The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

William L. Shirer

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Books by William L. Shirer

NonfictionBerlin DiaryEnd of a Berlin DiaryMidcentury JourneyThe Challenge of ScandinaviaThe Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

FictionThe TraitorStranger Come HomeThe Consul’s Wife

ALL RIGHTS RESERVEDINCLUDING THE RIGHT OF REPRODUCTIONIN WHOLE OR IN PART IN ANY FORMCOPYRIGHT © 1959, 1960 BY WILLIAM L. SHIRERPUBLISHED BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER, INC.ROCKEFELLER CENTER, 630 FIFTH AVENUENEW YORK, N.Y.

THIRD PRINTING

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 60-6729MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICABY GEO. MC KIBBIN AND SON, INC.

CONTENTS

Foreword ix

Book One: THE RISE OF ADOLF HITLER

1. Birth of the Third Reich 3

2. Birth of the Nazi Party 29

3. Versailles, Weimar and the Beer Hall Putsch 52

4. The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich 80

Book Two: TRIUMPH AND CONSOLIDATION

5. The Road to Power: 1925-31 117

6. The Last Days of the Republic: 1931-33 150

7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933-34 188

8. Life in the Third Reich: 1933-37 231

Book Three: THE ROAD TO WAR

9. The First Steps: 1934—37 279

10. Strange, Fateful Interlude: The Fall of Blomberg,

Fritsch, Neurath and Schacht 309

11. Anschluss: The Rape of Austria 322

12. The Road to Munich 357

13. Czechoslovakia Ceases to Exist 428

14. The Turn of Poland 455

15. The Nazi-Soviet Pact 513

16. The Last Days of Peace 545

17. The Launching of World War II 597

v

CONTENTS

vi

Book Four: WAR: EARLY VICTORIES ANDTHE TURNING POINT

18. The Fall of Poland 625

19. Sitzkrieg in the West 633

20. The Conquest of Denmark and Norway 673

21. Victory in the West 713

22. Operation Sea Lion: The Thwarted Invasion of Britain 758

23. Barbarossa: The Turn of Russia 793

24. A Turn of the Tide 853

25. The Turn of the United States 871

26. The Great Turning Point: 1942—Stalingrad and

El Alamein 903

Book Five: BEGINNING OF THE END

27. The New Order 937

28. The Fall of Mussolini 995

29. The Allied Invasion of Western Europe and the

Attempt to Kill Hitler 1014

Book Six: THE FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

30. The Conquest of Germany 1085

31. Goetterdaemmerung: The Last Days of the Third Reich 1107

Notes 1145

Acknowledgments 1179

Bibliography 1181

Index

1193

1 have often felt a bitter sorrow at the thought of the Germanpeople, which is so estimable in the individual and so wretched inthe generality . . . —Goethe

Hitler was the fate of Germany and this fate could not be stayed.—Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, Com-mander in Chief of the German Army, 1938-41A 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

Though i lived and worked in the Third Reich during the first half ofits brief life, watching at first hand Adolf Hitler consolidate his poweras dictator of this great but baffling nation and then lead it off to war andconquest, this personal experience would not have led me to attempt towrite this book had there not occurred at the end of World War II anevent unique in history.

This was the capture of most of the confidential archives of the Germangovernment and all its branches, including those of the Foreign Office, theArmy and Navy, the National Socialist Party and Heinrich Himmler’ssecret police. Never before, I believe, has such a vast treasure fallen intothe hands of contemporary historians. Hitherto the archives of a greatstate, even when it was defeated in war and its government overthrownby revolution, as happened to Germany and Russia in 1918, were pre-served by it, and only those documents which served the interests of thesubsequent ruling regime were ultimately published.

The swift collapse of the Third Reich in the spring of 1945 resulted inthe surrender not only of a vast bulk of its secret papers but of other price-less material such as private diaries, highly secret speeches, conference re-ports and correspondence, and even transcripts of telephone conversa-tions of the Nazi leaders tapped by a special office set up by HermannGoering in the Air Ministry.

General Franz Haider, for instance, kept a voluminous diary, jotteddown in Gabelsberger shorthand not only from day to day but from hourto hour during the day. It is a unique source of concise information forthe period between August 14, 1939, and September 24, 1942, when hewas Chief of the Army General Staff and in daily contact with Hitler andthe other leaders of Nazi Germany. It is the most revealing of the Germandiaries, but therd are others of great value, including those of Dr. JosephGoebbels, the Minister of Propaganda and close party associate of Hitler,and of General Alfred Jodi, Chief of Operations of the High Commandof the Armed Forces (OKW). There are diaries of the OKW itself and

IX

X

FOREWORD

of the Naval High Command. Indeed the sixty thousand files of theGerman Naval Archives, which were captured at Schloss Tambach nearCoburg, contain practically all the signals, ships’ logs, diaries, memoranda,etc., of the German Navy from April 1945, when they were found, backto 1868, when the modern German Navy was founded.

The 485 tons of records of the German Foreign Office, captured by theU.S. First Army in various castles and mines in the Harz Mountains justas they were about to be burned on orders from Berlin, cover not only theperiod of the Third Reich but go back through the Weimar Republic tothe beginning of the Second Reich of Bismarck. For many years after thewar tons of Nazi documents lay sealed in a large U.S. Army warehouse inAlexandria, Virginia, our government showing no interest in even open-ing the packing cases to see what of historical interest might lie withinthem. Finally in 1955, ten years after their capture, thanks to the initia-tive of the American Historical Association and the generosity of a coupleof private foundations, the Alexandria papers were opened and a piti-fully small group of scholars, with an inadequate staff and equipment, wentto work to sift through them and photograph them before the government,which was in a great hurry in the matter, returned them to Germany. Theyproved 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 dis-cussed at Hitler’s headquarters, and the fuller text of the Nazi warlord’stable talk with his old party cronies and secretaries during the war; thefirst of these was rescued from the charred remains of some of Hitler’spapers at Berchtesgaden by an intelligence officer of the U.S. 101st Air-borne Division, and the second was found among Martin Bormann’spapers.

Hundreds of thousands of captured Nazi documents were hurriedlyassembled at Nuremberg as evidence in the trial of the major Nazi warcriminals. While covering the first part of that trial I collected stacks ofmimeographed copies and later the forty-two published volumes of testi-mony and documents, supplemented by ten volumes of English transla-tions of many important papers. The text of other documents publishedin a fifteen-volume series on the twelve subsequent Nuremberg trials wasalso of value, though many papers and much testimony were omitted.

Finally, in addition to this unprecedented store of documents, thereare the records of the exhaustive interrogation of German military officersand party and government officials and their subsequent testimony underoath at the various postwar trials, which provide material the like of whichwas never available, I believe, from such sources after previous wars.

I have not read, of course, all of this staggering amount of documenta-tion—it would be far beyond the power of a single individual. But I haveworked my way through a considerable part of it, slowed down, as alltoilers 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 inGermany during the Nazi time, journalists and diplomats, really knew

FOREWORD

XI

of what was going on behind the facade of the Third Reich. A totali-tarian dictatorship, by its very nature, works in great secrecy and knowshow to preserve that secrecy from the prying eyes of outsiders. It waseasy enough to record and describe the bare, exciting and often revoltingevents in the Third Reich: Hitler’s accession to power, the Reichstag fire,the Roehm Blood Purge, the Anschluss with Austria, the surrender ofChamberlain at Munich, the occupation of Czechoslovakia, the attackson Poland, Scandinavia, the West, the Balkans and Russia, the horrors ofthe Nazi occupation and of the concentration camps and the liquidationof the Jews. But the fateful decisions secretly made, the intrigues, thetreachery, the motives and the aberrations which led up to them, the partsplayed by the principal actors behind the scenes, the extent of the terrorthey exercised and their technique of organizing it—all this and muchmore remained largely hidden from us until the secret German papersturned up.

Some may think that it is much too early to try to write a history of theThird Reich, that such a task should be left to a later generation of writersto whom time has given perspective. I found this view especially preva-lent in France when I went to do some research there. Nothing more re-cent than the Napoleonic era, I was told, should be tackled by writers ofhistory.

There is much merit in this view. Most historians have waited fiftyyears or a hundred, or more, before attempting to write an account of acountry, an empire, an era. But was this not principally because it tookthat long for the pertinent documents to come to light and furnish themwith the authentic material they needed? And though perspective wasgained, was not something lost because the authors necessarily lacked apersonal acquaintance with the life and the atmosphere of the times andwith the historical figures about which they wrote?

In the case of the Third Reich, and it is a unique case, almost all of thedocumentary material became available at its fall, and it has been en-riched by the testimony of all the surviving leaders, military and civilian,in some instances before their death by execution. With such incom-parable sources so soon available and with the memory of life in NaziGermany and of the appearance and behavior and nature of the men whoruled it, Adolf Hitler above all, still fresh in my mind and bones, I de-cided, at any rate, to make an attempt to set down the history of the riseand fall of the Third Reich.

“I lived through the whole war,” Thucydides remarks in his History ojthe Peloponnesian War, one of the greatest works of history ever written,“being of an age to comprehend events and giving my attention to themin order to know the exact truth about them.”

I found it extremely difficult and not always possible to learn the exacttruth about Hitler’s Germany. The avalanche of documentary materialhelped one further along the road to truth than would have seemed possibletwenty years ago, but its very vastness could often be confusing. And in

xn

FOREWORD

all human records and testimony there are bound to be baffling contradic-tions.

No doubt my own prejudices, which inevitably spring from my experi-ence and make-up, creep through the pages of this book from time totime. I detest totalitarian dictatorships in principle and came to loathe thisone the more I lived through it and watched its ugly assault upon the hu-man spirit. Nevertheless, in this book 1 have tried to be severely objective,letting the facts speak for themselves and noting the source for each. Noincidents, scenes or quotations stem from the imagination; all are basedon documents, the testimony of eyewitnesses or my own personal observa-tion. 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. Thatis inevitable, since no man’s opinions are infallible. Those that I haveventured here in order to add clarity and depth to this narrative are merelythe best I could come by from the evidence and from what knowledge andexperience I have had.

Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors inthe tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reichthe 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 his-tory, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the bal-listic missile and of rockets that can be aimed to hit the moon.

In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftlythe old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will belaunched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Sucha war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be noconquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead onan uninhabited planet.

Book One

+ + +

THE RISEOF

ADOLF HITLER

1

BIRTH OF THE THIRD REICH

On the very eve of the birth of the Third Reich a feverish tensiongripped Berlin. The Weimar Republic, it seemed obvious to almosteveryone, was about to expire. For more than a year it had been fastcrumbling. General Kurt von Schleicher, who like his immediate pred-ecessor, Franz von Papen, cared little for the Republic and less for itsdemocracy, and who, also like him, had ruled as Chancellor by presidentialdecree without recourse to Parliament, had come to the end of his ropeafter fifty-seven days in office.

On Saturday, January 28, 1933, he had been abruptly dismissed by theaging President of the Republic, Field Marshal von Hindenburg. AdolfHitler, leader of the National Socialists, the largest political party inGermany, was demanding for himself the chancellorship of the demo-cratic Republic he had sworn to destroy.

The wildest rumors of what might happen were rife in the capital thatfateful 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 inChief of the Army, was preparing a putsch with the support of thePotsdam garrison for the purpose of arresting the President and establish-ing a military dictatorship. There was talk of a Nazi putsch. The Berlinstorm troopers, aided by Nazi sympathizers in the police, were to seize theWilhelmstrasse, where the President’s Palace and most of the governmentministries were located. There was talk also of a general strike. OnSunday, January 29, a hundred thousand workers crowded into theLustgarten in the center of Berlin to demonstrate their opposition to mak-ing Hitler Chancellor. One of their leaders attempted to get in touch withGeneral von Hammerstein to propose joint action by the Army andorganized labor should Hitler be named to head a new government.1 Oncebefore, at the time of the Kapp putsch in 1920, a general strike had savedthe Republic after the government had fled the capital.

Throughout most of the night from Sunday to Monday Hitler paced

3

4 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

up and down his room in the Kaiserhof hotel on the Reichskanzlerplatz,just down the street from the Chancellery.2 Despite his nervousness hewas supremely confident that his hour had struck. For nearly a monthhe had been secretly negotiating with Papen and the other leaders of theconservative Right. He had had to compromise. He could not have apurely Nazi government. But he could be Chancellor of a coalitiongovernment whose members, eight out of eleven of whom were not Nazis,agreed with him on the abolition of the democratic Weimar regime. Onlythe aged, dour President had seemed to stand in his way. As recently asJanuary 26, two days before the advent of this crucial weekend, the grizzlyold Field Marshal had told General von Hammerstein that he had “nointention whatsoever of making that Austrian corporal either Minister ofDefense or Chancellor of the Reich.”3

Yet under the influence of his son, Major Oskar von Hindenburg, ofOtto von Meissner, the State Secretary to the President, of Papen andother members of the palace camarilla, the President was finally weaken-ing. He was eighty-six and fading into senility. On the afternoon of Sun-day, January 29, while Hitler was having coffee and cakes with Goebbelsand other aides, Hermann Goering, President of the Reichstag and secondto Hitler in the Nazi Party, burst in and informed them categorically thaton the morrow Hitler would be named Chancellor.4

Shortly before noon on Monday, January 30, 1933, Hitler drove overto the Chancellery for an interview with Hindenburg that was to provefateful for himself, for Germany and for the rest of the world. From awindow in the Kaiserhof, Goebbels, Roehm and other Nazi chiefs keptan anxious watch on the door of the Chancellery, where the Fuehrerwould shortly be coming out. “We would see from his face whether hehad succeeded or not,” Goebbels noted. For even then they were notquite sure. “Our hearts are torn back and forth between doubt, hope, joyand discouragement,” Goebbels jotted down in his diary. “We havebeen disappointed too often for us to believe wholeheartedly in the greatmiracle.”5

A few moments later they witnessed the miracle. The man with theCharlie Chaplin mustache, who had been a down-and-out tramp in Viennain his youth, an unknown soldier of World War I, a derelict in Munich inthe first grim postwar days, the somewhat comical leader of the Beer HallPutsch, this spellbinder who was not even German but Austrian, and whowas only forty-three years old, had just been administered the oath asChancellor of the German Reich.

He drove the hundred yards to the Kaiserhof and was soon with hisold cronies, Goebbels, Goering, Roehm and the other Brownshirts whohad helped him along the rocky, brawling path to power. “He says noth-ing, and all of us say nothing,” Goebbels recorded, “but his eyes are fullof tears.”6

That evening from dusk until far past midnight the delirious Nazistorm troopers marched in a massive torchlight parade to celebrate thevictory. By the tens of thousands, they emerged in disciplined columns

from the depths of the Tiergarten, passed under the triumphal arch of theBrandenburg Gate and down the Wilhelmstrasse, their bands blaring theold martial airs to the thunderous beating of the drums, their voicesbawling the new Horst Wessel song and other tunes that were as old asGermany, their jack boots beating a mighty rhythm on the pavement, theirtorches held high and forming a ribbon of flame that illuminated the nightand kindled the hurrahs of the onlookers massed on the sidewalks. Froma window in the palace Hindenburg looked down upon the marchingthrong, beating time to the military marches with his cane, apparentlypleased that at last he had picked a Chancellor who could arouse thepeople 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 theparade he had turned to an old general and said, “I didn’t know we hadtaken so many Russian prisoners.”

A stone’s throw down the Wilhelmstrasse Adolf Hitler stood at anopen 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 dif-ferent feelings. “The river of fire flowed past the French Embassy,”Andre Frangois-Poncet, the ambassador, wrote, “whence, with heavyheart and filled with foreboding, I watched its luminous wake.”7

Tired but happy, Goebbels arrived home that night at 3 a.m. Scribblingin his diary before retiring, he wrote: “It is almost like a dream ... afairy tale . . . The new Reich has been born. Fourteen years of workhave 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 oftenreferred to as the “Thousand-Year Reich.” It lasted twelve years and fourmonths, but in that flicker of time, as history goes, it caused an eruptionon this earth more violent and shattering than any previously experienced,raising the German people to heights of power they had not known inmore than a millennium, making them at one time the masters of Europefrom the Atlantic to the Volga, from the North Cape to the Mediterranean,and then plunging them to the depths of destruction and desolation atthe end of a world war which their nation had cold-bloodedly provokedand during which it instituted a reign of terror over the conquered peopleswhich, in its calculated butchery of human life and the human spirit, out-did all the savage oppressions of the previous ages.

The man who founded the Third Reich, who ruled it ruthlessly andoften with uncommon shrewdness, who led it to such dizzy heights andto such a sorry end, was a person of undoubted, if evil, genius. It is truethat he found in the German people, as a mysterious Providence andcenturies of experience had molded them up to that time, a natural instru-ment which he was able to shape to his own sinister ends. But without

6

THE* RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Adolf Hitler, who was possessed of a demonic personality, a granite will,uncanny instincts, a cold ruthlessness, a remarkable intellect, a soaringimagination and—until toward the end, when, drunk with power andsuccess, he overreached himself—an amazing capacity to size up peopleand situations, there almost certainly would never have been a ThirdReich.

“It is one of the great examples,” as Friedrich Meinecke, the eminentGerman historian, said, “of the singular and incalculable power of person-ality in historical life.”10

To some Germans and, no doubt, to most foreigners it appeared thata charlatan had come to power in Berlin. To the majority of GermansHitler had—or would shortly assume—the aura of a truly charismaticleader. They were to follow him blindly, as if he possessed a divine judg-ment, for the next twelve tempestuous years.

THE ADVENT OF ADOLF HITLER

Considering his origins and his early life, it would be difficult to imaginea more unlikely figure to succeed to the mantle of Bismarck, the Hohen-zollern emperors and President Hindenburg than this singular Austrianof 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 Braunauam Inn, across the border from Bavaria.

The place of birth on the Austro-German frontier was to prove signifi-cant, for early in his life, as a mere youth, Hitler became obsessed withthe idea that there should be no border between these two German-speak-ing peoples and that they both belonged in the same Reich. So strongand enduring were his feelings that at thirty-five, when he sat in a Germanprison dictating the book that would become the blueprint for the ThirdReich, his very first lines were concerned with the symbolic significanceof his birthplace. Mein Kampf begins with these words:

Today it seems to me providential that fate should have chosen Braunau amInn as my birthplace. For this little town lies on the boundary between twoGerman states which we of the younger generation at least have made it ourlife-work to reunite by every means at our disposal. . . . This little city on theborder seems to me the symbol of a great mission.11

Adolf Hitler was the third son of the third marriage of a minor Austriancustoms official who had been bom an illegitimate child and who for thefirst thirty-nine years of his life bore his mother’s name, Schicklgruber.The name Hider appears in the maternal as well as the paternal line. BothHider’s grandmother on his mother’s side and his grandfather on hisfather’s side were named Hitler, or rather variants of it, for the familyname was variously written as Hiedler, Huetler, Huetder and Hitler.

Birth of the Third Reich 7

Adolf s mother was his father’s second cousin, and an episcopal dispensa-tion had to be obtained for the marriage.

The forebears of the future German Fuehrer, on both sides, dwelt forgenerations in the Waldviertel, a district in Lower Austria between theDanube and the borders of Bohemia and Moravia. In my own Viennadays 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, andthough only some fifty miles from Vienna it has a somewhat remote andimpoverished 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 northof them. Intermarriage is common, as in the case of Hitler’s parents, andillegitimacy is frequent.

On the mother s side there was a certain stability. For four generationsKlara Poelzl’s family remained on peasant holding Number 37 in thevillage of Spital.1- The story of Hitler’s paternal ancestors is quite dif-ferent. The spelling of the family name, as we have seen, changes; theplace of residence also. There is a spirit of restlessness among theHitlers, an urge to move from one village to the next, from one job toanother, to avoid firm human ties and to follow a certain bohemian lifein 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 monthsafter his first marriage, in 1824, a son was born, but the child and themother did not survive. Eighteen years later, while working in Duerenthal,he married a forty-seven-year-old peasant woman from the village ofStrones, Maria Anna Schicklgruber. Five years before the marriage, onJune 7, 1837, Maria had had an illegitimate son whom she named Aloisand who became Adolf Hitler’s father. It is most probable that the fatherof Alois was Johann Hiedler, though conclusive evidence is lacking. Atany rate Johann eventually married the woman, but contrary to the usualcustom in such cases he did not trouble himself with legitimizing the sonafter the marriage. The child grew up as Alois Schicklgruber.

Anna died in 1847, whereupon Johann Hiedler vanished for thirtyyears, only to reappear at the age of eighty-four in the town of Weitra inthe Waldviertel, the spelling of his name now changed to Hitler, to testifybefore a notary in the presence of three witnesses that he was the fatherof 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. Accord-ing to Heiden, Alois later confided to a friend that it was done to help himobtain 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 tardyrecognition was made on June 6, 1876, and on November 23 the parishpriest at Doellersheim, to whose office the notarized statement had beenforwarded, scratched out the name of Alois Schicklgruber in the baptismalregistry 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

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

1930s that enterprising journalists in Vienna, delving into the parisharchives, discovered the facts about Hitler’s ancestry and, disregarding oldJohann 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 beforehis birth. Had the eighty-four-year-old wandering miller not made his un-expected reappearance to recognize the paternity of his thirty-nine-year-old son nearly thirty years after the death of the mother, Adolf Hitlerwould have been born Adolf Schicklgruber. There may not be much oranything in a name, but I have heard Germans speculate whether Hitlercould have become the master of Germany had he been known to theworld as Schicklgruber. It has a slightly comic sound as it rolls off thetongue of a South German. Can one imagine the frenzied German massesacclaiming a Schicklgruber with their thunderous “Heils”? “Heil Schickl-gruber!”? Not only was “Heil Hitler!” used as a Wagnerian, paganlikechant by the multitude in the mystic pageantry of the massive Nazi rallies,but it became the obligatory form of greeting between Germans during theThird 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 afterthey were married, the future father of Adolf Hitler grew up with hisuncle, who though a brother of Johann Georg Hiedler spelled his name dif-ferently, being known as Johann von Nepomuk Huetler. In view of theundying hatred which the Nazi Fuehrer would develop from youth on forthe Czechs, whose nation he ultimately destroyed, the Christian name isworthy of passing mention. Johann von Nepomuk was the national saintof the Czech people and some historians have seen in a Hitler’s beinggiven this name an indication of Czech blood in the family.

Alois Schicklgruber first learned the trade of shoemaker in the villageof Spital, but being restless, , like his father, he soon set out to make hisfortune in Vienna. At eighteen he joined the border police in the Austriancustoms service near Salzburg, and on being promoted to the customsservice itself nine years later he married Anna Glasl-Hoerer, the adopteddaughter of a customs official. She brought him a small dowry and in-creased social status, as such things went in the old Austro-Hungarianpetty bureaucracy. But the marriage was not a happy one. She was four-teen years older than he, of failing health, and she remained childless.After sixteen years they were separated and three years later, in 1883, shedied.

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

* Hitler himself seems to have recognized this. In his youth he confided to the onlyboyhood friend he had that nothing had ever pleased him as much as his father’schange of names. He told August Kubizek that the name Schicklgruber “seemed tohim 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.)

9

Birth of the Third Reich

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 marriedthe cook and three months later she gave birth to a daughter, Angela. Thesecond marriage did not last long. Within a year Franziska was dead oftuberculosis. Six months later Alois Hitler married for the third and lasttime.

The new bride, Klara Poelzl, who would shortly become the mother ofAdolf Hitler, was twenty-five, her husband forty-eight, and they had longknown each other. Klara came from Spital, the ancestral village of theHitlers. Her grandfather had been Johann von Nepomuk Huetler, withwhom his nephew, Alois Schicklgruber-Hitler, had grown up. Thus Aloisand Klara were second cousins and they found it necessary, as we haveseen, to apply for episcopal dispensation to permit the marriage.

It was a union which the customs official had first contemplated yearsbefore when he had taken Klara into his childless home as a fosterdaughter during his first marriage. The child had lived for years with theSchicklgrubers in Braunau, and as the first wife ailed Alois seems tohave given thought to marrying Klara as soon as his wife died. Hislegitimation and his coming into an inheritance from the uncle who wasKlara s grandfather occurred when the young girl was sixteen, just oldenough to legally marry. But, as we have seen, the wife lingered on afterthe separation, and, perhaps because Alois in the meantime took up withthe cook Franziska Matzelsberger, Klara, at the age of twenty, left thehousehold and went to Vienna, where she obtained employment as ahousehold servant.

She returned four years later to keep house for her cousin; Franziskatoo, 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 somefour months and ten days later their first child, Gustav, was born. Hedied in infancy, as did the second child, Ida, born in 1886. Adolf wasthe third child of this third marriage. A younger brother, Edmund, bornin 1894, lived only six years. The fifth and last child, Paula, born in 1896,lived to survive her famous brother.

Adolfs half-brother, Alois, and his half-sister, Angela, the children ofFranziska Matzelsberger, also lived to grow up. Angela, a handsomeyoung woman, married a revenue official named Raubal and after hisdeath worked in Vienna as a housekeeper and for a time, if Heiden's in-formation is correct, as a cook in a Jewish charity kitchen.14 In 1928Hitler brought her to Berchtesgaden as his housekeeper, and thereafterone heard a great deal in Nazi circles of the wondrous Viennese pastriesand desserts she baked for him and for which he had such a ravenousappetite. She left him in 1936 to marry a professor of architecture inDresden, and Hitler, by then Chancellor and dictator, was resentful ofher departure and declined to send a wedding present. She was the onlyperson in the family with whom, in his later years, he seems to have beenclose—with one exception. Angela had a daughter, Geli Raubal, an

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attractive young blond woman with whom, as we shall see, Hitler hadthe only truly deep love affair of his life.

Adolf Hitler never liked to hear mention of his half-brother. AloisMatzelsberger, later legitimized as Alois Hitler, became a waiter, and formany years his life was full of difficulties with the law. Heiden recordsthat at eighteen the young man was sentenced to five months in jail fortheft and at twenty served another sentence of eight months on the samecharge. He eventually moved to Germany, only to become embroiled infurther troubles. In 1924, while Adolf Hitler was languishing in prisonfor having staged a political revolt in Munich, Alois Hitler was sentencedto six months in prison by a Hamburg court for bigamy. Thereafter,Heiden recounts, he moved on to England, where he quickly establisheda family and then deserted it.15

The coming to power of the National Socialists brought better times toAlois Hitler. He opened a Bierstube—a small beerhouse—in a suburbof Berlin, moving it shortly before the war to the Wittenbergplatz in thecapital’s fashionable West End. It was much frequented by Nazi officialsand during the early part of the war when food was scarce it inevitably hada plentiful supply. I used to drop in occasionally at that time. Alois wasthen nearing sixty, a portly, simple, good-natured man with little physicalresemblance to his famous half-brother and in fact indistinguishable fromdozens of other little pub keepers one had seen in Germany and Austria.Business was good and, whatever his past, he was now obviously enjoyingthe prosperous life. He had only one fear: that his half-brother, in amoment of disgust or rage, might revoke his license. Sometimes there wastalk in the little beerhouse that the Chancellor and Fuehrer of the Reichregretted this reminder of the humble nature of the Hitler family. Aloishimself, I remember, refused to be drawn into any talk whatsoever abouthis half-brother—a wise precaution but frustrating to those of us whowere trying to learn all we could about the background of the man whoby that time had already set out to conquer Europe.

Except in Mein Kampf, where the sparse biographical material is oftenmisleading and the omissions monumental, Hitler rarely discussed—orpermitted discussion of in his presence—his family background and earlylife. We have seen what the family background was. What was the earlylife?

THE EARLY LIFE OF ADOLF HITLER

The year his father retired from the customs service at the age offifty-eight, the six-year-old Adolf entered the public school in the villageof Fischlham, a short distance southwest of Linz. This was in 1895. Forthe next four or five years the restless old pensioner moved from one vil-lage to another in the vicinity of Linz. By the time the son was fifteen hecould remember seven changes of address and five different schools. Fortwo years he attended classes at the Benedictine monastery at Lambach,

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Birth of the Third Reich

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 ofone day taking holy orders. Finally the retired customs official settleddown 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. Thisrepresented a financial sacrifice for the father and indicated an ambitionthat the son should follow in his father’s footsteps and become a civilservant. That, however, was the last thing the youth would dream of.

“Then barely eleven years old,” Hitler later recounted,17 “I was forcedinto opposition (to my father) for the first time. ... I did not want tobecome a civil servant.”

The story of the bitter, unrelenting struggle of the boy, not yet in histeens, against a hardened and, as he said, domineering father is one of thefew biographical items which Hitler sets down in great detail and withapparent sincerity and truth in Mein Kampf. The conflict aroused the firstmanifestation of that fierce, unbending will which later would carry himso far despite seemingly insuperable obstacles and handicaps and which,confounding all those who stood in his way, was to put an indelible stampon Germany and Europe.

I did not want to become a civil servant, no, and again no. All attempts onmy father’s part to inspire me with love or pleasure in this profession by storiesfrom his own life accomplished the exact opposite. I . . . grew sick to mystomach at the thought of sitting in an office, deprived of my liberty; ceasingto be master of my own time and being compelled to force the content of mywhole 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 mis-understood me. But when he was clear on the subject, and particularly afterhe felt the seriousness of my intention, he opposed it with all the determinationof his nature. . . .

“Artist! No! Never as long as I live!” . . . My father would never departfrom his “Never!” And I intensified my “Nevertheless!”18

One consequence of this encounter, Hitler later explained, was that hestopped studying in school. “I thought that once my father saw howlittle progress I was making at high school he would let me devote myselfto my dream, whether he liked it or not.”19

This, written thirty-four years later, may be partly an excuse for hisfailure 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, withoutobtaining the customary certificate, he was forced to transfer to the statehigh school at Steyr, some distance from Linz. He remained there but ashort time and left before graduating.

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Hitler’s scholastic failure rankled in him in later life, when he heapedridicule on the academic “gentry,” their degrees and diplomas and theirpedagogical airs. Even in the last three or four years of his life, at SupremeArmy Headquarters, where he allowed himself to be overwhelmed withdetails of military strategy, tactics and command, he would take an eveningoff to reminisce with his old party cronies on the stupidity of the teachershe had had in his youth. Some of these meanderings of this mad genius,now the Supreme Warlord personally directing his vast armies from theVolga to the English Channel, have been preserved.

When I think of the men who were my teachers, I realize that most of themwere slightly mad. The men who could be regarded as good teachers were ex-ceptional. It's tragic to think that such people have the power to bar a youngman’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 independ-ence of thought, distinguished by unparalleled ignorance and most admirablyfitted to become the pillars of an effete system of government which, thankGod, 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 ab-normal. . . . We pupils of old Austria were brought up to respect old peopleand women. But on our professors we had no mercy; they were our naturalenemies. The majority of them were somewhat mentally deranged, and quitea few ended their days as honest-to-God lunatics! ... I was in particularbad odor with the teachers. I showed not the slightest aptitude for foreignlanguages—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 them-selves. If any pupil showed the slightest trace of originality, they persecutedhim relentlessly, and the only model pupils whom 1 have ever got to knowhave all been failures in after-life.—September 7, 1942.23

To his dying day, it is obvious, Hitler never forgave his teachers forthe poor marks they had given him—nor could he forget. But he coulddistort to a point of grotesqueness.

The impression he made on his teachers, recollected after he had be-come a world figure, has been briefly recorded. One of the few instructorsHitler seems to have liked was Professor Theodor Gissinger, who stroveto teach him science. Gissinger later recalled, “As far as I was concerned.Hitler left neither a favorable nor an unfavorable impression in Linz. Hewas 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 unusuallyopen, his eyes brilliant.”24

Professor Eduard Huemer, apparently the “congenital idiot” men-tioned by Hitler above—for he taught French—came to Munich in 1923to testify for his former pupil, who was then being tried for treason as theresult of the Beer Hall Putsch. Though he lauded Hitler’s aims and saidthat he wished from the bottom of his heart to see him fulfill his ideals, hegave the following thumbnail portrait of the young high-school student:

Hitler was certainly gifted, although only for particular subjects, but helacked self-control and, to say the least, he was considered argumentive, auto-cratic, self-opinionated and bad-tempered, and unable to submit to schooldiscipline. Nor was he industrious; otherwise he would have achieved muchbetter results, gifted as he was.25

There was one teacher at the Linz high school who exercised a strongand, as it turned out, a fateful influence on the young Adolf Hitler. Thiswas a history teacher, Dr. Leopold Poetsch, who came from the southernGerman-language border region where it meets that of the South Slavsand whose experience with the racial struggle there had made him afanatical German nationalist. Before coming to Linz he had taught atMarburg, which later, when the area was transferred to Yugoslavia afterthe 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 inMein Kampf. Hitler readily admitted his debt to this man.

It was perhaps decisive for my whole later life that good fortune gave me ahistory teacher who understood, as few others did, this principle . . . —ofretaining the essential and forgetting the nonessential ... In my teacher,Dr. Leopold Poetsch of the high school in Linz, this requirement was fulfilledin a truly ideal manner. An old gentleman, kind but at the same time firm, hewas able not only to hold our attention by his dazzling eloquence but to carryus 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 pres-ent; who, as if by magic, transported us into times past and, out of the mil-lennium mists of time, transformed dry historical facts into vivid reality. Therewe sat, often aflame with enthusiasm, sometimes even moved to tears ... Heused our budding national fanaticism as a means of educating us, frequentlyappealing 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 ayoung revolutionary.26

Some thirty-five years later, in 1938, while touring Austria in triumphafter he had forced its annexation to the Third Reich, Chancellor Hitlerstopped off at Klagenfurt to see his old teacher, then in retirement. He was

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delighted to find that the old gentleman had been a member of the under-ground Nazi S.S., which had been outlawed during Austria’s independ-ence. He conversed with him alone for an hour and later confided tomembers of his party, “You cannot imagine how much I owe to that oldman.”27

Alois Hitler died of a lung hemorrhage on January 3, 1903, at the ageof sixty-five. He was stricken while taking a morning walk and died a fewmoments later in a nearby inn in the arms of a neighbor. When histhirteen-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 inUrfahr, a suburb of Linz, where she tried to keep herself and her twosurviving children, Adolf and Paula, on the meager savings and pensionleft her. She felt obligated, as Hitler remarks in Mein Kampf, to continuehis 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 thoughthe young widow was indulgent to her son, and he seems to have loved herdearly, he was “more than ever determined absolutely,” he says, “not toundertake this career.” And so, despite a tender love between mother andson, there was friction and Adolf continued to neglect his studies.

“Then suddenly an illness came to my help and in a few weeks decidedmy future and the eternal domestic quarrel.”29

The lung ailment which Hitler suffered as he was nearing sixteen neces-sitated his dropping out of school for at least a year. He was sent for atime to the family village of Spital, where he recuperated at the home ofhis mother’s sister, Theresa Schmidt, a peasant woman. On his recoveryhe returned briefly to the state high school at Steyr. His last report, datedSeptember 16, 1905, shows marks of “adequate” in German, chemistry,physics, geometry and geometrical drawing. In geography and historyhe was “satisfactory”; in free-hand drawing, “excellent.” He felt so ex-cited at the prospect of leaving school for good that for the first and lasttime in his life he got drunk. As he remembered it in later years he waspicked up at dawn, lying on a country road outside of Steyr, by a milkmaidand helped back to town, swearing he would never do it again.* In thismatter, 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 penni-less vagabond in Vienna and Munich, and later out of conviction.

The next two or three years Hitler often described as the happiest daysof his life. f While his mother suggested—and other relatives urged—thathe go to work and learn a trade he contented himself with dreaming of

* He told this story on himself in one of his reminiscing moods on the evening ofJanuary 8-9, 1942, at Supreme Headquarters. (Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p.160.)

t “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 becameChancellor, Hitler wrote his boyhood friend, August Kubizek: “I should be veryglad ... to revive once more with you those memories of the best years of mylife.” (Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, p. 273.)

his future as an artist and with idling away the pleasant days along theDanube. He never forgot the “downy softness” of those years from sixteento nineteen when as a “mother’s darling” he enjoyed the “hollowness of acomfortable life.”80 Though the ailing widow found it difficult to makeends meet on her meager income, young Adolf declined to help out bygetting a job. The idea of earning even his own living by any kind ofregular employment was repulsive to him and was to remain so throughouthis life.

What apparently made those last years of approaching manhood sohappy for Hitler was the freedom from having to work, which gave himthe freedom to brood, to dream, to spend his days roaming the city streetsor the countryside declaiming to his companion what was wrong with theworld and how to right it, and his evenings curled up with a book orstanding in the rear of the opera house in Linz or Vienna listening enrap-tured to the mystic, pagan works of Richard Wagner.

A boyhood friend later remembered him as a pale, sickly, lanky youthwho, though usually shy and reticent, was capable of sudden bursts ofhysterical anger against those who disagreed with him. For four years hefancied himself deeply in love with a handsome blond maiden namedStefanie, and though he often gazed at her longingly as she strolled upand down the Landstrasse in Linz with her mother he never made theslightest effort to meet her, preferring to keep her, like so many otherobjects, in the shadowy world of his soaring fantasies. Indeed, in thecountless love poems which he wrote to her but never sent (one of themwas entitled “Hymn to the Beloved”) and which he insisted on readingto his patient young friend, August Kubizek,* she became a damsel outof Die Walkuerie, clad in a dark-blue flowing velvet gown, riding a whitesteed over the flowering meadows.31

Although Hitler was determined to become an artist, preferably apainter or at least an architect, he was already obsessed with politics atthe age of sixteen. By then he had developed a violent hatred for theHapsburg monarchy and all the non-German races in the multinationalAustro-Hungarian Empire over which it ruled, and an equally violent lovefor everything German. At sixteen he had become what he was to remaintill his dying breath: a fanatical German nationalist.

He appears to have had little of the carefree spirit of youth despite allthe loafing. The world’s problems weighed down on him. Kubizek laterrecalled, “He saw everywhere only obstacles and hostility ... He was

* Kubizek, who appears to have been the only friend Hitler ever had in his youth,has given in his book, The Young Hitler 1 Knew, an interesting picture of hiscompanion in the last four years before, at the age of nineteen, he skidded down tothe life of a vagabond in Vienna—a portrait, incidentally, that not only fills a bio-graphical gap in the life of the German Fuehrer but corrects somewhat the hithertoprevalent impressions of his early character. Kubizek was as unlike Hitler as can beimagined. 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 theVienna Conservatory of Music and began a promising professional career as a con-ductor and composer which was shattered by the First World War.

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always up against something and at odds with the world ... I never sawhim take anything lightly . . ,”32

It was at this period that the young man who could not stand schoolbecame a voracious reader, subscribing to the Library of Adult Educationin Linz and joining the Museum Society, whose books he borrowed inlarge numbers. His young friend remembered him as always surroundedby books, of which his favorites were works on German history andGerman mythology.33

Since Linz was a provincial town, it was not long before Vienna, theglittering baroque capital of the empire, began to beckon a youth of suchambition and imagination. In 1906, just after his seventeenth birthday,Hitler set out with funds provided by his mother and other relations tospend two months in the great metropolis. Though it was later to becomethe scene of his bitterest years when, at times, he literally lived in thegutter, Vienna on this first visit enthralled him. He roamed the streets fordays, filled with excitement at the sight of the imposing buildings along theRing 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, anda year later, in October 1907, he was back in the capital to take the en-trance examination as the first practical step in fulfilling his dream of be-coming a painter. He was eighteen and full of high hopes, but they weredashed. 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 civilservant. 4 classes in High School. Few Heads. Test drawing unsatisfactory.34

Hitler tried again the following year and this time his drawings wereso poor that he was not admitted to the test. For the ambitious young manthis was, as he later wrote, a bolt from the blue. He had been absolutelyconvinced that he would be successful. According to his own account inMein Kampf, Hitler requested an explanation from the rector of theacademy.

That gentleman assured me that the drawings I had submitted incontrovert-ibly showed my unfitness for painting, and that my ability obviously lay in thefield of architecture; for me, he said, the Academy’s School of Painting was outof 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 sorrowthat his failure to graduate from high school might well block his entryinto the architectural school.

In the meantime his mother was dying of cancer of the breast and hereturned to Linz. Since Adolf’s departure from school Klara Hitler andher relatives had supported the young man for three years, and they couldsee 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 twodays later she was buried at Leonding beside her husband. To the nine-teen-year-old youth

it was a dreadful blow ... I had honored my father, but my mother I hadloved . . . [Her] death put a sudden end to all my highflown plans . . . Pov-erty and hard reality compelled me to take a quick decision ... I was facedwith 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 hisrelatives farewell, he declared that he would never return until he hadmade good.

With a suitcase full of clothes and underwear in my hand and an indomi-table will in my heart, I set out for Vienna. I too hoped to wrest from fate whatmy father had accomplished fifty years before; I too hoped to become “some-thing”—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 timeof 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 ofthe city as the capital of an empire of fifty-two million people in the heartof Europe, Vienna had a gaiety and charm that were unique among thecapitals of the world. Not only in its architecture, its sculpture, its music,but in the lighthearted, pleasure-loving, cultivated spirit of its people, itbreathed an atmosphere of the baroque and the rococo that no other cityof 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 naturalbeauty that captivated the visitor and made the Viennese believe thatProvidence had been especially kind to them. Music filled the air, thetowering music of gifted native sons, the greatest Europe had known,Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, and, in the last Indian-summeryears, 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 passedthe pleasant days and nights of their lives waltzing and wining, in lighttalk in the congenial coffeehouses, listening to music and viewing themake-believe of theater and opera and operetta, in flirting and makinglove, 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 fewin Vienna worked overtime—or even full time—at such things.

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

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poor: ill-fed, ill-clothed and living in hovels. But as the greatest industrialcenter in Central Europe as well as the capital of the empire, Vienna wasprosperous, 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 partyof its own, the Social Democrats. There was a ferment in the life of thecity, now grown to a population of two million. Democracy was forcingout the ancient autocracy of the Hapsburgs, education and culture wereopening up to the masses so that by the time Hitler came to Vienna in1909 there was opportunity for a penniless young man either to get ahigher education or to earn a fairly decent living and, as one of a millionwage earners, to live under the civilizing spell which the capital cast overits inhabitants. Was not his only friend, Kubizek, as poor and as obscureas himself, already making a name for himself in the Academy of Music?

But the young Adolf did not pursue his ambition to enter the Schoolof Architecture. It was still open for him despite his lack of a high-schooldiploma—young men who showed “special talent” were admitted withoutsuch a certificate—but so far as is known he made no application. Norwas he interested in learning a trade or in taking any kind of regularemployment. Instead he preferred to putter about at odd jobs: shovelingsnow, beating carpets, carrying bags outside the West Railroad Station,occasionally for a few days working as a building laborer. In November1909, less than a year after he arrived in Vienna to “forestall fate,” hewas forced to abandon a furnished room in the Simon Denk Gasse, andfor the next four years he lived in flophouses or in the almost equallymiserable quarters of the men’s hostel at 27 Meldemannstrasse in theTwentieth District of Vienna, near the Danube, staving off hunger byfrequenting 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 pleas-ure, 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 methe 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, thenas a small painter; a truly meager living which never sufficed to appease evenmy daily hunger.88

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

Hunger was then my faithful bodyguard; he never left me for a momentand partook of all I had . . . My life was a continual struggle with this piti-less friend.39

It never, however, drove him to the extremity of trying to find a regularjob. 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 manuallaborers—a fear he was later to exploit in building up the NationalSocialist Party on the broad foundation of the hitherto leaderless, ill-paid,neglected white-collar class, whose millions nourished the illusion thatthey were at least socially better off than the “workers.”

Although Hitler says he eked out at least part of a living as “a smallpainter,” he gives no details of this work in his autobiography except toremark that in the years 1909 and 1910 he had so far improved his posi-tion that he no longer had to work as a common laborer.

“By this time,” he says, “I was working independently as a small drafts-man and painter of water colors.”40

This is somewhat misleading, as is so much else of a biographical naturein Mein Kampf. Though the evidence of those who knew him at the timeappears to be scarcely more trustworthy, enough of it has been piecedtogether to give a picture that is probably more accurate and certainlymore complete. *

That Adolf Hitler was never a house painter, as his political opponentstaunted him with having been, is fairly certain. At least there is no evi-dence that he ever followed such a trade. What he did was draw or paintcrude little pictures of Vienna, usually of some well-known landmarksuch as St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the opera house, the Burgtheater, thePalace of Schoenbrunn or the Roman ruins in Schoenbrunn Park. Accord-ing to his acquaintances he copied them from older works; apparently hecould not draw from nature. They are rather stilted and lifeless, like abeginning architect’s rough and careless sketches, and the human figureshe sometimes added are so bad as to remind one of a comic strip. 1 finda note of my own made once after going through a portfolio of Hitler’soriginal sketches: “Few faces. Crude. One almost ghoulish face.” ToHeiden, “they stand like tiny stuffed sacks outside the high, solemnpalaces.”41

Probably hundreds of these pitiful pieces were sold by Hitler to thepetty traders to ornament a wall, to dealers who used them to fill emptypicture frames on display and to furniture makers who sometimes tackedthem to the backs of cheap sofas and chairs after a fashion in Vienna inthose days. Hitler could also be more commercial. He often drew postersfor shopkeepers advertising such products as Teddy’s Perspiration Powder,and there was one, perhaps turned out to make a little money at Christmastime, depicting Santa Claus selling brightly colored candles, and anothershowing St. Stephen’s Gothic spire, which Hitler never tired of copying,rising out of a mountain of soap cakes.

* See Das Ende des Hitler-Mythos, by Josef Greiner, who was personally acquaintedwith Hitler during part of his Vienna days. See also Hitler the Pawn, by RudolfOlden; Olden’s book includes statements from Reinhold Hanisch, a Sudeten trampwho for a time was a roommate of Hitler’s in the men’s hostel and who hawked someof 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 forcheating him out of a share of a painting which Hanisch allegedly sold for him.

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This was the extent of Hitler’s “artistic” achievement, yet to the endof 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 over-coat, which hung down to his ankles and resembled a caftan and whichhad been given him by a Hungarian Jewish old-clothes dealer, a fellowinmate of the dreary men’s hostel who had befriended him. They remem-bered his greasy black derby, which he wore the year round; his mattedhair, brushed down over his forehead as in later years and, in the back,hanging disheveled over his soiled collar, for he rarely appeared to havehad a haircut or a shave and the sides of his face and his chin were usuallycovered with the black stubble of an incipient beard. If one can believeHanisch, who later became something of an artist, Hitler resembled “anapparition such as rarely occurs among Christians.”42

Unlike some of the shipwrecked young men with whom he lived, he hadnone of the vices of youth. He neither smoked nor drank. He had noth-ing to do with women—not, so far as can be learned, because of anyabnormality but simply because of an ingrained shyness.

“I believe,” Hitler remarked afterward in Mein Kampf, in one of hisrare flashes of humor, “that those who knew me in those days took me foran eccentric.”43

They remembered, as had his teachers, the strong, staring eyes thatdominated the face and expressed something embedded in the personalitythat did not jibe with the miserable existence of the unwashed tramp. Andthey recalled that the young man, for all his laziness when it came tophysical labor, was a voracious reader, spending much of his days andevenings devouring books.

At that time I read enormously and thoroughly. All the free time my workleft me was employed in my studies. In this way I forged in a few years’ timethe 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 theaverage member of our so-called “intelligentsia.”

I know people who “read” enormously ... yet whom I would not describeas “well-read.” True, they possess a mass of “knowledge,” but their brain isunable to organize and register the material they have taken in ... On theother hand, a man who possesses the art of correct reading will . . . instinc-tively and immediately perceive everything which in his opinion is worthpermanently remembering, either because it is suited to his purpose or gener-ally worth knowing . . . The art of reading, as of learning, is this: ... toretain the essential, to forget the nonessential.* . . . Only this kind of read-ing has meaning and purpose . . . Viewed in this light, my Vienna period wasespecially fertile and valuable.45

* The italics are Hitler’s.

Valuable for what? Hitler’s answer is that from his reading and fromhis life among the poor and disinherited of Vienna he learned all that heneeded to know in later life.

Vienna was and remained for me the hardest, though most thorough, schoolof 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 philosophywhich became the granite foundation of all my acts. In addition to what I thencreated, I have had to learn little; and I have had to alter nothing.48

What, then, had he learned in the school of those hard knocks whichVienna had so generously provided? What were the ideas which heacquired there from his reading and his experience and which, as he says,would remain essentially unaltered to the end? That they were mostlyshallow and shabby, often grotesque and preposterous, and poisoned byoutlandish prejudices will become obvious on.the most cursory examina-tion. That they are important to this history, as they were to the world, isequally obvious, for they were to form part of the foundation for theThird 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, fromthe churning maelstrom of Austrian politics and life in the first years ofthe twentieth century. The Danube monarchy was dying of indigestion.For centuries a minority of German-Austrians had ruled over the polyglotempire of a dozen nationalities and stamped their language and theirculture on it. But since 1848 their hold had been weakening. The minori-ties could not be digested. Austria was not a melting pot. In the 1860sthe Italians had broken away and in 1867 the Hungarians had wonequality with the Germans under a so-called Dual Monarchy. Now, asthe twentieth century began, the various Slav peoples—the Czechs, theSlovaks, the Serbs, the Croats and the others—were demanding equalityand at least national autonomy. Austrian politics had become dominatedby the bitter quarrel of the nationalities.

But this was not all. There was social revolt too and this often trans-cended the racial struggle. The disenfranchised lower classes were de-manding the ballot, and the workers were insisting on the right to organizetrade unions and to strike—not only for higher wages and better workingconditions but to gain their democratic political ends. Indeed a generalstrike had finally brought universal manhood suffrage and with this the endof political dominance by the Austrian Germans, who numbered but athird of the population of the Austrian half of the empire.

To these developments Hitler, the fanatical young German-Austriannationalist from Linz, was bitterly opposed. To him the empire was sink-

22

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

ing into a “foul morass.” It could be saved only if the master race, theGermans, 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 Parliamentmust be abolished and an end put to all the democratic “nonsense.”

Though he took no part in politics, Hitler followed avidly the activitiesof the three major political parties of old Austria: the Social Democrats,the Christian Socialists and the Pan-German Nationalists. And there nowbegan to sprout in the mind of this unkempt frequenter of the soup kitchensa political shrewdness which enabled him to see with amazing clarity thestrengths 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 SocialDemocrats. “What most repelled me,” he says, “was its hostile attitudetoward the struggle for the preservation of Germanism [and] its disgracefulcourting of the Slavic ‘comrade’ ... In a few months I obtained whatmight have otherwise required decades: an understanding of a pestilentialwhore,* cloaking herself as social virtue and brotherly love.”47

And yet he was already intelligent enough to quench his feelings of rageagainst this party of the working class in order to examine carefully thereasons for its popular success. He concluded that there were severalreasons, and years later he was to remember them and utilize them inbuilding up the National Socialist Party of Germany.

One day, he recounts in Mein Kampf, he witnessed a mass demonstra-tion of Viennese workers. “For nearly two hours I stood there watchingwith bated breath the gigantic human dragon slowly winding by. In op-pressed anxiety I finally left the place and sauntered homeward.”48

At home he began to read the Social Democratic press, examine thespeeches of its leaders, study its organization, reflect on its psychology andpolitical techniques and ponder the results. He came to three conclusionswhich explained to him the success of the Social Democrats: They knewhow to create a mass movement, without which any political party wasuseless; they had learned the art of propaganda among the masses; and,finally, they knew the value of using what he calls “spiritual and physicalterror.”

This third lesson, though it was surely based on faulty observation andcompounded 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 tosuch attacks; at a given sign it unleashes a veritable barrage of lies and slandersagainst whatever adversary seems most dangerous, until the nerves of the at-tacked persons break down . . . This is a tactic based on precise calculation

* The word was cut out in the second and all subsequent editions of Mein Kampf,and the noun “pestilence” substituted.

Birth of the Third Reich 23

of all human weaknesses, and its result will lead to success with almost mathe-matical certainty . . .

I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of physical terrortoward the individual and the masses . . . For while in the ranks of their sup-porters 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 re-sistance.49

No more precise analysis of Nazi tactics, as Hitler was eventually todevelop them, was ever written.

There were two political parties which strongly attracted the fledglingHitler in Vienna, and to both of them he applied his growing power ofshrewd, cold analysis. His first allegiance, he says, was to the Pan-GermanNationalist Party founded by Georg Ritter von Schoenerer, who camefrom 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 forGerman supremacy in the multinational empire. And though Hitlerthought that Schoenerer was a “profound thinker” and enthusiasticallyembraced his basic program of violent nationalism, anti-Semitism, anti-socialism, union with Germany and opposition to the Hapsburgs and theHoly See, he quickly sized up the causes for the party’s failure:

“This movement’s inadequate appreciation of the importance of thesocial problem cost it the truly militant mass of the people; its entry intoParliament took away its mighty impetus and burdened it with all theweaknesses peculiar to this institution; the struggle against the CatholicChurch . . . robbed it of countless of the best elements that the nationcan 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 inMein Kampf is the futility of a political party’s trying to oppose thechurches. “Regardless of how much room for criticism there was in anyreligious denomination,” he says, in explaining why Schoenerer’s Los-von-Rom (Away from Rome) movement was a tactical error, “apolitical party must never for a moment lose sight of the fact that in allprevious historical experience a purely political party has never succeededin producing a religious reformation.”51

But it was the failure of the Pan-Germans to arouse the masses, theirinability to even understand the psychology of the common people, thatto Hitler constituted their biggest mistake. It is obvious from his re-capitulation of the ideas that began to form in his mind when he was notmuch 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 notto make. That was the failure to win over the support of at least some ofthe powerful, established institutions of the nation—if not the Church,then the Army, say, or the cabinet or the head of state. Unless a politicalmovement gained such backing, the young man saw, it would be difficult

24

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

if not impossible for it to assume power. This support was precisely whatHitler had the shrewdness to arrange for in the crucial January days of1933 in Berlin and what alone made it possible for him and his NationalSocialist Party to take over the rule of a great nation.

There was one political leader in Vienna in Hitler’s time who under-stood this, as well as the necessity of building a party on the foundation ofthe masses. This was Dr. Karl Lueger, the burgomaster of Vienna andleader of the Christian Social Party, who more than any other becameHitler’s political mentor, though the two never met. Hitler always re-garded him as “the greatest German mayor of all times ... a statesmangreater than all the so-called ‘diplomats’ of the time ... If Dr. KarlLueger had lived in Germany he would have been ranked among the greatminds of our people.”52

There was, to be sure, little resemblance between Hitler as he later be-came and this big, bluff, genial idol of the Viennese lower middle classes.It is true that Lueger became the most powerful politician in Austria asthe head of a party which was drawn from the disgruntled petty bour-geoisie and which made political capital, as Hitler later did, out of araucous anti-Semitism. But Lueger, who had risen from modest circum-stances and worked his way through the university, was a man of con-siderable intellectual attainments, and his opponents, including the Jews,readily conceded that he was at heart a decent, chivalrous, generous andtolerant man. Stefan Zweig, the eminent Austrian Jewish writer, who wasgrowing up in Vienna at this time, has testified that Lueger never allowedhis official anti-Semitism to stop him from being helpful and friendly tothe Jews. “His city administration,” Zweig recounted, “was perfectly justand even typically democratic . . . The Jews who had trembled at thistriumph of the anti-Semitic party continued to live with the same rightsand esteem as always.”63

This the young Hitler did not like. He thought Lueger was far tootolerant and did not appreciate the racial problem of the Jews. He re-sented the mayor’s failure to embrace Pan-Germanism and was skepticalof his Roman Catholic clericalism and his loyalty to the Hapsburgs. Hadnot the old Emperor Franz-Josef twice refused to sanction Lueger’s elec-tion as burgomaster?

But in the end Hitler was forced to acknowledge the genius of this manwho knew how to win the support of the masses, who understood modernsocial problems and the importance of propaganda and oratory in swayingthe multitude. Hider could not help but admire the way Lueger dealt withthe powerful Church—“his policy was fashioned with infinite shrewd-ness.” And, finally, Lueger “was quick to make use of all available meansfor winning the support of long-established institutions, so as to be able toderive the greatest possible advantage for his movement from those oldsources of power.”54

Here in a nutshell were the ideas and techniques which Hitler was laterto use in constructing his own political party and in leading it to power inGermany. His originality lay in his being the only politician of the Right

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Birth of the Third Reich

to apply them to the German scene after the First World War. It was thenthat the Nazi movement, alone among the nationalist and conservativeparties, gained a great mass following and, having achieved this, won overthe support of the Army, the President of the Republic and the associationsof big business—three “long-established institutions” of great power,which led to the chancellorship of Germany. The lessons learned inVienna proved useful indeed.

Dr. Karl Lueger had been a brilliant orator, but the Pan-German Partyhad lacked effective public speakers. Hitler took notice of this and inMein Kampf makes much of the importance of oratory in politics.

The power which has always started the greatest religious and political ava-lanches in history rolling has from time immemorial been the magic power ofthe 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 humanpassions and emotional sentiments, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Dis-tress or by the firebrand of the word hurled among the masses; they are notthe lemonade-like outpourings of the literary aesthetes and drawing-roomheroes.55

Though refraining from actual participation in Austrian party politics,young Hitler already was beginning to practice his oratory on the audienceswhich he found in Vienna’s flophouses, soup kitchens and on its streetcorners. It was to develop into a talent (as this author, who later was tolisten to scores of his most important speeches, can testify) more formi-dable than any other in the Germany between the wars, and it was to con-tribute 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 havingheard the word during my father’s lifetime.” At high school there was aJewish boy—“but we didn’t give the matter any thought ... I eventook them [the Jews] for Germans.”56

According to Hitler’s boyhood friend, this is not the truth. “When Ifirst met Adolf Hitler,” says August Kubizek, recalling their days togetherin Linz, “his anti-Semitism was already pronounced . . . Hitler was al-ready a confirmed anti-Semite when he went to Vienna. And although hisexperiences in Vienna might have deepened this feeling, they certainly didnot give birth to it.”57

“Then,” says Hitler, “I came to Vienna.”

Preoccupied by the abundance of my impressions . . . oppressed by thehardship of my own lot, I gained at first no insight into the inner stratification ofthe people in this gigantic city. Notwithstanding that Vienna in those dayscounted nearly two hundred thousand Jews among its two million inhabitants,

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

I did not see them . . . The Jew was still characterized for me by nothing buthis religion, and therefore on grounds of human tolerance I maintained myrejection of religious attacks in this case as in others. Consequently the tone ofthe Viennese anti-Semitic press seemed to me unworthy of the cultural tradi-tion 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 notlooked like that in Linz. I observed the man furtively and cautiously, butthe 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 beforeanswering he decided “to try to relieve my doubts by books.” He buriedhimself in anti-Semitic literature, which had a large sale in Vienna at thetime. Then he took to the streets to observe the “phenomenon” moreclosely. “Wherever I went,” he says, “I began to see Jews, and the moreI saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from therest of humanity . . . Later I often grew sick to the stomach from thesmell 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 culturallife, without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiouslyinto such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, oftendazzled by the sudden light—a kike!” The Jews were largely responsible,he says he found, for prostitution and the white-slave traffic. “When forthe first time,” he relates, “I recognized the Jew as the cold-hearted,shameless and calculating director of this revolting vice traffic in the scumof the big city, a cold shudder ran down my back.”61

There is a great deal of morbid sexuality in Hitler’s ravings about theJews. 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, pub-lished by one of Hitler’s favorite cronies, Julius Streicher, Nazi boss ofFranconia, a noted pervert and one of the most unsavory characters in theThird Reich. Mein Kampf is sprinkled with lurid allusions to uncouthJews seducing innocent Christian girls and thus adulterating their blood.Hitler can write of the “nightmare vision of the seduction of hundreds ofthousands of girls by repulsive, crooked-legged Jew bastards.” As RudolfOlden has pointed out, one of the roots of Hitler’s anti-Semitism mayhave 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 hissojourn in Vienna.

“Gradually,” Hitler relates, “I began to hate them . . . For me thiswas the time of the greatest spiritual upheaval I have ever had to gothrough. I had ceased to be a weak-kneed cosmopolitan and become ananti-Semite.”62

He was to remain a blind and fanatical one to the bitter end; his last

27

Birth of the Third Reich

testament, written a few hours before his death, would contain a finalblast against the Jews as responsible for the war which he had startedand which was now finishing him and the Third Reich. This burninghatred, which was to infect so many Germans in that empire, would leadultimately to a massacre so horrible and on such a scale as to leave anugly 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 inGermany, where his heart, he says, had always been. He was twenty-fourand to everyone except himself he must have seemed a total failure. Hehad not become a painter, nor an architect. He had become nothing, so faras anyone could see, but a vagabond—an eccentric, bookish one, to besure. He had no friends, no family, no job, no home. He had, however,one thing: an unquenchable confidence in himself and a deep, burningsense of mission.

Probably he left Austria to escape military service.* This was not be-cause he was a coward but because he loathed the idea of serving in theranks with Jews, Slavs and other minority races of the empire. In MeinKampf Hitler states that he went to Munich in the spring of 1912, butthis is an error. A police register lists him as living in Vienna until May1913.

His own stated reasons for leaving Austria are quite grandiose.

My inner revulsion toward the Hapsburg State steadily grew ... I wasrepelled by the conglomeration of races which the capital showed me, repelledby this whole mixture of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs, andCroats, and everywhere the eternal mushroom of humanity—Jews, and moreJews. 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 mixtureof 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 lastwhither since my childhood secret desires and secret love had drawn me.63

* Since 1910, when he was twenty-one, he had been subject to military service. Ac-cording to Heiden the Austrian authorities could not put their finger on him while hewas in Vienna. They finally located him in Munich and ordered him to report forexamination in Linz. Josef Greiner, in his Das Ende des Hitler-Mythos, publishessome of the correspondence between Hitler and the Austrian military authorities inwhich Hitler denies that he went to Germany to avoid Austrian military service. Onthe ground that he lacked funds, he requested to be allowed to take his examinationin Salzburg because of its nearness to Munich. He was examined there on February5, 1914, and found unfit for military or even auxiliary service on account of poorhealth—apparently he still had a lung ailment. His failure to report for militaryservice until the authorities finally located him at the age of twenty-four must havebothered Hitler when his star rose in Germany. Greiner confirms a story that wascurrent in anti-Nazi circles when I was in Berlin that when the German troops oc-cupied Austria in 1938 Hitler ordered the Gestapo to find the official papers relatingto his military service. The records in Linz were searched in vain—to Hitler’s mount-ing fury. They had been removed by a member of the local government, who, afterthe war, showed them to Greiner.

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His destiny in that land he loved so dearly was to be such as not evenhe, in his wildest dreams, could have then imagined. He was, and wouldremain until shortly before he became Chancellor, technically a foreigner,an Austrian, in the German Reich. It is only as an Austrian who came ofage in the last decade before the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire, whofailed to take root in its civilized capital, who embraced all the preposter-ous prejudices and hates then rife among its German-speaking extremistsand who failed to grasp what was decent and honest and honorable in thevast 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 isdoubtful 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 hisblood and mind out of any possible experience exactly the mixture of in-gredients which propelled Adolf Hitler to the heights he eventuallyreached. To be sure, there was added a liberal touch of unpredictablegenius.

But in the spring of 1913 his genius had not yet shown. In Munich, asin Vienna, he remained penniless, friendless and without a regular job.And then in the summer of 1914 the war came, snatching him, like mil-lions of others, into its grim clutches. On August 3 he petitioned KingLudwig III of Bavaria for permission to volunteer in a Bavarian regimentand it was granted.

This was the heaven-sent opportunity. Now the young vagabond couldsatisfy not only his passion to serve his beloved adopted country in whathe 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 personallife.

To me, he wrote in Mein Kampf, “those hours came as a deliverancefrom 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 themoment, I sank down on my knees and thanked Heaven out of the full-ness of my heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted tolive in such a time . . . For me, as for every German, there now beganthe most memorable period of my life. Compared to the events of thisgigantic struggle all the past fell away into oblivion.”64

For Hitler the past, with all its shabbiness, loneliness and disappoint-ments, was to remain in the shadows, though it shaped his mind andcharacter forever afterward. The war, which now would bring death toso many millions, brought for him, at twenty-five, a new start in life.

2

BIRTH OF THE NAZI PARTY

ON THE DARK autumn Sunday of November 10, 1918, Adolf Hitlerexperienced what out of the depths of his hatred and frustration hecalled the greatest villainy of the century.* A pastor had come bearingunbelievable news for the wounded soldiers in the military hospital atPasewalk, a small Pomeranian town northeast of Berlin, where Hitler wasrecovering from temporary blindness suffered in a British gas attack amonth before near Ypres.

That Sunday morning, the pastor informed them, the Kaiser had ab-dicated and fled to Holland. The day before a republic had been pro-claimed in Berlin. On the morrow, November 11, an armistice would besigned at Compiegne in France. The war had been lost. Germany wasat 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 myway back to the ward, threw myself on my bunk, and dug my burning headinto my blanket and pillow ... So it had all been in vain. In vain allthe sacrifices and privations; ... in vain the hours in which, with mortalfear clutching at our hearts, we nevertheless did our duty; in vain thedeath of two millions who died . . . Had they died for this? . . . Didall this happen only so that a gang of wretched criminals could lay handson the Fatherland?”1

For the first time since he had stood at his mother’s grave, he says, hebroke down and wept. “I could not help it.” Like millions of his fellowcountrymen then and forever after, he could not accept the blunt andshattering fact that Germany had been defeated on the battlefield and hadlost the war.

Like millions of other Germans, too, Hitler had been a brave andcourageous soldier. Later he would be accused by some political oppo-

* The expression appeared in the first German edition of Mein Kampf, but waschanged to “revolution” in all subsequent editions.

29

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

nents 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 adispatch runner in the First Company of the 16th Bavarian Reserve In-fantry Regiment, he arrived at the front toward the end of October 1914after scarcely three months of training, and his unit was decimated infour days of hard fighting at the first Battle of Ypres, where the Britishhalted the German drive to the Channel. According to a letter Hitlerwrote his Munich landlord, a tailor named Popp, his regiment was reducedin four days of combat from 3,500 to 600 men; only thirty officers sur-vived, 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. Afterhospitalization in Germany he returned to the List Regiment—it wasnamed after its original commander—in March 1917 and, now promotedto corporal, fought in the Battle of Arras and the third Battle of Ypresduring that summer. His regiment was in the thick of the fighting duringthe last all-out German offensive in the spring and summer of 1918. Onthe night of October 13 he was caught in a heavy British gas attack on ahill south of Werwick during the last Battle of Ypres. “I stumbled backwith 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 growndark around me.”2

He was twice decorated for bravery. In December 1914 he wasawarded the Iron Cross, Second Class, and in August 1918 he receivedthe Iron Cross, First Class, which was rarely given to a common soldierin the old Imperial Army. One comrade in his unit testified that he wonthe coveted decoration for having captured fifteen Englishmen single-handed; another said it was Frenchmen. The official history of the ListRegiment contains no word of any such exploit; it is silent about the in-dividual feats of many members who received decorations. Whatever thereason, there is no doubt that Corporal Hitler earned the Iron Cross, FirstClass. He wore it proudly to the end of his life.

And yet, as soldiers go, he was a peculiar fellow, as more than one ofhis 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 com-bat soldier’s interest in women. He never grumbled, as did the bravest ofmen, about the filth, the lice, the mud, the stench, of the front line. Hewas the impassioned warrior, deadly serious at all times about the war’saims and Germany’s manifest destiny.

“We all cursed him and found him intolerable,” one of the men in hiscompany later recalled. “There was this white crow among us that didn’tgo along with us when we damned the war to hell.”3 Another man de-scribed him as sitting “in the comer of our mess holding his head betweenhis hands, in deep contemplation. Suddenly he would leap up and, run-ning about excitedly, say that in spite of our big guns victory would bedenied us, for the invisible foes of the German people were a greaterdanger than the biggest cannon of the enemy.”4 Whereupon he would

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Birth of the Nazi Party

launch into a vitriolic attack on these “invisible foes”—the Jews and theMarxists. Had he not learned in Vienna that they were the source of allevil?

And indeed had he not seen this for himself in the German homelandwhile convalescing from his leg wound in the middle of the war? After hisdischarge from the hospital at Beelitz, near Berlin, he had visited thecapital and then gone on to Munich. Everywhere he found “scoundrels”cursing the war and wishing for its quick end. Slackers abounded, andwho 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 ... Inthe year 1916-17 nearly the whole production was under control of Jew-ish finance . . . The Jew robbed the whole nation and pressed it be-neath his domination ... I saw with horror a catastrophe approach-ing . . ,”5 Hitler could not bear what he saw and was glad, he says, toreturn to the front.

He could bear even less the disaster which befell his beloved Father-land in November 1918. To him, as to almost all Germans, it was “mon-strous” and undeserved. The German Army had not been defeated in thefield. It had been stabbed in the back by the traitors at home.

Thus emerged for Hitler, as for so many Germans, a fanatical beliefin the legend of the “stab in the back” which, more than anything else, wasto undermine the Weimar Republic and pave the way for Hitler’s ultimatetriumph. The legend was fraudulent. General LudendorfE, the actualleader of the High Command, had insisted on September 28, 1918, on anarmistice “at once,” and his nominal superior, Field Marshal von Hinden-burg, had supported him. At a meeting of the Crown Council in Berlinon October 2 presided over by Kaiser Wilhelm II, Hindenburg had re-iterated the High Command’s demand for an immediate truce. “TheArmy,” he said, “cannot wait forty-eight hours.” In a letter written onthe same day Hindenburg flatly stated that the militaiy situation made itimperative “to stop the fighting.” No mention was made of any “stab inthe back.” Only later did Germany’s great war hero subscribe to themvth. In a hearing before the Committee of Inquiry of the NationalAssembly on November 18, 1919, a year after the war’s end, Hinden-burg declared, “As an English general has very truly said, the GermanArmy was ‘stabbed in the back.’ ”*

* The attribution of the myth to an English general was hardly factual. Wheeler-Bennett, in Wooden Titan: Hindenburg, has explained that, ironically, two Britishgenerals did have something to do—inadvertently—with the perpetration of the falselegend. “The first was Maj.-Gen. Sir Frederick Maurice, whose book The Last FourMonths, published in 1919, was grossly misrepresented by reviewers in the Germanpress as proving that the German Army had been betrayed by the Socialists on theHome Front and not been defeated in the field.” The General denied this interpreta-tion in the German press, but to no avail. Ludendorff made use of the reviews toconvince Hindenburg. “The other officer,” says Wheeler-Bennett, “was Maj.-Gen.Malcolm, head of the British Military Mission in Berlin. Ludendorff was dining withthe General one evening, and with his usual turgid eloquence was expatiating on howthe High Command had always suffered lack of support from the Civilian Govern-

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In point of fact, the civilian government headed by Prince Max ofBaden, which had not been told of the worsening military situation by theHigh Command until the end of September, held out for several weeksagainst LudendoriT’s demand for an armistice.

One had to live in Germany between the wars to realize how widespreadwas the acceptance of this incredible legend by the German people. Thefacts which exposed its deceit lay all around. The Germans of the Rightwould not face them. The culprits, they never ceased to bellow, were the“November criminals”—an expression which Hitler hammered into theconsciousness of the people. It mattered not at all that the German Army,shrewdly and cowardly, had maneuvered the republican government intosigning the armistice which the military leaders had insisted upon, andthat it thereafter had advised the government to accept the Peace Treatyof Versailles. Nor did it seem to count that the Social Democratic Partyhad accepted power in 1918 only reluctantly and only to preserve thenation from utter chaos which threatened to lead to Bolshevism. It wasnot responsible for the German collapse. The blame for that rested on theold order, which had held the power.* * But millions of Germans refusedto concede this. They had to find scapegoats for the defeat and for theirhumiliation and misery. They easily convinced themselves that they hadfound them in the “November criminals” who had signed the surrenderand established democratic government in the place of the old autocracy.The gullibility of the Germans is a subject which Hitler often harps on inMein Kampf. He was shortly to take full advantage of it.

When the pastor had left the hospital in Pasewalk that evening ofNovember 10, 1918, “there followed terrible days and even worse nights”for Adolf Hitler. “I knew,” he says, “that all was lost. Only fools, liarsand criminals could hope for mercy from the enemy. In these nightshatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible for this deed . . . Miser-able and degenerate criminals! The more I tried to achieve clarity on themonstrous event in this hour, the more the shame of indignation and dis-grace burned my brow. What was all the pain in my eyes compared tothis misery?”

And then: “My own fate became known to me. I decided to go intopolitics.”6

As it turned out, this was a fateful decision for Hitler and for the world.

ment and how the Revolution had betrayed the Army. In an effort to crystallize themeaning of Ludendorff’s verbosity into a single sentence, General Malcolm askedhim: ‘Do you mean, General, that you were stabbed in the back?’ Ludendorff’s eyeslit up and he leapt upon the phrase like a dog on a bone. ‘Stabbed in the back?’ herepeated. ‘Yes, that’s it exactly. We were stabbed in the back.’ ”

* A few generals were courageous enough to say so. On August 23, 1924 theFrankfurter Zeitung published an article by General Freiherr von Schoenaichanalyzing the reasons for Germany’s defeat. He came to “the irresistible conclu-sion that we owe our ruin to the supremacy of our military authorities over civilianauthorities ... In fact, German militarism simply committed suicide.” (Quotedby Telford Taylor in Sword and Swastika, p. 16.)

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THE BEGINNING OF THE NAZI PARTY

The prospects for a political career in Germany for this thirty-year-oldAustrian without friends or funds, without a job, with no trade or profes-sion or any previous record of regular employment, with no experiencewhatsoever in politics, were less than promising, and at first, for a briefmoment, Hitler realized it. “For days,” he says, “I wondered what couldbe 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 hisadopted city scarcely recognizable. Revolution had broken out here too.The Wittelsbach King had also abdicated. Bavaria was in the hands ofthe Social Democrats, who had set up a Bavarian “People’s State” underKurt Eisner, a popular Jewish writer who had been born in Berlin. OnNovember 7, Eisner, a familiar figure in Munich with his great gray beard,his pince-nez, his enormous black hat and his diminutive size, had traipsedthrough the streets at the head of a few hundred men and, without a shotbeing fired, had occupied the seat of parliament and government andproclaimed a republic. Three months later he was assassinated by a youngright-wing officer, Count Anton Arco-Valley. The workers thereuponset up a soviet republic, but this was short-lived. On May 1, 1919, Regu-lar Army troops dispatched from Berlin and Bavarian “free corps”

(Freikorps) volunteers entered Munich and overthrew the Communistregime, massacring several hundred persons, including many non-Com-munists, in revenge for the shooting of a dozen hostages by the soviet.Though a moderate Social Democratic government under Johannes Hoff-mann was nominally restored for the time being, the real power in Ba-varian politics passed to the Right.

What was the Right in Bavaria at this chaotic time? It was the RegularArmy, the Reichswehr; it was the monarchists, who wished the Wittel-bachs back. It was a mass of conservatives who despised the democraticRepublic established in Berlin; and as time went on it was above all thegreat mob of demobilized soldiers for whom the bottom had fallen outof the world in 1918, uprooted men who could not find jobs or theirway back to the peaceful society they had left in 1914, men grown toughand violent through war who could not shake themselves from ingrainedhabit and who, as Hitler, who for a while was one of them, would latersay, “became revolutionaries who favored revolution for its own sakeand desired to see revolution established as a permanent condition.”

Armed free-corps bands sprang up all over Germany and were secretlyequipped by the Reichswehr. At first they were mainly used to fight thePoles and the Balts on the disputed eastern frontiers, but soon they werebacking plots for the overthrow of the republican regime. In March 1920,one of them, the notorious Ehrhardt Brigade, led by a freebooter, CaptainEhrhardt, occupied Berlin and enabled Dr. Wolfgang Kapp,* a mediocre

* Kapp was born in New York on July 24, 1868.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

politician of the extreme Right, to proclaim himself Chancellor. TheRegular Army, under General von Seeckt, had stood by while the Presi-dent of the Republic and the government fled in disarray to western Ger-many. Only a general strike by the trade unions restored the republicangovernment.

In Munich at the same time a different kind of military coup d’etat wasmore successful. On March 14, 1920, the Reichswehr overthrew the Hoff-mann Socialist government and installed a right-wing regime under Gus-tav von Kahr. And now the Bavarian capital became a magnet for allthose forces in Germany which were determined to overthrow the Re-public, set up an authoritarian regime and repudiate the Diktat of Ver-sailles. Here the condottieri of the free corps, including the members ofthe Ehrhardt Brigade, found a refuge and a welcome. Here GeneralLudendorff settled, along with a host of other disgruntled, dischargedArmy officers.* Here were plotted the political murders, among themthat of Matthias Erzberger, the moderate Catholic politician who hadhad the courage to sign the armistice when the generals backed out; and ofWalther Rathenau, the brilliant, cultured Foreign Minister, whom theextremists hated for being a Jew and for carrying out the national govern-ment’s policy of trying to fulfill at least some of the provisions of the Ver-sailles 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, hehad 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 assoon as possible.” He spent the winter doing guard duty at a prisoner-of-war camp at Traunstein, near the Austrian border. He was back inMunich in the spring. In Mein Kampf he relates that he incurred the “dis-approval” of the left-wing government and claims that he avoided arrestonly by the feat of aiming his carbine at three “scoundrels” who had cometo fetch him. Immediately after the Communist regime was overthrownHitler began what he terms his “first more or less political activity.” Thisconsisted of giving information to the commission of inquiry set up bythe 2nd Infantry Regiment to investigate those who shared responsibilityfor the brief soviet regime in Munich.

Apparently Hitler’s service on this occasion was considered valuableenough to lead the Army to give him further employment. He was as-signed to a job in the Press and News Bureau of the Political Department

* At the war’s end Ludendorff fled to Sweden disguised in false whiskers and bluespectacles. He returned to Germany in February 1919, writing his wife: “It wouldbe 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.” (Mar-garine Ludendorff, A Is ich Ludendorffs Frau war, p. 229.) Ebert was the firstPresident and Scheidemann the first Chancellor of the Weimar Republic. Luden-dorff, though second-in-command to Hindenburg, had been the virtual dictator ofGermany for the last two years of the war.

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of the Army’s district command. The German Army, contrary to itstraditions, was now deep in politics, especially in Bavaria, where at lastit had established a government to its liking. To further its conservativeviews it gave the soldiers courses of “political instruction,” in one ofwhich Adolf Hitler was an attentive pupil. One day, according to his ownstory, he intervened during a lecture in which someone had said a goodword for the Jews. His anti-Semitic harangue apparently so pleased hissuperior officers that he was soon posted to a Munich regiment as an edu-cational officer, a Bildungsoffizier, whose main task was to combat dan-gerous ideas—pacifism, socialism, democracy; such was the Army’s con-ception of its role in the democratic Republic it had sworn to serve.

This was an important break for Hitler, the first recognition he hadwon in the field of politics he was now trying to enter. Above all, it gavehim a chance to try out his oratorical abilities—the first prerequisite, as hehad always maintained, of a successful politician. “All at once,” he says,“I was offered an opportunity of speaking before a larger audience; andthe thing that I had always presumed from pure feeling without knowingit was now corroborated: I could ‘speak.’ ” The discovery pleased himgreatly even if it came as no great surprise. He had been afraid that hisvoice might have been permanently weakened by the gassing he had suf-fered at the front. Now he found it had recovered sufficiently to enablehim to make himself heard “at least in every comer of the small squadrooms.”8 This was the beginning of a talent that was to make him easilythe most effective orator in Germany, with a magic power, after he took toradio, to sway millions by his voice.

One day in September 1919, Hitler received orders from the Army’sPolitical Department to have a look at a tiny political group in Munichwhich called itself the German Workers’ Party. The military were suspi-cious of workers’ parties, since they were predominantly Socialist or Com-munist, 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 wasscheduled to speak at the party’s meeting which he had been assigned toinvestigate.

A few weeks before, in one of his Army educational courses, he hadheard a lecture by Gottfried Feder, a construction engineer and a crank inthe field of economics, who had become obsessed with the idea that “spec-ulative” capital, as opposed to “creative” and “productive” capital, wasthe root of much of Germany’s economic trouble. He was for abolishingthe first kind and in 1917 had formed an organization to achieve this pur-pose: 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 sittingthrough what he thought was a dull session of some twenty-five persons

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

gathered in a murky room in the Sterneckerbrau beer cellar, he was notimpressed. It was “a new organization like so many others. This was atime,” he says, “in which anyone who was not satisfied with develop-ments . . . felt called upon to found a new party. Everywhere theseorganizations sprang out of the ground, only to vanish silently after atime. I judged the German Workers’ Party no differently.”10 After Federhad finished speaking Hitler was about to leave, when a “professor” sprangup, questioned the soundness of Feder’s arguments and then proposedthat Bavaria should break away from Prussia and found a South Germannation 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 learnedgentleman,” as he later recounted, a piece of his mind. This apparentlywas so violent that, according to Hitler, the “professor” left the hall “likea wet poodle,” while the rest of the audience looked at the unknown youngspeaker “with astonished faces.” One man—Hitler says he did not catchhis name—came leaping after him and pressed a little booklet into hishands.

This man was Anton Drexler, a locksmith by trade, who may be saidto have been the actual founder of National Socialism. A sickly, be-spectacled man, lacking a formal education, with an independent but nar-row and confused mind, a poor writer and a worse speaker, Drexler wasthen employed in the Munich railroad shops. On March 7, 1918, he hadset up a “Committee of Independent Workmen” to combat the Marxismof 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 Ger-many as the Association for the Promotion of Peace on Working-ClassLines (the country was then and would continue to be until 1933 full ofcountless pressure groups with highfalutin titles).

Drexler never recruited more than forty members, and in January 1919he merged his committee with a similar group, the Political Workers’Circle, led by a newspaper reporter, one Karl Harrer. The new organiza-tion, which numbered less than a hundred, was called the German Workers’Party and Harrer was its first chairman. Hitler, who has little to say inMein Kampf of some of his early comrades whose names are now for-gotten, pays Harrer the tribute of being “honest” and “certainly widelyeducated” but regrets that he lacked the “oratorical gift.” Perhaps Har-rer’s chief claim to fleeting fame is that he stubbornly maintained thatHitler was a poor speaker, a judgment which riled the Nazi leader everafter, as he makes plain in his autobiography. At any rate, Drexler seemsto have been the chief driving force in this small, unknown GermanWorkers’ Party.

The next morning Hitler turned to a perusal of the booklet whichDrexler had thrust into his hands. He describes the scene at length inMein Kampf. It was 5 a.m. Hitler had awakened and, as he says was hiscustom, was reclining on his cot in the barracks of the 2nd Infantry Regi-ment watching the mice nibble at the bread crumbs which he invariablyscattered on the floor the night before. “I had known so much poverty in

Birth of the Nazi Party 37

my life,” he muses, “that I was well able to imagine the hunger and hencealso the pleasure of the little creatures.” He remembered the little pam-phlet and began to read it. It was entitled “My Political Awakening.” ToHitler’s surprise, it reflected a good many ideas which he himself had ac-quired over the years. Drexler’s principal aim was to build a politicalparty which would be based on the masses of the working class but which,unlike the Social Democrats, would be strongly nationalist. Drexler hadbeen a member of the patriotic Fatherland Front but had soon becomedisillusioned with its middle-class spirit which seemed to have no contactat all with the masses. In Vienna, as we have seen, Hitler had learned toscorn the bourgeoisie for the same reason—its utter lack of concern withthe 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 thathe had been accepted in the German Workers’ Party. “I didn’t knowwhether to be angry or to laugh,” he remembered later. “I had no inten-tion 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 Hewas about to say so in a letter when “curiosity won out” and he decidedto go to a committee meeting to which he had been invited and explainin person his reasons for not joining “this absurd little organization.”

The tavern in which the meeting was to take place was the Alte Rosenbadin the Herrenstrasse, a very run-down place ... I went through the ill-litdining 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 grimygas lamp four young people sat at a table, among them the author of the littlepamphlet, who at once greeted me most joyfully and bade me welcome as anew member of the German Workers’ Party.

Really, I was somewhat taken aback. The minutes of the last meeting wereread and the secretary given a vote of confidence. Next came the treasuryreport—all in all the association possessed seven marks and fifty pfennigs—for which the treasurer received a vote of confidence. This too was entered inthe 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 Ito join this organization?12

Yet there was something about these shabby men in the ill-lit backroom that attracted him: “the longing for a new movement which shouldbe more than a party in the previous sense of the word.” That eveninghe returned to the barracks to “face the hardest question of my life: shouldI join?” Reason, he admits, told him to decline. And yet . . . The veryunimportance of the organization would give a young man of energy andideas an opportunity “for real personal activity.” Hitler thought overwhat he could “bring to this task.”

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

That I was poor and without means seemed to me the most bearable part ofit, but it was harder that I was numbered among the nameless, that I was oneof the millions whom chance permits to live or summons out of existencewithout even their closest neighbors condescending to take any notice of it. Inaddition, there was the difficulty which inevitably arose from my lack ofschooling.

After two days of agonized pondering and reflection, I finally came to theconviction that I had to take this step.

It was the most decisive resolve of my life. From here there was and couldbe no turning back.13

Adolf Hitler was then and there enrolled as the seventh member of thecommittee of the German Workers’ Party.

There were two members of this insignificant party who deserve men-tion at this point; both were to prove important in the rise of Hitler. Cap-tain Ernst Roehm, on the staff of the Army’s District Command VII inMunich, had joined the party before Hitler. He was a stocky, bull-necked,piggish-eyed, scar-faced professional soldier—the upper part of his nosehad been shot away in 1914—with a flair for politics and a natural abilityas an organizer. Like Hitler he was possessed of a burning hatred for thedemocratic Republic and the “November criminals” he held responsiblefor it. His aim was to re-create a strong nationalist Germany and he be-lieved with Hitler that this could be done only by a party based on thelower classes, from which he himself, unlike most Regular Army officers,had come. A tough, ruthless, driving man—albeit, like so many of theearly Nazis, a homosexual—he helped to organize the first Nazi strong-arm squads which grew into the S.A., the army of storm troopers whichhe commanded until his execution by Hitler in 1934. Roehm not onlybrought into the budding party large numbers of ex-servicemen and free-corps volunteers, who formed the backbone of the organization in itsearly years, but, as an officer of the Army, which controlled Bavaria, heobtained for Hitler and his movement the protection and sometimes thesupport of the authorities. Without this help, Hitler probably could neverhave got a real start in his campaign to incite the people to overthrow theRepublic. Certainly he could not have got away with his methods ofterror and intimidation without the tolerance of the Bavarian governmentand police.

Dietrich Eckart, twenty-one years older than Hitler, was often calledthe spiritual founder of National Socialism. A witty journalist, a mediocrepoet and dramatist, he had translated Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and written anumber of unproduced plays. In Berlin for a time he had led, like Hitlerin Vienna, the bohemian vagrant’s life, become a drunkard, taken tomorphine and, according to Heiden, been confined to a mental institu-tion, where he was finally able to stage his dramas, using the inmates asactors. He had returned to his native Bavaria at the war’s end and heldforth before a circle of admirers at the Brennessel wine cellar in Schwa-

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Birth of the Nazi Party

bling, the artists’ quarter in Munich, preaching Aryan superiority and call-ing for the elimination of the Jews and the downfall of the “swine” inBerlin.

“We need a fellow at the head,” Heiden, who was a working newspaper-man in Munich at the time, quotes Eckart as declaiming to the habituesof the Brennessel wine cellar in 1919, “who can stand the sound of a ma-chine gun. The rabble need to get fear into their pants. We can’t use anofficer, because the people don’t respect them any more. The best wouldbe 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 inAdolf Hitler the very man he was looking for? He became a close adviserto the rising young man in the German Workers’ Party, lending him books,helping to improve his German—both written and spoken—and introduc-ing him to his wide circle of friends, which included not only certainwealthy persons who were induced to contribute to the party’s funds andHitler’s living but such future aides as Rudolf Hess and Alfred Rosen-berg. Hitler’s admiration for Eckart never flagged, and the last sentenceof 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 lifeto the awakening of our people, in his writings and his thoughts and finallyin his deeds.”15

Such was the weird assortment of misfits who founded National So-cialism, who unknowingly began to shape a movement which in thirteenyears would sweep the country, the strongest in Europe, and bring toGermany its Third Reich. The confused locksmith Drexler provided thekernel, the drunken poet Eckart some of the “spiritual” foundation, theeconomic crank Feder what passed as an ideology, the homosexual Roehmthe support of the Army and the war veterans, but it was now the formertramp, Adolf Hitler, not quite thirty-one and utterly unknown, who tookthe lead in building up what had been no more than a back-room debatingsociety into what would soon become a formidable political party.

All the ideas which had been bubbling in his mind since the lonesomedays of hunger in Vienna now found an outlet, and an inner energy whichhad not been observable in his make-up burst forth. He prodded histimid committee into organizing bigger meetings. He personally typedout and distributed invitations. Later he recalled how once, after he haddistributed eighty of these, “we sat waiting for the masses who were ex-pected 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 news-paper. “The success,” he says, “was positively amazing. One hundredand eleven people were present.” Hitler was to make his first “public”

* Eckart died of overdrinking in December 1923.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

speech, following the main address by a “Munich professor.” Harrer,nominal head of the party, objected. “This gentleman, who was certainlyotherwise honest,” Hitler relates, “just happened to be convinced that Imight be capable of doing certain things, but not of speaking. I spoke forthirty minutes, and what before I had simply felt within me, without inany way knowing it, was now proved by reality: I could speak!”17 Hitlerclaims the audience was “electrified” by his oratory and its enthusiasmproved by donations of three hundred marks, which temporarily relievedthe party of its financial worries.

At the start of 1920, Hitler took over the party’s propaganda, an ac-tivity to which he had given much thought since he had observed its im-portance in the Socialist and Christian Social parties in Vienna. He beganimmediately to organize by far the biggest meeting ever dreamt of by thepitifully small party. It was to be held on February 24, 1920, in the Fest-saal of the famous Hofbrauhaus, with a seating capacity of nearly twothousand. Hitler’s fellow committeemen thought he was crazy. Harrerresigned in protest and was replaced by Drexler, who remained skeptical.*Hitler emphasizes that he personally conducted the preparations. Indeedthe event loomed so large for him that he concludes the first volume ofMein Kampf with a description of it, because, he explains, it was the oc-casion when “the party burst the narrow bonds of a small club and for thefirst time exerted a determining influence on the mightiest factor of ourtime: public opinion.”

Hitler was not even scheduled as the main speaker. This role wasreserved for a certain Dr. Johannes Dingfelder, a homeopathic physician,a crackpot who contributed articles on economics to the newspapers underthe pseudonym of “Germanus Agricola,” and who was soon to be for-gotten. 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 ofthe most faithful war comrades and other supporters battled with the disturbers. . . Communists and Socialists . . . and only little by little were able to re-store order. I was able to go on speaking. After half an hour the applauseslowly began to drown out the screaming and shouting . . . When afternearly four hours the hall began to empty I knew that now the principles of themovement which could no longer be forgotten were moving out among theGerman people.18

In the course of his speech Hitler had enunciated for the first time thetwenty-five points of the program of the German Workers’ Party. Theyhad been hastily drawn up by Drexler, Feder and Hitler. Most of theheckling at Hitler had really been directed against parts of the programwhich he read out, but he nevertheless considered all the points as having

* Harrer also was opposed to Hitler’s violent anti-Semitism and believed that Hit-ler was alienating the working-class masses. These were the real reasons why heresigned.

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Birth of the Nazi Party

been adopted and they became the official program of the Nazi Party whenits name was altered on April 1, 1920, to the National Socialist GermanWorkers’ Party. Indeed, for tactical reasons Hider in 1926 declared them“unalterable.”

They are certainly a hodgepodge, a catchall for the workers, the lowermiddle class and the peasants, and most of them were forgotten by thetime the party came to power. A good many writers on Germany haveridiculed them, and the Nazi leader himself was later to be embarrassedwhen reminded of some of them. Yet, as in the case of the main principleslaid down in Mein Kampf, the most important of them were carried outby 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 Germansin a Greater Germany. Was this not exactly what Chancellor Hitlerwould insist on and get when he annexed Austria and its six millionGermans, when he took the Sudetenland with its three million Germans?And was it not his demand for the return of German Danzig and the otherareas in Poland inhabited predominantly by Germans which led to theGerman attack on Poland and brought on World War II? And cannotit be added that it was one of the world’s misfortunes that so many in theinterwar years either ignored or laughed off the Nazi aims which Hitlerhad taken the pains to put down in writing? Surely the anti-Semiticpoints of the program promulgated in the Munich beer hall on the eveningof February 24, 1920, constituted a dire warning. The Jews were to bedenied office and even citizenship in Germany and excluded from thepress. All who had entered the Reich after August 2, 1914, were to beexpelled.

A good many paragraphs of the party program were obviously merely ademagogic appeal to the mood of the lower classes at a time when theywere in bad straits and were sympathetic to radical and even socialistslogans. Point 11, for example, demanded abolition of incomes unearnedby work; Point 12, the nationalization of trusts; Point 13, the sharingwith the state of profits from large industry; Point 14, the abolishing ofland rents and speculation in land. Point 18 demanded the death penaltyfor traitors, usurers and profiteers, and Point 16, calling for the mainte-nance of “a sound middle class,” insisted on the communalization ofdepartment stores and their lease at cheap rates to small traders. Thesedemands had been put in at the insistence of Drexler and Feder, who ap-parently really believed in the “socialism” of National Socialism. Theywere the ideas which Hitler was to find embarrassing when the big indus-trialists and landlords began to pour money into the party coffers, and ofcourse nothing was ever done about them.

There were, finally, two points of the program which Hitler would carryout as soon as he became Chancellor. Point 2 demanded the abrogationof 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

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the abolition of the peace treaties, was put into the program at Hitler’sinsistence and it showed how even then, when his party was hardly knownoutside Munich, he was casting his eyes on further horizons even at thensk ot losing popular support in his own bailiwick.

Separatism was very strong in Bavaria at the time and the Bavariansconstantly at odds with the central government in Berlin, were demandingess, not more, centralization, so that Bavaria could rule itself In factthis was what it was doing at the moment; Berlin’s writ had very littleauthority in the states. Hitler was looking ahead for power not only inBavaria but eventually in the Reich, and to hold and exercise that powera dictatorial regime such as he already envisaged needed to constituteitself as a strong centralized authority, doing away with the semiautono-mous states which under the Weimar Republic, as under the HohenzollernBmpire, enjoyed their own parliaments and governments. One of his firstacts after January 30, 1933, was to swiftly carry out this final point in thepar y s program which so few had noticed or taken seriously. No one

beginning ^ ^ ^ ^ ample warning> in writing, from the very

Inflammatory oratory and a radical, catchall program, important asthey were for a fledgling party out to attract attention and recruit masssupport, were not enough, and Hitler now turned his attention to providing

m°f' first si8ns of his Peculiar genius began to appea?

and make themselves felt. What the masses needed, he thought, werenot

tTr^olTtt7'1 fvW„Sim?e idCaS’ that ‘S’ that he could ceaselessly hammerthrough their skulls-but symbols that would win their faith, pageantry

and color that would arouse them, and acts of violence and terrorf whichf successful, would attract adherents (were not most Germans drawn tothe strong?) and give them a sense of power over the weak.

«. X,n Vienna’ as we have seen, he was intrigued by what he called themfamous spiritual and physical terror” which he thought was employedby the Social Democrats against their political opponents.* Now heturned it to good purpose in his own anti-Socialist party. At first ex-servicemen were assigned to the meetings to silence hecklers and, if nec-

e®.!fT.<xrSS em °Ut In the summer of 1920, soon after the party hadadded National Socialist” to the name of the “German Workers’ Party”and became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or N.S.D.A Pas it was now to be familiarly known, Hitler organized a bunch of rough-neck war veterans into “strong-arm” squads, Ordnertruppe, under the50“f Enul Maurice> an ex-convict and watchmaker. On October, 1921, after camouflaging themselves for a short time as the “Gymnastican ports Division ’ of the party to escape suppression by the Berlingovernment, they were officially named the Sturmabteilung, from which

wrpname ; , ,Cam<;' Jhe St°rm trooPers’ outfitted in brown uniforms,ZT l™d arg?y fr°m the freebooters of the free corps and placedunder the command of Johann Ulrich Klintzich, an aide of the notorious

* See above, pp. 22-23.

Birth of the Nazi Party 43

Captain Ehrhardt, who had recently been released from imprisonment inconnection 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 Hitlerpersonally led his storm troopers in an attack on a meeting which was tobe addressed by a Bavarian federalist by the name of Ballerstedt, whoreceived 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 heemerged from it somewhat of a martyr and more popular than ever. “It’sall right,” Hitler boasted to the police. “We got what we wanted. Bal-lerstedt did not speak.” As Hitler had told an audience some monthsbefore, “The National Socialist Movement will in the future ruthlesslyprevent—if necessary by force—all meetings or lectures that are likelyto distract the minds of our fellow countrymen.”19

In the summer of 1920 Hitler, the frustrated artist but now becomingthe master propagandist, came up with an inspiration which can only bedescribed as a stroke of genius. What the party lacked, he saw, was anemblem, a flag, a symbol, which would express what the new organizationstood for and appeal to the imagination of the masses, who, as Hitlerreasoned, must have some striking banner to follow and to fight under.After much thought and innumerable attempts at various designs he hitupon a flag with a red background and in the middle a white disk onwhich was imprinted a black swastika. The hooked cross—the haken-kreuz—of the swastika, borrowed though it was from more ancient times,was to become a mighty and frightening symbol of the Nazi Party andultimately of Nazi Germany. Whence Hitler got the idea of using it forboth the flag and the insignia of the party he does not say in a lengthy dis-sertation on the subject in Mein Kampf.

The hakenkreuz is as old, almost, as man on the planet. It has beenfound in the ruins of Troy and of Egypt and China. I myself have seen itin ancient Hindu and Buddhist relics in India. In more recent times itshowed up as an official emblem in such Baltic states as Estonia and Fin-land, where the men of the German free corps saw it during the fightingof 1918-19. The Ehrhardt Brigade had it painted on their steel helmetswhen they entered Berlin during the Kapp putsch in 1920. Hitler hadundoubtedly 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 Brigadecame to Munich. He says that numerous designs suggested to him byparty members invariably included a swastika and that a “dentist fromSternberg” actually delivered a design for a flag that “was not bad at alland quite close to my own.”

For the colors Hitler had of course rejected the black, red and gold ofthe hated Weimar Republic. He declined to adopt the old imperial flagof red, white and black, but he liked its colors not only because, he says,they form “the most brilliant harmony in existence,” but because theywere the colors of a Germany for which he had fought. But they had tobe given a new form, and so a swastika was added.

44 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Hitler reveled in his unique creation. “A .symbol it really is!” he ex-claims in Mein Kampf. “In red we see the social idea of the movement, inwhite the nationalist idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle forthe victory of the Aryan man.”20

Soon the swastika armband was devised for the uniforms of the stormtroopers and the party members, and two years later Hitler designed theNazi standards which would be carried in the massive parades and wouldadorn the stages of the mass meetings. Taken from old Roman designs,they consisted of a black metal swastika on top with a silver wreath sur-mounted by an eagle, and, below, the initials NSDAP on a metal rectanglefrom 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 highestorder. The Nazis now had a symbol which no other party could match.The hooked cross seemed to possess some mystic power of its own, tobeckon to action in a new direction the insecure lower middle classeswhich had been floundering in the uncertainty of the first chaotic postwaryears. They began to flock under its banner.

ADVENT OF THE “FUEHRER”

In the summer of 1921 the rising young agitator who had shown suchsurprising talents not only as an orator but as an organizer and a propa-gandist took over the undisputed leadership of the party. In doing so,he gave his fellow workers a first taste of the ruthlessness and tacticalshrewdness with which he was to gain so much success in more importantcrises later on.

Early in the summer Hitler had gone to Berlin to get in touch withNorth German nationalist elements and to speak at the National Club,which was their spiritual headquarters. He wanted to assess the pos-sibilities of carrying his own movement beyond the Bavarian borders intothe rest of Germany. Perhaps he could make some useful alliances forthat purpose. While he was away the other members of the committeeof the Nazi Party decided the moment was opportune to challenge hisleadership. He had become too dictatorial for them. They proposed somealliances 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 inNuremberg. The committee members were sure that if these groups, withtheir ambitious leaders, could be merged with the Nazis, Hitler would bereduced in size.

Sensing the threat to his position, Hitler hurried back to Munich toquell the intrigues of these “foolish lunatics,” as he called them in MeinKampf. He offered to resign from the party. This was more than the partycould afford, as the other members of the committee quickly realized.Hitler was not only their most powerful speaker but their best organizer

45

Birth of the Nazi Party

and propagandist. Moreover, it was he who was now bringing in most ofthe organization’s funds—from collections at the mass meetings at whichhe spoke and from other sources as well, including the Army. If he left,the budding Nazi Party would surely go to pieces. The committee refusedto accept his resignation. Hitler, reassured of the strength of his position,now forced a complete capitulation on the other leaders. He demandeddictatorial powers for himself as the party’s sole leader, the abolition ofthe committee itself and an end to intrigues with other groups such asStreicher’s.

This was too much for the other committee members. Led by theparty’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 accusa-tion Hitler was ever confronted with from the ranks of his own party—from those, that is, who had firsthand knowledge of his character andhow he operated.

A lust for power and personal ambition have caused Herr Adolf Hitler toreturn to his post after his six weeks’ stay in Berlin, of which the purpose hasnot yet been disclosed. He regards the time as ripe for bringing disunion andschism into our ranks by means of shadowy people behind him, and thus tofurther the interests of the Jews and their friends. It grows more and moreclear that his purpose is simply to use the National Socialist party as a spring-board for his own immoral purposes, and to seize the leadership in order toforce the Party onto a different track at the psychological moment. This ismost clearly shown by an ultimatum which he sent to the Party leaders a fewdays ago, in which he demands, among other things, that he shall have a soleand absolute dictatorship of the Party, and that the Committee, including thelocksmith Anton Drexler, the founder and leader of the Party, shouldretire. . . .

And how does he carry on his campaign? Like a Jew. He twists every fact. . . National Socialists! Make up your minds about such characters! Makeno mistake. Hitler is a demagogue . . . He believes himself capable ... offilling 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 therebels as far as might be supposed. Hitler promptly brought a libel suitagainst the authors of the pamphlet, and Drexler himself, at a publicmeeting, was forced to repudiate it. In two special meetings of the partyHitler dictated his peace terms. The statutes were changed to abolish thecommittee and give him dictatorial powers as president. The humiliatedDrexler was booted upstairs as honorary president, and he soon passedout of the picture.* As Heiden says, it was the victory of the Cavaliersover the Roundheads of the party. But it was more than that. Then and

* He left the party in 1923 but served as Vice-President of the Bavarian Diet from1924 to 1928. In 1930 he became reconciled with Hitler, but he never returned toactive politics. The fate of all discoverers, as Heiden observed, overtook Drexler.

46

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

there, in July 1921, was established the “leadership principle” which wasto be the Jaw 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 Sterneckerbrau, which to Hitler was more of “afuneral vault than an office,” was given up and new offices in anothertavern in the Corneliusstrasse occupied. These were lighter and roomier.An old Adler typewriter was purchased on the installment plan, and asafe, filing cabinets, furniture, a telephone and a full-time paid secretarywere gradually acquired. 1

Money was beginning to come in. Nearly a year before, in Decemberof 1920, the party had acquired a run-down newspaper badly in debt, theVoelkischer Beobachter, an anti-Semitic gossip sheet which appearedtwice a week. Exactly where the sixty thousand marks for its purchasecame from was a secret which Hitler kept well, but it is known that Eckartand Roehm persuaded Major General Ritter von Epp, Roehm’s com-manding officer in the Reichswehr and himself a member of the party, toraise the sum. Most likely it came from Army secret funds. At the be-ginning of 1923 the Voelkischer Beobachter became a daily, thus givingHitler the prerequisite of all German political parties, a daily newspaper inwhich to preach the party’s gospels. Running a daily political journalrequired additional money, and this now came from what must haveseemed to some of the more proletarian roughnecks of the party likestrange sources. Frau Helene Bechstein, wife of the wealthy piano manu-facturer, was one. From their first meeting she took a liking to the youngfirebrand, inviting him to stay at the Bechstein home when he was inBerlin, arranging parties in which he could meet the affluent, and donatingsizable sums to the movement. Part of the money to finance the newdaily came from a Frau Gertrud von Seidlitz, a Balt, who owned stock insome prosperous Finnish paper mills.

In March 1923, a Harvard graduate, Ernst (Putzi) Hanfstaengl, whosemother was American and whose cultivated and wealthy family owned anart-publishing business in Munich, loaned the party one thousand dollarsagainst a mortgage on the Voelkischer Beobachter* This was a fabulous

hl* mem°irs. Unheard Witness, Hanfstaengl says that he was first steered toHitler by an American. This was Captain Truman Smith, then an assistant militaryattache at the American Embassy in Berlin. In November 1922 Smith was sent byTj ,,aS,Sy t0 Mumch t0 check on an obscure political agitator by the name ofAdolt Hitler and his newly founded National Socialist Labor Party. For a youngprofessional American Army officer, Captain Smith had a remarkable bent forpolitical analysis. In one week in Munich, November 15-22, he managed to seeLudendorff, Crown Prince Rupprecht and a dozen political leaders in Bavariamost of whom told him that Hitler was a rising star and his movement a rapidlygrowing political force. Smith lost no time in attending an outdoor Nazi rally atwhich Hitler spoke. “Never saw such a sight in my life!” he scribbled in his diaryimmediately afterward. “Met Hitler," he wrote, “and he promises to talk to meMonday and explain his aims.” On the Monday, Smith made his way to Hitler’sresidence—“a *dtle bare bedroom on the second floor of a run-down house,” as hedescribed it—and had a long talk with the future dictator, who was scarcely known

47

Birth of the Nazi Party

sum in marks in those inflationary days and was of immense help to theparty and its newspaper. But the friendship of the Hanfstaengls extendedbeyond monetary help. It was one of the first respectable families ofmeans in Munich to open its doors to the brawling young politician.Putzi became a good friend of Hitler, who eventually made him chief ofthe Foreign Press Department of the party. An eccentric, gangling man,whose sardonic wit somewhat compensated for his shallow mind, Hanf-staengl was a virtuoso at the piano and on many an evening, even afterhis friend came to power in Berlin, he would excuse himself from thecompany of those of us who might be with him to answer a hasty summonsfrom the Fuehrer. It was said that his piano-playing—he pounded theinstrument furiously—and his clowning soothed Hitler and even cheeredhim up after a tiring day. Later this strange but genial Harvard man, likesome other early cronies of Hitler, would have to flee the country for hislife.*

Most of the men who were to become Hitler’s closest subordinates werenow in the party or would shortly enter it. Rudolf Hess joined in 1920.Son of a German wholesale merchant domiciled in Egypt, Hess had spentthe first fourteen years of his life in that country and had then come to theRhineland for his education. During the war he served for a time in theList Regiment with Hitler—though they did not become acquainted

outside Munich. “A marvelous demagogue!” the assistant U.S. military attachebegan his diary that evening. “Have rarely listened to such a logical and fanaticalman.” The date was November 22, 1922.

Just before leaving for Berlin that evening Smith saw Hanfstaengl, told him of hismeeting with Hitler and advised him to take a look at the man. The Nazi leaderwas to address a rally that evening and Captain Smith turned over bis press ticketto Hanfstaengl. The latter, like so many others, was overwhelmed by Hitler’s ora-tory, 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 Smithwrote a lengthy report which the embassy dispatched to Washington on November25, 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 popularmovement, it must be considered as the Bavarian counterpart to the Italianfascisti ... It has recently acquired a political influence quite disproportionateto its actual numerical strength. . . .

Adolf Hitler from the very first has been the dominating force in the move-ment, and the personality of this man has undoubtedly been one of the mostimportant factors contributing to its success . . . His ability to influence apopular assembly is uncanny. In private conversation he disclosed himself as aforceful 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 attache in Berlin duringthe early years of the Nazi regime, kindly placed his diary and notes of his trip toMunich at the disposal of this writer. They have been invaluable in the preparationof this chapter.

* Hanfstaengl spent part of World War II in Washington, ostensibly as an internedenemy alien but actually as an “adviser” to the United States government on NaziGermany. This final role of his life, which seemed so ludicrous to Americans whoknew him and Nazi Germany, must have amused him.

48

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

then—and after being twice wounded became a flyer. He enrolled in theUniversity of Munich after the war as a student of economics but seems tohave spent much of his time distributing anti-Semitic pamphlets and fight-ing with the various armed bands then at loose in Bavaria. He was in thethick of the firing when the soviet regime in Munich was overthrown onMay 1, 1919, and was wounded in the leg. One evening a year later hewent to hear Hitler speak, was carried away by his eloquence and joinedthe party, and soon he became a close friend, a devoted follower andsecretary of the leader. It was he who introduced Hitler to the geopoliticalideas of General Karl Haushofer, then a professor of geopolitics at theumversity.

Hess had stirred Hider with a prize-winning essay which he wrote for athesis, entitled “How Must the Man Be Constituted Who Will Lead Ger-many Back to Her Old Heights?”

Where all authority has vanished, only a man of the people can establishauthority ... The deeper the dictator was originally rooted in the broadmasses, the better he understands how to treat them psychologically, the lessthe workers will distrust him, the more supporters he will win among thesemost energetic ranks of the people. He himself has nothing in common with

the mass; like every great man he is all personality . . . When necessity com-mands, he does not shrink before bloodshed. Great questions are always de-cided by blood and iron ... In order to reach his goal, he is prepared totrample on his closest friends . . . The lawgiver proceeds with terrible hard-ness ... As the need arises, he can trample them [the people] with the bootsof a grenadier . . ,22

No wonder Hitler took to the young man. This was a portrait perhapsnot of the leader as he was at the moment but of the leader he wanted tobecome—and did. For all his solemnity and studiousness, Hess remaineda man of limited intelligence, always receptive to crackpot ideas, which hecould adopt with great fanaticism. Until nearly the end, he would be oneof Hitler’s most loyal and trusted followers and one of the few who wasnot bitten by consuming personal ambition.

Alfred Rosenberg, although he was often hailed as the “intellectualleader of the Nazi Party and indeed its “philosopher,” was also a man ofmedtocre intelligence. Rosenberg may with some truth be put down as aRussian. Like a good many Russian “intellectuals,” he was of BalticGerman stock. The son of a shoemaker, he was born January 12, 1893, atReval (now Tallinn) in Estonia, which had been a part of the CzaristEmpire since 1721. He chose to study not in Germany but in Russia andreceived a diploma in architecture from the University of Moscow in 1917He lived in Moscow through the days of the Bolshevik revolution and itmay be that, as some of his enemies in the Nazi Party later said, he flirtedwith the idea of becoming a young Bolshevik revolutionary. In’ February1918, however, he returned to Reval, volunteered for service in the Ger-man 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 becameactive in White Russian Emigre circles.

Rosenberg then met Dietrich Eckart and through him Hitler, andjoined the party at the end of 1919. It was inevitable that a man who hadactually received a diploma in architecture would impress the man who hadfailed even to get into a school of architecture. Hitler was also impressedby Rosenberg’s “learning,” and he liked the young Balt’s hatred of theJews and the Bolsheviks. Shortly before Eckart died, toward the end of1923, Hitler made Rosenberg editor of the Voelkischer Beobachter, andfor many years he continued to prop up this utterly muddled man, thisconfused and shallow “philosopher,” as the intellectual mentor of theNazi movement and as one of its chief authorities on foreign policy.

Like Rudolf Hess, Hermann Goering had also come to Munich sometime after the war ostensibly to study economics at the university, and hetoo had come under the personal spell of Adolf Hitler. One of the nation’sgreat war heroes, the last commander of the famed Richthofen FighterSquadron, holder of the Pour le Merite, the highest war decoration inGermany, he found it even more difficult than most war veterans to returnto the humdrum existence of peacetime civilian life. He became a trans-port pilot in Denmark for a time and later in Sweden. One day he flewCount Eric von Rosen to the latter’s estate some distance from Stockholmand while stopping over as a guest fell in love with Countess Rosen’s sister,Carin von Kantzow, nee Baroness Fock, one of Sweden’s beauties. Somedifficulties arose. Carin von Kantzow was epileptic and was married andthe mother of an eight-year-old son. But she was able to have the marriagedissolved and marry the gallant young flyer. Possessed of considerablemeans, she went with her new husband to Munich, where they lived insome splendor and he dabbled in studies at the university.

But not for long. He met Hitler in 1921, joined the party, contributedgenerously to its treasury (and to Hitler personally), threw his restlessenergy 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 in-dividuals joined the circle around the party dictator. Max Amann, Hitler’sfirst sergeant in the List Regiment, a tough, uncouth character but anable organizer, was named business manager of the party and the Voel-kischer 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 photog-rapher,” the only man who for years was permitted to photograph him,Hitler had the lame Heinrich Hoffmann, whose loyalty was doglike andprofitable, making him in the end a millionaire. Another favorite brawlerwas Christian Weber, a horse dealer, a former bouncer in a Munich diveand a lusty beer drinker. Close to Hitler in these days was HermannEsser, whose oratory rivaled the leader’s and whose Jew-baiting articles inthe 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

50

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

his mistresses. A notorious blackmailer, resorting to threats to “expose”even his own party comrades who crossed him, Esser became so repulsiveto some of the older and more decent men in the movement that theydemanded his expulsion. “I know Esser is a scoundrel,” Hitler retortedin public, “but I shall hold on to him as long as he can be of use to me.”23This was to be his attitude toward almost all of his close collaborators, nomatter how murky their past—or indeed their present. Murderers, pimps,homosexual perverts, drug addicts or just plain rowdies were all the sameto him if they served his purposes.

He stood Julius Streicher, for example, almost to the end. This de-praved sadist, who started life as an elementary-school teacher, was oneof the most disreputable men around Hitler from 1922 until 1939, whenhis star finally faded. A famous fornicator, as he boasted, who blackmailedeven the husbands of women who were his mistresses, he made his fameand fortune as a blindly fanatical anti-Semite. His notorious weekly DerStuermer, thrived on lurid tales of Jewish sexual crimes and Jewish “ritualmurders ; its obscenity was nauseating, even to many Nazis. Streicherwas also a noted pornographist. He became known as the “uncrownedKing of Franconia with the center of his power in Nuremberg, where hisword was law and where no one who crossed him or displeased him wassafe from prison and torture. Until I faced him slumped in the dock atNuremberg, on trial for his life as a war criminal, I never saw him withouta whip in his hand or in his belt, and he laughingly boasted of the countlesslashings he had meted out.

Such were the men whom Hitler gathered around him in the early yearsfor his drive to become dictator of a nation which had given the world aLuther, a Kant, a Goethe and a Schiller, a Bach, a Beethoven and aBrahms.

On April 1, 1920, the day the German Workers’ Party became theNational Socialist German Workers’ Party—from which the abbreviatedname “Nazi” emerged—Hitler left the Army for good. Henceforth hewould devote all of his time to the Nazi Party, from which neither thennor later did he accept any salary.

How, then, it might be asked, did Hitler live? His fellow party workersthemselves sometimes wondered. In the indictment which the rebelmembers of the party committee drew up in July 1921, the question wasbluntly posed. If any member asks him how he lives and what was hisformer profession, he always becomes angry and excited. Up to now noanswer has been supplied to these questions. So his conscience cannot beclean, especially as his excessive intercourse with ladies, to whom he oftendescribes himself as ‘King of Munich,’ costs a great deal of money.”

Hitler answered the question during the subsequent libel action whichhe brought against the authors of the pamphlet. To the question of thecourt as to exactly how he lived, he replied, “If I speak for the NationalSocialist Party I take no money for myself. But I also speak for otherorganizations ... and then of course I accept a fee. I also have my

Birth of the Nazi Party 51

midday meal with various party comrades in turn. I am further assistedto a modest extent by a few party comrades.”24

Probably this was very close to the truth. Such well-heeled friends asDietrich Eckart, Goering and Hanfstaengl undoubtedly “lent” him moneyto pay his rent, purchase clothes and buy a meal. His wants were certainlymodest. Until 1929 he occupied a two-room flat in a lower-middle-classdistrict in the Thierschstrasse near the River Isar. In the winter he worean old trench coat—it later became familiar to everyone in Germany fromnumerous photographs. In the summer he often appeared in shorts, theLederhosen which most Bavarians donned in seasonable weather. In1923 Eckart and Esser stumbled upon the Platterhof, an inn near Berch-tesgaden, as a summer retreat for Hitler and his friends. Hitler fell in lovewith the lovely mountain country; it was here that he later built thespacious villa, Berghof, which would be his home and where he wouldspend much of his time until the war years.

There was, however, little time for rest and recreation in the stormyyears between 1921 and 1923. There was a party to build and to keepcontrol of in the face of jealous rivals as unscrupulous as himself. TheN.S.D.A.P. was but one of several right-wing movements in Bavariastruggling for public attention and support, and beyond, in the rest ofGermany, there were many others.

There was a dizzy succession of events and of constantly changingsituations 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 Ger-mans howled they could not possibly pay. The mark, normally valuedat four to the dollar, had begun to fall; by the summer of 1921 it haddropped to seventy-five, a year later to four hundred, to the dollar.Erzberger had been murdered in August 1921. In June 1922, there wasan attempt to assassinate Philipp Scheidemann, the Socialist who hadproclaimed the Republic. The same month, June 24, Foreign MinisterRathenau was shot dead in the street. In all three cases the assassins hadbeen men of the extreme Right. The shaky national government in Berlinfinally answered the challenge with a special Law for the Protection ofthe Republic, which imposed severe penalties for political terrorism.Berlin demanded the dissolution of the innumerable armed leagues andthe end of political gangsterism. The Bavarian government, even underthe moderate Count Lerchenfeld, who had replaced the extremist Kahrin 1921, was finding it difficult to go along with the national regime inBerlin. When it attempted to enforce the law against terrorism, theBavarian Rightists, of whom Hitler was now one of the acknowledgedyoung leaders, organized a conspiracy to overthrow Lerchenfeld andmarch on Berlin to bring down the Republic.

The fledgling democratic Weimar Republic was in deep trouble, its veryexistence constantly threatened not only from the extreme Right but fromthe extreme Left.

3

VERSAILLES, WEIMARAND THE BEER HALL PUTSCH

To most men in the victorious Allied lands of the West, the proc-lamation of the Republic in Berlin on November 9, 1918, hadappeared to mark the dawn of a new day for the German people and theirnation. Woodrow Wilson, in the exchange of notes which led to thearmistice, had pressed for the abolition of the Hohenzollern militaristautocracy, and the Germans had seemingly obliged him, although reluc-tantly. The Kaiser had been forced to abdicate and to flee; the monarchywas 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, theso-called Majority Social Democrats under the leadership of FriedrichEbert and Philipp Scheidemann met in the Reichstag in Berlin followingthe resignation of the Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden. They weresorely puzzled as to what to do. Prince Max had just announced theabdication of the Kaiser. Ebert, a saddler by trade, thought that one ofWilhelm’s sons—anyone except the dissolute Crown Prince—might suc-ceed him, for he favored a constitutional monarchy on the British pattern.Ebert, though he led the Socialists, abhorred social revolution. “I hate itlike sin,” he had once declared.

But revolution was in the air in Berlin. The capital was paralyzed by ageneral strike. Down the broad Unter den Linden, a few blocks from theReichstag, the Spartacists, led by the Left Socialists Rosa Luxemburg andKarl Liebknecht, were preparing from their citadel in the Kaiser’s palaceto proclaim a soviet republic. When word of this reached the Socialistsin the Reichstag they were consternated. Something had to be done atonce to forestall the Spartacists. Scheidemann thought of something.Without consulting his comrades he dashed to the window overlooking theKoenigsplatz, where a great throng had gathered, stuck his head out andon his own, as if the idea had just popped into his head, proclaimed theRepublic! The saddle maker Ebert was furious. He had hoped, somehow,to save the Hohenzollern monarchy.

52

Thus was the German Republic born, as if by a fluke. If the Socialiststhemselves were not staunch republicans it could hardly be expected thatthe conservatives would be. But the latter had abdicated their respon-sibihty. They and the Army leaders, Ludendorff and Hindenburg, hadpushed political power into the hands of the reluctant Social DemocratsIn doing so they managed also to place on the shoulders of these demo-cratic working-class leaders apparent responsibility for signing the sur-render and ultimately the peace treaty, thus laying on them the blame forGermany s defeat and for whatever suffering a lost war and a dictatedpeace might bring upon the German people. This was a shabby trick, onewhich the merest child would be expected to see through, but in Germanyit worked. It doomed the Republic from the start.

Perhaps it need not have. In November 1918 the Social Democratsholding absolute power, might have quickly laid the foundation for u’lasting democratic Republic. But to have done so they would have hadto suppress permanently, or at least curb permanently, the forces whichad propped up the Hohenzollern Empire and which would not loyallyaccept a democratic Germany: the feudal Junker landlords and otherupper castes, the magnates who ruled over the great industrial cartels theroving condottieri of the free corps, the ranking officials of the imperialcivil service and, above all, the military caste and the members of theGeneral Staff. They would have had to break up many of the greatestates, which were wasteful and uneconomic, and the industrial mo-nopolies and cartels, and clean out the bureaucracy, the judiciary thepolice, the universities and the Army of all who would not loyally andhonestly 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 whichwas ingrained in Germans of other classes, could not bring themselvesto do Instead they began by abdicating their authority to the force whichhad always been dominant in modern Germany, the Army. For thoughit had been defeated on the battlefield the Army still had hopes of main-taining itself at home and of defeating the revolution. To achieve theseends it moved swiftly and boldly.

On the night of November 9, 1918, a few hours after the Republichad been proclaimed,” a telephone rang in the study of Ebert in the ReichChancellery in Berlin. It was a very special telephone, for it was linkedwith Supreme Headquarters at Spa by a private and secret line. Ebert wasalone He picked up the telephone. “Groener speaking,” a voice said.The former saddle maker, still bewildered by the day’s events which hadsuddenly thrust into his unwilling hands whatever political power remainedin a crumbling Germany, was impressed. General Wilhelm Groener wasthe successor of Ludendorff as First Quartermaster General. Earlier onthat very day at Spa it was he who, when Field Marshal von Hindenburgfaltered had bluntly informed the Kaiser that he no longer commandedthe loyalty of his troops and must go—a brave act for which the militarycaste never forgave him. Ebert and Groener had developed a bond of

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mutual respect since 1916, when the General, then in charge of war pro-duction, had worked closely with the Socialist leader. Early in November—a few days before—they had conferred in Berlin on how to save themonarchy and the Fatherland.

Now at the Fatherland’s lowest moment a secret telephone line broughtthem together. Then and there the Socialist leader and the second-in-command of the German Army made a pact which, though it would notbe publicly known for many years, was to determine the nation’s fate.Ebert agreed to put down anarchy and Bolshevism and maintain theArmy in all its tradition. Groener thereupon pledged the support of theArmy in helping the new government establish itself and carry out itsaims.

“Will the Field Marshal (Hindenburg) retain the command?” Ebertasked.

General Groener replied that he would.

“Convey to the Field Marshal the thanks of the government,” Ebertreplied.1

The German Army was saved, but the Republic, on the very day of itsbirth, was lost. The generals, with the honorable exception of Groenerhimself and but few others, would never serve it loyally. In the end, ledby Hindenburg, they betrayed it to the Nazis.

At the moment, to be sure, the specter of what had just happened inRussia haunted the minds of Ebert and his fellow Socialists. They didnot want to become the German Kerenskys. They did not want to besupplanted by the Bolshevists. Everywhere in Germany the Soldiers’ andWorkers’ Councils were springing up and assuming power, as they haddone in Russia. It was these groups which on November 10 elected aCouncil of People’s Representatives, with Ebert at its head, to governGermany for the time being. In December the first Soviet Congress ofGermany met in Berlin. Composed of delegates from the Soldiers’ andWorkers’ Councils throughout the country, it demanded the dismissal ofHindenburg, the abolition of the Regular Army and the substitution of acivil guard whose officers would be elected by the men and which wouldbe under the supreme authority of the Council.

This was too much for Hindenburg and Groener. They declined torecognize the authority of the Soviet Congress. Ebert himself did nothingto carry out its demands. But the Army, fighting for its life, demandedmore positive action from the government it had agreed to support. Twodays before Christmas the People’s Marine Division, now under the con-trol of the Communist Spartacists, occupied the Wilhelmstrasse, brokeinto the Chancellery and cut its telephone wires. The secret line to Armyheadquarters, however, continued to function and over it Ebert appealedfor help. The Army promised liberation by the Potsdam garrison, butbefore it could arrive the mutinous sailors retired to their quarters in thestables of the imperial palace, which the Spartacists still held.

The Spartacists, with Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the twomost effective agitators in Germany, at their head, continued to push for

a soviet republic. Their armed power in Berlin was mounting. OnChristmas Eve the Marine Division had easily repulsed an attempt byregular troops from Potsdam to dislodge it from the imperial stables.Hindenburg and Groener pressed Ebert to honor the pact between themand suppress the Bolshevists. This the Socialist leader was only too gladto do. Two days after Christmas he appointed Gustav Noske as Ministerof National Defense, and from this appointment events proceeded witha logic which all who knew the new Minister might have expected.

Noske was a master butcher by trade who had worked his way up inthe trade-union movement and the Social Democratic Party, becoming amember of the Reichstag in 1906, where he became recognized as theparty’s expert on military affairs. He also became recognized as a strongnationalist and as a strong man. Prince Max of Baden had picked him toput down the naval mutiny at Kiel in the first days of November and hehad put it down. A stocky, square-jawed man of great physical strengthand energy, though of abbreviated intelligence—typical, his enemies said,of his trade—Noske announced on his appointment as Defense Ministerthat “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 Generalvon Luettwitz* crushed the Spartacists. Rosa Luxemburg and KarlLiebknecht were captured and murdered by officers of the Guard CavalryDivision.

As soon as the fighting in Berlin was over, elections were held through-out Germany for the National Assembly, which was to draw up the newconstitution. The voting, which took place on January 19, 1919, revealedthat the middle and upper classes had regained some of their courage inthe little more than two months which had elapsed since the “revolution.”The Social Democrats (the Majority and Independent Socialists), whohad 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 of421 seats in the Assembly, but this was considerably less than a majority.Obviously the new Germany was not going to be built by the workingclass alone. Two middle-class parties, the Center, representing the politi-cal movement of the Roman Catholic Church, and the Democratic Party,born of a fusion in December of the old Progressive Party and the left

* A year later General Freiherr Walther von Luettwitz, a reactionary officer of theold school, would show how loyal he was to the Republic in general and to Noske inparticular when he led free-corps troops in the capture of Berlin in support of theKapp putsch. Ebert, Noske and the other members of the government were forcedto flee at five in the morning of March 13, 1920. General von Seeckt, Chief of Staffof the Army and nominally subordinate to Noske, the Minister of Defense, had re-fused to allow the Army to defend the Republic against Luettwitz and Kapp. “Thisnight has shown the bankruptcy of all my policy,” Noske cried out. “My faith inthe Officer Corps is shattered. You have all deserted me.” (Quoted by Wheeler-Bennett in The Nemesis of Power, p. 77.)

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wing of the National Liberals, polled 11,500,000 votes between them andobtained 166 seats in the Assembly. Both parties professed support fora moderate, democratic Republic, though there was considerable senti-ment for an eventual restoration of the monarchy.

The Conservatives, some of whose leaders had gone into hiding inNovember and others who, like Count von Westarp, had appealed to Ebertfor protection, showed that though reduced in numbers they were far fromextinguished. Rechristened the German National People’s Party, theypolled over three million votes and elected 44 deputies; their right-wingallies, the National Liberals, who had changed their name to the GermanPeople’s Party, received nearly a million and a half votes and won 19seats. Though decidedly in the minority, the two conservative partieshad won enough seats in the Assembly to be vocal. Indeed, no soonerhad the Assembly met in Weimar on February 6, 1919, than the leadersof these two groups sprang up to defend the name of Kaiser Wilhelm IIand the way he and his generals had conducted the war. Gustav Strese-mann, the head of the People’s Party, had not yet experienced what laterseemed to many to be a change of heart and mind. In 1919 he was stillknown as the man who had been the Supreme Command’s mouthpiece inthe Reichstag—“Ludendorffs young man,” as he was called—a violentsupporter of the policy of annexation, a fanatic for unrestricted submarinewarfare.

The constitution which emerged from the Assembly after six months ofdebate—it was passed on July 31, 1919, and ratified by the President onAugust 31—was, on paper, the most liberal and democratic document ofits kind the twentieth century had seen, mechanically well-nigh perfect,full of ingenious and admirable devices which seemed to guarantee theworking of an almost flawless democracy. The idea of cabinet governmentwas borrowed from England and France, of a strong popular Presidentfrom the United States, of the referendum from Switzerland. An elaborateand complicated system of proportional representation and voting by listswas established in order to prevent the wasting of votes and give smallminorities a right to be represented in Parliament.*

* There were flaws, to be sure, and in the end some of them proved disastrous. Thesystem of proportional representation and voting by list may have prevented thewasting of votes, but it also resulted in the multiplication of small splinter partieswhich eventually made a stable majority in the Reichstag impossible and led tofrequent 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 ofProfessor Hugo Preuss, the principal drafter of the constitution, not been rejected.He proposed at Weimar that Germany be made into a centralized state and thatPrussia and the other single states be dissolved and transformed into provinces. Butthe Assembly turned his proposals down.

Finally, Article 48 of the constitution conferred upon the President dictatorialpowers during an emergency. The use made of this clause by Chancellors Brue-ning, von Papen and von Schleicher under President Hindenburg enabled them togovern without approval of the Reichstag and thus, even before the advent of Hit-ler, brought an end to democratic parliamentary government in Germany.

The wording of the Weimar Constitution was sweet and eloquent to theear of any democratically minded man. The people were declared sover-eign: “Political power emanates from the people.” Men and women weregiven the vote at the age of twenty. “All Germans are equal before thelaw . . . Personal liberty is inviolable . . . Every German has a right. . . to express his opinion freely ... All Germans have the right toform associations or societies ... All inhabitants of the Reich enjoycomplete liberty of belief and conscience . . .” No man in the worldwould be more free than a German, no government more democratic andliberal than his. On paper, at least.

THE SHADOW OF VERSAILLES

Before the drafting of the Weimar Constitution was finished an inevi-table event occurred which cast a spell of doom over it and the Republicwhich it was to establish. This was the drawing up of the Treaty ofVersailles. During the first chaotic and riotous days of the peace and evenafter the deliberations of the National Assembly got under way in Weimarthe German people seemed to give little thought to the consequences oftheir defeat. Or if they did, they appeared to be smugly confident thathaving, as the Allies urged, got rid of the Hohenzollerns, squelched theBolshevists and set about forming a democratic, republican government,they were entitled to a just peace based not on their having lost the warbut on President Wilson’s celebrated Fourteen Points.

German memories did not appear to stretch back as far as one year, toMarch 3, 1918, when the then victorious German Supreme Commandhad imposed on a defeated Russia at Brest Litovsk a peace treaty whichto a British historian, writing two decades after the passions of war hadcooled, was a “humiliation without precedent or equal in modern his-tory.”2 It deprived Russia of a territory nearly as large as Austria-Hungaryand Turkey combined, with 56,000,000 inhabitants, or 32 per cent ofher whole population; a third of her railway mileage, 73 per cent of hertotal iron ore, 89 per cent of her total coal production; and more than5,000 factories and industrial plants. Moreover, Russia was obliged topay Germany an indemnity of six billion marks.

The day of reckoning arrived for the Germans in the late spring of1919. The terms of the Versailles Treaty, laid down by the Allies withoutnegotiation with Germany, were published in Berlin on May 7. Theycame as a staggering blow to a people who had insisted on deludingthemselves to the last moment. Angry mass meetings were organizedthroughout the country to protest against the treaty and to demand thatGermany refuse to sign it. Scheidemann, who had become Chancellorduring the Weimar Assembly, cried, “May the hand wither that signs thistreaty!” On May 8 Ebert, who had become Provisional President, andthe government publicly branded the terms as “unrealizable and unbear-able.” The next day the German delegation at Versailles wrote the un-

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bending Clemenceau that such a treaty was “intolerable for any nation.”

What was so intolerable about it? It restored Alsace-Lorraine toFrance, a parcel of territory to Belgium, a similar parcel in Schleswig toDenmark—after a plebiscite—which Bismarck had taken from the Danesin the previous century after defeating them in war. It gave back to thePoles the lands, some of them only after a plebiscite, which the Germanshad taken during the partition of Poland. This was one of the stipulationswhich infuriated the Germans the most, not only because they resentedseparating East Prussia from the Fatherland by a corridor which gavePoland access to the sea, but because they despised the Poles, whom theyconsidered an inferior race. Scarcely less infuriating to the Germans wasthat the treaty forced them to accept responsibility for starting the warand demanded that they turn over to the Allies Kaiser Wilhelm II andsome eight hundred other “war criminals.”

Reparations were to be fixed later, but a first payment of five billiondollars in gold marks was to be paid between 1919 and 1921, and certaindeliveries in kind—coal, ships, lumber, cattle, etc.—were to be made inlieu 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 hegemonyin Europe. And yet the hated Treaty of Versailles, unlike that whichGermany had imposed on Russia, left the Reich geographically and eco-nomically largely intact and preserved her political unity and her potentialstrength as a great nation.

The provisional government at Weimar, with the exception of Erzber-ger, who urged acceptance of the treaty on the grounds that its terms couldbe easily evaded, was strongly against accepting the Versailles Diktat, as itwas now being called. Behind the government stood the overwhelmingmajority of citizens, from right to left.

And the Army? If the treaty were rejected, could the Army resist aninevitable Allied attack from the west? Ebert put it up to the SupremeCommand, which had now moved its headquarters to Kolberg in Pomer-ania. On June 17 Field Marshal von Hindenburg, prodded by GeneralGroener, who saw that German military resistance would be futile, replied:

In the event of a resumption of hostilities we can reconquer the provinceof 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 thepart of the enemy in view of the numerical superiority of the Entente andtheir ability to outflank us on both wings.

The success of the operation as a whole is therefore very doubtful, but as asoldier 1 cannot help feeling that it were better to perish honorably than accepta disgraceful peace.

* It restricted the Army to 100,000 long-term volunteers and prohibited it fromhaving planes or tanks. The General Staff was also outlawed. The Navy was re-duced to little more than a token force and forbidden to build submarines or vesselsover 10,000 tons.

Versailles, Weimar and the Beer Hall Putsch

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The concluding words of the revered Commander in Chief were in thebest German military tradition but their sincerity may be judged by knowl-edge of the fact which the German people were unaware of—that Hinden-burg had agreed with Groener that to try to resist the Allies now would notonly be hopeless but might result in the destruction of the cherishedofficer corps of the Army and indeed of Germany itself.

The Allies were now demanding a definite answer from Germany. OnJune 16, the day previous to Hindenburg’s written answer to Ebert, theyhad given the Germans an ultimatum: Either the treaty must be acceptedby June 24 or the armistice agreement would be terminated and the Alliedpowers would “take such steps as they think necessary to enforce theirterms.”

Once again Ebert appealed to Groener. If the Supreme Commandthought there was the slightest possibility of successful military resistanceto the Allies, Ebert promised to try to secure the rejection of the treaty bythe Assembly. But he must have an answer immediately. The last dayof the ultimatum, June 24, had arrived. The cabinet was meeting at4:30 p.m. to make its final decision. Once more Hindenburg and Groenerconferred. “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 No-vember 9, 1918, when he could not bring himself to tell the Kaiser thefinal truth and left the unpleasant duty to Groener, he declined to tell thetruth to the Provisional President of the Republic. “You can give theanswer to the President as well as I can,” he said to Groener.3 And againthe courageous General took the final responsibility which belonged to theField Marshal, though he must have known that it would eventually makedoubly sure his being made a scapegoat for the officer corps. He tele-phoned the Supreme Command’s view to the President.

Relieved at having the Army’s leaders take the responsibility—a factthat was soon forgotten in Germany—the National Assembly approvedthe signing of the peace treaty by a large majority and its decision wascommunicated to Clemenceau a bare nineteen minutes before the Alliedultimatum ran out. Four days later, on June 28, 1919, the treaty of peacewas 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 theRepublic which had ratified it. Nor, in the long run, would the Army—General Groener excepted—though it had sworn to support the new demo-cratic regime and had itself made the final decision to sign at Versailles.Despite the November “revolution,” the conservatives still held the eco-nomic power. They owned the industries, the large estates and most ofthe country’s capital. Their wealth could be used, and was, to subsidize

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political parties and a political press that would strive from now on toundermine the Republic.

The Army began to circumvent the military restrictions of the peacetreaty before the ink on it was scarcely dry. And thanks to the timidityand shortsightedness of the Socialist leaders, the officer corps managed notonly 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. TheArmy did not, until the last days of the short-lived Republic, stake itsfortunes on any one political movement. But under General Hans vonSeeckt, 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 in-creasing influence on the nation’s foreign and domestic policies until apoint was reached where the Republic’s continued existence depended onthe will of the officer corps.

As a state within a state it maintained its independence of the nationalgovernment. Under the Weimar Constitution the Army could have beensubordinated to the cabinet and Parliament, as the military establishmentsof the other Western democracies were. But it was not. Nor was theofficer corps purged of its monarchist, antirepublican frame of mind. Afew Socialist leaders such as Scheidemann and Grzesinski urged “democ-ratizing” the armed forces. They saw the danger of handing the Armyback to the officers of the old authoritarian, imperialist tradition. But theywere successfully opposed not only by the generals but by their fellowSocialists, led by the Minister of Defense, Noske. This proletarian ministerof the Republic openly boasted that he wanted to revive “the proud soldiermemories of the World War.” The failure of the duly elected governmentto build a new Army that would be faithful to its own democratic spiritand subordinate to the cabinet and the Reichstag was a fatal mistake forthe Republic, as time would tell.

The failure to clean out the judiciary was another. The administratorsof the law became one of the centers of the counterrevolution, pervertingjustice for reactionary political ends. “It is impossible to escape the con-clusion,” the historian Franz L. Neumann declared, “that political justiceis the blackest page in the life of the German Republic.”4 After theKapp putsch in 1920 the government charged 705 persons with hightreason; only one, the police president of Berlin, received a sentence—fiveyears of “honorary confinement.” When the state of Prussia withdrewhis pension the Supreme Court ordered it restored. A German court inDecember 1926 awarded General von Luettwitz, the military leader ofthe Kapp putsch, back payment of his pension to cover the period whenhe was a rebel against the government and also the five years that he wasa fugitive from justice in Hungary.

Yet hundreds of German liberals were sentenced to long prison terms oncharges of treason because they revealed or denounced in the press or byspeech the Army’s constant violations of the Versailles Treaty. Thetreason 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

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learn, got off either free or with the lightest of sentences. Even the assas-sins, if they were of the Right and their victims democrats, were lenientlytreated by the courts or, as often happened, helped to escape from thecustody of the courts by Army officers and right-wing extremists.

And so the mild Socialists, aided by the democrats and the CatholicCentrists, were left to carry on the Republic, which tottered from its birth.They bore the hatred, the abuse and sometimes the bullets of their op-ponents, who grew in number and in resolve. “In the heart of the people,”cried Oswald Spengler, who had skyrocketed to fame with his book TheDecline of the West, “the Weimar Constitution is already doomed.” Downin Bavaria the young firebrand Adolf Hitler grasped the strength of thenew nationalist, antidemocratic, antirepublican tide. He began to ride it.

He was greatly aided by the course of events, two in particular: thefall of the mark and the French occupation of the Ruhr. The mark, as wehave seen, had begun to slide in 1921, when it dropped to 75 to thedollar; 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 Alliesto grant a moratorium on reparation payments. This the French govern-ment of Poincare had bluntly refused. When Germany defaulted indeliveries of timber, the hardheaded French Premier, who had been thewartime President of France, ordered French troops to occupy the Ruhr.The industrial heart of Germany, which, after the loss of Upper Silesia toPoland, 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 mo-mentarily as they had not been united since 1914. The workers of theRuhr declared a general strike and received financial support from thegovernment 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 ofthe mark. On the occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923, it fell to18,000 to the dollar; by July 1 it had dropped to 160,000; by August 1to a million. By November, when Hitler thought his hour had struck, ittook four billion marks to buy a dollar, and thereafter the figures becametrillions. German currency had become utterly worthless. Purchasingpower of salaries and wages was reduced to zero. The life savings of themiddle classes and the working classes were wiped out. But somethingeven more important was destroyed: the faith of the people in the eco-nomic structure of German society. What good were the standards andpractices of such a society, which encouraged savings and investment andsolemnly promised a safe return from them and then defaulted? Wasthis not a fraud upon the people?

And was not the democratic Republic, which had surrendered to theenemy and accepted the burden of reparations, to blame for the disaster?Unfortunately for its survival, the Republic did bear a responsibility. The

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inflation could have been halted by merely balancing the budget—adifficult but not impossible feat. Adequate taxation might have achievedthis, 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 partby direct taxation but 93 billions of it by war loans, 29 billions out ofTreasury bills and the rest by increasing the issue of paper money. Insteadof drastically raising taxes on those who could pay, the republican govern-ment actually reduced them in 1921.

From then on, goaded by the big industrialists and landlords, whostood to gain though the masses of the people were financially ruined, thegovernment deliberately let the mark tumble in order to free the State ofits public debts, to escape from paying reparations and to sabotage theFrench in the Ruhr. Moreover, the destruction of the currency enabledGerman heavy industry to wipe out its indebtedness by refunding itsobligations in worthless marks. The General Staff, disguised as the“Truppenamt” (Office of Troops) to evade the peace treaty which sup-posedly had outlawed it, took notice that the fall of the mark wiped outthe war debts and thus left Germany financially unencumbered for a newwar.

The masses of the people, however, did not realize how much the in-dustrial tycoons, the Army and the State were benefiting from the ruin ofthe currency. All they knew was that a large bank account could notbuy a straggly bunch of carrots, a half peck of potatoes, a few ounces ofsugar, 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 theirmisery and hopelessness they made the Republic the scapegoat for all thathad 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. “Be-cause once the printing presses stopped—and that is the prerequisite forthe stabilization of the mark—the swindle would at once be brought tolight . . . Believe me, our misery will increase. The scoundrel will getby. The reason: because the State itself has become the biggest swindlerand crook. A robbers’ state! ... If the horrified people notice that theycan starve on billions, they must arrive at this conclusion: we will nolonger 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 weredriving millions of Germans toward that conclusion and Hitler was readyto lead them on. In fact, he had begun to believe that the chaotic condi-tions of 1923 had created an opportunity to overthrow the Republic whichmight 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 unlesshe was.

In the first place, the Nazi Party, though it was growing daily innumbers, was far from being even the most important political movementin Bavaria, and outside that state it was unknown. How could such asmall party overthrow the Republic? Hitler, who was not easily dis-couraged by odds against him, thought he saw a way. He might uniteunder his leadership all the antirepublican, nationalist forces in Bavaria.Then with the support of the Bavarian government, the armed leaguesand the Reichswehr stationed in Bavaria, he might lead a march on Berlin—as Mussolini had marched on Rome the year before—and bring theWeimar Republic down. Obviously Mussolini’s easy success had givenhim food for thought.

The French occupation of the Ruhr, though it brought a renewal ofGerman hatred for the traditional enemy and thus revived the spirit ofnationalism, complicated Hitler’s task. It began to unify the Germanpeople behind the republican government in Berlin which had chosen todefy France. This was the last thing Hitler wanted. His aim was to doaway with the Republic. France could be taken care of after Germanyhad had its nationalist revolution and established a dictatorship. Againsta 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 makingthe slogan effective. In February, due largely to the organizational talentsof Roehm, four of the armed “patriotic leagues” of Bavaria joined withthe Nazis to form the so-called Arbeitsgemeinschaft der VaterlaendischenKampfverbaende (Working Union of the Fatherland Fighting Leagues)under the political leadership of Hitler. In September an even strongergroup 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 Nurembergon September 2 to celebrate the anniversary of the German defeat ofFrance at Sedan in 1870. Most of the fascist-minded groups in southernGermany were represented and Hitler received something of an ovationafter a violent speech against the national government. The objectives ofthe new Kampfbund were openly stated: overthrow of the Republic andthe tearing up of the Treaty of Versailles.

At the Nuremberg meeting Hitler had stood in the reviewing standnext to General Ludendorff during a parade of the demonstrators. Thiswas not by accident. For some time the young Nazi chief had beencultivating the war hero, who had lent his famous name to the makers ofthe Kapp putsch in Berlin and who, since he continued to encouragecounterrevolution from the Right, might be tempted to back an actionwhich was beginning to germinate in Hitler’s mind. The old General hadno political sense; living now outside Munich, he did not disguise his con-tempt for Bavarians, for Crown Prince Rupprecht, the Bavarian pre-

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tender, and for the Catholic Church in this most Catholic of all states inGermany. All this Hitler knew, but it suited his purposes. He did notwant Ludendorff as the political leader of the nationalist counterrevolu-tion, 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 renownin the officer corps and among the conservatives throughout Germanywould be an asset to a provincial politician still largely unknown outsideBavaria. Hitler began to include Ludendorff in his plans.

In the fall of 1923 the German Republic and the state of Bavariareached a point of crisis. On September 26, Gustav Stresemann, theChancellor, announced the end of passive resistance in the Ruhr and theresumption of German reparation payments. This former mouthpiece ofHindenburg and Ludendorff, a staunch conservative and, at heart, amonarchist, 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, acceptthe Republic, come to terms with the Allies and obtain a period oftranquillity in which to regain its economic strength. To drift any furtherwould only end in civil war and perhaps in the final destruction of thenation.

The abandonment of resistance to the French in the Ruhr and theresumption of the burden of reparations touched off an outburst of angerand hysteria among the German nationalists, and the Communists, whoalso had been growing in strength, joined them in bitter denunciation ofthe Republic. Stresemann was faced with serious revolt from both ex-treme Right and extreme Left. He had anticipated it by having PresidentEbert declare a state of emergency on the very day he announced thechange of policy on the Ruhr and reparations. From September 26, 1923,until February 1924, executive power in Germany under the EmergencyAct was placed in the hands of the Minister of Defense, Otto Gessler, andof the Commander of the Army, General von Seeckt. In reality thismade the General and his Army virtual dictators of the Reich.

Bavaria was in no mood to accept such a solution. The Bavarian cabinetof Eugen von Knilling proclaimed its own state of emergency on September26 and named the right-wing monarchist and former premier Gustavvon Kahr as State Commissioner with dictatorial powers. In Berlin itwas feared that Bavaria might secede from the Reich, restore the Wittels-bach monarchy and perhaps form a South German union with Austria.A meeting of the cabinet was hastily summoned by President Ebert, andGeneral von Seeckt was invited to attend. Ebert wanted to know wherethe Army stood. Seeckt bluntly told him. “The Army, Mr. President,stands behind me.”7

The icy words pronounced by the monocled, poker-faced PrussianCommander in Chief did not, as might have been expected, dismay theGerman President or his Chancellor. They had already recognized theArmy’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

Versailles, Weimar and the Beer Hall Putsch 65

Berlin and a similar appeal had been made to Seeckt, the Army hadstood not behind the Republic but behind the General. The only questionnow, in 1923, was where Seeckt stood.

Fortunately for the Republic he now chose to stand behind it, notbecause he believed in republican, democratic principles but becausehe saw that for the moment the support of the existing regime wasnecessary for the preservation of the Army, itself threatened by revolt inBavaria and in the north, and for saving Germany from a disastrous civilwar. Seeckt knew that some of the leading officers of the Army divisionin Munich were siding with the Bavarian separatists. He knew of a con-spiracy of the “Black Reichswehr” under Major Buchrucker, a formerGeneral Staff officer, to occupy Berlin and turn the republican governmentout. He now moved with cool precision and absolute determination, toset the Army right and end the threat of civil war.

On the night of September 30, 1923, “Black Reichswehr” troops underthe command of Major Buchrucker seized three forts to the east of Berlin.Seeckt ordered regular forces to besiege them, and after two days Buch-rucker surrendered. He was tried for high treason and actually sentencedto ten years of fortress detention. The “Black Reichswehr,” which hadbeen 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 uprisingsin Saxony, Thuringia, Hamburg and the Ruhr. In suppressing the Leftthe loyalty of the Army could be taken for granted. In Saxony theSocialist-Communist government was arrested by the local Reichswehrcommander and a Reich Commissioner appointed to rule. In Hamburgand in the other areas the Communists were quickly and severelysquelched. It now seemed to Berlin that the relatively easy suppression ofthe Bolshevists had robbed the conspirators in Bavaria of the pretext thatthey were really acting to save the Republic from Communism, and thatthey would now recognize the authority of the national government. Butit did not turn out that way.

Bavaria remained defiant of Berlin. It was now under the dictatorialcontrol of a triumvirate: Kahr, the State Commissioner, General Ottovon Lossow, commander of the Reichswehr in Bavaria, and Colonel Hansvon Seisser, the head of the state police. Kahr refused to recognize thatPresident Ebert’s proclamation of a state of emergency in Germany had

* The “Black Reichswehr” troops, numbering roughly twenty thousand, were sta-tioned on the eastern frontier to help guard it against the Poles in the turbulent daysof 1920-23. The illicit organization became notorious for its revival of the horrorsof the medieval Femegerichte—secret courts—which dealt arbitrary death sentencesagainst Germans who revealed the activities of the “Black Reichswehr” to the AlliedControl Commission. Several of these brutal murders reached the courts. At onetrial the German Defense Minister, Otto Gessler, who had succeeded Noske, deniedany knowledge of the organization and insisted that it did not exist. But when oneof his questioners protested against such innocence Gessler cried, “He who speaksof the ‘Black Reichswehr’ commits an act of high treason!”

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any application in Bavaria. He declined to carry out any orders fromBerlin. When the national government demanded the suppression ofHitler’s newspaper, the Voelkischer Beobachter, because of its vitriolicattacks on the Republic in general and on Seeckt, Stresemann and Gesslerin particular, Kahr contemptuously refused.

A second order from Berlin to arrest three notorious leaders of someof the armed bands in Bavaria, Captain Heiss, Captain Ehrhardt (the“hero” of the Kapp putsch) and Lieutenant Rossbach (a homosexualfriend of Roehm), was also ignored by Kahr. Seeckt, his patience strained,ordered General von Lossow to suppress the Nazi newspaper and arrestthe three free-corps men. The General, himself a Bavarian and a con-fused and weak officer who had been taken in by Hitler’s eloquence andKahr’s persuasiveness, hesitated to obey. On October 24 Seeckt sackedhim and appointed General Kress von Kressenstein in his place. Kahr,however, would not take such dictation from Berlin. He declared thatLossow would retain the command of the Reichswehr in Bavaria anddefying not only Seeckt but the constitution, forced the officers and themen of the Army to take a special oath of allegiance to the Bavariangovernment.

This, to Berlin, was not only political but military rebellion, andGeneral von Seeckt was now determined to put down both.8

He issued a plain warning to the Bavarian triumvirate and to Hitlerand the armed leagues that any rebellion on their part would be opposedby force. But for the Nazi leader it was too late to draw back. Hisrabid followers were demanding action. Lieutenant Wilhelm Brueckner,one of his S.A. commanders, urged him to strike at once. “The dayis 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 andbegan to succeed in his endeavor to restore tranquillity in the country,his own opportunity would be lost. He pleaded with Kahr and Lossowto march on Berlin before Berlin marched on Munich. And his suspiciongrew that either the triumvirate was losing heart or that it was planninga separatist coup without him for the purpose of detaching Bavaria fromthe 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’swarning. They were not interested in a futile gesture that might destroythem. On November 6 they informed the Kampfbund, of which Hitlerwas the leading political figure, that they would not be hurried intoprecipitate 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. Hedid not possess the backing to carry out a putsch alone. He would haveto have the support of the Bavarian state, the Army and the police—thiswas a lesson he had learned in his beggarly Vienna days. Somehow hewould have to put Kahr, Lossow and Seisser in a position where theywould have to act with him and from which there would be no turning

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back. Boldness, even recklessness, was called for, and that Hitler nowproved he had. He decided to kidnap the triumvirate and force them touse 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 him-self with his wife’s name and called himself Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, was a dubious character who, like Rosenberg, had spent most ofhis life in the Russian Baltic provinces and after the war made his waywith other refugees from the Soviet Union to Munich, where he joinedthe Nazi Party and became one of Hitler’s close confidants.

On November 4, Germany’s Memorial Day (Totengedenktag) would beobserved by a military parade in the heart of Munich, and it had beenannounced in the press that not only the popular Crown Prince Rupprechtbut Kahr, Lossow and Seisser would take the salute of the troops from astand in a narrow street leading from the Feldherrnhalle. Scheubner-Richter and Rosenberg proposed to Hitler that a few hundred stormtroopers, transported by trucks, should converge on the little street beforethe parading troops arrived and seal it off with machine guns. Hitlerwould then mount the tribune, proclaim the revolution and at pistol pointprevail upon the notables to join it and help him lead it. The planappealed to Hitler and he enthusiastically endorsed it. But, on the ap-pointed day, when Rosenberg arrived early on the scene for purposes ofreconnaissance he discovered to his dismay that the narrow street wasfully 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, onethat could not be balked by the presence of a band of strategically locatedpolice. On the night of November 10-11, the S.A. and the other armedbands of the Kampfbund would be concentrated on the Froettmamn<ierHeath, just north of Munich, and on the morning of the eleventh, theanniversary of the hated, shameful armistice, would march into the city,seize strategic points, proclaim the national revolution and present thehesitant Kahr, Lossow and Seisser with a fait accompli.

At this point a not very important public announcement induced Hitlerto drop that plan and improvise a new one. A brief notice appeared inthe press that, at the request of some business organizations in Munich,Kahr would address a meeting at the Buergerbraukeller, a large beer hallon the southeastern outskirts of the city. The date was November 8,in the evening. The subject of the Commissioner’s speech, the noticesaid, would be the program of the Bavarian government. General vonLossow, Colonel von Seisser and other notables would be present.

Two considerations led Hitler to a rash decision. The first was thathe suspected Kahr might use the meeting to announce the proclamationof Bavarian independence and the restoration of the Wittelsbachs to theBavarian throne. All day long on November 8 Hitler tried in vain tosee Kahr, who put him off until the ninth. This only increased the Nazileader’s suspicions. He must forestall Kahr. Also, and this was the second

oo THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

consideration, the Buergerbraukeller meeting provided the opportunitywhich had been missed on November 4: the chance to rope in all threemembers of the triumvirate and at the point of a pistol force them tojoin the Nazis in carrying out the revolution. Hitler decided to act at once.Plans for the November 10 mobilization were called off; the storm troopswere 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, afterKahr had been speaking for half an hour to some three thousand thirstyburghers, seated at roughhewn tables and quaffing their beer out of stonemugs in the Bavarian fashion, S.A. troops surrounded the Buerger-braukeller and Hitler pushed forward into the hall. While some of hismen were mounting a machine gun in the entrance, Hitler jumped upon a table and to attract attention fired a revolver shot toward the ceiling.Kahr paused in his discourse. The audience turned around to see whatwas the cause of the disturbance. Hitler, with the help of Hess and ofUlrich Graf, the former butcher, amateur wrestler and brawler and nowthe leader’s bodyguard, made his way to the platform. A police majortried 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 buildingis occupied by six hundred heavily armed men. No one may leave thehall. Unless there is immediate quiet I shall have a machine gun postedin the gallery. The Bavarian and Reich governments have been removedand a provisional national government formed. The barracks of theReichswehr and police are occupied. The Army and the police aremarching on the city under the swastika banner.”

This last was false; it was pure bluff. But in the confusion no oneknew for sure. Hitler’s revolver was real. It had gone off. The stormtroopers with their rifles and machine guns were real. Hitler now orderedKahr, Lossow and Seisser to follow him to a nearby private room offstage. Prodded by storm troopers, the three highest officials of Bavariadid Hitler’s bidding while the crowd looked on in amazement.

But with growing resentment too. Many businessmen still regardedHitler 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 ownchiefs so docile and the S.A. taking over the hall, did not budge. Hitlerhad arranged for a Nazi spy at police headquarters, Wilhelm Frick, totelephone the police on duty at the beer hall not to interfere but merely toreport. The crowd began to grow so sullen that Goering felt it necessaryto step to the rostrum and quiet them. “There is nothing to fear,” hecried. “We have the friendliest intentions. For that matter, you’ve no

Versailles, Weimar and the Beer Hall Putsch 69

cause to grumble, you’ve got your beer!” And he informed them that inthe next room a new government was being formed.

It was, at the point of Adolf Hitler’s revolver. Once he had herdedhis prisoners into the adjoining room, Hitler told them, “No one leavesthis room alive without my permission.” He then informed them theywould all have key jobs either in the Bavarian government or in the Reichgovernment 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 Naziconspiracy, to the beerhouse at once.

The three prisoners at first refused even to speak to Hitler. He continuedto harangue them. Each of them must join him in proclaiming the rev-olution 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 ofBavaria; Lossow, Minister of the National Army; Seisser, Minister of theReich Police. None of the three was impressed at the prospect of suchhigh office. They did not answer.

Their continued silence unnerved Hitler. Finally he waved his gun atthem. “I have four shots in my pistol! Three for my collaborators, if theyabandon me. The last bullet for myself!” Pointing the weapon to hisforehead, he cried, “If I am not victorious by tomorrow afternoon, I shallbe 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 wordof honor not to make a putsch against the police.

“Yes, I did,” Hitler replied. “Forgive me, but I had to for the sakeof the Fatherland.”

General von Lossow disdainfully maintained silence. But when Kahrstarted to whisper to him, Hitler snapped, “Halt! No talking without mypermission!”

He was getting nowhere with his own talk. Not one of the three menwho held the power of the Bavarian state in their hands had agreed tojoin 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 dashedback into the hall, mounted the tribune, faced the sullen crowd andannounced that the members of the triumvirate in the next room hadjoined him in forming a new national government.

The Bavarian Ministry,” he shouted, “is removed. . . . The govern-ment of the November criminals and the Reich President are declaredto be removed. A new national government will be named this very dayhere in Munich. A German National Army will be formed immediately• ■ • I propose that, until accounts have been finally settled with theNovember criminals, the direction of policy in the National Governmentbe taken over by me. Ludendorff will take over the leadership of theGerman National Army . . . The task of the provisional German

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National Government is to organize the march on that sinful Babel,Berlin, and save the German people . . . Tomorrow will find eithera National Government in Germany or us dead!”

Not for the first time and certainly not for the last, Hitler had tolda masterful lie, and it worked. When the gathering heard that Kahr,General von Lossow and Police Chief von Seisser had joined Hitler itsmood abruptly changed. There were loud cheers, and the sound of themimpressed the three men still locked up in the little side room.

Scheubner-Richter now produced General Ludendorff, as if out of ahat. The war hero was furious with Hitler for pulling such a completesurprise on him, and when, once closeted in the side room, he learned thatthe former corporal and not he was to be the dictator of Germany hisresentment was compounded. He spoke scarcely a word to the brashyoung man. But Hitler did not mind so long as Ludendorff lent hisfamous name to the desperate undertaking and won over the three re-calcitrant Bavarian leaders who thus far had failed to respond to his ownexhortations and threats. This Ludendorff proceeded to do. It was now aquestion of a great national cause, he said, and he advised the gentlemento co-operate. Awed by the attention of the generalissimo, the trio ap-peared to give in, though later Lossow denied that he had agreed to placehimself under Ludendorff’s command. For a few minutes Kahr fussedover the question of restoring the Wittelsbach monarchy, which was sodear to him. Finally he said he would co-operate as the “King’s deputy.”

Ludendorff’s timely arrival had saved Hitler. Overjoyed at this luckybreak, he led the others back to the platform, where each made a briefspeech and swore loyalty to each other and to the new regime. Thecrowd leaped on chairs and tables in a delirium of enthusiasm. Hitlerbeamed with joy. “He had a childlike, frank expression of happiness thatI shall never forget,” an eminent historian who was present later declared.9

Again mounting the rostrum, Hitler spoke his final word to the gather-ing:

I want now to fulfill the vow which I made to myself five years ago whenI was a blind cripple in the military hospital: to know neither rest nor peaceuntil the November criminals had been overthrown, until on the ruins of thewretched Germany of today there should have arisen once more a Germanyof power and greatness, of freedom and splendor.

This meeting began to break up. At the exits Hess, aided by stormtroopers, detained a number of Bavarian cabinet members and othernotables who were trying to slip out with the throng. Hitler kept his eyeon Kahr, Lossow and Seisser. Then news came of a clash between stormtroopers of one of the fighting leagues, the Bund Oberland, and regulartroops at the Army Engineers’ barracks. Hitler decided to drive to thescene and settle the matter personally, leaving the beer hall in charge ofLudendorff.

This turned out to be a fatal error. Lossow was the first to slip away.

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He informed Ludendorff he must hurry to his office at Army headquartersto give the necessary orders. When Scheubner-Richter objected, Luden-dorff rejoined stiffly, “I forbid you to doubt the word of a Germanofficer.” Kahr and Seisser vanished too.

Hitler, in high spirits, returned to the Buergerbrau to find that thebirds had flown the coop. This was the first blow of the evening and itstunned him. He had confidently expected to find his “ministers” busyat their new tasks while Ludendorff and Lossow worked out plans for themarch on Berlin. But almost nothing was being done. Not even Munichwas being occupied by the revolutionary forces. Roehm, at the head ofa detachment of storm troopers from another fighting league, the Reichs-kriegsflagge, had seized Army headquarters at the War Ministry inthe Schoenfeldstrasse but no other strategic centers were occupied, noteven the telegraph office, over whose wires news of the coup went out toBerlin and orders came back, from General von Seeckt to the Army inBavaria, to suppress the putsch.

Though there were some defections among the junior officers and someof the troops, whose sympathies were with Hitler and Roehm, the higherofficers, led by General von Danner, commander of the Munich gar-rison, not only were prepared to carry out Seeckt’s command but werebitterly resentful of the treatment meted out to General von Lossow. Inthe Army’s code a civilian who pointed a revolver at a general deservedto be smitten by an officer’s side arms. From headquarters at the 19thInfantry barracks, where Lossow had joined Danner, messages went outto outlying garrisons to rush reinforcements to the city. By dawn RegularArmy troops had drawn a cordon around Roehm’s forces in the WarMinistry.

Before this action Hitler and Ludendorff joined Roehm at the ministryfor a time, to take stock of the situation. Roehm was shocked to find thatno one besides himself had taken military action and occupied the keycenters. Hitler tried desperately to re-establish contact with Lossow,Kahr and Seisser. Messengers were dispatched to the 19th Infantrybarracks in the name of Ludendorff but they did not return. Poehner,the former Munich police chief and now one of Hitler’s supporters, wassent with Major Huehnlein and a band of the S.A. troopers to occupypolice headquarters. They were promptly arrested there.

And what of Gustav von Kahr, the head of the Bavarian government?After leaving the Buergerbraukeller he had quickly recovered his sensesand his courage. Not wishing to take any more chances on being made aprisoner of Hitler and his rowdies, Kahr moved the government to Regens-burg. But not before he had ordered placards posted throughout Munichcarrying the following proclamation:

The deception and perfidy of ambitious comrades have converted a demon-stration in the interests of national reawakening into a scene of disgustingviolence. The declarations extorted from myself, General von Lossow and

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Colonel Seisser at the point of the revolver are null and void. The NationalSocialist German Workers’ Party, as well as the fighting leagues Oberland andReichskriegsliagge, are dissolved.

Von Kahr

General State Commissioner

The triumph which earlier in the evening had seemed to Hitler sonear and so easily won was rapidly fading with the night. The basis for asuccessful political revolution on which he had always insisted—thesupport of existing institutions such as the Army, the police, the politicalgroup 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 sug-gested that perhaps the situation could be retrieved if he and the Generalwithdrew to the countryside near Rosenheim and rallied the peasantsbehind the armed bands for an assault on Munich, but Ludendorffpromptly rejected the idea.

Or perhaps there was another way out which at least would avertdisaster. On first hearing of the putsch, Crown Prince Rupprecht, abitter personal enemy of Ludendorff, had issued a brief statement callingfor its prompt suppression. Now Hitler decided to appeal to the Princeto intercede with Lossow and Kahr and obtain an honorable, peacefulsettlement. A Lieutenant Neunzert, a friend of Hider and of Rupprecht,was hurried off at dawn to the Wittelsbach castle near Berchtesgadenon the delicate mission. Unable to find an automobile, he had to wait fora train and did not arrive at his destination until noon, at which hourevents were taking a turn not foreseen by Hitler nor dreamt of as possibleby Ludendorff.

Hitler had planned a putsch, not a civil war. Despite his feverish stateof excitement he was in sufficient control of himself to realize that helacked the strength to overcome the police and the Army. He had wantedto make a revolution with the armed forces, not against them. Blood-thirsty though he had been in his recent speeches and during the hours heheld the Bavarian triumvirs at gunpoint, he shrank from the idea of menunited 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 Presi-dent 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 planof 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 whohad 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 thecity and take it over. Not only would the police and the Army not dareto oppose him, he was certain; they would join him and fight under hisorders. Though somewhat skeptical, Hitler agreed. There seemed no

Versailles, Weimar and the Beer Hall Putsch 73

other way out. The Crown Prince, he noted, had not replied to his pleafor mediation.

Toward eleven o’clock on the morning of November 9, the anniversaryof the proclamation of the German Republic, Hitler and Ludendorff led acolumn of some three thousand storm troopers out of the gardens of theBuergerbraukeller and headed for the center of Munich. Beside them inthe front rank marched Goering, commander of the S.A., Scheubner-Richter, Rosenberg, Ulrich Graf, Hitler’s bodyguard, and half a dozenother Nazi officials and leaders of the Kampfbund. A swastika flag and abanner of the Bund Oberland were unfurled at the head of the column.Not far behind the first ranks a truck chugged along, loaded with machineguns and machine gunners. The storm troopers carried carbines, slungover their shoulders, some with fixed bayonets. Hitler brandished hisrevolver. Not a very formidable armed force, but Ludendorff, who hadcommanded millions of Germany’s finest troops, apparently thought itsufficient for his purposes.

A few hundred yards north of the beer cellar the rebels met their firstobstacle. On the Ludwig Bridge, which leads over the River Isar towardthe center of the city, stood a detachment of armed police barring theroute. Goering sprang forward and, addressing the police commander,threatened to shoot a number of hostages he said he had in the rear ofhis column if the police fired on his men. During the night Hess and othershad rounded up a number of hostages, including two cabinet members, forjust such a contingency. Whether Goering was bluffing or not, the policecommander apparently believed he was not and let the column file overthe bridge unmolested.

At the Marienplatz the Nazi column encountered a large crowd whichwas listening to an exhortation of Julius Streicher, the Jew-baiter fromNuremberg, 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 andjoined the rebels, jumping into step immediately behind Hitler.

Shortly after noon the marchers neared their objective, the War Minis-try, where Roehm and his storm troopers were surrounded by soldiers ofthe Reichswehr. Neither besiegers nor besieged had yet fired a shot.Roehm and his men were all ex-soldiers and they had many wartime com-rades on the other side of the barbed wire. Neither side had any heart forkilling.

To reach the War Ministry and free Roehm, Hitler and Ludendorff nowled their column through the narrow Residenzstrasse, which, just beyondthe Feldherrnhalle, opens out into the spacious Odeonsplatz. At the endof the gullylike street a detachment of police about one hundred strong,armed with carbines, blocked the way. They were in a strategic spot andthis 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 thepolice officer in charge, “Don’t shoot! His Excellency Ludendorff is com-

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ing!” Even at this crucial, perilous moment, a German revolutionary,even an old amateur wrestler and professional bouncer, remembered togive a gentleman his proper title. Hitler added another cry. “Surrender!Surrender!” he called out. But the unknown police officer did not sur-render. Apparently LudendorfFs name had no magic sound for him; thiswas the police, not the Army.

Which side fired first was never established. Each put the blame on theother. One onlooker later testified that Hitler fired the first shot with hisrevolver. Another thought that Streicher did, and more than one Nazilater 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 shotsrang out from both sides, spelling in that instant the doom of Hitler’shopes. Scheubner-Richter fell, mortally wounded. Goering went downwith a serious wound in his thigh. Within sixty seconds the firing stopped,but the street was already littered with fallen bodies—sixteen Nazis andthree police dead or dying, many more wounded and the rest, includingHitler, clutching the pavement to save their lives.

There was one exception, and had his example been followed, the daymight have had a different ending. Ludendorff did not fling himself tothe ground. Standing erect and proud in the best soldierly tradition, withhis adjutant, Major Streck, at his side, he marched calmly on between themuzzles of the police rifles until he reached the Odeonsplatz. He musthave 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 tosafety. He had locked his left arm with the right arm of Scheubner-Rich-ter (a curious but perhaps revealing gesture) as the column approachedthe police cordon, and when the latter fell he pulled Hitler down to thepavement with him. Perhaps Hitler thought he had been wounded; hesuffered sharp pains which, it was found later, came from a dislocatedshoulder. But the fact remains that according to the testimony of one ofhis own Nazi followers in the column, the physician Dr. Walther Schulz,which was supported by several other witnesses, Hitler “was the first to getup and turn back,” leaving his dead and wounded comrades lying in thestreet. He was hustled into a waiting motorcar and spirited off to thecountry home of the Hanfstaengls at Uffing, where Putzi’s wife and sisternursed him and where, two days later, he was arrested.

Ludendorff was arrested on the spot. He was contemptuous of therebels who had not had the courage to march on with him, and so bitteragainst the Army for not coming over to his side that he declared hence-

* Some years later, in approving Streicher’s appointment as Nazi leader for Fran-conia over the opposition of many party comrades. Hitler declared, “Perhaps thereare one or two who don’t like the shape of Comrade Streicher’s nose. But when helay beside me that day on the pavement by the Feldherrnhalle, I vowed to myselfnever to forsake him so long as he did not forsake me.” (Heiden, Hitler: A Biog-raphy, p. 157.)

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forth he would not recognize a German officer nor ever again wear anofficer’s uniform. The wounded Goering was given first aid by the Jewishproprietor of a nearby bank into which he had been carried and thensmuggled across the frontier into Austria by his wife and taken to a hospi-tal in Innsbruck. Hess also fled to Austria. Roehm surrendered at theWar Ministry two hours after the collapse before the Feldherrnhalle.Within a few days all the rebel leaders except Goering and Hess wererounded up and jailed. The Nazi putsch had ended in a fiasco. The partywas dissolved. National Socialism, to all appearances, was dead. Itsdictatorial leader, who had run away at the first hail of bullets, seemedutterly discredited, his meteoric political career at an end.

TRIAL FOR TREASON

As things turned out, that career was merely interrupted, and not forlong. Hitler was shrewd enough to see that his trial, far from finishinghim, would provide a new platform from which he could not only discreditthe compromised authorities who had arrested him but—and this wasmore important—for the first time make his name known far beyond theconfines of Bavaria and indeed of Germany itself. He was well awarethat correspondents of the world press as well as of the leading Germannewspapers were flocking to Munich to cover the trial, which began onFebruary 26, 1924, before a special court sitting in the old InfantrySchool in the Blutenburgstrasse. By the time it had ended twenty-fourdays later Hitler had transformed defeat into triumph, made Kahr, Los-sow and Seisser share his guilt in the public mind to their ruin, impressedthe 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 prisonersin the dock, Hitler at once grabbed the limelight for himself. From be-ginning to end he dominated the courtroom. Franz Guertner, the BavarianMinister of Justice and an old friend and protector of the Nazi leader, hadseen to it that the judiciary would be complacent and lenient. Hitler wasallowed to interrupt as often as he pleased, cross-examine witnesses atwill and speak on his own behalf at any time and at any length—his open-ing statement consumed four hours, but it was only the first of many longharangues.

He did not intend to make the mistake of those who, when tried forcomplicity in the Kapp putsch, had pleaded, as he later said, that “theyknew nothing, had intended nothing, wished nothing. That was whatdestroyed the bourgeois world—that they had not the courage to standby their act . . . to step before the judge and say, ‘Yes, that was whatwe wanted to do; we wanted to destroy the State.’ ”

Now before the judges and the representatives of the world press inMunich, Hitler proclaimed proudly, “I alone bear the responsibility. ButI am not a criminal because of that. If today I stand here as a revolution-

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ary, it is as a revolutionary against the revolution. There is no such thingas high treason against the traitors of 1918.”

If there were, then the three men who headed the government, theArmy and the police in Bavaria and who had conspired with him againstthe national government were equally guilty and should be in the dockbeside him instead of in the witness stand as his chief accusers. Shrewdlyhe turned the tables on the uneasy, guilt-ridden triumvirs:

One thing was certain, Lossow, Kahr and Seisser had the same goal that wehad—to get rid of the Reich government ... If our enterprise was actuallyhigh treason, then during the whole period Lossow, Kahr and Seisser musthave been committing high treason along with us, for during all these weekswe talked of nothing but the aims of which we now stand accused.

The three men could scarcely deny this, for it was true. Kahr andSeisser were no match for Hitler’s barbs. Only General von Lossow de-fended himself defiantly. “I was no unemployed komitadji,” he remindedthe court. “I occupied a high position in the State.” And the Generalpoured all the scorn of an old Army officer on his former corporal, thisunemployed upstart, whose overpowering ambition had led him to try todictate to the Army and the State. How far this unscrupulous demagoguehad come, he exclaimed, from the days, not so far distant, when he hadbeen 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 theacquisition of a minister’s portfolio as a thing worth striving for. I do not holdit worthy of a great man to endeavor to go down in history just by becoming aminister. One might be in danger of being buried beside other ministers. Myaim 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 heartoverflowed with pride in a man who had forbidden any such inscription as“Here lies Privy Councilor, Music Director, His Excellency Baron Richard vonWagner.” I was proud that this man and so many others in German historywere content to give their names to history without titles. It was not frommodesty that I wanted to be a drummer in those days. That was the highestaspiration—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 notdriven forward, but drives himself. There is nothing immodest about this. Is

Versailles, Weimar and the Beer Hall Putsch 77

it immodest for a worker to drive himself toward heavy labor? Is it presumptu-ous of a man with the high forehead of a thinker to ponder through the nightstill he gives the world an invention? The man who feels called upon to governa 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 hightreason against his country, his confidence in himself, in the call to “governa people,” was undiminished. While in prison awaiting trial, he had al-ready analyzed the reasons for the failure of the putsch and had vowedthat he would not commit the same mistakes in the future. Recalling histhoughts thirteen years later after he had achieved his goal, he told his oldfollowers, assembled at the Buergerbraukeller to celebrate the anniversaryof 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 oneof our squads from the year 1923 marching by, you would ask, ‘Whatworkhouse have they escaped from?’ . . . But fate meant well with us.It did not permit an action to succeed which, if it had succeeded, wouldin the end have inevitably crashed as a result of the movement’s innerimmaturity in those days and its deficient organizational and intellectualfoundation . . . We recognized that it is not enough to overthrow theold State, but that the new State must previously have been built up andbe ready to one’s hand . . . In 1933 it was no longer a question of over-throwing a State by an act of violence; meanwhile the new State had beenbuilt up and all that remained to do was to destroy the last remnants ofthe old State—and that took but a few hours.”

How to build the new Nazi State was already in his mind as he fencedwith the judges and his prosecutors during the trial. For one thing, hewould have to have the German Army with him, not against him, thenext time. In his closing address he played on the idea of reconciliationwith 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 thestreet 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 happythat it was not the Reichswehr which had stained the record; the Reichswehrstands as untarnished as before. One day the hour will come when theReichswehr 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 cannotpermit.”

The accused paid not the slightest attention to the admonition. In aperoration that held the audience in the courtroom spellbound Hitlerspoke his final words:

The army we have formed is growing from day to day ... I nourish theproud hope that one day the hour will come when these rough companies will

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grow to battalions, the battalions to regiments, the regiments to divisions, thatthe 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 weare 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 isspoken by the eternal court of history. What judgment you will hand down Iknow. But that court will not ask us, “Did you commit high treason or did younot?” That court will judge us, the Quartermaster General of the old Army[Ludendorff], his officers and soldiers, as Germans who wanted only the goodof their own people and Fatherland, who wanted to fight and die. You maypronounce us guilty a thousand times over, but the goddess of the eternal courtof history will smile and tear to tatters the brief of the state prosecutor and thesentence of this court. For she acquits us.10

The sentences, if not the verdicts, of the actual judges were, as KonradHeiden wrote, not so far from the judgment of history. Ludendorff wasacquitted. Hitler and the other accused were found guilty. But in theface of the law—Article 81 of the German Penal Code—which declaredthat “whosoever attempts to alter by force the Constitution of the GermanReich or of any German state shall be punished by lifelong imprison-ment,” Hitler was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in the old fortressof Landsberg. Even then the lay judges protested the severity of thesentence, but they were assured by the presiding judge that the prisonerwould be eligible for parole after he had served six months. Efforts of thepolice to get Hitler deported as a foreigner—he still held Austrian citizen-ship—came to nothing. The sentences were imposed on April 1, 1924. Alittle less than nine months later, on December 20, Hitler was releasedfrom prison, free to resume his fight to overthrow the democratic state.The consequences of committing high treason, if you were a man of theextreme Right, were not unduly heavy, despite the law, and a good manyantirepublicans took notice of it.

The putsch, even though it was a fiasco, made Hitler a national figureand, in the eyes of many, a patriot and a hero. Nazi propaganda soontransformed 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, Hitlerreturned on the evening of November 8 to the beer hall in Munich toaddress his Old Guard comrades—the alte Kaempfer, as they were called—who had followed the leader to what seemed then such a grotesque dis-aster. In 1935 Hitler, the Chancellor, had the bodies of the sixteen Naziswho had fallen in the brief encounter dug up and placed in vaults in theFeldherrnhalle, which became a national shrine. Of them Hitler said, indedicating the memorial, “They now pass into German immortality. Herethey stand for Germany and keep guard over our people. Here they lieas true witnesses to our movement.” He did not add, and no German

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seemed to recall, that they were also the men whom Hitler had abandonedto their dying when he had picked himself up from the pavement and ranaway.

That summer of 1924 in the old fortress at Landsberg, high above theRiver Lech, Adolf Hitler, who was treated as an honored guest, with aroom of his own and a splendid view, cleared out the visitors who flockedto pay him homage and bring him gifts, summoned the faithful RudolfHess, who had finally returned to Munich and received a sentence, andbegan to dictate to him chapter after chapter of a book.*

* Before the arrival of Hess, Emil Maurice, an ex-convict, a watchmaker and thefirst commander of the Nazi “strong-arm” squads, took some preliminary dictation.

4

THE MIND OF HITLERAND THE ROOTSOF THE THIRD REICH

Hitler wanted to call his book “Four and a Half Years of Struggleagainst 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 itto My Struggle (Mein Kampf). Amann was sorely disappointed in thecontents. He had hoped, first, for a racy personal story in which Hitlerwould recount his rise from an unknown “worker” in Vienna to worldrenown. As we have seen, there was little autobiography in the book.The Nazi business manager had also counted on an inside story of theBeer Hall Putsch, the drama and double-dealing of which, he was sure,would make good reading. But Hitler was too shrewd at this point, whenthe party fortunes were at their lowest ebb, to rake over old coals.* Thereis scarcely a word of the unsuccessful putsch in Mein Kampf.

The first volume was published in the autumn of 1925. A work of somefour hundred pages, it was priced at twelve marks (three dollars), abouttwice the price of most books brought out in Germany at that time. It didnot by any means become an immediate best seller. Amann boasted thatit sold 23,000 copies the first year and that sales continued upward—aclaim that was received with skepticism in anti-Nazi circles.

Thanks to the Allied seizure in 1945 of the royalty statements of theEher Verlag, the Nazi publishing firm, the facts about the actual sale ofMein Kampf can now be disclosed. In 1925 the book sold 9,473 copies,and thereafter for three years the sales decreased annually. They slumped

* “It is useless,” he wrote at the end of the second volume, “to reopen wounds thatseem scarcely healed; . . . useless to speak of guilt regarding men who in the bot-tom of their hearts, perhaps, were all devoted to their nation with equal love, andwho only missed or failed to understand the common road.” For a man so vindic-tive as Hitler, this showed unexpected tolerance of those who had crushed hisrebellion and jailed him; or, in view of what happened later to Kahr and otherswho crossed him, it was perhaps more a display of will power—an ability to restrainhimself momentarily for tactical reasons. At any rate, he refrained from recrimina-tion.

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to 6,913 in 1926, to 5,607 in 1927 and to a mere 3,015 in 1928, countingboth volumes. They were up a little—to 7,664—in 1929, rose with thefortunes of the Nazi Party in 1930, when an inexpensive one-volume edi-tion at eight marks appeared, to 54,086, dropped slightly to 50,808 thefollowing year and jumped to 90,351 in 1932.

Hitler’s royalties—his chief source of income from 1925 on—wereconsiderable when averaged over those first seven years. But they werenothing compared to those received in 1933, the year he became Chancel-lor. In his first year of office Mein Kampf sold a million copies, and Hit-ler s income from the royalties, which had been increased from 10 to 15per cent after January 1, 1933, was over one million marks (some $300,-000), making him the most prosperous author in Germany and for thefirst time a millionaire.* Except for the Bible, no other book sold as wellduring the Nazi regime, when few family households felt secure withouta copy on the table. It was almost obligatory—and certainly politic—topresent a copy to a bride and groom at their wedding, and nearly everyschool child received one on graduation from whatever school. By 1940,the year after World War II broke out, six million copies of the Nazi biblehad been sold in Germany.1

Not every German who bought a copy of Mein Kampf necessarily readit. I have heard many a Nazi stalwart complain that it was hard goingand not a few admit—in private—that they were never able to get throughto the end of its 782 turgid pages. But it might be argued that had morenon-Nazi Germans read it before 1933 and had the foreign statesmen ofthe world perused it carefully while there still was time, both Germany andthe world might have been saved from catastrophe. For whatever otheraccusations can be made against Adolf Hitler, no one can accuse him ofnot putting down in writing exactly the kind of Germany he intended tomake if he ever came to power and the kind of world he meant to createby armed German conquest. The blueprint of the Third Reich and, whatis more, of the barbaric New Order which Hitler inflicted on conqueredEurope in the triumphant years between 1939 and 1945 is set down inall its appalling crudity at great length and in detail between the covers ofthis revealing book.

As we have seen, Hitler’s basic ideas were formed in his early twentiesin Vienna, and we have his own word for it that he learned little after-ward and altered nothing in his thinking.f When he left Austria forGermany in 1913 at the age of twenty-four, he was full of a burning pas-sion for German nationalism, a hatred for democracy, Marxism and theJews and a certainty that Providence had chosen the Aryans, especiallythe Germans, to be the master race.

* 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,t See above, p. 21.

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In Mein Kampf he expanded his views and applied them specificallyto the problem of not only restoring a defeated and chaotic Germany to aplace in the sun greater than it had ever had before but making a newkind of state, one which would be based on race and would include allGermans then living outside the Reich’s frontiers, and in which would beestablished the absolute dictatorship of the Leader—himself—with anarray of smaller leaders taking orders from above and giving them to thosebelow. Thus the book contains, first, an outline of the future Germanstate 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, aconception of life, or, to use Hitler’s favorite German word, a Weltan-schauung. That this view of life would strike a normal mind of thetwentieth century as a grotesque hodgepodge concocted by a half-baked,uneducated neurotic goes without saying. What makes it important isthat it was embraced so fanatically by so many millions of Germans andthat if it led, as it did, to their ultimate ruin it also led to the ruin of so manymillions of innocent, decent human beings inside and especially outsideGermany.

Now, how was the new Reich to regain her position as a world powerand then go on to world mastery? Hitler pondered the question in thefirst volume, written mostly when he was in prison in 1924, returning toit at greater length in Volume Two, which was finished in 1926.

In the first place, there must be a reckoning with France, “the inexo-rable 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 anydifferently from Clemenceau.” Therefore, there must be “a final activereckoning with France ... a last decisive struggle . . . only then willwe be able to end the eternal and essentially so fruitless struggle betweenourselves and France; presupposing, of course, that Germany actually re-gards the destruction of France as only a means which will afterwardenable her finally to give our people the expansion made possible else-where.”2

Expansion elsewhere? Where? In this manner Hitler leads to the coreof his ideas on German foreign policy which he was to attempt so faith-fully to carry out when he became ruler of the Reich. Germany, he saidbluntly, must expand in the East—largely at the expense of Russia.

In the first volume of Mein Kampf Hitler discoursed at length on thisproblem of Lebensraum—living space—a subject which obsessed him tohis dying breath. The Hohenzollern Empire, he declared, had been mis-taken in seeking colonies in Africa. “Territorial policy cannot be fulfilledin the Cameroons but today almost exclusively in Europe.” But the soil ofEurope was already occupied. True, Hitler recognized, “but nature hasnot reserved this soil for the future possession of any particular nationor race; on the contrary, this soil exists for the people which possesses theforce to take it.” What if the present possessors object? “Then the law

The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich 83

of self-preservation goes into effect; and what is refused to amicablemethods, it is up to the fist to take.”3

Acquisition of new soil. Hitler continued, in explaining the blindnessof German prewar foreign policy, “was possible only in the East ... Ifland was desired in Europe, it could be obtained by and large only at theexpense of Russia, and this meant that the new Reich must again set itselfon the march along the road of the Teutonic Knights of old, to obtain bythe German sword sod for the German plow and daily bread for thenation.”4

As if he had not made himself entirely clear in the initial volume, Hitlerreturned to the subject in the second one.

Only an adequate large space on this earth assures a nation of freedomof existence . . . Without consideration of “traditions” and prejudices [theNational Socialist movement] must find the courage to gather our people andtheir strength for an advance along the road that will lead this people fromits present restricted living space to new land and soil . . . The NationalSocialist movement must strive to eliminate the disproportion between ourpopulation and our area—viewing this latter as a source of food as well as abasis for power politics . . . We must hold unflinchingly to our aim ... tosecure 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 politicalidea for the future,” had been clamoring for the restoration of the 1914German frontiers.

The demand for restoration of the frontiers of 1914 is a political absurdityof such proportions and consequences as to make it seem a crime. Quite asidefrom the fact that the Reich’s frontiers in 1914 were anything but logical. Forin reality they were neither complete in the sense of embracing the people ofGerman nationality nor sensible with regard to geomilitary expediency. Theywere not the result of a considered political action, but momentary frontiers ina political struggle that was by no means concluded . . . With equal rightand in many cases with more right, some other sample year of German historycould be picked out, and the restoration of the conditions at that time declaredto be the aim in foreign affairs.6

Hitler’s “sample year” would go back some six centuries, to when theGermans were driving the Slavs back in the East. The push eastwardmust be resumed. “Today we count eighty million Germans in Europe!This foreign policy will be acknowledged as correct only if, after scarcelya hundred years, there are two hundred and fifty million Germans on thiscontinent.”7 And all of them within the borders of the new and expandedReich.

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Some other peoples, obviously, will have to make way for so manyGermans. What other peoples?

And so we National Socialists . . . take up where we broke off six hun-dred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south andwest, and turn our gaze toward the land in the East.

If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind onlyRussia and her vassal border states.*8

Fate, Hitler remarks, was kind to Germany in this respect. It hadhanded over Russia to Bolshevism, which, he says, really meant handingover Russia to the Jews. “The giant empire in the East,” he exults, “isripe for collapse. And the end of Jewish rule in Russia will also be theend 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 inblood 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 east-ward. First the immediate lands to the East inhabited predominantly byGermans will be taken. And what are these? Obviously Austria, theSudetenland in Czechoslovakia and the western part of Poland, includingDanzig. After that, Russia herself. Why was the world so surprised, then,when Chancellor Hitler, a bare few years later, set out to achieve thesevery ends?

On the nature of the future Nazi State, Hitler’s ideas in Mein Kampfare less concise. He made it clear enough that there would be no “demo-cratic nonsense” and that the Third Reich would be ruled by the Fuehrer-prinzip, the leadership principle—that is, that it would be a dictatorship.There is almost nothing about economics in the book. The subject boredHitler and he never bothered to try to learn something about it beyondtoying with the crackpot ideas of Gottfried Feder, the crank who wasagainst “interest slavery.”

What interested Hitler was political power; economics could somehowtake care of itself.

The state has nothing at all to do with any definite economic conception ordevelopment . . . The state is a racial organism and not an economic organi-zation . . . The inner strength of a state coincides only in the rarest cases withso-called economic prosperity; the latter, in innumerable cases, seems to in-dicate the state’s approaching decline . . . Prussia demonstrates with marvel-ous sharpness that not material qualities but ideal virtues alone make possiblethe formation of a state. Only under their protection can economic lifeflourish. Always when in Germany there was an upsurge of political power

* The italics are mine.

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the economic conditions began to improve; but always when economics be-came the sole content of our people’s life, stifling the ideal virtues, the statecollapsed and in a short time drew economic life with it . . . Never yet hasa state been founded by peaceful economic means . . ,9

Therefore, as Hitler said in a speech in Munich in 1923, “no economicpolicy is possible without a sword, no industrialization without power.”Beyond that vague, crude philosophy and a passing reference in MeinKampf to “economic chambers,” “chambers of estates” and a “centraleconomic parliament” which “would keep the national economy func-tioning,” Hitler refrains from any expression of opinion on the economicfoundation of the Third Reich.

And though the very name of the Nazi Party proclaimed it as “social-ist,” Hitler was even more vague on the kind of “socialism” he envisagedfor 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 extentthat he knows no higher ideal than the welfare of his nation; whoever hasunderstood our great national anthem, “Deutschland ueber Alles,” to meanthat nothing in the wide world surpasses in his eyes this Germany, people andland—that man is a Socialist.10

Considerable editorial advice and even pruning on the part of at leastthree helpers could not prevent Hitler from meandering from one subjectto another in Mein Kampf. Rudolf Hess, who took most of the dictationfirst at Landsberg prison and later at Haus Wachenfeld near Berchtes-gaden, did his best to tidy up the manuscript, but he was no man to standup to the Leader. More successful in this respect was Father BernhardStempfle, a former member of the Hieronymite order and an anti-Semiticjournalist of some notoriety in Bavaria. This strange priest, of whom morewill be heard in this history, corrected some of Hitler’s bad grammar,straightened out what prose he could and crossed out a few passageswhich he convinced the author were politically objectionable. The thirdadviser was Josef Czerny, of Czech origin, who worked on the Nazi news-paper, Voelkischer Beobachter, and whose anti-Jewish poetry endearedhim to Hitler. Czerny was instrumental in revising the first volume ofMein Kampf for its second printing, in which certain embarrassing wordsand sentences were eliminated or changed; and he went over carefullythe proofs of Volume Two.

Nevertheless, most of the meanderings remained. Hitler insisted onairing his thoughts at random on almost every conceivable subject, in-cluding culture, education, the theater, the movies, the comics, art, litera-ture, history, sex, marriage, prostitution and syphilis. Indeed, on thesubject of syphilis, Hitler devotes ten turgid pages, declaring it is “the

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task of the nation—not just one more task,”* to eradicate it. To combatthis dread disease Hitler demands that all the propaganda resources ofthe nation be mobilized. “Everything,” he says, “depends on the solutionof this question.” The problem of syphilis and prostitution must also beattacked, he states, by facilitating earlier marriages, and he gives a fore-taste of the eugenics of the Third Reich by insisting that “marriage can-not be an end in itself, but must serve the one higher goal: the increaseand preservation of the species and the race. This alone is its meaningand its task.”11

And so with this mention of the preservation of the species and of therace in Mein Kampf we come to the second principal consideration: Hit-ler’s Weltanschauung, his view of life, which some historians, especiallyin 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. LikeDarwin but also like a whole array of German philosophers, historians,kings, generals and statesmen, Hitler saw all life as an eternal struggleand the world as a jungle where the fittest survived and the strongestruled—a “world where one creature feeds on the other and where thedeath of the weaker implies the life of the stronger.”

Mein Kampf is studded with such pronouncements: “In the end onlythe urge for self-preservation can conquer . . . Mankind has growngreat in eternal struggle, and only in eternal peace does it perish. . . .Nature . . . puts living creatures on this globe and watches the freeplay of forces. She then confers the master’s right on her favorite child,the strongest in courage and industry . . . The stronger must dominateand not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Onlythe born weakling can view this as cruel . . .” For Hitler the preserva-tion of culture “is bound up with the rigid law of necessity and the rightto 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 eternalstruggle, 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 in-dustry” on whom Providence has conferred “the master’s right”? TheAryan. Here in Mein Kampf we come to the kernel of the Nazi idea ofrace superiority, of the conception of the master race, on which the ThirdReich and Hitler’s New Order in Europe were based.

All the human culture, all the results of art, science and technology that wesee 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 thefounder of all higher humanity, therefore representing the prototype of allthat we understand by the word “man.” He is the Prometheus of mankindfrom whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has sprung at all times,

* The italics are Hitler’s.

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forever kindling anew that fire of knowledge which illumined the night of silentmysteries and thus caused man to climb the path to mastery over the otherbeings of this earth ... It was he who laid the foundations and erected thewalls 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 Germanthinkers of the nineteenth century, Hitler fairly revels in a sadism (and itsopposite, masochism) which foreign students of the German spirit havealways found so difficult to comprehend.

Thus, for the formation of higher cultures the existence of lower humantypes was one of the most essential preconditions ... It is certain that thefirst culture of humanity was based less on the tamed animal than on the useof lower human beings. Only after the enslavement of subject races did thesame fate strike beasts. For first the conquered warrior drew the plow—andonly after him the horse. Hence it is no accident that the first cultures arosein places where the Aryan, in his encounters with lower peoples, subjugatedthem and bent them to his will ... As long as he ruthlessly upheld themaster attitude, not only did he remain master, but also the preserver andincreaser of culture.14

Then something happened which Hitler took as a warning to theGermans.

As soon as the subjected people began to raise themselves up and approachthe level of their conqueror, a phase of which probably was the use of hislanguage, 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 sojournin the paradise which he had made for himself. He became submerged in aracial 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 causeof 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 pureblood. 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 dicta-tor and conqueror, Hitler would forbid the marriage of a German withany member of these races, though a fourth-grade schoolmarm could havetold him that there was a great deal of Slavic blood in the Germans,

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especially in those who dwelt in the eastern provinces. In carrying outhis racial ideas, it must again be admitted, Hitler was as good as hisword. In the New Order which he began to impose on the Slavs in theEast during the war, the Czechs, the Poles, the Russians were—and wereto remain, if the grotesque New Order had endured—the hewers of woodand the drawers of water for their German masters.

It was an easy step for a man as ignorant of history and anthropologyas Hitler to make of the Germans the modern Aryans—and thus the mas-ter race. To Hitler the Germans are “the highest species of humanity onthis earth” and will remain so if they “occupy themselves not merely withthe breeding of dogs, horses and cats but also with care for the purity oftheir 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 neverclearly understood despite many rereadings of Mein Kampf and listeningto dozens of addresses on the subject by the Fuehrer himself, thoughmore than once I heard the dictator declare that it was the central pointof his whole thinking. The German word Volk cannot be translated ac-curately into English. Usually it is rendered as “nation” or “people,” butin German there is a deeper and somewhat different meaning that connotesa primitive, tribal community based on blood and soil. In Mein KampfHitler has a difficult time trying to define the folkish state, announcing,for example, on page 379 that he will clarify “the ‘folkish’ concept” onlyto shy away from any clarification and wander off on other subjects forseveral pages. Finally he has a go at it:

In opposition to [the bourgeois and the Marxist-Jewish worlds], the folkishphilosophy finds the importance of mankind in its basic racial elements. In thestate it sees only a means to an end and construes its end as the preservation ofthe racial existence of man. Thus, it by no means believes in an equality ofraces, but along with their difference it recognizes their higher or lesser valueand feels itself obligated to promote the victory of the better and stronger, anddemand the subordination of the inferior and weaker in accordance with theeternal will that dominates this universe. Thus, in principle, it serves thebasic aristocratic idea of nature and believes in the validity of this law down tothe last individual. It sees not only the different value of the races, but alsothe different value of individuals. From the mass it extracts the importance ofthe individual personality and thus ... it has an organizing effect. It believesin the necessity of an idealization of humanity, in which alone it sees thepremise for the existence of humanity. But it cannot grant the right to exist-ence even to an ethical idea if this idea represents a danger for the racial lifeof the bearers of a higher ethics; for in a bastardized and niggerized world allthe concepts of the humanly beautiful and sublime, as well as all ideas of anidealized future of our humanity, would be lost forever . .

And so the folkish philosophy of life corresponds to the innermost will ofnature, since it restores that free play of forces which must lead to a con-tinuous mutual higher breeding, until at last the best of humanity, having

The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich 89

achieved possession of this earth, will have a free path for activity in domainswhich will lie partly above it and partly outside it.

We all sense that in the distant future humanity must be faced by problemswhich only a highest race, become master people and supported by themeans and possibilities of an entire globe, will be equipped to overcome.11,

“Thus,” Hitler declares a little farther on, “the highest purpose of afolkish state is concern for the preservation of those original racial ele-ments which bestow culture and create the beauty and dignity of a highermankind.”18 This again leads him to a matter of eugenics:

The folkish state . . . must set race in the center of all life. It must takecare 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, tobring children into the world; and one highest honor: to renounce doing so.And conversely it must be considered reprehensible to withhold healthy chil-dren from the nation. Here the [folkish] state must act as guardian of amillennial future in the face of which the wishes and the selfishness of theindividual must appear as nothing and submit ... A folkish state must there-fore begin by raising marriage from the level of a continuous defilement ofthe race and give it the consecration of an institution which is called upon toproduce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between manand ape.19

Hitler’s fantastic conception of the folkish state leads to a good manyother wordy considerations which, if heeded, he says, will bring the Ger-mans the mastery of the earth—German domination has become an obses-sion with him. At one point he argues that the failure to keep theGermanic race simon-pure “has robbed us of world domination. If theGerman people had possessed that herd unity which other peoples enjoyed,the German Reich today would doubtless be mistress of the globe.”20Since a folkish state must be based on race, “the German Reich mustembrace all Germans”—this is a key point in his argument, and one he didnot 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 bythe Fuehrerprinzip. The authoritarianism of the Prussian Army is tobe adopted by the Third Reich: “authority of every leader downward andresponsibility 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 madeby one man* . . . only he alone may possess the authority and the rightto command ... It will not be possible to dispense with Parliament. Buttheir councilors will then actually give counsel ... In no chamber does a

* The italics are Hitler’s.

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vote ever take place. They are working institutions and not voting machines.This principle—absolute responsibility unconditionally combined with ab-solute authority-—will gradually breed an elite of leaders such as today, in thisera of irresponsible parliamentarianism, is utterly inconceivable.21

Such were the ideas of Adolf Hitler, set down in all their appallingcrudeness as he sat in Landsberg prison gazing out at a flowering orchardabove the River Lech,* or later, in 1925—26, as he reclined on the balconyof a comfortable inn at Berchtesgaden and looked out across the toweringAlps toward his native Austria, dictating a torrent of words to his faith-ful Rudolf Hess and dreaming of the Third Reich which he would buildon the shoddy foundations we have seen, and which he would rule with aniron hand. That one day he would build it and rule it he had no doubtswhatsoever, for he was possessed of that burning sense of mission peculiarto so many geniuses who have sprouted, seemingly, from nowhere andfrom nothing throughout the ages. He would unify a chosen people whohad never before been politically one. He would purify their race. Hewould make them strong. He would make them lords of the earth.

A crude Darwinism? A sadistic fancy? An irresponsible egoism? Amegalomania? It was all of these in part. But it was something more. Forthe mind and the passion of Hitler—all the aberrations that possessed hisfeverish brain—had roots that lay deep in German experience and thought.Nazism and the Third Reich, in fact, were but a logical continuation ofGerman history.

THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF THE THIRD REICH

In the delirious days of the annual rallies of the Nazi Party at Nurem-berg at the beginning of September, I used to be accosted by a swarm ofhawkers selling a picture postcard on which were shown the portraits ofFrederick the Great, Bismarck, Hindenburg and Hitler. The inscriptionread: “What the King conquered, the Prince formed, the Field Marshaldefended, the Soldier saved and unified.” Thus Hitler, the soldier, wasportrayed not only as the savior and unifier of Germany but as the suc-cessor of these celebrated figures who had made the country great. Theimplication of the continuity of German history, culminating in Hitler’srule, was not lost upon the multitude. The very expression “the ThirdReich” also served to strengthen this concept. The First Reich had been

* “Without my imprisonment,” Hitler remarked long afterward, “Mein Kampfwould never have been written. That period gave me the chance of deepeningvarious notions for which I then had only an instinctive feeling . . . It’s from thistime, too, that my conviction dates—a thing that many of my supporters neverunderstood—that we could no longer win power by force. The state had had timeto 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 Rus-sian front on the night of February 3-4, 1942.

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the medieval Holy Roman Empire; the Second Reich had been that whichwas formed by Bismarck in 1871 after Prussia’s defeat of France. Bothhad added glory to the German name. The Weimar Republic, as Nazipropaganda had it, had dragged that fair name in the mud. The ThirdReich 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, knewenough history to realize that there had been German failures in the past,failures that must be set against the successes of France and Britain. Henever forgot that by the end of the Middle Ages, which had seen Britainand France emerge as unified nations, Germany remained a crazy patch-work of some three hundred individual states. It was this lack of nationaldevelopment which largely determined the course of German history fromthe end of the Middle Ages to midway in the nineteenth century and madeit so different from that of the other great nations of Western Europe.

To the lack of political and dynastic unity was added, in the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries, the disaster of religious differences which fol-lowed the Reformation. There is not space in this book to recount ade-quately the immense influence that Martin Luther, the Saxon peasantwho became an Augustinian monk and launched the German Reforma-tion, had on the Germans and their subsequent history. But it may besaid, in passing, that this towering but erratic genius, this savage anti-Semite and hater of Rome, who combined in his tempestuous characterso many of the best and the worst qualities of the German—the coarse-ness, the boisterousness, the fanaticism, the intolerance, the violence, butalso the honesty, the simplicity, the self-scrutiny, the passion for learningand 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 in-delible, more fateful, than was wrought by any other single individual be-fore or since. Through his sermons and his magnificent translation of theBible, Luther created the modern German language, aroused in the peoplenot only a new Protestant vision of Christianity but a fervent Germannationalism and taught them, at least in religion, the supremacy of theindividual conscience. But tragically for them, Luther’s siding with theprinces in the peasant risings, which he had largely inspired, and his pas-sion for political autocracy ensured a mindless and provincial politicalabsolutism which reduced the vast majority of the German people topoverty, to a horrible torpor and a demeaning subservience. Even worseperhaps, it helped to perpetuate and indeed to sharpen the hopeless di-visions not only between classes but also between the various dynastic andpolitical groupings of the German people. It doomed for centuries thepossibility of the unification of Germany.

The Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, whichended it, brought the final catastrophe to Germany, a blow so devastatingthat the country has never fully recovered from it. This was the last ofEurope’s great religious wars, but before it was over it had degenerated

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from a Protestant-Catholic conflict into a confused dynastic struggle be-tween the Catholic Austrian Hapsburgs on the one side and the CatholicFrench Bourbons and the Swedish Protestant monarchy on the other. Inthe savage fighting, Germany itself was laid waste, the towns and country-side were devastated and ravished, the people decimated. It has beenestimated that one third of the German people perished in this barbarouswar.

The Peace of Westphalia was almost as disastrous to the future of Ger-many as the war had been. The German princes, who had sided withFrance and Sweden, were confirmed as absolute rulers of their little do-mains, some 350 of them, the Emperor remaining merely as a figureheadso far as the German lands were concerned. The surge of reform and en-lightenment which had swept Germany at the end of the fifteenth and thebeginning of the sixteenth centuries was smothered. In that period thegreat free cities had enjoyed virtual independence; feudalism was gone inthem, the arts and commerce thrived. Even in the countryside the Ger-man peasant had secured liberties far greater than those enjoyed in Eng-land and France. Indeed, at the beginning of the sixteenth century Ger-many could be said to be one of the fountains of European civilization.

Now, after the Peace of Westphalia, it was reduced to the barbarism ofMuscovy. Serfdom was reimposed, even introduced in areas where ithad been unknown. The towns lost their self-government. The peasants,the laborers, even the middle-class burghers, were exploited to the limitby the princes, who held them down in a degrading state of servitude. Thepursuit of learning and the arts all but ceased. The greedy rulers had nofeeling for German nationalism and patriotism and stamped out any mani-festations of them in their subjects. Civilization came to a standstill in Ger-many. The Reich, as one historian has put it, “was artificially stabilizedat 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 in-grained in the German mind. The idea of democracy, of rule by parlia-ment, which made such rapid headway in England in the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries, and which exploded in France in 1789, did notsprout in Germany. This political backwardness of the Germans, dividedas they were into so many petty states and isolated in them from the surg-ing currents of European thought and development, set Germany apartfrom and behind the other countries of the West. There was no naturalgrowth of a nation. This has to be borne in mind if one is to comprehendthe disastrous road this people subsequently took and the warped stateof mind which settled over it. In the end the German nation was forgedby naked force and held together by naked aggression.

Beyond the Elbe to the east lay Prussia. As the nineteenth centurywaned, this century which had seen the sorry failure of the confused andtimid liberals at Frankfurt in 1848-49 to create a somewhat democratic,unified Germany, Prussia took over the German destiny. For centuries

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this Germanic state had lain outside the main stream of German historicaldevelopment and culture. It seemed almost as if it were a freak of history.Prussia had begun as the remote frontier state of Brandenburg on thesandy wastes east of the Elbe which, beginning with the eleventh century,had been slowly conquered from the Slavs. Under Brandenburg’s rulingprinces, 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. Theimperial law of the German Empire forbade the princes from assumingroyal titles, but in 1701 the Emperor acquiesced in the Elector FrederickIll’s being crowned King in Prussia at Koenigsberg.

By this time Prussia had pulled itself up by its own bootstraps to beone of the ranking military powers of Europe. It had none of the resourcesof the others. Its land was barren and bereft of minerals. The populationwas small. There were no large towns, no industry and little culture. Eventhe nobility was poor, and the landless peasants lived like cattle. Yet bya supreme act of will and a genius for organization the Hohenzollernsmanaged to create a Spartan military state whose well-drilled Army wonone victory after another and whose Machiavellian diplomacy of tempo-rary alliances with whatever power seemed the strongest brought constantadditions to its territory.

There thus arose quite artificially a state born of no popular force noreven of an idea except that of conquest, and held together by the absolutepower of the ruler, by a narrow-minded bureaucracy which did his biddingand by a ruthlessly disciplined army. Two thirds and sometimes as muchas five sixths of the annual state revenue was expended on the Army,which became, under the King, the state itself. “Prussia,” remarkedMirabeau, “is not a state with an army, but an army with a state.” Andthe state, which was run with the efficiency and soullessness of a factory,became all; the people were little more than cogs in the machinery. In-dividuals were taught not only by the kings and the drill sergeants but bythe philosophers that their role in life was one of obedience, work, sacrificeand duty. Even Kant preached that duty demands the suppression ofhuman feeling, and the Prussian poet Willibald Alexis gloried in theenslavement of the people under the Hohenzollerns. To Lessing, who didnot 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 masterrace. It was they who occupied the land conquered from the Slavs andwho farmed it on large estates worked by these Slavs, who became landlessserfs quite different from those in the West. There was an essential differ-ence between the agrarian system in Prussia and that of western Germanyand Western Europe. In the latter, the nobles, who owned most of theland, received rents or feudal dues from the peasants, who though oftenkept in a state of serfdom had certain rights and privileges and could, anddid, gradually acquire their own land and civic freedom. In the West,the peasants formed a solid part of the community; the landlords, for all

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their drawbacks, developed in their leisure a cultivation which led to,among other things, a civilized quality of life that could be seen in therefinement of manners, of thought and of the arts.

The Prussian Junker was not a man of leisure. He worked hard atmanaging his large estate, much as a factory manager does today. Hislandless laborers were treated as virtual slaves. On his large properties hewas the absolute lord. There were no large towns nor any substantialmiddle class, as there were in the West, whose civilizing influence mightrub 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 historiansnoted in the private life of Otto von Bismarck, the most successful ofthe Junkers.

It was this political genius, this apostle of “blood and iron,” whobetween 1866 and 1871 brought an end to a divided Germany which hadexisted for nearly a thousand years and, by force, replaced it with GreaterPrussia, or what might be called Prussian Germany. Bismarck’s uniquecreation is the Germany we have known in our time, a problem childof Europe and the world for nearly a century, a nation of gifted, vigorouspeople in which first this remarkable man and then Kaiser Wilhelm II andfinally Hitler, aided by a military caste and by many a strange intellectual,succeeded in inculcating a lust for power and domination, a passion forunbridled militarism, a contempt for democracy and individual freedomand a longing for authority, for authoritarianism. Under such a spell,this nation rose to great heights, fell and rose again, until it was seeminglydestroyed with the end of Hitler in the spring of 1945—it is perhaps tooearly to speak of that with any certainty.

“The great questions of the day,” Bismarck declared on becomingPrime Minister of Prussia in 1862, “will not be settled by resolutions andmajority votes—that was the mistake of the men of 1848 and 1849—butby 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, oftenof the most deceitful kind. Bismarck’s aim was to destroy liberalism,bolster the power of conservatism—that is, of the Junkers, the Army andthe crown—and make Prussia, as against Austria, the dominant powernot only among the Germans but, if possible, in Europe as well. “Germanylooks not to Prussia’s liberalism,” he told the deputies in the Prussianparliament, “but to her force.”

Bismarck first built up the Prussian Army and when the parliament re-fused to vote the additional credits he merely raised them on his own andfinally dissolved the chamber. With a strengthened Army he then struckin three successive wars. The first, against Denmark in 1864, brought theduchies of Schleswig and Holstein under German rule. The second,against Austria in 1866, had far-reaching consequences. Austria, whichfor centuries had been first among the German states, was finally excluded

from German affairs. It was not allowed to join the North German Con-federation which Bismarck now proceeded to establish.

“In 1866,” the eminent German political scientist Wilhelm Roepkeonce wrote, “Germany ceased to exist.” Prussia annexed outright all theGerman states north of the Main which had fought against her, exceptSaxony; these included Hanover, Hesse, Nassau, Frankfurt and the Elbeduchies. All the other states north of the Main were forced into the NorthGerman Confederation. Prussia, which now stretched from the Rhineto Koenigsberg, completely dominated it, and within five years, with thedefeat of Napoleon Ill’s France, the southern German states, with theconsiderable kingdom of Bavaria in the lead, would be drawn into PrussianGermany.23

Bismarck’s crowning achievement, the creation of the Second Reich,came on January 18, 1871, when King Wilhelm I of Prussia was pro-claimed Emperor of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Ger-many had been unified by Prussian armed force. It was now the greatestpower 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, “isthe dominant factor . . . The will of the Empire can be nothing but thewill of the Prussian state.” This was true, and it was to have disastrousconsequences for the Germans themselves. From 1871 to 1933 andindeed to Hitler’s end in 1945, the course of German history as a con-sequence was to run, with the exception of the interim of the WeimarRepublic, in a straight line and with utter logic.

Despite the democratic fagade put up by the establishment of theReichstag, whose members were elected by universal manhood suffrage,the German Empire was in reality a militarist autocracy ruled by the Kingof Prussia, who was also Emperor. The Reichstag possessed few powers;it was little more than a debating society where the representatives of thepeople let off steam or bargained for shoddy benefits for the classes theyrepresented. The throne had the power—by divine right. As late as 1910Wilhelm II could proclaim that the royal crown had been “granted byGod’s Grace alone and not by parliaments, popular assemblies and popu-lar decision . . . Considering myself an instrument of the Lord,” headded, “I go my way.”

He was not impeded by Parliament. The Chancellor he appointed wasresponsible to him, not to the Reichstag. The assembly could not over-throw a Chancellor nor keep him in office. That was the prerogative ofthe monarch. Thus, in contrast to the development in other countries inthe West, the idea of democracy, of the people sovereign, of the supremacyof parliament, never got a foothold in Germany, even after the twentiethcentury began. To be sure, the Social Democrats, after years of per-secution by Bismarck and the Emperor, had become the largest singlepolitical party in the Reichstag by 1912. They loudly demanded theestablishment of a parliamentary democracy. But they were ineffective.And, though the largest party, they were still a minority. The middle

THE rise and fall of THE THIRD REICH

classes, grown prosperous by the belated but staggering development ofthe industrial revolution and dazzled by the success of Bismarck’s policyof force and war, had traded for material gain any aspirations for politicalfreedom they may have had.* They accepted the Hohenzollern autocracy.They gladly knuckled under to the Junker bureaucracy and they ferventlyembraced Prussian militarism. Germany’s star had risen and they—almostall 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 Bis-marck’s Second Reich, despite its mistakes and its “terrifying forces ofdecay was a work of splendor in which the Germans at last had comeinto their own.

Was not Germany above all other countries a marvelous example of anempire which had risen from foundations of a policy purely of power?Prussia, the germ cell of the Empire, came into being through resplendentheroism and not through financial operations or commercial deals, and theReich itself in turn was only the glorious reward of aggressive political leader-ship and the death-defying courage of its soldiers . . .

The very founding of the [Second] Reich seemed gilded by the magic ofan event which uplifted the entire nation. After a series of incomparablevictories, a Reich was born for the sons and grandsons—a reward for im-mortal heroism . . . This Reich, which did not owe its existence to thetrickery of parliamentary fractions, towered above the measure of other statesby the very exalted manner of its founding; for not in the cackling of a parlia-mentary battle of words but in the thunder and rumbling of the front sur-rounding Paris was the solemn act performed: a proclamation of our will, de-claring that the Germans, princes and people, were resolved in the future toconstitute a Reich and once again to raise the imperial crown to symbolicheights ... No deserters and slackers were the founders of the Bismarckianstate, but the regiments at the front.

This unique birth and baptism of fire in themselves surrounded the Reichwith a halo of historic glory such as only the oldest states—and they butseldom—could boast.

And what an ascent now began!

Freedom on the outside provided daily bread within. The nation becamerich in numbers and earthly goods. The honor of the state, and with it that

In a sense the German working class made a similar trade. To combat socialismBismarck put through between 1883 and 1889 a program for social security farbeyond anything known in other countries. It included compulsory insurance forworkers against old age, sickness, accident and incapacity, and though organized bythe State it was financed by employers and employees. It cannot be said that itstopped the rise of the Social Democrats or the trade unions, but it did have a pro-found influence on the working class in that it gradually made them value securityover political fieedom and caused them to see in the State, however conservative, abenefactor and a protector. Hitler, as we shall see, took full advantage of this stateof mind. In this, as in other matters, he learned much from Bismarck. “I studiedBismarck’s socialist legislation,” Hitler remarks in Mein Kampf (p. 155), “in itsintention, struggle and success.”

of the whole people, was protected and shielded by an army which couldpoint most visibly to the difference from the former German Union.24

That was the Germany which Hitler resolved to restore. In MeinKampf he discourses at great length on what he believes are the reasonsfor its fall: its tolerance of Jews and Marxists, the crass materialism andselfishness of the middle class, the nefarious influence of the “cringers andlickspittles” around the Hohenzollern throne, the “catastrophic Germanalliance policy” which linked Germany to the degenerate Hapsburgs andthe untrustworthy Italians instead of with England, and the lack of afundamental “social” and racial policy. These were failures which, hepromised, National Socialism would correct.

THE INTELLECTUAL ROOTS OF THE THIRD REICH

But aside from history, where did Hitler get his ideas? Though hisopponents inside and outside Germany were too busy, or too stupid, totake much notice of it until it was too late, he had somehow absorbed, ashad so many Germans, a weird mixture of the irresponsible, megalo-maniacal ideas which erupted from German thinkers during the nineteenthcentury. Hitler, who often got them at second hand through such amuddled pseudo philosopher as Alfred Rosenberg or through his drunkenpoet friend Dietrich Eckart, embraced them with all the feverish enthu-siasm of a neophyte. What was worse, he resolved to put them into prac-tice 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 theauthoritarian state; the belief in the Aryans, or Germans, as the masterrace, and the hatred of Jews and Slavs; the contempt for democracy andhumanism. They are not original with Hitler—though the means ofapplying them later proved to be. They emanate from that odd assortmentof erudite but unbalanced philosophers, historians and teachers who cap-tured the German mind during the century before Hitler with conse-quences so disastrous, as it turned out, not only for the Germans but for alarge portion of mankind.

There had been among the Germans, to be sure, some of the mostelevated minds and spirits of the Western world—Leibnitz, Kant, Herder,Humboldt, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Bach and Beethoven—and theyhad made unique contributions to the civilization of the West. But theGerman culture which became dominant in the nineteenth century andwhich coincided with the rise of Prussian Germany, continuing from Bis-marck through Hitler, rests primarily on Fichte and Hegel, to begin with,and then on Treitschke, Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, and a host of lesserlights not the least of whom, strangely enough, were a bizarre Frenchmanand an eccentric Englishman. They succeeded in establishing a spiritualbreak with the West: the breach has not been healed to this day.

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In 1807, following Prussia’s humiliating defeat by Napoleon at Jena,Johann Gottlieb Fichte began his famous “Addresses to the GermanNation” from the podium of the University of Berlin, where he held thechair of philosophy. They stirred and rallied a divided, defeated peopleand 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 theGermans possess the possibility of regeneration. Their language is thepurest, 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 elitewhich would be free of any moral restraints of a “private” nature. Theseare 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 Fried-rich Hegel at the University of Berlin. This is the subtle and penetratingmind whose dialectics inspired Marx and Lenin and thus contributed tothe founding of Communism and whose ringing glorification of the Stateas supreme in human life paved the way for the Second and Third Reichsof Bismarck and Hitler. To Hegel the State is all, or almost all. Amongother things, he says, it is the highest revelation of the “world spirit”; itis the “moral universe”; it is “the actuality of the ethical idea . . .ethical mind . . . knowing and thinking itself”; the State “has the supremeright against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of theState ... for the right of the world spirit is above all special privi-leges . .

And the happiness of the individual on earth? Hegel replies that “worldhistory is no empire of happiness. The periods of happiness,” he declares,“are the empty pages of history because they are the periods of agree-ment, without conflict.” War is the great purifier. In Hegel’s view, itmakes for “the ethical health of peoples corrupted by a long peace, asthe blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which wouldbe the result of a prolonged calm.”

No traditional conception of morals and ethics must disturb either thesupreme State or the “heroes” who lead it. “World history occupies ahigher ground . . . Moral claims which are irrelevant must not bebrought into collision with world-historical deeds and their accomplish-ments. The litany of private virtues—modesty, humility, philanthropyand forbearance—must not be raised against them ... So mighty aform [the State] must trample down many an innocent flower—crush topieces many an object in its path.”

Hegel foresees such a State for Germany when she has recovered herGod-given genius. He predicts that “Germany’s hour” will come andthat its mission will be to regenerate the world. As one reads Hegel onerealizes how much inspiration Hitler, like Marx, drew from him, even ifit was at second hand. Above all else, Hegel in his theory of “heroes,”those great agents who are fated by a mysterious Providence to carryout “the will of the world spirit,” seems to have inspired Hider, as we

shall see at the end of this chapter, with his own overpowering sense ofmission.

Heinrich von Treitschke came later to the University of Berlin. From1874 until his death in 1896 he was a professor of history there and apopular one, his lectures being attended by large and enthusiastic gather-ings which included not only students but General Staff officers and of-ficials of the Junker bureaucracy. His influence on German thought in thelast quarter of the century was enormous and it continued through WilhelmIPs day and indeed Hitler’s. Though he was a Saxon, he became the greatPrussianizer; he was more Prussian than the Prussians. Like Hegel heglorifies the State and conceives of it as supreme, but his attitude is morebrutish: the people, the subjects, are to be little more than slaves in thenation, “ft does not matter what you think,” he exclaims, “so long as youobey.”

And Treitschke outdoes Hegel in proclaiming war as the highest ex-pression of man. To him “martial glory is the basis of all the politicalvirtues; in the rich treasure of Germany’s glories the Prussian militaryglory is a jewel as precious as the masterpieces of our poets and thinkers.”He holds that “to play blindly with peace ... has become the shameof the thought and morality of our age.”

War is not only a practical necessity, it is also a theoretical necessity, anexigency of logic. The concept of the State implies the concept of war, forthe essence of the State is power . . . That war should ever be banishedfrom the world is a hope not only absurd, but profoundly immoral. It wouldinvolve the atrophy of many of the essential and sublime forces of the humansoul ... A people which become attached to the chimerical hope of per-petual 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 geniusdiffer from those of the chauvinistic German thinkers of the nineteenthcentury. Indeed, he regarded most German philosophers, including Fichteand Hegel, as “unconscious swindlers.” He poked fun at the “Tartufferyof old Kant.” The Germans, he wrote in Ecce Homo, “have no concep-tion how vile they are,” and he came to the conclusion that “wheresoeverGermany penetrated, she ruins culture.” He thought that Christians, asmuch as Jews, were responsible for the “slave morality” prevalent in theworld; he was never an anti-Semite. He was sometimes fearful of Prussia’sfuture, and in his last years, before insanity closed down his mind, he eventoyed with the idea of European union and world government.

* “I have often felt,” Goethe once said, “a bitter sorrow at the thought of theGerman people, which is so estimable in the individual and so wretched in thegenerality. A comparison of the German people with other peoples arouses apainful feeling, which I try to overcome in every possible way.” (Conversationwith H. Luden on December 13, 1813, in Goethes Gespraeche, Auswahl Bieder-mann; quoted by Wilhelm Roepke in The Solution of the German Problem, p. 131.)

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Yet I think no one who lived in the Third Reich could have failed to beimpressed by Nietzsche’s influence on it. His books might be full, asSantayana said, of “genial imbecility” and “boyish blasphemies.” YetNazi scribblers never tired of extolling him. Hitler often visited theNietzsche museum in Weimar and publicized his veneration for the phi-losopher by posing for photographs of himself staring in rapture at thebust of the great man.

There was some ground for this appropriation of Nietzsche as one ofthe originators of the Nazi Weltanschauung. Had not the philosopherthundered against democracy and parliaments, preached the will to power,praised war and proclaimed the coming, of the master race and the super-man—and in the most telling aphorisms? A Nazi could proudly quotehim on almost every conceivable subject, and did. On Christianity: “theone great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion ... I callit the one immortal blemish of mankind . . . This Christianity is nomore than the typical teaching of the Socialists.” On the State, power andthe jungle world of man: “Society has never regarded virtue as anythingelse than as a means to strength, power and order. The State [is] un-morality organized ... the will to war, to conquest and revenge . . .Society is not entitled to exist for its own sake but only as a substructureand scaffolding, by means of which a select race of beings may elevatethemselves to their higher duties . . . There is no such thing as the rightto live, the right to work, or the right to be happy: in this respect man isno different from the meanest worm.”* And he exalted the superman asthe beast of prey, “the magnificent blond brute, avidly rampant for spoiland victory.”

And war? Here Nietzsche took the view of most of the other nineteenth-century German thinkers. In the thundering Old Testament language inwhich Thus Spake Zarathustra is written, the philosopher cries out: “Yeshall love peace as a means to new war, and the short peace more thanthe long. You I advise not to work, but to fight. You I advise not topeace but to victory ... Ye say it is the good cause which hallowetheven 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 wouldrule the world and from whom the superman would spring. In The Willto 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

* 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 chiefrole 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. Allelse is folly.” He went further. In Thus Spake Zarathustra he exclaims: “Thougoest to woman? Do not forget thy whip!”—which prompted Bertrand Russell toquip, “Nine women out of ten would have got the whip away from him, and he knewit. so he kept away from women . . .”

The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich 101

strong kind of man, most highly gifted in intellect and will. This man andthe elite around him will become the “lords of the earth.”

Such rantings from one of Germany’s most original minds must havestruck a responsive chord in Hitler’s littered mind. At any rate he ap-propriated them for his own—not only the thoughts but the philosopher’spenchant for grotesque exaggeration, and often his very words. “Lordsof the Earth” is a familiar expression in Mein Kampf. That in the endHitler considered himself the superman of Nietzsche’s prophecy can notbe doubted.

“Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must knowWagner,” Hitler used to say.* This may have been based on a partialmisconception of the great composer, for though Richard Wagner har-bored a fanatical hatred, as Hitler did, for the Jews, who he was convincedwere out to dominate the world with their money, and though he scornedparliaments and democracy and the materialism and mediocrity of thebourgeoisie, he also fervently hoped that the Germans, “with their specialgifts,” would “become not rulers, but ennoblers of the world.”

It was not his political writings, however, but his towering operas, re-calling so vividly the world of German antiquity with its heroic myths,its fighting pagan gods and heroes, its demons and dragons, its blood feudsand primitive tribal codes, its sense of destiny, of the splendor of loveand life and the nobility of death, which inspired the myths of modernGermany and gave it a Germanic Weltanschauung which Hitler and theNazis, with some justification, took over as their own.

From his earliest days Hitler worshiped Wagner, and even as his lifeneared a close, in the damp and dreary bunker at Army headquarters onthe Russian front, with his world and his dreams beginning to crack andcrumble, he loved to reminisce about all the times he had heard the greatWagnerian works, of what they had meant to him and of the inspirationhe had derived from the Bayreuth Festival and from his countless visitsto Haus Wahnfried, the composer’s home, where Siegfried Wagner, thecomposer’s son, still lived with his English-born wife, Winifred, who fora while was one of his revered friends.

“What joy each of Wagner’s works has given me!” Hitler exclaims onthe evening of January 24-25,1942, soon after the first disastrous Germandefeats in Russia, as he discourses to his generals and party cronies,Himmler among them, in the depths of the underground shelter ofWolfsschanze at Rastenburg in East Prussia. Outside there is snow andan arctic cold, the elements which he so hated and feared and which hadcontributed to the first German military setback of the war. But in thewarmth of the bunker his thoughts on this night, at least, are on one ofthe great inspirations of his life. “I remember,” he says, “my emotionthe first time I entered Wahnfried. To say I was moved is an understate-

* My own recollection is confirmed by Otto Tolischus in his They Wanted War,P- IE

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ment! At my worst moments, they never ceased to sustain me, evenSiegfried Wagner. I was on Christian-name terms with them. I lovedthem all, and I also love Wahnfried . . . The ten days of the Bayreuthseason were always one of the blessed seasons of my existence. And Irejoice 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’mgripped by a great sadness—as when one strips the Christmas tree of itsornaments.”25

Though Hitler reiterated in his monologue that winter evening that tohim Tristan und Isolde was “Wagner’s masterpiece,” it is the stupendousNibelungen Ring, a series of four operas which was inspired by the greatGerman epic myth, Nibelungenlied, and on which the composer workedfor the better part of twenty-five years, that gave Germany and especiallythe Third Reich so much of its primitive Germanic mythos. Often apeople’s myths are the highest and truest expression of its spirit and cul-ture, and nowhere is this more true than in Germany. Schelling evenargued that “a nation comes into existence with its mythology . . . Theunity of its thinking, which means a collective philosophy, [is] presentedin its mythology; therefore its mythology contains the fate of the nation.”And Max Mell, a contemporary poet, who wrote a modern version of theSong of the Nibelungs, declared, “Today only little has remained of theGreek 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 ancientheroes and heroines with whom so many modem Germans liked toidentify 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 theGoetterdaemmerung, the twilight of the gods, as Valhalla, set on fire byWotan after all his vicissitudes, goes up in flames in an orgy of self-willedannihilation which has always fascinated the German mind and answeredsome terrible longing in the German soul. These heroes, this primitive,demonic world, were always, in Mell’s words, “in the people’s soul.” Inthat German soul could be felt the struggle between the spirit of civiliza-tion and the spirit of the Nibelungs, and in the time with which this historyis concerned the latter seemed to gain the upper hand. It is not at allsurprising that Hitler tried to emulate Wotan when in 1945 he willed thedestruction 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 theRing operas often revolves around the theme of greed for gold, which thecomposer equated with the “tragedy of modern capitalism,” and whichhe saw, with horror, wiping out the old virtues which had come down froman earlier day. Despite all his pagan heroes he did not entirely despair ofChristianity, as Nietzsche did. And he had great compassion for theerring, warring human race. But Hitler was not entirely wrong in sayingthat to understand Nazism one must first know Wagner.

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Wagner had known, and been influenced by, first Schopenhauer andthen Nietzsche, though the latter quarreled with him because he thoughthis operas, especially Parsifal, showed too much Christian renunciation.In the course of his long and stormy life, Wagner came into contact withtwo other men, one a Frenchman, the other an Englishman, who are im-portant 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 Germanmind, which they helped to direct toward the coming of the Third Reich.

These individuals were Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a Frenchdiplomat and man of letters, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, one ofthe strangest Englishmen who ever lived.

Neither man, be it said at once, was a mountebank. Both were men ofimmense erudition, deep culture and wide experience of travel. Yet bothconcocted racial doctrines so spurious that no people, not even their own,took them seriously with the single exception of the Germans. To theNazis their questionable theories became gospel. It is probably no exag-geration to say, as I have heard more than one follower of Hitler say, thatChamberlain was the spiritual founder of the Third Reich. This singularEnglishman, who came to see in the Germans the master race, the hopeof the future, worshiped Richard Wagner, one of whose daughters heeventually married; he venerated first Wilhelm II and finally Hitler andwas the mentor of both. At the end of a fantastic life he could hail theAustrian corporal—and this long before Hitler came to power or had anyprospect of it—as a being sent by God to lead the German people outof the wilderness. Hitler, not unnaturally, regarded Chamberlain as aprophet, as indeed he turned out to be.

What was it in the teaching of these two men that inoculated theGermans with a madness on the question of race and German destiny?

Gobineau’s chief contribution was a four-volume work which waspublished in Paris between 1853 and 1855, entitled Essai sur I’Inegalitedes Races Humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races).Ironically enough, this French aristocrat, after serving as an officer in theRoyal Guard, had started his public career as chef de cabinet to Alexisde Tocqueville when the distinguished author of Democracy in Americaserved a brief term of office in 1848 He had then gone to Hanover andFrankfurt as a diplomat and it was from his contact with the Germans,rather than with De Tocqueville, that he derived his theories on racial in-equalities, though he once confessed that he wrote the volumes partly toprove the superiority of his own aristocratic ancestry.

To Gobineau, as he stated in his dedication of the work to the King ofHanover, the key to history and civilization was race. “The racial questiondominates all the other problems of history ... the inequality of racessuffices to explain the whole unfolding of the destiny of peoples.” Therewere three principal races, white, yellow and black, and the white was thesuperior. “History,” he contended, “shows that all civilization flows fromthe white race, that no civilization can exist without the co-operation ofthis race.” The jewel of the white race was the Aryan, “this illustrious

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human family, the noblest among the white race,” whose origins he tracedback to Central Asia. Unfortunately, Gobineau says, the contemporaryAryan suffered from intermixture with inferior races, as one could see inthe southern Europe of his time. However, in the northwest, above a linerunning roughly along the Seine and east to Switzerland, the Aryans,though far from simon-pure, still survived as a superior race. This tookin some of the French, all of the English and the Irish, the people of theLow Countries and the Rhine and Hanover, and the Scandinavians.Gobineau seemingly excluded the bulk of the Germans, who lived to theeast and southeast of his line—a fact which the Nazis glossed over whenthey 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 didnot gloss over. Wherever they went, the Germans, he found, broughtimprovement. This was true even in the Roman Empire. The so-calledbarbaric German tribes who conquered the Romans and broke up theirempire did a distinct service to civilization, for the Romans, by the timeof the fourth century, were little better than degenerate mongrels, whilethe Germans were relatively pure Aryans. “The Aryan German,” he de-clared, “is a powerful creature . . . Everything he thinks, says and doesis thus of major importance.”

Gobineau’s ideas were quickly taken up in Germany. Wagner, whomthe Frenchman met in 1876 toward the close of his life (he died in 1882)espoused them with enthusiasm, and soon Gobineau societies sprang upall over Germany.*

THE STRANGE LIFE AND WORKS OFH. S. CHAMBERLAIN

Among the zealous members of the Gobineau Society in Germany wasHouston Stewart Chamberlain, whose life and works constitute one ofthe most fascinating ironies in the inexorable course of history which ledto the rise and fall of the Third Reich.

This son of an English admiral, nephew of a British field marshal, SirNeville Chamberlain, and of two British generals, and eventually son-in-law of Richard Wagner, was born at Portsmouth in 1855. He was des-tined for the British Army or Navy, but his delicate health made such acalling out of the question and he was educated in France and Geneva,where French became his first language. Between the ages of fifteen andnineteen fate brought him into touch with two Germans and thereafter hewas drawn irresistibly toward Germany, of which he ultimately became acitizen and one of the foremost thinkers and in whose language he wroteall of his many books, several of which had an almost blinding influenceon Wilhelm II, Adolf Hitler and countless lesser Germans.

Though not in France.

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In 1870, when he was fifteen, Chamberlain landed in the hands of aremarkable tutor, Otto Kuntze, a Prussian of the Prussians, who for fouryears imprinted on his receptive mind and sensitive soul the glories ofmilitant, conquering Prussia and also—apparently unmindful of the con-trasts—of such artists and poets as Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller andWagner. At nineteen Chamberlain fell madly in love with Anna Horst,also a Prussian, ten years his senior and, like him, highly neurotic. In1882, at the age of twenty-seven, he journeyed from Geneva, where hehad 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 restof his days. From 1885, when he went with Anna Horst, who had becomehis wife, to live for four years in Dresden, he became a German in thoughtand in language, moving on to Vienna in 1889 for a decade and finally in1909 to Bayreuth, where he dwelt until his death in 1927. He divorcedhis idolized Prussian wife in 1905, when she was sixty and even morementally and physically ill than he (the separation was so painful thathe said it almost drove him mad) and three years later he married EvaWagner and settled down near Wahnfried, where he could be near hiswife’s mother, the revered, strong-willed Cosima.

Hypersensitive and neurotic and subject to frequent nervous break-downs, 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 hisprodigious writings. One vision after another forced him to change frombiology to botany to the fine arts, to music, to philosophy, to biographyto history. Once, in 1896, when he was returning from Italy, the presenceof a demon became so forceful that he got off the train at Gardone, shuthimself up in a hotel room for eight days and, abandoning some workon music that he had contemplated, wrote feverishly on a biological thesisuntil he had the germ of the theme that would dominate all of his laterworks: race and history.

Whatever its blemishes, his mind had a vast sweep ranging over thefields of literature, music, biology, botany, religion, history and politics.There was, as Jean Real26 has pointed out, a profound unity of inspira-tion in all his published works and they had a remarkable coherence. Sincehe felt himself goaded on by demons, his books (on Wagner, Goethe,Kant, Christianity and race) were written in the grip of a terrible fever, averitable trance, a state of self-induced intoxication, so that, as he saysin his autobiography, Lebenswege, he was often unable to recognize themas his own work, because they surpassed his expectations. Minds morebalanced than his have subsequently demolished his theories of race andmuch of his history, and to such a French scholar of Germanism asEdmond Vermeil Chamberlain’s ideas were essentially “shoddy.” Yet tothe anti-Nazi German biographer of Hitler, Konrad Heiden, who deploredthe influence of his racial teachings, Chamberlain “was one of the most

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astonishing talents in the history of the German mind, a mine of knowledgeand profound ideas.”

The book which most profoundly influenced that mind, which sentWilhelm II into ecstasies and provided the Nazis with their racial aber-rations, was Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (Grundlagen desNeunzehnten Jahrhunderts) a work of some twelve hundred pages whichChamberlain, again possessed of one of his “demons,” wrote in nineteenmonths between April 1, 1897, and October 31, 1898, in Vienna, andwhich was published in 1899.

As with Gobineau, whom he admired, Chamberlain found the key tohistory, indeed the basis of civilization, to be race. To explain thenineteenth century, that is, the contemporary world, one had to considerfirst what it had been bequeathed from ancient times. Three things, saidChamberlain: Greek philosophy and art, Roman law and the personalityof Christ. There were also three legatees: the Jews and the Germans, the“two pure races,” and the half-breed Latins of the Mediterranean—“achaos of peoples,” he called them. The Germans alone deserved such asplendid heritage. They had, it is true, come into history late, not untilthe thirteenth century. But even before that, in destroying the RomanEmpire, they had proved their worth. “It is not true,” he says, “that theTeutonic barbarian conjured up the so-called ‘Night of the Middle Ages’;this night followed rather upon the intellectual and moral bankruptcy ofthe raceless chaos of humanity which the dying Roman Empire hadnurtured; but for the Teuton, everlasting night would have settled uponthe world.” At the time he was writing he saw in the Teuton the only hopeof the world.

Chamberlain included among the “Teutons” the Celts and the Slavs,though the Teutons were the most important element. However, he isquite woolly in his definitions and at one point declares that “whoeverbehaves as a Teuton is a Teuton whatever his racial origin.” Perhaps herehe was thinking of his own non-German origin. Whatever he was, theTeuton, according to Chamberlain, was “the soul of our culture. Theimportance of each nation as a living power today is dependent upon theproportion of genuinely Teutonic blood in its population . . . Truehistory 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 werethe only pure races left in the West. And in this chapter he condemns“stupid and revolting anti-Semitism.” The Jews, he says, are not “in-ferior” to the Teuton, merely “different.” They have their own grandeur;they realize the “sacred duty” of man to guard the purity of race. And yetas he proceeds to analyze the Jews, Chamberlain slips into the very vulgaranti-Semitism which he condemns in others and which leads, in the end, tothe obscenities of Julius Streicher’s caricatures of the Jews in Der Stuer-mer in Hitler’s time. Indeed a good deal of the “philosophical” basis ofNazi anti-Semitism stems from this chapter.

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The preposterousness of Chamberlain’s views is quickly evident. Hehas declared that the personality of Christ is one of the three greatbequests of antiquity to modern civilization. He then sets out to “prove”that Jesus was not a Jew. His Galilean origins, his inability to utter cor-rectly the Aramaic gutturals, are to Chamberlain “clear signs” that Jesushad “a large proportion of non-Semitic blood.” He then makes a typicallyflat statement: “Whoever claimed that Jesus was a Jew was either beingstupid or telling a lie. . . . Jesus was not a Jew.”

What was he then? Chamberlain answers: Probably an Aryan! Ifnot entirely by blood, then unmistakably by reason of his moral and reli-gious teaching, so opposed to the “materialism and abstract formalism” ofthe Jewish religion. It was natural then—-or at least it was to Chamberlain—that Christ should become “the God of the young Indo-Europeanpeoples overflowing with life,” and above all the God of the Teuton, be-cause “no other people was so well equipped as the Teutonic to hear thisdivine voice.”

There follows what purports to be a detailed history of the Jewish racefrom the time of the mixture of the Semite or Bedouin of the desert withthe roundheaded Hittite, who had a “Jewish nose,” and finally with theAmorites, who were Aryans. Unfortunately the Aryan mixture—-theAmorites, he says, were tall, blond, magnificent—came too late to reallyimprove the “corrupt” Hebrew strain. From then on the Englishman,contradicting his whole theory of the purity of the Jewish race, finds theJews becoming a “negative” race, “a bastardy,” so that the Aryans werejustified in “denying” Israel. In fact, he condemns the Aryans for givingthe Jews “a halo of false glory.” He then finds the Jews “lamentablylacking in true religion.”

Finally, for Chamberlain the way of salvation lies in the Teutons andtheir 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. “Godbuilds today upon the Germans alone,” he wrote in another place. “Thisis the knowledge, the certain truth, that has filled my soul for years.”

Publication of Foundations of the Nineteenth Century created some-thing of a sensation and brought this strange Englishman sudden fame inGermany. Despite its frequent eloquence and its distinguished style—forChamberlain was a dedicated artist—the book was not easy reading. Butit was soon taken up by the upper classes, who seem to have found in itjust what they wanted to believe. Within ten years it had gone througheight editions and sold 60,000 copies and by the time of the outbreak ofthe First World War in 1914 it had reached a sale of 100,000. It flourishedagain 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 ofa 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

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meeting a friendship was formed that lasted to the end of the author’s lifein 1927. An extensive correspondence between the two followed. Someof the forty-three letters which Chamberlain addressed to the Emperor(Wilhelm answered twenty-three of them) were lengthy essays whichthe ruler used in several of his bombastic speeches and statements. “Itwas God who sent your book to the German people, and you personallyto me,” the Kaiser wrote in one of his first letters. Chamberlain’sobsequiousness, his exaggerated flattery, in these letters can be nauseating.“Your Majesty and your subjects,” he wrote, “have been bom in a holyshrine,” and he informed Wilhelm that he had placed his portrait in hisstudy opposite one of Christ by Leonardo so that while he worked heoften paced up and down between the countenance of his Savior and hissovereign.

His servility did not prevent Chamberlain from continually profferingadvice to the headstrong, flamboyant monarch. In 1908 the popular op-position to Wilhelm had reached such a climax that the Reichstag censoredhim for his disastrous intervention in foreign affairs. But Chamberlainadvised the Emperor that public opinion was made by idiots and traitorsand not to mind it, whereupon Wilhelm replied that the two of themwould stand together—“You wield your pen; I my tongue (and) mybroad sword.”

And always the Englishman reminded the Emperor of Germany’s mis-sion and its destiny. “Once Germany has achieved the power,” he wroteafter the outbreak of the First World War, “—and we may confidentlyexpect her to achieve it—she must immediately begin to carry out ascientific policy of genius. Augustus undertook a systematic transforma-tion of the world, and Germany must do the same . . . Equipped withoffensive and defensive weapons, organized as firmly and flawlessly asthe Army, superior to all in art, science, technology, industry, commerce,finance, in every field, in short; teacher, helmsman, and pioneer of theworld, every man at his post, every man giving his utmost for the holycause—thus Germany . . . will conquer the world by inner superiority.”

For preaching such a glorious mission for his adopted country (hebecame 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 afterhis death but whose coming he foresaw, that this Englishman’s influencewas the greatest. His racial theories and his burning sense of the destinyof the Germans and Germany were taken over by the Nazis, who ac-claimed him as one of their prophets. During the Hitler regime books,pamphlets and articles poured from the presses extolling the “spiritualfounder” of National Socialist Germany. Rosenberg, as one of Hitler’smentors, often tried to impart his enthusiasm for the English philosopherto the Fuehrer. It is likely that Hitler first learned of Chamberlain’s writ-ings before he left Vienna, for they were popular among the Pan-Germanand anti-Semitic groups whose literature he devoured so avidly in those

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early days. Probably too he read some of Chamberlain’s chauvinisticarticles during the war. In Mein Kampf he expresses the regret thatChamberlain’s observations were not more heeded during the SecondReich.

Chamberlain was one of the first intellectuals in Germany to see agreat future for Hitler—and new opportunities for the Germans if theyfollowed him. Hitler had met him in Bayreuth in 1923, and though ill,half paralyzed, and disillusioned by Germany’s defeat and the fall of theHohenzollem Empire—the collapse of all his hopes and prophecies!—Chamberlain was swept off his feet by the eloquent young Austrian. “Youhave mighty things to do,” he wrote Hitler on the following day, “. . . Myfaith in Germanism had not wavered an instant, though my hope—Iconfess—was at a low ebb. With one stroke you have transformed thestate of my soul. That in the hour of her deepest need Germany gives birthto 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 Chaplinmustache, his rowdy manners and his violent, outlandish extremism, wasstill considered a joke by most Germans. He had few followers then. Butthe hypnotic magnetism of his personality worked like a charm on theaging, ill philosopher and renewed his faith in the people he had chosento join and exalt. Chamberlain became a member of the budding NaziParty and so far as his health would permit began to write for its obscurepublications. One of his articles, published in 1924, hailed Hitler, whowas then in jail, as destined by God to lead the German people. Destinyhad 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 VoelkischerBeobachter, which hailed his Foundations as the “gospel of the Nazi move-ment,” and he went to his grave sixteen months later—on January 11,1927—with high hope that all he had preached and prophesied would yetcome true under the divine guidance of this new German Messiah.

Aside from a prince representing Wilhelm II, who could not return toGerman soil, Hitler was the only public figure at Chamberlain’s funeral.In reporting the death of the Englishman the Voelkischer Beobachtersaid that the German people had lost “one of the great armorers whoseweapons 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 thefortunes of the Nazi Party were at their lowest ebb, how soon, how verjsoon, those weapons which the transplanted Englishman had forged wouldbe put to their fullest use, and with what fearful consequences.27

Yet Adolf Hitler had a mystical sense of his personal mission on earthin those days, and even before. “From millions of men . . . one manmust step forward,” he wrote in Mein Kampf (the italics are his), “who

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with apodictic force will form granite principles from the wavering idea-world of the broad masses and take up the struggle for their sole correct-ness, until from the shifting waves of a free thought-world there will arisea brazen cliff of solid unity in faith and will.”28

He left no doubt in the minds of readers that he already consideredhimself that one man. Mein Kampf is sprinkled with little essays on therole of the genius who is picked by Providence to lead a great people, eventhough they may not at first understand him or recognize his worth, out oftheir troubles to further greatness. The reader is aware that Hitler is re-ferring to himself and his present situation. He is not yet recognized by theworld for what he is sure he is, but that has always been the fate ofgeniuses—in the beginning. “It nearly always takes some stimulus tobring the genius on the scene,” he remarks. “The world then resists anddoes not want to believe that the type, which apparently is identical withit, is suddenly a very different being; a process which is repeated withevery 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 blendof the practical politician and the thinker. “At long intervals in humanhistory it may occasionally happen that the politician is wedded to thetheoretician. The more profound this fusion, the greater are the obstaclesopposing the work of the politician. He no longer works for necessitieswhich will be understood by the first good shopkeeper, but for aims whichonly the fewest comprehend. Therefore his life is torn between love andhate. The protest of the present, which does not understand him, struggleswith the recognition of posterity—for which he also works. For thegreater a man’s works are for the future, the less the present can com-prehend 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 actuallyread Hegel or not is a matter of dispute. But it is clear from his writingsand speeches that he had some acquaintance with the philosopher’s ideas,if only through discussions with his early mentors Rosenberg, Eckartand Hess. One way or another Hegel’s famous lectures at the Universityof Berlin must have caught his attention, as did numerous dictums ofNietzsche. We have seen briefly* that Hegel developed a theory of“heroes” which had great appeal to the German mind. In one of theBerlin lectures he discussed how the “will of the world spirit” is carriedout by “world-historical individuals.”

They may be called Heroes, inasmuch as they have derived their purposesand their vocation, not from the calm regular course of things, sanctioned bythe existing order; but from a concealed fount, from that inner Spirit, still

* See above, p. 98.

The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich 111

hidden beneath the surface, which impinges on the outer world as on a shelland bursts it into pieces. Such were Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon. Theywere 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 fordevelopment. This was the very Truth for their age, for their world ... Itwas theirs to know this nascent principle, the necessary, directly sequent stepin progress, which their world was to take; to make this their aim, and toexpend their energy in promoting it. World-historical men—the Heroes ofan 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 MeinKampf. The fusion of the politician and the thinker—that is what pro-duces a hero, a “world-historical figure,” an Alexander, a Caesar, aNapoleon. If there was in him, as Hitler had now come to believe, thesame fusion, might he not aspire to their ranks?

In Hitler’s utterances there runs the theme that the supreme leader isabove the morals of ordinary man. Hegel and Nietzsche thought so too.We have seen Hegel’s argument that “the private virtues” and “irrelevantmoral claims” must not stand in the way of the great rulers, nor must onebe squeamish if the heroes, in fulfilling their destiny, trample or “crush topieces” many an innocent flower. Nietzsche, with his grotesque exaggera-tion, 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 contentmentin their souls as if they had indulged in some student’s rag . . . When a manis capable of commanding, when he is by nature a “Master,” when he isviolent in act and gesture, of what importance are treaties to him? ... Tojudge morality properly, it must be replaced by two concepts borrowed fromzoology: the taming of a beast and the breeding of a specific species.32

Such teachings, carried to their extremity by Nietzsche and applaudedby a host of lesser Germans, seem to have exerted a strong appeal onHitler.* A genius with a mission was above the law; he could not bebound by “bourgeois” morals. Thus, when his time for action came,Hitler could justify the most ruthless and cold-blooded deeds, the sup-pression of personal freedom, the brutal practice of slave labor, the de-pravities of the concentration camp, the massacre of his own followers inJune 1934, the killing of war prisoners and the mass slaughter of the Jews.

When Hitler emerged from Landsberg prison five days before Christ-mas, 1924, he found a situation which would have led almost any otherman to retire from public life. The Nazi Party and its press were banned;

* See above, pp. 86-87, for quotations from Mein Kampf.

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the former leaders were feuding and falling away. He himself was forbid-den to speak in public. What was worse, he faced deportation to hisnative Austria; the Bavarian state police had strongly recommended it ina report to the Ministry of the Interior. Even many of his old comradesagreed with the general opinion that Hitler was finished, that now he wouldfade away into oblivion as had so many other provincial politicians whohad enjoyed a brief moment of notoriety during the strife-ridden yearswhen 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. HjalmarHorace Greeley Schacht had been called in to stabilize the currency, andhe had succeeded. The ruinous inflation was over. The burden of repara-tions was eased by the Dawes Plan. Capital began to flow in fromAmerica. The economy was rapidly recovering. Stresemann was suc-ceeding in his policy of reconciliation with the Allies. The French weregetting out of the Ruhr. A security pact was being discussed which wouldpave the way for a general European settlement (Locarno) and bringGermany into the League of Nations. For the first time since the defeat,after six years of tension, turmoil and depression, the German people werebeginning to have a normal fife. Two weeks before Hitler was releasedfrom Landsberg, the Social Democrats—the “November criminals,” ashe called them—had increased their vote by 30 per cent (to nearly eightmillion) in a general election in which they had championed the Republic.The Nazis, in league with northern racial groups under the name of theNational Socialist German Freedom movement, had seen their vote fallfrom 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 coun-try’s misfortunes; now that the nation’s outlook was suddenly bright itwas rapidly withering away. Or so most Germans and foreign observersbelieved.

But not Adolf Hitler. He was not easily discouraged. And he knewhow to wait. As he picked up the threads of his life in the little two-roomapartment on the top floor of 41 Thierschstrasse in Munich during thewinter months of 1925 and then, when summer came, in various innson the Obersalzberg above Berchtesgaden, the contemplation of the mis-fortunes of the immediate past and the eclipse of the present, served onlyto strengthen his resolve. Behind the prison gates he had had time torange over in his mind not only his own past and its triumphs and mis-takes, but the tumultuous past of his German people and its triumphsand errors. He saw both more clearly now. And there was born in himanew a burning sense of mission—for himself and for Germany—from

* As late as 1929, Professor M. A. Gerothwohl, the editor of Lord D’Abernon’sdiaries, wrote a footnote to the ambassador’s account of the Beer Hall Putsch inwhich, after mention of Hitler’s being sentenced to prison, he added: “He wasfinally released after six months and bound over for the rest of his sentence, there-after fading into oblivion.” Lord D’Abernon was the British ambassador in Berlinfrom 1920 to 1926 and worked with great skill to strengthen the Weimar Republic.

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which all doubts were excluded. In this exalted spirit he finished dictatingthe torrent of words that would go into Volume One of Mein Kampf andwent on immediately to Volume Two. The blueprint of what the Almightyhad called upon him to do in this cataclysmic world and the philosophy,the Weltanschauung, that would sustain it were set down in cold print forall to ponder. That philosophy, however demented, had roots, as we haveseen, deep in German life. The blueprint may have seemed preposterousto most twentieth-century minds, even in Germany. But it too possessed acertain logic. It held forth a vision. It offered, though few saw this at thetime, a continuation of German history. It pointed the way toward aglorious German destiny.

Book Two

+ + 4*

TRIUMPH

AND

CONSOLIDATION

5

THE ROAD TO POWER: 1925-31

The years from 1925 until the coming of the depression in 1929were lean years for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement, but it is ameasure of the man that he persevered and never lost hope or confidence.Despite the excitability of his nature, which often led to outbursts ofhysteria, he had the patience to wait and the shrewdness to realize thatthe climate of material prosperity and of a feeling of relaxation whichsettled over Germany in those years was not propitious for his purposes.

He was confident that the good times would not last. So far as Germanywas concerned, he said, they depended not on her own strength but onthat of others—of America above all, from whose swollen coffers loanswere pouring in to make and keep Germany prosperous. Between 1924and 1930 German borrowing amounted to some seven billion dollars andmost of it came from American investors, who gave little thought to howthe Germans might make eventual repayment. The Germans gave evenless thought to it.

The Republic borrowed to pay its reparations and to increase its vastsocial services, which were the model of the world. The states, cities andmunicipalities borrowed to finance not only needed improvements butbuilding of airfields, theaters, sport stadiums and fancy swimming pools.Industry, which had wiped out its debts in the inflation, borrowed billionsto retool and to rationalize its productive processes. Its output, which in1923 had dropped to 55 per cent of that in 1913, rose to 122 per centby 1927. For the first time since the war unemployment fell below amillion—to 650,000—in 1928. That year retail sales were up 20 percent over 1925 and the next year real wages reached a figure 10 per centhigher than four years before. The lower middle classes, all the millionsof shopkeepers and small-salaried folk on whom Hitler had to draw foihis mass support, shared in the general prosperity.

My own acquaintance with Germany began in those days. I was sta-tioned in Paris and occasionally in London at that time, and fascinatingthough those capitals were to a young American happy to have escaped

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from the incredible smugness and emptiness of the Calvin Coolidge era,they paled a little when one came to Berlin and Munich. A wonderfulferment was working in Germany. Life seemed more free, more modern,more exciting than in any place I had ever seen. Nowhere else did the artsor 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 youngpeople all night in the sidewalk cafes, the plush bars, the summer camps,on a Rhineland steamer or in a smoke-filled artist’s studio and talked end-lessly about life. They were a healthy, carefree, sun-worshiping lot, andthey were filled with an enormous zest for living to the full and in completefreedom. 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 votesout of a total of thirty-one million cast and had but a dozen of theReichstag’s 491 members. The conservative Nationalists also lost heavily,their vote falling from six million in 1924 to four million, and their seats inParliament diminished from 103 to 73. In contrast, the Social Democratsgained a million and a quarter votes in the 1928 elections, and their totalpoll of more than nine million, with 153 seats in the Reichstag, made themeasily the largest political party in Germany. Ten years after the end ofthe war the German Republic seemed at last to have found its feet.

The membership of the National Socialist Party in that anniversaryyear—1928—was 108,000. Small as the figure was, it was slowly grow-ing. A fortnight after leaving prison at the end of 1924, Hitler had hurriedto see Dr. Heinrich Held, the Prime Minister of Bavaria and the head ofthe Catholic Bavarian People’s Party. On the strength of his promise ofgood behavior (Hitler was still on parole) Held had lifted the ban on theNazi Party and its newspaper. “The wild beast is checked,” Held toldhis 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, ofGermany’s politicians to fall into this fatal error of judgment.

The Voelkischer Beobachter reappeared on February 26, 1925, witha long editorial written by Hitler, entitled “A New Beginning.” The nextday he spoke at the first mass meeting of the resurrected Nazi Party in theBuergerbraiikeller, which he and his faithful followers had last seen onthe morning of November 9, a year and a half before, when they set outon their ill-fated march. Many of the faithful were absent. Eckart andScheubner-Richter were dead. Goering was in exile. Ludendorff andRoehm had broken with the leader. Rosenberg, feuding with Streicherand Esser, was sulking and stayed away. So did Gregor Strasser, whowith Ludendorff had led the National Socialist German Freedom move-ment while Hitler was behind bars and the Nazi Party itself banned. When

Hitler asked Anton Drexler to preside at the meeting the old locksmithand founder of the party told him to go to the devil. Nevertheless somefour thousand followers gathered in the beer hall to hear Hitler once againand 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 clearthat he still considered himself the dictatorial leader of the party. “Ialone lead the movement, and no one can impose conditions on me solong as l personally bear the responsibility,” he declared, and added,“Once more I bear the whole responsibility for everything that occurs inthe movement.”

Hitler had gone to the meeting with his mind made up on two objectiveswhich he intended henceforth to pursue. One was to concentrate all powerin his own hands. The other was to re-establish the Nazi Party as apolitical organization which would seek power exclusively through con-stitutional means. He had explained the new tactics to one of his hench-men, Karl Ludecke, while still in prison: “When I resume active work itwill be necessary to pursue a new policy. Instead of working to achievepower by armed coup, we shall have to hold our noses and enter theReichstag against the Catholic and Marxist deputies. If outvoting themtakes longer than outshooting them, at least the result will be guaranteedby their own constitution. Any lawful process is slow . . . Sooner orlater we shall have a majority—and after that, Germany.”1 On his releasefrom Landsberg, he had assured the Bavarian Premier that the NaziParty would henceforth act within the framework of the constitution.

But he allowed himself to be carried away by the enthusiasm of thecrowd in his reappearance at the Buergerbraiikeller on February 27. Histhreats against the State were scarcely veiled. The republican regime,as well as the Marxists and the Jews, was “the enemy.” And in hisperoration he had shouted, “To this struggle of ours there are only twopossible issues: either the enemy passes over our bodies or we pass overtheirs!”

The “wild beast,” in this, his first public appearance after his im-prisonment, did not seem “checked” at all. He was again threatening theState with violence, despite his promise of good behavior. The governmentof Bavaria promptly forbade him to speak again in public—a ban thatwas to last two years. The other states followed suit. This was a heavyblow to a man whose oratory had brought him so far. A silenced Hitlerwas a defeated Hitler, as ineffective as a handcuffed pugilist in a ring. Orso most people thought.

But again they were wrong. They forgot that Hitler was an organizer aswell 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 GermanWorkers’ Party and to make of it an organization such as Germany hadnever seen before. He meant to make it like the Army—a state withina state. The first job was to attract dues-paying members. By the end of1925 they numbered just 27,000. The going was slow, but each year some

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progress was made: 49,000 members in 1926; 72,000 in 1927; 108,000in 1928; 178,000 in 1929.

More important was the building up of an intricate party structure whichcorresponded to the organization of the German government and indeedof German society. The country was divided into districts, or Gaue,which corresponded roughly with the thirty-four Reichstag electoral dis-tricts and at the head of which was a gauleiter appointed by Hitler. Therewere an additional seven Gaue for Austria, Danzig, the Saar and theSudetenland in Czechoslovakia. A Gau was divided into Kreise—circles—and presided over by a Kreisleiter. The next smallest party unit was anOrtsgruppe—a local group—and in the cities these were further sub-divided into street cells and blocks.

The political organization of the Nazi Party was divided into twogroups: P.O. I, as it was known, designed to attack and undermine thegovernment, and P.O. II to establish a state within a state. Thus thesecond 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 laborunions and a Reich Press Office. The Propaganda Division was a separateand elaborate office.

Though some of the party roughnecks, veterans of street fighting andbeerhouse brawls, opposed bringing women and children into the NaziParty, Hitler soon provided organizations for them too. The Hitler Youthtook in youngsters from fifteen to eighteen who had their own departmentsof culture, schools, press, propaganda, “defense sports,” etc., and thosefrom ten to fifteen were enrolled in the Deutsches Jungvolk. For thegirls there was the Bund Deutscher Maedel and for the women theN. S. Frauenschaften. Students, teachers, civil servants, doctors, lawyers,jurists—all had their separate organizations, and there was a Nazi Kul-turbund to attract the intellectuals and artists.

After considerable difficulties the S.A. was reorganized into an armedband of several hundred thousand men to protect Nazi meetings, to breakup the meetings of others and to generally terrorize those who opposedHitler. Some of its leaders also hoped to see the S.A. supplant theRegular Army when Hitler came to power. To prepare for this a specialoffice under General Franz Ritter von Epp was set up, called the Wehr-politische Amt. Its five divisions concerned themselves with such prob-lems as external and internal defense policy, defense forces, populardefense potential, and so on. But the brown-shirted S.A. never becamemuch 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 onlya homosexual but a convicted murderer. These two and dozens of othersquarreled and feuded as only men of unnatural sexual inclinations, withtheir 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 tohim personally. At first the S.S. was little more than a bodyguard for theFuehrer. Its first leader was a newspaperman named Berchtold. As hepreferred the relative quiet of the newsroom of the Voelkischer Beobachterto playing at cop and soldier, he was replaced by one Erhard Heiden, aformer police stool pigeon of unsavory reputation. It was not until 1929that 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, nearMunich, a mild-mannered fellow whom people mistook (as did thisauthor when he first met him) for a small-town schoolmaster and whosename was Heinrich Himmler. When Himmler took over the S.S. itnumbered some two hundred men. By the time he finished his job withit, the S.S. dominated Germany and was a name that struck terror through-out occupied Europe.

At the top of the pyramid of the intricate party organization stoodAdolf Hitler with the highfalutin title of Partei-und-Oberster-S.A.-Fuehrer, Vorsitzender der N.S.D.A.V.—which may be translated as “Su-preme Leader of the Party and the S.A., Chairman of the National SocialistGerman Labor Organization.” Directly attached to his office was theReich Directorate (Reichsleitung) which was made up of the top bossesof 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 Re-public, one got the impression that here indeed were the offices of a statewithin a state. That, no doubt, was the impression Hitler wished to convey,for it helped to undermine confidence, both domestic and foreign, in theactual German State, which he was trying to overthrow.

But Hitler was intent on something more important than making animpression. Three years after he came to power, in a speech to the “oldfighters” at the Buergerbrau on the anniversary evening of November 9,1936, he explained one of the objectives he had had in building the partyup into such a formidable and all-embracing organization. “We rec-ognized, he said, in recalling the days when the party was being re-formed 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 practi-cally ready to one’s hand. . . . In 1933 it was no longer a question ofoverthrowing a state by an act of violence; meanwhile the new State hadbeen built up and all that there remained to do was to destroy the lastremnants of the old State—and that took but a few hours.”2

An organization, however streamlined and efficient, is made up of erringhuman beings, and in those years when Hitler was shaping his party totake over Germany’s destiny he had his fill of troubles with his chieflieutenants, who constantly quarreled not only among themselves but withhim. He, who was so monumentally intolerant by his very nature, wasstrangely tolerant of one human condition—a man’s morals. No otherparty in Germany came near to attracting so many shady characters. As

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we have seen, a conglomeration of pimps, murderers, homosexuals, alco-holics 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 emergedfrom prison he found not only that they were at each other’s throats butthat there was a demand from the more prim and respectable leaders suchas Rosenberg and Ludendorff that the criminals and especially the pervertsbe expelled from the movement. This Hitler frankly refused to do. “I donot 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 materiallying ready to his hand.”

By 1926, however, the charges and countercharges hurled by the Nazichieftains at one another became so embarrassing that Hitler set up a partycourt to settle them and to prevent his comrades from washing their dirtylinen in public. This was known as the USCHLA, from Untersuchung-und-Schlichtungs-Ausschuss—Committee for Investigation and Settle-ment. Its first head was a former general, Heinemann, but he was unableto grasp the real purpose of the court, which was not to pronounce judg-ment on those accused of common crimes but to hush them up and seethat they did not disturb party discipline or the authority of the Leader.So the General was replaced by a more understanding ex-officer, MajorWalther Buch, who was given two assistants. One was Ulrich Graf, theformer butcher who had been Hitler’s bodyguard; the other was HansFrank, a young Nazi lawyer, of whom more will be heard later when itcomes time to recount his bloodthirstiness as Governor General of oc-cupied Poland, for which he paid on the gallows at Nuremberg. This finejudicial triumvirate performed to the complete satisfaction of the Fuehrer.A party leader might be accused of the most nefarious crime. Buch’sanswer invariably was, “Well, what of it?” What he wanted to know waswhether it hurt party discipline or offended the Fuehrer.

It took more than this party court, effective though it was in thousandsof instances, to keep the ambitious, throat-cutting, big Nazi fry in line.Often Hitler had to intervene personally not only to keep a semblance ofharmony but to prevent his own throat from being cut.

While he had languished at Landsberg, a young man by the name ofGregor Strasser had suddenly risen in the Nazi movement. A druggistby profession and a Bavarian by birth, he was three years younger thanHitler; like him, he had won the Iron Cross, First Class, and during thewar he had risen from the ranks to be a lieutenant. He had become aNazi in 1920 and soon became the district leader in Lower Bavaria. Abig, stocky man, somewhat of a bon vivant, bursting with energy, hedeveloped into an effective public speaker more by the force of his person-ality than by the oratorical gifts with which Hitler was endowed. More-over, he was a born organizer. Fiercely independent in spirit and mind,Strasser refused to kowtow to Hitler or to take very seriously the Austrian’sclaims 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 Luden-dorff and Rosenberg in organizing a Nazi Voelkisch movement to contestthe state and national elections in the spring of 1924. In Bavaria the blocpolled enough votes to make it the second largest party; in Germany, aswe have seen, under the name of the National Socialist German Freedommovement it won two million votes and obtained thirty-two seats in theReichstag, one of which went to Strasser. Hitler took a dark view of theyoung 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 hepointedly 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 mustget a footing in the north, in Prussia, and above all in the citadel of theenemy, Berlin. In the election of 1924 Strasser had campaigned in thenorth and made alliances with ultranational groups there led by Albrechtvon Graefe and Count Ernst zu Reventlow. He thus had personal contactsand a certain following in this area and he was the only Nazi leader whohad. Two weeks after the February 27 meeting, Hitler swallowed hispersonal pique, sent for Strasser, induced him to come back to the foldand proposed that he organize the Nazi Party in the north. Strasseraccepted. Here was an opportunity to exercise his talents without thejealous, arrogant Leader being in a position to breathe down his neck.

Within a few months he had founded a newspaper in the capital, theBerliner Arbeiterzeitung, edited by his brother, Otto Strasser, and afortnightly newsletter, the N. S. Briefe, which kept the party officials in-formed of the party line. And he had laid the foundations for a politicalorganization that stretched through Prussia, Saxony, Hanover and theindustrial Rhineland. A veritable dynamo, Strasser traveled all over thenorth, addressing meetings, appointing district leaders and setting up aparty apparatus. Being a Reichstag deputy gave hirh two immediate ad-vantages over Hitler: he had a free pass on the railroads, so travel wasno expense to him or the party; and he enjoyed parliamentary immunity.No authority could ban him from public speaking; no court could tryhim for slandering anyone or anything he wanted to. As Heiden wrotesardonically, “Free travel and free slander—Strasser had a big head startover his Fuehrer.”

As his secretary and editor of the N. S. Briefe Gregor Strasser took on atwenty-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 mindand a complicated and neurotic personality, was not a stranger to theNazi movement. He had discovered it in 1922 when he first heard Hitler

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speak in Munich, was converted, and became a member of the party.But the movement did not really discover him until three years later, whenGregor Strasser, hearing him speak, decided that he could use a youngman of such obvious talents. Goebbels at twenty-eight was already animpassioned orator, a fanatical nationalist and, as Strasser knew, possessedof a vituperative pen and, rare for Nazi leaders, a sound university educa-tion. Heinrich Himmler had just resigned as Strasser’s secretary to devotemore of his time to raising chickens. Strasser appointed Goebbels in hisplace. It was to prove a fateful choice.

Paul Joseph Goebbels was born on October 29, 1897, in Rheydt, atextile center of some thirty thousand people in the Rhineland. His father,Fritz Goebbels, was a foreman in a local textile plant. His mother, MariaKatharina Odenhausen, was the daughter of a blacksmith. Both parentswere pious Catholics.

Through the Catholics, Joseph Goebbels received most of his education.He attended a Catholic parochial grade school and then the Gymnasiumin Rheydt. A scholarship from the Catholic Albert Magnus Societyenabled 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 thestudy of philosophy, history, literature and art and had continued hiswork in Latin and Greek.

He intended to become a writer. The year he received his doctorate hewrote an autobiographical novel, Michael, which no publisher would takeat the time, and in the next couple of years he finished two plays, TheWanderer (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 ofarticles he submitted and his application for a reporter’s job.

His personal life also was full of frustrations in the early days. Becausehe was a cripple he could not serve in the war and thus was cheated ofthe experience which seemed, at least in the beginning, so glorious for theyoung men of his generation and which was a requisite for leadership inthe Nazi Party. Goebbels was not, as most people believed, born with aclub 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 wasnot successful and the left leg remained shorter than the right and some-what withered. This handicap, which forced him to walk with a noticeablelimp, riled him all the days of his life and was one of the causes of hisearly embitterment. In desperation, during his university days and during

* Michael was finally published in 1929, after Goebbels had become nationallyknown as a Nazi leader. The Wanderer reached the stage after Goebbels becamePropaganda Minister and the boss of the German theater. It had a short run.

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 philander-ings, which became notorious in his years of power, for great amours.His diaries for 1925-26, when he was twenty-eight and twenty-nine andjust being launched into Nazi politics by Strasser, are full of moonings overloved ones—of whom he had several at a time.* Thus:

August 14, 1925: Alma wrote me a postcard from Bad Harzburg. The firstsign of her since that night. This teasing, charming Alma!

Received first letter from Else in Switzerland. Only Else dear can writelike 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 wonder-ful 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 ... Isshe angry with me? How I pine for her! I am living in the same room as I didwith her last Whitsuntide. What thoughts! What feeling! Why doesn’t shecome?

September 3: Else is here! On Tuesday she returned from Switzerland—fat, buxom, healthy, gay, only slightly tanned. She is very happy and in thebest 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 ofthese things.

December 21: There is a curse on me and the women. Woe to those wholove me!

December 29: To Krefeld last night with Hess. Christmas celebration. Adelightful, beautiful girl from Franconia. She’s my type. Home with herthrough rain and storm. Au revoir!

Else arrived.

February 6, 1926:1 yearn for a sweet woman! Oh, torturing pain!

Goebbels never forgot “Anke”—Anke Helhorn, his first love, whomhe had met during his second semester at Freiburg. His diary is full of

* These early diaries, unearthed by Allied intelligence agents after the war, are arich source of information for this period of Goebbel’s life.

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ravings about her dark-blond beauty and his subsequent disillusionmentwhen she left him. Later, when he became Propaganda Minister, herevealed to friends, with typical vanity and cynicism, why she had lefthim. “She betrayed me because the other guy had more money and couldafford to take her out to dinner and to shows. How foolish of her! . . .Today she might be the wife of the Minister of Propaganda! Howfrustrated 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 NationalSocialism, which attracted the young Goebbels. Both wanted to build theparty on the proletariat. The diary of Goebbels is full of expressions ofsympathy for Communism at this time. “In the final analysis,” he wroteon October 23, 1925, “it would be better for us to end our existence underBolshevism 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 . . . Wherecan we get together sometime with the leading Communists?” It was at thistime that he published an open letter to a Communist leader assuringhim that Nazism and Communism were really the same thing. “Youand I,” he declared, “are fighting one another, but we are not reallyenemies.”

To Adolf Hitler this was rank heresy, and he watched with increasinguneasiness the success of the Strasser brothers and Goebbels in building upa vigorous, radical, proletarian wing of the party in the north. If leftto themselves these men might capture the party, and for objectives whichHitler violently opposed. The inevitable showdown came in the fall of1925 and in February of the following year.

It was forced by Gregor Strasser and Goebbels over an issue whicharoused a good deal of feeling in Germany at that time. This was the pro-posal of the Social Democrats and the Communists that the extensiveestates and fortunes of the deposed royal and princely families be ex-propriated and taken over by the Republic. The question was to besettled by a plebiscite of the people, in accordance with the WeimarConstitution. Strasser and Goebbels proposed that the Nazi Party jumpinto the fray with the Communists and the Socialists and support thecampaign to expropriate the nobles.

Hitler was furious. Several of these former rulers had kicked in withcontributions to the party. Moreover, a number of big industrialists werebeginning to become financially interested in Hitler’s reborn movementprecisely because it promised to be effective in combating the Communists,the Socialists and the trade unions. If Strasser and Goebbels got away withtheir plans, Hitler’s sources of income would immediately dry up.

Before the Fuehrer could act, however, Strasser called a meeting ofthe northern district party leaders in Hanover on November 22, 1925.Its purpose was not only to put the northern branch of the Nazi Partybehind the expropriation drive but to launch a new economic programwhich would do away with the “reactionary” twenty-five points that had

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been adopted back in 1920. The Strassers and Goebbels wanted to nation-alize the big industries and the big estates and substitute a chamber ofcorporations on fascist lines for the Reichstag. Hitler declined to attendthe meeting, but sent his faithful Gottfried Feder to represent him andto squelch the rebels. Goebbels demanded that Feder be thrown out—“We don’t want any stool pigeons!” he cried. Several leaders who wouldlater make their mark in the Third Reich were present—-Bernhard Rust,Erich Koch, Hans Kerri and Robert Ley—but only Ley, the alcoholicchemist who was leader of the Cologne district, supported Hitler. WhenDr. Ley and Feder argued that the meeting was out of order, that nothingcould be done without Hitler, the Supreme Leader, Goebbels shouted(according to Otto Strasser, who was present), “I demand that thepetty bourgeois Adolf Hitler be expelled from the Nazi Party!”

The vituperative young Goebbels had come a long way since he hadfirst fallen under Hitler’s spell three years before—or so it must haveseemed to Gregor Strasser.

“At that moment I was reborn!” Goebbels exclaimed in recording hisimpressions of the first time he heard Hitler speak, in the Circus Krone inMunich in June 1922. “Now I knew which road to take . . . This wasa command!” He was even more ecstatic over Hitler’s behavior duringthe trial of the Munich putschists. After the verdicts were in, Goebbelswrote the Fuehrer:

Like a rising star you appeared before our wondering eyes, you performedmiracles 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 thefuture, and possessed by the will to free those masses with your unlimited lovefor all those who believe in the new Reich. For the first time we saw withshining 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. Youexpressed more than your own pain ... You named the need of a wholegeneration, searching in confused longing for men and task. What you said isthe catechism of the new political belief, born out of the despair of a col-lapsing, Godless world . . . We thank you. One day, Germany will thankyou . . .

But now, a year and a half later, Goebbels’ idol had fallen. He hadbecome a “petty bourgeois” who deserved being booted out of the party.With only Ley and Feder dissenting, the Hanover meeting adopted Stras-ser’s new party program and approved the decision to join the Marxistsin the plebiscite campaign to deprive the former kings and princes of theirpossessions.

Hitler bided his time and then on February 14, 1926, struck back. Hecalled a meeting at Bamberg, in southern Germany, shrewdly picking a

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weekday, when it was difficult for the northern leaders to get away fromtheir jobs. In fact, only Gregor Strasser and Goebbels were able toattend. They were greatly outnumbered by Hitler’s hand-picked leadersin the south. And at the Fuehrer’s insistence they were forced to capitulateand abandon their program. Such German historians of Nazism as Heidenand Olden, and the non-German writers who have been guided by them,have recounted that at the Bamberg meeting Goebbels openly desertedStrasser and went over to Hitler. But the Goebbels diaries, discoveredafter Heiden and Olden wrote their books, reveal that he did not betrayStrasser quite so abruptly. They show that Goebbels, though he joinedStrasser in surrendering to Hitler, thought the Fuehrer was utterly wrong,and that, for the moment at least, he had no intention whatever of goingover to him. On February 15, the day after the Bamberg meeting, heconfided to his diary:

Hitler talks for two hours. I feel as though someone had beaten me. Whatsort of Hitler is this? A reactionary? Extremely awkward and unsteady.Completely wrong on the Russian question. Italy and England are our naturalallies! Horrible! . . . We must annihilate Russia! . . . The question ofthe 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 havecomplete faith in Hitler. That is the terrible thing: my props have beentaken from under me.

To show where his loyalties stood, Goebbels went to the station withStrasser and tried to console him. A week later, on February 23, herecords: “Long conference with Strasser. Result: we must not begrudgethe Munich crowd their Pyrrhic victory. We must begin again our fightfor socialism.”

But Hitler had sized up the flamboyant young Rhinelander better thanStrasser. On March 29 Goebbels noted: “This morning a letter fromHitler. I shall make a speech on April 8 at Munich.” He arrived there onApril 7. “Hitler’s car is waiting,” he recorded. “What a royal reception!I will speak at the historic Buergerbrau.” The next day he did, from thesame platform as the Leader. He wrote it all down in his diary entry ofApril 8:

Hitler phones . . . His kindness in spite of Bamberg makes us feelashamed ... At 2 o’clock we drive to the Buergerbrau. Hitler is alreadythere. 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: Hitlerspoke for three hours. Brilliantly. He can make you doubt your own

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views. Italy and England our allies. Russia wants to devour us ... Ilove him ... He has thought everything through. His ideal: a justcollectivism and individualism. As to soil—everything belongs to thepeople. Production to be creative and individualistic. Trusts, transport,etc., to be socialized ... I am now at ease about him ... I bow to thegreater man, to the political genius.”

When Goebbels left Munich on April 17 he was Hitler’s man and was toremain his most loyal follower to his dying breath. On April 20 he wrotethe Fuehrer a birthday note: “Dear and revered Adolf Hitler! I havelearned so much from you ... You have finally made me see thelight . . .” And that night in his diary: “He is thirty-seven years old.Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple. Theseare 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 hepublicly broke with Strasser in an article in the Voelkischer Beobachter.

Only now do I recognize you for what you are: revolutionaries in speechbut not in deed [he told the Strassers and their followers] . . . Don’t talk somuch about ideals and don’t fool yourselves into believing that you are theinventors and protectors of these ideals . . . We are not doing penance bystanding solidly behind the Fuehrer. We . . . bow to him . . . with themanly, unbroken pride of the ancient Norsemen who stand upright beforetheir Germanic feudal lord. We feel that he is greater than all of us, greaterthan you and I. He is the instrument of the Divine Will that shapes historywith fresh, creative passion.

Late in October 1926 Hitler made Goebbels Gauleiter of Berlin. Heinstructed him to clean out the quarreling Brownshirt rowdies who hadbeen hampering the growth of the movement there and conquer the capitalof Germany for National Socialism. Berlin was “red.” The majority ofits voters were Socialists and Communists. Undaunted, Goebbels, whohad just turned twenty-nine, and who in a little more than a year’s timehad risen from nothing to be one of the leading lights of the Nazi Party, setout to fulfill his assignment in the great Babylonian city.

AN INTERLUDE OF REST AND ROMANCEFOR ADOLF HITLER

The politically lean years for Adolf Hitler were, as he later said, thebest 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 theNazi Party and of himself, he spent most of his time on the Obersalzbergabove the market village of Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. It wasa haven for rest and relaxation.

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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 hisfaithful women secretaries and reminisce about past times, are full ofnostalgic talk about what this mountain retreat, where he established theonly home he ever owned, meant to him. “Yes,” he exclaimed during oneof these sessions on the night of January 16-17, 1942, “there are so manylinks 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 greatprojects 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 invarious inns on the Obersalzberg and in that winter reminiscence in 1942he talked for an hour about them. He finally settled down in the DeutscheHaus, where he spent the best part of two years and in which he finisheddictating Mein Kampf. He and his party cronies, he says, were “very fondof visiting the Dreimaederlhaus, where there were always pretty girls.This,” he adds, “was a great treat for me. There was one of them, espe-cially, who was a real beauty.”

That evening in the headquarters bunker on the Russian front, Hitlermade a remark to his listeners that recalls two preoccupations he had dur-ing the pleasant years at Berchtesgaden.

At this period [on the Obersalzberg] I knew a lot of women. Several of thembecame attached to me. Why, then, didn’t 1 marry? To leave a wife behindme? At the slightest imprudence, I ran the risk of going back to prison forsix years. So there could be no question of marriage for me. I thereforehad to renounce certain opportunities that offered themselves.4

Hitler’s fear in the mid-Twenties of being sent back to prison or ofbeing deported was not without some foundation. He was still on parole.Had he openly evaded the ban against his speaking in public the Bavariangovernment might well have clapped him behind the bars again or senthim back over the border to his native Austria. One reason that he hadchosen the Obersalzberg as a refuge was its proximity to the Austrianfrontier; on a moment’s notice he could have slipped over the line andevaded arrest by the German police. But to have returned to Austria,voluntarily or by force, would have ruined his prospects. To lessen the riskof deportation, Hitler formally renounced his Austrian citizenship onApril 7, 1925—a step that was promptly accepted by the Austrian govern-ment. This, however, left him staatenlos, a man without a country. Hegave up his Austrian citizenship but he did not become a citizen of Ger-many. This was a considerable handicap for a politician in the Reich.For one thing, he could not be elected to office. He had publicly declaredthat he would never beg the republican government for a citizenshipwhich he felt should have been his because of his services to ImperialGermany 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 Hitlerrelated that evening of 1942. Contrary to the general opinion, he likedthe company of women, especially if they were beautiful. He returns tothe subject time and again in his table talk at Supreme Headquarters dur-ing the war. “What lovely women there are in the world!” he exclaimsto his cronies on the night of January 25—26, 1942, and he gives severalexamples in his personal experience, adding the boast, “In my youth inVienna, I knew a lot of lovely women!” Heiden has recounted some ofhis romantic yearnings of the early days: for a Jenny Haug, whose brotherwas Hitler’s chauffeur and who passed as his sweetheart in 1923; for thetall and stately Erna Hanfstaengl, sister of Putzi; for Winifred Wagner,daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner. But it was with his niece that AdolfHitler 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 Ober-salzberg above Berchtesgaden for a hundred marks a month ($25) fromthe widow of a Hamburg industrialist and induced his widowed half-sister, Angela Raubal, to come from Vienna to keep house for him in thefirst home which he could call his own.* Frau Raubal brought along hertwo daughters, Geli and Friedl. Geli was twenty, with flowing blond hair,handsome features, a pleasant voice and a sunny disposition which madeher attractive to men.5

Hitler soon fell in love with her. He took her everywhere, to meetingsand conferences, on long walks in the mountains and to the cafes andtheaters in Munich. When in 1929 he rented a luxurious nine-roomapartment in the Prinzregentenstrasse, one of the most fashionable thor-oughfares in Munich, Geli was given her own room in it. Gossip aboutthe party leader and his beautiful blond niece was inevitable in Munichand throughout Nazi circles in southern Germany. Some of the moreprim—or envious—leaders suggested that Hitler cease showing off hisyouthful sweetheart in public, or that he marry her. Hitler was furious atsuch talk and in one quarrel over the matter he fired the Gauleiter ofWuerttemberg.

It is probable that Hitler intended to marry his niece. Early partycomrades who were close to him at that time subsequently told this authorthat a marriage seemed inevitable. That Hitler was deeply in love withher they had no doubt. Her own feelings are a matter of conjecture. Thatshe was flattered by the attentions of a man now becoming famous, andindeed enjoyed them, is obvious. Whether she reciprocated her uncle’slove is not known; probably not, and in the end certainly not. Some deeprift whose origins and nature have never been fully ascertained grew be-tween them. There has been much speculation but little evidence. Eachwas apparently jealous of the other. She resented his attentions to other

* Later he bought it and, after becoming Chancellor, rebuilt it on a vast and lavishscale, changing the name from Haus Wachenfeld to Berghof.

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women—to Winifred Wagner, among others. He suspected that she hadhad a clandestine affair with Emil Maurice, the ex-convict who had beenhis bodyguard. She objected too to her uncle’s tyranny over her. He didnot want her to be seen in the company of any man but himself. He for-bade her to go to Vienna to continue her singing lessons, squelching herambition for a career on the operatic stage. He wanted her for himselfalone.

There are dark hints too that she was repelled by the masochistic in-clinations of her lover, that this brutal tyrant in politics yearned to be en-slaved by the woman he loved—a not uncommon urge in such men, ac-cording to the sexologists. Heiden tells of a letter which Hitler wrote tohis niece in 1929 confessing his deepest feelings in this regard. It fell intothe hands of his landlady’s son—with consequences which were tragic tomore than one life.6

Whatever it was that darkened the love between the uncle and hisniece, their quarrels became more violent and at the end of the summerof 1931 Geli announced that she was returning to Vienna to resume hervoice studies. Hitler forbade her to go. There was a scene between thetwo, witnessed by neighbors, when Hitler left his Munich apartment togo to Hamburg on September 17, 1931. The young girl was heard to cryto him from the window as her uncle was getting into his car, “Then youwon’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. Thestate’s attorney, after a thorough investigation, found that it was a suicide.The coroner reported that a bullet had gone through her chest below theleft shoulder and penetrated the heart; it seemed beyond doubt that theshot was self-inflicted.

Yet for years afterward in Munich there was murky gossip that GeliRaubal had been murdered—by Hitler in a rage, by Himmler to eliminatea situation that had become embarrassing to the party. But no credibleevidence ever turned up to substantiate such rumors.

Hitler himself was struck down by grief. Gregor Strasser later recountedthat he had had to remain for the following two days and nights at Hitler’sside to prevent him from taking his own life. A week after Geli’s burial inVienna, Hitler obtained special permission from the Austrian governmentto go there; he spent an evening weeping at the grave. For months he wasinconsolable.

Three weeks after the death of Geli, Hitler had his first interview withHindenburg. It was his first bid for the big stakes, for the chancellorshipof the Reich. His distraction on this momentous occasion—some of hisfriends said he did not seem to be in full possession of his faculties duringthe conversation, which went badly for the Nazi leader—was put downby those who knew him as due to the shock of the loss of his beloved niece.

From this personal blow stemmed, 1 believe, an act of renunciation,his decision to abstain from meat; at least, some of his closest henchmenseemed to think so. To them he declared forever afterward that GeliRaubal was the only woman he ever loved, and he always spoke of her

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with the deepest reverence—and often in tears. Servants said that herroom in the villa at Obersalzberg, even after it was rebuilt and enlargedin the days of Hitler’s chancellorship, remained as she had left it. In hisown room there, and in the Chancellery in Berlin, portraits* of the youngwoman always hung and when the anniversaries of her birth and deathcame around each year flowers were placed around them.

For a brutal, cynical man who always seemed to be incapable of loveof any other human being, this passion of Hitler’s for the youthful GeliRaubal stands out as one of the mysteries of his strange life. As with allmysteries, it cannot be rationally explained, merely recounted. There-after, it is almost certain, Adolf Hitler never seriously contemplated mar-riage until the day before he took his own life fourteen years later.

The compromising letter from Hitler to his niece was retrieved fromthe landlord’s son through the efforts of Father Bernhard Stempfle, theHieronymite Catholic priest and anti-Semitic journalist who had helpedthe Nazi leader in tidying up Mein Kampf for publication. The moneyfor its purchase, according to Heiden, was supplied by Franz XavierSchwarz, the party treasurer. Thus Father Stempfle was one of the fewpersons who knew something of the secrets of Hitler’s love for GeliRaubal. Apparently he did not keep his knowledge of the affair entirelyto himself. He was to pay for this lapse with his life when the author ofMein Kampf became dictator of Germany and one day settled accountswith some of his old friends.

The source of Hitler s income during those personally comfortable yearswhen he acquired a villa at Obersalzberg and a luxurious apartment inMunich and drove about in a flashy, chauffeured automobile, for whichhe paid 20,000 marks ($5,000), has never been established. But his in-come tax files, which turned up after the war, shed some light on the sub-ject. Until he became Chancellor and had himself declared exempt fromtaxation, he was in continual conflict with the tax authorities, and a con-siderable file accumulated in the Munich Finance Office between 1925and 1933.

That office notified him on May 1, 1925, that he had failed to file a re-turn for 1924 or for the first quarter of 1925. Hitler replied, “I had noincome in 1924 [when he was in prison], or in the first quarter of 1925. Ihave covered my living expenses by raising a bank loan.” What aboutthat $5,000 automobile? the tax collector shot back. Hitler answered thathe had raised a bank loan for that too. In all his tax returns, Hitler listedhis profession as “writer” and, as such, attempted to justify a high propor-tion of his income as deductible expenses—he doubtless was aware of thepractice of wri:ers everywhere. His first income tax declaration, for thethird quarter of 1925, listed a gross income of 11,231 R.M., deductible

Painted after her death by Adolf Ziegler, Hitler’s favorite painter.

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professional expenses of 6,540 R.M. and interest payments on loans of2,245 R.M., which left a net taxable income of 2,446 R.M.

In a three-page typewritten explanation Hitler defended his large de-ductions for professional expenses, arguing that though a large part ofthem appeared to be due to his political activities, such work providedhim with the material he needed as a political writer and also helped in-crease the sales of his book.

Without my political activity my name would be unknown, and I would belacking materials for the publication of a political work . . . Accordinglyin my case as a political writer, the expenses of my political activity, which isthe necessary condition of my professional writing as well as its assurance offinancial success, cannot be regarded as subject to taxation. . . .

The Finance Office can see that out of the income from my book, for thisperiod, only a very small fraction was expended for myself; nowhere do 1possess property or other capital assets that 1 can call my own.* I restrict ofnecessity my personal wants so far that I am a complete abstainer from alcoholand tobacco, take my meals in most modest restaurants, and aside from myminimal apartment rent make no expenditures that are not chargeable to myexpenses as a political writer . . . Also the automobile is for me but a meansto an end. It alone makes it possible for me to accomplish my daily work.9

The Finance Office allowed but one half of the deductions, and whenHitler appealed to the Review Board it upheld the original assessment.Thereafter only one half of his expense deductions were allowed by thetax authorities. He protested but paid.

The Nazi leader’s reported gross income in his tax returns correspondpretty 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 and15,448 R.M. in 1929. Since publishers’ books were subject to inspectionby the tax office, Hitler could not safely report an income less than hisroyalties. But what about other sources of income? These were neverreported. It was known that he demanded, and received, a high fee forthe many articles which he wrote in those days for the impoverished Nazipress. There was much grumbling in party circles over the high cost ofHitler. These items are absent from his tax declarations. As the Twentiesneared their end, money started to flow into the Nazi Party from a few ofthe big Bavarian and Rhineland industrialists who were attracted by Hit-ler’s opposition to the Marxists and the trade unions. Fritz Thyssen,head of the German steel trust, the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United SteelWorks), and Emil Kirdorf, the Ruhr coal king, contributed sizable sums.Often the money was handed over directly to Hitler. How much he keptfor himself will probably never be known. But his scale of living in thelast few years before he became Chancellor indicates that not all of themoney he received from his backers was turned over to the party treasury.

* The italics in this declaration are Hitler’s.

To be sure, from 1925 to 1928 he complained of difficulty in meetinghis income tax payments; he was constantly in arrears and invariablyasking for further postponements. In September of 1926 he wrote theFinance 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 claimedof that period that “for years I lived on Tyrolean apples. It’s unbelievablewhat economies we had to make. Every mark saved was for the party.”And between 1925 and 1928 he contended, to the tax collector, that hewas 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 hadbeen made up by further “bank loans.”

Then, miraculously, in 1929, though his declared income was con-siderably less than in 1925, the item of interest on or repayment of loansdisappears from his tax declaration—and never reappears. As ProfessorHale, on whose studies the foregoing is based, remarked, “a financialmiracle had been wrought and he had liquidated his indebtedness.”9

Hitler, it must be said in fairness, never seemed to care much aboutmoney—if he had enough to live on comfortably and if he did not haveto toil for it in wages or a salary. At any rate, beginning with 1930, whenhis book royalties suddenly tripled from the previous year to some $12,-000 and money started pouring in from big business, any personal financialworries he may have had were over for good. He could now devote hisfierce energies and all his talents to the task of fulfilling his destiny. Thetime 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 conflagrationtoward the end of 1929 gave Adolf Hitler his opportunity, and he madethe most of it. Like most great revolutionaries he could thrive only inevil times, at first when the masses were unemployed, hungry and des-perate, and later when they were intoxicated by war. Yet in one respect hewas unique among history’s revolutionaries: He intended to make hisrevolution after achieving political power. There was to be no revolutionto gain control of the State. That goal was to be reached by mandate ofthe voters or by the consent of the rulers of the nation—in short, by con-stitutional means. To get the votes Hitler had only to take advantageof the times, which once more, as the Thirties began, saw the Germanpeople plunged into despair; to obtain the support of those in power hehad to convince them that only he could rescue Germany from its dis-astrous predicament. In the turbulent years from 1930 to 1933 the shrewdand daring Nazi leader set out with renewed energy to obtain these twinobjectives. In retrospect it can be seen that events themselves and theweakness and confusion of the handful of men who were bound by theiroath to loyally defend the democratic Republic which they governed

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played into Hitler’s hands. But this was by no means foreseeable at thebeginning of 1930.

Gustav Stresemann died on October 3, 1929. He had exhausted him-self by his strenuous labors, as Foreign Minister over the preceding sixyears, to restore defeated Germany to the ranks of the big powers and toguide the German people toward political and economic stability. Hissuccesses had been prodigious. He had brought Germany into the Leagueof Nations, negotiated the Dawes Plan and the Young Plan which re-duced reparations to a level which Germany could easily pay, and in 1925had been one of the chief architects of the Pact of Locarno which broughtWestern Europe the first tranquillity its war-weary, strife-ridden peoplehad known in a generation.

Three weeks after Stresemann’s death, on October 24, the stock marketin Wall Street crashed. The results in Germany were soon felt—and dis-astrously. The cornerstone of German prosperity had been loans fromabroad, principally from America, and world trade. When the flow ofloans dried up and repayment on the old ones became due the Germanfinancial structure was unable to stand the strain. When world tradesagged following the general slump Germany was unable to export enoughto pay for essential imports of the raw materials and food which sheneeded. Without exports, German industry could not keep its plants going,and its production fell by almost half from 1929 to 1932. Millions werethrown out of work. Thousands of small business enterprises went under.In May of 1931 Austria’s biggest bank, the Kreditanstalt, collapsed, andthis was followed on July 13 by the failure of one of Germany’s principalbanks, the Darmstaedter und Nationalbank, which forced the governmentin Berlin to close down all banks temporarily. Not even President Hoover’sinitiative in establishing a moratorium on all war debts, including Germanreparations, which became effective on July 6, could stem the tide. Thewhole Western world was stricken by forces which its leaders did notunderstand and which they felt were beyond man’s control. How was itpossible that suddenly there could be so much poverty, so much humansuffering, in the midst of so much plenty?

Hitler had predicted the catastrophe, but no more than any other poli-tician did he understand what had brought it about; perhaps he had lessunderstanding than most, since he was both ignorant of and uninterestedin economics. But he was not uninterested in or ignorant of the opportuni-ties which the depression suddenly gave him. The misery of the Germanpeople, their lives still scarred by disastrous experience of the collapse ofthe mark less than ten years before, did not arouse his compassion. Onthe contrary, in the darkest days of that period, when the factories weresilent, when the registered unemployed numbered over six million andbread lines stretched for blocks in every city in the land, he could writein the Nazi press: “Never in my life have I been so well disposed and in-wardly contented as in these days. For hard reality has opened the eyesof millions of Germans to the unprecedented swindles, lies and betrayalsof the Marxist deceivers of the people.”10 The suffering of his fellow

Germans was not something to waste time sympathizing with, but ratherto transform, cold-bloodedly and immediately, into political support forhis own ambitions. This he proceeded to do in the late summer of 1930.

Hermann Mueller, the last Social Democrat Chancellor of Germanyand the head of the last government based on a coalition of the demo-cratic parties which had sustained the Weimar Republic, had resigned inMarch 1930 because of a dispute among the parties over the unemploy-ment insurance fund. He had been replaced by Heinrich Bruening, theparliamentary leader of the Catholic Center Party, who had won the IronCross as a captain of a machine gun company during the war and whosesober, conservative views in the Reichstag had attracted the favorableattention of the Army and in particular of a general by the name of Kurtvon Schleicher, who was then quite unknown to the German public.Schleicher, a vain, able, ambitious “desk officer,” already acknowledgedin military circles as a talented and unscrupulous intriguer, had suggestedBruening’s name to President von Hindenburg. The new Chancellor,though he may not have realized it fully, was the Army’s candidate. A manof sterling personal character, unselfish, modest, honest, dedicated, some-what austere in nature, Bruening hoped to restore stable parliamentarygovernment in Germany and rescue the country from the growing slumpand political chaos. It was the tragedy of this well-meaning and demo-cratically minded patriot that, in trying to do so, he unwittingly dug thegrave for German democracy and thus, unintentionally, paved the wayfor the coming of Adolf Hitler.

Bruening was unable to induce a majority of the Reichstag to approvecertain measures in his financial program. He thereupon asked Hinden-burg to invoke Article 48 of the constitution and under its emergencypowers approve his financial bill by presidential decree. The chamberresponded by voting a demand for the withdrawal of the decree. Parlia-mentary government was breaking down at a moment when the economiccrisis made strong government imperative. In an effort to find a way outof the impasse, Bruening requested the President in July 1930 to dissolvethe Reichstag. New elections were called for September 14. How Brue-ning expected to get a stable parliamentary majority in a new election is aquestion that was never answered. But Hitler realized that his own op-portunity had come sooner than he expected.

The hard-pressed people were demanding a way out of their sorrypredicament. The millions of unemployed wanted jobs. The shopkeeperswanted help. Some four million youths who had come of voting age sincethe last election wanted some prospect of a future that would at least givethem a living. To all the millions of discontented Hitler in a whirlwindcampaign offered what seemed to them, in their misery, some measure ofhope. He would make Germany strong again, refuse to pay reparations,repudiate the Versailles Treaty, stamp out corruption, bring the moneybarons to heel (especially if they were Jews) and see to it that every

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German had a job and bread. To hopeless, hungry men seeking not onlyrelief but new faith and new gods, the appeal was not without effect.

Though his hopes were high, Hitler was surprised on the night ofSeptember 14, 1930, when the election returns came in. Two years be-fore, his party had polled 810,000 votes and elected 12 members to theReichstag. This time he had counted on quadrupling the Nazi vote andsecuring perhaps 50 seats in Parliament. But on this day the vote of theN.S.D.A.P. rose to 6,409,600, entitling the party to 107 seats in theReichstag and propelling it from the ninth and smallest party in Parliamentto the second largest.

At the other extreme, the Communists had also gained, from 3,265,000votes in 1928 to 4,592,000, with their representation in the Reichstagincreased from 54 to 77. The moderate middle-class parties, with theexception of the Catholic Center, lost over a million votes, as did theSocial Democrats, despite the addition of four million new voters at thepolls. The vote of the right-wing Nationalists of Hugenberg dropped fromfour to two million. It was clear that the Nazis had captured millions ofadherents from the other middle-class parties. It was also clear that hence-forth it would be more difficult than ever for Bruening—or for anyoneelse—to command a stable majority in the Reichstag. Without such amajority how could the Republic survive?

This was a question which on the morrow of the 1930 elections becameof increased interest to two pillars of the nation whose leaders had neverreally accepted the Republic except as a passing misfortune in Germanhistory: the Army and the world of the big industrialists and financiers.Flushed by his success at the polls, Hitler now turned his attention towardwinning over these two powerful groups. Long ago in Vienna, as wehave seen, he had learned from the tactics of Mayor Karl Lueger theimportance of bringing “powerful existing institutions” over to one’s side.

A year before, on March 15, 1929, Hitler had made a speech in Munichin which he appealed to the Army to reconsider its enmity toward NationalSocialism and its support of the Republic.

The future does not lie with the parties of destruction, but rather with theparties who carry in themselves the strength of the people, who are preparedand who wish to bind themselves to this Army in order to aid the Army some-day in defending the interests of the people. In contrast we still see theofficers of our Army belatedly tormenting themselves with the question as tohow far one can go along with Social Democracy. But, my dear sirs, do youreally believe that you have anything in common with an ideology whichstipulates the dissolution of all that which is the basis of the existence of anarmy?

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 hundredthtime, had been stabbed in the back and betrayed by the very Republic

which they were now supporting and which, moreover, had no love forthe military caste and all that it stood for. And then in words which wereprophetic of what he himself one day would do, he warned the officers ofwhat 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 maythen become hangmen of the regime and political commissars, and if you donot behave your wife and child will be put behind locked doors. And if youstill do not behave, you will be thrown out and perhaps stood up against awall . . .n

Relatively few persons heard the speech, but in order to propagate itin Army circles the Voelkischer Beobachter published it verbatim in aspecial Army edition and it was discussed at length in the columns of aNazi monthly magazine, Deutscher Wehrgeist, a periodical devoted tomilitary affairs which had recently appeared.

100° *^7 the Army had forbidden the recruitment of Nazis in the100 000-man Reichswehr and even banned their employment as civiliansin the arsenals and supply depots. But by the beginning of 1930 it be-came obvious that Nazi propaganda was making headway in the Army,especially among the younger officers, many of whom were attracted noton y y Hitler s fanatical nationalism but by the prospects he held outfor an Army restored to its old glory and size in which there would beopportunities, now denied them in such a small military force, to advanceto higher rank.

The Nazi infiltration into the armed services became serious enough tocompel General Groener, now the Minister of Defense, to issue an orderof the day on January 22, 1930, which recalled a similar warning to theArmy by General von Seeckt on the eve of the Beer Hall Putsch sevenyears before. The Nazis, he declared, were greedy for power. “Theytherefore woo the Wehrmacht. In order to use it for the political aims oftheir party, they attempt to dazzle us [into believing] that the NationalSocialists alone represent the truly national power.” He requested thesoldiers to refrain from politics and to “serve the state” aloof from allparty strife.

rhat some of the young Reichswehr officers were not refraining frompolitics, or at least not from Nazi politics, came to light shortly afterwardarul aroused a furor in Germany, dissension in the highest echelons of theofficer corps, and delight in the Nazi camp. In the spring of 1930 threeyoung lieutenants, Ludin, Scheringer and Wendt, of the garrison at Ulmwere arrested for spreading Nazi doctrines in the Army and for trying toinduce their fellow officers to agree that in the case of an armed Nazirevolt they would not fire on the rebels. This last was high treason, butGeneral Groener, not wishing to publicize the fact that treason existed int e Army, attempted to hush up the affair by arranging for the accused

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to be tried before a court-martial for a simple breach of discipline. Thedefiance of Lieutenant Scheringer, who smuggled out an inflammatoryarticle for the Voelkischer Beobachter, made this impossible. A weekafter the Nazi successes in the September elections of 1930, the threesubalterns were arraigned before the Supreme Court at Leipzig on chargesof 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 lime-light at the trial, but Adolf Hitler. He was called by Frank as a witness.His appearance represented a calculated risk. It would be embarrassingto disown the three lieutenants, whose activities were proof of the growthof Nazi sentiment in the Army, which he did not want to discourage. Itwas embarrassing that Nazi efforts to subvert the Army had been un-covered. And it was not helpful to his present tactics that the prosecutionhad charged the Nazi Party with being a revolutionary organization intenton overthrowing the government by force. To deny that last charge,Hitler arranged with Frank to testify for the defense. But in reality theFuehrer had a much more important objective. That was, as leader of amovement which had just scored a stunning popular triumph at the polls,to assure the Army and especially its leading officers that NationalSocialism, far from posing a threat to the Reichswehr, as the case of theNazi subalterns implied, was really its salvation and the salvation ofGermany.

From this national forum which the witness box afforded, Hitler madegood 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 assuredthe court (and the Army officers) that neither the S.A. nor the party wasfighting the Army. “I have always held the view,” he declared, “that anyattempt to replace the Army was madness. None of us have any interestin replacing the Army . . . We will see to it, when we have come topower, that out of the present Reichswehr a great Army of the Germanpeople shall arise.”

And he reiterated to the court (and the generals) that the Nazi Partywas seeking to capture power only by constitutional means and that theyoung officers were mistaken if they anticipated an armed revolt.

Our movement has no need of force. The time will come when the Germannation will get to know of our ideas; then thirty-five million Germans willstand behind me . . . When we do possess constitutional rights, then wewill 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.

* Both of whom would end their lives on the gallows. Sack for his part in theconspiracy against Hitler on July 20, 1944, and Frank for what he did on behalf ofHitler in Poland.

But Hitler, though he was addressing mainly the Army and the otherconservative elements in Germany, had to consider the revolutionaryfervor of his own party followers. He could not let them down, as he hadthe three accused. He therefore seized on the opportunity presented whenthe president of the court recalled a statement of his in 1923, a monthbefore his unsuccessful putsch, that “heads will roll in the sand.” Did theNazi leader repudiate that utterance today?

I can assure you [Hitler replied] that when the National Socialist movementis victorious in this struggle, then there will be a National Socialist Court ofJustice too. Then the November 1918 revolution will be avenged and headswill roll!12

No one can say that Hitler did not give warning of what he would doi he came to power, but the audience in the courtroom apparently wel-comed it, for they applauded the threat loudly and long, and though thepresiding judge took exception to the interruption neither he nor thepublic prosecutor made objection to the remark. It made a sensationalheadline in newspapers throughout Germany and in many outside. Lostin the excitement of Hitler’s utterances was the actual case in hand. Thethree young officers, their zeal for National Socialism disavowed by theSupreme Leader of National Socialism himself, were found guilty ofconspiracy to commit high treason and given the mild sentence of eighteenmonths of fortress detention—in republican Germany the severe sentenceson this charge were reserved for those who supported the Republic.*

The month of September 1930 marked a turning point in the road thatwas leading the Germans inexorably toward the Third Reich. The surpris-ing success of the Nazi Party in the national elections convinced not onlymillions of ordinary people but many leaders in business and in the Armythat perhaps here was an upsurge that could not be stopped. They mightnot like the party’s demagoguery and its vulgarity, but on the other handit was arousing the old feelings of German patriotism and nationalismwhich had been so muted during the first ten years of the Republic. Itpromised to lead the German people away from communism, socialism,trade-unionism and the futilities of democracy. Above all, it had caughtfire throughout the Reich. It was a success.

Because of this and of Hitler’s public assurances to the Army at theLeipzig trial, some of the generals began to ponder whether NationalSocialism might not be just what was needed to unify the people, restorethe old Germany, make the Army big and great once more and enable

* Lieutenant Scheringer, embittered by what he considered Hitler’s betrayal re-nounced the Nazi Party while in prison and became a fanatical Communist ' Hewas marked—as were so many who crossed Hitler—for liquidation in the June 301934, purge, but somehow escaped and lived to see the end of Hitler. LieutenantLudm remained an enthusiastic Nazi, was elected to the Reichstag in 1932, becamea high officer in the S.A. and the S.S., and served as German minister to the puppetstate of Slovakia, where he was arrested at the time of the liberation and executedby the Czechoslovaks.

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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 theSupreme Court, who had asked him what he meant when he kept talkingabout the “German National Revolution.”

“This means,” Hitler had said, “exclusively the rescue of the enslavedGerman nation we have today. Germany is bound hand and foot by thepeace treaties . . . The National Socialists do not regard these treatiesas law, but as something imposed upon Germany by constraint. We donot admit that future generations, who are completely innocent, shouldbe burdened by them. If we protest against them with every means in ourpower, then we find ourselves on the path of revolution.”

That was the view of the officer corps too. Some of its leading membershad bitterly criticized General Groener, the Minister of Defense, for allow-ing the three subalterns to be tried by the Supreme Court. General Hansvon Seeckt, the recently deposed Commander in Chief and generallyacknowledged as the postwar genius of the German Army, the worthysuccessor of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, complained to Groener thatit had weakened the spirit of solidarity within the officer corps. ColonelLudwig Beck, who was soon to become Chief of Staff and later an evenmore important figure'in this history but who in 1930 was the commanderof the 5th Artillery Regiment at Ulm from which the three lieutenantshad come, not only protested vehemently to his superiors against theirarrest but testified in their defense at Leipzig.

Now that the trial was over and Hitler had spoken, the generals feltbetter disposed toward a movement which they had previously regardedas a threat to the Army. General Alfred Jodi, Chief of Operations of theArmed Forces High Command during World War II, told the militarytribunal at Nuremberg just what the Nazi leader’s statement at Leipzighad meant to the officer corps. Until that time, he said, the senior officershad believed Hitler was trying to undermine the Army; now they werereassured. General von Seeckt himself, after his election to the Reichstagin 1930, openly allied himself with Hitler for a while and in 1932 urgedhis 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 toprove so fatal to them in the end, had begun to grow and to show.

The political ineptitude of the magnates of industry and finance wasno less than that of the generals and led to the mistaken belief that if theycoughed up large enough sums for Hitler he would be beholden to themand, 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 overthe control of Germany began to dawn on the business leaders after thesensational Nazi gains in the September elections of 1930.

By 1931, Walther Funk testified at Nuremberg, “my industrial friendsand 1 were convinced that the Nazi Party would come to power in thenot too distant future.”

In the summer of that year Funk, a greasy, shifty-eyed, paunchy littleman whose face always reminded this writer of a frog, gave up a lucrativejob as editor of a leading German financial newspaper, the BerlinerBoersenzeitung, joined the Nazi Party and became a contact man betweenthe party and a number of important business leaders. He explained atNuremberg that several of his industrialist friends, especially those prom-inent in the big Rhineland mining concerns, had urged him to join theNazi movement “in order to persuade the party to follow the course ofprivate enterprise.”

At that time the leadership of the party held completely contradictory andconfused views on economic policy. I tried to accomplish my mission bypersonally 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 person-ally stressed time and again during talks with me and industrial leaders towhom I had introduced him, that he was an enemy of state economy and ofso-called “planned economy” and that he considered free enterprise and com-petition as absolutely necessary in order to gain the highest possible produc-tion.13

Hi'.ler, then, as his future Reichsbank president and Minister of Eco-nomics says, was beginning to see the men in Germany who had themoney, and he was telling them more or less what they wanted to hear.The party needed large sums to finance election campaigns, pay the billfor its widespread and intensified propaganda, meet the payroll of hun-dreds 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 bankerswere not the only financial sources—the party raised sizable sums fromdues, assessments, collections and the sale of party newspapers, booksand periodicals—but they were the largest. And the more money theygave the Nazis, the less they would have for the other conservative partieswhich they had been supporting hitherto.

In the summer of 1931,” Otto Dietrich, Hitler’s press chief first for theparty and later for the Reich, relates, “the Fuehrer suddenly decided toconcentrate systematically on cultivating the influential industrial mag-nates.”11

What magnates were they?

Their identity was a secret which was kept from all but the inner circlearound the Leader. The party had to play both sides of the tracks. It hadto allow Strasser, Goebbels and the crank Feder to beguile the masseswith the cry that the National Socialists were truly “socialists” and againstthe money barons. On the other hand, money to keep the party going hadto be wheedled out of those who had an ample supply of it. Throughoutthe latter half of 1931, says Dietrich, Hitler “traversed Germany from endto end, holding private interviews with prominent [business] person-

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alities.” So hush-hush were some of these meetings that they had to beheld “in some lonely forest glade. Privacy,” explains Dietrich, “wasabsolutely 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 of1930 Strasser, Feder and Frick introduced a bill in the Reichstag on be-half 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 mag-nates” and of all “Eastern Jews” without compensation, and the nation-alization of the big banks. Hitler was horrified; this was not only Bol-shevism, it was financial suicide for the party. He peremptorily orderedthe party to withdraw the measure. Thereupon the Communists reintro-duced it, word for word. Hitler bade his party vote against it.

We know from the interrogations of Funk in the Nuremberg jail afterthe war who some, at least, of the “influential industrial magnates” whomHitler sought out were. Emil Kirdorf, the union-hating coal baron whopresided over a political slush fund known as the “Ruhr Treasury” whichwas raised by the West German mining interests, had been seduced byHitler at the party congress in 1929. Fritz Thyssen, the head of the steeltrust, who lived to regret his folly and to write about it in a book called/ Paid Hitler, was an even earlier contributor. He had met the Nazi leaderin Munich in 1923, been carried away by his eloquence and forthwithmade, through Ludendorff, an initial gift of 100,000 gold marks ($25,-000) to the then obscure Nazi Party. Joining Thyssen was AlbertVoegler, also a power in the United Steel Works. In fact the coal andsteel interests were the principal sources of the funds that came from theindustrialists to help Hitler over his last hurdles to power in the periodbetween 1930 and 1933.

But Funk named other industries and concerns whose directors didnot want to be left out in the cold should Hitler make it in the end. Thelist is a long one, though far from complete, for Funk had a wretchedmemory by the time he arrived for trial at Nuremberg. It includedGeorg von Schnitzler, a leading director of I. G. Farben, the giant chemicalcartel; August Rosterg and August Diehn of the potash industry (Funkspeaks of this industry’s “positive attitude toward the Fuehrer”); Cunoof the Hamburg-Amerika line; the brown-coal industry of central Ger-many; the Conti rubber interests; Otto Wolf, the powerful Cologne in-dustrialist; Baron Kurt von Schroeder, the Cologne banker, who was toplay a pivotal role in the final maneuver which hoisted Hitler to power;several leading banks, among which were the Deutsche Bank, the Com-merz und Privat Bank, the Dresdener Bank, the Deutsche Kredit Gesell-schaft; and Germany’s largest insurance concern, the Allianz.

Wilhelm Keppler, one of Hitler’s economic advisers, brought in anumber of South German industrialists and also formed a peculiar societyof businessmen devoted to the S.S. chief, Himmler, called the Circle ofFriends of the Economy (Freundeskreis der Wirtschaft), which later be-came known as the Circle of Friends of the Reichsfuehrer S.S., who was

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Himmler, and which raised millions of marks for this particular gangsterto pursue his “researches” into Aryan origins. From the very beginningof 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 fond-ness for the rising young Nazi leader. It was in the Bechstein mansion inBerlin that Hitler first met many of the business and Army leaders andit was there that some of the decisive secret meetings took place whichled him finally to the chancellorship.

Not all German businessmen jumped on the Hitler bandwagon afterthe Nazi election showing in 1930. Funk mentions that the big electriccorporations Siemens and A.E.G. stood aloof, as did the king of themunition makers, Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach. Fritz Thyssen in hisconfessions declares that Krupp was a “violent opponent” of Hitler andthat as late as the day before Hindenburg appointed him ChancellorKrupp urgently warned the old Field Marshal against such a folly. How-ever, Krupp soon saw the light and quickly became, in the words of therepentant Thyssen, “a super Nazi.”15

It is obvious, then, that in his final drive for power Hitler had con-siderable financial backing from a fairly large chunk of the Germanbusiness world. How much the bankers and businessmen actually con-tributed to the Nazi Party in those last three years before January 1933has never been established. Funk says it probably amounted to no morethan “a couple of million marks.” Thyssen estimates it at two millions ayear; he says he himself personally gave one million marks. But judgedbv the large sums which the party had at its disposal in those days, thoughGoebbels complained it was never enough, the total gifts from businesswere certainly larger than these estimates by many times. What good theyeventually did these politically childish men of the business world willbe seen later in this narrative. One of the most enthusiastic of them atthis time—as he was one of the most bitterly disillusioned of them after-ward—was Dr. Schacht, who resigned his presidency of the Reichsbankin 1930 because of his opposition to the Young Plan, met Goering in thatyear and Hitler in 1931 and for the next two years devoted all of hisconsiderable abilities to bringing the Fuehrer closer to his banker andindustrialist friends and ever closer to the great goal of the Chancellor’sseat. By 1932 this economic wizard, whose responsibility for the comingof the Third Reich and for its early successes proved to be so immeasur-ably great, was writing Hitler: “I have no doubt that the present develop-ment of things can only lead to your becoming Chancellor . . . Yourmovement is carried internally by so strong a truth and necessity thatvictory cannot elude you long . . . No matter where my work may takeme in the near future, even if someday you should see me imprisoned ina fortress, you can always count on me as your loyal supporter.” One ofthe two letters from which these words are taken was signed: “With avigorous ‘Heil.’ ”10

One “so strong a truth” of the Nazi movement, which Hitler had never

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made any secret of, was that if the party ever took over Germany it wouldstamp out a German’s personal freedom, including that of Dr. Schachtand his business friends. It would be some time before the genial Reichs-bank president, as he would again become under Hitler, and his associatesin industry and finance would wake up to this. And since this history, likeall history, is full of sublime irony, it would not be too long a time beforeDr. Schacht proved himself to be a good prophet not only about Hitler’schancellorship but about the Fuehrer’s seeing him imprisoned, if not in afortress 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 partythe little band of fanatical, ruthless men who would help him in his finaldrive to power and who, with one exception, would be at his side to helphim sustain that power during the years of the Third Reich, though an-other of them, who was closest of all to him and perhaps the ablest andmost brutish of the lot, would not survive, even with his life, the secondyear of Nazi government. There were five who stood above the otherfollowers at this time. These were Gregor Strasser, Roehm, Goering,Goebbels and Frick.

Goering had returned to Germany at the end of 1927, following ageneral political amnesty which the Communists had helped the partiesof the Right put through the Reichstag. In Sweden, where he had spentmost of his exile since the 1923 putsch, he had been cured of addiction tonarcotics at the Langbro Asylum and when he was well had earned hisliving with a Swedish aircraft company. The dashing, handsome WorldWar ace had now grown corpulent but had lost none of his energy or hiszest for life. He settled down in a small but luxurious bachelor’s flatin the Badischestrasse in Berlin (his epileptic wife, whom he deeply loved,had contracted tuberculosis and remained, an invalid, in Sweden), earnedhis living as adviser to aircraft companies and the German airline, Luft-hansa, and cultivated his social contacts. These contacts were consider-able and ranged from the former Crown Prince and Prince Philip ofHesse, who had married Princess Mafalda, the daughter of the Kingof Italy, to Fritz Thyssen and other barons of the business world, as wellas to a number of prominent officers of the Army.

These were the very connections which Hitler lacked but needed, andGoering soon became active in introducing the Nazi leader to his friendsand in counteracting in upper-class circles the bad odor which some of theBro'wnshirt ruffians exuded. In 1928 Hitler chose Goering as one of thetwelve Nazi deputies to represent the party in the Reichstag, of which hebecame President when the Nazis became the largest party in 1932. Itwas in the official residence of the Reichstag President that many of themeetings were held and intrigues hatched which led to the party’s ultimatetriumph, and it was here—to jump ahead in time a little—that a planwas connived that helped Hider to stay in power after he became Chancel-lor: to set the Reichstag on fire.

Ernst Roehm had broken with Hitler in 1925 and not long afterwardgone off to join the Bolivian Army as a lieutenant colonel. Toward theend of 1930 Hitler appealed to him to return and take over again theleadership of the S.A., which was getting out of hand. Its members, evenits leaders, apparently believed in a coming Nazi revolution by violence,and with increasing frequency they were taking to the streets to molestand murder their political opponents. No election, national, provincialor municipal, took place without savage battles in the gutters.

Passing notice must here be taken of one of these encounters, for itprovided National Socialism with its greatest martyr. One of the neighbor-hood leaders of the S.A. in Berlin was Horst Wessel, son of a Protestantchaplain, who had forsaken his family and his studies and gone to livein a slum with a former prostitute and devote his life to fighting forNazism. Many anti-Nazis always held that the youth earned his living asa pimp, though this charge may have been exaggerated. Certainly heconsorted with pimps and prostitutes. He was murdered by some Com-munists in February 1930 and would have passed into oblivion alongwith hundreds of other victims of both sides in the street wars had it notbeen for the fact that he left behind a song whose words and tune he hadcomposed. This was the Horst Wessel song, which soon became theofficial 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 herolegends of the movement, hailed as a pure idealist who had given hislife for the cause.

At the time Roehm took over the S.A., Gregor Strasser was un-doubtedly the Number Two man in the Nazi Party. A forceful speakerand a brilliant organizer, he was the head of the party’s most importantoffice, the Political Organization, a post which gave him great influenceamong the provincial and local leaders whose labors he supervised. Withhis genial Bavarian nature, he was the most popular leader in the partynext to Hitler, and, unlike the Fuehrer he enjoyed the personal trust andeven liking of most of his political opponents. There were a good manyat that time, within and without the party, who believed that Strassermight well supplant the moody, incalculable Austrian leader. This viewwas especially strong in the Reichswehr and in the President’s Palace.

Otto, Gregor Strasser’s brother, had fallen by the wayside. Unfor-tunately for him, he had taken seriously not only the word “socialist” butthe word “workers” in the party’s official name of National SocialistGerman Workers’ Party. He had supported certain strikes of the socialisttrade unions and demanded that the party come out for nationalizationof industry. This of course was heresy to Hitler, who accused OttoStrasser of professing the cardinal sins of “democracy and liberalism.”On May 21 and 22, 1930, the Fuehrer had a showdown with his rebellioussubordinate and demanded complete submission. When Otto refused, hewas booted out of the party. He tried to form a truly national “socialist”movement, the Union of Revolutionary National Socialists, which became

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known only as the Black Front, but in the September elections it failedcompletely to win any sizable number of Nazi votes away from Hitler.

Goebbels, the fourth member of the Big Five around Hitler, hadremained an enemy and rival of Gregor Strasser ever since their breakin 1926. Two years after that he had succeeded Strasser as propagandachief of the party when the latter was moved up to head the Political Or-ganization. He had remained as Gauleiter of Berlin, and his achievementsin reorganizing the party there as well as his talents for propaganda hadfavorably impressed the Fuehrer. His glib but biting tongue and hisnimble mind had not endeared him to Hitler’s other chief lieutenants, whodistrusted him. But the Nazi leader was quite content to see strife amonghis principal subordinates, if only because it was a safeguard against theirconspiring together against his leadership. He never fully trusted Strasser,but in the loyalty of Goebbels he had complete confidence; moreover, thelame little fanatic was bubbling with ideas which were useful to him.Finally, Goebbels’ talents as a rowdy journalist—he now had a Berlinnewspaper 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 onlycolorless personality in it. He was a typical German civil servant. As ayoung police officer in Munich before 1923 he had served as one ofHitler’s spies at police headquarters, and the Fuehrer always felt gratefulto him. Often he had taken on the thankless tasks. On Hitler’s instigationhe had become the first Nazi to hold provincial office—in Thuringia—andlater he became the leader of the Nazi Party in the Reichstag. He wasdoggedly loyal, efficient and, because of the facade of his retiring natureand suave manners, useful in contacts with wavering officials in therepublican government.

Some of the lesser men in the party in the early Thirties would sub-sequently gain notoriety and frightening personal power in the ThirdReich. Heinrich Himmler, the poultry farmer, who, with his pince-nez,might be mistaken for a mild, mediocre schoolmaster—he had a degreein agronomy from the Munich Technische Hochschule—was graduallybuilding up Hitler’s praetorian guard, the black-coated S.S. But he workedunder the shadow of Roehm, who was commander of both the S.A. andthe S.S., and he was little known, even in party circles, outside his nativeBavaria. There was Dr. Robert Ley, a chemist by profession and ahabitual drunkard, who was the Gauleiter of Cologne, and Hans Frank,the bright young lawyer and leader of the party’s legal division. Therewas Walther Darre, born in 1895 in the Argentine, an able agronomistwho was won over to National Socialism by Hess and whose book ThePeasantry as the Life Source of the Nordic Race brought him to Hitler’sattention and to a job as head of the Agricultural Department of the party.Rudolf Hess himself, personally unambitious and doggedly loyal to theLeader, held only the title of private secretary to the Fuehrer. The secondprivate secretary was one Martin Bormann, a molelike man who preferredto burrow in the dark recesses of party life to further his intrigues and who

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once had served a year in prison for complicity in a political murder.The Reich Youth Leader was Baldur von Schirach, a romantically mindedyoung man and an energetic organizer, whose mother was an Americanand whose great-grandfather, a Union officer, had lost a leg at Bull Run; hetold 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 Balticpseudo philosopher who, as we have seen, was one of Hitler’s earliest men-tors and who since the putsch of 1923 had poured out a stream of booksand pamphlets of the most muddled content and style, culminating in a700-page work entitled The Myth of the Twentieth Century. This was aludicrous concoction of his half-baked ideas on Nordic supremity palmedoff as the fruit of what passed for erudition in Nazi circles—a book whichHitler often said jokingly he had tried unsuccessfully to read and whichprompted Schirach, who fancied himself as a writer, to remark once thatRosenberg was “a man who sold more copies of a book no one ever readthan any other author,” for in the first ten years after its publication in1930 it sold more than half a million copies. From the beginning to theend Hitler always had a warm spot in his heart for this dull, stupid,fumbling man, rewarding him with various party jobs such as editor ofthe Voelkischer Beobachter and other Nazi publications and naming himas one of the party’s deputies in the Reichstag in 1930, where he repre-sented the movement in the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Such was the conglomeration of men around the leader of the NationalSocialists. In a normal society they surely would have stood out as agrotesque assortment of misfits. But in the last chaotic days of theRepublic they began to appear to millions of befuddled Germans assaviors. And they had two advantages over their opponents: They wereled by a man who knew exactly what he wanted and they were ruthlessenough, 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 earnersout of work, the middle classes facing ruin, the farmers unable to meettheir mortgage payments, the Parliament paralyzed, the governmentfloundering, the eighty-four-year-old President fast sinking into the be-fuddlement of senility, a confidence mounted in the breasts of the Nazichieftains that they would not have long to wait. As Gregor Strasserpublicly boasted, “All that serves to precipitate the catastrophe ... isgood, very good for us and our German revolution.”

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THE LAST DAYSOF THE REPUBLIC:1931-33

Out of the turmoil and chaos of German life there now emergeda curious and devious figure who, more than any other single in-dividual, was destined to dig the grave of the Republic—one who wouldserve briefly as its last Chancellor and, ironically, in one of the finaltwists of his astonishing career desperately try to save it, when it wastoo 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, hehad entered military service at eighteen as a subaltern in Hindenburg’sold regiment, the 3rd Foot Guards, where he became a close friend ofOskar von Hindenburg, the son of the Field Marshal and President. Flissecond friendship proved almost as valuable. This was with GeneralGroener, who was impressed by his brilliance as a student at the WarAcademy, and who, when he replaced Ludendorff at Supreme Head-quarters in 1918, brought along the young officer as his adjutant. Pri-marily a “desk officer”-—he had seen but a short period of service on theRussian front—Schleicher remained thereafter close to the sources ofpower in the Army and in the Weimar Republic, where his nimble mind,affable manners and flair for politics impressed both the generals and thepoliticians. Under General von Seeckt he played an increasingly importantrole in helping to organize the illegal free corps and the equally illegaland highly secret “Black Reichswehr,” and he was a key figure in theconfidential negotiations with Moscow which led to the camouflagedtraining of German tank and air officers in Soviet Russia and in theestablishment of German-run arms factories there. A gifted manipulator,with a passion for intrigue, Schleicher worked best under cover in thedark. Until the beginning of the Thirties his name was unknown to thegeneral public, but for some time previously it had been attracting in-creasing notice in the Bendlerstrasse, where the War Ministry was, and inthe Wilhelmstrasse, where the government ministries were situated.

* Equivalent to a major general in the U.S. Army.

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In January 1928 he had used his growing influence with PresidentHindenburg, with whom he had become close through his friendship withOskar, to have his old chief, General Groener, appointed as Minister ofDefense, the first military man to hold that post during the Republic.Groener made Schleicher his right-hand man in the ministry, putting himin charge of a new office, the Ministry Bureau (Ministeramt), where hehandled the political and press affairs of the Army and Navy. “Mycardinal in politics,” Groener called his assistant and entrusted him withthe Army’s relations with the other ministries and the political leaders.In this position Schleicher not only was a power in the officer corps butbegan to be a power in politics. In the Army he could make and breakthe higher officers and began to do so, getting rid of General von Blom-berg, the second-in-command of the Army, in 1930 by a piece of trickeryand replacing him with an old friend from the 3rd Foot Guards, Generalvon Hammerstein. In the spring of the same year, as we have seen, hemade his first effort to select the Chancellor himself and, with the backingof the Army, talked Hindenburg into appointing Heinrich Bruening tothat post.

In achieving this political triumph Schleicher carried out what hethought would be the first step in a grandiose scheme to make over theRepublic, an idea which had been forming for some time in his agilemind. He saw clearly enough—as who didn’t?—the causes of the weak-ness of the Weimar regime. There were too many political parties (in1930 ten of them each polled over a million votes) and they were toomuch at cross-purposes, too absorbed in looking after the special eco-nomic and social interests they represented to be able to bury their dif-ferences and form an enduring majority in the Reichstag that could backa stable government capable of coping with the major crisis whichconfronted the country at the beginning of the Thirties. Parliamentarygovernment had become a matter of what the Germans called Kuhhandel—cattle trading—with the parties bargaining for special advantages forthe groups which elected them, and the national interests be damned. Nowonder that when Bruening took over as Chancellor on March 28, 1930,it had become impossible to achieve a majority in the Reichstag for anypolicy—of the Left, the Center or the Right—and that merely to carryon the business of government and do something about the economicparalysis he had to resort to Article 48 of the constitution, which per-mitted him in an emergency, if the President approved, to govern bydecree.

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 repre-sented the will of the people and was backed by the Army. If thedemocratically elected Reichstag couldn’t provide stable government,then the democratically elected President must. What the majority ofGermans wanted, Schleicher was sure, was a government that would take

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a firm stand and lead them out of their hopeless plight. Actually, as theelections which Bruening called in September showed, that was not whatthe majority of Germans wanted. Or at least they did not want to be ledout of the wilderness by the kind of government which Schleicher andhis friends in the Army and in the Presidential Palace had chosen.

In truth, Schleicher had committed two disastrous mistakes. By nuttinqup Bruening as Chancellor and encouraging him to rule by presidentialdecree, he had cracked the foundation of the Army’s strength in thenation—its position above politics, the abandonment of which wouldlead to its own and Germany’s ruin. And he had made a bad mis-calculation about the voters. When six and a half million of them, against810,000 two years before, voted for the Nazi Party on September 14,1930, the political General realized that he must take a new tack. Bythe end of the year he was in touch with Roehm, who had just returnedfrom Bolivia, and with Gregor Strasser. This was the first serious contactbetween 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 andGeneral von Schleicher to his fall and ultimate murder.

On October 10, 1931, three weeks after the suicide of his niece andsweetheart, Geli Raubal, Hitler was received by President Hindenburgfor the first time. Schleicher, busy weaving a new web of intrigue, hadmade the appointment. Earlier that autumn he had conferred with Hitlerand arranged for him to see both the Chancellor and the President. In theback of his mind, as well as that of Bruening, was the question of what todo when Hindenburg’s seven-year term of office came to an end in thespring of 1932. The Field Marshal would be eighty-five then, and theperiods when his mind was lucid were diminishing. Still, as everyone real-ized, if he were not a candidate to succeed himself, Hitler, though he wasnot legally a German citizen, might contrive to become one, run for theoffice, win the election and become President.

During the summer the scholarly Chancellor had pondered long hoursover the desperate plight of Germany. He quite realized that his govern-ment had become the most unpopular one the Republic had ever had. Tocope with the depression he had decreed lower wages and salaries as wellas lower prices and had clamped down severe restrictions on business,finance and the social services. The “Hunger Chancellor” he had beencalled by both the Nazis and the Communists. Yet he thought he saw away out that in the end would re-establish a stable, free, prosperousGermany. He would try to negotiate with the Allies a cancellation ofreparations, whose payment had been temporarily stopped by the Hoovermoratorium. In the disarmament conference scheduled to begin thefollowing year he would try either to get the Allies to honor their pledgein the Versailles Treaty to disarm to the level of Germany or to allowGermany to embark openly on a modest program of rearmament, whichin fact, with his connivance, and in secret, it had already started to do.

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Thus the last shackle of the peace treaty would be thrown off andGermany would emerge as an equal among the big powers. This wouldbe not only a boon to the Republic but might launch, Bruening thought, anew era of confidence in the Western world that would put an end to theeconomic 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 bringabout by agreement of all the major parties save the Communists a fun-damental change in the German constitution. He meant to restore theHohenzollern monarchy. Even if Hindenburg could be persuaded torun again, he could not be expected at his age to live out another fullterm of seven years. Should he die in another year or two, the way wouldstill be open to Hitler to be elected President. To forestall that, to assurepermanency and stability in the office of head of state, Bruening broachedthe following plan: The 1932 presidential elections would be called offand Hindenburg’s term of office simply extended, as it could be, by atwo-thirds vote in the two houses of Parliament, the Reichstag and theReichsrat. As soon as that was achieved, he would propose that Parlia-ment proclaim a monarchy with the President as regent. On his deathone of the sons of the Crown Prince would be put on the Hohenzollernthrone. This act too would take the wind out of the Nazis; in factBruening was confident that it would mean their end as a political force.

But the aged President was not interested. He, whose duty it hadbeen as Commander of the Imperial Army to tell the Kaiser on that darkfall day of November 1918 at Spa that he must go, that the monarchy wasat an end, would not consider any Hohenzollern’s resuming the throneexcept the Emperor himself, who still lived in exile at Doom, in Holland.When Bruening explained to him that the Social Democrats and thetrade unions, which with the greatest reluctance had given some encour-agement to his plan if only because it might afford the last desperatechance of stopping Hitler, would not stand for the return of either WilhelmII or his eldest son and that moreover if the monarchy were restored itmust be a constitutional and democratic one on the lines of the Britishmodel, the grizzly old Field Marshal was so outraged he summarily dis-missed his Chancellor from his presence. A week later he recalled himto inform him that he would not stand for re-election.

In the meantime first Bruening and then Hindenburg had had theirfirst 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; hismind wandered and he was unsure of himself. To Bruening’s request forNazi support for the continuance in office of Hindenburg Hitler answeredwith a long tirade against the Republic which left little doubt that hewould not go along with the Chancellor’s plans. With Hindenburg, Hitlerwas ill at ease. He tried to impress the old gentleman with a long haranguebut it fell flat. The President, at this first meeting, was not impressed bythe “Bohemian corporal,” as he called him, and told Schleicher that such

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a man might become Minister of Posts but never Chancellor—wordswhich 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 Opposi-tion” against the governments of Germany and Prussia. This was anassembly not so much of the radical Right, represented by the NationalSocialists, as of the older, conservative forces of reaction: Hugenberg’sGerman National Party, the right-wing veterans’ private army, the Stahl-helm, the so-called Bismarck Youth, the Junkers’ Agrarian League, andan odd assortment of old generals. But the Nazi leader did not have hisheart in the meeting. He despised the frock-coated, top-hatted, be-medaled relics of the old regime, with whom, he saw, it might be dan-gerous to associate a “revolutionary” movement like his own too closely.He raced through his speech in a perfunctory manner and left the fieldbefore the parade of the Stahlhelm, which, to his annoyance, had shownup in larger numbers than the S.A. The Harzburg Front which wasformed that day and which represented an effort of the old-line conserva-tives to bring the Nazis into a united front to begin a final assault on theRepublic (it demanded the immediate resignation of Bruening) was thusstillborn. Hitler had no intention of playing second fiddle to these gentle-men whose minds, he thought, were buried in the past to which he knewthere was no return. He might use them for the moment if they helped toundermine the Weimar regime and made available to him, as they did,new financial sources. But he would not, in turn, be used by them. Withina few days the Harzburg Front was facing collapse; the various elementsof it were once more at each other’s throats.

Except on one issue. Both Hugenberg and Hitler refused to agree toBruening’s proposal that Hindenburg’s term of office be prolonged. Atthe beginning of 1932 the Chancellor renewed his effort to get them tochange their minds. With great difficulty he had prevailed on the Presi-dent to agree to serving further if Parliament prolonged his term and thusmade it unnecessary for him to have to shoulder the burden of a bitterelection campaign. Now Bruening invited Hitler to come to Berlin forfresh discussions. The telegram arrived while the Fuehrer was conferringwith Hess and Rosenberg in the editorial offices of the Voelkischer Beo-bachter in Munich. Thrusting the paper into their faces, Hitler cried,“Now I have them in my pocket! They have recognized me as a partnerin their negotiations.”1

On January 7 Hitler conferred with Bruening and Schleicher, and therewas a further meeting on January 10. Bruening repeated his proposal thatthe Nazi Party agree to prolonging Hindenburg’s term. If this were done,and as soon as he had settled the problem of cancellation of reparationsand equality of armaments, he himself would retire. According to somesources—it is a disputed point—Bruening held out a further bait: he of-fered to suggest Hitler’s name to the President as his successor.2

Hitler did not immediately give a definite reply. He adjourned to theKaiserhof hotel and took counsel with his advisers. Gregor Strasser was in

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favor of accepting Bruening’s plan, arguing that if the Nazis forced anelection Hindenburg would win it. Goebbels and Roehm were for an out-right rejection. In his diary for January 7, Goebbels wrote: “The Presi-dency is not the issue. Bruening merely wants to strengthen his own posi-tion indefinitely . . . The chess game for power begins. . . . The chiefthing is that we remain strong and make no compromises.” The night be-fore, he had written: “There is a man in the organization that no onetrusts . . . This is Gregor Strasser.”3

Hitler himself saw no reason to strengthen Bruening’s hand and thusgive the Republic a further lease on life. But unlike the thickheaded Hu-genberg, who rejected the plan outright on January 12, Hitler was moresubtle. He replied not to the Chancellor but over his head to the Presi-dent, declaring that he regarded Bruening’s proposal as unconstitutionalbut that he would support Hindenburg’s re-election if the Field Marshalwould reject Bruening’s plan. To Otto von Meissner, the nimble Secretaryof State at the Presidential Chancellery, who had zealously served in thatcapacity first the Socialist Ebert and then the conservative Hindenburgand who was beginning to think of a third term in office for himself withwhoever the President might be—perhaps even Hitler?—the Nazi leader,in a secret conversation at the Kaiserhof, offered to support Hindenburg inthe elections if he would first get rid of Bruening, name a “National” gov-ernment and decree new elections for the Reichstag and the Prussian Diet.

