The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (126 page)

So Poland, like Austria and
Czechoslovakia
before it, disappeared from the map of Europe. But this time Adolf Hitler was aided and abetted in his obliteration of a country by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which had posed for so long as the champion of the oppressed peoples. This was the fourth partition of Poland by Germany and Russia
*
(Austria had participated in the others), and while it lasted it was to be by far the most ruthless and pitiless. In the secret protocol of September 28
†
Hitler and Stalin agreed to institute in Poland a regime of terror designed to brutally suppress Polish freedom, culture and national life.

   Hitler fought and won the war in Poland, but the greater winner was Stalin, whose troops scarcely fired a shot.
‡
The Soviet Union got nearly half of Poland and a stranglehold on the
Baltic States
. It blocked Germany more solidly than ever from two of its main long-term objectives: Ukrainian wheat and Rumanian oil, both badly needed if Germany was to survive the British blockade. Even Poland’s oil region of Borislav–Drogobycz, which Hitler desired, was claimed successfully by Stalin, who graciously agreed to sell the Germans the equivalent of the area’s annual production.

Why did Hitler pay such a high price to the Russians? It is true that he had agreed to it in August in order to keep the Soviet Union out of the Allied camp and out of the war. But he had never been a stickler for keeping agreements and now, with Poland conquered by an incomparable feat of German arms, he might have been expected to welsh, as the Army urged, on the August 23 pact. If Stalin objected, the Fuehrer could threaten him with attack by the most powerful army in the world, as the Polish campaign had just proved it to be. Or could he? Not while the British and French stood at arms in the West. To deal with Britain and France he must keep his rear free. This, as subsequent utterances of his would make clear, was the reason why he allowed Stalin to strike such a hard bargain. But he did not forget the Soviet dictator’s harsh dealings as he now turned his attention to the Western front.

N
OTHING MUCH
had happened there. Hardly a shot had been fired. The German man in the street was beginning to call it the “sit-down war”—
Sitzkrieg
. In the West it would soon be dubbed the “phony war.” Here was “the strongest army in the world [the French],” as the British General J. F. C. Fuller would put it, “facing no more than twenty-six [German] divisions, sitting still and sheltering behind steel and concrete while a quixotically valiant ally was being exterminated!”
¹

Were the Germans surprised? Hardly. In Halder’s very first diary entry, that of August 14, the Chief of the Army General Staff had composed a detailed estimate of the situation in the West if Germany attacked Poland. He considered a French offensive “not very likely.” He was sure that France would not send its army through
Belgium
“against Belgian wishes.” His conclusion was that the French would remain on the defensive. On September 7, with the
Polish Army
already doomed, Halder, as has been noted, was already occupied with plans to transfer German divisions to the west.

That evening he noted down the results of a conference which Brauchitsch had had during the afternoon with Hitler.

Two days later Hitler issued Directive No. 3 for the Conduct of the War, ordering arrangements to be made for Army and Air Force units to be sent from Poland to the west. But not necessarily to fight. “Even after the irresolute opening of hostilities by Great Britain … and France my express command,” the directive laid it down, “must be obtained in each of the following cases: Every time our ground forces [or] … one of our planes cross the western borders; [and] for every air attack on Britain.”
²

What had France and Britain promised Poland to do in case she were attacked? The British guarantee was general. But the French was specific. It was laid down in the Franco-Polish Military Convention of May 19, 1939. In this it was agreed that the French would “progressively launch offensive operations against limited objectives toward the third day after General Mobilization Day.” General mobilization had been proclaimed September 1. But further, it was agreed that “as soon as the principal German effort develops against Poland, France will launch an offensive action against Germany with the bulk of her forces, starting on the fifteenth day after the first day of the general French mobilization.” When the Deputy Chief of the Polish General Staff,
Colonel Jaklincz
, had asked how many French troops would be available for this major offensive, General Gamelin had replied that there would be about thirty-five to thirty-eight divisions.
³

But by August 23, as the German attack on Poland became imminent, the timid French generalissimo was telling his government, as we have seen,* that he could not possibly mount a serious offensive “in less than about two years … in 1941–2”—assuming, he had added, that France by that time had the “help of British troops and American equipment.”

In the first weeks of the war, to be sure, Britain had pitifully few troops to send to France. By October 11, three weeks after the fighting was over in Poland, it had four divisions—158,000 men—in France. “A symbolic contribution,”
Churchill
called it, and Fuller noted that the first British casualty—a corporal shot dead on patrol—did not occur until December 9. “So bloodless a war,” Fuller comments, “had not been seen since the Battles of Molinella and Zagonara.”
†

In retrospect at Nuremberg the German generals agreed that by failing to attack in the West during the Polish campaign the Western Allies had missed a golden opportunity.

