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Though he was in a rage because he had been balked from making this speech at Warsaw, whose garrison still gallantly held out, and dripped venom every time he mentioned Great Britain, he made a slight gesture toward peace.
Did Hitler want peace, or did he want to continue the war and, with Soviet help, push the responsibility for its continuance on the Western Allies? Perhaps he did not quite know himself, although he was pretty certain.
Goering, who was also present, suggested that representatives of Britain and Germany first meet secretly in Holland and then, if they made progress, the Queen could invite both countries to armistice talks.
How often before I had heard him from this same rostrum, after his latest conquest, and in the same apparent tone of earnestness and sincerity, propose what sounded—if you overlooked his latest victim—like a decent and reasonable peace.
In the course of world history there have never been two victors, but very often only losers.
There will never be another November, 1918, in German history.
early as September 8, the Spanish ambassador was tipping the Germans off that Bonnet, “in view of the great unpopularity of the war in France, is endeavoring to bring about an understanding as soon as the operations in Poland are concluded.
The struggle between Germany and the Western Powers, which, he said, had been going on since the dissolution of the First German Reich by the Treaty of Muenster (Westphalia) in 1648 “would have to be fought out one way or the other.”
this heart of German industrial production were hit, it would “lead to the collapse of the German war economy and thus of the capacity to resist.”
The chief thing, he said, was to avoid the positional warfare of 1914–18.
It is not necessary for them to attack towns at all, but… to maintain the flow of the army’s advance, to prevent fronts from becoming stable by massed drives through identified weakly held positions. This was a deadly accurate forecast of how the war in the West would be fought, and when one reads it one wonders why no one on the Allied side had similar insights.
On October 14, the German U-boat U-47, commanded by Oberleutnant Guenther Prien, penetrated the seemingly impenetrable defenses of Scapa Flow, the great British naval base, and torpedoed and sank the battleship Royal Oak as it lay at anchor, with a loss of 786 officers and men.
But Hitler by this time was longing for war, for battle, and he was fed up with what he thought to be the unpardonable timidity of his generals.
But the Fuehrer had smelled a rat, had declined to visit the former Commander in Chief of the Army and shortly thereafter had sacked him.
The officers’ ranks had been swollen with reserve officers many of whom were fanatical Nazis; and the mass of the troops were thoroughly indoctrinated with Nazism.
If they were to stage a revolt against Hitler with the accompanying confusion in the Army as well as the country, might not the British and French take advantage of it to break through in the west, occupy Germany and mete out a harsh peace to the German people—even though they had got rid of their criminal leader?
According to German sources, he succeeded in obtaining not only an assurance from the British but the agreement of the Pope to act as an intermediary between a new anti-Nazi German regime and Britain.
There are several accounts from the participants as to what happened next, or rather why nothing much happened, and they are conflicting and confusing.
But he blew hot and cold, was hesitant and confused.
But Brauchitsch was even more wishy-washy than his General Staff Chief.
Thus the buck was continually passed.
Finally in desperation the spineless Army chief informed the Fuehrer that the morale of the troops in the west was similar to that in 1917–18, when there was defeatism, insubordination and even mutiny in the German Army.
On November 7, the day the decision was made, the Germans had been considerably embarrassed by a joint declaration of the King of the Belgians and the Queen of the Netherlands, offering, “before the war in Western Europe begins in full violence,” to mediate a peace. In such circumstances it would have been difficult to convince anyone, as Hitler was attempting to do in the proclamations he was drafting, that the German Army was moving into the two Low Countries because it had learned the French Army was about to march into Belgium.
By that time all the important Nazi leaders, with Hitler at their head, had hurriedly left the premises, though it had been their custom in former years to linger over their beers and reminisce with old party comrades about the early putsch.
more than a month Schellenberg, who, like Alfred Naujocks, was a university-educated intellectual gangster, had been seeing in Holland two British intelligence officers, Captain S. Payne Best and Major R. H. Stevens.
Though of course he had never met Best and Stevens prior to the attempt, he did make the former’s acquaintance during long years at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. There he told the Englishman a long and involved—and not always logical—story.
We know now that Himmler, for reasons best known to himself, didn’t dare to have a trial. We also know—now—that Elser lived on at Sachsenhausen and then Dachau concentration camps, being accorded, apparently on the express orders of Hitler, who had personally gained so much from the bombing, quite humane treatment under the circumstances. But Himmler kept his eye on him to the last. It would not do to let the carpenter survive the war and live to tell his tale.
