Germany’s blitz victory over France in the Spring of 1940 was no surprise to those foreign correspondents accredited in Berlin who, like myself, had been able over a period of years to watch the Nazi preparations for the holocaust; had inspected the Siegfried Line and contacted the men who built it, and were intimately acquainted with Goebbels’ propaganda methods.
As a corollary, knowing British history and American industrial genius, we could only smile at German boasts that with the fall of France the war was nearly over.
Three events in the pre-war history of Nazism stand forth in my memory as dead give-aways concerning the military intentions of Hitler. The first was Hermann Goering’s sensational and entirely unexpected address before the Foreign Press Association in 1935, in which he informed the world that Germany was rearming in a gigantic way in the air in violation of the Treaty of Versailles.
Goering afterward was scared at his own audacity, for about 11 p.m.—he had spoken at a luncheon—he summoned me as the then president of the Foreign Press Association and asked that his remarks be suppressed. He made a long face when I told him the accounts had appeared hours ago on the streets of London and New York.
Unfortunately too many people regarded Goering’s remarks as idle boast, and us, who reported them, as gullible.
The second event was the remilitarization of the Rhineland in the Spring of 1937. “At this very moment,” Hitler told the assembled Reichstag, “our troops are marching into the Rhineland. As we are being denied the right to be masters in our own home, we are simply taking it.” Or words to that effect.
This was so flagrant a breach of international agreements that even the German General Staff advised against it and surely expected the French army to march into the Reich. When the French meekly acquiesced, all of us knew that Hitler, having seen how weak his opposite numbers were, would stop at nothing.
But again the world would not believe us. It was the era of appeasement, and men in high places in London, Paris and elsewhere thought Hitler could be bought off by concessions.
The third event was Der Fuhrer’s fiftieth birthday celebration on April 20, 1939. The Nazis staged the biggest military parade in post-war German history. Proud of their accomplishments, they showed their tanks and their super-guns, their parachute jumpers and their Waffen-SS.
The late Ralph Barnes of New York Herald Tribune and I were placed next to each other in the reviewing stand, a military attache of one of our present Allies on Ralph’s side. When he heard us expressing our fears as to what such a display of militarism might lead to, this gold-braided “expert” told us derisively, “Why, those are a few samples Hitler is showing off; but that is all he has. Some of that stuff may even be papier mache.”
After that parade we no longer asked ourselves, “Will war come?” We merely speculated, “When will it come?”
We saw hundreds of thousands of men in all stations in life depart for the west to help build the Westwall. We saw war plant after war plant, military barracks after military barracks, airport after airport spring up. We traveled on the super-highways which Hitler was having constructed—highways whose real purpose, we easily divined, was military. We saw a nation in arms.
Fateful September 1, 1939 came, and the war was on. It found Hitler prepared even to the detail of his appearing dramatically before the Reichstag with his large entourage dressed in a new hitherto unknown uniform: the Nazi Party costume in field grey instead of the traditional brown. Dramatically the German dictator exclaimed, “I shall not shed this field grey uniform until victory is achieved.”
It was not long before we learned how Goebbels proposed to let the foreign correspondents “see” the war. Front reporting was a matter of conducted tours, not of day-by-day experience. There was no freedom of movement. One could not obtain credentials to become accredited to this or that army group or to any particular theater of war.
Whenever a big victory was in sight—and only then—the Propaganda Ministry or the press department of the Foreign Office would arrange for a group of “Auslandskorrespondenten” to be taken from Berlin to the designated theater, where they never remained for more than two weeks.
When, therefore, beginning in early May of 1940 a number of trips to the western front was arranged for us in quick succession, we knew instinctively that things must be going very badly for the western Allies in Holland, Belgium, and France. Hitler’s blitz victory could not surprise us.
