August 26 was a turbulent day for many Germans. Holiday guests ended their vacations, but the Reichsbahn trains were already not following the normal schedule because military transports had priority. Whoever wanted to travel home by car would find gas stations closed since gasoline stores had been requisitioned by the Wehrmacht. From newspapers that Saturday evening and radio broadcasts Germans found out that they would only be able to obtain groceries, clothing, coal, and other staples in the future by using coupons or tickets. There was no enthusiasm for the war, as Wolff compared it with his recollections of the First World War. People were serious, and many felt depressed by horrible forebodings.
Most of them were hoping that the Führer would not let it come to war and, as in the past, the crisis would end in a diplomatic victory at the last minute.
Wolff had already given up hope. He knew that on August 22 Hitler announced to many commanding generals in the Hall at the Berghof, that he would begin this unavoidable war because Germany had the best head start in armaments. In addition, he had the greatest following among the German people than any head of state before, but that he could also “at any time be eliminated by a criminal or an idiot.” Due to his agreement with Stalin, the situation for war had become more favorable than it would ever be in the foreseeable future. Wolff was in the know: the date for the attack was postponed, but not cancelled.
This view was confirmed on August 27 at 5:00 p.m. when Himmler, Wolff, and Heydrich met with Goebbels and Bormann at the Reich chancellery. Hitler wanted to give the nervously expectant Reichstag deputies, including the Gau leaders, an explanation to gain some time. They could return home, but he would call them again soon because he was determined “to take care of the question in the east, one way or another.” He would then “go to war using the most brutal and inhumane means.” What he did not say was that no matter what France and England decided, September 1 at 4:45 a.m. was his final and irrevocable date for the invasion of Poland. Since the British would not negotiate this time, he prophesied—as Colonel Nikolaus von Vormann, liaison officer of the army, noted—“that France and England are only going to act as though they want to go to war,” until Poland has been conquered. Many Germans shared that opinion, and Wolff was one of them.
Therefore the Reichstag deputies were alerted by cable for the second time on August 31. When they gathered at the Kroll Opera House on the morning of September 1, Wolff being among them, more than one hundred were missing because they had joined the Wehrmacht. They would not have been allowed to decide anything anyway since their assignment was to celebrate Hitler. On the way from the Reich chancellery to the opera house this time, he had to forego the usual cheering parade. The correspondent for the
Zuricher Zeitung
commented: “a thin row of spectators. Some applause could be heard.” The deputies, however, greeted their Führer wildly, as was their duty. He was wearing a field gray uniform, of which he said in his speech, he would “only take it off after victory—or, I will not survive the end.” The applause was as long and as loud as usual, because Reichstag President Hermann Göring ensured that the
professional cheering crowd would have its normal booming volume, by simply assigning reliable Party comrades to the seats of the men who had been called up by the Wehrmacht.
From this hour on, Wolff awaited his Führer’s call. He had to wait, however, until the official declarations of war by England and France reached the Reich chancellery. For two days, Chief of the Personal Staff of the Reichsführer SS Wolff went from his office to the Reich chancellery, always ready to grab his marching gear. Not until September 3 did Hitler decide “to go to the front,” as he announced in four proclamations to the people, the soldiers of the eastern armies, the western armies, and the Party comrades.
“To my great and, I openly admit, joyful surprise I was ordered to the innermost Führer headquarters,” remembered Karl Wolff in his eighties. “Hitler wanted to have me nearby, because he knew that he could rely on me completely. He had known me for a long time, and rather well.” And not without pride, he recalled that even before the war he had often been a welcome guest at the “round table,” that Hitler usually offered to his confidants at the Reich chancellery.
Wolff used the privilege during the exciting days before leaving for the front. He certainly didn’t benefit from any culinary delicacies, since the vegetarian Hitler, who was anything but a gourmet, suffered from digestive problems and feared that even the slightest sign of a paunch and any hint of high living would reduce his popularity. With all Germans on war rations with grocery tickets, the cooks at the Reich chancellery were to make do with what the average person was eating. This rule was observed until Hitler’s final days. His entourage got around this constandy without him even noticing. Arthur Kannenberg, who headed the household, had connections, as did every cook, and Martin Bormann was constandy ordering food supplies from the Party farms (at Obersalzberg and Mecklenburg) for the Führer’s table.
