Hitler. Part 15

Chamberlain's government was still there next day. Hitler's belief in his own powers had outstripped realistic a.s.sessment. His commment revealed how out of touch he was with the mood of the British government, now fully backed by public opinion, by this time. He was puzzled, therefore, the following day by the low-key response in Britain to the Soviet Pact, and irritated by the speeches made in Parliament by Chamberlain and Halifax rea.s.serting Britain's resolve to uphold its obligations to Poland. Within twenty-four hours Ribbentrop had persuaded him, since wielding the big stick had produced little effect, to dangle the carrot.

At 12.45 p.m. on 25 August, Henderson was informed that Hitler wished to see him at 1.30 p.m. in the Reich Chancellery. The meeting lasted over an hour. Ribbentrop and the interpreter Paul Schmidt were also present. Hitler was far calmer than he had been in Berchtesgaden. He criticized Chamberlain's speech. But he was prepared to make Britain, he said, 'a large comprehensive offer' and pledge himself to maintain the continued existence of the British Empire once the Polish problem had been solved as a matter of urgency. Hitler was so anxious that his 'offer' be immediately and seriously considered that he suggested that Henderson fly to London, and put a plane at his disposal. Henderson left next morning.

The 'offer' to Britain was, in fact, no more than a ruse, another and by now increasingly desperate attempt to detach Britain from support for Poland, and prevent the intended localized war from becoming a general European war. How honest Hitler's 'offer' was can be judged from the fact that at the very time that Henderson was talking in the Reich Chancellery, final preparations were being made for the start of 'Case White' next morning, Sat.u.r.day, 26 August, at 4.30 a.m.

Already on 12 August, Hitler had set the likely date of the 26th for the invasion of Poland. Goebbels learnt on the morning of the 25th that the mobilization was due to take place that afternoon. At midday, Hitler then gave him propaganda instructions, emphasizing that Germany had been given no choice but to fight against the Poles, and preparing the people for a war, if necessary lasting 'months and years'. Telephone communications between Berlin and London and Paris were cut off for several hours that afternoon. The Tannenberg celebrations and Party Rally were abruptly cancelled. Airports were closed from 26 August. Food rationing was introduced as from 27 August. By midday on the 25th, however, even while Hitler was giving propaganda directives to Goebbels, Keitel's office was telephoning Halder to find out what was the latest time for the march-order, since there might have to be a postponement. The answer was given: no later than 3 p.m. The final order was delayed at 1.30 p.m. because Henderson was at that time in the Reich Chancellery. It was then further held back in the hope that Mussolini would have replied to Hitler's communication of earlier that morning. Under pressure from the military timetable, but anxious for news from Rome, Hitler put the attack on hold for an hour. Finally, without receiving Mussolini's answer, but able to wait no longer, Hitler gave the order at 3.02 p.m. Directives for mobilization were pa.s.sed to the various troop commanders during the afternoon. Then, amazingly, within five hours the order was cancelled. To a great deal of muttering from army leaders about incompetence, the complex machinery of invasion was halted just in time.

Mussolini's reply had arrived at 5.45 p.m. At 7.30 p.m. Brauchitsch telephoned Halder to rescind the invasion order. A shaken Hitler had changed his mind.

On 24 August Hitler had prepared a lengthy letter for Mussolini, justifying the alliance with the Soviet Union, and indicating that a strike against Poland was imminent. The letter was delivered by the German Amba.s.sador in Rome on the morning of the 25th. Mussolini's answer gave the over-confident Hitler an enormous shock. The Duce did not beat about the bush: Italy was in no position to offer military a.s.sistance at the present time. Hitler icily dismissed Attolico, the Italian Amba.s.sador. 'The Italians are behaving just like they did in 1914,' Paul Schmidt heard Hitler remark. 'That alters the entire situation,' judged Goebbels. 'The Fuhrer ponders and contemplates. That's a serious blow for him.' For an hour, the Reich Chancellery rang with comments of disgust at the Axis partner. The word 'treachery' was on many lips. Brauchitsch was hurriedly summoned. When he arrived, around seven that evening, he told Hitler there was still time to halt the attack, and recommended doing so to gain time for the Dictator's 'political game'. Hitler immediately took up the suggestion. At 7.45 p.m. a frantic order was dispatched to Halder to halt the start of hostilities. Keitel emerged from Hitler's room to tell an adjutant: 'The march-order must be rescinded immediately.'

Another piece of bad news arrived for Hitler at much the same time. Minutes before the news from Rome had arrived, Hitler had heard from the French Amba.s.sador, Robert Coulondre, that the French, too, were determined to stick by their obligations to Poland. This in itself was not critical. Hitler was confident that the French could be kept out of the war, if London did not enter. Then Ribbentrop arrived to tell him that the military alliance between Great Britain and Poland agreed on 6 April had been signed late that afternoon. This had happened after Hitler had made his 'offer' to Henderson. Having just signed the alliance, it must have been plain even to Hitler that Britain was unlikely to break it the very next day. Yesterday's hero, Ribbentrop, now found himself all at once out of favour and, in the midst of a foreign-policy crisis on which peace hinged, was not in evidence for over two days. Hitler turned again to the Foreign Minister's great rival, Goring.

Immediately, Goring inquired whether the cancellation of the invasion was permanent. 'No. I will have to see whether we can eliminate England's intervention,' was the reply. When Goring's personal emissary, his Swedish friend, the industrialist Birger Dahlerus, already in London to belabour Lord Halifax with similar vague offers of German good intent that Henderson would shortly bring via the official route, eventually managed, with much difficulty, to place a telephone call to Berlin, he was asked to report back to the Field-Marshal the following evening.

The mood in the Reich Chancellery had not been improved by the message from Daladier on 26 August underlining France's solidarity with Poland. Things at the hub of the German government seemed chaotic. No one had a clear idea of what was going on. Hewel, head of Ribbentrop's personal staff, though with different views from those of his boss, warned Hitler not to underestimate the British. He was a better judge of that than his Minister, he a.s.serted. Hitler angrily broke off the discussion. Brauchitsch thought Hitler did not know what he should do.

