The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (117 page)

“On my return to the embassy,” Lipski later related, “I found myself unable to communicate with Warsaw, as the Germans had cut my telephone.”

The questions of Weizsaecker and Ribbentrop as to the ambassador’s status as a negotiator were purely formal, with an eye, no doubt, for the record, for ever since noon, when Lipski’s communication had been received by telegram from Warsaw, the Germans had known that he was not coming, as they had demanded, as a plenipotentiary. They had decoded the telegram immediately. A copy had been sent to Goering, who
showed it to Dahlerus and instructed him to take it posthaste to
Henderson
so that the British government, as the Field Marshal later explained on the stand at Nuremberg, “should find out as quickly as possible how intransigent the Polish attitude was.” Goering read to the tribunal the secret instructions to Lipski, which were that the ambassador should refrain from conducting official negotiations “under any circumstances” and should insist that he had “no plenipotentiary powers” and that he was merely empowered to deliver the official communication of his government. In his testimony, the Field Marshal made much of this during his vain effort to convince the Nuremberg judges that Poland had “sabotaged” Hitler’s last bid for peace and that, as he said, he, Goering, did not want war and had done everything he could to prevent it. But Goering’s veracity was only a shade above Ribbentrop’s and one example of this was his further assertion to the court that only after Lipski’s visit to the Wilhelmstrasse at 6:15
P.M
. on August 31 did Hitler decide “on invasion the next day.”

The truth was quite otherwise. In fact, all these scrambling eleventh-hour moves of the weary and exhausted diplomats, and of the overwrought men who directed them on the afternoon and evening of that last day of August 1939, were but a flailing of the air, completely futile, and, in the case of the Germans, entirely and purposely deceptive.

For at half after noon on August 31, before Lord Halifax had urged the Poles to be more accommodating and before Lipski had called on Ribbentrop and before the Germans had made publicly known their “generous” proposals to Poland and before Mussolini had tried to intervene, Adolf Hitler had taken his final decision and issued the decisive order that was to throw the planet into its bloodiest war.

SUPREME COMMANDER OF THE ARMED FORCES
MOST SECRET

Berlin, August 31, 1939

Directive No. 1 for the Conduct of the War

1. Now that all the
political possibilities
of disposing by peaceful means of a situation on the Eastern Frontier which is intolerable for Germany
are
exhausted, I have determined on a
solution by force
.
^*

2.
The attack on Poland
is to be carried out in accordance with the preparations made for Case White, with the alterations which result, where the Army is concerned, from the fact that it has in the meantime almost completed its dispositions.

Allotment of tasks and the operational target remain unchanged.

Date of attack: September 1, 1939.

Time of attack: 4:45
A.M
. [Inserted in red pencil.]

This timing also applies to the operation at Gdynia, Bay of Danzig and the Dirschau Bridge.

3. In the
West
it is important that the responsibility for the opening of hostilities should rest squarely on England and France. For the time being insignificant frontier violations should be met by purely local action.

The neutrality of Holland,
Belgium
,
Luxembourg
and
Switzerland
, to which we have given assurances, must be scrupulously observed.

On land
, the German Western Frontier is not to be crossed without my express permission.

At sea
, the same applies for all warlike actions or actions which could be regarded as such.
^*

4.
If Britain and France open hostilities
against Germany, it is the task of the Wehrmacht formations operating in the West to conserve their forces as much as possible and thus maintain the conditions for a victorious conclusion of the operations against Poland. Within these limits enemy forces and their military-economic resources are to be damaged as much as possible. Orders to go over to the attack I reserve, in any case, to myself.

The Army will hold the
West Wall
and make preparations to prevent its being outflanked in the north through violation of Belgian or Dutch territory by the Western powers …

The Navy will carry on warfare against merchant shipping, directed mainly at England … The Air Force is, in the first place, to prevent the French and British Air Forces from attacking the German Army and the German
Lebensraum
.

In conducting the war against England, preparations are to be made for the use of the Luftwaffe in disrupting British supplies by sea, the armaments industry, and the transport of troops to France. A favorable opportunity is to be taken for an effective attack on massed British naval units, especially against battleships and aircraft carriers. Attacks against London are reserved for my decision.

Preparations are to be made for attacks against the British mainland, bearing in mind that partial success with insufficient forces is in all circumstances to be avoided.

A
DOLF
H
ITLER
⁷⁴

Shortly after noon on August 31, then, Hitler formally and in writing directed the attack on Poland to begin at dawn the next day. As his first war directive indicates, he was still not quite sure what Britain and France would do. He would refrain from attacking them first. If they took hostile action, he was prepared to meet it. Perhaps, as
Halder
had indicated in his diary entry of August 28, the British would go through the motions of honoring their obligation to Poland and “wage a sham war.” If so, the Fuehrer would not take it “amiss.”

Probably the Nazi dictator made his fateful decision a little earlier than
12:30
P.M
. on the last day of August. At 6:40
P.M
. on the previous day Halder jotted in his diary a communication from Lieutenant Colonel Curt Siewert, adjutant of General von Brauchitsch: “Make all preparations so that attack can begin at 4:30
A.M
. on September 1. Should negotiations in London require postponement, then September 2. In that case we shall be notified before 3
P.M
. tomorrow…. Fuehrer: either September 1 or 2. All off after September 2.” Because of the autumn rains, the attack had to begin at once or be called off altogether.

Very early on the morning of August 31, while Hitler still claimed he was waiting for the Polish emissary, the German Army received its orders. At 6:30
A.M
. Halder jotted down: “Word from the Reich Chancellery that jump-off order has been given for September 1.” At 11:30: “Gen. Stuelpnagel reports on fixing of time of attack for 0445 [4:45
A.M.
]. Intervention of West said to be unavoidable; in spite of this Fuehrer has decided to attack.” An hour later the formal Directive No. 1 was issued.

