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This was a further sign to Hitler that the Poles could not be intimidated and it was reinforced by the opinion of the German ambassador in Warsaw, who on July 6 telegraphed Berlin that there was “hardly any doubt” that Poland would fight “if there was a clear violation” of her rights in Danzig.
No small nation which stood in Hitler’s way had ever used such language.
In addition, despite all the divergencies in their views of life, there was one thing common to the ideology of Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union: opposition to the capitalist democracies in the West.
Our gold reserves are reduced to almost nothing, as well as our stocks of metals…
For some ten hours on August 11, Ciano conferred with Ribbentrop at the latter’s estate at Fuschl, outside Salzburg, which the Nazi Foreign Minister had taken from an Austrian monarchist who, conveniently, had been put away in a concentration camp.
Ribbentrop, he wrote in his very last diary entry on December 23, 1943, had bet him “during one of those gloomy meals at the Oesterreichischer Hof in Salzburg” a collection of old German armor against an Italian painting that France and Britain would remain neutral—a bet, he remarks ruefully, which was never paid.
One of Mussolini’s reasons, Ciano said, for wanting to postpone the war was that he “attached great importance to holding, according to plan, the World Exhibition of 1942”—a remark that must have astounded the Fuehrer, lost as he was in his military maps and calculations.
The Journal is a somewhat dubious book. Professor Edward Hallen Carr, a British authority on the Soviet Union, investigated it and found that though undoubtedly it had been touched up to a point where some of it was “pure fiction,” a large part of it fairly represents Litvinov’s outlook.
All material dealing with Nazi–Soviet collaboration during this period was handled gingerly by the tribunal, one of whose four judges was a Russian.
Even before this, on May 31, Germany had pushed through a similar pact with Denmark, which, considering recent events, appears to have given the Danes an astonishing sense of security.
One speech of the Fuehrer’s had been enough to rout Roosevelt; and Americans would not stir anyway. Fear of Japan would keep America quiet.
Attolico was furious. He protested to the Germans, accusing them of bad faith. He tipped off Henderson that war was imminent.
THE “TELEGRAM FROM Moscow” whose contents Hitler disclosed to Ciano at Obersalzberg on the afternoon of August 12 appears to have been, like certain previous “telegrams” which have figured in this narrative, of doubtful origin. No such wire from the Russian capital has been found in the German archives.
Germany was ready to divide up Eastern Europe, including Poland, with the Soviet Union. This was a bid which Britain and France could not—and, obviously, if they could, would not—match.
Early in July a Swedish friend of his, Birger Dahlerus, had tried to convince him that British public opinion would not stand for further Nazi aggression and when the Luftwaffe chief expressed his doubts had arranged for him to meet privately with a group of seven British businessmen on August 7 in Schleswig-Holstein, near the Danish border, where Dahlerus had a house.
He had studied engineering at Kiel University, where he got his first taste of brawling with anti-Nazis; on one occasion he had his nose bashed in by Communists.
Like so many other young men around Heydrich he dabbled in what passed as intellectual pursuits in the S.S.—“history” and “philosophy” especially—while rapidly emerging as a tough young man (Skorzeny was another) who could be entrusted with the carrying out of the less savory projects dreamed up by Himmler and Heydrich.
Swallowing his pride, he personally begged the Soviet dictator, whom he had so often and for so long maligned, to receive his Foreign Minister in Moscow at once.
“Official telegrams from Berlin to Moscow,” the ambassador reminded the Foreign Office, “take four to five hours, inclusive of two hours’ difference in time. To this must be added the time for deciphering.”
The way was now open to them to get together to dot the i’s and cross the t’s on one of the crudest deals of this shabby epoch.
The next day, August 22, 1939, Hitler, having been assured by Stalin himself that Russia would be a friendly neutral, once more convoked his top military commanders to the Obersalzberg, lectured them on his own greatness and on the need for them to wage war brutally and without pity and apprised them that he probably would order the attack on Poland to begin four days hence, on Saturday, August 26—six days ahead of schedule. Stalin, the Fuehrer’s mortal enemy, had made this possible.
Franco too was a help. He would assure Spain’s “benevolent neutrality.”
We have nothing to lose; we can only gain.
“Hannibal at Cannae, Frederick the Great at Leuthen, and Hindenburg and Ludendorff at Tannenberg,” he said, “took chances.
Hitler had created Greater Germany, he reminded them, “by political bluff.”
In 1918 the nation collapsed because the spiritual prerequisites were insufficient. Frederick the Great endured only because of his fortitude.
