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

by William L. Shirer

It was now time for Hitler to “liberate” Slovakia. Karol Sidor, who had represented the autonomous Slovak government at Prague, was named by President Hácha to be the new Premier of it in place of Monsignor Tiso. Returning to Bratislava, the Slovak seat of government, on Saturday, March 11, Sidor called a meeting of his new cabinet. At ten o’clock in the evening the session of the Slovak government was interrupted by strange and unexpected visitors. Seyss-Inquart, the quisling Nazi Governor of Austria, and Josef Buerckel, the Nazi Gauleiter of Austria, accompanied by five German generals, pushed their way into the meeting and told the cabinet ministers to proclaim the independence of Slovakia at once.

March 21, 1939, is a day to be remembered in the story of Europe’s march toward war.

At 2:30 in the afternoon of the twenty-third, Hitler made another of his triumphant entries into a newly occupied city and at the Stadttheater in Memel again addressed a delirious “liberated” German throng. Another provision of the Versailles Treaty had been torn up. Another bloodless conquest had been made.

they [the Western Allies] expect the Germany of today to sit patiently by until the very last day while they create satellite States and set them against Germany, then they are mistaking the Germany of today for the Germany of before the war. He who declares himself ready to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for these powers must realize he burns his fingers….

As so often before, Hitler ended on an old familiar note of peace: “Germany has no intention of attacking other people… Out of this conviction I decided three weeks ago to name the coming party rally the ‘Party Convention of Peace’”—a slogan, which as the summer of 1939 developed, became more and more ironic.

TOP SECRET Case White The present attitude of Poland requires… the initiation of military preparations to remove, if necessary, any threat from this direction forever.

This writer spent the first week of April in Poland in search of answers. They were, as far as he could see, that the Poles would not give in to Hitler’s threats, would fight if their land were invaded, but that militarily and politically they were in a disastrous position. Their Air Force was obsolete, their Army cumbersome, their strategic position—surrounded by the Germans on three sides—almost hopeless.

April 7, Mussolini sent his troops into Albania and added the conquest of that mountainous little country to that of Ethiopia.

it was probably the most brilliant oration he ever gave, certainly the greatest this writer ever heard from him. For sheer eloquence, craftiness, irony, sarcasm and hypocrisy, it reached a new level that he was never to approach again.

Reports that Germany intended to attack Poland, Hitler went on, were “mere inventions of the international press.” (Not one of the tens of millions of persons listening could know that only three weeks before he had given written orders to his armed forces to prepare for the destruction of Poland by September 1, “at the latest.”)

Mr. Roosevelt! I fully understand that the vastness of your nation and the immense wealth of your country allow you to feel responsible for the history of the whole world and for the history of all nations. I, sir, am placed in a much more modest and smaller sphere…

A Foreign Office memorandum of November 4, 1938, reveals “an emphatic demand from Field Marshal Goering’s office at least to try to reactivate our Russian trade, especially insofar as Russian raw materials are concerned.”

And he quoted further the Soviet dictator’s accusations that the Western Allies were pushing the Germans further eastward, promising them an easy prey and saying: “Just start a war with the Bolsheviks, everything else will take care of itself. This looks very much like encouragement… It looks as if the purpose… was to engender the fury of the Soviet Union against Germany… and to provoke a conflict with Germany without apparent reasons….

The object [said Mussolini] would be to induce Russia to react coolly and unfavorably to Britain’s efforts at encirclement, on the lines of Stalin’s speech… Moreover, in their ideological struggle against plutocracy and capitalism the Axis Powers had, to a certain extent, the same objectives as the Russian regime.

The significance of Litvinov’s abrupt dismissal was obvious to all. It meant a sharp and violent turning in Soviet foreign policy.

Thus, on a sudden impulse, after more than a year of hesitation, Mussolini committed himself irrevocably to Hitler’s fortunes. This was one of the first signs that the Italian dictator, like the German, was beginning to lose that iron self-control which up until this year of 1939 had enabled them both to pursue their own national interests with ice-cold clarity. The consequences for Mussolini would soon prove disastrous.

On May 23, 1939, then, Hitler, as he himself said, burned his boats. There would be war. Germany needed Lebensraum in the East. To get it Poland would be attacked at the first opportunity. Danzig had nothing to do with it. That was merely an excuse. Britain stood in the way; she was the real driving force against Germany. Very well, she would be taken on too, and France. It would be a life-and-death struggle.

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.

While the British and French military officers were waiting for their slow boat to Leningrad the Germans were acting swiftly. August 3 was a crucial day in Berlin and Moscow.

We must find some way out. By following the Germans we shall go to war and enter it under the least favorable conditions for the Axis, and especially for Italy. Our gold reserves are reduced to almost nothing, as well as our stocks of metals… We must avoid war.

So Poland, probably, could be taken on alone, but she would have to be defeated “within a week or two,” Hitler explained, so that the world could be convinced of her collapse and not try to save her.

The first suggestion, then, for a Nazi–Soviet nonaggression pact came from the Russians—at the very moment they were negotiating with France and Great Britain to go to war, if necessary, to oppose further German aggression.

“Molotov did not give reasons,” Schulenburg added in his telegram, “for his sudden change of mind. I assume that Stalin intervened.”

During the next twenty-four hours, from the evening of Sunday, August 20, when Hitler’s appeal to Stalin went out over the wires to Moscow, until the following evening, the Fuehrer was in a state bordering on collapse.