To this Hindenburg would not agree. Nettled by the refusal of theNazis and the Nationalists, the latter his friends and supposed supporters,to agree to spare him the strain of an election battle, Hindenburg agreedto run again. But to his resentment against the nationalist parties wasadded a curious spleen against Bruening, who he felt had handled thewhole matter badly and who was now forcing him into bitter conflict withthe very nationalist forces which had elected him President in 1925 againstthe liberal-Marxist candidates. Now he could win only with the supportof the Socialists and the trade unions, for whom he had always had an un-disguised contempt. A marked coolness sprang up in his dealings withhis Chancellor—“the best,” he had said not so long ago, “since Bismarck.”

A coolness toward Bruening also came over the General who had pro-pelled him into the chancellorship. To Schleicher the austere Catholicleader had been a disappointment after all. He had become the most un-popular Chancellor the Republic had ever had. He had been unable toobtain a majority in the country; he had failed to curb the Nazis or to winthem over; he had bungled the problem of keeping Hindenburg on. There-fore he must go—and perhaps with him General Groener, Schleicher’srevered 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 ahurry. Bruening and Groener, the two strong men of the government,must remain in power until Hindenburg was re-elected; without their sup-port the old Field Marshal might not make it. After the elections theirusefulness would be over.

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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, andthis was one of them. The question he faced in January 1932 was: to runor not to run for President? Hindenburg seemed unbeatable. The legend-ary hero would be supported not only by many elements of the Right butby the democratic parties which had been against him in the election of1925 but which now saw him as the savior of the Republic. To run againstthe Field Marshal and be beaten, as he almost certainly would be—wasthat not to risk the reputation for invincibility which the Nazis had beenbuilding up in one provincial election after another since their spectaculartriumph in the national poll in 1930? And yet, not to run—was that not aconfession of weakness, a demonstration of a lack of confidence that Na-tional Socialism was on the threshold of power? There was another con-sideration. Hitler was at the moment not even eligible to run. He was nota German citizen.

Joseph Goebbels urged him to announce his candidacy. On January 19they journeyed to Munich together and that evening Goebbels recordedin his diary: “Discussed the question of the presidency with the Fuehrer.No decision has yet been reached. I pleaded strongly for his own candi-dacy.” For the next month the diary of Goebbels reflected the ups anddowns in Hitler’s mind. On January 31: “The Fuehrer’s decision will bemade on Wednesday. It can no longer be in doubt.” On February 2 itseemed that he had made it. Goebbels noted: “He decides to be a candi-date himself.” But Goebbels adds that the decision will not be made pub-lic until it is seen what the Social Democrats do. Next day the partyleaders 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 tosee Greta Garbo in a movie and is “moved and shaken” by this “greatestliving actress.” Later that night “a number of old party comrades cometo me. They are depressed at the lack of a decision. They fear that theFuehrer is waiting too long.”

He may be waiting too long, but Hitler’s confidence in his ultimate tri-umph does not weaken. One night in Munich, the diary records, the Fueh-rer has a long discussion with Goebbels on which post the latter will havein the Third Reich. The Leader has in mind for him, Goebbels says, a“Ministry of Popular Education which will deal with films, radio, art, cul-ture and propaganda.” On another evening Hitler has a long discussionwith his architect, Professor Troost, over plans for a “grandiose alterationof the national capital.” And Goebbels adds: “The Fuehrer has his plansall 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 Hinden-burg. On February 9, Goebbels records, “the Fuehrer is back in Berlin.More debates at the Kaiserhof over the presidential election. Everythingis left in suspense.” Three days later Goebbels goes over his calculations

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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 February15 the aged President formally announces his candidacy. Goebbels ishappy. “Now we have a free hand. Now we need no longer hide our deci-sion.” But Hitler does hide it until February 22. At a meeting that dayin 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 Goebbelsbranded Hindenburg as “the candidate of the party of the deserters” andwas expelled from the chamber for insulting the President. In Berlin thenationalist Deutsche Zeitung, which had backed Hindenburg’s election in1925, now turned on him vehemently. “The present issue,” it declared,“is whether the internationalist traitors and pacifist swine, with the ap-proval of Hindenburg, are to bring about the final ruin of Germany.”

All the traditional loyalties of classes and parties were upset in the con-fusion and heat of the electoral battle. To Hindenburg, a Protestant, aPrussian, a conservative and a monarchist, went the support of the Social-ists, the trade unions, the Catholics of Bruening’s Center Party and theremnants of the liberal, democratic middle-class parties. To Hitler, aCatholic, an Austrian, a former tramp, a “national socialist,” a leader ofthe lower-middle-class masses, was rallied, in addition to his own fol-lowers, the support of the upper-class Protestants of the north, the con-servative Junker agrarians and a number of monarchists, including, at thelast minute, the former Crown Prince himself. The confusion was furthercompounded by the entrance of two other candidates, neither of whomcould hope to win but both of whom might poll enough votes to preventeither of the leading contestants from obtaining the absolute majorityneeded for election. The Nationalists put up Theodor Duesterberg,second-in-command of the Stahlhelm (of which Hindenburg was the hon-orary commander), a colorless former lieutenant colonel whom the Nazis,to their glee, soon discovered to be the great-grandson of a Jew. TheCommunists, shouting that the Social Democrats were “betraying theworkers” by supporting Hindenburg, ran their own candidate, ErnstThaelmann, the party’s leader. It was not the first time, nor the last, thatthe Communists, on orders from Moscow, risked playing into Nazi hands.

Before the campaign was scarcely under way Hitler solved the problemof his citizenship. On February 25 it was announced that the Nazi Ministerof the Interior of the state of Brunswick had named Herr Hitler an at-tache of the legation of Brunswick in Berlin. Through this comic-operamaneuver the Nazi leader became automatically a citizen of Brunswickand hence of Germany and was therefore eligible to run for President ofthe German Reich. Having leaped over this little hurdle with ease, Hitlerthrew himself into the campaign with furious energy, crisscrossing thecountry, addressing large crowds at scores of mass meetings and whippingthem up into a state of frenzy. Goebbels and Strasser, the other two spell-binders of the party, followed a similar schedule. But this was not all.

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They directed a propaganda campaign such as Germany had never seen.They plastered the walls of the cities and towns with a million screechingcolored posters, distributed eight million pamphlets and twelve millionextra copies of their party newspapers, staged three thousand meetings aday and, for the first time in a German election, made good use of filmsand gramophone records, the latter spouting forth from loudspeakers ontrucks.

Bruening also worked tirelessly to win the election for the aged Presi-dent. For once this fair-minded man was ruthless enough to reserve allradio time on the government-controlled networks for his own side—atactic which infuriated Hitler. Hindenburg spoke only once, in a recordedbroadcast on March 10, on the eve of the polling. It was a dignified utter-ance, one of the few made during the campaign, and it was effective.

Election of a party man, representing one-sided extremist views, who wouldconsequently have the majority of the people against him, would expose theFatherland to serious disturbances whose outcome would be incalculable.Duty commanded me to prevent this ... If I am defeated, I shall at leastnot have incurred the reproach that of my own accord I deserted my post inan hour of crisis ... I ask for no votes from those who do not wish to votefor me.

Those who voted for him fell .4 per cent short of the needed absolutemajority. When the polls closed on March 13, 1932, the results were:

Hindenburg

Hitler

18,651,497

11,339,446

4,983,341

2,557,729

49.6%

30.1%

13.2%

6.8%

Thaelmann

Duesterberg

The figures were a disappointment to both sides. The old President hadled the Nazi demagogue by .over seven million votes but had just failed towin the required absolute majority; this necessitated a second election, inwhich the candidate receiving the most votes would be elected. Hitler hadincreased the Nazi vote over 1930 by nearly five million—some 86 percent—but he had been left far behind Hindenburg. Late on the eveningof 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 overthe radio. “We’re beaten; terrible outlook,’’ Goebbels wrote in his diarythat night. “Party circles badly depressed and dejected . . . We cansave 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 shalllead it.” Indeed, he campaigned as vigorously as before. Chartering aJunkers passenger plane, he flew from one end of Germany to the other—a novelty in electioneering at that time—addressing three or four bigrallies a day in as many cities. Shrewdly, he altered his tactics to attractmore votes. In the first campaign he had harped on the misery of the

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people, the impotence of the Republic. Now he depicted a happy futurefor all Germans if he were elected: jobs for the workers, higher prices forthe farmers, more business for the businessmen, a big Army for the mili-tarists, and once in a speech at the Lustgarten in Berlin he promised, “Inthe Third Reich every German girl will find a husband!”

The Nationalists withdrew Duesterberg from the race and appealed totheir followers to vote for Hitler. Again even the dissolute former CrownPrince, Friedrich Wilhelm, fell into line. “I shall vote for Hitler,” heannounced.

April 10, 1932, the day of the second election, was dark and rainy, anda million fewer citizens cast their votes. The results announced late thatnight were:

19,359,983 53%

13,418,547 36.8%

3,706,759 10.2%

Hindenburg

Hitler

Thaelmann

Though Hitler had increased his total vote by. two million and Hinden-burg had gained only one million, the President was in by a clear, absolutemajority. More than half the German people had thus given expressionto their belief in the democratic Republic; they had decisively rejected theextremists of both Right and Left. Or so they thought.

Hitler himself had much to ponder. He had made an impressive show-ing. He had doubled the Nazi vote in two years. And yet a majority stilleluded him—and with it the political power he sought. Had he reachedthe end of this particular road? In the party discussions that followed theApril 10 poll, Strasser frankly argued that this was indeed Hitler’s posi-tion. Strasser urged a deal with those in power: with the President, withthe government of Bruening and General Groener, with the Army. Hitlerdistrusted his chief lieutenant but he did not dismiss his idea. He had notforgotten one of the lessons of his Vienna days, that to attain power onemust 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 ablow.

For more than a year the Reich government and various state govern-ments had been coming into possession of documents which showed that anumber of high Nazi leaders, especially in the S.A., were preparing to takeover Germany by force and institute a reign of terror. On the eve of thefirst presidential elections the S.A., now 400,000 strong, had been fullymobilized and had thrown a cordon around Berlin. Though CaptainRoehm, the S.A. chief, assured General von Schleicher that the measurewas merely “precautionary,” the Prussian police had seized documents atNazi headquarters in Berlin which made it pretty clear that the S.A. meantto carry out a coup d’etat on the following evening should Hitler be electedPresident—such was Roehm’s hurry. Goebbels in a diary notation on thenight of March 11 had confirmed that something was afoot. “Talked over

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instructions with the S.A. and S.S. commanders. Deep uneasiness is rifeeverywhere. The word Putsch haunts the air.”

Both the national and the state governments were alarmed. On April5 representatives of several of the states, led by Prussia and Bavaria, thetwo largest, had demanded that the central government suppress the S.A.or else they would do it themselves in their respective territories. Chan-cellor Bruening was away from Berlin electioneering, but Groener, whoreceived the delegates in his capacity of Minister of the Interior and ofDefense, promised action as soon as Bruening returned, which was onApril 10, the day of the second election. Bruening and Groener thoughtthey had good reasons for stamping out the S.A. It would end the threatof civil war and might be a prelude to the end of Hitler as a major factorin German politics. Certain of Hindenburg’s re-election by an absolutemajority, they felt that the voters were giving them a mandate to protectthe Republic against the threats of the Nazis to forcibly overthrow it. Thetime had come to use force against force. Also, unless they acted vigor-ously, the government would lose the support of the Social Democrats andthe trade unions, which were providing most of the votes for Hindenburgand the chief backing for the continuance of Bruening's government.

The cabinet met on April 10, in the midst of the polling, and decidedto immediately suppress Hitler’s private armies. There was some diffi-culty in getting Hindenburg to sign the decree—Schleicher, who had firstapproved it, began to whisper objections in the President’s ear—but hefinally 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 hot-heads in the party urged resistance to the order. But Hitler, shrewderthan his lieutenants, ruled that it must be obeyed. This was no momentfor armed rebellion. Besides, there was interesting news about Schleicher.Goebbels noted it in his diary on that very day, April 14: “We are in-formed that Schleicher does not approve Groener’s action . . Andlater that day: “. . . a telephone call from a well-known lady who is aclose friend of General Schleicher. She says the General wants to re-sign.”4

Goebbels was interested but skeptical. “Perhaps,” he added, “it isonly a maneuver.” Neither he nor Hitler nor anyone else, certainly notBruening and most certainly not Groener, to whom Schleicher owed hisrapid rise in the Army and in the councils of government, had as yet sur-mised 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 hadwon over the weak-minded commander of the Reichswehr, General vonHammerstein, confidentially informed the commanders of the seven mili-tary districts that the Army opposed the move. Next he persuaded Hin-denburg to write a cantankerous letter to Groener, on April 16, askingwhy the Reichsbanner, the paramilitary organization of the Social Demo-crats, had not been suppressed along with the S.A. Schleicher took a fur-ther step to undermine his chief’s position. He inspired a malicious smear

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campaign against General Groener, spreading tales that he was too ill toremain in office, that he had become a convert to Marxism and even topacifism and proclaiming that the Defense Minister had disgraced theArmy by having a child born five months after his recent marriage—thebaby, 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. Fieheld talks with both Roehm, the S.A. chief, and Count von Helldorf, theS.A. leader of Berlin. On April 26, Goebbels noted that Schleicher had in-formed Helldorff he “wanted to change his course.” Two days laterSchleicher saw Hitler, and Goebbels reported that “the talk went offwell.”

Even at this stage of the game it is evident that with regard to onequestion Roehm and Schleicher were conspiring behind Hitler’s back.Both men wanted the S.A. incorporated into the Army as a militia, a stepto which the Fuehrer was unalterably opposed. This was a matter overwhich Hitler had often quarreled with his S.A. chief of staff, who saw thestorm troopers as a potential military force to strengthen the country,whereas Hitler regarded them as purely a political force, a band to striketerror in the streets against his political opponents and to keep up politi-cal enthusiasm in the Nazi ranks. But in his conversations with the Nazileaders, Schleicher had another objective in mind. He wanted the S.A.attached to the Army, where he could control it; but he also wanted Hit-ler, the only conservative nationalist with any mass following, in thegovernment—where he could control him. The Verbot of the S.A. hin-dered progress toward both objectives.

By the end of the first week of May 1932, Schleicher’s intrigues reachedone of their climaxes. Goebbels notes on May 4 that “Hitler’s mines arebeginning to go off. First Groener and then Bruening must go.” On May8, Goebbels reported in his diary, Hitler had a “decisive conference withGeneral Schleicher and with some gentlemen close to the President.Everything goes well. Bruening will fall in a few days. The President willwithdraw his confidence in him.” He then outlines the plan which Schlei-cher and the President’s camarilla had hatched with Hitler: The Reich-stag will be dissolved, a presidential cabinet will be installed and all prohi-bitions against the S.A. and the Nazi Party lifted. To avoid arousingBruening’s suspicion of what is up, Goebbels adds, Hitler will keep awayfrom Berlin. Late that evening he spirits his chief away to Mecklenburgand into virtual hiding.

For the Nazis, the presidential cabinet is regarded, Goebbels notesthe next day, as merely an “interim” affair. Such a “colorless” transi-tional government, he says, “will clear the way for us. The weaker it isthe easier we can do away with it.” This, of course, is not the view ofSchleicher, who already is dreaming of a new government which will dis-pense with Parliament until the constitution can be changed and which hewill dominate. Already, it is clear, he and Hitler believe they can each getthe best of the other. But for the moment he has an ace to play. He can

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assure the tired old President that he can offer what Bruening could not:a government supported by Hitler and yet without the inconvenience ofhaving the fanatical demagogue in it.

So all was ready, and on May 10, two days after his meeting with Hitlerand the men around Hindenburg, Schleicher struck. The blow was de-livered at the Reichstag. General Groener rose to defend the banning ofthe S.A. and was violently attacked by Goering. Ill with diabetes andsick at heart at the treachery already wrought by Schleicher, the DefenseMinister tried to defend himself as best he could but he was overwhelmedby 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 theArmy and must resign.” Groener appealed to Hindenburg, for whom hehad loyally fronted—and taken the blame—when the crucial moment hadcome, first, in 1918, to tell the Kaiser to go, and then, in 1919, to advisethe republican government to sign the Versailles Treaty. But the old FieldMarshal, who had never ceased resenting his obligation to the youngerofficer, replied that he “regretted” he could do nothing in the matter. OnMay 13, bitter and disillusioned,* Groener resigned. That evening Goeb-bels 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 beforethe conniving General was able to slip it on the block. Groener’s fall hadbeen a grave setback for the tottering Republic; almost alone among themilitary men he had served it ably and devotedly, and there was no oneelse in the Army of his stature and loyalty to replace him. But the stub-born, hard-working Bruening was still a power. He had secured thebacking of the majority of Germans for Hindenburg’s re-election and, ashe believed, for the continuance of the Republic. He seemed to be on theeve of sensational successes in foreign policy with regard to both the can-cellation of reparations and equality of armament for the Reich. But theaging President, as we have seen, had rewarded with a remarkable cool-ness the Chancellor’s superhuman efforts in winning him a further term ofoffice. His attitude became more frigid when Bruening proposed that theState take over a number of bankrupt Junker estates in East Prussia, aftergenerous compensation, and give them to the landless peasants. WhenHindenburg went off for the Easter holidays at the middle of May to Neu-deck, the East Prussian estate which the Junkers, with the financial helpof the industrialists, had given him as a present on his eightieth birthday,he got an earful from his aristocratic neighbors, who clamored for the dis-missal of a Chancellor whom they now called “an agrarian Bolshevist.”

The Nazis, undoubtedly through Schleicher, learned before Brueningthat the Chancellor was on his way out. On May 18 Goebbels returned

* “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: ThePolicy of Wilhelm Groener,” Political Science Quarterly, June 1948.)

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from Munich to Berlin and, noting that the “Easter spirit” was still linger-ing, 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 accurateto say that the leading rat, far from leaving the sinking ship of state, wasmerely making ready to put in a new captain. The next day Goebbelsrecorded: “General Schleicher has refused to take over the Ministry ofDefense.” This was true but also not quite accurate. Bruening had in-deed made the request of Schleicher after upbraiding him for undermin-ing Groener. “I will,” Schleicher had replied, “but not in your govern-ment.”5

On May 19 Goebbels’ diary recorded: “Message from Schleicher. Thelist 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 wascooked. On Sunday, May 29, Hindenburg summoned Bruening to hispresence and abruptly asked for his resignation, and on the following dayit was given him.

Schleicher had triumphed. But not only Bruening had fallen; the demo-cratic Republic went down with him, though its death agonies wouldcontinue for another eight months before the final coup de grace was ad-ministered. Bruening’s responsibility for its demise was not small.Though democratic at heart, he had allowed himself to be maneuveredinto a position where he had perforce to rule much of the time by presi-dential decree without the consent of Parliament. The provocation totake such a step admittedly had been great; the politicians in their blind-ness had made it all but inevitable. As recently as May 12, though, he hadbeen 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 ofthe President to govern. Now that authority had been withdrawn. Fromnow on, from June 1932 to January 1933, it would be granted to twolesser men who, though not Nazis, felt no urge to uphold a democraticRepublic, at least as it was presently constituted.

The political power in Germany no longer resided, as it had since thebirth of the Republic, in the people and in the body which expressed thepeople’s will, the Reichstag. It was now concentrated in the hands of asenile, eighty-five-year-old President and in those of a few shallow ambi-tious men around him who shaped his weary, wandering mind. Hitler sawthis very clearly, and it suited his purposes. It seemed most unlikely thathe would ever win a majority in Parliament. Hindenburg’s new course of-fered him the only opportunity that was left of coming to power. Not atthe moment, to be sure, but soon.

He hurried back to Berlin from Oldenburg, where on May 29 theNazis had won an absolute majority in the election for the local diet.The next day he was received by Hindenburg, who confirmed the pointsof the deal which the Nazi leader had secretly worked out with Schleicheron May 8: the lifting of the ban on the S.A., a presidential cabinet ofHindenburg’s own choosing, dissolution of the Reichstag. Would Hitler

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support the new government? Hindenburg asked. Hitler replied that hewould. That evening of May 30, the Goebbels’ diary was brought up todate: “Hitler’s talk with the President went well . . . V. Papen is spokenof as Chancellor. But that interests us little. The important thing is thatthe 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 unexpectedand ludicrous figure. The man whom General von Schleicher foistedupon the octogenarian President and who on June 1, 1932, was namedChancellor of Germany was the fifty-three-year-old Franz von Papen,scion of an impoverished family of the Westphalian nobility, a formerGeneral Staff officer, a crack gentleman rider, an unsuccessful andamateurish Catholic Centrist politician, a wealthy industrialist by mar-riage and little known to the public except as a former military attachein Washington who had been expelled during the war for complicity inthe planning of such sabotage as blowing up bridges and railroad lineswhile the United States was neutral.

“The President’s choice met with incredulity,” wrote the Frenchambassador in Berlin. “No one but smiled or tittered or laughed becausePapen enjoyed the peculiarity of being taken seriously by neither hisfriends nor his enemies ... He was reputed to be superficial, blunder-ing, untrue, ambitious, vain, crafty and an intriguer.”7 To such a man—and M. Frangois-Poncct was not exaggerating—Hindenburg, at Schlei-cher’s prompting, had entrusted the fate of the floundering Republic.

Papen had no political backing whatsoever. He was not even a memberof the Reichstag. The furthest he had got in politics was a seat in thePrussian Landtag. On his appointment as Chancellor his own CenterParty, indignant at the treachery of Papen toward its leader, Bruening, un-animously expelled him from the party. But the President had told himto form a government above parties, and this he was able to do at oncebecause Schleicher already had a list of ministers at hand. It comprisedwhat became known as the “barons’ cabinet.” Five members were of thenobility, two were corporation directors, and one, Franz Guertner, namedMinister of Justice, had been Hitler’s protector in the Bavarian govern-ment during the troubled days before and after the Beer Hall Putsch.General von Schleicher was smoked out by Hindenburg from his preferredposition behind the scenes and made Minister of Defense. The “barons’cabinet” was received by much of the country as a joke, though the staminaof a number of its members, Baron von Neurath, Baron von Eltz-Ru-benach, Count Schwerin von Krosigk and Dr. Guertner, was such that theylingered 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 June4 he dissolved the Reichstag and convoked new elections for July 31,

The Last Days of the Republic: 1931-33 165

and after some prodding from the suspicious Nazis, he lifted the ban onthe S.A. on June 15. A wave of political violence and murder such aseven Germany had not previously seen immediately followed. The stormtroopers swarmed the streets seeking battle and blood and their challengewas often met, especially by the Communists. In Prussia alone betweenJune 1 and 20 there were 461 pitched battles in the streets which costeighty-two lives and seriously wounded four hundred men. In July,thirty-eight Nazis and thirty Communists were listed among the eighty-sixpersons killed in riots. On Sunday, July 10, eighteen persons were doneto death in the streets, and on the following Sunday, when the Nazis,under police escort, staged a march through Altona, a working-class sub-urb of Hamburg, nineteen persons were shot dead and 285 wounded. Thecivil war which the barons’ cabinet had been called in to halt was growingsteadily worse. All the parties save the Nazis and the Communists de-manded that the government take action to restore order.

Papen responded by doing two things. He banned all political paradesfor the fortnight prior to the July 31 elections. And he took a step whichwas aimed not only at placating the Nazis but at destroying one of the fewremaining pillars of the democratic Republic. On July 20 he deposed thePrussian government and appointed himself Reich Commissioner forPrussia. This was a daring move toward the kind of authoritarian govern-ment he was seeking for the whole of Germany. Papen’s excuse was thatthe Altona riots had shown the Prussian government could not maintainlaw and order. He also charged, on “evidence” hastily produced bySchleicher, that the Prussian authorities were in cahoots with the Com-munists. When the Socialist ministers refused to be deposed except byforce, Papen obligingly supplied it.

Martial law was proclaimed in Berlin and General von Rundstedt, thelocal Reichswehr commander, sent a lieutenant and a dozen men to makethe necessary arrests. This was a development which was not lost on themen of the Right who had taken over the federal power, nor did it escapeHitler’s notice. There was no need to worry any longer that the forcesof the Left or even of the democratic center would put up serious resist-ance to the overthrow of the democratic system. In 1920 a general strikehad saved the Republic from being overthrown. Such a measure wasdebated now among the trade-union leaders and the Socialists and rejectedas too dangerous. Thus by deposing the constitutional Prussian govern-ment Papen had driven another nail into the coffin of the Weimar Re-public. 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 downnot only the Republic but Papen and his barons too. Goebbels expressedthe aim in his diary on June 5: “We must disassociate ourselves at theearliest possible moment from this transitional bourgeois cabinet.” WhenPapen saw Hitler for the first time on June 9, the Nazi leader told him, “Iregard your cabinet only as a temporary solution and will continue my

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efforts to make my party the strongest in the country. The chancellorshipwill then devolve on me.”8

The Reichstag elections of July 31 were the third national electionsheld in Germany within five months, but, far from being weary from somuch electioneering, the Nazis threw themselves into the campaign withmore fanaticism and force than ever before. Despite Hitler’s promise toHindenburg that the Nazis would support the Papen government, Goeb-bels unleashed bitter attacks on the Minister of the Interior and as earlyas July 9 Hitler went to Schleicher and complained bitterly of the govern-ment’s policies. From the size of the crowds that turned out to see Hitlerit 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 Pots-dam, and that evening to 120,000 massed in the giant Grunewald Stadiumin Berlin while outside an additional 100,000 heard his voice by loud-speaker.

The polling on July 31 brought a resounding victory for the NationalSocialist Party. With 13,745,000 votes, the Nazis won 230 seats in theReichstag, making them easily the largest party in Parliament thoughstill far short of a majority in a house of 608 members. The SocialDemocrats, no doubt because of the timidity shown by their leaders inPrussia, lost ten seats and were reduced to 133. The working class wasswinging over to the Communists, who gained 12 seats and became thethird largest party, with 89 members in the Reichstag. The CatholicCenter increased its strength somewhat, from 68 to 73 seats, but theother middle-class parties and even Hugenberg’s German National Party,the only one which had supported Papen in the election, were over-whelmed. Except for the Catholics, the middle and upper classes, it wasevident, had gone over to the Nazis.

On August 2 Hitler took stock of his triumph at Tegernsee, nearMunich, where he conferred with his party leaders. Since the last Reich-stag elections two years before, the National Socialists had gained overseven million votes and increased their representation in Parliament from107 to 230. In the four years since the 1928 elections, the Nazis had wonsome thirteen million new votes. Yet the majority which would sweepthe party into power still eluded Hitler. He had won only 37 per cent ofthe total vote. The majority of Germans was still against him.

Far into the night he deliberated with his lieutenants. Goebbels re-corded the results in his diary entry of August 2: “The Fuehrer facesdifficult decisions. Legal? With the Center?” With the Center the Naziscould form a majority in the Reichstag. But to Goebbels this is “un-thinkable.” Still, he notes, “the Fuehrer comes to no final decision. Thesituation will take a little time to ripen.”

But not much. Hitler, flushed with his victory, though it was less thandecisive, was impatient. On August 4 he hurried to Berlin to see notChancellor von Papan, but General von Schleicher, and, as Goebbelsnoted, “to present his demands. They will not be too moderate,” headded. On August 5, at the Fuerstenberg barracks near Berlin, Hitler

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outlined his terms to General von Schleicher: the chancellorship for him-self; and for his party, the premiership of Prussia, the Reich and PrussianMinistries of Interior, the Reich Ministries of Justice, Economy, andAviation, and a new ministry for Goebbels, that of Popular Enlightenmentand Propaganda. As a sop to Schleicher, Hitler promised him the DefenseMinistry. Furthermore, Hitler said he would demand an enabling actfrom the Reichstag authorizing him to rule by decree for a specifiedperiod; if it were refused, the Reichstag would be “sent home.”

Hitler left the meeting convinced that he had won over Schleicher tohis program and hurried south in good spirits to his mountain retreat onthe Obersalzberg. Goebbels, always cynical in regard to the oppositionand always distrustful of the political General, was not so sure. “It iswell to be skeptical about further developments,” he confided to his diaryon August 6 after he had listened to the Leader’s optimistic report of hismeeting with Schleicher. Goebbels was sure of one thing, though: “Oncewe have the power we will never give it up. They will have to carry ourdead bodies out of the ministries.”

All was not as well as Hitler seemed to think. On August 8 Goebbelswrote: “Telephone call from Berlin. It is full of rumors. The wholeparty is ready to take over power. The S.A. men are leaving their placesof work in order to make themselves ready. The party leaders are pre-paring for the great hour. If all goes well, fine. If things go badly therewill be a terrible setback.” The next day Strasser, Frick and Funk arrivedat Obersalzberg with news that was not exactly encouraging. Schleicherwas turning again, like a worm. He was now insisting that if Hitler gotthe chancellorship he must rule with the consent of the Reichstag. Funkreported that his business friends were worried about the prospects of aNazi 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, Goeb-bels 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 . . . TheWilhelmstrasse is very nervous about it. But that is the point of ourmobilization.” On the following day the Fuehrer could stand the waitingno longer. He set out by motorcar for Berlin. He would make himself“scarce” there, Goebbels says, but on the other hand he would be readywhen he was called. When the call did not come he himself requested tosee 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 supportedPapen 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 “finaldecision” up to Hindenburg.*

* 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 viewof subsequent events.

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Hitler retired in a huff to the nearby Kaiserhof. There at 3 p.m. aphone call came from the President’s office. Someone—probablyGoebbels, judging from his diary—asked, “Has a decision already beenmade? 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 andleaning 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 suf-fered a complete mental relapse lasting more than a week, Hindenburgwas in a surprisingly lucid frame of mind. He listened patiently whileHitler reiterated his demand for the chancellorship and full power. Ottovon Meissner, chief of the Presidential Chancellery, and Goering, whohad accompanied Hitler, were the only witnesses to the conversation, andthough Meissner is not a completely dependable source, his affidavit atNuremberg 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 goodconscience risk transferring the power of government to a new party such asthe National Socialists, which did not command a majority and which wasintolerant, noisy and undisciplined.

At this point, Hindenburg, with a certain show of excitement, referred toseveral recent occurrences—clashes between the Nazis and the police, acts ofviolence committed by Hitler’s followers against those who were of a differentopinion, excesses against Jews and other illegal acts. All these incidents hadstrengthened him in his conviction that there were numerous wild elements inthe Party beyond control . . . After extended discussion Hindenburg pro-posed to Hitler that he should declare himself ready to co-operate with theother parties, in particular with the Right and Center, and that he should giveup the one-sided idea that he must have complete power. In co-operatingwith other parties, Hindenburg declared, he would be able to show what hecould achieve and improve upon. If he could show positive results, he wouldacquire increasing and even dominating influence even in a coalition govern-ment. Hindenburg stated that this also would be the best way to eliminate thewidespread fear that a National Socialist government would make ill use ofits power and would suppress all other viewpoints and gradually eliminatethem. Hindenburg stated that he was ready to accept Hitler an.l the repre-sentatives of his movement in a coalition government, the precise combinationto be a matter of negotiation, but that he could not take the responsibility ofgiving exclusive power to Hitler alone . . . Hitler was adamant, however, inrefusing to put himself in the position of bargaining with the leaders of theother parties and in such manner to form a coalition government.9

The discussion, then, ended without agreement, but not before the oldPresident, still standing, had delivered a stern lecture to the Nazi leader.In the words of the official communique issued immediately afterward,Hindenburg “regretted that Herr Hitler did not see himself in a position

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to support a national government appointed with the confidence of theReich President, as he had agreed to do before the Reichstag elections.”In the view of the venerable President, Hitler had broken his word, butlet him beware of the future. “The President,” the communique statedfurther, “gravely exhorted Herr Hitler to conduct the opposition on thepart of the N.S. Party in a chivalrous manner, and to bear in mind hisresponsibility to the Fatherland and to the German people.”

The communique giving Hindenburg’s version of the meeting and in-sisting that Hitler had demanded “complete control of the State” waspublished in such a hurry that it caught Goebbels’ propaganda machinenapping and did much harm to Hitler’s cause, not only among the generalpublic but among the Nazis themselves. In vain did Hitler respond thathe had not asked for “complete power” but only for the chancellorship anda 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 adifficult task,” Goebbels noted. “Who knows if their formations can beheld together? Nothing is more difficult than to tell victory-flushed troopsthat victory has been snatched out of their hand.” Late that night thelittle Doktor sought consolation in the reading of the letters of Frederickthe Great. Next day he raced off for a vacation on the beaches of theBaltic. “Great hopelessness reigns among the party comrades,” he wrote.He declined to leave his room even to speak with them. “1 don’t want tohear about politics for at least a week. I want only sun, light, air andpeace.”

Hitler retired to the Obersalzberg to imbibe the same elements andponder the immediate future. As Goebbels said, “the first big chancehas been missed.” Hermann Rauschning, the then Nazi leader in Danzig,found the Fuehrer brooding sullenly on his mountaintop. “We must beruthless,” Hitler told him, and launched into a tirade against Papen. Buthe 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 createthe nation before even beginning to tackle the national tasks before us.”But supposing the Nazis were suppressed by a military dictatorship underPapen and Schleicher? Hitler abruptly asked Rauschning whether Danzig,an independent city-state then under the protection of the League of Na-tions, had an extradition agreement with Germany. Rauschning did notat first understand the question, but it later became evident that Hitlerwas looking for a place that might serve as an asylum.10 In his diaryGoebbels noted “rumors that the Fuehrer is to be arrested.” Yet even now,after his rebuff by the Reich President and the government of Papen andSchleicher, and despite his fears that his party might be outlawed, he wasdetermined to stick to his path of “legality.” He squelched all talk of aputsch by the S.A. Except for occasional spells of depression he remainedconfident that he would achieve his goal—not by force and scarcely bywinning a parliamentary majority, but by the means which had carried

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Schleicher and Papen to the top: by backstairs intrigue, a game that twocould play.

It was not long before he gave an example. On August 25 Goebbelsconferred with Hitler at Berchtesgaden and noted: “We have got intotouch with the Center Party, if only to bring pressure on our opponents.”Next day Goebbels was back in Berlin, where he found that Schleicherhad already found out “about our feelers to the Center.” On the followingday he went to see the General just to make sure. He thought Schleicherappeared worried at the prospect of Hitler and the Catholic Center gettingtogether, for between them they commanded an absolute majority in theReichstag. As to Schleicher, Goebbels wrote: “I don’t know what isgenuine or false in him.”

The contacts with the Center Party, though never intended, as Goeb-bels said, to be much more than a means of applying pressure on thePapen government, paid off in a farcical event which now occurred inthe Reichstag and which marked the beginning of the end for the cavalry-man Chancellor. When the chamber convened on August 30 the Centristsjoined the Nazis in electing Goering President of the Reichstag. For thefirst time, then, a National Socialist was in the chair when the Reichstagreconvened on September 12 to begin its working session. Goering madethe most of his opportunity. Chancellor von Papen had obtained inadvance from the President a decree for the dissolution of the chamber—the first time that the death warrant of the Reichstag had been signed be-fore it met to transact business. But for this first working session heneglected to bring it along. He had with him instead a speech outliningthe program of his government, having been assured that one of theNationalist deputies, in agreement with most of the other parties, wouldobject to a vote on the expected Communist motion for censure of thegovernment. In this case a single objection from any one of the 600-oddmembers was enough to postpone a vote.

When Ernst Torgler, the Communist leader, introduced his motionas an amendment to the order of the day, however, neither a Nationalistdeputy nor any other rose to object. Finally Frick asked for a half hour’sadjournment on behalf of the Nazis.

“The situation was now serious,” Papen says in his memoirs, “and Ihad been caught unawares.” He sent a messenger posthaste to the Chan-cellery to fetch the dissolution order.

In the meantime Hitler conferred with his parliamentary party groupin the Reichstag President’s Palace across the street. The Nazis were ina dilemma, and they were embarrassed. The Nationalists, they felt, haddouble-crossed them by not moving to postpone the vote. Now Hitler’sparty, in order to bring down the Papen government, would have to votewith the Communists on a Communist motion. Hitler decided to swallowthe pill of such an unsavory association. He ordered his deputies to votefor the Communist amendment and overthrow Papen before the Chancel-lor could dissolve the Reichstag. To accomplish this, of course, Goering,as presiding officer, would have to pull some fast and neat tricks of parlia-

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mentary procedure. The former air ace, a man of daring and of manyabilities, as he was to prove on a larger stage later, was equal to theoccasion.

When the session reconvened Papen appeared with the familiar reddispatch case which, by tradition, carried the dissolution order he had sohastily retrieved. But when he requested the floor to read it, the Presidentof 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. Allbut Goering. His smiling face was turned the other way. He called foran immediate vote. By now Papen’s countenance, according to eyewit-nesses, had turned from red to white with anger. He strode up to thePresident’s rostrum and plunked the dissolution order on his desk. Goe-ring took no notice of it and ordered the vote to proceed. Papen, followedby his ministers, none of whom were members of the chamber, stalked out.The deputies voted: 513 to 32 against the government. Only then didGoering notice the piece of paper which had been thrust so angrily on hisdesk. He read it to the assembly and ruled that since it had been counter-signed by a Chancellor who already had been voted out of office by aconstitutional majority it had no validity.

Which elements in Germany gained and which lost by this farcicalincident, and how much, was not immediately clear. That the dandy,Papen, had been made a joke of there was no doubt; but then he hadalways been somewhat of a joke, even, as Ambassador Frangois-Poncetsaid, to his friends. That the Reichstag had shown that the overwhelmingmajority of Germans opposed Hindenburg’s hand-picked presidentialgovernment was clear enough. But in the process had it not furthersapped public confidence in the parliamentary system? As for the Nazis,had they not again shown themselves to be not only irresponsible butready to connive even with the Communists to achieve their ends? More-over, were the citizens not weary of elections and did the Nazis not facelosing votes in the inevitable new election, the fourth within the year?Gregor Strasser and even Frick thought that they did, and that such a lossmight be disastrous to the party.

Hitler, however, Goebbels reported that same evening, “was besidehimself with joy. Again he has made a clear, unmistakable decision.”

The Reichstag quickly recognized its dissolution, and new electionswere set for November 6. For the Nazis they presented certain difficulties.For one thing, as Goebbels noted, the people were tired of politicalspeeches and propaganda. Even the party workers, as he admitted inhis diary of October 15, had “become very nervous as the result of theseeverlasting elections. They are overworked . . .” Also there werefinancial difficulties. Big business and big finance were swinging behindPapen, who had given them certain concessions. They were becomingincreasingly distrustful, as Funk had warned, of Hitler’s refusal to co-operate with Hindenburg and with what seemed to them his growingradicalism and his tendency to work even with the Communists, as the

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Reichstag episode had shown. Goebbels took notice of this in his diaryof October 15: “Money is extraordinarily hard to obtain. All the gentle-men of ‘Property and Education’ are standing by the government.”

A few days before the election the Nazis had joined the Communistsin staging a strike of the transport workers in Berlin, a strike disavowedby the trade unions and the Socialists. This brought a further drying upof financial sources among the businessmen just when the Nazi Partyneeded funds most to make a whirlwind finish in the campaign. Goebbelsnoted lugubriously on November 1: “Scarcity of money has become achronic illness with us. We lack enough to really carry out a big campaign.Many bourgeois circles have been frightened off by our participation inthe strike. Even many of our party comrades are beginning to have theirdoubts.” On November 5, the eve of the elections: “Last attack. Desper-ate drive of the party against defeat. We succeed in getting 10,000marks at the last minute. This will be thrown into the campaign Saturdayafternoon. We have done everything that could be done. Now let fatedecide.”

Fate, and the German electorate, decided on November 6 a number ofthings, none of them conclusive for the future of the crumbling Republic.The Nazis lost two million votes and 34 seats in the Reichstag, reducingthem to 196 deputies. The Communists gained three quarters of a mil-lion votes and the Social Democrats lost the same number, with the resultthat the Communist seats rose from 89 to 100 and the Socialist seatsdropped from 133 to 121. The German National Party, the sole one whichhad backed the government, won nearly a million additional votes—obviously from the Nazis—and now had 52 seats instead of 37. Thoughthe National Socialists were still the largest party in the country, the lossof two million votes was a severe setback. For the first time the greatNazi tide was ebbing, and from a point far short of a majority. Thelegend of invincibility had been shattered. Hitler was in a weaker positionto bargain for power than he had been since July.

Realizing this, Papen put aside what he calls his “personal distaste” forHitler and wrote him a letter on November 13 inviting him to “discussthe situation.” But Hitler made so many conditions in his reply thatPapen abandoned all hope of obtaining an understanding with him. TheNazi leader’s intransigence did not surprise the breezy, incompetentChancellor, but a new course which his friend and mentor, Schleicher,now proposed did surprise him. For the slippery kingmaker had cometo the conclusion that Papen’s usefulness, like that of Bruening beforehim, had come to an end. New plans were sprouting in his fertile mind.His good friend Papen must go. The President must be left completelyfree to deal with the political parties, especially with the largest. He urgedPapen’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 remainfor over an hour. Hindenburg presented Hitler with two choices: the

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chancellorship if he could secure a workable majority in the Reichstag fora definite program, or the vice-chancellorship under Papen in anotherpresidential cabinet that would rule by emergency decrees. Hitler sawthe President again on the twenty-first and he also exchanged severalletters with Meissner. But there was no agreement. Hitler could not geta workable majority in Parliament. Though the Center Party agreed tosupport him on condition that he would not aspire to dictatorship, Hugen-berg withheld the co-operation of the Nationalists. Hitler thereforeresumed his demand for the chancellorship of a presidential government,but this the President would not give him. If there was to be a cabinetgoverning by decree Hindenburg preferred his friend Papen to head it.Hitler, he said in a letter on his behalf dispatched by Meissner, could notbe given such a post “because such a cabinet is bound to develop into aparty dictatorship. ... I cannot take the responsibility for this beforemy oath and my conscience.”11

The old Field Marshal was more prophetic on the first point than onthe second. As for Hitler, once more he had knocked on the door of theChancellery, 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 Schleicherwent to see Hindenburg on the evening of December 1 he was sure thathe would be reappointed Chancellor. Little did he suspect what thescheming General had been up to. Schleicher had been in touch withStrasser and had suggested that if the Nazis would not come into a Papengovernment perhaps they would join a cabinet in which he himself wereChancellor. Hitler was asked to come to Berlin for consultations withthe General, and according to one version widely publicized in the Germanpress and later accepted by most historians, the Fuehrer actually took thenight train to Berlin from Munich but was hauled off in the dead of thenight by Goering at Jena and spirited away to Weimar for a meeting ofthe top Nazi leaders. Actually the Nazi version of this incident is, surpris-ingly, probably the more accurate. Goebbels’ diary for November 30recounts that a telegram came for Hitler asking him to hurry to Berlin,but that he decided to let Schleicher wait while he conferred with hiscomrades at Weimar, where he was scheduled to open the campaign forthe Thuringian elections. At this conference, attended by the Big Fiveleaders, Goering, Goebbels, Strasser, Frick and Hitler, on December 1,there was considerable disagreement. Strasser, supported by Frick, urgedat least Nazi toleration of a Schleicher government, though he himselfpreferred joining it. Goering and Goebbels argued strenuously againstsuch a course and Hitler sided with them. Next day Hitler advised acertain Major Ott, whom Schleicher had sent to him, to counsel theGeneral not to take the chancellorship, but it was too late.

Papen had been blandly unaware of the intrigue which Schleicher wasweaving behind his back. At the beginning of the meeting with the Presi-dent on December 1 he had confidently outlined his plans for the future.He should continue as Chancellor, rule by decree and let the Reichstaggo hang for a while until he could “amend the constitution.” In effect,

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Papen wanted “amendments” which would take the country back to thedays 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 didto the Field Marshal, that his proposals involved “a breach of the presentconstitution by the President,” but he assured Hindenburg that “he mightbe justified in placing the welfare of the nation above his oath to the con-stitution,” as, he added, Bismarck once had done “for the sake of thecountry.”13

To Papen’s great surprise, Schleicher broke in to object. He playedupon the aged President’s obvious reluctance to violate his oath to upholdthe constitution, if it could be avoided—and the General thought it could.He believed a government which could command a majority in the Reich-stag was possible if he himself headed it. He was sure he could detachStrasser and at least sixty Nazi deputies from Hitler. To this Nazi fractionhe could add the middle-class parties and the Social Democrats. He eventhought the trade unions would support him.

Hindenburg was shocked at such an idea and, turning to Papen, askedhim then and there to go ahead with the forming of a new government.“Schleicher,” says Papen, “appeared dumfounded.” They had a longargument after they had left the President but could reach no agreement.As they parted, Schleicher, in the famous words addressed to Luther ashe 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 ata cabinet meeting which he had called.

Schleicher rose [Papen says] and declared that there was no possibility ofcarrying out the directive that the President had given me. Any attempt to doso would reduce the country to chaos. The police and the armed services couldnot guarantee to maintain transport and supply services in the event of ageneral strike, nor would they be able to ensure law and order in the event of acivil war. The General Staff had made a study in this respect and he had ar-ranged for Major Ott [its author] to place himself at the Cabinet’s disposal andpresent a report.13

Whereupon the General produced the major. If Schleicher’s remarkshad shaken Papen, the conveniently timed report of Major Eugen Ott(who would later be Hitler’s ambassador to Tokyo) demolished him. Ottsimply stated that “the defense of the frontiers and the maintenance oforder against both Nazis and Communists was beyond the strength of theforces at the disposal of the federal and state governments. It is thereforerecommended that the Reich government should abstain from declaringa state of emergency.”14

To Papen’s pained surprise, the German Army which had once sentthe Kaiser packing and which more recently, at Schleicher’s instigation,had eliminated General Groener and Chancellor Bruening, was nowcashiering him. He went immediately to Hindenburg with the news, hop-

ing that the President would fire Schleicher as Minister of Defense andretain Chancellor Papen—and indeed proposing that he do so.

“My dear Papen,” the stout old President replied, “you will not thinkmuch of me if 1 change my mind. But I am too old and have been throughtoo much to accept the responsibility for a civil war. Our only hope isto 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, aphotograph of the President arrived for him with the inscription, “Ichhalt' einen Kameraden/” The next day the President wrote him in his ownhandwriting of the “heavy heart” he felt in relieving him of his post andreiterating that his confidence in him “remains unshaken.” That wastrue and would shortly be proved.

On December 2 Kurt von Schleicher became Chancellor, the first gen-eral to occupy that post since General Count Georg Leo von Caprivi deCaprara de Montecuccoli, who had succeeded Bismarck in 1890. Schlei-cher’s tortuous intrigues had at last brought him to the highest office at amoment 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 thePresident, 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 thisentry: “Schleicher is named Chancellor. He won’t last long.”

Papen thought so too. He was smarting from wounded vanity andthirsting for revenge against his “friend and successor,” as he calls him inhis memoirs. To get Papen out of the way Schleicher offered him theParis embassy, but he declined. The President, Papen says, wanted himto remain in Berlin “within reach.” That was the most strategic placeto weave his own web of intrigues against the archintriguer. Busy andagile as a spider, Papen set to work. As the strife-ridden year of 1932approached its end, Berlin was full of cabals, and of cabals within cabals.Besides those of Papen and Schleicher, there was one at the President’sPalace, where Hindenburg’s son, Oskar, and his State Secretary, Meissner,held sway behind the throne. There was one at the Kaiserhof hotel, whereHitler and the men around him were plotting not only for power butagainst each other. Soon the webs of intrigue became so enmeshed thatby 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 OFTHE REPUBLIC

“I stayed in power only fifty-seven days,” Schleicher remarked once inthe hearing of the attentive French ambassador, “and on each and everyone of them I was betrayed fifty-seven times. Don’t ever speak to me of

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‘German loyalty’!”15 His own career and doings had certainly made himan authority on the subject.

He began his chancellorship by making Gregor Strasser an offer to be-come Vice-Chancellor of Germany and Premier of Prussia. Having failedto get Hitler to join his government, Schleicher now tried to split the Nazisby this bait to Strasser. There was some reason to believe he might suc-ceed. Strasser was the Number Two man in the party, and among the left-wing element, which really believed in a national socialism, he was morepopular than Hitler. As leader of the Party Organization he was in directtouch with all the provincial and local leaders and seemingly had earnedtheir loyalty. He was now convinced that Hitler had brought the move-ment to a dead end. The more radical followers were going over to theCommunists. The party itself was financially bankrupt. In NovemberFritz Thyssen had warned that he could make no further contributions tothe movement. There were simply no funds to meet the payroll of thou-sands of party functionaries or to maintain the S.A., which alone cost twoand a half million marks a week. The printers of the extensive Nazi presswere threatening to stop the presses unless they received payment onoverdue bills. Goebbels had touched on this in his diary on November11: “The financial situation of the Berlin organization is hopeless. Noth-ing but debts and obligations.” And in December he was regretting thatparty salaries would have to be cut. Finally, the provincial elections inThuringia on December 3, the day Schleicher called in Strasser, revealeda loss of 40 per cent in the Nazi vote. It had become obvious, at least toStrasser, that the Nazis would never obtain office through the ballot.

He therefore urged Hitler to abandon his “all or nothing” policy andtake what power he could by joining in a coalition with Schleicher. Other-wise, he feared, the party would fall to pieces. He had been pressing thisline for some months, and Goebbels’ diary from midsummer to Decemberis full of bitter references to Strasser’s “disloyalty” to Hitler.

The showdown came on December 5 at a meeting of the party leadersat the Kaiserhof in Berlin. Strasser demanded that the Nazis at least“tolerate” the Schleicher government, and he was backed by Frick, whoheaded the Nazi bloc in the Reichstag, many of whose members fearedlosing their seats and their deputy’s salary if Hitler provoked any moreelections. Goering and Goebbels strenuously opposed Strasser and wonHitler 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 theseventh, Hitler and Strasser had a conversation at the Kaiserhof that de-generated into a bitter quarrel. Hitler accused his chief lieutenant of try-ing to stab him in the back, oust him from his leadership of the party andbreak up the Nazi movement. Strasser heatedly denied this, swore that hehad been loyal but accused Hitler of leading the party to destruction. Ap-parently he left unsaid a number of things that had been swelling withinhim 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 hisoffices in the party.

The letter, which reached Hitler on the eighth, fell, as Goebbels’ diarysays, “like a bombshell.” The atmosphere in the Kaiserhof was that of agraveyard. “We are all dejected and depressed,” Goebbels noted. It wasthe greatest blow Hitler had suffered since he rebuilt the party in 1925.Now, on the threshold of power, his principal follower had deserted himand threatened to smash all he had built up in seven years.

In the evening [Goebbels wrote], the Fuehrer comes to our home. It is diffi-cult to be cheerful. We are all depressed, above all because of the danger of thewhole party falling apart, and all our work having been in vain . . . Tele-phone call from Dr. Ley. The situation in the party worsens from hour tohour. 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 justthen appearing on the streets. Hitler’s reaction was described by Goeb-bels:

Treason! Treason! Treason!

For hours the Fuehrer paces up and down in the hotel room, He is em-bittered and deeply wounded by this treachery. Finally he stops and says: Ifthe party once falls to pieces I’ll put an end to it all in three minutes with apistol shot.

The party did not fall apart and Hitler did not shoot himself. Strassermight have achieved both these ends, which would have radically alteredthe 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 havingbeen agreed that the quarrel must somehow be patched over to rescue theparty from disaster. But Strasser, fed up with it all, had taken a trainsouth for a vacation in sunny Italy. Hitler, always at his best when he de-tected weakness in an opponent, struck swiftly and hard. The PoliticalOrganization which Strasser had built up was taken over by the Fuehrerhimself, with Dr. Ley, the Gauleiter from Cologne, as his staff chief.Strasser’s friends were purged and all party leaders convoked to Berlin tosign a new declaration of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, which they did.

The wily Austrian had once more extricated himself from a tight fixthat might easily have proved disastrous. Gregor Strasser, whom so manyhad thought to be a greater man than Hitler, was quickly destroyed. “Adead man,” Goebbels called him in his diary notation of December 9.This was to become literally true within two years when Hitler decided tosettle accounts.

On December 10, a week after he had been tripped by General vonSchleicher, Franz von Papen began to spin his own web of intrigues. Fol-

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lowing a speech that evening to the exclusive Herrenklub, from whosearistocratic and wealthy members he had recruited his short-lived cabinet,he had a private talk with Baron Kurt von Schroeder, the Cologne bankerwho had contributed funds to the National Socialist Party. He suggestedthat the financier arrange for him to see Hitler on the sly. In his memoirsPapen claims that it was Schroeder who made the suggestion but admitsthat he agreed. By a strange coincidence, Wilhelm Keppler, Hitler’s eco-nomic adviser and one of his contact men with business circles, made thesame suggestion on behalf of the Nazi leader.

The two men, who had been at such odds only a few weeks before, metin what they hoped was the greatest of secrecy at the home of Schroederin Cologne on the morning of January 4. Papen was surprised when aphotographer snapped him at the entrance, but gave it little thought untilthe next day. Hitler was accompanied by Hess, Himmler and Keppler,but he left his aides in the parlor and retired to Schroeder’s study, wherehe was closeted for two hours with Papen and their host. Though the con-versation started badly, with Hitler complaining bitterly of the way Papenhad treated the Nazis while Chancellor, it soon developed to a point thatwas to prove fateful for both men and their country. This was a crucialmoment for the Nazi chief. By a superhuman effort he had kept the partyintact after Strasser’s defection. He had traveled up and down the countryaddressing three and four meetings a day, exhorting the party leaders tokeep together behind him. But Nazi spirits remained at a low ebb, andthe party was financially bankrupt. Many were saying it was finished.Goebbels had reflected the general feeling in his diary the last week of theyear: “1932 has brought us eternal bad luck . . . The past was difficultand the future looks dark and gloomy; all prospects and hopes have quitedisappeared.”

Hitler therefore was not nearly in so favorable a position to bargain forpower as he had been during the previous summer and autumn. Butneither was Papen; he was out of office. In their adversity, their mindsmet.

The terms on which they met are a matter of dispute. In his trial atNuremberg and in his memoirs Papen blandly maintained that, ever loyalto Schleicher, he merely suggested to Hitler that he join the General’sgovernment. In view, however, of Papen’s long record of deceit, of hisquite natural desire to present himself in the most favorable light at Nu-remberg and in his book, and of subsequent events, it seems certain thatSchroeder’s quite different account, which was given at Nuremberg, is themore truthful one. The banker maintained that what Papen suggestedwas the replacement of the Schleicher government by a Hitler-Papengovernment in which the two of them would be coequal. But:

Hitler . . . said if he were made Chancellor it would be necessary for himto be the head of the government but that supporters of Papen could go intohis government as ministers when they were willing to go along with him in hispolicy of changing many things. These changes included elimination of Social

Democrats, Communists and Jews from leading positions in Germany and therestoration of order in public life. Von Papen and Hitler reached agreementin principle . . . They agreed that further details would have to be workedout 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 ofPapen and Hitler, the newspapers in Berlin came out with flaming head-lines on the morning of January 5 over accounts of the Cologne meeting,accompanied by editorial blasts against Papen for his disloyalty to Schlei-cher. The wily General had placed his spies with his usual acumen; oneof them, Papen later learned, had been that photographer who hadsnapped his picture as he entered Schroeder’s home.

Besides his deal with Papen, Hitler got two other things out of theCologne meeting which were of great value to him. He learned from theex-Chancellor that Hindenburg had not given Schleicher power to dis-solve the Reichstag. This meant that the Nazis, with the help of the Com-munists, could overthrow the General any time they wished. Secondly,out of the meeting came an understanding that West German business in-terests would take over the debts of the Nazi Party. Two days after theCologne talks Goebbels noted “pleasing progress in political develop-ments” but still complained of the “bad financial situation.” Ten dayslater, on January 16, he reported that the financial position of the partyhad “fundamentally improved overnight.”

In the meantime Chancellor Schleicher went about—with an optimismthat was myopic, to say the least—trying to establish a stable government.On December 15 he made a fireside broadcast to the nation begging hislisteners to forget that he was a general and assuring them that he was asupporter “neither of capitalism nor of socialism” and that to him “con-cepts such as private economy or planned economy have lost their ter-rors.” His principal task, he said, was to provide work for the unem-ployed and get the country back on its economic feet. There would beno tax increase, no more wage cuts. In fact, he was canceling the last cutin wages and relief which Papen had made. Furthermore, he was endingthe agricultural quotas which Papen had established for the benefit of thelarge landowners and instead was launching a scheme to take 800,000acres from the bankrupt Junker estates in the East and give them to 25,000peasant families. Also prices of such essentials as coal and meat would bekept down by rigid control.

This was a bid for the support of the very masses which he had hithertoopposed or disregarded, and Schleicher followed it up with conversationswith the trade unions, to whose leaders he gave the impression that heenvisaged a future in which organized labor and the Army would be twinpillars of the nation. But labor was not to be taken in by a man whom itprofoundly mistrusted, and it declined its co-operation.

The industrialists and the big landowners, on the other hand, rose upin arms against the new Chancellor’s program, which they clamored was

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nothing less than Bolshevism. The businessmen were aghast at Schlei-cher’s sudden friendliness to the unions. The owners of large estates wereinfuriated at his reduction of agricultural protection and livid at the pros-pect of his breaking up the bankrupt estates in the East. On January 12the Landbund, the association of the larger farmers, bitterly attacked thegovernment, and its leaders, two of whom were Nazis, called on the Presi-dent with their protests. Hindenburg, now a Junker landowner himself,called his Chancellor to account. Schleicher’s answer was to threaten topublish a secret Reichstag report on the Osthilfe (Eastern Relief) loans—a scandal which, as everyone knew, implicated hundreds of the oldestJunker families, who had waxed fat on unredeemed government “loans,”and which indirectly involved even the President himself, since the EastPrussian estate which had been presented to him had been illegally deededto his son to escape inheritance taxes.

Despite the uproar among the industrialists and landowners and thecoolness of the trade unions, Schleicher remained unaccountably confi-dent that all was going well. On New Year’s Day, 1933, he and his cabi-net called on the aged President, who proceeded to express his gratitudethat “the gravest hardships are overcome and the upward path is now opento us.” On January 4, the day Papen and Hitler were conferring in Co-logne, the Chancellor arranged for Strasser, who had returned from hisholiday in the Italian sun, to see Hindenburg. The former Number TwoNazi, when he saw the President a few days later, expressed willingnessto join the Schleicher cabinet. This move threw consternation into theNazi 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 alocal election success in order to improve the Fuehrer’s bargaining posi-tion with Papen. Goebbels recounts the arrival of Goering at midnight ofJanuary 13 with the bad news of Strasser and of how the party chiefs hadsat up all night discussing it, agreeing that if he took office it would be agrave setback to the party.

Schleicher thought so too, and on January 15 when Kurt von Schusch-nigg, then the Austrian Minister of Justice, visited him he assured himthat “Herr Hitler was no longer a problem, his movement had ceased tobe a political danger, and the whole problem had been solved, it was athing of the past.”17

But Strasser did not come into the cabinet, nor did the leader of theNationalist Party, Hugenberg, who on the day before, the fourteenth, hadassured Hindenburg that he would. Both men soon turned to Hitler,Strasser to be turned down cold and Hugenberg with more success. OnJanuary 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 elec-tions of little Lippe. It was not much of an achievement. The total votewas only 90,000, of which the Nazis obtained 38,000, or 39 per cent, anincrease of some 17 per cent over their previous poll. But, led by Goeb-bels, the Nazi leaders beat the drums over their “victory,” and strangelyenough it seems to have impressed a number of conservatives, including

the men behind Hindenburg, of whom the principal ones were StateSecretary Meissner and the President’s son, Oskar.

On the evening of January 22, these two gentlemen stole out of thepresidential quarters, grabbed a taxi, as Meissner says, to avoid beingnoticed and drove to the suburban home of a hitherto unknown Nazi bythe name of Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was a friend of Papen—theyhad served together on the Turkish front during the war. There theymet Papen, Hitler, Goering and Frick. According to Meissner, Oskarvon Hindenburg had been opposed to any truck with the Nazis up to thisfa'teful evening. Hitler may have known this; at any rate he insisted onhaving a talk with him “under four eyes,” and to Meissner’s astonishmentyoung Hindenburg assented and withdrew with Hitler to another room,where they were closeted together for an hour. What Hitler said to thePresident’s son, who was not noted for a brilliant mind or a strong char-acter, has never been revealed. It was generally believed in Nazi circlesthat Hitler made both offers and threats, the latter consisting of hints todisclose to the public Oskar’s involvement in the Osthilfe scandal and thetax evasion on the Hindenburg estate. One can only judge the offers bythe fact that a few months later five thousand tax-free acres were addedto the Hindenburg family property at Neudeck and that in August 1934Oskar was jumped from colonel to major general in the Army.

At any rate there is no doubt that Hitler made a strong impression onthe President’s son. “In the taxi on the way back,” Meissner later re-counted in his affidavit at Nuremberg, “Oskar von Hindenburg was ex-tremely silent, and the only remark which he made was that it could notbe helped—the Nazis had to be taken into the government. My impres-sion was that Hitler had succeeded in getting him under his spell.”

It only remained for Hitler to cast the spell over the father. This ad-mittedly was more difficult, for whatever the old Field Marshal’s defi-ciencies of mind, age had not softened his granite character. More diffi-cult, but not impossible. Papen, busy as a beaver, was working daily onthe old man. And it was easy to see that, for all his cunning, Schleicherwas fast stumbling to a fall. He had failed to win over the Nazis or to splitthem. He could get no backing from the Nationalists, the Center or theSocial Democrats.

On January 23, therefore, Schleicher went to see Hindenburg, admittedthat he could not find a majority in the Reichstag and demanded its dis-solution and emergency powers to rule by decree under Article 48 of theconstitution. According to Meissner, the General also asked for the“temporary elimination” of the Reichstag and frankly acknowledged thathe would have to transform his government into “a military dictator-ship.”18 Despite all his devious plotting, Schleicher was back wherePapen had been early in December, but their roles were now reversed.Then Papen had demanded emergency powers and Schleicher had op-posed him and proposed that he himself form a majority government withthe backing of the Nazis. Now the General was insisting on dictatorialrule, and the sly fox Papen was assuring the Field Marshal that he himself

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could corral Hitler for a government that would have a majority in theReichstag. Such are the ups and downs of rogues and intriguers!

Hindenburg, reminding Schleicher of the reasons he had given on De-cember 2 for upsetting Papen, informed him that they still held good. Hebade him return to his task of finding a Reichstag majority. Schleicherwas finished, and he knew it. So did everyone else who was in on thesecret. 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 thePresident and tendered the resignation of his government. “I have alreadyone foot in the grave, and I am not sure that I shall not regret this actionin heaven later on,” Hindenburg told the disillusioned General. “Afterthis breach of trust, sir, I am not sure that you will go to heaven,” Schlei-cher replied, and quickly faded out of German history.19

At noon of the same day Papen was entrusted by the President to ex-plore the possibilities of forming a government under Hitler “within theterms of the constitution.” For a week this sly, ambitious man had beenflirting with the idea of double-crossing Hitler after all and becomingChancellor again of a presidential government backed by Hugenberg. OnJanuary 27 Goebbels noted: “There is still the possibility that Papen willagain be made Chancellor.” The day before, Schleicher had sent theCommander in Chief of the Army, General von Hammerstein, to thePresident to warn him against selecting Papen. In the maze of intrigueswith which Berlin was filled, Schleicher was at the last minute plumpingfor Hitler to replace him. Hindenburg assured the Army commander hehad no intention of appointing “that Austrian corporal.”

The next day, Sunday, January 29, was a crucial one, with the con-spirators playing their last desperate hands and filling the capital with themost alarming and conflicting rumors, not all of them groundless by anymeans. Once more Schleicher dispatched the faithful Hammerstein tostir up the brew. The Army chief sought out Hitler to warn him onceagain that Papen might leave him out in the cold and that it might be wisefor the Nazi leader to ally himself with the fallen Chancellor and theArmy. Hitler was not much interested. He returned to the Kaiserhof tohave cakes and coffee with his aides and it was at this repast that Goeringappeared with the tidings that the Fuehrer would be named Chancelloron the morrow.

That night the Nazi chieftains were celebrating the momentous news atGoebbels’ home on the Reichskanzlerplatz when another emissary fromSchleicher arrived with startling news. This was Werner von Alvensle-ben, a man so given to conspiracy that when one did not exist he inventedone. He informed the jubilant party that Schleicher and Hammersteinhad put the Potsdam garrison on an alarm footing and were preparing tobundle the old President off to Neudeck and establish a military dictator-ship. This was a gross exaggeration. It is possible that the two generalswere playing with the idea but most certain that they had not taken anyaction. The Nazis, however, became hysterical with alarm. Goering

hastened as fast as his bulk allowed across the square to alert the Presi-dent and Papen. What Hitler did he later described himself.

My immediate counteraction to this planned [military] putsch was to sendfor the Commander of the Berlin S.A., Count von Helldorf, and through him toalert the whole S.A. of Berlin. At the same time I instructed Major Wecke ofthe Police, whom I knew I could trust, to prepare for a sudden seizure of theWilhelmstrasse by six police battalions . . . Finally I instructed General vonBlomberg (who had been selected as Reichswehr Minister-elect) to proceed atonce, on arrival in Berlin at 8 a.m. on January 30, direct to the Old Gentlemanto be sworn in, and thus to be in a position, as Commander in Chief of theReichswehr, to suppress any possible attempts at a coup d’etat.20

Behind the backs of Schleicher and the Commander in Chief of theArmy—everything in this frenzied period was being done behind some-one’s back—General Werner von Blomberg had been summoned, not byHitler, who was not yet in power, but by Hindenburg and Papen fromGeneva, where he was representing Germany at the Disarmament Con-ference, to become the new Minister of Defense in the Hitler-Papen cabi-net. He was a man who, as Hitler later said, already enjoyed his confi-dence and who had come under the spell of his chief of staff in EastPrussia, 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 forhim. A Major von Kuntzen, Hammerstein’s adjutant, commanded him toreport to the Commander in Chief of the Army. Colonel Oskar von Hin-denburg, adjutant to his father, ordered the bewildered Blomberg to re-port to the President of the Republic. Blomberg went to the President,was immediately sworn in as Defense Minister, and thus was given theauthority not only to put down any attempted coup by the Army but to seethat the military supported the new government, which a few hours laterwould be named. Hitler was always grateful to the Army for acceptinghim at that crucial moment. Not long afterward he told a party rally, “Ifin the days of our revolution the Army had not stood on our side, then wewould not be standing here today.” It was a responsibility which wouldweigh heavily on the officer corps in the days to come and which, in theend, they would more than regret.

On this wintry morning of January 30, 1933, the tragedy of the Wei-mar Republic, of the bungling attempt for fourteen frustrating years of theGermans 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 placeamong the motley group of conspirators gathered to bury the republicanregime. Papen later described it.

At about half-past ten the members of the proposed Cabinet met in myhouse and walked across the garden to the Presidential palace, where wewaited in Meissner’s office. Hitler immediately renewed his complaints abouf

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not being appointed Commissioner for Prussia. He felt that this severely re-stricted his power. I told him . . . the Prussian appointment could be leftuntil 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 himby stating that he would make no changes in the Cabinet, whatever the resultmight be ... By this time it was long past eleven o’clock, the time that hadbeen appointed for our interview with the President, and Meissner asked me toend 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 coali-tion would break up before it was born ... At last we were shown in to thePresident and I made the necessary formal introductions. Hindenburg madea short speech about the necessity of full co-operation in the interests of thenation, 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 politicaldeal with the old-school reactionaries he privately detested, the formertramp from Vienna, the derelict of the First World War, the violent revo-lutionary, became Chancellor of the great nation.

To be sure, the National Socialists were in a decided minority in thegovernment; they had only three of the eleven posts in the cabinet andexcept for the chancellorship these were not key positions. Frick wasMinister of the Interior but he did not control the police as this ministerdid in most European countries—the police in Germany were in thehands of the individual states. The third Nazi cabinet member was Goe-ring, but no specific office could be found for him; he was named Ministerwithout Portfolio, with the understanding that he would become Ministerof Aviation as soon as Germany had an air force. Little noticed was thenaming of Goering to be also Minister of the Interior of Prussia, an officethat controlled the Prussian police; for the moment public attention wasfocused 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 theyhad lassoed the Nazis for their own ends: Neurath continued as Ministerof Foreign Affairs; Blomberg was Minister of Defense; Hugenberg tookover the combined Ministries of Economy and Agriculture; Seldte, theStahlhelm leader, was made Minister of Labor; the other ministries wereleft in the hands of nonparty “experts” whom Papen had appointed eightmonths before. Papen himself was Vice-Chancellor of the Reich andPremier of Prussia, and Hindenburg had promised him that he wouldnot 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 theradical Nazi leader. But even more: This government was Papen’s con-ception, his creation, and he was confident that with the help of thestaunch old President, who was his friend, admirer and protector, and

The Last Days of the Republic: 1931-33 185

with the knowing support of his conservative colleagues, who outnum-bered the obstreperous Nazis eight to three, he would dominate it.

But this frivolous, conniving politician did not know Hitler—no onereally knew Hitler—nor did he comprehend the strength of the forceswhich 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, thepolitical parties—or of the vast non-Nazi middle class and the highlyorganized proletariat all of which, as Papen mournfully observed muchlater, would “give up without a fight.”

No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of respon-sibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the adventof Adolf Hitler. The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazismwas 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 thevote. But the 63 per cent of the German people who expressed their op-position to Hitler were much too divided and shortsighted to combineagainst a common danger which they must have known would overwhelmthem unless they united, however temporarily, to stamp it out. The Com-munists, at the behest of Moscow, were committed to the last to the sillyidea of first destroying the Social Democrats, the Socialist trade unionsand what middle-class democratic forces there were, on the dubioustheory that although this would lead to a Nazi regime it would be onlytemporary and would bring inevitably the collapse of capitalism, afterwhich the Communists would take over and establish the dictatorship ofthe proletariat. Fascism, in the Bolshevik Marxist view, represented thelast stage of a dying capitalism; after that, the Communist deluge!

Fourteen years of sharing political power in the Republic, of makingall the compromises that were necessary to maintain coalition govern-ments, had sapped the strength and the zeal of the Social Democrats un-til their party had become little more than an opportunist pressure organi-zation, determined to bargain for concessions for the trade unions onwhich their strength largely rested. It might be true, as some Socialistssaid, that fortune had not smiled on them: the Communists, unscrupulousand undemocratic, had split the working class; the depression had furtherhurt the Social Democrats, weakening the trade unions and losing theparty the support of millions of unemployed, who in their desperationturned either to the Communists or the Nazis. But the tragedy of the So-cial Democrats could not be explained fully by bad luck. They had hadtheir chance to take over Germany in November 1918 and to found astate based on what they had always preached: social democracy. Butthey lacked the decisiveness to do so. Now at the dawn of the third decadethey were a tired, defeatist party, dominated by old, well-meaning butmostly mediocre men. Loyal to the Republic they were to the last, but inthe end too confused, too timid to take the great risks which alone couldhave preserved it, as they had shown by their failure to act when Papen

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turned out a squad of soldiers to destroy constitutional government inPrussia.

Between the Left and the Right, Germany lacked a politically powerfulmiddle class, which in other countries—in France, in England, in theUnited States—had proved to be the backbone of democracy. In thefirst year of the Republic the middle-class parties, the Democrats, thePeople’s Party, the Center, had polled a total of twelve million votes, onlytwo million less than the two Socialist groups. But thereafter theirstrength had waned as their supporters gravitated toward Hitler and theNationalists. In 1919, the Democrats had elected 74 members to theReichstag; by 1932 they held just 2 seats. The strength of the People’sParty fell from 62 seats in 1920 to 11 seats in 1932. Only the CatholicCenter retained its voting strength to the end. In the first republican elec-tions in 1919 the Center had 71 deputies in the Reichstag; in 1932 it had70. But even more than the Social Democrats, the Center Party sinceBismarck’s time had been largely opportunist, supporting whatever gov-ernment made concessions to its special interests. And though it seemedto 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 chan-cellorship before they were outbid by Papen and the Nationalists.

If the German Republic was bereft of a middle-of-the-road politicalclass, it also lacked that stability provided in many other countries by atruly conservative party. The German Nationalists at their peak in 1924had polled six million votes and sent 103 deputies to the Reichstag, inwhich they formed the second largest party. But then, as at almost alltimes during the Weimar regime, they refused to take a responsible posi-tion either in the government or in opposition, the only exception beingtheir participation in two short-lived cabinets in the Twenties. What theGerman Right, whose vote went largely to the Nationalists, wanted wasan end to the Republic and a return to an imperialist Germany in whichall of their old privileges would be restored. Actually the Republic hadtreated the Right both as individuals and as classes with the utmost gener-osity and, considering their aim, with exceptional tolerance. It had, as wehave seen, allowed the Army to maintain a state within a state, the busi-nessmen and bankers to make large profits, the Junkers to keep their un-economic estates by means of government loans that were never repaidand seldom used to improve their land. Yet this generosity had wonneither their gratitude nor their loyalty to the Republic. With a narrow-ness, a prejudice, a blindness which in retrospect seem inconceivable tothis chronicler, they hammered away at the foundations of the Republicuntil, in alliance with Hitler, they brought it down.

In the former Austrian vagabond the conservative classes thought theyhad found a man who, while remaining their prisoner, would help themattain their goals. The destruction of the Republic was only the first step.What they then wanted was an authoritarian Germany which at homewould put an end to democratic “nonsense” and the power of the tradeunions and in foreign affairs undo the verdict of 1918, tear off the shackles

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of Versailles, rebuild a great Army and with its military power restore thecountry to its place in the sun. These were Hitler’s aims too. And thoughhe brought what the conservatives had lacked, a mass following, the Rightwas sure that he would remain in its pocket—was he not outnumberedeight to three in the Reich cabinet? Such a commanding position alsowould allow the conservatives, or so they thought, to achieve their endswithout the barbarism of unadulterated Nazism. Admittedly they weredecent, God-fearing men, according to their lights.

The Hohenzollern Empire had been built on the armed triumphs ofPrussia, the German Republic on the defeat by the Allies after a greatwar. But the Third Reich owed nothing to the fortunes of war or toforeign influence. It was inaugurated in peacetime, and peacefully, bythe 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 January30, 1933, when President Hindenburg, acting in a perfectly constitutionalmanner, entrusted the chancellorship to Adolf Hitler.

But they were soon to learn.

7

THE NAZIFICATION OF GERMANY:1933-34

The theory which hitler had evolved in his vagabond days inVienna and never forgotten—that the way to power for a revolu-tionary movement was to ally itself with some of the powerful institutionsin the State—had now worked out in practice pretty much as he had cal-culated. The President, backed by the Army and the conservatives, hadmade him Chancellor. His political power, though great, was, however,not complete. It was shared with these three sources of authority, whichhad put him into office and which were outside and, to some extent, dis-trustful of the National Socialist movement.

Hitler’s immediate task, therefore, was to quickly eliminate them fromthe driver’s seat, make his party the exclusive master of the State and thenwith the power of an authoritarian government and its police carry outthe Nazi revolution. He had been in office scarcely twenty-four hourswhen he made his first decisive move, springing a trap on his gullible con-servative “captors” and setting in motion a chain of events which he eitheroriginated or controlled and which at the end of six months would bringthe complete Nazification of Germany and his own elevation to dictator ofthe 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, Hitlerheld his first cabinet meeting. The minutes of the session, which turned upat Nuremberg among the hundreds of tons of captured secret documents,reveal how quickly and adroitly Hitler, aided by the crafty Goering, beganto take his conservative colleagues for a ride.*1 Hindenburg had named

* This cabinet meeting, of course, was private, and, like most of the other con-ferences, many of them taking place in the strictest secrecy, held by Hitler and hispolitical and military aides during the Third Reich, its proceedings and decisionswere not accessible to the public until the captured German documents were firstperused during the Nuremberg trial.

A great many of these highly confidential discussions and the decisions emanat-ing from them—all regarded as state secrets—will henceforth be chronicled in thisbook, which, from here to the end, largely rests on the documents which recordedthem at the time. At the risk of somewhat cluttering the pages with numbers indicat-

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Hitler to head not a presidential cabinet but one based on a majority inthe Reichstag. However, the Nazis and the Nationalists, the only twoparties represented in the government, had only 247 seats out of 583 inParliament and thus lacked a majority. To attain it they needed the back-ing of the Center Party with its 70 seats. In the very first hours of the newgovernment Hitler had dispatched Goering to talk with the Centristleaders, and now he reported to the cabinet that the Center was demand-ing “certain concessions.” Goering therefore proposed that the Reich-stag be dissolved and new elections held, and Hitler agreed. Hugenberg,a man of wooden mind for all his success in business, objected to takingthe Center into the government but on the other hand opposed new elec-tions, well knowing that the Nazis, with the resources of the State behindthem, might win an absolute majority at the polls and thus be in a positionto dispense with his own services and those of his conservative friends.He proposed simply suppressing the Communist Party; with its 100 seatseliminated, the Nazis and the Nationalists would have a majority. ButHitler would not go so far at the moment, and it was finally agreed thatthe Chancellor himself would confer with the Center Party leaders on thefollowing morning and that if the talks were fruitless the cabinet wouldthen 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 questionswhich added up to a demand that Hitler promise to govern constitution-ally. But Hitler, tricking both Kaas and his cabinet members, reportedto the latter that the Center had made impossible demands and that therewas no chance of agreement. He therefore proposed that the President beasked to dissolve the Reichstag and call new elections. Hugenberg andPapen were trapped, but after a solemn assurance from the Nazi leaderthat the cabinet would remain unchanged however the elections turnedout, 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 tohave—the Nazi Party now could employ all the vast resources of thegovernment 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 callon all the resources of the State. Radio and press are at our disposal. Weshall stage a masterpiece of propaganda. And this time, naturally, thereis no lack of money.”2

The big businessmen, pleased with the new government that was goingto put the organized workers in their place and leave management to runits businesses as it wished, were asked to cough up. This they agreed todo 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 thefine to a couple of dozen of Germany’s leading magnates, including Krupp

ing notes, these sources will be indicated. No other history of a nation over a specificepoch has been so fully documented, I believe, as that of the Third Reich, and tohave left out reference to the documents, it seemed to the author, would havegreatly weakened whatever value this book may have as an authentic historicalrecord.

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von Bohlen, who had become an enthusiastic Nazi overnight, Bosch andSchnitzler 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. “Privateenterprise,” he said, “cannot be maintained in the age of democracy; it isconceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and per-sonality ... All the worldly goods we possess we owe to the struggleof the chosen . . . We must not forget that all the benefits of culturemust be introduced more or less with an iron fist.” He promised the busi-nessmen that he would “eliminate” the Marxists and restore the Wehr-macht (the latter was of special interest to such industries as Krupp, UnitedSteel and I. G. Farben, which stood to gain the most from rearmament).“Now we stand before the last election,” Hitler concluded, and he prom-ised 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 . . . withother weapons.” Goering, talking more to the immediate point, stressedthe necessity of “financial sacrifices” which “surely would be much easierfor industry to bear if it realized that the election of March fifth will surelybe the last one for the next ten years, probably even for the next hundredyears.”

All this was made clear enough to the assembled industrialists and theyresponded with enthusiasm to the promise of the end of the infernal elec-tions, of democracy and disarmament. Krupp, the munitions king, who,according to Thyssen, had urged Hindenburg on January 29 not to ap-point Hitler, jumped up and expressed to the Chancellor the “gratitude”of the businessmen “for having given us such a clear picture.” Dr. Schachtthen passed the hat. “I collected three million marks,” he recalled atNuremberg.3

On January 31, 1933, the day after Hitler was named Chancellor,Goebbels wrote in his diary: “In a conference with the Fuehrer we laydown the line for the fight against the Red terror. For the moment weshall abstain from direct countermeasures. The Bolshevik attempt atrevolution must first burst into flame. At the proper moment we shallstrike,”

Despite increasing provocation by the Nazi authorities there was nosign of a revolution, Communist or Socialist, bursting into flames as theelectoral campaign got under way. By the beginning of February the Hit-ler government had banned all Communist meetings and shut down theCommunist press. Social Democrat rallies were either forbidden orbroken up by the S.A. rowdies, and the leading Socialist newspapers werecontinually suspended. Even the Catholic Center Party did not escapethe Nazi terror. Stegerwald, the leader of the Catholic Trade Unions, wasbeaten by Brownshirts when he attempted to address a meeting, andBruening was obliged to seek police protection at another rally after S.A.troopers had wounded a number of his followers. Altogether fifty-oneanti-Nazis were listed as murdered during the electoral campaign, and the

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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 beganto be noticed, ignoring the restraining hand of Papen, who as Premier ofPrussia was supposedly above him, Goering removed hundreds of republi-can 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 whowere “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 out-right call for the shooting down of all who opposed Hitler by the police ofa state (Prussia) which controlled two thirds of Germany. Just to makesure that the job would be ruthlessly done, Goering on February 22 es-tablished an auxiliary police force of 50,000 men, of whom 40,000 weredrawn from the ranks of the S.A. and the S.S. and the rest from the Stahl-helm. Police power in Prussia was thus largely carried out by Nazi thugs.It was a rash German who appealed to such a “police” for protectionagainst the Nazi terrorists.

And yet despite all the terror the “Bolshevik revolution” which Goeb-bels, 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, theCommunist headquarters in Berlin. It had been abandoned some weeksbefore by the Communist leaders, a number of whom had already goneunderground or quietly slipped off to Russia. But piles of propagandapamphlets had been left in the cellar and these were enough to enableGoering to announce in an official communique that the seized “docu-ments” proved that the Communists were about to launch the revolution.The reaction of the public and even of some of the conservatives in thegovernment was one of skepticism. It was obvious that something moresensational must be found to stampede the public before the election tookplace on March 5.

THE REICHSTAG FIRE

On the evening of February 27, four of the most powerful men in Ger-many were gathered at two separate dinners in Berlin. In the exclusiveHerrenklub in the Vosstrasse, Vice-Chancellor von Papen was enter-taining President von Hindenburg. Out at Goebbels’ home, ChancellorHitler had arrived to dine en famille. According to Goebbels, they wererelaxing, playing music on the gramophone and telling stories. “Sud-denly,” he recounted later in his diary, “a telephone call from Dr. Hanf-staengl: ‘The Reichstag is on fire!’ I am sure he is telling a tall tale anddecline even to mention it to the Fuehrer.”4

But the diners at the Herrenklub were just around the corner from theReichstag.

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Suddenly [Papen later wrote] we noticed a red glow through the windowsand heard sounds of shouting in the street. One of the servants came hurryingup to me and whispered: “The Reichstag is on fire!” which I repeated to thePresident. He got up and from the window we could see the dome of theReichstag looking as though it were illuminated by searchlights. Every nowand 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 carand hurried off to the burning building. In the meantime Goebbels, ac-cording to his account, had had second thoughts about Putzi Hanf-staengl’s “tall tale,” had made some telephone calls and learned that theReichstag was in flames. Within a few seconds he and his Fuehrer wereracing “at sixty miles an hour down the Charlottenburger Chausseetoward the scene of the crime.”

That it was a crime, a Communist crime, they proclaimed at once onarrival at the fire. Goering, sweating and puffing and quite beside himselfwith excitement, was already there ahead of them declaiming to heaven,as Papen later recalled, that “this is a Communist crime against the newgovernment.” To the new Gestapo chief, Rudolf Diels, Goering shouted,“This is the beginning of the Communist revolution! We must not wait aminute. We will show no mercy. Every Communist official must be shot,where he is found. Every Communist deputy must this very night bestrung 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 Hitlerin the months that followed. Even at Nuremberg the mystery could notbe entirely unraveled, though there is enough evidence to establish be-yond a reasonable doubt that it was the Nazis who planned the arson andcarried 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 becomethe Berlin S.A. leader, led a small detachment of storm troopers on thenight of February 27 to the Reichstag, where they scattered gasoline andself- igniting chemicals and then made their way quickly back to the palacethe way they had come. At the same time a half-witted Dutch Com-munist with a passion for arson, Marinus van der Lubbe, had made hisway into the huge, darkened and to him unfamiliar building and set somesmall fires of his own. This feeble-minded pyromaniac was a godsend tothe Nazis. He had been picked up by the S.A. a few days before afterhaving been overheard in a bar boasting that he had attempted to set fireto several public buildings and that he was going to try the Reichstag next.

The coincidence that the Nazis had found a demented Communistarsonist who was out to do exactly what they themselves had determinedto do seems incredible but is nevertheless supported by the evidence. Theidea for the fire almost certainly originated with Goebbels and Goering.Hans Gisevius, an official in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior at the

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time, testified at Nuremberg that “it was Goebbels who first thought ofsetting the Reichstag on fire,” and Rudolf Diels, the Gestapo chief, addedin 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 whowere to be arrested immediately after it.” General Franz Haider, Chief ofthe German General Staff during the early part of World War II, recalledat Nuremberg how on one occasion Goering had boasted of his deed.

At a luncheon on the birthday of the Fuehrer in 1942 the conversationturned to the topic of the Reichstag building and its artistic value. I heardwith 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 onfire!” 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 en-couraged to try to set the Reichstag on fire. But the main job was to bedone—without his knowledge, of course—by the storm troopers. Indeed,it was established at the subsequent trial at Leipzig that the Dutch half-witdid not possess the means to set so vast a building on fire so quickly. Twoand a half minutes after he entered, the great central hall was fiercelyburning. He had only his shirt for tinder. The main fires, according tothe testimony of experts at the trial, had been set with considerable quanti-ties of chemicals and gasoline. It was obvious that one man could nothave carried them into the building, nor would it have been possible forhim 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 afterwardtold the court, wanted to hang him at once. The next day Ernst Torgler,parliamentary leader of the Communists, gave himself up to the policewhen he heard that Goering had implicated him, and a few days laterGeorgi Dimitroff, a Bulgarian Communist who later became Prime Minis-ter of Bulgaria, and two other Bulgarian Communists, Popov and Tanev,were apprehended by the police. Their subsequent trial before the Su-preme Court at Leipzig turned into something of a fiasco for the Nazis andespecially for Goering, whom Dimitroff, acting as his own lawyer, easilyprovoked into making a fool of himself in a series of stinging cross-exam-inations. At one point, according to the court record, Goering screamedat 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 GermanCommunist leader was immediately taken into “protective custody,”

* Both in his interrogations and at his trial at Nuremberg, Goering denied to thelast that he had had any part in setting fire to the Reichstag.

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where he remained until his death during the second war. Van der Lubbewas 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 lateto have any practical effect. For Hitler had lost no time in exploiting theReichstag fire to the limit.

On the day following the fire, February 28, he prevailed on PresidentHindenburg to sign a decree “for the Protection of the People and theState” suspending the seven sections of the constitution which guaranteedindividual and civil liberties. Described as a “defensive measure againstCommunist acts of violence endangering the state,” the decree laid downthat:

Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion,including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; andviolations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications;and warrants for house searchers, orders for confiscations as well as restric-tions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise pre-scribed.

In addition, the decree authorized the Reich government to take overcomplete power in the federal states when necessary and imposed thedeath sentence for a number of crimes, including “serious disturbancesof the peace” by armed persons.8

Thus with one stroke Hitler was able not only to legally gag his oppo-nents and arrest them at his will but, by making the trumped-up Com-munist threat “official,” as it were, to throw millions of the middle classand the peasantry into a frenzy of fear that unless they voted for NationalSocialism at the elections a week hence, the Bolsheviks might take over.Some four thousand Communist officials and a great many Social Demo-crat and liberal leaders were arrested, including members of the Reichstag,who, according to the law, were immune from arrest. This was the firstexperience Germans had had with Nazi terror backed up by the govern-ment. Truckloads of storm troopers roared through the streets all overGermany, breaking into homes, rounding up victims and carting them offto S.A. barracks, where they were tortured and beaten. The Communistpress and political meetings were suppressed; the Social Democrat news-papers and many liberal journals were suspended and the meetings of thedemocratic parties either banned or broken up. Only the Nazis and theirNationalist allies were permitted to campaign unmolested.

With all the resources of the national and Prussian governments at theirdisposal and with plenty of money from big business in their coffers,the Nazis carried on an election propaganda such as Germany hadnever seen before. For the first time the State-run radio carried thevoices of Hitler, Goering and Goebbels to every corner of the land. Thestreets, bedecked with swastika flags, echoed to the tramp of the stormtroopers. There were mass rallies, torchlight parades, the din of loud-

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speakers in the squares. The billboards were plastered with flamboyantNazi posters and at night bonfires lit up the hills. The electorate was inturn cajoled with promises of a German paradise, intimidated by thebrown terror in the streets and frightened by “revelations” about theCommunist “revolution.” The day after the Reichstag fire the Prussiangovernment issued a long statement declaring that it had found Com-munist “documents” proving:

Government buildings, museums, mansions and essential plants were to beburned down . . . Women and children were to be sent in front of terroristgroups . . . The burning of the Reichstag was to be the signal for a bloodyinsurrection and civil war ... It has been ascertained that today was to haveseen throughout Germany terrorist acts against individual persons, againstprivate property, and against the life and limb of the peaceful population, andalso the beginning of general civil war.

Publication of the “documents proving the Communist conspiracy” waspromised, but never made. The fact, however, that the Prussian govern-ment itself vouched for their authenticity impressed many Germans.

The waverers were also impressed perhaps by Goering’s threats. AtFrankfurt on March 3, on the eve of the elections, he shouted:

Fellow Germans, my measures will not be crippled by any judicial think-ing ... I don’t have to worry about justice; my mission is only to destroyand exterminate, nothing more! . . . Certainly, I shall use the power of theState and the police to the utmost, my dear Communists, so don’t draw anyfalse conclusions; but the struggle to the death, in which my fist will graspyour necks, I shall lead with those down there—the Brownshirts.9

Almost unheard was the voice of former Chancellor Bruening, whoalso spoke out that day, proclaiming that his Center Party would resist anyoverthrow of the constitution, demanding an investigation of the suspiciousReichstag fire and calling on President Hindenburg “to protect the op-pressed against their oppressors.” Vain appeal! The aged President kepthis 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 wereto know during Hitler’s life, they spoke with their ballots. Despite all theterror and intimidation, the majority of them rejected Hitler. The Nazisled the polling with 17,277,180 votes—an increase of some five and ahalf million, but it comprised only 44 per cent of the total vote. A clearmajority still eluded Hitler. All the persecution and suppression of theprevious weeks did not prevent the Center Party from actually increasingits vote from 4,230,600 to 4,424,900; with its ally, the Catholic BavarianPeople’s Party, it obtained a total of five and a half million votes. Eventhe Social Democrats held their position as the second largest party, poll-ing 7,181,629 votes, a drop of only 70,000. The Communists lost amillion supporters but still polled 4.848,058 votes. The Nationalists, led

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by Papen and Hugenberg, were bitterly disappointed with their own show-ing, a vote of 3,136,760, a mere 8 per cent of the votes cast and a gain ofless than 200,000.

Still, the Nationalists’ 52 seats, added to the 288 of the Nazis, gave thegovernment 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 ofthe two-thirds majority which Hitler needed to carry out a new, bold planto establish his dictatorship by consent of Parliament.

GLEICHSCHALTUNG: THE “CO-ORDINATION”

OF THE RETCH

The plan was deceptively simple and had the advantage of cloaking theseizure of absolute power in legality. The Reichstag would be asked topass an “enabling act” conferring on Hitler’s cabinet exclusive legislativepowers for four years. Put even more simply, the German Parliamentwould be requested to turn over its constitutional functions to Hitler andtake a long vacation. But since this necessitated a change in the constitu-tion, a two-thirds majority was needed to approve it.

How to obtain that majority was the main order of business at a cabinetmeeting on March 15, 1933, the minutes of which were produced atNuremberg.10 Part of the problem would be solved by the “absence” ofthe eighty-one Communist members of the Reichstag. Goering felt surethat the rest of the problem could be easily disposed of “by refusing ad-mittance to a few Social Democrats.” Hitler was in a breezy, confidentmood. After all, by the decree of February 28, which he had inducedHindenburg to sign the day after the Reichstag fire, he could arrest asmany opposition deputies as was necessary to assure his two-thirds major-ity. There was some question about the Catholic Center, which was de-manding guarantees, but the Chancellor was certain that this party wouldgo along with him. Hugenberg, the Nationalist leader, who had no desireto put all the power in Hitler’s hands, demanded that the President beauthorized to participate in preparing laws decreed by the cabinet underthe enabling act. Dr. Meissner, the State Secretary in the PresidentialChancellery, who had already committed his future to the Nazis, repliedthat “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 thestubborn old President, as the republican chancellors had been.

But Hitler wished, at this stage, to make a grandiose gesture to the agedField Marshal and to the Army and the nationalist conservatives as well,and in so doing link his rowdy, revolutionary regime with Hindenburg’svenerable name and with all the past military glories of Prussia. To accom-plish this he and Goebbels, who on March 13 became Minister of Propa-ganda, conceived a master stroke. Hitler would open the new Reichstag,which he was about to destroy, in the Garrison Church at Potsdam, the

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great shrine of Prussianism, which aroused in so many Germans memoriesof imperial glories and grandeur, for here lay buried the bones of Fred-erick the Great, here the Hohenzollern kings had worshiped, here Hinden-burg had first come in 1866 on a pilgrimage when he returned as a youngGuards officer from the Austro-Prussian War, a war which had givenGermany its first unification.

The date chosen for the ceremonial opening of the first Reichstag ofthe Third Reich, March 21, was significant too, for it fell on the anniver-sary of the day on which Bismarck had opened the first Reichstag of theSecond Reich in 1871. As the old field marshals, generals and admiralsfrom imperial times gathered in their resplendent uniforms in the Garri-son Church, led by the former Crown Prince and Field Marshal vonMackensen in the imposing dress and headgear of the Death’s-Head Hus-sars, the shades of Frederick the Great and the Iron Chancellor hoveredover the assembly.

Hindenburg was visibly moved, and at one point in the ceremonyGoebbels, who was staging the performance and directing the broadcast-ing of it to the nation, observed—and noted in his diary—that the oldField Marshal had tears in his eyes. Flanked by Hitler, who appeared illat ease in his formal cutaway morning coat, the President, attired in field-gray uniform with the grand cordon of the Black Eagle, and carrying aspiked helmet in one hand and his marshal’s baton in the other, hadmarched slowly down the aisle, paused to salute the empty seat of KaiserWilhelm II in the imperial gallery, and then in front of the altar had reada 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 innational self-consciousness to bless a proud and free Germany, united in her-self.

Hitler’s reply was shrewdly designed to play on the sympathies andenlist the confidence of the Old Order so glitteringly represented.

Neither the Kaiser nor the government nor the nation wanted the war. Itwas only the collapse of the nation which compelled a weakened race to takeupon itself, against its most sacred convictions, the guilt for this war.

And then, turning to Hindenburg, who sat stiffly in his chair a few feetin front of him:

By a unique unheaval in the last few weeks our national honor has beenrestored and, thanks to your understanding, Herr Generalfeldmarschall, theunion between the symbols of the old greatness and the new strength has beencelebrated. We pay you homage. A protective Providence places you over thenew forces of our nation.11

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Hitler, with a show of deep humility toward the President he intendedto rob of his political power before the week was up, stepped down, bowedlow to Hindenburg and gripped his hand. There in the flashing lights ofcamera bulbs and amid the clicking of movie cameras, which Goebbelshad placed along with microphones at strategic spots, was recorded forthe nation and the world to see, and to hear described, the solemn hand-clasp of the German Field Marshal and the Austrian corporal uniting thenew Germany with the old.

“After the dazzling pledge made by Hitler at Potsdam,” the Frenchambassador, who was present at the scene, later wrote, “how could suchmen—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 begunto view the excesses and abuses of his party? Could they now hesitate togrant him their entire confidence, to meet all his requests, to concede thefull powers he claimed?”12

The answer was given two days later, on March 23, in the Kroll OperaHouse in Berlin, where the Reichstag convened. Before the house was theso-called Enabling Act—the “Law for Removing the Distress of Peopleand Reich (Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich),” as itwas officially called. Its five brief paragraphs took the power of legislation,including control of the Reich budget, approval of treaties with foreignstates and the initiating of constitutional amendments, away from Parlia-ment 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 tobe drafted by the Chancellor and “might deviate from the constitution.”No laws were to “affect the position of the Reichstag”—surely the crudestjoke of all—and the powers of the President remained “undisturbed.”13

Hitler reiterated these last two points in a speech of unexpected restraintto the deputies assembled in the ornate opera house, which had longspecialized in the lighter operatic works and whose aisles were now linedwith brown-shirted storm troopers, whose scarred bully faces indicatedthat no nonsense would be tolerated from the representatives of the people.

The government [Hitler promised] will make use of these powers only inso-far as they are essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures. Neitherthe existence of the Reichstag nor that of the Reichsrat is menaced. The posi-tion and rights of the President remain unaltered . . . The separate existenceof the federal states will not be done away with. The rights of the churcheswill 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 recourseto such a law is in itself a limited one.

The fiery Nazi leader sounded quite moderate and almost modest; itwas too early in the life of the Third Reich for even the opposition mem-bers 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 troopersoutside yelling, “Full powers, or else!”—to defy the would-be dictator.Speaking quietly and with great dignity, Wells declared that the govern-ment might strip the Socialists of their power but it could never strip themof their honor.

We German Social Democrats pledge ourselves solemnly in this historichour to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom and socialism. Noenabling act can give you the power to destroy ideas which are eternal and in-destructible.

Furious, Hitler jumped to his feet, and now the assembly received areal taste of the man.

You come late, but yet you come! [he shouted] . . . You are no longerneeded . . . The star of Germany will rise and yours will sink. Your deathknell has sounded. ... 1 do not want your votes. Germany will be free, butnot through you! [Stormy applause.]

The Social Democrats, who bore a heavy responsibility for the weaken-ing 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 suc-cessfully defied the Iron Chancellor in the Kulturkampf. Monsignor Kaas,the party leader, had demanded a written promise from Hitler that hewould respect the President’s power of veto. But though promised beforethe voting, it was never given. Nevertheless the Center leader rose toannounce 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 deliriouslyand then, joined by the storm troopers, burst into the Horst Wessel song,which soon would take its place alongside “Deutschland ueber Alles” asone 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. Ex-cept for the arrests of the Communists and some of the Social Democraticdeputies, it was all done quite legally, though accompanied by terror.Parliament had turned over its constitutional authority to Hitler andthereby committed suicide, though its body lingered on in an embalmedstate to the very end of the Third Reich, serving infrequently as a sound-ing board for some of Hitler’s thunderous pronunciamentos, its membershenceforth hand-picked by the Nazi Party, for there were to be no morereal elections. It was this Enabling Act alone which formed the legal basisfor Hitler’s dictatorship. From March 23, 1933, on, Hitler was the die-

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tator of the Reich, freed of any restraint by Parliament or, for all practicalpurposes, by the weary old President. To be sure, much remained to bedone to bring the entire nation and all its institutions completely underthe Nazi heel, though, as we shall see, this also was accomplished withbreathless speed and with crudeness, trickery and brutality.

“The street gangs,” in the words of Alan Bullock, “had seized controlof the resources of a great modern State, the gutter had come to power.”But—as Hitler never ceased to boast—“legally,” by an overwhelming voteof Parliament. The Germans had no one to blame but themselves.

One by one, Germany’s most powerful institutions now began to sur-render to Hitler and to pass quietly, unprotestingly out of existence.

The states, which had stubbornly maintained their separate powersthroughout German history, were the first to fall. On the evening ofMarch 9, two weeks before the passage of the Enabling Act, General vonEpp, on orders from Hitler and Frick and with the help of a few stormtroopers, turned out the government of Bavaria and set up a Nazi regime.Within a week Reich Commissars were appointed to take over in the otherstates, with the exception of Prussia, where Goering was already firmly inthe saddle. On March 31, Hitler and Frick, using the Enabling Act forthe first time, promulgated a law dissolving the diets of all states exceptPrussia and ordering them reconstituted on the basis of the votes cast inthe last Reichstag election. Communist seats were not to be filled. Butthis solution lasted only a week. The Chancellor, working at feverishhaste, issued a new law on April 7, appointing Reich Governors (Reichs-staathaelter) in all the states and empowering them to appoint and removelocal governments, dissolve the diets, and appoint and dismiss state offi-cials 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 Chan-cellor.”

Thus, within a fortnight of receiving full powers from the Reichstag,Hitler had achieved what Bismarck, Wilhelm II and the Weimar Republichad never dared to attempt: he had abolished the separate powers of thehistoric states and made them subject to the central authority of theReich, which was in his hands. He had, for the first time in Germanhistory, 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 Re-construction of the Reich. “Popular assemblies” of the states were abol-ished, the sovereign powers of the states were transferred to the Reich,all state governments were placed under the Reich government and thestate governors put under the administration of the Reich Minister of theInterior.14 As this Minister, Frick, explained it, “The state governmentsfrom 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.

The Nazification of Germany: 1933-34 201

for by this time all the political parties of Germany except the Nazis hadbeen quickly eliminated.

It cannot be said that they went down fighting. On May 19, 1933, theSocial Democrats—those who were not in jail or in exile—voted in theReichstag without a dissenting voice to approve Hitler’s foreign policy.Nine days before, Goering’s police had seized the party’s buildings andnewspapers and confiscated its property. Nevertheless, the Socialists stilltried to appease Hitler. They denounced their comrades abroad who wereattacking the Fuehrer. On June 19 they elected a new party committee,but three days later Frick put an end to their attempts to compromise bydissolving the Social Democratic Party as “subversive and inimical to theState.” Paul Lobe, the surviving leader, and several of his party membersin the Reichstag were arrested. The Communists, of course, had alreadybeen suppressed.

This left the middle-class parties, but not for long. The Catholic Bavar-ian People’s Party, whose government had been kicked out of office by theNazi coup on March 9, announced its own dissolution on July 4, and itsally, the Center Party, which had defied Bismarck so strenuously and beena bulwark of the Republic, followed suit the next day, leaving Germanyfor the first time in the modern era without a Catholic political party—afact which did not discourage the Vatican from signing a concordat withHitler’s government a fortnight later. Stresemann’s old party, the People’sParty, committed hara-kiri on the Fourth of July; the Democrats (Staats-partei) had already done so a week before.

And what of Hitler’s partner in government, the German NationalParty, without whose support the former Austrian corporal could neverhave come legally to power? Despite its closeness to Hindenburg, theArmy, the Junkers and big business and the debt owed to it by Hitler, itwent the way of all other parties and with the same meekness. On June21 the police and the storm troopers took over its offices throughout thecountry, and on June 29 Hugenberg, the bristling party leader, who hadhelped boost Hitler into the Chancellery but six months before, resignedfrom 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 politicalparty in Germany.

Whoever undertakes to maintain the organizational structure of anotherpolitical party or to form a new political party will be punished with penalservitude up to three years or with imprisonment of from six months to threeyears, if the deed is not subject to a greater penalty according to other regula-tions.15

The one-party totalitarian State had been achieved with scarcely aripple of opposition or defiance, and within four months after the Reich-stag had abdicated its democratic responsibilities.

The free trade unions, which, as we have seen, once had crushed the

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fascist Kapp putsch by the simple means of declaring a general strike,were disposed of as easily as the political parties and the states—thoughnot until an elaborate piece of trickery had been practiced on them. Forhalf a century May Day had been the traditional day of celebration for theGerman—and European—worker. To lull the workers and their leadersbefore it struck, the Nazi government proclaimed May Day, 1933, as anational holiday, officially named it the “Day of National Labor” andprepared to celebrate it as it had never been celebrated before. The trade-union leaders were taken in by this surprising display of friendlinesstoward the working class by the Nazis and enthusiastically co-operatedwith the government and the party in making the day a success. Laborleaders were flown to Berlin from all parts of Germany, thousands ofbanners were unfurled acclaiming the Nazi regime’s solidarity with theworker, and out at Tempelhof Field Goebbels prepared to stage the great-est mass demonstration Germany had ever seen. Before the massiverally, Hitler himself received the workers’ delegates, declaring, “You willsee how untrue and unjust is the statement that the revolution is directedagainst the German workers. On the contrary.” Later in his speech tomore than 100,000 workers at the airfield Hitler pronounced the motto,“Honor work and respect the worker!” and promised that May Day wouldbe celebrated in honor of German labor “throughout the centuries.”

Late that night Goebbels, after describing in his most purple prose thetremendous enthusiasm of the workers for this May Day celebrationwhich he had so brilliantly staged, added a curious sentence in his diary:“Tomorrow we shall occupy the trade-union buildings. There will be littleresistance.”*16

That is what happened. On May 2 the trade-union headquartersthroughout the country were occupied, union funds confiscated, the unionsdissolved and the leaders arrested. Many were beaten and lodged in con-centration camps. Theodor Leipart and Peter Grassmann, the chairmen ofthe Trade Union Confederation, had openly pledged themselves to co-operate with the Nazi regime. No matter, they were arrested. “The Lei-parts and Grassmanns,” said Dr. Robert Ley, the alcoholic Cologne partyboss who was assigned by Hitler to take over the unions and establish theGerman Labor Front, “may hypocritically declare their devotion to theFuehrer as much as they like—but it is better that they should be inprison.” And that is where they were put.

At first, though, both Hitler and Ley tried to assure the workers thattheir rights would be protected. Said Ley in his first proclamation:“Workers! Your institutions are sacred to us National Socialists. I my-

* A document which came to light at Nuremberg shows that the Nazis had beenplanning for some time to destroy the trade unions. A secret order dated April 21and signed by Dr. Ley contained detailed instructions for “co-ordinating” theunions 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. Unionfunds were to be seized.17 The Christian (Catholic) Trade Unions were notmolested on May 2. Their end came on June 24.

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self am a poor peasant’s son and understand poverty ... I know theexploitation of anonymous capitalism. Workers! I swear to you, we willnot only keep everything that exists, we will build up the protection andthe rights of the workers still further.”

Within three weeks the hollowness of another Nazi promise was ex-posed when Hitler decreed a law bringing an end to collective bargainingand providing that henceforth “labor trustees,” appointed by him, would“regulate labor contracts” and maintain “labor peace.”18 Since the deci-sions of the trustees were to be legally binding, the law, in effect, outlawedstrikes. Ley promised “to restore absolute leadership to the natural leaderof 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 generouscontributions which so many employers had made to the National SocialistGerman Workers’ Party were paying off. Yet for business to prosper acertain stability of society is necessary, and all through the spring andearly summer law and order were crumbling in Germany as the frenziedbrown-shirted gangs roamed the streets, arresting and beating up andsometimes murdering whomever they pleased while the police looked onwithout lifting a nightstick. The terror in the streets was not the result ofthe breakdown of the State’s authority, as it had been in the FrenchRevolution, but on the contrary was carried out with the encouragementand often on the orders of the State, whose authority in Germany hadnever been greater or more concentrated. Judges were intimidated; theywere afraid for their lives if they convicted and sentenced a storm troopereven 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 “theNational Socialist Revolution has not yet run its course” and that “it willbe victoriously completed only if a new German people is educated.” InNazi parlance, “educated” meant “intimidated”—to a point where allwould 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—afew thousand, that is—were robbed, beaten or murdered during the firstmonths), he issued laws excluding them from public service, the univer-sities and the professions. And on April 1, 1933, he proclaimed a nationalboycott of Jewish shops.

The businessmen, who had been so enthusiastic over the smashing ofthe troublesome labor unions, now found that left-wing Nazis, who reallybelieved 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 housesof those who had not supported Hitler, threatening to seize them in somecases, and in others demanding well-paying jobs in the management. Dr.Gottfried Feder, the economic crank, now insisted that the party programbe carried out—nationalization of big business, profit sharing and the

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abolition of unearned incomes and “interest slavery.” As if this were notenough to frighten the businessmen, Walther Darre, who had just beennamed Minister of Agriculture, threw the bankers into jitters by promis-ing a big reduction in the capital debts of the farmers and a cut in theinterest 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 beenleft high and dry, and all his calculations that he and Hugenberg and theother defenders of the Old Order, with their 8-to-3 majority in the cabinetagainst the Nazis, could control Hitler and indeed use him for their ownconservative ends, had exploded in his face. He himself had been bootedout of his post as Prime Minister of Prussia and replaced by Goering.Papen remained Vice-Chancellor in the Reich cabinet but, as he ruefullyadmitted later, “this position turned out to be anomalous.” Hugenberg,the apostle of business and finance, was gone, his party dissolved. Goeb-bels, the third most important man in the Nazi Party, had been broughtinto the cabinet on March 13 as Minister of Popular Enlightenment andPropaganda. Darre, regarded as a “radical,” as was Goebbels, wasMinister of Agriculture.

Dr. Hans Luther, the conservative president of the Reichsbank, the keypost in the German economic system, was fired by Hitler and packed offto Washington as ambassador. Into his place, on March 17, 1933, steppedthe jaunty Dr. Schacht, the former head of the Reichsbank and devotedfollower of Hitler, who had seen the “truth and necessity” of Nazism. Nosingle man in all of Germany would be more helpful to Hitler in buildingup the economic strength of the Third Reich and in furthering its rearma-ment for the Second World War than Schacht, who later became alsoMinister of Economics and Plenipotentiary-General for War Economy. Itis true that shortly before the second war began he turned against his idol,eventually relinquished or was fired from all his offices and even joinedthose who were conspiring to assassinate Hitler. But by then it was toolate to stay the course of the Nazi leader to whom he had for so long givenhis loyalty and lent his prestige and his manifest talents.

“NO SECOND REVOLUTION!”

Hitler had conquered Germany with the greatest of ease, but a numberof problems remained to be faced as summer came in 1933. There wereat least five major ones: preventing a second revolution; settling the un-easy relations between the S.A. and the Army; getting the country out ofits economic morass and finding jobs for the six million unemployed;achieving equality of armaments for Germany at the Disarmament Con-ference in Geneva and accelerating the Reich’s secret rearming, which hadbegun during the last years of the Republic; and deciding who shouldsucceed the ailing Hindenburg when he died.

It was Roehm, chief of the S.A., who coined the phrase “the second

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revolution, and who insisted that it be carried through. He was joinedby Goebbels, who in his diary of April 18, 1933, wrote: “Everyone amongthe people is talking of a second revolution which must come. That meansthat the first revolution is not at an end. Now we shall settle with theReaktion. The revolution must nowhere come to a halt.”19

The Nazis had destroyed the Left, but the Right remained: big businessand finance, the aristocracy, the Junker landlords and the Prussian gen-erals, who kept tight rein over the Army. Roehm, Goebbels and the other“radicals” in the movement wanted to liquidate them too. Roehm, whosestorm troopers now numbered some two million—twenty times as manyas the troops in the Army—sounded the warning in June:

One victory on the road of German revolution has been won . . . TheS.A. and S.S., who bear the great responsibility of having set the German revo-lution rolling, will not allow it to be betrayed at the halfway mark ... If thePhilistines believe that the national revolution has lasted too long ... it isindeed high time that the national revolution should end and become a Na-tional Socialist one . . . We shall continue our fight—with them or withoutthem. And, if necessary, against them . . . We are the incorruptible guaran-tors of the fulfillment of the German revolution.20

And in August he added, in a speech, “There are still men in officialpositions 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 reactionaryideas into practice.”

But Hitler had contrary thoughts. For him the Nazi socialist sloganshad been merely propaganda, means of winning over the masses on hisway 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. Forthe moment at least the Right—business, the Army, the President—mustbe appeased. He did not intend to bankrupt Germany and thus risk thevery 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 speechto 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 asI will deal with the so-called second revolution, which would lead only tochaos.” He repeated the warning to the Nazi state governors gathered inthe Chancellery on July 6:

The revolution is not a permanent state of affairs, and it must not be allowedto develop into such a state. The stream of revolution released must be guidedinto the safe channel of evolution . . . We must therefore not dismiss abusinessman if he is a good businessman, even if he is not yet a National So-cialist, and especially not if the National Socialist who is to take his placeknows nothing about business. In business, ability must be the only stand-ard . . .

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History will not judge us according to whether we have removed and im-prisoned the largest number of economists, but according to whether we havesucceeded in providing work . . . The ideas of the program do not oblige usto act like fools and upset everything, but to realize our trains of thought wiselyand carefully. In the long run our political power will be all the more secure,the more we succeed in underpinning it economically. The state governorsmust therefore see to it that no party organizations assume the functions ofgovernment, dismiss individuals and make appointments to offices, to do whichthe Reich government—and in regard to business, the Reich Minister of Eco-nomics—is competent.21

No more authoritative statement was ever made that the Nazi revolu-tion was political, not economic. To back up his words, Hitler dismisseda number of Nazi “radicals” who had tried to seize control of the em-ployers’ associations. He restored Krupp von Bohlen and Fritz Thyssen totheir positions of leadership in them, dissolved the Combat League ofMiddle-Class Tradespeople, which had annoyed the big departmentstores, and in place of Hugenberg named Dr. Karl Schmitt as Minister ofEconomics. Schmitt was the most orthodox of businessmen, directorgeneral of Allianz, Germany’s largest insurance company, and he lost notime in putting an end to the schemes of the National Socialists who hadbeen naive enough to take their party program seriously.

The disillusion among the rank-and-file Nazis, especially among theS.A. storm troopers, who formed the large core of Hitler’s mass move-ment, was great. Most of them had belonged to the ragged army of thedispossessed and the unsatisfied. They were anticapitalist through experi-ence and they believed that the revolution which they had fought by brawl-ing in the streets would bring them loot and good jobs, either in businessor in the government. Now their hopes, after the heady excesses of thespring, were dashed. The old gang, whether they were party members ornot, were to keep the jobs and to keep control of jobs. But this develop-ment was not the only reason for unrest in the S.A.

The old quarrel between Hitler and Roehm about the position andpurpose of the S.A. cropped up again. From the earliest days of the Nazimovement Hitler had insisted that the storm troopers were to be a politicaland not a military force; they were to furnish the physical violence, theterror, by which the party could bludgeon its way to political power. ToRoehm, the S.A. had been not only the backbone of the Nazi revolutionbut the nucleus of the future revolutionary army which would be for Hitlerwhat the French conscript armies were to Napoleon after the FrenchRevolution. It was time to sweep away the reactionary Prussian generals—those “old clods,” as he contemptuously called them—and form a revolu-tionary fighting force, a people’s army, led by himself and his tough aideswho had conquered the streets of Germany.

Nothing could be further from Hitler’s thoughts. He realized moreclearly than Roehm or any other Nazi that he could not have come topower without the support or at least the toleration of the Army generals

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and that, for the time being at least, his very survival at the helm dependedin part on their continued backing, since they still retained the physicalpower to remove him if they were so minded. Also Hitler foresaw thatthe Army’s loyalty to him personally would be needed at that crucialmoment, which could not be far off, when the eighty-six-year-old Hinden-burg, the Commander in Chief, would pass on. Furthermore, the Nazileader was certain that only the officer corps, with all its martial traditionsand abilities, could achieve his goal of building up in a short space of timea strong, disciplined armed force. The S.A. was but a mob—good enoughfor street fighting but of little worth as a modern army. Moreover, itspurpose had now been served and from now on it must be eased tactfullyout 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 struggleliterally to the death was to be fought between these two veterans of theNazi movement who were also close friends (Ernst Roehm was the onlyman whom Hitler addressed by the familiar personal pronoun du).

Roehm expressed the deep sense of frustration in the ranks of thestorm troopers in a speech to fifteen thousand S.A. officers in the Sport-palast in Berlin on November 5, 1933. “One often hears . . . that theS.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 hadwarned at Bad Godesberg on August 19, “must be the same as that of thepolitical leadership.” And on September 23 at Nuremberg he spoke outeven 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 notstood on our side, then we should not be standing here today. We can assurethe Army that we shall never forget this, that we see in them the bearers of thetradition of our glorious old Army, and that with all our heart and all ourpowers we will support the spirit of this Army.

Some time before this. Hitler had secretly given the armed forces as-surances which had brought many of the higher officers to his side. OnFebruary 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 vonHammerstein, the Army Commander in Chief. Admiral Erich Raederrevealed at Nuremberg the tenor of this first meeting of the Nazi Chan-cellor with the officer corps.22 Hitler, he said, freed the military elite fromits fears that the armed services might be called upon to take part in a civilwar and promised that the Army and Navy could now devote themselvesunhindered to the main task of quickly rearming the new Germany. Ad-miral Raeder admitted that he was highly pleased at the prospect of a newNavy, and General von Blomberg, whose hasty assumption of the officeof Minister of Defense on January 30, 1933, had stamped out any tempta-tion on the part of the Army to revolt against Hitler’s becoming Chancel-

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lor, declared later in his unpublished memoirs that the Fuehrer openedup “a field of activities holding great possibilities for the future.”

Further to augment the enthusiasm of the military leaders Hitlercreated, as early as April 4, the Reich Defense Council to spur a new andsecret rearmament program. Three months later, on July 20, the Chancel-lor promulgated a new Army Law, abolishing the jurisdiction of the civilcourts over the military and doing away with the elected representation ofthe rank and file, thus restoring to the officer corps its ancient militaryprerogatives. A good many generals and admirals began to see the Nazirevolution in a different and more favorable light.

As a sop to Roehm, Hitler named him—along with Rudolf Hess, thedeputy leader of the party—a member of the cabinet on December 1 andon New Year’s Day, 1934, addressed to the S.A. chief a warm and friendlyletter. While reiterating that “the Army has to guarantee the protectionof the nation against the world beyond our frontiers,” he acknowledgedthat “the task of the S.A. is to secure the victory of the National SocialistRevolution and the existence of the National Socialist State” and that thesuccess of the S.A. had been “primarily due” to Roehm. The letter con-cluded:

At the close of the year of the National Socialist Revolution, therefore, I feelcompelled to thank you, my dear Ernst Roehm, for the imperishable serviceswhich you have rendered to the National Socialist movement and the Germanpeople, and to assure you how very grateful I am to fate that 1 am able to callsuch 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 Nazidaily paper, the Voelkischer Beobachter, on January 2, 1934, and didmuch to ease for the moment the feelings of resentment in the S.A. In theatmosphere of good feeling that prevailed over the Christmas and NewYear holidays, the rivalry between the S.A. and the Army and the clamorof 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 OswaldSpengler in commenting on how easily Hitler had conquered and NazifiedGermany in 1933. “This seizure of power—” the author of The Declineof the West wrote early in the year, “it is with misgiving that I see it cele-brated each day with so much noise. It would be better to save that for aday of real and definitive successes, that is, in the foreign field. There areno others.”24

The philosopher-historian, who for a brief moment was an idol of theNazis until a mutual disenchantment set in, was unduly impatient. Hitler

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had to conquer Germany before he could set out to conquer the world.But once his German opponents were liquidated—or had liquidated them-selves—he lost no time in turning to what had always interested him themost: foreign affairs.

Germany’s position in the world in the spring of 1933 could hardly havebeen worse. The Third Reich was diplomatically isolated and militarilyimpotent. The whole world had been revolted by Nazi excesses, especiallythe persecution of the Jews. Germany’s neighbors, in particular Franceand Poland, were hostile and suspicious, and as early as March 1933, fol-lowing a Polish military demonstration in Danzig, Marshal Pilsudski sug-gested to the French the desirability of a joint preventive war againstGermany. Even Mussolini, for all his outward pose of welcoming theadvent of a second fascist power, had not in fact been enthusiastic aboutHitler’s coming to power. The Fuehrer of a country potentially so muchstronger than Italy might soon put the Duce in the shade. A rabidly Pan-German Reich would have designs on Austria and the Balkans, where theItalian dictator had already staked out his claims. The hostility towardNazi Germany of the Soviet Union, which had been republican Germany’sone friend in the years since 1921, was obvious. The Third Reich wasindeed friendless in a hostile world. And it was disarmed, or relatively soin comparison with its highly armed neighbors.

The immediate strategy and tactics of Hitler’s foreign policy thereforewere dictated by the hard realities of Germany’s weak and isolated posi-tion. But, ironically, this situation also provided natural goals which cor-responded to his own deepest desires and those of the vast majority of theGerman people: to get rid of the shackles of Versailles without provokingsanctions, to rearm without risking war. Only when he had achieved thesedual short-term goals would he have the freedom and the military powerto pursue the long-term diplomacy whose aims and methods he had setdown so frankly and in such detail in Mein Kampf.

The first thing to do, obviously, was to confound Germany’s adversariesin Europe by preaching disarmament and peace and to keep a sharp eyefor a weakness in their collective armor. On May 17, 1933, before theReichstag, Hitler delivered his “Peace Speech,” one of the greatest of hiscareer, a masterpiece of deceptive propaganda that deeply moved theGerman people and unified them behind him and which made a profoundand favorable impression on the outside world. The day before, PresidentRoosevelt had sent a ringing message to the chiefs of state of forty-fournations outlining the plans and hopes of the United States for disarmamentand peace and calling for the abolition of all offensive weapons—bombers,tanks and mobile heavy artillery. Hitler was quick to take up the Presi-dent’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 toagree to this method of overcoming the international crisis . . . The Presi-dent’s proposal is a ray of comfort for all who wish to co-operate in the main-

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tenance of peace . . . Germany is entirely ready to renounce all offensiveweapons if the armed nations, on their side, will destroy their offensive weap-ons . . . Germany would also be perfectly ready to disband her entire mili-tary establishment and destroy the small amount of arms remaining to her, ifthe neighboring countries will do the same . . . Germany is prepared to agreeto any solemn pact of nonaggression, because she does not think of attackingbut only of acquiring security.

There was much else in the speech, whose moderateness and profes-sion of love for peace pleasantly surprised an uneasy world. Germany didnot want war. War was “unlimited madness.” It would “cause the col-lapse of the present social and political order.” Nazi Germany had nowish to “Germanize” other peoples. “The mentality of the last century,which led people to think that they would make Germans out of Poles andFrenchmen, is alien to us . . . Frenchmen, Poles and others are ourneighbors, and we know that no event that is historically conceivable canchange this reality.”

There was one warning. Germany demanded equality of treatment withall other nations, especially in armaments. If this was not to be obtained,Germany would prefer to withdraw from both the Disarmament Con-ference and the League of Nations.

The warning was forgotten amid the general rejoicing throughout theWestern world at Hitler’s unexpected reasonableness. The Times ofLondon agreed that Hitler’s claim for equality was “irrefutable.” TheDaily Herald of London, official organ of the Labor Party, demanded thatHitler be taken at his word. The conservative weekly Spectator of Londonconcluded that Hitler had grasped the hand of Roosevelt and that thisgesture provided new hope for a tormented world. In Washington thePresident’s secretary was quoted by the official German news bureau assaying, “The President was enthusiastic at Hitler’s acceptance of his pro-posals.”

From the Nazi firebrand dictator had come not brutal threats, as somany had expected, but sweetness and light. The world was enchanted.And in the Reichstag even the Socialists’ deputies, those who were not injail or in exile, voted without dissent to make the assembly’s approval ofHitler’s foreign policy declaration unanimous.

But Hitler’s warning was not an empty one, and when it became clearearly in October that the Allies would insist on an interval of eight yearsto bring their armaments down to Germany’s level, he abruptly announcedon October 14 that, denied equality of rights by the other powers atGeneva, Germany was immediately withdrawing from the DisarmamentConference and from the League of Nations. At the same time he tookthree other steps: He dissolved the Reichstag, announced that he wouldsubmit his decision to leave Geneva to a national plebiscite and orderedGeneral von Blomberg, the Minister of Defense, to issue secret directivesto the armed forces to resist an armed attack should the League resort tosanctions.25

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This precipitate action revealed the hollowness of the Hitler concilia-tory speech in the spring. It was Hitler’s first open gamble in foreignaffairs. It meant that from now on Nazi Germany intended to rearm itselfin defiance of any disarmament agreement and of Versailles. This was acalculated risk—also the first of many—and Blomberg’s secret directiveto the Army and Navy, which came to light at Nuremberg, reveals not onlythat Hitler gambled with the possibility of sanctions but that Germany’sposition would have been hopeless had they been applied.* In the Westagainst France and in the East against Poland and Czechoslovakia, thedirective laid down definite defense lines which the German forces wereordered “to hold as long as possible.” It is obvious from Blomberg’s or-ders that the German generals, at least, had no illusions that the defensesof the Reich could be held for any time at all.

This, then, was the first of many crises over a period that would extendfor three years—until after the Germans reoccupied the demilitarized leftbank of the Rhine in 1936—when the Allies could have applied sanctions,not for Hitler’s leaving the Disarmament Conference and the League butfor violations of the disarmament provisions of Versailles which had beengoing on in Germany for at least two years, even before Hitler. That theAllies at this time could easily have overwhelmed Germany is as certainas it is that such an action would have brought the end of the Third Reichin the very year of its birth. But part of the genius of this one-time Aus-trian waif was that for a long time he knew the mettle of his foreignadversaries as expertly and as uncannily as he had sized up that of hisopponents at home. In this crisis, as in those greater ones which were tofollow in rapid succession up to 1939, the victorious Allied nations tookno action, being too divided, too torpid, too blind to grasp the nature orthe direction of what was building up beyond the Rhine. On this, Hitler’scalculations were eminently sound, as they had been and were to be inregard to his own people. He knew well what the German people wouldsay 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 afterthe anniversary of the 1918 armistice, a black day that still rankled inGerman memories.

“See to it that this day,” he told an election rally at Breslau on Novem-ber 4, “shall later be recorded in the history of our people as a day of sal-vation—that the record shall run: On an eleventh of November the Ger-man people formally lost its honor; fifteen years later came a twelfth ofNovember and then the German people restored its honor to itself.” Onthe eve of the polling, November 11, the venerable Hindenburg added hissupport in a broadcast to the nation: “Show tomorrow your firm nationalunity and your solidarity with the government. Support with me and the

* Some months previously, on May 11, Lord Hailsham, the British Secretary ofState for War, had publicly warned that any attempt of Germany to rearm wouldbe a breach of the peace treaty and would be answered by sanctions, in accordancewith the treaty. In Germany it was thought that sanctions would mean armed in-vasion.

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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 willmaintain, German unity!”

The response of the German people, after fifteen years of frustrationand of resentment against the consequences of a lost war, was almostunanimous. Some 96 per cent of the registered voters cast their ballotsand 95 per cent of these approved Germany’s withdrawal from Geneva.The vote for the single Nazi list for the Reichstag (which included Hugen-berg and a half-dozen other non-Nazis) was 92 per cent. Even at theDachau concentration camp 2,154 out of 2,242 inmates voted for thegovernment which had incarcerated them! It is true that in many com-munities threats were made against those who failed to vote or who votedthe wrong way; and in some cases there was fear that anyone who cast hisvote against the regime might be detected and punished. Yet even withthese reservations the election, whose count at least was honest, was astaggering victory for Adolf Hitler. There was no doubt that in defyingthe outside world as he had done, he had the overwhelming support of theGerman people.

Three days after the plebiscite and election, Hitler sent for the newPolish ambassador, Josef Lipski. At the end of their talk a joint com-munique was issued which amazed not only the German public but theoutside world. The Polish and German governments agreed “to deal withthe questions touching both countries by means of direct negotiations andto renounce all application of force in their relations with each other forthe consolidation of European peace.”

Even more than France, Poland was the hated and despised enemy inthe minds of the Germans. To them the most heinous crime of the Ver-sailles peacemakers had been to separate East Prussia from the Reich bythe Polish Corridor, to detach Danzig and to give to the Poles the provinceof Posen and part of Silesia, which, though predominantly Polish in popu-lation, had been German territory since the days of the partition of Poland.No German statesmen during the Republic had been willing to regard thePolish acquisitions as permanent. Stresemann had refused even to con-sider an Eastern Locarno pact with Poland to supplement the Locarnoagreement for the West. And General von Seeckt, father of the Reichs-wehr and arbiter of foreign policy during the first years of the Republic,had advised the government as early as 1922, “Poland’s existence is in-tolerable, 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 . . . Withthe disappearance of Poland will fall one of the strongest pillars of theVersailles Peace, the hegemony of France.”26

Before Poland could be obliterated, Hitler saw, it must be separatedfrom its alliance with France. The course he now embarked on offeredseveral immediate advantages besides the ultimate one. By renouncingthe use of force against Poland he could strengthen his propaganda for

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peace and allay the suspicions aroused in both Western and EasternEurope by his hasty exit from Geneva. By inducing the Poles to conductdirect negotiations he could bypass the League of Nations and thenweaken its authority. And he could not only deal a blow to the League’sconception of “collective security” but undermine the French alliances inEastern Europe, of which Poland was the bastion. The German people,with their traditional hatred of the Poles, might not understand, but toHitler one of the advantages of a dictatorship over democracy was thatunpopular policies which promised significant results ultimately could bepursued temporarily without internal rumpus.

On January 26, 1934, four days before Hitler was to meet the Reich-stag on the first anniversary of his accession to power, announcement wasmade of the signing of a ten-year nonaggression pact between Germanyand Poland. From that day on, Poland, which under the dictatorship ofMarshal Pilsudski was itself just eliminating the last vestiges of parlia-mentary democracy, began gradually to detach itself from France, itsprotector since its rebirth in 1919, and to grow ever closer to Nazi Ger-many. It was a path that was to lead to its destruction long before thetreaty of “friendship and nonaggression” ran out.

When Hitler addressed the Reichstag on January 30, 1934, he couldlook back on a year of achievement without parallel in German history.Within twelve months he had overthrown the Weimar Republic, substi-tuted his personal dictatorship for its democracy, destroyed all the politi-cal parties but his own, smashed the state governments and their parlia-ments and unified and defederalized the Reich, wiped out the labor unions,stamped out democratic associations of any kind, driven the Jews out ofpublic and professional life, abolished freedom of speech and of the press,stifled the independence of the courts and “co-ordinated” under Nazi rulethe political, economic, cultural and social life of an ancient and cultivatedpeople. For all these accomplishments and for his resolute action in for-eign affairs, which took Germany out of the concert of nations at Geneva,and proclaimed German insistence on being treated as an equal amongthe great powers, he was backed, as the autumn plebiscite and election hadshown, by the overwhelming majority of the German people.

Yet as the second year of his dictatorship got under way clouds gath-ered on the Nazi horizon.

THE BLOOD PURGE OF JUNE 30, 1934

The darkening of the sky was due to three unresolved problems, andthey 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 ofwhose 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 mil-

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Hon storm troopers, had not been put off by Hitler’s gesture of appointinghim to the cabinet nor by the Fuehrer’s friendly personal letter on NewYear s Day. In February he presented to the cabinet a lengthy memoran-dum proposing that the S.A. should be made the foundation of a newPeople’s Army and that the armed forces, the S.A. and S.S. and all veter-ans groups should be placed under a single Ministry of Defense overwhich—the implication was clear—he should preside. No more revolt-ing idea could be imagined by the officer corps, and its senior membersnot only unanimously rejected the proposal but appealed to Hindenburgto support them. The whole tradition of the military caste would be de-stroyed if the roughneck Roehm and his brawling Brownshirts should getcontrol of the Army. Moreover, the generals were shocked by the tales,now beginning to receive wide circulation, of the corruption and debauch-ery of the homosexual clique around the S.A. chief. As General vonBrauchitsch would later testify, “rearmament was too serious and diffi-cult a business to permit the participation of peculators, drunkards andhomosexuals.”

For the moment Hitler could not afford to offend the Army, and hegave no support to Roehm’s proposal. Indeed, on February 21 he secretlytold Anthony Eden, who had come to Berlin to discuss the disarmamentimpasse, that he was prepared to reduce the S.A. by two thirds and toagree to a system of inspection to make sure that the remainder receivedneither military training nor arms—an offer which, when it leaked out,further inflamed the bitterness of Roehm and the S.A. As the summer of1934 approached, the relations between the S.A. chief of staff and theArmy High Command continued to deteriorate. There were stormyscenes in the cabinet between Roehm and General von Blomberg, and inMarch the Minister of Defense protested to Hitler that the S.A. wassecretly arming a large force of special staff guards with heavy machineguns—which was not only a threat against the Army but, General vonBlomberg added, an act done so publicly that it threatened Germany’sclandestine rearmament under the auspices of the Reichswehr.

It is plain that at this juncture Hitler, unlike the headstrong Roehm andhis cronies, was thinking ahead to the day when the ailing Hindenburgwould breathe his last. He knew that the aged President as well as theArmy and other conservative forces in Germany were in favor of arestoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy as soon as the Field Marshalhad passed away. He himself had other plans, and when early in Aprilthe news was secretly but authoritatively conveyed to him and Blombergfrom Neudeck that the President’s days were numbered, he realized thata bold stroke must soon be made. To ensure its success he would needthe backing of the officer corps; to obtain that support he was preparedto go to almost any length.

The occasion for confidential parleys with the Army soon presented it-self. On April 11 the Chancellor, accompanied by General von Blom-berg and the commanders in chief of the Army and the Navy, General Frei-herr von Fritsch and Admiral Raeder, set out on the cruiser Deutschland

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from Kiel for Koenigsberg to attend the spring maneuvers in East Prussia.The Army and Navy commanders were told of Hindenburg’s worseningcondition and Hitler, backed by the compliant Blomberg, bluntly pro-posed that he himself, with the Reichswehr’s blessing, be the President’ssuccessor. In return for the support of the military, Hitler offered to sup-press Roehm’s ambitions, drastically reduce the S.A. and guarantee theArmy and Navy that they would continue to be the sole bearers of armsin the Third Reich. It is believed that Hitler also held out to Fritsch andRaeder the prospect of an immense expansion of the Army and Navy, ifthey were prepared to go along with him. With the fawning Raeder therewas no question but that he would, but Fritsch, a tougher man, had firstto 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 offi-cers of the German Army unanimously endorsed Hitler as the successorto President Hindenburg.27 For the Army this political decision was toprove of historic significance. By voluntarily offering to put itself in theunrestrained hands of a megalomaniacal dictator it was sealing its ownfate. As for Hitler, the deal would make his dictatorship supreme. Withthe stubborn Field Marshal out of the way, with the prospect of the res-toration of the Hohenzollerns snuffed out, with himself as head of stateas well as of government, he could go his way alone and unhindered. Theprice he paid for this elevation to supreme power was paltry: the sacrificeof the S.A. He did not need it, now that he had all the authority. It wasa raucous rabble that only embarrassed him. Hitler’s contempt for thenarrow minds of the generals must have risen sharply that spring. Theycould be had, he must have thought, for surprisingly little. It was a judg-ment that he held, unaltered, except for one bad moment in June, to theend—-his end and theirs.

Yet, as summer came, Hitler’s troubles were far from over. An omi-nous tension began to grip Berlin. Cries for the “second revolution”multiplied, and not only Roehm and the storm troop leaders but Goebbelshimself, in speeches and in the press which he controlled, gave vent tothem. From the conservative Right, from the Junkers and big industrial-ists around Papen and Hindenburg, came demands that a halt be calledto the revolution, that the arbitrary arrests, the persecution of the Jews,the attacks against the churches, the arrogant behavior of the stormtroopers be curbed, and that the general terror organized by the Naziscome to an end.

Within the Nazi Party itself there was a new and ruthless struggle forpower. Roehm’s two most powerful enemies, Goering and Himmler,were uniting against him. On April 1 Himmler, chief of the black-coatedS.S., which was still an arm of the S.A. and under Roehm’s command, wasnamed by Goering to be chief of the Prussian Gestapo, and he immedi-ately began to build up a secret-police empire of his own. Goering, whohad been made a General der Infanterie by Hindenburg the previous Au-gust (though he was Minister of Aviation), gladly shed his shabby brown

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S.A. uniform for the more showy one of his new office, and the change wassymbolic: 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, Goeringalso recruited his own personal police force, the LandespolizeigruppeGeneral Goering, several thousand men strong, which he concentrated inthe former Cadet School at Lichterfelde, where he had first entered theArmy 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 rememberthat he no longer enjoyed the confidence of Hindenburg, the generals orthe conservatives and was therefore powerless, had begun to mix again inpolitics. He was in touch with Roehm and Gregor Strasser and therewere reports, some of which reached Hitler, that he was busy trying tomake a deal whereby he would become Vice-Chancellor in place of hisold enemy, Papen, Roehm would become Minister of Defense and theS.A. would be amalgamated with the Army. Cabinet “lists” circulated bythe dozen in Berlin; in some of them Bruening was to be made ForeignMinister and Strasser Minister of Economics. These reports had littlefoundation 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 atthe same time to settle accounts with Schleicher and the disgruntled con-servatives, embroidered them and brought them to Hitler, who at anytime needed little prodding to have his suspicions aroused. What Goeringand his Gestapo chief had in mind was not only to purge the S.A. but toliquidate other opponents on the Left and Right, including some who hadopposed Hitler in the past and were no longer politically active. At theend of May Bruening and Schleicher were warned that they were markedfor murder. The former slipped quietly out of the country in disguise, thelatter went off on a vacation to Bavaria but returned to Berlin toward theend 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 nearlyfive hours and which “dragged on until midnight.” It was, Hitler said, his“last attempt” to come to an understanding with his closest friend in themovement.

I informed him that I had the impression from countless rumors and nu-merous declarations of faithful old party members and S.A. leaders that con-scienceless elements were preparing a national Bolshevist action that couldbring nothing but untold misfortune to Germany ... I implored him for thelast time to voluntarily abandon this madness and instead to lend his authorityto prevent a development that, in any event, could only end in disaster.

According to Hitler, Roehm left him with the “assurance that he woulddo everything possible to put things right.” Actually, Hitler later claimed,Roehm began “preparations to eliminate me personally.”

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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 evi-dence that has come to light indicates that the S.A. chief never plotted toput Hitler out of the way. Unfortunately the captured archives shed nomore light on the purge than they do on the Reichstag fire; in both casesit is likely that all the incriminating documents were destroyed on theorders of Goering.

Whatever was the real nature of the long conversation between the twoNazi veterans, a day or two after it took place Hitler bade the S.A. go onleave for the entire month of July, during which the storm troopers wereprohibited from wearing uniforms or engaging in parades or exercises.On June 7, Roehm announced that he himself was going on sick leavebut 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 partafter its leave, we may permit them to enjoy this brief hope. They will re-ceive 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. lead-ers at the resort town of Wiessee, near Munich, on June 30. Hitler readilyagreed and indeed kept the appointment, though not in a manner whichRoehm could possibly have imagined. Perhaps not in a way, either, thatHitler himself at this moment could foresee. For, as he later admitted tothe Reichstag, he hesitated “again and again before taking a final de-cision ... I still cherished the secret hope that I might be able to sparethe movement and my S.A. the shame of such a disagreement and that itmight be possible to remove the mischief without severe conflicts.”

“It must be confessed,” he added, “that the last days of May continu-ously brought to light more and more disquieting facts.” But did they?Later Hitler claimed that Roehm and his conspirators had made prepara-tions to seize Berlin and take him into custody. But if this were so whydid all the S.A. leaders depart from Berlin early in June, and—even moreimportant—why did Hitler leave Germany at this moment and thus pro-vide an opportunity for the S.A. chiefs to grab control of the State in hisabsence?

For on June 14 the Fuehrer flew to Venice to hold the first of many con-versations with his fellow fascist dictator, Mussolini. The meeting, inci-dentally, did not go off well for the German leader, who, in his soiledraincoat and battered soft hat, seemed ill at ease in the presence of themore experienced Duce, resplendent in his glittering, bemedaled blackFascisti uniform and inclined to be condescending to his visitor. Hitlerreturned to Germany in a state of considerable irritation and called ameeting of his party leaders in the little town of Gera in Thuringia forSunday, June 17, to report on his talks with Mussolini and to assess theworsening situation at home. As fate would have it, another meeting tookplace on that Sunday in the old university town of Marburg which at-tracted much more attention in Germany and indeed in the world, andwhich helped bring the critical situation to a climax.

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The dilettante Papen, who had been rudely, shoved to the sidelines by

. er and Goenng but who was still nominally Vice-Chancellor and stillenjoyed the confidence of Hindenburg, summoned enough courage tospeak out publicly against the excesses of the regime which he had doneso 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: “Thingsare going badly, Papen. See what you can do to put them right.”

Thus encouraged, Papen had accepted an invitation to make an addressat the University of Marburg on June 17. The speech was largely writtenby one of his personal advisers, Edgar Jung, a brilliant Munich lawyerand writer and a Protestant, though certain ideas were furnished by oneof the Vice-Chancellor’s secretaries, Herbert von Bose, and by ErichKlausener, the leader of Catholic Action—a collaboration that soon costall three of them their lives. It was a courageous utterance and, thanks toJung, eloquent in style and dignified in tone. It called for an end of therevolution, for a termination of the Nazi terror, for the restoration ofnormal decencies and the return of some measure of freedom, especiallyof freedom of the press. Addressing Dr. Goebbels, the Propaganda Minis-ter, Papen said:

Open manly discussions would be of more service to the German peoplethan, 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 contactand unity with the people, one must not underestimate their understanding.One must not everlastingly keep them on leading strings ... No organiza-tion, no propaganda, however excellent, can alone maintain confidence in thelong run. It is not by incitement . . . and not by threats against the helplesspart of the nation but only by talking things over with people that confidenceand devotion can be maintained. People treated as morons, however, have noconfidence to give away ... It is time to join together in fraternal friendshipand respect for all our fellow countrymen, to avoid disturbing the labors ofserious 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 atGera, and Goebbels moved quickly to see that it became known as littleas possible. He forbade the broadcast of a recording of the speech sched-uled for the same evening as well as any reference to it in the press, andordered the police to seize copies of the Frankfurter Zeitung which wereon the streets with a partial text. But not even the absolute powers of thePropaganda Minister were sufficient to keep the German people and theoutside world from learning the contents of the defiant address. The wilyPapen had provided the foreign correspondents and diplomats in Berlinwith advance texts, and several thousand copies were hastily run off on thepresses of Papen’s newspaper, Germania, and secretly distributed.

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On learning of the Marburg speech, Hitler was stung to fury. In aspeech the same afternoon at Gera he denounced the “pygmy who imag-ines he can stop, with a few phrases, the gigantic renewal of a people’slife.” Papen was furious too, at the suppression of his speech. He rushedto Hitler on June 20 and told him he could not tolerate such a ban “by ajunior minister,” insisted that he had spoken “as a trustee for the Presi-dent,” and then and there submitted his resignation, adding a warningthat he “would advise Hindenburg of this immediately.”29

This was a threat that obviously worried Hitler, for he was aware ofreports that the President was so displeased with the situation that he wasconsidering declaring martial law and handing over power to the Army.In order to size up the seriousness of this danger to the very continuanceof the Nazi regime, he flew to Neudeck on the following day, June 21, tosee Hindenburg. His reception could only have increased his fears. Hewas met by General von Blomberg and quickly saw that his DefenseMinister’s usual lackeylike attitude toward him had suddenly disappeared.Blomberg instead was now the stern Prussian general and he brusquelyinformed Hitler that he was authorized by the Field Marshal to tell himthat unless the present state of tension in Germany was brought quickly toan end the President would declare martial law and turn over the controlof the State to the Army. When Hitler was permitted to see Hindenburgfor a few minutes in the presence of Blomberg, the old President con-firmed the ultimatum.

This was a disastrous turn of affairs for the Nazi Chancellor. Not onlywas 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 toBerlin the same day he must have reflected that he had only one choice tomake if he were to survive. He must honor his pact with the Army, sup-press the S.A. and halt the continuance of the revolution for which thestorm troop leaders were pressing. The Army, backed by the venerablePresident, it was obvious, would accept no less.

And yet, in that last crucial week of June, Hitler hesitated—as leastas 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. Theyhad already drawn up the scores they wanted to settle, long fists of presentand past enemies they wished to liquidate. All they had to do was con-vince the Fuehrer of the enormity of the “plot” against him and of thenecessity for swift and ruthless action. According to the testimony atNuremberg of Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the Interior and one ofHitler’s most faithful followers, it was Himmler who finally succeeded inconvincing Hitler that “Roehm wanted to start a putsch. The Fuehrer,”Frick added, “ordered Himmler to suppress the putsch.” Himmler, heexplained, was instructed to put it down in Bavaria, and Goering in Ber-lin.30

The Army prodded Hitler too and thereby incurred a responsibilityfor the barbarity which was soon to take place. On June 25 General vonFritsch, the Commander in Chief, put the Army in a state of alert, can-

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celing all leaves and confining the troops to barracks. On June 28 Roehmwas expelled from the German Officers’ League—a plain warning thatthe S.A. chief of staff was in for trouble. And just to make sure that noone, Roehm above all, should have any illusions about where the Armystood, Blomberg took the unprecedented step of publishing a signedarticle on June 29 in the Voelkischer Beobachter, affirming that “theArmy . . . stands behind Adolf Hitler . . . who remains one of ours.”

The Army, then, was pressing for the purge, but it did not want to soilits own hands. That must be done by Hitler, Goering and Himmler, withtheir black-coated S.S. and Goering’s special police.

Hitler left Berlin on Thursday, June 28, for Essen to attend the weddingof a local Nazi gauleiter, Josef Terboven. The trip and its purpose hardlysuggest that he felt a grave crisis to be imminent. On the same day Goe-ring and Himmler ordered special detachments of the S.S. and the “Goe-ring Police” to hold themselves in readiness. With Hitler out of town, theyevidently felt free to act on their own. The next day, the twenty-ninth, theFuehrer made a tour of Labor Service camps in Westphalia, returning inthe afternoon to Godesberg on the Rhine, where he put up at a hotel onthe riverbank run by an old war comrade, Dreesen. That evening Goeb-bels, who seems to have hesitated as to which camp to join—he had beensecretly 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 cafefrequented by homosexuals, whom Roehm had made leader of the BerlinS.A., had alerted the storm troopers. Ernst, a handsome but not a brightyoung man, believed then and for the remaining twenty-four hours or so ofhis life that he was faced by a putsch from the Right, and he would dieshouting proudly, “Heil Hitler!”

Hitler later claimed that up to this moment, June 29, he had decidedmerely to deprive the chief of staff [Roehm] of his office and for thetime being keep him in custody and arrest a number of S.A. leaders whosecrimes were unquestioned . . . and in an earnest appeal to the others, Iwould recall them to their duty.”

However, [he told the Reichstag on July 13] . . . at one o’clock in the nightI received from Berlin and Munich two urgent messages concerning alarmsummonses: 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 govern-ment buildings were to be occupied . . . Second, in Munich the alarm sum-mons had already been given to the S.A.; they had been ordered to assembleat nine o’clock in the evening . . . That was mutiny! ... In these circum-stances I could make but one decision . . . Only a ruthless and bloody inter-vention 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 theimplication is that they were sent by Goering and Himmler. What is

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certain is that they were highly exaggerated. In Berlin, S.A. LeaderErnst thought of nothing more drastic than to drive to Bremen thatSaturday with his bride to take ship for a honeymoon at Madeira. Andin the south, where the S.A. “conspirators” were concentrated?

At the moment of 2 a.m. on June 30 when Hitler, with Goebbels at hisside, was taking off from Hangelar Airfield near Bonn, Captain Roehmand his S.A. lieutenants were peacefully slumbering in their beds at theHanslbauer Hotel at Wiessee on the shores of the Tegernsee. EdmundHeines, the S.A. Obergruppenfuehrer of Silesia, a convicted murderer, anotorious homosexual with a girlish face on the brawny body of a pianomover, was in bed with a young man. So far did the S.A. chiefs seem fromstaging a revolt that Roehm had left his staff guards in Munich. Thereappeared to be plenty of carousing among the S.A. leaders but no plotting.

Hitler and his small party (Otto Dietrich, his press chief, and ViktorLutze, the colorless but loyal S.A. leader of Hanover, had joined it) landedin Munich at 4 a.m. on Saturday, June 30, and found that some actionalready had been taken. Major Walther Buch, head of USCHLA, theparty court, and Adolf Wagner, Bavarian Minister of the Interior, aidedby such early cronies of Hitler as Emil Maurice, the ex-convict and rivalfor Geli Raubal’s love, and Christian Weber, the horse dealer and formercabaret bouncer, had arrested the Munich S.A. leaders, including Ober-gruppenfuehrer Schneidhuber, who was also chief of police in Munich.Hitler, who was now working himself up to a fine state of hysteria, foundthe prisoners in the Ministry of the Interior. Striding up to Schneidhuber,a former Army colonel, he tore off his Nazi insignia and cursed him forhis “treason.”

Shortly after dawn Hitler and his party sped out of Munich towardWiessee in a long column of cars. They found Roehm and his friendsstill fast asleep in the Hanslbauer Hotel. The awakening was rude. Heinesand his young male companion were dragged out of bed, taken outsidethe hotel and summarily shot on the orders of Hitler. The Fuehrer, ac-cording to Otto Dietrich’s account, entered Roehm’s room alone, gavehim a dressing down and ordered him to be brought back to Munich andlodged in Stadelheim prison, where the S.A. chief had served time afterhis participation with Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. After four-teen stormy years the two friends, who more than any others were respon-sible for the launching of the Third Reich, for its terror and its degrada-tion, who though they had often disagreed had stood together in themoments of crisis and defeats and disappointments, had come to a partingof the ways, and the scar-faced, brawling battler for Hitler and Nazismhad come to the end of his violent life.

Hider, in a final act of what he apparently thought was grace, gaveorders that a pistol be left on the table of his old comrade. Roehm re-fused to make use of it. “If I am to be killed, let Adolf do it himself,” heis reported to have said. Thereupon two S.A. officers, according to thetestimony of an eyewitness, a police lieutenant, given twenty-three yearslater in a postwar trial at Munich in May 1957, entered the cell and

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fired their revolvers at Roehm point-blank. “Roehm wanted to say some-thing, 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 otherGerman had ever reached, and almost certainly, like hundreds of otherswho were slaughtered that day—like Schneidhuber, who was reportedto have cried, Gentlemen, I don’t know what this is all about, but shootstraight”—without any clear idea of what was happening, or why, otherthan that it was an act of treachery which he, who had lived so long withtreachery and committed it so often himself, had not expected fromAdolf 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 theCadet School at Lichterfelde and shot by firing squads of Himmler’sS.S. and Goering’s special police.

Among them was Karl Ernst, whose honeymoon trip was interruptedby S.S. gunmen as his car neared Bremen. His bride and his chauffeurwere wounded; he himself was knocked unconscious and flown back toBerlin for his execution.

The S.A. men were not the only ones to fall on that bloody summerweekend. On the morning of June 30, a squad of S.S. men in mufti rangthe 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, andwhen his wife, whom he had married but eighteen months before—hehad been a bachelor until then—stepped forward, she too was slain on thespot. General Kurt von Bredow, a close friend of Schleicher, met a simi-lar fate the same evening. Gregor Strasser was seized at his home in Ber-lin at noon on Saturday and dispatched a few hours later in his cell in thePrinz Albrechtstrasse Gestapo jail on the personal orders of Goering.

Papen was luckier. He escaped with his life. But his office was ran-sacked by an S.S. squad, his principal secretary, Bose, shot down at hisdesk, his confidential collaborator, Edgar Jung, who had been arrested afew days earlier by the Gestapo, murdered in prison, another collabora-

* The Munich trial in May 1957 was the first occasion on which actual eyewitnessesand participants in the June 30, 1934, purge talked in public. During the ThirdReich it would not have been possible. Sepp Dietrich, whom this author recallspersonally as one of the most brutal men of the Third Reich, commanded Hitler’sb.b. Bodyguard in 1934 and directed the executions in Stadelheim prison. Later acolonel general in the Waffen S.S. during the war, he was sentenced to twenty-fiveyears in prison for complicity in the murder of American prisoners of war during,the Battle °f the Bulge in 1944. Released after ten years, he was brought to MunichIa , m Sentencccl on. May 1410 eighteen months in prison for his part in the June30, 1934, executions. His sentence and that of Michael Lippert, who was convictedas being one of the two S.S. officers who actually killed Roehm, was the first punish-ment given to the Nazi executioners who took part in the purge.

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tor, Erich Klausener, leader of Catholic Action, slain in his office in theMinistry of Communications, and the rest of his staff, including his privatesecretary, Baroness Stotzingen, carted off to concentration camp. WhenPapen went to protest to Goering, the latter, who at that moment had notime for idle talk, “more or less,” he later recalled, threw him out, placinghim under house arrest at his villa, which was surrounded by heavilyarmed S.S. men and where his telephone was cut and he was forbidden tohave any contact with the outside world—an added humiliation which theVice-Chancellor of Germany swallowed remarkably well. For withinless than a month he defiled himself by accepting from the Nazi murderersof his friends a new assignment as German minister to Vienna, where theNazis had just slain Chancellor Dollfuss.

How many were slain in the purge was never definitely established. Inhis Reichstag speech of July 13, Hitler announced that sixty-one personswere shot, including nineteen “higher S.A. leaders,” that thirteen moredied “resisting arrest” and that three “committed suicide”—a total ofseventy-seven. The White Book of the Purge, published by emigres inParis, 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 inthe past, others were murdered apparently because they knew too much,and at least one because of mistaken identity. The body of Gustav vonKahr, whose suppression of the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 we have al-ready recounted, and who had long since retired from politics, was foundin a swamp near Dachau hacked to death, apparently by pickaxes. Hitlerhad neither forgotten nor forgiven him. The body of Father BernhardStempfle of the Hieronymite Order, who, it will be remembered fromearlier 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 andthree shots in the heart. Heiden says the murder gang that killed him wasled by Emil Maurice, the ex-convict who had also made love to GeliRaubal. Others who “knew too much” included three S.A. men who werebelieved to have been accomplices of Ernst in setting the Reichstag onfire. They were dispatched with Ernst.

One other murder deserves mention. At seven-twenty on the eveningof June 30, Dr. Willi Schmid, the eminent music critic of the MuenchenerNeueste Nachrichten, a leading Munich daily newspaper, was playing thecello 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 inthe Schackstrasse in Munich. The doorbell rang, four S.S. men appearedand without explanation took Dr. Schmid away. Four days later his bodywas returned in a coffin with orders from the Gestapo not to open it in anycircumstances. 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.

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who in the meantime had been arrested by another S.S. detachment andshot.*

Was there a plot against Hitler at all? There is only his word for it, con-tained in the official communiques and in his Reichstag speech of July 13.He never presented a shred of evidence. Roehm had made no secret ofhis ambition to see the S.A. become the nucleus of the new Army and tohead it himself. He had certainly been in touch with Schleicher about thescheme, which they had first discussed when the General was Chancellor.Probably, as Hitler stated, Gregor Strasser “was brought in.” But suchtalks certainly did not constitute treason. Hitler himself was in contactwith Strasser and early in June, according to Otto Strasser, offered him thepost of Minister of Economics.

At first Hitler accused Roehm and Schleicher of having sought thebacking of a “foreign power”—obviously France—and charged thatGeneral von Bredow was the intermediary in “foreign policy.” This waspart of the indictment of them as “traitors.” And though Hitler repeatedthe charges in his Reichstag speech and spoke sarcastically of “a foreigndiplomat [who could have been no other than Frangois-Poncet, theFrench ambassador] explaining that the meeting with Schleicher andRoehm was of an entirely harmless character,” he was unable to substan-tiate his accusations. It was crime enough, he said lamely, for any respon-sible German in the Third Reich even to see foreign diplomats without hisknowledge.

When three traitors in Germany arrange ... a meeting with a foreignstatesman ... 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 atsuch a consultation which was thus kept secret from me they talked of nothingmore than the weather, old coins and like topics.

When Frangois-Poncet protested vigorously against the insinuationthat he had participated in the Roehm “plot” the German Foreign Officeofficially informed the French government that the accusations werewholly without foundation and that the Reich government hoped the am-bassador would remain in his post. Indeed, as this writer can testify,Frangois-Poncet continued to remain on better personal terms with Hit-ler than any other envoy from a democratic state.

In the first communiques, especially in a blood-curdling eyewitness ac-count given the public by Otto Dietrich, the Fuehrer’s press chief, andeven in Hitler’s Reichstag speech, much was made of the depraved morals

* Kate Eva Hoerlin, former wife of Willi Schmid, told the story of her husband’smurder in an affidavit sworn on July 7, 1945, at Binghamton, N.Y. She becamean American citizen in 1944. To hush up the atrocity Rudolf Hess himself visitedthe widow, apologized for the “mistake” and secured for her a pension from theGerman government. The affidavit is given in Nuremberg Document L-135 NCAVII, pp. 883-90.

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of Roehm and the other S.A. leaders who were shot. Dietrich assertedthat the scene of the arrest of Heines, who was caught in bed at Wiesseewith a young man, “defied description,” and Hitler in addressing the sur-viving storm troop leaders in Munich at noon on June 30, just after thefirst executions, declared that for their corrupt morals alone these mendeserved 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 weresexual perverts and convicted murderers. It was common talk, for in-stance, that Heines used to send S.A. men scouring all over Germany tofind him suitable male lovers. These things Hitler had not only toleratedbut defended; more than once he had warned his party comrades againstbeing too squeamish about a man’s personal morals if he were a fanaticalfighter for the movement. Now, on June 30, 1934, he professed to beshocked 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 atea party in the gardens of the Chancellery. On Monday President Hin-denburg thanked Hitler for his “determined action and gallant personalintervention which have nipped treason in the bud and rescued the Ger-man people from great danger.” He also congratulated Goering for his“energetic and successful action” in suppressing “high treason.” On Tues-day General von Blomberg expressed to the Chancellor the congratula-tions of the cabinet, which proceeded to “legalize” the slaughter as anecessary measure “for the defense of the State.” Blomberg also issuedan order of the day to the Army expressing the High Command’s satisfac-tion with the turn of events and promising to establish “cordial relationswith the new S.A.”

It was natural, no doubt, that the Army should be pleased with theelimination of its rival, the S.A., but what about the sense of honor, letalone of decency, of an officer corps which not only condoned but openlypraised a government for carrying out a massacre without precedent inGerman history, during which two of its leading officers, Generals vonSchleicher and von Bredow, having been branded as traitors, were cold-bloodedly murdered? Only the voices of the eighty-five-year-old FieldMarshal von Mackensen and of General von Hammerstein, the formerCommander in Chief of the Army, were raised in protest against the mur-der of their two fellow officers and the charges of treason which had beenthe excuse for it.* This behavior of the corps was a black stain on the

* The two senior officers continued their efforts to clear the names of Schleicherand Bredow, and succeeded in getting Hitler, at a secret meeting of party and mili-tary leaders in Berlin on January 3, 1935, to admit that the killing of the twogenerals had been “in error” and to announce that their names would be restoredto the honor rolls of their regiments. This “rehabilitation” was never publishedin Germany, but the officer corps accepted it as such. (See Wheeler-Bennett, TheNemesis of Power, p. 337.)

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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 aposition in which they could never oppose future acts of Nazi terrorismnot only at home but even when they were aimed across the frontiers, evenwhen they were committed against their own members. For the Armywas backing Hitler’s claim that he had become the law, or, as he put it inhis Reichstag speech of July 13, “If anyone reproaches me and asks why Idid not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this: Inthis hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and therebyI became the supreme judge [oberster Gerichtsherr] of the Germanpeople.” And Hitler added, for good measure, “Everyone must know forall future time that if he raises his hand to strike the State, then certaindeath is his lot.” This was a warning that was to catch up with the generalsin ten years almost to a day when at last the more desperate of them daredto raise their hand to strike down their “supreme judge.”

Moreover, the officer corps only deluded itself in thinking that on June30 it got rid forever of the threat of the Nazi movement against its tradi-tional 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 madeindependent of the S.A., with Himmler—as its Reichsfuehrer—respon-sible only to Hitler. Soon this much-better-disciplined and loyal forcewould become much more powerful than the S.A. had ever been and as arival to the Army would succeed where Roehm’s ragged Brownshirts hadfailed.

For the moment, however, the generals were smugly confident. AsHitler reiterated in his Reichstag address on July 13, the Army was toremain “the sole bearer of arms.” At the High Command’s bidding, theChancellor had got rid of the S.A., which had dared to dispute that dic-tum. 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 hadbeen sinking and on August 2, at nine in the morning, he died in hiseighty-seventh year. At noon, three hours later, it was announced thataccording to a law enacted by the cabinet on the preceding day the officesof Chancellor and President had been combined and that Adolf Hitlerhad taken over the powers of the head of state and Commander in Chiefof the Armed Forces. The title of President was abolished; Hitler wouldbe known as Fuehrer and Reich Chancellor. His dictatorship had becomecomplete. To leave no loopholes Hitler exacted from all officers and menof the armed forces an oath of allegiance—not to Germany, not to theconstitution, which he had violated by not calling for the election of Hin-denburg’s successor, but to himself. It read:

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I swear by God this sacred oath, that I will render unconditional obedienceto Adolf Hitler, the Fuehrer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Com-mander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk mylife at any time for this oath.

From August 1934 on, the generals, who up to that time could haveoverthrown the Nazi regime with ease had they so desired, thus tied them-selves to the person of Adolf Hitler, recognizing him as the highest legiti-mate authority in the land and binding themselves to him by an oath offealty which they felt honor-bound to obey in all circumstances no matterhow degrading to them and the Fatherland. It was an oath which was totrouble the conscience of quite a few high officers when their acknowl-edged leader set off on a path which they felt could only lead to the na-tion’s destruction and which they opposed. It was also a pledge whichenabled an even greater number of officers to excuse themselves fromany personal responsibility for the unspeakable crimes which they carriedout on the orders of a Supreme Commander whose true nature they hadseen for themselves in the butchery of June 30. One of the appallingaberrations of the German officer corps from this point on rose out ofthis conflict of “honor”—a word which, as this author can testify by per-sonal experience, was often on their lips and of which they had such acurious concept. Later and often, by honoring their oath they dishonoredthemselves as human beings and trod in the mud the moral code of theircorps.

When Hindenburg died, Dr. Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda,officially announced that no last will and testament of the Field Marshalhad been found and that it must be presumed there was none. But onAugust 15, four days before the plebiscite in which the German peoplewere asked to approve Hitler’s taking over the President’s office, Hinden-burg’s political testament turned up, delivered to Hitler by none otherthan Papen. Its words of praise for Hitler provided strong ammunition toGoebbels in the final days of the plebiscite campaign, and it was re-inforced on the eve of the voting by a broadcast of Colonel Oskar von Hin-denburg:

My father had himself seen in Adolf Hitler his own direct successor ashead of the German State, and I am acting according to my father’s intentionwhen I call on all German men and women to vote for the handing over of myfather’s office to the Fuehrer and Reich Chancellor.*

Almost certainly this was not true. For Hindenburg, on the best evi-dence available, had recommended as his last wish a restoration of themonarchy after his death. This part of the testament Adolf Hitler sup-pressed.

* It is interesting and perhaps revealing that Hitler now promoted Oskar fromcolonel to major general. See above, p. 181.

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Some, if not all, of the mystery which cloaked the truth about the agedPresident s testament was cleared up after the war by Papen’s interroga-tion at Nuremberg and later in his memoirs. And while Papen is not anunimpeachable witness and may not have told all he knew, his testimonycannot be ignored. He himself wrote the initial draft of Hindenburg’s lastwill, and, according to him, at the Field Marshal’s request.

My draft [he says in his memoirs] recommended that after his death a con-stitutional monarchy should be adopted, and I made a point of the inadvisa-bility of combining the offices of President and Chancellor. In order to avoidgiving any offense to Hitler, there were also certain approving references tosome 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 haddecided 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 itdesired. He therefore intended to regard the account of his service as a testa-ment, and his recommendations concerning the return of the monarchy wouldbe expressed, as his last wish, in a private letter to Hitler. This meant, ofcourse, that the whole point of my original suggestion had been lost, as therecommendation concerning the monarchy was no longer addressed to thenation; a fact of which Hitler later took full advantage.

No German was as well placed as Papen to observe how Hitler took theadvantage.

When I returned to Berlin after Hindenburg’s funeral at Tannenberg, Hitlerrang me up. He asked me if a political testament by Hindenburg existed, and ifI knew where it was. I said that I would ask Oskar von Hindenburg. “I shouldbe obliged, said Hitler, if you would ensure that this document comes intomy possession as soon as possible.” I therefore told Kageneck, my privatesecretary, to go to Neudeck and ask Hindenburg’s son if the testament stillexisted, and whether I could have it to pass it on to Hitler. As I had not seenHindenburg after he left Berlin at the end of May, I had no idea whether hehad destroyed the testament or not.

Oskar, who had not been able to find the important document im-mediately after his father’s death, suddenly found it. That this could nothave been a very difficult feat was attested to by Count von der Schulen-burg, Hindenburg s adjutant, in his testimony at Papen’s denazificationtrial. He revealed that the President on May 11 signed two documents,his testament and his last wishes. The first was addressed to “the GermanPeople” and the second to the “Reich Chancellor.” When Hindenburgleft Berlin on his last journey to Neudeck Schulenburg took the papers

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with him. Papen says he did not know this at the time. But in due coursehis secretary returned from Neudeck bringing two sealed envelopesturned 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 withus. It was obvious that Hindenburg’s recommendations in the document ex-pressing his last wishes were contrary to Hitler’s intentions. He therefore tookadvantage of the fact that the envelope bore the address “Reich ChancellorAdolf Hitler.” “These recommendations of the late President,” he said, “aregiven to me personally. Later I shall decide if and when I shall permit theirpublication.” In vain I begged him to publish both documents. The onlyone 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 Hitlerbut a Hohenzollern become head of state Papen does not say and perhapsdoes not know. Since it has never turned up among the hundreds of tonsof captured secret Nazi documents it is likely that Hitler lost no time indestroying it.

Perhaps it would have made little difference if Hitler had been coura-geous and honest enough to publish it. Even before Hindenburg’s death,he had made the cabinet promulgate a law giving him the President’spowers. This was on August 1, the day before the Field Marshal died.That the “law” was illegal also made little difference in a Germany wherethe former Austrian corporal had now become the law itself. That it was il-legal was obvious. On December 17, 1932, during the Schleicher govern-ment, the Reichstag had passed by the necessary two-thirds majority anamendment to the constitution providing that the president of the HighCourt of Justice, instead of the Chancellor, should act as President untila new election could be held. And while the Enabling Act, which was the“legal” basis of Hitler’s dictatorship, gave the Chancellor the right tomake laws which deviated from the constitution, it specifically forbadehim to tamper with the institution of the Presidency.

But what mattered the law now? It mattered not to Papen, who cheer-fully went off to serve Hitler as minister in Vienna and smooth over themess caused by the murder of Chancellor Dollfuss by the Nazis. It mat-tered not to the generals, who went eagerly to work to build up Hitler’sArmy. It mattered not to the industrialists, who turned enthusiasticallyto 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 thosewho 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

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power. Only four and a quarter million Germans had the courage—or thedesire—to vote “No.”

No wonder that Hitler was in a confident mood when the Nazi PartyCongress assembled in Nuremberg on September 4. I watched him on themorning of the next day stride like a conquering emperor down the centeraisle of the great flag-bedecked Luitpold Hall while the band blared forth“The Badenweiler March” and thirty thousand hands were raised in theNazi salute. A few moments later he sat proudly in the center of the vaststage with folded arms and shining eyes as Gauleiter Adolf Wagner ofBavaria read the Fuehrer’s proclamation.

The German form of life is definitely determined for the next thousandyears. The Age of Nerves of the nineteenth century has found its close withus. 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 helived he would rule this great people as the most powerful and ruthlessautocrat they had ever had. The venerable Hindenburg was no longerthere to dispute his authority, the Army was in his hands, bound to obedi-ence by an oath no German soldier would lightly break. Indeed, all Ger-many and all the Germans were in his bloodstained hands now that thelast recalcitrants had been done away with or had disappeared for good.

“It is wonderful!” he exulted at Nuremberg to the foreign correspond-ents at the end of the exhausting week of parades, speeches, pagan pageant-ry and the most frenzied adulation for a public figure this writer had everseen. Adolf Hitler had come a long way from the gutters of Vienna. Hewas only forty-five, and this was just the beginning. Even one returningto Germany for the first time since the death of the Republic could seethat, whatever his crimes against humanity, Hitler had unleashed a dy-namic force of incalculable proportions which had long been pent up inthe German people. To what purpose, he had already made clear in thepages of Mein Kampf and in a hundred speeches which had gone un-noticed or unheeded or been ridiculed by so many—by almost everyone—within and especially without the Third Reich.

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LIFE IN THE THIRD REICH:1933-37

IT was at this time, in the late summer of 1934, that I came to live andwork in the Third Reich. There was much that impressed, puzzled andtroubled a foreign observer about the new Germany. The overwhelmingmajority of Germans did not seem to mind that their personal freedomhad been taken away, that so much of their culture had been destroyedand replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work hadbecome regimented to a degree never before experienced even by a peopleaccustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation.

In the background, to be sure, there lurked the terror of the Gestapoand the fear of the concentration camp for those who got out of line orwho had been Communists or Socialists or too liberal or too pacifist, or whowere Jews. The Blood Purge of June 30, 1934, was a warning of howruthless the new leaders could be. Yet the Nazi terror in the early yearsaffected the lives of relatively few Germans and a newly arrived observerwas somewhat surprised to see that the people of this country did notseem to feel that they were being cowed and held down by an unscrupu-lous and brutal dictatorship. On the contrary, they supported it withgenuine enthusiasm. Somehow it imbued them with a new hope and anew confidence and an astonishing faith in the future of their country.

Hitler was liquidating the past, with all its frustrations and disappoint-ments. Step by step, and rapidly (as we shall see in detail later), he wasfreeing Germany from the shackles of Versailles, confounding the vic-torious Allies and making Germany militarily strong again. This waswhat most Germans wanted and they were willing to make the sacrificeswhich the Leader demanded of them to get it: the loss of personal free-dom, a Spartan diet (“Guns before Butter”) and hard work. By theautumn of 1936 the problem of unemployment had been largely licked,almost everyone had a job again* and one heard workers who had beendeprived of their trade-union rights joking, over their full dinner pails,

* From February 1933 to the spring of 1937, the number of registered unemployedfell from six million to less than one million

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that at least under Hitler there was no more freedom to starve. “Gemein-nutz von Eigennutz!” (The Common Interest before Self!) was a popularNazi slogan in those days, and though many a party leader, Goering aboveall, was secretly enriching himself and the profits of business were mount-ing, there was no doubt that the masses were taken in by the new “na-tional socialism” which ostensibly put the welfare of the communityabove one’s personal gain.

The racial laws which excluded the Jews from the German communityseemed to a foreign observer to be a shocking throwback to primitivetimes, but since the Nazi racial theories exalted the Germans as the saltof the earth and the master race they were far from being unpopular. Afew Germans one met—former Socialists or liberals or devout Christiansfrom the old conservative classes—were disgusted or even revolted bythe persecution of the Jews, but though they helped to alleviate hardshipin 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 itwas not an easy one to answer.

The Germans heard vaguely in their censored press and broadcasts ofthe revulsion abroad but they noticed that it did not prevent foreignersfrom flocking to the Third Reich and seemingly enjoying its hospitality.For Nazi Germany, much more than Soviet Russia, was open for all theworld to see.* The tourist business thrived and brought in vast sums ofbadly needed foreign currency. Apparently the Nazi leaders had nothingto hide. A foreigner, no matter how anti-Nazi, could come to Germanyand see and study what he liked—with the exception of the concentrationcamps and, as in all countries, the military installations. And many did.And many returned who if they were not converted were at least renderedtolerant of the “new Germany” and believed that they had seen, as theysaid, “positive achievements.” Even a man as perspicacious as LloydGeorge, who had led England to victory over Germany in 1918, and whoin that year had campaigned with an election slogan of “Hang the Kaiser”could visit Hitler at Obersalzberg in 1936 and go away enchanted withthe Fuehrer and praise him publicly as “a great man” who had the visionand the will to solve a modern nation’s social problems—above all, un-employment, a sore which still festered in England and in regard to whichthe great wartime Liberal leader with his program We Can Conquer Un-employment had found so little interest at home.

The Olympic games held in Berlin in August 1936 afforded the Nazis agolden opportunity to impress the world with the achievements of theThird Reich, and they made the most of it. The signs “Juden uner-

* Also, in contrast to the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany permitted all but a fewthousand of its citizens who were in the black book of the secret police to travelabroad, though this was severely curtailed by currency restrictions because of thecountry’s lack of foreign exchange. However, the currency restrictions were nomore stringent than those for British citizens after 1945. The point is that theNazi rulers did not seem to be worried that the average German would be contami-nated by anti-Nazism if he visited the democratic countries.

Life in the Third Reich: 1933-37 233

wuenscht” (Jews Not Welcome) were quietly hauled down from the shops,hotels, beer gardens and places of public entertainment, the persecution ofthe Jews and of the two Christian churches temporarily halted, and thecountry put on its best behavior. No previous games had seen such aspectacular organization nor such a lavish display of entertainment. Goe-ring, Ribbentrop and Goebbels gave dazzling parties for the foreign visi-tors—the Propaganda Minister’s “Italian Night” on the Pfaueninsel nearWannsee gathered more than a thousand guests at dinner in a scene thatresembled the Arabian Nights. The visitors, especially those from Eng-land and America, were greatly impressed by what they saw: apparentlya happy, healthy, friendly people united under Hitler—a far differentpicture, they said, than they had got from reading the newspaper dis-patches from Berlin.

And yet underneath the surface, hidden from the tourists during thosesplendid late-summer Olympic days in Berlin and indeed overlooked bymost Germans or accepted by them with a startling passivity, thereseemed to be—to a foreigner at least—a degrading transformation ofGerman life.

There was nothing hidden, of course, about the laws which Hitler de-creed against the Jews or about the government-sponsored persecution ofthese hapless people. The so-called Nuremberg Laws of September 15,

1935, deprived the Jews of German citizenship, confining them to thestatus of “subjects.” It also forbade marriage between Jews and Aryansas well as extramarital relations between them, and it prohibited Jewsfrom employing female Aryan servants under thirty-five years of age. Inthe next few years some thirteen decrees supplementing the NurembergLaws would outlaw the Jew completely. But already by the summer of

1936, when the Germany which was host to the Olympic games was en-chanting the visitors from the West, the Jews had been excluded either bylaw or by Nazi terror—the latter often preceded the former—from publicand private employment to such an extent that at least one half of themwere without means of livelihood. In the first year of the Third Reich,1933, they had been excluded from public office, the civil service, journal-ism, radio, farming, teaching, the theater, the films; in 1934 they werekicked out of the stock exchanges, and though the ban on their practicingthe professions of law and medicine or engaging in business did not comelegally until 1938 they were in practice removed from these fields by thetime 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 butoften even the necessities. In many a town the Jew found it difficult if notimpossible to purchase food. Over the doors of the grocery and butchershops, the bakeries and the dairies, were signs, “Jews Not Admitted.” Inmany communities Jews could not procure milk even for their youngchildren. Pharmacies would not sell them drugs or medicine. Hotelswould not give them a night’s lodging. And always, wherever they went,were the taunting signs “Jews Strictly Forbidden in This Town” or “JewsEnter This Place at Their Own Risk.” At a sharp bend in the road near

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Ludwigshafen was a sign, “Drive Carefully! Sharp Curve! Jews 75 Milesan Hour!”*

Such was the plight of the Jews at about the time the Festival of theOlympics was held in Germany. It was but the beginning of a road thatwould 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 politicalCatholicism in Mein Kampf and attacked both of the Christian churchesfor 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 ofthe fact that in all previous historical experience a purely political partyhas never succeeded in producing a religious reformation.” Article 24 ofthe party program had demanded “liberty for all religious denominationsin the State so far as they are not a danger to . . . the moral feelings ofthe German race. The party stands for positive Christianity.” In hisspeech of March 23, 1933, to the Reichstag when the legislative body ofGermany abandoned its functions to the dictator, Hitler paid tribute tothe Christian faiths as “essential elements for safeguarding the soul of theGerman people,” promised to respect their rights, declared that his gov-ernment’s “ambition is a peaceful accord between Church and State” andadded—with an eye to the votes of the Catholic Center Party, which hereceived—that “we hope to improve our friendly relations with the HolySee.”

Scarcely four months later, on July 20, the Nazi government concludeda concordat with the Vatican in which it guaranteed the freedom of theCatholic religion and the right of the Church “to regulate her own affairs.”The agreement, signed on behalf of Germany by Papen and of the HolySee by the then Papal Secretary of State, Monsignor Pacelli, later PopePius XII, was hardly put to paper before it was being broken by the Nazigovernment. But coming as it did at a moment when the first excesses ofthe new regime in Germany had provoked world-wide revulsion, the con-cordat undoubtedly lent the Hitler government much badly needed pres-tige.!

On July 25, five days after the ratification of the concordat, the Germangovernment promulgated a sterilization law, which particularly offended

* The author was violently attacked in the German press and on the radio, andthreatened with expulsion, for having written a dispatch saying that some of theseanti-Semitic signs were being removed for the duration of the Olympic games,t In an allocution to the Sacred College on June 2, 1945, Pope Pius XII defendedthe concordat which he had signed, but described National Socialism, as he latercame to know it, as “the arrogant apostasy from Jesus Christ, the denial of Hisdoctrine and of His work of redemption, the cult of violence, the idolatry of raceand blood, the overthrow of human liberty and dignity.”

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the Catholic Church. Five days later the first steps were taken to dis-solve the Catholic Youth League. During the next years thousands ofCatholic priests, nuns and lay leaders were arrested, many of them ontrumped-up charges of “immorality” or of “smuggling foreign currency.”Erich Klausener, leader of Catholic Action, was, as we have seen, mur-dered in the June 30, 1934, purge. Scores of Catholic publications weresuppressed, and even the sanctity of the confessional was violated by Ges-tapo agents. By the spring of 1937 the Catholic hierarchy in Germany,which, like most of the Protestant clergy, had at first tried to co-operatewith the new regime, was thoroughly disillusioned. On March 14, 1937,Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical, “Mit Brennender Sorge” (With Burn-ing Sorrow), charging the Nazi government with “evasion” and “viola-tion” of the concordat and accusing it of sowing “the tares of suspicion,discord, hatred, calumny, of secret and open fundamental hostility toChrist and His Church.” On “the horizon of Germany” the Pope saw “thethreatening storm clouds of destructive religious wars . . . which haveno other aim than ... of extermination.”

The Reverend Martin Niemoeller had personally welcomed the comingto power of the Nazis in 1933. In that year his autobiography, FromU-Boat to Pulpit, had been published. The story of how this submarinecommander in the First World War had become a prominent Protestantpastor was singled out for special praise in the Nazi press and became abest seller. To Pastor Niemoeller, as to many a Protestant clergyman,the fourteen years of the Republic had been, as he said, “years of dark-ness”1 and at the close of his autobiography he added a note of satisfac-tion that the Nazi revolution had finally triumphed and that it had broughtabout 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 dividedfaith. 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 Method-ists. The rest belonged to twenty-eight Lutheran and Reformed Churchesof which the largest was the Church of the Old Prussian Union, witheighteen million members. With the rise of National Socialism there camefurther divisions among the Protestants. The more fanatical Nazis amongthem organized in 1932 “The German Christians’ Faith Movement” ofwhich the most vehement leader was a certain Ludwig Mueller, armychaplain of the East Prussian Military District, a devoted follower ofHitler who had first brought the Fuehrer together with General von Blom-berg when the latter commanded the district. The “German Christians”ardently supported the Nazi doctrines of race and the leadership principleand wanted them applied to a Reich Church which would bring all Prot-estants into one all-embracing body. In 1933 the “German Christians”had some three thousand out of a total of seventeen thousand pastors,

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though their lay followers probably represented a larger percentage ofchurchgoers.

Opposed to the “German Christians” was another minority groupwhich called itself the “Confessional Church.” It had about the same num-ber of pastors and was eventually led by Niemoeller. It opposed the Nazi-lication of the Protestant churches, rejected the Nazi racial theories anddenounced the anti-Christian doctrines of Rosenberg and other Nazileaders. In between lay the majority of Protestants, who seemed too timidto join either of the two warring groups, who sat on the fence and eventu-ally, for the most part, landed in the arms of Hitler, accepting his author-ity to intervene in church affairs and obeying his commands without openprotest.

It is difficult to understand the behavior of most German Protestantsin the first Nazi years unless one is aware of two things: their history andthe influence of Martin Luther. * The great founder of Protestantism wasboth a passionate anti-Semite and a ferocious believer in absolute obedi-ence to political authority. He wanted Germany rid of the Jews and whenthey were sent away he advised that they be deprived of “all their cash andjewels and silver and gold” and, furthermore, “that their synagogues orschools 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 miseryand captivity as they incessantly lament and complain to God about us”—advice that was literally followed four centuries later by Hitler, Goeringand Himmler.2

In what was perhaps the only popular revolt in German history, thepeasant uprising of 1525, Luther advised the princes to adopt the mostruthless measures against the “mad dogs,” as he called the desperate,downtrodden peasants. Here, as in his utterances about the Jews, Lutheremployed a coarseness and brutality of language unequaled in Germanhistory until the Nazi time. The influence of this towering figure extendeddown the generations in Germany, especially among the Protestants.Among other results was the ease with which German Protestantism be-came the instrument of royal and princely absolutism from the sixteenthcentury until the kings and princes were overthrown in 1918. The heredi-tary monarchs and petty rulers became the supreme bishops of the Prot-estant Church in their lands. Thus in Prussia the Hohenzollern King wasthe head of the Church. In no country with the exception of Czarist Rus-sia did the clergy become by tradition so completely servile to the politicalauthority of the State. Its members, with few exceptions, stood solidly be-hind the King, the Junkers and the Army, and during the nineteenth cen-tury they dutifully opposed the rising liberal and democratic movements.Even the Weimar Republic was anathema to most Protestant pastors, notonly because it had deposed the kings and princes but because it drew its

* To avoid any misunderstanding, it might be well to point out here that the authoris a Protestant.

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main support from the Catholics and the Socialists. During the Reichstagelections one could not help but notice that the Protestant clergy—Nie-moeller was typical—quite openly supported the Nationalist and eventhe Nazi enemies of the Republic. Like Niemoeller, most of the pastorswelcomed the advent of Adolf Hitler to the chancellorship in 1933.

They were soon to become acquainted with the very strong-arm Nazitactics which had swept Hitler to political power. In July 1933 representa-tives of the Protestant churches had written a constitution for a new“Reich Church,” and it was formally recognized by the Reichstag onJuly 14. Immediately there broke out a heated struggle over the electionof the first Reich Bishop. Hitler insisted that his friend, Chaplain Muel-ler, whom he had appointed his adviser on Protestant church affairs, begiven this highest office. The leaders of the Church Federation proposedan eminent divine, Pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh. But they werenaive. The Nazi government intervened, dissolved a number of provin-cial church organizations, suspended from office several leading dignitariesof the Protestant churches, loosed the S.A. and the Gestapo on recalcitrantclergymen—in fact, terrorized all who supported Bodelschwingh. On theeve of the elections of delegates to the synod which would elect the ReichBishop, Hitler personally took to the radio to “urge” the election of “Ger-man Christians” whose candidate Mueller was. The intimidation washighly successful. Bodelschwingh in the meantime had been forced towithdraw his candidacy, and the “elections” returned a majority of “Ger-man Christians,” who in September at the synod in Wittenberg, whereLuther had first defied Rome, elected Mueller Reich Bishop.

But the new head of the Church, a heavy-handed man, was not able toestablish a unified Church or to completely Nazify the Protestant congre-gations. On November 13, 1933, the day after the German people hadoverwhelmingly backed Hitler in a national plebiscite, the “GermanChristians” staged a massive rally in the Sportpalast in Berlin. A Dr.Reinhardt Krause, the Berlin district leader of the sect, proposed theabandonment of the Old Testament, “with its tales of cattle merchants andpimps” and the revision of the New Testament with the teaching of Jesus“corresponding entirely with the demands of National Socialism.” Reso-lutions were drawn up demanding “One People, One Reich, One Faith,”requiring all pastors to take an oath of allegiance to Hitler and insistingthat all churches institute the Aryan paragraph and exclude convertedJews. This was too much even for the timid Protestants who haddeclined to take any part in the church war, and Bishop Mueller wasforced to suspend Dr. Krause and disavow him.

In reality the struggle between the Nazi government and the churcheswas the age-old one of what to render unto Caesar and what to God. Sofar as the Protestants were concerned, Hitler was insistent that if theNazi “German Christians” could not bring the evangelical churches intoline under Reich Bishop Mueller then the government itself would haveto take over the direction of the churches. He had always had a certain

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contempt for the Protestants, who, though a tiny minority in his nativeCatholic Austria, comprised two thirds of the citizens of Germany. “Youcan do anything you want with them,” he once confided to his aides.“They will submit . . . they are insignificant little people, submissive asdogs, and they sweat with embarrassment when you talk to them.”3 Hewas well aware that the resistance to the Nazification of the Protestantchurches came from a minority of pastors and an even smaller minorityof worshipers.

By the beginning of 1934, the disillusioned Pastor Niemoeller hadbecome the guiding spirit of the minority resistance in both the “Con-fessional Church” and the Pastors’ Emergency League. At the GeneralSynod in Barmen in May 1934, and at a special meeting in Niemoeller’sChurch of Jesus Christ at Dahlem, a suburb of Berlin, in November, theConfessional Church” declared itself to be the legitimate ProtestantChurch of Germany and set up a provisional church government. Thusthere 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 toHitler, had failed to integrate the Protestant churches, and at the end of1935, after the Gestapo had arrested seven hundred “ConfessionalChurch” pastors, he resigned his office and faded out of the picture.Already, in July 1935, Hitler had appointed a Nazi lawyer friend, Dr.Hans Kerri, to be Minister for Church Affairs, with instructions to makea second attempt to co-ordinate the Protestants. One of the milder Nazisand a somewhat cautious man, Kerri at first had considerable success. Hesucceeded not only in winning over the conservative clergy, which con-stituted the majority, but in setting up a Church Committee headed bythe venerable Dr. Zoellner, who was respected by all factions, to work outa general settlement. Though Niemoeller’s group co-operated with thecommittee, it still maintained that it was the only legitimate Church.When, in May 1936, it addressed a courteous but firm memorandum toHitler protesting against the anti-Christian tendencies of the regime, de-nouncing the government’s anti-Semitism and demanding an end to Stateinterference 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. Weiss-ler, was murdered in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the fundsof the “Confessional Church” were confiscated and it was forbidden tomake collections.

On February 12, 1937, Dr. Zoellner resigned from the Church Com-mittee—he had been restrained by the Gestapo from visiting Luebeck,where nine Protestant pastors had been arrested—complaining that hiswork had been sabotaged by the Church Minister. Dr. Kerri replied thenext day in a speech to a group of submissive churchmen. He accusedthe venerable Zoellner of failing to appreciate the Nazi doctrine of Race,Blood and Soil, and clearly revealed the government’s hostility to bothProtestant and Catholic churches.

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The party [Kerri said] stands on the basis of Positive Christianity, and Posi-tive Christianity is National Socialism . . . National Socialism is the doingof God’s will . . . God’s will reveals itself in German blood ... Dr. Zoell-ner and Count Galen [the Catholic bishop of Muenster] have tried to makeclear to me that Christianity consists in faith in Christ as the Son of God. Thatmakes me laugh . . . No, Christianity is not dependent upon the Apostle’sCreed . . . True Christianity is represented by the party, and the Germanpeople are now called by the party and especially by the Fuehrer to a realChristianity . . . The Fuehrer is the herald of a new revelation.4

On the first of July, 1937, Dr. Niemoeller was arrested and confinedto Moabit prison in Berlin. On June 27 he had preached to the con-gregation, which always overflowed his church at Dahlem, what was tobe his last sermon in the Third Reich. As if he had a foreboding of whatwas to come he said, “We have no more thought of using our own powersto escape the arm of the authorities than had the Apostles of old. Nomore are we ready to keep silent at man’s behest when God commandsus to speak. For it is, and must remain, the case that we must obey Godrather than man.”

After eight months in prison he was tried on March 2, 1938, before aSondergericht, one of the “Special Courts” set up by the Nazis to tryoffenders against the State, and though acquitted of the main charge ofunderhand attacks against the State” was fined two thousand marks andsentenced to seven months’ imprisonment for “abuse of the pulpit” andholding collections in his church. Since he had served more than thistime, the court ordered his release, but he was seized by the Gestapo ashe was leaving the courtroom, placed in “protective custody” and con-fined 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 “ConfessionalChurch” were arrested in 1937, and hundreds more in the next couple ofyears. If the resistance of the Niemoeller wing of the church was not com-pletely broken, it was certainly bent. As for the majority of Protestantpastors, they, like almost everyone else in Germany, submitted in the faceof Nazi terror. By the end of 1937 the highly respected Bishop Marahrensof Hanover was induced by Dr. Kerri to make a public declaration thatmust have seemed especially humiliating to tougher men of God suchas Niemoeller: “The National Socialist conception of life is the nationaland political teaching which determines and characterizes German man-hood. As such, it is obligatory upon German Christians also.” In thespring of 1938 Bishop Marahrens took the final step of ordering allpastors in his diocese to swear a personal oath of allegiance to theFuehrer. In a short time the vast majority of Protestant clergymen tookthe oath, thus binding themselves legally and morally to obey the com-mands of the dictator.

It would be misleading to give the impression that the persecution of

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Protestants and Catholics by the Nazi State tore the German peopleasunder or even greatly aroused the vast majority of them. It did not. Apeople who had so lightly given up their political and cultural and eco-nomic freedoms were not, except for a relatively few, going to die oreven risk imprisonment to preserve freedom of worship. What reallyaroused the Germans in the Thirties were the glittering successes ofHitler in providing jobs, creating prosperity, restoring Germany’s militarymight, and moving from one triumph to another in his foreign policy. Notmany Germans lost much sleep over the arrests of a few thousandpastors 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 in-tended eventually to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, andsubstitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and thenew paganism of the Nazi extremists. As Bormann, one of the menclosest to Hitler, said publicly in 1941, “National Socialism and Chris-tianity are irreconcilable.”

What the Hitler government envisioned for Germany was clearly setout in a thirty-point program for the “National Reich Church” drawn upduring the war by Rosenberg, an outspoken pagan, who among his otheroffices held that of “the Fuehrer’s Delegate for the Entire Intellectualand Philosophical Education and Instruction for the National SocialistParty.” A few of its thirty articles convey the essentials:

1. The National Reich Church of Germany categorically claims the ex-

clusive 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, butNational Reich orators are to speak in them.

13. The National Church demands immediate cessation of the publishingand dissemination of the Bible in Germany . . .

14. The National Church declares that to it, and therefore to the Germannation, it has been decided that the Fuehrer’s Mein Kampf is the greatest ofall documents. It . . . not only contains the greatest but it embodies thepurest and truest ethics for the present and future life of our nation.

18. The National Church will clear away from its altars all crucifixes, Biblesand pictures of saints.

19. On the altars there must be nothing but Mein Kampf (to the Germannation and therefore to God the most sacred book) and to the left of the altara sword.

30. On the day of its foundation, the Christian Cross must be removedfrom all churches, cathedrals and chapels . . . and it must be supersededby the only unconquerable symbol, the swastika.1 * * * 5 * 7

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THE NAZIFICATION OF CULTURE

On the evening of May 10, 1933, some four and a half months afterHitler became Chancellor, there occurred in Berlin a scene which had notbeen witnessed in the Western world since the late Middle Ages. At aboutmidnight a torchlight parade of thousands of students ended at a squareon Unter den Linden opposite the University of Berlin. Torches wereput to a huge pile of books that had been gathered there, and as the flamesenveloped them more books were thrown on the fire until some twentythousand had been consumed. Similar scenes took place in several othercities. The book burning had begun.

Many of the books tossed into the flames in Berlin that night by thejoyous students under the approving eye of Dr. Goebbels had been writtenby authors of world reputation. They included, among German writers,Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwangcr, Jakob Wassermann,Arnold and Stefan Zweig, Erich Maria Remarque, Walther Rathenau,Albert Einstein, Alfred Kerr and Hugo Preuss, the last named being thescholar who had drafted the Weimar Constitution. But not only the worksof dozens of German writers were burned. A good many foreign authorswere also included: Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Helen Keller, MargaretSanger, H. G. Wells, Havelock Ellis, Arthur Schnitzler, Freud, Gide,Zola, Proust. In the words of a student proclamation, any book was con-demned to the flames “which acts subversively on our future or strikes atthe root of German thought, the German home and the driving forces ofour people.”

Dr. Goebbels, the new Propaganda Minister, who from now on was toput German culture into a Nazi strait jacket, addressed the students asthe burning books turned to ashes. “The soul of the German people canagain express itself. These flames not only illuminate the final end of anold era; they also light up the new.”

The new Nazi era of German culture was illuminated not only by thebonfires of books and the more effective, if less symbolic, measures ofproscribing the sale or library circulation of hundreds of volumes and thepublishing of many new ones, but by the regimentation of culture on ascale which no modern Western nation had ever experienced. As earlyas September 22, 1933, the Reich Chamber of Culture had been set up bylaw under the direction of Dr. Goebbels. Its purpose was defined, in thewords of the law, as follows: “In order to pursue a policy of German cul-ture, it is necessary to gather together the creative artists in all spheresinto a unified organization under the leadership of the Reich. The Reichmust not only determine the lines of progress, mental and spiritual, butalso lead and organize the professions.”

Seven subchambers were established to guide and control every sphereof cultural life: the Reich chambers of fine arts, music, the theater, litera-ture, the press, radio and the films. All persons engaged in these fieldswere obligated to join their respective chambers, whose decisions anddirectives had the validity of law. Among other powers, the chambers

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could expel—or refuse to accept—members for “political unreliability,”which meant that those who were even lukewarm about National Social-ism could be, and usually were, excluded from practicing their professionor art and thus deprived of a livelihood.

No one who lived in Germany in the Thirties, and who cared aboutsuch matters, can ever forget the sickening decline of the cultural stand-ards of a people who had had such high ones for so long a time. This wasinevitable, of course, the moment the Nazi leaders decided that the arts,literature, the press, radio and the films must serve exclusively the propa-ganda purposes of the new regime and its outlandish philosophy. Not asingle living German writer of any importance, with the exception of ErnstJuenger and Ernst Wiechert in the earlier years, was published in Ger-many during the Nazi time. Almost all of them, led by Thomas Mann,emigrated; the few who remained were silent or were silenced. Everymanuscript of a book or a play had to be submitted to the PropagandaMinistry before it could be approved for publication or production.

Music fared best, if only because it was the least political of the arts andbecause the Germans had such a rich store of it from Bach through Bee-thoven and Mozart to Brahms. But the playing of Mendelssohn wasbanned because he was a Jew (the works of all Jewish composers wereverboten) as was the music of Germany’s leading modern composer,Paul Hindemith. Jews were quickly weeded out of the great symphonyorchestras and the opera. Unlike the writers, most of the great figures ofthe German music world chose to remain in Nazi Germany and indeedlent their names and their talent to the New Order. Wilhelm Furtwaen-gler, one of the finest conductors of the century, remained. He was out offavor for a year in 1934 because of his defense of Hindemith, but re-turned to activity for the remaining years of Hitler’s rule. Richard Strauss,perhaps the world’s leading living composer, remained and indeed for atime became president of the Reich Music Chamber, lending his greatname to Goebbels’ prostituting of culture. Walter Gieseking, the eminentpianist, spent much of his time making tours in foreign countries whichwere organized or approved by the Propaganda Minister to promote Ger-man “culture” abroad. But because the musicians did not emigrate andbecause of Germany’s great treasure of classical music, one could hearduring the days of the Third Reich symphony music and opera performedmagnificently. In this the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the BerlinState Opera were pre-eminent. The excellent music fare did much tomake people forget the degradation of the other arts and of so much oflife under the Nazis.

The theater, it must be said, retained much of its excellence as long asit stuck to classical plays. Max Reinhardt, of course, was gone, alongwith all other Jewish producers, directors and actors. The Nazi play-wrights were so ludicrously bad that the public stayed away from theirofferings, which invariably had short runs. The president of the ReichTheater Chamber was one Hans Johst, an unsuccessful playwright whoonce had publicly boasted that whenever someone mentioned the word

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“culture” to him he wanted to reach for his revolver. But even Johst andGoebbels, who determined what was played on the stage and who playedand directed it, were unable to prevent the German theater from givingcommendable and often moving performances of Goethe, Schiller andShakespeare.

Strangely enough, some of Shaw’s plays were permitted to be per-formed in Nazi Germany—perhaps because he poked fun at Englishmenand lampooned democracy and perhaps too because his wit and left-wingpolitical views escaped the Nazi mind.

Strangest of all was the case of Germany’s great playwright, GerhartHauptmann. Because he had been an ardent Socialist his plays had beenbanned from the imperial theaters during Kaiser Wilhelm II’s time. Dur-ing the Republic he had been the most popular playwright in Germany,and indeed he retained that position in the Third Reich. His plays con-tinued to be produced. I shall never forget the scene at the close ofthe first night of his last play, The Daughter of the Cathedral, whenHauptmann, a venerable figure with his flowing white hair tumbling downover his black cape, strode out of the theater arm in arm with Dr. Goeb-bels and Johst. He, like so many other eminent Germans, had made hispeace with Hitler, and Goebbels, a shrewd man, had made much effectivepropaganda out of it, tirelessly reminding the German people and the out-side world that Germany’s greatest living playwright, a former Socialistand the champion of the common man, had not only remained in theThird Reich but had continued to write and have his plays produced.

How sincere or opportunistic or merely changeable this aging play-wright was may be gathered from what happened after the war. TheAmerican authorities, believing that Hauptmann had served the Nazistoo well, banned his plays from the theaters in their sector in West Berlin.Whereupon the Russians invited him to Berlin, welcomed him as a heroand staged a gala cycle of his plays in East Berlin. And on October 6,1945, Hauptmann sent a message to the Communist-dominated “Kultur-bund for the Democratic Revival of Germany” wishing it well and ex-pressing the hope that it would succeed in bringing about a “spiritualrebirth” of the German people.

The Germany which had given the world a Duerer and a Cranach hadnot been pre-eminent in the fine arts in modern times, though Germanexpressionism in painting and the Munich Bauhaus architecture were in-teresting and original movements and German artists had participatedin all the twentieth-century evolutions and eruptions represented by im-pressionism, cubism and Dadaism.

To Hitler, who considered himself a genuine artist despite his earlyfailures 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 ofhis first acts after coming to power was to “cleanse” Germany of its “de-cadent” art and to attempt to substitute a new “Germanic” art. Some6,500 modern paintings—not only the works of Germans such as Kokosch-

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ka and Grosz but those of Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picassoand many others—were removed from German museums.

What was to replace them was shown in the summer of 1937 whenHitler formally opened the “House of German Art” in Munich in a drab,pseudoclassic building which he had helped design and which he describedas “unparalleled and inimitable” in its architecture. In this first exhibitionof Nazi art were crammed some nine hundred works, selected from fifteenthousand submitted, of the worst junk this writer has ever seen in anycountry. Hitler himself made the final selection and, according to someof the party comrades who were with him at the time, had become so in-censed at some of the paintings accepted by the Nazi jury presided overby Adolf Ziegler, a mediocre painter who was president of the ReichChamber of Art,* that he had not only ordered them thrown out but hadkicked holes with his jack boot through several of them. “I was alwaysdetermined,” he said in a long speech inaugurating the exhibition, “iffate 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 theNazi line for “German art”:

Works of art that cannot be understood but need a swollen set of instruc-tions to prove their right to exist and find their way to neurotics who are recep-tive to such stupid or insolent nonsense will no longer openly reach the Ger-man nation. Let no one have illusions! National Socialism has set out topurge the German Reich and our people of all those influences threatening itsexistence and character . . . With the opening of this exhibition has comethe 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 Germanywhich Munich was, preferred to be artistically polluted. In another partof the city in a ramshackle gallery that had to be reached through a nar-row stairway was an exhibition of “degenerate art” which Dr. Goebbelshad organized to show the people what Hitler was rescuing them from.It contained a splendid selection of modern paintings—Kokoschka, Cha-gall and expressionist and impressionist works. The day I visited it, afterpanting 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, in-censed and embarrassed, soon closed it.

THE CONTROL OF PRESS, RADIO, FILMS

Every morning the editors of the Berlin daily newspapers and the cor-respondents of those published elsewhere in the Reich gathered at the

* Ziegler owed his position to the happy circumstance that he had painted theportrait of Geli Raubal.

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Pr°paganda Ministry to be told by Dr. Goebbels or by one of his aideswhat news to print and suppress, how to write the news and headline it,what campaigns to call off or institute and what editorials were desiredfor the day. In case of any misunderstanding a daily written directive wasfurnished along with the oral instructions. For the smaller out-of-townpapers and the periodicals the directives were dispatched by telegram orby 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, stipulatedthat all editors must possess German citizenship, be of Aryan descent andnot married to a Jew. Section 14 of the Press Law ordered editors “tokeep out of the newspapers anything which in any manner is misleadingto the public, mixes selfish aims with community aims, tends to weakenthe strength of the German Reich, outwardly or inwardly, the commonwill of the German people, the defense of Germany, its culture and econo-my ... 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 ofevery Nazi editor and publication in the country. It now led to the oustingof those journals and journalists who were not Nazi or who declined tobecome 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 suchnames as Frederick the Great, Lessing and Rathenau, it had become theleading newspaper of Germany, comparable to the Times of London andthe New York Times. But it was liberal and it was owned by the Flouseof Ullstein, a Jewish firm. It went out of business on April 1, 1934, after230 years of continuous publication. The Berliner Tageblatt, anotherworld-renowned liberal newspaper, lingered on a little longer, until 1937,though its owner, Hans Lackmann-Mosse, a Jew, was forced to surrenderhis interest in the newspaper in the spring of 1933. Germany’s thirdgreat liberal newspaper, the Frankfurter Zeitung, also continued to pub-lish after divesting itself of its Jewish proprietor and editors. Rudolf Kir-cher, its London correspondent, an Anglophile and a liberal, became theeditor and, like Karl Silex, editor of the conservative Deutsche A llgemeineZeitung of Berlin, who had also been a London correspondent, a Rhodesscholar, a passionate admirer of the British and a liberal, served the Naziswell, often becoming, as Otto Dietrich, the Reich press chief, once saidof the former “opposition papers,” “more papal than the Pope.” That thelast three newspapers survived was due partly to the influence of the Ger-man Foreign Office, which wanted these internationally known journalsas a kind of showpiece to impress the outside world. They gave a respect-ability to Nazi Germany and at the same time peddled its propaganda.

With all newspapers in Germany being told what to publish and how towrite the news and editorials, it was inevitable that a deadly conformitywould come over the nation’s press. Even a people so regimented and sogiven to accepting authority became bored by the daily newspapers. Cir-

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culation declined even for the leading Nazi daily newspapers such as themorning Voelkischer Beobachter and the evening Der Angriff. And thetotal circulation of all journals fell off steeply as one paper after anotherwent under or was taken over by Nazi publishers. In the first four yearsof the Third Reich the number of daily newspapers declined from 3,607to 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 FirstWorld War and head of the Eher Verlag, the party’s publishing firm, be-came the financial dictator of the German press. As Reich Leader for thePress and president of the Press Chamber, he had the legal right to sup-press any publication he pleased and the consequent power to buy it up fora song. In a short time the Eher Verlag became a gigantic publishing em-pire, probably the largest and most lucrative in the world.* Despite thedrop in sales of many Nazi publications, the daily newspapers owned orcontrolled by the party or individual Nazis had two thirds of the totaldaily circulation of twenty-five million by the time of the outbreak of thesecond war. In an affidavit made at Nuremberg, Amann described howhe operated:

After the party came to power in 1933 . . . many of these concerns, suchas the Ullstein House, which were owned or controlled by Jewish interests, orby political or religious interests hostile to the Nazi Party, found it expedientto sell their newspapers or assets to the Eher concern. There was no free mar-ket for the sale of such properties and the Eher Verlag was generally the onlybidder. In this matter the Eher Verlag, together with publishing concernsowned or controlled by it, expanded into a monopoly of the newspaper pub-lishing business in Germany . . . The party investment in these publishingenterprises became financially very successful. It is a true statement to saythat the basic purpose of the Nazi press program was to eliminate all thepress which was in opposition to the party.6

At one period in 1934 both Amann and Goebbels appealed to the ob-sequious editors to make their papers less monotonous. Amann said hedeplored “the present far-reaching uniformity of the press, which is not aproduct of government measures and does not conform to the will of thegovernment.” One rash editor, Ehm Welke of the weekly Gruene Post,made the mistake of taking Amann and Goebbels seriously. He chidedthe Propaganda Ministry for its red tape and for the heavy hand withwhich it held down the press and made it so dull. His publication waspromptly suspended for three months and he himself dismissed by Goeb-bels and carted off to a concentration camp.

* Amann’s own income skyrocketed from 108,000 marks in 1934 to 3,800,000marks in 1942. (Letter to the author from Professor Oron J. Hale, who has madea study of the surviving records of the Nazi publishing firm.)

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The radio and the motion pictures were also quickly harnessed to servethe propaganda of the Nazi State. Goebbels had always seen in radio(television had not yet come in) the chief instrument of propaganda inmodern society and through the Radio Department of his ministry and theChamber of Radio he gained complete control of broadcasting and shapedit to his own ends. His task was made easier because in Germany, as inthe other countries of Europe, broadcasting was a monopoly owned andoperated by the State. In 1933 the Nazi government automatically founditself in possession of the Reich Broadcasting Corporation.

The films remained in the hands of private firms but the PropagandaMinistry and the Chamber of Films controlled every aspect of the indus-try, their task being—in the words of an official commentary—“to lift thefilm industry out of the sphere of liberal economic thoughts . . . andthus enable it to receive those tasks which it has to fulfill in the NationalSocialist State.”

The result in both cases was to afflict the German people with radioprograms and motion pictures as inane and boring as were the contentsof their daily newspapers and periodicals. Even a public which usuallysubmitted without protest to being told what was good for it revolted.The customers stayed away in droves from the Nazi films and jammedthe houses which showed the few foreign pictures (mostly B-grade Holly-wood) which Goebbels permitted to be exhibited on German screens. Atone period in the mid-Thirties the hissing of German films became so com-mon that Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the Interior, issued a stern warn-ing against “treasonable behavior on the part of cinema audiences.” Like-wise the radio programs were so roundly criticized that the president ofthe Radio Chamber, one Horst Dressler-Andress, declared that such carp-ing was “an insult to German culture” and would not be tolerated. Inthose days, in the Thirties, a German listener could still turn his dial to ascore of foreign radio stations without, as happened later when the warbegan, 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’smost effective means of propaganda, doing more than any other singleinstrument of communication to shape the German people to Hitler’sends.

I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying andcensored press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Ger-mans I had daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of Lon-don, Paris and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and thoughI listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job ne-cessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German press,checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and going toparty meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find thatnotwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’sinherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady dietover the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression

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on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years ina totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape thedread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda.Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversationwith a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a cafe, I would meet with themost outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent per-sons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsensethey had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes onewas tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with sucha stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemedthe Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to makecontact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the factsof life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disre-gard 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 Hitlersince the early Twenties, was named Reich Minister of Science, Educationand Popular Culture. In the bizarre, topsy-turvy world of National So-cialism, Rust was eminently fitted for his task. Since 1930 he had beenan unemployed provincial schoolmaster, having been dismissed in thatyear by the local republican authorities at Hanover for certain manifesta-tions of instability of mind, though his fanatical Nazism may have beenpartly responsible for his ouster. For Dr. Rust preached the Nazi gospelwith the zeal of a Goebbels and the fuzziness of a Rosenberg. NamedPrussian Minister of Science, Art and Education in February 1933, heboasted that he had succeeded overnight in “liquidating the school as aninstitution of intellectual acrobatics.”

To such a mindless man was now entrusted dictatorial control overGerman science, the public schools, the institutions of higher learning andthe youth organizations. For education in the Third Reich, as Hitler en-visaged it, was not to be confined to stuffy classrooms but to be furtheredby a Spartan, political and martial training in the successive youth groupsand to reach its climax not so much in the universities and engineeringcolleges, which absorbed but a small minority, but first, at the age ofeighteen, in compulsory labor service and then in service, as conscripts,in the armed forces.

Hitler’s contempt for “professors” and the intellectual academic lifehad peppered the pages of Mein Kampf, in which he had set down some ofhis ideas on education. “The whole education by a national state,” he hadwritten, “must aim primarily not at the stuffing with mere knowledge butat building bodies which are physically healthy to the core.” But, evenmore 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 saidin a speech on November 6, 1933, “I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to usalready . . . What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, how-ever, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothingelse but this new community.’ ” And on May 1, 1937, he declared, “Thisnew Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and giveto youth its own education and its own upbringing.” It was not an idleboast; that was precisely what was happening.

The German schools, from first grade through the universities, werequickly Nazified. Textbooks were hastily rewritten, curricula werechanged, 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 instruc-tors had been more or less Nazi in sentiment when not outright partymembers. To strengthen their ideology they were dispatched to specialschools for intensive training in National Socialist principles, emphasis be-ing put on Hitler’s racial doctrines.

Every person in the teaching profession, from kindergarten through theuniversities, was compelled to join the National Socialist Teachers’ Leaguewhich, by law, was held “responsible for the execution of the ideologi-cal and political co-ordination of all teachers in accordance with the Na-tional Socialist doctrine.” The Civil Service Act of 1937 required teachersto be “the executors of the will of the party-supported State” and to beready “at any time to defend without reservation the National SocialistState. An earlier decree had classified them as civil servants and thussubject to the racial laws. Jews, of course, were forbidden to teach. Allteachers 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 Serviceor the Hitler Youth. Candidates for instructorships in the universitieshad to attend for six weeks an observation camp where their views andcharacter were studied by Nazi experts and reported to the Ministry ofEducation, which issued licenses to teach based on the candidates’ politi-cal “reliability.”

Prior to 1933, the German public schools had been under the jurisdic-tion of the local authorities and the universities under that of the individualstates. Now all were brought under the iron rule of the Reich Minister ofEducation. It was he who also appointed the rectors and the deans of theuniversities, who formerly had been elected by the full professors of thefaculty. He also appointed the leaders of the university students’ union,to which all students had to belong, and of the lecturers union, compris-ing all instructors. The N.S. Association of University Lecturers, underthe tight leadership of old Nazi hands, was given a decisive role in select-ing who was to teach and to see that what they taught was in accordancewith Nazi theories.

The result of so much Nazification was catastrophic for German edu-

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cation and for German learning. History was so falsified in the new text-books and by the teachers in their lectures that it became ludicrous. Theteaching of the “racial sciences,” exalting the Germans as the master raceand the Jews as breeders of almost all the evil there was in the world, waseven more so. In the University of Berlin alone, where so many greatscholars had taught in the past, the new rector, a storm trooper and byprofession a veterinarian, instituted twenty-five new courses in Rassen-kunde—racial science—and by the time he had really taken the univer-sity apart he had eighty-six courses connected with his own profession.

The teaching of the natural sciences, in which Germany had been sopre-eminent for generations, deteriorated rapidly. Great teachers suchas Einstein and Franck in physics, Haber, Willstaetter and Warburg inchemistry, were fired or retired. Those who remained, many of them,were bitten by the Nazi aberrations and attempted to apply them to purescience. They began to teach what they called German physics, Germanchemistry, German mathematics. Indeed, in 1937 there appeared a jour-nal called Deutsche Mathematik, and its first editorial solemnly proclaimedthat any idea that mathematics could be judged nonracially carried “withinitself the germs of destruction of German science.”

The hallucinations of these Nazi scientists became unbelievable, evento a layman. “German Physics?” asked Professor Philipp Lenard ofHeidelberg University, who was one of the more learned and internation-ally respected scientists of the Third Reich. “ ‘But,’ it will be replied,‘science is and remains international.’ It is false. In reality, science, likeevery other human product, is racial and conditioned by blood.” Pro-fessor Rudolphe Tomaschek, director of the Institute of Physics at Dres-den, went further. “Modern Physics,” he wrote, “is an instrument of[world] Jewry for the destruction of Nordic science . . . True physicsis the creation of the German spirit ... In fact, all European scienceis the fruit of Aryan, or, better, German thought.” Professor JohannesStark, head of the German National Institute of Physical Science, thoughtso too. It would be found, he said, that the “founders of research in phys-ics, and the great discoverers from Galileo to Newton to the physicalpioneers of our time, were almost exclusively Aryan, predominantly ofthe Nordic race.”

There was also Professor Wilhelm Mueller, of the Technical Collegeof Aachen, who in a book entitled Jewry and Science saw a world-wideJewish plot to pollute science and thereby destroy civilization. To himEinstein, with his theory of relativity, was the archvillain. The Einsteintheory, on which so much of modern physics is based, was to this singularNazi professor “directed from beginning to end toward the goal of trans-forming the living—that is, the non-Jewish—world of living essence, bornfrom a mother earth and bound up with blood, and bewitching it intospectral abstraction in which all individual differences of peoples and na-tions, and all inner limits of the races, are lost in unreality, and in whichonly an unsubstantial diversity of geometric dimensions survives whichproduces all events out of the compulsion of its godless subjection to

laws.” The world-wide acclaim given to Einstein on the publication ofhis theory of relativity. Professor Mueller proclaimed, was really only arejoicing over “the approach of Jewish world rule which was to forcedown German manhood irrevocably and eternally to the level of the life-less slave.”

To Professor Ludwig Bieberback, of the University of Berlin, Einsteinwas “an alien mountebank.” Even to Professor Lenard, “the Jew con-spicuously lacks understanding for the truth . . . being in this respectin contrast to the Aryan research scientist with his careful and serious willto truth . . . Jewish physics is thus a phantom and a phenomenon of de-generation of fundamental German Physics.”7

And yet from 1905 to 1931 ten German Jews had been awarded NobelPrizes for their contributions to science.

During the Second Reich, the university professors, like the Protestantclergy> had given blind support to the conservative government and itsexpansionist aims, and the lecture halls had been breeding grounds ofvirulent nationalism and anti-Semitism. The Weimar Republic had in-sisted on complete academic freedom, and one result had been that thevast 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 aconservative, monarchical Germany. And though to many of them, be-fore 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 facul-ties knuckled under to the Nazification of higher learning after 1933.Though official figures put the number of professors and instructors dis-missed during the first five years of the regime at 2,800—about one fourthof the total number—the proportion of those who lost their posts throughdefying National Socialism was, as Professor Wilhelm Roepke, himselfdismissed from the University of Marburg in 1933, said, “exceedinglysmall.” Though small, there were names famous in the German academicworld: Karl Jaspers, E. I. Gumbel, Theodor Litt, Karl Barth, Julius Eb-binghaus and dozen of others. Most of them emigrated, first to Switzer-land, Holland and England and eventually to America. One of them,Professor Theodor Lessing, who had fled to Czechoslovakia, was trackeddown by Nazi thugs and murdered in Marienbad on August 31, 1933.

A large majority of professors, however, remained at their posts, and asearly as the autumn of 1933 some 960 of them, led by such luminaries asProfessor Sauerbruch, the surgeon, Heidegger, the existentialist philoso-pher, and Pinder, the art historian, took a public vow to support Hitlerand the National Socialist regime.

“It was a scene of prostitution,” Professor Roepke later wrote, “thathas stained the honorable history of German learning.”8 And as Profes-sor Julius Ebbinghaus, looking back over the shambles in 1945, said, “The

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German universities failed, while there was still time, to oppose publiclywith all their power the destruction of knowledge and of the democraticstate. They failed to keep the beacon of freedom and right burning dur-ing the night of tyranny.”9

The cost of such failure was great. After six years of Nazification thenumber of university students dropped by more than one half—from127,920 to 58,325. The decline in enrollment at the institutes of tech-nology, from which Germany got its scientists and engineers, was evengreater—from 20,474 to 9,554. Academic standards fell dizzily. By1937 there was not only a shortage of young men in the sciences andengineering but a decline in their qualifications. Long before the out-break of the war the chemical industry, busily helping to further Nazi re-armament, was complaining through its organ, Die Chemische Industrie,that Germany was losing its leadership in chemistry. Not only the na-tional economy but national defense itself was being jeopardized, it com-plained, and it blamed the shortage of young scientists and their mediocrecaliber on the poor quality of the technical colleges.

Nazi Germany’s loss, as it turned out, was the free world’s gain, es-pecially in the race to be the first with the atom bomb. The story of thesuccessful efforts of Nazi leaders, led by Himmler, to hamstring theatomic-energy program is too long and involved to be recounted here. Itwas one of the ironies of fate that the development of the bomb in theUnited States owed so much to two men who had been exiled because ofrace from the Nazi and Fascist dictatorships: Einstein from Germany andFermi from Italy.

To Adolf Hitler it was not so much the public schools, from which hehimself had dropped out so early in life, but the organizations of the Hit-ler Youth on which he counted to educate the youth of Germany for theends he had in mind. In the years of the Nazi Party’s struggle for powerthe Hitler Youth movement had not amounted to much. In 1932, thelast year of the Republic, its total enrollment was only 107,956, com-pared to some ten million youths who belonged to the various organiza-tions united in the Reich Committee of German Youth Associations. Inno country in the world had there been a youth movement of such vitalityand numbers as in republican Germany. Hitler, realizing this, was deter-mined to take it over and Nazify it.

His chief lieutenant for this task was a handsome young man of banalmind but of great driving force, Baldur von Schirach, who, falling underHitler’s spell, had joined the party in 1925 at the age of eighteen and in1931 had been named Youth Leader of the Nazi Party. Among the scar-faced, brawling Brownshirts, he had the curious look of an Americancollege student, fresh and immature, and this perhaps was due to his hav-ing had, as we have seen, American forebears (including two signers ofthe Declaration of Independence).10

Schirach was named “Youth Leader of the German Reich” in June1933. 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 na-tional 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 ofGerman naval heroes, Admiral von Trotha, who had been Chief of Staffof the High Seas Fleet in the First World War and who was now presi-dent of the Youth Associations. The venerable admiral too was put toflight and his position and organization were dissolved. Millions of dol-lars’ worth of property, chiefly in hundreds of youth hostels scatteredthroughout Germany, was seized.

The concordat of July 20, 1933, had specifically provided for the un-hindered continuance of the Catholic Youth Association. On December1, 1936, Hitler decreed a law outlawing it and all other non-Nazi organi-zations for young people.

. . . All of the German youth in the Reich is organized within the HitlerYouth.

The German youth, besides being reared within the family and schools,shall be educated physically, intellectually and morally in the spirit of Na-tional Socialism . . . through the Hitler Youth.11

Schirach, whose office had formerly been subordinate to the Ministryof Education, was made responsible directly to Hitler.

This half-baked young man of twenty-nine, who wrote maudlin versein praise of Hitler (“this genius grazing the stars”) and followed Rosen-berg in his weird paganism and Streicher in his virulent anti-Semitism, hadbecome the dictator of youth in the Third Reich.

From the age of six to eighteen, when conscription for the Labor Serv-ice and the Army began, girls as well as boys were organized in the variouscadres of the Hitler Youth. Parents found guilty of trying to keep theirchildren from joining the organization were subject to heavy prison sen-tences even though, as in some cases, they merely objected to having theirdaughters enter some of the services where cases of pregnancy hadreached scandalous proportions.

From the age of six to ten, a boy served a sort of apprenticeship forthe Hitler Youth as a Pimpf. Each youngster was given a performancebook in which would be recorded his progress through the entire Naziyouth movement, including his ideological growth. At ten, after passingsuitable tests in athletics, camping and Nazified history, he graduatedinto the Jungvolk (“Young Folk”), where he took the following oath:

In the presence of this blood banner, which represents our Fuehrer, I swearto devote all my energies and my strength to the savior of our country, AdolfHitler. 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 remainedthere until he was eighteen, when he passed into the Labor Service and

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the Army. It was a vast organization organized on paramilitary linessimilar to the S.A. and in which the youngsters approaching manhoodreceived systematic training not only in camping, sports and Nazi ideologybut in soldiering. On many a weekend in the environs of Berlin this writerwould be interrupted in his picnicking by Hitler Youths scrambling throughthe woods or over the heath, rifles at the ready and heavy army packs ontheir backs.

Sometimes the young ladies would be playing at soldiering, too, forthe Hitler Youth movement did not neglect the maidens. From ten tofourteen, German girls were enrolled as Jungmaedel—literally, “youngmaidens”—and they too had a uniform, made up of a white blouse, fullblue skirt, socks and heavy—and most unfeminine—marching shoes.Their training was much like that of the boys of the same age and in-cluded long marches on weekends with heavy packs and the usual indoc-trination in the Nazi philosophy. But emphasis was put on the role ofwomen in the Third Reich—to be, above all, healthy mothers of healthychildren. This was stressed even more when the girls became, at four-teen, members of the B.D.M.—Bund Deutscher Maedel (League of Ger-man Maidens).

At eighteen, several thousand of the girls in the B.D.M. (they remainedin 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 taskwas to help both in the house and in the fields. The girls lived sometimesin the farmhouses and often in small camps in rural districts from whichthey were taken by truck early each morning to the farms. Moral prob-lems soon arose. The presence of a pretty young city girl sometimes dis-rupted a peasant’s household, and angry complaints from parents abouttheir daughters’ having been made pregnant on the farms began to beheard. But that wasn’t the only problem. Usually a girls’ camp was lo-cated near a Labor Service camp for young men. This juxtapositionseems to have made for many pregnancies too. One couplet—a take-offon the “Strength through Joy” movement of the Labor Front, but it ap-plied especially to the Land Jahr of the young maidens—went the roundsof Germany:

In the fields and on the heathI lose Strength through Joy.

Similar moral problems also arose during the Household Year forGirls, in which some half a million Hitler Youth maidens spent a year atdomestic service in a city household. Actually, the more sincere Nazisdid not consider them moral problems at all. On more than one occasionI listened to women leaders of the B.D.M.—they were invariably of theplainer type and usually unmarried—lecture their young charges on themoral and patriotic duty of bearing children for Hitler’s Reich—withinwedlock 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 stayout of the organization, and in March 1939 the government issued a lawconscripting all youth into the Hitler Youth on the same basis as theywere drafted into the Army. Recalcitrant parents were warned that theirchildren would be taken away from them and put into orphanages orother homes unless they enrolled.

The final twist to education in the Third Reich came in the establish-ment of three types of schools for the training of the elite: the Adolf Hit-ler Schools, under the direction of the Hitler Youth, the National Politi-cal Institutes of Education and the Order Castles—the last two under theaegis of the party. The Adolf Hitler Schools took the most promisingyoungsters from the Jungvolk at the age of twelve and gave them sixyears of intensive training for leadership in the party and in the publicservices. The pupils lived at the school under Spartan discipline and ongraduation were eligible for the university. There were ten such schoolsfounded after 1937, the principal one being the Akademie at Brunswick.

The purpose of the Political Institutes of Education was to restore thetype 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 wasadded special training in Nazi principles. The schools were under thesupervision of the S.S., which furnished the headmasters and most of theteachers. 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, theOrdensburgen. In these, with their atmosphere of the castles of the Orderof Teutonic Knights of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, weretrained the elite of the Nazi elite. The knightly order had been based onthe principle of absolute obedience to the Master, the Ordensmeister, anddevoted to the German conquest of the Slavic lands in the East and the en-slavement of the natives. The Nazi Order Castles had similar disciplineand purposes. Only the most fanatical young National Socialists werechosen, usually from the top ranks of the graduates of the Adolf HitlerSchools and the Political Institutes. There were four Castles, and a stu-dent attended successively all of them. The first of six years was spent inone which specialized in the “racial sciences” and other aspects of Naziideology. The emphasis was on mental training and discipline, with physi-cal training subordinated to it. This was reversed the second year at aCastle where athletics and sports, including mountain climbing and para-chute jumping, came first. The third Castle, where the students spentthe 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 yearand a half to the Ordensburg in Marienburg in East Prussia, near thePolish frontier. There, within the walls of the very Order Castle which hadbeen a stronghold of the Teutonic Knights five centuries before, his politi-cal and military training was concentrated on the Eastern question and

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Germany’s need (and right!) of expanding into the Slavic lands in itseternal search for Lebensraum—an excellent preparation, as it turned outand no doubt was meant to turn out, for the events of 1939 and there-after.

In such a manner were the youth trained for life and work and deathin the Third Reich. Though their minds were deliberately poisoned, theirregular schooling interrupted, their homes largely replaced so far as theirrearing went, the boys and the girls, the young men and women, seemedimmensely happy, filled with a zest for the life of a Hitler Youth. Andthere was no doubt that the practice of bringing the children of all classesand walks of life together, where those who had come from poverty orriches, from a laborer’s home or a peasant’s or a businessman’s, or anaristocrat’s, shared common tasks, was good and healthy in itself. Inmost cases it did no harm to a city boy and girl to spend six months in thecompulsory Labor Service, where they lived outdoors and learned thevalue of manual labor and of getting along with those of different back-grounds. No one who traveled up and down Germany in those days andtalked with the young in their camps and watched them work and playand sing could fail to see that, however sinister the teaching, here was anincredibly dynamic youth movement.

The young in the Third Reich were growing up to have strong andhealthy bodies, faith in the future of their country and in themselves and asense of fellowship and camaraderie that shattered all class and economicand social barriers. I thought of that later, in the May days of 1940, whenalong the road between Aachen and Brussels one saw the contrast be-tween the German soldiers, bronzed and clean-cut from a youth spent inthe sunshine on an adequate diet, and the first British war prisoners, withtheir hollow chests, round shoulders, pasty complexions and bad teeth—tragic examples of the youth that England had neglected so irresponsiblyin 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 in1932-33 had fallen to a new low, more than a billion marks below theworst postwar year, 1924-25. The farmers were in debt to the amountof twelve billions, almost all of it incurred in the last eight years. Intereston these debts took some 14 per cent of all farm income, and to this wasadded a comparable burden in taxes and contributions to social services.

“My party comrades, make yourselves clear about one thing: There isonly one last, one final last chance for the German peasantry,” Hitlerwarned at the outset of his chancellorship, and in October 1933 he de-

dared that “the ruin of the German peasant will be the ruin of the Germanpeople.”

For years the Nazi Party had cultivated the backing of the farmers.Point 17 of the “inalterable” party program promised them “land re-form ... a law for confiscation without compensation of land for com-mon purposes; abolition of interest on farm loans, and prevention of allspeculation in land.” Like most of the other points of the program, thepromises to the farmers were not kept—with the exception of the lastprovision against land speculation. In 1938, after five years of Nazi rule,land distribution remained more lopsided than in any other country inthe West. Figures published that year in the official Statistical Year Bookshowed that the smallest two and a half million farms had less land thanthe top .1 per cent. The Nazi dictatorship, like the Socialist-bourgeoisgovernments of the Republic, did not dare to break up the immensefeudal estates of the Junkers, which lay to the east of the Elbe.

Nevertheless, the Nazi regime did inaugurate a sweeping new farmprogram accompanied by much sentimental propaganda about “Blut undBoden” (Blood and Soil) and the peasant’s being the salt of the earthand the chief hope of the Third Reich. To carry it out Hitler appointedWalther Darre, one of the few party leaders who, though he subscribedto most of the Nazi myths, knew his field professionally and well. Anoutstanding agricultural specialist with suitable academic training, he hadserved in the Agriculture Ministries of Prussia and the Reich. Forcedto leave them because of conflicts with his superiors, he retired to hishome in the Rhineland in 1929 and wrote a book entitled The Peasantryas the Life Source of the Nordic Race. Such a title was bound to attractthe attention of the Nazis. Rudolf Hess brought Darre to Hitler, who wasso impressed with him that he commissioned him to draw up a suitablefarm program for the party.

With Hugenberg’s dismissal in June 1933, Darre became Minister ofFood and Agriculture. By September he was ready with his plans to makeover German agriculture. Two basic laws promulgated in that month re-organized the entire structure of production and marketing, with a viewto ensuring higher prices for farmers, and at the same time put the Ger-man peasant on a new footing—accomplishing this, paradoxically, byputting him back on a very old footing in which farms were entailed, asin feudal days, and the farmer and successive inheritors compulsorily at-tached to their particular plot of soil (provided they were Aryan Ger-mans) to the end of time.

The Hereditary Farm Law of September 29, 1933, was a remarkablemixture of pushing back the peasants to medieval days and of protectingthem against the abuses of the modern monetary age. All farms up to 308acres (125 hectares) which were capable of providing a decent living fora family were declared to be hereditary estates subject to the ancient lawsof entailment. They could not be sold, divided, mortgaged or foreclosedfor debts. Upon the death of the owner they had to be passed on to theoldest or youngest son, in accordance with local customs, or to the nearest

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male relative, who was obliged to provide a living and an education forhis brothers and sisters until they were of age. Only an Aryan Germancitizen who could prove the purity of his blood back to 1800 could ownsuch 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, toactively farm. Thus the heavily indebted German farmer, at the beginningof the Third Reich, was protected from losing his property by foreclosuresor from seeing it shrink in size (there being no necessity to sell a piece ofit to repay a debt), but at the same time he was bound to the soil as ir-revocably as the serfs of feudal times.

And every aspect of his life and work was strictly regulated by theReich Food Estate, which Darre established by a law of September 13,1933, a vast organization with authority over every conceivable branchof agricultural production, marketing and processing, and which he him-self headed in Iris capacity of Reich Peasant Leader. Its chief objectiveswere two: to obtain stable and profitable prices for the farmer and tomake Germany self-sufficient in food.

How well did it succeed? In the beginning, certainly, the farmer, whofor so long had felt himself neglected in a State which seemed to be pre-occupied with the interests of business and labor, was flattered to besingled out for so much attention and proclaimed a national hero and anhonored citizen. He was more pleased at the rise in prices which Darreobtained for him by simply arbitrarily fixing them at a profitable level. Inthe first two years of Nazi rule wholesale agricultural prices increased by20 per cent (in vegetables, dairy products and cattle the rise was a littlemore) but this advantage was partially offset by a similar rise in thethings which the farmer had to buy—above all in machinery and fertilizer.

As for self-sufficiency in food, which was deemed necessary by the Nazileaders, who already, as we shall see, were plotting war, the goal was neverachieved, nor—given the quality and quantity of German soil in relationto its population—could it ever be. The best the country could do, despiteall Nazi efforts in the much-advertised “Battle of Production,” was toreach 83 per cent of self-sufficiency and it was only by the conquest offoreign lands that the Germans obtained enough food to enable them tohold 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 onhis triumphs in foreign affairs, which brought so many bloodless con-quests, but on Germany’s economic recovery, which in party circles andeven among some economists abroad was hailed as a miracle. And in-deed it might have seemed so to a good many people. Unemployment, thecurse 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

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production rose 102 per cent from 1932 to 1937 and the national incomewas doubled. To an observer, Germany in the mid-Thirties seemed likeone vast beehive. The wheels of industry were humming and everyonewas as busy as a bee.

For the first year Nazi economic policies, which were largely deter-mined by Dr. Schacht—for Hitler was bored with economics, of whichhe had an almost total ignorance—were devoted largely to putting theunemployed back to work by means of greatly expanded public worksand the stimulation of private enterprise. Government credit was fur-nished by the creation of special unemployment bills, and tax relief wasgenerously given to firms which raised their capital expenditures and in-creased employment.

But the real basis of Germany’s recovery was rearmament, to which theNazi regime directed the energies of business and labor—as well as ofthe generals—from 1934 on. The whole German economy came to beknown in Nazi parlance as Wehrwirtschajt, or war economy, and it wasdeliberately designed to function not only in time of war but during thepeace that led to war. General Ludendorff, in his book Total War (DerTotale Krieg) whose title was mistranslated into English as The Nationat War, published in Germany in 1935, had stressed the necessity of mobi-lizing the economy of the nation on the same totalitarian basis as every-thing else in order to properly prepare for total war. It was not exactly anew idea among the Germans, for in Prussia during the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries some five sevenths of the government’s revenue, aswe have seen, was spent on the Army and that nation’s whole economywas always regarded as primarily an instrument not of the people’s wel-fare but of military policy.

It was left to the Nazi regime to adapt Wehrwirtschajt to the thirddecade of the twentieth century. The results were truthfully summed upby Major General Georg Thomas, chief of the Military Economic Staff:“History will know only a few examples of cases where a country hasdirected, even in peacetime, all its economic forces deliberately and sys-tematically toward the requirements of war, as Germany was compelledto do in the period between the two World Wars.”12

Germany, of course, was not “compelled” to prepare on such a scalefor war—that was a deliberate decision taken by Hitler. In the secretDefense Law of May 21, 1935, he appointed Schacht Plenipotentiary-General for War Economy, ordering him to “begin his work already inpeacetime” and giving him the authority to “direct the economic prepara-tions for war.” The inimitable Dr. Schacht had not waited until the springof 1935 to start building up the German economy for war. On September30, 1934, less than two months after he had become Minister of Eco-nomics, he submitted a report to the Fuehrer entitled “Report on the Stateof Work for War-Economic Mobilization as of September 30, 1934,” inwhich he proudly stressed that his ministry “has been charged with theeconomic preparation for war.” On May 3, 1935, four weeks before hewas made Plenipotentiary for War Economy, Schacht submitted a per-

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sonal memorandum to Hitler which began with the statement that “theaccomplishment of the armament program with speed and in quantity isthe [italics his] problem of German politics; everything else thereforeshould be subordinate to this purpose . . Schacht explained to Hitlerthat since “armament had to be camouflaged completely until March 16,1935 [when Hitler announced conscription for an army of thirty-six divi-sions], 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 theenemies of the State (mostly Jews) and others taken from blocked foreignaccounts had helped pay for Hitler’s guns. “Thus,” he cracked, “ourarmaments are partially financed with the credits of our political ene-mies.”13

Though at his trial at Nuremberg he protested in all innocence againstthe accusations that he had participated in the Nazi conspiracy to makeaggressive war—he had done just the contrary, he proclaimed—the factremains that no single person was as responsible as Schacht for Germany’seconomic preparation for the war which Hitler provoked in 1939. Thiswas freely acknowledged by the Army. On the occasion of Schacht’s six-tieth birthday the Army publication Militaer-Wochenblatt in its issue ofJanuary 22, 1937, hailed him as “the man who made the reconstructionof the Wehrmacht economically possible.” And it added: “The DefenseForce owes it to Schacht’s skill and great ability that, in defiance of allcurrency difficulties, it has been able to grow up to its present strengthfrom an army of 100,000 men.”

All of Schacht’s admitted wizardry in finance was put to work to payfor getting the Third Reich ready for war. Printing banknotes was merelyone of his devices. He manipulated the currency with such legerdemainthat at one time it was estimated by foreign economists to have 237 dif-ferent values. He negotiated amazingly profitable (for Germany) barterdeals with dozens of countries and to the astonishment of orthodox econo-mists successfully demonstrated that the more you owed a country themore business you did with it. His creation of credit in a country that hadlittle liquid capital and almost no financial reserves was the work ofgenius, or—as some said—of a master manipulator. His invention of theso-called “Mefo” bills was a good example. These were simply billscreated by the Reichsbank and guaranteed by the State and used to payarmament manufacturers. The bills were accepted by all German banksand ultimately discounted by the Reichsbank. Since they appearedneither in the published statements of the national bank nor in the gov-ernment’s budget they helped maintain secrecy as to the extent of Ger-many’s rearmament. From 1935 to 1938 they were used exclusively tofinance rearmament and amounted to a total of twelve billion marks. Inexplaining them once to Hitler, Count Schwerin von Krosigk, the har-assed 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 underthe iron control of Goering, who replaced Schacht as economic dictator

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though he was almost as ignorant of business as was Hitler, Germanywent over to a total war economy. The purpose of the plan was to makeGermany self-sufficient in four years, so that a wartime blockade wouldnot stille it. Imports were reduced to a bare minimum, severe price andwage controls were introduced, dividends restricted to 6 per cent, greatfactories set up to make synthetic rubber, textiles, fuel and other productsfrom Germany’s own sources of raw materials, and a giant HermannGoering 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, theirwork circumscribed by so many restrictions, by so many forms to fill out,that Dr. Funk, who succeeded Schacht in 1937 as Minister of Economicsand in 1939 as president of the Reichsbank, was forced to admit ruefullythat “official communications now make up more than one half of a Ger-man manufacturer’s entire correspondence” and that “Germany’s exporttrade involves 40,000 separate transactions daily; yet for a single transac-tion as many as forty different forms must be filled out.”

Buried under mountains of red tape, directed by the State as to whatthey could produce, how much and at what price, burdened by increasingtaxation and milked by steep and never ending “special contributions”to the party, the businessmen, who had welcomed Hitler’s regime so en-thusiastically because they expected it to destroy organized labor andallow an entrepreneur to practice untrammeled free enterprise, becamegreatly disillusioned. One of them was Fritz Thyssen, one of the earliestand biggest contributors to the party. Fleeing Germany at the outbreakof the war, he recognized that the “Nazi regime has ruined German in-dustry.” And to all he met abroad he proclaimed, “What a fool [Dumm-kopf] I was!”15

In the beginning, however, the businessmen fooled themselves into be-lieving that Nazi rule was the answer to all their prayers. To be sure, the“inalterable” party program had sounded ominous to them with its prom-ises of nationalization of trusts, profit sharing in the wholesale trade,“communalization of department stores and their lease at a cheap rate tosmall traders” (as Point 16 read), land reform and the abolition of inter-est on mortgages. But the men of industry and finance soon learned thatHitler had not the slightest intention of honoring a single economic plankin the party program—the radical promises had been thrown in merely toattract votes. For the first few months in 1933, a few party radicals triedto get control of the business associations, take over the department storesand institute a corporate state on lines which Mussolini was attempting toestablish. But they were quickly thrown out by Hitler and replaced byconservative businessmen. Gottfried Feder, Hitler’s early mentor in eco-nomics, the crank who wanted to abolish “interest slavery,” was given apost as undersecretary in the Ministry of Economics, but his superior, Dr.Karl Schmitt, the insurance magnate, who had spent his life lending moneyand collecting interest, gave him nothing to do, and when Schacht tookover the ministry he dispensed with Feder’s services.

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The little businessmen, who had been one of the party’s chief supportsand who expected great things from Chancellor Hitler, soon found them-selves, many of them, being exterminated and forced back into the ranksof wage earners. Laws decreed in October 1937 simply dissolved allcorporations with a capital under $40,000 and forbade the establishmentof new ones with a capital less than $200,000. This quickly disposed ofone fifth of all small business firms. On the other hand the great cartels,which even the Republic had favored, were further strengthened by theNazis. In fact, under a law of July 15, 1933, they were made compulsory.The Ministry of Economics was empowered to organize new compulsorycartels or order firms to join existing ones.

The system of myriad business and trade associations organized duringthe Republic was maintained by the Nazis, though under the basic law ofFebruary 27, 1934, they were reorganized on the streamlined leadershipprinciple and put under the control of the State. All businesses wereforced to become members. At the head of an incredibly complex struc-ture was the Reich Economic Chamber, whose leader was appointed bythe State, and which controlled seven national economic groups, twenty-three economic chambers, one hundred chambers of industry and com-merce and the seventy chambers of handicrafts. Amidst this labyrinthineorganization and all the multitude of offices and agencies of the Ministryof Economics and the Four-Year Plan and the Niagara of thousands ofspecial decrees and laws even the most astute businessman was often lost,and special lawyers had to be employed to enable a firm to function. Thegraft involved in finding one’s way to key officials who could make deci-sions on which orders depended or in circumventing the endless rules andregulations of the government and the trade associations became in thelate Thirties astronomical. “An economic necessity,” one businessmantermed it to this writer.

Despite his harassed life, however, the businessman made good prof-its. The heavy industries, chief beneficiaries of rearmament, increasedtheirs from 2 per cent in the boom year of 1926 to 6V2 per cent in 1938,the last full year of peace. Even the law limiting dividends to 6 per centworked no hardship on the companies themselves. Just the opposite. Intheory, according to the law, any amount above that had to be invested ingovernment bonds—there was no thought of confiscation. Actually mostfirms reinvested in their own businesses the undistributed profits, whichrose from 175 million marks in 1932 to five billion marks in 1938, a yearin which the total savings in the savings banks amounted to only two bil-lions, or less than half the undistributed profits, and in which the dis-tributed profits in form of dividends totaled only 1,200,000,000 marks.Besides his pleasant profits, the businessman was also cheered by the waythe workers had been put in their place under Hitler. There were no moreunreasonable wage demands. Actually, wages were reduced a little de-spite a 25 per cent rise in the cost of living. And above all, there were nocostly strikes. In fact, there were no strikes at all. Such manifestationsof unruliness were verboten in the Third Reich.

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THE SERFDOM OF LABOR

Deprived of his trade unions, collective bargaining and the right tostrike, the German worker in the Third Reich became an industrial serf,bound to his master, the employer, much as medieval peasants had beenbound to the lord of the manor. The so-called Labor Front, which intheory replaced the old trade unions, did not represent the worker. Ac-cording to the law of October 24, 1934, which created it, it was “theorganization of creative Germans of brain and fist.” It took in not onlywage and salary earners but also the employers and members of the pro-fessions. It was in reality a vast propaganda organization and, as someworkers said, a gigantic fraud. Its aim, as stated in the law, was not toprotect the worker but “to create a true social and productive communityof all Germans. Its task is to see that every single individual should beable ... to perform the maximum of work.” The Labor Front was notan independent administrative organization but, like almost every othergroup in Nazi Germany except the Army, an integral part of theN.S.D.A.P., or, as its leader, Dr. Ley—the “stammering drunkard,” to useThyssen’s phrase—said, “an instrument of the party.” Indeed, the Octo-ber 24 law stipulated that its officials should come from the ranks of theparty, 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 andraised the employer to his old position of absolute master—subject, ofcourse, to interference by the all-powerful State. The employer becamethe “leader of the enterprise,” the employees the “following,” or Gefolg-schaft. Paragraph Two of the law set down that “the leader of the enter-prise makes the decisions for the employees and laborers in all mattersconcerning the enterprise.” And just as in ancient times the lord was sup-posed to be responsible for the welfare of his subjects so, under the Nazilaw, was the employer made “responsible for the well-being of the em-ployees and laborers.” In return, the law said, “the employees andlaborers 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 LaborFront. In practice, they set the rates according to the wishes of the em-ployer—there was no provision for the workers even to be consulted insuch matters—though after 1936, when help became scarce in the arma-ment industries and some employers attempted to raise wages in order toattract men, wage scales were held down by orders of the State. Hitlerwas quite frank about keeping wages low. “It has been the iron principleof the National Socialist leadership,” he declared early in the regime, “notto permit any rise in the hourly wage rates but to raise income solely byan increase in performance.”16 In a country where most wages were basedat least partly on piecework, this meant that a worker could hope to earnmore only by a speed-up and by longer hours.

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Compared to the United States, and after allowances were made for thedifference in the cost of living and in social services, wages in Germanyhad always been low. Under the Nazis they were slightly lower than be-fore. According to the Reich Statistical Office, they declined for skilledworkers 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 laborfell from 16.1 cents to 13 cents an hour. At the party congress in Nurem-berg in 1936 Dr. Ley stated that the average earnings of full-time workersin the Labor Front amounted to $6.95 a week. The Reich Statistical Of-fice put the figure for all German workers at $6.29.

Although millions more had jobs, the share of all German workers inthe national income fell from 56.9 per cent in the depression year of 1932to 53.6 per cent in the boom year of 1938. At the same time income fromcapital and business rose from 17.4 per cent of the national income to26.6 per cent. It is true that because of much greater employment thetotal income from wages and salaries grew from twenty-five billion marksto forty-two billions, an increase of 66 per cent. But income from capitaland business rose much more steeply—by 146 per cent. All the propa-gandists in the Third Reich from Hitler on down were accustomed to rantin their public speeches against the bourgeois and the capitalist and pro-claim their solidarity with the worker. But a sober study of the officialstatistics, which perhaps few Germans bothered to make, revealed thatthe much maligned capitalists, not the workers, benefited most from Nazipolicies.

Finally, the take-home pay of the German worker shrank. Besidesstiff income taxes, compulsory contributions to sickness, unemploymentand disability insurance, and Labor Front dues, the manual worker—likeeveryone else in Nazi Germany—was constantly pressured to make in-creasingly large gifts to an assortment of Nazi charities, the chief of whichwas Winterhilfe {Winter Relief). Many a workman lost his job becausehe failed to contribute to Winterhilfe or because his contribution wasdeemed too small. Such failure was termed by one labor court, whichupheld the dismissal of an employee without notice, “conduct hostile tothe community of the people ... to be most strongly condemned.” Inthe mid-Thirties it was estimated that taxes and contributions took from15 to 35 per cent of a worker’s gross wage. Such a cut out of $6.95 aweek did not leave a great deal for rent and food and clothing and recrea-tion.

As with the medieval serfs, the workers in Hitler’s Germany foundthemselves being more and more bound to their place of labor, thoughhere it was not the employer who bound them but the State. We haveseen how the peasant in the Third Reich was bound to his land by theHereditary Farm Law. Likewise the agricultural laborer, by law, wasattached to the land and forbidden to leave it for work in the city. In prac-tice, it must be said, this was one Nazi law which was not obeyed; be-

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tween 1933 and 1939 more than a million (1,300,000) farm workersmigrated to jobs in industry and trade. But for industrial laborers thelaw was enforced. Various government decrees beginning with the lawof May 15, 1934, severely restricted a worker’s freedom of movementfrom one job to another. After June 1935 the state employment officeswere given exclusive control of employment; they determined who couldbe hired for what and where.

The “workbook” was introduced in February 1935, and eventually noworker could be hired unless he possessed one. In it was kept a record ofhis skills and employment. The workbook not only provided the Stateand the employer with up-to-date data on every single employee in thenation but was used to tie a worker to his bench. If he desired to leave forother employment his employer could retain his workbook, which meantthat he could not legally be employed elsewhere. Finally, on June 22,1938, a special decree issued by the Office of the Four-Year Plan insti-tuted labor conscription. It obliged every German to work where theState assigned him. Workers who absented themselves from their jobswithout a very good excuse were subject to fine and imprisonment. Therewas, it is obvious, another side to this coin. A worker thus conscriptedcould not be fired by his employer without the consent of the governmentemployment office. He had job security, something he had rarely knownduring the Republic.

Tied down by so many controls at wages little above the subsistencelevel, the German workers, like the Roman proletariat, were providedwith circuses by their rulers to divert attention from their miserable state.“We had to divert the attention of the masses from material to moralvalues,” Dr. Ley once explained. “It is more important to feed the soulsof 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 regi-mented leisure. In a twentieth-century totalitarian dictatorship, as per-haps with older ones, it is deemed necessary to control not only the work-ing hours but the leisure hours of the individual. This was what “Strengththrough Joy” did. In pre-Nazi days Germany had tens of thousands ofclubs devoted to everything from chess and soccer to bird watching. Underthe Nazis no organized social, sport or recreational group was allowed tofunction except under the control and direction of Kraft durch Freude.

To the ordinary German in the Third Reich this official all-embracingrecreational organization no doubt was better than nothing at all, if onecould not be trusted to be left to one’s own devices. It provided membersof the Labor Front, for instance, with dirt-cheap vacation trips on landand sea. Dr. Ley built two 25,000-ton ships, one of which he namedafter himself, and chartered ten others to handle ocean cruises for Kraftdurch Freude. This writer once participated in such a cruise; though lifeaboard was organized by Nazi leaders to a point of excruciation (forhim), the German workers seemed to have a good time. And at bargain

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rates! A cruise to Madeira, for instance, cost only $25, including rail fareto and from the German port, and other jaunts were equally inexpensive.Beaches on the sea and on lakes were taken over for thousands of sum-mer vacationers—one at Ruegen on the Baltic, which was not completedby the time the war came, called for hotel accommodations for twentythousand persons—and in winter special skiing excursions to the BavarianAlps were organized at a cost of $ 11 a week, including carfare, room andboard, rental of skis and lessons from a ski instructor.

Sports, every branch of which was controlled by the “Strength throughJoy,” were organized on a massive scale, more than seven million persons,according to the official figures, participating in them annually. The or-ganization also made available at bargain rates tickets to the theater, theopera and concerts, thus making available more high-brow entertainmentto the laboring man, as Nazi officials often boasted. Kraft durch Freudealso had its own ninety-piece symphony orchestra which continuallytoured the country, often playing in the smaller places where good musicwas 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 continuedthem, though adding a strong mixture of Nazi ideology to the instruction.

In the end, of course, the workers paid for their circuses. The annualincome from dues to the Labor Front came to $160,000,000 in 1937 andpassed the $200,000,000 point by the time the war started, according toDr. Ley—the accounting was exceedingly vague, being handled not bythe State but by the Finance Office of the party, which never published itsaccounts. From the dues, 10 per cent was earmarked for Kraft durchFreude. But the fees paid by individuals for vacation trips and entertain-ment, 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 thelargest single party organization in the country, with twenty-five millionmembers, the Labor Front became a swollen bureaucracy, with tens ofthousands of full-time employees. In fact, it was estimated that from 20 to25 per cent of its income was absorbed by administration expense.

One particular swindle perpetrated by Hitler on the German workersdeserves 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 wasonly one motorcar for every fifty persons (compared to one for every fivein America) the workman had used a bicycle or public transportation toget about. Now Hitler decreed that a car should be built for him to sellfor only 990 marks—$396 at the official rate of exchange. He himself, itwas said, took a hand in the actual designing of the car, which was doneunder the supervision of the Austrian automobile engineer Dr. FerdinandPorsche.

Since private industry could not turn out an automobile for $396, Hit-ler 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 atFallersleben, near Braunschweig, “the biggest automobile factory in theworld, 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 furnishthe 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 af-ford 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 itcould be turned out. Alas for the worker, not a single car was ever turnedout for any customer during the Third Reich. Tens of millions of markswere paid in by the German wage earners, not a pfennig of which wasever to be refunded. By the time the war started the Volkswagen factoryturned 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, andless prone than any other segment of German society to subscribe toNazism 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 statusin the Third Reich. The great German war machine that hurtled overthe Polish border at dawn on September 1, 1939, could never have beenfashioned without the very considerable contribution that the Germanworkman made to it. Regimented he was and sometimes terrorized, butso was everyone else—and centuries of regimentation had accustomedhim, as it had all other Germans, to being told what to do. Though it isperhaps unwise to attempt to generalize about such things, this writer’sown impression of the workingman in Berlin and in the Ruhr was thatwhile he was somewhat cynical about the promises of the regime he hadno more hankering for revolt than anyone else in the Third Reich. Un-organized as he was and lacking leadership, what could he do? A work-man often put that question to you.

But the greatest cause of his acceptance of his role in Nazi Germanywas, without any doubt at all, that he had a job again and the assurancethat he would keep it. An observer who had known something about hisprecarious predicament during the Republic could understand why he didnot seem to be desperately concerned with the loss of political freedomand even of his trade unions as long as he was employed full-time. In thepast, for so many, for as many as six million men and their families, suchrights of free men in Germany had been overshadowed, as he said, by thefreedom to starve. In taking away that last freedom, Hitler assured him-self of the support of the working class, probably the most skillful andindustrious and disciplined in the Western world. It was a backing givennot to his half-baked ideology or to his evil intentions, as such, but to whatcounted most: the production of goods for war.

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JUSTICE IN THE THIRD REICH

From the very first weeks of 1933, when the massive and arbitraryarrests, beatings and murders by those in power began, Germany underNational Socialism ceased to be a society based on law. “Hitler is thelaw!” the legal lights of Nazi Germany proudly proclaimed, and Goeringemphasized 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 lawwas what the dictator said it was and in moments of crisis, as during theBlood Purge, he himself, as we have seen in his speech to the Reichstagimmediately after that bloody event, proclaimed that he was the "supremejudge” of the German people, with power to do to death whomever hepleased.

In the days of the Republic, most judges, like the majority of the Prot-estant clergy and the university professors, had cordially disliked theWeimar regime and in their decisions, as many thought, had written theblackest page in the life of the German Republic, thus contributing to itsfall. But at least under the Weimar Constitution judges were independent,subject only to the law, protected from arbitrary removal and bound atleast in theory by Article 109 to safeguard equality before the law. Mostof them had been sympathetic to National Socialism, but they were hardlyprepared for the treatment they soon received under its actual rule. TheCivil Service law of April 7, 1933, was made applicable to all magistratesand quickly rid the judiciary not only of Jews but of those whose Nazismwas deemed questionable, or, as the law stipulated, “who indicated thathe was no longer prepared to intercede at all times for the National So-cialist 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 theyunderstood, Dr. Hans Frank, Commissioner of Justice and Reich LawLeader, told the jurists in 1936, “The National Socialist ideology is thefoundation of all basic laws, especially as explained in the party programand in the speeches of the Fuehrer.” Dr. Frank went on to explain whathe meant:

There is no independence of law against National Socialism. Say to your-selves at every decision which you make: “How would the Fuehrer decide inmy place?” In every decision ask yourselves: “Is this decision compatible withthe National Socialist conscience of the German people?” Then you will havea firm iron foundation which, allied with the unity of the National SocialistPeople’s State and with your recognition of the eternal nature of the will ofAdolf Hitler, will endow your own sphere of decision with the authority of theThird Reich, and this for all time.17

That seemed plain enough, as did a new Civil Service law of the fol-lowing year (January 26, 1937), which called for the dismissal of allofficials, including judges, for “political unreliability.” Furthermore, all

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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 notrespond 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 examplesof 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 thefour Communist defendants in the Reichstag fire trial in March 1934.(Only Van der Lubbe, the half-witted Dutchman, who confessed, wasfound guilty.) This so incensed Hitler and Goering that within a month,on April 24, 1934, the right to try cases of treason, which heretofore hadbeen under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, was takenaway from that august body and transferred to a new court, the Volksge-richtshof, the People’s Court, which soon became the most dreaded tri-bunal in the land. It consisted of two professional judges and five otherschosen from among party officials, the S.S. and the armed forces, thusgiving the latter a majority vote. There was ho appeal from its decisionsor sentences and usually its sessions were held in camera. Occasionally,however, for propaganda purposes when relatively light sentences wereto be given, the foreign correspondents were invited to attend.

Thus this writer once observed a case before the People’s Court in1935. It struck him more as a drumhead court-martial than a civil-courttrial. The proceedings were finished in a day, there was practically no op-portunity to present defense witnesses (if any had dared to appear in de-fense of one accused of “treason”) and the arguments of the defenselawyers, who were “qualified” Nazis, seemed weak to the point of ludi-crousness. One got the impression from reading the newspapers, whichmerely announced the verdicts, that most of the unfortunate defendants(though not on the day I attended) received a death sentence. No figureswere ever published, though in December 1940 Roland Freisler, themuch-feared president of the People’s Court (who was killed during thewar 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 Son-dergericht, the Special Court, which took over from the ordinary courtscases of political crime or, as the Law of March 21, 1933, which estab-lished the new tribunal, put it, cases of “insidious attacks against thegovernment.” The Special Courts consisted of three judges, who invari-ably had to be trusted party members, without a jury. A Nazi prosecutorhad the choice of bringing action in such cases before either an ordinarycourt or the Special Court, and invariably he chose the latter, for obviousreasons. Defense lawyers before this court, as before the Volksgericht-shof, had to be approved by Nazi officials. Sometimes even if they wereapproved they fared badly. Thus the lawyers who attempted to representthe widow of Dr. Klausener, the Catholic Action leader murdered in theBlood Purge, in her suit for damages against the State were whisked off

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to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where they were kept until theyformally withdrew the action.

Hitler, and for some time Goering, had the right to quash criminal pro-ceedings. In the Nuremberg documents18 a case came to light in whichthe Minister of Justice strongly recommended the prosecution of a highGestapo 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 concen-tration camp. He sent the evidence to Hitler. The Fuehrer ordered theprosecution dropped. Goering too, in the beginning, had such power.Once in April 1934 he halted criminal proceedings against a well-knownbusinessman. It soon became known that the defendant paid Goeringsome three million marks. As Gerhard F. Kramer, a prominent lawyerin Berlin at the time, later commented, “It was impossible to establishwhether Goering blackmailed the industrialist or whether the industrialistbribed the Prussian Prime Minister.”18 What was established was thatGoering quashed the case.

On the other hand, Rudolf Hess, deputy of the Fuehrer, was empoweredto take “merciless action” against defendants who in his opinion got offwith too light sentences. A record of all court sentences of those foundguilty of attacking the party, the Fuehrer or the State were forwarded toHess, who if he thought the punishment too mild could take the “merciless”action. This usually consisted of haling the victim off to a concentrationcamp or having him bumped off.

Sometimes, it must be said, the judges of the Sondergericht did displaysome spirit of independence and even devotion to the law. In such caseseither Hess or the Gestapo stepped in. Thus, as we have seen, when PastorNiemoeller was acquitted by the Special Court of the main chargesagainst him and sentenced only to a short term, which he had alreadyserved while awaiting trial, the Gestapo snatched him as he was leavingthe courtroom and carted him off to a concentration camp.

For the Gestapo, like Hitler, was also the law. It originally was estab-lished for Prussia by Goering on April 26, 1933, to replace DepartmentIA of the old Prussian political police. He had at first intended todesignate 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 frank-ing stamp for the new bureau suggested that it be called the GeheimeStaatspolizei, simply the “Secret State Police”—GESTAPO for short—and thus unwittingly created a name the very mention of which was toinspire terror first within Germany and then without.

In the beginning the Gestapo was little more than a personal instrumentof terror employed by Goering to arrest and murder opponents of theregime. It was only in April 1934, when Goering appointed Himmlerdeputy chief of the Prussian Secret Police, that the Gestapo began toexpand as an arm of the S.S. and, under the guiding genius of its new

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chief, the mild-mannered but sadistic former chicken farmer, and ofReinhard Heydrich, a young man of diabolical cast20 who was head ofthe S.S. Security Service, or S.D. (Sicherheitsdienst), become such ascourge, with the power of life and death over every German.

As early as 1935 the Prussian Supreme Court of Administration, underNazi pressure, had ruled that the orders and actions of the Gestapo werenot subject to judicial review. The basic Gestapo law promulgated by thegovernment on February 10, 1936, put the secret police organizationabove the law. The courts were not allowed to interfere with its activitiesin any way. As Dr. Werner Best, one of Himmler’s right-hand men in theGestapo, explained, “As long as the police carries out the will of theleadership, it is acting legally.”21

A cloak of “legality” was given to the arbitrary arrests and the in-carceration of victims in concentration camps. The term was Schutzhaft,or “protective custody,” and its exercise was based on the Law of Feb-ruary 28, 1933, which, as we have seen, suspended the clauses of theconstitution which guaranteed civil liberties; But protective custody didnot 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’sfirst 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 thenransom them to their relatives or friends for as much as the traffic wouldbear. It was largely a crude form of blackmail. Sometimes, however, theprisoners were murdered, usually out of pure sadism and brutality. Atthe Nuremberg trial four such cases came to light that took place in thespring of 1933 at the S.S. concentration camp at Dachau, near Munich.In each instance a prisoner was cold-bloodedly murdered, one bywhipping, another by strangulation. Even the public prosecutor in Mu-nich protested.

Since after the Blood Purge of June 1934 there was no more resistanceto the Nazi regime, many Germans thought that the mass “protectivecustody” arrests and the confinement of thousands in the concentrationcamps would cease. On Christmas Eve, 1933, Hitler had announced anamnesty for twenty-seven thousand inmates of the camps, but Goeringand Himmler got around his orders and only a few were actually released.Then Frick, the rubber-stamp bureaucrat who was Minister of the In-terior, had tried in April 1934 to reduce the abuses of the Nazi thugsby issuing secret decrees placing restrictions on the wholesale use ofSchutzhaft arrests and reducing commitments to concentration camps,but Himmler had persuaded him to drop the matter. The S.S. Fuehrersaw more clearly than the Minister that the purpose of the concentrationcamps was not only to punish enemies of the regime but by their veryexistence to terrorize the people and deter them from even contemplatingany resistance to Nazi rule.

Shortly after the Roehm purge, Hitler turned the concentration camps

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over to the control of the S.S., which proceeded to organize them withthe efficiency and ruthlessness expected of this elite corps. Guard dutywas given exclusively to the Death’s-Head units (Totenkopfverbaende)whose members were recruited from the toughest Nazi elements, servedan enlistment of twelve years and wore the familiar skull-and-bones in-signia on their black tunics. The commander of the first Death’s-Headdetachment and the first commander of the Dachau camp, Theodor Eicke,was put in charge of all the concentration camps. The fly-by-night oneswere closed down and larger ones constructed, the chief of which (untilthe war came, when they were expanded into occupied territory) wereDachau near Munich, Buchenwald near Weimar, Sachsenhausen, whichreplaced the Oranienburg camp of initial fame near Berlin, Ravensbrueckin Mecklenburg (for women) and, after the occupation of Austria in 1938,Mauthausen near Linz—names which, with Auschwitz, Belsec andTreblinka, which were later established in Poland, were to become alltoo familiar to most of the world.

In them, before the end mercifully came, millions of hapless personswere done to death and millions of others subjected to debasement andtorture more revolting than all but a few minds could imagine. But at thebeginning—in the Thirties—the population of the Nazi concentrationcamps in Germany probably never numbered more than from twenty tothirty thousand at any one time, and many of the horrors later inventedand perpetrated by Himmler’s men were as yet unknown. The extermina-tion camps, the slave labor camps, the camps where the inmates wereused 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 copyof the regulations drawn up for Dachau on November 1, 1933, by its firstcommander, Theodor Eicke, who when he became head of all the campsapplied them throughout.

Article 11. The following offenders, considered as agitators, will be hanged:Anyone who . . . politicizes, holds inciting speeches and meetings, formscliques, loiters around with others; who for the purpose of supplying thepropaganda of the opposition with atrocity stories, collects true or false in-formation about the concentration camp; receives such information, buries it,talks about it to others, smuggles it out of the camp into the hands of foreignvisitors, etc.

Article 12. The following offenders, considered as mutineers, will be shoton 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, incitingor holding speeches while marching or at work.

Milder sentences of two weeks’ solitary confinement and twenty-fivelashings were given “anyone making depreciatory remarks in a letter orother documents about National Socialist leaders, the State and Govern-ment . . . [or] glorifying Marxist or Liberal leaders of the old democraticparties.”

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Allied with the Gestapo was the Security Service, the Sicherheitsdienst,or S.D., which formed another set of initials that struck fear in the bosomsof all Germans—and later of the occupied peoples. Originally formedby Himmler in 1932 as the intelligence branch of the S.S., and placed byhim under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich, later internationally re-nowned as “Hangman Heydrich,” its initial function had been to watchover members of the party and report any suspicious activity. In 1934it became also the intelligence unit for the secret police, and by 1938 anew law gave it this function for the entire Reich.

Under the expert hand of Heydrich, a former intelligence officer in theNavy who had been cashiered by Admiral Raeder in 1931 at the age oftwenty-six for refusing to marry the daughter of a shipbuilder whom hehad compromised, the S.D. soon spread its net over the country, employ-ing some 100,000 part-time informers who were directed to snoop onevery citizen in the land and report the slightest remark or activity whichwas deemed inimical to Nazi rule. No one—if he were not foolish—saidor did anything that might be interpreted as “anti-Nazi” without first tak-ing precautions that it was not being recorded by hidden S.D. microphonesor overheard by an S.D. agent. Your son or your father or your wife oryour cousin or your best friend or your boss or your secretary might bean informer for Heydrich’s organization; you never knew, and if you werewise nothing was ever taken for granted.

The full-time sleuths of the S.D. probably never numbered more thanthree thousand during the Thirties and most of them were recruited fromthe ranks of the displaced young intellectuals—university graduates whohad been unable to find suitable jobs or any secure place in normalsociety. Thus among these professional spies there was always thebizarre atmosphere of pedantry. They had a grotesque interest in suchside lines as the study of Teutonic archeology, the skulls of the inferiorraces and the eugenics of a master race. A foreign observer, however,found difficulty in making contacts with these odd men, though Heydrichhimself, an arrogant, icy and ruthless character, might occasionally beseen 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 workbut, in 1934 and 1935 at least, because a number of them who had spiedon Roehm and his confederates in the S.A. were bumped off by a secretband that called itself “Roehm’s Avengers” and took care to pin thatlabel on the bodies.

One of the interesting, if subordinate, tasks of the S.D. was to ascertainwho voted “No” in Hitler’s plebiscites. Among the numerous Nurembergdocuments is a secret report of the S.D. in Kochem on the plebiscite ofApril 10, 1938:

Copy is attached enumerating the persons who cast “No” votes or invalidvotes at Rappel. The control was affected in the following way: some mem-bers of the election committee marked all the ballots with numbers. Duringthe balloting a voters’ list was made up. The ballots were handed out in nu-

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merical order, therefore it was possible afterward ... to find out the personswho cast “No” votes or invalid votes. The marking was done on the back ofthe 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 policewas established for the whole of the Reich—previously the police hadbeen organized separately by each of the states—and Himmler was putin charge as Chief of the German Police. This was tantamount to puttingthe police in the hands of the S.S., which since its suppression of theRoehm “revolt” in 1934 had been rapidly increasing its power. It hadbecome not only the praetorian guard, not only the single armed branchof the party, not only the elite from whose ranks the future leaders of thenew Germany were being chosen, but it now possessed the police power.The Third Reich, as is inevitable in the development of all totalitariandictatorships, had become a police state.

GOVERNMENT IN THE THIRD REICH

Though the Weimar Republic was destroyed, the Weimar Constitutionwas never formally abrogated by Hitler. Indeed—and ironically—Hitlerbased 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 Feb-ruary 28, 1933, for the Protection of the People and the State, whichHindenburg, under Article 48 of the constitution, had signed. It will beremembered that the aged President was bamboozled into signing thedecree the day after the Reichstag fire when Hitler assured him that therewas grave danger of a Communist revolution. The decree, which sus-pended all civil rights, remained in force throughout the time of the ThirdReich, 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 Nazigovernment, was the second pillar in the “constitutionality” of Hitler’srule. Each four years thereafter it was dutifully prolonged for anotherfour-year period by a rubber-stamp Reichstag, for it never occurred to thedictator to abolish this once democratic institution but only to make itnondemocratic. It met only a dozen times up to the war, “enacted” onlyfour laws,* held no debates or votes and never heard any speeches exceptthose made by Hitler.

After the first few months of 1933 serious discussions ceased in thecabinet, its meetings became more and more infrequent after the deathof Hindenburg in August 1934, and after February 1938 the cabinet was

* The Reconstruction Law of January 30, 1934, and the three anti-Semitic Nurem-berg Laws of September 15, 1935.

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never convened. However, individual cabinet members held the con-siderable power of being authorized to promulgate decrees which, withthe Fuehrer’s approval, automatically became laws. The Secret CabinetCouncil (Geheimer Kabinettsrat), set up with great fanfare in 1938,perhaps to impress Prime Minister Chamberlain, existed only on paperIt never met once. The Reich Defense Council (Reichsverteidigungsrat),established early in the regime as a war-planning agency under the chair-manship of Hitler, met formally only twice, though some of its workingcommittees were exceedingly active.

Many cabinet functions were delegated to special agencies such as theOffice 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). Inaddition there were what was known as the “supreme governmentagencies” and “national administrative agencies,” many of them hold-overs from the Republic. In all, there were some 42 executive agencies ofthe 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 thecountry was unified, and governors for the states, which were reduced toprovinces, were appointed by Hitler. Local self-government, the onlyfield in which the Germans had seemed to be making genuine progresstoward democracy, was also wiped out. A series of laws decreed between1933 and 1935 deprived the municipalities of their local autonomy andbrought them under the direct control of the Reich Minister of theInterior, who appointed their mayors—if they had a population of over100,000—and reorganized them on the leadership principle. In townsunder 100,000, the mayors were named by the provincial governors. ForBerlin, 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 con-sisted of four chancelleries: those of the President (though the title hadceased to exist after 1934), the Chancellor (the title was abandoned in1939) and the party, and a fourth known as the Chancellery of theFuehrer which looked after his personal affairs and carried out specialtasks.

In truth, Hitler was bored by the details of day-to-day governing andafter he had consolidated his position following the death of Hindenburghe left them largely to his aides. Old party comrades such as Goering,Goebbels, Himmler, Ley and Schirach were given free rein to carve outtheir own empires of power—and usually profit. Schacht was given a freehand at first to raise the money for expanding government expenditures bywhatever sleight of hand he could think up. Whenever these men clashedover the division of power or spoils, Hitler intervened. He did not mindthese quarrels. Indeed, he often encouraged them, because they addedstatus to his position as supreme arbiter and prevented any closing ofthe ranks against him. Thus he seemed to take delight at the spectacle of

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three men competing with each other in foreign affairs: Neurath, theForeign Minister, Rosenberg, the head of the party’s Foreign AffairsDepartment, and Ribbentrop, who had his own “Ribbentrop Bureau”which dabbled in foreign policy. All three men were at loggerheads witheach other and Hitler kept them so by maintaining their rival offices untilin the end he chose the dull-witted Ribbentrop to become his ForeignMinister and carry out his orders in foreign affairs.

Such was the government of the Third Reich, administered from topto bottom on the so-called leadership principle by a vast and sprawlingbureaucracy, having little of the efficiency usually credited to the Germans,poisoned by graft, beset by constant confusion and cutthroat rivalriesaugmented by the muddling interference of party potentates and oftenrendered 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 onearth. As Dr. Hans Frank reminded a convention of lawyers in the springof 1936, “There is in Germany today only one authority, and that is theauthority of the Fuehrer.”23

With that authority Hitler had quickly destroyed those who opposedhim, unified and Nazified the State, regimented the country’s institutionsand culture, suppressed individual freedom, abolished unemployment andset the wheels of industry and commerce humming—no small achievementafter only three or four years in office. Now he turned—in fact, he al-ready had turned—to the two chief passions of his life: the shaping ofGermany’s foreign policy toward war and conquest and the creation of amighty military machine which would enable him to achieve his goal.

It is time now to turn to the story, more fully documented than thatof any other in modern history, of how this extraordinary man, at thehead of so great and powerful a nation, set out to attain his ends.

Book Three

+ + +

THE ROAD TO WAR

9

THE FIRST STEPS: 1934-37

To talk peace, to prepare secretly for war and to proceed with enoughcaution in foreign policy and clandestine rearmament to avoid anypreventive 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 ChancellorDollfuss in Vienna on July 25, 1934. At noon on that day 154 membersof the S.S. Standarte 89, dressed in Austrian Army uniforms, broke intothe Federal Chancellery and shot Dollfuss in the throat at a range of twofeet. A few blocks away other Nazis seized the radio station and broad-cast the news that Dollfuss had resigned. Hitler received the tidings whilelistening to a performance of Das Rheingold at the annual Wagner Festi-val at Bayreuth. They greatly excited him. Friedelind Wagner, grand-daughter of the great composer, who sat in the family box nearby, was awitness. Two adjutants, Schaub and Brueckner, she later told, kept re-ceiving the news from Vienna on a telephone in the anteroom of her boxand then whispering it to Hitler.

After the performance the Fuehrer was most excited. This excitementmounted as he told us the horrible news . . . Although he could scarcelywipe the delight from his face Hitler carefully ordered dinner in the restaurantas usual.

“I must go across for an hour and show myself,” he said, “or people willthink I had something to do with this.”1

They would not have been far from right. In the first paragraph ofMein Kampj, it will be remembered, Hitler had written that the reunionof Austria and Germany was a “task to be furthered with every means ourlives long.” Soon after becoming Chancellor he had appointed a Reich-stag deputy, Theodor Habicht, as inspector of the Austrian Nazi Party,and a little later he had set up Alfred Frauenfeld, the self-exiled Austrianparty leader, in Munich, whence he broadcast nightly, inciting his com-

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rades in Vienna to murder Dollfuss. For months prior to July 1934 theAustrian Nazis, with weapons and dynamite furnished by Germany, hadinstituted a reign of terror, blowing up railways, power stations and gov-ernment buildings and murdering supporters of the Dollfuss clerical-fas-cist regime. Finally, Hitler had approved the formation of an AustrianLegion, several thousand strong, which camped along the Austrian borderin Bavaria, ready to cross over and occupy the country at an opportunemoment.

Dollfuss died of his wounds at about 6 p.m., but the Nazi putsch, duelargely to the bungling of the conspirators who had seized the Chancellery,failed. Government forces, led by Dr. Kurt von Schuschnigg, quickly re-gained control, and the rebels, though promised safe-conduct to Germanythrough the intervention of the German minister, were arrested and thirteenof them la er hanged. In the meantime Mussolini, to whom Hitler only amonth before at their meeting in Venice had promised to leave Austriaalone, caused uneasiness in Berlin by hastily mobilizing four divisions onthe Brenner Pass.

Hitler quickly backed down. The news story prepared for the press bythe official German news agency, D.N.B., rejoicing at the fall of Dollfussand proclaiming the Greater Germany that must inevitably follow, washastily withdrawn at midnight and a new version substituted expressingregret at the cruel murder and declaring that it was a purely Austrianaffair. Habicht was removed, the German minister in Vienna recalled anddismissed and Papen, who had narrowly escaped Dollfuss’ fate just amonth before during the Roehm purge, was packed off to Vienna post-haste to restore, as Hitler directed him, “normal and friendly relations.”

Hitler’s first joyous excitement had given way to fear. “We are facedwith a new Sarajevo!” Papen says he shouted at him when the two con-ferred about how to overcome the crisis.2 But the Fuehrer had learned alesson. The Nazi putsch in Vienna, like the Beer Hall Putsch in Munichin 1923, had been premature. Germany was not yet militarily strongenough to back up such a venture by force. It was too isolated diplo-matically. Even Fascist Italy had joined Britain and France in insistingon Austria’s continued independence. Moreover, the Soviet Union wasshowing interest for the first time in joining the West in an Eastern Lo-carno which would discourage any moves of Germany in the East. In theautumn it joined the League of Nations. The prospects for dividing theGreat Powers seemed dimmer than ever throughout the crucial year of1934. All that Hitler could do was to preach peace, get along with hissecret rearmament and wait and watch for opportunities.

Besides the Reichstag, Hitler had another means of communicating hispeace propaganda to the outside world: the foreign press, whose corre-spondents, editors and publishers were constantly seeking interviews withhim. There was Ward Price, the monocled Englishman, and his news-paper, the London Daily Mail, who were always ready at the drop of ahint to accommodate the German dictator. So in August 1934, in anotherone of the series of interviews which would continue up to the eve of the

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war, Hitler told Price—and his readers—that “war will not come again,”that Germany had “a more profound impression than any other of theevil that war causes,” that “Germany’s problems cannot be settled bywar.”! In the fall he repeated these glowing sentiments to Jean Goy, aFrench war veterans’ leader and a member of the Chamber of Deputies,who passed them on in an article in the Paris daily Le Matin*

THE BREACHING OF VERSAILLES

In the meantime Hitler pursued with unflagging energy his program ofbuilding up the armed services and procuring arms for them. The Armywas ordered to treble its numerical strength—from 100,000 to 300,000by 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 thefollowing year the Fuehrer would openly decree conscription and publiclyrepudiate the military restrictions of the Versailles Treaty.5 Until thenthe utmost secrecy must be observed. Goebbels was admonished never toallow the words “General Staff” to appear in the press, since Versaillesforbade the very existence of this organization. The annual official ranklist of the German Army ceased to be published after 1932 so that itsswollen lists of officers would not give the game away to foreign intelli-gence. General Keitel, chairman of the Working Committee of the ReichDefense Council, admonished his aides as early as May 22, 1933, “Nodocument must be lost, since otherwise enemy propaganda will makeuse of it. Matters communicated orally cannot be proven; they can bedenied.”6

The Navy too was warned to keep its mouth shut. In June 1934 Raederhad 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 de-mands complete secrecy on the construction of the U-boats.7

For the Navy had commenced the construction of two battle cruisers of26,000 tons (16,000 tons above the Versailles limit) which would eventu-ally be known as the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau. Submarines, thebuilding of which Versailles had prohibited, had been secretly constructedin Finland, Holland and Spain during the German Republic, and recentlyRaeder had stored the frames and parts of a dozen of them at Kiel. Whenhe saw Hitler in November 1934 he asked permission to assemble sixof 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 theFuehrer merely replied that “he would tell me when the situation de-manded that the assembly should commence.”8

At this meeting Raeder also pointed out that the new shipbuilding pro-

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gram (not to mention the tripling of naval personnel) would take moremoney than he had available, but Hitler told him not to worry. “In caseof need, he will get Dr. Ley to put 120—150 million from the Labor Frontat the disposal of the Navy, as the money would still benefit the workers.”9Thus 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 manu-facturers to work designing warplanes. Training of military pilots beganimmediately under the convenient camouflage of the League for AirSports.

A visitor to the Ruhr and Rhineland industrial areas in those daysmight have been struck by the intense activity of the armament works,especially those of Krupp, chief German gunmakers for three quarters ofa century, and I. G. Farben, the great chemical trust. Although Krupphad been forbidden by the Allies to continue in the armament businessafter 1919, the company had really not been idle. As Krupp would boastin 1942, when the German armies occupied most of Europe, “the basicprinciple of armament and turret design for tanks had already been workedout in 1926 ... Of the guns being used in 1939-41, the most importantones were already fully complete in 1933.” Farben scientists had savedGermany from early disaster in the First World War by the invention ofa process to make synthetic nitrates from air after the country’s normalsupply of nitrates from Chile was cut off by the British blockade. Nowunder Hitler the trust set out to make Germany self-sufficient in two ma-terials without which modern war could not be fought: gasoline and rub-ber, both of which had had to be imported. The problem of making syn-thetic gasoline from coal had actually been solved by the company’s scien-tists in the mid-Twenties. After 1933, the Nazi government gave I. G.Farben the go-ahead with orders to raise its synthetic oil production to300,000 tons a year by 1937. By that time the company had also dis-covered how to make synthetic rubber from coal and other products ofwhich Germany had a sufficiency, and the first of four plants was set upat Schkopau for large-scale production of buna, as the artificial rubberbecame known. By the beginning of 1934, plans were approved by theWorking Committee of the Reich Defense Council for the mobilizationof some 240,000 plants for war orders. By the end of that year rearma-ment, in all its phases, had become so massive it was obvious that it couldno longer be concealed from the suspicious and uneasy powers of Ver-sailles.

These powers, led by Great Britain, had been flirting with the idea ofrecognizing a fait accompli, that is, German rearmament, which was notnearly so secret as Hitler supposed. They would concede Hitler completearms equality in return for Germany’s joining in a general Europeansettlement which would include an Eastern Locarno and thus provide theEastern countries, especially Russia, Poland and Czechoslovakia, withthe same security which the Western nations enjoyed under the LocarnoTreaty—and, of course, furnish Germany with the same guarantees of

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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 tocomprehend the mind of Adolf Hitler, actually proposed equality of arma-ments to Germany. The French sharply rejected such an idea.

But the proposals for a general settlement, including equality of arma-ments and an Eastern Locarno, were renewed jointly by the British andFrench governments early in February 1935. The month before, onJanuary 13, the inhabitants of the Saar had voted overwhelmingly—477,000 to 48,000—to return their little coal-rich territory to the Reichand Hitler had taken the occasion to publicly proclaim that Germany hadno further territorial claims on France, which meant the abandoning ofGerman claims on Alsace and Lorraine. In the atmosphere of optimismand good will which the peaceful return of the Saar and Hitler’s remarksengendered, the Anglo-French proposals were formally presented toHitler at the beginning of February 1935.

Hitler’s reply of February 14 was somewhat vague—and, from hisviewpoint, understandably so. He welcomed a plan which would leaveGermany free to rearm in the open. But he was evasive on Germany’swillingness to sign an Eastern Locarno. That would be tying his hands inthe main area where, as he had always preached, Germany’s Lebensraumlay. Might not Britain be detached in this matter from France, whichwith its mutual-assistance pacts with Poland, Czechoslovakia and Ru-mania, was more interested in Eastern security? Hitler must have thoughtso, for in his cautious reply he suggested that bilateral discussions pre-cede general talks and invited the British to come to Berlin for preliminarydiscussions. Sir John Simon readily agreed, and a meeting was arrangedfor March 6 in Berlin. Two days before that date the publication of aBritish White Paper caused a great deal of simulated anger in the Wilhelm-strasse. Actually the White Paper struck most foreign observers in Berlinas a sober observation on Germany’s clandestine rearmament, the ac-celeration of which had moved Britain to a modest increase of her own.But Hitler was reported furious with it. Neurath informed Simon on thevery eve of his departure for Berlin that the Fuehrer had a “cold” and thetalks would have to be postponed.

Whether he had a cold or not, Hitler certainly had a brain storm. Itwould be embarrassing to have Simon and Eden around if he transformedit into a bold act. He thought he had found a pretext for dealing the Ver-sailles Diktat a mortal blow. The French government had just introduceda bill extending military service from eighteen months to two years be-cause of the shortage of youth born during the First World War. OnMarch 10, Hitler sent up a trial balloon to test the mettle of the Allies. Theaccommodating Ward Price was called in and given an interview with Goe-ring, who told him officially what all the world knew, that Germany had amilitary Air Force. Hitler confidently awaited the reaction in London tothis unilateral abrogation of Versailles. It was just what he expected. SirJohn Simon told the Commons that he still counted on going to Berlin.

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A SATURDAY SURPRISE

On Saturday, March 16—most of Hitler’s surprises were reserved forSaturdays—the Chancellor decreed a law establishing universal militaryservice and providing for a peacetime army of twelve corps and thirty-sixdivisions—roughly half a million men. That was the end of the militaryrestrictions of Versailles—unless France and Britain took action. AsHitler had expected, they protested but they did not act. Indeed, the Brit-ish government hastened to ask whether Hitler would still receive itsForeign Secretary—a query which the dictator graciously answered inthe 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 Hitlerand his gangster rule, he had to admit that the Fuehrer had accomplishedwhat no republican government had ever dared attempt. To most Ger-mans the nation’s honor had been restored. That Sunday was also Heroes’Memorial Day (Heldengedenktag). I went to the ceremony at noon atthe State Opera House and there witnessed a scene which Germany hadnot seen since 1914. The entire lower floor was a sea of military uniforms,the faded gray uniforms and spiked helmets of the old Imperial Armymingling with the attire of the new Army, including the sky-blue uniformsof the Luftwaffe, which few had seen before. At Hitler’s side was FieldMarshal von Mackensen, the last surviving field marshal of the Kaiser’sArmy, colorfully attired in the uniform of the Death’s-Head Hussars.Strong lights played on the stage, where young officers stood like marblestatues holding upright the nation’s war flags. Behind them on an enor-mous curtain hung an immense silver-and-black Iron Cross. Ostensiblythis was a ceremony to honor Germany’s war dead. It turned out to be ajubilant celebration of the death of Versailles and the rebirth of the con-script 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 hadspent the previous days at his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, had notbothered to apprise them of his thoughts. According to General von Man-stein’s later testimony at Nuremberg, he and his commanding officer, ofWehrkreis III (the Third Military District) in Berlin, General vonWitzleben, 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 pro-posed twenty-one divisions . . . The figure of thirty-six divisions was due toa spontaneous decision of Hitler.10

There now took place a series of empty gestures of warning to Hitlerby the other powers. The British, the French and the Italians met at

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Stresa on April 11, condemned Germany’s action and reiterated theirsupport of Austria’s independence and the Locarno Treaty. The Councilof the League of Nations at Geneva also expressed its displeasure at Hit-ler’s precipitate action and duly appointed a committee to suggest stepswhich might impede him the next time. France, recognizing that Germanywould never join an Eastern Locarno, hastily signed a pact of mutual as-sistance with Russia, and Moscow made a similar treaty with Czechoslo-vakia.

In the headlines this closing of ranks against Germany sounded some-what ominous and even impressed a number of men in the German ForeignOffice and in the Army, but apparently not Hitler. After all, he had gottenaway with his gamble. Still, it would not do to rest on his laurels. It wastime, he decided, to pull out the stops again on his love of peace and to seewhether the new unity of the powers arrayed against him might not beundermined and breached after all.

On the evening of May 21 * he delivered another “peace” speech to theReichstag—perhaps the most eloquent and certainly one of the cleverestand most misleading of his Reichstag orations this writer, who sat throughmost of them, ever heard him make. Hitler was in a relaxed mood andexuded a spirit not only of confidence but—to the surprise of his listeners—of tolerance and conciliation. There was no resentment or defiancetoward the nations which had condemned his scrapping of the militaryclauses of Versailles. Instead there were assurances that all he wantedwas peace and understanding based on justice for all. He rejected thevery 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 threehundred years bears no proportion to the national result of the events. In theend France has remained France, Germany Germany, Poland Poland, andItaly Italy. What dynastic egotism, political passion and patriotic blindnesshave attained in the way of apparently far-reaching political changes by shed-ding rivers of blood has, as regards national feeling, done no more than touchedthe skin of the nations. It has not substantially altered their fundamental char-acters. If these states had applied merely a fraction of their sacrifices to wiserpurposes the success would certainly have been greater and more permanent.

* Earlier that day Hitler had promulgated the secret Reich Defense Law, puttingDr. Schacht, as we have seen, in charge of war economy and thoroughly reorganiz-ing 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 Ministerof War with the additional title of Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces—theonly general in Germany who ever held that rank. Each of the three services hadits 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. GeneralBeck, assumed the title of Chief of the General Staff. But this title did not denotewhat it did in the Kaiser’s time, when the General Staff Chief was actually theCommander in Chief of the German Army under the warlord.

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Germany, Hitler proclaimed, had not the slightest thought of con-quering other peoples.

Our racial theory regards every war for the subjection and domination of analien people as a proceeding which sooner or later changes and weakens thevictor internally, and eventually brings about his defeat ... As there is nolonger any unoccupied space in Europe, every victory ... can at best resultin a quantitative increase in the number of the inhabitants of a country. Butif the nations attach so much importance to that they can achieve it withouttears in a simpler and more natural way—[by] a sound social policy, by in-creasing the readiness of a nation to have children.

No! National Socialist Germany wants peace because of its fundamentalconvictions. And it wants peace also owing to the realization of the simpleprimitive fact that no war would be likely essentially to alter the distress inEurope . . . The principal effect of every war is to destroy the flower of thenation . . .

Germany needs peace and desires peace!

He kept hammering away at the point. At the end he made thirteenspecific proposals for maintaining the peace which seemed so admirablethat they created a deep and favorable impression not only in Germanybut in all of Europe. He prefaced them with a reminder:

Germany has solemnly recognized and guaranteed France her frontiers asdetermined after the Saar plebiscite ... We thereby finally renounced allclaims to Alsace-Lorraine, a land for which we have fought two great wars. . . Without taking the past into account Germany has concluded a non-aggression 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 ofAustria, to annex Austria, or to conclude an Anschluss.

Hitler s thirteen points were quite comprehensive. Germany couldnot return to Geneva until the League divested itself of the VersaillesTreaty. 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 ful-fill all obligations arising out of the Locarno Treaty.” Hitler also pledgedGermany to abide by the demilitarization of the Rhineland. Though will-ing “at any time” to participate in a system of collective security, Germanypreferred bilateral agreements and was ready to conclude nonaggression

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pacts with its neighbor states. It was also prepared to agree to British andFrench proposals for supplementing the Locarno Treaty with an air ac-cord.

As for disarmament, Hitler was ready to go the limit:

The German government is ready to agree to any limitation which leads toabolition of the heaviest arms, especially suited for aggression, such [as] theheaviest artillery and the heaviest tanks . . . Germany declares herself readyto agree to any limitation whatsoever of the caliber of artillery, battleships,cruisers and torpedo boats. In like manner, the German government is readyto agree to the limitation of tonnage for submarines, or to their complete aboli-tion . . .

In this connection Hitler held out a special bait for Great Britain. Hewas willing to limit the new German Navy to 35 per cent of the Britishnaval forces; that, he added, would still leave the Germans 15 per centbelow the French in naval tonnage. To the objections raised abroad thatthis 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 notthe decline but the renaissance of the West. That Germany may make an im-perishable contribution to this great work is our proud hope and our unshak-able belief.11

These were honeyed words of peace, reason and conciliation, and inthe Western democracies of Europe, where the people and their govern-ments desperately yearned for the continuance of peace on any reason-able basis, on almost any basis, they were lapped up. The most influentialnewspaper in the British Isles, the Times of London, welcomed them withalmost hysterical joy.

. . . The speech turns out to be reasonable, straightforward and comprehen-sive. No one who reads it with an impartial mind can doubt that the points ofpolicy laid down by Herr Hitler may fairly constitute the basis of a completesettlement with Germany—a free, equal and strong Germany instead of theprostrate Germany upon whom peace was imposed sixteen years ago . . .

It is to be hoped that the speech will be taken everywhere as a sincere andwell-considered utterance meaning precisely what it says.12

This great journal, one of the chief glories of English journalism, wouldplay, like the Chamberlain government, a dubious role in the disastrousBritish appeasement of Hitler. But to this writer, at least, it had even less

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excuse than the government, for in its Berlin correspondent, NormanEbbutt, it had, until he was expelled on August 16, 1937, a source of in-formation about Hitler’s doings and purposes that was much more re-vealing than that provided by other foreign correspondents or foreigndiplomats, including the British. Though much that he wrote for theTimes from Berlin in those days was not published,* as he often com-plained to this writer and as was later confirmed, the Times editors musthave read all of his dispatches and have been in the position therefore ofknowing what was really going on in Nazi Germany and how hollow Hit-ler’s grandiose promises were.

The British government, no less than the Times, was ready and anxiousto accept Hitler’s proposals as “sincere” and “well-considered”—espe-cially the one by which Germany would agree to a Navy 35 per cent thesize of Britain’s.

Hitler had shrewdly thrown out a hint to Sir John Simon, when theBritish Foreign Secretary and Eden made their postponed visit to him atthe end of March, that a naval agreement might easily be worked out be-tween the two powers which would guarantee English superiority. Nowon May 21 he had made a public and specific offer—a German fleet ofonly 35 per cent of the tonnage of the British—and he had added in hisspeech some especially friendly words for England. “Germany,” he hadsaid, has not the intention or the necessity or the means to participate inany new naval rivalry”—an allusion, which apparently was not lost on theEnglish, to the days before 1914 when Tirpitz, enthusiastically backed byWilhelm II, was building up a high-seas fleet to match England’s. “TheGerman government,” continued Hitler, “recognizes the overpoweringvital importance, and therewith the justification, of a dominating protec-tion for the British Empire on the sea . . . The German government hasthe straightforward intention to find and maintain a relationship with theBri^sh people and state which will prevent for all time a repetition ofthe only struggle there has been between the two nations.” Hitler had ex-pressed similar sentiments in Mein Kampf, where he had stressed thatone of the Kaiser’s greatest mistakes had been his enmity toward Englandand his absurd attempt to rival the British in naval power.

With incredible naivete and speed, the British government fell for Hit-ler s bait. Ribbentrop, who had now become Hitler’s messenger boy forforeign 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 tonegotiation; they must take it or leave it. The British took it. Withoutconsulting their allies of the Stresa front, France and Italy, which were

hnrf <trny“tmOSt’ .ni8ht after night, to keep out of the paper anything that mighthurt their [German] susceptibiht.es,” Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of the Times

FKhy.»23’ D93r t0.r‘S Geneva correspondent, H. G. Daniels, who hadpreceded Ebbutt in Berlin. I can really think of nothing that has been printednow for many months past to which they could possibly take exception as unfaircomment. (John Evelyn Wrench, Geoffrey Dawson and Our Times.)

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also naval powers and much concerned over German rearmament andGerman flouting of the military clauses of Versailles, and without eveninforming the League of Nations, which was supposed to uphold the 1919peace treaties, they proceeded, for what they thought was a private ad-vantage, to wipe out the naval restrictions of Versailles.

For it was obvious to the most simple mind in Berlin that by agreeingto Germany’s building a navy a third as large as the British, the Londongovernment was giving Hitler free rein to build up a navy as fast as wasphysically possible—one that would tax the capacity of his shipyards andsteel mills for at least ten years. It was thus not a limitation on Germanrearmament but an encouragement to expand it, in the naval arm, asrapidly as Germany could find the means to do so.

To add insult to the injury already done France, the British govern-ment, in fulfillment of a promise to Hitler, refused to tell her closest allywhat kind of ships and how many Great Britain had agreed that Germanyshould build, except that the German submarine tonnage—the buildingof 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 author-ized the Germans to build five battleships, whose tonnage and armamentwould be greater than that of anything the British had afloat, though theofficial figures were faked to deceive London—twenty-one cruisers andsixty-four destroyers. Not all of them were built or completed by the out-break of the war, but enough of them, with the U-boats, were ready tocause Britain disastrous losses in the first years of the second war.

Mussolini took due notice of the “perfidy of Albion.” Two could playat the game of appeasing Hitler. Moreover, England’s cynical attitude ofdisregarding the Versailles Treaty encouraged him in the belief that Lon-don might not take too seriously the flouting of the Covenant of the Leagueof Nations. On October 3, 1935, in defiance of the Covenant, his armiesinvaded the ancient mountain kingdom of Abyssinia. The League, ledby Great Britain and supported halfheartedly by France, which saw thatGermany was the greater danger in the long run, promptly voted sanc-tions. But they were only partial sanctions, timidly enforced. They didnot prevent Mussolini from conquering Ethiopia but they did destroy thefriendship of Fascist Italy with Britain and France and bring an end to theStresa 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 inthe Wilhelmstrasse talking with a number of party and government of-ficials. A diary note that evening summed up how quickly and well theGermans had sized up the situation:

The Wilhelmstrasse is delighted. Either Mussolini will stumble and get him-self 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

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win, defying France and Britain, and thereupon be ripe for a tie-up with Hitleragainst 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 haveseen, had so impressed the world and, above all, Great Britain, Hitler hadmentioned that “an element of legal insecurity” had been brought into theLocarno Pact as a result of the mutual-assistance pact which had beensigned between Russia and France on March 2 in Paris and on March 14in Moscow, but which up to the end of the year had not been ratified bythe 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, Frangois-Poncet, the French ambassador, had atalk with Hitler in which the Fuehrer launched “into a long tirade” againstthe Franco-Soviet Pact. Frangois-Poncet reported to Paris he was con-vinced that Hitler intended to use the pact as an excuse to occupy the de-militarized zone of the Rhineland. “Hitler’s sole hesitancy,” he added,“is now concerned with the appropriate moment to act.”15

Frangois-Poncet, probably the best-informed ambassador in Berlin,knew what he was talking about, though he was undoubtedly unawarethat as early as the previous spring, on May 2, nineteen days before Hitler’sassurances in the Reichstag that he would respect the Locarno Pact andthe territorial clauses of Versailles, General von Blomberg had issued hisfirst directive to the three armed services to prepare plans for the reoccupa-tion of the demilitarized Rhineland. The code name Schulung was givento the operation, it was to be “executed by a surprise blow at lightningspeed” and its planning was to be so secret that “only the very smallestnumber 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 tookplace at the tenth meeting of the Working Committee of the Reich DefenseCouncil, during which a Colonel Alfred Jodi, who had just become headof the Home Defense Department, reported on the plans and emphasizedthe need for the strictest secrecy. Nothing should be committed to writ-ing that was not absolutely necessary, he warned, and he added that “with-out exception such material must be kept in safes.”17

All through the winter of 1935-36 Hitler bided his time. France andBritain, he could not help but note, were preoccupied with stopping Italy’saggression in Abyssinia, but Mussolini seemed to be getting by with it.Despite its much-publicized sanctions, the League of Nations was provingitself impotent to halt a determined aggressor. In Paris the French Parlia-ment 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

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thought there was a good chance of the French Chamber or Senate reject-ing the alliance with Moscow. In that case he would have to look for an-other excuse for Schulung. But the pact came before the Chamber onFebruary 11 and it was approved on the twenty-seventh by a vote of 353to 164. Two days later, on March 1, Hitler reached his decision, somewhatto the consternation of the generals, most of whom were convinced thatthe French would make mincemeat of the small German forces which hadbeen gathered for the move into the Rhineland. Nevertheless, on the nextday, March 2, 1936, in obedience to his master’s instructions, Blombergissued formal orders for the occupation of the Rhineland. It was, he toldthe senior commanders of the armed forces, to be a “surprise move.”Blomberg expected it to be a “peaceful operation.” If it turned out thatit was not—that is, that the French would fight—the Commander in Chiefreserved the “right to decide on any military countermeasures.”18 Ac-tually, as 1 learned six days later and as would be confirmed from thetestimony of the generals at Nuremberg, Blomberg already had in mindwhat those countermeasures would be: a hasty retreat back over theRhine!

But the French, their nation already paralyzed by internal strife andthe people sinking into defeatism, did not know this when a small tokenforce of German troops paraded across the Rhine bridges at dawn onMarch 7 and entered the demilitarized zone.* At 10 a.m. Neurath, thecompliant Foreign Minister, called in the ambassadors of France, Britainand Italy, apprised them of the news from the Rhineland and handed thema formal note denouncing the Locarno Treaty, which Hitler had justbroken—and proposing new plans for peace! “Hitler struck his adver-sary in the face,” Frangois-Poncet wryly observed, “and as he did so de-clared: ‘I bring you proposals for peace!’ ”20

Indeed, two hours later the Fuehrer was standing at the rostrum of theReichstag before a delirious audience, expounding on his desire for peaceand his latest ideas of how to maintain it. I went over to the Kroll OperaHouse to see the spectacle, which I shall never forget, for it was both fas-cinating and gruesome. After a long harangue about the evils of Versaillesand the threat of Bolshevism, Hitler calmly announced that France’s pactwith Russia had invalidated the Locarno Treaty, which, unlike that ofVersailles, Germany had freely signed. The scene that followed I noteddown in my diary that evening.

“Germany no longer feels bound by the Locarno Treaty [Hitler said]. In theinterest of the primitive rights of its people to the security of their frontier andthe safeguarding of their defense, the German government has re-established,

* According to Jodi’s testimony at Nuremberg, only three battalions crossed theRhine, making for Aachen, Trier and Saarbruecken, and only one division wasemployed in the occupation of the entire territory. Allied intelligence estimateswere considerably larger: 35,000 men, or approximately three divisions. Hitlercommented later, “The fact was, I had only four brigades.”19

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as from today, the absolute and unrestricted sovereignty of the Reich in thedemilitarized zone!”

Now the six hundred deputies, personal appointees all of Hitler, little menwith big bodies and bulging necks and cropped hair and pouched bellies andbrown uniforms and heavy boots . . . leap to their feet like automatons, theirright arms upstretched in the Nazi salute, and scream “Heils” . . . Hitlerraises his hand for silence. . . . He says in a deep, resonant voice, “Men ofthe German Reichstag!” The silence is utter.

“In this historic hour, when, in the Reich’s western provinces, German troopsare at this minute marching into their future peacetime garrisons, we all unitein two sacred vows.”

He can go no further. It is news to this “parliamentary” mob that Germansoldiers are already on the move into the Rhineland. All the militarism in theirGerman blood surges to their heads. They spring, yelling and crying, to theirfeet . . . Their hands are raised in slavish salute, their faces now contortedwith hysteria, their mouths wide open, shouting, shouting, their eyes, burningwith fanaticism, glued on the new god, the Messiah. The Messiah plays hisrole superbly. His head lowered, as if in all humbleness, he waits patiently forsilence. Then his voice, still low, but choking with emotion, utters the twovows:

“First, we swear to yield to no force whatever in restoration of the honor ofour people . . . Secondly, we pledge that now, more than ever, we shall strivefor an understanding between the European peoples, especially for one withour Western neighbor nations . . . We have no territorial demands to makein Europe! . . . Germany will never break the peace!”

It was a long time before the cheering stopped ... A few generals madetheir way out. Behind their smiles, however, you could not help detecting anervousness ... 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 hadissued in his own handwriting the order to march, was losing his nerve.The next day 1 learned that he had given orders for his troops to with-draw across the Rhine should the French move to oppose them. But theFrench never made the slightest move. Frangois-Poncet says that afterhis warning of the previous November, the French High Command hadasked the government what it would do in case the ambassador provedright. The answer was, he says, that the government would take the matterup with the League of Nations.22 Actually, when the blow occurred,* itwas the French government which wanted to act and the French GeneralStaff which held back. “General Gamelin,” Frangois-Poncet declares,“advised that a war operation, however limited, entailed unpredictablerisks and could not be undertaken without decreeing a general mobiliza-

* Despite Frangois-Poncet’s warning of the previous fall, Germany’s action ap-parently came as a complete surprise to the French and British governments andtheir general staffs.

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tion.”23 The most General Gamelin, the Chief of the General Staff, woulddo—and did—was concentrate thirteen divisions near the Germanfrontier, but merely to reinforce the Maginot Line. Even this was enoughto throw a scare into the German High Command. Blomberg, backed byJodi and most of the officers at the top, wanted to pull back the three bat-talions that had crossed the Rhine. As Jodi testified at Nuremberg, “Con-sidering the situation we were in, the French covering army could haveblown us to pieces.”24

It could have—and had it, that almost certainly would have been theend of Hitler, after which history might have taken quite a different andbrighter turn than it did, for the dictator could never have survived such afiasco. Hitler himself admitted as much. “A retreat on our part,” heconceded later, “would have spelled collapse.”23 It was Hitler’s iron nervesalone, which now, as during many crises that lay ahead, saved the situationand, confounding the reluctant generals, brought success. But it was noeasy moment for him.

“The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland,” PaulSchmidt, his interpreter, heard him later say, “were the most nerve-rackingin my life. If the French had then marched into the Rhineland, we wouldhave had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the militaryresources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even amoderate resistance.”28

Confident that the French would not march, he bluntly turned downall suggestions for pulling back by the wavering High Command. GeneralBeck, Chief of the General Staff, wanted the Fuehrer to at least soften theblow by proclaiming that he would not fortify the area west of the Rhine—a suggestion, Jodi later testified, “which the Fuehrer turned down verybluntly”—for obvious reasons, as we shall see.27 Blomberg’s proposal towithdraw, Hitler later told General von Rundstedt, was nothing less thanan act of cowardice.28

“What would have happened,” Hitler exclaimed in a bull session withhis cronies at headquarters on the evening of March 27, 1942, in recallingthe Rhineland coup, “if anybody other than myself had been at the headof the Reich! Anyone you care to mention would have lost his nerve. Iwas obliged to lie, and what saved us was my unshakable obstinacy andmy amazing aplomb.”29

It was true, but it must also be recorded that he was aided not only bythe hesitations of the French but by the supineness of their British allies.The French Foreign Minister, Pierre Etienne Flandin, flew to London onMarch 11 and begged the British government to back France in a militarycounteraction in the Rhineland. His pleas were unavailing. Britain wouldnot risk war even though Allied superiority over the Germans was over-whelming. As Lord Lothian remarked, “The Germans, after all, are onlygoing into their own back garden.” Even before the French arrived inLondon, Anthony Eden, who had become Foreign Secretary in the previousDecember, had told the House of Commons, on March 9, “Occupation ofthe Rhineland by the Reichswehr deals a heavy blow to the principle of

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the sanctity of treaties. Fortunately,” he added, “we have no reason tosuppose that Germany’s present action threatens hostilities.”30

And yet France was entitled, under the terms of the Locarno Treaty, totake military action against the presence of German troops in the demili-tarized zone, and Britain was obligated by that treaty to back her withher own armed forces. The abortive London conversations were a con-firmation to Hitler that he had gotten away with his latest gamble.

The British not only shied away from the risk of war but once againthey took seriously the latest installment of Hitler’s “peace” proposals.In the notes handed to the three ambassadors on March 7 and in his speechto the Reichstag, Hitler had offered to sign a twenty-five-year nonaggres-sion pact with Belgium and France, to be guaranteed by Britain and Italy;to conclude similar nonaggression pacts with Germany’s neighbors onthe east; to agree to the demilitarization of both sides of the Franco-German frontier; and, finally, to return to the League of Nations. Hitler’ssincerity might have been judged by his proposal to demilitarize both sidesof the Franco-German border, since it would have forced France to scrapher Maginot Line, her last protection against a surprise German attack.

In London, the esteemed Times, while deploring Hitler’s precipitateaction in invading the Rhineland, headed its leading editorial “A Chanceto Rebuild.”

In retrospect, it is easy to see that Hitler’s successful gamble in theRhineland brought him a victory more staggering and more fatal in itsimmense consequences than could be comprehended at the time. At homeit fortified his popularity* and his power, raising them to heights whichno German ruler of the past had ever enjoyed. It assured his ascendancyover his generals, who had hesitated and weakened at a moment of crisiswhen he had held firm. It taught them that in foreign politics and evenin military affairs his judgment was superior to theirs. They had fearedthat the French would fight; he knew better. And finally, and above all,the Rhineland occupation, small as it was as a military operation, openedthe way, as only Hitler (and Churchill, alone, in England) seemed torealize, to vast new opportunities in a Europe which was not only shaken

* 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 figuresof the voting on March 29, some 99 per cent of the 45,453,691 registered voterswent to the polls, and 98.8 per cent of them approved Hitler’s action. Foreign cor-respondents 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 theGestapo. 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, theJa vote, which was announced by the Propaganda Minister as forty-two, out-numbered 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 nodoubt that the vote of approval for Hitler’s coup was overwhelming. And whynot? The junking of Versailles and the appearance of German soldiers marchingagain into what was, after all, German territory were things that almost all Germansnaturally approved. The “No” vote was given as 540,211.

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but whose strategic situation was irrevocably changed by the parading ofthree German battalions across the Rhine bridges.

Conversely, it is equally easy to see, in retrospect, that France’s failureto repel the Wehrmacht battalions and Britain’s failure to back her in whatwould have been nothing more than a police action was a disaster for theWest from which sprang all the later ones of even greater magnitude. InMarch 1936 the two Western democracies were given their last chanceto halt, without the risk of a serious war, the rise of a militarized, aggres-sive, totalitarian Germany and, in fact—as we have seen Hitler admitting—bring the Nazi dictator and his regime tumbling down. They let thechance slip by.

For France, it was the beginning of the end. Her allies in the East,Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Yugoslavia, suddenly werefaced with the fact that France would not fight against German aggressionto preserve the security system which the French government itself hadtaken the lead in so laboriously building up. But more than that. TheseEastern allies began to realize that even if France were not so supine, shewould soon not be able to lend them much assistance because of Germany’sfeverish construction of a West Wall behind the Franco-German border.The erection of this fortress line, they saw, would quickly change thestrategic map of Europe, to their detriment. They could scarcely expect aFrance which did not dare, with her one hundred divisions, to repel threeGerman battalions, to bleed her young manhood against impregnableGerman fortifications while the Wehrmacht attacked in the East. But evenif the unexpected took place, it would be futile. Henceforth the Frenchcould 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 con-veyed to William C. Bullitt, the American ambassador to France, whenhe called on the German Foreign Minister in Berlin on May 18, 1936.

Von Neurath said [Bullitt reported to the State Department] that it was thepolicy of the German Government to do nothing active in foreign affairs un-til “the Rhineland had been digested.” He explained that he meant that untilthe German fortifications had been constructed on the French and Belgianfrontiers, the German Government would do everything possible to preventrather than encourage an outbreak by the Nazis in Austria and would pursuea quiet line with regard to Czechoslovakia. “As soon as our fortifications areconstructed and the countries of Central Europe realize that France cannotenter German territory at will, all those countries will begin to feel very dif-ferently about their foreign policies and a new constellation will develop,” hesaid.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

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Austrian independence I had to embark on a course of appeasement . . .Everything had to be avoided which could give Germany a pretext forintervention and everything had to be done to secure in some way Hitler’stoleration of the status quo.”32

The new and youthful Austrian Chancellor had been encouraged byHitler’s public declaration to the Reichstag on May 21, 1935, that “Ger-many neither intends nor wishes to interfere in the internal affairs ofAustria, to annex Austria or to conclude an Anschluss”; and he had beenreassured by the reiteration at Stresa by Italy, France and Britain of theirdetermination to help safeguard Austria’s independence. Then Mussolini,Austria’s principal protector since 1933, had become bogged down inAbyssinia and had broken with France and Britain. When the Germansmarched into the Rhineland and began to fortify it, Dr. Schuschniggrealized that some appeasement of Hitler was due. He began negotiatinga new treaty with the wily German minister in Vienna, Papen, who,though the Nazis had come within an ace of murdering him during theJune purge, had nevertheless gone to work on his arrival in Austria inthe late summer of 1934, after the Nazi assassination of Dollfuss, to under-mine Austria’s independence and capture Hitler’s native land for theLeader. “National Socialism must and will overpower the new Austrianideology,” he had written Hitler on July 27, 1935, in giving an accountof his first year of service in Vienna.33

In its published text the Austro—German agreement signed on J uly 11,1936, seemed to show an unusual amount of generosity and tolerance onthe part of Hitler. Germany reaffirmed its recognition of Austria’s sover-eignty and the promise not to interfere in the internal affairs of its neigh-bor. In return, Austria pledged that in its foreign policy it would alwaysact on the principle that it acknowledged itself to be “a German state.”

But there were secret clauses in the treaty,84 and in them Schuschniggmade concessions which would lead him—and his little country—to theirdoom. He agreed secretly to amnesty Nazi political prisoners in Austriaand to appoint representatives of the “so-called ‘National Opposition’ ”—a euphemism for Nazis or Nazi sympathizers—to positions of “politicalresponsibility.” This was equivalent to allowing Hitler to set up a Trojanhorse in Austria. Into it would crawl shortly Seyss-Inquart, a Vienneselawyer, who will cut a certain figure in the subsequent narrative.

Although Papen had obtained Hitler’s approval of the text of thetreaty, making a personal visit to Berlin for the purpose early in July, theFuehrer was furious with his envoy when the latter telephoned him onJuly 16 to notify him that the agreement had been signed.

Hitler’s reaction astonished me [Papen later wrote]. Instead of expressinghis gratification, he broke into a flood of abuse. I had misled him, he said, intomaking 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

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lost his grip on Austria. It might have been expected that this wouldworsen the relations between the two fascist dictators. But just theopposite occurred—due to events which now, in 1936, played into Hitler’shands.

On May 2, 1936, Italian forces entered the Abyssinian capital, AddisAbaba, and on July 4 the League of Nations formally capitulated andcalled off its sanctions against Italy. Two weeks later, on July 16, Francostaged a military revolt in Spain and civil war broke out.

Hitler, as was his custom at that time of year, was taking in the operaat the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth. On the night of July 22, after he hadreturned from the theater, a German businessman from Morocco, ac-companied by the local Nazi leader, arrived in Bayreuth with an urgentletter from Franco. The rebel leader needed planes and other assistance.Hitler immediately summoned Goering and General von Blomberg, whohappened to be in Bayreuth, and that very evening the decision was takento give support to the Spanish rebellion.36

Though German aid to Franco never equaled that given by Italy, whichdispatched between sixty and seventy thousand troops as well as vastsupplies of arms and planes, it was considerable. The Germans estimatedlater that they spent half a billion marks on the venture37 besides furnishingplanes, tanks, technicians and the Condor Legion, an Air Force unit whichdistinguished itself by the obliteration of the Spanish town of Guernicaand its civilian inhabitants. Relative to Germany’s own massive rearma-ment it was not much, but it paid handsome dividends to Hitler.

It gave France a third unfriendly fascist power on its borders. It ex-acerbated the internal strife in France between Right and Left and thusweakened Germany’s principal rival in the West. Above all it renderedimpossible a rapprochement of Britain and France with Italy, which theParis and London governments had hoped for after the termination ofthe 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 documentsmakes plain that one of Hitler’s purposes was to prolong the SpanishCivil War in order to keep the Western democracies and Italy at logger-heads and draw Mussolini toward him.* As early as December 1936,Ulrich von Hassell, the German ambassador in Rome, who had not yetachieved that recognition of Nazi aims and practices which he laterobtained and which would cost him his life, was reporting to theWilhelmstrasse:

* More than a year later, on November 5, 1937, Hitler would reiterate his Spanishpolicy in a confidential talk with his generals and his Foreign Minister. “A hundredper cent victory for Franco,” he told them, was “not desirable from the Germanpoint of view. Rather we are interested in a continuance of the war and in keepingud the tension in the Mediterranean.”38

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The role played by the Spanish conflict as regards Italy’s relations withFrance and England could be similar to that of the Abyssinian conflict, bring-ing out clearly the actual, opposing interests of the powers and thus prevent-ing Italy from being drawn into the net of the Western powers and used fortheir machinations. The struggle for dominant political influence in Spainlays bare the natural opposition between Italy and France; at the same timethe position of Italy as a power in the western Mediterranean comes into com-petition with that of Britain. All the more clearly will Italy recognize theadvisability of confronting the Western powers shoulder to shoulder with Ger-many.39

It was these circumstances which gave birth to the Rome-Berlin Axis.On October 24, after conferences with Neurath in Berlin, Count GaleazzoCiano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and Foreign Minister, made the first of hismany pilgrimages to Berchtesgaden. He found the German dictator in afriendly and expansive mood. Mussolini, Hitler declared, was “the lead-ing statesman in the world, to whom none may even remotely comparehimself.” Together, Italy and Germany could conquer not only “Bol-shevism” but the West. Including England! The British, Hitler thought,might eventually seek an accommodation with a united Italy and Ger-many. If not, the two powers, acting together, could easily dispose of her.“German and Italian rearmament,” Hitler reminded Ciano, “is proceed-ing much more rapidly than rearmament can in England ... In threeyears 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 secretprotocol which outlined a common policy for Germany and Italy inforeign affairs. In a speech at Milan a few days later (November 1) Mus-solini publicly referred to it without divulging the contents, as an agree-ment which constituted an “Axis”—around which the other Europeanpowers “may work together.” It would become a famous—and, for theDuce, a fatal—word.

With Mussolini in the bag, Hitler turned his attentions elsewhere. InAugust 1936 he had appointed Ribbentrop as German ambassador inLondon in an effort to explore the possibility of a settlement with Eng-land—on his own terms. Incompetent and lazy, vain as a peacock,arrogant and without humor, Ribbentrop was the worst possible choicefor such a post, as Goering realized. “When I criticized Ribbentrop’squalifications to handle British problems,” he later declared, “the Fuehrerpointed out to me that Ribbentrop knew ‘Lord So and So’ and ‘MinisterSo and So.’ To which I replied: ‘Yes, but the difficulty is that they knowRibbentrop.’ ”41

It is true that Ribbentrop, unattractive a figure though he was, was notwithout influential friends in London. Mrs. Simpson, the friend of theKing, was believed in Berlin to be one of these. But Ribbentrop’s initialefforts in his new post were discouraging and in November he flew backto Berlin to conclude some non-British business he had been dabbling in.

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On November 25 he signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan, in which,he told the correspondents (of whom this writer was one) without battingan eye, Germany and Japan had joined together to defend Westerncivilization. On the surface this pact seemed to be nothing more than apropaganda trick by which Germany and Japan could win world supportby exploiting the universal dislike for Communism and the general distrustof the Comintern. But in this treaty too there was a secret protocol,specifically directed against Russia. In case of an unprovoked attack bythe Soviet Union against Germany or Japan, the two nations agreed toconsult on what measures to take “to safeguard their common interests”and also to “take no measures which would tend to ease the situation ofthe Soviet Union.” It was also agreed that neither nation would make anypolitical treaties with Russia contrary to the spirit of the agreement with-out mutual consent.42

It would not be very long before Germany broke the agreement andaccused Japan—unjustifiably—of not observing it. But the pact didserve a certain propaganda purpose among the world’s gullible and itbrought 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 “thewithdrawal of the German signature” from the Versailles Treaty—anempty 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 couldbe pardoned for his pride, for it was an impressive record in both domesticand foreign affairs. He had, as we have seen, abolished unemployment,created a boom in business, built up a powerful Army, Navy and AirForce, provided them with considerable armaments and the promise ofmore on a massive scale. He had singlehandedly broken the fetters ofVersailles and bluffed his way into occupying the Rhineland. Completelyisolated at first, he had found a loyal ally in Mussolini and another inFranco, and he had detached Poland from France. Most important ofall, perhaps, he had released the dynamic energy of the German people,reawakening their confidence in the nation and their sense of its missionas a great and expanding world power.

Everyone could see the contrast between this thriving, martial, boldlyled new Germany and the decadent democracies in the West, whose con-fusions and vacillations seemed to increase with each new month of thecalendar. Though they were alarmed, Britain and France had not lifteda finger to prevent Hitler from violating the peace treaty by rearmingGermany and by reoccupying the Rhineland; they had been unable tostop Mussolini in Abyssinia. And now, as the year 1937 began, they werecutting a sorry figure by their futile gestures to prevent Germany andItaly from determining the outcome of the Spanish Civil War. Everyoneknew what Italy and Germany were doing in Spain to assure Franco’svictory. Yet the governments of London and Paris continued for years toengage in empty diplomatic negotiations with Berlin and Rome to assure“nonintervention” in Spain. It was a sport which seems to have amused

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the German dictator and which certainly increased his contempt for thestumbling political leaders of France and Britain—“little worms,” hewould shortly call them on a historic occasion when he again humbled thetwo 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 beganthat almost all that Hitler had done in his first four years was a preparationfor war. This writer can testify from personal observation that right upto September 1, 1939, the German people were convinced that Hitlerwould get what he wanted—and what they wanted—without recourse towar. But among the elite who were running Germany, or serving it in thekey 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, approachedan end, Goering, who in September 1936 had been put in charge of theFour-Year Plan, bluntly stated what was coming in a secret speech toindustrialists and high officials in Berlin.

The battle we are now approaching [he said] demands a colossal measure ofproduction capacity. No limit on rearmament can be visualized. The only al-ternatives are victory or destruction ... We live in a time when the finalbattle is in sight. We are already on the threshold of mobilization and we arealready at war. All that is lacking is the actual shooting.43

Goering’s warning was given on December 17, 1936. Within elevenmonths, as we shall shortly see, Hitler made his fateful and inalterabledecision to go to war.

1937: “NO SURPRISES”

In his address to the robots of the Reichstag on January 30, 1937, Hitlerproclaimed, “The time of so-called surprises has been ended.”

And in truth, there were no weekend surprises during 1937.* The yearfor Germany was one of consolidation and further preparation for theobjectives which in November the Fuehrer would at last lay down to ahandful of his highest officers. It was a year devoted to forging arma-ments, training troops, trying out the new Air Force in Spain,! developing

Wilhelmstrasse officials used to say jokingly that Hitler pulled his surprises onSaturdays because he had been told that British officials took the weekend off inthe country.

t In his testimony at Nuremberg on March 14, 1946, Goering spoke proudly of theopportunities 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 anumber of experimental fighter units, bombers and antiaircraft guns; and in thatway I had an opportunity to ascertain, under combat conditions, whether thematerial was equal to the task. In order that the personnel, too, might gather acertain experience, I saw to it that there was a continuous flow [so] that newpeople were constantly being sent and others recalled.”44

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ersatz gasoline and rubber, cementing the Rome-Berlin Axis and watch-ing for further weak spots in Paris, London and Vienna.

All through the first months of 1937, Hitler sent important emissariesto Rome to cultivate Mussolini. The Germans were somewhat uneasyover Italy’s flirtation with Britain (on January 2 Ciano had signed a“gentleman’s agreement” with the British government in which the twocountries recognized each other’s vital interests in the Mediterranean)and they realized that the question of Austria was still a touchy subjectin Rome. When Goering saw the Duce on January 15 and bluntly spokeof the inevitability of the Anschluss with Austria, the excitable Italiandictator, according to the German interpreter, Paul Schmidt, shook hishead violently, and Ambassador von Hassell reported to Berlin that Goe-ring’s statement on Austria “had met with a cool reception.” In JuneNeurath hastened to assure the Duce that Germany would abide by itsJuly 11 pact with Austria. Only in the case of an attempted restoration ofthe Hapsburgs would the Germans take stern action.

Thus placated on Austria and still smarting from the opposition ofFrance and Britain to almost all of his ambitions—in Ethiopia, in Spain,in the Mediterranean—Mussolini accepted an invitation from Hitler tovisit Germany, and on September 25, 1937, outfitted in a new uniformcreated especially for the occasion, he crossed the Alps into the ThirdReich. 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 ofmany to Hitler’s side which were to lead to a progressive weakening ofhis own position and finally to a disastrous end. Hitler’s purpose was notto engage in further diplomatic conversations with his guest but to im-press him with Germany’s strength and thus play on Mussolini’s obsessionto cast his lot with the winning side. The Duce was rushed from one sideof Germany to the other: to parades of the S.S. and the troops, to Armymaneuvers in Mecklenburg, to the roaring armament factories in theRuhr.

His visit was climaxed by a celebration in Berlin on September 28 whichvisibly impressed him. A gigantic crowd of one million persons wasgathered on the Maifeld to hear the two fascist dictators speak theirpieces. Mussolini, orating in German, was carried away by the deafeningapplause—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 severethunderstorm broke over the field before Mussolini had finished his ora-tion and that in the confusion of the scattering mob the S.S. securityarrangements broke down and the proud Duce, drenched to the skin andsorely put, was forced to make his way back to his headquarters alone andas best he could. However, this untoward experience did not dampenMussolini’s enthusiasm to be a partner of this new, powerful Germany,and the next day, after reviewing a military parade of Army, Navy andAir Force detachments, he returned to Rome convinced that his futurelay at the side of Hitler.

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It was not surprising, then, that a month later when Ribbentropjourneyed to Rome to obtain Mussolini’s signature for the Anti-CominternPact, a ceremony held on November 6, he was told by the Duce of Italy’sdeclining interest in the independence of Austria. “Let events [in Austria]take their natural course,” Mussolini said. This was the go-ahead forwhich 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 withdrewhis country from the Locarno Pact and from its alliance with Britain andFrance and proclaimed that henceforth Belgium would follow a strictcourse of neutrality. This was a serious blow to the collective defense ofthe West, but in April 1937 Britain and France accepted it—an action forwhich they, as well as Belgium, would soon pay dearly.

At the end of May the Wilhelmstrasse had watched with interest theretirement of Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister of Great Britain and theaccession of Neville Chamberlain to that post. The Germans were pleasedto hear that the new British Prime Minister would take a more active partin foreign affairs than had his predecessor and that he was determined toreach, if possible, an understanding with Nazi Germany. What sort ofunderstanding would be acceptable to Hitler was outlined in a secretmemorandum of November 10, written by Baron von Weizsaecker, thenhead of the Political Department of the German Foreign Office.

From England we want colonies and freedom of action in the EastThe British need for tranquillity is great. It would be profitable to find outwhat England would be willing to pay for such tranquillity.46

An occasion for finding out what England would pay arose in Novemberwhen Lord Halifax, with Mr. Chamberlain’s enthusiastic approval, madethe pilgrimage to Berchtesgaden to see Hitler. On November 19 they helda long conversation, and in the lengthy secret German memorandum onit drawn up by the German Foreign Office46 three points emerge:Chamberlain was most anxious for a settlement with Germany and pro-posed talks between the two countries on a cabinet level; Britain wanteda general European settlement, in return for which she was prepared tomake concessions to Hitler as regards colonies and Eastern Europe; Hitlerwas not greatly interested at the moment in an Anglo—German accord.

In view of the rather negative outcome of the talk, it was surprising tothe Germans that the British seemed to be encouraged by it.* It would

* Chamberlain wrote in his diary: “The German visit [of Halifax] was from mypoint ot view a great success because it achieved its object, that of creating anatmosphere in which it is possible to discuss with Germany the practical questionsinvolved in a European settlement.” (Keith Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamber-lain, p. 332.)

Halifax himself seems to have been taken in by Hitler. In a written report to

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have been a much greater surprise to the British government had it knownof a highly secret meeting which Hitler had held in Berlin with his militarychiefs and his Foreign Minister exactly fourteen days before his conversa-tion with Lord Halifax.

THE FATEFUL DECISION OF NOVEMBER 5, 1937

An indication of things to come and of the preparations that must bemade to meet them had been given the commanders in chief of the threearmed forces on June 24, 1937, by Field Marshal von Blomberg in adirective marked “Top Secret,” of which only four copies were made.47“The general political situation,” the Minister of War and Commander inChief of the Armed Forces informed the three service chiefs, “justifies thesupposition 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 worldsituation, which does not preclude surprising incidents, demands constantpreparedness for war on the part of the German armed forces ... tomake possible the military exploitation of politically favorable opportuni-ties should they occur. Preparations of the armed forces for a possiblewar in the mobilization period 1937—38 must be made with this in mind.’

What possible war, since Germany need not fear an attack “from anyside”? 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 Con-centration “Rot.")

II. War on two fronts with the main struggle in the Southeast. (StrategicConcentration “Gruen.”)

The “assumption” in the first case was that the French might stage asurprise attack on Germany, in which case the Germans would employtheir main forces in the West. This operation was given the code name“Red” (Rot).* *

the Foreign Office he said: “The German Chancellor and others gave the impressionthat 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 “wasnot bent on early adventures, partly because they might be unprofitable, and partlybecause he was busy building up Germany internally . . . Goering had assuredhim that not one drop of German blood would be shed in Europe unless Germanywas absolutely forced to do it. The Germans gave him [Halifax] the impression... of intending to achieve their aims in orderly fashion.” (Tansill, Back Door toWar, pp. 365-66.)

* This is the first of many such code names for German military plans which weshall 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 opera-

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I

For the second eventuality:

The war in the East can begin with a surprise German operation againstCzechoslovakia in order to parry the imminent attack of a superior enemycoalition. The necessary conditions to justify such an action politically and inthe eyes of international law must be created beforehand. [Emphasis by Blom-berg.]

Czechoslovakia, the directive stressed, must be “eliminated from thevery beginning” and occupied.

There were also three cases where “special preparations” were to bemade:

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 thesepages. “Otto” stood for Otto of Hapsburg, the young pretender to theAustrian throne, then living in Belgium. In Blomberg’s June directiveCase Otto was summarized as follows:

The object of this operation—armed intervention in Austria in the event ofher restoring the Monarchy—will be to compel Austria by armed force togive 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 anyresistance will be broken.

A note of caution, almost of despair, creeps into this revealing docu-ment at the end. There are no illusions about Britain. “England,” itwarns, “will employ all her available economic and military resourcesagainst us.” Should she join Poland and Lithuania, the directive acknowl-edges, “our military position would be worsened to an unbearable, evenhopeless, extent. The political leaders will therefore do everything tokeep these countries neutral, above all England.”

Although the directive was signed by Blomberg it is obvious that itcame from his master in the Reich Chancellery. To that nerve center ofthe Third Reich in the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin there came on the after-

tions in the West and against Czechoslovakia, respectively) and in the beginning,according to the arguments of the German generals in Nuremberg, it was merelythe designation commonly used by all military commands for plans to coverhypothetical 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 armedaggression. The word “Operation” would probably be a more accurate renderingof Fall than the word “Case.” However, for the sake of convenience, the authorwill go along with the word “Case.”

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noon of November 5,1937, to receive further elucidation from the Fuehrersix individuals: Field Marshal von Blomberg, Minister of War and Com-mander in Chief of the Armed Forces; Colonel General Baron vonFritsch, Commander in Chief of the Army; Admiral Dr. Raeder, Com-mander in Chief of the Navy; Colonel General Goering, Commander inChief of the Air Force; Baron von Neurath, Foreign Minister; and ColonelHossbach, military adjutant to the Fuehrer. Hossbach is not a familiarname in these pages, nor will it become one. But in the darkening hoursof that November day the young colonel played an important role. Hetook notes of what Hitler said and five days later wrote them up in a highlysecret memorandum, thus recording for history—his account showed upat Nuremberg among the captured documents48—the decisive turningpoint in the life of the Third Reich.

The meeting began at 4:15 p.m. and lasted until 8:30, with Hitler doingmost 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 ofpower.” He explained that he regarded the remarks he was about to makeas of such importance that, in the event of his death, they should beregarded as his last will and testament.

“The aim of German policy,” he said, “was to make secure and topreserve the racial community and to enlarge it. It was therefore a ques-tion of space [Lebensraum].” The Germans, he laid it down, had “theright to a greater living space than other peoples . . . Germany’s futurewas therefore wholly conditional upon the solving of the need for space.”*

Where? Not in some far-off African or Asian colonies, but in the heartof Europe “in immediate proximity to the Reich.” The question forGermany was, Where could she achieve the greatest gain at the lowestcost?

The history of all ages—the Roman Empire and the British Empire—hadproved that expansion could only be carried out by breaking down resistanceand taking risks; setbacks were inevitable. There had never . . . been spaceswithout a master, and there were none today; the attacker always comes upagainst a possessor.

* From here on, the reader will note that what obviously is indirect discourse hasbeen put within quotation marks or in quotations in the form of extracts. Almostall the German records of the remarks of Hitler and of others in private talks werewritten down in the third person as indirect discourse, though frequently theyabruptly slipped into direct, first-person discourse without any change of punctua-tion. This question posed a problem for American English.

Because I wanted to preserve the accuracy of the original document and the exactwording used or recorded, I decided it was best to refrain from tampering withthese accounts by rendering them into first-person direct discourse or by excludingthem from within quotation marks. In the latter case it would have looked asthough 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 theactual recorders from present to past and of changing the first-person pronoun tothird-person. If this is borne in mind there will not be, I believe, any confusion.

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Two “hate-inspired” countries, Hitler declared, stood in Germany’sway: Britain and France. Both countries were opposed “to any furtherstrengthening of Germany’s position.” The Fuehrer did not believe thatthe British Empire was “unshakable.” In fact, he saw many weaknessesin it, and he proceeded to elaborate them: the troubles with Ireland andIndia, the rivalry with Japan in the Far East and with Italy in the Mediter-ranean. France’s position, he thought, “was more favorable than that ofBritain . . . but France was going to be confronted with internal politicaldifficulties.” Nonetheless, Britain, France and Russia must be consideredas “power factors in our political calculations.”

Therefore:

Germany’s problem could be solved only by means of force, and this wasnever without attendant risk ... If one accepts as the basis of the followingexposition the resort to force, with its attendant risks, then there remain to beanswered the questions “when” and “where.” There were three cases to bedealt with:

Case I: Period 1943—45

After this date only a change for the worse, from our point of view, couldbe expected. The equipment of the Army, Navy and Airforce . . . was nearlycompleted. Equipment and armament were modern; in further delay therelay the danger of their obsolescence. In particular, the secrecy of “specialweapons” could not be preserved forever . . . Our relative strength woulddecrease in relation to the rearmament ... by the rest of the world ... Be-sides, the world was expecting our attack and was increasing its countermeas-ures from year to year. It was while the rest of the world was increasing its de-fenses that we were obliged to take the offensive.

Nobody knew today what the situation would be in the years 1943-45. Onething only was certain, that we could not wait longer.

If the Fuehrer was still living, it was his unalterable resolve to solve Ger-many s problem of space at the latest by 1943—45. The necessity for actionbefore 1943-45 would arise in Cases II and III.

Case II

If internal strife in France should develop into such a domestic crisis as toabsorb the French Army completely and render it incapable of use for waragainst 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 “pro-ceed" against Germany. . . .

Our first objective . . . must be to overthrow Czechoslovakia and Austriasimultaneously in order to remove the threat to our flank in any possible opera-tion against the West ... If the Czechs were overthrown and a commonGerman-Hungarian frontier achieved, a neutral attitude on the part of Polandcould be the more certainly counted upon in the event of a Franco-Germanconflict.

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But what would France, Britain, Italy and Russia do? Hitler went intothe answer to that question in considerable detail. He believed “that al-most certainly Britain, and probably France, had already tacitly writtenoff the Czechs. Difficulties connected with the Empire and the prospectof being once more entangled in a protracted European war were decisiveconsiderations for Britain against participation in a war against Germany.Britain’s attitude would certainly not be without influence on that ofFrance. An attack by France without British support, and with theprospect of the offensive being brought to a standstill on our westernfortifications, was hardly probable. Nor was a French march throughBelgium and Holland without British support to be expected ... Itwould of course be necessary to maintain a strong defense on our westernfrontier during the prosecution of our attack on the Czechs and Austria.”

Hitler then outlined some of the advantages of the “annexation ofCzechoslovakia and Austria”: better strategic frontiers for Germany, thefreeing of military forces “for other purposes,” acquisition of some twelvemillion “Germans,” additional foodstuffs for five to six million Germansin the Reich, and manpower for twelve new Army divisions.

He had forgotten to mention what Italy and Russia might do, and henow returned to them. He doubted whether the Soviet Union would in-tervene, “in view of Japan’s attitude.” Italy would not object “to theelimination of the Czechs” but it was still a question as to her attitude ifAustria was also taken. It depended “essentially on whether the Ducewere still alive.”

Hitler’s supposition for Case III was that France would become em-broiled in a war with Italy—a conflict that he counted upon. That was thereason, he explained, for his policy in trying to prolong the Spanish CivilWar; it kept Italy embroiled with France and Britain. He saw a war be-tween them “coming definitely nearer.” In fact, he said, he was “resolvedto 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 littleGerman 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 decidenot to act against Germany. Without British support, a warlike action byFrance against Germany was not to be expected.

The time for our attack on the Czechs and Austria must be made dependenton the course of the Anglo-French-Italian war . . . This favorable situation. . . would not occur again . . . The descent upon the Czechs would haveto 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. Hitlerhad communicated his irrevocable decision to go to war. To the handfulof 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

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Germany must have Lebensraum in the East and must be prepared to useforce to obtain it; but then he had been only an obscure agitator and hisbook, as Field Marshal von Blomberg later said, had been regarded bythe 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 con-fronted with specific dates for actual aggression against two neighboringcountries—an action which they were sure would bring on a Europeanwar. They must be ready by the following year, 1938, and at the latest by1943-45.

The realization stunned them. Not, so far as the Hossbach recordsshow, because they were struck down by the immorality of their Leader’sproposals but for more practical reasons: Germany was not ready for abig war; to provoke one now would risk disaster.

On those grounds Blomberg, Fritsch and Neurath dared to speak upand question the Fuehrer’s pronouncement. Within three months all ofthe three were out of office and Hitler, relieved of their opposition, suchas it was—and it was the last he was to suffer in his presence during theThird 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—hadforeseen.

10

STRANGE, FATEFUL INTERLUDE: THE FALLOF BLOMBERG, FRITSCH, NEURATHAND SCHACHT

The decision to use armed force against Austria and Czechoslovakiaeven 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 hisForeign Minister that Baron von Neurath, easygoing, complacent andmorally weak though he was, suffered several heart attacks.1

“I was extremely upset at Hitler’s speech,” he later told the Nurembergtribunal, “because it knocked the bottom out of the whole foreign policywhich I had consistently pursued.”2 In this frame of mind, and despitehis heart attacks, he sought out General von Fritsch and General Beck,Chief of the General Staff, two days later and discussed with them whatcould be done “to get Hitler to change his ideas.” The impression on Beckof Hitler’s harangue, according to Colonel Hossbach, who informed himof it, had been “shattering.” It was agreed that Fritsch should again re-monstrate with the Fuehrer at their next appointment, pointing out to himthe military considerations which made his plans inadvisable, whileNeurath would follow up by again stressing to Hitler the political dangers.As for Beck, he immediately committed to paper a devastating critique ofHitler’s plans, which apparently he showed to no one—the first sign of afatal flaw in the mind and character of this estimable general who at firsthad welcomed the advent of Nazism and who, in the end, would give hislife in an abortive effort to destroy it.