Dahlerus certainly found him in a highly agitated state when he was taken towards midnight to the Reich Chancellery. He had brought with him a letter from Lord Halifax, indicating in non-committal terms that negotiations were possible if force were not used against Poland. It added in reality nothing to that which Chamberlain had already stated in his letter of 22 August. It made an impact on Goring, but Hitler did not even look at the letter before launching into a lengthy diatribe, working himself into a nervous frenzy, marching up and down the room, his eyes staring, his voice at one moment indistinct, hurling out facts and figures about the strength of the German armed forces, the next moment shouting as if addressing a party meeting, threatening to annihilate his enemies, giving Dahlerus the impression of someone 'completely abnormal'. Eventually, Hitler calmed down enough to list the points of the offer which he wanted Dahlerus to take to London. Germany wanted a pact or alliance with Britain, would guarantee the Polish borders, and defend the British Empire (even against Italy, Goring added). Britain was to help Germany acquire Danzig and the Corridor, and have Germany's colonies returned. Guarantees were to be provided for the German minority in Poland. Hitler had altered the stakes in a bid to break British backing for Poland. In contrast to the 'offer' made to Henderson, the alliance with Britain now appeared to be available before before any settlement with Poland. any settlement with Poland.

Dahlerus took the message to London next morning, 27 August. The response was cool and sceptical. Dahlerus was sent back to report that Britain was willing to reach an agreement with Germany, but would not break its guarantee to Poland. Following direct negotiations between Germany and Poland on borders and minorities, the results would require international guarantee. Colonies could be returned in due course, but not under threat of war. The offer to defend the British Empire was rejected. Astonis.h.i.+ngly, to Dahlerus, back in Berlin late that evening, Hitler accepted the terms, as long as the Poles had been immediately instructed to contact Germany and begin negotiations. Halifax made sure this was done. In Warsaw, Beck agreed to begin negotiations. Meanwhile, the German mobilization, which had never been cancelled along with the invasion, rolled on. Before Henderson arrived back in Berlin to bring the official British response, Brauchitsch informed Halder that Hitler had provisionally fixed the new date for the attack as 1 September.

Henderson handed Hitler a translation of the British reply to his 'offer' of 25 August at 10.30 p.m. that evening, the 28th. Ribbentrop and Schmidt were there. Hitler and Henderson spoke for over an hour. For once, Hitler neither interrupted, nor harangued Henderson. He was, according to the British Amba.s.sador, polite, reasonable, and not angered by what he read. The 'friendly atmosphere' noted by Henderson was so only in relative terms. Hitler still spoke of annihilating Poland. The British reply did not in substance extend beyond the informal answer that Dahlerus had conveyed (and had been composed after Hitler's response to that initiative was known). The British government insisted upon a prior settlement of the differences between Germany and Poland. Britain had already gained a.s.surances of Poland's willingness to negotiate. Depending upon the outcome of any settlement and how it was reached, Britain was prepared to work towards a lasting understanding with Germany. But the obligation to Poland would be honoured. Hitler promised a written reply the next day.

At 7.15 p.m. on the evening of 29 August, Henderson, sporting as usual a dark red carnation in the b.u.t.tonhole of his pin-striped suit, pa.s.sed down the darkened Wilhelmstrae Berlin was undergoing experimental blackouts through a silent, but not hostile, crowd of 300400 Berliners, to be received at the Reich Chancellery as on the previous night with a roll of drums and guard of honour. Otto Meissner, whose role as head of the so-called Presidential Chancellery was largely representational, and Wilhelm Bruckner, the chief adjutant, escorted him to Hitler. Ribbentrop was also present. Hitler was in a less amenable mood than on the previous evening. He gave Henderson his reply. He had again raised the price exactly as Henlein had been ordered to do in the Sudetenland the previous year, so that it was impossible to meet it. Hitler now demanded the arrival of a Polish emissary with full powers by the following day, Wednesday, 30 August. Even the pliant Henderson, protesting at the impossible time-limit for the arrival of the Polish emissary, said it sounded like an ultimatum. Hitler replied that his generals were pressing him for a decision. They were unwilling to lose any more time because of the onset of the rainy season in Poland. Henderson told Hitler that any attempt to use force against Poland would inevitably result in conflict with Britain.

When Henderson had left, the Italian Amba.s.sador Attolico was ushered in. He had come to tell Hitler that Mussolini was prepared to intercede with Britain if required. The last thing Hitler wanted, as he had made clear to his generals at the meeting on 22 August, was a last-minute intercession to bring about a new Munich least of all from the partner who had just announced that he could not stand by the pact so recently signed. Hitler coldly told Attolico that direct negotiations with Britain were in hand and that he had already declared his readiness to accept a Polish negotiator.

Hitler had been displeased at Henderson's response to his reply to the British government. He now called in Goring to send Dahlerus once more on the unofficial route to let the British know the gist of the 'generous' terms he was proposing to offer the Poles return of Danzig to Germany, and a plebiscite on the Corridor (with Germany to be given a 'corridor through the Corridor' if the result went Poland's way). By 5 a.m. on 30 August, Dahlerus was again heading for London in a German military plane. An hour earlier Henderson had already conveyed Lord Halifax's unsurprising response, that the German request for the Polish emissary to appear that very day was unreasonable.

During the day, while talking of peace Hitler prepared for war. In the morning he instructed Albert Forster, a week earlier declared Head of State in Danzig, on the action to be taken in the Free City at the outbreak of hostilities. Later, he signed the decree to establish a Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich with wide powers to promulgate decrees. Chaired by Goring, its other members were He as Deputy Leader of the Party, Frick as plenipotentiary for Reich administration, Funk as plenipotentiary for the economy, Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery, and Keitel, chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht. It had the appearance of a 'war cabinet' to administer the Reich while Hitler preoccupied himself with military matters. In reality, the fragmentation of Reich government had gone too far for that. Hitler's own interest in preventing any centralized body operating as a possible check on his own power was to mean that the Ministerial Council was destined not to bring even a limited resurrection of collective government.

Hitler spent much of the day working on his 'proposals' to be put to the Polish negotiator who, predictably, never arrived. From the outset it had not been a serious suggestion. But when Henderson returned to the Reich Chancellery at midnight to present the British reply to Hitler's communication of the previous evening, he encountered Ribbentrop in a highly nervous state and in a vile temper. Diplomatic niceties were scarcely preserved. After Ribbentrop had read out Hitler's 'proposals' at breakneck speed, so that Henderson was unable to note them down, he refused on Hitler's express orders to let the British Amba.s.sador read the doc.u.ment, then hurled it on the table stating that it was now out of date, since no Polish emissary had arrived in Berlin by midnight. In retrospect, Henderson thought that Ribbentrop 'was wilfully throwing away the last chance of a peaceful solution'.