And General Keitel, Chief of the OKW, added this testimony:

Why then did not the French Army (the first two British divisions were not deployed until the first week of October), which had overwhelming superiority over the German forces in the west, attack, as General Gamelin and the French government had promised in writing it would?

There were many reasons: the defeatism in the French High Command, the government and the people; the memories of how France had been bled white in the First World War and a determination not to suffer such slaughter again if it could be avoided; the realization by mid-September that the Polish armies were so badly defeated that the Germans would soon be able to move superior forces to the west and thus probably wipe out any initial French advances; the fear of German superiority in arms and in the air. Indeed, the French government had insisted from the start that the British Air Force should not bomb targets in Germany for fear of reprisal on French factories, though an all-out bombing of the
Ruhr
, the industrial heart of the Reich, might well have been disastrous to the Germans. It was the one great worry of the German generals in September, as many of them later admitted.

Fundamentally the answer to the question of why France did not attack Germany in September was probably best stated by
Churchill
. “This battle,” he wrote, “had been lost some years before.”
⁷
At Munich in 1938; at the time of the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936; the year before when Hitler proclaimed a conscript army in defiance of Versailles. The price of those sorry Allied failures to act had now to be paid, though it seems to have been thought in Paris and London that payment might somehow be evaded by inaction.

   At sea there was action.

The German Navy was not put under such wraps as the Army in the west, and during the first week of hostilities it sank eleven British ships with a total tonnage of 64,595 tons, which was nearly half the weekly tonnage sunk at the peak of German submarine warfare in April 1917 when Great Britain had been brought to the brink of disaster. British losses tapered off thereafter: 53,561 tons the second week, 12,750 the third week and only 4,646 the fourth week—for a total during September
of twenty-six ships of 135,552 tons sunk by
U-boats
and three ships of 16,488 tons by mines.
*

There was a reason, unknown to the British, for the sharp tapering off. On September 7, Admiral Raeder had a long conference with Hitler. The Fuehrer, jubilant over his initial victories in Poland and the failure of the French to attack in the west, advised the Navy to go more slowly. France was showing “political and military restraint”; the British were proving “hesitant.” In view of this situation it was decided that submarines in the Atlantic would spare all passenger ships without exception and refrain altogether from attacking the French, and that the pocket battleships
Deutschland
in the North Atlantic and the
Graf Spee
in the South Atlantic should withdraw to their “waiting” stations for the time being. The “general policy,” Raeder noted in his diary, would be “to exercise restraint until the political situation in the West has become clearer, which will take about a week.”
⁸

There was one other decision agreed upon by Hitler and Raeder at the meeting on September 7. The Admiral noted it in his diary: “No attempt shall be made to solve the
Athenia
affair until the submarines return home.”

The war at sea, as we have noted, had begun ten hours after Britain’s declaration of war when the British liner
Athenia
, jammed with some 1,400 passengers, was torpedoed without warning at 9
P.M
. on September 3 some two hundred miles west of the Hebrides, with the loss of 112 Uves, including twenty-eight Americans. The German
Propaganda Ministry
checked the first reports from London with the
Naval High Command
, was told that there were no U-boats in the vicinity and promptly denied that the ship had been sunk by the Germans. The disaster was most embarrassing to Hitler and the Naval Command and at first they did not believe the British reports. Strict orders had been given to all submarine commanders to observe the
Hague Convention
, which forbade attacking a ship without warning. Since all U-boats maintained radio silence, there
was no means of immediately checking what had happened.
*
That did not prevent the controlled Nazi press from charging, within a couple of days, that the British had torpedoed their own ship in order to provoke the United States into coming into the war.

The Wilhelmstrasse was indeed concerned with American reaction to a disaster that had caused the deaths of twenty-eight United States citizens. The day after the sinking Weizsaecker sent for the American chargé, Alexander
Kirk
, and denied that a German submarine had done it. No German craft was in the vicinity, he emphasized. That evening, according to his later testimony at Nuremberg, the State Secretary sought out Raeder, reminded him of how the German sinking of the
Lusitania
during the First World War had helped bring America into it and urged that “everything should be done” to avoid provoking the United States. The Admiral assured him that “no German U-boat could have been involved.”
⁹

At the urging of Ribbentrop, Admiral Raeder invited the American naval attaché to come to see him on September 16 and stated that he had now received reports from all the submarines, “as a result of which it was definitely established that the
Athenia
had not been sunk by a German U-boat.” He asked him to so inform his government, which the attaché promptly did.
†
¹⁰

The Grand Admiral had not quite told the truth. Not all the submarines which were at sea on September 3 had yet returned to port. Among those that had not was the
U-30
, commanded by Oberleutnant Lemp, which did not dock in home waters until September 27. It was met by Admiral Karl Doenitz, commander of submarines, who years later at Nuremberg described the meeting and finally revealed the truth about who sank the
Athenia
.