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

by William L. Shirer

On this historic day Dr. Schmidt overslept, and, rushing to the Foreign Office by taxi, he saw the British ambassador already mounting the steps to the Foreign Office as he arrived. Ducking in by a side door, Schmidt managed to slip into Ribbentrop’s office just at the stroke of 9 o’clock, in time to receive Henderson on the dot.

He did not realize that it was past time for such diplomatic antics, but he was soon made to.

He had meant well, he had striven for peace; for a few moments he had found himself in the center of the dazzling stage of world history. But as happened to almost everyone else, the confusion had been too great for him to see clearly; and as he would admit at Nuremberg, he had at no time realized how much he had been taken in by the Germans.

There followed a lengthy and shabby propaganda statement obviously hastily concocted by Hitler and Ribbentrop during the intervening two hours.

Henderson read the document (“this completely false representation of events,” as he later called it) and remarked “It would be left to history to judge where the blame really lay.” Ribbentrop retorted that “history had already proved the facts.”

There now followed at this solemn moment a minor diplomatic comedy.

Though the Nazi Foreign Minister knew what the ambassador’s mission was, he could not let the opportunity, the very last such one, slip by without treating the French envoy to one of his customary prevarications of history.

But Coulondre, over the past months, had heard enough of Ribbentrop’s falsifications.

falsifications.

“History will be the judge of that,” Coulondre replied. On that Sunday in Berlin all the participants in the final act of the drama seemed intent on calling upon the judgment of history. Although France was mobilizing an army which would have overwhelming superiority for the time being over the German forces in the west, it was Great Britain, whose army at the moment was negligible, which loomed in Hitler’s feverish mind as the main enemy and as the antagonist who was almost entirely responsible for the pass in which he found himself as September 3, 1939, began to wane and pass into history.

Though Hitler, on September 1, had forbidden listening to foreign broadcasts on the pain of death, we picked up in Berlin the words of the Prime Minister as quoted over the BBC.

Everything that I have worked for, everything that I have believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins. There is only one thing left for me to do: that is, to devote what strength and powers I have to forwarding the victory of the cause for which we have to sacrifice so much…

He died, a broken man—though still a member of the cabinet—on November 9, 1940.

…It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man.

Britain and France were now at war with Germany. But there were the two other great European powers, whose support had made Hitler’s venture possible, to consider: Italy, the ally, which had reneged at the last moment, and Soviet Russia, which, though distrusted by the Nazi dictator, had obliged him by making his gamble on war seem worth the taking.

It would have been impossible to allow blood which was there sacrificed to be squandered through diplomatic intrigue.

England and France would have gone on arming their allies to such an extent that the decisive technical superiority of the German Wehrmacht could not have been in evidence in the same way.

Very early on that morning the Chief of the General Staff of the Air Force, General Hans Jeschonnek, had rung up the German Embassy in Moscow to say that in order to give his pilots navigational aid in the bombing of Poland—“urgent navigation tests,” he called it—he would appreciate it if the Russian radio station at Minsk would continually identify itself.

The Russians agreed to introduce a station identification as often as possible in the programs over their transmitter and to extend the broadcasting time of the Minsk station by two hours so as to aid the German flyers late at night.

It would not only avoid misunderstandings and friction between the Germans and the Russians in dividing up the spoils but would take some of the onus of the Nazi aggression in Poland off Germany and place it on the Soviet Union.

Without warning, the submarine U-30 torpedoed and sank the British liner Athenia some two hundred miles west of the Hebrides as it was en route from Liverpool to Montreal with 1,400 passengers, of whom 112, including twenty-eight Americans, lost their lives. World War II had begun.

The French generalissimo’s timid views explain a good deal of subsequent history.

In fact, Henderson had protested to the Foreign Office against the circulation of King-Hall’s publication in Germany and the British government had requested the editor to desist.

It was in this battle that General Heinz Guderian first made a name for himself with his tanks.

This was their—and the world’s—first experience of the blitzkrieg: the sudden surprise attack; the fighter planes and bombers roaring overhead, reconnoitering, attacking, spreading flame and terror; the Stukas screaming as they dove; the tanks, whole divisions of them, breaking through and thrusting forward thirty or forty miles in a day; self-propelled, rapid-firing heavy guns rolling forty miles an hour down even the rutty Polish roads; the incredible speed of even the infantry, of the whole vast army of a million and a half men on motorized wheels, directed and co-ordinated through a maze of electronic communications consisting of intricate radio, telephone and telegraphic networks.

Within forty-eight hours the Polish Air Force was destroyed, most of its five hundred first-line planes having been blown up by German bombing on their home airfields before they could take off.

In one week the Polish Army had been vanquished.

Thus it was that on the shabby pretext that because Poland had ceased to exist and therefore the Polish–Soviet nonaggression pact had also ceased to exist and because it was necessary to protect its own interests and those of the Ukrainian and White Russian minorities, the Soviet Union trampled over a prostrate Poland beginning on the morning of September 17.

The next day, September 18, Soviet troops met the Germans at Brest Litovsk, where exactly twenty-one years before a newborn Bolshevik government had gone back on its country’s ties with the Western Allies and had received from the German Army, and accepted, separate peace terms of great harshness.

It stated that the joint aim of Germany and Russia was “to restore peace and order in Poland, which has been destroyed by the disintegration of the Polish State, and to help the Polish people to establish new conditions for its political life.” For cynicism Hitler had met his match in Stalin. At first both dictators seem to have considered setting up a rump Polish state on the order of Napoleon’s Grand Duchy of Warsaw in order to mollify world public opinion.

Stalin now took personal charge of the negotiations, and his German allies learned, as his British and American allies later would also learn, what a tough, cynical and opportunistic bargainer he was.

In the meantime he would get the Baltic States, which had been taken from Russia after the First World War and whose geographical position offered the Soviet Union great protection against surprise attack by his German ally.

They were, as he had suggested to Schulenburg on the twenty-fifth: acceptance of the original line of demarcation in Poland along the Pissa, Narew, Vistula and San rivers, with Germany getting Lithuania; or yielding Lithuania to Russia in return for more Polish territory (the province of Lublin and the lands to the east of Warsaw) which would give the Germans almost all of the Polish people.

The Treaty itself, which was made public, announced the boundary of the “respective national interests” of the two countries in “the former Polish state” and stated that within their acquired territories they would re-establish “peace and order” and “assure the people living there a peaceful life in keeping with their national character.” But, as with the previous Nazi–Soviet deal, there were “secret protocols”—three of them, of which two contained the meat of the agreement.

Both parties will tolerate in their territories no Polish agitation which affects the territories of the other party. They will suppress in their territories all beginnings of such agitation and inform each other concerning suitable measures for this purpose.

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.

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.

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.

To deal with Britain and France he must keep his rear free.

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!”

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.”

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In accordance with my previous instructions he had been keeping a sharp lookout for possible armed merchant cruisers in the approaches to the British Isles, and had torpedoed a ship he afterward identified as the Athenia from wireless broadcasts, under the impression that she was an armed merchant cruiser on patrol…

But Doenitz, who must have suspected the truth all along, for otherwise he would not have been at the dock to greet the returning U-30, did have a part in altering the submarine’s log and his own diary so as to erase any telltale evidence of the truth.

On the evening of Sunday, October 22, Propaganda Minister Goebbels personally took to the air—this writer well remembers the broadcast—and accused Churchill of having sunk the Athenia.