about four hundred thousand people, had gotten out of Germany before the borders closed. They had bribed South American consular officials, filled the British quotas in Palestine, deployed wealth and influence to evade immigration regulations in the United States and Great Britain. But in using those methods they had, in effect, worn out the administrative escape lines. For the three million Polish Jews, there was nothing.
So the commodity analyst, a yellow Star of David sewn to the breast pocket of a suit made by a London tailoring establishment in 1937, wrote what he believed to be his final report. Since the German occupation he had worked in a small factory that made needles and pins, sweeping up, running errands, whatever was needed, but even this little job was ending. And he had been told that he and his family would have to move into the old Polish ghetto just south of Gdansk station. The Germans meant to kill him, a forty-eight-year-old man with a wife and three children. If there was something he could do about that, some tactic of evasion, he had not been able to discover it. He had a good mind, trained in Talmud, trained in business, and recognized that some problems cannot be solved. What would happen next would happen next, it wasn’t up to him.
He would have liked to be, in this analysis written at the request of an old friend, brilliant, at least ingenious. He had specialized in the behavior of the wool markets for twenty years, and he thought he knew them just about as well as anyone could. But facts were facts, numbers worked a certain way, and after an intensive study of twelve months of buying and selling activity in the commodity exchanges of London, Chicago, and Geneva, there was only one, rather dull but plainly evident, conclusion to be drawn:
No change.
Captain de Milja met privately with Colonel Broza in Room 9. Outside, the evening streets were awash with spring rain. “There is no preparation to attack,” de Milja said.
“Hard to believe that,” Broza said.
“Yes. But that is what we found. Germany will have to deploy three million men to attack Russia, led by tanks as they were in Poland. Supplied by horse and wagon, and freight train. Attacking on a line from the Baltic to the Black Sea. As for the time of the attack, that too can be deduced. Today is the sixteenth of March. Russia must be invaded in the late spring, after the rivers crest and the floods recede, and it must be defeated by the middle of autumn, before the winter freeze. Napoleon learned that in 1812, and very little has changed since then. The temperature in Russia in December goes down, habitually and unremarkably, to minus thirty degrees Fahrenheit. It can go lower, and when the wind blows—which it does, for weeks on end—the cold is acutely intensified. You can’t send three million men into that kind of weather without preparation.
“So, we have the sixteenth of March and three million men. As of a week ago, not a drop of low-viscosity oil had been issued at any Wehrmacht base we know about. And there has been no change in the international wool markets—which means no warm coats for the Wehrmacht. The Germans have been clever all along about covert logistics—disguised orders for chemicals and rubber—but you can’t slaughter millions of sheep or buy up that much wool production without a reaction from the markets. So if the Wehrmacht goes east in April, they’ll go without wool coats, and by January they’ll freeze to death with useless rifles in their hands.”
Broza wasn’t so sure. “Perhaps. But Hitler thinks he’ll be in Moscow by late October—that’s the point of the blitzkrieg. They’ll take their wool coats from the cloakroom at the Kremlin. What’s to stop them? The Red Army is sick as a dog; officers shot in the purges, all the tactics they tried in Finland failed miserably.”
“The Russians
Broza paused to consider that. Defense-in-depth was the ancient, traditional military doctrine of Russia. For a thousand years, they’d protected their cities by use of the abatis: trees cut down at the three-foot level, the logs hung up on the stumps and pointing out toward the enemy. Among the felled trees were pits camouflaged with cut brush— intended to break the ankle of a horse or a man. These defenses were eighty miles deep. With raiding parties harassing their flanks, an invasion force would find itself exhausted when it finally reached the site the Russians had chosen as a battleground.
By 1938, building what was called the Stalin Line on the U.S.S.R.’s western boundary, various refinements had been added: artificial lakes—five feet deep, to tempt an invader to try a crossing—artificial marsh, cornfields cut to accommodate enfilading machine-gun fire, concrete bunkers three feet thick, with barbed wire now tangled in the trunks of the fallen trees.
“Defense-in-depth doesn’t happen overnight,” Broza said, thinking out loud. “And the Stalin Line is being dismantled now that the Russians have moved up to the middle of Poland. That advance may cost them more than they suspect.”
“They will sacrifice lives,” de Milja said. “And land. Burn the villages, blow up the bridges.”
Broza thumbed through a sheaf of papers in a dossier. “Granted, they are not distributing light oil for the winter, and they are not buying sheepskins. But we know they are building large hospitals on the border. For who? Not for us, certainly. And we’ve seen important commanders and staff logistics people flown in to border camps for conferences.”
Both officers thought about that for a time. “It is coming,” de Milja said. “But not this spring. Perhaps in ’41.”
“And this spring?”
“France.”
“Nobody believes such a thing can happen,” Broza said. “You mean a major attack—tanks, assault planes, infantry, Paris in flames?”
“Yes,” de Milja said.
Broza shook his head. It wasn’t possible.
The first winter of German occupation turned slowly to the rain and mud of a long, slow spring. Perhaps the Poles lost heart a little. The first rage was spent—a few SS officers assassinated, several hundred hostages shot. But when the smoke cleared the Germans weren’t frightened and the Poles weren’t intimidated. And so they settled down to fight.
The recommendation of the ZWZ intelligence service—to hammer at the links between Russia and Germany—was endorsed by the Sixth Bureau administration in Paris, and the logical area of attack turned out to be the Hitler/Stalin Pact trade agreements. German technology needed Russian raw materials; a million tons of animal fodder, a million tons of crude oil, tons of cotton, coal, phosphates, chromium, and iron ore. The Russians had the materiel—it was simply a matter of shipping it to Germany. By rail. Across Poland.
From the first days of occupation it was clear that all labor would be performed by Polish workers, under German supervision. So the Germans, when they decided to enlarge Prezmysl railroad station, just on the German side of the border, hired ZWZ carpenters, ZWZ masons, and ZWZ helpers to hand them the proper tool. Broza, de Milja, and company knew everything before it happened. The railroad line Prezmysl/Cracow/Breslau, entirely under the view of Polish underground intelligence, was soon ready to carry the goods that would keep Germany rich and powerful, while the Poles were itching to blow it all to hell, a small first step on the road to making Germany poor and weak.
The battle started with Polish Boy Scouts, adept at crawling under freight cars, opposed by German sentries, who shot anything and justified nothing. But it did not remain on that level. The initial Polish thrust—we can blow up whatever we want—was answered by a German counterthrust—we can fix whatever you blow up. The Poles soon realized the magnitude of the job they had taken on: the Germans
Like any organization, Kedyv measured its success in numbers. In 1940, a disabled locomotive was out of service for fourteen hours. Later, the period would rise to fourteen days. The increase in productivity was achieved by Polish chemists and engineers, opposed by German chemists and engineers. At which point the conflict had reached the level on which it would be decided: national intelligentsia versus national intelligentsia.
The Polish scientists took the offensive and never let up: they built incendiary devices that were swiftly and easily attachable to tank cars loaded with Russian crude oil, they then timed the fuse by the rhythm of the rails: x number of thumps would set off the explosion, sometimes in Poland, sometimes in Germany. Unable to determine the venue of the sabotage, the Germans found it impossible to investigate. Petroleum storage tanks were set afire