General von Fritsch saw Hitler on November 9. There is no record oftheir talk but it may be presumed that the Commander in Chief of theArmy repeated his military arguments against Hitler’s plans and that hegot nowhere. The Fuehrer was in no mood to brook opposition eitherfrom the generals or from his Foreign Minister. He refused to receiveNeurath and took off for a long rest at his mountain retreat at Berchtes-gaden. It was not until the middle of January that the stricken Neurathwas able to arrange an appointment with the Leader.

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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 init ... I called his attention to the danger of war and to the serious warn-ings of the generals . . . When despite all my arguments he still held to hisopinions I told him that he would have to find another Foreign Minister . . 3

Though Neurath did not then know it, that was precisely what Hitlerhad decided to do. In a fortnight he would celebrate the fifth anniversaryof his coming to power and he intended to mark it by cleaning house notonly in the Foreign Office but in the Army, those two citadels of upper-class “reaction” which he secretly distrusted, which he felt had never com-pletely accepted him nor really understood his aims and which, as Blom-berg, Fritsch and Neurath had shown on the evening of November 5, stoodin the way of realizing his ambitions. The last two gentlemen in particular,and perhaps even the accommodating Blomberg, to whom he owed somuch, would have to follow the inimitable Dr. Schacht into retirement.

For the crafty financier, the early enthusiast for Nazism and backer ofHitler, had already fallen.

Schacht, as we have seen, had devoted his energies and his wizardryto financing Hitler’s speedy rearmament. As Plenipotentiary for WarEconomy, as well as Minister of Economics, he had concocted anynumber of fancy schemes, including the use of the printing press, to raisethe money for the new Army, Navy and Air Force and to pay the arma-ment bills. But there was a limit beyond which the country could not gowithout becoming bankrupt, and by 1936 he believed Germany was ap-proaching that limit. He warned Hitler, Goering and Blomberg, but tolittle avail, though the War Minister for a time sided with him. WithGoering’s appointment in September 1936 as Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan, a farfetched scheme to make Germany self-sufficient in fouryears—a goal which Schacht regarded as impossible—the Luftwaffe chiefbecame, in fact, the economic dictator of Germany. To a man as vainand ambitious* and as contemptuous of Goering’s ignorance of economicsas Schacht was, this made his own position untenable and after months ofviolent controversy between the two strong-minded men Schacht askedthe Fuehrer to place the further direction of economic policies solely in hisrival’s hand and to allow him to resign his post in the cabinet. To add tohis discouragement had been the attitude of many of the nation’s leadingindustrialists and businessmen, who, as he later recounted, “crowded intoGoering’s anteroom in the hope of getting orders when I was still tryingto make the voice of reason heard.”4

To make the voice of reason heard in the frenzied atmosphere of NaziGermany in 1937 was an impossible task, as Schacht realized, and aftera further exchange of blows with Goering during the summer in which he

* The astute French ambassador, Fran^ois-Poncet, who knew him well, says in hisbook The Fateful Years (p. 221) that at one time Schacht had hoped to succeedHindenburg as President, and even Hitler, “should things go ill with the Fuehrer.”

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denounced as unsound “your foreign-exchange policy, your policy regard-ing production and your financial policy,” he traveled down to theObersalzberg in August to submit his formal resignation to Hitler. TheFuehrer was loath to accept it in view of the unfavorable reaction bothat home and abroad which the departure of Schacht would almost certainlybring, but the battered Minister was adamant and Hitler finally agreed torelease him at the end of two months. On September 5 Schacht went onleave, and his resignation was formally accepted on December 8.

At Hitler’s insistence Schacht remained in the cabinet as Minister with-out Portfolio and retained the presidency of the Reichsbank, thus preserv-ing appearances and blunting the shock to German and world opinion. Hisinfluence 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 Reichs-bank he continued to lend the aura of his name and reputation to Hitler’spurposes. Indeed, he would shortly endorse publicly and enthusiasticallythe Leader’s first gangster act of naked aggression, for, like the generalsand the other conservatives who had played such a key role in turningover Germany to the Nazis, he was slow to awaken to the facts of life.

Goering took over temporarily the Ministry of Economics, but oneevening in mid-January 1938 Hitler ran into Walther Funk at the operain 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 businessleaders in Hitler in the early Thirties, was held up, however. For therenow burst upon the Third Reich a two-headed crisis in the Army whichwas precipitated by, among all things, certain matters pertaining to sex,both normal and abnormal, and which played directly into the hands ofHitler, enabling him to deal a blow to the old aristocratic military hierarchyfrom which it never recovered, with dire consequences not only for theArmy, which thereby lost the last vestiges of independence which it hadguarded 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 thehistory of a country and thereby on the world!” Colonel Alfred Jodiexclaimed in his diary on January 26, 1938. “One has the feeling of livingin a fateful hour for the German people.”5

The woman this brilliant young staff officer referred to was FrauleinErna Gruhn, and as the year 1937 approached its end she must haveregarded herself as the last person in Germany who could possibly propel,as Jodi declared, the German people into a fateful crisis and exercise aprofound influence on their history. Perhaps only in the eerie, psycho-pathic world in which the inner circle of the Third Reich moved at thistime with such frenzy would it have been possible.

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Fraulein Gruhn was the secretary of Blomberg and toward the end of1937 he felt sufficiently enamored of her to suggest marriage. His firstwife, the daughter of a retired Army officer, whom he had married in1904, had died in 1932. His five children in the meantime had grown up(his youngest daughter had married the oldest son of General Keitel, hisprotege, in 1937) and, tiring of his somewhat lonely widowerhood, hedecided the time had come to remarry. Realizing that for the senior officerof the German Army to wed a commoner would not go down well with thehaughty, aristocratic officer corps, he sought out Goering for advice. Goe-ring 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 placein the Third Reich for the stodgy social prejudices of the officer corps.Goering not only approved what Blomberg had in mind; he declared him-self ready to smooth matters over with Hitler, if that were necessary, andto help in any other way. As it happened, there was another way he couldbe helpful. There was a rival lover involved, the Field Marshal confided.To Goering that was no problem. Such nuisances in other cases had beencarted off to concentration camp. Probably out of consideration for theold-fashioned morals of the Field Marshal, Goering, however, offered toship the troublesome rival off to South America, which he did.

Still, Blomberg felt troubled. On December 15, 1937, Jodi made acurious entry in his diary: “The General Field Marshal [Blomberg] in ahigh state of excitement. Reason not known. Apparently a personalmatter. He retired for eight days to an unknown place.”6

On December 22 Blomberg reappeared to deliver the funeral orationfor General Ludendorff at the Feldherrnhalle in Munich. Hitler wasthere, but declined to speak. The World War hero had refused to haveanything to do with him ever since he had fled from in front of theFeldherrnhalle after the volley of bullets during the Beer Hall Putsch.After the funeral Blomberg broached the matter of his proposed marriageto Hitler. The Fuehrer, to his relief, gave it his blessing.

The wedding took place on January 12, 1938, and Hitler and Goeringwere present as the principal witnesses. Hardly had the bridal pair takenoff for Italy on their honeymoon than the storm broke. The rigid officercorps might have absorbed the shock of their Field Marshal marrying hisstenographer, but they were not prepared to accept his marriage to awoman with a past such as now began to come to light in all its horrificdetails.

At first there were only rumors. Anonymous telephone calls began tobe received by stiff-necked generals from giggling girls, apparently callingfrom unsavory cafes and night clubs, congratulating the Army for havingaccepted one of their number. At police headquarters in Berlin a policeinspector, 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 daysof the S.A., was horrified too. For the dossier showed that the bride ofthe Field Marshal and Commander in Chief had a police record as a

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prostitute and had been convicted of having posed for pornographicphotographs. The young Frau Field Marshal, it developed, had grownup in a massage salon run by her mother which, as sometimes happenedin Berlin, was merely a camouflage for a brothel.

It was obviously Helldorf s duty to pass along the damaging dossier tohis superior, the chief of the German police, Himmler. But ardent Nazithough he was, he had formerly been a member of the Army officer corpshimself and had absorbed some of its traditions. He knew that Himmler,who had been feuding with the Army High Command for more than a yearand was now coming to be regarded by it as more of a sinister threat thanRoehm had been, would use the file to blackmail the Field Marshal andmake him his tool against the conservative generals. Courageously, Hell-dorf took the police papers to General Keitel instead. He apparently wasconvinced that Keitel, who owed his recent rise in the Army to Blomberg,to whom he was attached by family ties, would arrange for the officercorps itself to handle the affair and also would warn his chief of the perilhe was in. But Keitel, an arrogant and ambitious man, though of feeblemind and moral character, had no intention of risking his career by gettinginto trouble with the party and the S.S. Instead of passing on the papersto the Army chief, General von Fritsch, he gave them back to Helldorfwith 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, hethought, that he himself should succeed him as Commander in Chief ofthe Wehrmacht—a goal he had long had in mind. Blomberg interruptedhis honeymoon in Italy to return to Germany for the funeral of his motherand on January 20, still unmindful of what was brewing, appeared at hisoffice in the War Ministry to resume his duties.

But not for long. On January 25 Goering brought the explosive docu-ments to Hitler, who had just returned from Berchtesgaden, and theFuehrer blew up. His Field Marshal had deceived him and made him, whowas an official witness at the wedding, look like a fool. Goering quicklyagreed with him and at noon went off to see Blomberg personally andbreak the news to him. The Field Marshal appears to have been over-whelmed by the revelations about his bride and offered to divorce her atonce. But this, Goering politely explained, would not be enough. TheArmy Command itself was demanding his resignation; as Jodi’s diary oftwo days later reveals, the Chief of the General Staff, General Beck, hadinformed Keitel that “one cannot tolerate the highest-ranking soldiermarrying a whore.” On January 25, Jodi learned through Keitel that Hitlerhad dismissed his Field Marshal. Two days later the sixty-year-old fallenofficer left Berlin for Capri to resume his honeymoon.

To this idyllic island he was pursued by his naval adjutant, who pro-vided the final grotesque touch to this singular tragi-comedy. AdmiralRaeder had dispatched this aide, Lieutenant von Wangenheim, to demandof Blomberg that for the sake of the honor of the officer corps he divorcehis wife. The junior naval officer was an arrogant and extremely zealous

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young man and when he arrived in the presence of the honeymooningField Marshal he exceeded his instructions. Instead of asking for a divorcehe suggested that his former chief do the honorable thing, whereupon heattempted 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 hadhappened. He declined to take the proffered weapon, remarking, as heimmediately wrote to Keitel, that he and the young naval officer “ap-parently had quite different views and standards of life.”7

After all, the Fuehrer had held out to him the prospect of further em-ployment at the highest level as soon as the storm blew over. Accordingto Jodi’s diary, Hitler told Blomberg during the interview in which hedismissed him that “as soon as Germany’s hour comes, you will again beby my side, and everything that has happened in the past will be forgot-ten.”8 Indeed, Blomberg wrote in his unpublished memoirs that Hitler,at their final meeting, promised him “with the greatest emphasis” that hewould be given the supreme command of the armed forces in the eventof war.9

Like so many other promises of Hitler, this one was not kept. FieldMarshal 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 re-stored to duty in any capacity. After their return to Germany Blombergand his wife settled in the Bavarian village of Wiessee, where they lived incomplete obscurity until the end of the war. As was the case of a formerEnglish King of the same era he remained to the end loyal to the wife whohad 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 WERNERVON FRITSCH

Colonel General Freiherr Werner von Fritsch, the Commander in Chiefof the Army and a gifted and unbending officer of the old school (“atypical General Staff character,” Admiral Raeder called him) was theobvious candidate to succeed Blomberg as Minister of War and Com-mander in Chief of the Armed Forces. But Goering himself, as we haveseen, had his eye on the top post, and there were some who believed thathe had deliberately pushed Blomberg into his marriage with a womanwhose unfortunate past he may have had prior knowledge of, in order toclear the way for himself. If this was true, Blomberg did not know it, forduring his farewell interview with Hitler on January 27 he at first sug-gested Goering as his successor. The Fuehrer, however, knew his oldNazi henchman better than anyone else; Goering, he said, was too self-indulgent and lacked both patience and diligence. Nor did he favorGeneral von Fritsch, whose opposition to his grandiose plans on November5 he had not liked or forgotten. Moreover, Fritsch’s hostility to the Nazi

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Party and especially to the S.S. had never been concealed—a circumstancewhich not only had attracted the attention of the Fuehrer but had pro-voked in Heinrich Himmler, the S.S. leader and chief of police, a growingdetermination to overthrow this formidable antagonist who led theArmy.*

Himmler’s opportunity now came, or, rather, he created it by settingin motion a frame-up so outrageous that it is difficult to believe that itcould have happened—at least in 1938—even in the gangster-riddenworld of the S.S. and the National Socialist Party, or that the GermanArmy, 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 andmuch more explosive bomb which rocked the officer corps to its founda-tion and settled its fate.

On January 25, the day on which Goering was showing Hitler thepolice record of Blomberg’s bride, he also spread before the Fuehrer aneven more damaging document. This had been conveniently providedby 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 hadbeen guilty of homosexual offenses under Section 175 of the Germancriminal code and that he had been paying blackmail to an ex-convictsince 1935 to hush the matter up. The Gestapo papers seemed so con-clusive that Hitler was inclined to believe the charge, and Blomberg, per-haps venting his resentment at Fritsch for the severe attitude the Armyhad 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 theGeneral, a lifelong bachelor, might well have “succumbed to weakness.”

Colonel Hossbach, the Fuehrer’s adjutant, who was present when theGestapo file was shown, was horrified and, in defiance of Hitler’s ordersthat he was to say nothing to Fritsch, went immediately to the Armycommander’s apartment to inform him of the charge and to warn him ofthe dire trouble he was in.f The taciturn Prussian nobleman wasstupefied. “A lot of stinking lies!” he blurted out. When he had calmeddown he assured his brother officer on his word of honor that the chargeswere utterly baseless. Early the next morning Hossbach, fearless of theconsequences, told Hitler of his meeting with Fritsch, reported the Gen-eral’s categorical denial of the accusations and urged that the Fuehrei

* On March 1, 1935, the day Germany took over the Saar, I stood next to Fritschin the reviewing stand at Saarbruecken for some time before the parade started.Although he scarcely knew me, except as one of the many American correspondentsin Berlin, he poured out a running fire of sarcastic remarks about the S.S., the partyand various Nazi leaders from Hitler on down. He did not disguise his contemptfor them all. See Berlin Diary, p. 27.

t This cost Hossbach his job two days later, but not, as some feared, his life. He wasrestored to the Army General Staff, rose during the war to the rank of General ofthe Infantry and commanded the Fourth Army on the Russian front until abruptlydismissed by Hitler by telephone on January 28, 1945, for withdrawing his troopsin defiance of the Fuehrer’s orders.

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give him a hearing and the opportunity of personally denying his guilt.

To this Hitler, to Hossbach’s surprise, assented, and the Commander inChief of the German Army was summoned to the Chancellery late on theevening of the same day. He was there to undergo an experience forwhich his long training as an aristocrat, an officer and a gentleman hadscarcely prepared him. The meeting took place in the Chancellery libraryand this time Himmler as well as Goering was present. After Hitler hadsummed up the charges, Fritsch gave his word of honor as an officer thatthey were completely untrue. But such assurances no longer had muchvalue in the Third Reich and now Himmler, who had been waiting forthree years for this moment, introduced a shuffling, degenerate-lookingfigure from a side door. He must have been one of the strangest, if notthe most disreputable, figures ever let into the offices of the Chancellor ofGermany. His name was Hans Schmidt and he had a long prison recorddating back to his first sentence to a boy’s reformatory. His chief weak-ness, it developed, had been spying on homosexuals and then blackmailingthem. He now professed to recognize General von Fritsch as the Armyofficer whom he had caught in a homosexual offense in a dark alley nearthe Potsdam railroad station in Berlin with an underworld character bythe name of “Bavarian Joe.”* For years, Schmidt insisted to the threemost powerful figures in Germany, this officer had paid him blackmail tokeep quiet, the payments only ceasing when the law again clamped himbehind the bars of a penitentiary.

General Freiherr von Fritsch was too outraged to answer. The spectacleof the head of the German State, the successor of Hindenburg and theHohenzollerns, introducing such a shady character in such a place forsuch a purpose was too much for him. His speechlessness only helped toconvince Hitler that he was guilty and the Fuehrer asked for his resigna-tion. This Fritsch declined to give, demanding in turn a trial by a militarycourt of honor. But Hitler had no intention of allowing the military casteto take over the case, at least for the moment. This was a heaven-sentopportunity, which he would not let pass, to smash the opposition of thegenerals who would not bend to his will and genius. He then and thereordered Fritsch to go on indefinite leave, which was equivalent to hissuspension as Commander in Chief of the Army. The next day Hitlerconferred with Keitel about a successor not only to Blomberg but toFritsch. Jodi, whose chief source of information was Keitel, begansprinkling his diary with entries which indicated that a drastic shake-upnot only in the Army Command but in the whole organization of thearmed forces was being worked out which would at last bring the militaryto heel.

Would the senior generals surrender their power, which though byno means absolute was the last that remained outside the grip of Hitler?When Fritsch returned to his apartment in the Bendlerstrasse from theordeal in the Chancellery library he conferred with General Beck, the

* The name is supplied by Gisevius in To the Bitter End, p. 229.

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Chief of the Army General Staff. Some English historians10 have re-counted that Beck urged him to carry out a military putsch at once againstthe Hitler government, and that Fritsch declined. But Wolfgang Foerster,the German biographer of Beck, who had the General’s personal papersat his disposal, states merely that on the fateful evening Beck saw firstHitler, who apprised him of the grave charges, then Fritsch, who deniedthem, and that finally, late on the same evening, he hurried back to Hitlerto demand only that the Army commander be given a chance to clearhimself before a military court of honor. Beck too, his biographer makesclear, had not yet attained that understanding of the rulers of the ThirdReich which was later to come to him—when it was too late. Some dayslater, when it was also too late, when not only Blomberg and Fritsch weregone but sixteen of the senior generals retired and forty-four others trans-ferred to lesser commands, Fritsch and his closest associates, of whomBeck was one, did seriously consider military countermeasures. But theyquickly abandoned such dangerous thoughts. “It was clear to these men,”Foerster says, “that a military putsch would mean civil war and was byno means sure of success.” Then, as always, the German generals wantedto be sure of winning before taking any great risks. They feared, as thisGerman writer states, that not only would Goering’s Air Force andAdmiral Raeder’s Navy oppose them, since both commanders were com-pletely under the Fuehrer’s spell, but that the Army itself might not fullysupport its fallen Commander in Chief.11

However, one last chance was given the ranking Army officers to deala blow in their turn to Hitler. A preliminary investigation conducted bythe Army in collaboration with the Ministry of Justice quickly establishedthat General von Fritsch was the innocent victim of a Gestapo frame-upinitiated by Himmler and Heydrich. It was found that the ex-convictSchmidt had indeed caught an Army officer in an unnatural act in theshadows of the Potsdam Station and had successfully blackmailed himfor years. But his name was Frisch, not Fritsch, and he was a bedriddenretired cavalry officer listed in the Army rolls as Rittmeister von Frisch.This the Gestapo had known, but it had arrested Schmidt and threatenedhim with death unless he pointed the finger to the Commander in Chiefof the Army. The ailing Rittmeister also was taken into custody by thesecret police so as to prevent him from talking, but both he and Schmidtwere eventually wrested from the Gestapo’s clutches by the Army andkept 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 Com-mander in Chief be vindicated and restored to his leadership of the Army.The machinations of the S.S. and the Gestapo, of those two unscrupulousmen, Himmler and Heydrich, who held such unbridled power in thecountry, would be exposed and they and the S.S. would go the way ofRoehm and the S.A. four years before. It would be a blow too to the partyand to Hitler himself; it would shake the foundations of the Third Reichso violently that the Fuehrer himself might topple over. If he tried tocover up the crime, the Army itself, with a clear conscience, now that the

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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 theformer Austrian corporal and then utterly defeated by fate, which theLeader, if not they, knew how to take advantage of for his own ends.

All through the last week of January 1938 a tension, reminiscent ofthat of late June 1934, gripped Berlin. Again the capital seethed withrumors. Hitler had dismissed the two top men in the Army, for reasonsunknown. The generals were in revolt. They were plotting a militaryputsch. Ambassador Frangois-Poncet heard that Fritsch, who had invitedhim to dinner for February 2 and then canceled the invitation, had beenarrested. There were reports that the Army planned to surround theReichstag, when it met to hear Hitler’s fifth-anniversary speech on Janu-ary 30, and arrest the entire Nazi government and its hand-pickeddeputies. Credence of such reports grew when it was announced that themeeting of the Reichstag had been indefinitely postponed. The Germandictator was obviously in difficulties. He had met his match at last in theunbending senior generals of the German Army. Or so the latter musthave thought, but they were in error.

On February 4, 1938, the German cabinet met for what was to provethe last time. Whatever difficulties Hitler had experienced, he now re-solved them in a manner which eliminated those who stood in his way, notonly in the Army but in the Foreign Office. A decree which he hastily putthrough the cabinet that day and which was announced to the nation andthe world on the radio shortly before midnight began:

“From now on I take over personally the command of the whole armedforces.”

As head of state, Hitler of course had been the Supreme Commander ofthe Armed Forces, but now he took over Blomberg’s office of Commanderin Chief and abolished the War Ministry, over which the now moon-struckbridegroom had also presided. In its place was created the organizationwhich was to become familiar to the world during World War II, the HighCommand of the Armed Forces (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, orOKW), to which the three fighting services, the Army, the Navy and theAir Force, were subordinated. Hitler was its Supreme Commander, andunder him was a chief of staff, with the high-sounding title of “Chief of theHigh Command of the Armed Forces”—a post which went to the toadyKeitel, who managed to keep it to the end.

To assuage the wounded feelings of Goering, who had been confidentof succeeding Blomberg, Hitler named him a Field Marshal, which madehim the ranking officer of the Reich and apparently pleased him no end.To calm the uneasiness of the public, Hitler announced that Blomberg andFritsch had resigned “for reasons of health.” Thus Fritsch was got rid ofonce and for all even before his trial by a military court of honor, whichHitler knew would exonerate him. This seemed particularly outrageousto the senior generals but there was nothing they could do about it, forthey were sent into the discard in the same decree. Sixteen of them, in-cluding Generals von Rundstedt, von Leeb, von Witzleben, von Kluge

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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 hesita-tion, picked General Walther von Brauchitsch, who enjoyed a good reputa-tion among the generals but who was to prove as weak and as compliant asBlomberg when it came to standing up to the mercurial temperament ofHitler. For a few days during the crisis it appeared that a problem of sexwould 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 frownedupon by the military aristocracy. The ever curious Jodi noted the com-plication in his diary. On Sunday, January 30, he recorded that Keitelhad called in Brauchitsch’s son “in order to send him to his mother (heis to get her assent to the divorce),” and a couple of days later he reporteda meeting of Brauchitsch and Keitel with Goering “for a discussion of thefamily situation.” Goering, who seemed to have made himself an arbiterof the sex difficulties of the generals, promised to look into the matter. Onthe same day, Jodi further noted, “the son of Br. returns with a verydignified letter from his mother.” The inference was that she would notstand in her husband’s way. Nor would Goering and Hitler disapprove ofa divorce, which the new commander of the Army actually obtained a fewmonths after assuming his new post. For both of them knew that FrauCharlotte Schmidt, the woman he wanted to marry, was, as Ulrich vonHassell said, “a two hundred per cent rabid Nazi.” The marriage tookplace in the following autumn and was to prove, as Jodi might have notedagain, 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 theshallow and compliant Ribbentrop.f 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

* According to Milton Shulman (Defeat in the West, p. 10), Hitler himself inter-vened with the first Frau von Brauchitsch in order to obtain her consent to thedivorce and helped provide a financial settlement for her, thus putting the ArmyCommander in Chief under personal obligation to him. Shulman gives as hissource a Canadian Army intelligence report.

t To divert attention from the military crisis and to save something of Neurath’sprestige both at home and abroad. Hitler, at Goering’s suggestion, created theso-called Secret Cabinet Council (Geheimer Kabinettsrat) whose purpose, said theFuehrer’s February 4 decree, was to furnish him “guidance in the conduct of foreignpolicy.” Neurath was appointed its president, and its members included Keiteland the chiefs of the three armed services as well as the most important members ofthe ordinary cabinet and of the party. Goebbels’ propaganda machine gave it muchfanfare, making it look as if it were a supercabinet and that Neurath actually hadbeen promoted. Actually the Secret Cabinet Council was pure fiction. It neverexisted. As Goering testified at Nuremberg, “There was, to be sure, no such cabinetin existence, but the expression would sound quite nice and everyone would imaginethat it meant something ... I declare under oath that this Secret Cabinet Councilnever met at all, not even for a minute.”12

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weakling Funk was formally named as the successor of Schacht as Ministerof Economics.

The next day, February 5, there were screaming headlines in theVoelkischei deobachter: Strongest Concentration of All Powersin the Fuehrer’s Hands! For once, the leading daily Nazi newspaperdid not exaggerate.

February 4, 1938, is a major turning point in the history of the ThirdReich, 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 stoodin the way of Hitler’s embarking upon the course which he had long deter-mined to follow, once Germany was sufficiently armed, were swept away.Blomberg, Fritsch and Neurath had been put in office by Hindenburg andthe old-school conservatives to act as a brake upon Nazi excesses, andSchacht had joined them. But in the struggle for control of the foreignand economic policy and the military power of Germany they proved tobe no match for Hitler. They had neither the moral strength nor thepolitical shrewdness to stand up to him, let alone to triumph over him.Schacht quit. Neurath stepped aside. Blomberg, under pressure from hisown brother generals, resigned. Fritsch, though he was framed in gangsterfashion, accepted his dismissal without a gesture of defiance. Sixteen topgenerals meekly accepted theirs—and his. There was talk in the officercorps of a military putsch, but only talk. Hitler’s contempt for the Prussianofficer caste, which he held till the end of his life, proved quite justified.It had accepted with scarcely a murmur the officially condoned murder ofGenerals von Schleicher and von Bredow. It was swallowing supinelynow the cashiering of its senior officers. Was not Berlin swarming withyounger generals eager to replace them, eager to serve him? Where wasthe 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 hadpossessed the physical power to overthrow Hitler and the Third Reich.When it learned on November 5, 1937, where he was leading it and thenation, why did it not attempt to do so? Fritsch himself gave the answerafter his fall. On Sunday, December 18, 1938, he entertained the deposedAmbassador von Hassell at his manor house at Achterberg, near Soltau,which the Army had put at his disposal after his retirement. Hassell noteddown in his diary “the substance of his views”:

“This man—Hitler—is Germany’s destiny for good and for evil. Ifhe now goes over the abyss—which Fritsch believes he will—he will dragus all down with him. There is nothing we can do.”13

With foreign, economic and military policy concentrated in his handsand the armed forces directly under his command, Hitler now proceededon his way. Having got rid of Fritsch without giving him the opportunityof clearing his name, he belatedly afforded him the opportunity by settingup a military court of honor to hear the case. Field Marshal Goeringpresided and at his side were the commanders in chief of the Army and

The Fall of Blomberg, Fritsch, Neurath and Schacht 321

Navy, General von Brauchitsch and Admiral Raeder, and two professionaljudges of the Supreme War Tribunal.

The trial, from which the press and the public were excluded, began inBerlin on March 10, 1938, and was suddenly suspended before the daywas over. Late on the previous night news had come from Austria whichsent the Fuehrer into one of his greatest tantrums. * Field Marshal Goeringand General von Brauchitsch were urgently needed elsewhere.

* When Papen arrived at the Chancellery in Berlin thirty-six hours later he foundHitler 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 toradio reporting, my headquarters were transferred from Berlin toVienna, which I had come to know as a youthful correspondent a decadebefore. Though I would spend most of the period of the next three crucialyears in Germany, my new assignment, which was to cover continentalEurope, gave me a certain perspective of the Third Reich and, as it hap-pened, set me down in those very neighboring countries which were tobe victims of Hitler’s aggression just prior to and during the time theaggression took place. I roved back and forth in those days betweenGermany and the country that for the moment was the object of Hitler’sfury and so gathered a firsthand experience of the events which are nowto be described and which led inexorably to the greatest and bloodiest warin man’s experience. Though we observed these happenings at first hand,it is amazing how little we really knew of how they came about. Theplottings and maneuvers, the treachery, the fateful decisions and momentsof indecision, and the dramatic encounters of the principal participantswhich 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 tookpart in them.

We have had to wait for the maze of secret documents and the testimonyof the surviving leading actors in the drama, most of whom were not freeat the time—many landed in Nazi concentration camps—to tell theirstory. What follows, therefore, in the ensuing pages is based largely onthe mass of factual evidence which has been accumulated since 1945. Butit was perhaps helpful for a narrator of such a history as this to have beenpersonally present at its main crises and turning points. Thus, it happenedthat I was in Vienna on the memorable night of March 11-12, 1938, whenAustria 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 en-

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joying life, such as it was, than any people I had ever known, had beenprey to deep anxieties. Dr. Kurt von Schuschnigg, the Austrian Chancel-lor, would later recall the period between February 12 and March 11 as“The Four Weeks’ Agony.” Since the Austro-German agreement ofJuly 11, 1936, in which Schuschnigg, in a secret annex to the treaty, hadmade far-reaching concessions to the Austrian Nazis,* Franz von Papen,Hitler’s special ambassador in Vienna, had been continuing his labors toundermine the independence of Austria and bring about its union withNazi Germany. In a long report to the Fuehrer at the end of 1936, hehad reported on his progress and a year later had done the same, this timestressing “that only by subjecting the Federal Chancellor [Schuschnigg]to the strongest possible pressure can further progress be made.”1 Hisadvice, though scarcely needed, was soon to be taken more literally thaneven he could conceive.

Throughout 1937, the Austrian Nazis, financed and egged on by Berlin,had stepped up their campaign of terror. Bombings took place nearlyevery day in some part of the country, and in the mountain provincesmassive and often violent Nazi demonstrations weakened the govern-ment’s position. Plans were uncovered disclosing that Nazi thugs werepreparing to bump off Schuschnigg as they had his predecessor. Finallyon January 25, 1938, Austrian police raided the Vienna headquarters ofa group called the Committee of Seven, which had been set up to bringabout peace between the Nazis and the Austrian government, but whichin reality served as the central office of the illegal Nazi underground. Therethey found documents initialed by Rudolf Hess, the Fuehrer’s deputy,which made it clear that the Austrian Nazis were to stage an open revoltin the spring of 1938 and that when Schuschnigg attempted to put it down,the German Army would enter Austria to prevent “German blood frombeing shed by Germans.” According to Papen, one of the documentscalled for his own murder or that of his military attache, Lieutenant Gen-eral Muff, by local Nazis so as to provide an excuse for German interven-tion.2

If the debonair Papen was less than amused to learn that he wasmarked—for the second time—for assassination by Nazi roughnecks onorders from party leaders in Berlin, he was also distressed by a telephonecall which came to him at the German Legation in Vienna on the eveningof February 4. State Secretary Hans Lammers was on the line from theChancellery in Berlin to inform him that his special mission in Austriahad ended. He had been fired, along with Neurath, Fritsch and severalothers.

“I was almost speechless with astonishment,” Papen later remembered.3He recovered sufficiently to realize that Hitler evidently had decided onmore drastic action in Austria, now that he had rid himself of Neurath,Fritsch and Blomberg. In fact, Papen recovered sufficiently to decide todo “something unusual for a diplomat,” as he put it. He resolved todeposit copies of all his correspondence with Hitler “in a safe place,”

* See above, p. 296.

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which turned out to be Switzerland. “The defamatory campaigns of theThird Reich,” he says, “were only too well known to me.” As we haveseen, they had almost cost him his life in June 1934.

Papen’s dismissal was also a warning to Schuschnigg. He had not fullytrusted the suave former cavalry officer, but he was quick to see that Hitlermust have something worse in mind than inflicting on him the wily ambas-sador, who at least was a devout Catholic, as was he, and a gentleman. Inthe last few months the course of European diplomacy had not favoredAustria. Mussolini had drawn closer to Hitler since the establishment ofthe Rome-Berlin Axis and was not so concerned about maintaining thelittle country’s independence as he had been at the time of the murder ofDollfuss, when he had rushed four divisions to the Brenner Pass to frightenthe Fuehrer. Neither Britain, freshly embarked under Chamberlain upona policy of appeasing Hitler, nor France, beset by grave internal politicalstrife, had recently shown much interest in defending Austria’s independ-ence should Hitler strike. And now, with Papen, had gone the conserva-tive leaders of the German Army and Foreign Office, who had exercisedsome 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 worseningsituation. The time had come, as he felt it had come after the Nazis slewDollfuss, 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 hadhurried to Hitler the very day after his dismissal “to obtain some pictureof what was going on.” At Berchtesgaden on February 5, he found theFuehrer “exhausted and distrait” from his struggle with the generals. ButHitler’s recuperative powers were considerable, and soon the cashieredenvoy was interesting him in a proposal that he had already broached tohim a fortnight before when they had met in Berlin: Why not have it outwith Schuschnigg personally? Why not invite him to come to Berchtes-gaden for a personal talk? Hitler found the idea interesting. Unmindfulof the fact that he had just fired Papen, he ordered him to return to Viennaand arrange the meeting.

Schuschnigg readily assented to it, but, weak as his position was, laiddown certain conditions. He must be informed in advance of the precisepoints which Hitler wanted to discuss, and he must be assured beforehandthat the agreement of July 11, 1936, in which Germany promised torespect Austria’s independence and not to interfere in her internal affairs,would be maintained. Furthermore, the communique at the end of themeeting must reaffirm that both countries would continue to abide by the1936 treaty. Schuschnigg wanted to take no chances in bearding the lionin his den. Papen hurried off to Obersalzberg to confer with Hitler andreturned with the Fuehrer’s assurance that the 1936 agreement wouldremain unchanged and that he merely wanted to discuss “such misunder-standings and points of friction as have persisted” since it was signed. Thiswas not as precise as the Austrian Chancellor had requested, but he said

he was satisfied with the answer. The meeting was set for the morningof February 12,* and on the evening of February 11 Schuschnigg, ac-companied by his Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, Guido Schmidt, setoff by special train in the strictest secrecy for Salzburg, whence he woulddrive by car over the border to Hitler’s mountain retreat on the followingmorning. 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 thefrosty winter morning air seemed to be, Schuschnigg thought, “in the verybest of humor.” Hitler, he assured his guests, was in an excellent moodthis day. And then came the first warning note. The Fuehrer, Papen saidgenially, hoped Dr. Schuschnigg would not mind the presence at the Berg-hof of three generals who had arrived quite by chance: Keitel, the newChief of OKW, Reichenau, who commanded the Army forces on the Ba-varian-Austrian frontier, and Sperrle, who was in charge of the Air Forcein this area.

Papen later remembered of his guests that this was “a piece of informa-tion that seemed little to their taste.” Schuschnigg says he told the am-bassador he would not mind, especially since he had “not much choice inthe matter.” A Jesuit-trained intellectual, he was getting on his guard.

Even so, he was not prepared for what now took place. Hitler, wearingthe brown tunic of a storm trooper, with black trousers, and flanked by thethree generals, greeted the Austrian Chancellor and his aide on the stepsof the villa. Schuschnigg felt it was a friendly but formal greeting. In afew moments he found himself alone with the German dictator in the spa-cious second-floor study whose great picture windows looked out uponthe stately, snow-capped Alps and on Austria, the birthplace of both thesemen, beyond.

Kurt von Schuschnigg, forty-one years old, was, as all who have knownhim would agree, a man of impeccable Old World Austrian manners, andit was not unnatural for him to begin the conversation with a graceful tid-bit about the magnificent view, the fine weather that day, and a flatteringword about this room having been, no doubt, the scene of many decisive

* Which happened to be the fourth anniversary of the slaughter of the AustrianSocial Democrats by the Dollfuss government, of which Schuschnigg was a member.On February 12, 1934, seventeen thousand government troops and fascist militiahad turned artillery on the workers’ flats in Vienna, killing a thousand men, womenand children and wounding three or four thousand more. Democratic politicalfreedom was stamped out and Austria thereafter was ruled first by Dollfuss and thenby Schuschnigg as a clerical-fascist dictatorship. It was certainly milder than theNazi variety, as those of us who worked in both Berlin and Vienna in those dayscan testify. Nevertheless it deprived the Austrian people of their political freedomand subjected them to more repression than they had known under the Hapsburgsin the last decades of the monarchy. The author has discussed this more fully inMidcentury Journey.

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conferences. Adolf Hitler cut him short: “We did not gather here to speakof the fine view or of the weather.” Then the storm broke. As the Aus-trian Chancellor later testified, the ensuing two-hour “conversation wassomewhat 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 mustnow reach its long-overdue end. And 1 can tell you right now, Herr Schusch-nigg, that I am absolutely determined to make an end of all this. The GermanReich is one of the great powers, and nobody will raise his voice if it settles itsborder problems.

Shocked at Hitler’s outburst, the quiet-mannered Austrian Chancel-lor tried to remain conciliatory and yet stand his ground. He said he dif-fered 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 nationalidea was sabotaged by Austria throughout history; and indeed all this sabotagewas the chief activity of the Hapsburgs and the Catholic Church.t

Schuschnigg: All the same, Herr Reichskanzler, many an Austrian contri-bution cannot possibly be separated from the general picture of German cul-ture. Take for instance a man like Beethoven . . .

Hitler: Oh—Beethoven? Let me tell you that Beethoven came from thelower Rhineland.

Schuschnigg: Yet Austria was the country of his choice, as it was for somany others . . .

Hitler: That’s as may be. I am telling you once more that things cannotgo on in this way. I have a historic mission, and this mission I will fulfill be-cause Providence has destined me to do so . . . who is not with me will becrushed ... I have chosen the most difficult road that any German ever took;I have made the greatest achievement in the history of Germany, greater thanany other German. And not by force, mind you. I am carried along by thelove of my people . . .

Schuschnigg: Herr Reichskanzler, I am quite willing to believe that.

* Later Dr. Schuschnigg wrote down from memory an account of what he callsthe “significant passages” of the one-sided conversation, and though it is thereforenot a verbatim record it rings true to anyone who has heard and studied Hitler’scountless utterances and its substance is verified not only by all that happenedsubsequently but by others who were present at the Berghof that day, notablyPapen, Jodi and Guido Schmidt. I have followed Schuschnigg’s account given inhis book Austrian Requiem and in his Nuremberg affidavit on the meeting.4t It is evident that Hitler’s warped version of Austro-German history, which, as wehave seen in earlier chapters, was picked up in his youth at Linz and Vienna, re-mained unchanged.

After an hour of this, Schuschnigg asked his antagonist to enumeratehis complaints. “We will do everything,” he said, “to remove obstaclesto a better understanding, as far as it is possible.”

Hitler: That is what you say, Herr Schuschnigg. But I am telling you thatI 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 borderagainst Germany, a charge that Schuschnigg denied.

Hitler: Listen, you don’t really think you can move a single stone in Aus-tria without my hearing about it the next day, do you? ... I have only togive an order, and in one single night all your ridiculous defense mechanismswill be blown to bits. You don’t seriously believe that you can stop me forhalf an hour, do you? ... I would very much like to save Austria from sucha fate, because such an action would mean blood. After the Army, my S.A. andAustrian Legion would move in, and nobody can stop their just revenge—noteven I.

After these threats, Hitler reminded Schuschnigg (rudely addressinghim always by his name instead of by his title, as diplomatic courtesy calledfor) of Austria’s isolation and consequent helplessness.

Hitler. Don t think for one moment that anybody on earth is going tothwart 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 “andthen 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 tocome to terms, Herr Schuschnigg. Either we find a solution now or else eventswill take their course . . . Think it over, Herr Schuschnigg, think it overwell. 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 somewhatto his surprise, in excellent spirits.” His monologue dwelt on horses andhouses. He was going to build the greatest skyscrapers the world had everseen. The Americans will see,” he remarked to Schuschnigg, “that Ger-many is building bigger and better buildings than the United States.” Asfor the harried Austrian Chancellor, Papen noted that he appeared “wor-ried and preoccupied. A chain cigarette smoker, he had not been allowed

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to smoke in Hitler’s presence. But after coffee in an adjoining room, Hitlerexcused himself and Schuschnigg was able for the first time to snatch asmoke. He was also able to tell his Foreign Undersecretary, GuidoSchmidt, the bad news. It was soon to grow worse.

After cooling their heels for two hours in a small anteroom, the two Aus-trians were ushered into the presence of Ribbentrop, the new GermanForeign Minister, and of Papen. Ribbentrop presented them with a two-page typewritten draft of an “agreement” and remarked that they wereHitler’s final demands and that the Fuehrer would not permit discussionof them. They must be signed forthwith. Schuschnigg says he felt relievedto have at least something definite from Hitler. But as he perused the docu-ment his relief evaporated. For here was a German ultimatum calling onhim, in effect, to turn the Austrian government over to the Nazis withinone week.

The ban against the Austrian Nazi Party was to be lifted, all Nazis injail were to be amnestied and the pro-Nazi Viennese lawyer Dr. Seyss-Inquart was to be made Minister of the Interior, with authority over thepolice and security. Another pro-Nazi, Glaise-Horstenau, was to be ap-pointed Minister of War, and the Austrian and German armies were toestablish closer relations by a number of measures, including the system-atic exchange of one hundred officers. “Preparations will be made,” thefinal demand read, “for the assimilation of the Austrian into the Germaneconomic system. For this purpose Dr. Fischboeck [a pro-Nazi] will beappointed Minister of Finance.”5

Schuschnigg, as he later wrote, realized at once that to accept the ulti-matum would mean the end of Austria’s independence.

Ribbentrop advised me to accept the demands at once. I protested, and re-ferred him to my previous agreement with von Papen, made prior to comingto Berchtesgaden, and made clear to Ribbentrop that I was not prepared tobe confronted with such unreasonable demands . . ,6

But was Schuschnigg prepared to accept them? That he was not pre-pared to be confronted with them was obvious even to a dullard such asRibbentrop. The question was: Would he sign them? In this difficult anddecisive moment the young Austrian Chancellor began to weaken. He in-quired lamely, according to his own account, “whether we could count onthe good will of Germany, whether the Reich government had at least theintention 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 tohis “amazement” when he read the ultimatum. It was an “unwarrantableinterference in Austrian sovereignty.” Schuschnigg says Papen apologizedto him and expressed his “complete surprise” at the terms. Nevertheless,he advised the Austrian Chancellor to sign them.

Anschluss: The Rape of Austria 329

He furthermore informed me that I could be assured that Hitler would takecare that, if I signed, and acceded to these demands, from that time on Ger-many would remain loyal to this agreement and that there would be no furtherdifficulties for Austria.8

Schuschnigg, it would appear from the above statements, the last givenin an affidavit at Nuremberg, was not only weakening but letting his naiveteget the best of him.

He had one last chance to make a stand. He was summoned again toHitler. He found the Fuehrer pacing excitedly up and down in his study.

Hitler: Herr Schuschnigg . . . here is the draft of the document. Thereis nothing to be discussed. I will not change one single iota. You will eithersign it as it is and fulfill my demands within three days, or I will order themarch into Austria.9

Schuschnigg capitulated. He told Hitler he was willing to sign. But hereminded him that under the Austrian constitution only the President ofthe Republic had the legal power to accept such an agreement and carryit out. Therefore, while he was willing to appeal to the President to acceptit, he could give no guarantee.

“You have to guarantee it!” Hitler shouted,p p coliId not possibly, Herr Reichskanzler,” Schuschnigg says he re-

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 hadbeen made aware of the presence of the generals all day, did not perhapsknow it. Papen relates that Keitel told later of how Hitler greeted himwith a broad grin when he rushed in and asked for orders. “There are noorders,” 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 theboth of them were arrested within the next five minutes. Thirty minutelater Schuschnigg was again ushered into the presence of Hitler.

I have decided to change my mind—for the first time in my life [Hitlersaid]. But I warn you this is your very last chance. I have given you threeadditional days to carry out the agreement.12

That was the extent of the German dictator’s concessions, and thoughthe wording of the final draft was somewhat softened, the changes, asSchuschnigg later testified, were inconsequential. Schuschnigg signed. Itwas Austria’s death warrant.

The behavior of men under duress differs according to their character

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and is often puzzling. That Schuschnigg, a veteran despite his compara-tive youth of the rough and tumble of politics which had seen his predeces-sor murdered by the Nazis, was a brave man few would doubt. Yet hiscapitulation to Hitler on February 11, 1938, under the terrible threat ofarmed attack has left a residue of unresolved doubts among his fellowcountrymen and the observers and historians of this fateful period. Wassurrender necessary? Was there no alternative? It would be a rash manwho would argue that Britain and France, in view of their subsequent be-havior in the face of Hitler’s aggressions, might have come to the aid ofAustria had Hitler then and there marched in. But up to this momentHitler had not yet broken across the German borders nor had he preparedhis own people and the world for any such act of wanton aggression. TheGerman Army itself was scarcely prepared for a war should France andBritain intervene. In a few weeks Austria, as a result of the Berchtesgaden“agreement,” would be softened up by the local Nazis and Germanmachinations to a point where Hitler could take it with much less risk offoreign intervention than on February 11. Schuschnigg himself, as he laterwrote, recognized that acceptance of Hitler’s terms meant “nothing elsebut the complete end of the independence of the Austrian government.”

Perhaps he was in a daze from his ordeal. After signing away his coun-try’s independence at the point of a gun he indulged in a strange conversa-tion with Hitler which he himself later recorded in his book. “Does theHerr Reichskanzler,” he asked, “believe that the various crises in theworld today can be solved in a peaceful manner?” The Fuehrer answeredfatuously that they could—“if my advice were followed.” WhereuponSchuschnigg said, apparently with no sign of sarcasm, “At the momentthe state of the world looks rather promising, don’t you think?”13

Such an utterance at such a moment seems incredible, but that is whatthe beaten Austrian Chancellor says he said. Hitler had one more humilia-tion to administer to him. When Schuschnigg suggested that in the pressrelease of their meeting mention be made that their discussion reaffirmedthe July 1936 agreement, Hitler exclaimed, “Oh, no! First you have tofulfill the conditions of our agreement. This is what is going to the press:‘Today the Fuehrer and Reichskanzler conferred with the Austrian Bun-deskanzler at the Berghof.’ That’s all.”

Declining the Fuehrer’s invitation to stay for dinner, Schuschnigg andSchmidt drove down from the mountains to Salzburg. It was a gray andfoggy winter night. The ubiquitous Papen accompanied them as far asthe frontier and was somewhat uncomfortable in what he terms the “op-pressive silence.” He could not refrain from trying to cheer his Austrianfriends up.

“Well, now,” he exclaimed to them, “you have seen what the Fuehrercan be like at times! But the next lime I am sure it will be different. Youknow, the Fuehrer can be absolutely charming.”*

* Papen’s version (see his Memoirs, p. 420) is somewhat different, but that ofSchuschnigg rings more true.

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Anschluss: The Rape of Austria

THE FOUR WEEKS’ AGONY:

FEBRUARY 12-MARCH 11, 1938

Hitler had given Schuschnigg four days—until Tuesday, February 15to send him a ‘ binding reply” that he would carry out the ultimatum,and an additional three days—until February 18—to fulfill its specificterms. Schuschnigg returned to Vienna on the morning of February 12and immediately sought out President Miklas. Wilhelm Miklas was aplodding, mediocre man of whom the Viennese said that his chief accom-plishment in life had been to father a large brood of children. But therewas 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 otherAustrian. He was willing to make certain concessions to Hitler such asamnestying the Austrian Nazis, but he balked at putting Seyss-Inquartin charge of the police and the Army. Papen duly reported this to Berlinon the evening of February 14. He said Schuschnigg hoped “to overcomethe resistance of the President by tomorrow.”

At 7:30 that same evening Hitler approved orders drawn up by GeneralKeitel to put military pressure on Austria.

Spread false, but quite credible news, which may lead to the conclusion ofmilitary preparations against Austria.14

As a matter of fact, Schuschnigg had hardly departed from Berchtes-gaden when the Fuehrer began shamming military action in order to seethat the Austrian Chancellor did as he was told. Jodi jotted it all down inhis diary.

February 13. In the afternoon General Kfeitel] asks Admiral Cfanaris]* andmyself to come to his apartment. He tells us that the Fuehrer’s order is thatmilitary pressure by shamming military action should be kept up until the 15th.Proposals for these measures are drafted and submitted to the Fuehrer bytelephone for approval.

February 14. The effect is quick and strong. In Austria the impression iscreated that Germany is undertaking serious military preparations.15

General Jodi was not exaggerating. Before the threat of armed inva-sion President Miklas gave in and on the last day of grace, February 15,Schuschnigg formally advised Ambassador von Papen that the Berchtes-gaden agreement would be carried out before February 18. On February16 the Austrian government announced a general amnesty for Nazis, in-cluding those convicted in the murder of Dollfuss, and made public thereorganized cabinet, in which Arthur Seyss-Inquart was named Ministerof Security. The next day this Nazi Minister hurried off to Berlin to seeHitler and receive his orders.

* Wilhelm Canaris was head of the Intelligence Bureau (Abwehr) of OKW.

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Seyss-Inquart, the first of the quislings, was a pleasant-mannered, in-telligent young Viennese lawyer who since 1918 had been possessed witha burning desire to see Austria joined with Germany. This was a popularnotion in the first years after the war. Indeed, on November 12, 1918, theday after the armistice, the Provisional National Assembly in Vienna,which had just overthrown the Hapsburg monarchy and proclaimed theAustrian Republic, had tried to effect an Anschluss by affirming that “Ger-man Austria is a component part of the German Republic.” The victoriousAllies had not allowed it and by the time Hitler came to power in 1933there was no doubt that the majority of Austrians were against their littlecountry’s joining with Nazi Germany. But to Seyss-Inquart, as he said athis trial in Nuremberg, the Nazis stood unflinchingly for the Anschlussand for this reason he gave them his support. He did not join the partyand took no part in its rowdy excesses. He played the role, rather, of arespectable front for the Austrian Nazis, and after the July 1936 agree-ment, when he was appointed State Councilor, he concentrated his efforts,aided by Papen and other German officials and agents, in burrowing fromwithin. Strangely, both Schuschnigg and Miklas seem to have trusted himalmost to the end. Later Miklas, a devout Catholic as was Schuschnigg,confessed that he was favorably impressed by the fact that Seyss was “adiligent churchgoer.” The man’s Catholicism and also the circumstancethat he, like Schuschnigg, had served in a Tyrolean Kaiserjaeger regimentduring the First World War, in which he was severely wounded, seems tohave been the basis of the trust which the Austrian Chancellor had forhim. Schuschnigg, unfortunately, had a fatal inability to judge a manon more substantial grounds. Perhaps he thought he could keep his newNazi Minister in line by simple bribes. He himself tells in his book of themagic effect of $500 on Seyss-Inquart a year before when he threatenedto resign as State Councilor and then reconsidered on the receipt of thispaltry sum. But Hitler had the bigger prizes to dazzle before the ambitiousyoung 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 spokewarmly of Schuschnigg’s “understanding” and of his “warmhearted will-ingness” to bring about a closer understanding between Austria and Ger-many—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 theReich 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 racialcomrades at its side who are constantly being afflicted with the severest suffer-

ing for their sympathy or unity with the whole nation, its destiny and its Wel-tanschauung. To the interests of the German Reich belong the protection ofthose German peoples who are not in a position to secure along our frontierstheir political and spiritual freedom by their own efforts.16

That was blunt, public notice that henceforth Hitler regarded the futureof the seven million Austrians and the three million Sudeten Germans inCzechoslovakia as the affair of the Third Reich.

Schuschnigg answered Hitler four days later—on February 24—in aspeech to the Austrian Bundestag, whose members, like those of the Ger-man Reichstag, were hand-picked by a one-party dictatorial regime.Though conciliatory toward Germany, Schuschnigg emphasized that Aus-tria had gone to the very limit of concessions “where we must call a haltand say: ‘Thus far and no further.’ ” Austria, he said, would never vol-untarily give up its independence, and he ended with a stirring call: “Red-White-Red [the Austrian national colors] until we’re dead!” (The expres-sion 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 reac-tion to his defiant speech. Papen telegraphed to Berlin the next day advis-ing the Foreign Office that the speech should not be taken too seriously.Schuschnigg, he said, had expressed his rather strong nationalist feelingsin order to retrieve his domestic position; there were plots in Vienna tooverthrow him because of his concessions at Berchtesgaden. In the mean-time, Papen informed Berlin, “the work of Seyss-Inquart ... is proceed-ing according to plan.”17 The next day Papen, his long years of deviouswork in Austria nearing fruition, took formal leave of the Austrian Chan-cellor and set off for Kitzbuehl to do some skiing.

Hitler’s speech of February 20, which had been broadcast by the Aus-trian radio network, had set off a series of massive Nazi demonstrationsthroughout Austria. On February 24, during the broadcast of Schusch-nigg’s reply, a wild mob of twenty thousand Nazis in Graz had invadedthe town square, torn down the loudspeakers, hauled down the Austrianflag and raised the swastika banner of Germany. With Seyss-Inquart inpersonal command of the police, no effort was made to curb the Nazi out-breaks. Schuschnigg’s government was breaking down. Not only politicalbut economic chaos was setting in. There were large withdrawals of ac-counts from the banks both from abroad and by the local people. Cancel-lation of orders from uneasy foreign firms poured into Vienna. The foreigntourists, one of the main props of the Austrian economy, were beingfrightened away. Toscanini cabled from New York that he was cancelinghis appearance at the Salzburg Festival, which drew tens of thousands oftourists each summer, “because of political developments in Austria.”The situation was becoming so desperate that Otto of Hapsburg, the ex-iled youthful pretender to the throne, sent a letter from his home in Bel-gium and, as Schuschnigg later revealed, implored him on his old oath of

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allegiance as a former officer of the Imperial Army to appoint him asChancellor if he thought such a step might save Austria.

In his desperation Schuschnigg turned to the Austrian workers whosefree trade unions and political party, the Social Democrats, he had keptsuppressed after Dollfuss had brutally smashed them in 1934. Thesepeople had represented 42 per cent of the Austrian electorate, and if atany time during the past four years the Chancellor had been able to seebeyond the narrow horizons of his own clerical-fascist dictatorship andhad enlisted their support for a moderate, anti-Nazi democratic coalitionthe Nazis, a relatively small minority, could have been easily handled. ButSchuschnigg had lacked the stature to take such a step. A decent, uprightman as a human being, he had become possessed, as had certain others inEurope, with a contempt for Western democracy and a passion for author-itarian one-party rule.

Out of the factories and the prisons, from which many of them recentlyhad been released along with the Nazis, the Social Democrats came in abody on March 4 to respond to the Chancellor’s call. Despite all that hadhappened they said they were ready to help the government defend thenation’s independence. All they asked was what the Chancellor had al-ready conceded to the Nazis: the right to have their own political partyand preach their own principles. Schuschnigg agreed, but it was too late.

On March 3 the always well-informed General Jodi noted in his diary:“The Austrian question is becoming critical. 100 officers shall be dis-patched here. The Fuehrer wants to see them personally. They shouldnot see to it that the Austrian armed forces will fight better against us, butrather 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 lastdays of February when the Nazis began to take over in the provinces. Hewould hold a plebiscite. He would ask the Austrian people whether theywere for a “free, independent, social, Christian and united Austria—Jaoder Nein?"*

I felt that the moment for a clear decision had come [he wrote later]. Itseemed irresponsible to wait with fettered hands until, in the course of someweeks, we should be gagged as well. The gamble now was for stakes which de-manded the ultimate and supreme effort.19

Shortly after his return from Berchtesgaden, Schuschnigg had apprisedMussolini, Austria’s protector, of Hitler’s threats and had received an im-mediate reply from the Duce that Italy’s position on Austria remained un-

* According to the testimony of President Miklas during a trial of an Austrian Naziin 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 closepersonal friend of the Chancellor, was the “father of the plebiscite idea.” He con-cedes, however, that Schuschnigg certainly adopted it on his own resnonsibilitv.1*

changed. Now on March 7 he sent his military attache in Rome to Musso-lini to inform him that in view of events he “was probably going to have toresort to a plebiscite.” The Italian dictator answered that it was a mistake—“C’e un errore!” He advised Schuschnigg to hold to his previous course.Things were improving; an impending relaxation of relations betweenRome and London would do much to ease the pressure. It was the lastSchuschnigg ever heard from Mussolini.

On the evening of March 9, Schuschnigg announced in a speech atInnsbruck that a plebiscite would be held in four days—on Sunday,March 13. The unexpected news sent Adolf Hitler into a fit of fury. Jodi’sdiary entry of March 10 described the initial reaction in Berlin:

By surprise and without consulting his Ministers, Schuschnigg ordered aplebiscite for Sunday, March 13 . . .

Fuehrer is determined not to tolerate it. The same night, March 9 to 10, hecalls for Goering. General v. Reichenau is called back from Cairo OlympicCommittee. General v. Schobert [commander of the Munich Military Districton the Austrian border] is ordered to come, as well as [Austrian] MinisterGlaise-Horstenau, who is ... in the Palatinate . . . Ribbentrop is beingdetained 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 nodoubt that his generals were taken by surprise. If Schuschnigg’s plebisciteon Sunday were to be prevented by force the Army would have to moveinto 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 Fuehrerthe General conferred with Jodi and General Max von Viebahn, chief ofthe Fuehrungsstab (Operations Staff) of OKW. The resourceful Jodiremembered Special Case Otto which had been drawn up to counter anattempt to place Otto of Hapsburg on the Austrian throne. Since it wasthe only plan that existed for military action against Austria, Hitler decidedit would have to do. “Prepare Case Otto,” he ordered.

Keitel raced back to OKW headquarters in the Bendlerstrasse to con-fer with General Beck, Chief of the General Staff. When he asked for de-tails of the Otto plan, Beck replied, “We have prepared nothing, nothinghas been done, nothing at all.” Beck in turn was summoned to the ReichChancellery. Seizing General von Manstein, who was about to leaveBerlin 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 armedaggression. They were merely concerned with the difficulty of improvisingmilitary action on such short notice. Manstein, returning to the Bendler-strasse, set to work to draft the necessary orders, finishing his task withinfive hours, at 6 p.m. At 6:30 p.m., according to Jodi’s diary, mobilizationorders went out to three Army corps and the Air Force. At 2 a.m. the next

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morning, March 11, Hitler issued Directive Number One for OperationOtto. Such was his haste that he neglected to sign it, and his signature wasnot obtained until 1 p.m.

top SECRET

1. If other measures prove unsuccessful, I intend to invade Austria witharmed forces to establish constitutional conditions and to prevent further out-rages against the pro-German population.

2. The whole operation will be directed by myself. . . .

4. The forces of the Army and Air Force detailed for this operation mustbe ready for invasion on March 12, 1938, at the latest by 12:00 hours . . .

5. The behavior of the troops must give the impression that we do not wantto wage war against our Austrian brothers. . . . Therefore any provocationis to be avoided. If, however, resistance is offered it must be broken ruthlesslyby force of arms. . . ,21

A few hours later Jodi issued supplemental “top-secret” orders on be-half 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 Mus-solini has declared himself disinterested in the solution of the Austrian ques-tion.22

Hitler had been worried about Mussolini. On the afternoon of March10, as soon as he had decided on military invasion, he had sent off byspecial plane Prince Philip of Hesse, with a letter to the Duce (datedMarch 11) informing him of the action he contemplated and asking forthe Italian dictator’s understanding. The letter, a tissue of lies concern-ing his treatment of Schuschnigg and conditions in Austria, which he as-sured the Duce were “approaching a state of anarchy,” began with such afraudulent argument that Hitler had it omitted when the letter was laterpublished in Germany.* He stated that Austria and Czechoslovakia wereplotting to restore the Hapsburgs and preparing “to throw the weight of amass of at least twenty million men against Germany.” He then outlinedhis demands to Schuschnigg, which, he assured Mussolini, “were morethan moderate,” told of Schuschnigg’s failure to carry them out and spokeof the “mockery” of “a so-called plebiscite.”

In my responsibility as Fuehrer and Chancellor of the German Reich andlikewise as a son of this soil, I can no longer remain passive in the face of thesedevelopments.

I am now determined to restore law and order in my homeland and enable

* The stricken passages were found after the war in the archives of the ItalianForeign Ministry.

the people to decide their own fate according to their judgment in an unmistak-able, 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 asan act that any man of character would do in the same way, were he in myposition. You too, Excellency, could not act differently if the fate of Italianswere at stake. . . .

2. In a critical hour for Italy I proved to you the steadfastness of mysympathy. Do not doubt that in the future there will be no change in thisrespect.

3. Whatever the consequences of the coming events may be, I have drawna definite boundary between Germany and France and now draw one just asdefinite 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 andthat the Nazis “would present no formidable obstacle.”! Indeed, thatevening Dr. Seyss-Inquart had assured him that he would support theplebiscite and even broadcast a speech in its favor.

At half past five on the morning of Friday, March 11, the AustrianChancellor was wakened by the ringing of the telephone at his bedside.Dr. Skubl, the Austrian chief of police, was speaking. The Germans hadclosed the border at Salzburg, he said. Rail traffic between the two coun-tries had been halted. German troops were reported concentrating on theAustrian frontier.

By 6:15 Schuschnigg was on his way to his office at the Ballhausplatz,

* Drawing the frontier at the Brenner was a sop to Mussolini. It meant thatHitler would not be asking for the return of the southern Tyrol, which was takenfrom Austria and awarded to Italy at Versailles.

t In all fairness, it should be pointed out that Schuschnigg’s plebiscite was scarcelymore free or democratic than those perpetrated by Hitler in Germany. Since therehad been no free elections in Austria since 1933, there were no up-to-date pollinglists. 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 forcampaigning even if the opposition groups, the Nazis and the Social Democrats, hadbeen free to do so. The Social Democrats undoubtedly would have voted la,since they regarded Schuschnigg as a lesser evil than Hitler and moreover had beenpromised the restoration of political freedom. There is no question that their votewould have given Schuschnigg a victory.

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but he decided to stop first at St. Stephen’s Cathedral. There in the firstdim light of dawn while early mass was being read he sat restlessly in hispew thinking of the ominous message from the chief of police. “I was notquite sure what it meant,” he later recalled. “I only knew that it wouldbring some change.” He gazed at the candles burning in front of the imageof Our Lady of Perpetual Succor, looked furtively around and then madethe sign of the cross, as countless Viennese had done before this figure inpast times of stress.

At the Chancellery all was quiet; not even any disturbing dispatcheshad arrived during the night from Austria’s diplomats abroad. He calledpolice headquarters and asked that as a precautionary measure a policecordon be thrown around the Inner City and the government buildings.He also convoked his cabinet colleagues. Only Seyss-Inquart failed toshow up. Schuschnigg could not locate him anywhere. Actually the NaziMinister was out at the Vienna airport. Papen, summarily summoned toBerlin the night before, had departed by special plane at 6 a.m. and Seysshad seen him off. Now the Number One quisling was waiting for the Num-ber Two—Glaise-Horstenau, like Seyss a minister in Schuschnigg’s cabi-net, like him already deep in treason, who was due to arrive from Berlinwith 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 Schusch-nigg by the two gentlemen at 10 a.m. along with the information that Hit-ler was furious. After several hours of consultations with President Mik-las, his cabinet colleagues and Dr. Skubl, Schuschnigg agreed to cancelthe plebiscite. The police chief had reluctantly told him that the police,liberally sprinkled with Nazis who had been restored to their posts in ac-cordance with the Berchtesgaden ultimatum, could no longer be countedon by the government. On the other hand, Schuschnigg felt sure that theArmy and the militia of the Patriotic Front—the official authoritarianparty in Austria—would fight. But at this crucial moment Schuschniggdecided—he says, in fact, that his mind had long been made up on thematter—that he would not offer resistance to Hitler if it meant spillingGerman blood. Hitler was quite willing to do this, but Schuschnigg shrankback from the very prospect.

At 2 p.m. he called in Seyss-Inquart and told him that he was callingoff the plebiscite. The gentle Judas immediately made for the telephone toinform Goering in Berlin. But in the Nazi scheme of things one concessionfrom a yielding opponent must lead quickly to another. Goering and Hit-ler then and there began raising the ante. The minute-by-minute accountof how this was done, of the threats and the swindles employed, was re-corded—ironically enough—by Goering’s own Forschungsamt, the “In-stitute for Research,” which took down and transcribed twenty-seventelephone conversations from the Field Marshal’s office beginning at 2:45p.m. on March 11. The documents were found in the German Air Minis-try after the war and constitute an illuminating record of how Austria’sfate was settled by telephone from Berlin during the next few criticalhours.24.

During Seyss’s first call to Goering at 2:45 p.m. the Field Marshaltold him that Schuschnigg’s cancellation of the plebiscite was not enoughand that after talking with Hitler he would call him back. This he did at3:05. Schuschnigg, he ordered, must resign, and Seyss-Inquart must benamed Chancellor within two hours. Goering also told Seyss then to“send the telegram to the Fuehrer, as agreed upon.” This is the first men-tion of a telegram that was to pop up throughout the frantic events of thenext few hours and which would be used to perpetrate the swindle bywhich Hitler justified his aggression to the German people and to theforeign offices of the world.

Wilhelm Keppler, Hitler’s special agent in Austria, arriving in the after-noon 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 thedispatch of German troops to Austria to put down disorder. In his Nurem-berg affidavit, Seyss declared that he refused to send such a wire sincethere were no disorders. Keppler, insisting that it would have to be done,hurried to the Austrian Chancellery, where he was brazen enough to set upan emergency office along with Seyss and Glaise-Horstenau. Why Schusch-nigg allowed such interlopers and traitors to establish themselves physi-cally in the seat of the Austrian government at this critical hour is incom-prehensible, but he did. Later he remembered the Chancellery as looking“like a disturbed beehive,” with Seyss-Inquart and Glaise-Horstenau hold-ing “court” in one corner “and around them a busy coming and going ofstrange-looking men”; but apparently it never occurred to the courteousbut dazed Chancellor to throw them out.

He had made up his mind to yield to Hitler’s pressure and resign. Whilestill closeted with Seyss he had put through a telephone call to Mussolini,but the Duce was not immediately available and a few minutes laterSchuschnigg canceled the call. To ask for Mussolini’s help, he decided,would be a waste of time.” Even Austria’s pompous protector was desert-ing her in the hour of need. A few minutes later, when Schuschnigg wastrying to talk President Miklas into accepting his resignation, a messagecame from the Foreign Office: “The Italian government declares that itcould give no advice under the circumstances, in case such advice shouldbe 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 herefused to make Seyss-Inquart his successor. “That is quite impossible,”he said. “We will not be coerced.” He instructed Schuschnigg to informthe 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 Schusch-nigg] ■ • • I suggested he entrust the Chancellorship to me . . . but hewould like to entrust a man like Ender . . .

Goering: Well, that won’t do! Under no circumstances! The President

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has to be informed immediately that he has to turn the powers of the FederalChancellor over to you and to accept the cabinet as it was arranged.

There was an interruption at this point. Seyss-Inquart put a Dr. Muehl-mann, a shadowy Austrian Nazi whom Schuschnigg had noticed lurkingin the background at Berchtesgaden and who was a personal friend ofGoering, on the line.

Muehlmann: The President still refuses persistently to give his consent.We three National Socialists went to speak to him personally ... He wouldnot 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 Germanmilitary attache] and tell the President that if the conditions are not acceptedimmediately, the troops which are already advancing to the frontier will marchin tonight along the whole line, and Austria will cease to exist . . . Tell himthere is no time now for any joke. The situation now is that tonight theinvasion will begin from all the corners of Austria. The invasion will bestopped 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 nowbe in the streets. So remember, a report must be given by seven-thirty. IfMiklas could not understand it in four hours, we shall make him understandit 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 upstairsagain and tell him plainly that Seyss will call on the National Socialist guardsand in five minutes the troops will march in on my order.

After this order General Muff and Keppler presented to the Presidenta second military ultimatum threatening that if he did not yield within anhour, by 7:30, German troops would march into Austria. “I informed thetwo 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 wellas of the Chancellery. About six that evening, returning from the hospitalwhere my wife was fighting for her life after a difficult childbirth which hadended with a Caesarean operation, I had emerged from the subway at theKarlsplatz to find myself engulfed in a shouting, hysterical Nazi mob whichwas sweeping toward the Inner City. These contorted faces I had seenbefore, at the Nuremberg party rallies. They were yelling, “Sieg Heil! SiegHeil! Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler! Hang Schuschnigg! Hang Schuschnigg!”

The police, whom only a few hours before I had seen disperse a small Nazigroup without any trouble, were standing by, grinning.

Schuschnigg heard the tramp and the shouts of the mob, and the soundsimpressed 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 AustrianChancellor. 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 thanSeyss-Inquart. With the little hope I had left I clung to all the promises he hadmade me, I clung to his personal reputation as a practicing Catholic and anhonest man.27

Schuschnigg clung to his illusions to the last.

The fallen Chancellor then proposed that he make a farewell broad-cast and explain why he had resigned. He says that Miklas agreed, thoughthe President would later dispute it. It was the most moving broadcast Ihave ever heard. The microphone was set up some five paces from whereDollfuss had been shot to death by the Nazis.

. . . The German government [Schuschnigg said] today handed to Presi-dent Miklas an ultimatum, with a time limit, ordering him to nominate asChancellor a person designated by the German government . . . otherwiseGerman troops would invade Austria.

I declare before the world that the reports launched in Germany concerningdisorders by the workers, the shedding of streams of blood and the creationof a situation beyond the control of the Austrian government are lies from Ato Z. President Miklas has asked me to tell the people of Austria that we haveyielded to force since we are not prepared even in this terrible hour to shedblood. 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!

* In his postwar testimony already referred to, Miklas denied that he askedSchuschnigg to say any such thing or that he even agreed that the broadcast shouldbe made. Contrary to what the retiring Chancellor said, the President was not yetready to yield to force. “Things have not gone so far that we must capitulate,” hesays he told Schuschnigg. He had just turned down the second German ultimatum.He was standing firm. But Schuschnigg’s broadcast did help to undermine hisposition and force his hand. As we shall see, the obstinate old President held outfor several hours more before capitulating. On March 13, he refused to sign theAnschluss law snuffing out Austria’s independent existence which Seyss-Inquart, atHitler’s insistence, promulgated. Though he surrendered the functions of his officeto the Nazi Chancellor for as long as he was prevented from carrying them out, hemaintained that he never formally resigned as President. “It would have been toocowardly,” he later explained to a Vienna court. This did not prevent Seyss-Inquartfrom announcing officially on March 13 that “the President, upon request of theChancellor,” had “resigned from his office” and that his “affairs” were transferredto the Chancellor.28

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The Chancellor might take leave but the stubborn President was notyet ready to. Goering learned this when he phoned General Muff shortlyafter 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 tohim almost fifteen minutes. He declared that under no circumstances willhe 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 stayput. Anyway, tell Seyss to take over.”

There was still the matter of the telegram which Hitler wanted in orderto justify his invasion. The Fuehrer, according to Papen, who had joinedhim at the Chancellery in Berlin, was now “in a state bordering on hys-teria.” The stubborn Austrian President was fouling up his plans. So wasSeyss-Inquart, because of his failure to send the telegram calling on Hitlerto send troops into Austria to quell disorder. Exasperated beyond endur-ing, Hitler flashed the invasion order at 8:45 p.m. on the evening of MarchIT* Three minutes later, at 8:48, Goering was on the phone to Kepplerin 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 theSchuschnigg Government considers it its task to establish peace and order inAustria, sends to the German Government the urgent request to support it inthe task and to help it to prevent bloodshed. For this purpose it asks theGerman Government to send German troops as soon as possible.”

Keppler assured the Field Marshal he would show Seyss-Inquart thetext of the “telegram” immediately.

“Well,” Goering said, “he does not even have to send the telegram. Allhe needs to do is say ‘Agreed.’ ”

One hour later Keppler called back Berlin. “Tell the Field Marshal,”he said, “that Seyss-Inquart agrees.”f

* Marked “Top Secret” and identified as Directive No. 2 of Operation Otto, it readin part: “The demands of the German ultimatum to the Austrian government havenot been fulfilled . . . To avoid further bloodshed in Austrian cities, the entry ofthe 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 exertingall forces to the full as quickly as possible. (Signed) Adolf Hitler.”2^t Actually, Seyss-Inquart tried until long after midnight to get Hitler to call offthe German invasion. A German Foreign Office memorandum reveals that at2:10 a.m. on March 12 General Muff telephoned Berlin and stated that on theinstructions of Chancellor Seyss-Inquart he was requesting that “the alerted troopsshould remain on. but not cross, the border.” Keppler also came on the telephone

Thus it was that when I passed through Berlin the next day I found ascreaming headline in the Voelkischer Beobachter: German AustriaSaved from Chaos. There were incredible stories hatched up by Goeb-bels describing Red disorders—fighting, shooting, pillaging—in the mainstreets of Vienna. And there was the text of the telegram, issued byD.N.B., the official German news agency, which said that it had been dis-patched by Seyss-lnquart to Hitler the night before. Actually two copiesof the “telegram,” just as Goering had dictated it, were found in the Ger-man Foreign Office archives at the end of the war. Papen later explainedhow they got there. They were concocted, he says, sometime later by theGerman Minister of Posts and Telegraph and deposited in the governmentfiles.

Hitler had waited anxiously throughout the frenzied afternoon andevening not only for President Miklas to capitulate but for some wordfrom Mussolini. The silence of Austria’s protector was becoming omi-nous. At 10:25 p.m. Prince Philip of Hesse called the Chancellery fromRome. Hitler himself grabbed the telephone. Goering’s technicians re-corded the conversation that followed:

Prince: I have just come back from the Palazzo Venezia. The Duceaccepted the whole thing in a very friendly manner. He sends you hisregards. . . . Schuschnigg gave him the news . . . Mussolini said that Aus-tria 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 tomake 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 readyto 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 ofthe terrible position which would have existed militarily in case we had gotteninto a conflict. You may tell him that I do thank him from the bottom of myheart. Never, never shall I forget it.

Prince: Yes, my Fuehrer.

Hitler: I shall never forget him for this, no matter what happens. If heshould ever need any help or be in any danger, he can be convinced that I shallstick to him whatever may happen, even if the whole world gangs up on him.

Prince: Yes, my Fuehrer.

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 byBerlin that Hitler declined to halt his troops he replied that he “regretted thismessage.”30

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And what stand were Great Britain and France and the League of Na-tions taking at this critical moment to halt Germany’s aggression against apeaceful neighboring country? None. For the moment France was againwithout a government. On Thursday, March 10, Premier Chautemps andhis cabinet had resigned. All through the crucial day of Friday, March 11,when Goering was telephoning his ultimatums to Vienna, there was no onein Paris who could act. It was not until the Anschluss had been proclaimedon the thirteenth that a French government was formed under Leon Blum.

And Britain? On February 20, a week after Schuschnigg had capitu-lated at Berchtesgaden, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden had resigned,principally because of his opposition to further appeasement of Musso-lini by Prime Minister Chamberlain. He was replaced by Lord Halifax.This change was welcomed in Berlin. So was Chamberlain’s statement tothe Commons after the Berchtesgaden ultimatum. The German Embassyin London reported fully on it in a dispatch to Berlin on March 4.31Chamberlain was quoted as saying that “what happened [at Berchtes-gaden] was merely that two statesmen had agreed upon certain measuresfor the improvement of relations between their two countries ... It ap-peared hardly possible to insist that just because two statesmen had agreedon certain domestic changes in one of two countries—changes desirablein the interest of relations between them—the one country had renouncedits independence in favor of the other. On the contrary, the Federal Chan-cellor’s speech of February 24 contained nothing that might convey theimpression that the Federal Chancellor [Schuschnigg] himself believed inthe surrender of the independence of his country.”

In view of the fact that the British Legation in Vienna, as I myselflearned at the time, had provided Chamberlain with the details of Hitler’sBerchtesgaden ultimatum to Schuschnigg, this speech, which was made tothe Commons on March 2, is astounding.* But it was pleasing to Hitler.He knew that he could march into Austria without getting into complica-tions with Britain. On March 9, Ribbentrop, the new German ForeignMinister, 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 ofthe British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, he reported back toBerlin, were “very good.” After a long conference with Lord Halifax,Ribbentrop reported directly to Hitler on March 10 as to what Britainwould do “if the Austrian question cannot be settled peacefully.” Basi-cally he was convinced from his London talks “that England will do noth-ing in regard to Austria.”33

On Friday, March 11, Ribbentrop was lunching at Downing Street with

* In his testimony at Nuremberg Guido Schmidt swore that both he and Schuschnigginformed the envoys of the “Big Powers” of Hitler’s ultimatum “in detail.”32 More"over, the Vienna correspondents of the Times and the Daily Telegraph of London,to my knowledge, also telephoned their respective newspapers a full and accuratereport.

Anschluss: The Rape of Austria 345

the Prime Minister and his associates when a Foreign Office messengerbroke in with urgent dispatches for Chamberlain telling of the startlingnews from Vienna. Only a few minutes before, Chamberlain had askedRibbentrop to inform the Fuehrer “of his sincere wish and firm determina-tion to clear up German-British relations.” Now, at the receipt of the sournews from Austria, the statesmen adjourned to the Prime Minister’s study,where Chamberlain read to the uncomfortable German Foreign Ministertwo telegrams from the British Legation in Vienna telling of Hitler’s ulti-matum. “The discussion,” Ribbentrop reported to Hitler, “took place in atense atmosphere and the usually calm Lord Halifax was more excitedthan 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-tak-ing,” he reported, “was entirely amiable, and even Halifax was calmagain.”*34

Chamberlain s reaction to the dispatches from Vienna was to instructAmbassador Henderson in Berlin to pen a note to Acting Foreign Ministervon Neurath stating that if the report of the German ultimatum to Austriawas correct, His Majesty’s Government feel bound to register a protest inthe strongest terms.”35 But a formal diplomatic protest at this late hourwas the least of Hitler’s worries. The next day, March 12, while Germantroops were streaming into Austria, Neurath returned a contemptuous re-ply,30 declaring that Austro—German relations were the exclusive concernof the German people and not of the British government, and repeatingthe lies that there had been no German ultimatum to Austria and thattroops had been dispatched only in answer to “urgent” appeals from thenewly formed Austrian government. He referred the British ambassadorto the telegram, “already published in the German press.”f

Hitler’s only serious worry on the evening of March 11 had been overMussolini’s reaction to his aggression,$ but there was some concern inBerlin too as to what Czechoslovakia might do. However, the indefati-

* Churchill has given an amusing description of this luncheon in The GatheringStorm (pp. 271-72).

t The lies were repeated in a circular telegram dispatched by Baron von Weizsaeckerof the Foreign Office March 12 to German envoys abroad for “information andorientation of your conversations.” Weizsaecker stated that Schuschnigg’s declara-tion concerning a German ultimatum “was sheer fabrication” and went on to in-form his diplomats abroad: “The truth was that the question of sending militaryforces . . . was first raised in the well-known telegram of the newly formedAustrian government. In view of the imminent danger of civil war, the Reichgovernment decided to comply with this appeal.”37 Thus the German ForeignOffice lied not only to foreign diplomats but to its own. In a long and ineffectualbook written after the war Weizsaecker, like so many other Germans who servedHitler, maintained that he was anti-Nazi all along.

t In his testimony at Nuremberg on August 9, 1946, Field Marshal von Mansteinemphasized that “at the time when Hitler gave us the orders for Austria his chiefworry was not so much that there might be interference on the part of theWestern Powers, but his only worry was as to how Italy would behave, because itappeared that Italy always sided with Austria and the Hapsburgs.”3®

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gable Goering quickly cleared this up. Busy though he was at the telephonedirecting the coup in Vienna, he managed to slip over during the eveningto the Haus der Flieger, where he was official host to a thousand high-ranking officials and diplomats, who were being entertained at a glitteringsoiree by the orchestra, the singers and the ballet of the State Opera. Whenthe Czech minister in Berlin, Dr. Mastny, arrived at the gala fete he wasimmediately taken aside by the bemedaled Field Marshal, who told him onhis 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 afamily 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 mobilizingand that Czechoslovakia had no intention of trying to interfere with eventsin Austria. Goering was relieved and repeated his assurances, adding thathe was authorized to back them up by Hitler’s word too.

It may have been that even the astute Czech President, Eduard Benes,did not have time to realize that evening that Austria’s end meant Czecho-slovakia’s as well. There were some in Europe that weekend who thoughtthe Czech government was shortsighted, who argued that in view of thedisastrous strategic position in which Czechoslovakia would be left by theNazi occupation of Austria—with German troops surrounding her onthree sides—and considering too that her intervention to help save Austriamight have brought Russia, France and Britain, as well as the League ofNations, into a conflict with the Third Reich which the Germans were inno condition to meet, the Czechs should have acted on the night of March11. But subsequent events, which shortly will be chronicled here, surelydemolish any such argument. A little later when the two big Westerndemocracies and the League had a better opportunity of stopping Hitlerthey shrank from it. Anyway, at no time on the eventful day did Schusch-nigg make a formal appeal to London, Paris, Prague or Geneva. Perhaps,as his memoirs indicate, he thought this would be a waste of time. Presi-dent Miklas, on the other hand, was under the impression, as he later testi-fied, that the Austrian government, which immediately had informed Parisand London of the German ultimatum, was continuing “conversations”with the French and British governments throughout the afternoon inorder to ascertain their “frame of mind.”

When it became clear that their “frame of mind” was to do nothing morethan utter empty protests President Miklas, a little before midnight, gavein. He appointed Seyss-Inquart Chancellor and accepted his list of cabi-net ministers. “1 was completely abandoned both at home and abroad,”he commented bitterly later.

Having issued a grandiose proclamation to the German people in whichhe justified his aggression with his usual contempt for the truth and prom-ised that the Austrian people would choose their future in “a real plebi-

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scite”—Goebbels read it over the German and Austrian radio stations atnoon on March 12—Hitler set off for his native land. He received a tu-multuous welcome. At every village, hastily decorated in his honor, therewere cheering crowds. During the afternoon he reached his first goal,Linz, where he had spent his school days. The reception there was deliri-ous and Hitler was deeply touched. The next day, after getting off a tele-gram to Mussolini—“I shall never forget you for this!”—he laid a wreathon the graves of his parents at Leonding and then returned to Linz to makea speech:

When years ago I went forth from this town I bore within me precisely thesame profession of faith which today fills my heart. Judge the depth of myemotion when after so many years I have been able to bring that professionof faith to its fulfillment. If Providence once called me forth from this townto be the leader of the Reich, it must in so doing have charged me with amission, and that mission could only be to restore my dear homeland to theGerman 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 byHimmler, had flown to Linz to meet Hitler and had proudly proclaimed thatArticle 88 of the Treaty of St. Germain, which proclaimed Austria’s in-dependence as inalienable and made the League of Nations its guarantor,had been voided. To Hitler, carried away by the enthusiasm of the Aus-trian crowds, this was not enough. He ordered Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, anundersecretary in the Ministry of the Interior who had been rushed by hisMinister, Frick, to Vienna to draft a law making Hitler President of Aus-tria, 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 alaw providing for a total Anschluss.”39

This draft Stuckart presented to the newly formed Austrian govern-ment in Vienna on Sunday, March 13, the day on which Schuschnigg’splebiscite was to have been held. President Miklas, as we have seen, re-fused to sign it, but Seyss-Inquart, who had taken over the President’spowers, did and late that evening flew back to Linz to present it to theFuehrer. It proclaimed the end of Austria. “Austria,” it began, “is aprovince of the German Reich.” Hitler shed tears of joy, Seyss-Inquartlater recalled.40 The so-called Anschluss law was also promulgated thesame day at Linz by the German government and signed by Hitler, Goe-ring, Ribbentrop, Frick and Hess. It provided for “a free and secret plebi-scite” on April 10 in which the Austrians could determine “the question ofreunion with the German Reich.” The Reich Germans, Hitler announcedon March 18, were also to have a plebiscite on the Anschluss, along withnew elections to the Reichstag.

Hitler did not make his triumphal entry into Vienna, where he hadlived so long as a tramp, until the afternoon of Monday, March 14. He

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was delayed by two unforeseen developments. Despite the delirium of theAustrians at the prospect of seeing the Fuehrer in the capital, Himmlerasked for an extra day to perfect security arrangements. He was alreadycarrying out the arrest of thousands of “unreliables”—within a few weeksthe number would reach 79,000 in Vienna alone. Also the vaunted Ger-man panzer units had broken down long before they got within sight ofVienna’s hills. According to Jodi, some 70 per cent of the armored vehi-cles were stranded on the road from Salzburg and Passau to Vienna,though General Guderian, who commanded the panzer troops, later con-tended that only 30 per cent of his forces became stalled. At any rate, Hit-ler was furious at the delay. He remained in Vienna only overnight, put-ting up at the Hotel Imperial.

Still, this triumphant return to the former imperial capital which he felthad rejected him and condemned him in his youth to a starved and miser-able gutter life and which was now acclaiming him with such tumultuousjubilation could not have failed to revive his spirits. The ubiquitous Papen,rushing by plane from Berlin to Vienna to get in on the festivities, foundHitler in the reviewing stand opposite the Hofburg, the ancient palace ofthe Hapsburgs. “I can only describe him,” Papen later wrote, “as being ina state of ecstasy.”*

He remained in this state during most of the next four weeks, when hetraversed Germany and Austria from one end to the other whipping uppublic fervor for a big Ja vote in favor of the Anschluss. But in his ex-uberant speeches he missed no opportunity to vilify Schuschnigg or topeddle the by now shopworn lies about how the Anschluss was achieved.In his address to the Reichstag on March 18 he asserted that Schuschnigg

* Yet underneath the ecstasy, and unnoticed by the shallow Papen, there may haveburned in Hitler a feeling of revenge for a city and a people which had not appreciatedhim as a young man and which at heart he despised. This in part may have ac-counted for his brief stay. Though a few weeks later he would publicly say to theburgomaster of Vienna, “Be assured that this city is in my eyes a pearl—I will bringit into a setting which is worthy of it,” this was probably more electioneeringpropaganda than an expression of his inner feelings. These feelings were revealedto Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi Governor and Gauleiter of Vienna during thewar, at a heated meeting at the Berghof in 1943. Describing it during his testimonyat Nuremberg, Schirach said:

Then the Fuehrer began with, I might say, incredible and unlimited hatred tospeak against the people of Vienna. ... At four o’clock in the morning Hitlersuddenly 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 GreaterGermany.” Hitler never loved Vienna. He hated its people.41

Papen’s own festive spirits on March 14 were spoiled that same day when helearned 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, BaronTschirschky, had fled to England to escape certain death from the S.S. At the endof April Ketteler’s body was fished out of the Danube, where Gestapo thugs inVienna had thrown it after murdering him.

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had “broken his word” by his “election forgery,” adding that “only acrazy, blinded man” could have behaved in such a manner. On March25 at Koenigsberg the “election forgery” had become in Hitler’s mind “thisridiculous comedy.” Letters had been found, Hitler claimed, provingthat Schuschnigg had deliberately double-crossed him by seeking delaysin augmenting the Berchtesgaden agreement until “a more propitioushour to stir up foreign countries against Germany.”

In Koenigsberg Hitler also answered the taunts of the foreign press athis use of brutal force and his trickery in having proclaimed the Anschlusswithout even waiting for the decision of the plebiscite:

Certain foreign newspapers have said that we fell on Austria with brutalmethods. I can only say: even in death they cannot stop lying. I have in thecourse of my political struggle won much love from my people, but when Icrossed the former frontier [into Austria] there met me such a stream of loveas 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 tenthbut to effect the unification forthwith . . .

If this sounded less than logical—or honest—to foreign ears, there isno doubt that it made a great impression on the Germans. When at theconclusion of his Reichstag speech Hitler implored, in a voice choked withemotion, “German people, give me another four years so that 1 can nowexploit the accomplished union for the benefit of all!” he received anovation so overwhelming that it dwarfed all his former triumphs at thistribune.

The Fuehrer wound up his election campaign in Vienna on April 9, onthe eve of the polling. The man who had once tramped the pavements ofthis city as a vagabond, unwashed and empty-bellied, who but four yearsbefore had assumed in Germany the powers of the Hohenzollern kingsand had now taken upon himself those of the Hapsburg emperors, was fullof a sense of God-given mission.

I believe that it was God’s will to send a youth from here into the Reich, tolet him grow up, to raise him to be the leader of the nation so as to enable himto lead back his homeland into the Reich.

There is a higher ordering and we all are nothing else than its agents. Whenon March 9 Herr Schuschnigg broke his agreement, then in that second I feltthat now the call of Providence had come to me. And that which then tookplace in three days was only conceivable as the fulfillment of the wish andthe will of this Providence.

In three days the Lord has smitten them! . . . And to me the grace wasgiven on the day of the betrayal to be able to unite my homeland with theReich! . . .

I would now give thanks to Him who let me return to my homeland in orderthat I might now lead it into my German Reich! Tomorrow may every

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German recognize the hour and measure its import and bow in humilitybefore the Almighty, who in a few weeks has wrought a miracle upon us!

That a majority of Austrians, who undoubtedly would have said Ja toSchuschmgg on March 13, would say the same to Hitler on April 10 was aforegone conclusion. Many of them sincerely believed that ultimate unionwith any kind of Germany, even a Nazi Germany, was a desirable andinevitable end, that Austria, cut off from its vast Slavic and Hungarianhinterland in 1918, could not in the long run exist decently by itself thatit could only survive as part of the German Reich. In addition to theseAustrians were the fanatical Nazis whose ranks were swelling rapidly withjobseekers and jobholders attracted by success and anxious to improvetheir position. Many Catholics in this overwhelmingly Catholic countrywere undoubtedly swayed by a widely publicized statement of CardinalInnitzer welcoming Nazism to Austria and urging a Ja vote.*

In a fair and honest election in which the Social Democrats and Schusch-n’8S s Christian Socials would have had freedom to campaign openlythe plebiscite, in my opinion, might have been close. As it was, it took avery brave Austrian to vote No. As in Germany, and not without reason,the voters feared that their failure to cast an affirmative ballot might befound out. In the polling station which I visited in Vienna that Sundayafternoon, wide slits in the corner of the polling booths gave the Nazielection 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 inthe secrecy of the booth; they voted openly for all to see. I happened tobroadcast at seven-thirty that evening, a half hour after the polls hadclosed, when few votes had yet been counted. A Nazi official assured mebefore the broadcast that the Austrians were voting 99 per cent Ja. Thatwas the figure officially given later—99.08 per cent in Greater Germany99.75 in Austria.

And so Austria, as Austria, passed for a moment out of history, its veryname suppressed by the revengeful Austrian who had now joined it toGermany. The ancient German word for Austria, Oesterreich, wasabolished. Austria became the Ostmark and soon even that name wasdropped and Berlin administered the country by Gaue (districts) whichcorresponded roughly to the historic Laender such as Tyrol, Salzburg,Styria and Carinthia. Vienna became just another city of the Reich, aprovincial district administrative center, withering away. The formerAustrian tramp become dictator had wiped his native land off the mapand deprived its once glittering capital of its last shred of glory andimportance. Disillusionment among the Austrians was inevitable.

* months la'er; °n October 8, the cardinal’s palace opposite St. Stephen’s

Cathedral was sacked by Nazi hooligans. Too late Innitzer had learnedPwhatNationa^ Socialism was, and had spoken out in a sermon against the Nazi persecu-

For the first few weeks the behavior of the Vienna Nazis was worsethan anything I had seen in Germany. There was an orgy of sadism. Dayafter day large numbers of Jewish men and women could be seen scrubbingSchuschnigg signs off the sidewalk and cleaning the gutters. While theyworked on their hands and knees with jeering storm troopers standingover them, crowds gathered to taunt them. Hundreds of Jews, men andwomen, were picked off the streets and put to work cleaning public latrinesand 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 con-fiscated or stolen. I myself, from our apartment in the Plosslgasse, watchedsquads of S.S. men carting off silver, tapestries, paintings and other lootfrom the Rothschild palace next door. Baron Louis de Rothschild himselfwas later able to buy his way out of Vienna by turning over his steel millsto the Hermann Goering Works. Perhaps half of the city’s 180,000 Jewsmanaged, by the time the war started, to purchase their freedom to emi-grate by handing over what they owned to the Nazis.

This lucrative trade in human freedom. was handled by a specialorganization set up under the S.S. by Heydrich, the “Office for JewishEmigration,” which became the sole Nazi agency authorized to issuepermits to Jews to leave the country. Administered from the beginning tothe end by an Austrian Nazi, a native of Hitler’s home town of Linz by thename of Karl Adolf Eichmann, it was to become eventually an agencynot of emigration but of extermination and to organize the slaughter ofmore than four million persons, mostly Jews. Himmler and Heydrich alsotook advantage of their stay in Austria during the first weeks of theAnschluss to set up a huge concentration camp at Mauthausen, on the northbank of the Danube near Enns. It was too much trouble to continue totransport thousands of Austrians to the concentration camps of Germany.Austria, Himmler decided, needed one of its own. Before the Third Reichtumbled to its fall the non-Austrian prisoners were to outnumber the localinmates and Mauthausen was to achieve the dubious record as theGerman concentration camp (the extermination camps in the East weresomething 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 theAnschluss Germans flocked by the hundreds of thousands to Austria,where they could pay with their marks for sumptuous meals not availablein Germany for years and for bargain-priced vacations amid Austria’smatchless mountains and lakes. German businessmen and bankers pouredin to buy up the concerns of dispossessed Jews and anti-Nazis at a fractionof their value. Among the smiling visitors was the inimitable Dr. Schacht,who, despite his quarrels with Hitler, was still a minister (without port-folio) in the Reich cabinet, still the president of the Reichsbank, and whowas overjoyed with the Anschluss. Arriving to take over the AustrianNational Bank on behalf of the Reichsbank even before the plebiscite, headdressed the staff of the Austrian bank on March 21. Ridiculing theforeign press for criticizing Hitler’s methods of effecting the union, Dr.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Schacht stoutly defended the methods, arguing that the Anschluss was“the consequence of countless perfidies and brutal acts of violence whichforeign countries have practiced against us.

“Thank God . . . Adolf Hitler has created a communion of German willand German thought. He bolstered it up with the newly strengthenedWehrmacht and he then finally gave the external form to the inner unionbetween Germany and Austria. . . .

“Not a single person will find a future with us who is not wholeheartedly forAdolf Hitler . . . The Reichsbank will always be nothing but NationalSocialist or I shall cease to be its manager.”

Whereupon Dr. Schacht administered to the Austrian staff an oath tobe “faithful and obedient to the Fuehrer.”

“A scoundrel he who breaks it!” Dr. Schacht cried, and then ledhis audience in the bellowing of a triple “Sieg Heil!”42

In the meantime Dr. Schuschnigg had been arrested and subjected totreatment so degrading that it is difficult to believe that it was not prescribedby Hitler himself. Kept under house arrest from March 12 until May 28,during which time the Gestapo contrived to prevent him from getting anysleep by the most petty devices, he was then taken to Gestapo headquartersat the Hotel Metropole in Vienna, where he was incarcerated in a tinyroom on the fifth floor for the next seventeen months. There, with thetowel issued to him for his personal use, he was forced to clean thequarters, washbasins, slop buckets and latrines of the S.S. guards andperform other various menial tasks thought up by the Gestapo. By March11, the first anniversary of his fall, he had lost fifty-eight pounds, but theS.S. doctor reported that his condition was excellent. The years of solitaryconfinement and then of life “among the living dead” in some of the worstof the German concentration camps such as Dachau and Sachsenhausenthat followed have been described by Dr. Schuschnigg in his book.*

Shortly after his arrest he was allowed to marry by proxy the formerCountess Vera Czernin, whose marriage had been annulled by an ecclesi-astical court,f and in the last war years she was permitted to share hisexistence in the concentration camps along with their child, who was bornin 1941. How they survived the nightmare of imprisonment is a miracle.Toward the end they were joined by a number of other distinguished victimsof Hitler’s wrath such as Dr. Schacht, Leon Blum, the former FrenchPremier, and Madame Blum, Pastor Niemoeller, a host of high-rankinggenerals and Prince Philip of Hesse, whose wife, Princess Mafalda, thedaughter of the King of Italy, had been done to death by the S.S. at Buchen-

* Austrian Requiem.

t At this time Schuschnigg was a widower.

wald in 1944 as part of the Fuehrer’s revenge for Victor Emmanuel’sdesertion to the Allied side.

On May 1, 1945, the eminent group of prisoners, who had been hastilyevacuated from Dachau and transported southward to keep them frombeing liberated by the Americans advancing from the West, arrived at avillage high in the mountains of southern Tyrol. The Gestapo officersshowed Schuschnigg a list of those who, on Himmler’s orders, were to bedone away with before they fell into the hands of the Allies. Schuschniggnoted 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 lastminute!

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 strategicposition of immense value to his future plans. Not only did his armies flankCzechoslovakia on three sides but he now possessed in Vienna the gate-way to Southeast Europe. As the capital of the old Austro-HungarianEmpire, Vienna had long stood at the center of the communications andthe trading systems of Central and Southeast Europe. Now that nervecenter was in German hands.

Perhaps most important to Hitler was the demonstration again thatneither Britain nor France would lift a finger to stop him. On March 14Chamberlain had addressed the Commons on Hitler’s fait accompli inAustria, and the German Embassy in London had got off to Berlin a suc-cession of urgent telegrams on the course of the debate. There was notmuch for Hitler to fear. “The hard fact is,” Chamberlain declared, “thatnothing 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 notonly to employ force but even to concert with the other Big Powers abouthalting Germany’s future moves. On March 17 the Soviet government hadproposed 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, inthe House of Commons, publicly rejected it. “The inevitable consequenceof any such action,” he said, “would be to aggravate the tendency towardsthe establishment of exclusive groups of nations which must ... beinimical 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.

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In the same speech Chamberlain announced a decision of his govern-ment which must have been even more pleasing to Hitler. He bluntlyrejected the suggestion not only that Britain should give a guarantee tocome to the aid of Czechoslovakia in case she were attacked but also thatBritain should support France if the French were called upon to implementtheir obligations under the Franco—Czech pact. This forthright statementeased Hitler’s problems considerably. He now knew that Britain wouldalso stand by when he took on his next victim. If Britain held back wouldnot 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 withFrance and Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union was not obliged to come tothe aid of the Czechs until the French moved first. Such knowledge was allthat he needed to enable him to go ahead at once with his plans.

The reluctant German generals, Hitler could assume after the successof the Anschluss, would no longer stand in his way. If he had any doubtsat 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 ofhonor on charges of homosexualism had been abruptly suspended on itsopening day, March 10, when Field Marshal Goering and the commandersof the Army and Navy were convoked by Hitler to handle more urgentaffairs in connection with Austria. The trial resumed on March 17, butin 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 thatwhen the military court exposed the unbelievable machinations of Himmlerand Heydrich against Fritsch not only would their fallen Commander inChief be restored to his post in the Army but the S.S., perhaps even theThird Reich, possibly even Adolf Hitler, would be shaken to a fall. Vainand empty hope! On February 4, as has been recounted, Hitler hadsmashed the dreams of the old officer corps by taking over command ofthe armed forces himself and cashiering Fritsch and most of the high-rank-ing generals around him. Now he had conquered Austria without a shot.After this astounding triumph, nobody in Germany, not even the oldgenerals, 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 hadthreatened his life unless he implicated General von Fritsch—a threat,incidentally, which was carried out anyway a few days later—and that thesimilarity of names between Fritsch and Rittmeister von Frisch, whom hehad actually blackmailed for homosexualism, had led to the frame-up. Noattempt was made by Fritsch or the Army to expose the Gestapo’s realrole, nor the personal guilt of Himmler and Heydrich in cooking up thefalse charges. On the second day, March 18, the trial was concluded withthe inevitable verdict: “Proven not guilty as charged, and acquitted.”

* See previous chapter.

Anschluss: The Rape of A ustria 355

It was a personal exoneration for General von Fritsch but it did notrestore him to his command, nor the Army to its former position of someindependence in the Third Reich. Since the trial was held in camera, thepublic knew nothing of it or of the issues involved. On March 25 Hitlersent 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 atHimmler in court, now made a final futile gesture. He challenged theGestapo chief to a duel. The challenge, drawn up in strict accordancewith the old military code of honor by General Beck himself, was givento General von Rundstedt, as the senior ranking Army officer, to deliverto the head of the S.S. But Rundstedt got cold feet, carried it around inhis pocket for weeks and in the end forgot it.

General von Fritsch, and all he stood for, soon faded out of Germanlife. But what did he stand for in the end? In December he was writinghis friend Baroness Margot von Schutzbar a letter which indicated thepathetic confusion into which he, like so many of the other generals, hadfallen.

It is really strange that so many people should regard the future withincreasing fears, in spite of the Fuehrer’s indisputable successes during thepast years . . .

Soon after the war I came to the conclusion that we should have to bevictorious 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 Ultra-montanism, and

3. Against the Jews.

We are in the midst of these battles and the one against the Jews is themost 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’sGermany. I shall accompany my regiment only as a target, because Icannot stay at home.”

That is what he did. On August 11, 1938, he had been named colonelin chief of his old regiment, the 12th Artillery Regiment, a purely honorarytitle. On September 22,1939, he was the target of a Polish machine gunnerbefore beleaguered Warsaw, and four days later he was buried with fullmilitary honors in Berlin on a cold, rainy, dark morning, one of thedreariest days, according to my diary, I ever lived through in the capital.

With Fritsch’s discharge as Commander in Chief of the German Armytwenty months before, Hitler had won, as we have seen, a complete victoryover the last citadel of possible opposition in Germany, the old, traditionalArmy officer caste. Now, in the spring of 1938, by his clever coup inAustria, he had further established his hold on the Army, demonstratinghis bold leadership and emphasizing that he alone would make the

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decisions in foreign policy and that it was the Army’s role merely to supplythe force, or the threat of force. Moreover, he had given the Army, with-out the sacrifice of a man, a strategic position which rendered Czechoslo-vakia militarily indefensible. There was no time to lose in taking advantageof it.

On April 21, eleven days after the Nazi plebiscite on Austria, Hitlercalled in General Keitel, Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces,to discuss Case Green.

12

THE ROAD TO MUNICH

Case Green was the code name of the plan for a surprise attack onCzechoslovakia. It had first been drawn up, as we have seen, on June24, 1937, by Field Marshal von Blomberg, and Hitler had elaborated onit in his lecture to the generals on November 5, admonishing them that“the descent upon the Czechs” would have to be “carried out with lightningspeed” and that it might take place “as early as 1938.”*

Obviously, the easy conquest of Austria now made Case Green a matterof some urgency; the plan must be brought up to date and preparations forcarrying it out begun. It was for this purpose that Hitler summonedKeitel 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 con-clusions” and “propaganda.”1

Hitler rejected the “idea of strategic attack out of the blue without causeor possibility of justification” because of “hostile world opinion whichmight lead to a critical situation.” He thought a second alternative, “actionafter a period of diplomatic discussions which gradually lead to a crisisand to war,” was “undesirable because Czech (Green) security measureswill have been taken.” The Fuehrer preferred, at the moment at least, athird alternative: “Lightning action based on an incident (for example,the murder of the German minister in the course of an anti-Germandemonstration).”f Such an “incident,” it will be remembered, was at onetime planned to justify a German invasion of Austria, when Papen wasto have been the victim. In Hitler’s gangster world German envoys abroadwere certainly expendable.

The German warlord, as he now was—since he had taken over per-sonal command of the armed forces—emphasized to General Keitel thenecessity of speed in the operations.

* See above, pp. 303-08.t The parentheses are in the original.

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The first four days of military action are, politically speaking, decisive. Inthe absence of outstanding military successes, a European crisis is certain torise. Faits accomplis must convince foreign powers of the hopelessness ofmilitary intervention.

As for the propaganda side of the war, it was not yet time to call inDr. Goebbels. Hitler merely discussed leaflets “for the conduct of theGermans in Czechoslovakia” and those which would contain “threats tointimidate the Czechs.”

The Republic of Czechoslovakia, which Hitler was now determined todestroy, was the creation of the peace treaties, so hateful to the Germans,after the First World War. It was also the handiwork of two remarkableCzech intellectuals, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, a self-educated son of acoachman, who became a noted savant and the country’s first President;and Eduard Benes, son of a peasant, who worked his way through theUniversity of Prague and three French institutions of higher learning, andwho after serving almost continually as Foreign Minister became thesecond President on the retirement of Masaryk in 1935. Carved out of theHapsburg Empire, which in the sixteenth century had acquired the ancientKingdom of Bohemia, Czechoslovakia developed during the years thatfollowed its founding in 1918 into the most democratic, progressive, en-lightened and prosperous state in Central Europe.

But by its very make-up of several different nationalities it was grippedfrom the beginning by a domestic problem which over twenty years it hadnot been able entirely to solve. This was the question of its minorities.Within the country lived one million Hungarians, half a million Rutheniansand three and a quarter million Sudeten Germans. These peoples lookedlongingly toward their “mother” countries, Hungary, Russia, and Germanyrespectively, though the Sudeteners had never belonged to the GermanReich (except as a part of the loosely formed Holy Roman Empire) butonly to Austria. At the least, these minorities desired more autonomythan they had been given.

Even the Slovaks, who formed a quarter of the ten million Czecho-slovaks, wanted some measure of autonomy. Although racially andlinguistically closely related to the Czechs, the Slovaks had developeddifferently—historically, culturally and economically—largely due totheir centuries-old domination by Hungary. An agreement between Czechand Slovak emigres in America signed in Pittsburgh on May 30, 1918,had provided for the Slovaks’ having their own government, parliamentand courts. But the government in Prague had not felt bound by thisagreement and had not kept it.

To be sure, compared to minorities in most other countries even in theWest, even in America, those in Czechoslovakia were not badly off. Theyenjoyed not only full democratic and civil rights—including the right tovote—but to a certain extent were given their own schools and allowed tomaintain their own cultural institutions. Leaders of the minority political

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parties often served as ministers in the central government. Nevertheless,the Czechs, not fully recovered from the effects of centuries of oppressionby the Austrians, left a great deal to be desired in solving the minoritiesproblem. They were often chauvinistic and frequently tactless. I recallfrom my own earlier visits to the country the deep resentment in Slovakiaagainst the imprisonment of Dr. Vojtech Tuka, at that time a respectedprofessor, who had been sentenced to fifteen years’ confinement “fortreason,” though it was doubtful that he was guilty of more than workingfor Slovak autonomy. Above all, the minority groups felt that the Czecho-slovak government had not honored the promises made by Masaryk andBenes to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to establish a cantonal systemsimilar to that of Switzerland.

Ironically enough, in view of what is now to be set down here, theSudeten Germans had fared tolerably well in the Czechoslovak state—certainly better than any other minority in the country and better thanthe German minorities in Poland or in Fascist Italy. They resented thepetty tyrannies of local Czech officials and the discrimination against themthat sometimes occurred in Prague. They found it difficult to adjust to theloss of their former dominance in Bohemia and Moravia under the Haps-burgs. But lying in compact groups along the northwestern and south-western parts of the new Republic, where most of the industry of thecountry was concentrated, they prospered and as the years went by theygradually reached a state of relative harmony with the Czechs, continuingalways to press for more autonomy and more respect for their linguisticand cultural rights. Until the rise of Hitler, there was no serious politicalmovement which asked for more. The Social Democrats and otherdemocratic parties received most of the Sudeten votes.

Then in 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor, the virus of NationalSocialism struck the Sudeten Germans. In that year was formed theSudeten German Party (S.D.P.) under the leadership of a mild-manneredgymnastics teacher by the name of Konrad Henlein. By 1935, the partywas being secretly subsidized by the German Foreign Office to the amountof 15,000 marks a month.2 Within a couple of years it had captured themajority of the Sudeten Germans, only the Social Democrats and theCommunists remaining outside it. By the time of the Anschluss Henlein’sparty, which for three years had been taking its orders from Berlin, wasready to do the bidding of Adolf Hitler.

To receive this bidding, Henlein sped to Berlin a fortnight after theannexation of Austria and on March 28 was closeted with Hitler for threehours, Ribbentrop and Hess also being present. Hitler’s instructions, asrevealed in a Foreign Office memorandum, were that “demands should bemade by the Sudeten German Party which are unacceptable to the Czechgovernment.” As Henlein himself summarized the Fuehrer’s views, “Wemust always demand so much that we can never be satisfied.”3

Thus, the plight of the German minority in Czechoslovakia was forHitler merely a pretext, as Danzig was to be a year later in regard toPoland, for cooking up a stew in a land he coveted, undermining it, con-

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fusing and misleading its friends and concealing his real purpose. Whatthat purpose was he had made clear in his November 5 harangue to themilitary leaders and in the initial directives of Case Green: to destroy theCzechoslovak state and to grab its territories and inhabitants for the ThirdReich. Despite what had happened in Austria, the leaders of France andGreat Britain did not grasp this. All through the spring and summer,indeed almost to the end, Prime Minister Chamberlain and PremierDaladier apparently sincerely believed, along with most of the rest of theworld, that all Hitler wanted was justice for his kinsfolk in Czechoslovakia.

In fact, as the spring days grew warmer the British and French govern-ments went out of their way to pressure the Czech government to grantfar-reaching concessions to the Sudeten Germans. On May 3 the newGerman ambassador in London, Herbert von Dirksen, was reporting toBerlin that Lord Halifax had informed him of a demarche the Britishgovernment would shortly make in Prague “which would aim at inducingBenes to show the utmost measure of accommodation to the SudetenGermans.”4 Four days later, on May 7, the British and French ministersin Prague made their demarche, urging the Czech government “to go tothe utmost limit,” as the German minister reported to Berlin, to meet theSudeten demands. Hitler and Ribbentrop seemed quite pleased to findthat the British and French governments were so concerned with aidingthem.

Concealment of German aims, however, was more than ever necessaryat this stage. On May 12 Henlein paid a secret visit to the Wilhelmstrassein Berlin and received instructions from Ribbentrop on how to bamboozlethe British when he arrived in London that evening to see Sir RobertVansittart, chief diplomatic adviser to the Foreign Secretary, and otherBritish officials. A memorandum by Weizsaecker laid down the line tobe taken. Henlein will deny in London that he is acting on instructionsfrom Berlin . . . Finally, Henlein will speak of the progressive disin-tegration of the Czech political structure, in order to discourage thosecircles which consider that their intervention on behalf of this structuremay still be of use. 3 On the same day the German minister in Prague waswiring Ribbentrop about the need of precaution to cover his legation inits work of handing over money and instructions to the Sudeten GermanParty.

Hugh R. Wilson, the American ambassador in Berlin, called on Weiz-saecker on May 14 to discuss the Sudeten crisis and was told of Germanfears that Czech authorities were deliberately provoking a European crisisin order to try to prevent the “disintegration of Czechoslovakia.” Twodays later, on May 16, Major Schmundt got off an urgent and “most secret”telegram to OKW headquarters on behalf of Hitler, who was resting atObersalzberg, asking how many divisions on the Czech frontier were“ready to march within twelve hours, in the case of mobilization.” Lieu-tenant 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 theirnumbers and adding one armored and one mountain division.6

Hitler was getting restless for action. The next day, the seventeenth, hewas inquiring of OKW for precise information on the fortifications whichthe Czechs had constructed in the Sudeten mountains on their borders.These were known as the Czech Maginot Line. Zeitzler replied fromBerlin on the same day with a long and “most secret” telegram informingthe Fuehrer in considerable detail of the Czech defense works. He madeit clear that they were fairly formidable.7

THE FIRST CRISIS: MAY 1938

The weekend which began on Friday, May 20, developed into a criticalone and would later be remembered as the “May crisis.” During theensuing forty-eight hours, the governments in London, Paris, Prague andMoscow were panicked into the belief that Europe stood nearer to warthan it had at any time since the summer of 1914. This may have beenlargely due to the possibility that new plans for a German attack onCzechoslovakia, which were drawn up for Hitler by OKW and presentedto him on that Friday, leaked out. At any rate, it was believed at least inPrague and London that Hitler was about to launch aggression againstCzechoslovakia. In this belief the Czechs began to mobilize and Britain,France and Russia displayed a firmness and a unity in the face of whattheir governments feared to be an imminent German threat which theywere not to show again until a new world war had almost destroyed them.

On Friday, May 20, General Keitel dispatched to Hitler at the Obersalz-berg a new draft of Case Green which he and his staff had been workingon since the Fuehrer had laid down the general lines for it in their meetingon April 21. In an obsequious letter to the Leader attached to the newplan, Keitel explained that it took into account “the situation created bythe incorporation of Austria into the German Reich” and that it wouldnot be discussed with the commanders in chief of the three armed servicesuntil “you, my Fuehrer,” approved it and signed it.

The new directive for “Green,” dated Berlin, May 20, 1938, is aninteresting and significant document. It is a model of the kind of Naziplanning for aggression with which the world later became acquainted.

It is not my intention [it began] to smash Czechoslovakia by military actionin the immediate future without provocation, unless an unavoidable develop-ment . . . within [emphasis in the original] Czechoslovakia forces the issue,or political events in Europe create a particularly favorable opportunity whichmay perhaps never recur.8

Three “political possibilities for commencing the operation” are con-sidered. The first, “a sudden attack without convenient outward excuse,”is rejected.

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Operations preferably will be launched, either:

(a) after a period of increasing diplomatic controversies and tension linkedwith military preparations, which will be exploited so as to shift the war guilton the enemy.

(b) by lightning action as the result of a serious incident which will subjectGermany to unbearable provocation and which, in the eyes of at least a partof world opinion, affords the moral justification for military measures.

Case (b) is more favorable, both from a military and a political point ofview.

As for the military operation itself, it was to attain such a success withinfour days that it would “demonstrate to enemy states which may wish tointervene the hopelessness of the Czech military position and also providean incentive to those states which have territorial claims upon Czecho-slovakia to join in immediately against her.” Those states were Hungaryand Poland, and the plan counted on their intervention. Whether Francewould honor its obligations to the Czechs was considered doubtful, but“attempts by Russia to give Czechoslovakia military support are to beexpected.”

The German High Command, or at least Keitel and Hitler, were soconfident that the French would not fight that only a “minimum strengthis 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 ofCzechoslovakia.” The “task of the bulk of the Army,” aided by theLuftwaffe, was “to smash the Czechoslovak Army and to occupy Bohemiaand Moravia as quickly as possible.”

It was to be total war, and for the first time in the planning of Germansoldiers the value of what the directive calls “propaganda warfare” and“economic warfare” is emphasized and their employment woven into theover-all military plan of attack.

Propaganda warfare [emphasis in the original] must on the one handintimidate the Czechs by means of threats and wear down their power ofresistance; on the other hand it must give the national minorities indications asto how to support our military operations and influence the neutrals in ourfavor.

Economic warfare has the task of employing all available economic resourcesto hasten the final collapse of the Czechs ... In the course of military opera-tions it is important to help to increase the total economic war effort by rapidlycollecting information about important factories and setting them going againas soon as possible. For this reason the sparing—as far as military operationspermit—of Czech industrial and engineering establishments may be of decisiveimportance to us.

This model for Nazi aggression was to remain essentially unchangedand to be used with staggering success until an aroused world much laterwoke up to it

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Shortly after noon on May 20, the German minister in Prague sent an“urgent and most secret” wire to Berlin reporting that the Czech ForeignMinister 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 foranxiety,” but he requested Berlin to inform him immediately what, ifanything, was up.

This was the first of a series of feverish diplomatic exchanges thatweekend which shook Europe with a fear that Hitler was about to moveagain and that this time a general war would follow. The basis for theinformation received by British and Czech intelligence that German troopswere concentrating on the Czech border has never, so far as I know, cometo light. To a Europe still under the shock of the German military occupa-tion of Austria there were several straws in the wind. On May 19 anewspaper in Leipzig had published a report of German troop movements.Henlein, the Sudeten Fuehrer, had announced the breaking off of hisparty’s negotiations with the Czech government on May 9 and it wasknown that on his return from London on the fourteenth he had stoppedoff at Berchtesgaden to see Hitler and that he was still there. There wereshooting affrays in the Sudetenland. And all through May Dr. Goebbels’propaganda war—featuring wild stories of “Czech terror” against theSudeten Germans—had been stepped up. The tension seemed to bereaching a climax.

Though there was some movement of German troops in connection withspring maneuvers, particularly in the eastern regions, no evidence wasever 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 containconfidential assurances to the Wilhelmstrasse from Colonel Jodi of theOKW that there had been no such concentrations either in Silesia or inLower Austria. There had been nothing, Jodi asserted in messages notintended for foreign perusal, “apart from peacetime maneuvers.”9 It wasnot that the Czech border was denuded of German troops. As we haveseen, on May 16 Hitler had been informed by OKW, in answer to hisurgent request for information, that there were twelve German divisionson the Czech frontier “ready to march within twelve hours.”

Could it have been that Czech or British intelligence got wind of thetelegrams which exchanged this information? And that they learned of thenew directive for “Green” which Keitel dispatched for Hitler’s approvalon May 20? For on the next day the Czech Chief of Staff, General Krejci,told the German military attache in Prague, Colonel Toussaint, that hehad “irrefutable proof that in Saxony a concentration of from eight toten [German] divisions had taken place.”10 The figures on the number ofdivisions were not far from correct, even if the information on the mannerof their deployment was somewhat inaccurate. At any rate, on the after-noon of May 20, following an emergency cabinet session at HradschinPalace in Prague presided over by President Benes, the Czechs decided

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on an immediate partial mobilization. One class was called to the colorsand certain technical reservists were mobilized. The Czech government,in contrast to the Austrian two months before, did not intend to give upwithout a fight.

The Czech mobilization, partial though it was, sent Adolf Hitler intoa fit of fury, and his feelings were not assuaged by the dispatches thatarrived for him at Obersalzberg from the German Foreign Office in Berlintelling of continual calls by the British and French ambassadors warningGermany that aggression against Czechoslovakia meant a European war.

The Germans had never been subjected to such strenuous and persistentdiplomatic pressure as the British employed on this weekend. Sir NevileHenderson, the British ambassador, who had been sent to Berlin by PrimeMinister Chamberlain to apply his skills as a professional diplomat to theappeasement of Hitler and who applied them to the utmost, called re-peatedly at the German Foreign Office to inquire about German troopmovements and to advise caution. There is no doubt that he was eggedon by Lord Halifax and the British Foreign Office, for Henderson, asuave, debonair diplomat, had little sympathy with the Czechs, as all whoknew him in Berlin were aware. He saw Ribbentrop twice on May 21 andon the next day, though it was a Sunday, called on State Secretary vonWeizsaecker—Ribbentrop having been hastily convoked to Hitler’s pres-ence at Obersalzberg—to deliver a personal message from Halifax stressingthe gravity of the situation. In London, the British Foreign Secretary alsocalled in the German ambassador on the Sabbath and emphasized howgrave the moment was.

In all these British communications the Germans did not fail to note, asAmbassador von Dirksen pointed out in a dispatch after seeing Halifax,that the British government, while certain that France would go to theaid of Czechoslovakia, did not affirm that Britain would too. The furthestthe British would go was to warn, as Dirksen says Halifax did, that “in theevent of a European conflict it was impossible to foresee whether Britainwould not be drawn into it.”11 As a matter of fact, this was as far asChamberlain’s government would ever go—until it was too late to stopHitler. It was this writer’s impression in Berlin from that moment untilthe end that had Chamberlain frankly told Hitler that Britain would dowhat it ultimately did in the face of Nazi aggression, the Fuehrer wouldnever have embarked on the adventures which brought on the SecondWorld War—an impression which has been immensely strengthened bythe study of the secret German documents. This was the well-meaningPrime Minister’s fatal mistake.

Adolf Hitler, brooding fitfully in his mountain retreat above Berchtes-gaden, felt deeply humiliated by the Czechs and by the support given themin London, Paris and even Moscow, and nothing could have put theGerman dictator in a blacker, uglier mood. His fury was all the moreintense because he was accused, prematurely, of being on the point ofcommitting an aggression which he indeed intended to commit. That very

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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 orderedthe Foreign Office in Berlin to inform the Czech envoy on Monday, May23, that Germany had no aggressive intentions toward Czechoslovakiaand that the reports of German troop concentrations on her borders werewithout foundation. In Prague, London, Paris and Moscow the govern-ment 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 awaywith 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 grewwithin him a burning rage to get even with Czechoslovakia and particularlywith President Benes, who, he believed, had deliberately humiliated him,he suddenly appeared in Berlin on May 28 and convoked the rankingofficers 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 28,1 ordered:

1. That preparations should be made for military action against this stateby October 2.

2. That the construction of our western defenses should be greatly extendedand speeded up . . .

The immediate mobilization of 96 divisions was planned, to beginwith . . ,12

To his assembled confederates, Goering, Keitel, Brauchitsch, Beck,Admiral Raeder, Ribbentrop and Neurath, he thundered, “It is my un-shakable will that Czechoslovakia shall be wiped off the map!”13 CaseGreen was again brought out and again revised.

Jodi’s diary traces what had been going on in Hitler’s feverish, vindic-tive mind.

The intention of the Fuehrer not to activate the Czech problem as yet ischanged because of the Czech strategic troop concentration of May 21, whichoccurs without any German threat and without the slightest cause for it.Because of Germany s self-restraint, its consequences lead to a loss of prestigeof 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 onMay 30 do not differ essentially from those of the version submitted toHitler nine days before. But there are two significant changes. Instead ofthe opening sentence of May 21, which read: “It is not my intention tosmash Czechoslovakia in the near future,” the new directive began: “It ismy unalterable decision to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in thenear future.”

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What the “near future” meant was explained by Keitel in a coveringletter. “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 newdirective for “Green” and that because of its demand for “an immediatebreakthrough into Czechoslovakia right on X Day ... the previousintentions of the Army must be changed considerably,” Jodi added thefollowing sentence:

The whole contrast becomes acute once more between the Fuehrer’s intuitionthat we must do it this year and the opinion of the Army that we cannot do itas yet because most certainly the Western powers will interfere and we arenot as yet equal to them.18

The perceptive Wehrmacht staff officer had put his finger on a new riftbetween Hitler and some of the highest-ranking generals of the Army. Theopposition to the Fuehrer’s grandiose plans for aggression was led byGeneral Ludwig Beck, Chief of the Army General Staff, who henceforthwould assume the leadership of such resistance as there was to Hitler inthe Third Reich. Later this sensitive, intelligent, decent but indecisivegeneral would base his struggle against the Nazi dictator on broad grounds.As late as the spring of 1938, however, after more than four years ofNational Socialism, Beck opposed the Fuehrer only on the narrowerprofessional grounds that Germany was not yet strong enough to take onthe Western Powers and perhaps Russia as well.

Beck, as we have seen, had welcomed Hitler’s coming to power and hadpublicly acclaimed the Fuehrer for re-establishing the conscript GermanArmy in defiance of Versailles. As far back as 1930, it will be rememberedfrom earlier pages, Beck, then an obscure regimental commander, hadgone out of his way to defend three of his subalterns on a treason chargethat they were fomenting Nazism in the armed forces and, in fact, hadtestified in their favor before the Supreme Court after Hitler had appearedon the stand and warned that when he came to power “heads would roll.”It was not the Fuehrer’s aggression against Austria—which Beck hadsupported—but the rolling of General von Fritsch’s head after the Gestapoframe-up which seems to have cleared his mind. Swept of its cobwebs itbegan to perceive that Hitler’s policy of deliberately risking war withBritain, 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 whichthe Wehrmacht was instructed to hasten plans for attacking Czechoslo-

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vakia, and on May 5 he wrote out the first of a series of memoranda forGeneral von Brauchitsch, the new Commander in Chief of the Army,strenuously opposing any such action.17 They are brilliant papers, blunt asto unpleasant facts and full of solid reasoning and logic. Although Beckoverestimated the strength of will of Britain and France, the politicalshrewdness of their leaders and the power of the French Army, and in theend proved wrong on the outcome of the Czech problem, his long-rangepredictions turned out, so far as Germany was concerned, to be deadlyaccurate.

Beck was convinced, he wrote in his May 5 memorandum, that aGerman attack on Czechoslovakia would provoke a European war inwhich Britain, France and Russia would oppose Germany and in whichthe United States would be the arsenal of the Western democracies.Germany simply could not win such a war. Its lack of raw materials alonemade victory impossible. In fact, he contended, Germany’s “military-economic situation is worse than it was in 1917-18,” when the collapseof the Kaiser’s armies began.

On May 28, Beck was among the generals convoked to the ReichChancellery after the “May crisis” to hear Hitler storm that he intended towipe Czechoslovakia off the map the coming autumn. He took carefulnotes of the Fuehrer’s harangue and two days later, on the very day thatHitler was signing the new directive for “Green,” which fixed the date forthe attack as October 1, penned another and sharper memorandum toBrauchitsch criticizing Hitler’s program point by point. To make sure thathis cautious Commander in Chief fully understood it, Beck read it to himpersonally. At the end he emphasized to the unhappy and somewhatshallow 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 fateof the Army, indeed of Germany, would be “black.” A few days later, onJune 3, Beck got off another memorandum to Brauchitsch in which hedeclared that the new directive for “Green” was “militarily unsound” andthat the Army General Staff rejected it.

Hitler, however, pressed forward with it. The captured “Green” filediscloses how frenzied he grew as the summer proceeded. The usualautumn troop maneuvers, he orders, must be moved forward so that theArmy will be in trim for the attack. Special exercises must be held “in thetaking of fortifications by surprise attack.” General Keitel is informed that“the Fuehrer repeatedly emphasized the necessity of pressing forwardmore rapidly the fortification work in the west.” On June 9, Hitler asksfor more information on Czech armament and receives immediately a de-tailed report on every conceivable weapon, large and small, used by theCzechs. On the same day he asks, “Are the Czech fortifications stilloccupied in reduced strength?” In his mountain retreat, where he isspending the summer, surrounded by his toadies, his spirits rise and fallas he toys with war. On June 18 he issues a new “General GuidingDirective” to “Green.”

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There is no danger of a preventive war against Germany ... I will decideto take action against Czechoslovakia only if I am firmly convinced . . . thatFrance will not march and that therefore England will not intervene.

On July 7, however, Hitler is laying down “considerations” of what todo if France and Britain intervene. “The prime consideration,” he says,“is to hold the western fortifications” until Czechoslovakia is smashed andtroops can be rushed to the Western front. The fact that there are notroops available to hold the western fortifications does not intrude itselfupon his feverish thinking. He advises that “Russia is most likely to inter-vene” and by now he is not so sure that Poland may not too. Theseeventualities must be met, but he does not say how.

Apparently Hitler, somewhat isolated at Obersalzberg, has not yetheard the rumblings of dissent in the upper echelons of the Army GeneralStaff. Despite Beck’s pestering of Brauchitsch with his memoranda, theGeneral Staff Chief began to realize by midsummer that his unstableCommander in Chief was not bringing his opinions to the notice of theFuehrer. By the middle of July Beck therefore determined to make onelast desperate effort to bring matters to a head, one way or the other. OnJuly 16 he penned his last memorandum to Brauchitsch. He demandedthat the Army tell Hitler to halt his preparations for war.

In full consciousness of the magnitude of such a step but also of myresponsibilities I feel it my duty to urgently ask that the Supreme Commanderof the Armed Forces [Hitler] call off his preparations for war, and abandon theintention of solving the Czech question by force until the military situation isfundamentally changed. For the present I consider it hopeless, and this viewis shared by all the higher officers of the General Staff.

Beck took his memorandum personally to Brauchitsch and augmentedit orally with further proposals for unified action on the part of the Armygenerals should Hitler prove recalcitrant. Specifically, he proposed thatin that case the ranking generals should all resign at once. And for thefirst time in the Third Reich, he raised a question which later haunted theNuremberg trials: Did an officer have a higher allegiance than the one tothe Fuehrer? At Nuremberg dozens of generals excused their war crimesby answering in the negative. They had to obey orders, they said. ButBeck on July 16 held a different view, which he was to press, unsuccessfullyfor the most part, to the end. There were “limits,” he said, to one’sallegiance to the Supreme Commander where conscience, knowledge andresponsibility forbade carrying out an order. The generals, he felt, hadreached those limits. If Hitler insisted on war, they should resign in abody. In that case, he argued, a war was impossible, since there would benobody to lead the armies.

The Chief of the German Army General Staff was now aroused as hehad never been before in his lifetime. The scales were falling from his eyes.

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What was at stake for the German nation, he saw at last, was more thanjust the thwarting of a hysterical head of state bent, out of pique, on attack-ing a small neighboring nation at the risk of a big war. The whole follyof the Third Reich, its tyranny, its terror, its corruption, its contempt forthe old Christian virtues, suddenly dawned on this once pro-Nazi general.Three days later, on July 19, he went again to Brauchitsch to speak ofthis revelation.

Not only, he insisted, must the generals go on strike to prevent Hitlerfrom starting a war, but they must help clean up the Third Reich. TheGerman people and the Fuehrer himself must be freed from the terror ofthe S.S. and the Nazi party bosses. A state and society ruled by law mustbe restored. Beck summed up his reform program:

For the Fuehrer, against war, against boss rule, peace with the Church, freeexpression of opinion, an end to the Cheka terror, restoration of justice, reduc-tion 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 naive politically to realize that Hitler, more than any othersingle man, was responsible for the very conditions in Germany whichnow revolted him. However, Beck’s immediate task was to continue tobrowbeat the hesitant Brauchitsch into presenting an ultimatum on behalfof the Army to Hitler calling on him to stop his preparations for war.To further this purpose he arranged a secret meeting of the commandinggenerals for August 4. He prepared a ringing speech that the Army Com-mander in Chief was to read, rallying the senior generals behind him ina common insistence that there be no Nazi adventures leading to armedconflict. Alas for Beck, Brauchitsch lacked the courage to read it. Beckhad to be content with reading his own memorandum of July 16, whichleft a deep impression on most of the generals. But no decisive action wastaken and the meeting of the top brass of the German Army broke up with-out their having had the courage to call Hitler to count, as their predeces-sors once had done with the Hohenzollern emperors and the ReichChancellors.

Brauchitsch did summon up enough courage to show Beck’s July 16memorandum to Hitler. Hitler’s response was to call in not the resistingranking generals, who were behind it, but the officers just below them, theArmy and Air Force staff chiefs of various commands who formed ayounger set on which he believed he could count after he had treated it tohis persuasive oratory. Summoned to the Berghof on August 10—Hitlerhad scarcely budged from his mountain villa all summer—they were treatedafter dinner to a speech that, according to Jodi, who was present and whodescribed it in his faithful diary, lasted nearly three hours. But on thisoccasion the eloquence of the Fuehrer was not so persuasive as he hadhoped. Both Jodi and Manstein, who was also present, later told of “amost serious and unpleasant clash” between General von Wietersheim

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and Hitler. Wietersheim was the ranking officer at the gathering and asdesignate chief of staff of the Army of the West under General WilhelmAdam he dared to speak up about the key problem which Hitler and theOKW were dodging: that with almost all of the military forces committedto the blow against Czechoslovakia, Germany was defenseless in the westand would be overrun by the French. In fact, he reported, the West Wallcould not be held for more than three weeks.

The Fuehrer [Jodi recounted in his diary] becomes furious and flames up,bursting into the remark that in such a case the whole Army would not be goodfor anything. “I say to you, Herr General [Hitler shouted back], the positionwill be held not only for three weeks but for three years!”18

With what, he did not say. On August 4, General Adam had reportedto the meeting of senior generals that in the west he would have only fiveactive divisions and that they would be overwhelmed by the French.Wietersheim presumably gave the same figure to Hitler, but the Fuehrerwould not listen. Jodi, keen staff officer though he was, was now so muchunder the spell of the Leader that he left the meeting deeply depressedthat the generals did not seem to understand Hitler’s genius.

The cause of this despondent opinion [Wietersheim’s], which unfortunatelyis 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 feelsitself responsible for political decisions instead of obeying and carrying out itsmilitary assignments. Admittedly it does the last with traditional devotion butthe vigor of the soul is lacking because in the end it does not believe in thegenius 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 talkingabout the opposition between the opinions of the generals and those of theFuehrer—but a danger for the morale of the troops. But 1 have no doubt thatthe Fuehrer will be able to boost the morale of the people when the rightmoment comes.19

Jodi might have added that Hitler would be able, too, to quell revoltamong the generals. As Manstein told the tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946,this meeting was the last at which Hitler permitted any questions or dis-cussions from the military.20 At the Jueterbog military review on August15, Hitler reiterated to the generals that he was determined “to solve theCzech question by force” and no officer dared—or was permitted—to saya word to oppose him.

Beck saw that he was defeated, largely by the spinelessness of his ownbrother officers, and on August 18 he resigned as Chief of the ArmyGeneral Staff. He tried to induce Brauchitsch to follow suit, but the

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Army commander was now coming under Hitler’s hypnotic power, nodoubt aided by the Nazi enthusiasms of the woman who was about tobecome his second wife.* As Hassell said of him, “Brauchitsch hitcheshis collar a notch higher and says: ‘I am a soidier; it is my duty to obey.’ ”21

Ordinarily the resignation of a chief of the Army General Staff in themidst of a crisis, and especially of one so highly respected as was GeneralBeck, would have caused a storm in military circles and even given rise torepercussions abroad. But here again Hitler showed his craftiness. Thoughhe accepted Beck’s resignation at once, and with great relief, he forbadeany mention of it in the press or even in the official government and militarygazettes and ordered the retired General and his fellow officers to keep itto themselves. It would not do to let the British and French governmentsget wind of dissension at the top of the German Army at this critical junc-ture and it is possible that Paris and London did not hear of the matteruntil the end of October, when it was officially announced in Berlin. Hadthey heard, one could speculate, history might have taken a differentturning; the appeasement of the Fuehrer might not have been carried sofar.

Beck himself, out of a sense of patriotism and loyalty to the Army, madeno effort to bring the news of his quitting to the public’s attention. He wasdisillusioned, though, that not a single general officer among those whohad agreed with him and backed him in his opposition to war felt calledupon 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 ofBluecher 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 himdown at a decisive moment in German history, and this embittered him.Beck’s biographer and friend noted years later the General’s “deep bitter-ness” whenever he spoke of his old commander. On such occasions hewould shake with emotion and mutter, “Brauchitsch left me in the lurch.”23

Beck s successor as Chief of the Army General Staff—though his ap-pointment was kept a secret by Hitler for several weeks, until the end ofthe crisis—was Franz Haider, fifty-four years old, who came from an oldBavarian military family and whose father had been a general. Himselftrained as an artilleryman, he had served as a young officer on the staff ofCrown Prince Rupprecht in the First World War. Though a friend ofRoehm in the first postwar Munich days, which might have made himsomewhat suspect in Berlin, he had risen rapidly in the Army and for thepast year had served as Beck’s deputy. In fact, Beck recommended him toBrauchitsch as his successor, for he was certain that his deputy shared hisviews.

Haider became the first Bavarian and the first Catholic ever to becomeChief of the German General Staff—a severe break with the old Protes-

* General von Brauchitsch received his divorce during the summer and onSeptember 24 married Frau Charlotte Schmidt.

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tant Prussian tradition of the officer corps. A man of wide intellectualinterests, with a special bent for mathematics and botany (my own firstimpression of him was that he looked like a university professor of mathe-matics or science) and a devout Christian, there was no doubt that he hadthe mind and the spirit to be a true successor to Beck. The question waswhether, like his departed chief, he lacked the knack of taking decisiveaction at the proper moment. And whether, if he did not lack it, at thatmoment he had the character to disregard his oath of allegiance to theFuehrer and move resolutely against him. For Haider, like Beck, thoughnot at first a member of a growing conspiracy against Hitler, knew about itand apparently, again like Beck, was willing to back it. As the new Chiefof the General Staff, he became the key figure in the first serious plot tooverthrow 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 thefew Germans who opposed Hitler that only the Army possessed the physi-cal 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 organi-zation outside of the Nazi party groups and they were, of course, unarmed.Though much would later be written about the German “resistance” move-ment, 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 lackingfollowers.

The very maintenance of its bare existence was, admittedly, difficultin a police state dominated by terror and spying. Moreover, how could atiny group—or even a large group, had there been one—rise up in revoltagainst the machine guns, the tanks, the flame throwers of the S.S.?

In the beginning, what opposition there was to Hitler sprang fromamong the civilians; the generals, as we have seen, were only too pleasedwith a system which had shattered the restrictions of the Versailles Treatyand given them the heady and traditional task of building up a great armyonce again. Ironically, the principal civilians who emerged to lead theopposition had served the Fuehrer in important posts, most of them withan initial enthusiasm for Nazism which dampened only when it began todawn on them in 1937 that Hitler was leading Germany toward a warwhich it was almost sure to lose.

One of the earliest of these to see the fight was Carl Goerdeler, themayor of Leipzig, who, first appointed Price Controller by Bruening, hadcontinued in that job for three years under Hitler. A conservative and amonarchist at heart, a devout Protestant, able, energetic and intelligent,but also indiscreet and headstrong, he broke with the Nazis in 1936 overtheir anti-Semitism and their frenzied rearmament and, resigning bothhis 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 Statesin 1937 to discreetly warn of the peril of Nazi Germany.

The light came a little later to two other eventual conspirators, JohannesPopitz, Prussian Minister of Finance, and Dr. Schacht. Both had receivedthe Nazi Party’s highest decoration, the Golden Badge of Honor, for theirservices in shaping Germany’s economy for war purposes. Both had be-gun to wake up to what Hitler’s real goal was in 1938. Neither of themseems to have been fully trusted by the inner circle of the opposition be-cause of their past and their character. Schacht was too opportunist, andHassell remarked in his diary that the Reichsbank president had a ca-pacity “for talking one way and acting another,” an opinion, he says, thatwas shared by Generals Beck and von Fritsch. Popitz was brilliant butunstable. A fine Greek scholar as well as eminent economist, he, alongwith General Beck and Hassell, was a member of the Wednesday Club, agroup of sixteen intellectuals who gathered once a week to discuss philoso-phy, history, art, science and literature and who as time went on—or ranout—formed one of the centers of the opposition.

Ulrich von Hassell became a sort of foreign-affairs adviser to the re-sistance leaders. His dispatches as ambassador in Rome during the Abys-sinian War and the Spanish Civil War, as we have seen, had been full ofadvice to Berlin on how to keep Italy embroiled with France and Britainand therefore on the side of Germany. Later he came to fear that warwith France and Britain would be fatal to Germany and that even a Ger-man alliance with Italy would be too. Far too cultivated to have anythingbut contempt for the vulgarism of National Socialism, he did not, however,voluntarily give up serving the regime. He was kicked out of the diplo-matic service in the big military, political and Foreign Office shake-upwhich Hitler engineered on February 4, 1938. A member of an old Han-over 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 hisfinger tips, Hassell, like so many others of his class, seems to have neededthe shock of being cast out by the Nazis before he became much interestedin doing anything to bring them down. Once this had happened, thissensitive, intelligent, uneasy man devoted himself to that task and in theend, as we shall see, sacrificed his life to it, meeting a barbarous end.

There were others, lesser known and mostly younger, who had opposedthe Nazis from the beginning and who gradually came together to formvarious resistance circles. One of the leading intellects of one group wasEwald von Kleist, a gentleman farmer and a descendant of the great poet.He worked closely with Ernst Niekisch, a former Social Democrat andeditor of Widerstand (Resistance), and with Fabian von Schlabrendorff,a young lawyer, who was the great-grandson of Queen Victoria’s privatephysician and confidential adviser, Baron von Stockmar. There wereformer trade-union leaders such as Julius Leber, Jakob Kaiser and Wil-helm Leuschner. Two Gestapo officials, Artur Nebe, the head of thecriminal police, and Bernd Gisevius, a young career police officer, became

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valuable aides as the conspiracies developed. The latter became the dar-ling of the American prosecution at Nuremberg and wrote a book whichsheds much light on the anti-Hitler plots, though most historians take thebook and the author with more than a grain of salt.

There were a number of sons of venerable families in Germany: CountHelmuth von Moltke, great-grandnephew of the famous Field Marshal,who later formed a resistance group of young idealists known as the KreisauCircle; Count Albrecht Bernstorff, nephew of the German ambassador inWashington during the First World War; Freiherr Karl Ludwig von Gut-tenberg, editor of a fearless Catholic monthly; and Pastor Dietrich Bon-hoeffer, a descendant of eminent Protestant clergymen on both sides ofhis family, who regarded Hitler as Antichrist and who believed it a Chris-tian duty to “eliminate him.”

Nearly all of these brave men would persevere until, after being caughtand tortured, they were executed by rope or by ax or merely murderedby the S.S.

For a good long time this tiny nucleus of civilian resistance had littlesuccess in interesting the Army in its work. As Field Marshal von Blom-berg testified at Nuremberg, “Before 1938-39 German generals did notoppose Hitler. There was no reason to oppose him, since he producedthe results they desired.” There was some contact between Goerdeler andGeneral von Hammerstein, but the former Commander in Chief of theGerman Army had been in retirement since 1934 and had little influenceamong the active generals. Early in the regime Schlabrendorff had got intouch with Colonel Hans Oster, chief assistant to Admiral Canaris in theAbwehr, the Intelligence Bureau of OKW, and found him to be not only astaunch anti-Nazi but willing to try to bridge the gulf between the militaryand civilians. However, it was not until the winter of 1937-38, when thegenerals were subjected to the successive shocks engendered by Flitler’sdecision to go to war, his shake-up of the military command, which hehimself took over, and his shabby treatment of General von Fritsch, thatsome of them became aware of the danger to Germany of the Nazi dicta-tor. The resignation of General Beck toward the end of August 1938, asthe Czech crisis grew more menacing, provided a further awakening, andthough none of his fellow officers followed him into retirement as he hadhoped, it immediately became evident that the fallen Chief of the GeneralStaff was the one person around whom both the recalcitrant generals andthe civilian resistance leaders could rally. Both groups respected andtrusted him.

Another consideration became evident to both of them. To stop Hit-ler, force would now be necessary, and only the Army possessed it. Butwho in the Army could muster it? Not Hammerstein and not even Beck,since they were in retirement. What was needed, it was realized, was tobring in generals who at the moment had actual command of troops in andaround Berlin and who thus could act effectively on short notice. GeneralHaider, the new Chief of the Army General Staff, had no actual forces

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under his command. General von Brauchitsch had the whole Army, buthe was not fully trusted. His authority would be useful but he could bebrought in only, the conspirators felt, at the last minute.

As it happened, certain key generals who were willing to help werequickly discovered and initiated into the budding conspiracy. Three ofthem held commands which were vital to the success of the venture: Gen-eral Erwin von Witzleben, commander of the all-important Wehrkreis III,which comprised Berlin and the surrounding areas; General Count Erichvon Brockdorff-Ahlefeld, commander of the Potsdam garrison, whichwas made up of the 23rd Infantry Division; and General Erich Hoepner,who commanded an armored division in Thuringia which could, if neces-sary, 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 attackCzechoslovakia and hale him before one of his own People’s Courts onthe charge that he had tried recklessly to hurl Germany into a Europeanwar and was therefore no longer competent to govern. In the meantime,for a short interim, there would be a military dictatorship followed by aprovisional government presided over by some eminent civilian. In duecourse a conservative democratic government would be formed.

There were two considerations on which the success of the coup de-pended and which involved the two key conspirators, General Haider andGeneral Beck. The first was timing. Haider had arranged with OKW thathe personally be given forty-eight hours’ notice of Hitler’s final order toattack Czechoslovakia. This would give him the time to put the plot intoexecution before the troops could cross the Czech frontier. Thus he wouldbe able not only to arrest Hitler but to prevent the fatal step that wouldlead to war.

The second factor was that Beck must be able to convince the generalsbeforehand and the German people later (during the proposed trial ofHitler) that an attack on Czechoslovakia would bring in Britain andFrance and thus precipitate a European war, for which Germany was notprepared and which it would certainly lose. This had been the burden ofhis memoranda all summer and it was the basis of all that he was nowprepared to do: to preserve Germany from a European conflict which hebelieved would destroy her—by overthrowing Hitler.

Alas for Beck, and for the future of most of the world, it was Hitler andnot the recently resigned Chief of the General Staff who proved to have theshrewder view of the possibilities of a big war. Beck, a cultivated Euro-pean with a sense of history, could not conceive that Britain and Francewould willfully sacrifice their self-interest by not intervening in case of aGerman attack on Czechoslovakia. He had a sense of history but not ofcontemporary politics. Hitler had. For some time now he had felt him-self reinforced in his judgment that Prime Minister Chamberlain wouldsacrifice the Czechs rather than go to war and that, in such a case, Francewould not fulfill her treaty obligations to Prague.

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The Wilhelmstrasse had not failed to notice dispatches published inthe New York newspapers as far back as May 14 in which their Londoncorrespondents had reported an “off-the-record” luncheon talk withChamberlain at Lady Astor’s. The British Prime Minister, the journal-ists reported, had said that neither Britain nor France nor probably Rus-sia would come to the aid of Czechoslovakia in the case of a German at-tack, that the Czech state could not exist in its present form and thatBritain favored, in the interest of peace, turning over the Sudetenland toGermany. Despite angry questions in the House of Commons, the Ger-mans noted, Chamberlain had not denied the veracity of the Americandispatches.

On June 1, the Prime Minister had spoken, partly off the record, toBritish correspondents, and two days later the Times had published thefirst of its leaders which were to help undermine the Czech position; ithad urged the Czech government to grant “self-determination” to thecountry’s minorities “even if it should mean their secession from Czecho-slovakia” and for the first time it had suggested plebiscites as a means ofdetermining what the Sudetens and the others desired. A few days laterthe German Embassy in London informed Berlin that the Times editorialwas based on Chamberlain’s off-the-record remarks and that it reflectedhis views. On June 8 Ambassador von Dirksen told the Wilhelmstrassethat the Chamberlain government would be willing to see the Sudetenareas separated from Czechoslovakia providing it was done after a plebi-scite and “not interrupted by forcible measures on the part of Germany.”24

All this must have been pleasing for Hitler to hear. The news fromMoscow also was not bad. By the end of June Friedrich Werner Countvon der Schulenburg, the German ambassador to Russia, was advisingBerlin that the Soviet Union was “hardly likely to march in defense of abourgeois state,” i.e., Czechoslovakia.28 By August 3, Ribbentrop wasinforming the major German diplomatic missions abroad that there waslittle fear of intervention over Czechoslovakia by Britain, France or Rus-sia.28

It was on that day, August 3, that Chamberlain had packed off LordRunciman 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 arrivaland after attending his press conference and talking with members of hisparty remarked in my diary that “Runciman’s whole mission smells.” Itsvery announcement in the House of Commons on July 26 had been ac-companied by a piece of prevaricating by Chamberlain himself whichmust have been unique in the experience of the British Parliament. ThePrime Minister had said that he was sending Runciman “in response to arequest from the government of Czechoslovakia.” The truth was thatRunciman had been forced down the throat of the Czech government byChamberlain. But there was an underlying and bigger falsehood. Every-one, 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 freeagent and could not negotiate, and that the dispute now was betweenPrague and Berlin. My diary notes for the first evening and subsequentdays make it clear that the Czechs knew perfectly well that Runciman hadbeen sent by Chamberlain to pave the way for the handing over of theSudetenland to Hitler. It was a shabby diplomatic trick.

And now the summer of 1938 was almost over. Runciman putteredabout in the Sudetenland and in Prague, making ever more friendly ges-tures to the Sudeten Germans and increasing demands on the Czech gov-ernment to grant them what they wanted. Hitler, his generals and hisForeign Minister were frantically busy. On August 23, the Fuehrer en-tertained aboard the liner Patria in Kiel Bay during naval maneuvers theRegent of Hungary, Admiral Horthy, and the members of the Hungariangovernment. 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 atleast help in the kitchen.”27 The Italian ambassador, Bernardo Attolico,was also a guest on the ship. But when he pressed Ribbentrop for the dateof “the German move against Czechoslovakia” so that Mussolini couldbe prepared, the German Foreign Minister gave an evasive answer. TheGermans, it was plain, did not quite trust the discretion of their Fascistally. Of Poland they were now sure. All through the summer Ambassa-dor von Moltke in Warsaw was reporting to Berlin that not only wouldPoland decline to help Czechoslovakia by allowing Russia to send troopsand planes through or over her territory but Colonel Jozef Beck, thePolish Foreign Minister, was casting covetous eyes on a slice of Czechterritory, the Teschen area. Beck already was exhibiting that fatal short-sightedness, so widely shared in Europe that summer, which in the endwould prove more disastrous than he could possibly imagine.

At OKW (the High Command of the Armed Forces) and at OKH (theHigh Command of the Army) there was incessant activity. Final planswere being drawn up to have the armed forces ready for the push-off intoCzechoslovakia by October 1. On August 24, Colonel Jodi at OKWwrote an urgent memorandum for Hitler stressing that “the fixing of theexact time for the incident’ which will give Germany provocation for mili-tary 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 whichthere is not an innocent explanation, as otherwise we shall appear to havemanufactured the incident. ... If for technical reasons the evening hoursshould be considered desirable for the incident, then the following day cannotbe X Day, but it must be the day after that ... It is the purpose of thesenotes to point out what a great interest the Wehrmacht has in the incident andthat it must be informed of the Fuehrer’s intention in good time—insofar asthe Abwehr Section is not also charged with organizing the incident.28

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The expert preparations for the onslaught on Czechoslovakia were ob-viously in fine shape by the summer’s end. But what about the defense ofthe 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 accom-panied by Jodi, Dr. Todt, the engineer in charge of building the West Wall,Himmler and various party officials. On August 27 General WilhelmAdam, a blunt and able Bavarian who was in command of the west, joinedthe party and in the next couple of days witnessed how intoxicated theFuehrer became at the triumphal reception he was given by the Rhine-landers. Adam himself was not impressed; in fact, he was alarmed, and onthe twenty-ninth in a surprising scene in Hitler’s private car he abruptlydemanded to speak with the Fuehrer alone. Not without sneers, accord-ing to the General’s later report, Hitler dismissed Himmler and his otherparty cronies. Adam did not waste words. He declared that despite allthe fanfare about the West Wall he could not possibly hold it with thetroops at his disposal. Hitler became hysterical and launched into a longharangue about how he had made Germany stronger than Britain andFrance together.

“The man who doesn’t hold these fortifications,” Hitler shouted, “is ascoundrel!”*

Nevertheless doubts on this score were rising in the minds of generalsother than Adam. On September 3, Hitler convoked the chiefs of OKWand OKH, Keitel and Brauchitsch, to the Berghof. Field units, it wasagreed, were to be moved into position along the Czech border on Septem-ber 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 orderedthat it be changed in several respects. From the notes of this meeting keptby Major Schmundt it is clear that Brauchitsch at least—for Keitel wastoo much the toady to speak up—again raised the question of how theywere going to hold out in the west. Hitler fobbed him off with the assur-ance that he had given orders for speeding up the western fortifications.30

On September 8 General Heinrich von Stuelpnagel saw Jodi and thelatter noted in his diary the General’s pessimism regarding the militaryposition 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 Czechoslo-vakia whether France intervened or not. “I must admit,” wrote the usu-ally optimistic Jodi, “that I am worried too.”

The next day, September 9, Hitler convoked Keitel, Brauchitsch andHaider to Nuremberg for a conference which began at 10 p.m., lasted un-til 4 o’clock the next morning and, as Keitel later confided to Jodi, who inturn confided it to his diary, was exceedingly stormy. Haider found him-self in the ticklish position—for the key man in the plot to overthrow Hit-

* Hitler, according to Jodi’s diary, used the word Hundsfott, a stronger word.29Telford Taylor, in Sword and Swastika, gives a fuller account based on GeneralAdam’s unpublished memoirs.

ler the moment he gave the word to attack—of having to explain in greatdetail the General Staff s plan for the campaign in Czechoslovakia, and inthe uncomfortable position, as it developed, of seeing Hitler tear it toshreds and dress down not only him but Brauchitsch for their timidity andtheir military incapabilities.31 Keitel, Jodi 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 Com-mand of the Army . . . Keitel declares that he will not tolerate any officer inOKW indulging in criticism, unsteady thoughts and defeatism . . . TheFuehrer knows that the Commander of the Army [Brauchitsch] has asked hiscommanding generals to support him in order to open the Fuehrer’s eyes aboutthe adventure which he has resolved to risk. He himself [Brauchitsch] has nomore influence with the Fuehrer.

Thus a cold and frosty atmosphere prevailed in Nuremberg and it is highlyunfortunate that the Fuehrer has the whole nation behind him with the excep-tion of the leading generals of the Army.

All of this greatly saddened the aspiring young Jodi, who had hitched hisstar to Hitler.

Only by actions can [these generals] honorably repair the damage whichthey have caused through lack of strength of mind and lack of obedience. Itis the same problem as in 1914. There is only one example of disobedience inthe Army and that is of the generals and in the end it springs from theirarrogance. They can no longer believe and no longer obey because they donot recognize the Fuehrer’s genius. Many of them still see in him the corporalof the World War but not the greatest statesman since Bismarck.32

In his talk with Jodi on September 8, General von Stuelpnagel, whoheld the post of Oberquartiermeister I in the Army High Command, andwho was in on the Haider conspiracy, had asked for written assurancesfrom OKW that the Army High Command would receive notice of Hitler’sorder for the attack on Czechoslovakia live days in advance. Jodi hadanswered that because of the uncertainties of the weather two days’ noticewas all that could be guaranteed. This, however, was enough for theconspirators.

But they needed assurances of another kind—whether, after all, theyhad been right in their assumption that Britain and France would go towar against Germany if Hitler carried out his resolve to attack Czecho-slovakia. For this purpose they had decided to send trustworthy agentsto London not only to find out what the British government intended todo but, if necessary, to try to influence its decision by informing it thatHitler had decided to attack the Czechs on a certain date in the fall, and

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that the General Staff, which knew the date, opposed it and was preparedto take the most decisive action to prevent it if Britain stood firm againstHitler to the last.

The first such emissary of the plotters, selected by Colonel Oster ofthe Abwehr, was Ewald von Kleist, who arrived in London on August 18.Ambassador Henderson in Berlin, who was already anxious to give Hitlerwhatever he wanted in Czechoslovakia, advised the British Foreign Of-fice that “it would be unwise for him [Kleist] to be received in officialquarters.”* Nevertheless Sir Robert Vansittart, chief diplomatic adviserto the Foreign Secretary and one of the leading opponents in London ofthe appeasement of Hitler, saw Kleist on the afternoon of his arrival, andWinston Churchill, still in the political wilderness in Britain, received himthe next day. To both men, who were impressed by their visitor’s sobrietyand sincerity, Kleist repeated what he had been instructed to tell, stressingthat Hitler had set a date for aggression against the Czechs and that thegenerals, most of whom opposed him, would act, but that further Britishappeasement of Hitler would cut the ground from under their feet. If Brit-ain and France would declare publicly that they would not stand idly bywhile Hitler threw his armies into Czechoslovakia and if some prominentBritish statesmen would issue a solemn warning to Germany of the conse-quences 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 bolsterhis colleagues:

I am sure that the crossing of the frontier of Czechoslovakia by Germanarmies or aviation in force will bring about renewal of the World War. I am ascertain as I was at the end of July, 1914, that England will march withFrance . . . Do not, I pray you, be misled upon this point . . .f

Vansittart took Kleist’S warning seriously enough to submit immedi-ately a report on it to both the British Prime Minister and the Foreign

* According to a German Foreign Office memorandum of August 6, Henderson, ata private party, had remarked to the Germans present “that Great Britain wouldnot think of risking even one sailor or airman for Czechoslovakia, and that anyreasonable solution would be agreed to so long as it were not attempted by force.”33t Kleist returned to Berlin on August 23 and showed Churchill’s letter to Beck,Haider, Hammerstein, Canaris, Oster and others in the plot. In Nemesis of Power(p. 413), Wheeler-Bennett writes that, according to private information given himafter 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 houseat Schmenzin in Pomerania. It was discovered there by the Gestapo after the July20, 1944, attempt on Hitler’s life and contributed to Kleist’s death sentence beforea People’s Court, which was passed and carried out on April 16, 1945. Actuallythe contents of Churchill’s letter became known to the German authorities muchsooner than the conspirators could have imagined. I found it in a German ForeignOffice memorandum which, though undated, is known to have been submitted onSeptember 6, 1938. It is marked: “Extract from a letter of Winston Churchill to aGerman confidant.”35

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Secretary, and though Chamberlain, writing to Lord Halifax, said he wasinclined “to discount a good deal of what he [Kleist] says,” he added: “Idon’t feel sure that we ought not to do something.”38 What he did was tosummon Ambassador Henderson, in the wake of some publicity, to Lon-don on August 28 “for consultations.”

He instructed his ambassador in Berlin to do two things: convey a soberwarning to Hitler and, secondly, prepare secretly a “personal contact” be-tween himself and the Fuehrer. According to his own story, Hendersonpersuaded the Prime Minister to drop the first request.37 As for thesecond, Henderson was only too glad to try to carry it out.*

This was the first step toward Munich and Hitler’s greatest bloodlessvictory.

Ignorant of this turning in Chamberlain’s course, the conspirators inBerlin made further attempts to warn the British government. On August21, Colonel Oster sent an agent to inform the British military attache inBerlin of Hitler’s intention to invade Czechoslovakia at the end of Septem-ber. “If by firm action abroad Hitler can be forced at the eleventh hourto renounce his present intentions, he will be unable to survive the blow,”he told the British. “Similarly, if it comes to war the immediate interven-tion by France and England will bring about the downfall of the regime.”Sir Nevile Henderson dutifully forwarded this warning to London, butdescribed it “as clearly biased and largely propaganda.” The blinkers onthe eyes of the debonair British ambassador seemed to grow larger andthicker as the crisis mounted.

General Haider had a feeling that the conspirators were not gettingtheir message through effectively enough to the British, and on September2 he sent his own emissary, a retired Army officer, Lieutenant ColonelHans Boehm-Tettelbach, to London to make contact with the British WarOffice and Military Intelligence. Though, according to his own story, thecolonel saw several important personages in London, he does not seem tohave made much of an impression on them.

Finally, the plotters resorted to using the German Foreign Office andthe embassy in London in a last desperate effort to induce the British toremain firm. Counselor of the embassy and charge d’affaires was TheodorKordt, whose younger brother, Erich, was chief of Ribbentrop’s secretar-iat in the German Foreign Office. The brothers were proteges of Baronvon Weizsaecker, the principal State Secretary and undoubtedly the brainsof the Foreign Office, a man who after the war made a great fuss of hisalleged anti-Nazism but who served Hitler and Ribbentrop well almostto the end. It is clear, however, from captured Foreign Office documents,

* “I honestly believe,” the ambassador had written Lord Halifax from Berlin onJuly 18, “the moment has come for Prague to get a real twist of the screw ... IfBene§ cannot satisfy Henlein, he can satisfy no Sudeten leader . . . We have gotto be disagreeable to the Czechs.”38 It seems inconceivable that even Hendersondid not know by this time that Henlein was a mere tool of Hitler and had beenordered by him to keep increasing his demands to such an extent that BeneS couldnot possibly “satisfy” him. See above, p. 359

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that at this time he opposed aggression against Czechoslovakia on thesame grounds as those of the generals: that it would lead to a lost war.With Weizsaecker’s connivance, and after consultations with Beck, Hai-der and Goerdeler, it was agreed that Theodor Kordt should sound alast warning to Downing Street. As counselor of the embassy his visits tothe British authorities would not be suspect.

The information he brought on the evening of September 5 to Sir Hor-ace Wilson, Chamberlain’s confidential adviser, seemed so important andurgent that this official spirited him by a back way to Downing Streetand the chambers of the British Foreign Secretary. There he bluntly in-formed Lord Halifax that Hitler was planning to order a general mobiliza-tion on September 16, that the attack on Czechoslovakia had been fixedfor October 1 at the latest, that the German Army was preparing to strikeagainst Hitler the moment the final order for attack was given and that itwould succeed if Britain and France held firm. Halifax was also warnedthat Hitler’s speech closing the Nuremberg Party Rally on September 12would be explosive and might precipitate a showdown over Czechoslo-vakia and that that would be the moment for Britain to stand up againstthe dictator.39

Kordt, too, despite his continuous personal contact with DowningStreet and his frankness on this occasion with the Foreign Secretary, didnot know what was in the London wind. But he got a good idea, as dideveryone else, two days later, on September 7, when the Times of Londonpublished a famous leader:

It might be worth while for the Czechoslovak Government to considerwhether they should exclude altogether the project, which has found favor insome quarters, of making Czechoslovakia a more homogeneous State by thesecession of that fringe of alien populations who are contiguous to the nationwith which they are united by race . . . The advantages to Czechoslovakiaof becoming a homogeneous State might conceivably outweigh the obviousdisadvantages of losing the Sudeten German district of the borderland.

There was no mention in the editorial of the obvious fact that by cedingthe Sudetenland to Germany the Czechs would lose both the naturalmountain defenses of Bohemia and their “Maginot Line” of fortificationsand be henceforth defenseless against Nazi Germany.

Though the British Foreign Office was quick to deny that the Timesleader represented the views of the government, Kordt telegraphed Ber-lin the next day that it was possible that “it derived from a suggestionwhich reached the Times editorial staff from the Prime Minister’s en-tourage.” Possible indeed!

In these crisis-ridden years that have followed World War II it is diffi-cult to recall the dark and almost unbearable tension that gripped thecapitals of Europe as the Nuremberg Party Rally, which had begun on

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September 6, approached its climax on September 12, when Hitler wasscheduled to make his closing speech and expected to proclaim to theworld his final decision for peace or war with Czechoslovakia. I was inPrague, the focus of the crisis, that week, and it seemed strange that theCzech capital, despite the violence unleashed by the Germans in theSudetenland, the threats from Berlin, the pressure of the British andFrench governments to yield, and the fear that they might leave Czecho-slovakia in the lurch, was the calmest of all—at least outwardly.

On September 5, President Benes, realizing that a decisive step on hispart was necessary to save the peace, convoked the Sudeten leaders Kundtand Sebekovsky to Hradschin Palace and told them to write out their fulldemands. Whatever they were he would accept them. “My God,” ex-claimed the deputy Sudeten leader, Karl Hermann Frank, the next day,“they have given us everything.” But that was the last thing the Sudetenpoliticians and their bosses in Berlin wanted. On September 7 Henlein,on instructions from Germany, broke off all negotiations with the Czechgovernment. A shabby excuse about alleged Czech police excesses atMoravska-Ostrava was given.

On September 10, Goering made a bellicose speech at the NurembergParty 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.” ButBenes’ broadcast of the same day took no notice of Goering’s diatribe; itwas a quiet and dignified appeal for calm, good will and mutual trust.

Underneath the surface, though, the Czechs were tense. I ran into Dr.Benes in the hall of the Czech Broadcasting House after his broadcast andnoted that his face was grave and that he seemed to be fully aware of theterrible position he was in. The Wilson railroad station and the airportwere full of Jews scrambling desperately to find transportation to saferparts. That weekend gas masks were distributed to the populace. Theword from Paris was that the French government was beginning to panicat the prospect of war, and the London dispatches indicated that Cham-berlain 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 fromNuremberg. Though brutal and bombastic, and dripping with venomagainst the Czech state and especially against the Czech President, theFuehrer’s speech, made to a delirious mass of Nazi fanatics gathered inthe huge stadium on the last night of the party rally, was not a declarationof war. He reserved his decision—publicly at least, for, as we know fromthe captured German documents, he had already set October 1 for theattack across the Czech frontier. He simply demanded that the Czechgovernment give “justice” to the Sudeten Germans. If it didn’t, Ger-many would have to see to it that it did.

The repercussions to Hitler’s outburst were considerable. In the Su-detenland it inspired a revolt which after two days of savage fighting the

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Czech government put down by rushing in troops and declaring martiallaw. Henlein slipped over the border to Germany proclaiming that theonly solution now was the ceding of the Sudeten areas to Germany.

This was the solution which, as we have seen, was gaining favor inLondon, but before it could be furthered the agreement of France had tobe obtained. The day following Hitler’s speech, September 13, the Frenchcabinet sat all day, remaining hopelessly divided on whether it shouldhonor its obligations to Czechoslovakia in case of a German attack, whichit believed imminent. That evening the British ambassador in Paris, SirEric Phipps, was fetched from the Opera Comique for an urgent con-ference with Prime Minister Daladier. The latter appealed to Chamber-lain to try at once to make the best bargain he could with the Germandictator.

Mr. Chamberlain, it may be surmised, needed little urging. At eleveno’clock that same night the British Prime Minister got off an urgent mes-sage to Hitler:

In view of the increasingly critical situation I propose to come over at onceto see you with a view to trying to find a peaceful solution. I propose to comeacross by air and am ready to start tomorrow.

Please indicate earliest time at which you can see me and suggest place ofmeeting. 1 should be grateful for a very early reply.40

Two hours before, the German charge d’affaires in London, TheodorKordt, had wired Berlin that Chamberlain’s press secretary had informedhim that the Prime Minister “was prepared to examine far-reaching Ger-man proposals, including plebiscite, to take part in carrying them out, andto advocate them in public.”41

The surrender that was to culminate in Munich had begun.

CHAMBERLAIN AT BERCHTESGADEN:

SEPTEMBER 15, 1938

“Good heavens!” (“7c/t bin vom Himmel gefalien!”) Hitler exclaimedwhen he read Chamberlain’s message.42 He was astounded but highlypleased that the man who presided over the destinies of the mighty BritishEmpire should come pleading to him, and flattered that a man who wassixty-nine years old and had never traveled in an airplane before shouldmake the long seven hours’ flight to Berchtesgaden at the farthest ex-tremity of Germany. Hitler had not had even the grace to suggest a meet-ing place on the Rhine, which would have shortened the trip by half.

Whatever the enthusiasm of the English,* who seemed to believe that

* Even the severest critics of Chamberlain’s foreign policy in the British press andin 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.

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the Prime Minister was making the long journey to do what Mr. Asquithand Sir Edward Grey had failed to do in 1914—warn Germany that anyaggression against a small power would bring not only France but Britaininto war against it—Hitler realized, as the confidential German papersand subsequent events make clear, that Chamberlain’s action was a god-send to him. Already apprised by the German Embassy in London thatthe British leader was prepared to advocate “far-reaching German pro-posals, the Fuehrer felt fairly certain that Chamberlain’s visit was a fur-ther assurance that, as he had believed all along, Britain and France wouldnot intervene on behalf of Czechoslovakia. The Prime Minister had notbeen with him more than an hour or so before this estimate of the situa-tion became a certainty.

In the beginning there was a diplomatic skirmish, though Hitler, aswas his custom, did most of the talking.43 Chamberlain had landed at theMunich airport at noon on September 15, driven in an open car to therailroad station and there boarded a special train for the three-hour railjourney to Berchtesgaden. He did not fail to notice train after train ofGerman troops and artillery passing on the opposite track. Hitler did notmeet his train at Berchtesgaden, but waited on the top steps of the Berghofto greet his distinguished visitor. It had begun to rain, Dr. Schmidt, theGerman interpreter, later remembered, the sky darkened and clouds hidthe mountains. It was now 4 p.m. and Chamberlain had been on his waysince dawn.

After tea Hitler and Chamberlain mounted the steps to Hitler’s studyon the second floor, the very room where the dictator had receivedSchuschnigg seven months before. At the urging of Ambassador Hender-son, Ribbentrop was left out of the conversation, an exclusion which soirritated the vain Foreign Minister that the next day he refused to giveSchmidt’s notes on the conference to the Prime Minister—a singular buttypical discourtesy—and Chamberlain thereafter was forced to rely on hismemory of what he and Hitler had said.

Hitler began the conversation, as he did his speeches, with a long ha-rangue about all that he had done for the German people, for peace, and foran Anglo-German rapprochement. There was now one problem he wasdetermined to solve one way or another.” The three million Germans inCzechoslovakia must “return” to the Reich.*

He did not wish [as Schmidt’s official account puts it] that any doubts shouldarise as to his absolute determination not to tolerate any longer that a small,second-rate country should treat the mighty thousand-year-old German Reichas something inferior . . . He was forty-nine years old, and if Germany wereto become involved in a world war over the Czechoslovak question, he wishedto lead his country through the crisis in the full strength of manhood ... He

* 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, ac-cepted this false use of the word “return." The Sudeten Germans had belonged toAustria, but never to Germany.

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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 determina-tion . . . He would face any war, even a world war, for this. The rest of theworld 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 manof immense patience, but there were limits to it. At this juncture he inter-rupted to say, “If the Fuehrer is determined to settle this matter by forcewithout waiting even for a discussion between ourselves, why did he letme 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 re-tort appears to have had its effect. Hitler calmed down. He thought theycould go “into the question whether perhaps a peaceful settlement wasstill possible after all.” And then he sprang his proposal.

Would Britain agree to a secession of the Sudeten region, or would shenot? ... A secession on the basis of the right of self-determination?

The proposal did not shock Chamberlain. Indeed, he expressed satis-faction that they “had now got down to the crux of the matter.” Accord-ing to Chamberlain’s own account, from memory, he replied that hecould not commit himself until he had consulted his cabinet and theFrench. According to Schmidt’s version, taken from his own shorthandnotes made while he was interpreting, Chamberlain did say that, but addedthat “he could state personally that he recognized the principle of the de-tachment of the Sudeten areas . . . He wished to return to England toreport to the Government and secure their approval of his personal atti-tude.”

From this surrender at Berchtesgaden, all else ensued.

That it came as no surprise to the Germans is obvious. At the verymoment of the Berchtesgaden meeting Henlein was penning a secret letterto Hitler from Eger, dated September 15, just before he fled across theborder to Germany:

My Fuehrer:

I informed the British [Runciman] delegation yesterday that the basis forfurther negotiations could . . . only be the achievement of a union with theReich.

It is probable that Chamberlain will propose such a union.44

The next day, September 16, the German Foreign Office sent confiden-tial telegrams to its embassies in Washington and several other capitals.

Fuehrer told Chamberlain yesterday he was finally resolved to put an endin one way or another to the intolerable conditions in Sudetenland within avery short time. Autonomy for Sudeten Germans is no longer being con-

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sidered, but only cession of the region to Germany. Chamberlain has indicatedpersonal approval. He is now consulting British Cabinet and is in communica-tion with Paris. Further meeting between Fuehrer and Chamberlain plannedfor very near future.45

Toward the end of their conference Chamberlain had extracted apromise from Hitler that he would take no military action until they hadagain conferred. In this period the Prime Minister had great confidence inthe Fuehrer’s word, remarking privately a day or two later, “In spite of thehardness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face, I got the impressionthat here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given hisword.”46

While the British leader was entertaining these comforting illusionsHitler went ahead with his military and political plans for the invasion ofCzechoslovakia. Colonel Jodi, on behalf of OKW, worked out with thePropaganda Ministry what he described in his diary as “joint preparationsfor refutation of our own violations of international law.” It was to be arough war, at least on the part of the Germans, and Dr. Goebbels’ jobwas to justify Nazi excesses. The plan for his lies was worked out in greatdetail.47 On September 17 Hitler assigned an OKW staff officer to helpHenlein, who was now operating from new headquarters at a castle atDondorf, outside Bayreuth, to organize the Sudeten Free Corps. It wasto be armed with Austrian weapons and its orders from the Fuehrer wereto maintain “disturbances and clashes” with the Czechs.

September 18, a day on which Chamberlain occupied himself withrallying his cabinet and the French to his policy of surrender, was a busyone 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 confirmedthe 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 namedto lead armies: General Beck the First Army, and General von Hammer-stein the Fourth Army.

Political preparations for the final blow against Czechoslovakia alsocontinued. The captured German Foreign Office documents abound withreports of increasing German pressure on Hungary and Poland to get in onthe spoils. Even the Slovaks were brought in to stir up the brew. OnSeptember 20 Henlein urged them to formulate their demands for au-tonomy “more sharply.” On the same day Hitler received Prime MinisterImredy and Foreign Minister Kanya of Hungary and gave them a dress-ing down for the hesitancy shown in Budapest. A Foreign Office memo-randum gives a lengthy report on the meeting.

First of all, the Fuehrer reproached the Hungarian gentlemen for the un-decided attitude of Hungary. He, the Fuehrer, was determined to settle the

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Czech question even at the risk of a world war ... He was convinced[however] that neither England nor France would intervene. It was Hungary’slast opportunity to join in. If she did not, he would not be in a position to putin a word for Hungarian interests. In his opinion, the best thing would beto destroy Czechoslovakia . . .

He presented two demands to the Hungarians: (1) that Hungary shouldmake an immediate demand for a plebiscite in the territories which sheclaimed, and (2) that she should not guarantee any proposed new frontiers forCzechoslovakia.48

Come what might with Chamberlain, Hitler, as he made clear to theHungarians, had no intention of allowing even a rump Czechoslovakia tolong exist. As to the British Prime Minister:

The Fuehrer declared that he would present the German demands toChamberlain with brutal frankness. In his opinion, action by the Armywould provide the only satisfactory solution. There was, however, a dangerof the Czechs submitting to every demand.

It was a danger that was to haunt the dictator in all the subsequent meet-ings with the unsuspecting British Prime Minister.

Egged on by Berlin, the Polish government on September 21 demandedof the Czechs a plebiscite in the Teschen district, where there was a largePolish minority, and moved troops to the frontier of the area. The nextday the Hungarian government followed suit. On that day, too, Septem-ber 22, the Sudeten Free Corps, supported by German S.S. detachments,occupied the Czech frontier towns of Asch and Eger, which jutted intoGerman territory.

September 22, in fact, was a tense day throughout Europe, for on thatmorning Chamberlain had again set out for Germany to confer with Hit-ler. It is now necessary to glance briefly at what the Prime Minister hadbeen up to in London during the interval between his visits to the Fuehrer.

On his return to London on the evening of September 16, Chamberlaincalled a cabinet meeting to acquaint his ministers with Hitler’s demands.Lord Runciman was summoned from Prague to make his recommenda-tions. They were astonishing. Runciman, in his zeal to appease theGermans, went further than Hitler. He advocated transferring the pre-dominantly Sudeten territories to Germany without bothering about aplebiscite. He strongly recommended the stifling of all criticism of Ger-many in Czechoslovakia “by parties or persons” through legal measures.He demanded that Czechoslovakia, even though deprived of her mountainbarrier and fortifications—and thus left helpless—should nevertheless “soremodel her foreign relations as to give assurances to her neighbors thatshe will in no circumstances attack them or enter into any aggressive ac-tion against them arising from obligations to other States.” For evenRunciman to be concerned at this hour with the danger of aggression from

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a rump Czech state against Nazi Germany seems incredible, but his fan-tastic recommendations apparently made a deep impression on the Britishcabinet and bolstered Chamberlain’s intention to meet Hitler’s demands.*

Premier Daladier and his Foreign Minister, Georges Bonnet, arrived inLondon on September 18, for consultations with the British cabinet. Nothought 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 pro-posals which the Czechs would have to accept. All territories inhabitedmore than 50 per cent by Sudeten Germans must be turned over to Ger-many to assure “the maintenance of peace and the safety of Czechoslo-vakia’s vital interests.” In return Britain and France agreed to join in“an international guarantee of the new boundaries . . . against unpro-voked aggression. Such a guarantee would supplant the mutual-assist-ance treaties which the Czech state had with France and Russia. Thiswas an easy way out for the French, and led by Bonnet, who, as the courseof events would show, was determined to outdo Chamberlain in the ap-peasement of Hitler, they seized upon it. And then there was the cant.

Both the French and British governments [they told the Czechs in a formalnote] recognize how great is the sacrifice thus required of the CzechoslovakGovernment in the cause of peace. But because that cause is common both toEurope in general and in particular to Czechoslovakia herself they have feltit 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 laterthan Wednesday [September 22], and earlier if possible. We therefore feelwe must ask for your reply at the earliest possible moment.49

And so at noon on September 19 the British and French ministers inPrague jointly presented the Anglo-French proposals to the Czech gov-ernment. They were rejected the next day in a dignified note which ex-plained—prophetically—that to accept them would put Czechoslovakia“sooner or later under the complete domination of Germany.” After re-minding France of her treaty obligations and also of the consequences tothe French position in Europe should the Czechs yield, the reply offered

Though the main points of Runciman’s recommendations were presented to thecabinet on the evening of September 16, the report itself was not officially made untilthe twenty-first, and not published until the twenty-eighth, when events had made itonly of academic interest. Wheeler-Bennett points out that certain parts of thereport give the impression of having been written after September 21. WhenRunciman left Prague on the morning of September 16, no one, not even Hitler orthe Sudeten leaders, had gone so far as to suggest that the Sudetenland be turnedover to Germany without a plebiscite. (Wheeler-Bennett, Munich pp 111-12 Thetext of the Runciman report is in the British White Paper, Cmd. 5847, No. 1.)

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to submit the whole Sudeten question to arbitration under the terms ofthe German-Czech treaty of October 16, 1925.*

But the British and French were in no mood to allow such a matter asthe sanctity of treaties to interfere with the course they had set. No soonerwas the note of rejection received by the Anglo-French envoys in Pragueat 5 p.m. on the twentieth than the British minister, Sir Basil Newton,warned the Czech Foreign Minister, Dr. Kamil Krofta, that if the Czechgovernment adhered to it Britain would disinterest herself in the fate ofthe country. M. de Lacroix, the French minister, associated himself withthis statement on behalf of France.

In London and Paris, in the meantime, the Czech note was receivedwith ill grace. Chamberlain called a meeting of his inner cabinet and atelephone link with Paris was set up for conversations with Daladier andBonnet throughout the evening. It was agreed that both governmentsshould subject Prague to further pressure. The Czechs must be told thatif they held out they could expect no help from France or Britain.

By this time President Benes realized that he was being deserted by hissupposed friends. He made one final effort to rally at least France. Shortlyafter 8 p.m. on the twentieth he had Dr. Krofta put the vital question toLacroix: Would France honor her word to Czechoslovakia in case of aGerman attack or would she not? And when at 2:15 on the morning ofSeptember 21 Newton and Lacroix got Benes out of bed, bade him with-draw his note of rejection and declared that unless this were done andthe Anglo-French proposals were accepted Czechoslovakia would haveto fight Germany alone, the President asked the French minister to put itin writing. Probably he had already given up, but he had an eye on his-tory. f

All through the next day, September 21, Benes, aching from fatigue,from the lack of sleep and from the contemplation of treachery and dis-aster, consulted with his cabinet, party leaders and the Army High Com-mand. They had shown courage in the face of enemy threats but they be-gan to crumble at the desertion of their friends and allies. What aboutRussia? As it happened, the Soviet Foreign Commissar, Litvinov, wasmaking a speech that very day at Geneva reiterating that the Soviet Unionwould stand by its treaty with Czechoslovakia. Benes called in the Rus-sian minister in Prague, who backed up what his Foreign Commissar hadsaid. Alas for the Czechs, they realized that the pact with Russia calledfor the Soviets to come to their aid on condition that France did the same.And France had reneged.

* It is worth noting that neither the British nor the French government publishedthe text of this Czech note when they later issued the documents justifying theirpolicies which led up to Munich.

t The treachery of Bonnet at this juncture is too involved to be related in a historyof Germany. Among other things, he contrived to convince the French and Britishcabinet ministers of the falsehood that the Czech government wanted the French tostate they would not fight for Czechoslovakia so that it would have a good excusefor capitulating. For the story, see Wheeler-Bennett’s Munich; Herbert Ripka,Munich, Before and After; Pertinax, The Grave Diggers of France.

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Late in the afternoon of September 21, the Czech government capitu-lated and accepted the Anglo-French plan. “We had no other choice,because we were left alone,” a government communique explainedbitterly. Privately, Benes put it more succinctly: “We have been baselybetrayed.” The next day the cabinet resigned and General Jan Sirovy,the Inspector General of the Army, became the head of a new “governmentof national concentration.”

CHAMBERLAIN AT GODESBERG: SEPTEMBER 22-23

Though Chamberlain was bringing to Hitler all that he had asked forat their Berchtesgaden meeting, both men were uneasy as they met at thelittle Rhine town of Godesberg on the afternoon of September 22. TheGerman charge d’affaires, after seeing the Prime Minister off at theLondon airport, had rushed off a wire to Berlin: “Chamberlain and hisparty have left under a heavy load of anxiety . . . Unquestionably op-position 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, wherethe talks were to take place, when Hitler strode past on his way down tothe riverbank to inspect his yacht. He seemed to have a peculiar tic.Every few steps he cocked his right shoulder nervously, his left legsnapping up as he did so. He had ugly, black patches under his eyes. Heseemed to be, as I noted in my diary that evening, on the edge of a nervousbreakdown. Teppichfresser!” muttered my German companion, aneditor who secretly despised the Nazis. And he explained that Hitler hadbeen in such a maniacal mood over the Czechs the last few days that onmore than one occasion he had lost control of himself completely, hurlinghimself 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 athome, Mr. Chamberlain appeared to be in excellent spirits when hearrived at Godesberg and drove through streets decorated not only withthe 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 Hitlerhad demanded at Berchtesgaden, and even more. There remained onlythe details to work out and for this purpose he had brought along, inaddition to Sir Horace Wilson and William Strang (the latter a ForeignOffice expert on Eastern Europe), the head of the drafting and legal depart-ment of the Foreign Office, Sir William Malkin.

Late in the afternoon the Prime Minister crossed the Rhine by ferry

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to the Hotel Dreesen* where Hitler awaited him. For once, at the startat least, Chamberlain did all the talking. For what must have been morethan an hour, judging by Dr. Schmidt’s lengthy notes of the meeting,51 thePrime Minister, after explaining that following “laborious negotiations”he had won over not only the British and French cabinets but the Czechgovernment to accept the Fuehrer’s demands, proceeded to outline ingreat detail the means by which they, could be implemented. AcceptingRunciman’s advice, he was now prepared to see the Sudetenland turnedover to Germany without a plebiscite. As to the mixed areas, their futurecould be determined by a commission of three members, a German, aCzech and one neutral. Furthermore, Czechoslovakia’s mutual-assistancetreaties with France and Russia, which were so distasteful to the Fuehrer,would be replaced by an international guarantee against an unprovokedattack on Czechoslovakia, which in the future “would have to be com-pletely neutral.”

It all seemed so simple, so reasonable, so logical to the peace-lovingBritish businessman become British Prime Minister. He paused withevident self-satisfaction, as one eyewitness recorded, for Hitler’s reaction.

“Do I understand that the British, French and Czech governments haveagreed to the transfer of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia to Ger-many?” Hitler asked.f 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 fewdays, this plan is no longer of any use.”

Chamberlain, Dr. Schmidt later remembered, sat up with a start. Hisowllike face flushed with surprise and anger. But apparently not withresentment that Hitler had deceived him, that Hitler, like a commonblackmailer, was upping his demands at the very moment they were beingaccepted. The Prime Minister described his own feelings at this momentin 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

* It was from this hotel, run by Herr Dreesen, an early Nazi crony of Hitler, thatthe Fuehrer had set out on the night of June 29-30, 1934, to kill Roehm and carryout the Blood Purge. The Nazi leader had often sought out the hotel as a place ofrefuge where he could collect his thoughts and resolve his hesitations,t Hitler knew that the Czechs had accepted the Anglo-French proposals. Jodi notedin his diary that at 11:30 a.m. on September 21, the day before Chamberlain ar-rived 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 ac-cepted unconditionally.” At 12:45 Jodi noted, “Department heads are informed tocontinue preparation for ‘Green,’ but nevertheless to get ready for everythingnecessary for a peaceful penetration.”52 It is possible, however, that Hitler did notknow the terms of the Anglo-French plan until the Prime Minister explained themto him.

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back to Godesberg I had only to discuss quietly with him the proposals that Ihad 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. Hewas, he told Hitler, “both disappointed and puzzled. He could rightly saythat the Fuehrer had got from him what he had demanded.”

In order to achieve this he [Chamberlain] had risked his whole politicalcareer . . . He was being accused by certain circles in Great Britain of havingsold and betrayed Czechoslovakia, of having yielded to the dictators, and onleaving England that morning he actually had been booed.

But the Fuehrer was unmoved by the personal plight of the BritishPrime Minister. The Sudeten area, he demanded, must be occupied byGermany at once. The problem “must be completely and finally solved byOctober first, at the latest.” He had a map handy to indicate what ter-ritories 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 withhis own cabinet colleagues and with members of the French governmentby telephone it was agreed that London and Paris should inform theCzech government the next day that they could not “continue to take theresponsibility of advising them not to mobilize.”*

At 7:20 that evening General Keitel telephoned Army headquartersfrom Godesberg: “Date (of X Day) cannot yet be ascertained. Continuepreparations according to plan. If Case Green occurs, it will not be beforeSeptember 30. If it occurs sooner, it will probably be improvised.”53

For Adolf Hitler himself was caught in a dilemma. Though Chamber-lain did not know it, the Fuehrer’s real objective, as he had laid it downin his OKW directive after the May crisis, was “to destroy Czechoslovakiaby military action.” To accept the Anglo-French plan, which the Czechsalready had agreed to, however reluctantly, would not only give Hitler hisSudeten Germans but would effectively destroy the Czech state, since itwould be left defenseless. But it would not be by military action, and theFuehrer was determined not only to humiliate President Benes and theCzech government, which had so offended him in May, but to expose thespinelessness of the Western powers. For that, at least a military occupa-tion was necessary. It could be bloodless, as was the military occupationof Austria, but it must take place. He must have at least that much revengeon the upstart Czechs.

There was no further contact between the two men on the evening ofSeptember 22. But after sleeping on the problem and spending the early

* Czech mobilization began at 10:30 p.m. on September 23.

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morning pacing his balcony overlooking the Rhine, Chamberlain sat downfollowing breakfast and wrote a letter to Hitler. He would submit thenew German demands to the Czechs but he did not think they would beaccepted. In fact, he had no doubt that the Czechs would forcibly resistan immediate occupation by German troops. But he was willing to suggestto Prague, since all parties had agreed on the transfer of the Sudeten areato Germany, that the Sudeten Germans themselves maintain law andorder in their area until it was turned over to the Reich.

To such a compromise Hitler would not listen. After keeping thePrime Minister waiting throughout most of the day he finally replied bynote with a bitter tirade, again rehearsing all the wrongs the Czechs haddone to Germans, again refusing to modify his position and concludingthat 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 thatI can perform any further service here,” he concluded. “I propose there-fore to return to England.”

Before doing so he came over once again to the Dreesen for a finalmeeting with Hitler which began at 10:30 on the evening of September23. Hitler presented his demands in the form of a memorandum with anaccompanying map. Chamberlain found himself confronted with a newtime limit. The Czechs were to begin the evacuation of the ceded territoryby 8 a.m. on September 26—two days hence—and complete it bySeptember 28.

“But this is nothing less than an ultimatum!” Chamberlain exclaimed.

“Nothing of the sort,” Hitler shot back. When Chamberlain retortedthat the German word Diktat applied to it, Hitler answered, “It is not aDiktat at all. Look, the document is headed by the word ‘Memorandum.’ ”

At this moment an adjutant brought in an urgent message for theFuehrer. He glanced at it and tossed it to Schmidt, who was interpreting.“Read this to Mr. Chamberlain.”

Schmidt did. “Benes has just announced over the radio a generalmobilization in Czechoslovakia.”

The room, Schmidt recalled afterward, was deadly still. Then Hitlerspoke: “Now, of course, the whole affair is settled. The Czechs will notdream 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 contradictedthis. Germany had mobilized first . . . The Fuehrer denied that Germanyhad mobilized.

And so the talks continued into the early-morning hours. Finally, afterChamberlain had inquired whether the German memorandum “was reallyhis last word” and Hitler had replied that it was indeed, the PrimeMinister

answered that there was no point in continuing the conversations. He haddone 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 Czechevacuation—October first—if that will facilitate your task.” And so say-ing, he took a pencil and changed the dates himself. This, of course, wasno concession at all. October 1 had been X Day all along.*

But it seems to have impressed the Prime Minister. “He fully ap-preciated, Schmidt recorded him as saying, “the Fuehrer’s considerationon the point.” Nevertheless, he added, he was not in a position to acceptor reject the proposals; he could only transmit them.

The ice, however, had been broken, and as the meeting broke up at1:30 a.m. the two men seemed, despite all that had happened, to becloser together personally than at any time since they had first met. Imyself, from a vantage point twenty-five feet away in the porter’s booth,where I had set up a temporary broadcasting studio, watched them saytheir farewells near the door of the hotel. I was struck by their cordialityto each other. Schmidt took down the words which I could not hear.

Chamberlain bid a hearty farewell to the Fuehrer. He said he had thefeeling that a relationship of confidence had grown up between himself andthe Fuehrer as a result of the conversations of the last few days ... He didnot cease to hope that the present difficult crisis would be overcome, and thenhe would be glad to discuss other problems still outstanding with the Fuehrerin the same spirit.

The Fuehrer thanked Chamberlain for his words and told him that he hadsimilar hopes. As he had already stated several times, the Czech problem wasthe last territorial demand which he had to make in Europe.

This renunciation of further land grabs seems to have impressed thedeparting Prime Minister too, for in his subsequent report to the Houseof Commons he stressed that Hitler had made it “with great earnestness.”

When Chamberlain arrived at his hotel toward 2 a.m. he was asked bya journalist, “Is the position hopeless, sir?”

* The memorandum called for the withdrawal of all Czech armed forces, includingthe 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 mili-tary installations in the evacuated territories were to be left intact. All commercialand transport materials, “especially the rolling stock of the railway system,” wereto be handed over to the Germans undamaged. “Finally, no foodstuffs, goods,cattle, raw material, etc., are to be removed.”54 The hundreds of thousands ofCzechs in the Sudetenland were not to be allowed to take with them even theirhousehold goods or the family cow.

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“I would not like to say that,” the Prime Minister answered. “It is upto the Czechs now.”55

It did not occur to him, it is evident, that it was up to the Germans, withtheir outrageous demands, too.

In fact, no sooner had the Prime Minister returned to London onSeptember 24 than he attempted to do the very thing he had informedHitler he would not do: persuade the British cabinet to accept the newNazi demands. But now he ran into unexpected opposition. Duff Cooper,the First Lord of the Admiralty, firmly opposed him. Surprisingly, so didLord Halifax, though very reluctantly. Chamberlain could not carryhis cabinet. Nor could he persuade the French government, which onthe twenty-fourth rejected the Godesberg memorandum and on the sameday ordered a partial mobilization.

When the French ministers, headed by Premier Daladier, arrived inLondon on Sunday, September 25, the two governments were apprised ofthe formal rejection of the Godesberg proposals by the Czech govern-ment. * There was nothing for the French to do but affirm that they wouldhonor their word and come to the aid of Czechoslovakia if attacked. Butthey had to know what Britain would do. Finally cornered, or so it seemed,Chamberlain agreed to inform Hitler that if France became engaged inwar 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. Hitlerwas scheduled to make a speech at the Sportpalast in Berlin on September26. In order to induce him not to burn his bridges Chamberlain once againdashed 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 spedto the German capital by special plane.

On the departure of Chamberlain from the Dreesen in the early-morn-ing 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 aroundearnestly talking. They seemed dazed at the prospect of war.

In Berlin later that day I found hopes reviving. In the Wilhelmstrassethe feeling was that since Chamberlain, with all the authority of theBritish Prime Minister, had agreed to present Hitler’s new demands toPrague, it must be assumed that the British leader supported Hitler’sproposals. As we have seen, the assumption was quite correct—so far asit 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 weekendthat autumn, half of the population flocked to the lakes and woods thatsurround the capital. Despite reports of Hitler’s rage at hearing that the

* The Czech reply is a moving and prophetic document. The Godesberg proposals,it said, “deprive us of every safeguard for our national existence.”56

Godesberg ultimatum was being rejected in Paris, London and Prague,there was no feeling of great crisis, certainly no war fever, in Berlin. “Hardto 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 Hendersonand Ivone Kirkpatrick, First Secretary of the British Embassy, arrived atthe Chancellery bearing Chamberlain’s letter.” They found Hitler in anugly mood—probably he was already working himself down to a properlevel for his Sportpalast speech three hours hence.

When Dr. Schmidt began to translate the letter, which stated that theCzech government had informed the Prime Minister that the Godesber<>memorandum was “wholly unacceptable,” just as he had warned atGodesberg, Hitler, according to Schmidt, suddenly leaped up, shouting,“There’s no sense at all in negotiating further!” and bounded for thedoor.58

It was a painful scene, says the German interpreter. “For the first andonly time in my presence, Hitler completely lost his head.” And accord-ing to the British present, the Fuehrer, who soon stamped back to hischair, kept further interrupting the reading of the letter by screaming,The Germans are being treated like niggers ... On October first Ishall have Czechoslovakia where I want her. If France and Englanddecide to strike, let them ... I do not care a pfennig.”

Chamberlain had proposed that since the Czechs were willing to giveHitler what he wanted, the Sudeten areas, a meeting of Czech and Germanrepresentatives be called immediately to settle “by agreement the wayin which the territory is to be handed over.” He added that he was willingto have British representatives sit in at the meeting. Hitler’s response wasthat he would negotiate details with the Czechs if they accepted in advancethe Godesberg memorandum (which they had just rejected) and agreedto a German occupation of the Sudetenland by October 1. He must havean affirmative reply, he said, within forty-four hours—by 2 p m onSeptember 28.

That evening Hitler burned his bridges, or so it seemed to those of uswho listened in amazement to his mad outburst at the jammed Sportpalastin Berlin. Shouting and shrieking in the worst paroxysm I had ever seenhim in, he venomously hurled personal insults at “Herr Benes,” declaredthat the issue of war or peace was now up to the Czech President and thatin any case, he would have the Sudetenland by October 1. Carried awayas he was by his angry torrent of words and the ringing cheers of thecrowd, 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 hislast territorial claim in Europe. “We want no Czechs!” he mutteredcontemptuously.

At the conclusion of the Godesberg talks, the British and French correspondents—and the chief Buropean correspondent of the New York Times, who was anEnglish citizen—had scurried off for the French, Belgian and Dutch frontiers, none01 them wishing to be interned in case of war.

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Throughout the harangue I sat in a balcony just above Hitler, tryingwith no great success to broadcast a running translation of his words.That night in my diary 1 noted:

. . . For the first time in all the years I’ve observed him he seemed tonightto have completely lost control of himself. When he sat down, Goebbelssprang up and shouted into the microphone: “One thing is sure: 1918 willnever be repeated!” Hitler looked up to him, a wild, eager expression in hiseyes, as if those were the words which he had been searching for all eveningand hadn’t quite found. He leaped to his feet and with a fanatical fire in hiseyes that I shall never forget brought his right hand, after a grand sweep, pound-ing 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 thesecond time the next noon, September 27. The special envoy, a man withno diplomatic training but who was as anxious as the Prime Minister, ifnot more so, to give Hitler the Sudetenland if the dictator would onlyaccept it peacefully, called Hitler’s attention to a special statement issuedby Chamberlain in London shortly after midnight in response to theFuehrer’s Sportpalast speech. In view of the Chancellor’s lack of faithin Czech promises, the British government, Chamberlain said, wouldregard itself “as morally responsible” for seeing that the Czech promiseswere carried out “fairly, fully and with all reasonable promptitude.” Hetrusted that the Chancellor would not reject this proposal.

But Hitler showed no interest in it. He had, he said, no further messagefor Mr. Chamberlain. It was now up to the Czechs. They could acceptor reject his demands. If they rejected them, he shouted angrily, “I shalldestroy Czechoslovakia!” He kept repeating the threat with obviousrelish.

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 PrimeMinister to make the following statement: ‘If France, in fulfillment of hertreaty obligations, should become actively engaged in hostilities againstGermany, 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 obligedto attack her also.”

When Sir Horace replied that he had not said that, that it was up toHitler, after all, whether there would be peace or war, the Fuehrer, work-ing himself up by now to a fine lather, shouted, “If France and Englandstrike, let them do so! It’s a matter of complete indifference to me. Todayis Tuesday; by next Monday we shall be at war.”

According to Schmidt’s official notes on the meeting, Wilson apparentlywished to continue the conversation, but was advised by AmbassadorHenderson to desist. This did not prevent the inexperienced special envoyfrom 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 thelatter replied that he “would welcome that.” Perhaps, the Fuehrer musthave thought, Chamberlain could still be coaxed to go further in makingthe Czechs sensible.” That evening, in fact, he sat down and dictatedto the Prime Minister a shrewdly worded letter.

There were well-grounded reasons for writing it. Much had happenedin Berlin—and elsewhere—during that day, September 27.

At 1 p.m., shortly after Wilson’s departure, Hitler issued a “mostsecret order directing assault units comprising some twenty-one rein-forced regiments, or seven divisions, to move forward from their trainingareas to the jumping-off points on the Czech frontier. “They must beready,” said the order, “to begin action against ‘Green’ on September 30,the decision having been made one day previously by twelve noon.” Afew hours later a further concealed mobilization was ordered by theFuehrer. Among other measures, five new divisions were mobilized forthe west.59

But even as Hitler went ahead with his military moves, there weredevelopments during the day which made him hesitate. In order to stirup some war fever among the populace Hitler ordered a parade of amotorized division through the capital at dusk—an hour when hundredsof thousands of Berliners would be pouring out of their offices onto thestreets. It turned out to be a terrible fiasco—at least for the SupremeCommander. The good people of Berlin simply did not want to bereminded 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] wasturning down the Wilhelmstrasse, expecting to see a tremendous demonstra-tion. I pictured the scenes I had read of in 1914 when the cheering throngson this same street tossed flowers at the marching soldiers, and the girls ranup and kissed them . . . But today they ducked into the subways, refused tolook on, and the handful that did stood at the curb in utter silence ... It hasbeen the most striking demonstration against war I’ve ever seen.

At the urging of a policeman I walked down the Wilhelmstrasse to theReichskanzlerplatz, where Hitler stood on a balcony of the Chancelleryreviewing the troops. :

. . . There weren t two hundred people there. Hitler looked grim, thenangry, and soon went inside, leaving his troops to parade by unreviewed. WhatI’ve seen tonight almost rekindles a little faith in the German people. Theyare 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

* Wilson’s assurance is given in English in the original of Schmidt’s German notes.

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had informed the Hungarian government that they would move againstHungary militarily if she attacked Czechoslovakia. That would spreadthe war to the Balkans, something Hitler did not want.

The news from Paris was graver. From the German military attachethere came a telegram marked “Very Urgent” and addressed not onlyto the Foreign Ministry but to OKW and the General Staff. It warnedthat France’s partial mobilization was so much like a total one “that Ireckon with the completion of the deployment of the first 65 divisions onthe German frontier by the sixth day of mobilization.” Against such aforce the Germans had, as Hitler knew, barely a dozen divisions, half ofthem reserve units of doubtful value. Furthermore, wired the Germanmilitary attache, “it appears probable that in the event of belligerentmeasures by Germany ... an immediate attack will take place, in allprobability from Lower Alsace and from Lorraine in the direction ofMainz.”

Finally, this German officer informed Berlin, the Italians were doingabsolutely nothing to pin down French troops on the Franco-Italianfrontier.60 Mussolini, the valiant ally, seemed to be letting Hitler downin a crucial hour.

And then, the President of the United States and the King of Swedenwere butting in. The day before, on the twenty-sixth, Roosevelt hadaddressed an appeal to Hitler to help keep the peace, and though Hitlerhad answered it within twenty-four hours, saying that peace dependedsolely on the Czechs, there came another message from the AmericanPresident during the course of this day, Wednesday the twenty-seventh,suggesting an immediate conference of all the nations directly interestedand implying that if war broke out the world would hold Hitler respon-sible.61

The King of Sweden, staunch friend of Germany, as he had provedduring the 1914-18 war, was more frank. During the afternoon a dis-patch arrived in Berlin from the German minister in Stockholm saying thatthe King had hastily summoned him and told him that unless Hitler ex-tended his time limit of October 1 by ten days world war would inevitablybreak out, Germany would be solely to blame for it and moreover just asinevitably would lose it “in view of the present combination of thePowers.” In the cool, neutral air of Stockholm, the shrewd King was ableto assess at least the military situation more objectively than the headsof government in Berlin, London and Paris.

President Roosevelt, as perhaps was necessary in view of Americansentiment, had weakened his two appeals for peace by stressing that theUnited States would not intervene in a war nor even assume any obliga-tions “in the conduct of the present negotiations.” The German ambas-sador in Washington, Hans Dieckhoff, therefore thought it necessary toget off a “very urgent” cable to Berlin during the day. He warned that ifHitler resorted to force and was opposed by Britain he had reason toassume “that the whole weight of the United States [would] be throwninto the scale on the side of Britain.” And the ambassador, usually a

401

timid man when it came to standing up to the Fuehrer, added, “I considerit my duty to emphasize this very strongly.” He did not want the Germangovernment to stumble into the same mistaken assumptions it had madeabout America in 1914.

And Prague? Was there any sign of weakening there? In the eveningcame a telegram from Colonel Toussaint, the German military attache,to OKW: “Calm in Prague. Last mobilization measures carried out . . .Total estimated call-up is 1,000,000; field army 800,000 . . ”62 Thatwas as many trained men as Germany had for two fronts. Together theCzechs and the French outnumbered the Germans by more than two toone.

Faced with these facts and developments and no doubt mindful ofWilson’s parting words and of Chamberlain’s character and of Chamber-lain’s utter fear of war, Hitler sat down early on that evening of September27 to dictate a letter to the Prime Minister. Dr. Schmidt, who was calledin to translate it into English, got the feeling that the dictator was shrinkingback “from the extreme step.” Whether Hitler knew that the order wasgoing out that evening for the mobilization of the British fleet cannot beestablished. Admiral Raeder arranged to see the Fuehrer at 10 p.m., andit is possible that the German Navy learned of the British move, whichwas made at 8 p.m. and publicly announced at 11:38 p.m., and thatRaeder informed Hitler by telephone. At any rate, when the Admiralarrived 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, hisleading generals dead against him, and that his ultimatum on the Godes-berg proposals expired at 2 p.m. the next day.

His letter was beautifully calculated to appeal to Chamberlain. Mod-erate in tone, it denied that his proposals would “rob Czechoslovakia ofevery guarantee of its existence” or that his troops would fail to stop atthe demarcation lines. He was ready to negotiate details with the Czechs;he was ready to “give a formal guarantee for the remainder of Czecho-slovakia.” The Czechs were holding out simply because they hoped, withthe 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 thesefacts, you consider that you should continue your effort ... to spoil suchmaneuvers and bring the Government in Prague to reason at the very lasthour.03

THE ELEVENTH HOUR

Hitler’s letter, telegraphed urgently to London, reached Chamberlainat 10:30 on the night of September 27. It came at the end of a busy dayfor the Prime Minister.

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The disquieting news which Sir Horace Wilson, who arrived in Londonearly in the afternoon, brought from his second conference with Hitlerspurred Chamberlain and his inner cabinet to action. It was decided tomobilize the fleet, call up the Auxiliary Air Force and declare a state ofemergency. Already trenches were being dug in the parks and squares forprotection against bombing, and the evacuation of London’s school chil-dren had begun.

Also, the Prime Minister promptly sent off a message to PresidentBenes in Prague warning that his information from Berlin “makes it clearthat the German Army will receive orders to cross the Czechoslovakfrontier immediately if, by tomorrow [September 28] at 2 p.m. the Czecho-slovak Government have not accepted the German conditions.” But hav-ing honorably warned the Czechs, Chamberlain could not refrain fromadmonishing them, in the last part of his message, “that Bohemia wouldbe overrun by the German Army and nothing which another Power orPowers could do would be able to save your country and your people fromsuch a fate. This remains true whatever the result of a world war mightbe.”

Thus Chamberlain was putting the responsibility for peace or war nolonger on Hitler but on Benes. And he was giving a military opinion whicheven the German generals, as we have seen, held as irresponsible. How-ever, he did add, at the end of his message, that he would not assume theresponsibility of telling the Czechs what they must now do. It was up tothem.

But was it? Benes had not had time to reply to the telegram when asecond one arrived in which Chamberlain did endeavor to tell the Czechgovernment what to do. He proposed that the Czechs accept a limitedGerman military occupation on October 1—of Egerland and Asch, out-side the Czech fortifications—and that a German-Czech-British boundarycommission then quickly establish the rest of the areas to be turned overto the Germans.* And the Prime Minister added a further warning:

The only alternative to this plan would be an invasion and a dismembermentof the country by force, and Czechoslovakia, though a conflict might arisewhich would lead to incalculable loss of life, could not be reconstituted in herfrontiers whatever the result of the conflict may be.64

The Czechs were thus warned by their friends (France associated her-self with these latest proposals) that even if they and their allies defeatedthe Germans in a war, Czechoslovakia would have to give up the Sudeten-land to Germany. The inference was plain: Why plunge Europe into awar, since the Sudetenland is lost to you anyway?

* These proposals were also transmitted by Ambassador Henderson to the GermanForeign Office at 11 p.m. with the request that they be immediately submitted toHitler.

This business out of the way, the Prime Minister broadcast to thenation 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 whomwe know nothing! . . .

Hitler had got the “substance of what he wanted.” Britain had offeredto 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 itwould do any good . . .

However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a bigand powerful neighbor, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involvethe whole British Empire in a war simply on her account. If we have to fightit must be on larger issues than that . . .

I am myself a man of peace to the very depths of my soul. Armed conflictbetween nations is a nightmare to me; but, if I were convinced that any nationhad made up its mind to dominate the world by fear of force, I should feel thatit must be resisted. Under such a domination, life for people who believe inliberty would not be worth living; but war is a fearful thing, and we must bevery clear, before we embark on it, that it is really the great issues that are atstake.

Wheeler-Bennett has recorded that after listening to this broadcast mostpeople in Britain went to bed that night believing that Britain and Germanywould be at war within twenty-four hours.05 But the good people did notknow 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 PrimeMinister eagerly grasped. To the Fuehrer he replied;

After reading your letter, I feel certain that you can get all essentials withoutwar, and without delay. I am ready to come to Berlin myself at once to discussarrangements for transfer with you and representatives of the Czech Govern-ment, together with representatives of France and Italy, if you desire. I feelconvinced we can reach agreement in a week. I cannot believe that you willtake responsibility of starting a world war which may end civilization for thesake of a few days delay in settling this long-standing problem.60

A telegram also went out to Mussolini asking him to urge the Fuehrer’sacceptance of this plan and to agree to being represented at the suggestedmeeting.

The idea of a conference had been in the back of the Prime Minister’smind for some time. As far back as July, Sir Nevile Henderson had sug-gested it on his own in a dispatch to London. He had proposed that fourpowers, Germany, Italy, Britain and France, settle the Sudeten problem,both the ambassador and the Prime Minister had been reminded by

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

404

the British Foreign Office that it would be difficult to exclude other powersfrom participating in such a conference.67 The “other powers” wereRussia, which had a pact of mutual assistance with Prague, and Czecho-slovakia. Chamberlain had returned from Godesberg convinced—quitecorrectly—that Hitler would never consent to any meeting which includedthe Soviet Union. Nor did the Prime Minister himself desire the presenceof the Russians. Though it was obvious to the smallest mind in Britainthat in case of war with Germany, Soviet participation on the side of theWest would be of immense value, as Churchill repeatedly tried to pointout to the head of the British government, this was a view which seems tohave escaped the Prime Minister. He had, as we have seen, turned downthe Russian proposal for a conference after the Anschluss to discuss meansof opposing further German aggression. Despite Moscow’s guarantee toCzechoslovakia and the fact that right up to this moment Litvinov wasproclaiming that Russia would honor it, Chamberlain had no intention ofallowing the Soviets to interfere with his resolve to keep the peace bygiving Hitler the Sudetenland.

But until Wednesday, September 28, he had not yet gone so far in histhinking as to exclude the Czechs from a conference. Indeed, on thetwenty-fifth, after Prague had rejected Hitler’s Godesberg demands, thePrime Minister had called in Jan Masaryk, the Czech ambassador inLondon, and proposed that Czechoslovakia should agree to negotiationsat “an international conference in which Germany, Czechoslovakia andother powers could participate.” On the following day the Czech govern-ment had accepted the idea. And, as we have just seen, in his message toHitler late on the night of the twenty-seventh Chamberlain had specifiedthat “representatives of Czechoslovakia” should be included in his pro-posed conference of Germany, Italy, France and Great Britain.

“BLACK WEDNESDAY” AND THE HALDER PLOTAGAINST HITLER

Deep gloom hung over Berlin, Prague, London and Paris as “BlackWednesday,” September 28, dawned. War seemed inevitable.

“A Great War can hardly be avoided any longer,” Jodi quoted Goeringas 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 forthe choked trains leaving the city, and the motor traffic out of the capitalwas jammed. There were similar scenes in western Germany. Jodi jottedin his diary that morning reports of German refugees fleeing from theborder regions. At 2 p.m. Hitler’s time limit for Czechoslovakia’s accept-ance of the Godesberg proposals would run out. There was no sign fromPrague that they would be accepted. There were, however, certain othersigns: great activity in the Wilhelmstrasse; a frantic coming and going of

the French, British and Italian ambassadors. But of these the generalpublic and indeed the German generals remained ignorant.

To some of the generals and to General Haider, Chief of the GeneralStaff, above all, the time had come to carry out their plot to remove Hitlerand save the Fatherland from plunging into a European war which theyfelt it was doomed to lose. All through September the conspirators, ac-cording to the later accounts of the survivors,* had been busy workingout their plans.

General Haider was in close touch with Colonel Oster and his chief atthe Abwehr, Admiral Canaris, who tried to keep him abreast of Hitler’spolitical moves and of foreign intelligence. The plotters, as we have seen,had warned London of Hitler’s resolve to attack Czechoslovakia by theend of September and had begged the British government to make clearthat Britain, along with France, would answer German aggression byarmed force. For some months General von Witzleben, who commandedthe Berlin Military District, and who would have to furnish most of thetroops to carry out the coup, had been hesitant because he suspected thatLondon and Paris had secretly given Hitler a free hand in the East andwould therefore not go to war over Czechoslovakia—a view shared byseveral other generals and one which Hitler and Ribbentrop had en-couraged. If this were true, the plot to depose Hitler, in the opinion ofgenerals such as Witzleben and Haider, was senseless. For, at this stageof the Third Reich, they were concerned only with getting rid of theFuehrer in order to avert a European war which Germany had no chanceof winning. If there were really no risk of a big war, if Chamberlain weregoing 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, ColonelOster and Gisevius arranged for General Haider and General von Witzle-ben to meet Schacht, who, besides having prestige with the militaryhierarchy as the man who financed German rearmament and who still wasin the cabinet, was considered an expert on British affairs. Schacht assuredthem that the British would fight if Hitler resorted to arms against theCzechs.

The news that had reached Erich Kordt, one of the conspirators, inthe German Foreign Office late on the night of September 13, thatChamberlain urgently proposed “to come over at once by air” to seek apeaceful solution of the Czech crisis, had caused consternation in the camp

* These include firsthand accounts by Haider, Gisevius and Schacht.69 Each ofthem contains much that is confusing and contradictory, and on some points theycontradict each other. It must be remembered that all three of these men, who hadbegun by serving the Nazi regime, were anxious after the war to prove their opposi-tion to Hitler and their love of peace.

Erich Kordt, chief of Ribbentrop’s secretariat in the Foreign Office, also was animportant participant in the plot who survived the war. At Nuremberg he drew upa long memorandum about events in September 1938, which was made available tothis writer.

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of the plotters. They had counted on Hitler’s returning to Berlin fromthe Nuremberg Party Rally on the fourteenth and, according to Kordt,had planned to carry out the putsch on that day or the next. But theFuehrer did not return to the capital.* Instead, he went to Munich andon the fourteenth continued on to Berchtesgaden, where he awaited thevisit of the British Prime Minister the next day.

There were double grounds for the feeling of utter frustration amongthe plotters. Their plans could be carried out only if Hitler were in Berlinand they had been confident that, since the Nuremberg rally had onlysharpened the Czech crisis, he would certainly return immediately to thecapital. In the second place, although some of the members of the con-spiracy complacently assumed, as did the people of Britain, that Chamber-lain was flying to Berchtesgaden to warn Hitler not to make the mistakethat Wilhelm II had made in 1914 as to what Great Britain would do inthe case of German aggression, Kordt knew better. He had seen the textof Chamberlain’s urgent message explaining to Hitler that he wanted tosee him “with a view to trying to find a peaceful solution.” Furthermorehe had seen the telegram from his brother, Theodor Kordt, counselor ofthe German Embassy in London, that day, confiding that the PrimeMinister was prepared to go a long way to meet Hitler’s demands in theSudetenland.f

The effect on our plans,” says Kordt, “was bound to be disastrous. Itwould have been absurd to stage a putsch to overthrow Hitler at a momentwhen the British Prime Minister was coming to Germany to discuss withHitler ‘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 haveseen, acted as sole interpreter—and sole witness—at the Hitler-Chamber-Iain talk, informed him “by prearranged code” that the Fuehrer was stilldetermined to conquer the whole of Czechoslovakia and that he had putforward to Chamberlain impossible demands “in the hope that theywould be refused.” This intelligence revived the spirits of the con-spirators. Kordt informed Colonel Oster of it the same evening and itwas decided to go ahead with the plans as soon as Hitler returned to

There is considerable confusion anpng the historians and even among the con-spirators about Hitler's whereabouts on September 13 and 14. Churchill basinshis account on a memorandum of General Haider, states that Hitler arrived in Berl

Witf/lnh1enBerC|teS8aden mornln8 of September 14” and that Haider and

Witz'eben, on learning of ,t, “decided to strike at 8 that same evening.” They calledthe operation off, according to this account, when they learned at 4 p.m. that Cham-berlain was flying to Berchtesgaden. (Churchill, The Gathering Storm, p 312 )But Haiders memory-and hence Churchill’s account-is certainly in error. Hit-er s daily schcdu e book now in the Library of Congress, has several entries show-ng that he spent the thirteenth and fourteenth in Munich, where, among otherthings he conferred with Ribbentrop at Bormann’s home and visited the Sonnen-winkel, a cabaret, departing for the Obersalzberg at the end of the day of the four-icenin.

t See above, p. 38a

The Road to Munich 407

Berlin. “But first of all,” Oster said, “we must get the bird back into hiscage in Berlin.”

The bird flew back to his “cage” from the Godesberg talks on the after-noon of September 24. On the morning of “Black Wednesday,” thetwenty-eighth, Hitler had been in Berlin for nearly four days. On thetwenty-sixth he apparently had burned his bridges in his outburst at theSportpalast. On the twenty-seventh he had sent Sir Horace Wilson backto London empty-handed, and the British government’s reaction had beento mobilize the fleet and warn Prague to expect an immediate Germanattack. During the day he had also, as we have seen, ordered the “assaultunits” to take their combat positions on the Czech frontier and be readyfor “action” on September 30—three days hence.

What were the conspirators waiting for? All the conditions they them-selves had set had now been fulfilled. Hitler was in Berlin. He wasdetermined to go to war. He had set the date for the attack on Czecho-slovakia as September 30—two days away now. Either the putsch mustbe made at once, or it would be too late to overthrow the dictator and stopthe war.

Kordt declares that during the day of September 27 the plotters set adefinite date for action: September 29. Gisevius, in his testimony on thestand at Nuremberg and also in his book, claims that the generals—Haider and Witzleben—decided to act immediately on September 28after 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 toWitzleben. Witzleben went to Haider with it. Now, at last, the Chief of theGeneral Staff had his desired, unequivocal proof that Hitler was not bluffing,that he wanted war.

Tears of indignation ran down Haider’s cheeks . . . Witzleben insistedthat now it was time to take action. He persuaded Haider to go to seeBrauchitsch. After a while Haider 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 thegenerals misunderstood it, for, as we have seen, it was so moderate intone, so full of promises to “negotiate details with the Czechs” and to“give a formal guarantee for the remainder of Czechoslovakia,” so con-ciliatory in suggesting to Chamberlain that he might continue his efforts,that the Prime Minister, after reading it, had immediately telegraphedHitler suggesting a Big-Power conference to settle the details and at thesame time wired Mussolini asking his support for such a proposal.

Of this eleventh-hour effort at appeasement the generals apparentlyhad no knowledge, but General von Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chiefof the Army, may have had some inkling. According to Gisevius, Witzle-ben telephoned Brauchitsch from Haider’s office, told him that all was

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ready and pleaded with him to lead the revolt himself. But the Armycommander was noncommittal. He informed Haider and Witzleben thathe would first have to go over to the Fuehrer’s Chancellery to see for him-self whether the generals had assessed the situation correctly. Giseviussays 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 atKordt’s desk in the Foreign Office. Ciano was on the line from Romeand wanted urgently to speak to the German Foreign Minister. Ribben-trop was not available—he was at the Reich Chancellery—so the ItalianForeign Minister asked to be put through to his ambassador, BernardoAttolico. The Germans listened in and recorded the call. It developedthat 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. Tellhim the British government asked me through Lord Perth* to mediate in theSudeten question. The point of difference is very small. Tell the Chancellorthat I and Fascist Italy stand behind him. He must decide. But tell him I favoraccepting the suggestion. You hear me?

Attolico: Yes, I hear you.

Mussolini: Hurry!71

Out of breath, his face flushed with excitement (as Dr. Schmidt, theinterpreter, noted), Ambassador Attolico arrived at the Chancellery tofind that the French ambassador was already closeted with Hitler. M.Frangois-Poncet had had a hard time getting there. Very late the nightbefore, Bonnet, the French Foreign Minister, who was now intent ongoing Chamberlain one better, had telephoned his ambassador in Berlinand instructed him to see Hitler at the earliest possible moment and pre-sent a French proposal for surrendering the Sudetenland which went muchfurther than the British plan. Whereas the Prime Minister’s proposal de-livered to Hitler at 11 p.m. on September 27, offered Hitler the occupa-tion of Zone I of the Sudetenland by October 1—a mere token occupationof a tiny enclave—the French now proposed to hand over three lar<>ezones, which comprised most of the disputed territory, by October 1.

It was a tempting offer, but the French ambassador had great difficultyin making it. He phoned at 8 a.m. on September 28 for an appointmentwith the Chancellor and when no response had been received by teno’clock rushed his military attache off to the Army General Staff to informthe German generals of the offer which he was as yet unable to deliver. Heenlisted the aid of the British ambassador. Sir Nevile Henderson, whowas only too ready to oblige anyone who might help prevent a war at

The British ambassador in Rome.

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any cost—telephoned Goering, and the Field Marshal said he would tryto make the appointment. As a matter of fact, Henderson was trying tomake one for himself, for he had been instructed to present to Hitler “afinal personal message from the Prime Minister,” the one which Chamber-lain had drafted late the night before,* assuring Hitler that he could geteverything he wanted “without war, and without delay, and proposinga conference of the powers to work out the details.72

Hitler received Frangois-Poncet at 11:15 a.m. The ambassador foundhim nervous and tense. Brandishing a map which he had hastily drawnup and which showed the large chunks of Czech territory which Czecho-slovakia’s principal ally was now prepared to hand over to Hitler on aplatter, the French ambassador urged the Fuehrer to accept the Frenchproposals and spare Europe from war. Despite Ribbentrop s negativecomments, which Frangois-Poncet says he dealt “roundly” with, Hitlerwas impressed—especially, as Dr. Schmidt noted, by the ambassador smap, with its generous markings.

At 11:40 the interview was suddenly interrupted by a messenger whoannounced that Attolico had just arrived with an urgent message for theFuehrer from Mussolini. Hitler left the room, with Schmidt, to greet thepanting Italian ambassador.

“I have an urgent message to you from the Duce!” Attolico, who had anaturally hoarse voice, shouted from some distance off.73 After deliver-ing it, he added that Mussolini begged the Fuehrer to refrain from mobili-zation.

It was at this moment, says Schmidt, the only surviving eyewitness ofthe 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 ranout.

“Tell the Duce,” Hitler said, with obvious relief, to Attolico, “that Iaccept his proposal.”74

The rest of the day was anticlimactic. Ambassador Henderson fol-lowed Attolico and Frangois-Poncet to the Fuehrer’s presence.

“At the request of my great friend and ally, Mussolini,” Hitler toldHenderson, “I have postponed mobilizing my troops for twenty-fourhours.”t He would give his decision on other matters, such as the pro-posed conference of the powers, after he had again consulted Mussolini.73

There followed much telephoning between Berlin and Rome—Schmidtsays the two fascist dictators talked directly once. A few minutes before2 p.m. on September 28, just as his ultimatum was to expire, Hitler madeup his mind and invitations were hastily issued to the heads of govern-ment of Great Britain, France and Italy to meet the Fuehrer at Munich atnoon on the following day to settle the Czech question. No invitationwas sent to Prague or Moscow. Russia, the coguarantor of Czechoslo-

* See above, p. 403.

t As we have seen. Hitler already had mobilized all the troops available.

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vakia s integrity in case of a German attack, was not to be allowed to inter-fere. The Czechs were not even asked to be present at their own deathsentence.

In his memoirs Sir Nevile Henderson gave most of the credit for sav-ing the peace at this moment to Mussolini, and in this he has been backedby most of the historians who have written of this chapter in Europeanhistory.* But surely this is being overgenerous. Italy was the weakest ofthe Big Powers in Europe and her military strength was so negligible thatthe German generals, as their papers make clear, treated it as a joke.Great Britain and France were the only powers that counted in Germancalculations. And it was the British Prime Minister who, from the starthad sought to convince Hitler that he could get the Sudetenland without a

war. Chamberlain, not Mussolini, made Munich possible, and thus pre-served the peace for exactly eleven months. The cost of such a feat to hisown 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 appearedless dark than it had in the bleak morning hours, the British Prime Minis-ter had begun to address the House of Commons in London, giving a de-tailed account of the Czech crisis and of the part which he and his govern-ment had played in trying to solve it. The situation he depicted was stilluncertain, but it had improved. Mussolini, he said, had succeeded ingetting Hitler to postpone mobilization for twenty-four hours. It was now4:15, and Chamberlain had been speaking for an hour and twenty min-utes and was nearing the end of his speech. At this point he was inter-rupted. Sir John Simon, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, passed him apaper which had been handed down to the Treasuiy front bench by LordHalifax, 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 gesturefor 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 havenow been informed by Herr Hitler that he invites me to meet him at Munichtomorrow morning. He has also invited Signor Mussolini and MonsieurDaladier. Signor Mussolini has accepted and I have no doubt Monsieur Da-ladier 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

Alan Bullock (Hitler—A Study in Tyranny, p. 428) says;

was Mussolini’s intervention which turned the scale.”

“Almost certainly it

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The Road to Munich

was wild shouting and a wild throwing of order papers into the air andmany were in tears and one voice was heard above the tumult whichseemed to express the deep sentiments of all: “Thank God for the PrimeMinister!”

Jan Masaryk, the Czech minister, the son of the founding father of theCzechoslovak Republic, looked on from the diplomatic gallery, unableto believe his eyes. Later he called on the Prime Minister and the ForeignSecretary in Downing Street to find out whether his country, which wouldhave to make all the sacrifices, would be invited to Munich. Chamberlainand Halifax answered that it would not, that Hitler would not stand for it.Masaryk gazed at the two God-fearing Englishmen and struggled to keepcontrol 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, GeneralHaider and General von Witzleben, Schacht and Gisevius and Kordt, andthe rest, who shortly before noon on that fateful day had believed, asWitzleben said, that their time had come? The answer can be givenbriefly in their own words—spoken much later when all was over and theywere anxious to prove to the world how opposed they had been to Hitlerand his catastrophic follies which had brought Germany to utter ruin aftera long and murderous war.

Neville Chamberlain, they all claimed, was the villain! By agreeing tocome to Munich he had forced them at the very last minute to call offtheir plans to overthrow Hitler and the Nazi regime!

On February 25, 1946, as the long Nuremberg trial neared its end,General Haider was interrogated privately by Captain Sam Harris, ayoung New York attorney on the staff of the American prosecution.

It had been planned [Haider said] to occupy by military force the ReichChancellery and those government offices, particularly ministries, which wereadministered by party members and close supporters of Hitler, with the expressintention of avoiding bloodshed and then trying the group before the wholeGerman nation . . . On the day [September 28] Witzleben came to see mein my office during the noon hour. We discussed the matter. He requestedthat I give him the order of execution. We discussed other details—how muchtime he needed, etc. During this discussion, the news came that the BritishPrime Minister and the French Premier had agreed to come to Hitler forfurther talks. This happened in the presence of Witzleben. I therefore tookback the order of execution because, owing to this fact, the entire basis for theaction 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 . . . Thecritical hour for force was avoided . . . One could only wait in case a newchance should come . . .

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the rise and fall of THE THIRD REICH

“Do 1 understand you to say that if Chamberlain had not come toMunich your plan would have been executed, and Hitler would have beendeposed?” asked Captain Harris.

v ?n°n!y S3y the PIan would have been executed,” General Haiderreplied. I do not know if it would have been successful.”77

Dr. Schacht, who at Nuremberg and in his postwar books clearly exag-gerated the importance of his role in the various conspiracies against Hit-er, a so blamed Chamberlain for the failure of the Germans to carry outthe plot on September 28: •

11 “ 'q,U't® C!®ar [r°m the Iater course of history that this first attempt at acoup d etat by Witzleben and myself was the only one which could have broughta real turning point in Germany’s fate. It was the only attempt which wasplanned and prepared in good time ... In the autumn of 1938 it was stillpossible to count on bringing Hitler to trial before the Supreme Court but allsubsequent efforts to get rid of him necessarily involved attempts on his' ' ' had made PreParations for a coup d’etat in good time and I hadrought them to within an ace of success. History had decided against me.

e intervention of foreign statesmen was something I could not possibly havetaken into account.78 r J

MSeViUu Wh° W3S Schacht’s stoutest champion on the witnessstand at Nuremberg, added:

The imp°ssibIe had happened. Chamberlain and Daladier were flying toMunich Our revolt was done for. For a few hours I went on imagining thatwe could revolt anyway. But Witzleben soon demonstrated to me that the

troops would never revolt against the victorious Fuehrer . . . Chamberlainsaved Hitler.79

erak'f ^ ^ mereIy an excuse of the German civilians and gen-erals for their failure to act? 6

tb^i^ intCrr°8u3ti0n at Nuremberg Haider explained to Captain Harristhat there were three conditions for a successful “revolutionary action”:

The first condition is a clear and resolute leadership. The second conditionis the readiness of the masses of the people to follow the idea of the revolutionThe third condition is the right choice of time. According to our views, there condition of a dear resolute leadership was there. The second conditionwe thought fulfilled too, because ... the German people did not want war.

I herefore the nation was ready to consent to a revolutionary act for fear ofwar The third condition-the right choice of time-was good because wead to expect within forty-eight hours the order for carrying out a militaryaction. Therefore we were firmly convinced that we would be successful.

But now came Mr. Chamberlain and with one stroke the danger of war wasavoided.

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One can doubt that General Haider’s first condition was ever fulfilled,as he claimed. For had there been “clear and resolute leadership” whyshould the generals have hesitated for four days? They had on tap themilitary force to easily sweep Hitler and his regime aside: Witzleben hada whole army corps—the Illrd—in and around Berlin, Brockdorff-Ahle-feldt had a crack infantry division in nearby Potsdam, Hoefner had apanzer division to the south, and the two ranking police officers in thecapital, Count von Helldorf and Count von der Schulenburg, had a largeforce of well-armed police to help out. All of these officers, accordingto the plotters themselves, were but waiting for the word from Haider tospring into action with overwhelming armed force. And the populationof Berlin, scared to death that Hitler was about to bring on a war, wouldhave—so far as this writer could, at first hand, judge them—spontane-ously backed the coup.

Whether Haider and Witzleben would have finally acted had Chamber-lain not agreed to come to Munich is a question that can never be an-swered with any degree of finality. Given the peculiar attitude of thesegenerals at this time which made them concerned with overthrowing Hit-ler not in order to bring an end to the tyranny and terror of his regime butmerely to avert a lost war, it is possible that they might have acted had notthe Munich Conference been arranged. The information necessary toestablish how well the plot was hatched, how ready the armed forces wereto march and how near Haider and Witzleben really came to giving theorder to act has so far been lacking. We have only the statements of ahandful of participants who after the war were anxious to prove theiropposition to National Socialism, and what they have said and written inself-defense is often conflicting and confusing.*

If, as the conspirators claim, their plans were on the point of being car-ried out, the announcement of Chamberlain’s trip to Munich certainlycut the ground from underneath their feet. The generals could scarcelyhave arrested Hitler and tried him as a war criminal when it was obviousthat he was about to achieve an important conquest without war.

What is certain among all these uncertainties—and here Dr. Schachtmust be conceded his point—is that such a golden opportunity neveragain presented itself to the German opposition to dispose of Hitler, bringa 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 blam-ing foreigners for their failures. The responsibility of Chamberlain andHalifax, of Daladier and Bonnet, for Munich and thus for all the disastrousconsequences which ensued is overwhelming. But they may be pardoned

* For example, the explanation for the failure of the revolt given by General GeorgThomas, the brilliant chief of the Economic and Armaments Branch of OKW, andone of the conspirators: “The execution of this enterprise was unfortunately frus-trated because, according to the view of the commanding general appointed for thetask [Witzleben], the younger officers were found to be unreliable for a political ac-tion of this kind.” See his paper, “Gedanken und Ereignisse,” published in theDecember 1945 number of the Schweizerische Monatshefte.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

to some extent for not taking very seriously the warnings of a “revolt” ofa group of German generals and civilians most of whom had served Hit-ler with great ability up to this moment. They, or at least some of theiradvisers in London and Paris, may have recalled the bleak facts of recentGerman history: that the Army had helped put the former Austriancorporal into power, had been delighted at the opportunities he gave it torearm, had apparently not objected to the destruction of individual free-dom under National Socialism or done anything about the murder of itsown 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 tocarry it out. Whatever blame may be heaped on the archappeasers inLondon and Paris, and great it undoubtedly is, the fact remains that theGerman generals themselves, and their civilian coconspirators, failed atan 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 run-down little cafes he had made his lowly start as a politician and in whosestreets he had suffered the fiasco of the Beer Hall Putsch, Adolf Hitlergreeted, 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 actionat the conference. In the train coming up to Munich Hitler was in a belli-cose mood, explaining to the Duce over maps how he intended to “liqui-date Czechoslovakia. Either the talks beginning that day must be im-mediately successful, he said, or he would resort to arms. “Besides,”Ciano, who was present, quotes the Fuehrer as adding, “the time willcome when we shall have to fight side by side against France and Eng-land.” Mussolini agreed.80

Chamberlain made no similar effort to see Daladier beforehand to workout a joint strategy for the two Western democracies with which to con-front the two fascist dictators. Indeed, it became evident to many of usin contact with the British and French delegations in Munich as the dayprogressed that Chamberlain had come to Munich absolutely determinedthat no one, certainly not the Czechs and not even the French, shouldstand in the way of his reaching a quick agreement with Hitler * In thecase of Daladier, who went around all day as if in a daze, no precautionwas necessary, but the determined Prime Minister took no risks.

t 6:45 the evening before, Chamberlain had sent a message to President BeneS

informing him officially of the meeting at Munich. “I shall have the interests ofCzechoslovakia, he stated, “fully in mind ... I go there [to Munich] with theintention of trying to find accommodation between the positions of the German andCzechoslovak governments.” BeneS had immediately replied, “I beg that nothingmay be done at Munich without Czechoslovakia being heard ”«i

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The talks, which began at 12:45 p.m. in the so-called Fuehrerhaus inthe Koenigsplatz, were anticlimactic and constituted little more than amere formality of rendering to Hitler exactly what he wanted when hewanted it. Dr. Schmidt, the indomitable interpreter, who was called uponto function in three languages, German, French and English, noticed fromthe beginning “an atmosphere of general good will.” Ambassador Hen-derson later remembered that “at no stage of the conversations did theybecome heated.” No one presided. The proceedings unfolded informally,and judging by the German minutes of the meeting82 which came to lightafter the war, the British Prime Minister and the French Premier fairlyfell over themselves to agree with Hitler. Even when he made the follow-ing opening statement:

He had now declared in his speech at the Sportpalast that he would in anycase march in on October 1. He had received the answer that this action wouldhave the character of an act of violence. Hence the task arose to absolve thisaction from such a character. Action must, however, be taken at once.

The conferees got down to business when Mussolini, speaking third inturn—Daladier was left to the last—said that “in order to bring about apractical solution of the problem” he had brought with him a definitewritten proposal. Its origins are interesting and remained unknown toChamberlain, I believe, to his death. From the memoirs of Frangois-Pon-cet and Henderson it is obvious that they too were ignorant of them. Infact, the story only became known long after the violent deaths of the twodictators.

What the Duce now fobbed off as his own compromise plan had beenhastily drafted the day before in the German Foreign Office in Berlin byGoering, Neurath and Weizsaecker behind the back of Foreign Ministervon Ribbentrop, whose judgment the three men did not trust. Goeringtook it to Hitler, who said it might do, and then it was hurriedly translatedinto French by Dr. Schmidt and passed along to the Italian ambassador,Attolico, who telephoned the text of it to the Italian dictator in Romejust before he entrained for Munich. Thus it was that the “Italian pro-posals,” which provided the informal conference not only with its soleagenda but with the basic terms which eventually became the MunichAgreement, were in fact German proposals concocted in Berlin.*

This must have seemed fairly obvious from the text, which closely fol-

* Erich Kordt recounted the German origins of Mussolini’s proposals in his testi-mony before U.S. Military Tribunal IV at Nuremberg on June 4, 1948, in the caseof 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 storyin his book Wahn und Wirklichkeit, pp. 129-31. Dr. Schmidt (Hitler’s Interpreter,p. Ill) substantiates Kordt’s account and remarks that translating the Duce’sproposals “was easy” because he had already translated them the day before inBerlin. Ciano, the Italian Foreign Minister, in a diary entry of September 29-30from Munich, tells of Mussolini producing his document “which in fact had beentelephoned to us by our Embassy the previous evening, as expressing the desires ofthe German Government.” (Ciano’s Hidden Diary, 1937-38, p. 167.)

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lowedHitlers rejected Godesberg demands; but it was not obvious toUaladier and Chamberlain or to their ambassadors in Berlin, who nowattended them. The Premier, according to the German minutes, “wel-comed the Duce’s proposal, which had been made in an objective andrealistic spirit,” and the Prime Minister “also welcomed the Duce’s pro-posal and declared that he himself had conceived of a solution on thelines of this proposal.” As for Ambassador Henderson, as he later wrote

e thought Mussolini “had tactfully put forward as his own a combina-tion of Hitler’s and the Anglo-French proposals”; while AmbassadorFrangois-Poncet got the impression that the conferees were working on aBritish memorandum “drawn up by Horace Wilson.”™ So easily werethe British and French statesmen and diplomats, bent on appeasement atany cost, deceived!

With the “Italian” proposals so warmly welcomed by all present, thereremained but a few details to iron out. Chamberlain, as perhaps mighthave been expected from an ex-businessman and former Chancellor of theexchequer, wanted to know who would compensate the Czech govern-ment for the public property which would pass to Germany in the Sudeten-land. Hitler, who, according to Frangois-Poncet, appeared somewhatpale and worried, and annoyed because he could not follow, as Mussolinicould, the talk in French and English, replied heatedly there would be nocompensation. When the Prime Minister objected to the stipulation that^CfC^m°VmS °Ut °f the Sudetenland could not even take their cattle(this had been one of the Godesberg demands)—exclaiming, “Does thismean that the farmers will be expelled but that their cattle will be re-tained? —Hitler exploded.

Our time is too valuable to be wasted on such trivialities!” he shoutedat Chamberlain. 4 The Prime Minister dropped the matter.

He did insist at first that a Czech representative ought to be present orat east, as he put it, be “available.” His country, he said, “could natu-raily undertake no guarantee that the [Sudeten] territory would be evacu-ated by October 10 [as Mussolini had proposed] if no assurance of this wasforthcoming from the Czech government.” Daladier gave him lukewarmsupport. The French government, he said, “would in no wise tolerateprocrastination in this matter by the Czech government,” but he thoughtthe presence of a Czech representative, who could be consulted, if neces-sary, 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 concessionIt was agreed that a Czech representative might make himself availablein 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 Mas-ank, from the Prague Foreign Office, did arrive and were coolly usheredinto an adjoimng room. There, after they had been left from 2 p.m. to 7to cool their heels, the roof figuratively fell in on them. At the latter hourFrank Ashton-Gwatkin, who had been a member of the Runciman mis-

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sion and was now on Chamberlain’s staff, came to break the bad news tothem. A general agreement had been reached, the details of which hecould 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 tohis government, “that I seemed to ignore how difficult was the situationof the Great Powers, and that I could not understand how hard it had beento 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, Wilsoninformed them of the main points in the four-power agreement andhanded them a map of the Sudeten areas which were to be evacuated bythe Czechs at once. When the two envoys attempted to protest, the Brit-ish official cut them short. He had nothing more to say, he stated, andpromptly 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, “youwill have to settle your affairs with the Germans absolutely alone. Per-haps the French may tell you this more gently, but you can believe me thatthey share our views. They are disinterested.”

This was the truth, wretched though it must have sounded to the twoCzech emissaries. Shortly after 1 a.m. on September 30* Hitler, Cham-berlain, Mussolini and Daladier, in that order, affixed their signatures tothe Munich Agreement providing for the German Army to begin its marchinto Czechoslovakia on October 1, as the Fuehrer had always said itwould, 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—

* The agreement was dated September 29, though not actually signed until theearly-morning hours of September 30. It stipulated that the German occupation“of the predominantly German territory” should be carried out by German troopsin four stages, from October 1 through October 7. The remaining territory, afterbeing delimited by the “International Commission,” would be occupied “by October10.” The commission was to consist of representatives of the four Big Powers andCzechoslovakia. Britain, France and Italy agreed “that the evacuation of the ter-ritory shall be completed by October 10, without any existing installations havingbeen destroyed, and that the Czechoslovak Government will be held responsiblefor carrying out the evacuation without damage to the said installations.”

Further, the “International Commission” would arrange for plebiscites, “notlater than the end of November,” in the regions where the ethnographical characterwas in doubt and would make the final determination of the new frontiers. In anannex to the accord, Britain and France declared that “they stand by their offer . . .relating to an international guarantee of the new boundaries of the CzechoslovakState against unprovoked aggression. When the question of the Polish and Hun-garian minorities . . . has been settled, Germany and Italy, for their part, willgive a guarantee to Czechoslovakia.”85

The pledge of plebiscites was never carried out. Neither Germany nor Italy evergave the guarantee to Czechoslovakia against aggression, even after the matter ofthe Polish and Hungarian minorities was settled, and, as we shall see, Britain andFrance declined to honor their guarantee.

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of informing the Czechs of what they had to give up and how soon. Hitlerand Mussolini were not interested in this part of the ceremony and with-drew, leaving the task to the representatives of Czechoslovakia’s ally,France, and of Great Britain. The scene was vividly described by Masa-rik, in his official report to the Czech Foreign Office.

At 1:30 a.m. we were taken into the hall where the conference had beenheld. There were present Mr. Chamberlain, M. Daladier, Sir Horace Wilson,M. Leger [secretary general of the French Foreign Office], Mr. Ashton-Gwatkin, Dr. Mastny and myself. The atmosphere was oppressive; sentencewas about to be passed. The French, obviously nervous, seemed anxious topreserve French prestige before the court. Mr. Chamberlain, in a long intro-ductory 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 toconceal his yawns. I asked MM. Daladier and Leger whether they expected adeclaration or answer of our Government to the Agreement. M. Daladier wasnoticeably nervous. M. Leger replied that the four statesmen had not muchtime. He added hurriedly and with superficial casualness that no answer wasrequired from us, that they regarded the plan as accepted, that our Governmenthad that very day, at the latest at 3 p.m., to send its representative to Berlin tothe sitting of the Commission, and finally that the Czechoslovak officer whowas to be sent would have to be in Berlin on Saturday in order to fix the detailsfor the evacuation of the first zone. The atmosphere, he said, was beginningto become dangerous for the whole world.

He spoke to us harshly enough. This was a Frenchman ... Mr. Chamber-lain did not conceal his weariness. They gave us a second slightly correctedmap. Then they finished with us, and we could go.86

I remember from that fateful night the light of victory in Hitler’s eyesas he strutted down the broad steps of the Fuehrerhaus after the meeting,the cockiness of Mussolini, laced in his special militia uniform, the yawnsof Chamberlain and his air of pleasant sleepiness as he returned to theRegina Palace Hotel.

Daladier [I wrote in my diary that night], on the other hand, looked acompletely beaten and broken man. He came over to the Regina to saygood-bye to Chamberlain. . . . Someone asked, or started to ask: “Monsieurle President, are you satisfied with the agreement?” He turned as if to saysomething, but he was too tired and defeated and the words did not come outand he stumbled out the door in silence.87

Chamberlain was not through conferring with Hitler about the peaceof the world. Early the next morning, September 30, refreshed by a fewhours of sleep and pleased with his labors of the previous day, he sought

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out the Fuehrer at his private apartment in Munich to discuss further thestate of Europe and to secure a small concession which he apparentlythought would improve his political position at home.

According to Dr. Schmidt, who acted as interpreter and who was thesole witness of this unexpected meeting, Hitler was pale and moody. Helistened absent-mindedly as the exuberant head of the British govern-ment expressed his confidence that Germany would “adopt a generousattitude in the implementation of the Munich Agreement” and renewedhis hope that the Czechs would not be “so unreasonable as to make diffi-culties” and that, if they did make them, Hitler would not bomb Prague“with the dreadful losses among the civilian population which it would en-tail.” This was only the beginning of a long and rambling discourse whichwould seem incredible coming from a British Prime Minister, even onewho had made so abject a surrender to the German dictator the night be-fore, had it not been recorded by Dr. Schmidt in an official Foreign Of-fice 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 whatwas to come. After what must have seemed to the morose German dicta-tor an interminable exposition by Chamberlain in proposing further co-operation in bringing an end to the Spanish Civil War (which German andItalian “volunteers” were winning for Franco), in furthering disarma-ment, world economic prosperity, political peace in Europe and even asolution of the Russian problem, the Prime Minister drew out of hispocket a sheet of paper on which he had written something which he hopedthey 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 thatthe question of Anglo-German relations is of the first importance for the twocountries and for Europe.

We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German NavalAgreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to warwith one another again.

We are resolved that the method of consultation shall be the methodadopted to deal with any other questions that may concern our two countries,and we are determined to continue our efforts to remove possible sources ofdifference, and thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe.

Hitler read the declaration and quickly signed it, much to Chamber-lain’s satisfaction, as Dr. Schmidt noted in his official report. The inter-preter’s impression was that the Fuehrer agreed to it “with a certain re-luctance . . . only to please Chamberlain,” who, he recounts further,“thanked the Fuehrer warmly . . . and underlined the great psychologi-cal effect which he expected from this document.”

The deluded British Prime Minister did not know, of course, that, as thesecret German and Italian documents would reveal much later, Hitler

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and Mussolini had already agreed at this very meeting in Munich that intime 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 fermentingin Hitler’s lugubrious mind.88 6

Chamberlain returned to London—as did Daladier to Paris—in tri-umph. Brandishing the declaration which he had signed with Hitler, thejubilant Prime Minister faced a large crowd that pressed into DowningStreet. After listening to shouts of “Good old Neville!” and a lusty sing-ing of For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” Chamberlain smilingly spoke a fewwords from a second-story window in Number 10.

My good friends,” he said, “this is the second time in our history thatthere 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 thebattlefield has come adorned with nobler laurels.” There was a spontane-ous movement to raise a “National Fund of Thanksgiving” in Chamber-lain’s honor, which he graciously turned down. Only Duff Cooper, theFirst Lord of the Admiralty, resigned from the cabinet, and when in theensuing Commons debate Winston Churchill, still a voice in the wilder-ness, began to utter his memorable words, “We have sustained a totalunmitigated defeat,” he was forced to pause, as he later recorded, untilthe storm of protest against such a remark had subsided.

The mood in Prague was naturally quite different. At 6:20 a.m. onSeptember 30, the German charge d’affaires had routed the Czech For-eign Minister, Dr. Krofta, out of bed and handed him the text of theMunich Agreement together with a request that Czechoslovakia send tworepresentatives 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 Benes, who conferred all morning at the Hradschin Pal-ace with the political and military leaders, there was no alternative but tosubmit. Britain and France had not only deserted his country but wouldnow back Hitler in the use of armed force should he turn down the termsof Munich. At ten minutes to one, Czechoslovakia surrendered, “underprotest to the world,” as the official statement put it. “We were aban-doned. We stand alone,” General Sirovy, the new Premier, explained bit-terly in a broadcast to the Czechoslovak people at 5 p.m.

To the very last Britain and France maintained their pressure on thecountry they had seduced and betrayed. During the day the BritishFrench and Italian ministers went to see Dr. Krofta to make sure thatthere was no last-minute revolt of the Czechs against the surrender. TheGerman charge, Dr. Hencke, in a dispatch to Berlin described the scene.

The French Minister’s attempt to address words of condolence to Krofta wascut short by the Foreign Minister’s remark: “We have been forced into this

The reference is to Disraeli’s return from the Congress of Berlin in 1878.

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situation; now everything is at an end; today it is our turn, tomorrow it willbe the turn of others.” The British Minister succeeded with difficulty in sayingthat Chamberlain had done his utmost; he received the same answer as theFrench Minister. The Foreign Minister was a completely broken man andintimated only one wish: that the three Ministers should quickly leave theroom.89

President Benes resigned on October 5 on the insistence of Berlin and,when it became evident that his life was in danger, flew to England andexile. He was replaced provisionally by General Sirovy. On November30, Dr. Emil Hacha, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a well-in-tentioned but weak and senile man of sixty-six, was selected by the Na-tional 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 Ger-many in Czechoslovakia the so-called “International Commission” pro-ceeded to hand over. This hastily formed body consisted of the Italian,British and French ambassadors and the Czech minister in Berlin andBaron von Weizsaecker, the State Secretary in the German Foreign Of-fice. Every dispute over additional territory for the Germans was settledin their favor, more than once under the threat from Hitler and OKW toresort to armed force. Finally, on October 13, the commission voted todispense with the plebiscites which the Munich Agreement had called forin the disputed regions. There was no need for them.

The Poles and the Hungarians, after threatening military action againstthe helpless nation, now swept down, like vultures, to get a slice of Czecho-slovak territory. Poland, at the insistence of Foreign Minister Jozef Beck,who for the next twelve months will be a leading character in this narra-tive, took some 650 square miles of territory around Teschen, comprisinga population of 228,000 inhabitants, of whom 133,000 were Czechs.Hungary got a larger slice in the award meted out on November 2 byRibbentrop and Ciano: 7,500 square miles, with a population of 500,000Magyars and 272,000 Slovaks.

Moreover, the truncated and now defenseless country was forced byBerlin to install a pro-German government of obvious fascist tendencies.It was clear that from now on the Czechoslovak nation existed at themercy of the Deader of the Third Reich.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF MUNICH

Under the terms of the Munich Agreement Hitler got substantiallywhat he had demanded at Godesberg, and the “International Commission,”bowing to his threats, gave him considerably more. The final settlement ofNovember 20, 1938, forced Czechoslovakia to cede to Germany 11,000square miles of territory in which dwelt 2,800,000 Sudeten Germansand 800,000 Czechs. Within this area lay all the vast Czech fortifications

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

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, tele-phone and telegraph communications was disrupted. According to Ger-man figures, the dismembered country lost 66 per cent of its coal, 80 percent 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 ofits electric power and 40 per cent of its timber. A prosperous industrialnation was split up and bankrupted overnight.

No wonder that Jodi could write joyfully in his diary on the night ofMunich:

The Pact of Munich is signed. Czechoslovakia as a power is out . . . Thegenius of the Fuehrer and his determination not to shun even a World Warhave again won the victory without the use of force. The hope remains thatthe incredulous, the weak and the doubtful people have been converted, andwill remain that way.80

Many of the doubtful were converted and the few who were not wereplunged into despair. The generals such as Beck, Haider and Witzlebenand their civilian advisers had again been proved wrong. Hitler had gotwhat he wanted, had achieved another great conquest, without firing ashot. His prestige soared to new heights. No one who was in Germany inthe days after Munich, as this writer was, can forget the rapture of theGerman people. They were relieved that war had been averted; they wereelated and swollen with pride at Hitler’s bloodless victory, not only overCzechoslovakia but over Great Britain and France. Within the short spaceof six months, they reminded you, Hitler had conquered Austria and theSudetenland, adding ten million inhabitants to the Third Reich and a vaststrategic territory which opened the way for German domination of south-eastern Europe. And without the loss of a single German life! With theinstinct of a genius rare in German history he had divined not only theweaknesses of the smaller states in Central Europe but those of the twoprincipal Western democracies, Britain and France, and forced them tobend to his will. He had invented and used with staggering success a newstrategy and technique of political warfare, which made actual war un-necessary.

In scarcely four and a half years this man of lowly origins had catapulteda disarmed, chaotic, nearly bankrupt Germany, the weakest of the bigpowers in Europe, to a position where she was regarded as the mightiestnation of the Old World, before which all the others, Britain even andFrance, trembled. At no step in this dizzy ascent had the victorious powersof Versailles dared to try to stop her, even when they had the power todo so. Indeed at Munich, which registered the greatest conquest of all,Britain and France had gone out of their way to support her. And whatmust have amazed Hitler most of all—it certainly astounded General

423

Beck, Hassell and others in their small circle of opposition—was thatnone of the men who dominated the governments of Britain and France(“little worms,” as the Fuehrer contemptuously spoke of them in privateafter Munich) realized the consequences of their inability to react withany force to one after the other of the Nazi leader’s aggressive moves.

Winston Churchill, in England, alone seemed to understand. No onestated the consequences of Munich more succinctly than he in his speechto the Commons of October 5:

We have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat . . . We are in themidst of a disaster of the first magnitude. The road down the Danube . . . theroad to the Black Sea has been opened . . . All the countries of Mittel Europaand the Danube valley, one after another, will be drawn in the vast system ofNazi politics . . . radiating from Berlin . . . And do not suppose that this isthe 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 AdolfHitler not bluffing?

The answer, paradoxically, to both questions, we now know, is No. Allthe generals close to Hitler who survived the war agree that had it notbeen for Munich Hitler would have attacked Czechoslovakia on October1, 1938, and they presume that, whatever momentary hesitations theremight have been in London, Paris and Moscow, in the end Britain, Franceand Russia would have been drawn into the war.

And—what is most important to this history at this point—the Germangenerals agree unanimously that Germany would have lost the war, andin short order. The argument of the supporters of Chamberlain andDaladier—and they were in the great majority at the time—that Munichsaved the West not only from war but from defeat in war and, incidentally,preserved London and Paris from being wiped out by the Luftwaffe’smurderous bombing has been impressively refuted, so far as concern thelast two points, by those in a position to know best: the German generals,and especially those generals who were closest to Hitler and who supportedhim 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 theNuremberg trial what the reaction of the German generals was to Munichhe replied:

We were extraordinarily happy that it had not come to a military operationbecause ... we had always been of the opinion that our means of attackagainst the frontier fortifications of Czechoslovakia were insufficient. Froma purely military point of view we lacked the means for an attack which in-volved the piercing of the frontier fortifications.81

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

It has always been assumed by Allied military experts that the GermanArmy would have romped through Czechoslovakia. But to the testimonyof Keitel that this would not have been the case must be added that ofField Marshal von Manstein, who became one of the most brilliant of theGerman field commanders. When he, in his turn, testified at Nuremberg(unlike Keitel and Jodi, he was not on trial for his life) on the Germanposition at the time of Munich, he explained:

If a war had broken out, neither our western border nor our Polish frontiercould really have been effectively defended by us, and there is no doubtwhatsoever that had Czechoslovakia defended herself, we would have beenheld up by her fortifications, for we did not have the means to breakthrough.92*

Jodi, the “brains” of OKW, put it this way when he took the stand inhis own defense at Nuremberg:

It was out of the question, with five fighting divisions and seven reservedivisions in the western fortifications, which were nothing but a large construc-tion site, to hold out against 100 French divisions. That”was militarily impos-sible.93

If, as these German generals concede, Hitler’s army lacked the meansof penetrating the Czech fortifications, and Germany, in the face ofFrance’s overwhelming strength in the west, was in a “militarily impos-sible situation, and further, since, as we have seen, there was such gravedissension among the generals that the Chief of the Army General Staffwas prepared to overthrow the Fuehrer in order to avert a hopeless war-why, then, did not the French and British general staffs know this? Ordid they? And if they did, how could the heads of government of Britainand France be forced at Munich into sacrificing so much of their nations’vital interests? In seeking answers to such questions we confront one ofthe mysteries of the Munich time which has not yet been cleared up. EvenChurchill, concerned as he is with military affairs, scarcely touches on itin his massive memoirs.

It is inconceivable that the British and French general staffs and the twogovernments did not know of the opposition of the German Army GeneralStaff to a European war. For, as already noted here, the conspirators inBerlin warned the British of this through at least four channels in Augustand September and, as we know, the matter came to the attention of

* Even Hitler became at least partly convinced of this after he had inspected theCzech fortress line. He later told Dr. Carl Burckhardt, League of Nations HighCommissioner of Danzig, “When after Munich we were in a position to examineCzechoslovak 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 formi-dable. I now understand why my generals urged restraint.” (Pertinax, The GraveDiggers of France, p. 5.)

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Chamberlain himself. By early September Paris and London must havelearned of the resignation of General Beck and of the obvious consequencesto 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 Frenchmilitary intelligence was fairly good. It is extremely difficult to believethat the military chiefs in London and Paris did not know of the obviousweaknesses of the German Army and Air Force and of their inability tofight a two-front war. What doubts could the Chief of Staff of the FrenchArmy, General Gamelin, have—despite his inbred caution, which wasmonumental—that with nearly one hundred divisions he could overwhelmthe five regular and seven reserve German divisions in the west and sweepeasily and swiftly deep into Germany?

On the whole, as he later recounted,94 Gamelin had few doubts. OnSeptember 12, the day on which Hitler was thundering his threats againstCzechoslovakia at the closing session of the Nuremberg rally, the Frenchgeneralissimo had assured Premier Daladier that if war came “the demo-cratic nations would dictate the peace.” He says he backed it up with aletter expressing the reasons for his optimism. On September 26, at theheight of the Czech crisis following the Godesberg meeting, Gamelin, whohad accompanied the French government leaders to London, repeated hisassurances to Chamberlain and tried to substantiate them with an analysisof the military situation calculated to buck up not only the British PrimeMinister but his own wavering Premier. In this attempt, apparently, hefailed. Finally, just before Daladier flew to Munich, Gamelin outlined tohim the limits of territorial concessions in the Sudetenland which couldbe made without endangering French security. The main Czech fortifica-tions, as well as the rail trunk lines, certain strategic branch lines and theprincipal defense industries must not be given to Germany. Above all, headded, 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 warwith Germany, but, as we have seen, Daladier was not the man to acton it.

A good deal was said at the time of Munich that one reason forChamberlain’s surrender was his fear that London would be obliterated byGerman bombing, and there is no doubt that the French were jittery atthe 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 thePremier, 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 Germanbombers could have been spared to attack London and Paris it is highlydoubtful that they would have reached their targets. Weak as the Britishand French fighter defenses were, the Germans could not have given theirbombers fighter protection, if they had had the planes. Their fighter baseswere too far away.

It has also been argued—most positively by Ambassadors Frangois-

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Poncet and Henderson—that Munich gave the two Western democraciesnearly a year to catch up with the Germans in rearmament. The factsbelie such an argument. As Churchill, backed up by every serious Alliedmilitary historian, has written, “The year’s breathing space said to begained by Munich left Britain and France in a much worse position com-pared to Hitler’s Germany than they had been at the Munich crisis.”96 Aswe shall see, all the German military calculations a year later bear thisout, and subsequent events, of course, remove any doubts whatsoever.

In retrospect, and with the knowledge we now have from the secretGerman documents and from the postwar testimony of the Germansthemselves, the following summing up, which was impossible to make inthe days of Munich, may be given:

Germany was in no position to go to war on October 1, 1938, againstCzechoslovakia and France and Britain, not to mention Russia. Hadshe done so, she would have been quickly and easily defeated, and thatwould have been the end of Hitler and the Third Reich. If a Europeanwar had been averted at the last moment by the intercession of the GermanArmy, Hitler might have been overthrown by Haider and Witzleben andtheir confederates carrying out their plan to arrest him as soon as he hadgiven the final order for the attack on Czechoslovakia.

By publicly boasting that he would march into the Sudetenland byOctober 1 “in any case,” Hitler had put himself far out on a limb. He wasin the “untenable position” which General Beck had foreseen. Had he,after all his categorical threats and declarations, tried to crawl back fromthe limb on his own, he scarcely could have survived for long, dictatorshipsbeing what they are and his dictatorship, in particular, being what it was.It would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, for him to havebacked 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 hewanted, his trips to Berchtesgaden and Godesberg and finally the fatefuljourney to Munich rescued Hitler from his limb and strengthened hisposition in Europe, in Germany, in the Army, beyond anything that couldhave been imagined a few weeks before. It also added immeasurably tothe power of the Third Reich vis-a-vis the Western democracies and theSoviet Union.

For France, Munich was a disaster, and it is beyond understanding thatthis was not fully realized in Paris. Her military position in Europe wasdestroyed. Because her Army, when the Reich was fully mobilized, couldnever be much more than half the size of that of Germany, which hadnearly twice her population, and because her ability to produce arms wasalso less, France had laboriously built up her alliances with the smallerpowers in the East on the other flank of Germany—and of Italy: Czecho-slovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia and Rumania, which, together, had themilitary potential of a Big Power. The loss now of thirty-five well-trained,well-armed Czech divisions, deployed behind their strong mountain for-tifications and holding down an even larger German force, was a crippling

The Road to Munich

All

one to the French Army. But that was not all. After Munich how couldFrance’s remaining allies in Eastern Europe have any confidence in herwritten word? What value now were alliances with France? The answerin Warsaw, Bucharest and Belgrade was: Not much; and there was ascramble in these capitals to make the best deal possible, while there wasstill time, with the Nazi conqueror.

And if not a scramble, there was a stir in Moscow. Though the SovietUnion was militarily allied to both Czechoslovakia and France, the Frenchgovernment had gone along with Germany and Britain, without protest,in excluding Russia from Munich. It was a snub which Stalin did notforget and which was to cost the two Western democracies dearly in themonths to come. On October 3, four days after Munich, the counselor ofthe German Embassy in Moscow, Werner von Tippelskirch, reported toBerlin on the “consequences” of Munich for Soviet policy. He thoughtStalin “would draw conclusions”; he was certain the Soviet Union would“reconsider her foreign policy,” become less friendly to her ally Franceand “more positive” toward Germany. As a matter of fact, the Germandiplomat thought that “the present circumstances offer favorable oppor-tunities for a new and wider German economic agreement with the SovietUnion.”96 This is the first mention in the secret German archives of achange in the wind that now began to stir, however faintly, over Berlinand Moscow and which, within a year, would have momentous con-sequences.

Despite his staggering victory and the humiliation he administered notonly to Czechoslovakia but to the Western democracies, Hitler was dis-appointed 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 wantedall along, as he had constantly confided to his generals since his lecture tothem on November 5 of the previous year. The conquest of Austria andCzechoslovakia, he had explained then, was to be but the preliminary fora major drive for Lebensraum in the East and a military settlement withFrance in the West. As he had told the Hungarian Prime Minister onSeptember 20, the best thing was “to destroy Czechoslovakia.” This, hehad said, would “provide the only satisfactory solution.” He was onlyafraid of the “danger” that the Czechs might submit to all of his demands.*

Now Mr. Chamberlain, grasping his much-publicized umbrella, hadcome to Munich and forced the Czechs to submit to all his demands andthereby had deprived him of his military conquest. Such, it is evidentfrom the record, were Hitler’s tortuous thoughts after Munich. “It wasclear to me from the first moment,” he later confided to his generals, “thatI could not be satisfied with the Sudeten-German territory. That was onlya partial solution.”98

A few days after Munich the German dictator set in motion plans toachieve a total solution.

* See above, p. 388.

13

CZECHOSLOVAKIA CEASES TO EXIST

Ylf ITHIN TEN DAYS of affixing his signature to the Munich Agreement—

▼ V before even the peaceful military occupation of the Sudetenland hadbeen completed—Adolf Hitler got off an urgent top-secret message toGeneral Keitel, Chief of OKW.

1. What reinforcements are necessary in the present situation to break allCzech resistance in Bohemia and Moravia?

-■ How much time is required for the regrouping or moving up of newforces?

3. How much time will be required for the same purpose if it is executedafter the intended demobilization and return measures?

4. How much time would be required to achieve the state of readiness ofOctober l?1

Keitel shot back to the Fuehrer on October 11a telegram giving detailedanswers. Not much time and not very many reinforcements would benecessary. There were already twenty-four divisions, including threearmored and four motorized, in the Sudeten area. “OKW believes,”Keitel stated, “that it would be possible to commence operations withoutreinforcements, in view of the present signs of weakness in Czechresistance.”2

Thus assured, Hitler communicated his thoughts to his military chiefsten days later.

TOP secret Berlin, October 21, 1938

The future tasks for the armed forces and the preparations for the conductof 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 atall 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.

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Memel, a Baltic port of some forty thousand inhabitants, had been lostby Germany to Lithuania after Versailles. Since Lithuania was smallerand weaker than Austria and Czechoslovakia, the seizure of the townpresented no problem to the Wehrmacht and in this directive Hitler merelymentioned that it would be “annexed.” As for Czechoslovakia:

It must be possible to smash at any time the remainder of Czechoslovakiaif her policy should become hostile toward Germany.

The preparations to be made by the armed forces for this contingency willbe considerably smaller in extent than those for “Green”; they must, however,guarantee a considerably higher state of preparedness since planned mobiliza-tion measures have been dispensed with. The organization, order of battleand state of readiness of the units earmarked for that purpose are in peace-time to be so arranged for a surprise assault that Czechoslovakia herself willbe deprived of all possibility of organized resistance. The object is the swiftoccupation of Bohemia and Moravia and the cutting off of Slovakia.3

Slovakia, of course, could be cut off by political means, which mightmake the use of German troops unnecessary. For this purpose theGerman Foreign Office was put to work. All through the first days ofOctober, Ribbentrop and his aides urged the Hungarians to press fortheir share of the spoils in Slovakia. But when Hungary, which hardlyneeded German prodding to whet its greedy appetite, spoke of takingSlovakia outright, the Wilhelmstrasse put its foot down. It had otherplans 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 themoment. But for the future the German thinking was summed up by Dr.Ernst Woermann, director of the Political Department of the ForeignOffice, in a memorandum of October 7. “An independent Slovakia,” hewrote, “would be weak constitutionally and would therefore best furtherthe German need for penetration and settlement in the East.”4

Here is a new turning point for the Third Reich. For the first timeHitler is on the verge of setting out to conquer non-Germanic lands. Overthe last six weeks he had been assuring Chamberlain, in private and inpublic, that the Sudetenland was his last territorial demand in Europe.And though the British Prime Minister was gullible almost beyond com-prehension in accepting Hitler’s word, there was some ground for hisbelieving that the German dictator would halt when he had digested theGermans who previously had dwelt outside the Reich’s frontier and werenow within it. Had not the Fuehrer repeatedly said that he wanted noCzechs in the Third Reich? Had he not in Mein Kampf and in countlesspublic speeches reiterated the Nazi theory that a Germany, to be strong,must be racially pure and therefore must not take in foreign, and espe-cially Slav, peoples? He had. But also—and perhaps this was forgottenin London—he had preached in many a turgid page in Mein Kampf that

U THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Germany’s future lay in conquering Lebensraum in the East. For morethan 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 wasreached. 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 thename of Herschel Grynszpan shot and mortally wounded the third secre-tary of the German Embassy in Paris, Ernst vom Rath. The youth’sfather had been among ten thousand Jews deported to Poland in boxcarsshortly before, and it was to revenge this and the general persecution ofJews in Nazi Germany that he went to the German Embassy intending tokill the ambassador, Count Johannes von Welczeck. But the youn» thirdsecretary was sent out to see what he wanted, and was shot. There wasirony in Rath’s death, because he had been shadowed by the Gestapo asa result of his anti-Nazi attitude; for one thing, he had never shared theanti-Semitic aberrations of the rulers of his country.

On the night of November 9-10, shortly after the party bosses, led byHitler and Goering, had concluded the annual celebration of the BeerHall Putsch in Munich, the worst pogrom that had yet taken place in theThird Reich occurred. According to Dr. Goebbels and the Germanpress, which he controlled, it was a “spontaneous” demonstration of theGerman people in reaction to the news of the murder in Paris. But afterthe war, documents came to light which show how “spontaneous” it was.5They are among the most illuminating—and gruesome—secret papersof the prewar Nazi era. 1

On the evening of November 9, according to a secret report made bythe chief party judge, Major Walther Buch, Dr. Goebbels issued instruc-tions that “spontaneous demonstrations” were to be “organized andexecuted ’ during the night. But the real organizer was Reinhard Hey-drich, 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. Histeletyped orders during the evening are among the captured Germandocuments.

At 1:20 a.m. on November 10 he flashed an urgent teletype messageto all headquarters and stations of the state police and the S.D. instructingthem to get together with party and S.S. leaders “to discuss the organizationof the demonstrations.”

a. Only such measures should be taken which do not involve danger toGerman life or property. (For instance synagogues are to be burned downonly when there is no danger of fire to the surroundings.)*

* The parentheses are in the original.

b. Business and private apartments of Jews may be destroyed but notlooted. . . .

d. ... 2. The demonstrations which are going to take place should notbe hindered by the police . . .

5. As many Jews, especially rich ones, are to be arrested as can beaccommodated in the existing prisons . . . Upon their arrest, the appropriateconcentration camps should be contacted immediately, in order to confinethem in these camps as soon as possible.

It was a night of horror throughout Germany. Synagogues, Jewishhomes and shops went up in flames and several Jews, men, women andchildren, were shot or otherwise slain while trying to escape burning todeath. A preliminary confidential report was made by Heydrich to Goe-ring on the following day, November 11.

The extent of the destruction of Jewish shops and houses cannot yet beverified by figures ... 815 shops destroyed, 171 dwelling houses set on fireor destroyed only indicate a fraction of the actual damage so far as arson isconcerned . . . 119 synagogues were set on fire, and another 76 completelydestroyed . . . 20,000 Jews were arrested. 36 deaths were reported andthose seriously injured were also numbered at 36. Those killed and injuredare Jews. . . .

The ultimate number of murders of Jews that night is believed to havebeen several times the preliminary figure. Heydrich himself a day afterhis 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 theyviolated the Nuremberg racial laws which forbade sexual intercourse be-tween Gentiles and Jews. Such offenders were expelled from the partyand turned over to the civil courts. Party members who simply murderedJews “cannot be punished,” Major Buch argued, since they had merelycarried out orders. On that point he was quite blunt. “The public, downto the last man,” he wrote, “realizes that political drives like those ofNovember 9 were organized and directed by the party, whether this isadmitted or not.”*

Murder and arson and pillage were not the only tribulations suffered byinnocent German Jews as the result of the murder of Rath in Paris. TheJews had to pay for the destruction of their own property. Insurance

* Major Buch’s report gives an authentic picture of justice in the Third Reich. “Inthe following cases of killing Jews,” one part reads, “proceedings were suspendedor minor punishments were pronounced.” He then cites a large number of such“cases,” giving the names of the murdered and the murderers. “Party MemberFruehling, August, because of shooting of the Jewish couple Goldberg and becauseof 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 theJew Ilsoffer . . . ,” etc.

A 7 O

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

monies due them were confiscated by the State. Moreover, they weresubjected, collectively, to a fine of one billion marks as punishment, asGoering put it, “for their abominable crimes, etc.” These additionalpenalties were assessed at a grotesque meeting of a dozen German cabinetministers and ranking officials presided over by the corpulent Field Marshalon ovember 12, a partial stenographic record of which survives

A number of German insurance firms faced bankruptcy if they wereto make good the policies on gutted buildings (most of which, thoughthey harbored Jewish shops, were owned by Gentiles) and damagedS°°,S' destruction in broken window glass alone came to five millionmarks ($1,250,000) as a Herr Hilgard, who had been called in to speakfor the insurance companies, reminded Goering; and most of the glassreplacements would have to be imported from abroad in foreign exchangeof which Germany was very short. 6 ’

“This cannot continue!” exclaimed Goering, who, among other thingswas the czar of the German economy. “We won’t be able to last, with fill

I“P°tSSlbl,e- A*d turninS to Heydrich, he shouted, “I wish youhad killed two hundred Jews instead of destroying so many valuables!”*

Thirty-five were killed,” Heydrich answered, in self-defense.

fsot ail the conversation, of which the partial stenographic record runsto ten thousand words, was so deadly serious. Goering and Goebbels hada lot of fun arguing about subjecting the Jews to further indignities. The

rTl8:!nfa ln!Ster Said the Jews would be made to clean up and leveloff the debris of the synagogues; the sites would then be turned into park-ing lots. He insisted that the Jews be excluded from everything: schoolst eaters, movies, resorts, public beaches, parks, even from the Germanforests He proposed that there be special railway coaches and compart-ments for the Jews, but that they be made available only after all Aryanswere seated. J

Well, if the tram is overcrowded,” Goering laughed, “we’ll kick theJew out and make him sit all alone all the way in the toilet.”

When Goebbels, in all seriousness, demanded that the Jews be forbiddento enter the forests, Goering replied, “We shall give the Jews a certainpart of the forest and see to it that various animals that look damned muchlike Jews—the elk has a crooked nose like theirs—get there also and be-come acclimated.”

In such talk, and much more like it, did the leaders of the Third Reichwhile away the time in the crucial year of 1938.

But the question of who was to pay for the 25 million marks’ worth ofdamage caused by a pogrom instigated and organized by the State was atairly serious one, especially to Goering, who now had become responsiblefor the economic well-being of Nazi Germany. Hilgard, on behalf of theinsurance companies, pointed out that if their policies were not honoredto the Jews, the confidence of the people, both at home and abroad, in

* wi?n fkued during cross-examination by Mr. Justice Jackson at NuremberPwhether he had actually said this, Goering replied, “Yes, this was said in a momentof bad temper and excitement ... It was not meant seriously.”6

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German insurance would be forfeited. On the other hand, he did not seehow many of the smaller companies could pay up without going broke.

This problem was quickly solved by Goering. The insurance com-panies would pay the Jews in full, but the sums would be confiscated bythe State and the insurers reimbursed for a part of their losses. This didnot satisfy Herr Hilgard, who, judging by the record of the meeting, musthave felt that he had fallen in with a bunch of lunatics.

Goering: The Jew shall get the refund from the insurance company butthe refund will be confiscated. There will remain some profit for the insurancecompanies, since they won’t have to make good for all the damage. HerrHilgard, you may consider yourself damned lucky.

Hilgard: I have no reason to. The fact that we won’t have to pay for allthe damage, you call a profit!

The Field Marshal was not accustomed to such talk and he quicklysquelched the bewildered businessman.

Goering: Just a moment! If you are legally bound to pay five millionsand all of a sudden an angel in my somewhat corpulent shape appears beforeyou and tells you that you may keep one million, for heaven’s sake isn’t that aprofit? I should like to go fifty-fifty with you, or whatever you call it. I haveonly to look at you. Your whole body seethes with satisfaction. You aregetting a big rake-off!

The insurance executive was slow to see the point.

Hilgard: All the insurance companies are the losers. That is so, andremains so. Nobody can tell me differently.

Goering: Then why don’t you take care of it that a few windows less arebeing 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 Americanpublic opinion be considered in taking further measures against the Jews.*This inspired an outburst from Goering: “That country of scoundrels!

. . . That gangster state!”

* The American ambassador in Berlin, Hugh Wilson, was recalled by PresidentRoosevelt on November 14, two days after Goering’s meeting, “for consultations,”and never returned to his post. The German ambassador in Washington, HansDieckhoff, who on that day reported to Berlin that “a hurricane is raging here” asthe result of the German pogrom, was recalled on November 18 and likewise neverreturned. On November 30, Hans Thomsen, the German charge d’affaires inWashington, advised Berlin by code that “in view of the strained relations and thelack of security for secret material” in the embassy, the “secret political files” be re-moved to Berlin. “The files,” he said, “are so bulky that they cannot be destroyedquickly enough should the necessity arise.”7

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

After further lengthy discussion it was agreed to solve the Jewish ques-tion in the following manner: eliminate the Jews from the Germaneconomy; transfer all Jewish business enterprises and property, includingjewelry and works of art, to Aryan hands with some compensation inbonds 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 theirproperty or confining them to German ghettos where they would beimpressed as forced labor, was left for further consideration by a com-

As Heydrich put it toward the close of the meeting: “In spite of theelimination of the Jews from economic life, the main problem remains

klck the Jew out of Germany.” Count Schwerin von Krosigk’the Minister of Finance, the former Rhodes scholar who prided himselfon representing the “traditional and decent Germany” in the Nazi govern-ment, agreed “that we will have to do everything to shove the Jews intoforeign countries.” As for the ghettos, this German nobleman saidmeekly I don t imagine the prospect of the ghetto is very nice. The ideaof the ghetto is not a very agreeable one.”

to fdose° P'M'—after Dearly four hours—Goering brought the meeting

I shall close the meeting with these words: German Jewry shall, as punish-ment for their abominable crimes, et cetera, have to make a contribution for onelllion marks. That will work. The swine won’t commit another murderIncidentally, 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 Stateand 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 haddeliberately turned down a dark and savage road from which there was

t0w! nAreiUrn' A g00d many Jews had been murdered and tortured androbbed before, but these crimes, except for those which took place inthe concentration camps, had been committed mostly by brown-shirtedrowdies acting out of their own sadism and greed while the State authoritieslooked on, or looked the other way. Now the German government itselfhad organ^ed and carried out a vast pogrom. The killings, the lootingthe burning of synagogues and houses and shops on the night of November

9 WZ° ^u r,8' S° Wefe the °fficial decrces’ duly published in the officialgazette, the Reichsgesetzblatt—three of them on the day of Goering’s

meeting—which fined the Jewish community a billion marks, eliminatedthem from the economy, robbed them of what was left of their property anddrove them toward the ghetto—and worse. r y

World opinion was shocked and revolted by such barbarity in a nationwhich boasted a centuries-old Christian and humanist culture. Hitler inturn, was enraged by the world reaction and convinced himself that itmerely proved the power and scope of “the Jewish world conspiracy.”

435

In retrospect, it is easy to see that the horrors inflicted upon the Jews ofGermany on November 9 and the harsh and brutal measures taken againstthem immediately afterward were portents of a fatal weakening which inthe end would bring the dictator, his regime and his nation down in utterruin. The evidences of Hitler’s megalomania we have seen permeatinghundreds of pages of this narrative. But until now he had usually beenable to hold it in check at critical stages in his rise and in that of hiscountry. At such moments his genius for acting not only boldly, butusually only after a careful calculation of the consequences, had won himone crashing success after another. But now, as November 9 and itsaftermath clearly showed, Hitler was losing his self-control. His megalo-mania was getting the upper hand. The stenographic record of the Goe-ring meeting on November 12 reveals that it was Hitler who, in the finalanalysis, was responsible for the holocaust of that November evening; itwas he who gave the necessary approval to launch it; he who pressedGoering to go ahead with the elimination of the Jews from German life.From now on the absolute master of the Third Reich would show littleof that restraint which had saved him so often before. And though hisgenius and that of his country would lead to further startling conquests,the poisonous seeds of eventual self-destruction for the dictator and hisland had now been sown.

Hitler’s sickness was contagious; the nation was catching it, as if itwere a virus. Individually, as this writer can testify from personal experi-ence, many Germans were as horrified by the November 9 inferno as wereAmericans and Englishmen and other foreigners. But neither the leadersof the Christian churches nor the generals nor any other representativesof the “good” Germany spoke out at once in open protest. They bowedto what General von Fritsch called “the inevitable,” or “Germany’sdestiny.”

The atmosphere of Munich soon was dissipated. At Saarbruecken, atWeimar, at Munich, Hitler delivered petulant speeches that fall warningthe outside world and particularly the British to mind their own businessand to quit concerning themselves “with the fate of Germans within thefrontiers of the Reich.” That fate, he thundered, was exclusively Ger-many’s affair. It could not be long before even Neville Chamberlainwould be awakened to the nature of the German government which hehad gone so far to appease. Gradually, as the eventful year of 1938 gaveway to ominous 1939, the Prime Minister got wind of what the Fuehrerwhom he had tried so hard to personally accommodate in the interest ofEuropean peace was up to behind the scenes.*

* On January 28, 1939, Lord Halifax secretly warned President Roosevelt that “asearly as November 1938, there were indications which gradually became moredefinite that Hitler was planning a further foreign adventure for the spring of 1939.”The British Foreign Secretary said that “reports indicate that Hitler, encouragedby Ribbentrop, Himmler and others, is considering an attack on the WesternPowers as a preliminary to subsequent action in the East.”8

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

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] isconvinced that we must inevitably count on a war with the Western democraciesm the course of a few years, perhaps three or four . . . The Czech crisis hasshown our power! We have the advantage of the initiative and are masters ofthe situation. We cannot be attacked. The military situation is excellent: asfrom 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, “TheDuce says you only have to look at his head to see that he has a smallbrain.” The German Foreign Minister had come to Rome to persuadeMussolini to sign a military alliance between Germany, Japan and Italy,a draft of which had been given the Italians at Munich; but Mussolinistalled for time. He was not yet ready, Ciano noted, to shut the door onBritain and France.

Hitler himself toyed that autumn with the idea of trying to detachFrance from her ally over the Channel. When on October 18 he receivedthe French ambassador, Frangois-Poncet, for a farewell visit in the eeriefastness of Eagle’s Nest, high above Berchtesgaden on a mountaintop fhe broke out into a bitter attack on Great Britain. The ambassador foundthe Fuehrer pale, his face drawn with fatigue, but not too tired to inveighagainst Albion. Britain re-echoed “with threats and calls to arms.” Shewas selfish and took on “superior” airs. It was the British who weredestroying the spirit of Munich. And so on. France was different. Hitlersaid he wanted more friendly and close relations with her. To prove it, hewas willing to sign at once a pact of friendship, guaranteeing their presentfrontiers (and thus again renouncing any German claims to Alsace-Lor-raine) and proposing to settle any future differences by consultation.

The pact was duly signed in Paris on December 6, 1938, by the Germanand French foreign ministers. France, by that time, had somewhat re-

drtw^nThv nT? °a Ribbe"tr°p’s talk with Ciano in Rome on October 28,l jvin ,hy,r Schmidt’c°nfirms R.bbentrop’s bellicose attitude and quotes himas saying that Geimany and Italy must prepare for “armed conflict with the Western

hCre ,an,d n0W-” At this meetinS Ribbentrop also assured Cianothat Munich had revealed the strength of the isolationists in the U.S.A “so thatthere is nothing to fear from America.”10

t This fantastic retreat, built at great cost over three years, was difficult to reach,len miles of a hairpin road, cut into the mountainside, led up to a long under-ground passageway, drilled into the rock, from which an elevator carried one 370teet to the cabin perched at an elevation of over 6,000 feet on the summit of amountain. It afforded a breath-taking panorama of the Alps. Salzburg could beln,the distance- Describing it later, Frangois-Poncet wondered, “Was thisedifice the work of a normal mind or of one tormented by megalomania and hauntedby visions of domination and solitude?”

437

covered from the defeatist panic of the Munich days. The writer happenedto be in Paris on the day the paper was signed and noted the frosty atmos-phere. When Ribbentrop drove through the streets they were completelydeserted, and several cabinet ministers and other leading figures in theFrench political and literary worlds, including the eminent presidents ofthe 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 misunder-standing which was to play a certain part in future events. The GermanForeign Minister claimed that Bonnet had assured him that after MunichFrance was no longer interested in Eastern Europe and he subsequentlyinterpreted this as meaning that the French would give Germany a freehand in this region, especially in regard to rump Czechoslovakia andPoland. Bonnet denied this. According to Schmidt’s minutes of themeeting, Bonnet declared, in answer to Ribbentrop’s demand that Ger-many’s sphere of influence in the East be recognized, that “conditions hadchanged fundamentally since Munich.”11 This ambiguous remark wassoon stretched by the slippery German Foreign Minister into the flatstatement, which he passed along to Hitler, that “at Paris Bonnet haddeclared he was no longer interested in questions concerning the East.”France’s swift surrender at Munich had already convinced the Fuehrerof this. It was not quite true.

SLOVAKIA “WINS” ITS “INDEPENDENCE”

What had happened to the German guarantee of the rest of Czecho-slovakia which Hitler had solemnly promised at Munich to give? Whenthe new French ambassador in Berlin, Robert Coulondre, inquired ofWeizsaecker on December 21, 1938, the State Secretary replied that thedestiny of Czechoslovakia lay in the hands of Germany and that he rejectedthe idea of a British-French guarantee. As far back as October 14, whenthe new Czech Foreign Minister, Frantisek Chvalkovsky, had comehumbly begging for crumbs at the hand of Hitler in Munich and had in-quired whether Germany was going to join Britain and France in theguarantee of his country’s shrunken frontiers, the Fuehrer replied sneer-ingly that “the British and French guarantees were worthless . . . andthat 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 haveinterfered with the plans which he had begun to lay immediately afterMunich. Soon there would be no Czechoslovakia to guarantee. To startwith, Slovakia would be induced to break away.

A few days after Munich, on October 17, Goering had received twoSlovak leaders, Ferdinand Durcansky and Mach, and the leader of theGerman minority in Slovakia, Franz Karmasin. Durcansky, who was

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Deputy Prime Minister of the newly appointed autonomous Slovakia,assured the Field Marshal that what the Slovaks really wanted was “com-plete independence, with very close political, economic and military tieswith Germany.” In a secret Foreign Office memorandum of the samedate it was noted that Goering had decided that independence for Slovakiamust be supported. “A Czech State minus Slovakia is even more com-pletely at our mercy. Air base in Slovakia for operation against the Eastvery important.”13 Such were Goering’s thoughts on the matter inmid-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 whatremained of the state by the military occupation of the Czech lands,Bohemia and Moravia. On October 21, 1938, as we have seen, Hitlerhad directed the Wehrmacht to be ready to carry out that liquidation.*On December 17, General Keitel issued what he called a “supplement toDirective of October 21”:

TOP SECRET

With reference to the “liquidation of the Rump Czech State,” the Fuehrerhas given the following orders:

The operation is to be prepared on the assumption that no resistance worthmentioning is to be expected.

To the outside world it must clearly appear that it is merely a peacefulaction and not a warlike undertaking.

The action must therefore be carried out by the peacetime armed forcesonly, without reinforcement by mobilization . . .14

Try as it might to please Hitler, the new pro-German government ofCzechoslovakia began to realize as the new year began that the country’sgoose was cooked. Just before Christmas, 1938, the Czech cabinet, inorder to further appease the Fuehrer, had dissolved the Communist Partyand suspended all Jewish teachers in German schools. On January 12,1939, Foreign Minister Chvalkovsky, in a message to the German ForeignOffice, stressed that his government “will endeavor to prove its loyaltyand good will by far-reaching fulfillment of Germany’s wishes.” On thesame day he brought to the attention of the German charge in Prague thespreading rumors that the incorporation of Czechoslovakia into theReich was imminent.”15

To see if even the pieces could be saved Chvalkovsky finally prevailedupon Hitler to receive him in Berlin on January 21. It turned out to bea painful scene, though not as painful for the Czechs as one that wouldshortly follow. The Czech Foreign Minister groveled before the mighty

* On November 24, Hitler issued another secret directive instructing the Wehrmachtto make preparations for the military occupation of Danzig, but that will be takenup later. Already the Fuehrer was looking beyond the final conquest of Czechoslo-vakia.

German dictator, who was in one of his most bullying moods. Czecho-slovakia, said Hitler, had been saved from catastrophe by “Germany’smoderation.” 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 onlysalvation. Specifically, Czechoslovakia must leave the League of Na-tions, drastically reduce the size of her Army—“because it did not countanyway”—join the Anti-Comintern Pact, accept German direction of herforeign policy, make a preferential trade agreement with Germany, onecondition of which was that no new Czech industries could be establishedwithout German consent,* dismiss all officials and editors not friendly tothe Reich and, finally, outlaw the Jews, as Germany had done under itsNuremberg Laws. (“With us, the Jews will be destroyed,” Hitler toldhis visitor.) On the same day Chvalkovsky received further demands fromRibbentrop, who threatened “catastrophic consequences” unless theCzechs immediately mended their ways and did as they were told. TheGerman Foreign Minister, so much the lackey in the presence of Hitler buta boor and a bully with anyone over whom he had the upper hand, badeChvalkovsky not to mention the new German demands to the British andFrench but just to go ahead and carry them out.17

And to do so without worrying about any German guarantee of theCzech frontiers! Apparently there had been little worry about this inParis and London. Four months had gone by since Munich, and stillHitler had not honored his word to add Germany’s guarantee to that givenby Britain and France. Finally on February 8 an Anglo-French noteverbale was presented in Berlin stating that the two governments “wouldnow be glad to learn the views of the German Government as to the bestway of giving effect to the understanding reached at Munich in regardto the guarantee of Czechoslovakia.”18

Hitler himself, as the captured German Foreign Office documentsestablish, drafted the reply, which was not made until February 28. Itsaid that the time had not yet come for a German guarantee. Germanywould have to “await first a clarification of the internal development ofCzechoslovakia.”18

The Fuehrer already was shaping that “internal development” to-ward an obvious end. On February 12 he received at the Chancellery inBerlin Dr. Vojtech Tuka, one of the Slovak leaders, whose long imprison-ment had embittered him against the Czechs, f Addressing Hitler as “my

* Hitler also demanded that the Czechoslovak National Bank turn over part of itsgold reserve to the Reichsbank. The sum requested was 391.2 million Czech crownsin gold. On February 18 Goering wrote the German Foreign Office: “In view of theincreasingly difficult currency position, I must insist most strongly that the 30 to 40million Reichsmarks in gold [from the Czech National Bank] which are involvedcome into our possession very shortly; they are urgently required for the executionof important orders of the Fuehrer.”161 See above, p. 359.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Fuehrer,” as the secret German memorandum of the talk emphasizes, Dr.Tuka begged the German dictator to make Slovakia independent andfree. “I lay the destiny of my people in your hands, my Fuehrer,” hedeclared. “My people await their complete liberation from you.”

Hitler’s reply was somewhat evasive. He said that unfortunately hehad not understood the Slovak problem. Had he known the Slovakswanted to be independent he would have arranged it at Munich. It wouldbe “a comfort to him to know that Slovakia was independent ... Hecould guarantee an independent Slovakia at any time, even today . . .”These were comforting words to Professor Tuka too.20 “This,” he saidlater, “was the greatest day of my life.”

The curtain on the next act of the Czechoslovak tragedy could now goup. By another one of those ironies with which this narrative history isso full, it was the Czechs in Prague who forced the curtain up a littleprematurely. By the beginning of March 1938 they were caught in aterrible dilemma. The separatist movements in Slovakia and Ruthenia,fomented, as we have seen, by the German government (and in Rutheniaalso by Hungary, which was hungry to annex that little land) had reachedsuch a state that unless they were squelched Czechoslovakia would breakup. In that case Hitler would surely occupy Prague. If the separatistswere put down by the central government, then the Fuehrer, just ascertainly, would take advantage of the resulting disturbance to also marchinto Prague.

The Czech government, after much hesitation and only after the provo-cation became unbearable, chose the second alternative. On March 6,Dr. Hacha, the President of Czechoslovakia, dismissed the autonomousRuthenian government from office, and on the night of March 9-10 theautonomous Slovakian government. The next day he ordered the arrestof Monsignor Tiso, the Slovak Premier, Dr. Tuka and Durcansky and pro-claimed martial law in Slovakia. The one courageous move of this govern-ment, which had become so servile to Berlin, quickly turned into a disasterwhich destroyed it.

The swift action by the tottering Prague government caught Berlin bysurprise. Goering had gone off to sunny San Remo for a vacation. Hitlerwas on the point of leaving for Vienna to celebrate the first anniversary ofthe 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 andsent to the German Foreign Office. It called upon the Czechs to submitto 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, whohad represented the autonomous Slovak government at Prague, was namedby President Hacha to be the new Premier of it in place of Monsignor Tiso.Returning to Bratislava, the Slovak seat of government, on Saturday,

Czechoslovakia Ceases to Exist 441

March 11, Sidor called a meeting of his new cabinet. At ten o’clock in theevening the session of the Slovak government was interrupted by strangeand unexpected visitors. Seyss-Inquart, the quisling Nazi Governor ofAustria, and Josef Buerckel, the Nazi Gauleiter of Austria, accompaniedby five German generals, pushed their way into the meeting and told thecabinet ministers to proclaim the independence of Slovakia at once.Unless they did, Hitler, who had decided to settle the question of Slovakiadefinitely 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 monasterywhere he supposedly was under house arrest, demanded a cabinet meet-ing, though he was no longer himself in the cabinet. To forestall furtherinterruptions by high German officials and generals, Sidor called themeeting in his own apartment, and when this became unsafe—for Germanstorm troopers were taking over the town—he adjourned it to the officesof a local newspaper. There Tiso informed him that he had just receiveda telegram from Buerckel inviting him to go at once to see the Fuehrer inBerlin. If he refused the invitation, Buerckel threatened, two Germandivisions across the Danube from Bratislava would march in and Slovakiawould be divided up between Germany and Hungary. Arriving in Viennathe next morning, Monday, March 13, with the intention of proceedingto Berlin by train, the chubby little prelate* was packed into a plane bythe Germans and flown to the presence of Hitler. For the Fuehrer, therewas no time to waste.

When Tiso and Durcansky arrived at the Chancellery in Berlin at 7:40on the evening of March 13, they found Hitler flanked not only by Ribben-trop but by his two top generals, Brauchitsch, Commander in Chief of theGerman Army, and Keitel, Chief of OKW. Though they may not haverealized 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 givingway to megalomania, and watch him spinning his fantastic lies and utter-ing his dire threats in a manner and to an extent which he no doubt wassure would never come to public attention.23

‘‘Czechoslovakia,” he said, “owed it only to Germany that she had notbeen mutilated further.” The Reich had exhibited “the greatest self-con-trol.” Yet the Czechs had not appreciated this. “During recent weeks,”he went on, working himself up easily to a fine lather, “conditions havebecome impossible. The old Benes spirit has come to life again.”

The Slovaks had also disappointed him. After Munich he had “fallen

* Monsignor Tiso, as this writer recalls him, was almost as broad as he was high. Hewas an enormous eater. “When I get worked up,” he once told Dr. Paul Schmidt,"I eat halt a pound of ham, and that soothes my nerves.” He was to die on thegallows. Arrested by American Army authorities on June 8, 1945, and turnedover to the newly restored Czechoslovakia, he was condemned to death on April15, 1947, after a trial lasting four months, and was executed on April 18.

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THE rise and fall of THE THIRD REICH

out” with his friends the Hungarians by not permitting them to grabSlovakia. He had thought Slovakia wanted to be independent.

He had now summoned Tiso in order to clear up this question in a very shorttime* . . . The question was: Did Slovakia want to lead an independent ex-istence or not? ... It was a question not of days but of hours. If Slovakiawished to become independent he would support and even guarantee itIf she hesitated or refused to be separated from Prague, he would leave the fateof Slovakia to events for which he was no longer responsible.

At this point, the German minutes reveal, Ribbentrop “handed to theFuehrer a report just received announcing Hungarian troop movementson the Slovak frontier. The Fuehrer read this report, told Tiso of itscontents, and expressed the hope that Slovakia would reach a decisionsoon.”

Tiso did not give his decision then. He asked the Fuehrer to “pardonhim if, under the impact of the Chancellor’s words, he could make nodefinite decision at once.” But the Slovaks, he quickly added, “wouldprove themselves worthy of the Fuehrer’s benevolence.”

This they did in a conference which continued far into the night at theForeign Ministry. According to the Nuremberg testimony of Keppler,who had been Hitler’s secret agent in Bratislava, as he had been the yearbefore in Vienna on the eve of the Anschluss, the Germans helped Tisodraft a telegram, which the “Premier” was to send as soon as he returnedto Bratislava, proclaiming Slovakia’s independence and urgently request-ing the Fuehrer to take over the protection of the new state.24 It isreminiscent of the telegram” dictated by Goering just a year before inwhich Seyss-Inquart was to appeal to Hitler to send German troops toAustria. By this time the Nazi “telegram” technique had been perfected.The telegram, considerably abridged, was duly dispatched by Tiso onMarch 16, and Hitler immediately replied that he would be glad to “takeover the protection of the Slovak State.”

At the Foreign Office that night Ribbentrop also drafted the Slovakproclamation of “independence” and had it translated into Slovak in timefor Tiso to take it back to Bratislava, where the “Premier” read it—inslightly altered form, as one German agent reported—to Parliament onthe following day, Tuesday, March 14. Attempts by several Slovakdeputies to at least discuss it were squelched by Karmasin, the leader ofthe German minority, who warned that German troops would occupythe country if there was any delay in proclaiming independence. Facedwith this threat the doubting deputies gave in.

Thus was “independent” Slovakia born on March 14, 1939. ThoughBritish diplomatic representatives were quick to inform London as to themanner of its birth, Chamberlain, as we shall see, was just as quick to

* Italics in the original German minutes.

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Czechoslovakia Ceases to Exist

use Slovakia’s “secession” as an excuse for Britain not to honor itsguarantee of Czechoslovakia after Hitler, on that very evening, March14, acted to finish what had been left undone at Munich.

The life of the Czechoslovak Republic of Masaryk and Benes had nowrun out. And once again the harassed leaders in Prague played intoHitler’s hands to set up the final act of their country’s tragedy. The aging,bewildered President Hacha asked to be received by the Fuehrer.* Hitlergraciously consented. It gave him an opportunity to set the stage for oneof the most brazen acts of his entire career.

Consider how well the dictator had already arranged the set as hewaited on the afternoon of March 14 for the President of Czechoslovakiato arrive. The proclamations of independence of Slovakia and Ruthenia,which he had so skillfully engineered, left Prague with only the Czechcore of Bohemia and Moravia. Had not Czechoslovakia in reality ceasedto exist—the nation whose frontiers Britain and France had guaranteedagainst aggression? Chamberlain and Daladier, his partners at Munichwhere the guarantee had been solemnly given, already had their “out.”That they would take it he had no doubt—and he was right. That disposedof any danger of foreign intervention. But to make doubly sure—to seeto it that his next move looked quite legal and legitimate by the vaguestandards of international law, at least on paper—he would force theweak and senile Hacha, who had begged to see him, to accept the verysolution which he had intended to achieve by military force. And in sodoing he could make it appear—he, who, alone in Europe, had masteredthe new technique of bloodless conquest, as the Anschluss and Munichhad proved—that the President of Czechoslovakia had actually andformally asked for it. The niceties of “legality,” which he had perfectedso well in taking over power in Germany, would be preserved in theconquest of a non-Germanic land.

Hitler had also set the stage to fool the German and other gulliblepeople in Europe. For several days now German provocateurs had beentrying to stir up trouble in various Czech towns, Prague, Bruenn andIglau. They had not had much success because, as the German Legationin Prague reported, the Czech “police have been instructed to take noaction against Germans, even in cases of provocation.”26 But this failuredid not prevent Dr. Goebbels from whipping up the German press intoa frenzy over invented acts of terror by the Czechs against the poorGermans. As the French ambassador, M. Coulondre, informed Paris,

* There is a difference of opinion on this point. Some historians have contendedthat the Germans forced Hacha to come to Berlin. They probably base this con-tention on a dispatch of the French ambassador in Berlin, who said he had learnedthis “from a reliable source.” But the German Foreign Office documents, subse-quently discovered, make it clear that the initiative came from Hacha. He first re-quested an interview with Hitler on March 13, through the German Legation inPrague, and repealed the request on the morning of the fourteenth. Hitler agreedto it that afternoon.25

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

they were the same stories with the same headlines which Dr. Goebbelshad concocted during the Sudeten crisis—down to the pregnant Germanwoman struck down by Czech beasts and the general “Blutbad” (“bloodbath”) to which the defenseless Germans were being subjected by theCzech barbarians. Hitler could assure the proud German people thattheir kinsmen would not remain unprotected for long.

Such was the situation and such were Hitler’s plans, we now knowfrom the German archives, as the train bearing President Hacha and hisForeign Minister, Chvalkovsky, drew into the Anhalt Station in Berlin at10:40 on the evening of March 14. Because of a heart condition thePresident had been unable to fly.

THE ORDEAL OF DR. HACHA

The German protocol was perfect. The Czech President was accordedall the formal honors due to a head of state. There was a military guardof honor at the station, where the German Foreign Minister himself greetedthe 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 Hacha—a personal gift of Adolf Hitler!who believed that everyone else shared his craving for sweets. And whenthe aged President and his Foreign Minister arrived at the Chancelleryhe was given a salute by an S.S. guard of honor.

They were not summoned to Hitler’s presence until 1:15 a.m. Hachamust have known what was in store for him. Before his train had leftCzech territory he learned from Prague that German troops had alreadyoccupied Moravska-Ostrava, an important Czech industrial town, andwere 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-morn-ing hour, that, besides Ribbentrop and Weizsaecker, Field Marshal Goe-ring, who had been urgently recalled from his holiday at San Remo, andGeneral Keitel stood at Hitler’s side. Most probably, as he went into thislion 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 thevery outset. The unhappy Dr. Hacha, despite his background as a re-spected judge of the Supreme Court, shed all human dignity by grovelingbefore the swaggering German Fuehrer. Perhaps the President thoughtthat only in this way could he appeal to Hitler’s generosity and save some-thing for his people; but regardless of his motive, his words, as theGermans recorded them for their confidential archives, nauseate thereader even so long afterward as today. He himself, Hacha assured Hitler,had never mixed in politics. He had rarely seen the founders of theCzechoslovak Republic, Masaryk and Benes, and what he had seen ofthem he did not like. Their regime, he said, was “alien” to him—“so

alien that immediately after the change of regime [after Munich] he hadasked himself whether it was a good thing for Czechoslovakia to be anindependent state at all.”

He was convinced that the destiny of Czechoslovakia lay in the Fuehrer’shands, and he believed it was in safekeeping in such hands . . . Then hecame to what affected him most, the fate of his people. He felt that it wasprecisely the Fuehrer who would understand his holding the view thatCzechoslovakia had the right to live a national life . . . Czechoslovakia wasbeing blamed because there still existed many supporters of the Benes system. . . The Government was trying by every means to silence them. This wasabout all he had to say.

Adolf Hitler then said all there was to say. After rehearsing all thealleged wrongs which the Czechoslovakia of Masaryk and Benes haddone to Germans and Germany, and reiterating that unfortunately theCzechs had not changed since Munich, he came to the point.

He had come to the conclusion that this journey by the President, despitehis advanced years, might be of great benefit to his country because it wasonly a matter of hours now before Germany intervened ... He harboredno enmity against any nation . . . That the Rump State of Czechoslovakiaexisted at all was attributable only to his loyal attitude ... In the autumnhe had not wished to draw the final conclusions because he had thought acoexistence possible, but he had left no doubt that if the Benes tendencies didnot 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 theorder for the invasion by the German troops and for the incorporation ofCzechoslovakia into the German Reich*

“Hacha and Chvalkovsky,” noted Dr. Schmidt, “sat as though turnedto stone. Only their eyes showed that they were alive.” But Hitler wasnot quite through. He must humble his guests with threats of Teutonicterror.

The German Army [Hitler continued] had already marched in today, andat a barracks where resistance was offered it had been ruthlessly broken.

Tomorrow morning at six o’clock the German Army was to enter Czechiafrom all sides and the German Air Force would occupy the Czech airfields.There were two possibilities. The first was that the entry of German troopsmight develop into fighting. In that case, resistance would be broken by bruteforce. The other possibility was that the entry of the German troops would

* The emphasis is in the German original.

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take place in a peaceful manner, in which case it would be easy for theFuehrer 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. Iflast autumn Czechoslovakia had not given in, the Czech people would havebeen exterminated. No one would have prevented him doing it. If it cameto 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 whichwould compel him, in self-preservation, not to concede autonomy. The worldwould not care a jot about this. He sympathized with the Czech people whenhe read the foreign press. It gave him the impression which might be summedup in the German proverb: “The Moor has done his duty; the Moor cango.” . . .

That was why he had asked Hacha to come here. This was the last goodturn he could render the Czech people . . . Perhaps Hacha’s visit mightprevent the worst . . .

The hours were passing. At six o’clock the troops would march in. He wasalmost ashamed to say it, but for every Czech battalion there was a Germandivision. He would like now to advise him [Hacha] to withdraw with Chval-kovsky and discuss what was to be done.

What was to be done? The broken old President did not have to with-draw 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 littleafter 2 a.m.—could he, in the space of four hours, arrange to restrain thewhole Czech people from offering resistance? The Fuehrer replied thathe had better consult with his companions. The German military machinewas already in motion and could not be stopped. Hacha should get intouch at once with Prague. “It was a grave decision,” the German minutesreport Hitler as saying, “but he saw dawning the possibility of a long periodof peace between the two peoples. Should the decision be otherwise, hesaw the annihilation of Czechoslovakia.”

With these words, he dismissed his guests for the time being. It was2:15 a.m. In an adjoining room Goering and Ribbentrop stepped up thepressure on the two victims. According to the French ambassador, whoin an official dispatch to Paris depicted the scene as he got it from what hebelieved to be an authentic source, Hacha and Chvalkovsky protestedagainst the outrage to their nation. They declared they would not sign thedocument of surrender. Were they to do so they would be forever cursedby their people.

The German ministers [Goering and Ribbentrop] were pitiless [M. Coulondrewrote in his dispatch]. They literally hunted Dr. Hacha and M. Chvalkovskyround the table on which the documents were lying, thrusting them continuallybefore them, pushing pens into their hands, incessantly repeating that if theycontinued in their refusal, half of Prague would lie in ruins from bombing

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within two hours, and that this would be only the beginning. Hundreds ofbombers were waiting the order to take off, and they would receive that orderat six in the morning if the signatures were not forthcoming.*

At this point, Dr. Schmidt, who seems to have managed to be presentwhenever and wherever the drama of the Third Reich reached a climax,heard Goering shouting for Dr. Morell.

“Hacha has fainted!” Goering cried out.

For a moment the Nazi bullies feared that the prostrate Czech Presi-dent might die on their hands and, as Schmidt says, “that the whole worldwill say tomorrow that he was murdered at the Chancellery.” Dr. Mo-rell’s specialty was injections—much later he would almost kill Hitlerwith them—and he now applied the needle to Dr. Hacha and brought himback to consciousness. The President was revived sufficiently to be ableto grasp the telephone which the Germans thrust into his hand and talkto his government in Prague over a special line which Ribbentrop hadordered rigged up. He apprised the Czech cabinet of what had happenedand advised surrender. Then, somewhat further restored by a second in-jection from the needle of Dr. Morell, the President of the expiring Re-public stumbled back into the presence of Adolf Hitler to sign his coun-try’s death warrant. It was now five minutes to four in the morning ofMarch 15, 1939.

The text had been prepared “beforehand by Hitler,” Schmidt recounts,and during Hacha’s fainting spells the German interpreter had been busy

(copying the official communique, which had also been written up “before-hand,” and which Hacha and Chvalkovsky were also forced to sign. Itread as follows:

Berlin, March 15,1939

At their request, the Fuehrer today received the Czechoslovak President,Dr. Hacha, and the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister, Dr. Chvalkovsky, inBerlin in the presence of Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop. At the meetingthe serious situation created by the events of recent weeks in the presentCzechoslovak territory was examined with complete frankness.

The conviction was unanimously expressed on both sides that the aim of allefforts must be the safeguarding of calm, order and peace in this part of CentralEurope. The Czechoslovak President declared that, in order to serve thisobject and to achieve ultimate pacification, he confidently placed the fate ofthe Czech people and country in the hands of the Fuehrer of the GermanReich. The Fuehrer accepted this declaration and expressed his intention oftaking the Czech people under the protection of the German Reich and of

* On the stand in Nuremberg, Goering admitted that he told Hacha, “I should besorry if I had to bomb beautiful Prague.” He really didn’t intend to carry out thethreat—“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

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guaranteeing them an autonomous development of their ethnic life as suitedto their character.

Hitler’s chicanery had reached, perhaps, its summit.

According to one of his woman secretaries, Hitler rushed from the sign-ing into his office, embraced all the women present and exclaimed, “Chil-dren! This is the greatest day of my life! I shall go down in history as thegreatest German!”

It did not occur to him—how could it?—that the end of Czechoslovakiamight be the beginning of the end of Germany. From this dawn of March15, 1939 the Ides of March—the road to war, to defeat, to disaster, aswe now know, stretched just ahead. It would be a short road and asstraight 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 Mo-ravia. They met no resistance, and by evening Hitler was able to makethe triumphant entry into Prague which he felt Chamberlain had cheatedhim of at Munich. Before leaving Berlin he had issued a grandiose proc-lamation to the German people, repeating the tiresome lies about thewild excesses” and “terror” of the Czechs which he had been forced tobring an end to, and proudly proclaiming, “Czechoslovakia has ceased toexist!”

That night he slept in Hradschin Castle, the ancient seat of the kings ofBohemia high above the River Moldau where more recently the despisedMasaryk and Benes had lived and worked for the first democracy CentralEurope had ever known. The Fuehrer’s revenge was complete, and thatit was sweet he showed in the series of proclamations which he issued.He had paid off all the burning resentments against the Czechs which hadobsessed him as an Austrian in his vagabond days in Vienna three decadesbefore and which had flamed anew when Benes dared to oppose him, theall-powerful German dictator, over the past year.

The next day, from Hradschin Castle, he proclaimed the Protectorateof Bohemia and Moravia, which though it professed to provide “autonomyand self-government” for the Czechs brought them, by its very lamma^ecompletely under the German heel. All power was given to the ‘‘ReichProtector” and to his Secretary of State and his Head of the Civil Ad-ministration, who were to be appointed by the Fuehrer. To placate out-raged public opinion in Britain and France, Hitler brought the “moderate”Neurath out of cold storage and named him Protector.* The two topSudeten leaders, Konrad Henlein and the gangster Karl Hermann Frank,were given an opportunity to get revenge on the Czechs by being ap-

* °n„ffie stand at Nuremberg, Neurath stated that he was taken by “complete sur-prise when H,tier named him Protector, and that he had "misgivings” about tak-ing the job However, he says, he took it when Hitler explained that by this ap-pointment he wanted to assure Britain and France “that he did not wish to carryon a policy hostile to Czechoslovakia.”2®

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pointed Head of the Civil Administration and Secretary of State respec-tively. It was not long before Himmler, as boss of the German police, gota stranglehold on the protectorate. To do his work, he made the notori-ous 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 theGerman people . . . Czechoslovakia showed its inherent inability to surviveand has therefore now fallen a victim to actual dissolution. The German Reichcannot tolerate continuous disturbances in these areas . . . Therefore theGerman Reich, in keeping with the law of self-preservation, is now resolvedto intervene decisively to rebuild the foundations of a reasonable order inCentral Europe. For in the thousand years of its history it has already provedthat, thanks to the greatness and the qualities of the German people, it aloneis called upon to undertake this task.

A long night of German savagery now settled over Prague and theCzech lands.

On March 16, Hitler took Slovakia too under his benevolent protectionin 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 “Treatyof Protection,” which, as signed on March 23 in Berlin by Ribbentropand Dr. Tuka, contained a secret protocol giving Germany exclusive rightsto 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 onMarch 14, lasted just twenty-four hours. Its appeal to Hitler for “protec-tion” was in vain. Hitler had already awarded this territory to Hungary.In the captured Foreign Office archives there is an interesting letter in thehandwriting of Miklos Horthy, Regent of Hungary, addressed to AdolfHitler on March 13.

Your Excellency: Heartfelt thanks! I cannot express how happy I am, forthis headwater region [Ruthenia] is for Hungary—I dislike using big words—a vital question. . . . We are tackling the matter with enthusiasm. The plansare already laid. On Thursday, the 16th, a frontier incident will take place,to be followed Saturday by the big thrust.31

* It might be of interest to skip ahead here and note what happened to some of thecharacters in the drama just recounted. Frank was sentenced to death by a postwarCzech court and publicly hanged near Prague on May 22, 1946. Henlein com-mitted suicide after his arrest by Czech resistance forces in 1945. Chvalkovsky,who became the representative of the protectorate in Berlin, was killed in an Alliedbombing there in 1944. Hacha was arrested by the Czechs on May 14, 1945, butdied before he could be tried.

4;>u THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

As things turned out, there was no need for an “incident.” Hungariantroops simply moved into Ruthenia at 6 a.m. on March 15, timing theirentry with that of the Germans to the west, and on the following day theterritory was formally annexed by Hungary.

Thus by the end of the day of March 15, which had started in Berlin at1:15 a.m. when Hacha arrived at the Chancellery, Czechoslovakia, asHitler said, had ceased to exist.

Neither Britain nor France made the slightest move to save it, thoughat Munich they had solemnly guaranteed Czechoslovakia against aggres-sion.

Since that meeting not only Hitler but Mussolini had reached the con-clusion that the British had become so weak and their Prime Minister, asa consequence, so accommodating that they need pay little further atten-tion to London. On January 11, 1939, Chamberlain, accompanied byLord Halifax, had journeyed to Rome to seek improvement in Anglo-Italian relations. This writer happened to be at the.station in Rome whenthe two Englishmen arrived and noted in his diary the “fine smirk” onMussolini’s face as he greeted his guests. “When Mussolini passed me,” Inoted 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 wassaying, but later Ciano, in his diary, revealed the gist of it.

Arrival of Chamberlain. [Ciano wrote on January 11 and 12] . Howfar apart we are from these people! It is another world. We were talking aboutit after dinner with the Duce. “These men are not made of the same stuff,” hewas saying, “as the Francis Drakes and the other magnificent adventurers whocreated the Empire. These, after all, are the tired sons of a long line of richmen, and they will lose their Empire.”

The British do not want to fight. They try to draw back as slowly aspossible, but they do not fight . . . Our conversations with the British haveended. Nothing was accomplished. I have telephoned Ribbentrop that thevisit 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 whenthe train started moving and his countrymen began singing “For He’s a JollyGood Fellow.” “What is this little song?” the Duce asked.33

Though during the Sudeten crisis Hitler had been solicitous of Cham-berlain s views, there is not a word in the captured German papers to in-dicate that thereafter he cared a whit what the Prime Minister thought ofhis destroying the rest of Czechoslovakia despite the British guarantee—■and, for that matter, despite the Munich Agreement. On March 14, asHitler waited in Berlin to humble Hacha, and as angry questions wereraised in the House of Commons in London about Germany’s engineeringSlovakia’s “secession” and about its effect on Britain’s guarantee to Prague

against aggression, Chamberlain replied heatedly, “No such aggressionhas taken place.”

But the next day, March 15, after it had taken place, the Prime Minis-ter used the proclamation of Slovakia’s “independence” as an excuse notto honor his country’s word. “The effect of this declaration,” he ex-plained, “put an end by internal disruption to the State whose frontier wehad proposed to guarantee. His Majesty’s Government cannot accord-ingly hold themselves any longer bound by this obligation.”

Hitler’s strategy had thus worked to perfection. He had given Cham-berlain his out and the Prime Minister had taken it.

It is interesting that the Prime Minister did not even wish to accuseHitler of breaking his word. “I have so often heard charges of breach offaith bandied about which did not seem to me to be founded upon suffi-cient premises,” he said, “that I do not wish to associate myself todaywith any charges of that character.” He had not one word of reproachfor the Fuehrer, not even for his treatment of Hacha and the shabbyswindle which obviously—even if the details were still unknown—hadbeen perpetrated at the Reich Chancellery on the early morning of thisday, 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 amatter with which other Governments may be more directly concerned. . . .They are, however, as the German Government will surely appreciate, deeplyconcerned for the success of all efforts to restore confidence and a relaxation oftension in Europe. They would deplore any action in Central Europe whichwould 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 byAmbassador Henderson to Ribbentrop as an official message from LordHalifax, about the specific events of the day.

The French were at least specific. Robert Coulondre, the new ambas-sador of France in Berlin, shared neither his British colleague’s illusionsabout Nazism nor Henderson’s disdain of the Czechs. On the morning ofthe fifteenth he demanded an interview with Ribbentrop, but the vain andvindictive German Foreign Minister was already on his way to Prague,intending to share in Hitler’s humiliation of a beaten people. State Secre-tary von Weizsaecker received Coulondre, instead, at noon. The am-bassador lost no time in saying what Chamberlain and Henderson werenot yet ready to say: that by its military intervention in Bohemia and Mo-ravia, Germany had violated both the Munich Agreement and the Franco-German declaration of December 6. Baron von Weizsaecker, who later

* On March 16 Chamberlain told the Commons that “so far” no protest had beenlodged with the German government.

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was to insist that he had been stoutly anti-Nazi all along, was in an arro-gant mood that would have done credit to Ribbentrop. According to hisown memorandum of the meeting,

I spoke rather sharply to the Ambassador and told him not to mention theMunich Agreement, which he alleged had been violated, and not to give usany lectures ... I told him that in view of the agreement reached last nightwith the Czech government I could see no reason for any demarche by theFrench ambassador . . . and that I was sure he would find fresh instructionswhen 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 govern-ments, in deference to outraged public opinion at home, finally got aroundto making formal protests to the Reich, Weizsaecker fairly outdid hismaster, Ribbentrop, in his insolence—again on his own evidence. In amemorandum found in the German Foreign Office files, he tells with evi-dent 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 theAmbassador with the remark that I categorically refused to accept from himany protest regarding the Czecho-Slovak affair. Nor would I take note of thecommunication, and I would advise M. Coulondre to urge his government torevise the draft . . ,80

Coulondre, unlike Henderson at this period, was not an envoy whocould be browbeaten by the Germans. He retorted that his government’snote had been written after due consideration and that he had no inten-tion of asking for it to be revised. When the State Secretary continued torefuse to accept the document, the ambassador reminded him of commondiplomatic practice and insisted that France had a perfect right to makeknown its views to the German government. Finally Weizsaecker, ac-cording to his own account, left the note lying on his desk, explaining thathe “would regard it as transmitted to us through the post.” But before hearrived at this impudent gesture, he got the following off his mind:

From the legal point of view there existed a Declaration which had comeabout between the Fuehrer and the President of the Czecho-Slovak State.The Czech President, at his own request, had come to Berlin and had thenimmediately declared that he wished to place the fate of his country in theFuehrer s hands. I could not imagine that the French Government were moreCatholic than the Pope and intended meddling in things which had been dulysettled between Berlin and Prague.*

* 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, athis trial in Nuremberg, the State Secretary argued that in his memoranda of suchmeetings he had purposely exaggerated his Nazi sentiments in order to cover hisreal anti-Nazi activities. But Coulondre’s account of the meedng is only one pieceof evidence that Weizsaecker did not exaggerate at all.

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Weizsaecker behaved quite differently to the accommodating Britishambassador, who transmitted his government’s protest late on the after-noon of March 18. Great Britain now held that it could not “but regardthe events of the past few days as a complete repudiation of the MunichAgreement” and that the “German military actions” were “devoid of anybasis of legality.” Weizsaecker, in recording it, noted that the Britishnote did not go as far in this respect as the French protest, which said thatFrance “would not recognize the legality of the German occupation.”

Henderson had gone to see Weizsaecker on March 17 to inform him ofhis recall to London for “consultations” and, according to the State Sec-retary, had sounded him out “for arguments which he could give Cham-berlain for use against the latter’s political opposition . . . Hendersonexplained that there was no direct British interest in the Czechoslovakterritory. His—Henderson’s—anxieties were more for the future.”37

Even Hitler’s destruction of Czechoslovakia apparently had not awak-ened the British ambassador to the nature of the government he was ac-credited to, nor did he seem aware of what was happening that day to thegovernment which he represented.

For, suddenly and unexpectedly, Neville Chamberlain, on March 17,two days after Hitler extinguished Czechoslovakia, had experienced agreat awakening. It had not come without some prodding. Greatly tohis surprise, most of the British press (even the Times, but not the DailyMail) and the House of Commons had reacted violently to Hitler’s latestaggression. More serious, many of his own backers in Parliament andhalf of the cabinet had revolted against any further appeasement of Hit-ler. Lord Halifax, especially, as the German ambassador informed Ber-lin, had insisted that the Prime Minister recognize what had happenedand abruptly change his course.38 It dawned on Chamberlain that his ownposi.ion as head of government and leader of the Conservative Party wasin jeopardy.

His radical change of mind came abruptly. As late as the evening ofMarch 16, Sir John Simon, on behalf of the government, had made aspeech in the Commons which was so cynical in regard to the Czechs, andso much in the “Munich spirit,” that according to press accounts itaroused the House to “a pitch of anger rarely seen.” The next day, on theeve of his seventieth birthday, Chamberlain was scheduled to make aspeech in his home city of Birmingham. He had drafted an address ondomestic matters with special emphasis on the social services. On theafternoon train going up to Birmingham, according to an account giventhis writer by French diplomatic sources, Chamberlain finally made hisdecision. He jettisoned his prepared speech and quickly jotted down notesfor one of quite a different kind.

To all of Britain and indeed to large parts of the world, for the speechwas broadcast, Chamberlain apologized for “the very restrained and cau-tious . . . somewhat cool and objective statement” which he had feltobliged to make in the Commons two days before. “I hope to correct thatstatement tonight,” he said.

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The Prime Minister at last saw that Adolf Hitler had deceived him.He recapitulated the Fuehrer’s various assurances that the Sudetenlandhad been his last territorial demand in Europe and that he “wanted noCzechs.” Now Hitler had gone back on them—“he has taken the lawinto his own hands.”

Now we are told that this seizure of territory has been necessitated bydisturbances in Czechoslovakia. ... If there were disorders, were they notfomented from without? ... Is this the end of an old adventure or is it thebeginning of a new? Is this the last attack upon a small State or is it to befollowed by others? Is this, in effect, a step in the direction of an attempt todominate the world by force? . . . While I am not prepared to engage thiscountry by new and unspecified commitments operating under conditionswhich cannot now be foreseen, yet no greater mistake could be made than tosuppose that because it believes war to be a senseless and cruel thing, thisnation has so lost its fiber that it will not take part to the utmost of its powerin resisting such a challenge if it ever were made.

This was an abrupt and fateful turning point for Chamberlain and forBritain, and Hitler was so warned the very next day by the astute Germanambassador in London. “It would be wrong,” Herbert von Dirksen noti-fied the German Foreign Office in a lengthy report on March 18, “tocherish any illusions that a fundamental change has not taken place inBritain’s attitude to Germany.”39

It was obvious to anyone who had read Mein Kampf, who glanced at amap and saw the new positions of the German Army in Slovakia, who hadwind of certain German diplomatic moves since Munich, or who hadpondered the dynamics of Hitler’s bloodless conquests of Austria andCzechoslovakia in the past twelve months, just which of the “small states”would be next on the Fuehrer’s list. Chamberlain, like almost everyoneelse, knew perfectly well. .

On March 31, sixteen days after Hitler entered Prague, the PrimeMinister told the House of Commons:

In the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence andwhich the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist withtheir national forces. His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves boundat once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power. They havegiven the Polish Government an assurance to this effect. I may add that theFrench Government have authorized me to make it plain that they stand inthe same position in this matter.

The turn of Poland had come.

14

THE TURN OF POLAND

On October 24, 1938, less than a month after Munich, Ribbentropwas host to Jozef Lipski, the Polish ambassador in Berlin, at a three-hour lunch at the Grand Hotel in Berchtesgaden. Poland, like Germanyand indeed in connivance with her, had just seized a strip of Czech terri-tory. The luncheon talk proceeded, as a German Foreign Office memo-randum stressed, “in a very friendly atmosphere.”1

Nevertheless, the Nazi Foreign Minister lost little time in getting downto business. The time had come, he said, for a general settlement betweenPoland and Germany. It was necessary, first of all, he continued, “tospeak with Poland about Danzig.” It should “revert” to Germany. Also,Ribbentrop said, the Reich wished to build a super motor highway and adouble-track railroad across the Polish Corridor to connect Germanywith Danzig and East Prussia. Both would have to enjoy extraterritorialrights. Finally, Hitler wished Poland to join the Anti-Comintern Pactagainst Russia. In return for all these concessions, Germany would bewilling to extend the Polish-German treaty by from ten to twenty yearsand guarantee Poland’s frontiers.

Ribbentrop emphasized he was broaching these problems “in strictconfidence.” He suggested that the ambassador make his report to For-eign Minister Beck “orally—since otherwise there was great danger ofits leaking out, especially to the press.” Lipski promised to report to War-saw but warned Ribbentrop that personally he saw “no possibility” ofthe return of Danzig to Germany. He further reminded the German For-eign Minister of two recent occasions—November 5, 1937, and January14, 1938—when Hitler had personally assured the Poles that he wouldnot support any change in the Danzig Statute.2 Ribbentrop replied thathe 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 itsthoughts. A week later, on October 31, Foreign Minister Beck dispatcheddetailed instructions to his ambassador in Berlin on how to answer theGermans. But it was not until November 19 that the latter was able to

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secure an interview with Ribbentrop—the Nazis obviously wanted thePoles to consider well their response. It was negative. As a gesture ofunderstanding, Poland was willing to replace the League of Nations’ guar-antee of Danzig with a German-Polish agreement about the status of theFree City.

“Any other solution,” Beck wrote in a memorandum which Lipskiread to Ribbentrop, “and in particular any attempt to incorporate theFree City into the Reich, must inevitably lead to conflict.” And he addedthat Marshal Pilsudski, the late dictator of Poland, had warned the Ger-mans in 1934, during the negotiations for a nonaggression pact, that “theDanzig question was a sure criterion for estimating Germany’s intentionstoward Poland.”

Such a reply was not to Ribbentrop’s taste. “He regretted the positiontaken by Beck” and advised the Poles that it was “worth the trouble togive serious consideration to the German proposals.”3

Hitler’s response to Poland’s rebuff on Danzig was more drastic. OnNovember 24, five days after the Ribbentrop-Lipski meeting, he issuedanother directive to the commanders in chief of the armed forces.

TOP SECRET

The Fuehrer has ordered: Apart from the three contingencies mentioned inthe instructions of 10/21/38* preparations are also to be made to enable theFree State of Danzig to be occupied by German troops by surprise.

The preparations will be made on the following basis: Condition is aquasi-revolutionary occupation of Danzig, exploiting a politically favorablesituation, not a war against Poland.i . . .

The troops to be employed for this purpose must not simultaneously beearmarked for the occupation of the Memelland, so that both operations can,if necessary, take place simultaneously. The Navy will support the Army’soperation by attack from the sea . . . The plans of the branches of thearmed forces are to be submitted by January 10, 1939.

Though Beck had just warned that an attempt by Germany to takeDanzig would lead “inevitably” to conflict, Hitler now convinced himselfthat it could be done without a war. Local Nazis controlled Danzig andthey took their orders, as had the Sudeteners, from Berlin. It would not bedifficult to stir up a “quasi-revolutionary” situation there.

Thus, as 1938 approached its end, the year that had seen the bloodlessoccupation of Austria and the Sudetenland, Hitler was preoccupied withfurther conquest: the remainder of Czechoslovakia, Memel, and Danzig.It had been easy to humble Schuschnigg and Benes. Now it was JozefBeck’s turn.

* See above, p. 428. The three “contingencies” were the liquidation of the rest ofCzechoslovakia, occupation of Memel and protection of the Reich’s frontiers,t Italics in the original.

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Yet, when the Fuehrer received the Polish Foreign Minister at Berchtes-gaden shortly after New Year’s—on January 5, 1939—he was not yetprepared to give him the treatment which he had meted out to Schuschniggand was shortly to apply to President Hacha. The rest of Czechoslovakiawould have to be liquidated first. Hitler, as the secret Polish and Germanminutes of the meeting make clear, was in one of his more conciliatorymoods. He was “quite ready,” he began, “to be at Beck’s service.” Wasthere anything “special,” he asked, on the Polish Foreign Minister’s mind?Beck replied that Danzig was on his mind. It became obvious that it hadalso been on Hitler’s.

“Danzig is German,” the Fuehrer reminded his guest, “will alwaysremain German, and will sooner or later become part of Germany.” Hecould give the assurance, however, that “no jait accompli would beengineered in Danzig.”

He wanted Danzig and he wanted a German highway and railroadacross the Corridor. If he and Beck would “depart from old patterns andseek solutions along entirely new lines,” he was sure they could reach anagreement which would do justice to both countries.

Beck was not so sure. Though, as he confided to Ribbentrop the nextday, 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 theChancellor’s suggestion any “equivalent” for Poland. Hitler thereuponpointed out the “great advantage” to Poland “of having her frontier withGermany, including the Corridor, secured by treaty.” This apparentlydid not impress Beck, but in the end he agreed to think the problem overfurther.4 I

After mulling it over that night, the Polish Foreign Minister had a talkwith Ribbentrop the next day in Munich. He requested him to informthe Fuehrer that whereas all his previous talks with the Germans had filledhim with optimism, he was today, after his meeting with Hitler, “for the firsttime in a pessimistic mood.” Particularly in regard to Danzig, as it hadbeen raised by the Chancellor, he “saw no possibility whatever of agree-ment.”5

It had taken Colonel Beck, like so many others who have figured inthese pages, some time to awaken and to arrive at such a pessimistic view.Like most Poles, he was violently anti-Russian. Moreover, he disliked theFrench, for whom he had nursed a grudge since 1923, when, as Polishmilitary attache in Paris, he had been expelled for allegedly selling docu-ments relating to the French Army. Perhaps it had been natural for thisman, who had become Polish Foreign Minister in November 1932, toturn to Germany. For the Nazi dictatorship he had felt a warm sympathyfrom the beginning, and over the past six years he had striven to bringhis country closer to the Third Reich and to weaken its traditional tieswith France.

Of all the countries that lay on the borders of Germany, Poland had, inthe long run, the most to fear. Of all the countries, it had been the most

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blind to the German danger. No other provision of the Versailles Treatyhad been resented by the Germans as much as that which established theCorridor, giving Poland access to the sea—and cutting off East Prussiafrom the Reich. The detachment of the old Hanseatic port of Danzigfrom Germany and its creation as a free city under the supervision of theLeague of Nations, but dominated economically by Poland, had equallyoutraged German public opinion. Even the weak and peaceful WeimarRepublic had never accepted what it regarded as the Polish mutilation ofthe German Reich. As far back as 1922, General von Seeckt, as we haveseen,* had defined the German Army’s attitude.

Poland’s existence is intolerable and incompatible with the essential con-ditions of Germany’s life. Poland must go and will go—as a result of her owninternal weaknesses and of action by Russia—with our aid . . . The oblitera-tion 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—thatalmost all of the German land awarded Poland at Versailles, including theprovinces of Posen and Polish Pomerania (Pomorze), which formed theCorridor, had been grabbed by Prussia at the time of the partitions whenPrussia, Russia and Austria had destroyed the Polish nation. For morethan 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 againstRussia, Lithuania, Germany and even Czechoslovakia—in the last in-stance over the coal-rich Teschen area. Deprived of their political freedomfor 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 solvetheir economic and agrarian problems. In 1926 Marshal Pilsudski, thehero of the 1918 revolution, had marched on Warsaw, seized control ofthe government and, though an old-time Socialist, had gradually replaceda chaotic democratic regime with his own dictatorship. One of his lastacts, before his death in 1935, was to sign a treaty of nonaggression withHitler. This took place on January 26, 1934, and, as has been recounted,twas one of the first steps in the undermining of France’s system of allianceswith Germany’s Eastern neighbors and in the weakening of the League ofNations and its concept of collective security. After Pilsudski’s death,Poland was largely governed by a small band of “colonels,” leaders ofPilsudski’s old Polish Legion which had fought against Russia during theFirst World War. At the head of these was Marshal Smigly-Rydz, a

* See above, p. 212.t See above, pp. 212-13.

The Turn of Poland 459

capable soldier but in no way a statesman. Foreign policy drifted into thehands of Colonel Beck. From 1934 on, it became increasingly pro-German.

This was bound to be a policy of suicide. And indeed when one con-siders Poland s position in post-Versailles Europe it is difficult to escapethe conclusion that the Poles in the nineteen thirties, as on occasions inthe centuries before, were driven by some fateful flaw in their nationalcharacter toward self-destruction and that in this period, as sometimesformerly, they were their own worst enemies. As long as Danzig andthe Corridor existed as they were, there could be no lasting peace betweenPoland and Nazi Germany. Nor was Poland strong enough to afford theluxury of being at odds with both her giant neighbors, Russia and Ger-many. Her relations with the Soviet Union had been uniformly bad since1920, when Poland had attacked Russia, already weakened by the WorldWar and the civil war, and a savage conflict had followed.*

Seizing an opportunity to gain the friendship of a country so stoutlyanti-Russian and at the same time to detach her from Geneva and Paris,thus undermining the system of Versailles, Hitler had taken the initiativein bringing about the Polish-German pact of 1934. It was not a popularmove in Germany. The German Army, which had been pro-Russianand anti-Polish since the days of Seeckt, resented it. But it served Hitleradmirably for the time being. Poland’s sympathetic friendship helped himto get first things done first: the reoccupation of the Rhineland, thedestruction of independent Austria and Czechoslovakia. On all of thesesteps, which strengthened Germany, weakened the West and threatenedthe East, Beck and his fellow colonels in Warsaw looked on benevolentlyand 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, hisspirits sank much lower with the coming of spring. Though in his an-niversary speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, Hitler spoke inwarm terms of “the friendship between Germany and Poland” and declaredthat 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 toWarsaw four days before. He again raised with Beck the question ofHitler s demands concerning Danzig and communications through theCorridor, insisting that they were “extremely moderate.” But neither onthese questions nor on his insistence that Poland join the Anti-CominternPact against the Soviet Union did the German Foreign Minister get a

* As a result of that war, Poland pushed its eastern boundary 150 miles east of theethnographic Curzon Line, at the expense of the Soviet Union—a frontier whichtransferred four and a half million Ukrainians and one and a half million WhiteRussians to Polish rule. Thus Poland’s western and eastern borders were unaccept-able to Germany and Russia respectively—a fact which seems to have been lostsight of in the Western democracies when Berlin and Moscow began to draw to-gether in the summer of 1939.

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satisfactory answer.6 Colonel Beck was becoming wary of his friends.As a matter of fact, he was beginning to squirm. On February 26, theGerman ambassador in Warsaw informed Berlin that Beck had taken theinitiative in getting himself invited to visit London at the end of March andthat 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 theWestern democracies . . . [for] fear that a conflict might arise withGermany over Danzig.”7 With Beck too, as with so many others who hadtried to appease the ravenous appetite of Adolf Hitler, the scales werefalling from the eyes.

They fell completely and forever on March 15 when Hitler occupiedBohemia and Moravia and sent his troops to protect “independent”Slovakia. Poland woke up that morning to find itself flanked in the southalong the Slovak border, as it already was in the north on the frontiers ofPomerania and East Prussia, by the German Army. Its military positionhad overnight become untenable.

March 21, 1939, is a day to be remembered in the story of Europe’smarch toward war.

There was intense diplomatic activity that day in Berlin, Warsaw andLondon. The President of the French Republic, accompanied by ForeignMinister Bonnet, arrived in the British capital for a state visit. To theFrench Chamberlain suggested that their two countries join Poland andthe Soviet Union in a formal declaration stating that the four nationswould 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 stopHitler. But the British Prime Minister had found the idea “premature.”He was highly distrustful of Moscow and thought a “declaration” by thefour powers, including the Soviet Union, was as far as he could go.*

His proposal was presented to Beck in Warsaw by the British ambas-sador on the same day, March 21, and received a somewhat cool reception,as far as including the Russians was concerned. The Polish ForeignMinister was even more distrustful of the Soviet Union than Chamberlainand, moreover, shared the Prime Minister’s views about the worthlessnessof Russian military aid. He was to hold these views, unflinchingly, rightup to the moment of disaster.

But the most fateful event of this day of March 21 for Poland tookplace in Berlin. Ribbentrop invited the Polish ambassador to call on himat noon. For the first time, as Lipski noted in a subsequent report, the

* “I must confess,” Chamberlain wrote in a private letter on March 26, “to themost profound distrust of Russia. I have no belief whatever in her ability to main-tain 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, notablyby Poland, Rumania and Finland.” (Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamberlain,p. 603.)

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Foreign Minister was not only cool toward him but aggressive. TheFuehrer, he warned, “was becoming increasingly amazed at Poland’sattitude.” Germany wanted a satisfactory reply to her demands forDanzig and a highway and railroad through the Corridor. This was acondition for continued friendly Polish-German relations. “Poland mustrealize,” Ribbentrop laid it down, “that she could not take a middle coursebetween Russia and Germany.” Her only salvation was “a reasonablerelationship with Germany and her Fuehrer.” That included a joint“anti-Soviet policy.” Moreover, the Fuehrer desired Beck “to pay anearly visit to Berlin.” In the meantime, Ribbentrop strongly advised thePolish ambassador to hurry to Warsaw and explain to his Foreign Ministerin person what the situation was. “He advised,” Lipski informed Beck,“that the talk [with Hitler] should not be delayed, lest the Chancellorshould 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 Ribbentropwhether he could tell him anything about his conversation with the ForeignMinister of Lithuania. The German replied that they had discussed theMemel question, “which called for a solution.”

As a matter of fact, Ribbentrop had received the Lithuanian ForeignMinister, Juozas Urbays, who was passing through Berlin after a trip toRome, on the previous day and demanded that Lithuania hand back theMemel district to Germany forthwith. Otherwise “the Fuehrer wouldact with lightning speed.” The Lithuanians, he warned, must not deceivethemselves by expecting “some kind of help from abroad.”9

Actually, some months before, on December 12, 1938, the French am-bassador and the British charge d’affaires had called the attention of theGerman government to reports that the German population of Memelwas planning a revolt and had asked it to use its influence to see that theMemel Statute, guaranteed by both Britain and France, was respected.The Foreign Office reply had expressed “surprise and astonishment” atthe Anglo-French demarche, and Ribbentrop had ordered that if therewere any further such steps the two embassies should be told “that wehad really expected that the French and British would finally becometired of meddling in Germany’s affairs.”10

For some time the German government and particularly the party andS.S. leaders had been organizing the Germans of Memel along lines withwhich we are now familiar from the Austrian and Sudeten affairs. TheGerman armed forces had also been called in to co-operate and, as wehave seen,* three weeks after Munich Hitler had ordered his militarychiefs to prepare, along with the liquidation of the remainder of Czecho-slovakia, the occupation of Memel. Since the Navy had had no opportu-

See above, pp. 428-29.

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nity for glory in the march-in to landlocked Austria and Sudetenland, Hitlerdecided that Memel should be taken from the sea. In November, navalplans for the venture were drawn up under the code name “TransportExercise Stettin.” Hitler and Admiral Raeder were so keen on this littledisplay of naval might that they actually put to sea from Swinemuendeaboard the pocket battleship Deutschland for Memel on March 22, ex-actly a week after the Fuehrer’s triumphant entry into Prague, beforedefenseless Lithuania had time to capitulate to a German ultimatum.

