The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (112 page)

The Pope took to the air on August 24 to make a broadcast appeal for peace, beseeching “by the blood of Christ … the strong [to] hear us that they may not become weak through injustice … [and] if they desire that their power may not be a destruction.” On the afternoon of August 31 the Pope sent identical notes to the governments of Germany, Poland, Italy and the two Western Powers “beseeching, in the name of God, the German and Polish Governments … to avoid any incident,” begging the British, French and Italian governments to support his appeal and adding:

The Pope is unwilling to abandon hope that pending negotiations may lead to a just pacific solution.

His Holiness, like almost everyone else in the world, did not realize that the “pending negotiations” were but a propaganda trick by Hitler to justify his aggression. Actually, as shortly will be shown, there were no bona fide negotiations, pending or otherwise, on that last afternoon of the peace.

A few days earlier, on August 23, the King of the Belgians, in the name of the rulers of the
“Oslo” powers
(
Belgium
, the
Netherlands
,
Luxembourg
, Finland and the three Scandinavian states), had also broadcast a moving appeal for peace, calling “on the men who are responsible for the course of events to submit their disputes and their claims to open negotiation.” On August 28 the King of the Belgians and the Queen of the Netherlands jointly offered their good offices “in the hope of averting war.”
²⁴

Noble in form and in intent as all these neutral appeals were, there is something unreal and pathetic about them when reread today. It was as if the President of the United States, the Pope and the rulers of the small Northern European democracies lived on a different planet from that of the Third Reich and had no more understanding of what was going on in Berlin than of what might be transpiring on Mars. This ignorance of the mind and character and purposes of Adolf Hitler, and indeed of the Germans, who, with a few exceptions, were ready to follow him blindly no matter where nor how, regardless of morals, ethics, honor, or the Christian concept of humanity, was to cost the peoples led by Roosevelt and the monarchs of Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg,
Norway
and Denmark dearly in the months to come.

Those of us who were in Berlin during those last few tense days of peace and who were attempting to report the news to the outside world knew very little either of what was going on in the Wilhelmstrasse, where the Chancellery and the Foreign Office were, or in the Bendlerstrasse, where the military had their offices. We followed as best we could the frantic comings and goings in the Wilhelmstrasse. We sifted daily an avalanche of rumors, tips and “plants.” We caught the mood of the people in the street and of the government officials, party leaders, diplomats and soldiers of our acquaintance. But what was said at Ambassador
Henderson
’s frequent and often stormy interviews with Hitler and Ribbentrop, what was written between Hitler and Chamberlain, between Hitler and Mussolini, between Hitler and Stalin, what was talked about between Ribbentrop and Molotov and between Ribbentrop and Ciano, what was contained in all the secret, coded dispatches humming over the wires between the stumbling, harassed diplomats and foreign-office officials, and all the moves which the military chiefs were planning or making—of all this we and the general public remained almost completely ignorant at the time.

A few things, of course, we, and the public, knew. The
Nazi–Soviet Pact
was trumpeted to the skies by the Germans, though the secret protocol dividing up Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe remained unknown until after the war. We knew that even before it was signed Henderson had flown to Berchtesgaden to emphasize to Hitler that the pact would not prevent Britain from honoring its guarantee to Poland. As the last week of August began we felt in Berlin that war was inevitable—unless there was another Munich—and that it would come within a few days. By August 25 the last of the British and French civilians had skipped out. The next day the big Nazi rally at
Tannenberg
scheduled for August 27, at which Hitler was to have spoken, was publicly called off, as was the annual party convention at Nuremberg (the
“Party Rally of Peace,”
Hitler had officially called it), due to convene the first week of September. On August 27 the government announced that rationing of food, soap, shoes, textiles and coal would begin on the following day. This announcement, I remember, above all others, woke up the German people to the imminence of war, and their grumbling about it was very audible. On Monday, August 28, the Berliners watched troops pouring through the city toward the east. They were being transported in moving vans, grocery trucks and every other sort of vehicle that could be scraped up.

That too must have alerted the man in the street as to what was up. The weekend, I remember, had been hot and sultry and most of the Berliners, regardless of how near war was, had betaken themselves to the lakes and the woods which surround the capital. Returning to the city Sunday evening, they learned from the radio that there had been a secret, unofficial meeting of the Reichstag at the Chancellery. A D.N.B, communiqué stated that the “Fuehrer outlined the gravity of the situation”—this was the first the German public had been told by Hitler that
the hour was grave. No details of the meeting were given and no one outside of the Reichstag members and of Hitler’s entourage could know of the mood the Nazi dictator was in that day. Halder’s diary of August 28 supplied—much later—one account, given him by Colonel Oster of the Abwehr.

