Hitler

Close heart to pity. Proceed brutally. Eighty million people must obtain what they have a right to. Their existence must be guaranteed. The stronger is in the right. Supreme hardness.

Hitler dismissed his generals by remarking that the order for commencing hostilities would be issued later, probably for Saturday morning, August 26. On the following day General Halder noted in his diary: “Y [Day] = Aug. 26 (Saturday) final—no further orders.”

This timetable, however, was once again upset. For although practically the entire framework of Western policy had collapsed as soon as the pact was signed, England led the way in demonstrating a stoic equanimity. Poland was as good as doomed, but the British cabinet dryly announced that the latest events had changed nothing. Military preparations were ostentatiously continued and increased. In a letter to Hitler Chamberlain warned against any doubts of the British determination to fight:

No greater mistake could be made…. It has been alleged that, if His Majesty’s Government had made their position more clear in 1914, the great catastrophe would have been avoided…. His Majesty’s Government are resolved that on this occasion there shall be no such tragic misunderstanding.¹³⁷

The Prime Minister also made a statement to the House of Commons pitched in the same tone. England would not retreat an inch—unlike France, which kept up an air of resolution with considerable difficulty and whose press expressed its defeatist attitude in the question, “Mourir pour Dantzig?” Danzig was no more the issue for Chamberlain than for Hitler. For him, as for the French, it was “a far-away city in a foreign land.” No one was going to have to die for it. But now, when the Moscow Pact had shattered her whole policy, England recognized the things her people would have to fight and die for. The policy of appeasement had been partly based on and sustained by the bourgeois world’s fear of Communist revolution. In the script of English statesmen, Hitler was assigned the role of a militant defender of the bourgeois world. That was why they had endured all his slaps in the face, his provocations and outrages. But this was the only reason. By coming to an agreement with the Soviet Union, he indicated that he was not the opponent of revolution that he had pretended to be; he was no protector of the bourgeois order, no “General Wrangel of the world bourgeoisie.” Although the pact with Stalin was a masterpiece of diplomacy, it contained an inconspicuous flaw: it abrogated the premises on which Hitler and the West had carried on their dealings. Here was something that could not be glossed over, and with rare unanimity the British, including the stoutest spokesmen for appeasement, now showed their resolve to oppose him. Although Hitler had a deserved reputation for psychological acuity, it became clear in this decisive moment that, after all, he was the psychologist only of the exhausted, the resigned, the doomed. And he was far better able to estimate the moves of victims than of adversaries.

Consequently, Hitler reacted with extreme ire to the many evidences of British determination. When Ambassador Henderson delivered his Prime Minister’s letter at Obersalzberg, he had to listen to a tirade which ended with Hitler’s saying he was now finally convinced that Germany and England would never be able to come to an agreement. Nevertheless, two days later, in the early afternoon of August 25, he repeated his “great bid” to divide the world. He offered a German guarantee for the existence of the British Empire, a limit on armaments, and a formal acknowledgment of the German western border in return for the right of Germany to move to the East without restriction. And as he had done so often before, he linked his outrageous demand with one of those ploys with which he tried to prove his essential harmlessness. “He said he was an artist by nature and not a politician and once the Polish question was settled he would conclude his life as an artist and not as a warmaker; he did not want to transform Germany into a great military barracks; and he would do so only if he were forced to. Once the Polish question was settled, he would retire.”

Ambassador Henderson was implored to pass the offer on at once. But no sooner had he left the room, at 3:02 P.M. on August 25, than Hitler sent for General Keitel and confirmed his order to attack Poland at dawn the next day.

A few hours later, he was once more deep in doubt. Two messages had arrived at the chancellery in the course of the afternoon. One came from London and made it plain that Hitler’s last attempt to drive a wedge between England and Poland had failed. After months of protracted negotiations, the British government now transformed the temporary guarantee of aid to Poland into a treaty of assistance. Hitler could not fail to see in this the most resolute rejection of his great offer. Nor could there any longer be doubt that England was determined to intervene. One of those present saw Hitler after receiving the news “sitting at the table for a considerable time, brooding.”