On March 21, Weizsaecker, who much later would proclaim his distastefor the brutality of Nazi methods, notified the Lithuanian governmentthat “there was no time to lose” and that its plenipotentiaries must cometo Berlin “by special plane tomorrow” to sign away to Germany the dis-trict of Memel. The Lithuanians had obediently arrived late in the after-noon of March 22, but despite German pressure administered in personby Ribbentrop, egged on by a seasick Hitler aboard his battleship at sea,they took their time about capitulating. Twice during the night, the cap-tured German documents reveal, the Fuehrer got off urgent radiogramsfrom the Deutschland to Ribbentrop asking whether the Lithuanians hadsurrendered, as requested. The dictator and his Admiral had to knowwhether they must shoot their way into the port of Memel. Finally, at1:30 a.m. on March 23, Ribbentrop was able to transmit by radio to hismaster the news that the Lithuanians had signed.11

At 2:30 in the afternoon of the twenty-third, Hitler made another ofhis triumphant entries into a newly occupied city and at the Stadttheaterin Memel again addressed a delirious “liberated” German throng. An-other provision of the Versailles Treaty had been tom up. Another blood-less conquest had been made. Although the Fuehrer could not know it, itwas to be the last.

THE HEAT ON POLAND

The German annexation of the Memelland came as “a very unpleasantsurprise” to the Polish government, as the German ambassador to Poland,Hans-Adolf von Moltke, reported to Berlin from Warsaw on the follow-ing day. “The main reason for this,” he added, “is that it is generallyfeared that now it will be the turn of Danzig and the Corridor.”12 He alsoinformed the German Foreign Office that Polish reservists were beingcalled up. The next day, March 25, Admiral Canaris, chief of the Ab-wehr, reported that Poland had mobilized three classes and was concen-trating troops around Danzig. General Keitel did not believe this showed“any aggressive intentions on the part of the Poles,” but the Army GeneralStaff, he noted, “took a somewhat more serious view.”13

Hitler returned to Berlin from Memel on March 24 and on the next dayhad a long talk with General von Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chiefof the Army. From the latter’s confidential memorandum of the conver-sation it appears that the Leader had not yet made up his mind exactly how

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to proceed against Poland.14 In fact, his turbulent brain seemed to be fullof 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 tosome terms with regard to Danzig. The Fuehrer left during the night of March25: he does not wish to be here when Lipski returns. Ribbentrop shallnegotiate at first. The Fuehrer does not wish, though, to solve the Danzigproblem by force. He would not like to drive Poland into the arms of GreatBritain by doing so.

A military occupation of Danzig would have to be taken into considerationonly if Lipski gives a hint that the Polish Government could not take theresponsibility toward their own people to cede Danzig voluntarily and thesolution would be made easier for them by a fait accompli.

This is an interesting insight into Hitler’s mind and character at thismoment. Three months before, he had personally assured Beck that therewould be no German fait accompli in Danzig. Yet he remembered thatthe Polish Foreign Minister had stressed that the Polish people wouldnever stand for turning over Danzig to Germany. If the Germans merelyseized it, would not this fait accompli make it easier for the Polish gov-ernment to accept it? Hitherto Hitler had been a genius at sizing up theweaknesses of his foreign opponents and taking advantage of them, buthere, for almost the first time, his judgment has begun to falter. The “colo-nels” who governed Poland were a mediocre and muddling lot, but thelast 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 think-ing beyond it, just as he had done in regard to Czechoslovakia after Mu-nich had given him the Sudetenland.

For the time being [Brauchitsch noted], the Fuehrer does not intend to solvethe Polish question. However, it should be worked on. A solution in the nearfuture would have to be based on especially favorable political conditions. Inthat case Poland shall be knocked down so completely that it need not betaken into account as a political factor for the next few decades. The Fuehrerhas in mind as such a solution a borderline advanced from the eastern borderof East Prussia to the eastern tip of Upper Silesia.

Brauchitsch well knew what that border signified. It was Germany’sprewar eastern frontier, which Versailles had destroyed, and which hadprevailed as long as there was no Poland.

If Hitler had any doubts as to what the Polish reply would be they weredissipated when Ambassador Lipski returned to Berlin on Sunday, March26, and presented his country’s answer in the form of a written memoran-dum.15 Ribbentrop read it at once, rejected it, stormed about Polish mo-bilization measures and warned the envoy “of possible consequences.”

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He also declared that any violation of Danzig territory by Polish troopswould be regarded as aggression against the Reich.

Poland s written response, while couched in conciliatory language, wasa firm rejection of the German demands. It expressed willingness to dis-cuss further means of facilitating German rail and road traffic across theCorridor but refused to consider making such communications extraterri-torial. As for Danzig, Poland was willing to replace the League of Na-tions status by a Polish-German guarantee but not to see the Free Citybecome a part of Germany.

Nazi Germany by this time was not accustomed to see a smaller nationturning down its demands, and Ribbentrop remarked to Lipski that “itreminded him of certain risky steps taken by another state”—an obviousreference to Czechoslovakia, which Poland had helped Hitler to dismem-ber. It must have been equally obvious to Lipski, when he was summonedagain to the Foreign Office the next day by Ribbentrop, that the ThirdReich would now resort to the same tactics against Poland which had beenused so successfully against Austria and Czechoslovakia. The Nazi For-eign Minister raged at the alleged persecution of the German minority inPoland, which, he said, had created “a disastrous impression in Ger-many.”

In conclusion, the [German] Foreign Minister remarked that he could nolonger understand the Polish Government . . . The proposals transmittedyesterday by the Polish Ambassador could not be regarded as a basis for asettlement. Relations between the two countries were therefore rapidlydeteriorating.16

Warsaw was not so easily intimidated as Vienna and Prague. The nextday, March 28, Beck sent for the German ambassador and told him, inanswer to Ribbentrop’s declaration that a Polish coup against Danzigwould signify a casus belli, that he in turn was forced to state that any at-tempt by Germany or the Nazi Danzig Senate to alter the status of theFree City would be regarded by Poland as a casus belli.

“You want to negotiate at the point of a bayonet!” exclaimed the am-bassador.

“This is your own method,” Beck replied.17

The reawakened Polish Foreign Minister could afford to stand up toBerlin more firmly than Benes had been able to do, for he knew that theBritish government, which a year before had been anxious to help Hitlerobtain his demands against Czechoslovakia, was now taking precisely theopposite course in regard to Poland. Beck himself had torpedoed theBritish proposal for a four-power declaration, declaring that Poland re-fused to associate itself with Russia in any manner. Instead, on March 22,he had suggested to Sir Howard Kennard, the British ambassador in War-saw, the immediate conclusion of a secret Anglo—Polish agreement forconsultation in case of a threatened attack by a third power. But, alarmed

The Turn of Poland 465

by German troop movements adjacent to Danzig and the Corridor and byBritish intelligence concerning German demands on Poland (which thetricky Beck had denied to the British), Chamberlain and Halifax wantedto 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 aggres-sion.* But even this step was overtaken by events. Fresh reports of thepossibility of an imminent German attack on Poland prompted the Britishgovernment on the same evening to ask Beck whether he had any objec-tion to an interim unilateral British guarantee of Poland’s independence.Chamberlain had to know by the morrow, as he wished to answer a parlia-mentary question on the subject. Beck—his sense of relief may be im-agined—had no objection. In fact, he told Kennard, he “agreed withouthesitation.”10

The next day, March 31, as we have seen, Chamberlain made his his-toric declaration in the House of Commons that Britain and France“would lend the Polish Government all support in their power” if Polandwere attacked and resisted.f

To anyone in Berlin that weekend when March 1939 came to an end,as this writer happened to be, the sudden British unilateral guarantee ofPoland seemed incomprehensible, however welcome it might be in thelands to the west and the east of Germany. Time after time, as we haveseen, in 1936 when the Germans marched into the demilitarized Rhine-land, in 1938 when they took Austria and threatened a European war totake the Sudetenland, even a fortnight before, when they grabbed Czecho-slovakia, Great Britain and France, backed by Russia, could have takenaction to stop Hitler at very little cost to themselves. But the peace-hungryChamberlain had shied away from such moves. Not only that: he hadgone out of his way, he had risked, as he said, his political career to helpAdolf Hitler get what he wanted in the neighboring lands. He had donenothing to save the independence of Austria. He had consorted with theGerman dictator to destroy the independence of Czechoslovakia, the onlytruly democratic nation on Germany’s eastern borders and the only onewhich was a friend of the West and which supported the League of Nationsand the idea of collective security. He had not even considered the mili-tary value to the West of Czechoslovakia’s thirty-five well-trained, well-

* In the telegram of instructions to Kennard18 it was made clear that Russia wasto be left out in the cold. “It is becoming clear,” it said, “that our attempts to con-solidate the situation will be frustrated if the Soviet Union is openly associatedwith the initiation of the scheme. Recent telegrams from a number of His Majesty’sMissions abroad have warned us that the inclusion of Russia would not only jeop-ardise the success of our constructive effort but also tend to consolidate the rela-tions of the parlies to the Anti-Comintern Pact, as well as excite anxiety among anumber of friendly governments.”t See above, p. 454.

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armed divisions entrenched behind their strong mountain fortifications ata time when Britain could put only two divisions in France and when theGerman Army was incapable of fighting on two fronts and, according tothe German generals, even incapable of penetrating the Czech defenses.

Now overnight, in his understandably bitter reaction to Hitler’s occupa-tion of the rest of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain, after having deliberatelyand recklessly thrown so much away, had undertaken to unilaterally guar-antee an Eastern country run by a junta of politically inept “colonels”who up to this moment had closely collaborated with Hitler, who likehyenas had joined the Germans in the carving up of Czechoslovakia andwhose country had been rendered militarily indefensible by the very Ger-man conquests which Britain and Poland had helped the Reich toachieve.* And he had taken this eleventh-hour risk without bothering toenlist the aid of Russia, whose proposals for joint action against furtherNazi aggression he had twice turned down within the year.

Finally, he had done exactly what for more than a year he had stoutlyasserted that Britain would never do: he had left to another nation thedecision 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, ap-parently, Britain would stand in the way of his committing further aggres-sion. He could no longer use the technique of taking one nation at a timewhile the Western democracies stood aside debating what to do. More-over, Chamberlain s move appeared to be the first serious step towardforming a coalition of powers against Germany which, unless it were suc-cessfully countered, might bring again that very encirclement which hadbeen the nightmare of the Reich since Bismarck.

CASE WHITE

The news of Chamberlain’s guarantee of Poland threw the Germandictator into one of his characteristic rages. He happened to be with Ad-

* Chamberlain could not have been ignorant of Poland’s military weakness. ColonelSword, the British military attache in Warsaw, had sent to London a week before, onMarch 22, a long report on the disastrous strategic position of Poland, “boundedon 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-assistancepact, Colonel Sword and also the British air attache in Warsaw, Group CaptainVachell, sent fresh reports which were even less hopeful. Vachell emphasized thatduring the next twelve months the Polish Air Force would have “no more thanabout 600 aircraft, many of which are no match for German aircraft.” Sword re-ported that the Polish Army and Air Force were both so lacking in modern equip-ment that they could put up only a limited resistance to an all-out German attack.Ambassador Kennard, summing up his attaches’ reports, informed London that thePoles would be unable to defend the Corridor or the western frontier against Ger-many and would have to fall back on the Vistula in the heart of Poland. “Afriendly Russia,” he added, was “thus of paramount importance” for Poland.21

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miral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, and according to the latter he stormedabout the room, pounding his fists on the marble table top, his face con-torted with fury, and shouting against the British, “I’ll cook them a stewthey’ll choke on!”22

The next day, April 1, he spoke at Wilhelmshaven at the launching ofthe battleship Tirpitz and was in such a belligerent mood that apparentlyhe did not quite trust himself, for at the last moment he ordered that thedirect 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 byuntil the very last day while they create satellite States and set them againstGermany, then they are mistaking the Germany of today for the Germany ofbefore the war.

He who declares himself ready to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for thesepowers must realize he burns his fingers. ...

When they say in other countries that they will arm and will keep armingstill 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 cautiousenough not to provoke foreign opinion too much. It was reported in Ber-lin that day that he would denounce the Anglo-German naval treaty ashis first reply to Chamberlain. But in his speech he merely declared thatif Great Britain no longer wished to adhere to it, Germany “would acceptthis very calmly.”

As so often before, Hitler ended on an old familiar note of peace: “Ger-many has no intention of attacking other people . . . Out of this con-viction I decided three weeks ago to name the coming party rally the‘Party Convention of Peace’ ”—a slogan, which as the summer of 1939developed, became more and more ironic.

That was for public consumption. In the greatest of secrecy Hitlergave his real answer to Chamberlain and Colonel Beck two days later, onApril 3. It was contained in a top-secret directive to the armed forces, ofwhich only five copies were made, inaugurating “Case White.” This was

* Actually, the relay of the broadcast to the American radio networks was cut offafter Hitler had begun to speak. This led to reports in New York that he had beenassassinated. I was in the control room of the short-wave section of the GermanBroadcasting Company in Berlin, looking after the relay to the Columbia Broad-casting System in New York, when the broadcast was suddenly shut off. To myprotests, German officials answered that the order had come from Hitler himself.Within fifteen minutes CBS was telephoning me from New York to check on theassassination report. I could easily deny it because through an open telephonecircuit to Wilhelmshaven I could hear Hitler shouting his speech. It would havebeen difficult to shoot the Fuehrer that day because he spoke behind a bulletproofglass enclosure.

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a code name which was to loom large in the subsequent history of theworld.

TOP SECRET

Case White

The present attitude of Poland requires . . . the initiation of military prep-arations 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 theEast a situation which satisfies the requirements of national defense. The FreeState of Danzig will be proclaimed a part of the Reich territory at the outbreakof hostilities, at the latest.

The political leaders consider it their task in this case to isolate Poland ifpossible, that is to say, to limit the war to Poland only.

The development of increasing internal crises in France and the resultingBritish cautiousness might produce such a situation in the not too distantfuture.

Intervention by Russia . . . cannot be expected to be of any use toPoland . . . 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 willcontinue to be determined by the antagonism of the Western democracies.“Case White” constitutes only a precautionary complement to these prepara-tions . . .

The isolation of Poland will be all the more easily maintained, even afterthe outbreak of hostilities, if we succeed in starting the war with sudden, heavyblows and in gaining rapid successes . . .

3. Tasks of the Armed Forces

The task of the Wehrmacht is to destroy the Polish armed forces. To thisend 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 . . . Occupationby the Army will be carried out from East Prussia. The Navy will supportthe 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 11and of course added to later as the time for hostilities approached. Butalready on April 3, Hitler appended the following directives to CaseWhite:

1. Preparations must be made in such a way that the operation can becarried out at any time from September 1, 1939, onward.

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The Turn of Poland

As in the case of the date Hitler gave long in advance for getting theSudetenland—October 1, 1938—this more important date of Septem-ber 1, 1939, would also be kept.

2. The High Command of the Armed Forces [OKW] is charged withdrawing up a precise timetable for “Case White” and is to arrange forsynchronized timing between the three branches of the Wehrmacht.

3. The plans of the branches of the Wehrmacht and the details for thetimetable must be submitted to OKW by May 1, 1939.23

The question now was whether Hitler could wear down the Poles to thepoint of accepting his demands, as he had done with the Austrians and(with Chamberlain’s help) the Czechs, or whether Poland would hold itsground and resist Nazi aggression if it came, and if so, with what. Thiswriter spent the first week of April in Poland in search of answers. Theywere, as far as he could see, that the Poles would not give in to Hitler’sthreats, would fight if their land were invaded, but that militarily andpolitically they were in a disastrous position. Their Air Force was ob-solete, their Army cumbersome, their strategic position—surrounded bythe Germans on three sides—almost hopeless. Moreover, the strengthen-ing of Germany’s West Wall made an Anglo-French offensive againstGermany in case Poland were attacked extremely difficult. And finally itbecame obvious that the headstrong Polish “colonels” would never con-sent to receiving Russian help even if the Germans were at the gates ofWarsaw.

Events now moved quickly. On April 6 Colonel Beck signed an agree-ment with Great Britain in London transforming the unilateral Britishguarantee into a temporary pact of mutual assistance. A permanenttreaty, it was announced, would be signed as soon as the details had beenworked out.

The next day, April 7, Mussolini sent his troops into Albania and addedthe conquest of that mountainous little country to that of Ethiopia. Itgave him a springboard against Greece and Yugoslavia and in the tenseatmosphere of Europe served to make more jittery the small countrieswhich dared to defy the Axis. As the German Foreign Office papers makeclear, it was done with the complete approval of Germany, which was in-formed of the step in advance. On April 13, France and Britain counteredwith a guarantee to Greece and Rumania. The two sides were beginningto line up. In the middle of April, Goering arrived in Rome and much toRibbentrop’s annoyance had two long talks with Mussolini, on the. fif-teenth and sixteenth.24 They agreed that they “needed two or three years”to prepare for “a general conflict,” but Goering declared that if war camesooner “the Axis was in a very strong position” and “could defeat anylikely opponents.”

Mention was made of an appeal from President Roosevelt which hadarrived 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

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

answering. Mussolini thought it “a result of infantile paralysis,” but Goe-nng s impression was that “Roosevelt was suffering from an incipientmental disease.” In his telegram to Hitler and Mussolini the President ofthe United States had addressed a blunt question:

Are you willing to give assurance that your armed forces will not attackor invade the territory of the following independent nations?

There had followed a list of thirty-one countries, including Poland, theBaltic States, Russia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France andBritain The President hoped that such a guarantee of nonaggressioncould be given for “ten years at the least” or “a quarter of a century, if wedare look that far ahead.” If it were given, he promised American par-ticipation in world-wide “discussions” to relieve the world from “thecrushing burden of armament” and to open up avenues of internationaltrade.

You have repeatedly asserted,” he reminded Hitler, “that you andthe German people have no desire for war. If this is true there need be no

In the light of what now is known, this seemed like a naive appeal, butthe Fuehrer found it embarrassing enough to let it be known that hewould reply to it—not directly, but in a speech to a specially convokedsession of the Reichstag on April 28.

In the meantime, as the captured German Foreign Office papers re-veal, the Wilhelmstrasse in a circular telegram of April 17 put two ques-hons of its own to all the states mentioned by Roosevelt except PolandRussia, Britain and France: Did they feel themselves in any way threat-ened by Germany? Had they authorized Roosevelt to make his proposal?

We are in no doubt,” Ribbentrop wired his various envoys in thecountries concerned, “that both questions will be answered in the negative,but nevertheless, for special reasons, we should like to have authenticconfirmation at once.” The “special reasons” would become evidentwhen Hitler spoke on April 28.

By April 22 the German Foreign Office was able to draw up a reportfor the Fuehrer that most of the countries, including Yugoslavia, BelgiumDenmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Luxembourg “have answeredboth questions in the negative”—a reply which would soon show what aninnocent view their governments took of the Third Reich. From Ru-mania, however, came a tart answer that the “Reich Government werethemselves in a position to know whether a threat might arise.” LittleLatvia up in the Baltic did not at first understand what answer was ex-pected of it, but the Foreign Office soon put it right. On April 18 Weiz-saecker rang up his minister in Riga

to tell him we were unable to understand the answer of the Latvian ForeignMinister to our question about the Roosevelt telegram. While practically all

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The Turn of Poland

the other governments have already answered, and naturally in the negative,M. Munters treated this ridiculous American propaganda as a question onwhich he wished to consult his cabinet. If M. Munters did not answer noto our question right away, we should have to add Latvia to those countrieswhich made themselves into willing accomplices of Mr. Roosevelt. I said thatI 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 masterlyuse of them as he swung into his speech to the Reichstag on the pleasantspring day of April 28, 1939. It was, I believe, the longest major publicspeech he ever made, taking more than two hours to deliver. In manyways, especially in the power of its appeal to Germans and to the friendsof Nazi Germany abroad, it was probably the most brilliant oration heever gave, certainly the greatest this writer ever heard from him. Forsheer eloquence, craftiness, irony, sarcasm and hypocrisy, it reached anew level that he was never to approach again. And though prepared forGerman ears, it was broadcast not only on all German radio stations buton hundreds of others throughout the world; in the United States it wascarried by the major networks. Never before or afterward was there sucha world-wide audience as he had that day.*

The speech began, after the usual introductory dissertation on the iniq-uities of Versailles and the many injustices and long suffering heapedupon the German people by it, with an answer first to Great Britain andPoland which shook an uneasy Europe.

After declaring his feeling of admiration and friendship for Englandand then attacking it for its distrust of him and its new “policy of encircle-ment” of Germany, he denounced the Anglo—German Naval Treaty of1935. “The basis for it,” he said, “has been removed.”

Likewise with Poland. He made known his proposal to Poland con-cerning Danzig and the Corridor (which had been kept secret), called it“the greatest imaginable concession in the interests of European peaceand informed the Reichstag that the Polish government had rejected this“one and only offer.”

* On the day of the speech Weizsaecker wired Hans Thomsen, German charge inWashington, instructing him to give the Fuehrer’s address the widest possible pub-licity in the United States and assuring him that extra funds would be provided forthe purpose. On May 1 Thomsen replied, “Interest in speech surpasses anything sofar known. I have therefore directed that the English text printed here is to besent ... to tens of thousands of addressees of all classes and callings, in accord-ance with the agreed plan. Claim for costs to follow.”26

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

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 ofproceeding in any way against Poland. This is in itself very regrettable, andposterity will one day decide whether it was really right to refuse this suggestion,made this once by me ... a truly unique compromise . . .

ReP°rts that Germany intended to attack Poland, Hitler went on, weremere inventions of the international press.” (Not one of the tens of mil-ions of persons listening could know that only three weeks before he hadgiven written orders to his armed forces to prepare for the destruction ofPoland by September 1, “at the latest”) The inventions of the press, hecontinued, had led Poland to make its agreement with Great Britainwhich, “under certain circumstances, would compel Poland to take mili-tary action against Germany.” Therefore, Poland had broken the Polish-German nonaggression pact! “Therefore, I look upon the agreementas having been unilaterally infringed by Poland and thereby no longer inexistence.

♦ himse]f un>laterally 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 hap-pier than I at the prospect.” This was an old trick he had pulled often be-fore when he had broken a treaty, as we have seen, but though he probablydid not know it, it would no longer work.

Hitler next turned to President Roosevelt, and here the German dicta-tor reached the summit of his oratory. To a normal ear, to be sure, itreeked with hypoensy and deception. But to the hand-picked membersof the Reichstag, and to millions of Germans, its masterly sarcasm andirony were a delight. The paunchy deputies rocked with raucous laughteras the Fuehrer uttered with increasing effect his seemingly endless ridiculeof the American President. One by one he took up the points of Roose-velt s telegram, paused, almost smiled, and then, like a schoolmaster, ut-tered m a low voice one word, “Answer”—and gave it. (This writer’canstill, in his mind, see Hitler pausing time after time to say quietly, “Ant-won,” while above the rostrum in the President’s chair Goering tried in-effectually 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 problemscan be solved at the council table.

Answer: ... I would be very happy if these problems could really findt eir solution at the council table. My skepticism, however, is based on thefact that it was America herself who gave sharpest expression to her mistrustin the effectiveness of conferences. For the greatest conference of all timewas the League of Nations . . . representing all the peoples of the world,created in accordance with the will of an American President. The first State,

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The Turn of Poland

however, that shrank from this endeavor was the United States ... It wasnot until after years of purposeless participation that I resolved to follow theexample of America. . . .

The freedom of North America was not achieved at the conference tableany 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 thesubjugation of the North American continent as a whole.

I mention all this only in order to show that your view, Mr. Roosevelt, al-though undoubtedly deserving of all honor, finds no confirmation in the his-tory of your own country or of the rest of the world.

Germany, Hitler reminded the President, had once gone to a confer-ence—at Versailles—not to discuss but to be told what to do: its repre-sentatives “were subjected to even greater degradations than can everhave been inflicted on the chieftains of the Sioux tribes.”

Hitler finally got to the core of his answer to the President’s requestthat he give assurances not to attack any of thirty-one nations.

Answer: How has Mr. Roosevelt learned which nations consider themselvesthreatened by German policy and which do not? Or is Mr. Roosevelt in aposition, in spite of the enormous amount of work which must rest upon himin his own country, to recognize of his own accord all these inner spiritual andmental impressions of other peoples and their governments?

Finally, Mr. Roosevelt asks that assurance be given him that the Germanarmed forces will not attack, and above all, not invade the territory or posses-sions of the following independent nations . . .

Hitler then read out slowly the name of each country and as he intonedthe names, I remember, the laughter in the Reichstag grew. Not onemember, no one in Berlin, I believe, including this writer, noticed that heslyly 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 theirsuggestion, or at any rate, with their consent.

The reply was in all cases negative ... It is true that I could not causeinquiries to be made of certain of the States and nations mentioned becausethey themselves—as for example, Syria—are at present not in possession oftheir freedom, but are occupied and consequently deprived of their rights bythe military agents of democratic States.

Apart from this fact, however, all States bordering on Germany have re-ceived much more binding assurances . . . than Mr. Roosevelt asked fromme in his curious telegram. . . ,

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

I must draw Mr. Roosevelt’s attention to one or two historical errors. Hementioned Ireland, for instance, and asks for a statement that Germany willnot attack Ireland. Now, I have just read a speech by De Valera, the IrishTaoiseach,* in which, strangely enough, and contrary to Mr. Roosevelt’sopinion, he does not charge Germany with oppressing Ireland but he re-proaches England with subjecting Ireland to continuous aggression . . .

In the same way, the fact has obviously escaped Mr. Roosevelt’s notice thatPalestine is at present occupied not by German troops but by the English; andthat the country is having its liberty restricted by the most brutal resort toforce . . .

Nevertheless, said Hitler, he was prepared “to give each of the Statesnamed an assurance of the kind desired by Mr. Roosevelt.” But morethan that! His eyes lit up.

I should not like to let this opportunity pass without giving above all to thePresident of the United States an assurance regarding those territories whichwould, after all, give him most cause for apprehension, namely the UnitedStates itself and the other States of the American continent.

I here solemnly declare that all the assertions which have been circulatedin any way concerning an intended German attack or invasion on or in Ameri-can territory are rank frauds and gross untruths, quite apart from the factthat such assertions, as far as the military possibilities are concerned, couldhave their origin only in a. stupid imagination.

The Reichstag rocked with laughter; Hitler did not crack a smile, main-taining with great effect his solemn mien.

And then came the peroration—the most eloquent for German ears, 1believe, he ever made.

Mr. Roosevelt! I fully understand that the vastness of your nation and theimmense wealth of your country allow you to feel responsible for the historyof the whole world and for the history of all nations. I, sir, am placed in amuch more modest and smaller sphere . . .

I once took over a State which was faced by complete ruin, thanks to itstrust in the promises of the rest of the world and to the bad regime of demo-cratic governments ... I have conquered chaos in Germany, re-establishedorder and enormously increased production . . . developed traffic, causedmighty roads to be built and canals to be dug, called into being gigantic newfactories and at the same time endeavored to further the education and cul-ture of our people.

I have succeeded in finding useful work once more for the whole of theseven million unemployed . . . Not only have I united the German people po-litically, but I have also rearmed them. I have also endeavored to destroy sheet

* Hitler was careful to use the Gaelic word for Prime Minister.

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The Turn of Poland

by sheet that treaty which in its four hundred and forty-eight articles containsthe vilest oppression which peoples and human beings have ever been expectedto put up with.

I have brought back to the Reich provinces stolen from us in 1919. I haveled back to their native country millions of Germans who were torn awayfrom us and were in misery . . . and, Mr. Roosevelt, without spilling bloodand without bringing to my people, and consequently to others, the misery ofwar . . .

You, Mr. Roosevelt, have a much easier task in comparison. You becamePresident 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 wealthi-est States in the world . . . Conditions prevailing in your country are onsuch a large scale that you can find time and leisure to give your attention touniversal problems . . . Your concerns and suggestions cover a much largerand wider area than mine, because my world, Mr. Roosevelt, in which Provi-dence has placed me and for which I am therefore obliged to work, is un-fortunately much smaller, although for me it is more precious than anythingelse, for it is limited to my people!

I believe however that this is the way in which I can be of the most serviceto that for which we are all concerned, namely, the justice, well-being, progressand peace of the whole community.

In the hoodwinking of the German people, this speech was Hitler’sgreatest masterpiece. But as one traveled about Europe in the proceed-ing days it was easy to see that, unlike a number of Hitler’s previous ora-tions, this one no longer fooled the people or the governments abroad. Incontrast to the Germans, they were able to see through the maze of decep-tions. And they realized that the German Fuehrer, for all his masterfuloratory, though scoring off Roosevelt, had not really answered the Presi-dent’s fundamental questions: Had he finished with aggression? Wouldhe attack Poland?

As it turned out, this was the last great peacetime public speech of Hit-ler’s life. The former Austrian waif had come as far in this world as waspossible by the genius of his oratory. From now on he was to try to makehis niche in history as a warrior.

Retiring for the summer to his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, Hit-ler did not publicly respond to the Polish answer to him which was givenon May 5 in a speech by Colonel Beck to Parliament and in an officialgovernment memorandum presented to Germany on that date. The Polishstatement and Beck’s speech constituted a dignified, conciliatory but alsofirm reply.

It is clear [it said] that negotiations, in which one State formulates demandsand the other is obliged to accept those demands unaltered, are not negotia-tions.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

THE INTERVENTION OF RUSSIA: I

In his speech to the Reichstag on April 28, Hitler had omitted his cus-tomary attack on the Soviet Union. There was not a word about Russia.Colonel Beck, in his reply, had mentioned “various other hints” made byGermany “which went much further than the subjects of discussion” andreserved the right “to return to this matter, if necessary”—a veiled butobvious reference to Germany’s previous efforts to induce Poland to jointhe Anti-Comintern Pact against Russia. Though Beck did not know itnor did Chamberlain, those anti-Russian efforts were now being aban-doned. Fresh ideas were beginning to germinate in Berlin and Moscow.

It is difficult to ascertain exactly when the first moves were made in thetwo capitals toward an understanding between Nazi Germany and theSoviet Union which was to lead to such immense consequences for theworld. One of the first slight changes in the wind, as has already beennoted, took place as far back as October 3, 1938, four days after Munich,when the counselor of the German Embassy in Moscow informed Berlinthat 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” economiccollaboration between the two countries and renewed his appeal in asecond dispatch a week later.27 Toward the end of October, the Germanambassador in Moscow, Friedrich Werner Count von der Schulenbur^,notified the German Foreign Office that it was his “intention in the im-mediate future to approach Molotov, the Chairman of the Council of thePeople’s Commissars, in an attempt to reach a settlement of the questionsdisturbing German-Soviet relations.”2* The ambassador would hardlyhave conceived such an intention on his own, in view of Hitler’s previousextremely hostile attitude toward Moscow. The hint must have come fromBerlin.

That it did becomes clear from a study of the captured Foreign Officearchives. The first step, in the German view, was to improve trade be-tween the two countries. A Foreign Office memorandum of November 41938, reveals “an emphatic demand from Field Marshal Goering’s officeat least to try to reactivate our Russian trade, especially insofar as Russianraw materials are concerned.”29 The Russo-German economic agree-ments expired at the end of the year and the Wilhelmstrasse files are fullof material showing the ups and downs experienced in negotiating a re-newal. The two sides were highly suspicious of each other but werevaguely drawing closer together. On December 22, there were lengthytalks in Moscow between Russian trade officials and Germany’s crackeconomic troubleshooter, Julius Schnurre.

Shortly after the New Year, the Soviet ambassador in Berlin, AlexeiMerekalov, made one of his infrequent trips to the Wilhelmstrasse to in-form it “of the Soviet Union’s desire to begin a new era in German-Soviet

* See above, p. 427.

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economic relations.” And for a few weeks there were promising talks,but by February 1939 they had pretty much broken down, ostensibly overwhether the main negotiations should be conducted in Moscow or Berlin.But the real reason was revealed in a memorandum of the director of theEconomic Policy Department of the German Foreign Office on March 11,1939: Though Germany was hungry for Russia’s raw materials and Goe-ring was constantly demanding that they be obtained, the Reich simplycould not supply the Soviet Union with the goods which would have to beexchanged. The director thought the “rupture of negotiations” was “ex-tremely regrettable in view of Germany’s raw-materials position.

But if the first attempt to draw nearer in their economic relations hadfailed for the time being, there were other straws in the wind. On March10, 1939, Stalin made a long speech at the first session of the EighteenthParty Congress in Moscow. Three days later the attentive Schulenburgfiled a long report on it to Berlin. He thought it “noteworthy that Stalin’sirony and criticism were directed in considerably sharper degree againstBritain than against the so-called aggressor States, and in particular, Ger-many.” The ambassador underlined Stalin’s remarks that “the weaknessof the democratic powers . . . was evident from the fact that they hadabandoned the principle of collective security and had turned to a policyof nonintervention and neutrality. Underlying this policy was the wish todivert the aggressor States to other victims.” And he quoted further theSoviet dictator’s accusations that the Western Allies were

pushing the Germans further eastward, promising them an easy prey and say-ing: “Just start a war with the Bolsheviks, everything else will take care of it-self. This looks very much like encouragement ... It looks as if the pur-pose . . . 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 economicrelations with all countries.

2. Not to let our country be drawn into conflict by warmongers, whosecustom 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 de-cisions in Russia that the Soviet Union did not intend to be maneuveredinto a war with Nazi Germany in order to spare Britain and France; andif it was ignored in London, it was at least noticed in Berlin.*

* Though an Associated Press dispatch from Moscow (published in the New YorkTimes March 12) reported that Stalin’s condemnation of efforts to embroil Russiain a war with Germany had led to talk in diplomatic circles in Moscow of the pos-sibility of a rapprochement between the Soviet Union and Germany, Sir WilliamSeeds, the British ambassador, apparently did not participate in any such talk. Inhis dispatch reporting Stalin’s speech Seeds made no mention of such a possi-

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Still, it is evident from Stalin’s speech and from the various diplomaticexchanges which shortly took place that Soviet foreign policy, while cau-tious, was still very much open. Three days after the Nazi occupation ofCzechoslovakia on March 15, the Russian government proposed, as wehave seen,* * a six-power conference to discuss means of preventing furtheraggression, and Chamberlain turned it down as “premature.”f That wason March 18. Two days later an official communique in Moscow, whichthe German ambassador there hurriedly wired to Berlin, denied that theSoviet Union had offered Poland and Rumania assistance “in the eventof their becoming the victims of aggression.” Reason: “Neither Polandnor Rumania had approached the Soviet government for assistance or in-formed [it] of any danger threatening them.”34

The British government’s unilateral guarantee of Poland of March 31may have helped to convince Stalin that Great Britain preferred an alli-ance with the Poles to one with the Russians and that Chamberlain wasintent, as he had been at the time of Munich, on keeping the Soviet Unionout of the European concert of powers.35

In this situation the Germans and Italians began to glimpse certain op-portunities. Goering, who now had an important influence on Hitler inforeign affairs, saw Mussolini in Rome on April 16 and called the Duce’sattention to Stalin’s recent speech to the Communist Party Congress. Hehad been impressed by the Soviet dictator’s statement that “the Russianswould not allow themselves to be used as cannon fodder for the capitalistpowers.” He said he “would ask the Fuehrer whether it would not bepossible to put out feelers cautiously to Russia . . . with a view to rap-prochement:’ And he reminded Mussolini that there had been “abso-lutely 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

bility. One Western diplomat, Joseph E. Davies, former American ambassador inMoscow, who was now stationed in Brussels, did draw the proper conclusions fromMalm s speech. It is a most significant statement,” he noted in his diary on March11. 'It bears the earmarks of a definite warning to the British and French govern-ments that the Soviets are getting tired of ‘nonrealistic’ opposition to the aggressors.

' ‘ j ,s. rea,ly ominous for the negotiations . . . between the British ForeignOffice and the Soviet Union. It certainly is the most significant danger signal that1 have yet seen. On March 21 he wrote to Senator Key Pittman: “. . . Hitler ismaking a desperate effort to alienate Stalin from France and Britain. Unless theBritish and French wake up, I am afraid he will succeed.”32

* See above, p. 460.

t In explaining to the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, on March 19why the Russian proposal for a conference, preferably at Bucharest, was “not ac-ceptable, Lord Halifax said that no Minister of the Crown could be spared forthe moment to go to Bucharest. It is obvious that this rebuff soured the Russiansin the subsequent negotiations with the British and French. Maisky later toldRobert Boothby, a Conservative M.P., that the rejection of the Russian proposalhad been “another smashing blow at the policy of effective collective security” andthat it had decided the fate of Litvinov.33

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The Turn of Poland

Soviet Union. The Italian dictator too had sensed a change in Moscow; hethought a rapprochement could be “effected with comparative ease.”

The object [said Mussolini] would be to induce Russia to react coolly andunfavorably to Britain’s efforts at encirclement, on the lines of Stalin’s speech. . . Moreover, in their ideological struggle against plutocracy and capitalismthe Axis Powers had, to a certain extent, the same objectives as the Russianregime.86

This was a radical turn in Axis policy, and no doubt it would have sur-prised Chamberlain had he learned of it. Perhaps it would have surprisedLitvinov too.

On the very day of this discussion between Goering and Mussolini,April 16, the Soviet Foreign Commissar received the British ambassadorin Moscow and made a formal proposal for a triple pact of mutual as-sistance between Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union. It calledfor a military convention between the three powers to enforce the pactand a guarantee by the signatories, to be joined by Poland, if it desired,of all the nations in Central and Eastern Europe which felt themselvesmenaced by Nazi Germany. It was Litvinov’s last bid for an allianceagainst the Third Reich, and the Russian Foreign Minister, who hadstaked his career on a policy of stopping Hitler by collective action, musthave thought that at last he would succeed in uniting the Western democ-racies with Russia for that purpose. As Churchill said in a speech on May4, complaining that the Russian offer had not yet been accepted in Lon-don, “there is no means of maintaining an Eastern front against Nazi ag-gression without the active aid of Russia.” No other power in EasternEurope, certainly not Poland, possessed the military strength to maintaina front in that region. Yet the Russian proposal caused consternation inLondon and Paris.

Even before it was rejected, however, Stalin made his first serious moveto play the other side of the street.

The day after Litvinov made his far-reaching offer to the British am-bassador in Moscow, on April 17, the Soviet ambassador in Berlin paida visit to Weizsaecker at the German Foreign Office. It was the first call,the State Secretary noted in a memorandum, that Merekalov had made onhim since he assumed his post nearly a year before. After some prelimi-nary remarks about German—Russian economic relations, the ambassadorturned to politics and

asked me point-blank [Weizsaecker wrote] what I thought of German-Rus-sian relations . . . The Ambassador spoke somewhat as follows:

Russian policy had always followed a straight course. Ideological differ-ences had had very little adverse effect on relations between Russia and Italyand need not disturb those with Germany either. Russia had not exploited thepresent friction between Germany and the Western democracies against us,

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

neither did she wish to do that. As far as Russia was concerned, there was noreason why she should not live on a normal footing with us, and out of normalrelations could grow increasingly improved relationsWith this remark, toward which he had been steering the conversation, MMerekalov ended the talk. He intends to visit Moscow in a day or two." '

to which ,he s°™1 . <■»

theW^ °Ut °n May 3' °n that datC’ tUcked away on the back Page of

mallTmn‘‘MPrtrS “ ^ “NeWS in Brief’” aPPeared 3

small item. M. Litvinov has been released from the Office of Foreignommissar at his own request.” He was replaced by Vyacheslav MolotovChairman of the Council of the People’s Commissars.

day6 GCrman Chafg6 d’affaires reported the change to Berlin the next

inffie n f f greatest SUrprise here’ as Litvinov was

n the midst of negotiations with the British delegation, had appeared in closeproximity to Stalin at the parade on May 1 . .

Since Litvinov had received the British Ambassador as recently as May 2

p'ral3^ itVseenemeThThntiHned " P^8 as a 8** of honor at L

parade, seems that h.s dismissal must be due to a spontaneous decision by

Union h 3St Party C°ngress Stalln ur8ed caution lest the Soviet

tmn ofh T mtOCOnflicts' Molot°v, who is not a Jew, has the reputa-tion of being the most intimate friend and closest collaborator” of Stalin ? His

whlbe cond u ,'y intended t0 Pr°Vide a gUarantee that f°reign policybe conducted strictly on lines laid down by Stalin.38

The significance of Litvinov’s abrupt dismissal was obvious to all Itmeant a sharp and violent turning in Soviet foreign policy Litvinov hadbeen the archaposrlc of collective security, of strengthening thf Zee „f

bv a miEval| at'°nS' "I, rCt"'S Russlan “eurity against Nazi Germanyby a military alliance with Great Britain and France. Chamberlain’s hesi-

sar0TnaSt°r T allmnCe W£re fatal t0 the Russian Foreign Commis-. In Stalin s judgment—and his was the only one which counted in

SffilT TnVS P°liCieS had failed- Moreover> they threatened toland the Soviet Union in a war with Germany which the Western democ-racies might well contrive to stay out of. It was time, Stalin concludedto try a new tack.* If Chamberlain could appease Hitler, could not the

(tvL^r^^/?nsSinT^Tly 8iVe" t0 the PUbliSh6d j°Urnal 0f Litvinov

from .hie ,he Sovill'S TctS'

$££35z:sa* ?erm“ •••«■*->» po1.K™,“ “Z

remov7me ” in fh S Commisf r noted: “It would appear they have decided toSovief Fmhrt n S,ame entr> he revea,s that ah his communications with the

kalov Pm ymBe:lln mUSt n°W g0 through Stalin and that Ambassador Mere-kalov, on Stalins instructions, is about to begin negotiations with Weizsaecker in

481

The Turn of Poland

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 charge d’affaires, brought the matter up onMay 5 when he conferred with Dr. Julius Schnurre, the German ForeignOffice expert on East European economic affairs.

Astakhov touched upon the dismissal of Litvinov [Schnurre reported] andtried ... to learn whether this event would cause a change in our attitudetoward the Soviet Union. He stressed the great importance of the personalityof Molotov, who was by no means a specialist in foreign policy but who wouldhave all the greater importance for future Soviet foreign policy.39

The charge also invited the Germans to resume the trade negotiationswhich had been broken off in February.

The British government did not reply until May 8 to the Soviet pro-posals of April 16 for a military alliance. The response was a virtual rejec-tion. It strengthened suspicions in Moscow that Chamberlain was notwilling to make a military pact with Russia to prevent Hitler from takingPoland.

It is not surprising, then, that the Russians intensified their approachto the Germans. On May 17 Astakhov again saw Schnurre at the ForeignOffice and after discussing problems of trade turned to larger matters.

Astakhov stated [Schnurre reported] that there were no conflicts in foreignpolicy between Germany and the Soviet Union and that therefore there wasno reason for any enmity between the two countries. It was true that in theSoviet Union there was a distinct feeling of being menaced by Germany. Itwould undoubtedly be possible to eliminate this feeling of being menaced andthe distrust in Moscow ... In reply to my incidental question he com-mented on the Anglo-Soviet negotiations to the effect that, as they stood atthe moment, the result desired by Britain would hardly materialize.40

Three days later, on May 20, Ambassador von der Schulenburg had along talk with Molotov in Moscow. The newly appointed Commissar forForeign Affairs was in a “most friendly” mood and informed the Germanenvoy that economic negotiations between the two countries could beresumed if the necessary political bases for them were created. This wasa new approach from the Kremlin but it was made cautiously by the cageyMolotov. When Schulenburg asked him what he meant by “politicalbases” the Russian replied that this was something both governments

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 EdwardHallett Carr, a British authority on the Soviet Union, investigated it and found thatthough undoubtedly it had been touched up to a point where some of it was “purefiction,” a large part of it fairly represents Litvinov’s outlook.

482

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

would have to think about. All the ambassador’s efforts to draw out thewily Foreign Commissar were in vain. “He is known,” Schulenburg re-minded Berlin, “for his somewhat stubborn manner.” On his way out ofthe Russian Foreign Office, the ambassador dropped in on VladimirPotemkin, the Soviet Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and told himhe had not been able to find out what Molotov wanted of a politicalnature. “I asked Herr Potemkin,” Schulenburg reported, “to find out.”41

The renewed contacts between Berlin and Moscow did not escape thewatchful eyes of the French ambassador in the German capital. As earlyas May 7, four days after Litvinov’s dismissal, M. Coulondre was inform-ing the French Foreign Minister that, according to information given himby a close confidant of the Fuehrer, Germany was seeking an understand-ing with Russia which would result in, among other things, a fourth parti-tion of Poland. Two days later the French ambassador got off anothertelegram to Paris telling of new rumors in Berlin “that Germany had made,or was going to make, to Russia proposals aimed at a partition ofPoland.”42 v

THE PACT OF STEEL

Although the top brass of the Wehrmacht had a low opinion of Italianmilitary power, Hitler now pressed for a military alliance with Italy, whichMussolini had been in no hurry to conclude. Staff talks between the twohigh commands began in April and Keitel reported to OKW his “impres-sion that neither the Italian fighting services nor Italian rearmament werein 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 increasingsigns that Germany might attack Poland at any moment and precipitatea European war for which Italy was not prepared. When, on April 20,Ambassador Attolico in Berlin wired Rome that German action againstPoland was imminent Ciano urged him to hasten arrangements for hismeeting with Ribbentrop so that Italy would not be caught napping.

The two foreign ministers met at Milan on May 6. Ciano had arrivedwith written instructions from Mussolini to emphasize to the Germans thatItaly 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 longtoo. In fact, Ciano found the German Foreign Minister “for the firsttime in a “pleasantly calm state of mind.” They reviewed the situationin Europe, agreed on improving Axis relations with the Soviet Union andadjourned 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 brainstorm. He asked his son-in-law to release to the press a communiquesaying 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 toMussolini’s suggestion.46

Thus, on a sudden impulse, after more than a year of hesitation, Mus-solini committed himself irrevocably to Hitler’s fortunes. This was oneof the first signs that the Italian dictator, like the German, was beginningto lose that iron self-control which up until this year of 1939 had enabledthem both to pursue their own national interests with ice-cold clarity. Theconsequences for Mussolini would soon prove disastrous.

The “Pact of Steel,” as it came to be known, was duly signed with con-siderable pomp at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin on May 22. Ciano hadbestowed on Ribbentrop the Collar of the Annunziata, which not onlymade Goering furious but, as the Italian Foreign Minister noticed, broughttears 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 sinceit was he who had really promoted the alliance.

“I promised Mackensen [the German ambassador in Rome],” Cianoreported, “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, probablyfrom lack of sleep.* The Fuehrer was in the best of spirits as he watchedthe two foreign ministers sign the document.

It was a bluntly worded military alliance and its aggressive nature wasunderlined by a sentence in the preamble which Hitler had insisted onputting in declaring that the two nations, “united by the inner affinity oftheir ideologies ... are resolved to act side by side and with unitedforces 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 shouldhappen that one of them became involved in warlike complications with an-other Power or Powers, the other High Contracting Party would immediatelycome to its assistance as an ally and support it with all its military forces onland, at sea and in the air.

Article V provided that in the event of war neither nation would con-clude a separate armistice or peace.46

In the beginning, as it would turn out, Mussolini did not honor thefirst, nor, at the end, did Italy abide by the second.

* 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 ex-claimed, “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 istwenty 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 ob-viously intrigued. Apparently he had not yet heard of Eva Braun, Hitler s mistress,who was rarely permitted at this time to come to Berlin.

484

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

HITLER BURNS HIS BOATS: MAY 23, 1939

The day after the signing of the Pact of Steel, on May 23, Hitler sum-moned his military chiefs to the study in the Chancellery in Berlin andtold them bluntly that further successes could not be won without theshedding of blood and that war therefore was inevitable.

This was a somewhat larger gathering than a similar one on November5, 1937, when the Fuehrer had first imparted his decision to go to war tothe commanders in chief of the three armed services. * Altogether four-teen officers were present, including Field Marshal Goering, GrandAdmiral Raeder (as he now was), General von Brauchitsch, GeneralHaider, General Keitel, General Erhard Milch, Inspector General of theLuftwaffe, and Rear Admiral Otto Sehniewind, naval Chief of Staff. TheFuehrer’s adjutant, Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Schmundt, was also pres-ent and, luckily for history, took notes. His minutes of the meeting areamong the captured German documents. Apparently Hitler’s words onthis occasion were regarded as such a top secret that no copies of theminutes 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 whichdepict Hitler’s road to war. Here, before the handful of men who will haveto direct the military forces in an armed conflict, Hitler cuts through hisown propaganda and diplomatic deceit and utters the truth about why hemust 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—forthe dictator did all the talking—discloses more uncertainty and confusionof mind than he has shown up to this point. Above all, Britain and theBritish 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 clearand precise, and no general or admiral could have left the Chancellery onMay 23 without knowing exactly what was coming at the summer’s end.Germany’s economic problems, he began, could only be solved by obtain-ing more Lebensraum in Europe, and “this is impossible without invadingother countries or attacking other people’s possessions.”

Further successes can no longer be attained without the shedding ofblood ... &

Danzig is not the subject of the dispute at all. It is a question of expandingour living space in the East, of securing our food supplies and also of solvingthe 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 pos-sess a large area in the East. In wartime we shall be even less able to rely onrecord harvests than in peacetime.

Besides, Hitler adds, the population of non-German territories in the

* See above, p. 305.

The Turn of Poland 485

East will be available as a source of labor—an early hint of the slavelabor 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. Ourtask is to isolate Poland. Success in isolating her will be decisive.

So there will be war. With an “isolated” Poland alone? Here theFuehrer 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 andEngland.

If it is not certain that a German-Polish conflict will not lead to war withthe West, then the fight must be primarily against England and France.

Fundamentally therefore: Conflict with Poland—beginning with an at-tack 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 Po-land at the same time.

In the face of such rapid-fire contradictions the generals must havewinced, perhaps prying their monocles loose, though there is no evidencein the Schmundt minutes that this happened or that anyone in the selectaudience even dared to ask a question to straighten matters out.

Hitler next turned to Russia. “It is not ruled out,” he said, “thatRussia might disinterest herself in the destruction of Poland.” On theother hand, if the Soviet Union allied herself to Britain and France, that“would lead me to attack England and France with a few devastatingblows.” That would mean committing the same mistake Wilhelm II madein 1914, but though in this lecture Hitler drew several lessons from theWorld War he did not draw this one. His thoughts now turned towardGreat 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 develop-ment the establishment of a hegemony which would weaken England. There-fore England is our enemy, and the conflict with England is a matter of lifeand death.

What will this conflict be like?f

England cannot finish off Germany with a few powerful blows and force usdown. It is of decisive importance for England to carry the war as near as

* Emphasis in the original,t Emphasis in the original.

486

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

possible to the Ruhr. French blood will not be spared. (West Wall!) Theduration of our existence is dependent on possession of the Ruhr.

Having decided to follow the Kaiser in one mistake—attacking Franceand England if they lined up with Russia—Hitler now announced that hewould follow the Emperor in another matter which eventually had proveddisastrous to Germany.

The Dutch and Belgian air bases must be militarily occupied. Declarationsof 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 anew line of defense on Dutch territory as far as the Zuyder Zee. The war withEngland 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 orwrong but of to be or not to be for eighty million people.

Though he had just announced that Germany would attack Poland “atthe first suitable opportunity” and though his listeners knew that almostall of Germany’s military strength was being concentrated on that objec-tive, Hitler, as he rambled on, could not keep his thoughts off GreatBritain.

“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 adventureand the courage of the Nordic race ...

England is a world power in herself. Constant for three hundred years. In-creased by alliances. This power is not only something concrete but must alsobe 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 courageousair force.

But Britain, Hitler reminded his hearers, also had her weaknesses, andhe proceeded to enumerate them.

If in the last war we had had two more battleships and two more cruisersand had begun the Battle of Jutland in the morning, the British fleet wouldhave been defeated and England brought to her knees.* It would have meantthe end of the World War. In former times ... to conquer England it wasnecessary 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.

Hitlers understanding of the Battle of Jutland was obviously faulty.

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The Turn of Poland

Luftwaffe attacks on England will not force her to capitulate. But if thefleet is annihilated instant capitulation results. There is no doubt that a sur-prise attack might lead to a quick decision.

A surprise attack with what? Surely Admiral Raeder must have thoughtthat Hitler was talking through his hat. Under the so-called Z Plan,promulgated at the end of 1938, German naval strength would only beginto approach that of the British by 1945. At the moment, in the spring of1939, 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 Hitlercame 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 blowright at the start. Considerations of right or wrong, or of treaties, do not enterinto the matter. This will be possible only when we do not “slide” into a warwith 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 Luft-waffe. If we succeed in occupying and securing Holland and Belgium, as wellas defeating France, the basis for a successful war against England has beencreated.

The Luftwaffe can then closely blockade England from western France andthe 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 May23, would also be carried out. At the beginning of the last war, had theGerman Army executed a wheeling movement toward the Channel portsinstead of toward Paris, the end, he said, would have been different. Per-haps it would have been. At any rate he would try it in 1940.

“The aim,” Hitler concluded, apparently forgetting all about Polandfor 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 keptsecret from both Italy and Japan.

Even Hitler’s own Army General Staff, whose Chief, General Haider,sat there listening, was not to be trusted entirely. “Our studies,” theFuehrer laid down, “must not be left to the General Staff. Secrecy wouldthen no longer be assured.” He ordered that a small planning staff inOKW be set up to work out the military plans.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

On May 23, 1939, then, Hitler, as he himself said, burned his boats.There would be war. Germany needed Lebensraum in the East. To getit Poland would be attacked at the first opportunity. Danzig had nothingto do with it. That was merely an excuse. Britain stood in the way; shewas the real driving force against Germany. Very well, she would betaken on too, and France. It would be a life-and-death struggle.

When the Fuehrer had first outlined his plans for aggression to themilitary chiefs, on November 5, 1937, Field Marshal von Blomberg andGeneral von Fritsch had protested—at least on the grounds that Germanywas too weak to fight a European war.* During the following summerGeneral Beck had resigned as Chief of the Army General Staff for thesame reason. But on May 23, 1939, not a single general or admiral, sofar as the record shows, raised his voice to question the wisdom of Hitler’scourse.

Their job, as they saw it, was not to question but to blindly obey.Already they had been applying their considerable talents to working outplans for military aggression. On May 7, Colonel Guenther Blumentrittof the Army General Staff, who with Generals von Rundstedt and vonManstein formed a small “Working Staff,” submitted an estimate of thesituation for Case White. Actually it was a plan for the conquest ofPoland. It was an imaginative and daring plan, and it would be followedwith very few changes.48

Admiral Raeder came through with naval plans for Case White in atop-secret directive signed May 16.49 Since Poland had only a few milesof coast on the Baltic west of Danzig and possessed only a small navy, nodifficulties were expected. France and Britain were the Admiral’s chiefconcern. The entrance to the Baltic was to be protected by submarines,and the two pocket battleships and the two battleships, with the “remain-ing” submarines, were to prepare for “war in the Atlantic.” Accordingto the instructions of the Fuehrer, the Navy had to be prepared to carryout its part of “White” by September 1 but Raeder urged his commandersto hasten plans because “due to the latest political developments” actionmight come sooner.50

As May 1939 came to an end German preparations for going to warby the end of the summer were well along. The great armament workswere humming, turning out guns, tanks, planes and warships. The ablestaffs of the Army, Navy and Air Force had reached the fin il stage ofplanning. The ranks were being swelled by new men called up for“summer training.” Hitler could be pleased with what he had accom-plished.

The day after the Fuehrer’s lecture to the military chiefs, on May 24,General Georg Thomas, head of the Economic and Armaments Branchof OKW, summed up that accomplishment in a confidential lecture to thestaff of the Foreign Office. Whereas it had taken the Imperial Army,

* See above, p. 308.

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The Turn of Poland

Thomas reminded his listeners, sixteen years—from 1898 to 1914—toincrease its streng'h from forty-three to fifty divisions, the Army of theThird 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 hadbuilt up from practically nothing a fleet of two battleships of 26,000 tons,*two heavy cruisers, seventeen destroyers and forty-seven submarines. Ithad already launched two battleships of 35,000 tons, one aircraft carrier,four heavy cruisers, five destroyers and seven submarines, and was planningto launch a great many more ships. From absolutely nothing, theLuftwaffe had built up a force of twenty-one squadrons with a personnelof 260,000 men. The armament industry, General Thomas said, wasalready producing more than it had during the peak of the last war andits output in most fields far exceeded that of any other country. In fact,total German rearmament, the General declared, was “probably unique inthe world.”

Formidable as German military power was becoming at the beginningof the summer of 1939, the prospect of success in the war which Hitlerwas 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, totake on France, Britain and Russia in addition to Poland. As the fatefulsummer commenced, all depended on the Fuehrer’s ability to limit thewar—above all, to keep Russia from forming the military alliance withthe West which Litvinov, just before his fall, had proposed and whichChamberlain, though he had at first seemed to reject it, was, by May’send, again mulling over.

THE INTERVENTION OF RUSSIA: II

In a debate in the House of Commons on May 19, the British PrimeMinister had again taken a cool and even disdainful view, as Churchillthought, of the Russian proposals. Somewhat wearily he had explained tothe House that “there is a sort of veil, a sort of wall, between the twoGovernments which it is extremely difficult to penetrate.” Churchill, onthe other hand, backed by Lloyd George, argued that Moscow had made“a fair offer .. . more simple, more direct, more effective” than Chamber-lain’s own proposals. He begged His Majesty’s Government “to get somebrutal truths into their heads. Without an effective Eastern front, there

* In giving these tonnages for German battleships, General Thomas was deceivingeven the Foreign Office. An interesting German naval document51 dated morethan a year before, February 18, 1938, notes that false figures on battleship tonnagehad been furnished the British government under the Anglo-German naval agree-ment. 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.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

can be no satisfactory defense in the West, and without Russia there canbe no effective Eastern front.”

Bowing to the storm of criticism from all sides, Chamberlain on May27 finally instructed the British ambassador in Moscow to agree to begindiscussions of a pact of mutual assistance, a military convention andguarantees to the countries threatened by Hitler.* Ambassador vonDirksen in London advised the German Foreign Office that the Britishgovernment had taken the step “with the greatest reluctance.” Further-more, Dirksen divulged what was perhaps the primary reason forChamberlain’s move. The British Foreign Office, he reported urgently toBerlin, had got wind of “German feelers in Moscow” and was “afraid thatGermany might succeed in keeping Soviet Russia neutral or even inducingher to adopt benevolent neutrality. That would have meant the completecollapse of the encirclement action.”53

On the last day of May, Molotov made his first public speech as Com-missar for Foreign Affairs in an address to the Supreme Council of theU.S.S.R. He castigated the Western democracies for their hesitation anddeclared that if they were serious in joining Russia to stop aggression theymust get down to brass tacks and come to an agreement on three mainpoints:

1. Conclude a tripartite mutual-assistance pact of a purely defensivecharacter.

2. Guarantee the states of Central and Eastern Europe, including allEuropean states bordering on the Soviet Union.

3. Conclude a definite agreement on the form and scope of the im-mediate and effective aid to be afforded each other and the smaller statesthreatened by aggression.

Molotov also declared that the talks with the West did not mean thatRussia would forego “business relations on a practical footing” withGermany and Italy. In fact, he said that “it was not out of the question”that commercial negotiations with Germany could be resumed. Ambas-sador von der Schulenburg, in reporting the speech to Berlin, pointed outthat Molotov had indicated that Russia was still prepared to conclude atreaty with Britain and France “on condition that all her demands areaccepted,” but that it was now evident from the address that it would takea long time before any real agreement was reached. He pointed out thatMolotov had “avoided sallies against Germany and showed readiness tocontinue 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 andcold over the thorny question of making advances to Moscow in order tothwart the Anglo-Russian negotiations. It was felt in Berlin that Molotov

* On May 27, the British ambassador and the French charge d’affaires in Moscowpresented Molotov with an Anglo-French draft of the proposed pact. To the sur-prise of the Western envoys, Molotov took a very cool view of it.52

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The Turn of Poland

in his talk with Ambassador von der Schulenburg on May 20* had throwncold water on Germany’s approaches, and on the following day, May 21,Weizsaecker wired the ambassador that in view of what the Foreign Com-missar had said “we must now sit tight and wait to see if the Russians willspeak more openly.”85

But Hitler, having fixed September 1 for his attack on Poland, could notafford to sit tight. On or about May 25, Weizsaecker and Friedrich Gaus,director of the Legal Department of the German Foreign Office, weresummoned to Ribbentrop’s country house at Sonnenburg and, accordingto Gaus’s affidavit submitted at Nuremberg,t informed that the Fuehrerwanted “to establish more tolerable relations between Germany and theSoviet Union.” Draft instructions to Schulenburg were drawn up by Rib-bentrop outlining in considerable detail the new line he was to take withMolotov, whom he was asked to see “as soon as possible.” This draft isamong the captured German Foreign Office documents.66

It was shown to Hitler, according to a notation on the document, onMay 26. It is a revealing paper. It discloses that by this date the GermanForeign Office was convinced that the Anglo-Russian negotiations wouldbe successfully concluded unless Germany intervened decisively. Rib-bentrop therefore proposed that Schulenburg tell Molotov the following:

A real opposition of interests in foreign affairs does not exist between Ger-many and Soviet Russia . . . The time has come to consider a pacificationand normalization of German—Soviet Russian foreign relations . . . TheItalo German alliance is not directed against the Soviet Union. It is exclu-sively directed against the Anglo-French combination . . .

If against our wishes it should come to hostilities with Poland, we are firmlyconvinced that even this need not in any way lead to a clash of interests withSoviet 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 in-terests into account as far as possible.

Next the danger to Russia of an alliance with Great Britain was to bepointed up.

We are unable to see what could really induce the Soviet Union to play anactive part in the game of the British policy of encirclement . . . This wouldmean Russia undertaking a one-sided liability without any really valuableBritish quid pro quo . . . Britain is by no means in a position to offer Russia

* See above, pp. 481-82.

t The affidavit was rejected as evidence by the tribunal and is not published in theNazi Conspiracy and Aggression or Trial of the Major War Criminals volumes ofthe Nuremberg evidence. This does not detract from its authenticity. All materialdealing with Nazi-Soviet collaboration during this period was handled gingerly bythe tribunal, one of whose four judges was a Russian

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

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 aretherefore convinced that Britain will once more remain faithful to her tradi-tional policy of letting other powers pull her chestnuts out of the fire.

Schulenburg also was to emphasize that Germany had “no aggressiveintentions against Russia.” Finally, he was instructed to tell Molotov thatGermany was ready to discuss with the Soviet Union not only economicquestions but “a return to normal in political relations.”

Hitler thought the draft went too far and ordered it held up. TheFuehrer, according to Gaus, had been impressed by Chamberlain’s opti-mistic statement of two days before, May 24, when the Prime Ministerhad told the House of Commons that as the result of new British proposalshe hoped that full agreement with Russia could be reached “at an earlydate.” What Hitler feared was a rebuff. He did not abandon the idea ofa rapprochement with Moscow but decided that for the time being a morecautious approach would be best.

The backing and filling which took place in the Fuehrer’s mind duringthe last week of May is documented in the captured German ForeignOffice papers. On or about the twenty-fifth—the exact day is not quitecertain—he had suddenly come out for pushing talks with the SovietUnion in order to thwart the Anglo—Russian negotiations. Schulenburgwas to see Molotov at once for that purpose. But Ribbentrop’s instructionsto him, which were shown Hitler on the twenty-sixth, were never sent.The Fuehrer canceled them. That evening Weizsaecker wired Schulen-burg advising him to maintain an “attitude of complete reserve—you per-sonally should not make any move until further notice.”57

This telegram and a letter which the State Secretary wrote the ambas-sador in Moscow on May 27 but did not mail until May 30, when asignificant postscript was added, go far to explaining the hesitations inBerlin.58 Weizsaecker, writing on the twenty-seventh, informed Schulen-burg that it was the opinion in Berlin that an Anglo—Russian agreementwould “not be easy to prevent” and that Germany hesitated to intervenedecisively against it for fear of provoking “a peal of Tartar laughter” inMoscow. Also, the State Secretary revealed, both Japan and Italy hadbeen cool toward Germany’s proposed move in Moscow, and the reserveof 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 Moscowand Paris-London mutually engage themselves.”

For some reason Weizsaecker did not post his letter at once; perhapshe felt that Hitler had not yet fully made up his mind. When he did mailit 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 holdtoday with the Russian charge d’affaires.

This talk with Georgi Astakhov did not get very far, but it representedfor the Germans a new start. Weizsaecker’s pretext for calling in theRussian charge was to discuss the future of the Soviet trade delegation inPrague, which the Russians were anxious to maintain. Around this subjectthe two diplomats sparred to find out what was in each other’s mind.Weizsaecker said he agreed with Molotov that political and economicquestions could not be entirely separated and expressed interest in the“normalization of relations between Soviet Russia and Germany.” Astak-hov asserted that Molotov had no “intention of barring the door againstfurther Russo-German discussions.”

Cautious as both men were, the Germans were encouraged. At 10:40o’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 tomake a certain degree of contact with the Soviet Union.*

It may have been that a long secret memorandum which Mussolinipenned to Hitler on May 30 strengthened the Fuehrer’s resolve to turnto the Soviet Union, however cautiously. As the summer commenced,the Duce’s doubts mounted as to the advisability of an early conflict. Hewas convinced, he wrote Hitler, that “war between the plutocratic, self-seeking conservative nations” and the Axis was “inevitable.” But—“Italyrequires a period of preparation which may extend until the end of1942 . . . Only from 1943 onward will an effort by war have thegreatest prospects of success.” After enumerating several reasons why“Italy needs a period of peace,” the Duce concluded: “For all thesereasons Italy does not wish to hasten a European war, although she isconvinced of the inevitability of such a war.”60

Hitler, who had not taken his good friend and ally into his confidenceabout the date of September 1 which he had set for attacking Poland,replied that he had read the secret memorandum “with the greatest in-terest” and suggested that the two leaders meet for discussions sometimein the future. In the meantime the Fuehrer decided to see if a crack could

* In Nazi-Soviet Relations, a volume of German Foreign Office documents on thatsubject published by the U.S. State Department in 1949, the English translationof the telegram came out much stronger. The key sentence was given as: “Wehave now decided to undertake definite negotiations with the Soviet Union.” Thishas led many historians, including Churchill, to conclude that this telegram ofMay 30 marked the decisive turning point in Hitler’s efforts to make a deal withMoscow. That turning point came later. As Weizsaecker pointed out in the May 30postscript to his letter to Schulenburg, the German approach, which Hitler hadapproved, was to be “a very much modified one.”

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be made in the Kremlin wall. All through June preliminary talks con-cerning a new trade agreement were held in Moscow between the GermanEmbassy and Anastas Mikoyan, the Russian Commissar for ForeignTrade.

The Soviet government was still highly suspicious of Berlin. AsSchulenburg reported toward the end of the month (June 27), the Kremlinbelieved the Germans, in pressing for a trade agreement, wished totorpedo the Russian negotiations with Britain and France. “They areafraid,” he wired Berlin, “that as soon as we have gained this advantagewe 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 thenonaggression treaties which Germany had just concluded with the BalticStates,* the Soviet Foreign Commissar tartly replied that “he must doubtthe permanence of such treaties after the experiences which Poland hadhad.” Summing up the talk, Schulenburg concluded:

My impression is that the Soviet Government is greatly interested in learn-ing our political views and in maintaining contact with us. Although therewas no mistaking the strong distrust evident in all that Molotov said, henevertheless described a normalization of relations with Germany as beingdesirable and possible.62

The ambassador requested telegraphic instructions as to his next move.Schulenburg was one of the last survivors of the Seeckt, Maltzan andBrockdorff-Rantzau school which had insisted on a German rapproche-ment with Soviet Russia after 1919 and which had brought it about atRapallo. As his dispatches throughout 1939 make clear, he sincerelysought to restore the close relations which had existed during the WeimarRepublic. But like so many other German career diplomats of the oldschool he little understood Hitler.

Suddenly on June 29 Hitler, from his mountain retreat at Berchtes-gaden, 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 thatthey are making the continuation of further talks dependent on the acceptanceof the basis for our economic discussions as fixed in January. Since this basis

* To try to forestall an Anglo-French-Russian guarantee of Latvia and Estonia,which bordered on the Soviet Union, Germany had hastily signed nonaggressionpacts with these two Baltic States on June 7. Even before this, on May 31, Ger-many had pushed through a similar pact with Denmark, which, considering recentevents, appears to have given the Danes an astonishing sense of security.

The Turn of Poland 495

was not acceptable to us, we would not be interested in a resumption of theeconomic discussions with Russia at present.

The Fuehrer has agreed that this answer be delayed for a few days.83

Actually, the substance of it was telegraphed to the German Embassyin Moscow the next day.

The Foreign Minister [Weizsaecker wired] ... is of the opinion that inthe political field enough has been said until further instructions and that forthe moment the talks should not be taken up again by us.

Concerning the possible economic negotiations with the Russian Govern-ment, the deliberations here have not yet been concluded. In this field too youare requested for the time being to take no further action, but to await in-structions.84

There is no clue in the secret German documents which explains Hitler’ssudden change of mind. The Russians already had begun to compromiseon their proposals of January and February. And Schnurre had warnedon June 15 that a breakdown in the economic negotiations would be asetback for Germany both economically and politically.

Nor could the rocky course of the Anglo-French-Soviet negotiationshave so discouraged Hitler as to lead him to such a decision. He knewfrom the reports of the German Embassy in Moscow that Russia and theWestern Powers were deadlocked over the question of guarantees toPoland, Rumania and the Baltic States. Poland and Rumania werehappy to be guaranteed by Britain and France, which could scarcely helpthem in the event of German aggression except by the indirect means ofsetting up a Western front. But they refused to accept a Russian guaranteeor even to allow for Soviet troops to pass through their territories to meeta German attack. Latvia, Estonia and Finland also stoutly declined toaccept any Russian guarantee, an attitude which, as the German ForeignOffice papers later revealed, was encouraged by Germany in the form ofdire threats should they weaken in their resolve.

In this impasse Molotov suggested at the beginning of June that GreatBritain send its Foreign Secretary to Moscow to take part in the negotia-tions. Apparently in the Russian view this would not only help to breakthe deadlock but would show that Britain was in earnest in arriving at anagreement with Russia. Lord Halifax declined to go.* Anthony Eden,who was at least a former Foreign Secretary, offered to go in his place, butChamberlain turned him down. It was decided, instead, to send WilliamStrang, a capable career official in the Foreign Office who had previously

♦According to the British Foreign Office papers, Halifax told Maisky on June 8that he had thought of suggesting to the Prime Minister that he should go to Mos-cow, “but it was really impossible to get away.” Maisky, on June 12, after Stranghad left, suggested to Halifax that it would be a good idea for the Foreign Secretaryto go to Moscow “when things were quieter,” but Halifax again stressed the im-possibility of his being absent from London “for the present.”6R

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served in the Moscow Embassy and spoke Russian but was little knowneither in his own country or outside of it. The appointment of so sub-ordinate an official to head such an important mission and to negotiatedirectly with Molotov and Stalin was a signal to the Russians, they latersaid, that Chamberlain still did not take very seriously the business ofbuilding an alliance to stop Hitler.

Strang arrived in Moscow on June 14, but though he participated ineleven Anglo-French meetings with Molotov, his appearance had littleeffect on the course of Anglo-Soviet negotiations. A fortnight later, onJune 29, Russian suspicion and irritation was publicly displayed in anarticle in Pravda by Andrei Zhdanov under the headline, “British andFrench Governments Do Not Want a Treaty on the Basis of Equality forthe Soviet Union.” Though purporting to write “as a private individualand not committing the Soviet Government,” Zhdanov was not only amember of the Politburo and president of the Foreign Affairs Committeeof the Soviet Parliament but, as Schulenburg emphasized to Berlin inreporting on the matter, “one of Stalin’s confidants [whose] article wasdoubtless written on orders from above.”

It seems to me [Zhdanov wrote] that the British and French Governmentsare not out for a real agreement acceptable to the U.S.S.R. but only for talksabout an agreement in order to demonstrate before the public opinion of theirown countries the alleged unyielding attitude of the U.S.S.R. and thus facili-tate the conclusion of an agreement with the aggressors. The next few dayswill show whether this is so or not.66

Stalin’s distrust of Britain and France and his suspicion that theWestern Allies might in the end make a deal with Hitler, as they had theyear before at Munich, was thus publicized for all the world to ponder.Ambassador von der Schulenburg, pondering it, suggested to Berlin thatone purpose of the article was “to lay the blame on Britain and Francefor the possible breakdown of the negotiations.”67

PLANS FOR TOTAL WAR

Still Adolf Hitler did not rise to the Russian bait. Perhaps it was becauseall during June he was busy at Berchtesgaden supervising the completionof military plans to invade Poland at the summer’s end.

By June 15 he had General von Brauchitsch’s top-secret plan for theoperations of the Army against Poland.68 “The object of the operation,”the Commander in Chief of the Army, echoing his master, declared, “isto destroy the Polish armed forces. The political leadership demands thatthe war should be begun by heavy surprise blows and lead to quick suc-cesses. The intention of the Army High Command is to prevent a regularmobilization and concentration of the Polish Army by a surprise invasion

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of Polish territory and to destroy the mass of the Polish Army, which isexpected to be west of the Vistula-Narew line, by a concentric attack fromSilesia on the one side and from Pomerania-East Prussia on the other.”

To carry out his plan, Brauchitsch set up two army groups—ArmyGroup South, consisting of the Eighth, Tenth and Fourteenth armies, andArmy Group North, made up of the Third and Fourth armies. The south-ern army group, under the command of General von Rundstedt, was toattack from Silesia “in the general direction of Warsaw, scatter opposingPolish forces and occupy as early as possible with forces as strong aspossible the Vistula on both sides of Warsaw with the aim of destroyingthe Polish forces still holding out in western Poland in co-operation withArmy Group North.” The first mission of the latter group was “toestablish connection between the Reich and East Prussia” by drivingacross the Corridor. Detailed objectives of the various armies wereoutlined as well as those for the Air Force and Navy. Danzig, saidBrauchitsch, would be declared German territory on the first day ofhostilities and would be secured by local forces under German command.

A supplemental directive issued at the same time stipulated that theorder of deployment for “White” would be put into operation on August20. “All preparations,” it laid down, “must be concluded by that date.”69

A week later, on June 22, General Keitel submitted to Hitler a “pre-liminary timetable for Case White.”70 The Fuehrer, after studying it,agreed with it “in the main” but ordered that “so as not to disquiet thepopulation by calling up reserves on a larger scale than usual . . . civilianestablishments, employers or other private persons who make inquiriesshould be told that men are being called up for the autumn maneuvers.”Also Hitler stipulated that “for reasons of security, the clearing of hospitalsin the frontier area which the Supreme Command of the Army proposedshould take place from the middle of July must not be carried out.”

The war which Hitler was planning to launch would be total war andwould require not only military mobilization but a total mobilization of allthe resources of the nation. To co-ordinate this immense effort a meetingof 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, Haider, Thomas and Milchfor the armed forces and the Ministers of the Interior, Economics, Financeand Transport, as well as Himmler, were present. It was only the secondmeeting of the Council but, as Goering explained, the body was convokedonly to make the most important decisions and he left no doubt in theminds of his hearers, as the captured secret minutes of the session reveal,that war was near and that much remained to be done about manpowerfor industry and agriculture and about many other matters relating tototal mobilization.71

Goering informed the Council that Hitler had decided to draft someseven million men. To augment the labor supply Dr. Funk, the Minister ofEconomics, was to arrange “what work is to be given to prisoners ofwar and to the inmates of prisons and concentration camps.” Himmler

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chimed in to say that “greater use will be made of the concentration campsin wartime.” And Goering added that “hundreds of thousands of workersfrom the Czech protectorate are to be employed under supervision inGermany, 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 thepublic administration” and enlivened the proceedings by admitting thatunder the Nazi regime the number of bureaucrats had increased “fromtwenty to forty fold—an impossible state of affairs.” A committee was setup 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 thetransportation sphere,” he declared bluntly, “Germany is at the momentnot ready for war.”

Whether the German transportation facilities would be equal to theirtask depended, of course, on whether the war was confined to Poland. Ifit had to be fought in the West against France and Great Britain it wasfeared that the transport system would simply not be adequate. In Julytwo emergency meetings of the Defense Council were called “in order tobring the West Wall, by August 25 at the latest, into the optimum condi-tion of preparedness with the material that can be obtained by that timeby an extreme effort.” High officials of Krupp and the steel cartel wereenlisted to try to scrape up the necessary metal to complete the armamentof the western fortifications. For on their impregnancy, the Germansknew, depended whether the Anglo-French armies would be inclined tomount a serious attack on western Germany while the Wehrmacht waspreoccupied in Poland.

Though Hitler, with unusual frankness, had told his generals on May23 that Danzig was not the cause of the dispute with Poland at all, itseemed for a few weeks at midsummer that the Free City might be thepowder keg which any day would set off the explosion of war. For sometime the Germans had been smuggling into Danzig arms and RegularArmy officers to train the local defense guard in their use.* The arms andofficers came in across the border from East Prussia, and in order to keepcloser watch on them the Poles increased the number of their customsofficials and frontier guards. The local Danzig authorities, now operatingexclusively on orders from Berlin, countered by trying to prevent thePolish officials from carrying out their duties.

* On June 19 the High Command of the Army had informed the Foreign Officethat 168 German Army officers “have been granted permission to travel throughthe Free State of Danzig in civilian clothes on a tour for study purposes.” Early inJuly General Keitel inquired of the Foreign Office “whether it is politically advis-able to show in public the twelve light and four heavy guns which are in Danzigand to let exercises be carried out with them, or whether it is better to conceal thepresence of these guns.”72 How the Germans succeeded in smuggling in heavyartillery past the Polish inspectors is not revealed in the German papers.

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The conflict reached a crisis on August 4 when the Polish diplomaticrepresentative in Danzig informed the local authorities that the Polishcustoms inspectors had been given orders to carry out their functions“with arms” and that any attempt by the Danzigers to hamper them wouldbe regarded “as an act of violence” against Polish officials, and that insuch a case the Polish government would “retaliate without delay againstthe Free City.”

This was a further sign to Hitler that the Poles could not be intimidatedand it was reinforced by the opinion of the German ambassador inWarsaw, who on July 6 telegraphed Berlin that there was “hardly anydoubt” that Poland would fight “if there was a clear violation” of herrights in Danzig. We know from a marginal note on the telegram in Rib-bentrop’s handwriting that it was shown the Fuehrer.73

Hitler was furious. The next day, August 7, he summoned AlbertForster, the Nazi Gauleiter of Danzig, to Berchtesgaden and told himthat he had reached the extreme limit of his patience with the Poles.Angry notes were exchanged between Berlin and Warsaw—so violent intone that neither side dared to make them public. On the ninth, the Reichgovernment warned Poland that a repetition of its ultimatum to Danzig“would lead to an aggravation of German-Polish relations ... forwhich the German Government must disclaim all responsibility.” Thenext day the Polish government replied tartly

that they will continue to react as hitherto to any attempt by the authorities ofthe 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 appropri-ate, 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 lan-guage. When on the following day, August 11, the Fuehrer received CarlBurckhardt, a Swiss, who was League of Nations High Commissioner atDanzig and who had gone more than halfway to meet the German de-mands there, he was in an ugly mood. He told his visitor that “if theslightest thing was attempted by the Poles, he would fall upon them likelightning with all the powerful arms at his disposal, of which the Poleshad not the slightest idea.”

M. Burckhardt said [the High Commissioner later reported] that thatwould lead to a general conflict. Herr Hitler replied that if he had to makewar he would rather do it today than tomorrow, that he would not conduct itlike the Germany of Wilhelm II, who had always had scruples about the fulluse of every weapon, and that he would fight without mercy up to the extremelimit.76

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Against whom? Against Poland certainly. Against Britain and France,if necessary. Against Russia too? With regard to the Soviet Union, Hit-ler 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, ac-companied by two aides, called on Julius Schnurre at the German ForeignOffice and informed him that Russia would like to extend and intensifyGerman-Soviet economic relations. He brought along a detailed memo-randum for a trade agreement calling for a greatly increased exchange ofgoods between the two countries and declared that if a few differencesbetween the two parties were clarified he was empowered to sign a tradetreaty in Berlin. The Germans, as Dr. Schnurre’s confidential memoran-dum of the meeting shows, were rather pleased. Such a treaty, Schnurrenoted, “will not fail to have its effect at least in Poland and Britain.”76Four days later, on July 22, the Russian press announced in Moscow thatSoviet-German trade negotiations had been resumed in Berlin.

On the same day Weizsaecker rather exuberantly wired Ambassadorvon der Schulenburg in Moscow some interesting new instructions. As tothe trade negotiations, he informed the ambassador, “we will act here in amarkedly forthcoming manner, since a conclusion, and this at the earliestpossible moment, is desired here for general reasons. As far as the purelypolitical aspect of our conversations with the Russians is concerned,” headded, “we regard the period of waiting stipulated for you in our telegram[of June 30]* as having expired. You are therefore empowered to pickup 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 Sovietcharge, and Babarin at a swank Berlin restaurant and sound them out.The two Russians needed little sounding. As Schnurre noted in his con-fidential memorandum of the meeting, “the Russians stayed until about12:30 a.m.” and talked “in a very lively and interested manner about thepolitical 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 ofthe two countries. In Moscow, he said, they had never quite understoodwhy Nazi Germany had been so antagonistic to the Soviet Union. TheGerman diplomat, in response, explained that “German policy in the Easthad now taken an entirely different course.”

On our part there could be no question of menacing the Soviet Union. Ouraims were in an entirely different direction . . . German policy was aimed

* See above, p. 495.

at Britain ... I could imagine a far-reaching arrangement of mutual inter-ests with due consideration for vital Russian problems.

However, this possibility would be barred the moment the Soviet Unionaligned itself with Britain against Germany. The time for an understandingbetween Germany and the Soviet Union was opportune now, but would nolonger be so after the conclusion of a pact with London.

What could Britain offer Russia? At best, participation in a European warand the hostility of Germany. What could we offer against this? Neutralityand keeping out of a possible European conflict and, if Moscow wished, aGerman-Russian understanding on mutual interests which, just as in formertimes, would work out to the advantage of both countries . . . Controversialproblems [between Germany and Russia] did not, in my opinion, exist any-where 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 onething common to the ideology of Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union: op-position to the capitalist democracies in the West.78

Thus in the late-evening hours of July 26 in a small Berlin restaurantover good food and wine partaken by second-string diplomats was Ger-many’s first serious bid for a deal with Soviet Russia made. The new linewhich Schnurre took had been given him by Ribbentrop himself. Astak-hov was pleased to hear it. He promised Schnurre that he would reportit at once to Moscow.

In the Wilhelmstrasse the Germans waited impatiently to see what thereaction 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 Astak-hov and Babarin have met with any response in Moscow. If you see an op-portunity of arranging a further conversation with Molotov, please soundhim out on the same lines. If this results in Molotov abandoning the reservehe has so far maintained you could go a step further . . . This applies inparticular to the Polish problem. We would be prepared, however the Polishproblem may develop ... to safeguard all Soviet interests and to come toan 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 adjust-ing our attitude to the Baltic States as to respect vital Soviet interests in theBaltic 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 couriertoday:

Please report by telegram the date and time of your next interview withMolotov as soon as it is fixed.

We are anxious for an early interview.80

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For the first time a note of urgency crept into the dispatches from Ber-lin 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 wouldspell out specifically how Hitler’s armies were to be met by the three na-tions. Although Chamberlain did not announce this agreement until July31, when he made it to the House of Commons, the Germans got wind ofit earlier. On July 28 Ambassador von Welczeck in Paris wired Berlinthat he had learned from “an unusually well-informed source” that Franceand Britain were dispatching military missions to Moscow and that theFrench group would be headed by General Doumenc, whom he describedas being “a particularly capable officer” and a former Deputy Chief ofStaff under General Maxime Weygand.81 It was the German ambassa-dor’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 ofpreventing the adjournment of the Moscow negotiations.82

It was a well-founded impression. As the confidential British ForeignOffice papers make clear, the political talks in Moscow had reached animpasse by the last week in July largely over the impossibility of reachinga definition of “indirect aggression.” To the British and French the Rus-sian interpretation of that term was so broad that it might be used tojustify Soviet intervention in Finland and the Baltic States even if therewere no serious Nazi threat, and to this London at least—the French wereprepared to be more accommodating—would not agree.

Also, on June 2 the Russians had insisted that a military agreement set-ting down in detail the “methods, form and extent” of the military helpwhich the three countries were to give each other should come into forceat the same time as the mutual-assistance pact itself. The Western Powers,which did not think highly of Russia’s military prowess,* tried to putMolotov off. They would only agree to starting staff talks after the politi-cal agreement had been signed. But the Russians were adamant. Whenthe British tried to strike a bargain, offering on July 17 to begin staff con-versations at once if the Soviet Union would yield on its insistence onsigning political and military agreements simultaneously and also—for

* The British High Command, like the German later, grossly underestimated thepotential strength of the Red Army. This may have been due in large part to thereports it received from its military attaches in Moscow. On March 6, for instance,Colonel Firebrace, the military attache, and Wing Commander Hallawell, the airattache, had filed long reports to London to the effect that while the defensive capa-bilities of the Red Army and Air Force were considerable they were incapable ofmounting a serious offensive. Hallawell thought that the Russian Air Force, “likethe Army, is likely to be brought to a standstill as much by the collapse of essentialservices as by enemy action.” Firebrace found that the purge of higher officers hadseverely weakened the Red Army. But he did point out to London that “the RedArmy considers war inevitable and is undoubtedly being strenuously prepared forit.”88

good measure—accept the British definition of “indirect aggression,” Mo-lotov answered with a blunt rejection. Unless the French and Britishagreed to political and military agreements in one package, he said, therewas no point in continuing the negotiations. This Russian threat to end thetalks caused consternation in Paris, which seems to have been moreacutely aware than London of the course of Soviet-Nazi flirtations, and itwas largely due to French pressure that the British government, on Au-gust 23, while refusing to accept the Russian proposals on “indirect ag-gression,” reluctantly agreed to negotiate a military convention.84

Chamberlain was less than lukewarm to the whole business of stafftalks.* On August 1 Ambassador von Dirksen in London informed Ber-lin that the military negotiations with the Russians were “regarded skep-tically” in British government circles.

This is borne out [he wrote] by the composition of the British Military Mis-sion, f The Admiral ... is practically on the retired list and was never onthe Naval Staff. The General is also purely a combat officer. The Air Marshalis outstanding as a pilot and an instructor, but not as a strategist. This seems toindicate that the task of the Military Mission is rather to ascertain the fightingvalue of the Soviet forces than to conclude agreements on operations . . .The Wehrmacht attaches are agreed in observing a surprising skepticism inBritish military circles about the forthcoming talks with the Soviet armedforces.88

Indeed, so skeptical was the British government that it neglected togive Admiral Drax written authority to negotiate—an oversight, if it wasthat, which Marshal Voroshilov complained about when the staff officersfirst met. The Admiral’s credentials did not arrive until August 21, whenthey were no longer of use.

But if Admiral Drax had no written credentials he certainly had secretwritten instructions as to the course he was to take in the military talks inMoscow. As the British Foreign Office papers much later revealed, theAdmiral was admonished to “go very slowly with the [military] conversa-tions, watching the progress of the political negotiations,” until a political

* 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 expectedto talk military secrets with the Soviet Government before we are sure that theywill be our allies.” 1

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 divi-sions each party would contribute to the common cause and where they would belocated."80 Before the Russians committed themselves politically they wanted toknow how much military help they could expect from the West,t The British mission consisted of Admiral Sir Reginald Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax,who had been Commander in Chief, Plymouth, 1935-1938, Air Marshal Sir CharlesBurnett and Major General Heywood.

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agreement had been concluded.87 It was explained to him that confidentialmilitary information could not be imparted to the Russians until the polit-ical pact was signed.

But since the political conversations had been suspended on August 2and Molotov had made it clear that he would not assent to their being re-newed until the military talks had made some progress, the conclusion canscarcely be escaped that the Chamberlain government was quite preparedto take its time in spelling out the military obligations of each country inthe proposed mutual-assistance pact.* In fact the confidential BritishForeign Office documents leave little doubt that, by the beginning of Au-gust, Chamberlain and Halifax had almost given up hope of reaching anagreement with the Soviet Union to stop Hitler but thought that if theystretched out the staff negotiations in Moscow this might somehow deterthe German dictator from taking, during the next four weeks, the fatalstep toward war.f

In contrast to the British and French, the Russians placed on theirmilitary mission the highest officers of their armed forces: Marshal Voro-shilov, who was Commissar for Defense, General Shaposhnikov, Chief ofthe General Staff of the Red Army, and the commanders in chief of theNavy and Air Force. The Russians could not help noting that whereasthe British had sent the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General SirEdmund Ironside, to Warsaw in July for military talks with the PolishGeneral Staff, they did not consider sending this ranking British officerto Moscow.

It cannot be said that the Anglo-French military missions were ex-actly 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 whichtook as long to get them to Russia as the Queen Mary could have con-veyed them to America. They sailed for Leningrad on August 5 and didnot arrive in Moscow until August 11.

By that time it was too late. Hitler had beaten them to it.

* 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. Seep. 482.

t On August 16, Air Marshal Sir Charles Burnett wrote to London from Moscow:“I understand it is the Government’s policy to prolong negotiations as long as pos-sible if we cannot get acceptance of a treaty.” Seeds, the British ambassador inMoscow, had wired London on July 24, the day after his government agreed tostaff talks: “I am not optimistic as to the success of military conversations, nor do Ithink they can in any case be rapidly concluded, but to begin with them now wouldgive a healthy shock to the Axis Powers and a fillip to our friends, while they mightbe prolonged sufficiently to tide over the next dangerous few months.”**® In viewof what Anglo-French intelligence knew of the meetings of Molotov with theGerman ambassador, of German efforts to interest Russia in a new partition ofPoland—which Coulondre had warned Paris of as early as May 7 (see above, p.482), of massive German troop concentrations on the Polish border, and ofHitler’s intentions, this British trust in stalling in Moscow is somewhat startling.

While the British and French military officers were waiting for theirslow boat to Leningrad the Germans were acting swiftly. August 3 was acrucial day in Berlin and Moscow.

At 12:58 p.m. on that day Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, who in-variably left the sending of telegrams to State Secretary von Weizsaecker,got off on his own a wire marked “Secret—Most Urgent” to Schulenburgin Moscow. °

Yesterday I had a lengthy conversation with Astakhov, on which a telegramfollows.

I expressed the German wish for remolding German-Russian relations andstated that from the Baltic to the Black Sea there was no problem which couldnot be solved to our mutual satisfaction. In response to Astakhov’s desire formore concrete conversations on topical questions ... I declared myselfready for such conversations if the Soviet Government would inform methrough Astakhov that they also desired to place German-Russian relationson a new and definitive basis.89

It was known at the Foreign Office that Schulenburg was seeing Molotovlater 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 areanxious, without prejudice to your conversation with Molotov today, to con-tinue in more concrete terms in Berlin the conversations on harmonizing Ger-man-Soviet intentions. To this end Schnurre will receive Astakhov today andwill tell him that we would be ready for a continuation on more concreteterms.90

Though Ribbentrop s sudden desire for “concrete” talks on everythingfrom the Baltic to the Black Sea must have surprised the Russians—atone point, as he informed Schulenburg in his following telegram whichwas sent at 3:47 p.m., he “dropped a gentle hint [to Astakhov] at ourcoming to an understanding with Russia on the fate of Poland”—the For-eign Minister emphasized to his ambassador in Moscow that he had toldthe Russian charge that “we were in no hurry.”91

This was bluff, and the sharp-minded Soviet charge called it when hesaw Schnurre at the Foreign Office at 12:45 p.m. He remarked that whileSchnurre seemed to be in a hurry, the German Foreign Minister the pre-vious day had shown no such urgency.” Schnurre rose to the occasion.

I told M. Astakhov [he noted in a secret memorandum]92 that though theForeign Minister last night had not shown any urgency to the Soviet Govern-ment, we nevertheless thought it expedient to make use of the next few days*

* Emphasis in the original document.

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for continuing the conversations in order to establish a basis as quickly aspossible.

For the Germans, then, it had come down to a matter of the next fewdays. Astakhov told Schnurre that he had received “a provisional an-swer” 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 atti-tude.”

The Soviet Foreign Commissar conveyed his ideas directly to Schulen-burg in Moscow that evening. The ambassador reported in a long dis-patch filed shortly after midnight93 that in a talk lasting an hour and aquarter Molotov had “abandoned his habitual reserve and appeared un-usually open.” There seems no doubt of that. For after Schulenburg hadreiterated Germany’s view that no differences existed between the twocountries “from the Baltic to the Black Sea” and reaffirmed the Germanwish to “come to an understanding,” the unbending Russian Ministerenumerated some of the hostile acts that the Reich had committed againstthe Soviet Union: the Anti-Comintern Pact, support of Japan againstRussia and the exclusion of the Soviets from Munich.

“How,” asked Molotov, “could the new German statements be recon-ciled with these three points? Proofs of a changed attitude of the GermanGovernment were for the present still lacking.”

Schulenburg seems to have been somewhat discouraged.

My general impression [he telegraphed Berlin] is that the Soviet Govern-ment are at present determined to conclude an agreement with Britain andFrance, if they fulfill all Soviet wishes ... I believe that my statements madean impression on Molotov; it will nevertheless require considerable effort onour part to cause a reversal in the Soviet Government’s course.

Knowledgeable though the veteran German diplomat was about Rus-sian affairs, he obviously overestimated the progress in Moscow of theBritish and French negotiators. Nor did he yet realize the lengths towhich 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 forPoland or, if they did, would easily be held on the western fortificationsuntil the Poles were quickly liquidated and the German Army could turnits full strength on the West.

The astute French charge d’affaires in Berlin, Jacques Tarbe de St.-Hardouin, noticed the change of atmosphere in the German capital. Onthe very day, August 3, when there was so much Soviet-German diplo-matic activity in Berlin and Moscow, he reported to Paris: “In the courseof the last week a very definite change in the political atmosphere has been

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observed in Berlin . . . The period of embarrassment, hesitation, in-clination to temporization or even to appeasement has been succeededamong the Nazi leaders by a new phase.”04

THE HESITATION OF GERMANY’S ALLIES

It was different with Germany’s allies, Italy and Hungary. As the sum-mer progressed, the governments in Budapest and Rome became increas-ingly fearful that their countries would be drawn into Hitler’s war onGermany’s side.

On July 24 Count Teleki, Premier of Hungary, addressed identicalletters to Hitler and Mussolini informing them that “in the event of ageneral conflict Hungary will make her policy conform to the policy ofthe Axis. Having gone so far, he then pulled back. On the same day hewrote the two dictators a second letter stating that “in order to preventany possible misinterpretation of my letter of July 24, I . . . repeat thatHungary could not, on moral grounds, be in a position to take armed ac-tion against Poland.”05

The second letter from Budapest threw Hitler into one of his accus-tomed rages. When he received Count Csaky, the Hungarian ForeignMinister, at Obersalzberg on August 8, in the presence of Ribbentrop, heopened the conversation by stating that he had been “shocked” at theHungarian Prime Minister’s letter. He emphasized, according to the con-fidential memorandum drawn up for the Foreign Office, that he had neverexpected help from Hungary—or from any other state—“in the event of aGerman—Polish conflict.” Count Teleki’s letter, he added, “was impos-sible.” And he reminded his Hungarian guest that it was due to Germany’sgenerosity that Hungary had been able to regain so much territory at theexpense of Czechoslovakia. Were Germany to be defeated in war, hesaid, “Hungary would be automatically smashed too.”

The German memorandum of this conversation, which is among thecaptured Foreign Office documents, reveals Hitler’s state of mind as thefateful month of August got under way. Poland, he said, presented nomilitary problem at all for Germany. Nevertheless, he was reckoningfrom the start with a war on two fronts. “No power in the world,” heboasted, “could penetrate Germany’s western fortifications. Nobody in allmy life has been able to frighten me, and that goes for Britain. Nor will Isuccumb to the oft-predicted nervous breakdown.” As for Russia:

The Soviet Government would not fight against us . . . The Soviets wouldnot 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 Statesor Poland, without engaging in military action themselves.

So effective was Hitler’s harangue that at the end of a second talk heldthe same day Count Csaky requested him “to regard the two letters written

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by Teleki as not having been written.” He said he would also make thesame request of Mussolini.

For some weeks the Duce had been worrying and fretting about thedanger of the Fuehrer dragging Italy into war. Attolico, his ambassadorin Berlin, had been sending increasingly alarming reports about Hitler’sdetermination to attack Poland.* Since early June Mussolini had beenpressing for another meeting with Hitler and in July it was fixed for Au-gust 4 at the Brenner. On July 24 he presented to Hitler through Attolico“certain basic principles” for their discussion. If the Fuehrer consideredwar “inevitable,” then Italy would stand by her side. But the Duce re-minded him that a war with Poland could not be localized; it would be-come a European conflict. Mussolini did not think that this was the timefor the Axis to start such a war. He proposed instead “a constructivepeaceful policy over several years,” with Germany settling her differenceswith Poland and Italy hers with France by diplomatic negotiation. Hewent further. He suggested another international conference of the BigPowers.97

The Fuehrer’s reaction, as Ciano noted in his diary on July 26, was un-favorable, and Mussolini decided it might be best to postpone his meetingwith Hitler.98 He proposed instead, on August 7, that the foreign minis-ters of the two countries meet immediately. Ciano’s diary notes duringthese days indicate the growing uneasiness in Rome. On August 6 hewrote:

We must find some way out. By following the Germans we shall go to warand enter it under the least favorable conditions for the Axis, and especiallyfor Italy. Our gold reserves are reduced to almost nothing, as well as our stocksof metals . . . We must avoid war. I propose to the Duce the idea of mymeeting with Ribbentrop . . . during which I would attempt to continue dis-cussion of Mussolini’s project for a world conference.

* Typical was a vivid report Attolico sent of a talk he had with Ribbentrop onJuly 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! IfFrance were to intervene over Danzig, and so precipitate a general war, let her;Germany would like nothing better. France would be “annihilated”; Britain, ifshe stirred, would be bringing destruction on the British Empire. Russia? Therewas 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; andAmericans would not stir anyway. Fear of Japan would keep America quiet.

I listened [Attolico reported] in wondering silence, while Ribbentrop drew thispicture of the war ad usum Germaniae which his imagination has now establishedindelibly in his head . . . He can see nothing but his version—which is a reallyamazing 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 com-plete agreement between the Duce and the Fuehrer that Italy and Germany werepreparing for a war that was not to be immediate.86

But the astute Attolico did not believe that at all. All through July his dispatcheswarned of imminent German action in Poland.

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August 9.—Ribbentrop has approved the idea of our meeting. I decidedto leave tomorrow night in order to meet him at Salzburg. The Duce isanxious that I prove to the Germans, by documentary evidence, that the out-break of war at this time would be folly.

August 10.—The Duce is more than ever convinced of the necessity of de-laying the conflict. He himself has worked out the outline of a report con-cerning the meeting at Salzburg which ends with an allusion to internationalnegotiations to settle the problems that so dangerously disturb European life.

Before letting me go he recommends that I shall frankly inform the Ger-mans that we must avoid a conflict with Poland since it will be impossible tolocalize it, and a general war would be disastrous for everybody."

Armed with such commendable but, in the circumstances, naivethoughts and recommendations, the youthful Fascist Foreign Ministerset out for Germany, where during the next three days—August 11, 12and 13—he received from Ribbentrop and especially from Hitler theshock of his life.

CIANO AT SALZBURG AND OBERSALZBERG:

AUGUST 11, 12, 13

For some ten hours on August 11, Ciano conferred with Ribbentrop atthe latter’s estate at Fuschl, outside Salzburg, which the Nazi ForeignMinister had taken from an Austrian monarchist who, conveniently, hadbeen put away in a concentration camp. The hot-blooded Italian foundthe atmosphere, as he later reported, cold and gloomy. During dinnerat the White Horse Inn at St. Wolfgang not a word was exchanged betweenthe two. It was scarcely necessary. Ribbentrop had informed his visitorearlier in the day that the decision to attack Poland was implacable.

“Well, Ribbentrop,” Ciano says he asked, “what do you want? TheCorridor 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 ifPoland were attacked the Western democracies would fight, were bluntlyrejected. The day before Christmas Eve four years later—1943—whenCiano lay in Cell 27 of the Verona jail waiting execution at the instigationof the Germans, he still remembered that chilling day of August 11 atFuschl and Salzburg. Ribbentrop, he wrote in his very last diary entry onDecember 23, 1943, had bet him “during one of those gloomy meals atthe Oesterreichischer Hof in Salzburg” a collection of old German armoragainst 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 meetingson August 12 and 13 reiterated that France and Britain would not fight.

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In contrast to the Nazi Foreign Minister, the Fuehrer was cordial, but hewas equally implacable in his determination to go to war. This is evidentnot only from Ciano’s reports but from the confidential German minutesof the meeting, which are among the captured documents.101 The ItalianMinister found Hitler standing before a large table covered with militarystaff maps. He began by explaining the strength of Germany’s West Wall.It was, he said, impenetrable. Besides, he added scornfully, Britaincould put only three divisions into France. France would have consider-ably 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 re-sponse, the Fuehrer was contradicting himself. The Italian Minister, ashe had promised himself, spoke up to Hitler. According to the Germanminutes, he expressed “Italy’s great surprise at the entirely unexpectedgravity of the situation.” Germany, he complained, had not kept her allyinformed. “On the contrary,” he said, “the Reich Foreign Minister hadstated [at Milan and Berlin in May] that the Danzig question would besettled in due course.” When Ciano went on to declare that a conflict withPoland would spread into a European war his host interrupted to say thathe differed.

“I personally,” said Hitler, “am absolutely convinced that the Westerndemocracies will, in the last resort, recoil from unleashing a general war.”To which Ciano replied (the German minutes add) “that he hoped theFuehrer would prove right but he did not believe it.” The Italian ForeignMinister then outlined in great detail Italy’s weaknesses, and from his taleof woe, as the Germans recorded it, Hitler must have been finally con-vinced that Italy would be of little help to him in the coming war.* One ofMussolini’s reasons, Ciano said, for wanting to postpone the war was thathe “attached great importance to holding, according to plan, the WorldExhibition of 1942”—a remark that must have astounded the Fuehrer,lost as he was in his military maps and calculations. He must have beenequally astounded when Ciano naively produced the text of a commu-nique, which he urged to be published, stating that the meeting of the Axisministers had “reaffirmed the peaceful intentions of their governments”and their belief that peace could be maintained “through normal diplo-matic negotiations.” Ciano explained that the Duce had in mind a peaceconference of the chief European nations but that out of deference to “theFuehrer’s misgivings” he would settle for ordinary diplomatic negotia-tions.

Hitler did not, the first day, turn down completely the idea of a con-ference but reminded Ciano that “Russia could no longer be excluded

* At one point. Ribbentrop, with obvious exasperation, told Ciano, “We don’t needyou!”; to which Ciano replied, “The future will show.” (From General Haider’sunpublished diary, entry of August 14.102 Haider says he got it through Weiz-saecker.)

The Turn of Poland 511

from future meetings of the powers.” This was the first mention of theSoviet Union but it was not the last.

Finally when Ciano tried to pin his host down as to the date of the at-tack on Poland Hitler replied that because of the autumn rains, whichwould render useless his armored and motorized divisions in a countrywith few paved roads, the “settlement with Poland would have to be madeone way or the other by the end of August.”

At last Ciano had the date. Or the last possible date, for a momentlater Hitler was storming that if the Poles offered any fresh provocationhe was determined “to attack Poland within forty-eight hours.” There-fore, he added, “a move against Poland must be expected any moment.”That outburst ended the first day’s talks except for Hitler’s promise tothink over the Italian proposals.

Having given them twenty-four hours’ thought, he told Ciano the nextday that it would be better if no communique of any kind were issuedabout their talks.* Because of the expected bad weather in the fall

it was of decisive importance, firstly [he said], that within the shortest possibletime Poland should make her intentions plain, and secondly, that no furtheracts of provocation of any sort should be tolerated by Germany.

When Ciano inquired as to “what the shortest possible time” was, Hitlerreplied, “By the end of August at the latest.” While it would take only afortnight, he explained, to defeat Poland, the “final liquidation” wouldrequire a further two to four weeks—a remarkable forecast of timing, asit 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. Hepersonally felt fortunate, he declared, “to live at a time when, apart fromhimself, there was another statesman living who would stand out in his-tory as a great and unique figure. It was a source of great personal hap-piness that he could be a friend of this man. When the hour struck for the

* Though the German minutes explicitly state that Ciano agreed with Hitler “thatno communique should be issued at the conclusion of the conversation,” the Ger-mans immediately double-crossed their Italian ally. D.N.B., the official Germannews agency, issued a communique two hours after Ciano’s departure and withoutany consultation whatever with the Italians, that the talks had covered all theproblems of the day—with particular attention to Danzig—and had resulted in a“hundred per cent” agreement. So much so, the communique added, that not asingle problem had been left in suspense, and therefore there would be no furthermeetings, because there was no occasion for them. Attolico was furious. He pro-tested to the Germans, accusing them of bad faith. He tipped off Henderson thatwar was imminent. And in an angry dispatch to Rome he described the Germancommunique as “Machiavellian,” pointed out that it was deliberately done to bindItaly to Germany after the latter’s attack on Poland and pleaded that Mussolinishould 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 graceto settle the Danzig question through diplomatic channels.103

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common fight he would always be found at the side of the Duce, comewhat may.”

However much the strutting Mussolini might be impressed by suchwords, his son-in-law was not. “I return to Rome,” he wrote in his diaryon August 13, after the second meeting with Hitler, “completely disgustedwith the Germans, with their leader, with their way of doing things. Theyhave betrayed us and lied to us. Now they are dragging us into an adven-ture which we have not wanted and which might compromise the regimeand the country as a whole.”

But Italy at the moment was the least of Hitler’s concerns. His thoughtswere 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 fewmoments while Hitler and Ribbentrop perused it. They then informedCiano of its contents.

“The Russians,” Hitler said, “have agreed to a German political nego-tiator being sent to Moscow.”

15

THE NAZI-SOVIET PACT

The “telegram from Moscow” whose contents Hitler disclosed toCiano at Obersalzberg on the afternoon of August 12 appears to havebeen, like certain previous “telegrams” which have figured in this narra-tive, of doubtful origin. No such wire from the Russian capital has beenfound in the German archives. Schulenburg did send a telegram to Ber-lin from Moscow on the twelfth, but it merely reported the arrival of theFranco-British military missions and the friendly toasts exchanged be-tween the Russians and their guests.

Yet there was some basis for the “telegram” with which Hitler andRibbentrop had so obviously tried to impress Ciano. On August 12 ateleprint was sent to Obersalzberg from the Wilhelmstrasse reporting theresults of a call which the Russian charge had made on Schnurre in Berlinon that day. Astakhov informed the Foreign Office official that Molotovwas now ready to discuss the questions raised by the Germans, includingPoland and other political matters. The Soviet government proposedMoscow 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 emphasisin his instructions from Molotov lay in the phrase ‘by degrees’ . . . Thediscussions could be undertaken only by degrees.”1

But Adolf Hitler could not wait for negotiations with Russia “by de-grees.” As he had just revealed to a shocked Ciano, he had set the lastpossible date for the onslaught on Poland for September 1, and it was nowalmost the middle of August. If he were to successfully sabotage theAnglo-French parleys with the Russians and swing his own deal withStalin, it had to be done quickly—not by stages but in one big leap.

Monday, August 14, was another crucial day. While Ambassador vonder Schulenburg, who obviously had not yet been taken fully into theconfidence of Hitler and Ribbentrop, was writing Weizsaecker from Mos-cow advising him that Molotov was “a strange man and a difficult char-acter” and that “I am still of the opinion that any hasty measures in ourrelations with the Soviet Union should be avoided,” he was being sent a

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“most urgent” telegram from Berlin.2 It came from Ribbentrop and itwas dispatched from the Wilhelmstrasse (the Foreign Minister was stillat Fuschl) at 10:53 p.m. on August 14. It directed the German ambassa-dor to call upon Molotov and read him a long communication “verbatim.”

This, finally, was Hitler’s great bid. German-Russian relations, saidRibbentrop, had “come to a historic turning point . . . There exist noreal conflicts of interests between Germany and Russia ... It has gonewell with both countries previously when they were friends and badlywhen they were enemies.”

The crisis which has been produced in Polish-German relations by Englishpolicy [Ribbentrop continued] and the attempts at an alliance which are boundup with that policy, make a speedy clarification of German-Russian relationsnecessary. Otherwise matters . . . might take a turn which would depriveboth Governments of the possibility of restoring German-Russian friendshipand in due course clarifying jointly territorial questions in Eastern Europe.The leadership of both countries, therefore, should not allow the situation todrift, but should take action at the proper time. It would be fatal if, throughmutual ignorance of views and intentions, the two peoples should finally driftapart.

The German Foreign Minister, “in the name of the Fuehrer,” wastherefore prepared to act in proper time.

As we have been informed, the Soviet Government also feel the desire for aclarification of German-Russian relations. Since, however, according toprevious experience this clarification can be achieved only slowly through theusual diplomatic channels, I am prepared to make a short visit to Moscow inorder, 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 broughtabout, and it should not be impossible thereby to lay the foundations for a finalsettlement 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 togo—a contrast which the Nazis calculated quite correctly would make animpression on the suspicious Stalin.* The Germans saw that it was highlyimportant 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. Molo-tov these instructions in writing, but that they reach M. Stalin in as exact aform 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

See p. 523.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact

515

make this important communication directly to him also. In addition to aconference with Molotov, a detailed discussion with Stalin would be a condi-tion for my making the trip.3

There was a scarcely disguised bait in the Foreign Minister’s proposalwhich the Germans, not without reason, must have thought the Kremlinwould rise to. Reiterating that “there is no question between the BalticSea and the Black Sea which cannot be settled to the complete satisfactionof both counties,” Ribbentrop specified “the Baltic States, Poland,southeastern questions, etc.” And he spoke of the necessity of “clarifyingjointly 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 couldnot—and, obviously, if they could, would not—match. And having madeit, Hitler, apparently confident that it would not be turned down, oncemore—on the same day, August 14—called in the commanders in chiefof his armed forces to listen to him lecture on the plans and prospects forwar.

THE MILITARY CONFERENCE AT OBERSALZBERG:

AUGUST 14*

“The great drama,” Hitler told his select listeners, “is now approach-ing its climax.” While political and military successes could not be hadwithout taking risks, he was certain that Great Britain and France wouldnot fight. For one thing, Britain “has no leaders of real caliber. The menI got to know at Munich are not the kind that start a new world war.” Asat previous meetings with his military chiefs, the Fuehrer could not keephis mind off England and he spoke in considerable detail of her strengthsand weaknesses, especially the latter.

England [Haider noted down the words], unlike in 1914, will not allow her-self to blunder into a war lasting for years . . . Such is the fate of rich coun-

* The only source found for what happened at this meeting is in the unpublisheddiary of General Haider, Chief of the Army General Staff. It is the first entry,August 14, 1939. Haider kept his diary in Gabelsberger shorthand and it is animmensely valuable record of the most confidential military and political goingson in Nazi Germany from August 14, 1939, to September 24, 1942, when he wasdismissed from his post. The Obersalzberg entry consists of Haider’s shorthandnotes jotted down while Hitler spoke and a summary which he added at the end. It isstrange that no American or British publisher has published the Haider diary. Thewriter had access to the German longhand version of it, transcribed by Haider him-self, during the writing of this volume. Hitler’s daily record book confirms thedate 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 waspresent.

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tries . . . 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 un-dertake?

Drive against the West Wall unlikely [he answered]. A northward swingthrough Belgium and Holland will not bring speedy victory. None of thiswould 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 therisk . . . English and French general staffs take a very sober view of theprospects of an armed conflict and advise against it. . . .

All this supports the conviction that while England may talk big, even re-call her Ambassador, perhaps put a complete embargo on trade, she is surenot to resort to armed intervention in the conflict.

So Poland, probably, could be taken on alone, but she would have tobe defeated “within a week or two,” Hitler explained, so that the worldcould 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 goingthat very day to make a deal with Russia, though it would have immenselypleased them, convinced as they were that Germany could not fight amajor war on two fronts. But he told them enough to whet their appetitefor more.

“Russia,” he said, “is not in the least disposed to pull chestnuts out ofthe fire.” He explained the “loose contacts” with Moscow which hadstarted with the trade negotiations. He was now considering whether “anegotiator should go to Moscow and whether this should be a prominentfigure.” The Soviet Union, he declared, felt under no obligation to theWest. The Russians understood the destruction of Poland. They wereinterested in a “delimitation of spheres of interest.” The Fuehrer was“inclined to meet them halfway.”

In all of Haider’s voluminous shorthand notes on the meeting thereis no mention that he, the Chief of the Army’s General Staff, or Generalvon Brauchitsch, its Commander in Chief, or Goering questioned theFuehrer’s course in leading Germany into a European conflict—for despiteHitler’s confidence it was by no means certain that France and Britainwould not fight nor that Russia would stay out. In fact, exactly a weekbefore, Goering had received a direct warning that the British would cer-tainly fight if Germany attacked Poland.

Early in July a Swedish friend of his, Birger Dahlerus, had tried toconvince him that British public opinion would not stand for further Naziaggression and when the Luftwaffe chief expressed his doubts had ar-ranged for him to meet privately with a group of seven British business-men on August 7 in Schleswig-Holstein, near the Danish border, where

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Dahlerus had a house. The British businessmen, both orally and in awritten memorandum, did their best to persuade Goering that GreatBritain would stand by its treaty obligations with Poland should Germanyattack. Whether they succeeded is doubtful, though Dahlerus, a business-man himself, thought so.* This curious Swede, who was to play a certainrole as a peacemaker between Germany and Britain in the next hecticweeks, certainly had high connections in Berlin and London. He had ac-cess to Downing Street, where on July 20 he had been received by LordHalifax, with whom he discussed the coming meeting of British business-men with Goering; and soon he would be called in by Hitler and Chamber-lain themselves. But, though well-meaning in his quest to save the peace,he was naive and, as a diplomat, dreadfully amateurish. Years later atNuremberg, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, in a devastating cross-examination,led the Swedish diplomatic interloper to admit sadly that he had beenbadly misled by Goering and Hitler.4

And why did not General Haider, who had been the ringleader in theplot eleven months before to remove Hitler, speak up on August 14 tooppose the Fuehrer’s determination to go to war? Or, if he thought thatuseless, why did he not renew plans to get rid of the dictator on the samegrounds as just before Munich: that a war now would be disastrous forGermany? Much later, in his interrogation at Nuremberg, Haider wouldexplain that even at mid-August 1939 he simply did not believe that Hitlerwould, in the end, risk war, regardless of what he said.5 Also, a diary en-try of August 15, the day after the meeting with Hitler at the Berghof,shows that Haider did not believe that France and Britain would risk wareither.

As for Brauchitsch, he was not the man to question what the Fuehrerplanned to do. Hassell, who on August 15 learned of the military con-ference at the Obersalzberg from Gisevius, got word through to the Armychief that he was “absolutely convinced” that Britain and France wouldintervene if Germany invaded Poland. “Nothing can be done with him,”Hassell noted sadly in his diary. “Either he is afraid or he doesn’t under-stand what it is all about. . . . Nothing is to be hoped for from thegenerals . . . Only a few have kept clear heads: Haider, Canaris,Thomas.”6

Only General Thomas, the brilliant head of the Economic and Arma-ments Branch of OKW, dared to openly challenge the Fuehrer. A fewdays after the August 14 military conference, following a discussion withthe now largely inactive conspirators Goerdeler, Beck and Schacht, Gen-

* Dahlerus told the Nuremberg tribunal on March 19, 1946, when he was on thestand as a witness for Goering, that the Field Marshal had assured the Britishbusinessmen “on his word of honor” that he would do everything in his power toavert war. But Goering’s state of mind at this time may have been more accuratelyexpressed in a statement he made two days after seeing the British visitors. Inboasting about the Luftwaffe’s air defenses, he said, “The Ruhr will not be sub-jected to a single bomb. If an enemy bomber reaches the Ruhr, my name is notHermann Goering: you can call me Meier!”—a boast he was soon to rue.

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eral Thomas drew up a memorandum and personally read it to GeneralKeitel, the Chief of OKW. A quick war and a quick peace were a com-plete illusion, he argued. An attack on Poland would unleash a worldwar and Germany lacked the raw materials and the food supplies to fightit. 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 toodegenerate, America too uninterested, to fight for Poland, he said.7

And so as the second half of August 1939 began, the German militarychiefs pushed forward with their plans to annihilate Poland and to pro-tect the western Reich just in case the democracies, contrary to all evi-dence, did intervene. On August 15 the annual Nuremberg Party Rally,which Hitler on April 1 had proclaimed as the “Party Rally of Peace” andwhich was scheduled to begin the first week in September, was secretlycanceled. A quarter of a million men were called up for the armies of thewest. Advance mobilization orders to the railways were given. Plans weremade to move Army headquarters to Zossen, east of Berlin. And on thesame day, August 15, the Navy reported that the pocket battleships GrafSpee and Deutschland and twenty-one submarines were ready to sail fortheir stations in the Atlantic.

On August 17 General Haider made a strange entry in his diary: “Ca-naris checked with Section I [Operations]. Himmler, Heydrich, Ober-salzberg: 150 Polish uniforms with accessories for Upper Silesia.”

What did it mean? It was only after the war that it became clear. Itconcerned one of the most bizarre incidents ever arranged by the Nazis.Just as Hitler and his Army chiefs, it will be remembered, had consideredcooking up an “incident,” such as the assassination of the German minis-ter, in order to justify their invading Austria and Czechoslovakia, so nowthey concerned themselves, as time began to run out, with concoctingan incident which would, at least in their opinion, justify before the worldthe planned aggression against Poland.

The code name was “Operation Himmler” and the idea was quitesimple—and crude. The S.S.-Gestapo would stage a faked attack on theGerman radio station at Gleiwitz, near the Polish border, using con-demned concentration camp inmates outfitted in Polish Army uniforms.Thus Poland could be blamed for attacking Germany. Early in AugustAdmiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr Section of OKW, had received anorder from Hitler himself to deliver to Himmler and Heydrich 150 Polishuniforms and some Polish small arms. This struck him as a strange busi-ness and on August 17 he asked General Keitel about it. While the spine-less OKW Chief declared he did not think much of “actions of this kind,”he nevertheless told the Admiral that “nothing could be done,” since theorder had come from the Fuehrer.8 Repelled though he was, Canarisobeyed his instructions and turned the uniforms over to Heydrich.

The chief of the S.D. chose as the man to carry out the operation ayoung S.S. secret-service veteran by the name of Alfred Helmut Naujocks.

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This was not the first of such assignments given this weird individual norwould it be the last. Early in March of 1939, shortly before the Germanoccupation of Czechoslovakia, Naujocks, at Heydrich’s instigation, hadbusied 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 ofintellectual gangster. He had studied engineering at Kiel University,where he got his first taste of brawling with anti-Nazis; on one occasionhe had his nose bashed in by Communists. He had joined the S.S. in1931 and was attached to the S.D. from its inception in 1934. Like somany other young men around Heydrich he dabbled in what passed asintellectual 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 projectsdreamed up by Himmler and Heydrich.* On October 19, 1944, Naujocksdeserted to the Americans and at Nuremberg a year later made a numberof sworn affidavits, in one of which he preserved for history the account ofthe “incident” which Hitler used to justify his attack on Poland.

On or about August 10, 1939, the chief of the S.D., Heydrich, personallyordered me to simulate an attack on the radio station near Gleiwitz near thePolish border [Naujocks related in an affidavit signed in Nuremberg November20, 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 forthe foreign press as well as for German propaganda.” . . .

My instructions were to seize the radio station and to hold it long enough topermit a Polish-speaking German who would be put at my disposal to broad-cast a speech in Polish. Heydrich told me that this speech should state thatthe time had come for conflict between Germans and Poles . . . Heydrichalso 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 25thand 31st of August, I went to see Heinrich Mueller, head of the Gestapo, whowas then nearby at Oppeln. In my presence, Mueller discussed with a man

* 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 Bel-gian 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 andwhile thus employed proposed “Operation Bernhard,” a fantastic plan to dropforged British banknotes over England. Heydrich eventually tired of him and forcedhim to serve in the ranks of an S.S. regiment in Russia, where he was wounded. In1944 Naujocks turned up in Belgium as an economic administrator, but his prin-cipal job at that time appears to have been to carry out in Denmark the murder ofa number of members of the Danish resistance movement. He probably desertedto the American Army in Belgium to save his neck. In fact, he had a charmedlife. Held as a war criminal, he made a dramatic escape from a special camp inGermany 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 inSchaumburg-Lippe, Zwischen Krone und Kerker.

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named Mehlhorn* plans for another border incident, in which it should bemade to appear that Polish soldiers were attacking German troops . . . Muel-ler stated that he had 12 to 13 condemned criminals who were to be dressed inPolish uniforms and left dead on the ground of the scene of the incident toshow they had been killed while attacking. For this purpose they were to begiven fatal injections by a doctor employed by Heydrich. Then they werealso to be given gunshot wounds. After the incident members of the press andother persons were to be taken to the spot of the incident . . .

Mueller told me he had an order from Heydrich to make one of thosecriminals available to me for the action at Gleiwitz. The code name by whichhe referred to these criminals was “Canned Goods.”9

While Himmler, Heydrich and Mueller, at Hitler’s command, werearranging for the use of “Canned Goods” to fake an excuse for Germany’saggression against Poland, the Fuehrer made his first decisive move todeploy his armed forces for a possibly bigger war. On August 19—anotherfateful day—orders to sail were issued to the German Navy. Twenty-onesubmarines were directed to put out for positions north and northwest ofthe British Isles, the pocket battleship Graf Spee to depart for waters offthe Brazilian coast and her sister ship, the Deutschland, to take a positionathwart the British sea lanes in the North Atlantic.f

The date of the order to dispatch the warships for possible action againstBritain is significant. For on August 19, after a hectic week of franticappeals from Berlin, the Soviet government finally gave Hitler the answerhe wanted.

THE NAZI-SOVIET TALKS: AUGUST 15-21, 1939

Ambassador von der Schulenburg saw Molotov at 8 p.m. on August 15and, as instructed, read to him Ribbentrop’s urgent telegram stating thatthe Reich Foreign Minister was prepared to come to Moscow to settleSoviet-German relations. According to a “most urgent, secret” telegramwhich the German envoy got off to Berlin later that night, the SovietForeign Commissar received the information “with the greatest interest”and “warmly welcomed German intentions of improving relations withthe Soviet Union.” However, expert diplomatic poker player that he was,Molotov gave no sign of being in a hurry. Such a trip as Ribbentrop

* S.S. Oberfuehrer Dr. Mehlhorn, who administered the S.D. under Heydrich.Schellenberg, in his memoirs (The Labyrinth, pp. 48-50), recounts that Mehlhorntold him on August 26 that he had been put in charge of staging the faked attackat Gleiwitz but that Mehlhorn got out of it by feigning illness. Mehlhorn’s stomachgrew stronger in later years. During the war he was a notable instigator of Gestapoterror in Poland.

t The submarines sailed between August 19 and 23, the Graf Spee on the twenty-first and the Deutschland on the twenty-fourth.

proposed, he suggested, “required adequate preparation in order thatthe exchange of opinions might lead to results.”

What results? The wily Russian dropped some hints. Would theGerman government, he asked, be interested in a nonaggression pact be-tween the two countries? Would it be prepared to use its influence withJapan to improve Soviet-Japanese relations and “eliminate border con-flicts”?—a reference to an undeclared war which had raged all summer onthe Manchurian-Mongolian frontier. Finally, Molotov asked, how didGermany feel about a joint guarantee of the Baltic States?

All such matters, he concluded, “must be discussed in concrete termsso that, should the German Foreign Minister come here, it will not be amatter of an exchange of opinions but of making concrete decisions.”And he stressed again that “adequate preparation of the problems isindispensable.”10

The first suggestion, then, for a Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact camefrom the Russians—at the very moment they were negotiating withFrance and Great Britain to go to war, if necessary, to oppose furtherGerman aggression.* Flitler was more than willing to discuss such a pact“in concrete terms,” since its conclusion would keep Russia out of thewar and enable him to attack Poland without fear of Soviet intervention.And with Russia out of the conflict he was convinced that Britain andFrance would get cold feet.

Molotov's suggestions were just what he had hoped for; they were morespecific and went further than anything which he had dared to propose.There was only one difficulty. With August running out he could not waitfor 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 bythe Wilhelmstrasse to Ribbentrop at Fuschl at 6:40 a.m. on August 16 andhe hurried across the mountain to seek further instruction from theFuehrer at Obersalzberg. By early afternoon they had drawn up a replyto Molotov and it was rushed off on the teleprinter to Weizsaecker inBerlin 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 informhim

that Germany is prepared to conclude a nonaggression pact with the SovietUnion and, if the Soviet Government so desire, one which would be unde-nounceable for a term of twenty-five years. Further, Germany is ready toguarantee the Baltic States jointly with the Soviet Union. Finally, Germany

* The British government soon learned of this. On August 17 Sumner Welles, theU.S. Undersecretary of State, informed the British ambassador in Washington ofMolotov’s suggestions to Schulenburg. The American ambassador in Moscow hadwired them to Washington the day before and they were deadly accurate.11 Am-bassador Steinhardt had seen Molotov on August 16.

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is prepared to exercise influence for an improvement and consolidation ofRussian-Japanese relations.

All pretense was now dropped that the Reich government was not in ahurry to conclude a deal with Moscow.

The Fuehrer [Ribbentrop’s telegram continued] is of the opinion that, inview of the present situation and of the possibility of the occurrence any dayof serious events (please at this point explain to M. Molotov that Germanyis determined not to endure Polish provocation indefinitely), a basic and rapidclarification of German-Russian relations, and of each country’s attitude tothe questions of the moment, is desirable.

For these reasons I am prepared to come by airplane to Moscow at any timeafter 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 occasionarises, to sign the appropriate treaties.

Again Ribbentrop added an “annex” of personal instructions to hisambassador.

I request that you again read these instructions word for word to Molotovand ask for the views of the Russian Government and of M. Stalin immedi-ately. Entirely confidentially, it is added for your guidance that it would be ofvery special interest to us if my Moscow trip could take place at the end of thisweek or the beginning of next week.

The next day, on their mountaintop, Hitler and Ribbentrop waitedimpatiently for the response from Moscow. Telegraphic communicationbetween Berlin and Moscow was by no means instantaneous—a conditionof affairs which did not seem to be realized in the rarefied atmosphere ofthe Bavarian Alps. By noon of the seventeenth, Ribbentrop was wiringSchulenburg “most urgent” requesting “a report by telegram regarding thetime when you made your request to be received by Molotov and the timefor which the conversation has been arranged.”13 By dinnertime the har-assed ambassador was replying, also “most urgent,” that he had only re-ceived the Foreign Minister’s telegram at eleven the night before, that itwas by then too late to conduct any diplomatic business and that first thingin the morning of today, August 17, he had made an appointment withMolotov for 8 p.m.14

For the now frantic Nazi leaders it turned out to be a disappointingmeeting. Conscious of Hitler’s eagerness and no doubt fully aware of thereasons for it, the Russian Foreign Commissar played with the Germans,teasing and taunting them. After Schulenburg had read to him Ribben-trop’s telegram, Molotov, taking little note of its contents, produced theSoviet government’s written reply to the Reich Foreign Minister’s firstcommunication of August 15.

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Beginning acidly with a reminder of the Nazi government’s previoushostility to Soviet Russia, it explained “that until very recently the SovietGovernment have proceeded on the assumption that the German Govern-ment are seeking occasion for clashes with the Soviet Union . . . Not tomention the fact that the German Government, by means of the so-calledAnti-Comintern Pact, were endeavoring to create, and have created, theunited front of a number of States against the Soviet Union.” It was forthis reason, the note explained, that Russia “was participating in theorganization of a defensive front against [German] aggression.”

If, however [the note continued], the German Government now undertakea change from the old policy in the direction of a serious improvement inpolitical relations with the Soviet Union, the Soviet Government can onlywelcome such a change, and are, for their part, prepared to revise their policyin the sense of a serious improvement in respect of Germany.

But, the Russian note insisted, it must be “by serious and practicalsteps”—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 non-aggression pact.

Simultaneously with the second step, the Soviets demanded the “con-clusion of a special protocol defining the interests of the contracting partiesin this or that question of foreign policy.” This was more than a hint thatin regard to dividing up Eastern Europe at least, Moscow was receptiveto the German view that a deal was possible.

As for the proposed visit of Ribbentrop, Molotov declared that theSoviet government was “highly gratified” with the idea, “since the dis-patch of such an eminent politician and statesman emphasized how seriouswere the intentions of the German Government. This stood,” he added,“in noteworthy contrast to England, which, in the person of Strang, hadsent only an official of second-class rank to Moscow. However, the journeyby the German Foreign Minister required thorough preparation. TheSoviet Government did not like the publicity that such a journey wouldcause. They preferred to do practical work without much fuss.”15

Molotov made no mention of Ribbentrop’s urgent, specific proposalthat he come to Moscow over the weekend, and Schulenburg, perhapssomewhat taken aback by the course of the interview, did not press thematter.

The next day, after the ambassador’s report had been received, Ribben-trop did. Hitler, it is obvious, was now growing desperate. From hissummer headquarters on the Obersalzberg there went out on the eveningof August 18 a further “most urgent” telegram to Schulenburg signed byRibbentrop. It arrived at the German Embassy in Moscow at 5:45 a.m.on the nineteenth and directed the ambassador to “arrange immediatelyanother conversation with M. Molotov and do everything possible to see

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that it takes place without any delay.” There was no time to lose. “I askyou,” Ribbentrop wired, “to speak to M. Molotov as follows”:

. . . We, too, under normal circumstances, would naturally be ready topursue a realignment of German-Russian relations through diplomatic chan-nels, and to carry it out in the customary way. But the present unusual situa-tion makes it necessary, in the opinion of the Fuehrer, to employ a differentmethod which would lead to quick results.

German-Polish relations are becoming more acute from day to day. Wehave to take into account that incidents might occur any day that would makethe outbreak of open conflict unavoidable . . . The Fuehrer considers itnecessary that we be not taken by surprise by the outbreak of a German-Polish conflict while we are striving for a clarification of German-Russianrelations. Fie therefore considers a previous clarification necessary, if only tobe able to take into account Russian interests in case of such a conflict, whichwould, of course, be difficult without such a clarification.

The ambassador was to say that the “first stage” in the consultationsmentioned by Molotov, the conclusion of the trade agreement, had beenconcluded in Berlin this very day (August 18) and that it was now timeto “attack” the second stage. To do this the German Foreign Ministerproposed his “immediate departure for Moscow,” to which he wouldcome “with full powers from the Fuehrer, authorizing me to settle fullyand conclusively the total complex of problems.” In Moscow, Ribbentropadded, he would “be in a position ... to take Russian wishes intoaccount.”

What wishes? The Germans now no longer beat around the bush.

I should also be in a position [Ribbentrop continued] to sign a special pro-tocol regulating the interests of both parties in questions of foreign policy ofone kind or another; for instance, the settlement of spheres of interest in theBaltic area. Such a settlement will only be possible, however, in an oral dis-cussion.

This time the ambassador must not take a Russian “No.”

Please emphasize [Ribbentrop concluded] that German foreign policy hastoday reached a historic turning point . . . Please press for a rapid realiza-tion of my journey and oppose appropriately any fresh Russian objections.In this connection you must keep in mind the decisive fact that an early out-break of open German-Polish conflict is possible and that we, therefore, havethe greatest interest in having my visit to Moscow take place immediately.18

August 19 was the decisive day. Orders for the German submarinesand pocket battleships to sail for British waters were being held up untilword came from Moscow. The warships would have to get off at once if

The Nazi-Soviet Pact

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they were to reach their appointed stations by Hitler’s target date for thebeginning of the war, September 1—only thirteen days away. The twogreat army groups designated for the onslaught on Poland would haveto be deployed immediately.

The tension in Berlin and especially on the Obersalzberg, where Hitlerand Ribbentrop waited nervously for Moscow’s decision, was becomingalmost unbearable. The Foreign Office dispatches and memoranda thatday disclosed the jittery feelings in the Wilhelmstrasse. Dr. Schnurrereported that the discussions with the Russians on the trade agreementhad ended the previous evening “with complete agreement” but that theSoviets were stalling on signing it. The signature, he said, was to havetaken place at noon this day, August 19, but at noon the Russians hadtelephoned saying they had to await instructions from Moscow. “It isobvious,” Schnurre reported, “that they have received instructions fromMoscow to delay the conclusion of the treaty for political reasons.”17From the Obersalzberg, Ribbentrop wired Schulenburg “most urgent” tobe sure to report anything Molotov said or any sign of “Russian intentions”by telegram, but the only wire received from the ambassador during theday was the text of a denial by Tass, the Soviet news agency, in Moscowthat the negotiations between the Russian and Anglo-French militarydelegations had become snarled over the Far East. However, the Tassdementi added that there were differences between the delegations on“entirely different matters.” This was a signal to Hitler that there was stilltime—and hope.

And then at 7:10 p.m. on August 19 came the anxiously awaited tele-gram:

SECRETMOST URGENT

The Soviet Government agree to the Reich Foreign Minister coming toMoscow one week after the announcement of the signature of the economicagreement. Molotov stated that if the conclusion of the economic agreementis made public tomorrow, the Reich Foreign Minister could arrive in Moscowon 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, aswell 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 nineteenthand lasted an hour, did not, the ambassador reported, go very well. TheRussians, it seemed, could not be stampeded into receiving Hitler’sForeign Minister. “Molotov persisted in his opinion,” Schulenburg wired,“that for the present it was not possible even approximately to fix the timeof the journey since thorough preparations would be required ... Tothe reasons I repeatedly and very emphatically advanced for the need of

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haste, Molotov rejoined that, so far, not even the first step—the conclud-ing of the economic agreement—had been taken. First of all, the economicagreement 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 thefirst conversation closed with a declaration by Molotov that he hadimparted to me the views of the Soviet Government and had nothing toadd to them.”

But he had something, shortly.

“Hardly half an hour after the conversation had ended,” Schulenburgreported, “Molotov sent me word asking me to call on him again at theKremlin at 4:30 p.m. He apologized for putting me to the trouble andexplained that he had reported to the Soviet Government.”

Whereupon the Foreign Commissar handed the surprised but happyambassador a draft of the nonaggression pact and told him that Ribbentropcould arrive in Moscow on August 26 or 27 if the trade treaty were signedand 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, theSoviet intention to sign a pact with Germany was announced to thePolitburo by Stalin on the evening of August 19.20 A little earlier thatday—between 3 p.m. and 4:30 p.m.—it is clear from Schulenburg’s dis-patch, he had communicated his fateful decision to Molotov.

Exactly three years later, in August 1942, “in the early hours of themorning,” as Churchill later reported, the Soviet dictator gave to theBritish Prime Minister, then on a mission to Moscow, some of the reasonsfor his brazen move.21

We formed the impression [said Stalin] that the British and FrenchGovernments were not resolved to go to war if Poland were attacked, but thatthey hoped the diplomatic line-up of Britain, France and Russia would deterHitler. 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?” Theanswer was: “Two, and two more later.” “Ah, two, and two more later,”Stalin had repeated. “Do you know,” he asked, “how many divisions we shallhave to put on the Russian front if we go to war with Germany?” There wasa pause. “More than three hundred.”

In his dispatch reporting the outcome of his conversations with Molotovon August 19, Schulenburg had added that his attempt to induce theForeign Commissar to accept an earlier date for Ribbentrop’s journey toMoscow “was, unfortunately, unsuccessful.”

But for the Germans it had to be made successful. The whole timetable

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for the invasion of Poland, indeed the question of whether the attack couldtake place at all in the brief interval before the autumn rains, dependedupon it. If Ribbentrop were not received in Moscow before August 26 or27 and then if the Russians stalled a bit, as the Germans feared, thetarget 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 hehad so often and for so long maligned, to receive his Foreign Minister inMoscow at once. His telegram to Stalin was rushed off to Moscow at 6:45p.m. on Sunday, August 20, just twelve hours after the receipt of Schulen-burg’s dispatch. The Fuehrer instructed the ambassador to hand it toMolotov “at once.”

M. Stalin, Moscow,

I sincerely welcome the signing of the new German—Soviet CommercialAgreement as the first step in the reshaping of German-Soviet relations.*

The conclusion of a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union means tome the establishment of German policy for a long time. Germany therebyresumes a political course that was beneficial to both States during bygonecenturies . . .

I accept the draft of the nonaggression pact that your Foreign Minister,M. Molotov, handed over, but consider it urgently necessary to clarify thequestions connected with it as soon as possible.

The substance of the supplementary protocol desired by the Soviet Unioncan, I am convinced, be clarified in the shortest possible time if a responsibleGerman statesman can come to Moscow himself to negotiate. Otherwise theGovernment of the Reich are not clear as to how the supplementary protocolcould be cleared up and settled in a short time.

The tension between Germany and Poland has become intolerable ... Acrisis may arise any day. Germany is determined from now on to look afterthe 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 Statesto enter into a new relationship to each other, not to lose any time. I thereforeagain propose that you receive my Foreign Minister on Tuesday, August 22,but at the latest on Wednesday, August 23. The Reich Foreign Minister hasthe fullest powers to draw up and sign the nonaggression pact as well as theprotocol. A longer stay by the Foreign Minister in Moscow than one to twodays at most is impossible in view of the international situation. I should beglad to receive your early answer.

Adolf Hitler22

During the next twenty-four hours, from the evening of Sunday, August20, when Hitler’s appeal to Stalin went out over the wires to Moscow, until

* It was signed in Berlin at 2 a.m. on Sunday, August 20.

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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 totell of his worries about Stalin’s reaction to his message and to fret overthe delays in Moscow. At 3 a.m. on the twenty-first, the Foreign Officereceived a “most urgent” wire from Schulenburg saying that Hitler’s tele-gram, of which Weizsaecker had advised him earlier, had not yet arrived.“Official telegrams from Berlin to Moscow,” the ambassador remindedthe Foreign Office, “take four to five hours, inclusive of two hours’ differ-ence in time. To this must be added the time for deciphering.”23 At10:15 a.m. on Monday, August 21, the anxious Ribbentrop got off anurgent wire to Schulenburg: “Please do your utmost to ensure that thejourney materializes. Date as in telegram.”24 Shortly after noon, theambassador 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 wiresin Berlin.

To the Chancellor of the German Reich,

A. Hitler:

I thank you for the letter. I hope that the German—Soviet nonaggressionpact will bring about a decided turn for the better in the political relationsbetween our countries.

The peoples of our countries need peaceful relations with each other. Theassent of the German Government to the conclusion of a nonaggression pactprovides the foundation for eliminating the political tension and for theestablishment of peace and collaboration between our countries.

The Soviet Government have instructed me to inform you that they agreeto Herr von Ribbentrop’s arriving in Moscow on August 23.

J. Stalin26

For sheer cynicism the Nazi dictator had met his match in the Sovietdespot. The way was now open to them to get together to dot the Vs andcross the f 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 avoice came on to announce, “The Reich government and the Sovietgovernment have agreed to conclude a pact of nonaggression with eachother. The Reich Minister for Foreign Affairs will arrive in Moscow onWednesday, August 23, for the conclusion of the negotiations.”

The next day, August 22, 1939, Hitler, having been assured by Stalinhimself that Russia would be a friendly neutral, once more convoked histop military commanders to the Obersalzberg, lectured them on his owngreatness and on the need for them to wage war brutally and without pityand apprised them that he probably would order the attack on Poland tobegin four days hence, on Saturday, August 26—six days ahead ofschedule. Stalin, the Fuehrer’s mortal enemy, had made this possible.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact

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THE MILITARY CONFERENCE OF AUGUST 22, 1939

The generals found Hitler in one of his most arrogant and uncom-promising moods.* “I have called you together,” he told them, “to giveyou a picture of the political situation in order that you may have some in-sight into the individual factors on which I have based my irrevocable deci-sion to act and in order to strengthen your confidence. After that we shalldiscuss military details.” First of all, he said, there were two personalconsiderations.

My own personality and that of Mussolini.

Essentially, all depends on me, on my existence, because of my politicaltalents. Furthermore, the fact that probably no one will ever again have theconfidence of the whole German people as I have. There will probably neveragain in the future be a man with more authority than I have. My existence istherefore a factor of great value. But I can be eliminated at any time by acriminal or a lunatic.

The second personal factor is the Duce. His existence is also decisive. Ifsomething happens to him, Italy’s loyalty to the alliance will no longer becertain. The Italian Court is fundamentally opposed to the Duce.

Franco too was a help. He would assure Spain’s “benevolent neu-trality.” As for “the other side,” he assured his listeners, “there is no out-standing personality in England or France.”

For what must have been a period of several hours, broken only by alate lunch, the demonic dictator rambled on, and there is no evidence fromthe records that a single general, admiral or Air Force commander dared

* No official minutes of Hitler’s harangue have been found, but several records ofit, two of them made by high-ranking officers from notes jotted down during themeeting, have come to light. One by Admiral Hermann Boehm, Chief of the HighSeas Fleet, was submitted at Nuremberg in Admiral Raeder’s defense and ispublished in the original German in TMWC, XLI, pp. 16—25. General Haider madevoluminous notes in his unique Gabelsberger shorthand, and an English translationof 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 theNuremberg trial was an unsigned memorandum in two parts from the OKW fileswhich were captured by American troops at Saalfelden in the Austrian Tyrol. It isprinted in English translation in NCA, III, pp. 581-86 (Nuremberg Document 798-PS), 665-66 (N.D. 1014-PS), and also in DGFP, VII, pp. 200-6. The originalGerman text of the two-part memorandum is, of course, in the TMWC volumes. Itmakes Hitler’s language somewhat more lively than do Admiral Boehm and GeneralHaider. But all three versions are similar in content and there can be no doubt oftheir authenticity. At Nuremberg there was some doubt about a fourth accountof Hitler’s speech, listed as N.D. C-3 (NCA, VII, pp. 752-54), and though it wasreferred to in the proceedings the prosecution did not submit it in evidence. Whileit undoubtedly rings true, it may have been embellished a little by persons who werenot present at the meeting at the Berghof. In piecing together Hitler’s remarksI have used the records of Boehm and Haider and the unsigned memorandumsubmitted at Nuremberg as evidence.

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to interrupt him to question his judgment or even to challenge his lies. Hehad made his decision in the spring, he said, that a conflict with Polandwas inevitable, but he had thought that first he would turn against theWest. In that case, however, it became “clear” to him that Poland wouldattack 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 canonly gain. Our economic situation is such that we cannot hold out morethan a few years. Goering can confirm this. We have no other choice, wemust act . . .

Besides the personal factor, the political situation is favorable to us; in theMediterranean, rivalry among Italy, France and England; in the Orient,tension . . .

England is in great danger. France’s position has also deteriorated. Declinein birth rate . . . Yugoslavia carries the germ of collapse . . . Rumania isweaker than before . . . Since Kemal’s death, Turkey has been ruled by smallminds, unsteady, weak men.

All these fortunate circumstances will not prevail in two to three years. Noone knows how long I shall live. Therefore a showdown, which it would notbe 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 therisk nevertheless had to be accepted. Had he not taken risks—in occupy-ing 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 atTannenberg,” he said, “took chances. So now we also must take riskswhich can only be mastered by iron determination.” There must be noweakening.

It has done much damage that many reluctant Germans in high placesspoke and wrote to Englishmen after the solution of the Czech question. TheFuehrer carried his point when you lost your nerve and capitulated too soon.

Haider, Witzleben and Thomas and perhaps other generals who hadbeen in on the Munich conspiracy must have winced at this. Hitlerobviously 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 politicalbluff.” It had now become necessary to “test the military machine. TheArmy must experience actual battle before the big final showdown in theWest.” Poland offered such an opportunity.

Coming back to England and France:

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The West has only two possibilities to fight against us:

1. Blockade: It will not be effective because of our self-sufficiency and oursources 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. Actuallythey cannot help Poland.

Would it be a long war?

No one is counting on a long war. If Herr von Brauchitsch had told me thatI would need four years to conquer Poland I would have replied, It cannot bedone. It is nonsense to say that England wants to wage a long war.

Having disposed, to his own satisfaction, at least, of Poland, Britain andFrance, Hitler pulled out his ace card. He turned to Russia.

The enemy had another hope, that Russia would become our enemy afterthe conquest of Poland. The enemy did not count on my great power ofresolution. Our enemies are little worms. I saw them at Munich.

I was convinced that Stalin would never accept the English offer. Only ablind optimist could believe that Stalin would be so crazy as not to see throughEngland’s intentions. Russia has no interest in maintaining Poland . . .Litvinov’s dismissal was decisive. It came to me like a cannon shot as a signof a change in Moscow toward the Western Powers.

I brought about the change toward Russia gradually. In connectionwith the commercial treaty we got into political conversations. Finally a propo-sition came from the Russians for a nonaggression treaty. Four days agoI took a special step which brought it about that Russia announced yesterdaythat she is ready to sign. The personal contact with Stalin is established. Theday after tomorrow Ribbentrop will conclude the treaty. Now Poland is inthe position in which I wanted her ... A beginning has been made for thedestruction of England’s hegemony. The way is open for the soldier, now thatI have made .the political preparations.

The way would be open for the soldiers, that is, if Chamberlain didn’tpull another Munich. “I am only afraid,” Hitler told his warriors, “thatsome Schweinehund* will make a proposal for mediation.”

At this point the meeting broke up for lunch, but not until Goering hadexpressed thanks to the Fuehrer for pointing the way and had assuredhim that the armed services would do their duty.f

* “Dirty dog.”

t According to the account in Nuremberg Document C-3 (see footnote above,p. 529), Goering jumped up on the table and gave “bloodthirsty thanks andbloody promises. He danced around like a savage. The few doubtful ones re-mained silent.” This description greatly nettled Goering during an interrogation atNuremberg on August 28 and 29, 1945. “I dispute the fact that I stood on the

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The afternoon lecture was devoted by Hitler mainly to bucking up hismilitary chiefs and trying to steel them for the task ahead. The roughjottings of all three records of the talk indicate its nature.

The most iron determination on our part. No shrinking back from any-thing. Everyone must hold the view that we have been determined to fightthe Western powers right from the start. A life-and-death struggle ... Along period of peace would not do us any good ... A manly bearing . . .We have the better men . . . On the opposite side they are weaker ... In1918 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 activeforces, not to reach a definite line. Even if war breaks out in the West, thedestruction of Poland remains the primary objective. A quick decision, inview of the season.

I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war—never mind whetherit is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterward whether he told thetruth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, butvictory.

Close your hearts to pity! Act brutally! Eighty million people must obtainwhat is their right . . . The stronger man is right ... Be harsh andremorseless! Be steeled against all signs of compassion! . . . Whoever haspondered over this world order knows that its meaning lies in the success ofthe best by means of force . . .

Having thundered such Nietzschean exhortations, the Fuehrer, whohad worked himself up to a fine fit of Teutonic fury, calmed down anddelivered a few directives for the campaign ahead. Speed was essential.He had “unshakable faith” in the German soldier. If any crises developedthey would be due solely to the commanders’ losing their nerve. The firstaim was to drive wedges from the southeast to the Vistula, and from thenorth to the Narew and the Vistula. Military operations, he insisted, mustnot be influenced by what he might do with Poland after her defeat. Asto that he was vague. The new German frontier, he said, would be basedon “sound principles.” Possibly he would set up a small Polish bufferstate between Germany and Russia.

The order for the start of hostilities, Hitler concluded, would be givenlater, probably for Saturday morning, August 26.

The next day, the twenty-third, after a meeting of the OKW sectionchiefs, General Haider noted in his diary: “Y Day definitely set for the26th (Saturday).”

table,” Goering said. “I want you to know that the speech was made in the greathall of Hitler’s private house. I did not have the habit of jumping on tables inprivate homes. That would have been an attitude completely inconsistent withthat of a German officer.”

“Well, the fact is,” Colonel John H. Amen, the American interrogator, said atthis point, “that you led the applause after the speech, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but not on the table,” Goering rejoined.27

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ALLIED STALEMATE IN MOSCOW

By the middle of August the military conversations in Moscow betweenthe Western democracies and the Soviet Union had come to a virtualstandstill—and for this the intransigence of the Poles was largely to blame.The Anglo-French military missions, it will be remembered, after takinga slow boat to Leningrad, had arrived in Moscow on August 11, exactlyone week after the frustrated Mr. Strang had left the Russian capital,obviously relieved to be able to turn over to the generals and admirals thedifficult and unpleasant job of trying to negotiate with the Russians.*

What now had to be worked out hurriedly was a military conventionwhich would spell out in detail just how and where, and with what, Naziarmed force could be met. But as the confidential British minutes of theday-to-day military conversations and the reports of the British negotiatorsreveal29 the Anglo-French military team had been sent to Moscow todiscuss not details but rather “general principles.” The Russians, how-ever, insisted on getting down at once to hard, specific and—in the Alliedview—awkward facts, and Voroshilov’s response to the Allied declara-tion of principles made at the first meeting by General Doumenc was thatthey were “too abstract and immaterial and do not oblige anyone to doanything . . . We are not gathered here,” he declared coolly, “to makeabstract declarations, but to work out a complete military convention.”

The Soviet Marshal posed some very definite questions: Was there anytreaty which defined what action Poland would take? How many Britishtroops 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 Heywoodanswered that the British envisaged “a first contingent of sixteen divisions,ready for service in the early stages of a war, followed later by a secondcontingent of sixteen divisions.” Pressed by Voroshilov to reveal howmany British troops there would be immediately on the outbreak of war,Heywood replied, “At the moment there are five regular divisions and onemechanized division in England.” These paltry figures came as an un-pleasant surprise to the Russians, who were prepared, they said, to deploy120 infantry divisions against an aggressor in the west at the very outbreakof hostilities.

As for Belgium, General Doumenc answered the Russian question bysaying 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 inMoscow 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 whetherPoland was willing to permit Soviet troops to enter her territory to meet

* “A humiliating experience,” Strang had called it in a dispatch to the ForeignOffice on July 20.28

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the Germans. If not, how could the Allies prevent the German Armyfrom quickly overrunning Poland? Specifically—on the fourteenth—heasked, “Do the British and French general staffs think that the Red Armycan move across Poland, and in particular through the Vilna gap andacross Galicia in order to make contact with the enemy?”

This was the core of the matter. As Seeds wired London, the Russianshad now

raised the fundamental problem, on which the military talks will succeed orfail and which has indeed been at the bottom of all our difficulties since thevery beginning of the political conversations, namely, how to reach any usefulagreement with the Soviet Union as long as this country’s neighbors maintaina 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?—AdmiralDrax had been instructed by the British government on how to handle it.The instructions, revealed in the confidential British papers, seem un-believably naive when read today. The “line of argument” he was to takein view of the refusal of Poland and Rumania “even to consider plans forpossible 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 shouldoccupy a position right up to the Russian frontier ... It is in Russia’s owninterest therefore that she should have plans ready to help both Poland andRumania should these countries be invaded.

If the Russians propose that the British and French governments shouldcommunicate to the Polish, Roumanian or Baltic States proposals involvingco-operation with the Soviet Government or General Staff, the Delegationshould not commit themselves but refer home.

And this is what they did.

At the August 14 session Voroshilov demanded “straightforwardanswers” 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 itsGovernment to take part in an enterprise so obviously doomed to failure.”

From Paris General Gamelin counseled General Doumenc to try tosteer the Russians off the subject. But they were not to be put off.30

The meeting of August 14, as General Doumenc later reported, wasdramatic. The British and French delegates were cornered and they knewit. They tried to evade the issue as best they could. Drax and Doumencasserted they were sure the Poles and Rumanians would ask for Russianaid as soon as they were attacked. Doumenc was confident they would“implore the Marshal to support them.” Drax thought it was “incon-ceivable” that they should not ask for Soviet help. He added—not very

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diplomatically, it would seem—that “if they did not ask for help whennecessary and allow themselves to be overrun, it may be expected that theywould become German provinces.” This was the last thing the Russianswanted, 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 contendedthat Voroshilov had raised political questions which they were not com-petent 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 thegovernments. He suggested that the Soviet government put its questionsto the Polish government. The Russian delegation agreed that this was apolitical matter. But it insisted that the British and French governmentsmust 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 thismoment, negotiating in good faith with the Franco-British military rep-resentatives? Or did they, as the British and French foreign offices, not tomention Admiral Drax, later concluded, insist on the right to deploy theirtroops through Poland merely to stall the talks until they saw whether theycould 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 wasnegotiating in good faith—in fact, that it took its job much too seriously.On August 13, after two days of staff talks, Ambassador Seeds wiredLondon that the Russian military chiefs seemed really “to be out forbusiness.” As a result, Admiral Drax’s instructions to “go very slowly”were changed and on August 15 he was told by the British government tosupport Doumenc in bringing the military talks to a conclusion “as soon aspossible.” His restrictions on confiding confidential military informationto the Russians were partially lifted.

Unlike the British Admiral’s original instructions to stall, those givenGeneral Doumenc by Premier Daladier personally had been to try to con-clude a military convention with Russia at the earliest possible moment.Despite British fears of leaks to the Germans, Doumenc on the secondday of the meetings had confided to the Russians such “highly secretfigures,” as he termed them, on the strength of the French Army that the

* The timing is important. Molotov did not receive the Nazi proposal that Ribben-trop come to Moscow until the evening of August 15. (See above, p. 520.) Andthough he did not accept it definitely he did hint that Russia would be interested ina nonaggression pact with Germany, which of course would have made negotiationof a military alliance with France and Britain superfluous. The best conclusion thiswriter can come to is that, as of August 14, when Voroshilov demanded an “un-equivocal answer” to the question of allowing Soviet troops to meet the Germansin Poland, the Kremlin still had an open mind as to which side to join. Unfor-tunately the Russian documents, which could clear up this crucial question, havenot been published. At any rate, Stalin does not seem to have made his finaldecision until the afternoon of August 19. (See above, p. 526.)

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Soviet members promised “to forget” them as soon as the meeting wasconcluded.

As late as August 17, after he and Drax had waited vainly for threedays for instructions from their governments as to how to reply to thePolish question, General Doumenc telegraphed Paris: “The U.S.S.R.wants a military pact . . . She does not want us to give her a piece ofpaper without substantial undertakings. Marshal Voroshilov has statedthat all problems . . . would be tackled without difficulty as soon as whathe called the crucial question was settled.” Doumenc strongly urged Paristo get Warsaw to agree to accepting Russian help.

Contrary to a widespread belief at the time, not only in Moscow but inthe Western capitals, that the British and French governments did nothingto induce the Poles to agree to Soviet troops meeting the Germans onPolish soil, it is clear from documents recently released that London andParis went quite far—but not quite far enough. It is also clear that thePoles reacted with unbelievable stupidity.31

On August 18, after the first Anglo-French attempt was made inWarsaw to open the eyes of the Poles, Foreign Minister Beck told theFrench ambassador, Leon Noel, that the Russians were “of no militaryvalue,” and General Stachiewicz, Chief of the Polish General Staff, backedhim up by declaring that he saw “no benefit to be gained by Red Armytroops operating in Poland.”

The next day both the British and French ambassadors saw Beckagain and urged him to agree to the Russian proposal. The Polish ForeignMinister stalled, but promised to give them a formal reply the next day.The Anglo-French demarche in Warsaw came as the result of a conversa-tion earlier on the nineteenth in Paris between Bonnet, the French ForeignMinister, and the British charge d’affaires. Somewhat to the Briton’ssurprise, this archappeaser of Hitler was now quite aroused at the prospectof losing Russia as an ally because of Polish stubbornness.

It would be disastrous [Bonnet told him] if, in consequence of a Polishrefusal, the Russian negotiations were to break down ... It was an unten-able position for the Poles to take up in refusing the only immediate efficacioushelp that could reach them in the event of a German attack. It would put theBritish and French Governments in an almost impossible position if we hadto ask our respective countries to go to war in defense of Poland, which hadrefused this help.

If this were so—and there is no doubt that it was—why then did notthe British and French governments at this crucial moment put theultimate pressure on Warsaw and simply say that unless the Polishgovernment agreed to accept Russian help Britain and France could seeno use of themselves going to war to aid Poland? The formal Anglo-Polish mutual-security treaty had not yet been signed. Could Warsaw’s

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acceptance of Russian military backing not be made a condition of con-cluding that pact?*

In his talk with the British charge in Paris on August 19, Bonnet sug-gested this, but the government in London frowned upon such a “ma-neuver,” as Downing Street called it. To such an extreme Chamberlainand Halifax would not go.

On the morning of August 20 the Polish Chief of Staff informed theBritish military attache in Warsaw that “in no case would the admissionof Soviet troops into Poland be agreed to.” And that evening Beckformally rejected the Anglo-French request. The same evening Halifax,through his ambassador in Warsaw, urged the Polish Foreign Minister toreconsider, emphasizing in strong terms that the Polish stand was “wreck-ing” the military talks in Moscow. But Beck was obdurate. “I do notadmit,” he told the French ambassador, “that there can be any kind ofdiscussion whatsoever concerning the use of part of our territory byforeign 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 thePolish government, Premier Daladier, according to an account he gaveto the French Constituent Assembly on July 18, 1946, took matters in hisown hands. After once more appealing to the Poles to be realistic, hetelegraphed General Doumenc on the morning of August 21 authorizinghim to sign a military convention with Russia on the best terms he couldget, with the provision, however, that it must be approved by the Frenchgovernment. The French ambassador, Paul-Emile Naggiar, was at thesame time instructed by Bonnet, according to the latter’s subsequentaccount, to tell Molotov that France agreed “in principle” to the passageof 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 latein the evening of August 21. When he brought it to the attention ofVoroshilov on the evening of the next day—the eve of Ribbentrop’sdeparture for Moscow—the Soviet Marshal was highly skeptical. Hedemanded to see the French General’s authorization for saying—asDoumenc had—that the French government had empowered him to signa military pact permitting the passage of Russian troops through Poland.Doumenc, obviously, declined. Voroshilov next wanted to know what

* Lloyd George, in a speech in the Commons on April 3, four days after Chamber-lain’s unilateral guarantee to Poland had been announced, had urged the Britishgovernment to make such a condition. “If we are going in without the help ofRussia we are walking into a trap. It is the only country whose armies can getthere [to Poland]. ... I cannot understand why, before committing ourselves tothis tremendous enterprise, we did not secure beforehand the adhesion of Russia... If Russia has not been brought into this matter because of certain feelings thePoles have that they do not want the Russians there, it is for us to declare theconditions, and unless the Poles are prepared to accept the only conditions withwhich we can successfully help them, the responsibility must be theirs.”

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the British response was and whether the consent of Poland had beenobtained. These were embarrassing questions and Doumenc merelyanswered 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 toMoscow. The trip had been announced publicly the night before, andalso its purpose: to conclude a nonaggression pact between Nazi Germanyand the Soviet Union.

Voroshilov, who seems to have developed a genuine liking for theFrench General, tried gently to let him know that their contacts were aboutto end.

I fear one thing [Voroshilov said]. The French and English sides haveallowed the political and military discussions to drag on too long. That iswhy we must not exclude the possibility, during this time, of certain politicalevents.*

RIBBENTROP IN MOSCOW: AUGUST 23, 1939

Those “certain political events” now took place.

Armed with full powers in writing from Hitler to conclude a nonaggres-sion treaty “and other agreements” with the Soviet Union, which wouldbecome effective as soon as they were signed, Ribbentrop set off by planefor Moscow on August 22. The large German party spent the night atKoenigsberg in East Prussia, where the Nazi Foreign Minister, accordingto Dr. Schmidt, worked throughout the night, constantly telephoning toBerlin and Berchtesgaden and making copious notes for his talks withStalin and Molotov.

The two large Condor transport planes carrying the German delegation

* At a session of the military delegates the morning before, on August 21, Voroshilovhad demanded the indefinite adjournment of the talks on the excuse that he andhis colleagues would be busy with the autumn maneuvers. To the Anglo-Frenchprotests at such a delay the Marshal had answered, “The intentions of the SovietDelegation were, and still are, to agree on the organization of military co-operationof the armed forces of the three parties . . . The U.S.S.R., not having a commonfrontier with Germany, can give help to France, Britain, Poland and Rumania, onlyon condition that her troops are given rights of passage across Polish and Rumanianterritory . . . The Soviet forces cannot co-operate with the armed forces of Britainand France if they are not allowed onto Polish and Rumanian territory . . . TheSoviet Military Delegation cannot picture to itself how the governments and generalstaffs of Britain and France, in sending their missions to the U.S.S.R. . . . couldnot have given them some directives on such an elementary matter . . . This canonly show that there are reasons to doubt their desire to come to serious andeffective co-operation with the U.S.S.R.”

The logic of the Marshal's military argument was sound and the failure of theFrench 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 ofAugust 19, was deceitful.

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arrived in Moscow at noon on August 23, and after a hasty meal at theembassy Ribbentrop hurried off to the Kremlin to confront the Sovietdictator and his Foreign Commissar. This first meeting lasted three hoursand, as Ribbentrop advised Hitler by “most urgent” wire, it went wellfor the Germans.32 Judging by the Foreign Minister’s dispatch, therewas no trouble at all in reaching agreement on the terms of a nonaggressionpact which would keep the Soviet Union out of Hitler’s war. In fact theonly difficulty, he reported, was a distinctly minor one concerning thedivision of spoils. The Russians, he said, were demanding that Germanyrecognize the small ports of Libau and Windau in Latvia “as being intheir sphere of interest.” Since all of Latvia was to be placed on theSoviet side of the line dividing the interests of the two powers, this demandpresented no problem and Hitler quickly agreed. Ribbentrop also advisedthe Fuehrer after the first conference that “the signing of a secret protocolon the delimitation of mutual spheres of interest in the whole Eastern areais contemplated.”

The whole works—the nonaggression treaty and the secret protocol—were signed at a second meeting at the Kremlin later that evening. Soeasily had the Germans and Russians come to agreement that this convivialsession, which lasted into the small hours of the following morning, wastaken up mostly not by any hard bargaining but with a warm and friendlydiscussion of the state of the world, country by country, and with theinevitable, effusive toasts customary at gala gatherings in the Kremlin. Asecret German memorandum by a member of the German delegation whowas present has recorded the incredible scene.33

To Stalin’s questions about the ambitions of Germany’s partners, Italyand Japan, Ribbentrop gave breezy, reassuring answers. As to Englandthe Soviet dictator and the Nazi Foreign Minister, who was now on hisbest behavior, found themselves at once in accord. The British militarymission in Moscow, Stalin confided to his guest, “had never told theSoviet government what it really wanted.” Ribbentrop responded byemphasizing that Britain had always tried to disrupt good relations be-tween Germany and the Soviet Union. “England is weak,” he boasted,“and wants to let others fight for her presumptuous claim to worlddominion.”

“Stalin eagerly concurred,” says the German memorandum, and heremarked: “If England dominated the world, that was due to the stupidityof the other countries that always let themselves be bluffed.”

By this time the Soviet ruler and Hitler’s Foreign Minister were gettingalong so splendidly that mention of the Anti-Comintern Pact no longerembarrassed them. Ribbentrop explained again that the pact had beendirected not against Russia but against the Western democracies. Stalininterposed to remark that “the Anti-Comintern had in fact frightenedprincipally the City of London [i.e., the British financiers] and the Englishshopkeepers.”

At this juncture, the German memorandum reveals, Ribbentrop felthimself in such good humor at Stalin’s accommodating manner that he

540 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

even tried to crack a joke or two—a remarkable feat for so humorless aman.

The Reich Foreign Minister [the memorandum continues] remarked jokinglythat M. Stalin was surely less frightened by the Anti-Comintern Pact than theCity of London and the English shopkeepers. What the German peoplethought of this matter was evident from a joke, which had originated with theBerliners, well known for their wit and humor, that Stalin will yet join theAnti-Comintern Pact himself.

Finally the Nazi Foreign Minister dwelt on how warmly the Germanpeople welcomed an understanding with Russia. “M. Stalin replied,” saysthe German record, “that he really believed this. The Germans desiredpeace.”

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 thereforelike 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 eraof German-Russian relations, and to the German nation.

The Reich Foreign Minister in turn proposed a toast to M. Stalin, toasts tothe Soviet Government, and to a favorable development of relations betweenGermany and the Soviet Union.

And yet despite such warm exchanges between those who untilrecently had been such mortal enemies, Stalin appears to have had mentalreservations about the Nazis’ keeping the pact. As Ribbentrop wasleaving, he took him aside and said, “The Soviet Government take thenew pact very seriously. He could guarantee on his word of honor thatthe Soviet Union would not betray its partner.”

What had the new partners signed?

The published treaty carried an undertaking that neither power wouldattack the other. Should one of them become “the object of belligerentaction” by a third power, the other party would “in no manner lend itssupport to this Third Power.” Nor would either Germany or Russia joinany grouping of Powers whatsoever which is aimed directly or indirectlyat the other Party.”*

* The wording of the essential articles is almost identical to that of a Soviet draftwhich Molotov handed Schulenburg on August 19 and which Hitler, in his telegramto Stalin, said he accepted. The Russian draft had specified that the nonaggressiontreaty would be valid only if a “special protocol” were signed simultaneously andmade 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

The Nazi-Soviet Pact

541

Thus Hitler got what he specifically wanted: an immediate agreementby the Soviet Union not to join Britain and France if they honored theirtreaty 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 betweenGermany and the Soviet Union the undersigned plenipotentiaries discussed instrictly confidential conversations the question of the delimitation of theirrespective spheres of interest in Eastern Europe.

1. In the event of a territorial and political transformation in the territoriesbelonging to the Baltic States (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), thenorthern frontier of Lithuania shall represent the frontier of the spheres ofinterest both of Germany and the U.S.S.R.

2. In the event of a territorial and political transformation of the territoriesbelonging to the Polish State, the spheres of interest of both Germany and theU.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 ofan independent Polish State appear desirable and how the frontiers of thisState should be drawn can be definitely determined only in the course offurther political developments.

In any case both Governments will resolve this question by means of afriendly understanding.

Once again Germany and Russia, as in the days of the German kingsand Russian emperors, had agreed to partition Poland. And Hitler hadgiven Stalin a free hand in the eastern Baltic.

Finally, in Southeastern Europe, the Russians emphasized their interestin Bessarabia, which the Soviet Union had lost to Rumania in 1919, andthe Germans declared their disinterest in this territory—a concessionRibbentrop later was to regret.

“This protocol,” the document concluded, “will be treated by bothparties as strictly secret.”36

As a matter of fact, its contents became known only after the war withthe capture of the secret German archives.

On the following day, August 24, while the jubilant Ribbentrop waswinging his way back to Berlin, the Allied military missions in Moscowrequested to see Voroshilov. Admiral Drax had actually sent an urgent

friendly Soviet-German relations was thrown out at the insistence of Stalin. TheSoviet dictator complained that “the Soviet government could not suddenly presentto the public assurances of friendship after they had been covered with pails ofmanure 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.

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letter to the Marshal requesting his views on the continuation of theirtalks.

Voroshilov gave them to the British and French military staffs at 1p.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 inviolation of the pact, Stalin would still justify his odious deal with Hitler,made behind the backs of the Anglo-French military delegations whichhad come to negotiate in Moscow. “We secured peace for our country forone and a half years,” he boasted in a broadcast to the Russian people onJuly 3, 1941, “as well as an opportunity of preparing our forces fordefense if fascist Germany risked attacking our country in defiance of thepact. This was a definite gain for our country and a loss for fascistGermany.”

But was it? The point has been debated ever since. That the sordid,secret deal gave Stalin the same breathing space—peredyshka—whichCzar Alexander I had secured from Napoleon at Tilsit in 1807 and Leninfrom the Germans at Brest Litovsk in 1917 was obvious. Within a shorttime it also gave the Soviet Union an advanced defensive position againstGermany beyond the existing Russian frontiers, including bases in theBaltic States and Finland—at the expense of the Poles, Latvians, Esto-nians and Finns. And most important of all, as the official Soviet Historyof Diplomacy later emphasized, it assured the Kremlin that if Russia werelater attacked by Germany the Western Powers would already be irrevo-cably committed against the Third Reich and the Soviet Union would notstand alone against the German might as Stalin had feared throughout thesummer 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 Polandand France and the British Expeditionary Force on the Continent hadbeen destroyed and Germany had the resources of all of Europe to drawupon and no Western front to tie her hands. All through 1941, 1942 and1943 Stalin was to complain bitterly that there was no second front inEurope against Germany and that Russia was forced to bear the brunt ofcontaining almost the entire German Army. In 1939-40, there was aWestern front to draw off the German forces. And Poland could not havebeen overrun in a fortnight if the Russians had backed her instead ofstabbing her in the back. Moreover, there might not have been any warat all if Hitler had known he must take on Russia as well as Poland,England and France. Even the politically timid German generals, if onecan judge from their later testimony at Nuremberg, might have put theirfoot 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 littlechance of winning a war in which Russia participated on the enemy side.

No statesmen, not even dictators, can foretell the course of events over

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the long run. It is arguable, as Churchill has argued, that cold-blooded asStalin’s move was in making a deal with Hitler, it was also “at the momentrealistic in a high degree.”39 Stalin’s first and primary consideration, aswas that of any other head of government, was his nation’s security. Hewas convinced in the summer of 1939, as he later told Churchill, thatHitler was going to war. He was determined that Russia should not bemaneuvered into the disastrous position of having to face the GermanArmy 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 thatthe objective of the Chamberlain government in Britain was to induceHitler to make his wars in Eastern Europe. He seems to have been in-tensely skeptical that Britain would honor its guarantee to Poland anymore than France had kept its obligations to Czechoslovakia. And every-thing that had happened in the West for the past two years tended toincrease his suspicions: the rejection by Chamberlain of Soviet proposals,after the Anschluss and after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, forconferences to draw up plans to halt further Nazi aggression; Chamber-lain’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich, from which Russia had beenexcluded; the delays and hesitations of Chamberlain in negotiating adefensive alliance against Germany as the fateful summer days of 1939ticked by.

One thing was certain—to almost everyone but Chamberlain. Thebankruptcy of Anglo-French diplomacy, which had faltered and totteredwhenever Hitler made a move, was now complete. * Step by step, the twoWestern democracies had retreated: when Hitler defied them by declaringconscription in 1935, when he occupied the Rhineland in 1936, when hetook 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 Czechoslo-vakia in March 1939. With the Soviet Union on their side, they still mighthave dissuaded the German dictator from launching war or, if that failed,have fairly quickly defeated him in an armed conflict. But they hadallowed this last opportunity to slip out of their hands.! Now, at the worst

* And of Polish diplomacy too. Ambassador Noel reported Foreign Minister Beck’sreaction to the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in a dispatch to Paris: “Beck is quiteunperturbed and does not seem in the slightest worried. He believes that, insubstance, very little has changed.”

t 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’sthoughts. “Hitler will risk war,” Coulondre wrote, “if he does not have to fightRussia. On the other hand, if he knows he has to fight her too he will draw backrather than expose his country, his party and himself to ruin.” The ambassadorurged the prompt conclusion of the Anglo-French negotiations in Moscow andadvised Paris that the British ambassador in Berlin had made a similar appeal tohis government in London. (French Yellow Book, Fr. ed., pp. 180-81.)

On August 15, both Coulondre and Henderson saw Weizsaecker at the Foreign

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possible time in the worst possible circumstances, they were committedto come to the aid of Poland when she was attacked.

The recriminations in London and Paris against the double-dealing ofStalin were loud and bitter. The Soviet despot for years had cried out atthe “fascist beasts” and called for all peace-loving states to band togetherto halt Nazi aggression. Now he had made himself an accessory to it. TheKremlin could argue, as it did, that the Soviet Union had only done whatBritain and France had done the year before at Munich: bought peaceand the time to rearm against Germany at the expense of a small state. IfChamberlain was right and honorable in appeasing Hitler in September1938 by sacrificing Czechoslovakia, was Stalin wrong and dishonorable inappeasing the Fuehrer a year later at the expense of Poland, which hadshunned Soviet help anyway?

Stalin’s cynical and secret deal with Hitler to divide up Poland and toobtain a free hand to gobble up Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Bessarabiawas not known outside Berlin and Moscow, but it would soon becomeevident from Soviet acts, and it would shock most of the world even atthis late date. The Russians might say, as they did, that they were onlyrepossessing territories which had been taken away from them at the endof the First World War. But the peoples of these lands were not Russianand had shown no desire to return to Russia. Only force, which the So-viets had eschewed in the heyday of Litvinov, could make them return.

Since joining the League of Nations the Soviet Union had built up acertain moral force as the champion of peace and the leading opponentof fascist aggression. Now that moral capital had been utterly dissipated.

Above all, by assenting to a shoddy deal with Nazi Germany, Stalinhad given the signal for the commencement of a war that almost cer-tainly would develop into a world conflict. This he certainly knew.* Asthings turned out, it was the greatest blunder of his life.

Office. The British ambassador informed London that the State Secretary wasconfident 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, wiredParis: “It is necessary at all costs to come to some solution of the Russian talks assoon as possible.” (French Yellow Book, p. 282.)

Throughout June and July, Laurence Steinhardt, the American ambassador inMoscow, had also sent warnings of an impending Soviet-Nazi deal, which PresidentRoosevelt passed on to the British, French and Polish embassies. As early as July5, when Soviet Ambassador Constantine Oumansky left for a leave in Russia, hecarried with him a message from Roosevelt to Stalin “that if his government joinedup with Hitler, it was as certain as that the night followed day that as soon as Hitlerhad conquered France he would turn on Russia.” (Joseph E. Davies, Mission toMoscow, p. 450.) The President’s warning was cabled to Steinhardt with instruc-tions to repeat it to Molotov, which the ambassador did on August 16. (US.Diplomatic Papers, 1939, I, pp. 296-99.)

* Years before, Hitler had written prophetically in Mein Kampf: “The very factof the conclusion of an alliance with Russia embodies a plan for the next war. Itsoutcome would be the end of Germany.” (See p. 660 of the Houghton Mifflin edi-tion, 1943.)

16

THE LAST DAYS OF PEACE

rT"'HE British government had not waited idly for the formal signing

-L of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in Moscow. The announcement in Berlinon the late evening of August 21 that Ribbentrop was flying to Moscow toconclude a German-Russian agreement stirred the British cabinet to ac-tion. It met at 3 p.m. on the twenty-second and issued a communiquestating categorically that a Soviet—Nazi nonaggression pact “would in noway affect their obligation to Poland, which they have repeatedly statedin public and which they are determined to fulfill.” At the same time Par-liament was summoned to meet on August 24 to pass the EmergencyPowers (Defense) Bill, and certain precautionary mobilization measureswere taken.

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

. . . Apparently the announcement of a German-Soviet Agreement istaken in some quarters in Berlin to indicate that intervention by Great Britainon 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 ofthe German-Soviet Agreement, it cannot alter Great Britain’s obligation toPoland ...

It has been alleged that, if His Majesty’s Government had made theirposition more clear in 1914, the great catastrophe would have been avoided.Whether or not there is any force in that allegation, His Majesty’s Governmentare resolved that on this occasion there shall be no such tragic misunderstand-ing.

If the case should arise, they are resolved, and prepared, to employ withoutdelay all the forces at their command, and it is impossible to foresee the endof hostilities once engaged . . 4

Having, as he added, “thus made our position perfectly clear,” thePrime Minister again appealed to Hitler to seek a peaceful solution of his

545

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

differences with Poland and once more offered the British government’sco-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 un-compromising,” Henderson wired Lord Halifax. “His language was vio-lent and exaggerated both as regards England and Poland.”2 Hender-son’s report of the meeting and the German Foreign Office memorandumon it—the latter among the captured Nazi papers—agree on the nature ofHitler’s tirade. England, he stormed, was responsible for Poland’s intran-sigence just as it had been responsible for Czechoslovakia’s unreasonableattitude the year before. Tens of thousands of Volksdeutsche in Polandwere being persecuted. There were even, he claimed, six cases of castra-tion—a subject that obsessed him. He could stand it no more. Any fur-ther persecution of Germans by the Poles would bring immediate action.

I contested every point [Henderson wired Halifax] and kept calling hisstatements inaccurate but the only effect was to launch him on some freshtirade.

Finally Hitler agreed to give a written answer to the Prime Minister’sletter in two hours’ time, and Henderson withdrew to Salzburg for a littlerespite.* Later in the afternoon Hitler sent for him and handed him hisreply. In contrast to the first meeting, the Fuehrer, Henderson reportedto London, “was quite calm and never raised his voice.”

He was, he said [Henderson reported], fifty years old; he preferred war nowto 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, theyadd:

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

Hitler’s reply to Chamberlain was a mixture of all the stale lies and ex-aggerations which he had been bellowing to foreigners and his own peoplesince the Poles dared to stand up to him. Germany, he said, did not seeka conflict with Great Britain. It had been prepared all along to discuss thequestions of Danzig and the Corridor with the Poles “on the basis of a

* “Hardly had the door shut on the Ambassador,” Weizsaecker, who was present,later noted, “than Hitler slapped himself on the thigh, laughed and said: ‘Chamber-lain won’t survive that conversation; his Cabinet will fall this evening.’ ” (Weiz-saecker, Memoirs, p. 203.)

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proposal of truly unparalleled magnanimity.” But the unconditional guar-antee of Poland by Britain had only encouraged the Poles “to unloosen awave of appalling terrorism against the one and a half million Germaninhabitants living in Poland.” Such “atrocities” he declared, “are terriblefor the victims but intolerable for a Great Power such as the GermanReich.” Germany would no longer tolerate them.

Finally he took note of the Prime Minister’s assurance that GreatBritain would honor its commitments to Poland and assured him “that itcan make no change in the determination of the Reich Government tosafeguard the interests of the Reich . . . Germany, if attacked by Eng-land, will be found prepared and determined.”3

What had this exchange of letters accomplished? Hitler now had asolemn assurance from Chamberlain that Britain would go to war if Ger-many attacked Poland. The Prime Minister had the Fuehrer’s word thatit would make no difference. But, as the events of the next hectic eightdays would show, neither man believed on August 23 that he had heardthe last word from the other.

This was especially true of Hitler. Buoyed up by the good news fromMoscow and confident that, despite what Chamberlain had just writtenhim, Great Britain and, in its wake, France would have second thoughtsabout honoring their obligations to Poland after the defection of Russia,the Fuehrer on the evening of August 23, as Henderson was flying back toBerlin, set the date for the onslaught on Poland: Saturday, August 26, at4:30 a.m.

“There will be no more orders regarding Y Day and X Hour,” GeneralHaider noted in his diary. “Everything is to roll automatically.”

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

On the morning of August 25, Hitler, who on the previous day had re-turned to Berlin to welcome Ribbentrop back from Moscow and receivea firsthand report on the Russians, got off a letter to Mussolini. It con-tained a belated explanation as to why he had not been able to keep hisAxis partner informed of his negotiations with the Soviet Union. (Hehad “no idea,” he said, that they would go so far so fast.) And he de-clared that the Russo-German pact “must be regarded as the greatestpossible gain for the Axis.”

But the real purpose of the letter, whose text is among the captureddocuments, was to warn the Duce that a German attack on Poland wasliable to take place at any moment, though Hitler refrained from givinghis friend and ally the exact date which he had set. “In case of intolerableevents in Poland,” he said, “I shall act immediately ... In these cir-cumstances no one can say what the next hour may bring.” Hitler did notspecifically ask for Italy’s help. That was, by the terms of the Italo-Ger-man alliance, supposed to be automatic. He contented himself with ex-pressing the hope for Italy’s understanding.4 Nevertheless, he was anx-

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ious for an immediate answer. The letter was telephoned by Ribbentroppersonally to the German ambassador in Rome and reached the Duce at3:20 p.m.

In the meantime, at 1:30 p.m., the Fuehrer had received AmbassadorHenderson at the Chancellery. His resolve to destroy Poland had in noway lessened but he was more anxious than he had been two days before,when he had talked with Henderson at Berchtesgaden, to make one lastattempt to keep Britain out of the war.* The ambassador found theFuehrer, as he reported to London, “absolutely calm and normal and [he]spoke with great earnestness and apparent sincerity.” Despite all his ex-perience of the past year Henderson could not, even at this late date, seethrough the “sincerity” of the German Leader. For what Hitler had tosay was quite preposterous. He “accepted” the British Empire, he toldthe ambassador, and was ready “to pledge himself personally to its con-tinued existence and to commit the power of the German Reich for this.”

He desired [Hitler explained] to make a move toward England which shouldbe as decisive as the move towards Russia . . . The Fuehrer is ready to con-clude agreements with England which would not only guarantee the existenceof the British Empire in all circumstances so far as Germany is concerned, butwould also if necessary assure the British Empire of German assistance regard-less of where such assistance should be necessary.

He would also be ready, he added, “to accept a reasonable limitationof armaments” and to regard the Reich’s western frontiers as final. At onepoint, according to Henderson, Hitler lapsed into a typical display ofsentimental hogwash, though the ambassador did not describe it as thatwhen 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 ques-tion 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 Germansfor Henderson] that he is a man of great decisions . . . and that this is his lastoffer. 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 toone condition: that it would take effect only “after the solution of theGerman-Polish problem.” When Henderson kept insisting that Britaincould not consider his offer unless it meant at the same time a peaceful

* According to Erich Kordt (Wahn und Wirklichkeit, p. 192) Hitler was so excitedby his triumph in Moscow that on the morning of August 25 he asked his pressbureau for news of the cabinet crises in Paris and London. He thought bothgovernments must fall. He was brought down to earth by being told of the firmspeeches of Chamberlain and Halifax in Parliament the day before.

The Last Days of Peace 549

settlement with Poland, Hitler replied, “If you think it useless then do notsend my offer at all.”

However, the ambassador had scarcely returned to the embassy a fewsteps up the Wilhelmstrasse from the Chancellery before Dr. Schmidtwas knocking at the door with a written copy of Hitler’s remarks—withconsiderable deletions—coupled with a message from the Fuehrer beggingHenderson to urge the British government “to take the offer very seri-ously” and suggesting that he himself fly to London with it, for whichpurpose a German plane would be at his disposal.5

It was rarely easy, as readers who have got this far in this book areaware, to penetrate the strange and fantastic workings of Hitler’s feveredmind. His ridiculous “offer” of August 25 to guarantee the British Em-pire was obviously a brain storm of the moment, for he had not men-tioned it two days before when he discussed Chamberlain’s letter withHenderson and composed a reply to it. Even making allowances for thedictator’s aberrations, it is difficult to believe that he himself took it asseriously as he made out to the British ambassador. Besides, how couldthe British government, as he requested, be asked to take it “very seri-ously” when Chamberlain would scarcely have time to read it before theNazi armies hurtled into Poland at dawn on the morrow—the X Daywhich still held?

But behind the “offer,” no doubt, was a serious purpose. Hitler ap-parently believed that Chamberlain, like Stalin, wanted an out by whichhe could keep his country out of war. * He had purchased Stalin’s benevo-lent neutrality two days before by offering Russia a free hand in EasternEurope “from the Baltic to the Black Sea.” Could he not buy Britain’snonintervention by assuring the Prime Minister that the Third Reichwould never, like the Hohenzollern Germany, become a threat to theBritish Empire? What Hitler did not realize, nor Stalin—to the latter’sawful cost—was that to Chamberlain, his eyes open at long last, Ger-many’s domination of the European continent would be the greatest of allthreats to the British Empire—as indeed it would be to the Soviet RussianEmpire. For centuries, as Hitler had noted in Mein Kampf, the first im-perative of British foreign policy had been to prevent any single nationfrom dominating the Continent.

At 5:30 p.m. Hitler received the French ambassador but had little ofimportance to say to him beyond repeating that “Polish provocation ofthe Reich” could no longer be endured, that he would not attack Francebut that if France entered the conflict he would fight her to the end.Whereupon he started to dismiss the French envoy by rising from hischair. But Coulondre had something to say to the Fuehrer of the ThirdReich and he insisted on saying it. He told him on his word of honor as a

* Or if not out of war, out of any serious participation in it. General Haider in-timates this in a recapitulation of the “sequence of events” of August 25 in a diaryentry made later, on August 28. Noting that at 1:30 p.m. on the twenty-fifth Hitlersaw Henderson, Haider added: “Fuehrer would not take it amiss if England were towage a sham war.”

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soldier that he had not the least doubt “that if Poland is attacked Francewill be at the side of Poland with all its forces.”

“It is painful to me,” Hitler replied, “to think of having to fight yourcountry, but that does not depend on me. Please say that to MonsieurDaladier.”6

It was now 6 p.m. of August 25 in Berlin. Tension in the capital hadbeen building up all day. Since early afternoon all radio, telegraph andtelephone communication with the outside world had been cut off onorders from the Wilhelmstrasse. The night before, the last of the Britishand French correspondents and nonoflficial civilians had hurriedly leftfor the nearest frontier. During the day of the twenty-fifth, a Friday, itbecame known that the German Foreign Office had wired the embassiesand consulates in Poland, France and Britain requesting that Germancitizens be asked to leave by the quickest route. My own diary notes forAugust 24-25 recall the feverish atmosphere in Berlin. The weather waswarm and sultry and everyone seemed to be on edge. All through thesprawling city antiaircraft guns were being set up, and bombers flewcontinually overhead in the direction of Poland. “It looks like war," Iscribbled on the evening of the twenty-fourth; “War is imminent,” I re-peated the next day, and on both nights, I remember, the Germans wesaw in the Wilhelmstrasse whispered that Hitler had ordered the soldiers tomarch into Poland at dawn.

Their orders, we now know, were to attack at 4:30 on Saturday morn-ing, August 26.* And up until 6 p.m. on the twenty-fifth nothing that hadhappened during the day, certainly not the personal assurances of Ambas-sadors Henderson and Coulondre that Britain and France would surelyhonor their commitments to Poland, had budged Adolf Hitler from hisresolve to go ahead with his aggression on schedule. But about 6 p.m.,or shortly afterward, there arrived news from London and Rome thatmade this man of apparently unshakable will hesitate.

It is not qui:e clear from the confidential German records and the post-war testimony of the Wilhelmstrasse officials at just what time Hitlerlearned of the signing in London of the formal Anglo-Polish treaty whichtransformed Britain’s unilateral guarantee of Poland into a pact of mutualassistance.f There is some evidence in Haider’s diary and in the German

* Although Hitler’s standing orders, which had not been canceled, called for theattack on this day and hour and, as Haider said, were “automatic,” a number ofGerman writers have reported that the Fuehrer gave specific orders a few minutesafter 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 Generalvon Vormann, who was present at the Chancellery when it was issued. No officialrecord of this has been found in the German documents.

t There was a secret protocol to this treaty which stated that the “EuropeanPower” mentioned in Article I, whose aggression would bring about mutual militaryassistance, was Germany. This saved the British government from the disastrousstep of having to declare war on the Soviet Union when the Red Army, in cahootswith the Germans, invaded eastern Poland.

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Naval Register that the Wilhelmstrasse got wind at noon on August 25that the pact would be signed during the day. The General Staff Chiefnotes that at 12 noon he got a call from OKW asking what was the latestdeadline for postponement of the decision to attack and that he replied:3 p.m. The Naval Register also mentions that news of the Anglo-Polishpact and of “information from the Duce” was received at noon.7 But thisis impossible. Word from Mussolini did not arrive, according to a Germannotation on the document, until “about 6 p.m.” And Hitler could not havelearned of the signing of the Anglo-Polish treaty in London until aboutthat time, since this event only took place at 5:35 p.m.—and, at that,barely fifteen minutes after the Polish ambassador in London, CountEdward Raczynski, had received permission from his Foreign Ministerin Warsaw over the telephone to affix his signature.*

Whatever time he received it—and around 6 p.m. is an accurateguess—Hitler was moved by the news from London. This could well beBritain’s answer to his “offer,” the terms of which must have reachedLondon by now. It meant that he had failed in his bid to buy off theBritish as he had bought off the Russians. Dr. Schmidt, who was inHitler’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 fromRome. Throughout the afternoon the German dictator had waited with“unconcealed impatience,” as Dr. Schmidt describes it, for the Duce’sreply to his letter. The Italian ambassador, Attolico, was summoned tothe Chancellery at 3 p.m., shortly after Henderson had departed, but hecould 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 outto get Ciano on the long-distance telephone, but the Foreign Minister wasunable to get through to him. Attolico, Schmidt says, was dismissed “withscant courtesy.”9

For some days Hitler had been receiving warnings from Rome that hisAxis partner might go back on him at the crucial moment of the attackon Poland, and this intelligence was not without foundation. No soonerhad Ciano returned from his disillusioning meetings with Hitler andRibbentrop on August 11 to 13, than he set to work to turn Mussoliniagainst the Germans—an action which did not escape the watchful eyesof the German Embassy in Rome. The Fascist Foreign Minister’s diarytraces the ups and downs of his efforts to make the Italian dictator seethe light and disassociate himself, in time, from Hitler’s war.10 On theevening of his return from Berchtesgaden on August 13, Ciano saw the

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

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Duce and after describing his talks with Hitler and Ribbentrop tried toconvince 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 firsthe agrees with me. Then he says that honor compels him to march withGermany. Finally, he states that he wants his part of the booty in Croatia andDalmatia.

August 14.—I find Mussolini worried. I do not hesitate to arouse in himevery possible anti-German reaction by every means in my power. I speakto 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 theGermans on the Polish question. The alliance was based on premises whichthey now deny; they are traitors and we must not have any scruples inditching 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 blindlywith the Germans. However ... he wants time to prepare the break withGermany ... He is more and more convinced that the democracies willfight . . . This time it means war. And we cannot engage in war because ourplight does not permit us to do so.

August 18.-—A conversation with the Duce in the morning; his usual shiftingfeelings. He still thinks it possible that the democracies will not march and thatGermany might do good business cheaply, from which business he does notwant to be excluded. Then, too, he fears Hitler’s rage. He believes that adenunciation of the pact or something like it might induce Hitler to abandonthe Polish question in order to square accounts with Italy. All this makes himnervous and disturbed.

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

August 21.—Today I have spoken very clearly . . . When I entered theroom 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 acommon line of action. I found myself face to face with a Diktat. TheGermans, 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 meetingwith Ribbentrop for the next day at the Brenner and inform him that Italy

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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 callfor him at noon, but at 5:30 he finally came on the line. The NaziForeign Minister could not give Ciano an immediate answer about meetingon the Brenner on such quick notice, because he was “waiting for animportant message from Moscow” and would call back later. This hedid at 10:30 p.m.

August 22.—Last evening at 10:30 a new act opened [Ciano recorded inhis diary], Ribbentrop telephoned that he would prefer to see me in Innsbruckrather than at the frontier, because he was to leave later for Moscow to sign apolitical 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 nolonger be timely.” Once more their German ally had shown its contemptfor them by not letting them know about the deal with Moscow.

The hesitations of the Duce, the anti-German feelings of Ciano andthe possibility that Italy might crawl out of its obligations under ArticleIII of the Pact of Steel, which called for the automatic participation inwar of one party if the other party “became involved in hostilities withanother Power,” became known in Berlin before Ribbentrop set off forMoscow on August 22.

On August 20, Count Massimo Magistrati, the Italian charge d’affairesin Berlin, called on Weizsaecker at the Foreign Office and revealed “anItalian state of mind which, although it does not surprise me,” the StateSecretary informed Ribbentrop in a confidential memorandum,11 “mustin my opinion definitely be considered.” What Magistrati brought to theattention of Weizsaecker was that since Germany had not adhered to theterms of the alliance, which called for close contact and consultation onmajor questions, and had treated its conflict with Poland as an exclusivelyGerman problem, “Germany was thus forgoing Italy’s armed assistance.”And if contrary to the German view the Polish conflict developed into abig war, Italy did not consider that the “prerequisites” of the allianceexisted. In brief, Italy was seeking an out.

Two days later, on August 23, a further warning was received inBerlin from Ambassador Hans Georg von Mackensen in Rome. Hewrote to Weizsaecker on what had been happening “behind the scenes.”The letter, according to a marginal note in Weizsaecker’s handwriting onthe captured document, was “submitted to the Fuehrer.” It must haveopened his eyes. The Italian position, following a series of meetingsbetween Mussolini, Ciano and Attolico, was, Mackensen reported, thatif Germany invaded Poland she would violate the Pact of Steel, which wasbased on an agreement to refrain from war until 1942. Furthermore,contrary to the German view, Mussolini was sure that if Germanyattacked Poland both Britain and France would intervene—“and the

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United States too after a few months.” While Germany remained on thedefensive in the west the French and British,

in the Duce’s opinion, would descend on Italy with all the forces at theirdisposal. In this situation Italy would have to bear the whole brunt of the warin order to give the Reich the opportunity of liquidating the affair in theEast . . .12

It was with these warnings in mind that Hitler got off his letter toMussolini on the morning of August 25 and waited all day, with mountingimpatience, for an answer. Shortly after midnight of the day before,Ribbentrop, after an evening recounting to the Fuehrer the details of histriumph in Moscow, rang up Ciano to warn him, “at the instigation of theFuehrer,” of the “extreme gravity of the situation due to Polish provoca-tions.”* A note by Weizsaecker reveals that the call was made to “preventthe Italians from being able to speak of unexpected developments.”

By the time Ambassador Mackensen handed Mussolini Hitler’s letterat 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 wouldimmediately enter the war, with catastrophic consequences for Italy, whoseNavy was no match for the British Mediterranean Fleet and whose Armywould be overwhelmed by the French.f According to a dispatch whichMackensen got off to Berlin at 10:25 p.m. describing the meeting, Mus-solini, after carefully reading the letter twice in his presence, declaredthat he was “in complete agreement” about the Nazi-Soviet Pact andthat he realized that an “armed conflict with Poland could no longer beavoided.” Finally—“and this he emphasized expressly,” Mackensenreported—“he stood beside us unconditionally and with all his re-sources.”13

But this was not what the Duce wrote the Fuehrer, unbeknownst tothe German ambassador, the text of which was hurriedly telephoned byCiano to Attolico, who had returned to his post in Berlin and who “about6 p.m.” arrived at the Chancellery to deliver it in person to Adolf Hitler.

* It must be kept in mind that the “Polish provocations” which Hitler and Ribben-trop 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 underflaming headlines in the controlled Nazi press, were almost entirely invented bythe 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,t The day before, on August 24, Ciano had visited the King at his summer residencein Piedmont, and the aging ruler, who had been shunted to the sidelines by Mus-solini, spoke contemptuously of the country’s armed services. “The Army is in apitiful state,” Ciano quotes him as saying. “Even the defense of our frontier isinsufficient. He has made thirty-two inspections and is convinced that the Frenchcan go through it with great ease. The officers of the Italian Army are notqualified for the job, and our equipment is old and obsolete.” (Ciano Diaries,p. 127.)

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It struck the Fuehrer, according to Schmidt, who was present, like abombshell. After expressing his “complete approval” of the Nazi-SovietPact and his “understanding concerning Poland,” Mussolini came to themain point.

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

If Germany attacks Poland and the conflict remains localized, Italy willafford Germany every form of political and economic assistance which isrequested of her.

If Germany attacks Poland* and the latter’s allies open a counterattackagainst Germany, I inform you in advance that it will be opportune for menot to take the initiative in military operations in view of the present state ofItalian war preparations, of which we have repeatedly and in good time in-formed you, Fuehrer, and Herr von Ribbentrop.

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

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

I am furthermore of the opinion that the purely military measures whichhave 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 truthand inform you beforehand about the real situation. Not to do so might haveunpleasant consequences for us all. This is my view, and since within a shorttime I must summon the highest governmental bodies, I beg you to let meknow yours.

MUSSOLINlt15

* In the German translation of Mussolini’s letter found in the Foreign Office archivesafter the war, and which I have used here, the word “Germany” has been crossedout here and the word “Poland” typed above it, making it read: “If Poland at-tacks . . .” In the Italian original, published after the war by the Italian govern-ment, the passage reads “Se la Germania attacca la Polonia.” It is strange that theNazis falsified even the secret documents deposited in their official governmentarchives.14

t As if Mussolini’s letter were not bad enough medicine for Hitler, a number ofGerman writers, mostly observers at first hand of the dramatic events of the lastdays of peace, have published an imaginary text of this letter of the Duce to theFuehrer. Erich Kordt, one of the anti-Nazi conspirators, who was head of thesecretariat at the Foreign Office, was the first to commit this faked version to printin his book, Wahn und Wirklichkeit, published in Stuttgart in 1947. Kordt droppedit 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 evenin the English translation of Paul Schmidt’s memoirs published in New York andLondon in 1951. Yet the authentic text was published in Italy in 1946 and anEnglish 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 theletter as saying, “In one of the most painful moments of my life, I have to inform

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

“The Italians are behaving just as they did in 1914,” Dr. Schmidtoverheard Hitler remark bitterly after Attolico had left, and that eveningthe Chancellery echoed with unkind words about the “disloyal Axispartner.” But words were not enough. The German Army was scheduledto hop off against Poland in nine hours, for it was now 6:30 p.m. ofAugust 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 fromLondon and Rome, to go ahead with it or postpone or cancel it.

Schmidt, accompanying Attolico out of Hitler’s study, bumped intoGeneral Keitel rushing to the presence of the Fuehrer. A few minuteslater the General hurried out, crying excitedly to his adjutant, “The orderto advance must be delayed again!”

Hitler, pushed into a corner by Mussolini and Chamberlain, had swiftlymade his decision. “Fuehrer considerably shaken,” Haider noted in hisdiary, and then continued:

7:30 p.m.—Treaty between Poland and England ratified. No opening ofhostilities. All troop movements to be stopped, even near the frontier if nototherwise possible.

8:35 p.m.—Keitel confirms. Canaris: Telephone restrictions lifted onEngland and France. Confirms development of events.

The German Naval Register gives a more concise account of thepostponement, 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 PactEngland-Poland of August 25, noon, and information from Duce that hewould 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 inter-rogation, their version of the postponement of the attack.17 Ribbentropclaimed that when he heard about the Anglo-Polish pact and “heard” that

you that Italy is not ready for war. According to what the responsible heads ofthe services tell me, the gasoline supplies of the Italian Air Force are so low thatthey would last only for three weeks of fighting. The position is the same withregard to supplies for the Army, and supplies of raw materials . . . Please under-stand my situation.” For an amusing note on the faking of this letter, see Namier,In the Nazi Era, p. 5.

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“military steps were being taken against Poland” (as if he didn’t knowall along about the attack) he went “at once” to the Fuehrer and urgedhim to call off the invasion of Poland, to which “the Fuehrer at onceagreed.” 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 onthe 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 hisway out of his impasse was confirmed by Goering during a pretrial inter-rogation at Nuremberg.

On the day that England gave her official guarantee to Poland the Fuehrercalled me on the telephone and told me that he had stopped the plannedinvasion 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 amutual-assistance treaty with Poland was the stronger influence in in-ducing the German leader to postpone the attack. Yet it is strange thatafter Ambassador Henderson on this very day had again warned him thatBritain would fight if Poland were attacked and that after the Britishgovernment had now solemnly given its word to that effect in a formaltreaty, he still believed he could, as he told Goering, “eliminate Britishintervention.” It is likely that his experience with Chamberlain at Munichled him to believe that the Prime Minister again would capitulate if a wayout could be concocted. But again it is strange that a man who had pre-viously shown such insight into foreign politics did not know of thechanges in Chamberlain and in the British position. After all, Hitlerhimself had provoked them.

It took some doing to halt the German Army on the evening of August25, for many units were already on the move. In East Prussia the ordercalling 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 theforward detachments succeeded in stopping the troops. The motorizedcolumns of General von Kleist’s corps to the south had begun to moveat dusk up to the Polish frontier. They were halted on the border by astaff officer who made a quick landing in a small scouting plane on thefrontier. In a few sectors the orders did not arrive until after the shootingbegan, but since the Germans had been provoking incidents all along theborder for several days the Polish General Staff apparently did not suspectwhat had really happened. It did report on August 26 that numerous“German bands” had crossed the border and attacked blockhouses andcustoms posts with machine guns and hand grenades and that “in one caseit was a Regular Army detachment.”

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JOY AND CONFUSION OF THE “CONSPIRATORS”

The news on the evening of August 25 that Hitler had called off theattack on Poland caused great jubilation among the conspiratorial mem-bers of the Abwehr. Colonel Oster gave Schacht and Gisevius the news,exclaiming, “The Fuehrer is done for,” and the next morning AdmiralCanaris was even more in the clouds. “Hitler,” Canaris declared, “willnever survive this blow. Peace has been saved for the next twenty years.”Both men thought there was no further need of bothering to overthrowthe Nazi dictator; he was finished.

For several weeks as the fateful summer approached its end the con-spirators, as they conceived themselves, had again been busy, though withwhat purpose exactly it is difficult to comprehend. Goerdeler, Adam vonTrott, Helmuth von Moltke, Fabian von Schlabrendorff and Rudolf Pechelhad all made the pilgrimage to London and there had informed not onlyChamberlain and Halifax but Churchill and other British leaders thatHitler planned to attack Poland at the end of August. These Germanopponents of the Fuehrer could see for themselves that Britain, right upto its umbrella-carrying Chamberlain, had changed since the days ofMunich, and that the one condition they themselves had made the yearbefore to their resolve to get rid of Hitler, namely that Britain and Francedeclare they would oppose any further Nazi aggression by armed force,had now been fulfilled. What more did they want? It is not clear fromthe records they have left, and one gathers the impression that they didnot quite know themselves. Well-meaning though they were, they weregripped by utter confusion and a paralyzing sense of futility. Hitler’s holdon Germany—on the Army, the police, the government, the people—wastoo complete to be loosened or undermined by anything they could thinkof doing.

On August 15, Hassell visited Dr. Schacht at his new bachelor quartersin Berlin. The dismissed Minister of Economics had just returned froma six-month journey to India and Burma. “Schacht’s view is,” Hassellwrote in his diary, “that we can do nothing but keep our eyes open andwait, that things will follow their inevitable course.” Hassell himself toldGisevius the same day, according to his own diary entry, that he “too wasin favor of postponing direct action for the moment.”

But what “direct action” was there to be put off? General Haider,keen as Hitler to smash Poland, was not at the moment interested ingetting rid of the dictator. General von Witzleben, who was to have ledthe troops in the overthrow of the Fuehrer the year before, was now incommand of an army group in the west and was, therefore, in no positionto 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 BBCradio news from London and soon realized that the General was interestedmerely in finding out what was going on.

As for General Haider, he was preoccupied with last-minute plans forthe onslaught on Poland, to the exclusion of any treasonable thoughts

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about getting rid of Hitler. When interrogated after the war—on Feb-ruary 26, 1946—at Nuremberg, he was exceedingly fuzzy about why heand the other supposed enemies of the Nazi regime had done nothing inthe last days of August to depose the Fuehrer and thus save Germanyfrom involvement in war. “There was no possibility,” he said. Why?Because General von Witzleben had been transferred to the west. With-out Witzleben the Army could not act.

What about the German people? When Captain Sam Harris, theAmerican interrogator, reminding Haider that he had said the Germanpeople were opposed to war, asked, “If Hitler were irrevocably com-mitted to war, why couldn’t you count on the support of the peoplebefore the invasion of Poland?” Haider replied, “You must excuse meif I smile. If I hear the word ‘irrevocably’ connected with Hitler, I mustsay that nothing was irrevocable.” And the General Staff Chief went onto explain that as late as August 22, after Hitler had revealed to his gen-erals at the meeting on the Obersalzberg his “irrevocable” resolve toattack Poland and fight the West if necessary, he himself did not believethat the Fuehrer would do what he said he would do.18 In the light ofHaider’s own diary entries for this period, this is an astonishing statementindeed. But it is typical not only of Haider but of most of the otherconspirators.

Where was General Beck, Haider’s predecessor as Chief of the ArmyGeneral Staff and the acknowledged leader of the conspirators? Accord-ing to Gisevius, Beck wrote a letter to General von Brauchitsch but theArmy Commander in Chief did not even acknowledge it. Next, Giseviussays, Beck had a long talk with Haider, who agreed with him that a bigwar would be the ruin of Germany but thought “Hitler would never permita world war” and that therefore there was no need at the moment to tryto overthrow him.19

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

Beck [is] a most cultured, attractive and intelligent man. Unfortunately, hehas a very low opinion of the leading people in the Army. For that reason hecould see no place there where we could gain a foothold. He is firmly con-vinced of the vicious character of the policies of the Third Reich.30

The convictions of Beck—and of the others around him—were highand noble, but as Adolf Hitler prepared to hurl Germany into war notone of these estimable Germans did anything to halt him. The task wasobviously 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 toKeitel which he had personally read to the OKW Chief at the middle ofAugust,* he called on him again on Sunday, August 27, and, according to

* See above, pp. 517-18.

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his own account, “handed him graphically illustrated statistical evidence. . . [which] demonstrated clearly the tremendous military-economicsuperiority of the Western Powers and the tribulation we would face,”Keitel, with unaccustomed courage, showed the material to Hitler, whoreplied that he did not share General Thomas’ “anxiety over the dangerof a world war, especially since he had now got the Soviet Union on hisside.”21

Thus ended the attempts of the “conspirators” to prevent Hitler fromlaunching World War II, except for the feeble last-minute efforts of Dr.Schacht, of which the canny financier made much in his own defense atthe Nuremberg trial. On his return from India in August he wrote lettersto Hitler, Goering and Ribbentrop—at the fateful moment none of theopposition leaders seem to have gone beyond writing letters and memo-randa—but, to his “very great surprise,” as he said later, received noreplies. Next he decided to go to Zossen, a few miles southeast of Berlin,where the Army High Command had set up headquarters for the Polishcampaign, and personally confront General von Brauchitsch. To tell himwhat? On the witness stand at Nuremberg Schacht explained that heintended to tell the Army chief that it would be unconstitutional forGermany to go to war without the approval of the Reichstag! It wastherefore the duty of the Army Commander in Chief to respect his oathto the constitution!

Alas, Dr. Schacht never got to see Brauchitsch. He was warned byCanaris that if he came to Zossen the Army commander “would probablyhave us arrested immediately”—a fate that did not seem attractive to thisformer supporter of Hitler.22 But the real reason Schacht did not go toZossen on his ridiculous errand (it would have been child’s play for Hitlerto get the rubber-stamp Reichstag to approve his war had he wanted tobodier with such a formality) was stated by Gisevius when he took thewitness stand on behalf of Schacht at Nuremberg. It seems that Schachtplanned to go to Zossen on August 25 and called off the trip when Hitleron that evening called off the attack on Poland scheduled for the nextday. Three days later, according to the testimony of Gisevius, Schachtagain decided to carry out his mission at Zossen but Canaris informed himit was too late.23 It wasn’t that the “conspirators” missed the bus; theynever arrived at the bus station to try to catch it.

As ineffective as the handful of anti-Nazi Germans in staying Hitler’shand were the various neutral world leaders who now appealed to theFuehrer to avert war. On August 24, President Roosevelt sent urgentmessages to Hitler and the President of Poland pressing them to settletheir differences without resorting to arms. President Moscicki, in adignified reply the following day, reminded Roosevelt that it was notPoland which was “formulating demands and demanding concessions”but that nevertheless it was willing to settle its disputes with Germany bydirect negotiation or by conciliation, as the American President hadurged. Hitler did not reply (Roosevelt had reminded him that he had not

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answered the President’s appeal to him of last April) and on the next day,August 25, Roosevelt sent a second message, informing Hitler ofMoscicki’s conciliatory response, and beseeching him to “agree to thepacific means of settlement accepted by the Government of Poland.”

To the second letter there was no answer either, although on theevening of August 26 Weizsaecker summoned the American charged’affaires in Berlin, Alexander C. Kirk, and asked him to tell the Presidentthat the Fuehrer had received the two telegrams and had placed them “inthe hands of the Foreign Minister for consideration by the government.”

The Pope took to the air on August 24 to make a broadcast appeal forpeace, beseeching “by the blood of Christ . . . the strong [to] hear usthat they may not become weak through injustice . . . [and] if they desirethat their power may not be a destruction.” On the afternoon of August31 the Pope sent identical notes to the governments of Germany, Poland,Italy and the two Western Powers “beseeching, in the name of God, theGerman and Polish Governments ... to avoid any incident,” beggingthe British, French and Italian governments to support his appeal andadding:

The Pope is unwilling to abandon hope that pending negotiations may lead toa just pacific solution.

His Holiness, like almost everyone else in the world, did not realizethat the “pending negotiations” were but a propaganda trick by Hitler tojustify his aggression. Actually, as shortly will be shown, there were nobona fide negotiations, pending or otherwise, on that last afternoon of thepeace.

A few days earlier, on August 23, the King of the Belgians, in the nameof the rulers of the “Oslo” powers (Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxem-bourg, Finland and the three Scandinavian states), had also broadcast amoving appeal for peace, calling “on the men who are responsible forthe course of events to submit their disputes and their claims to opennegotiation.” On August 28 the King of the Belgians and the Queen ofthe Netherlands jointly offered their good offices “in the hope of avertingwar.”24

Noble in form and in intent as all these neutral appeals were, there issomething unreal and pathetic about them when reread today. It was asif the President of the United States, the Pope and the rulers of the smallNorthern European democracies lived on a different planet ftom that ofthe Third Reich and had no more understanding of what was going on inBerlin than of what might be transpiring on Mars. This ignorance of themind and character and purposes of Adolf Hitler, and indeed of theGermans, who, with a few exceptions, were ready to follow him blindlyno matter where nor how, regardless of morals, ethics, honor, or theChristian concept of humanity, was to cost the peoples led by Rooseveltand the monarchs of Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Norway and Den-mark dearly in the months to come.

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Those of us who were in Berlin during those last few tense days ofpeace and who were attempting to report the news to the outside worldknew very little either of what was going on in the Wilhelmstrasse, wherethe Chancellery and the Foreign Office were, or in the Bendlerstrasse,where the military had their offices. We followed as best we could thefrantic comings and goings in the Wilhelmstrasse. We sifted daily anavalanche of rumors, tips and “plants.” We caught the mood of thepeople in the street and of the government officials, party leaders, diplo-mats and soldiers of our acquaintance. But what was said at AmbassadorHenderson’s frequent and often stormy interviews with Hitler and Rib-bentrop, what was written between Hitler and Chamberlain, betweenHitler and Mussolini, between Hitler and Stalin, what was talked aboutbetween Ribbentrop and Molotov and between Ribbentrop and Ciano,what was con ained in all the secret, coded dispatches humming over thewires between the stumbling, harassed diplomats and foreign-officeofficials, and all the moves which the military chiefs were planning ormaking—of all this we and the general public remained almost completelyignorant at the time.

A few things, of course, we, and the public, knew. The Nazi-SovietPact was trumpe ed to the skies by the Germans, though the secret pro-tocol dividing up Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe remained un-known until after the war. We knew that even before it was signedHenderson had flown to Berchtesgaden to emphasize to Hitler that thepact 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 afew days. By August 25 the last of the British and French civilians hadskipped out. The next day the big Nazi rally at Tannenberg scheduledfor August 27, at which Hitler was to have spoken, was publicly calledoff, as was the annual party convention at Nuremberg (the “Party Rally ofPeace,” Hitler had officially called it), due to convene the first week ofSeptember. On August 27 the government announced that rationing offood, soap, shoes, textiles and coal would begin on the following day.This announcement, I remember, above all others, woke up the Germanpeople to the imminence of war, and their grumbling about it was veryaudible. On Monday, August 28, the Berliners watched troops pouringthrough the city toward the east. They were being transported in movingvans, grocery trucks and every other sort of vehicle that could bescraped 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 theBerliners, regardless of how near war was, had betaken themselves to thelakes and the woods which surround the capital. Returning to the citySunday evening, they learned from the radio that there had been asecret, unofficial meeting of the Reichstag at the Chancellery. A D.N.B.communique stated that the “Fuehrer outlined the gravity of the situa-tion”—this was the first the German public had been told by Hitler that

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the hour was grave. No details of the meeting were given and no oneoutside of the Reichstag members and of Hitler’s entourage could knowof the mood the Nazi dictator was in that day. Haider’s diary of August28 supplied—much later—one account, given him by Colonel Oster ofthe Abwehr.

Conference at Reich Chancellery at 5:30 p.m. Reichstag and several Partynotables . . . Situation very grave. Determined to solve Eastern questionone way or another. Minimum demands: return of Danzig, settling of Cor-ridor question. Maximum demands: “Depending on military situation.” Ifminimum demands not satisfied, then war: Brutal! He will himself be onfront line. The Duce’s attitude served our best interests.

War very difficult, perhaps hopeless; “As long as I am alive there will be notalk of capitulation.” Soviet Pact widely misunderstood by Party. A pactwith Satan to cast out the Devil . . . “Applause on proper cues, but thin.”

Personal impression of Fuehrer: exhausted, haggard, croaking voice, pre-occupied. “Keeps himself completely surrounded now by his S.S. advisers.”

In Berlin too a foreign observer could watch the way the press, underGoebbels’ 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 beencut off from the truth of what was going on in the world. For a time theSwiss German-language newspapers from Zurich and Basel could bepurchased at the leading newsstands in Germany and these presentedobjective news. But in recent years their sale in the Reich had beeneither prohibited or limited to a few copies. For Germans who could readEnglish or French, there were occasionally a few copies of the Londonand Paris journals available, though not enough to reach more than ahandful of persons.

“How completely isolated a world the German people live in,” I notedin my diary on August 10, 1939. “A glance at the newspapers yesterdayand today reminds you of it.” I had returned to Germany from a briefleave in Washington, New York and Paris, and coming up in the trainfrom my home in Switzerland two days before I had bought a batch ofBerlin and Rhineland newspapers. They quickly propelled one back tothe cockeyed world of Nazism, which was as unlike the world I had justleft as if it had been on another planet. I noted further on August 10, afterI had arrived in Berlin:

Whereas all the rest of the world considers that the peace is about to bebroken by Germany, that it is Germany that is threatening to attack Poland. . . here in Germany, in the world the local newspapers create, the veryreverse is maintained . . . What the Nazi papers are proclaiming is this: thatit is Poland which is disturbing the peace of Europe; Poland which is threaten-ing Germany with armed invasion . . .

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“Poland, Look Out!” warns the B.Z. headline, adding: “Answer toPoland, the Runner-Amok [Amoklauffer] against Peace and Rightin Europe!”

Or the headline in Der Fuehrer, daily paper of Karlsruhe, which I boughton the train: “Warsaw Threatens Bombardment of Danzig—Unbeliev-able Agitation of the Polish Archmadness [Polnischen Groessen-wahsn]!”

You ask: But the German people can’t possibly believe these lies? Thenyou talk to them. So many do.

By Saturday, August 26, the date originally set by Hitler for the attackon Poland, Goebbels’ press campaign had reached its climax. I noted inmy 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 PassengerPlanes Shot At by Poles—In Corridor Many German Farmhouses inFlames!”

On my way to Broadcast House at midnight I picked up the Sundayedition (August 27) of the Voelkischer Beobachter. Across the wholetop 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 hadarrived early in the evening of August 25 and which, along with the newsof the signing of the Anglo—Polish alliance, had caused him to postponethe attack on Poland scheduled for the next day, Hitler got off a curt noteto the Duce asking him “what implements of war and raw materials yourequire and within what time” in order that Italy could “enter a majorEuropean conflict.” The letter was telephoned by Ribbentrop personallyto the German ambassador in Rome at 7:40 p.m. and handed to theItalian dictator at 9:30 p.m.25

The next morning, in Rome, Mussolini had a meeting with the chiefsof the Italian armed services to draw up a list of his minimum requirements

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for a war lasting twelve months. In the words of Ciano, who helped drawit up, it was “enough to kill a bull—if a bull could read it.”26 It includedseven million tons of petroleum, six million tons of coal, two million tonsof steel, one million tons of timber and a long list of other items down to600 tons of molybdenum, 400 tons of titanium, and twenty tons ofzirconium. In addition Mussolini demanded 150 antiaircraft batteriesto protect the Italian industrial area in the north, which was but a fewminutes’ flying time from French air bases, a circumstance which hereminded Hitler of in a letter which he now composed. This message wastelephoned by Ciano to Attolico in Berlin shortly after noon on August26 and immediately delivered to Hitler.27

It contained more than a swollen list of materials needed. By now thedeflated Fascist leader was obviously determined to wriggle out of hisobligations to the Third Reich, and the Fuehrer, after reading this secondletter, 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 lowerfigures, if I had had the time agreed upon beforehand to accumulate stocks andto 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 bein vain and could compromise your cause along with my own.

On his own hook, Ambassador Attolico, who was opposed to war, andespecially 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 beforethe beginning of hostilities” and that this demand was “decisive.”*

Mussolini was still hoping for another Munich. He added a paragraphto his note, declaring that if the Fuehrer thought there was still “any pos-sibility whatsoever of a solution in the political field” he was ready, asbefore, to give his German colleague his full support. Despite their closepersonal relations and their Pact of Steel and all the noisy demonstrationsof solidarity they had given in the past years, the fact remains that evenat this eleventh hour Hitler had not confided to Mussolini his true aim, thedestruction of Poland, and that the Italian partner remained quite ignorantof it. Only at the end of this day, the twenty-sixth, was this gulf betweenthem finally bridged.

* This caused added resentment in Berlin and some confusion in Rome whichCiano had to straighten out. Attolico told Ciano later he had deliberately insistedon complete deliveries before hostilities “in order to discourage the Germans frommeeting our requests.” To deliver thirteen million tons of supplies in a few dayswas, of course, utterly impossible, and Mussolini apologized to Ambassador vonMackensen for the “misunderstanding,” remarking that “even the Almighty Himselfcould not transport such quantities here in a few days. It had never occurred to himto make such an absurd request.”28

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Within three hours on August 26, Hitler sent a long reply to the Duce’smessage. Ribbentrop again telephoned it, at 3:08 p.m., to Ambassadorvon 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 in-sistence that the materials must be supplied before the outbreak ofhostilities was “impossible.”

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

As neither France nor Britain can achieve any decisive successes in theWest, and as Germany, as a result of the Agreement with Russia, will have allher forces free in the East after the defeat of Poland ... I do not shrinkfrom solving the Eastern question even at the risk of complications in theWest.

Duce, I understand your position, and would only ask you to try to achievethe pinning down of Anglo-French forces by active propaganda and suitablemilitary demonstrations such as you have already proposed to me.29

This is the first evidence in the German documents that, twenty-fourhours after he had canceled the onslaught on Poland, Hitler had recoveredhis confidence and was going ahead with his plans, “even at the risk” ofwar with the West.

The same evening, August 26, Mussolini made somewhat of an effortto still dissuade him. He wrote again to the Fuehrer, Ciano again tele-phoned it to Attolico and it reached the Reich Chancellery just before7 P.M.

Fuehrer:

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

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

But the anguished Duce—anguished at cutting such a sorry figure atsuch a crucial moment—still thought that the possibilities of anotherMunich should be looked into.

... I venture to insist anew [he continued] and not at all from considera-tions of a pacifist character foreign to my nature, but by reason of the interests

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of our two peoples and our two regimes, on the opportunity for a politicalsolution which I regard as still possible and such a one as will give full moraland material satisfaction to Germany.30

The Italian dictator was, as the records now make clear, striving forpeace because he was not ready for war. But his role greatly disturbedhim. “I leave you to imagine,” he declared to Hitler in this last of theexchange of messages on August 26, “my state of mind in finding myselfcompelled by forces beyond my control not to afford you real solidarityat the moment of action.” Ciano noted in his diary after this busy daythat “the Duce is really out of his wits. His military instinct and his senseof honor were leading him to war. Reason has now stopped him. Butthis hurts him very much . . . Now he has had to confront the hardtruth. And this, for the Duce, is a great blow.”

After such a plentiful exchange of letters, Hitler was now resigned toMussolini’s leaving him in the lurch. Late on the night of August 26 hegot off one more note to his Axis partner. It was dispatched by telegramfrom Berlin at 12:10 a.m. on August 27 and reached Mussolini thatmorning at 9 o’clock.

Duce:

I have received your communication on your final attitude. I respect thereasons and motives which led you to take this decision. In certain circum-stances it can nevertheless work out well.

In my opinion, however, the prerequisite is that, at least until the outbreakof the struggle, the world should have no idea of the attitude Italy intends toadopt. I therefore cordially request you to support my struggle psychologicallywith your press or by other means. I would also ask you, Duce, if you possiblycan, by demonstrative military measures, at least to compel Britain and Franceto 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 cometo a major war, the issue in the East will be decided before the two WesternPowers can score a success. Then, this winter, at latest in the spring, I shallattack in the West with forces which will be at least equal to those of Franceand Britain . . .

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

Adolf Hitler81

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-

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French military and naval forces as possible and he would send Hitler theItalian workers he requested.32 Earlier in the day he had repeated toAmbassador von Mackensen “in forceful terms,” as the latter reported toBerlin, “that he still believed it possible to attain all our objectives withoutresort to war” and had added that he would again bring this aspect up inhis le ter to the Fuehrer.33 But he did not. For the moment he seemedtoo discouraged to even mention it again.

Although France would provide almost the entire Allied army onGermany’s western border if war were suddenly to come, and although, inthe initial weeks, it would far outnumber the German forces there, Hitlerseemed unconcerned as August began to run out about what the Frenchwould do. On August 26, Premier Daladier dispatched to him a movingand eloquent letter reminding him of what France would do; it wouldfight if Poland were attacked.

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

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

If the blood of France and of Germany flows again, as it did twenty-fiveyears ago, in a longer and even more murderous war, each of the two peopleswill fight with confidence in its own victory, but the most certain victors willbe the forces of destruction and barbarism.34

Ambassador Coulondre, in presenting the Premier’s letter, added apassionate verbal and personal appeal of his own, adjuring Hitler “in thename of humanity and for the repose of his own conscience not to let passthis last chance of a peaceful solution.” But the ambassador had the“sadness” to report to Paris that Daladier’s letter had not moved theFuehrer—“he stands pat.”

Hitler’s reply to the French Premier the next day was cleverly calculatedto play on the reluctance of Frenchmen to “die for Danzig,” though hedid not use the phrase—that was left for the French appeasers. Germanyhad renounced all territorial claims on France after the return of theSaar, Hitler declared; there was therefore no reason why they should goto war. If they did, it was not his fault and it would be “very painful” tohim.

That was the extent of the diplomatic contact between Germany andFrance during the last week of peace. Coulondre did not see Hitler afterthe meeting on August 26 until all was over. The country that concerned

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the German Chancellor the most at this juncture was Great Britain. AsHitler had told Goering on the evening of August 25, when he postponedthe move into Poland, he wanted to see whether he could “eliminateBritish intervention.”

GERMANY AND GREAT BRITAIN AT THEELEVENTH HOUR

“Fuehrer considerably shaken,” General Haider had noted in his diaryon August 25 after the news from Rome and London had induced Hitlerto draw back from the precipice of war. But the next afternoon theGeneral Staff Chief noticed an abrupt change in the Leader. “Fuehrervery calm and clear,” he jotted down in his diary at 3:22 p.m. There wasa reason for this and the General’s journal gives it. “Get everything readyfor morning of 7th Mobilization Day. Attack starts September 1.” Theorder was telephoned by Hitler to the Army High Command.

Hitler, then, would have his war with Poland. That was settled. In themeantime he would do everything he could to keep the British out.Haider’s diary notes convey the thinking of the Fuehrer and his entourageduring 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 Englandstresses 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 thesame basis as Saar. England will perhaps accept. Poland probably not. Wedgebetween them,35

The emphasis is Haider’s and there is no doubt that it accuratelyreflects up to a point what was in Hitler’s mind. He would contrive todrive a wedge between Poland and Britain and give Chamberlain anexcuse to get out of his pledge to Warsaw. Having ordered the Army tobe ready to march on September 1, he waited to hear from London abouthis grandiose offer to “guarantee” the British Empire.

He now had two contacts with the British government outside of theGerman Embassy in London, whose ambassador (Dirksen) was on leave,and which played no part in the frenzied eleventh-hour negotiations. Onecontact was official, through Ambassador Henderson, who had flown toLondon in a special German plane on the morning of Saturday, August26, wi.h the Fuehrer’s proposals. The other was unofficial, surreptitiousand, as it turned out, quite amateurish, through Goering’s Swedish friend,the peripatetic Birger Dahlerus, who had flown to London from Berlin

* I.e., Hitler’s offer of August 25 to “guarantee” the British Empire.

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with a message for the British government from the Luftwaffe chief onthe previous day.

“At this time,” Goering related later during an interrogation atNuremberg, “I was in touch with Halifax by a special courier outside theregular diplomatic channels.”*30 It was to the British Foreign Secretaryin London that the Swedish “courier” made his way at 6:30 p.m. onFriday, August 25. Dahlerus had been summoned to Berlin from Stock-holm the day before by Goering, who informed him that despite theNazi-Soviet Pact, which had been signed the preceding night, Germanywanted an “understanding” with Great Britain. He put one of his ownplanes at the Swede’s disposal so that he could rush to London to appriseLord 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 in-formed him that Henderson had just conferred with Hitler in Berlin andwas flying to London with the Fuehrer’s latest proposals and that sinceofficial channels of communication between Berlin and London had nowbeen reopened he did not think the services of the Swedish intermediarywould be needed any longer. But they soon proved to be. TelephoningGoering later that evening to report on his conference with Halifax,Dahlerus was informed by the Field Marshal that the situation haddeteriorated as the result of the signing of the Anglo-Polish treaty andthat probably only a conference between representatives of Britain andGermany could save the peace. As he later testified at Nuremberg, Goe-ring, like Mussolini, had in mind another Munich.

Late the same night the indefatigable Swede informed the BritishForeign Office of his talk with Goering, and the next morning he wasinvited to confer again with Halifax. This time he persuaded the BritishForeign Secretary to write a letter to Goering, whom he described as theone German who might prevent war. Couched in general terms, theletter was brief and noncommittal. It merely reiterated Britain’s desire toreach a peaceful settlement and stressed the need “to have a few days”to achieve it.f

* “Ribbentrop knew nothing whatsoever about Dahlerus being sent,” Goeringtestified on the stand at Nuremberg. “I never discussed the matter of Dahlerus withRibbentrop. He did not know at all that Dahlerus went back and forth betweenme and the British government.”37 But Goering kept Hitler informed,t 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 abovevolume came out in 1954, an omission much commented upon by British historians.Dahlerus is not mentioned in the British Blue Book of documents concerning theoutbreak of the war nor in Henderson’s Final Report nor even in Henderson’s bookFailure 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 fromother members of the British Embassy which have now been published, Dahlerusand his activities play a fairly prominent part, as they do in various memoranda ofthe British Foreign Office.

The role of this singular Swedish businessman in trying to save the peace was awell-kept secret and both the Wilhelmstrasse and Downing Street went to con-

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

Hitler took no notice of the letter which Dahlerus had brought fromHalifax and which had seemed important enough to Goering to have theFuehrer waked up in the middle of the night. Instead, for twenty minuteshe lectured the Swede on his early struggles, his great achievements andall his attempts to come to an understanding with the British. Next, whenDahlerus had got in a word abou‘ his having once lived in England as aworker, the Chancellor questioned him about the strange island and itsstrange people whom he had tried so vainly to understand. There followeda long and somewhat technical lecture on Germany’s military might. Bythis time, Dahlerus says, he thought his visit “would not prove useful.”In the end, however, the Swede seized an opportunity to tell his hostsomething 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, asthough to himself, that Germany was irresistible . . . Suddenly he stoppedin the middle of the room and stood there staring. His voice was blurred, andhis behavior that of a completely abnormal person. He spoke in staccatophrases: “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 onecould not follow him at all. Then he pulled himself together, raised his voiceas though addressing a large audience and shrieked: “I shall build airplanes,build airplanes, airplanes, airplanes, and I shall annihilate my enemies.” Heseemed more like a phantom from a storybook than a real person. I stared athim in amazement and turned to see how Goering was reacting, but he did notturn a hair.

siderable lengths to keep his movements hidden from the correspondents and neutraldiplomats, who, to the best of my knowledge, knew absolutely nothing of themuntil Dahlerus testified at Nuremberg on March 19, 1946. His book, The LastAttempt, was published in Swedish in 1945, at the end of the war, but the Englishedition did not come out until 1948 and there remained a further interval of sixyears 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 notmention Dahlerus, except in one routine memorandum reporting receipt of amessage from the Lufthansa airline that “Dahlerus, a gentleman from the ‘ForeignOffice,’ ” was arriving in Berlin August 26 on one of its planes. He does appear,however, in some later papers.

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Finally the excited Chancellor strode up to his guest and said, “HerrDahlerus, you who know England so well, can you give me any reasonfor my perpetual failure to come to an agreement with her?” Dahlerusconfesses that he “hesitated at first” to answer but then replied that in hispersonal opinion the British “lack of confidence in him and in his Govern-ment was the reason.”

“Idiots!” Dahlerus says Hitler stormed back, flinging out his right armand striking his breast with his left hand. “Have I ever told a lie in mvlife?”

The Nazi dictator thereupon calmed down, there was a discussion ofHitler’s proposals made through Henderson and it was finally settled thatDahlerus should fly back to London with a further offer to the Britishgovernment. Goering objected to committing it to writing and the accom-modating Swede was told he must, instead, commit it to memory. Itcontained six points:

1. Germany wanted a pact or alliance with Britain.

2. Britain was to help Germany obtain Danzig and the Corridor, butPoland was to have a free harbor in Danzig, to retain the Baltic portof 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 toher.

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 toLondon on the morning of Sunday, August 27, and shortly after noon waswhisked by a roundabout route so as to avoid the snooping press reportersand ushered into the presence of Chamberlain, Lord Halifax, Sir HoraceWilson and Sir Alexander Cadogan. It was obvious that the Britishgovernment now took the Swedish courier quite seriously.

He had brought with him some hastily scribbled notes jotted down inthe plane describing his meeting with Hitler and Goering the night before.In these notes he assured the two leading members of the British cabinetwho now scanned his memorandum that during the interview Hitler hadbeen calm and composed.” Although no record of this extraordinarySabbath meeting has been found in the Foreign Office archives, it has beenreconstructed in the volume of Foreign Office papers (Volume VII, ThirdSeries) from data furnished by Lord Halifax and Cadogan and from theemissary’s memorandum. The British version differs somewhat fromthat given by Dahlerus in his book and at Nuremberg, but taking thevarious accounts together what follows seems as accurate a report as weshall ever get.

Chamberlain and Halifax saw at once that they were faced with twosets of proposals from Hitler, the one given to Henderson and the othernow brought by Dahlerus, and that they differed. Whereas the first had

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proposed to guarantee the British Empire after Hitler had settled accountswith Poland, the second seemed to suggest that the Fuehrer was ready tonegotiate through the British for the return of Danzig and the Corridor,after which he would “guarantee” Poland’s new boundaries. This was anold refrain to Chamberlain, after his disillusioning experiences with Hitlerover Czechoslovakia, and he was skeptical of the Fuehrer’s offer asDahlerus outlined it. He told the Swede that he saw “no prospect of asettlement on these terms; the Poles might concede Danzig, but theywould fight rather than surrender the Corridor.”

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

So important had this unknown Swedish businessman become as anintermediary in the negotiations between the governments of the twomost powerful nations in Europe that, according to his own account, hetold the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary at this critical juncturethat “they should keep Henderson in London until Monday [the next day]so that the answer could be given after they had been informed howHitler regarded the English standpoint.”40

And what was the English standpoint, as Dahlerus was to present it toHitler? There is some confusion about it. According to Halifax’s ownrough notes of his verbal instructions to Dahlerus, the British standpointwas 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 thinksdifferent, 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 wasmore 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 asGermany was mobilized. With regard to the Polish boundaries, they wantedthem to be guaranteed by the five great powers. Concerning the Corridor, theyproposed that negotiations with Poland be undertaken immediately. As to thefirst point [of Hitler’s proposals] England was willing in principle to come toan agreement with Germany.42

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Dahlerus flew back to Berlin Sunday evening and saw Goering shortlybefore midnight. The Field Marshal did not consider the British reply“very favorable.” But after seeing Hitler at midnight, Goering rang upDahlerus at his hotel at 1 a.m. and said that the Chancellor would “acceptthe English standpoint” provided the official version to be brought byHenderson Monday evening was in agreement with it.

Goering was pleased, and Dahlerus even more so. The Swede woke upSir George Ogilvie Forbes, the counselor of the British Embassy, at2 a.m. to give him the glad tidings. Not only to do that but—such had hisposition become, at least in his own mind—to advise the British govern-ment what to say in its official reply. That note, which Henderson wouldbe bringing later on this Monday, August 28, must contain an undertak-ing, Dahlerus emphasized, that Britain would persuade Poland to negoti-ate with Germany directly and immediately.

Dahlerus has just telephoned [read a later dispatch from Forbes on August28] from Goering’s office following suggestions which he considers mostimportant.

1. British reply to Hitler should not contain any reference to Rooseveltplan.*

2. Hitler suspects Poles will try to avoid negotiations. Reply should there-fore contain clear statement that the Poles have been strongly advised toimmediately establish contact with Germany and negotiate.!43

Throughout the day the now confident Swede not only heaped adviceon Forbes, who dutifully wired it to London, but himself telephoned theBritish Foreign Office with a message for Halifax containing furthersuggestions.

At this critical moment in world history the amateur Swedish diplomathad indeed become the pivotal point between Berlin and London. At2 p.m. on August 28, Halifax, who had been apprised both from hisBerlin embassy and from Dahlerus’ telephone call to the Foreign Officeof the Swede’s urgent advice, wired the British ambassador in Warsaw,Sir Howard Kennard, to see Foreign Minister Beck “at once” and get himto authorize the British government to inform Hitler “that Poland is readyto enter at once into direct discussion with Germany.” The ForeignSecretary was in a hurry. He wanted to include the authorization in theofficial reply to Hitler which Henderson was waiting to carry back to

* Presumably President Roosevelt’s message to Hitler on August 24 and 25 urgingdirect negotiations between Germany and Poland.

t Dahlerus, it must be pointed out in all fairness, was not so pro-German as someof his messages seem to imply. On the night of this same Monday, after two hourswith Goering at Luftwaffe headquarters at Oranienburg, he rang up Forbes to tellhim, “German Army will be in final position of attack on Poland during night ofWednesday-Thursday, August 30-31.” Forbes got this intelligence off to Londonas quickly as possible.

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Berlin this same day. He urged his ambassador in Warsaw to telephoneBeck’s reply. Late in the afternoon Beck gave the requested authorizationand 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 preten-sions were preserved to the end), he was ushered into the presence ofHitler, to whom he handed a German translation of the note, at 10:30p.m. The Chancellor read it at once.

The British government “entirely agreed” with him, the communica-tion said, that there must “first” be a settlement of the differences betweenGermany and Poland. “Everything, however,” it added, “turns upon thenature of the settlement and the method by which it is to be reached.” Onthis matter, the note said, the Chancellor had been “silent.” Hitler’s offerto “guarantee” the British Empire was gently declined. The British gov-ernment “could not, for any advantage offered to Great Britain, acquiescein a settlement which put in jeopardy the independence of a State to whomthey had given their guarantee.”

That guarantee would be honored, but because the British governmentwas “scrupulous” concerning its obligations to Poland the Chancellormust not think it was not anxious for an equitable settlement.

It follows that the next step should be the initiation of direct discussionsbetween the German and Polish Governments on a basis ... of safeguard-ing Poland’s essential interests and the securing of the settlement by aninternational guarantee.

They [the British government] have already received a definite assurancefrom the Polish Government that they are prepared to enter into discussionson this basis, and H. M. Government hope the German Government wouldalso be willing to agree to this course.

... A just settlement . . . between Germany and Poland may open theway to world peace. Failure to reach it would ruin the hopes of an under-standing between Germany and Great Britain, would bring the two countriesinto conflict and might well plunge the whole world into war. Such an outcomewould be a calamity without parallel in history.46

When Hitler had finished reading the communication, Henderson be-gan to elaborate on it from notes, he told the Fuehrer, which he had madeduring his conversations with Chamberlain and Halifax. It was the onlymeeting with Hitler, he said later, in which he, the ambassador, did mostof the talking. The gist of his remarks was that Britain wanted Germany’sfriendship, it wanted peace, but it would fight if Hitler attacked Poland.The Fuehrer, who was by no means silent, replied by expatiating on thecrimes of Poland and on his own “generous” offers for a peaceful settle-ment with her, which would not be repeated. In fact today “nothing lessthan 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 popu-

3/0 the RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

lation voted for Germany at the postwar plebiscite.” This was not true,nor was Hitler’s rejoinder a moment la'er that a million Germans had beendriven out of the Corridor after 1918. There had been only 385,000Germans there, according to the German census of 1910, but by thistime, of course, the Nazi dictator expected everyone to swallow his lies.For the last time in his crumbling mission to Berlin, the British ambassa-dor swallowed a good deal, for, as he declared in his Final Report, “HerrHitler on this occasion was again friendly and reasonable and appeared tobe not dissatisfied with the answer which I had brought to him.”

In the end I asked him two straight questions,” Henderson wiredLondon at 2:35 a.m. in a long dispatch describing the interview.48

Was he willing to negotiate direct with the Poles, and was he ready todiscuss the question of an exchange of populations? He replied in theaffirmative as regards the latter (though I have no doubt that he was thinkingat 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 dis-patch, the Chancellor turned to Ribbentrop and said, “We must summonGoering to discuss it with him.” Hitler promised a written reply to theBritish communication on the next day, Tuesday, August 29.

Conversation was conducted,” Henderson emphasized to Halifax, “inquite 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 againstPoland; he was still hopeful, despite all the British government and Hender-son had said, of keeping Britain out of it.

Apparently, Hitler, encouraged by the obsequious and ignorant Rib-bentrop, 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 bigmistake if they believed that he was. I replied that I was fully aware of thefact and that we were not bluffing either. Herr Hitler stated that he fullyrealized that.47

He said so, but did he realize it? For in his reply on August 29 hedeliberately tried to trick the British government in a way which he musthave 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 ofoptimism in Berlin, especially in Goering’s camp, where the inimitableDahlerus now spent most of his time. At 1:30 in the morning of August29 the Swede received a telephone call from one of the Field Marshal’s

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adjutants, who was calling from the Chancellery, where Hitler, Ribben-trop and Goering had pondered the British note after Henderson’s de-parture. The word to Dahlerus from his German friend was that theBritish reply “was highly satisfactory and that there was every hope thatthe threat of war was past.”

Dahlerus conveyed the good news by long-distance telephone to theBritish Foreign Office later that morning, informing Halifax that “Hitlerand Goering considered that there was now a definite possibility of apeaceful settlement.” At 10:50 a.m. Dahlerus saw Goering, who greetedhim effusively, pumped his hand warmly and exclaimed, “There will bepeace! Peace is secured!” Fortified with such happy assurances, theSwedish courier made immediately for the British Embassy to let Hen-derson, whom he had not yet personally met, in on the glad tidings. Ac-cording to the ambassador’s dispatch describing this encounter, Dahlerusreported that the Germans were highly optimistic. They “agreed” wi'.hthe “main point” of the British reply. Hitler, Dahlerus said, was asking“only” for Danzig and the Corridor—not the whole Corridor but just asmall one along the railroad tracks to Danzig. In fact, Dahlerus reported,the Fuehrer was prepared to be “most reasonable. He would go a longway to meet the Poles.”48

Sir Nevile Henderson, on whom some light was finally dawning, was notso sure. He told his visitor, according to the latter, that one could notbelieve 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 ruthlessgame.

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 surethat the ambassador’s inexplicable pessimism did not jeopardize his ownefforts, he again telephoned the British Foreign Office at 7:10 p.m. toleave a message for Halifax that there would be “no difficulties in theGerman reply.” But, advised the Swede, the British government shouldtell 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 Ger-many’s actual reply. It soon became evident how hollow had been theoptimism of Goering and his Swedish friend. The meeting, as the ambas-sador advised Halifax immediately afterward, “was of a stormy characterand Herr Hitler was far less reasonable than yesterday.”

The formal, written German note itself reiterated the Reich’s desire forfriendship with Great Britain but emphasized that “it could not be boughtat the price of a renunciation of vital German interests.” After a long andfamiliar rehearsal of Polish misdeeds, provocations and “barbaric actionsof maltreatment which cry to heaven,” the note presented Hitler’s de-mands officially and in writing for the first time: return of Danzig and theCorridor, and the safeguarding of Germans in Poland. To eliminate

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“present conditions,” it added, “there no longer remain days, still lessweeks, but perhaps only hours.”

Germany, the communication continued, could no longer share theBritish view that a solution could be reached by direct negotiations withPoland. However, “solely” to please the British government and in theinterests of Anglo-German friendship, Germany was ready “to accept theBritish proposal and enter into direct negotiations” with Poland. “Inthe event of a territorial rearrangement in Poland,” the German govern-ment could not give guarantees without the agreement of the SovietUnion. (The British government, of course, did not know of the secretprotocol of the Nazi-Soviet Pact dividing up Poland.) “For the rest,in making these proposals,” the note declared, “the German Governmentnever had any intention of touching Poland’s vital interests or questioningthe existence of an independent Polish State.”

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

The German Government accordingly agree to accept the British Govern-ment’s offer of their good offices in securing the dispatch to Berlin of a Polishemissary with full powers. They count on the arrival of this emissary onWednesday, August 30, 1939.

The German Government will immediately draw up proposals for a solutionacceptable to themselves and will, if possible, place these at the disposal of theBritish Government before the arrival of the Polish negotiator.50

Henderson read through the note while Hitler and Ribbentrop watchedhim and said nothing until he came to the passage saying that the Germansexpected the arrival of a Polish emissary with full powers on the followingday.

“That sounds like an ultimatum,” he commented, but Hitler and Rib-bentrop strenuously denied it. They merely wished to stress, they said,“the urgency of the moment when two fully mobilized armies were stand-ing face to face.”

The ambassador, no doubt mindful of the reception accorded by Hitlerto Schuschnigg and Hacha, says he asked whether if a Polish plenipoten-tiary did come he would be “well received” and the discussions “conductedon a footing of complete equality.”

“Of course,” Hitler answered.

There followed an acrimonious discussion provoked at one point byHitler’s “gratuitous” remark, as Henderson put it, that the ambassadordid not “care a row of pins” how many Germans were being slaughteredin Poland. To this Henderson says he made a “heated retort.”*

“I left the Reich Chancellery that evening filled with the gloomiestforebodings,” Henderson recounted later in his memoirs, though he does

* “I proceeded to outshout Hitler,” Henderson wired Halifax the next day. . . Iadded a good deal more shouting at the top of my voice.”51 This temperamentaldisplay was not mentioned in earlier British documents.

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not seem to have mentioned this in his dispatches which he got off toLondon 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 tolose another “lest the rainy season in Poland be added to their enemies.”

Nevertheless it is evident from the ambassador’s official reports andfrom his book that he did not quite comprehend the nature of Hitler’s trapuntil the next day, when another trap was sprung and the Fuehrer’strickery became clear. The dictator’s game seems quite obvious from thetext of his formal note. He demanded on the evening of August 29 thatan 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 treatmenthe had accorded the Austrian Chancellor and the Czechoslovak Presidentunder what he thought were similar circumstances. If the Poles, as he wasquite sure, did not rush the emissary to Berlin, or even if they did and thenegotiator declined to accept Hitler’s terms, then Poland could be blamedfor refusing a “peaceful settlement” and Britain and France might beinduced not to come to its aid when attacked. Primitive, but simple andclear.*

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 hismeeting with Hitler he invited the Polish ambassador to come over to theembassy. He filled him in on the German note and his talk with Hitlerand, by his own account, “impressed on him the need for immediateaction. I implored him, in Poland’s own interests, to urge his Governmentto nominate without any delay someone to represent them in the proposednegotiations.”62

In the London Foreign Office, heads were cooler. At 2 a.m. on August29, Halifax, after pondering the German reply and Henderson’s accountof the meeting with Hitler, wired the ambassador that while careful con-sideration would be given the German note, it was “of course unreason-able to expect that we can produce a Polish representative in Berlin today,and German Government must not expect this.”53 The diplomats andForeign Office officials were now laboring frantically around the clock andHenderson 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 advisinghim that the German reply was being considered “with all urgency” andthat it would be answered later in the afternoon. In the meantime thePrime Minister urged the German government, as he said he had thePolish government, to avoid frontier incidents. For the rest, he “wel-comed the evidence in the exchanges of views which are taking place of

* General Haider put Hitler’s game succinctly in a diary entry of August 29:“Fuehrer hopes to drive wedge between British, French and Poles. Strategy: Raisea barrage of demographic and democratic demands . . . The Poles will come toBerlin on August 30. On August 31 the negotiations will blow up. On September 1,start to use force.”

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the desire for an Anglo-German understanding.”54 The second messagewas in similar terms from Halifax. A third from the Foreign Secretaryspoke of reports of German sabotage in Poland and asked the Germansto refrain from such activities. The fourth message from Halifax, dis-patched at 6:50 p.m., reflected a stiffening of both the Foreign Office andthe British ambassador in Berlin.

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

While I still recommend that the Polish Government should swallow thiseleventh-hour effort to establish direct contact with Hitler, even if it be onlyto convince the world that they were prepared to make their own sacrifice forpreservation of peace, one can only conclude from the German reply thatHitler is determined to achieve his ends by so-called peaceful fair means if hecan, 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. thatmorning of August 30, the British ambassador in Warsaw had wiredHalifax that he felt sure “that it would be impossible to induce the PolishGovernment to send M. Beck or any other representative immediately toBerlin to discuss a settlement on the basis proposed by Hitler. Theywould 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 musttake place in some neutral country.56

His own stiffening attitude thus reinforced from his ambassadors inBerlin and Warsaw, Halifax wired Henderson that the British governmentcould not “advise” the Poles to comply with Hitler’s demand that anemissary with full powers come to Berlin. It was, said the ForeignSecretary, “wholly unreasonable.”

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

The promised British reply to Hitler’s latest note was delivered toRibbentrop by Henderson at midnight on August 30-31. There nowensued a highly dramatic meeting which Dr. Schmidt, the only observerpresent, later described as “the stormiest I have ever experienced duringmy twenty-three years as interpreter.”58

“I must tell you,” the ambassador wired Halifax immediately after-ward, “that Ribbentrop’s whole demeanor during an unpleasant interviewwas aping Hitler at his worst.” And in his Final Report three weeks later

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Henderson recalled the German Foreign Minister’s “intense hostility,which increased in violence as I made each communication in turn. Hekept leaping from his chair in a state of great excitement and asking ifI had anything more to say. I kept replying that I had.” According toSchmidt, Henderson was also aroused from his chair. At one point, saysthis sole eyewitness, both men leaped from their seats and glared at eachother so angrily that the German interpreter thought they were coming toblows.

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

Ribbentrop scarcely glanced at the British reply or listened to Hender-son’s attempted explanation of it. * When Henderson ventured to ask forthe German proposals for a Polish settlement, which had been promisedthe British in Hitler’s last note, Ribbentrop retorted contemptuously thatit was now too late since the Polish emissary had not arrived by midnight.However, the Germans had drawn up proposals and Ribbentrop nowproceeded to read them.

He read them in German “at top speed, or rather gabbled to me as fastas 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 itwould have been quite impossible to guarantee even the exact accuracy ofthese without a careful study of the text itself. When he had finished I accord-ingly asked him to let me see it. Ribbentrop refused categorically, threw thedocument with a contemptuous gesture on the table and said that it was nowout of date since no Polish emissary had arrived by midnight. +

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

t Ribbentrop, who, it seemed to this writer, cut the sorriest figure of all the chiefdefendants at the Nuremberg trial—and made the weakest defense—claimed onthe 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 notsay and was not asked on cross-examination. “Hitler told me,” Ribbentrop con-ceded, “that I might communicate to the British Ambassador only the substanceof them, if I thought it advisable. I did a little more than that: I read all theproposals from the beginning to the end.”59 Dr. Schmidt denies that Ribbentropread the text of the proposals in German so fast that it would have been impossiblefor Henderson to grasp them. He says the Foreign Minister did not “particularly

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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 meantto 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, worldopinion into believing that Hitler had attempted at the last minute to reacha reasonable settlement of his claims against Poland. The Fuehreradmitted as much. Dr. Schmidt later heard him say, “I needed an alibi,especially with the German people, to show them that I had done every-thing to maintain peace. This explains my generous offer about thesettlement of the Danzig and Corridor questions.”* *

Compared to his demands of recent days, they were generous, astonish-ingly so. In them Hitler demanded only that Danzig be returned to Ger-many. The future of the Corridor would be decided by a plebiscite, andthen only after a period of twelve months when tempers had calmed down.Poland would keep the port of Gdynia. Whoever received the Corridorin the plebiscite would grant the other party extraterritorial highway andrailroad routes through it—this was a reversion to his “offer” of theprevious spring. There was to be an exchange of populations and fullrights accorded to nationals of one country in the other.

One may speculate that had these proposals been offered seriously theywould undoubtedly have formed at least the basis of negotiations betweenGermany and Poland and might well have spared the world its secondgreat war in a generation. They were broadcast to the German people at9 p.m. on August 31, eight and one half hours after Hitler had issued thefinal orders for the attack on Poland, and, so far as I could judge inBerlin, they succeeded in their aim of fooling the German people. Theycertainly fooled this writer, who was deeply impressed by their reasonable-ness when he heard them over the radio, and who said so in his broadcastto America on that last night of the peace.

Henderson returned to His Majesty’s Embassy that night of August30-31, convinced, as he later said, “that the last hope for peace hadvanished.” Still, he kept frying. He roused the Polish ambassador out ofbed at 2 a.m., invited him to hurry over to the embassy, gave him “anobjective and studiously moderate account” of his conversation withRibbentrop, mentioned the cession of Danzig and the plebiscite in theCorridor as the two main points in the German proposals, stated that sofar as he could gather “they were not too unreasonable” and suggested

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 nativelanguage. Ribbentrop’s English was excellent, but he refused to speak it duringthese parleys.60

* The text of the sixteen proposals was telegraphed to the German charge d’affairesin 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 theywere to “be kept strictly secret and not to be communicated to anyone else untilfurther 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 thearrival of the Polish negotiator.

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that Lipski recommend to his government that they should propose atonce a meeting between Field Marshals Smigly-Rydz and Goering. “Ifelt obliged to add,” says Henderson, “that I could not conceive of thesuccess of any negotiations if they were conducted by Herr von Rib-bentrop.”*02

In the meantime the tireless Dahlerus had not been inactive. At 10p.m. on August 29, Goering had summoned him to his home and informedhim of the “unsatisfactory course” of the meeting just finished betweenHitler, Ribbentrop and Henderson. The corpulent Field Marshal was inone of his hysterical moods and treated his Swedish friend to a violentoutburst against the Poles and the British. Then he calmed down, assuredhis visitor that the Fuehrer was already at work drawing up a “magnani-mous” (“grosszuegig”) offer to Poland in which the only clear-cut demandwould be the return of Danzig and generously leaving the future of theCorridor to be decided by a plebiscite “under international control.”Dahlerus mildly inquired about the size of the plebiscite area, whereuponGoering tore a page out of an old atlas and with colored pencils shadedoff the “Polish” and “German” parts, including in the latter not onlyprewar Prussian Poland but the industrial city of Lodz', which was sixtymiles east of the 1914 frontier. The Swedish interloper could not help butnotice the “rapidity and the recklessness” with which such importantdecisions were made in the Third Reich. However, he agreed to Goering’srequest that he fly immediately back to London, emphasize to the Britishgovernment that Hitler still wanted peace and hint that as proof of it theFuehrer was already drawing up a most generous offer to Poland.

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

But by now the three Bri.ish architects of Munich (Cadogan, a perma-nent Foreign Office official, had always been impervious to Nazi charms)could no longer be taken in by Hitler and Goering, nor were they muchimpressed by Dahlerus’ efforts. The well-meaning Swede found them“highly mistrustful” of both Nazi leaders and “inclined to assume thatnothing would now prevent Hitler from declaring war on Poland.” More-over, the British government, it was made plain to the Swedish mediator,

* In a dispatch to Halifax filed at 5:15 a.m. (August 31), Henderson reported thathe had also advised Lipski “in the very strongest terms” to “ring up” Ribbentropand ask for the German proposals so that he could communicate them to thePolish government. Lipski said he would first have to talk with Warsaw. “ThePolish Ambassador,” Henderson added, “promised to telephone at once to hisGovernment, but he is so inert or so handicapped by instructions of his Governmentthat I cannot rely on his action being very effective.”03

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had not fallen for Hitler’s trickery in demanding that a Polish plenipoten-tiary show up in Berlin within twenty-four hours.

But Dahlerus, like Henderson in Berlin, kept on trying. He telephonedGoering in Berlin, suggested that the Polish-German delegates meet“outside Germany’’ and received the summary answer that “Hitler wasin Berlin” and the meeting would have to take place there.

So the Swedish go-between accomplished nothing by this flight. Bymidnight he was back in Berlin, where, it must be said, he had anotheropportunity to be at least helpful. He reached Goering’s headquarters athalf past midnight to find the Luftwaffe chief once more in an expansivemood. The Fuehrer, said Goering, had just handed Henderson throughRibbentrop a “democratic, fair and workable offer” to Poland. Dahlerus,who seems to have been sobered by his meeting in Downing Street, calledup Forbes at the British Embassy to check and learned that Ribbentrophad “gabbled” the terms so fast that Henderson had not been able to fullygrasp 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 ambas-sador of an empire like Great Briiain” and suggested that the FieldMarshal, who had a copy of the sixteen points, permit him to telephonethe text to the British Embassy. After some hesitation Goering ac-quiesced.*

In such a way, at the instigation of an unknown Swedish businessmanin connivance with the chief of the Air Force, were Hitler and Ribbentropcircumvented and the British informed of the German “proposals” toPoland. Perhaps by this time the Field Marshal, who was by no meansunintelligent or inexperienced in the handling of foreign affairs, saw morequickly than the Fuehrer and his fawning Foreign Minister certain advan-tages which might be gained by finally letting the British in on the secret.

To make doubly sure that Henderson got it correctly, Goerin^ dis-patched Dahlerus to the British Embassy at 10 a.m. of Thursday, August31, with a typed copy of the sixteen points. Henderson was still trying topersuade the Polish ambassador to establish the “desired contact” withthe Germans. At 8 a.m. he had once more urged this on Lipski, this limeover the telephone, warning him that unless Poland acted by noon therewould be war.f Shortly after Dahlerus had arrived with the text of theGerman proposals, Henderson dispatched him, along with Forbes, to the

* On the stand at Nuremberg Goering claimed that in turning over the text of'tiers offer to the British Embassy he was taking “an enormous risk, since theFuehrer had forbidden this information being made public. Only I,” Goering toldthe tribunal, “could take that risk.”84

t Even the levelheaded French ambassador supported his British colleague in thisHenderson had telephoned him at 9 a.m. to say that if the Poles did not agree bynoon to sending a plenipotentiary to Berlin the German Army would begin itsattack. Coulondre went immediately to the Polish Embassy and urged Lipski totelephone his government, asking authorization to make immediate contact withthe Germans “as a plenipotentiary.” (French Yellow Book, French edition, pp.366—67.) ’

The Last Days of Peace 585

Polish Embassy. Lipski, who had never heard of Dahlerus, was somewhatconfused at meeting the Swede—he was by this time, like most of the keydiplomats in Berlin, strained and dead tired—and became irritated whenDahlerus urged him to go immediately to Goering and accept the Fuehrer’soffer. Requesting the Swede to dictate the sixteen points to a secretaryin an adjoining room, he expressed his annoyance to Forbes for bringingin a “stranger” at ihis late date on so serious a matter. The harassedPolish ambassador must have been depressed too at the pressure whichHenderson was bringing on him and his government to negotiate im-mediately on the basis of an offer which he had just received quite un-officially and surreptitiously, but which the British envoy, as he had toldLipski the night before, thought was not “on the whole too unreason-able.”* He did not know that Henderson’s view was not endorsed byDowning Street. What he did know was that he had no intention of takingthe advice of an unknown Swede, even though he had been sent to him bythe 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.f

* By now, that is before noon of August 31, Henderson, striving desperately forpeace at almost any price, had convinced himself that the German terms werequite reasonable and even moderate. And though Ribbentrop had told him theprevious midnight that the German proposals were “out of date, since no Polishemissary had arrived,” and though the Polish government had not yet even seenthem, and though they were, in sum, a hoax, Henderson kept urging Halifax all dayto put pressure on the Poles to send a plenipotentiary, as Hitler had demanded, andkept 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 forurgent communication to his government “with a view to dispatching a plenipoten-tiary. The terms sound moderate to me,” Henderson contended. “This is noMunich . . . Poland will never get such good terms again . . .”

At the same time Henderson wrote a long letter to Halifax: “. . . The Germanproposals do not endanger the independence of Poland . . . She is likely to geta worse deal later . . .”

Still keeping at it, Henderson wired Halifax at 12:30 a.m. on September 1, fourhours before the German attack was scheduled to begin (though he did not knowthis): “German proposals . . . are not unreasonable ... I submit that on Germanoffer war would be completely unjustifiable.” He urged again that the British govern-ment pressure the Poles “in unmistakable language” to state “their intention tosend a plenipotentiary to Berlin.”

The British ambassador in Warsaw took a different view. He wired to Halifaxon August 31: “H. M. Ambassador at Berlin appears to consider German termsreasonable. I fear that I cannot agree with him from point of view of Warsaw.”65t There was another somewhat weird diplomatic episode this last day of peacewhich deserves a footnote. Dahlerus returned from the visit with Lipski to theBritish Embassy, where from Henderson’s office he put through at midday a tele-phone call to Sir Horace Wilson at the British Foreign Office in London. He toldWilson that the German proposals were “extremely liberal” but that the Polishambassador had just rejected them. “It is clear,” he said, “that the Poles areobstructing the possibilities of negotiations.”

At this moment Wilson heard certain noises on the long-distance line Whichsounded to him as though the Germans were listening in. He tried to end theconversation, but Dahlerus persisted in rambling on about the unreasonableness of

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THE LAST DAY OF PEACE

Having got the Germans and Poles to agree to direct negotiations, asthey thought, the British and French governments, though highly skepticalof Hitler, had concentrated their efforts on trying to bring such talksabout. In this Britain took the lead, supported diplomatically in Berlinand especially in Warsaw by France. Although the British did not advisethe Poles to accept Hitler’s ultimatum and fetch an emissary with fullpowers to Berlin on August 30, holding that such a demand was, asHalifax had wired Henderson, “wholly unreasonable,” they did urgeColonel Beck to declare that he was prepared to negotiate with Berlin“without delay.” This was the substance of a message which Halifax gotoff to his ambassador in Warsaw late on the night of August 30. Kennardwas to inform Beck of the contents of the British note to Germany whichHenderson was presenting to Ribbentrop, assure him that Britain wouldstand by its commitments to Poland, but stress the importance of Poland’sagreeing to direct discussions with Germany at once.

We regard it as most important [Halifax telegraphed] from the point ofview of the internal situation in Germany and of world opinion that, so longas the German Government profess themselves ready to negotiate, no oppor-tunity should be given them for placing the blame for a conflict on Poland.07

Kennard saw Beck at midnight and the Polish Foreign Minister promisedto consult his government and give him a “considered reply” by middayon August 31. Kennard’s dispatch describing this interview reached theBritish Foreign Office at 8 a.m. and Halifax was not entirely satisfied withit. At noon—it was now the last day of August—he wired Kennard thathe should “concert” with his French colleague in Warsaw (Leon Noel, theFrench ambassador) and suggest to the Polish government

that they should now make known to the German Government, preferablydirect, but if not, through us, that they have been made aware of our lastreply to German Government and that they confirm their acceptance of theprinciple of direct discussions.

French Government fear that German Government might take advantageof silence on part of Polish Government.08

Lord Halifax was still uneasy about his Polish allies, and less than twohours later, at 1:45 p.m., he again wired Kennard:

the Poles. “I again told Dahlerus,” Sir Horace noted in a Foreign Officememorandum, “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. Ambas-sador in Berlin, to his superiors. At 1 p.m., less than an hour later, Halifax wiredHenderson in code: “You really must be careful of use of telephone. D's conversa-tion [Dahlerus was always referred to in the messages between the Foreign Officeand the Berlin Embassy as “D”] at midday from Embassy was most indiscreet andhas certainly been heard by the Germans.”00

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Please at once inform Polish Government and advise them, in view of factthat they have accepted principle of direct discussions, immediately to instructPolish Ambassador in Berlin to say to German Government that, if latter haveany proposals, he is ready to transmit them to his Government so that they mayat once consider them and make suggestions for early discussions.69

But shortly before this telegram was dispatched, Beck, in response tothe demarche of the midnight before, had already informed the Britishambassador in a written note that the Polish government “confirm theirreadiness ... for a direct exchange of views with the German Govern-ment” and had orally assured him that he was instructing Lipski to seekan interview with Ribbentrop to say that “Poland had accepted the Britishproposals.” When Kennard asked Beck what Lipski would do if Ribben-trop handed over the German proposals, the Foreign Minister replied thathis ambassador in Berlin would not be authorized to accept them as, “inview of past experience, it might be accompanied by some sort of anultimatum.” The important thing, said Beck, was to re-establish contact“and then details should be discussed as to where, with whom and onwhat basis negotiations should be commenced.” In the light of the “pastexperience” 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 nointention of being treated like President Hacha.”70

Actually Beck did not send to Lipski quite those instructions. Insteadof saying that Poland “accepted” the British proposals, Lipski was toldto tell the Germans that Poland “was favorably considering” the Britishsuggestions and would make a formal reply “during the next few hoursat the latest.”

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

For a simple and good reason that will soon become apparent, theGermans 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 tele-graphic instructions from Warsaw, Lipski requested an interview withRibbentrop for the purpose of presenting a communication from hisgovernment. After cooling his heels for a couple of hours he received atelephone call from Weizsaecker asking, on behalf of the German ForeignMinister, whether he was coming as an emissary with full power “or insome other capacity.”

“I replied,” Lipski reported later in his final report,71 “that I was askingfor an interview as Ambassador, to present a declaration from myGovernment.”

Another long wait followed. At 5 p.m. Attolico called on Ribbentropand communicated the “urgent desire of the Duce” that the Fuehrershould receive Lipski “to establish in this way at least the minimum con-tact necessary for the avoidance of a final breach.” The German ForeignMinister promised to “transmit” the Duce’s wishes to the Fuehrer,72

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This was not the first call the Italian ambassador had made in theWilhelmstrasse 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 warin a few hours.” In Rome Mussolini and Ciano put their heads togetherto find something new. The first result was that Ciano telephoned Halifaxto say that Mussolini could not intervene unless he were able to producefor Hitler a “fat prize: Danzig.” The British Foreign Secretary did notrise to the bait. He told Ciano the first thing to be done was to establishdirect contact between the Germans and the Poles through Lipski.

Thus at 11:30 a.m. Attolico saw Weizsaecker at the German ForeignOffice and apprised him that Mussolini was in contact with London andhad suggested the return of Danzig as a first step toward a German-Polishsettlement, and that the Duce needed a certain “margin of time” to perfecthis plan for peace. In the meantime, couldn’t the German governmentreceive Lipski?

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

Last night the Polish Government were informed by the British Governmentof an exchange of views with the Reich Government as to a possibility of directnegotiations between the Polish and German Governments.

The Polish Government are favorably considering the British Government’ssuggestion, and will make them a formal reply on the subject during the nextfew hours.

“I added,” said Lipski later, “that I had been trying to present thisdeclaration since 1 p.m.” When Ribbentrop asked him whether he hadcome as an emissary empowered to negotiate, the ambassador replied that,“for the time being,” he had only been instructed to remit the communica-tion which he had just read, whereupon he handed it to the ForeignMinister. He had expected, Ribbentrop said, that Lipski would comeas a “fully empowered delegate,” and when the ambassador again declaredthat he had no such role he was dismissed. Ribbentrop said he wouldinform the Fuehrer.73

“On my return to the embassy,” Lipski later related, “I found myselfunable to communicate with Warsaw, as the Germans had cut my tele-phone.”

The questions of Weizsaecker and Ribbentrop as to the ambassador’sstatus as a negotiator were purely formal, with an eye, no doubt, for therecord, for ever since noon, when Lipski’s communication had beenreceived by telegram from Warsaw, the Germans had known that he wasnot coming, as they had demanded, as a plenipotentiary. They had de-coded the telegram immediately. A copy had been sent to Goering, who

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showed it to Dahlerus and instructed him to take it posthaste to Hendersonso that the British government, as the Field Marshal later explained on thestand at Nuremberg, “should find out as quickly as possible how intransi-gent the Polish attitude was.” Goering read to the tribunal the secretinstructions to Lipski, which were that the ambassador should refrainfrom conducting official negotiations “under any circumstances” andshould insist that he had “no plenipotentiary powers” and that he wasmerely empowered to deliver the official communication of his govern-ment. In his testimony, the Field Marshal made much of this during hisvain 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 wantwar and had done everything he could to prevent it. But Goering’sveracity was only a shade above Ribbentrop’s and one example of this washis further assertion to the court that only after Lipski’s visit to theWilhelmstrasse at 6:15 p.m. on August 31 did Hitler decide “on invasionthe next day.”

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

For at half after noon on August 31, before Lord Halifax had urged thePoles to be more accommodating and before Lipski had called on Ribben-trop and before the Germans had made publicly known their “generous”proposals to Poland and before Mussolini had tried to intervene, AdolfHitler had taken his final decision and issued the decisive order that wasto throw the planet into its bloodiest war.

SUPREME COMMANDER OF THE ARMED FORCESMOST SECRET

Berlin, August 31, 1939Directive No. 1 for the Conduct of the War

1. Now that all the political possibilities of disposing by peaceful means of asituation on the Eastern Frontier which is intolerable for Germany areexhausted, I have determined on a solution by force *

2. The attack on Poland is to be carried out in accordance with the prepara-tions made for Case White, with the alterations which result, where the Armyis concerned, from the fact that it has in the meantime almost completed itsdispositions.

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 theDirschau Bridge.

* The emphasis is in the original German text.

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

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

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

At sea, the same applies for all warlike actions or actions which could beregarded as such.*

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

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

The Navy will carry on warfare against merchant shipping, directed mainlyat England . . . The Air Force is, in the first place, to prevent the French andBritish Air Forces from attacking the German Army and the German Lebens-raum.

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

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

Adolf Hitler74

Shortly after noon on August 31, then, Hitler formally and in writingdirected the attack on Poland to begin at dawn the next day. As his firstwar directive indicates, he was still not quite sure what Britain and Francewould do. He would refrain from attacking them first. If they took hostileaction, he was prepared to meet it. Perhaps, as Haider had indicated inhis diary entry of August 28, the British would go through the motions ofhonoring their obligation to Poland and “wage a sham war.” If so, theFuehrer would not take it “amiss.”

Probably the Nazi dictator made his fateful decision a little earlier than

* A marginal note in the directive clears up this ambiguous point—“Thus, Atlanticforces will for the time being remain in a waiting position.”

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12:30 p.m. on the last day of August. At 6:40 p.m. on the previous dayHaider jotted in his diary a communication from Lieutenant Colonel CurtSiewert, adjutant of General von Brauchitsch: “Make all preparations sothat attack can begin at 4:30 a.m. on September 1. Should negotiations inLondon require postponement, then September 2. In that case we shallbe notified before 3 p.m. tomorrow. . . . Fuehrer: either September 1or 2. All off after September 2.” Because of the autumn rains, the attackhad to begin at once or be called off altogether.

Very early on the morning of August 31, while Hitler still claimed hewas waiting for the Polish emissary, the German Army received its orders.At 6:30 a.m. Haider jotted down: “Word from the Reich Chancellerythat 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 hasdecided to attack.” An hour later the formal Directive No. 1 was issued.

There was, I remember, an eerie atmosphere that day in Berlin; every-one seemed to be going around in a daze. At 7:25 in the morningWeizsaecker had telephoned Ulrich von Hassell, one of the “con-spirators,” and asked him to hurry over to see him. The State Secretarysaw only one last hope: that Henderson should persuade Lipski and hisgovernment to send a Polish plenipotentiary at once or at least to announcethe intention of dispatching one. Could the unemployed Hassell see hisfriend Henderson at once and also Goering to this end? Hassell tried. Hesaw Henderson twice and Goering once. But veteran diplomat and, now,anti-Nazi that he was, he did not seem to realize that events had outstrippedsuch puny efforts. Nor did he grasp the extent of his own confusions andof those of Weizsaecker and all the “good” Germans who, of course,wanted peace—on German terms. For it must have been obvious to themon August 31 that there would be war unless either Hitler or the Polesbacked down, and that there was not the slightest possibility of the oneor the other capitulating. And yet, as Hassell’s diary entry for this daymakes clear, he expected the Poles to back down and to follow the samedisastrous 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 Polesaround “like stupid little boys,” Hassell retorted “that the persistentsilence of the Poles was also objectionable.” He added that “everythingdepended on Lipski putting in an appearance—not to ask questions butto declare his willingness to negotiate.” Even to Hassell the Poles, whowere threatened with imminent attack on trumped-up Nazi charges, werenot supposed to ask questions. And when the former ambassador summedup his “final conclusions” about the outbreak of the war, though heblamed Hitler and Ribbentrop for “knowingly taking the risk of war withthe Western Powers,” he also heaped much responsibility on the Polesand even on the British and French. “The Poles, for their part,” he wrote,“wLh Polish conceit and Slavic aimlessness, confident of English and

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French support, had missed every remaining chance of avoiding war.”One can only ask what chance they missed except to surrender to Hitler’sfull demands. “The Government in London,” Hassell added, “. . . gaveUp the race in the very last days and adopted a kind of devil-may-careattitude. France went through the same stages, only with much morehesitation. Mussolini did all in his power to avoid war.”75 If an educatedcultivated and experienced diplomat such as Hassell could be so woollyin his thinking is it any wonder that it was easy for Hitler to take in themass of the German people?

There now followed during the waning afternoon of the last day ofpeace a somewhat grotesque interlude. In view of what is now knownabout the decisions of the day it might have been thought that the Com-mander m Chief of the Luftwaffe, which was to carry out far-flung airoperations against Poland beginning at dawn on the morrow, would lie avery busy Field Marshal. On the contrary. Dahlerus took him out tounch at the Hotel Esplanade and plied him with good food and drinkThe cognac was of such high quality that Goering insisted on lugging awaytwo bottles of it when he left. Having got the Field Marshal into theproper humor, Dahlerus proposed that he invite Henderson for a talk.After receiving Hitler’s permission, he did so, inviting him and Forbes tois house for tea at 5 p.m. Dahlerus (whose presence is not mentioned byHenderson in his Final Report or in his book) says that he suggested thatGoering on behalf of Germany, meet a Polish emissaiy in Holland andhat Henderson promised to submit the proposal to London. The Britishambassador’s version of the tea talk, given in his Final Report, was thatGoering “talked for two hours of the iniquities of the Poles and about HerrHitler s and his own desire for friendship with England. It was a con-versation which led to nowhere ... My general impression was that itconstituted 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 scarcelyhave afforded at such a moment to spare time in conversation if it did notmean 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 atNuremberg. J

The atmosphere was negative and desperate, though friendly . . . Goering’sstatement to the British ambassador was: If the Poles should not give in,Germany would crush them like lice, and if Britain should decide to declarewar, he would regret it greatly, but it would be most imprudent of Britain.7®

Later in the evening Henderson, according to his own account, draf'eda dispatch to London saying “that it would be quite useless for me to makeany further suggestions since they would now only be outstripped by

events and lhat the only course remaining to us was to show our inflexibledetermination to resist force by force.”*

S:r Nevile Henderson’s disillusionment seemed complete. Despite allhis 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 ofAugust s last day this shallow, debonair Englishman whose personaldiplomacy in Berlin had been so disastrously blind tried to face up to theshattering collapse of his vain hopes and abortive plans. And though hewould suffer one more typical, incredible lapse the next day, the first dayof war, an ancient truth was dawning on him: that there were times andcircumstances when, as he at last said, force must be met by force.f

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

The people were in need of the treatment which Hitler, abetted byGoebbels and Himmler, had become so expert in applying. I had beenabou‘ in the streets of Berlin, talking with the ordinary people, and thatmorning noted in my diary: “Everybody against the war. People talkingopenly. How can a country go into a major war with a population sodead against it?” Despite all my experience in the Third Reich I askedsuch a naive question! Hitler knew the answer very well. Had he not theweek before on his Bavarian mountaintop promised the generals that hewould “give a propagandist reason for starting the war” and admonishedthem not to “mind whether it was plausible or not”? “The victor,” he hadtold them, “will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. Instarting 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 theFuehrer s Polish peace proposals which, as they were read over the air,

He may have drafted it that evening but he did not send it to London until3:45 p.m. the next day, nearly twelve hours after the German attack on Poland hadbegun. It followed several of his telegrams, which like it were telephoned to Lon-don—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 Ican usefully acquiesce [s/c] in any further suggestions from here, which would onlyonce again be outstripped by events or lead to nothing as the result of methods fol-lowed or of considerations of honor and prestige.

“Last hope lies in inflexible determination on our part to resist force by force.”77t Since friends who have read this section have expressed doubts about this writer’sobjectivity in dealing with Henderson, perhaps another’s view of the British ambas-sador in Berlin should be given. Sir L. B. Namier, the British historian, has summedup Henderson as follows: “Conceited, vain, self-opinionated, rigidly adhering tohis preconceived ideas, he poured out telegrams, dispatches and letters in unbeliev-able 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 tobe innocuous, he proved iin homme nefaste.” (Namier, In the Nazi Era, p. 162.)

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seemed so reasonable to this misled correspondent. The fact that Hitlerhad never presented them to the Poles nor even, except in a vague and un-official manner, to the British, and then less than twenty-four hours be-fore, was brushed over. In fact, in a lengthy statement explaining to theGerman people how their government had exhausted every diplomaticmeans to preserve the peace the Chancellor, no doubt aided by Goebbels,showed that he had lost none of his touch for masterly deceit. After theBritish government on August 28, it said, had offered its mediation be-tween Germany and Poland, the German government on the next day hadreplied that,

in spite of being skeptical of the desire of the Polish Government to come toan understanding, they declared themselves ready in the interests of peace toaccept the British mediation or suggestion . . . They considered it necessary. . . if the danger of a catastrophe was to be avoided that action must betaken readily and without delay. They declared themselves ready to receivea personage appointed by the Polish Government up to the evening of August30, with the proviso that the latter was empowered not only to discuss but toconduct and conclude negotiations.

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

The Reich Government cannot be expected continually not only to empha-size 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 andmeaningless declarations.

It has once more been made clear as a result of a demarche which has mean-while been made by the Polish Ambassador that the latter himself has noplenary powers either to enter into any discussion or even to negotiate.

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

In these circumstances the German Government regard their proposals ashaving this time too been . . . rejected, although they considered that theseproposals, in the form in which they were made known to the British Govern-ment also, were more than loyal, fair and practicable.

Good propaganda, to be effective, as Hitler and Goebbels had learnedfrom experience, needs more than words. It needs deeds, however muchthey may have to be fabricated. Having convinced the German people(and of this the writer can testify from personal observation) that thePoles had rejected the Fuehrer’s generous peace offer, there remainedonly the concocting of a deed which would “prove” that not Germany butPoland had attacked first.

For this last shady business, it will be remembered, the Germans, atHitler’s direction, had made careful preparation.* For six days Alfred

* See above, pp. 518-20.

The Last Days of Peace 595

Naujocks, the intellectual S.S. ruffian, had been waiting at Gleiwitz on thePolish border to carry out a simulated Polish attack on the German radiostation there. The plan had been revised. S.S. men outfitted in PolishArmy uniforms were to do the shooting, and drugged concentration campinmates were to be left dying as “casualties”—this last delectable part ofthe operation had, as we have seen, the expressive code name “CannedGoods.” There were to be several such faked “Polish attacks” but theprincipal one was to be on the radio station at Gleiwitz.

At noon on August 31 [Naujocks related in his Nuremberg affidavit] Ireceived from Heydrich the code word for the attack which was to take placeat 8 o clock that evening. Heydrich said: “In order to carry out this attackreport to Mueller for Canned Goods.” I did this and gave Mueller instructionsto deliver the man near the radio station. I received this man and had himlaid down at the entrance to the station. He was alive but completely uncon-scious. I tried to open his eyes. I could not recognize by his eyes that he wasalive, only by his breathing. I did not see the gun wounds but a lot of bloodwas smeared across his face. He was in civilian clothes.

We seized the radio station, as ordered, broadcast a speech of three to fourminutes over an emergency transmitter,* fired some pistol shots and left.f79

Berlin that evening was largely shut off from the outside world, exceptfor outgoing press dispatches and broadcasts which reported the Fuehrer’s“offer” to Poland and the German allegations of Polish “attacks” on Ger-man territory. I tried to get through on the telephone to Warsaw, Londonand Paris but was told that communications with these capitals were cut.Berlin itself was quite normal in appearance. There had been no evacua-tion of women and children, as there had been in Paris and London, norany sandbagging of storefront windows, as was reported from the othercapitals. Toward 4 a.m. on September 1, after my last broadcast, I droveback from Broadcasting House to the Adlon Hotel. There was no traffic.The houses were dark. The people were asleep and perhaps—for all Iknew—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 31General Haider noted in his diary, “Fuehrer calm; has slept well . . ,

* The speech in Polish had been outlined by Heydrich to Naujocks. It contained in-flammatory statements against Germany and declared that the Poles were attack-ing. See above, p. 519.

t The “Polish attack” at Gleiwitz was used by Hitler in his speech to the Reichstagthe next day and was cited as justification for the Nazi aggression by Ribbentrop,Weizsaecker and other members of the Foreign Office in their propaganda. TheNew York Times and other newspapers reported it, as well as similar incidents, intheir issues of September 1, 1939. It remains only to be added that according to thetestimony at Nuremberg of General Lahousen, of the Abwehr, all the S.S. men whowore Polish uniforms in the simulated attacks that evening were, as the Generalput it, “put out of the way.”78

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Decision against evacuation [in the west] shows that he expects Franceand 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 carryingGermany into war, an action which the Canaris circle had supposedlysworn to prevent by getting rid of the dictator, there was no conspiracy inbeing now that the moment for it had arrived.

Later in the afternoon Gisevius had been summoned to OKW head-quarters by Colonel Oster. This nerve center of Germany’s military mightwas humming with activity. Canaris drew Gisevius down a dimly lit corri-dor. In a voice choked with emotion he said:

“This means the end of Germany.”81

* During the day Hitler found time to send a telegram to the Duke of Windsor atAntibes, France.

T . , , Berlin, August 31, 1939

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

Adolf Hitler80

This is the first mention of the formerlast, in the captured German documents,corded further on, the Duke of WindsorHitler and Ribbentrop.

King of England, but by no means theSubsequently, for a time, as will be re-loomed large in certain calculations of

17

THE LAUNCHING OF WORLD WAR II

At daybreak on September 1, 1939, the very date which Hitler hadCV set in his first directive for “Case White” back on April 3, the Ger-man armies poured across the Polish frontier and converged on Warsawfrom the north, south and west.

Overhead German warplanes roared toward their targets: Polish troopcolumns and ammunition dumps, bridges, railroads and open cities. With-in a few minutes they were giving the Poles, soldiers and civilians alike, thefirst taste of sudden death and destruction from the skies ever experiencedon any great scale on the earth and thereby inaugurating a terror whichwould become dreadfully familiar to hundreds of millions of men, womenand children in Europe and Asia during the next six years, and whoseshadow, after the nuclear bombs came, would haunt all mankind with thethreat of utter extinction.

It was a gray, somewhat sultry morning in Berlin, with clouds hanginglow over the city, giving it some protection from hostile bombers, whichwere feared but never came.

The people in the streets, I noticed, were apathetic despite the immen-sity of the news which had greeted them from their radios and from theextra editions of the morning newspapers.* Across the street from theAdlon Hotel the morning shift of laborers had gone to work on the newI. G. Farben building just as if nothing had happened, and when news-boys 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 wak-ing up on this first morning of September to find themselves in a war whichthey had been sure the Fuehrer somehow would avoid. They could notquite believe it, now that it had come.

What a contrast, one could not help thinking, between this gray apathyand the way the Germans had gone to war in 1914. Then there had beena wild enthusiasm. The crowds in the streets had staged delirious demon-

* Hitler s proclamation to the Army announcing the opening of hostilities wasbroadcast over the German radio at 5:40 A.M., and the newspaper extras were onthe street shortly after. See below, p. 599.

597

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strations, tossed flowers at the marching troops and frantically cheered theKaiser and Supreme Warlord, Wilhelm II.

There were no such demonstrations this time for the troops or for theNazi warlord, who shortly before 10 a.m. drove from the Chancellery tothe Reichstag through empty streets to address the nation on the momen-tous happenings which he himself, deliberately and cold-bloodedly, hadjust provoked. Even the robot members of the Reichstag, party hacks,for the most part, whom Hitler had appointed, failed to respond withmuch enthusiasm as the dictator launched into his explanation of whyGermany found itself on this morning engaged in war. There was far lesscheering than on previous and less important occasions when the Leaderhad declaimed from this tribune in the ornate hall of the Kroll OperaHouse.

Though truculent at times he seemed strangely on the defensive, andthroughout the speech, I thought as I listened, ran a curious strain, asthough he himself were dazed at the fix he had got himself into and felt alittle desperate about it. His explanation of why his Italian ally had re-neged on its automatic obligations to come to his aid did not seem to goover even with this hand-picked audience.

I should like [he said] here above all to thank Italy, which throughout hassupported us, but you will understand that for the carrying out of this strugglewe do not intend to appeal for foreign help. We will carry out this taskourselves.

Having lied so often on his way to power and in his consolidation ofpower, Hitler could not refrain at this serious moment in history fromthundering a few more lies to the gullible German people in justificationof his wanton act.

You know the endless attempts I made for a peaceful clarification andunderstanding of the problem of Austria, and later of the problem of theSudetenland, Bohemia and Moravia. It was all in vain

In my talks with Polish statesmen ... I formulated at last the Germanproposals and . . . there is nothing more modest or loyal than these pro-posals. I should like to say this to the world. I alone was in the position tomake such proposals, for I know very well that in doing so I brought myselfinto opposition to millions of Germans. These proposals have been re-fused. . . .

For two whole days I sat with my Government and waited to see whetherit was convenient for the Polish Government to send a plenipotentiary or not• • ‘ But 1 am wrongly judged if my love of peace and my patience are mistakenfor weakness or even cowardice ... I can no longer find any willingness onthe part of the Polish Government to conduct serious negotiations with us. . . I have therefore resolved to speak to Poland in the same language thatPoland for months past has used toward us . . .

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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 willbe met with bombs.

Thus was the faked German attack on the German radio station at Glei-wi'z, which, as we have seen, was carried out by S.S. men in Polish uni-forms under the direction of Naujocks, used by the Chancellor of Ger-many as justification of his cold-blooded aggression against Poland. Andindeed in its first communiques the German High Command referred toits military operations as a “counterattack.” Even Weizsaecker did hisbest to perpetrate this shabby swindle. During the day he got off a circulartelegram from the Foreign Office to all German diplomatic missionsabroad advising them on the line they were to take.

In defense against Polish attacks, German troops moved into action againstPoland at dawn today. This action is for the present not to be described aswar, but merely as engagements which have been brought about by Polishattacks.1

Even the German soldiers, who could see for themselves who had donethe attacking on the Polish border, were bombarded with Hitler’s lie. In agrandiose proclamation to the German Army on September 1, the Fuehrersaid:

The Polish State has refused the peaceful settlement of relations which Idesired, 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 respectthe frontier of the Reich.

In order to put an end to this lunacy, I have no other choice than to meetforce 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 myselfwas ready throughout four years to do ... I am from now on just the firstsoldier of the German Reich. I have once more put on that coat that was mostsacred and dear to me. I will not take it off again until victory is secured, orI will not survive the outcome.

In the end, this once, he would prove as good as his word. But no Ger-man I met in Berlin that day noticed that what the Leader was saying quitebluntly was that he could not face, not take, defeat should it come.

In his speech Hitler named Goering as his successor should anythinghappen to him. Hess, he added, would be next in line. “Should anythinghappen to Hess,” Hitler advised, “then by law the Senate will be calledand will choose from its midst the most worthy—that is to say, the bravest—successor.” What law? What Senate? Neither existed!

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Hitler s relatively subdued manner at the Reichstag gave way to an-other and uglier mood as soon as he had returned to the Chancellery. Theubiquitous Dahlerus, in tow of Goering, found him there in an “exceed-ingly nervous and very agitated” state.

He told me [the Swedish mediator later testified] he had all along suspectedthat England wanted the war. He told me further that he would crush Polandand annex the whole country .

He grew more and more excited, and began to wave his arms as he shoutedin my face: “If England wants to fight for a year, I shall fight for a year; ifEngland wants to fight two years, I shall fight two years . . .” He paused andthen 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 whenhe finally bellowed: “Und wenn es erforderlich ist, will ich zehn Jahrekaempfen” (“And if necessary, I will fight for ten years”) he brandished hisfist and bent down so that it nearly touched the floor.2

Yet for all his hysteria Hitler was by no means convinced that he wouldhave to fight Great Bri ain at all. It was now past noon, German armoredcolumns were already several miles inside Poland and advancing rapidlyand most of Poland’s cities, including Warsaw, had been bombed withconsiderable civilian casualties. But there was not a word from Londonor Pans tha: Bri'ain and France were in any hurry to honor their word toPoland.

Their course seemed clear, but Dahlerus and Henderson appeared tobe 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 duringthe night.* And that fighting took place with the Danzigers. On receipt ofthis news. Hitler gave orders for the Poles to be driven back from the borderline 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 wag-ing war—with all its military might—against Britain’s ally.

*The German operation to seize the Dirschau bridge over the Vistula before thePoles could blow it up had been planned early in the summer and appears con-stantly in the papers for “Case White.” It was specifically ordered in Hitler’s Di-rective 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. &

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Hitler did not send for Henderson after his Reichstag speech, and theambassador, who had accommodatingly passed along to London Goe-ring’s lies about the Poles beginning the aback, became discouraged—butnot completely discouraged. At 10:50 a.m. he telephoned a further mes-sage 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 itsrealization, to express the belief that the only possible hope now for peacewould be for Marshal Smigly-Rydz to announce his readiness to come im-mediately to Germany to discuss as soldier and plenipotentiary the whole ques-tion with Field Marshal Goering.4

It does not seem to have occurred to this singular British ambassadorthat Marshal Smigly-Rydz might have his hands full trying to repel themassive and unprovoked German attack, or that if he could break off anddid come to Berlin as a “plenipotentiary” it would be equivalent, underthe circumstances, to surrender. The Poles might be quickly beaten butthey would not surrender.

Dahlerus was even more active than Henderson during this first day ofthe German attack on Poland. At 8 a.m. he had gone to see Goering, whotold him that “war had broken out because the Poles had attacked theradio station at Gleiwitz and blown up a bridge near Dirschau.” TheSwede immediately rang up the Foreign Office in London with the news.

“I informed somebody,” he later testified in cross-examination at Nu-remberg, “that according to the informa ion I had received the Poles hadattacked, and they naturally wondered what was happening to me when 1gave that information.”5 But after all, it was only what H. M. Ambassadorin Berlin would be telephoning a couple of hours later.

A confidential British Foreign Office memorandum records the Swede’scall at 9:05 a.m. Aping Goering, Dahlerus insisted to London that “thePoles are sabotaging everything,” and that he had “evidence they nevermeant to attempt to negotiate.”6

At half after noon Dahlerus was on the long-distance phone again tothe Foreign Office in London, and this time got Cadogan. He againblamed the Poles for sabotaging the peace by blowing the Dirschau bridgeand suggested that he once again fly to London with Forbes. But thestem and unappeasing Cadogan had had about enough of Dahlerus nowthat the war which he had tried to prevent had come. He told the Swedethat “nothing could now be done.”

But Cadogan was merely the permanent Undersecretary for ForeignAffairs, not even a member of the cabinet. Dahlerus insisted that his re-quest be submitted to the cabinet itself, informing Cadogan haughtilythat he would ring back in an hour. This he did, and got his answer.

Any idea of mediation [Cadogan said] while German troops are invadingPoland is quite out of the question. The only way in which a world war can

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be stopped is (one) that hostilities be suspended, and (two) that Germantroops be immediately withdrawn from Polish territory.7

At 10 a.m. the Polish ambassador in London, Count Raczyfiski, hadcalled on Lord Halifax and officially communicated to him the news ofthe German aggression, adding that “it was a plain case as provided for bythe treaty.” The Foreign Secretary answered that he had no doubt of thefacts. At 10:50 he summoned the German charge d’affaires, TheodorKordt, to the Foreign Office and asked him if he had any information.Kordt replied that he had neither information about a German attack onPoland nor any instructions. Halifax then declared that the reports whichhe had received “create a very serious situation.” But further than thathe 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 con-sidered the situation serious, might not go to war after all. But the hopewas soon to be dashed.

At 7:15 p.m. a member of the British Embassy in Berlin telephonedthe German Foreign Office and requested Ribbentrop to receive Hender-son and Coulondre “on a matter of urgency as soon as possible.” TheFrench Embassy made a similar request a few minutes later. Ribbentrop.having declined to meet the two ambassadors together, received Hender-son at 9 p.m. and Coulondre an hour later. From the British ambassadorhe was handed a formal note from the British government.

. . . Unless the German Government are prepared [it said] to give HisMajesty’s Government satisfactory assurances that the German Governmenthave suspended all aggressive action against Poland and are prepared promptlyto withdraw their forces from Polish territory, His Majesty’s Government willwithout hesitation fulfill their obligation to Poland.8

The French communication was in identical words.

To both ambassadors Ribbentrop replied that he would transmit theirnotes to Hitler, whereupon he launched into a lengthy dissertation declar-ing that “there was no question of German aggression” but of Polish ag-gression and repeating the by now somewhat stale lie that “regular” Polishtroops had attacked German soil on the previous day. Still, the diplomaticniceties were maintained. Sir Nevile Henderson did not fail to note in hisdispatch that night describing the meeting that Ribbentrop had been“courteous and polite.” As the ambassador prepared to take his leave anargument arose as to whether the German Foreign Minister had gabbledthe text of the German “proposals” to Poland at their stormy meetingtwo evenings before. Henderson said he had; Ribbentrop said he hadread them “slowly and clearly and even given oral explanations of themain points so that he could suppose Henderson had understood every-thing.” It was an argument that would never be settled—but what dif-ference did it make now?9

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On the night of September 1, as the German armies penetrated furtheiinto Poland and the Luftwaffe bombed and bombed, Hitler knew from theAnglo-French notes that unless he stopped his armies and quickly with-drew 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—mighthold? For his friend Mussolini, frightened by the advent of war and fear-ing that an overwhelming Anglo-French naval and military force mightstrike 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 outof Italy’s obligations under the Pact of Steel, had insisted to the Fuehrerthat there was still a possibility of “a political solution” which would give“full moral and material satisfaction to Germany.”* Hitler had notbo hered to argue the matter with his friend and ally, and this had dis-couraged the junior partner in the Axis. Nevertheless on August 31, aswe have seen, Mussolini and Ciano, after being advised by their ambassa-dor in Berlin that the situation had become desperate, had urged Hitlerat least to see the Polish ambassador, Lipski, and had informed him thatthey were trying to get the British government to agree to the return ofDanzig “as a first step” in peace negotiations, t

But it was too late for Hitler to be tempted by such small bait. Danzigwas a mere pretense, as the Fuehrer had told his generals. What hewanted was to destroy Poland. But the Duce did not know this. On themorning of September 1, he himself was confronted with the choice ofimmediately declaring Italy’s neutrality or risking an attack by Britainand France. Ciano’s diary entries make clear what a nightmare this pros-pect was for his deflated father-in-law.$

Early on the morning of September 1 the unhappy Italian dictator per-sonally telephoned Ambassador Attolico in Berlin and, in the words ofCiano, “urged him to entreat Hitler to send him a telegram releasing himfrom the obligations of the alliance.”11 The Fuehrer quickly and evengraciously obliged. Just before he left for the Reichstag, at 9:40 a.m., hegot off a telegram to his friend which was telephoned through to the Ger-man Embassy in Rome to save time.

* See above, pp. 566-67.t See above, p. 588.

t Actually Mussolini’s decision was conveyed to Britain the night before. At11:15 p.m. on August 31 the Foreign Office received a message from Sir PercyLoraine in Rome: “Decision of the Italian Government is taken. Italy will notfight against either England or France . . . This communication made to me byCiano 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 alltelephone communication with Rome after 8 p.m. Ciano feared it might be theprelude to an Anglo-French attack-

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Duce:

I thank you most cordially for the diplomatic and political support whichyou have been giving recently to Germany and her just cause. I am convincedthat we can carry out the task imposed upon us with the military forces ofGermany. I do not therefore expect to need Italy’s military support in thesecircumstances. I also thank you, Duce, for everything which you will do infuture 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, Hitlerwas moved to send a further message to Mussolini. Declaring that he hadbeen prepared to solve the Polish problem “by negotiation” and that “fortwo whole days I have waited in vain for a Polish negotiator” and that“last night alone there were fourteen more cases of frontier violation” andthat consequently he had “now decided to answer force with force,” heagain expressed his gratitude to his welshing partner.

I thank you, Duce, for all your efforts. I thank you in particular also foryour offers of mediation. But from the start I was skeptical about these attemptsbecause the Polish Government, if they had had even the slightest intentionof solving the matter amicably, could have done so at any time. But theyrefused . . .

For this reason, Duce, I did not want to expose you to the danger of assum-ing the role of mediator which, in view of the Polish Government’s intransigentattitude, would in all probability have been in vain . . .

Adolf Hitler13

But Mussolini, prompted by Ciano, made one last desperate effort toexpose himself to the danger of being a mediator. Already on the previousday, shortly after noon, Ciano had proposed to the British and Frenchambassadors in Rome that, if their governments agreed, Mussolini wouldinvite Germany to a conference on September 5 for the purpose of “ex-amining the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles which are the cause ofthe present troubles.”

It might have been thought that the news of the German invasion ofPoland the next morning would have rendered Mussolini’s proposal super-fluous. But to the Italian’s surprise Georges Bonnet, the French ForeignMinister and master appeaser, telephoned Frangois-Poncet, who was nowthe ambassador of France in Rome, at 11:45 a.m. on September 1 andasked him to tell Ciano that the French government welcomed such aconference provided that it did not try to deal with problems of countries

* At 4:30 p.m., following a meeting of the Council of Ministers in Rome, theItalian radio broadcast the Council’s announcement “to the Italian people thatItaly will take no initiative in the way of military operations.” Immediately after-ward Hitler’s message to Mussolini releasing Italy from its obligations was broad-cast.

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not represented and that it did not restrict itself to seeking “partial andprovisional solutions for limited and immediate problems.” Bonnet madeno 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 incarrying the badly divided French cabinet along with them so that identi-cal warning notes could be delivered in Berlin on the evening of September1. Since the text of those notes giving notice that Britain and Francewould go to war unless the German troops were withdrawn from Polandwas made public the same evening, it is interesting that Mussolini, nowclutching desperately at every straw—or even at straws which were notthere—went ahead the next morning in a further appeal to Hitler just asif 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 sus-pense.! He and Coulondre waited anxiously for Hitler’s reply to theirnotes, but none came. Shortly after midday Attolico, somewhat out ofbreath, arrived at the British Embassy and told Henderson he must knowone thing immediately: Was the British note of the previous evening anultimatum or not?

“I told him,” Henderson later wrote, “that I had been authorized to tellthe Minister of Foreign Affairs if he had asked me—which he had notdone—that it was not an ultimatum but a warning.”16

Having received his answer, the Italian ambassador hastened down theWilhelmstrasse to the German Foreign Office. Attolico had arrived at 10o’clock that morning at the Wilhelmstrasse with a communication fromMussolini and, being told that Ribbentrop was unwell, handed it to Weiz-saecker.

September 2, 1939

For purposes of information, Italy wishes to make known, naturally leavingany 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.

* Twice during the afternoon of September 1, Bonnet instructed Noel, the Frenchambassador in Warsaw, to ask Beck if Poland would accept the Italian proposalfor a conference. Later that evening he received his reply: “We are in the midstof war as the result of unprovoked aggression. It is no longer a question of a con-ference but of common action which the Allies should take to resist.” Bonnet’smessages and Beck’s reply are in the French Yellow Book.

The British government did not associate itself with Bonnet’s efforts. A ForeignOffice memorandum signed by R. M. Makins notes that the British government“was neither consulted nor informed of this demarche."15

t The previous afternoon, on instructions from Halifax, Henderson had burned hisciphers and confidential documents and officially requested the United Statescharge d’affaires “to be good enough to take charge of British interests in the eventof war.” (British Blue Book, p. 21.)

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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 par-ticularly by France.*

Danzig is already German, and Germany has already in her hands pledgeswhich guarantee her the greater part of her claims. Moreover, Germany hasalready had her “moral satisfaction.” If she accepted the proposal for a con-ference 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 thatthe above should be immediately brought to the attention of Herr von Ribben-trop and the Fuehrer.17

No wonder that when Ribbentrop, who had quickly recovered from hisindisposition, saw Attolico at 12:30 p.m., he pointed out that the Duce’sproposal could not be “reconciled” with the Anglo-French notes of theevening before, which had “the character of an ultimatum.”

The Italian ambassador, who was as anxious as his chief to avoid aworld war and certainly more sincere, interrupted Ribbentrop to say thatthe British and French declarations “had been superseded by the latestcommunication from the Duce.” Attolico, of course, had no authoritywhatsoever to make such a statement, which was not true, but at this latehour he probably thought he could lose nothing by being reckless. Whenthe German Foreign Minister expressed his doubts, Attolico stuck to hisview.

The French and British declarations [he said] no longer came into considera-tion. Count Ciano had telephoned only at 8:30 this morning, that is to sayat a time when the declarations had already been given out on the radio inItaly. It followed that the two declarations must be considered as superseded.Count Ciano stated moreover that France in particular was greatly in favor ofthe Duce s proposal. The pressure comes at the moment from France butEngland will follow.18

Ribbentrop remained skeptical. He had just discussed Mussolini’s pro-posal with Hitler, he said, and what the Fuehrer wanted to know was:Were the Anglo-French notes ultimata? The Foreign Minister finallyagreed to Attolico’s suggestion that the Italian envoy should immediatelyconsult Henderson and Coulondre to find out.

That was the reason for Attolico’s call at the British Embassy. “I canstill see Attolico, no longer in his first youth,” Schmidt, who acted as in-terpreter, wrote later, “running out of Ribbentrop’s room and down the

Ciano claims that the note was sent as the result of “French pressure.” (CianoDianes, p. 136.) But this is surely misleading. Though Bonnet was doing all hecould to get a conference, Mussolini was pushing the proposal even more desper-

steps to consult Henderson and Coulondre ... A half hour later At-tolico came running back, as breathless as he had left.”19

Regaining his breath, the Italian ambassador reported that Hendersonhad just told him the British note was not an ultimatum. Ribbentrop re-plied that while “a German reply to the Anglo-French declarations couldonly be negative the Fuehrer was examining the Duce’s proposals and, ifRome confirmed that there had been no question of an ultimatum in theAnglo-French declaration, would draft an answer in a day or two.” WhenAttolico pressed for an earlier answer, Ribbentrop finally agreed to replyby 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 presencetelephoned to both Halifax and Bonnet and informed them of Attolico’stalks with the German Foreign Minister. Bonnet was effusive as usualand, according to his own account (in the French Yellow Book), warmlythanked Ciano for his efforts on behalf of peace. Halifax was sterner. Heconfirmed that the British note was not an ultimatum—one marvels atthe splitting of hairs among the statesmen over a single word, for theAnglo-French declarations spoke for themselves unequivocably—butadded that in his own view the British could not accept Mussolini’s pro-posal for a conference unless the German armies withdrew from Poland,a matter on which Bonnet again was silent. Halifax promised to telephoneCiano the decision of the British cabinet on that.

The decision came shortly after 7 p.m. Britain accepted the Duce’soffer on condition that Hitler pull back his troops to the German frontier.The Italian Foreign Minister realized that Hitler would never accept thisand 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 rejectdecisively and maybe with contempt. I tell this to Halifax, to the two ambas-sadors and to the Duce, and finally I telephone to Berlin that unless the Germansadvise us to the contrary we shall let the conversations lapse. The last noteof hope has died.20

And so at 8:50 p.m. on September 2 the weary and crushed Attolicoonce more made his way to the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin. This time Rib-bentrop received him in the Chancellery, where he was in conference withHitler. A captured Foreign Office memo records the scene.

The Italian Ambassador brought the Foreign Minister the information thatthe British were not prepared to enter into negotiations on the basis of theItalian proposal of mediation. The British demanded, before starting negotia-tions, the immediate withdrawal of all German troops from the occupiedPolish areas and from Danzig . . .

In conclusion the Italian Ambassador stated that the Duce now consideredhis mediation proposal as no longer in being. The Foreign Minister receivedthe communication from the Italian Ambassador without comment.21

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Not a word of thanks to the tireless Attolico for all his efforts! Onlythe contempt of silence toward an ally who was trying to cheat Germanyof its Polish spoils.

The last slight possibility of averting World War II had now been ex-hausted. This apparently was obvious to all except one actor in thedrama. At 9 p.m. the pusillanimous Bonnet telephoned Ciano, confirmedonce more that the French note to Germany did not have the “characterof an ultimatum” and reiterated that the French government was preparedto 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 thatGerman troops must “evacuate” Poland. This was the first time Bonnethad mentioned this—and now only because the British had insisted uponit. Ciano replied that he did not think the Reich government would acceptthis condition. But Bonnet would not give up. He sought during the nighta final escape from France’s obligations to the now battered and belea-guered Poland. Ciano recounts this bizarre move in the first paragraph ofhis diary entry for September 3.

During the night I was awakened by the Ministry because Bonnet had askedGuariglia [the Italian ambassador in Paris] if we could not at least obtain asymbolic withdrawal of German forces from Poland ... I throw the pro-posal in the wastebasket without informing the Duce. But this shows thatFrance is moving toward the great test without enthusiasm and full ofuncertainty.22

THE POLISH WAR BECOMES WORLD WAR II

Sunday, September 3, 1939, in Berlin was a lovely, end-of-the-summerday. The sun was shining, the air was balmy—“the sort of day,” I noted inmy diary, “the Berliner loves to spend in the woods or on the lakes near-by.”

As it dawned a telegram arrived at the British Embassy from Lord Hali-fax for Sir Nevile Henderson, instructing him to seek an interview withthe German Foreign Minister at 9 a.m. and convey a communication thetext of which was then given.

The Chamberlain government had reached the end of the road. Somethirty-two hours before, it had informed Hitler that unless Germany with-drew its troops from Poland, Britain would go to war. There had been noanswer, and now the British government was determined to make goodits word. On the previous day it had feared, as Charles Corbin, the Frenchambassador in London, had informed the hesitant Bonnet at 2:30 p.m.,that Hitler was deliberately delaying his reply in order to grab as muchPolish territory as possible, after which, having secured Danzig, the Corri-

The Launching of World War II 609

dor and other areas, he might make a “magnanimous” peace proposalbased on his sixteen points of August 31.23

To avoid that trap Halifax had proposed to the French that unless theGerman government gave a favorable reply within a few hours to theAnglo-French communications of September 1, the two Western nationsshould declare themselves at war with Germany. Following a British cabi-net meeting on the afternoon of September 2, when a definite decision wasmade, Halifax suggested specifically that the two allies present an ultima-tum to Berlin that very midnight which would expire at 6 a.m. on Septem-ber 3.24 Bonnet would not hear of any such precipitate action.

Indeed, the badly divided French cabinet had had a difficult time overthe 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, over-whelmed by the news that Ribbentrop had arrived in Moscow to concludea Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact, Bonnet had persuaded Daladier to calla meeting of the Council of Na'ional Defense to consider what Franceshould do.* Besides Premier Daladier and Bonnet, it was attended by theministers of the three armed services, General Gamelin, the chiefs of theNavy 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 ofthem) 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 ques-tion which was to remain uppermost in his mind to the last:

Taking stock of the situation, had we better remain faithful to our engage-ments and enter the war forthwith, or should we reconsider our attitude andprofit by the respite thus gained? . . . The answer to this question isessentially 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 theycan do little against Germany. But the French mobilization by itself wouldbring some relief to Poland by tying down some considerable German unitsat our frontier.

. . . General Gamelin, asked how long Poland and Rumania could resist,

* The minutes of the meeting, drawn up by General Decamp, chief of PremierDaladier’s military cabinet, came to light at the Riom trial. The paper was neversubmitted to other members of the meeting for correction, and General Gamelinin his book, Servir, claims it was so abbreviated as to be misleading. Still, even thet'mid generalissimo confirms its main outlines.

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says that he believes Poland would honorably resist, which would prevent thebulk of the German forces from turning against France before next spring;by then Great Britain would be by her side.1"

After a great deal of talk the French finally reached a decision, whichwas duly recorded in the minutes of the meeting.

In the course of the discussion it is pointed out that if we are stronger a fewmonths hence, Germany will have gained even more, for she will have thePolish and Rumanian resources at her disposal.

Therefore France has no choice.

The only solution ... is to adhere to our engagements to Poland assumedbefore negotiations were started with the U.S.S.R.

Having made up its mind, the French government began to act. Follow-ing this meeting on August 23, the alerte was sounded, which placed allfrontier troops in their war stations. The next day 360,000 reservists werecalled up. On August 31 the cabinet published a communique sayingFrance would “firmly fulfill” its obligations. And the next day, the firstday of the German attack on Poland, Bonnet was persuaded by Halifaxto associate France with Britain in the warning to Berlin that both coun-tries would honor their word to their ally.

But on September 2, when the British pressed for an ultimatum to bepresented to Hitler at midnight, General Gamelin and the French GeneralStaff held back. After all, it was the French who alone would have to dothe fighting if the Germans immediately attacked in the West. Therewould not be a single British trooper to aid them. The General Staff in-sisted on a further forty-eight hours in which to carry out the general mo-bilization unhindered.

At 6 p.m. Halifax telephoned Sir Eric Phipps, the British ambassador inParis: “Forty-eight hours is impossible for British Government. TheFrench attitude is very embarrassing to H. M. Government.”

It was to become dangerously so a couple of hours later when Chamber-lain rose to address a House of Commons whose majority of members, re-

* In his book, Servir, Gamelin admits that he hesitated to call attention to some ofFrance’s military weaknesses because he did not trust Bonnet. He quotes Daladieras later telling him, “You did right. If you had exposed them, the Germans wouldhave known about them the next day.”

Gamelin also claimed (in his book) that he did point out at this conference theweakness of France’s military position. He says he explained that if Germany “an-nihilated Poland” and then threw her whole weight against the French, Francewould be in a “difficult” situation. “In this case,” he said, “it would no longer bepossible for France to enter upon the struggle ... By spring, with the help ofBritish troops and American equipment I hoped we should be in a position to fighta defensive battle (of course if necessary). I added that we could not hope forvictory except in a long war. It had always been my opinion that we should not beable 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.

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gardless of party, was impatient at the British delay in honoring its obliga-tions. Their patience became almost exhausted after the Prime Ministerspoke. He informed the House that no reply had yet come from Berlin.Unless it did, and contained a German assurance of withdrawal from Po-land, the government would “be bound to take action.” If the Germansdid agree to withdraw, the British government, he said, would “be willingto regard the position as being the same as it was before the German forcescrossed the Polish frontier.” In the meantime, he said, the governmentwas in communication with France about a time limit to their warning toGermany.

After thirty-nine hours of war in Poland the House of Commons was inno mood for such dilatory tactics. A smell of Munich seemed to emanatefrom the government bench. “Speak for England!” cried Leopold Ameryfrom the Conservative benches as the acting leader of the Labor Opposi-tion, Arthur Greenwood, got up to talk.

“I wonder how long we are prepared to vacillate,” said Greenwood, “ata 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 theFrench to march. But so disturbed was Chamberlain at the angry moodof the House that he intervened in the sharp debate to plead that it tooktime to synchronize “thoughts and actions” by telephone with Paris. “Ishould be horrified if the House thought for one moment,” he added, “thatthe statement that I have made to them betrayed the slightest weakeningeither of this Government or of the French Government.” He said heunderstood the French government was “in session at this moment” andthat a communication would be received from it “in the next few hours.”At any rate, he tried to assure the aroused members, “I anticipate thatthere 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 goodfaith . . .”

The inexorable approach of the greatest ordeal in British history wasannounced, as Namier later wrote, “in a singularly halting manner.”

Chamberlain well understood, as the confidential British papers makeclear, that he was in deep trouble with his own people and that at this cri-tical moment for his country his own government was in danger of beingoverthrown.

As soon as he left the Commons he rang up Daladier. The time is re-corded as 9:50 p.m. and Cadogan, listening in, made a minute of it forthe record.

Chamberlain: The situation here is very grave . . . There has been anangry scene in the House ... if France were to insist on forty-eight hoursto run from midday tomorrow, it would be impossible for the Governmentto hold the situation here.

The Prime Minister said he quite realized that it is France who must bear

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the burden of a German attack. But he was convinced some step must betaken 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 itwould be better for French to delay, if possible, for some hours attacks onGerman armies.

Less than an hour later, at 10:30 p.m., Halifax rang up Bonnet. Heurged the French to agree to the British compromise, an ultimatum to bepresented in Berlin at 8 a.m. on the morrow (September 3) and to expireat noon. The French Foreign Minister not only would not agree, he pro-tested to Halifax that the British insistence on such speed would create a“deplorable impression.” He demanded that London wait at least untilnoon 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 theposition 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 Satur-day evening’s session that in order to survive they would have to giveParliament the answer it demanded. At 2 o’clock the next morning theFrench ambassador in London, Corbin, warned Bonnet that the Chamber-lain cabinet risked overthrow if it could not give Parliament definite word.Halifax, at the close of his telephone conversation with Bonnet, thereforeinformed 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 whichGreat Britain declared its intention of fulfilling its obligations to Polandunless German troops were promptly withdrawn.

* The Foreign Secretary had sent Henderson two warning telegrams during thenight. The first, dispatched at 11:50 p.m., read:

I may have to send you instructions tonight to make an immediate communi-cation to the German Government. Please be ready to act. You had better warnthe Minister for Foreign Affairs that you may have to ask to see him at anymoment.

It would seem from this telegram that the British government had not quite madeup its mind to go it alone despite the French. But thirty-five minutes later, at12:25 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.

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Although this communication [it continued] was made more than 24 hoursago, no reply has been received but German attacks upon Poland have beencontinued and intensified. I have accordingly the honor to inform you that,unless not later than 11 A.M., British summer time, today September 3, satis-factory assurances to the above effect have been given by the German Govern-ment and have reached His Majesty’s Government in London, a state of warwill exist between the two countries as from that hour.26*

In the early predawn Sabbath hours Henderson found it difficult tomake contact with the Wilhelmstrasse. He was told that Ribbentrop wouldnot be “available” at 9 a.m. on the Sunday but that he could leave hiscommunication with the official interpreter, Dr. Schmidt.

On this historic day Dr. Schmidt overslept, and, rushing to the ForeignOffice by taxi, he saw the British ambassador already mounting the stepsto the Foreign Office as he arrived. Ducking in by a side door, Schmidtmanaged to slip into Ribbentrop’s office just at the stroke of 9 o’clock, intime to receive Henderson on the dot. “He came in looking very serious,”Schmidt later recounted, “shook hands, but declined my invitation to beseated, remaining solemnly standing in the middle of the room.”28 Heread out the British ultimatum, handed Schmidt a copy, and bade himgoodby.

The official interpreter hastened down the Wilhelmstrasse to the Chan-cellery with the document. Outside the Fuehrer’s office he found mostmembers of the cabinet and several ranking party officials collected aboutand “anxiously awaiting” his news.

When I entered the next room [Schmidt later recounted] Hitler was sittingat his desk and Ribbentrop stood by the window. Both looked up expectantlyas I came in. I stopped at some distance from Hitler’s desk, and then slowlytranslated the British ultimatum. When I finished there was complete silence.

Hitler sat immobile, gazing before him . . . After an interval whichseemed an age, he turned to Ribbentrop, who had remained standing by thewindow. “What now?” asked Hitler with a savage look, as though implyingthat his Foreign Minister had misled him about England’s probable reaction.

Ribbentrop answered quietly: “I assume that the French will hand in asimilar ultimatum within the hour.”29

His duty performed, Schmidt withdrew, stopping in the outer room toapprise the others of what had happened. They too were silent for amoment. Then:

Goering turned to me and said: “If we lose this war, then God have mercyon us!”

* Halifax sent an additional wire, also dated 5 a.m., informing the ambassadorthat Coulondre “will not make a similar communication to the German Govern-ment until midday today (Sunday).” He did not know what the French time limitwould be but thought it “likely” to be anything between six and nine hours.27

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Goebbels stood in a corner by himself, downcast and self-absorbed. Every-where in the room I saw looks of grave concern.30

In the meantime the inimitable Dahlerus had been making his lastamateurish effort to avoid the inevitable. At 8 a.m. Forbes had informedhim of the British ultimatum which was being presented an hour later.He hastened out to Luftwaffe headquarters to see Goering and, accordingto his later account on the stand at Nuremberg, appealed to him to see toit that the German reply to the ultimatum was “reasonable.” He furthersuggested that the Field Marshal himself, before 11 o’clock, declare him-self prepared to fly to London “to negotiate.” In his book the Swedishbusinessman claims that Goering accepted the suggestion and telephonedto Hitler, who also agreed. There is no mention of this in the Germanpapers, and Dr. Schmidt makes it clear that Goering, a few minutes after9 o’clock, was not at his headquarters but at the Chancellery in theFuehrer’s anteroom.

At any rate, there is no doubt that the Swedish intermediary telephonedthe British Foreign Office—not once but twice. In the first call, at 10:15a.m., he took it upon himself to inform the British government that theGerman reply to its ultimatum was “on the way” and that the Germanswere still “most anxious to satisfy the British Government and to givesatisfactory assurances not to violate the independence of Poland.”!!)He hoped London would consider Hitler’s response “in the most favor-able light.”31

Half an hour later, at 10:50 a.m.—ten minutes before the ultimatumran out—Dahlerus was once more on the long-distance line to the ForeignOffice in London, this time to present his proposal that Goering, with Hit-ler’s assent, fly immediately to the British capital. He did not realize thatit was past time for such diplomatic antics, but he was soon made to. Hewas given an uncompromising answer from Halifax. His proposal couldnot be entertained. The German government had been asked a definitequestion, “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 historyuntil 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 thecenter of the dazzling stage of world history. But as happened to almosteveryone 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 muchhe had been taken in by the Germans.

* 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 therewas still a possibility of averting a world war.”33

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Shortly after 11 a.m., when the time limit in the British ultimatum hadrun out, Ribbentrop, who had declined to see the British ambassadortwo hours before, sent for him in order to hand him Germany’s reply. TheGerman government, it said, refused “to receive or accept, let alone tofulfill” the British ultimatum. There followed a lengthy and shabby propa-ganda statement obviously hastily concocted by Hitler and Ribbentropduring the intervening two hours. Designed to fool the easily fooled Ger-man people, it rehearsed all the lies with which we are now familiar, in-cluding the one about the Polish “attacks” on German territory, blamedBritain for all that had happened, and rejected attempts “to force Ger-many to recall their forces which are lined up for the defense of the Reich.”It declared, falsely, that Germany had accepted Mussolini’s eleventh-hourproposals for peace and pointed out that Britain had rejected them. Andafter all of Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler it accused the Britishgovernment of “preaching the destruction and extermination of the Ger-man people.”*

Henderson read the document (“this completely false representationof events,” as he later called it) and remarked “It would be left to historyto judge where the blame really lay.” Ribbentrop retorted that “historyhad already proved the facts.”

1 was standing in the Wilhelmstrasse before the Chancellery about noonwhen the loudspeakers suddenly announced that Great Britain had de-clared herself at war with Germany.f Some 250 people—no more—werestanding 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 theminto 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 wasthe Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, its headlines marching in large typeacross the page:

* So shoddy was this hastily prepared note that it ended with this sentence: “Theintention, 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 donethrough the Versailles Treaty, is taken note of by us, and we shall therefore answerany aggressive action on the part of England with the same weapons and in thesame form.” The British government had, of course, never presented to Germanyany intentions of Stephen King-Hall, a retired naval officer, whose newsletters werea purely private venture. In fact, Henderson had protested to the Foreign Officeagainst the circulation of King-Hall’s publication in Germany and the Britishgovernment had requested the editor to desist.

t In London at 11:15 a.m. Halifax had handed the German charge d’affaires aformal 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 countriesas from 11 a.m. today, September 3.”

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD RETCHBRITISH ULTIMATUM TURNED DOWN

ENGLAND DECLARES A STATE OF WARWITH GERMANY

BRITISH NOTE DEMANDS WITHDRAWALOF OUR TROOPS IN THE EAST

THE FUEHRER LEAVING TODAY FOR THE FRONT

The headline over the official account read as though it had been dic-tated by Ribbentrop.

GERMAN MEMORANDUM PROVESENGLAND’S GUILT

Proved though it may have been to a people as easily swindled as theGermans, it aroused no ill feelings toward the British during the day.When I passed the British Embassy, from whose premises Henderson andhis staff were moving to the Hotel Adlon around the corner, a loneSchupo paced up and down before the building. He had nothing to do butsaunter back and forth.

The French held out a little longer. Bonnet played for time until thelast moment, clinging stubbornly to the hope that Mussolini might stillswing a deal with Hitler which would let France off the hook. He evenpleaded with the Belgian ambassador to get King Leopold to use his in-fluence with Mussolini to influence Hitler. All day Saturday, September2, 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 Germananswer to the Anglo-French warning notes of September 1, and that hecould not go back on his word. He had, to be sure, given this assuranceto the Italian Foreign Minister over the phone—but not until 9 o’clock onthe evening of September 2.* By that time the Duce’s proposal for a con-ference was as dead as stone, as Ciano had tried to tell him. And by thathour, too, the British were pleading with him to present a joint ultimatumto Berlin at midnight.

Shortly before midnight on September 2, the French government fi-nally reached a decision. At precisely midnight, Bonnet wired Coulondreat Berlin that in the morning he would forward the terms of a “new de-marche" to be made “at noon to the Wilhelmstrasse.”f

* See above, p. 608.

t But even after that, it will be remembered (see above, p. 608), Bonnet made alast-minute effort to keep France out of the war by proposing, during the night, tothe Italians that they get Hitler to make a “symbolic” withdrawal from Poland.

The Launching of World War II 617

This he did, at 10:20 a.m. on Sunday, September 3—forty minutes be-fore the British ultimatum ran out. The French ultimatum was similarlyworded except that in case of a negative reply France declared that shewould fulfill her obligations to Poland “which are known to the Germangovernment”—even at this final juncture Bonnet held out against a formaldeclaration of war.

In the official French Yellow Book the text of the French ultimatumwired 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. Am-bassador Phipps had notified Halifax from Paris: “Bonnet tells me Frenchtime 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 Sundaymorning from the French General Staff, which had insisted on a fullforty-eight hours from the time the ultimatum was given Berlin at noon,it still irritated the British government, whose displeasure was communi-cated to Paris in no uncertain terms during the forenoon. Premier Dala-dier therefore made one last appeal to the military. He called in GeneralColston, of the General Staff, at 11:30 a.m. and urged a shorter dead-line. The General reluctantly agreed to move it up by twelve hours to 5P.M.

Thus it was that just as Coulondre was leaving the French Embassy inBerlin for the Wilhelmstrasse, Bonnet got through to him on the tele-phone and instructed him to make the necessary change in the zero hour.34

Ribbentrop was not available to the French ambassador at the noonhour. He was taking part in a little ceremony at the Chancellery, wherethe new Soviet ambassador, Alexander Shkvarzev, was being warmly re-ceived by the Fuehrer—an occasion that lent a bizarre note to this his-toric Sabbath in Berlin. Coulondre, insistent on following the letter of hisinstructions to call at the Wilhelmstrasse at precisely twelve noon, wastherefore received by Weizsaecker. To the ambassador’s inquiry as towhether the State Secretary was empowered to give a “satisfactory” an-swer to the French, Weizsaecker replied that he was not in a position togive 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 nega-tive German reply which he fully anticipated and to hand to the StateSecre.ary France s formal ultimatum, the latter declined to accept it.He suggested that the ambassador “be good enough to be patient a littlelonger and see the Foreign Minister personally.” Thus rebuffed—and notfor 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.33

Though the Nazi Foreign Minister knew what the ambassador’s mis-sion was, he could not let the opportunity, the very last such one, slip bywithout treating the French envoy to one of his customary prevaricationsof history. After remarking that Mussolini, in presenting his last-minutepeace proposal, had emphasized that France approved it, Ribbentrop

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declared that “Germany had informed the Duce yesterday that she alsowas prepared to agree to the proposal. Later in the day,” Ribbentropadded, “the Duce reported that his proposal had been wrecked by theintransigence of the British Government.”

But Coulondre, over the past months, had heard enough of Ribben-trop’s falsifications. After listening a little longer to the Nazi ForeignMinister, who had gone on to say that he would regret it if France followedGreat Britain and that Germany had no intention of attacking France,the ambassador got in the question he had come to ask: Did the ForeignMinister’s remarks mean that the response of the German government tothe French communication of September 1 was negative?

“/a,” 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 requestthat 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 thedrama seemed intent on calling upon the judgment of history.

Although France was mobilizing an army which would have over-whelming superiority for the time being over the German forces in thewest, it was Great Britain, whose army at the moment was negligible,which loomed in Hitler’s feverish mind as the main enemy and as theantagonist who was almost entirely responsible for the pass in which hefound himself as September 3, 1939, began to wane and pass intohistory. This was made clear in the two grandiose proclamations whichhe issued during the afternoon to the German people and to the Army ofthe West. His bitter resentment and hysterical anger at the British burstforth.

Great Britain [he said in an “Appeal to the German People”] has for cen-turies pursued the aim of rendering the peoples of Europe defenseless againstthe British policy of world conquest . . . [and] claimed the right to attackon threadbare pretexts and destroy that European state which at the momentseemed most dangerous . . .

We ourselves have been witnesses of the policy of encirclement . . . carriedon by Great Britain against Germany since before the war . . . The Britishwar inciters . . . oppressed the German people under the Versailles Dik-tat . . .

Soldiers of the Western Army! [Hitler said in an appeal to the troops whofor many weeks could only face the French Army] . . . Great Britain haspursued the policy of Germany’s encirclement . . . The British Government,-driven on by those warmongers whom we knew in the last war, have resolvedto let fall their mask and to proclaim war on a threadbare pretext . . .

The Launching of World War IIThere was not a word about France.

619

In London at six minutes past noon, Chamberlain addressed the Houseof Commons and informed it that Britain was now at war with Germany.Though Hitler, on September 1, had forbidden listening to foreign broad-casts on the pain of death, we picked up in Berlin the words of the PrimeMinister as quoted over the BBC. To those of us who had seen himrisking his political life at Godesberg and Munich to appease Hitler, hiswords were poignant.

This is a sad day for all of us, and to none is it sadder than to me. Everythingthat I have worked for, everything that I have believed in during my publiclife, 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 thecause for which we have to sacrifice so much ... I trust I may live to seethe day when Hitlerism has been destroyed and a liberated Europe has beenre-established.

Chamberlain was fated not to live to see that day. He died, a brokenman—though still a member of the cabinet—on November 9, 1940. Inview of all that has been written about him in these pages it seems onlyfitting to quote what was said of him by Churchill, whom he had excludedfrom the affairs of the British nation for so long and who on May 10,1940, succeeded him as Prime Minister. Paying tribute to his memoryin the Commons on November 12, 1940, Churchill said:

... It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the worldto be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be de-ceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which hewas disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? Whatwas that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble andbenevolent 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 inutter disdain of popularity or clamor.

His diplomacy having failed to keep Britain and France out of thewar, Hitler turned his attention during the afternoon of September 3 tomilitary matters. He issued Top-Secret Directive No. 2 for the Conductof the War. Despite the Anglo-French war declarations, it said, “theGerman war objective remains for the time being the speedy and victori-ous conclusion of the operations against Poland ... In the West theopening of hostilities is to be left to the enemy . . . Against Britain, navaloffensive operations are permitted.” The Luftwaffe was not to attackeven British naval forces unless the British opened similar attacks onGerman targets—and then only “if prospects of success are particularly

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

favorable. The conversion of the whole of German industry to ‘‘wareconomy” was ordered.38

At 9 o’clock in the evening Hitler and Ribbentrop left Berlin inseparate special trains for General Headquarters in the East. But notbefore they had made two more diplomatic moves. Britain and Francewere now at war with Germany. But there were the two other greatEuropean powers, whose support had made Hitler’s venture possible, toconsider: Italy, the ally, which had reneged at the last moment, andSoviet Russia, which, though distrusted by the Nazi dictator, had obligedhim by making his gamble on war seem worth the taking.

Just before leaving the capital, Hitler got off another letter to Mus-solini. It was dispatched by wire at 8:51 p.m., nine minutes before theFuehrer’s special train pulled out of the station. Though not entirelyfrank nor devoid of deceit it gives the best picture we shall probably everhave of the mind of Adolf Hitler as he set out for the first time from thedarkened capital of the Third Reich to assume his role as SupremeGerman Warlord. It is among the captured Nazi papers.

Duce:

I must first thank you for your last attempt at mediation. I would have beenready to accept, but only on condition that some possibility could have beenfound to give me certain guarantees that the conference would be successful.For the German troops have been engaged for two days in an extraordinarilyrapid advance into Poland. It would have been impossible to allow blood whichwas there sacrificed to be squandered through diplomatic intrigue.

Nevertheless, I believe that a way could have been found if England had notbeen determined from the outset to let it come to war in any case. I did notyield to England’s threats because, Duce, I no longer believe that peace couldhave been maintained for more than six months or, shall we say, a year. Inthese circumstances, I considered that the present moment was, in spite ofeverything, more suitable for making a stand.

. . . The Polish Army will collapse in a very short time. Whether it wouldhave been possible to achieve this quick success in another year or two is, Imust say, very doubtful in my opinion. England and France would have goneon arming their allies to such an extent that the decisive technical superiorityof 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 forlife and death . . . But I am also aware that such a struggle cannot in the endbe avoided, and that the moment for resistance must be chosen with icy de-liberation 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

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now march down separate paths, destiny will yet bind us one to the other. IfNational Socialist Germany were to be destroyed by the Western democracies,Fascist Italy also would face a hard future. I personally was always awarethat 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 con-cluded:

... In the West I shall remain on the defensive. France can shed herblood there first. The moment will then come when we can pit ourselves therealso against the enemy with the whole strength of the nation.

Please accept once more my thanks, Duce, for all the support you havegiven 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 afterBritain and France had honored theirs by declaring war on this day, waskept 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 Sovietgovernment, as the secret Nazi papers would later reveal, had renderedthe German Luftwaffe a signal service. Very early on that morning theChief 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 givehis pilots navigational aid in the bombing of Poland—“urgent navigationtests,” he called it—he would appreciate it if the Russian radio station atMinsk would continually identify itself. By afternoon Ambassador vonder Schulenburg was able to inform Berlin that the Soviet governmentwas “prepared to meet your wishes.” The Russians agreed to introducea station identification as often as possible in the programs over theirtransmitter and to extend the broadcasting time of the Minsk station bytwo hours so as to aid the German flyers late at night.38

But as they prepared to leave Berlin late on September 3 Hitler andRibbentrop had in mind much more substantial Russian military help fortheir conquest of Poland. At 6:50 p.m., Ribbentrop got off a “mosturgent” telegram to the embassy in Moscow. It was marked “Top Secret”and began: “Exclusive for the Ambassador. For the Head of Mission orhis representative personally. Special security handling. To be decodedby himself. Most secret.”

In the greatest of secrecy the Germans invited the Soviet Union tojoin in the attack on Poland!

We definitely expect to have beaten the Polish Army decisively in a fewweeks. We should then keep the territory that was fixed at Moscow as a

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German sphere of interest under military occupation. We should naturally,however, for military reasons, have to continue to take action against suchPolish military forces as are at that time located in the Polish territory belong-ing to the Russian sphere of interest.

Please discuss this at once with Molotov and see if the Soviet Union doesnot consider it desirable for Russian forces to move at the proper time againstPolish forces in the Russian sphere of interest and for their part to occupy thisterritory. In our estimation this would be not only a relief for us, but also bein 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” toHitler and Ribbentrop is obvious. It would not only avoid misunder-standings and friction between the Germans and the Russians in dividingup the spoils but would take some of the onus of the Nazi aggression inPoland off Germany and place it on the Soviet Union. If they shared thebooty, why should they not share the blame?

The most gloomy German of any consequence in Berlin that Sundaynoon after it became known that Britain was in the war was GrandAdmiral Erich Raeder, Commander in Chief of the German Navy. Forhim the war had come four or five years too soon. By 1944-45, theNavy’s Z Plan would have been completed, giving Germany a sizablefleet 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 hadneither the surface ships nor even the submarines to wage effective waragainst Great Britain.

Confiding to his diary, the Admiral wrote:

Today the war against France and England broke out, the war which, accord-ing 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 thismeant postponing a final settlement of the Polish question. . . .

As far as the Navy is concerned, obviously it is in no way very adequatelyequipped for the great struggle with Great Britain . . . the submarine armis 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 Fleetthat, even at full strength, they can do no more than show that they know howto die gallantly . . ,40

Nevertheless at 9 p.m. on September 3, 1939, at the moment Hitler wasdeparting Berlin, the German Navy struck. Without warning, the sub-marine U-30 torpedoed and sank the British liner Athenia some two hun-dred miles west of the Hebrides as it was en route from Liverpool toMontreal with 1,400 passengers, of whom 112, including twenty-eightAmericans, lost their lives.

World War II had begun.

Book Four

•i* + +

WAR: EARLY VICTORIES ANDTHE TURNING POINT

18

THE FALL OF POLAND

At TEN O’CLOCK on the morning of September 5, 1939, General Haider/v had a talk with General von Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chief ofthe 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 thefifth day of the German attack on Poland they agreed, as Haider wrote inhis diary, that “the enemy is practically beaten.”

By the evening of the previous day the battle for the Corridor had endedwith the junction of General von Kluge’s Fourth Army, pushing eastwardfrom Pomerania, and General von Kuechler’s Third Army, driving west-ward from East Prussia. It was in this battle that General Heinz Guderianfirst made a name for himself with his tanks. At one point, racing eastacross the Corridor, they had been counterattacked by the Pomorska Bri-gade 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 briefPolish campaign.

Horses against tanks! The cavalryman’s long lance against the tank’slong cannon! Brave and valiant and foolhardy though they were, the Poleswere simply overwhelmed by the German onslaught. This was their—andthe world’s—first experience of the blitzkrieg: the sudden surprise attack;the fighter planes and bombers roaring overhead, reconnoitering, attack-ing, spreading flame and terror; the Stukas screaming as they dove; thetanks, whole divisions of them, breaking through and thrusting forwardthirty or forty miles in a day; self-propelled, rapid-firing heavy guns roll-ing forty miles an hour down even the rutty Polish roads; the incrediblespeed of even the infantry, of the whole vast army of a million and a halfmen on motorized wheels, directed and co-ordinated through a maze ofelectronic communications consisting of intricate radio, telephone andtelegraphic networks. This was a monstrous mechanized juggernaut suchas the earth had never seen.

Within forty-eight hours the Polish Air Force was destroyed, most ofits five hundred first-line planes having been blown up by German bombingon their home airfields before they could take off. Installations were

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burned and most of the ground crews were killed or wounded. Cracow,the second city of Poland, fell on September 6. That night the Polishgovernment fled from Warsaw to Lublin. The next day Haider busiedhimself with plans to begin transferring troops to the Western front,though he could detect no activity there. On the afternoon of Septem-ber 8 the 4th Panzer Division reached the outskirts of the Polish capi-tal, while directly south of the city, rolling up from Silesia and Slova-kia, Reichenau’s Tenth Army captured Kielce and List’s Fourteenth Armyarrived 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 eithershattered or caught in a vast pincers movement that closed in around War-saw. There now remained for the Germans the “second phase”: tighten-ing the noose around the dazed and disorganized Polish units which weresurrounded and destroying (hem, and completing a second and larger pin-cers movement a hundred miles to the east which would trap the remain-ing Polish formations west of Brest Litovsk and the River Bug.

This phase began September 9 and ended on September 17. The leftwing of Bock’s Army Group North headed for Brest Litovsk, which Gu-derian’s XIXth Corps reached on the fourteenth and captured two dayslater. On September 17 it met patrols of List’s Fourteenth Army fiftymiles south of Brest Litovsk at Wlodawa, closing the second great pincersthere. The “counterattack,” as Guderian later observed, had come to a“definite conclusion” on September 17. All Polish forces, except for ahandful on the Russian border, were surrounded. Pockets of Polish troopsin the Warsaw triangle and farther west near Posen held out valiantly, butthey were doomed. The Polish government, or what was left of it, afterbeing unceasingly bombed and strafed by the Luftwaffe reached a villageon the Rumanian frontier on the fifteenth. For it and the proud nationall was over, except the dying in the ranks of the units which still, withincredible fortitude, held out.

It was now time for the Russians to move in on the stricken country tograb a share of the spoils.

THE RUSSIANS INVADE POLAND

The Kremlin in Moscow, like every other seat of government, had beentaken by surprise at the rapidity with which the German armies hurtledthrough Poland. On September 5 Molotov, in giving a formal written re-ply to the Nazi suggestion that Russia attack Poland from the east, statedthat this would be done “at a suitable time” but that “this time has not yetcome.” He thought that “excessive haste” might injure the Soviet “cause”but he insisted that even though the Germans got there first they mustscrupulously observe the “line of demarcation” in Poland agreed upon inthe secret clauses of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.1 Russian suspicion of the Ger-

mans was already evident. So was the feeling in the Kremlin that the Ger-man conquest of Poland might take quite a long time.

But shortly after midnight of September 8, after a German armoreddivision had reached the outskirts of Warsaw, Ribbentrop wired “urgent”a “top secret” message to Schulenburg in Moscow stating that operationsin Poland were “progressing even beyond our expectations” and that inthese circumstances Germany would like to know the “military intentionsof the Soviet Government.”2 By 4:10 p.m. the next day Molotov had re-plied that Russia would move militarily “within the next few days.” Ear-lier in the day the Soviet Foreign Commissar had officially congratulatedthe Germans “on the entry of German troops into Warsaw.”3

On September 10, Molotov and Ambassador von der Schulenburg gotinto a fine snafu. After declaring that the Soviet government had beentaken “completely by surprise by the unexpectedly rapid German militarysuccesses” and that the Soviet Union was consequently in “a difficult situa-tion,” the Foreign Commissar touched on the excuse which the Kremlinwould have to give for its own aggression in Poland. This was, as Schulen-burg wired Berlin “most urgent” and “top secret,”

that Poland was falling apart and that it was necessary for the Soviet Union, inconsequence, to come to the aid of the Ukrainians and the White Russians“threatened” by Germany. This argument [said Molotov] was necessary tomake the intervention of the Soviet Union plausible to the masses and at thesame time avoid giving the Soviet Union the appearance of an aggressor.

Furthermore, Molotov complained that General von Brauchitsch hadjust been quoted by D.N.B. as saying that “military action was no longernecessary on the German eastern border.” If that were so, if the war wasover, Russia, said Molotov, “could not start a new war.” He was verydispleased about the whole situation.4 To further complicate matters hesummoned Schulenburg to the Kremlin on September 14 and after in-forming him that the Red Army would march sooner than they had antici-pated demanded to know when Warsaw would fall. In order to justifytheir move the Russians must wait on the capture of the Polish capital.5

The Commissar had raised some embarrassing questions. When wouldWarsaw fall? How did the Germans like being blamed for Russian inter-vention? On the evening of September 15 Ribbentrop dispatched a “mosturgent,” a “top secret” message to Molotov through the German ambassa-dor, answering them. Warsaw, he said, would be occupied “in the next fewdays.” Germany would “welcome the Soviet military operation now.”As to the Russian excuse blaming Germany for it, this “was out of thequestion . . . contrary to the true German intentions . . . would bein contradiction to the arrangements made in Moscow and finally . . .would make the two States appear as enemies before the whole world.” Heended by asking the Soviet government to set “the day and the hour” fortheir attack on Poland.®

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This was done the next evening and two dispatches of Schulenburg,which are among the captured German papers, telling how it was donegive a revealing picture of the Kremlin’s deceit.