In Berlin too a foreign observer could watch the way the press, under Goebbels’ expert direction, was swindling the gullible German people. For six years, since the Nazi “co-ordination” of the daily newspapers, which had meant the destruction of a free press, the citizens had been cut off from the truth of what was going on in the world. For a time the Swiss German-language newspapers from
Zurich
and
Basel
could be purchased at the leading newsstands in Germany and these presented objective news. But in recent years their sale in the Reich had been either prohibited or limited to a few copies. For Germans who could read English or French, there were occasionally a few copies of the London and Paris journals available, though not enough to reach more than a handful of persons.

“How completely isolated a world the German people live in,” I noted in my diary on August 10, 1939. “A glance at the newspapers yesterday and today reminds you of it.” I had returned to Germany from a brief leave in Washington, New York and Paris, and coming up in the train from my home in
Switzerland
two days before I had bought a batch of Berlin and Rhineland newspapers. They quickly propelled one back to the cockeyed world of Nazism, which was as unlike the world I had just left as if it had been on another planet. I noted further on August 10, after I had arrived in Berlin:

   By Saturday, August 26, the date originally set by Hitler for the attack on Poland, Goebbels’ press campaign had reached its climax. I noted in my diary some of the headlines.

   On my way to Broadcast House at midnight I picked up the Sunday edition (August 27) of the
Voelkischer Beobachter.
Across the whole top of the front page were inch-high headlines:

   WHOLE OF POLAND IN WAR FEVER! 1,500,000 MEN MOBILIZED! UNINTERRUPTED TROOP TRANSPORT TOWARD THE FRONTIER! CHAOS IN UPPER SILESIA!

After recovering from the cold douche of Mussolini’s letter which had arrived early in the evening of August 25 and which, along with the news of the signing of the Anglo–Polish alliance, had caused him to postpone the attack on Poland scheduled for the next day, Hitler got off a curt note to the Duce asking him “what implements of war and raw materials you require and within what time” in order that Italy could “enter a major European conflict.” The letter was telephoned by Ribbentrop personally to the German ambassador in Rome at 7:40
P.M
. and handed to the Italian dictator at 9:30
P.M.
²⁵

The next morning, in Rome, Mussolini had a meeting with the chiefs of the Italian armed services to draw up a list of his minimum requirements
for a war lasting twelve months. In the words of Ciano, who helped draw it up, it was “enough to kill a bull—if a bull could read it.”
²⁶
It included seven million tons of petroleum, six million tons of coal, two million tons of steel, one million tons of timber and a long list of other items down to 600 tons of molybdenum, 400 tons of titanium, and twenty tons of zirconium. In addition Mussolini demanded 150 antiaircraft batteries to protect the Italian industrial area in the north, which was but a few minutes’ flying time from French air bases, a circumstance which he reminded Hitler of in a letter which he now composed. This message was telephoned by Ciano to Attolico in Berlin shortly after noon on August 26 and immediately delivered to Hitler.
²⁷

It contained more than a swollen list of materials needed. By now the deflated Fascist leader was obviously determined to wriggle out of his obligations to the Third Reich, and the Fuehrer, after reading this second letter, could no longer have the slightest doubt of it.

On his own hook, Ambassador Attolico, who was opposed to war, and especially to Italy’s joining Germany in it if it came, emphasized to Hitler, when he delivered the message, “that all material must be in Italy
before
the beginning of hostilities” and that this demand was “decisive.”
^*

Mussolini was still hoping for another Munich. He added a paragraph to his note, declaring that if the Fuehrer thought there was still “any possibility whatsoever of a solution in the political field” he was ready, as before, to give his German colleague his full support. Despite their close personal relations and their
Pact of Steel
and all the noisy demonstrations of solidarity they had given in the past years, the fact remains that even at this eleventh hour Hitler had not confided to Mussolini his true aim, the destruction of Poland, and that the Italian partner remained quite ignorant of it. Only at the end of this day, the twenty-sixth, was this gulf between them finally bridged.

Within three hours on August 26, Hitler sent a long reply to the Duce’s message. Ribbentrop again telephoned it, at 3:08
P.M
., to Ambassador von Mackensen in Rome, who rushed it to Mussolini shortly after 5
P.M.
While some of Italy’s requirements such as coal and steel, Hitler said, could be met in full, many others could not. In any case, Attolico’s insistence that the materials must be supplied before the outbreak of hostilities was “impossible.”