel, and so on, for a grand total of 184.5 billion francs.

Russia, devastated by warfare and German savagery, proved harder to milk.

Nazi documents are full of reports of Soviet “deliveries.” In 1943, for example, 9

million tons of cereals, 2 million tons of fodder, 3 million tons of potatoes,

662,000 tons of meat were listed by the Germans among the “deliveries,” to

which the Soviet Committee of Investigation added—for the duration of the

occupation—9 million cattle, 12 million pigs, 13 million sheep, to mention a few

items. But Russian “deliveries” proved much less than expected; the Germans

calculated them as worth a net of only some 4 billion marks ($1,000,000,000).*

Everything possible was squeezed out of Poland by the greedy Nazi

conquerors. “I shall endeavor,” said Dr. Frank, the Governor General, “to

squeeze out of this province everything that is still possible to squeeze out.” This

was at the end of 1942, and in the three years since the occupation he had

already squeezed out, as he continually boasted, a great deal, especially in

foodstuffs for hungry Germans in the Reich. He warned, however, that “if the

new food scheme is carried out in 1943 a half-million people in Warsaw and its

suburbs alone will be deprived of food. ”10

The nature of the New Order in Poland had been laid down as soon as the

country was conquered. On October 3, 1939, Frank informed the Army of

Hitler’s orders.

Poland can only be administered by utilizing the country through means of ruthless

exploitation, deportation of all supplies, raw materials, machines, factory installations, etc.,

which are important for the German war economy, availability of all workers for work within

Germany, reduction of the entire Polish economy to absolute minimum necessary for bare

existence of the population, closing of all educational institutions, especially technical schools

and colleges in order to prevent the growth of the new Polish intelligentsia. Poland shall be

treated as a colony. The Poles shall be the slaves of the Greater German Reich.11

Rudolf Hess, the Nazi deputy Fuehrer, added that Hitler had decided that

“Warsaw shall not be rebuilt, nor is it the intention of the Fuehrer to rebuild or

reconstruct any industry in the Government General.” 12

By decree of Dr. Frank, all property in Poland belonging not only to Jews but

to Poles was subject to confiscation without compensation. Hundreds of

thousands of Polish-owned farms were simply grabbed and handed over to

German settlers. By May 31, 1943, in the four Polish districts annexed to

Germany (West Prussia, Posen, Zichenau, Silesia) some 700,000 estates

comprising 15 million acres were “seized” and 9,500 estates totaling 6.5 million

acres “confiscated.” The difference between “seizure” and “confiscation” is not

explained in the elaborate table prepared by the German “Central Estate

Office, ”13 and to the dispossessed Poles it must not have mattered.

Even the art treasures in the occupied lands were looted, and, as the captured

Nazi documents later revealed, on the express orders of Hitler and Goering, who

thereby greatly augmented their “private” collections. The corpulent Reich

Marshal, according to his own estimate, brought his own collection up to a value

of 50 million Reichsmarks. Indeed, Goering was the driving force in this

particular field of looting. Immediately upon the conquest of Poland he issued

orders for the seizure of art treasures there and within six months the special

commissioner appointed to carry out his command could report that he had taken

over “almost the entire art treasury of the country.” 14

But it was in France where the bulk of the great art treasures of Europe lay,

and no sooner was this country added to the Nazi conquests than Hitler and

Goering decreed their seizure. To carry out this particular plunder Hitler

appointed Rosenberg, who set up an organization called Einsatzstab Rosenberg,

and who was assisted not only by Goering but by General Keitel. Indeed one

order by Keitel to the Army in France stated that Rosenberg “is entitled to

transport to Germany cultural goods which appear valuable to him and to

safeguard them there. The Fuehrer has reserved for himself the decision as to

their use.” 15

An idea of Hitler’s decision “as to their use” is revealed in a secret order

issued by Goering on November 5, 1940, specifying the distribution of art

objects being collected at the Louvre in Paris. They were “to be disposed of in

the following way”:

1. Those art objects about which the Fuehrer has reserved for himself the decision as to

their use.

2. Those … which serve the completion of the Reich Marshal’s [i.e., Goering’s] collection

…

4. Those … that are suited to be sent to German museums …16

The French government protested the looting of the country’s art treasures,

declaring that it was a violation of the Hague convention, and when one German

art expert on Rosenberg’s staff, a Herr Bunjes, dared to call this to the attention

of Goering, the fat one replied:

“My dear Bunjes, let me worry about that. I am the highest jurist in the state.

It is my orders which are decisive and you will act accordingly.”

And so according to a report of Bunjes—it is his only appearance in the

history of the Third Reich, so far as the documents show—

those art objects collected at the Jeu de Paume which are to go into the Fuehrer’s possession

and those which the Reich Marshal claims for himself will be loaded into two railroad cars

which will be attached to the Reich Marshal’s special train … to Berlin. 17

Many more carloads followed. According to a secret official German report

some 137 freight cars loaded with 4,174 cases of art works comprising 21,903

objects, including 10,890 paintings, made the journey from the West to Germany

up to July 1944. 18 They included works of, among others, Rembrandt, Rubens,

Hals, Vermeer, Velazquez, Murillo, Goya, Vecchio, Watteau, Fragonard,

Reynolds and Gainsborough. As early as January 1941, Rosenberg estimated the

art loot from France alone as worth a billion marks. 19

The plunder of raw materials, manufactured goods and food, though it

reduced the occupied peoples to impoverishment, hunger and sometimes

starvation and violated the Hague Convention on the conduct of war, might have

been excused, if not justified, by the Germans as necessitated by the harsh

exigencies of total war. But the stealing of art treasures did not help Hitler’s war

machine. It was a case merely of avarice, of the personal greed of Hitler and

Goering.

All this plunder and spoliation the conquered populations could have endured

—wars and enemy occupation had always brought privation in their wake. But

this was only a part of the New Order—the mildest part. It was in the plunder

not of material goods but of human lives that the mercifully short-lived New

Order will be longest remembered. Here Nazi degradation sank to a level seldom

experienced by man in all his time on earth. Millions of decent, innocent men

and women were driven into forced labor, millions more tortured and tormented

in the concentration camps and millions more still, of whom there were four and

a half million Jews alone, were massacred in cold blood or deliberately starved

to death and their remains—in order to remove the traces—burned.

This incredible story of horror would be unbelievable were it not fully

documented and testified to by the perpetrators themselves. What follows here—

a mere summary, which must because of limitations of space leave out a

thousand shocking details—is based on that incontrovertible evidence, with

occasional corroboration from the eyewitness accounts of the few survivors.

SLAVE LABOR IN THE NEW ORDER

By the end of September 1944, some seven and a half million civilian

foreigners were toiling for the Third Reich. Nearly all of them had been rounded

up by force, deported to Germany in boxcars, usually without food or water or

any sanitary facilities, and there put to work in the factories, fields and mines.

They were not only put to work but degraded, beaten and starved and often left

to die for lack of food, clothing and shelter.

In addition, two million prisoners of war were added to the foreign labor

force, at least a half a million of whom were made to work in the armaments and

munitions industries in flagrant violation of the Hague and Geneva conventions,

which stipulated that no war prisoners could be employed in such tasks. * This

figure did not include the hundreds of thousands of other POWs who were

impressed into the building of fortifications and in carrying ammunition to the

front lines and even in manning antiaircraft guns in further disregard of the

international conventions which Germany had signed. †

In the massive deportations of slave labor to the Reich, wives were torn away

from their husbands, and children from their parents, and assigned to widely

separated parts of Germany. The young, if they were old enough to work at all,

were not spared. Even top generals of the Army co-operated in the kidnaping of

children, who were carted off to the homeland to perform slave labor. A

memorandum from Rosenberg’s files of June 12, 1944, reveals this practice in

occupied Russia.

Army Group Center intends to apprehend forty to fifty thousand youths from the age of 10

to 14…. and transport them to the Reich. The measure was originally proposed by the Ninth

Army … It is intended to allot these juveniles primarily to the German trades as apprentices….

This action is being greatly welcomed by the German trade since it represents a decisive

measure for the alleviation of the shortage of apprentices.

This action is not only aimed at preventing a direct reinforcement of the enemy’s strength

but also as a reduction of his biological potentialities.

The kidnaping operation had a code name: “Hay Action.” It was also being

carried out, the memorandum added, by Field Marshal Model’s Army Group

Ukraine-North. 22

Increasing terrorization was used to round up the victims. At first,

comparatively mild methods were used. Persons coming out of church or the

movies were nabbed. In the West especially, S.S. units merely blocked off a

section of a town and seized all able-bodied men and women. Villages were

surrounded and searched for the same purposes. In the East, when there was

resistance to the forced-labor order, villages were simply burned down and their

inhabitants carted off. Rosenberg’s captured files are replete with German

reports of such happenings. In Poland, at least one German official thought

things were going a little too far.

The wild and ruthless man hunt [he wrote to Governor Frank], as exercised everywhere in

towns and country, in streets, squares, stations, even in churches, at night in homes, has badly

shaken the feeling of security of the inhabitants. Everybody is exposed to the danger of being

seized anywhere and at any time by the police, suddenly and unexpectedly, and of being sent

to an assembly camp. None of his relatives knows what has happened to him. 23

But rounding up the slave workers was only the first step. * The condition of

their transport to Germany left something to be desired. A certain Dr. Gutkelch

described one instance in a report to Rosenberg’s ministry on September 30,

1942. Recounting how a train packed with returning worked-out Eastern laborers

met a train at a siding near Brest Litovsk full of “newly recruited” Russian

workers bound for Germany, he wrote:

Because of the corpses in the trainload of returning laborers a catastrophe might have

occurred … In this train women gave birth to babies who were thrown out of the windows

during the journey. Persons having tuberculosis and venereal diseases rode in the same car.

Dying people lay in freight cars without straw, and one of the dead was thrown on the railway

embankment. The same must have occurred in other returning transports. 25

This was not a very promising introduction to the Third Reich for the

Ostarbeiter, but at least it prepared them somewhat for the ordeal that lay ahead.

Hunger lay ahead and beatings and disease and exposure to the cold, in unheated

quarters and in their thin rags. Long hours of labor lay ahead that were limited

only by their ability to stand on their feet.

The great Krupp works, makers of Germany’s guns and tanks and

ammunition, was a typical place of employment. Krupp employed a large

number of slave laborers, including Russian prisoners of war. At one point

during the war, six hundred Jewish women from the Buchenwald concentration

camp were brought in to work at Krupp’s, being “housed” in a bombed-out work

camp from which the previous inmates, Italian POWs, had been removed. Dr.

Wilhelm Jaeger, the “senior doctor” for Krupp’s slaves, described in an affidavit

at Nuremberg what he found there when he took over.

Upon my first visit I found these females suffering from open festering wounds and other

diseases. I was the first doctor they had seen for at least a fortnight … There were no medical

supplies … They had no shoes and went about in their bare feet. The sole clothing of each

consisted of a sack with holes for their arms and head. Their hair was shorn. The camp was

surrounded by barbed wire and closely guarded by S.S. guards.

The amount of food in the camp was extremely meager and of very poor quality. One could

not enter the barracks without being attacked by fleas … I got large boils on my arms and the

rest of my body from them …

Dr. Jaeger reported the situation to the directors of Krupp and even to the

personal physician of Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the owner—but in

vain. Nor did his reports on other Krupp slave labor camps bring any alleviation.

He recalled in his affidavit some of these reports of conditions in eight camps

inhabited by Russian and Polish workers: overcrowding that bred disease, lack

of enough food to keep a man alive, lack of water, lack of toilets.

The clothing of the Eastern workers was likewise completely inadequate. They worked and

slept in the same clothing in which they had arrived from the East. Virtually all of them had no

overcoats and were compelled to use their blankets as coats in cold and rainy weather. In view

of the shortage of shoes many workers were forced to go to work in their bare feet, even in

winter …

Sanitary conditions were atrocious. At Kramerplatz only ten children’s toilets were

available for 1,200 inhabitants … Excretion contaminated the entire floors of these lavatories

… The Tartars and Kirghiz suffered most; they collapsed like flies [from] bad housing, the

poor quality and insufficient quantity of food, overwork and insufficient rest.

These workers were likewise afflicted with spotted fever. Lice, the carrier of the disease,

together with countless fleas, bugs and other vermin tortured the inhabitants of these camps …

At times the water supply at the camps was shut off for periods of from eight to fourteen days

…

On the whole, Western slave workers fared better than those from the East—

the latter being considered by the Germans as mere scum. But the difference was

only relative, as Dr. Jaeger found at one of Krupp’s work camps occupied by

French prisoners of war in Nogerratstrasse at Essen.

Its inhabitants were kept for nearly half a year in dog kennels, urinals and in old baking

houses. The dog kennels were three feet high, nine feet long, six feet wide. Five men slept in

each of them. The prisoners had to crawl into these kennels on all fours … There was no water

in the camp. *26

Some two and a half million slave laborers—mostly Slavs and Italians—were

assigned to farm work in Germany and though their life from the very force of

circumstances was better than that of those in the city factories it was far from

ideal—or even humane. A captured directive on the “Treatment of Foreign Farm

Workers of Polish Nationality” gives an inkling of their treatment. And though

applied to Poles—it is dated March 6, 1941, before Russians became available—

it was later used as guidance for those of other nationalities.

Farm workers of Polish nationality no longer have the right to complain, and thus no

complaints will be accepted by any official agency … The visit of churches is strictly

prohibited … Visits to theaters, motion pictures or other cultural entertainment are strictly

prohibited …

Sexual intercourse with women and girls is strictly prohibited.

If it was with German females, it was, according to an edict of Himmler in

1942, punishable by death.*

The use of “railroads, buses or other public conveyances” was prohibited for

slave farm workers. This apparently was ordained so that they would not escape

from the farms to which they were bound.

Arbitrary change of employment [the directive stated] is strictly prohibited.

The farm workers have to labor as long as is demanded by the employer. There

are no time limits to the working time.

Every employer has the right to give corporal punishment to his farm workers … They

should, if possible, be removed from the community of the home and they can be quartered in

stables, etc. No remorse whatever should restrict such action.28

Even the Slav women seized and shipped to Germany for domestic service

were treated as slaves. As early as 1942 Hitler had commanded Sauckel to

procure a half million of them “in order to relieve the German housewife.” The

slave labor commissar laid down the conditions of work in the German

households.

There is no claim to free time. Female domestic workers from the East may leave the

household only to take care of domestic tasks … It is prohibited for them to enter restaurants,

movies, theaters and similar establishments. Attending church is also prohibited …29

Women, it is obvious, were almost as necessary as men in the Nazi slave labor

program. Of some three million Russian civilians pressed into service by the

Germans, more than one half were women. Most of them were assigned to do

heavy farm work and to labor in the factories.

The enslavement of millions of men and women of the conquered lands as

lowly toilers for the Third Reich was not just a wartime measure. From the

statements of Hitler, Goering, Himmler and the others already cited—and they

are only a tiny sampling—it is clear that if Nazi Germany had endured, the New

Order would have meant the rule of the German master race over a vast slave

empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Ural mountains. To be sure, the Slavs

in the East would have fared the worst.

As Hitler emphasized in July 1941, scarcely a month after he had attacked the

Soviet Union, his plans for its occupation constituted “a final settlement.” A year

later, at the high tide of his Russian conquests, he admonished his aides:

As for the ridiculous hundred million Slavs, we will mold the best of them to the shape that

suits us, and we will isolate the rest of them in their own pigsties; and anyone who talks about

cherishing the local inhabitant and civilizing him, goes straight off to a concentration camp! 30

THE PRISONERS OF WAR

Though it was a flagrant violation of the Hague and Geneva conventions to

use prisoners of war in armament factories or in any labor connected with the

fighting at the front such employment, massive as it was, constituted the least of

worries for the millions of soldiers captured by the Third Reich.

Their overwhelming concern was to survive the war. If they were Russian the

odds were greatly against them. There were more Soviet war prisoners than all

others put together—some five and three-quarter million of them. Of these

barely one million were found alive when Allied troops liberated the inmates of

the POW camps in 1945. About a million had either been released during the

war or allowed to serve in the collaborator units set up by the German Army.

Two million Russian prisoners of war died in German captivity—from

starvation, exposure and disease. The remaining million have never been

accounted for and at Nuremberg a good case was made that most of them either

had died from the above causes or had been exterminated by the S.D. (S.S.

Security Service). According to the German records 67,000 were executed, but

this is most certainly a partial figure.31

The bulk of the Russian war prisoners—some 3,800,000 of them—were taken

by the Germans in the first phase of the Russian campaign, in the great battles of

encirclement which were fought from June 21 to December 6, 1941. Admittedly

it was difficult for an army in the midst of combat and rapid advance to care

adequately for such a large number of captives. But the Germans made no effort

to. Indeed the Nazi records show, as we have seen, that the Soviet prisoners were

deliberately starved and left out in the open without shelter to die in the terrible

subzero snowbound winter of 1941–42.

“The more of these prisoners who die, the better it is for us,” was the attitude

of many Nazi officials according to no less an authority than Rosenberg.

The clumsy Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories was not a humane

Nazi, particularly in regard to the Russians, with whom, as we have seen, he had

grown up. But even he was moved to protest the treatment of Russian prisoners

in a long letter to General Keitel, the Chief of OKW, dated February 28, 1942.

This was the moment when the Soviet counteroffensive which had hurled the

Germans back before Moscow and Rostov had reached its farthest penetrations

that winter and when the Germans had realized at last that their gamble of

destroying Russia in one short campaign—or perhaps ever—had failed and that

just possibly, now that the U.S.A. had been added to Russia and Britain as their

enemies, they might not win the war, in which case they would be held

accountable for their war crimes.

The fate of the Soviet prisoners of war in Germany [Rosenberg wrote Keitel] is a tragedy

of the greatest extent. Of the 3,600,000 of them, only several hundred thousand are still able to

work fully. A large part of them have starved, or died because of the hazards of the weather.

This could have been avoided, Rosenberg continued. There was food enough

in Russia to provide them.

However, in the majority of cases the camp commanders have forbidden food to be put at

the disposal of the prisoners; they have rather let them starve to death. Even on the march to

the camps, the civilian population was not allowed to give the prisoners food. In many cases

when the prisoners could no longer keep up on the march because of hunger and exhaustion,

they were shot before the eyes of the horrified civilian population and the corpses were left. In

numerous camps no shelter for the prisoners was provided at all. They lay under the open sky

during rain or snow …

Finally, the shooting of prisoners of war must be mentioned. These … ignore all political

understanding. For instance, in various camps all the “Asiatics” were shot…32

Not only Asiatics. Shortly after the beginning of the Russian campaign an

agreement was reached between OKW and the S.S. Security Service for the

latter to “screen” Russian prisoners. The objective was disclosed in an affidavit

by Otto Ohlendorf, one of the S.D.s great killers and like so many of the men

around Himmler a displaced intellectual, for he had university degrees both in

the law and in economics and had been a professor at the Institute for Applied

Economic Science.

All Jews and Communist functionaries [Ohlendorf testified] were to be removed from the

prisoner-of-war camps and were to be executed. To my knowledge this action was carried out

throughout the entire Russian campaign. 33

But not without difficulties. Sometimes the Russian captives were so

exhausted that they could not even walk to their execution. This brought a

protest from Heinrich Mueller, the chief of the Gestapo, a dapper-looking fellow

but also a cold, dispassionate killer. *

The commanders of the concentration camps are complaining that 5 to 10 per cent of the

Soviet Russians destined for execution are arriving in the camps dead or half dead … It was

particularly noted that when marching, for example, from the railroad station to the camp, a

rather large number of prisoners collapsed on the way from exhaustion, either dead or half

dead, and had to be picked up by a truck following the convoy. It cannot be prevented that the

German people take notice of these occurrences.

The Gestapo didn’t care a rap about the Russian captives falling dead from

starvation and exhaustion, except that it robbed the executioners of their prey.

But they didn’t want the German people to see the spectacle. “Gestapo Mueller,”

as he was known in Germany, therefore ordered that

effective from today [November 9, 1941] Soviet Russians obviously marked by death and who

therefore are not able to withstand the exertions of even a short march shall in the future be

excluded from the transport into the concentration camps for execution.34

Dead prisoners or even starved and exhausted ones could not perform work

and in 1942, when it became obvious to the Germans that the war was going to

last considerably longer than they had expected and that the captive Soviet

soldiers constituted a badly needed labor reservoir, the Nazis abandoned their

policy of exterminating them in favor of working them. Himmler explained the

change in his speech to the S.S. at Posen in 1943.

At that time [1941] we did not value the mass of humanity as we value it today, as raw

material, as labor. What after all, thinking in terms of generations; is not to be regretted but is

now deplorable by reason of the loss of labor, is that the prisoners died in tens and hundreds of

thousands of exhaustion and hunger.35

They were now to be fed enough to enable them to work. By December 1944,

three quarters of a million of them, including many officers, were toiling in the

armament factories, the mines (where 200,000 were assigned) and on the farms.

Their treatment was harsh, but at least they were allowed to live. Even the

branding of the Russian war captives, which General Keitel had proposed, was

abandoned. *

The treatment of Western prisoners of war, especially of the British and

Americans, was comparatively milder than that meted out by the Germans to the

Russians. There were occasional instances of the murder and massacre of them

but this was due usually to the excessive sadism and cruelty of individual

commanders. Such a case was the slaughter in cold blood of seventy-one

American prisoners of war in a field near Malmédy, Belgium, on December 17,

1944, during the Battle of the Bulge.

There were other occasions when Hitler himself ordered the murder of

Western prisoners, as he did in the case of fifty British flyers who were caught in

the spring of 1944, after escaping from a camp at Sagan. At Nuremberg Goering

said he “considered it the most serious incident of the whole war” and General

Jodl called it “sheer murder.”

Actually it seemed to be part of a deliberate German policy, adopted after

Anglo–American bombing of Germany became so extensive from 1943 on, to

encourage the killing of Allied airmen who had bailed out over Germany.

Civilians were encouraged to lynch the flyers as soon as they had parachuted to

the ground and a number of these Germans were tried after the war for having

done so. In 1944 when the Anglo–American bombings were reaching their peak

Ribbentrop urged that airmen shot down be summarily executed but Hitler took

a somewhat milder view. On May 21, 1944, in agreement with Goering, he

merely ordered that captured flyers who had machine-gunned passenger trains or

civilians or German planes which had made emergency landings be shot without

court-martial.

Sometimes captured flyers were simply turned over to the S.D. for “special

treatment.” Thus some forty-seven American, British and Dutch flyers, all

officers, were brutally murdered at Mauthausen concentration camp in

September 1944. An eyewitness, Maurice Lampe, a French inmate at the camp,

described at Nuremberg how it was done.

The forty-seven officers were led barefooted to the quarry … At the bottom of the steps the

guards loaded stones on the backs of these poor men and they had to carry them to the top.

The first journey was made with stones weighing about sixty pounds and accompanied by

blows … The second journey the stones were still heavier, and whenever the poor wretches

sank under their burden they were kicked and hit with a bludgeon … in the evening twenty-

one bodies were strewn along the road. The twenty-six others died the following morning.37

This was a familiar form of “execution” at Mauthausen and was used on,

among others, a good many Russian prisoners of war.

From 1942 on—that is, when the tide of war began to surge against him—

Hitler ordered the extermination of captured Allied commandos, especially in

the West. (Captured Soviet partisans were summarily shot as a matter of course.)

The Fuehrer’s “Top-Secret Commando Order” of October 18, 1942, is among

the Nazi documents.

From now on all enemies on so-called commando missions in Europe or Africa challenged

by German troops, even if they are in uniform, whether armed or unarmed, in battle or in

flight, are to be slaughtered to the last man. 38

In a supplementary directive issued the same day Hitler explained to his

commanders the reason for his order. Because of the success of the Allied

commandos, he said,

I have been compelled to issue strict orders for the destruction of enemy sabotage troops and

to declare noncompliance with these orders severely punishable … It must be made clear to

the enemy that all sabotage troops will be exterminated, without exception, to the last man.

This means that their chance of escaping with their lives is nil … Under no circumstances

can [they] expect to be treated according to the rules of the Geneva Convention … If it should

become necessary for reasons of interrogation to initially spare one man or two, then they are

to be shot immediately after interrogation. 39

This particular crime was to be kept strictly secret. General Jodl appended

instructions to Hitler’s directive, underlining his words: “This order is intended

for commanders only and must not under any circumstances fall into enemy

hands. ” They were directed to destroy all copies of it after they had duly taken

note.

It must have remained imprinted on their minds, for they proceeded to carry it

out. A couple of instances, of many, may be given.

On the night of March 22, 1944, two officers and thirteen men of the 267th

Special Reconnaissance Battalion of the U.S. Army landed from a naval craft far

behind the German lines in Italy to demolish a railroad tunnel between La Spezia

and Genoa. They were all in uniform and carried no civilian clothes. Captured

two days later they were executed by a firing squad on March 26, without trial,

on the direct orders of General Anton Dostler, commander of the LXXVth

German Army Corps. Tried by a U.S. military tribunal shortly after the war,

General Dostler justified his action by contending that he was merely obeying

Hitler’s Commando Order. He argued that he himself would have been court-

martialed by the Fuehrer if he had not obeyed. *

Some fifteen members of an Anglo–American military mission—including a

war correspondent of the Associated Press, and all in uniform—which had

parachuted into Slovakia in January 1945 were executed at Mauthausen

concentration camp on the orders of Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the successor of

Heydrich as head of the S.D. and one of the defendants at Nuremberg.† Had it

not been for the testimony of a camp adjutant who witnessed their execution,

their murder might have remained unknown, for most of the files of the mass

executions at this camp were destroyed.40

NAZI TERROR IN THE CONQUERED LANDS

On October 22, 1941, a French newspaper Le Phare published the following

notice:

Cowardly criminals in the pay of England and Moscow killed the Feldkommandant of

Nantes on the morning of October 20. Up to now the assassins have not been arrested.

As expiation for this crime I have ordered that 50 hostages be shot, to begin with … Fifty

more hostages will be shot in case the guilty should not be arrested between now and October

23 by midnight.

This became a familiar notice in the pages of the newspapers or on red posters

edged with black in France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Poland and Russia. The

proportion, publicly proclaimed by the Germans, was invariably 100 to 1—a

hundred hostages shot for every German killed.

Though the taking of hostages was an ancient custom, much indulged in for

instance by the Romans, it had not been generally practiced in modern times

except by the Germans in the First World War and by the British in India and in

South Africa during the Boer War. Under Hitler, however, the German Army

carried it out on a large scale during the second war. Dozens of secret orders

signed by General Keitel and lesser commanders were produced at Nuremberg

ordering the taking—and shooting—of hostages. “It is important,” Keitel

decreed on October 1, 1941, “that these should include well-known leading

personalities or members of their families”; and General von Stuelpnagel, the

German commander in France, a year later stressed that “the better known the

hostages to be shot the greater will be the deterrent effect on the perpetrators.”

In all, 29,660 French hostages were executed by the Germans during the war

and this figure did not include the 40,000 who “died” in French prisons. The

figure for Poland was 8,000 and for Holland some 2,000. In Denmark what

became known as a system of “clearing murders” was substituted for the

publicly proclaimed shooting of hostages. On Hitler’s express orders reprisals

for the killing of Germans in Denmark were to be carried out in secret “on the

proportion of five to one. ”41 Thus the great Danish pastor-poet-playwright, Kaj

Munk, one of the most beloved men in Scandinavia, was brutally murdered by

the Germans, his body left on the road with a sign pinned to it: “Swine, you

worked for Germany just the same.”

Of all the war crimes which he claimed he had to commit on the orders of

Hitler “the worst of all,” General Keitel said on the stand at Nuremberg,

stemmed from the Nacht und Nebel Erlass—“Night and Fog Decree.” This

grotesque order, reserved for the unfortunate inhabitants of the conquered

territories in the West, was issued by Hitler himself on December 7, 1941. Its

purpose, as the weird title indicates, was to seize persons “endangering German

security” who were not to be immediately executed and make them vanish

without a trace into the night and fog of the unknown in Germany. No

information was to be given their families as to their fate even when, as

invariably occurred, it was merely a question of the place of burial in the Reich.

On December 12, 1941, Keitel issued a directive explaining the Fuehrer’s

orders. “In principle,” he said, “the punishment for offenses committed against

the German state is the death penalty.” But

if these offenses are punished with imprisonment, even with hard labor for life, this will be

looked upon as a sign of weakness. Efficient intimidation can only be achieved either by

capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminal and the population do

not know his fate.42

The following February Keitel enlarged on the Night and Fog Decree. In cases

where the death penalty was not meted out within eight days of a person’s arrest,

the prisoners are to be transported to Germany secretly … these measures will have a deterrent

effect because

(a) the prisoners will vanish without leaving a trace,

(b) no information may be given as to their whereabouts or their fate.43

The S.D. was given charge of this macabre task and its captured files are full

of various orders pertaining to “NN” (for Nacht und Nebel), especially in regard

to keeping the burial places of the victims strictly secret. How many Western

Europeans disappeared into “Night and Fog” was never established at

Nuremberg but it appeared that few emerged from it alive.

Some enlightening figures, however, were obtainable from the S.D. records

concerning the number of victims of another terror operation in conquered

territory which was applied to Russia. This particular exercise was carried out by

what was known in Germany as the Einsatzgruppen—Special Action Groups, or

what might better be termed, in view of their performance, Extermination

Squads. The first round figure of their achievement came out, as if by accident,

at Nuremberg.

One day some time before the trial began a young American naval officer,

Lieutenant Commander Whitney R. Harris, of the American prosecution staff,

was interrogating Otto Ohlendorf on his wartime activities. It was known that

this attractive-looking German intellectual of youthful appearance—he was 38—

had been head of Amt III of Himmler’s Central Security Office (R.S.H.A.) but

during the last years of the war had spent most of his time as a foreign trade

expert in the Ministry of Economics. He told his interrogator that apart from one

year he had spent the war period on official duty in Berlin. Asked what he had

done during the year away, he replied, “I was chief of Einsatzgruppe D.”

Harris, a lawyer by training and by this time something of an intelligence

authority on German affairs, knew quite a bit about the Einsatz groups. So he

asked promptly:

“During the year you were chief of Einsatzgruppe D, how many men, women

and children did your group kill?”

Ohlendorf, Harris later remembered, shrugged his shoulders and with only the

slightest hesitation answered:

“Ninety thousand! ”44

The Einsatz groups had first been organized by Himmler and Heydrich to

follow the German armies into Poland in 1939 and there round up the Jews and

place them in ghettos. It was not until the beginning of the Russian campaign

nearly two years later that, in agreement with the German Army, they were

ordered to follow the combat troops and to carry out one phase of the “final

solution.” Four Einsatzgruppen were formed for this purpose, Groups A, B, C,

D. It was the last one which Ohlendorf commanded between June 1941 and June

1942, and it was assigned the southernmost sector in the Ukraine and attached to

the Eleventh Army. Asked on the stand by Colonel John Harlan Amen what

instructions it received, Ohlendorf answered:

“The instructions were that the Jews and the Soviet political commissars were

to be liquidated.”

“And when you say ‘liquidated,’ do you mean ‘killed’?” Amen asked.

“Yes, I mean killed,” Ohlendorf answered, explaining that this took in the

women and children as well as the men.

“For what reason were the children massacred?” the Russian judge, General I.

T. Nikitchenko, broke in to ask.

OHLENDORF: The order was that the Jewish population should be totally exterminated.

THE JUDGE: Including the children?

OHLENDORF: Yes.

THE JUDGE: Were all the Jewish children murdered?

OHLENDORF: Yes.

In response to further questioning by Amen and in his affidavit, Ohlendorf

described how a typical killing took place.

The Einsatz unit would enter a village or town and order the prominent Jewish citizens to

call together all Jews for the purpose of “resettlement.” * They were requested to hand over

their valuables and shortly before execution to surrender their outer clothing. They were

transported to the place of executions, usually an antitank ditch, in trucks—always only as

many as could be executed immediately. In this way it was attempted to keep the span of time

from the moment in which the victims knew what was about to happen to them until the time

of their actual execution as short as possible.

Then they were shot, kneeling or standing, by firing squads in a military manner and the

corpses thrown into the ditch. I never permitted the shooting by individuals, but ordered that

several of the men should shoot at the same time in order to avoid direct-personal

responsibility. Other group leaders demanded that the victims lie down flat on the ground to be

shot through the nape of the neck. I did not approve of these methods.

“Why?” asked Amen.

“Because,” replied Ohlendorf, “both for the victims and for those who carried

out the executions, it was, psychologically, an immense burden to bear.”

In the spring of 1942, Ohlendorf then recounted, an order came from Himmler

to change the method of execution of the women and children.* Henceforth they

were to be dispatched in “gas vans” specially constructed for the purpose by two

Berlin firms. The S.D. officer described to the tribunal how these remarkable

vehicles worked.

The actual purpose of these vans could not be seen from the outside. They looked like

closed trucks and were so constructed that at the start of the motor the gas [exhaust] was

conducted into the van causing death in ten to fifteen minutes.

“How were the victims induced to enter the vans?” Colonel Amen wanted to

know.

“They were told they were to be transported to another locality,” Ohlendorf

replied.†

The burial of the victims of the gas vans, he went on to complain, was a “great

ordeal” for the members of the Einsatzgruppen. This was confirmed by a certain

Dr. Becker, whom Ohlendorf identified as the constructor of the vans, in a

document produced at Nuremberg. In a letter to headquarters Dr. Becker

objected to German S.D. men having to unload the corpses of the gassed women

and children, calling attention to

the immense psychological injuries and damage to their health which that work can have for

these men. They complained to me about headaches which appeared after each unloading.

Dr. Becker also pointed out to his superiors that

the application of gas usually is not undertaken correctly. In order to come to an end as fast as

possible, the driver presses the accelerator to the fullest extent. The persons to be executed

suffer death from suffocation and not death by dozing off, as was planned.

Dr. Becker was quite a humanitarian—in his own mind—and ordered a

change in technique.

My directions now have proved that by correct adjustment of the levers death comes faster

and the prisoners fall asleep peacefully. Distorted faces and excretions, such as could be seen

before, are no longer noticed.45

But the gas vans, as Ohlendorf testified, could dispatch only from fifteen to

twenty-five persons at a time, and this was entirely inadequate for the massacres

on the scale which Hitler and Himmler had ordered. Inadequate, for example, for

the job that was done at Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, in just two days,

September 29 and 30, 1941, when according to an official Einsatz report 33, 771

persons, mostly Jews, were “executed.” 46 An eyewitness report by a German of

how a comparatively minor mass execution was carried out in the Ukraine

brought a hush of horror over the Nuremberg courtroom when it was read by the

chief British prosecutor, Sir Hartley Shawcross. It was a sworn affidavit by

Hermann Graebe, the manager and engineer of a branch office in the Ukraine of

a German construction firm. On October 5,1942, he witnessed the Einsatz

commandos, supported by Ukrainian militia, in action at the execution pits at

Dubno in the Ukraine. It was a matter, he reported, of liquidating the town’s

5,000 Jews.

… My foreman and I went directly to the pits. I heard rifle shots in quick succession from

behind one of the earth mounds. The people who had got off the trucks—men, women and

children of all ages—had to undress upon the order of an S.S. man, who carried a riding or dog

whip. They had to put down their clothes in fixed places, sorted according to shoes, top

clothing and underclothing. I saw a heap of shoes of about 800 to 1,000 pairs, great piles of

under-linen and clothing.

Without screaming or weeping these people undressed, stood around in family groups,

kissed each other, said farewells and waited for a sign from another S.S. man, who stood near

the pit, also with a whip in his hand. During the fifteen minutes that I stood near the pit I heard

no complaint or plea for mercy …

An old woman with snow-white hair was holding a one-year-old child in her arms and

singing to it and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight. The parents were looking on

with tears in their eyes. The father was holding the hand of a boy about 10 years old and

speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked

his head and seemed to explain something to him.

At that moment the S.S. man at the pit shouted something to his comrade. The latter

counted off about twenty persons and instructed them to go behind the earth mound … I well

remember a girl, slim and with black hair, who, as she passed close to me, pointed to herself

and said: “twenty-three years old.”

I walked around the mound and found myself confronted by a tremendous grave. People

were closely wedged together and lying on top of each other so that only their heads were

visible. Nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads. Some of the people

were still moving. Some were lifting their arms and turning their heads to show that they were

still alive. The pit was already two-thirds full. I estimated that it contained about a thousand

people. I looked for the man who did the shooting. He was an S.S. man, who sat at the edge of

the narrow end of the pit, his feet dangling into the pit. He had a tommy gun on his knees and

was smoking a cigarette.

The people, completely naked, went down some steps and clambered over the heads of the

people lying there to the place to which the S.S. man directed them. They lay down in front of

the dead or wounded people; some caressed those who were still alive and spoke to them in a

low voice. Then I heard a series of shots. I looked into the pit and saw that the bodies were

twitching or the heads lying already motionless on top of the bodies that lay beneath them.

Blood was running from their necks.

The next batch was approaching already. They went down into the pit, lined themselves up

against the previous victims and were shot.

And so it went, batch after batch. The next morning the German engineer

returned to the site.

I saw about thirty naked people lying near the pit. Some of them were still alive … Later

the Jews still alive were ordered to throw the corpses into the pit. Then they themselves had to

lie down in this to be shot in the neck … I swear before God that this is the absolute truth. 47

How many Jews and Russian Communist party functionaries (the former

vastly outnumbered the latter) were massacred by the Einsatzgruppen in Russia

before the Red Army drove the Germans out? The exact total could never be

computed at Nuremberg but Himmler’s records, uncoordinated as they were,

give a rough idea.

Ohlendorf’s Einsatzgruppen D, with its 90,000 victims, did not do as well as

some of the other groups. Group A, for instance, in the north reported on January

31, 1942, that it had “executed” 229,052 Jews in the Baltic region and in White

Russia. Its commander, Franz Stahlecker, reported to Himmler that he was

having difficulty in the latter province because of a late start “after the heavy

frost set in, which made mass executions much more difficult. Nevertheless,” he

reported, “41,000 Jews [in White Russia] have been shot up to now.” Stahlecker,

who was disposed of later in the year by Soviet partisans, enclosed with his

report a handsome map showing the number of those done to death—symbolized

by coffins—in each area under his command. In Lithuania, alone, the map

showed, 136,421 Jews had been slain; some 34,000 had been spared for the time

being “as they were needed for labor.” Estonia, which had relatively few Jews,

was declared in this report to be “Jew-free. ”48

The Einsatzgruppen firing squads, after a letup during the severe winter,

banged away all through the summer of 1942. Some 55,000 more Jews were

exterminated in White Russia by July 1, and in October the remaining 16,200

inhabitants of the Minsk ghetto were dispatched in one day. By November

Himmler could report to Hitler that 363,211 Jews had been killed in Russia from

August through October, though the figure was probably somewhat exaggerated

to please the bloodthirsty Fuehrer. 49*

All in all, according to Karl Eichmann, the head of the Jewish Office of the

Gestapo, two million persons, almost all Jews, were liquidated by the

Einsatzgruppen in the East. But this is almost certainly an exaggeration; it is

strange but true that the S.S. bigwigs were so proud of their exterminations that

they often reported swollen figures to please Himmler and Hitler. Himmler’s

own statistician, Dr. Richard Korherr, reported to his chief on March 23, 1943,

that a total of 633,300 Jews in Russia had been “re-settled”—a euphemism for

massacre by the Einsatzgruppen.51 Surprisingly enough this figure tallies fairly

well with exhaustive studies later made by a number of experts. Add another

hundred thousand slain in the last two years of the war and the figure is probably

as accurate as we will ever have.*

High as it is, it is small compared to the number of Jews who were done to

death in Himmler’s extermination camps when the “final solution” came to be

carried out.

THE “FINAL SOLUTION”

One fine June day of 1946 at Nuremberg three members of the American

prosecution staff were interrogating S.S. Obergruppenfuehrer Oswald Pohl, who,

among other things, had been in charge of work projects for the inmates of the

Nazi concentration camps. Pohl, a naval officer before he joined the S.S., had

gone into hiding after the German collapse and had not been apprehended until a

year later—in May 1946—when he was discovered working on a farm disguised

as a farmhand. †

In answer to one question Pohl used a term with which the Nuremberg

prosecution, busy for months in poring over millions of words from the captured

documents, had begun to become familiar. A certain colleague by the name of

Hoess had, Pohl said, been employed by Himmler “in the final solution of the

Jewish question.”

“And what was that?” Pohl was asked.

“The extermination of Jewry,” he answered.

The expression crept with increasing frequency into the vocabulary and the

files of the leading Nazis as the war progressed, its seeming innocence

apparently sparing these men the pain of reminding one another what it meant

and perhaps too, they may have thought, furnishing a certain cover for their guilt

should the incriminating papers ever come to light. Indeed at the Nuremberg

trials most of the Nazi chiefs denied that they knew what it signified, and

Goering contended he had never used the term, but this pretense was soon

exploded. In the case against the fat Reich Marshal a directive was produced

which he had sent Heydrich, the chief of the S.D., on July 31, 1941, when the

Einsatzgruppen were already falling with gusto to their extermination tasks in

Russia.

I here with commission you [Goering instructed Heydrich] to carry out all preparations

with regard to … a total solution of the Jewish question in those territories of Europe which

are under German influence …

1 furthermore charge you to submit to me as soon as possible a draft showing the …

measures already taken for the execution of the intended final solution of the Jewish

question.*52

Heydrich knew very well what Goering meant by the term for he had used it

himself nearly a year before at a secret meeting after the fall of Poland, in which

he had outlined “the first step in the final solution,” which consisted of

concentrating all the Jews in the ghettos of the large cities, where it would be

easy to dispatch them to their final fate. †

As it worked out, the “final solution” was what Adolf Hitler had long had in

mind and what he had publicly proclaimed even before the war started. In his

speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, he had said:

If the international Jewish financiers … should again succeed in plunging the nations into a

world war the result will be … the annihilation of the Jewish race throughout Europe.

This was a prophecy, he said, and he repeated it five times, verbatim, in

subsequent public utterances. It made no difference that not the “international

Jewish financiers” but he himself plunged the world into armed conflict. What

mattered to Hitler was that there was now a world war and that it afforded him,

after he had conquered vast regions in the East where most of Europe’s Jews

lived, the opportunity to carry out their “annihilation.” By the time the invasion

of Russia began, he had given the necessary orders.

What became known in high Nazi circles as the “Fuehrer Order on the Final

Solution” apparently was never committed to paper—at least no copy of it has

yet been unearthed in the captured Nazi documents. All the evidence shows that

it was most probably given verbally to Goering, Himmler and Heydrich, who

passed it down during the summer and fall of 1941. A number of witnesses

testified at Nuremberg that they had “heard” of it but none admitted ever seeing

it. Thus Hans Lammers, the bullheaded chief of the Reich Chancellery, when

pressed on the witness stand replied:

I knew that a Fuehrer order was transmitted by Goering to Heydrich … This order was

called “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem. ”53

But Lammers claimed, as did so many others on the stand, that he did not

really know what it was all about until Allied counsel revealed it at Nuremberg.*

By the beginning of 1942 the time had come, as Heydrich said, “to clear up

the fundamental problems” of the “final solution” so that it could at last be

carried out and concluded. For this purpose Heydrich convened a meeting of

representatives of the various ministries and agencies of the S.S.-S.D. at the

pleasant Berlin suburb of Wannsee on January 20, 1942, the minutes of which

played an important part in some of the later Nuremberg trials. 54 Despite the

current setback of the Wehrmacht in Russia the Nazi officials believed that the

war was almost won and that Germany would shortly be ruling all of Europe,

including England and Ireland. Therefore, Heydrich told the assembly of some

fifteen high officials, “in the course of this Final Solution of the European

Jewish problem, approximately eleven million Jews are involved.” He then

rattled off the figures for each country. There were only 131, 800 Jews left in the

original Reich territory (out of a quarter of a million in 1939), but in the

U.S.S.R., he said, there were five million, in the Ukraine three million, in the

General Government of Poland two and a quarter million, in France three

quarters of a million and in England a third of a million. The clear implication

was that all eleven million must be exterminated. He then explained how this

considerable task was to be carried out.

The Jews should now in the course of the Final Solution be brought to the East … for use

as labor. In big labor gangs, with separation of sexes, the Jews capable of work are brought to

these areas and employed in road building, in which task undoubtedly a great part will fall

through natural diminution.

The remnant that finally is able to survive all this—since this is undoubtedly the part with

the strongest resistance—must be treated accordingly, since these people, representing a

natural selection, are to be regarded as the germ cell of a new Jewish development.

In other words, the Jews of Europe were first to be transported to the

conquered East, then worked to death, and the few tough ones who survived

simply put to death. And the Jews—the millions of them—who resided in the

East and were already on hand? State Secretary Dr. Josef Buehler, representing

the Governor General of Poland, had a ready suggestion for them. There were

nearly two and a half million Jews in Poland, he said, who “constituted a great

danger.” They were, he explained, “bearers of disease, black-market operators

and furthermore unfit for work.” There was no transportation problem with these

two and a half million souls. They were already there.

I have only one request [Dr. Buehler concluded], that the Jewish problem in my territory be

solved as quickly as possible.

The good State Secretary betrayed an impatience which was shared in high

Nazi circles right up to Hitler. None of them understood at this time—not, in

fact, until toward the end of 1942, when it was too late—how valuable the

millions of Jews might be to the Reich as slave labor. At this point they only

understood that working millions of Jews to death on the roads of Russia might

take some time. Consequently long before these unfortunate people could be

worked to death—in most cases the attempt was not even begun—Hitler and

Himmler decided to dispatch them by quicker means.

There were two—principally. One of them, as we have seen, had begun

shortly after the invasion of Russia in the summer of 1941. This was the method

of mass slaughter of the Polish and Russian Jews by the flying firing squads of

the Einsatzgruppen, which accounted for some three quarters of a million.

It was this method of achieving the “final solution” that Himmler had in mind

when he addressed the S.S. generals at Posen on October 4, 1943.

… I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter. Among ourselves it

should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly …

I mean … the extermination of the Jewish race … Most of you must know what it means

when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same

time—apart from exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent fellows,

that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been

written and is never to be written …55

No doubt the bespectacled S.S. Fuehrer, who had almost fainted at the sight of

a hundred Eastern Jews, including women, being executed for his own

delectation, would have seen in the efficient working by S.S. officers of the gas

chambers in the extermination camps an even more glorious page in German

history. For it was in these death camps that the “final solution” achieved its

most ghastly success.

THE EXTERMINATION CAMPS

All the thirty odd principal Nazi concentration camps were death camps and

millions of tortured, starved inmates perished in them. * Though the authorities

kept records—each camp had its official Totenbuch (death book)—they were

incomplete and in many cases were destroyed as the victorious Allies closed in.

Part of one Totenbuch that survived at Mauthausen listed 35,318 deaths from

January 1939 to April 1945.† At the end of 1942 when the need of slave labor

began to be acute, Himmler ordered that the death rate in the concentration

camps “must be reduced.” Because of the labor shortage he had been displeased

at a report received in his office that of the 136,700 commitments to

concentration camps between June and November 1942, some 70,610 had died

and that in addition 9,267 had been executed and 27,846 “transferred. ”57 To the

gas chamber, that is. This did not leave very many for labor duties.

But it was in the extermination camps, the Vernichtungslager, where most

progress was made toward the “final solution.” The greatest and most renowned

of these was Auschwitz, whose four huge gas chambers and adjoining

crematoria gave it a capacity for death and burial far beyond that of the others

—Treblinka, Belsec, Sibibor and Chelmno, all in Poland. There were other

minor extermination camps near Riga, Vilna, Minsk, Kaunas and Lwów, but

they were distinguished from the main ones in that they killed by shooting rather

than by gas.

For a time there was quite a bit of rivalry among the S.S. leaders as to which

was the most efficient gas to speed the Jews to their death. Speed was an

important factor, especially at Auschwitz, where toward the end the camp was

setting new records by gassing 6,000 victims a day. One of the camp’s

commanders for a period was Rudolf Hoess, an ex-convict once found guilty of

murder, who deposed at Nuremberg on the superiority of the gas he employed.‡

The “Final Solution” of the Jewish question meant the complete extermination of all Jews

in Europe. I was ordered to establish extermination facilities at Auschwitz in June 1941. At

that time there were already in the General Government of Poland three other extermination

camps: Belzec, Treblinka and Wolzek …

I visited Treblinka to find out how they carried out their extermination. The camp

commandant at Treblinka told me that he had liquidated 80,000 in the course of half a year. He

was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto. *

He used monoxide gas and I did not think that his methods were very efficient. So when I

set up the extermination building at Auschwitz, I used Zyklon B, which was a crystallized

prussic acid which we dropped into the death chamber from a small opening. It took from

three to fifteen minutes to kill the people in the death chamber, depending upon climatic

conditions.

We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped. We usually waited

about a half hour before we opened the doors and removed the bodies. After the bodies were

removed our special commandos took off the rings and extracted the gold from the teeth of the

corpses.

Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gas chambers to

accommodate 2,000 people at one time, whereas at Treblinka their ten gas chambers only

accommodated 200 people each.

Hoess then explained how the victims were “selected” for the gas chambers,

since not all the incoming prisoners were done away with—at least not at once,

because some of them were needed to labor in the I. G. Farben chemical works

and Krupp’s factory until they became exhausted and were ready for the “final

solution.”

We had two S.S. doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of

prisoners. These would be marched by one of the doctors, who would make spot decisions as

they walked by. Those who were fit to work were sent into the camp. Others were sent

immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably

exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work.

Always Herr Hoess kept making improvements in the art of mass killing.

Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims

almost always knew that they were to be exterminated, while at Auschwitz we endeavored to

fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course,

frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties. Very

frequently women would hide their children under the clothes but of course when we found

them we would send the children in to be exterminated.

We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy, but of course the foul and

nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of

the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at

Auschwitz.

Sometimes, Hoess explained, a few “special prisoners”—apparently Russian

prisoners of war—were simply killed by injections of benzine. “Our doctors,” he

added, “had orders to write ordinary death certificates and could put down any

reason at all for the cause of death. *58

To Hoess’s blunt description may be added a brief composite picture of death

and disposal at Auschwitz as testified to by surviving inmates and jailers. The

“selection,” which decided which Jews were to be worked and which ones

immediately gassed, took place at the railroad siding as soon as the victims had

been unloaded from the freight cars in which they had been locked without food

or water for as much as a week—for many came from such distant parts as

France, Holland and Greece. Though there were heart-rending scenes as wives

were torn away from husbands and children from parents, none of the captives,

as Hoess testified and survivors agree, realized just what was in store for them.

In fact some of them were given pretty picture postcards marked “Waldsee” to

be signed and sent back home to their relatives with a printed inscription saying:

We are doing very well here. We have work and we are well treated. We await your

arrival.

The gas chambers themselves and the adjoining crematoria, viewed from a

short distance, were not sinister-looking places at all; it was impossible to make

them out for what they were. Over them were well-kept lawns with flower

borders; the signs at the entrances merely said BATHS. The unsuspecting Jews

thought they were simply being taken to the baths for the delousing which was

customary at all camps. And taken to the accompaniment of sweet music!

For there was light music. An orchestra of “young and pretty girls all dressed

in white blouses and navy-blue skirts,” as one survivor remembered, had been

formed from among the inmates. While the selection was being made for the gas

chambers this unique musical ensemble played gay tunes from The Merry

Widow and Tales of Hoffmann. Nothing solemn and somber from Beethoven.

The death marches at Auschwitz were sprightly and merry tunes, straight out of

Viennese and Parisian operetta.

To such music, recalling as it did happier and more frivolous times, the men,

women and children were led into the “bath houses,” where they were told to

undress preparatory to taking a “shower.” Sometimes they were even given

towels. Once they were inside the “shower-room”—and perhaps this was the

first moment that they may have suspected something was amiss, for as many as

two thousand of them were packed into the chamber like sardines, making it

difficult to take a bath—the massive door was slid shut, locked and hermetically

sealed. Up above where the well-groomed lawn and flower beds almost

concealed the mushroom-shaped lids of vents that ran up from the hall of death,

orderlies stood ready to drop into them the amethyst-blue crystals of hydrogen

cyanide, or Zyklon B, which originally had been commercially manufactured as

a strong disinfectant and for which, as we have seen, Herr Hoess had with so

much pride found a new use.

Surviving prisoners watching from blocks nearby remembered how for a time

the signal for the orderlies to pour the crystals down the vents was given by a

Sergeant Moll. “Na, gib ihnen schon zu fressen” (“All right, give ‘em something

to chew on”), he would laugh and the crystals would be poured through the

openings, which were then sealed.

Through heavy-glass portholes the executioners could watch what happened.

The naked prisoners below would be looking up at the showers from which no

water spouted or perhaps at the floor wondering why there were no drains. It

took some moments for the gas to have much effect. But soon the inmates

became aware that it was issuing from the perforations in the vents. It was then

that they usually panicked, crowding away from the pipes and finally

stampeding toward the huge metal door where, as Reitlinger puts it, “they piled

up in one blue clammy blood-spattered pyramid, clawing and mauling each other

even in death.”

Twenty or thirty minutes later when the huge mass of naked flesh had ceased

to writhe, pumps drew out the poisonous air, the large door was opened and the

men of the Sonderkommando took over. These were Jewish male inmates who

were promised their lives and adequate food in return for performing the most

ghastly job of all. * Protected with gas masks and rubber boots and wielding

hoses they went to work. Reitlinger has described it.

Their first task was to remove the blood and defecations before dragging the clawing dead

apart with nooses and hooks, the prelude to the ghastly search for gold and the removal of

teeth and hair which were regarded by the Germans as strategic materials. Then the journey by

lift or rail-wagon to the furnaces, the mill that ground the clinker to fine ash, and the truck that

scattered the ashes in the stream of the Sola. *

There had been, the records show, some lively competition among German

businessmen to procure orders for building these death and disposal contraptions

and for furnishing the lethal blue crystals. The firm of I. A. Topf and Sons of

Erfurt, manufacturers of heating equipment, won out in its bid for the crematoria

at Auschwitz. The story of its business enterprise was revealed in a voluminous

correspondence found in the records of the camp. A letter from the firm dated

February 12, 1943, gives the tenor.

TO THE CENTRAL CONSTRUCTION OFFICE OF THE S.S. AND POLICE,

AUSCHWITZ:

SUBJECT: Crematoria 2 and 3 for the camp.

We acknowledge receipt of your order for five triple furnaces, including two electric

elevators for raising the corpses and one emergency elevator. A practical installation for

stoking coal was also ordered and one for transporting ashes.60

The correspondence of two other firms engaged in the crematorium business

popped up at the Nuremberg trials. The disposal of the corpses at a number of

Nazi camps had attracted commercial competition. One of the oldest German

companies in the field offered its drawings for crematoria to be built at a large

S.S. camp in Belgrade.

For putting the bodies into the furnace, we suggest simply a metal fork moving on

cylinders.

Each furnace will have an oven measuring only 24 by 18 inches, as coffins will not be

used. For transporting the corpses from the storage points to the furnaces we suggest using

light carts on wheels, and we enclose diagrams of these drawn to scale. 61

Another firm, C. H. Kori, also sought the Belgrade business, emphasizing its

great experience in this field since it had already constructed four furnaces for

Dachau and five for Lublin, which, it said, had given “full satisfaction in

practice.”

Following our verbal discussion regarding the delivery of equipment of simple construction

for the burning of bodies, we are submitting plans for our perfected cremation ovens which

operate with coal and which have hitherto given full satisfaction.

We suggest two crematoria furnaces for the building planned, but we advise you to make

further inquiries to make sure that two ovens will be sufficient for your requirements.

We guarantee the effectiveness of the cremation ovens as well as their durability, the use of

the best material and our faultless workmanship.

Awaiting your further word, we will be at your service.

Heil Hitler!

C. H. KORI, G.M.B.H. 62

In the end even the strenuous efforts of German free enterprise, using the best

material and providing faultless workmanship, proved inadequate for burning the

corpses. The well-constructed crematoria fell far behind at a number of camps

but especially at Auschwitz in 1944 when as many as 6,000 bodies (Hoess put it

at as many as 16,000) had to be burned daily. For instance, in forty-six days

during the summer of 1944 between 250,000 and 300,000 Hungarian Jews alone

were done to death at this camp. Even the gas chambers fell behind and resort

was made to mass shootings in the Einsatzkommando style. The bodies were

simply thrown into ditches and burned, many of them only partly, and then earth

was bulldozed over them. The camp commanders complained toward the end

that the crematoria had proved not only inadequate but “uneconomical.”

The Zyklon-B crystals that killed the victims in the first place were furnished

by two German firms which had acquired the patent from I. G. Farben. These

were Tesch and Stabenow of Hamburg, and Degesch of Dessau, the former

supplying two tons of the cyanide crystals a month and the latter three quarters

of a ton. The bills of lading for the deliveries showed up at Nuremberg.

The directors of both concerns contended that they had sold their product

merely for fumigation purposes and were unaware that lethal use had been made

of it, but this defense did not hold up. Letters were found from Tesch and

Stabenow offering not only to supply the gas crystals but also the ventilating and

heating equipment for extermination chambers. Besides, the inimitable Hoess,

who once he started to confess went the limit, testified that the directors of the

Tesch company could not have helped knowing how their product was being

used since they furnished enough to exterminate a couple of million people. A

British military court was convinced of this at the trial of the two partners, Bruno

Tesch and Karl Weinbacher, who were sentenced to death in 1946 and hanged.

The director of the second firm, Dr. Gerhard Peters of Degesch of Dessau, got

off more lightly. A German court sentenced him to five years’ imprisonment.63

Before the postwar trials in Germany it had been generally believed that the

mass killings were exclusively the work of a relatively few fanatical S.S. leaders.

But the records of the courts leave no doubt of the complicity of a number of

German businessmen, not only the Krupps and the directors of the I. G. Farben

chemical trust but smaller entrepreneurs who outwardly must have seemed to be

the most prosaic and decent of men, pillars—like good businessmen everywhere

—of their communities.

How many hapless innocent people—mostly Jews but including a fairly large

number of others, especially Russian prisoners of war—were slaughtered at the

one camp of Auschwitz? The exact number will never be known. Hoess himself

in his affidavit gave an estimate of “2,500,000 victims executed and

exterminated by gassing and burning, and at least another half million who

succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total of about 3,000,000.” Later

at his own trial in Warsaw he reduced the figure to 1,135,000. The Soviet

government, which investigated the camp after it was overrun by the Red Army

in January 1945, put the figure at four million. Reitlinger, on the basis of his own

exhaustive study, doubts that the number gassed at Auschwitz was “even as high

as three quarters of a million.” He estimates that about 600,000 died in the gas

chambers, to which he adds “the unknown proportion” of some 300,000 or more

“missing,” who were shot or who died of starvation and disease. By any estimate

the figure is considerable. 64

The bodies were burned, but the gold fillings in the teeth remained and these

were retrieved from the ashes if they had not already been yanked out by special

squads working over the clammy piles of corpses.* The gold was melted down

and shipped along with other valuables snatched from the condemned Jews to

the Reichsbank, where under a secret agreement between Himmler and the

bank’s president, Dr. Walther Funk, it was deposited to the credit of the S.S. in

an account given the cover name of “Max Heiliger.” This prize booty from the

extermination camps included, besides gold from dentures, gold watches,

earrings, bracelets, rings, necklaces and even spectacles frames—for the Jews

had been encouraged to bring all their valuables with them for the promised

“resettlement.” There were also great stocks of jewelry, especially diamonds and

much silverware. And there were great wads of banknotes.

The Reichsbank, in fact, was overwhelmed by the “Max Heiliger” deposits.

With its vaults filled to overflowing as early as 1942, the bank’s profit-minded

directors sought to turn the holdings into cold cash by disposing of them through

the municipal pawnshops. One letter from the Reichsbank to the Berlin

municipal pawnshop dated September 15 speaks of a “second shipment” and

begins, “We submit to you the following valuables with the request for the best

possible utilization.” The list is long and itemized and includes 154 gold

watches, 1,601 gold earrings, 132 diamond rings, 784 silver pocket watches and

“160 diverse dentures, partly of gold.” By the beginning of 1944 the Berlin

pawnshop itself was overwhelmed by the flow of these stolen goods and

informed the Reichsbank it could accept no more. When the Allies overran

Germany they discovered in some abandoned salt mines, where the Nazis had

hidden part of their records and booty, enough left over from the “Max Heiliger”

account to fill three huge vaults in the Frankfurt branch of the Reichsbank. 66

Did the bankers know the sources of these unique “deposits”? The manager of

the Precious Metals Department of the Reichsbank deposed at Nuremberg that

he and his associates began to notice that many shipments came from Lublin and

Auschwitz.

We all knew that these places were the sites of concentration camps. It was in the tenth

delivery in November, 1943, that dental gold appeared. The quantity of dental gold became

unusually great. 67

At Nuremberg the notorious Oswald Pohl, chief of the Economic Office of the

S.S., who handled the transactions for his organization, emphasized that Dr.

Funk and the officials and directors of the Reichsbank knew very well the

origins of the goods they were trying to pawn. He explained in some detail “the

business deal between Funk and the S.S. concerning the delivery of valuables of

dead Jews to the Reichsbank.” He remembered a conversation with the bank’s

vice-president, Dr. Emil Pohl.

In this conversation no doubt remained that the objects to be delivered [came from] Jews

who had been killed in concentration camps. The objects in question were rings, watches,

eyeglasses, gold bars, wedding rings, brooches, pins, gold fillings and other valuables.

Once, Pohl related, after an inspection tour through the vaults of the

Reichsbank where the valuables “from the dead Jews” were inspected, Dr. Funk

tendered the party a pleasant dinner in which the conversation turned around the

unique origins of the booty.68*

“THE WARSAW GHETTO IS NO MORE”

More than one eyewitness has commented on the spirit of resignation with

which so many Jews met their deaths in the Nazi gas chambers or in the great

execution pits of the Einsatz squads. Not all Jews submitted to extermination so

gently. In the spring days of 1943 some 60,000 Jews walled up in the Warsaw

ghetto—all that remained of 400,000 who had been herded into this place like

cattle in 1940—turned on their Nazi tormentors and fought.

Perhaps no one has left a more grisly—and authoritative—account of the

Warsaw ghetto rebellion than the proud S.S. officer who put it down. * This

German individual was Juergen Stroop, S.S. Brigadefuehrer and Major General

of Police. His eloquent official report, bound in leather, profusely illustrated and

typed on seventy-five pages of elegant heavy bond paper has survived.† It is

entitled The Warsaw Ghetto Is No More.69

By the late autumn of 1940, a year after the Nazi conquest of Poland, the S.S.

had rounded up some 400,000 Jews and sealed them off within a high wall from

the rest of Warsaw in an area approximately two and a half miles long and a mile

wide around the old medieval ghetto. The district normally housed 160,000

persons, so there was overcrowding, but this was the least of the hardships.

Governor Frank refused to allot enough food to keep even half of the 400,000

barely alive. Forbidden to leave the enclosure on the pain of being shot on sight,

the Jews had no employment except for a few armament factories within the

wall run by the Wehrmacht or by rapacious German businessmen who knew

how to realize large profits from the use of slave labor. At least 100,000 Jews

tried to survive on a bowl of soup a day, often boiled from straw, provided by

the charity of the others. It was a losing struggle for life.

But the ghetto population did not die fast enough from starvation and disease

to suit Himmler, who in the summer of 1942 ordered the Jews in the Warsaw

ghetto to be removed altogether “for security reasons.” On July 22 a great

“resettlement” action was instituted. Between then and October 3 a total of

310,322 Jews, according to Stroop, were “resettled.” That is, they were

transported to the extermination camps, most of them to Treblinka, where they

were gassed.

Still Himmler was not satisfied. When he paid a surprise visit to Warsaw in

January 1943 and discovered that 60,000 Jews were still alive in the ghetto he

ordered that the “resettlement” be completed by February 15. This proved to be a

difficult task. The severe winter and the demands of the Army, whose disaster at

Stalingrad and whose consequent retreats in southern Russia gave it first claim to

transportation facilities, made it difficult for the S.S. to obtain the necessary

trains to carry out the final “resettlement.” Also, Stroop reported, the Jews were

resisting their final liquidation “in every possible way.” It was not until spring

that Himmler’s order could be carried out. It was decided to clear out the ghetto

in a “special action” lasting three days. As it turned out, it took four weeks.

The deportation of more than 300,000 Jews had enabled the Germans to

reduce the size of the walled-in ghetto and as S.S. General Stroop turned his

tanks, artillery, flame throwers and dynamite squads on it on the morning of

April 19, 1943, it comprised an area measuring only 1,000 by 300 yards. It was

honeycombed, though, with sewers, vaults and cellars which the desperate Jews

had converted into fortified points. Their arms were few: some pistols and rifles,

a dozen or two machine guns that had been smuggled in, and homemade

grenades. But they were now on that April morning determined to use them—the

first time and the last in the history of the Third Reich that the Jews resisted their

Nazi oppressors with arms.

Stroop had 2,090 men, about half of them Regular Army or Waffen-S.S.

troops, and the rest S.S. police reinforced by 335 Lithuanian militia and some

Polish police and firemen. They ran into unexpected resistance the first day.

Hardly had operation begun [Stroop reported in the first of his many teletyped daily

reports], than we ran into strong concerted fire by the Jews and bandits. The tank and two

armored cars pelted with Molotov cocktails … Owing to this enemy counterattack we had to

withdraw.

The German attack was renewed but found heavy going.

About 1730 hours we encountered very strong resistance from one block of buildings,

including machine-gun fire. A special raiding party defeated the enemy but could not catch the

resisters. The Jews and criminals resisted from base to base and escaped at the last moment …

Our losses in first attack: 12 men.

And so it went for the first few days, the poorly armed defenders giving

ground before the attacks of tanks, flame throwers and artillery but keeping up

their resistance. General Stroop could not understand why “this trash and

subhumanity,” as he referred to the besieged Jews, did not give up and submit to

being liquidated.

Within a few days [he reported] it became apparent that the Jews no longer had any

intention to resettle voluntarily, but were determined to resist evacuation … Whereas it had

been possible during the first days to catch considerable numbers of Jews, who are cowards by

nature, it became more and more difficult during the second half of the operation to capture

the bandits and Jews. Over and over again new battle groups consisting of 20 to 30 Jewish

men, accompanied by a corresponding number of women, kindled new resistance.

The women belonged to the Chalutzim, Stroop noted, and had the habit, he

said, of “firing pistols with both hands” and also of unlimbering hand grenades

which they concealed in their bloomers.

On the fifth day of the battle, an impatient and furious Himmler ordered

Stroop to “comb out” the ghetto “with the greatest severity and relentless

tenacity.”

I therefore decided [Stroop related in his final report] to destroy the entire Jewish area by

setting every block on fire.

He then described what followed.

The Jews stayed in the burning buildings until because of the fear of being burned alive

they jumped down from the upper stories … With their bones broken, they still tried to crawl

across the street into buildings which had not yet been set on fire … Despite the danger of

being burned alive the Jews and bandits often preferred to return into the flames rather than

risk being caught by us.

It was simply incomprehensible to a man of Stroop’s stripe that men and

women preferred to die in the flames fighting rather than to die peacefully in the

gas chambers. For he was shipping off the captured whom he did not slaughter

to Treblinka. On April 25 he sent a teletype to S.S. headquarters reporting that

27,464 Jews had been captured.

I am going to try to obtain a train for T2 [Treblinka] tomorrow. Otherwise liquidation will

be carried out here tomorrow.

Often it was, on the spot. The next day Stroop informed his superiors: “1,330

Jews pulled out of dugouts and immediately destroyed; 362 Jews killed in

battle.” Only thirty prisoners were “evacuated.”

Toward the end of the rebellion the defenders took to the sewers. Stroop tried

to flush them out by flooding the mains but the Jews managed to stop the flow of

water. One day the Germans dropped smoke bombs into the sewers through 183

manholes but Stroop ruefully reported that they failed to “have the desired

results.”

The final outcome could never be in doubt. For a whole month the cornered

Jews fought with reckless courage though Stroop, in one daily report, put it

differently, complaining about the “cunning fighting methods and tricks used by

the Jews and bandits.” By April 26 he reported that many of the defenders were

“going insane from the heat, the smoke and the explosions.”

During the day several more blocks of buildings were burned down. This is the only and

final method which forces this trash and subhumanity to the surface.

The last day was May 16. That night Stroop got off his last daily battle report.

One hundred eighty Jews, bandits and subhumans were destroyed. The former Jewish

quarter of Warsaw is no longer in existence. The large-scale action was terminated at 2015

hours by blowing up the Warsaw synagogue …

Total number of Jews dealt with: 56,065, including both Jews caught and Jews whose

extermination can be proved.

A week later he was asked to explain that figure, and he replied:

Of the total of 56,065 caught, about 7,000 were destroyed in the former ghetto during

large-scale operation. 6,929 Jews were destroyed by transporting them to Treblinka; the sum

total of Jews destroyed is therefore 13,929. Beyond that, from five to six thousand Jews were

destroyed by being blown up or by perishing in the flames.

General Stroop’s arithmetic is not very clear since this report leaves some

36,000 Jews unaccounted for. But there can be little doubt that he was telling the

truth when he wrote in his handsomely bound final report that he had caught “a

total of 56,065 Jews whose extermination can be proved.” The gas chambers no

doubt accounted for the 36,000.

German losses, according to Stroop, were sixteen killed and ninety wounded.

Probably the true figures were much higher, given the nature of the savage

house-to-house fighting which the general himself described in such lurid detail,

but were kept low so as not to disturb Himmler’s fine sensibilities. The German

troops and police, Stroop concluded, “fulfilled their duty indefatigably in faithful

comradeship and stood together as exemplary models of soldiers.”

The “final solution” went on to the very end of the war. How many Jews did it

massacre? The figure has been debated. According to two S.S. witnesses at

Nuremberg the total was put at between five and six millions by one of the great

Nazi experts on the subject, Karl Eichmann, chief of the Jewish Office of the

Gestapo, who carried out the “final solution” under the prodding hand of its

originator, Heydrich.* The figure given in the Nuremberg indictment was

5,700,000 and it tallied with the calculations of the World Jewish Congress.

Reitlinger in his prodigious study of the Final Solution concluded that the figure

was somewhat less—between 4,194,200 and 4,581,200.71

There were some ten million Jews living in 1939 in the territories occupied by

Hitler’s forces. By any estimate it is certain that nearly half of them were

exterminated by the Germans. This was the final consequence and the shattering

cost of the aberration which came over the Nazi dictator in his youthful gutter

days in Vienna and which he imparted to—or shared with—so many of his

German followers.

THE MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

There were some practices of the Germans during the short-lived New Order

that resulted from sheer sadism rather than a lust for mass murder. Perhaps to a

psychiatrist there is a difference between the two lusts though the end result of

the first differed from the second only in the scale of deaths.

The Nazi medical experiments are an example of this sadism, for in the use of

concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war as human guinea pigs very

little, if any, benefit to science was achieved. It is a tale of horror of which the

German medical profession cannot be proud. Although the “experiments” were

conducted by fewer than two hundred murderous quacks—albeit some of them

held eminent posts in the medical world—their criminal work was known to

thousands of leading physicians of the Reich, not a single one of whom, so far as

the record shows, ever uttered the slightest public protest. *

In the murders in this field the Jews were not the only victims. The Nazi

doctors also used Russian prisoners of war, Polish concentration camp inmates,

women as well as men, and even Germans. The “experiments” were quite

varied. Prisoners were placed in pressure chambers and subjected to high-

altitude tests until they ceased breathing. They were injected with lethal doses of

typhus and jaundice. They were subjected to “freezing” experiments in icy water

or exposed naked in the snow outdoors until they froze to death. Poison bullets

were tried out on them as was mustard gas. At the Ravensbrueck concentration

camp for women hundreds of Polish inmates—the “rabbit girls” they were called

—were given gas gangrene wounds while others were subjected to

“experiments” in bone grafting. At Dachau and Buchenwald gypsies were

selected to see how long, and in what manner, they could live on salt water.

Sterilization experiments were carried out on a large scale at several camps by a

variety of means on both men and women; for, as an S.S. physician, Dr. Adolf

Pokorny, wrote Himmler on one occasion, “the enemy must be not only

conquered but exterminated.” If he could not be slaughtered—and the need for

slave labor toward the end of the war made that practice questionable, as we

have seen—then he could be prevented from propagating. In fact Dr. Pokorny

told Himmler he thought he had found just the right means, the plant Caladium

seguinum, which, he said, induced lasting sterility.

The thought alone [the good doctor wrote the S.S. Fuehrer] that the three million

Bolsheviks now in German captivity could be sterilized, so that they would be available for

work but precluded from propagation, opens up the most far-reaching perspectives. 72

Another German doctor who had “far-reaching perspectives” was Professor

August Hirt, head of the Anatomical Institute of the University of Strasbourg.

His special field was somewhat different from those of the others and he

explained it in a letter at Christmas time of 1941 to S.S. Lieutenant General

Rudolf Brandt, Himmler’s adjutant.

We have large collections of skulls of almost all races and peoples at our disposal. Of the

Jewish race, however, only very few specimens of skulls are available … The war in the East

now presents us with the opportunity to overcome this deficiency. By procuring the skulls of

the Jewish-Bolshevik commissars, who represent the prototype of the repulsive, but

characteristic, subhuman, we have the chance now to obtain scientific material.

Professor Hirt did not want the skulls of “Jewish-Bolshevik commissars”

already dead. He proposed that the heads of these persons first be measured

while they were alive. Then—

Following the subsequently induced death of the Jew, whose head should not be damaged,

the physician will sever the head from the body and will forward it … in a hermetically sealed

tin can.

Whereupon Dr. Hirt would go to work, he promised, on further scientific

measurements. 73 Himmler was delighted. He directed that Professor Hirt “be

supplied with everything needed for his research work.”

He was well supplied. The actual supplier was an interesting Nazi individual

by the name of Wolfram Sievers, who spent considerable time on the witness

stand at the main Nuremberg trial and at the subsequent “Doctors’ Trial,” in the

latter of which he was a defendant.* Sievers, a former bookseller, had risen to be

a colonel of the S.S. and executive secretary of the Ahnenerbe, the Institute for

Research into Heredity, one of the ridiculous “cultural” organizations established

by Himmler to pursue one of his many lunacies. It had, according to Sievers,

fifty “research branches,” of which one was called the “Institute for Military

Scientific Research,” which Sievers also headed. He was a shifty-eyed,

Mephistophelean-looking fellow with a thick, ink-black beard and at Nuremberg

he was dubbed the “Nazi Bluebeard,” after the famous French killer. Like so

many other characters in this history, he kept a meticulous diary, and this and his

correspondence, both of which survived, contributed to his gallows end.

By June 1943 Sievers had collected at Auschwitz the men and women who

were to furnish the skeletons for the “scientific measurements” of Professor Dr.

Hirt at the University of Strasbourg. “A total of 115 persons, including 79 Jews,

30 Jewesses, 4 ‘Asiatics’ and 2 Poles were processed,” Sievers reported,

requesting the S.S. main office in Berlin for transportation for them from

Auschwitz to the Natzweiler concentration camp near Strasbourg. The British

cross-examiner at Nuremberg inquired as to the meaning of “processing.”

“Anthropological measurements,” Sievers replied.

“Before they were murdered they were anthropologically measured? That was

all there was to it, was it?”

“And casts were taken,” Sievers added.

What followed was narrated by S.S. Captain Josef Kramer, himself a veteran

exterminator from Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Dachau and other camps and who

achieved fleeting fame as the “Beast of Belsen” and was condemned to death by

a British court at Lueneburg.

Professor Hirt of the Strasbourg Anatomical Institute told me of the prisoner convoy en

route from Auschwitz. He said these persons were to be killed by poison gas in the gas

chamber of the Natzweiler camp, their bodies then to be taken to the Anatomical Institute for

his disposal. He gave me a bottle containing about half a pint of salts—I think they were

cyanide salts—and told me the approximate dosage I would have to use to poison the arriving

inmates from Auschwitz.

Early in August 1943, I received eighty inmates who were to be killed with the gas Hirt

had given me. One night I went to the gas chamber in a small car with about fifteen women

this first time. I told the women they had to go into the chamber to be disinfected. I did not tell

them, however, that they were to be gassed.

By this time the Nazis had perfected the technique.

With the help of a few S.S. men [Kramer continued] I stripped the women completely and

shoved them into the gas chamber when they were stark naked.

When the door closed they began to scream. I introduced a certain amount of salt through a

tube … and observed through a peephole what happened inside the room. The women

breathed for about half a minute before they fell to the floor. After I had turned on the

ventilation I opened the door. I found the women lying lifeless on the floor and they were

covered with excrements.

Captain Kramer testified that he repeated the performance until all eighty

inmates had been killed and turned the bodies over to Professor Hirt, “as

requested.” He was asked by his interrogator what his feelings were at the time,

and he gave a memorable answer that gives insight into a phenomenon in the

Third Reich that has seemed so elusive of human understanding.

I had no feelings in carrying out these things because I had received an order to kill the

eighty inmates in the way I already told you.

That, by the way, was the way I was trained. 74

Another witness testified as to what happened next. He was Henry Herypierre,

a Frenchman who worked in the Anatomical Institute at Strasbourg as Professor

Hirt’s laboratory assistant until the Allies arrived.

The first shipment we received was of the bodies of thirty women … These thirty female

bodies arrived still warm. The eyes were wide open and shining. They were red and bloodshot

and were popping from their sockets. There were also traces of blood about the nose and

mouth. No rigor mortis was evident.

Herypierre suspected that they had been done to death and secretly copied

down their prison numbers which were tattooed on their left arms. Two more

shipments of fifty-six men arrived, he said, in exactly the same condition. They

were pickled in alcohol under the expert direction of Dr. Hirt. But the professor

was a Utile nervous about the whole thing. “Peter,” he said to Herypierre, “if

you can’t keep your trap shut, you’ll be one of them.”

Professor Dr. Hirt went about his work nonetheless. According to the

correspondence of Sievers, the professor severed the heads and, as he wrote,

“assembled the skeleton collection which was previously nonexistent.” But there

were difficulties and after hearing them described by Dr. Hirt—Sievers himself

had no expert medical or anatomical knowledge—the chief of the Ahnenerbe

reported them to Himmler on September 5, 1944.

In view of the vast amount of scientific research involved, the job of reducing the corpses

has not yet been completed. This requires some time for 80 corpses.

And time was running out. Advancing American and French troops were

nearing Strasbourg. Hirt requested “directives as to what should be done with the

collection.”

The corpses can be stripped of the flesh and thereby rendered unidentifiable [Sievers

reported to headquarters on behalf of Dr. Hirt]. This would mean, however, that at least part of

the whole work had been done for nothing and that this unique collection would be lost to

science, since it would be impossible to make plaster casts afterwards.

The skeleton collection as such is inconspicuous. The flesh parts could be declared as

having been left by the French at the time we took over the Anatomical Institute* and would

be turned over for cremating. Please advise me which of the following three proposals is to be

carried out: 1. The collection as a whole to be preserved; 2. The collection to be dissolved in

part; 3. The collection to be completely dissolved.

“Why were you wanting to deflesh the bodies, witness?” the British

prosecutor asked in the stillness of the Nuremberg courtroom. “Why were you

suggesting that the blame should be passed on to the French?”

“As a layman I could have no opinion in this matter,” the “Nazi Bluebeard”

replied. “I merely transmitted an inquiry from Professor Hirt. I had nothing to do

with the murdering of these people. I simply carried through the function of a

mailman.”

“You were the post office,” the prosecutor rejoined, “another of these

distinguished Nazi post offices, were you?”

It was a leaky defense offered by many a Nazi at the trials and on this

occasion, as on others, the prosecution nailed it. 75

The captured S.S. files reveal that on October 26, 1944, Sievers reported that

“the collection in Strasbourg has been completely dissolved in accordance with

the directive. This arrangement is for the best in view of the whole situation.” 76

Herypierre later described the attempt—not altogether successful—to hide the

traces.

In September, 1944, the Allies made an advance on Belfort, and Professor Hirt ordered

Bong and Herr Maier to cut up these bodies and have them burned in the crematory … I asked

Herr Maier the next day whether he had cut up all the bodies, but Herr Bong replied: “We

couldn’t cut up all the bodies, it was too much work. We left a few bodies in the storeroom.”

They were discovered there by an Allied team when units of the U.S. Seventh

Army, with the French 2nd Armored Division in the lead, entered Strasbourg a

month later.†77

Not only skeletons but human skins were collected by the masters of the New

Order though in the latter case the pretense could not be made that the cause of

scientific research was being served. The skins of concentration camp prisoners,

especially executed for this ghoulish purpose, had merely decorative value. They

made, it was found, excellent lamp shades, several of which were expressly

fitted up for Frau Ilse Koch, the wife of the commandant of Buchenwald and

nicknamed by the inmates the “Bitch of Buchenwald.” * Tattooed skins appear to

have been the most sought after. A German inmate, Andreas Pfaffenberger,

deposed at Nuremberg on this.

… All prisoners with tattooing on them were ordered to report to the dispensary … After

the prisoners had been examined the ones with the best and most artistic specimens were killed

by injections. The corpses were then turned over to the pathological department where the

desired pieces of tattooed skin were detached from the bodies and treated further. The finished

products were turned over to Koch’s wife, who had them fashioned into lamp shades, and

other ornamental household articles. 78

One piece of skin which apparently struck Frau Koch’s fancy had the words

“Haensel and Gretel” tattooed on it.

At another camp, Dachau, the demand for such skins often outran the supply.

A Czech physician prisoner, Dr. Frank Bláha, testified at Nuremberg as to that.

Sometimes we would not have enough bodies with good skin and Dr. Rascher would say,

“All right, you will get the bodies.” The next day we would receive twenty or thirty bodies of

young people. They would have been shot in the neck or struck on the head, so that the skin

would be uninjured … The skin had to be from healthy prisoners and free from defects. 79

It was this Dr. Sigmund Rascher who seems to have been responsible for the

more sadistic of the medical experiments in the first place. This horrible quack

had attracted the attention of Himmler, among whose obsessions was the

breeding of more and more superior Nordic offspring, through reports in S.S.

circles that Frau Rascher had given birth to three children after passing the age

of forty-eight, although in truth the Raschers had simply kidnaped them at

suitable intervals from an orphanage.

In the spring of 1941, Dr. Rascher, who was attending a special medical

course at Munich given by the Luftwaffe, had a brain storm. On May 15, 1941,

he wrote Himmler about it. He had found to his horror that research on the effect

of high altitudes on flyers was at a standstill because “no tests with human

material had yet been possible as such experiments are very dangerous and

nobody volunteers for them.”

Can you make available two or three professional criminals for these experiments … The

experiments, by which the subjects can of course die, would take place with my co-

operation. 80

The S.S. Fuehrer replied within a week that “prisoners will, of course, be

made available gladly for the high-flight research.”

They were, and Dr. Rascher went to work. The results may be seen from his

own reports and from those of others, which showed up at Nuremberg and at the

subsequent trial of the S.S. doctors.

Dr. Rascher’s own findings are a model of scientific jargon. For the high-

altitude tests he moved the Air Force’s decompression chamber at Munich to the

nearby Dachau concentration camp where human guinea pigs were readily

available. Air was pumped out of the contraption so that the oxygen and air

pressure at high altitudes could be simulated. Dr. Rascher then made his

observations, of which the following one is typical.

The third test was without oxygen at the equivalent of 29,400 feet altitude conducted on a

37-year-old Jew in good general condition. Respiration continued for 30 minutes. After four

minutes the TP [test person] began to perspire and roll his head.

After five minutes spasms appeared; between the sixth and tenth minute respiration

increased in frequency, the TP losing consciousness. From the eleventh to the thirtieth minute

respiration slowed down to three inhalations per minute, only to cease entirely at the end of

that period … About half an hour after breathing had ceased, an autopsy was begun.81

An Austrian inmate, Anton Pacholegg, who worked in Dr. Rascher’s office,

has described the “experiments” less scientifically.

I have personally seen through the observation window of the decompression chamber

when a prisoner inside would stand a vacuum until his lungs ruptured … They would go mad

and pull out their hair in an effort to relieve the pressure. They would tear their heads and face

with their fingers and nails in an attempt to maim themselves in their madness. They would

beat the walls with their hands and head and scream in an effort to relieve pressure on their

eardrums. These cases usually ended in the death of the subject.82

Some two hundred prisoners were subjected to this experiment before Dr.

Rascher was finished with it. Of these, according to the testimony at the

“Doctors’ Trial,” about eighty were killed outright and the remainder executed

somewhat later so that no tales would be told.

This particular research project was finished in May 1942, at which time Field

Marshal Erhard Milch of the Luftwaffe conveyed Goering’s “thanks” to

Himmler for Dr. Rascher’s pioneer experiments. A little later, on October 10,

1942, Lieutenant General Dr. Hippke, Medical Inspector of the Air Force,

tendered to Himmler “in the name of German aviation medicine and research”

his “obedient gratitude” for “the Dachau experiments.” However, he thought,

there was one omission in them. They had not taken into account the extreme

cold which an aviator faces at high altitudes. To rectify this omission the

Luftwaffe, he informed Himmler, was building a decompression chamber

“equipped with full refrigeration and with a nominal altitude of 100,000 feet.

Freezing experiments,” he added, “along different lines are still under way at

Dachau.” 83

Indeed they were. And again Dr. Rascher was in the vanguard. But some of

his doctor colleagues were having qualms. Was it Christian to do what Dr.

Rascher was doing? Apparently a few German Luftwaffe medics were beginning

to have their doubts. When Himmler heard of this he was infuriated and

promptly wrote Field Marshal Milch protesting about the difficulties caused by

“Christian medical circles” in the Air Force. He begged the Luftwaffe Chief of

Staff to release Rascher from the Air Force medical corps so that he could be

transferred to the S.S. He suggested that they find a “non-Christian physician,

who should be honorable as a scientist,” to pass on Dr. Rascher’s valuable

works. In the meantime Himmler emphasized that he

personally assumed the responsibility for supplying asocial individuals and criminals who

deserve only to die from concentration camps for these experiments.

Dr. Rascher’s “freezing experiments” were of two kinds: first, to see how

much cold a human being could endure before he died; and second, to find the

best means of rewarming a person who still lived after being exposed to extreme

cold. Two methods were selected to freeze a man: dumping him into a tank of

ice water or leaving him out in the snow, completely naked, overnight during

winter. Rascher’s reports to Himmler on his “freezing” and “warming”

experiments are voluminous; an example or two will give the tenor. One of the

earliest ones was made on September 10, 1942.

The TPs were immersed in water in full flying uniform … with hood. A life jacket

prevented sinking. The experiments were conducted at water temperatures between 36.5 and

53.5 degrees Fahrenheit. In the first test series the back of the head and the brain stem were

above water. In another series the back of the neck and cerebellum were submerged.

Temperatures as low as 79.5 in the stomach and 79.7 in the rectum were recorded electrically.

Fatalities occurred only when the medulla and the cerebellum were chilled.

In autopsies of such fatalities large quantities of free blood, up to a pint, were always found

inside the cranial cavity. The heart regularly showed extreme distention of the right chamber.

The TPs in such tests inevitably died when body temperature had declined to 82.5, despite all

rescue attempts. These autopsy findings plainly prove the importance of a heated head and

neck protector for the foam suit now in the process of development.84

A table which Dr. Rascher appended covers six “Fatal Cases” and shows the

water temperatures, body temperature on removal from water, body temperature

at death, the length of stay in the water and the time it took the patient to die.

The toughest man endured in the ice water for one hundred minutes, the weakest

for fifty-three minutes.

Walter Neff, a camp inmate who served as Dr. Rascher’s medical orderly,

furnished the “Doctors’ Trial” with a layman’s description of one water-freezing

test.

It was the worst experiment ever made. Two Russian officers were brought from the prison

barracks. Rascher had them stripped and they had to go into the vat naked. Hour after hour

went by, and whereas usually unconsciousness from the cold set in after sixty minutes at the

latest, the two men in this case still responded fully after two and a half hours. All appeals to

Rascher to put them to sleep by injection were fruitless. About the third hour one of the

Russians said to the other, ‘Comrade, please tell the officer to shoot us.’ The other replied that

he expected no mercy from this Fascist dog. The two shook hands with a ‘Farewell, Comrade’

… These words were translated to Rascher by a young Pole, though in a somewhat different

form. Rascher went to his office. The young Pole at once tried to chloroform the two victims,

but Rascher came back at once, threatening us with his gun … The test lasted at least five

hours before death supervened. 85

The nominal “chief” of the initial cold-water experiments was a certain Dr.

Holzloehner, Professor of Medicine at the University of Kiel, assisted by a Dr.

Finke, and after working with Rascher for a couple of months they believed that

they had exhausted the experimental possibilities. The three physicians

thereupon drew up a thirty-two-page top-secret report to the Air Force entitled

“Freezing Experiments with Human Beings” and called a meeting of German

scientists at Nuremberg for October 26–27, 1942, to hear and discuss their

findings. The subject of the meeting was “Medical Questions in Marine and

Winter Emergencies.” According to the testimony at the “Doctors’ Trial,”

ninety-five German scientists, including some of the most eminent men in the

field, participated, and though the three doctors left no doubt that a good many

human beings had been done to death in the experiments there were no questions

put as to this and no protests therefore made.

Professor Holzloehner* and Dr. Finke bowed out of the experiments at this

time but the persevering Dr. Rascher carried on alone from October 1942 until

May of the following year. He wanted, among other things, to pursue

experiments in what he called “dry freezing.” Auschwitz, he wrote to Himmler,

is much better suited for such tests than Dachau because it is colder there and because the

size of the grounds causes less of a stir in the camp. (The test persons yell when they freeze.)

For some reason the change of locality could not be arranged, so Dr. Rascher

went ahead with his studies at Dachau, praying for some real winter weather.

Thank God, we have had another intense cold snap at Dachau [he wrote Himmler in the

early spring of 1943]. Some people remained out in the open for 14 hours at 21 degrees,

attaining an interior temperature of 77 degrees, with peripheral frostbite …86

At the “Doctors’ Trial” the witness Neff again provided a layman’s

description of the “dry-freezing” experiments of his chief.

A prisoner was placed naked on a stretcher outside the barracks in the evening. He was

covered with a sheet, and every hour a bucket of cold water was poured over him. The test

person lay out in the open like this into the morning. Their temperatures were taken.

Later Dr. Rascher said it was a mistake to cover the subject with a sheet and to drench him

with water … In the future the test persons must not be covered. The next experiment was a

test on ten prisoners who were exposed in turn, likewise naked.

As the prisoners slowly froze, Dr. Rascher or his assistant would record

temperatures, heart action, respiration and so on. The cries of the suffering often

rent the night.

Initially [Neff explained to the court] Rascher forbade these tests to be made in a state of

anesthesia. But the test persons made such a racket that it was impossible for Rascher to

continue these tests without anesthetic. 87

The TPs (test persons) were left to die, as Himmler said they deserved to, in

the ice-water tanks or lying naked on the ground outside the barracks at Dachau

on a winter evening. If they survived they were shortly exterminated. But the

brave German flyers and sailors, for whose benefit the experiments were

ostensibly carried out, and who might find themselves ditched in the icy waters

of the Arctic Ocean or marooned in some frozen waste above the Arctic Circle in

Norway, Finland or northern Russia, had to be saved if possible. The inimitable

Dr. Rascher therefore took to performing on his human guinea pigs at Dachau

what he termed “warming experiments.” What was the best method, he wanted

to know, for warming a frozen man and thus possibly saving his life?

Heinrich Himmler, never backward in offering “practical” solutions to his

corps of busy scientists, suggested to Rascher that warming by “animal heat” be

tried, but at first the doctor did not think much of the idea. “Warming by animal

heat—the bodies of animals or women—is much too slow,” he wrote the S.S.

chief. But Himmler kept after him.

I am very curious [he wrote Rascher] about the experiments with animal heat. Personally I

believe these experiments may bring the best and the most sustained results.

Though skeptical, Dr. Rascher was not the man to ignore a suggestion from

the leader of the S.S. He promptly embarked on a series of the most grotesque

“experiments” of all, recording them for posterity in every morbid detail. Four

inmates from the women’s concentration camps at Ravensbrueck were sent to

him at Dachau. However there was something about one of them—they were

classified as prostitutes—that disturbed the doctor and he so reported to his

superiors.

One of the women assigned showed impeccably Nordic racial characteristics … I asked the

girl why she had volunteered for brothel service and she replied, “To get out of the

concentration camp.” When I objected that it was shameful to volunteer as a brothel girl, I was

advised, “Better half a year in a brothel than half a year in the concentration camp …”

My racial conscience is outraged by the prospect of exposing to racially inferior

concentration camp elements a girl who is outwardly pure Nordic … For this reason I decline

to use this girl for my experimental purposes.88

But he used others, whose hair was less fair and the eyes less blue. His

findings were duly reported to Himmler in a report marked “Secret” on February

12, 1942.89

The test persons were chilled in the familiar way—dressed or undressed—in cold water at

various temperatures … Removal from the water took place at a rectal temperature of 86

degrees.

In eight cases the test persons were placed between two naked women on a wide bed. The

women were instructed to snuggle up to the chilled person as closely as possible. The three

persons were then covered with blankets …

Once the test persons regained consciousness, they never lost it again, quickly grasping

their situation and nestling close to the naked bodies of the women. The rise of body

temperature then proceeded at approximately the same speed as with test persons warmed by

being swathed in blankets … An exception was formed by four test persons who practiced

sexual intercourse between 86 and 89.5 degrees. In these persons, after coitus, a very swift

temperature rise ensued, comparable to that achieved by means of a hot-water bath.

Dr. Rascher found, somewhat to his surprise, that one woman warmed a

frozen man faster than two women.

I attribute this to the fact that in warming by means of one woman personal inhibitions are

avoided and the woman clings more closely to the chilled person. Here too, return of full

consciousness was notably rapid. In the case of only one person did consciousness fail to

return and only a slight degree of warming was recorded. This test person died with symptoms

of a brain hemorrhage, later confirmed by autopsy.

Summing up, this murderous hack concluded that warming up a “chilled” man

with women “proceeds very slowly” and that hot baths were more efficacious.

Only test persons [he concluded] whose physical state permitted sexual intercourse warmed

up surprisingly fast and also showed a surprisingly rapid return of full bodily well-being.

According to the testimony at the “Doctors’ Trial” some four hundred

“freezing” experiments were performed on three hundred persons of whom

between eighty and ninety died directly as a result thereof, and the rest, except

for a few, were bumped off subsequently, some of them having been driven

insane. Dr. Rascher himself, incidentally, was not around to testify at this trial.

He continued his bloody labors on various new projects, too numerous to

mention, until May 1944, when he and his wife were arrested by the S.S.—not

for his murderous “experiments,” it seems, but on the charge that he and his wife

had practiced deceit about how their children came into the world. Such

treachery Himmler, with his worship of German mothers, could not brook—he

had sincerely believed that Frau Rascher had begun to bear her three children at

the age of forty-eight and he was outraged when he learned that she had

kidnaped them. So Dr. Rascher was incarcerated in the political bunker at his

familiar Dachau camp and his wife was carted off to Ravensbrueck, from which

the doctor had procured his prostitutes for the “warming” tests. Neither survived,

and it is believed that Himmler himself, in one of the last acts of his life, ordered

their execution. They might have made awkward witnesses.

A number of such awkward witnesses did survive to stand trial. Seven of them

were condemned to death and hanged, defending their lethal experiments to the

last as patriotic acts which served the Fatherland. Dr. Herta Oberheuser, the only

woman defendant at the “Doctors’ Trial,” was given twenty years. She had

admitted giving lethal injections to “five or six” Polish women among the

hundreds who suffered the tortures of the damned in a variety of “experiments”

at Ravensbrueck. A number of doctors, such as the notorious Pokorny, who had

wanted to sterilize millions of the enemy, were acquitted. A few were contrite.

At a second trial of medical underlings Dr. Edwin Katzenellenbogen, a former

member of the faculty of the Harvard Medical School, asked the court for the

death sentence. “You have placed the mark of Cain on my forehead,” he

exclaimed. “Any physician who committed the crimes I am charged with

deserves to be killed.” He was given life imprisonment. 90

THE DEATH OF HEYDRICH AND THE END OF LIDICE

Midway through the war there was one act of retribution against the gangster

masters of the New Order for their slaughtering of the conquered people.

Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Security Police and the S.D., deputy chief of the

Gestapo, this long-nosed, icy-eyed thirty-eight-year-old policeman of diabolical

cast, the genius of the “final solution,” Hangman Heydrich, as he became known

in the occupied lands, met a violent end.

Restless for further power and secretly intriguing to oust his chief, Himmler,

he had got himself appointed, in addition to his other offices, Acting Protector of

Bohemia and Moravia. Poor old Neurath, the Protector, was packed off on

indefinite sick leave by Hitler in September 1941, and Heydrich replaced him in

the ancient seat of the Bohemian kings at Hradschin Castle in Prague. But not

for long.

On the morning of May 29, 1942, as he was driving in his open Mercedes

sports car from his country villa to the Castle in Prague a bomb of British make

was tossed at him, blowing the car to pieces and shattering his spine. It had been

hurled by two Czechs, Jan Kubis and Josef Gabeik, of the free Czechoslovak

army in England, who had been parachuted from an R.A.F. plane. Well equipped

for their assignment, they got away under a smoke screen and were given refuge

by the priests of the Karl Borromaeus Church in Prague.

Heydrich expired of his wounds on June 4 and a veritable hecatomb followed

as the Germans took savage revenge, after the manner of the old Teutonic rites,

for the death of their hero. According to one Gestapo report, 1,331 Czechs,

including 201 women, were immediately executed.91 The actual assassins, along

with 120 members of the Czech resistance who were hiding in the Karl

Borromaeus Church, were besieged there by the S.S. and killed to the last man. *

It was the Jews, however, who suffered the most for this act of defiance against

the master race. Three thousand of them were removed from the “privileged”

ghetto of Theresienstadt and shipped to the East for extermination. On the day of

the bombing Goebbels had 500 of the few remaining Jews at large in Berlin

arrested and on the day of Heydrich’s death 152 of them were executed as a

“reprisal.”

But of all the consequences of Heydrich’s death the fate of the little village of

Lidice near the mining town of Kladno not far from Prague will perhaps be

longest remembered by the civilized world. For no other reason except to serve

as an example to a conquered people who dared to take the life of one of their

inquisitors a terrible savagery was carried out in this peaceful little rural place.

On the morning of June 9, 1942, ten truckloads of German Security Police

under the command of Captain Max Rostock* arrived at Lidice and surrounded

the village. No one was allowed to leave though anyone who lived there and

happened to be away could return. A boy of twelve, panicking, tried to steal

away. He was shot down and killed. A peasant woman ran toward the outlying

fields. She was shot in the back and killed. The entire male population of the

village was locked up in the barns, stables and cellar of a farmer named Horak,

who was also the mayor.

The next day, from dawn until 4 P.M., they were taken into the garden behind

the barn, in batches of ten, and shot by firing squads of the Security Police. A

total of 172 men and boys, over sixteen, were executed there. An additional

nineteen male residents, who were working in the Kladno mines during the

massacre, were later picked up and dispatched in Prague.

Seven women who were rounded up at Lidice were taken to Prague and shot.

All the rest of the women of the village, who numbered 195, were transported to

the Ravensbrueck concentration camp in Germany, where seven were gassed,

three “disappeared” and forty-two died of ill treatment. Four of the Lidice

women who were about to give birth were first taken to a maternity hospital in

Prague where their newly born infants were murdered and they themselves then

shipped to Ravensbrueck.

There remained for the Germans the disposal of the children of Lidice, whose

fathers were now dead, whose mothers were imprisoned. It must be said that the

Germans did not shoot them too, not even the male children. They were carted

off to a concentration camp at Gneisenau. There were ninety in all and from

these seven, who were less than a year old, were selected by the Nazis, after a

suitable examination by Himmler’s “racial experts,” to be sent to Germany to be

brought up as Germans under German names. Later, the others were similarly

disposed of.

“Every trace of them has been lost,” the Czechoslovak government, which

filed an official report on Lidice for the Nuremberg tribunal, concluded.

Happily, some of them, at least, were later found. I remember in the autumn of

1945 reading the pitiful appeals in the then Allied-controlled German

newspapers from the surviving mothers of Lidice asking the German people to

help them locate their children and send them “home.” †

Actually Lidice itself had been wiped off the face of the earth. As soon as the

men had been massacred and the women and children carted off, the Security

Police had burned down the village, dynamited the ruins and leveled it off.

Lidice, though it became the most widely known example of Nazi savagery of

this kind, was not the only village in the German-occupied lands to suffer such a

barbaric end. There was one other in Czechoslovakia, Lezhaky, and several more

in Poland, Russia, Greece and Yugoslavia. Even in the West, where the New

Order was relatively less murderous, the example of Lidice was repeated by the

Germans though in most cases, such as that of Televaag in Norway, the men,

women and children were merely deported to separate concentration camps after

every building in the village had been razed to the ground.

But on June 10, 1944, two years to a day after the massacre of Lidice, a

terrible toll of life was taken at the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, near

Limoges. A detachment of the S.S. division Das Reich, which had already

earned a reputation for terror—if not for fighting—in Russia, surrounded the

French town and ordered the inhabitants to gather in the central square. There

the people were told by the commandant that explosives were reported to have

been hidden in the village and that a search and the checking of identity cards

would be made. Whereupon the entire population of 652 persons was locked up.

The men were herded into barns, the women and children into the church. The

entire village was then set on fire. The German soldiers next set upon the

inhabitants. The men in the barns who were not burned to death were machine-

gunned and killed. The women and children in the church were also peppered

with machine-gun fire and those who were not killed were burned to death when

the German soldiers set fire to the church. Three days later the Bishop of

Limoges found the charred bodies of fifteen children in a heap behind the

burned-out altar.

Nine years later, in 1953, a French military court established that 642

inhabitants—245 women, 207 children and 190 men—had perished in the

massacre at Oradour. Ten survived. Though badly burned they had simulated

death and thus escaped it.*

Oradour, like Lidice, was never rebuilt. Its ruins remain a monument to

Hitler’s New Order in Europe. The gutted church stands out against the peaceful

countryside as a reminder of the beautiful June day, just before the harvest, when

the village and its inhabitants suddenly ceased to exist. Where once a window

stood is a little sign: “Madame Rouffance, the only survivor from the church,

escaped through this window.” In front there is a small figure of Christ affixed to

a rusty iron cross.

Such, as has been sketched in this chapter, were the beginnings of Hitler’s

New Order; such was the debut of the Nazi Gangster Empire in Europe.

Fortunately for mankind it was destroyed in its infancy—not by any revolt of the

German people against such a reversion to barbarism but by the defeat of

German arms and the consequent fall of the Third Reich, the story of which now

remains to be told.

* As early as September 18, 1941, Hitler had specifically ordered that Leningrad was to be

“wiped off the face of the earth.” After being surrounded it was to be “razed to the ground” by

bombardment and bombing and its population (three millions) was to be destroyed with it.

* Neither the extermination of masses of Soviet prisoners of war nor the exploitation of

Russian slave labor was a secret to the Kremlin. As early as November 1941, Molotov had

made a formal diplomatic protest against the “extermination” of Russian POWs, and in April

of the following year he made another protest against the German slave labor program.

* A year before, it will be remembered, Goering had told Ciano that “this year between twenty

and thirty million persons will die of hunger in Russia” and that “perhaps it is well that it

should be so.” Already, he said, Russian prisoners of war had begun “to eat each other.”.

† In a directive of Goering’s Economic Staff, East, on May 23, 1941, the destruction of the

Russian industrial areas was ordered. The workers and their families in these regions were to

be left to starve. “Any attempt to save the population there,” the directive stated, “from death

by starvation by importing [food] surpluses from the black-soil zone [of Russia]” was

prohibited.

* At the official rate of exchange (2.5 Reichsmarks to the dollar) this would amount to 40

billion dollars. But I have used the unofficial rate of four Reichsmarks to the dollar. In terms

of purchasing power it is more accurate.

* According to Alexander Dallin in his exhaustive study of German rule in Russia, Germany

could have obtained more from Russia in normal trade. (See Dallin, German Rule in Russia.)

* Albert Speer, Minister for Armament and War Production, admitted at Nuremberg that 40

per cent of all prisoners of war were employed in 1944 in the production of weapons and

munitions and in subsidiary industries. 20

† A captured record shows Field Marshal Milch of the Air Force in 1943 demanding 50,000

more Russian war prisoners to be added to the 30,000 already manning antiaircraft artillery.

“It is amusing,” Milch laughed, “that Russians must work the guns. ”21

* The entire slave labor program was put in charge of Fritz Sauckel, who was given the title of

Plenipotentiary General for the Allocation of Labor. A second-string Nazi, he had been

Gauleiter and Governor of Thuringia. A pig-eyed little man, rude and tough, he was, as

Goebbels mentioned in his diary, “one of the dullest of the dull.” In the dock at Nuremberg, he

struck this writer as being a complete nonentity, the sort of German who in other times might

have been a butcher in a small-town meat market. One of his first directives laid it down that

the foreign workers were “to be treated in such a way as to exploit them to the highest possible

extent at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure.” 24 He admitted at Nuremberg that of

all the millions of foreign workers “not even 200,000 came voluntarily.” However at the trial

he denied all responsibility for their ill-treatment. He was found guilty, sentenced to death, and

hanged in the Nuremberg jail on the night of October 15–16, 1946.

* Besides obtaining thousands of slave laborers, both civilians and prisoners of war for its

factories in Germany, the Krupp firm also built a large fuse factory at the extermination camp

at Auschwitz, where Jews were worked to exhaustion and then gassed to death.

Baron Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the chairman of the board, was indicted as a

major war criminal at Nuremberg (along with Goering, et al.) but because of his “physical and

mental condition” (he had had a stroke and had faded into senility), he was not tried. He died

on January 16, 1950. An effort was made by the prosecution to try in his stead his son, Alfried,

who had acquired sole ownership of the company in 1943, but the tribunal denied this.

Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach was subsequently tried before a Nuremberg

military tribunal (a purely American court) along with nine directors of the firm in the United

States v. Alfried Krupp et al. case. On July 31, 1948, he was sentenced to twelve years

imprisonment and confiscation of all his property. He was released from Landsberg prison

(where Hitler had served his sentence in 1924) on February 4, 1951, in a general amnesty

issued by John J. McCloy, the U.S. High Commissioner. Not only was the confiscation of his

corporate property annulled but his personal fortune of some $10,000,000 was returned to him.

The Allied governments had ordered the breakup of the vast Krupp empire but Alfried Krupp,

who took over the active management of the firm after his release from prison, evaded the

order and at the time of writing (1959) announced, with the approval of the Bonn government,

that not only would the company not be broken up but that it was acquiring new industries.

* Himmler’s directive of February 20, 1942, was directed especially against Russian slave

workers. It ordered “special treatment” also for “severe violations against discipline, including

work refusal or loafing at work.” In such cases

special treatment is requested. Special treatment is hanging. It should not take place in the

immediate vicinity of the camp. A certain number [however] should attend the special

treatment. 27

The term “special treatment” was a common one in Himmler’s files and in Nazi parlance

during the war. It meant just what Himmler in this directive said it meant.

* Mueller was never apprehended after the war. He was last seen in Hitler’s bunker in Berlin

on April 29, 1945. Some of his surviving colleagues believe he is now in the service of the

Soviet secret police, of which he was a great admirer.

* On July 20, 1942, Keitel had drafted the order.

1. Soviet prisoners of war are to be branded with a special and durable mark.

2. The brand is to consist of an acute angle of about 45 degrees with a one-centimetre

length of side, pointing downward on the left buttock, at about a hand’s width from the

rectum.36

* General Dostler was condemned to death by the U.S. military tribunal in Rome on October

12, 1945.

† Kaltenbrunner was hanged at Nuremberg jail on the night of October 15–16, 1946.

* I.e., they were told they were being resettled elsewhere.

* There was a special reason for this.

† Ohlendorf was tried at Nuremberg by a U.S. military tribunal along with twenty-one others

in the “Einsatzgruppen Case.” Fourteen of them were condemned to death. Only four,

Ohlendorf and three other group commanders, were executed—on June 8, 1951, at Landsberg

prison, some three and a half years after being sentenced. The death penalties for the others

were commuted.

* On August 31, Himmler had ordered an Einsatz detachment to execute a hundred inmates of

the Minsk prison, so that he could see how it was done. According to Bach-Zalewski, a high

officer in the S.S. who was present, Himmler almost swooned when he saw the effect of the

first volley from the firing squad. A few minutes later, when the shots failed to kill two Jewish

women outright, the S.S. Fuehrer became hysterical. One result of this experience was an

order from Himmler that henceforth the women and children should not be shot but dispatched

in the gas vans.50 (See above, p. 960.)

* The number of Soviet Communist party functionaries slain by the Einsatzgruppen has never

even been estimated, as far as I know. Most S.D. reports lumped them together with the Jews.

In one report of Group A, dated October 15, 1941, some 3,387 “Communists” are listed

among the 121,817 executed, the rest being Jews. But the same report often lists the two

together.

† Pohl was condemned to death in the so-called “Concentration Camp Case” by a U.S.

military tribunal on November 3, 1947, and hanged in Landsberg prison on June 8, 1951,

along with Ohlendorf and others.

* The emphasis is this writer’s. A faulty translation of the last line, rendering the German

word Endloesung as “desired solution” instead of “final solution” in the English copy of the

document, led Justice Jackson, who did not know German, to allow Goering under cross-

examination to get away with his contention that he never used the sinister term. (See n. 54.)

“The first time I learned of these terrible exterminations,” Goering exclaimed at one point,

“was right here in Nuremberg.”

† See above, p. 661.

* Lammers was sentenced in April 1949 to twenty years’ imprisonment by a U.S. military

tribunal at Nuremberg, chiefly because of his responsibility in the anti-Jewish decrees. But as

in the case of most of the other convicted Nazis whose sentences were greatly reduced by the

American authorities, his term was commuted in 1951 to ten years and he was released from

Landsberg prison at the end of that year, after serving a total of six years from the date of his

first imprisonment. It might be noted here that most Germans, at least so far as their sentiment

was represented in the West German parliament, did not approve of even the relatively mild

sentences meted out to Hitler’s accomplices. A number of them handed over by the Allies to

German custody were not even prosecuted—even when they were accused of mass murder—

and some of them quickly found employment in the Bonn government.

* Kogon estimates the number at 7,125,000 out of a total of 7,820,000 inmates, but the figure

undoubtedly is too high. (Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell, p. 227.)

† The camp commander, Franz Ziereis, put the total number at 65,000. 56

‡ Born in 1900, the son of a small shopkeeper in Baden-Baden, Hoess was pressured by his

pious Catholic father to become a priest. Instead he joined the Nazi Party in 1922. The next

year he was implicated in the murder of a school teacher who allegedly had denounced Leo

Schlageter, a German saboteur in the Ruhr who was executed by the French and became a

Nazi martyr. Hoess received a life sentence.

He was released in a general amnesty in 1928, joined the S.S. two years later and in 1934

became a member of the Death’s Head group of the S.S., whose principal job was the guarding

of the concentration camps. His first job in this unit was at Dachau. Thus he spent almost his

entire adult life first as a prisoner and then as a jailer. He freely—and even exaggeratedly—

testified to his killings both on the stand at Nuremberg and in affidavits for the prosecution.

Turned over later to the Poles, he was sentenced to death and in March 1947 hanged at

Auschwitz, the scene of his greatest crimes.

* A task which because of the large numbers involved and because of, at the end, armed

resistance, could not be completed (as we shall see) until 1943.

* Usually “heart disease” was written down. Kogon, himself in Buchenwald for eight years,

gives samples: “… Patient died after prolonged suffering on—at—o’clock. Cause of death:

cardiac weakness complicated by pneumonia.” (Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell, p.

218.) Such formalities were dispensed with at Auschwitz when the massive gassings began.

Often the day’s dead were not even counted.

* They were inevitably and regularly dispatched in the gas chambers and replaced by new

teams who continued to meet the same fate. The S.S. wanted no survivors to tell tales.

* There was testimony at the Nuremberg trials that the ashes were sometimes sold as fertilizer.

One Danzig firm, according to a document offered by the Russian prosecution, constructed an

electrically heated tank for making soap out of human fat. Its “recipe” called for “12 pounds of

human fat, 10 quarts of water, and 8 ounces to a pound of caustic soda … all boiled for two or

three hours and then cooled.” 59

* Sometimes they were pulled out before the victims were slain. A secret report of the German

warden of the prison at Minsk disclosed that after he had commandeered the services of a

Jewish dentist all the Jews “had their gold bridgework, crowns and fillings pulled or broken

out. This happens always one to two hours before the special action.” The warden noted that

of 516 German and Russian Jews executed at his prison during a six-week period in the spring

of 1943, some 336 had the gold yanked from their teeth. 65

* Dr. Funk was sentenced to life imprisonment at Nuremberg.

* John Hersey’s novel The Wall, based on the Jewish records, is an epic story of the uprising.

† But not Stroop. He was caught after the war, sentenced to death by an American court at

Dachau on March 22, 1947, for the shooting of hostages in Greece, and then extradited to

Poland, where he was tried for the slaughter of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. He was again

sentenced to death and hanged at the scene of the crime on September 8, 1951.

* Eichmann, according to one of his henchmen, said just before the German collapse that “he

would leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had five million people on his

conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction. ”70 Probably he never

leaped into the grave, laughing or otherwise. He escaped from an American internment camp

in 1945. (NOTE: As this book went on press, the government of Israel announced that it had

apprehended Eichmann.)

* Not even Germany’s most famous surgeon, Dr. Ferdinand Sauerbruch, though he eventually

became an anti-Nazi and conspired with the resistance. Sauerbruch sat through a lecture at the

Berlin Military Medical Academy in May of 1943 given by two of the most notorious of the

doctor-killers, Karl Gebhardt and Fritz Fischer, on the subject of gas gangrene experiments on

prisoners. Sauerbruch ‘s only argument on this occasion was that surgery was better than

sulfanilamide! Professor Gebhardt was sentenced to death at the so-called “Doctors’ Trial”

and hanged on June 2, 1948. Dr. Fischer was given life imprisonment.

* And in which he was condemned to death, and hanged.

* Germany had annexed Alsace after the fall of France in 1940 and the Germans had taken

over the University of Strasbourg.

† Professor Dr. Hirt disappeared. As he left Strasbourg he was heard boasting that no one

would ever take him alive. Apparently no one has—alive or dead.

* Frau Koch, whose power of life and death over the inmates of Buchenwald was complete,

and whose very whim could bring terrible punishment to a prisoner, was sentenced to life

imprisonment at the “Buchenwald Trial,” but her sentence was commuted to four years, and

she was soon released. On January 15, 1951, a German court sentenced her to life

imprisonment for murder. Her husband was sentenced to death by an S.S. court during the war

for “excesses” but was given the option of serving on the Russian front. Before he could do

this, however, Prince Waldeck, the leader of the S.S. in the district, had him executed. Princess

Mafalda, daughter of the King and Queen of Italy and wife of Prince Philip of Hesse, was

among those who died at Buchenwald.

* Professor Holzloehner may have had a guilty conscience. Picked up by the British he

committed suicide after his first interrogation.

* According to Schellenberg, who was there, the Gestapo never learned that the actual

assassins were among the dead in the church. (Schellenberg, The Labyrinth, p. 292.)

* Hanged in Prague in August 1951.

† UNRRA reported on April 2, 1947, that seventeen of them had been found in Bavaria and

sent back to their mothers in Czechoslovakia.

* Twenty members of the S.S. detachment were sentenced to death by this court but only two

were executed, the remaining eighteen having their sentences commuted to prison terms of

from five to twelve years. The commander of the Das Reich Division, S.S. Lieutenant General

Heinz Lammerding was condemned to death in absentia. So far as I know he was never found.

The actual commander of the detachment at Oradour, Major Otto Dickmann, was killed in

action in Normandy a few days later.

28

THE FALL OF MUSSOLINI

FOR THREE SUCCESSIVE WAR YEARS when summer came, it had been the Germans

who had launched the great offensives on the continent of Europe. Now in 1943

the tables turned.

With the capture in early May of that year of the Axis forces in Tunisia, all

that remained of a once mighty army in North Africa, it was obvious that

General Eisenhower’s Anglo–American armies would next turn on Italy itself.

This was the kind of nightmare which had haunted Mussolini in September of

1939 and which had made him delay Italy’s entry into the war until neighboring

France had been conquered by the Germans and the British Expeditionary Force

driven across the Channel. The nightmare now returned, but this time it was

rapidly turning into reality.

Mussolini himself was ill and disillusioned; and he was frightened. Defeatism

was rife among his people and in the armed forces. There had been mass strikes

in the industrial cities of Milan and Turin, where the hungry workers had

demonstrated for “bread, peace and freedom.” The discredited and corrupt

Fascist regime itself was fast crumbling, and when Count Ciano at the beginning

of the year was relieved as Foreign Minister and sent to the Vatican as

ambassador the Germans suspected that he had gone there to try to negotiate a

separate peace with the Allies, as Antonescu, the Rumanian dictator, was already

urging.

For several months Mussolini had been bombarding Hitler with appeals to

make peace with Stalin, so that his armies could be withdrawn to the West to

make a common defense with the Italians against the growing threat of the

Anglo–American forces in the Mediterranean and of those which he believed

were assembling in England for a cross-Channel invasion. The time had come

again, Hitler realized, for a meeting with Mussolini in order to buck up his

sagging partner and to put him straight. This was arranged for April 7, 1943, at

Salzburg, and though the Duce arrived determined to have his way—or at least

his say—at last, he once more succumbed to the Fuehrer’s torrents of words.

Hitler later described his success to Goebbels, who jotted it down in his diary.

By putting every ounce of energy into the effort, he succeeded in pushing Mussolini back

on the rails … The Duce underwent a complete change … When he got out of the train on his

arrival, the Fuehrer thought, he looked like a broken old man; when he left [after four days] he

was in high fettle, ready for any deed.1

But in point of fact Mussolini was not ready for the events which now

followed in quick succession. The Allied conquest of Tunisia in May was

followed by the successful Anglo–American landings in Sicily on July 10. The

Italians had little stomach for battle in their own homeland. Reports soon

reached Hitler that the Italian Army was “in a state of collapse,” as he put it to

his advisers at OKW.

Only barbaric measures [Hitler told a war council on July 17] like those applied by Stalin

in 1941 or by the French in 1917 can help to save the nation. A sort of tribunal or court-martial

should be set up in Italy to remove undesirable elements.2

Once again he summoned Mussolini to discuss the matter, the meeting taking

place on July 19 at Feltre in northern Italy. This, incidentally, was the thirteenth

conference of the two dictators and it followed the pattern of the most recent

ones. Hitler did all the talking, Mussolini all the listening—for three hours

before lunch and for two hours after it. Without much success the fanatical

German leader tried to rekindle the sunken spirits of his ailing friend and ally.

They must continue the fight on all fronts. Their tasks could not be left “to

another generation.” The “voice of history” was still beckoning them. Sicily and

Italy proper could be held if the Italians fought. There would be more German

reinforcements to help them. A new U-boat would soon be in operation and

would deal the British a “Stalingrad. ”

Despite Hitler’s promises and boasts the atmosphere, Dr. Schmidt found, was

most depressing. Mussolini was so overwrought that he could no longer follow

his friend’s tirades and at the end asked Schmidt to furnish him with his notes.

The Duce’s despair worsened when during the meeting reports came in of the

first heavy daylight Allied air attack on Rome. 3

Benito Mussolini, tired and senile though he was only going on sixty, he who

had strutted so arrogantly across Europe’s stage for two decades, was at the end

of his rope. When he returned to Rome he found much worse than the aftermath

of the first heavy bombing. He faced revolt from some of his closest henchmen

in the Fascist Party hierarchy, even from his son-in-law, Ciano. And behind it

there was a plot among a wider circle that reached to the King to overthrow him.

The rebellious Fascist leaders, led by Dino Grandi, Giuseppe Bottai and

Ciano, demanded the convocation of the Fascist Grand Council, which had not

met since December 1939 and which had always been a rubberstamp body

completely dominated by the Duce. It convened on the night of July 24–25,

1943, and Mussolini for the first time in his career as dictator found himself the

target of violent criticism for the disaster into which he had led the country. By a

vote of 19 to 8, a resolution was carried demanding the restoration of a

constitutional monarchy with a democratic Parliament. It also called for the full

command of the armed forces to be restored to the King.

The Fascist rebels, with the possible exception of Grandi, do not appear to

have had any idea of going further than this. But there was a second and wider

plot of certain generals and the King, which was now sprung. Mussolini himself

apparently felt that he had weathered the storm—after all, decisions in Italy were

not made by a majority vote in the Grand Council but by the Duce—and he was

taken completely by surprise when on the evening of July 25 he was summoned

to the royal palace by the King, summarily dismissed from office and carted off

under arrest in an ambulance to a police station.*

So fell, ignominiously, the modern Roman Caesar, a bellicose-sounding man

of the twentieth century who had known how to profit from its confusions and

despair, but who underneath the gaudy façade was made largely of sawdust. As a

person he was not unintelligent. He had read widely in history and thought he

understood its lessons. But as dictator he had made the fatal mistake of seeking

to make a martial, imperial Great Power of a country which lacked the industrial

resources to become one and whose people, unlike the Germans, were too

civilized, too sophisticated, too down to earth to be attracted by such false

ambitions. The Italian people, at heart, had never, like the Germans, embraced

fascism. They had merely suffered it, knowing that it was a passing phase, and

Mussolini toward the end seems to have realized this. But like all dictators he

was carried away by power, which, as it inevitably must, corrupted him,

corroding his mind and poisoning his judgment. This led him to his second fatal

mistake of tying his fortunes and those of Italy to the Third Reich. When the bell

began to toll for Hitler’s Germany it began to toll for Mussolini’s Italy, and as

the summer of 1943 came the Italian leader heard it. But there was nothing he

could do to escape his fate. By now he was a prisoner of Hitler.

Not a gun was fired—not even by the Fascist militia—to save him. Not a

voice was raised in his defense. No one seemed to mind the humiliating nature

of his departure—being hauled away from the King’s presence to jail in an

ambulance. On the contrary, there was general rejoicing at his fall. Fascism itself

collapsed as easily as its founder. Marshal Pietro Badoglio formed a nonparty

government of generals and civil servants, the Fascist Party was dissolved,

Fascists were removed from key posts and anti-Fascists released from prison.

The reaction at Hitler’s headquarters to the news of Mussolini’s fall may be

imagined, though it need not be—for voluminous secret records abound as to

what it was.4 It was one of deep shock. Certain parallels were immediately

evident even to the Nazi mind, and the danger that a terrible precedent might

have been set in Rome greatly troubled Dr. Goebbels, who was summoned

posthaste to Rastenburg headquarters on July 26. The Propaganda Minister’s

first thought, we learn from his diary, was how to explain the overthrow of

Mussolini to the German people. “What are we to tell them, anyway?” he asked

himself, and he decided that for the moment they were to be told only that the

Duce had resigned “for reasons of health.”

Knowledge of these events [he wrote in his diary] might conceivably encourage some

subversive elements in Germany to think they could put over the same thing here that

Badoglio and his henchmen accomplished in Rome. The Fuehrer ordered Himmler to see to it

that most severe police measures be applied in case such a danger seemed imminent here.

Hitler, however, Goebbels added, did not think the danger was very imminent

in Germany. The Propaganda Minister finally assured himself that the German

people would not “regard the crisis in Rome as a precedent.”

Though the Fuehrer had observed the signs of cracking in Mussolini at their

meeting but a fortnight before, he was taken completely by surprise when the

news from Rome began to trickle in to headquarters on the afternoon of July 25.

The first word was merely that the Fascist Grand Council had met, and Hitler

wondered why. “What’s the use of councils like that?” he asked. “What do they

do except jabber?”

That evening his worst fears were confirmed. “The Duce has resigned,” he

announced to his astounded military advisers at a conference that began at 9:30

P.M. “Badoglio, our most bitter enemy, has taken over the government.”

For one of the last times of the war Hitler reacted to the news with that ice-

cold judgment which he had displayed in crises in earlier and more successful

days. When General Jodl urged that they wait for more complete reports from

Rome, Hitler cut him short.

Certainly [he said], but still we have to plan ahead. Undoubtedly in their treachery they will

proclaim that they will remain loyal to us, but that is treachery. Of course they won’t remain

loyal … Although that so-and-so [Badoglio] declared immediately that the war would be

continued, that won’t make any difference. They have to say that, but it remains treason. We’ll

play the same game while preparing everything to take over the whole crew with one stroke, to

capture all that riffraff.

That was Hitler’s first thought: to seize those who had overthrown Mussolini

and restore the Duce to power.

Tomorrow [he went on] I’ll send a man down there with orders for the commander of the

Third Panzergrenadier Division to the effect that he must drive into Rome with a special detail

and arrest the whole government, the King and the whole bunch right away. First of all, to

arrest the Crown Prince and to take over the whole gang, especially Badoglio and that entire

crew. Then watch them cave in, and in two or three days there’ll be another coup.

Hitler turned to the OKW Chief of Operations.

HITLER: Jodl, work out the orders … telling them to drive into Rome with their assault

guns … and to arrest the government, the King, and the whole crew. I want the Crown Prince

above all.

KEITEL: He is more important than the old man.

BODENSCHATZ [a general of the Luftwaffe]: That has to be organized so that they can

be packed into a plane and flown away.

HITLER: Right into a plane and off with them.

BODENSCHATZ: Don’t let the Bambino get lost at the airfield.

At a later conference shortly after midnight the question was raised as to what

to do with the Vatican. Hitler answered it.

I’ll go right into the Vatican. Do you think the Vatican embarrasses me? We’ll take that

over right away … The entire diplomatic corps are in there … That rabble … We’ll get that

bunch of swine out of there … Later we can make apologies …

That night also Hitler gave orders to secure the Alpine passes, both between

Italy and Germany and between Italy and France. Some eight German divisions

from France and southern Germany were hastily assembled for this purpose and

established as Army Group? under the command of the energetic Rommel. Had

the Italians, as Goebbels noted in his diary, blown the Alpine tunnels and

bridges, the German forces in Italy, some of them already heavily engaged in

Sicily by Eisenhower’s armies, would have been cut off from their source of

supplies. They could not have held out for long.

But the Italians could not suddenly turn on the Germans overnight. Badoglio

had first to establish contact with the Allies to see if he could get an armistice

and Allied support against the Wehrmacht divisions. Hitler had been correct in

assuming that that was exactly what Badoglio would do, but he had no inkling it

would take as long as it did. Indeed, this assumption dominated the discussion at

a war conference at the Fuehrer’s headquarters on July 27 attended by most of

the bigwigs in the Nazi government and armed forces, among them Goering,

Goebbels, Himmler, Rommel and the new Commander in Chief of the Navy,

Admiral Karl Doenitz—who had succeeded Grand Admiral Raeder in January,

when the latter had fallen from favor.* Most of the generals, led by Rommel,

urged caution, arguing that any contemplated action in Italy be carefully

prepared and well thought out. Hitler wanted to move at once even though it

meant withdrawing key panzer divisions from the Eastern front, where the

Russians had just launched (July 15) their first summer offensive of the war. For

once the generals seem to have had their way and Hitler was persuaded to

withhold action. In the meantime as many German troops as could be rounded

up would be rushed over the Alps into Italy. Goebbels took a dim view of the

hesitancy of the generals.

They don’t take into account [he wrote in his diary after the war powwow] what the enemy

is going to do. Undoubtedly the English won’t wait a week while we consider and prepare for

action.

He and Hitler need not have worried. The Allies waited not a week, but six

weeks. By then Hitler had his plans and the forces to carry them out ready.

In his feverish mind he had in fact hastily conceived the plans by the time the

war conference on July 27 convened. There were four of them: (1) Operation

Eiche (“Oak”) provided for the rescue of Mussolini either by the Navy, if he

were located on an island, or by Luftwaffe parachutists, if he were found on the

mainland; (2) Operation Student called for the sudden occupation of Rome and

the restoration of Mussolini’s government there; (3) Operation Schwarz

(“Black”) was the code name for the military occupation of all of Italy; (4)

Operation Achse (“Axis”) envisaged the capture or destruction of the Italian

fleet. Later the last two operations were combined under the code name of

“Axis.”

Two events early in September 1943 set the Fuehrer’s plans in operation. On

September 3 Allied troops landed on the boot of southern Italy, and on

September 8 public announcement was made of the armistice (secretly signed on

September 3) between Italy and the Western Powers.

Hitler had flown to Zaporozhe in the Ukraine that day to try to restore the

sagging German front, but, according to Goebbels, he had been seized “by a

queer feeling of unrest” and had returned that evening to Rastenburg

headquarters in East Prussia, where the news awaited him that his principal ally

had deserted. Though he had expected it and prepared for it, the actual timing

took him by surprise and for several hours there was great confusion at

headquarters. The Germans had first learned of the Italian armistice from a BBC

broadcast from London, and when Jodl put through a call from Rastenburg to

Field Marshal Kesselring at Frascati, near Rome, to ask if it were true the

commander of the German armies in southern Italy confessed that it was news to

him. However, Kesselring, whose headquarters that morning had been destroyed

by an Allied bombing and who was preoccupied with rounding up troops to meet

a new Allied landing somewhere on the west coast, was able to get out the code

word “Axis, ” which set in motion the plans to disarm the Italian Army and

occupy the country.

For a day or two the situation of the German forces in central and south Italy

was extremely critical. Five Italian divisions faced two German divisions in the

vicinity of Rome. If the powerful Allied invasion fleet which had appeared off

Naples on September 8 moved north and landed near the capital and was

reinforced by parachutists seizing the nearby airfields, as Kesselring and his staff

at first expected, the course of the war in Italy would have taken a different turn

than it did and final disaster might have overtaken the Third Reich a year earlier

than happened. Kesselring later contended that on the evening of the eighth

Hitler and OKW “wrote off” his entire force of eight divisions as irretrievably

lost. 5 Two days later Hitler told Goebbels that southern Italy was lost and that a

new line would have to be established north of Rome in the Apennines.

But the Allied Command did not take advantage of its complete command of

the sea, which permitted it to make landings almost anywhere on both coasts of

Italy, nor did it exploit its overwhelming air superiority, as the Germans had

feared. Moreover, no effort seems to have been made by Eisenhower’s

Command to try to utilize the large Italian forces in conjunction with its own,

especially the five Italian divisions in the vicinity of Rome. Had Eisenhower

done so—at least such was the contention of both Kesselring and his chief of

staff, General Siegfried Westphal, later—the predicament of the Germans would

have become hopeless. It was simply beyond their powers, they declared, to

fight off Montgomery’s army advancing up the peninsula from the “boot,” throw

back General Mark Clark’s invasion force, wherever it landed, and deal with the

large Italian armed formations in their midst and in their rear. *6

Both generals breathed a sigh of relief when the American Fifth Army landed

not near Rome but south of Naples, at Salerno, and when the Allied parachutists

failed to appear over the Rome airfields. Their relief was all the greater when the

Italian divisions surrendered almost without firing a shot and were disarmed. It

meant that the Germans could easily hold Rome and, for the time being, even

Naples. This gave them possession of two thirds of Italy, including the industrial

north, whose factories were put to work turning out arms for Germany. Almost

miraculously Hitler had received a new lease on life.*

Italy’s withdrawal from the war had embittered him. It was, he told Goebbels,

who had again been summoned to Rastenburg, “a gigantic example of

swinishness.” Moreover, the overthrow of Mussolini made him apprehensive of

his own position. “The Fuehrer,” Goebbels noted in his diary on September 11,

“invoked final measures to preclude similar developments with us once and for

all.”

In his broadcast to the nation on the evening of September 10, which

Goebbels had persuaded him to make only after much pleading—“The people

are entitled to a word of encouragement and solace from the Fuehrer in this

difficult crisis,” the Propaganda Minister told him—Hitler spoke somewhat

defiantly on the subject:

Hope of finding traitors here rests on complete ignorance of the character of the National

Socialist State; a belief that they can bring about a July 25 in Germany rests on a fundamental

illusion as to my personal position, as well as to the attitude of my political collaborators and

my field marshals, admirals and generals.

Actually, as we shall see, there were a few German generals and a handful of

former political collaborators who were beginning once more, as the military

setbacks mounted, to harbor treasonable thoughts, which, when the next July

rolled around, would be translated into an act more violent but less successful

than that carried out against Mussolini.

One of Hitler’s measures to quash any incipient treason was to order all

German princes discharged from the Wehrmacht. Prince Philip of Hesse, the

former messenger boy of the Fuehrer to Mussolini, who had been hanging

around headquarters, was arrested and turned over to the tender mercies of the

Gestapo. His wife, Princess Mafalda, the daughter of the King of Italy, was also

arrested and, with her husband, incarcerated in a concentration camp. The King

of Italy, like the kings of Norway and Greece, had escaped the clutches of Hitler,

who took what revenge he could by arresting his daughter.*

For several weeks the Fuehrer’s daily military conferences had devoted a great

deal of time to a problem that burned in Hitler’s mind: the rescue of Mussolini.

“Operation Oak,” it will be remembered, was the code name for this plan, and in

the records of the conferences at headquarters Mussolini was always referred to

as “the valuable object.” Most of the generals and even Goebbels doubted

whether the former Duce was any longer a very valuable object, but Hitler still

thought so and insisted on his liberation.

He not only wanted to do a favor to his old friend, for whom he still felt a

personal affection. He also had it in mind to set up Mussolini as head of a new

Fascist government in northern Italy, which would relieve the Germans of

having to administer the territory and help safeguard his long lines of supply and

communication against an unfriendly populace from whose midst troublesome

partisans were now beginning to emerge.

By August 1, Admiral Doenitz was reporting to Hitler that the Navy believed

it had spotted Mussolini on the island of Ventotene. By the middle of August

Himmler’s sleuths were sure the Duce was on another island, Maddalena, near

the northern tip of Sardinia. Elaborate plans were made to descend upon the

island with destroyers and parachutists, but before they could be carried out

Mussolini had again been moved. According to a secret clause of the armistice

agreement he was to be turned over to the Allies, but for some reason Badoglio

delayed in doing this and early in September the “valuable object” was spirited

away to a hotel on top of the Gran Sasso d’Italia, the highest range in the

Abruzzi Apennines, which could be reached only by a funicular railway.

The Germans soon learned of his whereabouts, made an aerial reconnaissance

of the mountaintop and decided that glider troops could probably make a

landing, overcome the carabinieri guards and make away with the Duce in a

small Fieseler-Storch plane. This daring plan was carried out on September 13

under the leadership of another one of Himmler’s resourceful S.S. intellectual

roughnecks, an Austrian by the name of Otto Skorzeny, who will appear again

toward the very end of this narrative in another daredevil exploit.* Virtually

kidnaping an Italian general, whom he packed into his glider, Skorzeny landed

his airborne force a hundred yards from the mountaintop hotel, where he espied

the Duce looking out hopefully from a second-story window. Most of the

carabinieri, at the sight of German troops, took to the hills, and the few who

didn’t were dissuaded by Skorzeny and Mussolini from making use of their

arms, the S.S. leader yelling at them not to fire on an Italian general—he pushed

his captive officer to the front of his ranks—and the Duce shouting from his

window, as one eyewitness remembered, “Don’t shoot, anybody! Don’t shed any

blood!” And not a drop was shed.

Within a few minutes the overjoyed Fascist leader, who had sworn he would

kill himself rather than fall into Allied hands and be exhibited, as he later wrote,

in Madison Square Garden in New York, † was bundled into a tiny Fieseler-

Storch plane and after a perilous take-off from a small rock-strewn meadow

below the hotel flown to Rome and from there, the same evening, to Vienna in a

Luftwaffe transport aircraft. 7

Though Mussolini was grateful for his rescue and embraced Hitler warmly

when they met a couple of days later at Rastenburg, he was by now a broken

man, the old fires within him turned to ashes, and much to Hitler’s

disappointment he showed little stomach for reviving the Fascist regime in

German-occupied Italy. The Fuehrer made no attempt to hide his disillusionment

with his old Italian friend in a long talk with Goebbels toward the end of

September.

The Duce [Goebbels confided to his diary after the talk] has not drawn the moral

conclusions from Italy’s catastrophe that the Fuehrer had expected of him … The Fuehrer

expected that the first thing the Duce would do would be to wreak full vengeance on his

betrayers. But he gave no such indication and thereby showed his real limitations. He is not a

revolutionary like the Fuehrer or Stalin. He is so bound to his own Italian people that he lacks

the broad qualities of a world-wide revolutionary and insurrectionist.

Hitler and Goebbels were also incensed that Mussolini had had a

reconciliation with Ciano and seemed to be under the thumb of his daughter,

Edda, who was Ciano’s wife—both of them had found refuge in Munich.‡ They

thought he should have had Ciano immediately executed and Edda, as Goebbels

put it, whipped.* They objected to Mussolini’s putting Ciano—“that poisoned

mushroom,” Goebbels called him—in the forefront of the new Fascist

Republican Party.

For Hitler had insisted that the Duce immediately create such a party, and on

September 15, at the Fuehrer’s prodding, Mussolini proclaimed the new Italian

Social Republic.

It never amounted to anything. Mussolini’s heart was not in it. Perhaps he

retained enough sense of reality to see that he was now merely a puppet of

Hitler, that he and his “Fascist Republican Government” had no power except

what the Fuehrer gave them in Germany’s interests and that the Italian people

would never again accept him and Fascism.

He never returned to Rome. He set himself up at an isolated spot in the

extreme north—at Rocca delle Caminate, near Gargnano, on the shores of Lake

Garda, where he was closely guarded by a special detachment of the S.S.

Leibstandarte. To this beautiful lake resort Sepp Dietrich, the veteran S.S. tough,

who was detached from his reeling 1st S.S. Armored Corps in Russia for the

purpose—such were the goings on in the Third Reich—escorted Mussolini’s

notorious mistress, Clara Petacci. With his true love once more in his arms, the

fallen dictator seemed to care for little else in life. Goebbels, who had had not

one mistress but many, professed to be shocked.

The personal conduct of the Duce with his girl friend [Goebbels noted in his diary on

November 9], whom Sepp Dietrich had to bring to him, is cause for much misgiving.

A few days before, Goebbels had noted that Hitler had begun “to write off the

Duce politically.” But not before, it should be added, the Fuehrer forced him to

“cede” Trieste, Istria and the South Tyrol to Germany with the understanding

that Venice would be added later on. Now no humiliation was spared this once

proud tyrant. Hitler brought pressure on him to arrest his son-in-law, Ciano, in

November, and to have him executed in the jail at Verona on January 11, 1944.†

By the early autumn of 1943, Adolf Hitler could well claim to have mastered

the gravest threats to the Third Reich. The fall of Mussolini and the

unconditional surrender of the Badoglio government in Italy might easily have

led, as Hitler and his generals for a few crucial weeks feared, to exposing the

southern borders of Germany to direct Allied attack and opening the way—from

northern Italy—into the weakly held Balkans in the very rear of the German

armies fighting for their lives in southern Russia. The meek departure of the

Duce from the seat of power in Rome was a severe blow to the Fuehrer’s

prestige both at home and abroad, as was the consequent destruction of the Axis

alliance. Yet within a couple of months Hitler, by a daring stroke, had restored

Mussolini—at least in the eyes of the world. The Italian areas of occupation in

the Balkans, in Greece, Yugoslavia and Albania, were secured against Allied

attack, which OKW had expected any day that late summer; the Italian forces

there, amounting to several divisions, surrendered meekly and were made

prisoners of war. And instead of having to write off Kesselring’s forces, as he

had first done, and retreating to northern Italy, the Fuehrer had the satisfaction of

seeing the Field Marshal’s armies digging in south of Rome, where they easily

halted the advance of the Anglo–American-French troops up the peninsula.

There was no disputing that Hitler’s fortunes in the south had been considerably

restored by his daring and resourcefulness and by the prowess of his troops.

Elsewhere, though, his fortunes continued to fall.

On July 5, 1943, he had launched what was to prove his last great offensive of

the war against the Russians. The flower of the German Army—some 500,000

men with no less than seventeen panzer divisions outfitted with the new heavy

Tiger tanks—was hurled against a large Russian salient west of Kursk. This was

“Operation Citadel” and Hitler believed it would not only entrap the best of the

Russian armies, one million strong—the very forces which had driven the

Germans from Stalingrad and the Don the winter before—but enable him to push

back to the Don and perhaps even to the Volga and swing up from the southeast

to capture Moscow.

It led to a decisive defeat. The Russians were prepared for it. By July 22, the

panzers having lost half of their tanks, the Germans were brought to a complete

halt and started to fall back. So confident of their strength were the Russians that

without waiting for the outcome of the offensive they launched one of their own

against the German salient at Orel, north of Kursk, in the middle of July, quickly

penetrating the front. This was the first Russian summer offensive of the war and

from this moment on the Red armies never lost the initiative. On August 4 they

pushed the Germans out of Orel, which had been the southern hinge of the

German drive to capture Moscow in December 1941.

Now the Soviet offensive spread along the entire front. Kharkov fell on

August 23. A month later, on September 25, three hundred miles to the

northwest, the Germans were driven out of Smolensk, from which city they, like

the Grande Armée, had set out so confidently in the first months of the Russian

campaign on the high road to Moscow. By the end of September Hitler’s hard-

pressed armies in the south had fallen back to the line of the Dnieper and a

defensive line they had established from Zaporozhe at the bend of the river south

to the Sea of Azov. The industrial Donets basin had been lost and the German

Seventeenth Army in the Crimea was in danger of being cut off.

Hitler was confident that his armies could hold on the Dnieper and on the

fortified positions south of Zaporozhe which together formed the so-called

“Winter Line.” But the Russians did not pause even for regrouping. In the first

week of October they crossed the Dnieper north and southeast of Kiev, which

fell on November 6. By the end of the fateful year of 1943 the Soviet armies in

the south were approaching the Polish and Rumanian frontiers past the

battlefields where the soldiers of Hitler had achieved their early victories in the

summer of 1941 as they romped toward the interior of the Russian land.

This was not all.

There were two other setbacks to Hitler’s fortunes that year which also

marked the turning of the tide: the loss of the Battle of the Atlantic and the

intensification of the devastating air war day and night over Germany itself.

In 1942, as we have seen, German submarines sank 6,250,000 tons of Allied

shipping, most of it bound for Britain or the Mediterranean, a tonnage which far

outstripped the capacity of the shipyards in the West to make good. But by the

beginning of 1943 the Allies had gained the upper hand over the U-boats, thanks

to an improved technique of using long-range aircraft and aircraft carriers and,

above all, of equipping their surface vessels with radar which spotted the enemy

submarines before the latter could sight them. Doenitz, the new commander of

the Navy and the top U-boat man in the service, at first suspected treason when

so many of his underwater craft were ambushed and destroyed before they could

even approach the Allied convoys. He quickly learned that it was not treason but

radar which was causing the disastrous losses. In the three months of February,

March and April they had amounted to exactly fifty vessels; in May alone,

thirty-seven U-boats were sunk. This was a rate of loss which the German Navy

could not long sustain, and before the end of May Doenitz, on his own authority,

withdrew all submarines from the North Atlantic.

They returned in September but in the last four months of the year sank only

sixty-seven Allied vessels against the loss of sixty-four more submarines—a

ratio which spelled the doom of U-boat warfare and definitely settled the Battle

of the Atlantic. In 1917 in the First World War, when her armies had become

stalled, Germany’s submarines had almost brought Britain to her knees. They

were threatening to accomplish this in 1942, when Hitler’s armies in Russia and

North Africa had also been stopped, and when the United States and Great

Britain were straining themselves not only to halt the drive of the Japanese in

Southeast Asia but to assemble men and arms and supplies for the invasion of

Hitler’s European empire in the West.

Their failure to seriously disrupt the North Atlantic shipping lanes during

1943 was a bigger disaster than was realized at Hitler’s headquarters, depressing

though the actual news was.* For it was during the twelve months of that crucial

year that the vast stocks of weapons and supplies were ferried almost unmolested

across the Atlantic which made the assault of Fortress Europe possible in the

following year.

And it was during that period too that the horrors of modern war were brought

home to the German people—brought home to them on their own doorsteps. The

public knew little of how the U-boats were doing. And though the news from

Russia, the Mediterranean and Italy grew increasingly bad, it dealt after all with

events that were transpiring hundreds or thousands of miles distant from the

homeland. But the bombs from the British planes by night and the American

planes by day were now beginning to destroy a German’s home, and the office

or factory where he worked.

Hitler himself declined ever to visit a bombed-out city; it was a duty which

seemed simply too painful for him to endure. Goebbels was much distressed at

this, complaining that he was being flooded with letters “asking why the Fuehrer

does not visit the distressed air areas and why Goering isn’t to be seen

anywhere.” The Propaganda Minister’s diary authoritatively describes the

growing damage to German cities and industries from the air.

May 16, 1943…. The day raids by American bombers are creating extraordinary

difficulties. At Kiel … very serious damage to military and technical installations of the Navy

… If this continues we shall have to face serious consequences which in the long run will

prove unbearable …

May 25. The night raid of the English on Dortmund was extraordinarily heavy, probably

the worst ever directed against a German city … Reports from Dortmund are pretty horrible …

Industrial and munition plants have been hit very hard … Some eighty to one hundred

thousand inhabitants without shelter … The people in the West are gradually beginning to lose

courage. Hell like that is hard to bear … In the evening I received a [further] report on

Dortmund. Destruction is virtually total. Hardly a house is habitable …

July 26. During the night a heavy raid on Hamburg … with most serious consequences

both for the civilian population and for armaments production … It is a real catastrophe …

July 29. During the night we had the heaviest raid yet made on Hamburg … with 800 to

1,000 bombers … Kaufmann [the local Gauleiter] gave me a first report … He spoke of a

catastrophe the extent of which simply staggers the imagination. A city of a million inhabitants

has been destroyed in a manner unparalleled in history. We are faced with problems that are

almost impossible of solution. Food must be found for this population of a million. Shelter

must be secured. The people must be evacuated as far as possible. They must be given

clothing. In short, we are facing problems there of which we had no conception even a few

weeks ago … Kaufmann spoke of some 800,000 homeless people who are wandering up and

down the streets not knowing what to do …

Although considerable damage was done to specific German war plants,

especially to those turning out fighter planes, ball bearings, naval ships, steel,

and fuel for the new jets, and to the vital rocket experimental station at

Peenemunde on which Hitler had set such high hopes,* and though rail and canal

transport were continually disrupted, over-all German armament production was

not materially reduced during the stepped-up Anglo–American bombings of

1943. This was partly due to the increased output of factories in the occupied

zones—above all, those in Czechoslovakia, France, Belgium and northern Italy,

which escaped bombing.

The greatest damage inflicted by the Anglo–American air forces, as Goebbels

makes clear in his diary, was to the homes and the morale of the German people.

In the first war years they had been buoyed up, as this writer remembers, by the

lurid reports of what Luftwaffe bombing had done to the enemy, especially to

the British. They were sure it would help bring the war to an early—and

victorious—end. Now, in 1943, they themselves began to bear the full brunt of

air warfare far more devastating than any the Luftwaffe had dealt to others, even

to the populace of London in 1940–41. The German people endured it as bravely

and as stoically as the British people had done. But after four years of war it was

all the more a severe strain, and it is not surprising that as 1943 approached its

end, with all its blasted hopes in Russia, in North Africa and in Italy, and with

their own cities from one end of the Reich to the other being pulverized from the

air, the German people began to despair and to realize that this was the

beginning of the end that could only spell their defeat.

“Toward the end of 1943 at the latest,” the now unemployed General Halder

would later write, “it had become unmistakably clear that the war was militarily

lost. ”9

General Jodl, in a gloomy off-the-record lecture to the Nazi gauleiters in

Munich on November 7, 1943—the eve of the anniversary of the Beer Hall

Putsch—did not go quite so far. But the picture he painted of the situation at the

beginning of the fifth year of the war was dark enough.

What weighs most heavily today on the home front and consequently by reaction on the

front line [he said] is the enemy terror raids from the air on our homes and so on our wives and

children. In this respect … the war has assumed forms solely through the fault of England such

as were believed to be no longer possible since the days of the racial and religious wars.

The effect of these terror raids, psychological, moral and material, is such that they must be

relieved if they cannot be made to cease completely.

The state of German morale as the result of the defeats and the bombings of

1943 was vividly described by this authoritative source, who on this occasion

was speaking for the Fuehrer.

Up and down the country the devil of subversion strides. All the cowards are seeking a way

out, or—as they call it—a political solution. They say we must negotiate while there is still

something in hand …*

It wasn’t only the “cowards.” Dr. Goebbels himself, the most loyal and

faithful—and fanatical—of Hitler’s followers, was, as his diary reveals, seeking

a way out before this year of 1943 was ended, racking his brains not over

whether Germany should negotiate for peace but with whom—with Russia or

with the West. He did not talk behind Hitler’s back about the necessity of

searching for peace, as certain others had begun to do. He was courageous and

open enough to pour out his thoughts directly to the Leader. On September 10,

1943, while at the Fuehrer’s headquarters at Rastenburg, whither he had been

summoned on the news of Italy’s capitulation, Goebbels broached the subject of

possible peace negotiations for the first time in his diary.

The problem begins to present itself as to which side we ought to turn to first—the

Muscovite or the Anglo–American. Somehow we must realize clearly that it will be very

difficult to wage war successfully against both sides.

He found Hitler “somewhat worried” over the prospect of an Allied invasion in the West and

the “critical” situation on the Russian front.

The depressing thing is that we haven’t the faintest idea as to what Stalin has left in the way

of reserves. I doubt very much whether under these conditions we shall be able to transfer

divisions from the East to the other European theaters of war.

Having put down some of his own ideas—which would have seemed

treasonably defeatist to him a few months before—in his confidential diary,

Goebbels then approached Hitler.

I asked the Fuehrer whether anything might be done with Stalin sooner or later. He said not

for the moment … And anyway, the Fuehrer believes it would be easier to make a deal with

the English than with the Soviets. At a given moment, the Fuehrer believes, the English would

come to their senses … I am rather inclined to regard Stalin as more approachable, for Stalin is

more of a practical politician than Churchill. Churchill is a romantic adventurer, with whom

one can’t talk sensibly.

It was at this dark moment in their affairs that Hitler and his lieutenants began

to clutch at a straw of hope: that the Allies would fall out, that Britain and

America would become frightened of the prospect of the Red armies

overrunning Europe and in the end join Germany to protect the old Continent

from Bolshevism. Hitler had dealt at some length on this possibility in a

conference with Doenitz in August, and now in September he and Goebbels

discussed it.

The English [Goebbels added in his diary] don’t want a Bolshevik Europe under any

circumstances … Once they realize that … they have a choice only between Bolshevism or

relaxing somewhat toward National Socialism they will no doubt show an inclination toward a

compromise with us … Churchill himself is an old anti-Bolshevik and his collaboration with

Moscow today is only a matter of expediency.

Both Hitler and Goebbels seemed to have forgotten who collaborated with

Moscow in the first place and who forced Russia into the war. Summing up the

discussion of a possible peace with Hitler, Goebbels concluded:

Sooner or later we shall have to face the question of inclining toward one enemy side or the

other. Germany has never yet had luck with a two-front war; it won’t be able to stand this one

in the long run either.

But was it not late in the day to ponder this? Goebbels returned to

headquarters on September 23 and in the course of a morning stroll with the

Nazi leader found him much more pessimistic than a fortnight before about the

possibility of negotiating for peace with one side so that he could enjoy a one-

front war.

The Fuehrer does not believe that anything can be achieved at present by negotiation.

England is not yet groggy enough … In the East, naturally, the present moment is quite

unfavorable … At present Stalin has the advantage.

That evening Goebbels dined with Hitler alone.

I asked the Fuehrer whether he would be ready to negotiate with Churchill … He does not

believe that negotiations with Churchill would lead to any result as he is too deeply wedded to

his hostile views and, besides, is guided by hatred and not by reason. The Fuehrer would

prefer negotiations with Stalin, but he does not believe they would be successful …

Whatever may be the situation, I told the Fuehrer that we must come to an arrangement

with one side or the other. The Reich has never yet won a two-front war. We must therefore

see how we can somehow or other get out of a two-front war.

This was a task far more difficult than they seem to have realized, they who

had so lightly plunged Germany into a two-front war. But on that September

evening of 1943, at least for a few moments, the Nazi warlord finally shed his

pessimism and ruminated on how sweet peace would taste. According to

Goebbels, he even said he “yearned” for peace.

He said he would be happy to have contact with artistic circles again, to go to the theater in

the evening and to visit the Artists’ Club.11

Hitler and Goebbels were not the only ones in Germany who, as the war

entered its fifth year, speculated on the chances and means of procuring peace.

The frustrated, talkative anti-Nazi conspirators, their numbers somewhat larger

now but still pitifully small, were again giving the problem some thought, now

that they saw the war was lost though Hitler’s armies still fought on foreign soil.

Most of them, but by no means all, had come reluctantly, and only after

overcoming the greatest qualms of conscience, to the conclusion that to get a

peace for Germany which would leave the Fatherland with some prospect for

decent survival they would have to remove Hitler by killing him and at the same

time wipe out National Socialism.

As 1944 came, with the certainty that the Anglo–American armies would

launch an invasion across the Channel before the year was very far along and

that the Red armies would be approaching the frontiers of the Reich itself and

that the great and ancient cities of Germany would soon be reduced to utter

rubble by the Allied bombing,* the plotters in their desperation girded

themselves to make one final attempt to murder the Nazi dictator and overthrow

his regime before it dragged Germany over the precipice to complete disaster.

They knew there was not much time.

* “I was completely free of any forebodings,” Mussolini wrote later in describing his state of

mind as he set out for the palace. King Victor Emmanuel lost no time in bringing him down to

earth.

“My dear Duce,” Mussolini quotes him as saying at the outset, “it’s no longer any good.

Italy has gone to bits … The soldiers don’t want to fight any more … At this moment you are

the most hated man in Italy …”

“You are making an extremely grave decision,” Mussolini says he replied. But even by his

own account he made little attempt to induce the monarch to change his mind. He ended by

“wishing luck” to his successor. (Mussolini, Memoirs, 1942–1943, pp. 80–81.)

* Hitler had become furious with Raeder, who had commanded the German Navy since 1928,

for the Navy’s failure to destroy Allied convoys to Russia in the Arctic Ocean and for heavy

losses suffered there. In a hysterical outburst at headquarters on January 1, the warlord had

ordered the immediate decommissioning of the German High Seas Fleet. The vessels were to

be broken up for scrap. On January 6 there was a stormy showdown between Hitler and

Raeder at the Wolfsschanze headquarters. The Fuehrer accused the Navy of inaction and lack

of the will to fight and take risks. Raeder thereupon asked to be relieved of his command, and

his resignation was formally and publicly accepted on January 30. Doenitz, the new

Commander in Chief, had been commander of U-boats, knew little of the problems of surface

vessels and henceforth concentrated on submarine warfare.

* According to Captain Harry C. Butcher, Eisenhower’s naval aide, both the American and

British chiefs of staff, General George C. Marshall and Field Marshal Sir John G. Dill,

complained that Eisenhower was not showing sufficient initiative in pressing forward in Italy.

Butcher points out, in defense of his chief, that insufficient landing craft limited Eisenhower’s

plans and that to have launched a seaborne invasion as far north as the vicinity of Rome would

have put the operation beyond the range of Allied fighter planes, which had to take off from

Sicily. Eisenhower himself points out that after the capture of Sicily he was ordered to return

seven divisions, four American and three British, to England in preparation for the Channel

invasion, which left him woefully short of troops. Butcher also states that Eisenhower

originally planned to drop airborne troops on the Rome airfields to help the Italians defend the

capital against the Germans, but that at the last minute Badoglio begged that this operation be

“suspended temporarily.” General Maxwell D. Taylor, who at great personal risk had secretly

gone to Rome to confer with Badoglio, reported that because of Italian defeatism and German

strength the dropping of an American airborne division there appeared to be suicidal. (See

Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, p. 189, and Butcher, My Three Years with Eisenhower, pp.

407–25.)

* The King, Badoglio and the government, much to Hitler’s anger, escaped from Rome and a

little later established themselves in Allied-liberated’ southern Italy. Most of the Italian fleet

also got away to Malta despite intricate plans of Admiral Doenitz to capture or destroy it.

* Hitler had never cared for her personally. “I had to sit next to Mafalda,” he told his generals

during a military conference at headquarters in May that year. “What do I care about Mafalda?

… Her intellectual qualities aren’t such that she would charm you—to say nothing of her

looks.” (From the secret records of Hitler’s daily military conferences, in Felix Gilbert’s Hitler

Directs His War, p. 37.)

* Skorzeny had been summoned to the Fuehrer’s headquarters for the first time in his life the

day after Mussolini’s fall and personally assigned by Hitler to carry out the rescue.

† Just before Mussolini was liberated Captain Harry Butcher reported receiving a cablegram at

Eisenhower’s headquarters from a theater chain in Cape Town offering to donate ten thousand

pounds to charity “if you arrange for Mussolini’s personal appearance on the stages of our

Cape Town theatres. Three weeks’ engagement.” (Butcher, My Three Years with Eisenhower,

p. 423.)

‡ Actually, or at least according to a letter which Ciano later wrote to King Victor Emmanuel,

he was tricked into coming to Germany in August by the Germans, who had informed him that

his children were in danger and that the German government would be happy to convey him

and his family to Spain—via Germany. ( The Ciano Diaries, p. v.)

* “Edda Mussolini,” Goebbels wrote in his diary, “is acting like a wildcat in her Bavarian

villa. She smashes china and furniture on the slightest provocation.” ( The Goebbels Diaries, p.

479.)

† Ciano’s last diary entry is dated “December 23, 1943, Cell 27, Verona Jail.” It is a moving

piece. How he smuggled this last note as well as a letter of the same date to the King of Italy

out of his death cell I do not know. But he remarks that he had hidden the rest of the diary

before the Germans got him. The papers were smuggled out of German-occupied Italy by

Edda Ciano, who, disguised as a peasant woman and concealing the papers under her skirt,

succeeded in getting over the border into Switzerland.

All the other Fascist leaders who had voted against the Duce in the Grand Council and

whom the Duce could get his hands on were tried for treason by a special tribunal and, with

one exception, sentenced to death and shot along with Ciano. Among them was one of the

Duce’s erstwhile staunchest followers, Marshal Emilio de Bono, one of the quadrumvirate

who had led the march on Rome which put Mussolini in power.

* “There can be no talk of a letup in submarine warfare,” Hitler had stormed at Admiral

Doenitz when on May 31 the latter informed him that the U-boats had been withdrawn from

the North Atlantic. “The Atlantic,” he added, “is my first line of defense in the West.”

It was easier said than done. On November 12 Doenitz wrote despairingly in his diary:

“The enemy holds every trump card, covering all areas with long-range air patrols and using

location methods against which we still have no warning … The enemy knows all our secrets

and we know none of his. ”8

* In May 1943, an R.A.F. reconnaissance plane had photographed the Peenemunde installation

following a tip to London from the Polish underground that both a pilotless jet-propelled

aircraft (later known as the V-l, or buzz bomb) and a rocket (the V-2) were being developed

there. In August British bombers attacked Peenemunde, badly damaging the installation and

setting back research and tests by several months. By November the British and American air

forces had located sixty-three launching sites for the V-l’ on the Channel and between

December and the following February bombed and destroyed seventy-three of the sites, which

by that time had increased to ninety-six. The terms “V-l” and “V-2” came from the German

word Vergeltungswaffen, or weapons of reprisal, of which Dr. Goebbels’ propaganda was to

make so much of in the dark year of 1944.

* Jodl’s lecture, entitled “The Strategic Position in the Beginning of the Fifth Year of the

War,” is perhaps the most exhaustive firsthand account we have of the German predicament at

the end of 1943 as seen by Hitler and his generals. It is more than a mere confidential lecture

to the Nazi political leaders. It is studded with dozens of highly secret memoranda and

documents stamped “Fuehrer’s GHQ” to which Jodl referred in his talk and which, taken

together, give a revealing history of the war as it appeared to the Fuehrer, who seems to have

supervised the preparation of the lecture. Gloomy though he was as to the present, Jodl was

even more discouraging about the future, correctly predicting that the coming Anglo–

American invasion in the West “will decide the war” and that “the forces at our disposal will

not be adequate” to repel it.10

* “The work of a thousand years is nothing but rubble,” wrote Goerdeler to Field Marshal von

Kluge in July 1943, after visiting the bombed-out areas in the west. In his letter Goerdeler

beseeched the vacillating general to join the conspirators in putting an end to Hitler and his

“madness.”

29

THE ALLIED INVASION OF WESTERN

EUROPE AND THE ATTEMPT

TO KILL HITLER

THE CONSPIRATORS had made at least half a dozen attempts to assassinate Hitler

during 1943, one of which had miscarried only when a time bomb, planted in the

Fuehrer’s airplane during a flight behind the Russian front, failed to explode.

A considerable change had taken place that year in the resistance movement,

such as it was. The plotters had finally given up on the field marshals. They were

simply too cowardly—or thickheaded—to use their position and military power

to overthrow their Supreme warlord. At a secret meeting in November 1942 in

the forest of Smolensk, Goerdeler, the political spark plug of the resisters, had

pleaded personally with Field Marshal von Kluge, the commander of Army

Group Center in the East, to take an active part in getting rid of Hitler. The

unstable General, who had just accepted a handsome gift from the Fuehrer, *

assented, but a few days later got cold feet and wrote to General Beck in Berlin

to count him out.

A few weeks later the plotters tried to induce General Paulus, whose Sixth

Army was surrounded at Stalingrad and who, they presumed, was bitterly

disillusioned with the Leader who had made this possible, to issue an appeal to

the Army to overthrow the tyrant who had condemned a quarter of a million

German soldiers to such a ghastly end. A personal appeal from General Beck to

Paulus to do this was flown into the beleaguered city by an Air Force officer.

Paulus, as we have seen, responded by sending a flood of radio messages of

devotion to his Fuehrer, experiencing an awakening only after he got to Moscow

in Russian captivity.

For a few days the conspirators, disappointed by Paulus, pinned their hopes on

Kluge and Manstein, who after the disaster of Stalingrad were flying to

Rastenburg, it was understood, to demand that the Fuehrer turn over command

of the Russian front to them. If successful, this démarche was to be a signal for a

coup d’état in Berlin. Once again the plotters were victims of their wishful

thinking. The two field marshals did fly to Hitler’s headquarters, but only to

reaffirm their loyalty to the Supreme Commander.

“We are deserted,” Beck complained bitterly.

It was obvious to him and his friends that they could expect no practical aid

from the senior commanders at the front. In desperation they turned to the only

remaining source of military power, the Ersatzheer, the Home or Replacement

Army, which was scarcely an army at all but a collection of recruits in training

and various garrison troops of overage men performing guard duty in the

homeland. But at least its men were armed, and, with the fit troops and Waffen-

S.S. units far away at the front, it might be sufficient to enable the conspirators

to occupy Berlin and certain other key cities at the moment of Hitler’s

assassination.

But on the necessity—or even the desirability—of that lethal act, the

opposition was still not entirely agreed.

The Kreisau Circle, for instance, was unalterably opposed to any such act of

violence. This was a remarkable, heterogeneous group of young intellectual

idealists gathered around the scions of two of Germany’s most renowned and

aristocratic families: Count Helmuth James von Moltke, a great-great-nephew of

the Field Marshal who had led the Prussian Army to victory over France in

1870, and Count Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, a direct descendant of the famous

General of the Napoleonic era who, with Clausewitz, had signed the Convention

of Tauroggen with Czar Alexander I by which the Prussian Army changed sides

and helped bring the downfall of Bonaparte.

Taking its name from the Moltke estate at Kreisau in Silesia, the Kreisau

Circle was not a conspiratorial body but a discussion group* whose members

represented a cross section of German society as it had been in the pre-Nazi

times and as they hoped it would be when the Hitlerite nightmare had passed. It

included two Jesuit priests, two Lutheran pastors, conservatives, liberals,

socialists, wealthy landowners, former trade-union leaders, professors and

diplomats. Despite the differences in their backgrounds and thoughts they were

able to find a broad common ground which enabled them to provide the

intellectual, spiritual, ethical, philosophical and, to some extent, political ideas of

the resistance to Hitler. Judging by the documents which they have left—almost

all of these men were hanged before the war’s end—which included plans for

the future government and for the economic, social and spiritual foundations of

the new society, what they aimed at was a sort of Christian socialism in which

all men would be brothers and the terrible ills of modern times—the perversions

of the human spirit—would be cured. Their ideals were noble, high in the white

clouds, and to them was added a touch of German mysticism.

But these high-minded young men were unbelievably patient. They hated

Hitler and all the degradation he had brought on Germany and Europe. But they

were not interested in overthrowing him. They thought Germany’s coming

defeat would accomplish that. They turned their attention exclusively to the

thereafter. “To us,” Moltke wrote at the time, “… Europe after the war is a

question of how the picture of man can be re-established in the breasts of our

fellow citizens.”

Dorothy Thompson, the distinguished American journalist, who had been

stationed for many years in Germany and knew it well, appealed to Moltke, an

old and close friend of hers, to come down from the mountaintop. In a series of

short-wave broadcasts from New York during the summer of 1942 addressed to

“Hans” she begged him and his friends to do something to get rid of the demonic

dictator. “We are not living in a world of saints, but of human beings,” she tried

to remind him.

The last time we met, Hans, and drank tea together on that beautiful terrace before the lake

… 1 said that one day you would have to demonstrate by deeds, drastic deeds, where you

stood … and I remember that I asked you whether you and your friends would ever have the

courage to act …1

It was a penetrating question, and the answer seems to have turned out to be

that Moltke and his friends had the courage to talk—for which they were

executed—but not to act.

This flaw in their minds rather than in their hearts—for all of them met their

cruel deaths with great bravery—was the main cause of the differences between

the Kreisau Circle and the Beck-Goerdeler-Hassell group of conspirators, though

they also were in dispute about the nature and the make-up of the government

which was to take over from the Nazi regime.

There were several meetings between them following a full-dress conference

at the home of Peter Yorck on January 22, 1943, presided over by General Beck,

who, as Hassell reported in his diary, “was rather weak and reserved. ”2 A

spirited argument developed between the “youngsters” and the “oldsters”—

Hassell’s terms—over future economic and social policy, with Moltke clashing

with Goerdeler. Hassell thought the former mayor of Leipzig was quite

“reactionary” and noted Moltke’s “Anglo-Saxon and pacifist inclinations.” The

Gestapo also took note of this meeting and at the subsequent trials of the

participants turned up a surprisingly detailed account of the discussions.

Himmler was already closer on the trail of the conspirators than any of them

realized. But it is one of the ironies of this narrative that at this point, in 1943,

with the prospect of victory lost and of defeat imminent, the mild-mannered,

bloodthirsty S.S. Fuehrer, the master policeman of the Third Reich, began to

take a personal and not altogether unfavorable interest in the resistance, with

which he had more than one friendly contact. And it is indicative of the

mentality of the plotters that more than one of them, Popitz especially, began to

see in Himmler a possible replacement for Hitler! The S.S. chief, so seemingly

fanatically loyal to the Fuehrer, began to see this himself, but until almost the

end played a double game, in the course of which he snuffed out the life of many

a gallant conspirator.

The resistance was now working in three fields. The Kreisau Circle was

holding its endless talks to work out the millennium. The Beck group, more

down to earth, was striving in some way to kill Hitler and take over power. And

it was making contact with the West in order to apprise the democratic Allies of

what was up and to inquire what kind of peace they would negotiate with a new

anti-Nazi government. * These contacts were made in Stockholm and in

Switzerland.

In the Swedish capital Goerdeler often saw the bankers Marcus and Jakob

Wallenberg, with whom he had long been friends and who had intimate business

and personal contacts in London. At one meeting in April 1942 with Jakob

Wallenberg, Goerdeler urged him to get in touch with Churchill. The

conspirators wanted in advance an assurance from the Prime Minister that the

Allies would make peace with Germany if they arrested Hitler and overthrew the

Nazi regime. Wallenberg replied that from what he knew of the British

government no such assurance was possible.

A month later two Lutheran clergymen made direct contact with the British in

Stockholm. These were Dr. Hans Schoenfeld, a member of the Foreign Relations

Bureau of the German Evangelical Church, and Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an

eminent divine and an active conspirator, who on hearing that Dr. George Bell,

the Anglican Bishop of Chichester, was visiting in Stockholm hastened there to

see him—Bonhoeffer traveling incognito on forged papers provided him by

Colonel Oster of the Abwehr.

Both pastors informed the bishop of the plans of the conspirators and, as had

Goerdeler, inquired whether the Western Allies would make a decent peace with

a non-Nazi government once Hitler had been overthrown. They asked for an

answer—by either a private message or a public announcement. To impress the

bishop that the anti-Hitler conspiracy was a serious business, Bonhoeffer

furnished him with a list of the names of the leaders—an indiscretion which later

was to cost him his life and to help make certain the execution of many of the

others.

This was the most authoritative and up-to-date information the Allies had had

on the German opposition and its plans, and Bishop Bell promptly turned it over

to Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, when he returned to London in

June. But Eden, who had resigned this post in 1938 in protest against

Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler, was skeptical. Similar information had

been conveyed to the British government by alleged German plotters since the

time of Munich and nothing had come of it. No response was made. 4

The German underground’s contacts with the Allies in Switzerland were

mainly through Allen Dulles, who headed the U.S. Office of Strategic Services

there from November 1942 until the end of the war. His chief visitor was Hans

Gisevius, who journeyed to Berne frequently from Berlin and who also was an

active member of the conspiracy, as we have seen. Gisevius worked for the

Abwehr and was actually posted to the German consulate general in Zurich as

vice-consul His chief function was to convey messages to Dulles from Beck and

Goerdeler and to keep him informed of the progress of the various plots against

Hitler. Other German visitors included Dr. Schoenfeld and Trott zu Solz, the

latter a member of the Kreisau Circle and also of the conspiracy, who once

journeyed to Switzerland to “warn” Dulles, as had so many others, that if the

Western democracies refused to consider a decent peace with an anti-Nazi

German regime the conspirators would turn to Soviet Russia. Dulles, though he

was personally sympathetic, was unable to give any assurances.5

One marvels at these German resistance leaders who were so insistent on

getting a favorable peace settlement from the West and so hesitant in getting rid

of Hitler until they had got it. One would have thought that if they considered

Nazism to be such a monstrous evil as they constantly contended—no doubt

sincerely—they would have concentrated on trying to overthrow it regardless of

how the West might treat their new regime. One gets the impression that a good

many of these “good Germans” fell too easily into the trap of blaming the

outside world for their own failures, as some of them had done for Germany’s

misfortunes after the first lost war and even for the advent of Hitler himself.

OPERATION FLASH

In February 1943, Goerdeler told Jakob Wallenberg in Stockholm that “they

had plans for a coup in March.”

They had.

The preparations for Operation Rash, as it was called, had been worked out

during January and February by General Friedrich Olbricht, chief of the General

Army Office (Allgemeines Heeresamt) and General von Tresckow, chief of staff

of Kluge’s Army Group Center in Russia. Olbricht, a deeply religious man, was

a recent convert to the conspiracy, but, because of his new post, had rapidly

become a key figure in it. As deputy to General Friedrich Fromm, commander of

the Replacement Army, he was in a position to rally the garrisons in Berlin and

the other large cities of the Reich behind the plotters. Fromm himself, like

Kluge, was by now disillusioned with his Fuehrer but was not regarded as

sufficiently trustworthy to be let in on the plot.

“We are ready. It is time for the Flash,” Olbricht told young Fabian von

Schlabrendorff, a junior officer on Tresckow’s staff, at the end of February.

Early in March the plotters met for a final conference at Smolensk, the

headquarters of Army Group Center. Although not participating in the action,

Admiral Canaris, the chief of the Abwehr, was aware of it and arranged the

meeting, flying Hans von Dohnanyi and General Erwin Lahousen of his staff

with him to Smolensk ostensibly for a conference of Wehrmacht intelligence

officers. Lahousen, a former intelligence officer of the Austrian Army and the

only plotter in the Abwehr to survive the war, brought along some bombs.

Schlabrendorff and Tresckow, after much experimenting, had found that

German bombs were no good for their purpose. They worked, as the young

officer later explained,6 with a fuse that made a low hissing noise which gave

them away. The British, they discovered, made a better bomb. “Prior to the

explosion,” Schlabrendorff says, “they made no noise of any kind.” The R.A.F.

had dropped a number of these weapons over occupied Europe to Allied agents

for sabotage purposes—one had been used to assassinate Heydrich—and the

Abwehr had collected several of them and turned them over to the conspirators.

The plan worked out at the Smolensk meeting was to lure Hitler to the army

group headquarters and there do away with him. This would be the signal for the

coup in Berlin.

Enticing the warlord, who was now suspicious of most of his generals, into

the trap was not an easy matter. But Tresckow prevailed upon an old friend,

General Schmundt (as he now was), adjutant to Hitler, to work on his chief, and

after some hesitation and more than one cancellation the Fuehrer agreed

definitely to come to Smolensk on March 13, 1943. Schmundt himself knew

nothing of the plot.

In the meantime Tresckow had been renewing his efforts to get his chief,

Kluge, to take the lead in bumping off Hitler. He suggested to the Field Marshal

that Lieutenant Colonel Freiherr von Boeselager, * who commanded a cavalry

unit at headquarters, be allowed to use it to mow Hitler and his bodyguard down

when they arrived. Boeselager was more than willing. All he needed was an

order from the Field Marshal. But the vacillating commander could not bring

himself to give it. Tresckow and Schlabrendorff therefore decided to take

matters into their own hands.

They would simply plant one of their British-made bombs in Hitler’s plane on

its return flight. “The semblance of an accident,” Schlabrendorff later explained,

“would avoid the political disadvantages of a murder. For in those days Hitler

still had many followers who, after such an event, would have put up a strong

resistance to our revolt.”

Twice that afternoon and evening of March 13 after Hitler had arrived the two

anti-Nazi officers were tempted to change their plan and set the bomb off, first in

Kluge’s personal quarters, where Hitler conferred with the top generals of the

army group, and later in the officers’ mess where the gathering supped. * But this

would have killed some of the very generals who, once relieved of their personal

oaths of allegiance to the Fuehrer, were counted upon to help the conspirators

take over power in the Reich.

There still remained the task of smuggling the bomb onto the Fuehrer’s plane,

which was due to take off immediately after dinner. Schlabrendorff had

assembled what he calls “two explosive packets” and made of them one parcel

which resembled a couple of brandy bottles. During the repast Tresckow had

innocently asked a Colonel Heinz Brandt of the Army General Staff, who was in

Hitler’s party, whether he would be good enough to take back a present of two

bottles of brandy to his old friend General Helmuth Stieff,† who was chief of the

Organization Branch of the Army High Command. The unsuspecting Brandt

said he would be glad to.

At the airfield Schlabrendorff nervously reached through a small opening in

his parcel, started the mechanism of the time bomb and handed it to Brandt as he

boarded the Fuehrer’s plane. This was a cleverly built weapon. It had no telltale

clockwork. When the young officer pressed on a button it broke a small bottle,

releasing a corrosive chemical which then ate away a wire that held back a

spring. When the wire gave out, the spring pressed forward the striker, which hit

a detonator that exploded the bomb.

The crash, Schlabrendorff says, was expected shortly after Hitler’s plane

passed over Minsk, about thirty minutes’ flying time from Smolensk. Feverish

with excitement, he rang up Berlin and by code informed the conspirators that

Flash had begun. Then he and Tresckow waited with pounding hearts for the

great news. They expected the first word would come by radio from one of the

fighter planes which was escorting the Fuehrer’s plane. They counted off the

minutes, twenty, thirty, forty, an hour … and still there was no word. It came

more than two hours later. A routine message said that Hitler had landed at

Rastenburg.

We were stunned, and could not imagine the cause of the failure [Schlabrendorff later

recounted]. I immediately rang up Berlin and gave the code word indicating that the attempt

had miscarried. Then Tresckow and I consulted as to what action to take next. We were deeply

shaken. It was serious enough that the attempt had not succeeded. But even worse would be

the discovery of the bomb, which would unfailingly lead to our detection and the death of a

wide circle of close collaborators.

The bomb was never discovered. That night Tresckow rang up Colonel

Brandt, inquired casually whether he had had time to deliver his parcel to

General Stieff and was told by Brandt that he had not yet got around to it.

Tresckow told him to hold it—there had been a mistake in the bottles—and that

Schlabrendorff would be arriving the next day on some official business and

would bring the really good brandy that he had intended to send.

With incredible courage Schlabrendorff flew to Hitler’s headquarters and

exchanged a couple of bottles of brandy for the bomb.

I can still recall my horror [he later related] when Brandt handed me the bomb and gave it a

jerk that made me fear a belated explosion. Feigning a composure I did not feel I took the

bomb, immediately got into a car, and drove to the neighboring railway junction of Korschen.

There he caught the night train to Berlin and in the privacy of his sleeping

compartment dismantled the bomb. He quickly discovered what had happened—

or rather, why nothing had happened.

The mechanism had worked; the small bottle had broken; the corrosive fluid had consumed

the wire; the striker had hit forward; but—the detonator had not fired.

Bitterly disappointed but not discouraged, the conspirators in Berlin decided

to make a fresh attempt on Hitler’s life. A good occasion soon presented itself.

Hitler, accompanied by Goering, Himmler and Keitel, was due to be present at

the Heroes’ Memorial Day ( Heldengedenktag) ceremonies on March 21 at the

Zeughaus in Berlin. Here was an opportunity to get not only the Fuehrer but his

chief associates. As Colonel Freiherr von Gersdorff, chief of intelligence on

Kluge’s staff, later said, “This was a chance which would never recur.”

Gersdorff had been selected by Tresckow to handle the bomb, and this time it

would have to be a suicidal mission. The plan was for the colonel to conceal in

his overcoat pockets two bombs, set the fuses, stay as close to Hitler during the

ceremony as possible and blow the Fuehrer and his entourage as well as himself

to eternity. With conspicuous bravery Gersdorff readily volunteered to sacrifice

his life.

On the evening of March 20 he met with Schlabrendorff in his room at the

Eden Hotel in Berlin. Schlabrendorff had brought two bombs with ten-minute

fuses. But because of the near-freezing temperature in the glassed-over courtyard

of the Zeughaus it might take from fifteen to twenty minutes before the weapons

exploded. It was in this courtyard that Hitler, after his speech, was scheduled to

spend half an hour examining an exhibition of captured Russian war trophies

which Gersdorff’s staff had arranged. It was the only place where the colonel

could get close enough to the Fuehrer to kill him.

Gersdorff later recounted what happened. 7

The next day I carried in each of my overcoat pockets a bomb with a ten-minute fuse. I

intended to stay as close to Hitler as I could, so that he at least would be blown to pieces by

the explosion. When Hitler … entered the exhibitional hall, Schmundt came across to me and

said that only eight or ten minutes were to be spent on inspecting the exhibits. So the

possibility of carrying out the assassination no longer existed, since even if the temperature

had been normal the fuse needed at least ten minutes. This last-minute change of schedule,

which was typical of Hitler’s subtle security methods, had once again saved him his life.*

General von Tresckow, Gersdorff says, was anxiously and expectantly

following the broadcast of the ceremonies from Smolensk, “a stop watch in his

hand.” When the broadcaster announced that Hitler had left the hall only eight

minutes after he had entered it, the General knew that still another attempt had

failed.

There were at least three further “overcoat” attempts at Hitler’s life, as the

conspirators called them, and each, as we shall see, was similarly frustrated.

Early in 1943 there was one spontaneous uprising in Germany which, though

small in itself, helped to revive the flagging spirits of the resistance, whose every

attempt to remove Hitler had been thus far thwarted. It also served as a warning

of how ruthless the Nazi authorities could be in putting down the least sign of

opposition.

The university students in Germany, as we have seen, had been among the

most fanatical of Nazis in the early Thirties. But ten years of Hitler’s rule had

brought disillusionment, and this was sharpened by the failure of Germany to

win the war and particularly, as 1943 came, by the disaster at Stalingrad. The

University of Munich, the city that had given birth to Nazism, became the

hotbed of student revolt. It was led by a twenty-five-year-old medical student,

Hans Scholl, and his twenty-one-year-old sister, Sophie, who was studying

biology. Their mentor was Kurt Huber, a professor of philosophy. By means of

what became known as the “White Rose Letters” they carried out their anti-Nazi

propaganda in other universities; they were also in touch with the plotters in

Berlin.

One day in February 1943, the Gauleiter of Bavaria, Paul Giesler, to whom

the Gestapo had brought a file of the letters, convoked the student body,

announced that the physically unfit males—the able-bodied had been drafted

into the Army—would be put to some kind of more useful war work, and with a

leer suggested that the women students bear a child each year for the good of the

Fatherland.

“If some of the girls,” he added, “lack sufficient charm to find a mate, I will

assign each of them one of my adjutants … and I can promise her a thoroughly

enjoyable experience.”

The Bavarians are noted for their somewhat coarse humor, but this vulgarity

was too much for the students. They howled the Gauleiter down and tossed out

of the hall the Gestapo and S.S. men who had come to guard him. That afternoon

there were anti-Nazi student demonstrations in the streets of Munich, the first

that had ever occurred in the Third Reich. Now the students, led by the Scholls,

began to distribute pamphlets openly calling on German youth to rise. On

February 19 a building superintendent observed Hans and Sophie Scholl hurling

their leaflets from the balcony of the university and betrayed them to the

Gestapo.

Their end was quick and barbaric. Haled before the dreaded People’s Court,

which was presided over by its president, Roland Freisler, perhaps the most

sinister and bloodthirsty Nazi in the Third Reich after Heydrich (he will appear

again in this narrative), they were found guilty of treason and condemned to

death. Sophie Scholl was handled so roughly during her interrogation by the

Gestapo that she appeared in court with a broken leg. But her spirit was

undimmed. To Freisler’s savage browbeating she answered calmly, “You know

as well as we do that the war is lost. Why are you so cowardly that you won’t

admit it?”

She hobbled on her crutches to the scaffold and died with sublime courage, as

did her brother. Professor Huber and several other students were executed a few

days later. 8

This was a reminder to the conspirators in Berlin of the danger that confronted them at a

time when the indiscreetness of some of the leaders was becoming a source of constant worry

to the others. Goerdeler himself was much too talkative. The efforts of Popitz to sound out

Himmler and other high S.S. officers on joining the conspiracy were risky in the extreme. The

inimitable Weizsaecker, who after the war liked to picture himself as such a staunch resister,

became so frightened that he broke off all contact with his close friend Hassell, whom he

accused (along with Frau von Hassell) of being “unbelievably indiscreet” and whom, he

warned, the Gestapo was shadowing. *

The Gestapo was watching a good many others, especially the breezy,

confident Goerdeler, but the blow which it dealt the conspirators immediately

after the frustrating month of March 1943 during which their two attempts to kill

Hitler had miscarried came, ironically, as the result not so much of expert

sleuthing but of the rivalry between the two intelligence services, the

Wehrmacht’s Abwehr and Himmler’s R.S.H.A.—the Central Security Office—

which ran the S.S. secret service, and which wanted to depose Admiral Canaris

and take over his Abwehr.

In the autumn of 1942, a Munich businessman had been arrested for

smuggling foreign currency across the border into Switzerland. He was actually

an Abwehr agent, but the money he had long been taking over the frontier had

gone to a group of Jewish refugees in Switzerland. This was the height of crime

for a German in the Third Reich to commit even if he were an Abwehr agent.

When Canaris failed to protect this agent, he began to tell the Gestapo what he

knew of the Abwehr. He implicated Hans von Dohnanyi, who, with Colonel

Oster, had been in the inner circle of the plotters. He told Himmler’s men of the

mission of Dr. Josef Mueller to the Vatican in 1940 when contact was made with

the British through the Pope. He revealed Pastor Bonhoeffer’s visit to the Bishop

of Chichester at Stockholm in 1942 on a false passport issued by the Abwehr. He

hinted at Oster’s various schemes to get rid of Hitler.

After months of investigation the Gestapo acted. Dohnanyi, Mueller and

Bonhoeffer were arrested on April 5, 1943, and Oster, who had managed to

destroy most of the incriminating papers in the meantime, was forced to resign in

December from the Abwehr and placed under house arrest in Leipzig. *

This was a staggering blow to the conspiracy. Oster—“a man such as God

meant men to be, lucid and serene in mind, imperturbable in danger,” as

Schlabrendorff said of him—had been one of the key figures since 1938 in the

attempt to get Hitler, and Dohnanyi, a jurist by profession, had been a

resourceful assistant. Bonhoeffer, the Protestant, and Mueller, the Catholic, had

not only brought a great spiritual force to the resistance but had given an

example of individual courage in their various missions abroad—as they were to

do in their refusal, even after the torture which followed their arrests, to betray

their comrades.

But most serious of all, with the breakup of the Abwehr the plotters lost their

“cover” and the principal means of communication with each other, with the

hesitant generals and with their friends in the West.

Some further discoveries by Himmler’s sleuths put the Abwehr and its chief,

Canaris, out of business altogether within a few months.

One sprang out of what came to be known in Nazi circles as “the Frau Solf

Tea Party,” which took place on September 10, 1943. Frau Anna Solf, the

widow of a former Colonial Minister under Wilhelm II who had also served as

ambassador to Japan under the Weimar Republic, had long presided over an

anti-Nazi salon in Berlin. To it came often a number of distinguished guests,

who included Countess Hanna von Bredow, the granddaughter of Bismarck,

Count Albrecht von Bernstorff, the nephew of the German ambassador to the

United States during the First World War, Father Erxleben, a well-known Jesuit

priest, Otto Kiep, a high official in the Foreign Office, who once had been

dismissed as German consul general in New York for attending a public

luncheon in honor of Professor Einstein but who eventually had got himself

reinstated in the diplomatic service, and Elisabeth von Thadden, a sparkling and

deeply religious woman who ran a famous girls’ school at Weiblingen, near

Heidelberg.

To the tea party at Frau Solf’s on September 10 Fräulein von Thadden brought

an attractive young Swiss doctor named Reckse, who practiced at the Charité

Hospital in Berlin under Professor Sauerbruch. Like most Swiss Dr. Reckse

expressed bitter anti-Nazi sentiments, in which he was joined by the others

present, especially by Kiep. Before the tea party was over the good doctor had

volunteered to carry any letters which Frau Solf or her guests wished to send to

their friends in Switzerland—German anti-Nazi émigrés and British and

American diplomatic officials—an offer which was quickly taken up by more

than one present.

Unfortunately for them Dr. Reckse was an agent of the Gestapo, to whom he

turned over several incriminating letters as well as a report on the tea party.

Count von Moltke learned of this through a friend in the Air Ministry who had

tapped a number of telephone conversations between the Swiss doctor and the

Gestapo, and he quickly warned his friend Kiep, who tipped off the rest of the

Solf circle. But Himmler had his evidence. He waited four months to act on it,

perhaps hoping to widen his net. On January 12, everyone who had been at the

tea party was arrested, tried and executed, except Frau Solf and her daughter, the

Countess Ballestrem. * The Solfs were confined at the Ravensbrueck

concentration camp and miraculously escaped death. † Count von Moltke,

implicated with his friend Kiep, was also arrested at this time. But that was not

the only consequence of Kiep’s arrest. The repercussions spread as far as Turkey

and paved the way for the final liquidation of the Abwehr and the turning over of

its functions to Himmler.

Among Kiep’s close anti-Nazi friends were Erich Vermehren and his

stunningly beautiful wife, the former Countess Elisabeth von Plettenberg, who

like other opponents of the regime had joined the Abwehr and who had been

posted as its agents in Istanbul. Both were summoned to Berlin by the Gestapo

to be interrogated in the Kiep case. Knowing what fate was in store for them,

they refused, got in touch with the British secret service at the beginning of

February 1944 and were flown to Cairo and thence to England.

It was believed in Berlin—though it turned out not to be true—that the

Vermehrens had absconded with all the Abwehr’s secret codes and handed them

over to the British. This was the last straw for Hitler, coming after the arrests of

Dohnanyi and others in the Abwehr and coupled with his growing suspicion of

Canaris. On February 18, 1944, he ordered that the Abwehr be dissolved and its

functions taken over by R.S.H.A. This was a new feather in the cap of Himmler,

whose war against the Army officer corps went back to his faking charges

against General von Fritsch in 1938. It deprived the armed forces of any

intelligence service of their own. It enhanced Himmler’s power over the

generals. It was also a further blow to the conspirators, who were now left

without any secret service whatsoever through which to work. *

They had not ceased trying to kill Hitler. Between September 1943 and

January 1944 another half-dozen attempts were organized. In August Jakob

Wallenberg had come to Berlin to see Goerdeler, who assured him that all

preparations were now ready for a coup in September and that Schlabrendorff

would then arrive in Stockholm to meet a representative of Mr. Churchill to

discuss peace.

“I was awaiting the month of September with great suspense,” the Swedish

banker later told Allen Dulles. “It passed without anything happening.” 9

A month later General Stieff, the sharp-tongued hunchback to whom

Tresckow had sent the two bottles of “brandy” and whom Himmler later referred

to as “a little poisoned dwarf,” arranged to plant a time bomb at Hitler’s noon

military conference at Rastenburg, but at the last moment got cold feet. A few

days later his store of English bombs which he had received from the Abwehr

and hidden under a watch tower in the headquarters enclosure exploded, and it

was only because an Abwehr colonel, Werner Schrader, who was in on the

conspiracy, was entrusted by Hitler with the investigation that the plotters were

not discovered.

In November another “overcoat” attempt was organized. A twenty-four-year-

old infantry captain, Axel von dem Bussche, was selected by the conspirators to

“model” a new Army overcoat and assault pack which Hitler had ordered

designed and now wanted to personally inspect before approving for

manufacture. Bussche, in order to avoid Gersdorff’s failure, decided to carry in

the pockets of his model overcoat two German bombs which would go off a few

seconds after the fuse was set. His plan was to grab Hitler as he was inspecting

the new overcoat and blow the two of them to pieces.

The day before the demonstration an Allied bomb destroyed the models, and

Bussche returned to his company on the Russian front. He was back at Hitler’s

headquarters in December for a fresh attempt with new models, when the

Fuehrer suddenly decided to leave for Berchtesgaden for the Christmas holidays.

Shortly afterward Bussche was badly wounded at the front, so another young

front-line infantry officer was pressed into service to substitute for him. This was

Heinrich von Kleist, son of Ewald von Kleist—the latter one of the oldest

conspirators. The demonstration of the new overcoat was set for February 11,

1944, but the Fuehrer for some reason—Dulles says it was because of an air raid

—failed to appear.*

By this time the plotters had come to the conclusion that Hitler’s technique of

constantly changing his schedules called for a drastic overhauling of their own

plans. † It was realized that the only occasions on which he could definitely be

counted to appear were his twice-daily military conferences with the generals of

OKW and OKH. He would have to be killed at one of them. On December 26,

1943, a young officer by the name of Stauffenberg, deputizing for General

Olbricht, appeared at the Rastenburg headquarters for the noon conference, at

which he was to make a report on Army replacements. In his briefcase was a

time bomb. The meeting was canceled. Hitler had left to have his Christmas on

the Obersalzberg.

This was the first such attempt by the handsome young lieutenant colonel, but

not the last. For in Klaus Philip Schenk, Count von Stauffenberg, the anti-Nazi

conspirators had at last found their man. Henceforth he would not only take over

the job of killing Hitler by his own hand in the only way that now seemed

possible but would breathe new life and light and hope and zeal into the

conspiracy and become its real, though never nominal, leader.

THE MISSION OF COUNT VON STAUFFENBERG

This was a man of astonishing gifts for a professional Army officer. Born in

1907, he came from an old and distinguished South German family. Through his

mother, Countess von Uxkull-Gyllenbrand, he was a great-grandson of

Gneisenau, one of the military heroes of the war of liberation against Napoleon

and the cofounder, with Scharnhorst, of the Prussian General Staff, and through

her also a descendant of Yorck von Wartenburg, another celebrated general of

the Bonaparte era. Klaus’s father had been Privy Chamberlain to the last King of

Wuerttemberg. The family was congenial, devoutly Roman Catholic and highly

cultivated.

With this background and in this atmosphere Klaus von Stauffenberg grew up.

Possessed of a fine physique and, according to all who knew him, of a striking

handsomeness, he developed a brilliant, inquisitive, splendidly balanced mind.

He had a passion for horses and sports but also for the arts and literature, in

which he read widely, and as a youth came under the influence of Stefan George

and that poetic genius’s romantic mysticism. For a time the young man thought

of taking up music as a profession, and later architecture, but in 1926, at the age

of nineteen, he entered the Army as an officer cadet in the 17th Bamberg

Cavalry Regiment—the famed Bamberger Reiter.

In 1936 he was posted to the War Academy in Berlin, where his all-round

brilliance attracted the attention of both his teachers and the High Command. He

emerged two years later as a young officer of the General Staff. Though, like

most of his class, a monarchist at heart, he was not up to this time an opponent

of National Socialism. Apparently it was the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1938 which

first cast doubts in his mind about Hitler, and these increased when in the

summer of 1939 he saw that the Fuehrer was leading Germany into a war which

might be long, frightfully costly in human lives, and, in the end, lost.

Nevertheless, when the war came he threw himself into it with characteristic

energy, making a name for himself as a staff officer of General Hoepner’s 6th

Panzer Division in the campaigns in Poland and France. It was in Russia that

Stauffenberg seems to have become completely disillusioned with the Third

Reich. He had been transferred to the Army High Command (OKH) early in

June 1940, just before the assault on Dunkirk, and for the first eighteen months

of the Russian campaign spent most of his time in Soviet territory, where, among

other things, he helped organize the Russian “volunteer” units from among the

prisoners of war. By this time, according to his friends, Stauffenberg believed

that while the Germans were getting rid of Hitler’s tyranny these Russian troops

could be used to overthrow Stalin’s. Perhaps this was an instance of the

influence of Stefan George’s wooly ideas.

The brutality of the S.S. in Russia, not to mention Hitler’s order to shoot the

Bolshevik commissars, opened Stauffenberg’s eyes as to the master he was

serving. As chance had it, he met in Russia two of the chief conspirators who

had decided to make an end to that master: General von Tresckow and

Schlabrendorff. The latter says it took only a few subsequent meetings to

convince them that Stauffenberg was their man. He became an active

conspirator.

But he was still only a junior officer and he soon saw that the field marshals

were too confused—if not too cowardly—to do anything to remove Hitler or to

stop the grisly slaughter of Jews, Russians and POWs behind the lines. Also the

needless disaster at Stalingrad sickened him. As soon as it was over, in February

1943, he asked to be sent to the front and was posted as operations officer of the

10th Panzer Division in Tunisia, joining it in the last days of the battle of the

Kasserine Pass in which his unit had thrown the Americans out of the gap.

On April 7 his car drove into a mine field—some say it was also attacked by

low-flying Allied aircraft—and Stauffenberg was gravely wounded. He lost his

left eye, his right hand and two fingers of the other hand and suffered injuries to

his left ear and knee. For several weeks it seemed probable that he would be left

totally blind, if he survived. But under the expert supervision at a Munich

hospital of Professor Sauerbruch, he was restored to life. Almost any other man,

one would think, would have retired from the Army and thus from the

conspiracy. But by midsummer he was writing General Olbricht—after much

practice in wielding a pen with the three fingers of his bandaged left hand—that

he expected to return to active duty within three months. During the long

convalescence he had had time to reflect and he had come to the conclusion that,

physically handicaped though he was, he had a sacred mission to perform.

“I feel I must do something now to save Germany,” he told his wife, the

Countess Nina, mother of his four young children, when she visited his bedside

one day. “We General Staff officers must all accept our share of the

responsibility.” 10

By the end of September 1943, he was back in Berlin as a lieutenant colonel

and chief of staff to General Olbricht at the General Army Office. Soon he was

practicing with a pair of tongs how to set off one of the English-made Abwehr

bombs with the three fingers of his good hand.

He was doing much more. His dynamic personality, the clarity of his mind,

the catholicity of his ideas and his marked talents as an organizer infused new

life and determination into the conspirators. And also some differences, for

Stauffenberg was not satisfied with the kind of stodgy, conservative, colorless

regime which the old rusty leaders of the conspiracy, Beck, Goerdeler and

Hassell, envisaged as soon as National Socialism was overthrown. More

practical than his friends in the Kreisau Circle, he wanted a new dynamic Social

Democracy and he insisted that the proposed anti-Nazi cabinet include his new

friend Julius Leber, a brilliant Socialist, and Wilhelm Leuschner, a former trade-

union official, both deep and active in the conspiracy. There was much

argument, but Stauffenberg rapidly achieved dominance over the political

leaders of the plot.

He was equally successful with most of the military men. He recognized

General Beck as the nominal leader of these and held the former General Staff

Chief in great admiration, but on returning to Berlin he saw that Beck,

recovering from a major cancer operation, was only a shell of his former self,

tired and somewhat dispirited, and that moreover he had no concept of politics,

being in this field completely under the spell of Goerdeler. Beck’s illustrious

name in military circles would be useful, even necessary, in carrying out the

putsch. But for active help in supplying and commanding the troops which

would be needed, younger officers who were on active duty had to be mobilized.

Stauffenberg soon had most of the key men he needed.

These were, besides Olbricht, his chief: General Stieff, head of the

Organization Branch of OKH General Eduard Wagner, the First Quartermaster

General of the Army; General Erich Fellgiebel, the Chief of Signals at OKW;

General Fritz Lindemann, head of the Ordnance Office; General Paul von Hase,

chief of the Berlin Kommandantur (who could furnish the troops for taking over

Berlin); and Colonel Freiherr von Roenne, head of the Foreign Armies Section,

with his chief of staff, Captain Count von Matuschka.

There were two or three key generals, chief of whom was Fritz Fromm, the

actual commander in chief of the Replacement Army, who like Kluge, blew hot

and cold and could not be definitely counted on.

The plotters also did not yet have a field marshal on active duty. Field

Marshal von Witzleben, one of the original conspirators, was slated to become

Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces but he was on the inactive list and had

no troops at his command. Field Marshal von Rundstedt, who now commanded

all troops in the West, was approached, but declined to go back on his oath to the

Fuehrer—or such, at least, was his explanation. Likewise the brilliant but

opportunistic Field Marshal von Manstein.

At this juncture—early in 1944—a very active and popular Field Marshal

made himself, at first without the knowledge of Stauffenberg, somewhat

available to the conspirators. This was Rommel, and his entrance into the plot

against Hitler came as a great surprise to the resistance leaders and was not

approved by most of them, who regarded the “Desert Fox” as a Nazi and as an

opportunist who had blatantly courted Hitler’s favor and was only now deserting

him because he knew the war was lost.

In January 1944 Rommel had become commander of Army Group? in the

West, the main force with which the expected Anglo–American invasion across

The Channel was to be repelled. In France he began to see a good deal of two

old friends, General Alexander von Falkenhausen, the military governor of

Belgium and northern France, and General Karl Heinrich von Stuelpnagel,

military governor of France. Both generals had already joined the anti-Hitler

conspiracy and gradually initiated Rommel into it. They were aided by an old

civilian friend of Rommel, Dr. Karl Stroelin, the Oberbuergermeister of

Stuttgart, who like so many other characters in this narrative had been an

enthusiastic Nazi and now, with defeat looming and the cities of Germany,

including his own, rapidly becoming rubble from the Allied bombing, was

having second thoughts. He, in turn, had been helped along this path by Dr.

Goerdeler, who in August 1943 had persuaded him to join in drawing up a

memorandum to the Ministry of the Interior—now headed by Himmler—in

which they jointly demanded a cessation of the persecution of the Jews and the

Christian churches, the restoration of civil rights and the re-establishment of a

system of justice divorced from the party and the S.S.-Gestapo. Through Frau

Rommel, Stroelin brought the memorandum to the attention of the Field

Marshal, on whom it appears to have had a marked effect.

Toward the end of February 1944, the two men met at Rommel’s home at

Herrlingen, near Ulm, and had a heart-to-heart talk.

I told him [the mayor later recounted] that certain senior officers of the Army in the East

proposed to make Hitler a prisoner and to force him to announce over the radio that he had

abdicated. Rommel approved of the idea.

I went on to say to him that he was our greatest and most popular general, and more

respected abroad than any other. “You are the only one,” I said, “who can prevent civil war in

Germany. You must lend your name to the movement. ”11

Rommel hesitated and finally made his decision.

“I believe,” he said to Stroelin, “it is my duty to come to the rescue of

Germany.”

At this meeting and at all subsequent ones which Rommel had with the

plotters, he opposed assassinating Hitler—not on moral but on practical grounds.

To kill the dictator, he argued, would be to make a martyr of him. He insisted

that Hitler be arrested by the Army and haled before a German court for crimes

against his own people and those of the occupied lands. 12

At this time fate brought another influence on Rommel in the person of

General Hans Speidel, who on April 15, 1944, became the Field Marshal’s chief

of staff. Speidel, like his fellow conspirator Stauffenberg—though they belonged

to quite separate groups—was an unusual Army officer. He was not only a

soldier but a philosopher, having received summa cum laude a doctorate in

philosophy from the University of Tuebingen in 1925. He lost no time in going

to work on his chief. Within a month, on May 15, he arranged a meeting at a

country house near Paris between Rommel, Stuelpnagel and their chiefs of staff.

The purpose, says Speidel, was to work out “the necessary measures for ending

the war in the West and overthrowing the Nazi regime. ”13

This was a large order, and Speidel realized that in preparing it closer contacts

with the anti-Nazis in the homeland, especially with the Goerdeler–Beck group,

were urgently necessary. For some weeks the mercurial Goerdeler had been

pressing for a secret meeting between Rommel and—of all people—Neurath,

who, having done his own share of Hitler’s dirty work, first as Foreign Minister

and then as the Reich Protector of Bohemia, was also experiencing a rude

awakening now that terrible disaster was about to overtake the Fatherland. It was

decided that it would be too dangerous for Rommel to meet with Neurath and

Stroelin, so the Field Marshal sent General Speidel, at whose home in

Freudenstadt the conference was held on May 27. The three men present,

Speidel, Neurath and Stroelin, were, like Rommel himself, all Swabians and this

affinity appears not only to have made the meeting congenial but to have led to

ready agreement. This was that Hitler must be quickly overthrown and that

Rommel must be prepared to become either the interim head of state or

Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces—neither of which posts, it must be

said, Rommel at any time ever demanded for himself. A number of details were

worked out, including plans for contacting the Western Allies for an armistice,

and a code for communication between the conspirators in Germany and

Rommel’s headquarters.

General Speidel is emphatic in his assertion not only that Rommel frankly

informed his immediate superior in the West, Field Marshal von Rundstedt, as to

what was up, but that the latter was “in complete agreement.” There was a flaw,

however, in the character of this senior officer of the Army.

During a discussion on the formulation of joint demands to Hitler [Speidel later wrote]

Rundstedt said to Rommel: “You are young. You know and love the people. You do it.” 14

After further conferences that late spring the following plan was drawn up.

Speidel, almost alone among the Army conspirators in the West, survived to

describe it:

An immediate armistice with the Western Allies but not unconditional

surrender. German withdrawal in the West to Germany. Immediate suspension

of the Allied bombing of Germany. Arrest of Hitler for trial before a German

court. Overthrow of Nazi rule. Temporary assumption of executive power in

Germany by the resistance forces of all classes under the leadership of General

Beck, Goerdeler, and the trade-union representative, Leuschner. No military

dictatorship. Preparation of a “constructive peace” within the framework of a

United States of Europe. In the East, continuation of the war. Holding a

shortened line between the mouth of the Danube, the Carpathian Mountains, the

River Vistula and Memel. 15

The generals seem to have had no doubts whatsoever that the British and

American armies would then join them in the war against Russia to prevent, as

they said, Europe from becoming Bolshevik.

In Berlin General Beck agreed, at least to the extent of continuing the war in

the East. Early in May he sent through Gisevius a memorandum to Dulles in

Switzerland outlining a fantastic plan. The German generals in the West were to

withdraw their forces to the German frontier after the Anglo–American invasion.

While this was going on, Beck urged that the Western Allies carry out three

tactical operations: land three airborne divisions in the Berlin area to help the

conspirators hold the capital, carry out large-scale seaborne landings on the

German coast near Hamburg and Bremen, and land a sizable force across the

Channel in France. Reliable anti-Nazi German troops would in the meantime

take over in the Munich area and surround Hitler at his mountain retreat on the

Obersalzberg. The war against Russia would go on. Dulles says he lost no time

in trying to bring the Berlin conspirators down to earth. They were told there

could be no separate peace with the West.16

Stauffenberg, his friends in the Kreisau Circle and such members of the

conspiracy as Schulenburg, the former ambassador in Moscow, had come to

realize this. In fact most of them, including Stauffenberg, were “Easterners”—

pro-Russian though anti-Bolshevik. For a time they believed that it might be

easier to get a better peace with Russia—which through statements from Stalin

himself had emphasized in its radio propaganda that it was fighting not against

the German people but against “the Hitlerites”—than with the Western Allies,

who harped only of “unconditional surrender. ”* But they abandoned such

wishful thinking in October 1943, when the Soviet government at the Moscow

Conference of Allied Foreign Ministers formally adhered to the Casablanca

declaration of unconditional surrender.

And now, as the fateful summer of 1944 approached, they realized that with

the Red armies nearing the frontier of the Reich, the British and American

armies poised for a large-scale invasion across the Channel, and the German

resistance to Alexander’s Allied forces in Italy crumbling, they must quickly get

rid of Hitler and the Nazi regime if any kind of peace at all was to be had that

would spare Germany from being overrun and annihilated.

In Berlin, Stauffenberg and his confederates had at last perfected their plans.

They were lumped under the code name “Valkyrie”—an appropriate term, since

the Valkyrie were the maidens in Norse-German mythology, beautiful but

terrifying, who were supposed to have hovered over the ancient battlefields

choosing those who would be slain. In this case, Adolf Hitler was to be slain.

Ironically enough, Admiral Canaris, before his fall, had sold the Fuehrer the idea

of Valkyrie, dressing it up as a plan for the Home Army to take over the security

of Berlin and the other large cities in case of a revolt of the millions of foreign

laborers toiling in these centers. Such a revolt was highly unlikely—indeed,

impossible—since the foreign workers were unarmed and unorganized, but to

the suspicious Fuehrer danger lurked everywhere these days, and, with almost all

the able-bodied soldiers absent from the homeland either at the front or keeping

down the populace in the far-flung occupied areas, he readily fell in with the

idea that the Home Army ought to have plans for protecting the internal security

of the Reich against the hordes of sullen slave laborers. Thus Valkyrie became a

perfect cover for the military conspirators, enabling them to draw up quite

openly plans for the Home Army to take over the capital and such cities as

Vienna, Munich and Cologne as soon as Hitler had been assassinated.

In Berlin their main difficulty was that they had very few troops at their

disposal and that these were outnumbered by the S.S. formations. Also there

were considerable numbers of Luftwaffe units in and around the city manning

the antiaircraft defenses, and these troops, unless the Army moved swiftly,

would remain loyal to Goering and certainly make a fight of it to retain the Nazi

regime under their chief even if Hitler were dead. Their flak guns could be used

as artillery against the Army detachments. On the other hand, the police force in

Berlin had been won over through its chief, Count von Helldorf, who had joined

the conspiracy.

In view of the strength of the S.S. and Air Force troops, Stauffenberg laid

great stress on the timing of the operation to gain control of the capital. The first

two hours would be the most critical. In that short space of time the Army troops

must occupy and secure the national broadcasting headquarters and the city’s

two radio stations, the telegraph and telephone centrals, the Reich Chancellery,

the ministries and the headquarters of the S.S.-Gestapo. Goebbels, the only

prominent Nazi who rarely left Berlin, must be arrested along with the S.S.

officers. In the meantime, the moment Hitler was killed his headquarters at

Rastenburg must be isolated from Germany so that neither Goering nor

Himmler, nor any of the Nazi generals such as Keitel and Jodl, could take over

and attempt to rally the police or the troops behind a continued Nazi regime.

General Fellgiebel, Chief of Signals, who was stationed at the Fuehrer’s

headquarters, had undertaken to see to this.

Only then, after all these things had been accomplished within the first couple

of hours of the coup, could the messages, which had been drawn up and filed, be

sent out by radio, telephone and telegraph to the commanders of the Home Army

in other cities and to the top generals commanding the troops at the front and in

the occupied zones, announcing that Hitler was dead and that a new anti-Nazi

government had been formed in Berlin. The revolt would have to be over—and

achieved—within twenty-four hours and the new government firmly installed.

Otherwise the vacillating generals might have second thoughts. Goering and

Himmler might be able to rally them, and a civil war would ensue. In that case

the fronts would cave in and the very chaos and collapse which the plotters

wished to prevent would become inevitable.

All depended for success, after Hitler had been assassinated—and

Stauffenberg personally would see to this—on the ability of the plotters to utilize

for their purposes, and with the utmost speed and energy, the available Army

troops in and around Berlin. This posed a knotty problem.

Only General Fritz Fromm, the commander in chief of the Home or

Replacement Army, could normally give the order to carry out Valkyrie. And to

the very last he remained a question mark. All through 1943 the conspirators had

worked on him. They finally concluded that this wary officer could be definitely

counted upon only after he saw that the revolt had succeeded. But since they

were sure of its success, they proceeded to draft a series of orders under

Fromm’s name, though without his knowledge. In case he wavered at the crucial

moment, Fromm was to be replaced by General Hoepner, the brilliant tank

commander who had been cashiered by Hitler after the battle for Moscow in

1941 and forbidden to wear his uniform.

The problem of another key general in Berlin also plagued the plotters. This

was General von Kortzfleisch, an out-and-out Nazi, who commanded Wehrkreis

III, which included Berlin and Brandenburg. It was decided to have him arrested

and replaced by General Freiherr von Thuengen. General Paul von Hase, the

commandant of Berlin, was in on the plot and could be counted upon to lead the

local garrison troops in the first, all-important step of taking over the city.

Besides drawing up detailed plans for seizing control of Berlin, Stauffenberg

and Tresckow, in collaboration with Goerdeler, Beck, Witzleben and others,

drafted papers giving instructions to the district military commanders on how

they were to take over executive power in their areas, put down the S.S., arrest

the leading Nazis and occupy the concentration camps. Furthermore, several

ringing declarations were composed which at the appropriate moment were to be

issued to the armed forces, the German people, the press and the radio. Some

were signed by Beck, as the new head of state, others by Field Marshal von

Witzleben, as Commander in Chief of the Wehrmacht, and by Goerdeler, as the

new Chancellor. Copies of the orders and appeals were typed in great secrecy

late at night in the Bendlerstrasse by two brave women in the plot, Frau Erika

von Tresckow, the wife of the general who had done so much to further the

conspiracy, and Margarete von Oven, the daughter of a retired general and for

years the faithful secretary of two former commanders in chief of the Army,

Generals von Hammerstein and von Fritsch. The papers were then hidden in

General Olbricht’s safe.