I saw Molotov at 6 p.m. [Schulenburg wired on September 16]. Molotovdeclared that military intervention by the Soviet Union was imminent—perhaps even tomorrow or the day after. Stalin was at present in consultationwith the military leaders . . .

Molotov added that . . . the Soviet Government intended to justify itsprocedure as follows: The Polish State had disintegrated and no longer existed;therefore, all agreements concluded with Poland were void: third powersmight try to profit by the chaos which had arisen; the Soviet Government con-sidered itself obligated to intervene to protect its Ukrainian and White Russianbrothers 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 Governmentcontained a note that was jarring to German sensibilities but asked us in viewof the difficult situation of the Soviet Government not to stumble over thispiece of straw. The Soviet Government unfortunately saw no possibility ofany other motivation, since the Soviet Union had heretofore not botheredabout the plight of its minorities in Poland and had to justify abroad, in someway or other, its present intervention.7

At 5:20 p.m. on September 17, Schulenburg got off another “mosturgent” and “top secret” wire to Berlin.

Stalin received me at 2 o’clock . . . and declared that the Red Army wouldcross the Soviet border at 6 o’clock . . . Soviet planes would begin today tobomb the district east of Lwow (Lemberg).

When Schulenburg objected to three points in the Soviet communiquethe Russian dictator “with the utmost readiness” altered the text.8

Thus it was that on the shabby pretext that because Poland had ceasedto exist and therefore the Polish-Soviet nonaggression pact had also ceasedto exist and because it was necessary to protect its own interests and thoseof the Ukrainian and White Russian minorities, the Soviet Union trampledover a prostrate Poland beginning on the morning of September 17. Toadd insult to injury the Polish ambassador in Moscow was informed thatRussia would maintain strict neutrality in the Polish conflict! The nextday, September 18, Soviet troops met the Germans at Brest Litovsk, whereexactly twenty-one years before a newborn Bolshevik government hadgone back on its country’s ties with the Western Allies and had received

from the German Army, and accepted, separate peace terms of greatharshness.

And yet though they were now accomplices of Nazi Germany in wip-ing ancient Poland off the map, the Russians were at once distrustful oftheir new comrades. At his meeting with the German ambassador on theeve of the Soviet aggression, Stalin had expressed his doubts, as Schulen-burg duly notified Berlin, whether the German High Command wouldstand by the Moscow agreements and withdraw to the line that had beenagreed upon. The ambassador tried to reassure him but apparently withno great success. “In view of Stalin’s well-known attitude of mistrust,”Schulenburg wired Berlin, “I would be gratified if I were authorized tomake a further declaration of such a nature as to remove his last doubts.”9The next day, September 19, Ribbentrop telegraphed the ambassadorauthorizing him to “tell Stalin that the agreements which I made at Mos-cow will, of course, be kept, and that they are regarded by us as the foun-dation stone of the new friendly relations between Germany and the SovietUnion.”10

Nevertheless friction between the two unnatural partners continued.On September 17 there was disagreement over the text of a joint com-munique which would “justify” the Russo-German destruction of Poland.Stalin objected to the German version because “it presented the facts alltoo frankly.” Whereupon he wrote out his own version, a masterpiece ofsubterfuge, and forced the Germans to accept it. It stated that the jointaim of Germany and Russia was “to restore peace and order in Poland,which has been destroyed by the disintegration of the Polish State, and tohelp 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 Polishstate on the order of Napoleon’s Grand Duchy of Warsaw in order to mol-lify world public opinion. But on September 19 Molotov disclosed thatthe Bolsheviks were having second thoughts on that. After angrily pro-testing to Schulenburg that the German generals were disregarding theMoscow 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 inclinationentertained by the Soviet Government and Stalin personally to permit theexistence of a residual Poland had given way to the inclination to partitionPoland along the Pissa-Narew-Vistula-San Line. The Soviet Governmentwishes to commence negotiations on this matter at once.11

Thus the initiative to partition Poland completely, to deny the Polishpeople any independent existence of their own whatsoever, came from theRussians. But the Germans did not need much urging to agree. OnSeptember 23 Ribbentrop wired Schulenburg instructing him to tell Molo-tov that the “Russian idea of a border line along the well-known four-

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

rivers line coincides with the view of the Reich Government.” He pro-posed 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 Germanallies learned, as his British and American allies later would also learn,what a tough, cynical and opportunistic bargainer he was. The Sovietdictator summoned Schulenburg to the Kremlin at 8 p.m. on September25 and the ambassador’s dispatch later that evening warned Berlin ofsome stern realities and of some chickens that were coming home to roost.

Stalin stated ... he considered it wrong to leave an independent residualPoland. He proposed that from the territory to the east of the demarcationline, all the Province of Warsaw which extends to the Bug should be added toour share. In return we should waive our claim to Lithuania.

Stalin . . . added that if we consented, the Soviet Union would immediatelytake up the solution of the problem of the Baltic countries in accordance withthe [secret] Protocol of August 23, and expected in this matter the unstintingsupport of the German Government. Stalin expressly indicated Estonia, Latviaand Lithuania, but did not mention Finland.13

This was a shrewd and hard bargain. Stalin was offering to trade twoPolish provinces, which the Germans had already captured, for the BalticStates. He was taking advantage of the great service he had rendered Hit-ler—making it possible for him to attack Poland—to get everything hecould for Russia while the getting was good. Moreover, he was proposingthat 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 wouldnever peacefully submit to the loss of their independence. Let them be aheadache for the Germans, not the Russians! In the meantime he wouldget the Baltic States, which had been taken from Russia after the FirstWorld War and whose geographical position offered the Soviet Uniongreat 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 readtwo telegrams from Berlin which apprised him of what the Russians wereup to. They were messages forwarded from the German minister at Tal-linn, who reported that the Estonian government had just informed himthat the Soviet Union had demanded, “under the gravest threat of im-minent attack,” military and air bases in Estonia.14 Later that night, aftera long conference with Stalin and Molotov, Ribbentrop wired Hitler that“this very night” a pact was being concluded which would put two RedArmy 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 fleet-ing Estonia’s time would be. The very next day Ribbentrop was informedthat Hitler had ordered the evacuation of the 86,000 Volksdeutsche inEstonia and Latvia.15

The Fall of Poland 63 i

Stalin was presenting his bill and Hitler, for the time being at least, hadto pay it. He was instantly abandoning not only Estonia but Latvia, bothof which, he had agreed in the Nazi-Soviet Pact, belonged in the Sovietsphere of interest. Before the day was up he was also giving up Lithuania,on Germany’s northeastern border, which, according to the secret clausesof the Moscow Pact, belonged in the Reich’s sphere.

Stalin had presented the Germans two choices in the meeting with Rib-bentrop, 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: ac-ceptance of the original line of demarcation in Poland along the Pissa,Narew, Vistula and San rivers, with Germany getting Lithuania; or yield-ing Lithuania to Russia in return for more Polish territory (the province ofLublin and the lands to the east of Warsaw) which would give the Ger-mans almost all of the Polish people. Stalin strongly urged the secondchoice and Ribbentrop in a long telegram to Hitler filed at 4 a.m. onSeptember 28 put it up to Hitler, who agreed.

Dividing up Eastern Europe took quite a bit of intricate drawing ofmaps, and after three and a half more hours of negotiations on the after-noon of September 28, followed by a state banquet at the Kremlin, Stalinand Molotov excused themselves in order to confer with a Latvian delega-tion they had summoned to Moscow. Ribbentrop dashed off to the operahouse to take in an act of Swan Lake, returning to the Kremlin at midnightfor further consultations about maps and other things. At 5 a.m. Molotovand Ribbentrop put their signatures to a new pact officially called the“German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty” while Stalin oncemore beamed on, as a German official later reported, “with obvious satis-faction.”* He had reason to.17

The Treaty itself, which was made public, announced the boundary ofthe “respective national interests” of the two countries in “the formerPolish state” and stated that within their acquired territories they wouldre-establish “peace and order” and “assure the people living there apeaceful life in keeping with their national character.”

But, as with the previous Nazi-Soviet deal, there were “secret proto-cols”—three of them, of which two contained the meat of the agreement.One added Lithuania to the Soviet “sphere of influence,” and the prov-inces of Lublin and Eastern Warsaw to the German. The second wasshort and to the point.

Both parties will tolerate in their territories no Polish agitation which affectsthe territories of the other party. They will suppress in their territories allbeginnings of such agitation and inform each other concerning suitablemeasures for this purpose.

* This official, Andor Hencke, Understate Secretary in the Foreign Office, who hadserved for many years in the embassy at Moscow, wrote a detailed and amusingaccount of the talks. It was the only German record made of the second day’sconferences.18

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

So Poland, like Austria and Czechoslovakia before it, disappeared fromthe map of Europe. But this time Adolf Hitler was aided and abetted inhis 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* (Austriahad participated in the others), and while it lasted it was to be by far themost ruthless and pitiless. In the secret protocol of September 28f Hitlerand Stalin agreed to institute in Poland a regime of terror designed tobrutally suppress Polish freedom, culture and national life.

Hitler fought and won the war in Poland, but the greater winner wasStalin, whose troops scarcely fired a shot.J The Soviet Union got nearlyhalf of Poland and a stranglehold on the Baltic States. It blocked Ger-many more solidly than ever from two of its main long-term objectives:Ukrainian wheat and Rumanian oil, both badly needed if Germany was tosurvive the British blockade. Even Poland’s oil region of Borislav-Dro-gobycz, which Hitler desired, was claimed successfully by Stalin, whograciously agreed to sell the Germans the equivalent of the area’s annualproduction.

Why did Hitler pay such a high price to the Russians? It is true that hehad agreed to it in August in order to keep the Soviet Union out of theAllied camp and out of the war. But he had never been a stickler for keep-ing agreements and now, with Poland conquered by an incomparable featof German arms, he might have been expected to welsh, as the Armyurged, on the August 23 pact. If Stalin objected, the Fuehrer couldthreaten him with attack by the most powerful army in the world, as thePolish campaign had just proved it to be. Or could he? Not while theBritish and French stood at arms in the West. To deal with Britain andFrance he must keep his rear free. This, as subsequent utterances of hiswould make clear, was the reason why he allowed Stalin to strike such ahard bargain. But he did not forget the Soviet dictator’s harsh dealingsas he now turned his attention to the Western front.

* Arnold Toynbee, in his various writings, calls it the fifth partition,t Though signed at 5 a.m. September 29, the treaty is officially dated September 28.t German casualties in Poland were officially given as 10,572 lulled, 30,322 woundedand 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-downwar”—Sitzkrieg. In the West it would soon be dubbed the “phony war.”Here was “the strongest army in the world [the French],” as the BritishGeneral J. F. C. Fuller would put it, “facing no more than twenty-six[German] divisions, sitting still and sheltering behind steel and concretewhile a quixotically valiant ally was being exterminated!”1

Were the Germans surprised? Hardly. In Haider’s very first diary en-try, that of August 14, the Chief of the Army General Staff had composeda detailed estimate of the situation in the West if Germany attacked Po-land. He considered a French offensive “not very likely.” He was surethat France would not send its army through Belgium “against Belgianwishes.” His conclusion was that the French would remain on the defen-sive. On September 7, with the Polish Army already doomed, Haider, ashas been noted, was already occupied with plans to transfer German di-visions to the west.

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

Operation in the West not yet clear. Some indications that there is no realintention of waging a war . . . French cabinet lacks heroic caliber. Alsofrom Britain first hints of sobering reflection.

Two days later Hitler issued Directive No. 3 for the Conduct of theWar, ordering arrangements to be made for Army and Air Force units tobe sent from Poland to the west. But not necessarily to fight. “Evenafter the irresolute opening of hostilities by Great Britain . . . andFrance my express command,” the directive laid it down, “must be ob-tained in each of the following cases: Every time our ground forces [or]

. . . one of our planes cross the western borders; [and] for every airattack on Britain.”2

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What had France and Britain promised Poland to do in case she wereattacked? The British guarantee was general. But the French was specific.It was laid down in (he Franco-Polish Military Convention of May 19,1939. In this it was agreed that the French would “progressively launchoffensive operations against limited objectives toward the third day afterGeneral Mobilization Day.” General mobilization had been proclaimedSeptember 1. But further, it was agreed that “as soon as the principalGerman effort develops against Poland, France will launch an offensiveaction against Germany with the bulk of her forces, starting on the fif-teenth day after the first day of the general French mobilization.” Whenthe Deputy Chief of the Polish General Staff, Colonel Jaklincz, had askedhow many French troops would be available for this major offensive,General Gamelin had replied that there would be about thirty-five tothirty-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 haveseen,* that he could not possibly mount a serious offensive “in less thanabout two years . . . in 1941-2”—assuming, he had added, that Franceby 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 troopsto send to France. By October 11, three weeks after the fighting was overin Poland, it had four divisions—158,000 men—in France. “A symboliccontribution,” Churchill called it, and Fuller noted that the first Britishcasualty—a corporal shot dead on patrol—did not occur until December9. “So bloodless a war,” Fuller comments, “had not been seen since theBattles of Molinella and Zagonara.”f

In retrospect at Nuremberg the German generals agreed that by failingto attack in the West during the Polish campaign the Western Allies hadmissed a golden opportunity.

The success against Poland was only possible [said General Haider] byalmost completely baring our Western border. If the French had seen the logicof 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 toprevent it and would have threatened the Ruhr area, which was the mostdecisive factor of the German conduct of the war.4

* See above, p. 61 On.

t On October 9 this writer journeyed by rail up the east bank of the Rhine where fora hundred miles it forms the Franco-German frontier and noted in his diary: “Nosign of war and the train crew told me not a shot had been fired on this front sincethe war began ... We could see the French bunkers and at many places greatmats behind which the French were building fortifications. Identical picture on theGerman side. The troops . . . went about their business in full sight and range ofeach other . . . The Germans were hauling up guns and supplies on the railroadline, but the French did not disturb them. Queer kind of war.” (Berlin Diary, p.

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Sitzkrieg in the West

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

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

We soldiers had always expected an attack by France during the Polishcampaign, and were very surprised that nothing happened ... A Frenchattack would have encountered only a German military screen, not a realdefense.6

Why then did not the French Army (the first two British divisions werenot deployed until the first week of October), which had overwhelmingsuperiority over the German forces in the west, attack, as General Game-fin 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 beenbled white in the First World War and a determination not to suffer suchslaughter again if it could be avoided; the realization by mid-Septemberthat the Polish armies were so badly defeated that the Germans wouldsoon be able to move superior forces to the west and thus probably wipeout any initial French advances; the fear of German superiority in armsand in the air. Indeed, the French government had insisted from the startthat the British Air Force should not bomb targets in Germany for fear ofreprisal on French factories, though an all-out bombing of the Ruhr, theindustrial heart of the Reich, might well have been disastrous to the Ger-mans. 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 at-tack Germany in September was probably best stated by Churchill. “Thisbattle,” 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 beforewhen Hitler proclaimed a conscript army in defiance of Versailles. Theprice of those sorry Allied failures to act had now to be paid, though itseems to have been thought in Paris and London that payment mightsomehow be evaded by inaction.

At sea there was action.

The German Navy was not put under such wraps as the Army in thewest, and during the first week of hostilities it sank eleven British shipswith a total tonnage of 64,595 tons, which was nearly half the weeklytonnage sunk at the peak of German submarine warfare in April 1917when Great Britain had been brought to the brink of disaster. Britishlosses tapered off thereafter: 53,561 tons the second week, 12,750 thethird week and only 4,646 the fourth week—for a total during September

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of twenty-six ships of 135,552 tons sunk by U-boats and three ships of16,488 tons by mines.* r

There was a reason, unknown to the British, for the sharp tapering off.On September 7, Admiral Raeder had a long conference with Hitler. TheFuehrer, jubilant over his initial victories in Poland and the failure of theFrench to attack in the west, advised the Navy to go more slowly. Francewas showing “political and military restraint”; the British were proving“hesitant.” In view of this situation it was decided that submarines in theAtlantic would spare all passenger ships without exception and refrain al-together from attacking the French, and that the pocket battleshipsDeutschland in the North Atlantic and the Graf Spee in the South Atlanticshould withdraw to their “waiting” stations for the time being. The “gen-eral policy,” Raeder noted in his diary, would be “to exercise restraintuntil the political situation in the West has become clearer, which will takeabout a week.”8

THE SINKING OF THE ATHENIA

There was one other decision agreed upon by Hitler and Raeder at themeeting on September 7. The Admiral noted it in his diary: “No attemptshall be made to solve the Athenia affair until the submarines returnhome.”

The war at sea, as we have noted, had begun ten hours after Britain’sdeclaration of war when the British liner Athenia, jammed with some1,400 passengers, was torpedoed without warning at 9 p.m. on September3 some two hundred miles west of the Hebrides, with the loss of 112 lives,including twenty-eight Americans. The German Propaganda Ministrychecked the first reports from London with the Naval High Command,was told that there were no U-boats in the vicinity and promptly deniedthat the ship had been sunk by the Germans. The disaster was most em-barrassing to Hitler and the Naval Command and at first they did not be-lieve the British reports. Strict orders had been given to all submarinecommanders to observe the Hague Convention, which forbade attackinga ship without warning. Since all U-boats maintained radio silence, there

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 hismemoirs. He also told the House that six or seven U-boats had been sunk, butactually, 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 aU-boat commander had signaled him personally the position of a British ship he hadjust sunk and urged that rescue should be sent. “I was in some doubt to what addressI should direct a reply,” Churchill said. “However, he is now in our hands.” But hewasn’t. This writer interviewed the submarine skipper, Captain Herbert Schultze,m Berlin two days later in a broadcast to America. He produced from his logbookhis message to Churchill. (See Churchill, The Gathering Storm, pp. 436-37- BerlinDiary, pp. 225-27.}

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was no means of immediately checking what had happened.* That didnot prevent the controlled Nazi press from charging, within a couple ofdays, that the British had torpedoed their own ship in order to provokethe United States into coming into the war.

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

At the urging of Ribbentrop, Admiral Raeder invited the Americannaval attache to come to see him on September 16 and stated that he hadnow received reports from all the submarines, “as a result of which it wasdefinitely established that the Athenia had not been sunk by a GermanU-boat.” He asked him to so inform his government, which the attachepromptly did.t10

The Grand Admiral had not quite told the truth. Not all the submarineswhich were at sea on September 3 had yet returned to port. Among thosethat had not was the V-30, commanded by Oberleutnant Lemp, which didnot dock in home waters until September 27. It was met by Admiral KarlDoenitz, commander of submarines, who years later at Nuremberg de-scribed the meeting and finally revealed the truth about who sank theAthenia.

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

I dispatched Lemp at once by air to report to the Naval War Staff (SKL) atBerlin; 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 fromKapitaen zur See Fricke that:

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

* 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, evenwhen under escort.”

t Apparently not in code. A copy of the naval attache’s cable to Washingtonshowed up in the German naval papers at Nuremberg.

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

3. Political explanations would be handled by OKM*

I had had no part whatsoever in the political events in which the Fuehrerclaimed that no U-boat had sunk the Athenia.11

But Doenitz, who must have suspected the truth all along, for other-wise he would not have been at the dock to greet the returning U-30, didhave a part in altering the submarine’s log and his own diary so as to eraseany telbale evidence of the truth. In fact, as he admitted at Nuremberg,he himself ordered any mention of the Athenia stricken from the U-30'slog and deleted it from his own diary. He swore the vessel’s crew to abso-lute secrecy.f

The military high commands of all nations no doubt have skeletons intheir closets during the course of war, and it was understandable if notlaudable that Hitler, as Admiral Raeder testified at Nuremberg, insistedthat the Athenia affair be kept secret, especially since the Naval Commandhad acted in good faith in at first denying German responsibility and wouldhave been greatly embarrassed to have to admit it later. But Hitler didnot stop there. On the evening of Sunday, October 22, Propaganda Minis-ter Goebbels personally took to the air—this writer well remembers thebroadcast—and accused Churchill of having sunk the Athenia. The nextday the official Nazi newspaper, the Voelkischer Beobachter, ran a front-page story under the headline churchill sank the “athenia” and stat-ing that the First Lord of the Admiralty had planted a time bomb in theship’s hold. At Nuremberg it was established that the Fuehrer had per-sonally ordered the broadcast and the article—and also that though Rae-der, 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 ofthe darkest pages in German history.

HITLER PROPOSES PEACE

“Tonight the press talks openly of peace,” I noted in my diary September20. “All the Germans I’ve talked to today are dead sure we shall havepeace within a month. They are in high spirits.”

* The italics are the Admiral’s.

t The officers, including Lemp, and some of the crew were transferred to the U-l 10and went down with her on May 9, 1941. One member of the crew was wounded byaircraft fire a few days after the sinking of the Athenia. He was disembarked atReykjavik, Iceland, under pledge of the strictest secrecy, later taken to a POW campin Canada, and after the war signed an affidavit giving the facts. The Germansappear to have been worried that he would “talk,” but he didn’t until the war’s end.12

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The afternoon before at the ornate Guild Hall in Danzig I had heardHitler make his first speech since his Reichstag address of September 1started off the war. Though he was in a rage because he had been balkedfrom making this speech at Warsaw, whose garrison still gallantly heldout, and dripped venom every time he mentioned Great Britain, he madea slight gesture toward peace. “I have no war aims against Britain andFrance,” he said. “My sympathies are with the French poilu. What he isfighting for he does not know.” And he called upon the Almighty, “whonow has blessed our arms, to give other peoples comprehension of howuseless this war will be . . . and to cause reflection on the blessings ofpeace.”

On September 26, the day before Warsaw fell, the German press andradio 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, joinedin the peace offensive. Along with the signing of the German—SovietBoundary and Friendship Treaty, with its secret clauses dividing up East-ern Europe, Molotov and Ribbentrop concocted and signed at Moscowon 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 Polishstate and created a firm foundation for a lasting peace in Eastern Europe,mutually express their conviction that it would serve the true interests of allpeoples to put an end to the state of war between Germany and England andFrance. 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, thiswould demonstrate the fact that England and France are responsible for thecontinuation of the war . . .

Did Hitler want peace, or did he want to continue the war and, withSoviet help, push the responsibility for its continuance on the WesternAllies? Perhaps he did not quite know himself, although he was prettycertain.

On September 26 he had a long talk with Dahlerus, who had by nomeans given up the quest for peace. Two days before, the indefatigableSwede had seen his old friend Ogilvie Forbes at Oslo, where the formercounselor of the Berlin embassy was now serving in a similar capacity inthe British Legation in the Norwegian capital. Dahlerus reported to Hit-ler, according to a confidential memorandum of Dr. Schmidt,14 that Forbeshad told him the British government was looking for peace. The onlyquestion was: How could the British save face?

“If the British actually want peace,” Hitler replied, “they can have it intwo weeks—without losing face.”

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They would have to reconcile themselves, said the Fuehrer, to the fact“that Poland cannot rise again.” Beyond that he was prepared, he de-clared, to guarantee the status quo “of the rest of Europe,” includingguarantees of the “security” of Britain, France and the Low Countries.There followed a discussion of how to launch the peace talks. Hitler sug-gested that Mussolini do it. Dahlerus thought the Queen of the Nether-lands might be more “neutral.” Goering, who was also present, suggestedthat representatives of Britain and Germany first meet secretly in Hollandand then, if they made progress, the Queen could invite both countries toarmistice talks. Hitler, who several times professed himself as skepticalregarding “the British will to peace,” finally agreed to the Swede’s pro-posal that he “go to England the very next day in order to send out feelersin the direction indicated.”

“The British can have peace if they want it,” Hitler told Dahlerus ashe left, “but they will have to hurry.”

That was one trend in the Fuehrer’s thinking. He expressed anotherto his generals. The day before, on September 25, an entry in Haider’sdiary 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 readyto make peace with Britain, Hitler convoked the commanders in chief ofthe Wehrmacht to the Chancellery and informed them of his decision to“attack in the West as soon as possible, since the Franco-British army isnot yet prepared.” According to Brauchitsch he even set a date for theattack: November 12.15 No doubt Hitler was fired that day by the newsthat Warsaw had finally capitulated. He probably thought that France,at least, could be brought to her knees as easily as Poland, though twodays later Haider made a diary note to “explain” to the Fuehrer that“technique of Polish campaign no recipe for the West. No good against awell-knit army.”

Perhaps Ciano penetrated Hitler’s mind best when he had a long talkwith the Chancellor in Berlin on October 1. The young Italian ForeignMinister, who by now thoroughly detested the Germans but had to keep upappearances, found the Fuehrer in a confident mood. As he outlined hisplans, his eyes “flashed in a sinister fashion whenever he talked about hisways and means of fighting,” Ciano observed. Summing up his impres-sions, the Italian visitor wrote:

. . . Today to offer his people a solid peace after a great victory is perhapsan 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 hisvictory, he would then a thousand times prefer battle.*10

* Mussolini did not share Hitler’s confidence in victory, which Ciano reported tohim. 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’ssudden rise to fame.” (Ciano Diaries, p. 155.)

To me as I sat in the Reichstag beginning at noon on October 6 andlistened to Hitler utter his appeal for peace, it seemed like an old gramo-phone record being replayed for the fifth or sixth time. How often beforeI had heard him from this same rostrum, after his latest conquest, and inthe same apparent tone of earnestness and sincerity, propose whatsounded—if you overlooked his latest victim—like a decent and reason-able peace. He did so again this crisp, sunny autumn day, with his usualeloquence and hypocrisy. It was a long speech—one of the most lengthypublic utterances he ever made—but toward the end, after more than anhour of typical distortions of history and a boastful account of the feat ofGerman arms in Poland (“this ridiculous state”) he came to his pro-posals for peace and the reasons therefore.

My chief endeavor has been to rid our relations with France of all trace ofill will and render them tolerable for both nations . . . Germany has nofurther claims against France ... I have refused even to mention the prob-lem of Alsace-Lorraine ... I have always expressed to France my desireto bury forever our ancient enmity and bring together these two nations, bothof which have such glorious pasts . . .

And Britain?

I have devoted no less effort to the achievement of Anglo-German under-standing, nay, more than that, of an Anglo-German friendship. At no timeand in no place have I ever acted contrary to British interests ... I believeeven today that there can only be real peace in Europe and throughout theworld 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 ofre-establishment of the Polish State is a problem which will not be solved bywar in the West but exclusively by Russia and Germany ... It would besenseless to annihilate millions of men and to destroy property worth millionsin order to reconstruct a State which at its very birth was termed an abortionby 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 newregime . . . 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 ofthem: “formation of a Polish State” (which he had already agreed withthe Russians should not exist); “solution and settlement of the Jewishproblem”; colonies for Germany; revival of international trade; “an un-

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conditionally guaranteed peace”; reduction of armaments; “regulation ofair warfare, poison gas, submarines, etc.”; and settlement of minorityproblems in Europe.

To “achieve these great ends” he proposed a conference of the leadingEuropean nations “after the most thorough preparation.”

It is impossible [he continued] that such a conference, which is to determinethe fate of this continent for many years to come, could carry on its delibera-tions while cannon are thundering or mobilized armies are bringing pressureto bear upon it.

If, however, these problems must be solved sooner or later, then it would bemore sensible to tackle the solution before millions of men are first uselesslysent to death and billions of riches destroyed. Continuation of the presentstate of affairs in the West is unthinkable. Each day will soon demand increas-ing sacrifices . . . The national wealth of Europe will be scattered in theform of shells and the vigor of every nation will be sapped on the battle-fields . . .

One thing is certain. In the course of world history there have never beentwo victors, but very often only losers. May those peoples and their leaderswho are of the same opinion now make their reply. And let those whoconsider 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 willnever be another November, 1918, in German history.

It seemed to me highly doubtful, as I wrote in my diary on my returnfrom the Reichstag, that the British and French would listen to these vagueproposals “for five minutes.” But the Germans were optimistic. On myway to broadcast that evening I picked up an early edition of Hitler’s ownpaper, 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 ARMA-MENTS CO-OPERATION WITH ALL NATIONS OF EUROPE—PROPOSAL FOR A CON-

FERENCE

The Wilhelmstrasse, it is now known from the secret German docu-ments, was encouraged to believe by the reports it was getting from Paristhrough the Spanish and Italian ambassadors there that the French hadno stomach for continuing the war. As early as September 8, the Spanishambassador was tipping the Germans off that Bonnet, “in view of thegreat unpopularity of the war in France, is endeavoring to bring about anunderstanding as soon as the operations in Poland are concluded. There

Sitzkrieg in the West 643

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 mes-sage from the Italian ambassador in Paris, stating that the majority of theFrench cabinet were in favor of a peace conference and it was now mainlya 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 fora “real peace and general security” were obtained. But Hitler was moreinterested in hearing from Chamberlain than from the French Premier.On October 10, on the occasion of a brief address at the Sportpalast in-augurating Winterhilfe, Winter Relief, he again stressed his “readinessfor peace.” Germany, he added, “has no cause for war against the West-ern Powers.”

Chamberlain’s reply came on October 12. It was a cold douche to theGerman people, if not to Hitler, t Addressing the House of Commons,the Prime Minister termed Hitler’s proposals “vague and uncertain” andnoted that “they contain no suggestions for righting the wrongs done toCzechoslovakia and Poland.” No reliance, he said, could be put on thepromises “of the present German Government.” If it wanted peace, “acts—not words alone—must be forthcoming.” He called for “convincingproof” 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 thatChamberlain, by turning down Hitler’s offer of peace, had deliberatelychosen war. Now the Nazi dictator had his excuse.

Actually, as we now know from the captured German documents, Hit-ler had not waited for the Prime Minister’s reply before ordering prepara-tions for an immediate assault in the West. On October 10 he called inhis military chiefs, read them a long memorandum on the state of the warand the world and threw at them Directive No. 6 for the Conduct of theWar.20

The Fuehrer’s insistence toward the end of September that an attack bemounted in the West as soon as possible had thrown the Army High Com-mand into a fit. Brauchitsch and Haider, aided by several other generals,had consorted to prove to the Leader that an immediate offensive was out

* A little later, on November 16, the Italians informed the Germans that accordingto their information from Paris, “Marshal Petain is regarded as the advocate of apeace policy in France ... If the question of peace should become more acute inFrance, Petain will play a role.”19 This appears to be the first indication to theGermans that Petain might prove useful to them later on.

t The day before, on October 11, there had been a peace riot in Berlin. Early inthe morning a broadcast on the Berlin radio wave length announced that the Britishgovernment had fallen and that there would be an immediate armistice. There wasgreat rejoicing in the capital as the rumor spread. Old women in the vegetablemarkets tossed their cabbages into the air, wrecked their stands in sheer joy andmade for the nearest pub to toast the peace with Schnaps.

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of the question. It would take several months, they said, to refit the tanksused in Poland. General Thomas furnished figures to show that Germanyhad a monthly steel deficit of 600,000 tons. General von Stuelpnagel, theQuartermaster General, reported there was ammunition on hand only “forabout one third of our divisions for fourteen combat days”—certainly notlong enough to win a battle against the French. But the Fuehrer would notlisten to his Army Commander in Chief and his Chief of the General Staffwhen they presented a formal report to him on Army deficiencies on Octo-ber 7. General Jodi, the leading yes man on OKW, next to Keitel, warnedHaider “that a very severe crisis is in the making” because of the Army’sopposition to an offensive in the West and that the Fuehrer was “bitter be-cause the soldiers do not obey him.”

It was against this background that Hitler convoked the generals at11 a.m. on October 10. They were not asked for their advice. DirectiveNo. 6, dated the day before, told them what to do:

TOP SECRET

If it should become apparent in the near future that England, and underEngland’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 theareas of Luxembourg, Belgium and Holland. This attack must be carriedout ... at as early a date as possible.

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

I request the Commanders in Chief to give me, as soon as possible, detailedreports of their plans on the basis of this directive and to keep me currentlyinformed ...

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

It is not the object of this memorandum to study the possibilities in thisdirection or even to take them into consideration. I shall confine myself

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exclusively to the other case: the necessity to continue the fight . . . TheGerman war aim is the final military dispatch of the West, that is, the destruc-tion of the power and ability of the Western Powers ever again to be able tooppose the state consolidation and further development of the German peoplein Europe.

As far as the outside world is concerned, this eternal aim will have toundergo various propaganda adjustments . . . This does not alter the waraim. 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 vic-tories, he reminded them, were possible because Germany really hadonly one front. That situation still held—but for how long?

By no treaty or pact can a lasting neutrality of Soviet Russia be insured withcertainty. At present all reasons speak against Russia’s departure fromneutrality. In eight months, one year, or even several years, this may bealtered. The trifling significance of treaties has been proved on all sides inrecent years. The greatest safeguard against any Russian attack lies ... ina prompt demonstration of German strength.

As for Italy, the “hope of Italian support for Germany” was dependentlargely on whether Mussolini lived and on whether there were furtherGerman successes to entice the Duce. Here too time was a factor, as itwas with Belgium and Holland, which could be compelled by Britain andFrance to give up their neutrality—something Germany could not af-ford to wait for. Even with the United States, “time is to be viewed asworking 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 WorldWar. Also, he said, Germany’s “limited food and raw-material basis”would make it difficult to find “the means for carrying on the war.” Thegreatest danger, he said, was the vulnerability of the Ruhr. If this heartof German industrial production were hit, it would “lead to the collapseof the German war economy and thus of the capacity to resist.”

It must be admitted that in this memorandum the former corporalshowed an astonishing grasp of military strategy and tactics, accompaniedthough it was by a typical lack of morals. There are several pages aboutthe new tactics developed by the tanks and planes in Poland, and a de-tailed 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 inBelgian towns. It is not necessary for them to attack towns at all, but ... to

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maintain the flow of the army’s advance, to prevent fronts from becomingstable by massed drives through identified weakly held positions.

This was a deadly accurate forecast of how the war in the West wouldbe fought, and when one reads it one wonders why no one on the Alliedside 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 betwo military objectives first in mind: to destroy the Dutch, Belgian, Frenchand British armies and thereby to gain positions on the Channel and the

Brhai'n ^ ^ ^ ^ Luftwaffe could be “brutally employed” against

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

The peculiar nature of this campaign may make it necessary to resort toimprovisations to the utmost, to concentrate attacking or defending forces atcertain points in more than normal proportion (for example, tank or antitankforces) and in subnormal concentrations at others.

As for the time of the attack, Hitler told his reluctant generals “the startcannot take place too early. It is to take place in all circumstances (if atall possible) this autumn.”

The German admirals, unlike the generals, had not needed any proddingfrom Hitler to take the offensive, outmatched though their Navy was bythe British. In fact all through the last days of September and the first daysof October Raeder pleaded with the Fuehrer to take the wraps off theavy, Tbis was gradually done. On September 17 a German U-boattorpedoed the British aircraft carrier Courageous off southwest Ireland.On September 27 Raeder ordered the pocket battleships Deutschland andG rafSpee to leave their waiting areas and start attacking British shipping.By the middle of October they had accounted for seven British merchant-men and taken in prize the American ship City of Flint.

On October 14, the German U-boat U-47, commanded by OberleutnantGuenther Prien, penetrated the seemingly impenetrable defenses of ScapaFlow, the great British naval base, and torpedoed and sank the battleshipRoyal Oak as it lay at anchor, with a loss of 786 officers and men It wasa notable achievement, exploited to the full by Dr. Goebbels in hispropaganda, and it enhanced the Navy in the mind of Hitler.

The generals remained, however, a problem. Despite his long and con-sidered memorandum to them and the issuance of Directive No 6 to getready for an imminent attack in the West, they stalled. It wasn’t that theyhad any moral scruples against violating Belgium and Holland; they simplywere highly doubtful of success at this time. There was one exception.

General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, commander of Army Group Copposing the French on the Rhine and along the Maginot Line, not onlywas skeptical of victory in the West; he, alone so far as the available records

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reveal, opposed attacking neutral Belgium and Holland at least partly onmoral grounds. The day after Hitler’s meeting with the generals, onOctober 11, Leeb composed a long memorandum himself, which he sentto Brauchitsch and other generals. The whole world, he wrote, would turnagainst Germany,

which for the second time within 25 years assaults neutral Belgium! Germany,whose government solemnly vouched for and promised the preservation ofand 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 forpeace.”21

But Hitler by this time was longing for war, for battle, and he was fedup with what he thought to be the unpardonable timidity of his generals.On October 14 Brauchitsch and Haider put their heads together in alengthy conference. The Army chief saw “three possibilities: Attack.Wait and see. Fundamental changes.” Haider noted them in his diary thatday and, after the war, explained that “fundamental changes” meant “theremoval of Hitler.” But the weak Brauchitsch thought such a drasticmeasure was “essentially negative and tends to render us vulnerable.”They decided that none of the three possibilities offered “prospects ofdecisive 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 Haider, were without effect. The situation was “hopeless.” Hitlerinformed him curtly, as Haider wrote in his diary that day, that “the Britishwill be ready to talk only after a beating. We must get at them as quicklyas possible. Date between November 15 and 20 at the latest.”

There were further conferences with the Nazi warlord, who finallylaid down the law to the generals on October 27. After a ceremony con-ferring on fourteen of them the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, theFuehrer got down to the business of the attack in the West. When Brauch-itsch tried to argue that the Army would not be ready for a month, notbefore November 26, Hitler answered that this was “much too late.” Theattack, he ordered, would begin on November 12. Brauchitsch and Hai-der retired from the meeting feeling battered and defeated. That nightthey tried to console one another. “Brauchitsch tired and dejected,” Hai-der noted in his diary.

THE ZOSSEN “CONSPIRACY” TO OVERTHROW HITLER

The time had now come for the conspirators to spring to action oncemore, or so they thought. The unhappy Brauchitsch and Haider werefaced with the stern alternatives of either carrying out the third of the“possibilities” they had seen on October 14—the removal of Hitler—ororganizing an attack in the West which they thought would be disastrous

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for Germany. Both the military and civilian “plotters,” suddenly come tolife, were urging the first alternative.

They had already been balked once since the start of the war. Generalvon Hammerstein, recalled temporarily from his long retirement on theeve of the attack on Poland, had been given a command in the west. Dur-ing the first week of the war he had urged Hitler to visit his headquartersin order to show that he was not neglecting that front while conqueringPoland. Actually Hammerstein, an implacable foe of Hitler, planned toarrest him. Fabian von Schlabrendorff had already tipped Ogilvie Forbeson this plot the day Britain declared war, on September 3, at a hasty meet-ing in the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. But the Fuehrer had smelled a rat, haddeclined to visit the former Commander in Chief of the Army and shortlythereafter had sacked him.22

The conspirators continued to maintain contact with the British. Hav-ing failed to take any action to prevent Hitler from destroying Poland,they had concentrated their efforts on trying to keep the war from spread-ing to the West. The civilian members realized that, more than before,the Army was the only organization in the Reich which possessed themeans of stopping Hitler; its power and importance had vastly increasedwith general mobilization and the lightning victory in Poland. But itsexpanded size, as Haider tried to explain to the civilians, also was a handi-cap. The officers ranks had been swollen with reserve officers many ofwhom were fanatical Nazis; and the mass of the troops were thoroughlyindoctrinated with Nazism. It would be difficult, Haider 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 theFuehrer.

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

Several channels were used. One was developed through the Vaticanby Dr. Josef Mueller, a leading Munich lawyer, a devout Catholic, a manof such great physical bulk and tremendous energy and toughness that hehad been dubbed in his youth “Joe the Ox”—Ochsensepp. Early in Oc-tober, with the connivance of Colonel Oster of the Abwehr, Mueller hadjourneyed to Rome and at the Vatican had established contact with theBritish minister to the Holy See. According to German sources, he suc-ceeded in ob aining not only an assurance from the British but the agree-ment of the Pope to act as an intermediary between a new anti-Nazi Ger-man regime and Britain.23

The other contact was in Berne, Switzerland. There Weizsaecker had

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installed Theodor Kordt, until recently the German charge in London, asan attache in the German Legation and it was in the Swiss capital that hesaw on occasion an Englishman, Dr. Philip Conwell-Evans, whose profes-sorship at the German University of Koenigsberg had made him both anexpert on Nazism and to some extent a sympathizer with it. In the latterpart of October Conwell-Evans brought to Kordt what the latter laterdescribed as a solemn promise by Chamberlain to deal justly and under-standing^ with a future anti-Nazi German government. Actually theBritisher had only brought extracts from Chamberlain’s speech to theCommons in which, while rejecting Hitler’s peace proposals, the PrimeMinister had declared that Britain had no desire to “exclude from herrightful place in Europe a Germany which will live in amity and confi-dence with other nations.” Though this statement and others in the speechof a friendly nature toward the German people had been broadcast fromLondon and presumably picked up by the conspirators, they hailed the“pledge” brought by the unofficial British representative to Berne as ofthe utmost importance. With this and the British assurances they thoughtthey had through the Vatican, the conspirators turned hopefully to theGerman generals. Hopefully, but also desperately. “Our only hope ofsalvation,” Weizsaecker told Hassell on October 17, “lies in a militarycoup d’etat. But how?”

Time was short. The German attack through Belgium and Holland wasscheduled to begin on November 12. The plot had to be carried out be-fore that date. As Hassell warned the others, it would be impossible toget a “decent peace” after Germany had violated Belgium.

There are several accounts from the participants as to what happenednext, or rather why nothing much happened, and they are conflicting andconfusing. General Haider, the Chief of the Army General Staff, wasagain the key figure, as he had been at the time of Munich. But he blewhot and cold, was hesitant and confused. In his interrogation at Nurem-berg he explained that the “Field Army” could not stage the revolt becauseit 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 mosthe could get from its commander, General Friedrich (Fritz) Fromm, wasan understanding that “as a soldier”24 he would execute any order fromBrauchitsch.

But Brauchitsch was even more wishy-washy than his General StaffChief. “If Brauchitsch hasn’t enough force of character,” General Becktold Haider, “to make a decision, then you must make the decision andpresent him with a fait accompli.” But Haider insisted that since Brauch-itsch was the Commander in Chief of the Army, the final responsibilitywas his. Thus the buck was continually passed. “Haider,” Hassellmourned in his diary at the end of October, “is not equal to the situationeither 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,

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worked on Haider, who finally agreed, they thought, to stage a putsch assoon as Hitler gave the final order for the attack in the West. Haider him-self says it was still conditional on Brauchitsch’s making the final deci-sion. At any rate, on November 3, according to Colonel Hans Groscurthof OKW, a confidant of both Haider and Oster, Haider sent word to Gen-eral Beck and Goerdeler, two of the chief conspirators, to hold themselvesin readiness from November 5 on. Zossen, the headquarters of both theArmy Command and the General Staff, became a hotbed of conspiratorialactivity.

November 5 was a key date. On that day the movement of troops totheir jump-off points opposite Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg was tobegin. Also on that day, Brauchitsch had an appointment for a showdownwith Hitler. He and Haider had visited the top army commands in thewest on November 2 and 3 and fortified themselves with the negativeopinions of the field commanders. “None of the higher headquarters,”Haider confided to his diary, “thinks the offensive . . . has any prospectof success.” Thus amply supplied with arguments from the generals onthe Western front as well as his own and Haider’s and Thomas’, whichwere assembled in a memorandum, and carrying for good measure a“countermemorandum,” as Haider calls it, replying to Hitler’s memoran-dum of October 9, the Commander in Chief of the German Army droveover to the Chancellery in Berlin on November 5 determined to talk theFuehrer out of his offensive in the West. If Brauchitsch were unsuccessful,he would then join the conspiracy to remove the dictator—or so the con-spira'ors understood. They were in a high state of excitement—and op-timism. Goerdeler, according to Gisevius, was already drawing up a cabi-net list for the provisional anti-Nazi government and had to be restrainedby the more sober Beck. Schacht alone was highly skeptical. “Just youwatch,” he warned. “Hitler will smell a rat and won’t make any decisionat all tomorrow.”

They were all, as usual, wrong.

Brauchitsch, as might have been expected, got nowhere with his mem-oranda or his reports from the front-line commanders or his own argu-ments. 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 andmoreover that it might be no better in the spring. Finally in desperationthe spineless Army chief informed the Fuehrer that the morale of thetroops in the west was similar to that in 1917-18, when there was de-featism, insubordination and even mutiny in the German Army.

At hearing this, Hitler, according to Haider (whose diary is the prin-cipal source for this highly secret meeting), flew into a rage. “In whatunits,” he demanded to know, “have there been any cases of lack of disci-pline? What happened? Where?” He would fly there himself tomorrow.Poor Brauchitsch, as Haider notes, had deliberately exaggerated “in orderto deter Hitler,” and he now felt the full force of the Leader’s uncontrolledwrath. “What action has been taken by the Army Command?” the

Sitzkrieg in the West 651

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 tri-bunal at Nuremberg in recalling his unhappy experience. “So I left.”Others remembered that he staggered into headquarters at Zossen, eighteenmiles away, in such a state of shock that he was unable at first to give acoherent account of what had happened.

That was the end of the “Zossen Conspiracy.” It had failed as ignoblyas the Haider Plot” at the time of Munich. Each time the conditionslaid 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. Infact, after the stricken Brauchitsch had left his presence he had the orderreconfirmed by telephone to Zossen. When Haider asked that it be sentin writing, he was immediately obliged. Thus the conspirators had inwriting the evidence which they had said they needed in order to over-throw Hitler—the order for an attack which they thought would bringdisaster to Germany. But they did nothing further except to panic. Therewas 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 theBelgian and Dutch legations in Berlin to expect an attack on the morningof November 12.2B Then he set out for the Western front on a fruitlessexpedition to see if he could again interest General von Witzleben inbumping off Hitler. The generals, Witzleben included, knew when theywere beaten. The former corporal had once again triumphed over themwith the greatest of ease. A few days later Rundstedt, commanding ArmyGroup A, called in his corps and divisional commanders to discuss de-tails of the attack. While still doubting its success he advised his generalsto bury their doubts. “The Army,” he said, “has been given its task, andit will fulfill that task!”

The day after provoking Brauchitsch to the edge of a nervous break-down Hitler busied himself with composing the texts of proclamations tothe Dutch and Belgian people justifying his attack on them. Haider notedthe pretext: “French march into Belgium.”

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

TOP SECRET

Berlin, November 7,1939

. . . The Fuehrer and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, afterhearing reports on the meteorological and the railway transport situation, hasordered:

A-day is postponed by three days. The next decision will be made at6 p.m. on November 9, 1939.

Keitel

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This was the first of fourteen postponements ordered by Hitler through-out the fall and winter, copies of which were found in the OKW archivesat the end of the war.28 They show that at no time did the Fuehrer aban-don for one moment his decision to attack in the West; he merely put offthe date from week to week. On November 9, the attack was postponed toNovember 19; on November 13, to November 22; and so on, with five orsix days’ notice being given each time, and usually the weather stated asthe reason. Probably the Fuehrer was, to some extent, deferring to thegenerals. Probably he got it through his head that the Army was notready. Certainly the strategic and tactical plans had not been fully workedout, for he was always tinkering with them.

There may have been other reasons for Hitler’s first postponement ofthe offensive. On November 7, the day the decision was made, the Ger-mans had been considerably embarrassed by a joint declaration of theKing of the Belgians and the Queen of the Netherlands, offering, “beforethe war in Western Europe begins in full violence,” to mediate a peace.In such circumstances it would have been difficult to convince anyone, asHitler was attempting to do in the proclamations he was drafting, that theGerman Army was moving into the two Low Countries because it hadlearned the French Army was about to march into Belgium.

Also Hitler may have got wind that his attack on the neutral little coun-try of Belgium would not have the benefit of surprise, on which he hadcounted. At the end of October, Goerdeler had journeyed to Brusselswith a secret message from Weizsaecker urging the German ambassador,Buelow-Schwante, to privately warn the King of the “extreme gravity ofthe situation.” This the ambassador did and shortly thereafter King Leo-pold rushed to The Hague to consult with the Queen and draw up theirdeclaration. But the Belgians had more specific information. Some of itcame from Oster, as we have seen. On November 8, Buelow-Schwantewired Berlin a warning that King Leopold had told the Dutch Queen thathe had “exact information” of a German military build-up on the Belgianfrontier which pointed toward a German offensive through Belgium “intwo or three days.”27

Then on the evening of November 8 and the afternoon of the followingday there occurred two strange events—a bomb explosion that just missedkilling Hitler and the kidnaping by the S.S. of two British agents in Hollandnear the German border—which at first distracted the Nazi warlord fromhis plans for attacking the West and yet in the end bolstered his prestigein Germany while frightening the Zossen conspirators, who actually hadnothing to do with either happening.

A NAZI KIDNAPING AND A BEERHOUSE BOMB

Twelve minutes after Hitler had finished making his annual speech, onthe evening of November 8, to the “Old Guard” party cronies at the Buer-

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gerbraukeller in Munich in commemoration of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch,a shorter speech than usual, a bomb which had been planted in a pillar di-rectly behind the speaker’s platform exploded, killing seven persons andwounding sixty-three others. By that time all the important Nazi leaders,with Hitler at their head, had hurriedly left the premises, though it hadbeen their custom in former years to linger over their beers and reminiscewith 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. “Theattempted ‘assassination,’ ” I wrote that evening in my diary, “undoubt-edly will buck up public opinion behind Hitler and stir up hatred of Eng-land . . „ Most of us think it smells of another Reichstag fire.”

What connection could the British secret service have with it, outsideof Goebbel’s feverish mind? An attempt was made at once to connectthem. An hour or two after the bomb went off in Munich, Heinrich Himm-ler, chief of the S.S. and the Gestapo, telephoned to one of his rising youngS.S. subordinates, Walter Schellenberg, at Duesseldorf and ordered himby command of the Fuehrer, to cross the border into Holland the nextday and kidnap two British secret-service agents with whom Schellenberghad 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 auniversity-educated intellectual gangster, had been seeing in Holland twoBritish intelligence officers, Captain S. Payne Best and Major R. H.Stevens. To them he posed as “Major Schaemmel,” an anti-Nazi officerin OKW (Schellenberg took the name from a living major) and gave aconvincing story of how the German generals were determined to over-throw Hitler. What they wanted from the British, he said, were assurancesthat the London government would deal fairly with the new anti-Naziregime. Since the British had heard from other sources (as we have seen)of a German military conspiracy, whose members wanted the same kindof assurances, London was interested in developing further contacts with“Major Schaemmel.” Best and Stevens provided him with a small radiotransmitter and receiving set; there were numerous ensuing communica-tions over the wireless and further meetings in various Dutch towns. ByNovember 7, when the two parties met at Venlo, a Dutch town on the Ger-man frontier, the British agents were able to give “Schaemmel” a rathervague message from London to the leaders of the German resistance stat-ing in general terms the basis for a just peace with an anti-Nazi regime. Itwas agreed that “Schaemmel” should bring one of these leaders, a Germangeneral, to Venlo the next day, to begin definitive negotiations. This meet-ing was put off to the ninth.

Up to this moment the objectives of the two sides were clear. TheBritish were trying to establish direct contact with the German militaryputschists in order to encourage and aid them. Himmler was attempting

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to find out through the British who the German plotters were and whattheir connection was with the enemy secret service. That Himmler andHitler were already suspicious of some of the generals as well as of menlike Oster and Canaris of the Abwehr is clear. But now on the night ofNovember 8, Hitler and Himmler found need of a new objective: KidnapBest and Stevens and blame these two British secret-service agents for theBuergerbrau bombing!

A familiar character now entered the scene. Alfred Naujocks, whohad staged the “Polish attack” on the German radio station at Gleiwitz,showed up in command of a dozen Security Service (S.D.) toughs to helpSchellenberg carry out the kidnaping. The deed came off nicely. At 4p.m. on November 9, while Schellenberg sipped an aperitif on the terraceof a cafe at Venlo, waiting for a rendezvous with Best and Stevens, thetwo British agents drove up in their Buick, parked it behind the cafe, andthen ran into a hail of bullets from an S.S. car filled with Naujock’s ruf-fians. Lieutenant Klop, a Dutch intelligence officer, who had always ac-companied the British pair in their talks with Schellenberg, fell mortallywounded. Best and Stevens were tossed into the S.S. car “like bundles ofhay,” 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 theassassination plot against Hitler at the Buergerbraukeller had been solved.It was done at the instigation of the British Intelligence Service, two ofwhose leaders, Stevens and Best, had been arrested “on the Dutch-Ger-man frontier on the day following the bombing. The actual perpetratorwas given as Georg Elser, a German Communist carpenter residing inMunich.

Himmler’s detailed account of the crime sounded “fishy” to me, as Iwrote 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 toconvince the gullible German people that the British government tried towin the war by murdering Hitler and his chief aides.”

The mystery of who arranged the bombing has never been completelycleared up. Elser, though not the half-wit that was Marinus van der Lubbeof 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 boastedof it. Though of course he had never met Best and Stevens prior to the

* According to the official Dutch account, which came to light after the war, theBritish car, with Stevens, Best and Klop in it, was towed by the Germans across thefrontier, which was only 125 feet away. Starting on November 10, the next day,the Dutch government made nine written requests at frequent intervals for thereturn of Klop and the Dutch chauffeur of the car and also demanded a Germaninvestigation of this violation of Dutch neutrality. No reply was ever made untilMay 10, when Hitler justified his attack on the Netherlands partly on the groundsthat the Venlo affair had proven the complicity of the Dutch with the British secretservice. Klop died from his wounds a few days later. Best and Stevens survived fiveyears in Nazi concentration camps.29

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attempt, he did make the former’s acquaintance during long years at theSachsenhausen concentra'ion camp. There he told the Englishman a longand involved—and not always logical—story.

One day in October at the Dachau concentration camp, where he hadbeen incarcerated since midsummer as a Communist sympathizer, herelated, he had been summoned to the office of the camp commandant,where he was introduced to two strangers. They explained the necessityof doing away with some of the Fuehrer’s “traitorous” followers by ex-ploding a bomb in the Buergerbraukeller immediately after Hitler hadmade his customary address on the evening of November 8 and had leftthe hall. The bomb was to be planted in a pillar behind the speakers’ plat-form. Since Elser was a skilled cabinetmaker and electrician and a tink-erer, they suggested that he was the man to do the job. If he did, theywould arrange for his escape to Switzerland and for a large sum of moneyto keep him in comfort there. As a token of their seriousness they prom-ised him better treatment in the camp in the meanwhile: better food, ci-vilian clothes, plenty of cigarettes—for he was a chain smoker—and acarpenter’s bench and tools. There Elser constructed a crude but efficientbomb with an eight-day alarm-clock mechanism and a contraption bywhich the weapon could also be detonated by an electric switch. Elserasserted 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 gooff, he was taken by his accomplices, he said, to the Swiss frontier, givena sum of money and—interestingly—a picture postcard of the interior ofthe beer hall, with the pillar in which he had placed his bomb markedwith a cross. But instead of being helped across the frontier—and thisseems to have surprised the dim-witted fellow—he was nabbed by theGestapo, postcard and all. Later he was coached by the Gestapo to im-plicate Best and Stevens at the coming state trial, in which he would bemade the center of attention.*

The trial never came off. We know now that Himmler, for reasons bestknown to himself, didn’t dare to have a trial. We also know—now—thatElser lived on at Sachsenhausen and then Dachau concentration camps,being accorded, apparently on the express orders of Hitler, who had per-sonally gained so much from the bombing, quite humane treatment underthe circumstances. But Himmler kept his eye on him to the last. It would

* Later at Dachau Elser told a similar story to Pastor Niemoeller, who since hasstated his personal conviction that the bombing was sanctioned by Hitler to increasehis own popularity and stir up the war fever of the people. It is only fair to addthat Gisevius, archenemy of Hitler, Himmler and Schellenberg, believes—as hetestified at Nuremberg and in his book—that Elser really attempted to kill Hitler andthat there were no Nazi accomplices. Schellenberg, who is less reliable, states thatthough he was suspicious at first of Himmler and Heydrich, he later concluded, afterquestioning the carpenter and after reading interrogations made while Elser wasfirst drugged and then hypnotized, that it was a case of a genuine attempt atassassination.

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not do to let the carpenter survive the war and live to tell his tale. Shortlybefore the war ended, on April 16, 1945, the Gestapo announced thatGeorg 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 quelleddefiance among his generals, Hitler went ahead with his plans for the bigattack in the West. On November 20, he issued Directive No. 8 for theConduct of the War, ordering the maintenance of the “state of alert” soas to “exploit favorable weather conditions immediately,” and layingdown plans for the destruction of Holland and Belgium. And then to putcourage in the fainthearted and arouse them to the proper pitch he thoughtnecessary on the eve of great battles, he summoned the commanding gen-erals and General Staff officers to the Chancellery at noon on November23.

It was one of the most revealing of the secret pep talks to his principalmilitary chiefs, and thanks to the Allied discovery of some of the OKWfiles at Flensburg it has been preserved in the form of notes taken by anunidentified participant.31

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

His mind was full of the past, the present and the future, and to thislimited group he spoke with brutal frankness and great eloquence, giving amagnificent resume of all that had gone on in his warped but fertile brainand predicting with deadly accuracy the shape of things to come. But itseems difficult to imagine that anyone who heard it could have had anyfurther doubts that the man who now held the fate of Germany—and theworld—in his hands had become beyond question a dangerous megalo-maniac.

I had a clear recognition of the probable course of historical events [he saidin 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 attemptsmay be repeated. I am convinced of the powers of my intellect and ofdecision . . . No one has ever achieved what I have achieved ... I haveled the German people to a great height, even if the world does hate us now. . . The fate of the Reich depends only on me. 1 shall act accordingly.

He chided the generals for their doubts when he made his “hard deci-sions” to leave the League of Nations, decree conscription, occupy the

Sitzkrieg in the West 657

Rhineland, fortify it and seize Austria. “The number of people who puttrust in me,” he said, “was very small.”

“The next step,” he declared in describing his conquests with a cyni-cism 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 withthe Sudeten-German territory. That was only a partial solution. The decisionto march into Bohemia was made. Then followed the establishment of theProtectorate and with that the basis for the conquest of Poland was laid, but Iwas not quite clear at that time whether I should start first against the Eastand then against the West, or vice versa. By the pressure of events it came firstto the fight against Poland. One might accuse me of wanting to fight andfight again. In struggle I see the fate of all beings. Nobody can avoid fightingif 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 andthe space for them to live in. The fight must start here. No nation can evadethe solution of this problem. Otherwise it must yield and gradually godown ... No calculated cleverness is of any help here: solution only withthe sword. A people unable to produce the strength to fight must with-draw . . .

The trouble with the German leaders of the past, Hitler said, includingBismarck and Moltke, was “insufficient hardness. The solution was pos-sible only by attacking a country at a favorable moment.” Failure torealize this brought on the 1914 war “on several fronts. It did not bringa solution of the problem.”

Today [Hitler went on] the second act of this drama is being written. Forthe 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 notorganize the armed forces in order not to strike. The decision to strike wasalways in me.

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

Russia is at present not dangerous. It is weakened by many internal con-ditions. Moreover, we have the treaty with Russia. Treaties, however, arekept only as long as they serve a purpose. Russia will keep it only as long asRussia herself considers it to be to her benefit . . . Russia still has far-reach-ing goals, above all the strengthening of her position in the Baltic. We canoppose Russia only when we are jree in the West.

As for Italy, all depended on Mussolini, “whose death can alter every-thing . . . Just as the death of Stalin, so the death of the Duce can bring

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danger to us. How easily the death of a statesman can come I myself haveexperienced recently. ’ Hitler did not think that the United States was yetdangerous—“because of her neutrality laws”—nor that her aid to theAllies yet amounted to much. Still, time was working for the enemy. “Themoment 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 mostfavorable and earliest moment. Breach of the neutrality of Belgium andHolland 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 theWorld War, not just a single action. It concerns not just a single questionbut the existence or nonexistence of the nation.” Then he swung into hisperoration.

The spirit of the great men of our history must hearten us all. Fate demandsfrom us no more than from the great men of German history. As long as I liveI shall think only of the victory of my people. 1 shall shrink from nothing andshall annihilate everyone who is opposed to me ... I want to annihilate theenemy!

It was a telling speech and so far as is known not a single general raisedhis voice either to express the doubts which almost all the Army com-manders shared about the success of an offensive at this time or to ques-tion the immorality of attacking Belgium and Holland, whose neutralityand borders the German government had solemnly guaranteed. Accord-ing to some of the generals present Hitler’s remarks about the poor spiritin the top echelons of the Army and the General Staff were much strongerthan in the above account.

Later that day, at 6 p.m., the Nazi warlord sent again for Brauchitschand Haider and to the former—the General Staff Chief was kept waitingoutside the Fuehrer’s office like a bad boy—delivered a stern lecture onthe “spirit of Zossen.” The Army High Command (OKH) was shotthrough with “defeatism,” Hitler charged, and Haider’s General Staff hada “stiff-necked attitude which kept it from falling in with the Fuehrer.”The beaten Brauchitsch, according to his own account given much lateron the stand at Nuremberg, offered his resignation, but Hitler rejected it,reminding him sharply, as the Commander in Chief remembered, “that Ihad to fulfill my duty and obligation just like every other soldier.” Thatevening Haider scribbled a shorthand note in his diary: “A day of crisis!”32

In many ways November 23, 1939, was a milestone. It marked Hitler’sfinal, decisive triumph over the Army, which in the First World War hadshunted Emperor Wilhelm II aside and assumed supreme political as wellas military authority in Germany. From that day on the onetime Austrian

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corporal considered not only his political but his military judgment su-perior to that of his generals and therefore refused to listen to their adviceor permit their criticism—with results ultimately disastrous to all.

“A breach had occurred,” Brauchitsch told the Nuremberg tribunal indescribing the events of November 23, “which was later closed but wasnever completely mended.”

Moreover, Hitler’s harangue to the generals that autumn day put a com-plete damper on any ideas Haider and Brauchitsch might have had, how-ever tepidly, to overthrow the Nazi dictator. He had warned them thathe would “annihilate” anyone who stood in his way, and Haider says Hit-ler had specifically added that he would suppress any opposition to himon the General Staff “with brutal force.” Haider, 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 ofSchacht and Popitz, and urged him to keep after Brauchitsch to take actionagainst the Fuehrer (“Hitler has to be removed!” Haider later remem-bered Thomas as saying), the General Staff Chief reminded him of allthe “difficulties.” He was not yet sure, he said, that Brauchitsch “wouldtake part actively in a coup d’etat.”33

A few days later Haider gave Goerdeler the most ludicrous reasons fornot going on with the plans to get rid of the Nazi dictator. Hassell notedthem down in his diary. Besides the fact that “one does not rebel whenface to face with the enemy,” Haider added, according to Hassell, thefollowing points: “We ought to give Hitler this last chance to deliver theGerman people from the slavery of English capitalism . . . There is nogreat man available . . . The opposition has not yet matured enough. . . One could not be sure of the younger officers.” Hassell himself ap-pealed 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 thinksit would be useless to try anything more along this line.” A little laterHassell noted that “Haider and Brauchitsch are nothing more than caddiesto Hitler.”34

NAZI TERROR IN POLAND: FIRST PHASE

Not many days after the German attack on Poland my diary began tofill with items about the Nazi terror in the conquered land. Later onewould learn that many another diary was filling with them too. Hassellon 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 astory told by a German landlord in the province of Posen.

The last thing he had seen there was a drunken district Party leader who hadordered the prison opened; he had shot five whores, and attempted to rapetwo others.35

00U THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

On October 18, Haider wrote down in his diary the main points of a talkhe had had with General Eduard Wagner, the Quartermaster General, whohad conferred with Hitler that day about the future of Poland. That fu-ture was to be grim.

We have no intention of rebuilding Poland ... Not to be a model stateby German standards. Polish intelligentsia must be prevented from establish-ing itself as a governing class. Low standard of living must be conserved.Cheap slaves . . .

Total disorganization must be created! The Reich will give the GovernorGeneral the means to carry out this devilish plan.

The Reich did.

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

Just before the attack on Poland was launched, Hitler had told his gen-erals at the conference on the Obersalzberg on August 22 that thingswould happen “which would not be to the taste of German generals” andhe warned them that they “should not interfere in such matters but re-strict themselves to their military duties.” He knew whereof he spoke.Both in Berlin and in Poland this writer soon was being overwhelmedwith reports of Nazi massacres. So were the generals. On September 10,with the Polish campaign in full swing, Haider noted in his diary an ex-ample which soon became widely known in Berlin. Some toughs belong-ing to an S.S. artillery regiment, having worked fifty Jews all day on a jobof bridge repairing, herded them into a synagogue and, as Haider put it,“massacred them.” Even General von Kuechler, the commander of theThird Army, who was later to have few qualms, refused to confirm the lightsentences of the court-martial meted out to the murderers—one year inprison—on the ground that they were too lenient. But the Army Com-mander in Chief, Brauchitsch, quashed the sentences altogether thoughnot until Himmler had intervened, with the excuse that they came under a“general amnesty.”

The German generals, upright Christians that they considered them-selves to be, found the situation embarrassing. On September 12 therewas a meeting on the Fuehrer’s railroad train between Keitel and AdmiralCanaris at which the latter protested against the atrocities in Poland. Thelackey Chief of OKW curtly replied that “the Fuehrer has already decidedon this matter.” If the Army wanted “no part in these occurrences itwould have to accept the S.S. and Gestapo as rivals”—that is, it wouldhave to accept S.S. commissars in each military unit “to carry out the ex-terminations.”

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I pointed out to General Keitel [Canaris wrote in his diary, which wasproduced at Nuremberg] that I knew that extensive executions were plannedin Poland and that particularly the nobility and the clergy were to be exter-minated. Eventually the world would hold the Wehrmacht responsible forthese deeds.36

Himmler was too clever to let the generals wiggle out of part of theresponsibility. 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 andthe nobility.” Haider’s reaction to such plans was put down in his diaryafter Wagner had reported to him:

Army insists that housecleaning” be deferred until Army has withdrawnand the country has been turned over to civil administration. Early December.

This brief diary entry by the Chief of the Army General Staff provides akey to the understanding of the morals of the German generals. Theywere not going to seriously oppose the “housecleaning”—that is, thewiping out of the Polish Jews, intelligentsia, clergy and nobility. Theywere merely going to ask that it be “deferred” until they got out of Polandand could escape the responsibility. And, of course, foreign publicopinion must be considered. As Haider jotted down in his diary the nextday, after a long conference with Brauchitsch about the “housecleaning”in Poland:

Nothing must occur which would afford foreign countries an opportunity tolaunch any sort of atrocity propaganda based on such incidents. Catholicclergy! Impractical at this time.

The next day, September 21, Heydrich forwarded to the Army HighCommand a copy of his initial “housecleaning” plans. As a first step theJews were to be herded into the cities (where it would be easy to roundthem up for liquidation). “The final solution,” he declared, would takesome time to achieve and must be kept “strictly secret,” but no generalwho read the confidential memorandum could have doubted that the“final solution” was extermination.37 Within two years, when it camedme to carry it out, it would become one of the most sinister code namesbandied about by high German officials to cover one of the most hideousNazi crimes of the war.

What was left of Poland after Russia seized her share in the east andGermany formally annexed her former provinces and some additionalterritory in the west was designated by a decree of the Fuehrer of October12 as the General Government of Poland and Hans Frank appointed asits Governor General, with Seyss-Inquart, the Viennese quisling, as hisdeputy. Frank was a typical example of the Nazi intellectual gangster.

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He had joined the party in 1927, soon after his graduation from lawschool, and quickly made a reputation as the legal light of the movement.Nimble-minded, energetic, well read not only in the law but in generalliterature, devoted to the arts and especially to music, he became a powerin the legal profession after the Nazis assumed office, serving first asBavarian Minister of Justice, then Reichsminister without Portfolio andpresident of the Academy of Law and of the German Bar Association. Adark, dapper, bouncy fellow, father of five children, his intelligence andcultivation partly offset his primitive fanaticism and up to this time madehim one of the least repulsive of the men around Hitler. But behind thecivilized veneer of the man lay the cold killer. The forty-two-volumejournal 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 Naziworld, portraying the author as an icy, efficient, ruthless, bloodthirstyman. Apparently it omitted none of his barbaric utterances.

“The Poles,” he declared the day after he took his new job, “shall bethe slaves of the German Reich.” When once he heard that Neurath, the“Protector” of Bohemia, had put up posters announcing the execution ofseven Czech university students, Frank exclaimed to a Nazi journalist,“If I wished to order that one should hang up posters about every sevenPoles shot, there would not be enough forests in Poland with which tomake 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 ofPoland, was to liquidate the intelligentsia. The Nazis had a beautifulcode name for this operation: “Extraordinary Pacification Action” (Aus-serordenliche Befriedigungsaktion, or “AB Action,” as it came to beknown). It took some time for Frank to get it going. It was not until thefollowing late spring, when the big German offensive in the West tookthe 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 hispolice aides of good progress—the lives of “some thousands” of Polishintellectuals taken, or about to be taken.

“I pray you, gentlemen,” he asked, “to take the most rigorous measurespossible 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 follow-ing them . . . must be eliminated in their turn. There is no need to burdenthe Reich with this ... no need to send these elements to Reich concentra-tion 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

* It was found in May 1945 by Lieutenant Walter Stein of the U.S. SeventhArmy in Frank’s apartment at the hotel Berghof near Neuhaus in Bavaria.

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Police gave a progress report. About two thousand men and severalhundred women, he said, had been apprehended “at the beginning of theExtraordinary Pacification Action.” Most of them already had been“summarily sentenced”—a Nazi euphemism for liquidation. A secondbatch of intellectuals was now being rounded up “for summary sentence.”Altogether “about 3,500 persons,” the most dangerous of the Polish in-telligentsia, would thus be taken care of.40

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

My dear Comrades! ... I could not eliminate all lice and Jews in onlyone year. [“Public amused,” he notes down at this point.] But in the course oftime, and if you help me, this end will be attained.41

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

As far as the Jews are concerned, I want to tell you quite frankly that theymust be done away with in one way or another . . . Gentlemen, I must askyou 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 halfmillion Jews in the General Government, but we shall be able to takemeasures which will lead, somehow, to their annihilation.” This was anaccurate prediction.4-

The hounding of Jews and Poles from the homes which they and theirfamilies had dwelt in for generations began as soon as the fighting in Po-land was over. On October 7, the day after his “peace speech” in theReichstag, Hitler appointed Himmler to be the head of a new organization,the Reich Commissariat for the Strengthening of German Nationhood, orR.K.F.D.V., for short. It was to carry out the deportation of Poles andJews first from the Polish provinces annexed outright by Germany and re-place them by Germans and Volksdeutsche, the latter being Germans offoreign nationality who were streaming in from the threatened Balticlands and various outlying parts of Poland. Haider had heard of the plana fortnight before, noting in his diary that “for every German movinginto these territories, two people will be expelled to Poland.”

On October 9, two days after assuming the latest of his posts, Himmlerdecreed that 550,000 of the 650,000 Jews living in the annexed Polishprovinces, together with all Poles not fit for “assimilation,” should bemoved into the territory of the General Government, east of the VistulaRiver. Within a year 1,200,000 Poles and 300,000 Jews had been up-

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rooted and driven to the east. But only 497,000 Volksdeutsche had beensettled in their place. This was a little better than Haider’s ratio: threePoles and Jews expelled to one German settled in their stead.

It was an unusually severe winter, that of 1939-40, as this writer re-members, with heavy snows, and the “resettlement,” carried out in zeroweather and often during blizzards, actually cost more Jewish and Polishlives than had been lost to Nazi firing squads and gallows. Himmler him-self may be cited as authority. Addressing the S.S. Leibstandarte the fol-lowing summer after the fall of France, he drew a comparison betweenthe deportations which his men were beginning to carry out in the Westwith what had been accomplished in the East.

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

Already on February 21, 1940, S.S. Oberfuehrer Richard Gluecks, thehead of the Concentration Camp Inspectorate, scouting around near Cra-cow, had informed Himmler that he had found a “suitable site” for a new“quarantine camp” at Auschwitz, a somewhat forlorn and marshy townof twelve thousand inhabitants in which was situated, besides some fac-tories, a former Austrian cavalry barracks. Work was commenced im-mediately and on June 14 Auschwitz was officially opened as a concen-tration camp for Polish political prisoners whom the Germans wished totreat with special harshness. It was soon to become a much more sinisterplace. In the meantime the directors of I. G. Farben, the great Germanchemical trust, had discovered Auschwitz as a “suitable” site for a newsynthetic coal-oil and rubber plant. There not only the construction ofnew buildings but the operation of the new plant would have the benefitof 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 themost choice ruffians in the S.S., among them Josef Kramer, who wouldlater become known to the British public as the “Beast of Belsen,” andRudolf Franz Hoess, a convicted murderer who had served five years inprison 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 thatat Auschwitz he had superintended the extermination of two and a halfmillion persons, not counting another half million who had been allowedto “succumb to starvation.”

For Auschwitz was soon destined to become the most famous of theextermination camps—Vernichtungslager—which must be distinguished

from the concentration camps, where a few did survive. It is not withoutsignificance for an understanding of the Germans, even the most respect-able Germans, under Hitler, that such a distinguished, internationallyknown firm as I. G. Farben, whose directors were honored as beingamong the leading businessmen of Germany, God-fearing men all, shoulddeliberately choose this death camp as a suitable place for profitableoperations.

FRICTION BETWEEN THE TOTALITARIAN

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 Volks-deutsche from Italian South Tyrol, which had been agreed upon the previ-ous June; failure of the Germans to supply Italy with a million tons of coala month; failure of the Italians to ignore the British blockade and supplyGermany with raw materials brought through it; Italy’s thriving tradewith 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 waver-ings in his diary. On November 9, the Duce had trouble composing atelegram to Hitler congratulating him on his escape from assassination.

He wanted it to be warm, but not too warm, because in his judgment noItalian feels any great joy over the fact that Hitler escaped death—least of allthe 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 Ger-man defeat” and instructing Ciano to secretly inform Belgium and Hol-land that they were about to be attacked. * But by New Year’s Eve he wastalking again of jumping into the war on Hitler’s side.

The chief cause of friction between the two Axis Powers was Germany’spro-Russian policy. On November 30, 1939, the Soviet Red Army hadattacked Finland and Hitler had been placed in a most humiliating posi-tion. Driven out of the Baltic as the price of his pact with Stalin, forcedto hurriedly evacuate the German families who had lived there for cen-turies, he now had to officially condone Russia’s unprovoked at'ack on alittle country which had close ties with Germany and whose very independ-ence as a non-Communist nation had been won from the Soviet Union

* Ciano conveyed the warning to the Belgian ambassador in Rome on January 2,noting the action in his diary. According to Weizsaecker the Germans interceptedtwo coded telegrams from the ambassador to Brussels containing the Italian warningand deciphered them.44

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largely by the intervention of regular German troops in 1918.* It was abitter pill to swallow, but he swallowed it. Strict instructions were givento German diplomatic missions abroad and to the German press and radioto support Russia’s aggression and avoid expressing any sympathy withthe Finns.

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

He was “profoundly convinced,” he said, that Germany, even if assistedby Italy, could never bring Britain and France “to their knees or evendivide them. To believe that is to delude oneself. The United Stateswould not permit a total defeat of the democracies.” Therefore, now thatHitler had secured his eastern frontier, was it necessary “to risk all—in-cluding the regime—and sacrifice the flower of German generations” inorder to try to defeat them? Peace could be had, Mussolini suggested, ifGermany would allow the existence of “a modest, disarmed Poland, whichis exclusively Polish. Unless you are irrevocably resolved to prosecutethe war to a finish,” he added, “I believe that the creation of a Polishstate . . . would be an element that would resolve the war and constitutea condition sufficient for the peace.”

But it was Germany’s deal with Russia which chiefly concerned theItalian dictator.

. . . Without striking a blow, Russia has in Poland and the Baltic profitedfrom the war. But I, a born revolutionist, tell you that you cannot permanentlysacrifice the principles of your Revolution to the tactical exigencies of acertain political moment ... It is my duty to add that one further stepin your relations with Moscow would have catastrophic repercussions inItaly . . ,45

Mussolini’s letter not only was a warning to Hitler of the degenerationof Italo-German relations but it hit a vulnerable target: the Fuehrer’shoneymoon with Soviet Russia, which was beginning to get on the nervesof both parties. It had enabled him to launch his war and destroy Poland.It had even given him other benefits. The captured German papers re-veal, for instance, one of the best-kept secrets of the war: the SovietUnion’s help in providing ports on the Arctic, the Black Sea and the Pa-

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

Sitzkrieg in the West 667

cific through which Germany could import badly needed raw materialsotherwise shut off by the British blockade.

On November 10, 1939, Molotov even agreed to the Soviet govern-ment’s paying the freight charges on all such goods carried over the Rus-sian railways.46 Refueling and repair facilities were provided Germanships, including submarines, at the Arctic port of Teriberka, east ofMurmansk—Molotov thought the latter port “was not isolated enough,”whereas Teriberka was “more suited because it was more remote and notvisited by foreign ships.”47

All through the autumn and early winter of 1939 Moscow and Berlinnegotiated for increased trade between the two countries. By the end ofOctober Russian deliveries of raw stuffs, especially grain and oil, toGermany were considerable, but the Germans wanted more. However,they were learning that in economics, as well as politics, the Soviets wereshrewd and hard bargainers. On November 1, Field Marshal Goering,Grand Admiral Raeder and Colonel General Keitel, “independently ofeach other,” as Weizsaecker noted, protested to the German ForeignOffice that the Russians were demanding too much German war material.A month later Keitel was again complaining to Weizsaecker that Russianrequirements for German products, especially machine tools for manufac-turing munitions, were “growing more and more voluminous and un-reasonable.”48

But if Germany wanted food and oil from Russia, it would have to payfor them in the goods Moscow needed and wanted. So desperate was theblockaded Reich for these necessities from Russia that later, on March 30,1940, at a crucial moment, Hitler ordered that delivery of war material tothe Russians should have priority even over that to the German armedforces.*50 At one point the Germans threw in the unfinished heavy cruiserLuetzow as part of current payments to Moscow. Earlier, on December15, Admiral Raeder proposed selling the plans and drawings for theBismarck, the world’s biggest battleship (45,000 tons), then building, tothe Russians if they paid “a very high price.”51

By the end of 1939 Stalin himself was personally participating in thenegotiations at Moscow with the German trade delegation. The Germaneconomists found him a formidable trader. In the captured Wilhelmstrassepapers there are long and detailed memoranda of three memorable meet-ings with the awesome Soviet dictator, who had a grasp of detail thatstunned the Germans. Stalin, they found, could not be bluffed or cheatedbut could be terribly demanding, and at times, as Dr. Schnurre, one of theNazi negotiators, reported to Berlin, he “became quite agitated.” TheSoviet Union, Stalin reminded the Germans, had “rendered a very greatservice to Germany [and] had made enemies by rendering this assistance.”

* After the conquest of France and the lowlands, Goering informed GeneralThomas, the economic chief of OKW, “that the Fuehrer desired punctual deliveryto the Russians only until the spring of 1941. Later on,” he added, “we would haveno further interest in completely satisfying the Russian demands.”48

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In return it expected some consideration from Berlin. At one conferenceat the Kremlin on New Year’s Eve, 1939-40,

Stalin characterized the total price of the airplanes as out of the question. Itrepresented a multiplication of the actual prices. If Germany did not wish todeliver 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 themtoo high, as had happened before. As examples were mentioned the total priceof 300 million Reichsmarks for airplanes and the German valuation of thecruiser Luetzow at 150 million RM. One should not take advantage of theSoviet Union’s good nature.52

On February 11, 1940, an intricate trade agreement was finally signedin Moscow providing for an exchange of goods, during the ensuing eighteenmonths, of a minimum worth of 640 million Reichsmarks. This was inaddition to the trade agreed upon during the previous August amountingto roughly 150 millions a year. Russia was to get, besides the cruiserLuetzow and the plans of the Bismarck, heavy naval guns and other gearand some thirty of Germany’s latest warplanes, including the Messer-schmitt fighters 109 and 110 and the Ju-88 dive bombers. In addition theSoviets were to receive machines for their oil and electric industries, loco-motives, turbines, generators, Diesel engines, ships, machine tools andsamples of German artillery, tanks, explosives, chemical-warfare equip-ment and so on.53

What the Germans got the first year was recorded by OKW—one mil-lion 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 amountsof numerous other vital raw materials and the transit of a million tons ofsoybeans 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 ofmetals and raw materials in third countries.”

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

This was one reason why Hitler swallowed his pride, supported Russia’saggression against Finland, which was very unpopular in Germany, andaccepted the threat of Soviet troops and airmen setting up bases in thethree Baltic countries (to be eventually used against whom but Ger-

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many?). Stalin was helping him to surmount the British blockade. Butmore important than that, Stalin still afforded him the opportunity offighting a one-front war, of concentrating all his military might in the westfor a knockout blow against France and Britain and the overrunning ofBelgium and Holland, after which—well, Hitler had already told hisgenerals 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-offpoint 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, ashe had told his generals in his memorandum of October 9, that Sovietneutrality could not be counted on forever. In eight months or a year, hehad said, things might change. And in his harangue to them on November23 he had emphasized that “we can oppose Russia only when we are freein the West.” This was a thought which never left his restless mind.

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

In the South Atlantic the Graf Spee, one of Germany’s three pocketbattleships, had emerged from its waiting area and in three months hadsunk nine British cargo vessels totaling 50,000 tons. Then, a fortnightbefore the first Christmas of the war, on December 14, 1939, the Germanpublic was electrified by the news, splashed in flaming headlines and inbulletins 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 fourhundred miles off Montevideo and put them out of action. But elationsoon turned to puzzlement. Three days later the press announced that thepocket battleship had scuttled herself in the Plate estuary just outside theUruguayan capital. What kind of a victory was that? On December 21,the High Command of the Navy announced that the Graf Spee'% com-mander, Captain Hans Langsdorff, had “followed his ship” and thus“fulfilled like a fighter and hero the expectations of his Fuehrer, theGerman people and the Navy.”

The wretched German people were never told that the Graf Spee hadbeen severely damaged by the three British cruisers, which it outgunned,*that it had had to put into Montevideo for repairs, that the Uruguayan

* The day before the scuttling Goebbels had made the German press play up a fakeddispatch from Montevideo saying the Graf Spee had suffered only “superficialdamage” and that British reports that it had been severely crippled were “pure lies.”

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government, in accordance with international law, had allowed it toremain for only seventy-two hours, which was not enough, that the “hero,”Captain Langsdorff, ra'her than risk further battle with the British withhis crippled ship, had therefore scuttled it, and that he himself, instead ofgoing down with her, had shot himself two days afterward in a lonelyhotel room in Buenos Aires. Nor were they told, of course, that, asGeneral Jodi jotted in his diary on December 18, the Fuehrer was “veryangry about the scuttling of Graf Spee without a fight” and sent forAdmiral Raeder, to whom he gave a dressing down.57

On December 12, Hitler issued another top-secret directive postponingthe attack in the West and stipulating that a fresh decision would not bemade until December 27 and that the earliest date for “A Day” would beJanuary 1, 1940. He advised that Christmas leaves could therefore begranted. According to my diary, Christmas, the high point of the year forGermans, was a bleak one in Berlin that winter, with few presents ex-changed, Spartan food, the menfolk away, the streets blacked out, theshutters and curtains drawn tight, and everyone grumbling about the war,the food and the cold.

There was an exchange of Christmas greetings between Hitler andStalin.

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

To which Stalin replied:

The friendship of the peoples of Germany and the Soviet Union, cementedby blood, has every reason to be lasting and firm.

In Berlin Ambassador von Hassell used the holidays to confer withhis fellow conspirators, Popitz, Goerdeler and General Beck, and onDecember 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 ofthis action Beck would go to Zossen and take the supreme command fromBrauchitsch’s hands. A doctor would declare Hitler incapable of continuingin office, whereupon he would be taken into custody. Then an appeal wouldbe made to the people along these lines: prevention of further S.S. atrocities,restoration of decency and Christian morality, continuation of the war, butreadiness 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 ofwhether they should retain Goering or not!

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Goering himself, along with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Ley and otherparty leaders, used the New Year to issue grandiose proclamations. Leysaid, “The Fuehrer is always right! Obey the Fuehrer!” The Fuehrerhimself proclaimed that not he but “the Jewish and capitalistic war-mongers” had started the war and went on:

United within the country, economically prepared and militarily armed tothe highest degree, we enter this most decisive year in German history . . .May the year 1940 bring the decision. It will be, whatever happens, ourvictory.

On December 27 he had again postponed the attack in the West “byat least a fortnight.” On January 10 he ordered it definitely set for Jan-uary 17 “fifteen minutes before sunrise—8:16 a.m.” The Air Force wasto begin its attack on January 14, three days in advance, its task being todestroy enemy airfields in France, but not in Belgium and Holland. Thetwo little neutral countries were to be kept guessing about their fate untilthe last moment.

But on January 13 the Nazi warlord suddenly postponed the onslaughtagain “on account of the meteorological situation.” The captured OKWfile on D Day in the West is thereafter silent until May 7. Weather mayhave played a part in the calling off of the attack on January 13. But wenow know that two other events were mainly responsible—an unfortunateforced landing of a very special German military plane in Belgium onJanuary 10 and a new opportunity that now appeared to the north.

On the very day, January 10, that Hitler had ordered the attack throughBelgium and Holland to begin on the seventeenth, a German military planeflying from Muenster to Cologne became lost in the clouds over Belgiumand was forced to land near Mechelen-sur-Meuse. In it was MajorHelmut Reinberger, an important Luftwaffe staff officer, and in his brief-case were the German plans, complete with maps, for the attack in theWest. As Belgian soldiers closed in, the major made for some nearbybushes and lit a fire to the contents of his briefcase. Attracted by thisinteresting phenomenon the Belgian soldiers stamped out the flames andretrieved what was left. Taken to military quarters nearby, Reinberger,in a desperate gesture, grabbed the partly burned papers, which a Belgianofficer had placed on a table, and threw them into a lighted stove. TheBelgian officer quickly snatched them out.

Reinberger promptly reported to Luftwaffe headquarters in Berlinthrough his embassy in Brussels that he had succeeded in burning downthe papers to “insignificant fragments, the size of the palm of his hand.”But in Berlin there was consternation in high quarters. Jodi immediatelyreported to Hitler “on what the enemy may or may not know.” But hedid not know himself. “If enemy is in possession of all the files,” he con-fided to his diary on January 12, after seeing the Fuehrer, “the situation

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is catastrophic.” That evening Ribbentrop sent a “most urgent” wire tothe German Embassy in Brussels asking for an immediate report on the“destruction of the courier baggage.” On the morning of January 13,Jodi’s diary reveals, there was a conference of Goering with his air attach^in Brussels, who had flown posthaste back to Berlin, and the top Luftwaffebrass. “Result: Dispatch case burned for certain,” Jodi recorded.

But this was whistling in the dark, as Jodi’s journal makes clear. At1 p.m. it noted: “Order to Gen. Haider by telephone: All movements tostop.”

The same day, the thirteenth, the German ambassador in Brussels wasurgently informing Berlin of considerable Belgian troop movements “as aresult of alarming reports received by the Belgian General Staff.” Thenext day the ambassador got off another “most urgent” message to Berlin:The Belgians were ordering “Phase D,” the next-to-the-last step inmobilization, and calling up two new classes. The reason, he thought,was “reports of German troop movements on the Belgian and Dutchfrontiers as well as the content of the partly unburned courier mail foundon the German Air Force officer.”

By the evening of January 15 doubts had risen in the minds of the topbrass in Berlin whether Major Reinberger had really destroyed the in-criminating documents as he had claimed. They were “presumablyburned,” Jodi remarked after another conference on the matter. But onJanuary 17 the Belgian Foreign Minister, Paul-Henri Spaak, sent for theGerman ambassador and told him flatly, as the latter promptly reported toBerlin, that

the plane which made an emergency landing on January 10 had put intoBelgian hands a document of the most extraordinary and serious nature, whichcontained clear proof of an intention to attack. It was not just an operationsplan, but an attack order worked out in every detail, in which only the timeremained 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 copiesof the German plan—there was a tendency to view the German papersas a “plant.” Churchill says he vigorously opposed this interpretation andlaments that nothing was done about this grave warning. What is certainis that on January 13, the day after Hitler was informed of the affair, hepostponed the attack and that by the time it again came up for decision inthe spring the whole strategic plan had been fundamentally changed.88

But the forced landing in Belgium—and the bad weather—were notthe only reasons for put.ing off the attack. Plans for a daring Germanassault on two other little neutral states farther to the north had in themeantime been ripening in Berlin and now took priority. The phony war,so far as the Germans were concerned, was coming to an end with theapproach of spring.

20

THE CONQUEST OF DENMARKAND NORWAY

The innocent-sounding code name for the latest plan of Germanaggression was Weseruebung, or “Weser Exercise.” Its origins anddevelopment were unique, quite unlike those for unprovoked attack thathave filled so large a part of this narrative. It was not the brain child ofHitler, as were all the others, but of an ambitious admiral and a muddledNazi party hack. It was the only act of German military aggression inwhich the German Navy played the decisive role. It was also the only onefor which OKW did the planning and co-ordinating of the three armedservices. In fact, the Army High Command and its General Staff werenot even consul.ed, much to their annoyance, and Goering was not broughtinto the picture until the last moment—a slight that infuriated the corpu-lent chief of the Luftwaffe.

The German Navy had long had its eyes on the north. Germany hadno direct access to the wide ocean, a geographical fact which had beenimprinted on the minds of its naval officers during the First World War.A tight British net across the narrow North Sea, from the Shetland Islandsto the coast of Norway, maintained by a mine barrage and a patrol ofships, had bottled up the powerful Imperial Navy, seriously hampered theattempts of U-boats to break out into the North Atlantic, and kept Germanmerchant shipping off the seas. The German High Seas Fleet neverreached the high seas. The British naval blockade stifled ImperialGermany in the first war. Between the wars the handful of German navalofficers who commanded the country’s modestly sized Navy pondered thisexperience and this geographical fact and came to the conclusion that inany future war with Britain, Germany must try to gain bases in Norway,which would break the British blockade line across the North Sea, openup the broad ocean to German surface and undersea vessels and indeedoffer an opportunity for the Reich to reverse the tables and mount aneffective blockade of the British Isles.

It was not surprising, then, that at the outbreak of war in 1939 AdmiralRolf Carls, the third-ranking officer in the German Navy and a forceful

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personality, should start peppering Admiral Raeder, as the latter notedin his diary and testified at Nuremberg, with letters suggesting “,he im-portance of an occupation of the Norwegian coast by Germany.”1 Raederneeded little urging and on October 3, at the end of the Polish campaign,sent a confidential questionnaire to the Naval War S aff asking it to ascer-tain the possibility of gaining “bases in Norway under the combined pres-sure of Russia and Germany.” Ribbentrop was consulted about Moscow’sattitude and replied that “far-reaching support may be expected” fromthat source. Raeder told his staff that Hitler must be informed as soon aspossible about the “possibilities.”2

On October 10, in the course of a lengthy report to the Fuehrer onnaval operations, Raeder suggested the importance of obtaining navalbases in Norway, if necessary with the help of Russia. This—so far asthe confidential records show—was the first time the Navy had direcilycalled the matter to the attention of Hitler. Raeder says the Leader “sawat once the significance of the Norwegian problem.” He asked him toleave his notes on the subject and promised to give the question somethought. But at the moment the Nazi warlord was preoccupied withlaunching his attack in the West and with overcoming the hesitations ofhis 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 dependedupon the import of iron ore from Sweden. For the first war year theGermans were counting on eleven million tons of it out of a total annualconsumption of fifteen million tons. During the warm-weather monthsthis ore was transported from northern Sweden down the Gulf of Bothniaand across the Baltic to Germany, and presented no problem even inwartime, since the Baltic was effectively barred to British submarines andsurface ships. But in the wintertime this shipping lane could not be usedbecause of thick ice. During the cold months the Swedish ore had to beshipped by rail to the nearby Norwegian port of Narvik and brought downthe Norwegian coast by ship to Germany. For almost the entire journeyGerman ore vessels could sail within Norway’s territorial waters andthereby escape destruction by British naval vessels and bombers.

Thus, as Hitler at first pointed out to the Navy, a neutral Norway hadits advantages. It enabled Germany to obtain its lifeblood of iron orewithout interference from Britain.

In London, Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, perceived thisat once and in the very first weeks of the war attempted to persuade thecabinet to allow him to lay mines in Norwegian territorial waters in orderto stop the German iron traffic. But Chamberlain and Halifax were most

* It was on October 10 that Hitler had called in his military chiefs, read them a longmemorandum on the necessity of an immediate attack in the West and handed themDirective No. 6 ordering preparations for an offensive through Belgium andHolland. (See above, pp. 644-46.)

The Conquest of Denmark and Norway 675

reluctant to violate Norwegian neutrality, and the proposal was for thetime being dropped.4

Russia’s attack on Finland on November 30, 1939, radically changedthe situation in Scandinavia, immensely increasing its strategic importanceto both the Western Allies and Germany. France and Britain began toorganize an expeditionary force in Scotland to be sent to the aid of thegallant Finns, who, defying all predictions, held out stubbornly againstthe onslaughts of the Red Army. But it could reach Finland only throughNorway and Sweden, and the Germans at once saw that if Allied troopswere granted, or took, transit across the northern part of the two Scan-dinavian lands enough of them would remain, on the excuse of maintain-ing communications, to completely cut off Germany’s supply of Swedishiron ore.* Moreover, the Western Allies would outflank the Reich on thenorth. Admiral Raeder was not backward in reminding Hitler of thesethreats.

The chief of the German Navy had now found in Norway itself avaluable ally for his designs in the person of Major Vidkun AbrahamLauritz Quisling, whose name would soon become a synonym in almost alllanguages for a traitor.

THE EMERGENCE OF VIDKUN QUISLING

Quisling had begun life honorably enough. Born in 1887 of peasantstock, he had graduated first in his class at the Norwegian Military Aca-demy and while still in his twenties had been sent to Petrograd as militaryattache. For his services in looking after British interests after diplomaticrelations were broken with the Bolshevik government, Great Britainawarded 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 toFridtjof Nansen, the great Norwegian explorer and humanitarian, inRussian relief work.

So impressed had the young Norwegian Army officer been by thesuccess of the Communists in Russia that when he returned to Oslo heoffered his services to the Labor Party, which at that time was a memberof the Comintern. He proposed that he establish a “Red Guard,” but theLabor Party was suspicious of him and his project and turned him down.He then veered to the opposite extreme. After serving as Minister ofDefense from 1931 to 1933, he founded in May of the latter year a

* It was a correct assumption. It is now known that the Allied Supreme WarCouncil, meeting in Paris on February 5, 1940, decided that in sending an ex-peditionary force to Finland the Swedish iron fields should be occupied by troopslanded at Narvik, which was but a short distance from the mines. (See the authorsThe Challenge of Scandinavia, pp. 115-16n.) Churchill remarks that at the meetingit was decided “incidentally to get control of the Gullivare ore-field.” (The Gather-ing Storm, p. 560.)

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fascist party called Nasjonal Samling—National Union—appropriatingthe ideology and tactics of the Nazis, who had just come to power inGermany. But Nazism did not thrive in the fertile democratic soil ofNorway. 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 befuddledofficial philosopher of the Nazi movement, among whose jobs was that ofchief of the party’s Office for Foreign Affairs. This Baltic dolt, one ofHitler’s earliest mentors, thought he saw possibilities in the Norwegianofficer, for one of Rosenberg’s pet fantasies was the establishment of agreat Nordic Empire from which the Jews and other “impure” races wouldbe excluded and which eventually would dominate the world under NaziGerman leadership. From 1933 on, he kept in touch with Quisling andheaped on him his nonsensical philosophy and propaganda.

In June 1939, as the war clouds gathered over Europe, Quisling tookthe occasion of his attendance at a convention of the Nordic Society atLuebeck to ask Rosenberg for something more than ideological support.According to the latter’s confidential reports, which were produced atNuremberg, Quisling warned Rosenberg of the danger of Britain’s gettingcontrol of Norway in the event of war and of the advantages to Germanyof occupying it. He asked for some substantial aid for his party and press.Rosenberg, a great composer of memoranda, dashed out three of them forHitler, Goering and Ribbentrop, but the three top men appear to haveignored them—no one in Germany took the “official philosopher” veryseriously. Rosenberg himself was able to arrange at least for a fortnight’straining course in Germany in August for twenty-five of Quisling’s huskystorm troopers.

During the first months of the war Admiral Raeder—or so he testifiedat Nuremberg—had no contact with Rosenberg, whom he scarcely knew,and none with Quisling, of whom he had never heard. But immediatelyafter the Russian attack on Finland Raeder began to get reports from hisnaval attache at Oslo, Captain Richard Schreiber, of imminent Alliedlandings in Norway. He mentioned these to Hitler on December 8 andadvised him flatly, “It is important to occupy Norway.”5

Shortly afterward Rosenberg dashed off a memorandum (undated) toAdmiral Raeder “regarding visit of Privy Councilor Quisling—Norway.”The Norwegian conspirator had arrived in Berlin and Rosenberg thoughtRaeder ought to be told who he was and what he was up to. Quisling, hesaid, had many sympathizers among key officers in the Norwegian Armyand, as proof, had shown him a recent letter from Colonel Konrad Sundlo,the commanding officer at Narvik, characterizing Norway’s Prime Ministeras a “blockhead” and one of his chief ministers as “an old soak” anddeclaring his willingness to “risk his bones for the national uprising.”Later Colonel Sundlo did not risk his bones to defend his country againstaggression.

Actually, Rosenberg informed Raeder, Quisling had a plan for a coup.

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It must have fallen upon sympathetic ears in Berlin, for it was copied fromthe Anschluss. A number of Quisling’s storm troopers would be hurriedlytrained in Germany “by experienced and diehard National Socialists whoare 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 Armywill have to put in an appearance at a prearranged bay outside Oslo in answerto a special summons from the new Norwegian Government.

It was the Anschluss tactic all over again, with Quisling playing thepart of Seyss-Inquart.

Quisling has no doubt [Rosenberg added] that such a coup . . . wouldmeet with the approval of those sections of the Army with which he now hasconnections ... As regards the King, he believes that he would accept sucha fait accompli.

Quisling’s estimate of the number of German troops needed for the opera-tion coincides with the German estimates.®

Admiral Raeder saw Quisling on December 11, the meeting beingarranged through Rosenberg by one Viljam Hagelin, a Norwegian busi-nessman whose affairs kept him largely in Germany and who was Quisling’schief liaison there. Hagelin and Quisling told Raeder a mouthful and heduly 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 presentNorwegian Government as well as the Parliament and the whole foreign policyare controlled by the well-known Jew, Hambro [Carl Hambro, the Presidentof the Storting], a great friend of Hore-Belisha . . . The dangers to Germanyarising from a British occupation were depicted in great detail . . .

To anticipate a British move, Quisling proposed to place “the necessarybases at the disposal of the German Armed Forces. In the whole coastalarea men in important positions (railway, post office, communications)have already been bought for this purpose.” He and Hagelin had come toBerlin to establish “clear-cut relations with Germany for the future . . .Conferences are desired for discussion of combined action, transfer oftroops to Oslo, etc.”7

Raeder, as he later testified at Nuremberg, was impressed and told histwo visitors that he would confer with the Fuehrer and inform them of theresults. This he did the next day at a meeting at which Keitel and Jodiwere also present. The Navy Commander in Chief (whose report on thisconference is among the captured documents) informed Hitler that Quis-

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

ling had made “a reliable impression” on him. He then outlined themain points the Norwegians had made, emphasizing Quisling’s “good con-nections with officers in the Norwegian Army” and his readiness “to takeover the government by a political coup and ask Germany for aid.” Allpresent agreed that a British occupation of Norway could not be counte-nanced, but Raeder, become suddenly cautious, pointed out 'hat a Germanoccupation “would naturally occasion strong British countermeasures... and the German Navy is not yet prepared to cope with them for anylength of time. In the event of occupation this is a weak spot.” On theother hand, Raeder suggested that OKW

be permitted to make plans with Quisling for preparing and executing theoccupation either:

a. by friendly methods, i.e., the German Armed Forces are called upon byNorway, or

b. by force.

Hitler was not quite ready to go so far at the moment. He replied thathe first wanted to speak to Quisling personally “in order to form an impres-sion of him.”8 r

This he did the very next day, December 14, Raeder personally escort-ing the two Norwegian traitors to the Chancellery. Although no recordof this meeting has been found, Quisling obviously impressed the Germandictator,* as he had the Navy chief, for that evening Hitler ordered OKWto work out a draft plan in consultation with Quisling. Haider heard thatit would also include action against Denmark.10

Hitler saw Quisling again on December 16 and 18, despi‘e his preoc-cupation with the bad news about the Graf Spee. The naval setback,however, seems to have added to his cautiousness about a Scandinavianadventure which would depend first of all on the Navy. According toRosenberg, the Fuehrer emphasized to his visitor that “the most prefer-able attitude for Norway would be . . . complete neutrality.” However,if the British were preparing to enter Norway the Germans would have tobeat them to it. In the meantime he would provide Quisling with fundsto combat British propaganda and strengthen his own pro-German move-ment. An initial sum of 200,000 gold marks was allotted in January, withthe promise of 10,000 pounds sterling per month for three months begin-ning on March 15.11

Shortly before Christmas Rosenberg dispatched a special agent, Hans-Wilhelm Scheidt, to Norway to work with Quisling, and over the holidaysthe 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

* He had not impressed the German minister in Oslo, Dr. Curt Brauer, who twicem December warned Berlin that Quisling “need not be taken seriously . hisinfluence and prospects are . . . very slight.”0 For his frankness and reluctance toplay Hitler s game, the minister was quickly to pay.

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divided. Raeder was convinced that Britain intended to move intoNorway in the near future. The Operations Division of the Naval WarStaff 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 occupationof Norway is probable . . . [It] considers, however, that an occupation ofNorway by Germany, if no British action is to be feared, would be adangerous undertaking.

The Naval War Staff therefore concluded “that the most favorablesolution is definitely the maintenance of the status quo” and emphasizedthat this would permit the continued use of Norwegian territorial watersfor the ore traffic “in perfect safety.”

Hitler was displeased with both the hesitations of the Navy and theresults of Study North, which OKW presented to him the middle ofJanuary. On January 27 he had Keitel issue a top-secret directive statingthat further work on “North” be continued under the Fuehrer’s “personaland immediate supervision” and directing Keitel to take charge of allpreparations. A small working staff composed of one representative fromeach of the three armed services was to be set up in OKW and henceforththe operation was to have the code name Weseruebung.13

This step seems to have marked the end of the Fuehrer’s hesitationsabout occupying Norway, but if there were any lingering doubts in hismind they were dispelled by an incident which occurred in Norwegianwaters on February 17.

An auxiliary supply ship of the Graf Spee, the Altmark, had managedto slip back through the British blockade and on February 14 was dis-covered by a British scouting plane proceeding southward in Norwegianterritorial waters toward Germany. The British government knew thataboard it were three hundred captured British seamen from the shipssunk by the Graf Spee. They were being taken to Germany as prisonersof war. Norwegian naval officers had made a cursory inspection of theAltmark, found that it had no prisoners aboard and was unarmed, andgiven it clearance to proceed on to Germany. Now Churchill, who knewotherwise, personally ordered a British destroyer flotilla to go into Norwe-gian 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 Josing Fjord,where the Altmark had sought safety. After a scuffle in which fourGermans were killed and five wounded, the British boarding partyliberated 299 seamen, who had been locked in storerooms and in anempty oil tank to avoid their detection by the Norwegians.

The Norwegian government made a vehement protest to Britain aboutthis violation of its territorial waters, but Chamberlain replied in theCommons that Norway itself had violated international law by allowing

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its waters to be used by the Germans to convey British prisoners to aGerman prison.

For Hitler this was the last straw. It convinced him that the Norwegianswould not seriously oppose a British display of force in their own territorialwaters. He was also furious, as Jodi noted in his diary, that the membersof the Graf Spee crew aboard the Altmark had not put up a stiffer fight

no resistance, no British losses.” On February 19, Jodi’s diary discloses.Hitler “pressed energetically” for the completion of plans for Weserue-bung. “Equip ships. Put units in readiness,” he told Jodi. They stilllacked an officer to lead the enterprise and Jodi reminded Hitler that itwas time to appoint a general and his staff for this purpose.

Keitel suggested an officer who had fought with General von der Goltz’siivision in Finland at the end of the First World War, General Nikolausvon Falkenhorst, who now commanded an army corps in the west, andHitler, who had overlooked the little matter of a commander for thenorthern adventure, immediately sent for him. Though the General camefrom an old Silesian military family by the name of Jastrzembski, whichhe had changed to Falkenhorst (in German, “falcon’s eyrie”), he waspersonally unknown to the Fuehrer.

Falkenhorst later described in an interrogation at Nuremberg their firstmeeting at the Chancellery on the morning of February 21, which was notwithout its amusing aspects. Falkenhorst had never even heard of the“North” operation and this was the first time he had faced the Nazi war-lord, 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 tellthe Fuehrer about the operations in Finland in 1918 ... He said: “Sit downand 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. Hesaid: “. . . The Reich Government has knowledge that the British intend tomake a landing in Norway . .

Falkenhorst said he got the impression from Hitler that it was theAltmark incident which had influenced the Leader the most to “carry outthe plan now.” And the General, to his surprise, found himself appointedthen 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 toseize the main Norwegian ports.

At noon the warlord dismissed Falkenhorst and told him to report backat 5 p.m. with his plans for the occupation of Norway.

I went out and bought a Baedeker, a travel guide [Falkenhorst explained atNuremberg], in order to find out just what Norway was like. I didn’t have anyidea . . . Then I went to my hotel room and I worked on this Baedeker .

At 5 p.M. I went back to the Fuehrer.14

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The Conquest of Denmark and Norway

The General’s plans, worked out from an old Baedeker—he was nevershown the plans worked out by OKW—were, as can be imagined, some-what sketchy, but they seem to have satisfied Hitler. One division was tobe 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.” Afterbeing sworn to secrecy and urged “to hurry up,” the General was againdismissed and thereupon set to work.

Of all these goings on, Brauchitsch and Haider, busy preparing theoffensive on the Western front, were largely ignorant until Falkenhorstcalled on the Army General Staff Chief on February 26 and demandedsome troops, especially mountain units, to carry out his operation. Haiderwas not very co-operative; in fact, he was indignant and asked for moreinformation on what was up and what was needed. “Not a single word onthis matter has been exchanged between the Fuehrer and Brauchitsch,”Haider exclaimed in his diary. “That must be recorded for the history ofthe war!”

However, Hitler, full of contempt as he was for the old-line generals andespecially for his General Staff Chief, was not to be put off. On March 29he enthusiastically approved Falkenhorst’s plans, including his acquisitionof two mountain divisions, and moreover declared that more troops wouldbe necessary because he wanted “a strong force at Copenhagen.” Den-mark had definitely been added to the list of Hitler’s victims; the AirForce had its eyes on bases there to be used against Britain.

The next day, March 1, Hitler issued the formal directive for WeserExercise.

MOST SECRETTOP SECRET

The development of the situation in Scandinavia requires the making of allpreparations for the occupation of Denmark and Norway. This operationshould prevent British encroachment on Scandinavia and the Baltic. Furtherit should guarantee our ore base in Sweden and give our Navy and the AirForce a wider starting line against Britain . . .

In view of our military and political power in comparison with that of theScandinavian States, the force to be employed in “Weser Exercise” will bekept as small as possible. The numerical weakness will be balanced by daringactions and surprise execution.

On principle, we will do our utmost to make the operation appear as apeaceful occupation, the object of which is the military protection of theneutrality of the Scandinavian States. Corresponding demands will be trans-mitted 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 tocrush it . . . The crossing of the Danish border and the landings in Norwaymust take place simultaneously . . .

the RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

It is most important that the Scandinavian States as well as the Westernopponents should be taken by surprise . . . The troops may be acquaintedwith the actual objectives only after putting to sea . . ,15

That very evening, March 1, there was “fury” at the Army High Com-mand, Jodi reported, because of Hitler’s demands for troops for thenorthern operation. The next day Goering “raged” at Keitel and went tocomplain to Hitler. The fat Field Marshal was furious at having been leftout of the secret so long and because the Luftwaffe had been put underFalkenhorst’s command. Threatened by a serious jurisdictional dispute,Hitler convoked the heads of the three armed services to the Chancelleryon March 5 to smooth matters out, but it was difficult.

Field Marshal [Goering] vents his spleen [Jodi wrote in his diary] becausehe was not consulted beforehand. He dominates the discussion and tries toprove that all previous preparations are good for nothing.

The Fuehrer mollified him by some small concessions, and plans racedforward. As early as February 21, according to his diary, Haider had gotthe impression that the a tack on Denmark and Norway would not beginuntil after the offensive in the West had been launched and “carried to acertain point.” Hitler himself had been in doubt which operation tobegin first and raised the question with Jodi on February 26. Jodi’s advicewas to keep the two operations quite separate and Hitler agreed, “if it werepossible.”

On March 3 he decided that Weser Exercise would precede “CaseYellow” (the code name for attack in the West) and expressed “verysharply” to Jodi “the necessity of prompt and strong action in Norway.”By this time the courageous but outmanned and outgunned Finnish Armywas facing disaster from a massive Russian offensive and there were well-founded reports that the Anglo-French expeditionary corps was about toembark from its bases in Scotland for Norway and march across thatcountry and Sweden to Finland to try to save the Finns.* The threat of thiswas the main reason for Hitler’s hurry.

* On March 7 General Ironside, Chief of the British General Staff, informed MarshalMannerheim that an Allied expeditionary force of 57,000 men was ready to cometo the aid of the Finns and that the first division, of 15,000 troops, could reachFinland 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 andSweden 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 notofficially asking for Allied troops and from intimating that the Allied forces wouldbe sent regardless of Norwegian and Swedish protests. But Mannerheim was notto be fooled, and, having advised his government to sue for peace while the FinnishArmy was still intact and undefeated, he approved the immediate dispatch of apeace delegation to Moscow on March 8. The Finnish Commander in Chief seemsto have been skeptical of the French zeal for fighting on the Finnish front rather

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The Conquest of Denmark and Norway

But on March 12 the Russo-Finnish War suddenly ended with Finlandaccepting Russia’s harsh terms for peace. While this was generally wel-comed in Berlin because it freed Germany from its unpopular champion-ship of the Russians against the Finns and also brought an end, for themoment, of the Soviet drive to take over the Baltic, it nevertheless embar-rassed Hitler so far as his own Scandinavian venture was concerned. AsJodi confided to his diary, it made the “motivation” for the occupation ofNorway and Denmark “difficult.” “Conclusion of peace between Finlandand Russia,” he noted on March 12, “deprives England, but us too, of anypolitical basis to occupy Norway.”

In fact, Hitler was now hard put to find an excuse. On March 13 thefaithful Jodi recorded that the Fuehrer was “still looking for some justifica-tion.” The next day: “Fuehrer has not yet decided how to justify the‘Weser Exercise.’ ” To make matters worse, Admiral Raeder began to getcold feet. He was “in doubt whether it was still important to play atpreventive war (?) in Norway.”18

For the moment Hitler hesitated. Two other problems had in themeantime arisen: (1) how to handle Sumner Welles, the United StatesUndersecretary of State, who had arrived in Berlin March 1 on a missionfrom President Roosevelt to see if there was any chance of ending the warbefore the slaughter began in the West; and (2) how to placate theneglected, offended Italian ally. Hitler had not yet bothered to answerMussolini’s defiant letter of January 3, and relations between Berlin andRome had distinctly cooled. Now Sumner Welles, the Germans believed,and with some reason, had come to Europe to try to detach Italy from thecreaky Axis and persuade her, at any event, not to enter the war onGermany’s side if the conflict continued. Various warnings had reachedBerlin from Rome that it was time something were done to keep thesulking Duce in line.

HITLER MEETS WITH SUMNER WELLES ANDMUSSOLINI

Hitler’s ignorance of the United States, as well as that of Goering andRibbentrop, was abysmal.* * And though their policy at this time was to

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 amongthe belligerents had the Franco-British expeditionary corps ever arrived in Finlandand fought the Russians. In little more than a year Germany would be at war withRussia, 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 theFuehrer’s state of mind at this very moment. On March 12 Hitler had a long talkwith Colin Ross, a German “expert” on the United States, who had recently returnedfrom a lecture trip in America, where he had contributed his mite to Nazipropaganda. When Ross remarked that an “imperialist tendency” prevailed in the

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try to keep America out of the war, they, like their predecessors in Berlinin 1914, did not take the Yankee nation seriously as even a potentialmilitary power. As early as October 1, 1939, the German military attachein Washington, General Friedrich von Boetticher, advised OKW in Berlinnot to worry about any possible American expeditionary force in Europe.On December 1 he further informed his military superiors in Berlin thatAmerican armament was simply inadequate “for an aggressive war policy”and added that the General Staff in Washington “in contrast to the StateDepartment’s sterile policy of hatred and the impulsive policy of Roose-velt—often based on an overestimation of American military power—stillhas understanding for Germany and her conduct of the war.” In his firstdispatch Boetticher had noted that “Lindbergh and the famous flyerRickenbacker” were advocating keeping America out of the war. ByDecember 1, however, despite his low estimate of American militarypower, he warned OKW that “the United States will still enter the war ifit considers that the Western Hemisphere is threatened.”18

Hans Thomsen, the German charge d’affaires in Washington, did hisbest to impart some facts about the U.S.A. to his ignorant Foreign Ministerin Berlin. On September 18, as the Polish campaign neared its end, hewarned the Wilhelmstrasse that “the sympathies of the overwhelmingmajority of the American people are with our enemies, and America isconvinced of Germany’s war guilt.” In the same dispatch he pointed outthe dire consequences of any attempts by Germany to carry out sabotagein America and requested that there be no such sabotage “in any mannerwhatsoever.”19

The request evidently was not taken very seriously in Berlin, for onJanuary 25, 1940, Thomsen was wiring Berlin:

I have learned that a German-American, von Hausberger, and a Germancitizen, Walter, both of New York, are alleged to be planning acts of sabotage

United States, Hitler asked (according to the shorthand notes of Dr. Schmidt)

“whether this imperialist tendency did not strengthen the desire for the Anschlussof 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 helpfulin shedding light on their subject. At this same interview, Ross, in trying to answerHitler s questions as to why America was so anti-German, gave the followinganswers, among others:

. . . An additional factor in hatred against Germany ... is the monstrouspower of Jewry, directing with a really fantastic cleverness and organizationalskill the struggle against everything German and National Socialist . . .

Colin Ross then talked about Roosevelt, whom he believes to be an enemy ofthe Fuehrer for reasons of pure personal jealousy and also on account of hispersonal lust for power . . . He had come to power the same year as theFuehrer 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 whichin some respects were very similar to National Socialist ideas. Yet precisely thisrealization that the Fuehrer had attained his goal, while he had not, gave to hispathological ambition the desire to act upon the stage of world history as theFuehrer’s rival . . .

After Herr Colin Ross had taken his leave, the Fuehrer remarked that Ross wasa very intelligent man who certainly had many good ideas.)!

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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 againto a course of action which drove America into the ranks of our enemies oncebefore in the World War and, incidentally, did not in the least impede the warindustries of the United States.

Besides, he added, “both individuals are unfitted in every respect toact as agents of the Abwehr.”*

Since November 1938, when Roosevelt had recalled the Americanambassador in Berlin in protest against the officially sponsored Nazipogrom against the Jews, neither country had been represented in theother by an ambassador. Trade had dwindled to a mere trickle, largelyas the result of American boycotts, and was now completely shut down bythe British blockade. On November 4, 1939, the arms embargo waslifted, following votes in the Senate and the House, thus opening the wayfor the United States to supply the Western Allies with arms. It wasagainst this background of rapidly deteriorating relations that SumnerWelles arrived in Berlin on March 1, 1940.

The day before, on February 29—it was a leap year—Hitler had takenthe unusual step of issuing a secret “Directive for the Conversations withMr. Sumner Welles.”20 It called for “reserve” on the German side andadvised 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 whowere to receive the special American envoy. The principal German argu-ment was to be that Germany had not declared war on Britain and Francebut vice versa; that the Fuehrer had offered them peace in October andthat they had rejected it; that Germany accepted the challenge; that thewar aims of Britain and France were “the destruction of the GermanState,” and that Germany therefore had no alternative but to continue thewar.

A discussion [Hitler concluded] of concrete political questions, such as thequestion 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

* Weizsaecker replied that Canaris himself had assured him that neither of themen mentioned by Thomsen was an agent of the Abwehr. But no good secretservice admits these things. Other Foreign Office papers reveal that on January 24an Abwehr agent left Buenos Aires with instructions to report to Fritz von Haus-berger at Weehawken, N.J., “for instructions in our speciality.” Another agenthad been sent from the same place to New York in December to gather informationon American aircraft factories and arms shipments to the Allies. Thomsen himselfreported on February 20 the arrival of Baron Konstantin von Maydell, a BalticGerman of Estonian citizenship, who had told the German Embassy in Washingtonthat he was on a sabotage mission for the Abwehr.

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decided by me. It is self-evident that it is entirely out of the question to discussthe subject of Austria and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

All statements are to be avoided which could be interpreted ... to meanthat Germany is in any way interested at present in discussing possibilities ofpeace. I request, rather, that Mr. Sumner Welles not be given the slightestreason to doubt that Germany is determined to end this war victoriously

Not only Ribbentrop and Goering but the Leader himself followed thedirective 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 Americandiplomat, a somewhat taciturn and cynical man, must have got the impres-sion 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 grotesqueperversions of history, in which facts were fantastically twisted and eventhe simplest of words lost all meaning.* Hitler, who on March 1 hadissued his directive for Weseruebung, received Welles the next day andinsisted that the Allied war aim was “annihilation,” that of Germanypeace. He lectured his visitor on all he had done to maintain peacewith England and France.

Shortly before the outbreak of the war the British Ambassador had satexactly where Sumner Welles was now sitting, and the Fuehrer had made himthe greatest offer of his life.

All his offers to the British had been rejected and now Britain was outto destroy Germany. Hitler therefore believed “that the conflict wouldhave to be fought to a finish . . . there was no other solution than alife-and-death struggle.”

No wonder that Welles confided to Weizsaecker and repeated to Goeringthat if Germany were determined to win a military victory in the Westthen his trip to Europe “was pointless . . . and there was nothing morefor him to say.”21f

* “Before God and the world,” Goering exclaimed to Welles, “he, the FieldMarshal, could state that Germany had not desired the war. It had been forcedupon her . . . But what was Germany to do when the others wanted to destroyher?” J

t A quite unofficial American peacemaker was also in Berlin at this time: James DMooney, 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 indiplomacy, Dahlerus, though without the latter’s connections, to save the peace.The day after Welles left Berlin, on March 4, 1940, Hitler received Mooney, whotold him, according to a captured German record of the meeting, that PresidentRoosevelt was “more friendly and sympathetic” to Germany “than was generallybelieved in Berlin” and that the President was prepared to act as “moderator” inbringing the belligerents together. Hitler merely repeated what he had told Wellestwo days before.

On March 11 Thomsen sent to Berlin a confidential memorandum prepared for

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Though he had emphasized in his talks with the Germans that what heheard from the European statesmen on this trip was for the ears ofRoosevelt only, Welles thought it wise to be sufficiently indiscreet to tellboth Hitler and Goering that he had had a “long, constructive and helpful”talk with Mussolini and that the Duce thought “there was still a possibilityof bringing about a firm and lasting peace in Europe.” If these were theItalian dictator’s thoughts, then it was time, the Germans realized, tocorrect them. Peace yes, but only after a resounding German victory inthe West.

Hitler’s failure to answer Mussolini’s letter of January 3 had filled theDuce with mounting annoyance. All through the month AmbassadorAttolico was inquiring of Ribbentrop when a reply might be expected andhinting that Italy’s relations with France and Britain—and their trade, toboot—were improving.

This trade, which included Italian sales of war materials, aggravatedthe Germans, who constantly protested in Rome that it was unduly aidingthe Western Allies. Ambassador von Mackensen kept reporting his “graveanxieties” to his friend Weizsaecker and the latter himself was afraid thatMussolini’s unanswered letter, if it were “disregarded” much longer, wouldgive 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 thatthey were cutting off shipments of German coal by sea via Rotterdam toItaly. This was a heavy blow to the Italian economy and threw the Duceinto 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 toMussolini on March 8, which Ribbentrop delivered personally in Rometwo days later.24

It made no apologies for its belatedness, but was cordial in tone andwent into considerable detail about the Fuehrer’s thoughts and policies onalmost every conceivable subject, being more wordy than any previousletter of Hitler’s to his Italian partner. It defended the Nazi alliance withRussia, the abandonment of the Finns, the failure to leave even a rumpPoland.

If I had withdrawn the German troops from the General Government thiswould 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 ofthe Lord, but the priests would have had their heads chopped off . . .

him by an unnamed American informant declaring that Mooney “was more or lesspro-German.” The General Motors executive was certainly taken in by theGermans. Thomsen’s memorandum states that Mooney had informed Roosevelton the basis of an earlier talk with Hitler that the Fuehrer “was desirous of peaceand wished to prevent the bloodshed of a spring campaign.” Hans Dieckhoff, therecalled German ambassador to the United States, who was whiling away his timein Berlin, saw Mooney immediately after the latter’s interview with Hitler andreported 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

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As for the visit of Sumner Welles, Hitler continued, it had achievednothing. He was still determined to attack in the West. He realized “thatthe coming battle will not be a walkover but the fiercest struggle in Ger-many’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 willalso decide the future of Italy . . . You will some day be confronted by thevery opponents who are fighting Germany today ... I, too, see the destiniesof our two countries, our peoples, our revolutions and our regimes indissolublyjoined with each other . . .

And, finally, let me assure you that in spite of everything I believe thatsooner or later fate will force us after all to fight side by side, that is, that youwill likewise not escape this clash of arms, no matter how the individual aspectsof the situation may develop today, and that your place will then more thanever be at our side, just as mine will be at yours.

Mussolini was flattered by the letter and at once assured Ribbentropthat he agreed that his place was at Hitler’s side “on the firing line.” TheNazi Foreign Minister, on his part, lost no time in buttering up his host.The Fuehrer, he said, was “deeply aroused by the latest British measuresto block the shipment of coal from Germany to Italy by sea.” How muchcoal did the Italians need? From 500,000 to 700,000 tons a month, Mus-solini replied. Germany was now prepared, Ribbentrop answered glibly,to furnish a million tons a month and would provide most of the cars tohaul 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 Rib-bentrop was at his most flatulent.25 Though there were more importantthings to talk about, he produced captured Polish diplomatic dispatchesfrom the Western capitals to show “the monstrous war guilt of the UnitedStates.”

The Foreign Minister explained that these documents showed specificallythe sinister role of the American Ambassadors Bullitt [Paris], Kennedy[London] and Drexel Biddle [Warsaw] . . . They gave an intimation of themachinations of that Jewish-plutocratic clique whose influence, throughMorgan and Rockefeller, reached all the way up to Roosevelt.

For several hours the arrogant Nazi Foreign Minister raved on, dis-playing his customary ignorance of world affairs, emphasizing the commondestiny of the two fascist nations and stressing that Hitler would soonattack in the West, “beat the French Army in the course of the summer”and drive the British from the Continent “before fall.” Mussolini mostlylistened, only occasionally interjecting a remark whose sarcasm apparentlyescaped the Nazi Minister. When, for example, Ribbentrop pompously

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declared that “Stalin had renounced the idea of world revolution,” theDuce retorted, according to Schmidt’s notes, “Do you really believe that?”When Ribbentrop explained that “there was not a single German soldierwho did not believe that victory would be won this year,” Mussolini inter-jected, “That is an extremely interesting remark.” That evening Cianonoted in his diary:

After the interview, when we were left alone, Mussolini says that he doesnot believe in the German offensive nor in a complete German success.

The Italian dictator had promised to give his own views at the meetingthe next day and Ribbentrop was somewhat uneasy as to what they mightbe, wiring Hitler that he had been unable to obtain a “hint as to the Duce’sthoughts.”

He need not have worried. The next day Mussolini was a completelydifferent man. He had quite suddenly, as Schmidt noted, “turned com-pletely prowar.” It was not a question, he told his visitor, of whether Italywould enter the war on Germany’s side, but when. The question of timingwas “extremely delicate, for he ought not to intervene until all his prepara-tions were complete, so as not to burden his partner.”

In any event he had to state at this time with all distinctness that Italy wasin no position financially to sustain a long war. He could not afford to spenda billion lire a day, as England and France were doing.

This remark seems to have set Ribbentrop back for a moment and hetried to pin the Duce down on a date for Italy’s entry into the war, but thelatter was wary of committing himself. “The moment would come,” hesaid, “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 geta definite date. Obviously Hitler himself would have to intervene per-sonally for that. The Nazi Foreign Minister thereupon suggested a meet-ing at the Brenner between the two men for the latter part of March, afterthe nineteenth, to which Mussolini readily agreed. Ribbentrop, incident-ally, had not breathed a word about Hitler’s plans to occupy Denmark andNorway. There were some secrets you did not mention to an ally, evenwhile 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. “Ifhe wanted to reinforce the Axis,” Ciano lamented in his diary, “he hassucceeded.” When Sumner Welles, after visiting Berlin, Paris and London,returned to Rome and saw Mussolini again on March 16, he found him achanged 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

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my first visit to Rome, he had not determined to cross the Rubicon, and duringRibbentrop’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 theanguished Italian dictator was prey to second thoughts. “He fears,”Ciano jotted in his diary on March 12, “that he has gone too far in hiscommi ment to fight against the Allies. He would now like to dissuadeHitler from his land offensive, and this he hopes to achieve at the meetingat the Brenner Pass.” But Ciano, limited as he was, knew better. “Itcannot be denied,” he added in his diary, “that the Duce is fascinated byHi ler, a fascination which involves something deeply rooted in his make-up. The Fuehrer will get more out of the Duce than Ribbentrop was ableto 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 con-templated, for March 18. “The Germans are unbearable,” Mussoliniexploded. “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 nowhe has lived under the illusion that a real war would not be waged. Theprospect of an imminent clash in which he might remain an outsider disturbshim and, to use his words, humiliates him.27

It was snowing when the respective trains of the two dictators drew inon the morning of March 18, 1940, at the little frontier station at theBrenner Pass below the lofty snow-mantled Alps. The meeting, as a sopto Mussolini, took place in the Duce’s private railroad car, but Hitler didalmost all the talking. Ciano summed up the conference in his diary thatevening.

The conference is more a monologue . . . Hitler talks all the time . . .Mussolini listens to him with interest and with deference. He speaks little andconfirms his intention to move with Germany. He reserves to himself only thechoice 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 hatethem. Therefore Italy’s entry into the war is inevitable.” Hitler had spentmore than an hour trying to convince him of that—if Italy did not wantto be left out in the cold and, as he added, become “a second-rate power.”28But having answered the main question to the Fuehrer’s satisfaction, theDuce immediately began to hedge.

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The great problem, however, was the date . . . One condition for thiswould 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 Germanyif 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 fightingand himself limited to making demonstrations . . . He wanted to do some-thing more and he was not now in a position to do it.

The Nazi warlord had no intention of postponing his attack in theWest and said so. But he had a “few theoretical ideas” which might solveMussolini’s difficulty of making a frontal attack on mountainous southernFrance, since that conflict, he realized, “would cost a great deal of blood.”Why not, he suggested, supply a strong Italian force which together withGerman troops would advance along the Swiss frontier toward the RhoneValley “in order to turn the Franco-Italian Alpine front from the rear.”Before this, of course, the main German armies would have rolled backthe French and British in the north. Hitler was obviously trying to makeit easy for the Italians.

When the enemy has been smashed [in northern France] the moment wouldcome [Hitler continued] for Italy to intervene actively, not at the most difficultpoint on the Alpine front, but elsewhere . . .

The war will be decided in France. Once France is disposed of, Italy will bemistress of the Mediterranean and England will have to make peace.

Mussolini, it must be said, was not slow at seizing upon this glitteringprospect of getting so much after the Germans had done all the hardfighting.

The Duce replied that once Germany had made a victorious advance hewould intervene immediately ... he would lose no time . . . when theAllies were so shaken by the German attack that it needed only a second blowto 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 “somethingdeeply rooted in his make-up,” it might be said that the attraction wasmutual, for the same mysterious reasons. Disloyal as he had been tosome of his closest associates, a number of whom he had had murdered,such as Roehm and Strasser, Hitler maintained a strange and unusualloyalty to his ridiculous Italian partner that did not weaken, that indeed

the rise and fall of the THIRD REICH

was strengthened when adversity and then disaster overtook the strutting,sawdust Roman Caesar. It is one of the interesting paradoxes of thisnarrative.

At any rate, for what it was worth—and few Germans besides Hitler,especially among the generals, thought it was worth very much—Italy’sentrance into the war had now at last been solemnly promised. The Naziwarlord 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 hisfriend and ally.

THE CONSPIRATORS AGAIN FRUSTRATED

Once more the anti-Nazi plotters tried to persuade the generals todepose the Leader—this time before he could launch his new aggressionin the north, of which they had got wind. What the civilian conspiratorsagain wanted was assurance from the British government that it wouldmake peace with an anti-Nazi German regime, and, being what they were,they were insistent that in any settlement the new Reich government beallowed to keep most of Hitler’s territorial gains: Austria, the Sudetenlandand the 1914 frontier in Poland, though this last had only been obtainedin the past by the wiping out of the Polish nation.

It was with such a proposal that Hassell, with considerable personalcourage, journeyed to Arosa, Switzerland, on February 21, 1940, to conferwith a British contact whom he calls “Mr. X” in his diary and who was acertain J. Lonsdale Bryans. They conferred in the greatest secrecy at fourmeetings on February 22 and 23. Bryans, who had cut a certain figure inthe diplomatic society of Rome, was another of those self-appointed andsomewhat amateurish negotiators for peace who have turned up in thisnarrative. He had contacts in Downing Street, and Hassell, once they hadmet, was personally impressed by him. After the fiasco of the attempt ofMajor Stevens and Captain Best in Holland to get in touch with theGerman conspirators, the British were somewhat skeptical of the wholebusiness, and when Bryans pressed Hassell for some reliable informationas 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,” Hassellretorted. “I can only assure you that a statement from Halifax would getto the right people.”29

Hassell then outlined the views of the German “opposition”: it wasrealized that Hitler had to be overthrown “before major military opera-tions are undertaken”; that this must be “an exclusively German affair”;that there must be “some authoritative English statement” about how anew anti-Nazi regime in Berlin would be treated and that “the principalobstacle to any change in regime is the story of 1918, that is, Germananxiety 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 Germanshad got rid of Wilhelm II.

He thereupon handed over to Bryans a memorandum which he himselfhad drawn up in English. It is a wooly document, though full of noblesentiments about a future world based “on the principles of Christianethics, justice and law, social welfare and liberty of thought and con-science.” The greatest danger of continuing “this mad war,” Hassellwrote, was “a bolshevization of Europe”—he considered that worse thanthe continuance of Nazism. And his main condition for peace was thatthe new Germany be left with almost all of Hitler’s conquests, which heenumerated. The German acquisition of Austria and the Sudetenlandcould not even be discussed in any proposed peace; and Germany wouldhave to have the 1914 frontier with Poland, which, of course, though hedid not say so, was actually the 1914 frontier with Russia, since Polandhad not been allowed to exist in 1914.

Bryans agreed that speedy action was necessary in view of the immi-nence of the German offensive in the West and promised to deliver Hassell’smemorandum to Lord Halifax. Hassell returned to Berlin to acquaint hisfellow plotters with his latest move. Although they hoped for the bestfrom Hassell’s “Mr. X” they were more concerned at the moment withthe so-called “X Report” which Hans von Dohnanyi, one of the membersof the group in the Abwehr, had drawn up on the basis of Dr. Mueller’scontact with the British at the Vatican.* It declared that the Pope wasready to intervene with Britain for reasonable peace terms with a newanti-Nazi German government, and it is a measure of the views of theseopponents of Hitler that one of their terms, which they claimed the HolyFather would back, was “the settlement of the Eastern question in favorof Germany.” The demonic Nazi dictator had obtained a settlement inthe East “in favor of Germany” by armed aggression; the good Germanconspirators wanted the same thing handed to them by the British withthe Pope’s blessings.

The X Report loomed very large in the minds of the plotters that winterof 1939-40. At the end of October General Thomas had shown it toBrauchitsch with the intention of bucking up the Army Commander inChief in his efforts to dissuade Hitler from launching the offensive in theWest that fall. But Brauchitsch did not appreciate such encouragement.In fact, he threatened to have General Thomas arrested if he brought thematter up again. It was “plain high treason,” he barked at him.

Now, with a fresh Nazi aggression in the offing, Thomas took the XReport to General Haider in the hope that he might act on it. But this wasa vain hope. As the General Staff Chief told Goerdeler, one of the mostactive of the conspirators—who had also begged him to take the lead,since the spineless Brauchitsch would not—he could not at this timejustify 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.

See above, p. 648.

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A peace of compromise was senseless. Only in the greatest emergency couldone take the action desired by Goerdeler.

“Also, doch!" exclaimed Hassell in his diary on April 6, 1940, in re-counting Haider’s state of mind as explained to him by Goerdeler.“Haider,” the diarist added, “who had begun to weep during the discussionof his responsibility, gave the impression of a weak man with shatterednerves.”

The accuracy of such an impression is to be doubted. When one goesover Haider’s diary for the first week of April, cluttered as it is with hun-dreds of detailed entries about preparations for the gigantic offensive inthe West, which he was helping to mastermind, this writer at least gets theimpression that the General Staff Chief was in a buoyant mood as he con-ferred with the field commanders and checked the final plans for thegreatest and most daring military operation in German history. There isno hint in his journal of treasonable thoughts or of any wrestling with hisconscience. Though he has misgivings about the attack on Denmark andNorway, they are based purely on military grounds, and there is not aword of moral doubt about Nazi aggression against the four small neutralcountries whose frontiers Germany had solemnly guaranteed and whomHaider knew Germany was about to attack, and against two of whom,Belgium and Holland, he himself had taken a leading part in drafting theplans.

So ended the latest attempt of the “good Germans” to oust Hitler beforeit was too late. It was the last opportunity they would have to obtain agenerous peace. The generals, as Brauchitsch and Haider had made clear,were not interested in a negotiated peace. They were thinking now, aswas the Fuehrer, of a dictated peace—dictated after German victory. Notuntil the chances of that had gone glimmering did they seriously return totheir old and treasonable thoughts, which had been so strong at Munichand at Zossen, of removing their mad dictator. This state of mind andcharacter must be remembered in view of subsequent events and of sub-sequent spinning of myths.

THE TAKING OF DENMARK AND NORWAY

Hitler’s preparations for the conquest of Denmark and Norway havebeen called by many writers one of the best-kept secrets of the war, but ithas seemed to this author that the two Scandinavian countries and eventhe British were caught napping not because they were not warned of whatwas coming but because they did not believe the warnings in time.

Ten days before disaster struck, Colonel Oster of the Abwehr warneda close friend of his, Colonel J. G. Sas, the Dutch military attache inBerlin, of the German plans for Weseruebung and Sas immediately in-formed the Danish naval attache, Captain Kjolsen.30 But the complacentDanish government would not believe its own naval attache, and when

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on April 4 the Danish minister in Berlin sent Kjolsen scurrying to Copen-hagen to repeat the warning in person his intelligence was still not takenseriously. Even on the eve of catastrophe, on the evening of March 8, afternews had been received of the torpedoing of a German transport ladenwith troops off the south coast of Norway—just north of Denmark—andthe Danes had seen with their own eyes a great German naval armadasailing north between their islands, the King of Denmark had dismissedwith 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 latefreported. In fact, this officer related, the King had proceeded after dinneito the Royal Theater in a “confident and happy” frame of mind.31

Already in March the Norwegian government had received warningsfrom its legation in Berlin and from the Swedes about a German concentra-tion of troops and naval vessels in the North Sea and Baltic ports and onApril 5 definite intelligence arrived from Berlin of imminent Germanlandings on the southern coast of Norway. But the complacent cabinetin Oslo remained skeptical. Not even on the seventh, when several largeGerman war vessels were sighted proceeding up the Norwegian coast andreports arrived of British planes strafing a German battle fleet off themouth of the Skagerrak, not even on April 8, when the British Admiraltyinformed the Legation of Norway in London that a strong German navalforce had been discovered approaching Narvik and the newspapers inOslo were reporting that German soldiers rescued from the transport Riode Janeiro, torpedoed that day off the Norwegian coast at Lillesand by aPolish submarine, had declared they were en route to Bergen to help defendit against the British—not even then did the Norwegian government con-sider it necessary to take such obvious steps as mobilizing the Army, fullymanning the forts guarding the harbors, blocking the airfield runways, or,most important of all, mining the easily mined narrow water approachesto the capital and the main cities. Had it done these things history mighthave taken a different turning.

Ominous news, as Churchill puts it, had begun filtering into London bythe first of April, and on April 3 the British War Cabinet discussed thelatest intelligence, above all from Stockholm, which told of the Germanscollecting sizable military forces in its northern ports with the objectiveof moving into Scandinavia. But the news does not seem to have beentaken very seriously. Two days later, on April 5, when the first wave ofGerman naval supply ships was already at sea, Prime Minister Chamberlainproclaimed in a speech that Hitler, by failing to attack in the West whenthe British and French were unprepared, had “missed the bus”—a phrasehe was very shortly to rue. *

The British government at this moment, according to Churchill, was in-clined to believe that the German build-up in the Baltic and North Sea

* 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 connivanceof the Russians, who obligingly furnished the cargo of oil.

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ports was being done merely to enable Hitler to deliver a counterstroke incase the British, in mining Norwegian waters to cut off the ore shipmentsfrom Narvik, also occupied that port and perhaps others to the south.

As a matter of fact, the British government was contemplating such anoccupa ion. After seven months of frustration Churchill, First Lord of theAdmiralty, had finally succeeded in getting the approval of the WarCabinet and the Allied Supreme War Council to mine the NorwegianLeads on April 8—an action called “Wilfred.” Since it seemed likely thatthe Germans would react violently to the mortal blow of having their ironore shipments from Narvik blocked, it was decided that a small Anglo-French force should be dispatched to Narvik and advance to the nearbySwedish frontier. Other contingents would be landed at Trondheim.Bergen and S avanger farther south in order, as Churchill explained, “todeny these bases to the enemy.” This was known as “Plan R-4.”32

Thus during the first week of April, while German troops were beingloaded on various warships for the passage to Norway, British troops,though in much fewer numbers, were being embarked on transports inthe Clyde and on cruisers in the Forth for the same destination.

On the afternoon of April 2, Hitler, after a long conference withGoering, Raeder and Falkenhorst, issued a formal directive orderingWeseruebung to begin at 5:15 a.m. on April 9. At the same time he issuedanother directive stipulating that “the escape of the Kings of Denmark andNorway from their countries at the time of the occupation must be pre-vented by all means.”33 Also on the same day OKW let the ForeignOffice in on the secret. A lengthy directive was presented to Ribbentropinstructing him to prepare the diplomatic measures for inducing Denmarkand Norway to surrender without a fight as soon as the German armedforces had arrived and to concoct some kind of justificaffon for Hitler’slatest aggression.34

But trickery was not to be confined to the Foreign Office. The Navywas also to make use of it. On April 3, with the departure of the firstvessels, Jodi reflected in his diary on the problem of how deceit could beused to hoodwink the Norwegians in case they became suspicious of thepresence of so many German men-of-war in their vicinity. Actually thislittle matter had already been worked out by the Navy. It had instructedits warships and transports to try to pass as British craft—even if it werenecessary to fly the Union Jack! Secret German naval commands laiddown detailed orders for “Deception and Camouflage in the Invasion ofNorway.”35

MOST SECRET

Behavior During Entrance into the Harbor

All ships darkened . . . The disguise as British craft must be kept as longas possible. All challenges in Morse by Norwegian ships will be answered inEnglish. In answer, something like the following will be chosen:

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“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 illumi-nated . . .

For Bergen . . . Following is laid down as guiding principle should oneof 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 under-stand 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. Chas-ing German steamers.”*

And so on April 9, 1940, at 5:20 a.m. precisely (4:20 a.m. in Den-mark), an hour before dawn, the German envoys at Copenhagen andOslo, having routed the respective foreign ministers out of bed exactlytwenty minutes before (Ribbentrop had insisted on a strict timetable inco-ordination with the arrival at that hour of the German troops), pre-sented to the Danish and Norwegian governments a German ultimatumdemanding that they accept on the instant, and without resistance, the“protection of the Reich.” The ultimatum was perhaps the most brazendocument yet composed by Hitler and Ribbentrop, who were such mastersand by now so experienced in diplomatic deceit.37

After declaring that the Reich had come to the aid of Denmark andNorway to protect them against an Anglo-French occupation, the memo-randum 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 pointsoccupied by German troops as bases for operations against England as longas it is not forced to . . . On the contrary, German military operations aimexclusively at protecting the north against the proposed occupation of Norwe-gian bases by Anglo-French forces . . .

... In the spirit of the good relations between Germany and Norway whichhave existed hitherto, the Reich Government declares to the Royal NorwegianGovernment that Germany has no intention of infringing by her measures theterritorial integrity and political independence of the Kingdom of Norway nowor in the future . . .

The Reich Government therefore expects that the Norwegian Governmentand the Norwegian people will . . . offer no resistance to it. Any resistance

* On the stand at Nuremberg, Grand Admiral Raeder justified such tactics on theground that they were a legitimate “ruse of war against which, from the legal pointof view, no objection can be made.”36

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would have to be, and would be, broken by all possible means . . . and wouldtherefore lead only to absolutely useless bloodshed. . . .

German expectations proved justified as regards Denmark but notNorway. This became known in the Wilhelmstrasse with the receipt ofthe first urgent messages from the respective ministers to those countries.The German envoy in Copenhagen wired Ribbentrop at 8:34 a.m. thatthe Danes had “accepted all our demands [though] registering a protest.”Minister Curt Brauer in Oslo had a quite different report to make. At5:52 a.m., just thirty-two minutes after he had delivered the Germanultimatum, he wired Berlin the quick response of the Norwegian govern-ment: “We will not submit voluntarily: the struggle is already underway.”38

The arrogant Ribbentrop was outraged.* At 10:55 he wired Brauer“most urgent”: “You will once more impress on the Government therethat Norwegian resistance is completely senseless.”

This the unhappy German envoy could no longer do. The NorwegianKing, government and members of Parliament had by this time fled thecapital for the mountains in the north. However hopeless the odds, theywere determined to resist. In fact, resistance had already begun in someplaces, 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 islandcountry was incapable of defense. It was too small, too flat, and the larg-est part, Jutland, lay open by land to Hitler’s panzers. There were nomountains for the King and the government to flee to as there were inNorway, nor could any help be expected from Britain. It has been saidthat 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, al-most alone pleaded for resistance, but he was overruled by Premier Thor-vald Stauning, Foreign Minister Edvard Munch, and the King, who, whenthe bad news began coming in on April 8, refused his pleas for mobiliza-tion. For reasons which remain obscure to this writer, even after an in-vestigation in Copenhagen, the Navy never fired a shot, either from itsships or from its shore batteries, even when German troop ships passedunder the noses of its guns and could have been blown to bits. The Army

* This writer had rarely seen the Nazi Foreign Minister more insufferable than hewas that morning. He strutted into a specially convoked press conference at theForeign Office, garbed in a flashy field-gray uniform and looking, I noted in mydiary, “as if he owned the earth.” He snapped, “The Fuehrer has given hisanswer . . . Germany has occupied Danish and Norwegian soil in order to protectthose countries from the Allies, and will defend their true neutrality until the endof 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. Germanyprotects the weak states from the English highway robbers . . . Norway ought tosee the righteousness of Germany’s action, which was taken to ensure the freedomof the Norwegian people.” Hitler’s own paper, the Voelkischer Beobachter, carriedthis banner line: Germany saves scandinavla!

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fought a few skirmishes in Jutland, the Royal Guard fired a few shotsaround 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 GeneralPryor, capitulated and ordered what slight resistance there was to cease.

The plans to take Denmark by surprise and deceit, as the capturedGerman Army records show, had been prepared with meticulous care.General Kurt Himer, chief of staff of the task force for Denmark, had ar-rived by train in civilian clothes in Copenhagen on April 7 to reconnoiterthe capital and make the necessary arrangements for a suitable pier todock the troopship Hansestadt Danzig and a truck to handle the movingof a few supplies and a radio transmitter. The commander of the bat-talion—all that was considered necessary to capture a great city—hadalso been in Copenhagen in civilian clothes a couple of days before toget the layout of the land.

It was not so strange, therefore, that the plans of the General and thebattalion major were carried out with scarcely a hitch. The troopship ar-rived off Copenhagen shortly before dawn, passed without challenge theguns of the fort guarding the harbor and those of the Danish patrol ves-sels and tied up neatly at the Langelinie Pier in the heart of the city, only astone’s throw from the Citadel, the headquarters of the Danish Army, andbut a short distance from Amalienborg Palace, where the King resided.Both were quickly seized by the lone battalion with no resistance worthmentioning.

Upstairs in the palace, amidst the rattle of scattered shots, the Kingconferred with his ministers. The latter were all for nonresistance. OnlyGeneral Pryor begged to be allowed to put up a fight. At the very leasthe demanded that the King should leave for the nearest military camp atHpvelte to escape capture. But the King agreed with his ministers. Themonarch, according to one eyewitness, asked “whether our soldiers hadfought long enough”—and Pryor retorted that they had not.*39

General Himer became restless at the delay. He telephoned head-quarters for the combined operation, which had been set up at Hamburg—the Danish authorities had not thought of cutting the telephone lines teGermany—and, according to his own story,40 asked for some bombers tozoom over Copenhagen “in order to force the Danes to accept.” The con-versation was in code and the Luftwaffe understood that Himer was call-ing for an actual bombing, which it promised to carry out forthwith—anerror which was finally corrected just in time. General Himer says thebombers “roaring over the Danish capital did not fail to make their im-pression: the Government accepted the German requests.”

There was some difficulty in finding means of broadcasting the govern-ment’s capitulation to the Danish troops, because the local radio stationswere not yet on the air at such an early hour. This was solved by broad-

* Total Danish casualties throughout the realm were thirteen killed and twenty-threewounded. The Germans suffered some twenty casualties.

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casting it on the Danish wave length over the transmitter which the Ger-man battalion had brought along with it and for which General Himerhad thoughtfully dug up a truck to haul it to the Citadel.

At 2 o’clock that afternoon General Himer, accompanied by the Ger-man minister, Cecil von Renthe-Fink, called on the King of Denmark,who was no longer sovereign but did not yet realize it. Himer left arecord of the interview in the secret Army archives.

The seventy-year-old King appeared inwardly shattered, although he pre-served outward appearances perfectly and maintained absolute dignity duringthe audience. His whole body trembled. He declared that he and his govern-ment would do everything possible to keep peace and order in the country andto eliminate any friction between the German troops and the country. Hewished to spare his country further misfortune and misery.

General Himer replied that personally he very much regretted coming tothe 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 mightkeep his bodyguard, General Himer replied . . . that the Fuehrer woulddoubtless permit him to retain them. He had no doubt about it.

The King was visibly relieved at hearing this. During the course of theaudience ... the King became more at ease, and at its conclusion addressedGeneral Himer with the words: “General, may I, as an old soldier, tell yousomething? As soldier to soldier? You Germans have done the incredibleagain! One must admit that it is magnificent work!”

For nearly four years, until the tide of war had changed, the DanishKing 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, eventhe Parliament and the press, were at first allowed a surprising amount offreedom by their conquerors. Not even Denmark’s seven thousand Jewswere molested—for a time. But the Danes, later than most of the otherconquered peoples, finally came to the realization that further “loyal co-operation,” as they called it, with their Teutonic tyrants, whose brutalityincreased with the years and with the worsening fortunes of war, was im-possible—if they were to retain any shred of self-respect and honor. Theyalso began to see that Germany might not win the war after all and thatlittle Denmark was not inexorably condemned, as so many had feared atfirst, to be a vassal state in Hitler’s unspeakable New Order. Then re-sistance 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

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Konrad Sundlo, in command of the local garrison, who, as we have seen,was a fanatical follower of Quisling,* surrendered to the Germans with-out firing a shot. The naval commander was of a different caliber. Withthe approach of ten German destroyers at the mouth of the long fjord, theEidsvold, one of two ancient ironclads in the harbor, fired a warning shotand signaled to the destroyers to identify themselves. Rear Admiral FritzBonte, commanding the German destroyer flotilla, answered by sendingan officer in a launch to the Norwegian vessel to demand surrender. Therenow followed a bit of German treachery, though German naval officerslater defended it with the argument that in war necessity knows no law.When the officer in the launch signaled the German Admiral that the Nor-wegians had said they would resist, Bonte waited only until his launch gotout of the way and then quickly blew up the Eidsvold with torpedoes. Thesecond Norwegian ironclad, the Norge, then opened fire but was quicklydispatched. Three hundred Norwegian sailors—almost the entire crewsof the two vessels—perished. By 8 a.m. Narvik was in the hands of theGermans, taken by ten destroyers which had slipped through a formidableBritish fleet, and occupied by a mere two battalions of Nazi troops underthe command of Brigadier General Eduard Dietl, an old Bavarian cronyof Hitler since the days of the Beer Hall Putsch, who was to prove himselfa resourceful and courageous commander when the going at Narvik gotrough, as it did beginning the next day.

Trondheim, halfway down the long Norwegian west coast, was taken bythe Germans almost as easily. The harbor batteries failed to fire on theGerman naval ships, led by the heavy cruiser Hipper, as they came up thelong fjord, and the troops aboard that ship and four destroyers were con-veniently disembarked at the city’s piers without interference. Some fortsheld 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 suitablefor the largest naval ships as well as submarines and the railhead of a linethat ran across north-central Norway to Sweden and over which the Ger-mans expected, and with reason, to receive supplies should the Britishcut them off at sea.

Bergen, the second port and city of Norway, lying some three hundredmiles down the coast from Trondheim and connected with Oslo, the capi-tal, by railway, put up some resistance. The batteries guarding the harborbadly damaged the cruiser Koenigsberg and an auxiliary ship, but troopsfrom other vessels landed safely and occupied the city before noon. Itwas at Bergen that the first direct British aid for the stunned Norwegiansarrived. 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 andseven destroyers which could have overwhelmed the smaller Germannaval force. It was about to enter the harbor when it received orders from

See above, p. 676.

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the Admiralty to cancel the attack because of the risk of mines and bomb-ing from the air, a decision which Churchill, who concurred in it, later re-gretted. This was the first sign of caution and of half measures whichwould cost the British dearly in the next crucial days.

Sola airfield, near the port of Stavanger on the southwest coast, wastaken by German parachute troops after the Norwegian machine gunemplacements—there was no real antiaircraft protection—were silenced.This was Norway’s biggest airfield and strategically of the highest impor-tance to the Luftwaffe, since from here bombers could range not onlyagainst the British fleet along the Norwegian coast but against the chiefBritish naval bases in northern Britain. Its seizure gave the Germans im-mediate air superiority in Norway and spelled the doom of any attempt bythe British to land sizable forces.

Kristiansand on the south coast put up considerable resistance to theGermans, its shore batteries twice driving off a German fleet led by thelight cruiser Karlsruhe. But the forts were quickly reduced by Luftwaffebombing and the port was occupied by midafternoon. The Karlsruhe,however, on leaving port that evening was torpedoed by a British sub-marine and so badly damaged that it had to be sunk.

By noon, then, or shortly afterward, the five principal Norwegian citiesand ports and the one big airfield along the west and south coasts that ranfor 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 vastlyinferior to that of the British. Daring, deceit and surprise had broughtHitler a resounding victory at very little cost.

But at Oslo, the main prize, his military force and his diplomacy hadrun into unexpected trouble.

All through the chilly night of April 8-9, a gay welcoming party fromthe German Legation, led by Captain Schreiber, the naval attache, andjoined occasionally by the busy Dr. Brauer, the minister, stood at thequayside in Oslo Harbor waiting for the arrival of a German fleet and trooptransports. A junior German naval attache was darting about the bay ina motorboat waiting to act as pilot for the fleet, headed by the pocketbattleship Leutzow (its name changed from Deutschland because Hitlerdid not want to risk losing a ship by that name) and the brand-new heavycruiser Bluecher, flagship of the squadron.

They waited in vain. The big ships never arrived. They had been chal-lenged at the entrance to the fifty-mile-long Oslo Fjord by the Norwegianmine layer Olav Trygverson, which sank a German torpedo boat and dam-aged the light cruiser Emden. After landing a small force to subdue theshore batteries the German squadron, however, continued on its way upthe fjord. At a point some fifteen miles south of Oslo where the watersnarrowed to fifteen miles, further trouble developed. Here stood the an-cient fortress of Oskarsborg, whose defenders were more alert than theGermans suspected. Just before dawn the fort’s 28-centimeter Krupp gunsopened fire on the Luetzow and the Bluecher, and torpedoes were also

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launched from the shore. The 10,000-ton Bluecher, ablaze and torn bythe explosions of its ammunition, went down, with the loss of 1,600 men,including several Gestapo and administrative officials (and all theirpapers) who were to arrest the King and the government and take overthe administration of the capital. The Luetzow was also damaged but notcompletely disabled. Rear Admiral Oskar Kummetz, commander of thesquadron, and General Erwin Engelbrecht, who led the 163rd InfantryDivision, who were on the Bluecher, managed to swim ashore, where theywere made prisoners by the Norwegians. Whereupon the crippled Ger-man fleet turned back for the moment to lick its wounds. It had failed inits mission to take the main German objective, the capital of Norway. Itdid not get there until the next day.

Oslo, in fact, fell to little more than a phantom German force droppedfrom the air at the local, undefended airport. The catastrophic newsfrom the other seaports and the pounding of the guns fifteen miles downthe Oslo Fjord had sent the Norwegian royal family, the government andmembers of Parliament scurrying on a special train from the capital at9:30 a.m. for Hamar, eighty miles to the north. Twenty motor trucksladen with the gold of the Bank of Norway and three more with the secretpapers of the Foreign Office got away at the same hour. Thus the gallantaction of the garrison at Oskarsborg had foiled Hitler’s plans to get hishands on the Norwegian King, government and gold.

But Oslo was left in complete bewilderment. There were some Nor-wegian troops there, but they were not put into a state for defense. Aboveall, nothing was done to block the airport at nearby Fornebu, which couldhave been done with a few old automobiles parked along the runway andabout the field. Late on the previous night Captain Spiller, the Germanair attache in Oslo, had stationed himself there to welcome the airbornetroops, which were to come in after the Navy had reached the city. Whenthe ships failed to arrive a frantic radio message was sent from the lega-tion to Berlin apprising it of the unexpected and unhappy situation. Theresponse was immediate. Soon parachute and airborne infantry troopswere being landed at Fornebu. By noon about five companies had beenassembled. As they were only lightly armed, the available Norwegiantroops in the capital could have easily destroyed them. But for reasonsnever yet made clear—so great was the confusion in Oslo—they were notmustered, much less deployed, and the token German infantry forcemarched 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, butadjourned at 7:30 p.m. when news was received that German troops wereapproaching and moved on to Elverum, a few miles to the east toward theSwedish border. Dr. Brauer, pressed by Ribbentrop, was demanding animmediate audience with the King, and the Norwegian Prime Minister

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had assented on condition that German troops withdraw to a safe distancesouth. This the German minister would not agree to.

Indeed, at this moment a further piece of Nazi treachery was in the mak-ing. Captain Spiller, the air attache, had set out from the Fornebu airportfor Hamar with two companies of German parachutists to capture the re-calcitrant King and government. It seemed to them more of a lark thananything else. Since Norwegian troops had not fired a shot to preventthe German entry into Oslo, Spiller expected no resistance at Hamar. Infact the two companies, traveling on commandeered autobuses, weremaking a pleasant sightseeing jaunt of it. But they did not reckon with aNorwegian Army officer who acted quite unlike so many of the others.Colonel Ruge, Inspector General of Infantry, who had accompanied theKing northward, had insisted on providing some sort of protection to thefugitive government and had set up a roadblock near Hamar with twobattalions of infantry which he had hastily rounded up. The Germanbuses were stopped and in a skirmish which followed Spiller was mortallywounded. After suffering further casualties the Germans fell back all theway to Oslo.

The next day, Dr. Brauer set out from Oslo alone along the same roadto see the King. An old-school professional diplomat, the German minis-ter did not relish his role, but Ribbentrop had kept after him relentlesslyto talk the King and the government into surrender. Brauer’s difficulttask had been further complicated by certain political events which hadjust taken place in Oslo. On the preceding evening Quisling had finallybestirred himself, once the capital was firmly in German hands, stormedinto the radio station and broadcast a proclamation naming himself ashead of a new government and ordering all Norwegian resistance to theGermans to halt immediately. Though Brauer could not yet grasp it—and Berlin could never, even later, understand it—this treasonable actdoomed the German efforts .to induce Norway to surrender. And para-doxically, though it was a moment of national shame for the Norwegianpeople, the treason of Quisling rallied the stunned Norwegians to a re-sistance which was to become formidable and heroic.

Dr. Brauer met Haakon VII, the only king in the twentieth centurywho had been elected to the throne by popular vote and the first monarchNorway had had of its own for five centuries,* in a schoolhouse at thelittle town of Elverum at 3 p.m. on April 10. From a talk this writer laterhad with the monarch and from a perusal of both the Norwegian recordsand Dr. Brauer’s secret report (which is among the captured GermanForeign Office documents) it is possible to give an account of what hap-

•' Norway had been a part of Denmark for four centuries and of Sweden for afurther century, regaining its complete independence only in 1905, when it brokeaway from its union with Sweden and the people elected Prince Carl of Denmarkas King of Norway. He assumed the name of Haakon VII. Haakon VI had diedin 1380. Haakon VII was a brother of Christian X of Denmark, who surrenderedso promptly to the Germans on the morning of April 9, 1940.

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pened. After considerable reluctance the King had agreed to receive theGerman envoy in the presence of his Foreign Minister, Dr. Halvdan Koht.When Brauer insisted on seeing Haakon at first alone the King, with theagreement of Koht, finally consented.

The German minister, acting on instructions, alternately flattered andtried to intimidate the King. Germany wanted to preserve the dynasty.It was merely asking Haakon to do what his brother had done the day be-fore in Copenhagen. It was folly to resist the Wehrmacht. Only uselessslaughter for the Norwegians would ensue. The King was asked to ap-prove the government of Quisling and return to Oslo. Haakon, a salty,democratic man and a great stickler, even at this disastrous moment, forconstitutional procedure, tried to explain to the German diplomat that inNorway the King did not make political decisions; that was exclusivelythe business of the government, which he would now consult. Koht thenjoined the conversation and it was agreed that the government’s answerwould be telephoned to Brauer at some point on his way back to Oslo.

For Haakon, who, though he could not make the political decisioncould surely influence it, there was but one answer to the Germans. Retir-ing to a modest inn in the village of Nybergsund near Elverum—just incase the Germans, with Brauer gone, tried to capture him in another sur-prise attack—he assembled the members of the government as Councilof State.

. . . For my part [he told them] I cannot accept the German demands. Itwould conflict with all that I have considered to be my duty as King of Norwaysince 1 came to this country nearly thirty-five years ago ... I do not wantthe decision of the government to be influenced by or based upon this state-ment. But ... I cannot appoint Quisling Prime Minister, a man in whomI know neither our people . . . nor its representatives in the Storting have anyconfidence 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 impendingdanger of war in which so many young Norwegians will have to give theirlives—if so, abdication will be the only course open to me.41

The government, though there may have been some waverers up tothis moment, could not be less courageous than the King, and it quickly ral-lied behind him. By the time Brauer got to Eidsvold, halfway back toOslo, 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 decisionwas made upon the unanimous advice of the Government. To my specificquestion, Foreign Minister Koht replied: “Resistance will continue as long aspossible.”42

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That evening from a feeble little rural radio station nearby, the onlymeans of communication to the outside world available, the Norwegiangovernment flung down the gauntlet to the mighty Third Reich. It an-nounced its decision not to accept the German demands and called uponthe 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 believethat the Norwegians meant what they said. Two more attempts weremade to dissuade the King. On the morning of April 11 an emissary ofQuisling, a Captain Irgens, arrived to urge the monarch to return to thecapital. He promised that Quisling would serve him loyally. His pro-posal was dismissed with silent contempt.

In the afternoon an urgent message came from Brauer, requesting afurther audience with the King to talk over “certain proposals.” Thehard-pressed German envoy had been instructed by Ribbentrop to tellthe monarch that he “wanted to give the Norwegian people one lastchance of a reasonable agreement.”* This time Dr. Koht, after consult-ing 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 coun-try was immediate and in character. The Germans had failed, first, tocapture the King and the members of the government and, then, to per-suade them to surrender. Now the Germans tried to kill them. Late onApril 11, the Luftwaffe was sent out to give the village of Nybergsund thefull treatment. The Nazi flyers demolished it with explosive and incendi-ary bombs and then machine-gunned those who tried to escape the burn-ing ruins. The Germans apparently believed at first that they had suc-ceeded in massacring the King and the members of the government. Thediary of a German airman, later captured in northern Norway, had thisentry for April 11: “Nybergsund. Oslo Regierung. A lies vernichtet.”(Oslo government. Completely wiped out.)

The village had been, but not the King and the government. With theapproach of the Nazi bombers they had taken refuge in a nearby wood.Standing in snow up to their knees, they had watched the Luftwaffe reducethe modest cottages of the hamlet to ruins. They now faced a choice ofeither moving on to the nearby Swedish border and asylum in neutralSweden or pushing north into their own mountains, still deep in the springsnow. They decided to move on up the rugged Gudbrands Valley, whichled past Hamar and Lillehammer and through the mountains to Andalsnes

* There is an ominous hint of further treachery in Ribbentrop’s secret instructions.Brauer was told to try to arrange the meeting “at a point between Oslo and theKing’s present place of residence. For obvious reasons he, Brauer, would have todiscuss this move fully with General von Falkenhorst and would then also have toinform the latter of the meeting place agreed upon.” Gaus, who telephoned Rib-bentrop’s instructions, reported that “Herr Brauer clearly understood the meaningof the instructions.” One cannot help but think that had the King gone to thismeeting, Falkenhorst’s troops would have grabbed him.43

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on the northwest coast, a hundred miles southwest of Trondheim. Alongthe route they might organize the still dazed and scattered Norwegianforces for further resistance. And there was some hope that Britishtroops might eventually arrive to help them.

THE BATTLES FOR NORWAY

In the far north at Narvik the British Navy already had reacted sharplyto the surprise German occupation. It had been, as Churchill, who was incharge of it, admitted, “completely outwitted” by the Germans. Now inthe north at least, out of range of the German land-based bombers, it wentover to the offensive. On the morning of April 10, twenty-four hoursafter ten German destroyers had taken Narvik and disembarked Dietl’stroops, a force of five British destroyers entered Narvik harbor, sank twoof the five German destroyers then in the port, damaged the other threeand sank all the German cargo vessels except one. In this action the Ger-man naval commander, Rear Admiral Bonte, was killed. On leaving theharbor, however, the British ships ran into the five remaining Germandestroyers emerging from nearby fjords. The German craft were heaviergunned and sank one British destroyer, forced the beaching of anotheron which the British commander, Captain Warburton-Lee, was mortallywounded, and damaged a third. Three of the five British destroyers man-aged to make the open sea where, in retiring, they sank a large Germanfreighter, 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 ofdestroyers, returned to Narvik and wiped out the remaining German warvessels. Vice-Admiral W. J. Whitworth, the commanding officer, in wire-lessing the Admiralty of his action urged that since the German troops onshore had been stunned and disorganized—Died and his men had in facttaken to the hills—Narvik be occupied at once “by the main landingforce.” Unfortunately for the Allies, the British Army commander, MajorGeneral P. J. Mackesy, was an exceedingly cautious officer and, arrivingthe 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 Har-stad, thirty-five miles to the north, which was in the hands of the Norwe-gians. This was a costly error.

In the light of the fact that they had prepared a small expeditionarycorps for Norway, the British were unaccountably slow in getting theirtroops under way. On the afternoon of April 8, after news was receivedof the movement of German fleet units up the Norwegian coast, the BritishNavy hurriedly disembarked the troops that had already been loaded onshipboard for the possible occupation of Stavanger, Bergen, Trondheimand Narvik, on the ground that every ship would be needed for naval ac-tion. By the time the British land forces were re-embarked all those port

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cities were in German hands. And by the time they reached central Nor-way they were doomed, as were the British naval ships which were tocover them, by the Luftwaffe’s control of the air.

By April 20, one British brigade, reinforced by three battalions ofFrench Chasseurs Alpins, had been landed at Namsos, a small port eightymiles northeast of Trondheim, and a second British brigade had been putashore at Andalsnes, a hundred miles to the southwest of Trondheim,which was thus to be attacked from north and south. But lacking fieldartillery, antiaircraft guns and air support, their bases pounded night andday by German bombers which blocked the further landing of supplies orreinforcements, neither force ever seriously threatened Trondheim. TheAndalsnes brigade, after meeting a Norwegian unit at Dombas, a railjunction sixty miles to the east, abandoned the proposed attack northwardtoward Trondheim and pushed southeast down the Gudbrandsdal in orderto aid the Norwegian troops which, under the energetic command ofColonel Ruge, had been slowing up the main German drive coming up thevalley from Oslo.

At Lillehammer, north of Hamar, the first engagement of the war be-tween British and German troops took place on April 21, but it was nomatch. The ship laden with the British brigade’s artillery had been sunkand there were only rifles and machine guns with which to oppose a strongGerman force armed with artillery and light tanks. Even worse, the Britishinfantry, lacking air support, was incessantly pounded by Luftwaffe planesoperating from nearby Norwegian airfields. Lillehammer fell after atwenty-four-hour battle and the British and Norwegian forces began a re-treat of 140 miles up the valley railway to Andalsnes, halting here andthere to fight a rear-guard action which slowed the Germans but neverstopped them. On the nights of April 30 and May 1 the British forceswere evacuated from Andalsnes and on May 2 the Anglo-French contin-gent from Namsos, considerable feats in themselves, for both harbors wereblazing shambles from continuous German bombing. On the night ofApril 29 the King of Norway and the members of his government weretaken aboard the British cruiser Glasgow at Molde, across the Romsdals-fjord from Andalsnes, itself also a shambles from Luftwaffe bombing, andconveyed to Tromso, 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 maintowns, had been irretrievably lost. But northern Norway seemed secure.On May 28 an Allied force of 25,000 men, including two brigades of Nor-wegians, a brigade of Poles and two battalions of the French ForeignLegion, had driven the greatly outnumbered Germans out of Narvik.There seemed no reason to doubt that Hitler would be deprived of bothhis iron ore and his objective of occupying all of Norway and making theNorwegian government capitulate. But by this time the Wehrmacht hadstruck with stunning force on the Western front and every Allied soldierwas needed to plug the gap. Narvik was abandoned, the Allied troops

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were hastily re-embarked, and General Died, who had held out in a wildmountainous tract near the Swedish border, reoccupied the port on June8 and four days later accepted the surrender of the persevering and gallantColonel Ruge and his bewildered, resentful Norwegian troops, who feltthey had been left in the lurch by the British. King Haakon and his gov-ernment were taken aboard the cruiser Devonshire at Tromso on June7 and departed for London and five years of bitter exile. * In Berlin Dietlwas promoted to Major General, awarded the Ritterkreuz and hailed byHitler as the Sieger von Narvik.

Despite his amazing successes the Fuehrer had had his bad momentsduring the Norwegian campaign. General Jodi’s diary is crammed withterse entries recounting a succession of the warlord’s nervous crises.“Terrible excitement,” he noted on April 14 after news had been receivedof the wiping out of the German naval forces at Narvik. On April 17 Hit-ler had a fit of hysteria about the loss of Narvik; he demanded that GeneralDietl’s troops there be evacuated by air—an impossibility. “Each piece ofbad news,” Jodi scribbled that day in his diary, “leads to the worst fears.”And two days later: “Renewed crisis. Political action has failed. EnvoyBrauer is recalled. According to the Fuehrer, force has to be used . . .fThe conferences at the Chancellery in Berlin that day, April 19, becameso embittered, with the heads of the three services blaming each other for

* Quisling did not last long in his first attempt to govern Norway. Six days after hehad proclaimed himself Prime Minister, on April 15, the Germans kicked him outand appointed an Administrative Council of six leading Norwegian citizens, includ-ing Bishop Eivind Berggrav, head of the Lutheran Church of Norway, and PaalBerg, the President of the Supreme Court. It was mostly the doing of Berg, aneminent and scrappy jurist who later became the secret head of the Norwegianresistance movement. On April 24 Hitler appointed Josef Terboven, a tough youngNazi gauleiter, to be Reich Commissar for Norway, and it was he who actuallygoverned the country, with increasing brutality, during the occupation. Brauer,who had opposed Quisling from the beginning, was recalled on April 17, retiredfrom the diplomatic service, and sent to the Western front as a soldier. The Germansreinstated Quisling as Prime Minister in 1942, but though his unpopularity amongthe people was immense, his power was nil despite his best efforts to serve hisGerman masters.

At the end of the war Quisling was tried for treason and after an exhaustive trialsentenced to death and executed on October 24, 1945. Terboven committed suiciderather than face capture. Knut Hamsun, the great Norwegian novelist, who hadopenly collaborated with the Germans, singing their praises, was indicted fortreason, 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,” andfined $65,000. He died on February 19, 1952, at the age of ninety-three. Generalvon Falkenhorst was tried as a war criminal before a mixed British and Norwegianmilitary court on charges of having handed over captured Allied commandos to theS.S. for execution. He was sentenced to death on August 2, 1946, but the sentencewas commuted to life imprisonment.

t On April 13, General von Falkenhorst, no doubt goaded by Hitler, who was ina fury because of Norwegian resistance, signed an order providing for taking ashostages twenty of the most distinguished citizens of Oslo, including Bishop Berg-grav and Paal Berg, who, in the words of Minister Brauer, “were to be shot in theevent of the continued resistance or attempted sabotage.”44

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the delays, that even the lackey Keitel stalked out of the room. “Chaos ofleadership is again threatening,” Jodi 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 fromOslo toward Trondheim and Andalsnes caused the “excitement to grow,”as Jodi put it, but the next day the news was better and from that day itcontinued to grow more rosy. By the twenty-sixth the warlord was insuch fine fettle that at 3:30 in the morning, during an all-night sessionwith his military advisers, he told them he intended to start “Yellow” be-tween May 1 and 7. “Yellow” was the code name for the attack in theWest across Holland and Belgium. Though on April 29 Hitler was again“worried about Trondheim,” the next day he was “happy with joy” at thenews that a battle group from Oslo had reached the city. He could at lastturn his attention back to the West. On May 1 he ordered that prepara-tions for the big attack there be ready by May 5.

The Wehrmacht commanders—Goering, Brauchitsch, Haider, Keitel,Jodi, Raeder and the rest—had for the first time had a foretaste duringthe Norwegian campaign of how their demonic Leader cracked under thestrain of even minor setbacks in battle. It was a weakness which wouldgrow on him when, after a series of further astonishing military successes,the tide of war changed, and it would contribute mightily to the eventualdebacle of the Third Reich.

Still, any way one looked at it, the quick conquest of Denmark and Nor-way had been an important victory for Hitler and a discouraging defeatfor the British. It secured the winter iron ore route, gave added protectionto the entrance to the Baltic, allowed the daring German Navy to breakout into the North Atlantic and provided them with excellent port facili-ties 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 militaryprestige of the Third Reich and correspondingly diminished that of theWestern Allies. Nazi Germany seemed invincible. Austria, Czechoslo-vakia, Poland and now Denmark and Norway had succumbed easily toHitler’s force, or threat of force, and not even the help of two major alliesin the West had been, in the latter cases, of the slightest avail. The waveof the future, as an eminent American woman wrote, seemed to belong toHitler and Nazism.

For the remaining neutral states Hitler’s latest conquest was also aterrifying lesson. Obviously neutrality no longer offered protection tothe little democratic nations trying to survive in a totalitarian-dominatedworld. Finland had just found that out, and now Norway and Denmark.They had themselves to blame for being so blind, for declining to acceptin good time—before the actual aggression—the help of friendly worldpowers.

I trust this fact [Churchill told Commons on April 11] will be meditatedupon by other countries who may tomorrow, or a week hence, or a month

The Conquest of Denmark and Norway 711

hence, find themselves the victims of an equally elaborately worked-out staffplan for their destruction and enslavement.45

He was obviously thinking of Holland and Belgium, but even in theircase, though there would be a month of grace, no such meditation began.*

There were military lessons, too, to be learned from Hitler’s lightningconquest of the two Scandinavian countries. The most significant was theimportance of air power and its superiority over naval power when landbases for bombers and fighters were near. Hardly less important was anold lesson, that victory often goes to the daring and the imaginative. TheGerman Navy and Air Force had been both, and Dietl at Narvik hadshown a resourcefulness of the German Army which the Allies had lacked.

There was one military result of the Scandinavian adventure whichcould not be evaluated at once, if only because it was not possible to lookvery far into the future. The losses in men in Norway on both sides werelight. The Germans suffered 1,317 killed, 2,375 missing and 1,604wounded, a total of 5,296 casualties; those of the Norwegians, French andBritish were slightly less than 5,000. The British lost one aircraft carrier,one cruiser and seven destroyers and the Poles and the French one de-stroyer each. German naval losses were comparably much heavier: ten outof twenty destroyers, three of eight cruisers, while the battle cruisersScharnhorst and Gneisenau and the pocket battleship Luetzow were dam-aged so severely that they were out of action for several months. Hitlerhad 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 bean insurmountable handicap.

* The Swedes, caught between Russia in Finland and the Baltic countries andGermany in possession of adjoining Denmark and Norway, meditated and decidedthere was no choice except to cling to their precarious neutrality and go downfighting if they were attacked. They had placated the Soviet Union by refusing toallow Allied troops transit to Finland, and now under great pressure they placatedGermany. Though Sweden had sent an impressive stock of arms to Finland, itrefused to sell Norway either arms or gasoline when it was attacked. All throughApril the Germans demanded that Sweden allow the transit of troops to Narvik torelieve Dietl, but this was refused until the end of hostilities, although a train ofmedical personnel and supplies was allowed through. On June 19, fearing a directattack by Germany, Sweden gave in to Hitler’s pressure and agreed to permit thetransport over Swedish railways of Nazi troops and war material to Norway oncondition that the number of troops moving in each direction should balance so thatthe German garrisons in Norway would not be strengthened by the arrangement.

This was of immense help to Germany. By transporting fresh troops and warmaterial by land through Sweden Hitler avoided the risk of having them sunk atsea by the British. In the first six months of the accord, some 140,000 Germantroops in Norway were exchanged and the German forces there greatly strengthenedby supplies. Later, just before the German onslaught on Russia, Sweden permittedthe Nazi High Command to transport an entire army division, fully armed, fromNorway across Sweden to Finland to be used to attack the Soviet Union. What ithad refused the Allies the year before it accorded to Nazi Germany. For details ofGerman pressure on Sweden and for the text of the exchange of letters betweenKing Gustav V and Hitler, see Documents on German Foreign Policy, IX. Theauthor has covered the subject more thoroughly in The Challenge of Scandinavia.

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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, heworked with his eager generals—for they had now shed their misgivingsof the previous autumn—on the last-minute preparations for what theywere confident would be the greatest conquest of all.

21

VICTORY IN THE WEST

Shortly after dawn on the fine spring day of May 10, 1940, the am-bassador of Belgium and the minister of the Netherlands in Berlinwere summoned to the Wilhelmstrasse and informed by Ribbentrop thatGerman troops were entering their countries to safeguard their neutralityagainst an imminent attack by the Anglo-French armies—the sameshabby excuse that had been made just a month before with Denmark andNorway. A formal German ultimatum called upon the two governmentsto see to it that no resistance was offered. If it were, it would be crushedby all means and the responsibility for the bloodshed would “be borne ex-clusively 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 withsimilar messages. Ironically enough, the bearer of the ultimatum in TheHague was Count Julius von Zech-Burkersroda, the German minister, whowas a son-in-law of Bethmann-Hollweg, the Kaiser’s Chancellor, who in1914 had publicly called Germany’s guarantee of Belgian neutrality, whichthe Hohenzollern Reich had just violated, “a scrap of paper.”

At the Foreign Ministry in Brussels, while German bombers roaredoverhead and the explosion of their bombs on nearby airfields rattled thewindows, Buelow-Schwante, the German ambassador, started to take apaper 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 ofoutrage] has just attacked our country. This is the second time in twenty-fiveyears that Germany has committed a criminal aggression against a neutral andloyal Belgium. What has happened is perhaps even more odious than theaggression of 1914. No ultimatum, no note, no protest of any kind has everbeen placed before the Belgian Government. It is through the attack itselfthat Belgium has learned that Germany has violated the undertakings given

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by her . . . The German Reich will be held responsible by history. Belgiumis resolved to defend herself.

The unhappy German diplomat then began to read the formal Germanultimatum, 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 oftheir neutrality almost without number. The independence and neutral-ity of Belgium had been guaranteed “perpetually” by the five great Euro-pean powers in 1839, a pact that was observed for seventy-five years untilGermany broke it in 1914. The Weimar Republic had promised neverto take up arms against Belgium, and Hitler, after he came to power, con-tinually reaffirmed that policy and gave similar assurances to the Nether-lands. 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 andHolland that it is prepared to recognize and to guarantee the inviolability andneutrality of these territories.

Frightened by the remilitarization of the Third Reich and its reoccupa-tion of the Rhineland in the spring of 1936, Belgium, which wisely hadabandoned neutrality after 1918, again sought refuge in it. On April 24,1937, Britain and France released her from the obligations of Locarnoand on October 13 of that year Germany officially and solemnly con-firmed

its determination that in no circumstances will it impair the inviolability andintegrity [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 solemnpublic assurances to the Low Countries and his private admonitions tohis generals. On August 24, 1938, in regard to one of the papers drawnup for him for Case Green, the plan for the attack on Czechoslovakia, hespoke of the “extraordinary advantage” to Germany if Belgium and Hol-land were occupied and asked the Army’s opinion “as to the conditionsunder which an occupation of this area could be carried out and howlong it would take.” On April 28, 1939, in his reply to Roosevelt, Hitleragain stressed the “binding declarations” which he had given to the Neth-erlands and Belgium, among others. Less than a month later, on May 23,the Fuehrer, as has been noted, was telling his generals that “the Dutchand Belgian air bases must be occupied by armed force . . . with light-ning 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 withhis generals about the “possibility” of violating Dutch and Belgian neu-trality. “England and France,” he said, “will not violate the neutralityof these countries.” Four days later, on August 26, he ordered his envoys

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in Brussels and The Hague to inform the respective governments that inthe event of an outbreak of war “Germany will in no circumstances im-pair the inviolability of Belgium and Holland,” an assurance which he re-peated publicly on October 6, after the conclusion of the Polish campaign.The very next day, October 7, General von Brauchitsch advised his armygroup 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 . . . throughLuxembourg, Belgium and Holland. This attack must be carried out as soonand as forcefully as possible . . . The object of this attack is to acquire asgreat an area of Holland, Belgium and northern France as possible.3

The Belgians and Dutch, of course, were not privy to Hitler’s secretorders. Nevertheless they did receive warnings of what was in store forthem. A number of them have already been noted: Colonel Oster, one ofthe anti-Nazi conspirators, warned the Dutch and Belgian military at-taches in Berlin on November 5 to expect the German attack on November12, which was then the target date. At the end of October Goerdeler, an-other one of the conspirators, had gone to Brussels at the instigation ofWeizsaecker, to warn the Belgians of an imminent attack. And shortlyafter the New Year, on January 10, 1940, Hitler’s plans for the offensivein the West had fallen into the hands of the Belgians when an officer carry-ing them had made a forced landing in Belgium.*

By that time the Dutch and Belgian general staffs knew from their ownborder intelligence that the Germans were concentrating some fifty divi-sions on their frontiers. They also had the benefit of an unusual sourceof information in the German capital. This “source” was Colonel G. J.Sas, the Netherland’s military attache in Berlin. Sas was a close personalfriend of Colonel Oster and often dined with him at the latter’s home inthe secluded suburb of Zehlendorf—a practice facilitated, once the warbroke out, by the blackout, whose cover enabled a number of persons inBerlin at that time, German and foreign, to get about on various subver-sive missions without much fear of detection. It was Sas whom Ostertipped off early in November about the German onslaught then set forNovember 12, and he gave the attache a new warning in January. Thefact that neither attack came off somewhat lessened the credibility of Sasin The Hague and in Brussels, where the fact that Hitler had actually setdates for his aggression and then postponed them naturally was not known.However the ten days’ warning that Sas got through Oster of the invasion

* See above, pp. 651, 652, 671-72, respectively.

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of Norway and Denmark and his prediction of the exact date seems tohave restored his prestige at home.

On May 3, Oster told Sas flatly that the German attack in the Westthrough the Netherlands and Belgium would begin on May 10, and themilitary attache promptly informed his government. The next day TheHague received confirmation of this from its envoy at the Vatican. TheDutch immediately passed the word along to the Belgians. May 5 was aSunday and as the week began to unfold it became pretty obvious to allof us in Berlin that the blow in the West would fall within a few days. Ten-sion mounted in the capital. By May 8 I was cabling my New York officeto hold one of our correspondents in Amsterdam instead of shipping himoff to Norway, where the war had ended anyway, and that evening themilitary censors allowed me to hint in my broadcast that there would soonbe action in the West, including Holland and Belgium.

On the evening of May 9 Oster and Sas dined together for what wouldprove the last time. The German officer confirmed that the final orderhad 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 droppedby OKW headquarters in the Bendlerstrasse after dinner. There had beenno changes. “The swine has gone to the Western front,” Oster told Sas.The “swine” was Hitler. Sas informed the Belgian military attache andthen went to his own legation and put through a call to The Hague. Aspecial code for this moment already had been arranged and Sas spokesome seemingly innocuous words which conveyed the message “Tomor-row, 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 re-ports from Brussels and The Hague. London itself was preoccupied witha three-day cabinet crisis which was resolved only on the evening of May10 by the replacement of Chamberlain by Churchill as Prime Minister.The first the French and British headquarters heard of the German on-slaught was when the peace of the spring predawn was broken by the roarof German bombers and the screech of Stuka dive bombers overhead, fol-lowed shortly afterward, as daylight broke, by frantic appeals for helpfrom the Dutch and Belgian governments which had held the Allies atarm’s length for eight months instead of concerting with them for a com-mon defense.

Nevertheless the Allied plan to meet the main German attack in Bel-gium went ahead for the first couple of days almost without a hitch. Agreat Anglo-French army rushed northeastward from the Franco-Belgianborder to man the main Belgian defense line along the Dyle and Meuserivers east of Brussels. As it happened, this was just what the GermanHigh Command wanted. This massive Allied wheeling movement playeddirectly into its hands. Though they did not know it the Anglo-Frencharmies sped directly into a trap that, when sprung, would soon prove tobe utterly disastrous.

Victory in the West

111

THE RIVAL PLANS

The original German plan of attack in the West had been drasticallychanged since it fell into the hands of the Belgians and, as the Germanssuspected, of the French and British, in January. Fall Gelb (Case Yel-low), as the operation was called, had been hastily concocted in the fallof 1939 by the Army High Command under the pressure of Hitler’s orderto launch the offensive in the West by mid-November. There is muchdispute among military historians and indeed among the German generalsthemselves whether this first plan was a modified version of the old Schlief-fen plan or not; Haider and Guderian have maintained that it was. Itcalled for the main German drive on the right flank through Belgium andnorthern France, with the object of occupying the Channel ports. It fellshort of the famous Schlieffen plan, which had failed by an ace of successin 1914 and which provided not only for the capture of the Channel portsbut for a continuation of a great wheeling movement which would bringthe German right-wing armies through Belgium and northern France andacross the Seine, after which they would turn east below Paris and encircleand destroy the remaining French forces. Its purpose had been to quicklyput an end to armed French resistance so that Germany, in 1914, couldthen 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 cam-paign, at any rate, he planned not to knock out the French Army but toroll it back and occupy the Channel coast, thus cutting off Britain from itsally and at the same time securing air and naval bases from which hecould harass and blockade the British Isles. It is obvious from his variousharangues to the generals at this time that he thought that after such a de-feat Britain and France would be inclined to make peace and leave himfree to turn his attention once more to the East.

Even before the original plan for Fall Gelb had fallen into the hands ofthe enemy it was anticipated by the Allied Supreme Command. On No-vember 17 the Allied Supreme War Council, meeting in Paris, had adopted“Plan D,” which, in the event of a German attack through Belgium, calledfor the French First and Ninth armies and the British Expeditionary Forceto dash forward to the principal Belgian defense line on the Dyle andMeuse rivers from Antwerp through Louvain, Namur and Givet to Me-zieres. A few days before, the French and British general staffs, in aseries of secret meetings with the Belgian High Command, had receivedthe latter’s assurance that it would strengthen the defenses on that line andmake its main stand there. But the Belgians, still clinging to the illusionsof neutrality which fortified their hope that they yet might be spared in-volvement in war, would not go further. The British chiefs of staff arguedthat there would not be time to deploy the Allied forces so far forwardonce the Germans had a.tacked, but they went along with Plan D at theurging of General Gamelin.

At the end of November the Allies added a scheme to rush Genera)

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Henri Giraud’s Seventh Army up the Channel coast to help the Dutchnorth of Antwerp in case the Netherlands was also attacked. Thus aGerman attempt to sweep through Belgium—and perhaps Holland—toflank the Maginot Line would be met very early in the game by the entireB.E.F., the bulk of the French Army, the twenty-two divisions of the Bel-gians and the ten divisions of the Dutch—a force numerically equal, asit turned out, to that of the Germans.

It was to avoid such a head-on clash and at the same time to trap theBritish and French armies that would speed forward so far that GeneralErich von Manstein (born Lewinski), chief of staff of Rundstedt’s ArmyGroup A on the Western front, proposed a radical change in Fall Gelb.Manstein was a gifted and imaginative staff officer of relatively juniorrank, but during the winter he succeeded in getting his bold idea put be-fore Hitler over the initial opposition of Brauchitsch, Haider and a num-ber of other generals. Manstein’s proposal was that the main Germanassault should be launched in the center through the Ardennes with amassive armored force which would then cross the Meuse just north ofSedan and break out into the open country and race to the Channel atAbbeville.

Hitler, always attracted by daring and even reckless solutions, was in-terested. Rundstedt pushed the idea relentlessly not only because he be-lieved in it but because it would give his Army Group A the decisive rolein the offensive. Although Haider’s personal dislike of Manstein and cer-tain professional jealousies among some of the generals who outrankedhim led to Manstein’s transfer from his staff post to the command of aninfantry corps at the end of January, he had an opportunity to expound hisunorthodox views to Hitler personally at a dinner given for a number ofnew corps commanders in Berlin on February 17. He argued that anarmored strike through the Ardennes would hit the Allies where theyleast expected it, since their generals probably, like most of the Germans,considered this hilly, wooded country unsuitable for tanks. A feint by theright wing of the German forces would bring the British and French armiesrushing pell-mell into Belgium. Then by cracking through the French atSedan and heading west along the north bank of the Somme for the Chan-nel, the Germans would entrap the major Anglo-French forces as well asthe Belgian Army.

It was a daring plan, not without its risks, as several generals, includingJodi, emphasized. But by now Hitler, who considered himself a militarygenius, practically believed that it was his own idea and his enthusiasm forit mounted. Haider, who had at first dismissed it as a crackpot idea, alsobegan to embrace it and indeed, with the help of his General Staff officers,considerably improved it. On February 24, 1940, it was formally adoptedin a new OKW directive and the generals were told to redeploy their troopsby March 7. Somewhere along the line, incidentally, the plan for theconquest of the Netherlands, which had been dropped from Fall Gelb in arevision on October 29, 1939, was reinstated on November 14 at the urg-ing of the Luftwaffe, which wanted the Dutch airfields for use against

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Britain and which offered to supply a large batch of airborne troops forthis minor but somewhat complicated operation. On such considerationsare the fates of little nations sometimes decided.5

And so as the campaign in Norway approached its victorious conclusionand 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 wereevenly matched—136 German divisions against 135 divisions of theFrench, British, Belgian and Dutch. The defenders had the advantage ofvast defensive fortifications: the impenetrable Maginot Line in the south,the extensive line of Belgian forts in the middle and fortified water linesin Holland in the north. Even in the number of tanks, the Allies matchedthe Germans. But they had not concentrated them as had the latter. Andbecause of the aberration of the Dutch and Belgians for neutrality therehad been no staff consultations by which the defenders could pool theirplans and resources to the best advantage. The Germans had a unifiedcommand, the initiative of the attacker, no moral scruples against aggres-sion, a contagious confidence in themselves and a daring plan. They hadhad experience in battle in Poland. There they had tested their new tac-tics and their new weapons in combat. They knew the value of the divebomber and the mass use of tanks. And they knew, as Hitler had neverceased to point out, that the French, though they would be defending theirown soil, had no heart in what lay ahead.

Notwithstanding their confidence and determination, the German HighCommand, as the secret records make clear, suffered some moments ofpanic as the zero hour drew near—or at least Hitler, the Supreme Com-mander, did. General Jodi jotted them down in his diary. Hitler orderedseveral last-minute postponements of the jump-off, which on May 1 he hadset for May 5. On May 3 he put it off until May 6 on account of theweather but perhaps also in part because the Foreign Office didn’t think hisproposed justification for violating the neutrality of Belgium and Hollandwas good enough. The next day he set May 7 as X Day and on the follow-ing day postponed it again until Wednesday, May 8. “Fuehrer has finishedjustification for Case Yellow,” Jodi noted. Belgium and the Netherlandswere to be accused of having acted most unneutrally.

May 7. Fuehrer railroad train was scheduled to leave Finkenkrug at 16:38hours [Jodi’s diary continued]. But weather remains uncertain and thereforethe order [for the attack] is rescinded . . . Fuehrer greatly agitated aboutnew postponement as there is danger of treachery. Talk of the Belgian Envoyto the Vatican with Brussels permits the deduction that treason has beencommitted 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 waitany longer. Goering wants postponement until the 10th, at least . . . Fuehreris very agitated; then he consents to postponement until May 10, which he saysis against his intuition. But not one day longer . . .

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May 9. Fuehrer decides on attack for May 10 for sure. Departure withFuehrer train at 17:00 hours from Finkenkrug. After report that weathersituation will be favorable on the 10th, the code word “Danzig” is given at21:00 hours.

Hitler, accompanied by Keitel, Jodi and others of the OKW staff, ar-rived at headquarters, which he had named Felsennest (Eyrie), nearMuenstereifel just as dawn was breaking on May 10. Twenty-five milesto the west German forces were hurtling over the Belgian frontier. Alonga front of 175 miles, from the North Sea to the Maginot Line, Nazi troopsbroke across the borders of three small neutral states, Holland, Belgiumand Luxembourg, in brutal violation of the German word, solemnly andrepeatedly 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 thefate of Belgium, France and the British Expeditionary Force was sealed.For the Germans everything went according to the book, or even betterthan the book, in the unfolding both of strategy and of tactics. Their suc-cess exceeded the fondest hopes of Hitler. His generals were confoundedby the lightning rapidity and the extent of their own victories. As for theAllied leaders, they were quickly paralyzed by developments they had notfaintly expected and could not—in the utter confusion that ensued—com-prehend.

Winston Churchill himself, who had taken over as Prime Minister onthe first day of battle, was dumfounded. He was awakened at half pastseven on the morning of May 15 by a telephone call from Premier PaulReynaud in Paris, who told him in an excited voice, “We have been de-feated! We are beaten!” Churchill refused to believe it. The great FrenchArmy vanquished in a week? It was impossible. “I did not comprehend,”he wrote later, “the violence of the revolution effected since the last warby the incursion of a mass of fast-moving armor.”6

Tanks—seven divisions of them concentrated at one point, the weakestposition in the Western defenses, for the big breakthrough—that was whatdid it. That and the Stuka dive bombers and the parachutists and the air-borne troops who landed far behind the Allied lines or on the top of theirseemingly impregnable forts and wrought havoc.

And yet we who were in Berlin wondered why these German tacticsshould have come as such a shattering surprise to the Allied leaders. Hadnot Hitler’s troops demonstrated their effectiveness in the campaignagainst Poland? There the great breakthroughs which had surrounded ordestroyed the Polish armies within a week had been achieved by the mass-ing of armor after the Stukas had softened up resistance. Parachutists andairborne troops had not done well in Poland even on the very limited

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scale with which they were used; they had failed to capture intact the keybridges. But in Norway, a month before the onslaught in the West, theyhad been prodigious, capturing Oslo and all the airfields, and reinforcingthe isolated small groups that had been landed by sea at Stavanger, Ber-gen, Trondheim and Narvik and thereby enabling them to hold out.Hadn’t the Allied commanders studied these campaigns and learned theirlessons?

THE CONQUEST OF THE NETHERLANDS

Only one division of panzers could be spared by the Germans for theconquest of the Netherlands, which was accomplished in five days largelyby parachutists and by troops landed by air transports behind the greatflooded water lines which many in Berlin had believed would hold theGermans up for weeks. To the bewildered Dutch was reserved the ex-perience of being subjected to the first large-scale airborne attack in thehistory of warfare. Considering their unpreparedness for such an ordealand the complete surprise by which they were taken they did better thanwas realized at the time.

The first objective of the Germans was to land a strong force by air onthe flying fields near The Hague, occupy the capital at once and capturethe Queen and the government, as they had tried to do just a month beforewith the Norwegians. But at The Hague, as at Oslo, the plan failed, thoughdue to different circumstances. Recovering from their initial surpriseand confusion, Dutch infantry, supported by artillery, was able to drivethe Germans—two regiments strong—from the three airfields surroundingThe Hague by the evening of May 10. This saved the capital and the gov-ernment momentarily, but it tied down the Dutch reserves, which weredesperately needed elsewhere.

The key to the German plan was the seizure by airborne troops of thebridges just south of Rotterdam over the Nieuwe Maas and those farthersoutheast over the two estuaries of the Maas (Meuse) at Dordrecht andMoerdijk. It was over these bridges that General Georg von Kuechler’sEighteen h Army driving from the German border nearly a hundred milesaway hoped to force his way into Fortress Holland. In no other waycould this entrenched place, lying behind formidable water barriers andcomprising 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 anti-quated seaplanes—before the surprised Dutch guards could blow them.Desperate efforts were made by improvised Netherlands units to drive theGermans away and they almost succeeded. But the Germans hung ontenuously until the morning of May 12, when the one armored divisionassigned to Kuechler arrived, having smashed through the Grebbe-Peel

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Line, a fortified front to the east strengthened by a number of water bar-riers, on which the Dutch had hoped to hold out for several days.

There was some hope that the Germans might be stopped short of theMoerdijk bridges by General Giraud’s French Seventh Army, which hadraced up from the Channel and reached Tilburg on the afternoon of May11. But the French, like the hard-pressed Dutch, lacked air support,armor, and antitank and antiaircraft guns, and were easily pushed back toBreda. This opened the way for the German 9th Panzer Division tocross the bridges at Moerdijk and Dordrecht and, on the afternoon ofMay 12, arrive at the south bank of the Nieuwe Maas across from Rotter-dam, where the German airborne troops still held the bridges.

But the tanks could not get across the Rotterdam bridges. The Dutchin the meantime had sealed them off at the northern ends. By the morn-ing of May 14, then, the situation for the Netherlands was desperate butnot hopeless. Fortress Holland had not been cracked. The strong Ger-man airborne forces around The Hague had been either captured or dis-persed into nearby villages. Rotterdam still held. The German HighCommand, anxious to pull the armored division and supporting troopsout of Holland to exploit a new opportunity which had just been openedto the south in France, was not happy. Indeed, on the morning of thefourteenth Hitler issued Directive No. 11 stating: “The power of resist-ance of the Dutch Army has proved to be stronger than was anticipated.Political as well as military considerations require that this resistance bebroken speedily.” How? He commanded that detachments of the AirForce be taken from the Sixth Army front in Belgium “to facilitate therapid 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—thekind that had been applied the autumn before at beleaguered Warsaw.

On the morning of May 14 a German staff officer from the XXXIXthCorps had crossed the bridge at Rotterdam under a white flag and de-manded the surrender of the city. He warned that unless it capitulated itwould be bombed. While surrender negotiations were under way—aDutch officer had come to German headquarters near the bridge to dis-cuss the details and was returning with the German terms—bombers ap-peared and wiped out the heart of the great city. Some eight hundred per-sons, almost entirely civilians, were massacred, several thousand woundedand 78,000 made homeless.* This bit of treachery, this act of calculatedruthlessness, would long be remembered by the Dutch, though at Nurem-berg both Goering and Kesselring of the Luftwaffe defended it on thegrounds that Rotterdam was not an open city but stoutly defended by theDutch. Both denied that they knew that surrender negotiations were going

* It was first reported and long believed that from 25,000 to 30,000 Dutch werekilled, and this is the figure given in the 1953 edition of the EncyclopaediaBritannica. However, at Nuremberg the Dutch government gave the figure as814 killed.8

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on when they dispatched the bombers, though there is strong evidencefrom German Army archives that they did.*9 At any rate, OKW made noexcuses at the time. I myself heard over the Berlin radio on the eveningof May 14 a special OKW communique:

Under the tremendous impression of the attacks of German dive bombersand the imminent attack of German tanks, the city of Rotterdam has capitu-lated and thus saved itself from destruction.

Rotterdam surrendered, and then the Dutch armed forces. Queen Wil-helmina and the government members had fled to London on two Britishdestroyers. At dusk on May 14 General H. G. Winkelmann, the Com-mander in Chief of the Dutch forces, ordered his troops to lay down theirarms 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 anight of savage German terror would henceforth darken this raped, civi-lized little land.

THE FALL OF BELGIUM AND THE TRAPPINGOF 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 onlythe fifth day of the attack, was the fatal day. The previous evening Ger-man armor had secured four bridgeheads across the steeply banked andheavily wooded Meuse River from Dinant to Sedan, captured the lattercity, which had been the scene of Napoleon Ill’s surrender to Moltke in1870 and the end of the Third Empire, and gravely threatened the centerof the Allied lines and the hinge on which the flower of the British andFrench armies had so quickly wheeled into Belgium.

The next day, May 14, the avalanche broke. An army of tanks un-precedented in warfare for size, concentration, mobility and strikingpower, which when it had started through the Ardennes Forest from theGerman frontier on May 10 stretched in three columns back for a hundredmiles far behind the Rhine, broke through the French Ninth and Secondarmies and headed swiftly for the Channel, behind the Allied forces inBelgium. This was a formidable and frightening juggernaut. Precededby waves of Stuka dive bombers, which softened up the French defensivepositions, swarming with combat engineers who launched rubber boatsand threw up pontoon bridges to get across the rivers and canals, eachpanzer division possessed of its own self-propelled artillery and of onebrigade of motorized infantry, and the armored corps closely followed bydivisions of motorized infantry to hold the positions opened up by the

There were no criminal convictions at Nuremberg for the bombing of Rotterdam.

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tanks, this phalanx of steel and fire could not be stopped by any means inthe hands of the bewildered defenders. On both sides of Dinant on theMeuse the French gave way to General Hermann Hoth’s XVth ArmoredCorps, one of whose two tank divisions was commanded by a daringyoung brigadier general, Erwin Rommel. Farther south along the river,at Montherme, 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 thegreatest blow fell. Here on the morning of May 14 two tank divisions ofGeneral Heinz Guderian’s XIXth Armored Corps* poured across ahastily constructed pontoon bridge set up during the night over the Meuseand struck toward the west. Though French armor and British bomberstried desperately to destroy the bridge—forty of seventy-one R.A.F.planes were shot down in one single attack, mostly by flak, and seventyFrench tanks were destroyed—they could not damage it. By evening theGerman bridgehead at Sedan was thirty miles wide and fifteen miles deepand the French forces in the vital center of the Allied line were shattered.Those who were not surrounded and made prisoners were in disorderlyretreat. The Franco-British armies to the north, as well as the twenty-twodivisions 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 theythought. To Churchill, plunging with new zest into his fresh responsibili-ties 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.”10Gamelin, the generalissimo of the Allied forces, was highly pleased withthe situation. The evening before, the best and largest part of the Frenchforces, the First, Seventh and Ninth armies, along with the B.E.F., ninedivisions strong under Lord Gort, had joined the Belgians, as planned, ona strong defensive line running along the Dyle River from Antwerpthrough Louvain to Wavre and thence across the Gembloux gap to Namurand south along the Meuse to Sedan. Between the formidable Belgianfortress of Namur and Antwerp, on a front of only sixty miles, the Alliesactually outnumbered the oncoming Germans, having some thirty-six di-visions against the twenty in Reichenau’s Sixth Army.

The Belgians, though they had fought well along the reaches of theirnortheast 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 ofthem, had simply not been able to cope with the revolutionary new tacticsof the Wehrmacht. Here, as in Holland, the Germans seized the vitalbridges by the daring use of a handful of specially trained troops landedsilently at dawn in gliders. They overpowered the guards at two of thethree bridges over the Albert Canal behind Maastricht before the de-fenders could throw the switches that were supposed to blow them.

* The two armored corps of Reinhardt and Guderian made up General Ewaldvon Kleist’s panzer group, which consisted of five tank divisions and three motorizedinfantry divisions.

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They had even greater success in capturing Fort Eben Emael, whichcommanded the junction of the Meuse River and the Albert Canal. Thismodern, strategically located fortress was regarded by both the Alliesand the Germans as the most impregnable fortification in Europe, strongerthan anything the French had built in the Maginot Line or the Germansin the West Wall. Constructed in a series of steel-and-concrete galleriesdeep underground, its gun turrets protected by heavy armor and mannedby 1,200 men, it was expected to hold out indefinitely against the pound-ing of the heaviest bombs and artillery shells. It fell in thirty hours toeighty German soldiers who under the command of a sergeant had landedin nine gliders on its roof and whose total casualties amounted to six killedand nineteen wounded. In Berlin, I remember, OKW made the enterpriselook very mysterious, announcing in a special communique on the eveningof May 11 that Fort Eben Emael had been taken by a “new method of at-tack,” an announcement that caused rumors to spread—and Dr. Goebbelswas delighted to fan them—that the Germans had a deadly new “secretweapon,” perhaps a nerve gas that temporarily paralyzed the defenders.

lire truth was much more prosaic. With their usual flair for minutepreparation, the Germans during the winter of 1939-40 had erected atHildesheim a replica of the fort and of the bridges across the Albert Canaland 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 aspecially prepared “hollow” explosive in the armored gun turrets whichnot only put them out of action but spread flames and gas in the chambersbelow. Portable flame throwers were also used at the gun portals andobservation openings. Within an hour the Germans were able to pene-trate the upper galleries, render the light and heavy guns of the great fortuseless and blind its observation posts. Belgian infantry behind the forti-fication tried vainly to dislodge the tiny band of attackers but they weredriven off by Stuka attacks and by reinforcements of parachutists. By themorning of May 11 advance panzer units, which had raced over the twointact bridges to the north, arrived at the fort and surrounded it, and, afterfurther Stuka bombings and hand-to-hand fighting in the undergroundtunnels, a white flag was hoisted at noon and the 1,200 dazed Belgian de-fenders filed out and surrendered.11

This feat, along with the capture of the bridges and the violence of theattack mounted by General von Reichenau’s Sixth Army, which was sus-tained by General Hoepner’s XVIth Armored Corps of two tank divisionsand one mechanized infantry division, convinced the Allied High Com-mand that now, as in 1914, the brunt of the German offensive was beingcarried out by the enemy’s right wing and that they had taken the propermeans 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 Ant-werp to Namur.

This was just what the German High Command wanted. It had now be-

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come possible for it to spring the Manstein plan and deliver the haymakerin the center. General Haider, the Chief of the Army General Staff, sawthe situation—and his opportunities—very clearly on the evening ofMay 13.

North of Namur [he wrote in his diary] we can count on a completed con-centration 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 tobring up any more forces. South of Namur we face a weaker enemy. Abouthalf our strength. Outcome of Meuse attack will decide if, when and wherewe will be able to exploit this superiority. The enemy has no force worthmentioning behind this front.

No force worth mentioning behind this front, which, the next day, wasbroken?

On May 16 Prime Minister Churchill flew to Paris to find out. By theafternoon, when he drove to the Quai d’Orsay to see Premier Reynaudand General Gamelin, German spearheads were sixty miles west of Sedan,rolling along the undefended open country. Nothing very much stood be-tween them and Paris, or between them and the Channel, but Churchill didnot know this. “Where is the strategic reserve?” he asked Gamelin and,breaking into French, “Ou est la masse de manoeuvre?” The Commanderin Chief of the Allied armies turned to him with a shake of the head and ashrug and answered, “Aucune—there is none.”*

“I was dumfounded,” Churchill later related. It was unheard of thata great army, when attacked, held no troops in reserve. “I admit,” saysChurchill, “that this was one of the greatest surprises I have had in mylife.”12

It was scarcely less a surprise to the German High Command, or atleast to Hitler and the generals at OKW if not to Haider. Twice duringthis campaign in the West, which the Fuehrer himself directed, he hesi-tated. The first occasion was on May 17 when a crisis of nerves over-came him. That morning Guderian, who was a third of the way to theChannel with his panzer corps, received an order to halt in his tracks. In-telligence had been received from the Luftwaffe that the French weremounting a great counterattack to cut off the thin armored German wedgeswhich extended westward from Sedan. Hitler conferred hastily with hisArmy Commander in Chief, Brauchitsch, and with Haider. He was cer-tain that a serious French threat was developing from the south. Rund-stedt, commander of Army Group A, the main force which had launchedthe breakthrough over the Meuse, backed him up when they conferredlater in the day. He expected, he said, “a great surprise counteroffensiveby strong French forces from the Verdun and Chalons-sur-Marne areas.”

* After the war Gamelin stated that his reply was not “There is none,” but “Thereis no longer any.” (L'Aurore, Paris, November 21, 1949.)

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The specter of a second Marne rose in Hitler’s feverish mind. “I am keep-ing an eye on this,” he wrote Mussolini the next day. “The miracle of theMarne of 1914 will not be repeated!”13

A very unpleasant day [Haider noted in his diary the evening of May 17].The Fuehrer is terribly nervous. He is worried over his own success, will risknothing and insists on restraining us. Puts forward the excuse that it is allbecause of his concern with the left flank . . . [He] has brought only bewilder-ment and doubts.

The Nazi warlord showed no improvement during the next day despitethe avalanche of news about the French collapse. Haider recorded thecrisis in his diary of the eighteenth:

The Fuehrer has an unaccountable worry about the south flank. He ragesand screams that we are on the way to ruining the whole operation and thatwe are courting the danger of a defeat. He won't have any part in continuingthe drive westward, let alone southwest, and clings always to the idea of athrust to the northwest. This is the subject of a most unpleasant disputebetween the Fuehrer on the one side and Brauchitsch and me on the other.

General Jodi 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 Chiefof the Army [Brauchitsch] has not carried out the intention of building up asquickly as possible a new flanking position to the south . . . Brauchitsch andHaider are called immediately and ordered peremptorily to adopt the necessarymeasures immediately.

But Haider had been right; the French had no forces with which tostage a counterattack from the south. And though the panzer divisions,chafing at the bit as they were, received orders to do no more than proceedwith “a reconnaissance in force” this was all they needed to press towardthe Channel. By the morning of May 19 a mighty wedge of seven armoreddivisions, driving relentlessly westward north of the Somme River pastthe storied scenes of battle of the First World War, was only some fiftymiles from the Channel. On the evening of May 20, to the surprise of Hit-ler’s headquarters, the 2nd Panzer Division reached Abbeville at themouth of the Somme. The Belgians, the B.E.F. and three French armieswere trapped.

Fuehrer is beside himself with joy [Jodi 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

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robbed over the last 400 years from the German people, and of othervalues . . .

A special memorandum is in the files containing the emotion-choked wordsof the Fuehrer when receiving the telephone report from the Commander inChief of the Army about the capture of Abbeville.

The only hope of the Allies to extricate themselves from this disastrousencirclement was for the armies in Belgium to immediately turn south-west, disengage themselves from the German Sixth Army attacking themthere, fight their way across the German armored wedge that stretchedacross northern France to the sea and join up with fresh French forcespushing northward from the Somme. This was in fact what GeneralGamelin ordered on the morning of May 19, but he was replaced thatevening by General Maxime Weygand, who immediately canceled theorder. Weygand, who had a formidable military reputation gained in theFirst World War, wanted to confer first with the Allied commanders inBelgium before deciding what to do. As a result, three days were lost be-fore Weygand came up with precisely the same plan as his predecessor.The delay proved costly. There were still forty French, British and Bel-gian battle-tested divisions in the north, and had they struck south acrossthe thin armored German line on May 19 as Gamelin ordered, they mighthave succeeded in breaking through. By the time they moved, communi-cations between the various national commands had become chaotic andthe 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’smind; no French troops ever moved up from the Somme.

In the meantime the German High Command had thrown in all theinfantry troops that could be rushed up to strengthen the armored gapand enlarge it. By May 24 Guderian’s tanks, driving up the Channel fromAbbeville, had captured Boulogne and surrounded Calais, the two mainports, and reached Gravelines, some twenty miles down the coast fromDunkirk. The front in Belgium had moved southwestward as the Alliesattempted to detach themselves there. By the 24th, then, the British,French and Belgian armies in the north were compressed into a relativelysmall triangle with its base along the Channel from Gravelines to Terneu-zen and its apex at Valenciennes, some seventy miles inland. There wasnow no hope of breaking out of the trap. The only hope, and it seemed aslim one, was possible evacuation by sea from Dunkirk.

It was at this juncture, on May 24, that the German armor, now withinsight of Dunkirk and poised along the Aa Canal between Gravelines andSt.-Omer for the final kill, received a strange—and to the soldiers in thefield inexplicable—order to halt their advance. It was the first of theGerman High Command’s major mistakes in World War II and becamea subject of violent controversy, not only between the German generalsthemselves but among the military historians, as to who was responsibleand why. We shall return to that question in a moment in the light of a

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mass of material now available. Whatever the reasons for this stop order,it provided a miraculous reprieve to the Allies, and especially to the Brit-ish, leading as it did to the miracle of Dunkirk. But it did not save theBelgians.

THE CAPITULATION OF KING LEOPOLD

King Leopold III of the Belgians surrendered early on the morning ofMay 28. The headstrong young ruler, who had taken his country out ofits alliance with France and Britain into a foolish neutrality, who had re-fused to restore the alliance even during the months when he knew theGermans were preparing a massive assault across his border, who at thelast moment, after Hitler had struck, called on the French and British formilitary succor and received it, now deserted them in a desperate hour,opening the dyke for German divisions to pour through on the flank of thesorely pressed Anglo-French troops. Moreover, he did it, as Churchilltold the Commons on June 4, “without prior consultation, with the leastpossible notice, without the advice of his ministers and upon his own per-sonal 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 therewas a showdown meeting at the King’s headquarters between the monarchand three members of the cabinet, including the Prime Minister and theForeign Minister. They urged him for the last time not to surrender per-sonally and become a prisoner of the Germans, for if he did he “would bedegraded to the role of Hacha” in Prague. They also reminded him thathe was head of state as well as Commander in Chief, and that if matterscame to the worst he could exercise his first office in exile, as the Queenof Holland and the King of Norway had decided to do, until eventual Al-lied victory came.

“I have decided to stay,” Leopold answered. “The cause of the Alliesis lost.”14

At 5 p.m. on May 27 he dispatched General Derousseaux, DeputyChief of the Belgian General Staff, to the Germans to ask for a truce. At10 o’clock the General brought back the German terms: “The Fuehrerdemands that arms be laid down unconditionally.” The King acceptedunconditional surrender at 11 p.m. and proposed that fighting cease at4 a.m., which it did.

Leopold’s capitulation was angrily denounced by Premier Reynaud ofFrance in a violent broadcast, and Belgian Premier Pierlot, also broad-casting from Paris but in a more dignified tone, informed the Belgianpeople that the King had acted against the unanimous advice of the gov-ernment, broken his links with the people and was no longer in a positionto govern, and that the Belgian government in exile would continue thestruggle. Churchill when he spoke in the House on May 28 reservedjudgment on Leopold’s action but on June 4 joined in the general criticism.

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The controversy raged long after the war was over. Leopold’s de-fenders, and there were many in and outside Belgium, believed that he haddone the right and honorable thing in sharing the fate of his soldiers andof the Belgian people. And they made much of the claim that the Kingacted not as chief of state but as Commander in Chief of the Belgian Armyin surrendering.

That the battered Belgian troops were in desperate straits by May 27there is no dispute. Valiantly they had agreed to extend their front inorder to free the British and French to fight their way south. And thatextended front was fast collapsing though the Belgians fought doggedly.Also Leopold was not told that on May 26 Lord Gort had received ordersfrom 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 Armywas under the over-all Allied Command and Leopold made a separatepeace without consulting it. In his defense it has been pointed out that onMay 27 at 12:30 p.m. he telegraphed Gort that he soon would “be forcedto capitulate to avoid a collapse.” But the British commander, who wasextremely busy and constantly on the move, did not receive it. He latertestified that he first heard of the surrender only shortly after 11 p.m. onMay 27 and found himself “suddenly faced with an open gap of twentymiles between Ypres and the sea through which enemy armored forcesmight reach the beaches.”15 To General Weygand, who was the King’ssuperior military commander, the news arrived by telegram from Frenchliaison at Belgian headquarters a little after 6 p.m. and it hit him, helater 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 inthis constitutional, democratic monarchy was bound to accept the adviceof his government. Neither in that role nor certainly as chief of state did hehave 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 tothe throne from Switzerland, where he took refuge at the war’s end, untilfive years after it was over. When the call came, on July 20, 1950, after57 per cent of those voting in a referendum had approved it, his returnprovoked such a violent reaction among the populace that civil warthreatened to break out. He soon abdicated in favor of his son.

Whatever may be said of Leopold’s behavior, there should be no dis-pute—though there has been*—about the magnificent way his Armyfought. For a few days in May I followed Reichenau’s Sixth Army throughBelgium and saw for myself the tenacity with which the Belgians struggledagainst insuperable odds. Not once did they break under the unmercifuland unopposed bombing of the Luftwaffe or when the German armortried to cut through them. This could not be said of certain other Allied

* From, among others. General Sir Alan Brooke, who commanded the British IlndCorps and later became Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the ImperialGeneral Staff. See Sir Arthur Bryant, The Turn of the Tide, based on Alanbrooke’sdiaries.

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troops in that campaign. The Belgians held out for eighteen days andwould have held out much longer had not they, like the B.E.F. and theFrench northern armies, been caught in a trap which was not of theirmaking.

MIRACLE AT DUNKIRK

Ever since May 20, when Guderian’s tanks broke through to Abbe-ville 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 personneland other “useless mouths” began to be ferried across the narrow sea toEngland at once. By May 24, as we have seen, the Belgian front to thenorth was near collapse, and to the south the German armor, striking upthe coast from Abbeville, after taking Boulogne and enveloping Calais,had reached the Aa Canal only twenty miles from Dunkirk. In betweenwere caught the Belgian Army, the nine divisions of the B.E.F. and tendivisions of the French First Army. Though the terrain on the southernend of the pocket was bad tank country, being crisscrossed with canals,ditches and flooded areas, Guderian’s and Reinhardt’s panzer corps al-ready had five bridgeheads across the main barrier, the Aa Canal, betweenGravelines on the sea and St.-Omer, and were poised for the knockoutblow which would hammer the Allied armies against the anvil of the ad-vancing German Sixth and Eighteenth armies pushing down from thenortheast and utterly destroy them.

Suddenly on the evening of May 24 came the peremptory order from theHigh Command, issued at the insistence of Hitler with the prompting ofRundstedt and Goering but over the violent objections of Brauchitschand Haider, that the tank forces should halt on the canal line and attemptno further advance. This furnished Lord Gort an unexpected and vitalreprieve which he and the British Navy and Air Force made the most ofand which, as Rundstedt later perceived and said, led “to one of the greatturning points of the war.”

How did this inexplicable stop order on the threshold of what seemedcertain to be the greatest German victory of the campaign come about?What were the reasons for it? And who was responsible? The questionshave provoked one of the greatest arguments of the war, among the Ger-man generals involved and among the historians. The generals, led byRundstedt and Haider, have put the blame exclusively on Hitler. Church-ill added further fuel to the controversy in the second volume of his warmemoirs by contending that the initiative for the order came from Rund-stedt and not Hitler and citing as evidence the war diaries of Rundstedt’sown headquarters. In the maze of conflicting and contradictory testimonyit has been difficult to ascertain the facts. In the course of preparing thischapter the author wrote General Haider himself for further elucidation

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and promptly received a courteous and detailed reply. On the basis ofthis and much other evidence now in, certain conclusions may be drawnand the controversy settled, if not conclusively, at least fairly convincingly.

As for responsibility for the famous order, Rundstedt, despite his laterassertions to the contrary, must share it with Hitler. The Fuehrer visitedthe General’s Army Group A headquarters at Charleville on the morningof May 24. Rundstedt proposed that the panzer divisions on the canal linebefore Dunkirk be halted until more infantry could be brought up. * Hitleragreed, observing that the armor should be conserved for later operationsagainst the French south of the Somme. Moreover, he declared that ifthe pocket in which the Allies were entrapped became too small it wouldhamper the activities of the Luftwaffe. Probably Rundstedt, with the ap-proval of the Fuehrer, issued the stop order at once, for Churchill notesthat the B.E.F. intercepted a German radio message giving orders to thateffect at 11:42 that morning.17 Hitler and Rundstedt were at that momentin conference.

At any rate, that evening Hitler issued the formal order from OKW,both Jodi and Haider noting it in their diaries. The General Staff Chiefwas most unhappy.

Our left wing, consisting of armor and motorized forces [he wrote in hisdiary], will thus be stopped dead in its tracks on the direct orders of theFuehrer! Finishing off the encircled enemy army is to be left to the Air Force!

This exclamation mark of contempt indicates that Goering had inter-vened with Hitler, and it is now known that he did. He offered to liquidatethe entrapped enemy troops with his Air Force alone! The reasons for his

This fact, established from the records of Rundstedt’s own headquarters, did notprevent the General from making several statements after the war which put theblame entirely on Hitler. “If I had had my way,” he told Major Milton Shulman, aCanadian intelligence officer, “the English would not have got off so lightly atDunkirk. But my hands were tied by direct orders from Hitler himself. While theEnglish were clambering into the ships off the beaches, I was kept uselessly outsidethe port unable to move ... I sat outside the town, watching the English escape,while my tanks and infantry were prohibited from moving. This incredible blunderwas 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 June20, 1946 (mimeographed transcript, p. 1490), Rundstedt added: “That was avery big mistake of the Commander . . . How angry we leaders were at that timeis indescribable.” Rundstedt made similar declarations to Liddell Hart (TheGerman Generals Talk, pp. 112-13) and to the Nuremberg Military Tribunal inthe trial of United States v. Leeb (pp. 3350—53, 3931—32, of the mimeographedtranscript).

Telford Taylor in The March of Conquest and Major L. F. Ellis in The War inFrance and Flanders, 1939—40 have analyzed the German Army records of theincident and drawn conclusions that somewhat differ. Ellis’ book is the officialBritish account of the campaign and contains both British and German documents.Taylor, who spent four years as an American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, isan authority on the German documents.

ambitious and vain proposal were given the writer in the letter from Haideron July 19, 1957.

During the following days [i.e., after May 24] it became known that Hitler’sdecision was mainly influenced by Goering. To the dictator the rapid move-ment of the Army, whose risks and prospects of success he did not understandbecause of his lack of military schooling, became almost sinister. He wasconstantly oppressed by a feeling of anxiety that a reversal loomed . . .

Goering, who knew his Fuehrer well, took advantage of this anxiety. Heoffered to fight the rest of the great battle of encirclement alone with hisLuftwaffe, thus eliminating the risk of having to use the valuable panzerformations. He made this proposal . . . for a reason which was characteristicof the unscrupulously ambitious Goering. He wanted to secure for his AirForce, after the surprisingly smooth operations of the Army up to then, thedecisive final act in the great battle and thus gain the glory of success beforethe whole world.

General Haider then tells in his letter of an account given him byBrauchitsch after a talk which the latter had with the Luftwaffe GeneralsMilch and Kesselring in Nuremberg jail in January 1946, in which the AirForce officers declared

that Goering at that time [May 1940] emphasized to Hitler that if the greatvictory in battle then developing could be claimed exclusively by the Armygenerals, the prestige of the Fuehrer in the German homeland would bedamaged beyond repair. That could be prevented only if the Luftwaffe andnot the Army carried out the decisive battle.

It is fairly clear, then, that Hitler’s idea, prompted by Goering andRundstedt but strenuously opposed by Brauchitsch and Haider, was to letthe Air Force and Bock’s Army Group B, which, without any armor tospeak of, was slowly driving back the Belgians and British southwest to theChannel, mop up the enemy troops in the pocket. Rundstedt’s ArmyGroup A, with some seven tank divisions, halted on the water lines westand south of Dunkirk, would merely stand pat and keep the enemyhemmed in. But neither the Luftwaffe nor Bock’s army group proved ableto achieve their objectives. On the morning of May 26, Haider was fumingin his diary that “these orders from the top just make no sense . . . Thetanks are stopped as if they were paralyzed.”

Finally, on the evening of May 26, Hitler rescinded the stop order andagreed that, in view of Bock’s slow advance in Belgium and the move-ment of transports off the coast, the armored forces could resume theiradvance on Dunkirk. By then it was late; the cornered enemy had hadtime to strengthen his defenses and behind them was beginning to slipaway to sea.

We now know that there were political reasons too for Hitler’s fatal

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order. Haider had noted in his diary on May 25, a day, he says, thatstarted “off with one of those painful wrangles between Brauchitsch andthe Fuehrer on the next moves in the battle of encirclement,” that

now political command has formed the fixed idea that the battle of decisionmust not be fought on Flemish soil, but rather in northern France.

This entry puzzled me and when I wrote to the former General StaffChief I asked him if he could recall Hitler’s political reasons for wantingto finish this battle in northern France rather than in Belgium. Haiderrecalled them very well. “According to my still quite lively memory,” hereplied, “Hitler, in our talks at the time, supported his reasons for thestop order with two main lines of thought. The first were military reasons:the unsuitable nature of the terrain for tanks, the resulting high losseswhich would weaken the impending attack on the rest of France, and soon.” Then, writes Haider, the Fuehrer cited

a second reason which he knew that we, as soldiers, could not argue againstsince it was political and not military.

This second reason was that for political reasons he did not want the decisivefinal battle, which inevitably would cause great damage to the population, totake place in territory inhabited by the Flemish people. He had the intention,he said, of making an independent National Socialist region out of the territoryinhabited by the German-descended Flemish, thereby binding them close toGermany. His supporters on Flemish soil had been active in this direction fora long time; he had promised them to keep their land free from the damage ofwar. If he did not keep this promise now, their confidence in him would beseverely damaged. That would be a political disadvantage for Germany whichhe, as the politically responsible leader, must avoid.

Absurd? If this seems, to be another of Hitler’s sudden aberrations(Haider writes that he and Brauchitsch were “not convinced by this rea-soning”), other political consideration which he confided to other gen-erals were more sane—and important. Describing after the war Hitler’smeeting with Rundstedt on May 24, General Guenther Blumentritt, thelatter’s chief of operations, told Liddell Hart, the British military writer:

Hitler was in very good humor . . . and gave us his opinion that the warwould be finished in six weeks. After that he wished to conclude a reasonablepeace with France and then the way would be free for an agreement withBritain . . .

He then astonished us by speaking with admiration of the British Empire,of the necessity for its existence, and of the civilization that Britain hadbrought into the world . . . He said that all he wanted from Britain was thatshe should acknowledge Germany’s position on the continent. The return ofGermany’s colonies would be desirable but not essential ... He concluded

Victory in the West 735

by saying that his aim was to make peace with Britain on a basis that she wouldregard as compatible with her honor to accept.18

Such thoughts Hitler was to express often during the next few weeks tohis generals, to Ciano and Mussolini and finally in public. Ciano was as-tonished a month later to find the Nazi dictator, then at the zenith of hissuccess, harping about the importance of maintaining the British Empireas “a factor in world equilibrium,”19 and on July 13 Haider, in his diary,described the Fuehrer as sorely puzzled over Britain’s failure to acceptpeace. To bring England to her knees by force, he told his generals thatday, “would not benefit Germany . . . only Japan, the United Statesand others.”

It may be, then, though some doubt it, that Hitler restrained his armoredforces before Dunkirk in order to spare Britain a bitter humiliation andthereby facilitate a peace settlement. It would have to be, as he said, apeace in which the British left Germany free to turn once more eastward,this time against Russia. London would have to recognize, as he alsosaid, the Third Reich’s domination of the Continent. For the next coupleof months Hitler would be confident that such a peace was within hisgrasp. No more now than in all the years before did he comprehend thecharacter of the British nation or the kind of world its leaders and itspeople were determined to fight for—to the end.

Nor did he and his generals, ignorant of the sea as they were—and re-mained—dream that the sea-minded British could evacuate a third of amillion men from a small battered port and from the exposed beachesright under their noses.

At three minutes before seven on the evening of May 26, shortly afterHitler’s stop order had been canceled, the British Admiralty signaled thebeginning of “Operation Dynamo,” as the Dunkirk evacuation was called.That night the German armor resumed its attack on the port from thewest and south, but now the panzers found it hard going. Lord Gort hadhad time to deploy against them three infantry divisions with heavy artil-lery support. The tanks made little progress. In the meantime the evacua-tion began. An armada of 850 vessels of all sizes, shapes and methods ofpropulsion, from cruisers and destroyers to small sailboats and Dutchskoots, many of them manned by civilian volunteers from the Englishcoastal towns, converged on Dunkirk. The first day. May 27, they tookoff 7,669 troops; the next day, 17,804; the following day, 47,310; and onMay 30, 53,823, for a total of 126,606 during the first four days. Thiswas far more than the Admiralty had hoped to get out. When the opera-tion began it counted on evacuating only about 45,000 men in the twodays’ time it then thought it would have.

It was not until this fourth day of Operation Dynamo, on May 30, thatthe German High Command woke up to what was happening. For fourdays the communiques of OKW had been reiterating that the encircledenemy armies were doomed. A communique of May 29, which I noted

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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 at-tack.”

But it wasn’t; it was going to sea. Without its heavy arms and equip-ment, to be sure, but with the certainty that the men would live to fight an-other day.

As late as the morning of May 30, Haider confided confidentially in hisdiary that “the disintegration of the enemy which we have encircled con-tinues.” Some of the British, he conceded, were “fighting with tooth andnail:” the others were “fleeing to the coast and trying to get across theChannel on anything that floats. Le Debacle,” he concluded, alluding toZola’s famous novel of the French collapse in the Franco—Prussian War.

By afternoon, after a session with Brauchitsch, the General Staff Chiefhad awakened to the significance of the swarms of miserable little boatson which the British were fleeing.

Brauchitsch is angry . . . The pocket would have been closed at the coastif only our armor had not been held back. The bad weather has grounded theLuftwaffe and we must now stand by and watch countless thousands of theenemy get away to England right under our noses.

That was, in fact, what they watched. Despite increased pressure whichwas immediately applied by the Germans on all sides of the pocket, theBritish lines held and more troops were evacuated. The next day, May31, was the biggest day of all. Some 68,000 men were embarked for Eng-land, 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 timesthe number originally hoped for.

Where was the famed Luftwaffe? Part of the time, as Haider noted,it was grounded by bad weather. The rest of the time it encountered un-expected opposition from the Royal Air Force, which from bases justacross the Channel successfully challenged it for the first time.* Thoughoutnumbered, the new British Spitfires proved more than a match for theMesserschmitts and they mowed down the cumbersome German bombers.On a few occasions Goering’s planes arrived over Dunkirk between Brit-ish sorties and did such extensive damage to the port that for a time it wasunusable and the troops had to be lifted exclusively from the beaches. TheLuftwaffe also pressed several strong attacks on the shipping and ac-

* A good many of the exhausted Tommies on the beaches, who underwent severebombings, were not aware of this, since the air clashes were often above the cloudsor some distance away. They knew only that they had been bombed and strafed allthe way back from eastern Belgium to Dunkirk, and they felt their Air Force had letthem down. When they reached the home ports some of them insulted men in theblue R.A.F. uniforms. Churchill was much aggrieved at this and went out of hisway to put them right when he spoke in the House on June 4. The deliverance atDunkirk, he said, “was gained by the Air Force.”

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counted for most of the 243—out of 861—vessels sunk. But it failed toachieve 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 heaviestlosses—each side lost thirty planes), sinking three British destroyers anda 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 re-mained in the perimeter, protected by 100,000 French who now mannedthe defenses.

Medium German artillery had in the meantime come within range anddaytime evacuation operations had to be abandoned. The Fuftwaffe atthat time did not operate after dark and during the nights of June 2 and3 the remainder of the B.E.F. and 60,000 French troops were success-fully brought out. Dunkirk, still defended stubbornly by 40,000 Frenchsoldiers, held out until the morning of June 4. By that day 338,226 Brit-ish and French soldiers had escaped the German clutches. They were nolonger an army; most of them, understandably, were for the moment ina pitiful shape. But they were battle-tried; they knew that if properlyarmed and adequately covered from the air they could stand up to theGermans. Most of them, when the balance in armament was achieved,would prove it—and on beaches not far down the Channel coast fromwhere they had been rescued.

A deliverance Dunkirk was to the British. But Churchill remindedthem in the House on June 4 that “wars are not won by evacuations.” Thepredicament of Great Britain was indeed grim, more dangerous than it hadbeen since the Norman landings nearly a millennium before. It had noarmy to defend the islands. The Air Force had been greatly weakened inFrance. Only the Navy remained, and the Norwegian campaign hadshown how vulnerable the big fighting ships were to land-based aircraft.Now the Fuftwaffe bombers were based but five or ten minutes awayacross the narrow Channel. France, to be sure, still held out below theSomme and the Aisne. But its best troops and armament had been lost inBelgium and in northern France, its small and obsolescent Air Force hadbeen largely destroyed, and its two most illustrious generals, MarshalPetain and General Weygand, who now began to dominate the shakygovernment, had no more stomach for battle against such a superior foe.

These dismal facts were very much on the mind of Winston Churchillwhen he rose in the House of Commons on June 4, 1940, while the lasttransports from Dunkirk were being unloaded, determined, as he wrotelater, to show not only his own people but the world—and especially theU.S.A.—“that our resolve to fight on was based on serious grounds.” Itwas on this occasion that he uttered his famous peroration, which will belong remembered and will surely rank with the greatest ever made downthe ages:

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States havefallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of

' 3° THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fightin France, we shall fight in the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growingconfidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, what-ever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landinggrounds, 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 Empirebeyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on thestruggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power andmight, 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 havetroubled Hitler’s thoughts. He was sure they would see the light after hehad finished off France, which he now proceeded to do. The morning afterDunkirk fell, on June 5, the Germans launched a massive assault on theSomme and soon they were attacking in overwhelming strength all alonga 400-mile front that stretched across France from Abbeville to the UpperRhine. The French were doomed. Against 143 German divisions, includ-ing ten armored, they could deploy only 65 divisions, most of themsecond-rate, for the best units and most of the armor had been expendedin Belgium. Little was left of the weak French Air Force. The Britishcould contribute but one infantry division, which had been in the Saar,and parts of an armored division. The R.A.F. could spare few planesfor this battle unless it were to leave the British Isles themselves defense-less. Finally, the French High Command, now dominated by Petain andWeygand, had become sodden with defeatism. Nevertheless some Frenchunits fought with great bravery and tenacity, temporarily stopping even theGerman armor here and there, and standing up resolutely to the incessantpounding of the Luftwaffe.

But it was an unequal struggle. In “victorious confusion,” as TelfordTaylor has aptly put it, the German troops surged across France like atidal wave, the confusion coming because there were so many of them andthey were moving so fast and often getting in each other’s way.20 OnJune 10 the French government hastily departed Paris and on June 14 thegreat city, the glory of France, which was undefended, was occupied byGeneral von Kuechler’s Eighteenth Army. The swastika was immediatelyhoisted on the Eiffel Tower. On June 16, Premier Reynaud, whose gov-ernment had fled to Bordeaux, resigned and was replaced by Petain, whothe next day asked the Germans, through the Spanish ambassador, for anarmistice.* Hitler replied the same day that he would first have to con-

* On this day, June 17, 1940, the exiled Kaiser sent from Doom, in occupiedHolland, a telegram of congratulations to Hitler, whom he had for so long scornedas a vulgar upstart. It was found among the captured Nazi papers.

Under the deeply moving impression of the capitulation of France I con-

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suit his ally, Mussolini. For this strutting warrior, after making sure thatthe French armies were hopelessly beaten, had, like a jackal, hopped intothe war on June 10, to try to get in on the spoils.

THE DUCE PLUNGES HIS SMALL DAGGERINTO 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 inter-vals, keeping him informed of the mounting German victories.

After the first letter on May 7, apprising the Duce that he was attack-ing Belgium and Holland “to ensure their neutrality” and saying he wouldkeep his friend informed of his progress so that the Duce could make hisown decisions in time, there were further ones on May 13, 18 and 25,each more detailed and enthusiastic than the other.22 Though the gen-erals, as Haider’s diary confirms, couldn’t have cared less what Italy did—-whether it came into the war or not—the Fuehrer for some reason at-tached importance to Italian intervention. As soon as the Netherlandsand Belgium had surrendered and the Anglo-French northern armieshad been smashed and the surviving British troops began taking to theboats at Dunkirk, Mussolini decided to slither into the war. He informedHitler by letter on May 30 that the date would be June 5. Hitler repliedimmediately that he was “most profoundly moved.”

If there could still be anything which could strengthen my unshakablebelief in the victorious outcome of this war [Hitler wrote on May 31] it wasyour statement . . . The mere fact of your entering the war is an elementcalculated to deal the front of our enemies a staggering blow.

The Fuehrer asked his ally, however, to postpone his date for threedays—he wanted to knock out the rest of the French Air Force first, hesaid—and Mussolini obliged by setting it back five days, to June 10. Hos-tilities, the Duce said, would begin the following day.

gratulate you and the whole German Wehrmacht on the mighty victory grantedby God, in the words of the Emperor Wilhelm the Great in 1870: “What a turnof events brought about by divine dispensation.”

In all German hearts there echoes the Leuthen chorale sung by the victors ofLeuthen, 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 thedocuments.21

The Fuehrer had been furious a little earlier when he learned that a German unitwhich overran Doom had posted a guard of honor around the exiled Emperor’sresidence. Hitler ordered the guard removed and Doom posted as out of bounds toall German soldiers. Wilhelm II died at Doom on June 4, 1941, and was buriedthere. His death, Hassell noted in his diary (p. 200), “went almost unnoticed” inGermany. Hitler and Goebbels saw to that.

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They did not amount to much. By June 18, when Hitler summoned hisjunior partner to Munich to discuss an armistice with France, some thirty-two Italian divisions, after a week of “fighting,” had been unable to budgea scanty French force of six divisions on the Alpine front and farther southalong the Riviera, though the defenders were now threatened by assaultin the rear from the Germans sweeping down the Rhone Valley.* OnJune 21 Ciano noted in his diary:

Mussolini is quite humiliated because our troops have not moved a stepforward. Even today they have not succeeded in advancing and have haltedin front of the first French fortification which put up some resistance.23

The hollowness of Mussolini’s boasted military might was exposed atthe very beginning and this put the deflated Italian dictator in a dour moodas he and Ciano set out by train on the evening of June 17 to confer withHitler about the armistice with France.

Mussolini dissatisfied [Ciano wrote in his diary]. This sudden peace disquietshim. During the trip we speak at length in order to clarify conditions underwhich the armistice is to be granted to the French. The Duce . . . wouldlike to go so far as the total occupation of French territory and demands thesurrender of the French fleet. But he is aware that his opinion has only aconsultative value. The war has been won by Hitler without any activemilitary participation on the part of Italy, and it is Hitler who will have thelast word. This naturally disturbs and saddens Mussolini.

The mildness of the Fuehrer’s “last word” came as a distinct shock tothe Italians when they conferred with the Nazi warlord at the Fuehrer-haus at Munich where Chamberlain and Daladier had been so accommo-dating to the two dictators regarding Czechoslovakia less than two yearsbefore. The secret German memorandum of the meeting24 makes clearthat Hitler was determined above all not to allow the French fleet to fallinto the hands of the British. He was also concerned lest the French gov-ernment flee to North Africa or to London and continue the war. Forthat reason the armistice terms—the final terms of peace might be some-thing else—would have to be moderate, designed to keep “a French gov-ernment functioning on French soil” and “the French fleet neutralized.”He abruptly dismissed Mussolini’s demands for the Italian occupation ofthe Rhone Valley, including Toulon (the great French Mediterraneannaval base, where most of the fleet was concentrated) and Marseilles, andthe disarmament of Corsica, Tunisia and Djibouti. The last town, the

* The defeatist French High Command forbade any offensive action against Italy.On June 14 a French naval squadron bombarded factories, oil tanks and refineriesnear Genoa, but Admiral Darlan prohibited any further action of this kind. Whenthe R.A.F. tried to send bombers from the airfield at Marseilles to attack Milan andTurin the French drove trucks onto the field and prevented the planes from taking off.

Victory in the West 741

gateway to Italian-held Ethiopia, was thrown in by Ciano, the Germannotes say, “in an undertone.”

Even the bellicose Ribbentrop, Ciano found, was “exceptionally mod-erate and calm, and in favor of peace.” The warrior Mussolini was “verymuch embarrassed,” his son-in-law noted.

He feels that his role is secondary ... In truth, the Duce fears that thehour of peace is growing near and sees fading once again that unattainabledream of his life: glory on the field of battle.25

Mussolini was unable even to get Hitler to agree to joint armistice ne-gotiations with the French. The Fuehrer was not going to share his tri-umph at a very historic spot (he declined to name it to his friend) withthis Johnny-come-lately. But he promised the Duce that his armisticewith France would not come into effect until the French had also signedone with Italy.

Mussolini left Munich bitter and frustrated, but Ciano had been veryfavorably impressed by a side of Hitler which his diaries make clear hehad not previously seen or suspected.

From all that he [Hitler] says [he wrote in his diary as they returned toRome] it is clear that he wants to act quickly to end it all. Hitler is now thegambler, 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 perspicacitywhich, after such a victory, are really astonishing. I cannot be accused ofexcessive 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 loveliestof months in the majestic capital, which was now stricken, and on June19 got wind of where Hitler was going to lay down his terms for the armis-tice which Petain had requested two days before. It was to be on the samespot where the German Empire had capitulated to France and her allieson November 11, 1918: in the little clearing in the woods at Compiegne.There the Nazi warlord would get his revenge, and the place itself wouldadd to the sweetness of it for him. On May 20, a bare ten days after thegreat offensive in the West had started and on the day the German tanksreached Abbeville, the idea had come to him. Jodi noted it in his diarythat day: “Fuehrer is working on the peace treaty . . . First negotiationsin the Forest of Compiegne.” Late on the afternoon of June 19 I droveout there and found German Army engineers demolishing the wall of themuseum where the old wagon-lit of Marshal Foch, in which the 1918armistice was signed, had been preserved. By the time I left, the engi-

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neers, working with pneumatic drills, had tom the wall down and werepulling the car out to the tracks in the center of the clearing on the exactspot, they said, where it had stood at 5 a.m. on November 11, 1918, whenat the dictation of Foch the German emissaries put their signatures to thearmistice.

And so it was that on the afternoon of June 211 stood by the edge ofthe forest at Compiegne to observe the latest and greatest of Hitler’s tri-umphs, of which, in the course of my work, I had seen so many over thelast turbulent years. It was one of the loveliest summer days I ever re-member in France. A warm June sun beat down on the stately trees—elms, oaks, cypresses and pines—casting pleasant shadows on the woodedavenues 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, andGoering, the lone Field Marshal of the Reich, fiddling with his field mar-shal’s baton. They alighted from their automobiles some two hundredyards away, in front of the Alsace-Lorraine statue, which was draped withGerman war flags so that the Fuehrer could not see (though I rememberedfrom previous visits in happier days) the large sword, the sword of thevictorious Allies of 1918, sticking through a limp eagle representing theGerman Empire of the Hohenzollerns. Hitler glanced at the monumentand strode on.

I observed his face [I wrote in my diary]. It was grave, solemn, yetbrimming with revenge. There was also in it, as in his springy step, a note ofthe triumphant conqueror, the defier of the world. There was somethingelse ... a sort of scornful, inner joy at being present at this great reversalof fate—a reversal he himself had wrought.

When he reached the little opening in the forest and his personal stand-ard had been run up in the center of it, his attention was attracted by agreat granite block which stood some three feet above the ground.

Hitler, followed by the others, walks slowly over to it [I am quoting mydiary], steps up, and reads the inscription engraved (in French) in great highletters:

“HERE ON THE ELEVENTH OF NOVEMBER 1918 SUCCUMBED THE CRIMINALPRIDE OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE—VANQUISHED BY THE FREE PEOPLES WHICH ITTRIED TO ENSLAVE.”

Hitler reads it and Goering reads it. They all read it, standing there in theJune sun and the silence. I look for the expression in Hitler’s face. I am butfifty yards from him and see him through my glasses as though he were directlyin front of me. I have seen that face many times at the great moments of hislife. 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-

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piece of contempt. He glances back at it, contemptuous, angry—angry, youalmost feel, because he cannot wipe out the awful, provoking lettering withone 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 thereis triumph there too—revengeful, triumphant hate. Suddenly, as though hisface were not giving quite complete expression to his feelings, he throws hiswhole body into harmony with his mood. He swiftly snaps his hands on hiships, arches his shoulders, plants his feet wide apart. It is a magnificent gestureof defiance, of burning contempt for this place now and all that it has stood forin the twenty-two years since it witnessed the humbling of the German Empire.

Hitler and his party then entered the armistice railway car, the Fuehrerseating himself in the chair occupied by Foch in 1918. Five minutes laterthe French delegation arrived, headed by General Charles Huntziger, com-mander of the Second Army at Sedan, and made up of an admiral, an AirForce general and one civilian, Leon Noel, the former ambassador to Po-land, who was now witnessing his second debacle wrought by Germanarms. They looked shattered, but retained a tragic dignity. They had notbeen told that they would be led to this proud French shrine to undergosuch a humiliation, and the shock was no doubt just what Hitler had cal-culated. As Haider wrote in his diary that evening after being given aneyewitness account by Brauchitsch:

The French had no warning that they would be handed the terms at the verysite of the negotiations in 1918. They were apparently shaken by this arrange-ment and at first inclined to be sullen.

Perhaps it was natural, even for a German so cultivated as Haider, oiBrauchitsch, to mistake solemn dignity for sullenness. The French, onesaw at once, were certainly dazed. Yet, contrary to the reports at thetime, they tried, as we now know from the official German minutes of themeetings found among the captured Nazi secret papers,27 to soften theharsher portions of the Fuehrer’s terms and to eliminate those which theythought were dishonorable. But they tried in vain.

Hitler and his entourage left the wagon-lit as soon as General Keitel hadread the preamble of the armistice terms to the French, leaving the ne-gotiations in the hands of his OKW Chief, but allowing him no leewayin departing from the conditions which he himself had laid down.

Huntziger told the Germans at once, as soon as he had read them, thatthey were “hard and merciless,” much worse than those which Francehad handed Germany here in 1918. Moreover, if “another country be-yond the Alps, which had not defeated France (Huntziger was too con-temptuous of Italy even to name her), advanced similar demands Francewould in no circumstances submit. She would fight to the bitter end . . .

* It was blown up three days later, at Hitler’s command.

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It was therefore impossible for him to put his signature to the Germanarmistice agreement . .

General Jodi, the Number Two officer at OKW, who presided tempo-rarily at this moment, had not expected such defiant words from a hope-lessly beaten foe and replied that though he could not help express his “un-derstanding” for what Huntziger had said about the Italians neverthelesshe 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 Frenchwould have to take the armistice document or leave it, as it was.

The Germans had been annoyed that the French delegation had arrivedwithout authority to conclude an armistice except with the express agree-ment of the government at Bordeaux. By a miracle of engineering andperhaps with some luck they succeeded in setting up a telephone connec-tion from the old sleeping car right through the battle lines, where thefighting still continued, to Bordeaux. The French delegates were author-ized to use it to transmit the text of the armistice terms and to discuss itwith their government. Dr. Schmidt, who served as interpre er, was di-rected to listen in on the tapped conversations from an Army communica-tions van a few yards away behind a clump of trees. The next day I myselfcontrived to hear the German recording of part of the conversation be-tween Huntziger and General Weygand.

To the credit of the latter, who bears a grave responsibility for Frenchdefeatism and the final surrender and the break with Britain, it must berecorded that he at least strenuously objected to many of the Germandemands. One of the most odious of them obligated the French to turnover to the Reich all anti-Nazi German refugees in France and in herterritories. Weygand called this dishonorable in view of the French tra-dition of the right of asylum, but when it was discussed the next day thearrogant Keitel would not listen to its being deleted. “The German emi-gres,” he shouted, were “the greatest warmongers.” They had “betrayedtheir own people.” They must be handed over “at all costs.” The Frenchmade no protest against a clause which stated that all their nationalscaught fighting with another country against Germany would be treatedas “francs-tireurs”—that is, immediately shot. This was aimed againstDe Gaulle, who was already trying to organize a Free French force inBritain, and both Weygand and Keitel knew it was a crude violation ofthe primitive rules of war. Nor did the French question a paragraph whichprovided for all prisoners of war to remain in captivity until the conclu-sion of peace. Weygand was sure the British would be conquered withinthree weeks and the French POWs thereafter released. Thus he con-demned a million and a half Frenchmen to war prison camps for fiveyears.

The crux of the armistice treaty was the disposal of the French Navy.Churchill, as France tottered, had offered to release her from her pledgenot to make a separate peace if the French Navy were directed to sail forBritish ports. Hitler was determined that this should not take place; he

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fully realized, as he told Mussolini on June 18, that it would immeasur-ably strengthen Britain. With so much at stake he had to make a con-cession, or at least a promise, to the beaten foe. The armistice agreementstipulated that the French fleet would be demobilized and disarmed andthe ships laid up in their home ports. In return for this

the German Government solemnly declares to the French Government thatit does not intend to use for its own purposes in the war the French fleet whichis in ports under German supervision. Furthermore, they solemnly and ex-pressly declare that they have no intention of raising any claim to the Frenchwar 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 thesouth and southeast in which it ostensibly was free to govern. This wasan astute move. It would not only divide France itself geographically andadministratively; it would make difficult if not impossible the formation ofa French government-in-exile and quash any plans of the politicians inBordeaux to move the seat of government to French North Africa—adesign which almost succeeded, being defeated in the end not by the Ger-mans but by the French defeatists: Petain, Weygand, Laval and their sup-porters. Moreover, Hitler knew that the men who had now seized con-trol of the French government at Bordeaux were enemies of Frenchdemocracy and might be expected to be co-operative in helping him set upthe Nazi New Order in Europe.

Yet on the second day of the armistice negotiations at Compiegne theFrench delegates continued to bicker and delay. One reason for the de-lay was that Huntziger insisted that Weygand give him not an authoriza-tion to sign but an order—no one in France wanted to take the responsi-bility. Finally, at 6:30 p.m. Keitel issued an ultimatum. The French mustaccept or reject the German armistice terms within an hour. Within thehour 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 microphonesin the wagon-lit. Just before he signed, the French General, his voicequivering, said he wished to make a personal statement. I took it down inFrench, as he spoke.

I declare that the French Government has ordered me to sign these termsof armistice . . . Forced by the fate of arms to cease the struggle in whichwe were engaged on the side of the Allies, France sees imposed on her veryhard conditions. France has the right to expect in the future negotiations thatGermany show a spirit which will permit the two great neighboring countriesto live and work in peace.

* It was stipulated that it would go into effect as soon as the Franco-Italian armisticewas signed, and that hostilities would cease six hours after that event.

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Those negotiations—for a peace treaty—would never take place, butthe spirit which the Nazi Third Reich would have shown, if they had, soonbecame evident as the occupation became harsher and the pressure on theservile Petain regime increased. France was now destined to become aGerman vassal, as Petain, Weygand and Laval apparently believed—andaccepted.

A light rain began to fall as the delegates left the armistice car anddrove away. Down the road through the woods you could see an un-broken 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 startedto move the old wagon-lit.

“Where to?” I asked.

“To Berlin,” they said. *

The Franco-Italian armistice was signed in Rome two days later. Mus-solini was able to occupy only what his troops had conquered, whichmeant a few hundred yards of French territory, and to impose a fifty-mile demilitarized zone opposite him in France and Tunisia. The armis-tice was signed at 7:35 p.m. on June 24. Six hours later the guns in Francelapsed into silence.

France, which had held out unbeaten for four years the last time, wasout of the war after six weeks. German troops stood guard over most ofEurope, from the North Cape above the Arctic Circle to Bordeaux, fromthe English Channel to the River Bug in eastern Poland. Adolf Hitlerhad reached the pinnacle. The former Austrian waif, who had been thefirst to unite the Germans in a truly national State, this corporal of theFirst World War, had now become the greatest of German conquerors.All that stood between him and the establishment of German hegemony inEurope under his dictatorship was one indomitable Englishman, WinstonChurchill, and the determined people Churchill led, who did not recognizedefeat when it stared them in the face and who now stood alone, vir-tually unarmed, their island home besieged by the mightiest military ma-chine the world had ever seen.

HITLER PLAYS FOR PEACE

Ten days after the German onslaught on the West began, on the eve-ning German tanks reached Abbeville, General Jodi, after describing in hisdiary how the Fuehrer was “beside himself with joy,” added: “. . . isworking on the peace treaty . . . Britain can get a separate peace anytime after restitution of the colonies.” That was May 20. For severalweeks thereafter Hitler seems to have had no doubts that, with France

* It arrived there July 8. Ironically, it was destroyed in an Allied bombing of Berlinlater in the war.

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knocked out, Britain would be anxious to make peace. His terms, from theGerman point of view, seemed most generous, considering the beating theBritish had taken in Norway and in France. He had expounded them toGeneral von Rundstedt on May 24, expressing his admiration of theBritish Empire and stressing the “necessity” for its existence. All hewanted 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 thefall of France he made no plans for continuing the war against Britain,and the vaunted General Staff, which supposedly planned with Prussianthoroughness for every contingency far in advance, did not bother tofurnish him any. Haider, the Chief of the General Staff, made no mentionof the subject at this time in his voluminous diary entries. He was moredisturbed about Russian threats in the Balkans and the Baltic than aboutthe 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? Thiswas a question asked everywhere except in Downing Street, where, asChurchill later revealed, it was never even discussed, because the answerwas taken for granted.28 But the German dictator did not know this, andwhen Churchill began to state it publicly—that Britain was not quitting—Hitler apparently did not believe it. Not even when on June 4, after theevacuation from Dunkirk, the Prime Minister had made his resoundingspeech about fighting on in the hills and on the beaches; not even when onJune 18, after Petain had asked for an armistice, Churchill reiterated inthe Commons Britain’s “inflexible resolve to continue the war” and inanother one of his eloquent and memorable perorations concluded:

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, ifthe British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men willsay: “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 en-couraged too by soundings in neutral capitals and by the appeals for end-ing the war that now emanated from them. On June 28 a confidentialmessage arrived for Hitler from the Pope—analogous communicationswere addressed to Mussolini and Churchill—offering his mediation for“a just and honorable peace” and declaring that before initiating this stephe wished to ascertain confidentially how it would be received.29 TheKing of Sweden was also active in proposing peace to both London andBerlin.

In the United States the German Embassy, under the direction of HansThomsen, the charge d’affaires, was spending every dollar it could lay itshands on to support the isolationists in keeping America out of the warand thus discourage Britain from continuing it. The captured German

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Foreign Office documents are full of messages from Thomsen reportingon the embassy’s efforts to sway American public opinion in Hitler’s favor.The party conventions were being held that summer and Thomsen wasbending every effort to influence their foreign-policy planks, especiallythat of the Republicans.

On June 12, for example, he cabled Berlin in code “most urgent, topsecret” that a “well-known Republican Congressman,” who was work-ing “closely” with the German Embassy, had offered, for $3,000, to invitefifty isolationist Republican Congressmen to the Republican conventionso that they may work on the delegates in favor of an isolationist foreignpolicy.” The same individual, Thomsen reported, wanted $30,000 to helppay for full-page advertisements in the American newspapers, to beheaded “Keep America Out of the War!”*30

The next day Thomsen was wiring Berlin about a new project he saidhe was negotiating through an American literary agent to have fivewell-known American writers write books “from which I await greatresults.” For this project he needed $20,000, a sum Ribbentrop okayeda few days later, f31

One of Hitler’s first public utterances about his hopes for peace withBritain had been given Karl von Wiegand, a Hearst correspondent, andpublished in the New York Journal-American on June 14. A fortnightlater Thomsen informed the German Foreign Office that he had printed100,000 extra copies of the interview and that

I was able furthermore through a confidential agent to induce the isolationistRepresentative Thorkelson [Republican of Montana] to have the Fuehrer inter-view inserted in the Congressional Record of June 22. This assures the inter-view once more the widest distribution.33

The Nazi Embassy in Washington grasped at every straw. At one pointduring the summer its press attache was forwarding what he said was asuggestion of Fulton Lewis, Jr., the radio commentator, whom he de-

* Such an advertisement appeared in the New York Times June 25, 1940.t By July 5, 1940, Thomsen had become so apprehensive about his payments thathe 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 . . . Suchreceipts or memoranda would fall into the hands of the American Secret Serviceif the Embassy were suddenly to be seized by American authorities, and despiteall camouflage, by the fact of their existence alone, they would mean politicalruin and have other grave consequences for our political friends, who are probablyknown to our enemies . . .

I therefore request that the Embassy be authorized to destroy these receiptsand statements and henceforth dispense with making them, as also with keepingaccounts of such payments.

This telegraphic report has been destroyed.32

Victory in the West 749

scribed as an admirer of “Germany and the Fuehrer and a highly respectedAmerican journalist.”

The Fuehrer should address telegrams to Roosevelt . . . reading approxi-mately as follows: “You, Mr. Roosevelt, have repeatedly appealed to me andalways expressed the wish that a sanguinary war be avoided. I did not declarewar on England; on the contrary I always stressed that I did not wish todestroy the British Empire. My repeated requests to Churchill to be reasonableand to arrive at an honorable peace treaty were stubbornly rejected byChurchill. I am aware that England will suffer severely when I order totalwar to be launched against the British Isles. I ask you therefore to approachChurchill on your part and prevail upon him to abandon his senseless obsti-nacy.” Lewis added that Roosevelt would, of course, make a rude and spitefulreply; that would make no difference. Such an appeal would surely make aprofound impression on the North American people and especially in SouthAmerica . . ,34

Adolf Hitler did not take Mr. Lewis’ purported advice, but the ForeignOffice in Berlin cabled to ask how important the radio commentator wasin America. Thomsen replied that Lewis had “enjoyed a particular suc-cess of late . . . [but that] on the other hand, in contrast to some leadingAmerican commentators, no political importance is to be attached toL.”*35

* The doings of the German Embassy in Washington at this period, as disclosed inits own dispatches which are published in Documents on German Foreign Policy,would furnish the material for a revealing book. One is struck by the tendency ofthe German diplomats to tell the Nazi dictator pretty much what he wanted to hear—a practice common among representatives of totalitarian lands. Two officers ofOKW told me in Berlin that the High Command, or at least the General Staff, washighly suspicious of the objectivity of the reports from the Washington embassy andthat they had established their own military intelligence in the United States.

They were not served very well by General Friedrich von Boetticher, the Germanmilitary attache in Washington, if one can judge by his dispatches included in theDGFP volumes. He never tired of warning OKW and the general staffs of the Armyand Air Force to whom his messages were addressed, that America was controlledby the Jews and the Freemasons, which was exactly what Hitler thought. Boetticheralso overestimated the influence of the isolationists in American politics, especiallyof 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 Free-masonry control the broad masses of the American people, Roosevelt wants Eng-land to continue fighting and the war to be prolonged . . . The circle aboutLindbergh has become aware of this development and now tries at least to im-pede the fatal control of American policy by the Jews ... I have repeatedly re-ported on the mean and vicious campaign against Lindbergh, whom the Jewsfear as their most potent adversary . . . [DGFP, X, pp. 254-55.]

August 6, 1940: . . . The background of Lindbergh’s re-emergence in publicand 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 Secre-

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Churchill himself, as he related later in his memoirs, was somewhattroubled by the peace feelers emanating through Sweden, the United Statesand the Vatican and, convinced that Hitler was trying to make the mostof them, took stern measures to counter them. Informed that the Germancharge in Washington, Thomsen, had been attempting to talk with theBritish ambassador there, he cabled that “Lord Lothian should be told onno account to make any reply to the German Charge d’Affaires’ mes-sage.”36

To the King of Sweden, who had urged Great Britain to accept a peacesettlement, the grim Prime Minister drafted a strong reply.

. . . Before any such requests or proposals could even be considered, itwould be necessary that effective guarantees by deeds, not words, should beforthcoming from Germany which would ensure the restoration of the freeand independent life of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Denmark, Holland,Belgium and above all, France . . ,*37

tary of War, and Secretary of the Navy with subservient individuals and attacheda leading and very influential Jew, “Colonel” Julius Ochs-Adler, as secretary tothe Secretary of War.

The forces opposing the Jewish element and the present policy of the UnitedStates have been mentioned in my reports, taking account also of the importanceof the General Staff. The greatly gifted Lindbergh, whose connections reach veryfar, is much the most important of them all. The Jewish element and Rooseveltfear 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 Ger-many with a view to peace and the preservation of Western culture. Several hourslater, the aged General Pershing, who has long been a puppet in the hands ofRoosevelt, which means of the Jews, read over the radio a declaration, foistedupon him by the wire-pullers, to the effect that America would be imperiled byEngland’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 Lindberghover 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 thisman, about whose progress I have reported since the beginning of the war and inwhose 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 confiden-tial conversation he said had taken place between Lindbergh and several AmericanGeneral Staff officers. Lindbergh gave it as his opinion that England would sooncollapse before German air attacks. The General Staff officers, however, held thatGermany’s air strength was not sufficient to force a decision. (DGFP, X, pp. 413-15.)

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 distinguishedforeigners 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 Officeabout alleged contacts with various British diplomats and personages, sometimesdirect, sometimes through neutrals such as the Franco Spaniards. Prince Max vonHohenlohe, the Sudeten-German Anglophile, reported to Berlin on his conversa-

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That was the nub of Churchill’s case and apparently no one in Londondreamt of compromising it by concluding a peace that would preserveBritain but permanently enslave the countries Hitler had conquered. Butthis was not comprehended in Berlin, where, as I recall those summerdays, 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, Hitlerwaited for word from London that the British government was ready tothrow in the sponge and conclude peace. On July 1 he told the new Italianambassador, Dino Alfieri,* that he “could not conceive of anyone inEngland still seriously believing in victory.”38 Nothing had been done inthe High Command about continuing the war against Britain.

But the next day, July 2, the first directive on that subject was finallyissued 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 beattained and certain other necessary conditions fulfilled. The date of com-mencement is still undecided. All preparations to be begun immediately.

Hitler’s lukewarm feeling about the operation and his belief that itwould not be necessary is reflected in the concluding paragraph of the di-rective.

All preparations must be undertaken on the basis that the invasion is stillonly 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 makingup his mind.

tions with the British minister in Switzerland, Sir David Kelly, and with the AgaKhan. He claimed the latter had asked him to relay the following message to theFuehrer:

The Khedive of Egypt, who is also here, had agreed with him that on the daywhen the Fuehrer puts up for the night in Windsor, they would drink a bottle ofchampagne together ... If Germany or Italy were thinking of taking over India,he would place himself at our disposal . . . The struggle against England was nota struggle against the English people but against the lews. Churchill had beenfor years in their pay and the King was too weak and limited ... If he were togo with these ideas to England, Churchill would lock him up. . . . [DGFP Xpp. 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 ForeignOffice secret papers, is noted later.

* Attolico had been replaced by Alfieri at the instigation of Ribbentrop in May.

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He is rather inclined to continue the struggle and to unleash a storm ofwrath and of steel upon the English. But the final decision has not beenreached, and it is for this reason that he is delaying his speech, of which, ashe himself puts it, he wants to weigh every word.40

On July 11 Hitler began assembling his military chiefs on the Obersalz-berg to see how they felt about the matter. Admiral Raeder, whose Navywould have to ferry an invading army across the Channel, had a long talkwith the Fuehrer on that date. Neither of them was eager to come to gripswith the problem—in fact, they spent most of their time together discuss-ing the matter of developing the naval bases at Trondheim and Narvik inNorway.

The Supreme Commander, judging by Raeder’s confidential report ofthe meeting,41 was in a subdued mood. He asked the Admiral whether hethought his planned speech to the Reichstag “would be effective.” Raederreplied that it would be, especially if it were preceded by a “concentrated”bombing attack on Britain. The Admiral, who reminded his chief thatthe R.A.F. was carrying out “damaging attacks” on the principal Germannaval bases at Wilhelmshaven, Hamburg and Kiel, thought the Luftwaffeought to get busy immediately on Britain. But on the question of inva-sion, the Navy Commander in Chief was distinctly cool. He urgently ad-vised that it be attempted “only as a last resort to force Britain to suefor peace.”

He [Raeder] is convinced that Britain can be made to ask for peace simplyby cutting off her import trade by means of submarine warfare, air attacks onconvoys and heavy air attacks on her main centers. . . .

The C. in C., Navy [Raeder], cannot for his part therefore advocate aninvasion of Britain as he did in the case of Norway . . .

Whereupon the Admiral launched into a long and detailed explanationof all the difficulties involved in such an invasion, which must have beenmost 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 aboveBerchtesgaden to confer with the Supreme Commander. They found himstill baffled by the British. “The Fuehrer,” Haider jotted in his diary thatevening, “is obsessed with the question why England does not yet wantto take the road to peace.” But now, for the first time, one of the reasonshad begun to dawn on him. Haider noted it.

He sees, just as we do, the solution of this question in the fact that Englandis still setting her hope in Russia. Thus he too expects that England will haveto 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 willdisintegrate. Germany, however, would not profit from this. With German

Victory in the West 753

blood we would achieve something from which only Japan, America andothers will derive profit.

On the same day, July 13, Hitler wrote Mussolini, declining with thanksthe Duce’s offer to furnish Italian troops and aircraft for the invasion ofBritain. It is clear from this letter that the Fuehrer was at last beginningto 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 anynew appeal to reason would meet with a similar rejection. For in that countryat present it is not reason that rules . . ,42

Three days later, on July 16, the warlord finally reached a decision. Heissued “Directive No. 16 on the Preparation of a Landing Operationagainst England.”43

TOP SECRET

Fuehrer’s HeadquartersJuly 16, 1940

Since England, despite her militarily hopeless situation, still shows no signof willingness to come to terms, I have decided to prepare a landing operationagainst England, and if necessary to carry it out.

The aim of this operation is to eliminate the English homeland as a base forthe 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 forit were to be completed by mid-August.

“If necessary to carry it out.” Despite his growing instinct that it wouldbe necessary, he was not quite sure, as the directive shows. The “if” wasstill a big one as Adolf Hitler rose in the Reichstag on the evening of July19 to make his final peace offer to Britain. It was the last of his greatReichstag speeches and the last of so many in this place down the yearsthat this writer would hear. It was also one of his best. I put down myimpressions of it that same evening.

The Hitler we saw in the Reichstag tonight was the conqueror and consciousof it, and yet so wonderful an actor, so magnificent a handler of the Germanmind, that he mixed superbly the full confidence of the conqueror with thehumbleness which always goes down so well with the masses when they knowa man is on top. His voice was lower tonight; he rarely shouted as he usuallydoes; and he did not once cry out hysterically as I’ve seen him do so often fromthis rostrum.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

To be sure, his long speech was swollen with falsifications of historyand liberally sprinkled with personal insults of Churchill. But it was mod-erate in tone, considering the glittering circumstances, and shrewdly con-ceived to win the support not only of his own people but of the neutralsand 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 butof the politicians—that the war must go on! I do not know whether thesepoliticians already have a correct idea of what the continuation of this strugglewill be like. They do, it is true, declare that they will carry on with the warand that, even if Great Britain should perish, they would carry on fromCanada. I can hardly believe that they mean by this that the people ofBritain are to go to Canada. Presumably only those gentlemen interested inthe continuation of their war will go there. The people, I am afraid, will haveto remain in Britain and . . . will certainly regard the war with other eyesthan their so-called leaders in Canada.

Believe me, gentlemen, I feel a deep disgust for this type of unscrupulouspolitician who wrecks whole nations. It almost causes me pain to think thatI should have been selected by fate to deal the final blow to the structure whichthese men have already set tottering . . . Mr. Churchill ... no doubt willalready be in Canada, where the money and children of those principally in-terested in the war have already been sent. For millions of other people, how-ever, great suffering will begin. Mr. Churchill ought perhaps, for once, tobelieve me when I prophesy that a great Empire will be destroyed—an Empirewhich it was never my intention to destroy or even to harm . . .

Having thus tilted at the dogged Prime Minister and attempted to de-tach the British people from him, Hitler came to the point of his lengthyspeech.

In this hour I feel it to be my duty before my own conscience to appeal oncemore 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 thevanquished begging favors, but the victor speaking in the name of reason.

I can see no reason why this war must go on *

* There was a colorful scene and one unprecedented in German history when Hitlersuddenly broke off his speech in the middle to award field marshals’ batons to twelvegenerals and a special king-size one to Goering, who was given the newly createdrank of Reich Marshal of the Greater German Reich, which put him above all theothers. He was also awarded the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross, the only one givenduring the entire war. Haldei was passed over in this avalanche of field marshalawards, being merely promoted one grade, from lieutenant general to general. Thispromiscuous award of field-marshalships—the Kaiser had named only five fieldmarshals from the officer corps during all of World War I and not even Ludendorffhad been made one—undoubtedly helped to stifle any latent opposition to Hitleramong the generals such as had threatened to remove him on at least three occasions

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Victory in the West

He was not more specific than that. He made no concrete suggestionsfor peace terms, no mention of what was to happen to the hundred mil-lion people now under the Nazi yoke in the conquered countries. Butthere were few if any in the Reichstag that evening who believed that itwas necessary at this stage to go into the details. I mingled with a goodmany officials and officers at the close of the session and not one of themhad the slightest doubt, as they said, that the British would accept whatthey really believed was a very generous and even magnanimous offerfrom the Fuehrer. They were not for long to be deceived.

I drove directly to the Rundfunk to make a broadcast report of thespeech to the United States. I had hardly arrived at Broadcasting Housewhen I picked up a BBC broadcast in German from London. It was giv-ing the British answer to Hitler already—within the hour. It was a de-termined No!* *

Junior officers from the High Command and officials from variousministries were sitting around the room listening with rapt attention. Theirfaces fell. They could not believe their ears. “Can you make it out?” oneof them shouted to me. He seemed dazed. “Can you understand thoseBritish fools?” he continued to bellow. “To turn down peace now?They’re crazy!”

The same evening Cianof heard the reaction to the crazy English on amuch higher level in Berlin than mine. “Late in the evening,” he noted inhis diary, “when the first cold English reactions to the speech arrive, asense of ill-concealed disappointment spreads among the Germans.” Theeffect on Mussolini, according to Ciano, was just the opposite.

He . . . defines it “a much too cunning speech.” He fears that the Englishmay 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

in the past. In achieving this and in debasing the value of the highest military rank byraising so many to it, Hitler acted shrewdly to tighten his hold over the generals.Nine Army generals were promoted to field marshal: Brauchitsch, Keitel, Rund-stedt, Bock, Leeb, List, Kluge, Witzleben and Reichenau; and three Luftwaffe offi-cers: Milch, Kesselring and Sperrle.

* Churchill later declared that this immediate and brusque rejection of Hitler’speace offer was made “by the BBC without any prompting from H. M. Governmentas soon as Hitler’s speech was heard over the radio.” (Churchill, Their Finest Hour,

p. 260.)

t The Italian Foreign Minister had behaved like a clown during the Reichstag ses-sion, bobbing up and down like a jack-in-the-box to give the Fascist salute everytime Hitler paused for breath. I also noticed Quisling, a pig-eyed little man, crouch-ing in a corner seat in the first balcony. He had come to Berlin to beg the Fuehrerto reinstate him in power in Oslo.

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“As a manuever calculated to rally the German people for the fightagainst Britain,” I wrote in my diary that night, “Hitler’s speech was amasterpiece. For the German people will now say: ‘Hitler offers Englandpeace, and no strings attached. He says he sees no reason why this warshould go on. If it does, it’s England’s fault.’ ”

And was that not the principal reason for giving it, three days after hehad issued Directive No. 16 to prepare the invasion of Britain? He ad-mitted as much—beforehand—to two Italian confidants, Alfieri andCiano. On July 1 he had told the ambassador:

... It was always a good tactic to make the enemy responsible in the eyesof public opinion in Germany and abroad for the future course of events. Thisstrengthened one’s own morale and weakened that of the enemy. An opera-tion such as the one Germany was planning would be very bloody . . . There-fore one must convince public opinion that everything had first been done toavoid this horror . . .

In his speech of October 6 [when he had offered peace to the West at theconclusion of the Polish campaign—W.L.S.] he had likewise been guided bythe thought of making the opposing side responsible for all subsequent develop-ments. 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 tospeak, 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—hemight achieve a psychological effect among the English people . . . Perhapsit would be possible by a skillful appeal to the English people to isolate theEnglish Government still further in England.47

It did not prove possible. The speech of July 19 worked with the Ger-man people, but not with the British. On July 22 Lord Halifax in abroadcast made the rejection of Hitler’s peace offer official. Though ithad been expected, it somehow jolted the Wilhelmstrasse, where I foundmany angry faces that afternoon. “Lord Halifax,” the official govern-ment spokesman told us, “has refused to accept the peace offer of theFuehrer. Gentlemen, there will be war!”

It was easier said than done. In truth neither Hitler, the High Com-mand nor the general staffs of the Army, Navy and Air Force had everseriously considered how a war with Great Britain could be fought andwon. Now in the midsummer of 1940 they did not know what to do withtheir glittering success; they had no plans and scarcely any will for ex-ploiting the greatest military victories in the history of their soldieringnation. This is one of the great paradoxes of the Third Reich. At thevery moment when Hitler stood at the zenith of his military power, with

Victory in the West 757

most of the European Continent at his feet, his victorious armies stretchedfrom the Pyrenees to the Arctic Circle, from the Atlantic to beyond theVistula, rested now and ready for further action, he had no idea how togo 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 atthe time. The Germans, despite their vaunted military talents, lacked anygrand strategic concept. Their horizons were limited—they had alwaysbeen limited—to land warfare against the neighboring nations on theEuropean Continent. Hitler himself had a horror of the sea* and his greatcaptains almost a total ignorance of it. They were land-minded, not sea-minded. And though their armies could have crushed in a week the feebleland forces of Britain if they had only been able to come to grips withthem, even the narrow waters of the Dover Straits which separated thetwo—so narrow that you can see across to the opposite shore—loomed intheir minds, as the splendid summer began to wane, as an obstacle theyknew not how to overcome.

There was of course another alternative open to the Germans. Theymight bring Britain down by striking across the Mediterranean with theirItalian ally, taking Gibraltar at its western opening and in the east driv-ing on from Italy’s bases in North Africa through Egypt and over the canalto Iran, severing one of the Empire’s main life lines. But this necessitatedvast operations overseas at distances far from home bases, and in 1940it 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 carriedthrough. This fateful neglect would prove to be one of the great turningpoints of the war and indeed of the short life of the Third Reich and ofthe meteoric career of Adolf Hitler. Failure, after so many stupendousvictories, was now to set in. But this, to be sure, could not be foreseen asbeleaguered Britain, now holding out alone, girded herself with what smallmeans she had for the German onslaught at the summer’s end.

* “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 THWARTEDINVASION OF BRITAIN

(,(, he final german victory over England is now only a question of

X time,” General Jodi, Chief of Operations at OKW, wrote on June30, 1940. “Enemy offensive operations on a large scale are no longerpossible.”

Hitler’s favorite strategist was in a confident and complacent mood.France had capitulated the week before, leaving Britain alone and appar-ently helpless. On June 15 Hitler had informed the generals that hewanted the Army partially demobilized—from 160 to 120 divisions. “Theassumption behind this,” Haider noted in his diary that day, “is that thetask of the Army is fulfilled. The Air Force and Navy will be given themission of carrying on alone the war against England.”

In truth, the Army showed little interest in it. Nor was the Fuehrerhimself much concerned. On June 17 Colonel Walter Warlimont, Jodi’sdeputy, informed the Navy that “with regard to the landing in Britain, theFuehrer . . . has not up to now expressed such an intention . . . There-fore, even at this time, no preparatory work of any kind [has] been carriedout in OKW.”1 Four days later, on June 21, at the very moment Hitlerwas entering the armistice car at Compiegne to humble the French, theNavy was informed that the “Army General Staff is not concerning itselfwith the question of England. Considers execution impossible. Does notknow how operation is to be conducted from southern area . . . GeneralStaff rejects the operation.”2

None of the gifted planners in any of the three German armed servicesknew how Britain was to be invaded, though it was the Navy, not un-naturally, which had first given the matter some thought. As far back asNovember 15, 1939, when Hitler was trying vainly to buck up his generalsto launch an attack in the West, Raeder instructed the Naval War Staffto examine “the possibility of invading England, a possibility arising ifcertain conditions are fulfilled by the further course of the war.”3 It wasthe first time in history that any German military staff had been asked evento consider such an action. It seems likely that Raeder took this step

758

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Operation Sea Lion: The Thwarted Invasion of Britain

largely because he wanted to anticipate any sudden aberration of hisunpredictable Leader. There is no record that Hitler was consulted orknew anything about it. The furthest his thoughts went at this time was toget airfields and naval bases in Holland, Belgium and France for thetightening of the blockade against the British Isles.

By December 1939, the Army and Luftwaffe high commands were alsogiving some thought to the problem of invading Britain. Rather nebulousideas 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 asunrealistic. To the Navy it did not take into account British naval power;to the Luftwaffe it underestimated the R.A.F. “In conclusion,” remarkedthe Luftwaffe General Staff in a communication to OKH, “a combinedoperation with a landing in England as its object must be rejected.”4Later, as we shall see, Goering and his aides were to take a quite contraryview.

The first mention in the German records that Hitler was even facingthe possibility of invading Britain was on May 21, the day after thearmored forces drove through to the sea at Abbeville. Raeder discussed“in private” with the Fuehrer “the possibility of a later landing in Eng-land.” The source of this information is Admiral Raeder,5 whose Navywas not sharing in the glory of the astounding victories of the Army andAir Force in the West and who, understandably, was seeking means ofbringing his service back into the picture. But Hitler’s thoughts were onthe battle of encirclement to the north and on the Somme front then form-ing to the south. He did not trouble his generals with matters beyondthese two immediate tasks.

The naval officers, however, with little else to do, continued to studythe problem of invasion, and by May 27 Rear Admiral Kurt Fricke,Chief of the Naval War Staff Operations Division, came up with a freshplan entitled Studie England. Preliminary work was also begun on round-ing up shipping and developing landing craft, the latter of which theGermany Navy was entirely bereft. In this connection Dr. GottfriedFeder, the economic crank who had helped Hitler draft the party programin the early Munich days and who was now a State Secretary in the Ministryof Economics, where his crackpot ideas were given short shrift, producedplans for what he called a “war crocodile.” This was a sort of self-propelled barge made of concrete which could carry a company of twohundred men with full equipment or several tanks or pieces of artillery,roll up on any beach and provide cover for the disembarking troops andvehicles. It was taken quite seriously by the Naval Command and even byHaider, who mentioned it in his diary, and was discussed at length byHitler 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 theBritish Isles as June approached its end. Following his appearance atCompiegne on June 21, Hitler went off with some old cronies to do the

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

sights of Paris briefly* and then to visit the battlefields, not of this warbut of the first war, where he had served as a dispatch runner. With himwas his tough top sergeant of those days, Max Amann, now a millionaireNazi publisher. The future course of the war—specifically, how to con-tinue the fight against Britain—seemed the least of his concerns, or per-haps it was merely that he believed that this little matter was alreadysettled, since the British would now come to “reason” and make peace.

Hitler did not return to his new headquarters, Tannenberg, west ofFreudenstadt in the Black Forest, until the twenty-ninth of June. Thenext day, coming down to earth, he mulled over Jodi’s paper on what todo next. It was entitled “The Continuation of the War against England.”8Though Jodi was second only to Keitel at OKW in his fanatical belief inthe Fuehrer’s genius, he was, when left alone, usually a prudent strategist.But now he shared the general view at Supreme Headquarters that the warwas won and almost over. If Britain didn’t realize it, a little more forcewould have to be supplied to remind her. For the “siege” of England, hismemorandum proposed three steps: intensification of the German air andsea war against British shipping, storage depots, factories and the R.A.F.;“terror attacks against the centers of population”; “a landing of troopswith the objective of occupying England.”

Jodi recognized that “the fight against the British Air Force must havetop priority.” But, on the whole, he thought this as well as other aspects ofthe assault could be carried out with little trouble.

Together with propaganda and periodic terror attacks, announced as re-prisals, this increasing weakening of the basis of food supply will paralyze andfinally break the will of the people to resist, and thereby force its governmentto capitulate,f

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 toadminister the deathblow [Todesstoss] to an England already economicallyparalyzed and no longer capable of fighting in the air, if this is still necessary.t

However, thought Jodi, all this might not be necessary.

* And to gaze down at the tomb of Napoleon at the Invalides. “That,” he told hisfaithful photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, “was the greatest and finest moment ofmy life.”

t The emphasis is Jodi’s.

t Jodi also suggested the possibility of “extending the war to the periphery”—thatis, attacking the British Empire with the help not only of Italy but of Japan, Spainand Russia.

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Operation Sea Lion: The Thwarted Invasion of Britain

Since England can no longer fight for victory, but only for the preservationof 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 atrelatively little cost.

This was what Hitler thought too and he immediately set to work onhis peace speech for the Reichstag. In the meantime, as we have seen, heordered (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, itwas decided to invade Britain, “if necessary.” This, as Hitler and hisgenerals belatedly began to realize, would have to be a major militaryoperation, not without its risks and depending for success on whether theLuftwaffe and the Navy could prepare the way for the troops against afar superior British Navy and a by no means negligible enemy Air Force.

Was Sea Lion a serious plan? And was it seriously intended that itshould be carried out?

To this day many have doubted it and they have been reinforced in theiropinions by the chorus from the German generals after the war. Rund-stedt, who was in command of the invasion, told Allied investigators in1945:

The proposed invasion of England was nonsense, because adequate shipswere not available . . . We looked upon the whole thing as a sort of gamebecause it was obvious that no invasion was possible when our Navy was notin a position to cover a crossing of the Channel or carry reinforcements. Norwas the German Air Force capable of taking on these functions if the Navyfailed ... I was always very skeptical about the whole affair ... I have afeeling that the Fuehrer never really wanted to invade England. He neverhad sufficient courage ... He definitely hoped that the English would makepeace . . ,7

Blumentritt, Rundstedt’s chief of operations, expressed similar viewsto Liddell Hart after the war, claiming that “among ourselves we talkedof 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 Germanbombers and fighters heading over the Channel toward England on whatturned out to be the first massive air assault. And while it was evident thatthe Luftwaffe was going all out, the lack of shipping and especially of in-vasion barges in the ports and in the canals and rivers behind them leftme with the impression that the Germans were bluffing. They simply didnot have the means, so far as I could see, of getting their troops across theChannel.

But one reporter can see very little of a war and we know now that the

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Germans did not begin to assemble the invasion fleet until September 1.As for the generals, anyone who read their interrogations or listened tothem on cross-examination at the Nuremberg trials learned to take theirpostwar testimony with more than a grain of salt. * The trickiness of man’smemory is always considerable and the German generals were no excep-tion to this rule. Also they had many axes to grind, one of the foremostbeing to discredit Hitler’s military leadership. Indeed, their principaltheme, expounded at dreary length in their memoirs and in their interroga-tions and trial testimony, was that if they had been left to make thedecisions Hitler never would have led the Third Reich to defeat.

Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for posterity and the truth, themountainous secret German military files leave no doubt that Hitler’splan to invade Britain in the early fall of 1940 was deadly serious andthat, though given to many hesitations, the Nazi dictator seriously intendedto carry it out if there were any reasonable chance of success. Its ultimatefate was settled not by any lack of determination or effort but by thefortunes 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 theinvasion and two days before the Fuehrer’s “peace” speech in the Reich-stag, the Army High Command (OKH) allocated the forces for Sea Lionand ordered thirteen picked divisions to the jumping-off places on theChannel coast for the first wave of the invasion. On the same day theArmy Command completed its detailed plan for a landing on a broadfront on the south coast of England.

The main thrust here, as in the Battle of France, would be carried outby Field Marshal von Rundstedt (as he would be titled on July 19) ascommander of Army Group A. Six infantry divisions of General ErnstBusch’s Sixteenth Army were to embark from the Pas de Calais and hitthe beaches between Ramsgate and Bexhill. Four divisions of GeneralAdolf Strauss’s Ninth Army would cross the Channel from the area of LeHavre and land between Brighton and the Isle of Wight. Farther to thewest three divisions of Field Marshal von Reichenau’s Sixth Army (fromField Marshal von Bock’s Army Group B), taking off from the Cherbourgpeninsula, would be put ashore in Lyme Bay, between Weymouth andLyme Regis. Altogether 90,000 men would form the first wave; by thethird day the High Command planned on putting ashore a total of 260,000men. Airborne forces would help out after being dropped at Lyme Bayand other areas. An armored force of no less than six panzer divisions,reinforced by three motorized divisions, would follow in the second waveand in a few days it was planned to have ashore a total of thirty-ninedivisions plus two airborne divisions.

Their task was as follows. After the bridgeheads had been secured, the

* Even so astute a military critic as Liddell Hart neglected always to do so, andthis neglect mars his book The German Generals Talk. Talk they did, but not al-ways with very good memories or even very truthfully.

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Operation Sea Lion: The Thwarted Invasion of Britain

divisions of Army Group A in the southeast would push forward to the firstobjective, a line running between Gravesend and Southampton. Reich-enau’s Sixth Army would advance north to Bristol, cutting off Devon andCornwall. The second objective would be a line between Maldon on theeast coast north of the Thames estuary to the Severn River, blocking offWales. “Heavy battles with strong British forces” were expected todevelop at about the time the Germans reached their first objective. Butthey would be quickly won, London surrounded, and the drive northwardresumed.9 Brauchitsch told Raeder on July 17 that the whole operationwould be finished in a month and would be relatively easy.*10

But Raeder and the Naval High Command were skeptical. An opera-tion of such size on such a broad front—it stretched over two hundredmiles from Ramsgate to Lyme Bay—was simply beyond the means of theGerman Navy to convoy and protect. Raeder so informed OKW twodays later and brought it up again on July 21 when Hitler summoned him,Brauchitsch and General Hans Jeschonnek (Chief of the Luftwaffe Gen-eral Staff) to a meeting in Berlin. The Fuehrer was still confused about“what is going on in England.” He appreciated the Navy’s difficulties butstressed the importance of ending the war as soon as possible. For theinvasion forty divisions would be necessary, he said, and the “main opera-tion” would have to be completed by September 15. On the whole thewarlord was in an optimistic mood despite Churchill’s refusal at that verymoment to heed his peace appeal.

England’s situation is hopeless [Haider noted Hitler as saying]. The war hasbeen 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 armyacross the choppy Channel in the face of a vastly stronger British Navyand 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

* German intelligence overestimated British strength on the ground throughoutJuly, August and September by about eight divisions. Early in July the GermanGeneral Staff estimated British strength at from fifteen to twenty divisions “of fight-ing value.” Actually there were twenty-nine divisions in England at this time butnot more than half a dozen of much “fighting value,” as they had practically noarmor or artillery. But contrary to widespread belief at the time, which has lingeredto this day, the British Army by the middle of September would have been a matchfor the German divisions then allocated for the first wave of invasion. By that timeit had ready to meet an attack on the south coast a force of sixteen well-traineddivisions, of which three were armored, with four divisions plus an armored brigadecovering the east coast from the Thames to the Wash. This represented a remark-able recovery after the debacle at Dunkirk, which had left Britain virtually defense-less on land in June.

British intelligence of the German plans was extremely faulty and for the firstthree months of the invasion threat almost completely wrong. Throughout thesummer, Churchill and his military advisers remained convinced that the Germanswould make their main landing attempt on the east coast and it was here that thebulk of the British land forces were concentrated until September.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

“against undertaking the operation this year” and proposing that “it beconsidered in May 1941 or thereafter.”12

Hitler, however, insisted on considering it on July 31, 1940, when heagain summoned his military chiefs, this time to his villa on the Obersalz-berg. Besides Raeder, Keitel and Jodi were there from OKW andBrauchitsch and Haider from the Army High Command. The GrandAdmiral, as he now was, did most of the talking. He was not in a veryhopeful 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 theweather or the enemy.” When Hitler inquired about the weather problemRaeder responded with a lecture on the subject that grew quite eloquentand certainly forbidding. Except for the first fortnight in October theweather, he explained, was “generally bad” in the Channel and the NorthSea; 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,” hedeclared, “can be carried out only if the sea is calm.” If the water wererough, the barges would sink and even the big ships would be helpless,since they could not unload supplies. The Admiral grew gloomier withevery minute that he contemplated what lay ahead.

Even if the first wave crosses successfully [he went on] under favorableweather conditions, there is no guarantee that the same favorable weather willcarry through the second and third waves ... As a matter of fact, we mustrealize 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 beacheswithout supplies and reinforcements. Raeder now came to the main pointof the differences between the Army and the Navy. The Army wanted abroad front from the Straits of Dover to Lyme Bay. But the Navy simplycouldn’t provide the ships necessary for such an operation against the ex-pected strong reaction of the British Navy and Air Force. Raeder there-fore argued strongly that the front be shortened—to run only from theDover Straits to Eastbourne. The Admiral saved his clincher for the end.

“All things considered,” he said, “the best time for the operation wouldbe 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 con-sider the consequences of losing time. The German Navy would not beany stronger vis-a-vis the British Navy by spring. The British Army atthe moment was in poor shape. But give it another eight to ten monthsand it would have from thirty to thirty-five divisions, which was a con-siderable force in the restricted area of the proposed invasion. Thereforehis decision (according to the confidential notes made by both Raeder andHaider)13 was as follows:

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Diversions in Africa should be studied. But the decisive result can beachieved only by an attack on England. An attempt must therefore be madeto prepare the operation for September 15, 1940 . . . The decision as towhether the operation is to take place in September or is to be delayed untilMay 1941, will be made after the Air Force has made concentrated attackson southern England for one week. If the effect of the air attacks is such thatthe 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 postponeduntil May 1941.

All now depended on the Luftwaffe.

The next day, August 1, Hitler issued as a consequence two directivesfrom OKW, one signed by himself, the other by Keitel.

TOP SECRET

Fuehrer’s HeadquartersAugust 1, 1940

Directive No. 17 for the Conduct of Air and NavalWarfare against England

In order to establish the conditions necessary for the final conquest ofEngland, I intend to continue the air and naval war against the English home-land 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 allmeans at its disposal and as soon as possible . . .

2. After gaining temporary or local air superiority the air war is to becarried out against harbors, especially against establishments connected withfood supply . . . Attacks on the harbors of the south coast are to be under-taken 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 . . . TheNavy is authorized to begin the projected intensified naval warfare at the sametime.

Adolf Hitler14

The directive signed by Keitel on behalf of Hitler the same day read inpart:

TOP SECRET

Operation Sea Lion

The C. in C., Navy, having reported on July 31 that the necessary prepara-tions for .Sea Lion could not be completed before September 15, the Fuehrerhas ordered:

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Preparations for Sea Lion are to be continued and completed by the Armyand Air Force by September 15.

Eight to fourteen days after the launching of the air offensive againstBritain, scheduled to begin about August 5, the Fuehrer will decide whetherthe invasion will take place this year or not; his decision will depend largelyon the outcome of the air offensive . . .

In spite of the Navy’s warning that it can guarantee only the defense of anarrow strip of coast (as far west as Eastbourne), preparations are to becontinued for the attack on a broad basis, as originally planned . . ,15

The last paragraph only served to inflame the feud between the Armyand Navy over the question of a long or a short invasion front. A fort-night before, the Naval War Staff had estimated that to fulfill the demandsof the Army for landing 100,000 men with equipment and supplies in thefirst wave, along a 200-mile front from Ramsgate to Lyme Bay, wouldnecessitate rounding up 1,722 barges, 1,161 motorboats, 471 tugs and155 transports. Even if it were possible to assemble such a vast amount ofshipping, Raeder told Hitler on July 25, it would wreck the Germaneconomy, since taking away so many barges and tugs would destroy thewhole inland-waterway transportation system, on which the economic lifeof the country largely depended.16 At any rate, Raeder made it clear, theprotection of such an armada trying to supply such a broad front againstthe certain attacks of the British Navy and Air Force was beyond thepowers of the German naval forces. At one point the Naval War Staffwarned the Army that if it insisted on the broad front, the Navy might loseall of its ships.

But the Army persisted. Overestimating British strength as it did, itargued that to land on a narrow front would confront the attackers with a“superior” British land force. On August 7 there was a showdown be-tween the two services when Haider met his opposite number in the Navy,Admiral Schniewind, the Chief of the Naval War Staff. There was a sharpand 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 ArmyI regard it as complete suicide. I might just as well put the troops that havelanded straight through a sausage machine!”

According to the Naval War Staff’s record of the meeting* Schniewindreplied that it would be “equally suicidal” to attempt to transport thetroops for such a broad front as the Army desired, “in view of British navalsupremacy.”

It was a cruel dilemma. If a broad front with the large number of

* In his diary entry that evening Haider did not quote himself as above. He declared,however, that “the talk led only to the confirmation of an unbridgeable gap.” TheNavy, he said, was “afraid of the British High Seas Fleet and maintained that adefense against this danger by the Luftwaffe was impossible.” Obviously by thistime the German Navy, if not the Army, had few illusions about the striking powerof Goering’s Air Force.

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Operation Sea Lion: The Thwarted Invasion of Britain

troops to man it was attempted, the whole German expedition might besunk at sea by the British Navy. If a short front, with correspondinglyfewer troops, was adopted, the invaders might be hurled back into the seaby the British Army. On August 10 Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chiefof the Army, informed OKW that he “could not accept” a landing betweenFolkestone and Eastbourne. However, he was willing, albeit “very reluc-tantly,” to abandon the landing at Lyme Bay in order to shorten the frontand meet the Navy halfway.

This was not enough for the hardheaded admirals, and their caution andstubbornness were beginning to have an effect at OKW. On August 13Jodi drafted an “appreciation” of the situation, laying down five conditionsfor the success of Sea Lion that seemingly would have struck the generalsand admirals as almost ludicrous had their dilemma not been so serious.First, he said, the British Navy would have to be eliminated from the southcoast, and second, the R.A.F. would have to be eliminated from theBritish skies. The other conditions concerned the landing of troops in astrength and with a rapidity that were obviously far beyond the Navy’spowers. If these conditions were not fulfilled, he considered the landing“an act of desperation which would have to be carried out in a desperatesituation, but which we have no cause to carry out now.”17

If the Navy’s fears were spreading to Jodi, the OKW Operations Chief’shesitations were having their effect on Hitler. All through the war theFuehrer leaned much more heavily on Jodi than on the Chief of OKW,the spineless, dull-minded Keitel. It is not surprising, then, that onAugust 13, when Raeder saw the Supreme Commander in Berlin andrequested a decision on the broad versus the narrow front, Hitler wasinclined to agree with the Navy on the smaller operation. He promisedto make a definite ruling the next day after he had seen the Commanderin Chief of the Army.18 After hearing Brauchitsch’s views on the four-teenth, Hitler finally made up his mind, and on the sixteenth an OKWdirective signed by Keitel declared that the Fuehrer had decided to aban-don the landing in Lyme Bay, which Reichenau’s Sixth Army was to havemade. Preparations for landings on the narrower front on September 15were to be continued, but now, for the first time, the Fuehrer’s own doubtscrept into a secret directive. “Final orders,” it added, “will not be givenuntil the situation is clear.” The new order, however, was somewhat of acompromise. For a further directive that day enlarged the narrower front.

Main crossing to be on narrow front. Simultaneous landing of four to fivethousand troops at Brighton by motorboats and the same number of airbornetroops at Deal-Ramsgate. In addition, on D-minus-I Day the Luftwaffe isto make a strong attack on London, which would cause the population to fleefrom the city and block the roads.19

Although Haider on August 23 was scribbling a shorthand note in hisdiary that “on this basis, an attack has no chance of success this year,” a

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

directive on August 27 over Keitel’s signature laid down final plans forlandings in four main areas on the south coast between Folkestone andSelsey Bill, just east of Portsmouth, with the first objective, as before, aline running between Portsmouth and the Thames east of London atGravesend, to be reached as soon as the beachheads had been connectedand organized and the troops could strike north. At the same time orderswere given to get ready to carry out certain deception maneuvers, ofwhich the principal one was “Autumn Journey” (Herbstreise). Thiscalled for a large-scale feint against Britain’s east coast, where, as has beennoted, Churchill and his military advisers were still expecting the maininvasion blow to fall. For this purpose four large liners, including Ger-many’s largest, Europa and Bremen, and ten additional transports, escortedby four cruisers, were to put out from the southern Norwegian ports andthe Heligoland Bight on D-minus-2 Day and head for the English coastbetween Aberdeen and Newcastle. The transports would be empty andthe whole expedition would turn back as darkness fell, repeating themaneuver the next day.20

On August 30 Brauchitsch gave out a lengthy order of instructions forthe landings, but the generals who received it must have wondered howmuch heart their Army chief now had in the undertaking. He entitled it“Instruction for the Preparation of Operation Sea Lion”—rather late inthe game to be ordering preparations for an operation that he commandedmust be carried out from September 15. “The order for execution,” headded, “depends on the political situation”—a condition that must havepuzzled the unpolitical generals.21

On September 1 the movement of shipping from Germany’s North Seaports toward the embarkation harbors on the Channel began, and twodays later, on September 3, came a further directive from OKW.

The earliest day for the sailing of the invasion fleet has been fixed asSeptember 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 zerohour.

Keitel22

This sounded like business. But the sound was deceptive. On Septem-ber 6 Raeder had another long session with Hitler. “The Fuehrer’sdecision to land in England,” the Admiral recorded in the Naval Staff WarDiary that night, “is still by no means settled, as he is firmly convinced thatBritain’s defeat will be achieved even without the ‘landing.’ ” Actually, asRaeder’s long recording of the talk shows, the Fuehrer discoursed atlength 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 GermanicUnion.”23

If Churchill and his military chiefs had only got wind of this remarkableconference the code word “Cromwell” might not have been sent out inEngland on the evening of the next day, September 7, signifying “Invasionimminent and causing no end of confusion, the endless ringing of churchbells by the Home Guard, the blowing of several bridges by RoyalEngineers and the needless casualties suffered by those stumbling overhastily laid mines.*

But on the late afternoon of Saturday, September 7, the Germans hadbegun their first massive bombing of London, carried out by 625 bombersprotected by 648 fighters. It was the most devastating attack from the airever delivered up to that day on a city—the bombings of Warsaw andRotterdam 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 tothe south, so vital to the defense against invasion, was blocked. In thecircumstances, many in London believed that this murderous bombing wasthe prelude to immediate German landings, and it was because of thismore 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, markeda decisive turning point in the Battle of Britain, the first great decisivestruggle in the air the earth had ever experienced, which was now rapidlyapproaching its climax.

The time for Hitler to make his fatal decision to launch the invasion ornot to launch it was also drawing near. It was to be made, as the Septem-ber 3 directive stipulated, on September 11, giving the armed services tendays to carry out the preliminaries. But on the tenth Hitler decided topostpone his decision until the fourteenth. There seem to have been atleast two reasons for the delay. One was the belief at OKW that thebombing of London was causing so much destruction, both to propertyand to British morale, that an invasion might not be necessary, f

The other reason arose from the difficulties the German Navy was

* Churchill says that neither he nor the chiefs of staff were “aware” that the deci-sive code word Cromwell had been given. It was sent out by Headquarters of theHome 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 takeplace it could not “be long delayed. Therefore,” he said, “we must regard the nextweek or so as a very important period in our history. It ranks with the days whenthe Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel, and Drake was finishing hisgame of bowls; or when Nelson stood between us and Napoleon’s Grand Army atBoulogne.”

t The Germans were greatly impressed by reports from the embassy in Washington,which relayed information received there from London and embroidered mi it.The American General Staff was said to believe that Britain couldn’t hold out muchlonger. According to Lieutenant Colonel von Lossberg (Im Wehrmacht Fuehrungs-stab, p. 91) Hitler seriously expected a revolution to break out in Britain. Lossberswas an Army representative on OKW.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

beginning to experience in assembling its shipping. Besides the weather,which the naval authorities reported on September 10 as being “com-pletely abnormal and unstable,” the R.A.F., which Goering had promisedo destroy, and the British Navy were increasingly interfering with theconcentration of the invasion fleet. That same day the Naval War Staffwarned of the “danger” of British air and naval attacks on German trans-port movements, which it said had “undoubtedly been successful.” Twodays later, on September 12, H.Q. of Naval Group West sent an ominousmessage to Berlin:

Interruptions caused by the enemy’s air forces, long-range artillery and lightnaval forces have, for the first time, assumed major significance. The harborsat Ostend, Dunkirk, Calais and Boulogne cannot be used as night anchoragesfor shipping because of the danger of English bombings and shelling. Unitsof 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 theinvasion fleet.

The next day matters grew worse. British light naval forces bombardedthe chief Channel invasion ports, Ostend, Calais, Boulogne and Cher-bourg, while the R.A.F. sank eighty barges in Ostend Harbor. In Berlinthat day Hitler conferred with his service chiefs at lunch. He thought theair war was going very well and declared that he had no intention ofrunning the risk of invasion.24 In fact, Jodi got the impression from theFuehrer’s remarks that he had “apparently decided to abandon Sea Lioncompletely,” an impression which was accurate for that day, as Hitlerconfirmed the following day—when, however, he again changed his mind.

Both Raeder and Haider have left confidential notes of the meeting ofthe Fuehrer with his commanders in chief in Berlin on September 14.25The Admiral managed to slip Hitler a memorandum before the sessionopened, setting forth the Navy’s opinion that

the present air situation does not provide conditions for carrying out theoperation [Sea Lion], as the risk is still too great.

At the beginning of the conference, the Nazi warlord displayed a some-what negative mood and his thoughts were marred by contradictions. Hewould not give the order to launch the invasion, but neither would he callit off as, Raeder noted in the Naval War Diary, “he apparently had plannedto do on September 13.”

What were the reasons for his latest change of mind? Haider recordedthem in some detail.

A successful landing [the Fuehrer argued] followed by an occupation wouldend the war in a short time. England would starve. A landing need not neces-

Operation Sea Lion: The Thwarted Invasion of Britain 111

sarily be carried out within a specified time . . . But a long war is not desir-able. 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 wouldnot be fully effective until 1945. As for the moment, the “quickest solu-tion would be a landing in England. The Navy has achieved the necessaryconditions. The operations of the Luftwaffe are above all praise. Four orfive days of decent weather would bring the decisive results . . . We havea good chance of bringing England to her knees.”

What was wrong, then? Why hesitate any longer in launching the in-vasion?

The trouble was, Hitler conceded:

The enemy recovers again and again . . . Enemy fighters have not yet beencompletely eliminated. Our own reports of successes do not give a completelyreliable picture, although the enemy has been severely damaged.

On the whole, then, Hitler declared, “in spite of all of our successesthe prerequisite conditions for Operation Sea Lion have not yet beenrealized. ” (The emphasis is Haider’s.)

Hitler summed up his reflections.

1. Successful landing means victory, but for this we must obtain completeair 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 wayto soaring hopes that the Luftwaffe might still bring off the victory that sotantalizingly and so narrowly continued to evade him. “The air attacksup to now,” he said, “have had a tremendous effect, though perhapschiefly on the nerves. Even if victory in the air is only achieved in ten ortwelve days the English may yet be seized by mass hysteria.”

To help bring that about, Jeschonnek of the Air Force begged to beallowed to bomb London’s residential districts, since, he said, there wasno 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 impor-tant. “Bombing with the object of causing a mass panic,” he said, “mustbe left to the last.”

Admiral Raeder’s enthusiasm for terror bombing seems to have beendue mainly to his lack of enthusiasm for the landings. He now intervenedto stress again the “great risks” involved. The situation in the air, hepointed out, could hardly improve before the projected dates of Septem-

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

ber 24-27 for the landing; therefore they must be abandoned “until Octo-ber 8 or 24.”

But this was practically to call off the invasion altogether, as Hitlerrealized, and he ruled that he would hold up his decision on the landingsonly until September 17—three days hence—so that they still might takeplace on September 27. If not feasible then, he would have to think aboutthe 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 followsSeptember 17. All preparations are to be continued.

The air attacks against London are to be continued and the target areaexpanded against military and other vital installations (e.g., railway stations).

Terror attacks against purely residential areas are reserved for use as anultimate means of pressure.26

Thus though Hitler had put off for three days a decision on the invasionhe had by no means abandoned it. Give the Luftwaffe another few daysto finish off the R. A.F. and demoralize London, and the landing then couldtake place. It would bring final victory. So once again all depended onGoering’s vaunted Air Force. It would make, in fact, its supreme effortthe very next day.

The Navy’s opinion of the Luftwaffe, however, grew hourly worse. Onthe evening of the crucial conference in Berlin the German Naval WarStaff reported severe R.A.F. bombings of the invasion ports, from Ant-werp to Boulogne.

... In Antwerp . . . considerable casualties are inflicted on transports—-five transport steamers in port heavily damaged; one barge sunk, two cranesdestroyed, an ammunition train blown up, several sheds burning.

The next night was even worse, the Navy reporting “strong enemy airattacks on the entire coastal area between Le Havre and Antwerp.” AnS.O.S. was sent out by the sailors for more antiaircraft protection of theinvasion ports. On September 17 the Naval Staff reported:

The R.A.F. are still by no means defeated: on the contrary they are showingincreasing activity in their attacks on the Channel ports and in their mountinginterference with the assembly movements.*27

* On September 16, according to a German authority, R.A.F. bombers surprised alarge invasion training exercise and inflicted heavy losses in men and landing ves-sels. This gave rise to many reports in Germany and elsewhere on the Continent

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Operation Sea Lion: The Thwarted Invasion of Britain

That night there was a full moon and the British night bombersmade the most of it. The German Naval War Staff reported “very con-siderable losses” of the shipping which now jammed the invasion ports.At Dunkirk eighty-four barges were sunk or damaged, and from Cher-bourg to Den Helder the Navy reported, among other depressing items, a500-ton ammunition store blown up, a rations depot burned out, varioussteamers and torpedo boats sunk and many casualties to personnel suf-fered. This severe bombing plus bombardment from heavy guns across theChannel made it necessary, the Navy Staff reported, to disperse the navaland transport vessels already concentrated on the Channel and to stopfurther movement of shipping to the invasion ports.

Otherwise [it said] with energetic enemy action such casualties will occur inthe course of time that the execution of the operation on the scale previouslyenvisaged will in any case be problematic.28

It had already become so.

In the German Naval War Diary there is a laconic entry for September17.

The enemy Air Force is still by no means defeated. On the contrary, it showsincreasing activity. The weather situation as a whole does not permit us toexpect 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 metfailure. For nearly a month thereafter the pretense was kept up that theinvasion might still take place that autumn, but it was a case of whistlingin the dark. On September 19 the Fuehrer formally ordered the furtherassembling of the invasion fleet to be stopped and the shipping already inthe ports to be dispersed “so that the loss of shipping space caused byenemy air attacks may be reduced to a minimum.”

But it was impossible to maintain even a dispersed armada and all thetroops and guns and tanks and supplies that had been assembled to crossover the Channel for an invasion that had been postponed indefinitely.“This state of affairs,” Haider exclaimed in his diary September 28, “drag-

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” onthe night of September 16 in Geneva, Switzerland, where I was taking a few daysoff. On September 18 and again on the next day I saw two long ambulance trainsunloading wounded soldiers in the suburbs of Berlin. From the bandages, I con-cluded the wounds were mostly burns. There had been no fighting anywhere forthree months on land.

On September 21, confidential German Navy papers recorded that 21 transportsand 214 barges—some 12 per cent of the total assembled for the invasion—had beenlost or damaged. (Fuehrer Conferences on Naval Affairs, p. 102.)

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

ging out the continued existence of Sea Lion, is unbearable.” When Cianoand Mussolini met the Fuehrer on the Brenner on October 4, the ItalianForeign Minister observed in his diary that “there is no longer any talkabout 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 seenthe Duce in such good humor ... as at the Brenner Pass today,” Cianonoted.30

Already both the Navy and the Army were pressing the Fuehrer for adecision to call off Sea Lion altogether. The Army General Staff pointedout to him that the holding of the troops on the Channel “under constantBritish air attacks led to continual casualties.”

Finally on October 12, the Nazi warlord formally admitted failure andcalled off the invasion until spring, if then. A formal directive was issued.

Fuehrer’s HeadquartersOctober 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 politicaland 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 otherduties or for employment on other fronts.” The Navy was instructed to“take all measures to release personnel and shipping space.” But bothservices were to camouflage their moves. “The British,” Hitler laid itdown, “must continue to believe that we are preparing an attack on abroad 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 theturning of his thoughts once more eastward, to Russia.

THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN

Goering’s great air offensive against Britain, Operation Eagle (Adler-angriffe), had been launched on August 15 with the objective of drivingthe British Air Force from the skies and thus achieving the one conditionon 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 confi-dent that British fighter defenses in southern England could be smashedwithin four days by an all-out assault, thus opening the way for the inva-sion. To destroy the R.A.F. completely would take a little longer, Goeringtold the Army High Command: from two to four weeks.32 In fact, the

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Operation Sea Lion: The Thwarted Invasion of Britain

bemedaled German Air Force chief thought that the Luftwaffe alonecould bring Britain to her knees and that an invasion by land forces prob-ably would not be necessary.

To obtain this mighty objective he had three great air fleets (Luftflot-ten): Number 2 under Field Marshal Kesselring, operating from the LowCountries and northern France, Number 3 under Field Marshal Sperrle,based on northern France, and Number 5 under General Stumpff, sta-tioned in Norway and Denmark. The first two had a total of 929 fighters,875 bombers and 316 dive bombers; Number 5 was much smaller, with123 bombers and 34 twin-engined ME-110 fighters. Against this vastforce the R.A.F. had for the air defense of the realm at the beginning ofAugust between 700 and 800 fighters.

Throughout July the Luftwaffe gradually stepped up its attacks onBritish shipping in the Channel and on Britain’s southern ports. This wasa probing operation. Though it was necessary to clear the narrow watersof British ships before an invasion could begin, the main object of thesepreliminary air assaults was to lure the British fighters to battle. Thisfailed. The R.A.F. Command shrewdly declined to commit more than afraction of its fighters, and as a result considerable damage was done toshipping and to some of the ports. Four destroyers and eighteen merchantships were sunk, but this preliminary sparring cost the Luftwaffe 296 air-craft destroyed and 135 damaged. The R.A.F. lost 148 fighters.

On August 12, Goering gave orders to launch Eagle the next day. As acurtain raiser heavy attacks were made on the twelfth on enemy radar sta-tions, 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 de-fenses radar was and did not pursue the attack. On the thirteenth andfourteenth the Germans put in the air some 1,500 aircraft, mostly againstR.A.F. fighter fields, and though they claimed five of them had been “com-pletely destroyed” the damage was actually negligible and the Luftwaffelost forty-seven planes against thirteen for the R.A.F.*

August 15 brought the first great battle in the skies. The Germans threwin the bulk of their planes from all three air fleets, flying 801 bombing and1,149 fighter sorties. Luftflotten 5, operating from Scandinavia, met dis-aster. By sending some 800 planes in a massive attack on the south coastthe Germans had expected to find the northeast coast defenseless. But aforce of a hundred bombers, escorted by thirty-four twin-engined ME-110fighters, was surprised by seven squadrons of Hurricanes and Spitfires asit approached the Tyneside and severely mauled. Thirty German planes,mostly bombers, were shot down without loss to the defenders. That wasthe 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

* The Luftwaffe claimed 134 British craft against a loss of 34. From that date onboth sides grossly overestimated the damage they did the other.

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almost to London. Four aircraft factories at Croydon were hit and fiveR-A.F. fighter fields damaged. In all, the Germans lost seventy-fiveplanes, against thirty-four for the R.A.F.* At this rate, despite their nu-merical 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 ofBritish Fighter Command in committing its planes to battle against vastlysuperior attacking forces was based on its shrewd use of radar. From themoment they took off from their bases in Western Europe the Germanaircraft were spotted on British radar screens, and their course so ac-curately plotted that Fighter Command knew exactly where and whenthey could best be attacked. This was something new in warfare and itpuzzled the Germans, who were far behind the British in the developmentand 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 somenew procedure because we heard commands skillfully and accurately directingSpitfires and Hurricanes on to German formations . . . For us this radarand fighter control was a surprise and a very bitter one.33

Yet the attack on British radar stations which on August 12 had beenso damaging had not been continued and on August 15, the day of his firstmajor setback, Goering called them off entirely, declaring: “It is doubtfulwhether 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 Eng-land was the sector station. This was the underground nerve center fromwhich the Hurricanes and Spitfires were guided by radiotelephone intobattle on the basis of the latest intelligence from radar, from ground ob-servation posts and from pilots in the air. The Germans, as Galland noted,could hear the constant chatter over the air waves between the sector sta-tions and the pilots aloft and finally began to understand the importanceof these ground control centers. On August 24 they switched their tacticsto the destruction of the sector stations, seven of which on the airfieldsaround London were crucial to the protection of the south of England andof the capital itself. This was a blow against the very vitals of Britain’s airdefenses.

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 wayfor the Army’s victories in Poland and in the West, was proving to be a

* In London that evening an official communique reported 182 German planes shotdown and 43 more probably destroyed. This gave a great fillip to British morale ingeneral and to that of the hard-pressed fighter pilots in particular.

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Operation Sea Lion: The Thwarted Invasion of Britain

sitting duck for British fighters and on that day, August 17, was withdrawnby Goering from the battle, reducing the German bombing force by athird. Between August 19 and 23 there was a five-day lull in the air dueto bad weather. Goering, reviewing the situation at Karinhall, his countryshow place near Berlin, on the nineteenth, ordered that as soon as theweather improved, the Luftwaffe was to concentrate its attacks exclusivelyon 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 firstaim is to destroy the enemy’s fighters.”34

From August 24 to September 6 the Germans sent over an average ofa thousand planes a day to achieve this end. For once the Reich Marshalwas right. The Battle of Britain had entered its decisive stage. Thoughthe R.A.F. pilots, already strained from a month of flying several sortiesa day, put up a valiant fight, the German preponderance in sheer numbersbegan to tell. Five forward fighter fields in the south of England were ex-tensively damaged and, what was worse, six of the seven key sector sta-tions were so severely bombed that the whole communications systemseemed to be on the verge of being knocked out. This threatened dis-aster to Britain.

Worst of all, the pace was beginning to tell on the R.A.F. fighter de-fense. In the crucial fortnight between August 23 and September 6 theBritish lost 466 fighters destroyed or badly damaged, and though they didnot know it at the time the Luftwaffe losses were less: 385 aircraft, ofwhich 214 were fighters and 138 bombers. Moreover, the R.A.F. hadlost 103 pilots killed and 128 seriously wounded—a quarter of all thoseavailable.

“The scales,” as Churchill later wrote, “had tilted against Fighter Com-mand . . . There was much anxiety.” A few more weeks of this andBritain would have had no organized defense of its skies. The invasionwould almost certainly succeed.

And then suddenly Goering made his second tactical error, this onecomparable in its consequences to Hitler’s calling off the armored attackon Dunkirk on May 24. It saved the battered, reeling R.A.F. and markedone 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 theground which it could not for long sustain, the Luftwaffe switched its at-tack 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 tacticswhich was destined to prove so fatal to the ambitions of Hitler and Goe-ring? The answer is full of irony.

To begin with, there was a minor navigational error by the pilots of adozen German bombers on the night of August 23. Directed to drop theirloads on aircraft factories and oil tanks on the outskirts of London, theymissed their mark and dropped bombs on the center of the capital, blowing

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up some homes and killing some civilians. The British thought it wasdeliberate and as retaliation bombed Berlin the next evening.

It didn’t amount to much. There was a dense cloud cover over Berlinthat night and only about half of the eighty-one R.A.F. bombers dis-patched found the target. Material damage was negligible. But the effecton German morale was tremendous. For this was the first time that bombshad 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, Goeringassured them it couldn’t . . . They believed him. Their disillusionment todaytherefore 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 threehours while the visiting bombers droned above the clouds, which pre-vented the hundreds of searchlight batteries from picking them up, theflak fire was the most intense I had ever seen. But not a single plane wasbrought down. The British also dropped a few leaflets saying that “thewar 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 28-29and, as I noted in my diary, “for the first time killed Germans in the capi-tal of the Reich.” The official count was ten killed and twenty-ninewounded. The Nazi bigwigs were outraged. Goebbels, who had orderedthe press to publish only a few lines on the first attack, now gave instruc-tions to cry out at the “brutality” of the British flyers in attacking the de-fenseless women and children of Berlin. Most of the capital’s dailies car-ried 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 inmy diary on September 1] has been to spread great disillusionment among thepeople and sow doubt in their minds . . . Actually the bombings have notbeen very deadly.

September 1 was the first anniversary of the beginning of the war. Inoted the mood of the people, aside from their frayed nerves at havingbeen robbed of their sleep and frightened by the surprise bombings and theterrific din of the flak.

In this year German arms have achieved victories never equaled even inthe brilliant military history of this aggressive, militaristic nation. And yet thewar is not yet over or won. And it was on this aspect that people’s minds wereconcentrated today. They long for peace. And they want it before the wintercomes.

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Hitler deemed it necessary to address them on September 4 on the oc-casion of the opening of the Winterhilfe campaign at the Sportpalast. Hisappearance there was kept secret to the last moment, apparently out offear that enemy planes might take advantage of the cloud cover and breakup 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 givento what the German people regarded as humor, though Hitler was es-sentially a humorless man. He described Churchill as “that noted warcorrespondent.” For “a character like Duff Cooper,” he said, “there is noword in conventional German. Only the Bavarians have a word that ade-quately describes this type of man, and that is Krampfhenne,” which mightbe translated as “a nervous old hen.”

The babbling of Mr. Churchill or of Mr. Eden [he said]—reverence for oldage forbids the mention of Mr. Chamberlain—doesn’t mean a thing to theGerman people. At best, it makes them laugh.

And Hitler proceeded to make his audience, which consisted mostly ofwomen nurses and social workers, laugh—and then applaud hysterically.He was faced with the problem of answering two questions uppermost inthe minds of the German people: When would Britain be invaded, andwhat would be done about the night bombings of Berlin and other Germancities? As to the first:

In England they’re filled with curiosity and keep asking, “Why doesn’t hecome?” Be calm. Be calm. He’s coming! He’s coming!

His listeners found that crack very funny, but they also believed thatit was an unequivocal pledge. As to the bombings, he began by a typicalfalsification and ended with a dire threat:

Just now . . . Mr. Churchill is demonstrating his new brain child, the nightair raid. Mr. Churchill is carrying out these raids not because they promise tobe highly effective, but because his Air Force cannot fly over Germany indaylight . . . whereas German planes are over English soil every day . . .Whenever the Englishman sees a light, he drops a bomb ... on residentialdistricts, farms and villages.

And then came the threat.

For three months I did not answer because I believed that such madnesswould be stopped. Mr. Churchill took this for a sign of weakness. We arenow answering night for night.

When the British Air Force drops two or three or four thousand kilogramsof bombs, then we will in one night drop 150-, 230-, 300- or 400,000 kilograms.

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At this point, according to my diary, Hitler had to pause because of thehysterical applause of the German women listeners.

“When they declare,” Hitler continued, “that they will increase theirattacks on our cities, then we will raze their cities to the ground.” At this,I noted, the young ladies were quite beside themselves and applaudedphrenetically. When they had recovered, he added, “We will stop thehandiwork of these night air pirates, so help us God!”

On hearing this, I also noted, “the young German women hopped totheir 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 shoutsof joy with a chorus of ‘Never! Never!’ ”

Ciano in Rome, listening to the broadcast, which was made fromrecords some hours later, confessed to being perplexed. “Hitler must benervous,” he concluded.35

His nerves were a factor in the fatal decision to switch the Luftwaffe’swinning daylight attacks on the R.A.F. to massive night bombings ofLondon. This was a political as well as a military decision, made in partto revenge the bombings of Berlin and other German cities (which werebut pinpricks compared to what the Luftwaffe was doing to Britain’scities) 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 inva-sion might not be necessary.

And so on the late afternoon of September 7 the great air attack onLondon began. The Germans threw in, as we have seen,* 625 bombersand 648 fighters. At about 5 p.m. that Saturday the first wave of 320bombers, protected by every fighter the Germans had, flew up the Thamesand began to drop their bombs on Woolwich Arsenal, various gas works,power stations, depots and mile upon mile of docks. The whole vast areawas soon a mass of flames. At one locality, Silvertown, the population wassurrounded 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 Sundaymorning. The next evening at 7:30, the attack was renewed by two hun-dred bombers and continued throughout the night. Some 842 personswere killed and 2,347 wounded, according to the official British historian,during these first two nights, and vast damage was inflicted on the sprawl-ing city.36 The assault went on all the following week, night after night, f

And then, stimulated by its successes, or what it thought were such, theLuftwaffe decided to carry out a great daylight assault on the battered,burning capital. This led on Sunday, September 15, to one of the decisivebattles of the war.

* Above, p. 769.

t At this time night defenses had not yet been perfected and the German losses werenegligible.

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Some two hundred German bombers, escorted by three times as manyfighters, appeared over the Channel about midday, headed for London.Fighter Command had watched the assembling of the attackers on itsradar screens and was ready. The Germans were intercepted before theyapproached the capital, and though some planes got through, many weredispersed and others shot down before they could deliver their bomb load.Two hours later an even stronger German formation returned and wasrouted. Though the British claimed to have shot down 185 Luftwaffeplanes, the actual figure, as learned after the war from the Berlin archives,was much lower—fifty-six, but thirty-four of these were bombers. TheR.A.F. lost only twenty-six aircraft.

The day had shown that the Luftwaffe could not for the moment, any-way, now that it had given Fighter Command a week to recover, carry outa successful major daylight attack on Britain. That being so, the prospectof an effective landing was dim. September 15 therefore was a turningpoint, “the crux,” as Churchill later judged, of the Battle of Britain.Though Goering the next day, in ordering a change of tactics that pro-vided for the use of bombers in daylight no longer to bomb but merely toserve 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 Armyand Navy commanders knew better and two days after the decisive airbattle, on September 17, as has been noted, the Fuehrer called off SeaLion indefinitely.

Although London was to take a terrible pounding for fifty-seven con-secutive nights from September 7 to November 3 from a daily average oftwo hundred bombers, so that it seemed certain to Churchill, as he laterrevealed, that the city would soon be reduced to a rubble heap, and thoughmost of Britain’s other cities, Coventry above all, were to suffer greatdamage throughout that grim fall and winter, British morale did not col-lapse nor armament production fall off, as Hitler had so confidently ex-pected. Just the opposite. Aircraft factories in England, one of the primetargets of the Luftwaffe bombers, actually outproduced the Germans in1940 by 9,924 to 8,070 planes. Hitler’s bomber losses over England hadbeen so severe that they could never be made up, and in fact the Luftwaffe,as the German confidential records make clear, never fully recovered fromthe 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 foran invasion of Britain. Without this, and without air supremacy, the Ger-man Army was helpless to move across the narrow Channel waters. Forthe first time in the war Hitler had been stopped, his plans of further con-quest frustrated, and just at the moment, as we have seen, when he wascertain that final victory had been achieved.

He had never conceived—nor had anyone else up to that time—that adecisive battle could be decided in the air. Nor perhaps did he yet realizeas the dark winter settled over Europe that a handful of British fighter

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pilots, by thwarting his invasion, had preserved England as a great basefor 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 de-fended 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) inthe interwar years, had recognized that air power had become decisivein the mid-twentieth century and the little fighter plane and its pilot thechief shield for defense. As Churchill told the Commons in anothermemorable peroration on August 20, when the battle in the skies stillraged and its outcome was in doubt, “never in the field of human conflictwas 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 gentleaffair. The captured German papers leave no doubt of that. On Septem-ber 9 Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chief of the Army, signed a direc-tive providing that “the able-bodied male population between the ages ofseventeen and forty-five [in Britain] will, unless the local situation callsfor an exceptional ruling, be interned and dispatched to the Continent.”Orders to this effect were sent out a few days later by the QuartermasterGeneral, in OKH, to the Ninth and Sixteenth armies, which were as-sembled for the invasion. In no other conquered country, not even in Po-land, had the Germans begun with such a drastic step. Brauchitsch’sinstructions were headed “Orders Concerning the Organization and Func-tion of Military Government in England” and went into considerable de-tail. They seem designed to ensure the systematic plunder of the islandand the terrorization of its inhabitants. A special “Military EconomicStaff England” was set up on July 27 to achieve the first aim. Every-thing but normal household stocks was to be confiscated at once. Hostageswould be taken. Anybody posting a placard the Germans didn’t likewould be liable to immediate execution, and a similar penalty was pro-vided 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. Forthis the dreaded R.S.H.A.,* under Heydrich, was put in charge. The manwho was designated to direct its activities on the spot from London was acertain S.S. colonel, Professor Dr. Franz Six, another of the peculiar in-tellectual gangsters who in the Nazi time were somehow attracted to theservice of Himmler’s secret police. Professor Six had left his post as dean

* R.S.H.A., the initials of the Reich Central Security Office (Reichssicherheitshaup-tamt), which, as has been noted, took over control in 1939 of the Gestapo, theCriminal Police and the Security Service, or S.D.

of the economic faculty of Berlin University to join Heydrich’s S.D., wherehe specialized in “scientific matters,” the weirder side of which cast such aspell over the bespectacled Heinrich Himmler and his fellow thugs. Whatthe British people missed by not having Dr. Six in their presence may bejudged by his later career in Russia, where he was active in the S.S.Einsatzgruppen, which distinguished themselves in wholesale massacresthere, one of the professor’s specialties being to ferret out captured Sovietpolitical commissars for execution.*

On August 1, the R.S.H.A. captured archives reveal, Goering toldHeydrich to get busy. The S.S. Security Police and the S.D. (SecurityService) were to

commence their activities simultaneously with the military invasion in orderto seize and combat effectively the numerous important organizations andsocieties in England which are hostile to Germany.

On September 17, which, ironically, was the date on which Hitler post-poned the invasion indefinitely, Professor Six was formally appointed tohis new post in England by Heydrich and told:

Your task is to combat, with the requisite means, all anti-German organiza-tions, institutions, and opposition groups which can be seized in England, toprevent the removal of all available material and to centralize and safeguardit for future exploitation. I designate London as the location of your head-quarters . . . and I authorize you to set up small Einsatzgruppen in otherparts of Great Britain as the situation dictates and the necessity arises.

Actually, already in August Heydrich had organized six Einsatzkom-mando for Britain which were to operate from headquarters in London,Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Edinburgh—or in Glas-gow, if the Forth Bridge was found blown up. They were to carry out Naziterror; to begin with, they were to arrest all those on the “Special SearchList, G.B. [Great Britain],” which in May had been hurriedly and care-lessly compiled by Walter Schellenberg, another one of Himmler’s brightyoung university graduates, who was then chief of Amt (Bureau) IV E—Counterespionage—of R.S.H.A. Or so Schellenberg later claimed, thoughat this time he was mainly occupied in Lisbon, Portugal, on a bizarremission to kidnap the Duke of Windsor.

The Special Search List, G.B. (die Sonderfahndungsliste, G.B.) isamong the more amusing “invasion” documents found in the Himmlerpapers, though of course it was not meant to be. It contains the names ofsome 2,300 prominent persons in Great Britain, not all of them English,

* Dr. Six was sentenced in 1948 at Nuremberg as a war criminal to twenty years inprison, but was released in 1952.

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whom the Gestapo thought it important to incarcerate at once. Churchillis 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 Ebbuttand Douglas Reed, whose dispatches had displeased the Nazis, are on thelist. British authors claim special attention. Shaw’s name is conspicuouslyabsent, 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 Angell.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 Englandto round up both foreign and German emigres. Paderewski, Freud* andChaim Weizmann were on its list, as well as Benes, the President, and JanMasaryk, the Foreign Minister, of the Czechoslovak government in exile.Of the German refugees there were, among many others, two former per-sonal friends of Hitler who had turned on him: Hermann Rauschning andPutzi Hanfstaengl. Many English names were so badly misspelled as tomake them almost unrecognizable and sometimes bizarre identificationswere 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 markedthe bureau of R.S.H.A. which was to handle that person. Churchill wasto be placed in the hands of Amt VI—Foreign Intelligence—but mostwere to be handed over to Amt IV—the Gestapo, f

This Nazi Black Book actually formed a supplement to a supposedlyhighly secret handbook called Informationsheft, which Schellenberg alsoclaims to have written, and whose purpose seems to have been to aid theconquerors in looting Britain and stamping out anti-German institutionsthere. It is even more amusing than the Search List. Among the danger-ous 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 de-scribed as “a powerful tool of British imperial politics,” and the BoyScouts, which was put down as “an excellent source of information for theBritish 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 re-ceived gently by the British. Churchill later confessed that he had oftenwondered what would have happened. Of this much he was certain:

* The famous psychoanalyst had died in London in 1939.

t A number of Americans are on the arrest list, including Bernard Baruch, JohnGunther, 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.

The massacre would have been on both sides grim and great. There wouldhave been neither mercy nor quarter. They would have used terror, and wewere prepared to go all lengths.38

He does not say specifically to what lengths, but Peter Fleming in hisbook 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, toattack the German beachheads with mustard gas, sprayed from low-flyingairplanes. It was a painful decision, taken not without much soul searchingat the highest level; and as Fleming comments, the decision was “sur-rounded by secrecy at the time and ever since.”39

This particular massacre on which Churchill speculates, the unleashingof this kind of terror which the Gestapo planned, did not take place at thistime 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 tounleash horrors on a scale never before experienced.

Already, even before the invasion of Britain was abandoned, AdolfHitler had come to a decision. He would turn on Russia in the followingspring.

POSTSCRIPT: THE NAZI PLOT TO KIDNAP THEDUKE AND DUCHESS OF WINDSOR

More amusing than important, but not without its insight into theludicrous side of the rulers of the Third Reich that summer of their greatconquests, is the story of the Nazi plot to kidnap the Duke and Duchess ofWindsor and induce the former King of England to work with Hitler fora peace settlement with Great Britain. The evolution of the fantastic planis told at length in the captured German Foreign Office documents40 andtouched on by Walter Schellenberg, the youthful S.S.-S.D. chief who wasdesignated to carry it out, in his memoirs.41

The idea, Schellenberg was told by Ribbentrop, was Hitler’s. TheNazi Foreign Minister embraced it with all the enthusiasm to which hisabysmal ignorance often drove him, and the German Foreign Office andits diplomatic representatives in Spain and Portugal were forced to wastea 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 amember of the British military mission with the French Army HighCommand, made his way with the Duchess to Spain to escape capture bythe Germans. On June 23 the German ambassador in Madrid, Eberhardvon Stohrer, a career diplomat, telegraphed Berlin:

The Spanish Foreign Minister requests advice with regard to the treatmentof 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

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assumes that we might perhaps be interested in detaining the Duke here andpossibly establishing contact with him. Please telegraph instructions.

Ribbentrop shot back instructions by wire the next day. He suggestedthat the Windsors be “detained for a couple of weeks in Spain” butwarned that it must not appear “that the suggestion came from Germany.”On the following day, June 25, Stohrer replied: “The [Spanish] ForeignMinister promised me to do everything possible to detain Windsor here fora time. The Foreign Minister, Colonel Juan Beigbeder y Atienza, saw theDuke and reported on his talk to the German ambassador, who informedBerlin by “top secret” telegram of July 2 that Windsor would not returnto England unless his wife were recognized as a member of the royalfamily and he himself given a position of importance. Otherwise hewould settle in Spain in a castle promised him by the Franco government.

Windsor has expressed himself to the Foreign Minister and other acquaint-ances [the ambassador added] against Churchill and against this war.

The Windsors proceeded to Lisbon early in July and on July 11 theGerman minister there informed Ribbentrop that the Duke had beennamed Governor of the Bahamas but “intends to postpone his departurethere as long as possible ... in hope of a turn of events favorable tohim.”

He is convinced [the minister added] that if he had remained on the thronewar would have been avoided, and he characterized himself as a firm supporterof a peaceful arrangement with Germany. The Duke definitely believes thatcontinued severe bombing would make England ready for peace.

This intelligence spurred the arrogant German Foreign Minister to getoff from his special train at Fuschl a telegram marked “Very Urgent, TopSecret to the German Embassy in Madrid late on the evening of the sameday, July 11. He wanted the Duke to be prevented from going to theBahamas by being brought back to Spain, preferably by his Spanishfriends. “After their return to Spain,” Ribbentrop advised, “the Duke andhis 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 in-formed that Germany wants peace with the English people, that the Churchillclique stands in the way of it, and that it would be a good thing if the Dukewould hold himself in readiness for further developments. Germany is deter-mined to force England to peace by every means of power and upon this hap-pening 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

Operation Sea Lion: The Thwarted Invasion of Britain 787

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 subsistencewhich would permit him ... to lead a life suitable for a king.*

The fatuous Nazi Minister, whose experience as German ambassadorin London had taught him little about the English, added that he hadinformation 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 RamonSerrano Sutler, Spanish Minister of the Interior and brother-in-law ofFranco, who promised to get the Generalissimo in on the plot and carryout the following plan. The Spanish government would send to Lisbonan old friend of the Duke, Miguel Primo de Rivera, Madrid leader of theFalange and son of a former Spanish dictator. Rivera would invite theDuke to Spain for some hunting and also to confer with the governmentabout Anglo-Spanish relations. Suner would inform the Duke about theBritish secret-service plot to bump him off.

The Minister [the German ambassador informed Berlin] will then add aninvitation to the Duke and Duchess to accept Spanish hospitality, and possiblyfinancial assistance as well. Possibly also the departure of the Duke could beprevented in some other way. In this whole plan we remain completely in thebackground.

Rivera, according to the German papers, returned from Lisbon toMadrid after his first visit with the Windsors on July 16 and brought amessage to the Spanish Foreign Minister, who passed it along to theGerman ambassador, who, in turn, flashed it to Berlin. Churchill, themessage said, had designated the Duke as Governor of the Bahamas “ina very cool and categorical letter” and ordered him to proceed to his postat once. Should he fail to do so, “Churchill has threatened Windsor witha 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 nextday 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 onethe Duchess was present also. The Duke expressed himself very freely . . .Politically he was more and more distant from the King and the presentBritish Government. The Duke and Duchess have less fear of the King, whowas quite foolish, than of the shrewd Queen, who was intriguing skillfullyagainst the Duke and particularly against the Duchess.

* Fifty million Swiss francs, deposited in Switzerland, Ribbentrop told Schellen-berg, adding that “the Fuehrer is quite ready to go to a higher figure.”

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The Duke was considering making a public statement . . . disavowingpresent English policy and breaking with his brother . . . The Duke andDuchess said they very much desired to return to Spain.

To facilitate this, the ambassador had arranged with Suner, the telegramadded, to send another Spanish emissary to Portugal “to persuade theDuke to leave Lisbon, as if for a long excursion in an automobile, and thento cross the border at a place which has been arranged, where the Spanishsecret police will see that there is a safe crossing of the frontier.”

Two days later the ambassador added further information from Riverain an “urgent and strictly confidential” telegram to Ribbentrop.

When he gave the Duke the advice not to go to the Bahamas, but to returnto Spain, since the Duke was likely to be called upon to play an important rolein English policy and possibly to ascend the English throne, both the Duke andDuchess gave evidence of astonishment. Both . . . replied that accordingto the English constitution this would not* be possible after the abdication.When the confidential emissary then expressed his expectation that the courseof the war might bring about changes even in the English constitution, theDuchess especially became very pensive.

In this dispatch the German ambassador reminded Ribbentrop thatRivera did not know of “any German interest in the matter.” The youngSpaniard apparently believed he was acting for his own government.

By the last week in July, the Nazi plan to kidnap the Windsors had beendrawn up. Walter Schellenberg was assigned personally by Hitler tocarry it out. He had flown from Berlin to Madrid, conferred with theGerman ambassador there, and gone on to Portugal to begin work. OnJuly 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 beassumed. To strengthen this intention the second confidential emissary wassent off today with a letter to the Duke very skillfully composed; as an enclosureto it was attached the very precisely prepared plan for carrying out thecrossing of the frontier.

According to this plan the Duke and his wife should set out officially for asummer vacation in the mountains at a place near the Spanish frontier, in orderto cross over at a precisely designated place at a particular time in the courseof a hunting trip. Since the Duke is without passports, the Portuguese frontierofficial in charge there will be won over.

At the time set according to plan, the first confidential emissary [Primo deRivera] is to be staying at the frontier with Spanish forces suitably placed inorder to guarantee safety.

Schellenberg, with his group, is operating out of Lisbon in closest relationto the same purpose.

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For this purpose, the journey to the place of the summer vacation, as wellas the vacation itself, will be shadowed with the help of a trustworthy Portu-guese police chief . . .

At the exact moment of the crossing of the frontier as scheduled the Schel-lenberg group is to take over the security arrangements on the Portuguese sideof the frontier and continue thus into Spain as a direct escort which is to beunobtrusively changed from time to time.

For the security of the entire plan, the [Spanish] Minister has selected anotherconfidential agent, a woman, who can make contact if necessary with thesecond confidential agent and can also, if necessary, get information to theSchellenberg group.

In case there should be an emergency as a result of action by the BritishIntelligence Service preparations are being made whereby the Duke andDuchess can reach Spain by plane. In this case, as in the execution of the firstplan, the chief requisite is to obtain willingness to leave by psychologicallyadroit influence upon the pronounced English mentality of the Duke, withoutgiving the impression of flight, through exploiting anxiety about the BritishIntelligence Service and the prospect of free political activity from Spanish soil.

In addition to the protection in Lisbon, it is being considered in case ofnecessity to induce willingness to leave by a suitable scare maneuver to becharged to the British Intelligence Service.

Such was the Nazi plan to kidnap the Windsors. It had a typicalGerman clumsiness, and it was handicapped by the customary German in-ability to understand “the English mentality of the Duke.”

