The Point of No Return
‘THE DAY IS charged with electricity and full of threats,’ noted Count Ciano on 23 August. Since his return from Salzburg, the Duce had been vacillating badly. One minute he was bellicose and all for entering the fray alongside Hitler, the next he appeared persuaded that war would be disastrous for Italy. In truth, much depended on whom the dictator spoke to. If it was Generale Alberto Pariani, the Under-Secretary for War, he was all for fighting; if it was Ciano, or Maresciallo – Marshal – Pietro Badoglio, the Chief of the General Staff, he became more cautious.
That evening, as Hitler had stood on the balcony at the Berghof, Mussolini had had one of his talks with Pariani. The upshot was predictable.
‘This evening the Duce is favourable to war,’ wrote Ciano. ‘He talks of armies and attacks. He received Pariani who gave him good news of the condition of the army. Pariani is a traitor and a liar.’
It was a curious feature of Mussolini’s dictatorship that he was never quite as powerful as he would have liked, and certainly with none of the absolute power of his Axis colleague, Hitler. Despite seventeen years of Fascism, Italy was still a monarchy, and ultimate authority belonged to the King, Vittorio Emanuele III, and to the senior generals of the Regio Esercito, the Royal Army. Collectively, these men were quite powerful enough to have thrown out both Mussolini and Fascism at any time should they have chosen to do so.
So it was fortunate for Ciano that the following day, 24 August, he had the opportunity to speak with the King, who, he knew, was both hostile to the Germans and vehemently opposed to war. The King was staying at Sant’Anna di Valdieri, an Alpine resort in Piedmont on the French border, so yet again Ciano left Rome and headed north for this latest audience.
The diminutive King Vittorio Emanuele, who had acceded to his throne in 1900 and presided over Italy’s disastrous involvement in the last war, could not have been more withering about the state of the armed forces, and the Army in particular. The officers, he told Ciano, were not fit for purpose, their weapons old and obsolete, and during his thirty-two recent inspections of various units and border defences he was appalled by the sad state of preparedness. If the French chose to march into Italy, he was convinced they could at any time. What’s more, the Italian ‘peasants’ all curse the ‘damn Germans’. ‘We must, therefore, in his opinion,’ noted Ciano, ‘await events and do nothing.’
Meanwhile Neville Henderson, the British Ambassador, had visited Hitler at the Berghof and handed him a letter from Neville Chamberlain. ‘No greater mistake could be made,’ Chamberlain warned, if Germany believed the German–Soviet pact made any difference to Britain’s obligation to Poland. But he also stated that in his mind, ‘war between our two peoples would be the greatest calamity that could occur’. It was not too late, he wrote, to resolve the issues between Germany and Poland by negotiation, not force.
But of course it was too late. Hitler had made up his mind. The die had been cast, his Rubicon crossed.
The Führer was in a highly charged mood – a dangerous blend of high excitement, nerves and resolve. He was, he had told his generals, now fifty. An assassin might claim him at any time. Only he had the strength of will to lead Germany to victory. The attack on Poland had to be now, while he was fit and alive and well. He was convincing himself of the rightness of his course as much as the generals.
No letter from Chamberlain was going to make him change his mind, but Britain’s continued pressure and insistence on honouring its pledge to Poland was making him seethe. He berated Henderson, partly because of his own heightened mood and partly because giving verbal tongue-lashings had always been a tried-and-tested means of getting what he wanted. His aim was to browbeat Henderson and the British into backing down. Britain’s aggressive stance, he told the Ambassador, was making negotiation impossible. Germany had continually offered friendship and that offer had been thrown back in Germany’s face – forcing it to seek an alliance with Russia. The British Government, he told him, preferred anything to co-operation with Germany; if war came, it would be a life-and-death struggle, and Britain would have more to lose.