There had, in fact, been no 'last chance'. No Polish emissary had been expected. Ribbentrop was concerned precisely not not to hand over terms which the British might have pa.s.sed to the Poles, who might have been prepared to discuss them. Hitler had needed his 'generous suggestion over the regulation of the Danzig and Corridor Question', as Schmidt later heard him say, as 'an alibi, especially for the German people, to show them that I have done everything to preserve peace'. to hand over terms which the British might have pa.s.sed to the Poles, who might have been prepared to discuss them. Hitler had needed his 'generous suggestion over the regulation of the Danzig and Corridor Question', as Schmidt later heard him say, as 'an alibi, especially for the German people, to show them that I have done everything to preserve peace'.

The army had been told on 30 August to make all preparations for attack on 1 September at 4.30 a.m. If negotiations in London required a postponement, notification would be given before 3 p.m. next day. 'Armed intervention by Western powers now said to be unavoidable,' noted Halder. 'In spite of this, Fuhrer has decided to strike.'

When informed that Ribbentrop had arrived at the Reich Chancellery, Hitler told him he had given the order, and that 'things were rolling'. Ribbentrop wished him luck. 'It looks as if the die is finally cast,' wrote Goebbels.

After making his decision, Hitler cut himself off from external contact. He refused to see the Polish Amba.s.sador, Jozef Lipski, later in the afternoon. Ribbentrop did see him a little later. But hearing that the Amba.s.sador carried no plenipotentiary powers to negotiate, he immediately terminated the interview. Lipski returned to find telephone lines to Warsaw had been cut off.

At 9 p.m. the German radio broadcast Hitler's 'sixteen-point proposal' which Ribbentrop had so cra.s.sly presented to Henderson at midnight. By 10.30 p.m. the first reports were coming in of a number of serious border incidents, including an armed 'Polish' a.s.sault on the German radio station at Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia. These had been planned for weeks by Heydrich's office, using SS men dressed in Polish uniforms to carry out the attacks. To increase the semblance of authenticity, a number of concentration-camp inmates killed by lethal injections and carried to the sites provided the bodies required.

Throughout Germany, people went about their daily business as normal. But the normality was deceptive. All minds now were fixed on the likelihood of war. A brief war, with scarcely any losses, and confined to Poland, was one thing. But war with the West, which so many with memories of the Great War of 191418 had dreaded for years, now seemed almost certain. There was now no mood like that of August 1914, no 'hurrah-patriotism'. The faces of the people told of their anxiety, fears, worries, and resigned acceptance of what they were being faced with. 'Everybody against the war,' wrote the American correspondent William s.h.i.+rer on 31 August. 'How can a country go into a major war with a population so dead against it?' he asked. 'Trust in the Fuhrer will now probably be subjected to its hardest acid test,' ran a report from the Upper Franconian district of Ebermannstadt. 'The overwhelming proportion of people's comrades expects from him the prevention of the war, if otherwise impossible even at the cost of Danzig and the Corridor.'

How accurate such a report was as a reflection of public opinion cannot be ascertained. The question is in any case irrelevant. Ordinary citizens, whatever their fears, were powerless to affect the course of events. While many of them were fitfully sleeping in the hope that even now, at the eleventh hour and beyond, some miracle would preserve peace, the first shots were fired and bombs dropped near Dirschau at 4.30 a.m. And just over quarter of an hour later in Danzig harbour the elderly German battles.h.i.+p Schleswig-Holstein, Schleswig-Holstein, now a sea-cadet trainings.h.i.+p, focused its heavy guns on the fortified Polish munitions depot on the Westerplatte and opened fire. now a sea-cadet trainings.h.i.+p, focused its heavy guns on the fortified Polish munitions depot on the Westerplatte and opened fire.

By late afternoon the army leaders.h.i.+p reported: 'Our troops have crossed the frontier everywhere and are sweeping on toward their objectives of the day, checked only slightly by the Polish forces thrown against them.' In Danzig itself, the purported objective of the conflict between Germany and Poland, border posts and public buildings manned by Poles had been attacked at dawn. The League of Nations High Commissioner had been forced to leave, and the swastika banner raised over his building. Gauleiter Albert Forster proclaimed Danzig's reincorporation in the Reich. In the turmoil of the first day of hostilities, probably few people in Germany took much notice.

On a grey, overcast morning s.h.i.+rer had found the few people on the streets apathetic. There were not many cheers from those thinly lining the pavements when Hitler drove to the Reichstag shortly before 10 a.m. A hundred or so deputies had been called up to serve in the army. But Goring saw to it that there were no empty s.p.a.ces when Hitler spoke. The vacancies were simply filled by drafting in party functionaries. Hitler, now wearing Wehrmacht uniform, was on less than top form. He sounded strained. There was less cheering than usual. After a lengthy justification of the alleged need for Germany's military action, he declared: 'Poland has now last night for the first time fired on our territory through regular soldiers. Since 5.45 a.m.' he meant 4.45 a.m. 'the fire has been returned. And from now on bomb will be met with bomb.'

Hitler had still not given up hope that the British could be kept out of the conflict. On his return from the Reichstag he had Goring summon Dahlerus to make a last attempt. But he wanted no outside intercession, no repeat of Munich. Mussolini, under the influence of Ciano and Attolico, and unhappy at Italy's humiliation at being unable to offer military support, had been trying for some days to arrange a peace conference. He was now desperate, fearing attack on Italy from Britain and France, to stop the war spreading. Before seeing Dahlerus, Hitler sent the Duce a telegram explicitly stating that he did not want his mediation. Then Dahlerus arrived. He found Hitler in a nervous state. The odour from his mouth was so strong that Dahlerus was tempted to move back a step or two. Hitler was at his most implacable. He was determined to break Polish resistance 'and to annihilate the Polish people', he told Dahlerus. In the next breath he added that he was prepared for further negotiations if the British wanted them. Again the threat followed, in ever more hysterical tones. It was in British interests to avoid a fight with him. But if Britain chose to fight, she would pay dearly. He would fight for one, two, ten years if necessary.

