The German War (6 page)

The next day, 26 August 1939, Germany officially mobilised. Wilm Hosenfeld, the village schoolmaster at Thalau, reported to a girls’ high school on the other side of the valley in Fulda. Like many schools across Germany, it became a military assembly point that day, and Hosenfeld resumed his First World War rank of sergeant major. Many of the men in his company of infantry reservists were also veterans of the last war and, as he doled out their weapons and equipment, he judged their mood to be ‘serious but determined’. They were, he thought, all convinced ‘that it won’t come to war’.
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In Flensburg, a young fireman took the tram to the Junkerhohlweg barracks where he was appointed ‘equipment sergeant’ and issued with a bicycle. The 26th Infantry Regiment marched off to the railway station at eleven that night. Despite the late hour, the streets of Flensburg were thronged with people who had come to see them off. In the 12th Company, Gerhard M. had no idea where they were bound. He found a space under a bench in their cattle truck and, once the train finally got moving, he slept ‘the sleep of the just’.
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In the leafy Nikolassee suburb of Berlin, Jochen Klepper felt himself sliding into a state of nervous exhaustion. Hoping against hope that war would be averted, he saw things too bleakly to fall for the optimistic rumours repeated to him by everyone from the block warden to his newspaper editor. Klepper’s general fear of war focused on the future facing his Jewish wife, Johanna, and 17-year-old stepdaughter, Renate. When a letter arrived from Croydon, it was from Johanna’s elder daughter, Brigitte, who had emigrated to England at the start of the year: she told them that the evacuation of London was already under way. Over the coming months, Klepper would blame himself for talking Johanna and Renate out of leaving with Brigitte. He found some consolation: the tone of the German press and radio was less shrill than during the Czechoslovakian crisis the previous year. They also dropped their usual references to ‘war-mongering Jewry’ since Germany had signed the Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union on 23 August.
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Throughout the spring and summer of 1939, the German government had complained about violence against the German minority in Poland. The neutral, ‘free city’ of Danzig played a central role as the crisis developed. With its largely German population but cut off from the rest of the Reich, in Danzig all the anomalies and resentments of the post-First World War settlement were concentrated, and the Nazi Party Gauleiter, Albert Forster, was given careful instructions throughout the summer on how to increase tensions without letting the conflict explode. Focusing on the Polish ability to choke off the city’s food supply through its control of the customs post, he kept the issue in the headlines. Events escalated dramatically on 30 August, when Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, abruptly called the British Ambassador to a sudden, late-night meeting, in order to relay his government’s ‘final offer’ to resolve the crisis. The ambassador, Sir Nevile Henderson, did not receive a written copy of the German demands before being sent off to London. The Polish embassy and government were not presented with them at all. Hitler’s terms, which required that new plebiscites should be held on the future of the Polish Corridor and of the former German territories in western Poland, would have reignited the ethno-nationalist civil war that had raged there after the First World War. Acceding to Hitler’s demands would have broken Poland up and made it completely indefensible.
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Danzig was the second international crisis in a year. The previous summer had been dominated by Hitler’s championship of the Sudeten Germans, who accounted for a third of the population of Czechoslovakia. War had been averted by an agreement brokered at Munich, without any input from Czechoslovakia or the Soviet Union, in September 1938, but the crisis had forced the British and French to rearm. Within six months, Hitler broke his solemn promise that the Sudetenland would be his ‘last territorial demand’, sending the Wehrmacht across the new Czech border and turning the Czech lands into a ‘Reich Protectorate’. Even dovish British Conservatives could not ignore this breach, though the Bank of England did perform a final service to the Reich by sending the Czech gold reserves back from London. In Britain and France, the occupation of Prague on 15 March 1939 underlined the futility of Munich.
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Within Germany the same events were read quite differently. In Austria, especially, the idea of the new ‘Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’ augured well, with its sense of restoring the old Habsburg Crown lands to their rightful place under German control. Elsewhere in Germany, where this heritage meant little, opinions were more divided. In the coal-mining belt of the Ruhr, with its Polish and Czech immigrant population, some expressed sympathy for the Czechs. During the 1938 crisis, virtually the entire country, including the political and military elites, had been convinced that Germany could not win a war. So great was this reported ‘war psychosis’ that when agreement was reached at Munich, the propagandists’ triumphalism was quite swamped by the public outpouring of relief: Goebbels had to remind newpapers to celebrate Germany’s success. Hitler had raged in frustration that he had been ‘cheated of his war’, but in this he was alone even amongst the Nazi elite.