What Hitler simply could not understand was that both Britain and France found him and his regime utterly repellent. The vast majority of British people viewed totalitarianism as repugnant, and while the British Union of Fascists had gained a certain amount of ground during the 1930s, it had remained a minority movement. Certainly, the instruments of the Nazis – the SS, the secret police, the sinister storm troopers and swastikas – chilled most British people to the core. Then there was Nazi anti-Semitism. Many in Britain and even more in France had a wariness of Judaism, but persecuting a particular religious group was not considered the action of civilized people. Furthermore, the violence towards and ostracization of Jews in the Third Reich had truly shocked many British citizens. ‘Kristallnacht’, as the pogrom of the night of 9–10 November 1938 had come to be known, had appalled people throughout the free world. ‘No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world,’ noted The Times of London on 11 November 1938, ‘could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenceless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday.’
All these factors combined to make it very hard for Britain – and France – to cosy up to Germany in any way. Nevertheless, however, Britain was not standing up to Hitler now to defend the Jews; rather, it was doing so because it feared that Hitler had designs not just on the German-speaking corners of Europe, but the entire world. Where would his ambitions end if not checked now? Defending Poland was about maintaining the balance of power.
By the 24th, Hitler and his entourage were back in Berlin, at the Reich Chancellery built by Speer the previous year. Also there, returned from Moscow, was von Ribbentrop, who now revealed that a secret part of the pact had been that the Red Army invade Poland from the east a short time after Germany’s attack from the west. Poland was to be divided. This news stunned Göring. He was beginning to feel increasingly on edge. It was essential, he firmly believed, to keep Britain categorically out of the war and he had finally by now made direct contact with the British Secret Service; it seemed a meeting with Chamberlain might happen after all. At this point, however, Hitler refused to let him go. Later that day, he saw his Swedish friend, Birger Dahlerus, who was now talking about arranging a four-power conference between Britain, France, Germany and Italy. Göring asked Dahlerus to let Chamberlain know about this latest revelation concerning the German–Soviet pact.
On the 25th, Hitler made an offer to Britain, repeated by Göring through Dahlerus. If Britain kept out of Germany’s squabble with Poland, then the Reich would be prepared to enter an agreement in which it would safeguard the British Empire and even guarantee German assistance should it be required. This Hitler told Henderson in person at the Reich Chancellery at 1.30 p.m. At 3.02 p.m., he ordered Case WHITE, the invasion of Poland, to begin at dawn the following morning.
The ‘offer’ was clearly no more than a simple bribe, a carrot dangled to encourage Britain to take a step back. Hitler remained convinced, outwardly at any rate, that Britain was still bluffing. This was where his lack of geo-political understanding, his myopic world-view, skewed his judgement. The point had been reached where neither Britain nor France could possibly stand by if Germany invaded Poland; to do so would be to abandon all political and moral authority, not just in Europe but in the world. They could not allow such a loss of influence and prestige.
That same day, Friday, 25 August, almost as soon as the order for Case WHITE had been issued, Göring received intelligence that suggested the attempt to cow the British had failed. As well as his many state offices, command of the Luftwaffe and control of the HG Works, Göring also had his own private intelligence service, the Forschungsamt. This was an extensive and highly efficient monitoring service of radio, wireless and telephone communications, involving deciphering as well as phone-tapping. Among those regularly being deciphered and tapped were Dahlerus, Neville Henderson, Monsieur Coulondre, the French Ambassador, and Attolico, the Italian Ambassador. Traffic from Ciano’s Palazzo Chigi was also regularly being intercepted.
Incredibly, Hitler both was aware of its existence and did nothing to make Göring hand over control to the SS or the Abwehr, the Wehrmacht’s secret intelligence service, or any other Nazi apparatus. As a consequence, Göring was not only able to keep one step ahead of many of his rivals within the party, but also to control vital intelligence that he could then pass on to the Führer. Thus it was that his Forschungsamt heard Neville Henderson telephone London saying the German offer was nothing more than an attempt to drive a wedge between Britain and Poland, when earlier, to Hitler, he had told the Führer he thought it would be worth him flying personally to London to present the proposal to the British government. In other words, to Hitler, Henderson had hinted there might be some ground for manoeuvre, whereas on the telephone he had made it clear he thought the opposite.