The aim is to eliminate active forces, not to reach a definite line.
Eighty million people must obtain what is their right… The stronger man is right…
Whoever has pondered over this world order knows that its meaning lies in the success of the best by means of force…
If any crises developed they would be due solely to the commanders’ losing their nerve.
During the very first meeting and again at a critical session on August 14, Marshal Voroshilov insisted that the essential question was whether Poland was willing to permit Soviet troops to enter her territory to meet the Germans. If not, how could the Allies prevent the German Army from quickly overrunning Poland?
Were the Russians, in view of their dealings with the Germans at this moment, negotiating in good faith with the Franco–British military representatives? Or did they, as the British and French foreign offices, not to mention Admiral Drax, later concluded, insist on the right to deploy their troops through Poland merely to stall the talks until they saw whether they could make a deal with Hitler?
If this were so—and there is no doubt that it was—why then did not the British and French governments at this crucial moment put the ultimate pressure on Warsaw and simply say that unless the Polish government agreed to accept Russian help Britain and France could see no use of themselves going to war to aid Poland?
These were embarrassing questions and Doumenc merely answered that he had no information.
And yet despite such warm exchanges between those who until recently had been such mortal enemies, Stalin appears to have had mental reservations about the Nazis’ keeping the pact.
Finally, in Southeastern Europe, the Russians emphasized their interest in Bessarabia, which the Soviet Union had lost to Rumania in 1919, and the Germans declared their disinterest in this territory—a concession Ribbentrop later was to regret.
That the sordid, secret deal gave Stalin the same breathing space—peredyshka—which Czar Alexander I had secured from Napoleon at Tilsit in 1807 and Lenin from the Germans at Brest Litovsk in 1917 was obvious.
By the time Hitler got around to attacking Russia, the armies of Poland and France and the British Expeditionary Force on the Continent had been destroyed and Germany had the resources of all of Europe to draw upon and no Western front to tie her hands.
In 1939–40, there was a Western front to draw off the German forces. And Poland could not have been overrun in a fortnight if the Russians had backed her instead of stabbing her in the back. Moreover, there might not have been any war at all if Hitler had known he must take on Russia as well as Poland, England and France.
Step by step, the two Western democracies had retreated: when Hitler defied them by declaring conscription in 1935, when he occupied the Rhineland in 1936, when he took Austria in 1938 and in the same year demanded and got the Sudetenland; and they had sat by weakly when he occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939.
Since joining the League of Nations the Soviet Union had built up a certain moral force as the champion of peace and the leading opponent of fascist aggression. Now that moral capital had been utterly dissipated. Above all, by assenting to a shoddy deal with Nazi Germany, Stalin had given the signal for the commencement of a war that almost certainly would develop into a world conflict.
Early in the war, he managed a section of the S.D. which forged passports and while thus employed proposed “Operation Bernhard,” a fantastic plan to drop forged British banknotes over England.
In 1944 Naujocks turned up in Belgium as an economic administrator, but his principal job at that time appears to have been to carry out in Denmark the murder of a number of members of the Danish resistance movement.
Held as a war criminal, he made a dramatic escape from a special camp in Germany for war criminals in 1946 and thus escaped trial. At the time of writing, he has never been apprehended or heard of.
It makes Hitler’s language somewhat more lively than do Admiral Boehm and General Halder. But all three versions are similar in content and there can be no doubt of their authenticity. At Nuremberg there was some doubt about a fourth account of Hitler’s speech, listed as N.D. C-3 (NCA, VII, pp. 752–54), and though it was referred to in the proceedings the prosecution did not submit it in evidence. While it undoubtedly rings true, it may have been embellished a little by persons who were not present at the meeting at the Berghof.
Formal ratification in two such totalitarian states was, to be sure, a mere formality.
Though the cabinet statement was as clear as words could make it, Chamberlain wanted Hitler to have no doubts about it. Immediately after the cabinet meeting broke up he wrote a personal letter to the Fuehrer.
It has been alleged that, if His Majesty’s Government had made their position more clear in 1914, the great catastrophe would have been avoided. Whether or not there is any force in that allegation, His Majesty’s Government are resolved that on this occasion there shall be no such tragic misunderstanding.
I contested every point [Henderson wired Halifax] and kept calling his statements inaccurate but the only effect was to launch him on some fresh tirade.
But, as the events of the next hectic eight days would show, neither man believed on August 23 that he had heard the last word from the other.