Dahlerus's reports of such hysteria could cut no ice in London. Nor did an official approach on the evening of 2 September, inviting Sir Horace Wilson to Berlin for talks with Hitler and Ribbentrop. Wilson replied straightforwardly that German troops had first to be withdrawn from Polish territory. Otherwise Britain would fight. This was only to repeat the message which the British Amba.s.sador had already pa.s.sed to Ribbentrop the previous evening. No reply to that message was received. At 9 a.m. on 3 September, Henderson handed the British ultimatum to the interpreter Paul Schmidt, in place of Ribbentrop, who had been unwilling to meet the British Amba.s.sador. Unless a.s.surances were forthcoming by 11 a.m. that Germany was prepared to end its military action and withdraw from Polish soil, the ultimatum read, 'a state of war will exist between the two countries as from that hour'. No such a.s.surances were forthcoming. 'Consequently,' Chamberlain broadcast to the British people and immediately afterwards repeated in the House of Commons, 'this country is at war with Germany.' The French declaration of war followed that afternoon at 5 p.m.

Hitler had led Germany into the general European war he had wanted to avoid for several more years. Military 'insiders' thought the army, 2.3 million strong, through the rapidity of the rearmament programme, was less prepared for a major war than it had been in 1914. Hitler was fighting the war allied with the Soviet Union, the ideological arch-enemy. And he was at war with Great Britain, the would-be 'friend' he had for years tried to woo. Despite all warnings, his plans at every turn backed by his warmongering Foreign Minister had been predicated upon his a.s.sumption that Britain would not enter the war, though he had shown himself undeterred even by that eventuality. It was little wonder that, if Paul Schmidt's account is to be believed, when Hitler received the British ultimatum on the morning of 3 September, he angrily turned to Ribbentrop and asked: 'What now?'

X.

'Responsibility for this terrible catastrophe lies on the shoulders of one man,' Chamberlain had told the House of Commons on 1 September, 'the German Chancellor, who has not hesitated to plunge the world into misery in order to serve his own senseless ambitions.' It was an understandable over-simplication. Such a personalized view necessarily left out the sins of omission and commission by others including the British government and its French allies which had a.s.sisted in enabling Hitler to acc.u.mulate such a unique basis of power that his actions could determine the fate of Europe.

Internationally, Hitler's combination of bullying and blackmail could not have worked but for the fragility of the post-war European settlement. The Treaty of Versailles had given Hitler the basis for his rising demands, accelerating drastically in 19389. It had provided the platform for ethnic unrest that Hitler could easily exploit in the cauldron of central and eastern Europe. Not least, it had left an uneasy guilt-complex in the West, especially in Britain. Hitler might rant and exaggerate; his methods might be repellent; but was there not some truth in what he was claiming? The western governments, backed by their war-weary populations, anxious more than all else to do everything possible to avoid a new conflagration, their traditional diplomacy no match for unprecedented techniques of lying and threatening, thought so, and went out of their way to placate Hitler. By the time the western powers fully realized what they were up against, they were no longer in any position to bring the 'mad dog' to heel.

Within Germany, the fracturing of any semblance of collective government over the previous six years left Hitler in the position where he determined alone. No one doubted the suffocating effect of years of the expanding Fuhrer cult had seen to that that he had the right to decide, and that his decisions were to be implemented. In the critical days, he saw a good deal of Ribbentrop, Goring, Goebbels, Himmler, and Bormann. Other leading figures in the party, government ministers, even court favourites like Speer, had little or no contact with him. He was naturally also in constant touch with the Wehrmacht leaders.h.i.+p. But while Goebbels, for instance, only learnt at second hand about military plans, leaders of the armed forces often had less than full information, or were belatedly told, about diplomatic developments. The cabinet, of course, never met. Remarkable for a complex modern state, there was no government beyond Hitler and whichever individuals he chose to confer with at a particular time. Hitler was the only link of the component parts of the regime. Only in his presence could the key steps be taken. But those admitted to his presence, apart from his usual entourage of secretaries, adjutants, and the like, were for the most part officers needing operational guidelines or those like Ribbentrop or Goebbels who thought like he did and were dependent on him. Internal government of the Reich had become Fuhrer autocracy.

For those in proximity to Hitler, the personalized decision-making meant anything but consistency, clarity, and rationality. On the contrary: it brought bewildering improvisation, rapid changes of course, uncertainty. Hitler was living off his nerves. That conveyed itself to others around him. External pressures of the course he had embarked upon met Hitler's personal psychology at this point. At the age of fifty, men frequently ruminate on the ambitions they had, and how the time to fulfil them is running out. For Hitler, a man with an extraordinary ego and ambitions to go down in history as the greatest German of all time, and a hypochondriac already prepossessed with his own approaching death, the sense of ageing, of youthful vigour disappearing, of no time to lose was hugely magnified.

Hitler had felt time closing in on him, under pressure to act lest the conditions became more disadvantageous. He had thought of war against the West around 19435, against the Soviet Union though no time-scale was ever given at some point after that. He had never thought of avoiding war. On the contrary: reliving the lost first great war made him predicate everything on victory in the second great war to come. Germany's future, he had never doubted and had said so on innumerable occasions, could only be determined through war. In the dualistic way in which he always thought, victory would ensure survival, defeat would mean total eradication the end of the German people. War was for Hitler inevitable. Only the timing and the direction were at issue. And there was no time to wait. Starting from his own strange premisses, given Germany's strained resources and the rapid strides forward in rearmament by Britain and France, there was a certain contorted logic in what he said. Time was running out on the options for Hitler's war.

This strong driving-force in Hitler's mentality was compounded by other strands of his extraordinary psychological make-up. The years of spectacular successes all attributed by Hitler to the 'triumph of the will' and the undiluted adulation and sycophancy that surrounded him at every turn, the Fuhrer cult on which the 'system' was built, had by now completely erased in him what little sense of his own limitations had been present. This led him to a calamitous over-estimation of his own abilities, coupled with an extreme denigration of those particularly in the military who argued more rationally for greater caution. It went hand in hand with an equally disastrous refusal to contemplate compromise, let alone retreat, as other than a sign of weakness. The experience of the war and its traumatic outcome had doubtless cemented this characteristic. It was certainly there in his early political career, for instance at the time of the attempted putsch in Munich in 1923. But it must have had deeper roots. Psychologists might have answers. At any rate the behaviour trait, increasingly dangerous as. .h.i.tler's power expanded to threaten the peace of Europe, was redolent of the spoilt child turned into the would-be macho-man. His inability to comprehend the unwillingness of the British government to yield to his threats produced tantrums of frustrated rage. The certainty that he would get his way through bullying turned into blind fury whenever his bluff was called. The purchase he placed on his own image and standing was narcissistic in the extreme. The number of times he recalled the Czech mobilization of May 1938, then the Polish mobilization of March 1939, as a slight on his prestige was telling. A heightened thirst for revenge was the lasting consequence. Then the rescinding of the order to attack Poland on 26 August, much criticized as a sign of incompetence by the military, he took as a defeat in the eyes of his generals, feeling his prestige threatened. The result was increased impatience to remedy this by a new order at the earliest possible moment, from which there would be no retreat.

