Hitler (117 page)

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
“finis Germaniae.”
¹⁴⁹

Now he was at war with England.

The horoscope of the times does not point to peace but to war.

Adolf Hitler

 

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
Lebensraum;
the requisite living space had from time immemorial been conquered and held only by struggle; consequently, politics was a kind of permanent warfare, and armed conflict was only its actualization and maximum intensification. War was, as Hitler formulated it, the “strongest and most classic manifestation” of politics and indeed of life itself. In pacifism, on the other hand, human beings would necessarily fade away and “be replaced by animals” who more obediently conformed to the law of nature. “As long as the earth turns around the sun,” he declared in solemn, half-poetic accents to Bulgarian Ambassador Dragonoff, “as long as there are cold and warmth, fertility and infertility, storm and sunshine, so long will struggle continue, among men and among nations.... If people lived in the Garden of Eden they would rot. What mankind has become, it has become through struggle.” And during the war he maintained to his table companions that a peace of more than twenty-five years would do great harm to a nation.
¹

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 constant; war is everywhere. There is no beginning, there is no conclusion of peace. War is life. All struggle is war. War is the primal condition.”
²
Unmoved by friendships, ideologies, and present alliances, he occasionally told his table companions that some distant day, when Mussolini's reforestation program had taken effect, it might be necessary to wage war against Italy, too.

These ideas also make it clear why National Socialism had no utopian concept, but only a vision. Hitler called the notion of a grand, comprehensive order of peace “ridiculous.” Even his dreams of empire did not culminate in the panorama of a harmonious age; they were filled with the clash of arms, riot, and tumult. No matter how far Germany's power might one day stretch, somewhere sooner or later it would come upon a bleeding, fought-over frontier where the race would have been hardened and a constant selection of the best would be taking place. This cranky fixation on the idea of war once again showed, far beyond the Social-Darwinist starting point, the degree to which Hitler and National Socialism were a product of the First World War. It had molded their sentiments, their practical handling of power, and their ideology. The World War, Hitler repeated incessantly, had never stopped for him. To him, as to that whole generation, the idea of peace seemed curiously stale and unpleasant. It was certainly not a theme to arouse their imaginations, which were fascinated rather by struggle and hostility. Soon after the end of the struggle for power, shortly after the domestic opponents had been eliminated, Goebbels told a foreign diplomat that “he often thought back full of longing to those earlier times when there were always opportunities for combat.” A member of Hitler's most intimate entourage spoke of his “pathologically militant nature.” So dominant was this urge that ultimately it crushed and devoured everything else, including Hitler's long demonstrated political genius.

‘ But if all his thoughts were bent on war, the one that began on September 3, 1939, with the declarations of war by the Western powers, the one marked by absurdly reversed fronts, was not the war he had sought. Shortly before he became Chancellor, he had told his entourage that he would begin the war that had to come free of all romantic emotions, guided only by tactical considerations. He would not play at war and would not be tricked into a trial at arms.
“I
shall wage the war.
I
shall determine the suitable time for attack. There is only one most favorable moment. I will wait for it. With iron resolution. And I will not miss it. I will employ all my energy to compelling it to come. That is my task. If I succeed in forcing that, I have the right to send the young to their deaths.”
³

Apparently he had failed in this self-imposed task. But had he really failed? The question cannot be why or even whether Hitler began the Second World War of his own free will. It can only be why he, who up to this point had almost alone determined the course of events, stumbled into war at this time contrary to all his plans.

Certainly he misread England's attitude and once more gambled in defiance to all common sense. He had too frequently emerged triumphant from similar situations not to have been misled; he had come to think of the possibility of the impossible as a kind of law of his life. Hence, too, the many vain hopes he harbored in the following months. First he told himself that England would come around after the rapid subjugation of Poland. Then he expected the intervention of the Soviet Union on the German side. For a while he counted on the effects of reduced military activity against Great Britain, later on the effects of heavy bombing, and then expected the turning point to come from victory over England's continental vassal: “The war will be decided in France,” he told Mussolini in March, 1940. “If France were finished... England would have to make peace.”
⁴
After all, he argued, England had entered the war without any strong motive, chiefly because of Italy's indecisive attitude. Any of these factors, he thought, might prompt England to withdraw from the conflict. He simply did not see what else might actuate the enemy. So sure was he of his reasoning that in the so-called Z Plan he treated the U-boat building program, which had already been cut back, with noticeable neglect; instead of twenty-nine monthly launchings the plan called for only two.

But illusions about England's determination to fight cannot sufficiently explain Hitler's decision to go to war. He was after all conscious of the high degree of risk. When the British government made its intentions clearer by signing the pact of assistance with the Poles on August 25, Hitler rescinded an order to attack already issued. Nor did the following week give him any reason to reassess the situation. When, therefore, he renewed the order to attack on August 31, there must have been some special feeling that overrode his sense of risk.

One of the striking aspects of his behavior is the stubborn, peculiarly blind impatience with which he pressed forward into the conflict. That impatience was curiously at odds with the hesitancy and vacillations that had preceded earlier decisions of his. When, in the last days of August, Göring pleaded with him not to push the gamble too far, he replied heatedly that throughout his life he had always played vabanque. And though this metaphor was accurate for the matter at hand, it hardly described the wary, circumspect style with which he had proceeded in the past. We must go further back, almost to the early, prepolitical phase of his career, to find the link with the abruptness of his conduct during the summer of 1939, with its reminders of old provocations and daredevil risks.

There is, in fact, every indication that during these months Hitler was throwing aside more than tried and tested tactics, that he was giving up a policy in which he had excelled for fifteen years and in which for a while he had outstripped all antagonists. It was as if he were at last tired of having to adapt himself to circumstances, tired of the eternal talking, dissimulation, and diplomatic wirepulling, and were again seeking “a great, universally understandable, liberating action.”

The November putsch of 1923, one of the great caesuras that so strikingly divide up his life, was also an example of such a liberating action. As we have noted earlier, it marked Hitler's specific entry into politics. Until that point, he had made a name for himself by the boldness of his agitation, by the radical alternatives of either/or that he announced the night before the march to the Feldherrnhalle: “When the decisive struggle for to be or not to be calls us, then all we want to know is this: heaven above us, the ground under us, the enemy before us.” Until that time he had recognized only frontal relationships, both inwardly and outwardly. His thrusting, offensive style as an orator was matched by his rude tone of command as party chairman. Orders were issued in a brusque, categorical tone. Only after the collapse of November 9, 1923, did Hitler realize the possibilities of the political game, the use that might be made of tactical devices, coalitions, and sham compromises. That insight had transformed the rude putschist into a politician who played his cards with deliberation. But even though he had learned to play his new part with sovereign skill, he had never been able entirely to conceal how much it had gone against the grain and that his innate tendency continued to be against detours, rules of the game, legality, and in fact against politics in general.