The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

The Fuehrer stated that he was by nature an artist, not a politician, and that once the Polish question was settled he would end his life as an artist and not as a warmonger. But the dictator ended on another note. The Fuehrer repeated [says the verbal statement drawn up by the Germans for Henderson] that he is a man of great decisions… and that this is his last offer.

However, the ambassador had scarcely returned to the embassy a few steps up the Wilhelmstrasse from the Chancellery before Dr. Schmidt was knocking at the door with a written copy of Hitler’s remarks—with considerable deletions—coupled with a message from the Fuehrer begging Henderson to urge the British government “to take the offer very seriously” and suggesting that he himself fly to London with it, for which purpose a German plane would be at his disposal.5 It was rarely easy, as readers who have got this far in this book are aware, to penetrate the strange and fantastic workings of Hitler’s fevered mind.

Could he not buy Britain’s nonintervention by assuring the Prime Minister that the Third Reich would never, like the Hohenzollern Germany, become a threat to the British Empire? What Hitler did not realize, nor Stalin—to the latter’s awful cost—was that to Chamberlain, his eyes open at long last, Germany’s domination of the European continent would be the greatest of all threats to the British Empire—as indeed it would be to the Soviet Russian Empire. For centuries, as Hitler had noted in Mein Kampf, the first imperative of British foreign policy had been to prevent any single nation from dominating the Continent.

Since early afternoon all radio, telegraph and telephone communication with the outside world had been cut off on orders from the Wilhelmstrasse. The night before, the last of the British and French correspondents and nonofficial civilians had hurriedly left for the nearest frontier.

No sooner had Ciano returned from his disillusioning meetings with Hitler and Ribbentrop on August 11 to 13, than he set to work to turn Mussolini against the Germans—an action which did not escape the watchful eyes of the German Embassy in Rome.

If Germany attacks Poland* and the latter’s allies open a counterattack against Germany, I inform you in advance that it will be opportune for me not to take the initiative in military operations in view of the present state of Italian war preparations, of which we have repeatedly and in good time informed you, Fuehrer, and Herr von Ribbentrop. Our intervention can, nevertheless, take place at once if Germany delivers to us immediately the military supplies and the raw materials to resist the attack which the French and English would predominantly direct against us. At our meetings the war was envisaged for 1942, and by that time I would have been ready on land, on sea and in the air, according to the plans which had been concerted.

“The Italians are behaving just as they did in 1914,” Dr. Schmidt overheard Hitler remark bitterly after Attolico had left, and that evening the Chancellery echoed with unkind words about the “disloyal Axis partner.”

This is surely entirely untrue. But the testimony of Keitel and Goering at least seemed more honest.

But again it is strange that a man who had previously shown such insight into foreign politics did not know of the changes in Chamberlain and in the British position. After all, Hitler himself had provoked them.

In a few sectors the orders did not arrive until after the shooting began, but since the Germans had been provoking incidents all along the border for several days the Polish General Staff apparently did not suspect what had really happened.

Both men thought there was no further need of bothering to overthrow the Nazi dictator; he was finished.

Well-meaning though they were, they were gripped by utter confusion and a paralyzing sense of futility. Hitler’s hold on Germany—on the Army, the police, the government, the people—was too complete to be loosened or undermined by anything they could think of doing.

When interrogated after the war—on February 26, 1946—at Nuremberg, he was exceedingly fuzzy about why he and the other supposed enemies of the Nazi regime had done nothing in the last days of August to depose the Fuehrer and thus save Germany from involvement in war.

On the witness stand at Nuremberg Schacht explained that he intended to tell the Army chief that it would be unconstitutional for Germany to go to war without the approval of the Reichstag! It was therefore the duty of the Army Commander in Chief to respect his oath to the constitution!

But the real reason Schacht did not go to Zossen on his ridiculous errand (it would have been child’s play for Hitler to get the rubber-stamp Reichstag to approve his war had he wanted to bother with such a formality) was stated by Gisevius when he took the witness stand on behalf of Schacht at Nuremberg.

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 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.

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.

“Applause on proper cues, but thin.”

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.

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.

You ask: But the German people can’t possibly believe these lies? Then you talk to them. So many do.

But even though the misunderstanding has been cleared up, it is evident that it is impossible for you to assist me materially in filling the large gaps which the wars in Ethiopia and Spain have made in Italian armaments.

His military instinct and his sense of honor were leading him to war. Reason has now stopped him. But this hurts him very much…

The Swede was now to confront for the first time the weird fantasies and the terrible temper of the charismatic dictator.38 It was a shattering experience.

His voice was blurred, and his behavior that of a completely abnormal person.