When Wolff arrived at the Reich chancellery at midday on September 3, he wore the field gray SS uniform, with the royal eagle holding the swastika on the upper left sleeve. He was given a gas mask, like all soldiers, that members of the Führer headquarters were to always carry in their gray tin cans. He was told that they would not eat until late afternoon and that he was, however, to have his bags ready at headquarters for transport.
In one room there was a large area map of Poland pinned to the wall and stuck with little flags. Happily Wolff realized that the armies had already advanced briskly since the previous day. Czestochowa, a religious
shrine, was marked with a “Sepp” flag; that especially pleased the SS officer, because it meant that the Leibstandarte had fought there under its commander, Sepp Dietrich.
That afternoon the company at the table was more numerous than commonly accepted: Party big wigs, ministers, generals—like theater actors who were in Hitler’s good graces—all made great efforts to sound confident, even though the second afternoon radio news broadcast stated that now England was also at war with the Reich. A stew was served, and field cooks ladled it from the cauldron for the deployed soldiers as well.
Around 8:00 p.m. the entourage was ordered to take their designated seats in the cars in the courtyard of the Reich chancellery. The stars were shining particularly brightly, because the mandatory darkness throughout Germany also applied there. Not everyone found his car right away. Hitler came out last with his adjutant. The guards presented arms and the convoy took the Wilhelmstrasse to the Stettin train station. All the lights were out in the streets and only from very narrow slits did any light seep through from the houses. The headlights of the cars were covered in black cloth that only let a weak shimmer fall onto the pavement. There were hardly any private cars because the Wehrmacht requisitioned large numbers of them and those remaining had only been allotted very little gasoline. The Head of State slipped out of his capital like a thief in the night. The column left the Reich chancellery at 8:00 p.m. At the Stettin train station, dim blue lights marked the way to the entrance. On a very weakly lit platform the special train was waiting. It was to be the Führer headquarters for the immediate future. Everyone already knew his assigned spot inside. At 9:00 p.m. the train left the station.
It consisted of more than ten cars of the express train type, two locomotives, two flat open freight cars equipped with four antiaircraft guns, one baggage car, and electric power units. Hitler’s quarters and the conference room in the next car took up the space of about three express train compartments. Conference sessions took place at a table with eight chairs. Two other compartments consisted of Hitler’s bedroom and bathroom. His adjutant and servants lived and slept in the other compartments of that car.
The command center with teletype machines and radio equipment was in the following car, as well as the situation room where the conditions at the front were presented to the Führer at a large card table twice a day. The military had their compartments in the third car: Lieutenant General Wilhelm Keitel (head of the OKW), Brigadier General Alfred Jödl (head
of the Operations Office), the liaison officers of the army, navy, and air force. Inside the train there were also the adjutants, General Bodenschatz (Göring’s deputy), and SS Gruppenführer Wolff. One of the travelers, Reich chief press officer Dr. Otto Dietrich, published a book right after the end of the Polish campaign where Wolff was not mentioned as part of the military, but rather with legation councilor Walter Hewel, the liaison officer of the minister of foreign affairs, and Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s court photographer. Wolff was described as “liaison of the Reichsführer SS.” His name was spelled incorrectly with one “f” The two men avoided each other, although Dietrich held a high honorary rank in the SS and both had worked very closely with Hitler during the occupation of Prague.
“…and tomorrow the entire world!”