Then, at 5 p.m., the Forschungsamt detected Count Ciano dictating a formal note warning that Italy would not fight. Half an hour later, the French Ambassador delivered a message to Hitler insisting on France’s determination to fight for Poland. Half an hour after that, at 6 p.m., the British announced they had ratified their alliance with Poland.
At this, even Hitler briefly lost his nerve. The invasion was still due to begin the following morning, but the Führer now telephoned Keitel and ordered him to stop everything.
‘Is this just temporary?’ Göring asked Hitler.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Just for four or five days until we can eliminate British intervention.’
‘Do you think four or five days will make any difference?’ Göring responded.
Friday, 25 August, had been a fraught day for Ciano. In the morning, he had been warned that Il Duce was still in a furiously warlike mood and indeed this was how he found him on his arrival at the Palazzo Venezia. With the King’s opinions to help him, Ciano gradually talked Mussolini out of his latest belligerent stance and suggested he send Hitler a communiqué announcing Italian non-intervention until Italy was better prepared for war.
With this agreed, Ciano left happy that he had at last got his way. However, no sooner had he reached his office at the Palazzo Chigi, some six hundred metres away down the Via Corso, than Mussolini called him back, having yet again changed his mind. ‘He fears the bitter judgement of the Germans,’ Ciano scrawled wearily, ‘and wants to intervene at once. It is useless to struggle.’
At 2 p.m., a message for Mussolini from Hitler arrived, hinting at imminent action against Poland and asking for Italian ‘understanding’. Ciano then used this latter phrase as a pretext to persuade Mussolini to reply stating categorically that Italy was not ready for war. It was this that was picked up as it had been written by the Forschungsamt.
This news and the subsequent formal communiqué from Mussolini had taken some of the puff out of Hitler’s sails, and Hauptmann Engel thought the Führer seemed suddenly totally downcast and at a loss as to what to do, even though this did nothing to divert him from the course on which he was set. He did not blame Mussolini, but rather what he believed to be the Anglophile Italian aristocracy, and not least upper-crust playboys like Ciano. The implication was clear, though, and Mussolini would have wept with shame to hear it: a proper dictator would have thrown out the King and silenced any dissenting voices.
Hitler’s response was to ask Italy for a shopping list of what they needed in order to come into the war. This reached Rome by 9.30 p.m.
The Germans were given this list the following day, and it included more than 18,000 tons of coal, steel, oil, nickel, tungsten and other raw materials, all of which were vital ingredients of modern war and none of which Italy could produce itself. As Ciano admitted with thinly disguised glee, this gargantuan figure would require no fewer than 17,000 train carriages to ship them.
The ploy worked exactly as Ciano had hoped. The Germans, in reply, offered a fraction of the material asked. They understood the Italian position and released them from their obligation to fight by their side. For the time being, at any rate, Italy could keep out of the war that was about to erupt. It was a blow for Mussolini’s damaged pride, but as far as Ciano was concerned, Italy had been saved from tragedy.
In some ways it is odd that Hitler should have been so alarmed by Italy’s stance. Italy was clearly not ready for war and unquestionably would have been more of a hindrance than a help. Perhaps, though, he liked the idea of standing shoulder to shoulder rather than Germany going it alone; perhaps, too, the sheer scale of the Italian demands both shocked and alarmed him. The German High Command had known Italy was militarily weak, but perhaps not quite as weak as was the reality. On the other hand, the Germans had hardly behaved like allies in recent months; rather, they had played a game of smoke and mirrors, flagrantly lying and pulling the wool over Italy’s eyes, and showing scant regard or respect for their Axis partner. It hardly augured well for the future.
Oberst Warlimont had been hugely relieved to learn that Case WHITE had been called off, although on being summoned by Keitel to the Reich Chancellery the following day, 26 August, he was told not to start celebrating; the invasion had not been cancelled, just delayed. Although this meant there would still be war, at least it gave the Wehrmacht a bit more time to mobilize.
Two days later, Henderson returned to Berlin with Britain’s formal response to Hitler’s offer, which he handed to the Führer at 10.30 p.m. that night, Monday, 28 August. The letter expressed the desire to ‘make friendship’ and a ‘lasting understanding’ with Germany, although it insisted a settlement be reached with Poland first. The Poles, wrote the British, had expressed a willingness to open negotiations. In turn, on the 29th, Hitler accepted the suggestion and proposed that a Polish negotiator be sent the next day, 30 August.