The plans, then, were ready. In fact, they had been perfected by the end of

1943, but for months little had been done to carry them out. Events, however,

could not wait on the conspirators. As June 1944 came they realized that time

was running out on them. For one thing, the Gestapo was closing in. The arrests

of those who were in on the plot, among them Count von Moltke and the

members of the Kreisau Circle, were mounting with each week that passed, and

there were many executions. Beck, Goerdeler, Hassell, Witzleben and others in

the inner circle were being so closely shadowed by Himmler’s secret police that

they found it increasingly difficult to meet together. Himmler himself had

warned the fallen Canaris in the spring that he knew very well that a rebellion

was being hatched by the generals and their civilian friends. He mentioned that

he was keeping a watch on Beck and Goerdeler. Canaris passed the warning on

to Olbricht. 17

Just as ominous for the conspirators was the military situation. The Russians,

it was believed, were about to launch an all-out offensive in the East. Rome was

being abandoned to the Allied forces. (It fell on June 4.) In the West the Anglo–

American invasion was imminent. Very soon Germany might go down to

military defeat—before Nazism could be overthrown. Indeed, there was a

growing number of conspirators, perhaps influenced by the thinking of the

Kreisau Circle, who began to feel that it might be better to call off their plans

and let Hitler and the Nazis take the responsibility for the catastrophe. To

overthrow them now might merely perpetrate another “stab-in-the-back” legend,

such as that which had fooled so many Germans after the First World War.

THE ANGLO–AMERICAN INVASION, JUNE 6, 1944

Stauffenberg himself did not believe that the Western Allies would attempt to

land in France that summer. He persisted in this belief even after Colonel Georg

Hansen, a carryover from the Abwehr in Himmler’s military-intelligence bureau,

had warned him early in May that the invasion might begin on any day in June.

The German Army itself was beset by doubts, at least as to the date and place

of the assault. In May there had been eighteen days when the weather, the sea

and the tides were just right for a landing, and the Germans noted that General

Eisenhower had not taken advantage of them. On May 30 Rundstedt, the

Commander in Chief in the West, had reported to Hitler that there was no

indication that the invasion was “immediately imminent.” On June 4, the Air

Force meteorologist in Paris advised that because of the inclement weather no

Allied action could be expected for at least a fortnight.

On the strength of this and of what little information he had—the Luftwaffe

had been prevented from making aerial reconnaissance of the harbors on

England’s south coast where Eisenhower’s troops at that moment were

swarming aboard their ships, and the Navy had withdrawn its reconnaissance

craft from the Channel because of the heavy seas—Rommel drew up a situation

report on the morning of June 5 reporting to Rundstedt that the invasion was not

imminent, and immediately set off by car for his home at Herrlingen to spend the

night with his family and then to proceed to Berchtesgaden the next day to

confer with Hitler.

June 5, General Speidel, Rommel’s chief of staff, later recalled, “was a quiet

day.” There seemed no reason why Rommel should not make his somewhat

leisurely journey back to Germany. There were the usual reports from German

agents about the possibility of an Allied landing—this time between June 6 and

June 16—but there had been hundreds of these since April and they were not

taken seriously. Indeed, on the sixth General Friedrich Dollmann, who

commanded the Seventh Army in Normandy, on whose beaches the Allied

forces were about to land, ordered a temporary relaxation of the standing alert

and convoked his senior officers for a map exercise at Rennes, some 125 miles

south of those beaches.

If the Germans were in the dark about the date of the invasion, they were also

ignorant of where it would take place. Rundstedt and Rommel were certain it

would be in the Pas-de-Calais area, where the Channel was at its narrowest.

There they had concentrated their strongest force, the Fifteenth Army, whose

strength during the spring was increased from ten to fifteen infantry divisions.

But by the end of March Adolf Hitler’s uncanny intuition was telling him that

the Schwerpunkt of the invasion probably would be in Normandy, and during the

next few weeks he ordered considerable reinforcements to the region between

the Seine and the Loire. “Watch Normandy!” he kept warning his generals.

Still, the overwhelming part of German strength, in both infantry and panzer

divisions, was retained north of the Seine, between Le Havre and Dunkirk.

Rundstedt and his generals were watching the Pas-de-Calais rather than

Normandy and they were encouraged in this by a number of deceptive

maneuvers carried out during April and May by the British-American High

Command which indicated to them that their calculations were correct.

The day of June 5, then, passed in relative quiet, so far as the Germans were

concerned. Severe Anglo–American air attacks continued to disrupt German

depots, radar stations, V-l sites, communications and transport, but these had

been going on night and day for weeks and seemed no more intense on this day

than on others.

Shortly after dark Rundstedt’s headquarters was informed that the BBC in

London was broadcasting an unusually large number of coded messages to the

French resistance and that the German radar stations between Cherbourg and Le

Havre were being jammed. At 10 P.M. the Fifteenth Army intercepted a code

message from the BBC to the French resistance which it believed meant that the

invasion was about to begin. This army was alerted, but Rundstedt did not think

it necessary to alert the Seventh Army, on whose sector of the coast farther west,

between Caen and Cherbourg, the Allied forces were now—toward midnight—

approaching on a thousand ships.

It was not until eleven minutes past 1 A.M., June 6, that the Seventh Army, its

commander not yet returned from his map exercise at Rennes, realized what was

happening. Two American and one British airborne divisions had begun landing

in its midst. The general alarm was sounded at 1:30 A.M.

Forty-five minutes later Major General Max Pemsel, chief of staff of the

Seventh Army, got General Speidel on the telephone at Rommel’s headquarters

and told him that it looked like “a large-scale operation.” Speidel did not believe

it but passed on the report to Rundstedt, who was equally skeptical. Both

generals believed the dropping of parachutists was merely an Allied feint to

cover their main landings around Calais. At 2:40 A.M. Pemsel was advised that

Rundstedt “does not consider this to be a major operation.” 18 Not even when the

news began to reach him shortly after dawn on June 6 that on the Normandy

coast between the rivers Vire and Orne a huge Allied fleet was disembarking

large bodies of troops, under cover of a murderous fire from the big guns of an

armada of warships, did the Commander in Chief West believe that this was to

be the main Allied assault. It did not become apparent, Speidel says, until the

afternoon of June 6. By that time the Americans had a toehold on two beaches

and the British on a third and had penetrated inland for a distance of from two to

six miles.

Speidel had telephoned Rommel at 6 A.M. at his home and the Field Marshal

had rushed back by car without going on to see Hitler, but he did not arrive at

Army Group B headquarters until late that afternoon. * In the meantime Speidel,

Rundstedt and the latter’s chief of staff, General Blumentritt, had been on the

telephone to OKW, which was then at Berchtesgaden. Due to an idiotic order of

Hitler’s not even the Commander in Chief in the West could employ his panzer

divisions without the specific permission of the Fuehrer. When the three generals

early on the morning of the sixth begged for permission to rush two tank

divisions to Normandy, Jodl replied that Hitler wanted first to see what

developed. Whereupon the Fuehrer went to bed and could not be disturbed by

the frantic calls of the generals in the West until 3 P.M.

When he woke up, the bad news which had in the meantime arrived finally

stirred the Nazi warlord to action. He gave—too late, as it turned out—

permission to engage the Panzer Lehr and 12th S.S. Panzer divisions in

Normandy. He also issued a famous order which has been preserved for

posterity in the log of the Seventh Army:

16:55 hours. June 6, 1944

Chief of Staff Western Command emphasizes the desire of the Supreme Command to have

the enemy in the bridgehead annihilated by the evening of June 6 since there exists the danger

of additional sea- and airborne landings for support … The beachhead must be cleaned up by

not later than tonight.

In the eerie mountain air of the Obersalzberg, from which Hitler was now

trying to direct the most crucial battle of the war up to this moment—he had

been saying for months that Germany’s destiny would be decided in the West—

this fantastic order seems to have been issued in all seriousness, concurred in by

Jodl and Keitel. Even Rommel, who passed it on by telephone shortly before 5

o’clock that afternoon, an hour after his return from Germany, seems to have

taken it seriously, for he ordered Seventh Army headquarters to launch an attack

by the 21st Panzer Division, the only German armored unit in the area,

“immediately regardless of whether reinforcements arrive or not.”

This the division had already done, without waiting for Rommel’s command.

General Pemsel, who was on the other end of the line when Rommel called

Seventh Army headquarters, gave a blunt reply to Hitler’s demand that the

Allied beachhead—there were actually now three—“be cleaned up by not later

than tonight.”

“That,” he replied, “would be impossible.”

Hitler’s much-propagandized Atlantic Wall had been breached within a few

hours. The once vaunted Luftwaffe had been driven completely from the air and

the German Navy from the sea, and the Army taken by surprise. The battle was

far from over, but its outcome was not long in doubt. “From June 9 on,” says

Speidel, “the initiative lay with the Allies.”

Rundstedt and Rommel decided that it was time to say so to Hitler, face to

face, and to demand that he accept the consequences. They enticed him to a

meeting on June 17 at Margival, north of Soissons, in the elaborate bombproof

bunker which had been built to serve as the Fuehrer’s headquarters for the

invasion of Britain in the summer of 1940, but never used. Now, four summers

later, the Nazi warlord appeared there for the first time.

He looked pale and sleepless [Speidel later wrote], playing nervously with his glasses and

an array of colored pencils which he held between his fingers. He sat hunched upon a stool,

while the field marshals stood. His hypnotic powers seemed to have waned. There was a curt

and frosty greeting from him. Then in a loud voice he spoke bitterly of his displeasure at the

success of the Allied landings, for which he tried to hold the field commanders responsible. 19

But the prospect of another stunning defeat was emboldening the generals, or

at least Rommel, whom Rundstedt left to do most of the talking when Hitler’s

diatribe against them had come to a momentary pause. “With merciless

frankness,” says Speidel, who was present, “Rommel pointed out … that the

struggle was hopeless against the [Allied] superiority in the air, at sea and on the

land. ”*20 Well, not quite hopeless, if Hitler abandoned his absurd determination

to hold every foot of ground and then to drive the Allied forces into the sea.

Rommel proposed, with Rundstedt’s assent, that the Germans withdraw out of

range of the enemy’s murderous naval guns, take their panzer units out of the

line and re-form them for a later thrust which might defeat the Allies in a battle

fought “outside the range of the enemy’s naval artillery.”

But the Supreme warlord would not listen to any proposal for withdrawal.

German soldiers must stand and fight. The subject obviously was unpleasant to

him and he quickly changed to others. In a display which Speidel calls “a strange

mixture of cynicism and false intuition,” Hitler assured the generals that the new

V-l weapon, the buzz bomb, which had been launched for the first time the day

before against London, “would be decisive against Great Britain … and make

the British willing to make peace.” When the two field marshals drew Hitler’s

attention to the utter failure of the Luftwaffe in the West, the Fuehrer retorted

that “masses of jet fighters”—the Allies had no jets, but the Germans had just

put them into production—would soon drive the British and American flyers

from the skies. Then, he said, Britain would collapse. At this juncture the

approach of Allied planes forced them to adjourn to the Fuehrer’s air-raid

shelter.

Safe in the underground concrete bunker, they resumed the conversation, * and

at this point Rommel insisted on steering it into politics.

He predicted [says Speidel] that the German front in Normandy would collapse and that a

breakthrough into Germany by the Allies could not be checked … He doubted whether the

Russian front could be held. He pointed to Germany’s complete political isolation … He

concluded … with an urgent request that the war be brought to an end.

Hitler, who had interrupted Rommel several times, finally cut him short:

“Don’t you worry about the future course of the war, but rather about your own

invasion front.”

The two field marshals were getting nowhere, either with their military or

political arguments. “Hitler paid no attention whatsoever to their warnings,”

General Jodl later recalled at Nuremberg. Finally the generals urged the Supreme

Commander at least to visit Rommel’s Army Group? headquarters to confer with

some of the field commanders on what they were up against in Normandy. Hitler

reluctantly agreed to the visit for June 19—two days hence.

He never showed up. Shortly after the field marshals had departed from

Margival on the afternoon of June 17 an errant V-l on its way to London turned

around and landed on the top of the Fuehrer’s bunker. No one was killed or even

hurt, but Hitler was so upset that he set off immediately for safer parts, not

stopping until he got to the mountains of Berchtesgaden.

There more bad news shortly arrived. On June 20 the long-awaited Russian

offensive on the central front began, developing with such overwhelming power

that within a few days the German Army Group Center, in which Hitler had

concentrated his strongest forces, was completely smashed, the front torn wide

open and the road to Poland opened. On July 4 the Russians crossed the 1939

Polish eastern border and converged on East Prussia. All available reserves of

the High Command were quickly rounded up to be rushed—for the first time in

World War II—to the defense of the Fatherland itself. This helped to doom the

German armies in the West. From now on they could not count on receiving any

sizable reinforcements.

Once more, on June 29, Rundstedt and Rommel appealed to Hitler to face

realities both in the East and in the West and to try to end the war while

considerable parts of the German Army were still in being. This meeting took

place on the Obersalzberg, where the Supreme warlord treated the two field

marshals frostily, dismissing their appeals curtly and then lapsing into a long

monologue on how he would win the war with new “miracle weapons.” His

discourse, says Speidel, “became lost in fantastic digressions.”

Two days later Rundstedt was replaced as Commander in Chief West by Field

Marshal von Kluge. * On July 15 Rommel wrote a long letter to Hitler and

dispatched it by Army teletype. “The troops,” he wrote, “are fighting heroically

everywhere, but the unequal struggle is nearing its end.” He added a postscript in

his own handwriting:

I must beg you to draw the proper conclusions without delay. I feel it my duty as

Commander in Chief of the Army Group to state this clearly. 21

“I have given him his last chance,” Rommel told Speidel. “If he does not take

it, we will act. ”22

Two days later, on the afternoon of July 17, while driving back to

headquarters from the Normandy front, Rommel’s staff car was shot up by low-

flying Allied fighter planes and he was so critically wounded that it was first

thought he would not survive the day. This was a disaster to the conspirators, for

Rommel had now—Speidel swears to it23—made up his mind irrevocably to do

his part in ridding Germany of Hitler’s rule (though still opposing his

assassination) within the next few days. As it turned out, his dash and daring

were sorely missing among the Army officers who, at long last, as the German

armies crumbled in the East and West that July of 1944, made their final bid to

bring Hitler and National Socialism down.

The conspirators, says Speidel, “felt themselves painfully deprived of their

pillar of strength.” *24

THE CONSPIRACY AT THE ELEVENTH HOUR

The successful Allied landing in Normandy threw the conspirators in Berlin

into great confusion. Stauffenberg, as we have seen, had not believed it would be

attempted in 1944, and that, if it were, there was a fifty-fifty chance that it would

fail. He seems to have wished that it would, since then the American and British

governments, after such a bloody and costly setback, would be more willing to

negotiate a peace in the West with his new anti-Nazi government, which in this

case could get better terms.

When it became evident that the invasion had succeeded, that Germany had

suffered another crucial defeat, and that a new one was threatening in the East,

Stauffenberg, Beck and Goerdeler wondered whether there was any point in

going ahead with their plans. If they succeeded they would only be blamed for

bringing on the final catastrophe. Though they knew it was now inevitable, this

was not generally realized by the mass of the German people. Beck finally

concluded that though a successful anti-Nazi revolt could not now spare

Germany from enemy occupation, it could bring the war to an end and save

further loss of blood and destruction of the Fatherland. A peace now would also

prevent the Russians from overrunning Germany and Bolshevizing it. It would

show the world that there was “another Germany” besides the Nazi one. And—

who knew?—perhaps at least the Western Allies, despite their terms of

unconditional surrender, might not be too hard on a conquered Germany.

Goerdeler agreed and pinned even greater hopes on the Western democracies.

He knew, he said, how much Churchill feared the danger of “a total Russian

victory.”

The younger men, led by Stauffenberg, were not entirely convinced. They

sought advice from Tresckow, who was now chief of staff of the Second Army

on the crumbling Russian front. His reply brought the stumbling plotters back on

the track.

The assassination must be attempted at any cost. Even should it fail, the attempt to seize

power in the capital must be undertaken. We must prove to the world and to future generations

that the men of the German Resistance Movement dared to take the decisive step and to hazard

their lives upon it. Compared with this object, nothing else matters.25

This inspired answer settled the matter and revived the spirits and dissolved

the doubts of Stauffenberg and his young friends. The threatened collapse of the

fronts in Russia, France and Italy impelled the plotters to act at once. Another

event helped to speed them on their way.

From the beginning the Beck–Goerdeler–Hassell circle had declined to have

anything to do with the Communist underground, and vice versa. To the

Communists the plotters were as reactionary as the Nazis and their very success

might prevent a Communist Germany from succeeding a National Socialist one.

Beck and his friends were well aware of this Communist line, and they knew

also that the Communist underground was directed from Moscow and served

chiefly as an espionage source for the Russians. * Furthermore, they knew that it

had become infiltrated with Gestapo agents—“V men,” as Heinrich Mueller, the

Gestapo chief and himself a student and admirer of the Soviet N.K.V.D., called

them.

In June the plotters, against the advice of Goerdeler and the older members,

decided to contact the Communists. This was at the suggestion of the Socialist

wing and especially of Adolf Reichwein, the Socialist philosopher and

celebrated Wandervogel, who was now director of the Folklore Museum in

Berlin. Reichwein had maintained vague contacts with the Communists. Though

Stauffenberg himself was suspicious of them, his Socialist friends Reichwein

and Leber convinced him that some contact with them had become necessary in

order to see what they were up to and what they would do in case the putsch

succeeded, and, if possible, to use them at the last moment to widen the basis of

the anti-Nazi resistance. Reluctantly he agreed to Leber and Reichwein meeting

with the underground Communist leaders on June 22. But he warned them that

the Communists should be told as little as possible.

The meeting took place in East Berlin between Leber and Reichwein,

representing the Socialists, and two individuals named Franz Jacob and Anton

Saefkow who claimed to be—and perhaps were—the leaders of the Communist

underground. They were accompanied by a third comrade whom they introduced

as “Rambow.” The Communists turned out to know quite a bit about the plot

against Hitler and wanted to know more. They asked for a meeting with its

military leaders on July 4. Stauffenberg refused, but Reichwein was authorized

to represent him at a further meeting on that date. When he arrived at it, he,

along with Jacob and Saefkow, were promptly arrested. “Rambow,” it turned

out, was a Gestapo stool pigeon. The next day Leber, on whom Stauffenberg was

counting to become the dominant political force in the new government, was

also arrested. *

Stauffenberg was not only deeply upset by the arrest of Leber, with whom he

had become a close personal friend and whom he regarded as indispensable to

the proposed new government, but he saw at once that the whole conspiracy was

in dire peril of being snuffed out now that Himmler’s men were so close on its

trail. Leber and Reichwein were courageous men and could be counted on, he

thought, not to reveal any secrets even under torture. Or could they be? Some of

the plotters were not so sure. There might be limits beyond which even the

bravest man could not keep silent when his body was being racked by

insufferable pain.

The arrest of Leber and Reichwein was a further spur to immediate action.

THE COUP OF JULY 20, 1944

Toward the end of June the plotters received one good stroke of fortune.

Stauffenberg was promoted to full colonel and appointed chief of staff to

General Fromm, the commander in chief of the Home Army. This post not only

enabled him to issue orders to the Home Army under Fromm’s name but gave

him direct and frequent access to Hitler. Indeed, the Fuehrer began to summon

the chief of the Replacement Army, or his deputy, to headquarters two or three

times a week to demand fresh replacements for his decimated divisions in

Russia. At one of these meetings Stauffenberg intended to plant his bomb.

Stauffenberg had now become the key man in the conspiracy. On his

shoulders alone rested its only chance for success. As the one member of the plot

who could penetrate the heavily guarded Fuehrer headquarters it was up to him

to kill Hitler. As chief of staff of the Replacement Army it would have to be left

to him—since Fromm had not been won over completely and could not be

definitely counted on—to direct the troops that were to seize Berlin after Hitler

was out of the way. And he had to carry out both objectives on the same day and

at two spots separated by two or three hundred miles—the Fuehrer’s

headquarters, whether on the Obersalzberg or at Rastenburg, and Berlin.

Between the first and the second acts there must be an interval of two or three

hours while his plane was droning back to the capital during which he could do

nothing but hope that his plans were being energetically initiated by his

confederates in Berlin. That was one trouble, as we shall shortly see.

There were others. One seems to have been an almost unnecessary

complication that sprang up in the minds of the now desperate conspirators.

They came to the conclusion that it would not suffice to kill Adolf Hitler. They

must at the same time kill Goering and Himmler, thus ensuring that the military

forces under the command of these two men could not be used against them.

They thought too that the top generals at the front who had not yet been won

over would join them more quickly if Hitler’s two chief lieutenants were also

done away with. Since Goering and Himmler usually attended the daily military

conferences at the Fuehrer headquarters, it was believed that it would not be too

difficult to kill all three men with one bomb. This foolish resolve led

Stauffenberg to miss two golden opportunities.

He was summoned to the Obersalzberg on July 11 to report to the Fuehrer on

the supply of badly needed replacements. He carried with him on the plane down

to Berchtesgaden one of the Abwehr’s English-made bombs. It had been decided

at a meeting of the plotters in Berlin the night before that this was the moment to

kill Hitler—and Goering and Himmler as well. But Himmler was not present at

the conference that day and when Stauffenberg, leaving the meeting for a

moment, rang up General Olbricht in Berlin to tell him so, stressing that he could

still get Hitler and Goering, the General urged him to wait for another day when

he could get all three. That night, on his return to Berlin, Stauffenberg met with

Beck and Olbricht and insisted that the next time he must attempt to kill Hitler,

regardless of whether Goering and Himmler were present or not. The others

agreed.

The next time was soon at hand. On July 14 Stauffenberg was ordered to

report the next day to the Fuehrer on the replacement situation—every available

recruit was needed to help fill the gaps in Russia, where Army Group Center,

having lost twenty-seven divisions, had ceased to exist as a fighting force. That

day—the fourteenth—Hitler had moved his headquarters back to Wolfsschanze

at Rastenburg to take personal charge of trying to restore the central front, where

Red Army troops had now reached a point but sixty miles from East Prussia.

Again, on the morning of July 15, Colonel Stauffenberg set out by plane for

the Fuehrer’s headquarters* with a bomb in his briefcase. This time the

conspirators were so certain of success that it was agreed that the first Valkyrie

signal—for the troops to start marching in Berlin and for the tanks from the

panzer school at Krampnitz to begin rolling toward the capital—should be given

two hours before Hitler’s conference, scheduled for 1 P.M., began. There must be

no delay in taking over.

At 11 A.M. on Saturday, July 15, General Ulbricht issued Valkyrie I for Berlin

and before noon troops were moving toward the center of the capital with orders

to occupy the Wilhelmstrasse quarter. At 1 P.M. Stauffenberg, briefcase in hand,

arrived at the Fuehrer’s conference room, made his report on replacements, and

then absented himself long enough to telephone Olbricht in Berlin to say—by

prearranged code—that Hitler was present and that he intended to return to the

meeting and set off his bomb. Olbricht informed him that the troops in Berlin

were already on the march. At last success in the great enterprise seemed at

hand. But when Stauffenberg returned to the conference room Hitler had left it

and did not return. Disconsolate, Stauffenberg hurriedly rang up Olbricht with

the news. The General frantically canceled the Valkyrie alarm and the troops

were marched back to their barracks as quickly and as inconspicuously as

possible.

The news of still another failure was a heavy blow to the conspirators, who

gathered in Berlin on Stauffenberg’s return to consider what next to do.

Goerdeler was for resorting to the so-called “Western solution.” He proposed to

Beck that both of them fly to Paris to confer with Field Marshal von Kluge on

getting an armistice in the West whereby the Western Allies would agree not to

push farther than the Franco–German border, thus releasing the German armies

in the West to be shunted to the Eastern front to save the Reich from the

Russians and their Bolshevism. Beck had a clearer head. The idea that they

could now get a separate peace with the West, he knew, was a pipe dream.

Nevertheless the plot to kill Hitler and overthrow Nazism must be carried out at

all costs, Beck argued, if only to save Germany’s honor. Stauffenberg agreed. He

swore he would not fail the next time. General Olbricht, who had received a

dressing down from Keitel for moving his troops in Berlin, declared that he

could not risk doing it again, since that would unmask the whole conspiracy. He

had barely got by, he said, with an explanation to Keitel and Fromm that this

was a practice exercise. This fear of again setting the troops in motion until it

was known definitely that Hitler was dead was to have disastrous consequences

on the crucial following Thursday.

On Sunday evening, July 16, Stauffenberg invited to his home at Wannsee a

small circle of his close friends and relatives: his brother, Berthold, a quiet,

introspective, scholarly young man who was an adviser on international law at

naval headquarters; Lieutenant Colonel Caesar von Hofacker, a cousin of the

Stauffenbergs and their liaison man with the generals in the West; Count Fritz

von der Schulenburg, a former Nazi who was still deputy police president of

Berlin; and Trott zu Solz. Hofacker had just returned from the West, where he

had conferred with a number of generate—Falkenhausen, Stuelpnagel, Speidel,

Rommel and Kluge. He reported an imminent German breakdown on the

Western front but, more important, that Rommel would back the conspiracy

regardless of which way Kluge jumped, though he still opposed killing Hitler.

After a long discussion the young conspirators agreed, however, that ending

Hitler’s life was now the only way out. They had no illusions by this time that

their desperate act would save Germany from having to surrender

unconditionally. They even agreed that this would have to be done to the

Russians as well as to the Western democracies. The important thing, they said,

was for Germans—and not their foreign conquerors—to free Germany from

Hitler’s tyranny. 26

They were terribly late. The Nazi despotism had endured for eleven years and

only the certainty of utter defeat in a war which Germany had launched, and

which they had done little to oppose—or, in many cases, not opposed at all—had

roused them to action. But better late than never. There remained, however, little

time. The generals at the front were advising them that collapse in both the East

and the West was probably only a matter of weeks.

For the plotters there seemed to be only a few more days left to them to act.

The premature march of the troops in Berlin on July 15 had aroused the

suspicions of OKW. On that day came news that General von Falkenhausen, one

of the leaders of the plot in the West, had been suddenly dismissed from his post

as military governor of Belgium and northern France. Someone, it was feared,

must be giving them away. On July 17 they learned that Rommel had been so

seriously wounded that he would have to be left out of their plans indefinitely.

The next day Goerdeler was tipped off by his friends at police headquarters that

Himmler had issued an order for his arrest. At Stauffenberg’s insistence

Goerdeler went, protesting, into hiding. That same day a personal friend in the

Navy, Captain Alfred Kranzfelder, one of the very few naval officers in on the

conspiracy, informed Stauffenberg that rumors were spreading in Berlin that the

Fuehrer’s headquarters were to be blown up in the next few days. Again it

seemed that someone in the conspiracy must have been indiscreet. Everything

pointed to the Gestapo’s closing in on the inner ring of the conspiracy.

On the afternoon of July 19 Stauffenberg was again summoned to Rastenburg,

to report to Hitler on the progress being made with the new Volksgrenadier

divisions which the Replacement Army was hurriedly training to be thrown in on

the dissolving Eastern front. He was to make his report at the first daily

conference at Fuehrer headquarters the next day, July 20, a 1 P.M.* Field Marshal

von Witzleben and General Hoepner, who lived some distance outside Berlin,

were notified by Stauffenberg to appear in the city in good time. General Beck

made his last-minute preparations for directing the coup until Stauffenberg could

return by air from his murderous deed. The key officers in the garrisons in and

around Berlin were apprised that July 20 would be Der Tag.

Stauffenberg worked at the Bendlerstrasse on his report for Hitler until dusk,

leaving his office shortly after 8 o’clock for his home at Wannsee. On his way he

stopped off at a Catholic church in Dahlem to pray. † He spent the evening at

home quietly with his brother, Berthold, and retired early. Everyone who saw

him that afternoon and evening remembered that he was amiable and calm, as if

nothing unusual was in the offing.

JULY 20, 1944

Shortly after 6 o’clock on the warm, sunny summer morning of July 20, 1944,

Colonel Stauffenberg, accompanied by his adjutant, Lieutenant Werner von

Haeften, drove out past the bombed-out buildings of Berlin to the airport at

Rangsdorf. In his bulging briefcase were papers concerning the new

Volksgrenadier divisions on which at 1 P.M. he was to report to Hitler at the

“Wolf’s Lair” at Rastenburg in East Prussia. In between the papers, wrapped in a

shirt, was a time bomb.

It was identical to the one which Tresckow and Schlabrendorff had planted in

the Fuehrer’s airplane the year before and which had failed to explode. Of

English make, as we have seen, it was set off by breaking a glass capsule, whose

acid then ate away a small wire, which released the firing pin against the

percussion cap. The thickness of the wire governed the time required to set off

the explosion. On this morning the bomb was fitted with the thinnest possible

wire. It would dissolve in a bare ten minutes.

At the airport Stauffenberg met General Stieff, who had produced the bomb

the night before. There they found a plane waiting, the personal craft of General

Eduard Wagner, the First Quartermaster General of the Army and a ringleader in

the plot, who had arranged to put it at their disposal for this all-important flight.

By 7 o’clock the plane was off, landing at Rastenburg shortly after 10 A.M.

Haeften instructed the pilot to be ready to take off for the return trip at any time

after twelve noon.

From the airfield a staff car drove the party to the Wolfsschanze headquarters,

set in a gloomy, damp, heavily wooded area of East Prussia. It was not an easy

place to get into or, as Stauffenberg undoubtedly noted, out of. It was built in

three rings, each protected by mine fields, pillboxes and an electrified barbed-

wire fence, and was patrolled day and night by fanatical S.S. troops. To get into

the heavily guarded inner compound, where Hitler lived and worked, even the

highest general had to have a special pass, good for one visit, and pass the

personal inspection of S.S. Oberfuehrer Rattenhuber, Himmler’s chief of

security and commander of the S.S. guard, or of one of his deputies. However,

since Hitler himself had ordered Stauffenberg to report, he and Haeften, though

they were stopped and their passes examined, had little trouble in getting

through the three check points. After breakfast with Captain von Moellendorff,

adjutant to the camp commander, Stauffenberg sought out General Fritz

Fellgiebel, Chief of Signals at OKW.

Fellgiebel was one of the key men in the plot. Stauffenberg made sure that the

General was ready to flash the news of the bombing to the conspirators in Berlin

so that action there could begin immediately. Fellgiebel was then to isolate the

Fuehrer headquarters by shutting off all telephone, telegraph and radio

communications. No one was in such a perfect position to do this as the head of

the OKW communications network, and the plotters counted themselves lucky

to have won him over. He was indispensable to the success of the entire

conspiracy.

After calling on General Buhle, the Army’s representative at OKW, to discuss

the affairs of the Replacement Army, Stauffenberg walked over to Keitel’s

quarters, hung up his cap and belt in the anteroom and entered the office of the

Chief of OKW. There he learned that he would have to act with more dispatch

than he had planned. It was now a little after 12 noon, and Keitel informed him

that because Mussolini would be arriving by train at 2:30 P.M. the Fuehrer’s first

daily conference had been put forward from 1 P.M. to 12:30. The colonel, Keitel

advised, must make his report brief. Hitler wanted the meeting over early.

Before the bomb could go off? Stauffenberg must have wondered if once

again, and on what was perhaps his last try, fate was robbing him of success.

Apparently he had hoped too that this time the conference with Hitler would be

held in the Fuehrer’s underground bunker, where the blast from the bomb would

be several times more effective than in one of the surface buildings. But Keitel

told him the meeting would be in the Lagebaracke—the conference barracks. *

This was far from being the flimsy wooden hut so often described. During the

previous winter Hitler had had the original wooden structure reinforced with

concrete walls eighteen inches thick to give protection against incendiary and

splinter aerial bombs that might fall nearby. These heavy walls would add force

to Stauffenberg’s bomb.

He must soon set it to working. He had briefed Keitel on what he proposed to

report to Hitler and toward the end had noticed the OKW Chief glancing

impatiently at his watch. A few minutes before 12:30 Keitel said they must leave

for the conference immediately or they would be late. They emerged from his

quarters, but before they had taken more than a few steps Stauffenberg remarked

that he had left his cap and belt in the anteroom and quickly turned to go back

for them before Keitel could suggest that his adjutant, a Lieutenant von John,

who was walking alongside, should retrieve them for him.

In the anteroom Stauffenberg swiftly opened his briefcase, seized the tongs

with the only three fingers he had, and broke the capsule. In just ten minutes,

unless there was another mechanical failure, the bomb would explode.

Keitel, as much a bully with his subordinates as he was a toady with his

superiors, was aggravated at the delay and turned back to the building to shout to

Stauffenberg to get a move on. They were late, he yelled. Stauffenberg

apologized for the delay. Keitel no doubt realized that it took a man as maimed

as the colonel a little extra time to put on his belt. As they walked over to

Hitler’s hut Stauffenberg seemed to be in a genial mood and Keitel’s petty

annoyance—he had no trace of suspicion as yet—was dissipated.

Nevertheless, as Keitel had feared, they were late. The conference had already

begun. As Keitel and Stauffenberg entered the building the latter paused for a

moment in the entrance hall to tell the sergeant major in charge of the telephone

board that he expected an urgent call from his office in Berlin, that it would

contain information he needed to bring his report up to the minute (this was for

Keitel’s ear), and that he was to be summoned immediately when the call came.

This too, though it must have seemed most unusual—even a field marshal would

scarcely dare to leave the Nazi warlord’s presence until he had been dismissed or

until the conference was over and the Supreme Commander had left first—did

not arouse Keitel’s suspicions.

The two men entered the conference room. About four minutes had ticked by

since Stauffenberg reached into his briefcase with his tongs and broke the

capsule. Six minutes to go. The room was relatively small, some thirty by fifteen

feet, and it had ten windows, all of which were wide open to catch the breezes on

this hot, sultry day. So many open windows would certainly reduce the effect of

any bomb blast. In the middle of the room was an oblong table, eighteen by five

feet, made of thick oak planks. It was a peculiarly constructed table in that it

stood not on legs but on two large heavy supports, or socles, placed near the

ends and extending to nearly the width of the table. This interesting construction

was not without its effect on subsequent history.

When Stauffenberg entered the room, Hitler was seated at the center of the

long side of the table, his back to the door. On his immediate right were General

Heusinger, Chief of Operations and Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army, General

Korten, Air Force Chief of Staff, and Colonel Heinz Brandt, Heusinger’s chief

of staff. Keitel took his place immediately to the left of the Fuehrer and next to

him was General Jodl. There were eighteen other officers of the three services

and the S.S. standing around the table, but Goering and Himmler were not

among them. Only Hitler, playing with his magnifying glass—which he now

needed to read the fine print on the maps spread before him—and two

stenographers were seated.

Heusinger was in the midst of a lugubrious report on the latest breakthrough

on the central Russian front and on the perilous position, as a consequence, of

the German armies not only there but on the northern and southern fronts as

well. Keitel broke in to announce the presence of Colonel von Stauffenberg and

its purpose. Hitler glanced up at the one-armed colonel with a patch over one

eye, greeted him curtly, and announced that before hearing his report he wanted

to have done with Heusinger’s.

Stauffenberg thereupon took his place at the table between Korten and Brandt,

a few feet to the right of Hitler. He put his briefcase on the floor, shoving it

under the table so that it leaned against the inside of the stout oaken support. It

was about six feet distant from the Fuehrer’s legs. The time was now 12:37. Five

minutes to go. Heusinger continued to talk, pointing constantly to the situation

map spread on the table. Hitler and the officers kept bending over to study it.

No one seems to have noticed Stauffenberg stealing away. Except perhaps

Colonel Brandt. This officer became so absorbed in what his General was saying

that he leaned over the table the better to see the map, discovered that

Stauffenberg’s bulging briefcase was in his way, tried to shove it aside with his

foot and finally reached down with one hand and lifted it to the far side of the

heavy table support, which now stood between the bomb and Hitler. * This

seemingly insignificant gesture probably saved the Fuehrer’s life; it cost Brandt

his. There was an inexplicable fate involved here. Colonel Brandt, it will be

remembered, was the innocent officer whom Tresckow had induced to carry a

couple of “bottles of brandy” back on Hitler’s plane from Smolensk to

Rastenburg on the evening of March 13, 1943, and he had done so without the

faintest suspicion that they were in reality a bomb—the very make of bomb

which he had now unostentatiously moved farther away under the table from the

warlord. Its chemical had by this time almost completed the eating away of the

wire that held back the firing pin.

Keitel, who was responsible for the summoning of Stauffenberg, glanced

down the table to where the colonel was supposed to be standing. Heusinger was

coming to the end of his gloomy report and the OKW Chief wanted to indicate

to Stauffenberg that he should make ready to report next. Perhaps he would need

some aid in getting his papers out of his briefcase. But the young colonel, he saw

to his extreme annoyance, was not there. Recalling what Stauffenberg had told

the telephone operator on coming in, Keitel slipped out of the room to retrieve

this curiously behaving young officer.

Stauffenberg was not at the telephone. The sergeant at the board said he had

hurriedly left the building. Nonplused, Keitel turned back to the conference

room. Heusinger was concluding, at last, his report on the day’s catastrophic

situation. “The Russian,” he was saying, “is driving with strong forces west of

the Duna toward the north. His spearheads are already southwest of Dunaburg.

If our army group around Lake Peipus is not immediately withdrawn, a

catastrophe …”27

It was a sentence that was never finished.

At that precise moment, 12:42 P.M., the bomb went off.

Stauffenberg saw what followed. He was standing with General Fellgiebel

before the latter’s office in Bunker 88 a couple of hundred yards away, glancing

anxiously first at his wrist watch as the seconds ticked off and then at the

conference barracks. He saw it go up with a roar in smoke and flame, as if, he

said later, it had been hit directly by a 155-mm. shell. Bodies came hurtling out

of the windows, debris flew into the air. There was not the slightest doubt in

Stauffenberg’s excited mind that every single person in the conference room was

dead or dying. He bade a hasty farewell to Fellgiebel, who was now to telephone

the conspirators in Berlin that the attempt had succeeded and then cut off

communications until the plotters in the capital had taken over the city and

proclaimed the new government.†

Stauffenberg’s next task was to get out of the Rastenburg headquarters camp

alive and quickly. The guards at the check points had seen or heard the explosion

at the Fuehrer’s conference hall and immediately closed all exits. At the first

barrier, a few yards from Fellgiebel’s bunker, Stauffenberg’s car was halted. He

leaped out and demanded to speak with the duty officer in the guardroom. In the

latter’s presence he telephoned someone—whom is not known—spoke briefly,

hung up and turned to the officer, saying, “Herr Lieutenant, I am allowed to

pass.”

This was pure bluff, but it worked, and apparently, after the lieutenant had

dutifully noted in his log: “12:44. Col. Stauffenberg passed through,” word was

sent along to the next check point to let the car through. At the third and final

barrier, it was more difficult. Here an alarm had already been received, the rail

had been lowered and the guard doubled, and no one was to be permitted to enter

or leave. Stauffenberg and his aide, Lieutenant Haeften, found their car blocked

by a very stubborn sergeant major named Kolbe. Again Stauffenberg demanded

the use of the telephone and rang up Captain von Moellendorff, adjutant to the

camp commander. He complained that “because of the explosion,” the guard

would not let him through. “I’m in a hurry. General Fromm is waiting for me at

the airfield.” This also was bluff. Fromm was in Berlin, as Stauffenberg well

knew.

Hanging up, the colonel turned to the sergeant. “You heard, Sergeant, I’m

allowed through.” But the sergeant was not to be bluffed. He himself rang

through to Moellendorff for confirmation. The captain gave it.28

The car then raced to the airport while Lieutenant Haeften hurriedly

dismantled a second bomb that he had brought along in his briefcase, tossing out

the parts on the side of the road, where they were later found by the Gestapo.

The airfield commandant had not yet received any alarm. The pilot had his

engines warming up when the two men drove onto the field. Within a minute or

two the plane took off.

It was now shortly after 1 P.M. The next three hours must have seemed the

longest in Stauffenberg’s life. There was nothing he could do as the slow

Heinkel plane headed west over the sandy, flat German plain but to hope that

Fellgiebel had been able to get through to Berlin with the all-important signal,

that his fellow plotters in the capital had swung immediately into action in taking

over the city and sending out the prepared messages to the military commanders

in Germany and in the West, and that his plane would not be forced down by

alerted Luftwaffe fighters or by prowling Russian craft, which were increasingly

active over East Prussia. His own plane had no long-distance radio which might

have enabled him to tune in on Berlin and hear the first thrilling broadcasts

which he expected the conspirators would be making before he landed. Nor, for

this lack, could he himself communicate with his confederates in the capital and

give the signal that General Fellgiebel might not have been able to flash.

His plane droned on through the early summer afternoon. It landed at

Rangsdorf at 3:45 P.M. and Stauffenberg, in high spirits, raced to the nearest

telephone at the airfield to put through a call to General Olbricht to learn exactly

what had been accomplished in the fateful three hours on which all depended. To

his utter consternation he found that nothing had been accomplished. Word

about the explosion had come through by telephone from Fellgiebel shortly after

1 o’clock but the connection was bad and it was not quite clear to the

conspirators whether Hitler had been killed or not. Therefore nothing had been

done. The Valkyrie orders had been taken from Olbricht’s safe but not sent out.

Everyone in the Bendlerstrasse had been standing idly by waiting for

Stauffenberg’s return. General Beck and Field Marshal von Witzleben, who as

the new head of state and Commander in Chief of the Wehrmacht, respectively,

were supposed to have started issuing immediately the already-prepared

proclamations and commands and to have gone on the air at once to broadcast

the dawn of a new day in Germany, had not yet showed up.

Hitler, contrary to Stauffenberg’s firm belief, which he imparted to Olbricht on

the telephone from Rangsdorf, had not been killed. Colonel Brandt’s almost

unconscious act of shoving the briefcase to the far side of the stout oaken table

support had saved his life. He had been badly shaken but not severely injured.

His hair had been singed, his legs burned, his right arm bruised and temporarily

paralyzed, his eardrums punctured and his back lacerated by a falling beam. He

was, as one eyewitness later recalled, hardly recognizable as he emerged from

the wrecked and burning building on the arm of Keitel, his face blackened, his

hair smoking and his trousers in shreds. Keitel, miraculously, was uninjured. But

most of those who had been at the end of the table where the bomb had exploded

were either dead, dying or badly wounded.*

In the first excitement there were several guesses as to the origin of the

explosion. Hitler thought at first it might have been caused by a sneak attack of

an enemy fighter-bomber. Jodl, nursing a blood-spattered head—the chandelier,

among other objects, had fallen on him—was convinced that some of the

building laborers had planted a time bomb under the floor of the building. The

deep hole which Stauffenberg’s bomb had blown in the floor seemed to confirm

this. It was some time before the colonel became suspected. Himmler, who came

running to the scene on hearing the explosion, was completely puzzled and his

first act was to telephone—a minute or two before Fellgiebel shut down

communications—Artur Nebe, the head of the criminal police in Berlin, to

dispatch by plane a squad of detectives to carry out the investigation.

In the confusion and shock no one at first remembered that Stauffenberg had

slipped out of the conference room shortly before the explosion. It was at first

believed that he must have been in the building and was one of those severely

hurt who had been rushed to the hospital. Hitler, not yet suspicious of him, asked

that the hospital be checked.

Some two hours after the bomb went off the clues began to come in. The

sergeant who operated the telephone board at the Lagebaracke reported that “the

one-eyed colonel,” who had informed him he was expecting a long-distance call

from Berlin, had come out of the conference room and, without waiting for it,

had left the building in a great hurry. Some of the participants at the conference

recalled that Stauffenberg had left his briefcase under the table. The guardhouses

at the check points revealed that Stauffenberg and his aide had passed through

immediately after the explosion.

Hitler’s suspicions were now kindled. A call to the airfield at Rastenburg

supplied the interesting information that Stauffenberg had taken off from there in

great haste shortly after 1 P.M., giving as his destination the airport at Rangsdorf.

Himmler immediately ordered that he be arrested on landing there, but his order

never got through to Berlin because of Fellgiebel’s courageous action in closing

down communications. Up to this minute no one at headquarters seems to have

suspected that anything untoward might be happening in Berlin. All now

believed that Stauffenberg had acted alone. It would not be difficult to

apprehend him unless, as some suspected, he had landed behind the Russian

lines. Hitler, who, under the circumstances, seems to have behaved calmly

enough, had something else on his mind. He had to greet Mussolini, who was

due to arrive at 4 P.M., his train having been delayed.

There is something weird and grotesque about this last meeting of the two

fascist dictators on the afternoon of July 20, 1944, as they surveyed the ruins of

the conference hall and tried to fool themselves into thinking that the Axis which

they had forged, and which was to have dominated the continent of Europe, was

not also in shambles. The once proud and strutting Duce was now no more than

a Gauleiter of Lombardy, rescued from imprisonment by Nazi thugs, and

propped up by Hitler and the S.S. Yet the Fuehrer’s friendship and esteem for

the fallen Italian tyrant had never faltered and he greeted him with as much

warmth as his physical condition permitted, showed him through the still

smoking debris of the Lagebaracke where his life had almost been snuffed out a

few hours before, and predicted that their joint cause would soon, despite all the

setbacks, triumph.

Dr. Schmidt, who was present as interpreter, has recalled the scene.29

Mussolini was absolutely horrified. He could not understand how such a thing could

happen at Headquarters….

“I was standing here by this table [Hitler recounted]; the bomb went off just in front of my

feet … It is obvious that nothing is going to happen to me; undoubtedly it is my fate to

continue on my way and bring my task to completion … What happened here today is the

climax! Having now escaped death … I am more than ever convinced that the great cause

which I serve will be brought through its present perils and that everything can be brought to a

good end.”

Mussolini, carried away as so often before by Hitler’s words, says Schmidt,

agreed.

“Our position is bad [he said], one might almost say desperate, but what has happened here

today gives me new courage. After [this] miracle it is inconceivable that our cause should

meet with misfortune.”

The two dictators, with their entourages, then went to tea, and there now

ensued—it was about 5 P.M.—a ludicrous scene that gives a revealing, if not

surprising, picture of the shabby, tattered Nazi chiefs at the moment of one of the

supreme crises in the Third Reich. By this time the communications system of

Rastenburg had been restored by the direct order of Hitler and the first reports

from Berlin had begun to come in indicating that a military revolt had broken out

there and perhaps one on the Western front. Mutual recriminations, long

suppressed, broke out between the Fuehrer’s captains, their shouting echoing

through the rafters though at first Hitler himself sat silent and brooding while

Mussolini blushed with embarrassment.

Admiral Doenitz, who had rushed by air to Rastenburg at the news of the

attentat and arrived after the tea party had begun, lashed out at the treachery of

the Army. Goering, on behalf of the Air Force, supported him. Then Doenitz lit

on Goering for the disastrous failures of the Luftwaffe, and the fat Reich

Marshal, after defending himself, attacked his pet hate, Ribbentrop, for the

bankruptcy of Germany’s foreign policy, at one point threatening to smack the

arrogant Foreign Minister with his marshal’s baton. “You dirty little champagne

salesman! Shut your damned mouth!” Goering cried, but this was impossible for

Ribbentrop, who demanded a little respect, even from the Reich Marshal. “I am

still the Foreign Minister,” he shouted, “and my name is von Ribbentrop! ”*

Then someone brought up the subject of an earlier “revolt” against the Nazi

regime, the Roehm “plot” of June 30, 1934. Mention of this aroused Hitler—

who had been sitting morosely sucking brightly colored medicinal pills supplied

by his quack physician, Dr. Theodor Morell—to a fine fury. Eyewitnesses say he

leaped from his chair, foam on his lips, and screamed and raged. What he had

done with Roehm and his treasonable followers was nothing, he shouted, to what

he would do to the traitors of this day. He would uproot them all and destroy

them. “I’ll put their wives and children into concentration camps, ” he raved,

“and show them no mercy!” In this case, as in so many similar ones, he was as

good as his word.

Partly because of exhaustion but also because the telephone from Berlin began

to bring further details of a military uprising, Hitler broke off his mad

monologue, but his temper did not subside. He saw Mussolini off to his train—it

was their final parting—and returned to his quarters. When told at about 6

o’clock that the putsch had not yet been squelched, he grabbed the telephone and

shrieked orders to the S.S. in Berlin to shoot everyone who was the least suspect.

“Where’s Himmler? Why is he not there!” he yelled, forgetful that only an hour

before, as his party sat down to tea, he had ordered the S.S. chief to fly to Berlin

and ruthlessly put down the rebellion, and that his master policeman could not

possibly have arrived as yet.30

The long and carefully prepared rebellion in Berlin had, as Stauffenberg

learned to his dismay when he landed at Rangsdorf at 3:45 P.M., got off to a slow

start. Three precious, vital hours, during which the Fuehrer headquarters had

been shut off from the outside world, had been lost.

Stauffenberg, for the life of him, could not understand why, nor can a

historian trying to reconstitute the events of this fateful day. The weather was hot

and sultry, and perhaps this had a certain effect. Though the chief conspirators

had known that Stauffenberg had left for Rastenburg that morning “heavily

laden,” as General Hoepner was informed, to attend the 1 P.M. Fuehrer

conference, only a few of them, and these mostly junior officers, began to drift

leisurely into the headquarters of the Replacement Army—and of the plot—in

the Bendlerstrasse toward noon. On Stauffenberg’s last previous attempt to get

Hitler, on July 15, it will be recalled, General Olbricht had ordered the troops of

the Berlin garrison to start marching two hours before the bomb was timed to go

off. But on July 20, perhaps mindful of the risk he had run, he did not issue

similar orders. Unit commanders in Berlin and in the training centers in nearby

Doeberitz, Jueterbog, Krampnitz and Wuensdorf had been tipped the night

before that they would most probably be receiving the Valkyrie orders on the

twentieth. But Olbricht decided to wait until definite word had come from

Fellgiebel at Rastenburg before again setting his troops in motion. General

Hoepner, with the uniform which Hitler had forbade him to wear in his suitcase,

arrived at the Bendlerstrasse at thirty minutes past noon—at the very moment

Stauffenberg was breaking the capsule of his bomb—and he and Olbricht went

out for lunch, where they toasted the success of their enterprise with a half bottle

of wine.

They had not been back in Olbricht’s office very long when General Fritz

Thiele, chief signals officer of OKH, burst in. He had just been on the telephone

to Fellgiebel, he said excitedly, and though the line was bad and Fellgiebel was

very guarded in what he said, it seemed that the explosion had taken place but

that Hitler had not been killed. In that case Thiele concluded that the Valkyrie

orders should not be issued. Olbricht and Hoepner agreed.

So between approximately 1:15 P.M. and 3:45, when Stauffenberg set down at

Rangsdorf and hurried to the telephone, nothing was done. No troops were

assembled, no orders were sent out to the military commands in other cities and,

perhaps strangest of all, no one thought of seizing the radio broadcasting

headquarters or the telephone and telegraph exchanges. The two chief military

leaders, Beck and Witzleben, had not yet appeared.

The arrival of Stauffenberg finally moved the conspirators to action. On the

telephone from Rangsdorf he urged General Olbricht not to wait until he had

reached the Bendlerstrasse—the trip in from the airfield would take forty-five

minutes—but to start Valkyrie going at once. The plotters finally had someone

to give orders—without such, a German officer seemed lost, even a rebellious

one, even on this crucial day—and they began to act. Colonel Mertz von

Quirnheim, Olbricht’s chief of staff and a close friend of Stauffenberg, fetched

the Valkyrie orders and began to dispatch them by teleprinter and telephone. The

first one alerted the troops in and around Berlin, and a second one, signed by

Witzleben as “Commander in Chief of the Wehrmacht” and countersigned by

Count von Stauffenberg—they had been drawn up months before—announced

that the Fuehrer was dead and that Witzleben was “transferring executive

power” to the Army district commanders at home and to the commanders in

chief of the fighting armies at the front. Field Marshal von Witzleben had not yet

arrived at the Bendlerstrasse. He had got as far as Zossen, twenty miles southeast

of Berlin, where he was conferring with the First Quartermaster General,

Wagner. He was sent for, as was General Beck. The two senior generals in the

plot were acting in the most leisurely manner on this fateful day.

With the orders going out, some of them signed by General Fromm, though

without his knowledge, Olbricht went to the office of the commander of the

Replacement Army, told him that Fellgiebel had reported that Hitler had been

assassinated and urged him to take charge of Valkyrie and assure the internal

security of the State. Fromm’s orders, the conspirators realized, would be obeyed

automatically. He was very important to them at this moment. But Fromm, like

Kluge, was a genius at straddling; he was not the man to jump until he saw

where he was landing. He wanted definite proof that Hitler was dead before

deciding what to do.

At this point Olbricht made another one of the disastrous mistakes committed

by the plotters that day. He was sure from what Stauffenberg had told him on the

telephone from Rangsdorf that the Fuehrer was dead. He also knew that

Fellgiebel had succeeded in blocking the telephone lines to Rastenburg all

afternoon. Boldly he picked up the telephone and asked for a “blitz” telephone

connection with Keitel. To his utter surprise—communications, as we have seen,

had now been reopened, but Olbricht did not know this—Keitel was almost

instantly on the line.

FROMM: What has happened at General Headquarters? Wild rumors are afloat in Berlin.

KEITEL: What should be the matter? Everything is as usual here.

FROMM: I have just received a report that the Fuehrer has been assassinated.

KEITEL: That’s all nonsense. It is true there has been an attempt, but fortunately it has

failed. The Fuehrer is alive and only slightly injured. Where, by the way, is your Chief of

Staff, Colonel Count Stauffenberg?

FROMM: Stauffenberg has not yet returned to us. 31

From that moment on Fromm was lost to the conspiracy, with consequences

which would soon prove catastrophic. Olbricht, momentarily stunned, slipped

out of the office without a word. At this moment General Beck arrived, attired in

a dark civilian suit—perhaps this was a gesture toward playing down the military

nature of the revolt—to take charge. But the man really in charge, as everyone

soon realized, was Colonel von Stauffenberg, who, hatless and out of breath,

bounded up the stairs of the old War Ministry at 4:30 P.M. He reported briefly on

the explosion, which he emphasized he had seen himself from a couple of

hundred yards away. When Olbricht interjected that Keitel himself had just been

on the phone and sworn that Hitler was only slightly wounded, Stauffenberg

answered that Keitel was playing for time by lying. At the very least, he

contended, Hitler must have been severely wounded. In any case, he added, there

was only one thing they could now do: use every minute to overthrow the Nazi

regime. Beck agreed. It did not make too much difference to him, he said,

whether the despot was alive or dead. They must go ahead and destroy his evil

rule.

The trouble was that after the fateful delay and in the present confusion they

did not, for all their planning, know how to go ahead. Not even when General

Thiele brought word that the news of Hitler’s survival was shortly to be

broadcast over the German national radio network does it seem to have occurred

to the conspirators that the first thing they had to do, and at once, was to seize

the broadcasting central, block the Nazis from getting their word out, and begin

flooding the air with their own proclamations of a new government. If troops

were not yet at hand to accomplish this, the Berlin police could have done it.

Count von Helldorf, the chief of police and deep in the conspiracy, had been

waiting impatiently since midday to swing into action with his sizable and

already alerted forces. But no call had come and finally at 4 o’clock he had

driven over to the Bendlerstrasse to see what had happened. He was told by

Olbricht that his police would be under the orders of the Army. But as yet there

was no rebel army—only bewildered officers milling about at headquarters

without any soldiers to command.

Instead of seeing to this at once Stauffenberg put in an urgent telephone call to

his cousin, Lieutenant Colonel Caesar von Hofacker, at General von

Stuelpnagel’s headquarters in Paris, urging the conspirators to get busy there.

This was of the utmost importance, to be sure, since the plot had been better

organized in France and was supported by more important Army officers than in

any other place save Berlin. Actually Stuelpnagel was to show more energy than

his fellow generals at the center of the revolt. Before dark he had arrested and

locked up all 1,200 S.S. and S.D. officers and men in Paris, including their

redoubtable commander, S.S. Major General Karl Oberg. Had similar energy

and similar direction of energy been shown in Berlin that afternoon, history

might have taken a different turn.

Having alerted Paris, Stauffenberg next turned his attention to the stubborn

Fromm, whose chief of staff he was, and whose refusal to go along with the

rebels after he had learned from Keitel that Hitler was alive was seriously

jeopardizing the success of the plot. Beck had no stomach to quarrel with Fromm

so early in the game and excused himself from joining Stauffenberg and

Olbricht, who went to see him. Olbricht told Fromm that Stauffenberg could

confirm Hitler’s death.

“That is impossible,” Fromm snapped. “Keitel has assured me to the

contrary.”

“Keitel is lying, as usual,” Stauffenberg put in. “I myself saw Hitler’s body

being carried out.”

This word from his chief of staff and an eyewitness gave Fromm food for

thought and for a moment he said nothing. But when Olbricht, trying to take

advantage of his indecision, remarked that, at any rate, the code word for

Valkyrie had already been sent out, Fromm sprang to his feet and shouted, “This

is rank insubordination! Who issued the order?” When told that Colonel Mertz

von Quirnheim had, he summoned this officer and told him he was under arrest.

Stauffenberg made one last effort to win his chief over. “General,” he said, “I

myself set off the bomb at Hitler’s conference. The explosion was as if a fifteen-

millimeter shell had hit. No one in that room can still be alive.”

But Fromm was too ingenious a trimmer to be bluffed. “Count Stauffenberg,”

he answered, “the attempt has failed. You must shoot yourself at once.”

Stauffenberg coolly declined. In a moment Fromm, a beefy, red-faced man, was

proclaiming the arrest of all three of his visitors, Stauffenberg, Olbricht and

Mertz.

“You deceive yourself,” Olbricht answered. “It is we who are now going to

arrest you.”

An untimely scuffle among the brother officers ensued in which Fromm,

according to one version, struck the one-armed Stauffenberg in the face. The

General was quickly subdued and put under arrest in the room of his adjutant,

where Major Ludwig von Leonrod was assigned to guard him. * The rebels took

the precaution of cutting the telephone wires in the room.

Stauffenberg returned to his office to find that Oberfuehrer Piffraeder, an S.S.

ruffian who had distinguished himself recently by superintending the exhuming

and destroying of 221,000 bodies of Jews murdered by the Einsatzgruppen in the

Baltic regions before the advancing Russians got to them, had come to arrest

him. Piffraeder and his two S.D. plain-clothes men were locked up in an adjacent

empty office. Then General von Kortzfleisch, who had over-all command of the

troops in the Berlin-Brandenburg district (Wehrkreis III), arrived to demand

what was up. This strictly Nazi General insisted on seeing Fromm but was taken

to Olbricht, with whom he refused to speak. Beck then received him, and when

Kortzfleisch proved adamant he too was locked up. General von Thuengen, as

planned, was appointed to replace him.

Piffraeder’s appearance reminded Stauffenberg that the conspirators had

forgotten to place a guard around the building. So a detachment from the Guard

Battalion Grossdeutschland, which was supposed to be on guard duty but wasn’t,

was posted at the entrance. By a little after 5 P.M., then, the rebels were at least in

control of their own headquarters, but that was all of Berlin they were in control

of. What had happened to the Army troops that were supposed to occupy the

capital and secure it for the new anti-Nazi government?

A little after 4 P.M., when the conspirators had finally come to life following

Stauffenberg’s return, General von Hase, the Berlin commandant, telephoned the

commander of the crack Guard Battalion Grossdeutschland at Doeberitz and

instructed him to alert his unit and himself to report at once to the

Kommandantur on the Unter den Linden. The battalion commander, recently

appointed, was Major Otto Remer, who was to play a key role this day, though

not the one the plotters had counted on. They had investigated him, since his

battalion had been allotted an all-important task, and satisfied themselves that he

was a nonpolitical officer who would obey the orders of his immediate superiors.

Of his bravery there could be no doubt. He had been wounded eight times and

had recently received from the hand of Hitler himself the Knight’s Cross with

Oak Leaves—a rare distinction.

Remer alerted his battalion, as instructed, and sped into the city to receive his

specific orders from Hase. The General told him of Hitler’s assassination and of

an attempted S.S. putsch and instructed him to seal off the ministries in the

Wilhelmstrasse and the S.S. Security Main Office in the nearby Anhalt Station

quarter. By 5:30 P.M. Remer, acting with dispatch, had done so and reported back

to Unter den Linden for further orders.

And now another minor character nudged himself into the drama and helped

Remer to become the nemesis of the conspiracy. A Lieutenant Dr. Hans Hagen,

a highly excitable and self-important young man, had been posted as National

Socialist guidance officer to Remer’s guard battalion. He also worked for Dr.

Goebbels at the Propaganda Ministry and at the moment was actually stationed

at Bayreuth where he had been sent by the Minister to work on a book which

Martin Bormann, Hitler’s secretary, wanted written—a “History of National

Socialist Culture.” His presence in Berlin was quite fortuitous. He had come to

deliver a memorial address in tribute to an obscure writer who had fallen at the

front and he sought to take advantage of his visit by also delivering a lecture that

afternoon to his battalion—though it was a hot and sultry day—on “National

Socialist Guidance Questions.” He had a passion for public speaking.

On his way to Doeberitz the excitable lieutenant was sure he saw Field

Marshal von Brauchitsch in a passing Army car attired in full uniform, and it

immediately occurred to him that the old generals must be up to something

treasonable. Brauchitsch, who had been booted out of his command long before

by Hitler, was not in Berlin that day, in uniform or out, but Hagen swore he had

seen him. He spoke of his suspicions to Remer, with whom he happened to be

talking when the major received his orders to occupy the Wilhelmstrasse. The

orders kindled his suspicions and he persuaded Remer to give him a motorcycle

and sidecar, in which he promptly raced to the Propaganda Ministry to alert

Goebbels.

The Minister had just received his first telephone call from Hitler, who told

him of the attempt on his life and instructed him to get on the air as soon as

possible and announce that it had failed. This seems to have been the first news

the usually alert Propaganda Minister had of what had occurred at Rastenburg.

Hagen soon brought him up to date on what was about to happen in Berlin.

Goebbels was at first skeptical—he regarded Hagen as somewhat of a nuisance

—and, according to one version, was on the point of throwing his visitor out

when the lieutenant suggested he go to the window and see for himself. What he

saw was more convincing than Hagen’s hysterical words. Army troops were

taking up posts around the ministry. Goebbels, who though a stupid man was

extremely quickwitted, told Hagen to send Remer to him at once. This Hagen

did, and thereupon passed out of history.

Thus while the conspirators in the Bendlerstrasse were getting in touch with

generals all over Europe and giving no thought to such a junior officer as Remer,

indispensable as his job was, Goebbels was getting in touch with the man who,

however low in rank, mattered most at this particular moment.

The contact was inevitable, for in the meantime Remer had been ordered to

arrest the Propaganda Minister. Thus the major had an order to nab Goebbels

and also a message from Goebbels inviting him to see him. Remer entered the

Propaganda Ministry with twenty men, whom he instructed to fetch him if he did

not return from the Minister’s office within a few minutes. With drawn pistols he

and his adjutant then went into the office to arrest the most important Nazi

official in Berlin on that day.

Among the talents which had enabled Joseph Goebbels to rise to his eminence

in the Third Reich was a genius for fast talking in tight situations—and this was

the tightest and most precarious of his stormy life. He reminded the young major

of his oath of allegiance to the Commander in Chief. Remer retorted crisply that

Hitler was dead. Goebbels said that the Fuehrer was very much alive—he had

just talked with him on the telephone. He would prove it. Whereupon he picked

up the phone and put in an urgent call to the Commander in Chief at Rastenburg.

Once more the failure of the conspirators to seize the Berlin telephone exchange

or at least cut its wires compounded disaster.* Within the matter of a minute or

two Hitler was on the line. Goebbels quickly handed his telephone to Remer.

Did the major recognize his voice? asked the warlord. Who in Germany could

fail to recognize that husky voice, since it had been heard on the radio hundreds

of times? Moreover, Remer had heard it directly a few weeks before when he

received his decoration from the Fuehrer. The major, it is said, snapped to

attention. Hitler commanded him to crush the uprising and obey only the

commands of Goebbels, Himmler, who he said had just been named the

commander of the Replacement Army and who was en route by plane to Berlin,

and General Reinecke, who happened to be in the capital and had been ordered

to take over the command of all troops in the city. The Fuehrer also promoted

the major forthwith to colonel.

This was enough for Remer. He had received orders from on high and he

proceeded with an energy which was lacking in the Bendlerstrasse to carry them

out. He withdrew his battalion from the Wilhelmstrasse, occupied the

Kommandantur in the Unter den Linden, sent out patrols to halt any other troops

that might be marching on the city and himself set out to find where the

headquarters of the conspiracy was so that he could arrest the ringleaders.

Why the rebelling generals and colonels entrusted such a key role to Remer in

the first place, why they did not replace him at the last moment with an officer

who was heart and soul behind the conspiracy, why at least they did not send a

dependable officer along with the guard battalion to see that Remer obeyed

orders—these are among the many riddles of July 20. But then, why was not

Goebbels, the most important and the most dangerous Nazi official present in

Berlin, arrested at once? A couple of Count von Helldorf’s policemen could

have done this in two minutes, for the Propaganda Ministry was completely

unguarded. But why then did the plotters not seize the Gestapo headquarters in

the Prinz Albrechtstrasse and not only suppress the secret police but liberate a

number of their fellow conspirators, including Leber, who were incarcerated

there? The Gestapo headquarters were virtually unguarded, as was the central

office of the R.S.H.A., the nerve center of the S.D. and S.S., which, one would

have thought, would be among the first places to be occupied. It is impossible to

answer these questions.

Remer’s quick turnabout did not become known in the Bendlerstrasse

headquarters for some time. Apparently very little of what was happening in

Berlin became known there until too late. And it is difficult even today to find

out, for the eyewitness reports are filled with bewildering contradictions. Where

were the tanks, where were the troops from the outlying stations?

A brief announcement broadcast shortly after 6:30 P.M. over the

Deutschlandsender, a radio station with such a powerful transmitter that it could

be heard all over Europe, announcing that there had been an attempt to kill Hitler

but that it had failed, came as a severe blow to the harried men in the

Bendlerstrasse, but it was a warning that the detachment of troops which was

supposed to have occupied the Rundfunkhaus had failed to do so. Goebbels had

been able to telephone the text of the announcement to broadcasting

headquarters while he was waiting for Remer. At a quarter to seven Stauffenberg

sent out a signal by teleprinter to the Army commanders, saying that the radio

announcement was false and that Hitler was dead. But the damage to the

putschists was almost irreparable. The commanding generals in Prague and

Vienna, who had already proceeded to arrest the S.S. and Nazi Party leaders,

began to backtrack. Then at 8:20 P.M. Keitel managed to get out by Army

teleprinter to all Army commands a message from Fuehrer headquarters

announcing that Himmler had been appointed chief of the Replacement Army

and that “only orders from him and myself are to be obeyed.” Keitel added,

“Any orders issued by Fromm, Witzleben or Hoepner are invalid.” The

Deutschlandsender’s announcement that Hitler was alive and Keitel’s crisp order

that only his commands and not those of the conspirators were to be obeyed had,

as we shall see, a decisive effect upon Field Marshal von Kluge, who off in

France was on the point of throwing in his lot with the conspirators. *

Even the tanks, on which the rebel officers had counted so much, failed to

arrive. It might have been thought that Hoepner, an outstanding panzer general,

would have seen to the tanks, but he did not get around to it. The commandant of

the panzer school at Krampnitz, which was to supply the tanks, Colonel

Wolfgang Glaesemer, had been ordered by the conspirators to start his vehicles

rolling into the city and himself to report to the Bendlerstrasse for further

instructions. But the tank colonel wanted no part in any military putsch against

the Nazis, and Olbricht, after pleading with him in vain, had to lock him up too

in the building. Glaesemer, however, was able to whisper to his adjutant, who

was not arrested, instructions to inform the headquarters of the Inspectorate of

Panzer Troops in Berlin, which had jurisdiction over the tank formations, of

what had happened and to see to it that only the inspectorate’s commands were

obeyed.

Thus it happened that the badly needed tanks, though some of them reached

the heart of the city at the Victory Column in the Tiergarten, were denied the

rebels. Colonel Glaesemer escaped from his confinement by a ruse, telling his

guards that he had decided to accept Olbricht’s orders and would himself take

command of the tanks, whereupon he slipped out of the building, The tanks were

soon withdrawn from the city.

The panzer colonel was not the only officer to slip away from the haphazard

and gentlemanly confinement imposed on those who would not join the

conspiracy—a circumstance which contributed to the swift end of the revolt.

Field Marshal von Witzleben, when he finally arrived in full uniform and

waving his baton shortly before 8 P.M. to take over his duties as the new

Commander in Chief of the Wehrmacht, seems to have realized at once that the

putsch had failed. He stormed at Beck and Stauffenberg for having bungled the

whole affair. At his trial he told the court that it was obvious to him that the

attempt had misfired when he learned that not even the broadcasting

headquarters had been occupied. But he himself had done nothing to help at a

time when his authority as a field marshal might have rallied more of the troop

commanders in Berlin and abroad. Forty-five minutes after he had entered the

Bendlerstrasse building he stamped out of it—and out of the conspiracy, now

that it seemed certain to fail—drove his Mercedes back to Zossen, where he had

whiled away the seven hours that were decisive that day, told Quartermaster

General Wagner that the revolt had failed, and drove on to his country estate

thirty miles beyond, where he was arrested the next day by a fellow General

named Linnertz.

The curtain now went up on the last act.

Shortly after 9 P.M. the frustrated conspirators were struck dumb at hearing the

Deutschlandsender announce that the Fuehrer would broadcast to the German

people later in the evening. A few minutes afterward it was learned that General

von Hase, the Berlin commandant, who had started Major—now Colonel—

Remer on his fateful errand, had been arrested and that the Nazi General,

Reinecke, backed by the S.S., had taken over command of all troops in Berlin

and was preparing to storm the Bendlerstrasse.

The S.S. had at last rallied, thanks mostly to Otto Skorzeny, the tough S.S.

leader who had shown his prowess in rescuing Mussolini from captivity.

Unaware that anything was up that day Skorzeny had boarded the night express

for Vienna at 6 P.M., but had been hauled off the train when it stopped at the

suburb of Lichterfelde, at the urging of S.S. General Schellenberg, the Number

Two man in the S.D. Skorzeny found the unguarded S.D. headquarters in a most

hysterical state, but being the coldblooded man he was, and a good organizer to

boot, he quickly rounded up his armed bands and went to work. It was he who

first persuaded the tank school formations to remain loyal to Hitler.

The energetic counteraction at Rastenburg, the quick thinking of Goebbels in

winning over Remer and in utilizing the radio, the revival of the S.S. in Berlin

and the unbelievable confusion and inaction of the rebels in the Bendlerstrasse

caused a good many Army officers who had been on the point of throwing in

their lot with the conspirators, or had even done so, to think better of it. One of

these was General Otto Herfurth, chief of staff to the arrested Kortzfleisch, who

at first had co-operated with the Bendlerstrasse in trying to round up the troops,

and then, when he saw how things were going, changed sides, ringing up Hitler’s

headquarters around 9:30 P.M. to say that he was putting down the military

putsch. *

General Fromm, whose refusal to join the revolt had put it in jeopardy from

the beginning and who, as a result, had been arrested, now bestirred himself.

About 8 P.M., after four hours of confinement in his adjutant’s office, he had

asked to be allowed to retire to his private quarters on the floor below. He had

given his word of honor as an officer that he would make no attempt to escape or

to establish contact with the outside. General Hoepner had consented and

moreover, since Fromm had complained that he was not only hungry but thirsty,

had sent him sandwiches and a bottle of wine. A little earlier three generals of

Fromm’s staff had arrived, had refused to join the rebellion, and had demanded

to be taken to their chief. Inexplicably, they were taken to him in his private

quarters, though put under arrest. They had no sooner arrived than Fromm told

them of a little-used rear exit through which they could escape. Breaking his

word to Hoepner, he ordered the generals to organize help, storm the building,

liberate him and put down the revolt. The generals slipped out unnoticed.

But already a group of junior officers on Olbricht’s staff, who at first had

either gone along with the rebels or stuck around in the Bendlerstrasse to see

how the revolt would go, had begun to sense that it was failing. They had begun

to realize too, as one of them later said, that they would all be hanged as traitors

if the revolt failed and they had not turned against it in time. One of them,

Lieutenant Colonel Franz Herber, a former police officer and a convinced Nazi,

had fetched some Tommy guns and ammunition from the arsenal of Spandau,

and these were secreted on the second floor. About 10:30, these officers called

upon Olbricht and demanded to know exactly what he and his friends were

trying to accomplish. The General told them, and without arguing they

withdrew.

Twenty minutes later they returned—six or eight of them, led by Herber and

Lieutenant Colonel Bodo von der Heyde—brandishing their weapons and

demanded further explanations from Olbricht. Stauffenberg looked in to see

what all the noise was about and was seized. When he tried to escape, bolting

out the door and down the corridor, he was shot in the arm—the only one he had.

The counterrebels began shooting wildly, though apparently not hitting anyone

except Stauffenberg. They then roved through the wing which had been the

headquarters of the plot, rounding up the conspirators. Beck, Hoepner, Olbricht,

Stauffenberg, Haeften and Mertz were herded into Fromm’s vacated office,

where Fromm himself shortly appeared, brandishing a revolver.

“Well, gentlemen,” he said, “I am now going to treat you as you treated me.”

But he didn’t.

“Lay down your weapons,” he commanded, and informed his former captors

that they were under arrest.

“You wouldn’t make that demand of me, your old commanding officer,” Beck

said quietly, reaching for his revolver. “I will draw the consequences from this

unhappy situation myself.”

“Well, keep it pointed at yourself,” Fromm warned.

The curious lack of will to act of this brilliant, civilized former General Staff

Chief had finally brought his downfall at the supreme test of his life. It remained

with him to the very end.

“At this moment it is the old days that I recall …” he began to say, but Fromm

cut him short.

“We don’t want to hear that stuff now. I ask you to stop talking and do

something.”

Beck did. He pulled the trigger, but the bullet merely scratched his head. He

slumped into his chair, bleeding a little.

“Help the old gentleman,” Fromm commanded two young officers, but when

they tried to take the weapon Beck objected, asking for another chance. Fromm

nodded his consent.

Then he turned to the rest of the plotters. “And you gentlemen, if you have

any letters to write I’ll give you a few more minutes.” Olbricht and Hoepner

asked for stationery and sat down to pen brief notes of farewell to their wives.

Stauffenberg, Mertz, Haeften and the others stood there silently. Fromm

marched out of the room.

He had quickly made up his mind to eliminate these men and not only to

cover up the traces—for though he had refused to engage actively in the plot, he

had known of it for months, sheltering the assassins and not reporting their plans

—but to curry favor with Hitler as the man who put down the revolt. In the

world of the Nazi gangsters it was much too late for this, but Fromm did not

realize it.

He returned in five minutes to announce that “in the name of the Fuehrer” he

had called a session of a “court-martial” (there is no evidence that he had) and

that it had pronounced death sentences on four officers: “Colonel of the General

Staff Mertz, General Olbricht, this colonel whose name I no longer know

[Stauffenberg], and this lieutenant [Haeften].”

The two generals, Olbricht and Hoepner, were still scratching their letters to

their wives. General Beck lay sprawled in his chair, his face smeared with blood

from the bullet scratch. The four officers “condemned” to death stood like

ramrods, silent.

“Well, gentlemen,” Fromm said to Olbricht and Hoepner, “are you ready? I

must ask you to hurry so as not to make it too difficult for the others.”

Hoepner finished his letter and laid it on the table. Olbricht asked for an

envelope, put his letter in it and sealed it. Beck, now beginning to come to, asked

for another pistol. Stauffenberg, the sleeve of his wounded good arm soaked in

blood, and his three “condemned” companions were led out. Fromm told

Hoepner to follow him.

In the courtyard below in the dim rays of the blackout-hooded headlights of an

Army car the four officers were quickly dispatched by a firing squad.

Eyewitnesses say there was much tumult and shouting, mostly by the guards,

who were in a hurry because of the danger of a bombing attack—British planes

had been over Berlin almost every night that summer. Stauffenberg died crying,

“Long live our sacred Germany! ”32

In the meantime Fromm had given General Hoepner a certain choice. Three

weeks later, in the shadow of the gallows, Hoepner told of it to the People’s

Court.

“Well, Hoepner [Fromm said], this business really hurts me. We used to be good friends

and comrades, you know. You’ve got yourself mixed up in this thing and must take the

consequences. Do you want to go the same way as Beck? Otherwise I shall have to arrest you

now.”

Hoepner answered that he did “not feel so guilty” and that he thought he could

“justify” himself.

“I understand that,” Fromm answered, shaking his hand. Hoepner was carted

off to the military prison at Moabit.

As he was being taken away he heard Beck’s tired voice through the door in

the next room: “If it doesn’t work this time, then please help me.” There was the

sound of a pistol shot. Beck’s second attempt to kill himself failed. Fromm

poked his head in the door and once more told an officer, “Help the old

gentleman.” This unknown officer declined to give the coup de grâce, leaving

that to a sergeant, who dragged Beck, unconscious from the second wound,

outside the room and finished him off with a shot in the neck. 33

It was now sometime after midnight. The revolt, the only serious one ever

made against Hitler in the eleven and a half years of the Third Reich, had been

snuffed out in eleven and a half hours. Skorzeny arrived at the Bendlerstrasse

with a band of armed S.S. men, forbade any more executions—as a policeman

he knew enough not to kill those who could be tortured into giving much

valuable evidence of the extent of the plot—handcuffed the rest of the plotters,

sent them off to the Gestapo prison on the Prinz Albrechtstrasse and put

detectives to work collecting incriminating papers which the conspirators had

not had time to destroy. Himmler, who had reached Berlin a little earlier and set

up temporary headquarters in Goebbels’ ministry, now protected by part of

Remer’s guard battalion, telephoned Hitler and reported that the revolt had been

crushed. In East Prussia a radio van was racing from Koenigsberg to Rastenburg

so that the Fuehrer could make his long-heralded broadcast which the

Deutschlandsender had been promising every few minutes since 9 P.M.

Just before 1 A.M. Adolf Hitler’s hoarse voice burst upon the summer night’s

air.

My German comrades!

If I speak to you today it is first in order that you should hear my voice and should know

that I am unhurt and well, and secondly, that you should know of a crime unparalleled in

German history.

A very small clique of ambitious, irresponsible and, at the same time, senseless and stupid

officers had concocted a plot to eliminate me and, with me, the staff of the High Command of

the Wehrmacht.

The bomb planted by Colonel Count Stauffenberg exploded two meters to the right of me.

It seriously wounded a number of my true and loyal collaborators, one of whom has died. I

myself am entirely unhurt, aside from some very minor scratches, bruises and burns. I regard

this as a confirmation of the task imposed upon me by Providence …

The circle of these usurpers is very small and has nothing in common with the spirit of the

German Wehrmacht and, above all, none with the German people. It is a gang of criminal

elements which will be destroyed without mercy.

I therefore give orders now that no military authority … is to obey orders from this crew of

usurpers. I also order that it is everyone’s duty to arrest, or, if they resist, to shoot at sight,

anyone issuing or handling such orders …

This time we shall settle accounts with them in the manner to which we National Socialists

are accustomed.

BLOODY VENGEANCE

This time, too, Hitler kept his word.

The barbarism of the Nazis toward their own fellow Germans reached its

zenith. There was a wild wave of arrests followed by gruesome torture,

drumhead trials, and death sentences carried out, in many cases, by slow

strangling while the victims were suspended by piano wire from meathooks

borrowed from butchershops and slaughterhouses. Relatives and friends of the

suspects were rounded up by the thousands and sent to concentration camps,

where many of them died. The brave few who gave shelter to those who were in

hiding were summarily dealt with.

Hitler, seized by a titanic fury and an unquenchable thirst for revenge,

whipped Himmler and Kaltenbrunner to ever greater efforts to lay their hands on

every last person who had dared to plot against him. He himself laid down the

procedure for dispatching them.

“This time,” he stormed at one of his first conferences after the explosion at

Rastenburg, “the criminals will be given short shrift. No military tribunals. We’ll

hail them before the People’s Court. No long speeches from them. The court will

act with lightning speed. And two hours after the sentence it will be carried out.

By hanging—without mercy.” 34

These instructions from on high were carried out literally by Ronald Freisler,

the president of the People’s Court (Volksgerichetshof), a vile, vituperative

maniac, who as a prisoner of war in Russia during the first war had become a

fanatical Bolshevik and who, even after he became, in 1924, an equally fanatical

Nazi, remained a warm admirer of Soviet terror and a keen student of its

methods. He had made a special study of Andrei Vishinsky’s technique as chief

prosecutor in the Moscow trials of the Thirties in which the “Old Bolsheviks”

and most of the leading generals had been found guilty of “treason” and

liquidated. “Freisler is our Vishinsky,” Hitler had exclaimed in the conference

mentioned above.

The first trial of the July 20 conspirators before the People’s Court took place

in Berlin on August 7 and 8, with Field Marshal von Witzleben, Generals

Hoepner, Stieff and von Hase, and the junior officers, Hagen, Klausing,

Bernardis and Count Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, who had worked closely with

their idol Stauffenberg, in the dock. They were already pretty well broken by

their treatment in the Gestapo cellars and, since Goebbels had ordered every

minute of the trial to be filmed so that the movie could be shown to the troops

and to the civilian public as an example—and a warning—everything had been

done to make the accused look as shabby as possible. They were outfitted in

nondescript clothes, old coats and sweaters, and they entered the courtroom

unshaven, collarless, without neckties and deprived of suspenders and belts to

keep their trousers hitched up. The once proud Field Marshal, especially, looked

like a terribly broken, toothless old man. His false teeth had been taken from him

and as he stood in the dock, badgered unmercifully by the venomous chief judge,

he kept grasping at his trousers to keep them from falling-down.

“You dirty old man,” Freisler shouted at him, “why do you keep fiddling with

your trousers?”

Yet though the accused knew that their fate was already settled they behaved

with dignity and courage despite Freisler’s ceaseless efforts to degrade and

demean them. Young Peter Yorck, a cousin of Stauffenberg, was perhaps the

bravest, answering the most insulting questions quietly and never attempting to

hide his contempt for National Socialism.

“Why didn’t you join the party?” Freisler asked.

“Because I am not and never could be a Nazi,” the count replied.

When Freisler had recovered from this answer and pressed the point, Yorck

tried to explain. “Mr. President, I have already stated in my interrogation that the

Nazi ideology was such that I—”

The judge interrupted him. “—could not agree … You didn’t agree with the

National Socialist conception of justice, say, in regard to rooting out the Jews?”

“What is important, what brings together all these questions,” Yorck replied,

“is the totalitarian claim of the State on the individual which forces him to

renounce his moral and religious obligations to God.”

“Nonsense!” cried Freisler, and he cut off the young man. Such talk might

poison Dr. Goebbels’ film and enrage the Fuehrer, who had decreed, “No long

speeches from them.”

The court-appointed defense lawyers were more than ludicrous. Their

cowardice, as one reads the transcript of the trial, is almost unbelievable.

Witzleben’s attorney, for example, a certain Dr. Weissmann, outdid the state

prosecutor and almost equaled Freisler, in denouncing his client as a “murderer,”

as completely guilty and as deserving the worst punishment.

That punishment was meted out as soon as the trial had ended on August 8.

“They must all be hanged like cattle,” Hitler had ordered, and they were. Out at

Ploetzensee prison the eight condemned were herded into a small room in which

eight meathooks hung from the ceiling. One by one, after being stripped to the

waist, they were strung up, a noose of piano wire being placed around their

necks and attached to the meathooks. A movie camera whirled as the men

dangled and strangled, their beltless trousers finally dropping off as they

struggled, leaving them naked in their death agony.35 The developed film, as

ordered, was rushed to Hitler so that he could view it, as well as the pictures of

the trial, the same evening. Goebbels is said to have kept himself from fainting

by holding both hands over his eyes.*36

All that summer, fall and winter and into the new year of 1945 the grisly

People’s Court sat in session, racing through its macabre trials and grinding out

death sentences, until finally an American bomb fell directly on the courthouse

on the morning of February 3, 1945, just as Schlabrendorff was being led into

the courtroom, killing Judge Freisler and destroying the records of most of the

accused who still survived. Schlabrendorff thus miraculously escaped with his

life—one of the very few conspirators on whom fortune smiled—being

eventually liberated from the Gestapo’s clutches by American troops in the

Tyrol.

The fate of the others must now be recorded.

Goerdeler, who was to be the Chancellor of the new regime, had gone into

hiding three days before July 20, after having been warned that the Gestapo had

issued an order for his arrest. He wandered for three weeks between Berlin,

Potsdam and East Prussia, rarely spending two nights in the same place but

always being taken in by friends or relatives, who risked death by giving him

shelter, for Hitler had now put a price of one million marks on his head. On the

morning of August 12, exhausted and hungry after several days and nights

wandering afoot in East Prussia, he stumped into a small inn in the village of

Konradswalde near Marienwerder. While waiting to be served breakfast he

noticed a woman in the uniform of a Luftwaffe Wac eying him closely, and

without waiting for his food he slipped out and made for the nearby woods. It

was too late. The woman was an old acquaintance of the Goerdeler family, a

Helene Schwaerzel, who had easily recognized him and who promptly confided

in a couple of Air Force men who were sitting with her. Goerdeler was quickly

apprehended in the woods.

He was sentenced to death by the People’s Court on September 8, 1944, but

not executed until February 2 of the following year, along with Popitz. *

Apparently Himmler delayed the hangings because he thought the contacts of

the two men, especially those of Goerdeler, with the Western Allies through

Sweden and Switzerland might prove helpful to him if he took over the sinking

ship of state—a prospect which began to grow in his mind at this time.37

Count Friedrich Werner von Schulenburg, the former ambassador in Moscow,

and Hassell, the former ambassador in Rome, both of whom were to have taken

over the direction of foreign policy in the new anti-Nazi regime, were executed

on November 10 and September 8, respectively. Count Fritz von der

Schulenburg died on the gallows August 10. General Fellgiebel, chief of signals

at OKW, whose role at Rastenburg on July 20 we have recounted, was executed

on the same day.

The death roll is a long one. According to one source it numbered some 4,980

names. 38 The Gestapo records list 7,000 arrests. Among those resistance leaders

mentioned in these pages who were executed were General Fritz Lindemann,

Colonel von Boeselager, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Colonel Georg Hansen of

the Abwehr, Count von Helldorf, Colonel von Hofacker, Dr. Jens Peter Jessen,

Otto Kiep, Dr. Carl Langbehn, Julius Leber, Major von Leonrod, Wilhelm

Leuschner, Artur Nebe (the chief of the criminal police), Professor Adolf

Reichwein, Count Berthold von Stauffenberg, brother of Klaus, General Thiele,

Chief of Signals, OKH, and General von Thuengen, who was appointed by Beck

to succeed General von Kortzfleisch on the day of the putsch.

One group of twenty condemned, whose lives Himmler had prolonged

apparently in the belief that they might prove useful to him if he took over power

and had to make peace, were shot out of hand on the night of April 22–23 as the

Russians began fighting to the center of the capital. The prisoners were being

marched from the Lehrterstrasse prison to the Prinz Albrechtstrasse Gestapo

dungeon—a good many prisoners escaped in the blackout on occasions such as

these in the final days of the Third Reich—when they met an S.S. detachment,

which lined them up against a wall and mowed them down, only two escaping to

tell the tale. Among those who perished were Count Albrecht von Bernstorff,

Klaus Bonhoeffer, brother of the pastor, and Albrecht Haushofer, a close friend

of Hess and son of the famous geopolitician. The father committed suicide

shortly afterward.

General Fromm did not escape execution despite his behavior on the fateful

evening of July 20. Arrested the next day on orders of Himmler, who had

succeeded him as head of the Replacement Army, he was haled before the

People’s Court in February 1945 on charges of “cowardice” and sentenced to

death.* Perhaps as a small recognition for his vital service in helping to save the

Nazi regime, he was not strangled from a meathook, as were those whom he had

arrested on the night of July 20, but merely dispatched by a firing squad on

March 19, 1945.

The mystery which surrounded the life of Admiral Canaris, the deposed head

of the Abwehr who had done so much to aid the conspirators but was not

directly involved in the events of July 20, enveloped for many years the

circumstances of his death. It was known that he was arrested after the attempt

on Hitler’s life. But Keitel, in one of the few decent gestures of his life at OKW,

managed to prevent him from being handed over to the People’s Court. The

Fuehrer, outraged at the delay, then ordered Canaris to be tried by a summary

S.S. court. This process was also delayed, but Canaris, along with Colonel Oster,

his former assistant, and four others were finally tried at Flossenburg

concentration camp on April 9, 1945, less than a month before the war ended,

and sentenced to death. But it was not known for sure whether Canaris had been

executed. It took ten years to solve the mystery. In 1955 the Gestapo prosecutor

in the case was brought to trial and a large number of witnesses testified that

they had seen Canaris hanged on April 9, 1945. One eyewitness, the Danish

Colonel Lunding, told of seeing Canaris dragged naked from his cell to the

gallows. Oster was dispatched at the same time.

Some who were arrested escaped trial and were eventually liberated from the

Gestapo by the advancing Allied troops. Among these were General Halder and

Dr. Schacht, who had had no part in the July 20 revolt though on the stand at

Nuremberg Schacht claimed to have been “initiated” into it. Halder was placed

in solitary confinement in a pitch-dark cell for several months. The two men,

along with a distinguished group of prisoners, German and foreign, including

Schuschnigg, Léon Blum, Schlabrendorff and General von Falkenhausen, were

freed by American troops on May 4, 1945, at Niederdorf in the South Tyrol just

as their Gestapo guard was on the point of executing the whole lot. Falkenhausen

was later tried by the Belgians as a war criminal and sentenced on March 9,

1951, after four years in prison awaiting trial, to twelve years’ penal servitude.

He was released, however, a fortnight later and returned to Germany.

A good many Army officers implicated in the plot chose suicide rather than

let themselves be turned over to the tender mercies of the Volksgericht. On the

morning of July 21, General Henning von Tresckow, who had been the heart and

soul of the conspiracy among the officers on the Eastern front, took leave of his

friend and aide, Schlabrendorff, who has recalled his last words:

“Everybody will now turn upon us and cover us with abuse. But my conviction remains

unshaken—we have done the right thing. Hitler is not only the archenemy of Germany: he is

the archenemy of the world. In a few hours I shall stand before God, answering for my actions

and for my omissions. I think I shall be able to uphold with a clear conscience all that I have

done in the fight against Hitler …

“Whoever joined the resistance movement put on the shirt of Nessus. The worth of a man

is certain only if he is prepared to sacrifice his life for his convictions.” 39

That morning Tresckow drove off to the 28th Rifle Division, crept out to no

man’s land and pulled the pin on a hand grenade. It blew his head off.

Five days later the First Quartermaster General of the Army, Wagner, took his

own life.

Among the high Army officers in the West, two field marshals and one

general committed suicide. In Paris, as we have seen, the uprising had got off to

a good start when General Heinrich von Stuelpnagel, the military governor of

France, arrested the entire force of the S.S. and S.D.-Gestapo. Now all depended

on the behavior of Field Marshal von Kluge, the new Commander in Chief West,

on whom Tresckow had worked for two years on the Russian front in an effort to

make him an active conspirator. Though Kluge had blown hot and cold, he had

finally agreed—or so the conspirators understood—that he would support the

revolt once Hitler was dead.

There was a fateful dinner meeting that evening of July 20 at La Roche-

Guyon, the headquarters of Army Group B, which Kluge had also taken over

after Rommel’s accident. Kluge wanted to discuss the conflicting reports as to

whether Hitler was dead or alive with his chief advisers, General Guenther

Blumentritt, his chief of staff, General Speidel, chief of staff of Army Group B,

General Stuelpnagel and Colonel von Hofacker, to whom Stauffenberg had

telephoned earlier in the afternoon informing him of the bombing and the coup

in Berlin. When the officers assembled for dinner it seemed to some of them at

least that the cautious Field Marshal had about made up his mind to throw in his

lot with the revolt. Beck had reached him by telephone shortly before dinner and

had pleaded for his support—whether Hitler was dead or alive. Then the first

general order signed by Field Marshal von Witzleben had arrived. Kluge was

impressed.

Still, he wanted more information on the situation and, unfortunately for the

rebels, this now came from General Stieff, who had journeyed to Rastenburg

with Stauffenberg that morning, wished him well, seen the explosion,

ascertained that it had not killed Hitler and was now, by evening, trying to cover

up the traces. Blumentritt got him on the line and Stieff told him the truth of

what had happened, or rather, not happened.

“It has failed, then,” Kluge said to Blumentritt. He seemed to be genuinely

disappointed, for he added that had it succeeded he would have lost no time in

getting in touch with Eisenhower to request an armistice.

At the dinner—a ghostly affair, Speidel later recalled, “as if they sat in a

house visited by death”—Kluge listened to the impassioned arguments of

Stuelpnagel and Hofacker that they must go ahead with the revolt even though

Hitler might have survived. Blumentritt has described what followed.

When they had finished, Kluge, with obvious disappointment, remarked: “Well, gentlemen,

the attempt has failed. Everything is over.” Stuelpnagel then exclaimed: “Field Marshal, I

thought you were acquainted with the plans. Something must be done.” 40

Kluge denied that he knew of any plans. After ordering Stuelpnagel to release

the arrested S.S.-S.D. men in Paris, he advised him, “Look here, the best thing

you can do is to change into civilian clothes and go into hiding.”

But this was not the way out which a proud general of Stuelpnagel’s stripe

chose. After a weird all-night champagne party at the Hotel Raphael in Paris in

which the released S.S. and S.D. officers, led by General Oberg, fraternized with

the Army leaders who had arrested them—and who most certainly would have

had them shot had the revolt succeeded—Stuelpnagel, who had been ordered to

report to Berlin, left by car for Germany. At Verdun, where he had commanded

a battalion in the First World War, he stopped to have a look at the famous

battlefield. But also to carry out a personal decision. His driver and a guard

heard a revolver shot. They found him floundering in the waters of a canal. A

bullet had shot out one eye and so badly damaged the other that it was removed

in the military hospital at Verdun, to which he was taken.

This did not save Stueipnagel from a horrible end. Blinded and helpless, he

was brought to Berlin on Hitler’s express orders, haled before the People’s

Court, where he lay on a cot while Freisler abused him, and strangled to death in

Ploetzensee prison on August 30.

Field Marshal von Kluge’s decisive act in refusing to join the revolt did not

save him any more than Fromm, by similar behavior in Berlin, saved himself.

“Fate,” as Speidel observed apropos of this vacillating general, “does not spare

the man whose convictions are not matched by his readiness to give them

effect.” There is evidence that Colonel von Hofacker, under terrible torture—he

was not executed until December 20—mentioned the complicity of Kluge,

Rommel and Speidel in the plot. Blumentritt says that Oberg informed him that

Hofacker had “mentioned” Kluge in his first interrogations, and that, after being

informed of this by Oberg himself, the Field Marshal “began to look more and

more worried.” 41

Reports from the front were not such as to restore his spirits.

On July 26, General Bradley’s American forces broke through the German

front at St.-Lô. Four days later General Patton’s newly formed Third Army,

racing through the gap, reached Avranches, opening the way to Brittany and to

the Loire to the south. This was the turning point in the Allied invasion, and on

July 30 Kluge notified Hitler’s headquarters, “The whole Western front has been

ripped open … The left flank has collapsed.” By the middle of August all that

was left of the German armies in Normandy was locked in a narrow pocket

around Falaise, where Hitler had forbidden any further retreat. The Fuehrer had

now had enough of Kluge, whom he blamed for the reverses in the West and

whom he suspected of considering the surrender of his forces to Eisenhower.

On August 17 Field Marshal Walther Model arrived to replace Kluge—his

sudden appearance was the first notice the latter had of his dismissal. Kluge was

told by Hitler to leave word as to his whereabouts in Germany—a warning that

he had become suspect in connection with the July 20 revolt. The next day he

wrote a long letter to Hitler and then set off by car for home. Near Metz he

swallowed poison.

His farewell letter to the Fuehrer was found in the captured German military

archives.

When you receive these lines I shall be no more … Life has no more meaning for me …

Both Rommel and I … foresaw the present development. We were not listened to …

I do not know whether Field Marshal Model, who has been proved in every sphere, will

master the situation … Should it not be so, however, and your cherished new weapons not

succeed, then, my Fuehrer, make up your mind to end the war. The German people have borne

such untold suffering that it is time to put an end to this frightfulness …

I have always admired your greatness…. If fate is stronger than your will and your genius,

so is Providence … Show yourself now also great enough to put an end to a hopeless struggle

when necessary …

Hitler read the letter, according to the testimony of Jodl at Nuremberg, in

silence and handed it to him without comment. A few days later, at his military

conference on August 31, the Supreme warlord observed, “There are strong

reasons to suspect that had Kluge not committed suicide he would have been

arrested anyway.” 42

The turn of Field Marshal Rommel, the idol of the German masses, came next.

As General von Stuelpnagel lay blinded and unconscious on the operating

table in the hospital at Verdun after his not quite successful attempt to kill

himself, he had blurted out the name of Rommel. Later under hideous torture in

the Gestapo dungeon in the Prinz Albrechtstrasse in Berlin Colonel von

Hofacker broke down and told of Rommel’s part in the conspiracy. “Tell the

people in Berlin they can count on me,” Hofacker quoted the Field Marshal as

assuring him. It was a phrase that stuck in Hitler’s mind when he heard of it and

which led him to decide that his favorite general, whom he knew to be the most

popular one in Germany, must die.

Rommel, who had suffered bad fractures of his skull, temples and cheekbones

and a severe injury to his left eye, and whose head was pitted with shell

fragments, was first removed from a field hospital at Bernay to St. Germain to

escape capture by the advancing Allied troops and thence, on August 8, to his

home at Herrlingen near Ulm. He received the first warning of what might be in

store for him when General Speidel, his former chief of staff, was arrested on

September 7, the day after he had visited him at Herrlingen.

“That pathological liar,” Rommel had exclaimed to Speidel when the talk

turned to Hitler, “has now gone completely mad. He is venting his sadism on the

conspirators of July 20, and this won’t be the end of it! ”43

Rommel now noticed that his house was being shadowed by the S.D. When he

went out walking in the nearby woods with his fifteen-year-old son, who had

been given temporary leave from his antiaircraft battery to tend his father, both

carried revolvers. At headquarters in Rastenburg Hitler had now received a copy

of Hofacker’s testimony incriminating Rommel. He thereupon decreed his death

—but in a special way. The Fuehrer realized, as Keitel later explained to an

interrogator at Nuremberg, “that it would be a terrible scandal in Germany if this

well-known Field Marshal, the most popular general we had, were to be arrested

and haled before the People’s Court.” So Hitler arranged with Keitel that

Rommel would be told of the evidence against him and given the choice of

killing himself or standing trial for treason before the People’s Court. If he chose

the first he would be given a state funeral with full military honors and his

family would not be molested.

Thus it was that at noon on October 14, 1944, two generals from Hitler’s

headquarters drove up to the Rommel home, which was now surrounded by S.S.

troops reinforced by five armored cars. The generals were Wilhelm Burgdorf, an

alcoholic, florid-faced man who rivaled Keitel in his slavishness to Hitler, and

his assistant in the Army Personnel Office, Ernst Maisel, of like character. They

had sent word ahead to Rommel that they were coming from Hitler to discuss his

“next employment.”

“At the instigation of the Fuehrer,” Keitel later testified, “I sent Burgdorf there

with a copy of the testimony against Rommel. If it were true, he was to take the

consequences. If it were not true, he would be exonerated by the court.”

“And you instructed Burgdorf to take some poison with him, didn’t you?”

Keitel was asked.

“Yes. I told Burgdorf to take some poison along so that he could put it at

Rommel’s disposal, if conditions warranted it.”

After Burgdorf and Maisel arrived it soon became evident that they had not

come to discuss Rommel’s next assignment. They asked to talk with the Field

Marshal alone and the three men retired to his study.

“A few minutes later,” Manfred Rommel later related, “I heard my father

come upstairs and go into my mother’s room.” Then:

We went into my room. “I have just had to tell your mother,” he began slowly, “that I shall

be dead in a quarter of an hour … Hitler is charging me with high treason. In view of my

services in Africa I am to have the chance of dying by poison. The two generals have brought

it with them. It’s fatal in three seconds. If I accept, none of the usual steps will be taken

against my family … I’m to be given a state funeral. It’s all been prepared to the last detail. In

a quarter of an hour you will receive a call from the hospital in Ulm to say that I’ve had a brain

seizure on the way to a conference.”

And that is what happened.

Rommel, wearing his old Afrika Korps leather jacket and grasping his field

marshal’s baton, got into the car with the two generals, was driven a mile or two

up the road by the side of a forest, where General Maisel and the S.S. driver got

out, leaving Rommel and General Burgdorf in the back seat. When the two men

returned to the car a minute later, Rommel was slumped over the seat, dead.

Burgdorf paced up and down impatiently, as though he feared he would be late

for lunch and his midday drinks. Fifteen minutes after she had bidden her

husband farewell, Frau Rommel received the expected telephone call from the

hospital. The chief doctor reported that two generals had brought in the body of

the Field Marshal, who had died of a cerebral embolism, apparently as the result

of his previous skull fractures. Actually Burgdorf had gruffly forbidden an

autopsy. “Do not touch the corpse,” he stormed. “Everything has already been

arranged in Berlin.”

It had been.

Field Marshal Model issued a ringing order of the day announcing that

Rommel had died of “wounds sustained on July 17” and mourning the loss “of

one of the greatest commanders of our nation.”

Hitler wired Frau Rommel: “Accept my sincerest sympathy for the heavy loss

you have suffered with the death of your husband. The name of Field Marshal

Rommel will be forever linked with the heroic battles in North Africa.” Goering

telegraphed “in silent compassion”:

The fact that your husband has died a hero’s death as the result of his wounds, after we all

hoped that he would remain to the German people, has deeply touched me.

Hitler ordered a state funeral, at which the senior officer of the German Army,

Field Marshal von Rundstedt, delivered the funeral oration. “His heart,” said

Rundstedt as he stood over Rommel’s swastika-bedecked body, “belonged to the

Fuehrer. ”*

“The old soldier [Rundstedt],” Speidel says, “appeared to those present to be

broken and bewildered … Here destiny gave him the unique chance to play the

role of Mark Antony. He remained in his moral apathy.” †45

The humiliation of the vaunted officer corps of the German Army was great. It

had seen three of its illustrious field marshals, Witzleben, Kluge and Rommel,

implicated in a plot to overthrow the Supreme warlord, for which one of them

was strangled and two forced to suicide. It had to stand idly by while scores of

its highest-ranking generals were hauled off to the prisons of the Gestapo and

judicially murdered after farcical trials before the People’s Court. In this

unprecedented situation, despite all its proud traditions, the corps did not close

ranks. Instead it sought to preserve its “honor” by what a foreign observer, at

least, can only term dishonoring and degrading itself. Before the wrath of the

former Austrian corporal, its frightened leaders fawned and groveled.

No wonder that Field Marshal von Rundstedt looked broken and bewildered

as he intoned the funeral oration over the body of Rommel. He had fallen to a

low state, as had his brother officers, whom Hitler now forced to drink the bitter

cup to its dregs. Rundstedt himself accepted the post of presiding officer over the

so-called military Court of Honor which Hitler created to expel from the Army

all officers suspected of complicity in the plot against him so that they could be

denied a court-martial and handed over in disgrace as civilians to the drumhead

People’s Court. The Court of Honor was not permitted to hear an accused officer

in his own defense; it acted merely on the “evidence” furnished it by the

Gestapo. Rundstedt did not protest against this restriction, nor did another

member of the court, General Guderian—who the day after the bombing had

been appointed as the new Chief of the Army General Staff—though the latter,

in his memoirs, confesses that it was an “unpleasant task,” that the court sessions

were “melancholy” and raised “the most difficult problems of conscience.” No

doubt they did, for Rundstedt, Guderian and their fellow judges—all generals—

turned over hundreds of their comrades to certain execution after degrading them

by throwing them out of the Army.

Guderian did more. In his capacity of General Staff Chief he issued two

ringing orders of the day to assure the Nazi warlord of the undying loyalty of the

officer corps. The first, promulgated on July 23, accused the conspirators of

being “a few officers, some of them on the retired list, who had lost all courage

and, out of cowardice and weakness, preferred the road of disgrace to the only

road open to an honest soldier—the road of duty and honor.” Whereupon he

solemnly pledged to the Fuehrer “the unity of the generals, of the officer corps

and of the men of the Army.”

In the meantime the discarded Field Marshal von Brauchitsch rushed into

print with a burning statement condemning the putsch, pledging renewed

allegiance to the Fuehrer and welcoming the appointment of Himmler—who

despised the generals, including Brauchitsch—as chief of the Replacement

Army. Another discard, Grand Admiral Raeder, fearful that he might be

suspected of at least sympathy with the plotters, rushed out of retirement to

Rastenburg to personally assure Hitler of his loyalty. On July 24 the Nazi salute

was made compulsory in place of the old military salute “as a sign of the Army’s

unshakable allegiance to the Fuehrer and of the closest unity between Army and

Party.”

On July 29 Guderian warned all General Staff officers that henceforth they

must take the lead in being good Nazis, loyal and true to the Leader.

Every General Staff officer must be a National Socialist officer-leader not only … by his

model attitude toward political questions but by actively co-operating in the political

indoctrination of younger commanders in accordance with the tenets of the Fuehrer …

In judging and selecting General Staff officers, superiors should place traits of character

and spirit above the mind. A rascal may be ever so cunning but in the hour of need he will

nevertheless fail because he is a rascal.

I expect every General Staff officer immediately to declare himself a convert or adherent to

my views and to make an announcement to that effect in public. Anyone unable to do so

should apply for his removal from the General Staff. *

So far as is known no one applied.

With this, comments a German military historian, “the story of the General

Staff as an autonomous entity may be said to have come to an end.” 46 This elite

group, founded by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and built up by Moltke to be the

pillar of the nation, which had ruled Germany during the First World War,

dominated the Weimar Republic and forced even Hitler to destroy the S.A. and

murder its leader when they stood in its way, had been reduced in the summer of

1944 to a pathetic body of fawning, frightened men. There was to be no more

opposition to Hitler, not even any criticism of him. The once mighty Army, like

every other institution in the Third Reich, would go down with him, its leaders

too benumbed now, too lacking in the courage which the handful of conspirators

alone had shown, to raise their voices—let alone do anything—to stay the hand

of the one man who they by now fully realized was leading them and the

German people rapidly to the most awful catastrophe in the history of their

beloved Fatherland.