Not just external circ.u.mstances, but also his personal psyche, pushed him forwards, compelled the risk. Hitler's reply on 29 August, when Goring suggested it was not necessary to 'go for broke', was, therefore, absolutely in character: 'In my life I've always gone for broke.' There was, for him, no other choice.

17.

Licensing Barbarism

I.

Hitler's 'mission' since he entered politics had been to undo the stain of defeat and humiliation in 1918 by destroying Germany's enemies internal and external and restoring national greatness. This 'mission', he had plainly stated on many occasions during the 1920s, could only be accomplished through 'the sword'. It meant war for supremacy. The risk could not be avoided. 'Germany will either be a world power, or there will be no Germany,' he had written in Mein Kampf Mein Kampf. Nothing had changed over the years in his fanatical belief in this 'mission'.

In war n.a.z.ism came into its own. The n.a.z.i Movement had been born out of a lost war. As with Hitler personally, the experience of that war and erasing the stain of that defeat were at its heart. 'National renewal' and preparation for another war to establish the dominance in Europe which the first great war had failed to attain drove it forwards. The new war now brought the circ.u.mstances and opportunities for the dramatic radicalization of n.a.z.ism's ideological crusade. Long-term goals seemed almost overnight to become attainable policy objectives. Persecution which had targeted usually disliked social minorities was now directed at an entire conquered and subjugated people. The Jews, a tiny proportion of the German population, were not only far more numerous in Poland, but were despised by many within their native land and were now the lowest of the low in the eyes of the brutal occupiers of the country.

As before the war, Hitler set the tone for the escalating barbarism, approved of it, and sanctioned it. But his own actions provide an inadequate explanation of such escalation. The accelerated disintegration of any semblance of collective government, the undermining of legality by an ever-encroaching and ever-expanding police executive, and the power-ambitions of an increasingly autonomous SS leaders.h.i.+p all played important parts. These processes had developed between 1933 and 1939 in the Reich itself. They were now, once the occupation of Poland opened up new vistas, to acquire a new momentum altogether. The planners and organizers, theoreticians of domination, and technocrats of power in the SS leaders.h.i.+p saw Poland as an experimental playground. They were granted a tabula rasa tabula rasa to undertake more or less what they wanted. The Fuhrer's 'vision' served as the legitimation they needed. Party leaders put in to run the civilian administration of the parts of Poland annexed to the Reich, backed by thrusting and 'inventive' civil servants, also saw themselves as 'working towards the Fuhrer' in their efforts to bring about the speediest possible 'Germanization' of their territories. And the occupying army officers and rank-and-file imbued with deep-seated anti-Polish prejudice, also needed little encouragement in the ruthlessness with which the conquered Poles were subjugated. to undertake more or less what they wanted. The Fuhrer's 'vision' served as the legitimation they needed. Party leaders put in to run the civilian administration of the parts of Poland annexed to the Reich, backed by thrusting and 'inventive' civil servants, also saw themselves as 'working towards the Fuhrer' in their efforts to bring about the speediest possible 'Germanization' of their territories. And the occupying army officers and rank-and-file imbued with deep-seated anti-Polish prejudice, also needed little encouragement in the ruthlessness with which the conquered Poles were subjugated.

The ideological radicalization which took place in Poland in the eighteen months following the German invasion was an essential precursor to the plans which would unfold in spring 1941 as preparation for the war which Hitler knew at some time he would fight: the war against Bolshevik Russia.

Towards nine o'clock on the evening of 3 September, Hitler had boarded his special armoured train in Berlin's Stettiner Bahnhof and left for the front. For much of the following three weeks, the train standing initially in Pomerania (Hinterpommern), then later in Upper Silesia formed the first wartime 'Fuhrer Headquarters'. Among Hitler's accompaniment were two personal adjutants, for the most part Wilhelm Bruckner and Julius Schaub, two secretaries (Christa Schroeder and Gerda Daranowski), two manservants, his doctor, Karl Brandt (or sometimes his deputy, Hans-Karl von Ha.s.selbach), and his four military adjutants (Rudolf Schmundt, Karl-Jesko von Puttkamer, Gerhard Engel, and Nicolaus von Below). Behind Hitler's carriage, the first on the train, containing his s.p.a.cious 'living room', sleeping compartment, and bathroom, together with compartments for his adjutants, was the command carriage that held communications equipment and a conference room for meetings with military leaders. In the next carriage Martin Bormann had his quarters. On the day of the invasion of Poland, he had informed Lammers that he would 'continue permanently to belong to the Fuhrer's entourage'. From now on, he was never far from Hitler's side echoing the Fuhrer's wishes, and constantly reminding him of the need to keep up the ideological drive of the regime.

The Polish troops, ill-equipped for modern warfare, were from the outset no match for the invaders. Within the first two days, most aerodromes and almost the whole of the Polish air force were wiped out. The Polish defences were rapidly overrun, the army swiftly in disarray. Already on 5 September Chief of Staff Halder noted: 'Enemy practically defeated.' By the second week of fighting, German forces had advanced to the outskirts of Warsaw. Hitler seldom intervened in the military command. 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. 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. But Hitler was in his element. He was invigorated by war.

On 19 September, 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. 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 sh.e.l.ling 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. Poland no longer existed. An estimated 700,000 Polish soldiers were taken prisoners of war. Around 70,000 were killed in action, and a further 133,000 wounded. German fatalities numbered about 11,000, with 30,000 wounded, and a further 3,400 missing.

Territorial and political plans for Poland were improvised and amended as events unfolded in September and October 1939. On 7 September he 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 p.i.s.sia, 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 Friends.h.i.+p signed on 28 September 1939 the question of whether or not there would be a Polish rump state was in Berlin's hands alone.