No Polish emissary arrived that day, however. Instead, German proposals for these possible talks grew increasingly demanding, while von Ribbentrop in his conversations with Henderson became more heated. The Poles, meanwhile, promised a reply by noon on the 31st.
By this time, it was too late; in fact, Hitler had never intended anything other than a delay. He had always been a gambler and had made his mind up days before. His course had been set; there could be no deviation. Invading Poland was a gamble he was going to take, whether Britain and France declared war or not.
At 12.40 p.m. on Thursday, 31 August, Hitler issued his ‘Directive No. 1 for the Conduct of War’. Case WHITE, the German plan for the invasion of Poland, was to begin at dawn the following day, Friday, 1 September 1939.
Propaganda had been a key component of Nazi politics from the outset, and while there were some who had not been persuaded, it had unquestionably been hugely effective, not just within the Reich but around the world too. To a large degree, this was due to Dr Josef Goebbels, the Reich Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, and Gauleiter – administrative leader, an old Frankish term that had been resurrected by the Nazis – of Berlin. A former failed journalist and one of the first Nazis, he was utterly devoted to Hitler, so much so he had even given up an affair with a Czech film star with whom he was deeply in love because the Führer asked him to. The son of a shop assistant, Goebbels was highly intelligent and despite those humble beginnings had attended several universities and gained a doctorate. Marriage to Magda Quant, a society divorcee, gave him the kind of money and status he needed to help him climb up the Nazi ladder. He had become Propaganda Minister in 1933, the year Hitler became Chancellor, and had immediately announced that his prime goal was to achieve the ‘mobilisation of mind and spirit’ of the German people. ‘We did not lose the war because our artillery gave out,’ he said of defeat in 1918, ‘but because the weapons of our minds did not fire.’
In many ways, Goebbels was as responsible for Hitler’s position as Hitler was himself. It was Goebbels who had largely shaped the Nazis’ public image. It was he who had insisted on draping swastikas – the bigger the better – from as many places as possible; it was he who taught Hitler how to whip a crowd into a frenzy; it was also Goebbels who had elevated Hitler into a demigod in the eyes of many. He knew all about manipulation theories and orchestrated heavy-handed mob violence, and in the 1933 election created the ‘Hitler over Germany’ campaign; it was the first time aircraft had been used to take a candidate around a country in an effort to reach more people. It worked spectacularly well.
With the Nazis in power, Goebbels had also done much to whip up the virulent anti-Semitism that lay at the heart of Nazi ideology and had helped turn Nazism into a form of surrogate religion, in which harking back to a ‘purer’ Aryan past worked to bind the people both together and behind the party and, more importantly, the leader. Goebbels’s influence – his genius – should never be underestimated.
Yet despite his position, and despite the job title, Goebbels did not have complete control over propaganda. Hitler’s divide-and-rule style of leadership was to encourage jealousy and back-stabbing among his acolytes, so von Ribbentrop’s office was given foreign propaganda and the OKW any military reporting. Further muddying the waters was Otto Dietrich, the Reich Press Chief, and although on paper subordinate to Goebbels, he was still part of Hitler’s inner circle.
Even so, Goebbels was the top dog despite these checks on his power and had masterminded a cunning way of getting the prescribed message across. Key to this was repetition and radio. There were many innovations of the 1930s in which Germany lagged behind other leading countries in the world, but the embracing of radio sets was not one of them. Goebbels had realized that radio was the ideal way to get his message across and so was instrumental in making sure radio sets were both cheap and accessible. First up into the mass market was the Volksempfänger – the ‘People’s Receiver’. Using the word ‘Volk’ was another Nazi trick, which suggested togetherness rather than exclusivity. This was later followed by the DKE, or Deutsche Kleinempfänger, the ‘German Little Receiver’, which, as its name implied, was both pioneeringly small and also affordable. The net result was that by 1939 almost 70 per cent of the population owned radios. For those remaining 30 per cent still without one, however, there were communal listening points: in cafés, bars, restaurants, the stairwells of blocks of flats, the corners of town squares with accompanying loud speakers. Radio coverage in Germany was more dense than anywhere else in the world. Finally, to really ram home the message, there were radio wardens to coax people into listening to key speeches and programmes, all of which were mixed in between unceasing light music, martial marches, Wagner and popular entertainment. ‘Radio must reach all,’ claimed Hans Fritzsche, the Nazis’ chief radio commentator, ‘or it will reach none.’