I am convinced of the powers of my intellect and of decision… No one has ever achieved what I have achieved… I have led the German people to a great height, even if the world does hate us now… The fate of the Reich depends only on me. I shall act accordingly.
Treaties, however, are kept only as long as they serve a purpose.
Hitler did not think that the United States was yet dangerous—“because of her neutrality laws”—nor that her aid to the Allies yet amounted to much.
No one will question that when we have won. We shall not justify the breach of neutrality as idiotically as in 1914.
It marked Hitler’s final, decisive triumph over the Army, which in the First World War had shunted Emperor Wilhelm II aside and assumed supreme political as well as military authority in Germany. From that day on the onetime Austrian corporal considered not only his political but his military judgment superior to that of his generals and therefore refused to listen to their advice or permit their criticism—with results ultimately disastrous to all.
Besides the fact that “one does not rebel when face to face with the enemy,” Halder added, according to Hassell, the following points: “We ought to give Hitler this last chance to deliver the German people from the slavery of English capitalism…
Low standard of living must be conserved. Cheap slaves… Total disorganization must be created!
The German generals, upright Christians that they considered themselves to be, found the situation embarrassing.
I pointed out to General Keitel [Canaris wrote in his diary, which was produced at Nuremberg] that I knew that extensive executions were planned in Poland and that particularly the nobility and the clergy were to be exterminated.
They were not going to seriously oppose the “housecleaning”—that is, the wiping out of the Polish Jews, intelligentsia, clergy and nobility. They were merely going to ask that it be “deferred” until they got out of Poland and could escape the responsibility.
“The final solution,” he declared, would take some time to achieve and must be kept “strictly secret,” but no general who read the confidential memorandum could have doubted that the “final solution” was extermination.
Frank was a typical example of the Nazi intellectual gangster. He had joined the party in 1927, soon after his graduation from law school, and quickly made a reputation as the legal light of the movement. Nimble-minded, energetic, well read not only in the law but in general literature, devoted to the arts and especially to music, he became a power in the legal profession after the Nazis assumed office, serving first as Bavarian Minister of Justice, then Reichsminister without Portfolio and president of the Academy of Law and of the German Bar Association.
The forty-two-volume journal he kept of his life and works, which showed up at Nuremberg,* was one of the most terrifying documents to come out of the dark Nazi world, portraying the author as an icy, efficient, ruthless, bloodthirsty man.
Frank’s job, besides squeezing food and supplies and forced labor out of Poland, was to liquidate the intelligentsia.
By May 30, as his own journal shows, he could boast in a pep talk to his police aides of good progress—the lives of “some thousands” of Polish intellectuals taken, or about to be taken.
“The men capable of leadership in Poland must be liquidated. Those following them… must be eliminated in their turn.
Already on February 21, 1940, S.S. Oberfuehrer Richard Gluecks, the head of the Concentration Camp Inspectorate, scouting around near Cracow, had informed Himmler that he had found a “suitable site” for a new “quarantine camp” at Auschwitz, a somewhat forlorn and marshy town of twelve thousand inhabitants in which was situated, besides some factories, a former Austrian cavalry barracks. Work was commenced immediately and on June 14 Auschwitz was officially opened as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners whom the Germans wished to treat with special harshness. It was soon to
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For Auschwitz was soon destined to become the most famous of the extermination camps—Vernichtungslager—which must be distinguished from the concentration camps, where a few did survive. It is not without significance for an understanding of the Germans, even the most respectable Germans, under Hitler, that such a distinguished, internationally known firm as I. G. Farben, whose directors were honored as being among the leading businessmen of Germany, God-fearing men all, should deliberately choose this death camp as a suitable place for profitable operations.
He wanted it to be warm, but not too warm, because in his judgment no Italian feels any great joy over the fact that Hitler escaped death—least of all the Duce.
Driven out of the Baltic as the price of his pact with Stalin, forced to hurriedly evacuate the German families who had lived there for centuries, he now had to officially condone Russia’s unprovoked attack on a little country which had close ties with Germany and whose very independence as a non-Communist nation had been won from the Soviet Union largely by the intervention of regular German troops in 1918.
Strict instructions were given to German diplomatic missions abroad and to the German press and radio to support Russia’s aggression and avoid expressing any sympathy with the Finns.
The United States would not permit a total defeat of the democracies.”
The captured German papers reveal, for instance, one of the best-kept secrets of the war: the Soviet Union’s help in providing ports on the Arctic, the Black Sea and the Pacific through which Germany could import badly needed raw materials otherwise shut off by the British blockade.
