The Third Reich at War, 1939-1945

by Richard J. Evans

These massive forces confronted the Poles with overwhelming odds. Hoping that the invasion would be stopped by Anglo-French intervention, and anxious not to offend world opinion by seeming to provoke the Germans, the Polish government delayed mobilizing its armed forces until the last minute. Thus they were poorly prepared to resist the sudden, massive invasion of German troops.

Stories of Polish cavalry squadrons quixotically charging German tank units were most probably apocryphal, but the disparity in resources and equipment was undeniable all the same.

In the first two weeks after the German invasion, Stalin had held back while he extricated his forces from a successful conflict with Japan in Manchuria, concluded only in late August.

Stalin was keen to grasp the opportunity to regain territory that had belonged to Russia before the revolution of 1917.

Though this was quickly rejected, the continued inaction of the British and the French kept hopes alive that they could be persuaded to pull out of the war.14 Rumours of a peace deal with the western powers were rife at this time, and even led to spontaneous celebratory demonstrations on the streets of Berlin.

The nationalistic military regime in Poland had indeed discriminated heavily against the German ethnic minority in the interwar years. At the onset of the German invasion in September 1939, gripped by fears of sabotage behind the lines, it had arrested between ten and fifteen thousand ethnic Germans and marched them towards the eastern part of the country, beating laggards and shooting many of those who gave up through exhaustion.

Altogether, around 2,000 ethnic Germans were killed in mass shootings or died from exhaustion on the marches. Some 300 were killed in Bromberg (Bydgoszcz), where local ethnic Germans had staged an armed uprising against the town’s garrison in the belief that the war was virtually over, and had been killed by the enraged Poles.

Many Germans were convinced. Melita Maschmann, a young activist in the League of German Girls, the female wing of the Hitler Youth, was persuaded that war was morally justified not only in the light of the injustices of Versailles, which had ceded German-speaking areas to the new Polish state, but also by press and newsreel reports of Polish violence against the German-speaking minority. 60,000 ethnic Germans, she believed, had been brutally murdered by the Poles in ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Bromberg.

Under Hitler’s orders, its bitterness was quickly brought into the service of a campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass murder that far outdid anything that had happened after the German occupation of Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938.20

It was not the task of the administration ‘to put the country on a sound basis economically and financially’. There must be no opportunity for the Poles to reassert themselves. ‘The Polish intelligentsia must be prevented from forming itself into a ruling class. The standard of living in the country is to remain low; it is of use to us only as a reservoir of labour.’

As a result of these methods, by September 1941 there were over a million Polish workers in the Old Reich. According to one estimate, only 15 per cent of them had gone there of their own accord.

Not all German army commanders, particularly in the senior ranks, where the influence of Nazism was less extreme than lower down the army hierarchy, accepted this situation with equanimity. Some of them indeed were soon complaining of unauthorized shootings of Polish civilians on the orders of junior officers, and of looting and extortion by German troops, and alleging that ‘some of the prisoners were brutally beaten’.

The German army hierarchy did not, for example, intend to break the Geneva Convention of 1929 in relation to the nearly 700,000 prisoners of war they took in the Polish campaign, but there were numerous cases of military guards shooting Polish prisoners when they failed to keep up with a forced march, killing prisoners who were too weak or ill to stand, and penning prisoners into open-air camps with inadequate food and supplies.

In formal military executions alone at least 16,000 Poles were shot; one estimate puts the figure at 27,000.82

In effect, Poland was to serve the same function for Germany as Australia had for Britain, or the American West for the USA: it was to be a colony of settlement, in which the supposedly racially inferior indigenous inhabitants would be removed by one means or another to make room for the invading master race. The idea of changing the ethnic map of Europe by forcibly shifting ethnic groups from one area to another was not new either: a precedent had already been established immediately after the First World War with a large-scale exchange of minority populations between Turkey and Greece.

Thousands of Polish children deemed suitable for Germanization were sent to special camps in the Reich. Here they were given German names and identity papers (including forged birth certificates) and were put through a six-month course of learning the German language and imbibing the rudiments of Nazi ideology.

Polish schools, theatres, museums, libraries, bookshops, newspapers and all other Polish cultural and linguistic institutions were closed down, and the use of the Polish language was forbidden. Poles were banned from possessing gramophones and cameras, and any Pole found attending a German theatre was liable to arrest and imprisonment.

lived. According to one estimate, more than 80 per cent of the Polish population’s daily needs were supplied by the black economy.

philatelists’.

Poland in 1939 contained the largest proportion of Jews living in any European state, numbering almost three and a half million, or 10 per cent of the population, measured by religious affiliation.

The creation of the Warsaw ghetto involved the concentration of nearly a third of the city’s population into 2.4 per cent of its territory.

Neither the Polish nationalist underground ‘Home Army’ nor the Polish government in exile in London nor, finally, the Polish Catholic Church took a clear stance against the Germans’ murderous policies towards Polish Jews; if anything, the opposite was the case, with all three institutions regarding Poland’s Jewish population as supporters of ‘Bolshevism’.