Hitler was still contemplating the possibility of some form of Polish political ent.i.ty at the end of the month. He held out the prospect of recreating a truncated Polish state though expressly ruling out any recreation 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. 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 'ReichsgauWartheland', as it was soon to be renamed, though generally known simply as the 'Warthegau'). Hans Frank, the party's legal chief, was appointed General Governor in the rump Polish territory. 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 150200 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 per cent.

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 fas.h.i.+on, 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.

II.

The terror unleashed from the first days of the invasion of Poland left the violence, persecution, and discrimination that had taken place in the Reich itself since 1933 dreadful though that had been completely in the shade. The orgy of atrocities was unleashed from above, exploiting in the initial stages the ethnic antagonism which n.a.z.i agitation and propaganda had done much to incite. The radical, planned programme of 'ethnic cleansing' that followed was authorized by Hitler himself. But its instigation everything points to this almost certainly came from the SS leaders.h.i.+p. The SS had readily recognized the opportunities there to be grasped from expansion. New possibilities for extending the tentacles of the police state had opened up with the Anschlu. Einsatzgruppen (task forces) of the Security Police had been used there for the first time. They had been deployed again in the Sudeten territory, then the rest of Czecho-Slovakia, where there was even greater scope for the SS's attack on 'enemies of the state'. The way was paved for the ma.s.sive escalation of uncontrolled brutality in Poland. Once more, five (later six) Einsatzgruppen were sent into action. They interpreted most liberally their brief to shoot 'hostages' in recrimination for any show of hostility, or 'insurgents' seen as anyone giving the slightest indication of active opposition to the occupying forces. The need to sustain good relations with the Wehrmacht initially restricted the extent and arbitrariness of the shootings. It probably also at first constrained the 'action' aimed at liquidating the Polish n.o.bility, clergy, and intelligentsia. This 'action' nevertheless claimed ultimately an estimated 60,000 victims. Plainly, with the occupation of Poland, the barbarities of the Einsatzgruppen had moved on to a new plane. The platform was established for what was subsequently to take place in the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941.

There was no shortage of eager helpers among the ethnic Germans in the former Polish territories. The explosion of violence recalled, in hugely magnified fas.h.i.+on, the wild and barbarous treatment of 'enemies of the state' in Germany in spring 1933. But now, after six years of c.u.mulative onslaught on every tenet of humane and civilized behaviour, and persistent indoctrination with chauvinistic hatred, the penned-in aggression could be let loose externally on a downtrodden and despised enemy.

Some of the worst German atrocities in the weeks following the invasion were perpetrated by the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz (Ethnic German Self-Protection), a civilian militia established on Hitler's directions in the first days of September and within little more than a week coming under the control of the SS. Himmler's adjutant, Ludolf von Alvensleben, took over its organization, and later led the Selbstschutz in West Prussia, where the extent of its brutality stood out even in the horrific catalogue of misdeeds of the organization's other branches. Especially in West Prussia, where ethnic conflict had been at its fiercest, the Selbstschutz carried out untold numbers of 'executions' of Polish civilians. The Selbstschutz was eventually wound up in West Prussia in November, and elsewhere by early 1940 but only because its uncontrolled atrocities were becoming counter-productive on account of the resulting conflicts with the army and German civil authorities in the occupied areas.

The rampaging actions of the Selbstschutz were only one element of the programme of radical 'ethnic struggle' designed by the SS leaders.h.i.+p for the 'new order' in Poland. More systematic 'ethnic cleansing' operations, involving widespread liquidation of targeted groups, were mainly in the hands of the Security Police Einsatzgruppen, following in the wake of the military advance. Already at the end of the first week of the invasion, Heydrich was reported to be enraged as, apparently, was. .h.i.tler too at the legalities of the military courts, despite 200 executions a day. He was demanding shooting or hanging without trial. 'The n.o.bility, clerics, and Jews must be done away with,' were his reported words. He repeated the same sentiments, referring to a general 'ground cleansing', to Halder's Quartermaster-General Eduard Wagner some days later. Reports of atrocities were not long in arriving. By 1011 September accounts were coming in of an SS ma.s.sacre of Jews herded into a church, and of an SS shooting of large numbers of Jews. On 12 September Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, told Keitel that he had heard 'that extensive shootings were planned in Poland and that especially the n.o.bility and clergy were to be exterminated'. Keitel replied 'that this matter had already been decided by the Fuhrer'. Chief of Staff Halder was already by then heard to have said that 'it was the intention of the Fuhrer and of Goring to annihilate and exterminate the Polish people', and that 'the rest could not even be hinted at in writing'.

What it amounted to an all-out 'ethnic cleansing' programme was explained by Heydrich to the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen on 21 September. The thinking was that the former German provinces would become German Gaue. Another Gau with a 'foreign-speaking population' would be established, with its capital in Cracow. An 'eastern wall' would surround the German provinces, with the 'foreign-speaking Gau' forming a type of 'no man's land' in front of it. The Reichsfuhrer-SS was to be appointed Settlement Commissar for the East (an appointment of vital importance, giving Himmler immense, practically unrestricted powers in the east, confirmed by secret edict of Hitler on 7 October). 'The deportation of Jews into the foreign-speaking Gau, expulsion over the demarcation-line has been approved by the Fuhrer,' Heydrich went on. The process was to be spread over a year. As regards 'the solution of the Polish problem', the 3 per cent at most of the Polish leaders.h.i.+p in the occupied territories 'had to be rendered harmless' and put in concentration camps. The Einsatzgruppen were to draw up lists of significant leaders, and of various professional and middle-cla.s.s groups (including teachers and priests) who were to be deported to the designated 'dumping-ground' of the General Government. The 'primitive Poles' were to be used as migrant workers and gradually deported to the 'foreign-speaking Gau'. Jews in rural areas were to be removed, and placed in towns. Jews were systematically to be transported by goods-train from German areas. Heydrich also envisaged the deportation to Poland of the Reich's Jews, and of 30,000 gypsies.