This paralysis of the mind and will of grown-up men, raised as Christians,

supposedly disciplined in the old virtues, boasting of their code of honor,

courageous in the face of death on the battlefield, is astonishing, though perhaps

it can be grasped if one remembers the course of German history, outlined in an

earlier chapter, which made blind obedience to temporal rulers the highest virtue

of Germanic man and put a premium on servility. By now the generals knew the

evil of the man before whom they groveled. Guderian later recalled Hitler as he

was after July 20.

In his case, what had been hardness became cruelty, while a tendency to bluff became plain

dishonesty. He often lied without hesitation and assumed that others lied to him. He believed

no one any more. It had already been difficult enough dealing with him: it now became a

torture that grew steadily worse from month to month. He frequently lost all self-control and

his language grew increasingly violent. In his intimate circle he now found no restraining

influence. 47

Nevertheless, it was this man alone, half mad, rapidly deteriorating in body

and mind, who now, as he had done in the snowy winter of 1941 before

Moscow, rallied the beaten, retreating armies and put new heart into the battered

nation. By an incredible exercise of will power which all the others in Germany

—in the Army, in the government and among the people—lacked, he was able

almost singlehandedly to prolong the agony of war for well nigh a year.

The revolt of July 20,1944, had failed not only because of the inexplicable

ineptness of some of the ablest men in the Army and in civilian life, because of

the fatal weakness of character of Fromm and Kluge and because misfortune

plagued the plotters at every turn. It had flickered out because almost all the men

who kept this great country running, generals and civilians, and the mass of the

German people, in uniform and out, were not ready for a revolution—in fact,

despite their misery and the bleak prospect of defeat and foreign occupation, did

not want it. National Socialism, notwithstanding the degradation it had brought

to Germany and Europe, they still accepted and indeed supported, and in Adolf

Hitler they still saw the country’s savior.

At that time [Guderian later wrote]—the fact seems beyond dispute—the great proportion

of the German people still believed in Adolf Hitler and would have been convinced that with

his death the assassin had removed the only man who might still have been able to bring the

war to a favorable conclusion. 48

Even after the end of the war General Blumentritt, who was not in on the

conspiracy but would have supported it had his chief, Kluge, been of sterner

stuff, found that at least “one half of the civil population was shocked that the

German generals had taken part in the attempt to overthrow Hitler, and felt

bitterly toward them in consequence—and the same feeling was manifested in

the Army itself.” 49

By a hypnotism that defies explanation—at least by a non-German—Hitler

held the allegiance and trust of this remarkable people to the last. It was

inevitable that they would follow him blindly, like dumb cattle but also with a

touching faith and even an enthusiasm that raised them above the animal herd,

over the precipice to the destruction of the nation.

* On his sixtieth birthday, October 30, 1942, Kluge received from the Fuehrer a check for

250,000 marks ($100,000 at the official rate of exchange) and a special permit to spend half of

it on the improvement of his estate. Notwithstanding this insult to his honesty and honor as a

German officer, the Field Marshal accepted both. (Schlabrendorff, They Almost Killed Hitler,

p. 40.) Later when Kluge turned against Hitler the Fuehrer told his officers at headquarters, “I

personally promoted him twice, gave him the highest decorations, gave him a large estate …

and a large supplement to his pay as Field Marshal …” (Gilbert, Hitler Directs His War, pp.

101–02, a stenographic account of Hitler’s conference at headquarters on August 31, 1944.)

* “We are to be hanged,” Moltke wrote to his wife just before his execution, “for thinking

together.”

* It is said in some of the German memoirs that in 1942 and 1943 the Nazis were in contact

with the Russians about a possible peace negotiation and even that Stalin had offered to

initiate talks for a separate peace. Ribbentrop on the stand at Nuremberg made a good deal of

his own efforts to get in touch with the Russians and said he actually made contact with Soviet

agents at Stockholm. Peter Kleist, who acted for Ribbentrop in Stockholm, had told of this in

his book. 3 I suspect that when all the secret German papers are sorted, a revealing chapter on

this episode may come to light.

* Executed by the Nazis.

* At the first meeting, Schlabrendorff says, he had an opportunity to examine Hitler’s oversize

cap. He was struck by its weight. On examination it proved to be lined with three and a half

pounds of steel plating.

† Executed by the Nazis.

* One of the difficulties of piecing together the deeds of the plotters is that the memories of

the few survivors are far from perfect, so that their accounts not only often differ but are

contradictory. Schlabrendorff, for example, who had brought the bombs to Gersdorff, recounts

in his book that because they could not find a short enough time fuse the Zeughaus attempt

“had to be given up.” He apparently was unaware, or forgot, that Gersdorff actually went to

the Zeughaus to try to carry out his assignment, though the colonel says that the night before

he told him he was “determined to do it” with the fuses he had.

* Hassell describes the painful scene in his diary. “He asked me to spare him the

embarrassment of my presence,” Hassell writes. “When I started to remonstrate he interrupted

me harshly.” ( The Von Hassell Diaries, pp. 256–57.) Only when Weizsaecker was safely

settled down in the Vatican later, as German ambassador there, did he urge the conspirators to

action. “This is easy to do from the Vatican,” Hassell commented. Weizsaecker survived to

write his somewhat shabby memoirs. Hassell’s diary was published after his execution.

* Bonhoeffer, Dohnanyi and Oster were all executed by the S.S. on April 9, 1945, less than a

month before Germany’s capitulation. Their extinction seems to have been an act of revenge

on the part of Himmler. Mueller alone survived.

* Apparently Himmler had widened his net in the intervening four months. According to

Reitlinger some seventy-four persons were arrested as the result of Dr. Reckse’s spying.

(Reitlinger, The S.S. , p. 304.)

† First the Japanese ambassador intervened to delay their trial. Then on February 3, 1945, a

bomb dropped during a daylight attack by the American Air Force not only killed Roland

Freisler, while he was presiding over one of his grisly treason trials, but destroyed the dossier

on the Solfs, which was in the files of the People’s Court. They were nevertheless scheduled to

be tried by this court on April 27, but by that time the Russians were in Berlin. Actually the

Solfs were released from Moabit prison on April 23, apparently because of an error. (Wheeler-

Bennett, Nemesis, p. 595n., and Pechel, Deutscher Widerstand, pp. 88–93.)

* Canaris was made chief of the Office for Commercial and Economic Warfare. With the

assumption of this empty title the “little Admiral” faded out of German history. He was so

shadowy a figure that no two writers agree as to what kind of man he was, or what he believed

in, if anything much. A cynic and a fatalist, he had hated the Weimar Republic and worked

secretly against it and then turned similarly on the Third Reich. His days, like those of all the

other prominent men in the Abwehr save one (General Lahousen), were now numbered, as we

shall see.

* The Kleists, father and son, were later arrested. The father was executed on April 16, 1945;

his son survived.

† Hitler often discussed this technique with his old party cronies. There is a stenographic

record of a monologue of his at headquarters on May 3, 1942. “I quite understand,” he said,

“why ninety per cent of the historic assassinations have been successful. The only preventive

measure one can take is to live irregularly—to walk, to drive and to travel at irregular times

and unexpectedly … As far as possible, whenever I go anywhere by car I go off unexpectedly

and without warning the police.” ( Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p. 366.)

Hitler had always been aware, as we have seen, that he might be assassinated. In his war

conference on August 22, 1939, on the eve of the attack on Poland, he had emphasized to his

generals that while he personally was indispensable he could “be eliminated at any time by a

criminal or an idiot.”

In his ramblings on the subject on May 3, 1942, he added, “There can never be absolute

security against fanatics and idealists … If some fanatic wishes to shoot me or kill me with a

bomb, I am no safer sitting down than standing up.” He thought, though, that “the number of

fanatics who seek my life on idealistic grounds is getting much smaller … The only really

dangerous elements are either those fanatics who have been goaded to action by dastardly

priests or nationalist-minded patriots from one of the countries we have occupied. My many

years of experience make things fairly difficult even for such as these.” ( Ibid. , p. 367.)

* At their meeting at Casablanca Churchill and Roosevelt had issued on January 24, 1943,

their declaration of unconditional surrender for Germany. Goebbels naturally made a great

deal of this in trying to whip the German people into a state of all-out resistance but in the

opinion of this author his success has been grossly exaggerated by a surprisingly large number

of Western writers.

* Because of Allied air superiority in the West, Hitler had forbidden his senior commanders to

travel by plane.

* “If, in spite of the enemy’s air superiority, we succeed in getting a large part of our mobile

force into action in the threatened coast defense sectors in the first hours, I am convinced that

the enemy attack on the coast will collapse completely on its first day,” Rommel had written

General Jodl on April 23, less than two months before. ( The Rommel Papers, ed. Liddell Hart,

p. 468.) Hitler’s strict orders had made it impossible to throw in the armored divisions “in the

first hours” or even the first days. When they finally arrived they were thrown in piecemeal

and failed.

* The talks lasted from 9 A.M. to 4 P.M., with a break for lunch—“a one-dish meal,” Speidel

recounts, “at which Hitler bolted a heaped plate of rice and vegetables, after it had been

previously tasted for him. Pills and liqueur glasses containing various medicines were ranged

around his place, and he took them in turn. Two S.S. men stood guard behind his chair.”

* Rundstedt’s dismissal may have come partly as the result of his blunt words to Keitel the

night before. The latter had rung him up to inquire about the situation. An all-out German

attack on the British lines by four S.S. panzer divisions had just floundered and Rundstedt was

in a gloomy mood.

“What shall we do?” cried Keitel.

“Make peace, you fools,” Rundstedt retorted. “What else can you do?”

It seems that Keitel, the “telltale toady,” as most Army field commanders called him, went

straight to Hitler with the remarks. The Fuehrer was at that moment conferring with Kluge,

who had been on sick leave for the last few months as the result of injuries sustained in a

motor accident. Kluge was immediately named to replace Rundstedt. In such ways were top

commands changed by the Nazi warlord. General Blumentritt told of the telephone

conversation to both Wilmot ( The Struggle for Europe, p. 347) and Liddell Hart ( The German

Generals Talk, p. 205).

* Speidel quotes the writer Ernst Juenger, whose books had once been popular in Nazi

Germany but who eventually had turned and had joined the Paris end of the plot: “The blow

that felled Rommel on the Livarot Road on July 17 deprived our plan of the only man strong

enough to bear the terrible weight of war and civil war simultaneously.” (Speidel, Invasion

1944, p. 119.)

* This came out in the “Rote Kapelle” affair in 1942, when the Abwehr discovered a large

number of strategically placed Germans, many of them from old, prominent families, running

an extensive espionage network for the Russians. At one time they were transmitting

intelligence to Moscow over some 100 clandestine radio transmitters in Germany and in the

occupied countries of the West. The leader of the “Rote Kapelle” (Red Orchestra) was Harold

Schulze-Boysen, a grandson of Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, a picturesque leader of the “lost

generation” after the First World War and a familiar Bohemian figure in those days in Berlin,

where his black sweater, his thick mane of blond hair and his passion for revolutionary poetry

and politics attracted attention. At that time he rejected both Nazism and Communism, though

he considered himself a man of the Left. Through his mother he got into the Luftwaffe as a

lieutenant at the outbreak of the war and wormed himself into Goering’s “research” office, the

Forschungsamt, which, as we have seen in connection with the Anschluss, specialized in

tapping telephones. Soon he was organizing a vast espionage service for Moscow, with trusted

associates in every ministry and military office in Berlin. Among these were Arvid Harnack,

nephew of a famous theologian, a brilliant young economist in the Ministry of Economics,

who was married to an American woman, Mildred Fish, whom he had met at the University of

Wisconsin; Franz Scheliha in the Foreign Office; Horst Heilmann in the Propaganda Ministry;

and Countess Erika von Brockdorff in the Ministry of Labor.

Two Soviet agents who parachuted into Germany and were later apprehended gave the

“Rote Kapelle” away, and a large number of arrests followed.

Of the seventy-five leaders charged with treason, fifty were condemned to death, including

Schulze-Boysen and Harnack. Mildred Harnack and Countess von Brockdorff got off with

prison sentences but Hitler insisted that they be executed too, and they were. To impress

would-be traitors the Fuehrer ordered that the condemned be hanged. But there were no

gallows in Berlin, where the traditional form of execution was the ax, and so the victims were

simply strangled by a rope around their necks which was attached to a meathook (borrowed

from an abattoir) and slowly hoisted. From then on this method of hanging was to be

employed, as a special form of cruelty, on those who dared to defy the Fuehrer.

* All four, Leber, Reichwein, Jacob and Saefkow, were executed.

* There is disagreement among the historians whether Stauffenberg set out for Rastenburg or

the Obersalzberg. The two most authoritative German writers on the subject, Eberhard Zeller

and Professor Gerhard Ritter, give contradictory accounts. Zeller thinks Hitler was still at

Berchtesgaden, but Ritter is sure this is a mistake and that the Fuehrer had returned to

Rastenburg. Unfortunately Hitler’s daily calendar book, which has proved an unfailing guide

to this writer up to this point, was not captured intact and does not cover this period. But the

best evidence, including a report on Stauffenberg’s movements drawn up at Fuehrer

headquarters on July 22, indicates pretty conclusively that on July 15 Hitler was at Rastenburg

and that it was there that Stauffenberg planned to kill him. Though the two places from which

Hitler tried to conduct the war—he was rarely in Berlin, which was being unmercifully

bombed—were about equidistant from the capital, Berchtesgaden, being more centrally

located and near Munich, where the Army garrison was believed to be loyal to Beck, had

certain advantages over Rastenburg for the conspirators.

* General Adolf Heusinger, Chief of Operations of the Army High Command, recounts that on

July 19 the news from the Ukrainian front was so bad that he inquired at OKW whether the

Replacement Army had any troops in training in Poland which might be thrown into the

Eastern front. Keitel suggested that Stauffenberg be summoned the next day to advise them.

(Heusinger, Befehl im Widerstreit, p. 350.)

† FitzGibbon says ( 20 July, p. 150) “it is believed that he had previously confessed, but of

course could not be granted absolution.” The author recounts that Stauffenberg had told the

Bishop of Berlin, Cardinal Count Preysing, of what he intended to do, and that the bishop had

replied that he honored the young man’s motives and did not feel justified in attempting to

restrain him on theological grounds. ( Ibid. , p. 152.)

* A number of writers have declared that Hitler’s daily military conferences at Rastenburg

usually took place in his underground bunker and that because of repairs being made to it and

because of the hot, humid day, the meeting on July 20 was shifted to the building

aboveground. “This accidental change of place saved Hitler’s life,” Bullock writes ( Hitler, p.

681). It is to be doubted if there was any accidental change of place. The Lagebaracke, as its

name implies, was, so far as I can make out, the place where the daily conferences were

usually held. Only in case of threatened air raids were the meetings adjourned to the

underground bunker which, at that, would have been cooler on this sweltering day. (See

Zeller, Geist der Freiheit, p. 360, n.4.)

* According to the account given Allied interrogators by Admiral Kurt Assmann, who was

present, Stauffenberg had whispered to Brandt, “I must go and telephone. Keep an eye on my

briefcase. It has secret papers in it.”

† A good many writers have contended that at this moment General Fellgiebel was to have

blown up the communications center and that his failure to do so was disastrous to the

conspiracy. Thus Wheeler-Bennett ( Nemesis, p. 643) writes that “General Fellgiebel failed

lamentably in the execution of his task.” Since the various communications centers were

housed in several different underground bunkers, heavily guarded by S.S., it is most

improbable that Stauffenberg’s plans ever called for blowing them up—an impossible task for

the General. What Fellgiebel agreed to do was to shut off communication with the outside

world for two or three hours after he had sent word to Berlin of the explosion. This, except for

an unavoidable lapse or two, he did.

* The official stenographer, Berger, was killed, and Colonel Brandt, General Schmundt,

Hitler’s adjutant, and General Korten died of their wounds. All the others, including Generals

Jodl, Bodenschatz (Goering’s chief of staff) and Heusinger, were more or less severely

injured.

* Ribbentrop had been a champagne salesman and then had married the daughter of

Germany’s leading producer of the wine. His “von” had come through adoption by an aunt—

Fräulein Gertrud von Ribbentrop—in 1925, when he was thirty-two years old.

* A few weeks before, Leonrod had asked an Army chaplain friend of his, Father Hermann

Wehrle, whether the Catholic Church condoned tyrannicide and had been given a negative

answer. When this came out in Leonrod’s trial before the People’s Court, Father Wehrle was

arrested for not having told the authorities and, like Leonrod, was executed.

* “To think that these revolutionaries weren’t even smart enough to cut the telephone wires!”

Goebbels is said to have exclaimed afterward. “My little daughter would have thought of

that.” (Curt Riess, Joseph Goebbels: The Devil’s Advocate, p. 280.)

* There are conflicting stories as to why the Berlin radio was not seized. According to one

account, a unit from the infantry school at Doeberitz had been assigned this task, which was to

be carried out by the commandant, General Hitzfeld, who was in on the plot. But the

conspirators failed to warn Hitzfeld that July 20 was the day, and he was away in Baden

attending the funeral of a relative. His second-in-command, a Colonel Mueller, was also away

on a military assignment. When Mueller finally returned about 8 P.M. he found that his best

battalion had left for a night exercise. By the time he rounded up his troops at midnight, it was

too late. According to a different story, a Major Jacob succeeded in surrounding the

Rundfunkhaus with troops from the infantry school but could get no clear orders from Olbricht

as to what to do. When Goebbels phoned the text of the first announcement Jacob did not

interfere with its being broadcast. Later the major contended that if Olbricht had given him the

necessary orders the German radio network could easily have been denied the Nazis and put at

the service of the conspirators. The first version is given by Zeller ( Geist der Freiheit, pp.

267–68), the most authoritative German historian on the July 20 plot; the second is given by

Wheeler-Bennett ( Nemesis, pp. 654–55/1.) and Rudolf Sammler ( Goebbels: The Man Next to

Hitler, p. 138), both of whom say Major Jacob gave the above testimony.

* His treachery did not prevent his being arrested for complicity in the plot and hanged for it.

* Though the film of this trial was found by the Allies (and shown at Nuremberg, where the

author first saw it) that of the executions was never discovered and presumably was destroyed

or the orders of Hitler lest it fall into enemy hands. According to Allen Dulles the two films—

originally thirty miles long and cut to eight miles—were put together by Goebbels and shown

to certain Army audiences as a lesson and a warning. But the soldiers refused to look at it—at

the Cadet School at Lichterfelde they walked out as it began to run—and it was soon

withdrawn from circulation. (Dulles, Germany’s Underground, p. 83.)

* Father Alfred Delp, Jesuit member of the Kreisau Circle, was executed with them.

Goerdeler’s brother, Fritz, was hanged a few days later. Count von Moltke, the leader of the

Kreisau Circle, was executed on January 23, 1945, though he had had no part in the

assassination plot. Trott zu Solz, a leading light in the Circle and in the conspiracy, was

hanged on August 25, 1944.

* “The sentence affected him deeply,” Schlabrendorff, who saw a good deal of Fromm at the

Prinz Albrechtstrasse Gestapo prison, later recounted. “He had not expected it.”

(Schlabrendorff, They Almost Killed Hitler, p. 121.)

* It is only fair to add that Rundstedt probably did not know of the circumstances of Rommel’s

death, apparently learning them only from Keitel’s testimony at Nuremberg. “I did not hear

these rumors,” Rundstedt testified on the stand, “otherwise I would have refused to act as

representative of the Fuehrer at the state funeral; that would have been an infamy beyond

words. ”44 Nevertheless the Rommel family noticed that this gentleman of the old school

declined to attend the cremation after the funeral and to come to the Rommel home, as did

most of the other generals, to extend condolences to the widow.

† General Speidel himself, though incarcerated in the cellars of the Gestapo prison in the Prinz

Albrechtstrasse in Berlin and subjected to incessant questioning, became neither broken nor

bewildered. Being a philosopher as well as a soldier perhaps helped. He outwitted his S.D.

tormentors, admitting nothing and betraying no one. He had one bad moment when he was

confronted with Colonel von Hofacker, who, he believes, had been not only tortured but

drugged into talking, but on this occasion Hofacker did not betray him and repudiated what he

had previously said.45

Though never brought to trial, Speidel was kept in Gestapo custody for seven months. As

American troops neared his place of confinement near Lake Constance in southern Germany,

he escaped with twenty others by a ruse and took refuge with a Catholic priest, who hid the

group until the Americans arrived. Speidel omits this chapter of his life in his book, which is

severely objective and written in the third person, but he told the story to Desmond Young

who gives it in his Rommel—The Desert Fox (pp. 251–52 of the paperback edition).

Capping an unusual career, Speidel held an important command at NATO in the late

1950s.

* In his memoirs, Guderian, who constantly emphasizes how he stood up to Hitler and

criticizes him bitterly, makes no mention of these orders of the day.

Book Six

THE FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

30

THE CONQUEST OF GERMANY

THE WAR CAME HOME to Germany.

Scarcely had Hitler recovered from the shock of the July 20 bombing when he

was faced with the loss of France and Belgium and of the great conquests in the

East. Enemy troops in overwhelming numbers were converging on the Reich.

By the middle of August 1944, the Russian summer offensives, beginning

June 10 and unrolling one after another, had brought the Red Army to the border

of East Prussia, bottled up fifty German divisions in the Baltic region, penetrated

to Vyborg in Finland, destroyed Army Group Center and brought an advance on

this front of four hundred miles in six weeks to the Vistula opposite Warsaw,

while in the south a new attack which began on August 20 resulted in the

conquest of Rumania by the end of the month and with it the Ploesti oil fields,

the only major source of natural oil for the German armies. On August 26

Bulgaria formally withdrew from the war and the Germans began to hastily clear

out of that country. In September Finland gave up and turned on the German

troops which refused to evacuate its territory.

In the West, France was liberated quickly. In General Patton, the commander

of the newly formed U.S. Third Army, the Americans had found a tank general

with the dash and flair of Rommel in Africa. After the capture of Avranches on

July 30, he had left Brittany to wither on the vine and begun a great sweep

around the German armies in Normandy, moving southeast to Orleans on the

Loire and then due east toward the Seine south of Paris. By August 23 the Seine

was reached southeast and northwest of the capital, and two days later the great

city, the glory of France, was liberated after four years of German occupation

when General Jacques Leclerc’s French 2nd Armored Division and the U.S. 4th

Infantry Division broke into it and found that French resistance units were

largely in control. They also found the Seine bridges, many of them works of art,

intact.*

The remnants of the German armies in France were now in full retreat.

Montgomery, the victor over Rommel in North Africa, who on September 1 was

made a field marshal, drove his Canadian First Army and British Second Army

two hundred miles in four days—from the lower Seine past the storied battle

sites of 1914–18 and 1940 into Belgium. Brussels fell to him on September 3

and Antwerp the next day. So swift was the advance that the Germans did not

have time to destroy the harbor facilities at Antwerp. This was a great stroke of

fortune for the Allies, for this port, as soon as its approaches were cleared, was

destined to become the principal supply base of the Anglo–American armies.

Farther south of the British-Canadian forces, the U.S. First Army, under

General Courtney H. Hodges, advanced with equal speed into southeastern

Belgium, reaching the Meuse River, from which the devastating German

breakthrough had begun in May 1940, and capturing the fortresses of Namur and

Liege, where the Germans had no time to organize a defense. Farther south still,

Patton’s Third Army had taken Verdun, surrounded Metz, reached the Moselle

River and linked up at the Belfort Gap with the Franco-American Seventh Army,

which under the command of General Alexander Patch had landed on the

Riviera in southern France on August 15 and pushed rapidly up the Rhone

Valley.

By the end of August the German armies in the West had lost 500,000 men,

half of them as prisoners, and almost all of their tanks, artillery and trucks. There

was very little left to defend the Fatherland. The much-publicized Siegfried Line

was virtually unmanned and without guns. Most of the German generals in the

West believed that the end had come. “There were no longer any ground forces

in existence, to say nothing of air forces,” says Speidel. 1 “As far as I was

concerned,” Rundstedt, who was reinstated on September 4 as Commander in

Chief in the West, told Allied interrogators after the war, “the war was ended in

September. ”2

But not for Adolf Hitler. On the last day of August he lectured some of his

generals at headquarters, attempting to inject new iron into their veins and at the

same time hold out hope.

If necessary we’ll fight on the Rhine. It doesn’t make any difference. Under all

circumstances we will continue this battle until, as Frederick the Great said, one of our

damned enemies gets too tired to fight any more. We’ll fight until we get a peace which

secures the life of the German nation for the next fifty or a hundred years and which, above

all, does not besmirch our honor a second time, as happened in 1918 … I live only for the

purpose of leading this fight because I know that if there is not an iron will behind it, this

battle cannot be won.

After excoriating the General Staff for its lack of iron will, Hitler revealed to

his generals some of the reasons for his stubborn hopes.

The time will come when the tension between the Allies will become so great that the

break will occur. All the coalitions in history have disintegrated sooner or later. The only thing

is to wait for the right moment, no matter how hard it is. 3

Goebbels was assigned the task of organizing “total mobilization,” and

Himmler, the new chief of the Replacement Army, went to work to raise twenty-

five Volksgrenadier divisions for the defense of the West. Despite all the plans

and all the talk in Nazi Germany concerning “total war” the resources of the

country had been far from “totally” organized. At Hitler’s insistence the

production of civilian goods had been maintained at a surprisingly large figure

throughout the war—ostensibly to keep up morale. And he had balked at

carrying out the prewar plans to mobilize women for work in the factories. “The

sacrifice of our most cherished ideals is too great a price,” he said in March 1943

when Speer wanted to draft women for industry.4 Nazi ideology had taught that

the place of the German woman was in the home and not in the factory—and in

the home she stayed. In the first four years of the war, when in Great Britain two

and a quarter million women had been placed in war production, only 182,000

women were similarly employed in Germany. The number of peacetime

domestic servants in Germany remained unchanged at a million and a half

during the war.5

Now with the enemy at the gates, the Nazi leaders bestirred themselves. Boys

between fifteen and eighteen and men between fifty and sixty were called to the

colors. Universities and high schools, offices and factories, were combed for

recruits. In September and October 1944 a half-million men were found for the

Army. But no provision was made to replace them in the factories and offices by

women, and Albert Speer, the Minister for Armament and War Production,

protested to Hitler that the drafting of skilled workers was seriously affecting the

output of arms.

Not since Napoleonic times had German soldiers been forced to defend the

sacred soil of the Fatherland. All the subsequent wars, Prussia’s and Germany’s,

had been fought on—and had devastated—the soil of other peoples. A shower of

exhortations fell upon the hard-pressed troops.

SOLDIERS OF THE WESTERN FRONT!

… I expect you to defend Germany’s sacred soil … to the very last! …

Heil the Fuehrer!

VON RUNDSTEDT,

Field Marshal

SOLDIERS OF THE ARMY GROUP.!

… None of us gives up a square foot of German soil while still alive … Whoever retreats

without giving battle is a traitor to his people … Soldiers! Our homeland, the lives of our

wives and children are at stake! Our Fuehrer and our loved ones have confidence in their

soldiers! … Long live our Germany and our beloved Fuehrer!

MODEL.

Field Marshal

Nevertheless, with the roof caving in, there were an increasing number of

desertions and Himmler took drastic action to discourage them. On September

10 he posted an order:

Certain unreliable elements seem to believe that the war will be over for them as soon as

they surrender to the enemy….

Every deserter … will find his just punishment. Furthermore, his ignominious behavior

will entail the most severe consequences for his family … They will be summarily shot.

A Colonel Hoffmann-Schonforn of the 18th Grenadier Division proclaimed to

his unit:

Traitors from our ranks have deserted to the enemy … These bastards have given away

important military secrets … Deceitful Jewish mudslingers taunt you with their pamphlets and

try to entice you into becoming bastards also. Let them spew their poison! … As for the

contemptible traitors who have forgotten their honor—their families will have to atone for

their treason. 6

In September what the skeptical German generals called a “miracle” occurred.

To Speidel it was “a German variation of the ‘miracle of the Marne’ for the

French in 1914. The furious advance of the Allies suddenly subsided.”

Why it subsided has been a subject of dispute to this day among the Allied

commanders from General Eisenhower on down; to the German generals it was

incomprehensible. By the second week in September American units had

reached the German border before Aachen and on the Moselle. Germany lay

open to the Allied armies. Early in September Montgomery had urged

Eisenhower to allot all of his supplies and reserves to the British and Canadian

armies and the U.S. Ninth and First armies for a bold offensive in the north

under his command that would penetrate quickly into the Ruhr, deprive the

Germans of their main arsenal, open the road to Berlin and end the war.

Eisenhower rejected the proposal. * He wanted to advance toward the Rhine on a

“broad front.”

But his armies had outrun their supplies. Every ton of gasoline and

ammunition had to be brought in over the beaches in Normandy or through the

single port of Cherbourg and transported by truck three to four hundred miles to

the advancing front. By the second week of September, Eisenhower’s armies

were bogging down for lack of supplies. They were also running into unexpected

German resistance. By concentrating his available forces at two critical points

Rundstedt was able, by the middle of September, to halt at least temporarily

Patton’s Third Army on the Moselle and Hodges’ First Army in front of Aachen.

Eisenhower, prodded by Montgomery, had then agreed to a bold plan to seize

a bridgehead over the Lower Rhine at Arnhem and thus obtain a position from

which the Siegfried Line could be outflanked on the north. The objective fell far

short of Montgomery’s dream of racing into the Ruhr and thence to Berlin, but it

promised a strategic base for a later try. The attack, led by a massive drop of two

American and one British airborne divisions, flying in from bases in Britain,

began on September 17, but due to bad weather, to the circumstance that the

airborne troops landed right in the midst of two S.S. panzer divisions they did

not know were there, and to the lack of adequate land forces pushing up from the

south, it failed, and after ten days of savage fighting the Allies withdrew from

Arnhem. The British 1st Airborne Division, which had been dropped near the

city, lost all but 2,163 of some 9,000 men. To Eisenhower this setback “was

ample evidence that much bitter campaigning was to come. ”7

Yet he hardly expected the Germans to recover sufficiently to launch the

stunning surprise that burst on the Western Front as Christmas approached that

winter.

HITLER’S LAST DESPERATE GAMBLE

On the evening of December 12, 1944, a host of German generals, the senior

field commanders on the Western front, were called to Rundstedt’s headquarters,

stripped of their side arms and briefcases, packed into a bus, driven about the

dark, snowy countryside for half an hour to make them lose their bearings, and

finally deposited at the entrance to a deep underground bunker which turned out

to be Hitler’s headquarters at Ziegenberg near Frankfurt. There they learned for

the first time what only a handful of the top staff officers and army commanders

had known for more than a month: the Fuehrer was to launch in four days a

mighty offensive in the West.

The idea had been simmering in his mind since mid-September, when

Eisenhower’s armies had been brought to a halt on the German frontier west of

the Rhine. Although the U.S. Ninth, First and Third armies tried to resume the

offensive in October with the objective of “slugging” their way to the Rhine, as

Eisenhower put it, the going had been hard and slow. Aachen, the old imperial

capital, the seat of Charlemagne, surrendered to First Army on October 24 after

a bitter battle—the first German city to fall into Allied hands—but the

Americans had been unable to achieve a breakthrough to the Rhine. Still, all

along the front they—and the British and Canadians to the north—were wearing

down the weakening defenders in battles of attrition. Hitler realized that by

remaining on the defensive he was merely postponing the hour of reckoning. In

his feverish mind there emerged a bold and imaginative plan to recapture the

initiative, strike a blow that would split the U.S. Third and First armies,

penetrate to Antwerp and deprive Eisenhower of his main port of supply, and

roll up the British and Canadian armies along the Belgian-Dutch border. Such an

offensive, he thought, would not only administer a crushing defeat on the

Anglo–American armies and thus free the threat to Germany’s western border,

but would then enable him to turn against the Russians, who, though still

advancing in the Balkans, had been halted on the Vistula in Poland and in East

Prussia since October. The offensive would strike swiftly through the Ardennes,

where the great breakthrough in 1940 had begun, and which German intelligence

knew to be defended only by four weak American infantry divisions.

It was a daring plan. It would, Hitler believed, almost certainly catch the

Allies by surprise and overcome them before they had a chance to recover.* But

there was one drawback. The German Army was not only weaker than it had

been in 1940, especially in the air, but it was up against a much more resourceful

and far better armed enemy. The German generals lost no time in bringing this to

the Fuehrer’s attention.

“When I received this plan early in November,” Rundstedt later declared, “I

was staggered. Hitler had not troubled to consult me … It was obvious to me that

the available forces were far too small for such an extremely ambitious plan.”

Realizing, however, that it was useless to argue with Hitler, Rundstedt and

Model decided to propose an alternative plan which might satisfy the warlord’s

insistence on an offensive but which would be limited to pinching off the

American salient around Aachen. 8 The German Commander in Chief in the

West, however, had so little hope of changing the Fuehrer’s mind that he

declined to attend a military conference in Berlin on December 2, sending his

chief of staff, Blumentritt, instead. But Blumentritt, Field Marshal Model,

General Hasso von Manteuffel and S.S. General Sepp Dietrich (the last two were

to command two great panzer armies for the breakthrough), who attended the

meeting, were unable to shake Hitler’s resolve. All through the late autumn he

had been scraping the barrel in Germany for this last desperate gamble. In

November he had managed to collect nearly 1,500 new or rebuilt tanks and

assault guns, and in December another 1,000. He had assembled some twenty-

eight divisions, including nine panzer divisions, for the Ardennes breakthrough,

with another six divisions allotted for an attack in Alsace to follow the main

offensive. Goering promised 3,000 fighter planes.

This was a considerable force, though far weaker than Rundstedt’s army

group on the same front in 1940. But raising it had meant denying the German

forces in the East the reinforcements their commanders thought absolutely

necessary to repel the expected Russian winter attack in January. When

Guderian, the Chief of the General Staff, who was responsible for the Eastern

front, protested Hitler gave him a stern lecture.

“There’s no need for you to try to teach me. I’ve been commanding the German Army in

the field for five years and during that time I’ve had more practical experience than any

gentleman of the General Staff could ever hope to have. I’ve studied Clausewitz and Moltke

and read all the Schlieffen papers. I’m more in the picture than you are!”

When Guderian protested that the Russians were about to attack in

overwhelming strength and cited figures of the Soviet build-up, Hitler shouted,

“It’s the greatest bluff since Gengis Khan! Who’s responsible for producing all

this rubbish?” 9

The generals who assembled at the Fuehrer’s headquarters at Ziegenberg on

the evening of December 12, minus their briefcases and revolvers, found the

Nazi warlord, as Manteuffel later recalled, “a stooped figure with a pale and

puffy face, hunched in his chair, his hands trembling, his left arm subject to a

violent twitching which he did his best to conceal. A sick man … When he

walked he dragged one leg behind him.” 10

Hitler’s spirits, however, were as fiery as ever. The generals had expected to

be briefed on the over-all military picture of the offensive, but the warlord

treated them instead to a political and historical harangue.

Never in history was there a coalition like that of our enemies, composed of such

heterogeneous elements with such divergent aims … Ultracapitalist states on the one hand;

ultra-Marxist states on the other. On the one hand a dying Empire, Britain; on the other, a

colony bent upon inheritance, the United States …

Each of the partners went into this coalition with the hope of realizing his political

ambitions … America tries to become England’s heir; Russia tries to gain the Balkans …

England tries to hold her possessions … in the Mediterranean … Even now these states are at

loggerheads, and he who, like a spider sitting in the middle of his web, can watch

developments observes how these antagonisms grow stronger and stronger from hour to hour.

If now we can deliver a few more blows, then at any moment this artificially bolstered

common front may suddenly collapse with a gigantic clap of thunder … provided always that

there is no weakening on the part of Germany.

It is essential to deprive the enemy of his belief that victory is certain … Wars are finally

decided by one side or the other recognizing that they cannot be won. We must allow no

moment to pass without showing the enemy that, whatever he does, he can never reckon on

[our] capitulation. Never! Never!11

With this pep talk resounding in their ears the generals dispersed, none of

them—or at least so they said afterward—believing that the Ardennes blow

would succeed but determined to carry out their orders to the best of their ability.

This they did. The night of December 15 was dark and frosty and a thick mist

hung over the rugged snow-laden hills of the Ardennes Forest as the Germans

moved up to their assault positions on a seventy-mile front between Monschau,

south of Aachen, and Echternach, northwest of Trier. Their meteorologists had

predicted several days of such weather, during which it was calculated that the

Allied air forces would be grounded and the German supply columns spared the

inferno of Normandy. For five days Hitler’s luck with the weather held and the

Germans, catching the Allied High Command completely by surprise, scored

several breakthroughs after their initial penetrations on the morning of December

16.

When a German armored group reached Stavelot on the night of December

17, it was only eight miles from the U.S. First Army headquarters at Spa, which

was being hurriedly evacuated. More important, it was only a mile from a huge

American supply dump containing three million gallons of gasoline. Had this

dump been captured the German armored divisions, which were continually

being slowed down because of the delay in bringing up gasoline, of which the

Germans were woefully short, might have gone farther and faster than they did.

Skorzeny’s so-called Panzer Brigade 150, its men outfitted in American

uniforms and driving captured American tanks, trucks and jeeps, got farthest.

Some forty jeeploads slipped through the crumbling front, a few of them getting

as far as the River Meuse.*

Yet stubborn makeshift resistance by scattered units of the U.S. First Army

after the four weak divisions in the Ardennes had been overrun slowed up the

German drive and the firm stand on the northern and southern shoulders of the

breakthrough at Monschau and Bastogne, respectively, channeled Hitler’s forces

through a narrow salient. The American defense of Bastogne sealed their fate.

This road junction was the key to the defense of the Ardennes and of the River

Meuse behind. If strongly held it not only would block the main roads along

which Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army was driving for the Meuse River at

Dinant but would tie up considerable German forces earmarked for the push

beyond. By the morning of December 18, Manteuffel’s armored spearheads were

only fifteen miles from the town and the only Americans in it belonged to a

corps headquarters staff which was preparing to evacuate. However, on the

evening of the seventeenth the 101st Airborne Division, which had been refitting

at Reims, was ordered to proceed with all speed to Bastogne a hundred miles

away. By driving its trucks with headlights on through the night it reached the

town in twenty-four hours, just ahead of the Germans. It was a decisive race and

the Germans had lost it. Although they encircled Bastogne, they had difficulty in

getting their divisions around it to renew the drive toward the Meuse. And they

had to leave strong forces behind to contain the road junction and to try to take

it.

On December 22, General Heinrich von Luettwitz, commander of the German

XLVIIth Armored Corps, sent a written note to General A. C. McAuliffe,

commanding the 101st Airborne, demanding surrender of Bastogne. He received

a one-word answer which became famous: “NUTS!”

The definite turning point in Hitler’s Ardennes gamble came on the day before

Christmas. A reconnaissance battalion of the German 2nd Panzer Division had

reached the heights three miles east of the Meuse at Dinant the day before and

had waited for gasoline for its tanks and some reinforcements before plunging

down the slopes to the river. Neither the gasoline nor the reinforcements ever

arrived. The U.S. 2nd Armored Division suddenly struck from the north.

Already several divisions of Patton’s Third Army were moving up from the

south, their main objective being to relieve Bastogne. “On the evening of the

twenty-fourth,” Manteuffel later wrote, “it was clear that the high-water mark of

our operation had been reached. We now knew that we would never reach our

objective.” The pressure on the northern and southern flanks of the deep and

narrow German salient had become too great. And two days before Christmas

the weather had finally cleared and the Anglo–American air forces had begun to

have a field day with massive attacks on German supply lines and on the troops

and tanks moving up the narrow, tortuous mountain roads. The Germans made

another desperate attempt to capture Bastogne. All day Christmas, beginning at 3

A.M., they launched a series of attacks, but McAuliffe’s defenders held. The next

day an armored force of Patton’s Third Army broke through from the south and

relieved the town. For the Germans it now became a question of extricating their

forces from the narrow corridor before they were cut off and annihilated.

But Hitler would not listen to any withdrawal being made. On the evening of

December 28 he held a full-dress military conference. Instead of heeding the

advice of Rundstedt and Manteuffel to pull out the German forces in the Bulge

in time, he ordered the offensive to be resumed, Bastogne to be stormed and the

push to the Meuse renewed. Moreover, he insisted on a new offensive being

started immediately to the south in Alsace, where the American line had been

thinned out by the sending of several of Patton’s divisions north to the Ardennes.

To the protests of the generals that they lacked sufficient forces either to

continue the offensive in the Ardennes or to attack in Alsace he remained deaf.

Gentlemen, I have been in this business for eleven years, and … I have never heard

anybody report that everything was completely ready … You are never entirely ready. That is

plain.

He talked on and on.* It must have been obvious to the generals long before

he finished that their Commander in Chief had become blinded to reality and had

lost himself in the clouds.

The question is … whether Germany has the will to remain in existence or whether it will

be destroyed … The loss of this war will destroy the German people.

There followed a long dissertation on the history of Rome and of Prussia in

the Seven Years’ War. Finally he returned to the immediate problems at hand.

Although he admitted that the Ardennes offensive had not “resulted in the

decisive success which might have been expected,” he claimed that it had

brought about “a transformation of the entire situation such as nobody would

have believed possible a fortnight ago.”

The enemy has had to abandon all his plans for attack … He has had to throw in units that

were fatigued. His operational plans have been completely upset. He is enormously criticized

at home. It is a bad psychological moment for him. Already he has had to admit that there is

no chance of the war being decided before August, perhaps not before the end of next year …

Was this last phrase an admission of ultimate defeat? Hitler quickly tried to

correct any such impression.

I hasten to add, gentlemen, that … you are not to conclude that even remotely I envisage

the loss of this war … I have never learned to know the word “capitulation” … For me the

situation today is nothing new. I have been in very much worse situations. I mention this only

because I want you to understand why I pursue my aim with such fanaticism and why nothing

can wear me down. As much as I may be tormented by worries and even physically shaken by

them, nothing will make the slightest change in my decision to fight on till at last the scales tip

to our side.

Whereupon he appealed to the generals to support the new attacks “with all

your fire.”

We shall then … smash the Americans completely … Then we shall see what happens. I do

not believe that in the long run the enemy will be able to resist forty-five German divisions …

We shall yet master fate!

It was too late. Germany lacked the military force to make good his words.

On New Year’s Day Hitler threw eight German divisions into an attack in the

Saar and followed it with a thrust from the bridgehead on the Upper Rhine by an

army under the command of—to the German generals this was a bad joke—

Heinrich Himmler. Neither drive got very far. Nor did an all-out assault on

Bastogne beginning on January 3 by no less than two corps of nine divisions

which led to the most severe fighting of the Ardennes campaign. By January 5

the Germans abandoned hope of taking this key town. They were now faced with

being cut off by a British-American counteroffensive from the north which had

begun on January 3. On January 8 Model, whose armies were in danger of being

entrapped at Houffalize, northeast of Bastogne, finally received permission to

withdraw. By January 16, just a month after the beginning of the offensive on

which Hitler had staked his last reserves in men and guns and ammunition, the

German forces were back to the line from which they had set out.

They had lost some 120,000 men, killed, wounded and missing, 600 tanks and

assault guns, 1,600 planes and 6,000 vehicles. American losses were also severe

—8,000 killed, 48,000 wounded, 21,000 captured or missing, and 733 tanks and

tank destroyers. * But the Americans could make good their losses; the Germans

could not. They had shot their last bolt. This was the last major offensive of the

German Army in World War II. Its failure not only made defeat inevitable in the

West, it doomed the German armies in the East, where the effect of Hitler’s

throwing his last reserves into the Ardennes became immediately felt.

In his long lecture to the generals in the West three days after Christmas Hitler

had been quite optimistic about the Russian front, where, though the Balkans

was being lost, the German armies had held firmly on the Vistula in Poland and

in East Prussia since October.

Unfortunately [Hitler said] because of the treachery of our dear allies we are forced to

retire gradually … Yet despite all this it has been possible on the whole to hold the Eastern

front.

But for how long? On Christmas Eve, after the Russians had surrounded

Budapest, and again on New Year’s morning Guderian had pleaded in vain with

Hitler for reinforcements to meet the Russian threat in Hungary and to counter

the Soviet offensive in Poland which he expected to begin the middle of January.

I pointed out [Guderian says] that the Ruhr had already been paralyzed by the Western

Allies’ bombing attacks…. on the other hand, I said, the industrial area of Upper Silesia could

still work at full pressure, the center of the German armament industry was already in the East,

and the loss of Upper Silesia must lead to our defeat in a very few weeks. All this was of no

avail. I was rebuffed and I spent a grim and tragic Christmas Eve in those most unchristian

surroundings.

Nonetheless Guderian returned to Hitler’s headquarters for a third time on

January 9. He took with him his Chief of Intelligence in the East, General

Gehlen, who with maps and diagrams tried to explain to the Fuehrer the

precarious German position on the eve of the expected renewal of the Russian

offensive in the north.

Hitler [Guderian says] completely lost his temper … declaring the maps and diagrams to be

“completely idiotic” and ordering that I have the man who had made them shut up in a lunatic

asylum. I then lost my temper and said … “If you want General Gehlen sent to a lunatic

asylum then you had better have me certified as well.”

When Hitler argued that the Eastern front had “never before possessed such a

strong reserve as now,” Guderian retorted, “The Eastern front is like a house of

cards. If the front is broken through at one point all the rest will collapse. ”12

And that is what happened. On January 12, 1945, Konev’s Russian army

group broke out of its bridgehead at Baranov on the upper Vistula south of

Warsaw and headed for Silesia. Farther north Zhukov’s armies crossed the

Vistula north and south of Warsaw, which fell on January 17. Farther north still,

two Russian armies overran half of East Prussia and drove to the Gulf of Danzig.

This was the greatest Russian offensive of the war. Stalin was throwing in 180

divisions, a surprisingly large part of them armored, in Poland and East Prussia

alone. There was no stopping them.

“By January 27 [only fifteen days after the Soviet drive began] the Russian

tidal wave,” says Guderian, “was rapidly assuming for us the proportions of a

complete disaster. ”13 By that date East and West Prussia were cut off from the

Reich. Zhukov that very day crossed the Oder near Lueben after an advance of

220 miles in a fortnight, reaching German soil only 100 miles from Berlin. Most

catastrophic of all, the Russians had overrun the Silesian industrial basin.

Albert Speer, in charge of armament production, drew up a memorandum to

Hitler on January 30—the twelfth anniversary of Hitler’s coming to power—

pointing out the significance of the loss of Silesia. “The war is lost,” his report

began, and he went on in his cool and objective manner to explain why. The

Silesian mines, ever since the intensive bombing of the Ruhr, had supplied 60

per cent of Germany’s coal. There was only two weeks’ supply of coal for the

German railways, power plants and factories. Henceforth, now that Silesia was

lost, Speer could supply, he said, only one quarter of the coal and one sixth of

the steel which Germany had been producing in 1944. 14 This augured disaster

for 1945.

The Fuehrer, Guderian later related, glanced at Speer’s report, read the first

sentence and then ordered it filed away in his safe. He refused to see Speer

alone, saying to Guderian:

“… I refuse to see anyone alone any more … [He] always has something unpleasant to say

to me. I can’t bear that. ”15

On the afternoon of January 27, the day Zhukov’s troops crossed the Oder a

hundred miles from Berlin, there was an interesting reaction at Hitler’s

headquarters, which had now been transferred to the Chancellery in Berlin,

where it was to remain until the end. On the twenty-fifth the desperate Guderian

had called on Ribbentrop and urged him to try to get an immediate armistice in

the West so that what was left of the German armies could be concentrated in the

East against the Russians. The Foreign Minister had quickly tattled to the

Fuehrer, who that evening up braided his General Staff Chief and accused him of

committing “high treason.”

But two nights later, under the impact of the disaster in the East, Hitler,

Goering and Jodl were in such a state that they thought it would not be necessary

to ask the West for an armistice. They were sure the Western Allies would come

running to them in their fear of the consequences of the Bolshevik victories. A

fragment of the Fuehrer conference of January 27 has preserved part of the

scene.

HITLER: Do you think the English are enthusiastic about all the Russian developments?

GOERING: They certainly didn’t plan that we hold them off while the Russians conquer

all of Germany … They had not counted on our … holding them off like madmen while the

Russians drive deeper and deeper into Germany, and practically have all of Germany now …

JODL: They have always regarded the Russians with suspicion.

GOERING: If this goes on we will get a telegram [from the English] in a few days.16

On such a slender thread the leaders of the Third Reich began to pin their last

hopes. In the end these German architects of the Nazi–Soviet Pact against the

West would reach a point where they could not understand why the British and

Americans did not join them in repelling the Russian invaders.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE GERMAN ARMIES

The end came quickly for the Third Reich in the spring of 1945.

The death throes began in March. By February, with the Ruhr largely in ruins

and Upper Silesia lost, coal production was down to one fifth of what it had been

the year before and very little of this could be moved because of the dislocation

of rail and water transport by Anglo–American bombing. The Fuehrer

conferences became dominated by talk of the coal shortage, Doenitz

complaining that many of his ships had to lie idle because of lack of fuel and

Speer explaining patiently that the power plants and armament factories were in

a similar situation for the same reason. The loss of the Rumanian and Hungarian

oil fields and the bombing of the synthetic-oil plants in Germany caused such an

acute shortage of gasoline that a good part of the desperately needed fighter

planes had to be grounded and were destroyed on the fields by Allied air attacks.

Many panzer divisions could not move for lack of fuel for their tanks.

The hopes in the promised “miracle weapons,” which had for a time sustained

not only the masses of the people and the soldiers but even such hardheaded

generals as Guderian, were finally abandoned. The launching sites for the V-l

flying bombs and the V-2 rockets directed against Britain were almost entirely

lost when Eisenhower’s forces reconquered the French and Belgian coasts,

though a few remained in Holland. Nearly eight thousand of the two V bombs

were hurled against Antwerp and other military targets after the British-

American armies reached the German frontier, but the damage they did was

negligible.

Hitler and Goering had counted on the new jet fighters driving the Allied air

forces from the skies, and well they might have—for the Germans succeeded in

producing more than a thousand of them—had the Anglo–American flyers, who

lacked this plane, not taken successful counteraction. The conventional Allied

fighter was no match for the German jet in the air, but few ever got off the

ground. The refineries producing the special fuel for them were bombed and

destroyed and the extended runways which had to be constructed for them were

easily detected by Allied pilots, who destroyed the jets on the ground.

Grand Admiral Doenitz had promised the Fuehrer that the new electro-U-

boats would provide a miracle at sea, once more wreaking havoc on the British-

American lifelines in the North Atlantic. But by the middle of February 1945

only two of the 126 new craft commissioned had put to sea.

As for the German atom bomb project, which had given London and

Washington much worry, it had made little progress due to Hitler’s lack of

interest in it and Himmler’s practice of arresting the atom scientists for suspected

disloyalty or pulling them off to work on some of his pet nonsensical “scientific”

experiments which he deemed more important. Before the end of 1944 the

American and British governments had learned, to their great relief, that the

Germans would not have an atom bomb in this war.*

On February 8 Eisenhower’s armies, now eighty-five divisions strong, began

to close in on the Rhine. They had expected that the Germans would fight only a

delaying action and, conserving their strength, retire behind the formidable water

barrier of the wide and swift-flowing river. Rundstedt counseled this. But here,

as elsewhere throughout the years of his defeats, Hitler would not listen to a

withdrawal. It would merely mean, he told Rundstedt, “moving the catastrophe

from one place to another.” So the German armies, at Hitler’s insistence, stood

and fought—but not for long. By the end of the month the British and Americans

had reached the Rhine at several places north of Duesseldorf, and a fortnight

later they had firm possession of the left bank from the Moselle River northward.

The Germans had lost another 350,000 men killed, wounded or captured (the

prisoners numbered 293,000) and most of their arms and equipment.

Hitler was in a fine fury. He sacked Rundstedt for the last time on March 10,

replacing him with Field Marshal Kesselring, who had held out so stubbornly

and long in Italy. Already in February the Fuehrer, in a fit of rage, had

considered denouncing the Geneva Convention in order, he said at a conference

on the nineteenth, “to make the enemy realize that we are determined to fight for

our existence with all the means at our disposal.” He had been urged to take this

step by Dr. Goebbels, the bloodthirsty noncombatant, who suggested that all

captured airmen be shot summarily in reprisal for their terrible bombing of the

German cities. When some of the officers present raised legal objections Hitler

retorted angrily:

To hell with that! … If I make it clear that I show no consideration for prisoners but that I

treat enemy prisoners without any consideration for their rights, regardless of reprisals, then

quite a few [Germans] will think twice before they desert.17

This was one of the first indications to his followers that Hitler, his mission as

world conqueror having failed, was determined to go down, like Wotan at

Valhalla, in a holocaust of blood—not only the enemy’s but that of his own

people. At the close of the discussion he asked Admiral Doenitz “to consider the

pros and cons of this step and to report as soon as possible.”

Doenitz came back with his answer on the following day and it was typical of

the man.

The disadvantages would outweigh the advantages … It would be better in any case to

keep up outside appearances and carry out the measures believed necessary without

announcing them beforehand.18

Hitler reluctantly agreed and while, as we have seen,* there was no general

massacre of captured flyers or of other prisoners of war (except the Russians)

several were done to death and the civil population was incited to lynch Allied

air crews who parachuted to the ground. One captive French general, Mesny,

was deliberately murdered on the orders of Hitler, and a good many Allied

POWs perished when they were forced to make long marches without food or

water on roads strafed by British, American and Russian flyers as the Germans

herded them toward the interior of the country to prevent them from being

liberated by the advancing Allied armies.

Hitler’s concern to make German soldiers “think twice before they desert”

was not ungrounded. In the West the number of deserters, or at least of those

who gave themselves up as quickly as possible in the wake of the British-

American advances, became staggering. On February 12 Keitel issued an order

“in the name of the Fuehrer” stating that any soldier “who deceitfully obtains

leave papers, or who travels with false papers, will … be punished by death.”

And on March 5 General Blaskowitz, commanding Army Group H in the West,

issued this order:

All soldiers … encountered away from their units … and who announce they are stragglers

looking for their units will be summarily tried and shot.

On April 12 Himmler added his bit by decreeing that any commander who

failed to hold a town or an important communications center “is punishable by

death.” The order was already being carried out in the case of the unfortunate

commanders at one of the Rhine bridges.

On the early afternoon of March 7, a spearhead of the U.S. 9th Armored

Division reached the heights above the town of Remagen, twenty-five miles

down the Rhine from Koblenz. To the amazement of the American tank crews

they saw that the Ludendorff railroad bridge across the river was still intact.

They raced down the slopes to the water front. Engineers frantically cut every

demolition wire they could find. A platoon of infantry raced across the bridge.

As they were approaching the east bank a charge went off and then another. The

bridge shook but held. Feeble German forces on the far shore were quickly

driven back. Tanks sped over the span. By dusk the Americans had a strong

bridgehead on the east bank of the Rhine. The last great natural barrier in

Western Germany had been crossed.*

A few days later, on the night of March 22, Patton’s Third Army, after

overrunning the Saar-Palatinate triangle in a brilliant operation carried out in

conjunction with the U.S. Seventh and French First armies, made another

crossing of the Rhine at Oppenheim, south of Mainz. By March 25 the Anglo–

American armies were in possession of the entire west bank of the river and

across it in two places with strong bridgeheads. In six weeks Hitler had lost more

than one third of his forces in the West and most of the arms for half a million

men.

At 2:30 A.M. on March 24, he called a war conference at his headquarters in

Berlin to consider what to do.

HITLER: I consider the second bridgehead at Oppenheim as the greatest danger.

HEWEL [Foreign Office representative]: The Rhine isn’t so very wide there.

HITLER: A good two hundred fifty meters. On a river barrier only one man has to be

asleep and a terrible misfortune can happen.

The Supreme Commander wanted to know if there was “no brigade or

something like that which could be sent there.” An adjutant answered:

At the present time no unit is available to be sent to Oppenheim. There are only five tank

destroyers in the camp at Senne, which will be ready today or tomorrow. They could be put

into the battle in the next few days …19

In the next few days! At that very moment Patton had a bridgehead at

Oppenheim seven miles wide and six miles deep and his tanks were heading

eastward toward Frankfurt. It is a measure of the plight of the once mighty

German Army whose vaunted panzer corps had raced through Europe in the

earlier years that at this moment of crisis the Supreme Commander should be

concerned with scraping up five broken-down tank destroyers which could only

be “put into battle in the next few days” to stem the advance of a powerful

enemy armored army.*

With the Americans across the Rhine by the third week of March and a

mighty Allied army of British, Canadians and Americans under Montgomery

poised to cross the Lower Rhine and head both into the North German plain and

into the Ruhr—which they did, beginning on the night of March 23—Hitler’s

vengeance turned from the advancing enemy to his own people. They had

sustained him through the greatest victories in German history. Now in the

winter of defeat he thought them no longer worthy of his greatness.

“If the German people were to be defeated in the struggle,” Hitler had told the

gauleiters in a speech in August 1944, “it must have been too weak: it had failed

to prove its mettle before history and was destined only to destruction.” 20

He was fast becoming a physical wreck and this helped to poison his view.

The strain of conducting the war, the shock of defeats, the unhealthy life without

fresh air and exercise in the underground headquarters bunkers which he rarely

left, his giving way to ever more frequent temper tantrums and, not the least, the

poisonous drugs he took daily on the advice of his quack physician, Dr. Morell,

had undermined his health even before the July 20, 1944, bombing. The

explosion on that day had broken the tympanic membranes of both ears, which

contributed to his spells of dizziness. After the bombing his doctors advised an

extended vacation, but he refused. “If I leave East Prussia,” he told Keitel, “it

will fall. As long as I am here, it will hold.”

In September 1944 he suffered a breakdown and had to take to bed, but he

recovered in November when he returned to Berlin. But he never recovered

control of his terrible temper. More and more, as the news from the fronts in

1945 grew worse, he gave way to hysterical rage. It was invariably accompanied

by a trembling of his hands and feet which he could not control. General

Guderian has given several descriptions of him at these moments. At the end of

January, when the Russians had reached the Oder only a hundred miles from

Berlin and the General Staff Chief started to demand the evacuation by sea of

several German divisions cut off in the Baltic area, Hitler turned on him.

He stood in front of me shaking his fists, so that my good Chief of Staff, Thomale, felt

constrained to seize me by the skirt of my jacket and pull me backward lest I be the victim of a

physical assault.

A few days later, on February 13, 1945, the two men got into another row

over the Russian situation that lasted, Guderian says, for two hours.

His fists raised, his cheeks flushed with rage, his whole body trembling, the man stood

there in front of me, beside himself with fury and having lost all self-control. After each

outburst Hitler would stride up and down the carpet edge, then suddenly stop immediately

before me and hurl his next accusation in my face. He was almost screaming, his eyes seemed

to pop out of his head and the veins stood out in his temples. 21

It was in this state of mind and health that the German Fuehrer made one of

the last momentous decisions of his life. On March 19 he issued a general order

that all military, industrial, transportation and communication installations as

well as all stores in Germany must be destroyed in order to prevent them from

falling intact into the hands of the enemy. The measures were to be carried out

by the military with the help of the Nazi gauleiters and “commissars for

defense.” “All directives opposing this,” the order concluded, “are invalid.” 22

Germany was to be made one vast wasteland. Nothing was to be left with

which the German people might somehow survive their defeat.

Albert Speer, the outspoken Minister for Armament and War Production, had

anticipated the barbarous directive from previous meetings with Hitler and on

March 15 had drawn up a memorandum in which he strenuously opposed such a

criminal step and reiterated his contention that the war was already lost. He

presented it to the Fuehrer personally on the evening of March 18.

In four to eight weeks [Speer wrote] the final collapse of the German economy must be

expected with certainty … After that collapse the war cannot be continued even militarily …

We must do everything to maintain, even if only in a most primitive manner, a basis for the

existence of the nation to the last … We have no right at this stage of the war to carry out

demolitions which might affect the life of the people. If our enemies wish to destroy this

nation, which has fought with unique bravery, then this historical shame shall rest exclusively

upon them. We have the duty of leaving to the nation every possibility of insuring its

reconstruction in the distant future …23

But Hitler, his own personal fate sealed, was not interested in the continued

existence of the German people, for whom he had always professed such

boundless love. He told Speer:

If the war is lost, the nation will also perish. This fate is inevitable. There is no necessity to

take into consideration the basis which the people will need to continue a most primitive

existence. On the contrary, it will be better to destroy these things ourselves because this

nation will have proved to be the weaker one and the future will belong solely to the stronger

eastern nation [Russia]. Besides, those who will remain after the battle are only the inferior

ones, for the good ones have been killed.

Whereupon the Supreme Warlord promulgated his infamous “scorched earth”

directive the next day. It was followed on March 23 by an equally monstrous

order by Martin Bormann, the Fuehrer’s secretary, a molelike man who had now

gained a position at court second to none among the Nazi satraps. Speer

described it on the stand at Nuremberg.

The Bormann decree aimed at bringing the population to the center of the Reich from both

East and West, and the foreign workers and prisoners of war were to be included. These

millions of people were to be sent upon their trek on foot. No provisions for their existence

had been made, nor could it be carried out in view of the situation. It would have resulted in an

unimaginable hunger catastrophe.

And had all the other orders of Hitler and Bormann—there were a number of

supplementary directives—been carried out, millions of Germans who had

escaped with their lives up to then might well have died. Speer tried to

summarize for the Nuremberg court the various “scorched earth” orders. To be

destroyed, he said, were

all industrial plants, all important electrical facilities, water works, gas works, food stores

and clothing stores; all bridges, all railway and communication installations, all waterways, all

ships, all freight cars and all locomotives.

That the German people were spared this final catastrophe was due to—aside

from the rapid advances of the Allied troops, which made the carrying out of

such a gigantic demolition impossible—the superhuman efforts of Speer and a

number of Army officers who, in direct disobedience (finally!) of Hitler’s

orders, raced about the country to make sure that vital communications, plants

and stores were not blown up by zealously obedient Army officers and party

hacks.

The end now approached for the German Army.

While Field Marshal Montgomery’s British-Canadian armies, after their

crossing of the Lower Rhine the last week of March, pushed northeast for

Bremen, Hamburg and the Baltic at Luebeck, General Simpson’s U.S. Ninth

Army and General Hodges’ U.S. First Army advanced rapidly past the Ruhr, the

Ninth Army on its northern perimeter, the First Army to the south. On April 1

they linked up at Lippstadt. Field Marshal Model’s Army Group B, consisting of

the Fifteenth and the Fifth Panzer armies—some twenty-one divisions—was

trapped in the ruins of Germany’s greatest industrial area. It held out for eighteen

days, surrendering on April 18. Another 325,000 Germans, including thirty

generals, were captured, but Model was not among them. Rather than become a

prisoner he shot himself.

The encirclement of Model’s armies in the Ruhr had torn the German front in

the West wide open, leaving a gap two hundred miles wide through which the

divisions of the U.S. Ninth and First armies not needed to contain the Ruhr now

burst toward the Elbe River in the heart of Germany. The road to Berlin lay

open, for between these two American armies and the German capital there were

only a few scattered, disorganized German divisions. On the evening of April

11, after advancing some sixty miles since daybreak, a spearhead of the U.S.

Ninth Army reached the Elbe River near Magdeburg, and on the next day threw

a bridgehead over it. The Americans were only sixty miles from Berlin.

Eisenhower’s purpose now was to split Germany in two by joining up with the

Russians on the Elbe between Magdeburg and Dresden. Though bitterly

criticized by Churchill and the British military chiefs for not beating the

Russians to Berlin, as he easily could have done, Eisenhower and his staff at

SHAEF were obsessed at this moment with the urgency of heading southeast

after the junction with the Russians in order to capture the so-called National

Redoubt, where it was believed Hitler was gathering his remaining forces to

make a last stand in the almost impenetrable Alpine mountains of southern

Bavaria and western Austria.

The “National Redoubt” was a phantom. It never existed except in the

propaganda blasts of Dr. Goebbels and in the cautious minds at Eisenhower’s

headquarters which had fallen for them. As early as March 11, SHAEF

intelligence had warned Eisenhower that the Nazis were planning to make an

impregnable fortress in the mountains and that Hitler himself would command

its defenses from his retreat at Berchtesgaden. The icy mountain crags were

“practically impenetrable,” it said.

Here [it continued], defended by nature and by the most efficient secret weapons yet

invented, the powers that have hitherto guided Germany will survive to reorganize her

resurrection; here armaments will be manufactured in bombproof factories, food and

equipment will be stored in vast underground caverns and a specially selected corps of young

men will be trained in guerrilla warfare, so that a whole underground army can be fitted and

directed to liberate Germany from the occupying forces. 24

It would almost seem as though the Allied Supreme Commander’s

intelligence staff had been infiltrated by British and American mystery writers.

At any rate, this fantastic appreciation was taken seriously at SHAEF, where

Eisenhower’s chief of staff, General Bedell Smith, mulled over the dread

possibility “of a prolonged campaign in the Alpine area” which would take a

heavy toll of American lives and prolong the war indefinitely. *

This was the last time that the resourceful Dr. Goebbels succeeded in

influencing the strategic course of the war by propaganda bluff. For though

Adolf Hitler at first considered retiring to the Austro-Bavarian mountains near

which he was born and in which he had spent most of the private hours of his

life, and which he loved and where he had the only home he could call his own

—on the Obersalzberg above Berchtesgaden—and there make a last stand, he

had hesitated until it was too late.

On April 16, the day American troops reached Nuremberg, the city of the

great Nazi Party rallies, Zhukov’s Russian armies broke loose from their

bridgeheads over the Oder, and on the afternoon of April 21 they reached the

outskirts of Berlin. Vienna had already fallen on April 13. At 4:40 on the

afternoon of April 25, patrols of the U.S. 69th Infantry Division met forward

elements of the Russian 58th Guards Division at Torgau on the Elbe, some

seventy-five miles south of Berlin. North and South Germany were severed.

Adolf Hitler was cut off in Berlin. The last days of the Third Reich had come.

* On August 23, according to Speidel, Hitler had ordered all the Paris bridges and other

important installations destroyed “even if artistic monuments are destroyed thereby.” Speidel

refused to carry out the order, as did General von Choltitz, the new commandant of Greater

Paris, who surrendered after a few shots had satisfied his honor. For this Choltitz was tried in

absentia for treason in April 1945, but officer friends of his managed to delay the proceedings

until the end of the war. Speidel also reveals that as soon as Paris was lost Hitler ordered its

destruction by heavy artillery and V-l flying bombs, but this order too he refused to obey.

(Speidel, Invasion 1944, pp. 143–45.)

* “I am certain,” Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs ( Crusade in Europe, p. 305), “that Field

Marshal Montgomery, in the light of later events, would agree that this view was a mistaken

one.” But this is far from being the case, as those who have read Montgomery’s memoirs

know.

* There was an interesting adornment to the plan called “Operation Greif,” which seems to

have been Hitler’s brain child. Its leadership was entrusted by the Fuehrer to Otto Skorzeny,

who, following his rescue of Mussolini and his resolute action in Berlin on the night of July

20, 1944, had further distinguished himself in his special field by kidnaping the Hungarian

Regent, Admiral Horthy, in Budapest in October 1944, when the latter tried to surrender

Hungary to the advancing Russians. Skorzeny’s new assignment was to organize a special

brigade of two thousand English-speaking German soldiers, put them in American uniforms,

and infiltrate them in captured American tanks and jeeps behind the American lines to cut

communication wires, kill dispatch riders, misdirect traffic and generally sow confusion.

Small units were also to penetrate to the Meuse bridges and try to hold them intact until the

main German panzer troops arrived.

* On the sixteenth a German officer carrying several copies of Operation Greif was taken

prisoner and the Americans thus learned what was up. But this does not seem to have curbed

the initial confusion spread by Skorzeny’s men, some of whom, posing as M.P.s, took up posts

at crossroads and misdirected American military traffic. Nor did it prevent First Army’s

intelligence office from believing the tall tales of some of the captured Germans in American

uniform that more than a few of Skorzeny’s desperadoes were on their way to Paris to

assassinate Eisenhower. For several days thousands of American soldiers as far back as Paris

were stopped by M.P.s and had to prove their nationality by telling who won the World Series

and what the capital of their native state was—though some could not remember or did not

know. A good many of the Germans caught in American uniforms were summarily shot and

others court-martialed and executed. Skorzeny himself was tried by an American tribunal at

Dachau in 1947 but acquitted. Thereafter he moved to Spain and South America, where he

soon established a prosperous cement business and composed his memoirs.

* For several hours, judging by the length of the stenographic record of this conference, which

has survived almost intact. It is Fragment 27 of the Fuehrer conferences. Gilbert gives the

entire text in Hitler Directs His War, pp. 158–74.

* Among the American dead were several prisoners shot in cold blood by Colonel Jochen

Peiper’s combat group of the 1st S.S. Panzer Division near Malmédy on December 17.

According to the evidence presented at Nuremberg 129 American prisoners were massacred;

at the subsequent trial of the S.S. officers involved, the figure was reduced to 71. The trial

before an American military tribunal at Dachau in the spring of 1946 had a curious

denouement. Forty-three S.S. officers, including Peiper, were condemned to death, twenty-

three to life imprisonment and eight to shorter sentences. Sepp Dietrich, commander of the

Sixth S.S. Panzer Army, which fought in the northern side of the Bulge, received twenty-five

years; Kraemer, commander of the 1st S.S. Armored Corps, ten years, and Hermann Priess,

commander of the 1st S.S. Panzer Division, eighteen years.

Then a hue and cry arose in the U.S. Senate, especially from the late Senator McCarthy,

that the S.S. officers had been treated brutally in order to extort confessions. In March 1948

thirty-one of the death sentences were commuted; in April General Lucius D. Clay reduced the

death sentences from twelve to six; and in January 1951, under a general amnesty, John J.

McCloy, the American High Commissioner, commuted the remaining death sentences to life

imprisonment. At the time of writing all have been released. Almost forgotten in the hubbub

over the alleged ill-treatment of the S.S. officers was the indisputable evidence that at least

seventy-one unarmed U.S. war prisoners were slain in cold blood on a snowy field near

Malmédy on December 17,1944, on the orders—or incitement—of several S.S. officers.

* How they learned is a fascinating story in itself but too long to be set down here. Professor

Samuel Goudsmit has told it well in his book Alsos. “Alsos” was the code name of the

American scientific mission which he headed and which followed Eisenhower’s armies into

Western Europe.

* In Chapter 27, “The New Order.”

* Hitler had eight German officers who commanded the weak forces at the Remagen bridge

executed. They were tried by a “Flying Special Tribunal, West,” set up by the Fuehrer and

presided over by a fanatical Nazi general by the name of Huebner.

* The transcript of this March 23 Fuehrer conference is the last one which was saved, fairly

intact, from the flames. It gives a good picture of the frantic mind of the Fuehrer and his

obsession with trivial details at the moment when the walls are caving in. For the best part of

an hour he discusses Goebbels’ proposal to use the broad avenue through the Tiergarten in

Berlin as an airstrip. He lectures on the weakness of German concrete in the face of bombing.

Much of the conference is given over to scraping up troops. One general raises the question of

the Indian Legion.

HITLER: The Indian Legion is a joke. There are Indians who can’t kill a louse, who’d

rather let themselves be eaten up. They won’t kill an Englishman either. I consider it nonsense

to put them opposite the English … If we used Indians to turn prayer mills, or something like

that, they would be the most indefatigable soldiers in the world …

And so on far into the night. The meeting broke up at 3:43 A.M.

* “Not until after the campaign ended,” General Omar Bradley later wrote, “were we to learn

that this Redoubt existed largely in the imaginations of a few fanatic Nazis. It grew into so

exaggerated a scheme that I am astonished we could have believed it as innocently as we did.

But while it persisted, this legend of the Redoubt was too ominous a threat to ignore and in

consequence it shaped our tactical thinking during the closing weeks of the war.” (Bradley, A

Soldier’s Story, p. 536.)

“A great deal has been written about the Alpine Fortress,” Field Marshal Kesselring

commented wryly after the war, “mostly nonsense.” (Kesselring, A Soldier’s Record, p. 276.)

31

GOETTERDAEMMERUNG: THE LAST DAYS OF THE THIRD

REICH

HITLER HAD PLANNED to leave Berlin on April 20, his fifty-sixth birthday, for

Obersalzberg and there direct the last stand of the Third Reich in the legendary

mountain fastness of Barbarossa. Most of the ministerial offices had already

moved south with their trucks full of state papers and of frantic officials

desperate to get out of doomed Berlin. The Fuehrer himself had sent most of the

members of his household staff to Berchtesgaden ten days before to prepare his

mountain villa, the Berghof, for his coming.

He was destined, however, never to see his beloved Alpine retreat again. The

end was approaching faster than he had thought possible. The Americans and

Russians were driving swiftly to a junction on the Elbe. The British were at the

gates of Hamburg and Bremen and threatening to cut off Germany from

occupied Denmark. In Italy Bologna had fallen and Alexander’s Allied forces

were plunging into the valley of the Po. The Russians, having captured Vienna

on April 13, were heading up the Danube, and the U.S. Third Army was

sweeping down that river to meet them in Hitler’s home town of Linz in Austria.

Nuremberg, where work had been going on throughout the war on the great

auditorium and stadiums which were to mark the ancient town as the capital of

the Nazi Party, was besieged and part of the U.S. Seventh Army was sweeping

past it toward Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi movement. In Berlin the

thunder of Russian heavy artillery could be heard.

“All through the week,” Count Schwerin von Krosigk, the puerile Minister of

Finance and former Rhodes scholar, who had scooted out of Berlin for the north

at the first word of the approaching Bolsheviki, noted in his diary on April 23,

“there was nothing but a succession of Job’s messengers. Our people seem to be

faced with the darkest fate.” 1

Hitler had left his headquarters in Rastenburg in East Prussia for the last time

on the previous November 20, as the Russians approached, and had remained in

Berlin, which he had scarcely seen since the beginning of the war in the East,

until December 10, when he had gone to his Western headquarters at Ziegenberg

near Bad Nauheim to direct the great gamble in the Ardennes. After its failure he

had returned on January 16 to Berlin, where he was to remain until the end,

directing his crumbling armies from the underground bunker fifty feet below the

Chancellery, whose great marble halls were now in ruins from Allied bombing.

Physically he was fast deteriorating. A young Army captain who saw him for

the first time in February later recalled his appearance.

His head was slightly wobbling. His left arm hung slackly and his hand trembled a good

deal. There was an indescribable flickering glow in his eyes, creating a fearsome and wholly

unnatural effect. His face and the parts around his eyes gave the impression of total

exhaustion. All his movements were those of a senile man.2

Since the July 20 attempt on his life he had grown distrustful of everyone,

even of his old party stalwarts. “I am lied to on all sides,” he fumed to one of his

women secretaries in March.

I can rely on no one. They all betray me. The whole business makes me sick … If anything

happens to me, Germany will be left without a leader. I have no successor. Hess is mad,

Goering has lost the sympathy of the people, and Himmler would be rejected by the Party—

besides, he [Himmler] is so completely inartistic … Rack your brains and tell me who my

successor is to be …3

One would have thought that at this stage of history the question of succession

was academic, but it was not—not in this Nazi cuckoo land. Not only the

Fuehrer was obsessed by it but the leading candidates to succeed him, as we

shall shortly see.

Physical wreck though Hitler now was, with a disastrous end staring him in

the face as the Russians approached Berlin and the Western Allies overran the

Reich, he and a few of his most fanatical followers, Goebbels above all, clung

stubbornly to their hopes of being saved at the last minute by a miracle.

One fine evening early in April Goebbels had sat up reading to Hitler from

one of the Fuehrer’s favorite books, Carlyle’s History of Frederick the Great.

The chapter he was reading told of the darkest days of the Seven Years’ War,

when the great King felt himself at the end of his rope and told his ministers that

if by February 15 no change for the better in his fortunes occurred he would give

up and take poison. This portion of history certainly had its appropriateness and

no doubt Goebbels read it in his most dramatic fashion.

“Brave King! [Goebbels read on] Wait yet a little while, and the days of your suffering will

be over. Already the sun of your good fortune stands behind the clouds and soon will rise upon

you.” On February 12 the Czarina died, the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg had come to

pass.

The Fuehrer’s eyes, Goebbels told Krosigk, to whose diary we owe this

touching scene, “were filled with tears. ”4

With such encouragement—and from a British source—they sent for two

horoscopes, which were kept in the files of one of Himmler’s multitudinous

“research” offices. One was the horoscope of the Fuehrer drawn up on January

30, 1933, the day he took office; the other was the horoscope of the Weimar

Republic, composed by some unknown astrologer on November 9, 1918, the day

of the Republic’s birth. Goebbels communicated the results of the re-

examination of these two remarkable documents to Krosigk.

An amazing fact has become evident, both horoscopes predicting the outbreak of the war in

1939, the victories until 1941, and the subsequent series of reversals, with the hardest blows

during the first months of 1945, particularly during the first half of April. In the second half of

April we were to experience a temporary success. Then there would be stagnation until August

and peace that same month. For the following three years Germany would have a hard time,

but starting in 1948 she would rise again.5

Fortified by Carlyle and the “amazing” predictions of the stars, Goebbels on

April 6 issued a ringing appeal to the retreating troops:

The Fuehrer has declared that even in this very year a change of fortune shall come … The

true quality of genius is its consciousness and its sure knowledge of coming change. The

Fuehrer knows the exact hour of its arrival. Destiny has sent us this man so that we, in this

time of great external and internal stress, shall testify to the miracle …6

Scarcely a week later, on the night of April 12, Goebbels convinced himself

that “the exact hour” of the miracle had come. It had been a day of further bad

news. The Americans had appeared on the Dessau–Berlin autobahn and the High

Command had hastily ordered the destruction of its last two remaining powder

factories, which were in the vicinity. Henceforth the German soldiers would

have to get along with the ammunition at hand. Goebbels had spent the day at

the headquarters of General Busse on the Oder front at Kuestrin. The General

had assured him that a Russian breakthrough was impossible, that (as Goebbels

the next day told Krosigk) he was “holding out until the British kick us in the

ass.”

In the evening [Goebbels recounted] they had sat together at headquarters and he had

developed his thesis that according to historical logic and justice things were bound to change,

just as in the Seven Years’ War there had been the miracle of the House of Brandenburg.

“What Czarina will die this time?” an officer asked. Goebbels did not know.

But fate, he replied, “holds all sorts of possibilities.”

When the Propaganda Minister got back to Berlin late that night the center of

the capital was in flames from another R.A.F. bombing. The remains of the

Chancellery and the Adlon Hotel up the Wilhelmstrasse were burning. At the

steps of the Propaganda Ministry, a secretary greeted Goebbels with a piece of

urgent news. “Roosevelt,” he said, “is dead!”

The Minister’s face lit up, visible to all in the light of the flames from the

Chancellery across the Wilhelmsplatz.

“Bring out our best champagne!” Goebbels cried. “And get me the Fuehrer on

the telephone!”

Hitler was in his deep bunker across the way sitting out the bombing. He

picked up the telephone.

“My Fuehrer,” Goebbels said. “I congratulate you! Roosevelt is dead! It is

written in the stars that the second half of April will be the turning point for us.

This is Friday, April the thirteenth. [It was already after midnight.] It is the

turning point!”

Hitler’s reaction to the news was not recorded, though it may be imagined in

view of the encouragement he had been receiving from Carlyle and the stars. But

that of Goebbels was. “He was,” says his secretary, “in ecstasy.” 7

The fatuous Count Schwerin von Krosigk too. When Goebbels’ State

Secretary phoned him that Roosevelt was dead he exclaimed—at least in his

faithful diary:

This was the Angel of History! We felt its wings flutter through the room. Was that not the

turn of fortune we awaited so anxiously?

The next morning Krosigk telephoned Goebbels with his “congratulations”—

he affirms it proudly in his diary—and, as if this were not enough, followed it

with a letter in which he hailed Roosevelt’s death, he says, as “a divine judgment

… a gift from God.”

In this atmosphere of a lunatic asylum, with cabinet ministers long in power

and educated in Europe’s ancient universities, as Krosigk and Goebbels were,

grasping at the readings of the stars and rejoicing amidst the flames of the

burning capital in the death of the American President as a sure sign that the

Almighty would now rescue the Third Reich at the eleventh hour from

impending catastrophe, the last act in Berlin was played out to its final curtain.

Eva Braun had arrived in Berlin to join Hitler on April 15. Very few Germans

knew of her existence and even fewer of her relationship to Adolf Hitler. For

more than twelve years she had been his mistress. Now in April she had come,

as Trevor-Roper says, for her wedding and her ceremonial death.

She is interesting for her role in the last chapter of this narrative but not

interesting in herself; she was not a Pompadour or a Lola Montez. * Hitler,

although he was undoubtedly extremely fond of her and found relaxation in her

unobtrusive company, had always kept her out of sight, refusing to allow her to

come to his various headquarters, where he spent almost all of his time during

the war years, and rarely permitting her even to come to Berlin. She remained

immured at the Berghof on the Obersalzberg, passing her time in swimming and

skiing, in reading cheap novels and seeing trashy films, in dancing (which Hitler

disapproved of) and endlessly grooming herself, pining away for her absent

loved one.

“She was,” says Erich Kempka, the Fuehrer’s chauffeur, “the unhappiest

woman in Germany. She spent most of her life waiting for Hitler. ”8

Field Marshal Keitel described her appearance during an interrogation at

Nuremberg.

She was very slender, elegant appearance, quite nice legs—one could see that—reticent

and retiring and a very, very nice person, dark blond. She stood very much in the background

and one saw her very rarely. 9

The daughter of lower-middle-class Bavarian parents, who at first strenuously

opposed her illicit relation with Hitler, even though he was the dictator, she had

been employed in the Munich photograph shop of Heinrich Hoffmann, who

introduced her to the Fuehrer. This was a year or two after the suicide of Geli

Raubal, the niece of Hitler, for whom, as we have seen, he had the one great

passionate love of his life. Eva Braun too, it seems, was often driven to despair

by her lover, though not for the same reasons as Geli Raubal. Eva, though

installed in a suite in Hitler’s Alpine villa, couldn’t endure the long separations

when he was away and twice tried to kill herself in the early years of their

friendship. But gradually she accepted her frustrating and ambiguous role—

acknowledged neither as wife nor as mistress—content to be sole woman

companion of the great man and making the most of their rare moments together.

She was now determined to share his end. Like Dr. and Frau Goebbels, she

had no desire to live in a Germany without Adolf Hitler. “It would not be fit to

live in for a true German,” she told Hanna Reitsch, the famed German woman

test pilot, in the shelter just before the end. 10 Though Eva Braun had a birdlike

mind and made no intellectual impression on Hitler at all—perhaps this is one

reason he preferred her company to that of intelligent women—it is obvious that

his influence on her, as on so many others, was total.

HITLER’S LAST GREAT DECISION

Hitler’s birthday on April 20 passed quietly enough, although, as General Karl

Koller, the Air Force Chief of Staff, who was present at the celebration in the

bunker, noted in his diary, it was a day of further catastrophes on the rapidly

disintegrating fronts. All the Old Guard Nazis, Goering, Goebbels, Himmler,

Ribbentrop and Bormann, were there, as well as the surviving military leaders,

Doenitz, Keitel, Jodl and Krebs—the last-named the new, and last, Chief of the

Army General Staff. They offered the Fuehrer birthday congratulations.

The warlord was not unusually cast down, despite the situation. He was still

confident, as he had told his generals three days before, that “the Russians were

going to suffer their bloodiest defeat of all before Berlin.” The generals knew

better, and at the regular military conference after the birthday party they urged

Hitler to leave Berlin for the south. In a day or two, they explained, the Russians

would cut off the last escape corridor in that direction. Hitler hesitated; he would

not say yes or no. Apparently he could not quite face the appalling fact that the

capital of the Third Reich was now about to be captured by the Russians, whose

armies, he had announced years before, were as good as destroyed. As a

concession to the generals he consented to setting up two separate commands in

case the Americans and Russians made their junction on the Elbe. Admiral

Doenitz would head that in the north and perhaps Kesselring the one in the south

—he was not quite sure about the latter appointment.

That night there was a general getaway from Berlin. Two of the Fuehrer’s

most trusted and veteran aides got out: Himmler and Goering, the latter in a

motor caravan whose trucks were filled with booty from his fabulous estate,

Karinhall. Each of these Old Guard Nazis left convinced that his beloved Leader

would soon be dead and that he would succeed him.

They never saw him again. Nor did Ribbentrop, who also scurried for safer

parts late that night.

But Hitler had not yet given up. On the day after his birthday he ordered an

all-out counterattack on the Russians in the southern suburbs of Berlin by S.S.

General Felix Steiner. Every available soldier in the Berlin area was to be

thrown into the attack, including the Luftwaffe ground troops.

“Any commander who holds back his forces,” Hitler shouted to General

Koller, who had remained behind to represent the Air Force, “will forfeit his life

in five hours. You yourself will guarantee with your head that the last man is

thrown in. ”11

All through the day and far into the next Hitler waited impatiently for the

news of Steiner’s counterattack. It was a further example of his loss of contact

with reality. There was no Steiner attack. It was never attempted. It existed only

in the feverish mind of the desperate dictator. When he was finally forced to

recognize this the storm broke.

April 22 brought the last turning point in Hitler’s road to ruin. From early

morning until 3 P.M. he had been on the telephone, as he had been the day before,

trying to find out from the various command posts how the Steiner counterattack

was going. No one knew. General Roller’s planes could not locate it, nor could

the ground commanders, though it was supposed to be rolling only two or three

miles south of the capital. Not even Steiner, though he existed, could be found,

let alone his army.

The blowup came at the daily military conference in the bunker at 3 P.M. Hitler

angrily demanded news of Steiner. Neither Keitel nor Jodl nor anyone else had

any. But the generals had other news. The withdrawal of troops from the north of

Berlin to support Steiner had so weakened the front there that the Russians had

broken through and their tanks were now within the city limits.

This was too much for the Supreme Warlord. All the surviving witnesses

testify that he completely lost control of himself. He flew into the greatest rage

of his life. This was the end, he shrieked. Everyone had deserted him. There was

nothing but treason, lies, corruption and cowardice. All was over. Very well, he

would stay on in Berlin. He would personally take over the defense of the capital

of the Third Reich. The others could leave, if they wished. In this place he would

meet his end.

The others protested. There was still hope, they said, if the Fuehrer retired to

the south, where Field Marshal Ferdinand Schoerner’s army group in

Czechoslovakia and considerable forces of Kesselring were still intact. Doenitz,

who had left for the northwest to take over command of the troops there, and

Himmler, who, as we shall see, was up to his own game, telephoned to urge the

Leader not to remain in Berlin. Even Ribbentrop called up to say he was about to

spring a “diplomatic coup” which would save everything. But Hitler had no

more faith in them, not even in his “second Bismarck, ” as he once, in a moment

of folly, had called his Foreign Minister. He had made his decision, he said to

all. And to show them that it was irrevocable, he called for a secretary and in

their presence dictated an announcement that was to be read immediately over

the radio. The Fuehrer, it said, would stay in Berlin and defend it to the end.

Hitler then sent for Goebbels and invited him, his wife and their six young

children to move into the Fuehrerbunker from their badly bombed house in the

Wilhelmstrasse garden. He knew that at least this fanatical and faithful follower,

and his family, would stick by him to the end. Next Hitler turned to his papers,

sorted out those he wished to be destroyed, and turned them over to one of his

adjutants, Julius Schaub, who took them up to the garden and burned them.

Finally that evening he called in Keitel and Jodl and ordered them to proceed

south to take over direct command of the remaining armed forces. Both generals,

who had been at Hitler’s side throughout the war, have left vivid accounts of

their final parting with the Supreme Warlord. 12

When Keitel protested that he would not leave without the Fuehrer, Hitler

answered, “You will follow my orders.” Keitel, who had never disobeyed an

order from the Leader in his life, not even those commanding him to commit the

vilest war crimes, said nothing further, but Jodl, less a lackey, did. To this

soldier, who, despite his fanatical devotion to the Fuehrer whom he had served

so well, still retained some sense of military tradition, the Supreme Warlord was

deserting the command of his troops and shirking his responsibility for them at a

moment of disaster.

“You can’t direct anything from here,” Jodl said. “If you don’t have your

Leadership Staff with you how can you lead anything?”

“Well, then,” Hitler retorted, “Goering can take over the leadership down

there.”

When one of them pointed out that no soldier would fight for the Reich

Marshal, Hitler cut in. “What do you mean, fight? There’s precious little more

fighting to be done!” Even for the mad conqueror the scales at last were falling

from the eyes. Or, at least, the gods were giving him moments of lucidity in

these last nightmarish days of his life.

There were several repercussions to Hitler’s outbursts on April 22 and to his

final decision to remain in Berlin. When Himmler, who was at Hohenlychen,

northwest of Berlin, received a firsthand account on the telephone from

Hermann Fegelein, his S.S. liaison officer at headquarters, he exclaimed to his

entourage, “Everyone is mad in Berlin! What am I to do?”

“You go straight to Berlin,” replied one of Himmler’s principal aides,

Obergruppenfuehrer Gottlob Berger, the chief of the S.S. head office. Berger

was one of those simple Germans who sincerely believed in National Socialism.

He had no idea that his revered chief, Himmler, under the prodding of S.S.

General Walter Schellenberg, was already in touch with Count Folke Bernadotte

of Sweden about surrendering the German armies in the West. “I am going to

Berlin,” Berger said to Himmler, “and it is your duty to go too.”

Berger, but not Himmler, went to Berlin that night and his visit is of interest

because of his firsthand description of Hitler on the night of his great decision.

Russian shells were already bursting near the Chancellery when Berger arrived.

To his shock he found the Fuehrer “a broken man—finished.” When he ventured

to express his appreciation of Hitler’s resolve to remain in Berlin—“one couldn’t

desert the people after they had held out so loyally and long,” he says he

declared—the very words touched off the Leader again.

All this time [Berger later recounted] the Fuehrer had never uttered a word; then suddenly

he shrieked: “Everyone has deceived me! No one has told me the truth! The Armed Forces

have lied to me!” … He went on and on in a loud voice. Then his face went bluish purple. I

thought he was going to have a stroke any minute …

Berger was also the head of Himmler’s Prisoner-of-War Administration, and

after the Fuehrer had calmed down they discussed the fate of a group of

prominent British, French and American prisoners as well as of such Germans as

Halder and Schacht and the former Austrian Chancellor, Schuschnigg, who were

being moved southeast to keep them out of the hands of the Americans

advancing through Germany. Berger was flying to Bavaria that night to take

charge of them. The two men also talked of reports that there had been outbreaks

of separatism in Austria and Bavaria. The idea that revolt could break out in his

native Austria and in his adopted Bavaria once more convulsed Hitler.

His hand was shaking, his leg was shaking and his head was shaking; and all that he kept

saying [Berger reported] was: “Shoot them all! Shoot them all! ”13

Whether this was an order to shoot all the separatists or all the distinguished

prisoners, or both, was not clear to Berger, but apparently to this simple man it

meant the whole lot.

GOERING AND HIMMLER TRY TO TAKE OVER

General Koller had stayed away from the Fuehrer’s military conference on

April 22. He had the Luftwaffe to look after, and “besides,” he says in his diary,

“I should never have been able to tolerate being insulted all day long.”

General Eckard Christian, his liaison officer at the bunker, had rung him up at

6:15 P.M. and in a breathless voice had said, “Historical events, the most decisive

of the war, are taking place here!” A couple of hours later Christian arrived at

Air Force headquarters at Wildpark-Werder on the outskirts of Berlin to report to

Koller in person. “The Fuehrer has broken down!” Christian, an ardent Nazi who

had married one of Hitler’s secretaries, gasped, but beyond saying that the

Leader had decided to meet his end in Berlin and was burning his papers, he was

so incoherent that the Luftwaffe Chief of Staff set out, despite a heavy British

bombing that had just begun, to find General Jodl and ascertain just what had

happened that day in the bunker.

At Krampnitz, between Berlin and Potsdam, where the now Fuehrerless OKW

had set up temporary headquarters, he found him, and Jodl told his Air Force

friend the whole sad story. He also revealed something which no one else had

yet mentioned to Koller and which was to lead to a certain denouement during

the next few frantic days.

“When it comes to negotiating [for peace],” Hitler had told Keitel and Jodl,

“Goering can do better than I. Goering is much better at those things. He can

deal much better with the other side.” Jodl now repeated this to Koller. 14

The Air Force General felt that it was his duty to immediately fly to Goering.

It would be difficult and also dangerous, in view of the enemy’s monitoring, to

try to explain this new development in a radio message. If Goering, who had

been officially named by Hitler years before as his successor-designate, were to

take over peace negotiations, as the Fuehrer had suggested, there was no time to

lose. Jodl agreed. At 3:30 on the morning of April 23 Koller took off in a fighter

plane and sped toward Munich.

At noon he arrived on the Obersalzberg and delivered his news to the Reich

Marshal. Goering, who had been looking forward, to put it mildly, to the day

when he might succeed Hitler, was more circumspect than might have been

expected. He did not want to lay himself open, he said, to the machinations of

his “deadly enemy,” Bormann, a precaution which, as it turned out, was well

founded. He perspired under his dilemma. “If I act now,” he told his advisers, “I

may be stamped as a traitor; if I don’t act, I’ll be accused of having failed to do

something in the hour of disaster.”

Goering sent for Hans Lammers, the State Secretary of the Reich Chancellery,

who was in Berchtesgaden, for legal advice and also fetched from his safe a

copy of the Fuehrer’s decree of June 29, 1941. The decree was quite clear. It

stipulated that if Hitler died Goering was to be his successor and that if the

Fuehrer were incapacitated Goering was to act as his deputy. All agreed that by

remaining in Berlin to die, cut off in his last hours from both the military

commands and the government offices, Hitler was incapacitated from governing

and that it was Goering’s clear duty under the decree to take over.

Nevertheless the Reich Marshal drafted his telegram to Hitler with great care.

He wanted to make sure of the delegation of authority.

MY FUEHRER!

In view of your decision to remain in the fortress of Berlin, do you agree that I take over at

once the total leadership of the Reich, with full freedom of action at home and abroad as your

deputy, in accordance with your decree of June 29, 1941? If no reply is received by 10 o’clock

tonight, I shall take it for granted that you have lost your freedom of action, and shall consider

the conditions of your decree as fulfilled, and shall act for the best interests of our country and

our people. You know what I feel for you in this gravest hour of my life. Words fail me to

express myself. May God protect you, and speed you quickly here in spite of all.

Your loyal

Hermann Goering

That very evening several hundred miles away Heinrich Himmler was

meeting with Count Bernadotte in the Swedish consulate at Luebeck on the

Baltic. Der treue Heinrich—the loyal Heinrich, as Hitler had often fondly

referred to him—was not asking for the powers of succession; he was already

assuming them.

“The Fuehrer’s great life,” he told the Swedish count, “is drawing to a close.”

In a day or two, he said, Hitler would be dead. Whereupon Himmler urged

Bernadotte to communicate to General Eisenhower immediately Germany’s

willingness to surrender to the West. In the East, Himmler added, the war would

be continued until the Western Powers themselves had taken over the front

against the Russians—such was the naïveté, or stupidity, or both, of this S.S.

chieftain who now claimed for himself the dictatorship of the Third Reich. When

Bernadotte asked that Himmler put in writing his offer to surrender, a letter was

hastily drafted by candlelight—for an R.A.F. bombing that night had shut off the

electricity in Luebeck and driven the conferees to the cellar. Himmler signed

it.15

Both Goering and Himmler had acted prematurely, as they quickly found out.

Although Hitler was cut off from all but a scanty radio communication with his

armies and his ministries—for the Russians had nearly completed their

encirclement of the capital by the evening of the twenty-third—he was now to

demonstrate that he could rule Germany by the power of his personality and

prestige alone and quell “treason,” even by the most eminent of his followers, by

a mere word over his creaky wireless transmitter suspended from a balloon

above the bunker.

Albert Speer and a remarkable lady witness whose dramatic appearance in the

last act of the drama in Berlin will shortly be noted have described Hitler’s

reaction to Goering’s telegram. Speer had flown into the besieged capital on the

night of April 23, landing in a cub plane on the eastern end of the East–West

Axis—the broad avenue which led through the Tiergarten—at the Brandenburg

Gate, a block from the Chancellery. Having learned that Hitler had decided to

remain in Berlin to the end, which could not be far off, Speer had come to say

his farewell to the Leader and to confess to him that his “conflict between

personal loyalty and public duty,” as he puts it, had forced him to sabotage the

Fuehrer’s scorched-earth policy. He fully expected to be arrested for “treason”

and probably shot, and no doubt he would have been had the dictator known of

Speer’s effort two months before to kill him and all the others who had escaped

Stauffenberg’s bomb.

The brilliant architect and Armament Minister, though he had always prided

himself on being apolitical, had had, like some other Germans, a late—a too late

—awakening. When he had finally realized that his beloved Fuehrer was

determined through his scorched-earth decrees to destroy the German people he

had decided to murder him. His plan was to introduce poison gas into the

ventilation system in the bunker in Berlin during a full-dress military conference.

Since not only the generals but invariably Goering, Himmler and Goebbels now

attended these, Speer hoped to wipe out the entire Nazi leadership of the Third

Reich as well as the High Command. He procured his gas, inspected the air-

conditioning system and then discovered, he says, that the air-intake pipe in the

garden was protected by a twelve-foot-high chimney, recently installed on

Hitler’s personal orders to discourage sabotage, and that it would be impossible

to inject his gas into it without being interrupted by the S.S. guards in the garden.

So he abandoned his project and Hitler once again escaped assassination.

Now on the evening of April 23 Speer made a full confession of his

insubordination in refusing to carry out the wanton destruction of Germany’s

remaining installations. To his surprise Hitler showed no resentment or anger.

Perhaps the Fuehrer was touched by the candor and courage of his young friend

—Speer had just turned forty—for whom he had long had a deep affection and

whom he regarded as a “fellow artist.” Hitler, as Keitel also noted, seemed

strangely serene that evening, as though having made up his mind to die in this

place within a few days had brought a peace of mind and spirit. But it was the

calm not only after the storm—of the previous day—but before the storm.

For Goering’s telegram had meanwhile arrived in the Chancellery and after

being held up by Bormann, who saw his opportunity at last, was presented to the

Fuehrer by this master of intrigue as an “ultimatum” and as a treasonous attempt

to “usurp” the Leader’s power.

“Hitler was highly enraged,” says Speer, “and expressed himself very strongly

about Goering. He said he had known for some time that Goering had failed, that

he was corrupt and a drug addict”—a statement which “extremely shook” the

young architect, since he wondered why Hitler had employed such a man in so

high a post so long. Speer was also puzzled when Hitler calmed down and

added, “Well, let Goering negotiate the capitulation all the same. It doesn’t

matter anyway who does it.” 16 But this mood lasted only a few moments.

Before the discussion was finished, Hitler, prompted by Bormann, dictated a

telegram informing Goering that he had committed “high treason,” for which the

penalty was death, but that because of his long service to the Nazi Party and

State his life would be spared if he immediately resigned all his offices. He was

ordered to answer with one word: Yes or No. This did not satisfy the wormlike

Bormann. On his own hook he got off a radiogram to the S.S. headquarters in

Berchtesgaden ordering the immediate arrest of Goering, his staff and Lammers

for “high treason.” Before dawn the next day the Number Two man of the Third

Reich, the most arrogant—and opulent—of the Nazi princes, the only Reich

Marshal in German history and the Commander in Chief of the Air Force, found

himself a prisoner of the S.S.

Three days later, on the evening of April 26, Hitler expressed himself even

more strongly on the subject of Goering than he had in the presence of Speer.

THE LAST TWO VISITORS TO THE BUNKER

Two more interesting visitors had meanwhile arrived in the madhouse of the

Fuehrer’s bunker: Hanna Reitsch, the crack woman test pilot who, among other

qualities, had a capacity for monumental hatred, especially of Goering, and

General Ritter von Greim, who on April 24 had been summoned from Munich to

appear personally before the Supreme Warlord and had done so, though the

plane in which he and Reitsch flew the last lap on the evening of the twenty-

sixth had been torn over the Tiergarten by Russian antiaircraft shells and

Greim’s foot had been shattered.

Hitler came into the surgery, where a physician was dressing the general’s

wound.

HITLER: Do you know why I have called you?

GREIM: No, my Fuehrer.

HITLER: Because Hermann Goering has betrayed and deserted both me and his

Fatherland. Behind my back he has established contact with the enemy. His action was a mark

of cowardice. Against my orders he has gone to save himself at Berchtesgaden. From there he

sent me a disrespectful telegram. It was …

At this point, says Hanna Reitsch, who was present, the Fuehrer’s face began

to twitch and his breath came in explosive puffs.

HITLER: … an ultimatum! A crass ultimatum! Now nothing remains. Nothing is spared

me. No allegiances are kept, no honor lived up to, no disappointments that I have not had, no

betrayals that I have not experienced, and now this above all else! Nothing remains. Every

wrong has already been done me.

I immediately had Goering arrested as a traitor to the Reich, took from him all his offices,

and removed him from all organizations. That is why I have called you.17

Then and there he named the startled General lying wounded on his cot the

new Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe—a promotion he could have made by

radio, which would have spared Greim a crippled foot and left him at

headquarters, the only place from which what was left of the Air Force could be

directed. Three days later Hitler ordered Greim, who by now, like Fräulein

Reitsch, expected and indeed desired to die in the bunker at the side of the

Leader, to depart in order to deal with a new case of “treachery.” For “treason,”

as we have seen, was not confined among the leaders of the Third Reich to

Hermann Goering.

During those three days Hanna Reitsch had ample opportunity to observe the

lunatic life in the underground madhouse—indeed, she participated in it. Since

she was as emotionally unstable as her distinguished host, the account she has

left of it is lurid and melodramatic, and yet it is probably largely true and even

fairly accurate, for it has been checked against other eyewitness reports, and is

thus of importance for the closing chapter of this history.

Late on the night of her arrival with General von Greim—it was April 26—

Russian shells began falling on the Chancellery and the thud of the explosions

and the sound of crashing walls above increased the tension in the bunker. Hitler

took the aviatrix aside.

“My Fuehrer, why do you stay?” she said. “Why do you deprive Germany of

your life? … The Fuehrer must live so that Germany can live. The people

demand it.”

“No, Hanna,” she says the Fuehrer replied. “If I die it is for the honor of our

country, it is because as a soldier I must obey my own command that I would

defend Berlin to the last.”

My dear girl [he continued], I did not intend it so. I believed firmly that Berlin would be

saved on the banks of the Oder … When our best efforts failed I was the most horror-struck of

all. Then when the encirclement of the city began … I believed that by staying all the troops of

the land would take example from my act and come to the rescue of the city … But, my

Hanna, I still have hope. The army of General Wenck is moving up from the south. He must

and will drive the Russians back long enough to save our people. Then we will fall back to

hold again.18

That was one mood of Hitler that evening; he still had hope in General

Wenck’s relieving Berlin. But a few moments later, as the Russian bombardment

of the Chancellery reached great intensity, he was in despair again. He handed

Reitsch a vial of poison for herself and one for Greim.

“Hanna,” he said, “you belong to those who will die with me … I do not wish

that one of us falls to the Russians alive, nor do I wish our bodies to be found by

them … Eva and I will have our bodies burned. You will devise your own

method.”

Hanna took the vial of poison to Greim and they decided that “should the end

really come” they would swallow the poison and then, to make sure, pull a pin

from a heavy grenade and hold it tightly to their bodies.

A day and a half later, on the twenty-eighth, Hitler’s hopes seem to have risen

again—or at least his delusions. He radioed Keitel:

“I expect the relief of Berlin. What is Heinrici’s army doing? Where is

Wenck? What is happening to the Ninth Army? When will Wenck and Ninth

Army join?” 19

Reitsch describes the Supreme Warlord that day, striding

about the shelter, waving a road map that was fast disintegrating from the sweat of his

hands and planning Wenck’s campaign with anyone who happened to be listening.

But Wenck’s “campaign,” like the Steiner “attack” of a week before, existed

only in the Fuehrer’s imagination. Wenck’s army had already been liquidated, as

had the Ninth Army. Heinrici’s army, to the north of Berlin, was beating a hasty

retreat westward so that it might be captured by the Western Allies instead of by

the Russians.

All through April 28 the desperate men in the bunker waited for news of the

counterattacks of these three armies, especially that of Wenck. Russian

spearheads were now but a few blocks from the Chancellery and advancing

slowly toward it up several streets from the east and north and through the

nearby Tiergarten from the west. When no news of the relieving forces came,

Hitler, prompted by Bormann, began to expect new treacheries. At 8 P.M.

Bormann got out a radiogram to Doenitz.

Instead of urging the troops forward to our rescue, the men in authority are silent.

Treachery seems to have replaced loyalty! We remain here. The Chancellery is already in

ruins.

Later that night Bormann sent another message to Doenitz.

Schoerner, Wenck and others must prove their loyalty to the Fuehrer by coming to the

Fuehrer’s aid as soon as possible.20

Bormann was now speaking for himself. Hitler had made up his mind to die in

a day or two, but Bormann wanted to live. He might not succeed the Fuehrer but

he wanted to continue to pull the strings behind the scenes for whoever did.

Finally, that night Admiral Voss got out a message to Doenitz saying that all

radio connection with the Army had broken down and urgently requesting the

Navy to send over the naval wave length some news of what was happening in

the outside world. Very shortly some news came, not from the Navy but from

the listening post in the Propaganda Ministry, and it was shattering for Adolf

Hitler.

