refused to withdraw her troops from Poland at once, to fulfill those “contractual obligations which France has undertaken toward Poland and which are known to the German government.” When Coulondre returned to his embassy, he burst into tears in the presence of his associates.144
But England, too, had difficulty adjusting to the reality of war. In desperation Poland waited for military aid, or at least some relief; when she realized that she was without actual assistance, it was far too late. The ponderousness of the British responses was, however, not simply a matter of temperament or of inadequate military preparation. The guarantee for Poland had never been popular in England. There was no traditional friendship between the two countries, and Poland was regarded as one of those dictatorial regimes that merely showed up the constriction and oppressiveness of authoritarian government, but not the glamour and allure of power.145 When in the early days of September an opposition conservative urged a member of the cabinet to provide help for Poland and mentioned the plan then being discussed, of setting fire to the Black Forest with incendiary bombs, he was answered: “Oh, we can’t do that, that’s private property. Next you’ll be insisting that we bomb the Ruhr region.”
France, for her part, had pledged to launch an offensive with from thirty-five to thirty-eight divisions by the sixteenth day of the war. But the country was psychologically fixed on defense and incapable of planning an offensive. General Jodi declared at Nuremberg: “If we did not collapse in 1939, that was only because the approximately one hundred and ten French and English divisions in the West, which during the campaign in Poland were facing twenty-five German divisions, remained completely inactive.”146
Under these circumstances the modernized German armies were able to overrun Poland in a single victorious onslaught. To their perfection and smoothly functioning impetus the opposing side would offer, as was later admitted, mere gestures of “touching absurdity.” The co-operation of hitherto unknown swarms of armored formations with motorized infantry units and the dominant air force, whose Stuks plummeted with deafening screams upon their targets, the precision of the intelligence and supply system—all the might of this advancing, mechanized colossus—left the Poles little more than their courage. Beck had declared with assurance that his country’s forces were “organized for a flexible, delaying war of movement. There will be great surprises.” But the real significance of this campaign was that the Second World War was, so to speak, fighting against the First. Nowhere was the disproportion so evident as in the cavalry attack on Tuchel Heath, when a Polish mounted unit rode its horses against German tanks.
As early as the morning of September 5 General Halder noted after a military conference: “Enemy as good as beaten.” On September 6 Cracow fell; a day later the Warsaw government fled to Lublin; and in still another day the German advance units reached the Polish capital. All organized resistance began to collapse. In two great pincer movements initiated on September 9 the remnants of the Polish forces were encircled and slowly crushed. Eight days later, when the campaign was nearly ended, the Soviet Union fell upon the already overwhelmed country from the East—having first prepared an elaborate legalistic and diplomatic smoke screen to shield her from the charge of aggression. On September 18 the German and Soviet troops met in Brest-Litovsk. The first blitzkrieg was over. When Warsaw fell a few days later, Hitler ordered all the bells in Germany to be rung for a week, every day between noon and one o’clock.
The question nevertheless remains whether he felt unclouded satisfaction at the rapid military triumph or whether, through all the cheering and all the pealing of bells, he had not recognized that victory was already eluding him. His grand design was turned upside down. He was fighting on the wrong front, not against the East, as he might have been able to persuade himself during the far too brief Polish campaign, but henceforth against the West. For nearly twenty years all this thinking and talking had been determined by a diametrically opposite idea. Now his nervous restiveness, his arrogance, and the corrupting effect of great successes had overriden all rational considerations and finally destroyed the “Fascist” constellation. He was “at war with the conservatives before he had defeated the revolutionaries.”147 There are some indications that he was already aware of this most fatal of errors during those early days of victory. His entourage has spoken of fits of pessimism and sudden attacks of anxiety: “He would have been glad to draw his head out of the noose.”148 Shortly after the war with England became a certainty, he remarked to Rudolf Hess: “All my work is now disintegrating. My book was written for nothing.” Occasionally he compared himself to Martin Luther, who had no more wanted to fight against Rome than he himself against England. Then again, he would muster all the casual knowledge about England he had picked up to persuade himself of England’s weakness and democratic decadence. Or he would try to quiet his apprehensions by speaking of a “sham war,” by which the British government was formally satisfying an unpopular duty to an ally. As soon as Poland was finished, he had declared at the end of August: “We’ll hold a great peace conference with the Western powers.” Now Poland was finished and he was hoping for just that.
It is within this context that we must see Hitler’s attempts, immediately after the Polish campaign and later, in conjunction with the defeat of France, to wage the war against England lackadaisically and halfheartedly. The propaganda threats were louder than the actual blows; it was for this that the British coined the phrase “phony war.” For almost two years Hitler’s conduct of the war was partly governed by the effort to set the topsy-turvy constellation back on its feet again, to return to the design that he had frivolously abandoned. He tried repeatedly, but in vain.
A few weeks before the outbreak of the war—on July 22, 1939—he had said to Admiral Donitz that on no account must a war with England be allowed to develop; a war with England would mean nothing less than
Now he was at war with England.
The Wrong War
The horoscope of the times does not point to peace but to war.
In regard to the Second World War there can be no question about whose was the guilt. Hitler’s conduct throughout the crisis, his highhandedness, his urge to bring things to a head and plunge into catastrophe, so shaped events that any wish to compromise on the part of the Western powers was bound to come to nothing. Who caused the war is a question that cannot be seriously raised. Hitler’s policy during the preceding years, in the strict sense his entire career, was oriented toward war. Without war his actions would have lacked goal and consistency, and Hitler would not have been the man he was.
He had said that war was “the ultimate goal of politics.” That sentence must be taken as one of the key premises of his world view. In many passages in his writings, speeches, and conversations he repeatedly developed the underlying train of thought: the aim of politics was to guarantee a people’s
In these mythologizing realms of his thought, the lust for conquest, the desire for fame, or revolutionary beliefs were not sufficient reason for unleashing a war. Hitler actually called it “a crime” to wage war for the acquisition of raw materials. Only the issue of living space permitted resort to arms. But in its purest form war was independent even of this factor, and sprang solely from the almighty primal law of death and life, of gain at the expense of others. War was an ineradicable atavism: “War is the most natural, the most ordinary thing. War is a