There was, I remember, an eerie atmosphere that day in Berlin; everyone seemed to be going around in a daze. At 7:25 in the morning Weizsaecker had telephoned Ulrich von Hassell, one of the “conspirators,” and asked him to hurry over to see him. The State Secretary saw only one last hope: that Henderson should persuade Lipski and his government to send a Polish plenipotentiary at once or at least to announce the intention of dispatching one. Could the unemployed Hassell see his friend Henderson at once and also Goering to this end? Hassell tried. He saw Henderson twice and Goering once. But veteran diplomat and, now, anti-Nazi that he was, he did not seem to realize that events had outstripped such puny efforts. Nor did he grasp the extent of his own confusions and of those of Weizsaecker and all the “good” Germans who, of course, wanted peace—on German terms. For it must have been obvious to them on August 31 that there would be war unless either Hitler or the Poles backed down, and that there was not the slightest possibility of the one or the other capitulating. And yet, as Hassell’s diary entry for this day makes clear, he expected the Poles to back down and to follow the same disastrous route which the Austrians and Czechs had taken.

When Henderson tried to point out to Hassell that the “chief difficulty” was in German methods, in the way they were trying to order the Poles around “like stupid little boys,” Hassell retorted “that the persistent silence of the Poles was also objectionable.” He added that “everything depended on Lipski putting in an appearance—not to ask questions but to declare his willingness to negotiate.” Even to Hassell the Poles, who were threatened with imminent attack on trumped-up Nazi charges, were not supposed to ask questions. And when the former ambassador summed up his “final conclusions” about the outbreak of the war, though he blamed Hitler and Ribbentrop for “knowingly taking the risk of war with the Western Powers,” he also heaped much responsibility on the Poles and even on the British and French. “The Poles, for their part,” he wrote, “with Polish conceit and Slavic aimlessness, confident of English and
French support, had missed every remaining chance of avoiding war.” One can only ask what chance they missed except to surrender to Hitler’s full demands. “The Government in London,” Hassell added, “… gave up the race in the very last days and adopted a kind of devil-may-care attitude. France went through the same stages, only with much more hesitation. Mussolini did all in his power to avoid war.”
⁷⁵
If an educated, cultivated and experienced diplomat such as Hassell could be so woolly in his thinking is it any wonder that it was easy for Hitler to take in the mass of the German people?

There now followed during the waning afternoon of the last day of peace a somewhat grotesque interlude. In view of what is now known about the decisions of the day it might have been thought that the Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe, which was to carry out far-flung air operations against Poland beginning at dawn on the morrow, would be a very busy Field Marshal. On the contrary. Dahlerus took him out to lunch at the Hotel Esplanade and plied him with good food and drink. The cognac was of such high quality that Goering insisted on lugging away two bottles of it when he left. Having got the Field Marshal into the proper humor, Dahlerus proposed that he invite Henderson for a talk. After receiving Hitler’s permission, he did so, inviting him and Forbes to his house for tea at 5
P.M
. Dahlerus (whose presence is not mentioned by Henderson in his
Final Report
or in his book) says that he suggested that Goering, on behalf of Germany, meet a Polish emissary in Holland and that Henderson promised to submit the proposal to London. The British ambassador’s version of the tea talk, given in his
Final Report
, was that Goering “talked for two hours of the iniquities of the Poles and about Herr Hitler’s and his own desire for friendship with England. It was a conversation which led to nowhere … My general impression was that it constituted a final but forlorn effort on his part to detach Britain from the Poles … I augured the worst from the fact that he was in a position at such a moment to give me so much of his time … He could scarcely have afforded at such a moment to spare time in conversation if it did not mean that everything down to the last detail was now ready for action.”

The third and most piquant description of this bizarre tea party was given by Forbes in answer to a questionnaire from Goering’s lawyer at Nuremberg.

Later in the evening Henderson, according to his own account, drafted a dispatch to London saying “that it would be quite useless for me to make any further suggestions since they would now only be outstripped by
events and that the only course remaining to us was to show our inflexible determination to resist force by force.”
^*

Sir Nevile Henderson
’s disillusionment seemed complete. Despite all his strenuous efforts over the years to appease the insatiable Nazi dictator, his mission to Germany, as he called it, had failed. In the fading hours of August’s last day this shallow, debonair Englishman whose personal diplomacy in Berlin had been so disastrously blind tried to face up to the shattering collapse of his vain hopes and abortive plans. And though he would suffer one more typical, incredible lapse the next day, the first day of war, an ancient truth was dawning on him: that there were times and circumstances when, as he at last said, force must be met by force.
^†

   As darkness settled over Europe on the evening of August 31, 1939, and a million and a half German troops began moving forward to their final positions on the Polish border for the jump-off at dawn, all that remained for Hitler to do was to perpetrate some propaganda trickery to prepare the German people for the shock of aggressive war.

The people were in need of the treatment which Hitler, abetted by Goebbels and
Himmler
, had become so expert in applying. I had been about in the streets of Berlin, talking with the ordinary people, and that morning noted in my diary: “Everybody against the war. People talking openly. How can a country go into a major war with a population so dead against it?” Despite all my experience in the Third Reich I asked such a naïve question! Hitler knew the answer very well. Had he not the week before on his Bavarian mountaintop promised the generals that he would “give a propagandist reason for starting the war” and admonished them not to “mind whether it was plausible or not”? “The victor,” he had told them, “will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory.”