Besides Bormann there was another Nazi official in the bunker who wanted to

live. This was Hermann Fegelein, Himmler’s representative at court and typical

of the type of German who rose to prominence under Hitler’s rule. A former

groom and then a jockey and quite illiterate, he was a protégé of the notorious

Christian Weber, one of Hitler’s oldest party cronies and himself a horse fancier,

who by fraudulence had amassed a fortune and a great racing stable after 1933.

Fegelein, with Weber’s help, had climbed quite high in the Third Reich. He was

a general in the Waffen S.S. and in 1944, shortly after being appointed

Himmler’s liaison officer at Fuehrer headquarters, he had further advanced his

position at court by marrying Eva Braun’s sister, Gretl. All the surviving S.S.

chiefs agree that, in alliance with Bormann, Fegelein lost no time in betraying

his own S.S. chief, Himmler, to Hitler. But disreputable, illiterate and ignorant

though he was, Fegelein seems to have been possessed of a simon-pure instinct

for survival. He knew a sinking ship when he saw one.

On April 26 he quietly left the bunker. By the next afternoon Hitler had

noticed his disappearance. The Fuehrer’s easily aroused suspicions were kindled

and he sent out an armed S.S. search party to try to find the man. He was found,

in civilian clothes, resting in his home in the Charlottenburg district, which the

Russians were about to overrun. Brought back to the Chancellery, he was

stripped of his S.S. rank of Obergruppenfuehrer and placed under arrest.

Fegelein’s attempt at desertion made Hitler immediately suspicious of Himmler.

What was the S.S. chief up to, now that he had deliberately absented himself

from Berlin? There had been no news since his liaison officer, Fegelein, had quit

his post. It now came.

April 28, as we have seen, had been a trying day in the bunker. The Russians

were getting close. The expected news of Wenck’s counter attack, or of any

counterattack, had not come through. Desperately the besieged had asked,

through the Navy’s radio, for news of developments outside the encircled city.

The radio listening post of the Propaganda Ministry had picked up from a

broadcast of the BBC in London one piece of news of what was happening

outside Berlin. It was a Reuter dispatch from Stockholm and it was so

sensational, so incredible, that one of Goebbels’ assistants, Heinz Lorenz, had

scampered across the shell-torn square late on the evening of April 28 to the

bunker with copies of it for his Minister and for the Fuehrer.

The dispatch, says Reitsch, struck “a deathblow to the entire assembly. Men

and women alike screamed with rage, fear and desperation, all mixed into one

emotional spasm.” Hitler’s spasm was the worst. “He raged,” says the aviatrix,

“like a madman.”

Heinrich Himmler— der treue Heinrich—had also deserted the sinking ship of

state. The Reuter dispatch told of his secret negotiations with Count Bernadotte

and his offer to surrender the German armies in the West to Eisenhower.

To Hitler, who had never doubted Himmler’s absolute loyalty, this was the

heaviest blow of all. “His color,” says Reitsch, “rose to a heated red and his face

was virtually unrecognizable … After the lengthy outburst Hitler sank into a

stupor and for a time the entire bunker was silent.” Goering at least had asked

the Leader’s permission to take over. But the “treue” S.S. chief and

Reichsfuehrer had not bothered to ask; he had treasonably contacted the enemy

without saying a word. This, Hitler told his followers when he had somewhat

recovered, was the worst act of treachery he had ever known.

This blow—coupled with the news received a few minutes later that the

Russians were nearing the Potsdamerplatz, but a block away, and would

probably storm the Chancellery on the morning of April 30, thirty hours hence—

was the signal for the end. It forced Hitler to make immediately the last

decisions of his life. By dawn he had married Eva Braun, drawn up his last will

and testament, dispatched Greim and Hanna Reitsch to rally the Luftwaffe for an

all-out bombing of the Russian forces approaching the Chancellery, and ordered

them also to arrest Himmler as a traitor.

“A traitor must never succeed me as Fuehrer!” Hanna says he told them. “You

must get out to insure that he will not.”

Hitler could not wait to begin his revenge against Himmler. He had the S.S.

chief’s liaison man, Fegelein, in his hands. The former jockey and present S.S.

General was now brought out of the guardhouse, closely questioned as to

Himmler’s “betrayal,” accused of having been an accomplice in it, and on the

Fuehrer’s orders taken up to the Chancellery garden and shot. The fact that

Fegelein was married to Eva Braun’s sister did not help him. Eva made no effort

to save her brother-in-law’s life.

“Poor, poor Adolf,” she whimpered to Hanna Reitsch, “deserted by everyone,

betrayed by all. Better that ten thousand others die than that he be lost to

Germany.”

He was lost to Germany but in those final hours he was won by Eva Braun.

Sometime between 1 A.M. and 3 A.M. on April 29, as a crowning award for her

loyalty to the end, he accorded his mistress’s wish and formally married her. He

had always said that marriage would interfere with his complete dedication to

leading first his party to power and then his nation to the heights. Now that there

was no more leading to do and his life was at an end, he could safely enter into a

marriage which could last only a few hours.

Goebbels rounded up a municipal councilor, one Walter Wagner, who was

fighting in a unit of the Volkssturm not many blocks away, and this surprised

official performed the ceremony in the small conference room of the bunker.

The marriage document survives and gives part of the picture of what one of the

Fuehrer’s secretaries described as the “death marriage.” Hitler asked that “in

view of war developments the publication of the banns be done orally and all

other delays be avoided.” The bride- and groom-to-be swore they were “of

complete Aryan descent” and had “no hereditary disease to exclude their

marriage.” On the eve of death the dictator insisted on sticking to form. Only in

the spaces given to the name of his father (born Schicklgruber) and his mother

and the date of their marriage did Hitler leave a blank. His bride started to sign

her name “Eva Braun,” but stopped, crossed out the “B” and wrote “Eva Hitler,

born Braun.” Goebbels and Bormann signed as witnesses.

After the brief ceremony there was a macabre wedding breakfast in the

Fuehrer’s private apartment. Champagne was brought out and even Fräulein

Manzialy, Hitler’s vegetarian cook, was invited, along with his secretaries, the

remaining generals, Krebs and Burgdorf, Bormann and Dr. and Frau Goebbels,

to share in the wedding celebration. For a time the talk gravitated to the good old

times and the party comrades of better days. Hitler spoke fondly of the occasion

on which he had been best man at the Goebbels wedding. As was his custom,

even to the very last, the bridegroom talked on and on, reviewing the high points

in his dramatic life. Now it was ended, he said, and so was National Socialism. It

would be a release for him to die, since he had been betrayed by his oldest

friends and supporters. The wedding party was plunged into gloom and some of

the guests stole away in tears. Hitler finally slipped away himself. In an

adjoining room he summoned one of his secretaries, Frau Gertrude Junge, and

began to dictate his last will and testament.

HITLER’S LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT

These two documents survive, as Hitler meant them to, and like others of his

papers they are significant to this narrative. They confirm that the man who had

ruled over Germany with an iron hand for more than twelve years, and over most

of Europe for four, had learned nothing from his experience; not even his

reverses and shattering final failure had taught him anything. Indeed, in the last

hours of his life he reverted to the young man he had been in the gutter days in

Vienna and in the early rowdy beer hall period in Munich, cursing the Jews for

all the ills of the world, spinning his half-baked theories about the universe, and

whining that fate once more had cheated Germany of victory and conquest. In

this valedictory to the German nation and to the world which was also meant to

be a last, conclusive appeal to history, Adolf Hitler dredged up all the empty

claptrap of Mein Kampf and added his final falsehoods. It was a fitting epitaph of

a power-drunk tyrant whom absolute power had corrupted absolutely and

destroyed.

The “Political Testament,” as he called it, was divided into two parts, the first

consisting of his appeal to posterity, the second of his specific directions for the

future.

More than thirty years have passed since I made my modest contribution as a volunteer in

the First World War, which was forced upon the Reich.

In these three decades, love and loyalty to my people alone have guided me in all my

thoughts, actions and life. They gave me power to make the most difficult decisions which

have ever confronted mortal man …

It is untrue that I or anybody else in Germany wanted war in 1939. It was wanted and

provoked exclusively by those international statesmen who either were of Jewish origin or

worked for Jewish interests.

I have made too many offers for the limitation and control of armaments, which posterity

will not for all time be able to disregard, for responsibility for the outbreak of this war to be

placed on me. Further, I have never wished that after the appalling First World War there

should be a second one against either England or America. Centuries will go by, but from the

ruins of our towns and monuments the hatred of those ultimately responsible will always grow

anew. They are the people whom we have to thank for all this: international Jewry and its

helpers.

Hitler then repeated the lie that three days before the attack on Poland he had

proposed to the British government a reasonable solution of the Polish–German

problem.

It was rejected only because the ruling clique in England wanted war, partly for

commercial reasons, partly because it was influenced by propaganda put out by the

international Jewry.

Next he placed “sole responsibility” not only for the millions of deaths

suffered on the battlefields and in the bombed cities but for his own massacre of

the Jews—on the Jews. Then he turned to the reasons for his decision to remain

in Berlin to the last.

After six years of war, which in spite of all setbacks will one day go down in history as the

most glorious and heroic manifestation of the struggle for existence of a nation, I cannot

forsake the city that is the capital of this state … I wish to share my fate with that which

millions of others have also taken upon themselves by staying in this town. Further, I shall not

fall in the hands of the enemy, who requires a new spectacle, presented by the Jews, to divert

their hysterical masses.

I have therefore decided to remain in Berlin and there to choose death voluntarily at that

moment when I believe that the position of the Fuehrer and the Chancellery itself can no

longer be maintained. I die with a joyful heart in my knowledge of the immeasurable deeds

and achievements of our peasants and workers and of a contribution unique in history of our

youth which bears my name.

There followed an exhortation to all Germans “not to give up the struggle.”

He had finally forced himself to recognize, though, that National Socialism was

finished for the moment, but he assured his fellow Germans that from the

sacrifices of the soldiers and of himself

the seed has been sown that will grow one day … to the glorious rebirth of the National

Socialist movement of a truly united nation.

Hitler could not die without first hurling one last insult at the Army and

especially at its officer corps, whom he held chiefly responsible for the disaster.

Though he confessed that Nazism was dead, at least for the moment, he

nevertheless adjured the commanders of the three armed services

to strengthen with every possible means the spirit of resistance of our soldiers in the National

Socialist belief, with special emphasis on the fact that I myself, as the founder and creator of

this movement, prefer death to cowardly resignation or even to capitulation.

Then the jibe at the Army officer caste:

May it be in the future a point of honor with the German Army officers, as it already is in

our Navy, that the surrender of a district or town is out of the question and that, above

everything else, the commanders must set a shining example of faithful devotion to duty unto

death.

It was Hitler’s insistence that “a district or town” must be held “unto death,”

as at Stalingrad, which had helped bring about military disaster. But in this, as in

other things, he had learned nothing.

The second part of the Political Testament dealt with the question of

succession. Though the Third Reich was going up in flames and explosions,

Hitler could not bear to die without naming his successor and dictating the exact

composition of the government which that successor must appoint. First he had

to eliminate his would-be successors.

Before my death, I expel former Reich Marshal Hermann Goering from the party and

withdraw from him all the rights that were conferred on him by the decree of June 20, 1941 …

In his place I appoint Admiral Doenitz as President of the Reich and Supreme Commander of

the Armed Forces.

Before my death, I expel the former Reichsfuehrer of the S.S. and the Minister of Interior

Heinrich Himmler from the party and from all his state offices.

The leaders of the Army, the Air Force and the S.S., he believed, had betrayed

him, had cheated him of victory. So his only possible choice of successor had to

be the leader of the Navy, which had been too small to play a major role in

Hitler’s war of conquest. This was a final jibe at the Army, which had done most

of the fighting and lost most of the men killed in the war. There was also a last

parting denunciation of the two men who had been, with Goebbels, his most

intimate collaborators since the early days of the party.

Apart altogether from their disloyalty to me, Goering and Himmler have brought

irreparable shame on the whole nation by secretly negotiating with the enemy without my

knowledge and against my will, and also by illegally attempting to seize control of the State.

Having expelled the traitors and named his successor, Hitler then proceeded to

tell Doenitz whom he must have in his new government. They were all

“honorable men,” he said, “who will fulfill the task of continuing the war with

all means.” Goebbels was to be the Chancellor and Bormann the “Party

Minister”—a new post. Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian quisling and, most recently,

the butcher governor of Holland, was to be Foreign Minister. Speer, like

Ribbentrop, was dropped. But Count Schwerin von Krosigk, who had been

Minister of Finance continuously since his appointment by Papen in 1932, was

to retain that post. This man was a fool, but it must be admitted that he had a

genius for survival.

Hitler not only named his successor’s government. He imparted one last

typical directive to it.

Above all, I enjoin the government and the people to uphold the racial laws to the limit and

to resist mercilessly the poisoner of all nations, international Jewry. 21

With that the Supreme German Warlord was finished. The time was now 4

A.M. on Sunday, April 29. Hitler called in Goebbels, Bormann and Generals

Krebs and Burgdorf to witness his signing of the document, and to affix their

own signatures. He then quickly dictated his personal will. In this the Man of

Destiny reverted to his lower-middle-class origins in Austria, explaining why he

had married and why he and his bride were killing themselves, and disposing of

his property, which he hoped would be enough to support his surviving relatives

in a modest way. At least Hitler had not used his power to amass a vast private

fortune, as had Goering.

Although during the years of struggle I believed that I could not undertake the

responsibility of marriage, now, before the end of my life, I have decided to take as my wife

the woman who, after many years of true friendship, came to this city, already almost

besieged, of her own free will in order to share my fate.

She will go to her death with me at her own wish as my wife. This will compensate us both

for what we lost through my work in the service of my people.

My possessions, insofar as they are worth anything, belong to the party, or, if this no longer

exists, to the State. If the State too is destroyed, there is no need for any further instructions on

my part. The paintings in the collections bought by me during the years were never assembled

for private purposes but solely for the establishment of a picture gallery in my home town of

Linz on the Danube.

Bormann, as executor, was asked

to hand over to my relatives everything that is of value as a personal memento or is necessary

for maintaining a petty-bourgeois [ kleinen bürgerlichen] standard of living …*

My wife and I choose to die in order to escape the shame of overthrow or capitulation. It is

our wish that our bodies be burned immediately in the place where I have performed the

greater part of my daily work during the twelve years of service to my people.

Exhausted by the dictation of his farewell messages, Hitler went to bed as

dawn was breaking over Berlin on this last Sabbath of his life. A pall of smoke

hung over the city. Buildings crashed in flames as the Russians fired their

artillery at point-blank range. They were now not far from the Wilhelmstrasse

and the Chancellery.

While Hitler slept, Goebbels and Bormann made haste. In his Political

Testament, which they had signed as witnesses, the Fuehrer had specifically

ordered them to leave the capital and join the new government. Bormann was

more than willing to obey. For all his devotion to the Leader, he did not intend to

share his death, if he could avoid it. The only thing in life he wanted was power

behind the scenes, and Doenitz might still offer him this. That is, if Goering, on

learning of the Fuehrer’s death, did not try to usurp the throne. To make sure that

he did not, Bormann now got out a radio message to the S.S. headquarters at

Berchtesgaden.

… If Berlin and we should fall, the traitors of April 23 must be exterminated. Men, do your

duty! Your life and honor depend on it!22

This was an order to murder Goering and his Air Force staff, whom Bormann

had already placed under S.S. arrest.

Dr. Goebbels, like Eva Braun but unlike Bormann, had no desire to live in a

Germany from which his revered Fuehrer had departed. He had hitched his star

to Hitler, to whom alone he owed his sensational rise in life. He had been the

chief prophet and propagandist of the Nazi movement. It was he who, next to

Hitler, had created its myths. To perpetuate those myths not only the Leader but

his most loyal follower, the only one of the Old Guard who had not betrayed

him, must die a sacrificial death. He too must give an example that would be

remembered down the ages and help one day to rekindle the fires of National

Socialism.

Such seem to have been his thoughts when, after Hitler retired, Goebbels

repaired to his little room in the bunker to write his own valedictory to present

and future generations. He entitled it “Appendix to the Fuehrer’s Political

Testament.”

The Fuehrer has ordered me to leave Berlin … and take part as a leading member in the

government appointed by him.

For the first time in my life I must categorically refuse to obey an order of the Fuehrer. My

wife and children join me in this refusal. Apart from the fact that feelings of humanity and

personal loyalty forbid us to abandon the Fuehrer in his hour of greatest need, I would

otherwise appear for the rest of my life as a dishonorable traitor and a common scoundrel and

would lose my self-respect as well as the respect of my fellow citizens …

In the nightmare of treason which surrounds the Fuehrer in these most critical days of the

war, there must be someone at least who will stay with him unconditionally until death …

I believe I am thereby doing the best service to the future of the German people. In the hard

times to come, examples will be more important than men …

For this reason, together with my wife, and on behalf of my children, who are too young to

be able to speak for themselves and who, if they were old enough, would unreservedly agree

with this decision, I express my unalterable resolution not to leave the Reich capital, even if it

falls, but rather, at the side of the Fuehrer, to end a life that for me personally will have no

further value if I cannot spend it at the service of the Fuehrer and at his side.23

Dr. Goebbels finished writing his piece at half past five on the morning of

April 29. Daylight was breaking over Berlin, but the sun was obscured by the

smoke of battle. In the electric light of the bunker much remained to be done.

The first consideration was how to get the Fuehrer’s last will and testament out

through the nearby Russian lines so that it could be delivered to Doenitz and

others and preserved for posterity.

Three messengers were chosen to take copies of the precious documents out:

Major Willi Johannmeier, Hitler’s military adjutant; Wilhelm Zander, an S.S.

officer and adviser to Bormann; and Heinz Lorenz, the Propaganda Ministry

official who had brought the shattering news of Himmler’s treachery the night

before. Johannmeier, a much decorated officer, was to lead the party through the

Red Army’s lines. He himself was then to deliver his copy of the papers to Field

Marshal Ferdinand Schoerner, whose army group still held out intact in the

Bohemian mountains and whom Hitler had named as the new Commander in

Chief of the Army. General Burgdorf enclosed a covering letter informing

Schoerner that Hitler had written his Testament “today under the shattering news

of Himmler’s treachery, It is his unalterable decision.” Zander and Lorenz were

to take their copies to Doenitz. Zander was given a covering note from Bormann.

DEAR GRAND ADMIRAL:

Since all divisions have failed to arrive and our position seems hopeless, the Fuehrer

dictated last night the attached political Testament. Heil Hitler.

The three messengers set out on their dangerous mission at noon, edging their

way westward through the Tiergarten and Charlottenburg to Pichelsdorf at the

head of the Havel lake, where a Hitler Youth battalion held the bridge in

anticipation of the arrival of Wenck’s ghost army. To get that far they had

successfully slipped through three Russian rings; at the Victory Column in the

middle of the Tiergarten, at the Zoo Station just beyond the park, and on the

approaches to Pichelsdorf. They still had many other lines to penetrate, and

much adventure lay ahead of them, * and though they eventually got through it

was much too late for their messages to be of any use to Doenitz and Schoerner,

who never saw them.

The three messengers were not the only persons to depart from the bunker that

day. At noon on April 29, Hitler, who had now been restored to a period of calm,

held his customary war conference to discuss the military situation, just as he

had daily at this hour for nearly six years—and just as if the end of the road had

not been reached. General Krebs reported that the Russians had advanced farther

toward the Chancellery during the night and early morning. The supply of

ammunition of the city’s defenders, such as they were, was getting low. There

was still no news from Wenck’s rescue army. Three military adjutants, who now

found little to do and who did not want to join the Leader in self-inflicted death,

asked if they could leave the bunker in order to try to find out what had

happened to Wenck. Hitler granted them permission and instructed them to urge

General Wenck to get a move on. During the afternoon the three officers left.

They were soon joined by a fourth, Colonel Nicolaus von Below, Hitler’s

Luftwaffe adjutant, who had been a junior member of the inner circle since the

beginning of the war. Below too did not believe in suicide and felt that there was

no longer any useful employment in the Chancellery shelter. He asked the

permission of the Fuehrer to leave and it was granted. Hitler was being most

reasonable this day. It also occurred to him that he could utilize the Air Force

colonel to carry out one last message. This was to be to General Keitel, whom

Bormann already suspected of treason, and it would contain the warlord’s final

blast at the Army, which, he felt, had let him down.

No doubt the news at the evening situation conference at 10 P.M. increased the

Fuehrer’s already monumental bitterness at the Army. General Weidling, who

commanded the courageous but ragged overage Volkssturm and underage Hitler

Youth troops being sacrificed in encircled Berlin to prolong Hitler’s life a few

days, reported that the Russians had pushed ahead along the Saarlandstrasse and

the Wilhelmstrasse almost to the Air Ministry, which was only a stone’s throw

from the Chancellery. The enemy would reach the Chancellery, he said, by May

1 at the latest—in a day or two, that is.

This was the end. Even Hitler, who up until now had been directing

nonexistent armies supposed to be coming to the relief of the capital, saw that—

at last. He dictated his final message and asked Below to deliver it to Keitel. He

informed his Chief of OKW that the defense of Berlin was now at an end, that he

was killing himself rather than surrender, that Goering and Himmler had

betrayed him, and that he had named Admiral Doenitz as his successor.

He had one last word to say about the armed forces which, despite his

leadership, had brought Germany to defeat. The Navy, he said, had performed

superbly. The Luftwaffe had fought bravely and only Goering was responsible

for its losing its initial supremacy in the war. As for the Army, the common

soldiers had fought well and courageously, but the generals had failed them—

and him.

The people and the armed forces [he continued] have given their all in this long and hard

struggle. The sacrifice has been enormous. But my trust has been misused by many people.

Disloyalty and betrayal have undermined resistance throughout the war.

It was therefore not granted to me to lead the people to victory. The Army General Staff

cannot be compared with the General Staff in the First World War. Its achievements were far

behind those of the fighting front.

At least the Supreme Nazi Warlord was remaining true to character to the very

end. The great victories had been due to him. The defeats and final failure had

been due to others—to their “disloyalty and betrayal.”

And then the parting valediction—the last recorded written words of this mad

genius’s life.

The efforts and sacrifices of the German people in this war have been so great that I cannot

believe that they have been in vain. The aim must still be to win territory in the East for the

German people. *

The last sentence was straight out of Mein Kampf. Hitler had begun his

political life with the obsession that “territory in the East” must be won for the

favored German people, and he was ending his life with it. All the millions of

German dead, all the millions of German homes crushed under the bombs, even

the destruction of the German nation had not convinced him that the robbing of

the lands of the Slavic peoples to the East was—morals aside—a futile Teutonic

dream.

THE DEATH OF HITLER AND HIS BRIDE

During the afternoon of April 29 one of the last pieces of news to reach the

bunker from the outside world came in. Mussolini, Hitler’s fellow fascist

dictator and partner in aggression, had met his end and it had been shared by his

mistress, Clara Petacci.

They had been caught by Italian partisans on April 27 while trying to escape

from Como into Switzerland, and executed two days later. On the Saturday night

of April 28 the bodies were brought to Milan in a truck and dumped on the

piazza. The next day they were strung up by the heels from lampposts and later

cut down so that throughout the rest of the Sabbath day they lay in the gutter,

where vengeful Italians reviled them. On May Day Benito Mussolini was buried

beside his mistress in the paupers’ plot in the Cimitero Maggiore in Milan. In

such a macabre climax of degradation II Duce and Fascism passed into history.

It is not known how many of the details of the Duce’s shabby end were

communicated to the Fuehrer. One can only speculate that if he heard many of

them he was only strengthened in his resolve not to allow himself or his bride to

be made a “spectacle, presented by the Jews, to divert their hysterical

masses,”—as he had just written in his Testament—not their live selves or their

bodies.

Shortly after receiving the news of Mussolini’s death Hitler began to make the

final preparations for his. He had his favorite Alsatian dog, Blondi, poisoned and

two other dogs in the household shot. Then he called in his two remaining

women secretaries and handed them capsules of poison to use if they wished to

when the barbarian Russians broke in. He was sorry, he said, not to be able to

give them a better farewell gift, and he expressed his appreciation for their long

and loyal service.

Evening had now come, the last of Adolf Hitler’s life. He instructed Frau

Junge, one of his secretaries, to destroy the remaining papers in his files and he

sent out word that no one in the bunker was to go to bed until further orders.

This was interpreted by all as meaning that he judged the time had come to make

his farewells. But it was not until long after midnight, at about 2:30 A.M. of April

30, as several witnesses recall, that the Fuehrer emerged from his private

quarters and appeared in the general dining passage, where some twenty persons,

mostly the women members of his entourage, were assembled. He walked down

the line shaking hands with each and mumbling a few words that were inaudible.

There was a heavy film of moisture on his eyes and, as Frau Junge remembered,

“they seemed to be looking far away, beyond the walls of the bunker.”

After he retired, a curious thing happened. The tension which had been

building up to an almost unendurable point in the bunker broke, and several

persons went to the canteen—to dance. The weird party soon became so noisy

that word was sent from the Fuehrer’s quarters requesting more quiet. The

Russians might come in a few hours and kill them all—though most of them

were already thinking of how they could escape—but in the meantime for a brief

spell, now that the Fuehrer’s strict control of their lives was over, they would

seek pleasure where and how they could find it. The sense of relief among these

people seems to have been enormous and they danced on through the night.

Not Bormann. This murky man still had work to do. His own prospects for

survival seemed to be diminishing. There might not be a long enough interval

between the Fuehrer’s death and the arrival of the Russians in which he could

escape to Doenitz. If not, while the Fuehrer still lived and thus clothed his orders

with authority, Bormann could at least exact further revenge on the “traitors.” He

dispatched during this last night a further message to Doenitz.

DOENITZ!

Our impression grows daily stronger that the divisions in the Berlin theater have been

standing idle for several days. All the reports we receive are controlled, suppressed, or

distorted by Keitel … The Fuehrer orders you to proceed at once, and mercilessly, against all

traitors.

And then, though he knew that Hitler’s death was only hours away, he added a

postscript, “The Fuehrer is alive, and is conducting the defense of Berlin.”

But Berlin was no longer defensible. The Russians already had occupied

almost all of the city. It was now merely a question of the defense of the

Chancellery. It too was doomed, as Hitler and Bormann learned at the situation

conference at noon on April 30, the last that was ever to take place. The

Russians had reached the eastern end of the Tiergarten and broken into the

Potsdamerplatz. They were just a block away. The hour for Adolf Hitler to carry

out his resolve had come.

His bride apparently had no appetite for lunch that day and Hitler took his

repast with his two secretaries and with his vegetarian cook, who perhaps did not

realize that she had prepared his last meal. While they were finishing their lunch

at about 2:30 P.M., Erich Kempka, the Fuehrer’s chauffeur, who was in charge of

the Chancellery garage, received an order to deliver immediately 200 liters of

gasoline in jerricans to the Chancellery garden. Kempka had some difficulty in

rounding up so much fuel but he managed to collect some 180 liters and with the

help of three men carried it to the emergency exit of the bunker.24

While the oil to provide the fire for the Viking funeral was being collected,

Hitler, having done with his last meal, fetched Eva Braun for another and final

farewell to his most intimate collaborators: Dr. Goebbels, Generals Krebs and

Burgdorf, the secretaries and Fräulein Manzialy, the cook. Frau Goebbels did not

appear. This formidable and beautiful blond woman had, like Eva Braun, found

it easy to make the decision to die with her husband, but the prospect of killing

her six young children, who had been playing merrily in the underground shelter

these last days without an inkling of what was in store for them, unnerved her.

“My dear Hanna,” she had said to Fräulein Reitsch two or three evenings

before, “when the end comes you must help me if I become weak about the

children … They belong to the Third Reich and to the Fuehrer, and if these two

cease to exist there can be no further place for them. My greatest fear is that at

the last moment I will be too weak.” Alone in her little room she was now

striving to overcome her greatest fear. *

Hitler and Eva Braun had no such problem. They had only their own lives to

take. They finished their farewells and retired to their rooms. Outside in the

passageway, Dr. Goebbels, Bormann and a few others waited. In a few moments

a revolver shot was heard. They waited for a second one, but there was only

silence. After a decent interval they quietly entered the Fuehrer’s quarters. They

found the body of Adolf Hitler sprawled on the sofa dripping blood. He had shot

himself in the mouth. At his side lay Eva Braun. Two revolvers had tumbled to

the floor, but the bride had not used hers. She had swallowed poison.

It was 3:30 P.M. on Monday, April 30, 1945, ten days after Adolf Hitler’s fifty-

sixth birthday, and twelve years and three months to a day since he had become

Chancellor of Germany and had instituted the Third Reich. It would survive him

but a week.

The Viking funeral followed. There were no words spoken; the only sound

was the roar of Russian shells exploding in the garden of the Chancellery and on

the shattered walls around it. Hitler’s valet, S.S. Sturm-bannfuehrer Heinz Linge,

and an orderly carried out the Fuehrer’s body, wrapped in an Army field-gray

blanket, which concealed the shattered face. Kempka identified it in his own

mind by the black trousers and shoes which protruded from the blanket and

which the warlord always wore with his field-gray jacket. Eva Braun’s death had

been cleaner, there was no blood, and Bormann carried out her body just as it

was to the passage, where he turned it over to Kempka.

Frau Hitler [the chauffeur later recounted] wore a dark dress … I could not recognize any

injuries to the body.

The corpses were carried up to the garden and during a lull in the

bombardment placed in a shell hole and ignited with gasoline. The mourners,

headed by Goebbels and Bormann, withdrew to the shelter of the emergency exit

and as the flames mounted stood at attention and raised their right hands in a

farewell Nazi salute. It was a brief ceremony, for Red Army shells began to

spatter the garden again and the survivors retired to the safety of the bunker,

leaving the gasoline-fed flames to complete the work of eradicating the last

earthly remains of Adolf Hitler and his wife. * For Bormann and Goebbels, there

were still tasks to perform in the Third Reich, now bereft of its founder and

dictator, though they were not the same tasks.

There had not yet been time for the messengers to reach Doenitz with the

Fuehrer’s testament appointing him as his successor. The admiral would now

have to be informed by radio. But even at this point, with power slipped from his

hands, Bormann hesitated. It was difficult to one who had savored it to give it up

so abruptly. Finally he got off a message.

GRAND ADMIRAL DOENITZ:

In place of the former Reich Marshal Goering the Fuehrer appoints you as his successor.

Written authority is on its way. You will immediately take all such measures as the situation

requires.

There was not a word that Hitler was dead.

The Admiral, who was in command of all German forces in the north and had

moved his headquarters to Ploen in Schleswig, was flabbergasted at the news.

Unlike the party leaders, he had no desire to succeed Hitler; the thought had

never entered his sailor’s head. Two days before, believing that Himmler would

inherit the succession, he had gone to the S.S. chief and offered him his support.

But since it would never have occurred to him to disobey an order of the

Fuehrer, he sent the following reply, in the belief that Adolf Hitler was still

alive.

MY FUEHRER!

My loyalty to you will be unconditional. I shall do everything possible to relieve you in

Berlin. If fate nevertheless compels me to rule the Reich as your appointed successor, I shall

continue this war to an end worthy of the unique, heroic struggle of the German people.

GRAND ADMIRAL DOENITZ

That night Bormann and Goebbels had a fresh idea. They decided to try to

negotiate with the Russians. General Krebs, the Chief of the Army General Staff,

who had remained in the bunker, had once been the assistant military attaché in

Moscow, spoke Russian, and on one famous occasion had even been embraced

by Stalin at the Moscow railway station. Perhaps he could get something out of

the Bolsheviks; specifically, what Goebbels and Bormann wanted was a safe-

conduct for themselves so that they could take their appointed places in the new

Doenitz government. In return for this they were prepared to surrender Berlin.

General Krebs set out shortly after midnight of April 30-May 1 to see General

Chuikov, * the Soviet commander of the troops fighting in Berlin. One of the

German officers accompanying him has recorded the opening of their

conversation.

KREBS: Today is the First of May, a great holiday for our two nations. †

CHUIKOV: We have a great holiday today. How things are with you over there it is hard

to say. 25

The Russian General demanded the unconditional surrender of everyone in the

Fuehrer’s bunker as well as of the remaining German troops in Berlin.

It took Krebs some time to carry out his mission, and when he had not

returned by 11 A.M. on May 1 the impatient Bormann dispatched another radio

message to Doenitz.

The Testament is in force. I will join you as soon as possible. Till then, I

recommend that publication be held up.

This was still ambiguous. Bormann simply could not be straightforward

enough to say that the Fuehrer was dead. He wanted to get out to be the first to

inform Doenitz of the momentous news and thereby help to insure his favor with

the new Commander in Chief. But Goebbels, who with his wife and children

was about to die, had no such reason for not telling the Admiral the simple truth.

At 3:15 P.M. he got off his own message to Doenitz—the last radio

communication ever to leave the beleaguered bunker in Berlin.

GRAND ADMIRAL DOENITZ

MOST SECRET

The Fuehrer died yesterday at 1530 hours [3:30 P.M.]. Testament of April 29 appoints you

as Reich President … [There follow the names of the principal cabinet appointments.]

By order of the Fuehrer the Testament has been sent out of Berlin to you … Bormann

intends to go to you today and to inform you of the situation. Time and form of announcement

to the press and to the troops is left to you. Confirm receipt.

GOEBBELS

Goebbels did not think it necessary to inform the new Leader of his own

intentions. Early in the evening of May 1, he carried them out. The first act was

to poison the six children. Their playing was halted and they were given lethal

injections, apparently by the same physician who the day before had poisoned

the Fuehrer’s dogs. Then Goebbels called his adjutant, S.S. Hauptsturmfuehrer

Guenther Schwaegermann, and instructed him to fetch some gasoline.

“Schwaegermann,” he told him, “this is the worst treachery of all. The

generals have betrayed the Fuehrer. Everything is lost. I shall die, together with

my wife and family.” He did not mention, even to his adjutant, that he had just

had his children murdered. “You will burn our bodies. Can you do that?”

Schwaegermann assured him he could and sent two orderlies to procure the

gasoline. A few minutes later, at about 8:30 P.M., just as it was getting dark

outside, Dr. and Frau Goebbels walked through the bunker, bade goodbye to

those who happened to be in the corridor, and mounted the stairs to the garden.

There, at their request, an S.S. orderly dispatched them with two shots in the

back of the head. Four cans of gasoline were poured over their bodies and set on

fire, but the cremation was not well done.26 The survivors in the bunker were

anxious to join the mass escape which was just getting under way and there was

no time to waste on burning those already dead. The Russians found the charred

bodies of the Propaganda Minister and his wife the next day and immediately

identified them.

By 9 o’clock on the evening of May 1, the Fuehrerbunker had been set on fire

and some five or six hundred survivors of the Fuehrer’s entourage, mostly S.S.

men, were milling about in the shelter of the New Chancellery—like chickens

with their heads off, as one of them, the Fuehrer’s tailor, later recalled—

preparatory to the great breakout. The plan was to go by foot along the subway

tracks from the station below the Wilhelmsplatz, opposite the Chancellery, to the

Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof and there cross the River Spree and sift through the

Russian lines immediately to the north of it. A good many got through; some did

not, among them Martin Bormann.

When General Krebs had finally returned to the bunker that afternoon with

General Chuikov’s demand for unconditional surrender Hitler’s party secretary

had decided that his only chance for survival lay in joining the mass exodus. His

group attempted to follow a German tank, but according to Kempka, who was

with him, it received a direct hit from a Russian shell and Bormann was almost

certainly killed. Artur Axmann, the Hitler Youth leader, who had deserted his

battalion of boys at the Pichelsdorf Bridge to save his neck, was also present and

later deposed that he had seen Bormann’s body lying under the bridge where the

Invalidenstrasse crosses the railroad tracks. There was moonlight on his face and

Axmann could see no sign of wounds. His presumption was that Bormann had

swallowed his capsule of poison when he saw that his chances of getting through

the Russian lines were nil.

Generals Krebs and Burgdorf did not join in the mass attempt to escape. It is

believed that they shot themselves in the cellar of the New Chancellery.

THE END OF THE THIRD REICH

The Third Reich survived the death of its founder by seven days.

A little after 10 o’clock on the evening of the first of May, while the bodies of

Dr. and Frau Goebbels were burning in the Chancellery garden and the

inhabitants of the bunker were herding together for their escape through a

subway tunnel in Berlin, the Hamburg radio interrupted the playing of a

recording of Bruckner’s solemn Seventh Symphony. There was a roll of military

drums and then an announcer spoke.

Our Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism, fell for Germany

this afternoon in his operational headquarters in the Reich Chancellery. On April 30 the

Fuehrer appointed Grand Admiral Doenitz his successor. The Grand Admiral and successor of

the Fuehrer now speaks to the German people.

The Third Reich was expiring, as it had begun, with a shabby lie. Aside from

the fact that Hitler had not died that afternoon but the previous one, which was

not important, he had not fallen fighting “to the last breath,” but the broadcasting

of this falsehood was necessary if the inheritors of his mantle were to perpetuate

a legend and also if they were to hold control of the troops who were still

offering resistance and who would surely have felt betrayed if they had known

the truth.

Doenitz himself repeated the lie when he went on the air at 10:20 P.M. and

spoke of the “hero’s death” of the Fuehrer. Actually at that moment he did not

know how Hitler had met his end. Goebbels had radioed only that he had “died”

on the previous afternoon. But this did not inhibit the Admiral either on this

point or on others, for he did his best to muddy the confused minds of the

German people in the hour of their disaster.

It is my first task [he said] to save Germany from destruction by the advancing Bolshevik

enemy. For this aim alone the military struggle continues. As far and as long as the

achievement of this aim is impeded by the British and Americans, we shall be forced to carry

on our defensive fight against them as well. Under such conditions, however, the Anglo–

Americans will continue the war not for their own peoples but solely for the spreading of

Bolshevism in Europe.

After this silly distortion, the Admiral, who is not recorded as having

protested Hitler’s decision to make the Bolshevik nation Germany’s ally in 1939

so that a war could be fought against England and later America, assured the

German people in concluding his broadcast that “God will not forsake us after so

much suffering and sacrifice.”

These were empty words. Doenitz knew that German resistance was at an end.

On April 29, the day before Hitler took his life, the German armies in Italy had

surrendered unconditionally, an event whose news, because of the breakdown in

communications, was spared the Fuehrer, which must have made his last hours

more bearable than they otherwise would have been. On May 4 the German

High Command surrendered to Montgomery all German forces in northwest

Germany, Denmark and Holland. The next day Kesselring’s Army Group G,

comprising the German First and Nineteenth armies north of the Alps,

capitulated.

On that day, May 5, Admiral Hans von Friedeburg, the new Commander in

Chief of the German Navy, arrived at General Eisenhower’s headquarters at

Reims to negotiate a surrender. The German aim, as the last papers of OKW

make clear, 27 was to stall for a few days in order to have time to move as many

German troops and refugees as possible from the path of the Russians so that

they could surrender to the Western Allies. General Jodl arrived at Reims the

next day to help his Navy colleague draw out the proceedings. But it was in vain.

Eisenhower saw through the game.

I told General Smith [he later recounted] to inform Jodl that unless they instantly ceased all

pretense and delay I would close the entire Allied front and would, by force, prevent any more

German refugees from entering our lines. I would brook no further delay.28

At 1:30 A.M. on May 7 Doenitz, after being informed by Jodl of Eisenhower’s

demands, radioed the German General from his new headquarters at Flensburg

on the Danish frontier full powers to sign the document of unconditional

surrender. The game was up.

In a little red schoolhouse at Reims, where Eisenhower had made his

headquarters, Germany surrendered unconditionally at 2:41 on the morning of

May 7, 1945. The capitulation was signed for the Allies by General Walter

Bedell Smith, with General Ivan Susloparov affixing his signature as witness for

Russia and General François Sevez for France. Admiral Friedeburg and General

Jodl signed for Germany.

Jodl asked permission to say a word and it was granted. 29

With this signature the German people and the German Armed Forces are, for better or

worse, delivered into the hands of the victors … In this hour I can only express the hope that

the victor will treat them with generosity.

There was no response from the Allied side. But perhaps Jodl recalled another

occasion when the roles were reversed just five years before. Then a French

general, in signing France’s unconditional surrender at Compiègne, had made a

similar plea—in vain, as it turned out.

The guns in Europe ceased firing and the bombs ceased dropping at midnight

on May 8–9, 1945, and a strange but welcome silence settled over the Continent

for the first time since September 1, 1939. In the intervening five years, eight

months and seven days millions of men and women had been slaughtered on a

hundred battlefields and in a thousand bombed towns, and millions more done to

death in the Nazi gas chambers or on the edge of the S.S. Einsatzgruppen pits in

Russia and Poland—as the result of Adolf Hitler’s lust for German conquest. A

greater part of most of Europe’s ancient cities lay in ruins, and from their rubble,

as the weather warmed, there was the stench of the countless unburied dead.

No more would the streets of Germany echo to the jack boot of the goose-

stepping storm troopers or the lusty yells of the brown-shirted masses or the

shouts of the Fuehrer blaring from the loudspeakers.

After twelve years, four months and eight days, an Age of Darkness to all but

a multitude of Germans and now ending in a bleak night for them too, the

Thousand-Year Reich had come to an end. It had raised, as we have seen, this

great nation and this resourceful but so easily misled people to heights of power

and conquest they had never before experienced and now it had dissolved with a

suddenness and a completeness that had few, if any, parallels in history.

In 1918, after the last defeat, the Kaiser had fled, the monarchy had tumbled,

but the other traditional institutions supporting the State had remained, a

government chosen by the people had continued to function, as did the nucleus

of a German Army and a General Staff. But in the spring of 1945 the Third

Reich simply ceased to exist. There was no longer any German authority on any

level. The millions of soldiers, airmen and sailors were prisoners of war in their

own land. The millions of civilians were governed, down to the villages, by the

conquering enemy troops, on whom they depended not only for law and order

but throughout that summer and bitter winter of 1945 for food and fuel to keep

them alive. Such was the state to which the follies of Adolf Hitler—and their

own folly in following him so blindly and with so much enthusiasm—had

brought them, though I found little bitterness toward him when I returned to

Germany that fall.

The people were there, and the land—the first dazed and bleeding and hungry,

and, when winter came, shivering in their rags in the hovels which the bombings

had made of their homes; the second a vast wasteland of rubble. The German

people had not been destroyed, as Hitler, who had tried to destroy so many other

peoples and, in the end, when the war was lost, themselves, had wished.

But the Third Reich had passed into history.

* “For all writers of history,” Speer told Trevor-Roper, “Eva Braun is going to be a

disappointment,” to which the historian adds: “—and for readers of history too.” (Trevor-

Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, p. 92.)

* Who these relatives were Hitler did not say, but from what he told his secretaries he had in

mind his sister, Paula, and his mother-in-law.

* Trevor-Roper, in The Last Days of Hitler, has given a graphic account of their adventures.

But for an indiscretion of Heinz Lorenz, the farewell messages of Hitler and Goebbels might

never have become known. Major Johannmeier eventually buried his copy of the documents in

the garden of his home at Iserlohn in Westphalia. Zander hid his copy in a trunk which he left

in the Bavarian village of Tegernsee. Changing his name and assuming a disguise, he

attempted to begin a new life under the name of Wilhelm Paustin. But Lorenz, a journalist by

profession, was too garrulous to keep his secret very well and a chance indiscretion led to the

discovery of his copy and to the exposure of the other two messengers.

* Colonel Below destroyed the message when he learned of Hitler’s death while he was still

making his way toward the Allied Western armies. He has reconstructed it from memory. See

Trevor-Roper, op. cit. , pp. 194–95.

* The children and their ages were: Hela, 12; Hilda, 11; Helmut, 9; Holde, 7; Hedda, 5; Heide,

3.

* The bones were never found, and this gave rise to rumors after the war that Hitler had

survived. But the separate interrogation of several eyewitnesses by British and American

intelligence officers leaves no doubt about the matter. Kempka has given a plausible

explanation as to why the charred bones were never found. “The traces were wiped out,” he

told his interrogators, “by the uninterrupted Russian artillery fire.”

* Not Marshal Zhukov, as most accounts have had it.

† May I was the traditional Labor Day in Europe.

A BRIEF EPILOGUE

I WENT BACK that autumn to the once proud land, where I had spent most of the

brief years of the Third Reich. It was difficult to recognize. I have described that

return in another place.29 It remains here merely to record the fate of the

remaining characters who have figured prominently in these pages.

Doenitz’s rump government, which had been set up at Flensburg on the

Danish border, was dissolved by the Allies on May 23, 1945, and all its

members were arrested. Heinrich Himmler had been dismissed from the

government on May 6, on the eve of the surrender at Reims, in a move which the

Admiral calculated might win him favor with the Allies. The former S.S. chief,

who had held so long the power of life and death over Europe’s millions, and

who had often exercised it, wandered about in the vicinity of Flensburg until

May 21, when he set out with eleven S.S. officers to try to pass through the

British and American lines to his native Bavaria. Himmler—it must have galled

him—had shaved off his mustache, tied a black patch over his left eye and

donned an Army private’s uniform. The party was stopped the first day at a

British control point between Hamburg and Bremerhaven. After questioning,

Himmler confessed his identity to a British Army captain, who hauled him away

to Second Army headquarters at Lueneburg. There he was stripped and searched

and made to change into a British Army uniform to avert any possibility that he

might be concealing poison in his clothes. But the search was not thorough.

Himmler kept his vial of potassium cyanide concealed in a cavity of his gums.

When a second British intelligence officer arrived from Montgomery’s

headquarters on May 23 and instructed a medical officer to examine the

prisoner’s mouth, Himmler bit on his vial and was dead in twelve minutes,

despite frantic efforts to keep him alive by pumping his stomach and

administering emetics.

The remaining intimate collaborators of Hitler lived a bit longer. I went down

to Nuremberg to see them. I had often watched them in their hour of glory and

power at the annual party rallies in this town. In the dock before the International

Military Tribunal they looked different. There had been quite a metamorphosis.

Attired in rather shabby clothes, slumped in their seats fidgeting nervously, they

no longer resembled the arrogant leaders of old. They seemed to be a drab

assortment of mediocrities. It seemed difficult to grasp that such men, when last

you had seen them, had wielded such monstrous power, that such as they could

conquer a great nation and most of Europe.

There were twenty-one of them* in the dock: Goering, eighty pounds lighter

than when last I had seen him, in a faded Luftwaffe uniform without insignia and

obviously pleased that he had been given the Number One place in the dock—a

sort of belated recognition of his place in the Nazi hierarchy now that Hitler was

dead; Rudolf Hess, who had been the Number Three man before his flight to

England, his face now emaciated, his deep-set eyes staring vacantly into space,

feigning amnesia but leaving no doubt that he was a broken man; Ribbentrop, at

last shorn of his arrogance and his pompousness, looking pale, bent and beaten;

Keitel, who had lost his jauntiness; Rosenberg, the muddled party “philosopher,”

whom the events which had brought him to this place appeared to have

awakened to reality at last.

Julius Streicher, the Jew-baiter of Nuremberg, was there. This sadist and

pornographer, whom I had once seen striding through the streets of the old town

brandishing a whip, seemed to have wilted. A bald, decrepit-looking old man, he

sat perspiring profusely, glaring at the judges and convincing himself—so a

guard later told me—that they were all Jews. There was Fritz Sauckel, the boss

of slave labor in the Third Reich, his narrow little slit eyes giving him a porcine

appearance. He seemed nervous, swaying to and fro. Next to him was Baldur

von Schirach, the first Hitler Youth Leader and later Gauleiter of Vienna, more

American by blood than German and looking like a contrite college boy who has

been kicked out of school for some folly. There was Walther Funk, the shifty-

eyed nonentity who had succeeded Schacht. And there was Dr. Schacht himself,

who had spent the last months of the Third Reich as a prisoner of his once

revered Fuehrer in a concentration camp, fearing execution any day, and who

now bristled with indignation that the Allies should try him as a war criminal.

Franz von Papen, more responsible than any other individual in Germany for

Hitler’s coming to power, had been rounded up and made a defendant. He

seemed much aged, but the look of the old fox, who had escaped from so many

tight fixes, was still imprinted on his wizened face.

Neurath, Hitler’s first Foreign Minister, a German of the old school, with few

convictions and little integrity, seemed utterly broken. Not Speer, who made the

most straightforward impression of all and who during the long trial spoke

honestly and with no attempt to shirk his responsibility and his guilt. Seyss-

Inquart, the Austrian quisling, was in the dock, as were Jodl and the two Grand

Admirals, Raeder and Doenitz—the latter, the successor to the Fuehrer, looking

in his store suit for all the world like a shoe clerk. There was Kaltenbrunner, the

bloody successor of “Hangman Heydrich, ” who on the stand would deny all his

crimes; and Hans Frank, the Nazi Inquisitor in Poland, who would admit some

of his, having become in the end contrite and, as he said, having rediscovered

God, whose forgiveness he begged; and Frick, as colorless on the brink of death

as he had been in life. And finally Hans Fritzsche, who had made a career as a

radio commentator because his voice resembled that of Goebbels, who had made

him an official in the Propaganda Ministry. No one in the courtroom, including

Fritzsche, seemed to know why he was there—he was too small a fry—unless it

were as a ghost for Goebbels, and he was acquitted.

So were Schacht and Papen. All three later drew stiff prison sentences from

German denazification courts though, in the end, they served very little time.

Seven defendants at Nuremberg drew prison sentences: Hess, Raeder and

Funk for life, Speer and Schirach for twenty years, Neurath for fifteen, Doenitz

for ten. The others were sentenced to death.

At eleven minutes past 1 A.M. on October 16, 1946, Ribbentrop mounted the

gallows in the execution chamber of the Nuremberg prison, and he was followed

at short intervals by Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher,

Seyss-Inquart, Sauckel and Jodl.

But not by Hermann Goering. He cheated the hangman. Two hours before his

turn would have come he swallowed a vial of poison that had been smuggled

into his cell. Like his Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, and his rival for the succession,

Heinrich Himmler, he had succeeded at the last hour in choosing the way in

which he would depart this earth, on which he, like the other two, had made such

a murderous impact.

* Dr. Robert Ley, head of the Arbeitsfront, who was to have been a defendant, had hanged

himself in his cell before the trial began. He had made a noose from rags torn from a towel,

which he had tied to a toilet pipe.

AFTERWORD

This book had a surprising reception.

No one—not my publisher, my editor, my agent, my friends—believed that

the public would buy a book so long, so full of footnotes, so expensive, and on

such a subject. My lecture agent had told me there was no more interest in Hitler

and the Third Reich and that I would have to talk about something else. My

publisher printed only 12,500 copies in advance.

The fact that the book started at once to attract considerable readership was

therefore a pleasant surprise to us all. I never kept track of the sales myself—

either of the hardcover edition brought out by Simon and Schuster or the mass-

market paperback edition brought out by Fawcett. I was surprised to hear two or

three years ago that the Book-of-the-Month Club had sold more copies of The

Rise and Fall of the Third Reich than of any other book in its history. But how

many copies, I have no idea. The book also did well abroad—in Britain, France,

and Italy, though less well in Germany.

The reviews of the book, except in Germany, were much more perceptive than

I had expected. And though the academic historians, on the whole, were cool to

the book and to me (as if I were a usurper with no right to invade their field—to

write good history, they said, you had to teach it), there were notable exceptions.

H. R. Trevor-Roper, for instance. I felt some trepidation when I first heard

that the Sunday New York Times Book Review had given him the book to review.

He was a prestigious historian at Oxford whom I much admired—I had found

his book The Last Days of Hitler very valuable. But British book reviewers at

that time had been rather hard on American authors, and besides, as an eminent

academic, Trevor-Roper might share, I thought, the disdain of his American

colleagues for journalists who try to write history. So I concluded I would

probably be clobbered in the publication that was most important for American

writers and their books.

But Trevor-Roper too surprised. The headline above his page-one review gave

a hint as to what he would have to say:

LIGHT ON OUR CENTURY’S DARKEST NIGHT

The Awful Story of Hitler’s Germany

Is Movingly Told in Masterly Study

“In ordinary circumstances,” Trevor-Roper began, “it would be impossible,

only half a generation after its end … to write its history. But with the Third

Reich, nothing was ordinary, not even its end. In that total annihilation all the

secrets of [Hitler’s] rule were broken open, all the archives captured….

“Now, as never before, the living witnesses can converge with the historical

truth. All they need is a historian. In William L. Shirer they have found one….”

This was heady stuff, and at the very beginning of the review. It almost took

my breath away. The concluding lines were almost as breathtaking. “This is a

splendid work of scholarship, objective in method, sound in judgment,

inescapable in its conclusions.”

I was brought down to earth by the front-page review in the rival New York

Herald-Tribune Book Review. Its author, Gordon A. Craig, then a historian at

Princeton, did not agree at all with his Oxford colleague that the Third Reich had

found its historian in me. By no means! He thought the book was too long and

“out of balance.” He regretted that I had not read the book of an obscure German

historian. The fact that the book was based not on what other historians had

written but on original sources—captured secret German documents—did not

impress him, if he noticed it.

In Germany, to put it mildly, the book did not fare very well with the

reviewers. The Germans simply could not face up to their past. Led by the

chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, the book was furiously attacked

and the author maligned. “A German-hater!” Adenauer called me. Since the

book dealt objectively with Nazi Germany and the crimes the Germans

committed against the human spirit and against their neighbors and against the

Jews of Europe, and since I allowed the documented facts to speak for

themselves, I was somewhat taken back by the vehemence of the German

reaction, but not entirely surprised.

And now, as the thirtieth-anniversary edition of The Rise and Fall goes to

press, the world is suddenly confronted with a new reunification of Germany.

Soon, united, Germany will be strong again economically and, if it wishes,

militarily, as it was in the time of Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler. And Europe will

be faced again with the German problem. If the past is any guide, the outlook is

not very promising for Germany’s neighbors, who twice in my lifetime have

been invaded by the Teutonic armies. The last time, under Hitler, as the readers

of this book are reminded, the German behavior was a horror in its barbarism.

People ask now: Have the Germans changed? Many in the West appear to

believe so. I myself am not so sure, my view no doubt clouded by the personal

experience of having lived and worked in Germany in the Nazi time. The truth is

that no one really knows the answer to that crucial question. And quite

understandably the nations that were former victims of German conquest do not

want to take any chances again.

Is there a solution to the German problem? Perhaps. It lies in enmeshing

reunited Germany in a European security system out of which it could never

break loose to pursue its past policies of aggression.

In one fundamental sense, the situation has changed since the fall of the Third

Reich. The development of the hydrogen bomb, as I mentioned at the end of my

Foreword, written in 1959, has rendered an old-fashioned conqueror like Adolf

Hitler obsolete. If ever a new adventurer such as Hitler tried to lead the Germans

to new conquests, he would be repelled by a nuclear response. That would put a

quick end to German aggression. But, unfortunately, it would put an end to the

world too.

So maybe the H-bomb and the rockets and planes and submarines designed to

deliver it, horrible threat though they are to the survival of the planet, will,

ironically, help, at least, to solve the German problem. No more bloody

conquests by the Germans, or by anyone else.

Perhaps it will help too if the erring governments and the wondering people of

this world will remember the dark night of Nazi terror and genocide that almost

engulfed our world and that is the subject of this book. Remembrance of the past

helps us to understand the present.

William L. Shirer

May 1990

NOTES

Abbreviations used in these notes:

DBrFP—Documents on British Foreign Policy. Files of the British

Foreign Office.

DDI—I Documenti diplomatica italiani. Files of the Italian

government.

DGFP—Documents on German Foreign Policy. Files of the German

Foreign Office.

FCNA—Fuehrer Conferences on Naval Affairs. Summary records of

Hitler’s conferences with the Commander in Chief of the German

Navy.

NCA—Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression. Part of the Nuremberg

documents.

N.D.—Nuremberg document.

NSR—Nazi–Soviet Relations. From the files of the German Foreign

Office.

TMWC—Trial of the Major War Criminals. Nuremberg documents

and testimony.

TWC—Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military

Tribunals.

CHAPTER 1

1. The Hammerstein memorandum, cited by Wheeler-Bennett in his

The Nemesis of Power, p. 285. The memorandum was written for

Wheeler-Bennett by Dr. Kunrath von Hammerstein, son of the

General, and was based on his father’s notes and diaries. It is entitled

“Schleicher, Hammerstein and the Seizure of Power.”

2. Joseph Goebbels, Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlei, p. 251.

3. Hammerstein memorandum, cited by Wheeler-Bennett, op. cit. , p.

280.

4. Goebbels, op. cit. , p. 250.

5. Ibid. , p. 252.

6. Ibid. , p. 252.

7. André François-Poncet, The Fateful Years, p. 48. He was French

ambassador in Berlin 1930–38.

8. Goebbels, Kaiserhof, pp. 251–54.

9. Proclamation of Sept. 5, 1934, at Nuremberg.

10. Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe,

11. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, American edition (Boston, 1943), In a

good number of quotations from this book I have altered the English

translation somewhat to bring it closer to the original text in German.

12. Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer, All who write on the Third Reich

are indebted to Heiden for material on the early life of Hitler.

13. Ibid. , p. 41.

14. Ibid. , p. 43.

15. Ibid. , p. 43.

16. Mein Kampf, p. 6.

17. Ibid. , p. 8.

18. Ibid. , pp. 8–10.

19. Ibid. , p. 10.

20. Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 1941–44, p. 287.

21. Ibid. , p. 346.

22. Ibid. , p. 547.

23. Ibid. , pp. 566–67

24. August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, p. 50.

25. Ibid. , p. 49.

26. Mein Kampf, pp. 14–15.

27. Kubizek, op. cit. , p. 52, and Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p. 567.

28. Kubizek, op. cit. , p. 44.

29. Mein Kampf, p. 18.

30. Ibid. , p. 21.

31. Kubizek, op. cit. , p. 59.

32. lbid. , p. 76.

33. Ibid. , pp. 54–55.

34. Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer, p. 52.

35. Mein Kampf, p. 20.

36. Ibid. , p. 18.

37. Ibid. , p. 18.

38. Ibid. , p. 21.

39. Ibid. , pp. 21–22.

40. Ibid. , p. 34.

41. Heiden, Der Fuehrer, p. 54.

42. Ibid. , p. 68.

43. Mein Kampf, p. 34.

44. Ibid. , p. 22.

45. Ibid. , pp. 35–37.

46. Ibid. , pp. 22, 125.

47. Ibid. , pp. 38–49.

48. Ibid. , p. 41.

49. Ibid., pp. 43–44.

50. Ibid. , pp. 116–17.

51. Ibid. , p. 118.

52. Ibid. , pp. 55, 69, 122.

53. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, p. 63.

54. Mein Kampf, p. 100.

55. Ibid. , p. 107.

56. Ibid. , p. 52.

57. Kubizek, op. cit. , p. 79.

58. Mein Kampf, p. 52.

59. Ibid. , p. 56.

60. Ibid. , pp. 56–57.

61. Ibid. , p. 59.

62. Ibid., pp. 63–64.

63. Ibid. , pp. 123–24.

64. Ibid. , pp. 161, 163.

CHAPTER 2

1. Mein Kampf, pp. 204–5.

2. Ibid., p. 202.

3. Heiden, Der Fuehrer, p. 84.

4. Rudolf Olden, Hitler, the Pawn, p. 70.

5. Mein Kampf, p. 193.

6. Ibid. , pp. 205–6.

7. Ibid. , p. 207.

8. Ibid. , pp. 215–16.

9. Ibid. , pp. 210, 213.

10. Ibid. , pp. 218–19.

11. Ibid. , p. 220.

12. Ibid. , pp. 221–22.

13. Ibid. , p. 224.

14. Ibid. , p. 687n.

15. Ibid. , p. 687.

16. Ibid. , p. 354.

17. Ibid. , p. 355.

18. Ibid. , pp. 369–70.

19. Konrad Heiden, A History of National Socialism, p. 36.

20. Mein Kampf, pp. 496–97. The italics are Hitler’s.

21. Heiden, A History of National Socialism, pp. 51–52.

22. Heiden, Der Fuehrer, pp. 98–99.

23. Heiden, A History of National Socialism, p. 52.

24. Heiden, Hitler, pp. 90–91.

CHAPTER 3

1. Wheeler-Bennett, Wooden Titan: Hindenburg, pp. 207–8.

2. Ibid. , p. 131.

3. Wheeler-Bennett’s Nemesis, p. 58.

4. Franz L. Neumann, Behemoth, p. 23.

5. Heiden, Der Fuehrer, pp. 131–33.

6. Ibid. , p. 164.

7. Lt. Gen. Friedrich von Rabenau, Seeckt, aus seinem Leben, II, p.

342.

8. Ibid. ,

9. Karl Alexander von Mueller, quoted by Heiden in Der Fuehrer, p.

190.

10. The record of the court proceedings is contained in Der Hitler

Prozess.

CHAPTER 4

1. The figures are from a study of Eher Verlag’s royalty statements

made by Prof. Oron James Hale and published in The American

Historical Review, July 1955, under the title “Adolf Hitler: Taxpayer.”

2. The quotations are from Mein Kampf, pp. 619, 672, 674.

3. Ibid. , pp. 138–39.

4. Ibid. , p. 140.

5. Ibid. , pp. 643, 646, 652.

6. Ibid. , p. 649.

7. Ibid. , p. 675.

8. Ibid. , p. 654.

9. Ibid. , pp. 150–53.

10. Adolf Hitlers Reden, p. 32. Quoted by Bullock, op. cit. , p. 68.

11. Mein Kampf, pp. 247–53.

12. Ibid. , pp. 134–35, 285, 289.

13. Ibid. , p. 290.

14. Ibid. , pp. 295–96.

15. Ibid. , p. 296, for this and the two quotations above it.

16. Ibid. , p. 646.

17. Ibid. , pp. 383–84.

18. Ibid. , p. 394.

19. Ibid. , pp. 402–4.

20. Ibid. , p. 396.

21. Ibid. , pp. 449–50.

22. A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History, p. 24.

23. Wilhelm Roepke, The Solution of the German Problem, 153.

24. Mein Kampf, pp. 154, 225–26.

25. Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p. 198.

26. See his study of Chamberlain in The Third Reich, ed. by Baumont,

Fried and Vermeil.

27. The foregoing, from Chamberlain back to Fichte and Hegel, is

based on the works of the authors and on quotations and

interpretations in such books as German Philosophy and Politics, by

John Dewey; The German Catastrophe, by Friedrich Meinecke; The

Solution of the German Problem, by Wilhelm Roepke; A History of

Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell; Thus Speaks Germany, ed.

by W. W. Coole and M. F. Potter; The Third Reich, ed. by Baumont,

Fried and Vermeil; German Nationalism: The Tragedy of a People, by

Louis L. Snyder; German History: Some New German Views, ed. by

Hans Kohn; The Rise and Fall of Nazi Germany, by T. L. Jarman; Der

Fuehrer, by Konrad Heiden; The Course of German History, by A. J.

P. Taylor; L’Allemagne Contemporaine, by Edmond Vermeil; History

of Germany, by Hermann Pinnow.

E. Eyck’s Bismarck and the German Empire is an invaluable

study.

The limitations of space in a work of this kind prohibited

discussion of the considerable influence on the Third Reich of a

number of other German intellectuals whose writings were

popular and significant in Germany: Schlegel, J. Goerres,

Novalis, Arndt, Jahn, Lagarde, List, Droysen, Ranke, Mommsen,

Constantin Frantz, Stoecker, Bernhardi, Klaus Wagner,

Langbehn, Lange, Spengler.

28. Mein Kampf, p. 381.

29. Ibid. , p. 293.

30. Ibid. , pp. 213–13.

31. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, pp. 31–32. Quoted

by Bullock, op. cit. , p. 351.

32. Quoted in The Third Reich, ed. by Baumont et al. , pp. 204–5, from

two works of Nietzsche: Zur Genealogie der Moral and Der Wille zur

Macht.

CHAPTER 5

1. Kurt Ludecke, I Knew Hitler, pp. 217–18.

2. Baynes (ed.), The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, I, pp. 155–56.

3. Curt Riess, Joseph Goebbels, p. 8.

4. This and the other quoted Hitler reminiscences of January 16–17,

1942, about Obersalzberg are from Hitler’s Secret Conversations.

5. Such authorities as Heiden and Bullock tell of the Raubals coming

to Haus Wachenfeld in 1925, when Geli Raubal was seventeen. But

Hitler makes it clear that he did not acquire the villa until 1928, at

which time he says, “I immediately rang up my sister in Vienna with

the news, and begged her to be so good as to take over the part of

mistress of the house.” See Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p. 177.

6. Heiden, Der Fuehrer, pp. 384–86.

7. See the fascinating analysis of Hitler’s income tax returns made by

Prof. Oron James Hale in The American Historical Review, July 1955.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Heiden, Der Fuehrer, p. 419.

11. The speech does not appear in Baynes or in Roussy de Sales’s

collection of Hitler’s speeches (Hitler, My New Order). It was

published verbatim in the Voelkischer Beobachter (special Reichswehr

edition) on March 26, 1929, and is quoted at length in “Blueprint of

the Nazi Underground,” Research Studies of the State College of

Washington, June 1945.

12. The quotations are from the Frankfurter Zeitung, September 26,

1930.

13. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression [hereafter referred to as NCA],

Supplement A, p. 1194 (Nuremberg Document [hereafter, N.D.] EC-

440).

14. Otto Dietrich, Mit Hitler in die Macht.

15. Funk’s testimony, NCA, Suppl. A, pp. 1194–1204 (N.D. EC-440),

and NCA, V., pp. 478–95 (N.D. 2328–PS). Thyssen’s declarations are

from his book I Paid Hitler, pp. 79–108.

16. NCA, VII, pp. 512–13 (N.D. EC-456).

CHAPTER 6

1. According to Heiden, Der Fuehrer, p. 433.

2. Heiden, History of National Socialism, p. 166.

3. Goebbels, Kaiserhof, pp. 19–20.

4. Ibid. , pp. 80–81.

5. Wheeler-Bennett, Nemesis, p. 243.

6. The above quotes are from Goebbels, Kaiserhof, pp. 81–104.

7. François-Poncet, op. cit. , p. 23.

8. Franz von Papen, Memoirs, p. 162.

9. NCA, Suppl. A, p. 508 (N.D. 3309–PS).

10. Hermann Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction.

11. Goebbels was not caught napping this time, as he had been on

August 13. He immediately gave the press the exchange of

correspondence and it was published in the morning papers of Nov.

25. It is available in the Jahrbuch des Oeffen-lichen Rechts, Vol. 21,

1933–40.

12. Papen, op. cit. , pp. 216–17.

13. Ibid. , p. 220.

14. Ibid. , p. 221.

15. François-Poncet, op. cit. , p. 43. He says erroneously, “seventy

days.”

16. NCA, II, pp. 922–24.

17. Kurt von Schuschnigg, Farewell, Austria, pp. 165–66.

18. Meissner affidavit, NCA, Suppl. A, p. 511.

19. The Hammerstein memorandum, Wheeler-Bennett’s Nemesis, p.

280.

20. Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p. 404.

21. Papen, op. cit. , pp. 243–44.

CHAPTER 7

1. NCA, III, pp. 272–75 (N.D. 351–PS).

2. Goebbels, Kaiserhof, p. 256.

3. See affidavit of Georg von Schnitzler, NCA, VII, p. 501 (N.D. EC-

439); speeches of Goering and Hitler, NCA, VI, p. 1080 (N.D. D–203):

Schacht’s interrogation, NCA, VI. p. 465 (N.D. 3725–PS); Funk’s

interrogation, NCA, V, p. 495 (N.D. 2828–PS).

4. Goebbels, Kaiserhof, pp. 269–70.

5. Papen, op. cit. ,

6. Rudolf Diels, Lucifer ante Portas, p. 194.

7. For sources on the responsibility for the Reichstag fire see:

Halder’s affidavit, NCA, VI, p. 635 (N.D. 3740–PS); transcript of

Gisevius’ cross-examination on April 25, 1946, Trial of the Major War

Criminals [hereafter cited as TMWC], XII, pp. 252–53; Diehl’s

affidavit, Goering’s denial, TMWC, IX, pp. 432–36, and NCA, VI, pp.

298–99 (N.D. 3593–PS); Willy Frischauer, The Rise and Fall of

Hermann Goering, pp. 88–95; Douglas Reed, The Burning, of the

Reichstag; John Gunther, Inside Europe (Gunther attended the trial at

Leipzig). There are many alleged testaments and confessions by those

claiming to have participated in the Nazi firing of the Reichstag or to

have positive knowledge of it, but none, so far as I know, has ever

been substantiated. Of these, memoranda by Ernst Oberfohren, a

Nationalist deputy, and Karl Ernst, the Berlin S.A. leader, have been

given some credence. Both men were slain by the Nazis within a few

months of the fire.

8. NCA, III, pp. 968–70 (N.D. 1390–PS).

9. NCA, IV, p. 496 (N.D. 1856–PS).

10. NCA, V, p. 669 (N.D. 2962–PS).

11. Dokumente der deutschen Politik, I, 1935, pp. 20–24.

12. François-Poncet, op. cit. , p. 61.

13. Text of law, NCA, IV, pp. 638–39 (N.D.2001–PS).

14. Laws of March 31 and April 7, 1933, and January 30, 1934, all in

NCA, IV, pp. 640–43.

15. NCA, III, p. 962 (N.D. 1388–PS).

16. Goebbels, Kaiserhof, p. 307.

17. NCA, III, pp. 380–85 (N.D. 392–PS).

18. Law of May 19, 1933, NCA, III, p. 387 (N.D.405–PS).

19. Goebbels, op. cit. , p. 300.

20. N. S. Monatshefte, No. 39 (June 1933).

21. The July 1 and 6 quotations in Baynes, I, p. 287 and pp. 865–66.

22. From a study entitled My Relations with Adolf Hitler and the

Party, which Admiral Raeder wrote in Moscow after his capture by the

Russians and which was made available at Nuremberg. NCA, VIII, p.

707.

23. Baynes, I, p. 289.

24. Spengler, Jahre der Entscheidung, p. viii.

25. Blomberg’s directive, TMWC, XXXIV, pp. 487–91 (N.D. C–140).

26. Quoted by Telford Taylor in Sword and Swastika, p. 41. The

Seeckt papers are now at the National Archives in Washington.

27. The source for the “Pact of the Deutschfond” is Weissbuch ueber

die Erschiessung des 30 Juni, 1934 (Paris, 1935), pp. 52–53. Herbert

Rosinski in his The German Army, pp. 222–23, confirms the terms of

the pact. Bullock and Wheeler-Bennett accept it in their books on this

period. The source for the May 16 meeting of the generals is Jacques

Bénoist-Méchin’s Histoire de l’Armée Allemande depuis l’Armistice,

II, pp. 553–54.

28. Rede des Vizekanzlers von Papen vor dem Universitaetsbund,

Marburg, am 17 Juni, 1934 (Berlin: Germania-Verlag).

29. Papen, op. cit. , p. 310.

30. NCA, V, pp. 654–55 (N.D. 2950–PS).

31. Papen, op. cit. , pp. 330–33.

CHAPTER 8

1. Leo Stein, I Was in Hell with Niemoeller, p. 80.

2. Neumann, Behemoth, p. 109. He states that the quotations are from

the research project “Antisemitism” of the Institute of Social Research,

published in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, 1940.

3. Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction, p. 54.

4. Stewart W. Herman, Jr., It’s Your Souls We Want, pp. 157–58.

Herman was pastor of the American Church in Berlin from 1936 to

1941.

5. The text is given in Herman, op. cit. , pp. 297–300; also in the New

York Times of Jan. 3, 1942.

6. Affidavit of Nov. 19, 1945, NCA, V, pp. 735–36 (N.D. 3016–PS).

7. Most foreign correspondents in Berlin kept a collection of such

gems. My own has been lost. The quotations are from Philipp Lenard,

Deutsche Physik, preface; Wallace Deuel, People under Hitler;

William Ebenstein, The Nazi State.

8. Wilhelm Roepke, The Solution of the German Problem, p. 61.

9. Quoted in Frederic Lilge’s The Abuse of Learning: The Failure of

the German University, p. 170.

10. Schirach’s American ancestry is given by Douglas M. Kelley, the

American psychiatrist at the Nuremberg jail during the trial of the

major war criminals, in his book, 22 Cells in Nuremberg, pp. 86–87.

11. Reichsgesetzblatt, 1936, Part 1, p. 933. Quoted in NCA, III, pp.

972–73 (N.D. 1392–PS).

12. From his book, Basic Facts for a History of German War and

Armament Economy. Quoted in NCA, I, p. 350 (N.D. 2353–PS).

13. The ministry’s report of September 30, 1934, NCA, VII, pp. 306–9

(N.D. EC-128); Schacht’s report of May 3, 1935, NCA, III, pp. 827–30

(N.D. 1168–PS); text of the secret Reich Defense Law, NCA, IV, pp.

934–36 (N.D. 2261–PS).

14. NCA, VII, p. 474 (N.D. EC-419).

15. Thyssen, I Paid Hitler, pp. xv, 157.

16. Quoted by Neumann in Behemoth, p. 432.

17. Ebenstein, op. cit. , p. 84.

18. NCA, III, pp. 568–72 (N.D. 787, 788–PS).

19. The Third Reich, ed. by Baumont et al. , p. 630.

20. Eugen Kogon’s phrase. See his Der SS Staat—das System der

deutschen Konzentrationslager. A somewhat abridged version

appeared in English, The Theory and Practice of Hell. It is the best

study of Nazi concentration camps yet written. Kogon spent seven

years in them.

21. Quoted in NCA, II, p. 258 (N.D. 1852–PS).

22. NCA, VIII, pp. 243–44 (N.D. R–142).

23. Voelkischer Beobachter, May 20, 1936.

CHAPTER 9

1. Friedelind Wagner, Heritage of Fire, p. 109.

2. Papen, op. cit. , p. 338.

3. Daily Mail, Aug. 6, 1934.

4. Le Matin, Nov. 18, 1934.

5. Wolfgang Foerster, Ein General kaempft gegen den Krieg, p. 22.

This book is based on Beck’s papers.

6. NCA, VII, p. 333 (N.D. EC–177).

7. NCA, I, p. 431 (N.D. C–189).

8. NCA, VI, p. 1018 (N.D. C–190).

9. Ibid.

10. TMWC, XX, p.603.

11. My New Order, ed. by Roussy de Sales, pp. 309–33. The text of

the speech is also in Baynes, II, pp. 1218–47.

12. My New Order, pp. 333–34.

13. Pertinax, The Grave Diggers of France, p. 381.

14. The author’s Berlin Diary, p. 43.

15. François-Poncet, op. cit. , pp. 188–89.

16. NCA, VI, pp. 951–52 (N.D. C–139), the text of the order. See also

TMWC, XV, pp. 445–48.

17. NCA, VII, pp. 454–55 (N.D. EC–405), minutes of the meeting.

18. NCA, VI, pp. 974–76 (N.D. C–159).

19. TMWC, XV, p. 252, for Jodl’s evidence; Hitler’s Secret

Conversations, pp. 211–12, for Hitler’s figure.

20. François-Poncet, op. cit. , p. 193.

21. Berlin Diary, pp. 51–54.

22. François-Poncet, op. cit. , p. 190.

23. Ibid. , pp. 194–95.

24. TMWC, XV, p. 352.

25. Hitler’s Secret Conversations, pp. 211–12. Remarks of January 27,

1942.

26. Paul Schmidt, Hitler’s Interpreter, p. 41.

27. TMWC, XV, p. 352.

28. TMWC, XXI, p. 22.

29. Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p. 211.

30. Quoted by François-Poncet, op. cit. , p. 196.

31. NCA, VII, p. 890 (N.D. L–150).

32. Kurt von Schuschnigg, Austrian Requiem, p. 5.

33. NCA, I, p. 466 (N.D. 2248–PS).

34. Documents on German Foreign Policy [hereafter referred to as

DGFP], Series D, I, pp. 278–81 (No. 152).

35. Papen, op. cit. , p. 370.

36. DGFP, III, pp. 1–2.

37. Ibid. , pp. 892–94.

38. DGFP, I, p. 37.

39. Ibid. III, p. 172.

40. Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers, ed. by Malcolm Muggeridge, pp. 43–

48.

41. Milton Shulman, Defeat in the West, p. 76. His source is given as a

British War Office Intelligence Review, December 1945. It would

seem to be from an interrogation of Goering.

42. Text of the secret protocol, DGFP, I, p. 734.

43. TWC, XII, pp. 460–65 (N.D. NI–051).

44. TMWC, IX, p. 281.

45. DGFP, I, p. 40.

46. Ibid., pp. 55–57.

47. NCA, VI, pp. 1001–11 (N.D. C–175).

48. The Hossbach minutes, dated Nov. 10, 1937. The German text is

given in TMWC, XXV, pp. 402–13, and the best English translation is

in DGFP, I, pp. 29–39. A hasty English version was done at

Nuremberg and printed in NCA, III, pp. 295–305 (N.D. 386–PS).

Hossbach also gives an account of the meeting in his book Zwischen

Wehrmacht und Hitler, pp. 186–94. The brief testimony of Goering,

Raeder and Neurath on the conference is printed in TMWC.

CHAPTER 10

1. Affidavit of Baroness von Ritter, a relative of Neurath, TMWC,

XVI, p. 640.

2. TMWC, XVI, p. 640.

3. Ibid. , p. 641.

4. Schacht, Account Settled, p. 90.

5. Jodl’s diary, TMWC, XXVIII, p. 357.

6. Ibid. , p. 356.

7. Ibid. , pp. 360–62.

8. Ibid. , p. 357.

9. Telford Taylor, Sword and Swastika, pp. 149–50. The manuscript

of Blomberg’s unpublished memoirs is in the Library of Congress.

10. Bullock, op. cit. , p. 381, and Wheeler-Bennett, Nemesis, p. 369.

11. Wolfgang Foerster, Ein General kaempft gegen den Krieg, op. cit.,

pp. 70–73.

12. TMWC, IX, p. 290.

13. The Von Hassell Diaries. 1938–1944, p. 23.

CHAPTER 11

1. Dispatch to Hitler, Dec. 21, 1937, DGFP, I, p. 486.

2. Papen, op. cit. , p. 404.

3. Ibid., p. 406.

4. Schuschnigg, Austrian Requiem, pp. 12–19; NCA, V, pp. 709–12

(N.D. 2995–PS).

5. Draft of protocol submitted to Schuschnigg, DGFP, I, pp. 513–15.

6. NCA, V, p. 711 (N.D. 2995–PS).

7. Schuschnigg, Austrian Requiem, p. 23.

8. N.D. 2995–PS, op. cit.

9. Schuschnigg gave slightly different versions of Hitler’s threats in

his book, p. 24, and in his Nuremberg affidavit, 2995–PS ( NCA, V, p.

712). I have used both in abbreviated form.

10. Austrian Requiem, p. 24.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid. , p. 25, and Schuschnigg’s affidavit, N.D. 2995–PS, op. cit.

13. Austrian Requiem, p. 25.

14. NCA, IV, p. 357 (N.D. 1775–PS).

15. NCA. IV, p. 361 (N.D. 1780–PS).

16. From my own notes taken during the broadcast.

17. Dispatch to the German Foreign Office on Feb. 25, 1938, marked

“Very Secret,” DGFP, I, p. 546.

18. For Miklas’ testimony, see NCA, Suppl. A, p. 523. Papen’s

suggestion is in his Memoirs, p. 425.

19. Austrian Requiem, pp. 35–36.

20. NCA, IV, p. 362 (N.D. 1780–PS).

21. NCA, VI, pp. 911–12 (N.D. C–102).

22. Ibid. , VI, p. 913 (N.D. C–103).

23. DGFP, I, pp. 573–76.

24. NCA, V, pp. 629–54 (N.D. 2949–PS).

25. Austrian Requiem, p. 47.

26. Testimony of Wilhelm Miklas on January 30, 1946, during anti-

Nazi court proceedings against Dr. Rudolf Neumayer. Though the

former President is a bit hazy about exact times and the exact sequence

of events on the fateful day, his testimony is of great value and

interest. NCA, Suppl. A, pp. 518–34 (N.D. 3697–PS).

27. Austrian Requiem, p. 51.

28. See NCA, Suppl. A, pp. 525–34 (N.D. 3697–PS). Also, NCA, V, p.

209 (N.D. 2465–PS, 2466–PS).

29. NCA, VI, p. 1017 (N.D. C–182).

30. DGFP, 1, pp. 584–86.

31. Ibid. , pp. 553–55.

32. TMWC, XVI, p. 153.

33. DGFP, I, p. 263.

34. Ibid. ,

35. Ibid. ,

36. NCA, I, pp. 501–2 (N.D. 3287–PS).

37. Text of circular cipher telegram, DGFP, I, pp. 586–87.

38. TMWC, XX, p. 605.

39. TMWC, XV, p. 632.

40. Memorandum of Seyss-lnquart at Nuremberg, Sept. 9, 1945, NCA,

V, pp. 961–92 (N.D. 3254–PS).

41. TMWC, XIV, p. 429.

42. Text of Schacht’s address, NCA, VII, pp. 394–402 (N.D. EC–297–

A).

43. NCA, IV, p. 585 (N.D. 1947–PS).

CHAPTER 12

1. The file for Case Green was kept at Hitler’s headquarters and was

captured intact by American troops in a cellar at Obersalzbreg. The

summary of the Apr. 21 Hitler-Keitel discussion is the second paper in

the collection. The entire file was introduced in evidence at

Nuremberg as N.D. 388–PS. An English translation is in NCA, III, pp.

306709; a better English version of the Apr. 21 talks is in DGFP, II,

pp. 239–40.

2. Secret memorandum of the German Foreign Office, Aug. 19, 1938,

NCA, VI, p. 855 (N.D. 3059–PS).

3. DGFP, II, pp. 197–98.

4. Ibid. , p. 255.

5. Weizsaecker memorandum, May 12, 1938, DGFP, II, pp. 273–74.

6. Text of four telegrams exchanged, NCA, III, pp. 308–9 (N.D. 388–

PS).

7. Ibid. , pp. 309–10.

8. Text of Keitel’s letter and of the directive, DGFP, II, pp. 299–303.

9. Ibid. , pp. 309–10.

10. Dispatch of the German minister and military attaché in Prague,

May 21, 1938, ibid. , pp. 309–10.

11. Dispatch of Ambassador von Dirksen, May 22, 1938, ibid. , pp.

322–23.

12. Speech to the Reichstag, Jan. 30, 1939, in My New Order, ed. by

Roussy de Sales, p. 563.

13. According to Fritz Wiedermann, one of the Fuehrer’s adjutants,

who was present and who later swore that he “was considerably

shaken by this statement.” NCA, V, pp. 743–44 (N.D. 3037–PS).

14. Undated Jodl diary entry, TMWC, XXVIII, p. 372 (N.D. 1780–PS).

15. Item 11 of Case Green, NCA, III, pp. 315–20 (N.D. 388–PS); also

DGFP, II, pp. 357–62.

16. TMWC, XXVIII, p. 373. The TMWC volume gives the German

text. An English translation of excerpts of Jodl’s diary is in NCA, IV,

pp. 360–70.

17. The texts of the memoranda are given by Wolfgang Foerster in Ein

General kaempft gegen den Krieg, pp. 81–119.

18. Jodl’s diary, TMWC, XXVIII, p. 374. English translation, NCA,

IV, p. 364 (N.D. 1780–PS).

19. Ibid.

20. TMWC, XX, p. 606.

21. The Von Hassell Diaries, p. 6.

22. Ibid. , p. 347.

23. Foerster, op. cit. , p. 122.

24. Dispatches of June 8 and 9, 1938, DGFP, II, pp. 395, 399–401.

25. Dispatch of June 22, ibid. , p. 426.

26. Ibid. , pp. 529–31.

27. Ibid. , p. 611.

28. Item 17 of the “Green” file, NCA, III, pp. 332–33 (N.D. 388–PS).

29. TMWC, XXVIII, p. 375.

30. Minutes of the Sept. 3, 1938, meeting, NCA, III, pp. 334–35 (N.D.

388–PS).

31. Schmundt’s minutes of the Sept. 9 meeting, ibid. , pp. 335–38. It is

Item 19 in the “Green” file.

32. Jodl’s diary note for Sept. 13, TMWC, XXVIII, pp. 378–79 (N.D.

1780–PS).

33. DGFP, II, p. 536.

34. Reports of Kleist’s visit are in Documents on British Foreign

Policy [hereafter referred to as DBrFP], Third Series, II.

35. Most of the text of Churchill’s letter is in DGFP, II, p. 706.

36. DBrFP, Third Series, II, pp. 686–87.

37. Nevile Henderson, Failure of a Mission, pp. 147, 150.

38. DBrFP, Third Series, I.

39. Erich Kordt gives his brother’s account of this meeting in his book

Nicht aus den Akten, pp. 279–81.

40. DGFP, II, p. 754.

41. Ibid. , p. 754.

42. L. B. Namier, Diplomatic Prelude, p. 35.

43. There is a considerable amount of material about the conference.

The text of the official report drawn up by Paul Schmidt, who acted as

interpreter and was the only other person present, is in DGFP, II, pp.

786–98. Schmidt has given an eyewitness account of the meeting in

his book Hitler’s Interpreter, pp. 90–95. Chamberlain’s notes are in

DBrFP, Third Series, pp. 338–41; his letter to his sister on the meeting

is in Keith Feiling’s Life of Neville Chamberlain, pp. 366–68. See also

Nevile Henderson’s Failure of a Mission, pp. 152–54.

44. DGFP, II, p. 801.

45. Ibid. , p. 810.

46. Feiling, op. cit. , p. 367.

47. NCA, VI, p. 799 (N.D. C–2).

48. DGFP, II, pp. 863–64.

49. British White Paper, Cmd. 5847, No. 2. Text also in DGFP, II, pp.

831–32.

50. See Berlin Diary, p. 137.

51. The chief sources for the Godesberg conference are: Schmidt’s

notes on the two Godesberg meetings, DGFP, II, pp. 870–79, 898–

908; Schmidt’s description of the talks, Hitler’s Interpreter, pp. 95–

102; texts of correspondence exchanged between Hitler and

Chamberlain on September 23, DGFP, II, pp. 887–92; notes by

Kirkpatrick on the meeting, DBrFP, Third Series, II, pp. 463–73, 499–

508; Henderson’s description in Failure of a Mission, pp. 156–62.

52. NCA, IV, p. 367 (N.D. 1780–PS).

53. Jodl’s diary, Sept. 26, 1938, ibid.

54. Text of the Godesberg memorandum, DGFP, II, pp. 908–10.

55. The Times, London, Sept. 24, 1938.

56. Text of the Czech reply, British White Paper, Cmd. 5847, No. 7.

57. Text of Chamberlain’s letter to Hitler of Sept. 26, 1938, DGFP, II,

pp. 994–95.

58. Though Dr. Schmidt’s notes on this meeting are missing from the

German Foreign Office papers, his own account of it appears in his

book, op. cit., pp. 102–3. Kirkpatrick’s notes are in DBrFP, Third

Series, II, No. 1, p. 118. Henderson’s version in his book, op. cit. , p.

163.

59. Items 31–33 of “Green” file, NCA, III, pp. 350–52 (N.D. 388–PS).

60. Dispatch from Paris, DGFP, II, p. 977.

61. The text of Roosevelt’s two appeals and Hitler’s answer to the first

one are in DGFP, II.

62. Dispatch from Prague, DGFP, II, p. 976.

63. Text of Hitler’s letter of Sept. 27, 1938, DGFP, II, pp. 966–68.

64. Chamberlain’s plan, DGFP, II, pp. 987–88. The Prime Minister’s

messages are quoted by Wheeler-Bennett in Munich, pp. 151–52, 155,

from the Czech Archives.

65. Ibid. , p. 158.

66. Text in British White Paper, Cmd. 5848, No. I. The letter was

handed to Hitler by Henderson at noon the next day.

67. Henderson, op. cit. , p. 144. DBrFP, Third Series, II, p. 614.

68. Jodl’s diary, Sept. 28, 1938, NCA, IV, p. 368 (N.D. 1780–PS).

69. Sources: Halder’s interrogation at Nuremberg by Capt. Sam Harris,

a New York attorney, NCA, Suppl. B, pp. 1547–71: also Halder’s

memorandum, which was given to the press at Nuremberg but is not

included in either the NCA or TMWC volumes. Gisevius, To the Bitter

End, pp. 283–328; his testimony at Nuremberg, TMWC, XII, pp. 210–

19. Schacht. Account Settled, pp. 114–25.

70. Gisevius, To the Bitter End, p. 325. Also his testimony on the stand

at Nuremberg, TMWC, XII, p. 219.

71. Erich Kordt’s memorandum, made available to the writer. Allen

Dulles, Germany’s Underground, p. 46. also gives an account of the

call.

72. Accounts of the meetings in the Chancellery on the forenoon of

Sept. 28 are given by some of the participants: Schmidt, op. cit. , pp.

105–8; François-Poncet, op. cit. , pp. 265–68; Henderson, op. cit. , pp.

166–71.

73. Schmidt, op. cit. , p. 107.

74. Ibid. , p. 107.

75. Henderson, op. cit. , pp. 168–69. Schmidt, op. cit. , p. 108.

76. Masaryk later described this scene to the writer, as he did to many

other friends. But my notes on it were lost, and I have used Wheeler-

Bennett’s moving account in Munich, pp. 170–71.

77. From Halder’s interrogation, Feb. 25. 1946. NCA, Suppl. B, pp.

1553–58.

78. Schacht, op. cit. , p. 128.

79. Gisevius, op. cit. , p. 326.

80. Ciano’s Hidden Diary, 1937–1938, p. 166. In a telegram dated

June 26, 1940, Mussolini reminded Hitler that at Munich he had

promised to take part in the attack on Britain. The text of the telegram

is in DGFP, X, p. 27.

81. Text of the Chamberlain and Beneš notes, DBrFP, Third Series, II,

pp. 599, 604.

82. The minutes of the two Munich meetings, DGFP, II, pp. 1003–8,

1011–14.

83. Henderson, op. cit. , p. 271. François-Poncet, op. cit. , p. 271.

84. Schmidt, op. cit. , p. 110.

85. Text of the Munich Agreement, DGFP, II, pp. 1014–16.

86. From the official report of Dr. Masarik to the Czech Foreign

Office. The sources for this section on the Munich Conference are:

DGFP, II, as cited above in note 83; text of the Munich Agreement,

ibid. , pp. 1014–16; DBrFP, Third Series, II, No. 1, p. 227; and Ciano.

Schmidt, Henderson, François-Poncet and Weizsaecker, op. cit.

87. Berlin Diary, p. 145.

88. The sources for this Chamberlain-Hitler meeting are: DGFP, II, p.

1017, for text of declaration; DGFP, IV, pp. 287–93, for Schmidt’s

official memorandum on the meeting; Schmidt’s book, op. cit. , pp.

112–13. DBrFP, Third Series, II, No. 1228, gives a slightly different

version of the conversation.

89. DGFP, IV, pp. 4–5.

90. Jodl’s diary, NCA, IV, p. 368 (N.D. 1780–PS).

91. Keitel’s testimony, April 4, 1946, TMWC, X, p. 509.

92. Manstein’s testimony, Aug. 9, 1946, TMWC, XX, p. 606.

93. Jodl’s testimony, June 4, 1946, TMWC, XV, p. 361.

94. Gamelin, Servir, pp. 344–46. A disappointing book! Pertinax, The

Grave Diggers of France, p. 3, confirms the General here. These are

also the sources of Gamelin’s advice on Sept. 26 and 28.

95. Churchill, The Gathering Storm, p. 339.

96. DGFP, IV, pp. 602–4.

97. Schacht on the stand at Nuremberg, TMWC, XII, p. 531.

98. Speech to the commanders in chief, Nov. 23, 1939, NC A, III, p.

573 (N.D. 789–PS).

CHAPTER 13

1. “Green” file, Item 48, NC A, III, pp. 372–74 (N.D. 388–PS).

2. Ibid.

3. Hitler’s directive, Oct. 21, 1938, NCA, VI, pp. 947–48 (N.D. C–

136).

4. DGFP, IV, p. 46.

5. Heydrich’s orders to the police for organizing the pogrom, NCA, V,

pp. 797–801 (N.D. 3051–PS); Heydrich’s report to Goering on the

damage and the number of killed and wounded, NCA, V. p. 854 (N.D.

3058–PS). Report of Walter Buch, chief party judge, on the pogrom,

NCA, V, pp. 868–76 (N.D. 3063–PS); Major Buch gives lurid details

of numerous murders of Jews and blames Goebbels for the excesses.

Stenographic report of the meeting of Goering with cabinet members

and government officials and a representative of the insurance

companies on Nov. 12, NCA, IV, pp. 425–57 (N.D. 1816–PS). Though

the complete report is missing, the part which was found runs to

10,000 words.

6. TMWC, IX, p. 538.

7. DGFP, IV, pp. 639–49.

8. DBrFP, Third Series, IV, No. 5.

9. Ciano’s Hidden Diary, entry for Oct. 28, 1938, p. 185; Ciano’s

Diplomatic Papers, pp. 242–46.

10. DGFP, IV, pp. 515–20.

11. Schmidt, op. cit. , p. 118; his notes on the meeting, DGFP, IV, pp.

471–77.

12. DGFP, IV, pp. 69–72.

13. Ibid. , pp. 82–83.

14. Ibid. , also in NCA, VI, pp. 950–51 (N.D. C–138).

15. Dispatch of the chargé, DGFP, IV, pp. 188–89.

16. DGFP, IV, p. 215.

17. Memoranda of Chvalkovsky’s two talks, with Hitler and

Ribbentrop, on Jan. 21, 1939, DGFP, IV, pp. 190–202. Chvalkovsky’s

own report to the Czechoslovak cabinet on Jan. 23, Czech Archives,

quoted by Wheeler-Bennett in Munich, pp. 316–17. Also see French

Yellow Book, pp. 55–56.

18. Text, DGFP, IV, pp. 207–8.

19. Text, ibid. , pp. 218–20.

20. Memorandum of meeting, ibid. , pp. 209–13.

21. Text, ibid. , pp. 234–35.

22. Based on an account later given by the British minister in Prague,

NCA, VII, pp. 88–90 (N.D. D–571).

23. Secret minutes of Tiso-Hitler talk, DGFP, IV, pp. 243–45.

24. See DGFP, IV, p. 250.

25. Ibid. , For Ambassador Coulondre’s dispatch, see French Yellow

Book, p. 96 (No. 77).

26. Dispatch from Prague, March 13, 1939, DGFP, IV, p. 246.

27. TMWC, IX, pp. 303–4.

28. The sources for the foregoing section, “The Ordeal of Dr. Hácha,”

are: Secret minutes of the meeting of Hitler and Hácha, DGFP, IV, pp.

263–69; it is also in the Nuremberg documents, NCA, V, pp. 43340

(N.D. 2798–PS). Text of the declaration of the German and

Czechoslovak governments, March 15, 1939, DGFP, IV, pp. 270–71;

the first part was issued as a communiqué; it was actually drafted in

the Foreign Office on March 14. Proclamation of the Fuehrer to the

German People, March 15, NCA, VIII, pp. 402–3 (N.D. TC–50).

Coulondre’s dispatch, French Yellow Book, p. 96 (No. 77). Schmidt’s

description of meeting, his book, op. cit. , pp. 123–26. Henderson on,

his book, op. cit. , Ch. 9. Scene with secretaries, A. Zoller, ed., Hitler

Privat, p. 84.

29. TMWC, XVI, pp. 654–55.

30. Text, DGFP, VI, pp. 42–45.

31. Text, DGFP, IV, p. 241.

32. Berlin Diary, p. 156.

33. The Ciano Diaries, 1939–1943, pp. 9–12.

34. Text, DGFP, IV, pp. 274–75.

35. Ibid. , pp. 273–74.

36. DGFP, VI, pp. 20–21.

37. Ibid. , pp. 16–17, 40.

38. Reports of Dirksen, March 18, 1939, ibid. , pp. 24–25, 36–39.

39. Ibid. p. 39.

CHAPTER 14

1. German memo of meeting, DGFP, VI, pp. 104–7. Lipski’s report to

Beck, Polish White Book, No. 44; given in NCA, VIII, p. 483 (N.D.

TC–73. No. 44).

2. Hitler’s assurance to Lipski, Nov. 15, 1937, DGFP, VI, pp. 26–27;

assurance to Beck, Jan. 14, 1938, ibid. , p. 39.

3. Beck’s instructions to Lipski, Oct. 31, 1938, Polish White Book,

No. 45; NCA, VII, pp. 484–86. Ribbentrop’s memo on meeting with

Lipski, Nov. 19, DGFP, V, pp. 127–29.

4. German memo of meeting by Dr. Schmidt, DGFP, V, pp. 152–58.

Polish minutes on, Polish White Book, No. 48; NCA, VIII, pp. 48688

(N.D.TC–73).

5. Ribbentrop’s memo of the meeting, DGFP, V, pp. 159–61. Polish

minutes on, Polish White Book, No. 49; NCA, VIII, p. 488 (N.D. TC–

73).

6. Ribbentrop’s memo of his meeting with Beck in Warsaw, Jan. 26,

1939, DGFP, V, pp. 167–68; Beck’s version is given in the Polish

White Book, No. 52.

7. Dispatch of Moltke, Feb. 26, 1939, DGFP, VI, p. 172.

8. Lipski’s dispatch to Warsaw on the meeting, Polish White Book,

No. 61; also in NCA, VIII, pp. 489–92 (N.D. TC–73, No. 61).

Ribbentrop’s memo of the meeting, DGFP, VI, pp. 70–72.

9. Foreign Office memo of the meeting, DGFP, V, pp. 524–26.

10. Ibid. , pp. 502–4.

11. Source for this paragraph: DGFP, V, pp. 528–30.

12. DGFP, VI, p. 97.

13. Ibid. , pp. 110–11.

14. NCA, VII, pp. 83–86 (N.D. R-100).

15. Text in DGFP, VI, pp. 122–24. Ribbentrop’s report on March 26

meeting with Lipski, ibid. , pp. 121–22; Polish version, White Book,

No. 63.

16. Dr. Schmidt’s memo of the meeting, DGFP, VI, pp. 135–36.

17. Moltke’s dispatch, ibid. , pp. 147–48; Polish version, White Book,

No. 64.

18. DBrFP, IV, No. 538.

19. See DBrFP, IV, Nos. 485,518, 538 (text of Anglo–French

proposal), 561,563,566,571,573.

20. Ibid. , No. 498.

21. DBrFP, V, No. 12.

22. Quoted by Gisevius, op. cit. , p. 363.

23. The text of Case White, NCA, VI, pp. 916–28; a partial translation

is in DGFP, VI, pp. 186–87, 223–28 (N.D. C–120). The text of the

original German is in TMWC, XXXIV, pp. 380–422.

24. Confidential German memos on the Goering-Mussolini talks are in

DGFP, VI, pp. 248–53, 258–63. See also The Ciano Diaries, pp. 66–

67.

25. The circular telegram of April 17, 1939, DGFP, VI, pp. 264–65;

Foreign Office memo of the answers, ibid. , pp. 309–10; Weizsaecker’s

call to German minister in Riga, April 18, ibid. , pp. 283–84.

26. Ibid. , pp. 355, 399.

27. DGFP, IV, pp. 602–7.

28. Ibid. , (dispatch of Oct. 26, 1938).

29. Ibid. , pp. 608–9.

30. Ibid. , p. 631.

31. DGFP, VI, pp. 1–3.

32. Davies, Mission to Moscow, pp. 437–39. Ambassador Sieds’s

dispatch, DBrFP, IV, No. 419.

33. Boothby, I Fight to Live, p. 189. Halifax statement to Maisky,

DBrFP, IV, No. 433.

34. DGFP, VI, pp. 88–89.

35. Ibid. , p. 139.

36. German memo of Goering-Mussolini talk, April 16, 1939, ibid. ,

pp. 259–60.

37. Ibid. , pp. 266–67.

38. Ibid. , pp. 419–20.

39. Ibid. , p. 429.

40. Ibid. , pp. 535–36.

41. Nazi–Soviet Relations, 1939–41 [hereafter referred to as NSR], pp.

5–7, 8–9.

42. French Yellow Book, Dispatches Nos. 123, 125. I have used the

French-language edition ( Le Livre Jaune Français), but I believe the

English edition carries the same numbers for dispatches.

43. DGFP, VI, pp. 1, 111. Appendix I of this volume contains a

number of memoranda on the staff talks taken from the German naval

archives.

44. The Ciano Diaries, pp. 67–68.

45. German memo on the Milan meeting, DGFP, VI, pp. 450–52.

Ciano’s minutes, Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers, pp. 282–87.

46. Text of the treaty of alliance, DGFP, VI, pp. 561–64. A secret

protocol contained nothing of significance.

47. Schmundt’s minutes, May 23, 1939, NC A, VII, pp. 847–54 (N.D.

L–79). There is also an English translation in DGFP, VI, pp. 574–80.

The German text is in TMWC, XXXVII, pp. 546–56.

48. For details of the plan, see N.D. NOKW-2584. This is in the TWC

volumes [ Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military

Tribunals].

49. NCA, VI, pp. 926–27 (N.D. C–120).

50. TMWC, XXXIV, pp. 428–42 (N.D. C–126). The English

translation of this document in NCA, VI, pp. 937–38, is so abbreviated

that it has little value.

51. NCA, VI, p. 827 (N.D. C–23).

52. Text of the Anglo–French draft, DBrFP, V, No. 624; the British

ambassador’s account of Molotov’s reaction is in the same volume,

Nos. 648 and 657.

53. “Urgent” dispatch of May 31, DGFP, VI, pp. 616–17.

54. Dispatch of June 1, ibid. , pp. 624–26.

55. Ibid. , p. 547.

56. Ibid. , pp. 589–93.

57. Ibid. , p. 593.

58. Letter, Weizsaecker to Schulenburg, May 27, with postscript of

May 30, pp. 597–98.

59. Ibid. , pp. 608–9.

60. Ibid. , pp. 618–20.

61. Ibid. , pp. 790–91.

62. Ibid. , pp. 805–7.

63. Ibid. , p. 810.

64. Ibid. , p. 813.

65. DBrFP, V, Nos. 5 and 38.

66. Pravda, June 29, 1939.

67. Dispatch of June 29, DGFP, VI, pp. 808–9.

68. TMWC, XXXIV, pp. 493–500 (N.D. C–142). It is given much

more briefly in English translation in NCA, VI, p. 956.

69. NCA, IV, pp. 1035–36 (N.D. 2327—PS).

70. NCA, VI,’ p. 934 (N.D. C–126).

71. The secret minutes of the meeting of the Reich Defense Council,

June 23, 1939, NCA, VI, pp. 718–31 (N.D. 3787–PS).

72. DGFP, VI, pp. 750, 920–21.

73. Ibid. , pp. 864–65.

74. Text of notes, DGFP, VII, pp. 4–5, 9–10.

75. Report of Burckhardt to the League of Nations, March 19, 1940.

Text in Documents on International Affairs, 1939–1946, I, pp. 346–47.

76. DGFP, VI, pp. 936–38.

77. Ibid. , pp. 955–56.

78. Schnurre’s memo, ibid. , pp. 11069.

79. Ibid. , pp. 1015–16.

80. Ibid. , pp. 1022–23.

81. Ibid. , pp. 1010–11.

82. Ibid. , p. 1021.

83. DBrFP, IV, No. 183.

84. See DBrFP, VI, Nos. 329, 338, 346, 357, 358, 376, 399.

85. Ibid. ,

86. Two dispatches of Aug. 1, DGFP, VI, pp. 1033–34.

87. DBrFP, Appendix V, p. 763.

88. Burnett’s letter in DBrFP, VII, Appendix II, p. 600; Seeds’s

telegram, ibid. , VI, No. 416.

89. DGFP, VI, p. 1047.

90. Ibid. ,

91. Ibid. ,

92. Ibid. ,

93. Ibid. ,

94. French Yellow Book, Fr. ed., pp. 250–51.

95. Text of two letters, DGFP, VI, pp. 973–74.

96. Attolico’s dispatch on his July 6 meeting with Ribbentrop is

printed in I Documenti diplomatica italiani [hereafter cited as DDI],

Seventh Series, XII, No. 503. I have used the quotation and

paraphrasing from The Eve of the War, ed. by Arnold and Veronica M.

Toynbee.

97. Memo of Weizsaecker, DGFP, VI, pp. 971–72.

98. The Ciano Diaries, pp. 113–14.

99. lbid. , pp. 116–18.

100. The Ciano Diaries, pp. 118–19, 582–83. Ciano’s minutes of the

meeting with Ribbentrop are in Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers, pp. 297–

98; also in DDI, Eighth Series, XIII, No. 1. No German record of this

meeting has been found.

101. The captured German minutes of the meetings on Aug. 12 and 13

were presented at Nuremberg as documents 1871–PS and TC–77. The

latter is the more complete and is published in English translation in

NCA, VIII, pp. 516–29. I have used the version signed by Dr. Schmidt,

in DGFP, VII, pp. 39–49, 53–56. Ciano’s record of his two talks with

Hitler are in Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers, pp. 303–4, and in DDI, XIII,

Nos. 4 and 21. Also the entries for Aug. 12 and 13, 1939, and Dec. 23,

1943, in his Diaries, pp. 119–20, 582–83.

102. This extract from Halder’s diary is published in DGFP, VII, p.

556.

103. See DDI, Seventh Series, XIII, No. 28, and DBrFP, VI, No. 662.

CHAPTER 15

1. Schnurre’s memo of the meeting, taken from his dispatch to the

embassy in Moscow, Aug. 14, 1939, DGFP, VII, pp. 58–59.

2. Text of Schulenburg’s letter, ibid. , pp. 67–68.

3. Text of Ribbentrop’s telegram, ibid. , pp. 62–64.

4. The memo of the British businessmen was found in a file of

Goering’s office and is published in DGFP, VI, pp. 1088–93. There

are numerous jottings on the document in Goering’s handwriting.