Finally, at 9:35 P.M. on August 21, Stalin’s reply came over the wires in Berlin. TO THE CHANCELLOR OF THE GERMAN REICH, A. HITLER: I thank you for the letter. I hope that the German–Soviet nonaggression pact will bring about a decided turn for the better in the political relations between our countries. The peoples of our countries need peaceful relations with each other. The assent of the German Government to the conclusion of a nonaggression pact provides the foundation for eliminating the political tension and for the establishment of peace and collaboration between our countries. The Soviet Government have instructed me to inform you that they agree to Herr von Ribbentrop’s arriving in Moscow on August 23. J. STALIN

Essentially, all depends on me, on my existence, because of my political talents. Furthermore, the fact that probably no one will ever again have the confidence of the whole German people as I have. There will probably never again in the future be a man with more authority than I have. My existence is therefore a factor of great value. But I can be eliminated at any time by a criminal or a lunatic.

I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war—never mind whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory.

The whole works—the nonaggression treaty and the secret protocol—were signed at a second meeting at the Kremlin later that evening. So easily had the Germans and Russians come to agreement that this convivial session, which lasted into the small hours of the following morning, was taken up mostly not by any hard bargaining but with a warm and friendly discussion of the state of the world, country by country, and with the inevitable, effusive toasts customary at gala gatherings in the Kremlin. A secret German memorandum by a member of the German delegation who was present has recorded the incredible scene.

The price he paid was set down in the “Secret Additional Protocol” to the treaty:

Once again Germany and Russia, as in the days of the German kings and Russian emperors, had agreed to partition Poland. And Hitler had given Stalin a free hand in the eastern Baltic.

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.

Noble in form and in intent as all these neutral appeals were, there is something unreal and pathetic about them when reread today. It was as if the President of the United States, the Pope and the rulers of the small Northern European democracies lived on a different planet from that of the Third Reich and had no more understanding of what was going on in Berlin than of what might be transpiring on Mars.

I noted further on August 10, after I had arrived in Berlin: Whereas all the rest of the world considers that the peace is about to be broken by Germany, that it is Germany that is threatening to attack Poland… here in Germany, in the world the local newspapers create, the very reverse is maintained… What the Nazi papers are proclaiming is this: that it is Poland which is disturbing the peace of Europe; Poland which is threatening Germany with armed invasion… “POLAND, LOOK OUT!” warns the B.Z. headline, adding: “ANSWER TO POLAND, THE RUNNER-AMOK [AMOKLÄUFFER] AGAINST PEACE AND RIGHT IN EUROPE!” Or the headline in Der Fuehrer, daily paper of Karlsruhe, which I bought on the train: “WARSAW THREATENS BOMBARDMENT OF DANZIG—UNBELIEVABLE AGITATION OF THE POLISH ARCHMADNESS [POLNISCHEN GROESSEN-WAHSN]!”

Hitler took no notice of the letter which Dahlerus had brought from Halifax and which had seemed important enough to Goering to have the Fuehrer waked up in the middle of the night. Instead, for twenty minutes he lectured the Swede on his early struggles, his great achievements and all his attempts to come to an understanding with the British.

“On my return to the embassy,” Lipski later related, “I found myself unable to communicate with Warsaw, as the Germans had cut my telephone.” The questions of Weizsaecker and Ribbentrop as to the ambassador’s status as a negotiator were purely formal, with an eye, no doubt, for the record, for ever since noon, when Lipski’s communication had been received by telegram from Warsaw, the Germans had known that he was not coming, as they had demanded, as a plenipotentiary. They had decoded the telegram immediately.

“The victor,” he had told them, “will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory.”

In defense against Polish attacks, German troops moved into action against Poland at dawn today. This action is for the present not to be described as war, but merely as engagements which have been brought about by Polish attacks.

By afternoon Ambassador von der Schulenburg was able to inform Berlin that the Soviet government was “prepared to meet your wishes.” 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.

Earlier in the day the Soviet Foreign Commissar had officially congratulated the Germans “on the entry of German troops into Warsaw.”

that Poland was falling apart and that it was necessary for the Soviet Union, in consequence, to come to the aid of the Ukrainians and the White Russians “threatened” by Germany. This argument [said Molotov] was necessary to make the intervention of the Soviet Union plausible to the masses and at the same time avoid giving the Soviet Union the appearance of an aggressor.

Stalin received me at 2 o’clock… and declared that the Red Army would cross the Soviet border at 6 o’clock… Soviet planes would begin today to bomb the district east of Lwów (Lemberg).

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.

Zossen, the headquarters of both the Army Command and the General Staff, became a hotbed of conspiratorial activity.

To superintend the new camp and the supply of slave labor for I. G. Farben there arrived at Auschwitz in the spring of 1940 a gang of the most choice ruffians in the S.S., among them Josef Kramer, who would later become known to the British public as the “Beast of Belsen,” and Rudolf Franz Hoess, a convicted murderer who had served five years in prison—he spent most of his adult life as first a convict and then a jailer—and who in 1946, at the age of forty-six, would boast at Nuremberg that at Auschwitz he had superintended the extermination of two and a half million persons, not counting another half million who had been allowed to “succumb to starvation.”

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.

The Agreement [Schnurre concluded] means a wide-open door to the East for us… The effects of the British blockade will be decisively weakened.

The Fuehrer himself proclaimed that not he but “the Jewish and capitalistic warmongers” had started the war

The chief of the German Navy had now found in Norway itself a valuable ally for his designs in the person of Major Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Quisling, whose name would soon become a synonym in almost all languages for a traitor.

At any rate, for what it was worth—and few Germans besides Hitler, especially among the generals, thought it was worth very much—Italy’s entrance into the war had now at last been solemnly promised.

treasonable act doomed the German efforts to induce Norway to surrender. And paradoxically, though it was a moment of national shame for the Norwegian people, the treason of Quisling rallied the stunned Norwegians to a resistance which was to become formidable and heroic.