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By the summer of 1939, the public mood had changed. In 1938, huge crowds had cheered Chamberlain at Munich, seeing him as the peace-bringer. A year later, the British prime minister had become a figure of fun, personifying the decay and impotence of the Western democracies. At 70, he was a full twenty years older than the Führer, and German children mimicked his walk and, above all, his patrician umbrella. Ernst Guicking’s girlfriend, Irene Reitz, followed popular usage and called Chamberlain’s government the ‘Umbrella government’. The occupation of Prague in March 1939, like Hitler’s entry into Vienna a year earlier, appeared to be another bloodless triumph, confirming that the French and British were unlikely to act.
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Hitler had succeeded in portraying himself as the champion of an injured and besieged German minority, mobilising reservoirs of resentment at the loss of territories in the post-1918 settlement. To many Germans, from former Social Democrats and ex-voters for the Catholic Centre Party to Protestant conservatives, the post-war Polish state was another excrescence of the Versailles Diktat, a peace treaty which the German delegation was forced to sign without ever having the chance of negotiating its terms. The clandestine reporters in Germany for the exiled Social Democrats had no doubt that Hitler was pushing at an open door when it came to Poland: ‘An action against Poland would be welcomed by the overwhelming mass of the German people. The Poles are enormously hated among the masses for what they did at the end of the War.’ They concluded that even amongst their own old working-class supporters, people believed ‘that if Hitler strikes out against the Poles, he will have a majority of the population behind him’. Above all, propaganda blamed the intransigence of the Poles on Britain and its policy of preventing Germany’s resurgence through ‘encirclement’. Already in the early summer, a Social Democratic reporter noted, ‘The agitation against England is so strong at this time that I am convinced that, but for the official “Heil Hitler” greeting, people would surely greet each other as they did in the World War with “God punish England”.’ Hitler was slowly recreating the broad patriotic coalition which had reached across German society in 1914, from the moderate Social Democratic Left to conservative nationalists: the parties themselves may have been suppressed, but the Nazi regime knew that their subcultures remained and it was not slow to plug into them.
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In August 1939, the German government set the wheels in motion for a rapid and limited war of conquest. On 15 August, military commanders were given orders to prepare for an invasion of Poland. Briefing the top brass at his Alpine retreat on 22 August – the day Ribbentrop flew to Moscow to agree terms with Stalin and Molotov – Hitler maintained that the British and French would not resort to arms. The German–Soviet Pact, with its secret protocol to divide Poland between the two powers, was greeted with relief by Hitler’s deeply anti-communist generals, because it effectively removed the threat of a two-front war. It now looked as if action could be confined to the Polish theatre with a short, victorious campaign, which would re-establish Germany’s military credentials. According to its own internal assessments, the government still needed several years to arm for what Hitler saw as the ‘inevitable’ confrontation with Britain and France.
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On 31 August at 9 p.m., German radio cleared its schedules and broadcast the Führer’s sixteen-point proposal to solve the crisis. Hitler confessed later in the hearing of his diplomatic translator, Dr Paul Schmidt, that the broadcast provided ‘a pretext, especially for the German people, to show them that I have done everything to preserve peace’. The world still watched Ambassador Henderson’s frantic shuttle diplomacy between London and Berlin. Behind the scenes Hitler made sure that Göring and Mussolini, the principal mediators with Britain and France in the Sudeten crisis, played no part, fearing ‘that at the last moment some swine or other will yet submit to me a plan for mediation’.
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At 10 a.m. on Friday 1 September, Jochen and Johanna Klepper listened to Hitler’s speech on the radio. ‘Last night regular Polish soldiers fired on our territory for the first time,’ the Führer told the hastily convened Reichstag, announcing that ‘Since 5.45 a.m.’ – actually 4.45 a.m. – ‘the fire has been returned.’ To cheering deputies, Hitler added that he would ‘put on the field-grey uniform and not take it off till the war was over’. It was not a declaration of war – Poland was never honoured with one. Rather, it was a justification of self-defence to the German nation. The phrase ‘returning fire’ entered the official lexicon.