“Oho!” he scribbled several times opposite statements that obviously

he could not believe. The whole fantastic and somewhat ludicrous

story of Dahlerus’ peace mission which brought him briefly to the

center of the stage at a momentous moment is told in his own book,

The Last Attempt. Also in his testimony at Nuremberg, TMWC, IX, pp.

457–91, and in Sir Lewis Namier’s Diplomatic Prelude, pp. 417–33;

the chapter is entitled “An Interloper in Diplomacy.”

5. Interrogation of Halder, Feb. 26, 1946, NCA, Suppl. B, p. 1562.

6. Hassell, op. cit. , pp. 53, 58–59.

7. Thomas, “Gedanken und Ereignisse,” Schweizerische Monatshefte,

December 1945.

8. Memo of Canaris on conversation with Keitel, Aug. 17, 1939, NCA,

III, p. 580 (N.D. 795–PS).

9. Naujocks affidavit, NCA, VI, pp. 390–92 (N.D. 2751–PS).

10. Dispatch of Schulenburg, 2:48 A.M., Aug. 16, DGFP, VII, pp.

7677. The ambassador gave a fuller account in a memo dispatched by

courier, and he added details in a letter to Weizsaecker, ibid. , pp. 87–

90, 99–100.

11. DBrFP, Third Series, VII, pp. 41–42. For Ambassador Steinhardt’s

reports see U.S. Diplomatic Papers, 1939, I, pp. 296–99, 334.

12. Dispatch of Ribbentrop to Schulenburg, Aug. 16, DGFP, VII, pp.

84–85.

13. Ibid. , p. 100.

14. Ibid. , p. 102.

15. Dispatch by Schulenburg, 5:58 A.M., Aug. 18, ibid. , pp. 114–16.

16. Dispatch of Ribbentrop, 10:48 P.M., Aug. 18, ibid. , pp. 121–23.

17. Memo of Schnurre, Aug. 19, ibid. , pp. 132–33.

18. Dispatch of Schulenburg, 6:22 P.M., Aug. 19, ibid. , p. 134.

19. Dispatch of Schulenburg, 12:08 A.M., Aug. 20, ibid. , pp. 149–50.

20. Churchill, The Gathering Storm, p. 392. He does not give his

source.

21. Ibid. , p. 391.

22. Hitler’s telegram to Stalin, Aug. 20, DGFP, VII, pp. 156–57.

23. Dispatch of Schulenburg, 1:19 A.M., Aug. 21, ibid. , pp. 161–62.

24. Dispatch of Ribbentrop, Aug. 21, ibid. , p. 162.

25. Dispatch of Schulenburg, 1:43 P.M., Aug. 21, ibid. , p. 164.

26. Stalin’s letter to Hitler, Aug. 21, ibid. , p. 168.

27. NCA, Suppl. B, pp. 1103–5.

28. DBrFP, VI, No. 376.

29. See DBrFP, Third Series, VII, Appendix II, pp. 558–614. The

appendix contains a detailed day-to-day record of the military

conversations in Moscow and constitutes the most comprehensive

source I have seen of the Allied version of the talks. It includes reports

to London, during the negotiations, by Air Marshal Burnett and Gen.

Heywood, and the final report of the British mission by Adm. Drax.

Also, a verbatim account of the dramatic meeting of Gen. Doumenc

with Marshal Voroshilov on the evening of Aug. 22, when the chief of

the French military mission tried desperately to save the situation

despite the public announcement that Ribbentrop was arriving in

Moscow the next day. Also, the record of the final, painful meeting of

the Allied missions with Voroshilov on Aug. 26. Volume VII also

includes many dispatches between the British Foreign Office and the

embassy in Moscow which throw fresh light on this episode.

This section of the chapter is based largely on these

confidential British papers. Unfortunately the Russians, so far as I

know, have never published their documents on the meeting,

though a Soviet account is given in Nikonov’s Origins of World

War II, in which much use of the British Foreign Office

documents is made. The Soviet version is also given in Histoire

de la Diplomatie, ed. by V. Potemkin.

30. Paul Reynaud, In the Thick of the Fight, p. 212. Reynaud, pp. 210–

33, gives the French version of the Allied negotiations in Moscow in

August 1939. He gives his sources on p. 211. Bonnet gives his version

in his book Fin d’une Europe.

31. The documents are in DBrFP, VII (see note 29 above). It is

interesting that not a line on the Anglo–French diplomatic efforts in

Warsaw to get the Poles to accept Russian help nor on the course of

the military talks in Moscow was published in either the British Blue

Book or the French Yellow Book.

32. Dispatch of Ribbentrop, 9:05 P.M., Aug. 23, from Moscow, DGFP,

VII, p. 220.

33. Secret German memoranda, Aug. 24, ibid. , pp. 225–29.

34. Text of the Soviet draft, DGFP, VII, pp. 150–51.

35. Gaus affidavit at Nuremberg, TMWC, X, p. 312.

36. Text of the German–Soviet nonaggression pact and of secret

additional protocol, signed in Moscow Aug. 23, 1939, DGFP, VII, pp.

245–47.

37. Churchill, The Gathering Storm, p. 394.

CHAPTER 16

1. British Blue Book, pp. 96–98.

2. Henderson’s dispatch, Aug. 23, 1939, ibid. , pp. 98–100. German

Foreign Office memo of meeting, DGFP, VII, pp. 210–15. Henderson

reported on the second meeting on Aug. 24 ( British Blue Book, pp.

100–2).

3. Text of Hitler’s letter of Aug. 23 to Chamberlain, ibid. , pp. 102–4.

It is also printed in DGFP, VII, pp. 216–19.

4. Text of Hitler’s letter to Mussolini, Aug. 25, DGFP, VII, pp. 281–

83.

5. Text of verbal declaration of Hitler to Henderson, Aug. 25, drawn

up by Ribbentrop and Dr. Schmidt, DGFP, VII, pp. 279–84; also in

British Blue Book, pp. 120–22. Henderson’s dispatch of Aug. 25

describing interview, British Blue Book, pp. 122–23. See also

Henderson’s Failure of a Mission, p. 270.

6. Coulondre’s dispatch, Aug. 25, French Yellow Book, Fr. ed., pp.

312–14.

7. NCA, VI, pp. 977–98. From a file on Russo–German relations

found in the files of the Navy High Command.

8. Schmidt, op. cit. , p. 144.

9. Ibid. , pp. 143–44.

10. Ciano Diaries, pp. 120–29.

11. Weizsaecker memorandum, Aug. 20, DGFP, VII, p. 160.

12. Mackensen letter to Weizsaecker, Aug. 23, ibid. , pp. 240–43.

13. Dispatch of Mackensen, Aug. 25, ibid., pp. 291–93.

14. See DGFP, VII, note on p. 285.

15. Mussolini’s letter to Hitler, Aug. 25, ibid. , pp. 285–86.

16. NCA, VI, pp. 977–78 (N.D. 170).

17. Ribbentrop’s interrogation, Aug. 29, 1945, NCA, VII, pp. 535–36;

Goering’s interrogation, Aug. 29, 1945, ibid., pp. 534–35; Keitel’s

testimony on the stand at Nuremberg under direct examination, Apr. 4,

1946, TMWC, X, pp. 514–15.

18. NCA, Suppl. B, pp. 1561–63.

19. Gisevius, op. cit. , pp. 358–59.

20. Hassell, op. cit. , p. 59.

21. Thomas, “Gedanken und Ereignisse,” loe. cit.

22. Testimony of Dr. Schacht, May 2, 1946, at Nuremberg, TMWC.

XII, pp. 545–46.

23. Testimony of Gisevius, Apr. 25, 1946, at Nuremberg, ibid. , pp.

224–25.

24. The texts of all these appeals are in the British Blue Book, pp. 122–

42.

25. Hitler to Mussolini, Aug. 25, 7:40 P.M., DGFP, VII, p. 289.

26. Ciano Diaries, p. 129.

27. Mussolini to Hitler, Aug. 26, 12:10 P.M., DGFP, VII, pp. 309–10.

28. Ciano Diaries, p. 129. Mackensen’s report, DGFP, VII, p. 325.

29. Hitler to Mussolini, Aug. 26, 3:08 P.M., DGFP, VII, pp. 313–14.

30. Mussolini to Hitler, 6:42 P.M., Aug. 26, ibid. , p. 323.

31. Hitler to Mussolini, 12:10 A.M., Aug. 27, ibid. , pp. 346–47.

32. Mussolini to Hitler, 4:30 P.M., Aug. 27, ibid. , pp. 353–54.

33. Dispatch of Mackensen, Aug. 27, ibid. , pp. 351–53.

34. Daladier to Hitler, Aug. 26, ibid. , pp. 330–31. Also in the French

Yellow Book, Fr. ed., pp. 321–22.

35. Halder’s diary, entry of Aug. 28, recapitulating “sequence of

events” of previous five days. This portion is in DGFP, VII, pp. 564–

66.

36. Goering’s interrogation, Aug. 29, 1945, at Nuremberg, NCA, VIII,

p. 534 (N.D.TC–90).

37. TMWC, IX,p.498.

38. The account of the doings of Dahlerus is based on his book, op.

cit. , and on his testimony at Nuremberg, where he learned how naïve

he had been about his German friends. See above, note 4 for Chapter

15. It is substantiated by a great deal of material from the British

Foreign Office published in DBrFP, Third Series, Vol. VII.

39. DBrFP, VII, p. 287.

40. Testimony of Dahlerus at Nuremberg, TMWC, IX, p. 465.

41. DBrFP, VII, p. 319 n.

42. TMWC, IX, p. 466.

43. DBrFP, VII, pp. 321–22.

44. British Blue Book, p. 125, and DBrFP, VII, p. 318.

45. Text of British note to Germany, Aug. 28, British Blue Book, pp.

126–28.

46. Dispatch of Henderson to Halifax, 2:35 A.M., Aug. 29, ibid. , pp.

128–31.

47. Dispatch of Henderson to Halifax, Aug. 29, ibid., p. 131.

48. Dispatch of Henderson, Aug. 29, DBrFP, VII, p. 360.

49. Ibid. ,

50. Text of German reply, Aug. 29, British Blue Book, pp. 135–37.

51. DBrFP, Third Series, VII, p. 393.

52. Henderson, Failure of a Mission, p. 281.

53. British Blue Book, p. 139.

54. Text of Chamberlain’s note to Hitler, Aug. 30, DGFP, VII, p. 441.

55. British Blue Book, pp. 139–40.

56. Ibid. , p. 140.

57. lbid. , p. 142.

58. Schmidt, op. cit., pp. 150–55. Also Schmidt’s testimony at

Nuremberg, TMWC, X, pp. 196–222.

59. TMWC, X, p. 275.

60. Schmidt, op. cit. , p. 152.

61. DGFP, VII, pp. 447–50.

62. Henderson’s Final Report, Cmd. 6115, p. 17. Also his book, op.

cit. , p. 287.

63. DBrFP, VII, No. 575, p. 433.

64. TMWC, IX, p. 493.

65. Henderson’s wire to Halifax, 12:30 P.M., Aug. 31, DBrFP, VII, p.

440; letter to Halifax, ibid., pp. 465–67; wire, 12:30 A.M., Sept. 1, ibid. ,

pp. 468–69. Kennard’s wire to Halifax, Aug. 31, ibid. , No. 618.

66. DBrFP, VII, pp. 441–43.

67. British Blue Book, p. 144.

68. Ibid. , p. 147.

69. Ibid. , p. 147.

70. Text of Polish written reply to Britain, Aug. 31, ibid. , pp. 148–49;

Kennard’s dispatch, Aug. 31 (it was not received in London until

7:15p.M.), ibid., p. l48.

71. For Lipski’s Final Report, see Polish White Book. Extracts are

published in NCA, VIII, pp. 499–512.

72. DGFP, VII, p. 462.

73. Lipski’s version in his Final Report, loc. cit. Dr. Schmidt’s German

account of the interview is in DGFP, VII, p. 463.

74. The German text of Hitler’s directive is in TMWC, XXXIV, pp.

456–59 (N.D. C–126). English translations are given in NCA, VI, pp.

935–39, and DGFP, VII, pp. 477–79.

75. Hassell, op. cit. , pp. 68–73.

76. Dahlems’ testimony at Nuremberg, TMWC, IX, pp. 470–71;

Forbes’s answer to questionnaire submitted by Goering’s lawyer at

Nuremberg is quoted in Namier, Diplomatic Prelude, pp. 376–77.

Henderson’s account is in his Final Report, p. 19.

77. DBrFP, VII, p. 483. Henderson’s later account of the dispatch is

given in his Final Report, p. 20, and in his book, op. cit. , pp. 291–92.

78. TMWC, II, p. 451.

79. Naujocks affidavit, loc. cit.

80. DGFP, VII, p. 472.

81. Gisevius, op. cit. , pp. 374–75.

CHAPTER 17

1. DGFP, VII, p. 491.

2. From Dahlems’ book, op. cit. , pp. 119–20; and from his testimony

on the stand at Nuremberg, TMWC, IX, p. 471.

3. DBrFP, VII, pp. 466–67.

4. ibid.

5. TMWC, IX, p. 436. Dahlems testimony, as printed here, contains a

typographical error which makes him say the Poles “had been

attacked,” and is therefore totally misleading.

6. DBrFP, VII, pp. 474–75.

7. Ibid. , Nos. 651, 652, pp. 479–80.

8. The text is in DGFP, VII, p. 492, and in the British Blue Book, p.

168. Dr. Schmidt’s notes on Ribbentrop’s comments to Henderson and

Coulondre are in DGFP, VII, pp. 493 and 495, respectively.

9. Schmidt’s version of the argument in DGFP, VII, p. 493;

Henderson gave his account briefly in his dispatch on the evening of

Sept. 1, 1939 ( British Blue Book, p. 169).

10. DBrFP, VII, No. 621, p. 459.

11. Ciano Diaries, p. 135.

12. DGFP, VII, p. 483.

13. Ibid. , pp. 485–86.

14. Bonnet to François-Poncet, 11:45 A.M., Sept. 1, French Yellow

Book, Fr. ed., pp. 377–78. Mussolini’s proposal for a conference on

September 5 was outlined in a dispatch from François-Poncet to

Bonnet Aug. 31, ibid. , pp. 360–61.

15. DBrFP, VII, pp. 530–31.

16. Henderson’s Final Report, p. 22.

17. Text in DGFP, VII, pp. 509–10.

18. From Schmidt’s memo, on which this scene is based, ibid. , pp.

512–13.

19. Schmidt, op. cit. , p. 156.

20. Ciano Diaries, pp. 136–37.

21. DGFP, VII, pp. 524–25.

22. Ciano Diaries, p. 137. De Monzie, a defeatist French senator,

confirms the story in his book Ci-Devant, pp. 146–47.

23. Corbin’s dispatch, French Yellow Book, Fr. ed., p. 395.

24. This section is based on DBrFP, VII, covering Sept. 2–3. There is

an excellent summary, based on the confidential British Foreign Office

papers and on the scant French sources available, in The Eve of the

War, 1939, ed. by Arnold and Veronica M. Toynbee. Namier,

Diplomatic Prelude, also is useful. I have purposely omitted the

references to scores of documents in DBrFP in order to avoid

cluttering the pages with numerals.

25. Halifax wires to Henderson: 11:50 P.M., Sept. 2, DBrFP, VII, No.

746, p. 528; 12:25 A.M., Sept. 3, ibid. , p. 533.

26. The text is in the British Blue Book, p. 175, and in DGFP, VII. p.

529.

27. DBrFP, VII, No. 758, p. 535.

28. Schmidt’s account is in his book, op. cit., p. 157; see also his

testimony on the stand at Nuremberg. TMWC, X, p. 200.

29. Schmidt, op. cit. , pp. 157–58; also his testimony at Nuremberg,

TMWC, X, pp. 200–1.

30. Ibid.

31. DBrFP, VII, No. 762, p. 537, n. 1.

32. Ibid.

33. TMWC, IX, p. 473.

34. Bonnet recounts this himself, op. cit. , pp. 365–68.

35. Weizsaecker’s memo of the meeting, DGFP, VII, p. 532.

36. The text is in DGFP, VII, pp. 54849.

37. The text is given in DGFP, VII, pp. 538–39.

38. This is revealed in the German Foreign Office papers, ibid. , p. 480.

39. Text of telegram, ibid. , pp. 540–41.

40. Fuehrer Conferences on Naval Affairs [hereafter referred to as

FCNA], 1939, pp. 13–14.

CHAPTER 18

1. Text of Russian reply, DGFP, VIII, p. 4. A number of these Nazi–

Soviet exchanges are printed in NSR, but DGFP gives a fuller account.

2. Ibid. , pp. 33–34.

3. Molotov’s congratulations, ibid. , p. 34. His promise of military

action, p. 35.

4. Schulenburg dispatch, Sept. 10, ibid. , pp. 44–45.

5. Ibid. , pp. 60–61.

6. Ibid. , pp. 68–70.

7. Ibid. , pp. 76–77.

8. Ibid. , pp. 79–80.

9. Schulenburg dispatch, ibid. , p. 92.

10. Ibid. , p. 103.

11. Ibid. , p. 105.

12. Ibid. , pp. 123–24.

13. Ibid. , p. 130.

14. The two telegrams, ibid. , pp. 147–48.

15. Ibid. , p. 162.

16. Ibid. , Appendix 1.

17. Text of the treaty, including the secret protocols, a public

declaration, and exchanges of two letters between Molotov and

Ribbentrop, ibid. , pp. 164–68.

CHAPTER 19

1. Maj.-Gen. J. F. C. Fuller, The Second World War, p. 55. Quoted

from The First Quarter, p. 343.

2. Text of Directive No. 3, DGFP, VIII, p. 41.

3. Namier, op. cit. , pp. 459–60. He quotes the French text of the

convention.

4. Testimony of Halder for defendants in the “Ministries Case” trial,

on Sept. 8–9, 1948, at Nuremberg, TWC, XII, p. 1086.

5. Testimony of Jodl in his own defense on June 4, 1946, at

Nuremberg, TMWC, XV, p. 350.

6. Testimony of Keitel in his own defense on April 4, 1946, at

Nuremberg, ibid. , X, p. 519.

7. Churchill, The Gathering Storm, p. 478.

8. FCNA, 1939, pp. 16–17.

9. Weizsaecker’s memorandum of his talk with Kirk, DGFP, VIII, pp.

3–4. His testimony at Nuremberg on his talk with Raeder, TMWC,

XIV, p. 278.

10. Ibid. , XXXV, pp. 527–29 (N.D. 804–D). The document gives both

Raeder’s memorandum of his conversation and the text of the

American naval attaché’s cable to Washington.

11. Sworn statement of Doenitz at Nuremberg, NCA, VII, pp. 114–15

(N.D. 638–D).

12. Ibid. , pp. 156–58.

13. Nuremberg testimony of Raeder, TMWC, XIV, p. 78; of

Weizsaecker, ibid. , pp. 277, 279, 293; of Hans Fritzsche, a high

official in the Propaganda Ministry and an acquitted defendant in the

trial. ibid. , XVII, pp. 191, 234–35. The Voelkischer Beobachter article

is in NCA, V, p. 1008 (N.D. 3260–PS). For Goebbels’ broadcast, see

Berlin Diary, p. 238.

14. Schmidt memorandum of the talk, DGFP, VIII, pp. 140–45.

15. Brauchitsch’s testimony at Nuremberg, TMWC, XX, p. 573. A note

in the OKW War Diary confirms the quotation.

16. Ciano Diaries, pp. 154–55. Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers, pp. 309–

16.

17. DGFP, VIII, p. 24.

18. Ibid. , pp. 197–98.

19. DGFP, VII, p. 414.

20. Hitler’s memorandum, NCA, VII, pp. 800–14 (N.D. L–52);

Directive No. 6, NCA, VI, pp. 880–81 (N.D.C–62).

21. The text is in TWC, X, pp. 864–72 (N.D. NOKW–3433).

22. Both Schlabrendorff, op. cit. , p. 25, and Gisevius, op. cit. , p. 431,

tell of this plot.

23. Wheeler-Bennett in Nemesis, p. 491 n., gives the German sources.

See also Hassell, op. cit. , and Thomas, “Gedanken und Ereignisse,”

loc. cit.

24. Halder’s interrogation at Nuremberg, Feb. 26, 1946, NCA; Suppl.

B, pp. 1564–75.

25. Rothfels, The German Opposition to Hitler.

26. They are given in NCA, VI, pp. 893–905 (N.D.C–72).

27. Buelow-Schwante testified in the “Ministries Case” before the

Nuremberg Military Tribunal about Goerdeler’s message and his own

private audience with King Leopold. See transcript, English edition,

pp. 9807–11. It is also mentioned in DGFP, VIII, p. 384 n. His

telegram of warning to Berlin is printed in DGFP, VIII, p. 386.

28. For the varied accounts of the Venlo kidnaping, see S. Payne Best,

The Venlo Incident; Schellenberg, The Labyrinth; Wheeler-Bennett,

Nemesis.

An official Dutch account is given in the protest of the

Netherlands government to Germany, DGFP, VIII, pp. 395–96.

Additional material was given at the “Ministries Case” trial at

Nuremberg. See TWC, XII.

29. TWC, XII, pp. 1206–8, and DGFP, VIII, pp. 395–96.

30. For various accounts of the bomb attempt, see Best, op. cit.;

Schellenberg, op. cit.; Wheeler-Bennett, Nemesis; Reitlinger, The S.S.;

Berlin Diary; Gisevius, op. cit. There was also some material at

Nuremberg from which I made notes and which I have used here,

though I cannot find it in the NCA and TMWC volumes.

31. The textual notes are given in NCA, III, pp. 572–80, and also in

DGFP, VIII, pp. 439–46 (N.D. 789–PS).

32. Halder’s diary for Nov. 23 and his footnote added later.

Brauchitsch’s testimony at Nuremberg, TMWC, XX, p. 575.

33. Halder’s interrogation at Nuremberg, NCA, Suppl. B, pp. 1569–70.

Also see Thomas, “Gedanken und Ereignisse,” loc. cit.

34. Hassell, op. cit. , pp. 93–94, 172.

35. Ibid. , pp. 79, 94.

36. From the diary of Admiral Canaris, NCA, V, p. 769 (N.D. 3047–

PS).

37. NCA, VI, pp. 97–101 (N.D. 3363–PS).

38. TMWC, I, p. 297.

39. Ibid. , pp. 468–69.

40. Ibid., XXIX, pp. 447–48.

41. NCA, IV, p. 891 (N.D. 2233–C–PS).

42. Ibid. , pp. 891–92.

43. Ibid. , pp. 553–54.

44. DGFP, VIII, p. 683 n.

45. The text, ibid. , pp. 604–9.

46. Ibid. , p. 394.

47. Ibid., p. 213.

48. Ibid., p. 490.

49. NCA, IV, p. 1082.

50. Ibid. , p. 1082 (N.D. 2353–PS).

51. DGFP, VIII, p. 537.

52. Ibid. , respectively.

53. Text of trade treaty of Feb. 11, 1940, and figures on deliveries,

ibid. , pp. 762–64.

54. NCA, IV, pp. 1081–82 (N.D. 2353–PS).

55. DGFP, VIII, pp. 814–17 (Schnurre memorandum, Feb. 26, 1940).

56. NCA, III, p. 620 (N.D. 864–PS).

57. Langsdorff’s moving letter is given in FCNA, 1939, p. 62. Other

German material on the battle and its aftermath, pp. 59–62.

58. I have used some of the original German sources for this account

of the forced landing: reports of the German ambassador and the air

attaché in Brussels to Berlin, DGFP, VIII, and Jodl’s diary. The text of

the German plan of attack in the West, as salvaged by the Belgians, is

given in NCA, VIII, pp. 423–28 (N.D. TC-58–A). Karl Bartz has given

an account of the incident in Als der Himmel brannte. Churchill’s

comments are in The Gathering Storm, pp. 556–57. He gives a wrong

date for the forced landing.

CHAPTER 20

1. NCA, IV, p. 104 (N.D. 1546–PS); VI, pp. 891–92 (N.D. C–66).

2. Ibid. , VI, pp. 928 (N.D. C–122), p. 978 (N.D. C–170).

3. Ibid. , p. 892 (N.D. C–166); FCNA, 1939, p. 27.

4. Churchill, The Gathering Storm, pp. 531–37.

5. FCNA, 1939, p. 51.

6. Rosenberg’s memorandum, NCA, VI, pp. 885–87 (N.D. C–64). It is

also given in FCNA, 1939, pp. 53–55.

7. FCNA, 1939, pp. 55–57.

8. Ibid. , pp. 57–58.

9. DGFP, VIII, pp. 515, 546–47.

10. Jodl’s diary, Dec. 12, 13—obviously misdated. Halder diary for

Dec. 14.

11. Rosenberg memorandum, NCA, III, pp. 22–25 (N.D. 004–PS).

12. DGFP, VIII, pp. 663–66.

13. Text of the directive, NCA, VI, p. 883 (N.D.C–63).

14. Interrogation of Falkenhorst at Nuremberg, NCA, Suppl. B, pp.

1534–47.

15. Text of the directive, NCA, VI, pp. 1003–5; also in DGFP, VIII,

pp. 831–33.

16. Jodl’s diary, March 10–14, 1940.

17. DGFP, VIII, pp. 910–13.

18. Ibid. , pp. 179–81, 470–471.

19. Ibid. , pp. 89–91.

20. Text of Hitler’s directive, ibid. , pp. 817–19.

21. Dr. Schmidt’s minutes of the meetings of Sumner Welles with

Hitler, Goering and Ribbentrop are in DGFP, VIII; also Weizsaecker’s

two memoranda on his talk with Welles. The American envoy also

saw Dr. Schacht after the banker, now fallen from grace, had been

summoned by Hitler and told what line to take. See Hassell, op. cit. , p.

121. Welles has given his own account of his talks in Berlin in The

Time for Decision.

22. DGFP, VIII, pp. 865–66.

23. DGFP, VIII, pp. 652–56, 683–84.

24. Text of Hitler’s letter to Mussolini, March 8, 1940, ibid. , pp. 870–

871.

25. Schmidt’s minutes of the meetings, ibid. , pp. 882–93, 898–909;

Ciano’s version is in Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers, pp. 339–59. Also see

Schmidt, op. cit. , pp. 170–71, and The Ciano Diaries, for their

personal comments on the meetings. Ribbentrop’s two telegrams to

Hitler reporting on his interviews are in DGFP, VIII.

26. Welles, op. cit. , p. 138.

27. Ciano Diaries, p. 220.

28. Dr. Schmidt’s transcribed shorthand notes of the meeting, DGFP,

IX, pp. 1–16.

29. Hassell, op. cit. , pp. 116–18, on which this account is largely

based.

30. Allen Dulles, Germany’s Underground, p. 59.

31. Shirer, The Challenge of Scandinavia, pp. 223–25.

32. Churchill, The Gathering Storm, p. 579. The British plans for R–4

are given in Derry, The Campaign in Norway, the official British

account of the Norwegian campaign.

33. Text of the directive, DGFP, IX, pp. 66–68.

34. Text, ibid. , pp. 68–73.

35. Text of, NCA, VI, pp. 914–15 (N.D.C–115).

36. TMWC, XIV, pp. 99, 194.

37. Text of, NCA, VIII, pp. 410–14 (N.D. TC–55). Also in DGFP, IX,

pp. 88–93.

38. Renthe–Fink’s dispatch from Copenhagen, DGFP, IX, pp. 102–3;

Bräuer’s dispatch from Oslo, ibid. , p. 102.

39. The Danish version of the German occupation is based on the

author’s The Challenge of Scandinavia, and on Denmark during the

Occupation, ed. by Børge Outze. Lt. Col. Th. Thaulow’s contribution

is especially valuable. A Guards officer, he was with the King at the

time.

40. From the secret German Army Archives. Quoted in NCA, VI, pp.

299–308 (N.D. 3596–PS).

41. From the Norwegian State Archives; quoted in the author’s The

Challenge of Scandinavia, p. 38.

42. DGFP, IX, p. 124.

43. Ibid. , p. 129.

44. Ibid. , p. 186.

45. Churchill, The Gathering Storm, p. 601.

CHAPTER 21

1. Belgium—The Official Account of What Happened, 1939–1940, pp.

27–29.

2. NCA, IV, p. 1037 (N.D. 2329–PS).

3. Ibid. , VI, p. 880 (N.D. C–62).

4. Allen Dulles, op. cit. , pp. 58–61. Dulles says Col. Sas personally

confirmed this account to him after the war.

5. There is a vast amount of material on the development of the

German plans for the attack in the West. I have drawn on the

following: the diaries of Halder and Jodl; Halder’s booklet, Hitler als

Feldherr, Munich, 1949 (an English translation, Hitler as War Lord,

was published in London in 1950); extracts from the OKW War Diary

published in the NCA and TMWC volumes of the Nuremberg

documents; the various directives of Hitler and OKW, published in the

Nuremberg volumes and in DGFP, VIII and IX; Manstein, Verlorene

Siege; Goerlitz, History of the German General Staff and Der Zweite

Weltkrieg; Jacobsen, Dokumente zur Vorgeschichte des Westfeldzuges,

1939–40; Guderian, Panzer Leader; Blumentritt, Von Rundstedt;

Liddell Hart, The German Generals Talk; considerable German

material in the Nuremberg documents of the NOKW series which were

produced at the secondary trials. For the British plans, see Churchill’s

first two volumes of his memoirs; Ellis, The War in France and

Flanders, which is the official British account; J. F. C. Fuller, The

Second World War; Draper, The Six Weeks’ War. The best over-all

account, based on all the German material available, is in Telford

Taylor’s The March of Conquest.

6. Churchill, Their Finest Hour, pp. 42–43.

7. DGFP, IX, pp. 343–44.

8. Both Goering and Kesselring were questioned on the stand at

Nuremberg in regard to the bombing of Rotterdam. See TMWC, IX,

pp. 175–77,213–18,338–40.

9. TMWC, XXXVI, p. 656.

10. Churchill, Their Finest Hour, p. 40.

11. For more detailed accounts, see Walther Melzer, Albert Kanal und

Eben-Emael; Rudolf Witzig, “Die Einnahme von Eben-Emael,”

Wehrkunde, May 1954 (Lt. Witzig commanded the operation, but

because of a mishap to his glider did not arrive until his men, under

Sgt. Wenzel, had nearly accomplished their mission); Gen. van

Overstraeten, Albert I-Leopold III; Belgium—The Official Account of

What Happened. Telford Taylor, The March of Conquest, pp. 210–14,

gives an excellent summary.

12. Churchill, Their Finest Hour, pp. 46–47.

13. Hitler to Mussolini, May 18, 1940, DGFP, IX, pp. 374–75.

14. From the King’s own account of the meeting and that of Premier

Pierlot. Published in the official Belgian Rapport, Annexes, pp. 69–75,

and quoted by Paul Reynaud, who was French Premier at the time, in

his In the Thick of the Fight, pp. 420–26.

15. Lord Gort’s dispatches, Supplement to the London Gazette,

London, 1941.

16. Weygand, Rappelé au service, pp. 125–26.

17. Churchill, Their Finest Hour, p. 76.

18. Liddell Hart, The German Generals Talk, pp. 114–15 (soft-cover

edition).

19. Ciano Diaries, pp. 265–66.

20. Telford Taylor, The March of Conquest, p. 297.

21. Text, Wilhelm II’s telegram and draft of Hitler’s reply, DGFP, IX,

p. 598.

22. Texts of the exchange of letters between Hitler and Mussolini in

May-June 1940 are in DGFP, IX.

23. Ciano Diaries, p. 267.

24. DGFP, IX, pp. 608–11.

25. Ciano Diaries, p. 266.

26. Ibid. , p. 266.

27. Though copies of the minutes found in the German Archives are

unsigned, Dr. Schmidt has testified that he himself drew them up.

Since he acted as interpreter, he was in the best position of anyone to

do this. They are printed in DGFP, IX, as follows: negotiations of June

21, pp. 643–52; record of the telephone conversations between Gen.

Huntziger and Gen. Weygand (at Bordeaux) on the evening of June

21, as drawn up by Schmidt, who had been directed to listen in, pp.

652–54; record of the telephone conversation between Gen. Huntziger

and Col. Bourget, Gen. Weygand’s adjutant (at Bordeaux), at 10 A.M.

on June 22, pp. 664–71; text of the Franco–German Armistice

Agreement, pp. 671–76; memorandum of questions raised by the

French and answered by the Germans during me negotiations at

Compiègne, pp. 676–79. Hitler gave instructions that this document,

though not a part of the agreement, was “binding on the German side.”

The Germans had placed hidden microphones in the wagon-lit

and recorded every word spoken. I myself listened to part of the

proceedings as they were being recorded In the German

communications van. So far as I know, they were never published

and perhaps neither the recording nor the transcript was ever

found. My own notes are very fragmentary, except for the closing

dramatic session.

28. Churchill, Their Finest Hour, p. 177.

29. DGFP, X, pp. 49–50.

30. Ibid. , IX, pp. 550–51.

31. Ibid. , IX, pp. 558–59, 585.

32. Ibid. , X, pp. 125–26.

33. Ibid. , pp. 39–40.

34. Ibid. , p. 298.

35. Ibid. , pp. 424, 435.

36. Churchill, Their Finest Hour, pp. 259–60.

37. Ibid. , pp. 261–62.

38. DGFP, X, p. 82.

39. OKW directive, signed by Keitel, FCNA, 1940, pp. 61–62.

40. Ciano Diaries, p. 274.

41. FCNA, 1940, pp. 62–66.

42. Letter of Hitler to Mussolini, July 13, 1940, DGFP, X, pp. 209–11.

43. Text of Directive No. 16, NCA, III, pp. 399–403 (N.D. 442–PS). It

is also published in DGFP, X, pp. 226–29.

44. The Ciano Diaries, pp. 277–78 (for July 19, 22).

45. Churchill, Their Finest Hour, p. 261.

46. DGFP, X, pp. 79–80.

47. Ibid. , p. 148.

CHAPTER 22

1. Naval Staff War Diary, June 18, 1940. Quoted in Ronald Wheatley,

Operation Sea Lion, p. 16. The author, a member of the British team

compiling an official history of the war, had unrestricted access to the

captured German military, naval, air and diplomatic archives, a

privilege not accorded up to the time of writing to any unofficial

American authors by either the British or the American authorities,

who hold joint custody of the documents. Wheatley, as a guide to

restricted German sources on Sea Lion, is therefore very helpful.

2. OKM (Navy High Command) records. Wheatley, p. 26.

3. Naval Staff War Diary, Nov. 15, 1939. Wheatley, pp. 4–7.

4. Wheatley, pp. 7–13.

5. FCNA, p. 51 (May 21, 1940); Naval Staff War Diary, same date,

Wheatley, p. 15.

6. Text, TMWC, XXVIII, pp. 301–3 (N.D. 1776–PS). A not very good

English translation is published in NCA, Suppl. A, pp. 4046.

7. British War Office Intelligence Review, November 1945. Cited by

Shulman, op. cit. , pp. 49–50.

8. Liddell Hart, The German Generals Talk, p. 129.

9. From OKH papers, cited by Wheatley, pp. 40, 152–55, 158. The

plan was continually being altered throughout the next six weeks.

10. Naval Staff War Diary, Raeder-Brauchitsch discussion, July 17.

Wheatley, p. 40 n.

11. Halder diary, July 22; FCNA, pp. 71–73 (July 21).

12. Naval Staff War Diary, July 30, and memorandum, July 29.

Wheatley, pp. 45–46.

13. FCNA, Aug. 1, 1940. This is Raeder’s confidential report on the

meeting. Halder gave his in a long diary entry of July 31.

14. DGFP, X, pp. 390–91. It is also given in N.D. 443–PS, which was

not published in the NCA or TMWC volumes.

15. FCNA, pp. 81–82 (Aug. 1, 1940).

16. Ibid. , pp. 73–75.

17. From the Jodl and OKW papers. Wheatley, p. 68.

18. FCNA, pp. 82–83 (Aug. 13).

19. The two directives, ibid. , pp. 81–82 (Aug. 16).

20. Ibid. , pp. 85–86. Wheatley, pp. 161–62, gives details of Autumn

Journey from the German military records.

21. Text of Brauchitsch’s instructions, from the OKH files. Wheatley,

pp. 174–82.

22. FCNA, 1940, p. 88.

23. Ibid. ,

24. Halder’s diary of the same date; Assmann, Deutsche

Schicksalsjahre, pp. 189–90; OKW War Diary, cited by Wheatley, p.

82.

25. Raeder’s report, FCNA, 1940, pp. 98–101. Halder’s diary, Sept 14.

26. FCNA, 1940, pp. 100–1.

27. Naval Staff War Diary, Sept. 17. Wheatley, p. 88.

28. Ibid. , Sept. 18. Cited by Wheatley.

29. FCNA, 1940, p. 101.

30. Ciano Diaries, p. 298.

31. FCNA, 1940, p. 103.

32. Vorstudien zur Luftkriegsgeschichte, Heft 11, Der Luftkrieg gegen

England, 1940–1, by Lt. Col. von Hesler, cited by Wheatley, p. 59.

The two to four weeks’ estimate was given Halder, who noted it in his

diary on July 11.

33. Adolf Galland, The First and the Last, p. 26. Also from Galland’s

interrogation, quoted by Wilmot in The Struggle for Europe, p. 44.

34. Luftwaffe General Staff record of directives given by Goering at

this conference. Wheatley, p. 73.

35. Ciano Diaries, p. 290.

36. See T. H. O’Brien, Civil Defence. This is a volume in the official

British history of the Second World War, edited by Prof. J. R. M.

Butler and published by H. M. Stationery Office.

37. Notes on Goering’s conference with air chiefs, Sept. 16. Cited by

Wheatley, p. 87.

38. Churchill, Their Finest Hour, p. 279.

39. Peter Fleming, Operation Sea Lion, p. 293. An excellent book, but

Fleming was denied access to restricted documents, though he says he

was permitted to glance through—for an hour or two—Wheatley’s

study shortly before it was published.

40. DGFP, X.

41. Schellenberg, The Labyrinth, Ch. 2.

42. New York Times, Aug. 1,1957.

CHAPTER 23

1. DGFP, IX, p. 108.

2. Ibid. , pp. 294, 316.

3. Ibid. , pp. 599–600.

4. Ibid., X, pp. 3–4.

5. Churchill, Their Finest Hour, pp. 135–36 (the text of his letter to

Stalin).

6. DGFP, X, pp. 207–8.

7. Mein Kampf, p. 654.

8. Speech of Jodl, Nov. 7, 1943, NCA, I, p. 795 (N.D. L–172).

9. Sworn testimony of Warlimont, Nov. 21, 1945, NCA, V, p. 741;

interrogation of Warlimont, Oct. 12, 1945, ibid. , Suppl. B, pp. 163537.

10. Halder’s diary, July 22, 1940. He records what Brauchitsch told

him of the conference with Hitler in Berlin on the previous day.

11. Halder’s diary, July 3, 1940.

12. NCA, IV, p. 1083 (N.D. 2353–PS).

13. War Diary, OKW Operations Staff, Aug. 26, 1940. Quoted in

DGFP, X, pp. 549–50.

14. See Warlimont’s two affidavits, NCA, V, pp. 740–41 (N.D. 3031,

2–PS), and his interrogation, ibid. , Suppl. B, p. 1536. Jodl’s directive

of Sept. 6, 1940, is given in NCA, III, pp. 849–50 (N.D. 1229–PS).

15. The directive of Nov. 12, 1940, NCA, III, pp. 403–7. The portion

dealing with Russia is on p. 406.

16. OKW War Diary, Aug. 28. Quoted in DGFP, X, pp. 566–67 n.

17. The Ciano Diaries, p. 289.

18. NCA, VI, p. 873 (N.D. C–53).

19. NSR, pp. 178–81.

20. The German memorandum, ibid. , pp. 181–83; the Soviet

memorandum of Sept. 21 in reply, ibid. ,

21. Ibid. , pp. 188–89.

22. Ibid. , pp. 195–96.

23. lbid. , pp. 197–99.

24. Ibid. , pp. 201–3.

25. Ibid. , pp. 206–7.

26. Ribbentrop’s letter to Stalin, Oct. 13,1940, ibid. , pp. 207–13.

27. Text of Ribbentrop’s indignant telegram, ibid. , p. 214.

28. Text of Stalin’s reply, ibid., p. 216.

29. Ibid., p 217.

30. Memoranda of the meetings of Molotov with Ribbentrop and

Hitler on Nov. 12–13, 1940, ibid. , pp. 217–54.

31. Schmidt, op. cit., p. 212.

32. Ibid. ,

33. Dispatch of Schulenburg, Nov. 26, 1940, NSR, pp. 258–59.

34. FCNA, 1941, p. 13; Halder’s diary, Jan. 16, 1941.

35. Halder diary, Dec. 5, 1940; NCA, IV, pp. 374–75 (N.D. 1799–PS).

The latter is a translation of part of the War Diary of the OKW

Operations Staff, headed by Jodl.

36. Complete German text, TMWC, XXVI, pp. 47–52; short English

version, NCA, III, pp. 407–9 (N.D.446–PS).

37. Halder, Hitler als Feldherr, p. 22.

38. FCNA, 1940, pp. 135–36 (conference of Dec. 27,1940).

39. Ibid. , pp. 91–97, 104–8. (conferences of Sept. 6 and 26, 1940).

Raeder signed both reports.

40. DGFP, IX, pp. 620–21.

41. Schmidt, op. cit. , p. 196. The interpreter gives a fairly complete

account of the conversations. The German minutes in the U.S. State

Department’s The Spanish Government and the Axis are fragmentary.

Erich Kordt, who was also present, gives a more detailed account in

his unpublished memorandum, previously referred to.

42. Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers, p. 402.

43. Schmidt, op. cit. , p. 197.

44. The text of the Montoire Agreement is among the captured

German Foreign Office papers but was not released by the State

Department at the time of writing. However, William L. Langer, Our

Vichy Gamble (pp. 94–95), cites it from the German papers made

available to him by the Department.

45. The Ciano Diaries, p. 300.

46. Ribbentrop on the stand at Nuremberg, and Schmidt in his book, p.

200, recalled the words.

47. Schmidt, op. cit. , p. 200.

48. Halder’s diary, Nov. 4, 1940; report of Jodl to Adm. Schniewind,

Nov. 4, FCNA, 1940, pp. 112–17; Directive No. 18, Nov. 12, 1940,

NCA, III, pp. 403–7 (N.D. 444–PS).

49. FCNA, 1940, p. 125.

50. Ibid. , p. 124.

51. The Spanish Government and the Axis, pp. 28–33.

52. Raeder’s report is in FCNA, 1941, pp. 8–13; Halder did not record

the two-day conference in his diary until Jan. 16, 1941.

53. Text of Directive No. 20, NCA, IV, pp. 101–3 (N.D. 1541–PS).

54. Text of Directive No. 22 and supplementary order giving code

names, NCA, III, pp. 413–15 (N.D. 448–PS).

55. NCA, VI, pp. 939–46 (N.D. C–134).

56. Halder, Hitler als Feldherr, pp. 22–24.

57. NCA, III, pp. 626–33 (N.D. 872–PS).

58. German figures given by Foreign Office, as of Feb. 21, 1941, NSR,

p. 275.

59. German minutes of conference, NCA, IV, pp. 272–75 (N.D. 1746–

PS).

60. NCA, I, p. 783 (N.D. 1450–PS).

61. A partial text of Directive No. 25, NCA, VI, pp. 938–39 (N.D. C–

127).

62. OKW minutes of the meeting, NCA, IV, pp. 275–78 (N.D. 1746–

PS, Part II).

63. Jodl’s testimony, TMWC, XV, p. 387. His “tentative” plan of

operations, NCA, IV, pp. 278–79 (N.D. 1746–PS, Part V).

64. Text, letter of Hitler to Mussolini, March 28, 1941, NCA, IV, pp.

475–77 (N.D. 1835–PS).

65. For details see text of directive, NCA, III, pp. 838–39 (N.D. 1195–

PS).

66. Churchill, The Grand Alliance, pp. 235–36.

67. From the Russian file of the High Command of the German Navy;

entries for May 30 and June 6, NCA, VI, pp. 998–1000 (N.D. C–170).

68. FCNA, 1941, pp. 50–52.

69. TMWC, VII, pp. 255–56.

70. NCA, VI, p. 996 (N.D. C–170).

71. Cited by Shulman, op. cit. , p. 65.

72. Top–secret directive, April 30, 1941, NCA, III, pp. 633–34 (N.D.

873–PS).

73. Halder affidavit, Nov. 22, 1945, at Nuremberg, NCA, VIII, pp.

645–46.

74. TMWC, XX, p. 609.

75. Testimony of Brauchitsch at Nuremberg, TMWC, XX, pp. 581–82,

593.

76. Text of Keitel’s order, July 23, 1941, NCA, VI, p. 876 (N.D. C–

52); July 27 order, ibid. , pp. 875–76 (N.D.C–51).

77. Text of the court–martial directive, NCA, III, pp. 637–39 (N.D.

886–PS). A slightly different version found in the records of Army

Group South and dated a day later, May 14, is given in NCA, VI, pp.

872–75 (N.D.C–50).

78. Text of directive, also dated May 13, 1941, NCA, III, pp. 409–13

(N.D.447–PS).

79. Text of Rosenberg’s instructions, NCA, III, pp. 690–93 (N.D.

1029, 1030–PS).

80. Text, NCA, III, pp. 716–17 (N.D. 1058–PS).

81. Text of directive, NCA, VII, p. 300 (N.D. EC–126).

82. Memorandum of meeting, NCA, V, p. 378 (N.D. 2718–PS).

83. Schmidt, op. cit., p. 233.

84. Keitel interrogation, NCA, Suppl. B, pp. 1271–73.

85. The Duke of Hamilton’s personal report, NCA, VIII, pp. 38–40

(N.D. M–116).

86. Kirkpatrick’s reports on his interviews with Hess on May 13, 14,

15, ibid., pp. 40–46 (N.D.s M–117, 118, 119).

87. Churchill, The Grand Alliance, p. 54.

88. TMWC, X, p. 7.

89. Ibid. , p. 74.

90. Douglas M. Kelley, 22 Cells in Nuremberg, pp. 23–24.

91. NSR, p. 324.

92. Ibid. , p. 326.

93. Ibid. , p. 325.

94. Ibid. , p. 328.

95. Ibid. , pp. 340–41.

96. Ibid. , pp. 316–18.

97. Ibid., p. 328.

98. Ibid. , p. 338.

99. Schulenburg’s dispatches, May 7, 12, ibid., pp. 335–39.

100. Ibid. , p. 334.

101. Ibid. , pp. 334–35.

102. Sumner Welles, The Time for Decision, pp. 170–71.

103. Churchill, The Grand Alliance, pp. 356–61.

104. NSR, p. 330.

105. NCA, VI, p. 997 (N.D. C–170).

106. NSR, p. 344.

107. Ibid. , pp. 345–46.

108. Ibid. , p. 346.

109. Text of, NCA, VI, pp. 852–67 (N.D. C–39).

110. The minutes of this meeting never turned up, so far as I know, but

Halder’s diary for June 14, 1941, describes it, and Keitel told about it

on the stand at Nuremberg ( TMWC, X, pp. 531–32). The Naval War

Diary also mentions it briefly.

111. NSR, pp. 355–56.

112. Ibid. , pp. 347–49.

113. Schmidt’s formal memorandum of the meeting, ibid. , pp. 356–57.

Also his book, pp. 234–35.

114. Hitler to Mussolini, June 21, 1941, NSR, pp. 349–53.

115. The Ciano Diaries, pp. 369, 372.

116. Ibid. , p. 372.

CHAPTER 24

1. NCA, VI, pp. 905–6 (N.D. C–74). The complete text in German,

TMWC, XXXIV, pp. 298–302.

2. Halder Report (mimeographed, Nuremberg).

3. NCA, VI, p. 929 (N.D. C–123).

4. Ibid. , p. 931 (N.D.C–124).

5. Article by Gen. Blumentritt in The Fatal Decisions, ed. by Seymour

Freidin and William Richardson, p. 57.

6. Liddell Hart, The German Generals Talk, p. 147.

7. Ibid. , p. 145.

8. Halder Report,

9. Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader, pp. 159–62. The page references

in this and subsequent chapters are to the Ballentine soft-cover edition.

10. Blumentritt article, loc. cit. , p. 66.

11. Interrogation of Rundstedt, 1945. Quoted by Shulman, op. cit. , pp.

68–69.

12. Guderian, op. cit. , pp. 189–90.

13. Ibid. , p. 192.

14. Ibid. , p. 194.

15. Ibid. , p. 191.

16. Ibid. , p. 199.

17. Goerlitz, History of the German General Staff, p. 403.

18. The Goebbels Diaries, pp. 135–36.

19. Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p. 153.

20. Halder, Hitler als Feldherr, p. 45.

21. NCA, IV, p. 600 (N.D. 1961–PS).

22. Blumentritt article, loc. cit. , pp. 78–79.

23. Liddell Hart, The German Generals Talk, p. 158.

CHAPTER 25

1. DGFP, VIII, pp. 905–6.

2. NCA, IV, pp. 469–75 (N.D. 1834–PS).

3. The text, NCA, VI, pp. 906–8 (N.D.C–75).

4. Raeder’s report on the meeting, FCNA, 1941, p. 37. Also in NCA,

VI, pp. 966–67 (N.D. C–152).

5. They are published, along with those of the subsequent talks,

including two with Hitler, in NSR, pp. 281–316.

6. Schmidt, op. cit. , p. 224.

7. FCNA, 1941, pp. 47–48.

8. N.D. NG–3437, Document Book VIII–B, Weizsaecker Case. Cited

by H. L. Trefousse, Germany and American Neutrality, 1939–1941, p.

124 and n.

9. Text of telegram, NCA, VI, pp. 564–65 (N.D. 2896–PS).

10. Ibid. , p. 566 (N.D. 2897–PS).

11. FCNA, 1941, p. 104.

12. NCA, VI, pp. 545–46 (N.D. 3733–PS).

13. Falkenstein memorandum of Oct. 29, 1940, NCA, III, p. 289 (N.D.

376–PS).

14. FCNA, 1941, p. 57.

15. Ibid. ,

16. Ibid. , Annex I (Raeder’s report to the Fuehrer, Feb. 4, 1941).

17. Ibid. , (March 18, 1941).

18. Ibid. ,(April 20, 1941).

19. Ibid., May 22, 1941.

20. Ibid. ,(June 21, 1941).

21. NCA, V, p. 565 (N.D. 2896–PS).

22. German Naval War Diary, TMWC, XXXIV, p. 364 (N.D. C–118).

The partial English translation in NCA, VI, p. 916, is quite misleading.

23. FCNA, Sept. 17, 1941, pp. 108–10.

24. Ibid. , Nov. 13, 1941.

25. NCA, Suppl. B, p. 1200 (interrogation of Ribbentrop at

Nuremberg, Sept. 10, 1945).

26. N.D. NG–4422E, Document Book IX, “Weizsaecker Case,” cited

by Trefousse, p. 102.

27. Ibid. Numerous telegrams between Ribbentrop and Ott in May

1941, and Ott’s testimony in the “Far Eastern Trial” in Tokyo, cited by

Trefousse, p. 103.

28. Vice-Minister Amau on Aug. 29 and Foreign Minister Adm.

Toyoda on Aug. 30. Japanese minutes of the two meetings are in NCA,

VI, pp. 546–51 (N.D. 3733–PS).

29. Hull, Memoirs, p. 1034. The texts of Toyoda’s telegrams to

Nomura on Oct. 16, 1941, are given in Pearl Harbor Attack, Hearings

before the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor

Attack, XII, pp. 71–72.

30. Hull, op. cit. , pp. 1062–63.

31. Documents 4070 and 4070B, Far Eastern Trial, cited by

Trefousse, pp. 140–41.

32. Hull, op. cit. , pp. 1056, 1074.

33. Intercepted message of Oshima to Tokyo, Nov. 29, 1941, NCA,

VII, pp. 160–63 (N.D. D–656).

34. Pearl Harbor Attack, XII, p. 204. The intercepted Tokyo telegram

is also given in NCA, VI, pp. 308–10 (N.D.3598–PS).

35. NCA, V, pp. 556–57 (N.D. 2898–PS).

36. NCA, VI, p. 309 (N.D. 3598–PS).

37. Text of telegram, ibid., pp. 312–13 (N.D. 3600–PS).

38. Schmidt, op. cit. , pp. 236–37.

39. TMWC, X, p. 297.

40. Intercepted message of Oshima to Tokyo, Dec. 8, 1941, NCA, VII,

p. 163 (N.D. D–167).

41. N.D. NG–4424, Dec. 9, 1941, Document Book IX, Weizsaecker

Case.

42. I have combined here Ribbentrop’s testimony in direct

examination on the stand at Nuremberg— TMWC, X, pp. 297–98—and

his statements during his pretrial interrogation which are contained in

NCA, Suppl. B, pp. 1199–1200.

43. Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p. 396.

44. NCA, V, p. 603 (N.D. 2932–PS).

45. Schmidt, op. cit., p. 237.

46. A partial translation of Hitler’s speech is published in Gordon W.

Prange (ed.), Hitler’s Words, pp. 97, 367–77.

47. English translation in NCA, VIII. pp. 432–33 (N.D. TC–62).

48. FCNA, 1941, pp. 128–30 (December 12).

CHAPTER 26

1. TMWC, XX, p. 625.

2. Hassell, op. cit., p. 208.

3. Ibid. , p. 209.

4. Schlabrendorff, op. cit., p. 36.

5. Hassell, op. cit., p. 243.

6. The text of the first draft drawn up in January-February 1940,

Hassell, op. cit., pp. 368–72; text of the second draft, composed at the

end of 1941, Wheeler-Bennett, Nemesis, Appendix A, pp. 705–15.

7. Hassell, op. cit., pp. 247–48.

8. Ibid. , p. 247.

9. The German Campaign in Russia—Planning and Operations,

1940–42 (Washington: Department of the Army, 1955), p. 120. This

study is based largely on captured German Army records and

monographs prepared by German generals for the Historical Division

of the U.S. Army which, at the time of writing, were not generally

available to civilian historians. However, I must point out that in the

preparation of this and subsequent chapters the Office of the Chief of

Military History, Department of the Army, was most helpful in giving

access to German documentary material.

10. TMWC, VII, p. 260 (Paulus’ testimony at Nuremberg). Hitler’s

remark was made on June 1, 1942, nearly a month before the offensive

began.

11. The Ciano Diaries, op. cit. , pp. 442–43.

12. Ibid. , pp. 478–79.

13. Ibid. , pp. 403–4.

14. FCNA, 1942, p. 47 (conference at the Berghof, June 15). Also p.

42.

15. Halder, Hitler als Feldherr, pp. 50–51.

16. FCNA, 1942, p. 53 (conference of Aug. 16 at Hitler’s

headquarters).

17. Halder, op. cit. , p. 50.

18. Ibid. , p. 52.

19. The quotations from Hitler and Halder are from the latter’s diary

and book, and from Heinz Schroeter, Stalingrad, p. 53.

20. Quoted by Gen. Bayerlein from Rommel’s papers, The Fatal

Decisions, ed. by Freidin and Richardson, p. 110.

21. Bayerlein quotes the order. Ibid., p. 120.

22. The source for this and for much else in this chapter about Hitler’s

OKW conferences is the so-called OKW Diary, which was kept until

the spring of 1943 by Dr. Helmuth Greiner, and thereafter until the end

of the war by Dr. Percy Ernst Schramm. The original diary was

destroyed at the beginning of May 1945 on the order of General

Winter, deputy to Jodl. After the war Greiner reconstructed the part he

had kept from his original notes and drafts and eventually turned it

over to the Military History Branch of the Department of the Army in

Washington. Part of the material is published in Greiner’s book, Die

Oberste Wehrmachtfuehrung, 1939–1943.

23. Procès du M. Pétain (Paris, 1945), p. 202—Laval’s testimony.

24. The Ciano Diaries, pp. 541–42.

25. Gen. Zeitzler’s essay on Stalingrad in Freidin (ed.), The Fatal

Decisions, from which I have drawn for this section. Other sources:

OKW War Diary (see note 22 above), Halder’s book, and Heinz

Schroeter, Stalingrad. Schroeter, a German war correspondent with the

Sixth Army, had access to OKW records, radio and teleprinter

messages of the various army commands, operational orders, marked

maps and the private papers of many who were at Stalingrad. He got

out before the surrender and was assigned to write the official story of

the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, based on the documents then in the

possession of OKW. Dr. Goebbels forbade its publication. After the

war Schroeter rescued his manuscript and continued his studies of the

battle before rewriting his book.

26. The Ciano Diaries, p. 556. Mussolini’s proposals are given on pp.

555–56 and confirmed from the German side in the OKW War Diary

of December 19.

27. Felix Gilbert, Hitler Directs His War, pp. 17–22. This is a

compilation of the stenographic record of Hitler’s military conferences

at OKW. Unfortunately only a fragment of the records were recovered.

28. Goerlitz, History of the German General Staff, p. 431.

CHAPTER 27

1. NCA, IV, p. 559 (N.D. 1919–PS).

2. Ibid. , III, pp. 618–19 (N.D. 862–PS), report of Gen. Gotthard

Heinrici, Deputy General of the Wehrmacht in the Protectorate.

3. Bormann’s memorandum. Quoted in TMWC, VII, pp. 224–26

(N.D. USSR 172).

4. NCA, III, pp. 798–99 (N.D. 1130–PS).

5. Ibid. , VIII, p. 53 (N.D. R–36).

6. Dr. Bräutigam’s memorandum of Oct. 25, 1942. Text in NCA, III. ,

pp. 242–51; German original in TMWC, XXV, pp. 331–42 (N.D. 294

—PS).

7. NCA, VII, pp. 1086–93 (N.D. L–221).

8. TMWC, IX, p. 633.

9. Ibid. ,

10. TMWC, VIII, p. 9.

11. NCA, VII, pp. 420–21 (N.D.s EC–344–16 and −17).

12. Ibid. , p. 469 (N.D. EC–411).

13. Ibid. , VIII, pp. 66–67 (N.D. R–92).

14. Ibid. , III, p. 850 (N.D. 1233–PS).

15. Ibid. , p. 186 (N.D. 138–PS).

16. Ibid. , pp. 188–89 (N.D. 141–PS).

17. Ibid. , V, pp. 258–62 (N.D. 2523–PS).

18. Ibid. , III, pp. 666–70 (N.D. 1015–B–PS).

19. Ibid. , I, p. 1105 (N.D. 090–PS).

20. NCA, VI, p. 456 (N.D. 1720–PS).

21. Ibid. , VIII, p. 186 (N.D. R–124).

22. Ibid. , III, pp. 71–73 (N.D. 031–PS).

23. Ibid. , IV, p. 80 (N.D. 1526–PS).

24. Ibid. , III, p. 57 (N.D. 016–PS).

25. Ibid. , III, p. 144 (N.D. 084–PS).

26. Ibid. , VII, pp. 2–7 (N.D. D–288).

27. Ibid. , V, pp. 744–54 (N.D. 3040–PS).

28. Ibid. , VII, pp. 260–64 (N.D. EC–68).

29. Ibid. , V, p. 765 (N.D. 3044–B–PS).

30. Eider’s Secret Conversations, p. 501.

31. Based on an exhaustive study from the German records made by

Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, pp. 426–27. He used figures

compiled by OKW-AWA in Nachweisungen des Verbleibs der

sowjetischen Kr. Gef. nach den Stand vom 1.5.1944. AWA are the

initials for the General Armed Forces Department of OKW

( Allgemeines Wehrmachtsamt).

32. NCA, III, pp. 126–30 (N.D. 081–PS).

33. Ibid. , V, p. 343 (N.D. 2622–PS).

34. Ibid. , III, p. 823 (N.D. 1165–PS).

35. Ibid. , IV, p. 558 (N.D. 1919–PS).

36. TMWC, XXXIX, pp. 48–49.

37. Ibid., VI, pp. 185–86.

38. NCA, III, pp. 416–17 (N.D. 498–PS).

39. Ibid. , pp. 426–30 (N.D. 503–PS).

40. NCA, VII, pp. 798–99 (N.D. L–51).

41. TMWC, VII, p. 47.

42. NCA, VII, pp. 873–74 (N.D. L–90).

43. Ibid. , pp. 871–72 (N.D. L–90).

44. Harris, Tyranny on Trial, pp. 349–50.

45. Ohlendorf’s testimony on the stand at Nuremberg, TMWC, IV, pp.

311–23; his affidavit, based on Harris’ interrogation, NCA, V, pp.

341–12 (N.D. 2620–PS). Dr. Becker’s letter, ibid. , III, pp. 418–19

(N.D.501–PS).

46. NCA, VIII, p. 103 (N.D. R–102).

47. Ibid. , V, pp. 696–99 (N.D. 2992–PS).

48. Ibid. , IV, pp. 944–49 (N.D. 2273–PS).

49. Case IX of the Trials of War Criminals [ TWC] (N.D. NO–511).

This was the so-called “Einsatzgruppen Case,” entitled “United States

v. Otto Ohlendorf, et al.”

50. Ibid. (N.D.NO–2653).

51. Cited by Reitlinger in The Final Solution, pp. 499–500.

Reitlinger’s studies in this book and in his The S.S. are the most

exhaustive on the subject that I have seen.

52. NCA, III, pp. 525–26 (N.D. 710–PS). The English translation here

of the last line misses the whole point. The German word Endloesung

(“final solution”) is rendered as “desirable solution.” See the German

transcript.

53. TMWC, XI, p. 141.

54. TWC, XIII, pp. 210–19 (N.D. NG–2586–G).

55. NCA, IV, p. 563 (N.D. 1919–PS).

56. Ibid. , VI, p. 791 (N.D. 3870–PS).

57. Ibid. , IV, pp. 812, 832–35 (N.D. 2171–PS).

58. Hoess affidavit, NCA, VI, pp. 787–90 (N.D. 3868–PS).

59. N.D. USSR-8, p. 197. Transcript.

60. TMWC, VII, p. 584.

61. Ibid.,

62. Ibid. , p. 585 (N.D. USSR 225). Transcript.

63. Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals, I, p. 28. London, 1946.

This is a summary of the twelve secondary Nuremberg trials, covered

in the TWC volumes.

64. The above section on Auschwitz is based on, aside from the

sources quoted, the testimony at Nuremberg of Mme. Vaillant-

Couturier, a Frenchwoman who was confined there, TMWC, VI, pp.

203–40; Case IV, the so-called “Concentration Camp Case,” entitled

“United States v. Pohl, et al.,” in the TWC volumes; The Belsen Trial,

London, 1949; G. M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary, op. cit.; Filip

Friedman, This Was Oswiecim [Auschwitz]; and the brilliant survey of

Reitlinger in The Final Solution and The SS.

65. NCA, VIII, p. 208 (N.D. R-135).

66. NCA, Suppl. A, pp. 675–82 (N.D.s 3945–PS, 3948–PS, 3951–PS).

67. Ibid., p. 682 (N.D. 3951–PS).

68. Ibid. , pp. 805–7 (N.D. 4045–PS).

69. The text, ibid., III, pp. 719–75 (N.D. 1061–PS).

70. TMWC, IV, p. 371.

71. Reitlinger, The Final Solution, pp. 489–501. The author analyzes

the Jewish exterminations country by country.

72. TMWC, XX, p. 548.

73. Ibid. , p. 519.

74. Examination of Josef Kramer, Case I of the Trials of the War

Criminals—the so-called “Doctors’ Trial,” entitled “United States v.

Brandt, et al.”

75. Sievers’ testimony, TMWC, XX, pp. 521–25.

76. Ibid. , p. 526.

77. The testimony of Henry Herypierre is in the transcript of the

“Doctors’ Trial.”

78. NCA, VI, pp. 122–23 (N.D. 3249–PS).

79. Ibid. , V, p. 952 (N.D. 3249–PS).

80. Ibid. , IV, p. 132 (N.D. 1602–PS).

81. Report of Dr. Rascher to Himmler, April 5, 1942, in the transcript

of the “Doctors’ Trial,” Case I, “United States v. Brandt, et al.” Dr.

Karl Brandt was Hitler’s personal physician and Reich Commissioner

for Health. He was found guilty at the trial, sentenced to death and

hanged.

82. NCA, Suppl. A, pp. 416–17 (N.D. 2428–PS).

83. Letter of Prof. Dr. Hippke to Himmler, Oct. 10, 1942, in transcript,

Case I.

84. NCA, IV, pp. 135–36 (N.D. 1618–PS).

85. Testimony of Walter Neff, transcript, Case I.

86. Letter of Dr. Rascher to Himmler, April 4, 1943, transcript, Case I.

87. Testimony of Walter Neff, ibid.

88. Himmler’s letter and Rascher’s protest, ibid.

89. 1616–PS, in transcript of Case I. The document is not printed in

TMWC, and the English translation in NCA is too brief to be of any

help.

90. Alexander Mitscherlich, M.D., and Fred Mielke, Doctors of

Infamy, pp. 146–70. This is an excellent summary of the “Doctors’

Trial” by two Germans. Dr. Mitscherlich was head of the German

Medical Commission at the trial.

91. Wiener Library Bulletin, 1951, V, pp. 1–2. Quoted by Reitlinger in

The S.S., p. 216.

CHAPTER 28

1. The Goebbels Diaries, p. 352.

2. FCNA, 1943, p. 61.

3. The Italian minutes of the Feltre meeting are in Hitler e Mussolini,

pp. 165–90; also in Department of State Bulletin, Oct 6, 1946, pp.

607–14, 639; Dr. Schmidt’s description of the meeting is in his book,

op. cit. , p. 263.

4. The chief sources are the stenographic records of Hitler’s

conferences with his aides at his headquarters in East Prussia on July

25 and 26, published in Felix Gilbert, Hitler Directs His War, pp. 39–

71; also The Goebbels Diaries, entries for July 1943, pp. 403–21; and

the Fuehrer Conferences on Naval Affairs [ FCNA], entries for July

and August 1943, made by Adm. Doenitz, the new commander of the

German Navy.

5. The Memoirs of Field Marshal Kesselring (London, 1953), pp. 177,

184. I have used this British edition of Kesselring’s memoirs; they

have been published in America under the title A Soldier’s Record.

6. See Kesselring, op. cit. , and Gen. Siegfried Westphal, The German

Army in the West, pp. 149–52.

7. Firsthand accounts of Mussolini’s rescue are given in Otto

Skorzeny, Skorzeny’s Secret Missions, by the Duce himself in his

Memoirs, 1942–43, and by the Italian manager and manageress of the

Hotel Campo Imperatore in a special article included in the British

edition of the Memoirs.

8. Hitler quotation from FCNA, 1943, p. 46; the item from Doenitz’

diary is quoted by Wilmot, op. cit., p. 152.

9. Halder, Hitler als Feldherr, p. 57.

10. I have quoted the lecture at length in End of a Berlin Diary, pp.

27086. The text (in English) is in NCA, VII, pp. 920–75.

11. The above excerpts from Goebbels’ diary are from The Goebbels

Diaries, pp. 428–42, 468, 477–78. Hitler’s talk with Doenitz in August

1943 was noted by the Admiral in FCNA, 1943, pp. 85–86.

CHAPTER 29

1. Dorothy Thompson, Listen, Hans, pp. 137–38, 283.

2. Hassell, op. cit., p. 283.

3. Zwischen Hitler und Stalin. Ribbentrop’s testimony, TMWC, X, p.

299.

4. George Bell, The Church and Humanity, pp. 165–76. Also

Wheeler-Bennett, Nemesis, pp. 553–57.

5. Allen Dulles, op. cit. , pp. 125–46. Dulles gives the text of a

memorandum written for him by Jakob Wallenberg on his meetings

with Goerdeler.

6. The account of this whole episode is based largely on the report of

Schlabrendorff, op. cit. , pp. 51–61.

7. To Rudolf Pechel, who quotes him at length in his book, Deutscher

Widerstand.

8. There are a number of accounts, some of them firsthand, of the

students’ revolt: Inge Scholl, Die weisse Rose (Frankfurt, 1952); Karl

Vossler, Gedenkrede fuer die Opfer an der Universitaet Muenchen

(Munich, 1947); Ricarda Huch, “Die Aktion der Muenchner Studenten

gegen Hitler,” Neue Schweizer Rundschau, Zurich, September-October

1948;

“Der

18

Februar:

Umriss

einer

deutschen

Widerstandsbewegung,” Die Gegenwart, October 30,1940; Pechel, op.

cit., pp. 96–104; Wheeler-Bennett, Nemesis, pp. 539–41; Dulles, op.

cit. , pp. 120–22.

9. Dulles, op. cit. , pp. 144–45.

10. Quoted by Constantine FitzGibbon in 20 July, p. 39.

11. Desmond Young, Rommel, pp. 223–24. Stroelin gave Young a

personal account of the meeting. See also Stroelin’s Nuremberg

testimony, TMWC, X, p. 56, and his book, Stuttgart in Endstadium des

Krieges.

12. Speidel emphasizes the point in his book Invasion 1944, pp. 68,

73.

13. Ibid. , p. 65.

14. lbid., p. 71.

15. Ibid. , pp. 72–74.

16. Dulles, op. cit., p. 139.

17. Schlabrendorff, op. cit., p. 97.

18. The telephone log of the Seventh Army headquarters. This

revealing document was captured intact in August 1944 and provides

an invaluable source for the German version of what happened to

Hitler’s armies on D Day and during the subsequent Battle of

Normandy.

19. Speidel, op. cit. , p. 93.

20. Ibid. , on which this account is largely based. Gen. Blumentritt,

Rundstedt’s chief of staff, has also left an account, and there is

additional material in The Rommel Papers, ed. by Liddell Hart, p. 479.

21. The text of the letter is given in Speidel, op. cit., pp. 115–17. A

slightly different version is in The Rommel Papers, pp. 486–87.

22. Speidel, op. cit., p. 117.

23. Ibid. ,

24. Ibid. ,

25. Schlabrendorff, op. cit., p. 103. He was still attached to Tresckow’s

staff.

26. The sources for these meetings of the conspirators on July 16 are

the stenographic account of the trial of Witzleben, Hoepner et al.;

Kaltenbrunner’s reports on the July 20 uprising; Eberhard Zeller, Geist

der Freiheit, pp. 213–14; Gerhard Ritter, Carl Goerdeler und die

deutsche Widerstandsbewegung, pp. 401–3.

27. Heusinger, Befehl im Widerstreit, p. 352, tells of his last words that

day.

28. Zeller, op. cit. , p. 221.

29. Schmidt, op. cit. , pp. 275–77.

30. A number of guests at the tea party, Italian and German, have

given eyewitness accounts of it Eugen Dollmann, an S.S. liaison

officer with Mussolini, has rendered the fullest description both in his

book, Roma Nazista, pp. 393–400, and in his interrogation by Allied

investigators, which is summed up by Dulles, op. cit. , pp. 9–11. Zeller,

op. cit. , p. 367, n.69, and Wheeler-Bennett, Nemesis, pp. 644–46, have

written graphic accounts, based mostly on Dollmann.

31. The transcript of this telephone conversation was put in evidence

before the People’s Court. Schlabrendorff, op. cit. , quotes it on p. 113.

32. Zeller, op. cit. , p. 363n., cites two eyewitnesses to the executions,

an Army chauffeur who observed them from a nearby window, and a

woman secretary of Fromm.

33. This account of what went on in the Bendlerstrasse that evening is

taken largely from General Hoepner’s frank testimony before the

People’s Court during his trial and that of Witzleben and six other

officers on Aug. 6–7, 1944. The records of the People’s Court were

destroyed in an American bombing on Feb. 3, 1945, but one of the

stenographers at this trial—at the risk of his life, he says—purloined

the shorthand records before the bombing and after the war turned

them over to the Nuremberg tribunal. They are published verbatim in

German in TMWC, XXX-III, pp. 299–530.

There is a great deal of material on the July 20 plot, much of it

conflicting and some quite confusing. The best reconstruction of

it is by Zeller, op. cit. , who gives a lengthy list of his sources on

pp. 381–88. Gerhard Ritter’s book on Goerdeler, op. cit., is an

invaluable contribution, though it naturally concentrates on its

subject. Wheeler-Bennett’s Nemesis gives the best account

available in English and uses, as does Zeller, Otto John’s

unpublished memorandum. John, who after the war got into

difficulties with the Bonn government and was imprisoned by it,

was present at the Bendlerstrasse that day and recorded a great

deal of what he saw and what Stauffenberg told him. Constantine

FitzGibbon, op. cit. , gives a lively account, based mostly on

German sources, especially Zeller.

Also invaluable, though they must be read with caution, are the

daily reports on the investigation of the plot carried out by the

S.D. Gestapo, which date from July 21 to Dec. 15, 1944. They

were signed by Kaltenbrunner and sent to Hitler, being drawn up

in extra-large type so that the Fuehrer could read them without his

spectacles. They represent the labors of the “Special Commission

for July 20, 1944,” which numbered some 400 S.D.-Gestapo

officials divided into eleven investigation groups. The

Kaltenbrunner reports are among the captured documents.

Microfilm copies are available at the National Archives in

Washington—No. T–84, Serial No. 39, Rolls 19–21. See also

Serial No. 40, Roll 22.

34. Zeller, op. cit. , p. 372, n.10, quotes an officer who was present.

35. The account of the executions was later related by the prison

warder, Hans Hoffmann, a second warden and the photographer, and is

given in Wheeler-Bennett, Nemesis, pp. 683–84, among others.

36. Wilfred von Oven, Mit Goebbels bis zum Ende, II, p. 118.

37. Ritter, op. cit. , pp. 419–29, gives the details of this interesting

sidelight.

38. This figure is given in a commentary in the records of the

Fuehrer’s conferences on naval affairs ( FCNA, 1944, p. 46) and is

accepted by Zeller, op. cit. , p. 283. Pechel, op. cit. , who found the

official “Execution Register,” says, p. 327, there were 3,427

executions recorded in 1944, though a few of these probably were not

connected with the July 20 plot.

39. Schlabrendorff, op. cit. , pp. 119–20. I have altered the English text

here given to make it conform more to the original German.

40. Gen. Blumentritt gave this account to Liddell Hart ( The German

Generals Talk, pp. 217–23).

41. Ibid. , There is considerable source material on the Paris end of the

plot, including the account given by Speidel in his book and numerous

articles in German magazines by eyewitnesses. The best over-all

account has been rendered by Wilhelm von Schramm, an Army

archivist stationed in the West: Der 20 Juli in Paris.

42. Felix Gilbert, op. cit. , p. 101.

43. Speidel, op. cit. , p. 152. My account of the death of Rommel is

based on, besides Speidel, who questioned Frau Rommel and other

witnesses, the following sources: two reports written by the Field

Marshal’s son, Manfred, the first for British intelligence, quoted by

Shulman, op. cit. , pp. 138–39, the second for The Rommel Papers, ed.

by Liddell Hart, pp. 495505; and Gen. Keitel’s interrogation by Col.

John H. Amen on Sept. 28, 1945, at Nuremberg ( NCA, Suppl. B, pp.

1256–71). Desmond Young, op. cit. , has also given a full account,

based on talks with the Rommel family and friends and on Gen.

Maisel’s denazification trial after the war.

44. TMWC, XXI, p. 47.

45. Speidel, op. cit. , pp. 155,172.

46. Goerlitz, History of the German General Staff, p. 477.

47. Guderian, op. cit. , p. 273.

48. Ibid. , p. 276.

49. Liddell Hart, The German Generals Talk, pp. 222–23.

CHAPTER 30

1. Speidel, op. cit. , p. 147.

2. British War Office interrogation, cited by Shulman, op. cit. , p. 206.

3. Fuehrer conference, Aug. 31,1944. Felix Gilbert, op. cit. , p. 106.

4. Fuehrer conference, March 13, 1943.

5. United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Economic Report,

Appendix, Table 15.

6. From U.S. First Army G-2 reports, quoted by Shulman, op. cit. , pp.

215–19.

7. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, p. 312.

8. Rundstedt to Liddell Hart, The German Generals Talk, p. 229.

9. Guderian, op. cit. , pp. 305–6, 310.

10. Manteuffel, in Freidin and Richardson (eds.), op. cit. , p. 266.

11. Fuehrer conference, Dec. 12,1944.

12. Guderian, op. cit. , p. 315.

13. Ibid. , p. 334.

14. Albert Speer to Hitler, Jan. 30, 1945, TMWC, XLI.

15. Guderian, op. cit. , p. 336.

16. Fuehrer conference, Jan. 27, 1945. This is included in Felix

Gilbert, op. cit. , pp. 111–32. I have slightly altered the sequence of the

text.

17. Fuehrer conference, undated, but probably on Feb. 19, 1945, since

Adm. Doenitz notes the discussion in his record of that date. See

FCNA, 1945, p. 49. Gilbert, op. cit. , gives the Hitler quotation, p. 179.

18. FCNA, 1945, pp. 50–51.

19. Fuehrer conference, March 23, 1945. This is the last transcript

preserved. Gilbert, op. cit. , gives it in full, pp. 141–74.

20. Testimony of Albert Speer at Nuremberg, TMWC, XVI, p. 492.

21. Guderian, op. cit. , pp. 341, 43.

22. Text of Hitler’s order, FCNA, 1945, p. 90.

23. Speer, TMWC, XVI, pp. 497–98. This section, including the

quotations from Hitler and Speer, is taken from the letter’s testimony

on the stand at Nuremberg on June 20, 1946, the text of which is given

in TMWC, XVI; and from the documents which he presented in his

defense, which are given in Vol. XLI.

24. SHAEF intelligence summary, March 11, 1945. Quoted by

Wilmot, op. cit. , p. 690.

CHAPTER 31

1. Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk’s unpublished diary. I have

given the essential extracts in End of a Berlin Diary, pp. 190–205.

Trevor-Roper, in The Last Days of Hitler, also quotes from it.

Trevor-Roper, the historian, who was a British intelligence officer

during the war, was assigned the task of investigating the

circumstances of Hitler’s end. The results are given in his brilliant

book, to which all who attempt to write this final chapter of the

Third Reich are indebted. I have availed myself of a number of

other sources, especially the firsthand accounts of eyewitnesses

such as Speer, Keitel, Jodl, Gen. Karl Koller, Doenitz, Krosigk,

Hanna Reitsch, Capt. Gerhardt Boldt and Capt. Joachim Schultz,

as well as one of Hitler’s women secretaries and his chauffeur.

2. Gerhardt Boldt, In the Shelter with Hitler, Ch. 1. Capt. Boldt was

A.D.C. to Guderian and then to Gen. Krebs, the last Chief of the Army

General Staff, and spent the final days in the bunker.

3. Albert Zoller, Hitler Privat, pp. 203–5. According to the French

edition ( Douze Ans auprès d’Hitler) Zoller was a captain in the French

Army attached as interrogation officer to the U.S. Seventh Army and

in this capacity questioned one of Hitler’s four women secretaries;

later, in 1947, he collaborated with her in the writing of this book of

recollections of the Fuehrer. She is probably Christa Schroeder, who

served Hitler as stenographer from 1933 to a week before his end.

4. Krosigk’s diary.

5. Ibid.

6. Quoted by Wilmot, op. cit., p. 699.

7. Trevor-Roper, op. cit., p. 100. The account was given by one of

Goebbels’ secretaries, Frau Inge Haberzettel.

8. Michael A. Musmanno, Ten Days to Die, p. 92. Judge Musmanno,

a U.S. Navy intelligence officer during the war, personally

interrogated the survivors who had been with Hitler during his last

days.

9. Keitel interrogation, NCA, Suppl. B, p. 1294.

10. NCA, VI, p. 561 (N.D. 3734–PS). This is a lengthy summary of a

U.S. Army interrogation of Hanna Reitsch on the last days of Hitler in

the bunker. She later repudiated parts of her statement, but Army

authorities have confirmed its substantial accuracy as containing what

she said during the interrogation on Oct. 8, 1945. Though Frl. Reitsch

is a highly hysterical person, or was during the months that followed

her harrowing experience in the bunker, her account, when checked

against the evidence of the others, is a valuable record of Hitler’s very

last days.

11. Gen. Karl Koller, Der letzte Monat, p. 23. This is Roller’s diary

covering the period from April 14 to May 27, 1945, and is an

invaluable source for the last days of the Third Reich.

12. Keitel in his interrogation at Nuremberg, NCA, Suppl. B, pp.

1275–79. Jodl’s account was given to Gen. Koller the same night and

recorded in the latter’s diary of April 22–23. See Koller, op. cit. , pp.

30–32.

13. Trevor-Roper, op. cit. , pp. 124, 126–27. The author gives Berger’s

account, he says, “with some reservations.”

14. Keitel recalled the remark in his interrogation, loc. cit. , p. 1277.

Jodl’s version is in Koller’s diary, op. cit. , p. 31.

15. Bernadotte, The Curtain Falls, p. 114; Schellenberg, op. cit. , pp.

399–400. They agree substantially in their versions of the meeting.

16. Speer on the stand at Nuremberg, TMWC, XVI, pp. 554–55.

17. Hanna Reitsch interrogation, loc. cit. , pp. 554–55.

18. Ibid. , All the subsequent quotations and the events described by

Hanna Reitsch are taken from this interrogation and are found in NCA,

VI, pp. 551–71 (N.D. 3734–PS). They will not therefore be cited in

each case.

19. Keitel, in his interrogation, loc. cit. , pp. 1281–82, quoted the

message from memory. The German naval records give a similarly

worded radio message from Hitler to Jodl dated 7:52 P.M., April 29

( FCNA, 1945, p. 120), and Schultz’s OKW Diary (p. 51), which gives

the same text, records it as received by Jodl at 11 P.M. on April 29.

This is probably an error, since by that hour of that evening Hitler,

judging by his actions, no longer cared where any army was.

20. Trevor-Roper, op. cit. , p. 163, gives the first message. The second I

have found in the Navy’s records, FCNA, 1945, p. 120. The further

message from the naval liaison officer in the bunker, Adm. Voss, is

also given in FCNA, p. 120.

21. The text of Hitler’s Political Testament and personal will is given

in N.D. 3569–PS. A copy of his marriage certificate was also

presented at Nuremberg. I have given the texts of all three in End of a

Berlin Diary, pp. 177–83, n. A rather hastily written English

translation of the will and testament is published in NCA; VI, pp. 259–

63. The original German is in TMWC, XLI, under the Speer

documents.

22. Gen. Koller, op. cit. , p. 79, gives the text of Bormann’s radiogram.

23. The text of Goebbels’ appendix was presented at the Nuremberg

trial. I have given it in End of a Berlin Diary, p. 183n.

24. Kempka’s account of the death of Hitler and his bride is given in

two sworn statements published in NCA, VI, pp. 571–86 (N.D. 3735–

PS).

25. Juergen Thorwald, Das Ende an der Elbe, p. 224.

26. This account of the death of the Goebbels family is given by

Trevor-Roper, op. cit. , pp. 212–14, and is based largely on the later

testimony of Schwaegermann, Axmann and Kempka.

27. Joachim Schultz, Die letzten 30 Tage, pp. 81–85. These notes are

based on the OKW diaries for the last month of the war and I have

used them to bolster a good many pages of this chapter. The book is

one of several published under the direction of Thorwald under the

general title Dokumente zur Zeitgeschichte.

28. Eisenhower, op. cit. , p. 426.

29. End of a Berlin Diary.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Though for this book, as for all others that I have written, I have done my own

research and planning, I owe a great deal to a number of persons and institutions

for their generous help during the five years that this work was in the making.

The late Jack Goodman, of Simon and Schuster, and Joseph Barnes, my editor

at this publishing house, got me started and Barnes, an old friend from our days

as correspondents in Europe, stuck it out over many ups and downs, offering

helpful criticism at every turn. Dr. Fritz T. Epstein, of the Library of Congress, a

fine scholar and an authority on the captured German documents, guided me

through the mountains of German papers. A good many others also came to my

aid in this. Among them were Telford Taylor, chief counsel for the prosecution

at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, who already has published two volumes of a

military history of the Third Reich. He loaned me documents and books from his

private collection and proferred much good advice.

Professor Oron J. Hale, of the University of Virginia, chairman of the

American Committee for the Study of War Documents, American Historical

Association, led me to much useful material, including the results of some of his

own research, and one hot summer day in 1956 did me a signal service by

yanking me out of the manuscript room of the Library of Congress and sternly

advising me to get back to the writing of this book lest I spend the rest of my life

peering into the German papers, which one easily could do. Dr. G. Bernard

Noble, chief of the Historical Division of the State Department, and Paul R.

Sweet, a Foreign Service officer in the Department, who was one of the

American editors of the Documents on German Foreign Policy, also helped me

through the maze of Nazi papers. At the Hoover Library at Stanford University,

Mrs. Hildegard R. Boeninger, by mail, and Mrs. Agnes F. Peterson, in person,

were generous of their aid. At the Department of the Army, Colonel W. Hoover,

acting Chief of Military History, and Detmar Finke, of his staff, put me on the

track of German military records, of which this office has a unique collection.

Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of Foreign Affairs, took a personal interest

in seeing me through this book, as did Walter H. Mallory, then executive

director of the Council on Foreign Relations. To the Council, to Frank Altschul

and to the Overbrook Foundation I am grateful for a generous grant which

enabled me to devote all of my time to this book during its final year of

preparation. I must also thank the staff of the Council’s excellent library, on

whose members I made many wearisome demands. The staff of the New York

Society Library also experienced this and, despite it, proved most patient and

understanding.

Lewis Galantière and Herbert Kriedman were good enough to read most of the

manuscript and to offer much valuable criticism. Colonel Truman Smith, who

was a U.S. military attaché in Berlin when Adolf Hitler first began his political

career in the early Twenties and later after he came to power, put at my disposal

some of his notebooks and reports, which shed light on the beginnings of

National Socialism and on certain aspects of it later. Sam Harris, a member of

the U.S. prosecution staff at Nuremberg and now an attorney in New York, made

available the TMWC Nuremberg volumes and much additional unpublished

material. General Franz Halder, Chief of the German Army General Staff during

the first three years of the war, was most generous in answering my inquiries and

in pointing the way to German sources. I have mentioned elsewhere the value to

me of his unpublished diary, a copy of which I kept at my side during the writing

of a large part of this book. George Kennan, who was serving in the U.S.

Embassy in Berlin at the beginning of the war, has refreshed my memory on

certain points of historical interest. Several old friends and colleagues from my

days in Europe, John Gunther, M. W. Fodor, Kay Boyle, Sigrid Schultz, Dorothy

Thompson, Whit Burnett and Newell Rogers, discussed various aspects of this

work with me—to my profit. And Paul R. Reynolds, my literary agent, provided

encouragement when it was most needed.

Finally I owe a great debt to my wife, whose knowledge of foreign languages,

background in Europe and experience in Germany and Austria were of great

help in my research, writing and checking. Our two daughters, Inga and Linda,

on vacation from college, aided in a dozen necessary chores.

To all these and to others who have helped in one way or another, I express

my gratitude. The responsibility for the book’s shortcomings and errors is, of

course, exclusively my own.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

This book is based principally on the captured German documents, the

interrogations and testimony of German military officers and civilian officials,

the diaries and memoirs which some of them have left, and on my own

experience in the Third Reich.

Millions of words from the German archives have been published in various

series of volumes, and millions more have been collected or microfilmed and

deposited in libraries—in this country chiefly the Library of Congress and the

Hoover Library at Stanford University—and in the National Archives at

Washington. In addition, the Office of the Chief of Military History, Department

of the Army, at Washington is in possession of a vast collection of German

military records.

Of the published volumes of documents the most useful for my purposes have

been three series. The first is Documents on German Foreign Policy, Series D,

comprising a large selection in English translation of the papers of the German

Foreign Office from 1937 to the summer of 1940. Through the courtesy of the

State Department I have been given access to a number of additional German

Foreign Office papers, not yet translated or published, which deal primarily with

Germany’s declaration of war on the United States.

Two series of published documents dealing with the main Nuremberg trial

have been invaluable in taking one behind the scenes in the Third Reich. The

first is the forty-two-volume Trial of the Major War Criminals, of which the first

twenty-three volumes contain the text of the testimony at the trial and the

remainder the text of the documents accepted in evidence, which are published

in their original language, mostly German. Additional documents, interrogations

and affidavits collected for that trial and translated rather hurriedly into English

are published in the ten-volume series Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression.

Unfortunately, the extremely valuable testimony given before the commissioners

of the International Military Tribunal is mostly omitted from the latter series and

is available only in mimeographed form on deposit with a few leading libraries.

There were twelve subsequent trials at Nuremberg, conducted by United

States military tribunals, but the fifteen bulky published volumes of testimony

and documents presented at these trials, titled Trials of War Criminals before the

Nuremberg Military Tribunals, contain less than one tenth of the material.

However, the rest may be found in mimeograph or photostats in some libraries.

Summaries of other trials which shed much light on the Third Reich may be

found in Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals, published by His Majesty’s

Stationery Office in London, 1947–49.

Of the unpublished German documents other than the rich collections in the

Hoover Library, the Library of Congress and the National Archives—which

contain, among other things, the Himmler files and a number of Hitler’s private

papers—one of the most valuable finds has been that of the so-called

“Alexandria Papers,” a good proportion of which have now been microfilmed

and deposited at the National Archives. Information about a number of other

captured papers will be found in the notes. Among the unpublished German

material, incidentally, is General Halder’s diary—seven volumes of typescript

with annotations added by the General after the war to clarify certain passages—

which I found to be one of the most valuable records of the Third Reich.

Some of the books which have been helpful to me are listed below. They are

of three types: first, the memoirs and diaries of some of the leading figures in

this narrative; second, books based on the new documentary material, such as

those of John W. Wheeler-Bennett, Alan Bullock, H. R. Trevor-Roper and

Gerald Reitlinger in England, of Telford Taylor in America, and of Eberhard

Zeller, Gerhard Ritter, Rudolf Pechel and Walter Goerlitz in Germany; and third,

books which provide background.

A comprehensive bibliography of works on the Third Reich has been

published in Munich as a special number of the Vierteljahrshefte fuer

Zeitgeschichte under the auspices of the Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte. The

catalogues of the Wiener Library in London also contain excellent

bibliographies.

PUBLISHED DOCUMENTARY MATERIAL

Der Hitler Prozess. Munich: Deutscher Volksverlag, 1924. (The

record of the court proceedings of Hitler’s trial in Munich.)

Documents and Materials relating to the Eve of the Second World

War, 1937–39. 2 vols. Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House,

1948.

Documents concerning German–Polish Relations and the Outbreak of

Hostilities between Great Britain and Germany. London: His

Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1939. (The British Blue Book. )

Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919–39. London: H. M.

Stationery Office, 1947-. (Referred to in the notes as DBrFP. )

Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–45. Series D, 1937–45.

10 vols, (as of 1957). Washington: U.S. Department of State.

(Referred to as DGFP. )

Dokumente der deutschen Politik, 1933–40. Berlin, 1935–43.

Fuehrer Conferences on Naval Affairs (mimeographed). London:

British Admiralty, 1947. (Referred to as FCNA. )

Hitler e Mussolini—Lettere e documenti. Milan: Rizzoli, 1946. I

Documenti diplomatica italiani. Ottavo series, 1935–39. Rome:

Libreria della Stato, 1952–53. (Referred to as DDI. )

Le Livre Jaune Français. Documents diplomatiques, 1938–39. Paris:

Ministère des Affaires Étrangères. (The French Yellow Book. )

Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression. 10 vols. Washington: U.S.

Government Printing Office, 1946. (Referred to as NCA. )

Nazi–Soviet Relations, 1939–41. Documents from the Archives of the

German Foreign Office. Washington: U.S. Department of State, 1948.

(Referred to as NSR. )

Official Documents concerning Polish–German and Polish—Soviet

Relations, 1933–39. London, 1939. (The Polish White Book. )

Pearl Harbor Attack. Hearings before the Joint Committee on the

Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack. 39 vols. Washington: U.S.

Government Printing Office, 1946.

Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy. 3 vols. London: Royal Institute

of International Affairs, 1951–53.

Spanish Government and the Axis, The. Washington: U.S. State

Department, 1946. (From the German Foreign Office papers.)

Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military

Tribunal. 42 vols. Published at Nuremberg. (Referred to as TMWC. )

Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals. 15

vols. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1951–52.

(Referred to as TWC. )

HITLER’S SPEECHES

Adolf Hitlers Reden. Munich, 1934.

BAYNES, NORMAN H., ed.: The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922–

August 1939. 2 vols. New York, 1942.

PRANGE, GORDON W., ed.: Hitler’s Words. Washington, 1944.

ROUSSY DE SALES, COUNT RAOUL DE, ed.: My New Order. New York,

1941. (The speeches of Hitler, 1922–41.)

GENERAL WORKS

ABSHAGEN, K. H.: Canaris. Stuttgart, 1949.

AMBRUSTER, HOWARD WATSON: Treason’s Peace. New York, 1947.

ANDERS, WLADYSLAW: Hitler’s Defeat in Russia. Chicago, 1953.

ANONYMOUS: De Weimar au Chaos—Journal politique d’un Général

de la Reichswehr. Paris, 1934.

ARMSTRONG, HAMILTON FISH: Hitler’s Reich. New York, 1933.

ASSMANN, KURT: Deutsche Schicksalsjahre. Wiesbaden, 1950.

BADOGLIO, MARSHAL PIETRO: Italy in the Second World War. London,

1948.

BARRACLOUGH, S.: The Origins of Modern Germany. Oxford, 1946.

BARTZ, KARL: Als der Himmel brannte. Hanover, 1955.

BAUMONT, FRIED AND VERMEIL, eds.: The Third Reich. New York,

1955.

BAYLE, FRANÇOIS: Croix gammée ou caducée. Freiburg, 1950. (A

documented account of the Nazi medical experiments.)

BELGIAN MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS: Belgium: The Official

Account of What Happened, 1939–1940. New York, 1941.

BENEŠ, EDUARD: Memoirs of Dr. Eduard Beneŝ. From Munich to New

War and New Victory. London, 1954.

BÉNOIST-MÉCHIN, JACQUES: Histoire de l’Armée allemande depuis

l’Armistice. Paris, 1936–38.

BERNADOTTE, FOLKE: The Curtain Falls. New York, 1945.

BEST, CAPTAIN S. PAYNE: The Venlo Incident. London, 1950.

Bewegung, Staat und Volk in ihren Organisationen. Berlin, 1934,

BLUMENTRITT. GUENTHER: Von Rundstedt. London, 1952.

BOLDT, GERHARD: In the Shelter with Hitler. London, 1948.

BONNET, GEORGES: Fin d’une Europe. Geneva, 1948.

BOOTHBY, ROBERT: I Fight to Live. London, 1947.

BORMANN, MARTIN: The Bormann Letters: the Private Correspondence

between Martin Bormann and his Wife, from Jan. 1943 to April 1945.

London, 1954.

BRADLEY, GENERAL OMAR N.: A Soldier’s Story. New York, 1951.

BRADY, ROBERT K.: The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism.

London, 1937.

BRYANS, J. LONSDALE: Blind Victory. London, 1951.

BRYANT, SIR ARTHUR: The Turn of the Tide—A History of the War

Years Based on the Diaries of Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Chief

of the Imperial General Staff. New York, 1957.

BULLOCK, ALAN: Hitler—A Study in Tyranny. New York, 1952.

BUTCHER, HARRY C: My Three Years with Eisenhower. New York,

1946.

CARR, EDWARD HALLETT: German–Soviet Relations between the Two

World Wars, 1919–1939. Baltimore, 1951.

—, The Soviet Impact on the Western World. New York, 1947.

CHURCHILL, SIR WINSTON S.: The Second World War. 6 vols. New

York, 1948–1953.

CIANO, COUNT GALEAZZO: Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers, edited by

Malcolm Muggeridge. London, 1948.

—, Ciano’s Hidden Diary, 1937–1938, New York, 1953.

— , The Ciano Diaries, 1939–1943, edited by Hugh Wilson. New

York, 1946.

CLAUSEWITZ, KARL VON: On War. New York, 1943.

COOLE, W. W., AND POTTER, M. F.: Thus Speaks Germany. New York,

1941.

CRAIG, GORDON A.: The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1940–1945.

New York, 1955.

CROCE, BENEDETTO: Germany and Europe. New York, 1944.

Czechoslovakia Fights Back. Washington: American Council on

Public Affairs, 1943.

DAHLERUS, BIRGER: The Last Attempt. London, 1947.

DALLIN, ALEXANDER: German Rule in Russia, 1941–1944. New York,

1957.

DALUCES, JEAN: Le Troisième Reich. Paris, 1950.

DAVIES, JOSEPH E.: Mission to Moscow. New York, 1941.

DERRY, T. K.: The Campaign in Norway. London, 1952.

DEUEL, WALLACE: People under Hitler. New York, 1943.

DEWEY, JOHN: German Philosophy and Politics. New York, 1952.

DIELS, RUDOLF: Lucifer ante Portas. Stuttgart, 1950.

DIETRICH, OTTO: Mit Hitler in die Macht. Munich, 1934.

DOLLMANN, EUGEN: Roma Nazista. Milan, 1951.

DRAPER, THEODORE: The Six Weeks’ War. New York, 1944.

DUBOIS, JOSIAH E., JR.: The Devil’s Chemists. Boston, 1952.

DULLES, ALLEN: Germany’s Underground. New York, 1947.

EBENSTEIN, WILLIAM: The Nazi State. New York, 1943.

EISENHOWER, DWIGHT D.: Crusade in Europe. New York, 1948.

ELLIS, MAJOR L. F.: The War in France and Flanders, 1939–1950.

London, 1953.

EYCK, E.: Bismarck and the German Empire. London, 1950.

FEILING, KEITH: The Life of Neville Chamberlain. London, 1946.

FEUCHTER, GEORG W.: Geschichte des Luftkriegs. Bonn, 1954.

FISHER, H. A. L.: A History of Europe. London, 1936.

FISHMAN, JACK: The Seven Men of Spandau. New York, 1954.

FITZGIBBON. CONSTANTINE: 20 July. New York, 1956.

FLEMING, PETER: Operation Sea Lion. New York, 1957.

FLENLEY, RALPH: Modern German History. New York, 1953.

FOERSTER, WOLFGANG: Ein General kaempft gegen den Krieg. Munich,

1949. (The papers of General Beck.)

FRANÇOIS-PONCET, ANDRÉ: The Fateful Years. New York, 1949.

FREIDIN, SEYMOUR, AND RICHARDSON, WILLIAM, eds.: The Fatal

Decisions. New York, 1956.

FRIEDMAN, FILIP: This Was Oswiecim [Auschwitz]. London, 1946.

FRISCHAUER, WILLY: The Rise and Fall of Hermann Goering. Boston,

1951.

FULLER, MAJOR-GENERAL J. F. C: The Second World War. New York,

1949.

GALLAND, ADOLF: The First and the Last. The Rise and Fall of the

Luftwaffe Fighter Forces, 1938–45. New York, 1954.

GAMELIN, GENERAL MAURICE GUSTAVE: Servir. 3 vols. Paris, 1949.

GAY, JEAN: Carnets Secrets de Jean Gay. Paris, 1940.

Germany: A Self-Portrait. Harland R. Crippen, ed. New York, 1944.

GILBERT, FELIX: Hitler Directs His War. New York, 1950. (The partial

text of Hitler’s daily military conferences.)

GILBERT, G. M.: Nuremberg Diary. New York, 1947.

GISEVIUS, BERND: To the Bitter End. Boston, 1947.

Glaubenskrise im Dritten Reich. Stuttgart, 1953.

GOEBBELS, JOSEPH: Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlei. Munich, 1936.

—, The Goebbels Diaries, 1942–1943, edited by Louis P. Lochner.

New York, 1948.

GOERLITZ, WALTER: History of the German General Staff, 1657–1945.

New York, 1953.

—, Der zweite Weltkrieg, 1939–45. 2 vols. Stuttgart, 1951.

GOUDIMA, CONSTANTIN: L’Armée Rouge dans la Paix et la Guerre.

Paris, 1947.

GREINER, HELMUTH: Die Oberste Wehrmachtfuehrung, 1939–1945.

Wiesbaden, 1951.

GREINER, JOSEF: Das Ende des Hitler-Mythos. Vienna, 1947.

GUDERIAN, GENERAL HEINZ: Panzer Leader. New York, 1952.

GUILLAUME, GENERAL A.: La Guerre Germano-Soviétique, 1941.

Paris, 1949.

HABATSCH, WALTHER: Die deutsche Besetzung von Daenemark und

Norwegen, 1940, 2nd ed. Goettingen, 1952.

HALDER, FRANZ: Hitler als Feldherr. Munich, 1949.

HALIFAX, LORD: Fullness of Days. New York, 1957.

HALLGARTEN, GEORGE W. F.: Hitler, Reichswehr und Industrie.

Frankfurt, 1955.

HANFSTAENGL, ERNST: Unheard Witness. New York, 1957.

HARRIS, WHITNEY R.: Tyranny on Trial—The Evidence at Nuremberg.

Dallas, 1954. (A selection of the German documents at Nuremberg from

the TMWC and NCA volumes.)

HASSELL, ULRICH VON: The Von Hassell Diaries, 1938–1944. New

York, 1947.

HEGEL: Lectures on the Philosophy of History. London, 1902.

HEIDEN, KONRAD: A History of National Socialism. New York, 1935.

—, Hitler—A Biography. New York, 1936.

—, Der Fuehrer. Boston, 1944.

HENDERSON, NEVILE: The Failure of a Mission. New York, 1940.

HERMAN, STEWART W., JR.: It’s Your Souls We Want. New York,

1943.

HEUSINGER,

GENERAL

ADOLF:

Befehl

im

Widerstreit—

Schicksalsstunden der deutschen Armee, 1923–1925. Stuttgart, 1950.

HINDENBURG, FIELD MARSHAL PAUL VON BENECKENDORF UND VON: Aus

meinem Leben. Leipzig, 1934.

HITLER, ADOLF: Mein Kampf. Boston, 1943. This is the unexpurgated

edition in English translation published by Houghton Mifflin. (The

German original: Munich, 1925, 1927. The first volume, Eine

Albrechnung,

was

published

in

1925;

the

second,

Die

Nationalsozialistische Bewegung, in 1927. Thereafter the two were

published in one volume.)

Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 1941–44. New York, 1953.

Les Lettres Sécrètes Echangées par Hitler et Mussolini. Paris, 1946.

HOETTL, WILHELM (WALTER HAGEN): The Secret Front: The Story of

Nazi Political Espionage. New York, 1954.

HOFER, WALTHER: War Premeditated, 1939. London, 1955. (English

translation from Die Entfesselung des zweiten Weltkrieges. )

HOSSBACH, GENERAL FRIEDRICH: Zwischen Wehrmacht und Hitler.

Hanover, 1949.

HULL, CORDELL: The Memoirs of Cordell Hull. 2 vols. New York,

1948.

JACOBSEN,

HANS-ADOLF:

Dokumente

zur

Vorgeschichte

des

Westfeldzuges, 1939–40. Goettingen, 1956.

JARMAN, T. L.: The Rise and Fall of Nazi Germany. London, 1955.

JASPER, KARL: The Question of German Guilt. New York, 1947.

KELLEY, DOUGLAS M.: 22 Cells in Nuremberg. New York, 1947.

KESSELRING, ALBERT: A Soldier’s Record. New York, 1954.

KIELMANNSEGG, GRAF: Der Fritsch Prozess. Hamburg, 1949.

KLEE, CAPTAIN KARL: Das Unternehmen Seeloewe. Goettingen, 1949.

KLEIN, BURTON: Germany’s Economic Preparations for War.

Cambridge, 1959.

KLEIST, PETER: Zwischen Hitler und Stalin. Bonn, 1950.

KNELLER, GEORGE FREDERICK: The Educational Philosophy of

National Socialism. New Haven, 1941.

KOGON, EUGEN: The Theory and Practice of Hell. New York, 1951.

(The German original: Der SS Staat und das System der deutschen

Konzentrationslager. Munich, 1946.)

KOHN, HANS, ed.: German History: Some New German Views. Boston,

1954.

KOLLER, GENERAL KARL: Der letzte Monat. Mannheim, 1949. (The

diary of the last Chief of the Luftwaffe General Staff.)

KORDT, ERICH: Nicht aus den Akten. (Die Wilhelmstrasse in Frieden

Und Krieg, 1928–1945. ) Stuttgart, 1950.

—, Wahn und Wirklichkeit. Stuttgart, 1947.

KREIS, ERNST, AND SPEIER, HANS: German Radio Propaganda. New

York, 1946.

KROSIGK, COUNT LUTZ SCHWERIN VON: Es geschah in Deutschland.

Tuebingen, 1951.

KUBIZEK, AUGUST: The Young Hitler I Knew. Boston, 1955.

LANGER, WILLIAM L.: Our Vichy Gamble. New York, 1947.

LANGER AND GLEASON: The Undeclared War, 1940–1941. New York,

1953.

LAVAL, PIERRE: The Diary of Pierre Laval. New York, 1948.

LENARD, PHILIPP: Deutsche Physik, 2nd ed. Munich-Berlin, 1938.

LICHTENBERGER, HENRI: L’Allemagne Nouvelle. Paris, 1936.

LIDDELL HART, B. H.: The German Generals Talk. New York, 1948.

—(ed.): The Rommel Papers. New York, 1953.

LILGE, FREDERIC: The Abuse of Learning: The Failure of the German

University. New York, 1948.

LITVINOV, MAXIM: Notes for a Journal. New York, 1955.

LORIMER, E. O.: What Hitler Wants. London, 1939.

LOSSBERG, GENERAL BERNHARD VON: Im Wehrmacht Fuehrungsstab.

Hamburg, 1950.

LUDECKE, KURT: I Knew Hitler. London, 1938.

LUDENDORFF, GENERAL ERIC: Auf dem Weg zur Feldherrnhalle.

Munich, 1937.

LUDENDORFF, MARGARITTE: Als ich Ludendorffs Frau war. Munich,

1929.