Hitler spoke little over a week later to Rosenberg of the Germanization and deportation programme to be carried out in Poland. The three weeks spent in Poland during the campaign had confirmed his ingrained racial prejudices. 'The Poles,' Rosenberg recalled him saying: 'a thin Germanic layer, below that dreadful material. The Jews, the most horrible thing imaginable. The towns covered in dirt. He has learnt a lot in these weeks. Above all: if Poland had ruled for a few decades over the old parts of the Reich, everything would be lice-ridden and decayed. A clear, masterful hand was now needed to rule here.' Hitler then referred, along similar lines to Heydrich's address to his Einsatzgruppen chiefs, to his plans for the conquered Polish territories. 'He wanted to divide the now established territory into three strips: 1. between the Vistula and the Bug: the entire Jewry (also from the Reich) along with all somehow unreliable elements. On the Vistula an invincible Eastern Wall even stronger than in the West. 2. Along the previous border a broad belt of Germanization and colonization. Here there would be a great task for the entire people: to create a German granary, strong peasantry, to resettle there good Germans from all over the world. 3. Between, a Polish "form of state". Whether after decades the settlement belt could be pushed forward will have to be left to the future.'

A few days later, Hitler spoke to Goebbels in similar vein. 'The Fuhrer's judgement on the Poles is annihilatory,' Goebbels recorded. 'More animals than human beings ... The filth of the Poles is unimaginable.' Hitler wanted no a.s.similation. 'They should be pushed into their reduced state' meaning the General Government 'and left entirely among themselves.' If Henry the Lion the mighty twelfth-century Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, who had resettled peasants on lands in northern and eastern Germany had conquered the east, the result, given the scope of power available at the time, would have been a 'slavified' German mongrel-race, Hitler went on. 'It's all the better as it is. Now at least we know the laws of race and can act accordingly.'

Hitler hinted in his Reichstag speech of 6 October, though in the vaguest terms for public consumption, at 'cleansing work' and ma.s.sive ethnic resettlement as preparation for the 'new order of ethnographical relations' in former Poland. Only in confidential dealings with those in the regime's leaders.h.i.+p who needed to know a characteristic technique of his rule not to spread information beyond essential limits did Hitler speak frankly, as he had done to Rosenberg and Goebbels, about what was intended. At a meeting on 17 October in the Reich Chancellery attended by Keitel, Frank, Himmler, He, Bormann, Lammers, Frick, and the State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, Stuckart, Hitler outlined the draconian policy for Poland. The military should be happy to be freed from administrative responsibility. The General Government was not to become part of the Reich. It was not the task of the administration there to run it like a model province or to establish a sound economic and financial basis. The Polish intelligentsia were to be deprived of any chance to develop into a ruling cla.s.s. The standard of living was to remain low: 'We only want to get labour supplies from there.' The administration there was to be given a free hand, independent of Berlin ministries. 'We don't want to do anything there that we do in the Reich,' was ominously noted. Carrying out the work there would involve 'a hard ethnic struggle that will not permit any legal restrictions. The methods will not be compatible with our normal principles.' Rule over the area would 'allow us to purify the Reich area too of Jews and Polacks'. Cooperation of the General Government with the new Gaue of Posen and West Prussia was to take place only for resettlement purposes (through Himmler's new role as head of the programme for the ethnic reordering of Poland). 'Cleverness and hardness in this ethnic struggle,' Hitler ended, with usual recourse to national needs as justification, 'must save us from again having to enter the fields of slaughter on account of this land.' 'The devil's work,' he called it.

Hitler's approval for what Heydrich had set in motion cannot be doubted. Referring back several months later to the chequered relations of the SS and police in Poland with the army leaders.h.i.+p, Heydrich pointed out that the work of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland was 'in accordance with the special order of the Fuhrer'. The 'political activity' carried out in Poland by the Reichsfuhrer-SS, which had caused conflict with some of the army leaders.h.i.+p, had followed 'the directives of the Fuhrer as well as the General Field-Marshal'. He added 'that the directives according to which the police deployment took place were extraordinarily radical (e.g. orders of liquidation for numerous sectors of the Polish leaders.h.i.+p, going into thousands)'. Since the order was not pa.s.sed on to army leaders, they had presumed that the police and SS were acting arbitrarily.

Indeed, the army commanders on the ground in Poland had been given no explicit instructions about any mandate from Hitler for the murderous 'ethnic cleansing' policy of the SS and Security Police, though Brauchitsch, like Keitel, was well aware of what was intended. This was in itself characteristic of how the regime functioned, and of Hitler's keenness through keeping full knowledge to the smallest circle possible, and speaking for the most part even there in generalities, however draconian to cloud his own responsibility. The army's hands were far from unsullied by the atrocities in Poland. Brauchitsch's proclamation to the Poles on 1 September had told them that the Wehrmacht did not regard the population as its enemy, and that all agreements on human rights would be upheld. But already in the first weeks of September numerous army reports recounted plundering, 'arbitrary shootings', 'maltreatment of the unarmed, rapes', 'burning of synagogues', and ma.s.sacres of Jews by soldiers of the Wehrmacht. The army leaders even the most pro-n.a.z.i among them nevertheless regarded such repellent actions as serious lapses of discipline, not part of a consistent racially motivated policy of unremitting 'cleansing' to be furthered with all means possible, and sought to punish those involved through the military courts. (In fact, most were amnestied by Hitler through a decree on 4 October justifying German actions as retaliation 'out of bitterness for the atrocities committed by the Poles'.) The commanders on the ground in Poland, harsh though their own military rule was, did not see the atrocities which they acknowledged among their own troops in their view regrettable, if inevitable, side-effects of the military conquest of a bitter enemy and perceived 'inferior' people as part of an exterminatory programme of 'ethnic struggle'. Their approach, draconian though their treatment of the Poles was, differed strikingly from the thinking of Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich.

Gradually, in the second half of September the unease among army commanders in Poland at the savagery of the SS's actions turned to unmistakable criticism. Awareness of this fed complaints from the n.a.z.i leaders.h.i.+p about the 'lack of understanding' in the army of what was required in the 'ethnic struggle'. Hitler told Goebbels on 13 October that the military in Poland were 'too soft and yielding' and would be replaced as soon as possible by civil administration. 'Only force is effective with the Poles,' he added. 'Asia begins in Poland.' On 17 October, in a step notably contributing to the extension of the SS's autonomy, Hitler removed the SS and police from military jurisdiction.

The most forthright and courageous denunciations of the continuing horrendous outrages of the SS were made in written reports to Brauchitsch by Colonel-General Johannes Blaskowitz, following the ending of military administration the commander of the army in Poland. His reports condemned the 'criminal atrocities, maltreatment, and plundering carried out by the SS, police, and administration', castigating the 'animal and pathological instincts' of the SS which had brought the slaughter of tens of thousands of Jews and Poles. Blaskowitz feared 'immeasurable brutalization and moral debas.e.m.e.nt' if the SS were not brought under control something, he said, which was increasingly impossible within Poland 'since they can well believe themselves officially authorized and justified in committing any act of cruelty'. General Wilhelm Ulex, Commander-in-Chief of the southern section of the front, reported in similar vein.