Emanuel Ringelblum, who gathered together people of many different political persuasions to collect an archive of diaries, letters, memoirs, interviews and documents, and to keep a record of the ghetto’s history for posterity. He even managed to write a serious study of Polish-Jewish relations during the war while simultaneously trying to survive in the increasingly intolerable conditions of life in the ghetto.

Numbering 207,000 in September 1939, according to the official racial classification of the Nazis, it was mostly middle-aged or elderly.

Emigration, which had seen more than half Germany’s Jewish inhabitants leave since the beginning of 1933, thus became a lesser priority under the impact of the demand for Jewish labour.

Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, a Japanese consul stationed variously in Lithuania, Prague and Königsberg in 1939–41, Chiune Sugihara, whose main function was supposed to be observing military matters, began on his own initiative to issue transit visas to Japan to any Jews who approached him, even though they had no permission to enter the country; out of perhaps 10,000 Jews who obtained these documents, possibly half managed to find their way illegally eventually to Canada, the USA or other destinations.

All in all, by the time the initial action was over, in January 1940, some 7,700 inmates of psychiatric hospitals and institutions for the mentally and physically handicapped had been killed, along with a number of prostitutes from Gdingen (Gdynia) and Bromberg (Bydgoszcz), and Gypsies from Preussisch-Stargard (Starograd).228 Such events could hardly be kept secret. Dr Klukowski heard of the killings in February 1940. ‘It is hard to believe anything as terrible as this,’ he wrote.229

On 14 July 1933 the regime had introduced compulsory sterilization for Germans considered to be suffering from hereditary weaknesses, including ‘moral feeble-mindedness’, a vague criterion that could encompass many different kinds of social deviance. Some 360,000 people had been sterilized by the time the war broke out.234 In 1935, in addition, abortion on eugenic grounds had been legalized.

Aware that they were in some sense acting illegally, the physicians used false names when signing the death certificate, as well as, of course, appending a false date, to make it appear that death had occurred days or weeks after arrival, instead of merely an hour or so.

Within the killing centres, the atmosphere frequently belied the impression of cold calculation conveyed by the numerous forms and documents that it generated. Those who actually carried out the murders were frequently drunk on the special liquor rations they received. They were reported to indulge in numerous casual sexual affairs with one another to take their minds of the all-pervasive stench of death. At Hartheim the staff held a party to celebrate their ten-thousandth cremation, assembling in the crematorium around the naked body of a recently gassed victim, which was laid out on a stretcher and covered with flowers. One staff member dressed as a clergyman and performed a short ceremony, then beer was distributed to all present.

On 2 December 1940 the Vatican issued a decree declaring roundly: ‘The direct killing of an innocent person because of mental or physical defects is not allowed.’ It was ‘against natural and positive Divine law’.278 Despite this, the Church hierarchy in Germany decided that further action would be inadvisable.

The government’s response was oblique: in August 1941 it released a film entitled I Accuse!, in which a beautiful young woman stricken with multiple sclerosis expresses the wish to end her suffering, and is helped to die by her husband and another friend, after lengthy discussions of the rights and wrongs of such an action. The discussions also extended to the principle of involuntary euthanasia, justified in one passage by an elaborate lecture from a university professor. 18 million people saw the film, and many, reported the SS Security Service, regarded it as an answer to Galen’s sermons. Indeed key scenes had in fact been personally inserted by Viktor Brack from the T-4 office.

All of these actions reflected official policy, of course, directed from the top by Hitler himself, who had declared that Poland was to be totally destroyed, its academically educated and professional classes annihilated, and its population reduced to the status of uneducated helots whose lives were worth next to nothing.

Nazism taught that might was right, winners took all, and the racially inferior were free game. Not surprisingly, it was the younger generation of German soldiers whose behaviour was the most brutal and violent towards the Jews.

Georg Elser was an ordinary man from a humble background whose brutal and violent father had aroused in him a powerful dislike of tyranny. At one time a member of the Communist Party’s Red Front-Fighters’ League, he had difficulty in getting work under the Third Reich and blamed Hitler for his misfortunes. In Munich he had reconnoitred the beer cellar where Hitler was to give his annual speech, then set about preparing his assassination attempt. Over many months he pilfered explosives, a detonator and other equipment from his employers, even finding employment in a quarry so that he could have access to the right kind of material. He surreptitiously took measurements in the beer-cellar, though an attempt to get a job there came to nothing. Every evening he would eat his evening meal there at around nine, then hide in a store-room until the cellar closed for the night. During the small hours Elser worked meticulously at the load-bearing pillar he had selected as the best site for the explosion, fitting a secret door into the wooden cladding, hollowing out the bricks, putting in the explosives and the detonator, and fixing the specially made timer. After two months, on 2 November 1939, he inserted the bomb; three nights later he installed the timer, set for 9.20 in the evening of the 8th, when, he thought, Hitler would be in the middle of his speech. Only the fact that Hitler had curtailed his address in order to go off to Berlin prevented the bomb from killing him outright.3

The many setbacks and disasters of the war persuaded Stalin to recall purged and disgraced former officers to active service in senior positions. They also prodded his generals into embarking on sweeping military reforms that they hoped would ensure that the Red Army would put on a better performance the next time it went into action.18

disruption of British supplies from America. Not only were Swedish ore deliveries to Germany now assured, but Sweden itself, still nominally neutral, had effectively been reduced to the position of a German client state. Even during the Norwegian campaign the Swedish authorities had allowed German supplies to be transported across Swedish territory; subsequently they permitted the transit of hundreds of thousands of German troops as well. Swedish shipyards built warships for the German navy, and the Swedish economy became the source of supply for practically anything the Germans chose to demand so long as they had it.