LUEDDE-NEURATH, WALTER: Die letzten Tage des Dritten Reiches.

Goettingen, 1951.

MANSTEIN, FIELD MARSHAL ERIC VON: Verlorene Siege. Bonn, 1955.

(English translation: Lost Victories. Chicago, 1958.)

MARTIENSEN, ANTHONY K.: Hitler and His Admirals. New York, 1949.

MEINECKE, FRIEDRICH: The German Catastrophe. Cambridge, 1950.

MEISSNER, OTTO: Staatssekretaer unter Ebert–Hindenburg–Hitler.

Hamburg, 1950.

MELZER, WALTHER: Albert Kanal und Eben-Emael. Heidelberg, 1957.

MITSCHERLICH, ALEXANDER, M.D., and MIELKE, FRED: Doctors of

Infamy. New York, 1949.

MONZIE, ANATOLE DE: Ci-Devant. Paris, 1942.

MORISON, SAMUEL ELIOT: History of the United States Naval

Operations in World War II. Vol. I, The Battle of the Atlantic,

September 1939–May 1943. Boston, 1948.

MOURIN, MAXIME: Les Complots contre Hitler. Paris, 1948.

MUSMANNO, MICHAEL A.: Ten Days to Die. New York, 1950.

MUSSOLINI, BENITO: Memoirs 1942–1943. London, 1949.

NAMIER, SIR LEWIS B.: In the Nazi Era. London, 1952.

—, Diplomatic Prelude, 1938–1939. London, 1948.

NATHAN, OTTO: The Nazi Economic System: Germany’s Mobilization

for War. Durham, N.C., 1944.

NEUMANN, FRANZ L.: Behemoth. New York, 1942.

O’BRIEN, T. H.: Civil Defence. London, 1955. (A volume in the

official British history of the Second World War, edited by J. R. M.

Butler.)

OLDEN, RUDOLF: Hitler, the Pawn. London, 1936.

OUTZE, BORGE, ed.: Denmark during the Occupation. Copenhagen,

1946.

OVEN, WILFRED VON: Mit Goebbels bis zum Ende. Buenos Aires, 1949.

OVERSTRAETEN, GENERAL VAN: Albert I–Leopold III. Brussels, 1946.

PAPEN, FRANZ VON: Memoirs. New York, 1953.

PECHEL, RUDOLF: Deutscher Widerstand. Zurich, 1947.

PERTINAX: The Grave Diggers of France. New York, 1944.

PINNOW, HERMANN: History of Germany. London, 1936.

POLIAKOV, LEON, AND WULF, JOSEF: Das Dritte Reich und die Juden.

Berlin, 1955.

POTEMKIN, V. V., ed.: Histoire de la Diplomatie. Paris, 1946–47. (A

French edition of a Soviet Russian work.)

RABENAU, LIEUTENANT GENERAL FRIEDRICH VON: Seeckt, aus seinem

Leben. Leipzig, 1940.

RAUSCHNING, HERMANN: Time of Delirium. New York, 1946.

—, The Revolution of Nihilism. New York, 139.

—, The Conservative Revolution. New York, 1941.

—, The Voice of Destruction. New York, 1940.

REED, DOUGLAS: The Burning of the Reichstag. New York, 1934.

REITLINGER, GERALD: The Final Solution—The Attempt to Exterminate

the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945. New York, 1953.

—, The SS—Alibi of a Nation. New York, 1957.

REYNAUD, PAUL: In the Thick of the Fight. New York, 1955.

RIBBENTROP, JOACHIM VON: Zwischen London und Moskau.

Erinnerungen und letzte Aufzeichnungen. Leone am Starnberger See,

1953.

RIESS, CURT: Joseph Goebbels: The Devil’s Advocate. New York,

1948.

RITTER,

GERHARD:

Carl

Goerdeler

und

die

deutsche

Widerstandsbewegung. Stuttgart, 1955.

ROEPKE, WILHELM: The Solution of the German Problem. New York,

1946.

ROSINSKI, HERBERT: The German Army. Washington, 1944.

ROTHFELS, HANS: The German Opposition to Hitler. Hinsdale, III.,

1948.

ROUSSET, DAVID: The Other Kingdom. New York, 1947.

RUSSELL, BERTRAND: A History of Western Philosophy. New York,

1945.

SAMMLER, RUDOLF: Goebbels: The Man Next to Hitler. London, 1947.

SASULY, RICHARD: I. G. Farben. New York, 1947.

SCHACHT, HJALMAR: Account Settled. London, 1949.

SCHAUMBURG-LIPPE, PRINZ FRIEDRICH CHRISTIAN zu: Zwischen Krone

und Kerker. Wiesbaden, 1952.

SCHELLENBERG, WALTER: The Labyrinth. New York, 1956.

SCHLABRENDORFF, FABIAN VON: They Almost Killed Hitler. New York,

1947.

SCHMIDT, PAUL: Hitler’s Interpreter. New York, 1951. (This English

translation omits about one half of the original, Statist auf

diplomatischer Buehne, 1923–45, Bonn, 1949, which covered the pre-

Hitlerian period.)

SCHOLL, INGE: Die weisse Rose. Frankfurt, 1952.

SCHRAMM, WILHELM VON: Der 20. Juli in Paris. Bad Woerishorn,

1953.

SCHROETER, HEINZ: Stalingrad. New York, 1958.

SCHUETZ, WILLIAM WOLFGANG: Pens under the Swastika, a Study in

Recent German Writing. London, 1946.

SCHULTZ, JOACHIM: Die letzten 30 Tage—aus dem Kriegstagebuch des

O.K.W. Stuttgart, 1951.

SCHULTZ, SIGRID: Germany Will Try It Again. New York, 1944.

SCHUMANN, FREDERICK L.: The Nazi Dictatorship. New York, 1939.

—, Europe on the Eve. New York, 1939.

—, Night Over Europe. New York, 1941.

SCHUSCHNIGG, KURT VON: Austrian Requiem. New York, 1946. (This is

an English translation of the original: Ein Requiem in Rot-Weiss-Rot.

Zurich, 1946.)

—, Farewell, Austria. London, 1938.

SCOLEZY, MAXINE S.: The Structure of the Nazi Economy. Cambridge,

1941.

SEABURY, PAUL: The Wilhelmstrasse: A Study of German Diplomats

under the Nazi Regime. Berkeley, 1954.

SHERWOOD, ROBERT E.: Roosevelt and Hopkins. New York, 1948.

SHIRER, WILLIAM L.: Berlin Diary. New York, 1941.

—, End of a Berlin Diary. New York, 1947.

—, The Challenge of Scandinavia. Boston, 1955.

SHULMAN, MILTON: Defeat in the West. New York, 1948.

SKORZENY, OTTO: Skorzeny’s Secret Memoirs. New York, 1950.

SNYDER, LOUIS L.: The Tragedy of a People. Harrisburg, 1952.

SPEIDEL, GENERAL HANS: Invasion 1944. Chicago, 1950.

SPENGLER, OSWALD: Jahre der Entscheidung. Munich, 1935.

STEED, HENRY WICKHAM: The Hapsburg Monarchy. London, 1919.

STEIN, LEO: I Was in Hell with Niemoeller. New York, 1942.

STIPP, JOHN L.: Devil’s Diary. Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1955. (A

selection of German documents from the NCA volumes.)

STROELIN, KARL: Stuttgart im Endstadium des Krieges. Stuttgart, 1950.

SUAREZ, GEORGES, AND LABORDE, GUY: Agonie de la Paix. Paris, 1942.

TANSILL, CHARLES C: Back Door to War. New York, 1952.

TAYLOR, A. J. P.: The Course of German History. New York, 1946.

TAYLOR, TELFORD: Sword and Swastika. New York, 1952.

—, The March of Conquest. New York, 1958.

THOMAS, GENERAL GEORG: Basic Facts for a History of German War

and Armament Economy (mimeographed). Nuremberg, 1945.

THOMPSON, DOROTHY: Listen, Hans. Boston, 1942.

THORWALD, JUERGEN: Das Ende an der Elbe. Stuttgart, 1950.

—, Flight in Winter: Russia, January to May 1945. New York, 1951.

THYSSEN, FRITZ: I Paid Hitler. New York, 1941.

TOLISCHUS, OTTO D.: They Wanted War. New York, 1940.

TOYNBEE, ARNOLD, ed.: Hitler’s Europe. London, 1954.

TOYNBEE, ARNOLD AND VERONICA M., eds.: The Eve of the War.

London, 1958.

TREFOUSSE, H. L.: Germany and American Neutrality, 1939–1941.

New York, 1951.

TREVOR-ROPER, H. R.: The Last Days of Hitler. New York, 1947.

VERMEIL, EDMOND: L’Allemagne Contemporaine, Sociale, Politique et

Culturale, 1890–1950. 2 vols. Paris, 1952–53.

VOSSLER, KARL: Gedenkrede fuer die Opfer an der Universitaet

Muenchen. Munich, 1947.

VOWINCKEL, KURT: Die Wehrmacht im Kampf, Vols. 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9,

10, 11. Heidelberg, 1954.

WAGNER, FRIEDELIND: Heritage of Fire. New York, 1945.

WEISENBORN, GUENTHER: Der lautlose Aufstand. Hamburg, 1953.

WEIZSAECKER, ERNST VON: The Memoirs of Ernst von Weizsaecker.

London, 1951.

WELLES, SUMNER: The Time for Decision. New York, 1944.

WESTPHAL, GENERAL SIEGFRIED: The German Army in the West.

London, 1951.

WEYGAND, GENERAL MAXIME: Rappelé au Service. Paris, 1947.

WHEATLEY, RONALD: Operation Sea Lion. London, 1958.

WHEELER-BENNETT, JOHN W.: Wooden Titan: Hindenburg. New York,

1936.

—, Munich: Prologue to Tragedy. New York, 1948.

—, The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics, 1918–1945.

New York, 1953.

WICHERT, ERWIN: Dramatische Tage in Hitlers Reich. Stuttgart, 1952.

WILMOT, CHESTER: The Struggle for Europe. New York, 1952.

WRENCH, JOHN EVELYN: Geoffrey Dawson and Our Times. London,

1955.

YOUNG, DESMOND: Rommel—The Desert Fox. New York, 1950.

ZELLER, EBERHARD: Geist der Freiheit. Munich, 1954.

ZIEMER, GREGOR: Education for Death. New York, 1941.

ZOLLER, A., ed.: Hitler Privat. Duesseldorf, 1949. (French edition:

Douze Ans auprès d’Hitler. Paris, 1949.)

ZWEIG, STEFAN: The World of Yesterday. New York, 1943.

PERIODICALS

HALE, PROFESSOR ORÓN JAMES: “Adolf Hitler: Taxpayer.” The

American Historical Review, LX, No. 4 (July 1955).

HUCH, RICARDA: “Die Aktion der Muenzhner Studenten gegen Hitler.”

Neue Schweizer Rundschau, Zurich, September–October 1948.

HUCH, RICARDA: “Der 18. Februar: Umriss einer deutschen

Widerstandsbewegung.” Die Gegenwart, October 30, 1946.

KEMPNER, ROBERT M. W.: “Blueprint of the Nazi Underground.”

Research Studies of the State College of Washington, June 1945.

THOMAS,

GENERAL

GEORG:

“Gedanken

und

Ereignisse.”

Schweizerische Monatshefte, December 1945.

WITZIG, RUDOLF: “Die Einnahme von Eben-Emael.” Wehrkunde, May

1945.

INDEX

Aa Canal, 728, 731

Aachen, 291 fn., 1088, 1089–90, 1092

“AB Action,” 662–63

Abbeville, 718, 727, 728, 731, 738, 741, 746, 759

Abwehr (Intelligence Bureau), see under OKW

Abyssinia, see Ethiopia

Adam, Gen. Wilhelm, 370, 378, 387

Addis Ababa, 297

Adlerangriffe (“Operation Eagle”), 774–75

Adlon Hotel, 444, 595, 597, 616, 648, 807, 1110

Adolf Hitler Schools, 255

A.E.G., (Allgemeine Elektrizitaetgesellschaft), 145

Africa, 82, 305, 804, 805; see also North Africa

Afrika Korps, 911-13, 919–25, 1078

Aga Khan, 751 fn.

Ahnenerbe (Institute for Research into Heredity), 980, 982

Air Force, German, see Luftwaffe

Aisne river, 737

Alanbrooke, Field Marshal Lord, 730 fn.

Albania, 469, 813, 816, 818, 820, 821, 825, 1006

Albert Canal, 724, 725

Alexander I, Czar of Russia, 542, 1015

Alexander, Gen. Sir Harold, 919, 1033, 1107

Alexandria, Egypt, 817, 911, 919

Alfieri, Dino, 751, 756

Algeria, 814, 923

Algiers, 923

Allianz insurance company, 144, 206

Allied air operations, 1001, 1038, 1040, 1092, 1093, 1099; bombing of Germany, 778–80, 807–9, 954, 1008–9, 1013, 1027, 1031, 1032, 1037,

1096–1100, 1108, 1110

Allied commandos, 955

Allied Supreme War Council, 675 fn. , 696, 717

Allies, Nazi hopes for dissension among, 1011, 1033, 1042, 1087, 1091–92,

1098

Alsace, 400, 983 fn., 1091, 1094

Alsace-Lorraine, 58, 286, 436, 641, 742

Altmark (Ger. auxiliary ship), 679, 680

Alvensleben, Werner von, 182

Amann, Max, 49, 80, 246, 760

Amau, Vice-Minister, 884

Amen, Col. John Harlan, 532 fn. , 959

America First Committee, 827 fn. , 871

Amery, Leopold, 611

Amsterdam, 716, 721

Andalsnes, 706, 708, 710

Angell, Norman, 784

Anglo–German naval agreement (1935), 287–89, 419, 467, 471, 489 fn.

Anglo–Polish treaty (1939), 550, 551, 556–57, 564, 570

Annunziata, Collar of the, 483

Anti-Comintern Pact, 299, 353, 439, 455, 459, 465, 476, 506, 523, 539–40,

887

anti-Hitler conspiracy, 372–82, 404–8, 411–14, 422–26, 517, 530, 558–60,

591, 596, 647–56, 658–59, 670, 692–94, 715, 719, 754 fn., 846 fn., 848 fn.,

903–8, 1002, 1012–82

anti-Semitism, 23–27, 35, 40 fn., 41, 45, 48, 91, 106, 149, 236, 238, 251,

372; see also Jews

“Anton,” 922, 923

Antonescu, Ion, 800 fn., 995

Antwerp, 717, 718, 724, 725, 761, 772, 1086, 1090, 1099

Arabia, 810

Arabian Sea, 805

Archangel, U.S.S.R., 811, 870 fn.

Arco-Valley, Count Anton, 33

Ardennes Forest, 718, 723, 933, 1090–96, 1108

armistice: of 1918, see under World War I; of 1940, see Franco–German

armistice; Franco–Italian armistice

Army, German (and Reichswehr), 63–66, 89, 93, 119, 143, 160, 185, 201,

211, 236, 259, 260, 263, 267, 293, 301, 305, 328, 458, 1104–5

UNDER THE REPUBLIC: political activities, 3, 31–35, 38, 45, 46, 53–55,

63, 64, 137–38, 150–52, 159–62, 174–75, 179, 182–83, 188, 219; policy on armistice and Versailles terms, 31–32, 53, 58–60, 62, 63, 65,

281, 284, 285; attitude toward Republic, 31–34, 53, 58–61, 64–65,

138–42, 186–87; suppresses leftists, 33–34, 54–55, 65, 165; relations

with Nazis (to 1934), 45, 46, 70–73, 77, 138–42, 146, 159–61, 182–83,

185–88, 196–98, 204–7, 214–16, 220, 225–27, 229

HITLER ERA: subordination to Hitler, 226–27, 229, 318, 320, 324, 355–

56, 658–59, 754 fn., 840, 866–67; expansion and reorganization by

Hitler, 253–55, 281, 284–85, 299, 307, 318–19, 489, 865; generals’

opposition to Hitler, 309, 310, 354, 366–71, 488, 517–18, 643–46,

830–31, 834, 856–58, 915, 917–19, 926–27, 1091; Blomberg-Fritsch affair, 311–21, 354–56; generals’ plot, 317, 372, 374, 378–82, 393,

405, 414, 424–26, 517–18, 558–60, 647–51, 658–59, 693–94, 903–7,

1014–15, 1018–19, 1020–22, 1026–36, 1041–82

INVASION PLANS AND CAMPAIGNS: Austria, 335, 336; Balkans, 816–17,

820; Britain, 747, 758–67, 774, 781; Czechoslovakia, 363, 366–71,

377–82, 387, 393, 402, 410, 428, 445; Danzig and Memel, 456, 468,

498; Mediterranean area, 913–14; North Africa, 827, 911–13; Norway

and Denmark, 673, 681–82, 698–701, 707, 709–11; Poland, 460, 462–

63, 496–98, 506, 517–18, 530, 534, 549, 556–60, 569, 589–91, 599,

625, 626, 629, 633, 660–61, 944; Russia, 796–800, 810, 812, 822,

829–32, 834, 844–46, 853, 855–70, 879, 891, 909, 915–19, 922, 925–

34, 1014–15; Western Europe, 487, 506, 590, 618, 633, 635, 643–46,

652, 656, 658–59, 693–94, 713, 715–38, 728–29, 731–36, 741

SETBACKS AND DEFEAT: retreat in Africa, 919–21; Italy, 996, 999–

1001; Russian front, 1006–7, 1041, 1043, 1085, 1096–98, 1103; in

west, 1036–42, 1085–86, 1088–96, 1099, 1100–2; total mobilization, 1087; desertions, 1088, 1100–1; rout and surrender, 1105–7, 1112–13,

1120–22, 1125, 1126, 1130, 1138, 1139

WAR CRIMES AND VIOLATIONS OF GENEVA CONVENTION, 939, 945, 947,

952, 957–59, 976, 1029, 1090 fn., 1095 fn. , 1100

Army, German, units:

ARMY GROUPS:

A (eastern front), 915, 928

A (western front), 718, 726, 732, 733, 762–63

B (in Alps), 999

B (eastern front), 916

B (western front, 1940), 733, 762

B (western front, 1944–45), 1031, 1038, 1040, 1074–75, 1105

C, 646

Center, 853, 856–57, 859, 862, 863, 865, 903 fn., 905, 947, 1014,

1018–19, 1041, 1046, 1085

Don, 926–28

G, 1138

H, 1101

North, 497, 625, 626, 853, 856, 903 fn.

South, 497, 830, 853, 856, 861, 903 fn.

Ukraine-North, 947

ARMORED GROUPS:

Third Tank, 863

Fourth Tank, 863, 865

ARMIES:

First, 387, 1138

First Panzer, 860, 914, 916, 928

Second, 387, 1043

Second Panzer, 863, 864

Third, 387, 497, 625, 660

Fourth, 387, 497, 625, 860, 863, 864, 865, 868–69

Fourth Panzer, 914–16, 919, 926–27

Fifth Panzer, 1093, 1105

Sixth, 722, 724, 725, 726, 728, 730, 731, 762, 763, 767, 782, 861 fn.,

909, 914, 915, 919, 922, 926–27, 929, 930–31, 933, 1014

Seventh, 1037, 1038, 1039

Eighth, 387, 497

Ninth, 762, 782, 868, 947, 1120

Tenth, 387, 497, 626

Tenth, 959

Twelfth, 387, 826

Fourteenth, 387, 497, 626

Fifteenth, 1037, 1105

Sixteenth, 762

Seventeenth, 928, 1007

Eighteenth, 721, 731, 738

Nineteenth, 1138

Replacement (Home) Army, 904, 906, 1015, 1019, 1030, 1034–35,

1044–45, 1048–49, 1057, 1058, 1063, 1064, 1073, 1080, 1087

West, Army of the, 370

CORPS:

Ist, 557

IIIrd, 413

XVth Armored, 724

XVIth Armored, 725

XIXth Armored, 626, 724

XXXIXth, 722

XLIst Armored (Tank), 724, 859

XLVIIth Armored, 1093

LXXVth, 956

Afrika Korps, 911–13, 919–25, 1078

DIVISIONS:

2nd Panzer, 727

3rd Panzergrenadier, 999

4th Panzer, 626

6th Panzer, 1028

9th Panzer, 722

10th Panzer, 1029

18th Grenadier, 1088

21st Panzer, 1039

23rd Infantry, 375

28th Rifle, 1074

163rd Infantry, 703

258th Infantry, 863

Volksgrenadier, 1048–49

BRIGADES, REGIMENTS, BATTALIONS:

12th Artillery Regt., 355

17th Bamberg Cav. Regt., 1028

150th Panzer Brigade, 1092

Guard Battalion Grossdeutschland, 1061

MILITARY DISTRICTS ( Wehrkreise):

III (Berlin), 284, 375, 1035, 1061; Berlin Kommandantur, 1030, 1061,

1063

VII (Munich), 35, 38

WAFFEN (ARMED) S.S. UNITS, see under S. S.

Army General Staff, 53, 99, 174, 335, 367, 370, 371, 379, 380, 400, 424,

487, 488, 498, 650, 656, 658, 673, 718, 749 fn., 756, 758, 763 fn., 774, 830,

843, 856–57, 914–19, 933, 1029, 1087, 1130, 1139; banned by Versailles Treaty, 58 fn. , 62; re-created as Truppenamt, 62; re-established, 281, 284,

285 fn.; resignation of Beck as Chief, 370–72, 559; apptmt. of Halder, 370–

72; Halder out, Zeitzler named, 917–18; Guderian named, 1080–81; Krebs

named, 1112; see also Beck, Ludwig; Halder; Guderian; Krebs; Zeitzler

Army High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres—OKH), 377–79, 560,

658, 661, 673, 682, 717, 726–27, 759, 762, 764, 774, 782, 812, 822, 856–

57, 858, 1027, 1028, 1030, 1057, 1073

Army Law (July 20, 1933), 208

Arnhem, 1089

Arras, 30

Artists’ Club, 1012

Aryan superiority, 39, 81–82, 86–89, 103–4, 107, 145, 237, 245, 250, 251

Asch, 388, 402

Ashton-Gwatkin, Frank, 416–18

Asia, 305, 805, 872, 873, 885, 892, 901, 1007

Asquith, Herbert, 385

Assmann, Adm. Kurt, 1052 fn.

Associated Press, 477 fn. , 784 fn., 956

Astakhov, Georgi, 481, 493, 500–1, 505, 506, 513

Astor, Lady, 376

Athenia, S. S., 622, 636–38

Athens, 826

Atlantic, Battle of the, 877 fn., 879–83, 894 fn., 895, 898, 901, 912, 913,

1007, 1008, 1099

Atlantic Charter, 904

atom bomb, 1099

atomic energy, 252

Attolico, Bernardo, 377, 408, 409, 415, 482, 508, 511 fn., 551, 552, 554,

556, 565, 566, 587–88, 603, 605–8, 643, 687, 751 fn.

Aufbau Ost (“Build-up East”), 799

August Wilhelm, Prince, 907

Auschwitz, 272, 664, 949 fn. , 967–74, 981, 988

Austria, 21–28, 36, 64, 94–95, 120, 130, 132, 136, 238, 326, 332, 334, 358,

794, 889, 1105, 1107; Anschluss, 9, 41, 84, 209, 279–309 passim, 322–60,

363–66, 422, 440, 459, 518, 530, 543, 579, 591, 598, 632, 657, 677, 686,

692–93, 710, 904; Dollfuss murder, Nazi agitation, 223, 279–80, 295–96,

322–23, 328, 340–41; German invasion plans, 289, 304–9, 331, 335–37;

Hitler ultimatums to, 327–31, 339–42, 344; plebiscite on Anschluss, 334–

39, 347, 349–50; Nazi rule established, 348, 350–51; see also Italy, and

Anschluss; Miklas; Schuschnigg; Seyss-Inquart

Austrian Legion, 280, 327

Austrian National Bank, 351

“Autumn Journey” ( Herbstreise), 768

Aviation, Ministry of, 282

Avranches, 1076, 1085

Axmann, Artur, 1137

Azores, 817, 879, 901

Azov, Sea of, 928, 1007

Babarin, E., 500–1

Bach-Zelewski, 962 fn.

Baden-Powell, Lord, 784

Bad Harzburg, 154

Bad Nauheim, 215, 1108

Badoglio, Marshal Pietro, 998, 999, 1002 fn., 1003, 1006

Bagdad, 828, 829

Bahama Is., 786, 787, 788, 789, 790, 792

Baku, 798, 809, 942

Baldwin, Stanley, 302

Balkan States, 209, 747, 795, 804, 805, 808, 815, 816, 817, 819, 822–30,

839, 844, 928, 1006, 1090, 1096

Ballerstedt, Herr, 43

Ballestrem, Countess, 1025

Baltic Sea, 549, 674, 695, 710, 808, 833, 839, 847, 853, 909, 1105, 1116

Baltic States, 484, 494, 495, 501, 502, 514, 515, 521, 534, 541, 542, 630–

31, 632, 657, 665–66, 668, 683, 711 fn., 747, 793–94, 797, 798, 800, 801,

811, 822 fn. , 832, 853, 939, 942, 1061

Bamberg, 127–28

Banat, 824 fn.

Bank of France, 943

Bank of Norway, 703

Baranov, 1097

“Barbarossa,” 797, 810–13, 818, 822–24, 828–30, 838, 845, 873, 881; see also Army, German, invasion plans and campaigns, Russia; Soviet Union,

Hitler’s aims toward

Bardia, 827

Barmen, 238

“barons’ cabinet,” 164–65

Barth, Karl, 251

Baruch, Bernard, 784 fn. , 897 fn.

Basel, 563

Bastogne, 1093–95

Batum, 809

Bavaria, 28, 33–36, 38, 42–44, 48, 51, 63–67, 280, 1105, 1141; Hitler

difficulties with govt., 118, 119, 130–31, 160, 164 ( see also Beer Hall

Putsch); local govt., abolished, 200; Nazi rule in, 201, 219, 1023; see also

Munich

Bavaria, Kingdom of, 95

“Bavarian Joe,” 316

Bavarian People’s Party, 118, 195, 201

Bavarian “People’s State,” 33

Bayerlein, Gen. Fritz, 912 fn., 913 fn. ; 920

Bayreuth, 101–2, 105, 109, 279, 297, 1061

BBC, 247, 558, 619, 755, 1001, 1037, 1122

“Beast of Belsen,” see Kramer, Josef

Bechstein, Carl, 145

Bechstein, Helene, 46

Beck, Col. Józef, 377, 421, 455–57, 459–61, 463–65, 466 fn. , 467, 469, 475,

476, 536–37, 543 fn., 574–75, 580, 586–87, 605 fn.

Beck, Gen. Ludwig, 142, 281, 285 fn., 313, 335, 355, 373, 918; opposes

Hitler’s military plans, 293, 309, 316–17, 365–71, 488; resigns as Gen.

Staff Chief, 370–71, 374, 424–25; in anti-Hitler conspiracy, 374, 375,

380 fn., 382, 422–26, 517, 559, 649–50, 670, 846 fn. , 848 fn. , 904, 907, 908,

1014–18, 1030, 1032–33, 1035, 1036, 1042–43; named head of First Army,

387; July 1944 bomb plot, 1045–48, 1054, 1058–61, 1065, 1067–68, 1073,

1075; death, 1067–68

Becker, Dr., 960

Beer Hall Putsch, 4, 10, 13, 67–80, 112 fn. , 118, 139, 146, 221, 223, 280,

312, 701; anniversary celebrations, 77, 121, 653, 882, 922, 925, 1010

Beethoven, Ludwig von, 17, 97, 242, 326, 933, 970

Beigbeder y Atienza, Col. Juan, 786

Belgian Army, 718, 724, 727–31

Belgian government in exile, 729

Belgium, 58, 294, 302, 307, 470, 516, 531, 533, 561, 590, 616, 633, 645,

841, 1074; German plans for invasion of, 486, 487, 519 fn., 644–47, 649–

52, 656, 658, 665, 669, 671–72, 694, 710, 711, 714–20, 739, 793; invasion and battle of, 713, 720, 723, 728–31, 737, 738, 954, 1090; King surrenders,

729–31; German occupation, 734, 759, 906, 943, 956–57, 1009, 1031, 1047; liberation, 1085, 1086, 1099

Belgrade, 823–26, 971

Bell, Dr. George, 1017–18, 1024

Below, Col. Nicolaus von, 1130, 1131 fn.

Belsec, 272, 967, 968

Belsen, 981

Beneš, Eduard, 346, 358–60, 363–65, 381 fn., 383, 390, 391, 393, 397, 402,

414 fn., 420, 421, 441, 443–45, 448, 456, 464, 784

Benghazi, 819, 921, 922

Berchtesgaden (and the Obersalzberg), 9, 51, 112, 129, 130, 167, 169, 284,

309, 311, 324, 360, 361, 363, 364, 365, 368, 475, 494, 521, 523, 525, 925,

1027, 1028, 1038, 1041, 1105–7, 1116, 1118, 1127; Berghof, 51, 131 fn.,

325, 326 fn. , 752, 834, 838, 1107, 1111; Berghof diplomatic conferences,

232, 298, 302, 325–30, 331, 333, 334, 338, 340, 344, 349, 384–87, 391,

406, 426, 455, 457, 499, 507, 509–10, 513, 546, 548, 551, 562, 800, 821–

23; Berghof military meetings, 369–70, 378, 496, 515–18, 528, 559, 660,

752, 764, 797–98, 819, 845, 880, 1041; plot to eliminate Hitler at, 1033,

1045, 1046 fn.; Wachenfeld (villa), 85, 131, 133,

Berchtold, Joseph, 121

Berg, Paul, 709 fn.

Bergen, 681, 695, 696, 701, 707, 721

Berger, Gottlob, 1114–15

Berggrav, Bishop Eivind, 709 fn.

Berghof, see under Berchtesgaden

Berlin: Allies advance on, 1088–89, 1097, 1103, 1105, 1107, 1108; Battle of, 1073, 1106, 1112, 1117–21, 1127, 1128, 1130, 1132, 1135–37; bombed by Allies, 778, 779, 780, 807, 807–9, 1110; govt, of, 275; life in, during 1920s, 118; Mussolini visit, 301; peace rumor riot, 643 fn.; people’s apathy

to war, 396–97, 399, 413, 593, 595, 597, 599, 615–16, 670; revolutionary agitation (1918), 52, 54–55; S. A. violence in, 147, 166

Berlin, University of, 98, 99, 110, 124, 241, 250, 251, 783

Berliner Arbeiterzeitung, 123

Berliner Boersenzeitung, 143, 698 fn.

Berliner Tageblatt, 124, 245

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, 242

Berlin State Opera, 242, 284, 346

Bernadotte, Count Folke, 1114, 1116–17, 1122

Berne, 648–49, 1018

Bernstorff, Count Albrecht von, 374, 1025, 1073

Bessarabia, 541, 544, 794, 795, 800, 806

Best, Capt. S. Payne, 653–55, 692

Best, Dr. Werner, 271

Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald von, 713

Bialystok, 853

Bible, banning of, 240

Biddle, A. J. Drexel, 688

Bieberback, Ludwig, 251

Birmingham, England, 453–54, 783

Bismarck, Otto, Prince von, 90, 94–98, 155, 174, 175, 186, 197, 200, 657,

1025, 1113

Bismarck, Otto Christian, Prince von, 851

Bismarck (Ger. battleship), 667, 668

Bismarck Youth, 154

Black Front, 148

“Black Reichswehr,” 65, 150

Black Sea, 549, 666, 805, 811, 823, 846, 847, 853, 859, 909

“Black Wednesday,” 404–8, 410

Blackshirts, see S. S.

Bláha, Dr. Frank, 984

Blaskowitz, Gen. Johannes, 1101

Blomberg, Erna Gruhn, 311–14

Blomberg, Gen. Werner von, 151, 183, 184, 207–8, 210, 211, 214, 215,

219, 220, 225, 235, 285 fn. , 290–93, 297, 303–5, 308, 310–20, 323, 332,

357, 374, 488

Blood Purge, 215–19, 268, 269, 271, 280, 392 fn. , 1056–57; see also Roehm, Ernst

“Bloody Week” in Berlin, 55

Bluecher (Ger. heavy cruiser), 702–3

Blum, Léon, 344, 352, 1074

Blumentritt, Gen. Guenther, 488, 734, 761, 852 fn. , 855, 859, 860, 863, 864,

868, 1038, 1041 fn., 1075, 1076, 1082, 1090

Bock, Field Marshal Fedor von, 625, 626, 733, 755 fn., 762, 853, 856, 859,

862–65, 869, 903 fn., 905, 914

Bodelschwing, Pastor Friedrich von, 237

Bodenschatz, Gen. Karl, 999, 1054 fn.

Boehm, Adm. Hermann, 529 fn.

Boehm-Tettelbach, Lt. Col. Hans, 381

Boer War, 957

Boeselager, Col. Frh. von, 1019, 1072

Boetticher, Gen. Friedrich von, 684, 749 fn.

Bogorodsk, 862

Boguchar, 928

Bohemia, 359, 362, 382, 402, 428, 429, 438, 440, 443, 444, 448, 449, 451,

460, 598, 657, 686, 991, 1032, 1129

Bohemia, Kingdom of, 358

Bologna, 1107

Bonham Carter, Lady, 784

Bonhoeffer, Pastor Dietrich, 374, 1017, 1024, 1072, 1073

Bonhoeffer, Klaus, 1073

Bonn government, 950 fn. , 965 fn.

Bonnet, Georges, 389, 390, 408, 413–14, 437, 460, 536–37, 543 fn., 604–5,

607–10, 612, 616–17, 642–43

Bono, Marshal Emilio de, 1005 fn.

Bonte, Rear Adm. Fritz, 701, 707

book burning, 241

Boothby, Robert, 478 fn.

Bordeaux, 738, 744–45

Borisov, 905

Bormann, Martin, 148–49, 240, 275, 406 fn. , 838, 938, 939, 941, 1062,

1104, 1112, 1116, 1117–18, 1120–21, 1123, 1126, 1127, 1128, 1129, 1130,

1132, 1133, 1134, 1135, 1136, 1137

Borovsk, 869

Bosch, Dr. Karl, 190

Bose, Herbert von, 218, 222

Bosporus, Strait of, 804, 807–10

Bottai, Giuseppe, 996

Boulogne, 728, 731, 761, 770, 772

Boy Scouts, 784

Bradley, Gen. Omar N., 1076, 1106 fn.

Brandenburg, 93, 166, 1035, 1061, 1109, 1110

Brandenburg Gate, 5

Brandt, Col. Heinz, 1020–21, 1051, 1052, 1054

Brandt, Lt. Gen. Rudolf, 980

Bratislava, 440–41

Brauchitsch, Charlotte von, 319, 371 fn.

Brauchitsch, Field Marshal Walther von, 214, 321, 542, 710, 816, 824,

1062; named Army C. in C, 319; and Czechosl. invasion plans, 365, 367,

368–69, 370–71, 378, 379; and anti-Hitler plot, 375, 407–8, 559–60, 647–

51, 658–59, 670, 693–94, 1080; and Poland invasion plans, 462–63, 484,

496–97, 515 fn. , 516, 517, 531, 557, 591, 625, 627; and western offensive,

633, 640, 643–44, 647, 715, 718; and S.S. brutality in Poland, 660; and Weseruebung, 681; Dunkirk and stop order, 726–27, 731–34, 736; at

Compiègne, 742, 743; made field marshal, 755 fn.; and Britain invasion

plans, 763, 764, 767, 768, 782; Russian campaign, 797, 810, 822, 831, 840,

846, 856–57, 858, 859; illness and “resignation,” 648, 861 fn. , 864, 866,

903 fn.

Bräuer, Dr. Curt, 678 fn. , 698, 702–6, 709

Braun, Eva, 483 fn., 1110–11, 1120, 1122–23, 1127, 1128, 1133, 1134

Braun, Gretl, 1121

Braunau am Inn, 6, 9

Bräutigam, Dr. Otto, 940–41

Breda, 722

Bredow, Countess Hanna von, 1025

Bredow, Gen. Kurt von, 222, 224, 225, 320

Bremen, 221, 222, 1105, 1107

Bremen, S. S., 768

Bremerhaven, 1141

Brenner Pass, 280, 337, 508, 552–53, 689, 690–91, 774, 815

Breslau, 211

Brest, 914

Brest Litovsk, 57, 542, 626, 628, 852 fn., 948

Brighton, 762, 767

Bristol, 763, 783

Britain, 95, 97, 256, 306, 450, 957, 965; collective action with France and Italy, 280, 284–85, 288, 289, 296, 297, 307; appeasement policy: on German rearmament, 282–85, 287–89 ( see also Anglo–German naval

agreement); on Rhineland remilitarization, 290–95; on Italo-Ethiopian war,

289–90, 297; on Span, civil war, 299; on Anschluss, 324, 327, 330, 344–46,

353; on Czechoslovakia, 354, 360–427 passim, 443, 450–54, 544 ( see also Munich Conference and Pact); joint policy with France, 283, 284, 287, 290,

293–94, 299, 307, 330, 384, 389, 396, 398, 454, 461, 465, 469, 501–4, 605–

17; Hitler’s contempt for, 300, 306, 436, 518, 529; Hitler considers and

plans war against, 298, 304, 307, 366, 368, 420, 467, 484–87, 498, 501,

508 fn., 516, 520, 531, 566–67, 590, 600, 620–22; pact with Italy on

Mediterranean, 301; policy toward U.S. S.R., 353, 361, 404, 460, 466, 478–

81, 489–92, 494–96, 501–6, 513–16, 521, 523, 525, 526, 533–43, 550 fn.;

presses Czechs to appease Hitler, 360, 376–77, 388–90, 399, 402, 411,

417–18, 420–21; protests Nazi moves against Czechs, 364–65, 452–53;

contacts with anti-Hitler Germans, 373, 380–82, 405, 424, 558, 648–50,

692–94, 1017–19, 1024, 1026, 1042; pledge of aid to Poland, 460, 464–66,

469, 472, 478, 481, 495, 506, 509–10, 514–18, 521, 526, 533–43, 545–54,

556–58, 561, 564, 569–89, 591–93, 596, 600–17, 634; pledges aid to Greece, Rumania, 469, 495; mobilization, war preparations, 545, 562, 595; and 1939 “peace negotiations,” 569–89, 601–4; ultimatum and declaration

of war, 605–20; at war, 633, 666, 689, 698, 782, 807, 827, 854 fn., 904, 995,

1036, 1087, 1099, 1105; ship losses, 635–38, 646, 669, 711, 737, 775,

901 fn. ( see also Atlantic, Battle of the; British Navy); German peace offers

to, 639–42, 734–35, 746–57, 785, 790, 835–38, 1012, 1138–39; German attitude and strategy toward in war, 658, 669, 760, 763, 768, 770–71, 798,

804, 805, 809, 846, 849–50, 853, 871–74, 915, 954, 1124; joint strategy with France, 635, 643, 744–45; expeditionary force to Finland, 675, 682 fn., involvement in Norway, 676–77, 679, 682 fn. , 694–96; invasion of, 752,

753, 756, 758–85, 797, 813, 816, 820, 873, 879, 1039; air operations against (Battle of Britain), 756, 763, 765, 769, 774–82, 809, 827, 850, 1009,

1040, 1098; German occupation plans for, 782–85, 791; Vichy war against,

815, 817, 923; Japanese war against, 872, 873, 877 fn., 886–88, 892, 894,

895, 1007; alliance with Russia, 838, 847–48, 1011, 1033, 1098; in Mediterranean, 812–13, 816–18; U.S. aid to, 877, 880–83, 898, 900, 901

British Admiralty, 695–96, 702, 731, 735, 892

British Air Force (R.A.F.), 402, 635, 701, 752, 827, 914, 920, 991, 1019,

1040; in Battle of France, 724, 731, 736–38, 740 fn.; in Battle of Britain,

759–61, 763, 764, 766, 767, 770, 772–81; bombing of Germany, 778, 779,

807–8, 934, 1008–9, 1010, 1068, 1100, 1110, 1115, 1117

British Army, 424, 510, 533, 618, 672, 682 fn., 708, 716, 954–55, 1089,

1105; in France and Belgium, 542, 634, 635, 717, 718, 720, 723, 724, 727,

728, 730, 731, 736–38; Norway expedition, 696, 707, 708; defense against invasion, 763 fn., 764, 767; in N. Africa, 818 fn., 819, 827, 911–12, 919,

920; in Greece, 823, 826, 827; Normandy landings, 1033, 1038; in Germany, 1088, 1090, 1102, 1105, 1107, 1141

British Empire, 288, 306, 548–49, 569, 575, 734–35, 738, 747, 749, 752,

754, 757, 804, 806, 808, 815, 828, 829, 836, 910

British Intelligence, 363, 652–55, 787, 789, 1026

British Navy, 401, 402, 487, 554, 646, 669–70, 679, 701–2, 707, 723, 731,

737, 738, 817, 873, 922; blockade of Germany, 687–88, 701, 914; ship losses, 711, 737, 901 fn.; defense against invasion, 759, 761, 763, 764, 766,

767, 770

British White Paper, 283

Brittany, 1076, 1085

Broadcasting House (Rundfunkhaus), 564, 595, 755, 1064

Brockdorff, Countess Erika von, 1043 fn.

Brockdorff-Ahlefeld, Gen. Count Erich von, 375, 413

Brockdorff-Rantzau, Count Ulrich von, 494

Brown House, Munich, 121

Brownshirts, see S.A.

Bruckman, Hugo, 145

Brueckner, Lt. Wilhelm, 66, 279

Bruening, Heinrich, 56 fn., 137, 138, 151–55, 157–64, 172, 174, 190, 195,

199, 216, 372

Bruenn, Czechoslovakia, 443

Brunswick, 157

Brussels, 672, 713, 1086

Bryans, J. Lonsdale (“Mr. X”), 692–93

Bryansk, 859

Bryant, Arthur, 730 fn.

Buch, Maj. Walther, 122, 221, 430–31

Buchenwald, 272, 352–53, 948, 979, 983–84

Buchrucker, Major, 65

Bucovina, 794, 795, 800

Budapest, 1090 fn., 1096

Budënny, Marshal Semën, 854, 857

Buehler, Dr. Josef, 966

Buelow-Schwante, Ambassador von, 652, 713–14

Buerckel, Josef, 441

Buergerbräukeller, see Beer Hall Putsch

Bug river, 626, 630, 746

Buhle, General, 1049

Bulgaria, 800, 801 fn., 804, 805, 806, 807, 808, 809, 810, 817, 820, 823,

826, 839, 847, 1085

Bulge, Battle of the, 222 fn., 954; see also Ardennes Forest

Bullitt, William C, 295, 688

Bullock, Alan, 200, 410 fn. , 1050 fn.

Bund Deutscher Maedel, 120, 254

Bund Oberland, 70, 72, 73

Burckhardt, Dr. Carl, 424 fn. , 499

Burgdorf, Gen. Wilhelm, 1077–78, 1123, 1126, 1129, 1133, 1137

Burnett, Air Marshal Sir Charles, 503 fn. , 504 fn.

Busch, Gen. Ernst, 762

Bussche, Capt. Axel von dem, 1027

Busse, General, 1109

Butcher, Capt. Harry C, 1001 fn. , 1004 fn.

Buttlar-Brandenfels, Col. Frh. Treusch von, 922

Cadogan, Sir Alexander, 572, 583, 601, 611–12

Caen, 1037

Calais, 728, 731, 761, 770, 1038

Canada, 684 fn. , 754, 913

Canadian Army, 1086, 1088, 1090, 1102, 1105

Canaris, Adm. Wilhelm, 331, 374, 380 fn., 405, 462, 467, 517, 518, 556,

558, 560, 596, 654, 659–61, 685 fn. , 1019, 1024, 1026, 1034, 1036, 1073

Canary Is., 813, 817, 879

Canned Goods,” 520, 595

Canterbury, Archbishop of, 344

Cape Verde Is., 817, 901

Cap Gris-Nez, 761

Caprivi de Caprara de Montecuccoli, Gen. Count Georg von, 175

Carinthia, 350

Carlyle, Thomas, 1108–10

Carl, Prince, of Denmark, see Haakon VII, King of Norway

Carls, Adm. Rolf, 673

Carol II, King of Rumania, 800 fn.

Carpathian Mts., 1033

Carpatho-Ukraine, Republic of, 449

Carr, Edward Hallett, 481 fn.

Casablanca Conference, 1033

Case Otto, 304, 335, 336, 342 fn. ; see also “Otto”

Case Richard, 304

Cases Green, White, Yellow, see Green; White; etc.

Caspian Sea, 909, 914

Catholic Action, 218, 223, 235

Catholic Trade Unions, 190, 202 fn.

Catholic Youth League, 235, 253

Caucasia (the Caucasus), 832, 857, 859, 860, 865, 870, 909–12, 914–18,

928, 929

Caulaincourt, Marquis Armand de, 860

Cavour (It. battleship), 818 fn.

Center Party, 55–56, 61, 137, 138, 157, 164, 166, 170, 173, 181, 186, 189,

190, 195, 196, 199, 201, 234

Central Security Office, see R.S.H.A.

Chagall, Marc, 244

Châlons-sur-Marne, 726

Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 103–9

Chamberlain, Neville, 275, 283, 302, 382, 450, 544, 643, 649, 653, 657,

674, 679, 716, 779, 1018; condones Anschluss, 324, 332, 344–45, 353;

“Munich” policy on Czechosl., 287, 354, 360, 364, 375–77, 381, 383–99,

401–27, 429, 435, 442–43, 448, 451, 453–54, 469, 531, 740, 814; policy toward U.S.S.R., 353, 476, 478–80, 489–90, 492, 495–96, 502–41, 543; opposes Hitler on Poland, 454, 460, 465, 466, 467, 517, 537, 545–47,

548 fn., 549, 556–58, 562, 569, 572–73, 575, 579–80; 583, 836; warns Hitler, declares war, 608, 610–12, 615, 619; says Hitler “missed the bus,”

695; Churchill’s tribute to, 619

Chamberlain, Field Marshal Sir Neville Bowles, 104

Charles XII, King of Sweden, 812, 829

Charleville, 732

Chautemps, Camille, 344

Chelmno, 967

Cherbourg, 762, 770, 773, 1037, 1089

Chicago Daily News, 784 fn.

Chicago Tribune, 894 fn.

Choltitz, Gen. Dietrich von, 1085 fn.

Christian X, King of Denmark, 695, 696, 698–700, 704 fn.

Christian, Gen. Eckard, 1115

Christianity, 99, 102–3, 234, 239, 240

Christian Socialists, 22, 24, 350

Christiansand, 677, 702

Chuikov, Gen. Vasili I., 1135, 1137

Church and State, 234–40

Church Federation, 237

Church of England, 784

Church of Jesus Christ, 238

Church of the Old Prussian Union, 235

Churchill, Winston S., 294, 345 fn., 406 fn. , 424, 493 fn. , 526, 543, 619, 634,

635, 636 fn. , 638, 642, 672, 731, 736 fn. , 737, 751 fn., 755, 786, 787, 790,

804 fn., 807 fn., 809 fn., 815 fn., 8–35-38, 847 fn. , 874, 900, 901 fn., 904,

1033 fn., 1105; contact with anti-Nazis, 380, 558, 1017, 1026, 1042; criticizes Munich Pact, appeasement, 404, 420, 423, 426; for co-operation

with Russia, 404, 479, 489, 795; strategy in Norway, 674, 695–96, 702,

707, 710–11; succeeds Chamberlain, 716; and French, Belgian surrender,

720, 724, 726, 729, 744; determination to fight on, 737–38, 746, 747, 749,

750–51; Hitler’s gibes at, 754, 779, 828, 1011, 1012; defense of Britain,

763 fn., 768, 769, 777, 781, 782, 784, 785; appeals for U.S. aid, 828, 829; warns Stalin of Nazi attack, 843–44

Chvalkovsky, František, 437, 438, 444–47, 449 fn.

Ciano, Edda, 1004–5

Ciano, Count Galeazzo, 436, 469–70, 562, 755, 780, 800, 803 fn. , 818 fn.,

845, 851, 854 fn., 889, 890, 893, 912, 921, 923; meetings with Hitler, 298,

509–13, 640, 690–91, 735, 740–41, 751–52, 756, 774, 815, 816, 821, 823,

910–11, 923–24, 928–29; negotiation, pacts with Britain, 301, 450; mediation in Czech crisis, 408, 414, 415 fn., 421; Pact of Steel negotiation,

482–83; and Italy’s reluctance to go to war, 508–13, 551–54, 565–67, 688–

91; anti-German sentiment, 512, 551–54, 640, 665, 910; mediation efforts

in Polish crisis, 588, 603, 604, 607, 608, 616; French armistice terms, 741; ousted as Foreign Minister, 995; in anti-Mussolini revolt, 996, 1004–5;

executed, 1005

Ciliax, Vice-Admiral, 914 fn.

Cincar-Marković, Aleksander, 823

Circle of Friends of the Economy (Freundeskreis der Wirtschaft), 144–45

Circle of Friends of the Reichsfuehrer S.S., 144–45

City of Flint, S.S., 646

Civil Service Act (1937), 249

Civil Service Law (Apr. 7, 1933), 268

Clark, Gen. Mark, 1001

Clay, Gen. Lucius D., 1096 fn.

Clemenceau, Georges, 57–59, 82

Cohen, Benjamin, 897 fn.

Cologne, 127, 148, 178–80, 934, 1034

Colson, General, 617

Columbia Broadcasting System, 467 fn.

Combat League of Middle-Class Tradespeople, 206

“Commando Order,” 955

Commerz und Privat Bank, 144

“Commissar Order,” 830-31, 834

Committee of Independent Workmen, 36

Committee of Seven (Austrian Nazis), 323

Communists in Czechoslovakia, 359, 438

Communists in Germany: in post–World War I period, 33, 34, 40, 52, 54–

55, 64, 65, 126, 129; in Reichstag, 138, 144, 146, 170, 179; brawls with

Nazis, 147, 165, 174, 519; and Bruening, 152, 153; in 1932–33 elections,

157, 166, 172, 176, 195; suppression of, 179, 189, 190–91, 194–96, 199–

200, 231; strategy of, an aid to Hitler, 185; and Reichstag fire, 192–93, 269,

274, and anti-Hitler plot, 1043–44

Como, 1131

concentration camps, 111, 223, 231, 232, 238, 270–72, 322, 351, 352, 497–

98, 509, 518, 664–65, 953, 967–74, 979–91, 993, 1003, 1035, 1057, 1073,

1142;

see

also Auschwitz;

Buchenwald;

Dachau;

Mauthausen;

Sachsenhausen; Treblinka

Condor Legion, 297

Compiegne, 29, 741–42, 758, 759, 821, 852, 924, 1139

Confessional Church, 236, 238, 239

Congressional Record, 748

Conspiracy against Hitler, see anti-Hitler conspiracy

Constance, Lake, 1079 fn.

Conwell-Evans, Dr. Philip, 649

Cooper, Alfred Duff, see Duff Cooper, Alfred

Copenhagen, 681, 695, 697–700

Corbin, Charles, 608, 612

Corsica, 740, 924

Cossack (Br. destroyer), 679

Coulondre, Robert, 437, 443–44, 446, 451–52, 482, 540 fn., 542, 543 fn.,

549–50, 568, 584 fn., 602, 605–7, 613 fn. , 616–18

Council of People’s representatives, 54

Courageous (Br. carrier), 646

Coventry, 781

Coward, Noel, 784

Cracow, 626, 663

Craig, Gordon A., 162 fn.

Crete. 826, 828, 923

Crimea, 857, 858, 865, 942, 1007

Cripps, Sir Stafford, 795, 843–44, 848

Croatia, 552, 824, 826 fn.

“Cromwell,” 769

Croydon, 776

Csáky, Count István, 507–8

Cuno, Wilhelm, 144

Curzon line, 459 fn.

Cvetković, Dragisha, 823

Cyrenaica, 818 fn. , 819, 827, 911 fn.

Czech Broadcasting House, 383

Czech Maginot Line, 382

Czechoslovakia, 84, 282, 283, 295, 307, 336, 345–46, 353, 354, 356, 382,

399–400, 421–23, 437–54, 458, 472, 507, 544, 591, 632, 643; history, 358–

59; Hitler’s war plans against, 211, 304, 306, 309, 332–33, 357–63, 365–

68, 370, 375, 378–80, 382–88, 393, 399, 402, 405–7, 423, 424, 426–29,

437, 438, 714; pact with U.S.S.R., 285, 354, 362, 390, 392, 427; mobilizes against German threat, 363–64, 393–94, 401; British, French intervention,

364, 368, 376, 380–98, 402–4, 408–11, 414–27, 546 ( see also Sudetenland); German occupation of, 448–54, 457, 459, 464, 466, 478, 498,

518, 519, 530, 543, 573, 579, 580, 657, 710, 938, 991–94, 1009, 1113

Czechoslovakian government in exile, 784

Czechoslovak National Bank, 439 fn.

Czernin, Countess Vera (Frau von Schuschnigg), 352

Czerny, Josef, 85

D’Abernon, Lord, 112 fn.

Dachau, 212, 223, 239, 271, 272, 352, 353, 655, 918 fn. , 968 fn., 971, 975 fn.,

979, 981, 984–86, 988–90, 1092 fn. , 1095 fn.

Dahlem, 238, 239, 1048

Dahlerus, Birger, 516–17, 569–74, 576–77, 583–85, 589, 592, 600, 601,

604, 614, 639–40, 686 fn.

Daladier, Edouard, 360, 384, 389, 390, 396, 410, 413–21, 423, 425, 443,

535, 537, 550, 568, 609, 610 fn., 611–12, 617, 643, 682 fn, 740

Dallin, Alexander, 944 fn.

Dalmatia, 552

Daniels, H. G., 288 fn.

Danner, General von, 71

Danube river, 823, 1033, 1107

Danzig, 41, 84, 169, 209, 212, 359, 438 fn., 455–65, 468, 471, 484, 488,

497–99, 508 fn. , 509, 510, 511 fn., 546, 563, 568, 569, 572-73, 575, 577,

582, 583, 588, 589, 600, 603, 606–8, 639

Dardanelles, 804, 807–10

Darlan, Adm. Jean, 609, 740 fn., 923, 925 fn.

Darmstaetter und Nationalbank, 136

Darré, Walther, 148, 204, 257–58

Davies, Joseph E., 478 fn. , 544 fn.

Dawes Plan, 112, 136, 943

Dawson, Geoffrey, 288 fn.

Decamp, General, 609 fn.

Decline of the West, The (Spengler), 61

Defense Law, Secret (May 21, 1935), 259, 285 fn.

De Gaulle, Gen. Charles, 744, 817

Degesch of Dessau, 972

Dekanozov, Vladimir, 794, 848–49

Delp, Father Alfred, 1072 fn.

De Luce, Daniel, 784 fn.

Democratic Party (Staatspartei), 55–56, 186, 201

Denikin, Gen. Anton, 917 fn.

Denmark, 58, 94, 470, 494 fn., 561; German plans for invasion of, 678,

681–83, 689; German conquest of, 694–700, 704 fn., 710, 711 fn., 712, 713,

716, 793; German occupation, 519 fn., 775, 957, 1107; surrender of Germans in, 1138

Der Angriff, 148, 245

Der Deutsche Erzieher, 249

Der Fuehrer (Karlsruhe newsp.), 564

Derousseaux, General, 729

Derna, 912 fn.

Der Stuermer, 26, 50, 106

Der Totale Krieg (Ludendorff), 259

Desna river, 859

Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 245, 615–16

Deutsche Bank, 144

Deutsche Kredit Gesellschaft, 144

Deutsche Mathematik, 250

Deutscher Kampfbund (German Fighting Union), 63, 66, 67, 73

Deutscher Wehrgeist, 139

Deutsches Jungvolk, 120, 253, 255

Deutsche Zeitung, 157

Deutschland (Ger. cruiser), 214, 215, 226

Deutschland (Ger. pocket battleship, later renamed Luetzow), 462, 518,

520, 636, 646

“Deutschland Erwache,” 44

Deutschlandsender, 1064–1065, 1069

“Deutschland ueber Alles,” 85, 147, 199

De Valera, Eamon, 474

Devonshire (Br. cruiser), 709

Dickmann, Maj. Otto, 993 fn.

Didier Works, 971

Die Chemische Industrie, 252

Dieckhoff, Hans, 400–1, 433 fn, 897

Diehn, August, 144

Diels, Rudolf, 192–93

Dietl, Brig. Gen. Eduard, 701, 707, 709, 711, 810

Dietrich, Otto, 143–44, 221, 224–25, 245, 854

Dietrich, Sepp, 222 fn. , 855, 1005, 1090, 1095 fn.

Dill, Field Marshal Sir John, 1001 fn.

Dimitroff, Georgi, 193

Dinant, 723, 724, 1093

Dingfelder, Dr. Johannes, 40

Dirksen, Herbert von, 319, 360, 364, 376, 454, 490, 503, 569

Dirschau bridge, 589, 600, 601

Djibouti, 740–41

D.N.B., 280, 343, 511 f n., 562–63, 627

Dnieper river, 798, 811, 853, 857, 1007

Dobrudja, 801 fn.

“Doctors’ Trial,” 979 fn., 908, 985, 987, 988, 990–91

Doeberitz, 1057, 1061, 1062, 1064 fn.

Doenitz, Adm. Karl, 637–38, 882; Navy C. in C, 1000, 1002 fn., 1003,

1007, 1008 fn., 1011, 1056, 1098–1100; commands forces in north, 1112,

1113, 1120–21; Hitler’s successor, 1126–30, 1132, 1134–38, 1141, 1143

Dohnanyi, Hans von, 693, 904, 1019, 1024, 1026

Dollfuss, Engelbert, 223, 229, 279–80, 295, 296, 324, 325 fn, 331, 334, 341

Dollman, Gen. Friedrich, 1037

Dombas, 708

Don river, 860, 915–17, 919, 922, 925, 926, 928, 929, 1006

Dondorf, 387

Donets Basin, 811, 857, 909, 916, 1007

Dordrecht, 721, 722

Dortmund, 1008

Dostler, Gen. Anton, 956

Doumenc, General, 502, 533–38

Dover Straits, 757, 764

Drang nach Osten, 83–84; see also Europe, German expansion aims in

Drax, Adm. Sir Reginald, 503, 534–36, 541

Dreesen, Herr, 220, 392 fn.

Dreesen, Hotel, Godesberg, 391, 392, 394–96

Dresden, 1105

Dresdener Bank, 144

Dressler-Andress, Horst, 247

Drexler, Anton, 36–37, 39–41, 45, 119

Dubno, 961

Duesseldorf, 653, 1099

Duesterberg, Theodor, 157–59

Duff Cooper, Alfred, 396, 420, 779

Duilio (It. battleship), 818 fn.

Dulles, Allen, 1018, 1026–27, 1033, 1071 fn.

Dunkirk, 728–39, 747, 770, 773, 777, 826, 1037

Durcansky, Ferdinand, 437–38, 440, 441

Dyle river, 716, 717, 724, 725

Eagle’s Nest, 436

Eastbourne, 764, 766, 767

East Prussia, 162, 179–80, 183, 212, 215, 235, 1072; role in Hitler’s designs on Poland, 455, 458, 460, 463, 468, 497, 498, 557, 625; Russian drive on, 1041, 1046, 1085, 1090, 1096–97, 1103

Ebbinghaus, Julius, 251–52

Ebbutt, Norman, 288, 784

Eben Emael, Fort, 725, 814

Ebert, Friedrich, 34, 52, 53–54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 64, 65, 72

Echternach, 1092

Eckart, Dietrich, 38–39, 46, 49, 51, 97, 110, 118

Eckener, Dr. Hugo, 294 fn.

Economics, Ministry of, 259–62, 310, 320, 497, 759

Eden, Anthony, 214, 283, 288, 293–94, 344, 495, 779, 900, 1018

Education, ministry of, 249

Edward VIII, King of England, see Windsor, Duke of

Eger, 386, 388, 402

Egypt, 757, 813, 817, 818, 821, 827, 828, 850, 911–13, 915, 919

Egypt, Khedive of, 751 fn.

Eher Verlag, 80, 246

Ehrhardt, Captain, 43, 66

Ehrhardt Brigade, 33, 34, 43

Eichmann, Karl Adolf, 351, 963, 978

Eicke, Theodor, 272

Eidsvold, 705

Eidsvold (Norw. naval vessel), 701

Einsatzgruppen, 958–63, 964, 966, 974, 1061, 1139

Einsatzkommando, 972

Einsatzstab Rosenberg, 945

Einstein, Albert, 241, 250–52, 1025

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 923–25, 995, 999, 1001, 1002 fn., 1036, 1075,

1076, 1088–90, 1092 fn. , 1099, 1105–6, 1116, 1122, 1138–39

Eisner, Kurt, 33

El Agheila, 911 fn.

El Alamein, 911, 913, 914, 919, 920, 922, 933, 934

Elbe river, 1105–7, 1112

Elberus, Mount, 914

El Gazala, 911 fn.

Elizabeth, Queen (Consort), 787

Ellis, Havelock, 241

Ellis, Maj. L. F., 732 fn.

Elser, Georg, 654–56

Eltz-Rubenach, Baron von, 164

Elverum, 703, 705

Emden (Ger. light cruiser), 702

Enabling Act (Mar. 23, 1933), 196, 198–200, 229, 274

Enderis, Guido, 897 fn.

Engelbrecht, Gen. Erwin, 703

England, see Britain

English Channel, 646, 718, 723, 726–28, 731, 737, 746, 752, 761, 762, 764,

768, 770, 772–75, 781, 812, 813, 819, 913, 914, 995, 1012, 1031, 1033,

1036, 1037

Epp, Gen. Franz Ritter von, 46, 120, 200

Ernst, Karl, 192, 220–23

Erxleben, Father, 1025

Erzberger, Matthias, 34, 43, 51, 58

Espirito Santo Silva, Ricardo do, 789–90

Essen, 220, 949

Esser, Hermann, 49–51, 118

Estonia, 494 fn. , 495, 541, 542, 544, 630–31, 794, 833, 962

Ethiopia (Abyssinia), 289, 290, 296, 297, 301, 469, 566, 741

Europa, S.S., 768

Europe, German expansion aims in, 82–84, 256, 280, 286, 305, 308, 405,

427, 429–30, 435 fn., 437, 484, 488, 795, 796, 799, 833, 836, 839, 1131; German rule over, 5, 95, 426–27, 746, 757, 795–96, 820, 937–95, 1008,

1082, 1141, 1142; Nazi–Soviet division of East, 514, 515, 523, 541, 549,

562, 631, 639, 795, 808–10; post-war settlement, 1011, 1016, 1032–33

Excalibur, S.S., 791

extermination camps ( Vernichtungslager), 664–65, 967–74

Falaise, 1076

Falkenhausen, Gen. Alexander von, 906, 1031, 1047, 1074

Falkenhorst, Gen. Nikolaus von, 680–82, 696, 706 fn., 709 fn.

Falkenstein, Maj. Frh, von, 879

Fall Gelb, see Yellow, Case

Fall Gruen, see Green, Case

Fall Rot, see Red, Case

Fall Weiss, see White, Case

Fallersleben, 267

Fatherland Front, 37

F.B.I., 843

Feder, Gottfried, 35, 36, 39–41, 84, 127, 143, 144, 203–4, 261, 759

Fegelein, Gen. Hermann, 1114, 1121, 1122

Feiling, Keith, 302 fn., 460 fn.

“Felix,” 817, 819

Fellgiebel, Gen. Erich, 1030, 1034, 1049, 1052–55, 1057, 1058, 1072

Feltre, 996

Femegerichte, 65 fn.

Fermi, Enrico, 252

Feuchter, George W., 773 fn.

Feuchtwanger, Lion, 241

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 97–99

“Final Solution” of Jewish problem, 936–68, 978, 991

Finke, Doctor, 987

Finkenkrug, 719, 720

Finland, 281, 495, 502, 541, 542, 544, 561, 630, 680, 687, 710, 711 fn. , 798,

806, 810, 942, 1085; German arms, troops in, 801–6, 809–11, 845, 856–57,

859; Soviet attack on, 665–66, 668, 675, 676, 682, 683

Firebrace, Colonel, 502 fn.

Fischer, Dr. Fritz, 979 fn.

Fischer, Louis, 784 fn.

Fischboeck, Doctor, 328

Fischlham, 10

Fish, Mildred, 1043 fn.

Flandin, Pierre Etienne, 293

Fleming, Peter, 785

Flensburg, 656, 1139, 1141

Florence, Italy, 815, 816

Flossenburg, 1073

Foch, Marshal Ferdinand, 741–43

Fodor, M.W. ,784 fn.

Foerster, Wolfgang, 317

“folkish state,” 88–90

Folklore Museum, Berlin, 1044

Forbes, Sir George Ogilvie, 574, 584–85, 592, 601, 614, 639, 648

Ford, Henry, 149, 267

Ford Motor Co., 907

Foreign Ministers’ Conference, Moscow, 1033

Foreign Office, German, 302, 310, 335, 365, 386, 387, 433, 438–40,

451–52, 454, 469, 488–89, 498 fn., 507, 546, 562, 571 fn., 595 fn., 599,

683 fn., 685 fn., 719, 748–50, 874–75, 880, 893, 896, 897 fn.; Hitler tightens control of, names Ribbentrop head of, 318–19, 324; subsidizes Sudeten

Nazis, 359; anti-Hitler plotters in, 380 fn., 381, 405; prods Hungary on Slovakia, 429; negotiations with U.S.S.R., 476–77, 479–80, 491, 492, 500,

525, 528, 543 fn. , 631 fn. , 667, 668, 804, 807, 840; and Baltic States, 495; see also Ribbentrop; Weizsaecker

Fornebu, 703, 704

Forster, Albert, 499

Forster, E. M., 784

Four-Year Plan, 262, 265, 275, 300, 310

France, 84, 224, 286, 287, 294, 299–302, 373, 400, 461, 469, 470, 529, 530,

562, 675, 714; relations with pre-Hitler Germany, 58, 61, 63, 82, 95, 209,

211, 212; opposes German rearmament, 283, 284, 288–89; pact with Russia, 285, 290–91; and Rhineland remilitarization, 291–95, 327; policy on Spanish war, 297–99, 301; opposition to Anschluss, 280, 296, 324, 327,

330, 334 fn. , 344, 346, 353; prewar relations with Italy, 290, 297–99, 301,

426, 603, 604–7, 687, 690–91; correlation of policy with British, 283,

288–89, 384, 386–87, 389, 398, 402, 403, 436, 461, 469, 608–12, 675; German war plans against, 303, 306, 307, 309, 414, 484–88, 498, 500, 508,

531, 566–68, 590, 591–92; appeasement of Hitler on Czechosl., 354,

360–62, 364–68, 370, 375, 376, 378–94, 396–98, 400–5, 408–10, 414–27

passim, 439, 443, 448, 450–53; pact with Germany, 436–37; supports Poland against Germany, 454, 457, 460, 465, 468, 509, 510, 515–17, 526,

537, 543, 544, 549–50, 553–54, 558, 561, 568, 569, 579, 586–87, 591–92,

596, 600, 602, 604–12, 634; policy on Soviet collective-security bid, 477,

479, 480, 482, 489–90, 494–96, 502–6, 513, 521, 533–38, 541–43; declaration of war on Germany, 616–18; at war, 621, 622, 632, 634,

635–36, 644–46, 651, 658, 666, 669, 671, 672, 689; German “peace”

proposals, 639–43, 734; Battle of, 716, 720, 722, 728, 734, 737, 827, 850,

877; collapse, 738–41; German occupation, 759, 775, 821, 922, 923, 924,

943, 945, 956–57, 965, 969, 993, 999, 1009, 1031, 1033, 1036, 1037, 1047,

1060, 1064, 1085; Vichy govt., 806, 813, 815, 817, 850, 921, 923–24; Allied invasion and second Battle of, 1036–42, 1043, 1047, 1076, 1085,

1086, 1099, 1139; see also French Air Force; French Army; French Navy

Franck, James, 250

Franco, Gen. Francisco, 297, 299, 419, 529, 787, 791, 812, 814, 817, 819,

872

Franco–German armistice (1940), 740–47, 758, 759, 793, 794, 821, 852,

924, 1139

François-Poncet, André, 5, 164, 171, 175, 198, 224, 290, 291, 292, 310 fn.,

318, 408–9, 416, 425–26, 435, 604

Franco–Italian armistice (1940), 741, 743–44, 746

Franco-Polish Military Convention (May 19, 1939), 634

Franco–Prussian War, 736

Frank, Hans, 122, 140, 148, 268–69, 276, 661–63, 938, 944, 947, 975, 1143

Frank, Karl Hermann, 383, 448–49

Frankfurt, 195, 1089, 1102

Frankfurter, Felix, 897 fn.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 32 fn. , 218, 245, 256

Franz Josef, Emperor, 24

Frascati, Italy, 1001

Frauenfeld, Alfred, 279

Frederick the Great, 90, 169, 197, 245, 530, 532, 906, 1086, 1108–9

Frederick III, King in Prussia, 93

Free French, 744

Freidin, Seymour, 852 fn., 912 fn.

Freikorps (“free corps”), 33, 34, 38, 42, 43, 53, 55, 66, 150

Freisler, Roland, 269, 1023, 1025 fn., 1070–71, 1076

French Air Force, 609, 737–39

French Army, 425–27, 533, 535–36, 542, 554, 568, 609, 617, 1086; mobilization of, 610, 618, 634; Battle of France, 633, 635, 672, 718, 720,

722–24, 726–28, 730, 731, 736–38; in Norway, 708; repulses Italians, 740

French Army High Command, 728, 740 fn., 785

French Army (Free French), 983, 1085, 1101, 1139

French Army (North African), 923

French colonies, 768

French Foreign Legion, 708

French Navy, 609, 740, 744–45, 817, 821, 924–25

French North Africa, 745, 814

French Yellow Book, 452 fn., 543 fn. , 584 fn., 605 fn. , 607, 617

French West Africa, 879, 880

Freud, Sigmund, 241, 784

Frick, Wilhelm, 68, 144, 146, 148, 167, 170, 171, 173, 176, 181, 184, 200,

201, 219, 238, 247, 271, 275, 347, 498, 1143

Fricke, Rear Adm. Kurt, 637, 759

Friedeburg, Adm. Hans von, 1138, 1139

Friedrich Karl, Prince of Hesse, 666 fn.

Friedrich Wilhelm, Crown Prince, 52, 146, 153, 157, 159, 197, 907

Frisch, Rittmeister von, 317, 354

Fritsch, Gen. Frh. Werner von, 214–15, 219, 305, 308–10, 313–20, 323,

332, 354–56, 366, 373, 374, 414, 435, 488, 1026, 1035

Fritzsche, Hans, 1143

Fromm, Gen. Friedrich, 649, 1019, 1030, 1035, 1044–45, 1047, 1053,

1058–61, 1064, 1066–68, 1073, 1076, 1082

Fuehrerhaus, Munich, 415, 418, 740

Fuehrerprinzip (leadership principle), 46, 84, 89

Fuka, 920, 921

Fuller, Gen. J. F. C, 633, 634, 818 fn.

Funk, Walther, 142–45, 167, 171, 261, 311, 320, 497, 973–74, 1142–43

Furtwaengler, Wilhelm, 242

Fuschl, 509, 514, 521, 786, 790, 872

Gabeik, Josef, 991

Galen, Count, 239

Galicia, 534

Galland, Adolf, 776

Gamelin, Gen. Maurice, 292–93, 425, 534, 609, 610, 634, 635, 717, 724,

726, 728

Garbo, Greta, 156

Garda, Lake, 1005

Gauguin, Paul, 244

Gaus, Friedrich, 491, 492, 540 fn. , 706 fn.

Gdynia, 572, 582, 589

Gebhardt, Dr. Karl, 979 fn.

Geheimer Kabinettsrat, see Secret Cabinet Council

Gehlin, General, 1096

Gembloux gap, 724

General Motors Corp., 686 fn.

Geneva Convention, 946–47, 951, 955, 1100

Geneva Disarmament Conference, 183, 204, 210, 211

Genoa, 740 fn. , 956

George VI, King of England, 344, 787–88, 815 fn., 835

George, Stefan, 1028, 1029

Gera, 217, 218, 219

Gercke, Col. Rudolf, 498

German Air Force, see Luftwaffe

German Army, see Army, German; Army, German, units; Army General

Staff; Army High Command

German Broadcasting Co., see Reich Broadcasting Corp.

German Christians’ Faith Movement, 235, 236, 237, 239

German colonies, 302, 305, 641, 746, 836

German Evangelical Church, 1017

German Fighting League for the Breaking of Interest Slavery, 35

German Fighting Union, see Deutscher Kampfbund

Germania, 218

German National People’s Party (Nationalists), 56, 118, 138, 154, 155, 157,

159, 166, 170, 172, 173, 180, 181, 186, 189, 194, 195–96, 198, 201, 237

German Naval Register, 550–51, 556

German Navy, see Navy, German

German Officers’ League, 220

German People’s Party (formerly National Liberals), 56, 186, 201

German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, 631, 632, 639

German Workers’ Party, 35–41, 50

Germany, defeat of, in World War I, 29–32, 53

Germany, First Reich, 90–91

Germany, history, 90–97

Germany, Republic of (1918–33), 3, 4, 31, 42, 43, 52–64 91, 95, 112, 118,

121, 137, 150–56, 162, 163, 165, 171, 175, 200, 251, 268, 458, 494, 714,

1081, 1109; armed rebellions against, 33–34, 54–55, 60, 65–75 ( see also Beer Hall Putsch; Kapp putsch); reparations problem, 51, 58, 61, 64, 112,

117, 136, 137, 152, 154, 943; birth of, 52–56; Weimar Constitution, 55–57;

60, 61, 78, 126, 137, 153, 229, 241, 268, 274; economic problems, 61–63,

112, 117, 135–36, 152–53; Reichstag elections, 137–38; 165, 171, 189,

195; 1932 presidential elections, 153, 155, 158–60; ends with Hitler’s accession, 183, 213; responsibility for death of, 185–87; churches’

opposition to, 235–37, 268

Germany, Second Reich (1871–1918), 91, 95, 96, 98, 109, 197, 251

Gerothwohl, Prof. M. A., 112 fn.

Gersdorff, Colonel Frh. von, 1021, 1022, 1027

Gessler, Otto, 64, 65 fn. , 66

Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei, Secret State Police), 192–93, 222, 231,

276, 294 fn. , 518–19, 520 fn., 653, 655, 656, 703, 782 fn., 784, 785, 923, 991,

1023; Himmler named chief of, 215, 216; harassment of churches, 235,

237–39; establishment of, 270–71, 273; Fritsch frameup, 317, 354, 355,

373; in Austria, 348 fn., 351–53; and anti-Hitler conspirators, 380 fn., 430,

848 fn., 906, 1003, 1016, 1024–26, 1031, 1034, 1036, 1044, 1048, 1053,

1063, 1069, 1070, 1072–75, 1077, 1079, 1080; terror in Poland, 660, 663;

execution of Russian POWS, 953; Jewish Office, 963, 978

Gibbs, Sir Philip, 784

Gibraltar, 757, 768, 813, 814, 817, 819, 921–22

Gide, André, 241

Gieseking, Walter, 242

Giesler, Paul, 1023

Gilbert, Felix, 1003 fn., 1014 fn.

Giraud, Gen. Henri, 718, 722, 923

Gisevius, Hans Bernd, 192–93, 316 fn., 373–74, 40S, 407–8, 411, 412, 517,

558–60, 596, 650, 655 fn., 1018, 1033

Gissinger, Theodor, 12–13

Givet, 717

Glaesemer, Col. Wolfgang, 1065

Glaise-Horstenau, Edmund von, 328, 335, 338, 339

Glasgow (Br. cruiser), 708

Glasl-Hoerer, Anna, 8

Gleiwitz, 518–20, 595, 599, 601

Gluecks, Richard, 664

Gneisenau, Field Marshal Count August Neithardt von, 1028, 1081

Gneisenau, Germany, 992

Gneisenau (Ger. battle cruiser), 281, 711, 914

Gobineau, Count Joseph Arthur de, 103–4, 106

Godesberg, 220, 391–96, 397, 404, 407, 416, 417, 421, 425, 426, 619

Goebbels, Magda, 483 fn. , 1111, 1113, 1123, 1133, 1136, 1137

Goebbels, Paul Joseph, 4, 5, 146, 155–73, 176–80, 182, 184, 189–93, 614,

837, 866, 910 fn., 995–96, 998–1005, 1008–9, 1010–11, 1012, 1061, 1087,

1100, 1102 fn. , 1143; biographical sketch, 123–29; supports radical Nazi faction, 126–27, 143, 205, 215, 220; party propaganda chief, 147, 148; Reichstag fire, 191–93; Propaganda Minister, 196–98, 202, 204, 218, 227,

233, 241–48, 275, 281, 294 fn. , 319 fn., 343, 347, 363, 387, 396, 398,

443–44, 563–64, 593–94, 638, 646 653, 669 fn. , 671, 725, 739 fn., 778, 780,

860, 1002, 1033 fn. , 1105–6; role in Roehm purge, 220, 221; book burning, control of arts and letters, 241–48; persecution of Jews, 430, 432–33, 991; target of anti-Hitler plotters, 1034, 1062–64, 1066, 1069–71, 1117; last days, 1108–13, 1122, 1123, 1126–28, 1133–38

Goerdeler, Carl, 372–73, 374, 382, 517, 558, 650, 652, 659, 670, 693–94,

715, 846 fn., 848 fn., 904, 907, 908, 1013 fn., 1014, 1016–17, 1018, 1023,

1024, 1026, 1030–31, 1032, 1035, 1036, 1042–43, 1044, 1046–48, 1072

Goerdeler, Fritz, 1072 fn.

Goering, Carin von Kantzow (nee Baroness Fock), 49, 146

Goering, Hermann, 4, SI, 118, 145, 146, 168, 173, 176, 180–83, 188–90,

194–95, 218, 232, 233, 270, 271, 282, 297, 300, 303 fn., 319, 469–70, 530,

531, 560, 613, 671, 672, 683, 686–87, 813, 834–35, 837, 871, 879, 923,

1000, 1008, 1079, 1091, 1098, 1099, 1127; background, 49; in Beer Hall Putsch, 68–69, 73–75; drug addiction, 146; in Reichstag, 162, 170–71, 196,

472; heads Prussian police and govt., 184, 191, 200, 201, 204, 216; and Reichstag fire, 192–94; “Hitler is the law,” 203, 268; military rank, 215,

318, 754 fn. ; opposes Roehm, brings about purge, 215–17, 219–23, 225; anti-Jewish program, 236, 430–35; economic dictator of Reich, 260–61,

275, 310–11; Nazification of courts, 268–70; animosity toward Ribbentrop,

298, 483, 1056; meetings with Mussolini, 301, 469–70, 478–79; 909, 910; in on war preparations, 305, 484, 497–98, 515 fn., 516–17, 557; and Blomberg-Fritsch affair, 312–17, 320–21, 354; role in Anschluss, 335,

338–40, 342–44, 346, 347; role in Czechosl. annexation, 365, 383, 396,

404, 415, 437–38, 439 fn., 440, 444, 446–47; dealings with Russia, 476–79,

528, 667; “Call me Meier,” 517 fn.; last-minute peace talks with British,

569–72, 574, 576–77, 583–85, 588–89, 591–92, 614, 640; named by Hitler as his successor, 599; and invasion of Poland, 600, 601; Norway campaign,

673, 676, 682, 696, 710; target of conspirators, 670, 1021, 1034, 1035,

1045, 1051, 1117; western offensive and Battle of Britain, 719, 722,

731–33, 737, 742, 759, 766 fn., 770, 772, 774–78, 781, 783; invasion and occupation of Russia, 799, 832–34, 854 fn., 926, 930–31, 941, 942; bombing of Belgrade, 824, 826; “New Order” atrocities, 941–42, 945, 946, 951, 955,

964, 965, 985; successorship to Hitler, 1108; accused of treason, ousted,

arrest ordered, 1118–19, 1122, 1126–28, 1130, 1134; in Nuremberg dock,

1142

Goerlitz, Walter, 933

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 97, 99, 243

Golden Badge of Honor, 373

Goltz, General Count Ruediger von der, 680

Gorki, U.S.S.R., 870

Gort, Lord, 724, 730, 731, 735

Goudsmit, Prof. Samuel, 1099 fn.

Goy, Jean, 281

Graf Spee (Ger. battleship), 518, 520, 636, 646, 669–70, 678–80

Graebe, Hermann, 961–62

Graefe, Albrecht von, 123

Graf, Ulrich, 49, 68, 73, 122

Grandi, Dino, 996–97

Gran Sasso d’Italia, 1003

Grassmann, Peter, 202

Gravelines, 728, 731

Gravesend, 763, 768

Graz, 333

Graziani, Marshai Rodolfo, 817, 818 fn., 819

Great Britain, see Britain

Grebbe-Peei Line, 721–22

Greece, 469, 808, 815, 816, 817, 818, 820, 821, 823, 825, 826, 827, 828,

829, 830, 839, 841, 842, 875, 969, 975 fn. , 993, 1006

Green, Case ( Fall Gruen), 303, 356, 357, 360–63, 365, 367, 378, 392 fn.,

393, 399, 429, 714

Greenwood, Arthur, 611

Greer (U.S. destroyer), 882

Greim, Gen. Robert Ritter von, 1118–19, 1120, 1122

Greiner, Josef, 19 fn. , 27

Grey, Sir Edward, 385

Groener, Gen. Wilhelm, 53–55, 58–59, 139, 142, 150–51, 155, 159, 160,

161, 162, 163, 174

Groscurth, Col. Hans, 650

Grosz, George, 244

Grozny, 909, 914, 916, 928

Gruene Post, 246

Gruhn, Erna (Frau Blomberg), 311–14

Grynszpan, Herschel, 430

Grzesinski, Albert C, 60

Guariglia, Ambassador, 608

Gudbrandsdal, 706, 708

Guderian, Gen. Heinz, 348, 625, 626, 717, 724, 726, 728, 731, 855, 856,

858, 859, 860, 861, 862, 863, 864, 865, 903 fn, 1080–82, 1091, 1096–97,

1098, 1103

Guernica, 297

Guertner, Franz, 75, 118, 164

Gumbel, E. I., 251

“Guns before Butter,” 231

Gunther, John, 784 fn.

Gustav V. King of Sweden, 400, 711 fn. , 747, 750–51

Gutkelch, Doctor, 948

Guttenberg, Karl Ludwig Frh. von, 374

Guzzoni, Gen. Alfredo, 821

gypsies, medical experiments on, 979

Haakon VII, King of Norway, 696, 698, 703–6, 708, 709, 729

Haber, Fritz, 250

Habicht, Theodor, 279, 280

Hácha, Dr. Emil, 421, 440, 443–6, 449 fn. , 450–6, 457, 578–79, 587, 729

Haeften, Lt. Werner von, 1048–49, 1053, 1067, 1068

Hagelin, Viljam, 677

Hagen, Lt. Dr. Hans, 1061–62, 1070–71

Hague, The, 713, 721, 722, 865

Hague Convention, 636, 830, 945–47, 951

Hausham, Lord, 211

Haidane, J. B. S., 784

Halder, Gen. Franz, 510 fn., 549 fn., 550–51, 556, 590, 754 fn. , 816–17, 819–

21, 824, 860, 901, 902, 922, 1010; appointed Chief of Staff, 371–72; Czech

invasion plans, 378; in anti-Hitler conspiracy, 374–75, 378–79, 380 fn. , 381,

382, 404–8, 411–13, 422, 426, 517, 530, 558–59, 647–51, 658–59, 693–94,

906; Poland invasion, 484, 487, 497, 515–18, 529 fn., 532, 547, 563, 569,

579 fn., 591, 595–96, 625–26, 660, 661, 663–64; Norway and Denmark,

678, 681, 682, 710; war in west, 626, 633, 640, 643–44, 647, 651, 672, 717,

718, 726, 727, 731–36, 739, 743; Britain invasion plans, 747, 752, 759,

763, 764, 766–68, 770, 771, 773–74; Russian invasion, 796–99, 810, 812,

822, 830–31, 840, 846, 852, 855–60, 861 fn., 862–70, 877, 911, 914–15; ousted as General Staff Chief, 915–18; in concentration camp, 1073–74,

1115

Hale, Prof. Oron J., 135, 246 fn.

Halifax, Lord, 302–3, 344–45, 435 fn., 450, 674; negotiations on Czechosl.,

360, 364, 381, 396, 410, 411, 413, 451–53; contacts with anti-Hitler plotters, 381–82, 558, 692–93; support of Poland against Germany, 465,

517, 537, 546, 548 fn., 570, 572–75, 577, 579–80, 583, 585 fn. , 586–89,

600–2; policy on U.S.S.R., 478 fn., 495, 504, 537; ultimatums and war with Germany, 605 fn. , 607–10, 612–14, 615 fn. , 617; rejects Hitler peace bid,

756

Hallawell, Wing Commdr, 502 fn.

Hamar, 703, 704, 706, 708

Hambro, Carl, 677

Hamburg, 65, 165, 275, 699, 752, 1008–9, 1033, 1105, 1107, 1137, 1141

Hamburg-Amerika line, 144

Hamilton, Duke of, 835, 836

Hammerstein, Gen. Kurt von, 3, 4, 151, 160, 182, 183, 207, 225, 374,

380 fn., 387, 648, 1035

Hamsun, Knut, 709 fn.

Hanfstaengl, Erna, 131

Hanfstaengl, Ernst (Putzi), 46–47, 51, 74, 191, 192, 784

Hanisch, Reinhold, 19 fn., 20

Hanover, 126–27, 239

Hansen, Col. Georg, 1036, 1072

Hansestadt Danzig (Ger. troopship), 699

Hapsburgs, the, 18, 23, 24, 27, 97, 301, 304, 326, 332, 336, 345 fn., 348,

349, 359

Hardenberg, Count Hans von, 905

Harnack, Arvid, 1043 fn.

Harrer, Karl, 36, 40

Harris, Capt. Sam, 411–12, 559

Harris, Lt. Commdr. Whitney R., 958

Harstad, 707

Harzburg Front, 154

Hase, Gen. Paul von, 1030, 1035, 1061, 1065, 1070–71

Hassell, Ulrich von, 297–98, 301, 319, 320, 371, 739 fn. , 848 fn., 897 fn. ; anti-Hitler conspiracy, 373, 423, 517, 558, 559, 591–92, 649, 659, 670,

692–94, 846 fn., 848 fn., 903–4, 906–8, 1016, 1023, 1030, 1036, 1043;

executed, 1072

Haug, Jenny, 131

Hauptmann, Gerhart, 243

Hausberger, Fritz von, 684–85

Haushofer, Albrecht, 1073

Hapshofer, Gen. (Prof.) Karl, 48, 837, 1073

Havel lake, Berlin, 1129

“Hay Action,” 947

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, 97, 98–99, 110, 111

Heidegger, Martin, 251

Heidelberg University, 124, 250

Heiden, Erhard, 121

Heiden, Konrad, 7, 9, 10, 19, 27 fn., 38–39, 45, 74 fn., 78, 105–6, 123, 128,

131, 132, 133, 223

“Heiliger, Max,” 973–74

Heilmann, Horst, 1043 fn.

Heinemann, General, 122

Heines, Lt. Edmund, 120, 221, 225

Heinrici, General, 869 fn., 1120

Heiss, Captain, 66

Held, Dr. Heinrich, 118

Helhorn, Anke, 125–26

Heligoland Bight, 768

Helldorf, Count Wolf von, 161, 183, 312–13, 413, 1034, 1059, 1063, 1072

Hencke, Andor, 420, 631 fn., 814, 816

Hendaye, 814, 816

Henderson, Sir Nevile, 345, 364, 380–81, 385, 397, 398, 402 fn., 403, 408–

11, 415, 416, 426, 451–53, 511 fn., 543 fn., 546, 547, 548–49, 550, 551, 557,

562, 569, 570, 572–86, 589, 591–93, 600–2, 605–8, 612–13, 615, 616

Henlein, Konrad, 359, 360, 363, 377, 381 fn. , 383, 384, 386, 387, 448–49

Herber, Lt. Col. Franz, 1066

Hereditary Farm Law (Sept. 29, 1933), 257–58, 264

Herfurth, Gen. Otto, 1066

Hermann Goering Works, 261, 351

Herrenklub, 178, 191

Herriot, Edouard, 437

Herrlingen, 1031, 1037, 1077

Hersey, John, 975 fn.

Herypierre, Henry, 982, 983

Hess, Rudolf, 39, 49, 110, 148, 154, 178, 208, 224 fn. , 257, 270, 275, 599,

742, 944, 1073, 1108, 1142–43; background, 47–48; in Beer Hall Putsch,

68, 70, 73, 75; helps Hitler with Mein Kampf, 79, 85; directs Nazi revolt in Austria, 323, 347; flight to Scotland, 834–38

Heusinger, Gen. Adolf, 1048 fn. , 1051, 1052, 1054 fn.

Hewel, Walter, 1101

Heyde, Lt. Col. Bodo von der, 1067

Heydrich, Reinhard, 271, 518–20, 595, 655 fn., 782–83, 956, 1023, 1143; background, 273; and Fritsch frameup, 315, 317, 354; persecution of Jews,

351, 430–34, 661, 662, 958, 964, 965, 978; assassinated, 991, 1019

Heywood, Major General, 503 fn., 533

Hiedler, Johann Georg, 7, 8

High Command of the Armed Forces, see OKW

High Command of the Army, see Army High Command

Hildesheim, 725

Hilgard, Herr, 432–33

Hilger, Gustav, 807, 809

Himer, Gen. Kurt, 699–700

Himmler, Heinrich, 101, 124, 144–45, 178, 240, 252, 271, 275, 313, 353,

378, 431, 435 fn. , 497–98, 593, 653–56, 663, 671, 837, 991, 998, 1000,

1003, 1036, 1099, 1108, 1109, 1112–14, 1134; Organization of S.S., Gestapo, German police, 121, 148, 215, 226, 270–71, 274; rumored to have killed Geli Raubal, 132; aids in Roehm purge, 215, 216, 219, 220, 222;

extermination of Jews, 236, 660–62, 664, 958, 960–61, 962, 963, 965, 966–

67, 973, 975, 977, 978; Blomberg, Fritsch frameups, 313, 315–17, 354,

355; Austrian, Czech occupation, 347, 348, 351, 449; Polish border

“incident,” 518–20; occupation of-Britain program, 782–83; and Russian-

occupation policy, 832, 834, 937–38, 950 fn. , 951, 954; medical experiments, 979–80, 982, 984–85, 986, 988–89, 990; and anti-Hitler plotters, 1016–17, 1021, 1023, 1024, 1026, 1031, 1034, 1035, 1036, 1044,

1045, 1047–49, 1051, 1054–55, 1057, 1063, 1069, 1070, 1072–73, 1117; army command, 1063, 1064, 1073, 1080, 1087, 1095, 1101; attempt to displace Hitler, 1072, 1116–17, 1121, 1122, 1126, 1129, 1130, capture and suicide, 1141, 1143

Hindemith, Paul, 242

Hindenburg, Maj. Oskar von, 4, 150–51, 175, 181, 183, 227, 228, 229

Hindenburg, Paul von Beneckendorf und von, 3–5, 53–55, 56 fn. , 90, 137,

150–53, 155, 160–64, 166–75, 179–83, 191–92, 194–201, 211–12, 215,

216, 218, 219, 225, 274, 320, 530, 871; armistice of 1918 and Versailles Treaty, 31, 58–59; 1932 presidential elections, 142, 155–60; meetings with

Hitler, 4, 132, 152, 153, 168–69, 172–73; appointment of Hitler as Chancellor, 4, 145, 184, 187–90; senility, 4, 5, 149, 152; last illness, 204,

206, 213–15; death, last will and testament, 226–30

Hindenburg (dirigible), 294 fn.

Hipper (Ger. hvy. cruiser), 701

Hippke, Lt. Gen. Dr., 986

Hirohito, Emperor of Japan, 892

Hirt, Prof. August, 980–83

History of Frederick the Great (Carryle), 1108–9

Hitler, Adolf:

PERSONAL LIFE: birth, family background, 6–10; early life and

education, 10–16; artist’s aspirations, 11, 15, 16, 19; women in his life,

15, 20, 30, 130–33, 483 fn. ( see also Braun, Eva; Raubal, Geli); budding political ideas, 15, 21–32; youth in Vienna, 17–26; anti-Semitism, 25–27, 30–31, 35, 40 fn. , 41; moves to Bavaria, joins Army,

27–28; war service, wounds, medals, 29–31; postwar Army service,

34–35; citizenship problem, 130–31, 157; income tax difficulties, 133–

35; his reaction to Hess’s flight, 834–38; his health failing, 1102–3,

1108; marries Eva Braun, 1122–23; last will and testament, 1123–27;

suicide and cremation, 1133–34

PARTY LEADER: joins German Workers’ Party, 35–41; debut as orator,

35–36, 40; formulates Nazi program, 40–41; is jailed for assault, 42;

becomes party dictator, 44–46; his lieutenants, 47–51, 121–22, 146–

49; association with Ludendorff, 63–64; leads putsch, 65–75; is tried

for treason, 75–79; in prison, writes Mein Kampf, 79–90, 113, 129; his

ideological sources, 80–112; rebuilds party, 117–49; tightens control

of party, 119; defeats Strasser faction, 126–29; courts Army support,

138–42, 159, 196–98, 206–8, 214–15; “heads will roll” speech, 141; wins big business support, 142–46, 178–79, 189–90; meets with

Hindenburg, 152–53, 163–64, 168–69, 172–73, 184; maneuvers

toward chancellorship, 152–85; 1932 presidential elections, 155–59;

purges Roehm, party radicals, 204, 213–26

FUEHRER AND REICH CHANCELLOR—DOMESTIC POLICY: becomes

Chancellor, 3–6, 182–87; has Reichstag dissolved, 188–91; suppresses

Communists, 190–96; nationalizes state govts., 194, 200; opens new

Reichstag at Potsdam, 196–98; gets Reichstag to abdicate, 198–200;

dissolves opposition parties, 201; outlaws trade unions, 202–3; issues

anti–Jewish laws, 203; his policies endorsed by electorate, 211–12;

wins Army backing for Presidency, 215, 220; succeeds Hindenburg as

President, 226–30; wins “unconditional obedience” of Army, 226–27;

regiments churches, 234–40; Nazifies culture, 241–44; co-ordinates

labor, 263–67; reorganizes courts, 268–74; reshapes govt., 274–76;

ousts Blomberg, Fritsch, Neurath, Schacht, 309–21; assumes absolute

power in Reich, 867; conspiracies to depose or kill him, 372–75, 379–

82, 404–8, 411–14, 1014–36, 1042–82 ( see also anti-Hitler

conspiracy); presses persecution of Jews, 435, 439, 937–94, passim;

beer hall bomb plot, 652–56

FUEHRER AND REICH CHANCELLOR—FOREIGN RELATIONS: signs pact with

Poland, 212–13; first meeting with Mussolini, 217; quits League,

Geneva Conference, 210–12; directs Nazi agitation in Austria, 279–80,

323; aims peace propaganda abroad, 280–81; abrogates Versailles

Treaty, 281–85, 299; “peace” speeches, 209–10, 285–88, 290, 300,

471–76, 641–42, 752–55, 761; expands armed forces, war industries,

281–85; signs naval pact with Britain, 288–89; remilitarizes

Rhineland, denounces Locarno Pact, 290–95; signs pact with Austria,

296–97; aids Franco rebellion, 297–98; forms Axis with Mussolini,

298, 301; signs Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan, 299; receives Duce,

get go-ahead on Austria, 301–2, 343; meets with Lord Halifax, 302–3;

annexes Austria, 322–54; meets with Schuschnigg at Berchtesgaden,

Hitler, Adolf continued 325–31; reassures Duce on Austria, 336–37;

makes entry into Austria, 347–49; directs Sudeten Nazis, 358–59;

urges Hungary, Poland against Czechs, 377, 387–88, 429; demands

“justice for Sudetens,” 383; meets with Chamberlain at Berchtesgaden,

384–87; at Godesberg, 388–95; demands Sudetenland at once, 397–98;

at Munich Conference, 414–20; wins Sudetenland, 421–24;

dissatisfied with Munich award, blames Chamberlain, 427; annexes

Memel, 428–29; signs pact with France, 436–37; “liberates” Slovakia,

439–43, 449; takes over rest of Czechoslovakia, 438–49; presses

Poland to cede Danzig, Corridor, 455–57, 459–60, 462–65, 498–99;

replies to Roosevelt peace appeal, 471–75; signs Pact of Steel with

Duce, 483; negotiates treaty with U.S.S.R., 490–95, 500–2, 505–7,

513–15, 520–28, 538–44; meets with Ciano on war against Poland,

510–12; replies to British, French peace appeals, 545–51, 569–89,

592–93; is let down by Duce, 551–57, 564–68; thanks Duce for his

help, 604, 620–21; receives British, French ultimatums, 608, 613,

615–18; blames British for war, 618–19; invites Russia into Polish

war, 621–22; negotiates boundary treaty with U.S.S.R., 630–32; offers

peace to Britain, France, 639–43; is criticized by Duce, 665–66; his

trading with Soviets, 665–69, 794, 799; meets with Sumner Wells,

683–88; his loyalty to Mussolini, 691–92; 1055–56; intervenes in

Rumania, 800–1, 803; signs mil. pact with Italy, Japan, 802; meets

with Molotov, 803–9; invites Russia into Tripartite Pact, 808–10;

explains invasion of Russia to Duce, 849–51; last meeting with Duce,

1055–56

WARLORD: tells generals his plans re. Austria and Czechs, 303–8;

plans invasion of Austria, 331, 335–37; assumes command of armed

forces, 318; ousts 16, transfers 44 generals, 318–19; plans war on

Czechs, 357–58, 360–61, 365–67, 377–78, 399, 423, 428–29; rages at

Czechs’ arming, 364–65; meets generals’ opposition on war plans,

366–72, 378–79, 646–47, 656, 830–31, 856–58; rages against defeatist

generals, 378–79; plans occupation of Danzig, 456; takes over Memel,

461–62; plans Danzig seizure, 463, 468; plans war against Poland,

463, 467–69, 484–85, 488–89, 496–98, 517–20, 530–31, 589, 595–96;

prepares for war in west, 484–89, 516, 530–31, 589–90; holds up

attack on Poland, 556; begins war on Poland, 597–99; directs war

strategy, 619–20; conquers Poland, 632; limits naval operations, 636;

plans offensive in west, 633, 643–47, 651–52, 656–59, 670, 671, 717–

19; Polish occupation policy, 660–65; plans for war on Russia, 669;

approves, leads Norway campaign, 673–74, 678–83, 694–97, 709–12;

gets Duce’s promise to enter war, 690–92; invades Low Countries,

714–16, 720–26, 729–31; invades, conquers France, 726–29, 731–45; offers peace to Britain, 746–47, 750–56; plans invasion of Britain,

751–53, 756, 758–92; promotes 12 to field marshal, 754 fn.; plans invasion of Russia, 796–800, 810–12, 821–22, 830–34, 845–52;

strategy in Mediterranean, N. Africa, 812–21; Balkan campaigns, 820,

822–26, 830; N. African campaigns, 827–29, 911–13, 919–25; his

“Commissar Order,” 830–34; directs Russian campaign, 851–70, 908–

11, 914—19, 925–33, 1006–7, 1097; his “No retreat, no surrender”

order, 861, 865, 867–68, 920–21, 930; ousts generals who retreat, 861,

865–66, 903 fn., 917–18; takes over C-in-C post, 866; collaborates with

Japan, 870–78, 883–96, 900; policy toward U.S., 871–72, 875 fn., 878–

85, 887; declares war on U.S., 892–902; takes over unoccupied

France, 924–25; his occupation policy, 937–94, passim; meets with

Duce, 995–96; orders take-over in Italy, rescue of Duce, 998–1006;

refuses to visit bombed-out cities, 1008; speculates on peace

possibilities, 1011–12; directs defense in west, 1036–41, 1085–96,

1098–1102, 1105–6; orders enemy beachhead “annihilated,” 1038;

orders total mobilization, 1087; directs Ardennes counteroffensive,

1089–96; relies on conflict among Allies, 1087, 1091–92, 1098; issues

“scorched earth” directive, 1103–4; his last days, in Berlin bunker,

1107–35

Hitler (Schicklgruber) Alois, 7–9, 11, 14

Hitler, Alois Matzelsberger, 9, 10

Hitler, Angela, see Raubal, Angela Hitler

Hitler, Edmund, 9

Hitler, Franziska Matzelsberger, 9

Hitler, Gustav, 9

Hitler, Ida, 9

Hitler, Klara Poelzl, 9, 14, 15, 16–17

Hitler, Paula, 9, 14, 1127 fn.

Hitler Youth, 120, 249, 252–56, 1129, 1130, 1137

Hitzfeld, General, 1064 fn.

Hodges, Gen. Courtney H., 1086, 1089, 1105

Hoepner, Gen. Erich, 375, 413, 725, 863, 865, 903, 1028, 1035, 1048,

1057, 1058, 1064, 1066–67, 1068, 1070–71

Hoerlin, Kate Eva, 224 fn.

Hoess, Rudolf Franz, 664, 963, 967–69, 970, 972–73

Hofacker, Col. Caesar von, 1047, 1059, 1072, 1075–77

Hofer, Walther, 550 fn.

Hoffmann, Heinrich, 49, 760 fn. , 1111

Hoffmann, Johannes, 33, 34

Hoffmann-Schonforn, Colonel, 1088

Hohenlohe, Prince Max von, 750 fn.

Hohenlychen, 1114

Hohenzollerns, the, 52, 57, 82, 93, 96, 97, 153, 197, 214, 215, 229, 236,

349, 549, 907

Holland, see Netherlands

Holstein, 94

Holzloehner, Doctor, 987

Hoover, Herbert C., 136, 152

Hoover, J. Edgar, 843

Hopkins, Harry, 892

Horak, Mayor, 992

Hore-Belisha, Sir Leslie, 677

Horst, Anna, 105

Horst Wessel song, 5, 147, 199

Horthy, Adm. Miklós, 377, 449, 1090 fn.

Hossbach, Col. Friedrich, 305, 308, 309, 315–16

Hoth, Gen. Hermann, 724, 863, 927–28

Houffalize, 1095

Household Year for Girls, 254

House of German Art, Munich, 244

Hradschin Palace, Prague, 363, 383, 420, 448

Huber, Kurt, 1022–23

Huebner, General, 1101 fn.

Huehnlein, Major, 71

Huetler, Johann von Nepomuk, 8, 9

Huemer, Eduard, 13

Hugenberg, Alfred, 138, 154, 166, 173, 180, 182, 184, 189, 196, 198, 201,

204, 206, 212, 257

Hull, Cordell, 843, 873, 877 fn. , 884–85, 886, 887, 888 fn. , 891, 894, 896

Hungary, 358, 362, 507–8, 800, 808, 824, 826, 845; encouraged by Hitler to seize Ruthenia, 377, 387–88, 400, 417 fn. , 421, 427, 429, 440–42, 449–50; German occupation of, 839, 842; army units on Russian front, 869, 909,

911, 915; Nazis’ mass killing of Jews of, 972; taken by Russians, 1090 fn.,

1096, 1098

Huntziger, Gen. Charles, 743–45

Hurricanes (Br. planes), 775, 776

Huxley, Aldous, 784

Iceland, 879, 880–82

I. G. Farben, 144, 190, 282, 597, 664–65, 968, 972, 973

Igorka rivers, 839

Illustrious (Br. carrier), 818 fn.

Imredy, Bela, 387–88

India, 558, 560, 883, 901, 957

Indian Legion, 1102 fn.

Indian Ocean, 810, 915

Indochina, 884

Informationsheft, 784

Innitzer, Cardinal, 350

Innsbruck, 75, 335, 553

Institute for Military Scientific Research, 980

Institute for Research (Forschungsamt), 338

Interior, Ministry of the, 275, 497–98, 1031

“International Commission” on partition of Czechosl., 417 fn., 420, 421

International Military Tribunal, 1142

Iran (Persia), 757, 810, 915

Iraq, 828, 829, 841

Ireland, 474, 646

Irgens, Captain, 706

Iron Cross, 30, 122, 284, 754 fn.

Ironside, Gen. Sir Edmund, 504, 682 fn.

Iserlohn, 1129 fn.

Istanbul, 1026

Istria, 1005

Italian Air Force, 556 fn.

Italian Army, 554, 556 fn. , 817, 818, 825, 826, 827, 850, 869 909–11, 912,

915, 920–21, 925, 928, 929, 996, 1001, 1002, 1006

Italian Navy, 554, 818 fn. , 1000, 1002 fn.

Italian Social Republic, 1005

Italy, 97, 291, 294, 307, 359, 436, 478–80, 490, 501, 511, 529, 530, 539,

800–1, 803–4, 806, 807, 850, 924, 995, 996; and Anschluss, 209, 280, 285,

296–97, 301, 302, 324, 327, 334–37, 339, 343, 345 fn., 347; prewar policy toward Britain, France, 284–85, 289, 296, 298, 301, 400, 436, 508, 603,

687; invasion of Ethiopia, 289, 290, 296–98; aid to Spanish rebels, 297–99,

307, 814; in Anti-Comintern Pact, 299; role in German–Czech crisis, 377,

403, 404, 408–10, 414–21; friction with Germany, 400, 487, 492, 547–48,

665–66, 683, 687, 774, 815; invasion of Albania, 469, 813; military alliance with Reich, 482–84 ( see also Pact of Steel); reluctance to take part in war,

493, 507, 508, 510, 512, 551–57, 561, 564–68, 598, 603–8, 620–21, 642–

43, 645, 657, 687–92; enters war against France, 739, 740, 743–44, 746,

877 ( see also Franco–Italian armistice); war against Britain in

Mediterranean, N. Africa, 740, 757, 813, 817–22, 836, 900, 912, 914, 921; in Tripartite Pact, 802, 808, 889; invasion of Greece, 816–18, 821–23; royal family of, 820, 996; gets slice of Yugoslavia, 824, 826; war against

U.S.S.R., 851, 873, 909–11; war against U.S., 871, 885, 889–90, 894, 898,

900; Allied landing and Battle of Italy, 921, 956, 995, 1000, 1001, 1006,

1008, 1009, 1033, 1036, 1043, 1100, 1107, 1138; ousts Duce, makes peace with Allies, 995–1001, 1003; German occupation, 1001, 1003–5, 1009; Fascist Republican Party, 1005

Jackson, Robert H., 432 fn. , 964 fn.