The “scare maneuvers” were duly carried out by Schellenberg. Onenigh he arranged for some stone-throwing against the windows of theWindsors’ villa and then circulated rumors among the servants that it hadbeen done by the “British Secret Service.” He had a bouquet deliveredto the Duchess with a card: “Beware of the machinations of the BritishSecret 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 (harm-less breaking of the bedroom window) scheduled for the night of July 30was omitted, since the psychological effect on the Duchess would onlyhave been to increase her desire to depart.”

Time was getting short. On July 30 Schellenberg reported the arrivalin Lisbon of Sir Walter Monckton, an old friend of the Duke and animportant official in the British government. His mission was obviouslyto get the Windsors speeding toward the Bahamas as soon as possible. Onthe same day the German ambassador in Madrid was telegraphing Ribben-trop “most urgent, top secret” that a German agent in Lisbon had just in-formed him that the Duke and Duchess were planning to depart on August1—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 Dukehad expressed to his host, the Portuguese banker Ricardo do Espirito

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Santo Silva, “a desire to come in contact with the Fuehrer.” Why notarrange 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 Spanishemissary, who had just returned from seeing the Windsors in Lisbon, theDuke and Duchess, while “strongly impressed by reports of English in-trigues against them and the danger of their personal safety,” apparentlywere planning to sail on August 1, though Windsor was trying “to concealthe true date.” The Spanish Minister of the Interior, the ambassadoradded, was going to make “a last effort to prevent the Duke and Duchessfrom leaving.”

The news that the Windsors might be leaving so soon alarmed Ribben-trop and from his special train at Fuschl he got off a “most urgent, topsecret” telegram to the German minister in Lisbon late on the afternoonof the same day, July 31. He asked that the Duke be informed throughhis Portuguese banker host of the following:

Basically Germany wants peace with the English people. The Churchillclique stands in the way of this peace. Following the rejection of the Fuehrer’slast appeal to reason, Germany is now determined to force England to makepeace by every means in her power. It would be a good thing if the Duke wereto keep himself prepared for further developments. In such case Germanywould be willing to co-operate most closely with the Duke and to clear the wayfor any desire expressed by the Duke and Duchess . . . Should the Duke andDuchess have other intentions, but be ready to collaborate in the establishmentof a good relationship between Germany and England, Germany is likewiseprepared to co-operate with the Duke and to arrange the future of the Ducalcouple in accordance with their wishes. The Portuguese confidant, with whomthe Duke is living, should make the most earnest effort to prevent his departuretomorrow, since reliable reports are in our possession to the effect that Church-ill intends to get the Duke into his power in the Bahamas in order to keep himthere permanently, and also because the establishment of contact at an appro-priate moment with the Duke on the Bahama Islands would present the greatestdifficulty for us . . .

The German Foreign Minister’s urgent message reached the legationin Lisbon shortly before midnight. The German minister saw SenhorEspirito Santo Silva during the course of the night and urged him to passthe word on to his distinguished guest. This the banker did on the morn-ing of August 1 and according to a dispatch of the legation the Duke wasdeeply impressed.

The Duke paid tribute to the Fuehrer’s desire for peace, which was incomplete agreement with his own point of view. He was firmly convinced thatif he had been King it would never have come to war. To the appeal made tohim to co-operate at a suitable time in the establishment of peace he agreedgladly. However, at the present time he must follow the official orders of his

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Government. Disobedience would disclose his intentions prematurely, bringabout a scandal, and deprive him of his prestige in England. He was also con-vinced that the present moment was too early for him to come forward, sincethere was as yet no inclination in England for an approach to Germany. How-ever, as soon as this frame of mind changed he would be ready to returnimmediately . . . Either England would yet call upon him, which he con-sidered to be entirely possible, or Germany would express the desire tonegotiate with him. In both cases he was prepared for any personal sacrificeand would make himself available without the slightest personal ambition.

He would remain in continuing communication with his previous host andhad agreed with him upon a code word, upon receiving which he wouldimmediately come back over.

To the consternation of the Germans, the Duke and Duchess sailed onthe evening of August 1 on the American liner Excalibur. In a final reporton the failure of his mission made in a long telegram “to the ForeignMinister [Ribbentrop] personally” on the following day, Schellenbergdeclared that he had done everything possible right up to the last momentto prevent the departure. A brother of Franco, who was the Spanishambassador in Lisbon, was prevailed upon to make a last-minute appealto the Windsors not to go. The automobile carrying the ducal baggagewas “sabotaged,” Schellenberg claimed, so that the luggage arrived at theship late. The Germans spread rumors that a time bomb had been plantedaboard the ship. Portuguese officials delayed the sailing time until theyhad searched the liner from top to bottom.

Nevertheless, the Windsors departed that evening. The Nazi plot hadfailed. Schellenberg, in his final report to Ribbentrop, blamed it on theinfluence of Monckton, on the collapse of “the Spanish plan” and on “theDuke’s mentality.”

There is one last paper on the plot in the captured files of the GermanForeign Minister. On August 15 the German minister in Lisbon wiredBerlin: “The confidant has just received a telegram from the Duke fromBermuda, asking him to send a communication as soon as action wasadvisable. Should any answer be made?”

No answer has been found in the Wilhelmstrasse papers. By the middleof 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 theother conquered territory, would be ruled from Berlin. Or so Hitlerthought.

So much for this curious tale, as told by the secret German documentsand added to by Schellenberg, who was the least reliable of men—thoughit is difficult to believe that he invented his own role, which he admits wasa 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 Dukebranded the communications between Ribbentrop and the German ambas-

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sadors in Spain and Portugal as “complete fabrications and, in part, grossdistortions of the truth.” Windsor explained that while in Lisbon in 1940,waiting to sail for the Bahamas, “certain people,” whom he discovered tobe pro-Nazi sympathizers, made definite efforts to persuade him to returnto Spain and not assume his post as governor.

“It was even suggested to me that there would be a personal risk to theDuchess and myself if we were to proceed to the Bahamas,” he said. “Atno time did I ever entertain any thought of complying with such a sugges-tion, which I treated with the contempt it deserved.”

The British Foreign Office issued a formal statement declaring that theDuke never wavered in his loyalty to Great Britain during the war.42

23

BARBAROSSA: THE TURN OF RUSSIA

While hitler was busy that summer of 1940 directing the conquestof the West, Stalin was taking advantage of the Fuehrer’s preoccupa-tions 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 theGermans on every occasion of a new act of aggression or a fresh conquest.When Germany invaded Norway and Denmark on April 9, 1940, theSoviet Foreign Commissar hastened to tell Ambassador von der Schulen-burg in Moscow that very morning that “the Soviet Government under-stood the measures which were forced on Germany.” “We wish Ger-many,” said Molotov, “complete success in her defensive measures.”1

A month later, when the German ambassador called on Molotov toinform him officially of the Wehrmach.’s attack in the West, which Rib-bentrop had instructed his envoy to explain “was forced upon Germanyby the impending Anglo-French push on the Ruhr by way of Belgiumand Holland,” the Soviet statesman again expressed his pleasure. “Molotovreceived the communication in an understanding spirit,” Schulenburgwired Berlin, “and added that he realized that Germany must protectherself against Anglo-French attack. He had no doubt of our success.”2

On June 17, the day France asked for an armistice, Molotov summonedSchulenburg to his office “and expressed the warmest congratulations ofthe Soviet Government on the splendid success of the German Wehr-macht.”

The Foreign Commissar had something else to say, and this did notsound quite so pleasant in German ears. He informed the German envoy,as the latter wired Berlin “most urgent,” of “the Soviet action against theBaltic States,” adding—and one can almost see the gleam in Molotov’seyes—“that it had become necessary to put an end to all the intrigues bywhich England and France had tried to sow discord and mistrust betweenGermany and the Soviet Union in the Baltic States.”3 To put an end tosuch “discord” the Soviet government, Molotov added, had dispatched

793

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“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 onewould expect from this trio, especially the latter two individuals. Alreadyon June 14, the day German troops entered Paris, the Soviet governmenthad sent a nine-hour ultimatum to Lithuania demanding the resignation ofits government, the arrest of some of its key officials and the right to sendin as many Red Army troops as it pleased. Though the Lithuaniangovernment accepted the ultimatum, Moscow deemed its acceptance

unsatisfactory, and the next day, June 15, Soviet troops occupied thecountry, the only one of the Baltic States to border on Germany. Duringthe next couple of days similar Soviet ultimatums were dispatched toLatvia and Estonia, after which they were similarly overrun by the RedArmy.

Stalin could be as crude and as ruthless in these matters as Hitler and

even more cynical. The press having been suppressed, the political leadersarrested and all parties but the Communist declared illegal, “elections”were staged by the Russians in all three countries on July 14, and afterthe respective parliaments thus “elected” had voted for the incorporationof their lands into the Soviet Union, the Supreme Soviet (Parliament) ofRussia “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 theinvasion of Britain, could do nothing about it. The letters from the envoysof the three Baltic States in Berlin protesting Russian aggression werereturned to them by order of Ribbentrop. To further humble the GermansMolotov brusquely told them on August 11 to “liquidate” their legationsin Kaunas, Riga and Tallinn within a fortnight and close down their"Balticconsulates by September 1.

The seizure of the Baltic States did not satisfy Stalin’s appetite. Thesurprisingly quick collapse of the Anglo-French armies spurred him onto get as much as he could while the getting was good. He obviouslythought there was little time to lose. On June 23, the day after the Frenchformally capitulated and signed the armistice at Compiegne, Molotovagain called in the Nazi ambassador in Moscow and told him that “thesolution of the Bessarabian question brooked no further delay. The Sovietgovernment was determined to use force, should the Rumanian govern-ment decline a peaceful agreement.” It expected Germany, Molotovadded, “not to hinder but to support the Soviets in their action.” More-over, “the Soviet claim likewise extended to Bucovina.”4 Bessarabia hadbeen taken by Rumania from Russia at the end of the First World War, butBucovina had never belonged to it, having been under Austria until Ru-mania grabbed it in 1919. At the negotiations in Moscow for the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Ribbentrop, as he now reminded Hitler, who had questionedhim about it, had been forced to give Bessarabia to the Russian sphere ofinterest. But he had never given away Bucovina.

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There was some alarm in Berlin, which spread to OKW headquartersin the West. The Wehrmacht was desperately dependent on Rumanianoil and Germany needed the foodstuffs and fodder it also got from thisBalkan 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, theRumanian General Staff had sent an S.O.S. to OKW informing it thatSoviet troops were concentrating on the border. Jodi summed up thereaction at Hitler’s headquarters in his diary the next day: “Situation inEast becomes threatening because of Russian concentration of forceagainst Bessarabia.”

On the night of June 26 Russia delivered an ultimatum to Rumaniademanding the ceding to it of Bessarabia and northern Bucovina and in-sisting on a reply the next day. Ribbentrop, in panic, dashed off instruc-tions from his special train to his minister in Bucharest telling him toadvise the Rumanian government to yield, which it did on June 27. Soviettroops marched into the newly acquired territories the next day and Berlinbreathed a sigh of relief that at least the rich sources of oil and food hadnot been cut off by Russia’s grabbing the whole of Rumania.

It is clear from his acts and from the secret German papers that thoughStalin was out to get all he could in Eastern Europe while the Germanswere tied down in the West, he did not wish or contemplate a break withHitler.

Toward the end of June Churchill had tried to warn Stalin in a personalletter of the danger of the German conquests to Russia as well as toBritain.5 The Soviet dictator did not bother to answer; probably, likealmost everyone else, he thought Britain was finished. So he tattled to theGermans what the British government was up to. Sir Stafford Cripps, aleft-wing Labor Party leader, whom the Prime Minister had rushed toMoscow as the new British ambassador in the hope of striking a moreresponsive chord among the Bolsheviks—-a forlorn hope, as he later rue-fully admitted—was received by Stalin early in July in an interview thatChurchill described as “formal and frigid.” On July 13 Molotov, onStalin’s instructions, handed the German ambassador a written memo-randum of this confidential conversation.

It is an interesting document. It reveals, as no other source does, thesevere limitations of the Soviet dictator in his cold calculations of foreignaffairs. Schulenburg sped it to Berlin “most urgent” and, of course,“secret,” and Ribbentrop was so grateful for its contents that he told theSoviet government he “greatly appreciated this information.” Cripps hadpressed Stalin, the memorandum said, for his attitude on this principalquestion, among others:

The British Government was convinced that Germany was striving forhegemony in Europe . . . This was dangerous to the Soviet Union as well asEngland. Therefore both countries ought to agree on a common policy of

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self-protection against Germany and on the re-establishment of the Europeanbalance of power . . .

Stalin’s answers are given as follows:

He did not see any danger of the hegemony of any one country in Europeand still less any danger that Europe might be engulfed by Germany. Stalinobserved the policy of Germany, and knew several leading German statesmenwell. He had not discovered any desire on their part to engulf Europeancountries. Stalin was not of the opinion that German military successesmenaced the Soviet Union and her friendly relations with Germany . . ,8

Such staggering smugness, such abysmal ignorance leave one breath-less. The Russian tyrant did not know, of course, the secrets of Hitler’sturgid mind, but the Fuehrer’s past behavior, his known ambitions andthe unexpectedly rapid Nazi conquests ought to have been enough towarn him of the dire danger the Soviet Union was now in. But, incom-prehensibly, they were not enough.

From the captured Nazi documents and from the testimony of manyleading German figures in the great drama that was being played over thevast expanse of Western Europe that year, it is plain that at the verymoment of Stalin’s monumental complacency Hitler had in fact beenmulling over in his mind the idea of turning on the Soviet Union anddestroying her.

The basic idea went back much further, at least fifteen years—toMein Kampf.

And so we National Socialists [Hitler wrote] take up where we broke off sixhundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement toward the southand west of Europe and turn our gaze toward the lands of the East . . . Whenwe speak of new territory in Europe today we must think principally of Russiaand her border vassal states. Destiny itself seems to wish to point out the wayto us here . . . This colossal empire in the East is ripe for dissolution, and theend 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 hadnot 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 beenutilized to destroy Poland the Fuehrer instructed the Army that the con-quered Polish territory was to be regarded “as an assembly area for futureGerman operations.” The date was October 18, 1939, and Haiderrecorded it that day in his diary.

Five weeks later, on November 23, when he harangued his reluctantgenerals about attacking in the West, Russia was by no means out of hismind. “We can oppose Russia,” he declared, “only when we are jree inthe West.” At that time the two-front war, the nightmare of German

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generals for a century, was very much on Hitler’s mind, and he spoke ofit at length on this occasion. He would not repeat the mistake of formerGerman rulers; he would continue to see to it that the Army had one frontat a time.

It was only natural, then, that with the fall of France, the chasing of theBritish Army across the Channel and the prospects of Britain’s imminentcollapse, Hitler’s thoughts should turn once again to Russia. For he nowsupposed himself to be free in the West and thereby to have achieved theone condition he had laid down in order to be in a position to “opposeRussia.” The rapidity with which Stalin seized the Baltic States and thetwo Rumanian provinces in June spurred Hitler to a decision.

The moment of its making can now be traced. Jodi says that the“fundamental decision” was taken “as far back as during the WesternCampaign.”8 Colonel Walter Warlimont, Jodi’s deputy at OKW, remem-bers that on July 29 Jodi announced at a meeting of Operations Staffofficers that “Hitler intended to attack the U.S.S.R. in the spring of 1941.”Sometime previous to this meeting, Jodi related, Hitler had told Kei’el“that he intended to launch the attack against the U.S.S.R. during the fallof 1940.” But this was too much even for Keitel and he had argued Hitlerout of it by contending that not only the bad weather in the autumn butthe difficulties of transferring the bulk of the Army from the West to theEast made it impossible. By the time of this conference on July 29,Warlimont relates, “the date for the intended attack [against Russia] hadbeen moved back to the spring of 1941 .”9

Only a week before, we know from Haider’s diary,10 the Fuehrer hadstill held to a possible campaign in Russia for the autumn if Britain werenot invaded. At a military conference in Berlin on July 21 he toldBrauchitsch to get busy on the preparations for it. That the Army Com-mander in Chief and his General Staff already had given the problem somethought—but not enough thought—is evident from his response to Hitler.Brauchitsch told the Leader that the campaign “would last four to sixweeks” and that the aim would be “to defeat the Russian Army or at leastto occupy enough Russian territory so that Soviet bombers could notreach Berlin or the Silesian industrial area while, on the other hand, theLuftwaffe bombers could reach all important objectives in the SovietUnion.” Brauchitsch thought that from eighty to a hundred Germandivisions could do the job; he assessed Russian strength as “fifty toseventy-five good divisions.” Haider’s notes on what Brauchitsch told himof the meeting show that Hitler had been stung by Stalin’s grabs in theEast, that he thought the Soviet dictator was “coquetting with England” inorder to encourage her to hold out, but that he had seen no signs thatRussia was preparing to enter the war against Germany.

At a further conference at the Berghof on the last day of July 1940, thereceding prospects of an invasion of Britain prompted Hitler to announcefor the first time to his Army chiefs his decision on Russia. Haider waspersonally present this time and jotted down his shorthand notes of

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exactly what the warlord said.11 They reveal not only that Hitler hadmade a definite decision to attack Russia in the following spring but thathe had already worked out in his mind the major strategic aims.

Britain’s hope [Hitler said] lies in Russia and America. If that hope inRussia is destroyed then it will be destroyed for America too because elimina-tion 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, thatBritain’s stubborn determination to continue the war was due to its count-ing on the Soviet Union.

Something strange [he explained] has happened in Britain! The British werealready completely down.* Now they are back on their feet. Intercepted con-versations. Russia unpleasantly disturbed by the swift developments in WesternEurope.

Russia needs only to hint to England that she does not wish to see Germanytoo strong and the English, like a drowning man, will regain hope that thesituation in six to eight months will have completely changed.

But if Russia is smashed, Britain’s last hope will be shattered. Then Germanywill 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, f

The Nazi warlord then elaborated on his strategic plans which, it wasobvious to the generals, had been ripening in his mind for some timedespite 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 theSoviet nation in one great blow. Conquering a lot of Russian territorywould 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 upthrough the Baltic States and then toward Moscow. There the two armieswould make a junction. After that a special operation, if necessary, tosecure the Baku oil fields. The very thought of such new conquests excitedHitler; he already had in mind what he would do with them. He wouldannex outright, he said, the Ukraine, White Russia and the Baltic Statesand extend Finland’s territory to the White Sea. For the whole operationhe would allot 120 divisions, keeping sixty divisions for the defense of theWest and Scandinavia. The attack, he laid it down, would begin in May1941 and would take five months to carry through. It would be finishedby winter. He would have preferred, he said, to do it this year but thishad not proved possible.

* Haider uses the English word “down” here in the German text,t The emphasis in the report is Haider’s.

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The next day, August 1, Haider went to work on the plans with hisGeneral Staff. Though he would later claim to have opposed the wholeidea of an attack on Russia as insane, his diary entry for this day discloseshim full of enthusiasm as he applied himself to the challenging new task.

Planning now went ahead with typical German thoroughness on threelevels: that of the Army General Staff, of Warlimont’s Operations Staff atOKW, of General Thomas’ Economic and Armaments Branch of OKW.Thomas was instructed on August 14 by Goering that Hitler desireddeliveries 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 anaid for administering Russia.

A few days before, on August 9, Warlimont had got out his first direc-tive for preparing the deployment areas in the East for the jump-offagainst the Russians. The code name for this was Aufbau Ost—“Build-upEast.” On August 26, Hitler ordered ten infantry and two armoreddivisions to be sent from the West to Poland. The panzer units, hestipulated, were to be concentrated in southeastern Poland so that theycould intervene to protect the Rumanian oil fields.13 The transfer of largebodies of troops to the Eastf could not be done without exciting Stalin’seasily aroused suspicions if he learned of it, and the Germans went to greatlengths to see that he didn’t. Since some movements were bound to bedetected, General Ernst Koestring, the German military attache in Mos-cow, was instructed to inform the Soviet General Staff that it was merelya question of replacing older men, who were being released to industry, byyounger men. On September 6, Jodi got out a directive outlining in con-siderable detail the means of camouflage and deception. “These re-groupings,” he laid it down, “must not create the impression in Russiathat we are preparing an offensive in the East.”14

So that the armed services should not rest on their laurels after the greatvictories of the summer, Hitler issued on November 12, 1940, a compre-hensive top-secret directive outlining new military tasks all over Europeand beyond. We shall come back to some of them. What concerns ushere is that portion dealing with the Soviet Union.

Political discussions have been initiated with the aim of clarifying Russia’sattitude for the time being. Irrespective of the results of these discussions, all

* In his report on this Thomas stresses how punctual Soviet deliveries of goods toGermany were at this time. In fact, he says, they continued to be “right up to thestart of the attack,” and observes, not without amusement, that “even during thelast few days, shipments of India rubber from the Far East were completed [by theRussians] over express transit trains”—presumably over the Trans-Siberian Rail-way.12

t The Germans had kept only seven divisions in Poland, two of which were trans-ferred to the West during the spring campaign. The troops there, Haider cracked,were scarcely enough to maintain the customs service. If Stalin had attacked Ger-many in June 1940, the Red Army probably could have got to Berlin before anyserious resistance was organized.

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preparations for the East which have already been verbally ordered will becontinued. Instructions on this will follow, as soon as the general outline ofthe 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 arrivedin Berlin to continue with Hitler himself those political discussions.

MOLOTOV IN BERLIN

Relations between Berlin and Moscow had for some months been sour-ing. It was one thing for Stalin and Hitler to double-cross third parties, butquite another when they began to double-cross each other. Hitler hadbeen helpless to prevent the Russians from grabbing the Baltic States andthe two Rumanian provinces of Bessarabia and northern Bucovina, andhis frustration only added to his growing resentment. The Russian drivewestward would have to be stopped and first of all in Rumania, whose oilresources were of vital importance to a Germany which, because of theBritish blockade, could no longer import petroleum by sea.

To complicate Hitler’s problem, Hungary and Bulgaria too demandedslices of Rumanian territory. Hungary, in fact, as the summer of 1940approached its end, prepared to go to war in order to win back Transyl-vania, which Rumania had taken from her after the First World War.Such a war, Hitler realized, would cut off Germany from her main sourceof crude oil and probably bring the Russians in to occupy all of Rumaniaand rob the Reich permanently of Rumanian oil.

By August 28 the situation had become so threatening that Hitlerordered five panzer and three motorized divisions plus parachute and air-borne troops to make ready to seize the Rumanian oil fields on Septemberl-18 T^at same day he conferred with Ribbentrop and Ciano at theBerghof and then dispatched them to Vienna, where they were to lay downthe law to the foreign ministers of Hungary and Rumania and make themaccept Axis arbitration. This mission was accomplished without muchtrouble after Ribbentrop had browbeaten both sides. On August 30 atthe Belvedere Palace in Vienna the Hungarians and Rumanians acceptedthe Axis settlement. When Mihai Manoilescu, the Rumanian ForeignMinister, saw the map stipulating that about one half of Transylvaniashould go to Hungary, he fainted, falling across the table at which thesigning of the agreement was taking place, and regaining consciousnessonly after physicians had worked over him with camphor.*17 Ostensiblyfor her reasonableness but really to give Hitler a legal excuse for his

* It cost King Carol his throne. On September 6 he abdicated in favor of his eight-een-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 Yugo-slavia to Switzerland. General Ion Antonescu, chief of the fascist “Iron Guard” anda friend of Hitler, became dictator.

Barbarossa: The Turn of Russia 801

further plans, Rumania received from Germany and Italy a guarantee ofwhat was left of her territory. *

Light on the Fuehrer’s further plans came to his intimates three weekslater. On September 20, in a top-secret directive, Hitler ordered the send-ing of “military missions” to Rumania.

To the world their tasks will be to guide friendly Rumania in organizingand instructing her forces.

The real tasks—which must not become apparent either to the Rumaniansor to our own troops—will be:

To protect the oil district . . .

To prepare for deployment from Rumanian bases of German and Rumanianforces 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 wasbeginning to picture in his mind.

The Vienna award and especially the German guarantee of Rumania’sremaining territory went down badly in Moscow, which had not been con-sulted. When Schulenburg called on Molotov on September 1 to presenta windy memorandum from Ribbentrop attempting to explain—andjustify—what had taken place in Vienna, the Foreign Commissar, theambassador reported, “was reserved, in contrast to his usual manner.”He was not too reserved, however, to lodge a strong verbal protest. Heaccused 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 insuch cases, had begun to quarrel over the spoils.

Recriminations became more heated in the following days. On Sep-tember 3 Ribbentrop telegraphed a long memorandum to Moscow deny-ing that Germany had violated the Moscow Pact and accusing Russia ofhaving done just that by gobbling up the Baltic Slates and two Rumanianprovinces without consulting Berlin. The memorandum was couched instrong language and the Russians replied to it on September 21 withequally stern words—by this time both sides were putting their cases inwriting. The Soviet answer reiterated that Germany had broken the pact,warned that Russia still had many interests in Rumania and concludedwith a sarcastic proposal that if the article calling for consultation involved“certain inconveniences and restrictions” for the Reich the Soviet govern-ment was ready to amend or delete this clause of the treaty.20

The Kremlin’s suspicions of Hitler were further aroused by two eventsin September. On the sixteenth, Ribbentrop wired Schulenburg to call onMolotov and “casually” inform him that German reinforcements fornorthern Norway were going to be sent by way of Finland. A few dayslater, on September 25, the Nazi Foreign Minister got off another telegramto the embassy in Moscow, this time addressed to the charge, Schulenburg

Minus southern Dobrudja, which Rumania was forced to cede to Bulgaria.

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having returned to Germany on leave. It was a most confidential message,being marked “Strictly Secret—State Secret,” and directing that its in-structions were to be carried out only if on the next day the chargereceived from Berlin by wire or telephone a special code word.21

He was to inform Molotov that “in the next few days” Japan, Italy andGermany were going to sign in Berlin a military alliance. It was not to bedirected against Russia—a specific article would say that.

This alliance [Ribbentrop stated] is directed exclusively against Americanwarmongers. To be sure this is, as usual, not expressly stated in the treaty,but can be unmistakably inferred from its terms ... Its exclusive purposeis to bring the elements pressing for America’s entry into the war to their sensesby conclusively demonstrating to them that if they enter the present strugglethey will automatically have to deal with the three great powers as adver-saries.22

The chilly Soviet Foreign Commissar, whose suspicions of the Germanswere now growing like flowers in June, was highly skeptical when Wernervon Tippelskirch, the charge, brought him this news on the evening ofSeptember 26. He said immediately, with that pedantic attention to detailwhich so annoyed all with whom he negotiated, friend or foe, that accord-ing to Article IV of the Moscow Pact the Soviet government was entitledto see the text of this tripartite military alliance before it was signed, includ-ing, he added, the text of “any secret protocols.”

Molotov also wanted to know more about the German agreement withFinland for the transport of troops through that country, which he hadheard of mostly through the press, he said, including a United Press dis-patch from Berlin. During the last three days, Molotov added, Moscowhad received reports of the landing of German forces in at least threeFinnish ports, “without having been informed thereof by Germany.”

The Soviet Government [Molotov continued] wished to receive the text ofthe agreement on the passage of troops through Finland, including its secretportions . . . and to be informed as to the object of the agreement, againstwhom it was directed, and the purposes that were being served thereby.23

The Russians had to be mollified—even the obtuse Ribbentrop couldsee that—and on October 2 he telegraphed to Moscow what he said wasthe text of the agreement with Finland. He also reiterated that the Tri-partite Pact, which in the meantime had been signed,* was not directed

It was signed in Berlin on September 27, 1940, in a comic-opera setting and cere-mony which I have described elsewhere (Berlin Diary, pp. 532-37). In Articles 1and 2, respectively, Japan recognized “the leadership of Germany and Italy in theestablishment of a new order in Europe,” and the two countries recognized Japan’sleadership for the same in Greater East Asia. Article 3 provided for mutual assist-ance should any one of the powers be attacked by the United States, though Americawas not specifically mentioned, only defined. To me, as I wrote in my diary thatday in Berlin, the most significant thing about the pact was that it meant that Hitler

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against the Soviet Union and solemnly declared that “there were no secretprotocols nor any other secret agreements.”24 After instructing Tippel-skirch on October 7 to inform Molotov “incidentally” that a German“military mission” was being sent to Rumania and after receiving Molotov’sskeptical reaction to this further news (“How many troops are you sendingto Rumania?” the Foreign Commissar had demanded to know) ,25 Ribben-trop on October 13 got off a long letter to Stalin in an attempt to quietSoviet uneasiness about Germany.26

It is, as might be expected, a fatuous and at the same time arrogantepistle, abounding in nonsense and lies and subterfuge. England is blamedfor the war and all its aftermaths thus far, but one thing is sure: “The waras such has been won by us. It is only a question of how long it will bebefore England . . . admits to collapse.” The German moves againstRussia in Finland and Rumania as well as the Tripartite Pact are explainedas really a boon to Russia. In the meantime British diplomacy and Britishsecret agents are trying to stir up trouble between Russia and Germany.To frustrate them, why not send Molotov to Berlin, Ribbentrop askedStalin, so that the Fuehrer could “explain personally his views regardingthe future molding of relations between our two countries”?

Ribbentrop gave a sly hint what those views were: nothing less thandividing 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 delimitationof their interests on a world-wide scale.

The emphasis is Ribbentrop’s.

There was some delay in the German Embassy in Moscow in gettingthis letter to its destination, which made Ribbentrop livid with rage andinspired an angry telegram from him to Schulenburg demanding to knowwhy his letter had not been delivered until the seventeenth and why, “inkeeping with the importance of its contents,” it was not delivered to Stalinpersonally—Schulenburg had handed it to Molotov.27 Stalin replied onOctober 22, in a remarkably cordial tone. “Molotov admits,” he wrote,“that he is under obligation to pay you a visit in Berlin. He hereby acceptsyour invitation.”28 Stalin’s geniality must have been only a mask. Schulen-burg wired Berlin a few days later that the Russians were protesting therefusal of Germany to deliver war material while at the same time shippingarms to Finland. “This is the first time,” Schulenburg advised Berlin,“that our deliveries of arms to Finland have been mentioned by theSoviets.”29

A dark, drizzling day, and Molotov arrived, his reception being extremelystiff and formal. Driving up the Linden to the Soviet Embassy, he looked to

was now reconciled to a long war. Ciano, who signed the pact for Italy, came to thesame conclusion (Ciano Diaries, p. 296). Also, despite the disclaimer, the pact was,and was meant to be, a warning to the Soviet Union.

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me like a plugging, provincial schoolmaster. But to have survived in thecutthroat competition of the Kremlin he must have something. The Germanstalk glibly of letting Moscow have that old Russian dream, the Bosporus andthe 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 glibtalk of the Germans was accurate enough, as far as it went. Today weknow much more about this strange and—as it turned out—fateful meet-ing, thanks to the capture of the Foreign Office documents, in which onefinds the confidential German minutes of the two-day sessions, all but oneof them kept by the ubiquitous Dr. Schmidt.*30

At the first meeting between the two foreign ministers, during the fore-noon of November 12, Ribbentrop was in one of his most vapid andarrogant moods but Molotov quickly saw through him and sized up whatthe German game was. “England,” Ribbentrop began, “is beaten and it isonly a question of time when she will finally admit her defeat . . . Thebeginning 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 UnitedStates into the war is of no consequence at all for Germany. Germany andItaly will never again allow an Anglo-Saxon to land on the EuropeanContinent . . . This is no military problem at all . . . The Axis Powersare, therefore, not considering how they can win the war, but rather howrapidly they can end the war which is already won.”

This being so, Ribbentrop explained, the time had come for the fourpowers, Russia, Germany, Italy and Japan, to define their “spheres ofinterest.” The Fuehrer, he said, had concluded that all four countrieswould naturally expand “in a southerly direction.” Japan had alreadyturned south, as had Italy, while Germany, after the establishment of theNew Order in Western Europe, would find her additional Lebensraumin (of all places!) “Central Africa.” Ribbentrop said he “wondered” ifRussia would also not “turn to the south for the natural outlet to the opensea which was so important for her.”

“Which sea?” Molotov interjected icily.

This was an awkward but crucial question, as the Germans wouldlearn during the next thirty-six hours of ceaseless conversations with thisstubborn, prosaic, precise Bolshevik. The interruption floored Ribbentropfor a moment and he could not think of an answer. Instead, he rambledon about the great changes that would take place all over the world afterthe war” and gabbled that the important thing was that “both partners tothe German-Russian pact had together done some good business” and“would continue to do some business.” But when Molotov insisted on an

Their accuracy on this occasion was later confirmed by Stalin, though not inten-t‘°”a .y- Churchill says he received an account of Molotov’s talks in Berlin fromStalin in August 1942 which in no essential differs from the German record,” thoughit was more pithy. (Churchill, Their Finest Hour, pp. 585-86.)

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answer to his simple question, Ribbentrop finally replied by suggestingthat “in the long run the most advantageous access to the sea for Russiacould 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 tocomment at the end that “precision and vigilance” were necessary in de-limiting spheres of interest, “particularly between Germany and Russia.”The wily Soviet negotiator was saving his ammunition for Hitler, whomhe saw in the afternoon. For the all-powerful Nazi warlord it turned outto be quite a surprising, nerve-racking, frustrating and even unique experi-ence.

Hitler was just as vague as his Foreign Minister and even more grandi-ose. As soon as the weather improved, he began by saying, Germanywould strike “the final blow against England.” There was, to be sure, “theproblem of America.” But the United States could not “endanger thefreedom of other nations before 1970 or 1980 ... It had no businesseither in Europe, in Africa or in Asia”—an assertion which Molotov brokein to say he was in agreement with. But he was not in agreement withmuch else that Hitler said. After the Nazi leader had finished a lengthyexposition of pleasant generalities, stressing that there were no funda-mental differences between the two countries in the pursuit of their respec-tive aspirations and in their common drive toward “access to the ocean,”Molotov replied that “the statements of the Fuehrer had been of a generalnature.” He would now, he said, set forth the ideas of Stalin, who on hisdeparture from Moscow had given him “exact instructions.” Whereuponhe hurled the book at the German dictator who, as the minutes makeclear, 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. Whatwas the meaning of the New Order in Europe and in Asia, and what rolewould the U.S.S.R. be given in it? What was the “significance” of theTripartite Pact? “Moreover,” he continued, “there are issues to beclarified regarding Russia’s Balkan and Black Sea interests with respectto Bulgaria, Rumania and Turkey.” He would like, he said, to hear someanswers and “explanations.”

Hitler, perhaps for the first time in his life, was too taken aback toanswer. He proposed that they adjourn “in view of a possible air-raidalarm,” promising to go into a detailed discussion the next day.

A showdown had been postponed but not prevented, and the nextmorning when Hitler and Molotov resumed their talks the Russian Com-missar was relentless. To begin with, about Finland, over which the twomen soon became embroiled in a bitter and caustic dispute. Molotovdemanded that Germany get its troops out of Finland. Hitler denied that“Finland was occupied by German troops.” They were merely being sentthrough Finland to Norway. But he wanted to know “whether Russiaintended to go to war against Finland.” According to the German minutes,

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Molotov “answered this question somewhat evasively,” and Hitler was notsatisfied.

“There must be no war in the Baltic,” Hitler insisted. “It would put aheavy strain on German-Russian relations,” a threat which he added toa moment later by saying that such a strain might bring “unforeseeableconsequences.” What more did the Soviet Union want in Finland, any-way? Hitler wanted to know, and his visitor answered that it wanted a“settlement on the same scale as in Bessarabia”—which meant outrightannexation. Hitler’s reaction to this must have perturbed even the imper-turbable Russian, who hastened to ask the Fuehrer’s “opinion on that.”

The dictator in turn was somewhat evasive, replying that he could onlyrepeat that “there must be no war with Finland because such a conflictmight 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 havebecome thoroughly frightened by this time, broke in to say, according tothe German minutes, “that there was actually no reason at all for makingan issue of the Finnish question. Perhaps it was merely a misunderstand-ing.”

Hitler took advantage of this timely intervention to quickly change thesubject. Could not the Russians be tempted by the unlimited plunder soonto 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 beapportioned as a gigantic world-wide estate in bankruptcy of forty millionsquare kilometers. In this bankrupt estate there would be for Russia access tothe ice-free and really open ocean. Thus far, a minority of forty-five millionEnglishmen had ruled six hundred million inhabitants of the British Empire.He was about to crush this minority . . . Under these circumstances therearose world-wide perspectives ... All the countries which could possibly beinterested in the bankrupt estate would have to stop all controversies amongthemselves and concern themselves exclusively with the partition of the BritishEmpire. This applied to Germany, France, Italy, Russia and Japan.

The chilly, impassive Russian guest did not appear to be moved by suchglittering “world-wide perspectives,” nor was he as convinced as theGermans—a point he later rubbed in—that the British Empire wouldsoon be there for the taking. He wanted, he said, to discuss problemscloser 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 himselfbluntly all day, to the growing annoyance of his hosts, and now he pressedon. He demanded that Germany “revoke” this guarantee. Hitler declined.

All right, Molotov persisted, in view of Moscow’s interest in the

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Straits, what would Germany say “if Russia gave Bulgaria ... aguarantee under exactly the same conditions as Germany and Italy hadgiven one to Rumania”?

One can almost see Hitler’s dark frown. He inquired whether Bulgariahad asked for such a guarantee, as had Rumania? “He (the Fuehrer),”the German memorandum quotes him as adding, “did not know of anyrequest by Bulgaria.” At any rate, he would first have to consult Mussolinibefore giving the Russians a more definite answer to their question. Andhe added ominously that if Germany “were perchance looking for sourcesof friction with Russia, she would not need the Straits for that.”

But the Fuehrer, usually so talkative, had no more stomach for talkwith this impossible Russian.

“At this point in the conversation,” say the German minutes, “theFuehrer called attention to the late hour and stated that in view of thepossibility of English air attacks it would be better to break off the talknow, since the main issues had probably been sufficiently discussed.”

That night Molotov gave a gala banquet to his hosts at the RussianEmbassy on Unter den Linden. Hitler, apparently exhausted and stillirritated by the afternoon’s ordeal, did not put in an appearance.

The British did. I had wondered why their bombers had not appearedover Berlin, as they had almost every recent night, to remind the SovietCommissar on his first evening in the capital that, whatever the Germanstold 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 inthe Wilhelmstrasse, who had feared the worst, were visibly relieved. Butnot for long.

On the evening of November 13, the British came over early.* It getsdark in Berlin about 4 p.m. at this time of year, and shortly after 9 o’clockthe air-raid sirens began to whine and then you could hear the thunder ofthe flak guns and, in between, the hum of the bombers overhead. Accord-ing to Dr. Schmidt, who was at the banquet in the Soviet Embassy, Molotovhad just proposed a friendly toast and Ribbentrop had risen to his feet toreply when the air-raid warning was sounded and the guests scattered toshelter. I remember the hurrying and scurrying down the Linden andaround the corner at the Wilhelmstrasse as Germans and Russians madefor the underground shelter of the Foreign Ministry. Some of the officials,Dr. Schmidt among them, ducked into the Adlon Hotel, from in front ofwhich some of us were watching, and were unable to get to the impromptumeeting which the two foreign ministers now held in the undergrounddepths of the Foreign Office. The minutes of this meeting were thereforetaken, in the enforced absence of Dr. Schmidt, by Gustav Hilger, counselorof the German Embassy in Moscow, who had acted as one of the inter-preters during the conference.

* Churchill says the air raid was timed for this occasion. “We had heard of theconference beforehand,” he later wrote, “and though not invited to join in the dis-cussion did not wish to be entirely left out of the proceedings.” (Churchill, TheirFinest Hour, p. 584.)

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While the British bombers cruised overhead in the night and the anti-aircraft guns fired away ineffectively at them, the slippery Nazi ForeignMinister tried one last time to take the Russians in. Out of his pocket hepulled a draft of an agreement which, in substance, transformed theTripartite 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 SovietUnion 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 extentof the possessions of the Soviet Union and will respect it.” All four coun-tries, 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, butnot, of course, its secret protocols, which he next proceeded to read. Themost important one defined each country’s “territorial aspirations.” Rus-sia’s was to “center south of the national territory of the Soviet Union inthe direction of the Indian Ocean.”

Molotov did not rise to the bait. The proposed treaty was obviouslyan attempt to divert Russia from its historic pressure westward, down theBaltic, into the Balkans and through the Straits to the Mediterranean,where inevitably it would clash with the greedy designs of Germany andItaly. The U.S.S.R. was not, at least at the moment, interested in theIndian Ocean, which lay far away. What it was interested in at the mo-ment, Molotov replied, was Europe and the Turkish Straits. “Conse-quently,” he added, “paper agreements will not suffice for the SovietUnion; she would have to insist on effective guarantees of her security.”

The questions which interested the Soviet Union [he elaborated] concernednot only Turkey but Bulgaria ... But the fate of Rumania and Hungarywas also of interest to the U.S.S.R. and could not be immaterial to her underany circumstances. It would further interest the Soviet Government to learnwhat the Axis contemplated with regard to Yugoslavia and Greece, and like-wise, what Germany intended with regard to Poland . . . The Soviet Govern-ment 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 outand Ribbentrop, who felt himself being buried under the avalanche ofquestions—for at this point Molotov said he would “appreciate it” if hisguest made answer to them—protested that he was being “interrogatedtoo closely.” b

He could only repeat again and again [he replied weakly] that the decisivequestion was whether the Soviet Union was prepared and in a position toco-operate with us in the great liquidation of the British Empire.

Molotov was ready with a cutting retort. Hilger duly noted it in theminutes.

In his reply Molotov stated that the Germans were assuming that the waragainst England had already actually been won. If therefore [as Hitler hadmaintained] Germany was waging a life-and-death straggle against England, hecould only construe this as meaning that Germany was fighting “for life” andEngland “for death.”

This sarcasm may have gone over the head of Ribbentrop, a man ofmonumental denseness, but Molotov took no chances. To the German’sconstant reiteration that Britain was finished, the Commissar finally re-plied, “If that is so, why are we in this shelter, and whose are these bombswhich fall?”*

From this wearing experience with Moscow’s tough bargainer and fromfurther evidence that came a fortnight later of Stalin’s increasingly rapa-cious appetite, Hitler drew his final conclusions.

It must be set down here that the Soviet dictator, his subsequent claimsto the contrary notwithstanding, now accepted Hitler’s offer to join thefascist camp, though at a stiffer price than had been offered in Berlin. OnNovember 26, scarcely two weeks after Molotov had returned fromGermany, he informed the German ambassador in Moscow that Russiawas prepared to join the four-power pact, subject to the following con-ditions :

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 theStraits is assured by the conclusion of a mutual-assistance pact between theU.S.S.R. and Bulgaria . . . and by the establishment of a base for land andnaval forces by the Soviet Union within range of the Bosporus and theDardanelles by means of a long-term lease.

3. That the area south of Batum and Baku in the general direction of thePersian 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 innorthern Sakhalin.33

In all Stalin asked for five, instead of two, secret protocols embodyinghis new proposals and, for good measure, asked that, should Turkey provedifficult about Russian bases controlling the Straits, the four powers takemilitary measures against her.

The proposals constituted a price higher than Hitler was willing even toconsider. He had tried to keep Russia out of Europe, but now Stalin was

* Molotov’s parting shot is given by Churchill, to whom it was related by Stalinlater in the war. (Churchill, Their Finest Hour, p. 586.1

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demanding Finland, Bulgaria, control of the Straits and, in effect, theArabian and Persian oil fields, which normally supplied Europe withmost of its oil. The Russians did not even mention the Indian Ocean, whichthe Fuehrer had tried to fob off as the center of “aspirations” for theU.S.S.R.

Stalin is clever and cunning,” Hitler told his top military chiefs. “Hedemands more and more. He’s a cold-blooded blackmailer. A Germanvictory has become unbearable for Russia. Therefore: she must bebrought to her knees as soon as possible.”34

The great cold-blooded Nazi blackmailer had met his match, and therealization infuriated him. At the beginning of December he told Haiderto bring him the Army General Staff’s plan for the onslaught on theSoviet Union. On December 5 Haider and Brauchitsch dutifully broughtit to him, and at the end of a four-hour conference he approved it. Boththe captured OKW War Diary and Haider’s own confidential journal con-tain a report on this crucial meeting.35 The Nazi warlord stressed that theRed Army must be broken through both north and south of the PripetMarshes, surrounded and annihilated “as in Poland.” Moscow, he toldHaider, “was not important.” The important thing was to destroy thelife force of Russia. Rumania and Finland were to join in the attack,but not Hungary. General Dietl’s mountain division at Narvik was to betransported across northern Sweden to Finland for an attack on the Sovietarctic region.* Altogether some “120 to 130 divisions” were allotted forthe big campaign.

In its report on this conference, as in previous references to the planto attack Russia, General Haider’s diary employs the code name “Otto.”Less than a fortnight later, on December 18, 1940, the code name bywhich it will go down in history was substituted. On this day Hitler crossedthe Rubicon. He issued Directive No. 21. It was headed “OperationBarbarossa.” It began: .

TOP SECRET

The Fuehrer’s Headquarters .

December 18, 1940

The German Armed Forces must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in aquick campaign before the end of the war against England.! For this purposethe Army will have to employ all available units with the reservation that theoccupied territories will have to be safeguarded against surprise attacksPreparations ... are to be completed by May 15, 1941. Great cautionhas to be exercised that the intention of an attack will not be recognized.

* 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 joinedin the war against Russia,t The italics are Hitler’s.

Barbarossa: The Turn of Russia 811

So the target date was mid-May of the following spring. The “generalpurpose” of Operation Barbarossa Hitler laid down as follows:

The mass of the Russian Army in western Russia is to be destroyed in daringoperations by driving forward deep armored wedges, and the retreat of intact,battle-ready troops into the wide spaces of Russia is to be prevented. Theultimate objective of the operation is to establish a defense line against AsiaticRussia from a line running from the Volga River to Archangel.

Hitler’s directive then went into considerable detail about the mainlines of attack.* The roles of Rumania and Finland were defined. Theywere to provide the jumping-off areas for attacks on the extreme northand south flanks as well as troops to aid the German forces in these opera-tions. 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 occupythe Russian ice-free ports on the Arctic Ocean. Much depended, Hitleradmitted, on whether Sweden would permit the transit of German troopsfrom Norway, but he correctly predicted that the Swedes would beaccommodating in this.

The main operations were to be divided, Hitler explained, by the PripetMarshes. The major blow would be delivered north of the swamps withtwo whole army groups. One would advance up the Baltic States to Lenin-grad. The other, farther south, would drive through White Russia andthen swing north to join the first group, thus trapping what was left of theSoviet forces trying to retreat from the Baltic. Only then, Hitler laid itdown, must an offensive against Moscow be undertaken. The Russiancapital, which a fortnight before had seemed “unimportant” to Hitler, nowassumed more significance. “The capture of this city,” he wrote, “meansa decisive political and economic victory, beyond the fall of the country’smost important railroad junction.” And he pointed out that Moscow wasnot only the main communications center of Russia but its principalproducer of armaments.

A third army group would drive south of the marshes through theUkraine toward Kiev, its principal objective being to roll up and destroythe Soviet forces there west of the Dnieper River. Farther south German-Rumanian troops would protect the flank of the main operation andadvance toward Odessa and thence along the Black Sea. Thereafter theDonets basin, where 60 per cent of Soviet industry was concentrated,would be taken.

Such was Hitler’s grandiose plan, completed just before the Christmasholidays of 1940, and so well prepared that no essential changes would be

* A good many historians have contended that Hitler in this first Barbarossa direc-tive did not go into detail, a misunderstanding due probably to the extremely ab-breviated version given in English translation in the NCA volumes. But the com-plete German text given in TMWC, XXVI, pp. 47—52 discloses the full details, thusrevealing how far advanced the German military plans were at this early date.36

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made in it. In order to secure secrecy, only nine copies of the directive

WereJrn?de’ °ne f°r each of the three armed services and the rest to beguarded at OKW headquarters. Even the top field commanders, thedirec ive makes clear, were to be told that the plan was merely for “pre-cautmn m case Russia should change her previous attitude toward us ”And Hitler instructed that the number of officers in the secret “be kept assmall as possible. Otherwise the danger exists that our preparations willbecome known and the gravest political and military disadvantages result.”

There is no evidence that the generals in the Army’s High Commandobjected to Hitler’s decision to turn on the Soviet Union,^ whose loyalfulfillment of the pact with Germany had made possible their victories inoland and the West. Later Haider would write derisively of “Hitler’sRussian adventure” and claim the Army leaders were against it from theeginnmg.31 But there is not a word in his voluminous diary entries forDecember 1940 which supports him in this. Indeed, he gives the impres-sion of being full of genuine enthusiasm for the “adventure,” which he

himself, as Chief of the General Staff, had the main responsibility forplanning. r :

At any rate for Hitler the die was cast, and, though he did not knowit, his ultimate fate sealed, by this decision of December 18 1940 Relievedto have made up his mind at last, as he later revealed, he went off tocelebrate the Christmas holidays with the troops and flyers along theEnghsh Channe1—as far as it was possible for him to get from Russia.

at °f h*rnfdJ°0TaS far as Possible—:must have been any thoughts ofCharles XII of Sweden and of Napoleon Bonaparte, who after so manyg orious conquests not unlike his own, had met disaster in the vast depthsof the Russian steppes. How could they be much in his mind? By nowas the record shortly will show, the one-time Vienna waif regarded himselfas the greatest conqueror the world had ever seen. Egomania, that fataldisease of all conquerors, was taking hold.

SIX MONTHS OF FRUSTRATION

And yet, after all the tumultuous victories of the spring and earlvsummer of 1940, there had been a frustrating six months for the Naziconqueror.. Not only the final triumph over Britain eluded him but

opportunities to deal her a mortal blow in the Mediterranean had beenthrown away.

Two days after Christmas Grand Admiral Raeder saw Hitler in Berlinbut he had little Yuletide cheer to offer. “The threat to Britain in theentire eastern Mediterranean, the Near East and in North Africa ” he toldthe Fuehrer, “has been eliminated ... The decisive action in the Medi-erranean for which we had hoped therefore is no longer possible.”38

Adolf Hitler, balked by a shifty Franco, by the ineptitude of Mussoliniand even by the senility of Marshal Petain, had really missed the bus in the

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Mediterranean. Disaster had struck the Italian ally in the Egyptian desertand now in December confronted it in the snowy mountains of Albania.These untoward happenings were also turning points in the war and in thecourse of history of the Third Reich. They had come about not onlybecause of the weaknesses of Germany’s friends and allies, but, in part,because of the Nazi warlord’s incapacity to grasp the larger, interconti-nental strategy that was called for and that Raeder and even Goering hadurged upon him.

Twice in September 1940, on the sixth and the twenty-sixth, the GrandAdmiral attempted to open up new vistas in the Fuehrer’s mind now thatthe direct attack on England seemed out of the question. For the secondconference Raeder cornered Hitler alone and, without the Army andAir Force officers to muddle the conversation, gave his chief a lengthylecture on naval strategy and the importance of getting at Britain in otherplaces than over the English Channel.

The British [Raeder said] have always considered the Mediterranean thepivot of their world Empire . . . Italy, surrounded by British power, is fastbecoming the main target of attack . . . The Italians have not yet realizedthe danger when they refuse our help. Germany, however, must wage waragainst Great Britain with all the means at her disposal and without delay,before the United States is able to intervene effectively. For this reason theMediterranean 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 AirForce.

The Suez Canal must be taken.

After Suez, Raeder painted a rosy picture of what then would logicallyensue.

An advance from Suez through Palestine and Syria as far as Turkey isnecessary. If we reach that point, Turkey will be in our power. The Russianproblem will then appear in a different light ... It is doubtful whether anadvance against Russia from the north will be necessary.

Having in his mind driven the British out of the Mediterranean and putTurkey and Russia in Germany’s power, Raeder went on to complete thepicture. Correctly predicting that Britain, supported by the U.S.A. andthe Gaullist forces, eventually would try to get a foothold on NorthwestAfrica as a basis for subsequent war against the Axis, the Admiral urgedthat Germany and Vichy France forestall this by securing this strategicallyimportant region themselves.

According to Raeder, Hitler agreed with his “general trend of thought’

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

but added that he would have to talk matters over first with Mussolini,Franco and Petain.30 This he proceeded to do, though only after muchtime was lost. He arranged to see the Spanish dictator on October 23,Petain, 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 massivemilitary aid of Italy and Germany, had, like all his fellow dictators, aninordinate appetite for spoils, especially if they could be gained cheaply.In June, at the moment of France’s fall, he had hastily informed Hitler thatSpain would enter the war in return for being given most of the vastFrench African empire, including Morocco and western Algeria, andprovided that Germany supplied Spain liberally with arms, gasoline andfoodstuffs.40 It was to give Franco the opportunity to redeem this promisethat the Fuehrer arrived in his special train at the Franco-Spanish bordertown of Hendaye on October 23. But much had happened in the inter-vening months—Britain had stoutly held out, for one thing—and Hitlerwas 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’spromise to give Spain territorial compensation in French North Africa “tothe extent to which it would be possible to cover France’s losses fromBritish colonies. Franco wanted the French African empire, with nostrings attached. Hitler s proposal was that Spain enter the war in January1941, but Franco pointed out the dangers of such precipitate action.Hitler wanted the Spaniards to attack Gibraltar on January 10, with thehelp of German specialists who had taken the Belgian fort of Eben Emaelfrom the air. Franco replied, with typical Spanish pride, that Gibraltarwould have to be taken by Spaniards “alone.” And so the two dictatorswrangled—for nine hours. According to Dr. Schmidt, who was presenthere too, Franco spoke on and on in a monotonous singsong voice andHitler became increasingly exasperated, once springing up, as he had donewith Chamberlain, to exclaim that there was no point in continuing theconversations.41 &

“Rather than go through that again,” he later told Mussolini, in recount-ing his ordeal with the Caudillo, “I would prefer to have three or four teethyanked 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 definitelycommitted himself to come into the war. Hitler left Ribbentrop behindthat night to continue the parley with Serrano Suner, the Spanish ForeignMinister, and to try to get the Spaniards to sign something, at least anagreement to drive the British out of Gibraltar and close to them the west-ern Mediterranean—but to no avail. “That ungrateful coward!” Ribben-trop cursed to Schmidt about Franco the next morning. “He owes useverything and now won’t join us!”43

Hitler s meeting with Petain at Montoire the next day went off better.But this was because the aging, defeatist Marshal, the hero of Verdun in

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the First World War and the perpetrator of the French surrender in theSecond, agreed to France’s collaboration with her conqueror in one lasteffort to bring Britain, the late ally, to her knees. In fact, he assented toput down in writing this odious deal.

The Axis Powers and France have an identical interest in seeing the defeatof England accomplished as soon as possible. Consequently, the FrenchGovernment will support, within the limits of its ability, the measures whichthe Axis Powers may take to this end.44

In return for this treacherous act, France was to be given in the “NewEurope” “the place to which she is entitled,” and in Africa she was toreceive from the fascist dictators compensation from the British Empirefor whatever territory she was forced to cede to others. Both partiesagreed to keep the pact “absolutely secret.”*

Despite Petain’s dishonorable but vital concessions, Hitler was notsatisfied. According to Dr. Schmidt, he had wanted more—nothing lessthan France’s active participation in the war against Britain. On the longjourney back to Munich the official interpreter found the Fuehrer disap-pointed and depressed with the results of his trip. He was to become evenmore so in Florence, where he arrived on the morning of October 28 tosee Mussolini.

They had conferred but three weeks before, on October 4, at theBrenner Pass. Hitler, as usual, had done most of the talking, giving oneof his dazzling tours d’horizon in which was not included any mentionthat he was sending troops to Rumania, which Italy also coveted. Whenthe Duce learned of this a few days later he was indignant.

Hitler always faces me with a fait accompli [he fumed to Ciano]. This timeI am going to pay him back in his own coin. He will find out from the news-papers that I have occupied Greece. In this way the equilibrium will bere-established.45

The Duce’s ambitions in the Balkans were as rabid as Hitler’s and cutacross them so that as far back as the middle of August the Germans hadwarned Rome against any adventures in Yugoslavia and Greece. “It is acomplete order to halt all along the line,” Ciano noted in his diary onAugust 17. Mussolini scrapped, for the moment anyway, his plans forfurther martial glory in the Balkans and confirmed this in a humble letter

* Although they did not learn the contents of the secret accord at Montoire, bothChurchill and Roosevelt suspected the worst. The King of England sent throughAmerican channels a personal appeal to Petain asking him not to take sides againstBritain. President Roosevelt’s message to the Marshal was stern and toughly wordedand warned him of the dire consequences of Vichy France’s betraying Britain. (SeeWilliam L. Langer, Our Vichy Gamble, p. 97. To write this book, Professor Langerhad access to German documents that eleven years later have not been released bythe British and American governments.)

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

to Hitler of August 27. But the prospect of a quick, easy conquest ofGreece, which would compensate to some extent for his partner’s glitteringvictories, proved too big a temptation for the strutting Fascist Caesar toresist, false though the prospect was.

On October 22 he set the date for a surprise Italian assault on Greecefor October 28 and on the same day wrote Hitler a letter (predated October19) alluding to his contemplated action but making it vague as to theexact nature and date. He feared, Ciano noted that day in his diary, thatthe Fuehrer might “order” him to halt. Hitler and Ribbentrop got windof the Duce’s plans while they were returning in their respective specialtrains from France, and at the Fuehrer’s orders the Nazi Foreign Ministerstopped at the first station in Germany to telephone Ciano in Rome andurge an immediate meeting of the Axis leaders. Mussolini suggestedOctober 28 at Florence and, when his German visitor alighted from thetrain on the morning of that day, greeted him, his chin up and his eyesfull of glee: “Fuehrer, we are on the march! Victorious Italian troopscrossed the Greco-Albanian frontier at dawn today!”48

According to all accounts, Mussolini greatly enjoyed this revenge onhis friend for all the previous occasions when the Nazi dictator hadmarched into a country without previously confiding to his Italian ally.Hitler was furious. This rash act against a sturdy foe at the worst possibletime 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 ofpreventing it, but he had arrived too late. According to Schmidt, whowas present, the Nazi leader managed to control his rage.

Hitler went north that afternoon [Schmidt later wrote] with bitterness in hisheart. He had been frustrated three times—at Hendaye, at Montoire, and nowin Italy. In the lengthy winter evenings of the next few years these long, exact-ing journeys were a constantly recurring theme of bitter reproaches againstungrateful and unreliable friends, Axis partners and “deceiving” Frenchmen.47

Nevertheless he had to do something to prosecute the war against theBritish, now that the invasion of Britain had proved impossible. Hardlyhad the Fuehrer returned to Berlin before the need to act was furtherimpressed upon him by the fiasco of the Duce’s armies in Greece. Withina week, the “victorious” Italian attack there had been turned into a rout.On November 4 Hitler called a war conference at the Chancellery inBerlin to which he summoned Brauchitsch and Haider from the Army andKeitel and Jodi from OKW. Thanks to Haider’s diary and a capturedcopy of Jodi’s report to the Navy on the conference, we know the warlord’sdecisions, which were embodied in Directive No. 18 issued by Hitler onNovember 12, the text of which is among the Nuremberg records.48

The German Navy’s influence on Hitler’s strategy became evident, asdid the necessity for doing something about the faltering Italian ally.Haider noted the Fuehrer’s “lack of confidence” in Italian leadership. As

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Barbarossa: The Turn of Russia

a result it was decided not to send any German troops to Libya untilMarshal Rodolfo Graziani’s army, which in September had advancedsixty miles into Egypt to Sidi Barrani, had reached Mersa Matruh, afurther seventy-five miles along the coast, which was not expected beforeChristmas, if then. In the meantime plans were to be made to send a fewdive bombers to Egypt to attack the British fleet in Alexandria and minethe Suez Canal.

As for Greece, the Italian attack there, Hitler admitted to his generals,had been a “regrettable blunder” and unfortunately had endangeredGermany’s position in the Balkans. The British by occupying Crete andLemnos had achieved air bases from which they could easily bomb theRumanian oil fields and by sending troops to the Greek mainland threat-ened the whole German position in the Balkans. To counter this dangerHitler ordered the Army to prepare immediately plans to invade Greecethrough Bulgaria with a force of at least ten divisions which would besent first to Rumania. “It is anticipated,” he said, “that Russia will remainneutral.”

But it was in regard to destroying Britain’s position in the westernMediterranean that most of the conference of November 4 and most ofthe 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 ofthe Iberian peninsula or the Atlantic islands.

“Felix” was to be the code name for the taking of Gibraltar and theSpanish Canary Islands and the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands. TheNavy was also to study the possibility of occupying Portugal’s Madeiraand the Azores. Portugal itself might have to be occupied. “OperationIsabella” would be the cover name for that, and three German divisionswould be assembled on the Spanish-Portuguese frontier to carry it out.

Finally, units of the French fleet and some troops were to be released sothat France could defend her possessions in Northwest Africa against theBritish 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 andlaid down in the directive a week later, went into considerable militarydetail—especially on how Gibraltar was to be taken by a daring Germanstroke—and apparently they impressed his Army chiefs as bold andshrewd. But in reality they were half measures which could not possiblyachieve their objectives, and they were based partly on his deceiving hisown generals. He assured them on November 4, Haider noted, that hehad 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 drivingthe British out of the Mediterranean were sound, but the forces allottedto the task were quite insufficient, especially in view of Italy’s weaknesses.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

The Naval War Staff pointed this out in a toughly worded memorandumwhich Raeder gave Hitler on November 14.« The Italian disaster inGreece—Mussolini’s troops had now been hurled back into Albania andwere still retreating—had not only greatly improved Britain’s strategicposition in the Mediterranean, the sailors pointed out, but enhancedBritish prestige throughout the world. As for the Italian attack on Egyptt e Navy told Hitler flatly: “Italy will never carry out the Egyptianoffensive. The Italian leadership is wretched. They have no understand-ing of the situation. The Italian armed forces have neither the leadershipnor the military efficiency to carry the required operations in the Mediter-ranean area to a successful conclusion with the necessary speed and

Therefore, the Navy concluded, this task must be carried out bvGermany. The “fight for the African area,” it warned Hitler, is “theforemost strategic objective of German warfare as a whole . It is ofdecisive importance for the outcome of the war.”

But the Nazi dictator was not convinced. He had never been able toenvisage the war in the Mediterranean and North Africa as anything butsecondary to his main objective. As Admiral Raeder elaborated to himthe Navy s strategic conceptions in their meeting on November 14, Hitlerretorted that he was “still inclined toward a demonstration with Russia ”50In fact he was more inclined than ever, for Molotov had just departedBerlin that morning after so arousing the Fuehrer’s ire. When the AdmiralneXt saw his chief a couple of days after Christmas to report on how thebus had been missed in the Mediterranean, Hitler was not unduly per-turbed. To Raeder’s argument that the victory of Britain over the Italiansin Egyptf and the increasing material aid which she was receiving fromAmerica necessitated the concentration of all German resources to bringthe British down, and that Barbarossa ought to be postponed until “theoverthrow of Britain,” Hitler turned an almost deaf ear.

In view of present political developments and especially Russia’s

* The Navy’s italics.

t By this time a ramshackle British desert force of one armored division an Indianin^IuVaT011’ two'n^antry brigades and a Royal Tank regiment—31,000 men

SX non h d dnVen an Ita lan f°rce three times as lar8e out of Egypt and captured38,000 prisoners at a cost of 133 killed, 387 wounded and 8 missing The Britishcounteroffensive under the over-all command of General Sir Archibafd Wavell had

hadUs’tarte?afDfibera “r ^ dayS Marshal Graziani’s army was routed. Whatstart®dasa fiye-day limited counterattack continued until February 7 by whichf™ * *e Br' shrhad Pushed c,ear across Cyrenaica, a distance of 500 miles/annihi-ated the entire Italian army of ten divisions in Libya, taken 130,000 prisoners 1 240guns and 500 tanks and lost themselves 500 killed, 1,373 wounded and 55 missingTo the skeptical British military writer General J. F. Fuller it was “one of themost audacious campaigns ever fought.” (Fuller, The Second World War. p 98 )

l,1?,6 hnmhp NfVy nSO -bfen d?dt 3 ,ethal blow' °n ,he ni§ht of November11 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 formany months three battleships and two cruisers. “A black day,” Ciano began hisdiary on November 12 “The British, without warning, have sunk the dreadnoughtGavour and seriously damaged the battleships Littorio and Duilio.” S

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Barbarossa: The Turn of Russia

interference in Balkan affairs,” Hitler said, “it is necessary to eliminate atall costs the last enemy remaining on the Continent before coming togrips with Britain.” From now on to the bitter end he would stickfanatically to this fundamental strategy.

As a sop to his naval chief, Hitler promised to “try once more toinfluence Franco” so that the attack against Gibraltar could be made andthe Mediterranean closed to the British fleet. Actually, he had alreadydropped the whole idea. On December 11 he had quietly ordered, “Opera-tion Felix will not be carried out as the political conditions no longerexist.” 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 abattle of life and death and cannot at this time make any gifts . . .

The battle which Germany and Italy are fighting will determine the destinyof Spain as well. Only in the case of our victory will your present regimecontinue to exist.51

Unfortunately for the Axis, the letter reached the Caudillo on the veryday that Marshal Graziani’s last forces in Cyrenaica had been wiped outby the British south of Benghazi. Little wonder that when Franco gotaround to replying—on February 26, 1941—though protesting his “ab-solute loyalty” to the Axis, he reminded the Nazi leader that recent de-velopments had left “the circumstances of October far behind” and thattheir understanding of that time had become “outmoded.”

For one of the very few times in his stormy life, Adolf Hitler concededdefeat. “The long and short of the tedious Spanish rigmarole,” he wroteMussolini, “is that Spain does not want to enter the war and will not enterit. This is extremely tiresome since it means that for the moment thepossibility of striking at Britain in the simplest manner, in her Mediter-ranean possessions, is eliminated.”

Italy, not Spain, however, was the key to defeating Britain in the Medi-terranean, but the Duce’s creaky empire was not equal to the task of doingit alone and Hitler was not wise enough to give her the means, which hehad, to accomplish it. The possibility of striking at Britain either directlyacross the Channel or indirectly across the broader Mediterranean, henow confessed, had been eliminated “for the moment.” Though this wasfrustrating, the acknowledgment of it brought Hitler relief. He could nowturn to matters nearer his heart and mind.

On January 8-9, 1941, he held a council of war at the Berghof aboveBerchtesgaden, which now lay deep in the winter’s snow. The mountainair seems to have cleared his mind, and once more, as the lengthy confi-dential reports of the meeting by Admiral Raeder and General Haider52disclose, his thoughts ranged far and wide as he outlined his grand strategyto his military chiefs. His optimism had returned.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

The Fuehrer [Raeder noted] is firmly convinced that the situation in Europecan no longer develop unfavorably for Germany even if we should lose thewhole of North Africa. Our position in Europe is so firmly established thatthe outcome cannot possibly be to our disadvantage . . . The British canhope to win the war only by beating us on the Continent. The Fuehrer is con-vinced that this is impossible.

It was true, he conceded, that the direct invasion of Britain was “notfeasible unless she is crippled to a considerable degree and Germany hascomplete air superiority.” The Navy and Air Force, he said, must con-centrate on attacking her shipping lanes and thereby cut off her supplies.Such attacks, he thought, “might lead to victory as early as July or Au-gust. In the meantime, he said, “Germany must make herself so strongon the Continent that we can handle a further war against England (andAmerica).” The parenlheses are Haider’s and their enclosure is signifi-cant. 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 ofthe Uni'ed States into the war against him.

The Nazi warlord then took up the various strategic areas and problemsand outlined what he intended to do about them.

The Fuehrer is of the opinion [Raeder wrote] that it is vital for the outcomeof the war that Italy does not collapse . . . He is determined to . . . preventItaly from losing North Africa ... It would mean a great loss of prestige tothe Axis powers ... He is [therefore] determined to give them support.

At this point he cautioned his military leaders about divulging Germanplans.

He does not wish to inform the Italians of our plans. There is great dangerthat the Royal Family is transmitting intelligence to Britain!!*

Support for Italy, Hitler declared, would consist of antitank formationsand some Luftwaffe squadrons for Libya. More important, he would dis-patch an army corps of two and a half divisions to buck up the retreatingItalians in Albania—into which the Greeks had now pushed them. Inconnection with this, “Operation Marita”f would be pushed. The transferof troops from Rumania to Bulgaria, he ordered, must begin at once sothat Marita could commence on March 26. Hitler also spoke at somelength of the need to be ready to carry out “Operation Attila”—the Ger-man cover names seem almost endless—which he had outlined in a di-

* The italics and double exclamation points are Raeder’s.

t °Pfr 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 todescend o^Greece through Bulgaria as soon as favorable weather set in. It was

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Barbarossa: The Turn of Russia

rective of December 10, 1940. This was a plan to occupy the rest ofFrance and seize the French fleet at Toulon. He thought now it mighthave to be carried out soon. “If France becomes troublesome,” he de-clared, “she will have to be crushed completely.” This would have been acrude violation of the Compiegne armistice, but no general or admiral, sofar as Haider and Raeder noted—or at least recorded—raised the ques-tion.

It was at this war conference that Hitler described Stalin as “a cold-blooded blackmailer” and informed his commanders that Russia wouldhave 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], thesituation would become very complicated. Hence any possibility for such athreat to develop must be eliminated at the very beginning. If the Russianthreat were removed, we could wage war on Britain indefinitely. If Russiacollapsed, Japan would be greatly relieved: this in turn would mean increaseddanger to the U.S.A.

Such were the thoughts of the German dictator on global strategy as1941 got under way. Two days after the war council, on January 11, heembodied them in Directive No. 22. German reinforcements for Tripoliwere 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 and20. Shaken and humiliated by the Italian debacles in Egypt and Greece,he had no stomach for this journey. Ciano found him “frowning and nerv-ous” when he boarded his special train, fearful that Hitler, Ribbentropand the German generals would be insultingly condescending. To makematters worse the Duce took along General Alfredo Guzzoni, AssistantChief of Staff, whom Ciano in his diary described as a mediocre man witha big paunch and a little dyed wig and whom, he thought, it would bepositively humiliating to present to the Germans.

To his surprise and relief, Mussolini found Hitler, who came down tothe snow-covered platform of the little station at Puch to greet him, bothtactful and cordial and there were no reproaches for Italy’s sorry recordon the battlefields. He also found his host, as Ciano noted in his diary, in avery anti-Russian mood. For more than two hours on the second dayHitler lectured his Italian guests and an assembly of generals from bothcountries, and a secret report on it prepared by General Jodi55 confirmsthat while the Fuehrer was anxious to be helpful to the Italians in Albaniaand Libya, his principal thoughts were on Russia.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

I don’t see great danger coming from America [Hitler said] even if sheshould enter the war. The much greater danger is the gigantic block of Russia.Though we have very favorable political and economic agreements withRussia, 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 suffi-ciently far along to enable the Chief of the Army General Staff, who wasresponsible for working out the details, to present them to the SupremeCommander at a meeting in Berlin a fortnight later.

This war conference, attended by the top generals of OKW and of theArmy High Command (OKH), lasted from noon until 6 p.m. on February3. And though General Haider, who outlined the Army General Staff’splans, contended later in his bookGB that he and Brauchitsch raised doubtsabout their own assessment of Soviet military strength and in general op-posed Barbarossa as an “adventure,” there is not a word in his own diaryentry made the same evening or in the highly secret OKW memorandumof the meeting57 that supports this contention. Indeed, they disclose Hai-der 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 Haider reported, “farsuperior in quality.” Later, when catastrophe set in, Haider and his fellowgenerals realized that their intelligence on the Red Army had been fantasti-cally faulty. But on February 3, 1941, they did not suspect that. In fact,so convincing was Haider’s report on respective strengths and on thestrategy to be employed to annihilate the Red armies* that Hitler at theend not only expressed agreement “on the whole” but was so excited bythe prospects which the General Staff Chief had raised that he exclaimed:

“When Barbarossa commences, the world will hold its breath and makeno comment!”

He could scarcely wait for it to commence. Impatiently he ordered theoperation map and the plan of deployment of forces to be sent to him “assoon 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 thirdweek in February 1941, the Germans had massed a formidable army of680,000 troops in Rumania, which bordered the Ukraine for three hun-

* The strategy was essentially that laid down in Directive No. 21 of December 18,1940. (See pp. 810-11.) Again in comments to Brauchitsch and Haider, Hitleremphasized the importance of “wiping out large sections of the enemy” instead offorcing them to retreat. And he stressed that “the main aim [his emphasis] is to gainpossession of the Baltic States and Leningrad.”

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Barbarossa: The Turn of Russia

dred miles between the Polish border and the Black Sea.58 But to thesouth, Greece still held the Italians at bay and Berlin had reason to believethat British troops from Libya would soon be landed there. Hitler, as theminutes of his numerous conferences at this period make clear, feared thatan Allied front above Salonika might be formed which would be moretroublesome to Germany than a similar one had been in the First WorldWar, since it would give the British a base from which to bomb the Ru-manian oil fields. Moreover, it would jeopardize Barbarossa. In fact, thedanger had been foreseen as far back as December 1940, when the firstdirective for Operation Marita had been issued providing for a strongGerman attack on Greece through Bulgaria with troops assembled inRumania.

Bulgaria, whose wrong guess as to the victors in the first war had costher dearly, now made a similar miscalculation. Believing Hitler’s assur-ances that he had already won the war and bedazzled by the prospect ofobtaining Greek territory to the south which would give her access to theAegean Sea, her government agreed to participate in Marita—at least tothe extent of allowing passage of German troops. An agreement to thiseffect was made secretly on February 8, 1941, between Field MarshalList and the Bulgarian General Staff.58 On the night of February 28 Ger-man Army units crossed the Danube from Rumania and took up strategicpositions in Bulgaria, which the next day joined the Tripartite Pact.

The hardier Yugoslavs were not quite so accommodating. But theirstubbornness only spurred on the Germans to bring them into camp too.On March 4-5, the Regent, Prince Paul, was summoned in great secrecyto the Berghof by the Fuehrer, given the usual threats and, in addition,offered the bribe of Salonika. On March 25, the Yugoslav Premier, Dra-gisha Cvetkovid, and Foreign Minister Aleksander Cincar-Markovid,having slipped surreptitiously out of Belgrade the night before to avoidhostile demonstrations or even kidnaping, arrived at Vienna, where in thepresence of Hitler and Ribbentrop they signed up Yugoslavia to the Tri-partite Pact. Hitler was highly pleased and told Ciano that this wouldfacilitate his attack on Greece. Before leaving Vienna the Yugoslav lead-ers were given two letters from Ribbentrop confirming Germany’s “deter-mination” to respect “the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Yugo-slavia at all times” and promising that the Axis would not demand transitrights for its troops across Yugoslavia “during this war.”60 Both agree-ments 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 ofMarch 26-27, by a popular uprising led by a number of top Air Forceofficers and supported by most of the Army. The youthful heir to thethrone, Peter, who had escaped from the surveillance of regency officialsby sliding down a rain pipe, was declared King, and though the new regimeof General Dusan Simovid immediately offered to sign a nonaggressionpact with Germany, it was obvious in Berlin that it would not accept the

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

puppet status for Yugoslavia which the Fuehrer had assigned. During thedelirious celebrations in Belgrade, in which a crowd spat on the Germanminister’s car, the Serbs had shown where their sympathies lay.

The coup in Belgrade threw Adolf Hitler into one of the wildest rages ofhis entire life. He took it as a personal affront and in his fury made suddendecisions which would prove utterly disastrous to the fortunes of the ThirdReich.

He hurriedly summoned his military chieftains to the Chancellery inBerlin on March 27—the meeting was so hastily called that Brauchitsch,Haider and Ribbentrop arrived late—and raged about the revenge hewould take on the Yugoslavs. The Belgrade coup, he said, had endangeredboth Marita and, even more, Barbarossa. He was therefore determined,“without waiting for possible declarations of loyalty of the new govern-ment, to destroy Yugoslavia militarily and as a nation. No diplomatic in-quiries will be made,” he ordered, “and no ultimatums presented.” Yugo-slavia, he added, would be crushed with “unmerciful harshness.” Heordered Goering then and there to “destroy Belgrade in attacks by waves,”with bombers operating from Hungarian air bases. He issued DirectiveNo. 2581 for the immediate invasion of Yugoslavia and told Keitel andJodi to work out that very evening the military plans. He instructed Rib-bentrop to advise Hungary, Rumania and Italy that they would all get aslice of Yugoslavia, which would be divided up among them, except for asmall Croatian puppet state.*

And then, according to an underlined passage in the top-secret OKWnotes of the meeting,62 Hitler announced the most fateful decision of all.

“The beginning of the Barbarossa operationhe told his generals, “willhave to be postponed up to four weeks'’+

This postponement of the attack on Russia in order that the Nazi war-lord might vent his personal spite against a small Balkan country whichhad dared to defy him was probably the most catastrophic single decisionin Hitler’s career. It is hardly too much to say that by making it thatMarch afternoon in the Chancellery in Berlin during a moment of convul-sive rage he tossed away his last golden opportunity to win the war and tomake of the Third Reich, which he had created with such stunning ifbarbarous genius, the greatest empire in German history and himself themaster of Europe. Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, the Commander inChief of the German Army, and General Haider, the gifted Chief of theGeneral Staff, were to recall it with deep bitterness but also with moreunderstanding of its consequences than they showed at the moment of itsmaking, when later the deep snow and subzero temperatures of Russia hitthem three or four weeks short of what they thought they needed for final

* Th® war a8alnsl Yugoslavia should be very popular in Italy, Hungary and Bul-garia,” Hitler sneered. He said he would give the Banat to Hungary, Macedonia toBulgaria and the Adriatic coast to Italy.

t It had originally been set for May 15 in the first Barbarossa directive of December

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Barbarossa: The Turn of Russia

victory. For ever afterward they and their fellow generals would blamethat hasty, ill-advised decision of a vain and infuriated man for all thedisasters that ensued.

Military Directive No. 25, which the Supreme Commander issued tohis generals before the meeting broke up, was a typical Hitlerian docu-ment.

The military putsch in Yugoslavia has altered the political situation in theBalkans. Yugoslavia, in spite of her protestations of loyalty, must be con-sidered for the time being as an enemy and therefore crushed as speedily aspossible.

It is my intention to force my way into Yugoslavia . . . and to annihilatethe Yugoslav Army . . .

Jodi, as Chief of the Operations Staff of OKW, was told to prepare theplans that very night. “I worked the whole night at the Reich Chancel-lery,” Jodi later told the Nuremberg tribunal. “At four o’clock in themorning of March 28,1 put an aide-memoire into the hand of General vonRintelen, our liaison officer with the Italian High Command.”63

For Mussolini, whose sagging armies in Albania were in danger of beingtaken in the rear by the Yugoslavs, had to be told immediately of the Ger-man operational plans and asked to co-operate with them. To make surethat the Duce understood what was expected of him and without waitingfor General Jodi to concoct the military plans, Hitler dashed off a letterat midnight of the twenty-seventh and ordered it wired to Rome imme-diately so .hat it would reach Mussolini that same night.64

Duce, events force me to give you by this quickest means my estimation ofthe situation and the consequences which may result from it.

From the beginning I have regarded Yugoslavia as a dangerous factor inthe controversy with Greece . . . For this reason I have done everythinghonestly to bring Yugoslavia into our community . . . Unfortunately theseendeavors did not meet with success . . . Today’s reports leave no doubt asto the imminent turn in the foreign policy of Yugoslavia.

Therefore I have already arranged for all necessary measures . . . withmilitary means. Now, I would cordially request you, Duce, not to undertakeany further operations in Albania in the course of the next few days. I con-sider it necessary that you should cover and screen the most important passesfrom Yugoslavia into Albania with all available forces.

... I also consider it necessary, Duce, that you should reinforce yourforces on the Italian-Yugoslav front with all available means and with utmostspeed.

I also consider it necessary, Duce, that everything which we do and orderbe shrouded in absolute secrecy . . . These measures will completely losetheir value should they become known . . . Duce, should secrecy be observed,.

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then ... I have no doubt that we will both achieve a success no less thanthe 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 hisprediction, but he seems to have had no inkling how costly his successfulrevenge on Yugoslavia would be in the long run. At dawn on April 6, hisarmies in overwhelming strength fell on Yugoslavia and Greece, smash-ing across the frontiers of Bulgaria, Hungary and Germany itself with alltheir armor and advancing rapidly against poorly armed defenders dazedby the usual preliminary bombing from the Luftwaffe.

Belgrade itself, as Hitler ordered, was razed to the ground. For threesuccessive days and nights Goering’s bombers ranged over the little capitalat rooftop level—for the city had no antiaircraft guns—killing 17,000civilians, wounding many more and reducing the place to a mass of smol-dering rubble. “Operation Punishment,” Hitler called it, and he obviouslywas satisfied that his commands had been so effectively carried out. TheYugoslavs, who had not had time to mobilize their tough little army andwhose General Staff made the mistake of trying to defend the whole coun-try, were overwhelmed. On April 13 German and Hungarian troops en-tered what was left of Belgrade and on the seventeenth the remnants ofthe Yugoslav Army, still twenty-eight divisions strong, surrendered atSarajevo, 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 divi-sions, four of which were armored. The British had hurriedly sent toGreece some four divisions from Libya—53,000 men in all—but they,like the Greeks, were overwhelmed by the German panzers and by themurderous strikes of the Luftwaffe. The northern Greek armies surren-dered to the Germans and—bitter pill—to the Italians on April 23. Fourdays later Nazi tanks rattled into Athens and hoisted the swastika over theAcropolis. By this time the British were desperately trying once again toevacuate 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 assaulttoward the end of May. Where Mussolini had failed so miserably all win-ter, Hitler had succeeded in a few days in the spring. Though the Ducewas relieved to be pulled off the hook, he was humiliated that it had to bedone by the Germans. Nor were his feelings assuaged by Italy’s disap-pointing share in the Yugoslav spoils, which Hitler now began to divideup.*

* On April 12, 1941, six days after the launching of his attack, Hitler issued a secretdirective dividing up Yugoslavia among Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria.Croatia was created as an autonomous puppet state. The Fuehrer helped himself

Barbarossa: The Turn of Russia 827

The Balkans was not the only place where the Fuehrer pulled his muddling junior partner off the hook. After the annihilation of the Italianarmies in Libya Hitler, although reluctantly, had finally consented to send-ing a light armored division and some Luftwaffe units to North Africa,where he arranged for General Erwin Rommel to be in over-all commandof the Lalo-German forces. Rommel, a dashing, resourceful tank officer,who had distinguished himself as commander of a panzer division in theBattle of France, was a type of general whom the British had not previouslymet in the North African desert and he was to prove an immense problemto them for two years. But he was not the only problem. The sizablearmy and air force which the British had sent to Greece from Libya hadgreatly weakened them in the desert. At first they were not unduly wor-ried, not even after their intelligence reported the arrival of Germanarmored units in Tripolitania at the end of February. But they should havebeen.

Rommel, with his German panzer division and two Italian divisions,one of which was armored, struck suddenly at Cyrenaica on the last day ofMarch. In twelve days he recaptured the province, invested Tobruk andreached Bardia, a few miles from the Egyptian border. The entire Britishposition in Egypt and the Suez was again threatened; in fact, with theGermans and Italians in Greece the British hold on the eastern Mediter-ranean had become gravely endangered.

Another spring, the second of the war, had brought more dazzling Ger-man victories, and the predicament of Britain, which now held out alone,battered at home by nightly Luftwaffe bombings, its armies overseaschased out of Greece and Cyrenaica, seemed darker and more hopelessthan ever before. Its prestige, so important in a life-and-death strugglewhere propaganda was so potent a weapon, especially in influencing theUnited States and Russia, had sunk to a new low point.* *

Hitler was not slow or backward in taking advantage of this in a victory

liberally, Germany taking territory contiguous to the old Austria and keeping underits occupation all of old Serbia as well as the copper- and coal-mining districts,rtaly’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 fallenwith startling naivete, during his visits to Germany, to Nazi propaganda boasts, wasalready consigning Britain to defeat in his speeches to large and enthusiastic audi-ences in America. On April 23, 1941, at the moment of the Nazi victories in theBalkans and North Africa, he addressed 30,000 persons in New York at the firstmass meeting of the newly formed America First Committee. “The British govern-ment,” he said, “has one last desperate plan: . . . To persuade us to send anotherAmerican Expeditionary Force to Europe and to share with England militarily, aswell as financially, the fiasco of this war.” Fie condemned England for having “en-couraged the smaller nations of Europe to fight against hopeless odds.” Apparentlyit did not occur to this man that Yugoslavia and Greece, which Hitler had justcrushed, were brutally attacked without provocation, and that they had instinctivelytried to defend themselves because they had a sense of honor and because they hadcourage even in the face of hopeless odds. On April 28 Lindbergh resigned hiscommission as a colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve after President Roose-velt on the twenty-fifth had publicly branded him as a defeatist and an appeaser.The Secretary of War accepted the resignation.

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speech to the Reichstag in Berlin on May 4. It consisted mostly of avenomous and sarcastic personal attack on Churchill as the instigator(along with the Jews) of the war and as the man who was mastermindingthe losing of it.

He is the most bloodthirsty or amateurish strategist in history . . . Forover five years this man has been chasing around Europe like a madman insearch of something that he could set on fire ... As a soldier he is a badpolitician 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 todistort the truth until finally glorious victories are made of the most terribledefeats . . . Churchill, one of the most hopeless dabblers in strategy, thusmanaged [in Yugoslavia and Greece] to lose two theaters of war at one singleblow. In any other country he would be court-martialed . . . His abnormalstate of mind can only be explained as symptomatic either of a paralytic diseaseor of a drunkard’s ravings . . .

As to the Yugoslavian coup which had provoked him to such fury, Hit-ler made no attempt to hide his true feelings.

We were all stunned by that coup, carried through by a handful of bribedconspirators ... You will understand, gentlemen, that when I heard thisI at once gave orders to attack Yugoslavia. To treat the German Reich in thisway is impossible . . .

Arrogant though he was over his spring victories and especially thoseover the British, Hitler did not fully realize what a blow they had been toBritain nor how desperate was the predicament of the Empire. On thevery day he was addressing the Reichstag, Churchill was writing PresidentRoosevelt about the grave consequences of the loss of Egypt and the Mid-dle East and pleading for America to enter the war. The Prime Ministerwas 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 ofthe consequences which may follow from a Middle-East collapse.'10

The German Navy urged the Fuehrer to make the most of this situation.To further improve matters for the Axis, the newly appointed premier ofIraq, Rashid Ali, who was pro-German, had led an attack against theBritish airbase of Habbaniya, outside Bagdad, and appealed to Hitler foraid in driving the British out of the country. This was at the beginning ofMay. With Crete conquered by May 27, Admiral Raeder, who had al-ways been lukewarm to Barbarossa, appealed to Hitler on May 30 to pre-pare a decisive offensive against Egypt and Suez, and Rommel, eager tocontinue his advance as soon as he had received reinforcements, sent

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similar pleas from Nor h 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 theOpera ions Division of the Naval War Staff which warned that, whileBarbarossa “naturally stands in the foreground of the OKW leadership, itmust 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 notchanged it since the Christmas .holidays when he had promulgated Bar-barossa and told Admiral Raeder that Russia must be “eliminated first.”His landlocked mind simply did not comprehend the larger strategy ad-vocated by the Navy. Even before Raeder and the Naval Staff pleadedwith him at the end of May he laid down the law in Directive No. 30 is-sued on May 25.88 He ordered a military mission, a few planes and somearms to be dispatched to Bagdad to help Iraq. “I have decided,” he said,“to encourage developments in the Middle East by supporting Iraq.” Buthe saw no further than this small, inadequate step. As for the larger, boldstrategy championed by the admirals and Rommel, he declared:

Whether—and if so, by what means—it would be possible afterward tolaunch an offensive against the Suez Canal and eventually oust the Britishfinally from their position between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulfcannot 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 ofMay 1941, Hitler, with the use of only a fraction of his forces, could havedealt the British Empire a crushing blow, perhaps a fatal one. No onerealized this better than the hard-pressed Churchill. In his message toPresident Roosevelt on May 4, he had admitted that, were Egypt and theMiddle East to be lost, the continuation of the war “would be a hard, longand bleak proposition,” even if the United States entered the conflict. ButHitler did not understand this. His blindness is all the more incomprehen-sible because his Balkan campaign had delayed the commencement of Bar-barossa by several weeks and thereby jeopardized it. The conquest ofRussia would have to be accomplished in a shorter space of time thanoriginally planned. For there was an inexorable deadline: the Russianwin er, which had defeated Charles XII and Napoleon. That gave theGermans only six months to overrun, before the onset of winter, an im-mense country that had never been conquered from the west. And thoughJune had arrived, the vast army which had been turned southeast intoYugoslavia and Greece had to be brought back great distances to theSoviet frontier over unpaved roads and run-down single-track railwaylines that were woefully inadequate to handle so swarming a traffic.

The delay, as things turned out, was fa'al. Defenders of Hitler’s mili-tary genius have contended that the Balkan campaign did not set back the

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timetable for Barbarossa appreciably and that in any case the postpone-ment was largely due to the late thaw that year which left the roads inEastern Europe deep in mud until mid-June. But the testimony of the keyGerman generals is otherwise. Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, whosename will always be associated with Stalingrad, and who at this time wasthe chief planner of the Russian campaign on the Army General Staff, testi-fied on the stand at Nuremberg that Hitler’s decision to destroy Yugo-slavia postponed the beginning of Barbarossa by “about five weeks.”69The Naval War Diary gives the same length of time.70 Field Marshal vonRundstedt, who led Army Group South in Russia, told Allied interrogatorsafter the war that because of the Balkan campaign “we began at least fourweeks late. That,” he added, “was a very costly delay.”71

At any rate, on April 30, when his armies had completed their conquestof Yugoslavia and Greece, Hitler set the new date for Barbarossa. It wasto begin on June 22, 1941.72

THE PFANNING OF THE TERROR

No holds were to be barred in the taking of Russia. Hitler insisted thatthe generals understand this very clearly. Early in March 1941, he con-voked the chiefs of the three armed services and the key Army field com-manders and laid down the law. Haider took down his words.73

The war against Russia [Hitler said] will be such that it cannot be conductedin a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differencesand will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelentingharshness. All officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies. Iknow that the necessity for such means of waging war is beyond the com-prehension of you generals but ... I insist absolutely that my orders beexecuted without contradiction. The commissars are the bearers of ideologiesdirectly opposed to National Socialism. Therefore the commissars will beliquidated. German soldiers guilty of breaking international law . . . will beexcused. Russia has not participated in the Hague Convention and thereforehas no rights under it.

Thus was the so-called “Commissar Order” issued; it was to be muchdiscussed at the Nuremberg trial when the great moral question was posedto the German generals whether they should have obeyed the orders of theFuehrer to commit war crimes or obeyed their own consciences. *

* “It was the first time I found myself involved in a conflict between my soldierlyconceptions and my duty to obey,” Field Marshal von Manstein declared on thestand at Nuremberg in discussing the Commissar Order. “Actually, I ought to haveobeyed, but I said to myself that as a soldier I could not possibly co-operate in athing like that. I told the Commander of the Army Group under which I served atthat time . . . that I would not carry out such an order, which was against thehonor of a soldier.”74

As a matter of record, the order, of course, was carried out on a large scale.

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According to Haider, as he later remembered it, the generals were out-raged at this order and, as soon as the meeting was over, protested totheir Commander in Chief, Brauchitsch. This spineless Field Marshal*promised that he would “fight against this order in the form it was given.”Later, Haider swears, Brauchitsch informed OKW in writing that the offi-cers of the Army “could never execute such orders.” But did he?

In his testimony on direct examination at Nuremberg Brauchitsch ad-mitted that he took no such action with Hitler “because nothing in theworld could change his attitude.” What the head of the Army did, he toldthe tribunal, was to issue a written order that “discipline in the Army wasto be strictly observed along the lines and regulations that applied in thepast.”

“You did not give any order directly referring to the Commissar Or-der?” Lord Justice Lawrence, the peppery president of the tribunal, askedBrauchitsch.

“No,” he replied. “I could not rescind the order directly.”75

The old-line Army officers, with their Prussian traditions, were givenfurther occasion to struggle with their consciences by subsequent direc-tives issued in the name of the Fuehrer by General Keitel on May 13. Theprincipal one limited the functions of German courts-martial. They were togive way to a more primitive form of law.

Punishable offenses committed by enemy civilians [in Russia] do not, untilfurther notice, come any longer under the jurisdiction of the courts-mar-tial . . .

Persons suspected of criminal action will be brought at once before anofficer. This officer will decide whether they are to be shot.

With regard to offenses committed against enemy civilians by members ofthe Wehrmacht, prosecution is not obligatory even where the deed is at thesame time a military crime or offense.t

The Army was told to go easy on such offenders, remembering in eachcase all the harm done to Germany since 1918 by the “Bolsheviki.”Courts-martial of German soldiers would be justified only if “maintenanceof discipline or security of the Forces call for such a measure.” At anyrate, the directive concluded, “only those court sentences are confirmedwhich are in accordance with the political intentions of the High Com-mand.”76 The directive was to “be treated as ‘most secret.’ ”t

* “A man of straw,” Hitler later called him. (Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p. 153.)t The emphasis is in the original order.

t On July 27, 1941, Keitel ordered all copies of this directive of May 13 concerningcourts-martial destroyed, though “the validity of the directive,” he stipulated, “isnot affected by the destruction of the copies.” The July 27 order, he added, “woulditself be destroyed.” But copies of both survived and turned up at Nuremberg tohaunt the High Command.

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A second directive of the same date signed by Keitel on behalf of Hitlerentrusted Himmler with “special tasks” for the preparation of the politicaladministration in Russia—“tasks,” it said, “which result from the strugglewhich has to be carried out between two opposing political systems.” TheNazi secret-police sadist was delegated to act “independently” of theArmy, “under his own responsibility.” The generals well knew what thedesignation of Himmler for “special tasks” meant, though they deniedthat they did when they took the stand at Nuremberg. Furthermore, thedirective said, the occupied areas in Russia were to be sealed off whileHimmler went to work. Not even the “highest personalities of the Govern-ment and Party,” Hitler stipulated, were to be allowed to have a look. Thesame directive named Goering for the “exploitation of the country andthe securing of its economic assets for use by German industry.” Inciden-tally, Hitler also declared in this order that as soon as military operationswere concluded Russia would be “divided up into individual states withgovernments of their own.”78

Just how this would be done was to be worked out by Alfred Rosen-berg, the befuddled Balt and officially the leading Nazi thinker, who hadbeen, as we have seen, one of Hitler’s early mentors in the Munich days.On April 20 the Fuehrer appointed him “Commissioner for the CentralControl of Questions Connected with the East-European Region” andimmediately this Nazi dolt, with a positive genius for misunderstandinghistory, even the history of Russia, where he was born and educated, wentto work to build his castles in his once native land. Rosenberg’s volumi-nous files were captured intact; like his books, they make dreary readingand will not be allowed to impede this narrative, though occasionally theymust be referred to because they disclose some of Hitler’s plans for Russia.

By early May, Rosenberg had drawn up his first wordy blueprint forwhat promised to be the greatest German conquest in history. To beginwith, European Russia was to be divided up into so-called Reich Com-missariats. Russian Poland would become a German protectorate calledOstland, the Ukraine “an independent state in alliance with Germany,”Caucasia, with its rich oil fields, would be ruled by a German “plenipoten-tiary,” and the three Baltic States and White Russia would form a Germanprotectorate preparatory to being annexed outright to the Greater GermanReich. This last feat, Rosenberg explained in one of the endless memo-randa which he showered on Hitler and the generals in order, as he said,

Four days before, on July 23, Keitel had issued another order marked “TonSecret”: r

On July 22, the Fuehrer after receiving the Commander of the Army [Brauch-itsch] issued the following order:

In view of the vast size of the occupied areas in the East, the forces availablefor establishing security will be sufficient only if all resistance is punished not bylegal prosecution of the guilty, but by the spreading of such terror by the occupy-ing forces as is alone appropriate to eradicate every inclination to resist amongstthe population.77 &

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to elucidate “the historical and racial conditions” for his decisions, wouldbe accomplished by Germanizing the racially assimilable Balts and “ban-ishing the undesirable elements.” In Latvia and Estonia, he cautioned,“banishment on a large scale will have to be envisaged.” Those driven outwould be replaced by Germans, preferably war veterans. “The BalticSea,” he ordained, “must become a Germanic inland sea.”79

Two days before the troops jumped off, Rosenberg addressed his clos-est 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 listof Germany’s claims on the East. The southern [Russian] territories will haveto serve . . . for the feeding of the German people.

We see absolutely no reason for any obligation on our part to feed also theRussian people with the products of that surplus territory. We know that thisis a harsh necessity, bare of any feelings . . . The future will hold very hardyears in store for the Russians.80

Very hard years indeed, since the Germans were deliberately planningto starve to death millions of them!

Goering, who had been placed in charge of the economic exploitationof the Soviet Union, made this even clearer than Rosenberg did. In a longdirective of May 23, 1941, his Economic Staff, East, laid it down that thesurplus food from Russia’s black-earth belt in the south must not be di-verted to the people in the industrial areas, where, in any case, the indus-tries would be destroyed. The workers and their families in these regionswould 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] maywell attempt to mitigate the consequences of the famine which undoubtedlywill take place and to accelerate the return to primitive agricultural conditions.However, these measures will not avert famine. Any attempt to save thepopulation there from death by starvation by importing surpluses from theblack-soil zone would be at the expense of supplies to Europe. It would reduceGermany’s staying power in the war, and would undermine Germany’s andEurope’s power to resist the blockade. This must be clearly and absolutelyunderstood.81

How many Russian civilians would die as the result of this deliberateGerman policy? A meeting of state secretaries on May 2 had alreadygiven a general answer. “There is no doubt,” a secret memorandum of theconference declared, “that as a result, many millions of persons will bestarved to death if we take out of the country the things necessary for us. ”82And 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

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ruthlessness, this well-thought-out scheme to put millions of human beingsto death by starvation? In all the memoranda concerning the German di-rectives for the spoliation of Russia, there is no mention of anyone’s ob-jecting—as at least some of the generals did in regard to the CommissarOrder. These plans were not merely wild and evil fantasies of distortedminds and souls of men such as Hitler, Goering, Himmler and Rosenberg.For weeks and months, it is evident from the records, hundreds of Germanofficials toiled away at their desks in the cheerful light of the warm springdays, adding up figures and composing memoranda which coldly calcu-lated the massacre of millions. By starvation, in this case. HeinrichHimmler, 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 plansfor the massacre of other millions in a quicker and more violent way.

Well pleased with the labors of his busy minions, both military andcivilian, in planning the onslaught on the Soviet Union, her destruction,her exploitation and the mass murder of her citizenry, Hitler on April 30set the date for the attack—June 22—made his victory speech in theReichstag on May 4 and then retired to his favorite haunt, the Berghofabove Berchtesgaden, where he could gaze at the splendor of the Alpinemountains, their peaks still covered with spring snow, and contemplatehis 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 receivedstrange 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 forthe moment off the war. His closest personal confidant, the deputy leaderof the Nazi Party, the second in line to succeed him after Goering, the manwho had been his devoted and fanatically loyal follower since 1921 and,since Roehm’s murder, the nearest there was to a friend, had literally flownthe 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 takenoff alone for Scotland in a Messerschmitt-110 lighter plane hit Hitler, asDr. Schmidt recalled, “as though a bomb had struck the Berghof.”83 Gen-eral Keitel found the Fuehrer pacing up and down his spacious studypointing a finger at his forehead and mumbling that Hess must have beencrazy.84 “Eve got to talk to Goering right away,” Hitler shouted. Thenext morning there was an agitated powwow with Goering and all theparty gauleiter as they sought to “figure out”—the words are Keitel’s—how to present this embarrassing event to the German public and to theworld. Their task was not made easier, Keitel later testified, by the Britishat first keeping silent about their visitor, and for a time Hitler and his con-

ferees hoped that perhaps Hess had run out of gasoline and fallen into thechilly North Sea and drowned.

The Fuehrer’s first information had come in a somewhat incoherentletter from Hess which was delivered by courier a few hours after he tookoff 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—somemental disturbance, ’ Hitler told Keitel. But the Fuehrer was also suspi-cious. 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 byhis unexpected arrival.* Stalin was highly suspicious. For the duration ofthe war, the bizarre incident remained a mystery, and it was cleared uponly at the Nuremberg trial, in which Hess was one of the defendants. Thefac‘s may be briefly set down.

Hess, always a muddled man though not so doltish as Rosenberg, flewon his own to Britain under the delusion that he could arrange a peacesettlement. Though deluded, he was sincere—there seems to be no reasonto doubt that. He had met the Duke of Hamilton at the Olympic games inBerlin in 1936, and it was within twelve miles of the Duke’s home in Scot-land—so efficient was his navigation—that he baled out of his Messer-schmitt, parachuted safely to the ground and asked a farmer to take him tothe Scottish lord. As it happened, Hamilton, a wing commander in theR.A.F., was on duty that Saturday evening at a sector operations roomand had spotted the Messerschmitt plane off the coast as it came in to makea landfall shortly after 10 p.m. An hour later it was reported to him thatthe plane had crashed in flames, that the pilot, who had baled out and whogave 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 au-thorities for the next morning.

To the Duke, Hess explained that he was on “a mission of humanityand that the Fuehrer did not want to defeat England and wished to stopthe fighting.” The fact, Hess said, that this was his fourth attempt to flyto Britain—on the three other tries, he had had to turn back because ofweather—and that he was, after all, a Reich cabinet minister, showed“his sincerity and Germany’s willingness for peace.” In this interview, asin later ones with others, Hess was not backward in asserting that Germanywould win the war and that if it continued the plight of the British wouldbe terrible. Therefore, his hosts had better take advantage of his presenceand negotiate peace. So confident was this Nazi fanatic that the Britishwould 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 ownfree will.”85 Later he demanded that he be treated with the respect due toa cabinet member.

* Churchill has graphically described how he received the news late that Saturdaynight while visiting in the country and how at first he thought it too fantastic to be-lieve. (The Grand Alliance, pp. 50-55.)

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The subsequent talks, with one exception, were conducted on the Britishside by Ivone Kirkpatrick, the knowing former First Secretary of the Brit-ish Embassy in Berlin, whose confidential reports were later made avail-able at Nuremberg.8U To this sophisticated student of Nazi GermanyHess, after parroting Hitler’s explanations of all the Nazi aggressions, fromAustria to Scandinavia and the Lowlands, and having insisted that Britainwas responsible for the war and would certainly lose it if she didn’t bringa stop to it now, divulged his proposals for peace. They were none otherthan those which Hitler had urged on Chamberlain—unsuccessfully—onthe eve of his attack on Poland: namely, that Britain should give Germanya free hand in Europe in return for Germany’s giving Britain “a completelyfree hand in the Empire.” The former German colonies would have to bereturned and of course Britain would have to make peace with Italy.

Finally, as we were leaving the room [Kirkpatrick reported], Hess delivereda parting shot. He had forgotten, he declared, to emphasize that the proposalcould only be considered on the understanding that it was negotiated byGermany with an English government other than the present one. Mr.Churchill, who had planned the war since 1936, and his colleagues who hadlent themselves to his war policy, were not persons with whom the Fuehrercould negotiate.

For a German who had got so far in the jungle warfare within the NaziParty and then within the Third Reich, Rudolf Hess, as all who knew himcould testify, was singularly naive. He had expected, it is evident from therecord of these interviews, to be received immediately as a serious negotia-tor—not by Churchill, then by the “opposition party,” of which hethought the Duke of Hamilton was one of the leaders. When his contactswith British officialdom continued to be restricted to Kirkpatrick, he grewbellicose and threatening. At an interview on May 14, he pictured to theskeptical diplomat the dire consequences to Britain if she continued thewar. There would soon be, he said, a terrible and absolutely completeblockade of the British Isles.

It was fruitless [Kirkpatrick was told by Hess] for anyone here to imaginethat England could capitulate and that the war could be waged from theEmpire. It was Hitler’s intention, in such an eventuality, to continue theblockade of England ... so that we would have to face the deliberatestarvation of the population of these islands.

Hess urged that the conversations, which he had risked so much tobring about, get under way at once. “His own flight,” as explained to Kirk-patrick, “was intended to give us a chance of opening conversations with-out loss of prestige. If we rejected this chance it would be clear proof thatwe 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

Barbarossa: The Turn of Russia 837

war in a state of permanent subjection.” Hess insisted that the number ofnegotiators be kept small.

As a Reich Minister he could not place himself in the position of being alone individual subjected to a crossfire of comment and questions from a largenumber of persons.

On this ridiculous note, the conversations ended, so far as Kirkpatrickwas concerned. But—surprisingly—the British cabinet, according toChurchill,87 “invited” Lord Simon to interview Hess on June 10. Ac-cording to the Nazi deputy leader’s lawyer at Nuremberg, Simon promisedthat he would bring Hess’s peace proposals to the attention of the Britishgovernment.*88

Hess’s motives are clear. He sincerely wanted peace with Britain. Hehad not the shadow of doubt that Germany would win the war and destroythe United Kingdom unless peace were concluded at once. There were,to be sure, o.her motives. The war had brought his personal eclipse. Run-ning the Nazi Party as Hitler’s deputy during the war was dull businessand no longer very important. What mattered in Germany now wasrunning the war and foreign affairs. These were the things which engagedthe attention of the Fuehrer to the exclusion of almost all else, and whichput the limelight on Goering, Ribbentrop, Himmler, Goebbels and thegenerals. Hess felt frustrated and jealous. How better restore his oldposition with his beloved Leader and in the country than by pulling off abrilliant and daring stroke of statesmanship such as singlehandedly arrang-ing peace between Germany and Britain?

Finally, the beetle-browed deputy leader, like some of the other Nazibigwigs—Hitler himself and Himmler—had come to have an abiding be-lief in astrology. At Nuremberg he confided to the American prison psy-chiatrist, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, that late in 1940 one of his astrologershad read in the stars that he was ordained to bring about peace. He alsorelated how his old mentor, Professor Haushofer, the Munich Geopoliti-ker, had seen him in a dream striding through the tapestried halls of Eng-lish castles, bringing peace between the two great “Nordic” nations.80 Fora man who had never escaped from mental adolescence, this was headystuff and no doubt helped impel Hess to undertake his weird mission toEngland.

At Nuremberg one of the British prosecutors suggested still anotherreason: that Hess flew to England to try to arrange a peace settlement sothat Germany would have only a one-front war to fight when she attackedthe Soviet Union. The Russian prosecutor told the tribunal that he wassure of it. And so was Joseph Stalin, whose mighty suspicions at this criti-

* At Nuremberg Hess told the tribunal that Lord Simon had introduced himself tohim as “Dr. Guthrie” and had declared, “I come with the authority of the Govern-ment and I shall be willing to discuss with you as far as seems good anything youwould wish to state for the information of the Government.”89

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cal time seem to have been concentrated not on Germany, as they shouldhave been, but on Great Britain. The arrival of Hess in Scotland con-vinced him that there was some deep plot being hatched between Churchilland Hitler which would give Germany the same freedom to strike theSoviet Union which the Russian dictator had given her to assault Polandand the West. When three years later the British Prime Minister, then onhis second visit to Moscow, tried to convince Stalin of the truth, he simplydid not believe it. It is fairly clear from the interrogations conducted byKirkpatrick, who tried to draw the Nazi leader out on Hitler’s intentionsregarding Russia, that either Hess did not know of Barbarossa or, if hedid, did not know that it was imminent.

The days following Hess’s sudden departure were among the most em-barrassing of Hitler’s life. He realized that the prestige of his regime hadbeen severely damaged by the flight of his closest collaborator. How wasit to be explained to the German people and the outside world? The ques-tioning of the arrested members of Hess’s entourage convinced the Fuehrerthat there had been no disloyalty toward him and certainly no plot, andthat his trusted lieutenant had simply cracked up. It was decided at theBerghof, after the British had confirmed Hess’s arrival, to offer this ex-planation to the public. Soon the German press was dutifully publishingbrief accounts that this once great star of National Socialism had become“a deluded, deranged and muddled idealist, ridden with hallucinationstraceable to World War [I] injuries.”

It seemed [said the official press communique] that Party Comrade Hesslived in a state of hallucination, as a result of which he felt he could bring aboutan understanding between England and Germany . . . This, however, willhave no effect on the continuance of the war, which has been forced on theGerman 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 asdeputy leader of the party by Martin Bormann, a more sinister and conniv-ing character. The Fuehrer hoped that the bizarre episode would be for-gotten as soon as possible; his own thoughts quickly turned again to theattack on Russia, which was not far off.

* Hess, a sorry, broken figure at Nuremberg, where for a part of the trial he fakedtotal amnesia (his mind had certainly been shattered), outlived Hitler. He wassentenced to life imprisonment by the International Tribunal, escaping the deathsentence largely due to his mental collapse. I have described his appearance there inEnd 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 com-plained bitterly at being denied “full diplomatic privileges,” which he constantlydemanded, and his none too balanced mind began to deteriorate and he had longstretches of amnesia. He told Dr. Kelley, however, that he twice tried to kill him-self during his internment. He became convinced, he said, that the British were try-ing to poison him.

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THE PLIGHT OF THE KREMLIN

Despite all the evidence of Hitler’s intentions—the build-up of Germanforces in eastern Poland, the presence of a million Nazi troops in the near-by Balkans, the Wehrmacht’s conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece and itsoccupation of Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary—the men in the Kremlin,Stalin above all, stark realists though they were reputed to be and hadbeen, blindly hoped that Russia somehow would still escape the Nazi ty-rant’s wrath. Their natural suspicions, of course, could not help but feedon the bare facts, nor could their growing resentment at Hitler’s moves insoutheastern Europe be suppressed. There is, however, something un-real, almost unbelievable, quite grotesque, in the diplomatic exchanges be-tween Moscow and Berlin in these spring weeks (exhaustively recordedin the captured Nazi documents), in which the Germans tried clumsily todeceive the Kremlin to the last and the Soviet leaders seemed unable tofully grasp reality and act on it in time.

Though they several times protested the entry of German troops intoRumania and Bulgaria and then the attack on Yugoslavia and Greece as aviolation of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and a threat to Russian “security inter-ests,” the Soviets went out of their way to appease Berlin as the date forthe German attack approached. Stalin personally took the lead in this.On April 13, 1941, Ambassador von der Schulenburg telegraphed an in-teresting dispatch to Berlin recounting how on the departure of the Japa-nese Foreign Minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, that evening from Moscow,Stalin had shown “a remarkably friendly manner” not only to the Japa-nese but to the Germans. At the railroad station

Stalin publicly asked for me [Schulenburg wired] . . . and threw his armaround my shoulders: “We must remain friends and you must now do every-thing to that end!” Somewhat later Stalin turned to the acting German MilitaryAttache, Colonel Krebs, first made sure that he was a German, and then saidto him: “We will remain friends with you—through thick and thin!”91

Three days later the German charge in Moscow, Tippelskirch, wiredBerlin stressing that the demonstration at the station showed Stalin’sfriendliness toward Germany and that this was especially important “inview of the persistently circulating rumors of an imminent conflict be-tween Germany and the Soviet Union.”92 The day before, Tippelskirchhad informed Berlin that the Kremlin had accepted “unconditionally,”after months of wrangling, the German proposals for the settlement ofthe border between the two countries from the Igorka River to the BalticSea. “The compliant attitude of the Soviet Government,” he said, “seemsvery remarkable.”93 In view of what was brewing in Berlin, it surely was.

In supplying blockaded Germany with important raw materials, theSoviet government continued to be equally compliant. On April 5, 1941,Schnurre, in charge of trade negotiations with Moscow, reported jubilantlyto his Nazi masters that after the slowdown in Russian deliveries in Janu-

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ary and February 1941, due to the “cooling off of political relations,” theyhad 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 forrubber at our disposal at the Manchurian border.94

Six weeks later, on May 15, Schnurre was reporting that the obligingRussians had put on several special freight trains so that 4,000 tons ofbadly needed raw rubber could be delivered to Germany over the Siberianrailway.

The quantities of raw materials contracted for are being delivered punctuallyby the Russians, despite the heavy burden this imposes on them ... I amunder the impression that we could make economic demands on Moscow whichwould even go beyond the scope of the treaty of January 10, demands de-signed to secure German food and raw-material requirements beyond theextent 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 difficul-ties are created,’ he complained, “by the countless rumors of an imminentGerman—Russian conflict,” for which he blamed German official sources.Amazingly, the “difficulties,” Schnurre explained in a lengthy memoran-dum to the Foreign Office, did not come from Russia but from Germanindustrial firms, which, he said, were trying “to withdraw” from their con-tracts with the Russians.

Hitler, it must be noted here, was doing his best to contradict the ru-mors, but at the same time he was busy trying to convince his generals andtop officials that Germany was in growing danger of being attacked byRussia. Though the generals, from their own military intelligence, knewbetter, so hypnotic was Hitler’s spell over them that even after the warHaider, Brauchitsch, Manstein and others (though not Paulus, whoseems to have been more honest) contended that a Soviet military build-upon the Polish frontier had become very threatening by the beginning ofthe summer.

Count von der Schulenburg, who had come home from Moscow on abrief leave, saw Hitler in Berlin on April 28 and tried to convince him ofRussia’s peaceful intentions. “Russia,” he attempted to explain, “is veryapprehensive at the rumors predicting a German attack on Russia. I can-not believe, he added, “that Russia will ever attack Germany ... IfStalin was unable to go with England and France in 1939 when both werestill strong, he will certainly not make such a decision today, when Franceis destroyed and England badly battered. On the contrary, I am con-vinced that Stalin is prepared to make even further concessions to us.”

The Fuehrer feigned skepticism. He had been “forewarned,” he said,

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“by events in Serbia . . . What devil had possessed the Russians,” heasked, “to conclude the friendship pact with Yugoslavia?”* He did notbelieve, it was true, he said, that “Russia could be brought to attack Ger-many.” Nevertheless, he concluded, he was obliged “to be careful.” Hit-ler did not tell his ambassador to the Soviet Union what plans he had instore for that country, and Schulenburg, an honest, decent German of theold school, remained ignorant of them to the last.

Stalin, too, but not of the signs, or of the warnings, of what Hitler wasup to. On April 22 the Soviet government formally protested eighty in-stances of border violations by Nazi planes which it said had taken placebetween March 27 and April 18, providing detailed accounts of each. Inone case, it said, in a German reconnaissance plane which landed nearRovno on April 15 there was found a camera, rolls of exposed film and atorn topographical map of the western districts of the U.S.S.R., “all ofwhich give evidence of the purpose of the crew of this airplane.” Even inprotesting the Russians were conciliatory. They had given the bordertroops, the note said, “the order not to fire on German planes flying overSoviet territory so long as such flights do not occur frequently.”97

Stalin made further conciliatory moves early in May. To please Hitlerhe expelled the diplomatic representatives in Moscow of Belgium, Nor-way, Greece and even Yugoslavia and closed their legations. He recog-nized the pro-Nazi government of Rashid Ali in Iraq. He kept the Sovietpress under the strictest restraint in order to avoid provoking Germany.

These manifestations [Schulenburg wired Berlin on May 12] of the intentionof the Stalin Government are calculated ... to relieve the tension betweenthe Soviet Union and Germany and to create a better atmosphere for thefuture. We must bear in mind that Stalin personally has always advocated afriendly relationship between Germany and the Soviet Union.88

Though Stalin had long been the absolute dictator of the Soviet Unionthis was the first mention by Schulenburg in his dispatches of the term“Stalin Government.” There was good reason. On May 6 Stalin had per-sonally taken over as Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars,or Prime Minister, replacing Molotov, who remained as Foreign Com-missar. This was the first time the all-powerful secretary of the CommunistParty had taken government office and the general world reaction wasthat it meant the situation had become so serious for the Soviet Union,especially in its relations with Nazi Germany, that only Stalin could dealwith it as the nominal as well as the actual head of government. This in-

* On April 5, the day before the German attack on Yugoslavia, the Soviet govern-ment had hastily concluded a “Treaty of Nonaggression and Friendship” with thenew Yugoslav government, apparently in a frantic attempt to head off Hitler. Molo-tov had informed Schulenburg of it the night before and the ambassador had ex-claimed that “the moment was very unfortunate” and had tried, unsuccessfully, toargue the Russians into at least postponing the signing of the treaty.96

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terpretation was obvious, but there was another which was not so clearbut which the astute German ambassador in Moscow promptly pointedout 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 thatStalin has set himself a foreign-policy goal of overwhelming importance . . .which he hopes to attain by his personal efforts. I firmly believe that in aninternational situation which he considers serious, Stalin has set himself thegoal of preserving the Soviet Union from a conflict with Germany."

Did the crafty Soviet dictator not realize by now—the middle of May1941—that this was an impossible goal, that there was nothing, short ofan abject surrender to Hitler, that he could do to attain it? He surelyknew the significance of Hitler’s conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece, ofthe presence of large masses of German troops in Rumania and Hungaryon his southwest borders, of the Wehrmacht build-up on his westernfrontier in Poland. The persistent rumors in Moscow itself surely reachedhim. By the beginning of May what Schulenburg called in a dispatch onthe second day of that month “rumors of an imminent German-Russianmilitary showdown” were so rife in the Soviet capital that he and his offi-cials in the German Embassy were having difficulty in combating them.

Please bear in mind [he advised Berlin] that attempts to counteract theserumors here in Moscow must necessarily remain ineffectual if such rumorsincessantly reach here from Germany, and if every traveler who comes toMoscow, or travels through Moscow, not only brings these rumors along, butcan even confirm them by citing facts.100

The veteran ambassador was getting suspicious himself. He was in-structed by Berlin to continue to deny the rumors, and to spread it aboutthat not only was there no concentration of German troops on Russia’sfrontiers but that actually considerable forces (eight divisions, he was toldfor his “personal information”) were being transferred from “east towest.”101 Perhaps these instructions only confirmed the ambassador’suneasiness, since by this time the press throughout the world was be-ginning to trumpet the German military build-up along the Soviet borders.

But long before this, Stalin had received specific warnings of Hitler’splans, and apparently paid no attention to them. The most serious onecame from the government of the United States.

Early in January 1941, the U.S. commercial attache in Berlin, Sam E.Woods, had sent a confidential report to the State Department statingthat he had learned from trustworthy German sources that Hitler was mak-ing plans to attack Russia in the spring. It was a long and detailed mes-sage, outlining the General Staff plan of attack (which proved to be quite

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accurate) and the preparations being made for the economic exploitationof the Soviet Union, once it was conquered.*

Secretary of Sta e Cordell Hull thought at first that Woods had beenvictim 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 ofhis sources, both in various ministries in Berlin and in the German Gen-eral S aff, and on being checked they were adjudged in Washington to bemen who ought to know what was up and anti-Nazi enough to tattle. De-spite the strained relations then existing between the American and Sovietgovernments Hull decided to inform the Russians, requesting Undersecre-tary of State Sumner Welles to communica’e the substance of the report toAmbassador Constantine Oumansky. This was done on March 20.

Mr. Oumansky turned very white [Welles later wrote]. He was silent fora moment and then merely said: “I fully realize the gravity of the message youhave given me. My government will be grateful for your confidence andI will inform it immediately of our conversation.”102

If it was grateful, indeed if it ever believed this timely intelligence, itnever communicated any inkling to the American government. In fact,as Secretary Hull has related in his memoirs, Moscow grew more hostileand truculent because America’s support of Britain made it impossible tosupply Russia with all the materials it demanded. Nevertheless, accordingto Hull, the State Department, having received dispatches from its lega-tions in Bucharest and S ockholm the first week in June stating that Ger-many would invade Russia within a fortnight, forwarded copies of themto Ambassador Steinhardt in Moscow, who turned them over to Molotov.

Churchill too sought to warn Stalin. On April 3 he asked his ambassa-dor in Moscow, Sir Stafford Cripps, to deliver a personal note to the dic-tator pointing out the significance to Russia of German troop movementsin sou hern Poland which he had learned of through a British agent.

* Sam Woods, a genial extrovert whose grasp of world politics and history was notstriking, seems to those of us who knew him and liked him the last man in theAmerican Embassy in Berlin likely to have come by such crucial intelligence. Someof his colleagues in the embassy still doubt that he did. But Cordell Hull has con-firmed it in his memoirs and disclosed the details. Woods, the late Secretary of Staterelates, 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 informedWoods of conferences taking place at Hitler’s headquarters concerning preparationsfor an attack on the Soviet Union. From then on this informant kept the commer-cial attache an couranl of what was transpiring both at the General Staff andamong those planning the economic spoliation of Russia. To avoid detection,Woods met his informant in various movie houses in Berlin and in the darkness re-ceived 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 Serv-ice officer at the embassy, who remained there, informs me that the embassy learnedfrom several sources of the coming attack on Russia. Two or three weeks beforethe assault, he says, our consul at Koenigsberg, Kuykendall, relayed a report speci-fying correctly the exact day it would begin.

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Cripps’ delay in delivering the message still vexed Churchill when hewrote about the incident years later in his memoirs.103

Before the end of April, Cripps knew the date set for the German attack,and ihe Germans knew he knew it. On April 24, the German naval at-tache in Moscow sent a curt message to the Navy High Command in Ber-lin:

The British Ambassador predicts June 22 as the day of the outbreak of thewar.10i

This message, which is among the captured Nazi papers, was recordedin the German Naval Diary on the same day, with an exclamation pointadded at the end.103 The admirals were surprised at the accuracy of theBritish envoy’s prediction. The poor naval attache, who, like the ambas-sador in Moscow, had not been let in on the secret, added in his dispatchthat it was “manifestly absurd.”

Molotov must have thought so too. A month later, on May 22, he re-ceived 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 Molo'ov, “the two strongest menin ’he Soviet Union,” were striving “above all” to avoid a conflict withGermany.100

On one point the usually perspicacious ambassador couldn’t have beenmore wrong. Molotov, at this juncture, was certainly not “well-informed.”But nei her was the ambassador.

The extent to which the Russian Foreign Commissar was ill-informedwas given public expression on June 14, 1941, just a week before theGerman blow fell. Molotov called in Schulenburg that evening andhanded him the text of a Tass statement which, he said, was being broad-cast that very night and published in the newspapers the next morning.107Blaming Cripps personally for the “widespread rumors of ‘an impendingwar 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 “ob-vious absurdity ... a clumsy propaganda maneuver of the forces ar-rayed 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 founda-tion.

Even the recent German troop movements from the Balkans to theSoviet frontiers were explained in the communique as “having no connec-tion with Soviet-German relations.” As for the rumors saying that Rus-sia would attack Germany, they were “false and provocative.”

The irony of the Tass communique on behalf of the Soviet government

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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 asecret message on June 15 to Budapest warning the Hungarian govern-ment “to take steps to secure its frontiers.”

In view of the heavy concentration of Russian troops at the German easternborder, the Fuehrer will probably be compelled, by the beginning of July atthe latest, to clarify German-Russian relations and in this connection to makecertain demands.108

The Germans were tipping off the Hungarians, but not their principalally. When Ciano the next day, during a gondola ride on the canals ofVenice, 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 islocked in the impenetrable bosom of the Fuehrer. However, one thing iscertain: if we attack them, the Russia of Stalin will be erased from the mapwithin eight weeks.”*

While the Kremlin was smugly preparing to broadcast to the world onJune 14, 1941, that the rumors of a German attack on Russia were an“obvious absurdity,” Adolf Hitler that very day was having his final bigwar conference on Barbarossa with the leading officers of the Wehrmacht.The timetable for the massing of troops in the East and their deploymentto the jumping-off positions had been put in operation on May 22. A re-vised version of the timetable was issued a few days later.109 It is a longand detailed document and shows that by the beginning of June not onlywere all plans for the onslaught on Russia complete but the vast and com-plicated movement of troops, artillery, armor, planes, ships and supplieswas well under way and on schedule. A brief item in the Naval War Diaryfor May 29 states: “The preparatory movements of warships for Barba-rossa has begun.” Talks with the general staffs of Rumania, Hungary andFinland—the last country anxious now to win back what had been takenfrom her by the Russians in the winter war—were completed. On June 9from Berchtesgaden Hitler sent out an order convoking the commandersin chief of the three Armed Services and the top field generals for a finalall-day meeting on Barbarossa in Berlin on June 14.

Despite the enormity of the task, not only Hitler but his generals werein a confident mood as they went over last-minute details of the mostgigan ic military operation in history—an all-out attack on a front stretch-

* This is from the last diary entry of Ciano, made on December 23, 1943, in Cell 27of the Verona jail, a few days before he was executed. He added that the Italiangovernment learned of the German invasion of Russia a half hour after it began.(Ciano Diaries, p. 583.)

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ing some 1,500 miles from the Arctic Ocean at Petsamo to the Black Sea.The night before, Brauchitsch had returned to Berlin from an inspectionof the build-up in the East. Haider noted in his diary that the Army Com-mander in Chief was highly pleased. Officers and men, he said, were intop shape and ready.

This last military powwow on June 14 lasted from 11 a.m. until 6:30p.m. It was broken by lunch at 2 p.m., at which Hitler gave his generalsyet another of his fiery, eve-of-lhe-battle pep talks.110 According to Hai-der, it was “a comprehensive political speech,” with Hitler stressing thathe had to attack Russia because her fall would force England to “give up.”But the bloodthirsty Fuehrer must have emphasized something else evenmore. Keitel told about it during direct examination on the stand at Nu-remberg.

The main theme was that this was the decisive battle between two ideologiesand that the practices which we knew as soldiers—the only correct ones underinternational law—had to be measured by completely different standards.

Hitler thereupon, said Keitel, gave various orders for carrying out anunprecedented 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. Nordid any of the other generals, he added. *

It is almost inconceivable but nevertheless true that the men in theKremlin, for all the reputation they had of being suspicious, crafty andhardheaded, and despite all the evidence and all the warnings that stared!hem 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-

HaSS?l-I confirms this. Writing in his diary two days later, June 16. he remarks:

Brauchitsch and Haider have already agreed to Hitler’s tactics [in Russia], Thus theArmy must assume the onus of the murders and burnings which up to now havebeen confined to the S.S.” or

At first the anti-Nazi “conspirators” had naively believed that Hitler’s terror orderstor Russia might shock the generals into joining an anti-Nazi revolt. But by June 16Hassell himself is disillusioned. His diary entry for that date begins:

A series of conferences with Popitz, Goerdeler, Beck and Oster to considerwhether certain orders which the Army commanders have received (but whichthey have not as yet issued) might suffice to open the eyes of the military leadersto the nature of the regime for which they are fighting. These orders concernbrutal . . measures the troops are to take against the Bolsheviks when Russiais invaded.

We came to the conclusion that nothing was to be hoped for now . . . They[the generals] delude themselves , . . Hopeless sergeant majors! \The VonHassell Diaries, pp. 198-99.] J 1

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German ambassador at his office in the Kremlin and delivered his “finalfatuity.”* After mentioning further border violations by German air-craft, which he said he had instructed the Soviet ambassador in Berlin tobring to the attention of Ribbentrop, Molotov turned to another subject,which Schulenburg described in an urgent telegram to the Wilhelmstrassethat same night:

There were a number of indications [Molotov had told him] that the GermanGovernment was dissatisfied with the Soviet Government. Rumors wereeven current that a war was impending between Germany and the SovietUnion . . . The Soviet Government was unable to understand the reasons forGermany’s dissatisfaction ... He would appreciate it if I could tell him whathad brought about the present situation in German-Soviet relations.

I replied [Schulenburg added] that I could not answer his questions, as Ilacked the pertinent information.111

He was soon to get it.

For on its way to him over the air waves between Berlin and Moscowwas 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 bedestroyed. The radio set is to be put out of commission.

Please inform Herr Molotov at once that you have an urgent communica-tion to make to him . . . Then please make the following declaration to him.

It was a familiar declaration, strewn with all the shopworn lies andfabrications at which Hitler and Ribbentrop had become so expert andwhich they had concocted so often before to justify each fresh act of un-provoked aggression. Perhaps—at least such is the impression this writergets in rereading it—it somewhat topped all the previous ones for sheereffrontery and deceit. While Germany had loyally abided by the Nazi-Soviet Pact, it said, Russia had repeatedly broken it. The U.S.S.R. hadpracticed “sabotage, terrorism and espionage” against Germany. It had“combated the German attempt to set up a stable order in Europe.” Ithad conspired with Britain “for an attack against the German troops inRumania and Bulgaria.” By concentrating “all available Russian forceson a long front from the Baltic to the Black Sea,” it had “menaced” theReich.

Reports received the last few days [it went on] eliminate the last remainingdoubts as to the aggressive character of this Russian concentration ... Inaddition, there are reports from England regarding the negotiations of Ambas-

* The expression is Churchill’s.

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sador Cripps for still closer political and military collaboration betweenEngland and the Soviet Union.

To sum up, the Government of the Reich declares, therefore, that the SovietGovernment, contrary to the obligations it assumed,

1. has not only continued, but even intensified its attempts to undermineGermany 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 isabout to attack Germany from the rear in its struggle for life. The Fuehrerhas therefore ordered the German Armed Forces to oppose this threat with allthe means at their disposal.112

“Please do not enter into any discussion of this communication,” Rib-bentrop advised his ambassador at the end. What could the shaken anddisillusioned Schulenburg, who had devoted the best years of his life toimproving German-Russian relations and who knew that the attack onthe Soviet Union was unprovoked and without justification, say? Arriv-ing back at the Kremlin just as dawn was breaking, he contented himselfwith reading the German declaration. * Molotov, stunned at last, listenedin 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 theWilhelmstrasse in Berlin. All afternoon on June 21, the Soviet ambassa-dor, Vladimir Dekanozov, had been telephoning the Foreign Office askingfor an appointment with Ribbentrop so that he could deliver his little pro-test against further border violations by German planes. He was told thatthe Nazi Foreign Minister was “out of town.” Then at 2 a.m. on thetwenty-second he was informed that Ribbentrop would receive him at4 a.m. at the Foreign Office. There the envoy, who had been a deputyforeign commissar, a hatchetman for Stalin and the troubleshooter whohad arranged the taking over of Lithuania, received, like Molotov in Mos-cow, the shock of his life. Dr. Schmidt, who was present, has described thescene.

I had never seen Ribbentrop so excited as he was in the five minutes beforeDekanozov’s arrival. He walked up and down his room like a caged ani-mal . . .

* Thus ended the veteran ambassador’s diplomatic career. Returning to Germanyand 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 ananti-Hitler regime. Hassell reported Schulenburg in 1943 as being willing to crossthe 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.) Schulen-burg was arrested and imprisoned after the July 1944 plot against Hitler and exe-cuted by the Gestapo on November 10.

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Dekanozov was shown in and, obviously not guessing anything was amiss,held out his hand to Ribbentrop. We sat down and . . . Dekanozov pro-ceeded to put on behalf of his Government certain questions that neededclarification. But he had hardly begun before Ribbentrop, with a stonyexpression, interrupted, saying: “That’s not the question now” . . .

The arrogant Nazi Foreign Minister thereupon explained what the ques-tion was, gave the ambassador a copy of the memorandum which Schulen-burg at that moment was reading out to Molotov, and informed him thatGerman troops were at that instant taking “military countermeasures” onthe Soviet frontier. The startled Soviet envoy, says Schmidt, “recoveredhis composure quickly and expressed his deep regret” at the developments,for which he blamed Germany. “He rose, bowed perfunctorily and left theroom 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 andthe Wilhelmstrasse, the roar of Hitler’s guns along hundreds of miles offront had blasted it forever.

There was one other diplomatic prelude to the cannonade. On theafternoon of June 21, Hitler sat down at his desk in his new undergroundheadquarters, Wolfsschanze (Wolfs Lair), near Rastenburg in a gloomyforest of East Prussia, and dictated a long letter to Mussolini. As in thepreparation of all his other aggressions he had not trusted his good friendand 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 andauthentic 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 wayfor his end and that of the Third Reich. The letter, to be sure, is full ofHitler’s customary lies and evasions which he tried to fob off even on hisfriends. But beneath them, and between them, there emerges his funda-mental reasoning and his true—if mistaken—estimate of the world situa-tion 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 delibera-tion and continuous nerve-racking waiting are ending in the hardest decisionof my life.

The situation:* England has lost this war. Like a drowning person, shegrasps at every straw. Nevertheless, some of her hopes are naturally not with-out a certain logic . . . The destruction of France . . . has directed theglances of the British warmongers continually to the place from which theytried to start the war: to Soviet Russia.

Both countries, Soviet Russia and England, are equally interested in a

* Hitler’s emphasis.

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Europe . . . rendered prostrate by a long war. Behind these two countriesstands the North American Union goading them on. . . .

Hitler next explained that with large Soviet military forces in his rearhe could never assemble the strength—“particularly in the air”—to makethe all-out attack on Britain which would bring her down.

Really, all available Russian forces are at our border ... If circumstancesshould give me cause to employ the German Air Force against England, thereis danger that Russia will then begin its strategy of extortion, to which I wouldhave to yield in silence simply from a feeling of air inferiority . . . Englandwill be all the less ready for peace for it will be able to pin its hopes on theRussian partner. Indeed this hope must naturally grow with the progress inpreparedness of the Russian armed forces. And behind this is the massdelivery of war material from America which they hope to get in 1942 . . .

I have therefore, after constantly racking my brains, finally reached thedecision to cut the noose before it can be drawn tight . . . My over-all viewis now as follows:

1. France is, as ever, not to be trusted.

2. North Africa itself, insofar as your colonies, Duce, are concerned, isprobably out of danger until fall.

3. Spain is irresolute and—I am afraid—will take sides only when theoutcome 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 rawmaterials is growing steadily more difficult. The martial spirit to make war,after all, lives only on hopes. These hopes are based solely on two assump-tions: Russia and America. We have no chance of eliminating America. Butit 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 thepossibility of a much stronger threat to American activities through Japaneseintervention.

I have decided under these circumstances to put an end to the hypocriticalperformance in the Kremlin.

Germany, Hitler said, would not need any Italian troops in Russia. (Hewas not going to share the glory of conquering Russia any more than hehad shared the conquest of France.) But Italy, he declared, could “givedecisive aid” by strengthening its forces in North Africa and by preparing“to march into France in case of a French violation of the treaty.” Thiswas a fine bait for the land-hungry Duce.

So far as the air war on England is concerned, we shall, for a time, remainon the defensive . . .

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As for the war in the East, Duce, it will surely be difficult, but I do notentertain a second’s doubt as to its great success. I hope, above all, that it willthen be possible for us to secure a common food-supply base in the Ukrainewhich 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 be-cause the final decision itself will not be made until 7 o’clock tonight . . .

Whatever may come, Duce, our situation cannot become worse as a resultof this step; it can only improve . . . Should England nevertheless not drawany conclusions from the hard facts, then we can, with our rear secured, applyourselves with increased strength to the dispatching of our enemy.

Finally Hitler described his great feeling of relief at having finally madeup his mind.

. . . Let me say one more thing, Duce. Since I struggled through to thisdecision, 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 concilia-tion, was nevertheless often very irksome to me, for in some way or other itseemed to me to be a break with my whole origin, my concepts and my formerobligations. 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 theGerman troops jumped off, Ambassador von Bismarck awakened Ciano inRome to deliver Hitler’s long missive, which the Italian Foreign Ministerthen telephoned to Mussolini, who was resting at his summer place atRiccione. It was not the first time that the Duce had been wakened fromhis 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,” Mussolinifret ed to Ciano, “but the Germans make me jump out of bed at any hourwithout the least consideration.”115 Nevertheless, as soon as Mussolinihad rubbed the sleep from his eyes he gave orders for an immediate decla-ration of war on the Soviet Union. He was now completely a prisoner ofthe Germans. He knew it and resented it. “I hope for only one thing,” hetold Ciano, “that in this war in the East the Germans lose a lot of feath-ers.”116 Still, he realized that his own future now depended wholly onGerman arms. The Germans would win in Russia, he was sure, but hehoped that at least they would get a bloody nose.

He could not know, nor did he suspect, nor did anyone else in theWest, on either side, that they would get much worse. On Sunday morn-ing, June 22, the day Napoleon had crossed the Niemen in: 1812 on his.

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way to Moscow, and exactly a year after Napoleon’s country, France, hadcapitulated at Compiegne, Adolf Hitler’s armored, mechanized and hith-erto invincible armies poured across the Niemen and various other riversand penetrated swiftly into Russia. The Red Army, despite all the warn-ings and the warning signs, was, as General Haider noted in his diary thefirst day, “tactically surprised along the entire front.”* All the firstbridges were captured intact. In fact, says Haider, at most places alongthe border the Russians were not even deployed for action and were over-run before they could organize resistance. Hundreds of Soviet planeswere destroyed on the flying fields.t Within a few days tens of thousandsof prisoners began to pour in; whole armies were quickly encircled. Itseemed like the Feldzug in Polen all over again.

“It is hardly too much to say,” the usually cautious Haider noted in hisdiary on July 3 after going over the latest General S'aff reports, “that theFeldzug against Russia has been won in fourteen days.” In a matter ofweeks, he added, it would all be over.

* There is a curious notation in Haider’s diary that first day. After mentioning thatat noon the Russian radio stations, which the Germans were monitoring, had comeback on the air he writes: “They have asked Japan to mediate the political and eco-nomic differences between Russia and Germany, and remain in active contact withthe German Foreign Office.” Did Stalin believe—nine hours after the attack—thathe somehow might get it called off?

t General Guenther Blumentritt, chief of staff of the Fourth Army, later recalledthat a little after midnight on the twenty-first, when the German artillery had alreadyzeroed on its targets, the Berlin-Moscow express train chugged through the Germanlines on the Bug and across the river into Brest Litovsk “without incident.” It struckhim as a “weird moment.” Almost equally weird to him was that the Russian artil-lery did not respond even when the assault began. “The Russians,” he subsequentlywrote, “were taken entirely by surprise on our front.” As dawn broke German signalstations picked up the Red Army radio networks. “We are being fired on. Whatshall we do?” Blumentritt quotes one Russian message as saying. Back came theanswer from headquarters: “You must be insane. And why is your signal not incode?” (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 wasfinished.

Within three weeks of the opening of the campaign, Field Marshal vonBock’s Army Group Center, with thirty infantry divisions and fifteenpanzer or motorized divisions, had pushed 450 miles from Bialystok toSmolensk. Moscow lay but 200 miles farther east along the high roadwhich Napoleon had taken in 1812. To the north Field Marshal vonLeeb’s army group, twenty-one infantry and six armored divisions strong,was moving rapidly up through the Baltic States toward Leningrad. Tothe south Field Marshal von Rundstedt’s army group of twenty-five in-fantry, four motorized, four mountain and five panzer divisions was ad-vancing toward the Dnieper River and Kiev, capital of the fertile Ukraine,which Hitler coveted.

So planmaessig (according to plan), as the OKW communiques put it,was the German progress along a thousand-mile front from the Baltic tothe Black Sea, and so confident was the Nazi dictator that it would con-tinue at an accelerated pace as one Soviet army after another was sur-rounded or dispersed, that on July 14, a bare three weeks after the in-vasion had begun, he issued a directive advising that the strength of theArmy could be “considerably reduced in the near future” and that arma-ment production would be concentrated on naval ships and Luftwaffeplanes, especially the latter, for the conduct of the war against the lastremaining enemy, Britain, and—he added—“against America should thecase arise.”1 By the end of September he instructed the High Commandto prepare to disband forty infantry divisions so that this additional man-power could be utilized by industry.2

Russia’s two greatest cities, Leningrad, which Peter the Great hadbuilt as the capital on the Baltic, and Moscow, the ancient and nowBolshevik capital, seemed to Hitler about to fall. On September 18 heissued strict orders: “A capitulation of Leningrad or Moscow is not to be

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accepted, even if offered.”3 What was to happen to them he made clearto his commanders in a directive of September 29:

The Fuehrer has decided to have St. Petersburg [Leningrad] wiped off theface of the earth.* The further existence of this large city is of no interest onceSoviet Russia is overthrown . . .

The intention is to close in on the city and raze it to the ground by artilleryand by continuous air attack . . .

Requests that the city be taken over will be turned down, for the problemof the survival of the population and of supplying it with food is one whichcannot and should not be solved by us. In this war for existence we have nointerest in keeping even part of this great city’s population.t4

That same week, on October 3, Hitler returned to Berlin and in anaddress to the German people proclaimed the collapse of the Soviet Union.I declare today, and I declare it without any reservation,” he said, “thatthe enemy in the East has been struck down and will never rise againBehind our troops there already lies a territory twice the size of theGerman Reich when 1 came to power in 1933.”

When on October 8, Orel, a key city south of Moscow, fell. Hitler senthis press chief, Otto Dietrich, flying back to Berlin, to tell the correspond-ents of the world’s leading newspapers there the next day that the lastintact Soviet armies, those of Marshal Timoshenko, defending Moscow,were locked in two steel German pockets before the capital; that thesouthern armies of Marshal Budenny were routed and dispersed; and thatsixty to seventy divisions of Marshal Voroshilov’s army were surroundedin Leningrad.

“For all military purposes,” Dietrich concluded smugly, “Soviet Russiais done with. The British dream of a two-front war is dead.”

These public boasts of Hitler and Dietrich were, to say !he least, pre-mature. J In reality the Russians, despite the surprise with which theywere taken on June 22, their subsequent heavy losses in men and equip-ment, their rapid withdrawal and the entrapment of some of their bestarmies, had begun in July to put up a mounting resistance such as the

* Emphasis in the original.

t A few weeks later Goering told Ciano, "This year between twenty and thirty mil-lion persons will die of hunger in Russia. Perhaps it is well that it should be so, forcertain nations must be decimated. But even if it were not, nothing can be doneabout it. It is obvious that if humanity is condemned to die of hunger, the last todie will be our two peoples ... In the camps for Russian prisoners they have be-gun to eat each other.” (Ciuno’s Diplomatic Papers, pp. 464-65.)t Not as premature, however, as the warnings of the American General Staff, whichin July had confidentially informed American editors and Washington correspond-ents that the collapse of the Soviet Union was only a matter of a few weeks. It isnot surprising that the declarations of Hitler and Dr. Dietrich early in October 1941were widely believed in the United States and Britain as well as in Germany andelsewhere.

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Wehrmacht had never encountered before. Haider’s diary and the reportsof such front-line commanders as General Guderian, who led a largepanzer group on the central front, began to be peppered—and then laden—with accounts of severe fighting, desperate Russian stands and counter-attacks 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 behaviorof the Poles and the Western Allies in defeat. Even when encircled theRussians stood their ground and fought.”5 And there proved to be moreof them, and with better equipment, than Adolf Hitler had dreamed waspossible. Fresh Soviet divisions which German intelligence had no inklingof were continually being thrown into battle. “It is becoming ever clearer,”Haider wrote in his diary on August 11, “that we underestimated thestrength of the Russian colossus not only in the economic and transporta-tion sphere but above all in the military. At the beginning we reckonedwith some 200 enemy divisions and we have already identified 360. Whena dozen of them are destroyed the Russians throw in another dozen. Onthis broad expanse our front is too thin. It has no depth. As a result, therepeated enemy attacks often meet with some success.” Rundstedt putit bluntly to Allied interrogators after the war. “I realized,” he said, “soonaf er the attack was begun that everything that had been written aboutRussia was nonsense.”

Several generals, Guderian, Blumentritt and Sepp Dietrich among them,have left reports expressing astonishment at their first encounter with theRussian T-34 tank, of which they had not previously heard and whichwas so heavily armored that the shells from the German antitank gunsbounced harmlessly off it. The appearance of this panzer, Blumentrittsaid later, marked the beginning of what came to be called the “tankterror.” Also, for the first time in the war, the Germans did not have thebenefit of overwhelming superiority in the air to protect their ground troopsand scout ahead. Despite the heavy losses on the ground in the first day ofthe campaign and in early combat, Soviet fighter planes kept appearing,like the fresh divisions, out of nowhere. Moreover, the swiftness of theGerman advance and the lack of suitable airfields in Russia left theGerman fighter bases too far back to provide effective cover at the front.“At several stages in the advance,” General von Kleist later reported, “mypanzer forces were handicapped through lack of cover overhead.”8

There was another German miscalculation about the Russians whichKleist mentioned to Liddell Hart and which, of course, was shared bymost of the other peoples of the West that summer.

“Hopes of victory,” Kleist said, “were largely built on the prospect thatthe invasion would produce a political upheaval in Russia . . . Too highhopes were built on the belief that Stalin would be overthrown by his ownpeople if he suffered heavy defeats. The belief was fostered by theFuehrer’s political advisers.”7

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Indeed Hitler had told Jodi, “We have only to kick in the door and thewhole rotten structure will come crashing down.”

The opportunity to kick in the door seemed to the Fuehrer to be at handhalfway through July when there occurred the first great controversy overstrategy in the German High Command and led to a decision by theFuehrer, over the protests of most of the top generals, which Haiderthought proved to be “the greatest strategic blunder of the Easterncampaign.” The issue was simple but fundamental. Should Bock’s ArmyGroup Center, the most powerful and so far the most successful of thethree main German armies, push on the two hundred miles to Moscowfrom Smolensk, which it had reached on July 16? Or should the originalplan, which Hitler had laid down in the December 18 directive, and whichcalled 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 Haider and sup-ported by Bock, whose central army group was moving up the main high-way to Moscow, and by Guderian, whose panzer forces were leading it,insisted on an all-out drive for the Soviet capital. There was much moreto their argument than merely stressing the psychological value of captur-ing the enemy capital. Moscow, they pointed out to Hitler, was a vitalsource of armament production and, even more important, the center ofthe Russian transportation and communications system. Take it, and theSoviets would not only be deprived of an essential source of arms butwould be unable to move troops and supplies to the distant fronts, whichthereafter would weaken, wither and collapse.

But there was a final conclusive argument which the generals advancedto the former corporal who was now their Supreme Commander. Alltheir intelligence reports showed that the main Russian forces were nowbeing concentrated before Moscow for an all-out defense of the capital.Just east of Smolensk a Soviet army of half a million men, which hadextricated itself from Bock’s double envelopment, was digging in to barfurther German progress toward the capital.

The center of gravity of Russian strength [Haider wrote in a report preparedfor the Allies immediately after the war]8 was therefore in front of ArmyGroup Center . . .

The General Staff had been brought up with the idea that it must be the aimof an operation to defeat the military power of the enemy, and it therefore con-sidered the next and most pressing task to be to defeat the forces of Timoshenkoby concentrating all available forces at Army Group Center, to advance onMoscow, to take this nerve center of enemy resistance and to destroy the newenemy formations. The assembly for this attack had to be carried out as soonas possible because the season was advanced. Army Group North was in themeantime to fulfill its original mission and to try to contact the Finns. ArmyGroup South was to advance farther East to tie down the strongest possibleenemy force.

. . . After oral discussions between the General Staff and the Supreme

A Turn of the Tide

857

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 Haider’s diary, was done on August 18. “Theeffect,” says Haider, “was explosive.” Hitler had his hungry eyes on thefood belt and industrial areas of the Ukraine and on the Russian oil fieldsjust beyond in the Caucasus. Besides, he thought he saw a golden oppor-tunity to entrap Budenny’s armies east of the Dnieper beyond Kiev, whichstill held out. He also wanted to capture Leningrad and join up with theFinns in the north. To accomplish these twin aims, several infantry andpanzer divisions from Army Group Center would have to be detached andsent north and especially south. Moscow could wait.

On August 21, Hitler hurled a new directive at his rebellious GeneralStaff. Haider copied it out word for word in his diary the next day.

The proposals of the Army for the continuation of the operations in theEast do not accord with my intentions.

The most important objective to attain before the onset of winter is not thecapture of Moscow but the taking of the Crimea, the industrial and coal-miningareas of the Donets basin and the cutting off of Russian oil supplies from theCaucasus. In the north it is the locking up of Leningrad and the union withthe Finns.

The Soviet Fifth Army on the Dnieper in the south, whose stubbornresistance had annoyed Hitler for several days, must, he laid it down, beutterly destroyed, the Ukraine and the Crimea occupied, Leningrad sur-rounded and a junction with the Finns achieved. “Only then,” he con-cluded, “will the conditions be created whereby Timoshenko’s army canbe attacked and successfully defeated.”

Thus [commented Haider bitterly] the aim of defeating decisively the Rus-sian armies in front of Moscow was subordinated to the desire to obtain avaluable industrial area and to advance in the direction of Russian oil . . .Hitler now became obsessed with the idea of capturing both Leningrad andStalingrad, for he persuaded himself that if these two “holy cities of Com-munism” were to fall, Russia would collapse.

To add insult to injury to the field marshals and the generals who didnot appreciate his strategic genius, Hitler sent what Haider called a“countermemorandum” (to that of the Army of the eighteenth), whichthe General Staff Chief described as “full of insults,” such as stating thatthe Army High Command was full of “minds fossilized in out-of-datetheories.”

“Unbearable! Unheard of! The limit!” Haider snorted in his diary thenext day. He conferred all afternoon and evening with Field Marshal von

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Brauchitsch about the Fuehrer’s “inadmissible” mixing into the businessof the Army High Command and General Staff, finally proposing that thehead of the Army and he himself resign their posts. “Brauchitsch refused,”Haider noted, “because it wouldn’t be practical and would change noth-ing.” The gutless Field Marshal had already, as on so many other occa-sions, capitulated to the onetime corporal.

When General Guderian arrived at the Fuehrer’s headquarters thenext day, August 23, and was egged on by Haider to try to talk Hitler outof his disastrous decision, though the hard-bitten panzer leader needed nourging, he was met by Brauchitsch. “I forbid you,” the Army Commanderin Chief said, “to mention the question of Moscow to the Fuehrer. Theoperation to the south has been ordered. The problem now is simply howit is to be carried out. Discussion is pointless.”

Nevertheless, when Guderian was ushered into the presence of Hitler—neither Brauchitsch nor Haider accompanied him—he disobeyed ordersand 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 indetail the considerations which had led him to make a different decision. Hesaid that the raw materials and agriculture of the Ukraine were vitally necessaryfor the future prosecution of the war. He spoke of the need of neutralizingthe Crimea, “that Soviet aircraft carrier for attacking the Roumanian oilfields. For the first time I heard him use the phrase: “My generals knownothing about the economic aspects of war.” ... He had given strict ordersthat the attack on Kiev was to be the immediate strategic objective and allactions were to be carried out with that in mind. I here saw for the first timea spectacle with which I was later to become very familiar: all those present—Keitel, Jodi and others—nodded in agreement with every sentence that Hitleruttered, while I was left alone with my point of view . . ,8

But Haider had at no point in the previous discussions nodded his agree-ment. When Guderian saw him the next day and reported his failure toget Hitler to change his mind, he says the General Staff Chief “to myamazement suffered a complete nervous collapse, which led him to makeaccusations and imputations which were utterly unjustified.”*

This was the most severe crisis in the German military High Commandsince the beginning of the war. Worse were to follow, with adversity.

In itself Rundstedt’s offensive in the south, made possible by the rein-forcement of Guderian’s panzer forces and infantry divisions withdrawnfrom the central front, was, as Guderian put it, a great tactical victory.Kiev itself fell on September 19—German units had already penetrated150 miles beyond it—and on the twenty-sixth the Battle of Kiev ended

* Haider, in his diary of August 24, gives quite a different version. He accusesGuderian of irresponsibly” changing his mind after seeing Hitler and muses howuseless 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 hequickly recovered.

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with the encirclement and surrender of 665,000 Russian prisoners, accord-ing to the German claim. To Hitler it was “the greatest battle in thehistory of the world,” but though it was a singular achievement some of hisgenerals were more skeptical of its strategic significance. Bock’s armorlessarmy group in the center had been forced o cool its heels for two mon hsalon^ the Desna River just beyond Smolensk. The autumn rains, whichwould turn the Russian roads into quagmires, were drawing near. Andafter them—the winter, the cold and the snow.

THE GREAT DRIVE ON MOSCOW

Reluctantly Hitler gave in to the urging of Brauchitsch, Haider andBock and consented to the resumption of the drive on Moscow. But toolate! Haider saw him on the afternoon of September 5 and now theFuehrer, his mind made up, was in a hurry to get to the Kremlin. “Getstarted on the central front within eight to ten days,” the Supreme Com-mander ordered. (“Impossible!” Haider exclaimed in his diary.) “En-circle them, beat and destroy them,” Hitler added, promising to return toArmy 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 couldbe brought back, refitted and made ready. On October 2 the great offen-sive was finally launched. “Typhoon” was the code name. A mighty wind;a cyclone, was to hit the Russians, destroy their last fighting forces beforeMoscow 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 gaveorders that Field Marshal von Leeb in the north was at the same time tocapture Leningrad, make contact with the Finns beyond the city anddrive on and cut the Murmansk railway. Also, at the same time, Rundstedtwas to clear the Black Sea coast, take Rostov, seize the Maikop oil fieldsand push forward to Stalingrad on the Volga, thus severing Stalin’s lastlink with the Caucasus. When Rundstedt tried to explain to Hitler that thismeant an advance of more than four hundred miles beyond the Dnieper,with his left flank dangerously exposed, the Supreme Commander toldhim that the Russians in the south were now incapable of offering seriousresistance. Rundstedt, who says that he “laughed aloud” at such ridiculousorders, was soon to find the contrary.

The German drive along the old road which Napoleon had taken toMoscow at first rolled along with all the fury of a typhoon. In the firstfortnight of October, in what later Blumentritt called a “textbook battle,”'he Germans encircled two Soviet armies between Vyazma and Bryanskand claimed to have taken 650,000 prisoners along wilh 5,000 guns and1,200 anks. By October 20 German armored spearheads were withinforty miles of Moscow and the Soviet ministries and foreign embassies

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were hastily evacuating to Kuibyshev on the Volga. Even the soberHaider, who had fallen off his horse and broken a collarbone and wastemporarily hospitalized, now believed that with bold leadership andfavorable weather Moscow could be taken before the severe Russian winterset in.

The fall rains, however, had commenced. Rasputitza, the period ofmud, set in. The great army, moving on wheels, was slowed down andoften forced to halt. Tanks had to be withdrawn from battle to pull gunsand ammunition trucks out of the mire. Chains and couplings for this jobwere lacking and bundles of rope had to be dropped by Luftwaffe transportplanes which were badly needed for lifting other military supplies. Therains began in mid-October and, as Guderian later remembered, “the nextfew weeks were dominated by the mud.” General Blumentritt, chief ofstaff of Field Marshal von Kluge’s Fourth Army, which was in the thickof the battle for Moscow, has vividly described the predicament.

The infantryman slithers in the mud, while many teams of horses are neededto drag each gun forward. All wheeled vehicles sink up to their axles in theslime. Even tractors can only move with great difficulty. A large portion ofour heavy artillery was soon stuck fast . . . The strain that all this caused ouralready exhausted troops can perhaps be imagined.10

For the first time there crept into the diary of Haider and the reports ofGuderian, Blumentritt and other German generals signs of doubt and thenof despair. It spread to the lower officers and the troops in the field—orperhaps it stemmed from them. “And now, when Moscow was alreadyalmost in sight,” Blumentritt recalled, “the mood both of commanders andtroops began to change. Enemy resistance stiffened and the fighting be-came more bitter . . . Many of our companies were reduced to a meresixty or seventy men.” There was a shortage of serviceable artillery andtanks. “Winter,” he says, “was about to begin, but there was no sign ofwinter clothing . . . Far behind the front the first partisan units werebeginning 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, whichhad taken this same road to Moscow, and the memory of Napoleon’s fatebegan to haunt the dreams of the Nazi conquerors. The German generalsbegan to read, or reread, Caulaincourt’s grim account of the French con-queror’s disastrous winter in Russia in 1812.

Far to the south, where the weather was a little warmer but the rainand the mud were just as bad, things were not going well either. Kleist’stanks had entered Rostov at the mouth of the Don on November 21 amidstmuch fanfare from Dr. Goebbels’ propaganda band that the “gateway tothe Caucasus” had been opened. It did not remain open very long. BothKleist and Rundstedt realized that Rostov could not be held. Five dayslater the Russians retook it and the Germans, attacked on both the

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northern and southern flanks, were in headlong retreat back fifty miles tothe Mius River where Kleist and Rundstedt had wished in the first placeto establish a winter line.

The retreat from Rostov is another little turning point in the history ofthe Third Reich. Here was the first time that any Nazi army had eversuffered a major setback. “Our misfortunes began with Rostov,” Guderianafterward commented; “that was the writing on the wall.” It cost FieldMarshal von Rundstedt, the senior officer in the German Army, his com-mand. 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 im-mediately wired back: “It is madness to attempt to hold. In the first placethe troops cannot do it and in the second place if they do not retreat they willbe destroyed. I repeat that this order be rescinded or that you find someoneelse.” That same night the Fuehrer’s reply arrived: “I am acceding to yourrequest. Please give up your command.”

“I then,” said Rundstedt, “went home.”*11

This mania for ordering distant troops to stand fast no matter what theirperil perhaps saved the German Army from complete collapse in theshattering months ahead, though many generals dispute it, but it was tolead to Stalingrad and other disasters and to help seal Hitler’s fate.

Heavy snows and subzero temperatures came early that winter inRussia. Guderian noted the first snow on the night of October 6-7, justas the drive on Moscow was being resumed. It reminded him to ask head-quarters again for winter clothing, especially for heavy boots and heavywool socks. On October 12 he recorded the snow as still falling. OnNovember 3 came the first cold wave, the thermometer dropping belowthe freezing point and continuing to fall. By the seventh Guderian wasreporting the first “severe cases of frostbite” in his ranks and on the

* “Groesste Aufregung (greatest excitement) by the Fuehrer,” Haider noted in hisdiary on November 30 in describing Rundstedt’s retreat to the Mius and Hitler’s dis-missal of the Field Marshal. “The Fuehrer calls in Brauchitsch and hurls reproachesand abuse at him.” Haider had begun his diary that day by noting the figures ofGerman casualties up to November 26. “Total losses of the Eastern armies (notcounting the sick), 743,112 officers and men—23 per cent of the entire force of3.2 million.”

On December 1, Haider recorded the replacement of Rundstedt by Reichenau, whostill commanded the Sixth Army, which he had led in France and which had beenhaving a hard time of it to the north of Kleist’s armored divisions, which were re-treating from Rostov.

“Reichenau phones the Fuehrer,” Haider wrote, “and asks permission to with-draw tonight to the Mius line. Permission is given. So we are exactly where wewere yesterday. But time and strength have been sacrificed and Rundstedt lost.

“The health of Brauchitsch,” he added, “as the result of the continuing excite-ment is again causing anxiety.” On November 10 Haider had recorded that theArmy chief had suffered a severe heart attack.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

thirteenth that the temperature had fallen to 8 degrees below zero, Fahren-heit, 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 thetank 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. Fuelwas 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 our37-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 asBogorodsk. This was the first time that such a thing had occurred duringthe Russian campaign, and it was a warning that the combat ability of ourinfantry was at an end.”

But not only of the infantry. On November 21 Haider scribbled in hisdiary that Guderian had telephoned to say that his panzer troops “hadreached their end.” This tough, aggressive tank commander admits thaton this very day he decided to visit the commander of Army Group CenterBock and request that the orders he had received be changed, since hecould see no way of carrying them out.” He was in a deep mood ofdepression, writing on the same day:

The icy cold, the lack of shelter, the shortage of clothing, the heavy lossesof men and equipment, the wretched state of our fuel supplies—all this makesthe duties of a commander a misery, and the longer it goes on the more I amcrushed 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 ofour misery and felt the icy wind that blew across it, burying in snow everyobject in its path; who drove for hour after hour through that no-man’s landonly 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 nowoccurred.14

Those events may now be briefly narrated, but not without first stressingone point: terrible as the Russian winter was and granted that the Soviettroops were naturally better prepared for it than the German, the mainfactor in what is now to be set down was not the weather but the fiercelighting of the Red Army troops and their indomitable will not to give up.Tne diary of Haider and the reports of the field commanders, which con-stantly express amazement at the ex,ent and severity of Russian attacks

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and counterattacks and despair at the German setbacks and losses, areproof of that. The Nazi generals could not understand why the Russians,considering the nature of their tyrannical regime and the disastrous effectsof the first German blows, did not collapse, as had the French and somany others with less excuse.

“With amazement and disappointment,” Blumentritt wrote, “we dis-covered in late October and early November that the beaten Russiansseemed quite unaware that as a military force they had almost ceased toexist.” Guderian tells of meeting an old retired Czarist general at Orel onthe road to Moscow.

“If only you had come twenty years ago [he told the panzer General], weshould have welcomed you with open arms. But now it’s too late. We werejust beginning to get on our feet, and now you arrive and throw us back twentyyears so that we will have to start from the beginning all over again. Now weare fighting for Russia and in that cause we are all united.”15

Yet, as November approached its end amidst fresh blizzards and con-tinued subzero temperatures, Moscow seemed within grasp to Hitler andmost of his generals. North, south and west of the capital German armieshad reached points within twenty to thirty miles of their goal. To Hitlerporing over the map at his headquarters far off in East Prussia the laststretch seemed no distance at all. His armies had advanced five hundredmiles; they had only twenty to thirty miles to go. “One final heave,” hetold Jodi in mid-November, “and we shall triumph.” On the telephoneto Haider on November 22, Field Marshal von Bock, directing ArmyGroup Center in its final push for Moscow, compared the situation to theBattle of the Marne, “where the last battalion thrown in decided thebattle.” Despite increased enemy resistance Bock told the General StaffChief he believed “everything was attainable.” By the last day of No-vember he was literally throwing in his last battalion. The final all-outattack on the heart of the Soviet Union was set for the next day, December1, 1941.

It stumbled on a steely resistance. The greatest tank force ever con-centrated on one front: General Hoepner’s Fourth Tank Group and Gen-eral Hermann Hoth’s Third Tank Group just north of Moscow and drivingsouth, Guderian’s Second Panzer Army just to the south of the capital andpushing north from Tula, Kluge’s great Fourth Army in the middle andfighting its way due east through the forests that surrounded the city—onthis formidable array were pinned Hitler’s high hopes. By December 2a reconnaissance battalion of the 258th Infantry Division had penetratedto 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 motleyforce of hastily mobilized workers from the city’s factories. This was thenearest the German troops ever got to Moscow; it was their first and lastglimpse of the Kremlin.

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Already on the evening of December 1, Bock, who was now sufferingsevere stomach cramps, had telephoned Haider to say that he could nolonger “operate” with his weakened troops. The General Staff Chief hadtried to cheer him on. “One must try,” he said, “to bring the enemy downby a last expenditure of force. If that proves impossible then we will haveto draw new conclusions.” The next day Haider jo'tcd in his diary:“Enemy resistance has reached its peak.” On the following day, December3, Bock was again on the phone to the Chief of the General Staff, who notedhis message in his diary:

Spearheads of the Fourth Army again pulled back because the flanks couldnot come forward . . . The moment must be faced when the strength of ourtroops is at an end.

When Bock spoke for the first time of going over to the defensive Haidertried 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 hadbeen halted in its attempt to take Moscow from the south, reported thatthe thermometer had fallen to 31 degrees below zero. The next day itdropped another five degrees. His tanks, he said, were “almost im-mobilized” and he was threatened on his flanks and in the rear north ofTula.

December 5 was the critical day. Everywhere along the 200-mile semi-circular front around Moscow the Germans had been stopped. By eveningGuderian was notifying Bock that he was not only stopped but must pullback, and Bock was telephoning Haider that “his strength was at an end,”and Brauchitsch was telling his Chief of the General Staff in despair thathe was quitting as Commander in Chief of the Army. It was a dark andbitter day for the German generals.

This was the first time [Guderian later wrote] that I had to take a decisionof this sort, and none was more difficult . . . Our attack on Moscow hadbroken down. All the sacrifices and endurance of our brave troops had beenin 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, hewrote: “Our hopes of knocking Russia out of the war in 1941 had beendashed at the very last minute.”

The next day, December 6, General Georgi Zhukov, who had replacedMarshal Timoshenko as commander of the central front but six weeksbefore, struck. On the 200-mile front before Moscow he unleashed sevenarmies and two cavalry corps—100 divisions in all—consisting of troopsthat were either fresh or battle-tried and were equipped and trained tofight in the bitter cold and the deep snow. The blow which this relativelyunknown general now delivered with such a formidable force of infantry,

A Turn of the Tide 865

artillery, tanks, cavalry and planes, which Hitler had not faintly suspectedexisted, was so sudden and so shattering that the German Army and theThird Reich never fully recovered from it. For a few weeks during therest of that cold and bitter December and on into January it seemed thatthe beaten and retreating German armies, their front continually piercedby Soviet breakthroughs, might disintegrate and perish in the Russiansnows, as had Napoleon’s Grand Army just 130 years before. At severalcrucial moments it came very close to that. Perhaps it was Hitler’s granitewill and determination and certainly it was the fortitude of the Germansoldier that saved the armies of the Third Reich from a complete debacle.

But the failure was great. The Red armies had been crippled but notdestroyed. Moscow had not been taken, nor Leningrad nor Stalingradnor 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 morethan two years of unbroken military victories the armies of Hitler wereretreating before a superior force.

That was not all. The failure was greater than that. Haider realizedthis, at least later. “The myth of the invincibility of the German Army,”he wrote, “was broken.” There would be more German victories in Russiawhen another summer came around, but they could never restore themyth. December 6, 1941, then, is another turning point in the shorthistory of the Third Reich and one of the most fateful ones. Hitler’s powerhad reached its zenith; from now on it was to decline, sapped by thegrowing counterblows of the nations against which he had chosen to makeaggressive war.

A drastic shake-up in the German High Command and among the fieldcommanders now took place. As the armies fell back over the icy roadsand snowy fields before the Soviet counteroffensive, the heads of theGerman generals began to roll. Rundstedt, as we have already seen, wasrelieved of command of the southern armies because he had been forcedto retreat from Rostov. Field Marshal von Bock’s stomach pains becameworse with the setbacks in December and he was replaced on December18 by Field Marshal von Kluge, whose battered Fourth Army was beingpushed back, forever, from the vicinity of Moscow. Even the dashingGeneral Guderian, the originator of massive armored warfare which hadso revolutionized modern battle, was cashiered—on Christmas Day—forordering a retreat without permission from above. General Hoepner, anequally brilliant tank commander, whose Fourth Armored Group hadcome wiihin sight of Moscow on the north and then been pushed back,was abruptly dismissed by Hitler on the same grounds, stripped of his rankand forbidden to wear a uniform. General Hans Count von Sponeck, whohad received the Ritterkreuz for leading the airborne landings at TheHague the year before, received a severer chastisement for pulling backone division of his corps in the Crimea on December 29 after Russiantroops had landed by sea behind him. He was not only summarily stripped

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

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 Com-mander. Even he had enough sense to see during the first days ofDecember that a general withdrawal around Moscow was necessary inorder to avert disaster. But when he got up enough courage to say so toHitler the latter turned on him and gave him a tongue-lashing, shoutingthat he was a “blockhead.” Jodi found the unhappy OKW Chief a littlelater sitting at a desk writing out his resignation, a revolver at one side.Jodi quietly removed the weapon and persuaded Keitel—apparently with-out too much difficulty—to stay on and to continue to swallow theFuehrer’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 aSupreme Commander who insisted that it always do had brought aboutrenewed heart attacks for Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, and by the timeZhukov’s counteroffensive began he was determined to step down asCommander in Chief. He returned to headquarters from a trip to thereceding front on December 15 and Haider found him “very beatendown.” “Brauchitsch no longer sees any way out,” Haider noted in hisdiary, “for the rescue of the Army from its desperate position.” The headof the Army was at the end of his rope. He had asked Hitler on December7 to relieve him and he renewed the request on December 17. It wasformally granted two days later. What the Fuehrer really thought of theman he himself had named to head the Army he told to Goebbels threemonths later.

The Fuehrer spoke of him [Brauchitsch] only in terms of contempt [Goeb-bels 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 manof straw. If Brauchitsch had remained at his post only for another fewweeks, things would have ended in catastrophe.”19

There was some speculation in Army circles as to who would succeedBrauchitsch, but it was as wide of the mark as the speculation years beforeas to who would succeed Hindenburg. On December 19 Hitler called inHaider and informed him that he himself was taking over as Commanderin Chief of the Army. Haider could stay on as Chief of the General Staffif he wanted to—and he wanted to. But from now on, Hiller made itclear, he was personally running the Army, as he ran almost everythingelse in Germany.

This little matter of operational command [Hitler told him] is somethinganyone can do. The task of the Commander in Chief of the Army is to train

* He was not executed until after the July 1944 plot against Hitler, in which hewas in no way involved.

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A Turn of the Tide

the Army in a National Socialist way. I know of no general who could dothat, as I want it done. Consequently, I’ve decided to take over command ofthe 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,Minis er of War, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces and Com-mander in Chief of the Army. The generals, as Haider complained—inhis diary—were now merely postmen purveying Hitler’s orders based onHitler’s singular conception of strategy.

Actually the megalomaniacal dictator soon would make himself some-thing even greater, legalizing a power never before held by any man—emperor, king or president—in the experience of ihe German Reichs. OnApril 26, 1942, he had his rubber-stamp Reichstag pass a law which gavehim absolute power of life and death over every German and simplysuspended any laws which might stand in the way of this. The words ofthe law have to be read to be believed.

... In the present war, in which the German people are faced with astruggle for their existence or their annihilation, the Fuehrer must have all therights postulated by him which serve to further or achieve victory. Therefore—without being bound by existing legal regulations—in his capacity as Leaderof the nation, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, Head of Govern-ment and supreme executive chief, as Supreme Justice and Leader of theParty—the Fuehrer must be in a position to force with all means at his disposalevery German, if necessary, whether he be common soldier or officer, low orhigh official or judge, leading or subordinate official of the party, worker oremployer—to fulfill his duties. In case of violation of these duties, theFuehrer is entitled after conscientious examination, regardless of so-calledwell-deserved rights, to mete out due punishment and to remove the offenderfrom his post, rank and position without introducing prescribed procedures.21

Truly Adolf Hitler had become not only the Leader of Germany but theLaw. Not even in medieval times nor further back in the barbarous tribaldays had any German arrogated such tyrannical power, nominal and legalas well as actual, to himself.

But even without this added au hority, Hitler was absolute master ofthe Army, of which he had now assumed direct command. Ruthlessly hemoved that bitter winter to stem the retreat of his beaten armies and tosave them from the fate of Napoleon’s troops along the same frozen, snow-bound roads back from Moscow. He forbade any further withdrawals.The German generals have long debated the merits of his stubborn stand—whe her it saved the troops from complete disaster or whether it com-pounded the inevitable heavy losses. Most of the commanders have con-tended tha. if they had been given freedom to pull back when their positionbecame untenable they could have saved many men and much equipment

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

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 pieceswhen a timely withdrawal would have saved them.

And yet some of the generals later reluctantly admitted that Hitler’siron will in insisting that the armies stand and fight was his greatest accom-plishment of the war in that it probably did save his armies from com-pletely disintegrating in the snow. This view is best summed up byGeneral Blumentritt.

Hitler’s fanatical order that the troops must hold fast regardless in everyposition 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 happenedthe Wehrmacht would suffer the same fate that had befallen the GrandeArmee . . . The withdrawal could only be carried out across the open coun-try since the roads and tracks were blocked with snow. After a few nightsthis would prove too much for the troops, who would simply lie down and diewherever they found themselves. There were no prepared positions in the rearinto which they could be withdrawn, nor any sort of line to which they couldhold on.22

General von Tippelskirch, a corps commander, agreed.

It was Hitler’s one great achievement. At that critical moment the troopswere remembering what they had heard about Napoleon’s retreat fromMoscow, and living under the shadow of it. If they had once begun a retreat,it might have tuined into a panic flight.23

There was panic in the German Army, not only at the front but far in therear at headquarters, and it is graphically recorded in Haider’s diary.“Very difficult day!” he begins his journal on Christmas Day, 1941, andthereafter into the new year he repeats the words at the head of many aday’s eniry as he describes each fresh Russian breakthrough and theserious situation of the various armies.

December 29. Another critical day! . . . Dramatic long-distance tele-phone talk between Fuehrer and Kluge. Fuehrer forbids further withdrawalof northern wing of 4th Army. Very bad crisis by 9th Army where apparentlythe 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 9thArmies . . . Russian breakthrough north of Maloyaroslavets tears the frontwide 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. Verystormy argument with Fuehrer, who however holds to his stand: The front willremain where it is regardless of consequences . . .

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A Turn of the Tide

January 3. The situation has become more critical as the result of thebreakthrough between Maloyaroslavets and Borovsk. Kuebler* and Bockvery excited and demand withdrawal on the north front, which is crumbling.Again a dramatic scene by Fuehrer, who doubts courage of generals to makehard decisions. But troops simply don’t hold their ground when it’s 30 belowzero. Fuehrer orders: He will personally decide if any more withdrawalsnecessary. . . .

Not the Fuehrer but the Russian Army was by now deciding suchmatters. Hitler could force the German troops to stand fast and die, buthe could no more stop the Soviet advance than King Canute could preventthe tides from coming in. At one moment of panic some of the High Com-mand officers suggested that perhaps the situation could be retrieved bythe employment of poison gas. “Colonel Ochsner tries to talk me intobeginning gas warfare against the Russians,” Haider noted in his diary onJanuary 7. Perhaps it was too cold. At any rate nothing came of thesuggestion.

January 8 was “a very critical day,” as Haider noted in his journal.“The breakthrough at Sukhinichi [southwest of Moscow] is becoming un-bearable for Kluge. He is consequently insisting on withdrawing the 4thArmy front.” All day long the Field Marshal was on the phone to Hitlerand Haider insisting on it. Finally, in the evening the Fuehrer reluctantlyconsented. Kluge was given permission to withdraw “step by step in orderto protect his communications.”

Step by step and sometimes more rapidly throughout that grim winterthe German armies, which had planned to celebrate Christmas in Moscow,were driven back or forced by Russian encirclements and breakthroughsto retreat. By the end of February they found themselves from 75 to 200miles from the capital. By the end of that freezing month Haider wasnoting 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 31per cent of his entire force. Of these 202,251 had been killed, 725,642wounded and 46,511 were missing. (Casualties from frostbite were112,627.) 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 frontand Hitler and Haider began making plans for bringing up fresh troopsand more tanks and guns to resume the offensive—at least on part of thefront. Never again would they have the streng h to attack all along thevast battle line. The bitter winter’s toll and above all Zhukov’s counter-offensive doomed that hope.

But Hitler, we now know, had realized long before that his gamble of

* General Kuebler had replaced Kluge on December 26 as commander of theFourth Army when the latter took over Army Group Center. Though a toughsoldier, he stood the strain only three weeks and then was relieved by GeneralHeinrici.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

conquering Russia—not only in six months but ever—had failed. In adiary entry of November 19, 1941, General Haider notes a long “lecture”of the Fuehrer to several officers of the High Command. Though hisarmies are only a few miles from Moscow and still driving hard to captureit, Hitler has abandoned hopes of striking Russia down this year and hasalready turned his thoughts to next year. Haider jotted down the Leader’sideas.

Goals for next year. First of all the Caucasus. Objective: Russia’s southernborders. Time: March to April. In the north after the close of this year’scampaign, Vologda or Gorki,* but only at the end of May.

Further goals for next year must remain open. They will depend on thecapacity of our railroads. The question of later building an “East Wall” alsoremains open.

No East Wall would be necessary if the Soviet Union were to bedestroyed. Haider seems to have mulled over that as he listened to theSupreme Commander go on.

On the whole [he Concluded] one gets the impression that Hitler recognizesnow that neither side can destroy the other and that this will lead to peacenegotiations.

This must have been a rude awakening for the Nazi conqueror who sixweeks before in Berlin had made a broadcast declaring “without anyreservation” that Russia had been “struck down and would never riseagain.” His plans had been wrecked, his hopes doomed. They werefurther dashed a fortnight later, on December 6, when his troops beganto be beaten back from the suburbs of Moscow.

The next day, Sunday, December 7, 1941, an event occurred on theother side of the round earth that transformed the European war, whichhe had so lightly provoked, into a world war, which, though he could notknow it, would seal his fa'e and that of the Third Reich. Japanese bombersattacked Pearl Harbor. The next dayf Hitler hurried back by train toBerlin from his headquarters at Wolfsschanze. He had made a solemnsecret promise to Japan and the time had come to keep it—or break it.

* Vologda, 300 miles northeast of Moscow, controlled the railway to Archangel.Gorki is 300 miles due east of the capital.

t Hitler’s movements and whereabouts are noted in his daily calendar book, whichis 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 JapaneseForeign Minister, in the spring of 1941 just before the German attack onRussia. The captured German minutes of the meetings enable us totrace the development of another one of Hitler’s monumental miscalcula-tions. They and other Nazi documents of the period show the Fuehrertoo ignorant, Goering too arrogant and Ribbentrop too stupid to compre-hend the potential military strength of the United States—a blunder whichhad been made in Germany during the First World War by Wilhelm 11,Hindenburg and Ludendorff.

There was a basic contradiction from the beginning in Hitler’s policytoward America. Though he had only contempt for her military prowesshe endeavored during the first two years of the conflict to keep her out ofthe war. This, as we have seen, was the main task of the German Embassyin Washington, which went to great lengths, including the bribing of Con-gressmen, attempting to subsidize writers and aiding the America FirstCommittee, to support the American isolationists and thus help to keepAmerica 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 thedividing up of the planet among the Tripartite powers the Nazi dictatorfully understood, as his various private utterances make clear. TheAmerican 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 secretof his successful strategy thus far. The turn of America would come, butonly after Great Britain and the Soviet Union had been struck down.Then, with the aid of Japan and Italy, he would deal with the upstartAmericans, who, isolated and alone, would easily succumb to the powerof the victorious Axis.

Japan was the key to Hitler’s efforts to keep America out of the waruntil Germany was ready to take her on. Japan, as Ribbentrop pointed

871

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

out to Mussolini on March 11, 1940, possessed the counterweight to theUnited States which would prevent the Americans from trying to inter-vene in Europe against Germany as they had in the first war.1

In their wartime dealings with the Japanese, Hitler and Ribbentrop atfirst stressed the importance of not provoking the United States to abandonher neutrality. By the beginning of 1941 they were exceedingly anxiousto draw Japan into the war, not against America, not even against Russia,which they were shortly to attack, but against Britain, which had refusedto give in even when apparently beaten. Early in 1941 German pressureon Japan was stepped up. On February 23, Ribbentrop received at hisstolen estate at Fuschl, near Salzburg, the fiery and hot-temperedJapanese ambassador, General Hiroshi Oshima, who had often impressedthis observer as more Nazi than the Nazis. Though the war, Ribbentroptold 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 Americaout of the war. America, which at present is not armed and would hesitate toexpose her Navy to any risks west of Hawaii, could do this even less in such acase. If Japan would otherwise respect the American interests, there wouldnot even be the possibility for Roosevelt to use the argument of lost prestigeto make war plausible to the Americans. It was very unlikely that Americawould 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 fleetand the war would be brought rapidly to an end with the fall of bothBritain and America. This was heady stuff for the fire-eating Japaneseenvoy and Ribbentrop poured it on. He advised the Japanese to be firmand “use plain language” in their current negotiations in Washington.

Only if the U.S. realized that they were confronting firm determinationwould they hold back. The people in the U.S. . . . were not willing tosacrifice their sons, and therefore were against any entry into the war. TheAmerican people felt instinctively that they were being drawn into war forno reason by Roosevelt and the Jewish wire-pullers. Therefore our policieswith the U.S. should be plain and firm . . .

The Nazi Foreign Minister had one warning to give, the one that hadfailed so dismally with Franco.

If Germany should ever weaken, Japan would find itself confronted by aworld coalition within a short time. We were all in the same boat. The fate ofboth countries was being determined now for centuries to come ... A defeatof Germany would also mean the end of the Japanese imperialist idea.2

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To acquaint his military commanders and the top men in the ForeignOffice with his new Japanese policy, Hitler issued on March 5, 1941, atop-secret directive entitled “Basic Order No. 24 Regarding Collaborationwith Japan.”3

It must be the aim of the collaboration based on the Three-Power Pact toinduce 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 theinterests of the United States will be diverted to the Pacific . . .

The common aim of the conduct of war is to be stressed as forcing Englandto 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 wouldmean a decisive success for the entire conduct of war of the Three Powers.*

Hitler also urged the Japanese seizure of other British naval bases andeven American bases “if the entry of the United States into the war cannotbe prevented.” He concluded by ordering that “the Japanese must not begiven any intimation of the Barbarossa operation.” The Japanese ally,like the Italian ally, was to be used to further German ambitions, butneither government would be taken into the Fuehrer’s confidence regard-ing his intention to attack Russia.

A fortnight later, on March 18, at a conference with Hitler, Keitel andJodi, Admiral Raeder strongly urged that Japan be pressed to attackSingapore. The opportunity would never again be so favorable, Raederexplained, what with “the whole English fleet contained, the unprepared-ness 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 Admiralsaid, would “solve all the other Asiatic questions regarding the U.S.A. andEngland” and would of course enable Japan to avoid war with America, ifshe wished. There was only one hitch, the Admiral opined, and mentionof it must have made Hitler frown. According to naval intelligence,Raeder warned, Japan would move against the British in Southeast Asiaonly “if Germany proceeds to land in England.” There is no record in theNavy minutes of this meeting indicating what reply Hitler made to thisremark. Raeder certainly knew that the Supreme Commander had neitherplans nor hopes for a landing in England this year. Raeder said some-thing else that the Fuehrer did not respond to. He “recommended” thatMatsuoka “be advised regarding the designs on Russia.”4

The Japanese Foreign Minister was now on his way to Berlin viaSiberia and Moscow, uttering bellicose pro-Axis statements, as Secretaryof State Hull put it,f along the route. His arrival in the German capital

* The italics are Hitler’s.

t Hull made the remark to the new Japanese ambassador in Washington, AdmiralNomura, in the presence of Mr. Roosevelt on March 14. Nomura replied thatMatsuoka “talked loudly for home consumption because he was ambitious politi-cally.” (The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, II, pp. 900-01.)

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on March 26 came at an awkward moment for Hitler, for that night thepro-German Yugoslav government was overthrown in the Belgrade coupand the Fuehrer was so busy improvising plans to crush the obstreperousBalkan country that he had to postpone seeing the Japanese visitor untilthe afternoon of the twenty-seventh.

Ribbentrop saw him in the morning, playing over, so to speak, the oldgramophone records reserved for such guests on such occasions, thoughmanaging to be even more fatuous than usual and not allowing the dapperlittle Matsuoka to get in a word. The lengthy confidential minutes drawnup 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 theAxis,” Ribbentrop announced, “and it is only a question of time beforeEngland admits it.” In the next breath he was urging a “quick attack uponSingapore” because it would be “a very decisive factor in the speedy over-throw of England.” In the face of such a contradiction the diminutiveJapanese visitor did not bat an eye. “He sat there inscrutably,” Schmidtlater remembered, “in no way revealing how these curious remarks im-pressed him.”6

As to America—

There was no doubt [Ribbentrop said] that the British would long since haveabandoned 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 allpossible means from taking an active part in the war and from making its aidto England too effective . . . The capture of Singapore would perhaps bemost likely to keep America out of the war because the United States couldscarcely risk sending its fleet into Japanese waters . . . Roosevelt would bein a very difficult position . . .

Though Hitler had laid it down that Matsuoka must not be told aboutthe impending German attack on Russia—a necessary precaution to keepthe news from leaking out, but nevertheless, as we shall see, one thatwould have disastrous consequences for Germany—Ribbentrop did dropseveral broad hints. Relations with the Soviet Union, he told his visitor,were correct but not very friendly. Moreover, should Russia threatenGermany, “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 moreRussia.”

Matsuoka, says Schmidt, blinked at this and looked alarmed, whereuponRibbentrop hastened to assure him that he did not believe that “Stalinwould pursue an unwise policy.” At this juncture, says Schmidt, Ribben-trop was called away by Hitler to discuss the Yugoslav crisis and failedeven to return for the official lunch which he was supposed to tender thedistinguished visitor.

In the afternoon Hitler, having determined to smash another country

The Turn of the United States 875

(Yugoslavia), worked on the Japanese Foreign Minister. “England hasalready lost the war,” he began. “It is only a matter of having theintelligence to admit it.” Still, the British were grasping at two straws:Russia and America. Toward the Soviet Union Hitler was more circum-spect than Ribbentrop had been. He did not believe, he said, that thedanger of a war with Russia would arise. After all, Germany had some160 to 170 divisions “for defense against Russia.” As to the UnitedS.ates:

America was confronted by three possibilities: she could arm herself, shecould assist England, or she could wage war on another front. If she helpedEngland she could not arm herself. If she abandoned England the latterwould be destroyed and America would then find herself fighting the powersof the Three-Power Pact alone. In no case, however, could America wage waron another front.

Therefore, the Fuehrer concluded, “never in the human imagination”could there be a better opportunity for the Japanese to strike in the Pacificthan now. “Such a moment,” he said, laying it on as thickly as he could,“would never return. It was unique in history.” Matsuoka agreed, butreminded Hitler that unfortunately he “did not control Japan. At themoment he could make no pledge on behalf of the Japanese Empire thatit would take action.”

But Hitler, being absolute dictator, could make a pledge and he madeit to Japan—quite casually and without being asked to—on April 4,after Matsuoka had returned to Berlin from seeing Mussolini.* Thissecond meeting took place on the eve of the Nazi attack on two moreinnocent countries, Yugoslavia and Greece, and the Fuehrer, thirsting forfurther easy conquests and for revenge on Belgrade, was in one of hiswarlike moods. While he considered war with the United States “undesir-able, he said, he had “already included it in his calculations.” But hedid not think much of America’s military power, f

Germany had made her preparations so that no American could land inEurope. Germany would wage a vigorous war against America with U-boatsand the Luftwaffe, and with her greater experience . . . would be more than

* Mussolini had told him, he informed Hitler, that “America was the Number Oneenemy, and Soviet Russia came only in second place.”

t 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 fur-

ther exposition in a talk he had with Mussolini at the Russian front late in August1941. The Fuehrer, the Italian records quote him indirectly as saying, “gave adetailed account of the Jewish clique which surrounds Roosevelt and exploits theAmerican people. He stated that he could not, for anything in the world, live in acountry like the U.S.A., whose conceptions of life are inspired by the most graspingcommercialism and which does not love any of the loftiest expressions of the humanspirit such as music.” (Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers, pp. 449-52.)

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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 inhis minutes:

If Japan got into a conflict with the United States, Germany on her partwould take the necessary steps at once.

From Schmidt’s notes it is evident that Matsuoka did not quite graspthe 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 conflictbetween Japan and America *

Hitler paid dearly not only for this assurance, so casually given, but forhis deceit in not telling the Japanese about his intention to attack Russiaas soon as the Balkans were occupied. Somewhat coyly Matsuoka hadasked 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 theNonaggression Pact or the Treaty of Neutrality.” The dull-witted NaziForeign Minister had replied smugly that Matsuoka “if possible should notbring up the question in Moscow since it probably would not altogether fitinto the framework of the present situation.” He did not quite grasp thesignificance of what was up. But by the next day it had penetrated hiswooden 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, aGerman guarantee that if Russia attacked Japan “Germany would strikeimmediately.” He wanted to give this assurance, he said, “so that Japancould push southward toward Singapore without fear of any complicationswith Russia.” When Matsuoka finally admitted that while in Moscow onhis way to Berlin he himself had proposed a nonaggression pact with theSoviet Union and hinted that the Russians were favorably inclined towardit, Ribbentrop’s mind again became somewhat of a blank. He merelyadvised that Matsuoka handle the problem in a “superficial way.”

But as soon as the Nipponese Foreign Minister was back in Moscow onhis trip home, he signed a treaty of neutrality wi:h Stalin which, as Ambas-sador von der Schulenburg, who foresaw its consequences, wired Berlin,provided for each country to remain neutral in case the other got involvedin the war. This was one treaty—it was signed on April 13—which Japanhonored to the very last despite subsequent German exhortations that shedisregard it. For before the summer of 1941 was out the Nazis would bebegging the Japanese to attack not Singapore or Manila but Vladivostok!

At first, however, Hitler did not grasp the significance of the Russo-

* The author’s italics.

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Japanese Neutrality Pact. On April 20 he told Admiral Raeder, whoinquired about it, that it had been made “with Germany’s acquiescence”and that he welcomed it “because Japan is now restrained from takingaction against Vladivostok and should be induced to attack Singaporeinstead.”*7 At this stage Hitler was confident Germany could destroyRussia during the summer. He did not want Japan to share in this mightyfeat any more than he had desired that Italy should share in the conquest ofFrance. And he was absolutely confident that Japanese help would not beneeded. Ribbentrop, echoing his master’s thoughts, had told Ma‘suokaon March 29 that if Russia forced Germany “to strike” he would “con-sider it proper if the Japanese Army were prevented from attackingRussia.”

But the views of Hitler and Ribbentrop on this matter changed verysuddenly and quite drastically scarcely three months later. Six days afterthe Nazi armies were flung into Russia, on June 28, 1941, Ribbentrop wascabling the German ambassador in Tokyo, General Eugen Ott, to doeverything he could to get the Japanese to promptly attack Soviet Russiain the rear. Ott was advised to appeal to the Japanese appetite for spoilsand also to argue that this was the best way of keeping America neutral.

It may be expected [Ribbentrop explained] that the rapid defeat of SovietRussia—especially should Japan take action in the East—will prove the bestargument to convince the United States of the utter futility of entering the waron the side of a Great Britain entirely isolated and confronted by the mostpowerful alliance in the world.8

Matsuoka was in favor of immediately turning on Russia, but his viewswere not accepted by the government in Tokyo, whose attitude seemed tobe that if the Germans were rapidly defeating the Russians, as they claimed,they needed no help from the Japanese. However, Tokyo was not sosure about a lightning Nazi victory and this was the real reason for itsstand.

But Ribbentrop persisted. On July 10, when the German offensive inRussia was really beginning to roll and even Haider, as we have seen,thought that victory already had been won, the Nazi Foreign Minister got

* News of the signing in Moscow of the Soviet-Japanese neutrality pact causedconsiderable alarm in Washington, where Roosevelt and Hull were inclined to takea view similar to Hitler’s—namely, that the treaty would release Japanese forcesearmarked for a possible war with Russia for action farther south against Britishand perhaps American possessions. Sherwood discloses that on April 13, when thenews of the conclusion of the pact was received, the President scrapped a plan forlaunching aggressive action by U.S. naval ships against German U-boats in thewestern Atlantic. A new order called merely for American warships to report move-ments of German naval vessels west of Iceland, not to shoot at them. It was con-sidered that the new Japanese-Soviet neutrality agreement made the situation in thePacific too dangerous to risk too much in the Atlantic. (Robert E. Sherwood,Roosevelt and Hopkins, p. 291.)

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off from his special train on the Eastern front a new and stronger cable tohis ambassador in Tokyo.

Since Russia, as reported by the Japanese ambassador in Moscow, is ineffect close to collapse ... it is simply impossible that Japan does not solvethe matter of Vladivostok and the Siberian area as soon as her military prep-arations are completed . . .

I ask you to employ all available means in further insisting upon Japan’sentry into the war against Russia at the soonest possible date . . . Thesooner this entry is effected, the better it is. The natural objective still remainsthat we and Japan join hands on the Trans-Siberian railroad before winterstarts.9

Such a giddy prospect did not turn the head of even the militaristicJapanese government. Four days later Ambassador Ott replied that hewas doing his best to persuade the Japanese to attack Russia as soon aspossible, 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-eatingMatsuoka was soon forced out of the cabinet. With his departure, Ger-many lost, for the time being, its best friend, and though, as we shall see,closer relations were later restored between Berlin and Tokyo they neverbecame close enough to convince the Japanese of the wisdom of helpingGermany in the war against Russia. Once more Hitler had been bestedat 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 thefire in Russia—the Japanese had their own chestnuts roasting—it becameall the more important to Germany that the United States be kept out ofthe war until the Soviet Union had been conquered, as the Fuehrer wasconfident that summer of 1941 it would be before winter came.

* Ribbentrop kept trying all that fall and several times during the next two years toinduce the Japanese to fall upon Russia from the rear, but each time the Tokyogovernment replied politely, in effect, “So sorry, please.”

Hitler himself remained hopeful all through the summer. On August 26 he toldRaeder he was “convinced that Japan will carry out the attack on Vladivostok assoon as forces have been assembled. The present aloofness can be explained by thefact that the assembling of forces is to be accomplished undisturbed, and the attackis to come as a surprise.”11

The Japanese archives reveal how Tokyo evaded the Germans on this embarrass-ing question. When, for instance, on August 19 Ambassador Ott asked the JapaneseVice-Minister of Foreign Affairs about Japan’s intervention against Russia, thelatter replied, “For Japan to do a thing like attacking Russia would be a very seriousquestion and would require profound reflection." When on August 30 Ott, who bynow was a very irritated ambassador, asked Foreign Minister Admiral Toyoda, “Isthere any possibility that Japan may participate in the Russo-German war?”Toyoda replied, “Japan’s preparations are now making headway, and it will takemore time for their completion.”12

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The German Navy had long chafed under the restraints which Hitlerhad imposed on its efforts to curtail American shipments to Britain andto cope with the increasing belligerency of U.S. warships toward GermanU-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 inevi-table and they had urged the Supreme Commander to prepare for it. Im-mediately after the fall of France in June 1940, Admiral Raeder, backedby Goering, had urged Hitler to seize not only French West Africa but,more important, the Atlantic islands, including Iceland, the Azores andthe Canaries, to prevent the United States from occupying them. Hitlerhad expressed interest, but he first wanted to invade England and conquerRussia. Then the upstart Americans, their position rendered hopeless,would be taken care of. A top-secret memorandum of Major Freiherrvon Falkenstein, of the General Staff, discloses Hitler’s views at the endof the summer in 1940.

The Fuehrer is at present occupied with the question of the occupation ofthe Atlantic Islands with a view to the prosecution of war against Americaat 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 towar against the United States but of the date he would choose to embarkon it. By the following spring the date was beginning to sprout in theFuehrer’s mind. On May 22, 1941, Admiral Raeder conferred with theSupreme Commander and reported ruefully that the Navy “must rejectthe idea of occupying the Azores.” It simply didn’t have the strength. Butby this time Hitler had warmed to the project and, according to Raeder’sconfidential notes,14 replied:

The Fuehrer is still in favor of occupying the Azores in order to be able tooperate long-range bombers from there against the U.S.A. The occasion forthis may arise by autumn.*

After the fall of the Soviet Union, that is. The turn of the United Stateswould come then. He put this clearly to Raeder when the Admiral saw himjust two months later, on July 25, when the offensive in Russia was in fullswing. “After the Eastern campaign,” Raeder notes him as saying, “hereserves the right to take severe action against the U.S.A.”15 But untilthen, Hitler emphasized to his Navy chief, he wanted “to avoid having theU.S.A. declare war . . . out of consideration for the Army, which isinvolved in heavy combat.”

Raeder was not satisfied with this stand. In fact, his diary accounts ofhis meetings with Hitler, which one can now peruse in the captured docu-

* The Germans had no long-range bombers capable of reaching the Americancoast from the Azores—much less getting back—and it is a sign of the warping ofHitler’s mind by this time that he conjured up the nonexistent “long-range bombers.”

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merits, show his growing impatience at the wraps which the Fuehrer hadplaced on the German Navy. At every interview he sought to change theLeader’s mind.

Early that year, on February 4, Raeder submitted a memorandum toHitler in which the Navy expressed strong doubts about the value of con-tinued American neutrality, as it was working out, to Germany. In factthe admirals argued that America’s entry into the war might even prove“advantageous for the German war effort” if Japan thereby became a bel-ligerent on the side of the Axis.16 But the Nazi dictator was not impressedby the argument.

Raeder was greatly discouraged. The Battle of the Atlantic was at itsheight and Germany was not winning it. American supplies under theLend-Lease agreement were pouring into Britain. The Pan-AmericanNeutrality Patrol was making it more and more difficult for the U-boats tobe effective. All this Raeder pointed out to Hitler, but without mucheffect. He saw the Leader again on March 18 and reported that U.S.warships were escorting American convoys bound for Britain as far asIceland. He demanded authority to attack them without warning. Heasked that something be done to prevent the U.S.A. from gaining a foot-hold in French West Africa. This possibility, he said, “was most danger-ous.” Hider listened and said he would discuss these matters with theForeign Office (of all places!), which was one way of putting the admiralsoff.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 againstmerchant ships of the U.S.A., according to prize regulations.”18 The firstrecorded clash between American and German war vessels had occurredon April 10 when the U.S. destroyer Niblack dropped depth charges on aGerman U-boat which showed signs of attacking. On May 22 Raeder wasback at the Berghof with a long memorandum suggesting countermeasuresto President Roosevelt’s unfriendly acts, but he could not move hisSupreme Commander.

The Fuehrer [the Admiral noted] considers the attitude of the President ofthe United States still undecided. Under no circumstances does he wish tocause incidents which would result in U.S. entry into the war.19

There was all the more reason to avoid such incidents when thecampaign in Russia began, and on June 21, the day before the attackcommenced, Hitler emphasized this to Raeder. The Grand Admiral hadgiven him a glowing account of how the U-253, spotting the U.S. battle-ship Texas and an accompanying destroyer within the blockade zone inthe North Atlantic proclaimed by Germany, had “chased and attemptedto attack them” and had added that “where the U.S.A. is concerned firmmeasures are always more effective than apparent yielding.” The Fuehreragreed with the principle but not with the specific action and once morehe admonished the Navy.

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The Fuehrer declares in detail that until Operation Barbarossa is well underway he wishes to avoid any incident with the U.S.A. After a few weeks thesituation will become clearer, and can be expected to have a favorable effecton the U.S.A. and Japan. America will have less inclination to enter the wardue 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 dis-tinguish enemy from neutral warships Hitler cut him short by instructinghim to issue new orders to avoid incidents with America. As a result theNavy chief sent out orders the same night calling off attacks on any navalvessels “inside or outside the closed area” unless they were definitelyidentified as British. A similar order was given the Luftwaffe.20

On July 9, President Roosevelt announced that American forces weretaking over the occupation of Iceland from the British. The reaction inBerlin was immediate and violent. Ribbentrop cabled Tokyo that “thisintrusion of American military forces in support of England into a ter-ritory which has been officially proclaimed by us to be a combat area isin itself an aggression against Germany and Europe.”21

Raeder hurried to Wolfsschanze, from where the Fuehrer was directinghis armies in Russia. He wanted a decision, he said, on “whether theoccupation of Iceland by the U.S.A. is to be considered as an entry intothe war, or as an act of provocation which should be ignored.” As for theGerman Navy, it considered the American landings in Iceland an act ofwar and in a two-page memorandum it reminded the Fuehrer of all theother acts of “aggression” against Germany committed by the Rooseveltgovernment. Moreover, the Navy demanded the right to sink Americanfreighters in the convoy area and to attack U.S. warships if the occasionrequired 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 foranother one or two months. On the one hand the Eastern campaign must becarried on with the entire Air Force . . . which he does not wish to diverteven in part; on the other hand, a victorious campaign on the Eastern frontwill have a tremendous effect on the whole situation and probably on theattitude of the U.S.A. Therefore for the time being he does not wish theexisting instructions changed, but rather wants to be sure that incidents will beavoided.

When Raeder argued that his naval commanders could not be heldresponsible for “a mistake” if American ships were hit, Hitler retortedthat at least in regard to war vessels the Navy had better “definitely estab-lish” that they were enemy craft before attacking. To make sure that the

* It might be noted here that on the stand at Nuremberg Admiral Raeder insistedthat he did everything possible to avoid provoking the United States into war.

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admirals understood him correctly the Fuehrer issued a specific order onJuly 19 stipulating that “in the extended zone of operations U.S. merchantships, whether single or sailing in English or American convoys and ifrecognized as such before resort to arms, are not to be attacked.” Withinthe blockade area, which was also recognized by the United States as beingout of bounds, American vessels could be attacked, but Hitler specificallylaid 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 21aU-boat had sunk the American freighter Robin Moor en route to SouthAfrica and at a place well outside the German blockade zone. Two moreAmerican merchant vessels were torpedoed toward the end of thesummer. On September 4 a German submarine fired two torpedoes at theU.S. destroyer Greer, both missing. A week later, on September 11,Roosevelt reacted to this attack in a speech in which he announced thathe had given orders to the Navy to “shoot on sight” and warned that Axiswarships entering the American defense zone did so “at their peril.”

The speech incensed Berlin. In the Nazi press Roosevelt was attackedas “Warmonger Number One.” Ribbentrop recalled at Nuremberg thatHitler “was greatly excited.” However, by the time Admiral Raederarrived at the Wolfsschanze headquarters on the Eastern front on theafternoon of September 17 to urge a drastic retaliation to the “shoot-on-sight” order, the Fuehrer had calmed down. To the Admiral’s plea thatthe German Navy at last be released from the restrictions against attack-ing American ships the Supreme Commander again gave a firm No.

[Since] it appears that the end of September will bring the great decision inthe Russian campaign [Raeder’s record of the conversation declares], theFuehrer requests that care be taken to avoid any incidents in the war onmerchant shipping before about the middle of October.

“Therefore,” Raeder noted sadly, “the Commander in Chief, Navy, andthe Commanding Admiral, Submarines [Doenitz], withdraw their sug-gestions. The submarines are to be informed of the reason for temporarilykeeping to the old orders.”23 In view of the circumstances, Hitler wascertainly behaving with unaccustomed restraint. But admittedly it wasmore difficult for the young U-boat commanders, operating in the stormywaters of the North Atlantic and constantly harassed by increasingly effec-tive British antisubmarine measures in which U.S. war vessels sometimesjoined, to restrain themselves. Hitler had told Raeder in July that hewould never call a submarine skipper to account if he sank an Americanship “by mistake.” On November 9, in his annual address to the Nazi OldGuard at the familiar beer cellar in Munich, he answered Roosevelt’sspeech.

President Roosevelt has ordered his ships to shoot the moment they sightGerman ships. I have ordered German ships not to shoot when they sight

The Turn of the United States o®-3

American vessels, but to defend themselves when attacked. I will have anyGerman officer court-martialed who fails to defend himself.

And on November 13 he issued a new directive ordering that whileengagements with American warships were to be avoided as far as possibleGerman submarines must defend themselves against attack.-1

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 beingattacked 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 withGermany.* More were to quickly follow. On October 31, the U.S.destroyer Reuben James was torpedoed and sunk while on convoyduty, with the loss of 100 men of 145 in its crew, including all its sevenofficers. Thus, long before the final formalities of declaring war, a shoot-ing war had begun.

JAPAN PLAYS ITS OWN GAME

Japan, as we have seen, had been assigned by Hitler the role not ofbringing the United States into the war but of keeping her, at least for thetime being, out of it. He knew that if the Japanese took Singapore andthreatened India this would not only be a severe blow to the British butwould divert America’s attention—and some of her energies—from theAtlantic to the Pacific. Even after he began begging the Japanese to attackVladivostok he saw in this a means not only to help him bring Russia downbut to further pressure the United States into remaining neutral. Strangelyenough, it never seems to have occurred to him or to anyone else inGermany until very late that Japan had her own fish to fry and that theJapanese might be fearful of embarking on a grand offensive in SoutheastAsia against the British and Dutch, not to mention attacking Russia in therear, until they had secured their own rear by destroying the United StatesPacific Fleet. True, the Nazi conqueror had promised Matsuoka thatGermany would go to war with America if Japan did, but Matsuoka wasno longer in the government, and, besides, Hitler had constantly naggedthe Japanese to avoid a direct conflict wi h America and concentrate otBritain and the Soviet Union, whose resistance was preventing him fromwinning the war. It did not dawn on the Nazi rulers that Japan might givefirst priority to a direct challenge to the United States.

* “History has recorded who fired the first shot,” Roosevelt declared in reference tothis incident in a Navy Day speech on October 27. In all fairness it would seemthat in dropping depth charges the United States fired the first shot. According tothe confidential German Navy records this was not the first such occasion. The offi-cial 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 ofthe United States Naval Operations in World War ll. Vol. I, p. 57.)

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Not that Berlin wanted the Japanese and Americans to reach an under-standing. That would defeat the main purpose of the Tripartite Pact,which was to frighten the Americans into staying out of the war. Foronce Ribbentrop probably gave an honest and accurate appraisal of theFuehrer’s thoughts on this when he told an interrogator at Nuremberg:

He [Hitler] was afraid that if an arrangement were made between theUnited States and Japan this would mean, so to speak, the back free forAmerica, and the unexpected attack or entry into the war by the United Stateswould come quicker ... He was worried about an agreement because therewere certain groups in Japan who wanted to come to an arrangement withAmerica.25

One member of such a group was Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura, whoarrived in Washington in February 1941 as the new Japanese ambassadorand whose series of confidential conversations with Cordell Hull whichbegan in March, with the aim of settling peacefully the differences betweenthe two countries, and which continued right up to the end, gave consider-able 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 toRibbentrop pointing out that “any political treaty between Japan and theUnited States is undesirable at the present” and arguing that unless it wereprevented Japan might be lost to the Axis.28 General Ott, the Nazi ambas-sador in Tokyo, called frequently at the Foreign Office, to warn againstthe Hull-Nomura negotiations. When, in spite of this, they continued, theGermans switched to a new maneuver of trying to induce the Japanese tomake as a condition for (heir continuation that the United States abandonits aid to Britain and its hostile policies toward Germany.27

That was in May. The summer brought a change. In July Hitler wasconcerned mainly with badgering Japan into attacking the Soviet Union,and that month Secretary Hull broke off the talks with Nomura becausethe Japanese had invaded French Indochina. They were resumed towardthe middle of August when the Japanese government proposed a personalmeeting between Premier Prince Konoye and President Roosevelt for thepurpose of arriving at a peaceful settlement. This did not please Berlin atall and the indefatigable Ott was soon at the Tokyo Foreign Office express-ing Nazi displeasure with this turn of events. Both Foreign MinisterAdmiral Toyoda and Vice-Minister Amau told him blandly that theproposed Konoye-Roosevelt talks would merely advance the purpose ofthe Tripartite Pact, which they reminded him was “to prevent Americanpardcipation in the war.”28

In the autumn, as the Hull-Nomura talks continued, the Wilhelmstrasse

* “I credit Nomura,” Hull wrote later in his memoirs, “with having been honestlysincere in trying to avoid war between his country and mine.” (The Memoirs ojCordell Hull, II, p. 987.)

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switched back to the old tactics of the spring. It insisted in Tokyo thatNomura be instructed to warn the United States that if it continued itsunfriendly acts toward the European Axis Germany and Italy might haveto declare war, and that in this case Japan, under the terms of theTripartite Pact, would have to join them. Hitler still did not want Americain the war; the move was made, in fact, to bluff Washington into stayingout while at the same time affording some relief from American belliger-ency 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 hadenabled the American government to decode intercepted Japanese cableand wireless messages in Tokyo’s most secret ciphers—not only thosesent to and from Washington but those to and from Berlin and othercapitals. The German demand was cabled by Toyoda to Nomura onOctober 16, 1941, along with instructions to present a watered-downversion to Hull.29

That day the Konoye government fell and was replaced by a militarycabinet headed by the hotheaded, belligerent General Hideki Tojo. InBerlin General Oshima, a warrior of similar cast, hastened to the Wilhelm-strasse to explain the good news to the German government. Tojo’s ap-pearance at the post as Premier meant, the ambassador said, that Japanwould draw closer to its Axis partners and that the talks in Washingtonwould cease. Whether on purpose or not, he neglected to tell his Nazifriends what the consequences of the cessation of those talks must be, andthat Tojo’s appointment therefore meant a good deal more than theysuspected: namely, that his new government was determined to go to warwith the United States unless the Washington negotiations swiftly endedwith President Roosevelt accepting the Japanese terms for a free hand—not to attack Russia but to occupy Southeast Asia. This course had neverentered the minds of Ribbentrop and Hitler, who still envisaged Japan asuseful and helpful to German interests only if she attacked Siberia andSingapore and frightened Washington into worrying about the Pacific andstaying out of the war. The Fuehrer and, of course, his doltish ForeignMinister had never understood that the failure of the Nomura-Hull ne-gotiations in Washington, which they so greatly desired, would bring thevery result they had been trying to avoid until the time was ripe: America’sentry into the world conflict.*

The sands were now rapidly running out.

On November 15 Saburo Kurusu arrived in Washington as a specialambassador to aid Nomura in the negotiations, but Secretary Hull soonsensed that the diplomat, who as the Japanese envoy in Berlin had signedthe Tripartite Pact and was somewhat pro-German, had brought no fresh

* Prince Konoye’s postwar memoirs reveal that as early as August 4 he was forcedto 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 “witha determination to make war on the United States.” (Hull, Memoirs, pp. 1025-26.)

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proposals with him. His purpose, Hull thought, was to try to persuadeWashington to accept the Japanese terms at once or, if that failed, to lullthe American government with talk until Japan was ready to strike a heavysurprise blow.30 On November 19 came the ominous “Winds” messageto Nomura from Tokyo, which Hull’s cryptographers promptly de-ciphered. 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 withAmerica. Nomura was instructed, on receipt of the “Winds” warning, todestroy all his codes and confidential papers.

Now Berlin awoke to what was up. The day before the “Winds” mes-sage, on November 18, Ribbentrop was somewhat surprised to receive arequest from Tokyo asking Germany to sign a treaty in which the two na-tions would agree not to conclude a separate peace with common enemies.Just which enemies the Japanese meant was not clear, but the Nazi ForeignMinister obviously hoped that Russia was the first of them. He agreed “inprinciple” to the proposal, apparently in the comforting belief that Japanat last was about to honor its vague promises to hit the Soviet Union inSiberia. This was most welcome and timely, for the resistance of the RedArmy on the broad front was becoming formidable and the Russian winterwas setting in—much earlier than had been anticipated. A Japaneseattack on Vladivostok and the Pacific maritime provinces might providethat extra ounce of pressure which would bring a Soviet collapse.

Ribbentrop was swiftly disillusioned. On November 23 AmbassadorOtt wired him from Tokyo thaf all indications were that the Japanese weremoving south with the intention of occupying Thailand and the Dutch-heldBorneo oil fields, and that the Japanese government wanted to know ifGermany would make common cause with her if she were to start a war.This information plainly meant that Japan would not strike against Russiabut was contemplating “starting a war” with the Netherlands and Britainin the South Pacific which well might embroil her in an armed conflict withthe United States. But Ribbentrop and Ott did not grasp the last point.Their exchanges of telegrams during these days show that though theynow realized, to their disappointment, that Japan would not attack Russiathey believed that her move southward would be against the possessionsof 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 junc-ture of the Japanese to take the German government into their confidenceas to their fateful decisions regarding America. Secretary Hull, thanks tothe “Magic” code breaker, was much better informed. As early as No-vember 5 he knew that the new Foreign Minister, Shigenori Togo, hadwired Nomura setting a deadline of November 25 for the signing of anagreement—on Japan’s terms—with the American government. The finalJapanese proposals were delivered in Washington on November 20. Hulland Roosevelt knew they were final because two days later “Magic”

decoded for them a message from Togo to Nomura and Kurusu which saidso, 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 thesigning can be completed by the 29th . . . we have decided to wait until thatdate. 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 Councilof the danger confronting the country from Japan and to stress to theU.S. Army and Navy chiefs the possibility of Japanese surprise attacks.In Berlin that day there was a somewhat grotesque ceremony in which thethree Axis Powers, amid much pomp and ceremony, renewed the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936—an empty gesture which, as some Germansnoted, did absolutely nothing to get Japan into the war against Russia butwhich afforded the pompous Ribbentrop an opportunity to denounceRoosevelt as the “chief culprit of this war” and to shed crocodile tears forthe “truthful, religious . . . American people” betrayed by such anirresponsible leader.

The Nazi Foreign Minister seems to have become intoxicated by hisown words. He called in Oshima on the evening of November 28, follow-ing a lengthy council of war earlier that day presided over by Hitler, andgave the Japanese ambassador the impression that the German attitudetoward the United States, as Oshima promptly radioed Tokyo, had “con-siderably stiffened.” Hitler’s policy of doing everything possible to keepAmerica out of the war until Germany was ready to take her on seemedabout to be jettisoned. Suddenly Ribbentrop was urging the Japaneseto go to war against the United States as well as Britain and promisingthe backing of the Third Reich. After warning Oshima that “if Japanhesitates ... all the military might of Britain and the United States willbe concentrated against Japan”—a rather silly thesis as long as theEuropean war continued—Ribbentrop added:

As Hitler said today, there are fundamental differences in the very right toexist between Germany and Japan and the United States. We have receivedadvice to the effect that there is practically no hope of the Japanese—U.S.negotiations being concluded successfully because the United States is puttingup a stiff front.

If this is indeed the fact of the case, and if Japan reaches a decision to fightBritain and the United States, I am confident that that not only will be in theinterest of Germany and Japan jointly, but would bring about favorable resultsfor Japan herself.

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The ambassador, a tense little man, was agreeably surprised. But hewanted to be sure he understood correctly.

“Is Your Excellency,” he asked, “indicating that a state of actual waris to be established between Germany and the United States?”

Ribbentrop hesitated. Perhaps he had gone too far. “Roosevelt is afanatic,” he replied, “so it is impossible to tell what he would do.”

This seemed a strange and unsatisfactory answer to Oshima in view ofwhat the Foreign Minister had said just before, and toward the end of thetalk he insisted on coming back to the main point. What would Germanydo if the war were actually extended to “countries which have been aidingBritain”?

Should Japan become engaged in a war against the United States [Ribben-trop replied] Germany, of course, would join the war immediately. There isabsolutely no possibility of Germany’s entering into a separate peace with theUnited States under such circumstances. The Fuehrer is determined on thatpoint.33

This was the flat guarantee for which the Japanese government had beenwaiting. True, Hitler had given a similar one in the spring to Matsuoka,but it seemed to have been forgotten during the intervening period whenhe had become vexed at Japan’s refusal to join in the war on Russia. Allthat remained now, so far as the Japanese were concerned, was to get theGermans to put their assurance in writing. General Oshima joyfully filedhis report to Tokyo on November 29. Fresh instructions reached him inBerlin the next day. The Washington talks, he was informed, “now standruptured—broken.”

Will Your Honor [the message directed] therefore immediately interviewChancellor hitler and Foreign Minister ribbentrop and confidentially com-municate to them a summary of developments. Say to them that lately Englandand the United States have taken a provocative attitude, both of them. Say thatthey are planning to move military forces into various places in East Asia andthat we will inevitably have to counter by also moving troops. Say verysecretly to them that there is extreme danger that war may suddenly break outbetween Japan and the Anglo-Saxon nations through some clash of arms andadd that the time of the breaking out of that war may come quicker thananyone 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 thatOshima was receiving his new instructions, November 30, the Japanese

* Hull says that he received a copy of this message through “Magic.” Thus Wash-ington, as well as Berlin, knew by the last day of November that the Japanese mightstrike against the United States “quicker than anyone dreamt.” (Hull, Memoirs, p.1092.)

Foreign Minister was conferring with the German ambassador in Tokyo,to whom he emphasized that the Washington talks had broken downbecause Japan refused to accede to American demands that she abandonthe Tripartite Pact. The Japanese hoped the Germans would appreciatethis sacrifice in a common cause.

“Grave decisions are at stake,” Togo told General Ott. “The UnitedStates is seriously preparing for war . . . Japan is not afraid of a break-down 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 Ger-many s future position. Japanese Foreign Minister thereupon stated that heunderstood from my words that Germany in such a case would consider herrelationship to Japan as that of a community of fate. I answered, accordingto my opinion, Germany was certainly ready to have mutual agreement be-tween the two countries on this situation.36

ON THE EVE OF PEARL HARBOR

General Oshima was a great lover of German—Austrian classical musicand despite the gravity and tenseness of the situation he took off for Austriato enjoy a Mozart festival. But he was not permitted to listen to the greatAustrian composer’s lovely music for long. An urgent call on December1 brought him rushing back to his embassy in Berlin, where he found newinstructions to get busy and sign up Germany on the dotted line. Therewas no time to lose.

And now, when cornered, Ribbentrop stalled. Apparently realizingfully for the first time the consequences of his rash promises to the Jap-anese, the Nazi Foreign Minister grew exceedingly cool and evasive. Hetold Oshima late on the evening of December 1 that he would first have toconsult the Fuehrer before making any definite commitment. The Jap-anese ambassador returned to the Wilhelmstrasse on Wednesday, thethird, to press his case but again Ribbentrop put him off. To Oshima’spleas that the situation had become extremely critical the Foreign Ministerreplied that while he personally was for a written agreement the matterwould have to wait until the Fuehrer returned from headquarters later inthe 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 unexpectedoffensive.”

The Japanese, by this time, had also turned to Mussolini, who was notat any front. On December 3 the Japanese ambassador in Rome calledon 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 Americashould begin. The ambassador also wanted a treaty specifying that there

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would be no separate peace. The Japanese interpreter, Ciano noted in hisdiary, “was trembling like a leaf.” As for the Duce, he was “pleased” tocomply, after consultation with Berlin.

The German capital, Ciano found the next day, had grown extremelycautious.

Maybe they will go ahead [he began his diary on December 4] because theycan’t do otherwise, but the idea of provoking American intervention is less andless liked by the Germans. Mussolini, on the other hand, is happy about it.

Regardless of Ribbentrop’s opinion, which Hitler, surprisingly, stillpaid some attention to, the decision as to whether Germany would give aformal guarantee to Japan could be taken only by the Nazi warlord him-self. During the night of December 4-5 the Foreign Minister apparentlygot the Fuehrer’s go-ahead and at 3 a.m. he handed General Oshima adraft of the requested treaty in which Germany would join Japan in waragainst the United States and agree not to make a separate peace. Havingtaken the fateful plunge and followed his Leader in reversing a policy thathad been clung to stubbornly for two years, he could not refrain fromseeing that his Italian ally promptly followed suit.

A night interrupted by Ribbentrop’s restiveness [Ciano began his diary onDecember 5], After having delayed two days he now hasn’t a minute to losein answering the Japanese, and at 3 o’clock in the morning he sends [Ambas-sador] Mackensen to my house to submit a plan for a Tripartite Pact ofJapanese intervention and the promise not to make a separate peace. Theywanted me to wake up the Duce, but I did not do it, and the Duce was verypleased.

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 suspectedthat the Fuehrer was stalling because he wanted a quid pro quo: if Ger-many joined Japan in the war against the United States, Japan would haveto join Germany in the war against Russia. In his telegram of instructionsto Oshima on November 30, the Japanese Foreign Minister had givensome advice on how to handle this ticklish problem if the Germans andItalians raised it.

If [they] question you about our attitude toward the Soviet, say that we havealready clarified our attitude toward the Russians in our statement of lastJuly. Say that by our present moves southward we do not mean to relax ourpressure against the Soviet and that if Russia joins hands tighter with Englandand the United States and resists us with hostilities, we are ready to turn uponher with all our might. However, right now, it is to our advantage to stressthe south and for the time being we would prefer to refrain from any directmoves in the north.36

December 6 came. Zhukov that very day launched his counteroffensivein front of Moscow and the German armies reeled back in the snow andbitter cold. There was all the more reason for Hitler to demand his quidpro quo. On this question there was great uneasiness in the Foreign Officein Tokyo. The naval task force was now within flying distance of PearlHarbor for its carrier planes. So far—miraculously—it had not beendiscovered by American ships or aircraft. But it might be any moment.A long message was being radioed from Tokyo to Nomura and Kurusuin Washington instructing them to call on Secretary Hull at precisely 1p.m. the next day, Sunday, December 7, to present Japan’s rejection ofthe latest American proposals, and stressing that the negotiations were

de facto ruptured. In desperation Tokyo turned to Berlin for a writtenguarantee of German support. The Japanese warlords still did not trustthe Germans enough to inform them of the blow against the United Stateswhich would fall the next day. But they were more worried than ever thatHitler would refrain from giving his guarantee unless Japan agreed totake on not only the United States and Great Britain but the Soviet Unionas well. Jn this predicament Togo got off a long message to AmbassadorOshima in Berlin urging him to somehow stall the Germans on the Russianmatter and not to give in unless it became absolutely necessary. Deludedthough they were about their ability to deal with the Americans and theBritish, the Japanese generals and admirals retained enough sense torealize that they could not fight the Russians at the same time—even withGerman help. Togo’s instructions to Oshima on that fateful Saturday,December 6, which are among the intercepted messages decoded bySecretary Hull’s expert decipherers, give an interesting insight into thediplomacy practiced by the Nipponese with the Third Reich at the eleventhhour.

We would like to avoid ... an armed clash with Russia until strategiccircumstances permit it; so get the German government to understand thisposition of ours and negotiate with them so that at least for the present theywill not insist upon exchanging diplomatic notes on this question.

Explain to them at considerable length that insofar as American materialsbeing shipped to Soviet Russia . . . they are neither of high quality nor oflarge quantity, and that in case we start our war with the United States we willcapture all American ships destined for Soviet Russia. Please endeavor tocome to an understanding on this line.

However, should Ribbentrop insist upon our giving a guarantee in thismatter, since in that case we shall have no other recourse, make a state-ment to the effect that we would, as a matter of principle, prevent war materialsfrom being shipped from the United States to Soviet Russia via Japanesewaters, and get them to agree to a procedure permitting the addition of astatement to the effect that so long as strategic reasons continue to make itnecessary for us to keep Soviet Russia from fighting Japan (what I mean isthat we cannot capture Soviet ships) we cannot carry this out thoroughly.

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In case the German government refuses to agree with [the above] and makestheir approval of this question absolutely conditional upon our participationin 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 tothe Tokyo militarists, or to anyone else, and which defy logic and under-standing, Hitler did not insist on Japan’s taking on Russia along with theUnited States and Britain, though if he had the course of the war con-ceivably 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 inthe Pacific, though no one in Washington or Berlin knew just where oreven exactly when. That morning the British Admiralty had tipped off theAmerican government that a large Japanese invasion fleet had been ob-served heading across the Gulf of Siam for the Isthmus of Kra, whichindicated that the Nipponese were striking first at Thailand and perhapsMalaya. At 9 p.m. President Roosevelt got off a personal message to theEmperor of Japan imploring him to join him in finding “ways of dispellingthe dark clouds” and at the same time warning him that a thrust of theJapanese military forces into Southeast Asia would create a situation thatwas “unthinkable.” At the Navy Department, intelligence officers drewup their latest report on the location of the major warships of the Japa-nese Navy. It listed most of them as being in home ports, including all thecarriers and other warships of the task force which at that very momenthad steamed to within three hundred miles of Pearl Harbor and was tuningup its bombers to take off at dawn.

On that Saturday evening too the Navy Department informed the Presi-dent and Mr. Hull that the Japanese Embassy was destroying its codes. Ithad first had to decipher Togo’s long message, which had dribbled in allafternoon in fourteen parts. The Navy decoders were also deciphering itas fast as it came in and by 9:30 p.m. a naval officer was at the WhiteHouse with translations of the first thirteen parts. Mr. Roosevelt, who waswith Harry Hopkins in the study, read it and said, “This means war.” Butexactly when and just where, the message did not say and the Presidentdid not know. Even Admiral Nomura did not know. Nor far off in East-ern Europe did Adolf Hitler. He knew less than Roosevelt.

HITLER DECLARES WAR

The Japanese onslaught on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor at7:30 a.m. (local time) on Sunday, December 7, 1941, caught Berlin ascompletely by surprise as it did Washington. Though Hitler had made anoral promise to Matsuoka that Germany would join Japan in a war againstthe United States and Ribbentrop had made another to Ambassador

Oshima, the assurance had not yet been signed and the Japanese had notbreathed a word to the Germans about Pearl Harbor.* Besides, at thismoment, Hitler was fully occupied trying to rally his faltering generals andretreating troops in Russia.

Night had fallen in Berlin when the foreign-broadcast monitoring serv-ice first picked up the news of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. When anofficial of the Foreign Office Press Department telephoned Ribbentrop theworld-shaking news he at first refused to believe it and was extremelyangry at being disturbed. The report was “probably a propaganda trickof the enemy, he said, and ordered that he be left undisturbed until morn-ing.38 So probably Ribbentrop, for once, told the truth when he testifiedon the stand at Nuremberg that “this attack came as a complete surprise tous. We had considered the possibility of Japan’s attacking Singapore orperhaps Hong Kong, but we never considered an attack on the UnitedStates as being to our advan'age.”39 However, contrary to what he toldthe tribunal, he was exceedingly happy about it. Or so he struck Ciano.

A night telephone call from Ribbentrop [Ciano began his diary on December8], 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 aboutthe advantage . . . Mussolini was [also] happy. For a long time now he hasbeen in favor of clarifying the position between America and the Axis.

At 1 p.m. on Monday, December 8, General Oshima went to the Wil-helmstrasse to get Ribbentrop to clarify Germany’s position. He de-manded a formal declaration of war on the United States “at once.”

Ribbentrop replied [Oshima radioed Tokyo] that Hitler was then in themidst of a conference at general headquarters discussing how the formalitiesof declaring war could be carried out so as to make a good impression on theGerman people, and that he would transmit your wish to him at once and dowhatever he was able to have it carried out promptly.

The Nazi Foreign Minister also informed the ambassador, accordingto the latter’s message to Tokyo, that on that very morning of the eighthHitler issued orders to the German Navy to attack American ships when-ever and wherever they may meet them.”40 But the dictator stalled on adeclaration of war.f

The Fuehrer, according to the notation in his daily calendar book, hur-ried back to Berlin on the night of December 8, arriving there at 11 o’clockthe next morning. Ribbentrop claimed at Nuremberg that he pointed out

It was long believed by many that Hitler knew in advance the exact hour of theattack on Pearl Harbor, but I have been unable to find a single scrap of evidencein the secret German papers to substantiate it.

1 In Tokyo at the same time Foreign Minister Togo was telling Ambassador Ott,"The Japanese Government expects that now Germany too will speedily declarewar on the United States.”4!

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to the Leader that Germany did not necessarily have to declare war onAmerica under the terms of the Tripartite Pact, since Japan was obviouslythe aggressor.

The text of the Tripartite Pact bound us to assist Japan only in case of anattack against Japan herself. I went to see the Fuehrer, explained the legalaspect of the situation and told him that, although we welcomed a new allyagainst England, it meant we had a new opponent to deal with as well ... ifwe declared war on the United States.

I told him that according to the stipulation of the Three-Power Pact, sinceJapan had attacked, we would not have to declare war, formally. TheFuehrer thought this matter over quite a while and then he gave me a veryclear decision. “If we don’t stand on the side of Japan,” he said, “the Pact ispolitically dead. But that is not the main reason. The chief reason is that theUnited States already is shooting against our ships. They have been a forcefulfactor in this war and through their actions have already created a situationof war.”

The Fuehrer was of the opinion at that moment that it was quite evidentthat the United States would now make war against Germany. Therefore heordered me to hand over the passports to the American representative.42

This was a decision that Roosevelt and Hull in Washington had beenconfidently waiting for. There had been some pressure on them to haveCongress declare war on Germany and Italy on December 8 when thatstep was taken against Japan. But they had decided to wait. The bombingat Pearl Harbor had taken them off one hook and certain information intheir possession led them to believe that the headstrong Nazi dictatorwould take them off a second hook.* They had pondered the intercepted

* My own impression in Washington at that moment was that it might be difficultfor President Roosevelt to get Congress to declare war on Germany. There seemedto be a strong feeling in both Houses as well as in the Army and Navy that thecountry ought to concentrate its efforts on defeating Japan and not take on the addi-tional burden of fighting Germany at the same time.

Hans Thomsen, the German charge in Washington, who, like all the other Nazienvoys abroad, was usually kept ignorant of what Hitler and Ribbentrop were con-niving, reported this sentiment to Berlin. Immediately after the President’s speechto Congress on the morning of December 8 calling for a declaration of war onJapan Thomsen radioed Berlin: “The fact that he [Roosevelt] did not mention Ger-many and Italy with one word shows that he will try at first to avoid sharpeningthe situation in the Atlantic.” On the evening of the same day Thomsen got offanother dispatch on the subject: “Whether Roosevelt will demand declaration ofwar on Germany and Italy is uncertain. From the standpoint of the American mili-tary leaders it would be logical to avoid everything which could lead to a two-frontwar.” In several dispatches just prior to Pearl Harbor the German charge hademphasized that the United States simply was not prepared for a two-front war. OnDecember 4 he had radioed the revelations in the Chicago Tribune of the “warplans of the American High Command on preparations and prospects for defeatingGermany and her allies.”

Report confirms [he said] that full participation of America in war is not to be

message of Ambassador Oshima from Berlin to Tokyo on November 29* *in which Ribbentrop had assured the Japanese that Germany would joinJapan if she became “engaged” in a war against the United States. Therewas nothing in that assurance which made German aid conditional uponwho was the aggressor. It was a blank check and the Americans had nodoubt that the Japanese were now clamoring in Berlin that it be honored.

It was honored, but only after the Nazi warlord again hesitated. He hadconvoked the Reichstag to meet on December 9, the day of his arrival inBerlin, but he postponed it for two days, until the eleventh. Apparently, asRibbentrop later reported, he had made up his mind. He was fed up withthe attacks made by Roosevelt on him and on Nazism; his patience wasexhausted by the warlike acts of the U.S. Navy against German U-boats inthe Atlantic, about which Raeder had continually nagged him for nearly ayear. He had a growing hatred for America and Americans and, whatwas worse for him in the long run, a growing tendency to disastrously un-derestimate the potential strength of the United States, f

At the same time he grossly overestimated Japan’s military power. Infact, he seems to have believed that once the Japanese, whose Navy he be-lieved to be the most powerful in the world, had disposed of the Britishand Americans in the Pacific, they would turn on Russia and thus helphim finish his great conquest in the East. He actually told some of hisfollowers a few months later that he thought Japan’s entry into the war hadbeen “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 winterwere pressing most heavily on the morale of our people, and when everybodyin Germany was oppressed by the certainty that sooner or later the UnitedStates would come into the conflict. Japanese intervention therefore was, fromour point of view, most opportune.43

expected before July, 1943. Military measures against Japan are of defensivecharacter.

In his message to Berlin on the evening of December 8, Thomsen stressed thatPearl Harbor was certain to bring relief to Germany from America’s belligerentactivities in the Atlantic.

War with Japan [he reported] means transferring of all energy to America’sown rearmament, a corresponding shrinking of Lend-Lease help and a shiftingof all activity to the Pacific.

For the exchange of dispatches between the Wilhelmstrasse and the GermanEmbassy in Washington during this period, I am indebted to the State Departmentwhich gave me access to them. They will be published later in the Documents onGerman Foreign Policy series.

* See above, p. 888.

t “I don't see much future for the Americans,” he told his cronies a month laterduring a monologue at headquarters on January 7, 1942. “It’s a decayed country.And they have their racial problem, and the problem of social inequalitiesMy 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 Conversa-tions, p. 155.)

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There is also no doubt that Japan’s sneaky and mighty blow against theAmerican fleet at Pearl Harbor kindled his admiration—and all the moreso because it was the kind of “surprise” he had been so proud of pullingoff so often himself. He expressed this to Ambassador Oshima on Decem-ber 14 when he awarded him the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of theGerman 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 isinterested only in putting one off, in shaming and humiliating one, and is notwilling to come to an agreement, then one should strike—indeed, as hard aspossible and not waste time declaring war. It was heartwarming to him tohear of the first operations of the Japanese. He himself negotiated withinfinite 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 wayin the future.44

There was one other reason for Hitler’s deciding in such haste to add theUnited States to the formidable list of his enemies. Dr. Schmidt, who wasin and out of the Chancellery and Foreign Office that week, put his fingeron it: “I got the impression,” he later wrote, “that, with his inveteratedesire for prestige, Hitler, who was expecting an American declaration ofwar, wanted to get his declaration in first.”45 The Nazi warlord con-firmed this in his speech to the Reichstag on December 11.

“We will always strike first,” he told the cheering deputies. “We willalways deal the first blow!”

Indeed, Berlin was so fearful on December 10 that America might de-clare war first that Ribbentrop sternly admonished Thomsen, the Germancharge in Washington, about committing any indiscretion which might tipoff the State Department to what Hitler planned to do on the followingday. In a long radiogram on the tenth the Nazi Foreign Minister filed thetext of the declaration he would make in Berlin to the U.S. charge d’af-faires at precisely 2:30 p.m. on December 11. Thomsen was instructed tocall on Hull exactly one hour later, at 3:30 p.m. (Berlin time), hand theSecretary of State a copy of the declaration, ask for his passport and turnover Germany’s diplomatic representation to Switzerland. At the end ofthe message Ribbentrop warned Thomsen not to have any contact withthe State Department before delivering his note. “We wish to avoid underall circumstances,” the warning said, “that the Government there beats usto such a step.”

Whatever hesitations led Hitler to postpone the Reichstag session bytwo days, it is evident from the captured exchange of messages betweenthe Wilhelmstrasse and the German Embassy in Washington, and fromother Foreign Office papers, that the Fuehrer actually made his fateful de-

cision to declare war on the United States on December 9, the day he ar-rived in the capital from headquarters on the Russian front. The Nazidictator appears to have wanted the two extra days not for further reflec-tion but to prepare carefully his Reichstag speech so that it would makethe proper impression on the German people, of whose memories ofAmerica’s decisive role in the First World War Hitler was quite aware.

Hans Dieckhoff, who was still officially the German ambassador to theUnited States but who had been cooling his heels in the Wilhelmstrasseever since both countries withdrew their chief envoys in the autumn of1938, was put to work on December 9 to draw up a long list of Roosevelt’santi-German activities for the Fuehrer’s Reichstag address. *

Also on December 9 Thomsen in Washington was instructed to burnhis secret codes and confidential papers. “Measures carried out as or-dered, he flashed to Berlin at 11:30 a.m. on that day. For the first timehe became aware of what was going on in Berlin and during the eveningtipped the Wilhelmstrasse that apparently the American government knewtoo. “Believed here,” he said, “that within twenty-four hours Germanywill declare war on the United States or at least break off diplomatic re-lations.”f

HITLER IN THE REICHSTAG: DECEMBER 11

Hitler’s address on December 11 to the robots of the Reichstag in de-fense of his declaration of war on the United States was devoted mainly tohurling personal insults at Franklin D. Roosevelt, to charging that thePresident had provoked war in order to cover up the failures of the NewDeal and to thundering that “this man alone,” backed by the millionairesand the Jews, was “responsible for the Second World War.” All the ac-cumulated, pent-up resentment at a man who had stood from the first inhis way toward world dominion, who had continually taunted him, who

* Dieckhoff whom Hassell thought “temperamentally submissive,” had drawn upjus a week before at the request of Ribbentrop a long memorandum entitled “Prin-ciples for Influencing American Public Opinion.” Among his eleven principles were:Real danger to America is Roosevelt himself . . . Influence of lews on Roosevelt(Frankfurter Baruch, Benjamin Cohen, Samuel Rosenman, Henry Morgenthau,?„l ' ; ' Jhe s'ogan f°r every American mother must be: “I didn’t raise my boy°d'e for Bnta,n' (Fr°m the Foreign Office papers, not yet published.) Somehirfflv nfnnm u Itate, °ePartment and « our embassy in Berlin thought rather^ 8v a D efkho® and believed him to be anti-Nazi. My own feeling was that helacked the guts to be. He served Hitler to the end—from 1943 to 1945 as the Naziambassador to Franco Spain.

1 Thomsen also urged Berlin to arrest the American correspondents there in retalia-tion for the arrest of a handful of German newsmen in the United States. A ForeignOffice memorandum signed by Undersecretary Ernst Woermann on December 10„ ares that all American correspondents in Germany were ordered arrested asa reprisal Excepted was Guido Enderis, chief correspondent in Berlin of theJNew York Times, because,” Woermann wrote, “of his proved friendliness to Ger-ma.ny'u Thls “ay be unfair to the late Enderis, who was in ill health at the timeand who mainly for that reason perhaps was not arrested.

oyo THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

had provided massive aid to Britain at a moment when it seemed thatbattered island nation would fall, and whose Navy was frustrating him inthe Atlantic burst forth in violent wrath.

Permit me to define my attitude to that other world, which has its representa-tive in that man who, while our soldiers are fighting in snow and ice, verytactfully likes to make his chats from the fireside, the man who is the mainculprit of this war . . .

I will pass over the insulting attacks made by this so-called President againstme. That he calls me a gangster is uninteresting. After all, this expression wasnot coined in Europe but in America, no doubt because such gangsters arelacking here. Apart from this, I cannot be insulted by Roosevelt, for I con-sider him mad, just as Wilson was . . . First he incites war, then falsifiesthe causes, then odiously wraps himself in a cloak of Christian hypocrisy andslowly but surely leads mankind to war, not without calling God to witness thehonesty of his attack—in the approved manner of an old Freemason .

Roosevelt has been guilty of a series of the worst crimes against internationallaw. Illegal seizure of ships and other property of German and Italiannationals was coupled with the threat to, and looting of, those who weredeprived of their liberty by being interned. Roosevelt’s ever increasing attacksfinally went so far that he ordered the American Navy to attack everywhereships under the German and Italian flags, and to sink them—this in grossviolation of international law. American ministers boasted of having destroyedGerman submarines in this criminal way. German and Italian merchant shipswere attacked by American cruisers, captured and their crews imprisoned.

In this way the sincere efforts of Germany and Italy to prevent an extensionof the war and to maintain relations with the United States in spite of theunbearable provocations which have been carried on for years by PresidentRoosevelt have been frustrated . . .

What was Roosevelt’s motive “to intensify anti-German feeling to thepitch of war”? Hitler asked. He gave two explanations.

I understand only too well that a world-wide distance separates Roosevelt’sideas and my ideas. Roosevelt comes from a rich family and belongs to theclass whose path is smoothed in the democracies. I was only the child of asmall, poor family and had to fight my way by work and industry. When theGreat War came Roosevelt occupied a position where he got to know onlyits pleasant consequences, enjoyed by those who do business while othersbleed. 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 of1914. I shared the fate of millions, and Franklin Roosevelt only the fate ofthe so-called Upper Ten Thousand.

After the war Roosevelt tried his hand at financial speculations. He madeprofits out of inflation, out of the misery of others, while I ... lay in ahospital . . .

The Turn of the United States 899

Hitler continued at some length with this singular comparison beforehe reached his second point, that Roosevelt had reverted to war to escapethe consequences of his failure as President.

National Socialism came to power in Germany in the same year as Roose-velt was elected President . . . He took over a state in a very poor economiccondition, and I took over the Reich faced with complete ruin, thanks todemocracy . . .

While an unprecedented revival of economic life, culture and art took placein Germany under National Socialist leadership. President Roosevelt did notsucceed in bringing about even the slightest improvement in his own coun-try .. . This is not surprising if one bears in mind that the men he had calledto support him, or rather, the men who had called him, belonged to the Jewishelement, whose interests are all for disintegration and never for order

Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation was all wrong. There can be no doubtthat a continuation of this economic policy would have undone this Presidentin peacetime, in spite of all his dialectical skill. In a European state he wouldsurely have come eventually before a state court on a charge of deliberatewaste of the national wealth; and he would scarcely have escaped at the handsof a civil court on a charge of criminal business methods.

Hitler knew that this assessment of the New Deal was shared, in part atleast, by the American isolationists and a considerable portion of thebusiness community and he sought to make the most of it, ignorant of thefact that on Pearl Harbor Day these groups, like all others in America, hadrallied to the support of their country.

This fact was realized [he continued, alluding to these groups] and fullyappreciated by many Americans, including some of high standing. A threaten-ing opposition was gathering over the head of this man. He guessed that theonly salvation for him lay in diverting public attention from home to foreignpolicy ... He was strengthened in this by the Jews around him . . . Thefull diabolical meanness of Jewry rallied around this man, and he stretchedout his hands.

Thus began the increasing efforts of the American President to create con-flicts . . . For years this man harbored one desire—that a conflict shouldbreak out somewhere in the world.

There followed a long recital of Roosevelt’s efforts in this direction, be-ginning with the “quarantine” speech in Chicago in 1937. “Now he[Roosevelt] is seized,” Hitler cried at one point, “with fear that if peace isbrought about in Europe his squandering of millions of money on arma-ments 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 hesought to share his sense of relief with the German people.

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I think you have all found it a relief now that, at last, one State has beenthe first to take the step of protesting against this historically unique andshameless ill treatment of truth and of right . . . The fact that the JapaneseGovernment, which has been negotiating for years with this man, has at lastbecome tired of being mocked by him in such an unworthy way fills us all, theGerman people and, I think, all other decent people in the world, with deepsatisfaction . . . The President of the United States ought finally to under-stand—I say this only because of his limited intellect—that we know thatthe aim of his struggle is to destroy one state after another . . .

As for the German nation, it needs charity neither from Mr. Roosevelt norfrom Mr. Churchill, let alone from Mr. Eden. It wants only its rights! It willsecure for itself this right to live even if thousands of Churchills and Roose-velts conspire against it . . .

I have therefore arranged for passports to be handed to the Americancharge d’affaires today, and the following—48

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 frigidposes, received Leland Morris, the American charge 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 alwaysstrictly observed the rules of international law in her dealings with the UnitedStates throughout the present war, the Government of the United States hasfinally 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 withthe United States and declares that under these circumstances brought aboutby President Roosevelt, Germany too considers herself to be at war with theUnited States, as from today.47

The final act in the day’s drama was the signing of a tripartite agreementby Germany, Italy and Japan declaring “their unshakable determinationnot to lay down arms until the joint war against the United States andEngland reaches a successful conclusion” and not to conclude a separatepeace.

Adolf Hitler, who a bare six months before had faced only a beleagueredBritain in a war which seemed to him as good as won, now, by deliberatechoice, had arrayed against him the three greatest industrial powers in theworld in a struggle in which military might depended largely, in the longrun, on economic strength. Those three enemy countries together also hada great preponderance of manpower over the three Axis nations. NeitherHitler nor his generals nor his admirals seem to have weighed those sober-ing facts on that eventful December day as the year 1941 drew toward aclose.

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General Haider, the intelligent Chief of the General Staff, did not evennote in his diary on December 11 that Germany had declared war on theUnited States. He mentioned only that in the evening he attended a lec-ture by a naval captain on the “background of the Japanese-Americansea war.” The rest of his diary, understandably perhaps, was taken up withthe continued bad news from most sectors of the hard-pressed Russianfront. There was no room in his thoughts for an eventual day when hisweakened armies might also have to confront fresh troops from the NewWorld.

Admiral Raeder actually welcomed Hitler’s move. He conferred withthe Fuehrer on the following day, December 12. “The situation in the At-an ic, 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. Theneed for transport ships will be very great, so that a withdrawal of Americanmerchant ships from the Atlantic can be expected. The strain on British mer-chant shipping will increase.

Hitler, having taken his plunge, and with such reckless bravado, nowsuddenly was prey to doubts. He had some questions to put to the GrandAdmiral. Did he “believe that the enemy will in the near future take stepsto 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 Pa-cific?” Raeder did not think so.

The U.S. [he answered] will have to concentrate all her strength in thePacific during the next few months. Britain will not want to run any risksafter her severe losses of big ships.* It is hardly likely that transport tonnage isavailable 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 timein order to crush Germany and Italy first?” Here again the Grand Admiralwas reassuring.

It is improbable [he answered] that the enemy will give up East Asia eventemporarily; by so doing Britain would endanger India very seriously and theU.S. cannot withdraw her fleet from the Pacific as long as the Japanese fleethas the upper hand.

;hJZ°iTP before: °n Member 10, Japanese planes had sunk two British battle-ships, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, off the coast of Malaya. Coupled withthe crippling American losses in battleships at Pearl Harbor on December 7 thisblow gave the Japanese fleet complete supremacy in the Pacific, the China Sea andthe Indian Ocean. In all the war,” Churchill wrote later of the loss of the twogreat ships, I never received a more direct shock.”

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Raeder further tried to cheer up the Fuehrer by informing him that six“large” submarines were to proceed “as quickly as possible” to the eastcoast of the United States.48

With the situation in Russia being what it was, not to mention that inNorth Africa, where Rommel was also retreating, the thoughts of theGerman Supreme Commander and his military chiefs quickly turned fromthe new enemy, which they were sure would have its hands full in the Pa-cific far away. Their thoughts were not to return to it before another yearhad passed, the most fateful year of the war, in which the great turningpoint would come—irrevocably deciding not only the outcome of the con-flict which all through 1941 the Germans had believed almost over, almostwon, but the fate of the Third Reich, whose astounding early victories hadraised it so quickly to such a giddy height and which Hitler sincerely be-lieved—and said—would flourish for a thousand years.

Haider’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, andagain on the last day of the year. The Chief of the German General Staffhad a presentiment of terrible things to come.

26

THE GREAT TURNING POINT: 1942—STALINGRAD AND EL ALAMEIN

THE CONSPIRATORS COME BACK TO LIFE

'T'he severe setback to Hitler’s armies in Russia during the winter ofA 1941-42 and the cashiering of a number of field marshals and topgenerals ignited the hopes of the anti-Nazi conspirators again.

They had been unable to interest the leading commanders in a revolt aslong as their armies were smashing to one easy victory after another andthe glory of German arms and of the German Reich was soaring to theheavens. But now the proud and hitherto invincible soldiers were fallingback in the snow and bitter cold before an enemy which had proved theirmatch; casualties in six months had passed the million mark; and a host ofthe most renowned generals were being summarily dismissed, some ofthem, such as Hoepner and Sponeck, publicly disgraced, and most of theothers humiliated and made scapegoats of by the ruthless dictator.*

The time is almost ripe,” Hassell concluded hopefully in his diary onDecember 21, 1941. He and his fellow conspirators were sure that the

* Among those retired, it will be recalled, were Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, theCommander 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 I s'1942. The day before, Field Marshal von Reichenau, who had taken over Rund-stedt’s command, died of a stroke. General Udet of the Luftwaffe shot himself todeath on November 17, 1941. Moreover, some thirty-five corps and divisional com-manders were replaced during the winter retreat.

This, of course, was only a beginning. Field Marshal von Manstein summed upat Nuremberg what happened to the generals when they started losing battles orfinally got up enough courage to oppose Hitler. “Of seventeen field marshals,” hetold the tribunal, “ten were sent home during the war and three lost their livesas a result of July 20, 1944 [the plot against Hitler—W.L.S.]. Only one field marshalmanaged 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 orwere dishonorably discharged. Only three full generals survived the war in theirpositions.”1

903

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Prussian officer corps would react not only to their shabby treatment butto the madness of their Supreme Commander in leading them and theirarmies to the brink of disaster in the Russian winter. The plotters had longbeen convinced, as we have seen, that only the generals, in command oftroops, had the physical power to overthrow the Nazi tyrant. Now wastheir chance before it was too late. Timing was all-impor:ant. The war,they saw, after the reverses in Russia and the entry of America into theconflict, could no longer be won. But neither was it yet lost. An anti-Nazigovernment in Berlin could still get peace terms, they thought, whichwould leave Germany a major power and, perhaps, with at least some ofHitler’s gains, such as Austria, the Sudetenland and western Poland.

These thoughts had been very much in their minds at the end of thesummer of 1941, even when the prospect of destroying the Soviet Unionwas still good. The text of the Atlantic Charter, which Churchill andRoosevelt had drawn up on August 19, had come as a heavy blow tothem, especially Point 8, which had stipulated that Germany would haveto be disarmed after the war pending a general disarmament agreement.To Hassell, Goerdeler, Beck and the other members of their oppositioncircle this meant that the Allies had no intention of distinguishing betweenNazi and anti-Nazi Germans and was “proof,” as Hassell put it, “thatEngland and America are not fighting only against Hitler but also want tosmash Germany and render her defenseless.” Indeed, to this aristocraticformer ambassador, now deep in treason against Hitler but determined toget as much as possible for a Germany without Hitler, Point 8, as henoted in his journal, “destroys every reasonable chance for peace.”2

Disillusioned though they were by the Atlantic Charter, the conspiratorsseem to have been spurred to action by its promulgation, if only because itimpressed (hem with the necessity of doing away with Hitler while therewas yet time for an anti-Nazi regime to bargain advantageously for peacefor a Germany which still held most of Europe. They were not adverse tousing Hitler’s conquests to obtain the most favorable terms for their coun-try. The upshot of a series of talks in Berlin during the last days of Augustbetween Hassell, Popitz, Oster, Dohnanyi and General Friedrich Olbricht,chief of staff of the Home Army, was that the “German patriots,” as theycalled themselves, would make “very moderate demands” of the Alliesbut, to quote Hassell again, “there are certain claims from which theycould 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 in-sistence on Germany’s 1914 frontiers in the East plus Austria and theSudetenland.

But time pressed. After a final conference with his confederates at theend of August, Hassell wrote in his diary: “They were unanimously con-vinced that it would soon be too late. When our chances for victory areobviously 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 frontto arrest Hitler during the summer campaign in Russia. But though it in-

evitably proved ineffectual because the great captains were naturally tooabsorbed in their initial stunning victories to give any thought to over-throwing the man who had given them the opportunity to achieve them, itdid plant some seeds among the military minds that would eventuallysprout.

The center of the conspiracy in the Army that summer was in the head-quarters of Field Marshal von Bock, whose Army Group Center was driv-ing on Moscow. Major General Henning von Tresckow of Bock’s staff,whose early enthusiasm for National Socialism had so soured as to landhim in the ranks of the plotters, was the ringleader, and he was assisted byFabian von Schlabrendorff, his A.D.C., and by two fellow conspiratorswhom they had planted on Bock as A.D.C.s, Count Hans von HardenbergCount Heinrich von Lehndorff, both scions of old and prominent Ger-man families. * One of their self-appointed tasks was to work on the FieldMarshal and to persuade hint to arrest Hitler on one of his visits to thearmy group’s headquarters. But Bock was hard to work on. Though pro-fessing to loathe Nazism he had advanced too far under it and was muchtoo vain and ambitious to take any chances at this stage of the game. Oncewhen Tresckow tried to point out to hint that the Fuehrer was leading thecountry to disaster, Bock shouted, “I do not allow the Fuehrer to be at-tacked!”4

Tresckow and his young aide were discouraged but not daunted. Theydecided to act on their own. When on August 4, 1941, the Fuehrer visitedthe army group s headquarters at Borisov they planned to seize him as hewas driving from the airfield to Bock’s quarters. But the plotters were stillamateurs at this time and had not counted on the Fuehrer’s security ar-rangements. Surrounded by his own S.S. bodyguards and declining to useone of the army group’s automobiles to drive in from the airfield—he hadsent ahead his own fleet of cars for this purpose—he gave the two officersno opportunity of getting near him. This fiasco—apparently there wereothers 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 al-ways well guarded. Another was that to seize him and arrest him mightnot solve the problem, since the key generals were too cowardly or too con-fused about their oaths of allegiance to help the opposition to carry onfrom there. It was about this time, the fall of 1941, that some of the youngofficers in the Army, many of them civilians in uniform like Schlabren-dorff, reluctantly came to the conclusion that the simplest and perhaps theonly solution was to kill Hitler. Then the timid generals, released fromtheir personal oaths to the Leader, would go along with the new regimeand give it the support of the Army.

But the ringleaders in Berlin were not yet ready to go so far. They wereconcocting an idiotic plan called “isolated action,” which for some reasonthey thought would satisfy the consciences of the generals about breaking

Lehndorff was executed by the Nazis on September 4, 1944.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

their personal oaths to the Fuehrer and at the same time enable them to ridthe 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 inthe West, would simply, on a prearranged signal, refuse to obey the ordersof Hitler as Commander in Chief of the Army. This of course would havebeen breaking their oath of obedience to the Fuehrer, but the sophists inBerlin pretended not to see that. They explained, at any event, that thereal purpose of the scheme was to create confusion, in the midst of whichBeck, with the help of detachments of the Home Army in Berlin, wouldseize power, depose Hitler and outlaw National Socialism.

The Home Army, however, was scarcely a military force but more amotley collection of recruits doing a little basic training before beingshipped as replacements to the front. Some top generals in Russia or inthe occupation zones who had seasoned troops at their command wouldhave to be won over if the venture were really to succeed. One of them,who had been in on the Haider plot to arrest Hitler at the time of Munich,seemed a natural choice. This was Field Marshal von Witzleben, who wasnow Commander in Chief in the West. To initiate him and also GeneralAlexander von Falkenhausen, the military commander in Belgium, intothe new scheme of things Hassell was sent by the conspirators in mid-Jan-uary 1942 to confer with the two generals. Already under surveillance bythe Gestapo, the former ambassador used the “cover” of a lecture tour, ad-dressing groups of German officers and occupation officials on the subjectof Living Space and Imperialism.” In between lectures he conferredprivately with Falkenhausen in Brussels and Witzleben in Paris, receivinga favorable impression of both of them, especially of the latter.

Shunted to the sidelines in France while his fellow field marshals werefighting great battles in Russia, Witzleben was thirsting for action. He toldHassell that the idea of “isolated action” was utopian. Direct action tooverthrow Hitler was the only solution and he was willing to play a leadingpart. Probably the best time to strike would be during the summer of 1942when the German offensive in Russia was resumed. To prepare for TheDay he intended to be in top physical trim and would have a minor opera-tion to put him in shape. Unfortunately for the Field Marshal and his co-conspirators this decision had disastrous consequences. Like Frederickthe Great—and many others—Witzleben was troubled by hemorrhoids.*The operation to correct this painful and annoying condition was a routinecase of surgery, to be sure, but when Witzleben took a brief sick leave inthe spring to have it done, Hitler took advantage of the situation to retirethe Field Marshal from active service, replacing him with Rundstedt, whohad no stomach for conspiring against the Leader who had so recentlytreated him so shabbily. Thus the plotters found their chief hope in theArmy to be a Field Marshal without any troops at his command. Withoutsoldiers no new regime could be established.

* The Prussian King often complained about this malady, which he found hamperedhis mental facilities as well as his physical activities.

The leaders of the conspiracy were greatly disheartened. They keptmeeting clandestinely and plotting, but they could not overcome their dis-couragement. It seems at the moment,” Hassell noted at the end ofFebruary 1942, after one of the innumerable meetings, “that nothing canbe done about Hitler.”5

A great deal could be done, however, about straightening out theirideas concerning the kind of government they wanted for Germany afterHitler finally was deposed and about strengthening their helter-skelter andso far quite ineffectual organization so that it could take over that gov-ernment 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. Butfor a long time they could not agree on which Hohenzollern prince tohoist on the throne. Popitz, one of the leading civilians in the ring, wantedthe Crown Prince, who was anathema to most of the others. Schachtfavored the oldest son of the Crown Prince, Prince Wilhelm, and Goerde-ler the youngest surviving son of Wilhelm II, Prince Oskar of Prussia. Allwere 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 afanatical Nazi and a Gruppenfuehrer in the S.S.

By the summer of 1941, however, there was more or less agreementthat the most suitable candidate for the throne was Louis-Ferdinand, thesecond and oldest surviving son of the Crown Prince.* Then just thirty-three, a veteran of five years in the Ford factory at Dearborn, a workingemployee of the Lufthansa airlines and in contact and in sympathy withthe plotters, this personable young man had finally emerged as the mostdesirable of the Hohenzollerns. He understood the twentieth century, wasdemocratic 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 personalfriend of President Roosevelt, who had invited the couple to stay in theWhite House during their American honeymoon in 1938.

Hassell and some of his friends were not absolutely convinced thatLouis-Ferdinand was an ideal choice. “He lacks many qualities he cannotget along without,” Hassell commented wryly in his diary at Christmastime, 1941. But he went along with the others.

Hassell s chief interest was in the form and nature of the future Germangovernment, and early the year before he had drawn up, after consulta-tion with General Beck, Goerdeler and Popitz, a program for its interimstage, which he refined in a further draft at the end of 1941.® It restoredindividual freedom and pending the adoption of a permanent constitutionprovided for the supreme power to rest in the hands of a regent, who, ashead of state, would appoint a government and a Council of State. It was

194o'nCe Wllflelm’ the oldest son> had died of battle wounds in France on May 26,

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

all rather authoritarian and Goerdeler and the few trade-union representa-tives among the conspirators didn’t like it, proposing instead an immedi-ate plebiscite so that the interim regime would have popular backing andgive proof of its democratic character. But for the lack of somethingbetter Hassell’s plan was generally accepted at least as a statement ofprinciples until it was superseded by a liberal and enlightened programdrawn up in 1943 under pressure from the Kreisau Circle, led by CountHelmuth 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 hisintelligence and character but also because of his prestige among the gen-erals, his good name in the country and his reputation abroad. However,they had been so lackadaisical in organizing that they had never actuallyput him in charge. A few, like Hassell, though full of admira'ion andrespect for the former General Staff Chief, had some doubts about him.

“The principal difficulty with Beck,” Hassell wrote in his diary shortlybefore Christmas, 1941, “is that he is very theoretical. As Popitz says, aman of tactics but little will power.” This judgment, as it turned out, wasnot an ungrounded one and this quirk in the General’s temperament andcharacter, this surprising lack of a will to act, was to prove tragic and dis-astrous in the end.

Nevertheless in March 1942, after a good many secret meetings, theplotters decided, as Hassell reported, that “Beck must hold the strings,”and at the end of the month, as the ambassador further noted, “Beck wasformally adopted as the head of our group.”7

Still, the conspiracy remained nebulous and the air of unreality whichsurrounded even the most active members of it from the first hangs overtheir endless talk as one tries to follow it at this stage in the records theyhave left. Hitler, they knew that spring, was planning to resume the of-fensive in Russia as soon as the ground was dry. This, they felt, could onlyplunge Germany farther toward the abyss. And yet, though they talkedmuch, (hey did nothing. On March 28, 1942, Hassell sat in his countryhouse at Ebenhausen and began his diary:

During the last days in Berlin I had detailed discussions with lessen,* Beckand 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.

* Jens Peter lessen, a professor of economics at the University of Berlin, was oneof the brains of the circle. He had become an ardent Nazi during the periodbetween 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 executedat the Ploetzensee prison in Berlin in November of that year.

THE LAST GREAT GERMAN OFFENSIVES OF THE WAR

Although the Fuehrer’s folly in refusing to allow the German armiesin Russia to retreat in time had led to heavy losses in men and arms, to thedemoralization of many commands and to a situation which for a fewweeks in January and February 1942 threatened to end in utter catas-trophe, there is little doubt that Hitler’s fanatical determination to holdon and to stand and fight also helped to stem the Soviet tide. The tradi-tional courage and endurance of the German soldiers did the rest.

By February 20 the Russian offensive from the Baltic to the Black Seahad run out of steam and at the end of March the season of deep mud setin, bringing a relative quiet to the long and bloody front. Both sides wereexhausted. A German Army report of March 30, 1942, revealed what aterrible toll had been paid in the winter fighting. Of a total of 162 com-bat 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 wasnow Commander in Chief of the Army as well as Supreme Commanderof the Armed Forces, had been busy with plans for the coming summer’soffensive. They were not as ambitious as those of the previous year. Bynow he had sense enough to see that he could not destroy all of the Redarmies in a single campaign. This summer he would concentrate the bulkof his forces in the south, conquer the Caucasus oil fields, the Donets in-dustrial basin and the wheat fields of the Kuban and take Stalingrad onthe Volga. This would accomplish several prime objectives. It would de-prive the Soviets of the oil and much of the food and industry they des-perately needed to carry on the war, while giving the Germans the oil andthe food resources they were almost as badly in need of.

If I do not get the oil of Maikop and Grozny,” Hitler told GeneralPaulus, the commander of the ill-fated Sixth Army, just before the sum-mer offensive began, “then I must end this war.”10

Stalin could have said almost the same thing. He too had to have theoil of the Caucasus to stay in the war. That was where the significance ofStalingrad came in. German possession of it would block the last mainroute via the Caspian Sea and the Volga River over which the oil, as longas the Russians held the wells, could reach central Russia.

Besides oil to propel his planes and tanks and trucks, Hitler neededmen to fill out his thinned ranks. Total casualties at the end of the winterfighting were 1,167,835, exclusive of the sick, and there were not enoughreplacements available to make up for such losses. The High Commandturned to Germany’s allies—or, rather, satellites—for additional troops.During the winter General Keitel had scurried off to Budapest and Bucha-rest to drum up Hungarian and Rumanian soldiers—whole divisions ofthem—for the coming summer. Goering and finally Hitler himself ap-pealed to Mussolini for Italian formations.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Goering arrived in Rome at the end of January 1942 to line up Italianreinforcements for Russia, assuring Mussolini that the Soviet Unionwould be defeated in 1942 and that Great Britain would lay down herarms in 1943. Ciano found the fat, bemedaled Reich Marshal insuffer-able. “As usual he is bloated and overbearing,” the Italian ForeignMinister noted in his diary on February 2. Two days later:

Goering leaves Rome. We had dinner at the Excelsior Hotel, and duringthe dinner Goering talked of little else but the jewels he owned. In fact, hehad some beautiful rings on his fingers ... On the way to the station he worea great sable coat, something between what automobile drivers wore in 1906and what a high-grade prostitute wears to the opera.11

The corruption and corrosion of the Number Two man in the ThirdReich was making steady progress.

Mussolini promised Goering to send two Italian divisions to Russia inMarch if the Germans would give them artillery, but his concern abouthis ally’s defeats on the Eastern front grew to such proportions that Hitlerdecided it was time for another meeting to explain how strong Germanystill was.

This took place on April 29 and 30 at Salzburg, where the Duce andCiano 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 Ministersuspected the Germans “did not pay too much.” Ciano found the Fuehrerlooking tired. “The winter months in Russia have borne heavily uponhim,” he noted in his diary. “I see for the first time that he has many grayhairs.”* ^

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 com-ing offensive in the East, they confided, would be directed against theCaucasus oil fields.

When Russia’s sources of oil are exhausted [Ribbentrop said] she will bebrought to her knees. Then the British . . . will bow in order to save whatremains of the mauled Empire . . .

America is a big bluff . . .

Ciano, listening more or less patiently to his opposite number, got theimpression, however, that in regard to what the United States might

* Goebbels had seen Hitler a month before at headquarters and expressed shock inhis diary at his ailing. “I noted that he has already become quite gray . . . Hetold me he has had to fight off severe attacks of giddiness . . . The Fuehrer thistime truly worries me. He had, Goebbels added, a “physical revulsion againstfrost and snow . . . What worries and torments the Fuehrer most is that the countryis still covered with snow . . .” (The Goebbels Diaries, pp. 131-37.)

eventually do it was the Germans who were bluffing and that in realityw en 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—hewho is in the habit of talking himself, and who, instead, practically has to keepquiet. On the second day, after lunch, when everything had been said, Hitlertalked uninterruptedly for an hour and forty minutes. He omitted absolutelyno argument: war and peace, religion and philosophy, art and history. Mus-solini automatically looked at his wrist watch ... The Germans—poorpeople—have to take it every day, and I am certain there isn’t a gesture, a wordor a pause, which they don’t know by heart. General Jodi, after an epicstruggle, 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 thepromise of more Italian cannon fodder for the Russian front. So success-ful were he and Keitel with all the satellites that the German High Com-mand calculated it would have 52 “Allied” divisions available for thesummer s task—27 Rumanian, 13 Hungarian, 9 Italian, 2 Slovak and one

nr m1Sh;, Thll^aS °ne qUartCr °f the combined Axis force in the East.Ut the 41 fresh divisions which were to reinforce the southern part of the

ront, where the mam German blow would fall, one half—or 21 divisions—were Hungarian (10), Italian (6) and Rumanian (5). Haider andmost of ffie other generals did not like to stake so much on so manyforeign divisions whose fighting qualities, in their opinion, were, to putit mildly, questionable. But because of their own shortage of manpowerthey reluctantly accepted this aid, and this decision was shortly to con-tribute to the disaster which ensued.

At first, that summer of 1942, the fortunes of the Axis prospered. Evenbefore the jump-off toward the Caucasus and Stalingrad a sensational vic-tory was scored in North Africa. On May 27, 1942, General Rommel hadresumed his offensive in the desert.* Striking swiftly with his famedtnka Korps (two armored divisions and a motorized infantry division)and eight Italian divisions, of which one was armored, he soon had thentish desert army reeling back toward the Egyptian frontier. On June

^ be MPtUT Tobruk’ the key to the British defenses, which in 1941had held out for nine months until relieved, and two days later he enteredgypt. By the end of June he was at El Alamein, sixty-five miles fromAlexandria and the delta of the Nile. It seemed to many a startled Alliedstatesman, poring over a map, that nothing could now prevent Rommel

* In a savage series of battles with the British in November and December 1941Rommel s forces had been driven back clear across Cyrenai “ to the m Aahella

a^ua2“iWTT BlU “"S back with his -"omary «Sl££in

January 1942 Rommel recaptured half of the ground lost, in a swift seventeen dav

rm;;?4h2bb™rhim bact tb E| ,r™ ^

912

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

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 fieldsof the Middle East and then to the Caucasus to meet the German armiesin Russia, which already were beginning their advance toward that regionfrom the north.

It was one of the darkest moments of the war for the Allies and cor-respondingly one of the brightest for the Axis. But Hitler, as we haveseen, had never understood global warfare. He did not know how to ex-ploit Rommel’s surprising African success. He awarded the daring leaderof the Afrika Korps a field marshal’s baton but he did not send him sup-plies or reinforcements.* Under the nagging of Admiral Raeder and theurging of Rommel, the Fuehrer had only reluctantly agreed to send theAfrika Korps and a small German air force to Libya in the first place. Buthe had done this only to prevent an Italian collapse in North Africa, notbecause he foresaw the importance of conquering Egypt.

The key to that conquest actually was the small island of Malta, lyingin the Mediterranean between Sicily and the Axis bases in Libya. It wasfrom this British bastion that bombers, submarines and surface craftwrought havoc on German and Italian vessels carrying supplies and mento North Africa. In August 1941 some 35 per cent of Rommel’s suppliesand reinforcements were sunk; in October, 63 per cent. By November 9Ciano 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 itagain. A convoy of seven ships left, accompanied by two ten-thousand-toncruisers and ten destroyers . . . All—I mean all—our ships were sunkThe British returned to their ports [at Malta] after having slaughtered us.13

Belatedly the Germans diverted several U-boats from the Battle of theAtlantic to the Mediterranean and Kesselring was given additional squad-rons of planes for the bases in Sicily. It was decided to neutralize Maltaand destroy, if possible, the British fleet in the eastern Mediterranean.Success was immediate. By the end of 1941 the British had lost threebattleships, an aircraft carrier, two cruisers and several destroyers and

* Hitler’s naming Rommel a field marshal the day after the capture of Tobrukcaused Mussolini “much pain” because, as Ciano noted, it accentuated “theGerman character of the battle.” The Duce left immediately for Libya to grabsome honors for himself, believing that he could enter Alexandria, Ciano says, “infifteen days.” On July 2 he contacted Hitler by wire about “the question of thefuture political government of Egypt,” proposing Rommel as the military com-mander and an Italian as “civilian delegate.” Hitler replied that he did not considerthe matter “urgent.” (Ciano Diaries, pp. 502-04.)

“Mussolini was waiting impatiently in Derna [behind the front],” General FritzBayerlein, chief of staff to Rommel, later recalled, “for the day when he might takethe salute at a parade of Axis tanks beneath the shadow of the Pyramids.” (TheFatal Decisions, ed. Freidin and Richardson, p. 103.)

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 shippingwas lost—and Rommel was able to build up his forces for the big pushinto Egypt.

In March Admiral Raeder talked Hitler into approving plans not onlyfor Rommel’s offensive toward the Nile (Operation Aida) but for thecapture of Malta by parachute troops (Operation Hercules). The drivefrom Libya was to begin at the end of May and Malta was to be assaultedin mid-July. But on June 15, while Rommel was in the midst of his initialsuccesses, Hitler postponed the attack on Malta. He could spare neithertroops nor planes from the Russian front, he explained to Raeder. A fewweeks later he postponed Hercules again, saying it could wait until afterthe summer offensive in the East had been completed and Rommel hadconquered Egypt.14 Malta could be kept quiet in the meantime, he ad-vised, by continued bombing.

But it was not kept quiet and for this failure either to neutralize it or tocapture it the Germans would shortly pay a high price. A large British con-voy got through to the besieged island on June 16, and though severalwarships and freighters were lost this put Malta back in business. Spit-fires were flown to the island from the U.S. aircraft carrier Wasp and soondrove the attacking Luftwaffe bombers from the skies. Rommel felt theeffect. Three quarters of his supply ships thereafter were sunk.

He had reached El Alamein with just thirteen operational tanks.* “Ourstrength,” he wrote in his diary on July 3, “has faded away.” And at amoment when the Pyramids were almost in sight, and beyond—the greatprize of Egypt and Suez! This was another opportunity lost, and one ofthe last which Hitler would be afforded by Providence and the fortunesof war.

THE GERMAN SUMMER OFFENSIVE IN RUSSIA: 1942

By the end of the summer of 1942 Adolf Hitler seemed to be once moreon top of the world. German U-boats were sinking 700,000 tons of Brit-ish-American shipping a month in the Atlantic—more than could bereplaced in the booming shipyards of the United States, Canada and Scot-land. Though the Fuehrer had denuded his forces in the West of most oftheir troops and tanks and planes in order to finish with Russia, there wasno sign that summer that the British and Americans were strong enoughto make even a small landing from across the Channel. They had noteven risked trying to occupy French-held Northwest Africa, though theweakened French, of divided loyalties, had nothing much with which to

* According to General Bayerlein’s postwar testimony. He probably exaggeratedhis losses. Allied intelligence gave Rommel 125 tanks.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

stop them even if they attempted to, and the Germans nothing at all excepta few submarines and a handful of planes based in Italy and Tripoli.

The British Navy and Air Force had been unable to prevent Germany’stwo battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the heavy cruiser PrinzEugen from dashing up the English Channel in full daylight and makingtheir way safely home from Brest.* Hitler had feared that the British andAmericans would certainly try to occupy northern Norway—that was whyhe had insisted on the dash from Brest so that the three heavy ships therecould be used for the defense of Norwegian waters. “Norway,” he toldRaeder at the end of January 1942, “is the zone of destiny.” It had to bedefended 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 lookedstaggering. The Mediterranean had become practically an Axis lake,with Germany and Italy holding most of the northern shore from Spain toTurkey and the southern shore from Tunisia to within sixty miles of theNile. In fact, German troops now stood guard from the Norwegian NorthCape on the Arctic Ocean to Egypt, from the Atlantic at Brest to thesouthern reaches of the Volga River on the border of Central Asia.

German troops of the Sixth Army had reached the Volga just north ofStalingrad on August 23. Two days before, the swastika had been hoistedon Mount Elbrus, the highest peak (18,481 feet) in the Caucasus Moun-tains. The Maikop oil fields, producing annually two and a half milliontons of oil, had been captured on August 8, though the Germans foundthem almost completely destroyed, and by the twenty-fifth Kleist’s tankshad arrived at Mozdok, only fifty miles from the main Soviet oil centeraround Grozny and a bare hundred miles from the Caspian Sea. On thethirty-first Hitler was urging Field Marshal List, commander of the armiesin the Caucasus, to scrape up all available forces for the final push toGrozny so that he “could get his hands on the oil fields.” On that last dayof August, too, Rommel launched his offensive at El Alamein with everyhope of breaking through to the Nile.

Although Hitler was never satisfied with the performance of his gen-erals he had sacked Field Marshal von Bock, who commanded the wholesouthern offensive, on July 13 and, as Haider’s diary reveals, had con-stantly nagged and cursed most of the other commanders as well as theGeneral Staff for not advancing fast enough—he now believed that thedecisive victory was in his grasp. He ordered the Sixth Army and theFourth Panzer Army to swing north along the Volga, after Stalingrad wastaken, in a vast encircling movement which would enable him eventuallyto advance on central Russia and Moscow from the east as well as from

* This had taken place on February 11-12, 1942, and had caught the British bysurprise. Only weak naval and aircraft forces were rounded up in time to attackthe German fleet and they inflicted little damage. “Vice-Admiral Ciliax [who ledthe dash],” commented the Times of London, “has succeeded where the Duke ofMedina Sidonia failed . . . Nothing more mortifying to the pride of sea power hashappened in Home Waters since the 17th Century.”

the west. He believed the Russians were finished and Haider tells of himat this moment talking of pushing with part of his forces through Iran tothe Persian Gulf.15 Soon he would link up with the Japanese in the IndianOcean. He had no doubt of the accuracy of a German intelligence reporton September 9 that the Russians had used up all their reserves on the en-tire front. In a conference with Admiral Raeder at the end of August histhoughts were already turning from Russia, which he said he now regardedas a blockadeproof Lebensraum,” to the British and Americans, whowould soon, he was sure, be brought “to the point of discussing peaceterms.”18

And yet, as General Kurt Zeitzler later recalled, appearances even then,rosy as they were, were deceptive. Almost all the generals in the field, aswell as those on the General Staff, saw flaws in the pretty picture. Theycould be summed up: the Germans simply didn’t have the resources—themen or the guns or the tanks or the planes or the means of transportation—to reach the objectives Hitler had insisted on setting. When Rommeltried to tell this to the warlord in respect to Egypt, Hitler ordered him togo on sick leave in the mountains of the Semmering. When Haider andField 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 tothe German armies in southern Russia as Soviet resistance stiffened in theCaucasus and at Stalingrad and the season of the autumn rains ap-proached. The long northern flank of the Sixth Army was dangerouslyexposed along the line of the upper Don for 350 miles from Stalingrad toVoronezh. Here Hitler had stationed three satellite armies: the HungarianSecond, south of Voronezh; the Italian Eighth, farther southeast; and theRumanian Third, on the right at the bend of the Don just west of Stalin-grad. Because of the bitter hostility of Rumanians and Hungarians to eachother their armies had to be separated by the Italians. In the steppes southof Stalingrad there was a fourth satellite army, the Rumanian Fourth.Aside from their doubtful fighting qualities, all these armies were inade-quately equipped, lacking armored power, heavy artillery and mobility.Furthermore, they were spread out very thinly. The Rumanian ThirdArmy held a front of 105 miles with only sixty-nine battalions. But these“allied” armies were all Hitler had. There were not enough German unitsto fill the gap. And since he believed, as he told Haider, that the Russianswere “finished,” he did not unduly worry about this exposed and lengthyDon flank.

Yet it was the key to maintaining both the Sixth Army and the FourthPanzer Army at Stalingrad and Army Group A in the Caucasus. Shouldthe Don flank collapse not only would the German forces at Stalingrad bethreatened with encirclement but those in the Caucasus would be cut off.Once more the Nazi warlord had gambled. It was not his first gamble ofthe summer’s campaign.

On July 23, at the height of the offensive, he had made another. The

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Russians were in full retreat between the Donets and upper-Don rivers,falling rapidly back toward Stalingrad to the east and toward the lowerDon to the south. A decision had to be made. Should the German forcesconcentrate on taking Stalingrad and blocking the Volga River, or shouldthey deliver their main blow in the Caucasus in quest of Russian oil? Ear-lier in the month Hitler had pondered this crucial question but had beenunable to make up his mind. At first, the smell of oil had tempted himmost, and on July 13 he had detached the Fourth Panzer Army fromArmy Group B, which had been driving down the Don toward the river’sbend and Stalingrad just beyond, and sent it south to help Kleist’s FirstPanzer Army get over the lower Don near Rostov and on into the Caucasustoward the oil fields. At that moment the Fourth Panzer Army probablycould have raced on to Stalingrad, which was then largely undefended, andeasily captured it. By the time Hitler realized his mistake it was too late,and then he compounded his error. When the Fourth Panzer Army wasshifted back toward Stalingrad a fortnight later, the Russians had re-covered sufficiently to be able to check it; and its departure from the Cau-casus front left Kleist too weak to complete his drive to the Grozny oilfields.*

The shifting of this powerful armored unit back to the drive on Stalin-grad was one result of the fatal decision which Hitler made on July 23. Hisfanatical determination to take both Stalingrad and the Caucasus at thesame time, against the advice of Haider and the field commanders, who didnot believe it could be done, was embodied in Directive No. 45, which be-came famous in the annals of the German Army. It was one of the mostfateful of Hitler’s moves in the war, for in the end, and in a very shorttime, it resulted in his failing to achieve either objective and led to the mosthumiliating defeat in the history of German arms, making certain that hecould never win the war and that the days of the thousand-year ThirdReich were numbered.

General Haider was appalled, and there was a stormy scene at “Were-wolf” headquarters in the Ukraine near Vinnitsa to which Hitler hadmoved on July 16 in order to be nearer the front. The Chief of the Gen-eral Staff urged that the main forces be concentrated on the taking ofStalingrad and tried to explain that the German Army simply did notpossess the strength to carry out two powerful offensives in two differentdirections. When Hitler retorted that the Russians were “finished,” Hai-der attempted to convince him that, according to the Army’s own intelli-gence, this was far from the case.

* Kleist confirmed this to Liddell Hart: “The Fourth Panzer Army . . . couldhave taken Stalingrad without a fight at the end of July, but was diverted south tohelp me in crossing the Don. I did not need its aid, and it merely congested theroads I was using. When it turned north again a fortnight later the Russians hadgathered just sufficient forces at Stalingrad to check it.” By that time Kleist neededthe additional tank force. “We could have reached our goal [the Grozny oil] if myforces had not been drawn away ... to help the attack on Stalingrad,” he added.(Liddell Hart, The German Generals Talk, pp. 169-71.)

The continual underestimation of enemy possibilities [Haider noted sadlyin his diary that evening] takes on grotesque forms and is becoming dangerous.Serious work has become impossible here. Pathological reaction to momentaryimpressions and a complete lack of capacity to assess the situation and itspossibilities give this so-called “leadership” a most peculiar character.

Later the Chief of the General Staff, whose own days at his post werenow numbered, would come back to this scene and write:

Hitler’s decisions had ceased to have anything in common with theprinciples of strategy and operations as they have been recognized for genera-tions past. They were the product of a violent nature following its momentaryimpulses, 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 theenemy’s,” Haider later told a story:

Once when a quite objective report was read to him showing that still in1942 Stalin would be able to muster from one to one and a quarter millionfresh troops in the region north of Stalingrad and west of the Volga, not tomention half a million men in the Caucasus, and which provided proof thatRussian output of front-line tanks amounted to at least 1,200 a month, Hitlerflew at the man who was reading with clenched fists and foam in the cornersof 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 Haider, “to fore-see what would happen when Stalin unleashed those million and a halftroops against Stalingrad and the Don flank.* I pointed this out to Hitlervery clearly. The result was the dismissal of the Chief of the Army Gen-eral Staff.”

This took place on September 24. Already on the ninth, upon beingtold by Keitel that Field Marshal List, who had the over-all command ofthe armies in the Caucasus, had been sacked, Haider learned that hewould be the next to go. The Fuehrer, he was told, had become convincedthat he “was no longer equal to the psychic demands of his position.” Hit-ler explained this in greater detail to his General Staff Chief at their fare-well meeting on the twenty-fourth.

“You and I have been suffering from nerves. Half of my nervous ex-haustion is due to you. It is not worth it to go on. We need National

* Haider relates that “quite by accident” he came across in the Ukraine about thattime a book about Stalin’s defeat of General Denikin between the Don bend andStalingrad during the Russian Civil War. He says the situation then was verysimilar to that of 1942 and that Stalin exploited “masterfully” Denikin’s weakdefenses along the Don. “Hence,” he adds, “came the changing of the name of thecity from ‘Tsaritsyn’ to ‘Stalingrad.’ ”

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Socialist ardor now, not professional ability. I cannot expect this of anofficer of the old school such as you.”

“So spoke,” Haider commented later, “not a responsible warlord but apolitical fanatic.”19

And so departed Franz Haider. He was not without his faults, whichwere similar to those of his predecessor, General Beck, in that his mindwas often confused and his will to action paralyzed. And though he hadoften stood up to Hitler, however ineffectually, he had also, like all of theother Army officers who enjoyed high rank during World War II, gonealong with him and for a long time abetted his outrageous aggressionsand his conquests. Yet he had retained some of the virtues of more civi-lized times. He was the last of the old-school General Staff chiefs thatthe Army of the Third Reich would have.* He was replaced by GeneralKurt Zeitzler, a younger officer of a different stripe who was serving aschief of staff to Rundstedt in the West, and who endured in the post, whichonce—especially in the First World War—had been the highest and mostpowerful in the German Army, as little more than the Fuehrer’s office boyuntil the attempt against the dictator’s life in July 1944.f

A change in General Staff chiefs did not change the situation of theGerman Army, whose twin drives on Stalingrad and the Caucasus hadnow been halted by stiffening Soviet resistance itself. All through Octoberbi ter street fighting continued in Stalingrad itself. The Germans madesome progress, from building to building, but with staggering losses, forthe rubble of a great city, as everyone who has experienced modern war-fare knows, gives many opportunities for stubborn and prolonged defenseand the Russians, disputing desperately every foot of the debris, made themost of them. Though Haider and then his successor warned Hitler thatthe troops in Stalingrad were becoming exhausted, the Supreme Com-mander insisted that they push on. Fresh divisions were thrown in andwere soon ground to pieces in the inferno.

Instead of a means to an end—the end had already been achieved whenGerman formations reached the western banks of the Volga north andsouth of the city and cut off the river’s traffic—Stalingrad had become anend in itself. To Hitler its capture was now a question of personal pres-

IT*1® SnCk'n® ^ajcie.r was a l°ss not or>ly lo the Army but to historians of theThird Reich, for his invaluable diary ends on September 24, 1942. He waseventually arrested, placed in the concentration camp at Dachau along with suchillustrious prisoners as Schuschnigg and Schacht and liberated by U S forces atNiederdorf South Tyrol, on April 28, 1945. Since then, up to the time of writing,

hfj “llall°rated Wlth the U.S. Army in a number of military historical studies ofWorld War II. His generosity to this writer in answering queries and pointing outsources has already been noted. °

t The faithful and fanatically loyal General Jodi, Chief of Operations at OKWalso was in Hitler’s doghouse at this time. He had opposed the sacking of FieldMarshal List and General Haider and his defense of them sent Hitler into such arage that for months he refused to shake hands with Jodi or dine with him or anvother staff officer. Hitler was on the point of firing Jodi at the end of January 1943arid replacing him with General Paulus, but it was too late. Paulus, as we shallshortly see, was no longer available.

tige. When even Zeitzler got up enough nerve to suggest to the Fuehrerthat in view of the danger to the long northern flank along the Don theSixth 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 re-mains!” he stormed.

Despite the hard going and the severe losses, General Paulus, com-mander of the Sixth Army, informed Hitler by radio on October 25 that heexpected to complete the capture of Stalingrad at the latest by November10. Cheered up by this assurance, Hitler issued orders the next day thatthe Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army, which was fighting southof the city, should prepare to push north and south along the Volga assoon as Stalingrad had fallen.

It was not that Hitler was ignorant of the threat to the Don flank. TheOKW diaries make clear that it caused him considerable worry. Thepoint 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 situationwas well in hand that on the last day of October he, the staff of OKW andthe Army General Staff abandoned their headquarters at Vinnitsa in theUkraine and returned to Wolfsschanze at Rastenburg. The Fuehrer hadpractically convinced himself that if there were to be any Soviet winteroffensive at all it would come on the central and northern fronts. Hecould handle that better from his quarters in East Prussia.

Hardly had he returned there when bad news reached him from anotherand more distant front. Field Marshal Rommel’s Afrika Korps was introuble.

THE FIRST BLOW: EL ALAMEIN AND THEANGLO-AMERICAN LANDINGS

The Desert Fox, as he was called on both sides of the front, had resumedhis offensive at El Alamein on August 31 with the intention of rolling upthe British Eighth Army and driving on to Alexandria and the Nile. Therewas a violent battle in the scorching heat on the 40-mile desert front be-tween the sea and the Qattara Depression, but Rommel could not quitemake it and on September 3 he broke off the fighting and went over to thedefensive. At long last the British army in Egypt had received strong re-inforcements in men, guns, tanks and planes (many of the last two fromAmerica). It had also received on August 15 two new commanders: aneccentric but gifted general named Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, whotook over the Eighth Army, and General Sir Harold Alexander, who wasto prove to be a skillful strategist and a brilliant administrator and whonow assumed the post of Commander in Chief in the Middle East.

Shortly after his setback Rommel had gone on sick leave on the Sem-mering in the mountains below Vienna to receive a cure for an infectednose and a swollen fiver, and it was there that on the afternoon of October

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24 he received a telephone call from Hitler. “Rommel, the news fromAfrica sounds bad. The situation seems somewhat obscure. Nobody ap-pears to know what has happened to General Stumme.* Do you feel ca-pable of returning to Africa and taking over there again?”20 Though a sickman, Rommel agreed to return immediately.

By the time he got back to headquarters west of El Alamein on the fol-lowing 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 Rom-mel made desperate efforts to shift his battered divisions to stem the vari-ous attacks and even to counterattack he realized that his situation washopeless. He had no reserves: of men, or tanks or oil. The R.A.F., foronce, had complete command of the skies and was pounding his troopsand armor and remaining supply dumps mercilessly.

On November 2, Montgomery’s infantry and armor broke through onthe southern sector of the front and began to overrun the Italian divisionsthere. That evening Rommel radioed Hitler’s headquarters in East Prus-sia two thousand miles away that he could no longer hold out and that heintended to withdraw, while there was still the opportunity, to the Fukaposition forty miles to the west.

He had already commenced to do so when a long message came overthe air the next day from the Supreme warlord:

To Field Marshal Rommel:

I and the German people are watching the heroic defensive battle waged inEgypt with faithful trust in your powers of leadership and in the bravery ofthe German-Italian troops under your command. In the situation in whichyou now find yourself, there can be no other consideration save that of hold-ing fast, of not retreating one step, of throwing every gun and every man intothe battle . . . You can show your troops no other way than that which leadsto victory or to death.

Adolf Hitler21

This idiotic order meant, if obeyed, that the Italo—German armies werecondemned to swift annihilation and for the first time in Africa, Bayerleinsays, Rommel did not know what to do. After a brief struggle with hisconscience he decided, over the protests of General Ritter von Thoma, theactual commander of the German Afrika Korps, who said he was with-drawing in any case,f to obey his Supreme Commander. “I finally com-

* Stumme, who was acting commander in the absence of Rommel, had died of aheart attack the first night of the British offensive while fleeing on foot over thedesert from a British patrol that had almost captured him.

f The next day, November 4—after telling Bayerlein, “Hitler’s order is a piece ofunparalleled madness. I can’t go along with this any longer”—General von Thomadonned a clean uniform, with the insignia of his rank and his decorations, stood byhis burning tank until a British unit arrived, surrendered and in the evening dinedwith Montgomery at his headquarters mess.

polled myself to take this decision,” Rommel wrote later in his diary, “be-cause’ I myself have always demanded unconditional obedience from mysoldiers 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 thatunless he were permitted to fall back immediately all would be lost. Butevents were already making tha' trip unnecessary. On the evening ofNovember 4, at the risk of being court-martialed for disobedience, Rom-mel decided to save what was left of his forces and retreat to Fuka. Onlythe remnants of the armored and motorized units could be extricated. Thefoot soldiers, mostly Italian, were left behind to surrender, as indeed thebulk of them already had done.* On November 5 came a curt messagefrom the Fuehrer: “I agree to the withdrawal of your army into the Fukaposition.” But that position already had been overrun by Montgomery’stanks. Within fifteen days Rommel had fallen back seven hundred milesto beyond Benghazi with the remnants of his African army—some 25,000Italians, 10,000 Germans and sixty tanks—and there was no opportunityto stop even there.

This was the beginning of the end for Adolf Hitler, the most decisivebattle of the war yet won by his enemies, though a second and even moredecisive one was just about to begin on the snowy steppes of southernRussia. But before it did, the Fuehrer was to hear further bad news fromNorth 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 Rom-mel’s disaster, the Fuehrer’s headquarters had received word that an Alliedarmada had been sighted assembling at Gibraltar. No one at OKWcould make out what it might be up to. Hitler was inclined to think itwas merely another heavily guarded convoy for Malta. This is interestingbecause more than a fortnight earlier, on October 15, the OKW staffchiefs had discussed several reports about an imminent “Anglo-Saxonlanding” in West Africa. The intelligence apparently came from Rome,for Ciano a week before, on October 9, noted in his diary after a talk withthe chief of the military secret service that “the Anglo-Saxons are prepar-ing to land in force in North Africa.” The news depressed Ciano; he fore-saw—correctly, as it turned out—that this would lead inevitably to adirect Allied assault on Italy.

Hitler, preoccupied as he was with the failure of the Russians to ceasetheir infernal resistance, did not take this first intelligence very seriously.At a meeting of OKW on October 15, Jodi suggested that Vichy France bepermitted to send reinforcements to North Africa so that the French couldrepel any Anglo-American landings. The Fuehrer, according to the OKWDiary, turned the suggestion down because it might ruffle the Italians, whowere jealous of any move to strengthen France. At the Supreme Com-

* Rommel’s losses at El Alamein were 59,000 killed, wounded and captured, ofwhom 34,000 were Germans, out of a total force of 96,000 men.

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mander’s headquarters the matter appears to have been forgotten untilNovember 3. But on that day, although German agents on the Spanishside of Gibraltar had reported seeing a great Anglo-American fleet gath-ering there, Hitler was too busy rallying Rommel at El Alamein to botherwith what appeared to him to be merely another convoy for Malta.

On November 5, OKW was informed that one British naval force hadsailed out of Gibraltar headed east. But it was not until the morning ofNovember 7, twelve hours before American and British troops beganlanding in North Africa, that Hitler gave the latest intelligence from Gi-braltar some thought. The forenoon reports received at his headquartersin East Prussia were that British naval forces in Gibraltar and a vast fleetof transports and warships from the Atlantic had joined up and weresteaming east into the Mediterranean. There was a long discussion amongthe staff officers and the Fuehrer. What did it all mean? What was theobjective of such a large naval force? Hitler was now inclined to believe,he said, that the Western Allies might be attempting a major landing withsome four or five divisions at Tripoli or Benghazi in order to catch Rom-mel in the rear. Admiral Krancke, the naval liaison officer at OKW, de-clared 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 inthe Mediterranean be immediately reinforced but was told this was im-possible “for the moment.” Judging by the OKW Diary all that Hitlerdid that morning was to notify Rundstedt, Commander in Chief in theWest, to be ready to carry out “Anton.” This was the code word for theoccupation of the rest of France.

Whereupon the Supreme Commander, heedless of this ominous news orof the plight of Rommel, who would be trapped if the Anglo-Americanslanded behind him, or of the latest intelligence warning of an imminentRussian counteroffensive on the Don in the rear of the Sixth Army atStalingrad, entrained after lunch on November 7 for Munich, where onthe next evening he was scheduled to deliver his annual speech to his oldparty cronies gathered to celebrate the anniversary of the Beer HallPutsch!*

The politician in him, as Haider noted, had got the upper hand of thesoldier at a critical moment in the war. Supreme Headquarters in EastPrussia was left in charge of a colonel, one Freiherr Treusch von Buttlar-Brandenfels. Generals Keitel and Jodi, the chief officers of OKW, wentalong to participate in the beerhouse festivities. There is somethingweird and batty about such goings on that take the Supreme warlord, whoby now was insisting on directing the war on far-flung fronts down to thedivisional or regimental or even battalion level, thousands of miles fromthe battlefields on an unimportant political errand at a moment when the

* I learn from Hitler’s captured daily calendar book that the celebration had beenmoved from the old Buergerbraukeller, where the putsch had taken place, to a moreelegant beer hall in Munich, the Loewenbraukeller. The Buergerbraukeller, it willbe remembered, had been wrecked by a time bomb which had just missed killing theFuehrer on the night of November 8, 1939.

house is beginning to fall in. A change in the man, a corrosion, a de-terioration has set in, as it already had with Goering who, though his onceall-powerful Luftwaffe had been steadily declining, was becoming moreand more attached to his jewels and his toy trains, with little time to sparefor the ugly realties of a prolonged and increasingly bitter war.

Anglo-American troops under General Eisenhower hit the beaches ofMorocco and Algeria at 1:30 a.m. on November 8, 1942, and at 5:30Ribbentrop was on the phone from Munich to Ciano in Rome to give himthe news.

He was rather nervous [Ciano wrote in his diary] and wanted to know whatwe intended to do. I must confess that, having been caught unawares, I wastoo sleepy to give a very satisfactory answer.

The Italian Foreign Minister learned from the German Embassy thatthe officials there were “literally terrified by the blow.”

Hitler’s special train from East Prussia did not arrive in Munich until3:40 that afternoon and the first reports he got about the Allied landingsin Northwest Africa were optimistic.22 Everywhere the French, he wastold, were putting up stubborn resistance, and at Algiers and Oran theyhad repulsed the landing attempts. In Algeria, Germany’s friend, AdmiralDarlan, 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 toAfrica. He instructed the Gestapo to bring Generals Weygand and Gi-raud* to Vichy and to keep them under surveillance. He asked FieldMarshal von Rundstedt to set in action Anton but not to cross the line ofdemarcation in France until he had further orders. And he requestedCianof and Pierre Laval, who was now Premier of Vichy France, to meethim in Munich the next day.

For about twenty-four hours Hitler toyed with the idea of trying tomake an alliance with France in order to bring her into the war againstBritain and America and, at the moment, to strengthen the resolve of thePetain government to oppose the Allied landings in North Africa. Heprobably was encouraged in this by the action of Petain in breaking offdiplomatic relations with the United States on the morning of Sunday,November 8, and by the aged French Marshal’s statement to the U.S.

* General Giraud at that moment was arriving in Algiers. He had escaped from aGerman POW camp and settled in the south of France, where he was taken off bya British submarine on November 5 and brought to Gibraltar to confer withEisenhower just before the landings.

t “During the night,” Ciano wrote in his diary on November 9, “Ribbentroptelephoned. Either the Duce or 1 must go to Munich as soon as possible. Laval willalso be there. I wake up the Duce. He is not very anxious to leave, especially sincehe is not feeling very well. I shall go.”

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charge d’affaires that his forces would resist the Anglo-American inva-sion. The OKW Diary for that Sunday emphasizes that Hitler was pre-occupied with working out “a far-reaching collaboration with the French.”That evening the German representative in Vichy, Krug von Nidda, sub-mitted a proposal to Petain for a close alliance between Germany andFrance.23

By the next day, following his speech to the party veterans, in which heproclaimed that Stalingrad was “firmly in German hands,” the Fuehrerhad changed his mind. He told Ciano he had no illusions about theFrench desire to fight and that he had decided on “the total occupation ofFrance, a landing in Corsica, a bridgehead in Tunisia.” This decision,though not the timing, was communicated to Laval when he arrived inMunich by car on November 10. This traitorous Frenchman promptlypromised to urge Petain to accede to the Fuehrer’s wishes but suggestedthat the Germans go ahead with their plans without waiting for the senileold Marshal’s approval, which Hitler fully intended to do. Ciano has lefta description of the Vichy Premier, who was executed for treason afterthe war.

Laval, with his white tie and middle-class French peasant attire, is very muchout of place in the great salon among so many uniforms. He tries to speak ina familiar tone about his trip and his long sleep in the car, but his words gounheeded. Hitler treats him with frigid courtesy . . .

The poor man could not even imagine the fait accompli that the Germanswere to place before him. Not a word was said to Laval about the impendingaction—that the orders to occupy France were being given while he wassmoking his cigarette and conversing with various people in the next room.Von Ribbentrop told me that Laval would be informed only the next morningat 8 o’clock that on account of information received during the night Hitlerhad been obliged to proceed to the total occupation of the country.24

The orders for the seizure of unoccupied France, in clear violation ofthe armistice agreement, were given by Hitler at 8:30 p.m. on November10 and carried out the next morning without any other incident than afutile protest by Petain. The Italians occupied Corsica, and Germanplanes began flying in troops to seize French-held Tunisia before Eisen-hower’s forces could get there.

There was one further—and typical—piece of Hitlerian deceit. OnNovember 13 the Fuehrer assured Petain that neither the Germans northe Italians would occupy the naval base at Toulon, where the Frenchfleet had been tied up since the armistice. On November 25 the OKWDiary recorded that Hitler had decided to carry out “Lila” as soon aspossible.* This was the code word for the occupation of Toulon and the

* It is only fair to point out that Hitler strongly suspected, not without reason, thatthe French fleet might try to sail for Algeria and join the Allies. Despite histreacherous dealings with the Germans and his violent hatred of the British, Admiral

capture of the French fleet. On the morning of the twenty-seventh Ger-man troops attacked the naval port, but French sailors held them up longenough to allow the crews, on the orders of Admiral de Laborde, to scuttlethe ships. The French fleet was thus lost to the Axis, which badly neededits warships in the Mediterranean, but it was denied also to the Allies, towhom it would have been a most valuable addition.

Hitler won the race against Eisenhower to seize Tunisia, but it was adoubtful victory. At his insistence nearly a quarter of a million Germanand Italian troops were poured in to hold this bridgehead. If the Fuehrerhad sent one fifth as many troops and tanks to Rommel a few months be-fore, the Desert Fox most probably would have been beyond the Nile bynow, the Anglo-American landing in Northwest Africa could not havetaken place and the Mediterranean would have been irretrievably lost tothe 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 aswell as the remnants of the Afrika Korps would be lost by the end of thespring and more German troops would be marched into prisoner-of-warcages than at Stalingrad, to which we must now return. * *

DISASTER AT STALINGRAD

Hitler and the principal generals of OKW were lingering on in thepleasant Alpine surroundings of Berchtesgaden when the first news of theRussian counteroffensive on the Don reached them a few hours after ithad been launched in a blizzard at dawn on November 19. Though aSoviet attack in this region had been expected it was not believed at OKWthat it would amount to enough to warrant Hitler and his chief military ad-visers, Keitel and Jodi, hurrying back to headquarters in East Prussiaaf er the Fuehrer’s ringing beerhouse speech to the old party comrades inMunich on the evening of November 8. So they had puttered about onthe Obersalzberg taking in the mountain air.

Their peace and quiet was abruptly broken by an urgent telephone callfrom General Zeitzler, the new Chief of the Army General Staff, who hadremained behind at Rastenburg. He had what the OKW Diary recorded

Darlan, who happened to be visiting an ailing son at Algiers, had been pressed intoservice by Eisenhower as French commander in North Africa not only because heseemed to be the only officer who could get the French Army and Navy to ceaseresisting the Anglo-American landings but also in the hope that he could get theadmiral commanding in Tunisia to oppose the German landings there and alsoinduce the French fleet in Toulon to make a dash for North Africa. The hopesproved vain, although Darlan tried. To his message ordering Admiral de Labordeto bring the fleet over from Toulon he received an answer in one expressive—ifindelicate—word: “Merde.” (See the Proces du M. Petain.)

* Some 125,000 Germans, according to General Eisenhower, out of a total of240,000 Axis troops, the rest being Italian. This number includes only those whosurrendered during the last week of the campaign—May 5 to 12, 1943. (Crusadein Europe, p. 156.)

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as “alarming news.” In the very first hours of the attack an overwhelmingRussian armored force had broken clean through the Rumanian ThirdArmy between Serafimovich and Kletskaya on the Don just northwest ofStalingrad. South of the besieged city other powerful Soviet forces wereattacking strongly against the German Fourth Panzer Army and the Ru-manian Fourth Army and threatening to pierce their fronts.

The Russian objective was obvious to anyone who looked at a mapand especially obvious to Zeitzler who, from Army intelligence, knew thatthe enemy had massed thirteen armies, with thousands of tanks, in thesouth to achieve it. The Russians were clearly driving in great strengthfrom the north and the south to cut off Stalingrad and to force the GermanSixth Army there to either beat a hasty retreat to the west or see itselfsurrounded. Zeitzler later contended that as soon as he saw what was hap-pening he urged Hitler to permit the Sixth Army to withdraw from Stalin-grad to the Don bend, where the broken front could be restored. Themere 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 promptlyto disas‘er. The Fuehrer personally ordered the Sixth Army to stand fastaround Stalingrad.25

Hitler and his staff returned to headquarters on November 22. By thistime, the fourth day of the attack, the news was catastrophic. The twoSoviet forces from the north and south had met at Kalach, forty mileswest of Stalingrad on the Don bend. In the evening a wireless message ar-rived from General Paulus, commander of the Sixth Army, confirmingthat his troops were now surrounded. Hitler promptly radioed back, tell-ing Paulus to move his headquarters into the city and form a hedgehogdefense. The Sixth Army would be supplied by air until it could be re-lieved.

But this was futile talk. There were now twenty German and two Ru-manian divisions cut off at Stalingrad. Paulus radioed that they wouldneed a minimum of 750 tons of supplies a day flown in. This was far be-yond the capacity of the Luftwaffe, which lacked the required number oftransport planes. Even if they had been available, not all of them couldhave got through in the blizzardy weather and over an area where the Rus-sians had now established fighter superiority. Nevertheless, Goering as-sured Hitler that the Air Force could do the job. It never began to.

The relief of the Sixth Army was a more practical and encouragingpossibility. On November 25 Hitler had recalled Field Marshal von Man-stein, the most gifted of his field commanders, from the Leningrad frontand put him in charge of a newly created formation, Army Group Don.His assignment was to push through from the southwest and relieve theSixth Army at Stalingrad.

But now the Fuehrer imposed impossible conditions on his new com-mander. Manstein tried to explain to him that the only chance of successlay 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 theRussian armies which lay between the two German forces. But once againHitler refused to draw back from the Volga. The Sixth Army must remainin Stalingrad and Manstein must fight his way to it there.

This, as Manstein tried to argue with the Supreme warlord, could notbe done. The Russians were too strong. Nevertheless, with a heavy heart,Manstein launched his attack on December 12. It was called, appropri-ately, “Operation Winter Gale,” for the full fury of the Russian winterhad now hit the southern steppes, piling up the snow in drifts and droppingthe temperature below zero. At first the offensive made good progress, theFourth Panzer Army, under General Hoth, driving northeast up bothsides of the railroad from Kotelnikovski toward Stalingrad, some seventy-five miles away. By December 19 it had advanced to within some fortymiles of the southern perimeter of the city; by the twenty-first it was withinthirty miles, and across the snowy steppes the besieged troops of the SixthArmy could see at night the signal flares of their rescuers.

At this moment, according to the later testimony of the German gen-erals, a breakout from Stalingrad of the Sixth Army toward the advancingfines of the Fourth Panzer Army would almost certainly have succeeded.But once again Hitler forbade it. On December 21, Zeitzler had wrungpermission from the Leader for the troops of Paulus to break out providedthey also held on to Stalingrad. This piece of foolishness, the GeneralStaff Chief says, nearly drove him insane.

“On the following evening,” Zeitzler related later, “I begged Hitler toauthorize the breakout. I pointed out that this was absolutely our lastchance to save the two hundred thousand men of Paulus’ army.”

Hitler would not give way. In vain I described to him conditions inside theso-called fortress: the despair of the starving soldiers, their loss of confidencein the Supreme Command, the wounded expiring for lack of proper attentionwhile thousands froze to death. He remained as impervious to arguments ofthis sort as to those others which I had advanced.

In the face of increasing Russian resistance in front of him and on hisflanks General Hoth lacked the strength to negotiate that last thirty milesto Stalingrad. He believed that if the Sixth Army broke out he could stillmake a junction with it and then both forces could withdraw to Kotelnikov-ski. 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

* 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 tobreak out of Stalingrad to the southwest and make a junction with the FourthPanzer Army. He publishes the text of the directive. But it contained certainreservations 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 oneand only chance of saving the Sixth Army.” (Manstein, Lost Victories, pp. 336-41,

^ ’ll

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have been done, but by the latter date it had become impossible. Forunknown to Hoth the Red Army had struck farther north and was nowendangering the left flank of Manstein’s whole Army Group Don. On thenight of December 22, Manstein telephoned Hoth to prepare himself fordrastic new orders. The next day they came. Hoth was to abandon hisdrive on Stalingrad, dispatch one of his three panzer divisions to the Donfront on the north, and defend himself where he was and with what he hadleft as well as he could.

The attempt to relieve Stalingrad had failed.

Manstein’s drastic new orders had come as the result of alarming newsthat reached him on December 17. On the morning of that day a Sovietarmy had broken through the Italian Eighth Army farther up the Don atBoguchar and by evening opened a gap twenty-seven miles deep. Withinthree days the hole was ninety miles wide, the Italians were fleeing in panicand the Rumanian Third Army to the south, which already had beenbadly pummeled on the opening day of the Russian offensive on November19, was also disintegrating. No wonder Manstein had had to take part ofHoth’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 hadcome so close to Stalingrad. These retreats in turn endangered theGerman Army in the Caucasus, which would be cut off if the Russiansreached Rostov on the Sea of Azov. A day or two after Christmas Zeitzlerpointed out to Hitler, “Unless you order a withdrawal from the Caucasusnow, we shall soon have a second Stalingrad on our hands.” Reluctantlythe Supreme Commander issued the necessary instructions on December29 to Kleist’s Army Group A, which comprised the First Panzer andSeventeenth armies, and which had failed in its mission to grab the rich oilfields of Grozny. It too began a long retreat after having been withinsight of its goal.

The reverses of the Germans in Russia and of the Italo-German armiesin North Africa stirred Mussolini to thought. Hitler had invited him tocome to Salzburg for a talk around the middle of December and the ailingDuce, now on a strict diet for stomach disorders, had accepted, though, ashe told Ciano, he would go on one condition only: that he take his mealsalone “because he does not want a lot of ravenous Germans to notice thathe is compelled to five on rice and milk.”

The time had come, Mussolini decided, to tell Hitler to cut his losses inthe East, make some sort of deal with Stalin and concentrate Axis strengthon defending the rest of North Africa, the Balkans and Western Europe.“Nineteen forty-three will be the year of the Anglo-American effort,” hetold Ciano. Hitler was unable to leave his Eastern headquarters in order tomeet Mussolini, so Ciano made the long journey to Rastenburg onDecember 18 on his behalf, repeating to the Nazi leader the Duce’s pro-posals. Hitler scorned them and assured the Italian Foreign Minister thatwithout at all weakening the Russian front he could send additional forces

to North Africa, which must, he said, be held. Ciano found Germanspirits at a low ebb at headquarters, despite Hitler’s confident assurances.

The atmosphere is heavy. To the bad news there should perhaps be addedthe sadness of that humid forest and the boredom of collective living in thebarracks . . . No one tries to conceal from me the unhappiness over the newsof the breakthrough on the Russian front. There were open attempts to putthe blame on us.

At that very moment the survivors of the Italian Eighth Army on theDon were scurrying for their lives, and when one member of Ciano’s partyasked an OKW officer whether the Italians had suffered heavy losses hewas 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 tosave their fives.

On the morning of January 8, 1943, three young Red Army officers,bearing a white flag, entered the German fines on the northern perimeterof Stalingrad and presented General Paulus with an ultimatum fromGeneral Rokossovski, commander of the Soviet forces on the Don front.After reminding him that his army was cut off and could not be relievedor 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. Hardfrosts, cold winds and blizzards still lie ahead. Your soldiers are unprovidedwith winter clothing and are living in appalling sanitary conditions . . . Yoursituation is hopeless, and any further resistance senseless.

In view of [this] and in order to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, we proposethat you accept the following terms of surrender . . .

They were honorable terms. All prisoners would be given “normalrations.” The wounded, sick and frostbitten would receive medical treat-ment. All prisoners could retain their badges of rank, decorations andpersonal belongings. Paulus was given twenty-four hours to reply.

He immediately radioed the text of the ultimatum to Hitler and askedfor freedom of action. His request was curtly dismissed by the Supremewarlord. Twenty-four hours after the expiration of the time limit on thedemand for surrender, on the morning of January 10, the Russians openedthe last phase of the Battle of Stalingrad with an artillery bombardmentfrom five thousand guns.

The fighting was bitter and bloody. Both sides fought with incredible

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bravery and recklessness over the frozen wasteland of the city’s rubble—but not for long. Within six days the German pocket had been reducedby half, to an area fifteen miles long and nine miles deep at its widest. ByJanuary 24 it had been split in two and the last small emergency airstriplost. The planes which had brought in some supplies, especially medicinesfor 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 sur-render. Soviet emissaries arrived at the German lines on January 24 witha new offer. Again Paulus, tom between his duty to obey the mad Fuehrerand 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 anysupplies or dressings or drugs . . . Further defense senseless. Collapse in-evitable. Army requests immediate permission to surrender in order to savelives of remaining troops.

Hitler’s answer has been preserved.

Surrender is forbidden. Sixth Army will hold their positions to the last manand the last round and by their heroic endurance will make an unforgettablecontribution toward the establishment of a defensive front and the salvationof the Western world.

The Western world! It was a bitter pill for the men of the Sixth Armywho had fought against that world in France and Flanders but a shorttime ago.

Further resistance was not only senseless and futile but impossible, andas the month of January 1943 approached its end the epic battle woreitself out, expiring like the flame of an expended candle which sputtersand dies. By January 28 what was left of a once great army was split intothree small pockets, in the southern one of which General Paulus had hisheadquarters in the cellar of the ruins of the once thriving Univermagdepartment store. According to one eyewitness the commander in chiefsat 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 theflood of congratulatory radiograms that now began to pour in. Goering,who had whiled away a good part of the winter in sunny Italy, struttingabout in his great fur coat and fingering his jewels, sent a radio messageon January 28.

The fight put up by the Sixth Army will go down in history, and futuregenerations will speak proudly of a Langemarck of daredeviltry, an Alcazarof tenacity, a Narvik of courage and a Stalingrad of self-sacrifice.

Nor were they cheered when on the last evening, January 30, 1943, thetenth anniversary of the Nazis’ coming to power, they listened to the fatReich 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 Ger-many s ultimate victory was decided there ... In years to come it will besaid of the heroic battle on the Volga: When you come to Germany, say thatyou have seen us lying at Stalingrad, as our honor and our leaders ordainedthat we should, for the greater glory of Germany.

The glory and the horrible agony of the Sixth Army had now come toan end. On January 30, Paulus radioed Hitler: “Final collapse cannot bedelayed more than twenty-four hours.”

This signal prompted the Supreme Commander to shower a series ofpromotions on the doomed officers in Stalingrad, apparently in the hopethat such honors would strengthen their resolve to die gloriously at theirbloody posts. “There is no record in military history of a German FieldMarshal being taken prisoner,” Hitler remarked to Jodi, and thereuponconferred on Paulus, by radio, the coveted marshal’s baton. Some 117other officers were jumped up a grade. It was a macabre gesture.

The end itself was anticlimactic. Late on the last day of January Paulusgot off his final message to headquarters.

The Sixth Army, true to their oath and conscious of the lofty importance oftheir mission, have held their position to the last man and the last round forFuehrer and Fatherland unto the end.

At 7:45 p.m. the radio operator at Sixth Army headquarters sent a lastmessage on his own: “The Russians are at the door of our bunker. We aredestroying our equipment.” He added the letters “cl”—the internationalwireless code signifying “This station will no longer transmit.”

There was no last-minu:e fighting at headquarters. Paulus and his staffdid not hold out to the last man. A squad of Russians led by a juniorofficer 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. WhenSchmidt addressed him—“May I ask the Field Marshal if there is anythingmore to be said?”—Paulus was too weary to answer.

Farther north a small German pocket, containing all that was left oftwo panzer and four infantry divisions, still held out in the ruins of a tractorfactory. On the night of February 1 it received a message from Hitler’sheadquarters.

The German people expect you to do your duty exactly as did the troopsholding the southern fortress. Every day and every hour that you continue tofight facilitates the building of a new front.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Just before noon on February 2, this group surrendered after a lastmessage to the Supreme Commander: . . Have fought to the last managainst vastly superior forces. Long live Germany!”

Silence at last settled on the snow-covered, blood-spattered shamblesof the battlefield. At 2:46 p.m. on February 2 a German reconnaissanceplane flew high over the city and radioed back: “No sign of any fightingat Stalingrad.” 6 6

By that time 91,000 German soldiers, including twenty-four generals,half-starved, frostbitten, many of them wounded, all of them dazed andbroken, were hobbling over the ice and snow, clutching their blood-cakedblankets over their heads against the 24-degrees-below-zero cold towardthe dreary, frozen prisoner-of-war camps of Siberia. Except for some

20.000 Rumanians and the 29,000 wounded who had been evacuated byair 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 ofthose 91,000 Germans who began the weary march into captivity thatwinter day, only 5,000 were destined ever to see the Fatherland again.*

Meanwhile back in the well-heated headquarters in East Prussia theNazi warlord, whose stubbornness and stupidity were responsible for thisdisaster, berated his generals at Stalingrad for not knowing how and whento die. The records of a conference held by Hitler at OKW with hisgenerals on February 1 survive and shed enlightenment on the nature ofthe German dictator at this trying period in his fife and that of his Armyand country.

They have surrendered there—formally and absolutely. Otherwise theywould have closed ranks, formed a hedgehog, and shot themselves with theirlast bullet . . . The man [Paulus] should have shot himself just as the oldcommanders who threw themselves on their swords when they saw that thecause was lost . . . Even Varus gave his slave the order: “Now kill me!”

Hitler s venom toward Paulus for deciding to live became more poison-ous as he ranted on.

You have to imagine: he 11 be brought to Moscow—and imagine that rat-trap there. There he will sign anything. He’ll make confessions, make procla-mations—you’ll see. They will now walk down the slope of spiritual bank-ruptcy to its lowest depths . . . You’ll see—it won’t be a week before Seyd-litz and Schmidt and even Paulus are talking over the radiof . . . They are

* According to the figure given by the Bonn government in 1958. Many of theprisoners died during an epidemic of typhus in the following spring,t Hitler was correct in his forecast, except for the timing. By July of the followingsummer Paulus and Seydlitz, who became the leaders of the so-called NationalCommittee of Free Germany, did take to the air over the Moscow radio to urge theArmy to eliminate Hitler.

The Great Turning Point: 1942—Stalingrad and El A lamein 933

going to be put into the Liublanka, and there the rats will eat them. How canone be so cowardly? I don’t understand it . . .

What is life? Life is the Nation. The individual must die anyway. Beyondthe life of the individual is the Nation. But how can anyone be afraid of thismoment of death, with which he can free himself from this misery, if his dutydoesn’t chain him to this Vale of Tears. Na!

... So many people have to die, and then a man like that besmirches theheroism of so many others at the last minute. He could have freed himselffrom all sorrow and ascended into eternity and national immortality, but heprefers to go to Moscow! . . .

What hurts me most, personally, is that 1 still promoted him to field mar-shal. I wanted to give him this final satisfaction. That’s the last field marshalI shall appoint in this war. You mustn’t count your chickens before they’rehatched.27

There followed a brief exchange between Hitler and General Zeitzleron how to break the news of the surrender to the German people. OnFebruary 3, three days after the act, OKW issued a special communique:

The battle of Stalingrad has ended. True to their oath to fight to the lastbreath, the Sixth Army under the exemplary leadership of Field MarshalPaulus has been overcome by the superiority of the enemy and by the un-favorable circumstances confronting our forces.

The reading of the communique over the German radio was precededby the roll of muffled drums and followed by the playing of the secondmovement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Hitler proclaimed four daysof national mourning. All theaters, movies and variety halls were closeduntil it was over.

Stalingrad, wrote Walter Goerlitz, the German historian, in his workon the General Staff, “was a second Jena and was certainly the greatestdefeat 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 inWorld War II. The high tide of Nazi conquest which had rolled over mostof Europe to the frontier of Asia on the Volga and in Africa almost to theNile had now begun to ebb and it would never flow back again. The timeof the great Nazi blitz offensives, with thousands of tanks and planesspreading terror in the ranks of the enemy armies and cutting them topieces, had come to an end. There would be, to be sure, desperate localthrusts—at Kharkov in the spring of 1943, in the Ardennes at Christmastime in 1944—but they formed part of a defensive struggle which theGermans were to carry out with great tenacity and valor during the nexttwo—and last—years of the war. The initiative had passed from Hitler’shands, never to return. It was his enemies who seized it now, and held it.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

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 bombingof Cologne, and more followed on other cities during the eventful summer.For the first time the civilian German people, like the German soldiers atStalingrad and El Alamein, were to experience the horrors which theirarmed forces had inflicted on others up to now.

And finally, in the snows of Stalingrad and in the burning sands of theNorth African desert, a great and terrible Nazi dream was destroyed. Notonly was the Third Reich doomed by the disasters to Paulus and Rommelbut also the gruesome and grotesque so-called New Order which Hitlerand his S.S. thugs had been busy setting up in the conquered lands. Beforewe turn to the final chapter, the fall of the Third Reich, it might be wellto pause and see what this New Order was like—in theory and in barbarousprac ice—and what this ancient and civilized continent of Europe barelyescaped af.er a brief nightmare of experiencing its first horrors. It mustnecessarily be for this book, as it was for the good Europeans who livedthrough it, or were massacred before it ended, the darkest chapter of allin the history of the Third Reich.

Book Five

+ + +

BEGINNING OF THE END

27

THE NEW ORDER

No comprehensive blueprint for the New Order was ever drawnup, but it is clear from the captured documents and from what tookplace that Hitler knew very well what he wanted it to be: a Nazi-ruledEurope whose resources would be exploited for the profit of Germany,whose people would be made the slaves of the German master race andwhose “undesirable elements”—above all, the Jews, but also many Slavsin the East, especially the intelligentsia among them—would be exter-minated.

The Jews and the Slavic peoples were the Untermenschen—subhumans.To Hitler they had no right to live, except as some of them, among theSlavs, might be needed to toil in the fields and the mines as slaves of theirGerman masters. Not only were the great cities of the East, Moscow,Leningrad and Warsaw, to be permanently erased* but the culture of theRussians and Poles and other Slavs was to be stamped out and formaleducation denied them. Their thriving industries were to be dismantledand shipped to Germany and the people themselves confined to the pur-suits of agriculture so that they could grow food for Germans, being al-lowed to keep for themselves just enough to subsist on. Europe itself, asthe Nazi leaders put it, must be made “Jew-free.”

“What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in theslightest,” declared Heinrich Himmler on October 4, 1943, in a confiden-tial address to his S.S. officers at Posen. By this time Himmler, as chiefof the S.S. and the entire police apparatus of the Third Reich, was nextto Hitler in importance, holding the power of life and death not only overeighty million Germans but over twice that many conquered people.

What the nations [Himmler continued] can offer in the way of good bloodof our type, we will take, if necessary by kidnaping their children and raising

* As early as September 18, 1941, Hitler had specifically ordered that Leningradwas 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 (threemillions) was to be destroyed with it. See above, pp. 853-54.

937

938

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death likecattle 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 diggingan antitank ditch interests me only in so far as the antitank ditch for Germanyis finished . . 3

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 laiddown 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. Theother half, “particularly” the intellectuals, were simply to be, in the wordsof a secret report on the subject, “eliminated.”2

A fortnight before, on October 2, the Fuehrer had clarified his thoughtsabout the fate of the Poles, the second of the Slavic peoples to be con-quered. His faithful secretary, Martin Bormann, has left a long memoran-dum on the Nazi plans, which Hitler outlined to Hans Frank, the GovernorGeneral of rump Poland, and to other officials.3

The Poles [Hitler “emphasized”] are especially born for low laborThere can be no question of improvement for them. It is necessary to keep thestandard of life low in Poland and it must not be permitted to rise . . . ThePoles are lazy and it is necessary to use compulsion to make them workThe Government General [of Poland] should be used by us merely as a sourceof unskilled labor . . . Every year the laborers needed by the Reich couldbe 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 Polesquiet, stupid and dull-witted.

There were two other classes of Poles to be dealt with and the Nazidictator 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 theyare . . .

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 thePolish intelligentsia are to be exterminated. This sounds cruel, but such is thelaw of life.

939

This obsession of the Germans with the idea that they were the masterrace and that the Slavic peoples must be their slaves was especially viru-lent in regard to Russia. Erich Koch, the roughneck Reich Commissar forthe 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 drawthe very last out of this country. I did not come to spread bliss . . . Thepopulation must work, work, and work again . . . We definitely did not comehere 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 workeris racially and biologically a thousand times more valuable than the populationhere.4

Nearly a year before, on July 23, 1942, when the German armies inRussia were nearing the Volga and the oil fields of the Caucasus, MartinBormann, Hitler’s party secretary and, by now, right-hand man, wrotea 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 prac-tice abortion—the more the better. Education is dangerous. It is enough ifthey 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’tget any more than is absolutely necessary. We are the masters. We comefirst.5

When the German troops first entered Russia they were in many placeshailed as liberators by a population long ground down and terrorized byStalin’s tyranny. There were, in the beginning, wholesale desertionsamong the Russian soldiers. Especially in the Baltic, which had beenunder Soviet occupation but a short time, and in the Ukraine, where anincipient independence movement had never been quite stamped out, manywere 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 cardsshrewdly, treating the population with consideration and promising relieffrom Bolshevik practices (by granting religious and economic freedomand making true co-operatives out of the collectivized farms) and even-tual self-government, the Russian people could be won over. They mightthen not only co-operate with the Germans in the occupied regions but inthe unoccupied ones strive for liberation from Stalin’s harsh rule. If thiswere done, it was argued, the Bolshevik regime itself might collapse andthe Red Army disintegrate, as the Czarist armies had done in 1917.

But the savagery of the Nazi occupation and the obvious aims of theGerman conquerors, often publicly proclaimed, to plunder the Russian

940

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

lands, enslave their peoples and colonize the East with Germans soondestroyed any possibility of such a development.

No one summed up this disastrous policy and all the opportunities itdestroyed better than a German himself, Dr. Otto Brautigam, a careerdiplomat and the deputy leader of the Political Department of Rosenberg’snewly created Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. In a bitterconfidential report to his superiors on October 25, 1942, Brautigam daredto pinpoint the Nazi mistakes in Russia.

In the Soviet Union we found on our arrival a population weary of Bol-shevism, which waited longingly for new slogans holding out the prospect ofa better future for them. It was Germany’s duty to find such slogans, but theyremained unuttered. The population greeted us with joy as liberators andplaced themselves at our disposal.

Actually, there was a slogan but the Russian people soon saw throughit.

With the inherent instinct of the Eastern peoples [Brautigam continued], theprimitive man soon found out that for Germany the slogan “Liberation fromBolshevism” was only a pretext to enslave the Eastern peoples according toher own methods . . . The worker and peasant soon perceived that Germanydid not regard them as partners of equal rights but considered them only asthe objective of her political and economic aims . . . With unequaled pre-sumption, we put aside all political knowledge and . . . treat the peoples ofthe occupied Eastern territories as “Second-Class Whites” to whom Providencehas merely assigned the task of serving as slaves for Germany . . .

There were two other developments, Brautigam declared, which hadturned the Russians against the Germans: the barbaric treatment of Sovietprisoners of war and the shanghaiing of Russian men and women for slavelabor.

It is no longer a secret from friend or foe that hundreds of thousands ofRussian prisoners of war have died of hunger or cold in our camps . . . Wenow experience the grotesque picture of having to recruit millions of laborersfrom the occupied Eastern territories after prisoners of war have died of hungerlike flies . . .

In the prevailing limitless abuse of the Slavic humanity, “recruiting” methodswere used which probably have their origin only in the blackest periods of theslave traffic. A regular man hunt was inaugurated. Without consideration ofhealth or age the people were shipped to Germany . . .*

* Neither the extermination of masses of Soviet prisoners of war nor the exploitationof Russian slave labor was a secret to the Kremlin. As early as November 1941,Molotov had made a formal diplomatic protest against the “extermination” ofRussian POWs, and in April of the foil owing year he made another protest againstthe German slave labor program.

German policy and practice in Russia had “brought about the enormousresistance of the Eastern peoples,” this official concluded.

Our policy has forced both Bolshevists and Russian nationalists into acommon front against us. The Russian fights today with exceptional braveryand self-sacrifice for nothing more or less than recognition of his humandignity.

Closing his thirteen-page memorandum on a positive note Dr. Brau-tigam asked for a complete change of policy. “The Russian people,” heargued, “must be told something concrete about their future.”8

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 whatwould be done with Russia and the Russians* and he was not a man whocould be persuaded by any living German to change them by one iota.

On July 16, 1941, less than a month after the commencement of theRussian campaign but when it was already evident from the initial Germansuccesses that a large slice of the Soviet Union would soon be within grasp,Hitler convoked Goering, Keitel, Rosenberg, Bormann and Lammers (thelast, head of the Reich Chancellery) to his headquarters in East Prussiato remind them of his aims in the newly conquered land. At last his goalso clearly stated in Mein Kampf of securing a vast German Lebensraum inRussia was in sight and it is clear from the confidential memorandum ofthe meeting drawn up by Bormann (which showed up at Nuremberg)7 thathe wanted his chief lieutenants to understand well what he intended to dowith 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 ourselvesknow what we want . . . Nobody must be able to recognize that it initiates afinal 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 needsin 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 warfarebehind the German lines; “it enables us to eradicate everyone who op-poses us.”

In general, Hitler explained, Germany would dominate the Russian

* See above, pp. 830-34.

942

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

territory up to the Urals. None but Germans would be permitted to carryweapons in that vast space. Then Hitler went over specifically what wouldbe 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 Ger-many because of the large nickel mines there. The annexation of Finland as afederated state should be prepared with caution . . . The Fuehrer will razeLeningrad to the ground and then hand it over to the Finns.

The Baku oil fields. Hitler ordered, would become a “German conces-sion” and the German colonies on the Volga would be annexed outright.When it came to a discussion as to which Nazi leaders would administerthe new territory a violent quarrel broke out.

Rosenberg states he intends to use Captain von Petersdorff, owing to hisspecial merits; general consternation; general rejections. The Fuehrer andthe Reich Marshal [Goering] both emphasize there was no doubt that VonPetersdorff was insane.

There was also an argument on the best methods of policing the con-quered Russian people. Hitler suggested the German police be equippedwi h armored cars. Goering doubted that they would be necessary. Hisplanes could “drop bombs in case of riots,” he said.

Naturally [Goering added] this giant area would have to be pacified asquickly as possible. The best solution would be to shoot anybody who lookedsideways.*

Goering, as head of the Four-Year Plan, was also put in charge ofthe economic exploitation of Russia, f “Plunder” would be a better word,as Goering made clear in a speech to the Nazi commissioners for theoccupied territories on August 6, 1942. “It used to be called plundering,”he said. “But today things have become more humane. In spite of that, Iintend to plunder and to do it thoroughly.”8 On this, at least, he was asgood as his word, not only in Russia but throughout Nazi-conquered Eu-rope. It was all part of the New Order.

* A year before, it will be remembered, Goering had told Ciano that “this yearbetween twenty and thirty million persons will die of hunger in Russia” and thatperhaps it is well that it should be so.” Already, he said, Russian prisoners of warhad begun “to eat each other.” See above, p. 854n.

t In a directive of Goering’s Economic Staff, East, on May 23, 1941, the destructionof the Russian industrial areas was ordered. The workers and their families in theseregions were to be left to starve. “Any attempt to save the population there,” thedirective stated, “from death by starvation by importing [food] surpluses from theblack-soil zone [of Russia]” was prohibited. See above, p. 833.

943

THE NAZI PLUNDER OF EUROPE

The total amount of loot will never be known; it has proved beyondman s capacity to accurately compute. But some figures are available,many of them from the Germans themselves. They show with what Ger-manic thoroughness the instructions which Goering once gave to his sub-ordinates were carried out.

Whenever you come across anything that may be needed by the Germanpeople, you must be after it like a bloodhound. It must be taken out . . . andbrought to Germany.9

A great deal was taken out, not only in goods and services but in bank-notes and gold. Whenever Hitler occupied a country, his financial agentsseized the gold and foreign holdings of its national bank. That was a merebeginning. Staggering “occupation costs” were immediately assessed. Bythe end of February 1944, Count Schwerin von Krosigk, the Nazi Ministerof Finance, put the total take from such payments at some 48 billion marks(roughly $12,000,000,000), of which France, which was milked heavierthan any other conquered country, furnished more than half. By the endof the war, receipts from occupation assessments amounted to an estimated60 billion marks ($15,000,000,000).

France was forced to pay 31.5 billions of this total, its annual contribu-tions of more than 7 billions coming to over four times the yearly sumswhich Germany had paid in reparations under the Dawes and Young plansafter the first war—a tribute which had seemed such a heinous crime toHitler. In addition the Bank of France was forced to grant “credits” toGermany totaling 4.5 billion marks and the French government to paya further half billion in “fines.” At Nuremberg it was estimated that theGermans extracted in occupation costs and “credits” two thirds of Bel-gium’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 104billion marks ($26,000,000,000).*

But the goods seized and transported to the Reich without even theformality of payment can never possibly be estimated. Figures kept pour-ing in at Nuremberg until they overwhelmed one; but no expert, so far asI know, was ever able to straighten them out and compute totals. InFrance, 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 pro-duction of oats, 80 per cent of oil, 74 per cent of steel, and so on, for agrand total of 184.5 billion francs.

Russia, devastated by warfare and German savagery, proved harder to

* At the official rate of exchange (2.5 Reichsmarks to the dollar) this would amountto 40 billion dollars. But I have used the unofficial rate of four Reichsmarks to thedollar. In terms of purchasing power it is more accurate.

944

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

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 milliontons of potatoes, 662,000 tons of meat were listed by the Germans amon?the “deliveries,” to which the Soviet Committee of Investigation added—for the duration of the occupation—9 million cattle, 12 million pigs, 13million sheep, to mention a few items. But Russian “deliveries” provedmuch less than expected; the Germans calculated them as worth a net ofonly some 4 billion marks ($1,000,000,000).*

Everything possible was squeezed out of Poland by the greedy Naziconquerors. “I shall endeavor,” said Dr. Frank, the Governor General, “tosqueeze 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 occupationhe had already squeezed out, as he continually boasted, a great deal, es-pecially in foodstuffs for hungry Germans in the Reich. He warned, how-ever, that “if the new food scheme is carried out in 1943 a half-millionpeople 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 asthe country was conquered. On October 3, 1939, Frank informed theArmy of Hitler’s orders.

Poland can only be administered by utilizing the country through means ofruthless 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 entirePolish economy to absolute minimum necessary for bare existence of thepopulation, closing of all educational institutions, especially technical schoolsand 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 theGreater German Reich.11

Rudolf Hess, the Nazi deputy Fuehrer, added that Hitler had decidedthat “Warsaw shall not be rebuilt, nor is it the intention of the Fuehrerto rebuild or reconstruct any industry in the Government General.”12

By decree of Dr. Frank, all property in Poland belonging not only toJews but to Poles was subject to confiscation without compensation. Hun-dreds of thousands of Polish-owned farms were simply grabbed andhanded over to German settlers. By May 31, 1943, in the four Polishdistricts annexed to Germany (West Prussia, Posen, Zichenau, Silesia)some 700,000 estates comprising 15 million acres were “seized” and 9,500estates totaling 6.5 million acres “confiscated.” The difference between“seizure” and “confiscation” is not explained in the elaborate table pre-pared by the German “Central Estate Office,”13 and to the dispossessedPoles it must not have mattered.

* 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.)

945

Even the art treasures in the occupied lands were looted, and, as thecaptured Nazi documents later revealed, on the express orders of Hitlerand Goering, who thereby greatly augmented their “private” collections.The corpulent Reich Marshal, according to his own estimate, brought hisown collection up to a value of 50 million Reichsmarks. Indeed, Goeringwas the driving force in this particular field of looting. Immediately uponthe conquest of Poland he issued orders for the seizure of art treasuresthere and within six months the special commissioner appointed to carryout his command could report that he had taken over “almost the entireart treasury of the country.”14

But it was in France where the bulk of the great art treasures of Europelay, and no sooner was this country added to the Nazi conquests than Hitlerand Goering decreed their seizure. To carry out this particular plunderHitler appointed Rosenberg, who set up an organization called EinsatzstabRosenberg, and who was assisted not only by Goering but by GeneralKeitel. Indeed one order by Keitel to the Army in France s ated thatRosenberg “is entitled to transport to Germany cultural goods which ap-pear valuable to him and to safeguard them there. The Fuehrer hasreserved for himself the decision as to their use.”15

An idea of Hitler’s decision “as to their use” is revealed in a secretorder issued by Goering on November 5, 1940, specifying the distribu-tion of art objects being collected at the Louvre in Paris. They were “tobe disposed of in the following way”:

1. Those art objects about which the Fuehrer has reserved for himself thedecision 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 arttreasures, declaring that it was a violation of the Hague convention, andwhen one German art expert on Rosenberg’s staff, a Herr Bunjes, daredto call this to the attention of Goering, the fat one replied:

“My dear Bunjes, let me worry about that. 1 am the highest jurist inthe 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 inthe 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 theFuehrer’s possession and those which the Reich Marshal claims for himselfwill be loaded into two railroad cars which will be attached to the ReichMarshal’s special train ... to Berlin.17

Many more carloads followed. According to a secret official Germanreport some 137 freight cars loaded with 4,174 cases of art works com-

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prising 21,903 objects, including 10,890 paintings, made the journey fromthe West to Germany up to July 1944.18 They included works of, amongothers, Rembrandt, Rubens, Hals, Vermeer, Velazquez, Murillo, Goya,Vecchio, Watteau, Fragonard, Reynolds and Gainsborough. As early asJanuary 1941, Rosenberg estimated the art loot from France alone asworth a billion marks.19

The plunder of raw materials, manufactured goods and food, thoughit reduced the occupied peoples to impoverishment, hunger and sometimesstarvation and violated the Hague Convention on the conduct of war, mighthave been excused, if not justified, by the Germans as necessitated by theharsh exigencies of total war. But the stealing of art treasures did nothelp Hitler’s war machine. It was a case merely of avarice, of the personalgreed of Hitler and Goering.

All this plunder and spoliation the conquered populations could haveendured—wars and enemy occupation had always brought privation intheir 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 themercifully short-lived New Order will be longest remembered. Here Nazidegradation sank to a level seldom experienced by man in all his time onearth. Millions of decent, innocent men and women were driven intoforced labor, millions more tortured and tormented in the concentrationcamps and millions more still, of whom there were four and a half millionJews alone, were massacred in cold blood or deliberately starved to deathand their remains—in order to remove the traces—burned.

This incredible story of horror would be unbelievable were it not fullydocumented and testified to by the perpetrators themselves. What followshere—a mere summary, which must because of limitations of space leaveout a thousand shocking details—is based on that incontrovertible evi-dence, with occasional corroboration from the eyewitness accounts of thefew survivors.

SLAVE LABOR IN THE NEW ORDER

By the end of September 1944, some seven and a half million civilianforeigners were toiling for the Third Reich. Nearly all of them had beenrounded up by force, deported to Germany in boxcars, usually withoutfood or water or any sanitary facilities, and there put to work in the fac-tories, 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 andshelter.

In addition, two million prisoners of war were added to the foreignlabor force, at least a half a million of whom were made to work in thearmaments and munitions industries in flagrant violation of the Hague andGeneva conventions, which stipulated that no war prisoners could be em-

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ployed in such tasks.* This figure did not include the hundreds of thou-sands of other POWs who were impressed into the building of fortifi-cations and in carrying ammunition to the front lines and even in manningantiaircraft guns in further disregard of the international conventionswhich Germany had signed, f

In the massive deportations of slave labor to the Reich, wives weretorn away from their husbands, and children from their parents, and as-signed to widely separated parts of Germany. The young, if they wereold enough to work at all, were not spared. Even top generals of the Armyco-operated in the kidnaping of children, who were carted off to thehomeland to perform slave labor. A memorandum from Rosenberg’s filesof June 12,1944, reveals this practice in occupied Russia.

Army Group Center intends to apprehend forty to fifty thousand youthsfrom the age of 10 to 14 . . . and transport them to the Reich. The measurewas originally proposed by the Ninth Army ... It is intended to allot thesejuveniles primarily to the German trades as apprentices. . . . This action isbeing greatly welcomed by the German trade since it represents a decisivemeasure for the alleviation of the shortage of apprentices.

This action is not only aimed at preventing a direct reinforcement of theenemy’s strength but also as a reduction of his biological potentialities.