He seemed more like a phantom from a storybook than a real person.

The British version differs somewhat from that given by Dahlerus in his book and at Nuremberg, but taking the various accounts together what follows seems as accurate a report as we shall ever get.

Henderson arrived back in Berlin with it on the evening of August 28, and after being received at the Chancellery by an S.S. guard of honor, which presented arms and rolled its drums (the formal diplomatic pretensions were preserved to the end), he was ushered into the presence of Hitler, to whom he handed a German translation of the note, at 10:30 P.M.

It was the only meeting with Hitler, he said later, in which he, the ambassador, did most of the talking.

This was not true nor was Hitler’s rejoinder a moment later that a million Germans had been driven out of the Corridor after 1918.

There had been only 385,000 Germans there, according to the German census of 1910, but by this time, of course, the Nazi dictator expected everyone to swallow his lies.

He told his visitor, according to the latter, that one could not believe a word that Hitler said and the same went for Dahlerus’ friend, Hermann Goering, who had lied to the ambassador “heaps of times.”

Just to make sure that the ambassador’s inexplicable pessimism did not jeopardize his own efforts, he again telephoned the British Foreign Office at 7:10 P.M. to leave a message for Halifax that there would be “no difficulties in the German reply.”

“I left the Reich Chancellery that evening filled with the gloomiest forebodings,” Henderson recounted later in his memoirs, though he does not seem to have mentioned this in his dispatches which he got off to London that night.

There can be no doubt that he had in mind inflicting on him the treatment he had accorded the Austrian Chancellor and the Czechoslovak President under what he thought were similar circumstances. If the Poles, as he was quite sure, did not rush the emissary to Berlin, or even if they did and the negotiator declined to accept Hitler’s terms, then Poland could be blamed for refusing a “peaceful settlement” and Britain and France might be induced not to come to its aid when attacked.

They would sooner fight and perish rather than submit to such humiliation, especially after the examples of Czechoslovakia, Lithuania and Austria.”

It may have been out of date, since the Germans chose to make it so, but what is important is that these German “proposals” were never meant to be taken seriously or indeed to be taken at all.

One may speculate that had these proposals been offered seriously they would undoubtedly have formed at least the basis of negotiations between Germany and Poland and might well have spared the world its second great war in a generation.

They certainly fooled this writer, who was deeply impressed by their reasonableness when he heard them over the radio, and who said so in his broadcast to America on that last night of the peace.

Dahlerus, who seems to have been incapable of fatigue, flew off to London at 4 A.M. August 30 and, changing cars several times on the drive in from Heston to the city to throw the newspaper reporters off the track (apparently no journalist even knew of his existence), arrived at Downing Street at 10:30 A.M., where he was immediately received by Chamberlain, Halifax, Wilson and Cadogan. But by now the three British architects of Munich (Cadogan, a permanent Foreign Office official, had always been impervious to Nazi charms) could no longer be taken in by Hitler and Goering, nor were they much impressed by Dahlerus’ efforts.

Dahlerus, who seems to have been sobered by his meeting in Downing Street, called up Forbes at the British Embassy to check and learned that Ribbentrop had “gabbled” the terms so fast that Henderson had not been able to fully grasp them and that the ambassador had been refused a copy of the text.

In such a way, at the instigation of an unknown Swedish businessman in connivance with the chief of the Air Force, were Hitler and Ribbentrop circumvented and the British informed of the German “proposals” to Poland. Perhaps by this time the Field Marshal, who was by no means unintelligent or inexperienced in the handling of foreign affairs, saw more quickly than the Fuehrer and his fawning Foreign Minister certain advantages which might be gained by finally letting the British in on the secret.

In the light of the “past experience” which the once pro-Nazi Polish Foreign Minister mentioned, this was not an unreasonable view.

There was more to Beck’s instructions to Lipski than that and the Germans, having solved the Polish ciphers, knew it.

“On my return to the embassy,” Lipski later related, “I found myself unable to communicate with Warsaw, as the Germans had cut my telephone.”

In fact, all these scrambling eleventh-hour moves of the weary and exhausted diplomats, and of the overwrought men who directed them on the afternoon and evening of that last day of August 1939, were but a flailing of the air, completely futile, and, in the case of the Germans, entirely and purposely deceptive.

Perhaps, as Halder had indicated in his diary entry of August 28, the British would go through the motions of honoring their obligation to Poland and “wage a sham war.”

Nor did he grasp the extent of his own confusions and of those of Weizsaecker and all the “good” Germans who, of course, wanted peace—on German terms.

And yet, as Hassell’s diary entry for this day makes clear, he expected the Poles to back down and to follow the same disastrous route which the Austrians and Czechs had taken.