The weak-kneed response of army Commander-in-Chief von Brauchitsch in effect an apologia for the barbaric 'ethnic cleansing' policy authorized by Hitler was fateful. It compromised the position of the army, and pointed the way to the accommodation between army and SS about the genocidal actions to be taken in the Soviet Union in 1941. Brauchitsch spoke of 'regrettable mistakes' in the 'difficult solution' of the 'ethnic-political tasks'. After lengthy discussions with the Reichsfuhrer-SS, he was confident that the future would bring a change. Criticism endangering the 'unity and fighting power of the troops' had to be prohibited. 'The solution of ethnic-political tasks, necessary for securing German living s.p.a.ce and ordered by the Fuhrer, had necessarily to lead to otherwise unusual, harsh measures against the Polish population of the occupied area,' he stated. 'The necessarily accelerated execution of these tasks, caused by the imminently decisive struggle of the German people, naturally brought about a further intensification of these measures.' Doubtless antic.i.p.ating the inevitable explosion at the inadequacies of the army, Brauchitsch did not even deliver Blaskowitz's reports in person to Hitler, but pa.s.sed on at least the first report on 18 November 1939 via Hitler's army adjutant Gerhard Engel. The expected ferocious denunciation of the 'childish att.i.tudes' in the army leaders.h.i.+p inevitably followed. 'You can't wage war with Salvation Army methods,' Hitler raged.

The inquiries Himmler had set in train following the army complaints predictably concluded that it was a matter only of 'trivialities'. But the Reichsfuhrer-SS was angered by the attacks. In March 1940 he eventually sought an opportunity to address the leaders of the army. He accepted responsibility for what had happened, though played down the reports, attributing the accounts of serious atrocities to rumour. According to the memory of one partic.i.p.ant, General Weichs, he added that 'he was prepared, in matters that seemed perhaps incomprehensible, to take on responsibility before the people and the world, since the person of the Fuhrer could not be connected with these things'. Another partic.i.p.ant, with more cause than most to take a keen interest in Himmler's comments, General Ulex, recalled the Reichsfuhrer-SS saying: 'I do nothing that the Fuhrer does not know about.'

With the sanctioning of the liquidation programme at the core of the barbaric 'ethnic cleansing' drive in Poland, Hitler and the regime he headed had crossed the Rubicon. This was no longer a display of outright brutality at home that shocked as had the ma.s.sacre of the SA leaders.h.i.+p in 1934, or even more so the November Pogrom against the Jews in 1938 precisely because the structures and traditions of legality in the Reich, whatever the inroads made into them, had not been totally undermined. In what had once been Poland, the violence was unconstrained, systematic, and on a scale never witnessed within the Reich itself. Law, however draconian, counted for nothing. The police were given a free hand. Even the incorporated areas were treated for policing terms as outside the Reich. What was taking place in the conquered territories fell, to be sure, still far short of the all-out genocide that was to emerge during the Russian campaign in the summer of 1941. But it had near-genocidal traits. It was the training-ground for what was to follow.

Hitler's remarks to Rosenberg and Goebbels ill.u.s.trated how his own impressions of the Poles provided for him the self-justification for the drastic methods he had approved. He had unquestionably been strengthened in these att.i.tudes by Himmler and Heydrich. Goebbels, too, played to Hitler's prejudices in ventilating his own. In mid-October Goebbels told him of the preliminary work carried out on what was to become the nauseating antisemitic 'doc.u.mentary' film Der ewige Jude Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew). Hitler listened with great interest. What Goebbels said to Hitler might be implied from his own reactions when he viewed the first pictures from what he called the 'ghetto film'. The appearance of the degraded and downtrodden Jews, crushed under the n.a.z.i yoke, had come to resemble the caricature that Goebbels's own propaganda had produced. 'Descriptions so terrible and brutal in detail that your blood clots in your veins,' he commented. 'You shrink back at the sight of such brutishness. This Jewry must be annihilated.' A fortnight or so later Goebbels showed Hitler the horrible ritual-slaughter scenes from the film, and reported on his own impressions already pointing plainly in a genocidal direction gleaned during his visit to the Lodz ghetto: 'It's indescribable. Those are no longer human beings. They are animals. So it's not a humanitarian but a surgical task. Otherwise Europe will perish through the Jewish disease.' (The Eternal Jew). Hitler listened with great interest. What Goebbels said to Hitler might be implied from his own reactions when he viewed the first pictures from what he called the 'ghetto film'. The appearance of the degraded and downtrodden Jews, crushed under the n.a.z.i yoke, had come to resemble the caricature that Goebbels's own propaganda had produced. 'Descriptions so terrible and brutal in detail that your blood clots in your veins,' he commented. 'You shrink back at the sight of such brutishness. This Jewry must be annihilated.' A fortnight or so later Goebbels showed Hitler the horrible ritual-slaughter scenes from the film, and reported on his own impressions already pointing plainly in a genocidal direction gleaned during his visit to the Lodz ghetto: 'It's indescribable. Those are no longer human beings. They are animals. So it's not a humanitarian but a surgical task. Otherwise Europe will perish through the Jewish disease.'

In a most literal sense, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, and other leading n.a.z.is were 'working towards the Fuhrer', whose authority allowed the realization of their own fantasies. The same was true of countless lesser figures in the racial experiment under way in the occupied territories. Academics historians at the forefront excelled themselves in justifying German hegemony in the east. Racial 'experts' in the party set to work to construct the 'scientific' basis for the inferiority of the Poles. Armies of planners, moved to the east, started to let their imagination run riot in devising megalomaniac schemes for ethnic resettlement and social restructuring. Hitler had to do no more than provide the general licence for barbarism. There was no shortage of ready hands to put it into practice.

This began with the heads of the civil administration in occupied Poland. Forster in Danzig-West Prussia, Greiser in the Warthegau, and Frank in the General Government were trusted 'Old Fighters', hand-picked for the task by Hitler. They knew what was expected of them. Regular and precise directives were not necessary.

The combined heads.h.i.+p of state and party in the incorporated area, following the structure used in the 'Ostmark' and Sudetenland