Moreover, some of us had, after the close of the war on Poland, been taken on a tour of the Siegfried Line. Two things which we could not stress at the time seemed highly significant: first, Col. Wagner, who conducted us through the maze of connecting trenches, pill boxes, forts, and “Panzerwerke” of the German Westwall, or Siegfried Line, in an explanatory aside, told us that the German High Command was in possession of a set of blue-prints of the French fortifications system.
I don’t believe that the colonel knew that he was “spilling” something. He was intent upon convincing us that the Siegfried Line was the latest thing in fortifications and invincible. Hence, in order to underscore and lend more credence to this assertion he revealed that Adolf Hitler had profited from a study of the blue-prints of the Maginot fortifications system and had, accordingly, conceived the Westwall on quite a different and better principle, that of diffusion rather than concentration of defensive power.
What Col. Wagner did not mention, and what became apparent afterward, was that the General Staff well knew from these blue-prints and from reconnaissance where the Maginot Line was weakest and where it could both be successfully attacked and/or outflanked.
We could not help but notice that all over the 200 miles of Westwall front along which we traveled, German soldiers were in constant motion,—drilling, practising at war-games, maneuvering in rain, sleet and snow; whereas on the French side everything was quiet. We had the very definite feeling that the French were content to remain in the defensive, to rely upon the alleged impregnability of the Maginot Line to prevent the invasion of France, whereas the Germans, incessantly busy, were obviously conditioning themselves for offensive warfare.
Moreover, there were constant German sallies into no-man’s land and even into French outposts—“forced reconnaissances,” as they were called, from which sometimes only a few survivors returned, yet which yielded much important information concerning the enemy’s dispositions. We discerned almost no evidence of similar activity on the opposing side.
Thus prepared in every detail, the German army brought France to her knees swiftly, once the great Spring offensive started. Three factors characterized the campaign: First, Fifth Column treachery on the part of French collaborationists. These men stooped to urging the populace of villages, towns and even cities to abandon their homesteads and flee from an enemy already in the immediate vicinity. The bluff worked: the vast military roads became cluttered with hapless civilians with pushcarts, baby buggies and other primitive modes of locomotion, thus hampering the progress of the French defenders.
Also, the element of surprise was used with effectiveness. The French were surprised when the Germans virtually walked around the Maginot Line instead of attacking it frontally. They were surprised when the Nazi motorized troops continued on a straight thrust to the English Channel without pausing to bring up formidable reserves. They were surprised when devastating use was made of the Luftwaffe in disrupting communications and interfering with the marshalling of the opposing forces.
The German General Staff reverted to the ancient military principle of “Keil und Kessel” (literally Wedge and Kettle), meaning a break-through followed by an encircling movement. In other words, they threw overboard the 1914-18 German principle of frontal attack at all costs for which they paid so dearly in World War I, notably at Verdun.
At break-neck speed motorized infantry spearheads followed by hell-bent tanks drove a wedge into the enemy position. The troops which followed into this breach fanned out to the right and left until they had sealed off the enemy and encircled him. They then let time take care of the forces thus trapped, while meanwhile the spearheads roared on. In that way the Nazi juggernaut reached the English Channel before the French had even caught their breath. I saw miles and miles of guns and ammunition trucks which had never gone into action. The enemy overran them before they could even be demolished. No “scorched earth policy” in France.
Such was the situation in June, 1940 when France capitulated. The German army was cocky, certain of victory, rarin’ to push on to England.
What a contrast with late 1944, when I re-entered France and later Germany! With the exception of a few fanatical SS-troops, the German army knew it was licked. The common soldier was glad to surrender. The commanders kept their troops fighting solely from fear that their families might be executed. The civilian population everywhere seemed to have but one desire—that the shelling and bombing and firing cease. The Master Race was “kaputt”.
★★★
Louis P. Lochner covered every big story in Germany for the AP from 1924 to the outbreak of war… interned… released and returned to U. S., June 1942… returned to Germany with invasion armies… an Illinoian, born on Washington’s birthday, 1887, he won a Phi Beta Kappa key at the University of Wisconsin.