We of the German General Staff knew that at some point in Hitler’s spectacular normalizing of Europe, England would intervene. The only questions were, when, and under what circumstances? Already in 1937 we had prepared a plan for a two-front war against England and Poland:
But on March 31, 1939, a day that the world should not forget, all this changed. The British Prime Minister Chamberlain suddenly gave Poland an unconditional guarantee of military assistance! His pretext was anger at Hitler for breaking his promise not to occupy the weak fragment of Czechoslovakia, left after the Munich partition — the deal which Chamberlain himself had engineered. Hitler’s promises, like those of all politicians, were merely contingent and tactical, of course. It was asinine of Chamberlain to think otherwise, if he did.
Whatever the motive for the Polish guarantee, it was a piece of suicidal stupidity. It stiffened the corrupt Polish army oligarchy to stand fast on the just German grievances involving Danzig and the Polish Corridor. It placed in the hands of these backward militarists the lever to start another world war. Otherwise it had no meaning, because in the event England was unable to give Poland actual military help. With Russian participation the guarantee might have made sense, in fact it might have stopped Hitler in his tracks, because he feared above all things, as the General Staff also did, a two-front war. But the British gentlemen-politicians disdained the Bolsheviks, and Poland in any case utterly refused to consider admitting Russian protective troops. So foolishness and weakness joined hands to trigger the catastrophe.
For Chamberlain’s defiant move, like the weak pawing of a cornered rabbit, only spurred the Fuhrer to greater boldness. Like lightning, down came the word to our staff to prepare an operation order for an attack on Poland in the fall. Working day and night, with Case Red as a basis, we prepared the plan. On April 5 it went to the Fuhrer under a new code name:
Historic Ironies
Case White, the plan for smashing Poland, shaped itself on a few major and classic geographical facts.
Poland is a plain: a larger Belgium with few natural obstacles and no real boundaries. The Carpathian Mountains to the south are breached by the Jablunka pass, affording ready access from Czechoslovakia to Cracow and the Vistula. The rivers Vistula, Narew, and San present problems, but in the summer and early autumn the water levels are low and the rivers are in many places fordable by motor vehicles and horses.
Poland is itself a political freak, reflecting its formless geography. It has no permanent shape, no continuity of regime or national purpose. It has several times disappeared from the map of Europe, divided up as provinces of stronger and abler powers. Today it is again little more than a Russian province. At Yalta the Allied leaders moved the entire crude geographical parallelogram called “Poland” about two hundred kilometers to the west, to the Oder-Neisse Line. This was done at the expense of Germany, of course, giving to Poland cities, territories, and populations which had been German from time immemorial, and causing the tragic uprooting and resettling of millions of people. Such is war: to the victor, the spoils; to the defeated, the costs. The Second World War began over the question of Polish territorial integrity, but Poland has not recovered, and will never recover, its 1939 borders. It has lost that part of its territory which, through the deal between Hitler and Stalin, was absorbed into the Soviet Union. England went to war with us over the question of these borders, dragging in France and eventually the United States. At Yalta, England and the United States endorsed forever Hitler’s gift of Polish territory to the Soviets. Such are the ironies of history.
The Polish strategic situation in 1939 was poor. The entire land could be regarded as a weak salient into Germany and German-occupied territory, flanked by East Prussia to the north and Czechoslovakia to the south, and wholly flat and open to a thrust from Germany to the west. To the rear, in the east, the Soviet Union stood poised, newly linked to Germany through the nonaggression pact engineered by Ribbentrop.
The Fatal Pact
Insufficient attention is paid to the plain fact that this treaty, hailed at the time as a masterstroke, all but lost Germany the Second World War before a shot was fired. The alliance with Bolshevism (however temporary and tactical) was certainly a repudiation of the Dictator’s ideals, running counter to the German national spirit; but this might have been allowable had the tactical advantage proved real. In politics, as in war, only success matters. But the contrary was the case.
This pact handed Stalin the Baltic states and about half of Poland, allowing the Slav horde to march two hundred kilometers nearer Germany. Two years later we paid the price. In December 1941, the gigantic drive of our Army Group Center toward Moscow — the greatest armed march in world history — was halted forty kilometers from its goal, with advance patrols penetrating within sight of the Kremlin towers. Had the German forces jumped off from a line two hundred kilometers nearer Moscow, they would have engulfed the Russian capital, deposed Stalin, and won the campaign before the first flake of snow fell on the Smolensk road. England certainly would have made peace then, and we would have won the war.
Regarded as a triumph of daring diplomacy even by our enemies, this treaty contained between its lines the two words,
No member of the armed forces, including Hitler’s own chief of staff, Keitel, and the chief of operations, Jodl, knew of the secret protocol yielding half of Poland to the Bolsheviks. It was only when Stalin angrily telephoned Ribbentrop in the third week of the campaign, bitterly complaining about the advance of our Fourteenth Army into the southeast oil area, that the Wehrmacht received its specific chop lines, and retreated before the Russians, who airily rolled in without shedding a drop of their own, or of Polish, blood.
It was I who received at Supreme Headquarters the staggering telephone call from our military attache in Moscow around midnight of September 15, informing me that the Russians were marching into Poland in accordance with a secret agreement Hitler had made in August. I immediately telephoned General Jodl with the news that the Russians were on the move. His response, in a tremulous voice most uncharacteristic of Alfred Jodl, was “Against whom?” So completely was the army in the dark.
In the last few days of August, as Case White preparations speeded up, Hitler tried to cash in on Ribbentrop’s big political surprise with a comedy of peace negotiations. In the spring, in a calmer mood, he had stated with his usual prescience that the Western powers would not again permit a bloodless victory, that this time there would be battle. We had prepared Case White with feelings varying from misgivings to a sense of doom, because our combat readiness was much below par for a major conflict. We were so low on tanks, to cite just one key item, that even for Case White we had to deploy large numbers of Czech tanks of limited value; and the navy had only about fifty submarines ready for action. Worst of all, the Fuhrer was far from ordering full wartime production, even then, for he knew it would be an unpopular move. All in all we were going out on very thin ice.
The staff placed no hope in the peace talks. Hitler, however, while going through his planned histrionics with Henderson, apparently got carried away by his own playacting and the constant assurances of Ribbentrop; he began to believe that England might be bluffed once more and might present us with another Munich. At Supreme Headquarters, in the first days of September, nobody could fail to notice that when the Western declarations of war came through, the Fuhrer was surprised and shaken. But there was nothing to do at that point but execute Case White.
