Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

military command.¹² But he took the keenest interest in the progress of the war. He would leave his train most mornings by car to view a different part of the front line.¹³ His secretaries, left behind to spend boring days in the airless railway carriage parked in the glare of the blazing sun, tried to dissuade him from touring the battle scenes standing in his car, as he did in Germany.¹⁴ But Hitler was in his element. He was invigorated by war.

On 17 September, in the move which Hitler had impatiently awaited, Stalin’s army invaded Poland from the east. German generals, kept in the dark until then about the precise details of the demarcation line drawn up in the secret protocol to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, did not conceal their anger at having to withdraw from territories way beyond the agreed line that had cost casualties to capture. ‘A day of disgrace for the German political leadership’ was how Haider recorded it.¹⁵

Two days later, Hitler entered Danzig to indescribable scenes of jubilation. He took up accommodation for the next week in the Casino-Hotel at the adjacent resort of Zoppot.¹⁶ From there, on the 22nd and again on the 25th, he flew to the outskirts of Warsaw to view the devastation wrought on the city of a million souls by the bombing and shelling he had ordered. By 27 September, when the military commander of Warsaw eventually surrendered the city, he was back in Berlin, returning quietly with no prearranged hero’s reception.¹⁷ Poland no longer existed. An estimated 700,000 Polish soldiers were taken prisoners of war.¹⁸ Around 70,000 were killed in action, and a further 133,000 wounded.¹⁹ German fatalities numbered about 11,000, with 30,000 wounded, and a further 3,400 missing.²⁰

Among the German dead was Colonel-General Werner von Fritsch, unexpectedly caught in heavy Polish fire on 22 September on an inspection of the front where his artillery regiment was fighting.²¹ Typical of the mentality of conservative nationalists who had deep reservations about Hitler but rejoiced in the territorial gains he had brought about, Fritsch had commented in his last letter from the front that victory in the war would bring ‘the united states of Central Europe in a strong continental block under Germany’s leadership’.²² Hitler scarcely reacted when informed of Fritsch’s death.²³ Publicity was kept to a minimum.²⁴ On the anniversary of Fritsch’s death a year later Hitler expressly banned any floral tributes.²⁵

Territorial and political plans for Poland had not been finalized before the invasion. They were improvised and amended as events unfolded in September and October 1939. Hitler had, in fact, shown remarkably little interest in Poland before autumn 1938. As an Austrian, his main anti-Slav antipathies were directed at the Czechs, not the Poles. For Prussians, the age-old antagonisms revolving around the disputed territory on the eastern borders of the Reich tended in the opposite direction. In the face of traditional anti-Polish feeling in the Foreign Ministry and the army, Hitler had pushed through the pact with Poland in 1934 and repeatedly expressed admiration for the Polish head of state, until his death in 1935, Marshal Pilsudski, victor over the Red Army in 1920. Though the pact had obvious tactical value during the build-up of rearmament, and was presumed by many Nazi followers to be merely a ploy with limited life-span, Hitler’s preference continued in autumn 1938 and spring 1939, as we have seen, to have Poland as an ally (if now more or less as a German satellite). The British Guarantee had changed all that. But the new aim of destroying Poland by military force in summer 1939 was still not coupled with clear plans for the post- war future of the country. Neither in Mein Kampf nor in subsequent writings or speeches had Hitler had much to say about Poland. In his Second Book he had indicated that Poles ought to be removed from their property and the land given to ethnic Germans. He rigorously opposed, in this brief passage, the incorporation of Poles in the Reich (as had happened before 1914). ‘The volkisch state,’ he declared, ‘must on the contrary take the decision either to seal off these racially alien elements in order not again to allow the blood of our own people to be debased (zersetzen), or it must remove them forthwith and transfer the land (Grund und Boden) made available to our own people’s comrades.’²⁶ Otherwise, there was remarkably little on Poland. The vast expanses of Russia, as he had often stated, were what he had in mind as the answer to Germany’s alleged ‘space problem.’ But Hitler had repeatedly shown that he was prepared to put off long-term ideological goals in favour of short-term advantage.