The kidnaping operation had a code name: “Hay Action.” It was alsobeing carried out, the memorandum added, by Field Marshal Model’sArmy 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 orthe movies were nabbed. In the West especially, S.S. units merely blockedoff a section of a town and seized all able-bodied men and women. Vil-lages were surrounded and searched for the same purposes. In the East,when there was resistance to the forced-labor order, villages were simplyburned down and their inhabitants carted off. Rosenberg’s captured filesare replete with German reports of such happenings. In Poland, at leastone German official thought things were going a little too far.

The wild and ruthless man hunt [he wrote to Governor Frank], as exercisedeverywhere 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

* Albert Speer, Minister for Armament and War Production, admitted at Nurembergthat 40 per cent of all prisoners of war were employed in 1944 in the production ofweapons and munitions and in subsidiary industries.20

t A captured record shows Field Marshal Milch of the Air Force in 1943 demanding50,000 more Russian war prisoners to be added to the 30,000 already manning anti-aircraft artillery. “It is amusing,” Milch laughed, “that Russians must work theguns.

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by the police, suddenly and unexpectedly, and of being sent to an assemblycamp. None of his relatives knows what has happened to him.23

But rounding up the slave workers was only the first step.* The condi-tion of their transport to Germany left something to be desired. A certainDr. Gutkelch described one instance in a report to Rosenberg’s ministryon September 30, 1942. Recounting how a train packed with returningworked-out Eastern laborers met a train at a siding near Brest Litovsk fullof “newly recruited” Russian workers bound for Germany, he wrote:

Because of the corpses in the trainload of returning laborers a catastrophemight have occurred ... In this train women gave birth to babies who werethrown out of the windows during the journey. Persons having tuberculosisand venereal diseases rode in the same car. Dying people lay in freight carswithout straw, and one of the dead was thrown on the railway embankment.The same must have occurred in other returning transports.23

This was not a very promising introduction to the Third Reich for theOstarbeiter, but at least it prepared them somewhat for the ordeal that layahead. Hunger lay ahead and beatings and disease and exposure to thecold, in unheated quarters and in their thin rags. Long hours of labor layahead that were limited only by their ability to stand on their feet.

The great Krupp works, makers of Germany’s guns and tanks and am-munition, was a typical place of employment. Krupp employed a largenumber of slave laborers, including Russian prisoners of war. At onepoint during the war, six hundred Jewish women from the Buchenwaldconcentration camp were brought in to work at Krupp’s, being “housed”in a bombed-out work camp from which the previous inmates, ItalianPOWs, had been removed. Dr. Wilhelm Jaeger, the “senior doctor” forKrupp’s slaves, described in an affidavit at Nuremberg what he found therewhen he took over.

Upon my first visit I found these females suffering from open festeringwounds and other diseases. I was the first doctor they had seen for at least afortnight . . . There were no medical supplies . . . They had no shoes

* The entire slave labor program was put in charge of Fritz Sauckel, who was giventhe title of Plenipotentiary General for the Allocation of Labor. A second-stringNazi, he had been Gauleiter and Governor of Thuringia. A pig-eyed little man, rudeand tough, he was, as Goebbels mentioned in his diary, “one of the dullest of thedull.” 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-townmeat 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 thelowest conceivable degree of expenditure.”24 He admitted at Nuremberg that of allthe millions of foreign workers “not even 200,000 came voluntarily.” However atthe 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 15-161946.

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and went about in their bare feet. The sole clothing of each consisted of a sackwith holes for their arms and head. Their hair was shorn. The camp wassurrounded 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 tothe personal physician of Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, theowner—but in vain. Nor did his reports on other Krupp slave laborcamps bring any alleviation. He recalled in his affidavit some of these re-ports of conditions in eight camps inhabited by Russian and Polish work-ers: overcrowding that bred disease, lack of enough food to keep a manalive, 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 fromthe East. Virtually all of them had no overcoats and were compelled to usetheir blankets as coats in cold and rainy weather. In view of the shortage ofshoes many workers were forced to go to work in their bare feet, even inwinter . . .

Sanitary conditions were atrocious. At Kramerplatz only ten children’stoilets were available for 1,200 inhabitants . . . Excretion contaminatedthe entire floors of these lavatories . . . The Tartars and Kirghiz sufferedmost, they collapsed like flies [from] bad housing, the poor quality and insuf-ficient quantity of food, overwork and insufficient rest.

These workers were likewise afflicted with spotted fever. Lice, the carrierof the disease, together with countless fleas, bugs and other vermin torturedthe inhabitants of these camps . . . At times the water supply at the campswas shut off for periods of from eight to fourteen days . . .

On the whole, Western slave workers fared better than those fromthe East the latter being considered by the Germans as mere scum. Butthe difference was only relative, as Dr. Jaeger found at one of Krupp’swork camps occupied by French prisoners of war in Nogerratstrasse atEssen.

Its inhabitants were kept for nearly half a year in dog kennels, urinals and inold 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 crawlinto these kennels on all fours . . . There was no water in the camp.*26

' Besides obtaining thousands of slave laborers, both civilians and prisoners of warfor its factories in Germany, the Krupp firm also built a large fuse factory at theextermination camp at Auschwitz, where Jews were worked to exhaustion and thengassed to death.

Baron Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the chairman of the board, was

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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 veryforce of circumstances was better than that of those in the city factories itwas far from ideal—or even humane. A captured directive on the “Treat-ment of Foreign Farm Workers of Polish Nationality” gives an inkling oftheir treatment. And though applied to Poles—it is dated March 6, 1941,before Russians became available—it was later used as guidance for thoseof 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 visitof churches is strictly prohibited . . . Visits to theaters, motion pictures orother 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 Himmlerin 1942, punishable by death. * *

The use of “railroads, buses or other public conveyances” was pro-hibited for slave farm workers. This apparently was ordained so that theywould 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.

indicted as a major war criminal at Nuremberg (along with Goering, et al.) butbecause of his “physical and mental condition” (he had had a stroke and had fadedinto senility), he was not tried. He died on January 16, 1950. An effort was madeby the prosecution to try in his stead his son, Alfried, who had acquired sole owner-ship of the company in 1943, but the tribunal denied this.

Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach was subsequently tried before a Nurem-berg military tribunal (a purely American court) along with nine directors of thefirm in the United States v'. Alfried Krupp et al. case. On July 31, 1948, he wassentenced to twelve years imprisonment and confiscation of all his property. He wasreleased from Landsberg prison (where Hitler had served his sentence in 1924) onFebruary 4, 1951, in a general amnesty issued by John J. McCloy, the U.S. HighCommissioner. Not only was the confiscation of his corporate property annulledbut his personal fortune of some $10,000,000 was returned to him. The Alliedgovernments 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 ofthe Bonn government, that not only would the company not be broken up but thatit was acquiring new industries.

* Himmler’s directive of February 20, 1942, was directed especially against Russianslave workers. It ordered “special treatment” also for “severe violations againstdiscipline, including work refusal or loafing at work.” In such cases

special treatment is requested. Special treatment is hanging. It should not takeplace in the immediate vicinity of the camp. A certain number [however] shouldattend the special treatment.27

The term “special treatment” was a common one in Himmler’s files and in Naziparlance during the war. It meant just what Himmler in this directive said it meant.

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Every employer has the right to give corporal punishment to his farmworkers . . . They should, if possible, be removed from the community ofthe home and they can be quartered in stables, etc. No remorse whatevershould restrict such action.28

Even the Slav women seized and shipped to Germany for domesticservice were treated as slaves. As early as 1942 Hitler had commandedSauckel to procure a half million of them “in order to relieve the Germanhousewife.” The slave labor commissar laid down the conditions of workin the German households.

There is no claim to free time. Female domestic workers from the Eastmay leave the household only to take care of domestic tasks ... It is prohibitedfor them to enter restaurants, movies, theaters and similar establishments. At-tending church is also prohibited . . ,29

Women, it is obvious, were almost as necessary as men in the Nazi slavelabor program. Of some three million Russian civilians pressed into serv-ice by the Germans, more than one half were women. Most of them wereassigned to do heavy farm work and to labor in the factories.

The enslavement of millions of men and women of the conquered landsas lowly toilers for the Third Reich was not just a wartime measure. Fromthe statements of Hitler, Goering, Himmler and the others already cited—and they are only a tiny sampling—it is clear that if Nazi Germany hadendured, the New Order would have meant the rule of the German masterrace over a vast slave empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Uralmountains. 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 at-tacked the Soviet Union, his plans for its occupation constituted “a finalsettlement.” A year later, at the high tide of his Russian conquests, headmonished his aides:

As for the ridiculous hundred million Slavs, we will mold the best of themto the shape that suits us, and we will isolate the rest of them in their own pig-sties; and anyone who talks about cherishing the local inhabitant and civiliz-ing him, goes straight off to a concentration camp!30

THE PRISONERS OF WAR

Though it was a flagrant violation of the Hague and Geneva conventionsto use prisoners of war in armament factories or in any labor connectedwith the fighting at the front such employment, massive as it was, con-stituted the least of worries for the millions of soldiers captured by theThird Reich.

Their overwhelming concern was to survive the war. If they were Rus-

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sian the odds were greatly against them. There were more Soviet warprisoners than all others put together—some five and three-quarter mil-lion of them. Of these barely one million were found alive when Alliedtroops liberated the inmates of the POW camps in 1945. About a millionhad either been released during the war or allowed to serve in the col-laborator units set up by the German Army. Two million Russian prison-ers of war died in German captivity—from starvation, exposure and dis-ease. The remaining million have never been accounted for and at Nurem-berg a good case was made that most of them either had died from theabove causes or had been exterminated by the S.D. (S.S. Security Serv-ice). According to the German records 67,000 were executed, but this ismost 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, inthe great battles of encirclement which were fought from June 21 to De-cember 6, 1941. Admittedly it was difficult for an army in the midst ofcombat and rapid advance to care adequately for such a large number ofcaptives. But the Germans made no effort to. Indeed the Nazi recordsshow, as we have seen, that the Soviet prisoners were deliberately starvedand left out in the open without shelter to die in the terrible subzerosnowbound winter of 1941-42.

“The more of these prisoners who die, the better it is for us,” was theattitude of many Nazi officials according to no less an authority thanRosenberg.

The clumsy Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories was not ahumane Nazi, particularly in regard to the Russians, with whom, as wehave seen, he had grown up. But even he was moved to protest the treat-ment of Russian prisoners in a long letter to General Keitel, the Chief ofOKW, dated February 28, 1942. This was the moment when the Sovietcounteroffensive which had hurled the Germans back before Moscow andRostov had reached its farthest penetrations that winter and when theGermans had realized at last that their gamble of destroying Russia in oneshort campaign—or perhaps ever—had failed and that just possibly, nowthat 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 accountablefor 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 severalhundred thousand are still able to work fully. A large part of them havestarved, or died because of the hazards of the weather.

This could have been avoided, Rosenberg continued. There was foodenough in Russia to provide them.

However, in the majority of cases the camp commanders have forbiddenfood to be put at the disposal of the prisoners; they have rather let them

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starve to death. Even on the march to the camps, the civilian population wasnot allowed to give the prisoners food. In many cases when the prisonerscould no longer keep up on the march because of hunger and exhaustion,they were shot before the eyes of the horrified civilian population and thecorpses were left. In numerous camps no shelter for the prisoners was pro-vided 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 campaignan agreement was reached between OKW and the S.S. Security Service forthe latfer to “screen” Russian prisoners. The objective was disclosed inan affidavit by Otto Ohlendorf, one of the S.D.s great killers and like somany of the men around Himmler a displaced intellectual, for he haduniversity degrees both in the law and in economics and had been a pro-fessor at the Institute for Applied Economic Science.

All Jews and Communist functionaries [Ohlendorf testified] were to beremoved from the prisoner-of-war camps and were to be executed. To myknowledge this action was carried out throughout the entire Russian cam-paign.33

But not without difficulties. Sometimes the Russian captives were soexhausted that they could not even walk to their execution. This broughta protest from Heinrich Mueller, the chief of the Gestapo, a dapper-look-ing fellow but also a cold, dispassionate killer.*

The commanders of the concentration camps are complaining that 5 to 10per cent of the Soviet Russians destined for execution are arriving in thecamps dead or half dead ... It was particularly noted that when marching,for example, from the railroad station to the camp, a rather large number ofprisoners 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 pre-vented that the German people take notice of these occurrences.

The Gestapo didn’t care a rap about the Russian captives falling deadfrom starvation and exhaustion, except that it robbed the executioners oftheir 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 markedby death and who therefore are not able to withstand the exertions of even

* Mueller was never apprehended after the war. He was last seen in Hitler’s bunkerin Berlin on April 29, 1945. Some of his surviving colleagues believe he is now inthe service of the Soviet secret police, of which he was a great admirer.

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a short march shall in the future be excluded from the transport into theconcentration camps for execution.34

Dead prisoners or even starved and exhausted ones could not performwork and in 1942, when it became obvious to the Germans that the warwas going to last considerably longer than they had expected and that thecaptive Soviet soldiers constituted a badly needed labor reservoir, theNazis abandoned their policy of exterminating them in favor of workingthem. Himmler explained the change in his speech to the S.S. at Posenin 1943.

At that time [1941] we did not value the mass of humanity as we value ittoday, as raw material, as labor. What after all, thinking in terms of genera-tions, 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 andhunger.35

They were now to be fed enough to enable them to work. By December1944, three quarters of a million of them, including many officers, weretoiling in the armament factories, the mines (where 200,000 were as-signed) and on the farms. Their treatment was harsh, but at least theywere 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 Britishand Americans, was comparatively milder than that meted out by theGermans to the Russians. There were occasional instances of the murderand massacre of them but this was due usually to the excessive sadism andcruelty of individual commanders. Such a case was the slaughter in coldblood of seventy-one American prisoners of war in a field near Malmedy,Belgium, on December 17, 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge.

There were other occasions when Hitler himself ordered the murderof Western prisoners, as he did in the case of fifty British flyers who werecaught in the spring of 1944, after escaping from a camp at Sagan. AtNuremberg Goering said he “considered it the most serious incident of thewhole war” and General Jodi called it “sheer murder.”

Actually it seemed to be part of a deliberate German policy, adoptedafter Anglo-American bombing of Germany became so extensive from1943 on, to encourage the killing of Allied airmen who had bailed out overGermany. Civilians were encouraged to lynch the flyers as soon as theyhad parachuted to the ground and a number of these Germans were triedafter the war for having done so. In 1944 when the Anglo-American

* 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’swidth from the rectum.36

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bombings were reaching their peak Ribbentrop urged that airmen shotdown be summarily executed but Hitler took a somewhat milder view. OnMay 21, 1944, in agreement with Goering, he merely ordered that cap-tured flyers who had machine-gunned passenger trains or civilians orGerman planes which had made emergency landings be shot withoutcourt-martial.

Sometimes captured flyers were simply turned over to the S.D. for “spe-cial treatment.” Thus some forty-seven American, British and Dutchflyers, all officers, were brutally murdered at Mauthausen concentrationcamp in September 1944. An eyewitness, Maurice Lampe, a French in-mate at the camp, described at Nuremberg how it was done.

The forty-seven officers were led barefooted to the quarry ... At thebottom of the steps the guards loaded stones on the backs of these poor menand they had to carry them to the top. The first journey was made with stonesweighing about sixty pounds and accompanied by blows . . . The secondjourney the stones were still heavier, and whenever the poor wretches sankunder their burden they were kicked and hit with a bludgeon ... in theevening twenty-one bodies were strewn along the road. The twenty-six othersdied the following morning.37

This was a familiar form of “execution” at Mauthausen and was usedon, among others, a good many Russian prisoners of war.

From 1942 on—that is, when the tide of war began to surge againsthim—Hitler ordered the extermination of captured Allied commandos,especially in the West. (Captured Soviet partisans were summarily shotas a matter of course.) The Fuehrer’s “Top-Secret Commando Order” ofOctober 18, 1942, is among the Nazi documents.

From now on all enemies on so-called commando missions in Europe orAfrica challenged by German troops, even if they are in uniform, whetherarmed 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 tohis commanders the reason for his order. Because of the success of theAllied commandos, he said,

I have been compelled to issue strict orders for the destruction of enemysabotage troops and to declare noncompliance with these orders severelypunishable ... It must be made clear to the enemy that all sabotage troopswill be exterminated, without exception, to the last man.

This means that their chance of escaping with their lives is nil . . . Underno circumstances can [they] expect to be treated according to the rules of theGeneva Convention ... If it should become necessary for reasons of inter-rogation to initially spare one man or two, then they are to be shot immediatelyafter interrogation.38

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This particular crime was to be kept strictly secret. General Jodi ap-pended instructions to Hitler’s directive, underlining his words: “This or-der is intended for commanders only and must not under any circum-stances fall into enemy hands:' They were directed to destroy all copiesof it after they had duly taken note.

It must have remained imprinted on their minds, for they proceeded tocarry it out. A couple of instances, of many, may be given.

On the night of March 22, 1944, two officers and thirteen men of the267th Special Reconnaissance Battalion of the U.S. Army landed from anaval craft far behind the German lines in Italy to demolish a railroadtunnel between La Spezia and Genoa. They were all in uniform and car-ried no civilian clothes. Captured two days later they were executed by afiring squad on March 26, without trial, on the direct orders of GeneralAnton Dostler, commander of the LXXVth German Army Corps. Triedby a U.S. military tribunal shortly after the war, General Dostler justifiedhis action by contending that he was merely obeying Hitler’s CommandoOrder. He argued that he himself would have been court-martialed by theFuehrer if he had not obeyed.*

Some fifteen members of an Anglo-American military mission—in-cluding a war correspondent of the Associated Press, and all in uniform—which had parachuted into Slovakia in January 1945 were executed atMau'hausen concentration camp on the orders of Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrun-ner, the successor of Heydrich as head of the S.D. and one of the defend-ants at Nuremberg.f Had it not been for the testimony of a camp adjutantwho witnessed their execution, their murder might have remained un-known, for most of the files of the mass executions at this camp were de-stroyed.40

NAZI TERROR IN THE CONQUERED LANDS

On October 22, 1941, a French newspaper Le Phare published the fol-lowing notice:

Cowardly criminals in the pay of England and Moscow killed the Feldkom-mandant of Nantes on the morning of October 20. Up to now the assassinshave not been arrested.

As expiation for this crime I have ordered that 50 hostages be shot, tobegin with . . . Fifty more hostages will be shot in case the guilty should notbe arrested between now and October 23 by midnight.

This became a familiar notice in the pages of the newspapers or on redposters edged with black in France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Poland

* General Dostler was condemned to death by the U.S. military tribunal in Romeon October 12, 1945.

t Kaltenbrunner was hanged at Nuremberg jail on the night of October 15-16, 1946.

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and Russia. The proportion, publicly proclaimed by the Germans, wasinvariably 100 to 1 —a hundred hostages shot for every German killed.

Though the taking of hostages was an ancient custom, much indulged infor instance by the Romans, it had not been generally practiced in modemtimes except by the Germans in the First World War and by the British inIndia 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 commanderswere produced at Nuremberg ordering the taking—and shooting—of hos-tages. “It is important,” Keitel decreed on October 1, 1941, “that theseshould include well-known leading personalities or members of theirfamilies”; and General von Stuelpnagel, the German commander inFrance, a year later stressed that “the better known the hostages to be shotthe greater will be the deterrent effect on the perpetrators.”

In all, 29,660 French hostages were executed by the Germans duringthe war and this figure did not include the 40,000 who “died” in Frenchprisons. The figure for Poland was 8,000 and for Holland some 2,000. InDenmark what became known as a system of “clearing murders” wassubstituted for the publicly proclaimed shooting of hostages. On Hitler’sexpress orders reprisals for the killing of Germans in Denmark were to becarried out in secret “on the proportion of five to one.”41 Thus the greatDanish pastor-poet-playwright, Kaj Munk, one of the most beloved men inScandinavia, was brutally murdered by the Germans, his body left on theroad with a sign pinned to it: “Swine, you worked for Germany just thesame.”

Of all the war crimes which he claimed he had to commit on the ordersof 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 con-quered territories in the West, was issued by Hitler himself on December7, 1941. Its purpose, as the weird title indicates, was to seize persons “en-dangering German security” who were not to be immediately executed andmake them vanish without a trace into the night and fog of the unknown inGermany. No information was to be given their families as to their fateeven when, as invariably occurred, it was merely a question of the placeof burial in the Reich.

On December 12, 1941, Keitel issued a directive explaining theFuehrer’s orders. “In principle,” he said, “the punishment for offensescommitted against the German state is the death penalty.” But

if these offenses are punished with imprisonment, even with hard labor forlife, this will be looked upon as a sign of weakness. Efficient intimidation canonly be achieved either by capital punishment or by measures by which therelatives of the criminal and the population do not know his fate.42

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

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 aperson’s arrest,

the prisoners are to be transported to Germany secretly . . . these measureswill 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 filesare full of various orders pertaining to “NN” (for Nacht und Nebel), es-pecially in regard to keeping the burial places of the victims strictly secret.How many Western Europeans disappeared into “Night and Fog” wasnever established at Nuremberg but it appeared that few emerged from italive.

Some enlightening figures, however, were obtainable from the S.D.records concerning the number of victims of another terror operation inconquered territory which was applied to Russia. This particular exercisewas carried out by what was known in Germany as the Einsatzgruppen—Special Action Groups, or what might better be termed, in view of theirperformance, Extermination Squads. The first round figure of theirachievement came out, as if by accident, at Nuremberg.

One day some time before the trial began a young American navalofficer, Lieutenant Commander Whitney R. Harris, of the American pros-ecution staff, was interrogating Otto Ohlendorf on his wartime activities.It was known that this attractive-looking German intellectual of youthfulappearance—he was 38—had been head of Amt III of Himmler’s CentralSecurity Office (R.S.H.A.) but during the last years of the war had spentmost of his time as a foreign trade expert in the Ministry of Economics. Hetold his interrogator that apart from one year he had spent the war periodon 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 intelli-gence authority on German affairs, knew quite a bit about the Einsatzgroups. 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 withonly the slightest hesitation answered:

“Ninety thousand!”44

The Einsatz groups had first been organized by Himmler and Heydrichto follow the German armies into Poland in 1939 and there round up theJews and place them in ghettos. It was not until the beginning of the Rus-sian campaign nearly two years later that, in agreement with the GermanArmy, they were ordered to follow the combat troops and to carry out one

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phase of the “final solution.” Four Einsatzgruppen were formed for thispurpose, Groups A, B, C, D. It was the last one which Ohlendorf com-manded between June 1941 and June 1942, and it was assigned the south-ernmost sector in the Ukraine and attached to the Eleventh Army. Askedon the stand by Colonel John Harlan Amen what instructions it received,Ohlendorf answered:

“The instructions were that the Jews and the Soviet political commissarswere to be liquidated.”

“And when you say ‘liquidated,’ do you mean ‘killed’?” Amen asked.

“Yes, I mean killed,” Ohlendorf answered, explaining that this took inthe 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 totallyexterminated.

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, Ohlen-dorf described how a typical killing took place.

The Einsatz unit would enter a village or town and order the prominentJewish citizens to call together all Jews for the purpose of “resettlement.”*They were requested to hand over their valuables and shortly before executionto surrender their outer clothing. They were transported to the place of execu-tions, usually an antitank ditch, in trucks—always only as many as could beexecuted immediately. In this way it was attempted to keep the span of timefrom the moment in which the victims knew what was about to happen to themuntil the time of their actual execution as short as possible.

Then they were shot, kneeling or standing, by firing squads in a militarymanner and the corpses thrown into the ditch. I never permitted the shootingby individuals, but ordered that several of the men should shoot at the sametime in order to avoid direct personal responsibility. Other group leadersdemanded that the victims lie down flat on the ground to be shot through thenape of the neck. I did not approve of these methods.

“Why?” asked Amen.

“Because,” replied Ohlendorf, “both for the victims and for those whocarried out the executions, it was, psychologically, an immense burden tobear.”

In the spring of 1942, Ohlendorf then recounted, an order came from

* I.e., they were told they were being resettled elsewhere.

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Himmler to change the method of execution of the women and children.*Henceforth they were to be dispatched in “gas vans” specially constructedfor the purpose by two Berlin firms. The S.D. officer described to thetribunal how these remarkable vehicles worked.

The actual purpose of these vans could not be seen from the outside. Theylooked like closed trucks and were so constructed that at the start of the motorthe gas [exhaust] was conducted into the van causing death in ten to fifteenminutes.

“How were the victims induced to enter the vans?” Colonel Amenwanted to know.

“They were told they were to be transported to another locality,” Ohlen-dorf replied.f

The burial of the victims of the gas vans, he went on to complain, was agreat ordeal” for the members of the Einsatzgruppen. This was con-firmed by a certain Dr. Becker, whom Ohlendorf identified as the con-structor of the vans, in a document produced at Nuremberg. In a letter toheadquarters Dr. Becker objected to German S.D. men having to unloadthe corpses of the gassed women and children, calling attention to

the immense psychological injuries and damage to their health which that workcan have for these men. They complained to me about headaches whichappeared 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 toan 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 bydozing off, as was planned.

Dr. Becker was quite a humanitarian—in his own mind—and ordereda change in technique.

My directions now have proved that by correct adjustment of the leversdeath com js faster and the prisoners fall asleep peacefully. Distorted facesand excretions, such as could be seen before, are no longer noticed.45

But the gas vans, as Ohlendorf testified, could dispatch only from fif-teen to twenty-five persons at a time, and this was entirely inadequate for

* There was a special reason for this. See below, p. 942n.

t Ohlendorf was tried at Nuremberg by a U.S. military tribunal along with twentv-one others in the “Einsatzgruppen Case.” Fourteen of them were condemned to

deatff 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.I he death penalties for the others were commuted.

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the massacres on the scale which Hitler and Himmler had ordered. Inade-quate, for example, for the job that was done at Kiev, the capital of theUkraine, in just two days, September 29 and 30, 1941, when according toan official Einsatz report 33,771 persons, mostly Jews, were “executed.”46

An eyewitness report by a German of how a comparatively minor massexecution was carried out in the Ukraine brought a hush of horror overthe Nuremberg courtroom when it was read by the chief British prosecutor,Sir Harley Shawcross. It was a sworn affidavit by Hermann Graebe, themanager and engineer of a branch office in the Ukraine of a German con-struction firm. On October 5, 1942, he witnessed the Einsatz commandos,supported by Ukrainian militia, in action at the execution pits at Dubno inthe Ukraine. It was a matter, he reported, of liquidating the town’s 5,000Jews.

. . . My foreman and I went directly to the pits. I heard rifle shots in quicksuccession from behind one of the earth mounds. The people who had got offthe trucks—men, women and children of all ages-—had to undress upon theorder of an S.S. man, who carried a riding or dog whip. They had to put downtheir clothes in fixed places, sorted according to shoes, top clothing and under-clothing. I saw a heap of shoes of about 800 to 1,000 pairs, great piles ofunder-linen and clothing.

Without screaming or weeping these people undressed, stood around infamily groups, kissed each other, said farewells and waited for a sign fromanother S.S. man, who stood near the pit, also with a whip in his hand. Duringthe fifteen minutes that I stood near the pit I heard no complaint or plea formercy . . .

An old woman with snow-white hair was holding a one-year-old child inher 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 holdingthe hand of a boy about 10 years old and speaking to him softly; the boy wasfighting his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked his head and seemedto 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 behindthe earth mound ... 1 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 tremendousgrave. People were closely wedged together and lying on top of each other sothat only their heads were visible. Nearly all had blood running over theirshoulders from their heads. Some of the people were still moving. Some werelifting their arms and turning their heads to show that they were still alive. Thepit was already two-thirds full. I estimated that it contained about a thousandpeople. I looked for the man who did the shooting. He was an S.S. man, whosat at the edge of the narrow end of the pit, his feet dangling into the pit. Hehad a tommy gun on his knees and was smoking a cigarette.

The people, completely naked, went down some steps and clambered over

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the heads of the people lying there to the place to which the S.S. man directedthem. They lay down in front of the dead or wounded people; some caressedthose who were still alive and spoke to them in a low voice. Then I heard aseries of shots. I looked into the pit and saw that the bodies were twitching orthe 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 engi-neer 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 neckI swear before God that this is the absolute truth.47

How many Jews and Russian Communist party functionaries (the for-mer vastly outnumbered the latter) were massacred by the Einsatzgruppenin Russia before the Red Army drove the Germans out? The exact totalcould never be computed at Nuremberg but Himmler’s records, unco-ordinated as they were, give a rough idea.

Ohlendorfs Einsatzgruppen D, with its 90,000 victims, did not do as wellas some of the other groups. Group A, for instance, in the north reportedon January 31, 1942, that it had “executed” 229,052 Jews in the Balticregion and in White Russia. Its commander, Franz Stahlecker, reportedto Himmler that he was having difficulty in the latter province because ofa late start after the heavy frost set in, which made mass execu ions muchmore difficult. Nevertheless,” he reported, “41,000 Jews [in White Rus-sia] have been shot up to now. Stahlecker, who was disposed of later inthe 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 timebeing “as they were needed for labor.” Estonia, which had relatively fewJews, 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 Jewswere exterminated in White Russia by July 1, and in October the remain-ing 16,200 inhabitants of the Minsk ghetto were dispatched in one day. ByNovember Himmler could report to Hitler that 363,211 Jews had beenkilled in Russia from August through October, though the figure wasprobably somewhat exaggerated to please the bloodthirsty Fuehrer.49*

* On August 31, Himmler had ordered an Einsatz detachment to execute a hundredinmates of the Minsk prison, so that he could see how it was done. According toBach-Zalewski, a high officer in the S.S. who was present, Himmler almost swooned

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All in all, according to Karl Eichmann, the head of the Jewish Office ofthe Gestapo, two million persons, almost all Jews, were liquidated by theEinsatzgruppen 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 extermina-tions that they often reported swollen figures to please Himmler and Hitler.Himmler’s own statistician, Dr. Richard Korherr, reported to his chief onMarch 23, 1943, that a total of 633,300 Jews in Russia had been “re-settled”—a euphemism for massacre by the Einsatzgruppen.51 Surpris-ingly enough this figure tallies fairly well with exhaustive studies latermade by a number of experts. Add another hundred thousand slain in thelast two years of the war and the figure is probably as accurate as we willever have.* *

High as it is, it is small compared to the number of Jews who were doneto 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 Ameri-can prosecution staff were interrogating S.S. Obergruppenfuehrer OswaldPohl, who, among other things, had been in charge of work projects for theinmates of the Nazi concentration camps. Pohl, a naval officer before hejoined the S.S., had gone into hiding after the German collapse and hadnot been apprehended until a year later—in May 1946—when he was dis-covered working on a farm disguised as a farmhand, f

In answer to one question Pohl used a term with which the Nurembergprosecution, busy for months in poring over millions of words from thecaptured documents, had begun to become familiar. A certain colleagueby the name of Hoess had, Pohl said, been employed by Himmler “in thefinal 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

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 becamehysterical. One result of this experience was an order from Himmler that hence-forth 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 Einsatzgruppenhas never even been estimated, as far as I know. Most S.D. reports lumped themtogether with the Jews. In one report of Group A, dated October 15, 1941, some3,387 “Communists” are listed among the 121,817 executed, the rest being Jews.But the same report often lists the two together.

t Pohl was condemned to death in the so-called “Concentration Camp Case” by aU.S. military tribunal on November 3, 1947, and hanged in Landsberg prison onJune 8, 1951, along with Ohlendorf and others.

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the files of the leading Nazis as the war progressed, its seeming innocenceapparently sparing these men the pain of reminding one another what itmeant and perhaps too, they may have thought, furnishing a certain coverfor their guilt should the incriminating papers ever come to light. Indeedat the Nuremberg trials most of the Nazi chiefs denied that they knew whatit signified, and Goering contended he had never used the term, but thispretense was soon exploded. In the case against the fat Reich Marshal adirective was produced which he had sent Heydrich, the chief of the S.D.,on July 31, 1941, when the Einsatzgruppen were already falling withgusto to their extermination tasks in Russia.

I herewith commission you [Goering instructed Heydrich] to carry out allpreparations with regard to ... a total solution of the Jewish question inthose territories of Europe which are under German influence . . .

I furthermore charge you to submit to me as soon as possible a draft showingthe . . . measures already taken for the execution of the intended final solu-tion of the Jewish question.*52

Heydrich knew very well what Goering meant by the term for he hadused it himself nearly a year before at a secret meeting after the fall ofPoland, in which he had outlined “the first step in the final solution,” whichconsisted of concentrating all the Jews in the ghettos of the large cities,where it would be easy to dispatch them to their final fate.f

As it worked out, the “final solution” was what Adolf Hitler had longhad in mind and what he had publicly proclaimed even before the warstarted. In his speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, he had said:

If the international Jewish financiers . . . should again succeed in plungingthe nations into a world war the result will be . . . the annihilation of theJewish 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 “inter-national Jewish financiers” but he himself plunged the world into armedconflict. What mattered to Hitler was that there was now a world war andthat it afforded him, after he had conquered vast regions in the East wheremost of Europe’s Jews lived, the opportunity to carry out their “annihila-tion.” By the time the invasion of Russia began, he had given the neces-sary orders.

What became known in high Nazi circles as the “Fuehrer Order on theFinal Solution” apparently was never committed to paper—at least no

* The emphasis is this writer’s. A faulty translation of the last line, rendering theGerman word Endloesung as “desired solution” instead of “final solution” in theEnglish copy of the document, led Justice Jackson, who did not know German, toallow Goering under cross-examination to get away with his contention that henever used the sinister term. (See n. 54.) “The first time I learned of these terribleexterminations,” Goering exclaimed at one point, “was right here in Nuremberg.”t See above, p. 661.

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copy of it has yet been unearthed in the captured Nazi documents. Allthe evidence shows that it was most probably given verbally to Goering,Himmler and Heydrich, who passed it down during the summer and fallof 1941. A number of witnesses testified at Nuremberg that they had“heard” of it but none admitted ever seeing it. Thus Hans Lammers, thebullheaded chief of the Reich Chancellery, when pressed on the witnessstand 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 didnot really know what it was all about until Allied counsel revealed it atNuremberg.*

By the beginning of 1942 the time had come, as Heydrich said, “toclear up the fundamental problems” of the “final solution” so that it couldat last be carried out and concluded. For this purpose Heydrich conveneda meeting of representatives of the various ministries and agencies of theS.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 Nurem-berg trials.54 Despite the current setback of the Wehrmacht in Russia theNazi officials believed that the war was almost won and that Germanywould shortly be ruling all of Europe, including England and Ireland.Therefore, Heydrich told the assembly of some fifteen high officials, “inthe course of this Final Solution of the European Jewish problem, ap-proximately eleven million Jews are involved.” He then rattled off thefigures for each country. There were only 131,800 Jews left in the originalReich 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 theGeneral Government of Poland two and a quarter million, in France threequarters of a million and in England a third of a million. The clear implica-tion was that all eleven million must be exterminated. He then explainedhow this considerable task was to be carried out.

The Jews should now in the course of the Final Solution be brought to theEast . . . for use as labor. In big labor gangs, with separation of sexes, the

* 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 whosesentences were greatly reduced by the American authorities, his term was commutedin 1951 to ten years and he was released from Landsberg prison at the end of thatyear, after serving a total of six years from the date of his first imprisonment. Itmight be noted here that most Germans, at least so far as their sentiment wasrepresented in the West German parliament, did not approve of even the relativelymild sentences meted out to Hitler’s accomplices. A number of them handed overby the Allies to German custody were not even prosecuted—even when they wereaccused of mass murder—and some of them quickly found employment in the Bonngovernment.

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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 undoubtedlythe part with the strongest resistance—must be treated accordingly, since thesepeople, representing a natural selection, are to be regarded as the germ cell ofa new Jewish development.

In other words, the Jews of Europe were first to be transported to theconquered East, then worked to death, and the few tough ones whosurvived simply put to death. And the Jews—the millions of them—whoresided in the East and were already on hand? State Secretary Dr. JosefBuehler, representing the Governor General of Poland, had a ready sug-gestion 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 forwork.” There was no transportation problem with these two and a halfmillion souls. They were already there.

I have only one request [Dr. Buehler concluded], that the Jewish problemin my territory be solved as quickly as possible.

The good State Secretary betrayed an impatience which was shared inhigh 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—howvaluable the millions of Jews might be to the Reich as slave labor. At thispoint they only understood that working millions of Jews to death on theroads of Russia might take some time. Consequently long before theseunfortunate people could be worked to death—in most cases the attemptwas not even begun—Hitler and Himmler decided to dispatch them byquicker means.

There were two—principally. One of them, as we have seen, had begunshortly after the invasion of Russia in the summer of 1941. This was themethod of mass slaughter of the Polish and Russian Jews by the flyingfiring squads of the Einsatzgruppen, which accounted for some threequarters of a million.

It was this method of achieving the “final solution” that Himmler hadin 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. Amongourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speakof it publicly . . .

I mean . . . the extermination of the Jewish race . . . Most of you mustknow 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 byhuman weakness—to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made ushard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written andis never to be written . . ,55

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No doubt the bespectacled S.S. Fuehrer, who had almost fainted at thesight of a hundred Eastern Jews, including women, being executed for hisown delectation, would have seen in the efficient working by S.S. officersof the gas chambers in the extermination camps an even more gloriouspage in German history. For it was in these death camps that the “finalsolution” achieved its most ghastly success.

THE EXTERMINATION CAMPS

All the thirty odd principal Nazi concentration camps were death campsand millions of tortured, starved inmates perished in them.* Though theauthorities kept records—each camp had its official Totenbuch (deathbook)—they were incomplete and in many cases were destroyed as thevictorious Allies closed in. Part of one Totenbuch that survived at Mau-thausen listed 35,318 deaths from January 1939 to April 1945.t At theend of 1942 when the need of slave labor began to be acute, Himmlerordered that the death rate in the concentration camps “must be reduced.”Because of the labor shortage he had been displeased at a report receivedin his office that of the 136,700 commitments to concentration camps be-tween June and November 1942, some 70,610 had died and that in addi-tion 9,267 had been executed and 27,846 “transferred.”57 To the gaschamber, that is. This did not leave very many for labor duties.

But it was in the extermination camps, the Vernichtungslager, wheremost progress was made toward the “final solution.” The greatest andmost renowned of these was Auschwitz, whose four huge gas chambersand adjoining crematoria gave it a capacity for death and burial far beyondthat of the others—Treblinka, Belsec, Sibibor and Chelmno, all in Poland.There were other minor extermination camps near Riga, Vilna, Minsk,Kaunas and Lwow, but they were distinguished from the main ones inthat they killed by shooting rather than by gas.

For a time there was quite a bit of rivalry among the S.S. leaders as towhich was the most efficient gas to speed the Jews to their death. Speed wasan important factor, especially at Auschwitz, where toward the end thecamp was setting new records by gassing 6,000 victims a day. One ofthe camp’s commanders for a period was Rudolf Hoess, an ex-convict oncefound guilty of murder, who deposed at Nuremberg on the superiority ofthe gas he employed 4

* Kogon estimates the number at 7,125,000 out of a total of 7,820,000 inmates, butthe figure undoubtedly is too high. (Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell, p.227.)

f The camp commander, Franz Ziereis, put the total number at 65,000.58t Born in 1900, the son of a small shopkeeper in Baden-Baden, Hoess was pressuredby his pious Catholic father to become a priest. Instead he joined the Nazi Party in1922. The next year he was implicated in the murder of a school teacher whoallegedly had denounced Leo Schlageter, a German saboteur in the Ruhr who

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The “Final Solution” of the Jewish question meant the complete extermina-tion of all Jews in Europe. I was ordered to establish extermination facilitiesat Auschwitz in June 1941. At that time there were already in the GeneralGovernment of Poland three other extermination camps: Belzec, Treblinkaand Wolzek . . .

I visited Treblinka to find out how they carried out their extermination. Thecamp commandant at Treblinka told me that he had liquidated 80,000 in thecourse of half a year. He was principally concerned with liquidating all theJews from the Warsaw ghetto.*

He used monoxide gas and I did not think that his methods were veryefficient. So when I set up the extermination building at Auschwitz, I usedZyklon B, which was a crystallized prussic acid which we dropped into thedeath chamber from a small opening. It took from three to fifteen minutes tokill the people in the death chamber, depending upon climatic conditions.

We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped. Weusually waited about a half hour before we opened the doors and removed thebodies. After the bodies were removed our special commandos took off therings and extracted the gold from the teeth of the corpses.

Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gaschambers to accommodate 2,000 people at one time, whereas at Treblinkatheir ten gas chambers only accommodated 200 people each.

Hoess then explained how the victims were “selected” for the gaschambers, since not all the incoming prisoners were done away with—atleast not at once, because some of them were needed to labor in the 1. G.Farben chemical works and Krupp’s factory until they became exhaustedand were ready for the “final solution.”

We had two S.S. doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incomingtransports of prisoners. These would be marched by one of the doctors, whowould make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit to work weresent into the camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants.Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of theiryouth they were unable to work.

was executed by the French and became a Nazi martyr. Hoess received a lifesentence.

He was released in a general amnesty in 1928, joined the S.S. two years later andin 1934 became a member of the Death’s Head group of the S.S., whose principaljob was the guarding of the concentration camps. His first job in this unit was atDachau. Thus he spent almost his entire adult life first as a prisoner and then as ajailer. He freely—and even exaggeratedly—testified to his killings both on the standat 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 hisgreatest 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.

Always Herr Hoess kept making improvements in the art of mass killing.

Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinkathe victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated, while atAuschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were togo through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our trueintentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties. Very frequently womenwould hide their children under the clothes but of course when we found themwe would send the children in to be exterminated.

We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy, but ofcourse the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodiespermeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding com-munities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.

Sometimes, Hoess explained, a few “special prisoners”—apparentlyRussian prisoners of war—were simply killed by injections of benzine.“Our doctors,” he added, “had orders to write ordinary death certificatesand 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 ofdeath and disposal at Auschwitz as testified to by surviving inmates andjailers. The “selection,” which decided which Jews were to be workedand which ones immediately gassed, took place at the railroad siding assoon as the victims had been unloaded from the freight cars in which theyhad been locked without food or water for as much as a week—for manycame from such distant parts as France, Holland and Greece. Thoughthere were heart-rending scenes as wives were torn away from husbandsand children from parents, none of the captives, as Hoess testified andsurvivors agree, realized just what was in store for them. In fact some ofthem were given pretty picture postcards marked “Waldsee” to be signedand 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. Weawait your arrival.

The gas chambers themselves and the adjoining crematoria, viewedfrom a short distance, were not sinister-looking places at all; it was impos-sible to make them out for what they were. Over them were well-keptlawns with flower borders; the signs at the entrances merely said baths.The unsuspecting Jews thought they were simply being taken to the bathsfor the delousing which was customary at all camps. And taken to theaccompaniment of sweet music!

* 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 dispensedwith at Auschwitz when the massive gassings began. Often the day’s dead were noteven counted.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

For there was light music. An orchestra of “young and pretty girls alldressed in white blouses and navy-blue skirts,” as one survivor remem-bered, had been formed from among the inmates. While the selection wasbeing made for the gas chambers this unique musical ensemble played gaytunes from The Merry Widow and Tales of Hoffmann. Nothing solemnand somber from Beethoven. The death marches at Auschwitz weresprightly and merry tunes, straight out of Viennese and Parisian operetta.

To such music, recalling as it did happier and more frivolous times, themen, women and children were led into the “bath houses,” where they weretold to undress preparatory to taking a “shower.” Sometimes they wereeven given towels. Once they were inside the “shower-room”—and per-haps this was the first moment that they may have suspected somethingwas amiss, for as many as two thousand of them were packed into thechamber like sardines, making it difficult to take a bath—the massive doorwas slid shut, locked and hermetically sealed. Up above where the well-groomed lawn and flower beds almost concealed the mushroom-shapedlids of vents that ran up from the hall of death, orderlies stood ready todrop into them the amethyst-blue crystals of hydrogen cyanide, or ZyklonB, which originally had been commercially manufactured as a strong dis-infectant and for which, as we have seen, Herr Hoess had with so muchpride found a new use.

Surviving prisoners watching from blocks nearby remembered how fora time the signal for the orderlies to pour the crystals down the vents wasgiven by a Sergeant Moll. “Na, gib ihnen schon zu fressen” (“All right,give ’em something to chew on”), he would laugh and the crystals wouldbe poured through the openings, which were then sealed.

Through heavy-glass portholes the executioners could watch what hap-pened. The naked prisoners below would be looking up at the showersfrom which no water spouted or perhaps at the floor wondering why therewere 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 perfora-tions in the vents. It was then that they usually panicked, crowding awayfrom the pipes and finally stampeding toward the huge metal door where,as Reidinger puts it, “they piled up in one blue clammy blood-spatteredpyramid, clawing and mauling each other even in death.”

Twenty or thirty minutes later when the huge mass of naked flesh hadceased to writhe, pumps drew out the poisonous air, the large door wasopened and the men of the Sonderkommando took over. These wereJewish male inmates who were promised their lives and adequate foodin re.urn for performing the most ghastly job of all.* Protected with gasmasks and rubber boots and wielding hoses they went to work. Reitlin^erhas described it.

They were inevitably and regularly dispatched in the gas chambers and replacedby new teams who continued to meet the same fate. The S.S. wanted no survivorsto tell tales.

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Their first task was to remove the blood and defecations before dragging theclawing dead apart with nooses and hooks, the prelude to the ghastly searchfor gold and the removal of teeth and hair which were regarded by the Germansas 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 theashes in the stream of the Sola.*

There had been, the records show, some lively competition amongGerman businessmen to procure orders for building these death and dis-posal contraptions and for furnishing the lethal blue crystals. The firm ofI. A. Topf and Sons of Erfurt, manufacturers of heating equipment, wonout in its bid for the crematoria at Auschwitz. The story of its businessenterprise was revealed in a voluminous correspondence found in therecords 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, Ausch-witz:

Subject: Crematoria 2 and 3 for the camp.

We acknowledge receipt of your order for five triple furnaces, including twoelectric elevators for raising the corpses and one emergency elevator. A prac-tical installation for stoking coal was also ordered and one for transportingashes.60

But Topf and Sons was not the only firm in this grisly business. Thenames of two others, along with some of their correspondence, popped upat the Nuremberg trials. The disposal of the corpses at a number of othercamps had also attracted commercial competition. Thus the DidierWorks of Berlin bid for orders for a furnace at a Nazi camp at Belgrade,claiming it could furnish a very superior product.

For putting the bodies into the furnace, we suggest simply a metal forkmoving on cylinders.

Each furnace will have an oven measuring only 24 by 18 inches, as coffinswill not be used. For transporting the corpses from the storage points to thefurnaces we suggest using light carts on wheels, and we enclose diagrams ofthese drawn to scale.61

Another firm, C. H. Kori, also sought the Belgrade business, emphasiz-ing its great experience in this field since it had already constructed fourfurnaces for Dachau and five for Lublin, which, it said, had given “fullsatisfaction in practice.”

* There was testimony at the Nuremberg trials that the ashes were sometimes sold asfertilizer. One Danzig firm, according to a document offered by the Russian prosecu-tion, 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 ouncesto a pound of caustic soda ... all boiled for two or three hours and then cooled.”68

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Following our verbal discussion regarding the delivery of equipment ofsimple construction for the burning of bodies, we are submitting plans for ourperfected cremation ovens which operate with coal and which have hithertogiven full satisfaction.

We suggest two crematoria furnaces for the building planned, but we adviseyou to make further inquiries to make sure that two ovens will be sufficientfor your requirements.

We guarantee the effectiveness of the cremation ovens as well as theirdurability, 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, usingthe best material and providing faultless workmanship, proved inadequatefor burning the corpses. The well-constructed crematoria fell far behindat a number of camps but especially at Auschwitz in 1944 when as many as6,000 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 250,000and 300,000 Hungarian Jews alone were done to death at this camp. Eventhe gas chambers fell behind and resort was made to mass shootings in theEinsatzkommando style. The bodies were simply thrown into ditchesand burned, many of them only partly, and then earth was bulldozed overthem. The camp commanders complained toward the end that thecrematoria had proved not only inadequate but “uneconomical.”

The Zyklon-B crystals that killed the victims in the first place werefurnished by two German firms which had acquired the patent from I. G.Farben. These were Tesch and Stabenow of Hamburg, and Degesch ofDessau, the former supplying two tons of the cyanide crystals a month andthe latter three quarters of a ton. The bills of lading for the deliveriesshowed up at Nuremberg.

The directors of both concerns contended that they had sold theirproduct merely for fumigation purposes and were unaware that lethal usehad been made of it, but this defense did not hold up. Letters were foundfrom Tesch and Stabenow offering not only to supply the gas crystals butalso the ventilating and heating equipment for extermination chambers.Besides, the inimitable Hoess, who once he started to confess went thelimit, testified that the directors of the Tesch company could not havehelped knowing how their product was being used since they furnishedenough to exterminate a couple of million people. A British military courtwas convinced of this at the trial of the two partners, Bruno Tesch and KarlWeinbacher, who were sentenced to death in 1946 and hanged. Thedirector of the second firm, Dr. Gerhard Peters of Degesch of Dessau, gotoff more lightly. A German court sentenced him to five years’ imprison-ment.63

Before the postwar trials in Germany it had been generally believed that

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the mass killings were exclusively the work of a relatively few fanaticalS.S. leaders. But the records of the courts leave no doubt of the complicityof a number of German businessmen, not only the Krupps and the directorsof the I. G. Farben chemical trust but smaller entrepreneurs who outwardlymust have seemed to be the most prosaic and decent of men, pillars—likegood businessmen everywhere—of their communities.

How many hapless innocent people—mostly Jews but including a fairlylarge number of others, especially Russian prisoners of war—wereslaughtered at the one camp of Auschwitz? The exact number will neverbe known. Hoess himself in his affidavit gave an estimate of “2,500,000victims executed and exterminated by gassing and burning, and at leastanother half million who succumbed to starvation and disease, making atotal of about 3,000,000.” Later at his own trial in Warsaw he reducedthe figure to 1,135,000. The Soviet government, which investigated thecamp after it was overrun by the Red Army in January 1945, put the figureat four million. Reitlinger, on the basis of his own exhaustive study,doubts that the number gassed at Auschwitz was “even as high as threequarters of a million.” He estimates that about 600,000 died in the gaschambers, to which he adds “the unknown proportion” of some 300,000 ormore “missing,” who were shot or who died of starvation and disease. Byany estimate the figure is considerable.64

The bodies were burned, but the gold fillings in the teeth remained andthese were retrieved from the ashes if they had not already been yankedout by special squads working over the clammy piles of corpses.* The goldwas melted down and shipped along with other valuables snatched fromthe condemned Jews to the Reichsbank, where under a secret agreementbetween Himmler and the bank’s president, Dr. Walther Funk, it wasdeposited 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, neck-laces and even spectacles frames—for the Jews had been encouraged tobring all their valuables with them for the promised “resettlement.” Therewere also great stocks of jewelry, especially diamonds and much silver-ware. 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’sprofit-minded directors sought to turn the holdings into cold cash by dis-posing of them through the municipal pawnshops. One letter from theReichsbank to the Berlin municipal pawnshop dated September 15 speaks

* Sometimes they were pulled out before the victims were slain. A secret report ofthe German warden of the prison at Minsk disclosed that after he had commandeeredthe services of a Jewish dentist all the Jews “had their gold bridgework, crowns andfillings pulled or broken out. This happens always one to two hours before thespecial action.” The warden noted that of 516 German and Russian Jews executedat his prison during a six-week period in the spring of 1943, some 336 had the goldyanked from their teeth.65

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of a “second shipment” and begins, “We submit to you the followingvaluables with the request for the best possible utilization.” The list islong and itemized and includes 154 gold watches, 1,601 gold earrings, 132diamond rings, 784 silver pocket watches and “160 diverse dentures,partly of gold.” By the beginning of 1944 the Berlin pawnshop itself wasoverwhelmed by the flow of these stolen goods and informed the Reichs-bank it could accept no more. When the Allies overran Germany theydiscovered in some abandoned salt mines, where the Nazis had hiddenpart of their records and booty, enough left over from the “Max Heiliger”account to fill three huge vaults in the Frankfurt branch of the Reichs-bank.66

Did the bankers know the sources of these unique “deposits”? Themanager of the Precious Metals Department of the Reichsbank deposedat Nuremberg that he and his associates began to notice that many ship-ments came from Lublin and Auschwitz.

We all knew that these places were the sites of concentration camps. It wasin the tenth delivery in November, 1943, that dental gold appeared. Thequantity of dental gold became unusually great.67

At Nuremberg the notorious Oswald Pohl, chief of the Economic Officeof the S.S., who handled the transactions for his organization, emphasizedthat Dr. Funk and the officials and directors of the Reichsbank knew verywell the origins of the goods they were trying to pawn. He explained insome detail the business deal between Funk and the S.S. concerning thedelivery of valuables of dead Jews to the Reichsbank.” He remembereda 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 inquestion 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 theReichsbank where the valuables “from the dead Jews” were inspected,Dr. Funk tendered the party a pleasant dinner in which the conversationturned around the unique origins of the booty.68*

“THE WARSAW GHETTO IS NO MORE”

More than one eyewitness has commented on the spirit of resignationwith which so many Jews met their deaths in the Nazi gas chambers or inthe great execution pits of the Einsatz squads. Not all Jews submitted toextermination so gently. In the spring days of 1943 some 60,000 Jews

* Dr. Funk was sentenced to life imprisonment at Nuremberg.

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walled up in the Warsaw ghetto—all that remained of 400,000 who hadbeen herded into this place like cattle in 1940—turned on their Nazitormentors and fought.

Perhaps no one has left a more grisly—and authoritative—account ofthe Warsaw ghetto rebellion than the proud S.S. officer who put it down.*This German individual was Juergen Stroop, S.S. Brigadefuehrer andMajor General of Police. His eloquent official report, bound in leather,profusely illustrated and typed on seventy-five pages of elegant heavybond 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 ahigh wall from the rest of Warsaw in an area approximately two and a halfmiles long and a mile wide around the old medieval ghetto. The districtnormally housed 160,000 persons, so there was overcrowding, but thiswas the least of the hardships. Governor Frank refused to allot enoughfood to keep even half of the 400,000 barely alive. Forbidden to leave theenclosure on the pain of being shot on sight, the Jews had no employmentexcept for a few armament factories within the wall run by the Wehrmachtor by rapacious German businessmen who knew how to realize large profitsfrom the use of slave labor. At least 100,000 Jews tried to survive on abowl of soup a day, often boiled from straw, provided by the charity ofthe others. It was a losing struggle for life.

But the ghetto population did not die fast enough from starvation anddisease to suit Himmler, who in the summer of 1942 ordered the Jews inthe Warsaw ghetto to be removed altogether “for security reasons.” OnJuly 22 a great “resettlement” action was instituted. Between then andOctober 3 a total of 310,322 Jews, according to Stroop, were “resettled.”That is, they were transported to the extermination camps, most of themto Treblinka, where they were gassed.

Still Himmler was not satisfied. When he paid a surprise visit to Warsawin January 1943 and discovered that 60,000 Jews were still alive in theghetto he ordered that the “resettlement” be completed by February 15.This proved to be a difficult task. The severe winter and the demands ofthe Army, whose disaster at Stalingrad and whose consequent retreats insouthern Russia gave it first claim to transportation facilities, made itdifficult for the S.S. to obtain the necessary trains to carry out the final“reset lement.” Also, Stroop reported, the Jews were resisting their finalliquidation “in every possible way.” It was not until spring that Himmler’sorder 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.

* John Hersey’s novel The Wall, based on the Jewish records, is an epic story of theuprising.

t But not Stroop. He was caught after the war, sentenced to death by an Americancourt at Dachau on March 22, 1947, for the shooting of hostages in Greece, andthen extradited to Poland, where he was tried for the slaughter of the Jews in theWarsaw ghetto. He was again sentenced to death and hanged at the scene of thecrime on September 8, 1951.

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The deportation of more than 300,000 Jews had enabled the Germansto reduce the size of the walled-in ghetto and as S.S. General Stroop turnedhis tanks, artillery, flame throwers and dynami e squads on it on themorning of April 19, 1943, it comprised an area measuring only 1,000.by 300 yards. It was honeycombed, though, with sewers, vaults andcellars which the desperate Jews had converted into fortified points. Theirarms were few: some pistols and rifles, a dozen or two machine guns thathad been smuggled in, and homemade grenades. But they were now onthat April morning determined to use them—the first time and the last inthe history of the Third Reich that the Jews resisted their Nazi oppressorswith 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 andsome Polish police and firemen. They ran into unexpected resistance thefirst day.

Hardly had operation begun [Stroop reported in the first of his manyteletyped daily reports], than we ran into strong concerted fire by the Jews andbandits. 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 ofbuildings, including machine-gun fire. A special raiding party defeated theenemy but could not catch the resisters. The Jews and criminals resisted frombase 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 givingground before the attacks of tanks, flame throwers and artillery but keep-ing up their resistance. General Stroop could not understand why “thistrash and subhumanity,” as he referred to the besieged Jews, did not giveup and submit to being liquidated.

Within a few days [he reported] it became apparent that the Jews no longerhad any intention to resettle voluntarily, but were determined to resist evacua-tion . . . Whereas it had been possible during the first days to catch con-siderable numbers of Jews, who are cowards by nature, it became more andmore difficult during the second half of the operation to capture the banditsand Jews. Over and over again new battle groups consisting of 20 to 30Jewish men, accompanied by a corresponding number of women, kindled newresistance.

The women belonged to the Chalutzim, Stroop noted, and had thehabit, he said, of “firing pistols with both hands” and also of unlimberinghand grenades which they concealed in their bloomers.

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On the fifth day of the battle, an impatient and furious Himmlerordered Stroop to “comb out” the ghetto “with the greatest severity andrelentless tenacity.”

I therefore decided [Stroop related in his final report] to destroy the entireJewish 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 beingburned alive they jumped down from the upper stories . . . With their bonesbroken, they still tried to crawl across the street into buildings which had notyet been set on fire . . . Despite the danger of being burned alive the Jewsand bandits often preferred to return into the flames rather than risk beingcaught by us.

It was simply incomprehensible to a man of Stroop’s stripe that men andwomen preferred to die in the flames fighting rather than to die peacefullyin the gas chambers. For he was shipping off the captured whom he didnot slaughter to Treblinka. On April 25 he sent a teletype to S.S. head-quarters repordng that 27,464 Jews had been captured.

I am going to try to obtain a train for T2 [Treblinka] tomorrow. Otherwiseliquidation 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 Jewskilled 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 managedto stop the flow of water. One day the Germans dropped smoke bombsinto the sewers through 183 manholes but Stroop ruefully reported thatthey failed to “have the desired results.”

The final outcome could never be in doubt. For a whole month thecornered Jews fought with reckless courage though Stroop, in one dailyreport, put it differemly, complaining about the “cunning fighting methodsand tricks used by the Jews and bandits.” By April 26 he reported thatmany of the defenders were “going insane from the heat, the smoke andthe explosions.”

During the day several more blocks of buildings were burned down. This isthe only and final method which forces this trash and subhumanity to thesurface.

The last day was May 16. That night Stroop got off his last daily battlereport.

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One hundred eighty Jews, bandits and subhumans were destroyed. Theformer Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no longer in existence. The large-scaleaction was terminated at 2015 hours by blowing up the Warsaw syna-gogue . . .

Total number of Jews dealt with: 56,065, including both Jews caught andJews 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 formerghetto during large-scale operation. 6,929 Jews were destroyed by transportingthem to Treblinka; the sum total of Jews destroyed is therefore 13,929. Beyondthat, from five to six thousand Jews were destroyed by being blown up or byperishing in the flames.

General Stroop’s arithmetic is not very clear since this report leavessome 36,000 Jews unaccounted for. But there can be little doubt that hewas telling the truth when he wrote in his handsomely bound final reportthat he had caught “a total of 56,065 Jews whose extermination can beproved.” The gas chambers no doubt accounted for the 36,000.

German losses, according to Stroop, were sixteen killed and ninetywounded. Probably the true figures were much higher, given the natureof the savage house-to-house fighting which the general himself describedin such lurid detail, but were kept low so as not to disturb Himmler’s finesensibilities. The German troops and police, Stroop concluded, “fulfilledtheir duty indefatigably in faithful comradeship and stood together as ex-emplary models of soldiers.”

The “final solution” went on to the very end of the war. How manyJews did it massacre? The figure has been debated. According to twoS.S. witnesses at Nuremberg the total was put at between five and sixmillions 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 solu-tion” under the prodding hand of its originator, Heydrich.* The figuregiven in the Nuremberg indictment was 5,700,000 and it tallied with thecalculations of the World Jewish Congress. Reitlinger in his prodigiousstudy 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 oc-cupied by Hitler’s forces. By any estimate it is certain that nearly half ofthem were exterminated by the Germans. This was the final consequence

* Eichmann, according to one of his henchmen, said just before the German collapsethat “he would leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had fivemillion people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinarysatisfaction.”70 Probably he never leaped into the grave, laughing or otherwise. Heescaped from an American internment camp in 1945. (Note: As this book went onpress, the government of Israel announced that it had apprehended Eichmann.)

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and the shattering cost of the aberration which came over the Nazi dictatorin his youthful gutter days in Vienna and which he imparted to—or sharedwith—so many of his German followers.

THE MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

There were some practices of the Germans during the short-lived NewOrder that resulted from sheer sadism rather than a lust for mass murder.Perhaps to a psychiatrist there is a difference between the two lusts thoughthe end result of the first differed from the second only in the scale ofdeaths.

The Nazi medical experiments are an example of this sadism, for inthe use of concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war as humanguinea pigs very little, if any, benefit to science was achieved. It is a tale ofhorror of which the German medical profession cannot be proud. Al-though the “experiments” were conducted by fewer than two hundredmurderous quacks—albeit some of them held eminent posts in the medicalworld—their criminal work was known to thousands of leading physiciansof the Reich, not a single one of whom, so far as the record shows, everuttered the slightest public protest.*

In the murders in this field the Jews were not the only victims. TheNazi doctors also used Russian prisoners of war, Polish concentration campinmates, women as well as men, and even Germans. The “experiments”were quite varied. Prisoners were placed in pressure chambers and sub-jected to high-altitude tests until they ceased breathing. They were in-jected with lethal doses of typhus and jaundice. They were subjected to“freezing” experiments in icy water or exposed naked in the snow outdoorsuntil they froze to death. Poison bullets were tried out on them as wasmustard gas. At the Ravensbrueck concentration camp for women hun-dreds of Polish inmates—the “rabbit girls” they were called—were givengas gangrene wounds while others were subjected to “experiments” inbone grafting. At Dachau and Buchenwald gypsies were selected to seehow long, and in what manner, they could live on salt water. Sterilizationexperiments were carried out on a large scale at several camps by a varietyof means on both men and women; for, as an S.S. physician, Dr. AdolfPokorny, wrote Himmler on one occasion, “the enemy must be not onlyconquered but exterminated.” If he could not be slaughtered—and theneed for slave labor toward the end of the war made that practice question-

* Not even Germany’s most famous surgeon, Dr. Ferdinand Sauerbruch, though heeventually became an anti-Nazi and conspired with the resistance. Sauerbruch satthrough a lecture at the Berlin Military Medical Academy in May of 1943 given bytwo 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 argu-ment on this occasion was that surgery was better than sulfanilamide! ProfessorGebhardt was sentenced to death at the so-called “Doctors’ Trial” and hanged onJune 2, 1948. Dr. Fischer was given life imprisonment.

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able, as we have seen—then he could be prevented from propagating. Infact Dr. Pokorny told Himmler he thought he had found just the rightmeans, the plant Caladium seguinum, which, he said, induced lastingsterility.

The thought alone [the good doctor wrote the S.S. Fuehrer] that the threemillion Bolsheviks now in German captivity could be sterilized, so that theywould be available for work but precluded from propagation, opens up themost far-reaching perspectives.72

Another German doctor who had “far-reaching perspectives” wasProfessor August Hirt, head of the Anatomical Institute of the Universityof Strasbourg. His special field was somewhat different from those of theothers 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 ourdisposal. Of the Jewish race, however, only very few specimens of skulls areavailable . . . The war in the East now presents us with the opportunity toovercome this deficiency. By procuring the skulls of the Jewish-Bolshevikcommissars, 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 commis-sars already dead. He proposed that the heads of these persons first bemeasured while they were alive. Then—

Following the subsequently induced death of the Jew, whose head shouldnot be damaged, the physician will sever the head from the body and willforward it ... in a hermetically sealed tin can.

Whereupon Dr. Hirt would go to work, he promised, on further scientificmeasurements.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 in-dividual by the name of Wolfram Sievers, who spent considerable time onthe witness stand at the main Nuremberg trial and at the subsequent“Doctors’ Trial,” in the latter of which he was a defendant.* Sievers, aformer bookseller, had risen to be a colonel of the S.S. and executivesecretary of the Ahnenerbe, the Institute for Research into Heredity, oneof the ridiculous “cultural” organizations established by Himmler topursue one of his many lunacies. It had, according to Sievers, fifty “re-search branches,” of which one was called the “Institute for MilitaryScientific Research,” which Sievers also headed. He was a shifty-eyed,Mephistophelean-looking fellow with a thick, ink-black beard and at

* And in which he was condemned to death, and hanged.

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Nuremberg he was dubbed the “Nazi Bluebeard,” after the famous Frenchkiller. Like so many other characters in this history, he kept a meticulousdiary, and this and his correspondence, both of which survived, contributedto his gallows end.

By June 1943 Sievers had collected at Auschwitz the men and womenwho were to furnish the skeletons for the “scientific measurements” ofProfessor 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 transportationfor them from Auschwitz to the Natzweiler concentration camp nearStrasbourg. The British cross-examiner at Nuremberg inquired as to themeaning 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 aveteran exterminator from Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Dachau and othercamps and who achieved fleeting fame as the “Beast of Belsen” and wascondemned to death by a British court at Lueneburg.

Professor Hirt of the Strasbourg Anatomical Institute told me of the prisonerconvoy en route from Auschwitz. He said these persons were to be killed bypoison gas in the gas chamber of the Natzweiler camp, their bodies then to betaken to the Anatomical Institute for his disposal. He gave me a bottle con-taining about half a pint of salts—I think they were cyanide salts—and toldme the approximate dosage I would have to use to poison the arriving inmatesfrom Auschwitz.

Early in August 1943, I received eighty inmates who were to be killed withthe gas Hirt had given me. One night I went to the gas chamber in a smallcar with about fifteen women this first time. I told the women they had to gointo the chamber to be disinfected. I did not tell them, however, that they wereto 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 womencompletely and shoved them into the gas chamber when they were stark naked.

When the door closed they began to scream. I introduced a certain amountof salt through a tube ... and observed through a peephole what happenedinside the room. The women breathed for about half a minute before they fellto the floor. After I had turned on the ventilation I opened the door. I foundthe women lying lifeless on the floor and they were covered with excrements.

Captain Kramer testified that he repeated the performance until alleighty inmates had been killed and turned the bodies over to Professor

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Hirt, “as requested.” He was asked by his interrogator what his feelingswere at the time, and he gave a memorable answer that gives insight intoa phenomenon in the Third Reich that has seemed so elusive of humanunderstanding.

I had no feelings in carrying out these things because I had received anorder 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 HenryHerypierre, a Frenchman who worked in the Anatomical Institute atStrasbourg 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 andshining. They were red and bloodshot and were popping from their sockets.There were also traces of blood about the nose and mouth. No rigor mortiswas evident.

Herypierre suspected that they had been done to death and secretlycopied down their prison numbers which were tattooed on their left arms.Two more shipments of fifty-six men arrived, he said, in exactly the samecondition. They were pickled in alcohol under the expert direction of Dr.Hirt. But the professor was a little nervous about the whole thing.“Peter,” he said to Herypierre, “if you can’t keep your trap shut, you’ll beone of them.”

Professor Dr. Hirt went about his work nonetheless. According to thecorrespondence of Sievers, the professor severed the heads and, as hewrote, assembled the skeleton collection which was previously non-existent.” But there were difficulties and after hearing them described byDr. Hirt—Sievers himself had no expert medical or anatomical knowl-edge—the chief of the Ahnenerbe reported them to Himmler on Septem-ber 5, 1944.

In view of the vast amount of scientific research involved, the job of reducingthe corpses has not yet been completed. This requires some time for 80corpses.

And time was running out. Advancing American and French troopswere nearing Strasbourg. Hirt requested “directives as to what should bedone 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 andthat this unique collection would be lost to science, since it would be impossibleto make plaster casts afterwards.

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The skeleton collection as such is inconspicuous. The flesh parts could bedeclared as having been left by the French at the time we took over theAnatomical Institute* and would be turned over for cremating. Please adviseme which of the following three proposals is to be carried out: 1. The collectionas a whole to be preserved; 2. The collection to be dissolved in part; 3. Thecollection to be completely dissolved.

“Why were you wanting to deflesh the bodies, witness?” the Britishprosecutor asked in the stillness of the Nuremberg courtroom. “Whywere 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 Blue-beard” replied. “I merely transmitted an inquiry from Professor Hirt. Ihad nothing to do with the murdering of these people. I simply carriedthrough the function of a mailman.”

“You were the post office,” the prosecutor rejoined, “another of thesedis'inguished Nazi post offices, were you?”

It was a leaky defense offered by many a Nazi at the trials and on thisoccasion, as on others, the prosecution nailed it.75

The captured S.S. files reveal that on October 26, 1944, Sievers re-ported that “the collection in Strasbourg has been completely dissolved inaccordance with the directive. This arrangement is for the best in view ofthe whole situation.”78

Herypierre later described the attempt—not altogether successful—tohide the traces.

In September, 1944, the Allies made an advance on Belfort, and ProfessorHirt ordered Bong and Herr Maier to cut up these bodies and have themburned in the crematory ... I asked Herr Maier the next day whether he hadcut up all the bodies, but Herr Bong replied: “We couldn’t cut up all thebodies, 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, enteredStrasbourg a month later, t77

Not only skeletons but human skins were collected by the masters ofthe New Order though in the latter case the pretense could not be madethat the cause of scientific research was being served. The skins of con-centration camp prisoners, especially executed for this ghoulish purpose,had merely decorative value. They made, it was found, excellent lampshades, several of which were expressly fitted up for Frau Use Koch, thewife of the commandant of Buchenwald and nicknamed by the inmates

* Germany had annexed Alsace after the fall of France in 1940 and the Germans hadtaken over the University of Strasbourg.

t Professor Dr. Hirt disappeared. As he left Strasbourg he was heard boasting thatno one would ever take him alive. Apparently no one has—-alive or dead.

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the Bitch of Buchenwald.’ * Tattooed skins appear to have been themost sought after. A German inmate, Andreas Pfaffenberger, deposed atNuremberg on this.

. . . All prisoners with tattooing on them were ordered to report to thedispensary . . . After the prisoners had been examined the ones with the bestand most artistic specimens were killed by injections. The corpses were thenturned over to the pathological department where the desired pieces oftattooed skin were detached from the bodies and treated further. The finishedproducts were turned over to Koch’s wife, who had them fashioned intolamp shades, and other ornamental household articles.78

One piece of skin which apparently struck Frau Koch’s fancy had thewords “Haensel and Gretel” tattooed on it.

At another camp, Dachau, the demand for such skins often outran thesupply. A Czech physician prisoner, Dr. Frank Blaha, testified at Nurem-berg as to that.

Sometimes we would not have enough bodies with good skin and Dr. Rascherwould say, All right, you will get the bodies.” The next day we would receivetwenty or thirty bodies of young people. They would have been shot in theneck or struck on the head, so that the skin would be uninjured . . . The skinhad to be from healthy prisoners and free from defects.79

It was this Dr. Sigmund Rascher who seems to have been responsiblefor the more sadistic of the medical experiments in the first place. Thishorrible quack had attracted the attention of Himmler, among whoseobsessions was the breeding of more and more superior Nordic offspring,through reports in S.S. circles that Frau Rascher had given birth to threechildren after passing the age of forty-eight, although in truth the Raschershad simply kidnaped them at suitable intervals from an orphanage.

In the spring of 1941, Dr. Rascher, who was attending a special medicalcourse 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 re-search on the effect of high altitudes on flyers was at a standstill becauseno tests with human material had yet been possible as such experimentsare very dangerous and nobody volunteers for them.”

Frau Koch, whose power of life and death over the inmates of Buchenwald wascomplete, and whose very whim could bring terrible punishment to a prisoner, wassentenced to life imprisonment at the “Buchenwald Trial,” but her sentence wascommuted to four years, and she was soon released. On January 15, 1951, aGerman court sentenced her to life imprisonment for murder. Her husband wassentenced to death by an S.S. court during the war for “excesses” but was given theoption of serving on the Russian front. Before he could do this, however, PrinceWaldeck, 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, wasAmong those who died at Buchenwald.

985

Can you make available two or three professional criminals for these ex-periments . . . 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 seenfrom his own reports and from those of others, which showed up at Nurem-berg and at the subsequent trial of the S.S. doctors.

Dr. Rascher’s own findings are a model of scientific jargon. For thehigh-altitude tests he moved the Air Force’s decompression chamber atMunich to the nearby Dachau concentration camp where human guineapigs were readily available. Air was pumped out of the contraption sothat 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 altitudeconducted on a 37-year-old Jew in good general condition. Respiration con-tinued for 30 minutes. After four minutes the TP [test person] began toperspire and roll his head.

After five minutes spasms appeared; between the sixth and tenth minuterespiration increased in frequency, the TP losing consciousness. From theeleventh to the thirtieth minute respiration slowed down to three inhalationsper minute, only to cease entirely at the end of that period . . . About halfan hour after breathing had ceased, an autopsy was begun.81

An Austrian inmate, Anton Pacholegg, who worked in Dr. Rascher’soffice, has described the “experiments” less scientifically.

I have personally seen through the observation window of the decompres-sion chamber when a prisoner inside would stand a vacuum until his lungsruptured . . . They would go mad and pull out their hair in an effort torelieve the pressure. They would tear their heads and face with their fingersand nails in an attempt to maim themselves in their madness. They wouldbeat the walls with their hands and head and scream in an effort to relievepressure on their eardrums. These cases usually ended in the death of thesubject.82

Some two hundred prisoners were subjected to this experiment beforeDr. Rascher was finished with it. Of these, according to the testimony atthe “Doctors’ Trial,” about eighty were killed outright and the remainderexecuted somewhat later so that no tales would be told.

This particular research project was finished in May 1942, at whichtime Field Marshal Erhard Milch of the Luftwaffe conveyed Goering’s“thanks” to Himmler for Dr. Rascher’s pioneer experiments. A little

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REIC?*

later, on October 10, 1942, Lieutenant General Dr. Hippke, Medical In-spector of the Air Force, tendered to Himmler “in the name of Germanaviation medicine and research” his “obedient gratitude” for “the Dachauexperiments.” However, he thought, there was one omission in them.They had not taken into account the extreme cold which an aviator faces athigh altitudes. To rectify this omission the Luftwaffe, he informed Himm-ler, was building a decompression chamber “equipped with full refrigera-tion 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. Butsome of his doctor colleagues were having qualms. Was it Christian to dowhat Dr. Rascher was doing? Apparently a few German Luftwaffe medicswere beginning to have their doubts. When Himmler heard of this he wasinfuriated and promptly wrote Field Marshal Milch protesting about thedifficulties caused by “Christian medical circles” in the Air Force. Hebegged the Luftwaffe Chief of Staff to release Rascher from the Air Forcemedical corps so that he could be transferred to the S.S. He suggestedthat they find a “non-Christian physician, who should be honorable as ascientist,” to pass on Dr. Rascher’s valuable works. In the meantimeHimmler emphasized that he

personally assumed the responsibility for supplying asocial individuals andcriminals who deserve only to die from concentration camps for these experi-ments.

Dr. Rascher’s “freezing experiments” were of two kinds: first, to seehow 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 beingexposed 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, com-pletely naked, overnight during winter. Rascher’s reports to Himmler onhis “freezing” and “warming” experiments are voluminous; an exampleor two will give the tenor. One of the earliest ones was made on Septem-ber 10, 1942.

The TPs were immersed in water in full flying uniform . . . with hood.A life jacket prevented sinking. The experiments were conducted at watertemperatures between 36.5 and 53.5 degrees Fahrenheit. In the first test seriesthe back of the head and the brain stem were above water. In another seriesthe back of the neck and cerebellum were submerged. Temperatures as low as79.5 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 ex-treme distention of the right chamber. The TPs in such tests inevitably diedwhen body temperature had declined to 82.5, despite all rescue attempts.

987

These autopsy findings plainly prove the importance of a heated head and neckprotector for the foam suit now in the process of development.84

A table which Dr. Rascher appended covers six “Fatal Cases” andshows the water temperatures, body temperature on removal from water,body temperature at death, the length of stay in the water and the time ittook the patient to die. The toughest man endured in the ice water forone hundred minutes, the weakest for fifty-three minutes.

Walter Neff, a camp inmate who served as Dr. Rascher’s medical or-derly, furnished the “Doctors’ Trial” with a layman’s description of onewater-freezing test.

It was the worst experiment ever made. Two Russian officers were broughtfrom the prison barracks. Rascher had them stripped and they had to go intothe vat naked. Hour after hour went by, and whereas usually unconsciousnessfrom the cold set in after sixty minutes at the latest, the two men in this casestill responded fully after two and a half hours. All appeals to Rascher to putthem to sleep by injection were fruitless. About the third hour one of theRussians said to the other, ‘Comrade, please tell the officer to shoot us.’ Theother replied that he expected no mercy from this Fascist dog. The twoshook hands with a ‘Farewell, Comrade’ . . . These words were translated toRascher by a young Pole, though in a somewhat different form. Rascher wentto his office. The young Pole at once tried to chloroform the two victims, butRascher came back at once, threatening us with his gun . . . The test lastedat least five hours before death supervened.85

The nominal “chief” of the initial cold-water experiments was a certainDr. Holzloehner, Professor of Medicine at the University of Kiel, assistedby a Dr. Finke, and after working with Rascher for a couple of monthsthey believed that they had exhausted the experimental possibilities. Thethree physicians thereupon drew up a thirty-two-page top-secret report tothe Air Force entitled “Freezing Experiments with Human Beings” andcalled 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 tothe testimony at the “Doctors’ Trial,” ninety-five German scientists, in-cluding some of the most eminent men in the field, participated, andthough the three doctors left no doubt that a good many human beingshad been done to death in the experiments there were no questions put asto this and no protests therefore made.

Professor Holzloehner* and Dr. Finke bowed out of the experiments atthis time but the persevering Dr. Rascher carried on alone from October1942 until May of the following year. He wanted, among other things, to

* Professor Holzloehner may have had a guilty conscience. Picked up by the Britishhe committed suicide after his first interrogation.

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pursue experiments in what he called “dry freezing.” Auschwitz, hewrote to Himmler,

is much better suited for such tests than Dachau because it is colder there andbecause the size of the grounds causes less of a stir in the camp. (The testpersons 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 realwinter weather.

Thank God, we have had another intense cold snap at Dachau [he wroteHimmler in the early spring of 1943], Some people remained out in the openfor 14 hours at 21 degrees, attaining an interior temperature of 77 degrees, withperipheral frostbite . . ,86

At the “Doctors’ Trial” the witness Neff again provided a layman’s de-scription of the “dry-freezing” experiments of his chief.

A prisoner was placed naked on a stretcher outside the barracks in theevening. He was covered with a sheet, and every hour a bucket of cold waterwas poured over him. The test person lay out in the open like this into themorning. Their temperatures were taken.

Later Dr. Rascher said it was a mistake to cover the subject with a sheet andto drench him with water ... In the future the test persons must not becovered. The next experiment was a test on ten prisoners who were exposedin turn, likewise naked.

As the prisoners slowly froze, Dr. Rascher or his assistant would recordtemperatures, heart action, respiration and so on. The cries of the suffer-ing often rent the night.

Initially [Neff explained to the court] Rascher forbade these tests to bemade in a state of anesthesia. But the test persons made such a racket that itwas impossible for Rascher to continue these tests without anesthetic.87

The TPs (test persons) were left to die, as Himmler said they deservedto, in the ice-water tanks or lying naked on the ground outside the barracksat Dachau on a winter evening. If they survived they were shortly ex-terminated. But the brave German flyers and sailors, for whose benefitthe experiments were ostensibly carried out, and who might find them-selves ditched in the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean or marooned in somefrozen waste above the Arctic Circle in Norway, Finland or northern Rus-sia, had to be saved if possible. The inimitable Dr. Rascher therefore tookto performing on his human guinea pigs at Dachau what he termed “warm-

989

mg experiments.” What was the best method, he wanted to know, forwarming a frozen man and thus possibly saving his life?

Heinrich Himmler, never backward in offering “practical” solutions tohis corps of busy scientists, suggested to Rascher that warming by “animalheat” 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 tooslow,” he wrote the S.S. chief. But Himmler kept after him.

I am very curious [he wrote Rascher] about the experiments with animalheat. Personally I believe these experiments may bring the best and the mostsustained results.

Though skeptical, Dr. Rascher was not the man to ignore a suggestionfrom the leader of the S.S. He promptly embarked on a series of the mostgrotesque experiments ’ of all, recording them for posterity in everymorbid detail. Four inmates from the women’s concentration camps atRavensbrueck were sent to him at Dachau. However there was somethingabout one of them—they were classified as prostitutes—that disturbedthe 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 shereplied, “To get out of the concentration camp.” When I objected that it wasshameful to volunteer as a brothel girl, I was advised, “Better half a year in abrothel than half a year in the concentration camp . . .”

My racial conscience is outraged by the prospect of exposing to raciallyinferior 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. Hisfindings were duly reported to Himmler in a report marked “Secret” onFebruary 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 tookplace at a rectal temperature of 86 degrees.

In eight cases the test persons were placed between two naked women on awide bed. The women were instructed to snuggle up to the chilled person asclosely as possible. The three persons were then covered with blankets . . .

Once the test persons regained consciousness, they never lost it again, quicklygrasping their situation and nestling close to the naked bodies of the women.The rise of body temperature then proceeded at approximately the same speedas with test persons warmed by being swathed in blankets ... An exceptionwas formed by four test persons who practiced sexual intercourse between 86and 89.5 degrees. In these persons, after coitus, a very swift temperature riseensued, comparable to that achieved by means of a hot-water bath.

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Dr. Rascher found, somewhat to his surprise, that one woman warmeda frozen man faster than two women.

I attribute this to the fact that in warming by means of one woman personalinhibitions are avoided and the woman clings more closely to the chilledperson. Here too, return of full consciousness was notably rapid. In the caseof only one person did consciousness fail to return and only a slight degreeof warming was recorded. This test person died with symptoms of a brainhemorrhage, later confirmed by autopsy.

Summing up, this murderous hack concluded that warming up a“chilled” man with women “proceeds very slowly” and that hot bathswere more efficacious.

Only test persons [he concluded] whose physical state permitted sexualintercourse warmed up surprisingly fast and also showed a surprisingly rapidreturn of full bodily well-being.

According to the testimony at the “Doctors’ Trial” some four hundred“freezing” experiments were performed on three hundred persons ofwhom between eighty and ninety died directly as a result thereof, and therest, except for a few, were bumped off subsequently, some of them havingbeen driven insane. Dr. Rascher himself, incidentally, was not around totestify at this trial. He continued his bloody labors on various new proj-ects, too numerous to mention, until May 1944, when he and his wifewere 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 howtheir children came into the world. Such treachery Himmler, with hisworship of German mothers, could not brook—he had sincerely believedthat Frau Rascher had begun to bear her three children at the age offorty-eight and he was outraged when he learned that she had kidnapedthem. So Dr. Rascher was incarcerated in the political bunker at hisfamiliar Dachau camp and his wife was carted off to Ravensbrueck, fromwhich the doctor had procured his prostitutes for the “warming” tests.Neither survived, and it is believed that Himmler himself, in one of the lastacts of his life, ordered their execution. They might have made awkwardwitnesses.

A number of such awkward witnesses did survive to stand trial. Sevenof them were condemned to death and hanged, defending their lethal ex-periments to the last as patriotic acts which served the Fatherland. Dr.Herta Oberheuser, the only woman defendant at the “Doctors’ Trial,” wasgiven twenty years. She had admitted giving lethal injections to “five orsix” Polish women among the hundreds who suffered the tortures of thedamned in a variety of “experiments” at Ravensbrueck. A number ofdoctors, such as the notorious Pokorny, who had wanted to sterilize mil-lions of the enemy, were acquitted. A few were contrite. At a second

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trial of medical underlings Dr. Edwin Katzenellenbogen, a former memberof the faculty of the Harvard Medical School, asked the court for thedeath sen'ence. “You have placed the mark of Cain on my forehead,” heexclaimed. “Any physician who committed the crimes I am charged withdeserves to be killed.” He was given life imprisonment.80

THE DEATH OF HEYDRICH AND THE END OF LIDICE

Midway through the war there was one act of retribution against thegangster masters of the New Order for their slaughtering of the conqueredpeople. Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Security Police and the S.D.,deputy chief of the Gestapo, this long-nosed, icy-eyed thirty-eight-year-oldpoliceman of diabolical cast, the genius of the “final solution,” HangmanHeydrich, 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 Pro-tector, was packed off on indefinite sick leave by Hitler in September 1941,and Heydrich replaced him in the ancient seat of the Bohemian kings atHradschin Castle in Prague. But not for long.

On the morning of May 29, 1942, as he was driving in his open Mer-cedes sports car from his country villa to the Castle in Prague a bomb ofBritish make was tossed at him, blowing the car to pieces and shatteringhis spine. It had been hurled by two Czechs, Jan Kubis and Josef Gabeik,of the free Czechoslovak army in England, who had been parachuted froman R.A.F. plane. Well equipped for their assignment, they got away undera smoke screen and were given refuge by the priests of the Karl Borro-maeus Church in Prague.

Heydrich expired of his wounds on June 4 and a veritable hecatombfollowed as the Germans took savage revenge, after the manner of the oldTeutonic rites, for the death of their hero. According to one Gestapo re-port, 1,331 Czechs, including 201 women, were immediately executed.91The actual assassins, along with 120 members of the Czech resistance whowere hiding in the Karl Borromaeus Church, were besieged there by theS.S. and killed to the last man.* It was the Jews, however, who sufferedthe most for this act of defiance against the master race. Three thousandof them were removed from the “privileged” ghetto of Theresienstadt andshipped to the East for extermination. On the day of the bombing Goeb-bels had 500 of the few remaining Jews at large in Berlin arrested and onthe 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 vil-lage of Lidice near the mining town of Kladno not far from Prague will

* According to Schellenberg, who was there, the Gestapo never learned that theactual assassins were among the dead in the church. (Schellenberg, The Labyrinth,p. 292.)

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perhaps be longest remembered by the civilized world. For no other rea-son except to serve as an example to a conquered people who dared totake the life of one of their inquisitors a terrible savagery was carried out inthis peaceful little rural place.

On the morning of June 9, 1942, ten truckloads of German SecurityPolice under the command of Captain Max Rostock* arrived at Lidiceand surrounded the village. No one was allowed to leave though anyonewho 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 peasantwoman 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 gardenbehind the barn, in batches of ten, and shot by firing squads of the Se-curity Police. A total of 172 men and boys, over sixteen, were executedthere. An additional nineteen male residents, who were working in theKladno mines during the massacre, were later picked up and dispatchedin Prague.

Seven women who were rounded up at Lidice were taken to Prague andshot. All the rest of the women of the village, who numbered 195, weretransported to the Ravensbrueck concentration camp in Germany, whereseven 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 toa maternity hospital in Prague where their newly born infants were mur-dered 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 mustbe said that the Germans did not shoot them too, not even the male chil-dren. They were carted off to a concentration camp at Gneisenau. Therewere 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 underGerman 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, con-cluded.

Happily, some of them, at least, were later found. I remember in theautumn of 1945 reading the pitiful appeals in the then Allied-controlledGerman newspapers from the surviving mothers of Lidice asking the Ger-man people to help them locate their children and send them “home.”t

Actually Lidice itself had been wiped off the face of the earth. As soonas the men had been massacred and the women and children carted off,

* Hanged in Prague in August 1951.

f UNRRA reported on April 2, 1947, that seventeen of them had been found inBavaria and sent back to their mothers in Czechoslovakia.

The New Order 993

the Security Police had burned down the village, dynamited the ruins andleveled it off.

Lidice, though it became the most widely known example of Nazisavagery of this kind, was not the only village in the German-occupiedlands to suffer such a barbaric end. There was one other in Czechoslo-vakia, Lezhaky, and several more in Poland, Russia, Greece and Yugo-slavia. Even in the West, where the New Order was relatively less mur-derous, the example of Lidice was repeated by the Germans though in mostcases, such as that of Televaag in Norway, the men, women and childrenwere merely deported to separate concentration camps after every build-ing in the village had been razed to the ground.

But on June 10, 1944, two years to a day after the massacre of Lidice, aterrible 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 hadalready earned a reputation for terror—if not for fighting—in Russia, sur-rounded the French town and ordered the inhabitants to gather in the cen-tral square. There the people were told by the commandant that explo-sives were reported to have been hidden in the village and that a search andthe checking of identity cards would be made. Whereupon the entirepopulation of 652 persons was locked up. The men were herded intobarns, the women and children into the church. The entire village wasthen set on fire. The German soldiers next set upon the inhabitants. Themen in the barns who were not burned to death were machine-gunned andkilled. The women and children in the church were also peppered withmachine-gun fire and those who were not killed were burned to death whenthe German soldiers set fire to the church. Three days later the Bishop ofLimoges found the charred bodies of fifteen children in a heap behind theburned-out altar.

Nine years later, in 1953, a French military court established that 642inhabitants—245 women, 207 children and 190 men—had perished inthe massacre at Oradour. Ten survived. Though badly burned they hadsimulated death and thus escaped it.*

Oradour, like Lidice, was never rebuilt. Its ruins remain a monumentto Hitler’s New Order in Europe. The gutted church stands out againstthe peaceful countryside as a reminder of the beautiful June day, just be-fore the harvest, when the village and its inhabitants suddenly ceased toexist. Where once a window stood is a little sign: “Madame Rouffance,the only survivor from the church, escaped through this window.” In frontthere is a small figure of Christ affixed to a rusty iron cross.

* Twenty members of the S.S. detachment were sentenced to death by this court butonly two were executed, the remaining eighteen having their sentences commuted toprison terms of from five to twelve years. The commander of the Das ReichDivision, S.S. Lieutenant General Heinz Lammerding was condemned to death inabsentia. So far as I know he was never found. The actual commander of thedetachment at Oradour, Major Otto Dickmann, was killed in action in Normandy afew days later.

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Such, as has been sketched in this chapter, were the beginnings of Hit-ler s New Order; such was the debut of the Nazi Gangster Empire in Eu-rope. Fortunately for mankind it was destroyed in its infancy—not by anyrevolt of the German people against such a reversion to barbarism but bythe defeat of German arms and the consequent fall of the Third Reich, thestory of which now remains to be told.

28

THE FALL OF MUSSOLINI

For three successive war years when summer came, it had been theGermans who had launched the great offensives on the continent ofEurope. 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 obviousthat General Eisenhower’s Anglo-American armies would next turn onItaly itself. This was the kind of nightmare which had haunted Mussoliniin September of 1939 and which had made him delay Italy’s entry into thewar until neighboring France had been conquered by the Germans and theBritish Expeditionary Force driven across the Channel. The nightmarenow returned, but this time it was rapidly turning into reality.

Mussolini himself was ill and disillusioned; and he was frightened. De-featism was rife among his people and in the armed forces. There hadbeen mass strikes in the industrial cities of Milan and Turin, where thehungry workers had demonstrated for “bread, peace and freedom.” Thediscredited and corrupt Fascist regime itself was fast crumbling, and whenCount Ciano at the beginning of the year was relieved as Foreign Ministerand sent to the Vatican as ambassador the Germans suspected that hehad gone there to try to negotiate a separate peace with the Allies, asAntonescu, the Rumanian dictator, was already urging.

For several months Mussolini had been bombarding Hitler with appealsto make peace with Stalin, so that his armies could be withdrawn to theWest to make a common defense with the Italians against the growingthreat of the Anglo-American forces in the Mediterranean and of thosewhich he believed were assembling in England for a cross-Channel in-vasion. The time had come again, Hitler realized, for a meeting withMussolini 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 Ducearrived determined to have his way—or at least his say—at last, he oncemore succumbed to the Fuehrer’s torrents of words. Hitler later describedhis success to Goebbels, who jotted it down in his diary.

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By putting every ounce of energy into the effort, he succeeded in pushingMussolini back on the rails . . . The Duce underwent a complete change. . . When he got out of the train on his arrival, the Fuehrer thought, helooked like a broken old man; when he left [after four days] he was in highfettle, ready for any deed.1

But in point of fact Mussolini was not ready for the events which nowfollowed in quick succession. The Allied conquest of Tunisia in May wasfollowed by the successful Anglo-American landings in Sicily on July 10.The Italians had little stomach for battle in their own homeland. Reportssoon reached Hitler that the Italian Army was “in a state of collapse,” ashe put it to his advisers at OKW.

Only barbaric measures [Hitler told a war council on July 17] like thoseapplied 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 undesir-able elements.2

Once again he summoned Mussolini to discuss the matter, the meetingtaking place on July 19 at Feltre in northern Italy. This, incidentally, wasthe thirteenth conference of the two dictators and it followed the patternof the most recent ones. Hitler did all the talking, Mussolini all the listen-ing—for three hours before lunch and for two hours after it. Withoutmuch success the fanatical German leader tried to rekindle the sunkenspirits of his ailing friend and ally. They must continue the fight on allfronts. Their tasks could not be left “to another generation.” The “voiceof history” was still beckoning them. Sicily and Italy proper could beheld if the Italians fought. There would be more German reinforcementsto help them. A new U-boat would soon be in operation and would dealthe British a “Stalingrad.”

Despite Hitler’s promises and boasts the atmosphere, Dr. Schmidtfound, was most depressing. Mussolini was so overwrought that he couldno longer follow his friend’s tirades and at the end asked Schmidt to fur-nish him with his notes. The Duce’s despair worsened when during themeeting reports came in of the first heavy daylight Allied air attack onRome.3

Benito Mussolini, tired and senile though he was only going on sixty, hewho had strutted so arrogantly across Europe’s stage for two decades, wasat the end of his rope. When he returned to Rome he found much worsethan the aftermath of the first heavy bombing. He faced revolt from someof 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 thatreached to the King to overthrow him.

The rebellious Fascist leaders, led by Dino Grandi, Giuseppe Bottai andCiano, demanded the convocation of the Fascist Grand Council, whichhad not met since December 1939 and which had always been a rubber-

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stamp body completely dominated by the Duce. It convened on the nightof July 24-25, 1943, and Mussolini for the first time in his career as dicta-tor found himself the target of violent criticism for the disaster into whichhe had led the country. By a vote of 19 to 8, a resolution was carried de-manding the restoration of a constitutional monarchy with a democraticParliament. It also called for the full command of the armed forces to berestored to the King.

The Fascist rebels, with the possible exception of Grandi, do not appearto have had any idea of going further than this. But there was a secondand wider plot of certain generals and the King, which was now sprung.Mussolini himself apparently felt that he had weathered the storm—afterall, decisions in Italy were not made by a majority vote in the GrandCouncil but by the Duce—and he was taken completely by surprise whenon the evening of July 25 he was summoned to the royal palace by theKing, summarily dismissed from office and carted off under arrest in anambulance to a police station.*

So fell, ignominiously, the modern Roman Caesar, a bellicose-soundingman of the twentieth century who had known how to profit from its con-fusions and despair, but who underneath the gaudy facade was made largelyof sawdust. As a person he was not unintelligent. He had read widely inhistory and thought he understood its lessons. But as dictator he had madethe fatal mistake of seeking to make a martial, imperial Great Power of acountry which lacked the industrial resources to become one and whosepeople, unlike the Germans, were too civilized, too sophisticated, too downto earth to be attracted by such false ambitions. The Italian people, atheart, had never, like the Germans, embraced fascism. They had merelysuffered it, knowing that it was a passing phase, and Mussolini toward theend seems to have realized this. But like all dictators he was carried awayby power, which, as it inevitably must, corrupted him, corroding his mindand poisoning his judgment. This led him to his second fatal mistake oftying his fortunes and those of Italy to the Third Reich. When the bellbegan 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 wasnothing 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. Nota voice was raised in his defense. No one seemed to mind the humiliatingnature of his departure—being hauled away from the King’s presence tojail in an ambulance. On the contrary, there was general rejoicing at his

* “I was completely free of any forebodings,” Mussolini wrote later in describing hisstate of mind as he set out for the palace. King Victor Emmanuel lost no time inbringing him down to earth.

“My dear Duce,” Mussolini quotes him as saying at the outset, “it’s no longer anygood. 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 evenby 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.)

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fall. Fascism itself collapsed as easily as its founder. Marshal PietroBadoglio formed a nonparty government of generals and civil servants,the Fascist Party was dissolved, Fascists were removed from key posts andanti-Fascists released from prison.

The reaction at Hitler’s headquarters to the news of Mussolini’s fallmay be imagined, though it need not be—for voluminous secret recordsabound as to what it was.4 It was one of deep shock. Certain parallelswere immediately evident even to the Nazi mind, and the danger that aterrible precedent might have been set in Rome greatly troubled Dr.Goebbels, who was summoned posthaste to Rastenburg headquarters onJuly 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 decidedthat 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 en-courage some subversive elements in Germany to think they could put over thesame thing here that Badoglio and his henchmen accomplished in Rome. TheFuehrer ordered Himmler to see to it that most severe police measures beapplied in case such a danger seemed imminent here.

Hitler, however, Goebbels added, did not think the danger was veryimminent in Germany. The Propaganda Minister finally assured himselfthat the German people would not “regard the crisis in Rome as aprecedent.”

Though the Fuehrer had observed the signs of cracking in Mussolini attheir meeting but a fortnight before, he was taken completely by surprisewhen the news from Rome began to trickle in to headquarters on theafternoon of July 25. The first word was merely that the Fascist GrandCouncil had met, and Hitler wondered why. “What’s the use of councilslike 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 beganat 9:30 p.m. “Badoglio, our most bitter enemy, has taken over the govern-ment.”

For one of the last times of the war Hitler reacted to the news with thatice-cold judgment which he had displayed in crises in earlier and moresuccessful days. When General Jodi urged that they wait for more com-plete reports from Rome, Hitler cut him short.

Certainly [he said], but still we have to plan ahead. Undoubtedly in theirtreachery they will proclaim that they will remain loyal to us, but that istreachery. Of course they won’t remain loyal . . . Although that so-and-so[Badoglio] declared immediately that the war would be continued, that won’t

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make any difference. They have to say that, but it remains treason. We’ll playthe same game while preparing everything to take over the whole crew withone stroke, to capture all that riffraff.

That was Hitler’s first thought: to seize those who had overthrownMussolini and restore the Duce to power.

Tomorrow [he went on] I'll send a man down there with orders for thecommander of the Third Panzergrenadier Division to the effect that he mustdrive into Rome with a special detail and arrest the whole government, theKing and the whole bunch right away. First of all, to arrest the Crown Princeand 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: Jodi, work out the orders . . . telling them to drive into Romewith their assault guns . . . and to arrest the government, the King, and thewhole 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 thatthey 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 asto 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 . . . Laterwe can make apologies . . .

That night also Hitler gave orders to secure the Alpine passes, bothbetween Italy and Germany and between Italy and France. Some eightGerman divisions from France and southern Germany were hastilyassembled for this purpose and established as Army Group B under thecommand of the energetic Rommel. Had the Italians, as Goebbels notedin his diary, blown the Alpine tunnels and bridges, the German forces inItaly, some of them already heavily engaged in Sicily by Eisenhower’sarmies, would have been cut off from their source of supplies. They couldnot 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 getan armistice and Allied support against the Wehrmacht divisions. Hitlerhad been correct in assuming that that was exactly what Badoglio would

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do, but he had no inkling it would take as long as it did. Indeed, thisassumption dominated the discussion at a war conference at the Fuehrer’sheadquarters on July 27 attended by most of the bigwigs in the Nazigovernment and armed forces, among them Goering, Goebbels, Himmler,Rommel and the new Commander in Chief of the Navy, Admiral KarlDoenitz—who had succeeded Grand Admiral Raeder in January, whenthe latter had fallen from favor.* Most of the generals, led by Rommel,urged caution, arguing that any contempla ed action in Italy be carefullyprepared and well thought out. Hitler wanted to move at once even thoughit meant withdrawing key panzer divisions from the Eastern front, wherethe Russians had just launched (July 15) their first summer offensive ofthe war. For once the generals seem to have had their way and Hitler waspersuaded to withhold action. In the meantime as many German troopsas could be rounded up would be rushed over the Alps into Italy. Goebbelstook 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 weekwhile 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 themout ready.

In his feverish mind he had in fact hastily conceived the plans by thetime the war conference on July 27 convened. There were four of them:

(1) Operation Eiche (“Oak”) provided for the rescue of Mussolini eitherby the Navy, if he were located on an island, or by Luftwaffe parachu'.ists,if he were found on the mainland; (2) Operation Student called for thesudden occupation of Rome and the restoration of Mussolini’s govern-ment there; (3) Operation Schwarz (“Black”) was the code name for themilitary occupation of all of Italy; (4) Operation Achse (“Axis”) en-visaged the capture or destruction of the Italian fleet. Later the last twooperations were combined under the code name of “Axis.”

Two events early in September 1943 set the Fuehrer’s plans in opera-tion. On September 3 Allied troops landed on the boot of southern Italy,and on September 8 public announcement was made of the armistice

* Hitler had become furious with Raeder, who had commanded the German Navysince 1928, for the Navy’s failure to destroy Allied convoys to Russia in the ArcticOcean and for heavy losses suffered there. In a hysterical outburst at headquarterson January 1, the warlord had ordered the immediate decommissioning of theGerman High Seas Fleet. The vessels were to be broken up for scrap. On January6 there was a stormy showdown between Hitler and Raeder at the Wolfsschanzeheadquarters. The Fuehrer accused the Navy of inaction and lack of the will to fightand take risks. Raeder thereupon asked to be relieved of his command, and hisresignation was formally and publicly accepted on January 30. Doenitz, the newCommander in Chief, had been commander of U-boats, knew little of the problemsof surface vessels and henceforth concentrated on submarine warfare.

(secretly signed on September 3) between Italy and the Western Powers.

Hitler had flown to Zaporozhe in the Ukraine that day to try to restorethe sagging German front, but, according to Goebbels, he had been seized“by a queer feeling of unrest” and had returned that evening to Rastenburgheadquarters in East Prussia, where the news awaited him that his princi-pal ally had deserted. Though he had expected it and prepared for it, theactual timing took him by surprise and for several hours there was greatconfusion at headquarters. The Germans had first learned of the Italianarmistice from a BBC broadcast from London, and when Jodi put througha 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 Italyconfessed that it was news to him. However, Kesselring, whose head-quarters that morning had been destroyed by an Allied bombing and whowas preoccupied with rounding up troops to meet a new Allied landingsomewhere 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 thecountry.

For a day or two the situation of the German forces in central and southItaly was extremely critical. Five Italian divisions faced two Germandivisions in the vicinity of Rome. If the powerful Allied invasion fleetwhich had appeared off Naples on September 8 moved north and landednear the capital and was reinforced by parachutists seizing the nearbyairfields, as Kesselring and his staff at first expected, the course of the warin Italy would have taken a different turn than it did and final disastermight have overtaken the Third Reich a year earlier than happened.Kesselring later contended that on the evening of the eighth Hitler andOKW “wrote off” his entire force of eight divisions as irretrievably lost.5Two days later Hitler told Goebbels that southern Italy was lost and thata new line would have to be established north of Rome in the Apennines.

But the Allied Command did not take advantage of its complete com-mand of the sea, which permitted it to make landings almost anywhere onboth coasts of Italy, nor did it exploit its overwhelming air superiority,as the Germans had feared. Moreover, no effort seems to have been madeby Eisenhower’s Command to try to utilize the large Italian forces in con-junction with its own, especially the five Italian divisions in the vicinity ofRome. Had Eisenhower done so—at least such was the contention of bothKesselring and his chief of staff, General Siegfried Westphal, later—thepredicament of the Germans would have become hopeless. It was simplybeyond their powers, they declared, to fight off Montgomery’s armyadvancing up the peninsula from the “boot,” throw back General MarkClark’s invasion force, wherever it landed, and deal with the large Italianarmed formations in their midst and in their rear.*6

* According to Captain Harry C. Butcher, Eisenhower’s naval aide, both theAmerican and British chiefs of staff, General George C. Marshall and Field MarshalSir John G. Dill, complained that Eisenhower was not showing sufficient initiativein pressing forward in Italy. Butcher points out, in defense of his chief, that insuf-ficient landing craft limited Eisenhower's plans and that to have launched a seaborne

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Both generals breathed a sigh of relief when the American Fifth Armylanded not near Rome but south of Naples, at Salerno, and when theAllied parachutists failed to appear over the Rome airfields. Their reliefwas all the greater when the Italian divisions surrendered almost withoutfiring a shot and were disarmed. It meant that the Germans could easilyhold Rome and, for the time being, even Naples. This gave thempossession of two thirds of Italy, including the industrial north, whosefactories were put to work turning out arms for Germany. Almostmiraculously Hitler had received a new lease on life.*

Italy’s withdrawal from the war had embittered him. It was, he toldGoebbels, who had again been summoned to Rastenburg, “a gigantic ex-ample of swinishness.” Moreover, the overthrow of Mussolini made himapprehensive of his own position. “The Fuehrer,” Goebbels noted in hisdiary on September 11, “invoked final measures to preclude similar de-velopments with us once and for all.”

In his broadcast to the nation on the evening of September 10, whichGoebbels had persuaded him to make only after much pleading—“Thepeople are entitled to a word of encouragement and solace from theFuehrer in this difficult crisis,” the Propaganda Minister told him—Hitlerspoke somewhat defiantly on the subject:

Hope of finding traitors here rests on complete ignorance of the characterof the National Socialist State; a belief that they can bring about a July 25 inGermany rests on a fundamental illusion as to my personal position, as wellas to the attitude of my political collaborators and my field marshals, admiralsand generals.

Actually, as we shall see, there were a few German generals and ahandful 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 moreviolent but less successful than that carried out against Mussolini.

invasion as far north as the vicinity of Rome would have put the operation beyondthe range of Allied fighter planes, which had to take off from Sicily. Eisenhowerhimself points out that after the capture of Sicily he was ordered to return sevendivisions, four American and three British, to England in preparation for theChannel invasion, which left him woefully short of troops. Butcher also states thatEisenhower originally planned to drop airborne troops on the Rome airfields tohelp the Italians defend the capital against the Germans, but that at the last minuteBadoglio begged that this operation be “suspended temporarily.” General MaxwellD. Taylor, who at great personal risk had secretly gone to Rome to confer withBadoglio, reported that because of Italian defeatism and German strength thedropping of an American airborne division there appeared to be suicidal. (SeeEisenhower, Crusade in Europe, p. 189, and Butcher, My Three Years with Eisen-hower, pp. 407-25.)

* The King, Badoglio and the government, much to Hitler’s anger, escaped fromRome 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 AdmiralDoenitz to capture or destroy it.

The Fall of Mussolini 1003

One of Hitler’s measures to quash any incipient treason was to orderall German princes discharged from the Wehrmacht. Prince Philip ofHesse, the former messenger boy of the Fuehrer to Mussolini, who hadbeen hanging around headquarters, was arrested and turned over to thetender mercies of the Gestapo. His wife, Princess Mafalda, the daughterof the King of Italy, was also arrested and, with her husband, incarceratedin a concentration camp. The King of Italy, like the kings of Norway andGreece, had escaped the clutches of Hitler, who took what revenge hecould by arresting his daughter. *

For several weeks the Fuehrer’s daily military conferences had devoteda great deal of time to a problem that burned in Hitler’s mind: the rescueof Mussolini. “Operation Oak,” it will be remembered, was the codename for this plan, and in the records of the conferences at headquartersMussolini was always referred to as “the valuable object.” Most of thegenerals and even Goebbels doubted whether the former Duce was anylonger a very valuable object, but Hitler still thought so and insisted onhis liberation.

He not only wanted to do a favor to his old friend, for whom he still felta personal affection. He also had it in mind to set up Mussolini as headof a new Fascist government in northern Italy, which would relieve theGermans of having to administer the territory and help safeguard his longlines of supply and communication against an unfriendly populace fromwhose midst troublesome partisans were now beginning to emerge.

By August 1, Admiral Doenitz was reporting to Hitler that the Navybelieved it had spotted Mussolini on the island of Ventotene. By themiddle of August Himmler’s sleuths were sure the Duce was on anotherisland, Maddalena, near the northern tip of Sardinia. Elaborate planswere 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 beturned over to the Allies, but for some reason Badoglio delayed in doingthis and early in September the “valuable object” was spirited away toa hotel on top of the Gran Sasso d’ltalia, the highest range in the AbruzziApennines, which could be reached only by a funicular railway.

The Germans soon learned of his whereabouts, made an aerial recon-naissance of the mountaintop and decided that glider troops could probablymake a landing, overcome the carabinieri guards and make away with theDuce in a small Fieseler-Storch plane. This daring plan was carried out onSeptember 13 under the leadership of another one of Himmler’s resource-ful S.S. intellectual roughnecks, an Austrian by the name of Otto Skorzeny,

* Hitler had never cared for her personally. “I had to sit next to Mafalda,” he toldhis generals during a military conference at headquarters in May that year. “Whatdo I care about Mafalda? . . . Her intellectual qualities aren’t such that she wouldcharm you—to say nothing of her looks.” (From the secret records of Hitler’s dailymilitary conferences, in Felix Gilbert’s Hitler Directs His War, p. 37.)

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who will appear again toward the very end of this narrative in anotherdaredevil exploit.* Virtually kidnaping an Italian general, whom hepacked into his glider, Skorzeny landed his airborne force a hundred yardsfrom the mountaintop hotel, where he espied the Duce looking out hope-fully from a second-story window. Most of the carabinieri, at the sight ofGerman troops, took to the hills, and the few who didn’t were dissuadedby Skorzeny and Mussolini from making use of their arms, the S.S. leaderyelling at them not to fire on an Italian general—he pushed his captiveofficer to the front of his ranks—and the Duce shouting from his window,as one eyewitness remembered, “Don’t shoot, anybody! Don’t shed anyblood!” And not a drop was shed.

Within a few minutes the overjoyed Fascist leader, who had sworn hewould kill himself rather than fall into Allied hands and be exhibited, ashe later wrote, in Madison Square Garden in New York,t was bundledinto a tiny Fieseler-Storch plane and after a perilous take-off from a smallrock-strewn meadow below the hotel flown to Rome and from there, thesame evening, to Vienna in a Luftwaffe transport aircraft.7

Though Mussolini was grateful for his rescue and embraced Hitlerwarmly when they met a couple of days later at Rastenburg, he was bynow a broken man, the old fires within him turned to ashes, and much toHitler s disappointment he showed little stomach for reviving the Fascistregime in German-occupied Italy. The Fuehrer made no attempt to hidehis disillusionment with his old Italian friend in a long talk with Goebbelstoward the end of September.

The Duce [Goebbels confided to his diary after the talk] has not drawn themoral conclusions from Italy’s catastrophe that the Fuehrer had expected ofhim . . . The Fuehrer expected that the first thing the Duce would do wouldbe to wreak full vengeance on his betrayers. But he gave no such indicationand thereby showed his real limitations. He is not a revolutionary like theFuehrer or Stalin. He is so bound to his own Italian people that he lacks thebroad qualities of a world-wide revolutionary and insurrectionist.

Hitler and Goebbels were also incensed that Mussolini had had a recon-ciliation 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.$

’’ Skorzeny had been summoned to the Fuehrer’s headquarters for the first time inhis life the day after Mussolini’s fall and personally assigned by Hitler to carry outthe rescue. 1

t Just before Mussolini was liberated Captain Harry Butcher reported receiving acablegram at Eisenhower’s headquarters from a theater chain in Cape Town offer-ing to donate ten thousand pounds to charity “if you arrange for Mussolini’s per-sonal appearance on the stages of our Cape Town theatres. Three weeks’ engage-ment.” (Butcher, My Three Years with Eisenhower, p. 423.)t Actually, or at least according to a letter which Ciano later wrote to King VictorEmmanuel, he was tricked into coming to Germany in August by the Germans, whohad informed him that his children were in danger and that the German governmentwould be happy to convey him and his family to Spain—via Germany. {The CianoDiaries, p. v.)

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They thought he should have had Ciano immediately executed and Edda,as Goebbels put it, whipped.* They objected to Mussolini’s puttingCiano—“that poisoned mushroom,” Goebbels called him—in the fore-front 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 thenew Italian Social Republic.

It never amounted to anything. Mussolini’s heart was not in it. Perhapshe retained enough sense of reality to see that he was now merely a puppetof Hitler, that he and his “Fascist Republican Government” had no powerexcept what the Fuehrer gave them in Germany’s interests and that theItalian people would never again accept him and Fascism.

He never returned to Rome. He set himself up at an isolated spot in theextreme north—at Rocca delle Caminate, near Gargnano, on the shoresof Lake Garda, where he was closely guarded by a special detachment ofthe S.S. Leibstandarte. To this beautiful lake resort Sepp Dietrich, theveteran S.S. tough, who was detached from his reeling 1st S.S. ArmoredCorps in Russia for the purpose—such were the goings on in the ThirdReich—escorted Mussolini’s notorious mistress, Clara Petacci. With histrue love once more in his arms, the fallen dictator seemed to care forlittle 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 inhis diary on November 9], whom Sepp Dietrich had to bring to him, is causefor much misgiving.

A few days before, Goebbels had noted that Hitler had begun “to writeoff the Duce politically.” But not before, it should be added, the Fuehrerforced him to “cede” Trieste, Istria and the South Tyrol to Germany withthe understanding that Venice would be added later on. Now no humilia-tion was spared this once proud tyrant. Hitler brought pressure on himto arrest his son-in-law, Ciano, in November, and to have him executedin the jail at Verona on January 11, 1944.f

* “Edda Mussolini,” Goebbels wrote in his diary, “is acting like a wildcat in herBavarian villa. She smashes china and furniture on the slightest provocation.”(The Goebbels Diaries, p. 479.)

t Ciano’s last diary entry is dated “December 23, 1943, Cell 27, Verona Jail.” It isa moving piece. How he smuggled this last note as well as a letter of the same dateto the King of Italy out of his death cell I do not know. But he remarks that he hadhidden the rest of the diary before the Germans got him. The papers were smuggledout of German-occupied Italy by Edda Ciano, who, disguised as a peasant womanand concealing the papers under her skirt, succeeded in getting over the border intoSwitzerland.

All the other Fascist leaders who had voted against the Duce in the Grand Counciland whom the Duce could get his hands on were tried for treason by a special tribunaland, with one exception, sentenced to death and shot along with Ciano. Amongthem was one of the Duce’s erstwhile staunchest followers. Marshal Emilio deBono, one of the quadrumvirate who had led the march on Rome which putMussolini in power.

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By the early autumn of 1943, Adolf Hitler could well claim to havemastered the gravest threats to the Third Reich. The fall of Mussolini andthe unconditional surrender of the Badoglio government in Italy mighteasily have led, as Hitler and his generals for a few crucial weeks feared,to exposing the southern borders of Germany to direct Allied attack andopening the way—from northern Italy—into the weakly held Balkans inthe very rear of the German armies fighting for their lives in southernRussia. The meek departure of the Duce from the seat of power in Romewas a severe blow to the Fuehrer’s prestige both at home and abroad, aswas the consequent destruction of the Axis alliance. Yet within a coupleof months Hitler, by a daring stroke, had restored Mussolini—at least inthe eyes of the world. The Italian areas of occupation in the Balkans, inGreece, Yugoslavia and Albania, were secured against Allied attack, whichOKW had expected any day that late summer; the Italian forces there,amounting to several divisions, surrendered meekly and were made pris-oners of war. And instead of having to write off Kesselring’s forces, as hehad first done, and retreating to northern Italy, the Fuehrer had the satis-faction of seeing the Field Marshal’s armies digging in south of Rome,where they easily halted the advance of the Anglo—American—Frenchtroops up the peninsula. There was no disputing that Hitler’s fortunes inthe south had been considerably restored by his daring and resourcefulnessand 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 greatoffensive of the war against the Russians. The flower of the GermanArmy some 500,000 men with no less than seventeen panzer divisionsoutfitted with the new heavy Tiger tanks—was hurled against a largeRussian salient west of Kursk. This was “Operation Citadel” and Hitlerbelieved it would not only entrap the best of the Russian armies, onemillion strong—the very forces which had driven the Germans fromStalingrad and the Don the winter before—but enable him to push backto the Don and perhaps even to the Volga and swing up from the southeastto capture Moscow.

It led to a decisive defeat. The Russians were prepared for it. By July22, the panzers having lost half of their tanks, the Germans were broughtto a complete halt and started to fall back. So confident of their strengthwere the Russians that without waiting for the outcome of the offensive theylaunched one of their own against the German salient at Orel, north ofKursk, in the middle of July, quickly penetrating the front. This was thefirst Russian summer offensive of the war and from this moment on theRed armies never lost the initiative. On August 4 they pushed the Germansout of Orel, which had been the southern hinge of the German drive tocapture Moscow in December 1941.

Now the Soviet offensive spread along ihe entire front. Kharkov fellon August 23. A month later, on September 25, three hundred miles tothe northwest, the Germans were driven out of Smolensk, from which city

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they, like the Grande Armee, had set out so confidently in the first monthsof the Russian campaign on the high road to Moscow. By the end ofSeptember Hitler’s hard-pressed armies in the south had fallen back tothe line of the Dnieper and a defensive line they had established fromZaporozhe at the bend of the river south to the Sea of Azov. The industrialDonets basin had been lost and the German Seventeenth Army in theCrimea was in danger of being cut off.

Hitler was confident that his armies could hold on the Dnieper and onthe 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 southeastof Kiev, which fell on November 6. By the end of the fateful year of 1943the Soviet armies in the south were approaching the Polish and Rumanianfrontiers past the battlefields where the soldiers of Hitler had achievedtheir early victories in the summer of 1941 as they romped toward theinterior of the Russian land.

This was not all.

There were two other setbacks to Hitler’s fortunes that year which alsomarked the turning of the tide: the loss of the Battle of the Atlantic andthe intensification of the devastating air war day and night over Germanyitself.

In 1942, as we have seen, German submarines sank 6,250,000 tons ofAllied shipping, most of it bound for Britain or the Mediterranean, a ton-nage which far outstripped the capacity of the shipyards in the West tomake good. But by the beginning of 1943 the Allies had gained the upperhand over the U-boats, thanks to an improved technique of using long-range aircraft and aircraft carriers and, above all, of equipping their surfacevessels with radar which spotted the enemy submarines before the lattercould sight them. Doenitz, the new commander of the Navy and the topU-boat man in the service, at first suspected treason when so many of hisunderwater craft were ambushed and destroyed before they could evenapproach the Allied convoys. He quickly learned that it was not treasonbut radar which was causing the disastrous losses. In the three months ofFebruary, March and April they had amounted to exactly fifty vessels; inMay alone, thirty-seven U-boats were sunk. This was a rate of loss whichthe German Navy could not long sustain, and before the end of MayDoenitz, on his own authority, withdrew all submarines from the NorthAtlantic.

They returned in September but in the last four months of the year sankonly sixty-seven Allied vessels against the loss of sixty-four more sub-marines—a ratio which spelled the doom of U-boat warfare and definitelysettled the Battle of the Atlantic. In 1917 in the First World War, whenher armies had become stalled, Germany’s submarines had almost broughtBritain 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 themselvesnot only to halt the drive of the Japanese in Southeast Asia but to assemble

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

men and arms and supplies for the invasion of Hitler’s European empirein the West.

Their failure to seriously disrupt the North Atlantic shipping lanes dur-ing 1943 was a bigger disaster than was realized at Hitler’s headquarters,depressing though the actual news was.* For it was during the twelvemonths of that crucial year that the vast stocks of weapons and supplieswere ferried almost unmolested across the Atlantic which made the assaultof Fortress Europe possible in the following year.

And it was during that period too that the horrors of modern war werebrought home to the German people—brought home to them on their owndoorsteps. The public knew little of how the U-boats were doing. Andthough the news from Russia, the Mediterranean and Italy grew increas-ingly bad, it dealt after all with events that were transpiring hundreds orthousands of miles distant from the homeland. But the bombs from theBritish planes by night and the American planes by day were now begin-ning to destroy a German’s home, and the office or factory where heworked.

Hitler himself declined ever to visit a bombed-out city; it was a dutywhich seemed simply too painful for him to endure. Goebbels was muchdistressed at this, complaining that he was being flooded with letters “ask-ing why the Fuehrer does not visit the distressed air areas and why Goeringisn’t to be seen anywhere.” The Propaganda Minister’s diary authorita-tively describes the growing damage to German cities and industries fromthe air.

May 16, 1943. . . . The day raids by American bombers are creatingextraordinary difficulties. At Kiel . . . very serious damage to military andtechnical installations of the Navy ... If this continues we shall have to faceserious consequences which in the long run will prove unbearable . . .

May 25. The night raid of the English on Dortmund was extraordinarilyheavy, probably the worst ever directed against a German city . . . Reportsfrom Dortmund arc pretty horrible . . . Industrial and munition plants havebeen hit very hard . . . Some eighty to one hundred thousand inhabitantswithout shelter . . . The people in the West are gradually beginning to losecourage. Hell like that is hard to bear ... In the evening I received a[further] report on Dortmund. Destruction is virtually total. Hardly a houseis habitable . . .

July 26. During the night a heavy raid on Hamburg . . . with most serious

* “There can be no talk of a letup in submarine warfare,” Hitler had stormed atAdmiral Doenitz when on May 31 the latter informed him that the U-boats hadbeen withdrawn from the North Atlantic. “The Atlantic,” he added, “is my first lineof defense in the West.”

It was easier said than done. On November 12 Doenitz wrote despairingly in hisdiary: “The enemy holds every trump card, covering all areas with long-range airpatrols and using location methods against which we still have no warning . . . Theenemy knows all our secrets and we know none of his.”8

The Fall of Mussolini 1009

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] gaveme a first report . . . He spoke of a catastrophe the extent of which simplystaggers the imagination. A city of a million inhabitants has been destroyed ina manner unparalleled in history. We are faced with problems that are almostimpossible 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 whichwe had no conception even a few weeks ago . . . Kaufmann spoke of some800,000 homeless people who are wandering up and down the streets notknowing 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 stationat Peenemunde on which Hitler had set such high hopes,* and though railand canal transport were continually disrupted, over-all German arma-ment production was not materially reduced during the stepped-up Anglo-American bombings of 1943. This was partly due to the increased outputof 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, asGoebbels makes clear in his diary, was to the homes and the morale ofthe German people. In the first war years they had been buoyed up, asthis writer remembers, by the lurid reports of what Luftwaffe bombing haddone to the enemy, especially to the British. They were sure it would helpbring the war to an early—and victorious—end. Now, in 1943, theythemselves began to bear the full brunt of air warfare far more devastatingthan any the Luftwaffe had dealt to others, even to the populace of Londonin 1940-41. The German people endured it as bravely and as stoically asthe British people had done. But after four years of war it was all the morea severe strain, and it is not surprising that as 1943 approached its end,wi h all its blasted hopes in Russia, in North Africa and in Italy, and withtheir own cities from one end of the Reich to the other being pulverized

* I" May 1943, an R.A.F. reconnaissance plane had photographed the Peenemundeinstallation following a tip to London from the Polish underground that both apilotless 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 Peene-munde, badly damaging the installation and setting back research and tests byseveral months. By November the British and American air forces had locatedsixty-three launching sites for the V-l on the Channel and between December andthe following February bombed and destroyed seventy-three of the sites, which bythat time had increased to ninety-six. The terms “V-l” and “V-2” came from theGerman word Vergeltungswaffen, or weapons of reprisal, of which Dr. Goebbels'propaganda was to make so much of in the dark year of 1944.

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from the air, the German people began to despair and to realize that thiswas the beginning of the end that could only spell their defeat.

“Toward the end of 1943 at the latest,” the now unemployed GeneralHaider would later write, “it had become unmistakably clear that the warwas militarily lost.”9

General Jodi, in a gloomy off-the-record lecture to the Nazi gauleitersin Munich on November 7, 1943—the eve of the anniversary of the BeerHall Putsch—did not go quite so far. But the picture he painted of thesituation at the beginning of the fifth year of the war was dark enough.

What weighs most heavily today on the home front and consequently byreaction on the front line [he said] is the enemy terror raids from the air on ourhomes and so on our wives and children. In this respect ... the war hasassumed forms solely through the fault of England such as were believed to beno longer possible since the days of the racial and religious wars.

The effect of these terror raids, psychological, moral and material, is suchthat 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 bomb-ings of 1943 was vividly described by this authoritative source, who onthis occasion was speaking for the Fuehrer.

Up and down the country the devil of subversion strides. All the cowardsare seeking a way out, or—as they call it—a political solution. They say wemust negotiate while there is still something in hand . . .*

It wasn’t only the “cowards.” Dr. Goebbels himself, the most loyal andfaithful—and fanatical—of Hitler’s followers, was, as his diary reveals,seeking a way out before this year of 1943 was ended, racking his brainsnot over whether Germany should negotiate for peace but with whom—with Russia or with the West. He did not talk behind Hitler’s back aboutthe necessity of searching for peace, as certain others had begun to do.He was courageous and open enough to pour out his thoughts directly tothe Leader. On September 10, 1943, while at the Fuehrer’s headquartersat Rastenburg, whither he had been summoned on the news of Italy’s capit-ulation, Goebbels broached the subject of possible peace negotiations forthe first time in his diary.

* Jodi’s lecture, entitled “The Strategic Position in the Beginning of the Fifth Yearof the War,” is perhaps the most exhaustive firsthand account we have of theGerman predicament at the end of 1943 as seen by Hitler and his generals. It ismore than a mere confidential lecture to the Nazi political leaders. It is studded withdozens of highly secret memoranda arid documents stamped “Fuehrer’s GHQ” towhich Jodi referred in his talk and which, taken together, give a revealing history ofthe war as it appeared to the Fuehrer, who seems to have supervised the preparationof the lecture. Gloomy though he was as to the present, Jodi was even more dis-couraging about the future, correctly predicting that the coming Anglo-Americaninvasion in the West “will decide the war” and that “the forces at our disposal willnot be adequate” to repel it.10

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The problem begins to present itself as to which side we ought to turn tofirst—the Muscovite or the Anglo-American. Somehow we must realizeclearly that it will be very difficult to wage war successfully against both sides.

He found Hitler “somewhat worried” over the prospect of an Alliedinvasion 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 Stalinhas left in the way of reserves. I doubt very much whether under these condi-tions we shall be able to transfer divisions from the East to the other Europeantheaters of war.

Having put down some of his own ideas—which would have seemedtreasonably 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 orlater. He said not for the moment . . . And anyway, the Fuehrer believes itwould be easier to make a deal with the English than with the Soviets. At agiven moment, the Fuehrer believes, the English would come to their senses. . . I am rather inclined to regard Stalin as more approachable, for Stalin ismore of a practical politician than Churchill. Churchill is a romantic adven-turer, with whom one can’t talk sensibly.

It was at this dark moment in their affairs that Hitler and his lieutenantsbegan to clutch at a straw of hope: that the Allies would fall out, thatBritain and America would become frightened of the prospect of the Redarmies overrunning Europe and in the end join Germany to protect the oldContinent from Bolshevism. Hitler had dealt at some length on thispossibility in a conference with Doenitz in August, and now in Septemberhe and Goebbels discussed it.

The English [Goebbels added in his diary] don’t want a Bolshevik Europeunder any circumstances . . . Once they realize that . . . they have a choiceonly between Bolshevism or relaxing somewhat toward National Socialism theywill no doubt show an inclination toward a compromise with us . . . Churchillhimself is an old anti-Bolshevik and his collaboration with Moscow today isonly a matter of expediency.

Both Hitler and Goebbels seemed to have forgotten who collaboratedwith Moscow in the first place and who forced Russia into the war.Summing up the discussion of a possible peace with Hitler, Goebbelsconcluded:

Sooner or later e shall have to face the question of inclining toward oneenemy side or tb other. Germany has never yet had luck with a two-frontwar; it won’t br .ole to stand this one in the long run either.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

But was it not late in the day to ponder this? Goebbels returned toheadquarters on September 23 and in the course of a morning stroll withthe Nazi leader found him much more pessimistic than a fortnight beforeabout the possibility of negotiating for peace with one side so that hecould enjoy a one-front war.

The Fuehrer does not believe that anything can be achieved at present bynegotiation. England is not yet groggy enough ... In the East, naturally,the present moment is quite unfavorable ... At present Stalin has theadvantage.

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 anyresult as he is too deeply wedded to his hostile views and, besides, is guided byhatred 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 anarrangement 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 atwo-front war.

This was a task far more difficult than they seem to have realized, theywho had so lightly plunged Germany into a two-front war. But on thatSeptember evening of 1943, at least for a few moments, the Nazi warlordfinally 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 goto the theater in the evening and to visit the Artists’ Club.11

Hitler and Goebbels were not the only ones in Germany who, as thewar entered its fifth year, speculated on the chances and means of procur-ing peace. The frustrated, talkative anti-Nazi conspirators, their numberssomewhat larger now but still pitifully small, were again giving the problemsome thought, now that they saw the war was lost though Hitler’s armiesstill fought on foreign soil. Most of them, but by no means all, had comereluctantly, and only after overcoming the greatest qualms of conscience,to the conclusion that to get a peace for Germany which would leave theFatherland with some prospect for decent survival they would have toremove Hitler by killing him and at the same tin.e wipe out NationalSocialism.

As 1944 came, with the certainty that the Angk American armieswould launch an invasion across the Channel before the ear was very faralong and that the Red armies would be approaching thi. frontiers of the

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Reich itself and that the great and ancient cities of Germany would soonbe reduced to utter rubble by the Allied bombing,* the plotters in theirdesperation girded themselves to make one final attempt to murder theNazi dictator and overthrow his regime before it dragged Germany overthe precipice to complete disaster.

They knew there was not much time.

* “The work of a thousand years is nothing but rubble.” wrote Goerdeler to FieldMarshal 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 inputting an end to Hitler and his “madness.”

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THE ALLIED INVASION OL WESTERNEUROPE AND THE ATTEMPTTO KILL HITLER

The conspirators had made at least half a dozen attempts to assassinateHitler during 1943, one of which had miscarried only when a timebomb, planted in the Fuehrer’s airplane during a flight behind the Russianfront, failed to explode.

A considerable change had taken place that year in the resistance move-ment, such as it was. The plotters had finally given up on the field marshals.They were simply too cowardly—or thickheaded—to use their positionand military power to overthrow their Supreme warlord. At a secret meet-ing in November 1942 in the forest of Smolensk, Goerdeler, the politicalspark plug of the resisters, had pleaded personally with Field Marshal vonKluge, the commander of Army Group Center in the East, to take anactive part in getting rid of Hitler. The unstable General, who had justaccepted a handsome gift from the Fuehrer,* assented, but a few dayslater 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, whoseSixth Army was surrounded at Stalingrad and who, they presumed, wasbitterly disillusioned with the Leader who had made this possible, to issuean appeal to the Army to overthrow the tyrant who had condemned aquarter of a million German soldiers to such a ghastly end. A personalappeal from General Beck to Paulus to do this was flown into the belea-guered city by an Air Force officer. Paulus, as we have seen, responded by

On his sixtieth birthday, October 30, 1942, Kluge received from the Fuehrer acheck for 250,000 marks ($100,000 at the official rate of exchange) and a specialpermit to spend half of it on the improvement of his estate. Notwithstanding thisinsult to his honesty and honor as a Ge.V'-.an officer, the Field Marshal acceptedboth. (Schlabrendorff, They Almost Killed Hitler, p. 40.) Later when Kluge turnedagainst Hitler the Fuehrer told his officers at headquarters, “I personally promotedhim twice, gave him the highest decorations, gave him a large estate . . . and alarge 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 August31, 1944.) 6

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The Allied. Invasion of Western Europe 1015

sending a flood of radio messages of devotion to his Fuehrer, experiencingan awakening only after he got to Moscow in Russian captivity.

For a few days the conspirators, disappointed by Paulus, pinned theirhopes on Kluge and Manstein, who after the disaster of Stalingrad wereflying to Rastenburg, it was understood, to demand that the Fuehrer turnover command of the Russian front to them. If successful, this demarchewas to be a signal for a coup d’etat in Berlin. Once again the plotters werevictims of iheir wishful thinking. The two field marshals did fly to Hitler’sheadquarters, but only to reaffirm their loyalty to the Supreme Com-mander.

“We are deserted,” Beck complained bitterly.

It was obvious to him and his friends that they could expect no practicalaid from the senior commanders at the front. In desperation they turnedto the only remaining source of military power, the Ersatzheer, the Homeor Replacement Army, which was scarcely an army at all but a collectionof recruits in training and various garrison troops of overage men perform-ing guard duty in the homeland. But at least its men were armed, and, withthe fit troops and Waffen-S.S. units far away at the front, it might besufficient to enable the conspirators to occupy Berlin and certain otherkey cities at the moment of Hitler’s assassination.

But on the necessity—or even the desirability—of that lethal act, theopposition was still not entirely agreed.

The Kreisau Circle, for instance, was unalterably opposed to any suchact of violence. This was a remarkable, heterogeneous group of youngintellectual idealists gathered around the scions of two of Germany’s mostrenowned and aristocratic families: Count Helmuth James von Moltke, agreat-great-nephew of the Field Marshal who had led the Prussian Armyto victory over France in 1870, and Count Peter Yorck von Wartenburg,a direct descendant of the famous General of the Napoleonic era who, withClausewitz, had signed the Convention of Tauroggen with Czar Alex-ander I by which the Prussian Army changed sides and helped bring thedownfall of Bonaparte.

Taking its name from the Moltke estate at Kreisau in Silesia, theKreisau Circle was not a conspiratorial body but a discussion group*whose members represented a cross section of German society as it hadbeen in the pre-Nazi times and as they hoped it would be when theHitlerite nightmare had passed. It included two Jesuit priests, two Luth-eran pastors, conservatives, liberals, socialists, wealthy landowners,former trade-union leaders, professors and diplomats. Despite the differ-ences in their backgrounds and thoughts they were able to find a broadcommon ground which enabled them to provide the intellectual, spiritual,ethical, philosophical and, to some extent, political ideas of the resistanceto Hitler. Judging by the documents which they have left—almost all ofthese men were hanged before the war's end—which included plans for

* “We are to be hanged,” Moltke wrote to his wife just before his execution, “forthinking together.”

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the future government and for the economic, social and spiritual founda-tions of the new society, what they aimed at was a sort of Christiansocialism in which all men would be brothers and the terrible ills ofmodern times—the perversions of the human spirit—would be cured.Their ideals were noble, high in the white clouds, and to them was addeda touch of German mysticism.

But these high-minded young men were unbelievably patient. Theyhated Hitler and all the degradation he had brought on Germany andEurope. But they were not interested in overthrowing him. They thoughtGermany’s coming defeat would accomplish that. They turned theirattention exclusively to the thereaf.er. “To us,” Moltke wrote at thetime, . . . Europe after the war is a question of how the picture of mancan be re-established in the breasts of our fellow citizens.”

Dorothy Thompson, the distinguished American journalist, who hadbeen stationed for many years in Germany and knew it well, appealed toMoltke, an old and close friend of hers, to come down from the mountain-top. In a series of short-wave broadcasts from New York during thesummer of 1942 addressed to “Hans” she begged him and his friends todo something to get rid of the demonic dictator. “We are not living in aworld of saints, but of human beings,” she tried to remind him.

The last time we met, Hans, and drank tea together on that beautiful terracebefore the lake . . . T said that one day you would have to demonstrate bydeeds, drastic deeds, where you stood . . . and I remember that I asked youwhether you and your friends would ever have the courage to act . . 4

It was a penetrating question, and the answer seems to have turned outto be that Moltke and his friends had the courage to talk—for which theywere executed—but not to act.

This flaw in their minds rather than in their hearts—for all of them mettheir cruel deaths with great bravery—was the main cause of the differ-ences between the Kreisau Circle and the Beck-Goerdeler-Hassell groupof conspirators, though they also were in dispute about the na.ure andthe make-up of the government which was to take over from the Naziregime.

There were several meetings between them following a full-dress confer-ence at the home of Peter Yorck on January 22, 1943, presided over byGeneral Beck, who, as Hassell reported in his diary, “was rather weak andreserved.”2 A spirited argument developed between the “youngsters” andthe “oldsters”—Hassell’s terms—over future economic and social policy,with Moltke clashing with Goerdeler. Hassell thought the former mayorof Leipzig was quite “reactionary” and noted Moltke’s “Anglo-Saxon andpacifist inclinations. The Gestapo also took note of this meeting and atthe subsequent trials of the participants turned up a surprisingly detailedaccount of the discussions.

Himmler was already closer on the trail of the conspirators than any ofthem realized. But it is one of the ironies of this narrative that at this point,

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in 1943, with the prospect of victory lost and of defeat imminent, the mild-mannered, bloodthirsty S.S. Fuehrer, the master policeman of the ThirdReich, began to take a personal and not altogether unfavorable interestin the resistance, with which he had more than one friendly contact. Andit is indicative of the mentality of the plotters that more than one of them,Popitz especially, began to see in Himmler a possible replacement forHitler! The S.S. chief, so seemingly fanatically loyal to the Fuehrer, beganto see this himself, but until almost the end played a double game, in thecourse of which he snuffed out the life of many a gallant conspirator.

The resistance was now working in three fields. The Kreisau Circle washolding 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 overpower. And it was making contact with the West in order to apprise thedemocratic Allies of what was up and to inquire what kind of peace theywould negotiate wi h a new anti-Nazi government.* These contacts weremade in Stockholm and in Switzerland.

In the Swedish capital Goerdeler often saw the bankers Marcus andJakob Wallenberg, with whom he had long been friends and who hadintimate business and personal contacts in London. At one meeting inApril 1942 wi h Jakob Wallenberg, Goerdeler urged him to get in touchwith Churchill. The conspirators wanted in advance an assurance fromthe Prime Minister that the Allies would make peace with Germany ifthey arrested Hitler and overthrew the Nazi regime. Wallenberg repliedthat from what he knew of the British government no such assurance waspossible.

A month later two Lutheran clergymen made direct contact with theBritish in Stockholm. These were Dr. Hans Schoenfeld, a member of theForeign Relations Bureau of the German Evangelical Church, and PastorDietrich Bonhoeffer, an eminent divine and an active conspirator, who onhearing that Dr. George Bell, the Anglican Bishop of Chichester, wasvisiting in Stockholm hastened there to see him—Bonhoeffer traveling in-cognito 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 adecent peace with a non-Nazi government once Hitler had been over-thrown. They asked for an answer—by either a private message or apublic announcement. To impress the bishop that the anti-Hitler con-spiracy was a serious business, Bonhoeffer furnished him with a list of the

* It is said in some of the German memoirs that in 1942 and 1943 the Nazis were incontact with the Russians about a possible peace negotiation and even that Stalinhad offered to initiate talks for a separate peace. Ribbentrop on the stand atNuremberg made a good deal of his own efforts to get in touch with the Russians andsaid he actually made contact with Soviet agents at Stockholm. Peter Kleist, whoacted for Ribbentrop in Stockholm, had told of this in his book.3 I suspect thatwhen all the secret German papers are sorted, a revealing chapter on this episodemay come to light.

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names of the leaders—an indiscretion which later was to cost him hislife and to help make certain the execution of many of the others.

This was the most authoritative and up-to-date informa ion the Allieshad had on the German opposition and its plans, and Bishop Bell promptlyturned it over to Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, when hereturned to London in June. But Eden, who had resigned this post in1938 in protest against Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler, was skepti-cal. Similar information had been conveyed to the British government byalleged German plotters since the time of Munich and nothing had comeof it. No response was made.4

The German underground s contacts with the Allies in Switzerland weremainly through Allen Dulles, who headed the U.S. Office of StrategicServices there from November 1942 until the end of the war. His chiefvisitor was Hans Gisevius, who journeyed to Berne frequency from Berlinand who also was an active member of the conspiracy, as we have seen.Gisevius worked for the Abwehr and was actually posted to the Germanconsulate general in Zurich as vice-consul. His chief function was toconvey messages to Dulles from Beck and Goerdeler and to keep him in-formed of the progress of the various plots against Hitler. Other Germanvisitors included Dr. Schoenfeld and Trott zu Solz, the latter a member ofthe Kreisau Circle and also of the conspiracy, who once journeyed toSwitzerland to “warn” Dulles, as had so many others, that if the Westerndemocracies refused to consider a decent peace with an anti-Nazi Germanregime the conspirators would turn to Soviet Russia. Dulles, though hewas personally sympathetic, was unable to give any assurances.5

One marvels at these German resistance leaders who were so insistenton getting a favorable peace settlement from the West and so hesi ant ingetting rid of Hitler until they had got it. One would have thought that ifthey considered Nazism to be such a monstrous evil as they constantly con-tended no doubt sincerely—they would have concentrated on trying tooverthrow it regardless of how the West might treat their new regime. Onegets the impression that a good many of these “good Germans” fell tooeasily into the trap of blaming the outside world for their own failures, assome of them had done for Germany’s misfortunes after the first lost warand 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 Flash, as it was called, had been workedout during January and February by General Friedrich Olbricht, chief ofthe General Army Office (Allgemeines Heeresamt) and General vonTresckow, chief of staff of Kluge’s Army Group Center in Russia. Ol-

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bricht, 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 deputyto General Friedrich Fromm, commander of the Replacement Army, hewas in a position to rally the garrisons in Berlin and the other large citiesof the Reich behind the plotters. Fromm himself, like Kluge, was by nowdisillusioned with his Fuehrer but was not regarded as sufficiently trust-worthy to be let in on the plot.

“We are ready. It is time for the Flash,” Olbricht told young Fabianvon Schlabrendorff, a junior officer on Tresckow’s staff, at the end ofFebruary. Early in March the plotters met for a final conference at Smo-lensk, the headquarters of Army Group Center. Although not partici-pating in the action, Admiral Canaris, the chief of the Abwehr, was awareof it and arranged the meeting, flying Hans von Dohnanyi and GeneralErwin Lahousen of his staff with him to Smolensk ostensibly for a con-ference of Wehrmacht intelligence officers. Lahousen, a former intelli-gence officer of the Austrian Army and the only plotter in the Abwehr tosurvive the war, brought along some bombs.

Schlabrendorff and Tresckow, after much experimenting, had foundthat German bombs were no good for their purpose. They worked, asthe young officer later explained,6 with a fuse that made a low hissingnoise which gave them away. The British, they discovered, made a betterbomb. “Prior to the explosion,” Schlabrendorff says, “they made no noiseof any kind.” The R.A.F. had dropped a number of these weapons overoccupied Europe to Allied agents for sabotage purposes—one had beenused to assassinate Heydrich—and the Abwehr had collected several ofthem and turned them over to the conspirators.

The plan worked out at the Smolensk meeting was to lure Hitler to thearmy group headquarters and there do away with him. This would be thesignal 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 oldfriend, General Schmundt (as he now was), adjutant to Hitler, to work onhis chief, and after some hesitation and more than one cancellation theFuehrer 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 hischief, Kluge, to take the lead in bumping off Hitler. He suggested to theField Marshal that Lieutenant Colonel Freiherr von Boeselager,* whocommanded a cavalry unit at headquarters, be allowed to use it to mowHitler and his bodyguard down when they arrived. Boeselager was morethan willing. All he needed was an order from the Field Marshal. But thevacillating commander could not bring himself to give it. Tresckow andSchlabrendorff therefore decided to take matters into their own hands.

They would simply plant one of their British-made bombs in Hitler’splane on its return flight. “The semblance of an accident,” Schlabrendorff

Executed by the Nazis.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

later explained, “would avoid the political disadvantages of a murder. Forin 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 arrivedthe two anti-Nazi officers were tempted to change their plan and set thebomb off, first in Kluge’s personal quarters, where Hitler conferred withthe top generals of the army group, and later in the officers’ mess wherethe gathering supped.* But this would have killed some of the very gen-erals who, once relieved of their personal oaths of allegiance to theFuehrer, were counted upon to help the conspirators take over power in theReich.

There still remained the task of smuggling the bomb onto the Fuehrer’splane, which was due to take off immediately after dinner. Schlabrendorffhad assembled what he calls “two explosive packets” and made of themone parcel which resembled a couple of brandy bottles. During the repastTresckow had innocently asked a Colonel Heinz Brandt of the ArmyGeneral Staff, who was in Hitler’s party, whether he would be goodenough to take back a present of two bottles of brandy to his old friendGeneral Helmuth Stieff,f who was chief of the Organization Branch ofthe Army High Command. The unsuspecting Brandt said he would beglad to.

At the airfield Schlabrendorff nervously reached through a small open-ing in his parcel, started the mechanism of the time bomb and handed it toBrandt as he boarded the Fuehrer’s plane. This was a cleverly builtweapon, ft had no telltale clockwork. When the young officer pressed ona button it broke a small bottle, releasing a corrosive chemical which thenate away a wire that held back a spring. When the wire gave out, thespring pressed forward the striker, which hit a detonator that explodedthe bomb.

The crash, Schlabrendorff says, was expected shortly after Hitler’splane passed over Minsk, about thirty minutes’ flying time from Smolensk.Feverish with excitement, he rang up Berlin and by code informed the con-spirators that Flash had begun. Then he and Tresckow waited withpounding hearts for the great news. They expected the first word wouldcome by radio from one of the fighter planes which was escorting theFuehrer’s plane. They counted off the minutes, twenty, thirty, forty, anhour . . . and still there was no word, ft 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 [Schlabren-dorff later recounted], I immediately rang up Berlin and gave the code wordindicating that the attempt had miscarried. Then Tresckow and I consulted

* At the first meeting, Schlabrendorff says, he had an opportunity to examine Hitler’soversize cap. He was struck by its weight. On examination it proved to be linedwith three and a half pounds of steel plating.

1 Executed by the Nazis.

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as to what action to take next. We were deeply shaken. It was serious enoughthat the attempt had not succeeded. But even worse would be the discoveryof the bomb, which would unfailingly lead to our detection and the death ofa wide circle of close collaborators.

The bomb was never discovered. That night Tresckow rang up ColonelBrandt, inquired casually whether he had had time to deliver his parcel toGeneral 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 officialbusiness and would bring the really good brandy that he had intended tosend.

With incredible courage Schlabrendorff flew to Hitler’s headquartersand exchanged a couple of bottles of brandy for the bomb.

I can still recall my horror [he later related] when Brandt handed me thebomb and gave it a jerk that made me fear a belated explosion. Feigning acomposure I did not feel I took the bomb, immediately got into a car, anddrove to the neighboring railway junction of Korschen.

There he caught the night train to Berlin and in the privacy of hissleeping compartment dismantled the bomb. He quickly discovered whathad happened—or rather, why nothing had happened.

The mechanism had worked; the small bottle had broken; the corrosivefluid had consumed the wire; the striker had hit forward; but—the detonatorhad not fired.

Bitterly disappointed but not discouraged, the conspirators in Berlindecided to make a fresh attempt on Hitler’s life. A good occasion soonpresented 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 oppor-tunity to get not only the Fuehrer but his chief associates. As ColonelFreiherr von Gersdorff, chief of intelligence on Kluge’s staff, later said,“This was a chance which would never recur.” Gersdorff had been se-lected by Tresckow to handle the bomb, and this time it would have to be asuicidal mission. The plan was for the colonel to conceal in his overcoatpockets two bombs, set the fuses, stay as close to Hitler during the cere-mony as possible and blow the Fuehrer and his entourage as well as him-self to eternity. With conspicuous bravery Gersdorff readily volunteeredto sacrifice his life.

On the evening of March 20 he met with Schlabrendorff in his room atthe Eden Hotel in Berlin. Schlabrendorff had brought two bombs withten-minute fuses. But because of the near-freezing temperature in theglassed-over courtyard of the Zeughaus it might take from fifteen to

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

twenty minutes before the weapons exploded. It was in this courtyard thatHitler, after his speech, was scheduled to spend half an hour examining anexhibition of captured Russian war trophies which Gersdorff s staff hadarranged. It was the only place where the colonel could get close enoughto 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 leastwould be blown to pieces by the explosion. When Hitler . . . entered theexhibitional hall, Schmundt came across to me and said that only eight or tenminutes were to be spent on inspecting the exhibits. So the possibility of carry-ing out the assassination no longer existed, since even if the temperature hadbeen normal the fuse needed at least ten minutes. This last-minute change ofschedule, which was typical of Hitler’s subtle security methods, had once againsaved him his life.*

General von Tresckow, Gersdorff says, was anxiously and expectantlyfollowing the broadcast of the ceremonies from Smolensk, “a stop watch inhis hand.” When the broadcaster announced that Hitler had left the hallonly eight minutes after he had entered it, the General knew that stillanother attempt had failed.

There were at least three further “overcoat” attempts at Hitler’s life, asthe conspirators called them, and each, as we shall see, was similarlyfrustrated.

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 alsoserved as a warning of how ruthless the Nazi authorities could be in puttingdown the least sign of opposition.

The university students in Germany, as we have seen, had been amongthe most fanatical of Nazis in the early Thirties. But ten years of Hitler’srule had brought disillusionment, and this was sharpened by the failure ofGermany to win the war and particularly, as 1943 came, by the disaster atStalingrad. The University of Munich, the city that had given birth toNazism, 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 pro-fessor of philosophy. By means of what became known as the “White

One of the difficulties of piecing together the deeds of the plotters is that thememories of the few survivors are far from perfect, so that their accounts not onlyoften differ but are contradictory. Schlabrendorff, for example, who had brought thebombs to Gersdorff, recounts in his book that because they could not find a shortenough time fuse the Zeughaus attempt ‘ had to be given up.” He apparently wasunaware, or forgot, that Gersdorff actually went to the Zeughaus to try to carry outhis assignment, though the colonel says that the night before he told him he was"determined to do it” with the fuses he had.

The Allied Invasion of Western Europe 1023

Rose Letters” they carried out their anti-Nazi propaganda in other univer-sities; they were also in touch with the plotters in Berlin.

One day in February 1943, the Gauleiter of Bavaria, Paul Giesler, towhom the Gestapo had brought a file of the letters, convoked the studentbody, announced that the physically unfit males—the able-bodied hadbeen drafted into the Army—would be put to some kind of more usefulwar work, and with a leer suggested that the women students bear a childeach year for the good of the Fatherland.

“If some of the girls,” he added, “lack sufficient charm to find a mate, Iwill assign each of them one of my adjutants . . . and I can promise hera thoroughly enjoyable experience.”

The Bavarians are noted for their somewhat coarse humor, but thisvulgarity was too much for the students. They howled the Gauleiter downand tossed out of the hall the Gestapo and S.S. men who had come toguard him. That afternoon there were anti-Nazi student demonstrationsin the streets of Munich, the first that had ever occurred in the ThirdReich. Now the students, led by the Scholls, began to distribute pamphletsopenly calling on German youth to rise. On February 19 a buildingsuperintendent observed Hans and Sophie Scholl hurling their leafletsfrom the balcony of the university and betrayed them to the Gestapo.

Their end was quick and barbaric. Haled before the dreaded People’sCourt, which was presided over by its president, Roland Freisler, perhapsthe most sinister and bloodthirsty Nazi in the Third Reich after Heydrich(he will appear again in this narrative), they were found guilty of treasonand condemned to death. Sophie Scholl was handled so roughly duringher interrogation by the Gestapo that she appeared in court with a brokenleg. But her spirit was undimmed. To Freisler’s savage browbeating sheanswered calmly, “You know as well as we do that the war is lost. Whyare you so cowardly that you won’t admit it?”

She hobbled on her crutches to the scaffold and died with sublimecourage, as did her brother. Professor Huber and several other studentswere executed a few days later.8

This was a reminder to the conspirators in Berlin of the danger thatconfronted them at a time when the indiscreetness of some of the leaderswas becoming a source of constant worry to the others. Goerdeler himselfwas much too talkative. The efforts of Popitz to sound out Himmler andother high S.S. officers on joining the conspiracy were risky in the extreme.The inimitable Weizsaecker, who after the war liked to picture himself assuch a staunch resister, became so frightened that he broke off all contactwith his close friend Hassell, whom he accused (along with Frau vonHassell) of being “unbelievably indiscreet” and whom, he warned, theGestapo was shadowing.*

* Hassell describes the painful scene in his diary. “He asked me to spare him theembarrassment of my presence,” Hassell writes. “When I started to remonstrate heinterrupted me harshly.” (The Von Hassell Diaries, pp. 256-57.) Only whenWeizsaecker was safely settled down in the Vatican later, as German ambassador

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

The Gestapo was watching a good many others, especially the breezy,confident Goerdeler, but the blow which it dealt the conspirators imme-diately after the frustrating month of March 1943 during which their twoattempts to kill Hitler had miscarried came, ironically, as the result not somuch of expert sleuthing but of the rivalry between the two intelligenceservices, the Wehrmacht’s Abwehr and Himmler’s R.S.H.A.—the CentralSecurity Office—which ran the S.S. secret service, and which wanted todepose Admiral Canaris and take over his Abwehr.

In the autumn of 1942, a Munich businessman by the name of Schmidt-huber had been arrested for smuggling foreign currency across the borderinto Switzerland. He was actually an Abwehr agent, but the money hehad long been taking over the frontier had gone to a group of Jewish refu-gees in Switzerland. This was the height of crime for a German in theThird Reich to commit even if he were an Abwehr agent. When Canarisfailed to protect Schmidthuber the agent began to tell the Gestapo what heknew of the Abwehr. He implicated Hans von Dohnanyi, who, withColonel Oster, had been in the inner circle of the plotters. He told Himm-ler’s men of the mission of Dr. Josef Mueller to the Vatican in 1940 whencontact was made with the British through the Pope. He revealed PastorBonhoeffer’s visit to the Bishop of Chichester at S ockholm in 1942 on afalse passport issued by the Abwehr. He hinted at Oster’s various schemesto get rid of Hitler.

After months of investigation the Gestapo acted. Dohnanyi, Muellerand BonhoefTer were arrested on April 5, 1943, and Oster, who hadmanaged to destroy most of the incriminating papers in the meantime, wasforced to resign in December from the Abwehr and placed under housearrest in Leipzig. * *

This was a staggering blow to the conspiracy. Oster—“a man such asGod 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 1938in the attempt to get Hitler, and Dohnanyi, a jurist by profession, had beena resourceful assistant. BonhoefTer, the Protestant, and Mueller, theCatholic, had not only brought a great spiritual force to the resistance buthad given an example of individual courage in their various missionsabroad—as they were to do in their refusal, even after the torture whichfollowed their arrests, to betray their comrades.

But most serious of all, with the breakup of the Abwehr the plotters losttheir “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 itschief, Canaris, out of business altogether within a few months.

there did he urge the conspirators to action. “This is easy to do from the Vatican ”Hasse commented. Weizsaecker survived to write his somewhat shabby memoirsHassell s diary was published after his execution.

* BonhoefTer, Dohnanyi and Oster were all executed by the S.S. on April 9, 1945less than a month before Germany’s capitulation. Their extinction seems to havebeen an act of revenge on the part of Himmler. Mueller alone survived.

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One sprang out of what came to be known in Nazi circles as “the FrauSolf Tea Party,” which took place on September 10, 1943. Frau AnnaSolf, the widow of a former Colonial Minister under Wilhelm II who hadalso served as ambassador to Japan under the Weimar Republic, had longpresided over an anti-Nazi salon in Berlin. To it came often a number ofdistinguished guests, who included Countess Hanna von Bredow, thegranddaughter of Bismarck, Count Albrecht von BernstorlT, the nephewof the German ambassador to the United States during the First WorldWar, Father Erxleben, a well-known Jesuit priest, Otto Kiep, a highofficial in the Foreign Office, who once had been dismissed as Germanconsul general in New York for attending a public luncheon in honor ofProfessor Einstein but who eventually had got himself reinstated in thediplomatic service, and Elisabeth von Thadden, a sparkling and deeplyreligious woman who ran a famous girls’ school at Weiblingen, nearHeidelberg.

To the tea party at Frau Solf’s on September 10 Fraulein von Thaddenbrought an at'ractive young Swiss doctor named Reckse, who practiced atthe Charite Hospital in Berlin under Professor Sauerbruch. Like mostSwiss Dr. Reckse expressed bitter anti-Nazi sentiments, in which he wasjoined by the others present, especially by Kiep. Before the tea party wasover the good doctor had volunteered to carry any letters which Frau Solfor her guests wished to send to their friends in Switzerland—German anti-Nazi emigres and British and American diplomatic officials—an offerwhich was quickly taken up by more than one present.

Unfortunately for them Dr. Reckse was an agent of the Gestapo, towhom he turned over several incriminating letters as well as a report onthe tea party.

Count von Moltke learned of this through a friend in the Air Ministrywho had tapped a number of telephone conversations between the Swissdoctor and the Gestapo, and he quickly warned his friend Kiep, who tippedoff the rest of the Solf circle. But Himmler had his evidence. He waitedfour 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 Solfswere confined at the Ravensbrueck concentration camp and miraculouslyescaped death.f Count von Moltke, implicated with his friend Kiep, was

* Apparently Himmler had widened his net in the intervening four months. Accord-ing to Reitlinger some seventy-four persons were arrested as the result of Dr.Reckse’s spying. (Reitlinger, The S.S., p. 304.)

t First the Japanese ambassador intervened to delay their trial. Then on February3, 1945, a bomb dropped during a daylight attack by the American Air Force notonly killed Roland Freisler, while he was presiding over one of his grisly treasontrials, but destroyed the dossier on the Solfs, which was in the files of the People’sCourt. They were nevertheless scheduled to be tried by this court on April 27, butby that time the Russians were in Berlin. Actually the Solfs were released fromMoabit prison on April 23, apparently because of an error. (Wheeler-Bennett,Nemesis, p. 595n., and Pechel, Deutscher Wider stand, pp. 88-93.)

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

also arrested at this time. But that was not the only consequence of Kiep’sarrest. The repercussions spread as far as Turkey and paved the way forthe final liquidation of the Abwehr and the turning over of its functions toHimmler.

Among Kiep’s close anti-Nazi friends were Erich Vermehren and hisstunningly beautiful wife, the former Countess Elisabeth von Plettenberg,who like other opponents of the regime had joined the Abwehr and whohad been posted as its agents in Istanbul. Both were summoned to Berlinby the Gestapo to be interrogated in the Kiep case. Knowing what fatewas in store for them, they refused, got in touch with the British secretservice at the beginning of February 1944 and were flown to Cairo andthence to England.

It was believed in Berlin—though it turned out not to be true—that theVermehrens had absconded with all the Abwehr’s secret codes and handedthem over to the British. This was the last straw for Hitler, coming afterthe arrests of Dohnanyi and others in the Abwehr and coupled with hisgrowing suspicion of Canaris. On February 18, 1944, he ordered that theAbwehr be dissolved and its functions taken over by R.S.H.A. This was anew feather in the cap of Himmler, whose war against the Army officercorps went back to his faking charges against General von Fritsch in 1938.It deprived the armed forces of any intelligence service of their own. Itenhanced Himmler’s power over the generals. It was also a further blowto the conspirators, who were now left without any secret service whatso-ever through which to work.*

They had not ceased trying to kill Hitler. Between September 1943 andJanuary 1944 another half-dozen attempts were organized. In AugustJakob Wallenberg had come to Berlin to see Goerdeler, who assured himthat all preparations were now ready for a coup in September and thatSchlabrendorff would then arrive in Stockholm to meet a representative ofMr. Churchill to discuss peace.

“I was awaiting the month of September with great suspense,” theSwedish banker later told Allen Dulles. “It passed without anythinghappening.”9 J 6

A month later General Stieff, the sharp-tongued hunchback to whomTresckow had sent the two bottles of “brandy” and whom Himmler laterreferred to as “a little poisoned dwarf,” arranged to plant a time bomb atHitler s noon military conference at Rastenburg, but at the last moment gotcold feet. A few days later his store of English bombs which he hadreceived from the Abwehr and hidden under a watch tower in the head-quarters enclosure exploded, and it was only because an Abwehr colonel,

I0™ was made ctllef °f the Office for Commercial and Economic WarfareWith the assumption of this empty title the “little Admiral” faded out of Germanhistory. He was so shadowy a figure that no two writers agree as to what kind of

I!ia.nuhe^aSL0r,^hat he believ®d in> if anything much. A cynic and a fatalist, hehyd hated the Weimar Republic and worked secretly against it and then turnedsimilarly on the Third Reich. His days, like those of all the other prominent menin the Abwehr save one (General Lahousen), were now numbered, as we shall see.

Werner Schrader, who was in on the conspiracy, was entrusted by Hitlerwith 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 theconspirators to “model” a new Army overcoat and assault pack whichHitler had ordered designed and now wanted to personally inspect beforeapproving for manufacture. Bussche, in order to avoid Gersdorff s failure,decided to carry in the pockets of his model overcoat two German bombswhich would go off a few seconds after the fuse was set. His plan was tograb Hitler as he was inspecting the new overcoat and blow the two ofthem 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 backat Hitler’s headquarters in December for a fresh attempt with new models,when the Fuehrer suddenly decided to leave for Berchtesgaden for theChristmas holidays. Shortly afterward Bussche was badly wounded at thefront, so another young front-line infantry officer was pressed into serviceto substitute for him. This was Heinrich von Kleist, son of Ewald vonKleist—the latter one of the oldest conspirators. The demonstration ofthe new overcoat was set for February 11, 1944, but the Fuehrer for somereason—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 tech-nique of constantly changing his schedules called for a drastic overhaulingof their own plans, f It was realized that the only occasions on which hecould definitely be counted to appear were his twice-daily military con-ferences with the generals of OKW and OKH. He would have to be killedat one of them. On December 26, 1943, a young officer by the name ofStauffenberg, deputizing for General Olbricht, appeared at the Rastenburgheadquarters for the noon conference, at which he was to make a report on

* The Kleists, father and son, were later arrested. The father was executed onApril 16, 1945; his son survived.

t Hitler often discussed this technique with his old party cronies. There is astenographic record of a monologue of his at headquarters on May 3, 1942. “I quiteunderstand,” he said, “why ninety per cent of the historic assassinations have beensuccessful. 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 thepolice.” (Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p. 366.)

Hitler had always been aware, as we have seen, that he might be assassinated. Inhis war conference on August 22, 1939, on the eve of the attack on Poland, he hademphasized to his generals that while he personally was indispensable he could “beeliminated at any time by a criminal or an idiot.”

In his ramblings on the subject on May 3, 1942, he added, “There can never beabsolute security against fanatics and idealists ... If some fanatic wishes toshoot me or kill me with a bomb, I am no safer sitting down than standing up.” Hethought, though, that “the number of fanatics who seek my life on idealistic groundsis getting much smaller . . . The only really dangerous elements are either thosefanatics who have been goaded to action by dastardly priests or nationalist-mindedpatriots from one of the countries we have occupied. My many years of experiencemake things fairly difficult even for such as these.” (Ibid., p. 367.)

1UZ° THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Army replacements. In his briefcase was a time bomb. The meeting wascanceled. Hitler had left to have his Christmas on the Obersalzberg.

This was the first such attempt by the handsome young lieutenantcolonel, but not the last. For in Klaus Philip Schenk, Count von Stauffen-berg, the anti-Nazi conspirators had at last found their man. Henceforthhe would not only take over the job of killing Hitler by his own hand inthe only way that now seemed possible but would breathe new life andlight and hope and zeal into the conspiracy and become its real, thoughnever nominal, leader.

THE MISSION OF COUNT VON STAUFFENBERG

This was a man of astonishing gifts for a professional Army officer.

orn in 1907, he came from an old and distinguished South Germanfamily. Through his mother, Countess von Uxkull-Gyllenbrand, he wasa great-grandson of Gneisenau, one of the military heroes of the war ofliberation against Napoleon and the cofounder, with Schamhorst, of thePrussian General Staff, and through her also a descendant of Yorck vonWartenburg, another celebrated general of the Bonaparte era. Klaus’sfather had been Privy Chamberlain to the last King of WuerttembergThe family was congenial, devoutly Roman Catholic and highly cultivated.

With this background and in this atmosphere Klaus von Stauffenberggrew up. Possessed of a fine physique and, according to all who knewhim, of a striking handsomeness, he developed a brilliant, inquisitive,splendidly balanced mind. He had a passion for horses and sports but alsofor the arts and literature, in which he read widely, and as a youth cameunder the influence of Stefan George and that poetic genius’s romanticmysticism. For a time the young man thought of taking up music as aprofession, and later architecture, but in 1926, at the age of nineteen, heentered the Army as an officer cadet in the 17th Bamberg Cavalry Reei-ment—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 HighCommand. He emerged two years later as a young officer of the GeneralStaff. Though, like most of his class, a monarchist at heart, he was not upto this time an opponent of National Socialism. Apparently it was the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1938 which first cast doubts in his mind about Hitlerand these increased when in the summer of 1939 he saw that the Fuehrerwas leading Germany into a war which might be long, frightfully costlv inhuman lives, and, in the end, lost.

Nevertheless, when the war came he threw himself into it with char-acteristic energy, making a name for himself as a staff officer of GeneralHoepner’s 6th Panzer Division in the campaigns in Poland and France. Itwas in Russia that Stauffenberg seems to have become completely dis-illusioned with the Third Reich. He had been transferred to the ArmyHigh Command (OKH) early in June 1940, just before the assault on

The Allied Invasion of Western Europe 1029

Dunkirk, and for the first eighteen months of the Russian campaign spentmost of his time in Soviet territory, where, among other things, he helpedorganize the Russian “volunteer” units from among the prisoners of war.By this time, according to his friends, Stauffenberg believed that while theGermans were getting rid of Hitler’s tyranny these Russian troops couldbe used to overthrow Stalin’s. Perhaps this was an instance of the influenceof Stefan George’s wooly ideas.

The brutality of the S.S. in Russia, not to mention Hitler’s order toshoot the Bolshevik commissars, opened Stauffenberg’s eyes as to themaster he was serving. As chance had it, he met in Russia two of the chiefconspirators who had decided to make an end to that master: General vonTresckow and Schlabrendorff. The latter says it took only a few sub-sequent meetings to convince them that Stauffenberg was their man. Hebecame an active conspirator.

But he was still only a junior officer and he soon saw that the fieldmarshals were too confused—if not too cowardly—to do anything toremove Hitler or to stop the grisly slaughter of Jews, Russians andPOWs behind the lines. Also the needless disaster at Stalingrad sickenedhim. As soon as it was over, in February 1943, he asked to be sent to thefront and was posted as operations officer of the 10th Panzer Division inTunisia, joining it in the last days of the battle of the Kasserine Pass inwhich 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 attackedby low-flying Allied aircraft—and Stauffenberg was gravely wounded.He lost his left eye, his right hand and two fingers of the other hand andsuffered injuries to his left ear and knee. For several weeks it seemedprobable that he would be left totally blind, if he survived. But under theexpert supervision at a Munich hospital of Professor Sauerbruch, he wasrestored to life. Almost any other man, one would think, would haveretired from the Army and thus from the conspiracy. But by midsummerhe was writing General Olbricht—after much practice in wielding a penwith the three fingers of his bandaged left hand—that he expected toreturn to active duty within three months. During the long convalescencehe 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 visitedhis bedside one day. “We General Staff officers must all accept our shareof the responsibility.”10

By the end of September 1943, he was back in Berlin as a lieutenantcolonel 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 theEnglish-made Abwehr bombs with the three fingers of his good hand.

He was doing much more. His dynamic personality, the clarity of hismind, the catholicity of his ideas and his marked talents as an organizerinfused new life and determination into the conspirators. And also somedifferences, for Stauffenberg was not satisfied with the kind of stodgy,

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conservative, colorless regime which the old rusty leaders of the con-spiracy, Beck, Goerdeler and Hassell, envisaged as soon as NationalSocialism was overthrown. More practical than his friends in the KreisauCircle, he wanted a new dynamic Social Democracy and he insisted thatthe proposed anti-Nazi cabinet include his new friend Julius Leber, abrilliant Socialist, and Wilhelm Leuschner, a former trade-union official,both deep and active in the conspiracy. There was much argument, butStauffenberg rapidly achieved dominance over the political leaders of theplot.

He was equally successful with most of the military men. He recognizedGeneral Beck as the nominal leader of these and held the former GeneralStaff 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 formerself, tired and somewhat dispirited, and that moreover he had no conceptof 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 command-ing the troops which would be needed, younger officers who were onactive duty had to be mobilized. Stauffenberg soon had most of the keymen he needed.

These were, besides Olbricht, his chief; General Stieff, head of theOrganization Branch of OKH General Eduard Wagner, the First Quarter-master General of the Army; General Erich Fellgiebel, the Chief of Signalsat OKW; General Fritz Lindemann, head of the Ordnance Office; GeneralPaul von Hase, chief of the Berlin Kommandantur (who could furnish thetroops for taking over Berlin); and Colonel Freiherr von Roenne, head ofthe Foreign Armies Section, with his chief of staff, Captain Count vonMatuschka.

There were two or three key generals, chief of whom was Fritz Fromm,the actual commander in chief of the Replacement Army, who likeKluge, blew hot and cold and could not be definitely counted on.

The plotters also did not yet have a field marshal on active duty. FieldMarshal von Witzleben, one of the original conspirators, was slated tobecome Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces but he was on theinactive list and had no troops at his command. Field Marshal vonRundstedt, 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, washis explanation. Likewise the brilliant but opportunistic Field Marshal vonManstein.

At this juncture—early in 1944—a very active and popular FieldMarshal made himself, at first without the knowledge of Stauffenberg,somewhat available to the conspirators. This was Rommel, and hisentrance into the plot against Hitler came as a great surprise to theresistance leaders and was not approved by most of them, who regardedthe “Desert Fox” as a Nazi and as an opportunist who had blatantlycourted Hitler’s favor and was only now deserting him because he knewthe war was lost.

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The Allied, Invasion of Western Europe

In January 1944 Rommel had become commander of Army Group Bin the West, the main force with which the expected Anglo-Americaninvasion across l he Channel was to be repelled. In France he began tosee a good deal of two old friends, General Alexander von Falkenhausen,the military governor of Belgium and northern France, and General KarlHeinrich von Stuelpnagel, military governor of France. Both generals hadalready joined the anti-Hitler conspiracy and gradually initiated Rommelinto it. They were aided by an old civilian friend of Rommel, Dr. KarlStroelin, the Oberbuergermeister of Stuttgart, who like so many other char-acters in this narrative had been an enthusiastic Nazi and now, with defeatlooming and the cities of Germany, including his own, rapidly becomingrubble from the Allied bombing, was having second thoughts. He, in turn,had been helped along this path by Dr. Goerdeler, who in August 1943had persuaded him to join in drawing up a memorandum to the Ministryof the Interior—now headed by Himmler—in which they jointly demandeda cessation of the persecution of the Jews and the Christian churches, theres'oration of civil rights and the re-establishment of a system of justicedivorced 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 homeat Herrlingen, near Ulm, and had a heart-to-heart talk.

I told him [the mayor later recounted] that certain senior officers of theArmy in the East proposed to make Hitler a prisoner and to force him toannounce over the radio that he had abdicated. Rommel approved of theidea.

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 themovement.”11

Rommel hesitated and finally made his decision.

“I believe,” he said to Stroelin, “it is my duty to come to the rescue ofGermany.”

At this meeting and at all subsequent ones which Rommel had withthe plotters, he opposed assassinating Hitler—not on moral but on prac-tical grounds. To kill the dictator, he argued, would be to make a martyrof him. He insisted that Hitler be arrested by the Army and haled beforea German court for crimes against his own people and those of theoccupied lands.12

At this time fate brought another influence on Rommel in the personof General Hans Speidel, who on April 15, 1944, became the FieldMarshal’s chief of staff. Speidel, like his fellow conspirator Stauffenberg—though they belonged to quite separate groups—was an unusual Armyofficer. He was not only a soldier but a philosopher, having receivedsumma cum laude a doctorate in philosophy from the University of

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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 housenear Paris between Rommel, Stuelpnagel and their chiefs of staff. Thepurpose, says Speidel, was to work out “the necessary measures for endingthe war in the West and overthrowing the Nazi regime.”13

This was a large order, and Speidel realized that in preparing it closercontacts with the anti-Nazis in the homeland, especially with the Goer-deler-Beck group, were urgently necessary. For some weeks the mercurialGoerdeler had been pressing for a secret meeting between Rommel and—of all people—Neurath, who, having done his own share of Hitler’s dirtywork, first as Foreign Minister and then as the Reich Protector ofBohemia, was also experiencing a rude awakening now that terribledisaster was about to overtake the Fatherland. It was decided that itwould be too dangerous for Rommel to meet with Neurath and Stroelin,so the Field Marshal sent General Speidel, at whose home in Freudenstadtthe conference was held on May 27. The three men present, Speidel,Neurath and Stroelin, were, like Rommel himself, all Swabians and thisaffinity appears not only to have made the meeting congenial but to haveled to ready agreement. This was that Hitler must be quickly overthrownand that Rommel must be prepared to become either the interim head ofstate or Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces—neither of whichposts, it must be said, Rommel at any time ever demanded for himself. Anumber of details were worked out, including plans for contacting theWestern Allies for an armistice, and a code for communication betweenthe conspirators in Germany and Rommel’s headquarters.

General Speidel is emphatic in his assertion not only that Rommelfrankly informed his immediate superior in the West, Field Marshal vonRundstedt, as to what was up, but that the latter was “in complete agree-ment.” There was a flaw, however, in the character of this senior officerof the Army.

During a discussion on the formulation of joint demands to Hitler [Speidellater wrote] Rundstedt said to Rommel: “You are young. You know and lovethe people. You do it.”14

After further conferences that late spring the following plan was drawnup. Speidel, almost alone among the Army conspirators in the West,survived to describe it:

An immediate armistice with the Western Allies but not unconditionalsurrender. German withdrawal in the West to Germany. Immediatesuspension of the Allied bombing of Germany. Arrest of Hitler for trialbefore a German court. Overthrow of Nazi rule. Temporary assumptionof executive power in Germany by the resistance forces of all classes underthe leadership of General Beck, Goerdeler, and the trade-union repre-sentative, Leuschner. No military dictatorship. Preparation of a “con-structive peace” within the framework of a United States of Europe. Inthe East, continuation of the war. Holding a shortened line between the

The Allied Invasion of Western Europe 1033

mouth of the Danube, the Carpathian Mountains, the River Vistula andMemel.15

The generals seem to have had no doubts whatsoever that the Britishand American armies would then join them in the war against Russia toprevent, as they said, Europe from becoming Bolshevik.

In Berlin General Beck agreed, at least to the extent of continuing thewar in the East. Early in May he sent through Gisevius a memorandumto Dulles in Switzerland outlining a fantastic plan. The German generalsin the West were to withdraw their forces to the German frontier after theAnglo-American invasion. While this was going on, Beck urged that theWes'ern Allies carry out three tactical operations: land three airbornedivisions in the Berlin area to help the conspirators hold the capital, carryout large-scale seaborne landings on the German coast near Hamburgand Bremen, and land a sizable force across the Channel in France. Reli-able anti-Nazi German troops would in the meantime take over in theMunich area and surround Hitler at his mountain retreat on the Obersalz-berg. The war against Russia would go on. Dulles says he lost no time intrying to bring the Berlin conspirators down to earth. They were told therecould be no separate peace with the West.16

Stauffenberg, his friends in the Kreisau Circle and such members of theconspiracy as Schulenburg, the former ambassador in Moscow, had cometo realize this. In fact most of them, including Stauffenberg, were “East-erners”—pro-Russian though anti-Bolshevik. For a time they believedthat it might be easier to get a better peace with Russia—which throughstatements from Stalin himself had emphasized in its radio propagandathat it was fighting not against the German people but against “theHitlerites”—than with the Western Allies, who harped only of “uncon-ditional surrender.”* But they abandoned such wishful thinking inOctober 1943, when the Soviet government at the Moscow Conference ofAllied Foreign Ministers formally adhered to the Casablanca declarationof unconditional surrender.

And now, as the fateful summer of 1944 approached, they realized thatwith the Red armies nearing the frontier of the Reich, the British andAmerican armies poised for a large-scale invasion across the Channel, andthe 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 peaceat all was to be had that would spare Germany from being overrun andannihilated.

In Berlin, Stauffenberg and his confederates had at last perfected theirplans. They were lumped under the code name “Valkyrie”—an appropri-ate term, since the Valkyrie were the maidens in Norse-German mythology,

* At their meeting at Casablanca Churchill and Roosevelt had issued on January 24,1943, their declaration of unconditional surrender for Germany. Goebbels naturallymade a great deal of this in trying to whip the German people into a state of all-outresistance but in the opinion of this author his success has been grossly exaggeratedby a surprisingly large number of Western writers.

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beautiful but terrifying, who were supposed to have hovered over theancient battlefields choosing those who would be slain. In this case, AdolfHitler 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 theHome Army to take over the security of Berlin and the other large citiesin case of a revolt of the millions of foreign laborers toiling in thesecenters. Such a revolt was highly unlikely—indeed, impossible—sincethe foreign workers were unarmed and unorganized, but to the suspiciousFuehrer danger lurked everywhere these days, and, with almost all theable-bodied soldiers absent from the homeland either at the front or keep-ing down the populace in the far-flung occupied areas, he readily fell inwith the idea that the Home Army ought to have plans for protecting theinternal security of the Reich against the hordes of sullen slave laborers.Thus Valkyrie became a perfect cover for the military conspirators, en-abling them to draw up quite openly plans for the Home Army to takeover the capital and such cities as Vienna, Munich and Cologne as soonas Hitler had been assassinated.

In Berlin their main difficulty was that they had very few troops at theirdisposal and that these were outnumbered by the S.S. formations. Alsothere were considerable numbers of Luftwaffe units in and around theci'y manning the antiaircraft defenses, and these troops, unless the Armymoved swiftly, would remain loyal to Goering and certainly make a fightof 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 throughits chief, Count von Helldorf, who had joined the conspiracy.

In view of the strength of the S.S. and Air Force troops, Stauffenberglaid great stress on the timing of the operation to gain control of thecapital. The first two hours would be the most critical. In that short spaceof time the Army troops must occupy and secure the national broadcastingheadquarters and the city’s two radio stations, the telegraph and telephonecentrals, the Reich Chancellery, the ministries and the headquarters ofthe S.S.-Gestapo. Goebbels, the only prominent Nazi who rarely leftBerlin, must be arrested along with the S.S. officers. In the meantime, themoment Hitler was killed his headquarters at Rastenburg must be isolatedfrom Germany so that neither Goering nor Himmler, nor any of the Nazigenerals such as Keitel and Jodi, could take over and attempt to rally thepolice or the troops behind a continued Nazi regime. General Fellgiebel,Chief of Signals, who was stationed at the Fuehrer’s headquarters, hadundertaken to see to this.

Only then, after all these things had been accomplished within the firstcouple of hours of the coup, could the messages, which had been drawn upand filed, be sent out by radio, telephone and telegraph to the commandersof the Home Army in other cities and to the top generals commanding thetroops at the front and in the occupied zones, announcing that Hitler wasdead and that a new anti-Nazi government had been formed in Berlin. Therevolt would have to be over—and achieved—within twenty-four hours

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and the new government firmly installed. Otherwise the vacillating gen-erals might have second thoughts. Goering and Himmler might be able torally them, and a civil war would ensue. In that case the fronts would cavein and the very chaos and collapse which the plotters wished to preventwould become inevitable.

All depended for success, after Hitler had been assassinated—andStauffenberg personally would see to this—on the ability of the plotters toutilize for their purposes, and with the utmost speed and energy, the avail-able Army troops in and around Berlin. This posed a knotty problem.

Only General Fritz Fromm, the commander in chief of the Home orReplacement Army, could normally give the order to carry out Valkyrie.And to the very last he remained a question mark. All through 1943 theconspirators had worked on him. They finally concluded that this waryofficer could be definitely counted upon only after he saw that the revolthad succeeded. But since they were sure of its success, they proceeded todraft a series of orders under Fromm’s name, though without his knowl-edge. In case he wavered at the crucial moment, Fromm was to be re-placed by General Hoepner, the brilliant tank commander who had beencashiered by Hitler after the battle for Moscow in 1941 and forbidden towear 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 commandedWehrkreis III, which included Berlin and Brandenburg. It was decidedto have him arrested and replaced by General Freiherr von Thuengen.General Paul von Hase, the commandant of Berlin, was in on the plot andcould 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, Stauffen-berg and Tresckow, in collaboration with Goerdeler, Beck, Witzleben andothers, drafted papers giving instructions to the district military com-manders on how they were to take over executive power in their areas,put down the S.S., arrest the leading Nazis and occupy the concentrationcamps. Furthermore, several ringing declarations were composed whichat the appropriate moment were to be issued to the armed forces, theGerman people, the press and the radio. Some were signed by Beck, asthe new head of state, others by Field Marshal von Witzleben, as Com-mander in Chief of the Wehrmacht, and by Goerdeler, as the new Chancel-lor. Copies of the orders and appeals were typed in great secrecy late atnight in the Bendlerstrasse by two brave women in the plot, Frau Erikavon Tresckow, the wife of the general who had done so much to furtherthe conspiracy, and Margarete von Oven, the daughter of a retired generaland for years the faithful secretary of two former commanders in chief ofthe Army, Generals von Hammerstein and von Fritsch. The papers werethen hidden in General Olbricht’s safe.

The plans, then, were ready. In fact, they had been perfected by theend 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

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realized that time was running out on them. For one thing, the Gestapowas closing in. The arrests of those who were in on the plot, among themCount von Moltke and the members of the Kreisau Circle, were mountingwith each week that passed, and there were many executions. Beck,Goerdeler, Hassell, Witzleben and others in the inner circle were being soclosely shadowed by Himmler’s secret police that they found it increasinglydifficult to meet together. Himmler himself had warned the fallen Canarisin the spring that he knew very well that a rebellion was being hatched bythe generals and their civilian friends. He mentioned that he was keepinga watch on Beck and Goerdeler. Canaris passed the warning on toOlbricht.17

Just as ominous for the conspirators was the military situation. TheRussians, it was believed, were about to launch an all-out offensive in theEast. Rome was being abandoned to the Allied forces. (It fell on June 4.)In the West the Anglo-American invasion was imminent. Very soonGermany might go down to military defeat—before Nazism could beoverthrown. Indeed, there was a growing number of conspirators, per-haps influenced by the thinking of the Kreisau Circle, who began to feelthat it might be better to call off their plans and let Hitler and the Nazistake the responsibility for the catastrophe. To overthrow them now mightmerely perpetrate another “stab-in-the-back” legend, such as that whichhad 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 wouldattempt to land in France that summer. He persisted in this belief evenafter Colonel Georg Hansen, a carryover from the Abwehr in Himmler’smilitary-intelligence bureau, had warned him early in May that the in-vasion might begin on any day in June.

The German Army itself was beset by doubts, at least as to the date andplace of the assault. In May there had been eighteen days when theweather, the sea and the tides were just right for a landing, and theGermans noted that General Eisenhower had not taken advantage ofthem. On May 30 Rundstedt, the Commander in Chief in the West, hadreported to Hitler that there was no indication that the invasion was “im-mediately imminent.” On June 4, the Air Force meteorologist in Parisadvised that because of the inclement weather no Allied action could beexpected for at least a fortnight.

On the strength of this and of what little information he had—theLuftwaffe had been prevented from making aerial reconnaissance of theharbors on England’s south coast where Eisenhower’s troops at thatmoment were swarming aboard their ships, and the Navy had withdrawnits reconnaissance craft from the Channel because of the heavy seas—Rommel drew up a situation report on the morning of June 5 reporting toRundstedt that the invasion was not imminent, and immediately set off by

The Allied Invasion of Western Europe 1037

car for his home at Herrlingen to spend the night with his family and thento proceed to Berchtesgaden the next day to confer with Hitler.

June 5, General Speidel, Rommel’s chief of staff, later recalled, “wasa quiet day.” There seemed no reason why Rommel should not make hissomewhat leisurely journey back to Germany. There were the usual re-ports from German agents about the possibility of an Allied landing—thistime between June 6 and June 16—but there had been hundreds of thesesince April and they were not taken seriously. Indeed, on the sixth GeneralFriedrich Dollmann, who commanded the Seventh Army in Normandy, onwhose beaches the Allied forces were about to land, ordered a temporaryrelaxation of the standing alert and convoked his senior officers for a mapexercise at Rennes, some 125 miles south of those beaches.

If the Germans were in the dark about the date of the invasion, theywere also ignorant of where it would take place. Rundstedt and Rommelwere certain it would be in the Pas-de-Calais area, where the Channel wasat its narrowest. There they had concentrated their strongest force, theFifteenth Army, whose strength during the spring was increased from tento fifteen infantry divisions. But by the end of March Adolf Hitler’s un-canny intuition was telling him that the Schwerpunkt of the invasion prob-ably would be in Normandy, and during the next few weeks he orderedconsiderable reinforcements to the region between the Seine and theLoire. “Watch Normandy!” he kept warning his generals.

Still, the overwhelming part of German strength, in both infantry andpanzer divisions, was retained north of the Seine, between Le Havre andDunkirk. Rundstedt and his generals were watching the Pas-de-Calaisra'.her than Normandy and they were encouraged in this by a number ofdeceptive maneuvers carried out during April and May by the British-American High Command which indicated to them that their calculationswere correct.

The day of June 5, then, passed in relative quiet, so far as the Germanswere concerned. Severe Anglo-American air attacks continued to disruptGerman depots, radar stations, V-l sites, communications and transport,but these had been going on night and day for weeks and seemed no moreintense on this day than on others.

Shortly after dark Rundstedt’s headquarters was informed that theBBC in London was broadcasting an unusually large number of codedmessages to the French resistance and that the German radar stationsbetween Cherbourg and Le Havre were being jammed. At 10 P.M. theFifteenth Army intercepted a code message from the BBC to the Frenchresistance which it believed meant that the invasion was about to begin.This army was alerted, but Rundstedt did not think it necessary to alertthe Seventh Army, on whose sector of the coast farther west, betweenCaen 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 SeventhArmy, its commander not yet returned from his map exercise at Rennes,realized what was happening. Two American and one British airborne

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divisions had begun landing in its midst. The general alarm was soundedat 1:30 a.m.

Forty-five minutes later Major General Max Pemsel, chief of staff ofthe Seventh Army, got General Speidel on the telephone at Rommel’sheadquarters and told him that it looked like “a large-scale operation.”Speidel did not believe it but passed on the report to Rundstedt, who wasequally skeptical. Both generals believed the dropping of parachutistswas merely an Allied feint to cover their main landings around Calais.At 2:40 a.m. Pemsel was advised that Rundstedt “does not consider thisto be a major operation.”18 Not even when the news began to reach himshortly after dawn on June 6 that on the Normandy coast between therivers Vire and Orne a huge Allied fleet was disembarking large bodies oftroops, under cover of a murderous fire from the big guns of an armadaof warships, did the Commander in Chief West believe that this was to bethe main Allied assault. It did not become apparent, Speidel says, untilthe afternoon of June 6. By that time the Americans had a toehold ontwo beaches and the British on a third and had penetrated inland for adistance of from two to six miles.

Speidel had telephoned Rommel at 6 a.m. at his home and the FieldMarshal had rushed back by car without going on to see Hitler, but he didnot arrive at Army Group B headquarters until late that afternoon.* Inthe meantime Speidel, Rundstedt and the latter’s chief of staff, GeneralBlumentritt, had been on the telephone to OKW, which was then atBerchtesgaden. Due to an idiotic order of Hitler’s not even the Com-mander in Chief in the West could employ his panzer divisions withoutthe specific permission of the Fuehrer. When the three generals early onthe morning of the sixth begged for permission to rush two tank divisionsto Normandy, Jodi replied that Hitler wanted first to see what developed.Whereupon the Fuehrer went to bed and could not be disturbed by thefrantic calls of the generals in the West until 3 p.m.

When he woke up, the bad news which had in the meantime arrivedfinally stirred the Nazi warlord to action. He gave—too late, as it turnedout—permission to engage the Panzer Lehr and 12th S.S. Panzer divisionsin Normandy. He also issued a famous order which has been preservedfor posterity in the log of the Seventh Army:

16:55 hours. June 6, 1944

Chief of Staff Western Command emphasizes the desire of the SupremeCommand to have the enemy in the bridgehead annihilated by the evening ofJune 6 since there exists the danger of additional sea- and airborne landingsfor support . . . The beachhead must be cleaned up by not later than tonight.

In the eerie mountain air of the Obersalzberg, from which Hitler wasnow trying to direct the most crucial battle of the war up to this moment—

* Because of Allied air superiority in the West, Hitler had forbidden his seniorcommanders to travel by plane.

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he had been saying for months that Germany’s destiny would be decidedin the West—this fantastic order seems to have been issued in all serious-ness, concurred in by Jodi and Keitel. Even Rommel, who passed it on bytelephone shortly before 5 o’clock that afternoon, an hour after his returnfrom Germany, seems to have taken it seriously, for he ordered SeventhArmy headquarters to launch an attack by the 21st Panzer Division, theonly German armored unit in the area, “immediately regardless of whetherreinforcements arrive or not.”

This the division had already done, without waiting for Rommel’scommand. General Pemsel, who was on the other end of the line whenRommel called Seventh Army headquarters, gave a blunt reply to Hitler’sdemand that the Allied beachhead—there were actually now three—“becleaned up by not later than tonight.”

“That,” he replied, “would be impossible.”

Hitler’s much-propagandized Atlantic Wall had been breached withina few hours. The once vaunted Luftwaffe had been driven completely fromthe air and the German Navy from the sea, and the Army taken bysurprise. The batde was far from over, but its outcome was not long indoubt. “From June 9 on,” says Speidel, “the initiative lay with theAllies.”

Rundstedt and Rommel decided that it was time to say so to Hitler, faceto face, and to demand that he accept the consequences. They enticed himto a meeting on June 17 at Margival, north of Soissons, in the elaboratebombproof bunker which had been built to serve as the Fuehrer’s head-quarters for the invasion of Britain in the summer of 1940, but never used.Now, four summers later, the Nazi warlord appeared there for the firsttime.

He looked pale and sleepless [Speidel later wrote], playing nervously withhis 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 hypnoticpowers 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 theAllied landings, for which he tried to hold the field commanders responsible.19

But the prospect of another stunning defeat was emboldening the gen-erals, or at least Rommel, whom Rundstedt left to do most of the talkingwhen Hitler’s diatribe against them had come to a momentary pause.“With merciless frankness,” says Speidel, who was present, “Rommelpointed 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, in spite of the enemy’s air superiority, we succeed in getting a large part of ourmobile 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 itsfirst day,” Rommel had written General Jodi on April 23, less than two monthsbefore. (The Rommel Papers, ed. Liddell Hart, p. 468.) Hitler’s strict orders hadmade it impossible to throw in the armored divisions “in the first hours” or even thefirst days. When they finally arrived they were thrown in piecemeal and failed.

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if Hitler abandoned his absurd determination to hold every foot of groundand then to drive the Allied forces into the sea. Rommel proposed, withRundstedt’s assent, that the Germans withdraw out of range of the enemy’smurderous naval guns, take their panzer units out of the line and re-formthem 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 with-drawal. German soldiers must stand and fight. The subject obviously wasunpleasant to him and he quickly changed to others. In a display whichSpeidel calls “a strange mixture of cynicism and false intuition,” Hitlerassured the generals that the new V-l weapon, the buzz bomb, which hadbeen launched for the first time the day before against London, “would bedecisive against Great Britain . . . and make the British willing to makepeace.” When the two field marshals drew Hitler’s attention to the utterfailure of the Luftwaffe in the West, the Fuehrer retorted that “masses ofjet fighters”—the Allies had no jets, but the Germans had just put theminto production—would soon drive the British and American flyers fromthe skies. Then, he said, Britain would collapse. At this juncture theapproach of Allied planes forced them to adjourn to the Fuehrer’s air-raidshelter.

Safe in the underground concrete bunker, they resumed the conversa-tion, * and at this point Rommel insisted on steering it into politics.

He predicted [says Speidel] that the German front in Normandy wouldcollapse and that a breakthrough into Germany by the Allies could not bechecked . . . He doubted whether the Russian front could be held. Hepointed 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 himshort: “Don’t you worry about the future course of the war, but ratherabout your own invasion front.”

The two field marshals were getting nowhere, either with their militaryor political arguments. “Hitler paid no attention whatsoever to their warn-ings,” General Jodi later recalled at Nuremberg. Finally the generalsurged the Supreme Commander at least to visit Rommel’s Army Group Bheadquarters to confer with some of the field commanders on what theywere up against in Normandy. Hitler reluctantly agreed to the visit forJune 19—two days hence.

He never showed up. Shortly after the field marshals had departedfrom Margival on the afternoon of June 17 an errant V-l on its way toLondon turned around and landed on the top of the Fuehrer’s bunker.

* 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, afterit had been previously tasted for him. Pills and liqueur glasses containing variousmedicines were ranged around his place, and he took them in turn. Two S.S. menstood guard behind his chair.”

No one was killed or even hurt, but Hitler was so upset that he set oftimmediately for safer parts, not stopping until he got to the mountains ofBerchtesgaden.

There more bad news shortly arrived. On June 20 the long-awaitedRussian offensive on the central front began, developing with such over-whelming power that within a few days the German Army Group Center,in which Hitler had concentrated his strongest forces, was completelysmashed, the front tom wide open and the road to Poland opened. OnJuly 4 the Russians crossed the 1939 Polish eastern border and convergedon East Prussia. All available reserves of the High Command were quicklyrounded up to be rushed—for the first time in World War II—to thedefense of the Fatherland itself. This helped to doom the German armiesin the West. From now on they could not count on receiving any sizablereinforcements.

Once more, on June 29, Rundstedt and Rommel appealed to Hitler toface realities both in the East and in the West and to try to end the warwhile considerable parts of the German Army were still in being. Thismeeting took place on the Obersalzberg, where the Supreme warlordtreated the two field marshals frostily, dismissing their appeals curtly andthen lapsing into a long monologue on how he would win the war with new“miracle weapons.” His discourse, says Speidel, “became lost in fantasticdigressions.”

Two days later Rundstedt was replaced as Commander in Chief Westby Field Marshal von Kluge.* On July 15 Rommel wrote a long letter toHitler and dispatched it by Army teletype. “The troops,” he wrote, “arefighting 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 myduty 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 doesnot take it, we will act.”22

Two days later, on the afternoon of July 17, while driving back toheadquarters from the Normandy front, Rommel’s staff car was shot up

* Rundstedt’s dismissal may have come partly as the result of his blunt words toKeitel 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 justfloundered 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 calledhim, went straight to Hitler with the remarks. The Fuehrer was at that momentconferring with Kluge, who had been on sick leave for the last few months as theresult of injuries sustained in a motor accident. Kluge was immediately named toreplace Rundstedt. In such ways were top commands changed by the Nazi warlord.General Blumentritt told of the telephone conversation to both Wilmot (The Strugglefor Europe, p. 347) and Liddell Hart (The German Generals Talk, p. 205).

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by low-flying Allied fighter planes and he was so critically wounded thatit was first thought he would not survive the day. This was a disaster tothe conspirators, for Rommel had now—Speidel swears to it23—made uphis mind irrevocably to do his part in ridding Germany of Hitler’s rule(though still opposing his assassination) within the next few days. As itturned out, his dash and daring were sorely missing among the Armyofficers who, at long last, as the German armies crumbled in the East andWest that July of 1944, made their final bid to bring Hitler and NationalSocialism down.

The conspirators, says Speidel, “felt themselves painfully deprived oftheir pillar of strength.”*24

THE CONSPIRACY AT THE ELEVENTH HOUR

The successful Allied landing in Normandy threw the conspirators inBerlin into great confusion. Stauffenberg, as we have seen, had notbelieved it would be attempted in 1944, and that, if it were, there was afifty-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 andcostly setback, would be more willing to negotiate a peace in the West withhis new anti-Nazi government, which in this case could get better terms.

When it became evident that the invasion had succeeded, that Germanyhad suffered another crucial defeat, and that a new one was threateningin the East, Stauffenberg, Beck and Goerdeler wondered whether therewas any point in going ahead with their plans. If they succeeded theywould only be blamed for bringing on the final catastrophe. Though theyknew it was now inevitable, this was not generally realized by the mass ofthe German people. Beck finally concluded that though a successful anti-Nazi revolt could not now spare Germany from enemy occupation, itcould bring the war to an end and save further loss of blood and destruc-tion of the Fatherland. A peace now would also prevent the Russiansfrom overrunning Germany and Bolshevizing it. It would show the worldthat there was “another Germany” besides the Nazi one. And—whoknew?—perhaps at least the Western Allies, despite their terms of un-conditional surrender, might not be too hard on a conquered Germany.Goerdeler agreed and pinned even greater hopes on the Western democ-racies. He knew, he said, how much Churchill feared the danger of “atotal 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

* Speidel quotes the writer Ernst Juenger, whose books had once been popular inNazi Germany but who eventually had turned and had joined the Paris end of theplot: “The blow that felled Rommel on the Livarot Road on July 17 deprived ourplan of the only man strong enough to bear the terrible weight of war and civil warsimultaneously.” (Speidel, Invasion 1944, p. 119.)

The Allied Invasion of Western Europe 1043

Second Army on the crumbling Russian front. His reply brought thestumbling plotters back on the track.

The assassination must be attempted at any cost. Even should it fail, theattempt to seize power in the capital must be undertaken. We must prove tothe world and to future generations that the men of the German ResistanceMovement 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 dis-solved the doubts of Stauffenberg and his young friends. The threatenedcollapse of the fronts in Russia, France and Italy impelled the plotters toact at once. Another event helped to speed them on their way.

From the beginning the Beck-Goerdeler-Hassell circle had declined tohave anything to do with the Communist underground, and vice versa. Tothe Communists the plotters were as reactionary as the Nazis and theirvery success might prevent a Communist Germany from succeeding aNational Socialist one. Beck and his friends were well aware of this Com-munist line, and they knew also that the Communist underground wasdirected from Moscow and served chiefly as an espionage source for theRussians.* Furthermore, they knew that it had become infiltrated with

* This came out in the “Rote Kapelle” affair in 1942, when the Abwehr discovereda large number of strategically placed Germans, many of them from old, prominentfamilies, running an extensive espionage network for the Russians. At one time theywere transmitting intelligence to Moscow over some 100 clandestine radio trans-mitters 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 GrandAdmiral von Tirpitz, a picturesque leader of the “lost generation” after the FirstWorld War and a familiar Bohemian figure in those days in Berlin, where his blacksweater, his thick mane of blond hair and his passion for revolutionary poetry andpolitics 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 theLuftwaffe as a lieutenant at the outbreak of the war and wormed himself intoGoering’s “research” office, the Forschungsamt, which, as we have seen in connec-tion with the Anschluss, specialized in tapping telephones. Soon he was organizinga vast espionage service for Moscow, with trusted associates in every ministry andmilitary office in Berlin. Among these were Arvid Harnack, nephew of a famoustheologian, a brilliant young economist in the Ministry of Economics, who wasmarried to an American woman, Mildred Fish, whom he had met at the Universityof Wisconsin; Franz Scheliha in the Foreign Office; Horst Heilmann in thePropaganda Ministry; and Countess Erika von Brockdorff in the Ministry of Labor.

Two Soviet agents who parachuted into Germany and were later apprehended gavethe “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 vonBrockdorff got off with prison sentences but Hitler insisted that they be executedtoo, and they were. To impress would-be traitors the Fuehrer ordered that thecondemned be hanged. But there were no gallows in Berlin, where the traditionalform of execution was the ax, and so the victims were simply strangled by a ropearound 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 aspecial form of cruelty, on those who dared to defy the Fuehrer.

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Gestapo agents—“V men,” as Heinrich Mueller, the Gestapo chief andhimself a student and admirer of the Soviet N.K.V.D., called them.

In June the plotters, against the advice of Goerdeler and the oldermembers, decided to contact the Communists. This was at the suggestionof the Socialist wing and especially of Adolf Reichwein, the Socialistphilosopher and celebrated Wandervogel, who was now director of theFolklore Museum in Berlin. Reichwein had maintained vague contactswith the Communists. Though Stauffenberg himself was suspicious ofthem, his Socialist friends Reichwein and Leber convinced him that somecontact with them had become necessary in order to see what they wereup to and what they would do in case the putsch succeeded, and, if pos-sible, to use them at the last moment to widen the basis of the anti-Naziresistance. Reluctantly he agreed to Leber and Reichwein meeting withthe underground Communist leaders on June 22. But he warned them thatthe 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 andAnton Saefkow who claimed to be—and perhaps were—the leaders of theCommunist underground. They were accompanied by a third comradewhom they introduced as “Rambow.” The Communists turned out toknow 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. Stauffenbergrefused, but Reichwein was authorized to represent him at a further meet-ing on that date. When he arrived at it, he, along with Jacob and Saefkow,were promptly arrested. “Rambow,” it turned out, was a Gestapo stoolpigeon. The next day Leber, on whom Stauffenberg was counting to be-come the dominant political force in the new government, was alsoarrested.*

Stauffenberg was not only deeply upset by the arrest of Leber, withwhom he had become a close personal friend and whom he regarded asindispensable to the proposed new government, but he saw at once thatthe whole conspiracy was in dire peril of being snuffed out now thatHimmler s men were so close on its trail. Leber and Reichwein werecourageous men and could be counted on, he thought, not to reveal anysecrets even under torture. Or could they be? Some of the plotters werenot so sure. There might be limits beyond which even the bravest mancould not keep silent when his body was being racked by insufferable pain.

The arrest of Leber and Reichwein was a further spur to immediateaction.

THE COUP OF JULY 20, 1944

Toward the end of June the plotters received one good stroke offortune. Stauffenberg was promoted to full colonel and appointed chiefof staff to General Fromm, the commander in chief of the Home Army.

* AH four, Leber, Reichwein, Jacob and Saefkow, were executed,

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This post not only enabled him to issue orders to the Home Army underFromm’s name but gave him direct and frequent access to Hitler. Indeed,the Fuehrer began to summon the chief of the Replacement Army, or hisdeputy, to headquarters two or three times a week to demand fresh replace-ments for his decimated divisions in Russia. At one of these meetingsStauffenberg intended to plant his bomb.

Stauffenberg had now become the key man in the conspiracy. On hisshoulders alone rested its only chance for success. As the one member ofthe plot who could penetrate the heavily guarded Fuehrer headquarters itwas up to him to kill Hitler. As chief of staff of the Replacement Armyit would have to be left to him—since Fromm had not been won overcompletely and could not be definitely counted on—to direct the troopsthat were to seize Berlin after Hitler was out of the way. And he had tocarry out both objectives on the same day and at two spots separated bytwo or three hundred miles—the Fuehrer’s headquarters, whether on theObersalzberg or at Rastenburg, and Berlin. Between the first and thesecond acts there must be an interval of two or three hours while his planewas droning back to the capital during which he could do nothing buthope that his plans were being energetically initiated by his confederatesin Berlin. That was one trouble, as we shall shortly see.

There were others. One seems to have been an almost unnecessarycomplication that sprang up in the minds of the now desperate con-spirators. They came to the conclusion that it would not suffice to killAdolf Hitler. They must at the same time kill Goering and Himmler, thusensuring that the military forces under the command of these two mencould not be used against them. They thought too that the top generalsat the front who had not yet been won over would join them more quicklyif Hitler’s two chief lieutenants were also done away with. Since Goeringand Himmler usually attended the daily military conferences at theFuehrer headquarters, it was believed that it would not be too difficult tokill all three men with one bomb. This foolish resolve led Stauffenberg tomiss two golden opportunities.

He was summoned to the Obersalzberg on July 11 to report to theFuehrer on the supply of badly needed replacements. He carried withhim 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 Berlinthe night before that this was the moment to kill Hitler—and Goering andHimmler as well. But Himmler was not present at the conference that dayand when Stauffenberg, leaving the meeting for a moment, rang up Gen-eral Olbricht in Berlin to tell him so, stressing that he could still get Hitlerand Goering, the General urged him to wait for another day when hecould get all three. That night, on his return to Berlin, Stauffenberg metwith Beck and Olbricht and insisted that the next time he must attempt tokill Hitler, regardless of whether Goering and Himmler were present ornot. The others agreed.

The next time was soon at hand. On July 14 Stauffenberg was orderedto report the next day to the Fuehrer on the replacement situation—every

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available recruit was needed to help fill the gaps in Russia, where ArmyGroup Center, having lost twenty-seven divisions, had ceased to exist asa fighting force. That day—the fourteenth—Hitler had moved his head-quarters back to Wolfsschanze at Rastenburg to take personal charge oftrying to restore the central front, where Red Army troops had now reacheda point but sixty miles from East Prussia.

Again, on the morning of July 15, Colonel Stauffenberg set out byplane for the Fuehrer’s headquarters* with a bomb in his briefcase. Thistime the conspirators were so certain of success that it was agreed that thefirst Valkyrie signal—for the troops to start marching in Berlin and for thetanks from the panzer school at Krampnitz to begin rolling toward thecapital—should be given two hours before Hitler’s conference, scheduledfor 1 p.m., began. There must be no delay in taking over.

At 11 a.m. on Saturday, July 15, General Olbricht issued Valkyrie 1for Berlin and before noon troops were moving toward the center of thecapital 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 enoughto telephone Olbricht in Berlin to say—by prearranged code—that Hitlerwas present and that he intended to return to the meeting and set off hisbomb. Olbricht informed him that the troops in Berlin were already onthe march. At last success in the great enterprise seemed at hand. Butwhen Stauffenberg returned to the conference room Hitler had left it anddid not return. Disconsolate, Stauffenberg hurriedly rang up Olbricht withthe news. The General frantically canceled the Valkyrie alarm and thetroops were marched back to their barracks as quickly and as incon-spicuously 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 todo. Goerdeler was for resorting to the so-called “Western solution.” Heproposed to Beck that both of them fly to Paris to confer with Field Marshalvon Kluge on getting an armistice in the West whereby the Western Allieswould agree not to push farther than the Franco-German border, thusreleasing the German armies in the West to be shunted to the Eastern

* There is disagreement among the historians whether Stauffenberg set out forRastenburg or the Obersalzberg. The two most authoritative German writers onthe subject, Eberhard Zeller and Professor Gerhard Ritter, give contradictoryaccounts. Zeller thinks Hitler was still at Berchtesgaden, but Ritter is sure this is amistake and that the Fuehrer had returned to Rastenburg. Unfortunately Hitler’sdaily calendar book, which has proved an unfailing guide to this writer up to thispoint, 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 headquarterson July 22, indicates pretty conclusively that on July 15 Hitler was at Rastenburgand that it was there that Stauffenberg planned to kill him. Though the two placesfrom which Hitler tried to conduct the war—he was rarely in Berlin, which wasbeing unmercifully bombed—were about equidistant from the capital, Berchtesgaden,being more centrally located and near Munich, where the Army garrison wasbelieved to be loyal to Beck, had certain advantages over Rastenburg for theconspirators.

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front to save the Reich from the Russians and their Bolshevism. Beck hada clearer head. The idea that they could now get a separate peace with theWest, he knew, was a pipe dream. Nevertheless the plot to kill Hitler andoverthrow Nazism must be carried out at all costs, Beck argued, if only tosave Germany’s honor. Stauffenberg agreed. He swore he would not failthe next time. General Olbricht, who had received a dressing down fromKeitel for moving his troops in Berlin, declared that he could not riskdoing it again, since that would unmask the whole conspiracy. He hadbarely got by, he said, with an explanation to Keitel and Fromm that thiswas a practice exercise. This fear of again setting the troops in motion untilit was known definitely that Hitler was dead was to have disastrous con-sequences on the crucial following Thursday.

On Sunday evening, July 16, Stauffenberg invited to his home at Wann-see a small circle of his close friends and relatives: his brother, Berthold, aquiet, introspective, scholarly young man who was an adviser on interna-tional law at naval headquarters; Lieutenant Colonel Caesar von Hofacker,a cousin of the Stauffenbergs and their liaison man with the generals in theWest; Count Fritz von der Schulenburg, a former Nazi who was still deputypolice president of Berlin; and Trott zu Solz. Hofacker had just returnedfrom the West, where he had conferred with a number of generals—Fal-kenhausen, Stuelpnagel, Speidel, Rommel and Kluge. He reported animminent German breakdown on the Western front but, more important,that Rommel would back the conspiracy regardless of which way Klugejumped, though he still opposed killing Hitler. After a long discussionthe young conspirators agreed, however, that ending Hitler’s life was nowthe only way out. They had no illusions by this time that their desperateact would save Germany from having to surrender unconditionally. Theyeven agreed that this would have to be done to the Russians as well as to theWestern democracies. The important thing, they said, was for Germans—and not their foreign conquerors—to free Germany from Hitler’s tyr-anny.20

They were terribly late. The Nazi despotism had endured for elevenyears and only the certainty of utter defeat in a war which Germany hadlaunched, 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 ad-vising them that collapse in both the East and the West was probably onlya matter of weeks.

For the plotters there seemed to be only a few more days left to them toact. The premature march of the troops in Berlin on July 15 had arousedthe suspicions of OKW. On that day came news that General von Falken-hausen, one of the leaders of the plot in the West, had been suddenly dis-missed from his post as military governor of Belgium and northern France.Someone, it was feared, must be giving them away. On July 17 theylearned that Rommel had been so seriously wounded that he would haveto be left out of their plans indefinitely. The next day Goerdeler wastipped off by his friends at police headquarters that Himmler had issued

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an order for his arrest. At Stauffenberg’s insistence Goerdeler went, pro-testing, into hiding. That same day a personal friend in the Navy, CaptainAlfred Kranzfelder, one of the very few naval officers in on the conspiracy,informed Stauffenberg that rumors were spreading in Berlin that theFuehrer’s headquarters were to be blown up in the next few days. Againit seemed that someone in the conspiracy must have been indiscreet.Everything pointed to the Gestapo’s closing in on the inner ring of theconspiracy.

On the afternoon of July 19 Stauffenberg was again summoned toRastenburg, to report to Hitler on the progress being made with the newVolksgrenadier divisions which the Replacement Army was hurriedlytraining to be thrown in on the dissolving Eastern front. He was to makehis report at the first daily conference at Fuehrer headquarters the nextday, July 20, a 1 p.m.* Field Marshal von Witzleben and General Hoep-ner, who lived some distance outside Berlin, were notified by Stauffenbergto appear in the city in good time. General Beck made his last-minutepreparations for directing the coup until Stauffenberg could return by airfrom his murderous deed. The key officers in the garrisons in and aroundBerlin were apprised that July 20 would be Der Tag.

Stauffenberg worked at the Bendlerstrasse on his report for Hitler untildusk, leaving his office shortly after 8 o’clock for his home at Wannsee. Onhis way he stopped off at a Catholic church in Dahlem to pray.f He spentthe evening at home quietly with his brother, Berthold, and retired early.Everyone who saw him that afternoon and evening remembered that hewas 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, LieutenantWerner von Haeften, drove out past the bombed-out buildings of Berlin tothe airport at Rangsdorf. In his bulging briefcase were papers concerningthe new Volksgrenadier divisions on which at 1 p.m. he was to report toHitler at the “Wolfs Lair” at Rastenburg in East Prussia. In between thepapers, wrapped in a shirt, was a time bomb.

* 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 heinquired at OKW whether the Replacement Army had any troops in training inPoland which might be thrown into the Eastern front. Keitel suggested that Stauffen-berg be summoned the next day to advise them. (Heusinger, Befehl im Widerstreit,p. 350.)

t 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 Stauffen-berg had told the Bishop of Berlin, Cardinal Count Preysing, of what he intended todo, and that the bishop had replied that he honored the young man’s motives anddid not feel justified in attempting to restrain him on theological grounds. (Ibid.,p. 152.)

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It was identical to the one which Tresckow and Schlabrendorff hadplanted in the Fuehrer’s airplane the year before and which had failed toexplode. Of English make, as we have seen, it was set off by breaking aglass capsule, whose acid then ate away a small wire, which released thefiring pin against the percussion cap. The thickness of the wire governedthe time required to set off the explosion. On this morning the bomb wasfitted with the thinnest possible wire. It would dissolve in a bare tenminutes.

At the airport Stauffenberg met General Stieff, who had produced thebomb the night before. There they found a plane waiting, the personalcraft of General Eduard Wagner, the First Quartermaster General of theArmy and a ringleader in the plot, who had arranged to put it at their dis-posal for this all-important flight. By 7 o’clock the plane was off, landingat Rastenburg shortly after 10 a.m. Haeften instructed the pilot to beready 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 head-quarters, set in a gloomy, damp, heavily wooded area of East Prussia. Itwas 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, pillboxesand an electrified barbed-wire fence, and was patrolled day and night byfanatical S.S. troops. To get into the heavily guarded inner compound,where Hitler lived and worked, even the highest general had to have aspecial pass, good for one visit, and pass the personal inspection of S.S.Oberfuehrer Rattenhuber, Himmler’s chief of security and commander ofthe S.S. guard, or of one of his deputies. However, since Hitler himselfhad ordered Stauffenberg to report, he and Haeften, though they werestopped and their passes examined, had little trouble in getting throughthe three check points. After breakfast with Captain von Moellendorff,adjutant to the camp commander, Stauffenberg sought out General FritzFellgiebel, Chief of Signals at OKW.

Fellgiebel was one of the key men in the plot. Stauffenberg made surethat the General was ready to flash the news of the bombing to the con-spirators in Berlin so that action there could begin immediately. Fellgiebelwas then to isolate the Fuehrer headquarters by shutting off all telephone,telegraph and radio communications. No one was in such a perfect posi-tion to do this as the head of the OKW communications network, and theplotters counted themselves lucky to have won him over. He was indis-pensable to the success of the entire conspiracy.

After calling on General Buhle, the Army’s representative at OKW, todiscuss the affairs of the Replacement Army, Stauffenberg walked over toKeitel’s quarters, hung up his cap and belt in the anteroom and enteredthe office of the Chief of OKW. There he learned that he would have toact with more dispatch than he had planned. It was now a little after 12noon, and Keitel informed him that because Mussolini would be arrivingby train at 2:30 p.m. the Fuehrer’s first daily conference had been putforward from 1 p.m. to 12:30. The colonel, Keitel advised, must makehis report brief. Hitler wanted the meeting over early.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Before the bomb could go off? Stauffenberg must have wondered ifonce again, and on what was perhaps his last try, fate was robbing him ofsuccess. Apparently he had hoped too that this time the conference withHitler would be held in the Fuehrer’s underground bunker, where theblast from the bomb would be several times more effective than in one ofthe surface buildings. But Keitel told him the mee'.ing would be in theLagebaracke—the conference barracks.* This was far from being theflimsy wooden hut so often described. During the previous winter Hitlerhad had the original wooden structure reinforced with concrete wallseighteen inches thick to give protection against incendiary and splinteraerial bombs that might fall nearby. These heavy walls would add forceto Stauffenberg’s bomb.

He must soon set it to working. He had briefed Keitel on what he pro-posed to report to Hitler and toward the end had noticed the OKW Chiefglancing impatiently at his watch. A few minutes before 12:30 Keitelsaid they must leave for the conference immediately or they would belate. They emerged from his quarters, but before they had taken morethan a few steps Stauffenberg remarked that he had left his cap and belt inthe anteroom and quickly turned to go back for them before Keitel couldsuggest that his adjutant, a Lieutenant von John, who was walking along-side, should retrieve them for him.

In the anteroom Stauffenberg swiftly opened his briefcase, seized thetongs with the only three fingers he had, and broke the capsule. In just tenminutes, unless there was another mechanical failure, the bomb wouldexplode.

Keitel, as much a bully with his subordinates as he was a toady with hissuperiors, was aggravated at the delay and turned back to the building toshout to Stauffenberg to get a move on. They were late, he yelled. Stauf-fenberg apologized for the delay. Keitel no doubt realized that it took aman as maimed as the colonel a little extra time to put on his belt. As theywalked over to Hitler’s hut Stauffenberg seemed to be in a genial moodand Keitel’s petty annoyance—he had no trace of suspicion as yet—wasdissipated.

Nevertheless, as Keitel had feared, they were late. The conference hadalready begun. As Keitel and Stauffenberg entered the building the latterpaused for a moment in the entrance hall to tell the sergeant major incharge of the telephone board that he expected an urgent call from hisoffice in Berlin, that it would contain information he needed to bring his

* A number of writers have declared that Hitler’s daily military conferences atRastenburg usually took place in his underground bunker and that because of repairsbeing made to it and because of the hot, humid day, the meeting on July 20 wasshifted to the building aboveground. “This accidental change of place saved Hitler’slife, Bullock writes (Hitler, p. 681). It is to be doubted if there was any accidentalchange of place. The Lagebaracke, as its name implies, was, so far as I can makeout, the place where the daily conferences were usually held. Only in case ofthreatened air raids were the meetings adjourned to the underground bunker which,at that, would have been cooler on this sweltering day. (bee Zeller, Geist derFreiheit, p. 360, n.4.)

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report up to the minute (this was for Keitel’s ear), and that he was to besummoned immediately when the call came. This too, though it musthave seemed most unusual—even a field marshal would scarcely dare toleave the Nazi warlord’s presence until he had been dismissed or until theconference was over and the Supreme Commander had left first—did notarouse Keitel’s suspicions.

The two men entered the conference room. About four minutes hadticked by since Stauffenberg reached into his briefcase with his tongs andbroke 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 wideopen to catch the breezes on this hot, sultry day. So many open windowswould certainly reduce the effect of any bomb blast. In the middle of theroom 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 twolarge heavy supports, or socles, placed near the ends and extending tonearly the width of the table. This interesting construction was not withoutits effect on subsequent history.

When Stauffenberg entered the room, Hitler was seated at the center ofthe long side of the table, his back to the door. On his immediate rightwere General Heusinger, Chief of Operations and Deputy Chief of Staffof the Army, General Korten, Air Force Chief of Staff, and Colonel HeinzBrandt, Heusinger’s chief of staff. Keitel took his place immediately tothe left of the Fuehrer and next to him was General Jodi. There wereeighteen other officers of the three services and the S.S. standing aroundthe table, but Goering and Himmler were not among them. Only Hitler,playing with his magnifying glass—which he now needed to read the fineprint on the maps spread before him—and two stenographers wereseated.

Heusinger was in the midst of a lugubrious report on the latest break-through on the central Russian front and on the perilous position, as a con-sequence, of the German armies not only there but on the northern andsouthern fronts as well. Keitel broke in to announce the presence ofColonel von Stauffenberg and its purpose. Hitler glanced up at the one-armed colonel with a patch over one eye, greeted him curtly, and announcedthat before hearing his report he wanted to have done with Heusinger’s.

Stauffenberg thereupon took his place at the table between Korten andBrandt, 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 stoutoaken support. It was about six feet distant from the Fuehrer’s legs. Thetime was now 12:37. Five minutes to go. Heusinger continued to talk,pointing constantly to the situation map spread on the table. Hitler andthe officers kept bending over to study it.

No one seems to have noticed Stauffenberg stealing away. Except per-haps Colonel Brandt. This officer became so absorbed in what his Gen-eral was saying that he leaned over the table the better to see the map, dis-covered that Stauffenberg’s bulging briefcase was in his way, tried toshove it aside with his foot and finally reached down with one hand and

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

lifted it to the far side of the heavy table support, which now stood betweenthe bomb and Hitler.* This seemingly insignificant gesture probably savedthe Fuehrer s fife; it cost Brandt his. There was an inexplicable fate in-volved here. Colonel Brandt, it will be remembered, was the innocentofficer whom Tresckow had induced to carry a couple of “bottles ofbrandy” back on Hitler’s plane from Smolensk to Rastenburg on theevening of March 13, 1943, and he had done so without the faintest suspi-cion that they were in reality a bomb—the very make of bomb which hehad now unostentatiously moved farther away under the table from thewarlord. Its chemical had by this time almost completed the eating awayof 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 OKWChief wanted to indicate to Stauffenberg that he should make ready to re-port next. Perhaps he would need some aid in getting his papers out of hisbriefcase. But the young colonel, he saw to his extreme annoyance, wasnot there. Recalling what Stauffenberg had told the telephone operator oncoming in, Keitel slipped out of the room to retrieve this curiously behav-ing young officer.

Stauffenberg was not at the telephone. The sergeant at the board saidhe had hurriedly left the building. Nonplused, Keitel turned back to theconference room. Heusinger was concluding, at last, his report on theday s catastrophic situation. “The Russian,” he was saying, “is drivingwith strong forces west of the Duna toward the north. His spearheads arealready southwest of Dunaburg. If our army group around Lake Peipus isnot 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 Fellgie-bel 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 andthen at the conference barracks. He saw it go up with a roar in smoke andflame, as if, he said later, it had been hit directly by a 155-mm. shell. Bodiescame hurtling out of the windows, debris flew into the air. There was notthe slightest doubt in Stauffenberg’s excited mind that every single personin the conference room was dead or dying. He bade a hasty farewell toFellgiebel, who was now to telephone the conspirators in Berlin that theattempt had succeeded and then cut off communications until the plottersin the capital had taken over the city and proclaimed the new government.!

* 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.”

t A good many writers have contended that at this moment General Fellgiebel wasto have blown up the communications center and that his failure to do so wasdisastrous to the conspiracy. Thus Wheeler-Bennett (Nemesis, p. 643) writes that“General Fellgiebel failed lamentably in the execution of his task.” Since the variouscommunications centers were housed in several different underground bunkers,

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Stauffenberg’s next task was to get out of the Rastenburg headquarterscamp alive and quickly. The guards at the check points had seen or heardthe explosion at the Fuehrer’s conference hall and immediately closed allexits. At the first barrier, a few yards from Fellgiebel’s bunker, Stauffen-berg’s car was halted. He leaped out and demanded to speak with theduty officer in the guardroom. In the latter’s presence he telephonedsomeone—whom is not known—spoke briefly, hung up and turned to theofficer, saying, “Herr Leutnant, I am allowed to pass.”

This was pure bluff, but it worked, and apparently, after the lieutenanthad dutifully noted in his log: “12:44. Col. Stauffenberg passed throughword was sent along to the next check point to let the car through. At thethird and final barrier, it was more difficult. Here an alarm had alreadybeen received, the rail had been lowered and the guard doubled, and noone was to be permitted to enter or leave. Stauffenberg and his aide,Lieutenant Haeften, found their car blocked by a very stubborn sergeantmajor named Kolbe. Again Stauffenberg demanded the use of the tele-phone and rang up Captain von Moellendorff, adjutant to the camp com-mander. He complained that “because of the explosion,” the guard wouldnot let him through. “I’m in a hurry. General Fromm is waiting for me atthe airfield.” This also was bluff. Fromm was in Berlin, as Stauffenbergwell 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 himselfrang through to Moellendorff for confirmation. The captain gave it.28

The car then raced to the airport while Lieutenant Haeften hurriedlydismantled a second bomb that he had brought along in his briefcase, toss-ing out the parts on the side of the road, where they were later found bythe Gestapo. The airfield commandant had not yet received any alarm.The pilot had his engines warming up when the two men drove onto thefield. Within a minute or two the plane took off.

It was now shortly after 1 p.m. The next three hours must have seemedthe longest in Stauffenberg’s life. There was nothing he could do as theslow Heinkel plane headed west over the sandy, flat German plain but tohope that Fellgiebel had been able to get through to Berlin with the all-important signal, that his fellow plotters in the capital had swung imme-diately into action in taking over the city and sending out the preparedmessages to the military commanders in Germany and in the West, andthat his plane would not be forced down by alerted Luftwaffe fighters orby prowling Russian craft, which were increasingly active over East Prus-sia. His own plane had no long-distance radio which might have enabledhim to tune in on Berlin and hear the first thrilling broadcasts which heexpected the conspirators would be making before he landed. Nor, for

heavily guarded by S.S., it is most improbable that Stauffenberg’s plans ever calledfor blowing them up—an impossible task for the General. What Fellgiebel agreedto do was to shut off communication with the outside world for two or three hoursafter he had sent word to Berlin of the explosion. This, except for an unavoidablelapse or two, he did.

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this lack, could he himself communicate with his confederates in thecapital and give the signal that General Fellgiebel might not have beenable to flash.

His plane droned on through the early summer afternoon. It landed atRangsdorf at 3:45 p.m. and Stauffenberg, in high spirits, raced to thenearest telephone at the airfield to put through a call to General Olbrichtto learn exactly what had been accomplished in the fateful three hours onwhich all depended. To his utter consternation he found that nothing hadbeen accomplished. Word about the explosion had come through by tele-phone from Fellgiebel shortly after 1 o’clock but the connection was badand it was not quite clear to the conspirators whether Hitler had beenkilled or not. Therefore nothing had been done. The Valkyrie orders hadbeen taken from Olbricht’s safe but not sent out. Everyone in the Bend-lerstrasse had been standing idly by waiting for Stauffenberg’s return.General Beck and Field Marshal von Witzleben, who as the new head ofstate and Commander in Chief of the Wehrmacht, respectively, were sup-posed to have started issuing immediately the already-prepared proclama-tions and commands and to have gone on the air at once to broadcast thedawn of a new day in Germany, had not yet showed up.

Hitler, contrary to Stauffenberg’s firm belief, which he imparted to Ol-bricht on the telephone from Rangsdorf, had not been killed. ColonelBrandt’s almost unconscious act of shoving the briefcase to the far side ofthe stout oaken table support had saved his life. He had been badlyshaken but not severely injured. His hair had been singed, his legs burned,his right arm bruised and temporarily paralyzed, his eardrums puncturedand his back lacerated by a falling beam. He was, as one eyewitness laterrecalled, hardly recognizable as he emerged from the wrecked and burningbuilding on the arm of Keitel, his face blackened, his hair smoking and histrousers in shreds. Keitel, miraculously, was uninjured. But most of thosewho had been at the end of the table where the bomb had exploded wereeither dead, dying or badly wounded.*

In the first excitement there were several guesses as to the origin of theexplosion. Hitler thought at first it might have been caused by a sneakattack of an enemy fighter-bomber. Jodi, nursing a blood-spattered head

the chandelier, among other objects, had fallen on him—was convincedthat some of the building laborers had planted a time bomb under thefloor of the building. The deep hole which Stauffenberg’s bomb had blownin the floor seemed to confirm this. It was some time before the colonelbecame 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

* The official stenographer, Berger, was killed, and Colonel Brandt, GeneralSchmundt, Hitler s adjutant, and General Korten died of their wounds. All theothers, including Generals Jodi, Bodenschatz (Goering’s chief of staff) and Heu-singer, were more or less severely injured.

The Allied Invasion of Western Europe 1055

Nebe, the head of the criminal police in Berlin, to dispatch by plane asquad of detectives to carry out the investigation.

In the confusion and shock no one at first remembered that Stauffenberghad slipped out of the conference room shortly before the explosion. Itwas at first believed that he must have been in the building and was one ofthose severely hurt who had been rushed to the hospital. Hitler, not yetsuspicious of him, asked that the hospital be checked.

Some two hours after the bomb went off the clues began to come in. Thesergeant who operated the telephone board at the Lagebaracke reportedthat “the one-eyed colonel,” who had informed him he was expecting along-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 theparticipants at the conference recalled that Stauffenberg had left his brief-case under the table. The guardhouses at the check points revealed thatStauffenberg and his aide had passed through immediately after the ex-plosion.

Hitler’s suspicions were now kindled. A call, to the airfield at Rasten-burg supplied the interesting information that Stauffenberg had taken offfrom there in great haste shortly after 1 p.m., giving as his destination theairport at Rangsdorf. Himmler immediately ordered that he be arrestedon landing there, but his order never got through to Berlin because ofFellgiebel’s courageous action in closing down communications. Up tothis minute no one at headquarters seems to have suspected that anythinguntoward might be happening in Berlin. All now believed that Stauffen-berg had acted alone. It would not be difficult to apprehend him unless, assome suspected, he had landed behind the Russian lines. Hitler, who,under the circumstances, seems to have behaved calmly enough, hadsomething else on his mind. He had to greet Mussolini, who was due toarrive at 4 p.m., his train having been delayed.

There is something weird and grotesque about this last meeting of thetwo fascist dictators on the afternoon of July 20, 1944, as they surveyedthe ruins of the conference hall and tried to fool themselves into thinkingthat the Axis which they had forged, and which was to have dominatedthe continent of Europe, was not also in shambles. The once proud andstrutting Duce was now no more than a Gauleiter of Lombardy, rescuedfrom 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 hadnever faltered and he greeted him with as much warmth as his physicalcondition permitted, showed him through the still smoking debris of theLagebaracke 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 athing could happen at Headquarters. . . .

iu;)0 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

“I was standing here by this table [Hitler recounted]; the bomb went offjust in front of my feet ... It is obvious that nothing is going to happen tome; undoubtedly it is my fate to continue on my way and bring my task tocompletion . . . What happened here today is the climax! Having nowescaped death ... I am more than ever convinced that the great cause whichI serve will be brought through its present perils and that everything can bebrought 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 whathas happened here today gives me new courage. After [this] miracle it isinconceivable that our cause should meet with misfortune.”

The two dictators, with their entourages, then went to tea, and therenow 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 momentof one of the supreme crises in the Third Reich. By this time the com-munications system of Rastenburg had been restored by the direct orderof Hitler and the first reports from Berlin had begun to come in indicatingthat a military revolt had broken out there and perhaps one on theWestern front. Mutual recriminations, long suppressed, broke out betweenthe Fuehrer’s captains, their shouting echoing through the rafters thoughat first Hitler himself sat silent and brooding while Mussolini blushed withembarrassment.

Admiral Doenitz, who had rushed by air to Rastenburg at the news ofthe attentat and arrived after the tea party had begun, lashed out at thetreachery of the Army. Goering, on behalf of the Air Force, supportedhim. Then Doenitz lit on Goering for the disastrous failures of theLuftwaffe, and the fat Reich Marshal, after defending himself, attackedhis pet hate, Ribbentrop, for the bankruptcy of Germany’s foreign policy,at one point threatening to smack the arrogant Foreign Minister with hismarshal s baton. ‘‘You dirty little champagne salesman! Shut yourdamned mouth!” Goering cried, but this was impossible for Ribbentrop,who demanded a little respect, even from the Reich Marshal. “I am stillthe Foreign Minister,” he shouted, “and my name is von Ribbentrop!”*

Then someone brought up the subject of an earlier “revolt” against theNazi regime, the Roehm “plot” of June 30, 1934. Mention of this arousedHitler—who had been sitting morosely sucking brightly colored medicinalpills 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

■ Ribbentrop had been a champagne salesman and then had married the daughterot Germany’s leading producer of the wine. His “von” had come through adoptionby an aunt—Fraulem Gertrud von Ribbentrop—in 1925, when he was thirty-twoyears old. 1

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and raged. What he had done with Roehm and his treasonable followerswas nothing, he shouted, to what he would do to the traitors of this day.He would uproot them all and destroy (hem. “I’ll put their wives and chil-dren 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 Berlinbegan to bring further details of a military uprising, Hitler broke off hismad monologue, but his temper did not subside. He saw Mussolini off tohis train—it was their final parting—and returned to his quarters. Whentold at about 6 o’clock that the putsch had not yet been squelched, hegrabbed the telephone and shrieked orders to the S.S. in Berlin to shooteveryone who was the least suspect. “Where’s Himmler? Why is he notthere!” he yelled, forgetful that only an hour before, as his party sat downto tea, he had ordered the S.S. chief to fly to Berlin and ruthlessly put downthe rebellion, and that his master policeman could not possibly havearrived as yet.30

The long and carefully prepared rebellion in Berlin had, as Stauffenberglearned to his dismay when he landed at Rangsdorf at 3:45 p.m., got offto a slow start. Three precious, vital hours, during which the Fuehrerheadquarters had been shut off from the outside world, had been lost.

Stauffenberg, for the life of him, could not understand why, nor can ahistorian trying to reconstitute the events of this fateful day. The weatherwas hot and sultry, and perhaps this had a certain effect. Though the chiefconspirators had known that Stauffenberg had left for Rastenburg thatmorning “heavily laden,” as General Hoepner was informed, to attend the1 p.m. Fuehrer conference, only a few of them, and these mostly juniorofficers, began to drift leisurely into the headquarters of the ReplacementArmy—and of the plot—in the Bendlerstrasse toward noon. On Stauffen-berg’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 startmarching 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 thatthey would most probably be receiving the Valkyrie orders on thetwentieth. But Olbricht decided to wait until definite word had come fromFellgiebel at Rastenburg before again setting his troops in motion. Gen-eral Hoepner, with the uniform which Hitler had forbade him to wear inhis suitcase, arrived at the Bendlerstrasse at thirty minutes past noon-—atthe very moment Stauffenberg was breaking the capsule of his bomb—andhe and Olbricht went out for lunch, where they toasted the success of theirenterprise with a half bottle of wine.

They had not been back in Olbricht’s office very long when GeneralFritz Thiele, chief signals officer of OKH, burst in. He had just been onthe telephone to Fellgiebel, he said excitedly, and though the line was badand Fellgiebel was very guarded in what he said, it seemed that the ex-

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

plosion had taken place but that Hitler had not been killed. In that caseThiele concluded that the Valkyrie orders should not be issued. Olbrichtand Hoepner agreed.

So between approximately 1:15 p.m. and 3:45, when Stauffenberg setdown at Rangsdorf and hurried to the telephone, nothing was done. Notroops were assembled, no orders were sent out to the military commandsin other cities and, perhaps strangest of all, no one thought of seizing theradio 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. Onthe telephone from Rangsdorf he urged General Olbricht not to wait untilhe had reached the Bendlerstrasse—the trip in from the airfield would takeforty-five minutes but to start Valkyrie going at once. The plottersfinally had someone to give orders—without such, a German officer seemedlost, even a rebellious one, even on this crucial day—and they beean toact. Colonel Mertz von Quirnheim, Olbricht’s chief of s'aff and a"closefriend of Stauffenberg, fetched the Valkyrie orders and began to dispatchthem by teleprinter and telephone. The first one alerted the troops in andaround Berlin, and a second one, signed by Witzleben as “Commander inChief of the Wehrmacht” and countersigned by Count von Stauffenberg—they had been drawn up months before—announced that the Fuehrer wasdead and that Witzleben was “transferring executive power” to the Armydistrict commanders at home and to the commanders in chief of ;he fight-ing armies at the front. Field Marshal von Witzleben had not yet arrivedat the Bendlerstrasse. He had got as far as Zossen, twenty miles southeastof Berlin, where he was conferring with the First Quartermaster General,Wagner. He was sent for, as was General Beck. The two senior generalsin 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 com-mander of the Replacement Army, told him that Fellgiebel had reportedthat Hitler had been assassinated and urged him to take charge ofValkyrie and assure the internal security of the State. Fromm’s orders,the conspirators realized, would be obeyed automatically. He was veryimportant to them at this moment. But Fromm, like Kluge, was a geniusat straddling; he was not the man to jump until he saw where he waslanding. He wanted definite proof that Hitler was dead before decidingwhat to do.

At this point Olbricht made another one of the disastrous mistakes com-mitted by the plotters that day. He was sure from what Stauffenberg hadtold him on the telephone from Rangsdorf that the Fuehrer was dead. Healso knew that Fellgiebel had succeeded in blocking the telephone lines toRastenburg 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 Olbrichtdid not know this—Keitel was almost instantly on the line.

The Allied Invasion of Western Europe 1059

Fromm: What has happened at General Headquarters? Wild rumors areafloat 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, butfortunately 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 con-sequences which would soon prove catastrophic. Olbricht, momentarilystunned, slipped out of the office without a word. At this moment GeneralBeck arrived, attired in a dark civilian suit—perhaps this was a gesturetoward playing down the military nature of the revolt—to take charge.But the man really in charge, as everyone soon realized, was Colonel vonStauffenberg, who, hatless and out of breath, bounded up the stairs of theold War Ministry at 4:30 p.m. He reported briefly on the explosion, whichhe emphasized he had seen himself from a couple of hundred yards away.When Olbricht interjected that Keitel himself had just been on the phoneand sworn that Hitler was only slightly wounded, Stauffenberg answeredthat 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 wasonly one thing they could now do: use every minute to overthrow the Naziregime. 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 hisevil rule.

The trouble was that after the fateful delay and in the present confusionthey did not, for all their planning, know how to go ahead. Not even whenGeneral Thiele brought word that the news of Hitler’s survival was shortlyto be broadcast over the German national radio network does it seem tohave occurred to the conspirators that the first thing they had to do, andat once, was to seize the broadcasting central, block the Nazis from gettingtheir word out, and begin flooding the air with their own proclamations ofa new government. If troops were not yet at hand to accomplish this, theBerlin police could have done it. Count von Helldorf, the chief of policeand deep in the conspiracy, had been waiting impatiently since middayto swing into action with his sizable and already alerted forces. But no callhad come and finally at 4 o’clock he had driven over to the Bendlerstrasseto see what had happened. He was told by Olbricht that his police wouldbe under the orders of the Army. But as yet there was no rebel army—only bewildered officers milling about at headquarters without any soldiersto command.

Instead of seeing to this at once Stauffenberg put in an urgent telephonecall to his cousin, Lieutenant Colonel Caesar von Hofacker, at General vonStuelpnagel’s headquarters in Paris, urging the conspirators to get busythere. This was of the utmost importance, to be sure, since the plot had

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been better organized in France and was supported by more importantArmy officers than in any other place save Berlin. Actually Stuelpnagelwas to show more energy than his fellow generals at the center of therevolt. 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 ofenergy been shown in Berlin that afternoon, history might have taken adifferent turn.

Having alerted Paris, Stauffenberg next turned his attention to thestubborn Fromm, whose chief of staff he was, and whose refusal to goalong with the rebels after he had learned from Keitel that Hitler was alivewas seriously jeopardizing the success of the plot. Beck had no stomachto quarrel with Fromm so early in the game and excused himself fromjoining Stauffenberg and Olbricht, who went to see him. Olbricht toldFromm that Stauffenberg could confirm Hitler’s death.

“That is impossible,” Fromm snapped. “Keitel has assured me to thecontrary.”

“Keitel is lying, as usual,” Stauffenberg put in. “I myself saw Hitler’sbody being carried out.”

This word from his chief of staff and an eyewitness gave Fromm foodfor thought and for a moment he said nothing. But when Olbricht, tryingto take advantage of his indecision, remarked that, at any rate, the codeword for Valkyrie had already been sent out, Fromm sprang to his feetand shouted, “This is rank insubordination! Who issued the order?” Whentold that Colonel Mertz von Quirnheim had, he summoned this officerand told him he was under arrest.

Stauffenberg made one last effort to win his chief over. “General,” hesaid, “I myself set off the bomb at Hitler’s conference. The explosion wasas if a fifteen-millimeter shell had hit. No one in that room can still bealive.”

But Fromm was too ingenious a trimmer to be bluffed. “CountStauffenberg,” he answered, “the attempt has failed. You must shootyourself at once.” Stauffenberg coolly declined. In a moment Fromm, abeefy, 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 nowgoing 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 hisadjutant, where Major Ludwig von Leonrod was assigned to guard him.*The rebels took the precaution of cutting the telephone wires in the room.

* A few weeks before, Leonrod had asked an Army chaplain friend of his. FatherHermann Wehrle, whether the Catholic Church condoned tyrannicide and had beengiven a negative answer. When this came out in Leonrod’s trial before the People’sCourt, Father Wehrle was arrested for not having told the authorities and, likeLeonrod, was executed.

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Stauffenberg returned to his office to find that Oberfuehrer Piffraeder,an S.S. ruffian who had distinguished himself recently by superintendingthe exhuming and destroying of 221,000 bodies of Jews murdered by theEinsatzgruppen in the Baltic regions before the advancing Russians gotto them, had come to arrest him. Piffraeder and his two S.D. plain-clothesmen were locked up in an adjacent empty office. Then General vonKortzfleisch, 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 toOlbricht, with whom he refused to speak. Beck then received him, andwhen Kortzfleisch proved adamant he too was locked up. General vonThuengen, as planned, was appointed to replace him.

Piffraeder’s appearance reminded Stauffenberg that the conspiratorshad forgotten to place a guard around the building. So a detachment fromthe Guard Battalion Grossdeutschland, which was supposed to be onguard 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 thatwas all of Berlin they were in control of. What had happened to the Armytroops that were supposed to occupy the capital and secure it for the newanti-Nazi government?

A little after 4 p.m., when the conspirators had finally come to lifefollowing Stauffenberg’s return, General von Hase, the Berlin comman-dant, telephoned the commander of the crack Guard Battalion Gross-deutschland at Doeberitz and instructed him to alert his unit and himselfto report at once to the Kommandantur on the Unter den Linden. Thebattalion commander, recently appointed, was Major Otto Remer, whowas to play a key role this day, though not the one the plotters had countedon. They had investigated him, since his battalion had been allotted anall-important task, and satisfied themselves that he was a nonpoliticalofficer who would obey the orders of his immediate superiors. Of hisbravery there could be no doubt. He had been wounded eight times andhad recently received from the hand of Hitler himself the Knight’s Crosswith Oak Leaves—a rare distinction.

Remer alerted his battalion, as instructed, and sped into the city toreceive his specific orders from Hase. The General told him of Hitler’sassassination and of an attempted S.S. putsch and instructed him to sealoff the ministries in the Wilhelmstrasse and the S.S. Security Main Officein the nearby Anhalt Station quarter. By 5:30 p.m. Remer, acting withdispatch, had done so and reported back to Unter den Linden for furtherorders.

And now another minor character nudged himself into the drama andhelped Remer to become the nemesis of the conspiracy. A LieutenantDr. Hans Hagen, a highly excitable and self-important young man, hadbeen posted as National Socialist guidance officer to Remer’s guard bat-talion. He also worked for Dr. Goebbels at the Propaganda Ministry andat the moment was actually stationed at Bayreuth where he had been sent

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by the Minister to work on a book which Martin Bormann, Hitler’ssecretary, wanted written—a “History of National Socialist Culture.” Hispresence in Berlin was quite fortuitous. He had come to deliver a memo-rial address in tribute to an obscure writer who had fallen at the front andhe sought to take advantage of his visit by also delivering a lecture thatafternoon to his battalion—though it was a hot and sultry day—on “Na-tional Socialist Guidance Questions.” He had a passion for publicspeaking.

On his way to Doeberitz the excitable lieutenant was sure he saw FieldMarshal von Brauchitsch in a passing Army car attired in full uniform,and it immediately occurred to him that the old generals must be up tosomething treasonable. Brauchitsch, who had been booted out of hiscommand long before by Hitler, was not in Berlin that day, in uniform orout, but Hagen swore he had seen him. He spoke of his suspicions toRemer, with whom he happened to be talking when the major received hisorders to occupy the Wilhelmstrasse. The orders kindled his suspicionsand he persuaded Remer to give him a motorcycle and sidecar, in whichhe promptly raced to the Propaganda Ministry to alert Goebbels.

The Minister had just received his first telephone call from Hitler, whotold him of the attempt on his life and instructed him to get on the air assoon as possible and announce that it had failed. This seems to have beenthe first news the usually alert Propaganda Minister had of what hadoccurred at Rastenburg. Hagen soon brought him up to date on what wasabout to happen in Berlin. Goebbels was at first skeptical—he regardedHagen as somewhat of a nuisance—and, according to one version, wason the point of throwing his visitor out when the lieutenant suggested hego to the window and see for himself. What he saw was more convincingthan Hagen’s hysterical words. Army troops were taking up posts aroundthe ministry. Goebbels, who though a stupid man was extremely quick-witted, told Hagen to send Remer to him at once. This Hagen did, andthereupon passed out of history.

Thus while the conspirators in the Bendlerstrasse were getting in touchwith generals all over Europe and giving no thought to such a junior officeras Remer, indispensable as his job was, Goebbels was getting in touchwith the man who, however low in rank, mattered most at this particularmoment.

The contact was inevitable, for in the meantime Remer had been orderedto arrest the Propaganda Minister. Thus the major had an order to nabGoebbels and also a message from Goebbels inviting him to see him.Remer entered the Propaganda Ministry with twenty men, whom heinstructed to fetch him if he did not return from the Minister’s officewithin a few minutes. With drawn pistols he and his adjutant then wentinto the office to arrest the most important Nazi official in Berlin on thatday.

Among the talents which had enabled Joseph Goebbels to rise to hiseminence 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

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reminded the young major of his oath of allegiance to the Commander inChief. Remer retorted crisply that Hitler was dead. Goebbels said thatthe Fuehrer was very much alive-—he had just talked with him on thetelephone. He would prove it. Whereupon he picked up the phone andput in an urgent call to the Commander in Chief at Rastenburg. Oncemore the failure of the conspirators to seize the Berlin telephone exchangeor at least cut its wires compounded disaster.* Within the matter of aminute or two Hitler was on the line. Goebbels quickly handed his tele-phone to Remer. Did the major recognize his voice? asked the warlord.Who in Germany could fail to recognize that husky voice, since it hadbeen heard on the radio hundreds of times? Moreover, Remer had heardit directly a few weeks before when he received his decoration from theFuehrer. The major, it is said, snapped to attention. Hitler commandedhim to crush the uprising and obey only the commands of Goebbels,Himmler, who he said had just been named the commander of the Re-placement Army and who was en route by plane to Berlin, and GeneralReinecke, who happened to be in the capital and had been ordered to takeover the command of all troops in the city. The Fuehrer also promotedthe major forthwith to colonel.

This was enough for Remer. He had received orders from on high andhe proceeded with an energy which was lacking in the Bendlerstrasse tocarry them out. He withdrew his battalion from the Wilhelmstrasse,occupied the Kommandantur in the Unter den Linden, sent out patrols tohalt any other troops that might be marching on the city and himself setout to find where the headquarters of the conspiracy was so that he couldarrest the ringleaders.

Why the rebelling generals and colonels entrusted such a key role toRemer in the first place, why they did not replace him at the last momentwith an officer who was heart and soul behind the conspiracy, why atleast they did not send a dependable officer along with the guard ba'talionto see that Remer obeyed orders—these are among the many riddles ofJuly 20. But then, why was not Goebbels, the most important and themost dangerous Nazi official present in Berlin, arrested at once? A coupleof Count von Helldorfs policemen could have done this in two minutes,for the Propaganda Ministry was completely unguarded. But why thendid the plotters not seize the Gestapo headquarters in the Prinz Albrecht-strasse and not only suppress the secret police but liberate a number oftheir fellow conspirators, including Leber, who were incarcerated there?The Gestapo headquarters were virtually unguarded, as was the centraloffice of the R.S.H.A., the nerve center of the S.D. and S.S., which, onewould have thought, would be among the first places to be occupied. Itis impossible to answer these questions.

Remer’s quick turnabout did not become known in the Bendlerstrasse

* “To think that these revolutionaries weren’t even smart enough to cut the telephonewires!” Goebbels is said to have exclaimed afterward. “My little daughter wouldhave thought of that.” (Curt Riess, Joseph Goebbels: The Devil's Advocate, p. 280.)

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headquarters for some time. Apparently very little of what was happeningin Berlin became known there until too late. And it is difficult even todayto find out, for the eyewitness reports are filled with bewildering contradic-tions. Where were the tanks, where were the troops from the outlyingstations?

A brief announcement broadcast shortly after 6:30 p.m. over theDeutschlandsender, a radio station with such a powerful transmitter thatit could be heard all over Europe, announcing that there had been anat empt to kill Hitler but that it had failed, came as a severe blow to theharried men in the Bendlerstrasse, but it was a warning that the detach-ment of troops which was supposed to have occupied the Rundfunkhaushad failed to do so. Goebbels had been able to telephone the text of theannouncement to broadcasting headquarters while he was waiting forRemer. At a quarter to seven Stauffenberg sent out a signal by teleprinterto the Army commanders, saying that the radio announcement was falseand that Hitler was dead. But the damage (o the putschists was almostirreparable. The commanding generals in Prague and Vienna, who hadalready proceeded to arrest the S.S. and Nazi Party leaders, began tobacktrack. Then at 8:20 p.m. Keitel managed to get out by Army tele-printer to all Army commands a message from Fuehrer headquartersannouncing that Himmler had been appointed chief of the ReplacementArmy and that “only orders from him and myself are to be obeyed.”Keitel added, “Any orders issued by Fromm, Witzleben or Hoepner areinvalid.” The Deutschlandsender’s announcement that Hitler was aliveand Keitel’s crisp order that only his commands and not those of the con-spirators were to be obeyed had, as we shall see, a decisive effect uponField Marshal von Kluge, who off in France was on the point of throwingin his lot with the conspirators.*

Even the tanks, on which the rebel officers had counted so much, failedto arrive. It might have been thought that Hoepner, an outstanding panzergeneral, would have seen to the tanks, but he did not get around to it. The

* There are conflicting stories as to why the Berlin radio was not seized. Accordingto one account, a unit from the infantry school at Doeberitz had been assigned thistask, which was to be carried out by the commandant, General Hitzfeld, who wasin 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-com-mand, a Colonel Mueller, was also away on a military assignment. When Muellerfinally returned about 8 p.m. he found that his best battalion had left for a nightexercise. By the time he rounded up his troops at midnight, it was too late. Accord-ing to a different story, a Major Jacob succeeded in surrounding the Rundfunkhauswith troops from the infantry school but could get no clear orders from Olbricht asto what to do. When Goebbels phoned the text of the first announcement Jacobdid not interfere with its being broadcast. Later the major contended that ifOlbricht had given him the necessary orders the German radio network couldeasily have been denied the Nazis and put at the service of the conspirators. Thefirst version is given by Zeller (Geisl der Freiheit, pp. 267-68), the most authoritativeGerman historian on the July 20 plot; the second is given by Wheeler-Bennett(Nemesis, pp. 654-55n.) and Rudolf Sammler (Goebbels; The Man Next to Hitler,p. 138), both of whom say Major Jacob gave the above testimony.

commandant of the panzer school at Krampnitz, which was to supply thetanks, Colonel Wolfgang Glaesemer, had been ordered by the conspiratorsto start his vehicles rolling into the city and himself to report to theBendlerstrasse for further instructions. But the tank colonel wanted nopart in any military putsch against the Nazis, and Olbricht, after pleadingwith him in vain, had to lock him up too in the building. Glaesemer, how-ever, was able to whisper to his adjutant, who was not arrested, instruc-tions to inform the headquarters of the Inspectorate of Panzer Troops inBerlin, which had jurisdiction over the tank formations, of what had hap-pened and to see to it that only the inspectorate’s commands were obeyed.

Thus it happened that the badly needed tanks, though some of themreached the heart of the city at the Victory Column in the Tiergarten, weredenied the rebels. Colonel Glaesemer escaped from his confinement by aruse, telling his guards that he had decided to accept Olbricht’s orders andwould himself take command of the tanks, whereupon he slipped out ofthe building. The tanks were soon withdrawn from the city.

The panzer colonel was not the only officer to slip away from thehaphazard and gentlemanly confinement imposed on those who would notjoin the conspiracy—a circumstance which contributed to the swift endof the revolt.

Field Marshal von Witzleben, when he finally arrived in full uniformand waving his baton shortly before 8 p.m. to take over his duties as thenew Commander in Chief of the Wehrmacht, seems to have realized atonce that the putsch had failed. He stormed at Beck and Stauffenbergfor having bungled the whole affair. At his trial he told the court that itwas obvious to him that the attempt had misfired when he learned that noteven the broadcasting headquarters had been occupied. But he himselfhad done nothing to help at a time when his authority as a field marshalmight have rallied more of the troop commanders in Berlin and abroad.Forty-five minutes after he had entered the Bendlerstrasse building hestamped out of it—and out of the conspiracy, now that it seemed certainto fail—drove his Mercedes back to Zossen, where he had whiled awaythe seven hours that were decisive that day, told Quartermaster GeneralWagner that the revolt had failed, and drove on to his country estate thirtymiles beyond, where he was arrested the next day by a fellow Generalnamed Linnertz.

The curtain now went up on the last act.

Shortly after 9 p.m. the frustrated conspira ors were struck dumb athearing the Deutschlandsender announce that the Fuehrer would broad-cast to the German people later in the evening. A few minutes afterwardit was learned that General von Hase, the Berlin commandant, who hadstarted Major—now Colonel—Remer on his fateful errand, had beenarrested and that the Nazi General, Reinecke, backed by the S.S., hadtaken over command of a 11 troops in Berlin and was preparing to stormthe Bendlerstrasse.

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The S.S. had at last rallied, thanks mostly to Otto Skorzeny, the toughS.S. leader who had shown his prowess in rescuing Mussolini fromcaptivity. Unaware that anything was up that day Skorzeny had boardedthe night express for Vienna at 6 p.m., but had been hauled off the trainwhen it stopped at the suburb of Lichterfelde, at the urging of S.S. GeneralSchellenberg, the Number Two man in the S.D. Skorzeny found the un-guarded S.D. headquarters in a most hysterical state, but being the cold-blooded man he was, and a good organizer to boot, he quickly rounded uphis armed bands and went to work. It was he who first persuaded the tankschool formations to remain loyal to Hitler.

The energetic counteraction at Rastenburg, the quick thinking of Goeb-bels in winning over Remer and in utilizing the radio, the revival of theS.S. in Berlin and the unbelievable confusion and inaction of the rebels inthe Bendlerstrasse caused a good many Army officers who had been onthe point of throwing in their lot with the conspirators, or had even doneso, to think belter of it. One of these was General Otto Herfurth, chief ofstaff to the arrested Kortzfleisch, who at first had co-operated with theBendlerstrasse in trying to round up the troops, and then, when he sawhow things were going, changed sides, ringing up Hitler’s headquartersaround 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 jeopardyfrom the beginning and who, as a result, had been arrested, now bestirredhimself. About 8 p.m., after four hours of confinement in his adjutant’soffice, he had asked to be allowed to retire to his private quarters on thefloor below. He had given his word of honor as an officer that he wouldmake no attempt to escape or to establish contact with the outside. Gen-eral Hoepner had consented and moreover, since Fromm had complainedthat he was not only hungry but thirsty, had sent him sandwiches and abottle 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 theirchief. Inexplicably, they were taken to him in his private quarters, thoughput under arrest. They had no sooner arrived than Fromm told them ofa little-used rear exit through which they could escape. Breaking his wordto 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 hadeither gone along with the rebels or stuck around in the Bendlerstrasse tosee how the revolt would go, had begun to sense that it was failing. Theyhad begun to realize too, as one of them later said, that they would all behanged as traitors if the revolt failed and they had not turned against it intime. One of them, Lieutenant Colonel Franz Herber, a former policeofficer and a convinced Nazi, had fetched some Tommy guns and ammuni-tion from the arsenal of Spandau, and these were secreted on the secondfloor. About 10:30, these officers called upon Olbricht and demanded to

* ^'s treachery did not prevent his being arrested for complicity in the plot andhanged for it. r

know exactly what he and his friends were trying to accomplish. TheGeneral told them, and without arguing they withdrew.

Twenty minutes later they returned—six or eight of them, led by Herberand Lieutenant Colonel Bodo von der Heyde—brandishing their weaponsand demanded further explanations from Olbricht. Staulfenberg looked into 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—theonly one he had. The counterrebels began shooting wildly, though ap-parently not hitting anyone except Stauffenberg. They then roved throughthe wing which had been the headquarters of the plot, rounding up theconspirators. Beck, Hoepner, Olbricht, Stauffenberg, Haeften and Mertzwere herded into Fromm’s vacated office, where Fromm himself shortlyappeared, brandishing a revolver.

“Well, gentlemen,” he said, “I am now going to treat you as you treatedme.” But he didn’t.

“Lay down your weapons,” he commanded, and informed his formercaptors 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 consequencesfrom this unhappy situation myself.”

“Well, keep it pointed at yourself,” Fromm warned.

The curious lack of will to act of this brilliant, civilized former GeneralStaff 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 dosomething.”

Beck did. He pulled the trigger, but the bullet merely scratched hishead. He slumped into his chair, bleeding a little.

“Help the old gentleman,” Fromm commanded two young officers, butwhen they tried to take the weapon Beck objected, asking for anotherchance. Fromm nodded his consent.

Then he turned to the rest of the plotters. “And you gentlemen, if youhave any letters to write I’ll give you a few more minutes.” Olbricht andHoepner asked for stationery and sat down to pen brief notes of farewellto their wives. Stauffenberg, Mertz, Haeften and the others stood theresilently. Fromm marched out of the room.

He had quickly made up his mind to eliminate these men and not only tocover up the traces—for though he had refused to engage actively in theplot, he had known of it for months, sheltering the assassins and not report-ing their plans—but to curry favor with Hitler as the man who put downthe 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 theFuehrer” he had called a session of a “court-martial” (there is noevidence that he had) and that it had pronounced death sentences on fom

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officers: “Colonel of the General Staff Mertz, General Olbricht, thiscolonel whose name I no longer know [Stauifenberg], and this lieutenant[Haeften].”

The two generals, Olbricht and Hoepner, were still scratching theirletters to their wives. General Beck lay sprawled in his chair, his facesmeared with blood from the bullet scratch. The four officers “con-demned” to death stood like ramrods, silent.

“Well, gentlemen,” Fromm said to Olbricht and Hoepner, “are youready? I must ask you to hurry so as not to make it too difficult for theothers.”

Hoepner finished his letter and laid it on the table. Olbricht asked foran envelope, put his letter in it and sealed it. Beck, now beginning to cometo, asked for another pistol. Stauffenberg, the sleeve of his wounded goodarm soaked in blood, and his three “condemned” companions were ledout. Fromm told Hoepner to follow him.

In the courtyard below in the dim rays of the blackout-hooded head-lights of an Army car the four officers were quickly dispatched by a firingsquad. Eyewitnesses say there was much tumult and shouting, mostly bythe guards, who were in a hurry because of the danger of a bombingattack—British planes had been over Berlin almost every night thatsummer. 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 thePeople’s Court.

“Well, Hoepner [Fromm said], this business really hurts me. We used tobe good friends and comrades, you know. You’ve got yourself mixed up inthis thing and must take the consequences. Do you want to go the same wayas Beck? Otherwise I shall have to arrest you now.”

Hoepner answered that he did “not feel so guilty” and that he thoughthe could “justify” himself.

“I understand that,” Fromm answered, shaking his hand. Hoepner wascarted off to the military prison at Moabit.

As he was being taken away he heard Beck’s tired voice through thedoor 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 himselffailed. Fromm poked his head in the door and once more told an officer,“Help the old gentleman.” This unknown officer declined to give thecoup de grace, leaving that to a sergeant, who dragged Beck, unconsciousfrom the second wound, outside the room and finished him off with a shotin the neck.33

It was now sometime after midnight. The revolt, the only serious oneever 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 theBendlerstrasse with a band of armed S.S. men, forbade any more execu-

The Allied Invasion of Western Europe 1069

lions—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 onthe Prinz Albrechtstrasse and put detectives to work collecting incriminat-ing papers which the conspirators had not had time to destroy. Himmler,who had reached Berlin a little earlier and set up temporary headquartersin Goebbels’ ministry, now protected by part of Remer’s guard battalion,telephoned Hitler and reported that the revolt had been crushed. In EastPrussia a radio van was racing from Koenigsberg to Rastenburg so thatthe Fuehrer could make his long-heralded broadcast which the Deutsch-landsender had been promising every few minutes since 9 p.m.

Just before 1 a.m. Adolf Hitler’s hoarse voice burst upon the summernight’s air.

My German comrades!

If I speak to you today it is first in order that you should hear my voice andshould know that I am unhurt and well, and secondly, that you should knowof a crime unparalleled in German history.

A very small clique of ambitious, irresponsible and, at the same time, sense-less 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 tothe right of me. It seriously wounded a number of my true and loyal col-laborators, one of whom has died. I myself am entirely unhurt, aside fromsome very minor scratches, bruises and burns. I regard this as a confirmationof the task imposed upon me by Providence

The circle of these usurpers is very small and has nothing in common withthe spirit of the German Wehrmacht and, above all, none with the German

people. It is a gang of criminal elements which will be destroyed withoutmercy.

I therefore give orders now that no military authority ... is to obeyorders from this crew of usurpers. I also order that it is everyone’s duty toarrest, or, if they resist, to shoot at sight, anyone issuing or handling suchorders ...

This time we shall settle accounts with them in the manner to which weNational Socialists are accustomed.

BLOODY VENGEANCEThis time, too, Hitler kept his word.

The barbarism of the Nazis toward their own fellow Germans reachedits zenith. There was a wild wave of arrests followed by gruesome torture,drumhead trials, and death sentences carried out, in many cases, by slowstrangling while the victims were suspended by piano wire from meathooksborrowed from butchershops and slaughterhouses. Relatives and friends

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of the suspects were rounded up by the thousands and sent to concentra-tion camps, where many of them died. The brave few who gave shelterto 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 theirhands on every last person who had dared to plot against him. He himselflaid down the procedure for dispatching them.

“This time,” he stormed at one of his first conferences after the ex-plosion at Rastenburg, “the criminals will be given short shrift. Nomilitary tribunals. We’ll hail them before the People’s Court. No longspeeches from them. The court will act with lightning speed. And twohours after the sentence it will be carried out. By hanging—withoutmercy.”34

These instructions from on high were carried out literally by RonaldFreisler, the president of the People’s Court (Volksgerichetshof), a vile,vituperative maniac, who as a prisoner of war in Russia during the firstwar had become a fanatical Bolshevik and who, even after he became,in 1924, an equally fanatical Nazi, remained a warm admirer of Sovietterror and a keen student of its methods. He had made a special study ofAndrei Vishinsky’s technique as chief prosecutor in the Moscow trials ofthe Thirties in which the “Old Bolsheviks” and most of the leading generalshad been found guilty of “treason” and liquidated. “Freisler is our Vishin-sky,” Hitler had exclaimed in the conference mentioned above.

The first trial of the July 20 conspirators before the People’s Court tookplace 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 hadworked closely with their idol Stauffenberg, in the dock. They were al-ready pretty well broken by their treatment in the Gestapo cellars and,since Goebbels had ordered every minute of the trial to be filmed so thatthe movie could be shown to the troops and to the civilian public as anexample—and a warning—everything had been done to make the accusedlook as shabby as possible. They were outfitted in nondescript clothes, oldcoats and sweaters, and they entered the courtroom unshaven, collarless,without neckties and deprived of suspenders and belts to keep their trousershitched up. The once proud Field Marshal, especially, looked like aterribly broken, toothless old man. His false teeth had been taken fromhim and as he stood in the dock, badgered unmercifully by the venomouschief judge, he kept grasping at his trousers to keep them from fallingdown.

“You dirty old man,” Freisler shouted at him, “why do you keepfiddling with your trousers?”

Yet though the accused knew that their fate was already settled theybehaved with dignity and courage despite Freisler’s ceaseless efforts todegrade and demean them. Young Peter Yorck, a cousin of Stauffenberg,was perhaps the bravest, answering the most insulting questions quietlyand never attempting to hide his contempt for National Socialism.

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“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, 1 have already stated in my inter-rogation that the Nazi ideology was such that I—”

The judge interrupted him. “—could not agree ... You didn’tagree with the National Socialist conception of justice, say, in regard torooting out the Jews?”

“What is important, what brings together all these questions,” Yorckreplied, “is the totalitarian claim of the State on the individual which forceshim to renounce his moral and religious obligations to God.”

“Nonsense!” cried Freisler, and he cut off the young man. Such talkmight 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. Theircowardice, as one reads the transcript of the trial, is almost unbelievable.Witzleben’s attorney, for example, a certain Dr. Weissmann, outdid thestate prosecutor and almost equaled Freisler, in denouncing his client asa “murderer,” as completely guilty and as deserving the worst punish-ment.

That punishment was meted out as soon as the trial had ended onAugust 8. “They must all be hanged like cattle,” Hitler had ordered, andthey were. Out at Ploetzensee prison the eight condemned were herdedinto a small room in which eight meathooks hung from the ceiling. Oneby one, after being stripped to the waist, they were strung up, a noose ofpiano wire being placed around their necks and attached to the meathooks.A movie camera whirled as the men dangled and strangled, their beltlesstrousers finally dropping off as they struggled, leaving them naked in theirdeath agony.35 The developed film, as ordered, was rushed to Hitler sothat 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 handsover his eyes.*36

All that summer, fall and winter and into the new year of 1945 the grislyPeople’s Court sat in session, racing through its macabre trials and grind-ing out death sentences, until finally an American bomb fell directly on thecourthouse on the morning of February 3, 1945, just as Schlabrendorffwas being led into the courtroom, killing Judge Freisler and destroying therecords of most of the accused who still survived. Schlabrendorff thusmiraculously escaped with his life—one of the very few conspirators on

* 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 andpresumably was destroyed on the orders of Hitler lest it fall into enemy hands.According to Allen Dulles the two films—originally thirty miles long and cut to eightmiles—were put together by Goebbels and shown to certain Army audiences as alesson and a warning. But the soldiers refused to look at it—at the Cadet School atLichterfelde they walked out as it began to run—and it was soon withdrawn fromcirculation. (Dulles, Germany’s Underground, p. 83.)

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whom fortune smiled—being eventually liberated from the Gestapo’sclutches 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 goneinto hiding three days before July 20, after having been warned that theGestapo had issued an order for his arrest. He wandered for three weeksbetween Berlin, Potsdam and East Prussia, rarely spending two nights inthe same place but always being taken in by friends or relatives, who riskeddeath by giving him shel'.er, for Hitler had now put a price of one millionmarks on his head. On the morning of August 12, exhausted and hungryafter several days and nights wandering afoot in East Prussia, he stumpedinto a small inn in the village of Konradswalde near Marienwerder. Whilewaiting to be served breakfast he noticed a woman in the uniform of aLuftwaffe Wac eying him closely, and without waiting for his food heslipped out and made for the nearby woods. It was too late. The womanwas an old acquaintance of the Goerdeler family, a Helene Schwaerzel,who had easily recognized him and who promptly confided in a couple ofAir Force men who were sitting with her. Goerdeler was quickly appre-hended 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 contactsof the two men, especially those of Goerdeler, with the Western Alliesthrough Sweden and Switzerland might prove helpful to him if he tookover the sinking ship of state—a prospect which began to grow in his mindat this time.87

Count Friedrich Werner von Schulenburg, the former ambassador inMoscow, and Hassell, the former ambassador in Rome, both of whomwere to have taken over the direction of foreign policy in the new anti-Naziregime, were executed on November 10 and September 8, respectively.Count Fritz von der Schulenburg died on the gallows August 10. GeneralFellgiebel, chief of signals at OKW, whose role at Rastenburg on July 20we have recounted, was executed on the same day.

The death roll is a long one. According to one source it numbered some4,980 names.38 The Gestapo records fist 7,000 arrests. Among thoseresistance leaders mentioned in these pages who were executed wereGeneral Fritz Lindemann, Colonel von Boeselager, Pastor Dietrich Bon-hoeffer, Colonel Georg Hansen of the Abwehr, Count von Helldorf,Colonel von Hofacker, Dr. Jens Peter Jessen, Otto Kiep, Dr. CarlLangbehn, Julius Leber, Major von Leonrod, Wilhelm Leuschner, ArturNebe (the chief of the criminal police), Professor Adolf Reichwein,Count Berthold von Stauffenberg, brother of Klaus, General Thiele,

* 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, theleader of the Kreisau Circle, was executed on January 23, 1945, though he had hadno part in the assassination plot. Trott zu Solz, a leading light in the Circle and inthe conspiracy, was hanged on August 25, 1944.

Chief of Signals, OKH, and General von Thuengen, who was appointedby Beck to succeed General von Kortzfleisch on the day of the putsch.

One group of twenty condemned, whose lives Himmler had prolongedapparently in the belief that they might prove useful to him if he took overpower and had io make peace, were shot out of hand on the night of April22-23 as the Russians began fighting to the center of the capital. Theprisoners were being marched from the Lehrterstrasse prison to the PrinzAlbrechtstrasse Gestapo dungeon—a good many prisoners escaped in theblackout 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 andmowed them down, only two escaping to tell the tale. Among those whoperished were Count Albrecht von Bernstorff, Klaus Bonhoeffer, brotherof the pastor, and Albrecht Haushofer, a close friend of Hess and son ofthe famous geopolitician. The father committed suicide shortly afterward.

General Fromm did not escape execution despite his behavior on thefateful evening of July 20. Arrested the next day on orders of Himmler,who had succeeded him as head of the Replacement Army, he was haledbefore the People’s Court in February 1945 on charges of “cowardice”and sentenced to death.* Perhaps as a small recognition for his vitalservice in helping to save the Nazi regime, he was not strangled from ameathook, 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 deposedhead of the Abwehr who had done so much to aid the conspirators but wasnot directly involved in the events of July 20, enveloped for many years thecircumstances of his death. It was known that he was arrested after theattempt on Hitler s life. But Keitel, in one of the few decent gestures ofhis life at OKW, managed to prevent him from being handed over to thePeople’s Court. The Fuehrer, outraged at the delay, then ordered Canaristo be tried by a summary S.S. court. This process was also delayed, butCanaris, along with Colonel Oster, his former assistant, and four otherswere finally tried at Flossenburg concentration camp on April 9, 1945,less than a month before the war ended, and sentenced to death. But itwas not known for sure whether Canaris had been executed. It took tenyears to solve the mystery. In 1955 the Gestapo prosecu or in the casewas brought to trial and a large number of witnesses testified that they hadseen Canaris hanged on April 9, 1945. One eyewitness, the DanishColonel Lunding, told of seeing Canaris dragged naked from his cell tothe gallows. Oster was dispatched at the same time.

Some who were arrested escaped trial and were eventually liberatedfrom the Gestapo by the advancing Allied troops. Among these wereGeneral Haider and Dr. Schacht, who had had no part in the July 20revolt though on the stand at Nuremberg Schacht claimed to have been

* “The sentence affected him deeply,” Schlabrendorff, who saw a good deal of Frommat the Prinz Albrechtstrasse Gestapo prison, later recounted. “He had not expectedit.” (Schlabrendorff, They Almost Killed Hitler, p. 121.)

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“initiated” into it. Haider was placed in solitary confinement in a pitch-dark cell for several months. The two men, along with a distinguishedgroup of prisoners, German and foreign, including Schuschnigg, LeonBlum, Sehlabrendorff and General von Falkenhausen, were freed byAmerican troops on May 4, 1945, at Niederdorf in the South Tyrol justas their Gestapo guard was on the point of executing the whole lot.Falkenhausen was later tried by the Belgians as a war criminal andsentenced on March 9, 1951, after four years in prison awaiting trial, totwelve years’ penal servitude. He was released, however, a fortnight laterand returned to Germany.

A good many Army officers implicated in the plot chose suicide ratherthan let themselves be turned over to the tender mercies of the Volks-gericht. On the morning of July 21, General Henning von Tresckow,who had been Ihe heart and soul of the conspiracy among the officers onthe Eastern front, took leave of his friend and aide, Sehlabrendorff, whohas recalled his last words:

“Everybody will now turn upon us and cover us with abuse. But my con-viction remains unshaken—we have done the right thing. Hitler is not onlythe archenemy of Germany: he is the archenemy of the world. In a few hoursI shall stand before God, answering for my actions and for my omissions. Ithink I shall be able to uphold with a clear conscience all that I have done inthe fight against Hitler . . .

“Whoever joined the resistance movement put on the shirt of Nessus. Theworth of a man is certain only if he is prepared to sacrifice his life for his con-victions.”39

That morning Tresckow drove off to the 28th Rifle Division, crept outto 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 onegeneral committed suicide. In Paris, as we have seen, the uprising hadgot off to a good start when General Heinrich von Stuelpnagel, the militarygovernor 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 newCommander in Chief West, on whom Tresckow had worked for two yearson 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 theconspirators understood—that he would support the revolt once Hitlerwas dead.

There was a fateful dinner meeting that evening of July 20 at LaRoche-Guyon, the headquarters of Army Group B, which Kluge had alsotaken over after Rommel’s accident. Kluge wanted to discuss the con-flicting reports as to whether Hitler was dead or alive with his chief

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advisers, General Guenther Blumentritt, his chief of staff. General Speidel,chief of staff of Army Group B, General Stuelpnagel and Colonel vonHofacker, to whom Stauffenberg had telephoned earlier in the afternooninforming him of the bombing and the coup in Berlin. When the officersassembled for dinner it seemed to some of them at least that the cautiousField Marshal had about made up his mind to throw in his lot with therevolt. Beck had reached him by telephone shortly before dinner and hadpleaded for his support—whether Hitler was dead or alive. Then the firstgeneral order signed by Field Marshal von Witzleben had arrived. Klugewas impressed.

Still, he wanted more information on the situation and, unfortunatelyfor the rebels, this now came from General Stieff, who had journeyed toRastenburg with Stauffenberg that morning, wished him well, seen theexplosion, 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 Stiefftold him the truth of what had happened, or rather, not happened.

“It has failed, then,” Kluge said to Blumentritt. He seemed to begenuinely disappointed, for he added that had it succeeded he would havelost no time in getting in touch with Eisenhower to request an armistice.

At the dinner—a ghostly affair, Speidel later recalled, “as if they satin a house visited by death”—Kluge listened to the impassioned argumentsof Stuelpnagel and Hofacker that they must go ahead with the revolt eventhough Hitler might have survived. Blumentritt has described whatfollowed.

When they had finished, Kluge, with obvious disappointment, remarked:“Well, gentlemen, the attempt has failed. Everything is over.” Stuelpnagelthen exclaimed: Field Marshal, I thought you were acquainted with theplans. Something must be done.”40

Kluge denied that he knew of any plans. After ordering Stuelpnagel torelease 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 intohiding.”

But this was not the way out which a proud general of Stuelpnagel’sstripe chose. After a weird all-night champagne party at the HotelRaphael in Paris in which the released S.S. and S.D. officers, led byGeneral Oberg, fraternized with the Army leaders who had arrested them—and who most certainly would have had them shot had the revolt suc-ceeded—Stuelpnagel, who had been ordered to report to Berlin, left bycar for Germany. At Verdun, where he had commanded a battalion in theFirst World War, he stopped to have a look at the famous battlefield. Butalso to carry out a personal decision. His driver and a guard heard arevolver shot. They found him floundering in the waters of a canal. Abullet had shot out one eye and so badly damaged the other that it wasremoved in the military hospital at Verdun, to which he was taken.

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This did not save Stuelpnagel from a horrible end. Blinded and help-less, he was brought to Berlin on Hitler’s express orders, haled before thePeople’s Court, where he lay on a cot while Freisler abused him, andstrangled to death in Ploetzensee prison on August 30.

Field Marshal von Kluge’s decisive act in refusing to join the revolt didnot save him any more than Fromm, by similar behavior in Berlin, savedhimself. “Fate,” as Speidel observed apropos of this vacillating general,“does not spare the man whose convictions are not matched by his readi-ness to give them effect.” There is evidence that Colonel von Hofacker,under terrible torture—he was not executed until December 20—men-tioned the complicity of Kluge, Rommel and Speidel in the plot. Blumen-tritt says that Oberg informed him that Hofacker had “mentioned” Klugein his first interrogations, and that, after being informed of this by Oberghimself, 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 theGerman front at St.-Lo. Four days later General Patton’s newly formedThird Army, racing through the gap, reached Avranches, opening the wayto Brittany and to the Loire to the south. This was the turning point inthe Allied invasion, and on July 30 Kluge notified Hitler’s headquarters,“The whole Western front has been ripped open . . . The left flank hascollapsed.” By the middle of August all that was left of the German armiesin Normandy was locked in a narrow pocket around Falaise, where Hitlerhad forbidden any further retreat. The Fuehrer had now had enough ofKluge, whom he blamed for the reverses in the West and whom he suspectedof 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 20revolt. The next day he wrote a long letter to Hitler and then set off bycar for home. Near Metz he swallowed poison.

His farewell letter to the Fuehrer was found in the captured Germanmilitary archives.

When you receive these lines I shall be no more . . . Life has no moremeaning for me . . . Both Rommel and I . . . foresaw the present develop-ment. We were not listened to . . .

I do not know whether Field Marshal Model, who has been proved in everysphere, will master the situation . . . Should it not be so, however, and yourcherished new weapons not succeed, then, my Fuehrer, make up your mindto end the war. The German people have borne such untold suffering thatit is time to put an end to this frightfulness . . .

I have always admired your greatness ... If fate is stronger than your willand your genius, so is Providence . . . Show yourself now also great enoughto put an end to a hopeless struggle when necessary . . .

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Hitler read the letter, according to the testimony of Jodi at Nuremberg,in silence and handed it to him without comment. A few days later, at hismilitary conference on August 31, the Supreme warlord observed, “Thereare strong reasons to suspect that had Kluge not committed suicide hewould 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 operat-ing table in the hospital at Verdun after his not quite successful attemptto kill himself, he had blurted out the name of Rommel. Later underhideous torture in the Gestapo dungeon in the Prinz Albrechtstrasse inBerlin Colonel von Hofacker broke down and told of Rommel’s part inthe conspiracy. “Tell the people in Berlin they can count on me,”Hofacker quoted the Field Marshal as assuring him. It was a phrase thatstuck in Hitler’s mind when he heard of it and which led him to decide thathis favorite general, whom he knew to be the most popular one in Ger-many, must die.

Rommel, who had suffered bad fractures of his skull, temples and cheek-bones and a severe injury to his left eye, and whose head was pitted withshell fragments, was first removed from a field hospital at Bernay to St.-Germain to escape capture by the advancing Allied troops and thence, onAugust 8, to his home at Herrlingen near Ulm. He received the first warn-ing of what might be in store for him when General Speidel, his formerchief of staff, was arrested on September 7, the day after he had visited himat Herrlingen.

“That pathological liar,” Rommel had exclaimed to Speidel when thetalk turned to Hitler, “has now gone completely mad. He is venting hissadism 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-oldson, who had been given temporary leave from his antiaircraft battery totend his father, both carried revolvers. At headquarters in RastenburgHitler had now received a copy of Hofacker’s testimony incriminatingRommel. He thereupon decreed his death—but in a special way. TheFuehrer realized, as Keitel later explained to an interrogator at Nuremberg,“that it would be a terrible scandal in Germany if this well-known FieldMarshal, the most popular general we had, were to be arrested and haledbefore the People’s Court.” So Hitler arranged with Keitel that Rommelwould be told of the evidence against him and given the choice of killinghimself or standing trial for treason before the People’s Court. If he chosethe first he would be given a state funeral with full military honors and hisfamily would not be molested.

Thus it was that at noon on October 14,1944, two generals from Hitler’sheadquarters drove up to the Rommel home, which was now surroundedby S.S. troops reinforced by five armored cars. The generals were WilhelmBurgdorf, an alcoholic, florid-faced man who rivaled Keitel in his slavish-

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ness to Hitler, and his assistant in the Army Personnel Office, Ernst Maisel,of like character. They had sent word ahead to Rommel that they werecoming from Hitler to discuss his “next employment.”

“At the instigation of the Fuehrer,” Keitel later testified, “I sent Burg-dorf 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 beexonerated by the court.”

“And you instructed Burgdorf to take some poison with him, didn’tyou?” Keitel was asked.

“Yes. I told Burgdorf to take some poison along so that he could putit at Rommel’s disposal, if conditions warranted it.”

After Burgdorf and Maisel arrived it soon became evident that theyhad not come to discuss Rommel’s next assignment. They asked to talkwith the Field Marshal alone and the three men retired to his study.

“A few minutes later,” Manfred Rommel later related, “I heard myfather come upstairs and go into my mother’s room.” Then:

We went into my room. “I have just had to tell your mother,” he beganslowly, “that I shall be dead in a quarter of an hour . . . Hitler is chargingme with high treason. In view of my services in Africa I am to have the chanceof dying by poison. The two generals have brought it with them. It’s fatal inthree seconds. If I accept, none of the usual steps will be taken against myfamily ... I’m to be given a state funeral. It’s all been prepared to the lastdetail. In a quarter of an hour you will receive a call from the hospital in Ulmto 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 hisfield marshal s baton, got into the car with the two generals, was drivena mile or two up the road by the side of a forest, where General Maisel andthe S.S. driver got out, leaving Rommel and General Burgdorf in the backseat. When the two men returned to the car a minute later, Rommel wasslumped 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 Rommelreceived the expected telephone call from the hospital. The chief doctorreported that two generals had brought in the body of the Field Marshal,who had died of a cerebral embolism, apparently as the result of hisprevious skull fractures. Actually Burgdorf had gruffly forbidden anautopsy. “Do not touch the corpse,” he stormed. “Everything has alreadybeen arranged in Berlin.”

It had been.

Field Marshal Model issued a ringing order of the day announcing thatRommel had died of wounds sustained on July 17” and mourning theloss “of one of the greatest commanders of our nation.”

Hitler wired Frau Rommel: “Accept my sincerest sympathy for theheavy loss you have suffered with the death of your husband. The name

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of Field Marshal Rommel will be forever linked with the heroic battles inNorth Africa.” Goering telegraphed “in silent compassion”:

The fact that your husband has died a hero’s death as the result of hiswounds, after we all hoped that he would remain to the German people, hasdeeply touched me.

Hitler ordered a state funeral, at which the senior officer of the GermanArmy, Field Marshal von Rundstedt, delivered the funeral oration. “Hisheart,” said Rundstedt as he stood over Rommel’s swastika-bedeckedbody, “belonged to the Fuehrer.”*

“The old soldier [Rundstedt],” Speidel says, “appeared to those presentto be broken and bewildered . . . Here destiny gave him the uniquechance to play the role of Mark Antony. He remained in his moralapathy.”f45

The humiliation of the vaunted officer corps of the German Army wasgreat. It had seen three of its illustrious field marshals, Witzleben, Klugeand Rommel, implicated in a plot to overthrow the Supreme warlord, forwhich one of them was strangled and two forced to suicide. It had tostand idly by while scores of its highest-ranking generals were hauled offto the prisons of the Gestapo and judicially murdered after farcical trialsbefore the People’s Court. In this unprecedented situation, despite all itsproud traditions, the corps did not close ranks. Instead it sought to pre-serve its “honor” by what a foreign observer, at least, can only term dis-honoring and degrading itself. Before the wrath of the former Austriancorporal, its frightened leaders fawned and groveled.

* It is only fair to add that Rundstedt probably did not know of the circumstancesof Rommel’s death, apparently learning them only from Keitel’s testimony atNuremberg. “I did not hear these rumors,” Rundstedt testified on the stand, “other-wise I would have refused to act as representative of the Fuehrer at the statefuneral; that would have been an infamy beyond words.”44 Nevertheless the Rommelfamily noticed that this gentleman of the old school declined to attend the crema-tion after the funeral and to come to the Rommel home, as did most of the othergenerals, to extend condolences to the widow.

+ General Speidel himself, though incarcerated in the cellars of the Gestapo prisonin the Prinz Albreehtstrasse in Berlin and subjected to incessant questioning, becameneither broken nor bewildered. Being a philosopher as well as a soldier perhapshelped. 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 occasionHofacker did not betray him and repudiated what he had previously said.

Though never brought to trial, Speidel was kept in Gestapo custody for sevenmonths. As American troops neared his place of confinement near Lake Constancein southern Germany, he escaped with twenty others by a ruse and took refuge witha Catholic priest, who hid the group until the Americans arrived. Speidel omits thischapter of his life in his book, which is severely objective and written in the thirdperson, but he told the story to Desmond Young who gives it in his Rommel—TheDesert Fox (pp. 251-52 of the paperback edition).

Capping an unusual career, Speidel held an important command at NATO in thelate 1950s.

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No wonder that Field Marshal von Rundstedt looked broken and be-wildered as he intoned the funeral oration over the body of Rommel. Hehad fallen to a low state, as had his brother officers, whom Hitler nowforced to drink the bitter cup to its dregs. Rundstedt himself accepted thepost of presiding officer over the so-called military Court of Honor whichHitler created to expel from the Army all officers suspected of complicityin the plot against him so that they could be denied a court-martial andhanded over in disgrace as civilians to the drumhead People’s Court. TheCourt of Honor was not permitted to hear an accused officer in his owndefense; it acted merely on the “evidence” furnished it by the Gestapo.Rundstedt did not protest against this restriction, nor did another memberof the court, General Guderian—who the day after the bombing had beenappointed as the new Chief of the Army General Staff—though the latter,in his memoirs, confesses that it was an “unpleasant task,” that the courtsessions were “melancholy” and raised “the most difficult problems ofconscience. No doubt they did, for Rundstedt, Guderian and their fellowjudges all generals—turned over hundreds of their comrades to certainexecution after degrading them by throwing them out of the Army.

Guderian did more. In his capacity of General Staff Chief he issued tworinging orders of the day to assure the Nazi warlord of the undying loyaltyof the officer corps. The first, promulgated on July 23, accused the con-spira:ors of being “a few officers, some of them on the retired list, whohad lost all courage and, out of cowardice and weakness, preferred theroad of disgrace to the only road open to an honest soldier—the road ofduty and honor.” Whereupon he solemnly pledged to the Fuehrer “theunity of the generals, of the officer corps and of the men of the Army.”

In the meantime the discarded Field Marshal von Brauchitsch rushedinto print with a burning statement condemning the putsch, pledging re-newed allegiance to the Fuehrer and welcoming the appointment ofHimmler—who despised the generals, including Brauchitsch—as chief ofthe Replacement Army. Another discard, Grand Admiral Raeder, fearfulthat he might be suspected of at least sympathy with the plotters, rushedout 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 mili-tary salute “as a sign of the Army’s unshakable allegiance to the Fuehrerand of the closest unity between Army and Party.”

On July 29 Guderian warned all General Staff officers that henceforththey 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 notonly ... by his model attitude toward political questions but by activelyco-operating in the political indoctrination of younger commanders in accord-ance with the tenets of the Fuehrer . . .

In judging and selecting General Staff officers, superiors should place traitsof character and spirit above the mind. A rascal may be ever so cunning butin the hour of need he will nevertheless fail because he is a rascal.

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I expect every General Staff officer immediately to declare himself a convertor 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 theGeneral Staff as an autonomous entity may be said to have come to anend.”46 This elite group, founded by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau andbuilt up by Moltke to be the pillar of the nation, which had ruled Germanyduring the First World War, dominated the Weimar Republic and forcedeven Hitler to destroy the S.A. and murder its leader when they stood inits way, had been reduced in the summer of 1944 to a pathetic body offawning, frightened men. There was to be no more opposition to Hitler,not even any criticism of him. The once mighty Army, like every otherinstitution in the Third Reich, would go down with him, its leaders toobenumbed now, too lacking in the courage which the handful of con-spirators 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 leadingthem and the German people rapidly to the most awful catastrophe in thehistory of their beloved Fatherland.

This paralysis of the mind and will of grown-up men, raised as Chris-tians, supposedly disciplined in the old virtues, boasting of their code ofhonor, courageous in the face of death on the battlefield, is astonishing,though perhaps it can be grasped if one remembers the course of Germanhistory, outlined in an earlier chapter, which made blind obedience totemporal rulers the highest virtue of Germanic man and put a premium onservility. By now the generals knew the evil of the man before whom theygroveled. Guderian later recalled Hitler as he was after July 20.

In his case, what had been hardness became cruelty, while a tendency tobluff became plain dishonesty. He often lied without hesitation and assumedthat others lied to him. He believed no one any more. It had already beendifficult enough dealing with him: it now became a torture that grew steadilyworse from month to month. He frequently lost all self-control and hislanguage grew increasingly violent. In his intimate circle he now found norestraining influence.47

Nevertheless, it was this man alone, half mad, rapidly deteriorating inbody and mind, who now, as he had done in the snowy winter of 1941 be-fore Moscow, rallied the beaten, retreating armies and put new heartinto the battered nation. By an incredible exercise of will power which allthe others in Germany—in the Army, in the government and among thepeople—lacked, he was able almost singlehandedly to prolong the agonyof war for well nigh a year.

* In his memoirs, Guderian, who constantly emphasizes how he stood up to Hitlerand criticizes him bitterly, makes no mention of these orders of the day.

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The revolt of July 20, 1944, had failed not only because of the inexpli-cable 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 be-cause misfortune plagued the plotters at every turn. It had flickered outbecause almost all the men who kept this great country running, generalsand civilians, and the mass of the German people, in uniform and out,were not ready for a revolution—in fact, despite their misery and thebleak prospect of defeat and foreign occupation, did not want it. NationalSocialism, notwithstanding the degradation it had brought to Germanyand Europe, they still accepted and indeed supported, and in Adolf Hitlerthey still saw the country’s savior.

At that time [Guderian later wrote]—the fact seems beyond dispute—thegreat proportion of the German people still believed in Adolf Hitler and wouldhave been convinced that with his death the assassin had removed the only manwho 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 onthe conspiracy but would have supported it had his chief, Kluge, been ofsterner stuff, found that at least “one half of the civil population wasshocked that the German generals had taken part in the attempt to over-throw Hitler, and felt bitterly toward them in consequence—and the samefeeling 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. Itwas inevitable that they would follow him blindly, like dumb cattle butalso with a touching faith and even an enthusiasm that raised them abovethe animal herd, over the precipice to the destruction of the nation.

Book Six

4* + +

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 bomb-ing when he was faced with the loss of France and Belgium and of thegreat conquests in the East. Enemy troops in overwhelming numberswere converging on the Reich.

By the middle of August 1944, the Russian summer offensives, begin-ning June 10 and unrolling one after another, had brought the Red Armyto the border of East Prussia, bottled up fifty German divisions in the Bal-tic region, penetrated to Vyborg in Finland, destroyed Army Group Centerand brought an advance on this front of four hundred miles in six weeks tothe Vistula opposite Warsaw, while in the south a new attack which beganon August 20 resulted in the conquest of Rumania by the end of themonth and with it the Ploesti oil fields, the only major source of naturaloil for the German armies. On August 26 Bulgaria formally withdrewfrom the war and the Germans began to hastily clear out of that country.In September Finland gave up and turned on the German troops whichrefused to evacuate its territory.

In the West, France was liberated quickly. In General Patton, thecommander of the newly formed U.S. Third Army, the Americans hadfound a tank general with the dash and flair of Rommel in Africa. Afterthe capture of Avranches on July 30, he had left Brittany to wither on thevine and begun a great sweep around the German armies in Normandy,moving southeast to Orleans on the Loire and then due east toward theSeine south of Paris. By August 23 the Seine was reached southeast andnorthwest of the capital, and two days later the great city, the glory ofFrance, was liberated after four years of German occupation when GeneralJacques Leclerc’s French 2nd Armored Division and the U.S. 4th InfantryDivision broke into it and found that French resistance units were largelyin control. They also found the Seine bridges, many of them works of art,intact.*

* On August 23, according to Speidel, Hitler had ordered all the Paris bridges andother important installations destroyed “even if artistic monuments are destroyedthereby.” Speidel refused to carry out the order, as did General von Choltitz, the

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The remnants of the German armies in France were now in full retreat.Montgomery, the victor over Rommel in North Africa, who on September1 was made a field marshal, drove his Canadian First Army and BritishSecond Army two hundred miles in four days—from the lower Seine pastthe storied battle sites of 1914-18 and 1940 into Belgium. Brussels fellto him on September 3 and Antwerp the next day. So swift was the ad-vance that the Germans did not have time to destroy the harbor facilitiesat 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 prin-cipal 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 intosoutheastern Belgium, reaching the Meuse River, from which the devastat-ing German breakthrough had begun in May 1940, and capturing thefortresses of Namur and Liege, where the Germans had no time to or-ganize a defense. Farther south still, Patton’s Third Army had taken Ver-dun, surrounded Metz, reached the Moselle River and linked up at theBelfort Gap with the Franco-American Seventh Army, which under thecommand of General Alexander Patch had landed on the Riviera insouthern France on August 15 and pushed rapidly up the Rhone Valley.

By the end of August the German armies in the West had lost 500,000men, half of them as prisoners, and almost all of their tanks, artillery andtrucks. There was very little left to defend the Fatherland. The much-publicized Siegfried Line was virtually unmanned and without guns. Mostof the German generals in the West believed that the end had come.“There were no longer any ground forces in existence, to say nothing ofair forces,” says Speidel.1 “As far as I was concerned,” Rundstedt, whowas reinstated on September 4 as Commander in Chief in the West, toldAllied 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 ofhis generals at headquarters, attempting to inject new iron into their veinsand at the same time hold out hope.

If necessary we’ll fight on the Rhine. It doesn’t make any difference. Underall 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 untilwe get a peace which secures the life of the German nation for the next fiftyor a hundred years and which, above all, does not besmirch our honor a secondtime, as happened in 1918 . . . I live only for the purpose of leading this fightbecause I know that if there is not an iron will behind it, this battle cannot bewon.

new commandant of Greater Paris, who surrendered after a few shots had satisfiedhis honor. For this Choltitz was tried in absentia for treason in April 1945, butofficer 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 byheavy artillery and V-l flying bombs, but this order too he refused to obey. (Speidel,Invasion 1944, pp. 143-45.)

The Conquest of Germany 1087

After excoriating the General Staff for its lack of iron will, Hitler re-vealed to his generals some of the reasons for his stubborn hopes.

The time will come when the tension between the Allies will become sogreat that the break will occur. All the coalitions in history have disintegratedsooner or later. The only thing is to wait for the right moment, no matterhow hard it is.3

Goebbels was assigned the task of organizing “total mobilization,” andHimmler, the new chief of the Replacement Army, went to work to raisetwenty-five Volks grenadier divisions for the defense of the West. Despiteall the plans and all the talk in Nazi Germany concerning “toial war” theresources of the country had been far from “totally” organized. At Hitler’sinsistence the production of civilian goods had been maintained at a sur-prisingly large figure throughout the war—os’ensibly to keep up morale.And he had balked at carrying out the prewar plans to mobilize women forwork in the factories. “The sacrifice of our most cherished ideals is toogreat a price,” he said in March 1943 when Speer wanted to draft womenfor industry.4 Nazi ideology had taught that the place of the Germanwoman was in the home and not in the factory—and in the home shestayed. In the first four years of the war, when in Great Britain two and aquarter million women had been placed in war production, only 182,000women were similarly employed in Germany. The number of peacetimedomestic servants in Germany remained unchanged at a million and a halfduring 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 werecalled to the colors. Universities and high schools, offices and factories,were combed for recruits. In September and October 1944 a half-millionmen were found for the Army. But no provision was made to replacethem in the factories and offices by women, and Albert Speer, the Ministerfor Armament and War Production, protested to Hitler that the draftingof skilled workers was seriously affecting the output of arms.

Not since Napoleonic times had German soldiers been forced to defendthe sacred soil of the Fatherland. All the subsequent wars, Prussia’s andGermany’s, had been fought on—and had devastated—the soil of otherpeoples. A shower of exhortations fell upon the hard-pressed troops.

SOLDIERS OF THE WESTERN FRONT!

... 1 expect you to defend Germany’s sacred soil ... to the verylast! . . .

Heil the Fuehrer!

von Rundstedt,Field Marshal

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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 numberof desertions and Himmler took drastic action to discourage them. OnSeptember 10 he posted an order:

Certain unreliable elements seem to believe that the war will be over forthem as soon as they surrender to the enemy. . . .

Every deserter . . . will find his just punishment. Furthermore, his igno-minious behavior will entail the most severe consequences for his family . . .They will be summarily shot.

A Colonel Hoffmann-Schonforn of the 18th Grenadier Division pro-claimed to his unit:

Traitors from our ranks have deserted to the enemy . . . These bastardshave given away important military secrets . . . Deceitful Jewish mudslingerstaunt you with their pamphlets and try to entice you into becoming bastardsalso. Let them spew their poison! . . . As for the contemptible traitors whohave 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 theMarne’ for the French in 1914. The furious advance of the Allies sud-denly subsided.”

Why it subsided has been a subject of dispute to this day among theAllied commanders from General Eisenhower on down; to the Germangenerals it was incomprehensible. By the second week in SeptemberAmerican units had reached the German border before Aachen and on theMoselle. Germany lay open to the Allied armies. Early in SeptemberMontgomery had urged Eisenhower to allot all of his supplies and reservesto the British and Canadian armies and the U.S. Ninth and First armiesfor a bold offensive in the north under his command that would penetratequickly into the Ruhr, deprive the Germans of their main arsenal, openthe road to Berlin and end the war. Eisenhower rejected the proposal.*He wanted to advance toward the Rhine on a “broad front.”

* "1 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 thisview was a mistaken one.” But this is far from being the case, as those who haveread Montgomery’s memoirs know.

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But his armies had outrun their supplies. Every ton of gasoline andammunition had to be brought in over the beaches in Normandy orthrough the single port of Cherbourg and transported by truck three tofour hundred miles to the advancing front. By the second week of Septem-ber, Eisenhower’s armies were bogging down for lack of supplies. Theywere also running into unexpected German resistance. By concentratinghis available forces at two critical points Rundstedt was able, by the mid-dle of September, to halt at least temporarily Patton’s Third Army on theMoselle and Hodges’ First Army in front of Aachen.

Eisenhower, prodded by Montgomery, had then agreed to a bold planto seize a bridgehead over the Lower Rhine at Arnhem and thus obtain aposition from which the Siegfried Line could be outflanked on the north.The objective fell far short of Montgomery’s dream of racing into the Ruhrand thence to Berlin, but it promised a strategic base for a later try. Theattack, led by a massive drop of two American and one British airbornedivisions, flying in from bases in Britain, began on September 17, but dueto bad weather, to the circumstance that the airborne troops landed rightin the midst of two S.S. panzer divisions they did not know were there, andto the lack of adequate land forces pushing up from the south, it failed, andafter ten days of savage fighting the Allies withdrew from Arnhem. TheBritish 1st Airborne Division, which had been dropped near the city, lostall but 2,163 of some 9,000 men. To Eisenhower this setback “was ampleevidence that much bitter campaigning was to come.”7

Yet he hardly expected the Germans to recover sufficiently to launchthe stunning surprise that burst on the Western Front as Christmas ap-proached that winter.

HITLER’S LAST DESPERATE GAMBLE

On the evening of December 12, 1944, a host of German generals, thesenior field commanders on the Western front, were called to Rundstedt’sheadquarters, stripped of their side arms and briefcases, packed into a bus,driven about the dark, snowy countryside for half an hour to make themlose their bearings, and finally deposited at the entrance to a deep under-ground bunker which turned out to be Hitler’s headquarters at Ziegenbergnear Frankfurt. There they learned for the first time what only a handfulof the top staff officers and army commanders had known for more than amonth: the Fuehrer was to launch in four days a mighty offensive in theWest.

The idea had been simmering in his mind since mid-September, whenEisenhower’s armies had been brought to a halt on the German frontierwest of the Rhine. Although the U.S. Ninth, First and Third armies triedto resume the offensive in October with the objective of “slugging” theirway to the Rhine, as Eisenhower put it, the going had been hard and slow.Aachen, the old imperial capital, the seat of Charlemagne, surrendered toFirst Army on October 24 after a bitter battle—the first German city to

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fall into Allied hands—but the Americans had been unable to achieve abreakthrough to the Rhine. Still, all along the front they—and the Britishand Canadians to the north—were wearing down the weakening defendersin battles of attrition. Hitler realized that by remaining on the defensive hewas merely postponing the hour of reckoning. In his feverish mind thereemerged a bold and imaginative plan to recapture the initiative, strike ablow that would split the U.S. Third and First armies, penetrate to Ant-werp and deprive Eisenhower of his main port of supply, and roll up theBritish and Canadian armies along the Belgian-Dutch border. Such anoffensive, he thought, would not only administer a crushing defeat on theAnglo-American armies and thus free the threat to Germany’s westernborder, but would then enable him to turn against the Russians, who,though still advancing in the Balkans, had been halted on the Vistula inPoland and in East Prussia since October. The offensive would strikeswiftly through the Ardennes, where the great breakthrough in 1940 hadbegun, and which German intelligence knew to be defended only by fourweak American infantry divisions.

It was a daring plan. It would, Hitler believed, almost certainly catchthe Allies by surprise and overcome them before they had a chance to re-cover.* But there was one drawback. The German Army was not onlyweaker than it had been in 1940, especially in the air, but it was up againsta much more resourceful and far better armed enemy. The German gen-erals lost no time in bringing this to the Fuehrer’s attention.

“When I received this plan early in November,” Rundstedt later de-clared, “I was staggered. Hitler had not troubled to consult me ... Itwas obvious to me that the available forces were far too small for such anextremely ambitious plan.” Realizing, however, that it was useless toargue with Hitler, Rundstedt and Model decided to propose an alternativeplan which might satisfy the warlord’s insistence on an offensive butwhich would be limited to pinching off the American salient aroundAachen.8 The German Commander in Chief in the West, however, had solittle hope of changing the Fuehrer’s mind that he declined to attend amilitary conference in Berlin on December 2, sending his chief of staff,Blumentritt, instead. But Blumentritt, Field Marshal Model, GeneralHasso von Manteuffel and S.S. General Sepp Dietrich (the last two wereto command two great panzer armies for the breakthrough), who attended

* There was an interesting adornment to the plan called “Operation Greif,” whichseems to have been Hitler’s brain child. Its leadership was entrusted by the Fuehrerto Otto Skorzeny, who, following his rescue of Mussolini and his resolute action inBerlin on the night of July 20, 1944, had further distinguished himself in his specialfield by kidnaping the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy, in Budapest in October1944, when the latter tried to surrender Hungary to the advancing Russians. Skor-zeny’s new assignment was to organize a special brigade of two thousand English-speaking German soldiers, put them in American uniforms, and infiltrate them incaptured American tanks and jeeps behind the American lines to cut communicationwires, kill dispatch riders, misdirect traffic and generally sow confusion. Small unitswere also to penetrate to the Meuse bridges and try to hold them intact until themain German panzer troops arrived.

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the meeting, were unable to shake Hitler’s resolve. All through the lateautumn he had been scraping the barrel in Germany for this last desperategamble. In November he had managed to collect nearly 1,500 new or re-built tanks and assault guns, and in December another 1,000. He had as-sembled some twenty-eight divisions, including nine panzer divisions, forthe Ardennes breakthrough, with another six divisions allotted for an at-tack in Alsace to follow the main offensive. Goering promised 3,000fighter planes.

This was a considerable force, though far weaker than Rundstedt’s armygroup on the same front in 1940. But raising it had meant denying theGerman forces in the East the reinforcements their commanders thoughtabsolutely necessary to repel the expected Russian winter attack in Jan-uary. When Guderian, the Chief of the General Staff, who was responsiblefor 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 theGerman Army in the field for five years and during that time I’ve had morepractical experience than any gentleman of the General Staff could ever hopeto 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 inoverwhelming strength and cited figures of the Soviet build-up, Hitlershouted, “It’s the greatest bluff since Gengis Khan! Who’s responsiblefor producing all this rubbish?”9

The generals who assembled at the Fuehrer’s headquarters at Ziegen-berg on the evening of December 12, minus their briefcases and revolvers,found the Nazi warlord, as Manteuffel later recalled, “a stooped figurewith a pale and puffy face, hunched in his chair, his hands trembling, hisleft arm subject to a violent twitching which he did his best to conceal. Asick man . . . When he walked he dragged one leg behind him.”10

Hitler’s spirits, however, were as fiery as ever. The generals had ex-pected to be briefed on the over-all military picture of the offensive, butthe warlord treated them instead to a political and historical harangue.

Never in history was there a coalition like that of our enemies, composed ofsuch heterogeneous elements with such divergent aims . . . Ultracapitaliststates on the one hand; ultra-Marxist states on the other. On the one hand adying Empire, Britain; on the other, a colony bent upon inheritance, theUnited States . . .

Each of the partners went into this coalition with the hope of realizing hispolitical ambitions . . . America tries to become England’s heir; Russia triesto gain the Balkans . . . England tries to hold her possessions ... in theMediterranean . . . Even now these states are at loggerheads, and he who,like a spider sitting in the middle of his web, can watch developments observeshow these antagonisms grow stronger and stronger from hour to hour.

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If now we can deliver a few more blows, then at any moment this artificiallybolstered 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 certainWars are finally decided by one side or the other recognizing that they cannotbe 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, noneof them—or at least so they said afterward—believing that the Ardennesblow would succeed but determined to carry out their orders to the bestof their ability.

This they did. The night of December 15 was dark and frosty and athick mist hung over the rugged snow-laden hills of the Ardennes Forestas the Germans moved up to their assault positions on a seventy-mile frontbetween Monschau, south of Aachen, and Echternach, northwest of Trier.Their meteorologists had predicted several days of such weather, duringwhich it was calculated that the Allied air forces would be grounded andthe German supply columns spared the inferno of Normandy. For fivedays Hitler s luck with the weather held and the Germans, catching theAllied High Command completely by surprise, scored several break-throughs after their initial penetrations on the morning of December 16.

When a German armored group reached Stavelot on the night of De-cember 17, it was only eight miles from the U.S. First Army headquartersat Spa, which was being hurriedly evacuated. More important, it was onlya mile from a huge American supply dump containing three million gallonsof gasoline. Had this dump been captured the German armored divisions,which were continually being slowed down because of the delay in bringingup gasoline, of which the Germans were woefully short, might have gonefarther and faster than they did. Skorzeny’s so-called Panzer Brigade 150,i s men outfitted in American uniforms and driving captured Americantanks, trucks and jeeps, got farthest. Some forty jeeploads slipped throughthe crumbling front, a few of them getting as far as the River Meuse. *

On the sixteenth a German officer carrying several copies of Operation Greif wastaken prisoner and the Americans thus learned what was up. But this does not seemto 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 militarytraffic. Nor did it prevent First Army’s intelligence office from believing the talltales of some of the captured Germans in American uniform that more than a fewof Skorzeny’s desperadoes were on their way to Paris to assassinate Eisenhower. Forseveral days thousands of American soldiers as far back as Paris were stopped byM P.s and had to prove their nationality by telling who won the World Series andwhat the capital of their native state was—though some could not remember or didnot know. A good many of the Germans caught in American uniforms weresummarily shot and others court-martialed and executed. Skorzeny himself wastried by an American tribunal at Dachau in 1947 but acquitted. Thereafter hemoved to Spain and South America, where he soon established a prosperous cementbusiness and composed his memoirs.

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Yet stubborn makeshift resistance by scattered units of the U.S. FirstArmy after the four weak divisions in the Ardennes had been overrunslowed up the German drive and the firm stand on the northern and south-ern shoulders of the breakthrough at Monschau and Bastogne, respec-tively, channeled Hitler’s forces through a narrow salient. The Americandefense of Bastogne sealed their fate.

This road junction was the key to the defense of the Ardennes and of theRiver Meuse behind. If strongly held it not only would block the mainroads along which ManteufFel’s Fifth Panzer Army was driving for theMeuse River at Dinant but would tie up considerable German forces ear-marked for the push beyond. By the morning of December 18, Man-teuffel’s armored spearheads were only fifteen miles from the town and theonly Americans in it belonged to a corps headquarters staff which waspreparing to evacuate. However, on the evening of the seventeenth the101st Airborne Division, which had been refitting at Reims, was orderedto proceed with all speed to Bastogne a hundred miles away. By drivingits trucks with headlights on through the night it reached the town intwenty-four hours, just ahead of the Germans. It was a decisive race andthe Germans had lost it. Although they encircled Bastogne, they had diffi-culty in getting their divisions around it to renew the drive toward theMeuse. And they had to leave strong forces behind to contain the roadjunction and to try to take it.

On December 22, General Heinrich von Luettwitz, commander of theGerman XLVIIth Armored Corps, sent a written note to General A. C.McAuliffe, commanding the 101st Airborne, demanding surrender of Bas-togne. He received a one-word answer which became famous: “nuts!”

The definite turning point in Hitler’s Ardennes gamble came on the daybefore Christmas. A reconnaissance battalion of the German 2nd PanzerDivision had reached the heights three miles east of the Meuse at Dinantthe day before and had waited for gasoline for its tanks and some reinforce-ments before plunging down the slopes to the river. Neither the gasolinenor the reinforcements ever arrived. The U.S. 2nd Armored Division sud-denly struck from the north. Already several divisions of Patton’s ThirdArmy were moving up from the south, their main objective being to re-lieve Bastogne. “On the evening of the twenty-fourth,” Manteuffel laterwrote, “it was clear that the high-water mark of our operation had beenreached. We now knew that we would never reach our objective.” Thepressure on the northern and southern flanks of the deep and narrow Ger-man salient had become too great. And two days before Christmas theweather had finally cleared and the Anglo-American air forces had begunto have a field day with massive attacks on German supply lines and on thetroops and tanks moving up the narrow, tortuous mountain roads. TheGermans made another desperate attempt to capture Bastogne. All dayChristmas, beginning at 3 a.m., they launched a series of attacks, butMcAuliffe’s defenders held. The next day an armored force of Patton’sThird Army broke through from the south and relieved the town. For the

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Germans it now became a question of extricating their forces from 'henarrow corridor before they were cut off and annihilated.

But Hitler would not listen to any withdrawal being made. On theevening of December 28 he held a full-dress military conference. Insteadof heeding the advice of Rundstedt and Manteuffel to pull out the Germanforces in the Bulge in time, he ordered the offensive to be resumed, Bas-togne to be stormed and the push to the Meuse renewed. Moreover, heinsisted on a new offensive being started immediately to the south in Al-sace, where the American line had been thinned out by the sending ofseveral of Patton’s divisions north to the Ardennes. To the protests of thegenerals that they lacked sufficient forces either to continue the offensive inthe Ardennes or to attack in Alsace he remained deaf.

Gentlemen, I have been in this business for eleven years, and ... I havenever heard anybody report that everything was completely ready . . . Youare never entirely ready. That is plain.

He talked on and on.* It must have been obvious to the generals longbefore he finished that their Commander in Chief had become blinded toreality and had lost himself in the clouds.

The question is . . . whether Germany has the will to remain in existenceor whether it will be destroyed . . . The loss of this war will destroy theGerman people.

There followed a long dissertation on the history of Rome and of Prussiain the Seven Years’ War. Finally he returned to the immediate problemsat hand. Although he admitted that the Ardennes offensive had not “re-sulted in the decisive success which might have been expected,” he claimedthat it had brought about “a transformation of the entire situation such a*snobody would have believed possible a fortnight ago.”

The enemy has had to abandon all his plans for attack ... He has had tothrow in units that were fatigued. His operational plans have been completelyupset. He is enormously criticized at home. It is a bad psychological momentfor him. Already he has had to admit that there is no chance of the war beingdecided before August, perhaps not before the end of next year .

Was this last phrase an admission of ultimate defeat? Hitler quicklytried to correct any such impression.

I hasten to add, gentlemen, that . . . you are not to conclude that evenremotely I envisage the loss of this war ... I have never learned to know the

" For several hours, judging by the length of the stenographic record of this con-ference, which has survived almost intact. It is Fragment 27 of the Fuehrer confer-ences. Gilbert gives the entire text in Hitler Directs His War, pp. 158-74.

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word “capitulation” . . . For me the situation today is nothing new. I havebeen in very much worse situations. I mention this only because I want you tounderstand why I pursue my aim with such fanaticism and why nothing canwear me down. As much as I may be tormented by worries and even physicallyshaken by them, nothing will make the slightest change in my decision to fighton 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 shallsee what happens. I do not believe that in the long run the enemy will be ableto resist forty-five German divisions . . . We shall yet master fate!

It was too late. Germany lacked the military force to make good hiswords.

On New Year’s Day Hitler threw eight German divisions into an attackin the Saar and followed it with a thrust from the bridgehead on the UpperRhine by an army under the command of—to the German generals thiswas a bad joke—Heinrich Himmler. Neither drive got very far. Nor didan all-out assault on Bastogne beginning on January 3 by no less than twocorps of nine divisions which led to the most severe fighting of the Ar-dennes campaign. By January 5 the Germans abandoned hope of takingthis key town. They were now faced with being cut off by a British—Ameri-can counteroffensive from the north which had begun on January 3. OnJanuary 8 Model, whose armies were in danger of being entrapped atHouffalize, northeast of Bastogne, finally received permission to withdraw.By January 16, just a month after the beginning of the offensive on whichHitler had staked his last reserves in men and guns and ammunition, theGerman forces were back to the line from which they had set out.

They had lost some 120,000 men, killed, wounded and missing, 600tanks and assault guns, 1,600 planes and 6,000 vehicles. American losseswere also severe—8,000 killed, 48,000 wounded, 21,000 captured ormissing, and 733 tanks and tank destroyers.* But the Americans could

* Among the American dead were several prisoners shot in cold blood by ColonelJochen Peiper’s combat group of the 1st S.S. Panzer Division near Malmedy onDecember 17. According to the evidence presented at Nuremberg 129 Americanprisoners were massacred; at the subsequent trial of the S.S. officers involved, thefigure was reduced to 71. The trial before an American military tribunal at Dachauin the spring of 1946 had a curious denouement. Forty-three S.S. officers, includingPeiper, were condemned to death, twenty-three to life imprisonment and eight toshorter 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, com-mander of the 1st S.S. Panzer Division, eighteen years.

then a hue and cry arose in the U.S. Senate, especially from the late SenatorMcCarthy, that the S.S. officers had been treated brutally in order to extort confes-sions. In March 1948 thirty-one of the death sentences were commuted; in April

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make good their losses; the Germans could not. They had shot their lastbolt. This was the last major offensive of the German Army in World WarII. Its failure not only made defeat inevitable in the West, it doomed theGerman armies in the East, where the effect of Hitler’s throwing his lastreserves into the Ardennes became immediately felt.

In his long lecture to the generals in the West three days after ChristmasHitler had been quite optimistic about the Russian front, where, thoughthe Balkans was being lost, the German armies had held firmly on theVistula in Poland and in East Prussia since October.

Unfortunately [Hitler said] because of the treachery of our dear allies weare forced to retire gradually ... Yet despite all this it has been possible onthe whole to hold the Eastern front.

But for how long? On Christmas Eve, after the Russians had sur-rounded Budapest, and again on New Year’s morning Guderian hadpleaded in vain with Hitler for reinforcements to meet the Russian threatin Hungary and to counter the Soviet offensive in Poland which he ex-pected to begin the middle of January.

I pointed out [Guderian says] that the Ruhr had already been paralyzed bythe Western Allies’ bombing attacks. ... on the other hand, I said, theindustrial area of Upper Silesia could still work at full pressure, the center ofthe German armament industry was already in the East, and the loss of UpperSilesia 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 mostunchristian surroundings.

Nonetheless Guderian returned to Hitler’s headquarters for a third timeon January 9. He took with him his Chief of Intelligence in the East, Gen-eral Gehlen, who with maps and diagrams tried to explain to the Fuehrerthe precarious German position on the eve of the expected renewal of theRussian offensive in the north.

Hitler [Guderian says] completely lost his temper . . . declaring the mapsand diagrams to be “completely idiotic” and ordering that I have the man whohad 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 betterhave me certified as well.”

General Lucius D. Clay reduced the death sentences from twelve to six; and inJanuary 1951, under a general amnesty, John J. McCloy, the American HighCommissioner, commuted the remaining death sentences to life imprisonment. Atthe time of writing all have been released. Almost forgotten in the hubbub overthe alleged ill-treatment of the S.S. officers was the indisputable evidence that atleast seventy-one unarmed U.S. war prisoners were slain in cold blood on a snowyfield near Malmedy on December 17,1944, on the orders—or incitement—of severalS.S. officers.

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When Hitler argued that the Eastern front had “never before possessedsuch a strong reserve as now,” Guderian retorted, “The Eastern front islike a house of cards. If the front is broken through at one point all the restwill collapse.”12

And that is what happened. On January 12, 1945, Konev’s Russianarmy group broke out of its bridgehead at Baranov on the upper Vistulasouth of Warsaw and headed for Silesia. Farther north Zhukov’s armiescrossed the Vistula north and south of Warsaw, which fell on January 17.Farther north still, two Russian armies overran half of East Prussia anddrove to the Gulf of Danzig.

This was the greatest Russian offensive of the war. Stalin was throwingin 180 divisions, a surprisingly large part of them armored, in Poland andEast Prussia alone. There was no stopping them.

“By January 27 [only fifteen days after the Soviet drive began] theRussian tidal wave,” says Guderian, “was rapidly assuming for us the pro-portions of a complete disaster.”13 By that date East and West Prussiawere cut off from the Reich. Zhukov that very day crossed the Oder nearLueben after an advance of 220 miles in a fortnight, reaching German soilonly 100 miles from Berlin. Most catastrophic of all, the Russians hadoverrun the Silesian industrial basin.

Albert Speer, in charge of armament production, drew up a memoran-dum to Hitler on January 30—the twelfth anniversary of Hitler’s comingto power—pointing out the significance of the loss of Silesia. “The war islost,” his report began, and he went on in his cool and objective manner toexplain why. The Silesian mines, ever since the intensive bombing of theRuhr, had supplied 60 per cent of Germany’s coal. There was only twoweeks’ supply of coal for the German railways, power plants and factories.Henceforth, now that Silesia was lost, Speer could supply, he said, onlyone quarter of the coal and one sixth of the steel which Germany had beenproducing in 1944.14 This augured disaster for 1945.

The Fuehrer, Guderian later related, glanced at Speer’s report, read thefirst sentence and then ordered it filed away in his safe. He refused to seeSpeer alone, saying to Guderian:

. . I refuse to see anyone alone any more . . . [He] always has some-thing unpleasant to say to me. I can’t bear that.”15

On the afternoon of January 27, the day Zhukov’s troops crossed theOder a hundred miles from Berlin, there was an interesting reaction at Hit-ler’s headquarters, which had now been transferred to the Chancellery inBerlin, where it was to remain until the end. On the twenty-fifth thedesperate Guderian had called on Ribbentrop and urged him to try to getan immediate armistice in the West so that what was left of the Germanarmies could be concentrated in the East against the Russians. The For-eign Minister had quickly tattled to the Fuehrer, who that evening up-

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braided his General Staff Chief and accused him of committing “hightreason.” ° 6

But two nights later, under the impact of the disaster in the East, Hitler,Goenng and Jodi were in such a state that they thought it would not benecessary to ask the West for an armistice. They were sure the WesternAllies would come running to them in their fear of the consequences ofthe Bolshevik victories. A fragment of the Fuehrer conference of January27 has preserved part of the scene. J

Hitler: Do you think the English are enthusiastic about all the Russiandevelopments?

Goering: They certainly didn’t plan that we hold them off while the Rus-sians conquer all of Germany . . . They had not counted on our . . . hold-ing them off like madmen while the Russians drive deeper and deeper intoGermany, and practically have all of Germany now

J°dl: They have always regarded the Russians with suspicion.

Goering: If this goes on we will get a telegram [from the English] in a few

On such a slender thread the leaders of the Third Reich began to pintheir last hopes. In the end these German architects of the Nazi-SovietPact against the West would reach a point where they could not understandwhy the British and Americans did not join them in repelling the Russianinvaders.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE GERMAN ARMIES

The end came quickly for the Third Reich in the spring of 1945The death throes began in March. By February, with the Ruhr largelyin ruins and Upper Silesia lost, coal production was down to one fifth ofwhat it had been the year before and very little of this could be moved be-cause of the dislocation of rail and water transport by Anglo-Americanbombing. The Fuehrer conferences became dominated by talk of the coalshortage, Doenitz complaining that many of his ships had to lie idle be-cause of lack of fuel and Speer explaining patiently that the power plantsand armament factories were in a similar situation for the same reasonThe loss of the Rumanian and Hungarian oil fields and the bombing of thesynthetic-oil plants in Germany caused such an acute shortage of gasolinethat a good part of the desperately needed fighter planes had to begrounded and were destroyed on the fields by Allied air attacks Manypanzer divisions could not move for lack of fuel for their tanks.

The hopes in the promised “miracle weapons,” which had for a timesustained not only the masses of the people and the soldiers but even suchhardheaded generals as Guderian, were finally abandoned. The launchingsites for the V-l flying bombs and the V-2 rockets directed against Britain

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were almost entirely lost when Eisenhower’s forces reconquered theFrench and Belgian coasts, though a few remained in Holland. Nearlyeight thousand of the two V bombs were hurled against Antwerp and othermilitary targets after the British-American armies reached the Germanfrontier, but the damage they did was negligible.

Hitler and Goering had counted on the new jet fighters driving theAllied air forces from the skies, and well they might have—for theGermans succeeded in producing more than a thousand of them—hadthe Anglo-American flyers, who lacked this plane, not taken successfulcounteraction. The conventional Allied fighter was no match for theGerman jet in the air, but few ever got off the ground. The refineriesproducing the special fuel for them were bombed and destroyed and theextended runways which had to be constructed for them were easilydetected 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 theBritish-American lifelines in the North Atlantic. But by the middle ofFebruary 1945 only two of the 126 new craft commissioned had put to sea.

As for the German atom bomb project, which had given London andWashington much worry, it had made little progress due to Hitler’s lack ofinterest in it and Himmler’s practice of arresting the atom scientists forsuspected disloyalty or pulling them off to work on some of his pet non-sensical “scientific” experiments which he deemed more important. Be-fore 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 thiswar.*

On February 8 Eisenhower’s armies, now eighty-five divisions strong,began to close in on the Rhine. They had expected that the Germans wouldfight only a delaying action and, conserving their strength, retire behindthe formidable water barrier of the wide and swift-flowing river. Rundstedtcounseled this. But here, as elsewhere throughout the years of his defeats,Hitler would not listen to a withdrawal. It would merely mean, he toldRundstedt, “moving the catastrophe from one place to another.” So theGerman armies, at Hitler’s insistence, stood and fought—but not for long.By the end of the month the British and Americans had reached theRhine at several places north of Duesseldorf, and a fortnight later they hadfirm possession of the left bank from the Moselle River northward. TheGermans had lost another 350,000 men killed, wounded or captured (theprisoners numbered 293,000) and most of their arms and equipment.

Hitler was in a fine fury. He sacked Rundstedt for the last time onMarch 10, replacing him with Field Marshal Kesselring, who had held out

* 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 codename of the American scientific mission which he headed and which followed Eisen-hower’s armies into Western Europe.

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so stubbornly and long in Italy. Already in Februaiy the Fuehrer, in aht of rage, had considered denouncing the Geneva Convention in orderhe said at a conference on the nineteenth, “to make the enemy realize thatwe are determined to fight for our existence with all the means at our dis-posal. He had been urged to take this step by Dr. Goebbels, the blood-thirsty noncombatant, who suggested that all captured airmen be shotsummarily in reprisal for their terrible bombing of the German citiesWhen some of the officers present raised legal objections Hitler retorted

To hell with that! ... If I make it clear that I show no consideration forprisoners but that I treat enemy prisoners without any consideration for theirrights, regardless of reprisals, then quite a few [Germans] will think twicebefore they desert.17

This was one of the first indications to his followers that Hitler hismission as world conqueror having failed, was determined to go down,like Wotan at Valhalla, in a holocaust of blood—not only the enemy’s butthat of his own people. At the close of the discussion he asked AdmiralDoenitz “to consider the pros and cons of this step and to report as soonas possible.” r

Doenitz came back with his answer on the following day and it wastypical of the man. J

The disadvantages would outweigh the advantages ... It would be betterin any case to keep up outside appearances and carry out the measures believednecessary without announcing them beforehand.18

Hitler reluctantly agreed and while, as we have seen,* there was nogeneral massacre of captured flyers or of other prisoners of war (except theRussians) several were done to death and the civil population was incitedto lynch Allied air crews who parachuted to the ground. One captiveFrench general, Mesny, was deliberately murdered on the orders ofHitler and a good many Allied POWs perished when they were forcedto make long marches without food or water on roads strafed by BritishAmerican and Russian flyers as the Germans herded them toward theinterior of the country to prevent them from being liberated by the advanc-ing Allied armies.

Hitlers concern to make German soldiers “think twice before theydesert” was not ungrounded. In the West the number of deserters or atleast of those who gave themselves up as quickly as possible in the wakeot the British-American advances, became staggering. On February 12Keitel issued an order “in the name of the Fuehrer” stating that any soldierwho deceitfully obtains leave papers, or who travels with false papers,

* In Chapter 27, “The New Order.

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 an-nounce they are stragglers looking for their units will be summarily tried andshot.

On April 12 Himmler added his bit by decreeing that any commanderwho failed to hold a town or an important communications center “ispunishable by death.” The order was already being carried out in thecase of the unfortunate commanders at one of the Rhine bridges.

On the early afternoon of March 7, a spearhead of the U.S. 9thArmored Division reached the heights above the town of Remagen.twenty-five miles down the Rhine from Koblenz. To the amazement ofthe American tank crews they saw that the Ludendorff railroad bridgeacross the river was still intact. They raced down the slopes to the waterfront. Engineers frantically cut every demolition wire they could find.A platoon of infantry raced across the bridge. As they were approachingthe east bank a charge went off and then another. The bridge shook butheld. Feeble German forces on the far shore were quickly driven back.Tanks sped over the span. By dusk the Americans had a strong bridge-head on the east bank of the Rhine. The last great natural barrier inWes ern Germany had been crossed.*

A few days later, on the night of March 22, Patton’s Third Army, afteroverrunning the Saar-Palatinate triangle in a brilliant operation carriedout in conjunction with the U.S. Seventh and French First armies, madeanother crossing of the Rhine at Oppenheim, south of Mainz. By March25 the Anglo-American armies were in possession of the entire westbank of the river and across it in two places with strong bridgeheads. Insix weeks Hitler had lost more than one third of his forces in the Westand most of the arms for half a million men.

At 2:30 a.m. on March 24, he called a war conference at his head-quarters in Berlin to consider what to do.

Hitler: I consider the second bridgehead at Oppenheim as the greatestdanger.

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 manhas to be asleep and a terrible misfortune can happen.

The Supreme Commander wanted to know if there was “no brigadeor something like that which could be sent there.” An adjutant answered:

* Hitler had eight German officers who commanded the weak forces at the Remagenbridge executed. They were tried by a “Flying Special Tribunal, West,” set up bythe Fuehrer and presided over by a fanatical Nazi general by the name of Huebner.

1102 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

At the present time no unit is available to be sent to Oppenheim. There areonly five tank destroyers in the camp at Senne, which will be ready today ortomorrow. 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 atOppenheim seven miles wide and six miles deep and his tanks were head-ing eastward toward Frankfurt. It is a measure of the plight of the oncemighty German Army whose vaunted panzer corps had raced throughEurope in the earlier years that at this moment of crisis the Supreme Com-mander should be concerned with scraping up five broken-down tankdestroyers which could only be “put into battle in the next few days” tostem the advance of a powerful enemy armored army. *

With the Americans across the Rhine by the third week of March anda mighty Allied army of British, Canadians and Americans under Mont-gomery poised to cross the Lower Rhine and head both into the NorthGerman plain and into the Ruhr—which they did, beginning on the nightof March 23—Hitler’s vengeance turned from the advancing enemy tohis own people. They had sustained him through the greatest victoriesin German history. Now in the winter of defeat he thought them no longerworthy of his greatness.

“If the German people were to be defeated in the struggle,” Hitler hadtold the gauleiters in a speech in August 1944, “it must have been tooweak: it had failed to prove its mettle before history and was destined onlyto destruction.”20

He was fast becoming a physical wreck and this helped to poison hisview. The strain of conducting the war, the shock of defeats, the unhealthylife without fresh air and exercise in the underground headquarters bunkerswhich he rarely left, his giving way to ever more frequent temper tantrumsand, not the least, the poisonous drugs he took daily on the advice of hisquack physician, Dr. Morell, had undermined his health even before theJuly 20, 1944, bombing. The explosion on that day had broken thetympanic membranes of both ears, which contributed to his spells ofdizziness. After the bombing his doctors advised an extended vacation,

* The transcript of this March 23 Fuehrer conference is the last one which wassaved, fairly intact, from the flames. It gives a good picture of the frantic mind ofthe Fuehrer and his obsession with trivial details at the moment when the walls arecaving in. For the best part of an hour he discusses Goebbels’ proposal to use thebroad avenue through the Tiergarten in Berlin as an airstrip. He lectures on theweakness of German concrete in the face of bombing. Much of the conference isgiven over to scraping up troops. One general raises the question of the IndianLegion.

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 Indiansto turn prayer mills, or something like that, they would be the most indefatigablesoldiers in the world . . .

And so on far into the night. The meeting broke up at 3:43 a.m.

The Conquest of Germany 1103

but he refused. “If I leave East Prussia,” he told Keitel, “it will fall. Aslong 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 neverrecovered control of his terrible temper. More and more, as the news fromthe fronts in 1945 grew worse, he gave way to hysterical rage. It wasinvariably accompanied by a trembling of his hands and feet which hecould not control. General Guderian has given several descriptions ofhim at these moments. At the end of January, when the Russians hadreached the Oder only a hundred miles from Berlin and the General StaffChief started to demand the evacuation by sea of several German divisionscut 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 mebackward lest I be the victim of a physical assault.

A few days later, on February 13, 1945, the two men got into anotherrow over the Russian situation that lasted, Guderian says, for two hours.

His fists raised, his cheeks flushed with rage, his whole body trembling, theman stood there in front of me, beside himself with fury and having lost allself-control. After each outburst Hitler would stride up and down the carpetedge, then suddenly stop immediately before me and hurl his next accusationin my face. He was almost screaming, his eyes seemed to pop out of his headand the veins stood out in his temples.21

It was in this state of mind and health that the German Fuehrer madeone of the last momentous decisions of his life. On March 19 he issueda general order that all military, industrial, transportation and communi-cation installations as well as all stores in Germany must be destroyed inorder 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 theNazi gauleiters and “commissars for defense.” “All directives opposingthis,” the order concluded, “are invalid.”22

Germany was to be made one vast wasteland. Nothing was to be leftwith which the German people might somehow survive their defeat.

Albert Speer, the outspoken Minister for Armament and War Produc-tion, had anticipated the barbarous directive from previous meetings withHitler and on March 15 had drawn up a memorandum in which hestrenuously opposed such a criminal step and reiterated his contentionthat the war was already lost. He presented it to the Fuehrer personallyon the evening of March 18.

In four to eight weeks [Speer wrote] the final collapse of the Germaneconomy must be expected with certainty . . . After that collapse the warcannot be continued even militarily ... We must do everything to maintain.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICHeven 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 demoli-tions which might affect the life of the people. If our enemies wish to destroythis nation, which has fought with unique bravery, then this historical shameshall rest exclusively upon them. We have the duty of leaving to the nationevery possibility of insuring its reconstruction in the distant future . . ,2S

But Hitler, his own personal fate sealed, was not interested in the con-tinued existence of the German people, for whom he had always professedsuch boundless love. He told Speer:

If the war is lost, the nation will also perish. This fate is inevitable. Thereis no necessity to take into consideration the basis which the people will needto continue a most primitive existence. On the contrary, it will be better todestroy these things ourselves because this nation will have proved to be theweaker one and the future will belong solely to the stronger eastern nation[Russia]. Besides, those who will remain after the battle are only the inferiorones, for the good ones have been killed.

Whereupon the Supreme Warlord promulgated his infamous “scorchedearth” directive the next day. It was followed on March 23 by an equallymonstrous order by Martin Bormann, the Fuehrer’s secretary, a molelikeman who had now gained a position at court second to none among theNazi satraps. Speer described it on the stand at Nuremberg.

The Bormann decree aimed at bringing the population to the center of theReich from both East and West, and the foreign workers and prisoners of warwere to be included. These millions of people were to be sent upon their trekon foot. No provisions for their existence had been made, nor could it becarried out in view of the situation. It would have resulted in an unimaginablehunger catastrophe.

And had all the other orders of Hitler and Bormann—there were anumber of supplementary directives—been carried out, millions of Ger-mans who had escaped with their lives up to then might well have died.Speer tried to summarize for the Nuremberg court the various “scorchedearth” 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 communicationinstallations, all waterways, all ships, all freight cars and all locomotives.

That the German people were spared this final catastrophe was due to—a,side from the rapid advances of the Allied troops, which made the carry-ing out of such a gigantic demolition impossible—the superhuman effortsof Speer and a number of Army officers who, in direct disobedience

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The Conquest of Germany

(finally!) of Hitler’s orders, raced about the country to make sure thatvital communications, plants and stores were not blown up by zealouslyobedient Army officers and party hacks.

The end now approached for the German Army.

While Field Marshal Montgomery’s British-Canadian armies, aftertheir crossing of the Lower Rhine the last week of March, pushed north-east for Bremen, Hamburg and the Baltic at Luebeck, General Simpson’sU.S. Ninth Army and General Hodges’ U.S. First Army advanced rapidlypast the Ruhr, the Ninth Army on its northern perimeter, the First Armyto the south. On April 1 they linked up at Lippstadt. Field MarshalModel’s Army Group B, consisting of the Fifteenth and the Fifth Panzerarmies—some twenty-one divisions—was trapped in the ruins of Ger-many’s greatest industrial area. It held out for eighteen days, surrenderingon April 18. Another 325,000 Germans, including thirty generals, werecaptured, but Model was not among them. Rather than become a prisonerhe shot himself.

The encirclement of Model’s armies in the Ruhr had torn the Germanfront in the West wide open, leaving a gap two hundred miles wide throughwhich the divisions of the U.S. Ninth and First armies not needed to con-tain 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 andthe German capital there were only a few scattered, disorganized Germandivisions. On the evening of April 11, after advancing some sixty milessince daybreak, a spearhead of the U.S. Ninth Army reached the ElbeRiver near Magdeburg, and on the next day threw a bridgehead overit. The Americans were only sixty miles from Berlin.

Eisenhower’s purpose now was to split Germany in two by joining upwith the Russians on the Elbe between Magdeburg and Dresden. Thoughbitterly criticized by Churchill and the British military chiefs for not beat-ing the Russians to Berlin, as he easily could have done, Eisenhower andhis staff at SHAEF were obsessed at this moment with the urgency ofheading southeast after the junction with the Russians in order to capturethe so-called National Redoubt, where it was believed Hitler was gatheringhis remaining forces to make a last stand in the almost impenetrable Alpinemountains of southern Bavaria and western Austria.

The “National Redoubt” was a phantom. It never existed except in thepropaganda blasts of Dr. Goebbels and in the cautious minds at Eisen-hower’s headquarters which had fallen for them. As early as March 11,SHAEF intelligence had warned Eisenhower that the Nazis were planningto make an impregnable fortress in the mountains and that Hitler himselfwould command its defenses from his retreat at Berchtesgaden. The icymountain crags were “practically impenetrable,” it said.

Here [it continued], defended by nature and by the most efficient secretweapons yet invented, the powers that have hitherto guided Germany willsurvive to reorganize her resurrection; here armaments will be manufactured

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

in bombproof factories, food and equipment will be stored in vast undergroundcaverns and a specially selected corps of young men will be trained inguerrilla warfare, so that a whole underground army can be fitted and directedto liberate Germany from the occupying forces.24

It would almost seem as though the Allied Supreme Commander’s in-telligence staff had been infiltrated by British and American mysterywriters. At any rate, this fantastic appreciation was taken seriously atSHAEF, where Eisenhower’s chief of staff, General Bedell Smith, mulledover the dread possibility “of a prolonged campaign in the Alpine area”which would take a heavy toll of American lives and prolong the war in-definitely. *

This was the last time that the resourceful Dr. Goebbels succeededin influencing the strategic course of the war by propaganda bluff. Forthough Adolf Hitler at first considered retiring to the Austro-Bavarianmountains near which he was born and in which he had spent most of theprivate 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 cityof the great Nazi Party rallies, Zhukov’s Russian armies broke loose fromtheir bridgeheads over the Oder, and on the afternoon of April 21 theyreached the outskirts of Berlin. Vienna had already fallen on April 13. At4:40 on the afternoon of April 25, patrols of the U.S. 69th Infantry Divi-sion met forward elements of the Russian 58th Guards Division at Torgauon the Elbe, some seventy-five miles south of Berlin. North and SouthGermany were severed. Adolf Hitler was cut off in Berlin. The last daysof the Third Reich had come.

