Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (13 page)

Hitler’s problem was that his Polish interlocutors understood his foreign policy, if not well, then at least better than the German public did. The German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, made a final effort on the twenty-fifth of January, a symbolic date, the five-year anniversary of the signing of the German-Polish nonaggression declaration. Once again Ukraine was the bait. Once again the Germans failed. Polish diplomats asked Ribbentrop not to claim in Berlin that any agreement had been or might be reached. On the very day of that conversation, the
New York Times
published an article in which Poland’s foreign minister Beck presented the Soviet Union as an equal to Nazi Germany in its foreign policy. By calling both neighbors “allies” in front of the foreign press, Beck made clear that Poland would not join either in a war against the other. Ribbentrop returned to Berlin the next day with the certainty that Poland would never be a German ally against the Soviet Union.

The day of Ribbentrop’s return from Warsaw was a Thursday; the following Monday, Hitler gave the most notorious speech of his career. On January 30, 1939, Hitler proclaimed to the German parliament that if the Jews began a world war, it would end with their extermination. Poland had always been a matter of practice rather than theory for Hitler, and now improvisation gave way to rage. The particular style of international politics he had developed in 1938, the destruction of neighbors with words rather than weapons, had failed. His specific calculation about Poland, that its leaders would join in an antisemitic crusade against the USSR, had proven wrong. Both promises and threats regarding Jewish and Ukrainian questions had failed. The Polish choice was the end of a Nazi illusion that had lasted for five years.

Hitler decided to eliminate Poland as an object of international relations. The sudden necessity he felt to invade Poland had tremendous implications for Hitler’s plans. With Poland as an ally or benign neutral, Germany might have avoided the traditional problem of encirclement, its doom in the First World War. In such a scenario Germany could first invade France and remove the French army from the war, and then turn its attention to the real target, the riches of the Soviet Union. In Hitler’s basic scheme, Germany was to smash the USSR and become a world power after France was beaten and as the British (and the Americans) sat by and watched. Having redeemed the German race, attained continental power, and begun the grand project of planetary salvation from the Jews, Germany could later confront the British and the Americans as necessary. But with Poland as an adversary, the entire calculus was altered. As of January 30, 1939, as a result of his determination to begin a war despite his Polish miscalculation, Hitler had to contemplate a global conflict that would begin not after but before he won his European war. A German invasion of Poland might bring France into a war against Germany, thus creating encirclement. Worse still, it might draw in the United Kingdom, an eventuality Hitler always hoped to avoid. If Germany had to fight a long war in the west it was then to be feared that the USSR might intervene from the east.

Of course, in Hitler’s mind, any such insidious alliance against Germany would have to be the work of Jews. Since Jews, he believed, held the real power in foreign capitals, they would be the ones to determine whether or not a German invasion of Poland in 1939 actually did become a world war. If Jews could be made to understand that a world war was not in their interest, Hitler seems to have believed, then France and Britain and the Soviet Union would stay out of the initial conflict. If the Jews could be deterred with threats, then the German war against Poland could remain a local conflict in eastern Europe, a minor setback in Hitler’s plans rather than a major disruption. Thus Hitler’s failed Polish policy did not lead to warnings to the Poles. It led to warnings to the Jews.

Hitler’s notion that a threat to exterminate Jews would influence the future policy of the great powers was erroneous. The January 30, 1939, “prophecy,” as Hitler would call it in later speeches, had no resonance in Paris, London, or Moscow. What did matter was the continuation of German aggression in Czechoslovakia a few weeks later. On March 15, 1939, Germany moved forward to complete the destruction of that country, incorporating the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia as a “Protectorate” and creating an independent Slovak state that was to be an ally of Germany. Those who had betrayed Czechoslovakia to Germany at Munich in September 1938 were now betrayed by Germany in their turn. Since Hitler had taken lands that were populated by Czechs rather than Germans, it was clear that his claims to be interested only in national self-determination were lies. Those in London and Paris who had covered their complicity in the rape of Czechoslovakia with guilty references to the First World War realized that they had helped prepare the way for a Second. Paris and London in March 1939 now found themselves reaching the same conclusion as Warsaw had in December: Germany was about to undertake a massive war of aggression in which the only choices were resistance and submission.