He was harder hit by the other message, which roused him from his brooding. It came from Rome and made it clear that Italy was trying to creep out of the alliance so recently and pompously concluded. For weeks, as the conflict seemed to be coming closer, Mussolini had alternated abruptly between sanguine exultation and moods of despair. Ciano’s diary notes with some irony the way the Duce rocked back and forth on his “emotional seesaw.” At one time he appeared determined to keep out of Hitler’s war; “then he says that honor compels him to march with Germany. Finally he states that he wants his part of the booty in Croatia and Dalmatia.” Two days later “he wants time to prepare the break with Germany”; then again “he still thinks it possible that the democracies will not march and that Germany might do good business cheaply, from which business he does not want to be excluded. Then, too, he fears Hitler’s rage.”

Amid this confusion of crisscrossing impulses, at 3:30 P.M. on August 25, Mussolini assured the German ambassador of unconditional assistance, only to send a telegram to Hitler two hours later taking it all back, or at any rate making his assistance dependent on a vast amount of material aid that Germany could not possibly deliver—“enough to kill a bull,” Ciano commented. Reminding Hitler that they had not envisaged the war’s coming so soon and that Italy’s army was not equipped, Mussolini tried to wriggle out of the alternative between doom and betrayal.

Strictly speaking, Hitler had no reason to be upset. The Italians might well feel miffed; they had been offended countless times by contemptuous treatment; and even the belated letter in which Hitler had informed Mussolini of the pact with Moscow had been a model of diplomatic slighting. It had dismissed an ally’s claim to consultation with trivial phrases and an allusion to newspaper atrocity propaganda, but had said not a word about the ideological and political consequences resulting from Hitler’s reversal of his previous positions. Nevertheless, Hitler dismissed Italian Ambassador Attolico “with an icy face” and “the chancellery echoed with unkind words about ‘the disloyal Axis partner.’ ” A few minutes later Hitler canceled the order to advance. “Fuhrer rather shaken,” Halder noted in his diary.

Once again events seemed to undergo a dramatic slowdown. Three days passed before Hitler, sleepless, his voice cracking, appeared before an assemblage of high party and military leaders and attempted to justify Mussolini’s conduct. He was in a bleak mood and commented that the impending war would be “very difficult, perhaps hopeless.” But he did not change his mind; rather, as always, opposition seemed to reinforce his determination: “As long as I live there will be no talk of capitulation.” The new date he set for launching the attack was September 1.

As a result, the events of the last few days—the passionate efforts to preserve peace, the messages, travels and exchanges between the capitals, all have an unreal air. To the observer with hindsight much of it seems a kind of late-night show, full of sham dialogue, transparent confusion, and grotesque intermezzos. Daladier’s moving personal appeal was futile. The French ambassador Coulondre, who told Hitler everything “that my heart as a man and a Frenchman could inspire me to say,” wasted his words. England’s conciliatory gesture was answered by Hitler with a torrent of fresh reproaches, so that even the patient Henderson lost his self-control and began to outshout Hitler, telling him he did not want “to hear such language from him or anyone else…. If he wanted war, he could have it.” In vain, finally, was Mussolini’s imploring letter; he had tried to persuade Hitler to settle for a solution by conference so that “the rhythm of your magnificent creations will not be interrupted.”

Only two antagonists seemed to know that they had reached a dead end: Hitler and Beck. They alone thought exclusively of war, the former urgently, impatiently fixated upon his self-appointed timetable, the other fatalistically, wearily, facing an ineluctable fate. Hitler was so obsessed with the employment of his military power that he did not even see the political opportunities the moment offered. We have private notes from British diplomats from which we can deduce the maneuvers London expected and the concessions it was preparing. Merely for renouncing war Hitler probably could have obtained not only Danzig and the road and rail link through