Jacob, Franz, 1044

Jacob, Major, 1064 fn.

Jaeger, Dr. Wilhelm, 948–49

Jaklincz, Colonel, 634

Japan, 307, 487, 492, 521, 522, 539, 735, 753, 798, 803, 804, 806, 809,

839, 850, 884, 895, 1025; pacts with Germany, Italy, 299, 436, 506, 802,

808, 871, 876, 886–95; in Hitler’s strategy, 508 fn., 821, 871–96 passim,

915; war against U.S., Britain, 870–76, 880, 883–96, 900, 901, 1007; neutrality pact with U.S.S.R., 876–77

Japanese Air Force, 901 fn.

Japanese Army, 877

Japanese Navy, 872, 873, 887, 888, 891, 892, 895

Jaspers, Karl, 251

Jastrzembski, see Falkenhorst

Jeanneney, Jules, 437

Jena, 98, 173, 933

Jeschonnek, Gen. Hans, 621, 763, 771

Jessen, Jens Peter, 908, 1072

Jesus Christ, Jew or no?, 107, 108, 124

“Jewish Emigration Office,” Vienna, 351

Jews, 144, 157, 179, 355, 641, 700, 751 fn., 828, 1088; Hitler’s hatred for,

25–27, 31, 35, 39, 41, 81, 84, 87, 97, 111, 119, 137, 1124, 1126; German writings against, 98–101, 106–7, 236; Nazi persecution of, 203, 209, 215,

236, 260, 351, 430–35, 685, 1028, 1031, 1071; exclusion of from arts and professions, 242–43, 245–46, 249–51, 268; laws against, 213–34, 237; in Czechoslovakia, 383, 438, 439, 991; extermination program, 659–65, 937,

944, 946, 953, 958–69, 972–79, 991, 1029, 1061; in U.S., 688, 749 fn., 872,

875 fn., 897, 899; used as slave labor, 948–49; Warsaw ghetto uprising,

974–79; medical experiments on, 979–81, 985

Jodl, Gen. Alfred, 142, 290, 291 fn. , 293, 316, 319, 404, 670, 671–72, 816,

821, 824, 825, 866, 873, 911, 918 fn., 921, 922, 1010, 1034, 1077, 1098,

1112–16; on Blomberg affair, 311–14; on Anschluss, 326 fn., 331, 334–36,

348; on Czech problem and annexation, 363, 365, 366, 369, 370, 377–79,

387, 392 fn., 422, 424; on western-front operations, 378, 424, 635, 644,

718–20, 727, 732, 746; on Norway operations, 677, 680, 682, 683, 696,

709, 710; on French armistice, 741, 744; on invasion of Britain, 758, 760,

764, 767, 770; on invasion of Russia, 795, 797, 856, 858, 863, 925, 931; on Hitler’s Commando Order, 956; on Italian surrender, 998–99, 1001; on

Allied landings in Normandy, 1038–40; injured by bomb aimed at Hitler,

1051, 1054; signs surrender, 1138–39; executed at Nuremberg, 1143

Johannmeier, Maj. Willi, 1129

John, Lieutenant von, 1050

Johst, Hans, 242–43

Juenger, Ernst, 242, 1042 fn.

Jueterbog, 370, 1057

Jung, Edgar, 218, 222

Junge, Gertrude, 1123, 1132

Jungvolk, 120, 253, 255

Junkers, 53, 93–94, 96, 99, 154, 157, 162, 179–80, 186, 198, 201, 205, 215,

236, 257

Justice, Ministry of, 317

Jutland, Battle of, 486, 698–99, 707

Kaas, Monsignor, 189, 199

Kahr, Gustav von, 34, 51, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69–72, 75–76, 80 fn. , 223

Kaiser, Jakob, 373

Kaiserhof hotel, Berlin, 4, 154, 155, 156, 157, 168, 175, 176, 177, 182

Kaltenbrunner, Dr. Ernst, 956, 1070, 1143

Kampfbund, see Deutscher Kampfbund

Kant, Immanuel, 93, 97, 99

Kantzow, Carin von, see Goering, Carin von Kantzow

Kanya, Kalman, 387–88

Kapp, Dr. Wolfgang, 33–34

Kappel, 273–74

Kapp putsch, 3, 33–34, 43, 55 fn. , 60, 63, 75, 202

Karinhall, 777, 1112

Karlsruhe, 564

Karlsruhe (Ger. lt. crusier), 702

Karmasin, Franz, 437, 442

Kasserine Pass, 1029

Kauenellenbogen, Dr. Edwin, 991

Kaufmann, Karl Otto, 1009

Kaunas, 794, 967

Kearny (U.S. destroyer), 883

Keitel, Field Marshal Wilhelm, 281, 319, 482, 542, 644, 667, 669, 760,

816, 824, 834–35, 873, 911, 917, 922, 945, 999, 1041 fn. , 1039, 1100, 1103,

1111, 1115, 1118, 1130; and Blomberg affair, 312–14, 316; Chief of Armed Forces High Command, 318; role in Anschluss, 325, 329, 331, 335; Czech invasion plans, 356, 357, 361–63, 365–67, 378, 379, 393, 396, 423–24, 428,

438, 440, 441, 444; Poland invasion plans, 462, 484, 497, 498 fn., 518, 556,

557; and anti-Hitler conspiracy, 559–60, 1021, 1034, 1047, 1048 fn. , 1049–

52, 1054, 1058–60, 1064, 1073, 1077–78, 1079 fn.; western front, 635, 651,

720; and Nazi war crimes, 660–61, 831, 832, 846, 941, 952, 954, 957–58; Norway invasion, 677, 679, 680, 682, 710; at French surrender, 742–45; named Field Marshal, 755 fn. ; Britain invasion plans, 764–68; war on

Russia, 797, 858, 866, 909, 925; Battle of Berlin, 1112–14, 1120; his death

ordered by Bormann, 1132; executed at Nuremberg, 1142–43

Keller, Helen, 241

Kelly, Dr. Douglas M., 837, 838 fn. ,

Kelly, Sir David, 751 fn.

Kempka, Erich, 1111, 1133, 1134, 1137

Kennan, George F., 843 fn.

Kennard, Sir Howard, 464–65, 466 fn., 574–75, 586–87

Kennedy, Joseph P., 688

Keppier, Wilhelm, 144, 178, 339, 340, 342, 442

Kerr, Alfred, 241

Kerrl, Hans, 127, 238, 239

Kesselring, Field Marshal Albert, 722, 733, 755 fn. , 775, 912, 1001, 1006,

1099, 1106 fn., 1112, 1113, 1138

Ketteier, Wilhelm von, 348 fn.

Kharkov, 933, 1006

Kiel, 55, 281, 377, 752, 1008

Kiel, University of, 519, 987

Kielce, 626

Kiep, Otto, 1025, 1026, 1072

Kiev, 798, 811, 853, 857, 858–59, 939, 961, 1007

King-Hall, Stephen, 615 fn.

Kira, Princess, 907

Kircher, Rudolf, 245

Kirdorf, Emil, 134, 144

Kirk, Alexander C, 561, 637

Kirkpatrick, Ivone, 397, 836–38

Kitzbuehl, 333

Kjölsen, Captain, 694–95

Kladno.991, 992

Klagenfurt, 13–14

Klausener, Erich, 218, 223, 235, 269

Kleist, Gen. Ewald von, 319, 373, 380–81, 557, 724 fn. , 855, 860, 861, 889,

914, 916, 928, 1027

Kleist, Heinrich von, 1027

Kleist, Peter, 555 fn. , 1017 fn.

Kletskaya, 926

Klintzich, Johann Ulrich, 42–43

Klop, Lieutenant, 654–55

Kluge, Field Marshal Guenther Hans, 318–19, 625, 755 fn. , 860, 863, 864,

865, 868–69, 1013 fn. , 1014–15, 1018–19, 1020, 1021, 1030, 1041, 1046,

1047, 1058, 1064, 1074–75, 1076–77, 1079, 1082

Knilling, Eugen von, 64

Koblenz, 1101

Koch, Erich, 127, 939

Koch, Ilse, 983–84

Kochern, 273

Koeln (Ger. naval vessel), 697

Koenigsberg, 93, 349, 538, 843 fn., 1069

Koenigsberg (Ger. naval vessel), 697, 701

Koestring, Gen. Ernst, 799

Koht, Dr. Halvdan, 705, 706

Kokoschka, Oskar, 243–44

Kola Peninsula, 942

Koller, Gen. Karl, 1112–13, 1115, 1116

Konev, Marshal Ivan S. 1097

Konoye, Prince, 884, 885

Konradswalde, 1072

Kordt, Erich, 381, 405, 406–7 408, 411, 415 fn., 548 fn. , 550 fn., 555 fn.

Kordt, Theodor, 381, 382, 384, 406, 602, 649

Korherr, Dr. Richard, 963

Kori,C. H., 971–72

Korschen, 1021

Korten, General, 1051, 1054 fn.

Kortzfleisch, Gen. Joachim von, 1035, 1061, 1066, 1073

Kotelnikovski, 927

Kotze, Hans Ulrich von, 471

Kraemer, Gen. Fritz, 1095 fn.

Kramer, Gerhard F., 270

Kramer, Josef, 664, 981–82

Krampnitz, 1046, 1057, 1065, 1115

Krancke, Adm. Theodor, 922

Kranzfelder, Capt. Alfred, 1048

Krause, Dr. Reinhardt, 237

Krebs, Gen. Hans, 839, 1112, 1123, 1126, 1129, 1133, 1135, 1137

Kreisau Circle, 374, 908, 1015–17, 1018, 1030, 1033, 1036, 1072 fn.

Krejci, General, 363

Kremlin, 525, 526, 539, 863

Kress von Kressenstein, Gen. Frh. Fritz, 66

Kriegsfalle (war eventualities), 302

Kristiansand, 677, 702

Krofta, Dr. Kamil, 390, 420

Kroll Opera House, 198, 291, 598

Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, Alfried, 950 fn.

Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, Gustav, 145, 189–90, 206, 949

Krupp works, 190, 282, 498, 948, 949, 968, 973

Kuban, 909

Kubis, Jan, 991

Kubizek, August, 8 fn. , 14 fn. , 15–16, 18, 25

Kuebler, Gen. Ludwig, 869

Kuechler, Gen. Georg von, 625, 660, 721, 738

Kuestrin, 1109

Kuibyshev, 860

Kummetz, Rear Adm. Oskar, 703

Kuntze, Otto, 105

Kuntzen, Major von, 183

Kursk, 1006

Kurusu, Saburo, 885–86, 887, 891

labor, German, 3, 18, 52, 179, 180, 231, 258–59, 261, 265, 355; see also trade unions

Labor Commandos ( Arbeitskommando) 65

Laborde, Admiral de, 925

Labor Front, 202, 263–67, 282

Labor Service, 220, 249, 253, 254, 256

Lackmann-Mosse, Hans, 245

Lacroix, M. de, 390

Ladoga, Lake, 811

Lahousen, Gen. Erwin, 595 fn., 1019, 1026 fn.

Lambach, 10

Lammerding, Lt. Gen. Heinz, 993 fn.

Lammers, Hans, 323, 941, 965, 1116, 1118

Lampe, Maurice, 955

Landbund, 180

Landespolizeigruppe General Goering, 216

Landsberg prison, 78, 79, 85, 90, 111, 122, 963 fn. , 965 fn.

Langbehn, Dr. Carl, 1072

Langbro Asylum, 146

Langer, William L., 815 fn.

Langsdorff, Capt. Hans, 669–70

Lappus, Sigrid von, 483 fn.

La Roche-Guyon, 1074

Laski, Harold, 784

Latvia, 470–71, 494 fn. , 495, 539, 541, 542, 544, 630–31, 794, 833

Laval, Pierre, 745–46, 923, 924

Law for Removing the Distress of People and Reich, see Enabling Act

Law for the Protection of the People and the State (Feb. 28, 1933), 196, 274

Law for the Protection of the Republic (1922), 51

Law for the Reconstruction of the Reich (Jan. 30, 1934), 200–1, 274 fn.

Law Regulating National Labor (Jan. 20, 1934), 263

Lawrence, Lord Justice, 831

League for Air Sports, 282

League of National Socialist German Jurists, 269

League of Nations, 112, 136, 210, 211, 280, 285, 286, 289, 290, 292, 294,

297, 344, 346, 347, 353, 439, 458, 464, 472–73, 480, 499, 544, 656

Lebensraum, 82, 256, 283, 305, 308, 427, 430, 449, 484, 488, 657, 804,

915, 941

Lebenswege (H. S. Chamberlain), 105

Leber, Julius, 373, 1030, 1044, 1063, 1072

Lebrun, Albert, 460

Ledere, Gen. Jacques, 1085

Leeb, Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von, 318–19, 646–47, 755 fn., 853, 859,

903 fn.

Léger, Alexis, 418

Le Havre, 762, 772, 1037

Lehndorff, Count Heinrich von, 905

Lehrterstrasse prison, Berlin, 1073

Leipart, Theodor, 202

Leipzig, 140–42, 193, 363, 372, 1016

Le Matin, 281

Lemnos, 817

Lemp, Oberleutnant, 637, 638 fn.

Lenard, Philipp, 250, 251

Lenin, Nikolai, 98, 542

Leningrad, 811, 822 fn., 853–54, 856–57, 859, 865, 926, 937, 942

Leonding, 11, 17, 347

Leonrod, Maj. Ludwig von, 1060, 1072

Leopold III, King of the Belgians, 302, 561, 616, 652, 729–31

Lerchenfeld, Count, 51

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 93, 97, 245

Lessing, Theodor, 251

Leuschner, Wilhelm, 373, 1030, 1032, 1072

Lewis, Fulton, Jr., 748–49

Ley, Dr. Robert, 127, 148, 177, 202–3, 263, 264, 265, 266–67, 275, 282,

671, 1142 fn.

Leyden, 721

Lezhaky, 993

Libau, 539

Liberals, National, 56; see also German People’s Party

Libya, 817, 818 fn. , 820, 821, 823, 826, 827, 912, 913

Lichterfelde, 216, 222, 1066, 1071 fn.

Liddell Hart, B. H., 732 fn., 734, 761, 762 fn., 855, 916 fn. , 1041 fn.

Lidice, 991–94

Liebknecht, Karl, 52, 54–55, 191

Liege, 1086

“Lila,” 924–25

Lillehammer, 706, 708

Lillesand, 695

Limoges, 993

Lindbergh, Charles A., 684, 749 fn., 827 fn.

Lindemann, Gen. Fritz, 1030, 1072

Linge, Heinz, 1134

Linnertz, General, 1065

Linz, 10–11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 25, 27 fn., 326 fn. , 347, 351, 1107, 1127

Lippe, 180

Lippert, Michael, 222 fn.

Lippstadt, 1105

Lipski, Josef, 212, 455–56, 460–61, 463–64, 583, 584–85, 587, 588, 589,

591, 603

Lisbon, 783, 785–92

List, Field Marshal Sigmund Wilhelm, 626, 755 fn., 823, 826, 914, 915,

917, 918 fn.

List Regiment, 30, 47, 49

Lithuania, 304, 429, 458, 461–62, 541, 580, 630–31, 794, 848, 962, 976

Litt, Theodor, 251

Littorio (It. battleship), 818 fn.

Litvinov, Maxim, 390, 404, 460, 478 fn., 479, 480–81, 489, 531, 544

Lloyd George, David, 232, 489, 537 fn.

Lobe, Paul, 201

Locarno Pact, 112, 136, 212, 280, 282, 283, 285, 286–87, 290, 291, 294,

302, 714

Loire river, 1037, 1076, 1085

London, Jack, 241

London: defense measures, 402, 404, 595; air bombing of, 423, 425, 590,

767–69, 771, 772, 776, 777, 780, 781, 1009, 1040; Dutch govt, in, 723; in German plans for invasion of Britain, 763, 767–69, 782–83, 829

London, City of, 539–40

London Daily Herald, 210

London Daily Mail, 280–81, 453

London Daily Telegraph, 344 fn.

London Spectator, 210

London Times, 210, 245, 287–88, 294, 344 fn. , 376, 382, 384 fn., 420, 453,

784, 914 fn.

Lonesome Guest (Goebbels), 124

Loraine, Sir Percy, 603 fn.

Lorenz, Heinz, 1122, 1129

Lorraine, 400

Lossberg, Col. Bernhard von, 769 fn.

Lossow, Gen. Otto von, 65–72, 75–76

Lothian, Lord, 293, 750

Louis-Ferdinand, Prince, 907

Louvain, 717, 724

Louvre, 945

Low Countries, 640, 652, 714, 775; see also Belgium; Netherlands

Lubbe, Marinus van der, 192–94, 269, 654

Lublin, 626, 631, 971, 974

Lucas, Scott, 750 fn.

Ludecke, Karl, 119

Ludendorff, Gen. Erich, 31, 32, 34, 46 fn. , 53, 56, 63–64, 69, 70–74, 75, 78,

118, 122, 123, 144, 150, 259, 312, 530, 754 fn. , 871

Ludendorff Bridge, Remagen, 1101

Ludin, Lieutenant, 139–42

Ludwig III, King of Bavaria, 28

Ludwigshafen, 234

Luebeck, 238, 676, 1105, 1116

Lueger, Dr. Karl, 24–25, 138

Lueneburg, 981, 1141

Luettwitz, Gen. Walther Frh. von, 55, 60

Luettwitz, Gen. Heinrich von, 1093

Luetzow (Ger. hvy. cruiser), 667, 668

Luetzow (Ger. pocket battleship, former Deutschland), 702–3, 711

Luftflotten (air fleets), 775

Lufthansa, 146, 907

Luftwaffe (German Air Force), 284, 317, 318, 423, 425, 571, 621, 749 fn.,

755 fn., 813, 818 fn., 820, 826, 827, 850, 881, 903 fn., 923, 1004, 1034,

1043 fn., 1056, 1072, 1126, 1128, 1130; building of, 282, 283, 299, 489,

853; in Spanish Civil War, 297, 300; war preparations, 305, 335, 336, 362,

369–70, 445, 487, 488, 497, 517 fn. , 529, 590; bombing of Poland, 597, 603; in war in the west, 619–20, 633, 646, 671–72, 726, 730, 738, 1036, 1039,

1040, 1099; Norway campaign, 673, 681, 682, 699, 702, 703, 706, 708,

711; operations in Holland, Belgium, 718–19, 721, 722, 725, 730; and stop order, 732, 733, 736–37; Battle of Britain, 752, 756, 758, 759, 761, 765–67,

771, 772, 775–77, 779–81; eastern front, 797, 860, 926, 947 fn., 1009; in Mediterranean area and N. Africa, 912–13, 922; medical experiments for,

984–87; Battle of Berlin, 1112, 1115, 1122; Goering ousted, 1119

Lunding, Colonel, 1073

Lupescu, Magda, 800 fn.

Lusitania, S.S., 637

Luther, Dr. Hans, 204

Luther, Martin, 91, 174, 236, 237

Lutze, Viktor, 221

Luxembourg, 470, 561, 590, 644, 646, 650, 715, 720

Luxemburg, Rosa, 52, 54–55

Lwów (Lemberg), Poland, 628, 967

Lyme Bay, 762, 763, 764, 766, 767

Maas (Meuse) river, 721

Maastricht, 724

Mackensen, Field Marshal August von, 197, 225, 284

Mackensen, Hans Georg von, 483, 553, 554, 565 fn., 566, 568, 687, 890

Mackesy, Maj. Gen. P. J., 707

Maddalena I., 1003

Madeira, 265, 817

Madrid, 785–88

Mafalda, Princess, 146, 352, 984 fn., 1003

Magdeburg, 1105

“Magic,” 885, 886–87, 888 fn.

Maginot Line, 293, 294, 422, 531, 646, 718, 719, 720, 725

Magistrati, Count Massimo, 553

Maikop, 859, 909, 914

Mainz, 400, 1101

Maisel, Gen. Ernst, 1078

Maisky, Ivan, 478 fn., 495 fn.

Makins, R. M., 605 fn.

Malaya, 892, 901 fn.

Malcolm, Major General, 31 fn.

Maldon, 763

Malkin, Sir William, 391

Malmédy, 954, 1095 fn. , 1096 fn.

Maloyaroslavets, 868–69

Malta, 912–13, 921, 922, 1002 fn.

Manila, 876

Mann, Heinrich, 241

Mann, Thomas, 241, 242

Mannerheim, Marshai, 682 fn.

Manoilescu, Mihai, 800

Manstein, Gen. Fritz Erich von (Lewinski), 284, 335, 345 fn. , 369, 370, 424,

488, 718, 726, 830 fn. , 840, 903 fn. , 926–27, 928, 1015, 1030

Manteuffel, Gen. Hasso von, 1090, 1091, 1093, 1094

Marahrens, Bishop, 239

Marburg (Maribor), 13, 217

Marburg, University of, 218, 219, 251

Margival, 1039, 1040

Marienbad, 251

Marienburg, 255

Marienwerder, 1072

“Marita,” 823, 824

Marne river, 727, 863, 1088

Marseilles, 740

Marshall, Gen. George C, 1001 fn.

Marx, Karl, 98

Masarik, Dr. Hubert, 416–17, 418

Masaryk, Jan, 404, 411, 784

Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue, 358, 359, 443, 444, 445, 448

Masefield, John, 384 fn.

“master race” concept, 21–28, 81–82, 86–89, 93, 97, 98, 100, 103–9, 232,

236, 249, 250, 255, 286, 937, 939, 991

Mastny, Dr. Vojtech, 346, 416–17, 418

Matisse, Henri, 244

Matsuoka, Yosuke, 839, 871, 873, 874–6, 877, 878, 883, 888, 892

Matuschka, Capt. Count von, 1030

Matzelsberger, Franziska (Frau Hitler), 9

Maurice, Emil, 42, 79 fn., 132, 221, 223

Maurice, Maj. Gen. Sir Frederick, 31 fn.

Mauthausen, 272, 351, 955, 956, 967, 981

Max, Prince of Baden, 32, 52, 55

Maxwell-Fyfe, Sir David, 517

May Day celebration (1933), 202

Maydell. Baron Konstantin von, 685 fn.

McAuliffe, Gen. A. C, 1093

McCarthy, Joseph R., 1095 fn.

McCloy, John J., 950 fn. , 1096 fn.

Mechelen-sur-Meuse, 671

Mecklenburg, 161, 301

medical experiments, Nazi, 979–91

Medina Sidonia, Duke of, 914 fn.

Mediterranean, 301, 530, 554, 691, 757, 808, 812–13, 817–19, 827, 829,

912–14, 925, 995, 1007, 1008

Mehlhorn, Doctor, 520

Meinecke, Friedrich, 6

Mein Kampf (Hitler), 80–81, 113, 129–30, 133, 134, 249; autobiographical material, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 18–22, 25–29, 34, 36, 39, 40, 44, 109–10; cited,

6, 22, 25, 26, 32, 41, 43, 44, 82–90, 97, 110–11, 209, 230, 234, 240, 243,

248, 279, 288, 307–8, 429–30, 454, 544 fn. , 549, 796, 941, 1124, 1131

Meissner, Otto von, 4, 155, 168–69, 173, 175, 181, 183–84, 196

Meli, Max, 102

Memel, 428–29, 456, 461–62, 1033

Mendelssohn, Felix, 242

Merekalov, Alexei, 476, 479–80

Mersa Matrûh, 817

Mertz von Quirnheim, Colonel von, 1058, 1060, 1067, 1068

Mesny, General, 1100

Messerschmitt, Wilhelm, 835

Metz, 1076, 1086

Meuse river, 716–18, 723–26, 1086, 1090 fn. , 1092–93, 1094

Mézières, 717

Michael, King of Rumania, 800 fn.

Michael (Goebbels), 124

Middle East, 828, 829, 912, 919; see also Arabia; Iran; Palestine; Syria

Miklas, Wilhelm, 331, 332, 334 fn. , 338, 339, 340, 341–43, 346, 347

Mikoyan, Anastas, 494

Milan, 482, 740 fn. , 995, 1131

Milch, Field Marshal Erhard, 484, 497, 733, 755 fn. , 947 fn., 985, 986

Militaer-Wochenblatt, 260

Minsk, 621, 855, 962 fn. , 967, 973 fn., 1020

Mirabeau, Count Honoré Gabriel Victor Riqueti de, 93

Mius river, 861

Moabit prison, 239, 1025 fn. , 1068

Model, Field Marshal Walther, 947, 1076, 1078, 1088, 1090, 1095, 1105

Moellendorff, Captain von, 1049, 1053

Moerdijk, 721, 722

Molde, 708

Moll, Sergeant, 970

Molotov, Vyacheslav M., 490, 544 fn. ; named Foreign Min., 480–81;

negotiations with Germans, 476, 481–82, 491–94, 501, 505, 506, 513–14,

520–28, 535 fn., 538, 540, 562, 622, 626–31, 639, 667, 793–95, 844; with British, French, 495, 496, 503, 504, 537; Berlin visit, 800, 803–9, 818; replaced as Prime Min. by Stalin, 841–44; receives German war

declaration, 846–49

Moltke, Hans Adolf von, 377, 460, 462, 499

Moltke, Field Marshal Count Helmuth von, 374, 657, 723, 1081

Moltke, Count Helmuth James von, 374, 558, 908, 1015, 1016, 1025, 1036,

1072 fn.

Monckton, Sir Walter, 789, 791

Monschau, 1092–93

Montevideo, 669–70

Montgomery, Gen. Sir Bernard Law, 919, 920, 1001, 1086, 1088–89, 1102,

1105, 1138, 1141

Monthermé, 724

Montoire, 814, 815 fn. , 816

Mooney, James D., 686 fn.

Moravia, 359, 362, 428, 429, 438, 440, 443, 444, 448, 449, 451, 460, 598,

657, 686, 991

Moravská-Ostrava, 383, 444

Morell, Dr. Theodor, 444, 447, 1056, 1102

Morgan, J. P., 688

Morgenthau, Henry, Jr., 897 fn.

Morison, Samuel Eliot, 883 fn.

Morocco, 297, 814, 923

Morris, Leland, 900

Mościcki, Ignacy, 560–61

Moscow: German war plans against, 798, 810, 811, 937; rumors of German

attack in, 842, 844; German drive toward and defeat at, 853–54, 856–61,

863–70, 891, 905, 952, 1006, 1007, 1081; evacuated by govt., 859–60

Moscow Pact, see Nazi–Soviet Pact

Moselle river, 1086, 1088, 1089, 1099

motion pictures, Nazi control of, 247

Mozdok, 914

“Mr. X,” see Bryans, J. Lonsdale

Muehlmann, Doctor, 340

Mueller, Heinrich, 519–20, 595, 953, 1044

Mueller, Hermann, 137

Mueller, Dr. Josef, 648, 693, 1024

Mueller, Ludwig, 235, 237, 238

Mueller, Wilhelm, 250–51

Muenchener Neueste Nachrichten, 223

Muenster, 239; Treaty of, 644

Muenstereifel, 720

Muff, Lt. Gen. Wolfgang, 323, 340, 342

Munch, Edvard, 698

Munich, 38–44, 46–49, 112, 118, 120, 123, 128–29, 131, 132, 138, 148,

156, 225, 244, 271, 279, 406, 457, 694, 923, 1107; Hitler moves to, from Vienna, 27–28; Hitler returns to after war (1918), 31, 33–36; a magnet for

anti-Republic forces, 34; Roehm purge in, 220–23; Hitler-Duce meeting in,

740–41; Hitler-Laval meeting in, 924; Cianos take refuge in, 1004–5;

conspirators plan to take over, 1033, 1034; see also Beer Hallc Putsch

Munich, University of, 48, 124, 1022–23

Munich Conference and Pact, 384, 403, 407, 409–28, 436–37, 439, 440,

443, 445, 448, 450–53, 496, 506, 531, 543, 544, 557, 562, 565, 566, 570,

571, 580, 583, 603, 611, 619, 635

Munk, Kaj, 957

Munters, Vilhelms, 471

Murmansk, 667, 695 fn. , 811, 859

Murray, Gilbert, 784

music, Nazi control of, 242

Mussolini, Benito, 63, 209, 261, 344, 450, 507, 562, 640 fn. , 645, 657, 727,

735, 747, 819, 849–51, 872, 923 fn., 995; meetings with Hitler, 217, 301,

740–41, 774, 815–16, 821–22, 995–96, 1049, 1055–57; sends troops to bar Austrian Anschluss, 280; invades Ethiopia, 289–90, 296; Hitler gains

support of, 296–99, 301–2, 324, 327; approves German annexation of

Austria, 302, 324, 327, 334–35, 336–37, 339, 343, 345, 347; role in Czech problem, 377, 400, 403, 407–10, 414–19; reluctance to risk war against West, 436, 482–83, 493, 508, 509, 511–12, 529, 547–48, 551–57, 564–68,

570, 665–66, 687–92; conquest of Albania, 469; attitude toward U.S., 469–

70, 875 fn., 889–90, 893; opposes Axis amity with U.S.S.R., 478–79; signs

Pact of Steel, 482–83; mediation in war crisis, 587–89, 592, 603–8, 615–18,

620–21, 640, 643; criticizes Nazi policy toward U.S.S.R., 666, 683, 687,

688; promises to enter war, 689–92; war, armistice with French, 739–41,

745, 746; war with British, 733, 755, 812–14, 928; invasion of Greece, 815,

816, 818, 825, 826; in war against U.S.S.R., 851, 909–11; relations with Japan, 875, 889–90, 893; urges Hitler to make peace in east, 928, 995; deposed, arrested, 996–98, 1002, 1003; is rescued by S.S., 999, 1000,

1003–6; assassinated, 1131

Myth of the Twentieth Century, The (Rosenberg), 149

Nacht und Nebel Erlass (Night and Fog Decree), 957–58

Naggiar, Paul-Émile, 537

Namier, Sir Lewis B., 556 fn., 593 fn. , 611

Namsos, 708

Namur, 717, 724, 725, 726, 1086

Nansen, Fridtjof, 675

Nantes, 956

Naples, 1001, 1002

Napoleon, 98, 111, 206, 448, 542, 629, 760 fn. , 769 fn., 812, 829, 851–52,

853, 859, 860, 865, 867, 868, 1015, 1028

Napoleon III, 95, 723

Narew river, 497, 532, 541, 629, 631

Narvik, 674, 676, 681, 695, 696, 700–1, 707, 708, 709, 711, 721, 752, 810,

930

National Assembly, German, 31, 57, 59

National Club, Berlin, 44

National Liberais, 56

National Political Institutes of Education, 255

National Redoubt, 1105–6

National Socialist Association of University Lecturers, 249

National Socialist German Freedom Movement, 112, 118, 123

National Socialist movement (ideology), 25, 36, 38, 39, 40–41, 83–85, 97–

104, 108–9, 117, 120–21, 249, 1029, 1030, 1042, 1070–71, 1082, 1123,

1125, 1128

National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party, or N.S.D.A.P., 3, 19, 22,

24, 63, 112, 121–23, 129, 154, 159, 160, 165, 168, 173, 184, 185, 189–92,

194, 240, 314–15, 372, 373, 430–31, 562, 563, 663, 834, 837, 1061, 1064,

1065, 1080; establishment and early growth, 41–51; “second revolution”

and “socialism” in, 41, 123, 126, 128, 143, 147, 176, 180, 204–8, 213–15,

232, 261; Hitler’s dictatorship in, 44–46; suppressed after putsch attempt,

72, 75, 111–12; election campaigns, 118, 138, 152, 153, 156–59, 166, 171–

72, 180–81, 194–96, 211–12; structure, 119–21, 252–53, 255, 263;

factional strife in, 122–23, 126–29, 143–44, 147, 172, 174, 180, 181, 204–

8, 216; financial aid from big business, 134, 142–45, 172, 176, 178, 179,

203; gains support in Army, 139–42, 146–49; activities in Reichstag, 162,

170–72, 174, 179, 181, 199; sole party in Germany, 201; control of churches, 234–40; of arts and professions, 242, 244, 246; of education, 249,

251; of farmers, 257; of labor, 263–64; of courts, 268–69; terror tactics,

194, 221, 226, 231, 233, 237, 239, 271, 276, 351, 369, 372, 956–63, 993,

1139; in Austria, 279, 280, 296, 323, 328, 330–33, 337 fn. , 340–41, 350,

351; in Sudetenland, 359, 360, 363, 376–77, 381 fn., 383

National Socialist Teachers’ League, 249

Nationalists, see German National People’s Party

Natzweiler, 981

Naujocks, Alfred Helmut, 518–19, 594–95, 599, 653, 654

Naval High Command, 636, 638, 844; see also Raeder, Adm. Erich

Naval War Staff, 637, 679, 758–59, 763–64, 766, 768, 770, 772–73, 818,

829

Navy, German, 58 fn. , 211, 305, 317, 318, 321, 354, 401, 529, 766–68, 772–

73, 853, 1003, 1008, 1048, 1098, 1121–22, 1125, 1126, 1130; Hitler’s

pledges to, 207, 214–15; rebuilding program, 281–82, 287–89, 299, 487–

89; Memel, seizure of, 456, 461–62; preparations for war, 456, 468, 487–

89, 518, 520, 524–25, 590; U-boats, 281, 289, 518, 520, 524, 571, 622,

635–36, 646, 667, 710, 879–83, 895, 902, 912, 913, 996, 1007, 1008, 1099; war operations: in Atlantic, 622, 635–38, 646, 879–83, 895, 902, 913, 1007,

1008, 1036, 1039; ship sinkings, 622, 635–36, 637–38, 646, 913, 1007; ship losses, 669, 707, 709, 711–12, 773, 781, 1000fn; Norway invasion, 673–75,

679, 681, 696–97, 701, 707, 709–12; invasion of Britain, 752, 756, 758–59,

761, 763–74, 781; Mediterranean offensive urged, 816–20, 828–29; operations against Russia, 845; surrender negotiations, 1138

Nazi–Soviet Pact, 513–16, 520–28, 531, 535 fn. , 538–45, 547, 544–55, 562,

563, 566, 570, 578, 609, 626, 631, 794, 801, 802, 839, 847, 849

Near East, 812

Nebe, Arthur, 373–74, 1054–55, 1072

Neff, Walter, 987, 988

Netherlands, 281, 307, 470, 516, 531, 561, 590, 592, 640, 711, 717, 719,

723, 886; German war plans against, 486, 487, 519 fn., 644–47, 649–52,

656, 658, 665, 669, 671, 672, 694, 710, 714–19, 739, 793; conquest of, 713,

720–24; German occupation of, 759, 943, 956–57, 969, 1090, 1099, 1126,

1138

Netherlands Air Force, 955

Netherlands Army, 718, 722, 723

Neudeck, 181, 182, 214, 219, 228–229

Neuhaus, 662 fn.

Neumann, Franz L., 60

Neunzert, Lieutenant, 72

Neurath, Baron Konstantin von, 164, 184, 229, 276, 283, 291, 295, 298,

301, 305, 308, 309, 310, 319, 320, 323, 335, 345, 365, 415, 448, 662, 991,

1032, 1142–43

“Neville Chamberlain” (Masefield), 384 fn.

“New Beginning, A” (Hitler editorial), 118, 122

Newton, Sir Basil, 390

New York, 376, 685 fn.

New York Journal-American, 748

New York Times, 245, 397 fn. , 477 fn., 595 fn. , 748 fn., 897 fn.

Nibelungenlied, 102

Niblack (U.S. destroyer), 880, 883 fn.

Nidda, Krug von, 924

Niederdorf, 918 fn. , 1074

Niekisch, Ernst, 373

Niemen river, 851–52

Niemoeller, Rev. Martin, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 352, 655 fn.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102–3, 110, 111

Nieuwe Maas river, 721, 722

Nikitchenko, Gen. I. T., 959

Nile river, 913, 914, 919, 925

Noël, Léon, 536, 543 fn. , 586, 605 fn., 743

Nomura, Adm. Kichisaburo, 873 fn., 884–87, 891, 892

Nordic Society, 676

Norge (Norw. naval vessel), 701

Normandy, 1037, 1038, 1040, 1076, 1085, 1089, 1092

North Africa, 740, 757, 812, 813, 817, 818, 820, 827, 829, 850, 902, 910–

14, 919–25, 928–29, 995, 1009, 1029, 1079; Allied landing in, 921–25, 933

North German Confederation, 95

North Germanic Union, 769

North Sea, 646, 673, 695, 720, 764, 768

Norway, 561, 716, 805, 841; German war plans against, 673–83, 689, 694; Altmark incident, 679–80; invasion of, 698, 700–13, 719, 721, 793, 826; history of monarchy, 704 fn.; German occupation of, 709 fn. , 752, 768, 775,

801, 811, 914, 956–57, 993

Norwegian Army, 676, 678, 704, 708, 709

Norwegian Leads, 696

Noske, Gustav, 55, 60

“November criminals,” 32, 38, 63, 69, 70, 112

N.S. Briefe, 123

N.S.D.A.P., see National Socialist German Workers’ Party

Nuremberg, 26, 44, 50, 63, 90, 207, 340, 378–79, 987, 1106, 1107, 1111,

1141–43

Nuremberg Laws (Sept. 15, 1935), 233, 274 fn., 431, 439

Nuremberg party rallies, 90, 207, 230, 264, 378, 382–83, 406, 425, 518,

562, 1107

Nybergsund, 705, 706

Oberg, Maj. Gen. Karl, 1060, 1075, 1076

Oberheuser, Dr. Herta, 990

Obersalzberg, see Berchtesgaden

Occupied Eastern Territories, Ministry for the, 940, 952

Ochs-Adler, Col. Julius, 750 fn.

Ochsner, Colonel, 869

Oder river, 1097, 1103, 1106, 1109, 1120

Odessa, 811

Ohlendorf, Otto, 953, 958–62, 963 fn.

OKH, see Army High Command

OKM (Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine, High Command of the Navy),

638

OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, High Command of the Armed

Forces), 318, 335, 363, 379, 400, 482, 795, 816, 825, 1027, 1047, 1049,

1050, 1072, 1115, 1130; Austrian, Czech invasion plans, 335, 360–61, 370,

375, 377, 378, 387, 393, 421, 428; Polish invasion, 469, 487, 518, 529 fn.,

532, 551, 595 fn., 599, 629, 660–61; western front, 640, 644, 652, 656, 671,

716–20, 722, 723, 725–29, 731–35, 1038; Norway campaign, 673, 678,

679, 681, 696; activities in U.S., 684, 685, 749 fn.; Battle of Britain, 761,

756, 758, 760, 763–68; Barbarossa, 797, 799, 810, 812, 822, 829, 831, 853,

856–58, 918 fn., 919, 925, 929, 933, 952, 953; Mediterranean and N. Africa,

921, 922, 924; Italian defection, 996, 999, 1001, 1006; surrender, 1138; see also Jodl; Keitel

Abwehr (Intelligence Bureau), 331 fn., 374, 377, 462, 518, 558, 648–

49, 654, 685, 693, 1018, 1019, 1024, 1026, 1029, 1036, 1043 fn., 1045,

1072; see also Canaris; Oster

Economic and Armaments Branch, 413 fn., 517, 667 fn., 799; see also Thomas, Gen. Georg

Olav Trygverson (Norw. mine layer), 702

Olbricht, Gen. Friedrich, 904, 1018–19, 1027, 1029, 1030, 1035, 1036,

1045, 1046–47, 1054, 1057, 1058–59, 1060–61, 1064 fn., 1065, 1066–67,

1068

Olden, Rudolf, 19 fn. , 26, 128

Oldenburg, 163

Olympic games (1936), 232–33, 234, 835

Operations (code names):

Aida, 913

Alpine Violets, 821

Attila, 820–21

Axis, 1000, 1001

Bernhard, 519 fn.

Black ( Schwarz), 1000

Citadel, 1006

Dynamo, 735

Eagle ( Adlerangriffe), 774–75

Flash, 1018–21

Greif, 1090 fn. , 1092 fn.

Hercules, 913

Himmler, 518

Isabella, 817

Marita, 823, 824

Oak ( Eiche), 1000, 1003

Punishment, 826

Student, 1000

Sunflower, 821

Typhoon, 859

Winter Gale, 927

Oppeln, 519

Oppenheim, 1101, 1102

Oradour-sur-Glane, 993

Oran, 923

Oranienburg, 272, 571

Order Castles ( Ordensburgen), 255

Ordnertruppe, 42

Orel, 854, 863, 1006

Orleans, 1085

Orne river, 1038

Oshima, Gen. Hiroshi, 872, 885, 887–88, 889, 890, 891, 893, 895, 896

Oskar, Prince of Prussia, 907

Oskarsborg, 702–3

Oslo, 614 fn. , 639, 676, 677, 681, 695, 697, 698, 701, 702–3, 704, 705, 708,

709 fn., 710, 721

“Oslo” powers, 561

Ostend, 770

Oster, Col. Hans, 374, 380, 381, 405, 406–7, 558, 563, 596, 648–51, 652,

654, 694, 715–16, 846 fn., 904, 1017, 1024, 1073

Osthilfe (Eastern Relief), 180, 181

“Ostiand,” 832

Ott, Gen. Eugen, 173, 174, 877, 878, 884, 886, 889, 893 fn.

Otto, Crown Prince, of Austria, 304, 333–34, 335

“Otto” (Code name), 810; see also Case

Otto

Oumansky, Constantine, 544 fn. , 843

Oven, Margarete von, 1035

Pacholegg, Anton, 985

Pacific, 873, 875, 877 fn. , 901

Pact of Steel, 482–84, 511 fn. , 553, 556, 565, 603

Paderewski, Ignace, 784

Palatinate, 1101

Palestine, 747, 813

Pan-American Neutrality Patrol, 880

Pan-German Nationalists (Austrian), 22–25

Papen, Franz von, 3, 4, 56 fn. , 167, 169, 170–75, 189, 191, 192, 196, 216,

227–29, 234, 321 fn., 357, 1126; background, 164–66; intrigues with and

against Hitler, 177–84; named Vice-Chancellor and Prussian Premier, 183–

86; booted out of Prussian premiership, 204; protests Nazi excesses, 215,

218, 219; escapes purge, 222, 223; minister to Austria, 229, 280, 296, 319; role in Anschluss, 323–33, 338, 342, 343, 348; acquitted at Nuremberg,

1142–43

Paris, 177, 404, 420, 423, 425, 430, 436–37, 487, 595, 726, 738, 741, 760,

794, 945, 1054, 1060, 1074–75, 1085

Paris Peace Conference, 359

Parsifal (Wagner), 103

“Party Rally of Peace,” 467, 518, 562

Pas de Calais, 762, 1037

Pasewalk, 29, 32

Pastors’ Emergency League, 238

Patch, Gen. Alexander, 1086

Patria, S.S., 377

Patriotic Front, 338

Patton, Gen. George S., 1076, 1085, 1086, 1089, 1093, 1094, 1101, 1102

Paul, Prince Regent of Yugoslavia, 823

Paulus, Field Marshal Friedrich, 830, 840, 909, 918 fn. , 919, 926–27, 929–

34, 1014–15

Pearl Harbor, 870, 887, 888, 891, 892, 893, 894, 896, 899, 901 fn.

peasants, German, 91–94, 236, 256–57

Pechel, Rudolf, 558

Peenemunde, 1009

Peiper, Col. Jochen, 1095 fn.

Peipus, Lake, 1052

Pemsel, Maj. Gen. Max, 1038, 1039

People’s Court (Volksgericht), 269, 375, 1023, 1025 fn., 1060 fn., 1068,

1070–71, 1072, 1073, 1074, 1076–77, 1079, 1080

People’s Marine Division, 54, 55

People’s Party, Bavarian, see Bavarian People’s Party

People’s Party, German, see German People’s Party

Pershing, Gen. John J., 750 fn.

Persia, see Iran

Persian Gulf, 805, 809, 829, 915

Perth, Lord, 408

Pertinax (André Géraud), 390, 424 fn.

Petacci, Clara, 1005, 1131

Pétain, Marshal Henri Philippe, 643 fn., 737, 738, 741, 745–46, 747, 812,

814–15, 923–24

Peter, King of Yugoslavia, 823, 826

Peters, Dr. Gerhard, 972

Petersberg, 391

Petersdorff, Captain von, 942

Petsamo, 811, 846

Petzel, Gen. Walter, 557

Pfaffenberger, Andreas, 984

Philip, Prince of Hesse, 146, 336, 343, 352, 984 fn. , 1003

Phipps, Sir Eric, 384, 610, 617

Picasso, Pablo, 244

Piedmont, 554

Pichelsdorf, 1129, 1137

Pierlot, Hubert, 729

Piffraeder, Oberfuehrer, 1061

Pilsudski, Marshal Józef, 209, 213, 458

Pinder, Professor, 251

Pissa river, 629, 631

Pitman, Key, 478 fn.

Pittsburgh, Pa., 358

Pius XI, Pope 235

Pius XII, Pope (Eugenio Pacelli), 234, 561, 648, 693, 747, 1024

Plettenberg, Countess Elizabeth von, 1026

Ploen, 1134

Ploesti, 1085

Ploetzensee prison, 1071, 1076

Poehner, Ernst, 71

Poelzl, Klara, see Hitler, Klara Poelzl

Poetsch, Dr. Leopold, 13

Pohl, Dr. Emil, 974

Pohl, Oswald, 963–64, 974

Poincaré, Raymond, 61

Pokorny, Dr. Adolf, 979–80, 990

Poland, 41, 84, 209, 211, 282, 283, 359, 466 fn. , 639–43, 657, 692, 693,

710; created by Versailles Treaty, 58, 458–59; nonaggression pact with

Hitler, 212–13, 286; relations with France, 212–13, 295, 299, 306, 426–27,

457, 458; German plans for war with, 304, 437, 463, 467–69, 484–89, 491,

494, 496–99, 507–11, 513, 515–21, 525–32, 542, 556–57, 565, 589–91; policy toward Czechs, 362, 368, 377, 387–88, 417 fn., 421; toward Russia,

377, 457, 459, 460, 464, 469, 478, 495, 460, 536–37, 543; Hitler demands

461, Danzig and Corridor, 455–61, 462, 463–71, 499, 500; British, French

463, representations in support of, 464, 464–66, 469, 472, 495, 504, 465,

506, 516–17, 533–38, 545–51, 466, 556–57, 562, 568–89, 591–93, 467,

600–2, 604–20, 634; Nazi–Soviet 468, talks on partition of, 482, 501, 469,

505, 515–21, 541–44, 562; Italy refuses to enter war against, 551—57,

564–68, 603–4; German propaganda campaign against, 563–64, 575–76,

593–95; German invasion and conquest of, 597, 600, 603, 619–20, 625–27,

632, 633, 635, 714–15, 719, 720, 838, 1124; Russian invasion of, 626–32,

639; German occupation of, 659–65, 687, 782, 796, 799, 808, 832, 839,

842, 904, 937, 938, 944, 945, 947–48, 950, 956–58, 964–68, 974–79, 993,

1009 fn., 1139, 1143; liberation, 1007, 1041, 1090, 1096–97

Polish Air Force, 600, 625

Polish Army, 462, 469, 472, 520, 536–37, 542, 557, 620, 621, 625, 626,

633–35, 708

Polish Corridor, 212, 455, 457, 461, 462, 464, 465, 471, 497, 509, 546, 563,

569, 572–73, 575, 576, 577, 582, 583, 608–9, 625

Polish Navy, 695

Political Workers’ Circle, 36

Pomerania (Pomorze), 458, 460, 497, 625

Popitz, Johannes, 373, 659, 670, 846 fn. , 904, 907, 908, 1017, 1023, 1072

Porsche, Dr. Ferdinand, 266

Portugal, 785, 788, 789, 792, 817

Posen, 212, 458, 626, 659, 937–38, 944, 954, 966

Potemkin, Vladimir, 482

Potsdam, 3, 54–55, 166, 182, 196–97, 375, 413, 1072

Pour le Mérite (Ger. decoration), 49

Po Valley, 1107

Prague, 332, 376–77, 383, 419, 420, 443–44, 446, 447 fn., 448, 991, 992,

1064

Pravda, 496

Preuss, Hugo, 56 fn. , 241

Preysing, Cardinal Count, 1048 fn.

Price, Ward, 280–81, 283

Prien, Oberleutnant Guenther, 646

Priess, Hermann, 1095 fn.

Priestley, J. B., 784

Primo de Rivera, Miguel, 787, 788

Prince of Wales (Br. battleship), 901 fn.

Prinz Eugen (Ger. hvy. cruiser), 914

Pripet Marshes, 810, 811

prisoners of war, 744, 854 fn., 932, 940, 942 fn., 946–47, 948, 949, 951–56,

969, 973, 979, 1029, 1086, 1095 fn. , 1100, 1105, 1114–15

Progressive Party, 55–56

Propaganda Ministry, 167, 196, 204, 244–45, 246, 247, 387, 636, 638,

1061, 1062–63, 1110, 1121–22, 1143; see also Goebbels Protestant Church, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 251

Proust, Marcel, 241

Prussia (kingdom), 92–98, 196–97, 236, 259, 1015, 1087

Prussia (federal state), 154, 155, 159, 160, 165, 184, 186, 191, 200; see also

East Prussia, West Prussia

Pryor, Gen. W. W., 698–99

Puaux, Gabriel, 334 fn.

Puch, 821

Qattara Depression, 919

Quisling, Maj. Vidkun Abraham Lauritz, 675–78, 701, 704, 705, 706,

709 fn., 755 fn.

Raczyński, Count Edward, 551, 602

radar, 775, 776, 781, 1007, 1037

Raeder, Gr. Adm. Erich, 207, 214–15, 273, 305, 313, 314, 317, 321, 365,

401, 462, 484, 487, 488, 497, 515 fn. , 529 fn., 622, 636–38, 646, 667, 670,

742, 873, 877, 878 fn. , 914, 915, 1080; naval building program, 281–82,

487, 622; Norway campaign, 674–79, 683, 696, 697 fn., 710; Britain invasion plans, 752, 758–59, 763–68, 770, 771; urges concentration on Mediterranean area, 812–13, 818–21, 828–29, 912–13; urges attack on U.S.

shipping, 879, 880, 882, 895, 901–2; ousted as Navy C. in C, 1000; sentenced at Nuremberg, 1143

Ramsgate, 762, 763, 766, 767

Rangsdorf, 1048, 1054–55, 1057, 1058

Rapallo, 494

Rascher, Dr. Sigmund, 984–90

Rashid Ali, 828, 841

Rassenkunde, 259; see also “master race” concept

Rastenburg, E. Prussia, 101, 849, 863, 919, 920, 922, 925, 928, 932, 941,

998, 1001, 1002, 1004, 1010, 1015, 1020, 1026–27, 1034, 1058, 1062,

1066, 1069, 1070, 1075, 1077, 1080, 1107; attempt to assassinate Hitler at,

1045–57

Rath, Ernst vom, 430–31

Rathenau, Walther, 34, 51, 241, 245

Rattenhuber, Oberfuehrer, 1049

Raubal, Angela Hitler, 9, 131

Raubal, Friedl, 131

Kaubal, Geli, 9–10, 131, 132, 152, 153, 221, 223, 244 fn. , 1111

Rauschning, Hermann, 169, 784

Ravensbrueck, 272, 979, 989, 990, 992, 1025

Réal, Jean, 105

Reckse, Doctor, 1025

Red, Case, 303

Reed, Douglas, 784

Regensburg, 71

Regina Palace Hotel, Munich, 418

Reich Broadcasting Corp., 247, 467 fn.

Reich Central Security Office, see R.S.H.A.

Reich Chamber of Art, 244

Reich Chamber of Culture, 241–44

Reich Chamber of Films, 247

Reich Chamber of Radio, 247

“Reich Church,” 237, 238, 240

Reich Committee of German Youth Associations, 252–53

Reich Defense Council (Reichsverteidigungsrat), 208, 275, 281, 282, 290,

497–98

Reich Defense Law, secret (May 31, 1935), 259, 285 fn.

Reich Economic Chamber, 262

Reichenau, Field Marshal Walter von, 183, 325, 335, 626, 724, 725, 730,

755 fn., 762, 763, 767, 861 fn., 903 fn.

Reich Food Estate, 258

Reich Governors, 200

Reich Music Chamber, 242

Reich Press Chamber, 246

Reich Press Law (Oct. 4, 1933), 245

Reichsbank, 145, 146, 204, 260, 261, 311, 351–52, 439 fn. , 973–74

Reichsbanner, 160

Reichsgericht (Ger. Supreme Court), 269

Reichsgesetzblatt (official gazette), 434

Reichskriegsflagge, 71, 72

Reichsrat, 153, 198

Reichstag, 95, 151, 153, 163, 173, 174, 176, 180, 194, 318, 560; Nazi representation in, 118, 119, 123, 138, 146, 148, 149, 166, 172, 186, 196; Nazi program in, 127, 144, 162, 167, 184, 196–201, 229, 237; dissolutions of, 137, 155, 161, 164–65, 170–72, 179, 181, 189, 294 fn.; elections of, 138,

166, 172, 211, 237, 347; Goebbels expelled from, 157; support of Hitler-Papen govt., 182, 197–201, 210, 274; votes Hitler absolute power, 867; Hitler speeches in, 213, 234, 291, 562–63, 828, 834; repudiation of Versailles Treaty, 299, 300; on peace, 209, 280, 285, 290, 470–76, 641–42,

752–55, 761, 762; on 1934 purge, 220, 223, 224, 226, 268; on Anschluss,

348, 349; on Czech invasion, 365; on beginning of Polish war, 598–600,

603, 604; on war with U.S., 895–900; on annihilation of Jews, 964

Reichstag fire, 146, 191–95, 196, 223, 269, 274, 653, 654

Reich Statistical Office, 264

Reichswehr, 33, 34, 46, 60; becomes Wehrmacht, 285 fn. ; see also Army, German

Reich Theater Chamber. 242–43

Reichwein, Adolf, 1044, 1072

Reims, 1093, 1138–39, 1141

Reinberger, Maj. Helmut, 671–72

Reinecke, General, 1063, 1065

Reinhardt, Gen. Georg-Hans, 724, 731, 859

Reinhardt, Max, 242

Reitlinger, Gerald, 970, 973, 978, 1025 fn.

Reitsch, Hanna, 1111, 1118–19, 1120, 1122, 1133

Remagen, 1101

Remarque, Erich Maria, 241

Remer, Maj. Otto, 1061–66, 1069

Rennes, 1037

Renthe-Fink, Cecil von, 700

reparations, German, World War I, 51, 58, 61, 64, 112, 117, 136, 137, 152,

154, 943

Republican Party (U.S.), 748

Repulse (Br. battleship), 901 fn.

Reuben James (U.S. destroyer), 883

Reuters, 1122

Reventlow, Count Ernst zu, 123

Reynaud, Paul, 720, 726, 729, 738

Rheydt, 124

Rhine river, 634, 646, 723, 738, 1088–89, 1090, 1095, 1099, 1101, 1102,

1105

Rhineland, remilitarization of, 211, 282, 286, 290–96, 299, 302, 327, 378,

459, 530, 543, 635, 657, 714

Rhone Valley, 691, 740, 1086

Ribbentrop, Gertrud von, 1056 fn.

Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 233, 276, 302, 381, 406 fn., 435 fn. , 507, 556–57,

560, 595 fn. , 596 fn., 620, 672, 676, 741, 742, 751 fn., 814, 924, 955, 1017 fn.,

1097, 1112, 1113, 1126, 1142–43; personal characteristics, 181, 298, 415,

436; ambassador to Britain, 288, 298, 335, 344–45; appointed Foreign

Min., 319; and Goering, mutual dislike, 298, 469, 483, 1056; at Hitler-

Schuschnigg meeting, 328, 347; and Czechoslovakia, 360, 364, 365, 376,

377, 405, 408, 409, 421, 429, 439–42, 444, 446–47, 449, 451–52; at Hitler-

Chamberlain talks, 385, 396; pact with France, 437; negotiations with

Poland, 455–57, 459, 460–61, 463–64, 499, 588; rejects British, French

protests on Memel, 461–62; talks with Duce, Ciano on war co-operation,

436, 482–83, 508–10, 512, 548, 551–55, 564, 566, 687–90, 816, 821, 845,

910, 923; negotiations with U.S.S.R., 491, 492, 500, 501, 505, 513–14,

520–28, 531, 535 fn. , 537–41, 545, 547, 609, 621–22, 627, 629–31, 639,

674, 793–95, 801–9, 847–49; negotiations with West on Poland, 562,

570 fn., 576–78, 580–83, 585 fn. , 586–89, 591, 602, 605–7, 613; relations

with U.S., 637, 683, 686, 748, 871, 881–96 passim, 897 fn.; rejects British,

French ultimatums, 615–18; relations with Norway, Denmark, 696–98, 703,

704, 706; Windsor kidnap plot, 785–91; dealings in Balkans, 795, 800, 801,

823–24; declaration of war on U.S.S.R., 848–49; relations with Japan, 871–

72, 874–78, 881–96; declaration of war on U.S., 900

Riccione, 851

Richardson, William, 852 fn., 912

Richthofen Fighter Squadron, 49

Rickenbacker, Eddie, 684

Riess, Curt, 1063 fn.

Riga, 794, 967

Rintelen, General von, 825

Rio de Janeiro (Ger. transport), 695

Riom trial, 609 fn.

Ripka, Herbert, 390

Ritter, Gerhard, 1046 fn.

Riviera, French, 740, 1086

Robeson, Paul, 784 fn.

Robin Moor (U.S. freighter), 882

Rocca delle Caminate, 1005

Rockefeller, John D., 688

Roehm, Ernst, 4, 39, 46, 63, 120, 155, 159, 160, 313, 317, 371, 691, 834; background, 38; with Goering, organizes S.S., 49; in Beer Hall Putsch, 66,

71, 73, 75; break with Hitler (1925), 118; returns to party, heads S.A., S.S.,

146–48; contact with Schleicher, 152, 161, 216; friendship with Hitler, 207,

216; named to Cabinet, 208; rift with Hitler over radicalism, 204–8, 213–

17; purged, 219–22, 224–26, 273, 1056–57

Roenne, Colonel Freiherr von, 1030

Roepke, Wilhelm, 95, 99 fn., 251

Rokossovski, Gen. Konstantin, 929

Roman Catholic Church, 23, 24, 55–56, 61, 64, 92, 119, 157, 166, 201,

234–35, 237–40, 326, 332, 341, 350, 355, 370, 374, 1048, 1060 fn.

Roman Empire, 104, 106, 305

Rome, 436, 450, 469–70, 746, 910, 996, 1001, 1002, 1004, 1005, 1006,

1036

Rome–Berlin Axis, 298, 301, 324, 353, 478–79, 482–84, 491, 508, 547,

665–66, 800

Rommel, Field Marshal Erwin, 724, 999, 1000, 1085; in N. Africa, 827–29,

902, 911–15, 919–22, 934; in anti-Hitler plot, 1030–32, 1041–42, 1047,

1076–80; in Normandy, 1036–42; urges Hitler seek peace, is cashiered,

1039–41; wounded in air attack, 1041–42, 1047; suicide and funeral, 1078–

80

Rommel, Frau, 1031, 1078–79

Rommel, Manfred, 107, 8

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 435 fn., 544 fn. , 684 fn., 686 fn., 688, 815 fn. , 827 fn.,’

828, 829, 871, 872, 874, 887, 888, 894–95, 907; peace efforts, 209–10, 400,

469–75, 508 fn., 560–61, 574, 683, 684, 687, 714, 749; recalls ambassador,

433 fn., 685; negotiations with Japanese, 873 fn., 884–87, 892; Nazi gibes at,

470–75, 875 fn., 897–900; Atlantic naval policy, 877 fn., 880–82; war aims,

904, 1033 fn.; death of, delights Nazis, 1110

Rosen, Count Eric von, 49

Rosenberg, Alfred, 39, 67, 73, 97, 108, 118, 122, 123, 149, 154, 236, 240,

253, 276, 835; background, 48–49; contact with Quisling, 676–78; and

German occupation of Eastern Europe, 832–34, 939–42, 947–48, 952–53;

plunder of art treasures, 945–46; Nuremberg trial and execution, 1142–43

Rosenman, Samuel I., 897 fn.

Ross, Colin, 683 fn.

Rossbach, Lieutenant, 66

Rosterg, August, 144

Rostock, Capt. Max, 992

Rostov, 859, 860–61, 865, 916, 928, 952

“Rote Kapelle,” 1043 fn.

Rothschild, Baron Louis de, 351

Rotterdam, 721, 722–23, 769

Rovno, 841

Royal Oak (Br. battleship), 646

R.S.H.A. (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Reich Central Security Office), 782–

84, 958, 1024, 1026, 1063; see also S.D.

rubber, synthetic, 282, 301, 840

Ruegen, 266

Ruge, Colonel, 704, 708, 709

Ruhr, 61–65, 112, 282, 301, 486, 517 fn., 634, 635, 645, 793, 1088–89,

1096, 1097, 1098, 1102, 1105

Rumania, 283, 399–400, 530, 626, 799, 817, 823, 824, 909; relations with France, Britain, 295, 426–27, 469, 495; policy toward U.S.S.R., 478, 495,

534, 538 fn. ; Hungary takes Transylvania from, 800–1; Nazi–Soviet struggle

for control of, 541, 609, 610, 632, 794, 795, 797, 800–1, 803–8, 810, 811,

815, 817, 820, 822, 823, 839, 842, 845, 847, 858; Nazi driven out by Red Army, 1007, 1085, 1098

Rumanian Army, 869, 911, 915, 926, 928, 932

Runciman, Lord, 376–77, 386, 388–89, 392, 416

Rundfunkhaus, see Broadcasting House

Rundstedt, Field Marshal Gerd von, 165, 293, 355, 747, 757 fn.; relieved of commands (four times), 318–19, 861, 865, 903 fn., 1041, 1099; in Polish invasion, 488, 497; in Battle of France, 718, 726, 731–34; named Field Marshal, 755 fn. ; Britain invasion plan, 761, 762; Russian campaign, 830,

853, 855, 858–61, 865, 903 fn. ; and anti-Hitler plotters, 906, 1030, 1032; C.

in C. West, 906, 918, 922, 923, 1036–41, 1086, 1087, 1089–91, 1094; sacked again, 1099

Rupprecht, Crown Prince of Bavaria, 46 fn., 63, 67, 72–73, 371

Russell, Bertrand, 100 fn., 784

Russian Air Force, 502 fn., 855, 926, 1053, 1100

Russian Army, 502 fn. , 534, 797, 810, 811, 822; invades Poland, 627, 628; attacks Finland, 675 ( see also Finland; Russo–Finnish War); seizes Baltic

States, 794; takes over Bessarabia, Bucovina, 795; war with Germany, 852,

854, 855, 857, 859–60, 862–65, 869, 886, 909, 915, 939, 973, 1000, 1006–

7, 1033, 1036, 1041, 1042, 1046, 1085, 1090, 1096, 1097, 1105, 1107,

1120; at Stalingrad, 915, 922, 926–33; meets Americans at Elbe, 1106,

1107, 1112; Battle of Berlin, 1106, 1108, 1112, 1117, 1118, 1129, 1130,

1132, 1134–36

Russo–Finnish War, 665–66, 668–69, 675, 676, 682, 683

Russo-Japanese neutrality pact, 876–77

Rust, Bernhard, 127, 248–49

Ruthenia, 440, 443, 449–50

Rzhev, 868

S.A. (Sturmabteilung, storm troopers or Brownshirts), 3, 4–5, 143, 146–48,

154, 159–60, 167, 169, 176, 183, 190, 191, 192, 194, 195, 199, 202 fn. , 237,

249, 263, 270, 271, 273, 1081; beginnings of, 38, 42–43, 49; and Beer Hall Putsch, 66–71; conflict with Army, 120, 143, 204–8, 213–16, 226, 317; Bruening’s ban on, 160–65; Hitler’s suppression of, 215, 217, 219–26; role

in Austrian Anschluss, 327, 351

Saalfelden, 529 fn.

Saar, 283, 286, 568, 569, 738, 1095, 1101

Saarbruecken, 291 fn. , 435

Sachsenhausen, 238, 239, 270, 272, 352, 655

Sack, Dr. Carl, 140

Saefkow, Anton, 1044

St.-Germain, 1077

St.-Germain, Treaty of, 41, 347

St-Hardouin, Jacques Tarbé de, 506

St.-Lô, 1076

St.-Omer, 728, 731

St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna, 19, 338, 350

St. Wolfgang, 509

Sakhalin, 809

Salerno, 1002

Salonika, 823

Salzburg, 8, 27 fn. , 325, 330, 333, 337, 348, 350, 509, 546, 552, 910–11,

928, 995

Sammler, Rudolf, 1064 fn.

San river, 541, 626, 629, 631

Sandomierz, 626

Sanger, Margaret, 241

San Remo, 440

Santayana, George, 100

Sarajevo, 826

Sardinia, 1003

Sas, Col. J. G., 694, 715–16

Saturday, Hitler’s “surprise day,” 284, 300 fn.

Sauckel, Fritz, 948 fn., 951, 1142–43

Sauerbruch, Dr. Ferdinand, 251, 979 fn. , 1025, 1029

Saxony, 65, 363

Scapa Flow, 646

Schacht, Dr. Hjalmar H. G., 112, 145–46, 167, 189–90, 229, 351–52, 427,

918 fn., 1073–74, 1115, 1142–43; plans for war economy, 259–61, 275,

285 fn.; out of war economy post, 310–11, 320; in anti-Hitler conspiracy,

373, 405, 411–13, 517, 558, 560, 650, 659, 907

“Schaemmel, Major,” 653

Scharnhorst, Gen. Gerhard Johann David von, 1028, 1081

Scharnhorst (Ger. battle cruiser), 281, 711, 914

Schaub, Julius, 279, 1113

Schaumburg-Lippe, Prince, 519 fn.

Scheidemann, Philipp, 34 fn. , 51, 52, 57, 60

Scheldt, Hans-Wilhelm, 678

Scheliha, Franz, 1043 fn.

Schellenberg, Gen. Walter, 520 fn., 653–55, 783–84, 785, 787 fn. , 788, 789,

791, 991 fn. , 1066, 1114

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 102

Scheringer, Lieutenant, 139–42

Scheubner-Richter, Max Erwin von, 67, 69, 70–74, 118

Schicklgruber, Alois, 6, 7, 1123

Schicklgruber, Maria Anna, 7

Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von, 97, 243

Schirach, Baidur von, 149, 252–53, 275, 348 fn., 1142–43

Schkopau, 282

Schlabrendorff, Fabian von, 373, 374, 380 fn. , 558, 648, 905, 1014 fn. , 1019,

1020–21, 1022 fn. , 1024, 1026, 1029, 1049, 1071–72, 1073/7!., 1074

Schlageten Leo, 967 fn.

Schleicher, Gen. Kurt von, 3, 56 fn. , 137, 150–55, 159–67, 169–70, 172–75,

182, 183, 216; background, 150–52; his chancellorship, 175–82, 229; purge victim, 222, 224, 320, 414

Schleswig, 58, 94, 1134

Schleswig-Holstein, 516

Schlieffen plan, 717

Schmid, Dr. Willi, 223, 224 fn.

Schmidt, Gen. Arthur, 931

Schmidt, Charlotte (Frau von Brauchitsch), 319

Schmidt, Dr. Guido, 325, 326 fn. , 328, 329–30, 344 fn.

Schmidt, Hans, 316, 317, 354

Schmidt, Dr. Paul, 293, 301, 408, 409, 436 fn. , 437, 441 fn., 538, 551, 555,

556, 580–82, 606–7, 613–14, 639, 684 fn. , 686, 688–89, 744, 804, 805, 807,

814, 815, 834, 848–49, 874; on Hitler-Chamberlain negotiations, 385, 386,

392, 394, 395, 397, 398, 399 fn., 401, 415, 419, 549; anti-Hitler conspirator,

406; at Hitler-Hácha meeting, 445, 447; at Hitler-Duce meetings, 816, 996,

1055–56; at Hitler-Matsuoka meeting, 876; on Hitler’s declaring war on

U.S., 896

Schmidt, Theresa, 14

Schmidt, Willi, 223–24

Schmitt, Dr. Karl, 206, 261

Schmundt, Gen. Rudolf, 357, 360, 378, 484, 485, 1019, 1022, 1054 fn.

Schneidhuber, Obergruppenfuehrer, 221, 222

Schniewind, Adm. Otto, 484, 766

Schnitzler, Arthur, 241

Schnitzler, Georg von, 144, 190

Schnurre, Dr. Julius, 476, 481, 495, 500, 501, 505, 506, 513, 525, 667, 668,

839–40

Schobert, Gen. Eugen Ritter von, 355

Schoenaich, General Freiherr von, 32 fn.

Schoenerer, Georg Ritter von, 23

Schoenfeld, Dr. Hans, 1017, 1018

Schoerner, Field Marshal Ferdinand, 1113, 1121, 1129

Scholl, Hans, 1022–23

Scholl, Sophie, 1022–23

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 103

Schrader, Col. Werner, 1027

Schreiber, Capt. Richard, 676, 702

Schroeder, Baron Kurt von, 144, 178

Schulenburg, Herr von, 228

Schulenburg, Count Friedrich Werner von der, 376, 476–77, 481–82, 490–

94, 496, 500, 501, 505, 513, 514, 520, 521 fn., 522–28, 540 fn., 621, 627–31,

793, 795, 801, 803, 839, 840–41, 842, 844, 847–49, 876; in anti-Hitler conspiracy, 1033, 1072

Schulenburg, Count Fritz von der, 413, 1047, 1072

Schultze, Capt. Herbert, 636 fn.

Schulung, 290, 291

Schultz, Dr. Walther, 74

Schulze-Boysen, Harold, 1043 fn.

Schuschnigg, Kurt von, 180, 280, 295–96, 351, 385, 456, 457, 578–79; Anschluss, 323–44, 345 fn. , 346–52; meets with Hitler, 325–30; appeals to Mussolini, 334–35, 339, 343; resigns, 341; arrested, 352; in concentration camp, 353, 918 fn., 1074, 1115

Schuschnigg, Vera (Countess Czernin), 352

Schutzbar, Baroness Margot von, 355

Schutzstaffel, see S.S.

Schwaegermann, Guenther, 1136

Schwaerzel, Helene, 1072

Schwarz, Franz Xavier, 133

Schwerin von Krosigk, Count Lutz, 164, 260, 434, 943, 1107, 1109, 1110,

1126

Science, Education and Popular Culture, Reich Ministry of, 248–49

Scotland.675, 682, 834, 913

S.D. (Sicherheitsdienst, S.S. Security Service), 271, 273–74, 315, 430, 518–

19, 520 fn., 654, 782 fn., 783, 785, 952, 953, 955, 956, 958, 960, 963 fn., 965,

991–93, 1060–61, 1063, 1066, 1074–75, 1077

“Sea Lion.” code name for invasion of Britain, 753

Sebekovsky, Doctor, 383

Second Reich, see Germany, Second Reich

Secret Cabinet Council (Geheimer Kabinettsrat), 275, 319 fn.

Security Service, see S.D.

Sedan, 718, 723, 724

Seeckt, Gen. Hans von, 34, 55 fn., 60, 64–65, 66, 71, 139, 142, 150, 212,

458, 459, 494

Seeds, Sir William, 477 fn. , 480, 504 fn., 534, 535

Seidlitz, Gertrud, 46

Seine river, 1037, 1085, 1086

Seisser, Col. Hans von, 65–72, 75–76

Seldte, Franz, 184

Semmering, 915, 919

Senne, 1102

Serafimovich, 926

Serbia, 824, 841

Serrano Suñer, Ramón, 787, 788, 814

Seven Years’ War, 1108, 1110

Severn river, 763

Sevez, Gen. François, 1139

Seyss-Inquart, Dr. Arthur, 296, 328, 331–33, 337–42, 347, 441, 442, 661,

677, 1126, 1143

SHAEF, 1105, 1106

Shakespeare, William, 243

Shaposhnikov, Gen. Boris M., 504

Shaw, George Bernard, 243, 784

Shawcross, Sir Hartley, 961

Sherwood. Robert E., 877 fn.

Shetland Is., 673

Shkvarzev, Alexander, 617

Shulman, Milton, 319 fn. , 732 fn. , 757 fn.

Siberia, 833, 840, 885, 886, 932

Sibibor, 967

Sicily, 912, 996, 999, 1002 fn.

Sidi Barrâni, 817

Sidor, Karol, 440–41

Siegfried Line, 1086, 1089

Siemens, electrical company, 145

Sievers, Wolfram, 980–81, 982

Siewert, Lt. Col. Curt, 591

Silesia, 212, 363, 463, 497, 518, 575, 626, 797, 944, 1096, 1097, 1098

Silex, Karl, 245

Silvertown, Eng., 780

Simon, Sir John, 283, 288, 410, 453, 837

Simović, Gen. Dušan, 823, 826

Simpson, Gen. William H., 1105

Simpson, Mrs., see Windsor, Duchess of

Sinclair, Upton, 241

Singapore, 873, 874, 876, 877, 883, 885, 893

Sirovy, Gen. Jan, 391, 420, 421

Six, Dr. Franz, 782–83

Skagerrak, 695, 702

Skorzeny, Otto, 519, 1003–4, 1066, 1068–69, 1090 fn. , 1092

Skubl, Doctor, 337, 338

slave labor, 111, 484–85, 497, 940, 946–51, 954, 966, 968, 975, 979, 1034

Slavs, 21, 22, 83, 87, 88, 93, 97, 429–30, 937, 939, 950, 951

Slovakia, 358–59, 421, 429, 437–43, 449, 450–51, 460, 519, 626, 911, 956

Smigly-Rydz, Marshal Edward, 458–59, 583, 601

Smith, Capt. Truman, 46 fn.

Smith, Gen. Walter Bedell, 1106, 1138–39

Smolensk, 853, 856, 859, 1006, 1014, 1019, 1022, 1052

Snow, C. P., 784

Social Democrats; Austrian, 18, 22, 42, 325 fn., 334, 337 fn. , 350

Social Democrats, (Socialists), German, 31 fn. , 32–34, 37, 40, 55 96 fn. , 126,

129, 137, 138, 153, 155–57, 160, 165, 166, 172, 174, 178–79, 181, 185,

186, 190, 194, 195, 196, 198–99, 201, 210, 231, 237, 1044; proclaim Republic, 52; make deal with Army, 53–55, 60–61; largest party in nation,

55–56, 95, 112, 118; party dissolved, 201

Socialists, Left, 52

Soissons, 1039

Sola airfield, Norway, 702

Sola river, Poland, 971

“Soldiers’ Councils,” 34, 54

Solf. Anna, 1025

Somme river, 30, 727, 728, 732, 737, 738, 759

Sondergericht, see Special Court

Sonderkommando, 970

Song of the Nibelungs (Mell), 102

Sonnenburg, 491

South Africa, 957

Soviet Congress of Germany, 54

Soviet Union, 54, 57, 150, 209, 232, 280, 282, 299, 306, 307, 353, 455,

470, 550 fn. , 711 fn., 752, 771, 783, 822, 827, 829, 843, 1033, 1044, 1070,

1098, 1104, 1116–17; Hitler’s aims toward, 82–84, 299, 383, 426, 464, 669,

774, 785, 795–99, 810–13, 818, 821, 822, 829, 830, 837–47, 849–50, 871,

873–79; France, pact and relations with, 285, 290–91, 295, 354, 389, 390,

392, 404, 427; German–Czech issue, policy on, 285, 346, 354, 361, 362,

364–68, 376, 377, 383, 389, 390, 392, 404, 409; collective security, talks with Britain and France, 353, 460, 479, 489–92, 495–96, 500–4, 506, 521,

523, 525, 531, 533–38, 541, 542, 610; Poland, relations with, 377, 458,

459, 461, 464, 468, 478, 482, 485, 513–16, 521–22, 533–38 ( see also invasion of Poland, below); excluded from talks on Czechosl., Poland, 404,

409, 419, 427, 465 fn. , 466, 478, 481, 489; rapprochement with Germany, talks on trade and Poland, 476–77, 480–82, 489–96, 500–3, 505–7, 508 fn.,

510–12, 553, 556, 560, 617, 620–22, 626–31, 639–41, 645, 657, 666–70,

674, 687, 695 fn. , 747, 794–96, 800–5, 808–10, 839–40, 842, 844 ( see also Nazi–Soviet Pact); and Baltic States, 495, 501, 502, 515, 521, 534, 539,

541, 542, 544, 630–32, 657, 665–66, 668, 683, 747, 793–94, 797, 801; relations with Japan, 521, 522, 876–77, 878, 886, 890–92, 895; invasion of Poland, 626–32, 641; war against Finland, 665–66, 676, 683, 806; activity

in Balkans, 747, 800–3, 805–7, 817, 839, 841; German war against, 847–

48, 853–54, 857, 859–63, 870, 880, 886, 901, 910, 1010–11, 1017 fn., 1018,

1139; German occupation of, 830–34, 843, 846, 851, 854, 915, 937, 939,

940, 943–44, 947–48, 950, 954, 955, 957, 958, 962–66, 979, 993, 1029,

1139; Italy declares war on, 851; see also Russian Air Force; Russian Army

Spa, Germany, 54, 59, 153, 1092

Spaak, Paul-Henri, 672, 713–14

Spain, 281; civil war, 297–301, 304, 307, 373, 419, 566, 814; and World War II, 529, 642–43, 785–89, 791, 792, 814, 817, 819, 850, 911

Spandau, 1066

Spartacists, 52, 54–55; see also Communists in Germany

Special Court (Sondergericht), 239, 269, 270

Speer, Albert, 947 fn., 1087, 1097, 1098, 1103–4, 1111 fn. , 1117–18, 1126,

1142–43

Speidel, Gen. Hans, 1031–32, 1037, 1038, 1039, 1040, 1041, 1042, 1047,

1075, 1076–77, 1079, 1085 fn. , 1086, 1088

Spender, Stephen, 784

Spengler, Oswald, 61, 208

Sperrle, Field Marshal Hugo, 325, 755 fn., 775

Spiller, Captain, 703, 704

Spital, 7, 8, 9, 14, 23

Spitfires (Br. fighter planes), 736, 775, 776, 913

Sponeck, Gen. Count Hans von, 865–66, 903

Sportpalast, Berlin, 157, 207, 237, 396, 397–98, 407, 415, 643, 779–80

Spree river, 1137

S.S. (Schutzstaffel), Blackshirts, 143–45, 160, 202 fn. , 205, 255, 263, 269,

276, 301, 348 fn. , 352, 369, 372, 444, 461–62, 1023, 1055, 1114, 1121,

1122, 1126, 1127, 1129, 1136–37, 1141; organization of, 120–21, 148, 270,

273; control police, 191, 274; conflict with Army, 214, 226, 315, 317, 355,

660, 1024; role in Roehm purge, 215, 220, 222, 224, 226; atrocities, 271,

272, 351, 430, 659–64, 834, 934, 937–38, 947, 953, 965–68, 971, 973–78,

980–81, 983–86, 990, 1029 ( see also concentration camps; and see names

of individual occupied countries); and anti-Hitler plotters, 374, 670, 1031,

1034, 1035, 1057, 1060–61, 1063–66, 1068, 1073–75, 1077; in Czechoslovakia, 388, 449, 991; Polish border “incident,” 518–19, 595, 599; Venlo incident, 652–55; and Britain occupation plan, 782–85; rescues

Mussolini, 1003–4; arrests Goering, 1118

Security Service, see S.D.

Standarte 89, 279

Waffen S.S., 976, 1015, 1121

Waffen S.S. units:

1st S.S. Armored (Panzer) Corps, 1005, 1095 fn.

1st S.S. Panzer Div., 1095 fn.

Sixth S.S. Panzer Army, 1095 fn.

12th S.S. Panzer Div., 1038

Bodyguards ( Leibstandarte), 553, 664, 905, 1005, 1040 fn. , 1049, 1051

Das Reich Div., 993

Panzer Lehr Div., 1038

Staatspartei, see Democratic Party

Stachiewicz, General, 536, 537

Stadelheim prison, Munich, 221, 222 fn.

Stahlecker, Franz, 962

Stahlhelm, 154, 157, 191

Stalin, Joseph, 276, 427, 476–80, 496, 513, 514–15, 522, 526, 657, 689,

821, 839, 845, 852 fn., 855, 939, 1029; German pact, trade negotiations,

526–28, 531, 535 fn. , 540, 538–44, 549, 562, 630–32, 665, 667–70, 799,

800, 803, 804 fn. , 805, 809–10, 839–44; warned by West of German attack,

544 fn., 796, 843; invasion of Poland, 628–32; operations in Baltic and

Balkan states, 665, 793–95, 797; suspicious of British, 835, 837–38; takes over as Prime Min., 841; signs neutrality pact with Japan, 876; war

leadership, 909, 917, 995, 996, 1033, 1097; and German peace offers, 1011,

1012, 1017 fn., 1033, 1135

Stalingrad, 830, 857, 859, 861, 865, 909, 911, 914–19, 922, 924, 925–34,

975, 996, 1006, 1014–15, 1022, 1029, 1125

Stark, Johannes, 250

Statistical Year Book, 257

Stauffenberg, Count Berthold von, 1047, 1048, 1072

Stauffenberg, Lt. Col. Klaus Philip Schenk, Count von, 1027–31, 1033–36,

1042–55, 1057–61, 1064–65, 1067–71, 1072, 1075

Stauffenberg, Countess Nina von, 1029

Stauning, Thorvald, 698

Stavanger, 677, 681, 696, 702, 707, 721

Stavelot, 1092

Stefanie, 15

Stein, Lt. Walter, 662 fn.

Steiner, Gen. Felix, 1112–13, 1120

Steinhardt, Laurence, 521 fn., 544 fn., 843

Stempfle, Father Bernhard. 85, 133, 223

Sternberg, 43

Stevens, Maj. R. H., 653–55, 692

Steyr, 11, 14

Stieff, Gen. Hemuth, 1020, 1026, 1030, 1049, 1070–71, 1075

Stockholm, 695, 843, 1017, 1024, 1026, 1122

Stockmar, Baron Christian Friedrich von, 373

Stohrer, Eberhard von, 785–86

storm troopers, see S.A.

Storting (Norw. Parliament), 703

Stotzingen, Baroness, 222

Strang, William, 391, 495–96, 503 fn. , 523, 533

Strasbourg, 983

Strasbourg, University of, 980–83

Strasser, Gregor, 118, 122–29, 132, 143, 144, 146–49, 152, 154–55, 157,

159, 167, 171, 173, 174, 176–78, 180, 216, 222, 224, 691

Strasser, Otto, 123, 126, 127, 147, 224

Strauss, Gen. Adolf, 762

Strauss, Richard, 242

Streck, Major, 74

Streicher, Julius, 26, 44–45, 50, 73–74, 106, 118, 253, 1142–43

“Strength through Joy” (Kraft durch Freude) movement, 254, 265–66

Stresa Conference, 285, 288, 289, 296

Stresemann, Gustav, 56, 64, 66, 112, 136, 201, 212

Stroelin, Dr. Karl, 1031, 1032

Strones, 7

Stroop, Juergen, 975–78

Stuckart, Dr. Wilhelm, 347

Studie England (naval invasion plan), 759

Stuelpnagel, Gen. Karl Heinrich von, 378, 379, 591, 644, 957, 1031, 1032,

1047, 1059, 1060, 1074–77

Stuka (Ger. plane), 720, 723, 725, 776

Stumme, General, 920

Stumpff, Gen. Hans-Juergen, 775

Sturmabteilung, see S.A.

Stuttgart, 1031

Styria, 350

Sudeten Free Corps, 387, 388

Sudetenland, 358–61, 363, 365, 381 fn. , 382–83, 385–87, 392–95, 397, 398,

402–4, 406, 408, 410, 416–17, 421, 422, 425–28, 439, 444, 469, 476, 530,

543, 598, 657, 692, 693, 904; early Hitler designs on, 41, 84, 333, 359;

never part of Germany, 358, 385 fn.; Nazi agitation in, 359–60, 363, 383–

84, 387–88; Runciman mission on, 376–77, 386–88; cession demanded by

Britain, France, 389, 390, 402, 4, 16–17; Hitler’s “last territorial claim,”

397, 429, 454

Suez Canal, 757, 768, 813, 817, 827, 828, 829, 913

Sukhinichi, 869

Sundlo, Col. Konrad, 676, 701

Susloparov, Gen. Ivan, 1139

swastika, 43, 44, 240

Sweden, 400, 561, 674, 675, 681, 682, 696, 704 fn. , 711 fn., 747, 750, 808,

810, 811, 1072

Switzerland, 324, 359, 531, 563, 590, 648–49, 691, 896, 1017, 1018, 1024,

1025, 1033, 1072

Sword, Colonel, 466 fn.

synthetics, 282, 301, 1098

Syria, 473, 813

Tallinn, 630, 794

Tannenberg, 228, 530, 562, 760

Tansill, Charles C, 303 fn.

Taranto, 818 fn.

Tass, 525, 844

Tauroggen, Convention of, 1015

Taylor, Gen. Maxwell D., 1002 fn.

Taylor, Telford, 32 fn., 378 fn. , 732 fn., 738

Teddy’s Perspiration Powder, 19

Tegernsee, 166, 221, 1129 fn.

Teleki, Count Paul, 507–8

Televaag, 993

Tempelhof Field, 202

Terboven, Josef, 220, 709 fn.

Teriberka, 667

Terneuzen, 728

Tesch, Bruno, 972

Tesch & Stabenow, 972

Teschen, 377, 388, 421, 458

Teutonic Knights, 83, 255

Texas (U.S. battleship), 880

Thadden, Elisabeth von, 1025

Thaelmann, Ernst, 157–59

Thailand, 886, 892

Thames river, 763, 768

Theresienstadt, 991

Thiele, Gen. Fritz, 1057, 1059, 1072

Thirty Years’ War, 91–92

Thoma, Gen. Wilhelm Ritter von, 920

Thomas, Gen. Georg, 259, 413 fn., 488–89, 497, 517–18, 530, 559–60, 644,

649, 659, 667 fn. , 693, 799

Thompson, Dorothy, 1016

Thomsen, Hans, 471 fn. , 684–85, 686 fn. , 747–50, 894 fn. , 896–97

Thorkelson, Congressman, 748

“Thousand-Year Reich,” 5, 230, 916, 1139

Thuengen, General Freiherr von, 1035, 1061, 1073

Thuringia, 65, 148, 173, 176, 375

Thyssen, Fritz, 134, 144, 145, 146, 176, 190, 206, 261, 263

Tiergarten, Berlin, 5, 1065, 1102 fn., 1117, 1118, 1120, 1129, 1133

Tilburg, 722

Timoshenko, Marshal Semën K., 854, 856–57, 864

Tippeiskirch, Werner von, 427, 802, 803, 839, 868

Tirpitz, Grand Adm. Alfred von, 288, 373, 1043 fn.

Tirpitz (Ger. battleship), 467

Tiso, Monsignor, 440, 441, 442

Tobruk, 827, 911

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 103

Todt, Doctor, 378, 515 fn.

Togo, Shigenori, 886–87, 889, 891, 893 fn.

Tojo, Gen. Hideki, 885

Tokyo, 877, 878

Tolischus, Otto D., 101 fn.

Tomaschek, Rudolphe, 250

Topf, I. A., & Sons, 971

Torgau, 1106

Torgler, Ernst, 170, 193–94

Toscanini, Arturo, 333

Total War (Ludendorff), 259

Toulon, 740, 821, 924–25

Toussaint, Col. Rudolf, 363, 401

Toynbee, Arnold, 504 fn. , 632 fn.

Toyoda, Admiral, 878 fn. , 884, 885

trade unions, 34, 134, 153, 155, 157, 160, 165, 172, 174, 180, 185, 186,

201–3, 231, 263, 267, 373; see also labor, German

“Transport Exercise Stettin,” 462

Transport Ministry, 497

Trans-Siberian Railway, 799 fn. , 878

Transylvania, 800

Traunstein, 34

Treblinka, 272, 967, 968–69, 975, 977, 978

Treitschke, Heinrich von, 95, 97, 99

Tresckow, Maj. Gen. Henning von,-905, 1018–19, 1020–21, 1022, 1026,

1029, 1035, 1042–43, 1049, 1052, 1074

Tresckow, Erika von, 1035

Trevor-Roper, H. R., 1111, 1129 fn. , 1131 fn.

Trier, 291 fn., 1092

Trieste, 1005

Tripartite (Three-Power) Pact, 803, 805, 808, 823, 871, 872, 873, 874, 875,

884, 885, 889, 890, 894, 900

Tripoli, 821, 914, 922

Tripolitania, 827

Tromsö, 708, 709

Trondheim, 681, 696, 701, 707, 708, 710, 721, 752

Troost, Professor, 156

Trotha, Admiral Adolf von, 253

Trott zu Solz Adam von, 558, 1018, 1047, 1072fn,

Truppenamt, 62, 285 fn.

Tsaritsyn, 917 fn.

Tschirschky, Baron, 348 fn.

Tuebingen, University of, 1031–32

Tuka, Dr. Vojtech, 359, 439–40, 449

Tula, 863, 864

Tunisia, 740, 746, 924, 925, 995, 996, 1029

Turin, 740 fn., 995

Turkey, 530, 805, 806, 808, 809, 813, 1026

Turkish Straits, 804, 807–10

Tyrol, 337 fn., 350, 353, 1005, 1072, 1074

U-30 (Ger. submarine). 622, 637–38

U-47, 646

U-110, 638 fn.

U-253, 880

U-boats, are under Navy, German

Udet, Gen. Ernst, 903 fn.

Ukraine, 627, 628, 632, 798, 811, 822, 832, 851, 853, 856–57, 858, 859,

916, 919, 939, 959, 961, 965, 1001, 1048 fn.

Ullstein, House of, 245, 246

Ulm, 139–42, 1031

Umberto, Crown Prince of Italy, 999

Union of Revolutionary National Socialists, 147–48

United Press, 802

United States, 117, 266, 684 fn. , 685, 688, 735, 737, 750, 753, 768, 802,

854 fn., 923–24, 1095 fn. , 1099; war aid to Britain, France, 367, 400, 521 fn.,

605 fn., 658, 666, 685, 771, 815 fn., 818, 874, 879–84, 898; anti-Hitler conspirators’ contact with, 373, 1042; peace efforts of, 400, 469–75, 683; sentiment against Nazi excesses, 433; isolationist and pro-German

influence in, 436 fn. ; possible entry into war, 508 fn. , 518, 554, 645, 684–85,

798, 804, 805, 813, 820–22, 827, 850, 874–75, 877–80; nationals of, on

Athenia, 622, 637; Nazi propaganda, sabotage in, 684–85, 747–50, 871,

872; German preparations for war with, 853, 873, 879, 887, 888–91; relations with U.S.S.R., 842–43, 1011, 1033, 1098; Hitler’s ignorance

about, 871, 875 fn. ; belligerent action in Atlantic, 880–83; takes over

Iceland for British, 881; Japanese negotiations, war on U.S., 883–96, 900–

1, 1007; Italy declares war on, 889–91, 900; war with Germany, 894–902,

904, 910, 915, 952, 954–55, 1138–39; ship losses in Atlantic, 913

U.S. Army, 684, 750 fn. , 769 fn., 854 fn. , 887, 954–55; in Ardennes, 1092,

1093, 1095; in Austria, 918 fn. , 1072, 1074; in France, 1033, 1038, 1076,

1080, 1090; in Germany, 1089, 1102, 1105–7, 1109, 1112, 1115, 1141; in Italy, 956, 1002; in N. Africa, 1029; Malmédy massacre, 954, 1095 fn.

U.S. Army, Air Force, 1008–9, 1025 fn. , 1040, 1071, 1100

U.S. Army units:

ARMIES:

First, 1086, 1088, 1089, 1090, 1092–93, 1105

Third, 1076, 1085, 1086, 1089, 1090, 1093, 1101, 1107

Fifth, 1002

Seventh, 983, 1086, 1101, 1107

Ninth, 1088, 1089, 1105

DIVISIONS:

2nd Armored, 1093

4th Infantry, 1085

9th Armored, 1101

69th Infantry, 1106

101st Airborne, 1093

U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve, 827 fn.

U.S. Navy, 872, 873, 877 fn., 879, 880–83, 887, 892, 895, 898, 901, 913

U.S. Office of Strategic Services, 1018

U.S. State Department, 295, 493 fn. , 555 fn., 684, 842–43, 895 fn., 896–97

U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, 943

U.S. War Council, 887

United States of Europe, 1032

United Steel Works, 144, 190

Untermenschen, 937

Ural Mts., 942

Urbays, Juozas, 461

Urfahr, 14

USCHLA (Untersuchung-und-Schlichtungs-Ausschuss, Committee for

Investigation and Settlement), 122, 221

Uruguay, 669–70

U.S.S.R., see Soviet Union

Utrecht, 721

Uxkull-Gyllenbrand, Countess von, 1028

V-bombs (V-l, V-2), 1009 fn., 1037, 1040, 1098–99

Vachell, Group Captain, 466 fn.

Vaernes, 701

Valenciennes, 728

“Valkyrie,” 1033–35, 1046, 1054, 1057, 1058, 1060

Vansittart, Sir Robert, 360, 380

Vatican, 201, 234, 648–49, 693, 716, 719, 750, 995, 999, 1023 fn., 1024

Venice, 217, 845, 1005

Venlo, 519 fn. , 653–55

Ventotene, 1003

Verdun, 726, 1075, 1077, 1086

Vermehren, Erich, 1026

Vermeil, Edmond, 105

Vernichtungslager (extermination camps), 664–65, 967–74

Verona, 509, 845 fn. , 1005

Versailles Treaty, 32, 34, 41, 57–60, 63, 137, 142, 152–53, 186–87, 209,

211, 212, 231, 357 fn., 458, 462, 473, 475, 604, 615 fn. , 635, 641; Hitler’s repudiation of, 281–86, 289, 299, 372

Vian, Capt. Philip, 679

Vichy, 923, 924

Victor Emmanuel III, King of Italy, 353, 554 fn. , 996–99, 1002 fn. , 1003,

1004 fn., 1005 fn.

Victoria, Queen of England, 373

Viebahn, Gen. Max von, 335

Vienna, 8, 9, 132, 275, 304, 322–23, 325 fn., 340–41, 343, 349–53, 800–1,

823, 1004; Hitler’s youth in, 15–28, 31, 37; Dollfuss murder in, 279–80; Hitler enters after Anschluss, 347–48; anti-Nazi coup plans for, 1034, 1064;

occupied by Red Army, 1106, 1107

Vilna, 534, 967

Vinnitsa, 916, 919

Vire river, 1038

Vishinsky, Andrei, 794, 1070

Vistula river, 497, 532, 541, 626, 629, 631, 663, 1033, 1085, 1090, 1096,

1097

Vladivostok, 876, 877, 878, 883, 886

Voegler, Albert, 144, 190

Voelkischer Beobachter, 46, 49, 66, 85, 109, 118, 121, 122, 129, 139, 140,

149, 154, 158, 208, 220, 246, 320, 343, 564, 638, 642, 653, 658 fn.

Voelkisch movement, 123

Vogt, General, 253

Volga river, 811, 859, 860, 909, 914, 916–17, 918, 919, 926, 939, 942,

1006

Volksdeutsche, 546, 630, 663–64, 665

Volksgericht, see People’s Court

Volkssturm, 1123, 1130

Volkswagen, 266–67

Vologda, 870

Vormann, General von, 550 fn.

Voronezh, 915

Voroshilov, Marshal Kliment E., 503, 504, 533–38, 541–42, 854

Voss, Admiral, 1121

Vossische Zeitung, 245

Vyazma, 859

Vyborg, 1085

Wachenfeld, see under Berchtesgaden

Wagner, Adolf, 221, 230

Wagner, Cosima, 105

Wagner, Gen. Eduard, 660–61, 1030, 1049, 1058, 1065, 1074

Wagner, Eva, 105

Wagner, Friedelind, 279

Wagner, Richard, 15, 76, 97, 101–5

Wagner, Siegfried, 101–2

Wagner, Walter, 1123

Wagner, Winifred, 101, 131, 132

Wahnfried, 101–2, 105

Waldeck, Prince, 984 fn.

“Waldsee,” 969

Waldtrudering, 121

Waldviertel, 7

Wales, 763

Wallenberg, Jakob, 1017, 1018, 1026

Wallenberg, Marcus, 1017

Wanderer, The (Goebbels), 124

Wangenheim, Lieutenant von, 313–14

Wannsee, 965, 1047, 1048

War, Ministry of, 285 fn. , 318

war debts, see reparations

War veterans: Germans, 38, 39, 42, 72, 154, 214; French, 281

Warburg, Professor, 250

Warburton-Lee, Capt. B.A.W., 707

Warlimont, Col. Walter, 758, 797, 799

Warsaw, 355, 504, 550 fn. , 597, 600, 626, 627, 629, 631, 639, 640, 769,

937, 944, 968, 973–79, 1085, 1097

Warspite (Br. battleship), 707

Wasp (U.S. carrier), 213

Wasserman, Jakob, 241

Wavell, Gen. Sir Archibald, 818 fn.

Wavre, 724

Webb, Beatrice, 784

Weber, Christian. 49, 221, 1121

Wecke, Major, 183

Wednesday Club, 373

“Week of the Broken Glass,” 430–35

Wehrle, Father Herman, 1060 fn.

Wehrmacht, Hitler’s restoration of, 190, 285 fn.; anti-Nazi plotters’ plan for,

1035, 1054, 1058, 1065, 1069

Wehrpolitische Amt of the S.A., 120

Wehrwirtschaft (war economy), 259

Weidling, General, 1130

Weimar, 56, 57, 100, 173

Weimar Republic, see Germany, Republic of

Weinbacher, Karl, 972

Weissler, Doctor, 238

Weissmann, Doctor, 1071

Weizmann, Chaim, 784

Weizsaecker, Baron Ernst von, 462, 470–71, 510 fn., 546 fn., 550 fn., 553,

554, 561, 637–38, 643, 652, 665 fn., 685 fn. , 686, 687, 884; and anti-Hitler plot, 381–82, 591, 648–49, 715, 1023; in negotiations on Czechosl., 360,

364, 415, 421, 437, 444, 451–53; in Russian negotiations, 479–80, 491–93,

495, 500, 501, 505, 513, 521, 528, 543 fn. , 667; in peace negotiations on Polish crisis, 587, 588, 591, 595 fn. , 599, 605, 617

Welczeck, Count Johannes von, 430, 502

Welke, Ehm, 246

Welles, Sumner, 521 fn., 683, 685–88, 689–90, 843

Wells, H.G., 241, 784

Wells, Otto, 198–99

Wenck, General, 1120–21, 1129, 1130

Wendt, Lieutenant, 139–42

“Werewolf,” 916

Weseruebung (“Weser Exercise”), 673–712

Wessel, Horst, 147

West, Rebecca, 784

Westarp, Count von, 56

Westphal, Gen. Siegfried, 1001

Westphalia, 220; Peace of, 91–92, 644

West Prussia, 944, 1097

West Wall, 295, 367, 368, 370, 378, 469, 486, 492, 498, 510, 515 fn., 516,

590, 725

Weygand, Gen. Maxime, 502, 728, 730, 737, 738, 744–46, 923

Wheeler-Bennett, John W., 31 fn. , 55 fn., 225 fn. , 380 fn., 389 fn., 390 fn. , 403

White, Case, 466–69, 488, 497, 550 fn. , 556, 589, 597, 600 fn.

White Book of the Purge, The, 223

White Rose Letters, 1022–23

White Russia, 627, 628, 798, 811, 832, 962

White Sea, 798

Whitworth, Vice-Adm. W. J., 707

Widerstand (Resistance), 373

Wiechert, Ernst, 242

Wiegand, Karl von, 748

Wiessee, 217, 221, 314

Wietersheim, Gen. Gustav von, 369–70

Wildpark-Werder, 1115

“Wilfred,” 696

Wilhelm I, King of Prussia and Kaiser of Germany, 95

Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 29, 31, 52, 53, 56, 58, 94, 95, 99, 103, 104, 106, 107–8,

109, 153, 197, 200, 243, 288, 406, 485–86, 499, 598, 658, 692–93, 713,

738 fn., 754 fn. , 871, 907, 1025, 1139

Wilhelm, Prince, 907

Wilhelmina, Queen of the Netherlands, 561, 640, 652, 721, 723, 729

Wilhelmshaven, 467, 752

Willstaetter, Richard, 250

Wilmot, Chester, 1041 fn.

Wilson, Sir Horace, 382, 391, 396, 397, 398–99, 401, 402, 407, 416–17,

418, 572, 583, 585 fn.

Wilson, Hugh R., 360, 433 fn.

Wilson, Woodrow, 52, 57, 898

Windau, 539

“Winds” message to Nomura, 886

Windsor, Duchess of (Mrs. Simpson), 298, 785, 787, 788, 789, 792

Windsor, Duke of (Edward VIII), 298, 596 fn., 751 fn. , 783, 785–92

Winkelmann, Gen. H. G., 723

Winterhilfe, 264, 643, 779

Wisconsin, University of, 1043 fn.

Wittelsbach monarchy, 33, 64, 67, 70

Wittenberg, 237

Witzleben, Field Marshal Erwin von, 284, 318–19, 375, 405, 407–8, 411,

412, 413, 422, 426, 530, 558–59, 670, 755 fn. , 906, 1030, 1035, 1036, 1048,

1054, 1058, 1064–65, 1070–71, 1075, 1079

Wlodawa, 626

Woermann, Dr. Ernst, 429, 897 fn.

Wolf, Otto, 144

Wolfers, Alfred, 274

Wolfsschanze (Wolfs Lair), 849, 870, 881, 882, 919, 1000 fn., 1046, 1048–

49

Wolzek, 968

Woods, Sam E. 842–43

Woolff, Virginia, 784

Woolwich Arsenal, 780

World Jewish Congress, 978

World War I, 108, 282, 283, 544, 597–98, 630, 635, 637, 658, 673, 717,

727, 754 fn., 760, 794, 800, 823, 897, 918, 957, 1007, 1081; Hitler’s service in, 29–30, 1124; armistice, 29, 31–32, 52, 58–59, 741–42, 1036; peace terms, see Versailles Treaty; Germany’s mistakes in, 485, 486, 546, 645

Wrench, John Evelyn, 288 fn.

Wuensdorf, 1057

Wuerttemberg, 131, 1028

Yellow, Case, 682, 710, 717, 718, 719

Yorck von Wartenburg, Count Peter, 1015, 1016, 1028, 1070–71

Young, Desmond, 1079 fn.

Young Plan, 136, 145, 943

Ypres, 29, 30, 730

Yugoslavia, 295, 399–400, 426–27, 469, 470, 530, 804, 808, 815, 823–24,

825, 826, 828–30, 839, 841, 842, 874, 875, 993, 1006

Zander, Wilhelm, 1129

Zaporozhe, 1001, 1007

Zech-Burkersroda, Count Julius von, 713

Zehlendorf, 715

Zeitzler, Gen. Kurt, 360–61, 915, 918, 919, 925–27, 928, 933

Zeller, Eberhard, 1046 fn., 1050 fn.

Zeughaus, Berlin, 1021, 1022 fn.

Zhdanov, Andrei, 496, 794

Zhukov, Gen. Georgi, 864–65, 866, 869, 891, 1097, 1106, 1135 fn.

Zichenau, 944

Ziegenberg, 1089, 1091, 1108

Ziegler, Adolf, 133 fn. , 244

Ziereis, Franz, 967 fn.

Zoellner, Doctor, 238, 239

Zola, Emile, 241, 736

Zossen, 518, 560, 658, 670, 694, 1058, 1065

Z Plan, 487, 622

Zurich, 563, 1018

Zweig, Arnold, 241

Zweig, Stefan, 24, 241

Zwoelf-Uhr Blatt, 564

Zyklon B, 970, 972

Document Outline

Foreword

Book One: The Rise of Adolf Hitler

1. Birth of the Third Reich

2. Birth of the Nazi Party

3. Versailles, Weimar and the Beer Hall Putsch

4. The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich

Book Two: Triumph and Consolidation

5. The Road to Power: 1925–31

6. The Last Days of the Republic: 1931–33

7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34

8. Life in the Third Reich: 1933–37

Book Three: The Road to War

9. The First Steps: 1934–37

10. Strange, Fateful Interlude: The Fall of Blomberg, Fritsch, Neurath and Schacht

11. Anschluss: The Rape of Austria

12. The Road to Munich

13. Czechoslovakia Ceases to Exist

14. The Turn of Poland

15. The Nazi-Soviet Pact

16. The Last Days of Peace

17. The Launching of World War II

Book Four: War: Early Victories and the Turning Point

18. The Fall of Poland

19. Sitzkrieg in the West

20. The Conquest of Denmark and Norway

21. Victory in the West

22. Operation Sea Lion: The Thwarted Invasion of Britain

23. Barbarossa: The Turn of Russia

24. A Turn of the Tide

25. The Turn of the United States

26. The Great Turning Point: 1942—Stalingrad and El Alamein

Book Five: Beginning of the End

27. The New Order

28. The Fall of Mussolini

29. The Allied Invasion of Western Europe and the Attempt to Kill Hitler

Book Six: The Fall of the Third Reich

30. The Conquest of Germany

31. Goetterdaemmerung : The Last Days of the Third Reich

A Brief Epilogue

Afterword

Notes

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Index