* “Not until after the campaign ended,” General Omar Bradley later wrote, “werewe to learn that this Redoubt existed largely in the imaginations of a few fanaticNazis. It grew into so exaggerated a scheme that I am astonished we could havebelieved it as innocently as we did. But while it persisted, this legend of the Redoubtwas too ominous a threat to ignore and in consequence it shaped our tactical thinkingduring 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 Kes-selring commented wryly after the war, “mostly nonsense.” (Kesselring, A Soldier'sRecord, p. 276.)

31

GOETTERDAEMMERUNG: THE LAST DAYSOF THE THIRD REICH

Hitler had planned to leave Berlin on April 20, his fifty-sixth birth-day, for Obersalzberg and there direct the last stand of the ThirdReich in the legendary mountain fastness of Barbarossa. Most of the min-isterial offices had already moved south with their trucks full of statepapers and of frantic officials desperate to get out of doomed Berlin. TheFuehrer himself had sent most of the members of his household staff toBerchtesgaden 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 Ameri-cans and Russians were driving swiftly to a junction on the Elbe. TheBritish were at the gates of Hamburg and Bremen and threatening to cutoff Germany from occupied Denmark. In Italy Bologna had fallen andAlexander’s Allied forces were plunging into the valley of the Po. TheRussians, having captured Vienna on April 13, were heading up the Dan-ube, and the U.S. Third Army was sweeping down that river to meet themin Hitler’s home town of Linz in Austria. Nuremberg, where work hadbeen going on throughout the war on the great auditorium and stadiumswhich were to mark the ancient town as the capital of the Nazi Party, wasbesieged and part of the U.S. Seventh Army was sweeping past it towardMunich, the birthplace of the Nazi movement. In Berlin the thunder ofRussian heavy artillery could be heard.

“All through the week,” Count Schwerin von Krosigk, the puerileMinister of Finance and former Rhodes scholar, who had scooted out ofBerlin for the north at the first word of the approaching Bolsheviki, notedin his diary on April 23, “there was nothing but a succession of Job’smessengers. Our people seem to be faced with the darkest fate.”1

Hitler had left his headquarters in Rastenburg in East Prussia for thelast time on the previous November 20, as the Russians approached, andhad remained in Berlin, which he had scarcely seen since the beginning

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of the war in the East, until December 10, when he had gone to his Westernheadquarters at Ziegenberg near Bad Nauheim to direct the great gamblem eArdennes. After its fadure he had returned on January 16 to Berlinwhere he was to remain until the end, directing his crumbling armies fromthe underground bunker fifty feet below the Chancellery, whose greatmarble halls were now in ruins from Allied bombing.

Physically he was fast deteriorating. A young Army captain who sawhim for the first time in February later recalled his appearance.

His head was slightly wobbling. His left arm hung slackly and his handtrembled 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 thoseof a senile man.2

Since the July 20 attempt on his life he had grown distrustful of every-one, even of his old party stalwarts. “I am lied to on all sides,” he fumed toone of his women secretaries in March.

I can rely on no one. They all betray me. The whole business makes mesic ... If anything happens to me, Germany will be left without a leaderI have no successor. Hess is mad, Goering has lost the sympathy of the peopleand Himmler would be rejected by the Party-besides, he [Himmler] is so

completely inartistic . . . Rack your brains and tell me who my successor isto be . . ,3 J

One would have thought that at this stage of history the question ofsuccession was academic, but it was not—not in this Nazi cuckoo landNot only the Fuehrer was obsessed by it but the leading candidates to suc-ceed him, as we shall shortly see.

Physical wreck though Hitler now was, with a disastrous end staringhim in the face as the Russians approached Berlin and the Western Alliesoverran the Reich, he and a few of his most fanatical followers, Goebbelsabove all, clung stubbornly to their hopes of being saved at the last minuteby a miracle.

One fine evening early in April Goebbels had sat up reading to Hitlerfrom one of the Fuehrer’s favorite books, Carlyle’s History of Fredericke Great. The chapter he was reading told of the darkest days of the

ST,n MCurS War’ When the great King felt himself at the end of his ropeand told his ministers that if by February 15 no change for the better in

is fortunes occurred he would give up and take poison. This portion ofhistory certainly had its appropriateness and no doubt Goebbels read itin his most dramatic fashion.

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“Brave King! [Goebbels read on] Wait yet a little while, and the days ofyour suffering will be over. Already the sun of your good fortune standsbehind the clouds and soon will rise upon you.” On February 12 the Czarinadied, the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg had come to pass.

The Fuehrer’s eyes, Goebbels told Krosigk, to whose diary we owe thistouching scene, “were filled with tears.”4

With such encouragement—and from a British source—they sent fortwo horoscopes, which were kept in the files of one of Himmler’s multitu-dinous “research” offices. One was the horoscope of the Fuehrer drawnup on January 30, 1933, the day he took office; the other was the horo-scope of the Weimar Republic, composed by some unknown astrologeron November 9, 1918, the day of the Republic’s birth. Goebbels com-municated the results of the re-examination of these two remarkable docu-ments to Krosigk.

An amazing fact has become evident, both horoscopes predicting the out-break of the war in 1939, the victories until 1941, and the subsequent seriesof reversals, with the hardest blows during the first months of 1945, particularlyduring the first half of April. In the second half of April we were to experiencea temporary success. Then there would be stagnation until August and peacethat same month. For the following three years Germany would have a hardtime, but starting in 1948 she would rise again.5

Fortified by Carlyle and the “amazing” predictions of the stars, Goeb-bels on April 6 issued a ringing appeal to the retreating troops:

The Fuehrer has declared that even in this very year a change of fortuneshall come . . . The true quality of genius is its consciousness and its sureknowledge of coming change. The Fuehrer knows the exact hour of itsarrival. Destiny has sent us this man so that we, in this time of great externaland internal stress, shall testify to the miracle . . ,6

Scarcely a week later, on the night of April 12, Goebbels convincedhimself that “the exact hour” of the miracle had come. It had been a day offurther bad news. The Americans had appeared on the Dessau-Berlinautobahn and the High Command had hastily ordered the destruction ofits last two remaining powder factories, which were in the vicinity. Hence-forth the German soldiers would have to get along with the ammunition athand. Goebbels had spent the day at the headquarters of General Busseon the Oder front at Kuestrin. The General had assured him that a Russianbreakthrough was impossible, that (as Goebbels the next day told Kro-sigk) he was “holding out until the British kick us in the ass.”

In the evening [Goebbels recounted] they had sat together at headquartersand he had developed his thesis that according to historical logic and justice

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

things were bound to change, just as in the Seven Years’ War there had beenthe 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 possi-bilities.”

When the Propaganda Minister got back to Berlin late that night thecenter of the capital was in flames from another R.A.F. bombing. Theremains of the Chancellery and the Adlon Hotel up the Wilhelmstrassewere burning. At the steps of the Propaganda Ministry, a secretary greetedGoebbels 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 fromthe Chancellery across the Wilhelmsplatz.

“Bring out our best champagne!” Goebbels cried. “And get me theFuehrer 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 turningpoint for us. This is Friday, April the thirteenth. [It was already aftermidnight.] It is the turning point!”

Hitler’s reaction to the news was not recorded, though it may be im-agined in view of the encouragement he had been receiving from Carlyleand the stars. But that of Goebbels was. “He was,” says his secretary, “inecstasy.”7

The fatuous Count Schwerin von Krosigk too. When Goebbels’ S ateSecretary phoned him that Roosevelt was dead he exclaimed—at leastin 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 “congratula-tions”—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 inpower and educated in Europe’s ancient universities, as Krosigk andGoebbels were, grasping at the readings of the stars and rejoicing amidstthe flames of the burning capital in the death of the American Presidentas a sure sign that the Almighty would now rescue the Third Reich at theeleventh hour from impending catastrophe, the last act in Berlin was playedout to its final curtain.

Eva Braun had arrived in Berlin to join Hitler on April 15. Very fewGermans knew of her existence and even fewer of her relationship to

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Goetterdaemmerung: The Last Days

Adolf Hitler. For more than twelve years she had been his mistress. Nowin April she had come, as Trevor-Roper says, for her wedding and herceremonial death.

She is interesting for her role in the last chapter of this narrative but notinteresting in herself; she was not a Pompadour or a Lola Montez. * Hitler,although he was undoubtedly extremely fond of her and found relaxationin her unobtrusive company, had always kept her out of sight, refusing toallow her to come to his various headquarters, where he spent almost allof his time during the war years, and rarely permitting her even to come toBerlin. She remained immured at the Berghof on the Obersalzberg, pass-ing her time in swimming and skiing, in reading cheap novels and seeingtrashy films, in dancing (which Hitler disapproved of) and endlesslygrooming herself, pining away for her absent loved one.

“She was,” says Erich Kempka, the Fuehrer’s chauffeur, “the unhappiestwoman in Germany. She spent most of her life waiting for Hitler.”8

Field Marshal Keitel described her appearance during an interrogationat Nuremberg.

She was very slender, elegant appearance, quite nice legs—one could seethat—reticent and retiring and a very, very nice person, dark blond. Shestood very much in the background and one saw her very rarely.®

The daughter of lower-middle-class Bavarian parents, who at first stren-uously opposed her illicit relation with Hitler, even though he was thedictator, she had been employed in the Munich photograph shop of Hein-rich Hoffmann, who introduced her to the Fuehrer. This was a year or twoafter the suicide of Geli Raubal, the niece of Hitler, for whom, as we haveseen, he had the one great passionate love of his life. Eva Braun too, itseems, was often driven to despair by her lover, though not for the samereasons as Geli Raubal. Eva, though installed in a suite in Hitler’s Alpinevilla, couldn’t endure the long separations when he was away and twicetried to kill herself in the early years of their friendship. But gradually sheaccepted her frustrating and ambiguous role—acknowledged neither aswife nor as mistress—content to be sole woman companion of the greatman 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 notbe fit to live in for a true German,” she told Hanna Reitsch, the famedGerman woman test pilot, in the shelter just before the end.10 Though EvaBraun had a birdlike mind and made no intellectual impression on Hitlerat all—perhaps this is one reason he preferred her company to that ofintelligent women—it is obvious that his influence on her, as on so manyothers, was total.

* “For all writers of history,” Speer told Trevor-Roper, “Eva Braun is going to be adisappointment,” to which the historian adds: “—and for readers of history too.”(Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, p. 92.)

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

HITLER’S LAST GREAT DECISION

Hitler’s birthday on April 20 passed quietly enough, although, asGeneral Karl Roller, the Air Force Chief of Staff, who was present at thecelebration in the bunker, noted in his diary, it was a day of further catas-trophes on the rapidly disintegrating fronts. All the Old Guard Nazis,Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop and Bormann, were there, aswell as the surviving military leaders, Doenitz, Keitel, Jodi and Krebs—thelast-named the new, and last, Chief of the Army General Staff. They of-fered the Fuehrer birthday congratulations.

The warlord was not unusually cast down, despite the situation. Hewas still confident, as he had told his generals three days before, that “theRussians were going to suffer their bloodiest defeat of all before Berlin.”The generals knew better, and at the regular military conference after thebirthday party they urged Hitler to leave Berlin for the south. In a day ortwo, they explained, the Russians would cut off the last escape corridorin that direction. Hitler hesitated; he would not say yes or no. Apparentlyhe could not quite face the appalling fact that the capital of the ThirdReich was now about to be captured by the Russians, whose armies, hehad announced years before, were as good as destroyed. As a concessionto the generals he consented to setting up two separate commands in casethe Americans and Russians made their junction on the Elbe. AdmiralDoenitz would head that in the north and perhaps Kesselring the one inthe south he was not quite sure about the latter appointment.

That night there was a general getaway from Berlin. Two of theFuehrer’s most trusted and veteran aides got out: Himmler and Goering,the latter in a motor caravan whose trucks were filled with booty from hisfabulous estate, Karinhall. Each of these Old Guard Nazis left convincedthat his beloved Leader would soon be dead and that he would succeedhim.

They never saw him again. Nor did Ribbentrop, who also scurried forsafer parts late that night.

But Hitler had not yet given up. On the day after his birthday he orderedan all-out counterattack on the Russians in the southern suburbs of Berlinby S.S. General Felix Steiner. Every available soldier in the Berlin areawas to be thrown into the attack, including the Luftwaffe ground troops.

“Any commander who holds back his forces,” Hitler shouted to GeneralRoller, who had remained behind to represent the Air Force, “will forfeithis life in five hours. You yourself will guarantee with your head that thelast man is thrown in.”11

All through the day and far into the next Hitler waited impatiently forthe news of Steiner’s counterattack. It was a further example of his loss ofcontact with reality. There was no Steiner attack. It was never attempted.

It existed only in the feverish mind of the desperate dictator. When he wasfinally forced to recognize this the storm broke.

April 22 brought the last turning point in Hitler’s road to ruin. From

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early morning until 3 p.m. he had been on the telephone, as he had beenthe day before, trying to find out from the various command posts howthe Steiner counterattack was going. No one knew. General Koller’splanes could not locate it, nor could the ground commanders, though itwas supposed to be rolling only two or three miles south of the capital. Noteven 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 Jodi nor any-one else had any. But the generals had other news. The withdrawal oftroops from the north of Berlin to support Steiner had so weakened thefront there that the Russians had broken through and their tanks were nowwithin the city limits.

This was too much for the Supreme Warlord. All the surviving wit-nesses testify that he completely lost control of himself. He flew into thegreatest rage of his life. This was the end, he shrieked. Everyone haddeserted him. There was nothing but treason, lies, corruption and coward-ice. All was over. Very well, he would stay on in Berlin. He wouldpersonally take over the defense of the capital of the Third Reich. Theothers could leave, if they wished. In this place he would meet his end.

The others protested. There was still hope, they said, if the Fuehrerretired to the south, where Field Marshal Ferdinand Schoemer’s armygroup in Czechoslovakia and considerable forces of Kesselring were stillintact. Doenitz, who had left for the northwest to take over command ofthe troops there, and Himmler, who, as we shall see, was up to his owngame, telephoned to urge the Leader not to remain in Berlin. EvenRibbentrop called up to say he was about to spring a “diplomatic coup”which would save everything. But Hitler had no more faith in them, noteven in his “second Bismarck,” as he once, in a moment of folly, hadcalled his Foreign Minister. He had made his decision, he said to all. Andto show them that it was irrevocable, he called for a secretary and in theirpresence dictated an announcement that was to be read immediately overthe radio. The Fuehrer, it said, would stay in Berlin and defend it to theend.

Hitler then sent for Goebbels and invited him, his wife and their sixyoung children to move into the Fuehrerbunker from their badly bombedhouse in the Wilhelmstrasse garden. He knew that at least this fanaticaland faithful follower, and his family, would stick by him to the end. NextHitler turned to his papers, sorted out those he wished to be destroyed, andturned them over to one of his adjutants, Julius Schaub, who took themup to the garden and burned them.

Finally that evening he called in Keitel and Jodi and ordered them toproceed south to take over direct command of the remaining armed forces.Both generals, who had been at Hitler’s side throughout the war, have leftvivid 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

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

disobeyed an order from the Leader in his life, not even those command-ing him to commit the vilest war crimes, said nothing further, but Jodi, lessa lackey, did. To this soldier, who, despite his fanatical devotion to theFuehrer whom he had served so well, still retained some sense of militarytradition, the Supreme Warlord was deserting the command of his troopsand shirking his responsibility for them at a moment of disaster.

“You can’t direct anything from here,” Jodi said. “If you don’t haveyour Leadership Staff with you how can you lead anything?”

“Well, then,” Hitler retorted, “Goering can take over the leadershipdown there.”

When one of them pointed out that no soldier would fight for the ReichMarshal, Hitler cut in. What do you mean, fight? There’s precious littlemore fighting to be done!” Even for the mad conqueror the scales at lastwere falling from the eyes. Or, at least, the gods were giving him momentsof lucidity in these last nightmarish days of his life.

There were several repercussions to Hitler’s outbursts on April 22 andto his final decision to remain in Berlin. When Himmler, who was atHohenlychen, northwest of Berlin, received a firsthand account on thetelephone from Hermann Fegelein, his S.S. liaison officer at headquarters,he exclaimed to his entourage, “Everyone is mad in Berlin! What am I todo?”

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 NationalSocialism. He had no idea that his revered chief, Himmler, under the prod-ding of S.S. General Walter Schellenberg, was already in touch with CountFolke Bernadotte of Sweden about surrendering the German armies in theWest. “I am going to Berlin,” Berger said to Himmler, “and it is your dutyto go too.”

Berger, but not Himmler, went to Berlin that night and his visit is ofinterest because of his firsthand description of Hitler on the night of hisgreat decision. Russian shells were already bursting near the Chancellerywhen Berger arrived. To his shock he found the Fuehrer “a broken man-finished.” When he ventured to express his appreciation of Hitler’s resolveto remain in Berlin—“one couldn’t desert the people after they had heldout so loyally and long,” he says he declared—the very words touched offthe 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 methe truth! The Armed Forces have lied to me!” ... He went on and on ina loud voice. Then his face went bluish purple. I thought he was going tohave 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 groupof prominent British, French and American prisoners as well as of such

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Germans as Haider and Schacht and the former Austrian Chancellor,Schuschnigg, who were being moved sou’heast to keep them out of thehands of the Americans advancing through Germany. Berger was flyingto Bavaria that night to take charge of them. The two men also talked ofreports 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 adoptedBavaria once more convulsed Hitler.

His hand was shaking, his leg was shaking and his head was shaking; and allthat 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 dis-tinguished prisoners, or both, was not clear to Berger, but apparently tothis simple man it meant the whole lot.

GOERING AND HIMMLER TRY TO TAKE OVER

General Roller had stayed away from the Fuehrer’s military conferenceon April 22. He had the Luftwaffe to look after, and “besides,” he says inhis diary, “I should never have been able to tolerate being insulted all daylong.”

General Eckard Christian, his liaison officer at the bunker, had rung himup at 6:15 p.m. and in a breathless voice had said, “Historical events, themost decisive of the war, are taking place here!” A couple of hours laterChristian arrived at Air Force headquarters at Wildpark-Werder on theoutskirts of Berlin to report to Roller in person. “The Fuehrer has brokendown!” Christian, an ardent Nazi who had married one of Hitler’s secre-taries, gasped, but beyond saying that the Leader had decided to meet hisend in Berlin and was burning his papers, he was so incoherent that theLuftwaffe Chief of Staff set out, despite a heavy British bombing that hadjust begun, to find General Jodi and ascertain just what had happened thatday in the bunker.

At Krampnitz, between Berlin and Potsdam, where the now FuehrerlessOKW had set up temporary headquarters, he found him, and Jodi told hisAir Force friend the whole sad story. He also revealed something which noone else had yet mentioned to Roller and which was to lead to a certaindenouement during the next few frantic days.

“When it comes to negotiating [for peace],” Hitler had told Keitel andJodi, “Goering can do better than I. Goering is much better at those things.He can deal much better with the other side.” Jodi now repeated this toRoller.14

The Air Force General felt that it was his duty to immediately fly toGoering. It would be difficult and also dangerous, in view of the enemy’smonitoring, to try to explain this new development in a radio message. IfGoering, who had been officially named by Hitler years before as his sue-

^ ^ THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

cessor-designate, were to take over peace negotiations, as the Fuehrer hadsuggested there was no time to iose. Jodi agreed. At 3:30 on the morningApril 23 Koller took off in a fighter plane and sped toward Munich

Enrn Je,a™Ved on the Obersalzberg and delivered his news 'to theReich Marshal. Goering, who had been looking forward, to put it mildly,to the day when he might succeed Hitler, was more circumspect than migfihave been expected. He did not want to lay himself open, he said, to themac mations of his “deadly enemy,” Bormann, a precaution which, as itturned out was well founded. He perspired under his dilemma. “If I actnow, he told his advisers, “I may be stamped as a traitor; if I don’t act. I’llbe accused of having failed to do something in the hour of disaster.”

(joering sent for Hans Lammers, the State Secretary of the ReichChancellery, who was in Berchtesgaden, for legal advice and also fetchedrom his safe a copy of the Fuehrer’s decree of June 29 1941 The decreewas quite clear. It stipulated that if Hitler died Goering was to be his suc-

denm a v lf th,C f Ue!lrer WCre incaPacitated Goering was to act as hisdeputy. All agreed that by remaining in Berlin to die, cut off in his last

hours from both the military commands and the government offices, Hitlerwas incapacitated from governing and that it was Goering’s clear dutyunder the decree to take over. 6 y

Nevertheless the Reich Marshal drafted his telegram to Hitler with greatcare. 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 agreethat I take over at once the total leadership of the Reich, with full freedom ofaction at home and abroad as your deputy, in accordance with your decree ofJune 29, 1941? If no reply is received by 10 o’clock tonight, I shall take it forgranted that you have lost your freedom of action, and shall consider the con-ditions of your decree as fulfilled, and shall act for the best interests of ourcountry and our people. You know what I feel for you in this gravest hour ofmy life. Words fail me to express myself. May God protect you, and speedyou quickly here in spite of all.

Your loyalHermann Goering

That very evening several hundred miles away Heinrich Himmler wasmeeting with Count Bernadotte in the Swedish consulate at Luebeck onthe Baltic Der treue Heinrich—the loyal Heinrich, as Hitler had oftentondly referred to him—was not asking for the powers of succession- hewas already assuming them.

“The Fuehrer’s great life,” he told the Swedish count, “is drawing to aclose.” In a day or two, he said, Hitler would be dead. WhereuponHimmler urged Bernadotte to communicate to General Eisenhower im-mediately Germany’s willingness to surrender to the West. In the East,Himmler added, the war would be continued until the Western Powersthemselves had taken over the front against the Russians—such was the

naivete, or stupidity, or both, of this S.S. chieftain who now claimed forhimself the dictatorship of the Third Reich. When Bernadotte asked thatHimmler put in writing his offer to surrender, a letter was hastily drafted bycandlelight—for an R.A.F. bombing that night had shut off the electricityin Luebeck and driven the conferees to the cellar. Himmler signed it.15

Both Goering and Himmler had acted prematurely, as they quicklyfound out. Although Hitler was cut off from all but a scanty radio com-munication with his armies and his ministries—for the Russians had nearlycompleted their encirclement of the capital by the evening of the twenty-third—he was now to demonstrate that he could rule Germany by thepower of his personality and prestige alone and quell “treason,” even by themost eminent of his followers, by a mere word over his creaky wirelesstransmitter suspended from a balloon above the bunker.

Albert Speer and a remarkable lady witness whose dramatic appearancein the last act of the drama in Berlin will shortly be noted have describedHitler’s reaction to Goering’s telegram. Speer had flown into the besiegedcapital on the night of April 23, landing in a cub plane on the eastern endof the East-West Axis—the broad avenue which led through the Tiergar-ten—at the Brandenburg Gate, a block from the Chancellery. Havinglearned that Hitler had decided to remain in Berlin to the end, which couldnot be far off, Speer had come to say his farewell to the Leader and to con-fess to him that his “conflict between personal loyalty and public duty,” ashe 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 nodoubt he would have been had the dictator known of Speer’s effort twomonths before to kill him and all the others who had escaped Stauffenberg’sbomb.

The brilliant architect and Armament Minister, though he had alwaysprided himself on being apolitical, had had, like some other Germans, alate—a too late—awakening. When he had finally realized that his be-loved Fuehrer was determined through his scorched-earth decrees to de-stroy the German people he had decided to murder him. His plan was tointroduce poison gas into the ventilation system in the bunker in Berlinduring a full-dress military conference. Since not only the generals butinvariably Goering, Himmler and Goebbels now attended these, Speerhoped to wipe out the entire Nazi leadership of the Third Reich as well asthe High Command. He procured his gas, inspected the air-conditioningsystem and then discovered, he says, that the air-intake pipe in the gardenwas protected by a twelve-foot-high chimney, recently installed on Hitler’spersonal orders to discourage sabotage, and that it would be impossibleto inject his gas into it without being interrupted by the S.S. guards in thegarden. So he abandoned his project and Hitler once again escaped assas-sination.

Now on the evening of April 23 Speer made a full confession of his in-subordination in refusing to carry out the wanton destruction of Germany’s

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

remaining installations. To his surprise Hitler showed no resentment oranger. Perhaps the Fuehrer was touched by the candor and courage of hisyoung friend—Speer had just turned forty—for whom he had long had adeep affection and whom he regarded as a “fellow artist.” Hitler, as Keitelalso noted, seemed strangely serene that evening, as though having madeup his mind to die in this place within a few days had brought a peace ofmind and spirit. But it was the calm not only after the storm—of the previ-ous day—but before the storm.

For Goering’s telegram had meanwhile arrived in the Chancellery andafter being held up by Bormann, who saw his opportunity at last, was pre-sented to the Fuehrer by this master of intrigue as an “ultimatum” and asa treasonous attempt to “usurp” the Leader’s power.

“Hitler was highly enraged,” says Speer, “and expressed himself verystrongly about Goering. He said he had known for some time that Goeringhad failed, that he was corrupt and a drug addict”—a statement which“extremely shook” the young architect, since he wondered why Hitler hademployed such a man in so high a post so long. Speer was also puzzledwhen Hitler calmed down and added, “Well, let Goering negotiate thecapitulation all the same. It doesn’t matter anyway who does it.”16 Butthis mood lasted only a few moments.

Before the discussion was finished, Hitler, prompted by Bormann, dic-tated a telegram informing Goering that he had committed “high treason,”for which the penalty was death, but that because of his long service to theNazi Party and State his life would be spared if he immediately resignedall his offices. He was ordered to answer with one word: Yes or No. Thisdid not satisfy the wormlike Bormann. On his own hook he got off a radio-gram to the S.S. headquarters in Berchtesgaden ordering the immediatearrest of Goering, his staff and Lammers for “high treason.” Before dawnthe next day the Number Two man of the Third Reich, the most arrogant—and opulent—of the Nazi princes, the only Reich Marshal in Germanhistory and the Commander in Chief of the Air Force, found himself aprisoner of the S.S.

Three days later, on the evening of April 26, Hitler expressed himselfeven more strongly on the subject of Goering than he had in the presence ofSpeer.

THE LAST TWO VISITORS TO THE BUNKER

Two more interesting visitors had meanwhile arrived in the madhouseof the Fuehrer’s bunker: Hanna Reitsch, the crack woman test pilot who,among other qualities, had a capacity for monumental hatred, especially ofGoering, and General Ritter von Greim, who on April 24 had been sum-moned from Munich to appear personally before the Supreme Warlordand had done so, though the plane in which he and Reitsch flew the last lapon the evening of the twenty-sixth had been torn over the Tiergarten byRussian antiaircraft shells and Greim’s foot had been shattered.

Goetterdaemmerung: The Last Days 1119

Hitler came into the surgery, where a physician was dressing the gen-eral’s wound.

Hitler: Do you know why I have called you?

Greim: No, my Fuehrer.

Hitler: Because Hermann Goering has betrayed and deserted both meand 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 savehimself at Berchtesgaden. From there he sent me a disrespectful telegram. Itwas . . .

At this point, says Hanna Reitsch, who was present, the Fuehrer’s facebegan 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, nodisappointments that I have not had, no betrayals that I have not experienced,and now this above all else! Nothing remains. Every wrong has already beendone me.

I immediately had Goering arrested as a traitor to the Reich, took fromhim all his offices, and removed him from all organizations. That is why Ihave called you.17

Then and there he named the startled General lying wounded on his cotthe new Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe—a promotion he could havemade by radio, which would have spared Greim a crippled foot and lefthim at headquarters, the only place from which what was left of the AirForce could be direcffid. Three days later Hitler ordered Greim, who bynow, like Fraulein Reitsch, expected and indeed desired to die in thebunker at the side of the Leader, to depart in order to deal with a new caseof “treachery.” For “treason,” as we have seen, was not confined amongthe leaders of the Third Reich to Hermann Goering.

During those three days Hanna Reitsch had ample opportunity to ob-serve the lunatic life in the underground madhouse—indeed, she partici-pated in it. Since she was as emotionally unstable as her distinguishedhost, the account she has left of it is lurid and melodramatic, and yet it isprobably largely true and even fairly accurate, for it has been checkedagainst other eyewitness reports, and is thus of importance for the closingchapter of this history.

Late on the night of her arrival with General von Greim—it was April26—Russian shells began falling on the Chancellery and the thud of the ex-plosions and the sound of crashing walls above increased the tension inthe bunker. Hitler took the aviatrix aside.

“My Fuehrer, why do you stay?” she said. “Why do you deprive Ger-many of your life? . . . The Fuehrer must live so that Germany can live.The people demand it.”

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“No, Hanna,” she says the Fuehrer replied. “If I die it is for the honorof our country, it is because as a soldier I must obey my own commandthat I would defend Berlin to the last.”

My dear girl [he continued], I did not intend it so. I believed firmly thatBerlin would be saved on the banks of the Oder . . . When our best effortsfailed I was the most horror-struck of all. Then when the encirclement of thecity began ... I believed that by staying all the troops of the land wouldtake example from my act and come to the rescue of the city . . . But, myHanna, I still have hope. The army of General Wenck is moving up fromthe south. He must and will drive the Russians back long enough to save ourpeople. Then we will fall back to hold again.18

That was one mood of Hitler that evening; he still had hope in GeneralWenck’s relieving Berlin. But a few moments later, as the Russian bom-bardment of the Chancellery reached great intensity, he was in despairagain. 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 donot wish that one of us falls to the Russians alive, nor do I wish our bodiesto be found by them . . . Eva and 1 will have our bodies burned. Youwill devise your own method.”

Hanna took the vial of poison to Greim and they decided that “shouldthe end really come” they would swallow the poison and then, to makesure, 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 haverisen again—or at least his delusions. He radioed Keitel:

“I expect the relief of Berlin. What is Heinrici’s army doing? Where isWenck? What is happening to the Ninth Army? When will Wenck andNinth Army join?”19

Reitsch describes the Supreme Warlord that day, striding

about the shelter, waving a road map that was fast disintegrating from thesweat of his hands and planning Wenck’s campaign with anyone who happenedto 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 beenliquidated, 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 theWestern Allies instead of by the Russians.

All through April 28 the desperate men in the bunker waited for newsof the counterattacks of these three armies, especially that of Wenck.Russian spearheads were now but a few blocks from the Chancellery andadvancing slowly toward it up several streets from the east and north andthrough the nearby Tiergarten from the west. When no news of the reliev-ing forces came, Hitler, prompted by Bormann, began to expect newtreacheries. At 8 p.m. Bormann got out a radiogram to Doenitz.

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Instead of urging the troops forward to our rescue, the men in authority aresilent. Treachery seems to have replaced loyalty! We remain here. TheChancellery is already in ruins.

Later that night Bormann sent another message to Doenitz.

Schoerner, Wenck and others must prove their loyalty to the Fuehrer bycoming to the Fuehrer’s aid as soon as possible.20

Bormann was now speaking for himself. Hitler had made up his mind todie in a day or two, but Bormann wanted to live. He might not succeed theFuehrer but he wanted to continue to pull the strings behind the scenes forwhoever did.

Finally, that night Admiral Voss got out a message to Doenitz sayingthat all radio connection with the Army had broken down and urgentlyrequesting the Navy to send over the naval wave length some news of whatwas happening in the outside world. Very shortly some news came, notfrom the Navy but from the listening post in the Propaganda Ministry, andit was shattering for Adolf Hitler.

Besides Bormann there was another Nazi official in the bunker whowanted to live. This was Hermann Fegelein, Himmler’s representative atcourt and typical of the type of German who rose to prominence underHitler’s rule. A former groom and then a jockey and quite illiterate, he wasa protege of the notorious Christian Weber, one of Hitler’s oldest partycronies and himself a horse fancier, who by fraudulence had amassed a for-tune and a great racing stable after 1933. Fegelein, with Weber’s help, hadclimbed 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 atFuehrer headquarters, he had further advanced his position at court bymarrying 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 thoughhe was, Fegelein seems to have been possessed of a simon-pure instinct forsurvival. He knew a sinking ship when he saw one.

On April 26 he quietly left the bunker. By the next afternoon Hitler hadnoticed his disappearance. The Fuehrer’s easily aroused suspicions werekindled 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 Charlottenburgdistrict, which the Russians were about to overrun. Brought back to theChancellery, he was stripped of his S.S. rank of Obergruppenfuehrer andplaced under arrest. Fegelein’s attempt at desertion made Hitler immedi-ately suspicious of Himmler. What was the S.S. chief up to, now that hehad deliberately absented himself from Berlin? There had been no newssince 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. TheRussians were getting close. The expected news of Wenck’s counter-

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attack, or of any counterattack, had not come through. Desperately thebesieged had asked, through the Navy’s radio, for news of developmentsoutside the encircled city.

The radio listening post of the Propaganda Ministry had picked up froma broadcast of the BBC in London one piece of news of what was happen-ing outside Berlin. It was a Reuter dispatch from Stockholm and it was sosensational, so incredible, that one of Goebbels’ assistants, Heinz Lorenz,had scampered across the shell-tom square late on the evening of April 28to 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 mixedinto 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 sinkingship of state. The Reuter dispatch told of his secret negotiations withCount Bernadotte and his offer to surrender the German armies in theWest to Eisenhower.

To Hitler, who had never doubted Himmler’s absolute loyalty, this wasthe heaviest blow of all. “His color,” says Reitsch, “rose to a heated redand his face was virtually unrecognizable . . . After the lengthy outburstHitler 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 hadtreasonably contacted the enemy without saying a word. This, Hitler toldhis followers when he had somewhat recovered, was the worst act oftreachery he had ever known.

This blow coupled with the news received a few minutes later that theRussians were nearing the Potsdamerplatz, but a block away, and wouldprobably storm the Chancellery on the morning of April 30, thirty hourshence was the signal for the end. It forced Hitler to make immediatelythe last decisions of his life. By dawn he had married Eva Braun, drawn uphis last will and testament, dispatched Greim and Hanna Reitsch to rallythe Luftwaffe for an all-out bombing of the Russian forces approaching theChancellery, 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 hadthe S.S. chief’s liaison man, Fegelein, in his hands. The former jockey andpresent S.S. General was now brought out of the guardhouse, closely ques-tioned as to Himmler s betrayal,” accused of having been an accomplicein it, and on the Fuehrer s orders taken up to the Chancellery garden andshot. The fact that Fegelein was married to Eva Braun’s sister did not helphim. Eva made no effort to save her brother-in-law’s life.

“Poor, poor Adolf,” she whimpered to Hanna Reitsch, “deserted byeveryone, betrayed by all. Better that ten thousand others die than that hebe lost to Germany.”

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He was lost to Germany but in those final hours he was won by EvaBraun. Sometime between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. on April 29, as a crowningaward for her loyalty to the end, he accorded his mistress’s wish and for-mally married her. He had always said that marriage would interfere withhis complete dedication to leading first his party to power and then hisnation to the heights. Now that there was no more leading to do and hislife was at an end, he could safely enter into a marriage which could lastonly a few hours.

Goebbels rounded up a municipal councilor, one Walter Wagner, whowas fighting in a unit of the Volkssturm not many blocks away, and thissurprised official performed the ceremony in the small conference room ofthe bunker. The marriage document survives and gives part of the pictureof what one of the Fuehrer’s secretaries described as the “death marriage.”Hitler asked that “in view of war developments the publication of the bannsbe done orally and all other delays be avoided.” The bride- and groom-to-be swore they were “of complete Aryan descent” and had “no hereditarydisease to exclude their marriage.” On the eve of death the dictator insistedon 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 didHitler leave a blank. His bride started to sign her name “Eva Braun,” butstopped, crossed out the “B” and wrote “Eva Hitler, bom Braun.”Goebbels and Bormann signed as witnesses.

After the brief ceremony there was a macabre wedding breakfast in theFuehrer’s private apartment. Champagne was brought out and even Frau-lein Manzialy, Hitler’s vegetarian cook, was invited, along with his secre-taries, the remaining generals, Krebs and Burgdorf, Bormann and Dr. andFrau Goebbels, to share in the wedding celebration. For a time the talkgravitated 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 theGoebbels wedding. As was his custom, even to the very last, the bride-groom 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 arelease for him to die, since he had been betrayed by his oldest friends andsupporters. The wedding party was plunged into gloom and some of theguests stole away in tears. Hitler finally slipped away himself. In an ad-joining 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 othersof his papers they are significant to this narrative. They confirm that theman who had ruled over Germany with an iron hand for more than twelveyears, and over most of Europe for four, had learned nothing from hisexperience; not even his reverses and shattering final failure had taught him

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anything. Indeed, in the last hours of his life he reverted to the youngman he had been in the gutter days in Vienna and in the early rowdy beerhall period in Munich, cursing the Jews for all the ills of the world, spin-ning his half-baked theories about the universe, and whining that fate oncemore had cheated Germany of victory and conquest. In this valedictoryto 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 clap-trap of Mein Kampf and added his final falsehoods. It was a fitting epitaphof a power-drunk tyrant whom absolute power had corrupted absolutelyand destroyed.

The “Political Testament,” as he called it, was divided into two parts, thefirst consisting of his appeal to posterity, the second of his specific direc-tions for the future.

More than thirty years have passed since I made my modest contributionas 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 mein all my thoughts, actions and life. They gave me power to make the mostdifficult decisions which have ever confronted mortal man . . .

It is untrue that I or anybody else in Germany wanted war in 1939. It waswanted and provoked exclusively by those international statesmen who eitherwere 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 responsibilityfor the outbreak of this war to be placed on me. Further, I have never wishedthat after the appalling First World War there should be a second one againsteither England or America. Centuries will go by, but from the ruins of ourtowns and monuments the hatred of those ultimately responsible will alwaysgrow anew. They are the people whom we have to thank for all this: in-ternational Jewry and its helpers.

Hitler then repeated the lie that three days before the attack on Polandhe had proposed to the British government a reasonable solution of thePolish-German problem.

It was rejected only because the ruling clique in England wanted war,partly for commercial reasons, partly because it was influenced by propagandaput out by the international Jewry.

Next he placed “sole responsibility” not only for the millions of deathssuffered on the battlefields and in the bombed cities but for his own massa-cre of the Jews—on the Jews. Then he turned to the reasons for his de-cision to remain in Berlin to the last.

After six years of war, which in spite of all setbacks will one day go downin history as the most glorious and heroic manifestation of the struggle for

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existence of a nation, I cannot forsake the city that is the capital of thisstate ... I wish to share my fate with that which millions of others have alsotaken upon themselves by staying in this town. Further, I shall not fall inthe 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 deathvoluntarily at that moment when I believe that the position of the Fuehrer andthe Chancellery itself can no longer be maintained. I die with a joyful heartin my knowledge of the immeasurable deeds and achievements of our peasantsand workers and of a contribution unique in history of our youth which bearsmy name.

There followed an exhortation to all Germans “not to give up thestruggle.” He had finally forced himself to recognize, though, that NationalSocialism was finished for the moment, but he assured his fellow Germansthat from the sacrifices of the soldiers and of himself

the seed has been sown that will grow one day ... to the glorious rebirthof the National Socialist movement of a truly united nation.

Hitler could not die without first hurling one last insult at the Army andespecially at its officer corps, whom he held chiefly responsible for thedisaster. Though he confessed that Nazism was dead, at least for themoment, he nevertheless adjured the commanders of the three armedservices

to strengthen with every possible means the spirit of resistance of oursoldiers in the National Socialist belief, with special emphasis on the fact thatI myself, as the founder and creator of this movement, prefer death to cowardlyresignation 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 ofthe question and that, above everything else, the commanders must set ashining example of faithful devotion to duty unto death.

It was Hitler’s insistence that “a district or town” must be held “untodeath,” 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 ofsuccession. Though the Third Reich was going up in flames and explo-sions, Hitler could not bear to die without naming his successor anddictating the exact composition of the government which that successormust appoint. First he had to eliminate his would-be successors.

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Before my death, I expel former Reich Marshal Hermann Goering from theparty and withdraw from him all the rights that were conferred on him bythe decree of June 20, 1941 ... In his place I appoint Admiral Doenitz asPresident of the Reich and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.

Before my death, I expel the former Reichsfuehrer of the S.S. and the Min-ister 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, hadbetrayed him, had cheated him of victory. So his only possible choice ofsuccessor had to be the leader of the Navy, which had been too small toplay a major role in Hitler’s war of conquest. This was a final jibe at theArmy, which had done most of the fighting and lost most of the menkilled in the war. There was also a last parting denunciation of the twomen who had been, with Goebbels, his most intimate collaborators sincethe early days of the party.

Apart altogether from their disloyalty to me, Goering and Himmler havebrought irreparable shame on the whole nation by secretly negotiating withthe enemy without my knowledge and against my will, and also by illegallyattempting to seize control of the State.

Having expelled the traitors and named his successor, Hitler then pro-ceeded to tell Doenitz whom he must have in his new government. Theywere all “honorable men,” he said, “who will fulfill the task of continuingthe war with all means.” Goebbels was to be the Chancellor and Bormannthe “Party Minister”—a new post. Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian quislingand, most recently, the butcher governor of Holland, was o be ForeignMinister. Speer, like Ribbentrop, was dropped. But Count Schwerin vonKrosigk, who had been Minister of Finance continuously since his ap-pointment 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 onelast typical directive to it.

Above all, I enjoin the government and the people to uphold the racial lawsto the limit and to resist mercilessly the poisoner of all nations, internationalJewry.21

With that the Supreme German Warlord was finished. The time wasnow 4 a.m. on Sunday, April 29. Hitler called in Goebbels, Bormannand Generals Krebs and Burgdorf to witness his signing of the document,and to affix their own signatures. He then quickly dictated his personalwill. In this the Man of Destiny reverted to his lower-middle-class originsin Austria, explaining why he had married and why he and his bride werekilling themselves, and disposing of his property, which he hoped wouldbe enough to support his surviving relatives in a modest way. At least

Goetterdaemmerung: The Last Days 1127

Hitler had not used his power to amass a vast private fortune, as hadGoering.

Although during the years of struggle I believed that I could not undertakethe responsibility of marriage, now, before the end of my life, I have decidedto take as my wife the woman who, after many years of true friendship, cameto this city, already almost besieged, of her own free will in order to sharemy fate.

She will go to her death with me at her own wish as my wife. This will com-pensate 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, ifthis no longer exists, to the State. If the State too is destroyed, there is no needfor any further instructions on my part. The paintings in the collections boughtby me during the years were never assembled for private purposes but solelyfor the establishment of a picture gallery in my home town of Linz on theDanube.

Bormann, as executor, was asked

to hand over to my relatives everything that is of value as a personal mementoor is necessary for maintaining a petty-bourgeois [kleinen buergerlichen] stand-ard of living . . .*

My wife and I choose to die in order to escape the shame of overthrow orcapitulation. It is our wish that our bodies be burned immediately in the placewhere I have performed the greater part of my daily work during the twelveyears of service to my people.

Exhausted by the dictation of his farewell messages, Hitler went tobed as dawn was breaking over Berlin on this last Sabbath of his life. Apall of smoke hung over the city. Buildings crashed in flames as the Rus-sians fired their artillery at point-blank range. They were now not farfrom the Wilhelmstrasse and the Chancellery.

While Hitler slept, Goebbels and Bormann made haste. In his PoliticalTes'ament, which they had signed as witnesses, the Fuehrer had specifi-cally ordered them to leave the capital and join the new government.Bormann was more than willing to obey. For all his devotion to theLeader, he did not intend to share his death, if he could avoid it. Theonly thing in life he wanted was power behind the scenes, and Doenitzmight still offer him this. That is, if Goering, on learning of the Fuehrer’sdeath, 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 Berchtes-gaden.

* Who these relatives were Hitler did not say, but from what he told his secretarieshe had in mind his sister, Paula, and his mother-in-law.

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... If Berlin and we should fall, the traitors of April 23 must be exter-minated. Men, do your duty! Your life and honor depend on it!22

This was an order to murder Goering and his Air Force staff, whomBormann had already placed under S.S. arrest.

Dr. Goebbels, like Eva Braun but unlike Bormann, had no desire tolive in a Germany from which his revered Fuehrer had departed. He hadhitched his star to Hitler, to whom alone he owed his sensational rise inlife. He had been the chief prophet and propagandist of the Nazi move-ment. It was he who, next to Hitler, had created its myths. To perpetuatethose myths not only the Leader but his most loyal follower, the only oneof 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 agesand help one day to rekindle the fires of National Socialism.

Such seem to have been his thoughts when, after Hitler retired, Goeb-bels repaired to his little room in the bunker to write his own valedictoryto present and future generations. He entitled it “Appendix to theFuehrer’s Political Testament.”

The Fuehrer has ordered me to leave Berlin . . . and take part as a leadingmember in the government appointed by him.

For the first time in my life I must categorically refuse to obey an order ofthe Fuehrer. My wife and children join me in this refusal. Apart from thefact that feelings of humanity and personal loyalty forbid us to abandon theFuehrer in his hour of greatest need, I would otherwise appear for the restof my life as a dishonorable traitor and a common scoundrel and would losemy self-respect as well as the respect of my fellow citizens .

In the nightmare of treason which surrounds the Fuehrer in these mostcritical days of the war, there must be someone at least who will stay with himunconditionally until death . . .

I believe I am thereby doing the best service to the future of the Germanpeople. In the hard times to come, examples will be more important thanmen . . .

For this reason, together with my wife, and on behalf of my children, whoare too young to be able to speak for themselves and who, if they were oldenough, would unreservedly agree with this decision, I express my unalterableresolution not to leave the Reich capital, even if it falls, but rather, at the sideof the Fuehrer, to end a life that for me personally will have no furthervalue 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 morningof April 29. Daylight was breaking over Berlin, but the sun was obscuredby the smoke of battle. In the electric light of the bunker much remainedto be done. The first consideration was how to get the Fuehrer’s last willand testament out through the nearby Russian lines so that it could bedelivered to Doenitz and others and preserved for posterity.

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Three messengers were chosen to take copies of the precious documentsout: Major Willi Johannmeier, Hitler’s military adjutant; WilhelmZander, an S.S. officer and adviser to Bormann; and Heinz Lorenz, thePropaganda Ministry official who had brought the shattering news ofHimmler’s treachery the night before. Johannmeier, a much decoratedofficer, was to lead the party through the Red Army’s lines. He himselfwas then to deliver his copy of the papers to Field Marshal FerdinandSchoerner, whose army group still held out intact in the Bohemian moun-tains and whom Hitler had named as the new Commander in Chief of theArmy. General Burgdorf enclosed a covering letter informing Schoernerthat Hitler had written his Testament “today under the shattering newsof Himmler’s treachery. It is his unalterable decision.” Zander andLorenz were to take their copies to Doenitz. Zander was given a coveringnote 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 toPichelsdorf at the head of the Havel lake, where a Hitler Youth battalionheld the bridge in anticipation of the arrival of Wenck’s ghost army. Toget that far they had successfully slipped through three Russian rings; atthe Victory Column in the middle of the Tiergarten, at the Zoo Stationjust beyond the park, and on the approaches to Pichelsdorf. They still hadmany other lines to penetrate, and much adventure lay ahead of them,*and though they eventually got through it was much too late for theirmessages to be of any use to Doenitz and Schoerner, who never saw them.

The three messengers were not the only persons to depart from thebunker that day. At noon on April 29, Hitler, who had now been restoredto a period of calm, held his customary war conference to discuss themilitary 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 Krebsreported that the Russians had advanced farther toward the Chancelleryduring the night and early morning. The supply of ammunition of thecity’s defenders, such as they were, was getting low. There was still nonews from Wenck’s rescue army. Three military adjutants, who now

* Trevor-Roper, in The Last Days of Hitler, has given a graphic account of theiradventures. But for an indiscretion of Heinz Lorenz, the farewell messages of Hitlerand Goebbels might never have become known. Major Johannmeier eventuallyburied 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 Tegemsee.Changing his name and assuming a disguise, he attempted to begin a new life underthe name of Wilhelm Paustin. But Lorenz, a journalist by profession, was toogarrulous to keep his secret very well and a chance indiscretion led to the discoveryof his copy and to the exposure of the other two messengers.

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found little to do and who did not want to join the Leader in self-inflicteddeath, asked if they could leave the bunker in order to try to find out whathad happened to Wenck. Hitler granted them permission and instructedthem to urge General Wenck to get a move on. During the afternoon thethree officers left.

They were soon joined by a fourth, Colonel Nicolaus von Below, Hitler’sLuftwaffe adjutant, who had been a junior member of the inner circlesince the beginning of the war. Below too did not believe in suicide andfelt that there was no longer any useful employment in the Chancelleryshelter. He asked the permission of the Fuehrer to leave and it wasgranted. Hitler was being most reasonable this day. It also occurred tohim that he could utilize the Air Force colonel to carry out one last mes-sage. This was to be to General Keitel, whom Bormann already suspectedof 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. in-creased the Fuehrer’s already monumental bitterness at the Army. GeneralWeidling, who commanded the courageous but ragged overage Volkssturmand underage Hitler Youth troops being sacrificed in encircled Berlin toprolong Hitler s life a few days, reported that the Russians had pushedahead along the Saarlandstrasse and the Wilhelmstrasse almost to theAir Ministry, which was only a stone’s throw from the Chancellery. Theenemy would reach the Chancellery, he said, by May 1 at the latest—in aday or two, that is.

This was the end. Even Hitler, who up until now had been directingnonexistent armies supposed to be coming to the relief of the capital, sawthat—at last. He dictated his final message and asked Below to deliverit to Keitel. He informed his Chief of OKW that the defense of Berlinwas now at an end, that he was killing himself rather than surrender, thatGoering and Himmler had betrayed him, and that he had named AdmiralDoenitz as his successor.

He had one last word to say about the armed forces which, despite hisleadership, had brought Germany to defeat. The Navy, he said, had per-formed superbly. The Luftwaffe had fought bravely and only Goering wasresponsible for its losing its initial supremacy in the war. As for the Army,the common soldiers had fought well and courageously, but the generalshad failed them—and him.

The people and the armed forces [he continued] have given their all in thislong and hard struggle. The sacrifice has been enormous. But my trust hasbeen misused by many people. Disloyalty and betrayal have undermined re-sistance throughout the war.

It was therefore not granted to me to lead the people to victory. The ArmyGeneral Staff cannot be compared with the General Staff in the First WorldWar. Its achievements were far behind those of the fighting front.

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At least the Supreme Nazi Warlord was remaining true to character tothe very end. The great victories had been due to him. The defeats andfinal failure had been due to others—to their “disloyalty and betrayal.”

And then the parting valediction—the last recorded written words ofthis mad genius’s life.

The efforts and sacrifices of the German people in this war have been sogreat that I cannot believe that they have been in vain. The aim must still beto win territory in the East for the German people.*

The last sentence was straight out of Mein Kampf. Hitler had begun hispolitical life with the obsession that “territory in the East” must be won forthe favored German people, and he was ending his life with it. All themillions of German dead, all the millions of German homes crushed underthe bombs, even the destruction of the German nation had not convincedhim 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 reachthe bunker from the outside world came in. Mussolini, Hitler’s fellowfascist dictator and partner in aggression, had met his end and it had beenshared by his mistress, Clara Petacci.

They had been caught by Italian partisans on April 26 while trying toescape from Como into Switzerland, and executed two days later. On theSaturday night of April 28 the bodies were brought to Milan in a truckand dumped on the piazza. The next day they were strung up by the heelsfrom lampposts and later cut down so that throughout the rest of the Sab-bath day they lay in the gutter, where vengeful Italians reviled them. OnMay Day Benito Mussolini was buried beside his mistress in the paupers’plot in the Cimitero Maggiore in Milan. In such a macabre climax ofdegradation II Duce and Fascism passed into history.

It is not known how many of the details of the Duce’s shabby end werecommunicated to the Fuehrer. One can only speculate that if he heardmany of them he was only strengthened in his resolve not to allow himselfor his bride to be made a “spectacle, presented by the Jews, to divert theirhysterical masses,”—as he had just written in his Testament—not theirlive selves or their bodies.

Shortly after receiving the news of Mussolini’s death Hitler began tomake the final preparations for his. He had his favorite Alsatian dog,Blondi, poisoned and two other dogs in the household shot. Then he

* Colonel Below destroyed the message when he learned of Hitler’s death while hewas still making his way toward the Allied Western armies. He has reconstructed itfrom memory. See Trevor-Roper, op. cit., pp. 194-95.

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called in his two remaining women secretaries and handed them capsulesof 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, andhe expressed his appreciation for their long and loyal service.

Evening had now come, the last of Adolf Hitler’s life. He instructedFrau Junge, one of his secretaries, to destroy the remaining papers in hisfiles and he sent out word that no one in the bunker was to go to bed untilfurther orders. This was interpreted by all as meaning that he judgedthe time had come to make his farewells. But it was not until long aftermidnight, at about 2:30 a.m. of April 30, as several witnesses recall, thatthe Fuehrer emerged from his private quarters and appeared in the generaldining passage, where some twenty persons, mostly the women membersof his entourage, were assembled. He walked down the line shaking handswith each and mumbling a few words that were inaudible. There was aheavy film of moisture on his eyes and, as Frau Junge remembered, “theyseemed to be looking far away, beyond the walls of the bunker.”

After he retired, a curious thing happened. The tension which hadbeen building up to an almost unendurable point in the bunker broke, andseveral persons went to the canteen—to dance. The weird party soonbecame 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 controlof their lives was over, they would seek pleasure where and how theycould find it. The sense of relief among these people seems to Have beenenormous and they danced on through the night.

Not Bormann. This murky man still had work to do. His own prospectsfor survival seemed to be diminishing. There might not be a long enoughinterval between the Fuehrer’s death and the arrival of the Russians inwhich he could escape to Doenitz. If not, while the Fuehrer still lived andthus clothed his orders with authority, Bormann could at least exact furtherrevenge on the “traitors.” He dispatched during this last night a furthermessage to Doenitz.

Doenitz!

Our impression grows daily stronger that the divisions in the Berlin theaterhave been standing idle for several days. All the reports we receive are con-trolled, suppressed, or distorted by Keitel . . . The Fuehrer orders you toproceed at once, and mercilessly, against all traitors.

And then, though he knew that Hitler’s death was only hours away, headded a postscript, “The Fuehrer is alive, and is conducting the defenseof Berlin.”

But Berlin was no longer defensible. The Russians already had oc-cupied almost all of the city. It was now merely a question of the defenseof the Chancellery. It too was doomed, as Hitler and Bormann learned

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at the situation conference at noon on April 30, the last that was ever totake place. The Russians had reached the eastern end of the Tiergartenand broken into the Potsdamerplatz. They were just a block away. Thehour for Adolf Hitler to carry out his resolve had come.

His bride apparently had no appetite for lunch that day and Hitler tookhis repast with his two secretaries and with his vegetarian cook, who per-haps did not realize that she had prepared his last meal. While they werefinishing their lunch at about 2:30 p.m., Erich Kempka, the Fuehrer’schauffeur, who was in charge of the Chancellery garage, received an orderto deliver immediately 200 liters of gasoline in jerricans to the Chancellerygarden. Kempka had some difficulty in rounding up so much fuel buthe managed to collect some 180 liters and with the help of three mencarried it to the emergency exit of the bunker.24

While the oil to provide the fire for the Viking funeral was being col-lected, Hitler, having done with his last meal, fetched Eva Braun for an-other and final farewell to his most intimate collaborators: Dr. Goebbels,Generals Krebs and Burgdorf, the secretaries and Fraulein Manzialy, thecook. Frau Goebbels did not appear. This formidable and beautifulblond woman had, like Eva Braun, found it easy to make the decision to diewith her husband, but the prospect of killing her six young children, whohad been playing merrily in the underground shelter these last days withoutan inkling of what was in store for them, unnerved her.

“My dear Hanna,” she had said to Fraulein Reitsch two or three eve-nings before, “when the end comes you must help me if I become weakabout the children . . . They belong to the Third Reich and to theFuehrer, and if these two cease to exist there can be no further place forthem. 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 greatestfear.*

Hitler and Eva Braun had no such problem. They had only their ownlives to take. They finished their farewells and retired to their rooms.Outside in the passageway, Dr. Goebbels, Bormann and a few otherswaited. In a few moments a revolver shot was heard. They waited for asecond one, but there was only silence. After a decent interval they quietlyentered the Fuehrer’s quarters. They found the body of Adolf Hitlersprawled 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 thebride had not used hers. She had swallowed poison.

It was 3:30 p.m. on Monday, April 30, 1945, ten days after AdolfHitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, and twelve years and three months to a daysince he had become Chancellor of Germany and had instituted the ThirdReich. It would survive him but a week.

The Viking funeral followed. There were no words spoken; the onlysound was the roar of Russian shells exploding in the garden of the Chan-

* The children and their ages were: Hela, 12; Hilda, 11; Helmut, 9; Holde, 7; Hedda,5; Heide, 3.

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cellery 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 shatteredface. Kempka identified it in his own mind by the black trousers andshoes which protruded from the blanket and which the warlord alwayswore with his field-gray jacket. Eva Braun’s death had been cleaner, therewas no blood, and Bormann carried out her body just as it was to thepassage, where he turned it over to Kempka.

Frau Hitler [the chauffeur later recounted] wore a dark dress ... I couldnot recognize any injuries to the body.

The corpses were carried up to the garden and during a lull in thebombardment placed in a shell hole and ignited with gasoline. Themourners, headed by Goebbels and Bormann, withdrew to the shelterof the emergency exit and as the flames mounted stood at attention andraised 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 survivorsretired to the safety of the bunker, leaving the gasoline-fed flames to com-plete the work of eradicating the last earthly remains of Adolf Hitler andhis wife.* For Bormann and Goebbels, there were still tasks to performin the Third Reich, now bereft of its founder and dictator, though theywere not the same tasks.

There had not yet been time for the messengers to reach Doenitz withthe Fuehrer’s testament appointing him as his successor. The admiralwould now have to be informed by radio. But even at this point, withpower slipped from his hands, Bormann hesitated. It was difficult to onewho 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 ashis successor. Written authority is on its way. You will immediately take allsuch 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 northand had moved his headquarters to Ploen in Schleswig, was flabbergastedat 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, believ-ing that Himmler would inherit the succession, he had gone to the S.S.

* The bones were never found, and this gave rise to rumors after the war that Hitlerhad survived. But the separate interrogation of several eyewitnesses by British andAmerican intelligence officers leaves no doubt about the matter. Kempka has givena plausible explanation as to why the charred bones were never found. “The traceswere wiped out,” he told his interrogators, “by the uninterrupted Russian artilleryfire.”

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chief and offered him his support. But since it would never have occurredto him to disobey an order of the Fuehrer, he sent the following reply, inthe belief that Adolf Hitler was still alive.

My Fuehrer!

My loyalty to you will be unconditional. I shall do everything possible torelieve you in Berlin. If fate nevertheless compels me to rule the Reich asyour appointed successor, I shall continue this war to an end worthy of theunique, heroic struggle of the German people.

Grand Admiral Doenitz

That night Bormann and Goebbels had a fresh idea. They decided totry to negotiate with the Russians. General Krebs, the Chief of the ArmyGeneral Staff, who had remained in the bunker, had once been the as-sistant military attache in Moscow, spoke Russian, and on one famousoccasion had even been embraced by Stalin at the Moscow railway station.Perhaps he could get something out of the Bolsheviks; specifically, whatGoebbels and Bormann wanted was a safe-conduct for themselves so thatthey could take their appointed places in the new Doenitz government. Inreturn for this they were prepared to surrender Berlin.

General Krebs set out shortly after midnight of April 30-May 1 to seeGeneral Chuikov,* the Soviet commander of the troops fighting in Berlin.One of the German officers accompanying him has recorded the openingof 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 overthere it is hard to say.25

The Russian General demanded the unconditional surrender of every-one in the Fuehrer’s bunker as well as of the remaining German troops inBerlin.

It took Krebs some time to carry out his mission, and when he had notreturned by 11 a.m. on May 1 the impatient Bormann dispatched anotherradio message to Doenitz.

The Testament is in force. I will join you as soon as possible. Till then, Irecommend that publication be held up.

This was still ambiguous. Bormann simply could not be straightforwardenough to say that the Fuehrer was dead. He wanted to get out to be thefirst to inform Doenitz of the momentous news and thereby help to insure

* Not Marshal Zhukov, as most accounts have had it.t May 1 was the traditional Labor Day in Europe.

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his favor with the new Commander in Chief. But Goebbels, who with hiswife and children was about to die, had no such reason for not tellingthe Admiral the simple truth. At 3:15 p.m. he got off his own message toDoenitz—the last radio communication ever to leave the beleagueredbunker in Berlin.

Grand Admiral Doenitz

MOST SECRET

The Fuehrer died yesterday at 1530 hours [3:30 p.m.]. Testament of April29 appoints you as Reich President . . . [There follow the names of theprincipal 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 toyou. Confirm receipt.

Goebbels

Goebbels did not think it necessary to inform the new Leader of hisown intentions. Early in the evening of May 1, he carried them out. Thefirst act was to poison the six children. Their playing was halted and theywere given lethal injections, apparently by the same physician who theday before had poisoned the Fuehrer’s dogs. Then Goebbels called hisadjutant, S.S. Hauptsturmfuehrer Guenther Schwaegermann, and in-structed him to fetch some gasoline.

“Schwaegermann,” he told him, “this is the worst treachery of all. Thegenerals have betrayed the Fuehrer. Everything is lost. I shall die, to-gether 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 procurethe gasoline. A few minutes later, at about 8:30 p.m., just as it was gettingdark outside, Dr. and Frau Goebbels walked through the bunker, badegoodbye to those who happened to be in the corridor, and mounted thestairs to the garden. There, at their request, an S.S. orderly dispatchedthem with two shots in the back of the head. Four cans of gasoline werepoured over their bodies and set on fire, but the cremation was not welldone.-'1 The survivors in the bunker were anxious to join the mass escapewhich was just getting under way and there was no time to waste on burn-ing those already dead. The Russians found the charred bodies of thePropaganda Minister and his wife the next day and immediately identifiedthem.

By 9 o’clock on the evening of May 1, the Fuehrerbunker had been seton 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

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by foot along the subway tracks from the station below the Wilhelmsplatz,opposite the Chancellery, to the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof and there crossthe River Spree and sift through the Russian lines immediately to thenorth of it. A good many got through; some did not, among them MartinBormann.

When General Krebs had finally returned to the bunker that afternoonwith General Chuikov’s demand for unconditional surrender Hitler’s partysecretary had decided that his only chance for survival lay in joining themass exodus. His group attempted to follow a German tank, but accordingto Kempka, who was with him, it received a direct hit from a Russianshell and Bormann was almost certainly killed. Artur Axmann, the HitlerYouth leader, who had deserted his battalion of boys at the PichelsdorfBridge to save his neck, was also present and later deposed that he hadseen Bormann’s body lying under the bridge where the Invalidenstrassecrosses the railroad tracks. There was moonlight on his face and Axmanncould see no sign of wounds. His presumption was that Bormann hadswallowed his capsule of poison when he saw that his chances of gettingthrough 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 Chancel-lery.

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 thebodies of Dr. and Frau Goebbels were burning in the Chancellery gardenand the inhabitants of the bunker were herding together for their escapethrough a subway tunnel in Berlin, the Hamburg radio interrupted theplaying of a recording of Bruckner’s solemn Seventh Symphony. Therewas 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 ReichChancellery. On April 30 the Fuehrer appointed Grand Admiral Doenitz hissuccessor. The Grand Admiral and successor of the Fuehrer now speaks tothe German people.

The Third Reich was expiring, as it had begun, with a shabby lie. Asidefrom 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,” butthe broadcasting of this falsehood was necessary if the inheritors of hismantle were to perpetuate a legend and also if they were to hold controlof the troops who were still offering resistance and who would surely havefelt betrayed if they had known the truth.

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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 momenthe did not know how Hitler had met his end. Goebbels had radioed onlythat he had “died” on the previous afternoon. But this did not inhibitthe Admiral either on this point or on others, for he did his best to muddythe 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 ad-vancing 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 Britishand Americans, we shall be forced to carry on our defensive fight against themas well. Under such conditions, however, the Anglo-Americans will continuethe war not for their own peoples but solely for the spreading of Bolshevism inEurope.

After this silly distortion, the Admiral, who is not recorded as havingprotested Hitler’s decision to make the Bolshevik nation Germany’s allyin 1939 so that a war could be fought against England and later America,assured the German people in concluding his broadcast that “God will notforsake us after so much suffering and sacrifice.”

These were empty words. Doenitz knew that German resistance wasat an end. On April 29, the day before Hitler took his life, the Germanarmies 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 otherwisewould have been. On May 4 the German High Command surrendered toMontgomery all German forces in northwest Germany, Denmark andHolland. The next day Kesselring’s Army Group G, comprising theGerman First and Nineteenth armies north of the Alps, capitulated.

On that day, May 5, Admiral Hans von Friedeburg, the new Com-mander in Chief of the German Navy, arrived at General Eisenhower’sheadquarters at Reims to negotiate a surrender. The German aim, as thelast papers of OKW make clear,27 was to stall for a few days in order tohave time to move as many German troops and refugees as possible fromthe path of the Russians so that they could surrender to the WesternAllies. General Jodi arrived at Reims the next day to help his Navy col-league draw out the proceedings. But it was in vain. Eisenhower sawthrough the game.

1 told General Smith Lhe later recounted] to inform Jodi that unless theyinstantly ceased all pretense and delay I would close the entire Allied frontand would, by force, prevent any more German refugees from entering ourlines. I would brook no further delay.28

At 1:30 a.m. on May 7 Doenitz, after being informed by Jodi of Eisen-hower’s demands, radioed the German General from his new headquarters

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at Flensburg on the Danish frontier full powers to sign the document ofunconditional surrender. The game was up.

In a little red schoolhouse at Reims, where Eisenhower had made hisheadquarters, Germany surrendered unconditionally at 2:41 on the morn-ing of May 7, 1945. The capitulation was signed for the Allies by GeneralWalter Bedell Smith, with General Ivan Susloparov affixing his signatureas witness for Russia and General Frangois Sevez for France. AdmiralFriedeburg and General Jodi signed for Germany.

Jodi asked permission to say a word and it was granted.

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 hourI can only express the hope that the victor will treat them with generosity.

There was no response from the Allied side. But perhaps Jodi recalledanother occasion when the roles were reversed just five years before.Then a French general, in signing France’s unconditional surrender atCompiegne, had made a similar plea—in vain, as it turned out.

The guns in Europe ceased firing and the bombs ceased dropping atmidnight on May 8-9, 1945, and a strange but welcome silence settledover the Continent for the first time since September 1, 1939. In the in-tervening five years, eight months and seven days millions of men andwomen had been slaughtered on a hundred battlefields and in a thousandbombed towns, and millions more done to death in the Nazi gas chambersor on the edge of the S.S. Einsatzgruppen pits in Russia and Poland—asthe result of Adolf Hitler’s lust for German conquest. A greater part ofmost of Europe’s ancient cities lay in ruins, and from their rubble, as theweather warmed, there was the stench of the countless unburied dead.

No more would the streets of Germany echo to the jack boot of thegoose-stepping storm troopers or the lusty yells of the brown-shirtedmasses or the shouts of the Fuehrer blaring from the loudspeakers.

After twelve years, four months and eight days, an Age of Darkness toall but a multitude of Germans and now ending in a bleak night for themtoo, the Thousand-Year Reich had come to an end. It had raised, as wehave seen, this great nation and this resourceful but so easily misled peopleto heights of power and conquest they had never before experienced andnow it had dissolved with a suddenness and a completeness that had few, ifany, parallels in history.

In 1918, after the last defeat, the Kaiser had fled, the monarchy hadtumbled, but the other traditional institutions supporting the State hadremained, a government chosen by the people had continued to function,as did the nucleus of a German Army and a General Staff. But in thespring of 1945 the Third Reich simply ceased to exist. There was nolonger any German authority on any level. The millions of soldiers, air-men and sailors were prisoners of war in their own land. The millions ofcivilians were governed, down to the villages, by the conquering enemy

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troops, on whom they depended not only for law and order but throughoutthat summer and bitter winter of 1945 for food and fuel to keep themalive. Such was the state to which the follies of Adolf Hitler—and theirown folly in following him so blindly and with so much enthusiasm—hadbrought them, though I found little bitterness toward him when I returnedto Germany that fall.

The people were there, and the land—the first dazed and bleeding andhungry, and, when winter came, shivering in their rags in the hovelswhich the bombings had made of their homes; the second a vast wastelandof rubble. The German people had not been destroyed, as Hitler, whohad tried to destroy so many other peoples and, in the end, when the warwas lost, themselves, had wished.

But the Third Reich had passed into history.

A BRIEF EPILOGUE

I went back that autumn to the once proud land, where I had spentmost 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 torecord the fate of the remaining characters who have figured prominentlyin these pages.

Doenitz’s rump government, which had been set up at Flensburg onthe Danish border, was dissolved by the Allies on May 23, 1945, and allits members were arrested. Heinrich Himmler had been dismissed fromthe government on May 6, on the eve of the surrender at Reims, in a movewhich the Admiral calculated might win him favor with the Allies. Theformer S.S. chief, who had held so long the power of life and death overEurope’s millions, and who had often exercised it, wandered about in thevicinity 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 nativeBavaria. Himmler—it must have galled him—had shaved off his mus-tache, tied a black patch over his left eye and donned an Army private’suniform. The party was stopped the first day at a British control pointbetween Hamburg and Bremerhaven. After questioning, Himmler con-fessed his identity to a British Army captain, who hauled him away toSecond Army headquarters at Lueneburg. There he was stripped andsearched and made to change into a British Army uniform to avert anypossibility that he might be concealing poison in his clothes. But thesearch was not thorough. Himmler kept his vial of potassium cyanideconcealed in a cavity of his gums. When a second British intelligenceofficer arrived from Montgomery’s headquarters on May 23 and instructeda medical officer to examine the prisoner’s mouth, Himmler bit on hisvial and was dead in twelve minutes, despite frantic efforts to keep himalive by pumping his stomach and administering emetics.

The remaining intimate collaborators of Hitler lived a bit longer. Iwent down to Nuremberg to see them. I had often watched them in theirhour of glory and power at the annual party rallies in this town. In the

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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 thearrogant leaders of old. They seemed to be a drab assortment of medioc-rities. It seemed difficult to grasp that such men, when last you had seenthem, had wielded such monstrous power, that such as they could conquera great nation and most of Europe.

There were twenty-one of them* in the dock: Goering, eighty poundslighter than when last I had seen him, in a faded Luftwaffe uniform withoutinsignia and obviously pleased that he had been given the Number Oneplace in the dock—a sort of belated recognition of his place in the Nazihierarchy now that Hitler was dead; Rudolf Hess, who had been theNumber Three man before his flight to England, his face now emaciated,his deep-set eyes staring vacantly into space, feigning amnesia but leavingno doubt that he was a broken man; Ribbentrop, at last shorn of hisarrogance and his pompousness, looking pale, bent and beaten; Keitel, whohad lost his jauntiness; Rosenberg, the muddled party “philosopher,”whom the events which had brought him to this place appeared to haveawakened to reality at last.

Julius Streicher, the Jew-baiter of Nuremberg, was there. This sadistand pornographer, whom I had once seen striding through the streets ofthe old town brandishing a whip, seemed to have wilted. A bald, decrepit-looking old man, he sat perspiring profusely, glaring at the judges andconvincing 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, hisnarrow little slit eyes giving him a porcine appearance. He seemednervous, swaying to and fro. Next to him was Baldur von Schirach, thefirst Hitler Youth Leader and later Gauleiter of Vienna, more Americanby blood than German and looking like a contrite college boy who hasbeen kicked out of school for some folly. There was Walther Funk, theshifty-eyed nonentity who had succeeded Schacht. And there was Dr.Schacht himself, who had spent the last months of the Third Reich as aprisoner of his once revered Fuehrer in a concentration camp, fearingexecu.ion any day, and who now bristled with indignation that the Alliesshould try him as a war criminal. Franz von Papen, more responsiblethan any other individual in Germany for Hitler’s coming to power, hadbeen rounded up and made a defendant. He seemed much aged, but thelook of the old fox, who had escaped from so many tight fixes, was stillimprinted 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. NotSpeer, who made the most straightforward impression of all and who dur-ing the long trial spoke honestly and with no attempt to shirk his respon-

* Dr- R°bert Ley, head of the Arbeitsfront, who was to have been a defendant hadhanged himself in his cell before the trial began. He had made a noose from’ragstom trom a towel, which he had tied to a toilet pipe.

1143

A Brief Epilogue

sibility and his guilt. Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian quisling, was in the dock,as were Jodi and the two Grand Admirals, Raeder and Doenitz—thelatter, the successor to the Fuehrer, looking in his store suit for all theworld like a shoe clerk. There was Kaltenbrunner, the bloody successorof “Hangman Heydrich,” who on the stand would deny all his crimes; andHans Frank, the Nazi Inquisitor in Poland, who would admit some of his,having become in the end contrite and, as he said, having rediscoveredGod, whose forgiveness he begged; and Frick, as colorless on the brinkof death as he had been in life. And finally Hans Fritzsche, who had madea career as a radio commentator because his voice resembled that ofGoebbels, who had made him an official in the Propaganda Ministry. Noone in the courtroom, including Fritzsche, seemed to know why he wasthere—he was too small a fry—unless it were as a ghost for Goebbels, andhe was acquitted.

So were Schacht and Papen. All three later drew stiff prison sentencesfrom German denazification courts though, in the end, they served verylittle time.

Seven defendants at Nuremberg drew prison sentences: Hess, Raederand Funk for life, Speer and Schirach for twenty years, Neurath forfifteen, Doenitz for ten. The others were sentenced to death.

At eleven minutes past 1 a.m. on October 16, 1946, Ribbentropmounted the gallows in the execution chamber of the Nuremberg prison,and he was followed at short intervals by Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosen-berg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Seyss-Inquart, Sauckel and Jodi.

But not by Hermann Goering. He cheated the hangman. Two hoursbefore his turn would have come he swallowed a vial of poison that hadbeen smuggled into his cell. Like his Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, and his rivalfor the succession, Heinrich Himmler, he had succeeded at the last hourin choosing the way in which he would depart this earth, on which he, likethe other two, had made such a murderous impact.

NOTES

Abbreviations used in these notes:

DBrFP—Documents on British For-eign Policy. Files of the British For-eign Office.

DDI—/ Documenti diplomatica ital-iani. Files of the Italian government.

DGFP—Documents on German For-eign Policy. Files of the GermanForeign Office.

FCNA—Fuehrer Conferences on Na-val Affairs. Summary records ofHitler’s conferences with the Com-mander in Chief of the GermanNavy.

NCA—Nazi Conspiracy and Aggres-sion. Part of the Nuremberg docu-ments.

N.D.—Nuremberg document.

NSR—Nazi-Soviet Relations. Fromthe files of the German Foreign Of-fice.

TMWC—Trial of the Major WarCriminals. Nuremberg documentsand testimony.

TWC—Trials of War Criminals beforethe Nuremberg Military Tribunals.

CHAPTER 1

1. The Ilammerstein memorandum,cited by Wheeler-Bennett in hisThe Nemesis of Power, p. 285.The memorandum was written forWheeler-Bennett by Dr. Kunrathvon Hammerstein, son of the Gen-eral, and was based on his father’snotes and diaries. It is entitled“Schleicher, Hammerstein and theSeizure of Power.”

2. Joseph Goebbels, Vom Kaiserhofzur Reichskanzlei, p. 251.

3. Hammerstein memorandum, citedby Wheeler-Bennett, op. cit., p.280.

4. Goebbels, op. cit., p. 250.

5. Ibid., p. 252.

6. Ibid., p. 252.

7. Andre Franfois-Poncet, The Fate-ful Years, p. 48. He was Frenchambassador in Berlin 1930-38.

8- Goebbels, Kaiserhof, pp. 251-54.

9. Proclamation of Sept. 5, 1934, atNuremberg.

10. Friedrich Meinecke, The GermanCatastrophe, p. 96.

11. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Ameri-can edition (Boston, 1943), p. 3.In a good number of quotationsfrom this book I have altered theEnglish translation somewhat tobring it closer to the original textin German.

12. Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer, p.

36. All who write on the ThirdReich are indebted to Heiden formaterial 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 Hit-ler I Knew, p. 50.

25. Ibid., p. 49.

26. Mein Kampf, pp. 14-15.

27. Kubizek, op. cit., p. 52, and Hit-ler’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. Ibid., 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.

1145

1146

NOTES

46. Ibid., pp. 22, 125.

47. Ibid., pp. 38-39.

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 Yes-terday, 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 Na-tional Socialism, p. 36.

20. Mein Kampf, pp. 496-97. Theitalics are Hitler’s.

21. Heiden, A History of National So-cialism, pp. 51-52.

22. Heiden, Der Fuehrer, pp. 98-99.

23. Heiden, A History of National So-cialism, 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., p. 371.

9. Karl Alexander von Mueller,quoted by Heiden in Der Fuehrer,p. 190.

10. The record of the court proceed-ings is contained in Der HitlerProzess.

CHAPTER 4

1. The figures are from a study ofEher Verlag’s royalty statementsmade by Prof. Oron James Haleand published in The AmericanHistorical Review, July 1955, un-der the title “Adolf Hitler: Tax-payer.”

2. The quotations are from MeinKampf, 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 twoquotations 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 ofGerman History, p. 24.

23. Wilhelm Roepke, The Solution ofthe German Problem, p. 153.

24. Mein Kampf, pp. 154, 225-26.

25. Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p.198.

26. See his study of Chamberlain inThe Third Reich, ed. by Baumont,Fried and Vermeil.

27. The foregoing, from Chamberlainback to Fichte and Hegel, is based

1147

on the works of the authors andon quotations and interpretationsin such books as German Philoso-phy and Politics, by John Dewey;The German Catastrophe, byFriedrich Meinecke; The Solutionof the German Problem, by Wil-helm Roepke; A History of West-ern Philosophy, by Bertrand Rus-sell; Thus Speaks Germany, ed. byW. W. Coole and M. F. Potter;The Third Reich, ed. by Bau-mont, Fried and Vermeil; GermanNationalism: The Tragedy of aPeople, by Louis L. Snyder; Ger-man History: Some New GermanViews, ed. by Hans Kohn; TheRise and Fall of Nazi Germany,by T. L. Jarman; Der Fuehrer, byKonrad Heiden; The Course ofGerman History, by A. J. P. Tay-lor; L'Allemagne Contemporaine,by Edmond Vermeil; History ofGermany, by Hermann Pinnow.

E. Eyck’s Bismarck and the Ger-man Empire is an invaluable study.

The limitations of space in awork of this kind prohibited dis-cussion of the considerable influ-ence on the Third Reich of a num-ber of other German intellectualswhose writings were popular andsignificant in Germany: Schlegel,J. Goerres, Novalis, Arndt, Jahn,Lagarde, List, Droysen, Ranke,Mommsen, Constantin Frantz,Stoecker, Bernhardi, Klaus Wag-ner, Langbehn, Lange, Spengler.

28. Mein Kampf, p. 381.

29. Ibid., p. 293.

30. Ibid., pp. 212-13.

31. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophyof History, pp. 31-32. Quoted byBullock, op. cit., p. 351.

32. Quoted in The Third Reich, ed. byBaumont et a!., pp. 204-5, fromtwo works of Nietzsche: Zur Gen-ealogie der Moral and Der Willezur Macht.

CHAPTER 5

1. Kurt Ludecke, I Knew Hitler, pp.217-18.

2. Baynes (ed.). The Speeches ofAdolf Hitler, I, pp. 155-56.

3. Curt Riess, Joseph Goebbels, p. 8.

4. This and the other quoted Hitlerreminiscences of January 16-17,

1942, about Obersalzberg are fromHitler’s Secret Conversations.

5. Such authorities as Heiden andBullock tell of the Raubals comingto Haus Wachenfeld in 1925, whenGeli Raubal was seventeen. ButHitler makes it clear that he didnot acquire the villa until 1928, atwhich time he says, “I immediatelyrang up my sister in Vienna withthe news, and begged her to be sogood as to take over the part ofmistress of the house.” See Hitler’sSecret Conversations, p. 177.

6. Heiden, Der Fuehrer, pp. 384-86.

7. See the fascinating analysis ofHitler’s income tax returns madeby Prof. Oron James Hale in TheAmerican Historical Review, July1955.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Heiden, Der Fuehrer, p. 419.

11. The speech does not appear inBaynes or in Roussy de Sales’scollection of Hitler’s speeches(Hitler, My New Order). It waspublished verbatim in the Voel-kischer Beobachter (special Reich-swehr edition) on March 26, 1929,and is quoted at length in “Blue-print of the Nazi Underground,”Research Studies of the StateCollege of Washington, June 1945.

12. The quotations are from theFrankfurter Zeitung, September26, 1930.

13. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression[hereafter referred to as NCA],Supplement A, p. 1194 (Nurem-berg Document [hereafter, N.D.]EC-440).

14. Otto Dietrich, Mit Hitler in dieMacht.

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 declarationsare 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 So-cialism, p. 166.

1148

NOTES

3. Goebbels, Kaiserhof, pp. 19-20.

4. Ibid., pp. 80-81.

5. Wheeler-Bennett, Nemesis, p. 243.

6. The above quotes are from Goeb-bels, Kaiserhof, pp. 81-104.

7. Franqois-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 Voiceof Destruction.

11. Goebbels was not caught nappingthis time, as he had been on August

13. He immediately gave the pressthe exchange of correspondenceand it was published in the morn-ing papers of Nov. 25. It is avail-able 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. 222.

15. Fran?ois-Poncet, op. cit., p. 43. Hesays 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 Schnit-zler, NCA, VII, p. 501 (N.D.EC-439); speeches of Goering andHitler, 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., p. 268.

6. Rudolf Diels, Lucifer ante Portas,p. 194.

7. For sources on the responsibilityfor the Reichstag fire see: Haider’saffidavit, 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 asTMWC\, XII, pp. 252-53; Diehl’saffidavit, Goering’s denial, TMWC,IX, pp. 432-36, and NCA, VI, pp.298-99 (N.D. 3593-PS); WillyFrischauer, The Rise and Fall ofHermann Goering, pp. 88-95;Douglas Reed, The Burning of theReichstag; John Gunther, InsideEurope (Gunther attended the trialat Leipzig). There are many al-leged testaments and confessionsby those claiming to have par-ticipated in the Nazi firing of theReichstag or to have positiveknowledge of it, but none, so far asI know, has ever been substan-tiated. Of these, memoranda byErnst Oberfohren, a Nationalistdeputy, and Karl Ernst, the BerlinS.A. leader, have been given somecredence. Both men were slain bythe Nazis within a few months ofthe 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. Franqois-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 inNCA, 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 (June1933).

21. The July 1 and 6 quotations inBaynes, I, p. 287 and pp. 865-66.

22. From a study entitled My Rela-tions with Adolf Hitler and theParty, which Admiral Raederwrote in Moscow after his captureby the Russians and which wasmade 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).

1149

26. Quoted by Telford Taylor inSword and Swastika, p. 41. TheSeeckt papers are now at the Na-tional Archives in Washington.

27. The source for the “Pact of theDeutschland" is Weissbuch ueberdie Erschiessung des 30 Juni, 1934(Paris, 1935), pp. 52-53. HerbertRosinski in his The German Army,pp. 222-23, confirms the terms ofthe pact. Bullock and Wheeler-Bennett accept it in their books onthis period. The source for theMay 16 meeting of the generals isJacques Benoist-Mechin’s Histoirede TArmee Allemande depuisTArmistice, II, pp. 553-54.

28. Rede des Vizekanzlers von Papenvor dem Universitaetsbund, Mar-burg, 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 Nie-moeller, p. 80.

2. Neumann, Behemoth, p. 109. Hestates that the quotations are fromthe research project “Antisemit-ism” of the Institute of Social Re-search, published in Studies inPhilosophy and Social Science,

1940.

3. Rauschning, The Voice of Destruc-tion, p. 54.

4. Stewart W. Herman, Jr., It’s YourSouls We Want, pp. 157-58. Her-man was pastor of the AmericanChurch in Berlin from 1936 to

1941.

5. The text is given in Herman, op.cit., pp. 297-300; also in the NewYork Times of Jan. 3, 1942.

6. Affidavit of Nov. 19, 1945, NCA,V, pp. 735-36 (N.D. 3016-PS).

7. Most foreign correspondents inBerlin kept a collection of suchgems. My own has been lost. Thequotations are from Philipp Le-nard, Deutsche Physik, preface;Wallace Deuel, People underHitler; William Ebenstein, TheNazi State.

8. Wilhelm Roepke, The Solution ofthe German Problem, p. 61.

9. Quoted in Frederic Lilge’s The

Abuse of Learning: The Failureof the German University, p. 170.

10. Schirach’s American ancestry isgiven by Douglas M. Kelley, theAmerican psychiatrist at theNuremberg jail during the trial ofthe major war criminals, in hisbook, 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 aHistory of German War andArmament Economy. Quoted inNCA, I, p. 350 (N.D. 2353-PS).

13. The ministry’s report of September30, 1934, NCA, VII, pp. 306-9(N.D. EC-128); Schacht’s reportof May 3, 1935, NCA, III, pp.827-30 (N.D. 1168-PS); text ofthe 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 Baumontet al., p. 630.

20. Eugen Kogon’s phrase. See hisDer SS Staat—das System derdeutschen Konzentrationslager. Asomewhat abridged version ap-peared in English, The Theory andPractice of Hell. It is the best studyof Nazi concentration camps yetwritten. Kogon spent seven yearsin 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 ofFire, p. 109.

2. Papen, op. cit., p. 338.

3. Daily Mail, Aug. 6, 1934.

4. Le Matin, Nov. 18, 1934.

5. Wolfgang Foerster, Ein Generalkaempft gegen den Krieg, p. 22.This book is based on Beck’spapers.

1150

NOTES

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 deSales, pp. 309-33. The text of thespeech is also in Baynes, II, pp.1218-47.

12. My New Order, pp. 333-34.

13. Pertinax, The Grave Diggers ofFrance, p. 381.

14. The author’s Berlin Diary, p. 43.

15. Franyois-Poncet, op. cit., pp. 188—89.

16. NCA, VI, pp. 951-52 (N.D. C-139), the text of the order. Seealso 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 Jodi’sevidence; Hitler’s Secret Conversa-tions, pp. 211-12, for Hitler’s fig-ure.

20. Franfois-Poncet, op. cit., p. 193.

21. Berlin Diary, pp. 51-54.

22. Franfois-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 Frangois-Poncet, op.cit., p. 196.

31. NCA, VII, p. 890 (N.D. L-150).

32. Kurt von Schuschnigg, AustrianRequiem, p. 5.

33. NCA, I, p. 466 (N.D. 2248-PS).

34. Documents on German ForeignPolicy [hereafter referred to asDGFP], 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., Ill, p. 172.

40. Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers, ed. byMalcolm Muggeridge, pp. 43—48.

41. Milton Shulman, Defeat in theWest, p. 76. His source is given asa British War Office Intelligence

Review, December 1945. It wouldseem to be from an interrogation ofGoering.

42. Text of the secret protocol, DGFP,I, p. 734.

43. TWC, XH, pp. 460-65 (N.D. NI-051).

44. TMWC, IX, p. 281.

45. DGFP, I, p. 40.

46. Ibid., pp. 55-67.

47. NCA, VI, pp. 1001-11 (N.D. C-175).

48. The Hossbach minutes, dated Nov.10, 1937. The German text isgiven in TMWC, XXV, pp. 402-13, and the best English translationis in DGFP, I, pp. 29-39. A hastyEnglish version was done atNuremberg and printed in NCA,III, pp. 295-305 (N.D. 386-PS).Hossbach also gives an account ofthe meeting in his book ZwischenWehrmacht und Hitler, pp. 186-94. The brief testimony of Goe-ring, Raeder and Neurath on theconference 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. Jodi’s diary, TMWC, XXVIII, p.357.

6. Ibid., p. 356.

7. Ibid., pp. 360-62.

8. Ibid., p. 357.

9. Telford Taylor, Sword and Swas-tika, pp. 149-50. The manuscriptof Blomberg’s unpublished mem-oirs is in the Library of Congress.

10. Bullock, op. cit., p. 381, andWheeler-Bennett, Nemesis, p. 369.

11. Wolfgang Foerster, Fin Generalkaempft gegen den Krieg, op. cit.,pp. 70-73.

12. TMWC,lX,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 toSchuschnigg, 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 differentversions of Hitler’s threats in hisbook, p. 24, and in his Nurembergaffidavit, 2995-PS (NCA, V, p.712). I have used both in ab-breviated form.

10. Austrian Requiem, p. 24.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., p. 25, and Schuschnigg’s af-fidavit, 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 duringthe broadcast.

17. Dispatch to the German ForeignOffice on Feb. 25, 1938, marked“Very Secret,” DGFP, I, p. 546.

18. For Miklas’ testimony, see NCA,Suppl. A, p. 523. Papen’s sugges-tion 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 onJanuary 30, 1946, during anti-Nazi court proceedings against Dr.Rudolf Neumayer. Though theformer President is a bit hazyabout exact times and the exactsequence of events on the fatefulday, his testimony is of great valueand 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, I, pp. 584-86.

31. Ibid., pp. 553-55.

32. TMWC, XVI, p. 153.

33. DGFP, I, p. 263.

34. Ibid., pp. 273-75.

35. Ibid., p. 578.

1151

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-Inquart atNuremberg, 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 atHitler’s headquarters and was cap-tured intact by American troops ina cellar at Obersalzbreg. The sum-mary, of the Apr. 21 Hitler-Keiteldiscussion is the second paper inthe collection. The entire file wasintroduced in evidence at Nurem-berg as N.D. 388-PS. An Englishtranslation is in NCA, III, pp. 306-709; a better English version of theApr. 21 talks is in DGFP, II, pp.239-40.

2. Secret memorandum of the Ger-man 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, May12, 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 thedirective, DGFP, II, pp. 299-303.

9. Ibid., pp. 307-8.

10. Dispatch of the German ministerand military attache in Prague,May 21, 1938, ibid., pp. 309-10.

11. Dispatch of Ambassador von Dirk-sen, May 22, 1938, ibid., pp. 322-23.

12. Speech to the Reichstag, Jan. 30,1939, in My New Order, ed. byRoussy de Sales, p. 563.

13. According to Fritz Wiedermann,one of the Fuehrer’s adjutants,who was present and who laterswore that he “was considerablyshaken by this statement.” NCA,V, pp. 743-44 (N.D. 3037-PS).

1152

NOTES

14. Undated Jodi 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); alsoDGFP, II, pp. 357-62.

16. TMWC, XXVIII, p. 373. TheTMWC volume gives the Germantext. An English translation of ex-cerpts of Jodi’s diary is in NCA,IV, pp. 360-70.

17. The texts of the memoranda aregiven by Wolfgang Foerster in EinGeneral kaempft gegen den Krieg,pp. 81-119.

18. Jodi’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, meet-ing, NCA, III, pp. 334-35 (N.D.388-PS).

31. Schmundt’s minutes of the Sept. 9meeting, ibid., pp. 335-38. It isItem 19 in the “Green” file.

32. Jodi’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 inDocuments on British ForeignPolicy [hereafter referred to asDBrFP], Third Series, II.

35. Most of the text of Churchill’s let-ter is in DGFP, II, p. 706.

36. DBrFP, Third Series, II, pp. 686-87.

37. Nevile Henderson, Failure of aMission, pp. 147, 150.

38. DBrFP, Third Series, I.

39. Erich Kordt gives his brother’s ac-count of this meeting in his bookNicht 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 ofmaterial about the conference.

The text of the official reportdrawn up by Paul Schmidt, whoacted as interpreter and was theonly other person present, is inDGFP, II, pp. 786-98. Schmidthas given an eyewitness account ofthe meeting in his book Hitler’s In-terpreter, pp. 90-95. Chamber-lain’s notes are in DBrFP, ThirdSeries, pp. 338-41; his letter to hissister on the meeting is in KeithFeiling’s Life of Neville Chamber-lain, pp. 366-68. See also NevileHenderson’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 Godes-berg conference are: Schmidt’snotes on the two Godesberg meet-ings, DGFP, II, pp. 870-79, 898-908; Schmidt’s description of thetalks, Hitler’s Interpreter, pp. 95-102; texts of correspondence ex-changed between Hitler and Cham-berlain on September 23, DGFP,II, pp. 887-92; notes by Kirkpat-rick on the meeting, DBrFP, ThirdSeries, II, pp. 463-73, 499-508;Henderson’s description in Failureof a Mission, pp. 156-62.

52. NCA, IV, p. 367 (N.D. 1780-PS).

53. Jodi’s diary, Sept. 26, 1938, ibid.

54. Text of the Godesberg memoran-dum, DGFP, II, pp. 908-10.

55. The Times, London, Sept. 24,1938.

56. Text of the Czech reply, BritishWhite Paper, Cmd. 5847, No. 7.

57. Text of Chamberlain’s letter toHitler of Sept. 26, 1938, DGFP,II, pp. 994-95.

58. Though Dr. Schmidt’s notes on thismeeting are missing from the Ger-man Foreign Office papers, his ownaccount of it appears in his book,op. cit., pp. 102-3. Kirkpatrick’snotes are in DBrFP, Third Series,

II, No. 1, p. 118. Henderson’s ver-sion in his book, op. cit., p. 163.

59. Items 31-33 of “Green” file, NCA,

III, pp. 350-52 (N.D. 388-PS).

1153

60. Dispatch from Paris, DGFP, II, p.977.

61. The text of Roosevelt’s two appealsand Hitler’s answer to the first oneare 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’smessages 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. 1. The letter was handedto Hitler by Henderson at noon thenext day.

67. Henderson, op. cit., p. 144. DBrFP,Third Series, II, p. 614.

68. Jodi’s diary, Sept. 28, 1938, NCA,IV, p. 368 (N.D. 1780-PS).

69. Sources: Haider’s interrogation atNuremberg by Capt. Sam Harris,a New York attorney, NCA, Suppl.B, pp. 1547-71; also Haider’smemorandum, which was given tothe press at Nuremberg but is notincluded in either the NCA orTMWC volumes. Gisevius, Tothe Bitter End, pp. 283-328; histestimony at Nuremberg, TMWC,XII, pp. 210-19. Schacht, AccountSettled, pp. 114-25.

70. Gisevius, To the Bitter End, p. 325.Also his testimony on the stand atNuremberg, TMWC, XII, p. 219.

71. Erich Kordt’s memorandum, madeavailable to the writer. AllenDulles, Germany’s Underground,p. 46, also gives an account of thecall.

72. Accounts of the meetings in theChancellery on the forenoon ofSept. 28 are given by some of theparticipants: Schmidt, op. cit., pp.105-8; Frangois-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 sceneto the writer, as he did to manyother friends. But my notes on itwere lost, and I have used Wheeler-Bennett’s moving account in Mu-nich, pp. 170-71.

77. From Haider’s interrogation, Feb.

25, 1946, NCA, Suppl. B, pp.1553-58.

78. Schacht, op. cit., p. 125.

79. Gisevius, op. cit., p. 326.

80. Ciano’s Hidden Diary, 1937-1938,p. 166. In a telegram dated June

26, 1940, Mussolini reminded Hit-ler that at Munich he had promisedto take part in the attack on Brit-ain. The text of the telegram is inDGFP, X, p. 27.

81. Text of the Chamberlain andBene§ notes, DBrFP, Third Series,II, pp. 599, 604.

82. The minutes of the two Munichmeetings, DGFP, II, pp. 1003-8,1011-14.

83. Henderson, op. cit., p. 171. Fran-gois-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 Of-fice. The sources for this sectionon the Munich Conference are:DGFP, II, as cited above in note83; text of the Munich Agreement,ibid., pp. 1014-16; DBrFP, ThirdSeries, II, No. 1, p. 227; and Ciano,Schmidt, Henderson, Frangois-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, forSchmidt’s official memorandum onthe meeting; Schmidt’s book, op.cit., pp. 112-13. DBrFP, ThirdSeries, II, No. 1228, gives a slightlydifferent version of the conversa-tion.

89. DGFP, IV, pp. 4-5.

90. Jodi’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. Jodi’s testimony, June 4, 1946,TMWC, XV, p. 361.

94. Gamelin, Servir, pp. 344-46. Adisappointing book! Pertinax, TheGrave Diggers of France, p. 3, con-firms the General here. These arealso the sources of Gamelin’s ad-vice on Sept. 26 and 28.

1154

NOTES

95. Churchill, The Gathering Storm,p. 339.

96. DGFP, IV, pp. 602-4.

97. Schacht on the stand at Nurem-berg, TMWC, XII, p. 531.

98. Speech to the commanders in chief,Nov. 23, 1939, NCA, III, p. 573(N.D. 789-PS).

CHAPTER 13

1. “Green” file, Item 48, NCA, 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 fororganizing the pogrom, NCA, V,pp. 797-801 (N.D. 3051-PS);Heydrich’s report to Goering onthe damage and the number ofkilled and wounded, NCA, V. p.854 (N.D. 3058-PS). Report ofWalter Buch, chief party judge, onthe pogrom, NCA, V, pp. 868-76(N.D. 3063-PS); Major Buchgives lurid details of numerousmurders of Jews and blames Goeb-bels for the excesses. Stenographicreport of the meeting of Goeringwith cabinet members and govern-ment officials and a representativeof the insurance companies on

' Nov. 12, NCA, IV, pp. 425-57(N.D. 1816—PS). Though the com-plete report is missing, the partwhich was found runs to 10,000words.

6. TMWC, IX, p.538.

7. DGFP, IV, pp. 639-49.

8. DBrFP, Third Series, IV, No. 5.

9. Ciano’s Hidden Diary, entry forOct. 28, 1938, p. 185; Ciano’sDiplomatic Papers, pp. 242-46.

10. DGFP, IV, pp. 515-20.

11. Schmidt, op. cit., p. 118; his noteson the meeting, DGFP, IV, pp.471-77.

12. DGFP, IV, pp. 69-72.

13. Ibid., pp. 82-83.

14. Ibid., pp. 185-86; also in NCA, VI,pp. 950-51 (N.D. C-138).

15. Dispatch of the charge, DGFP, IV,pp. 188-89.

16. DGFP, IV, p. 215.

17. Memoranda of Chvalkovsky’s twotalks, with Hitler and Ribbentrop,

on Jan. 21, 1939, DGFP, IV, pp.190-202. Chvalkovsky’s own re-port to the Czechoslovak cabineton Jan. 23, Czech Archives, quotedby Wheeler-Bennett in Munich, pp.316-17. Also see French YellowBook, 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 bythe 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., pp. 249, 255, 260. ForAmbassador 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 sec-tion, “The Ordeal of Dr. Hacha,”are: Secret minutes of the meetingof Hitler and Hacha, DGFP, IV,pp. 263-69; it is also in the Nurem-berg documents, NCA, V, pp. 433-40 (N.D. 2798-PS). Text of thedeclaration of the German andCzechoslovak governments, March15, 1939, DGFP, IV, pp. 270-71;the first part was issued as a com-munique; it was actually draftedin the Foreign Office on March 14.Proclamation of the Fuehrer tothe German People, March 15,NCA, VIII, pp. 402-3 (N.D. TC-50). Coulondre’s dispatch, FrenchYellow 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.

1155

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 toBeck, 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. Rib-bentrop’s memo on meeting withLipski, Nov. 19, DGFP, V, pp.127-29.

4. German memo of meeting by Dr.Schmidt, DGFP, V, pp. 152-58.Polish minutes on, Polish WhiteBook, No. 48; NCA, VIII, pp. 486-88 (N.D. TC-73).

5. Ribbentrop’s memo of the meeting,DGFP, V, pp. 159-61. Polish min-utes on, Polish White Book, No.49; NCA, VIII, p. 488 (N.D. TC-73).

6. Ribbentrop’s memo of his meetingwith Beck in Warsaw, Jan. 26,1939, DGFP, V, pp. 167-68;Beck’s version is given in the PolishWhite Book, No. 52.

7. Dispatch of Moltke, Feb. 26,1939, DGFP, VI, p. 172.

8. Lipski’s dispatch to Warsaw on themeeting, Polish White Book, No.61; also in NCA, VIII, pp. 489-92(N.D. TC-73, No. 61). Ribben-trop’s memo of the meeting,DGFP, VI, pp. 70-72.

9. Foreign Office memo of the meet-ing, 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 26meeting with Lipski, ibid., pp. 121—22; Polish version. White Book,No. 63.

16. Dr. Schmidt’s memo of the meet-ing, 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 isin DGFP, VI, pp. 186-87, 223-28(N.D. C-120). The text of theoriginal German is in TMWC,XXXIV, pp. 380-422.

24. Confidential German memos onthe Goering-Mussolini talks arein 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 an-swers, ibid., pp. 309-10; Weiz-saecker’s call to German ministerin Riga, April 18, ibid., pp. 283-84.

26. Ibid., pp. 355, 399.

27. DGFP, IV, pp. 602-7.

28. Ibid., pp. 607-8 (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 dis-patch, DBrFP, IV, No. 419.

33. Boothby, 7 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-Mus-solini 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, DispatchesNos. 123, 125. I have used theFrench-language edition (Le LivreJaune Frangais), but I believe theEnglish edition carries the samenumbers for dispatches.

43. DGFP, VI, pp. 1, 111. Appendix I

1156

NOTES

of this volume contains a numberof memoranda on the staff talkstaken from the German navalarchives.

44. The Ciano Diaries, pp. 67-68.

45. German memo on the Milan meet-ing, DGFP, VI, pp. 450-52.Ciano’s minutes, Ciano’s Diplo-matic Papers, pp. 282-87.

46. Text of the treaty of alliance,DGFP, VI, pp. 561-64. A secretprotocol contained nothing ofsignificance.

47. Schmundt’s minutes. May 23,1939, NCA, VII, pp. 847-54 (N.D.L-79). There is also an Englishtranslation 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 TWCvolumes [Trials of War Criminalsbefore the Nuremberg MilitaryTribunals],

49. NCA, VI, pp. 926-27 (N.D. C-

120).

50. TMWC, XXXIV, pp. 428^12(N.D. C-126). The English trans-lation of this document in NCA,VI, pp. 937-38, is so abbreviatedthat 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 Britishambassador’s account of Molotov’sreaction is in the same volume,Nos. 648 and 657.

53. “Urgent” dispatch of May 31,DGFP, VI, pp. 616-17.

54. Dispatch of lune 1, ibid., pp. 624-26.

55. Ibid., p. 547.

56. Ibid., pp. 589-93.

57. Ibid., p. 593.

58. Letter, Weizsaecker to Schulen-burg, May 27, with postscript ofMay 30, ibid., 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 translationin 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 meetingof the Reich Defense Council, June23, 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 theLeague of Nations, March 19,1940. Text in Documents onInternational Affairs, 1939-1946,1,pp. 346^17.

76. DGFP, VI, pp. 936-38.

77. Ibid., pp. 955-56.

78. Schnurre’s memo, ibid., pp. 1106—9.

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., Nos. 376 and 473.

86. Two dispatches of Aug. 1, DGFP,VI, pp. 1033-34.

87. DBrFP, Appendix V, p. 763.

88. Burnett’s letter in DBrFP, VII, Ap-pendix II, p. 600; Seeds’s telegram,ibid., VI, No. 416.

89. DGFP, VI, p. 1047.

90. Ibid., pp. 1048—49.

91. Ibid.,pp. 1049-50.

92. Ibid., pp. 1051-52.

93. Ibid.,pp. 1059-62.

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 6meeting with Ribbentrop is printedin / Documenti diplomatica italiani[hereafter cited as DDI], SeventhSeries, XII, No. 503. I have usedthe quotation and paraphrasingfrom The Eve of the War, ed. byArnold and Veronica M. Toynbee.

97. Memo of Weizsaecker, DGFP, VI,pp. 971-72.

98. The Ciano Diaries, pp. 113-14.

99. Ibid., pp. 116-18.

100. The Ciano Diaries, pp. 118-19,582-83. Ciano’s minutes of themeeting with Ribbentrop are in

1157

Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers, pp.297-98; also in DDI, EighthSeries, XIII, No. 1. No Germanrecord of this meeting has beenfound.

101. The captured German minutes ofthe meetings on Aug. 12 and 13were presented at Nurembergas documents 1871-PS and TC-77. The latter is the morecomplete and is published inEnglish translation in NCA, VIII,pp. 516-29. I have used theversion signed by Dr. Schmidt, inDGFP, VII, pp. 39-49, 53-56.Ciano’s record of his two talkswith Hitler are in Ciano’s Diplo-matic Papers, pp. 303-4, and inDDI, XIII, Nos. 4 and 21. Alsothe entries for Aug. 12 and 13,1939, and Dec. 23, 1943, in hisDiaries, pp. 119-20, 582-83.

102. This extract from Haider’s diaryis 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 theembassy 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 business-men was found in a file of Goe-ring’s office and is published inDGFP, VI, pp. 1088-93. Thereare numerous jottings on the docu-ment in Goering’s handwriting.“Oho!” he scribbled several timesopposite statements that obviouslyhe could not believe. The wholefantastic and somewhat ludicrousstory of Dahlerus’ peace missionwhich brought him briefly to thecenter of the stage at a momentousmoment is told in his own book,The Last Attempt. Also in histestimony at Nuremberg, TMWC,IX, pp. 457-91, and in Sir LewisNamier’s Diplomatic Prelude, pp.417-33; the chapter is entitled “AnInterloper in Diplomacy.”

5. Interrogation of Haider, Feb. 26,1946, NCA, Suppl. B, p. 1562.

6. Hassell, op. cit., pp. 53, 63-64.

7. Thomas, “Gedanken und Ereig-nisse,” Schweizerische Monat-shefte, December 1945.

8. Memo of Canaris on conversationwith 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, 2:48a.m., Aug. 16, DGFP, VII, pp. 76-77. The ambassador gave a fulleraccount in a memo dispatched bycourier, and he added details in aletter to Weizsaecker, ibid., pp. 87-90, 99-100.

11. DBrFP, Third Series, VII, pp. 41-42. For Ambassador Steinhardt’sreports see U.S. DiplomaticPapers, 1939, I, pp. 296-99, 334.

12. Dispatch of Ribbentrop toSchulenburg, Aug. 16, DGFP, VII,pp. 84-85.

13. Ibid., p. 100.

14. Ibid., p. 102.

15. Dispatch by Schulenburg, 5:58a.m., Aug. 18, ibid., pp. 114-16.

16. Dispatch of Ribbentrop, 10:48p.m., Aug. 18, ibid., pp. 121-23.

17. Memo of Schnurre, Aug. 19, ibid.,pp. 132-33.

18. Dispatch of Schulenburg, 6:22p.m., Aug. 19, ibid., p. 134.

19. Dispatch of Schulenburg, 12:08a.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, 1:19a.m., Aug. 21, ibid., pp. 161-62.

24. Dispatch of Ribbentrop, Aug. 21,ibid., p. 162.

25. Dispatch of Schulenburg, 1:43p.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, Ap-pendix II, pp. 558-614. Theappendix contains a detailed day-to-day record of the military con-versations in Moscow and con-stitutes the most comprehensivesource I have seen of the Alliedversion of the talks. It includesreports to London, during thenegotiations, by Air MarshalBurnett and Gen. Heywood, and

1158

NOTES

the final report of the British mis-sion by Adm. Drax. Also, averbatim account of the dramaticmeeting of Gen. Doumenc withMarshal Voroshilov on the eveningof Aug. 22, when the chief of theFrench military mission trieddesperately to save the situationdespite the public announcementthat Ribbentrop was arriving inMoscow the next day. Also, therecord of the final, painful meetingof the Allied missions with Vo-roshilov on Aug. 26. Volume VIIalso includes many dispatches be-tween the British Foreign Officeand the embassy in Moscow whichthrow fresh light on this episode.

This section of the chapter isbased largely on these confidentialBritish papers. Unfortunately theRussians, so far as I know, havenever published their documentson the meeting, though a Sovietaccount is given in Nikonov’sOrigins of World War II, in whichmuch use of the British ForeignOffice documents is made. TheSoviet version is also given inHistoire de la Diplomatic, ed. byV. Potemkin.

30. Paul Reynaud, In the Thick of theFight, p. 212. Reynaud, pp. 210-33, gives the French version of theAllied negotiations in Moscow inAugust 1939. He gives his sourceson p. 211. Bonnet gives his versionin his book Fin d'une Europe.

31. The documents are in DBrFP, VII(see note 29 above). It is interest-ing that not a line on the Anglo-French diplomatic efforts in War-saw to get the Poles to accept Rus-sian help nor on the course of themilitary talks in Moscow was pub-lished in either the British BlueBook or the French Yellow Book.

32. Dispatch of Ribbentrop, 9:05p.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 non-aggression pact and of secret addi-tional 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. GermanForeign Office memo of meeting,DGFP, VII, pp. 210-15. Hender-son reported on the second meetingon Aug. 24 (British Blue Book, pp.100-2).

3. Text of Hitler’s letter of Aug. 23to 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 Hitlerto Henderson, Aug. 25, drawn upby Ribbentrop and Dr. Schmidt,DGFP, VII, pp. 279-84; also inBritish Blue Book, pp. 120-22.Henderson’s dispatch of Aug. 25describing interview, British BlueBook, pp. 122-23. See also Hen-derson’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 fileon Russo-German relations foundin the files of the Navy High Com-mand.

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. C-170).

17. Ribbentrop’s interrogation, Aug.29, 1945, NCA, VII, pp. 535-36;Goering’s interrogation, Aug. 29,1945, ibid., pp. 534-35; Keitel’stestimony on the stand at Nurem-berg under direct examination,Apr. 4, 1946, TMWC, X, pp. 514-15.

1159

18. NCA, Suppl. B, pp. 1561-63.

19. Gisevius, op. cit., pp. 358-59.

20. Hassell, op. cit., p. 59.

21. Thomas, “Gedanken und Ereig-nisse,” loc. 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 inthe British Blue Book, pp. 122-42.

25. Hitler to Mussolini, Aug. 25, 7:40p.m., DGFP, VII, p. 289.

26. Ciano Diaries, p. 129.

27. Mussolini to Hitler, Aug. 26, 12:10p.m., DGFP, VII, pp. 309-10.

28. Ciano Diaries, p. 129. Macken-sen’s report, DGFP, VII, p. 325.

29. Hitler to Mussolini, Aug. 26, 3:08p.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 FrenchYellow Book, Fr. ed., pp. 321-22.

35. Haider’s diary, entry of Aug. 28,recapitulating “sequence of events”of previous five days. This portionis 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 ofDahlerus is based on his book, op.cit., and on his testimony atNuremberg, where he learned hownaive he had been about hisGerman friends. See above, note4 for Chapter 15. It is substanti-ated by a great deal of materialfrom the British Foreign Officepublished in DBrFP, Third Series,Vol. VII.

39. DBrFP, VII, p. 287.

40. Testimony of Dahlerus at Nurem-berg, TMWC, IX, p. 465.

41. DBrFP, VII, p. 3l9n.

42. TMWC, IX, p. 466.

43. DBrFP, VII, pp. 321-22.

44. British Blue Book, p. 125, andDBrFP, 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., p. 361.

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 toHitler, Aug. 30, DGFP, VII, p.441.

55. British Blue Book, pp. 139-40.

56. Ibid., p. 140.

57. Ibid.,p. 142.

58. Schmidt, op. cit, pp. 150-55. AlsoSchmidt’s testimony at Nurem-berg, 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 wireto Halifax, Aug. 31, ibid., No. 618.

66. DBrFP, VII, pp. 441-43.

67. British BlueJiook,p. 144.

68. Ibid., p. 147.

69. Ibid., p. 147.

70. Text of Polish written reply toBritain, Aug. 31, ibid., pp. 148-49;Kennard’s dispatch, Aug. 31 (itwas not received in London until7:15 p.m.), ibid., p. 148.

71. For Lipski’s Final Report, seePolish White Book. Extracts arepublished in NCA, VIII, pp. 499-512.

72. DGFP, VII, p. 462.

73. Lipski’s version in his Final Re-port, loc. cit. Dr. Schmidt’s Ger-man account of the interview isin DGFP, VII, p.463.

74. The German text of Hitler’s direc-tive is in TMWC, XXXIV, pp.

1160

NOTES

456-59 (N.D. C-126). Englishtranslations are given in NCA, VI,pp. 935-39, and DGFP, VII, pp.477-79.

75. Hassell, op. cit., pp. 68-73.

76. Dahlerus’ testimony at Nurem-berg, TMWC, IX, pp. 470-71;Forbes’s answer to questionnairesubmitted by Goering’s lawyer atNuremberg is quoted in Namier,Diplomatic Prelude, pp. 376-77.Henderson's account is in his FinalReport, p. 19.

77. DBrFP, VII, p. 483. Henderson’slater account of the dispatch isgiven 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 Dahlerus’ book, op. cit., pp.119-20; and from his testimony onthe stand at Nuremberg, TMWC,IX, p. 471.

3. DBrFP, VII, pp. 466-67.

4. Ibid.

5. TMWC, IX, p. 436. Dahlerus’testimony, as printed here, con-tains a typographical error whichmakes him say the Poles “had beenattacked,” and is therefore totallymisleading.

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 Rib-bentrop’s comments to Hendersonand Coulondre are in DGFP, VII,pp. 493 and 495, respectively.

9. Schmidt’s version of the argumentin DGFP, VII, p. 493; Hendersongave his account briefly in his dis-patch 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 Fran?ois-Poncet, 11:45a.m., Sept. 1, French Yellow Book,Fr. ed., pp. 377-78. Mussolini’sproposal for a conference onSeptember 5 was outlined in a dis-

patch from Fran?ois-Poncet toBonnet 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 whichthis 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, con-firms the story in his book Ci-Devant, pp.146-47.

23. Corbin’s dispatch, French YellowBook, Fr. ed., p. 395.

24. This section is based on DBrFP,VII, covering Sept. 2-3. There isan excellent summary, based onthe confidential British ForeignOffice papers and on the scantFrench sources available, in TheEve of the War, 1939, ed. byArnold and Veronica M. Toynbee.Namier, Diplomatic Prelude, alsois useful. I have purposely omittedthe references to scores of docu-ments in DBrFP in order to avoidcluttering the pages with numerals.

25. Halifax wires to Henderson: 11:50p.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 BlueBook, 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 testi-mony on the stand at Nuremberg,TMWC, X,p. 200.

29. Schmidt, op. cit., pp. 157-58; alsohis 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 meet-ing, DGFP, VII, p. 532.

36. The text is in DGFP, VII, pp. 548-49.

37. The text is given in DGFP, VII,pp. 538-39.

38. This is revealed in the GermanForeign Office papers, ibid., p. 480.

1161

39. Text of telegram, ibid., pp. 540-41.

40. Fuehrer Conferences on NavalAffairs [hereafter referred to asFCNA], 1939, pp. 13-14.

CHAPTER 18

1. Text of Russian reply, DGFP,VIII, p. 4. A number of theseNazi-Soviet exchanges are printedin NSR, but DGFP gives a fulleraccount.

2. Ibid., pp. 33-34.

3. Molotov’s congratulations, ibid.,p. 34. His promise of military ac-tion, p. 35.

4. Schulenburg dispatch, Sept. 10,ibid., pp. 44-45.

5. Ibid., pp. 60-61.

6. Ibid., pp. 68-70.

7. Ibid., pp. lb-11.

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 thesecret protocols, a public declara-tion, and exchanges of two lettersbetween Molotov and Ribbentrop,ibid., pp. 164-68.

CHAPTER 19

1. Maj.-Gen. J. F. C. Fuller, TheSecond World War, p. 55. Quotedfrom The First Quarter, p. 343.

2. Text of Directive No. 3, DGFP,VIII, p. 41.

3. Namier, op. cit., pp. 459-60. Hequotes the French text of the con-vention.

4. Testimony of Haider for defend-ants in the “Ministries Case” trial,on Sept. 8-9, 1948, at Nuremberg,TWC, XII, p. 1086.

5. Testimony of Jodi in his own de-fense on June 4, 1946, at Nurem-berg, TMWC, XV, p. 350.

6. Testimony of Keitel in his own de-fense on April 4, 1946, at Nurem-berg, ibid., X, p. 519.

7. Churchill, The Gathering Storm,p. 478.

8. FCNA, 1939, pp. 16-17.

9. Weizsaecker’s memorandum of histalk with Kirk, DGFP, VIII, pp.3-4. His testimony at Nurembergon his talk with Raeder, TMWC,XIV, p. 278.

10. Ibid., XXXV, pp. 527-29 (N.D.804-D). The document gives bothRaeder’s memorandum of his con-versation and the text of theAmerican naval attache’s cable toWashington.

11. Sworn statement of Doenitz atNuremberg, NCA, VII, pp. 114-15 (N.D. 638-D).

12. Ibid., pp. 156-58.

13. Nuremberg testimony of Raeder,TMWC, XIV, p. 78; of Weiz-saecker, ibid., pp. Ill, 279, 293; ofHans Fritzsche, a high official inthe Propaganda Ministry and anacquitted defendant in the trial,ibid., XVII, pp. 191, 234-35. TheVoelkischer Beobachter article isin NCA, V, p. 1008 (N.D. 3260-PS). For Goebbels’broadcast, seeBerlin Diary, p. 238.

14. Schmidt memorandum of the talk,DGFP, VIII, pp. 140-45.

15. Brauchitsch’s testimony at Nurem-berg, TMWC, XX, p. 573. A notein the OKW War Diary confirmsthe quotation.

16. Ciano Diaries, pp. 154-55. Cia-no’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); Direc-tive 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 ofthis plot.

23. Wheeler-Bennett in Nemesis, p.491 n., gives the German sources.See also Hassell, op. cit., andThomas, “Gedanken und Ereig-nisse,” loc. cit.

24. Haider’s interrogation at Nurem-berg, Feb. 26, 1946, NCA, Suppl.B, pp. 1564-75.

25. Rothfels, The German Oppositionto Hitler.

26. They are given in NCA, VI, pp.893-905 (N.D.C-72).

27. Buelow-Schwante testified in the

1162

NOTES

“Ministries Case” before the Nu-remberg Military Tribunal aboutGoerdeler’s message and his ownprivate audience with King Leo-pold. See transcript, English edi-tion, pp. 9807-11. It is also men-tioned in DGFP, VIII, p. 384n.His telegram of warning to Berlinis printed in DGFP, VIII, p. 386.

28. For the varied accounts of theVenlo kidnaping, see S. PayneBest, The Venlo Incident; Schellen-berg, The Labyrinth; Wheeler-Ben-nett, Nemesis.

An official Dutch account isgiven in the protest of the Nether-lands government to Germany,DGFP, VIII, pp. 395-96. Addi-tional material was given at the“Ministries Case” trial at Nurem-berg. See TWC, XII.

29. TWC, XII, pp. 1206-8, andDGFP, VIII, pp. 395-96.

30. For various accounts of the bombattempt, see Best, op. cit.; Schellen-berg, op. cit.; Wheeler-Bennett,Nemesis; Reitlinger, The S.S.; Ber-lin Diary; Gisevius, op. cit. Therewas also some material at Nurem-berg from which I made notes andwhich I have used here, though Icannot find it in the NCA andTMWC volumes.

31. The textual notes are given inNCA, III, pp. 572-80, and also inDGFP, VIII, pp. 439^16 (N.D.789-PS).

32. Haider’s diary for Nov. 23 and hisfootnote added later. Brauch-itsch’s testimony at Nuremberg,TMWC, XX, p. 575.

33. Haider’s interrogation at Nurem-berg, NCA, Suppl. B, pp. 1569-70.Also see Thomas, “Gedanken undEreignisse,” loc. cit.

34. Hassell, op. cit., pp. 93-94, 172.

35. Ibid., pp. 79, 94.

36. From the diary of Admiral Ca-naris, 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., VII, 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. 683n.

45. The text, ibid., 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., pp. 591, 753, 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. LangsdorfFs moving letter is givenin FCNA, 1939, p. 62. Other Ger-man material on the battle and itsaftermath, pp. 59-62.

58. I have used some of the originalGerman sources for this account ofthe forced landing: reports of theGerman ambassador and the airattache in Brussels to Berlin,DGFP, VIII, and Jodi’s diary. Thetext of the German plan of attackin the West, as salvaged by theBelgians, is given in NCA, VIII,pp. 423-28 (N.D. TC-58-A).Karl Bartz has given an account ofthe incident in A is der Himmelbrannte. Churchill’s comments arein The Gathering Storm, pp. 556-57. He gives a wrong date for theforced 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). Itis 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. Jodi’s diary, Dec. 12, 13—obvi-

1163

ously misdated. Haider diary forDec. 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 atNuremberg, NCA, Suppl. B, pp.1534-47.

15. Text of the directive, NCA, VI, pp.1003-5; also in DGFP, VIII, pp.831-33.

16. Jodi’s diary, March 10-14, 1940.

17. DGFP, VIII, pp. 910-13.

18. Ibid., pp. 179-81, 470-71.

19. Ibid., pp. 89-91.

20. Text of Hitler’s directive, ibid., pp.817-19.

21. Dr. Schmidt’s minutes of the meet-ings of Sumner Welles with Hitler,Goering and Ribbentrop are inDGFP, VIII; also Weizsaecker’stwo memoranda on his talk withWelles. The American envoy alsosaw Dr. Schacht after the banker,now fallen from grace, had beensummoned by Hitler and told whatline to take. See Hassell, op. cit.,p. 121. Welles has given his ownaccount of his talks in Berlin inThe 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. 871-80.

25. Schmidt’s minutes of the meetings,ibid., pp. 882-93, 898-909; Ciano’sversion is in Ciano’s DiplomaticPapers, pp. 339-59. Also seeSchmidt, op. cit., pp. 170-71, andThe Ciano Diaries, for their per-sonal comments on the meetings.Ribbentrop’s two telegrams to Hit-ler reporting on his interviews arein DGFP, VIII.

26. Welles, op. cit., p. 138.

27. Ciano Diaries, p. 220.

28. Dr. Schmidt’s transcribed short-hand notes of the meeting, DGFP,IX, pp. 1-16.

29. Hassell, op. cit., pp. 116-18, onwhich this account is largely based.

30. Allen Dulles, Germany’s Under-ground, p. 59.

31. Shirer, The Challenge of Scandi-navia, pp. 223-25.

32. Churchill, The Gathering Storm,p. 579. "Hie British plans for R-4are given in Derry, The Campaign

in Norway, the official British ac-count 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 Co-penhagen, DGFP, IX, pp. 102-3;Brauer’s dispatch from Oslo, ibid.,

p. 102.

39. The Danish version of the Germanoccupation is based on the au-thor’s The Challenge of Scandi-navia, and on Denmark during theOccupation, ed. by Bprge Outze.Lt. Col. Th. Thaulow’s contribu-tion is especially valuable. AGuards officer, he was with theKing at the time.

40. From the secret German ArmyArchives. Quoted in NCA, VI, pp.299-308 (N.D. 3596-PS).

41. From the Norwegian State Ar-chives; quoted in the author’s TheChallenge 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 ofWhat 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 personallyconfirmed this account to himafter the war.

5. There is a vast amount of materialon the development of the Germanplans for the attack in the West. Ihave drawn on the following: thediaries of Haider and Jodi; Hai-der’s booklet, Hitler als Feldherr,Munich, 1949 (an English transla-tion, Hitler as War Lord, was pub-lished in London in 1950); extractsfrom the OKW War Diary pub-lished in the NCA and TMWC

1164

NOTES

volumes of the Nuremberg docu-ments; the various directives ofHitler and OKW, published in theNuremberg volumes and in DGFP,VIII and IX; Manstein, VerloreneSiege; Goerlitz, History of the Ger-man General Staff and Der ZweiteWeltkrieg; Jacobsen, Dokumentezur Vorgeschichte des Westfeld-zuges, 1939-40; Guderian, PanzerLeader; Blumentritt, Von Rund-stedt; Liddell Hart, The GermanGenerals Talk; considerable Ger-man material in the Nurembergdocuments of the NOKW serieswhich were produced at the sec-ondary trials. For the Britishplans, see Churchill’s first two vol-umes of his memoirs; Ellis, TheWar in France and Flanders, whichis the official British account;J. F. C. Fuller, The Second WorldWar; Draper, The Six Weeks’ War.The best over-all account, based onall the German material available,is in Telford Taylor’s The Marchof Conquest.

6. Churchill, Their Finest Hour, pp.42-43.

7. DGFP, IX, pp. 343-44.

8. Both Goering and Kesselring werequestioned on the stand at Nurem-berg in regard to the bombing ofRotterdam. 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, seeWalther Melzer, Albert Kanal undEben-Emael; Rudolf Witzig, “DieEinnahme von Eben-Emael,”Wehrkunde, May 1954 (Lt. Witzigcommanded the operation, but be-cause of a mishap to his glider didnot arrive until his men, under Sgt.Wenzel, had nearly accomplishedtheir mission); Gen. van Over-straeten, Albert 1-Leopold 111;Belgium—The Official Account ofWhat 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 ofthe meeting and that of PremierPierlot. Published in the official

Belgian Rapport, Annexes, pp. 69-

75, and quoted by Paul Reynaud,who was French Premier at thetime, in his In the Thick of theFight, pp. 420-26.

15. Lord Gort’s dispatches, Supple-ment to the London Gazette, Lon-don, 1941.

16. Weygand, Rappele au service, pp.125-26.

17. Churchill, Their Finest Hour, p.

76.

18. Liddell Hart, The German Gen-erals Talk, pp. 114-15 (soft-coveredition).

19. Ciano Diaries, pp. 265-66.

20. Telford Taylor, The March ofConquest, p. 297.

21. Text, Wilhelm II’s telegram anddraft of Hitler’s reply, DGFP, IX,p. 598.

22. Texts of the exchange of lettersbetween Hitler and Mussolini inMay-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 minutesfound in the German Archives areunsigned, Dr. Schmidt has testifiedthat he himself drew them up.Since he acted as interpreter, hewas in the best position of anyoneto do this. They are printed inDGFP, IX, as follows: negotia-tions of June 21, pp. 643-52; rec-ord of the telephone conversationsbetween Gen. Huntziger and Gen.Weygand (at Bordeaux) on theevening of June 21, as drawn up bySchmidt, who had been directed tolisten in, pp. 652-54; record of thetelephone conversation betweenGen. Huntziger and Col. Bourget,Gen. Weygand’s adjutant (atBordeaux), at 10 a.m. on June 22,pp. 664-71; text of the Franco-German Armistice Agreement, pp.671-76; memorandum of ques-tions raised by the French andanswered by the Germans duringthe negotiations at Compiegne, pp.676-79. Hitler gave instructionsthat this document, though not apart of the agreement, was “bind-ing on the German side.”

The Germans had placed hiddenmicrophones in the wagon-lit andrecorded every word spoken. I

myself listened to part of the pro-ceedings as they were being re-corded in the German communica-tions van. So far as I know, theywere never published and perhapsneither the recording nor thetranscript was ever found. Myown notes are very fragmentary,except for the closing dramaticsession.

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, July13, 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. Theauthor, a member of the Britishteam compiling an official historyof the war, had unrestricted accessto the captured German military,naval, air and diplomatic archives,a privilege not accorded up to thetime of writing to any unofficialAmerican authors by either theBritish or the American authori-ties, who hold joint custody of thedocuments. Wheatley, as a guideto restricted German sources onSea Lion, is therefore very helpful.

2. OKM (Navy High Command)records. Wheatley, p. 26.

1165

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 verygood English translation is pub-lished in NCA, Suppl. A, pp. 404-6.

7. British War Office Intelligence Re-view, November 1945. Cited byShulman, op. cit., pp. 49-50.

8. Liddell Hart, The German Gen-erals Talk, p. 129.

9. From OKH papers, cited byWheatley, pp. 40, 152-55, 158.The plan was continually being al-tered throughout the next sixweeks.

10. Naval Staff War Diary, Raeder-Brauchitsch discussion, July 17.Wheatley, p. 40n.

11. Haider 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 isRaeder’s confidential report on themeeting. Haider gave his in a longdiary entry of July 31.

14. DGFP, X, pp. 390-91. It is alsogiven in N.D. 443-PS, which wasnot published in the NCA orTMWC volumes.

15. FCNA, pp. 81-82 (Aug. 1, 1940).

16. Ibid., pp. 73-75.

17. From the Jodi 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 AutumnJourney from the German militaryrecords.

21. Text of Brauchitsch’s instructions,from the OKH files. Wheatley, pp.174-82.

22. FCNA, 1940, p. 88.

23. Ibid., pp. 91-97.

24. Haider’s diary of the same date;Assmann, Deutsche Schicksals-jahre, pp. 189-90; OKW WarDiary, cited by Wheatley, p. 82.

25. Raeder’s report, FCNA, 1940, pp.98-101. Haider’s diary. Sept. 14.

26. FCNA, 1940, pp. 100-1.

1166

NOTES

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 Luftkriegsges-chichte, Heft II, Der Luftkrieggegen England, 1940-1, by Lt. Col.von Hesler, cited by Wheatley, p.59. The two to four weeks’ esti-mate was given Haider, who notedit in his diary on July 11.

33. Adolf Galland, The First and theLast, p. 26. Also from Galland’sinterrogation, quoted by Wilmot inThe Struggle for Europe, p. 44.

34. Luftwaffe General Staff record ofdirectives given by Goering at thisconference. Wheatley, p. 73.

35. Ciano Diaries, p. 290.

36. See T. H. O’Brien, Civil Defence.This is a volume in the official Brit-ish history of the Second WorldWar, edited by Prof. J. R. M.Butler and published by H. M. Sta-tionery Office.

37. Notes on Goering’s conferencewith air chiefs, Sept. 16. Cited byWheatley, p. 87.

38. Churchill, Their Finest Hour, p.279.

39. Peter Fleming, Operation SeaLion, p. 293. An excellent book,but Fleming was denied access torestricted documents, though hesays he was permitted to glancethrough—for an hour or two—Wheatley’s study shortly before itwas 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 toStalin).

6. DGFP, X, pp. 207-8.

7. Mein Kampf, p. 654.

8. Speech of Jodi, 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. 1635-37.

10. Haider’s diary, July 22, 1940. Herecords what Brauchitsch toldhim of the conference with Hitlerin Berlin on the previous day.

11. Haider’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. Jodi’s directiveof 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 portiondealing with Russia is on p. 406.

16. OKW War Diary, Aug. 28.Quoted in DGFP, X, pp. 566-67n.

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 memo-randum of Sept. 21 in reply, ibid.,pp. 190-94.

21. Ibid., pp. 188-89.

22. Ibid., pp. 195-96.

23. Ibid., 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 indignanttelegram, ibid., p. 214.

28. Text of Stalin’s reply, ibid., p. 216.

29. Ibid., p. 217.

30. Memoranda of the meetings ofMolotov with Ribbentrop andHitler on Nov. 12-13, 1940, ibid.,pp. 217-54.

31. Schmidt, op. cit., p. 212.

32. Ibid., p.214.

33. Dispatch of Schulenburg, Nov. 26,1940, NSR, pp. 258-59.

34. FCNA, 1941, p. 13; Haider’s diary,Jan. 16, 1941.

35. Haider diary, Dec. 5, 1940; NCA,

IV, pp. 374-75 (N.D. 1799-PS).The latter is a translation of partof the War Diary of the OKWOperations Staff, headed by Jodi.

36. Complete German text, TMWC,XXVI, pp. 47-52; short English

version, NCA, III, pp. 407-9(N.D. 446-PS).

37. Haider, Hitler als Feldherr, p. 22.

38. FCNA, 1940, pp. 135-36 (confer-ence of Dec. 27, 1940).

39. Ibid., pp. 91-97, 104-8 (confer-ences of Sept. 6 and 26, 1940).Raeder signed both reports.

40. DGFP, IX, pp. 620-21.

41. Schmidt, op. cit., p. 196. The in-terpreter gives a fairly completeaccount of the conversations. TheGerman minutes in the U.S. StateDepartment’s The Spanish Govern-ment and the Axis are fragmen-tary. Erich Kordt, who was alsopresent, gives a more detailed ac-count in his unpublished memo-randum, previously referred to.

42. Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers, p. 402.

43. Schmidt, op. cit., p. 197.

44. The text of the Montoire Agree-ment is among the capturedGerman Foreign Office papers butwas not released by the State De-partment at the time of writing.However, William L. Langer,Our Vichy Gamble (pp. 94-95),cites it from the German papersmade available to him by the De-partment.

45. The Ciano Diaries, p. 300.

46. Ribbentrop on the stand at Nurem-berg, and Schmidt in his book, p.200, recalled the words.

47. Schmidt, op. cit., p. 200.

48. Haider’s diary, Nov. 4, 1940; re-port of Jodi 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 theAxis, pp. 28-33.

52. Raeder’s report is in FCNA, 1941,pp. 8-13; Haider did not recordthe two-day conference in his diaryuntil Jan. 16, 1941.

53. Text of Directive No. 20, NCA,IV, pp. 101-3 (N.D. 1541—PS).

54. Text of Directive No. 22 andsupplementary order giving codenames, NCA, III, pp. 413-15(N.D. 448-PS).

55. NCA, VI, pp. 939-46 (N.D. C-134).

56. Haider, Hitler als Feldherr, pp. 22-24.

1167

57. NCA, III, pp. 626-33 (N.D. 872-PS).

58. German figures given by ForeignOffice, 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. Jodi’s testimony, TMWC, XV, p.387. His “tentative” plan of opera-tions, 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 HighCommand 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. Haider affidavit, Nov. 22, 1945, atNuremberg, NCA, VIII, pp. 645-46.

74. TMWC, XX, p. 609.

75. Testimony of Brauchitsch atNuremberg, 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 direc-tive, NCA, III, pp. 637-39 (N.D.886-PS). A slightly different ver-sion found in the records of ArmvGroup 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 May13, 1941, NCA, III, pp. 409-13(N.D. 447-PS).

1168

NOTES

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 personalreport, NCA, VIII, pp. 38-40(N.D. M-116).

86. Kirkpatrick’s reports on his inter-views 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 inNuremberg, pp. 23-24.

91. NSR, p. 324.

92. Ibid., p. 326.

93. Ibid., p. 325.

94. Ibid., p. 318.

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 forDecision, 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 neverturned up, so far as I know, butHaider’s diary for June 14, 1941,describes it, and Keitel told aboutit on the stand at Nuremberg(TMWC, X, pp. 531-32). TheNaval War Diary also mentionsit 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 inGerman, TMWC, XXXIV, pp.298-302.

2. Haider 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 TheFatal Decisions, ed. by SeymourFreidin and William Richardson,P- 57.

6. Liddell Hart, The German Gen-erals Talk, p. 147.

7. Ibid., p. 145.

8. Haider Report,

9. Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader,pp. 159-62. The page referencesin this and subsequent chapters areto 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 GermanGeneral Staff, p. 403.

18. The Goebbels Diaries, pp. 135-36.

19. Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p.153.

20. Haider, 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 Gen-erals 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).

1169

5. They are published, along withthose of the subsequent talks, in-cluding 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 BookVIII-B, Weizsaecker Case. Citedby H. L. Trefousse, Germany andAmerican 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., p. 94.

16. Ibid., Annex I (Raeder’s report tothe Fuehrer, Feb. 4, 1941).

17. Ibid., p. 32 (March 18, 1941).

18. Ibid., p. 47 (April 20, 1941).

19. Ibid., May 22, 1941.

20. Ibid., pp. 88-90 (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 Englishtranslation 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 (inter-rogation of Ribbentrop at Nurem-berg, Sept. 10, 1945).

26. N.D. NG-4422E, Document BookIX, “Weizsaecker Case,” cited byTrefousse, p. 102.

27. Ibid. Numerous telegrams be-tween Ribbentrop and Ott in May1941, and Ott's testimony in the“Far Eastern Trial” in Tokyo,cited by Trefousse, p. 103.

28. Vice-Minister Amau on Aug. 29and Foreign Minister Adm. To-yoda on Aug. 30. Japanese min-utes of the two meetings are inNCA, VI, pp. 546-51 (N.D. 3733-PS).

29. Hull, Memoirs, p. 1034. The textsof Toyoda’s telegrams to Nomuraon Oct. 16, 1941, are given in PearlHarbor Attack, Hearings beforethe Joint Committee on the Investi-gation of the Pearl Harbor Attack,XII, pp. 71-72.

30. Hull, op. cit., pp. 1062-63.

31. Documents 4070 and 4070B, FarEastern Trial, cited by Trefousse,pp. 140-41.

32. Hull, op. cit., pp. 1056, 1074.

33. Intercepted message of Oshima toTokyo, Nov. 29, 1941, NCA, VII,pp. 160-63 (N.D. D-656).

34. Pearl Harbor Attack, XII, p. 204.The intercepted Tokyo telegram isalso 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 toTokyo, Dec. 8, 1941, NCA, VII, p.163 (N.D.D-167).

41. N.D. NG-4424, Dec. 9, 1941,Document Book IX, WeizsaeckerCase.

42. I have combined here Ribbentrop’stestimony in direct examination onthe stand at Nuremberg—TMWC,X, pp. 297-98—and his statementsduring his pretrial interrogationwhich are contained in NCA,Suppl. B, pp. 1199-1200.

43. Hitter’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’sspeech 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 (De-cember 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 upin January-February 1940, Has-sell, op. cit., pp. 368-72; text of thesecond draft, composed at the endof 1941, Wheeler-Bennett, Nem-esis, Appendix A, pp. 705-15.

7. Hassell, op. cit., pp. 247-48.

8. Ibid,,p. 247.

1170

NOTES

9. The German Campaign in Russia—Planning and Operations, 1940-42 (Washington: Department ofthe Army, 1955), p. 120. Thisstudy is based largely on capturedGerman Army records and mono-graphs prepared by German gen-erals for the Historical Division ofthe U.S. Army which, at the timeof writing, were not generallyavailable to civilian historians.However, I must point out that inthe preparation of this and sub-sequent chapters the Office of theChief of Military History, Depart-ment of the Army, was most help-ful in giving access to Germandocumentary material.

10. TMWC, VII, p. 260 (Paulus’testimony at Nuremberg). Hitler’sremark was made on June 1, 1942,nearly a month before the offensivebegan.

11. The Ciano Diaries, op. cit., pp.442-43.

12. Ibid., pp. 478-79.

13. Ibid., pp. 403^1.

14. FCNA, 1942, p. 47 (conference atthe Berghof, June 15). Also p. 42.

15. Haider, Hitler als Feldherr, pp.50-51.

16. FCNA, 1942, p. 53 (conference ofAug. 16 at Hitler’s headquarters).

17. Haider, op. cit., p. 50.

18. Ibid., p. 52.

19. The quotations from Hitler andHaider are from the latter’s diaryand book, and from Heinz Schroe-ter, Stalingrad, p. 53.

20. Quoted by Gen. Bayerlein fromRommel’s papers, The Fatal De-cisions, ed. by Freidin and Rich-ardson, p. 110.

21. Bayerlein quotes the order. Ibid.,

p. 120.

22. The source for this and for muchelse in this chapter about Hitler’sOKW conferences is the so-calledOKW Diary, which was kept untilthe spring of 1943 by Dr. HelmuthGreiner, and thereafter until theend of the war by Dr. Percy ErnstSchramm. The original diary wasdestroyed at the beginning of May1945 on the order of GeneralWinter, deputy to Jodi. After thewar Greiner reconstructed the parthe had kept from his original notesand drafts and eventually turnedit over to the Military History

Branch of the Department of theArmy in Washington. Part of thematerial is published in Greiner’sbook, Die Oberste Wehrmacht-fuehrung, 1939-1943.

23. Proces duM.Petain (Paris, 1945),p. 202—Laval’s testimony.

24. The Ciano Diaries, pp. 541-42.

25. Gen. Zeitzler’s essay on Stalingradin Freidin (ed.), The Fatal Deci-sions, from which I have drawn forthis section. Other sources: OKWWar Diary (see note 22 above),Haider’s book, and Heinz Schroe-ter, Stalingrad. Schroeter, a Ger-man war correspondent with theSixth Army, had access to OKWrecords, radio and teleprinter mes-sages of the various army com-mands, operational orders, markedmaps and the private papers ofmany who were at Stalingrad. Hegot out before the surrender andwas assigned to write the officialstory of the Sixth Army at Stalin-grad, based on the documents thenin the possession of OKW. Dr.Goebbels forbade its publication.After the war Schroeter rescuedhis manuscript and continued hisstudies of the battle before rewrit-ing his book.

26. The Ciano Diaries, p. 556. Mus-solini’s proposals are given on pp.555-56 and confirmed from theGerman side in the OKW WarDiary of December 19.

27. Felix Gilbert, Hitler Directs HisWar, pp. 17-22. This is a compila-tion of the stenographic record ofHitler’s military conferences atOKW. Unfortunately only a frag-ment of the records were re-covered.

28. Goerlitz, History of the GermanGeneral Staff, p. 431.

CHAPTER 27

1. NCA, IV, p. 559 (N.D. 1919-PS).

2. Ibid., Ill, pp. 618-19 (N.D. 862-PS), report of Gen. Gotthard Hein-rici, Deputy General of the Wehr-macht in the Protectorate.

3. Bormann’s memorandum. Quotedin 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. Brautigam’s memorandum ofOct. 25, 1942. Text in NCA, III,pp. 242-51; German original inTMWC, 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., p. 634.

10. TMWC, VIII, p. 9.

11. NCA, VII, pp. 420-21 (N.D.sEC-344-16 and-17).

12. Ibid., p. 469 (N.D. EC-411).

13. Ibid., VIII, pp. 66-67 (N.D. R-92).

14. Ibid., Ill, 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., Ill, 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., Ill, pp. 71-73 (N.D. 031-PS).

23. Ibid., IV, p. 80 (N.D. 1526-PS).

24. Ibid., Ill, p. 57 (N.D. 016-PS).

25. Ibid., Ill, 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. Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p.501.

31. Based on an exhaustive study fromthe German records made byAlexander Dallin, German Rule inRussia, pp. 426-27. He used fig-ures compiled by OKW-AWA inNachweisungen des Verbleibs dersowjetischen Kr. Gef. nach denStand vom 1.5.1944. AWA are theinitials for the General ArmedForces Department of OKW (All-gemeines Wehrmachtsamt).

32. NCA, III, pp. 126-30 (N.D. 081-PS).

33. Ibid., V, p. 343 (N.D. 2622-PS).

34. Ibid., Ill, 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).

1171

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 standat Nuremberg, TMWC, IV, pp.311-23; his affidavit, based onHarris’ interrogation, NCA, V,pp. 341-42 (N.D. 2620-PS). Dr.Becker’s letter, ibid., Ill, 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 FinalSolution, pp. 499-500. Reitlinger’sstudies in this book and in his TheS.S. are the most exhaustive on thesubject that I have seen.

52. NCA, III, pp. 525-26 (N.D. 710-PS). The English translation hereof the last line misses the wholepoint. The German word Endloe-sung (“final solution”) is renderedas “desirable solution.” See theGerman transcript.

53. TMWC,XI,]). 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., p. 585.

62. Ibid., p. 585 (N.D. USSR 225).Transcript.

63. Law Reports of Trials of WarCriminals, I, p. 28. London, 1946.This is a summary of the twelvesecondary Nuremberg trials, cov-ered in the TWC volumes.

64. The above section on Auschwitz isbased on, aside from the sources

1172

NOTES

quoted, the testimony at Nurem-berg of Mme. Vaillant-Couturier,a Frenchwoman who was confinedthere, TMWC, VI, pp. 203-40;Case IV, the so-calied “Concentra-tion Camp Case,” entitled “UnitedStates v. Pohl, et al.,” in the TWCvolumes; The Belsen Trial, Lon-don, 1949; G. M. Gilbert, Nurem-berg Diary, op. cit.; Filip Fried-man, This Was Oswiecim [Ausch-witz]; and the brilliant survey ofReitlinger in The Final Solutionand 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., Ill, pp. 719-75(N.D. 1061-PS).

70. TMWC, IV, p. 371.

71. Reitlinger, The Final Solution, pp.489-501. The author analyzes theJewish exterminations country bycountry.

72. TMWC, XX, p. 548.

73. Ibid., p. 519.

74. Examination of Josef Kramer,Case I of the Trials of the WarCriminals—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 Herypi-erre 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 Himm-ler, April 5, 1942, in the tran-script of the “Doctors’ Trial,”Case I, “United States v. Brandt,et al.” Dr. Karl Brandt was Hit-ler’s personal physician and ReichCommissioner for Health. He wasfound guilty at the trial, sentencedto death and hanged.

82. NCA, Suppl. A, pp. 416-17(N.D. 2428-PS).

83. Letter of Prof. Dr. Hippke toHimmler, Oct. 10, 1942, in tran-script, Case I.

84. NCA, IV, pp. 135-36 (N.D. 1618-PS).

85. Testimony of Walter Neff, tran-script, 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’sprotest, ibid.

89. 1616-PS, in transcript of Case I.The document is not printed inTMWC, and the English transla-tion in NCA is too brief to be ofany help.

90. Alexander Mitscherlich, M.D., andFred Mielke, Doctors of Infamy,pp. 146-70. This is an excellentsummary of the “Doctors’ Trial”by two Germans. Dr. Mitscherlichwas head of the German MedicalCommission at the trial.

91. Wiener Library Bulletin, 1951, V,pp. 1-2. Quoted by Reitlinger inThe S.S., p. 216.

CHAPTER 28

1. The Goebbels Diaries, p.352.

2. FCNA, 1943, p. 61.

3. The Italian minutes of the Feltremeeting are in Hitler e Mussolini,pp. 165-90; also in Department ofState Bulletin, Oct. 6, 1946, pp.607-14, 639; Dr. Schmidt’s de-scription of the meeting is in hisbook, op. cit., p. 263.

4. The chief sources are the steno-graphic records of Hitler’s confer-ences with his aides at his head-quarters in East Prussia on July 25and 26, published in Felix Gilbert,Hitler Directs His War, pp. 39-71;also The Goebbels Diaries, entriesfor July 1943, pp. 403-21; and theFuehrer Conferences on Naval Af-fairs [FCNA], entries for July andAugust 1943, made by Adm. Doe-nitz, the new commander of theGerman Navy.

5. The Memoirs of Field MarshalKesselring (London, 1953), pp.177, 184. I have used this Britishedition of Kesselring’s memoirs;they have been published in Amer-ica under the title A Soldier’s Rec-ord.

6. See Kesselring, op. cit., and Gen.Siegfried Westphal, The GermanArmy in the West, pp. 149-52.

7. Firsthand accounts of Mussolini’srescue are given in Otto Skorzeny,S.korzeny’s Secret Missions, by the

Duce himself in his Memoirs,1942-43, and by the Italian man-ager and manageress of the HotelCampo Imperatore in a specialarticle included in the British edi-tion of the Memoirs.

8. Hitler quotation from FCNA,1943, p. 46: the item from Doe-nitz’ diary is quoted by Wilmot,op. cit., p. 152.

9. Haider, Hitler als Feldherr, p. 57.

10. I have quoted the lecture at lengthin End of a Berlin Diary, pp. 270-86. The text (in English) is inNCA, VII, pp. 920-75.

11. The above excerpts from Goeb-bels’ diary are from The GoebbelsDiaries, pp. 428-42, 468, 477-78.Hitler’s talk with Doenitz in Au-gust 1943 was noted by the Ad-miral 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. Rib-bentrop’s testimony, TMWC, X, p.299.

4. George Bell, The Church and Hu-manity, pp. 165-76. AlsoWheeler-Bennett, Nemesis, pp. 553-57.

5. Allen Dulles, op. cit., pp. 125^46.Dulles gives the text of a memo-randum written for him by JakobWallenberg on his meetings withGoerdeler.

6. The account of this whole episodeis based largely on the report ofSchlabrendorff, op. cit., pp. 51-61.

7. To Rudolf Pechel, who quotes himat length in his book, DeutscherWiderstand.

8. There are a number of accounts,some of them firsthand, of the stu-dents’ revolt: Inge Scholl, Dieweisse Rose (Frankfurt, 1952);Karl Vossler, Gedenkrede fuer dieOpfer an der Universitaet Muen-chen (Munich, 1947); RicardaHuch, "Die Aktion der Muench-ner Studenten gegen Hitler,” NeueSchweizer Rundschau, Zurich, Sep-tember-October 1948; “Der 18Februar: Umriss einer deutschenWiderstandsbewegung,” Die Ge-genwart, October 30, 1940; Pechel,op. cit., pp. 96-104; Wheeler-Ben-

1173

nett, Nemesis, pp. 539-41; Dulles,op. cit., pp. 120-22.

9. Dulles, op. cit., pp. 144-45.

10. Quoted by Constantine FitzGibbonin 20 July, p. 39.

11. Desmond Young, Rommel, pp.223-24. Stroelin gave Young apersonal account of the meeting.See also Stroelin’s Nuremberg tes-timony, TMWC, X, p. 56, and hisbook, Stuttgart in Endstadium desKrieges.

12. Speidel emphasizes the point in hisbook Invasion 1944, pp. 68, 73.

13. Ibid., p. 65.

14. Ibid., p. 71.

15. Ibid., pp. 12-74.

16. Dulles, op. cit., p. 139.

17. Schlabrendorff, op. cit., p. 97.

18. The telephone log of the SeventhArmy headquarters. This reveal-ing document was captured intactin August 1944 and provides aninvaluable source for the Germanversion of what happened to Hit-ler’s armies on D Day and duringthe subsequent Battle of Nor-mandy.

19. Speidel, op. cit.,p. 93.

20. Ibid., pp. 93-94, on which this ac-count is largely based. Gen. Blu-mentritt, Rundstedt’s chief of staff,has also left an account, and thereis additional material in The Rom-mel Papers, ed. by Liddell Hart, p.479.

21. The text of the letter is given inSpeidel, op. cit., pp. 115-17. Aslightly different version is in TheRommel Papers, pp. 486-87.

22. Speidel, op. cit., p. 117.

23. Ibid., pp. 104-17.

24. Ibid., p. 119.

25. Schlabrendorff, op. cit., p. 103. Hewas still attached to Tresckow’sstaff.

26. The sources for these meetings ofthe conspirators on July 16 are thestenographic account of the trial ofWitzleben, Hoepner et al.; Kalten-brunner’s reports on the July 20uprising; Eberhard Zeller, Geistder Freiheit, pp. 213-14; GerhardRitter, Carl Goerdeler und diedeutsche Widerstandsbewegung,pp. 401-3.

27. Heusinger, Befehl im Widerstreit,p. 352, tells of his last words thatday.

28. Zeller, op. cit., p. 221.

1174

NOTES

29. Schmidt, op. cit., pp. 275-77.

30. A number of guests at the teaparty, Italian and German, havegiven eyewitness accounts of it.Eugen Dollmann, an S.S. liaisonofficer with Mussolini, has ren-dered the fullest description bothin his book, Roma Nazista, pp.393-400, and in his interrogationby Allied investigators, which issummed up by Dulles, op. cit., pp.9-11. Zeller, op. cit., p. 367, n.69,and Wheeler-Bennett, Nemesis,pp. 644-46, have written graphicaccounts, based mostly on Doll-mann.

31. The transcript of this telephoneconversation was put in evidencebefore the People’s Court. Schla-brendorff, op. cit., quotes it on p.113.

32. Zeller, op. cit., p. 363n., cites twoeyewitnesses to the executions, anArmy chauffeur who observedthem from a nearby window, anda woman secretary of Fromm.

33. This account of what went on inthe Bendlerstrasse that evening istaken largely from General Hoep-ner’s frank testimony before thePeople’s Court during his trial andthat of Witzleben and six otherofficers on Aug. 6-7, 1944. Therecords of the People’s Court weredestroyed in an American bombingon Feb. 3, 1945, but one of thestenographers at this trial—at therisk of his life, he says—purloinedthe shorthand records before thebombing and after the war turnedthem over to the Nuremberg tri-bunal. They are published verba-tim in German in TMWC, XXX-III, pp. 299-530.

There is a great deal of materialon the July 20 plot, much of itconflicting and some quite confus-ing. The best reconstruction of itis by Zeller, op. cit., who gives alengthy list of his sources on pp.381-88. Gerhard Ritter’s book onGoerdeler, op. cit., is an invaluablecontribution, though it naturallyconcentrates on its subject. Wheel-er-Bennett’s Nemesis gives the bestaccount available in English anduses, as does Zeller, Otto John’sunpublished memorandum. John,who after the war got into difficul-ties with the Bonn government and

was imprisoned by it, was presentat the Bendlerstrasse that day andrecorded a great deal of what hesaw and what Stauffenberg toldhim. Constantine FitzGibbon, op.cit., gives a lively account, basedmostly on German sources, espe-cially Zeller.

Also invaluable, though theymust be read with caution, are thedaily reports on the investigationof the plot carried out by the S.D.-Gestapo, which date from July 21to Dec. 15, 1944. They weresigned by Kaltenbrunner and sentto Hitler, being drawn up in extra-large type so that the Fuehrercould read them without his spec-tacles. They represent the laborsof the “Special Commission forJuly 20, 1944,” which numberedsome 400 S.D.-Gestapo officialsdivided into eleven investigationgroups. The Kaltenbrunner re-ports are among the captured doc-uments. Microfilm copies areavailable at the National Archivesin Washington—No. T-84, SerialNo. 39, Rolls 19-21. See also Se-rial No. 40, Roll 22.

34. Zeller, op. cit., p. 372, n.10, quotesan officer who was present.

35. The account of the executions waslater related by the prison warder,Hans Hoffmann, a second wardenand the photographer, and is givenin Wheeler-Bennett, Nemesis, pp.683-84, among others.

36. Wilfred von Oven, Mit Goebbelsbis zumEnde, II, p. 118.

37. Ritter, op. cit., pp. 419-29, givesthe details of this interesting side-light.

38. This figure is given in a commen-tary in the records of the Fuehrer’sconferences on naval affairs(FCNA, 1944, p. 46) and is ac-cepted by Zeller, op. cit., p. 283.Pechel, op. cit., who found the offi-cial “Execution Register,” says, p.327, there were 3,427 executionsrecorded in 1944, though a few ofthese probably were not connectedwith the July 20 plot.

39. Schlabrendorff, op. cit., pp. 119-20. I have altered the English texthere given to make it conformmore to the original German.

40. Gen. Blumentritt gave this account

1175

to Liddell Hart (The German Gen-erals Talk, pp. 217-23).

41. Ibid., p. 222. There is considerablesource material on the Paris endof the plot, including the accountgiven by Speidel in his book andnumerous articles in German mag-azines by eyewitnesses. The bestover-all account has been renderedby Wilhelm von Schramm, anArmy archivist stationed in theWest: Der20 Juli in Paris.

42. Felix Gilbert, op. cit., p. 101.

43. Speidel, op. cit., p. 152. My ac-count of the death of Rommel isbased on, besides Speidel, whoquestioned Frau Rommel andother witnesses, the followingsources: two reports written by theField Marshal’s son, Manfred, thefirst for British intelligence, quotedby Shulman, op. cit., pp. 138-39,the second for The Rommel Pa-pers, ed. by Liddell Hart, pp. 495-505; and Gen. Keitel’s interro-gation by Col. John H. Amen onSept. 28, 1945, at Nuremberg(NCA, Suppl. B, pp. 1256-71).Desmond Young, op. cit., has alsogiven a full account, based on talkswith the Rommel family andfriends and on Gen. Maisel’s de-nazification trial after the war.

44. TMWC, XX3, p. 47.

45. Speidel, op. cit., pp. 155,172.

46. Goerlitz, History of the GermanGeneral Staff, p. 477.

47. Guderian, op. cit., p.273.

48. Ibid., p. 276.

49. Liddell Hart, The German Gen-erals 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 BombingSurvey, Economic Report, Appen-dix, 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, TheGerman Generals Talk, p. 229.

9. Guderian, op. cit., pp. 305-6, 310.

10. Manteuffel, in Freidin and Rich-ardson (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 slightlyaltered the sequence of the text.

17. Fuehrer conference, undated, butprobably on Feb. 19, 1945, sinceAdm. Doenitz notes the discussionin his record of that date. SeeFCNA, 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 transcriptpreserved. Gilbert, op. cit., givesit in full, pp. 141-74.

20. Testimony of Albert Speer at Nu-remberg, 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 quota-tions from Hitler and Speer, istaken from the latter’s testimonyon the stand at Nuremberg onJune 20, 1946, the text of which isgiven in TMWC, XVI; and fromthe documents which he presentedin his defense, which are given inVol. XLI.

24. SHAEF intelligence summary,March 11, 1945. Quoted by Wil-mot, op. cit., p. 690.

CHAPTER 31

1. Count Lutz Schwerin von Kro-sigk’s unpublished diary. I havegiven the essential extracts in Endof a Berlin Diary, pp. 190-205.

Trevor-Roper, in The Last Daysof Hitler, also quotes from it.Trevor-Roper, the historian, whowas a British intelligence officerduring the war, was assigned thetask of investigating the circum-stances of Hitler’s end. The re-sults are given in his brilliant book,

1176

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to which all who attempt to writethis final chapter of the ThirdReich are indebted. I have availedmyself of a number of othersources, especially the firsthand ac-counts of eyewitnesses such asSpeer, Keitel, Jodi, Gen. Karl Kol-ler, Doenitz, Krosigk, HannaReitsch, Capt. Gerhardt Boldt andCapt. Joachim Schultz, as well asone of Hitler’s women secretariesand his chauffeur.

2. Gerhardt Boldt, In the Shelter withHitler, Ch. 1. Capt. Boldt was

A. D.C. to Guderian and then toGen. Krebs, the last Chief of theArmy General Staff, and spent thefinal days in the bunker.

3. Albert Zoller, Hitler Privat, pp.203-5. According to the Frenchedition (Douze Ans aupres d’Hit-ler) Zoller was a captain in theFrench Army attached as interro-gation officer to the U.S. SeventhArmy and in this capacity ques-tioned one of Hitler’s four womensecretaries; later, in 1947, he col-laborated with her in the writingof this book of recollections of theFuehrer. She is probably ChristaSchroeder, who served Hitler asstenographer from 1933 to a weekbefore his end.

4. Krosigk’s diary.

5. Ibid.

6. Quoted by Wilmot, op. eit., p. 699.

7. Trevor-Roper, op. cit., p. 100. Theaccount was given by one of Goeb-bels’ secretaries, Frau Inge Haber-zettel.

8. Michael A. Musmanno, Ten Daysto Die, p. 92. Judge Musmanno, aU.S. Navy intelligence officer dur-ing the war, personally interro-gated the survivors who had beenwith Hitler during his last days.His book is a valuable source butmarred by a high-flying, turgidprose.

9. Keitel interrogation, NCA, Suppl.

B, p. 1294.

10. NCA, VI, p. 561 (N.D. 3734-PS).This is a lengthy summary of aU.S. Army interrogation of HannaReitsch on the last days of Hitlerin the bunker. She later repudi-ated parts of her statement, butArmy authorities have confirmedits substantial accuracy as contain-ing what she said during the inter-

rogation on Oct. 8, 1945. ThoughFrl. Reitsch is a highly hystericalperson, or was during the monthsthat followed her harrowing ex-perience in the bunker, her ac-count, when checked against theevidence of the others, is a valuablerecord of Hitler’s very last days.

11. Gen. Karl Koller, Der letzteMonat, p. 23. This is Koller’s diarycovering the period from April 14to May 27, 1945, and is an invalu-able source for the last days of theThird Reich.

12. Keitel in his interrogation at Nu-remberg, NCA, Suppl. B, pp. 1275-79. Jodi’s account was given toGen. Koller the same night and re-corded in the latter’s diary of April22—23. See Koller, op. cit., pp. 30—32.

13. Trevor-Roper, op. cit., pp. 124,126-27. The author gives Berger’saccount, he says, “with some res-ervations.”

14. Keitel recalled the remark in hisinterrogation, loc. cit., p. 1277.Jodi’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 substantiallyin 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., p. 556. All the subsequent

quotations and the events describedby Hanna Reitsch are taken fromthis interrogation and are found inNCA, VI, pp. 551-71 (N.D.

3734-PS). They will not there-fore be cited in each case.

19. Keitel, in his interrogation, loc.cit., pp. 1281-82, quoted the mes-sage from memory. The Germannaval records give a similarlyworded radio message from Hitlerto Jodi dated 7:52 P.M., April29 (FCNA, 1945, p. 120), andSchultz’s OKW Diary (p. 51),which gives the same text, recordsit as received by Jodi at 11 p.m. onApril 29. This is probably an er-ror, since by that hour of that eve-ning Hitler, judging by his actions,no longer cared where any armywas.

20. Trevor-Roper, op. cit., p. 163,

Notes

1177

gives the first message. The sec-ond I have found in the Navy’srecords, FCNA, 1945, p. 120. Thefurther message from the navalliaison officer in the bunker, Adm.Voss, is also given in FCNA, p.120.

21. The text of Hitler’s Political Testa-ment and personal will is given inN.D. 3569-PS. A copy of hismarriage certificate was also pre-sented at Nuremberg. I have giventhe texts of all three in End of aBerlin Diary, pp. 177-83, n. Arather hastily written Englishtranslation of the will and testa-ment is published in NCA, VI, pp.259-63. The original German isin TMWC, XLI, under the Speerdocuments.

22. Gen. Roller, op. cit., p. 79, givesthe text of Bormann’s radiogram.

23. The text of Goebbels’ appendixwas presented at the Nurembergtrial. I have given it in End of aBerlin Diary, p. 183n.

24. Kempka’s account of the death of

Hitler and his bride is given in twosworn statements published inNCA, VI, pp. 571-86 (N.D.

3735—PS).

25. Juergen Thorwald, Das Ende ander Elbe, p. 224.

26. This account of the death of theGoebbels family is given byTrevor-Roper, op. cit., pp. 212-14,and is based largely on the latertestimony of Schwaegermann, Ax-mann and Kempka.

27. Joachim Schultz, Die letzten 30Tage, pp. 81-85. These notes arebased on the OKW diaries for thelast month of the war and I haveused them to bolster a good manypages of this chapter. The book isone of several published under thedirection of Thorwald under thegeneral title Dokumente zar Zeit-geschichte.

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 myown research and planning, I owe a great deal to a number of persons and in-stitutions for their generous help during the five years that this work was in themaking.

The late Jack Goodman, of Simon and Schuster, and Joseph Barnes, myeditor at this publishing house, got me started and Barnes, an old friend fromour 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 ofCongress, a fine scholar and an authority on the captured German documents,guided me through the mountains of German papers. A good many others alsocame to my aid in this. Among them were Telford Taylor, chief counsel forthe prosecution at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, who already has publishedtwo volumes of a military history of the Third Reich. He loaned me docu-ments and books from his private collection and proferred much good advice.

Professor Oron J. Hale, of the University of Virginia, chairman of theAmerican Committee for the Study of War Documents, American HistoricalAssociation, led me to much useful material, including the results of some ofhis own research, and one hot summer day in 1956 did me a signal service byyanking me out of the manuscript room of the Library of Congress and sternlyadvising me to get back to the writing of this book lest I spend the rest of mylife peering into the German papers, which one easily could do. Dr. G. BernardNoble, chief of the Historical Division of the State Department, and Paul R.Sweet, a Foreign Service officer in the Department, who was one of theAmerican editors of the Documents on German Foreign Policy, also helpedme through the maze of Nazi papers. At the Hoover Library at StanfordUniversity, Mrs. Hildegard R. Boeninger, by mail, and Mrs. Agnes F. Peterson,in person, were generous of their aid. At the Department of the Army, ColonelW. 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 aunique collection.

Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of Foreign Affairs, took a personal interestin seeing me through this book, as did Walter H. Mallory, then executive direc-tor of the Council on Foreign Relations. To the Council, to Frank Altschuland to the Overbrook Foundation I am grateful for a generous grant whichenabled me to devote all of my time to this book during its final year ofpreparation. I must also thank the staff of the Council’s excellent library, onwhose members I made many wearisome demands. The staff of the New YorkSociety Library also experienced this and, despite it, proved most patient andunderstanding.

Lewis Galantiere and Herbert Kriedman were good enough to read most ofthe manuscript and to offer much valuable criticism. Colonel Truman Smith,who was a U.S. military attache in Berlin when Adolf Hitler first began hispolitical career in the early Twenties and later after he came to power, put at

1179

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my disposal some of his notebooks and reports, which shed light on the be-ginnings of National Socialism and on certain aspects of it later. Sam Harris, amember of the U.S. prosecution staff at Nuremberg and now an attorney inNew York, made available the TMWC Nuremberg volumes and much addi-tional unpublished material. General Franz Haider, Chief of the GermanArmy General Staff during the first three years of the war, was most generousm answering my inquiries and in pointing the way to German sources. I havementioned elsewhere the value to me of his unpublished diary, a copy of whichI kept at my side during the writing of a large part of this book. George Ken-nan, who was serving in the U.S. Embassy in Berlin at the beginning of thewar, has refreshed my memory on certain points of historical interest. Severalold friends and colleagues from my days in Europe, John Gunther, M. W.Fodor, Kay Boyle, Sigrid Schultz, Dorothy Thompson, Whit Burnett andNewell Rogers, discussed various aspects of this work with me—to my profit.And Paul R. Reynolds, my literary agent, provided encouragement when itwas 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 greathelp 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 expressmy gratitude. The responsibility for the book’s shortcomings and errors is, ofcourse, exclusively my own.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

This book is based principally on the captured German documents, the in-terrogations and testimony of German military officers and civilian officials,the diaries and memoirs which some of them have left, and on my own experi-ence in the Third Reich.

Millions of words from the German archives have been published in variousseries of volumes, and millions more have been collected or microfilmed anddeposited in libraries—in this country chiefly the Library of Congress and theHoover Library at Stanford University—and in the National Archives atWashington. In addition, the Office of the Chief of Military History, Depart-ment of the Army, at Washington is in possession of a vast collection of Ger-man military records.

Of the published volumes of documents the most useful for my purposeshave been three series. The first is Documents on German Foreign Policy,Series D, comprising a large selection in English translation of the papers ofthe German Foreign Office from 1937 to the summer of 1940. Through thecourtesy of the State Department I have been given access to a number ofadditional 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 trialhave been invaluable in taking one behind the scenes in the Third Reich. Thefirst is the forty-two-volume Trial of the Major War Criminals, of which thefirst twenty-three volumes contain the text of the testimony at the trial and theremainder the text of the documents accepted in evidence, which are publishedin their original language, mostly German. Additional documents, interroga-tions and affidavits collected for that trial and translated rather hurriedly intoEnglish are published in the ten-volume series Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression.Unfortunately, the extremely valuable testimony given before the commis-sioners of the International Military Tribunal is mostly omitted from the latterseries and is available only in mimeographed form on deposit with a few leadinglibraries.

There were twelve subsequent trials at Nuremberg, conducted by UnitedStates military tribunals, but the fifteen bulky published volumes of testimonyand documents presented at these trials, titled Trials of War Criminals beforethe 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 befound in Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals, published by His Majesty’sStationery Office in London, 1947—49.

Of the unpublished German documents other than the rich collections in theHoover Library, the Library of Congress and the National Archives—whichcontain, among other things, the Himmler files and a number of Hitler’s privatepapers—one of the most valuable finds has been that of the so-called “Alexan-dria Papers,” a good proportion of which have now been microfilmed and

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

deposited at the National Archives. Information about a number of othercaptured papers will be found in the notes. Among the unpublished Germanmaterial, incidentally, is General Haider’s diary—seven volumes of typescriptwith annotations added by the General after the war to clarify certain pas-sages 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 areof three types: first, the memoirs and diaries of some of the leading figures inthis narrative; second, books based on the new documentary material, such asthose of John W. Wheeler-Bennett, Alan Bullock, H. R. Trevor-Roper andGerald Reitlmger in England, of Telford Taylor in America, and of EberhardZeller, Gerhard Ritter, Rudolf Pechel and Walter Goerlitz in Germany; andthird, books which provide background.

A comprehensive bibliography of works on the Third Reich has been pub-lished in Munich as a special number of the Vierteljahrshefte fuer Zeitges-chichte under the auspices of the Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte. The catalogues ofthe Wiener Library in London also contain excellent bibliographies.

PUBLISHED DOCUMENTARY MATERIAL

Der Hitler Prozess. Munich: Deutscher Volksverlag, 1924. (The record of thecourt proceedings of Hitler’s trial in Munich.)

Documents and Materials relating to the Eve of the Second World War, 1937-39. 2vols. Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1948.

Documents concerning German-Polish Relations and the Outbreak of Hostili-ties between Great Britain and Germany. London: His Majesty’s StationeryOffice, 1939. (The British Blue Book.)

Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919-39. London: H. M. StationeryOffice, 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 asDGFP.)

Dokumente der deutschen Politik, 1933-40. Berlin, 1935-43.

Fuehrer Conferences on Naval Affairs (mimeographed). London: British Ad-miralty, 1947. (Referred to as FCNA.)

Hitler e Mussolini—Lettere e documenti. Milan: Rizzoli, 1946.

I Documenti diplomatica italiani. Ottavo series, 1935-39. Rome: Libreriadella Stato, 1952—53. (Referred to as DDI.)

Le Livre Jaune Franpais. Documents diplomatiques, 1938-39. Paris: Minis-tere des Affaires Etrangeres. (The French Yellow Book.)

Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression. 10 vols. Washington: U.S. GovernmentPrinting Office, 1946. (Referred to as NCA.)

Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939-41. Documents from the Archives of the Ger-man Foreign Office. Washington: U.S. Department of State, 1948. (Re-ferred 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 Investiga-

tion of the Pearl Harbor Attack. 39 vols. Washington: U.S. GovernmentPrinting Office, 1946.

Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy. 3 vols. London: Royal Institute of Inter-national 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 asTWC.)

HITLER’S SPEECHES

Adolf Hitlers Reden. Munich, 1934.

Baynes, Norman H., ed.: The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August1939. 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 General de laReichswehr. 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, Francois: Croix gammee ou caducee. Freiburg, 1950. (A docu-mented account of the Nazi medical experiments.)

Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Belgium: The Official Account ofWhat Happened, 1939-1940. New York, 1941.

Benes, Eduard: Memoirs of Dr. Eduard Benel. From Munich to New Warand New Victory. London, 1954.

Benoist-Mechin, Jacques: Histoire de I’Armee allemande depuis 1’Armistice.Paris, 1936-38.

Bernadotte, Folke: The Curtain Falls. New York, 1945.

Best, Captain S. Payne: The Venlo Incident. London, 1950.

Bewegung, Stoat und Volk in ihren Organisationen. Berlin, 1934.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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 be-tween Martin Bormann and his Wife, from Jan. 1943 to April 1945. Lon-don, 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 YearsBased on the Diaries of Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Im-perial 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 WorldWars, 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 York1948-1953.

Ciano, Count Galeazzo: Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers, edited by MalcolmMuggeridge. 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 NewYork, 1955.

Croce, Benedetto: Germany and Europe. New York, 1944.

Czechoslovakia Fights Back. Washington: American Council on Public Af-fairs, 1943.

Dahlerus, Birger: The Last Attempt. London, 1947.

Dallin, Alexander: German Rule in Russia, 1941-1944. New York, 1957.Daluces, Jean: Le Troisieme 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: Mil Hitler in die Macht. Munich, 1934.

Dollmann, Eugen: Roma Nazism. 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.

Bibliography 1185

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 Genera] Beck.)

Francois-Poncet, Andre: 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 LuftwaffeFighter Forces, 1938-45. New York, 1954.

Gamelin, General Maurice Gustave: Servir. 3 vols. Paris, 1949.

Gay, Jean: Carnets Secrets de Jean Gay. Paris, 1940.

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Gilbert, Felix: Hitler Directs His War. New York, 1950. (The partial textof Hitler’s daily military conferences.)

Gilbert, G. M.: Nuremberg Diary. New York, 1947.

Gisevius, Bernd: To the Bitter End. Boston, 1947.

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York, 1948.

Goerlitz, Walter: History of the German General Staff, 1657-1945. NewYork, 1953.

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Goudima, Constantin: L’Armee Rouge dans la Paix et la Guerre. Paris,1947.

Greiner, Helmuth: Die Oberste Wehrmachtfuehrung, 1939—1945. Wies-baden, 1951.

Greiner, Josef: DasEnde des Hitler-Mythos. Vienna, 1947.

Guderian, General Heinz: Panzer Leader. New York, 1952.

Guillaume, General A.: La Guerre Germano-Sovietique, 1941. Paris,1949.

Habatsch, Walther: Die deutsche Besetzung von Daenemark und Norwegen,1940, 2nd ed. Goettingen, 1952.

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Halder, Franz: Hitler ah Feldherr. Munich, 1949.

Halifax, Lord: Fullness of Days. New York, 1957.

Hallgarten, George W. F.: Hitler, Reichswehr und Industrie. Frankfurt1955.

Hanfstaengl, Ernst: Unheard Witness. New York, 1957.

Harris, Whitney R.: Tyranny on Trial—The Evidence at Nuremberg. Dal-las, 1954. (A selection of the German documents at Nuremberg from theTMWC and NCA volumes.)

Hassell, Ulrich von: The Von Hassell Diaries, 1938-1944 New York1947.

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 derdeutschen Armee, 1923-1925. Stuttgart, 1950.

Hindenburg, Field Marshal Paul von Beneckendorf und von: A us mei-nem Leben. Leipzig, 1934.

Hitler, Adolf: Mein Kampf. Boston, 1943. This is the unexpurgated edi-tion in English translation published by Houghton Mifflin. (The Germanoriginal. Munich, 1925, 1927. The first volume, Eine Albrechnung, waspublished 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 Secretes Echangees par Hitler et Mussolini. Paris, 1946.

Hoettl, Wilhelm (Walter Hagen) : The Secret Front: The Story of NaziPolitical Espionage. New York, 1954.

Hofer, Walther: War Premeditated, 1939. London, 1955. (English trans-lation from Die Entfesselung des zweiten Weltkrieges.)

Hossbach, General Friedrich: Zwischen Wehrmacht und Hitler Hanover1949.

Hull, Cordell: The Memoirs of Cordell Hull. 2 vols. New York, 1948.

Jacobsen, Hans-Adolf: Dokumente zur Vorgeschichte des Westfeldzuees.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.

Kl™’ Burton: Germany’s Economic Preparations for War. Cambridge,

Kleist, Peter: Zwischen Hitler und Stalin. Bonn, 1950.

Kneller, George Frederick: The Educational Philosophy of NationalSocialism. New Haven, 1941.

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Kogon, Eugen: The Theory and Practice of Hell. New York, 1951. (TheGerman original: Der SS Staat und das System der deutschen Konzentra-tionslager. Munich, 1946.)

Kohn, Hans, ed.: German History: Some New German Views. Boston, 1954.

Roller, General Karl: Der letzte Monat. Mannheim, 1949. (The diaryof the last Chief of the Luftwaffe General Staff.)

Kordt, Erich: Nicht aus den Akten. (Die Wilhelmstrasse in Frieden undKrieg, 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. Tuebin-gen, 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 Univer-sity. 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. Ham-burg, 1950.

Ludecke, Kurt: I Knew Hitler. London, 1938.

Ludendorff, General Eric: Auf dem Weg zur Feldherrnhalle. Munich,1937.

Ludendorff, Margaritte: Als ich Ludendorff's Frau war. Munich, 1929.

Luedde-Neurath, Walter: Die letzten Tage des Dritten Reiches. Goet-tingen, 1951.

Manstein, Field Marshal Eric von: Verlorene Siege. Bonn, 1955. (Englishtranslation: 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 inWorld War II. Vol. I, The Battle of the Atlantic, September 1939-May 1943.Boston, 1948.

Mourin, Maxime: Les Complots contre Hitler. Paris, 1948.

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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.

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Olden, Rudolf: Hitler, the Pawn. London, 1936.

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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.

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Rauschning, Hermann: Time of Delirium. New York, 1946.

, The Revolution of Nihilism. New York, 1939.

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, The Voice of Destruction. New York, 1940.

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INDEX

Aa Canal, 728,731

Aachen, 291/n., 1088, 1089-90, 1092“AB Action,” 662-63Abbeville, 718, 727, 728, 731, 738, 741,746,759

Abwehr (Intelligence Bureau), see un-der 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, 255A.E.G., (Allgemeine Elektrizitaetgesell-schaft), 145

Africa, 82, 305, 804, 805; see alsoNorth Africa

AfrikaKorps, 911-13, 919-25, 1078Aga Khan, 751/n.

Ahnenerbe (Institute for Research intoHeredity), 980, 982Air Force, German, see LuftwaffeAisne river, 737

Alanbrooke, Field Marshal Lord, 730fn.Albania, 469, 813, 816, 818, 820, 821,825, 1006

Albert Canal, 724,725Alexander I, Czar of Russia, 542, 1015Alexander, Gen. Sir Harold, 919, 1033,1107

Alexandria, Egypt, 817, 911, 919Alfieri, Dino, 751,756Algeria, 814,923

Algiers, 923

Allianz insurance company, 144, 206Allied air operations, 1001, 1038, 1040,1092, 1093, 1099; bombing ofGermany, 778-80, 807-9, 954,1008-9, 1013, 1027, 1031, 1032,1037, 1096-1100, 1108, 1110Allied commandos, 955Allied Supreme War Council, 675fn.,696,717

Allies, Nazi hopes for dissension among,1011, 1033, 1042, 1087, 1091-92, 1098

Alsace, 400, 983fn., 1091, 1094Alsace-Lorraine, 58, 286, 436, 641, 742Altmark (Ger. auxiliary ship), 679, 680Alvensleben, Werner von, 182Amann, Max, 49, 80, 246,760Amau, Vice-Minister, 884Amen, Col. lohn Harlan, 532fn., 959America First Committee, 827fn., 871Amery, Leopold, 611Amsterdam, 716, 721Andalsnes, 706, 708, 710Angell, Norman, 784Anglo-German naval agreement (1935),287-89, 419, 467, 471, 489fn.Anglo-Polish treaty (1939), 550, 551,556-57,564,570Annunziata, Collar of the, 483Anti-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-

1195

1196

anti-Hitler conspiracy continued

60, 591, 596, 647-56, 658-59,

670, 692-94, 715, 719, 154fn.,846fn., 848fn., 903-8, 1002,

1012-82

anti-Semitism, 23-27, 35, 40fn., 41, 45,48, 91, 106, 149, 236, 238, 251,372; see also Jews“Anton,” 922, 923Antonescu, Ion, 800/n., 995Antwerp, 717, 718, 724, 725, 761, 772,1086, 1090, 1099Arabia, 810Arabian Sea, 805Archangel, U.S.S.R., 811, 870/n.Arco-Valley, Count Anton, 33Ardennes Forest, 718, 723, 933, 1090-96, 1108

armistice: of 1918, see under WorldWar I; of 1940, see Franco-Ger-man armistice; Franco-Italianarmistice

Army, German (and Reichswehr), 63-66, 89, 93, 119, 143, 160, 185,201, 211, 236, 259, 260, 263, 267,293, 301, 305, 328, 458, 1104-5Under the Republic: political ac-tivities, 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 Ver-sailles terms, 31-32, 53, 58-60,62, 63, 65, 281, 284, 285; attitudetoward Republic, 31-34, 53, 58-

61, 64-65, 138-42, 186-87; sup-presses leftists, 33-34, 54-55, 65,165; relations with Nazis (to1934), 45, 46, 70-73, 77, 138^12,146, 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, 754fn., 840, 866-67;expansion and reorganization byHitler, 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,

Army, German continued

Hitler Era continued

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: Aus-tria, 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; Mediterraneanarea, 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 inAfrica, 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 mobili-zation, 1087; desertions, 1088,1100-1; rout and surrender,1105-7, 1112-13, 1120-22, 1125,1126, 1130, 1138, 1139

War Crimes and Violations ofGeneva Convention, 939, 945,947, 952, 957-59, 976, 1029,1090/m, 1095/n., 1100Army, German, units:

Army Groups:

A (eastern front), 915,928A (western front), 718, 726, 732,733,762-63B (in Alps), 999B (eastern front), 916B (western front, 1940), 733, 762B (western front, 1944-45), 1031,1038, 1040, 1074-75,1105C, 646

1197

Army, German, units continuedArmy Groups continuedCenter, 853, 856-57, 859, 862, 863,865, 903fn., 905, 947, 1014,1018-19, 1041, 1046, 1085Don, 926-28

G, 1138

H, 1101

North, 497, 625, 626, 853, 856,903fn.

South, 497, 830, 853, 856, 861,903fn.

Ukraine-North, 947Armored Groups:

Third Tank, 863Fourth Tank, 863, 865Armies:

First, 387, 1138

First Panzer, 860, 914, 916, 928Second, 387, 1043Second Panzer, 863, 864Third, 387, 497, 625, 660Fourth, 387, 497, 625, 860, 863,864, 865, 868-69

Fourth Panzer, 914-16, 919, 926-27

Fifth Panzer, 1093, 1105Sixth, 722, 724, 725, 726, 728, 730,731, 762, 763, 767, 782, 861fn.,909, 914, 915, 919, 922, 926-27,929, 930-31, 933, 1014Seventh, 1037, 1038, 1039Eighth, 387, 497Ninth, 762, 782, 868, 947, 1120Tenth, 387, 497, 626Tenth, 959Twelfth, 387, 826Fourteenth, 387, 497, 626Fifteenth, 1037, 1105Sixteenth, 762Seventeenth, 928, 1007Eighteenth, 721,731,738Nineteenth, 1138

Replacement (Home) Army, 904,906, 1015, 1019, 1030, 1034-35,1044-45, 1048-49, 1057, 1058,1063, 1064, 1073, 1080, 1087West, Army of the, 370Corps:

1st, 557Illrd, 413

XVth Armored, 724XVIth Armored, 725

Army, German, units continuedCorps continuedXIXth Armored, 626, 724XXXIXth, 722

XLIst Armored (Tank), 724, 859XLVIIth Armored, 1093LXXVth, 956

Afrika Korps, 911-13, 919-25,1078Divisions:

2nd Panzer, 7273rd Panzergrenadier, 9994th Panzer, 6266th Panzer, 10289th Panzer, 72210th Panzer, 102918th Grenadier, 108821st Panzer, 103923rd Infantry, 37528th Rifle, 1074163rd Infantry, 703258th Infantry, 863Volksgrenadier, 1048-49Brigades, Regiments, Battalions:12th Artillery Regt., 35517th Bamberg Cav. Regt., 1028150th Panzer Brigade, 1092Guard Battalion Grossdeutschland,1061

Military Districts (Wehrkreise):III (Berlin), 284, 375, 1035, 1061;Berlin Kommandantur, 1030,1061,1063

VII (Munich), 35, 38Waffen (Armed) S.S. units, seeunder 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/n., 756, 758,763/n., 774, 830, 843, 856-57,914-19, 933, 1029, 1087, 1130,1139; banned by VersaillesTreaty, 58fn., 62; re-created asTruppenamt, 62; re-established,281, 284, 285fn.; resignation ofBeck as Chief, 370-72, 559; ap-ptmt. of Haider, 370-72; Haiderout, Zeitzler named, 917-18;Guderian named, 1080-81; Krebsnamed, 1112; see also Beck, Lud-wig; Haider; Guderian; Krebs;Zeitzler

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

1198

Army High Command (Oberkom-mando 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), 208Arnhem, 1089Arras, 30Artists’ Club, 1012

Aryan superiority, 39, 81-82, 86-89,103-4, 107, 145, 237, 245, 250,251

Asch, 388, 402

Ashton-Gwatkin, Frank, 416-18Asia, 305, 805. 872, 873, 885, 892. 901,1007

Asquith, Herbert, 385Assmann, Adm. Kurt, 1052fn.Associated Press, 477/n., 784/n., 956Astakhov, Georgi, 481, 493, 500-1, 505,506, 513Astor, Lady, 376Athenia, S. S., 622, 636-38Athens, 826

Atlantic, Battle of the, 877/n., 879-83,894/n., 895, 898, 901, 912, 913,1007, 1008, 1099Atlantic Charter, 904atom bomb, 1099atomic energy, 252

Attolico, Bernardo, 377, 408, 409, 415,482, 508, 511/n., 551, 552, 554,556, 565, 566, 587-88, 603, 605-8, 643, 687, 751/n.

Aufhau Ost (“Build-up East”), 799August Wilhelm, Prince, 907Auschwitz, 272, 664, 949/n„ 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; Dollfussmurder, Nazi agitation, 223, 279-

80, 295-96, 322-23, 328, 340-41; German invasion plans, 289,304-9, 331, 335-37; Hitler ulti-matums to, 327-31, 339-42, 344;plebiscite on Anschluss, 334-39,

Austria continued

347, 349-50; Nazi rule estab-lished, 348, 350-51; see also Italy,and Anschluss; Miklas; Schusch-nigg; Seyss-InquartAustrian Legion, 280, 327Austrian National Bank, 351“Autumn Journey” (Herbstreise), 768Aviation, Ministry of, 282Avranches, 1076, 1085Axmann, Artur, 1137Azores, 817, 879, 901Azov, Sea of, 928, 1007

Babarin, E., 500-1Bach-Zelewski, 962fn.

Baden-Powell, Lord, 784Bad Harzburg, 154Bad Nauheim, 215, 1108Badoglio, Marshal Pietro, 998, 999,1002/n., 1003, 1006Bagdad, 828, 829

Bahama Is., 786, 787, 788, 789, 790,792

Baku, 798, 809, 942Baldwin, Stanley, 302Balkan States, 209, 747, 795, 804, 805,808, 815, 816, 817, 819, 822-30,839, 844, 928, 1006, 1090, 1096Ballerstedt, Herr, 43Ballestrem, Countess, 1025Baltic Sea, 549, 674, 695, 710, 808, 833,839, 847, 853, 909, 1105, 1116Baltic States, 484, 494, 495, 501, 502,514, 515, 521, 534, 541, 542,630-31, 632, 657, 665-66, 668,683, 711/n„ 747, 793-94, 797,798, 800, 801, 811, 822fn., 832,853, 939, 942, 1061Bamberg, 127-28Banat, 824fn.

Bank of France, 943Bank of Norway, 703Baranov, 1097

“Barbarossa,” 797, 810-13, 818, 822-24, 828-30, 838, 845, 873, 881;see also Army, German, invasionplans and campaigns, Russia;Soviet Union, Hitler's aims to-ward

Bardia, 827Barmen, 238

“barons’ cabinet,” 164-65

Barth, Karl, 251

Baruch, Bernard, 784fn., 897fn.

Basel, 563Bastogne, 1093-95Batum, 809

Bavaria, 28, 33-36, 38, 42-44, 48, 51,63-67, 280, 1105, 1141; Hitlerdifficulties with govt., 118, 119,130-31, 160, 164 (see also BeerHall Putsch); local govt, abol-ished, 200; Nazi rule in, 201, 219,1023; see also MunichBavaria, Kingdom of, 95“Bavarian Jce,” 316Bavarian People’s Party, 118, 195, 201Bavarian “People’s State,” 33Bayerlein, Gen. Fritz, 912fn., 913fn.,920

Bayreuth, 101-2, 105, 109, 279, 297,1061

BBC, 247, 558, 619, 755, 1001, 1037,1122

“Beast of Belsen,” see Kramer, JosefBechstein, Carl, 145Bechstein, Helene, 46Beck, Col. Jozef, 377, 421, 455-57, 459-61,463-65, 466fn., 467, 469, 475,476, 536-37, 543/n., 574-75, 580,586-87, 605fn.

Beck, Gen. Ludwig, 142, 281, 285fn.,313, 335, 355, 373, 918; opposesHitler’s military plans, 293, 309,316-17, 365-71, 488; resigns asGen. Staff Chief, 370-71, 374,424-25; in anti-Hitler conspiracy,374, 375, 380/n., 382, 422-26,517, 559, 649-50, 670, 846/n.,848/n., 904, 907, 908, 1014-18,1030, 1032-33, 1035, 1036,

1042-43; named head of FirstArmy, 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, 67-80,112fn., 118, 139, 146, 221, 223,280, 312, 701; anniversary cele-brations, 77, 121, 653, 882, 922,925, 1010

1199

Beethoven, Ludwig von, 17, 97, 242, 326,933, 970

Beigbeder y Atienza, Col. Juan, 786Belgian Army, 718, 724, 727-31Belgian government in exile, 729Belgium, 58, 294, 302, 307, 470, 516,531, 533, 561, 590, 616, 633, 645,841, 1074; German plans for in-vasion of, 486, 487, 519/n., 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/n.

Belsec, 272, 967, 968

Belsen, 981

Benes, Eduard, 346, 358-60, 363-65,381/n., 383, 390, 391, 393, 397,402, 414/n., 420, 421, 441, 443-45,448,456,464,784Benghazi, 819, 921, 922Berchtesgaden (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/n., 325,326fn., 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 militarymeetings, 369-70, 378, 496, 515-18, 528, 559, 660, 752, 764, 797-98, 819, 845, 880, 1041; plot toeliminate Hitler at, 1033, 1045,1046/n.; Wachenfeld (villa), 85,131, 133.

Berchtold, Joseph, 121Berg, Paul, 709fn.

Bergen, 681, 695, 696, 701, 707, 721Berger, Gottlob, 1114-15Berggrav, Bishop Eivind, 709/n.

1200

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Berghof, see under BerchtesgadenBerlin: 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 rumorriot, 643fn.; people’s apathy towar, 396-97, 399, 413, 593, 595,597, 599, 615-16, 670; revolu-tionary agitation (1918), 52,54-55; S. A. violence in, 147, 166Berlin, University of, 98, 99, 110, 124,241, 250, 251, 783Berliner Arbeiterzeitung, 123Berliner Boersenzeitung, 143, 698fn.Berliner Tageblatt, 124, 245Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, 242Berlin State Opera, 242, 284, 346Bernadotte, Count Folke, 1114, 111 6—17, 1122

Berne, 648-49, 1018Bernstorff, Count Albrecht von, 374,1025, 1073

Bessarabia, 541, 544, 794, 795, 800, 806Best, Capt. S. Payne, 653-55, 692Best, Dr. Werner, 271Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald von, 713Bialystok, 853Bible, banning of, 240Biddle, A. J. Drexel, 688Bieberback, Ludwig, 251Birmingham, England, 453-54, 783Bismarck, 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, 668Bismarck Youth, 154Black Front, 148“Black Reichswehr,” 65, 150Black Sea, 549, 666, 805, 811, 823, 846,847, 853, 859, 909“Black Wednesday,” 404-8, 410Blackshirts, see S. S.

Blaha, Dr. Frank, 984Blaskowitz, Gen. Johannes, 1101Blomberg, Erna Gruhn, 311-14Blomberg, Gen. Werner von, 151, 183,184, 207-8, 210, 211, 214, 215,

Blomberg, Gen. Werner von continued219, 220, 225, 235, 285fn., 290-93, 297, 303-5, 308, 310-20, 323,332, 357, 374, 488

Blood Purge, 215-19, 268, 269, 271,280," 392fn., 1056-57; see alsoRoehm, Ernst

“Bloody Week” in Berlin, 55Bluecher (Ger. heavy cruiser), 702-3Blum, Leon, 344, 352, 1074Blumentritt, Gen. Guenther, 488, 734,761, 852/;;., 855, 859, 860, 863,864, 868, 1038, 1041/n., 1075,1076, 1082, 1090

Bock, Field Marshal Fedor von, 625,626, 733, 755/n., 762, 853, 856,859, 862-65, 869, 903fn., 905,914

Bodelschwing, Pastor Friedrich von,237

Bodenschatz, Gen. Karl, 999, 1054/n.Boehm, Adm. Hermann, 529fn.Boehm-Tettelbach, Lt. Col. Hans, 381Boer War, 957

Boeselager, Col. Frh. von, 1019, 1072Boetticher, Gen. Friedrich von, 684,749/n.

Bogorodsk, 862Boguchar, 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, 358Bologna, 1107Bonham Carter, Lady, 784Bonhoeffer, Pastor Dietrich, 374, 1017,1024, 1072, 1073Bonhoeffer, Klaus, 1073Bonn government, 950fn., 965fn.Bonnet, Georges, 389, 390, 408, 413-14,437, 460, 536-37, 543fn., 604-5, 607-10, 612, 616-17, 642-43Bono, Marshal Emilio de, 1005fn.Bonte, Rear Adm. Fritz, 701, 707book burning, 241Booth by, Robert, 47 8fn.

Bordeaux, 738, 744-45Borisov, 905

Bormann, Martin, 148-49, 240, 275,406/m, 838, 938, 939, 941, 1062,1104, 1112, 1116, 1117-18,

Bormann, Martin continued

1120-21. 1123, 1126, 1127, 1128,1129, 1130, 1132, 1133, 1134,1 135, 1136, 1137Borovsk, 869Bosch, Dr. Karl, 190Bose, Herbert von, 218, 222Bosporus, Strait of, 804, 807-10Bottai, Giuseppe, 996Boulogne, 728, 731, 761, 770, 772Boy Scouts, 784

Bradley, Gen. Omar N., 1076, 1106//!.Brandenburg, 93, 166, 1035, 1061, 1109,1110

Brandenburg Gate, 5Brandt, Col. Heinz, 1020-21, 1051, 1052,1054

Brandt, Lt. Gen. Rudolf, 980Bratislava, 440-41

Brauchitsch, Charlotte von, 319, 371/n.Brauchitsch, Field Marshal Walthervon, 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 in-vasion plans, 462-63, 484, 496-97, 515/n., 516, 517, 531, 557,591, 625, 627; and western of-fensive, 633, 640, 643-44, 647,715, 718; and S.S. brutality inPoland, 660; and Weseruebung,681; Dunkirk and stop order,726-27, 731-34, 736; at Com-piegne, 742, 743; made fieldmarshal, 755/zx.; and Britain in-vasion plans, 763, 764, 767, 768,782; Russian campaign, 797, 810,822, 831, 840, 846, 856-57, 858,859; illness and “resignation,”648, 861//!., 864, 866, 903/n.Brauer, Dr. Curt, 678//!., 698, 702-6,709

Braun, Eva, 483/zi., 1110-11, 1120,1122-23, 1127, 1128, 1133, 1134Braun, Gretl, 1121Braunau am Inn, 6, 9Briiutigam, Dr. Otto, 940-41Breda, 722

Bredow, Countess Hanna von, 1025

1201

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/w.,948

Brighton, 762, 767

Bristol, 763, 783

Britain, 95, 97, 256, 306, 450, 957, 965;collective action with Franceand Italy, 280, 284-85, 288, 289,296, 297, 307; appeasement pol-icy: on German rearmament,282-85, 287-89 (see also Anglo-German naval agreement); onRhineland 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 Conferenceand Pact); joint policy withFrance, 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; Hitlerconsiders and plans war against,298, 304, 307, 366, 368, 420, 467,484-87, 498, 501, 508//!., 516,520, 531, 566-67, 590, 600, 620-22; pact with Italy on Mediter-ranean, 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//!.; presses Czechs to appeaseHitler, 360, 376-77, 388-90, 399,402, 411, 417-18, 420-21; pro-tests Nazi moves against Czechs,364-65, 452-53; contacts withanti-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,

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

1202

Britain continued

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 anddeclaration of war, 605-20; atwar, 633, 666, 689, 698, 782, 807,827, 854fn„ 904, 995, 1036, 1087,1099, 1105; ship losses, 635-38,646, 669, 711, 737, 775, 901/n.(see also Atlantic, Battle of the;British Navy); German peaceoffers to, 639-42, 734-35, 746-57, 785, 790, 835-38, 1012,1138-39; German attitude andstrategy toward in war, 658, 669,760, 763, 768, 770-71, 798, 804,805, 809, 846, 849-50, 853,871-74, 915, 954, 1124; jointstrategy with France, 635, 643,744-45; expeditionary force toFinland, 675, 682fn., involve-ment in Norway, 676-77, 679,682fn., 694-96; invasion of, 752,753, 756, 758-85, 797, 813, 816,820, 873, 879, 1039; air opera-tions 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 waragainst, 872, 873, 877fn., 886-88,892, 894, 895, 1007; alliance withRussia, 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/n.; in Bat-tle of Britain, 759-61, 763, 764,766, 767, 770, 772-81; bombingof Germany, 778, 779, 807-8,934, 1008-9, 1010, 1068, 1100,1110,1115, 1117

British Army, 424, 510, 533, 618, 672,682fn., 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,763fn., 764, 767; in N. Africa,818/n., 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, 770British White Paper, 283Brittany, 1076, 1085

Broadcasting House (Rundfunkhaus),564,595,755, 1064

Brockdorff, Countess Erika von, 1043/n.Brockdorff-Ahlefeld, Gen. Count Erichvon, 375,413

Brockdorff-Rantzau, Count Ulrich von,494

Brown House, Munich, 121Brownshirts, see S.A.

Bruckman, Hugo, 145Brueckner, Lt. Wilhelm, 66, 279Bruening, Heinrich, 56fn., 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, 730fn.

Buch, Maj. Walther, 122, 221, 430-31Buchenwald, 272, 352-53, 948, 979,983-84

Buchrucker, Major, 65Bucovina, 794, 795, 800

1203

Budapest, 1090//!., 1096Budenny, Marshal Semen, 854, 857Buehler, Dr. Josef, 966Buelow-Schwante, Ambassador von,652,713-14Buerckel, Josef, 441

Buergerbraukeller, see Beer Hall PutschBug river, 626, 630, 746Buhle, General, 1049Bulgaria, 800, 801/zi., 804, 805, 806,807, 808, 809, 810, 817, 820,823,826,839, 847, 1085Bulge, Battle of the, 222//!., 954; see alsoArdennes ForestBullitt, William C„ 295, 688Bullock, Alan, 200,410//!., 1050//!.

Bund Deutscher Maedel, 120,254Bund Oberland, 70,72,73Burckhardt, Dr. Carl, 424//!., 499Burgdorf, Gen. Wilhelm, 1077-78, 1123,1126, 1129, 1133, 1137Burnett, Air Marshal Sir Charles, 503//!.,504fn.

Busch, Gen. Ernst, 762Bussche, Capt. Axel von dem, 1027Busse, General, 1109Butcher, Capt. Harry C., 1001 fn.,

1004/n.

Buttlar-Brandenfels, Col. Frh. Treuschvon, 922

Cadogan, Sir Alexander, 572, 583, 601,611-12Caen, 1037

Calais, 728,731,761, 770, 1038Canada, 684//1., 754,913Canadian Army, 1086, 1088, 1090, 1102,1105

Canaris, Adm. Wilhelm, 331, 374,380//!., 405, 462, 467, 517, 518,556, 558, 560, 596, 654, 659-61,685fn., 1019, 1024, 1026, 1034,1036,1073

Canary Is., 813,817, 879“Canned Goods,” 520, 595Canterbury, Archbishop of, 344Cape Verde Is., 817,901Cap Gris-Nez, 761

Caprivi de Caprara de Montecuccoli,Gen. Count Georg von, 175

Carinthia, 350Carlyle, Thomas, 1108-10Carl, Prince, of Denmark, see HaakonVII, King of NorwayCarls, Adm. Rolf, 673Carol II, King of Rumania, 800fn.Carpathian Mts., 1033Carpatho-Ukraine, Republic of, 449Carr, Edward Hallett, 481/n.

Casablanca Conference, 1033Case Otto, 304, 335, 336, 342fn.; seealso “Otto”

Case Richard, 304

Cases Green, White, Yellow, see Green;White; etc.

Caspian Sea, 909, 914Catholic Action, 218,223,235Catholic Trade Unions, 190,202fn.Catholic Youth League, 235, 253Caucasia (the Caucasus), 832, 857, 859,860, 865, 870, 909-12, 914-18,928,929

Caulaincourt, Marquis Armand de, 860Cavour (It. battleship), 818/n.

Center Party, 55-56, 61, 137, 138, 157,164, 166, 170, 173, 18L 186,189, 190, 195, 196, 199, 201, 234Central Security Office, see R.S.H.A.Chagall, Marc, 244Chalons-sur-Mame, 726Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 103-9Chamberlain, 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 onCzechosl., 287, 354, 360, 364,375-77, 381, 383-99, 401-27,429, 435, 442-43, 448, 451, 453-54, 469, 531, 740, 814; policytoward U.S.S.R., 353, 476, 478-80, 489-90, 492, 495-96, 502-4,543; opposes Hitler on Poland,454, 460, 465, 466, 467, 517,537, 545—47, 548//!., 549, 556-58, 562, 569, 572-73, 575, 579-80; 583, 836; warns Hitler, de-clares war, 608, 610-12, 615,619; says Hitler “missed the bus,”695; Churchill’s tribute to, 619Chamberlain, Field Marshal Sir NevilleBowles, 104

1204

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Charles XII, King of Sweden, 812, 829Charleville, 732Chautemps, Camille, 344Chelmno, 967

Cherbourg, 762,770,773, 1037, 1089Chicago Daily News, liAfn.

Chicago Tribune, 894fn.

Choltitz, Gen. Dietrich von, 1085/n.Christian X, King of Denmark, 695, 696,698-700,lOAfn.

Christian, Gen. Eckard, 1115Christianity, 99, 102-3, 234,239,240Christian Socialists, 22, 24, 350Christiansand, 677,702Chuikov, Gen. Vasili I., 1135, 1137Church and State, 234-40Church Federation, 237Church of England, 784Church of Jesus Christ, 238Church of the Old Prussian Union, 235Churchill, Winston S., 294, 345fn.,406fn., 424, 493fn., 526, 543,619, 634, 635, 636/n„ 638, 642,672, 731, 736/n., 737, 751 fn.,755, 786,787, 790, 804/n., 807fn.,809fn., 815fn., 835-38, 847/rc.,874, 900, 901/n., 904, 1033/n.,1105; contact with anti-Nazis,380, 558, 1017, 1026, 1042; criti-cizes Munich Pact, appeasement,404, 420, 423, 426; for co-opera-tion with Russia, 404, 479, 489,795; strategy in Norway, 674,695-96, 702, 707, 710-11; suc-ceeds Chamberlain, 716; andFrench, Belgian surrender, 720,724, 726, 729, 744; determinationto fight on, 737-38, 746, 747,749, 750-51; Hitler’s gibes at,754, 779, 828, 1011, 1012; de-fense of Britain, 763/n., 768, 769,777, 781, 782, 784, 785; appealsfor U.S. aid, 828, 829; warnsStalin of Nazi attack, 843-44Chvalkovsky, FrantiSek, 437, 438, 444-47, 449fn.

Ciano, Edda, 1004-5Ciano, Count Galeazzo, 436, 469-70,562, 755,780, 800, 803/rc., 818/n„845, 851, 854fn., 889, 890, 893,912, 921, 923; meetings with Hit-ler, 298, 509-13, 640, 690-91,735, 740-41, 751-52, 756, 774,

Ciano, Count Galeazzo continued

815, 816, 821, 823, 910-11, 923-24, 928-29; negotiation, pactswith Britain, 301, 450; mediationin Czech crisis, 408, 414, 415fn.,421; Pact of Steel negotiation,482-83; and Italy’s reluctance togo to war, 508-13, 551-54, 565-67, 688-91; anti-German senti-ment, 512, 551-54, 640, 665,910; mediation efforts in Polishcrisis, 588, 603, 604, 607, 608,616; French armistice terms,741; ousted as Foreign Minister,995; in anti-Mussolini revolt,996, 1004-5; executed, 1005Ciliax, Vice-Admiral, 914/n.Cincar-Markovic, Aleksander, 823Circle of Friends of the Economy(Freundeskreis der Wirtschaft),144-45

Circle of Friends of the ReichsfuehrerS.S., 144-45City of Flint, S.S., 646Civi 1 Service Act (1937), 249Civil Service Law (Apr. 7, 1933), 268Clark, Gen. Mark, 1001Clay, Gen. Lucius D., 1096fn.Clemenceau, Georges, 57-59, 82Cohen, Benjamin, 897/n.

Cologne, 127, 148, 178-80, 934, 1034Colson, General, 617Columbia Broadcasting System, 467fn.Combat League of Middle-Class Trades-people, 206

“Commando Order,” 955Commerz und Privat Bank, 144“Commissar Order,” 830-31, 834Committee of Independent Workmen, 36Committee of Seven (Austrian Nazis),323

Communists in Czechoslovakia, 359, 438Communists in Germany: in post-WorldWar I period, 33, 34, 40, 52, 54-55, 64, 65, 126, 129; in Reichstag,138, 144, 146, 170, 179; brawlswith 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,

Communists in Germany continued

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 Ausch-witz; Buchenwald; Dachau; Mau-thausen; Sachsenhausen; Treb-linka

Condor Legion, 297

Compiegne, 29, 741-42, 758, 759, 821,852, 924, 1139

Confessional Church, 236, 238,239Congressional Record, 748Conspiracy against Hitler, see anti-Hit-ler conspiracyConstance, Lake, 1079fn.

Conwell-Evans, Dr. Philip, 649Cooper, Alfred Duff, see Duff Cooper,Alfred

Copenhagen, 681, 695, 697-700Corbin, Charles, 608, 612Corsica, 740, 924Cossack (Br. destroyer), 679Coulondre, Robert, 437, 443-44, 446,451-52, 482, 540fn., 542, 543/m,549-50, 568, 584/m, 602, 605-7,613fn„616-18

Council of People’s representatives, 54

Courageous (Br. carrier), 646

Coventry, 781

Coward, Noel, 784

Cracow, 626, 663

Craig, Gordon A., 162fn.

Crete, 826, 828, 923Crimea, 857, 858, 865, 942, 1007Cripps, Sir Stafford, 795, 843—44, 848Croatia, 552, 824, 826fn.

“Cromwell,” 769Croydon, 776

Csaky, Count fstvan, 507-8Cuno, Wilhelm, 144Curzon line, 459fn.

Cvetkovic, Dragisha, 823Cyrenaica, 818/m, 819, 827,911/n.

Czech Broadcasting House, 383Czech Maginot Line, 382Czechoslovakia, 84, 282, 283, 295, 307,336, 345-46, 353, 354, 356, 382,399-400, 421-23, 437-54, 458,

1205

Czechoslovakia continued

472, 507, 544, 591, 632, 643; his-tory, 358-59; Hitler’s war plansagainst, 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; mobilizesagainst German threat, 363-64,393-94, 401; British, French in-tervention, 364, 368, 376, 380-98, 402-4, 408-11, 414-27, 546(see also Sudetenland); Germanoccupation 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/zi.

Czernin, Countess Vera (Frau vonSchuschnigg), 352

Czerny, Josef, 85

D’Abernon, Lord, 112fn.

Dachau, 212, 223, 239, 271, 272, 352,353, 655, 918/n., 968fn., 971,975/rc., 979, 981, 984-86, 988-90, 1092/m, 1095/n.

Dahlem, 238, 239, 1048Dahlerus, Birger, 516-17, 569-74, 576-77, 583-85, 589, 592, 600, 601,604,614,639-40, 686fn.

Daladier, fidouard, 360, 384, 389, 390,396, 410, 413-21, 423, 425, 443,535, 537, 550, 568, 609, 610/n.,611-12, 617, 643, 682fn., 740Dallin, Alexander, 944/n.

Dalmatia, 552Daniels, H. G., 288fn.

Danner, General von, 71Danube river, 823, 1033,1107Danzig, 41, 84, 169, 209, 212, 359,438/n., 455-65, 468, 471, 484,488, 497-99, 508fn., 509, 510,511/n., 546, 563, 568, 569, 572-73, 575, 577, 582, 583, 588, 589,600, 603,606-8, 639Dardanelles, 804, 807-10

1206

Darlan, Adm. Jean, 609, 740fn., 923,925fn.

Darmstaetter und Nationalbank, 136Darre, Walther, 148, 204, 257-58Davies, Joseph E., 478fn., 544/n.

Dawes Plan, 112, 136,943Dawson, Geoffrey, 288fn.

Decamp, General, 609fn.

Decline of the West, The (Spengler), 61Defense Law, Secret (May 21, 1935),259, 285fn.

De Gaulle, Gen. Charles, 744, 817Degesch of Dessau, 972Dekanozov, Vladimir, 794, 848-49Delp, Father Alfred, 1072/n.

De Luce, Daniel, 784/n.

Democratic Party (Staatspartei), 55-56,186,201

Denikin, Gen. Anton, 917fn.

Denmark, 58, 94, 470, 494/u., 561; Ger-man plans for invasion of, 678,681-83, 689; German conquestof, 694-700, 104fn., 710, 711/n.,712, 713, 716, 793; German oc-cupation, 519fn., 775, 957, 1107;surrender of Germans in, 1138DerAngriff, 148,245Der Deutsche Erzieher, 249Der Fuehrer (Karlsruhe newsp.), 564Derousseaux, General, 729Derna, 912fn.

Der Stuermer, 26, 50, 106

Der To tale Krieg (Ludendorff), 259

Desna river, 859

Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 245, 615-16

Deutsche Bank, 144Deutsche Kredit Gesellschaft, 144Deutsche Mathematik, 250Deutscher Kampfbund (German Fight-ing Union), 63, 66, 67,73Deutscher Wehrgeist, 139Deutsches Jungvolk, 120, 253, 255Deutsche Zeitung, 157Deutschland (Ger. cruiser), 214, 215,226

Deutschland (Ger. pocket battleship,later renamed Luetzow), 462,518,520,636, 646“Deutschland Erwache,” 44Deutschlandsender, 1064-65, 1069“Deutschland ueber Alles,” 85, 147, 199De Valera, Eamon, 474

Devonshire (Br. cruiser), 709Dickmann, Maj. Otto, 993fn.

Didier Works, 971Die Chemische Industrie, 252Dieckhoff, Hans, 400-1, 433fn., 897Diehn, August, 144Diels, Rudolf, 192-93Dietl, Brig. Gen. Eduard, 701, 707, 709,711,810

Dietrich, Otto, 143-44, 221, 224-25,245, 854

Dietrich, Sepp, 222fn., 855, 1005, 1090,1095fn.

Dill, Field Marshal Sir John, 1001/n.Dimitroff, Georgi, 193Dinant, 723, 724, 1093Dingfelder, Dr. Johannes, 40Dirksen, Herbert von, 319, 360, 364,376,454,490,503,569Dirschau bridge, 589, 600, 601Djibouti, 740-41

D.N.B., 280, 343, 51 \fn„ 562-63, 627Dnieper river, 798, 811, 853, 857, 1007Dobrudja, 801 fn.

“Doctors’ Trial,” 979fn., 908, 985, 987,988,990-91

Doeberitz, 1057, 1061, 1062, 1064/n.Doenitz, Adm. Karl, 637-38, 882; NavyC. in C., 1000, 1002//!., 1003,1007, 1008fn., 1011, 1056, 1098-1100; commands forces in north,1112, 1113, 1120-21; Hitler’s suc-cessor, 1126-30, 1132, 1134-38,1141, 1143

Dohnanyi, Hans von, 693, 904, 1019,1024, 1026

Dollfuss, Engelbert, 223, 229, 279-80,295, 296, 324, 325fn., 331, 334,341

Dollman, Gen. Friedrich, 1037Dombas, 708

Don river, 860, 915-17, 919, 922, 925,926, 928,929, 1006Dondorf, 387

Donets Basin, 811, 857, 909, 916, 1007Dordrecht, 721, 722Dortmund, 1008Dostler, Gen. Anton, 956Doumenc, General, 502, 533-38Dover Straits, 757, 764Drang nach Osten, 83-84; see alsoEurope, German expansion aimsin

Drax, Adm. Sir Reginald, 503, 534-36,541

Dreesen, Herr, 220, 392fn.

Dreesen, Hotel, Godesberg, 391, 392,394-96Dresden, 1105Dresdener Bank, 144Dressler-Andress, Horst, 247Drexler, Anton, 36-37, 39—41,45, 119Dubno, 961Duesseldorf, 653, 1099Duesterberg, Theodor, 157-59Duff Cooper, Alfred, 396,420,779Duilio (It. battleship), 818fn.

Dulles, Allen, 1018, 1026-27, 1033,1071/n.

Dunkirk, 728-39, 747, 770, 773, 777,826, 1037

Durcansky, Ferdinand, 437-38, 440, 441Dyle river, 716, 717,724,725

Eagle’s Nest, 436Eastbourne, 764, 766,767East Prussia, 162, 179-80, 183, 212, 215,235, 1072; role in Hitler’s designson Poland, 455, 458, 460, 463,468, 497, 498, 557, 625; Russiandrive on, 1041, 1046, 1085, 1090,1096-97,1103Ebbinghaus, Julius, 251-52Ebbutt, Norman, 288,784Eben Emael, Fort, 725, 814Ebert, Friedrich, 34, 52, 53-54, 55, 56,57,58,59,64,65,72Echternach, 1092

Eckart, Dietrich, 38-39, 46, 49, 51, 97,110, 118

Eckener, Dr. Hugo, 294/n.

Economics, Ministry of, 259-62, 310,320, 497,759

Eden, Anthony, 214, 283, 288, 293-94,344,495,779,900, 1018Education, ministry of, 249Edward VIII, King of England, seeWindsor, Duke ofEger, 386, 388, 402

Egypt, 757, 813, 817, 818, 821, 827, 828,850,911-13,915,919Egypt, Khedive of, 751 fn.

1207

Eher Verlag, 80, 246Ehrhardt, Captain, 43, 66Ehrhardt Brigade, 33, 34, 43Eichmann, Karl Adolf, 351,963, 978Eicke, Theodor, 272Eidsvold, 705

Eidsvold (Norw. naval vessel), 701Einsatzgruppen, 958-63, 964, 966, 974,1061, 1139

Einsatzkommando, 972Einsatzstab Rosenberg, 945Einstein, Albert, 241, 250-52,1025Eisenhower, Dwight D., 923-25, 995,999, 1001, 1002/n., 1036, 1075,1076, 1088-90, 1092/n., 1099,1105-6, 1116, 1122, 1138-39Eisner, Kurt, 33El Agheila, 911/n.

El Alamein, 911, 913, 914,919, 920, 922,933,934

Elbe river, 1105-7, 1112Elberus, Mount, 914El Gazala, 911/n.

Elizabeth, Queen (Consort), 787Ellis, Havelock, 241Ellis, Maj.L.F.,732/n.

Elser, Georg, 654-56Eltz-Rubenach, Baron von, 164Elverum, 703, 705Emden (Ger. light cruiser), 702Enabling Act (Mar. 23, 1933), 196,198-200, 229, 274Enderis, Guido, 897fn.

Engelbrecht, Gen. Erwin, 703England, 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, 1037Epp, Gen. Franz Ritter von, 46, 120, 200Ernst, Karl, 192, 220-23Erxleben, Father, 1025Erzberger, Matthias, 34,43, 51, 58Espirito Santo Silva, Ricardo do, 789-90Essen, 220, 949Esser, Hermann, 49-51, 118Estonia, 494/n., 495, 541, 542, 544, 630-31,794,833,962

Ethiopia (Abyssinia), 289, 290, 296,297, 301,469, 566,741Europa, S.S., 768

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

1208

Europe, German expansion aims in, 82-84, 256, 280, 286, 305, 308, 405,427, 429-30, 435/n„ 437, 484,488, 795, 796, 799, 833,

836, 839, 1131; German ruleover, 5, 95, 426-27, 746, 757,795-96, 820, 937-95, 1008, 1082,1141, 1142; Nazi-Soviet divisionof 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 (Vernichtungsla-ger), 664-65, 967-74

Falaise, 1076

Falkenhausen, Gen. Alexander von,906, 1031, 1047, 1074Falkenhorst, Gen. Nikolaus von, 680-82, 696, 706fn., 709fn.Falkenstein, Maj. Frh. von, 879Fall Gelb, see Yellow, CaseFall Gruen, see Green, CaseFall Rot, see Red, CaseFall Weiss, see White, CaseFallersleben, 267Fatherland Front, 37F.B.I., 843

Feder, Gottfried, 35, 36, 39-41, 84, 127,143, 144, 203-4, 261,759Fegelein, Gen. Hermann, 1114, 1121,1122

Feiling, Keith, 302fn., 460fn.

“Felix,” 817, 819

Fellgiebel, Gen. Erich, 1030, 1034, 1049,1052-55,1057,1058,1072Feltre, 996Femegerichte, 65fn.

Fermi, Enrico, 252Feuchter, George W., 773/n.Feuchtwanger, Lion, 241Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 97-99Final Solution” of Jewish problem,936-68, 978, 991Finke, Doctor, 987Finkenkrug, 719, 720Finland, 281, 495, 502, 541, 542, 544,561, 630, 680, 687, 710, 711/m,

Finland continued

798, 806, 810, 942, 1085; Ger-man arms, troops in, 801-6, 809-11, 845, 856—57, 859; Soviet at-tack on, 665-66, 668, 675, 676,682,683

Firebrace, Colonel, 502fn.

Fischer, Dr. Fritz, 979/n.

Fischer, Louis, 784/n.

Fischboeck, Doctor, 328

Fischlham, 10

Fish, Mildred, 1043/n.

Flandin, Pierre Etienne, 293Fleming, Peter, 785Flensburg, 656,1139,1141Florence, Italy, 815, 816Flossenburg, 1073Foch, Marshal Ferdinand, 741—43Fodor,M.W., 784/n.

Foerster, Wolfgang, 317“folkish state,” 88-90Folklore Museum, Berlin, 1044Forbes, Sir George Ogilvie, 574, 584-85,592, 601,614,639, 648Ford, Henry, 149, 267Ford Motor Co., 907Foreign Ministers’ Conference, Moscow,1033

Foreign Office, German, 302, 310, 335,365, 386, 387, 433, 438^10, 451-52, 454, 469, 488-89, 498/n„507, 546, 562, 571/n., 595fn.,599, 683fn., 685fn., 719, 748-50,874-75, 880, 893, 896, 897fn.;Hitler tightens control of, namesRibbentrop head of, 318-19, 324;subsidizes Sudeten Nazis, 359;anti-Hitler plotters in, 380fn.,381, 405; prods Hungary onSlovakia, 429; negotiations withU.S.S.R., 476-77, 479-80, 491,492, 500, 525, 528, 543fn.,631 fn., 667, 668, 804, 807, 840;and Baltic States, 495; see alsoRibbentrop; WeizsaeckerFornebu, 703, 704Forster, Albert, 499Forster, E. M., 784

Four-Year Plan, 262, 265, 275, 300, 310France, 84, 224, 286, 287, 294, 299-302,373, 400, 461, 469, 470, 529, 530,562, 675, 714; relations with pre-

France continued

Hitler Germany, 58, 61, 63, 82,95, 209, 211, 212; opposes Ger-man rearmament, 283, 284, 288-89; pact with Russia, 285, 290-91; and Rhineland remilitariza-tion, 291-95, 327; policy onSpanish war, 297-99, 301; oppo-sition to Anschluss, 280, 296, 324,327, 330, 334fn., 344, 346, 353;prewar relations with Italy, 290,297-99, 301, 426, 603, 604-7,687, 690-91; correlation of policywith British, 283, 288-89, 384,386-87, 389, 398, 402, 403, 436,461, 469, 608-12, 675; Germanwar plans against, 303, 306, 307,309, 414, 484-88, 498, 500, 508,531, 566-68, 590, 591-92; ap-peasement 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 againstGermany, 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-secur-ity bid, 477, 479, 480, 482, 489-90, 494-96, 502-6, 513, 521, 533—38, 541-43; declaration of war onGermany, 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 occu-pation, 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 invasionand second Battle of, 1036-42,1043, 1047, 1076, 1085, 1086,1099, 1139; see also French AirForce; French Army; FrenchNavy

1209

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

Frangois-Poncet, Andre, 5, 164, 171,175, 198, 224, 290, 291, 292,310/n., 318, 408-9, 416, 425-26,435,604

Franco-Italian armistice (1940), 741,743-44,746

Franco-Polish Military Convention(May 19, 1939), 634Franco-Prussian War, 736Frank, Hans, 122, 140, 148, 268-69,276, 661-63, 938, 944, 947, 975,1143

Frank, Karl Hermann, 383,448-49Frankfurt, 195, 1089, 1102Frankfurter, Felix, 897fn.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 32fn., 218, 245,256

Franz Josef, Emperor, 24

Frascati, Italy, 1001

Frauenfeld, Alfred, 279

Frederick the Great, 90, 169, 197, 245,

530, 532, 906, 1086, 1108-9Frederick III, King in Prussia, 93Free French, 744

Freidin, Seymour, 852fn., 912fn.Freikorps (“free corps”), 33, 34, 38, 42,43,53,55,66, 150

Freisler, Roland, 269, 1023, 1025/n.,1070-71, 1076

French Air Force, 609, 737-39French Army, 425-27, 533, 535-36, 542,554, 568, 609, 617, 1086; mobili-zation of, 610, 618, 634; Battle ofFrance, 633, 635, 672, 718, 720,722-24, 726-28, 730, 731, 736-38; in Norway, 708; repulses Ital-ians, 740

French Army High Command, 728,740/n., 785

French Army (Free French), 983, 1085,1101, 1139

French Army (North African), 923French colonies, 768French Foreign Legion, 708French Navy, 609, 740, 744—45, 817,821,924-25

1210

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

French North Africa, 745, 814French Yellow Book, 452fn., 543fn.,584/n., 605fn., 607,617French West Africa, 879, 880Freud, Sigmund, 241,784Frick, Wilhelm, 68, 144, 146, 148, 167,170, 171, 173, 176, 181, 184, 20o[201,219, 238, 247, 271,275, 347,498, 1143

Fricke, Rear Adm. Kurt, 637, 759Friedeburg, Adm. Hans von, 1138, 1139Friedrich Karl, Prince of Hesse, 666fn.Friedrich Wilhelm, Crown Prince, 52,146, 153, 157, 159, 197, 907Frisch, Rittmeister von, 317, 354Fritsch, Gen. Frh. Werner von, 214-15,219, 305, 308-10, 313-20, 323,332, 354-56, 366, 373, 374, 414,435,488, 1026, 1035Fritzsche, Hans, 1143Fromm, Gen. Friedrich, 649, 1019, 1030,1035, 1044-45, 1047, 1053,

1058-61, 1064, 1066-68, 1073,1076,1082

Fuehrerhaus, Munich, 415, 418, 740Fuehrerprinzip (leadership principle),46, 84, 89Fttka, 920, 921

Fuller, Gen. J. F. C„ 633, 634, 818fn.Funk, Walther, 142-45, 167, 171, 261,311, 320, 497, 973-74, 1142-43Furtwaengler, Wilhelm, 242Fuschl, 509, 514, 521, 786, 790, 872

Gabeik, Josef, 991Galen, Count, 239Galicia, 534Galland, Adolf, 776

Gamelin, Gen. Maurice, 292-93, 425,534, 609, 610, 634, 635, 717, 724,726, 728

Garbo, Greta, 156Garda, Lake, 1005Gauguin, Paul, 244

Gaus, Friedrich, 491, 492, 540/n., 706fn.Gdynia, 572, 582, 589Gebhardt, Dr. Karl, 979/n.

Geheimer Kabinettsrat, see Secret Cabi-net CouncilGehlin, General, 1096

Gembloux gap, 724General Motors Corp., 686fn.

Geneva Convention, 946-47, 951, 955,1100

Geneva Disarmament Conference, 183,204, 210, 211Genoa, 740fn., 956

George VI, King of England, 344, 787-88,815/m, 835George, Stefan, 1028, 1029Gera, 217, 218, 219Gercke, Col. Rudolf, 498German Air Force, see LuftwaffeGerman Army, see Army, German;Army, German, units; ArmyGeneral Staff; Army High Com-mand

German Broadcasting Co., see ReichBroadcasting Corp.

German Christians’ Faith Movement,235,236,237,239

German colonies, 302, 305, 641,746, 836German Evangelical Church, 1017

German Fighting League for the Break-ing of Interest Slavery, 35German Fighting Union, see DeutscherKampfbundGermania, 218

German National People’s Party (Na-tionalists), 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, 556German Navy, see Navy, GermanGerman Officers’ League, 220German People’s Party (formerly Na-tional Liberals), 56, 186, 201German-Soviet Boundary and Friend-ship Treaty, 631, 632, 639German Workers’ Party, 35-41, 50Germany, defeat of, in World War I, 29-32,53

Germany, First Reich, 90-91Germany, history, 90-97Germany, 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 re-bellions against, 33-34, 54-55,60, 65-75 (see also Beer HallPutsch; Kapp putsch); repara-

Germany, Republic of continued

tions problem, 51, 58, 61, 64,112,117, 136, 137, 152, 154, 943;birth of, 52-56; Weimar Consti-tution, 55-57; 60, 61, 78, 126,137, 153, 229, 241, 268, 274; eco-nomic problems, 61-63, 112, 117,135-36, 152-53; Reichstag elec-tions, 137-38; 165, 171, 189, 195;1932 presidential elections, 153,155, 158-60; ends with Hitler’saccession, 183, 213; responsibilityfor death of, 185-87; churches’opposition to, 235-37, 268Germany, Second Reich (1871-1918),91,95,96,98, 109, 197,251Gerothwohl, Prof. M. A., 112/n.

Gersdorff, Colonel Frh. von, 1021, 1022,1027

Gessler, Otto, 64, 65fn., 66Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei, SecretState Police), 192-93, 222, 231,276, 294fn., 518-19, 520fn., 653,655, 656, 703, 782/n., 784, 785,923, 991, 1023; Himmler namedchief of, 215, 216; harassment ofchurches, 235, 237-39; establish-ment of, 270-71, 273; Fritschframeup, 317, 354, 355, 373; inAustria, 348fn., 351-53; and anti-Hitler conspirators, 380fn., 430,848/n., 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 ofRussian POWS, 953; Jewish Of-fice, 963, 978Gibbs, Sir Philip, 784Gibraltar, 757, 768, 813, 814, 817, 819,921-22

Gide, Andre, 241Gieseking, Walter, 242Giesler, Paul, 1023Gilbert, Felix, 1003/n., 1014/n.

Giraud, Gen. Henri, 718, 722,923Gisevius, Hans Bernd, 192-93, 316fn.,373-74, 405, 407-8, 411, 412,517, 558-60, 596, 650, 655fn.,1018,1033

Gissinger, Theodor, 12-13Givet,717

Glaesemer, Col. Wolfgang, 1065

1211

Glaise-Horstenau, Edmund von, 328,335,338,339

Glasgow (Br. cruiser), 708Glasl-Hoerer, Anna, 8Gleiwitz, 518-20, 595, 599, 601Gluecks, Richard, 664Gneisenau, Field Marshal Count AugustNeithardt von, 1028, 1081Gneisenau, Germany, 992Gneisenau (Ger. battle cruiser), 281,711,914

Gobineau, Count Joseph Arthur de, 103—

4, 106

Godesberg, 220, 391-96, 397, 404, 407,416,417,421,425,426,619Goebbels, Magda, 483fn., 1111, 1113,1123,1133,1136,1137Goebbels, Paul Joseph, 4, 5, 146, 155—73, 176-80, 182, 184, 189-93,614, 837, 866, 910/n„ 995-96,998-1005, 1008-9, 1010-11,

1012, 1061, 1087, 1100, 1102/n.,1143; biographical sketch, 123—29; supports radical Nazi faction,126-27, 143, 205, 215, 220; partypropaganda chief, 147, 148;

Reichstag fire, 191-93; Propa-ganda Minister, 196-98,202,204,218, 227, 233, 241-48, 275, 281,294/n., 319fn., 343, 347, 363,387, 396, 398, 443-44, 563-64,593-94, 638, 646, 653, 669fn.,671, 725, 739/n., 778, 780, 860,1002, 1033/n., 1105-6; role inRoehm purge, 220, 221; bookburning, control of arts and let-ters, 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/n., 848/n., 904, 907,908, 1013/n., 1014, 1016-17,1018, 1023, 1024, 1026, 1030-31,1032, 1035, 1036, 1042-43, 1044,1046-48, 1072

Goerdeler, Fritz, 1072/n.

Goering, Carin von Kantzow (neeBaroness Fock), 49, 146

1212

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Goering, Hermann, 4, 51, 118, 145, 146,168, 173, 176, 180-83, 188-90,194-95, 218, 232, 233, 270, 271,282, 297, 300, 303/n., 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; back-ground, 49; in Beer Hall Putsch,68-69, 73-75; drug addiction,146; in Reichstag, 162, 170-71,196, 472; heads Prussian policeand govt., 184, 191, 200,201, 204,216; and Reichstag fire, 192-94;“Hitler is the law,” 203, 268;military rank, 215, 318, 754/n.;opposes Roehm, brings aboutpurge, 215-17, 219-23, 225; anti-Jewish program, 236, 430-35;economic dictator of Reich, 260-61, 275, 310-11; Nazification ofcourts, 268—70; animosity towardRibbentrop, 298, 483, 1056; meet-ings with Mussolini, 301, 469-70,478-79; 909, 910; in on warpreparations, 305, 484, 497-98,515/rc., 516-17, 557; and Blom-berg-Fritsch affair, 312-17, 320-21, 354; role in Anschluss, 335,338—40, 342—44, 346, 347; rolein Czechosl. annexation, 365,383, 396, 404, 415, 437-38,439fn., 440, 444, 446-47; deal-ings with Russia, 476-79, 528,667; “Call me Meier,” 517/rc.;last-minute peace talks withBritish, 569-72, 574, 576-77,583-85, 588-89, 591-92, 614,640; named by Hitler as his suc-cessor, 599; and invasion ofPoland, 600, 601; Norway cam-paign, 673, 676, 682, 696, 710;target of conspirators, 670, 1021,1034, 1035, 1045, 1051, 1117;western offensive and Battle ofBritain, 719, 722, 731-33, 737,742, 759, 766fn., 770, 772, 774-78, 781, 783; invasion and oc-cupation of Russia, 799, 832-34,854/n., 926, 930-31, 941, 942;bombing of Belgrade, 824, 826;“New Order” atrocities, 941-42,945, 946, 951, 955, 964, 965, 985;

Goering, Hermann continued

successorship to Hitler, 1108; ac-cused of treason, ousted, arrestordered, 1118-19, 1122, 1126-28,1130, 1134; in Nuremberg dock,1142

Goerlitz, Walter, 933Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 97, 99,243

Golden Badge of Honor, 373Goltz, General Count Ruediger von der,680

Gorki, U.S.S.R., 870

Gort, Lord, 724, 730, 731, 735

Goudsmit, Prof. Samuel, 1099/n.

Goy, Jean, 281

Graf Spee (Ger. battleship), 518, 520,636, 646, 669-70, 678-80Graebe, Hermann, 961-62Graefe, Albrecht von, 123Graf, Ulrich, 49, 68, 73, 122Grandi, Dino, 996-97Gran Sasso d’ltalia, 1003Grassmann, Peter, 202Gravelines, 728, 731Gravesend, 763, 768Graz, 333

Graziani, Marshal Rodolfo, 817, 818/n819

Great Britain, see BritainGrebbe-Peel Line, 721-22Greece, 469, 808, 815, 816, 817, 818,820, 821, 823, 825, 826, 827^828, 829, 830, 839, 841, 842, 875,969, 975/n., 993, 1006Green, Case (Fall Gruen), 303, 356,357, 360-63, 365, 367, 378,392fn., 393, 399, 429, 714Greenwood, Arthur, 611Greer (U.S. destroyer), 882Greim, Gen. Robert Ritter von, 1118-19, 1120, 1122Greiner, Josef, 19fn., 27Grey, Sir Edward, 385Groener, Gen. Wilhelm, 53-55, 58-59,139, 142, 150-51, 155, 159, 160,161, 162, 163, 174Groscurth, Col. Hans, 650Grosz, George, 244Grozny, 909, 914, 916, 928Gruene Post, 246

Gruhn, Erna (Frau Blomberg), 311-14Grynszpan, Herschel, 430

1213

Grzesinski, Albert C., 60Guariglia. Ambassador, 608Gudbrandsdal, 706, 708Guderian, Gen. Heinz, 348, 625, 626,717, 724, 726, 728, 731, 855,856, 858, 859, 860, 861, 862, 863,864, 865, 903fn., 1080-82, 1091,1096-97, 1098, 1103Guernica, 297

Guertner, Franz, 75, 118, 164Gumbel, E. I., 251“Guns before Butter,” 231Gunther, John, 784/n.

Gustav V. King of Sweden, 400, 711 fn.,747, 750-51Gutkelch, Doctor, 948Guttenberg, Karl Ludwig Frh. von, 374Guzzoni, Gen. Alfredo, 821gypsies, medical experiments on, 979

Haakon VII, King of Norway, 696, 698,703-6, 708, 709, 729Haber, Fritz, 250Habicht, Theodor, 279, 280Hacha, Dr. Emil, 421, 440, 443-47,449fn., 450-51, 457, 578-79,587, 729

Haeften, Lt. Werner von, 1048-49,1053, 1067, 1068Hagelin, Viljam, 677Hagen, Lt. Dr. Hans, 1061-62, 1070-71Hague, The, 713, 721, 722, 865Hague Convention, 636, 830, 945-47,951

Hailsham, Lord, 211Haldane, J. B. S., 784Haider, Gen. Franz, 5\0fn., 549fn., 550-51, 556, 590, 754/n„ 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/n„ 381,382, 404-8, 411-13, 422, 426,517, 530, 558-59, 647-51, 658-59, 693-94, 906; Poland inva-sion, 484, 487, 497, 515-18,529fn., 532, 547, 563. 569, 579fn.,591, 595-96, 625-26, 660, 661,663-64; Norway and Denmark,

Haider, Gen. Franz continued

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 inva-sion, 796-99, 810, 812, 822, 830-31, 840, 846, 852, 855-60, 861/m,862-70, 877, 911, 914-15; oustedas General Staff Chief, 915-18; inconcentration camp, 1073-74,1115

Hale, Prof. Oron J., 135, 246fn.

Halifax, Lord, 302-3, 344-45, 435/m,450, 674; negotiations on Czech-osl., 360, 364, 381, 396, 410, 411,413, 451-53; contacts with anti-Hitler plotters, 381-82, 558, 692-93; support of Poland againstGermany, 465, 517, 537, 546,548/n., 570, 572-75, 577, 579-80, 583, 585fn., 586-89, 600-2;policy on U.S.S.R., 478/n., 495,504, 537; ultimatums and warwith Germany, 605fn., 607-10,612-14, 615fn., 617; rejects Hit-ler peace bid, 756Hallawell, Wing Commdr, 502fn.Hamar, 703, 704, 706, 708Hambro, Carl, 677

Hamburg, 65, 165, 275, 699, 752, 1008-9, 1033, 1105, 1107, 1137, 1141Hamburg-Amerika line, 144Hamilton, Duke of, 835, 836Hammerstein, Gen. Kurt von, 3, 4, 151,160, 182, 183, 207, 225, 374,380/n., 387, 648, 1035Hamsun, Knut, 709fn.

Hanfstaengl, Erna, 131Hanfstaengl, Ernst (Putzi), 46-47, 51,74, 191, 192, 784Hanisch, Reinhold, 19fn., 20Hanover, 126-27, 239Hansen, Col. Georg, 1036, 1072Hansestadt Danzig (Ger. troopship),699

Hapsburgs, the, 18, 23, 24, 27, 97, 301,304, 326, 332, 336, 345/n., 348,349, 359

Hardenberg, Count Hans von, 905Hamack, Arvid, 1043/n.

Harrer, Karl, 36, 40

1214

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Harris, Capt. Sam, 411-12, 559Harris, Lt. Commdr. Whitney R., 958Harstad, 707Harzburg Front, 154Hase, Gen. Paul von, 1030, 1035, 1061,1065, 1070-71

Hassell, Ulrich von, 297-98, 301, 319,320, 371, 739/n., 848/n., 897fn.;anti-Hitler conspiracy, 373, 423,517, 558, 559, 591-92, 649, 659,670, 692-94, 846fn., 848/n., 903-4, 906-8, 1016, 1023, 1030, 1036,1043; executed, 1072Haug, Jenny, 131Hauptmann, Gerhart, 243Hausberger, Fritz von, 684-85Haushofer, Albrecht, 1073Haushofer, Gen. (Prof.) Karl, 48, 837,1073

Havel lake, Berlin, 1129“Hay Action,” 947

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, 97, 98-99, 110,111

Heidegger, Martin, 251Heidelberg University, 124, 250Heiden, Erhard, 121

Heiden, Konrad, 7, 9, 10, 19, 27fn., 38-39, 45, 74fn., 78, 105-6, 123,128, 131, 132, 133, 223“Heiliger, Max,” 973-74Heilmann, Horst, 1043/n.

Heinemann, General, 122Heines, Lt. Edmund, 120, 221, 225Heinrici, General, 869/n., 1120Heiss, Captain, 66Held, Dr. Heinrich, 118Helhorn, Anke, 125-26Heligoland Bight, 768Helldorf, Count Wolf von, 161, 183,312-13, 413, 1034, 1059, 1063,1072

Hencke, Andor, 420, 631fn., 814, 816Hendaye, 814, 816

Henderson, Sir Nevile, 345, 364, 380-81, 385, 397, 398, 402/n., 403,408-11, 415, 416, 426, 451-53,511/n., 543/n., 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/n., 383, 384, 386, 387, 448-49

Herber, Lt. Col. Franz, 1066Hereditary Farm Law (Sept. 29, 1933),257-58, 264

Herfurth, Gen. Otto, 1066Hermann Goering Works, 261, 351Herrenklub, 178, 191Herriot, Edouard, 437Herrlingen, 1031, 1037, 1077Hersey, John, 975/n.

Herypierre, Henry, 982, 983Hess, Rudolf, 39, 49, 110, 148, 154, 178,208, 224/n., 257, 270, 275, 599,742, 944, 1073, 1108, 1142-43;background, 47-48; in Beer HallPutsch, 68, 70, 73, 75; helps Hit-ler with Mein Kampf, 79, 85;directs Nazi revolt in Austria,323, 347; flight to Scotland, 834-38

Heusinger, Gen. Adolf, 1048/n., 1051,1052, 1054/n.

Hewel, Walter, 1101Heyde, Lt. Col. Bodo von der, 1067Heydrich, Reinhard, 271, 518-20, 595,655fn., 782-83, 956, 1023, 1143;background, 273; and Fritschframeup, 315, 317, 354; persecu-tion of Jews, 351, 430-34, 661,662, 958, 964, 965, 978; assas-sinated, 991, 1019

Heywood, Major General, 503/n., 533Hiedler, Johann Georg, 7, 8High Command of the Armed Forces,see OKW

High Command of the Army, see ArmyHigh CommandHildesheim, 725Hilgard, Herr, 432-33Hilger, Gustav, 807, 809Himer, Gen. Kurt, 699-700Himmler, Heinrich, 101, 124, 144-45,178, 240, 252, 271, 275, 313,353, 378, 431, 435/n., 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 tohave killed Geli Raubal, 132; aidsin Roehm purge, 215, 216, 219,220, 222; extermination of Jews,

Himmler, Heinrich continued

236, 660-62, 664, 958, 960-61,962, 963, 965, 966-67, 973, 975,977, 978; Blomberg, Fritschframeups, 313, 315-17, 354, 355;Austrian, Czech occupation, 347,348, 351, 449; Polish border“incident,” 518-20; occupation-of-Britain program, 782-83; andRussian-occupation policy, 832,834, 937-38, 950fn., 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, 242Hindenburg, Maj. Oskar von, 4, 150-51,175, 181, 183, 227, 228, 229Hindenburg, Paul von Beneckendorfund von, 3-5, 53-55, 56fn., 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 of1918 and Versailles Treaty, 31,58-59; 1932 presidential elec-tions, 142, 155-60; meetings withHitler, 4, 132, 152, 153, 168-69,172-73; appointment of Hitleras Chancellor, 4, 145, 184, 187—90; senility, 4, 5, 149, 152; lastillness, 204, 206, 213-15; death,last will and testament, 226-30Hindenburg (dirigible), 294fn.

Hipper (Ger. hvy. cruiser), 701Hippke, Lt. Gen. Dr., 986Hirohito, Emperor of Japan, 892Hirt, Prof. August, 980-83History of Frederick the Great (Car-lyle), 1108-9Hitler, Adolf:

Personal Life: birth, family back-ground, 6-10; early life and edu-cation, 10-16; artist’s aspirations,

1215

Hitler, Adolf continued

Personal Life continued

11, 15, 16, 19; women in his life,15, 20, 30, 130-33, 483/n. (seealso Braun, Eva; Raubal, Geli);budding political ideas, 15, 21-32; youth in Vienna, 17-26;anti-Semitism, 25-27, 30-31, 35,40/n., 41; moves to Bavaria,joins Army, 27-28; war service,wounds, medals, 29-31; postwarArmy service, 34-35; citizenshipproblem, 130-31, 157; incometax difficulties, 133-35; hisreaction to Hess’s flight, 834-38;his health failing, 1102-3, 1108;marries Eva Braun, 1122-23; lastwill and testament, 1123-27;suicide and cremation, 1133-34

Party Leader: joins German Work-ers’ Party, 35-41; debut asorator, 35-36, 40; formulatesNazi program, 40-41; is jailedfor assault, 42; becomes partydictator, 44—46; his lieutenants,47-51, 121-22, 146—49; associa-tion with Ludendorff, 63-64;leads putsch, 65-75; is tried fortreason, 75-79; in prison, writesMein Kampf, 79-90, 113, 129;his ideological sources, 80-112;rebuilds party, 117-49; tightenscontrol of party, 119; defeatsStrasser faction, 126-29; courtsArmy support, 138-42, 159, 196—98, 206-8, 214-15; “heads willroll” speech, 141; wins big-business support, 142-46, 178—79, 189-90; meets with Hinden-burg, 152-53, 163-64, 168-69,172-73, 184; maneuvers towardchancellorship, 152-85; 1932

presidential elections, 155-59;purges Roehm, party radicals,204, 213-26

Fuehrer and Reich Chancellor—domestic policy: becomesChancellor, 3-6, 182-87; hasReichstag dissolved, 188-91;suppresses Communists, 190-96;nationalizes state govts., 194,200; opens new Reichstag atPotsdam, 196-98; gets Reichstag

1216

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Hitler, Adolf continued

Fuehrer and Reich Chancellor—domestic policy continuedto abdicate, 198-200; dissolvesopposition parties, 201; outlawstrade unions, 202-3; issues anti-Jewish laws, 203; his policiesendorsed by electorate, 211-12;wins Army backing for Presi-dency, 215, 220; succeeds Hin-denburg as President, 226-30;wins “unconditional obedience”of Army, 226-27; regimentschurches, 234-40; Nazifies cul-ture, 241-44; co-ordinates labor,263-67; reorganizes courts, 268-74; reshapes govt., 274-76; oustsBlomberg, Fritsch, Neurath,Schacht, 309-21; assumes abso-lute power in Reich, 867; con-spiracies to depose or kill him,372-75, 379-82, 404-8, 411-14,1014-36, 1042-82 (see also anti-Hitler conspiracy); presses perse-cution of Jews, 435, 439, 937-94,passim; beer hall bomb plot,652-56

Fuehrer and Reich Chancellor—foreign relations: signs pactwith Poland, 212-13; first meet-ing with Mussolini, 217; quitsLeague, Geneva Conference,210-12; directs Nazi agitation inAustria, 279-80, 323; aims peacepropaganda abroad, 280-81;abrogates Versailles Treaty, 281—85, 299; “peace” speeches, 209-10, 285-88, 290, 300, 471-76,641-42, 752-55, 761; expandsarmed forces, war industries,281-85; signs naval pact withBritain, 288-89; remilitarizesRhineland, denounces LocarnoPact, 290-95; signs pact withAustria, 296-97; aids Franco re-bellion, 297-98; forms Axis withMussolini, 298, 301; signs Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan, 299;receives Duce, get go-ahead onAustria, 301-2, 343; meets withLord Halifax, 302-3; annexesAustria, 322-54; meets withSchuschnigg at Berchtesgaden,

Hitler, Adolf continuedFuehrer and Reich Chancellor—foreign relations continued325-31; reassures Duce on Aus-tria, 336-37; makes entry intoAustria, 347-49; directs SudetenNazis, 358-59; urges Hungary,Poland against Czechs, 377, 387-88, 429; demands “justice forSudetens,” 383;meets with Cham-berlain at Berchtesgaden, 384-87; at Godesberg, 388-95; de-mands Sudetenland at once,397-98; at Munich Conference,414-20; wins Sudetenland, 421-24; dissatisfied with Munichaward, blames Chamberlain,427; annexes Memel, 428-29;signs pact with France, 436-37; “liberates” Slovakia, 439—43,449; takes over rest of Czech-oslovakia, 438-49; presses Po-land to cede Danzig, Corridor,455-57, 459-60, 462-65, 498-99;replies to Roosevelt peace appeal,471-75; signs Pact of Steel withDuce, 483; negotiates treaty withU.S.S.R., 490-95, 500-2, 505-7, 513-15, 520-28, 538-44;

meets with Ciano on war againstPoland, 510-12; replies to British,French peace appeals, 545-51,569-89, 592-93; is let down byDuce, 551-57, 564-68; thanksDuce for his help, 604, 620-21;receives British, French ultima-tums, 608, 613, 615-18; blamesBritish for war, 618-19; invitesRussia into Polish war, 621-22;negotiates boundary treaty withU.S.S.R., 630-32; offers peaceto Britain, France, 639-43; iscriticized by Duce, 665-66; histrading with Soviets, 665-69,794, 799; meets with SumnerWells, 683-88; his loyalty toMussolini, 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 Tri-partite Pact, 808-10; explainsinvasion of Russia to Duce, 849-

1217

Hitler, Adolf continued

Fuehrer and Reich Chancellor—foreign relations continued51; 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 ofarmed 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 defeatistgenerals, 378-79; plans occupa-tion of Danzig, 456; takes overMemel, 461-62; plans Danzigseizure, 463, 468; plans waragainst Poland, 463, 467-69,484-85, 488-89, 496-98, 517—20, 530-31, 589, 595-96; pre-pares for war in west, 484-89,516, 530-31, 589-90; holds upattack on Poland, 556; begins waron Poland, 597-99; directs warstrategy, 619-20; conquers Po-land, 632; limits naval operations,636; plans offensive in west, 633,643-47, 651-52, 656-59, 670,671, 717-19; Polish occupationpolicy, 660-65; plans for waron Russia, 669; approves, leadsNorway campaign, 673-74, 678-83, 694-97, 709-12; gets Duce’spromise to enter war, 690-92;invades Low Countries, 714-16,720-26, 729-31; invades, con-quers France, 726-29, 731-45;offers peace to Britain, 746-47,

750- 56; plans invasion of Britain,

751- 53, 756, 758-92; promotes12 to field marshal, 754/n.; plansinvasion of Russia, 796-800,810-12, 821-22, 830-34, 845-52; strategy in Mediterranean,N. Africa, 812-21; Balkan cam-paigns, 820, 822-26, 830; N.African campaigns, 827-29, 911-13, 919-25; his “Commissar

Hitler, Adolf continuedWarlord continued

Order,” 830-34; directs Russiancampaign, 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, 903fn„ 917-18; takesover C-in-C post, 866; col-laborates with Japan, 870-78,883-96, 900; policy toward U.S.,871-72, 875fn„ 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; re-fuses to visit bombed-out cities,1008; speculates on peace pos-sibilities, 1011-12; directs de-fense in west, 1036—41, 1085—96, 1098-1102, 1105-6; ordersenemy beachhead “annihilated,”1038; orders total mobilization,1087; directs Ardennes counter-offensive, 1089-96; relies on con-flict 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 Hit-ler

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/n.

Hitler Youth, 120, 249, 252-56, 1129,1130, 1137

Hitzfeld, General, 1064/n.

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, 224fn.

1218

Hoess, Rudolf Franz, 664, 963, 967-69,970, 972-73

Hofacker, Col. Caesar von, 1047, 1059,1072, 1075-77Hofer, Walther, 550fn.

Hoffmann, Heinrich, 49, 760fn., 1111Hoffmann, Johannes, 33, 34Hoffmann-Schonfom, Colonel, 1088Hohenlohe, Prince Max von, 750/n.Hohenlychen, 1114

Hohenzollerns, the, 52, 57, 82, 93, 96,97, 153, 197, 214, 215, 229, 236,349, 549, 907Holland, see NetherlandsHolstein, 94

Holzloehner, Doctor, 987Hoover, Herbert C., 136, 152Hoover, J. Edgar, 843Hopkins, Harry, 892Horak, Mayor, 992Hore-Belisha, Sir Leslie, 677Horst, Anna, 105Horst Wessel song, 5, 147, 199Horthy, Adm. Miklos, 377, 449, 1090/n.Hossbach, Col. Friedrich, 305, 308, 309,315-16

Hoth, Gen. Hermann, 724, 863, 927-28Houffalize, 1095Household Year for Girls, 254House of German Art, Munich, 244Hradschin Palace, Prague, 363, 383,420, 448

Huber, Kurt, 1022-23Huebner, General, 1101/n.

Huehnlein, Major, 71Huetler, Johann von Nepomuk, 8, 9Huemer, Eduard, 13Hugenberg, Alfred, 138, 154, 166, 173,180, 182, 184, 189, 196, 198, 201,204, 206, 212, 257

Hull, Cordell, 843, 873, 877fn., 884-85,886, 887, 888fn., 891, 894, 896Hungary, 358, 362, 507-8, 800, 808,824, 826, 845; encouraged byHitler to seize Ruthenia, 377,387-88, 400, 417/n„ 421, 427,429, 440-42, 449-50; Germanoccupation of, 839, 842; armyunits on Russian front, 869, 909,911, 915; Nazis’ mass killing ofJews of, 972; taken by Russians,1090/n., 1096, 1098

Huntziger, Gen. Charles, 743-45Hurricanes (Br. planes), 775, 776Huxley, Aldous, 784

Iceland, 879, 880-82I. G. Farben, 144, 190, 282, 597, 664-65, 968, 972, 973Igorka rivers, 839Illustrious (Br. carrier), 818/n.Imredy, Bela, 387-88India, 558, 560, 883, 901, 957Indian Legion, 1102/n.

Indian Ocean, 810, 915Indochina, 884Informationsheft, 784Innitzer, Cardinal, 350Innsbruck, 75, 335, 553Institute for Military Scientific Research,980

Institute for Research (Forschungsamt),338

Interior, Ministry of the, 275, 497-98,1031

“International Commission” on partitionof Czechosl., 417/n., 420, 421International Military Tribunal, 1142Iran (Persia), 757, 810, 915Iraq, 828, 829, 841Ireland, 474, 646Irgens, Captain, 706Iron Cross, 30, 122, 284, 754/n.Ironside, Gen. Sir Edmund, 504, 682fn.Iserlohn, 1129/n.

Istanbul, 1026Istria, 1005

Italian Air Force, 556fn.

Italian Army, 554, 556fn., 817, 818, 825,826, 827, 850, 869 909-11, 912,915, 920-21, 925, 928, 929, 996,1001, 1002, 1006

Italian Navy, 554, 818/n., 1000, 1002/n.Italian Social Republic, 1005Italy, 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/n„347; prewar policy towardBritain, France, 284-85, 289,

Italy continued

296, 298, 301, 400, 436, 508, 603,687; invasion of Ethiopia, 289,290, 296-98; aid to Spanishrebels, 297-99, 307, 814; in Anti-Comintern Pact, 299; role inGerman-Czech crisis, 377, 403,404, 408-10, 414-21; frictionwith 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 alsoFranco-Italian armistice); waragainst Britain in Mediterranean,N. Africa, 740, 757, 813, 817-22,836, 900, 912, 914, 921; in Tri-partite Pact, 802, 808, 889; in-vasion 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 ofItaly, 921, 956, 995, 1000, 1001,

1006, 1008, 1009, 1033, 1036,

1043, 1100, 1107, 1138; ousts

Duce, makes peace with Allies,

995-1001, 1003; German oc-cupation, 1001, 1003-5, 1009;Fascist Republican Party, 1005

Jackson, Robert H., 432fn., 964/n.Jacob, Franz, 1044Jacob, Major, 1064/n.

Jaeger, Dr. Wilhelm, 948-49Jaklincz, Colonel, 634Japan, 307, 487, 492, 521, 522, 539, 735,753, 798, 803, 804, 806, 809, 839,850, 884, 895, 1025; pacts withGermany, Italy, 299, 436, 506,802, 808, 871, 876, 886-95; inHitler’s strategy, 508fn., 821,

1219

Japan continued

871-96 passim, 915; war againstU.S., Britain, 870-76, 880, 883—96, 900, 901, 1007; neutralitypact with U.S.S.R., 876-77Japanese Air Force, 901 fn.

Japanese Army, 877

Japanese Navy, 872, 873, 887, 888, 891,892, 895

Jaspers, Karl, 251Jastrzembski, see FalkenhorstJeanneney, Jules, 437Jena, 98, 173, 933Jeschonnek, Gen. Hans, 621, 763, 771Jessen, Jens Peter, 908, 1072Jesus Christ, Jew or no?, 107, 108, 124“Jewish Emigration Office,” Vienna, 351Jews, 144, 157, 179, 355, 641, 700,751/n., 828, 1088; Hitler’s hatredfor, 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 pro-fessions, 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; inU.S., 688, 749/n., 872, 875/m,897, 899; used as slave labor,948—49; Warsaw ghetto uprising,974-79; medical experiments on,979-81,985

Jodi, Gen. Alfred, 142, 290, 291/n., 293,316, 319, 404, 670, 671-72, 816,821, 824, 825, 866, 873, 911,918fn., 921, 922, 1010, 1034,1077, 1098, 1112-16; on Blom-berg affair, 311-14; on An-schluss, 326fn., 331, 334-36, 348;on Czech problem and annexa-tion, 363, 365, 366, 369, 370,377-79, 387, 392fn., 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; onFrench armistice, 741, 744; oninvasion of Britain, 758,760, 764,

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

1220

Jodi, Gen. Alfred continued

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 inNormandy, 1038-40; injured bybomb aimed at Hitler, 1051,1054; signs surrender, 1138-39;executed at Nuremberg, 1143Johannmeier, Maj. Willi, 1129John, Lieutenant von, 1050Johst, Hans, 242-43Juenger, Ernst, 242, 1042/n.

Jueterbog, 370, 1057Jung, Edgar, 218, 222Junge, Gertrude, 1123, 1132Jungvolk, 120, 253, 255Junkers, 53, 93-94, 96, 99, 154, 157,162, 179-80, 186, 198, 201, 205,215, 236, 257Justice, Ministry of, 317Jutland, Battle of, 486, 698-99, 707

Kaas, Monsignor, 189, 199Kahr, Gustav von, 34, 51, 64, 65, 66, 67,68,69-72, 75-76, 80fn., 223Kaiser, Jakob, 373

Kaiserhof hotel, Berlin, 4, 154, 155, 156,157, 168, 175, 176, 177, 182Kaltenbrunner, Dr. Ernst, 956, 1070,1143

Kampfbund, see Deutscher KampfbundKant, Immanuel, 93, 97, 99Kantzow, Carin von, see Goering, Carinvon KantzowKanya, Kalman, 387-88Kapp, Dr. Wolfgang, 33-34Kappel, 273-74

Kapp putsch, 3, 33-34, 43, 55fn., 60, 63,75,202

Karinhall, 777, 1112Karlsruhe, 564

Karlsruhe (Ger. It. crusier), 702Karmasin, Franz, 437,442Kasserine Pass, 1029Katzenellenbogen, Dr. Edwin, 991Kaufmann, Karl Otto, 1009Kaunas, 794, 967Kearny (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/m., 1039, 1100,1103, 1111, 1115, 1118, 1130;and Blomberg affair, 312-14, 316;Chief of Armed Forces HighCommand, 318; role in An-schluss, 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/m, 518, 556, 557;and anti-Hitler conspiracy, 559-60, 1021, 1034, 1047, 1048/m,1049-52, 1054, 1058-60, 1064,1073, 1077-78, 1079/m; westernfront, 635, 651, 720; and Naziwar 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/m; Britain invasion plans,764-68; war on Russia, 797, 858,866, 909, 925; Battle of Berlin,1112-14, 1120; his death orderedby Bormann, 1132; executed atNuremberg, 1142-43Keller, Helen, 241Kelly, Dr. Douglas M., 837, 838/m,

Kelly, Sir David, 751/mKempka, Erich, 1111, 1133, 1134, 1137Kennan, George F., 843/mKennard, Sir Howard, 464-65, 466/m.,574-75, 586-87Kennedy, Joseph P., 688Keppler, Wilhelm, 144, 178, 339, 340,342,442

Kerr, Alfred, 241Kerri, Hans, 127,238,239Kesselring, Field Marshal Albert, 722,733, 755/m., 775, 912, 1001, 1006,1099, 1106/m., 1112, 1113, 1138Ketteler, Wilhelm von, 348/m.

Kharkov, 933, 1006Kiel, 55,281, 377, 752, 1008Kiel, University of, 519, 987Kielce, 626

Kiep, Otto, 1025, 1026, 1072Kiev, 798, 811, 853, 857, 858-59, 939,961, 1007

1221

King-Hall, Stephen, 615/n.

Kira, Princess, 907Kircher, Rudolf, 245Kirdorf, Emil, 134, 144Kirk, Alexander C., 561, 637Kirkpatrick, Ivone, 397, 836-38Kitzbuehl, 333Kjolsen, Captain, 694-95Kladno, 991,992Klagenfurt, 13-14Klausener, Erich, 218, 223, 235, 269Kleist, Gen. Ewald von, 319, 373, 380-81, 557, 724/n., 855, 860, 861,889,914,916,928, 1027Kleist, Heinrich von, 1027Kleist, Peter, 555fn., 1017/n.

Kletskaya, 926

Klintzich, Johann Ulrich, 42-43Klop, Lieutenant, 654-55Kluge, Field Marshal Guenther Hans,318-19, 625, 755/n., 860, 863,864, 865, 868-69, 1013/n., 1014-15, 1018-19, 1020, 1021, 1030,1041, 1046, 1047, 1058, 1064,1074-75, 1076-77, 1079, 1082Knilling, Eugen von, 64Koblenz, 1101Koch, Erich, 127,939Koch, Ilse, 983-84Kochem, 273

Koeln (Ger. naval vessel), 697Koenigsberg, 93, 349, 538, 843/n., 1069Koenigsberg (Ger. naval vessel), 697,701

Koestring, Gen. Ernst, 799Koht, Dr. Halvdan, 705, 706Kokoschka, Oskar, 243-44Kola Peninsula, 942

Koller, Gen. Karl, 1112-13, 1115, 1116Konev, Marshal Ivan S. 1097Konoye, Prince, 884, 885Konrads walde, 1072Kordt, Erich, 381, 405, 406-7 408, 411,415/n., 548fn., 550fn., 555fn.Kordt, Theodor, 381, 382, 384, 406, 602,649

Korherr, Dr. Richard, 963Kori,C.H„ 971-72Korschen, 1021

Korten, General, 1051, 1054/n.Kortzfleisch, Gen. Joachim von, 1035,1061, 1066, 1073Kotelnikovski, 927

Kotze, Hans Ulrich von, 471Kraemer, Gen. Fritz, 1095fn.

Kramer, Gerhard F., 270Kramer, Josef, 664, 981-82Krampnitz, 1046, 1057, 1065, 1115Krancke, Adm. Theodor, 922Kranzfelder, Capt. Alfred, 1048Krause, Dr. Reinhardt, 237Krebs, Gen. Hans, 839, 1112, 1123, 1126,1129, 1133, 1135, 1137Kreisau Circle, 374, 908, 1015-17, 1018,1030, 1033, 1036, 1072/n.

Krejci, General, 363Kremlin, 525, 526, 539, 863Kress von Kressenstein, Gen. Frh. Fritz,66

Kriegsfalle (war eventualities), 302Kristiansand, 677, 702Krofta, Dr. Kamil, 390,420Kroll Opera House, 198, 291, 598Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, Alfried,950fn.

Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, Gustav,145, 189-90,206,949Krupp works, 190, 282, 498, 948, 949,968, 973Kuban, 909Kubis, Jan, 991

Kubizek, August, 8fn., 14fn., 15-16, 18,25

Kuebler, Gen. Ludwig, 869Kuechler, Gen. Georg von, 625, 660,721, 738Kuestrin, 1109Kuibyshev, 860

Kummetz, Rear Adm. Oskar, 703Kuntze, Otto, 105Kuntzen, Major von, 183Kursk, 1006

Kurusu, Saburo, 885-86, 887, 891

labor, German, 3, 18, 52, 179, 180, 231,258-59, 261, 265, 355; see alsotrade unions

Labor Commandos (Arbeitskommando)65

Laborde, Admiral de, 925Labor Front, 202, 263-67, 282Labor Service, 220, 249, 253, 254, 256Lackmann-Mosse, Hans, 245

1222

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Lacroix, M. de, 390Ladoga, Lake, 811

Lahousen, Gen. Erwin, 595fn., 1019,1026/n.

Lambach, 10

Lammerding, Lt. Gen. Heinz, 993fn.Lammers, Hans, 323, 941, 965, 1116,1118

Lampe, Maurice, 955Landbund, 180

Landespolizeigruppe General Goering,216

Landsberg prison, 78, 79, 85, 90, 111,122, 963fn., 965fn.

Langbehn, Dr. Carl, 1072Langbro Asylum, 146Langer, William L., 815/n.

Langsdorff, Capt. Hans, 669-70Lappus, Sigrid von, 483fn.

La Roche-Guyon, 1074Laski, Harold, 784

Latvia, 470-71, 494fn., 495, 539, 541,542, 544,630-31,794,833Laval, Pierre, 745-46, 923, 924Law for Removing the Distress of Peo-ple and Reich, see Enabling ActLaw for the Protection of the Peopleand the State (Feb. 28, 1933),196,274

Law for the Protection of the Republic(1922),51

Law for the Reconstruction of theReich (Jan. 30, 1934), 200-1,274/n.

Law Regulating National Labor (Jan. 20,1934),263

Lawrence, Lord Justice, 831League for Air Sports, 282League of National Socialist GermanJurists, 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), 105Leber, Julius, 373, 1030, 1044, 1063,1072

Lebrun, Albert, 460Leclerc, Gen. Jacques, 1085

Leeb, Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von,318-19, 646-47, 755fn., 853,859, 903fn.

Leger, Alexis, 418Le Havre, 762, 772, 1037Lehndorff, Count Heinrich von, 905Lehrterstrasse prison, Berlin, 1073Leipart, Theodor, 202Leipzig, 140-42, 193, 363, 372, 1016Le Matin, 281Lemnos, 817

Lemp, Oberleutnant, 637, 638fn.

Lenard, Philipp, 250, 251Lenin, Nikolai, 98, 542Leningrad, 811, 822fn., 853-54, 856-57,859, 865,926,937,942Leonding, 11, 17, 347Leonrod, Maj. Ludwig von, 1060, 1072Leopold III, King of the Belgians, 302,561,616, 652,729-31Lerchenfeld, Count, 51Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 93, 97, 245Lessing, Theodor, 251Leuschner, Wilhelm, 373, 1030, 1032,1072

Lewis, Fulton, Jr., 748-49Ley, Dr. Robert, 127, 148, 177, 202-3,263, 264, 265, 266-67, 275, 282,671, 1142//J.

Leyden, 721Lezhaky, 993Libau, 539

Liberals, National, 56; see also GermanPeople’s Party

Libya, 817, 818/n., 820, 821, 823, 826.827, 912, 913

Lichterfelde, 216, 222, 1066, 1071/n.Liddell Hart, B. H., 732fn., 734, 761,762/rt., 855, 916fn., 1041/n.Lidice, 991-94

Liebknecht, Karl, 52, 54-55, 191Liege, 1086“Lila,” 924-25Lillehammer, 706, 708Lillesand, 695Limoges, 993

Lindbergh, Charles A., 684, 749/n.,827fn.

Lindemann, Gen. Fritz, 1030, 1072Linge, Heinz, 1134Linnertz, General, 1065Linz, 10-11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 25, 21fn„326fn., 347,351, 1107, 1127

1223

Lippe, 180

Lippert, Michael, 222fn.

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/n., 823, 826, 914, 915,917,918/n.

List Regiment, 30, 47, 49Lithuania, 304, 429, 458, 461-62, 541,580, 630-31, 794, 848, 962, 976Litt, Theodor, 251Littorio (It. battleship), 818/n.

Litvinov, Maxim, 390, 404, 460, 478/n.,479,480-81,489,531,544Lloyd George, David, 232, 489, 537/n.Lobe, Paul, 201

Locarno Pact, 112, 136, 212, 280, 282,283, 285, 286-87, 290, 291, 294,302, 714

Loire river, 1037, 1076, 1085London, 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 in-vasion of Britain, 763, 767-69,782-83,829

London, City of, 539—40London Daily Herald, 210London Daily Mail, 280-81, 453London Daily Telegraph, 344fn.London Spectator, 210London Times, 210, 245, 287-88, 294,344/n., 376, 382, 384/«„ 420,453, 784, 914fn.

Lonesome Guest (Goebbels), 124Loraine, Sir Percy, 603fn.

Lorenz, Heinz, 1122, 1129Lorraine, 400

Lossberg, Col. Bernhard von, 769fn.Lossow, Gen. Otto von, 65-72, 75-76Lothian, Lord, 293, 750Louis-Ferdinand, Prince, 907Louvain, 717, 724Louvre, 945

Low Countries, 640, 652, 714, 775;

see also Belgium; NetherlandsLubbe, Marinus van der, 192-94, 269,654

Lublin, 626, 631, 971, 974Lucas, Scott, 750fn.

Ludecke, Karl, 119

Ludendorff, Gen. Erich, 31, 32, 34,46fn.,53, 56, 63-64, 69, 70-74, 75, 78,118, 122, 123, 144, 150, 259,312,530, 754/rc., 871

Ludendorff Bridge, Remagen, 1101Ludin, Lieutenant, 139-42Ludwig III, King of Bavaria, 28Ludwigshafen, 234Luebeck, 238, 676, 1105, 1116Lueger, Dr. Karl, 24-25, 138Lueneburg, 981, 1141Luettwitz, Gen. Walther Frh. von, 55, 60Luettwitz, Gen. Heinrich von, 1093Luetzow (Ger. hvy. cruiser), 667, 668Luetzow (Ger. pocket battleship, formerDeutschland),702-3, 711Luftflotten (air fleets), 775Lufthansa, 146,907

Luftwaffe (German Air Force), 284,317,318, 423, 425, 571, 621, 749/n.,755/n., 813, 818fn., 820, 826,827, 850, 881, 903fn„ 923, 1004,1034, 1043/n., 1056, 1072, 1126,1128, 1130; building of, 282, 283,299, 489, 853; in Spanish CivilWar, 297, 300; war preparations,305, 335, 336, 362, 369-70, 445,487, 488, 497, 517/n., 529, 590;bombing of Poland, 597, 603; inwar in the west, 619-20, 633,646, 671-72, 726, 730, 738, 1036,1039, 1040, 1099; Norway cam-paign, 673, 681, 682, 699, 702,703, 706, 708, 711; operations inHolland, Belgium, 718-19, 721,722, 725, 730; and stop order,732, 733, 736-37; Battle ofBritain, 752, 756, 758, 759, 761,765-67, 771, 772, 775-77, 779-81; eastern front, 797, 860, 926,947fn., 1009; in Mediterraneanarea and N. Africa, 912-13, 922;medical experiments for, 984-87;Battle of Berlin, 1112, 1115,1122; Goering ousted, 1119Lunding, Colonel, 1073Lupescu, Magda, 800fn.

Lusitania, S.S., 637

Luther, Dr. Hans, 204

Luther, Martin, 91, 174, 236, 237

1224

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Lutze, Viktor, 221

Luxembourg, 470, 561, 590, 644, 646,650, 715, 720

Luxemburg, Rosa, 52, 54-55Lwow (Lemberg), Poland, 628, 967Lyme Bay, 762, 763, 764, 766, 767

Maas (Meuse) river, 721Maastricht, 724

Mackensen, Field Marshal August von,197, 225, 284

Mackensen, Hans Georg von, 483, 553,554, 565fn., 566, 568, 687, 890Mackesy, Maj. Gen. P. J., 707Maddalena I., 1003Madeira, 265, 817Madrid, 785-88

Mafalda, Princess, 146, 352, 984/n.,1003

Magdeburg, 1105“Magic,” 885, 886-87, 888fn.

Maginot Line, 293, 294, 422, 531, 646,718,719, 720, 725Magistrati, Count Massimo, 553Maikop, 859, 909, 914Mainz, 400, 1101Maisel, Gen. Ernst, 1078Maisky, Ivan, 478fn., 495fn.

Makins, R. M., 605/n.

Malaya, 892, 901/n.

Malcolm, Major General, 31 fn.

Maldon, 763

Malkin, Sir William, 391Malmedy, 954, 1095/m, 1096/n.Maloyaroslavets, 868-69Malta, 912-13, 921, 922, 1002/n.Manila, 876Mann, Heinrich, 241Mann, Thomas, 241, 242Mannerheim, Marshal, 682fn.Manoilescu, Mihai, 800Manstein, Gen. Fritz Erich von (Lewin-ski), 284, 335, 345fn., 369, 370,424, 488, 718, 726, 830fn., 840,903fn., 926-27, 928, 1015, 1030Manteuffel, Gen. Hasso von, 1090, 1091,1093, 1094

Marahrens, Bishop, 239Marburg (Maribor), 13, 217Marburg, University of, 218, 219, 251Margival, 1039, 1040

Marienbad, 251Marienburg, 255Marienwerder, 1072“Marita,” 823, 824Marne river, 727, 863, 1088Marseilles, 740

Marshall, Gen. George C., 1001/n.Marx, Karl, 98

Masarik, Dr. Hubert, 416-17, 418Masaryk, Jan, 404, 411, 784Masaryk, Toma§ Garrigue, 358, 359,443, 444, 445, 448Masefield, John, 384/n.

“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, 418Matisse, Henri, 244Matsuoka, Yosuke, 839, 871, 873, 874-6, 877, 878, 883, 888, 892Matuschka, Capt. Count von, 1030Matzelsberger, Franziska (Frau Hitler),9

Maurice, Emil, 42, 79/n., 132, 221, 223Maurice, Maj. Gen. Sir Frederick, 31 fn.Mauthausen, 272, 351, 955, 956, 967,981

Max, Prince of Baden, 32, 52, 55Maxwell-Fyfe, Sir David, 517May Day celebration (1933), 202Maydell, Baron Konstantin von, 685fn.McAuliffe, Gen. A. C., 1093McCarthy, Joseph R„ 1095/n.

McCloy, John J., 950fn., 1096fn.Mechelen-sur-Meuse, 671Mecklenburg, 161, 301medical experiments, Nazi, 979-91Medina Sidonia, Duke of, 914/n.Mediterranean, 301, 530, 554, 691, 757,808, 812-13, 817-19, 827, 829^912-14, 925, 995, 1007, 1008Mehlhorn, Doctor, 520Meinecke, Friedrich, 6Mein Kampf (Hitler), 80-81, 113, 129-30, 133, 134, 249; autobiograph-ical 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/m,549, 796, 941, 1124, 1131

Index

Meissner, Otto von, 4, 155, 168-69, 173,175, 181, 183-84, 196Mell, Max, 102

Memel, 428-29, 456, 461-62, 1033Mendelssohn, Felix, 242Merekalov, Alexei, 476, 479-80Mersa Matruh, 817

Mertz von Quirnheim, Colonel von,1058, 1060, 1067, 1068Mesny, General, 1100Messerschmitt, Wilhelm, 835Metz, 1076, 1086

Meuse river, 716-18, 723-26, 1086,1090/n., 1092-93, 1094Mezieres, 717

Michael, King of Rumania, 800fn.Michael (Goebbels), 124Middle East, 828, 829, 912, 919; see alsoArabia; Iran; Palestine; SyriaMiklas, Wilhelm, 331, 332, 334fn., 338,339, 340, 341-43, 346, 347Mikoyan, Anastas, 494Milan, 482, 740/n., 995, 1131Milch, Field Marshal Erhard, 484, 497,733, 155fn., 941 fn., 985, 986Militaer-Wochenblatt, 260Minsk, 621, 855, 962fn., 967, 973/n.,1020

Mirabeau, Count Honore Gabriel VictorRiqueti de, 93Mius river, 861

Moabit prison, 239, 1025/n., 1068Model, 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/n.;named Foreign Min., 480-81;negotiations with Germans, 476,481-82, 491-94, 501, 505, 506,513-14, 520-28, 535fn., 538,540, 562, 622, 626-31, 639, 667,793-95, 844; with British, French,495, 496, 503, 504, 537; Berlinvisit, 800, 803-9, 818; replacedas Prime Min. by Stalin, 841-44;receives German war declaration,846-49

Moltke, Hans Adolf von, 377, 460, 462,499

1225

Moltke, Field Marshal Count Helmuthvon, 374, 657, 723, 1081Moltke, Count Helmuth James von, 374,558,908, 1015, 1016, 1025, 1036,1072/n.

Monckton, Sir Walter, 789, 791Monschau, 1092-93Montevideo, 669-70Montgomery, Gen. Sir Bernard Law,919, 920, 1001, 1086, 1088-89,1102, 1105, 1138, 1141Montherme, 724Montoire, 814, 815fn., 816Mooney, James D., 686fn.

Moravia, 359, 362, 428, 429, 438, 440,443, 444, 448, 449, 451, 460, 598,657, 686, 991

Moravska-Ostrava, 383, 444Morell, Dr. Theodor, 444, 447, 1056,1102

Morgan, J. P., 688Morgenthau, Henry, Jr., 891 fn.

Morison, Samuel Eliot, 883fn.

Morocco, 297, 814, 923Morris, Leland, 900Moscicki, Ignacy, 560-61Moscow: German war plans against,798, 810, 811, 937; rumors ofGerman attack in, 842, 844; Ger-man drive toward and defeat at,853-54, 856-61, 863-70, 891,905, 952, 1006, 1007, 1081;evacuated by govt., 859-60Moscow Pact, see Nazi-Soviet PactMoselle river, 1086, 1088, 1089, 1099motion pictures, Nazi control of, 247Mozdok, 914

“Mr. X,” see Bryans, J. LonsdaleMuehlmann, Doctor, 340Mueller, Heinrich, 519-20, 595, 953,1044

Mueller, Hermann, 137Mueller, Dr. Josef, 648, 693, 1024Mueller, Ludwig, 235, 237, 238Mueller, Wilhelm, 250-51Muenchener Neueste Nachrichten, 223Muenster, 239; Treaty of, 644Muenstereifel, 720

Muff, Lt. Gen. Wolfgang, 323, 340, 342Munch, Edvard, 698Munich, 38-44, 46-49, 112, 118, 120,123, 128-29, 131, 132, 138, 148,

1226

Munich continued

156, 225, 244, 271, 279, 406, 457,694, 923, 1107; Hitler moves to,from Vienna, 27-28; Hitler re-turns to after war (1918), 31,33-36; a magnet for anti-Repub-lic 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 HallPutsch

Munich, University of, 48, 124, 1022-23Munich 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, 957Munters, Vilhelms, 471Murmansk, 667, 695fn., 811, 859Murray, Gilbert, 784music, Nazi control of, 242Mussolini, Benito, 63, 209, 261, 344,450, 507, 562, 640fn., 645, 657,727, 735, 747, 819, 849-51, 872,923fn., 995; meetings with Hitler,217, 301, 740-41, 774, 815-16,821-22, 995-96, 1049, 1055-57;sends troops to bar Austrian An-schluss, 280; invades Ethiopia,289-90, 296; Hitler gains supportof, 296-99, 301-2, 324, 327; ap-proves German annexation ofAustria, 302, 324, 327, 334-35,336-37, 339, 343, 345, 347; rolein Czech problem, 377, 400, 403,407-10, 414-19; reluctance torisk war against West, 436, 482-83, 493, 508, 509, 511-12, 529,547-48, 551-57, 564-68, 570,665-66, 687-92; conquest ofAlbania, 469; attitude towardU.S., 469-70, 875fn., 889-90,893; opposes Axis amity withU.S.S.R., 478-79; signs Pact ofSteel, 482-83; mediation in warcrisis, 587-89, 592, 603-8, 615—18, 620-21, 640, 643; criticizesNazi policy toward U.S.S.R., 666,683, 687, 688; promises to enter

Mussolini, Benito continued

war, 689-92; war, armistice withFrench, 739-41, 745, 746; warwith British, 733, 755, 812-14,928; invasion of Greece, 815, 816,818, 825, 826; in war againstU.S.S.R., 851, 909-11; relationswith Japan, 875, 889-90, 893;urges Hitler to make peace ineast, 928, 995; deposed, arrested,996-98, 1002, 1003; is rescued byS.S., 999, 1000, 1003—6; assassi-nated, 1131

Myth of the Twentieth Century, The(Rosenberg), 149

Nacht und Nebel Erlass (Night and FogDecree), 957-58Naggiar, Paul-Emile, 537Namier, Sir Lewis B„ 556fn., 593fn.,611

Namsos, 708

Namur, 717, 724, 725, 726, 1086Nansen, Fridtjof, 675Nantes, 956Naples, 1001, 1002

Napoleon, 98, 111, 206, 448, 542, 629,760fn., 169fn„ 812, 829, 851-52,853, 859, 860, 865, 867, 868,1015, 1028

Napoleon III, 95, 723Narew river, 497, 532, 541, 629, 631Narvik, 674, 676, 681, 695, 696, 700-1,707, 708, 709, 711, 721, 752, 810,930

National Assembly, German, 31, 57, 59National Club, Berlin, 44National Liberals, 56National Political Institutes of Educa-tion, 255

National Redoubt, 1105-6National Socialist Association of Uni-versity Lecturers, 249National Socialist German FreedomMovement, 112, 118, 123National 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

1227

Index

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 earlygrowth, 41-51; “second revolu-tion” and “socialism” in, 41, 123,126, 128, 143, 147, 176, 180,204-8, 213-15, 232, 261; Hitler’sdictatorship in, 44-46; suppressedafter putsch attempt, 72, 75, 111-12; election campaigns, 118, 138,152, 153, 156-59, 166, 171-72,180-81, 194-96, 211-12; struc-ture, 119-21, 252-53, 255, 263;factional strife in, 122-23, 126—29, 143-44, 147, 172, 174, 180,181, 204-8, 216; financial aidfrom big business, 134, 142—45,172, 176, 178, 179, 203; gainssupport in Army, 139-42, 146—49; activities in Reichstag, 162,170-72, 174, 179, 181, 199; soleparty in Germany, 201; controlof churches, 234-40; of arts andprofessions, 242, 244, 246; ofeducation, 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/n„ 340-41, 350, 351; in Sudetenland,359, 360, 363, 376-77, 381/m,383

National Socialist Teachers’ League, 249

Nationalists, see German NationalPeople’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, 58fn„ 211, 305, 317,318, 321, 354, 401, 529, 766-68,772-73, 853. 1003, 1008, 1048,

Navy, German continued

1098, 1121-22, 1125, 1126, 1130;Hitler’s pledges to, 207, 214-15;rebuilding program, 281-82, 287-89, 299, 487-89; Memel, seizureof, 456, 461-62; preparations forwar, 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, 781,1000/rt,- 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; surrendernegotiations, 1138

Nazi-Soviet Pact, 513-16, 520-28, 531,535/m., 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, 1072Neff, Walter, 987, 988Netherlands, 281, 307, 470, 516, 531,561, 590, 592, 640, 711, 717, 719,723, 886; German war plansagainst, 486, 487, 519/rt., 644-47,649-52, 656, 658, 665, 669, 671,672, 694, 710, 714-19, 739, 793;conquest of, 713, 720-24; Ger-man occupation of, 759, 943,956-57, 969, 1090, 1099, 1126,1138

Netherlands Air Force, 955Netherlands Army, 718, 722, 723Neudeck, 181, 182, 214, 219, 228-229Neuhaus, 662fn.

Neumann, Franz L., 60Neunzert, Lieutenant, 72Neurath, Baron Konstantin von, 164,184, 229, 276, 283, 291, 295, 298,301, 305. 308, 309, 310, 319, 320,

1228

Neurath, Baron Konstantin von contin-ued

323, 335, 345, 365, 415, 448, 662,991, 1032, 1142-43

“Neville Chamberlain” (Masefield),384fn.

“New Beginning, A” (Hitler editorial),118, 122

Newton, Sir Basil, 390New York, 376, 685fn.

New York Journal-American, 748New York Times, 245, 391fn., 411 fn.,595fn., 748fn., 897/n.Nibelungenlied, 102Niblack (U.S. destroyer), 880, 883fn.Nidda, Krug von, 924Niederdorf, 918//!., 1074Niekisch, Ernst, 373Niemen river, 851-52Niemoeller, Rev. Martin, 235, 236, 237,238, 239, 352, 655/zi.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 97, 99,100, 101, 102-3, 110, 111Nieuwe Maas river, 721, 722Nikitchenko, Gen. I. T., 959Nile river, 913, 914, 919, 925Noel, Leon, 536, 543/n., 586, 605fn.,743

Nomura, Adm. Kichisaburo, 873/n.,884-87, 891, 892Nordic Society, 676Norge (Norw. naval vessel), 701Normandy, 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, 95North Germanic Union, 769North Sea, 646, 673, 695, 720, 764, 768Norway, 561, 716, 805, 841; Germanwar plans against, 673-83, 689,694; Altmark incident, 679-80;invasion of, 698, 700-13, 719,721, 793, 826; history of mon-archy, 104fn.; German occupa-tion of, 709/zi., 752, 768, 775,801,811,914,956-57,993Norwegian 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 Ger-man 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/zj., 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, 1076Oberheuser, Dr. Herta, 990Obersalzberg, see BerchtesgadenOccupied Eastern Territories, Ministryfor the, 940, 952Ochs-Adler, Col. Julius, 750/n.Ochsner, Colonel, 869Oder river, 1097, 1103, 1106, 1109, 1120Odessa, 811

Ohlendorf, Otto, 953, 958-62, 963fn.OKH, see Army High CommandOKM (Oberkommando der Kriegs-marine, High Command of theNavy), 638

OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht,High Command of the ArmedForces), 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 inva-sion, 469, 487, 518, 529fn., 532,551, 595fn., 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; activitiesin U.S., 684,685,749fn.; Battle ofBritain, 761, 756, 758, 760, 763-68; Barbarossa, 797, 799, 810,812, 822, 829, 831, 853, 856-58,918fn., 919, 925, 929, 933, 952,953; Mediterranean and N.

OKW continued

Africa, 921, 922, 924; Italian de-fection, 996, 999, 1001, 1006;surrender, 1138; see also Jodi;Keitel

Abwehr (Intelligence Bureau), 331 fn.,374, 377, 462, 518, 558, 648-49,654, 685, 693, 1018, 1019, 1024,

1026, 1029, 1036, 1043/n„ 1045,1072; see also Canaris; Oster

Economic and Armaments Branch,413/n., 517, 667fn., 799; see alsoThomas, Gen. GeorgOlav 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/n„ 1065,1066-67,1068

Olden, Rudolf, 19fn., 26, 128Oldenburg, 163

Olympic games (1936), 232-33, 234,835

Operations (code names):

Aida, 913Alpine Violets, 821Attila, 820-21Axis, 1000, 1001Bernhard, 519/n.

Black (Schwarz), 1000Citadel, 1006Dynamo, 735

Eagle (Adlerangriffe), 774-75Flash, 1018-21Greif, 1090/n., 1092fn.

Hercules, 913Himmler, 518Isabella, 817Marita, 823, 824Oak (Eiche), 1000, 1003Punishment, 826Student, 1000Sunflower, 821Typhoon, 859Winter Gale, 927Oppeln, 519Oppenheim, 1101, 1102Oradour-sur-Glane, 993Oran, 923

Oranienburg, 272, 571

Order Castles (Ordensburgen), 255

Ordnertruppe, 42

1229

Orel, 854, 863, 1006Orleans, 1085Orne river, 1038

Oshima, Gen. Hiroshi, 872, 885, 887-88, 889, 890, 891, 893, 895, 896Oskar, Prince of Prussia, 907Oskarsborg, 702-3

Oslo, 614/n., 639, 676, 677, 681, 695,697, 698, 701, 702-3, 704, 705,708, 709fn., 710, 721“Oslo” powers, 561Ostend, 770

Oster, Col. Hans, 374, 380, 381, 405,406-7, 558, 563, 596, 648-51,652, 654, 694, 715-16, 846/n„904, 1017, 1024, 1073Osthilfe (Eastern Relief), 180, 181“Ostland,” 832

Ott, Gen. Eugen, 173, 174, 877, 878,884, 886, 889, 893/n.

Otto, Crown Prince, of Austria, 304,333-34, 335

“Otto” (Code name), 810; see also CaseOtto

Oumansky, Constantine, 544/rc., 843Oven, Margarete von, 1035

Pacholegg, Anton, 985Pacific, 873, 875, 877fn., 901Pact of Steel, 482-84, 511/n„ 553, 556,565, 603

Paderewski, Ignace, 784Palatinate, 1101Palestine, 747, 813Pan-American Neutrality Patrol, 880Pan-German Nationalists (Austrian),22-25

Papen, Franz von, 3, 4, 56fn., 167, 169,170-75, 189, 191, 192, 196, 216,227-29, 234, 321fn., 357, 1126;background, 164-66; intrigueswith and against Hitler, 177-84;named Vice-Chancellor andPrussian Premier, 183-86; bootedout 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; acquittedat Nuremberg, 1142—43

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

1230

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, 359Parsifal (Wagner), 103“Party Rally of Peace,” 467, 518, 562Pas de Calais, 762, 1037Pasewalk, 29, 32Pastors’ Emergency League, 238Patch, Gen. Alexander, 1086Patria, S.S., 377Patriotic Front, 338

Patton, Gen. George S„ 1076, 1085,1086, 1089, 1093, 1094, 1101,1102

Paul, Prince Regent of Yugoslavia, 823Paulus, Field Marshal Friedrich, 830,840, 909, 918fn., 919, 926-27,929-34, 1014-15

Pearl Harbor, 870, 887, 888, 891, 892,893, 8-94, 896, 899, 901/n.peasants, German, 91-94, 236, 256-57Pechel, Rudolf, 558Peenemunde, 1009Peiper, Col. Jochen, 1095/n.

Peipus, Lake, 1052Pemsel, Maj. Gen. Max, 1038, 1039People’s Court (Volksgericht), 269,375, 1023, 1025/n., 1060/n„

1068, 1070-71, 1072, 1073, 1074,1076-77, 1079, 1080People’s Marine Division, 54, 55People’s Party, Bavarian, see BavarianPeople’s Party

People’s Party, German, see GermanPeople’s Party

Pershing, Gen. John J., 750/zi.

Persia, see Iran

Persian Gulf, 805, 809, 829, 915Perth, Lord, 408

Pertinax (Andre Geraud), 390, 424fn.Petacci, Clara, 1005, 1131Petain, Marshal Henri Philippe, 643fn.,737, 738, 741, 745-46, 747, 812,814-15, 923-24

Peter, King of Yugoslavia, 823, 826Peters, Dr. Gerhard, 972Petersberg, 391Petersdorff, Captain von, 942Petsamo, 811, 846Petzel, Gen. Walter, 557Pfaffenberger, Andreas, 984

Philip, Prince of Hesse, 146, 336, 343,352, 984fn., 1003Phipps, Sir Eric, 384, 610, 617Picasso, Pablo, 244Piedmont, 554Pichelsdorf, 1129, 1137Pierlot, Hubert, 729Piffraeder, Oberfuehrer, 1061Pilsudski, Marshal Jozef, 209, 213, 458Pinder, Professor, 251Pissa river, 629, 631Pitman, Key, 478fn.

Pittsburgh, Pa., 358Pius XI, Pope 235

Pius XII, Pope (Eugenio Pacelli), 234,561, 648, 693, 747, 1024Plettenberg, Countess Elizabeth von,1026Ploen, 1134Ploesti, 1085

Ploetzensee prison, 1071, 1076Poehner, Ernst, 71

Poelzl, Klara, see Hitler, Klara PoelzlPoetsch, Dr. Leopold, 13Pohl, Dr. Emil, 974Pohl, Oswald, 963-64, 974Poincare, Raymond, 61Pokorny, Dr. Adolf, 979-80, 990Poland, 41, 84, 209, 211, 282, 283, 359,466/zi., 639-43, 657, 692, 693,710; created by Versailles Treaty,58, 458-59; nonaggression pactwith Hitler, 212-13, 286; re-lations with France, 212-13, 295,299, 306, 426-27, 457, 458; Ger-man 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, 417fn.,421; toward Russia, 377, 457,

459, 460, 464, 469, 478, 495,536-37, 543; Hitler demandsDanzig and Corridor, 455-61,463-71, 499, 500; British, Frenchrepresentations in support of,

460, 464-66, 469, 472, 495, 504,506, 516-17, 533-38, 545-51,556-57, 562, 568-89, 591-93,600-2, 604-20, 634; Nazi-Soviettalks on partition of, 482, 501,505, 515-21, 541-44, 562; Italy

Poland continued

refuses to enter war against, 551—57, 564-68, 603-4"; German

propaganda campaign against,563-64, 575-76, 593-95; Germaninvasion 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/n.,1139, 1143; liberation, 1007,

1041, 1090, 1096-97Polish Air Force, 600, 625Polish 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, 625Polish Navy, 695Political Workers’ Circle, 36Pomerania (Pomorze), 458, 460, 497,625

Popitz, Johannes, 373, 659, 670, 846fn.,904, 907, 908, 1017, 1023, 1072Porsche, Dr. Ferdinand, 266Portugal, 785, 788, 789, 792, 817Posen, 212, 458, 626, 659, 937-38, 944,954, 966

Potemkin, Vladimir, 482Potsdam, 3, 54-55, 166, 182, 196-97,375, 413, 1072

Pour le Merite (Ger. decoration), 49Po Valley, 1 107

Prague, 332, 376-77, 383, 419, 420,443-44, 446, 447/n., 448, 991,992, 1064Pravda, 496Preuss, Hugo, 56fn., 241Preysing, Cardinal Count, 1048/n.Price, Ward, 280-81, 283Prien, Oberleutnant Guenther, 646Priess, Hermann, 1095/n.

Priestley, J. B., 784Primo de Rivera, Miguel, 787, 788Prince of Wales (Br. battleship), 901/n.Prinz Eugen (Ger. hvy. cruiser), 914Pripet Marshes, 810, 811

1231

prisoners of war, 744, 854fn., 932, 940,942fn., 946-47, 948, 949, 951-56, 969, 973, 979, 1029, 1086,1095/n., 1100, 1105, 1114-15Progressive Party, 55-56Propaganda Ministry, 167, 196, 204,"244-45, 246, 247, 387, 636, 638,1061, 1062-63, 1110, 1121-22,1143; see also GoebbelsProtestant Church, 235, 236, 237, 238,239, 240, 251Proust, Marcel, 241

Prussia (kingdom), 92-98, 196-97, 236,259, 1015, 1087

Prussia (federal state), 154, 155, 159,160, 165, 184, 186, 191, 200; seealso East Prussia, West PrussiaPryor, Gen. W. W„ 698-99Puaux, Gabriel, 334/n.

Puch, 821

Qattara Depression, 919Quisling, Maj. Vidkun Abraham Lauritz,675-78, 701, 704, 705, 706,109fn., 755/n.

Raczyriski, Count Edward, 551, 602radar, 775, 776, 781, 1007, 1037Raeder, Gr. Adm. Erich, 207, 214-15,273, 305, 313, 314, 317, 321, 365,401, 462, 484, 487, 488, 497,5X5fn., 529fn., 622, 636-38, 646,667, 670, 742, 873, 877, 878/n„914, 915, 1080; naval buildingprogram, 281-82, 487, 622; Nor-way campaign, 674-79, 683, 696,697fn., 710; Britain invasionplans, 752, 758-59, 763-68, 770,771; urges concentration onMediterranean area, 812-13,818-21, 828-29, 912-13; urgesattack on U.S. shipping, 879, 880,882, 895, 901-2; ousted as NavyC. in C., 1000; sentenced atNuremberg, 1143Ramsgate, 762, 763, 766, 767Rangsdorf, 1048, 1054-55, 1057, 1058

1232

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Rapallo, 494

Rascher, Dr. Sigmund, 984-90Rashid Ali, 828, 841Rassenkunde, 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 toassassinate Hitler at, 1045-57Rath, Ernst vom, 430-31Rathenau, Walther, 34, 51, 241, 245Rattenhuber, Oberfuehrer, 1049Raubal, Angela Hitler, 9, 131Raubal, Friedl, 131

Raubal, Geli, 9-10, 131, 132, 152, 153,221, 223, 244/n„ 1111Rauschning, Hermann, 169, 784Ravensbrueck, 272, 979, 989, 990, 992,1025

R6al, Jean, 105Reckse, Doctor, 1025Red, Case, 303Reed, Douglas, 784Regensburg, 71

Regina Palace Hotel, Munich, 418Reich Broadcasting Corp., 247, 467fn.Reich Central Security Office, seeR.S.H.A.

Reich Chamber of Art, 244Reich Chamber of Culture, 241-44Reich Chamber of Films, 247Reich Chamber of Radio, 247“Reich Church,” 237,238, 240Reich Committee of German Youth As-sociations, 252-53

Reich Defense Council (Reichsvertei-digungsrat), 208, 275, 281, 282,290, 497-98

Reich Defense Law, secret (May 31,1935), 259, 285fn.

Reich Economic Chamber, 262Reichenau, Field Marshal Walter von,183, 325, 335, 626, 724, 725,730, 755fn., 762, 763, 767,861/n., 903/n.

Reich Food Estate, 258Reich Governors, 200Reich Music Chamber, 242Reich Press Chamber, 246Reich Press Law (Oct. 4,1933), 245

Reichsbank, 145, 146, 204, 260, 261,311, 351-52, 439fn., 973-74Reichsbanner, 160

Reichsgericht (Ger. Supreme Court),269

Reichsgesetzblatt (official gazette), 434Reichskriegsflagge, 71, 72Reichsrat, 153, 198

Reichstag, 95, 151, 153, 163, 173, 174,176, 180, 194, 318, 560; Nazirepresentation 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, 189,294fn.; elections of, 138, 166,172, 211, 237, 347; Goebbels ex-pelled from, 157; support of Hit-ler-Papen govt., 182, 197-201,210, 274; votes Hitler absolutepower, 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, 223,269,274,653,654Reich Statistical Office, 264Reichswehr, 33, 34, 46, 60; becomesWehrmacht, 285fn.; see alsoArmy, German

Reich Theater Chamber, 242-43Reichwein, Adolf, 1044, 1072Reims, 1093, 1138-39, 1141Reinberger, Maj. Helmut, 671-72Reinecke, General, 1063, 1065Reinhardt, Gen. Georg-Hans, 724, 731,859

Reinhardt, Max, 242Reitlinger, Gerald, 970, 973, 978,1025//*.

Reitsch, Hanna, 1111, 1118-19, 1120,1122, 1133Remagen, 1101

1233

Remarque, Erich Maria, 241Remer, Maj. Otto, 1061-66, 1069Rennes, 1037

Renthe-Fink, Cecil von, 700reparations, German, World War I, 51,58, 61, 64, 112, 117, 136, 137,152, 154, 943

Republican Party (U.S.), 748Repulse (Br. battleship), 901/n.

Reuben James (U.S. destroyer), 883Reuters, 1122

Reventlow, Count Ernst zu, 123Reynaud, Paul, 720,726, 729, 738Rheydt, 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, 543,635,657,714Rhone Valley, 691, 740,1086Ribbentrop, Gertrud von, 1056/n.Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 233, 276, 302,381, 406/n., 435/m, 507, 556-57,560, 595fn., 596fn., 620, 672,676, 741, 742, 751/m, 814, 924,955, 1017/n., 1097, 1112, 1113,1126, 1142-43; personal charac-teristics, 181, 298, 415, 436; am-bassador to Britain, 288, 298,335, 344-45; appointed ForeignMin., 319; and Goering, mutualdislike, 298, 469, 483, 1056; atHitler-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-Chamber-lain talks, 385, 396; pact withFrance, 437; negotiations withPoland, 455-57, 459, 460-61,463-64, 499, 588; rejects British,French protests on Memel, 461-62; talks with Duce, Ciano onwar 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, 535fn., 537-41, 545,547, 609, 621-22, 627, 629-31,639, 674, 793-95, 801-9, 847-

Ribbentrop, Joachim von continued

49; negotiations with West onPoland, 562, 570fn., 576-78, 580-83, 585fn., 586-89, 591, 602,605-7, 613; relations with U.S.,637, 683, 686, 748, 871, 881-96passim, 897fn.; rejects British,French ultimatums, 615-18; re-lations with Norway, Denmark,696-98, 703, 704, 706; Windsorkidnap plot, 785-91; dealings inBalkans, 795, 800, 801, 823-24;declaration of war on U.S.S.R.,848-49; relations with Japan,871-72, 874-78, 881-96; decla-ration of war on U.S., 900Riccione, 851

Richardson, William, 852fn., 912Richthofen Fighter Squadron, 49Rickenbacker, Eddie, 684Riess, Curt, 1063/n.

Riga, 794, 967

Rintelen, General von, 825

Rio de Janeiro (Ger. transport), 695

Riom trial, 609fn.

Ripka, Herbert, 390Ritter, Gerhard, 1046/rc.

Riviera, French, 740, 1086Robeson, Paul, 784fn.

Robin Moor (U.S. freighter), 882Rocca delle Caminate, 1005Rockefeller, John D., 688Roehm, Ernst, 4, 39, 46, 63, 120, 155,159, 160, 313, 317, 371, 691, 834;background, 38; with Goering,organizes S.S., 49; in Beer HallPutsch, 66, 71, 73, 75; break withHitler (1925), 118; returns toparty, heads S.A., S.S., 146-48;contact with Schleicher, 152, 161,216; friendship with Hitler, 207,216; named to Cabinet, 208; riftwith Hitler over radicalism, 204-8, 213-17; purged, 219-22, 224-26,273, 1056-57

Roenne, Colonel Freiherr von, 1030Roepke, Wilhelm, 95, 99fn., 251Rokossovski, Gen. Konstantin, 929Roman 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/n.

1234

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Roman Empire, 104, 106, 305Rome, 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 Hit-ler seek peace, is cashiered, 1039-41; wounded in air attack, 1041-42, 1047; suicide and funeral,1078-80

Rommel, Frau, 1031, 1078-79Rommel, Manfred, 1078Roosevelt, Franklin D., 435fn., 544 fn.,684fn., 686/n., 688, 815/n.,

827fn., 828, 829, 871, 872, 874,887, 888, 894-95, 907; peaceefforts, 209-10, 400, 469-75,508/zi., 560-61, 574, 683, 684,687, 714, 749; recalls ambassa-dor, 433/n., 685; negotiationswith Japanese, 873fn., 884-87,892; Nazi gibes at, 470-75,875/rt., 897-900; Atlantic navalpolicy, 877fn., 880-82; war aims,904, 1033/n.; death of, delightsNazis, 1110

Rosen, Count Eric von, 49Rosenberg, 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 ofEastern Europe, 832-34, 939-42,947-48, 952-53; plunder of arttreasures, 945—46; Nurembergtrial and execution, 1142-43Rosenman, Samuel I„ 897fn.

Ross, Colin, 683fn.

Rossbach, Lieutenant, 66

Rosterg, August, 144

Rostock, Capt. Max, 992

Rostov, 859, 860-61, 865, 916, 928, 952

“Rote Kapelle,” 1043/n.

Rothschild, Baron Louis de, 351Rotterdam, 721, 722-23, 769Rovno, 841

Royal Oak (Br. battleship), 646R.S.H.A. (Reichssicherheitshauptamt,Reich Central Security Office),782-84, 958, 1024, 1026, 1063;see also S.D.

rubber, synthetic, 282, 301, 840Ruegen, 266

Ruge, Colonel, 704,708, 709Ruhr, 61-65, 112, 282, 301, 486, 517/n„634, 635, 645, 793, 1088-89,1096, 1097, 1098, 1102, 1105Rumania, 283, 399-400, 530, 626, 799,817, 823, 824, 909; relations withFrance, Britain, 295, 426-27,469, 495; policy toward U.S.S.R.,478, 495, 534, 538fn.; Hungarytakes Transylvania from, 800-1;Nazi-Soviet struggle for controlof, 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 RedArmy, 1007, 1085, 1098Rumanian Army, 869, 911, 915, 926,928,932

Runciman, Lord, 376-77, 386, 388-89,392,416

Rundfunkhaus, see Broadcasting HouseRundstedt, Field Marshal Gerd von, 165,293, 355, 747, 151fn.; relievedof commands (four times), 318—19, 861, 865, 903fn., 1041, 1099;in Polish invasion, 488, 497; inBattle of France, 718, 726, 731-34; named Field Marshal, 755fn.,Britain invasion plan, 761, 762;Russian campaign, 830, 853, 855,858-61, 865, 903fn.; and anti-Hitler plotters, 906, 1030, 1032;C. in C. West, 906, 918, 922, 923,1036-41, 1086, 1087, 1089-91,1094; sacked again, 1099Rupprecht, Crown Prince of Bavaria,46fn., 63,67,72-73,371Russell, Bertrand, 100/n., 784Russian Air Force, 502fn., 855, 926,1053,1100

Russian Army, 502fn., 534, 797, 810,811, 822; invades Poland, 627,628; attacks Finland, 675 (seealso Finland; Russo-FinnishWar); seizes Baltic States, 794;takes over Bessarabia. Bucovina,

Russian Army continued

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 Stal-ingrad, 915, 922, 926-33; meetsAmericans at Elbe, 1106, 1107,1112; Battle of Berlin, 1106,1108, 1112, 1117, 1118, 1129,1130, 1 132, 1134-36

Russo-Finnish War, 665-66, 668-69,675,676,682, 683

Russo-Japanese neutrality pact, 876-77Rust, Bernhard, 127, 248-49Ruthenia, 440, 443, 449-50Rzhev, 868

S.A. (Sturmabteilung, storm troopers orBrownshirts), 3, 4-5, 143, 146—48, 154, 159-60, 167, 169, 176,183, 190, 191, 192, 194, 195, 199,202fn., 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; Hit-ler’s suppression of, 215, 217,219-26; role in Austrian An-schluss, 327, 351Saalfelden, 529fn.

Saar, 283, 286, 568, 569, 738, 1095, 1101Saarbruecken, 291 fn., 435Sachsenhausen, 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 Tarbe de, 506

St.-Lo, 1076

St.-Omer, 728, 731

St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna, 19, 338,350

St. Wolfgang, 509Sakhalin, 809Salerno, 1002Salonika, 823

1235

Salzburg, 8, 21fn., 325, 330, 333, 337,348, 350, 509, 546, 552, 910-11,928,995

Sammler, Rudolf, 1064/rc.

San river, 541,626, 629, 631Sandomierz, 626Sanger, Margaret, 241San Remo, 440Santayana, George, 100Sarajevo, 826Sardinia, 1003Sas, Col. J.G., 694,715-16Saturday, Hitler’s “surprise day,” 284,300fn.

Sauckel, Fritz, 948fn., 951, 1142-43Sauerbruch, Dr. Ferdinand, 251, 979fn.,1025,1029Saxony, 65, 363Scapa Flow, 646

Schacht, Dr. Hjalmar H. G., 112, 145—46, 167, 189-90, 229, 351-52,427, 918/n., 1073-74, 1115,

1142-43; plans for war economy,259-61, 275, 285fn.; out of wareconomy post, 310-11, 320; inanti-Hitler conspiracy, 373, 405,411-13, 517, 558, 560, 650, 659,907

“Schaemmel, Major,” 653Scharnhorst, Gen. Gerhard JohannDavid von, 1028, 1081Scharnhorst (Ger. battle cruiser), 281,711,914

Schaub, Julius, 279, 1113Schaumburg-Lippe, Prince, 519fn.Scheidemann, Philipp, 34fn., 51, 52, 57,60

Scheidt, Hans-Wilhelm, 678Scheliha. Franz, 1 043/m.

Schellenberg, Gen. Walter, 520fn., 653—55, 783-84, 785, 787/n„ 788, 789,791,991/n., 1066, 1114Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von,102

Scheringer, Lieutenant, 139-42Scheubner-Richter, Max Erwin von, 67,69.70-74, 118

Schicklgruber, Alois, 6, 7, I 123Schicklgruber, Maria Anna, 7Schiller. Johann Christoph Friedrichvon,97,243

Schirach, Baldur von, 149, 252-53, 275.348jn., 1142-43

1236

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Schkopau, 282

Schlabrendorff, Fabian von, 373, 374,380/n., 558, 648, 905, 1014/n„1019, 1020-21, 1022/n., 1024,1026, 1029, 1049, 1071-72,

1073/n., 1074Schlageter, Leo, 967/n.

Schleicher, Gen. Kurt von, 3, 56fn., 137,150-55, 159-67, 169-70, 172-75,182, 183, 216; background, ISO-52; his chancellorship, 175-82,229; purge victim, 222, 224, 320,414

Schleswig, 58, 94, 1134Schleswig-Holstein, 516Schlieffen plan, 717Schmid, Dr. Willi, 223, 224fn.

Schmidt, Gen. Arthur, 931Schmidt, Charlotte (Frau von Brau-chitsch), 319

Schmidt, Dr. Guido, 325, 326fn., 328,329-30, 344fn.

Schmidt, Hans, 316, 317, 354Schmidt, Dr. Paul, 293, 301, 408, 409,436fn., 437, 441/«„ 538, 551,555, 556, 580-82, 606-7, 613-14,639, 684/n„ 686, 688-89, 744,804, 805, 807, 814, 815, 834,848—49, 874; on Hitler-Chamber-lain negotiations, 385, 386, 392,394, 395, 397, 398, 399fn., 401,415, 419, 549; anti-Hitler con-spirator, 406; at Hitler-Hachameeting, 445, 447; at Hitler-Ducemeetings, 816, 996, 1055-56; atHitler-Matsuoka meeting, 876;on Hitler’s declaring war on U.S.,896

Schmidt, Theresa, 14Schmidt, Willi, 223-24Schmidthuber, Herr, 1024Schmitt, Dr. Karl, 206, 261Schmundt, Gen. Rudolf, 357, 360, 378,484, 485, 1019, 1022, 1054/n.Schneidhuber, Obergruppenfuehrer, 221,222

Schniewind, Adm. Otto, 484, 766Schnitzler, Arthur, 241Schnitzler, Georg von, 144, 190Schnurre, 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/n.Schoenerer, Georg Ritter von, 23Schoenfeld, Dr. Hans, 1017, 1018Schoemer, Field Marshal Ferdinand,1113, 1121, 1129Scholl, Hans, 1022-23Scholl, Sophie, 1022-23Schopenhauer, Arthur, 103Schrader, Col. Werner, 1027Schreiber, Capt. Richard, 676, 702Schroeder, Baron Kurt von, 144, 178Schulenburg, Herr von, 228Schulenburg, Count Friedrich Wernervon der, 376, 476-77, 481-82,490-94, 496, 500, 501, 505, 513,514, 520, 521/n., 522-28, 540/n.,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/n.

Schulung, 290, 291Schultz, Dr. Walther, 74Schulze-Boysen, Harold, 1043/n.Schuschnigg, Kurt von, 180, 280, 295-96, 351, 385, 456, 457, 578-79;Anschluss, 323-44, 345fn., 346-52; meets with Hitler, 325-30;appeals to Mussolini, 334-35,339, 343; resigns, 341; arrested,352; in concentration camp, 353,918/n., 1074, 1115

Schuschnigg, Vera (Countess Czernin),352

Schutzbar, Baroness Margot von, 355Schutzstaffel, see S.S.

Schwaegermann, Guenther, 1136Schwaerzel, Helene, 1072Schwarz, Franz Xavier, 133Schwerin von Krosigk, Count Lutz, 164,260, 434, 943, 1107, 1109, 1110,1126

Science, Education and Popular Culture,Reich Ministry of, 248^49Scotland, 675, 682, 834,913S.D. (Sicherheitsdienst, S.S. SecurityService), 271, 273-74, 315, 430,518-19, 520/n., 654, 782/n„ 783,785, 952, 953, 955, 956, 958, 960,963fn., 965, 991-93, 1060-61,1063, 1066, 1074-75, 1077

“Sea Lion,” code name for invasion ofBritain, 753

Sebekovsky, Doctor, 383Second Reich, see Germany, SecondReich

Secret Cabinet Council (GeheimerKabinettsrat), 275, 319/n.Security Service, see S.D.

Sedan, 718,723,724

Seeckt, Gen. Hans von, 34, 55fn., 60,64-65, 66, 71, 139, 142, 150, 212,458,459,494

Seeds, Sir William, 477/n., 480, 504/n.,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 Suner, Ramon, 787,788, 814Seven Years’ War, 1108,1110Severn river, 763Sevez, Gen. Francois, 1139Seyss-Inquart, Dr. Arthur, 296, 328,331-33, 337-42, 347, 441, 442,661,677, 1126, 1143SHAEF, 1105, 1106Shakespeare, William, 243Shaposhnikov, Gen. Boris M., 504Shaw, George Bernard, 243, 784Shawcross, Sir Harley, 961Sherwood, Robert E., 877/n.

Shetland Is., 673Shkvarzev, Alexander, 617Shulman, Milton, 319/n., 732/n., 757/n.Siberia, 833, 840, 885, 886,932Sibibor, 967

Sicily, 912,996, 999, 1002/n.

Sidi Barrani, 817Sidor, Karol, 440—41Siegfried Line, 1086,1089Siemens, electrical company, 145Sievers, Wolfram, 980-81,982Siewert, Lt. Col. Curt, 591Silesia, 212, 363, 463, 497, 518, 575,626, 797, 944, 1096, 1097, 1098Silex, Karl, 245Silvertown, Eng., 780Simon, Sir John, 283, 288, 410, 453, 837Simovid, Gen. DuSan, 823, 826

1237

Simpson, Gen. William H., 1105Simpson, Mrs., see Windsor, Duchess ofSinclair, Upton, 241

Singapore, 873, 874, 876, 877, 883, 885,893

Sirovy, Gen. Jan, 391, 420,421Six, Dr. Franz, 782-83Skagerrak, 695,702

Skorzeny, Otto, 519, 1003-4, 1066,1068-69, 1090/n., 1092Skubl, Doctor, 337,338slave labor, 111, 484-85, 497, 940, 946-51, 954, 966, 968, 975, 979, 1034Slavs, 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, 46fn.

Smith, Gen. Walter Bedell, 1106, 1138-39

Smolensk, 853, 856, 859, 1006, 1014,1019, 1022, 1052Snow, C. P., 784

Social Democrats; Austrian, 18, 22, 42,325/n., 334, 337fn., 350Social Democrats, (Socialists), German,31 fn., 32-34, 37, 40, 55 96fn.,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 dis-solved, 201Socialists, Left, 52Soissons, 1039Sola airfield, Norway, 702Sola river, Poland, 971“Soldiers’ Councils,” 34, 54Solf, 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

1238

Soviet Union, 54, 57, 150, 209, 232, 280,282, 299, 306, 307, 353, 455, 470,550/n., 711/n., 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 rela-tions 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 withBritain 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 onCzechosl., Poland, 404, 409, 419,427, 465/n., 466, 478, 481, 489;rapprochement with Germany,talks on trade and Poland, 476-77, 480-82, 489-96, 500-3, 505-7, 508fn„ 510-12, 553, 556, 560,617, 620-22, 626-31, 639-41,645, 657, 666-70, 674, 687,695fn., 747, 794-96, 800-5,

808-10, 839-40, 842, 844 (seealso Nazi-Soviet Pact); andBaltic States, 495, 501, 502, 515,521, 534, 539, 541, 542, 544,630-32, 657, 665-66, 668, 683,747, 793-94, 797, 801; relationswith Japan, 521, 522, 876-77,878, 886, 890-92, 895; invasionof Poland, 626-32, 641; waragainst 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/m,1018, 1139; German occupationof, 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

Soviet Union continued

declares war on, 851; see alsoRussian Air Force; Russian ArmySpa, Germany, 54, 59, 153, 1092Spaak, Paul-Henri, 672, 713-14Spain, 281; civil war, 297-301, 304, 307,373, 419, 566, 814; and WorldWar II, 529, 642-43, 785-89,791, 792, 814, 817, 819, 850, 911Spandau, 1066

Spartacists, 52, 54-55; see also Com-munists in Germany

Special Court (Sondergericht), 239, 269,270

Speer, Albert, 947fn., 1087, 1097, 1098,1103-4, 1111/n., 1117-18, 1126,1142-43

Speidel, Gen. Hans, 1031-32, 1037,1038, 1039, 1040, 1041, 1042,1047, 1075, 1076-77, 1079,

1085/n., 1086, 1088Spender, Stephen, 784Spengler, Oswald, 61, 208Sperrle, Field Marshal Hugo, 325,155fn., 775 .

Spiller, Captain, 703,704Spital, 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, 779-80Spree river, 1137

S.S. (Schutzstaffel), Blackshirts, 143—45, 160, 202fn., 205, 255, 263,269, 276, 301, 348/n., 352, 369,372, 444, 461-62, 1023, 1055,1114, 1121, 1122, 1126, 1127,1129, 1136-37, 1141; organiza-tion of, 120-21, 148, 270, 273;control police, 191, 274; conflictwith Army, 214, 226, 315, 317,355, 660, 1024; role in Roehmpurge, 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 alsoconcentration camps; and seenames of individual occupiedcountries)', and anti-Hitler plot-ters, 374, 670, 1031, 1034, 1035,

S.S. (Schutzstaffel), continued

1057, 1060-61, 1063-66, 1068,1073-75, 1077; in Czechoslo-vakia, 388, 449, 991; Polishborder “incident,” 518-19, 595,599; Venlo incident, 652-55; andBritain occupation plan, 782-85;rescues Mussolini, 1003-4; ar-rests Goering, 1118Security Service, see S.D.

Standarte 89, 279Waffen S.S., 976, 1015, 1121Waffen S.S. units:

1st S.S. Armored (Panzer) Corps,1005, 1095/n.

1st S.S. Panzer Div., 1095/rc.

Sixth S.S. Panzer Army, 1095/n.

12th S.S. Panzer Div., 1038

Bodyguards (Leibstandarte), 553,

664, 905, 1005, 1040/n., 1049,1051

Das Reich Div., 993

Panzer Lehr Div., 1038Staatspartei, see Democratic PartyStachiewicz, General, 536, 537Stadelheim prison, Munich, 221, 222fn.Stahlecker, Franz, 962Stahlhelm, 154, 157, 191Stalin, Joseph, 276, 427, 476-80, 496,513, 514-15, 522, 526, 657, 689,821, 839, 845, 852fn., 855, 939,1029; German pact, trade nego-tiations, 526-28, 531, 535fn.,540, 538-44, 549, 562, 630-32,

665, 667-70, 799, 800, 803,804/n„ 805, 809-10, 839-44;warned by West of German at-tack, 544/n., 796, 843; invasionof Poland, 628-32; operations inBaltic and Balkan states, 665,793-95, 797; suspicious of Brit-ish, 835, 837-38; takes over asPrime Min., 841; signs neutralitypact with Japan, 876; war leader-ship, 909, 917, 995, 996, 1033,1097; and German peace offers,1011, 1012, 1017/n., 1033, 1135

Stalingrad, 830, 857, 859, 861, 865, 909,911, 914-19, 922, 924, 925-34,975, 996, 1006, 1014-15, 1022,1029, 1125Stark, Johannes, 250

1239

Statistical Year Book, 257Stauffenberg, Count Berthold von, 1047,

1048, 1072

Stauffenberg, Lt. Col. Klaus PhilipSchenk, Count von, 1027-31,1033-36, 1042-55, 1057-61,

1064-65,1067-71, 1072, 1075Stauffenberg, Countess Nina von, 1029Stauning, Thorvald, 698Stavanger, 677, 681, 696, 702, 707, 721Stavelot, 1092Stefanie, 15

Stein, Lt. Walter, 662fn.

Steiner, Gen. Felix, 1112-13, 1120Steinhardt, Laurence, 521 fn., 544/n., 843Stempfle, Father Bernhard, 85, 133, 223Sternberg, 43

Stevens, Maj. R. H., 653-55, 692Steyr, 11, 14

Stieff, Gen: Hemuth, 1020, 1026, 1030,

1049, 1070-71, 1075

Stockholm, 695, 843, 1017, 1024, 1026,1122

Stockmar, Baron Christian Friedrichvon, 373

Stohrer, Eberhard von, 785-86storm troopers, see S. A.

Storting (Norw. Parliament), 703Stotzingen, Baroness, 222Strang, William, 391, 495-96, 503/n.,523, 533Strasbourg, 983

Strasbourg, University of, 980-83Strasser, Gregor, 118, 122-29, 132, 143,144, 146-49, 152, 154-55, 157,159, 167, 171, 173, 174, 176-78,180,216,222,224,691Strasser, Otto, 123, 126, 127, 147,224Strauss, Gen. Adolf, 762Strauss, Richard, 242Streck, Major, 74

Streicher, Julius, 26, 44-45, 50, 73-74,106, 118,253, 1142-43“Strength through Joy” (Kraft durchFreude) movement, 254, 265-66Stresa Conference, 285, 288, 289, 296Stresemann, Gustav, 56, 64, 66, 112, 136,201,212

Stroelin, Dr. Karl, 1031, 1032Strones, 7

Stroop, Juergen, 975-78Stuckart, Dr. Wilhelm, 347

1240

Studie England (naval invasion plan),759

Stuelpnagel, Gen. Karl Heinrich von,378, 379, 591, 644, 957, 1031,1032, 1047, 1059, 1060, 1074-77Stuka (Ger. plane), 720, 723, 725, 776Stumme, General, 920Stumpff, Gen. Hans-Juergen, 775Sturmabteilung, see S.A.

Stuttgart, 1031Styria, 350

Sudeten Free Corps, 387, 388Sudetenland, 358-61, 363, 365, 381/n.,

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 de-signs on, 41, 84, 333, 359; neverpart of Germany, 358, 385fn.;Nazi agitation in, 359-60, 363,

383- 84, 387-88; Runciman mis-sion on, 376—77, 386—88; cessiondemanded by Britain, France,389, 390, 402, 416-17; Hitler’s“last territorial claim,” 397, 429,454

Suez Canal, 757, 768, 813, 817, 827,828, 829,913Sukhinichi, 869Sundlo, Col. Konrad, 676, 701Susloparov, Gen. Ivan, 1139swastika, 43, 44, 240

Sweden, 400, 561, 674, 675, 681, 682,696, 704/n., 711/n., 747, 750,808, 810, 811, 1072

Switzerland, 324, 359, 531, 563, 590,648^19, 691, 896, 1017, 1018,1024, 1025, 1033, 1072Sword, Colonel, 466fn.synthetics, 282, 301, 1098Syria, 473, 813

Tallinn, 630, 794Tannenberg, 228, 530, 562, 760Tansill, Charles C., 303fn.Taranto, 818fn.

Tass, 525, 844

Tauroggen, Convention of, 1015Taylor, Gen. Maxwell D., 1002fn.

Taylor, Telford, 32fn., 31%fn., 732/n.,738

Teddy’s Perspiration Powder, 19Tegernsee, 166, 221, 1129/n.

Teleki, Count Paul, 507-8Televaag, 993Tempelhof Field, 202Terboven, Josef, 220, 709/n.

Teriberka, 667Terneuzen, 728Tesch, Bruno, 972Tesch & Stabenow, 972Teschen, 377, 388,421, 458Teutonic Knights, 83, 255Texas (U.S. battleship), 880Thadden, Elisabeth von, 1025Thaelmann, Ernst, 157-59Thailand, 886, 892Thames river, 763, 768Theresienstadt, 991Thiele, Gen. Fritz, 1057, 1059, 1072Thirty Years’ War, 91-92Thoma, Gen. Wilhelm Ritter von, 920Thomas, Gen. Georg, 259, 413/n., 488-89, 497, 517-18, 530, 559-60,644, 649, 659, 667/n., 693, 799Thompson, Dorothy, 1016Thomsen, Hans, 471/n„ 684-85, 686fn.,747-50, 894/rc., 896-97Thorkelson, Congressman, 748“Thousand-Year Reich,” 5, 230, 916,1139

Thuengen, General Freiherr von, 1035,1061, 1073

Thuringia, 65, 148, 173, 176, 375Thyssen, Fritz, 134, 144, 145, 146, 176,190, 206,261,263

Tiergarten, Berlin, 5, 1065, 1102/n„1117, 1118, 1120, 1129, 1133Tilburg, 722

Timoshenko, Marshal Semen K., 854,856-57,864

Tippelskirch, Werner von, 427, 802, 803,839,868

Tirpitz, Grand Adm. Alfred von, 288,373,1043/n.

Tirpitz (Ger. battleship),467Tiso, Monsignor, 440, 441, 442Tobruk, 827, 911Tocqueville, Alexis de, 103Todt, Doctor, 378, 515fn.

Togo, Shigenori, 886-87, 889, 891,893fn.

Tojo, Gen. Hideki, 885Tokyo, 877, 878Tolischus, Otto D., 101/m.

Tomaschek, Rudolphe, 250Topf, I. A., & Sons, 971Torgau, 1106

Torgler, Ernst, 170, 193-94Toscanini, Arturo, 333Total War (Ludendorff), 259Toulon, 740, 821,924-25Toussaint, Col. Rudolf, 363,401Toynbee, Arnold, 504/m., 632fn.

Toyoda, Admiral, 878/m., 884, 885trade 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,” 462Transport Ministry, 497Trans-Siberian Railway, 799/m., 878Transylvania, 800Traunstein, 34

Treblinka, 272, 967, 968-69, 975, 977,978

Treitschke, Heinrich von, 95,97,99Tresckow, Maj. Gen. Henning von, 905,1018-19, 1020-21, 1022, 1026,1029, 1035, 1042-43, 1049, 1052,1074

Tresckow, Erika von, 1035Trevor-Roper, H. R., 1111, 1129/m.,1131/m.

Trier, 291 fn., 1092Trieste, 1005

Tripartite (Three-Power) Pact, 803, 805,808, 823, 871, 872, 873, 874, 875,884, 885, 889, 890, 894, 900Tripoli, 821, 914, 922Tripolitania, 827Tromso, 708,709

Trondheim, 681, 696, 701, 707, 708, 710,721,752

Troost, Professor, 156Trotha, Admiral Adolf von, 253Trott zu Solz Adam von, 558, 1018,1047, 1072/n.

Truppenamt, 62,285fn.

Tsaritsyn, 917fn.

Tschirschky, Baron, 348fn.

Tuebingen, University of, 1031-32Tuka, Dr. Vojtech, 359,439-40,449Tula, 863, 864

1241

Tunisia, 740, 746, 924, 925, 995, 996,1029

Turin, 740/m., 995

Turkey, 530, 805, 806, 808, 809, 813,1026

Turkish Straits, 804, 807-10Tyrol, 337fn., 350, 353, 1005, 1072,1074

U-30 (Ger. submarine), 622,637-38[7-47, 646U-l 10, 638fn.

U-253, 880

U-boats, are under Navy, GermanUdet, Gen. Ernst, 903fn.

Ukraine, 627, 628, 632, 798, 811, 822,832, 851, 853, 856-57, 858, 859,916, 919, 939, 959, 961, 965,1001,1048/m.

Ullstein, House of, 245, 246Ulm,139—42,1031Umberto, Crown Prince of Italy, 999Union of Revolutionary National So-cialists, 147—48United Press, 802

United States, 117, 266, 684/m., 685, 688,735, 737, 750, 753, 768, 802,854/n., 923-24, 1095/n., 1099;war aid to Britain, France, 367,400, 521/m., 605/m., 658, 666,685, 771, 815/m., 818, 874, 879-84, 898; anti-Hitler conspirators’contact with, 373, 1042; peaceefforts of, 400, 469-75, 683;sentiment against Nazi excesses,433; isolationist and pro-Germaninfluence in, 436/m.; possibleentry into war, 508/m., 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, sabotagein, 684-85, 747-50, 871, 872;German preparations for warwith, 853, 873, 879, 887, 888-91;relations with U.S.S.R., 842—43,1011, 1033, 1098; Hitler’s igno-rance about, 871, 875/m.; bellig-erent action in Atlantic, 880-83;takes over Iceland for British,

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

1242

United States continued

881; Japanese negotiations, waron 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, 750fn„ 769fn.,

854fn., 887, 954—55; in Ardennes,1092, 1093, 1095; in Austria,918fn., 1072, 1074; in France,1033, 1038, 1076, 1080, 1090; inGermany, 1089, 1102, 1105-7,1109, 1112, 1115, 1141; in Italy,956, 1002; in N. Africa, 1029;Malmedy massacre, 954, 1095/n.U.S. Army, Air Force, 1008-9, 1025fn.,1040, 1071, 1100U.S. Army units:

Armies:

First, 1086, 1088, 1089, 1090,1092-93,1105

Third, 1076, 1085, 1086, 1089,1090, 1093, 1101, 1107Fifth, 1002

Seventh, 983, 1086, 1101, 1107Ninth, 1088, 1089, 1105Divisions:

2nd Armored, 10934th Infantry, 10859th Armored, 110169th Infantry, 1106101st Airborne, 1093U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve, 827/n.

U.S. Navy, 872, 873, 877fn., 879, 880-83, 887, 892, 895, 898, 901, 913U.S. Office of Strategic Services, 1018U.S. State Department, 295, 493fn.,555/n., 684, 842-43, 895fn., 896-97

U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, 943U.S. War Council, 887United States of Europe, 1032United Steel Works, 144, 190Untermenschen, 937Ural Mts., 942Urbays, Juozas, 461Urfahr, 14

USCHLA (Untersuchung-und-Schlich-tungs-Ausschuss, Committee forInvestigation and Settlement),122,221

Uruguay, 669-70U.S.S.R., see Soviet UnionUtrecht, 721

Uxkull-Gyllenbrand, Countess von, 1028

V-bombs (V-l, V-2), 1009/n., 1037,1040, 1098-99

Vachell, Group Captain, 466fn.

Vaernes, 701Valenciennes, 728

“Valkyrie,” 1033-35, 1046, 1054, 1057,1058, 1060

Vansittart, Sir Robert, 360, 380Vatican, 201, 234, 648-49, 693, 716,719, 750, 995, 999, 1023/n.,1024

Venice, 217, 845, 1005Venlo, 519/n., 653-55Ventotene, 1003Verdun, 726, 1075, 1077, 1086Vermehren, Erich, 1026Vermeil, Edmond, 105Vernichtungslager (exterminationcamps), 664-65, 967-74Verona, 509, 845fn., 1005Versailles Treaty, 32, 34, 41, 57-60, 63,137, 142, 152-53, 186-87, 209,211, 212, 231, 351 fn., 458, 462,473, 475, 604, 615/n„ 635, 641;Hitler’s repudiation of, 281-86,289,299,372Vian, Capt. Philip, 679Vichy, 923, 924

Victor Emmanuel III, King of Italy, 353,554/n., 996-99, 1002/n„ 1003^1004/n., 1005/n.

Victoria, Queen of England, 373Viebahn, Gen. Max von, 335Vienna, 8, 9, 132, 275, 304, 322-23,325fn., 340-41, 343, 349-53,800-1, 823, 1004; Hitler’s youth■n, 15—28, 31, 37; Dollfuss mur-der in, 279-80; Hitler enters afterAnschluss, 347-48; anti-Nazicoup plans for, 1034, 1064; oc-cupied by Red Army, 1106, 1107Vilna, 534, 967Vinnitsa, 916, 919Vire river, 1038Vishinsky, Andrei, 794, 1070

Vistula river, 497, 532, 541, 626, 629,631, 663, 1033, 1085, 1090, 1096,1097

Vladivostok, 876, 877, 878, 883, 886Voegler, Albert, 144, 190Voelkischer Beobachler, 46, 49, 66, 85,109, 118, 121, 122, 129, 139, 140,149, 154, 158, 208, 220, 246, 320,343, 564, 638, 642, 653, 658fn.Voelkisch movement, 123Vogt, General, 253

Volga river, 811, 859, 860, 909, 914,916-17, 918, 919, 926, 939, 942,1006

Volksdeutsche, 546, 630, 663-64, 665Volksgericht, see People’s CourtVolkssturm, 1123, 1130Volkswagen, 266-67Vologda, 870

Vormann, General von, 550fn.

Voronezh, 915

Voroshilov, Marshal Kliment E., 503,504,533-38,541-42, 854Voss, Admiral, 1121Vossische Zeitung, 245Vyazma, 859Vyborg, 1085

Wachenfeld, see under BerchtesgadenWagner, Adolf, 221, 230Wagner, Cosima, 105Wagner, Gen. Eduard, 660-61, 1030,1049, 1058, 1065, 1074Wagner, Eva, 105Wagner, Friedelind, 279Wagner, Richard, 15,76, 97, 101-5Wagner, Siegfried, 101-2Wagner, Walter, 1123Wagner, Winifred, 101, 131, 132Wahnfried, 101-2, 105Waldeck, Prince, 984fn.

“Waldsee,” 969Waldtrudering, 121Waldviertel, 7Wales, 763

Wallenberg, Jakob, 1017, 1018, 1026Wallenberg, Marcus, 1017Wanderer, The (Goebbels), 124Wangenheim, Lieutenant von, 313-14Wannsee, 965, 1047, 1048

1243

War, Ministry of, 285fn., 318war debts, see reparationsWar veterans: Germans, 38, 39, 42, 72,154, 214; French, 281Warburg, Professor, 250Warburton-Lee, Capt. B.A.W.. 707Warlimont, Col. Walter, 758, 797, 799Warsaw, 355, 504, 550/m, 597, 600, 626,627, 629, 631, 639, 640, 769, 937,944, 968, 973-79, 1085, 1097Warspite (Br. battleship), 707Wasp (U.S. carrier), 213Wasserman, Jakob, 241Wavell, Gen. Sir Archibald, 818/n.Wavre, 724Webb, Beatrice, 784Weber, Christian, 49, 221, 1121Wecke, Major, 183Wednesday Club, 373“Week of the Broken' Glass,” 430-35Wehrle, Father Flerman, 1060/n.Wehrmacht, Hitler’s restoration of, 190,285fn.; anti-Nazi plotters’ planfor, 1035, 1054, 1058, 1065,1069

Wehrpolitische Amt of the S.A., 120Wehrwirtschaft (war economy), 259Weidling, General, 1130Weimar, 56, 57, 100, 173Weimar Republic, see Germany, Re-public of

Weinbacher, Karl, 972Weissler, Doctor, 238Weissmann, Doctor, 1071Weizmann, Chaim, 784Weizsaecker, Baron Ernst von, 462, 470-71, 510/n., 546/n., 550/m, 553,554, 561, 637-38, 643, 652,665fn., 685fn., 686, 687, 884; andanti-Hitler plot, 381-82, 591,648-49, 715, 1023; in negotia-tions on Czechosl., 360, 364, 415,421, 437, 444, 451-53; in Rus-sian negotiations, 479-80, 491—93, 495, 500, 501, 505, 513, 521,528, 543fn., 667; in peace nego-tiations on Polish crisis, 587, 588,591, 595fn., 599, 605, 617Welczeck, Count Johannes von, 430, 502Welke, Ehm, 246

Welles, Sumner, 521/n., 683, 685-88,689-90, 843Wells, H. G., 241,784

1244

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

Wells, Otto, 198-99Wenck, General, 1120-21, 1129, 1130Wendt, Lieutenant, 139-42“Werewolf,” 916

Weseruebung (“Weser Exercise”), 673-712

Wessel, Horst, 147West, Rebecca, 784Westarp, Count von, 56Westphal, Gen. Siegfried, 1001Westphalia, 220; Peace of, 91-92, 644West Prussia, 944, 1097West Wall, 295, 367, 368, 370, 378, 469,486, 492, 498, 510, 515/m, 516,590, 725

Weygand, Gen. Maxime, 502, 728, 730,737, 738,744-46, 923Wheeler-Bennett, John W., 31 fn., 55fn.,225fn., 380fn., 389fn., 390/m,403

White, Case, 466-69, 488, 497, 550fn.,556, 589, 597, 600fn.

White Book of the Purge, The, 223White Rose Letters, 1022-23White Russia, 627, 628, 798, 811, 832,962

White Sea, 798

Whitworth, Vice-Adm. W. J., 707Widerstand (Resistance), 373Wiechert, Ernst, 242Wiegand, Karl von, 748Wiessee, 217, 221, 314Wietersheim, Gen. Gustav von, 369-70Wildpark-Werder, 1115“Wilfred,” 696

Wilhelm I, King of Prussia and Kaiserof 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/n., 754/m, 871, 907,1025, 1139Wilhelm, Prince, 907Wilhelmina, Queen of the Netherlands,561,640, 652,721,723,729Wilhelmshaven, 467, 752Willstaetter, Richard, 250Wilmot, Chester, 1041/mWilson, Sir Horace, 382, 391, 396, 397,398-99, 401, 402, 407, 416-17,418,572,583,585/m

Wilson, Hugh R., 360, 433fn.

Wilson, Woodrow, 52, 57, 898Windau, 539

“Winds” message to Nomura, 886Windsor, Duchess of (Mrs. Simpson),298,785,787,788,789,792Windsor, Duke of (Edward VIII), 298,596/m, 751 fn., 783, 785-92Winkelmann, Gen. H. G., 723Winterhilfe, 264, 643, 779Wisconsin, University of, 1043/mWittelsbach monarchy, 33, 64, 67, 70Wittenberg, 237

Witzleben, Field Marshal Erwin von,284, 318-19, 375, 405, 407-8,411,412,413,422, 426,530, 558-59, 670, 755/m, 906, 1030, 1035,1036, 1048, 1054, 1058, 1064-65,1070-71, 1075, 1079Wlodawa, 626

Woermann, Dr. Ernst, 429, 897/mWolf, Otto, 144Wolfers, Alfred, 274Wolfsschanze (Wolfs Lair), 849, 870,881, 882, 919, 1000/m, 1046^1048-49Wolzek, 968Woods, Sam E. 842-43Woolff, Virginia, 784Woolwich Arsenal, 780World Jewish Congress, 978World War I, 108, 282, 283, 544, 597-98, 630, 635, 637, 658, 673, 717,727, 754fn., 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’smistakes in, 485, 486, 546, 645Wrench, John Evelyn, 288fn.Wuensdorf, 1057Wuerttemberg, 131, 1028

Yellow, Case, 682, 710, 717, 718, 719Yorck von Wartenburg, Count Peter,1015, 1016, 1028, 1070-71Young, Desmond, 1079/mYoung Plan, 136, 145,943

Index

1245

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, 1129Zaporozhe, 1001, 1007Zech-Burkersroda, Count Julius von, 713Zehlendorf, 715

Zeitzler, Gen. Kurt, 360-61, 915, 918,919, 925-27, 928, 933Zeller, Eberhard, 1046/n., 1050/n.Zeughaus, Berlin, 1021, 1022/n.

Zhdanov, Andrei, 496, 794Zhukov, Gen. Georgi, 864-65, 866, 869,891, 1097, 1106, 1135/n.Zichenau, 944

Ziegenberg, 1089, 1091, 1108Ziegler, Adolf, 133/n., 244Ziereis, Franz, 967fn.

Zoellner, Doctor, 238, 239Zola, Emile, 241, 736Zossen, 518, 560, 658, 670, 694, 1058,1065

Z Plan, 487, 622Zurich, 563, 1018Zweig, Arnold, 241Zweig, Stefan, 24, 241Zwoelf-Uhr Blatt, 564Zyklon B, 970, 972

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

For thirty-five years William L. Shirer has been a distinguished foreigncorrespondent, news commentator and historian of the contemporaryworld. He reported much of the rise of the Nazis from Berlin for theUniversal News Service and for CBS, and he covered their fall as a warcorrespondent. Besides his Berlin Diary, published in 1941, he has writtentwo other books on European politics, one on Scandinavia, and threenovels. He was born in Chicago and is a graduate of Coe College in Iowa.At present he divides his time between New York City, a country home inTorrington, Connecticut, and lecturing. The research for this book beganin 1925, when Mr. Shirer first went to Germany, and the writing hastaken five and a half years.

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