On March 21, 1939, a few days after the destruction of Czechoslovakia, Germany unveiled its new propaganda line towards Poland. After five years of coordinating his propaganda with Warsaw, Goebbels could finally say what he, and no doubt many Germans, actually thought. From one day to the next Poland was again the ancient enemy, the oppressor of Germans, the grasping and monstrous creation of an unjust postwar settlement. Hitler’s diplomatic misfortune with Warsaw was good luck in domestic politics. War was not popular with Germans in 1939. But a war against Poland for border territories, now apparently in the offing, was far less unpopular than a massive ideological war of aggression in alliance with Poland against the Soviet Union would have been.

On March 25, 1939, Hitler ordered preparations for a war of destruction against Poland. Aside from the political preliminaries directed to Germany and world public opinion, the planned campaign had nothing to do with Danzig or an extraterritorial corridor. Indeed, it had little to do with war as conventionally understood. What Hitler suddenly wanted was the complete annihilation of the Polish state and the physical elimination of all Poles who might be capable of building such a state. He would say as much, repeatedly, in the weeks to come. This radical plan to destroy a polity and a political nation was consistent with his general ideas about Slavs, and the invasion was a step eastward towards the Ukrainian breadbasket. It was however inconsistent both with his actions of the previous five years and with the announced reasons for German hostility now appearing in the press. The goal of the propaganda was to propel Germans, unknowingly, into a far greater conflict in the East.

The Poles were in a relatively good position to know what the war would be about. They knew that their choice was not between war and peace, as British prime minister Neville Chamberlain had thought at Munich, but between one kind of war and another: an offensive campaign as a German ally against the Soviet Union, or a defensive campaign against a German attack. If Poland had chosen a submissive alliance rather than a defiant resistance, thought Foreign Minister Beck, “We would have defeated Russia, and afterward we would be taking Hitler’s cows out to pasture in the Urals.” Beck, who after a long tenure as foreign minister had made many enemies in Europe, now made a hero of himself by resisting Hitler in public. On the fifth of May, 1939, responding to Hitler’s speeches, he addressed the Polish parliament. He used the kind of language that, until that point, no statesman, including those enjoying greater safety and power, had directed to Hitler. There could be compromise on various issues. But there could be no compromise on sovereignty. “There is only one thing in the life of people, nations, and states that is without price,” said Beck, “and that thing is honor.”

Yet neither the collapse of German-Polish relations nor the threat of war with Germany had any effect on Polish policy towards its own Jews. That policy had always been a sovereign one, arising from popular antisemitism and mass unemployment, calculated from assumptions about Polish interests. From the Polish perspective, Germany was a confusing and unhelpful partner on the Jewish question, whose policies had closed the gates to Palestine and driven tens of thousands of Jews to Poland. When Britain responded to German aggression against Czechoslovakia by guaranteeing Poland’s security, this opened, from Warsaw’s perspective, the possibility of a promising new partnership in Jewish policy. Great Britain, after all, held the mandate to Palestine and determined how many European Jews could emigrate there.

Polish relations with Britain in the 1930s had been cool, and until spring 1939 diplomats had no good occasion to raise the Palestinian issue. In Geneva, at meetings of the League of Nations, Polish diplomats buttonholed their British counterparts and tried to explain the need for the immigration of Polish Jews to Palestine, but this could easily be turned aside. The closest thing the Poles had to an argument was that the world was focused only on the very small German Jewish population, while ignoring the much bigger Polish Jewish population. Polish diplomats cautiously made the case that an opening of Palestine only for German Jews (which did not, in any case, happen) would be seen inside Poland as unfair. In spring 1939 Polish diplomats could raise the matter of Jewish emigration apropos of something very important: the coming war.