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In order to provide evidence of Polish ‘provocation’, the SS and police apparatus run by Reinhard Heydrich enlisted the help of local ethnic Germans who were given bombs with timers and a list of 223 ethnic German newspapers, schools, theatres, monuments and Protestant churches to show that they were the victims of Polish attacks. Unfortunately for them, Polish policemen managed to foil many of the attacks and only twenty-three targets were destroyed. To persuade the British not to fulfil their military undertaking to come to Poland’s aid, Heydrich was also instructed to manufacture ‘border incidents’, elaborating a plan to confuse and lure Polish troops across the border at Hohenlinden. It could not be enacted because the Wehrmacht itself destroyed the Polish border station there. Instead, on the night of 31 August, an SS commando unit clad in Polish uniforms attacked the German radio station at Gleiwitz and a Polish member of the unit then read a communiqué in Polish and German, ending with the words ‘Long live Poland!’ He was then shot by his SS comrades and his body left behind as evidence. The Gleiwitz station lay 5 kilometres inside the German border, making it hard to explain how a Polish unit had penetrated so far through German lines without detection. To make things worse, the transmitter was too weak for Heydrich to pick up the broadcast in Berlin. As a pretext for war, it was flimsy and could not have convinced an international audience or even the Wehrmacht war crimes investigators sent to these scenes. Only a national audience, already primed, would recognise Germany as the injured party.
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The 1st of September 1939 found the teacher Wilm Hosenfeld still in the girls’ school in Fulda where his unit had assembled. He used the lull to write a letter to his elder son Helmut, who had just started doing his six months of Reich Labour Service on a farm: ‘now the die is cast. The terrible uncertainty is over. We know what we face. In the east the storm is rising.’ Hosenfeld believed that war could have been avoided: ‘The Führer’s proposals were acceptable, modest and would serve to preserve the peace.’
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Coming from a family of devout Catholics and rural craftsmen, Hosenfeld had been 19 when he was called up in 1914, and served at the front until he was severely wounded in 1917. In the 1920s, he had revelled in the free comradeship of the youth movement, the
Wandervögel.
This and his love of organised sport prompted him to join the Nazi storm troopers and represent their ‘modern’ values in a traditional village like Thalau. Attending the Nuremberg Party rallies in 1936 and 1938 imbued Hosenfeld with a powerful sense of mystical unity with the German nation. An educational progressive, who rejected the kind of rote learning with the cane favoured by traditional Catholic educators, he remained profoundly religious and, by 1938, was alarmed at the attacks on religion by radicals within the Nazi movement. Wilm Hosenfeld was a man of deep and conflicting commitments.

As he continued his letter to his son that fateful Friday 1 September, to Hosenfeld it felt like the summer of 1914 all over again. Now, as then, war was being forced on Germany and the real cause was British ‘encirclement’; he was convinced that any other regime would have ended up ‘in conflict with E[ngland]’. ‘Today fate again reigns over us,’ he wrote. ‘The leaders are only characters in a higher hand and must do what He wills. All domestic ideological political differences have to step back, and everyone has to be a German, to take a stand for his people.’ His letter echoed the Kaiser’s words of twenty-five years before, that he saw ‘no parties, only Germans’.
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Jochen Klepper agreed. As anti-Nazi, piously Protestant and Prussian as Hosenfeld was Nazi, Catholic and Hessian, Klepper expected nothing good from this new war. ‘All the sufferings of the Germans in Poland which provide the grounds for war,’ he reasoned, ‘will be dealt out to the Jews in Germany in exact measure.’ With painfully vivid memories of the anti-Jewish pogrom of a mere ten months earlier, he feared for his Jewish wife and stepdaughter. A month after it, Jochen had had Johanna baptised and their marriage consecrated in church to try and protect her. He had chosen the brand-new Martin Luther Memorial Church in Mariendorf, with its portraits and busts of Luther, Hindenburg and Hitler in the antechapel. The 800 terracotta tiles in the nave alternated Nazi and Christian motifs, while a Hitler Youth, a storm trooper and a soldier jointly supported the pulpit. Klepper had found fame in 1937 by writing a novel which celebrated the founder of the Hohenzollern dynasty, King Frederick William I: holding up the Calvinist rectitude of the Prussian dynasty as a model, the novel was made required reading in the officer corps and annoyed many Nazis. It gave Klepper an entrée into conservative circles, now willing to overlook his ‘unfortunate’ Jewish marriage, and afforded him a degree of protection. In spite of his ominous forebodings, Klepper was completely convinced by the justice of the German claims to Danzig and of the need for a link through the Polish Corridor: ‘The German East is too important for us not to need to understand what is now being decided there.’ As Jochen and Johanna waited on events, they felt trapped by their own sense of loyalty: ‘We cannot wish for the fall of the Third Reich out of bitterness as many do. That is quite impossible. In this hour of external threat we cannot hope for a rebellion or a coup.’
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