O
n the night of September 4, the train had covered less than 300 km, through Pomerania to Bad Polzin, a little town of 6,000 and more than 10,000 holiday visitors each year. As the vacationers looked out of their windows one morning, they saw a train surrounded by the soldiers of a motorized division. Their commander was Brigadier General Erwin Rommel, decorated with the WWI medal “pour le mérite.” The unit guarded both the special train as well as the column of cars in which Hitler rode to the front in Poland with tanks, scout cars, and riflemen on motorcycles. Actually the unit only consisted of seven open Mercedes cars with canopy tops, having three axles, for any kind of terrain and all equipped with strong engines. Wherever those cars appeared, it became the signal that Hitler was nearby. So many prominent figures from the Party and the state in Pomerania and even from Berlin streamed into Bad Polzin. They simply lined up in their cars behind the column.
Wolff was upset in seeing his privilege of being among the very few in Hitler’s escorts devalued, but since Hitler saw this as a show of love by his people no one dared put an end to the growing extension of the column. When it became necessary to drive on unpaved roads through the Tuchel heathlands towards Graudenz and the Weichselbogen on the other
side of the Polish border, the cars kicked up enormous clouds of dust. If Hitler got out to see first-hand evidence of the Polish defeat or have one of his division commanders report to him, there were bitter fights about position and rank among his fans. Not until Hitler’s third trip to the front that left from Neudorf in Upper Silesia on September 10 were the onlookers ordered to stay back. The group from headquarters flew in three Ju 52 passenger planes deep into Poland and then took the cars that had been sent ahead—a procedure that of course was only possible once the enemy air force had been cut off.
After the campaign, Hitler claimed that he had annihilated the Polish state in eighteen days. Dietrich’s book tries to back this up; his timetable ends on September 18, although there was still heavy fighting in Warsaw. September 18 was the day when the Red Army moved into eastern Poland, allocated to Stalin in the secret additional protocol of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact that had been signed shortly before the beginning of the war. Towards the end, Hitler wanted to avoid the impression that Moscow had been instrumental in the victory.
The old Hanseatic city of Danzig provided a splendid background for a victory proclamation. A League of Nations commissioner had administered the city, as well as its surroundings, since the Treaty of Versailles; Danzig freely divided its loyalties between Warsaw and Berlin. Now on September 19 Hitler, arriving from Pomerania, triumphantly entered the city. He drove, as he had in Vienna, the Sudetenland and Memel in an open car through the streets where swastika flags practically covered the buildings, through masses of cheering people celebrating their return to the Reich with loud screams of “Heil!” and often tears of joy. Despite the official end of the campaign, the Führer headquarters were not yet dissolved. Immediately following the cheers, Wolff was reminded that he was not simply one of the Führer’s escorts but also continued as chief of the personal staff of the Reichsführer SS. Himmler was also in Danzig. Until then he mainly stayed at his own headquarters, a special train codenamed “Heinrich,” which he had to share with Minister Dr. Heinrich Lammers, the chief clerk of the Reich chancellery, and Minister of Foreign Affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop. Until September 25, Hitler held court in the old casino hotel on the Baltic Sea resort of Soppot, where Europe’s wealthy came to gamble. Now in this amazing building the winnings were of a different nature, as Hitler distributed new areas of responsibility and power from the spoils of war. Himmler managed to reap a considerable piece, thanks to the observers who kept eyes and ears open for him at headquarters
during the past weeks. In accordance to the will of the Führer the conquered land was to be cleaned up and made productive. No one seemed better suited for this than Heinrich Himmler. He had already received a new assignment before the war began; accordingly, there were five work groups of 500 men each, immediately behind the fighting units that spread out into the countryside. Their secret assignment was to exterminate the upper class of the Polish people, making it easier to rule and exploit the masses in the future. They worked so thoroughly that their boss Heydrich could already report on September 25: “There are at the most only three percent remaining of the Polish leadership in the occupied territories.”
In Danzig Himmler had to make sure that no competitor outdid him in this business. Albert Forster, the local gauleiter, wanted to lead the spontaneous German guerillas seeking revenge by murdering and plundering the Poles, following years of suppression and the crimes of recent weeks. The organization was called “self defense” but it actually threatened only those Poles living in regions where both nationalities were present. Many German nationals had been mistreated or even killed by agitated Polish mobs, but with a new and apparendy better order now in place, those crimes would be turned over to the proper courts.