The enterprise was extremely risky. It left virtually no German armour in reserve. Failure would have opened up Germany to devastating counter-attacks.

Far fewer would have escaped had Hitler not personally ordered the German advance to halt, reassured by Göring’s boast that his planes would finish off the Allied troops, and advised by Rundstedt to give his tired troops a respite before they turned southwards towards Paris.

In Weygand’s view, the British would not be able to hold out against a German invasion of the United Kingdom, so evacuating the French government to London was pointless. Moreover, like an increasing number of other generals, Weygand was beginning to think that it was the civilian politicians who were to blame for the debacle. So it was the army’s duty to make an honourable peace with the enemy. Only in this way would it be possible to prevent anarchy and revolution breaking out in France as it had after the previous defeat by the Germans, in 1870,

Conservatives like Pétain who abhorred the democratic institutions of the Third Republic did not see in the end why they should fight to the death to defend them. Many of them admired Hitler and wanted to take the opportunity of defeat to re-create France in Germany’s image. They were soon to be given the opportunity to do so.44 V

Moreover, Hitler’s attitude to the British was fundamentally ambivalent. On the one hand, he admired the British Empire, which in the 1930s and 1940s was the world’s largest, still covering an enormous area of the globe; and he regarded the English as ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cousins of the Germans, who in the end would be impelled by the logic of racial destiny to make common cause with them.

Time and again Hitler’s peace offers had proved to bring not ‘peace for our time’ but only further demands, as the experience of Czechoslovakia had shown, and by July 1940 few British politicians had any illusions about this fact.67

it gradually became clear that the Germans were not going to achieve their aim. Although the principal German fighter plane, the Messerschmitt Me109, was arguably better than its British equivalents at heights of over 20,000 feet, it lost its advantage because it had to protect the bombers by remaining at lower altitudes, where the Spitfire and Hurricane were more manoeuvrable and could turn and bank more quickly.

A force of 92,000 Italian and 250,000 Abyssinian soldiers was comprehensively defeated by 40,000 British-led African troops. The Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie was triumphantly reinstalled on his throne, while Allied forces had overrun Eritrea and Italian Somaliland by May 1941, leaving the whole north-east of Africa in Allied hands.98

A close alliance emerged between the two countries. German troops entered Romania but the country remained more than merely nominally independent. By 1941 nearly 50 per cent of Romania’s crude oil output was produced by German-owned companies and exports of petroleum products nearly tripled in comparison to the previous year. It was not least in order to secure these supplies that Hitler decided it was necessary to extricate the Italians from their problems in neighbouring Greece.106

Yet the German victories, spectacular as they were, came at a heavy price. The Greeks and their allies had fought determinedly, and the invading Germans had not escaped without casualties. In Crete, 3,352 out of a total of 17,500 invading German troops had been killed, persuading the German armed forces not to mount a similar airborne operation against Malta or Cyprus.111 ‘Our proud paratroop unit,’ wrote one soldier after the victory, ‘never recovered from the enormous losses sustained on Crete.’112 More seriously, the occupation of the conquered territories soon proved to be far from a simple matter.

In the longer term, the Croatian genocide created memories of deep and lasting bitterness among the Serbs. It still had not been forgotten by the time Serbia and Croatia eventually regained their independence after the collapse of the postwar Yugoslav state, in the 1990s.121

As a dogmatic Marxist-Leninist, Stalin was convinced that Hitler’s regime was the tool of German monopoly capitalism, so that if he made available everything German business wanted, there would be no immediate reason to invade. Already, under trade provisions agreed under the Nazi – Soviet Pact early the previous year, the Soviet Union was supplying nearly three-quarters of Germany’s requirement of phosphates, over two-thirds of its imported asbestos, only a little less of its chrome ore, over half its manganese, over a third of its imported nickel, and, even more crucially, more than a third of its imported oil.140 Stalin personally vetoed proposals to disrupt the German military build-up by attacking across the Polish demarcation line. Reports from Soviet agents and even from members of the German embassy in Moscow that an invasion was imminent only convinced him that the Germans were playing hard-ball in their drive to extract economic concessions from him.

For the rest of the war, Hess was kept imprisoned in various places, including the Tower of London. His self-imposed ‘mission’ had been completely pointless. It reflected nothing but his own mental confusion and lack of realism.148