When Beck flew to London in April 1939 for discussions that were supposed to concern the German threat to Europe, he treated the Jewish question as though it were the first order of business. Since Beck and the British foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, hardly knew each other, this priority led to a surreal exchange. Knowing of Beck’s preoccupations, Halifax had tried to get his ambassador in Warsaw to explain to the Poles that the two states had no “colonial question” to discuss. Halifax paid no heed to Beck when he raised the Palestine question, and British policy was moving in a direction opposite to Polish preferences. That same month, Prime Minister Chamberlain said that if Britain had to anger one side in Palestine it should be the Jews rather than the Arabs. The loyalty of Arabs and Muslims was too important in the British Empire as a whole to be challenged, especially at a time of coming conflict. A British White Paper of May 1939 recommended that future Jewish immigration to Palestine be made subject to Arab approval. London had decided to protect Poland from the German threat and in this sense, indirectly, Poland’s Jews. But the British were completely unmoved by the Polish idea that Palestine should be opened to massive Jewish settlement immediately.

Despite Warsaw’s new relationship with London, the conspiratorial track of Poland’s Palestine policy remained operative in spring 1939. Polish authorities maintained their friendly relationship with the Revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, who after
Kristallnacht
had hoped for an evacuation of a million Jews in 1939. He knew that his Polish patrons would make his case to the British. In the early months of the year, Jabotinsky, like his Polish partners, believed that the prospect of war might create an opening in London. He wanted to form Jewish legions that would fight for the British against the Germans, with the hope that the political capital thus earned could be converted into British support of a State of Israel after the war. Yet more and more of his followers were thinking not of the legionary but the terrorist strategy, whereby an empire weakened by war could be driven from the national homeland. Polish policy was aligned with the Jewish rebels whom the British had most reason to fear.

Between February and May 1939, at the very time that Britain and Poland joined forces against Germany, Polish military intelligence was training a select group of Irgun activists in a secret location near Andrychów. The Polish officers stressed the kinds of measures that Poles had used with success during and after the First World War: sabotage, bombings, and irregular warfare against an occupying army. The twenty-five Jews who were trained came from Palestine, but the language of instruction was Polish (with a Hebrew translation). At the end of the session Avraham Stern arrived and gave a rousing speech. In Polish he thanked the Polish officers for their support and noted the similarities between the Jewish and Polish liberation struggles. In Hebrew he described the future Jewish invasion of Palestine. As one of the participants later noted with a certain amount of understatement, “the Polish government’s support of the Irgun could be viewed as an unfriendly act toward Britain, with whom Poland wanted to sign a treaty.”

The men to whom Stern spoke became Irgun officers who would lead the revolt against the British. When they returned to Palestine in May 1939, just as the British White Paper was published, and right after Poland accepted a British security guarantee, these Jewish radicals began to employ their Polish weapons and training in operations against Poland’s new ally. The British noticed the training and confiscated some of the weapons, but never made the connection to Warsaw.

Polish military intelligence officers excelled in the kinds of insurgency in which they trained Irgun, as they did in certain aspects of counterintelligence work. A special unit of military intelligence, for example, had broken the mechanized German code system known as “Enigma,” and built duplicates of the machine in order to decode messages. In July 1939, Polish cryptologists passed on their knowledge and these duplicates to their British and French allies. This work would be important for the British later in the war, providing the basis for the decryption station at Bletchley Park. In their estimations of just how the war would unfold, however, the men and women of Polish intelligence committed a major error.

After 1933, Polish military intelligence, the Second Department of the General Staff, regarded both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as threats, with the Soviets seen as the more worrisome. The debate at the top of the Second Department was about whether a Soviet or a German invasion was more likely. Few if any officers recognized that Poland’s own decision not to ally with Nazi Germany would lead to a rapid German invasion of Poland. Once Britain and France had guaranteed Poland’s sovereignty, Germany faced encirclement from west and east. Hitler had lost, at least for the time being, any hope for the constellation he wanted: British indifference or support during a German war against the Soviet Union. Poland, which was not supposed to make a difference one way or the other, had altered the basic calculation of
My Struggle
. Logically, Germany’s only chance to avoid encirclement lay to the east of Poland: the Soviet Union itself. And this was the logic that Hitler indeed followed.