Alongside radio, there were news films shown at every cinema and movies that equally promoted Nazi ideology: Jews were played as villainous, duplicitous and money-grabbing, the heroes were tall, broad, blond and fulfilling the Aryan ideal. There were documentaries too, like Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, about the 1934 Nazi rally at Nuremberg. Cinema goers had grown massively through the 1930s, from 250,000 in 1933 to three times that number by 1939.
Finally, there were state-controlled newspapers. Every city had one and there were national ones too, not least the principal party mouthpiece, the Völkischer Beobachter, the ‘People’s Observer’. One of Goebbels’s key instructions to journalists was to make the writing more readable, more conversational and less dry. Again, it was a policy that worked a treat: the Völkischer Beobachter had climbed from a circulation of 116,000 in 1932, to almost a million by 1939. In little more than a year’s time it would become the first newspaper in Germany to pass a daily circulation of over a million.
The result was that very few in Nazi Germany could avoid hearing the oft-repeated propaganda put about by Goebbels and his carefully orchestrated team at the Propaganda Ministry.
In the run-up to the launch of Case WHITE, this was broadly very effective. Most people believed what was being put across both on radio and in the state-controlled press, namely that the Poles were committing all kinds of atrocities on former Prussians living in Poland, that they were war-mongering and using threatening language, and that not only was the Danzig Corridor rightfully part of Germany, but it was the duty of the Reich to defend those subjects living there.
Heinz Knocke, eighteen years old, was from Hameln in central Germany and typical of many of his age. He had absolute faith in the Führer and the rightness of the German cause. Wanting to join the Luftwaffe as a pilot, he had had his preliminary examinations and was eager that with war imminent his call-up would be accelerated. ‘The Polish atrocities against the German minority make horrible reading today,’ he scribbled in his diary on 31 August. ‘Thousands are being massacred daily in territory which had once been part of Germany.’ It was absolute nonsense.
Oberleutnant Hajo Herrmann, a 24-year-old pilot with the bomber group III/KG4, also thought the Poles had brought war upon themselves. As far as he was concerned, the Danzig issue was one of principle. It had been German before 1919, was still inhabited mostly by Germans, and since the Poles had rejected any peaceful solution, what did they expect? ‘The anger that I felt inside at their unreasonableness,’ he noted, ‘matched my sacred conviction: that of German rightness.’ Others, like another eighteen-year-old, Martin Pöppel, a young Gefreiter in 1. Fallschirmjägerregiment, were simply hugely excited at the sudden turn of events. A paratrooper in the Luftwaffe, he was less worried about the rights of Germans in Danzig and more concerned about seeing some action before it was all over.
Such was the callowness of youth, but there were many who did not share this bravado. ‘September 1, 1939, was no day of jubilation for us,’ said Oberleutnant zur See Erich Topp, then a 26-year-old First Watch Officer (1WO) on the U-boat U-46. ‘We were aware of our weaknesses from the beginning, notably in the Navy. Everyone knew it would be a long war.’
For Oberleutnant Hans von Luck, an officer in 7. Armoured Reconnaissance Regiment, the escalating situation had brought a sudden recall from leave just a few days earlier. He had found everyone at the garrison in Bad Kissingen near Schweinfurt in high spirits. Neither he nor his friends believed a word of Goebbels’s propaganda about the Poles, but they did believe Danzig and the corridor should be part of Germany once more. ‘We were not hungry for war,’ von Luck noted, ‘but we did not believe the British and French would come to Poland’s defence.’ How wrong he was.