The pact concluded with the Soviet Union in August, and in particular its secret protocol agreeing to partition Poland, naturally altered the situation. ‘Living space’ further east dropped for the foreseeable future out of the equation. Any resettlement of populations and ethnic experimentation would now have to take place in the former territory of Poland, not farther east. Whether a Polish state should continue in existence had been left open in the secret protocol. A country divided among two occupying powers held little prospect of sustaining even a puppet state. However, the lack of immediate invasion by the Soviets and Hitler’s hope even at this point of persuading the West, faced with the fait accompli of a Polish defeat, to pull out of the war and strike a deal with him left German plans still uncertain.²⁷

On 7 September Hitler had been ready to negotiate with the Poles, recognizing a rump Polish state (with territorial concessions to Germany and breaking of ties with Britain and France), together with an independent western Ukraine.²⁸ Five days later he still favoured a quasi-autonomous Polish rump state with which he could negotiate a peace in the east, and thought of limiting territorial demands to Upper Silesia and the Corridor if the West stayed out.²⁹ Another option advanced by Ribbentrop was a division between Germany and Russia, and the creation, out of the rump of Poland, of an autonomous Galician and Polish Ukraine — a proposal unlikely to commend itself to Moscow.³⁰ The belated Soviet occupation of eastern Poland on 17 September in any case promptly ruled out this possibility. Hitler still left open the final shape of Poland in his Danzig speech on 19 September.³¹ During the next days, Stalin made plain his opposition to the existence of a Polish rump state. His initial preference for the demarcation line along the line of the Pissia, Narev, Vistula, and San rivers was then replaced by the proposal to exchange central Polish territories within the Soviet zone between the Vistula and Bug rivers for Lithuania. Once Hitler had accepted this proposal — the basis of the German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship signed on 28 September 1939 — the question of whether or not there would be a Polish rump state was in Berlin’s hands alone.³²

Hitler was still contemplating the possibility of some form of Polish political entity at the end of the month.³³ He held out the prospect of re-creating a truncated Polish state — though expressly ruling out any re-creation of the Poland of the Versailles settlement — for the last time in his Reichstag speech of 6 October, as part of his ‘peace offer’ to the West.³⁴ But by then the provisional arrangements set up to administer occupied Poland had in effect already eliminated what remained of such a prospect. Even before the formality of Chamberlain’s rejection of the ‘peace offer’ on 12 October, they had created their own dynamic militating towards a rump Polish territory — the ‘General Government’, as it came to be known — alongside the substantial parts of the former Polish state to be incorporated in the Reich itself.

By 26 October, through a series of decrees characterized by extraordinary haste and improvisation, Hitler brought the military administration of occupied Poland to an end, replacing it by civilian rule in the hands of tried and tested ‘Old Fighters’ of the Movement. Albert Forster, Gauleiter of Danzig, was made head of the new Reichsgau of Danzig-West Prussia. Arthur Greiser, former President of the Danzig Senate, was put in charge of the largest annexed area, Reichsgau Posen (or ‘Reichsgau Wartheland’, as it was soon to be renamed, though generally known simply as the ‘War-thegau’). Hans Frank, the Party’s legal chief, was appointed General Governor in the rump Polish territory.³⁵ Other former Polish territory was added to the existing Gaue of East Prussia and Silesia. In each of the incorporated territories, most of all in the Wartheland, the boundaries fixed during the course of October enclosed sizeable areas which had never been part of the former Prussian provinces. The borders of the Reich were thereby extended some 150—200 kilometres to the east. Only in the Danzig area were ethnic Germans in the majority. Elsewhere in the incorporated territories the proportion of Germans in the population seldom reached much over 10 percent.³⁶

It was imperialist conquest, not revisionism. The treatment of the people of the newly conquered territory was unprecedented, its modern forms of barbarism evoking, though in even more terrible fashion, the worst barbaric subjugations of bygone centuries. What was once Poland amounted in the primitive view of its new overlords to no more than a colonial territory in eastern Europe, its resources to be plundered at will, its people regarded — with the help of modern race theories overlaying old prejudice — as inferior human beings to be treated as brutally as thought fit.

In Germany itself, despite new economic restrictions, life went on during the Polish campaign much as normal.³⁷ Berlin’s cafes, restaurants, and bars had been packed, as usual, on the first night of the war.³⁸ On the evening that the British and French had declared war, William Shirer heard people