Towards the end of July, Hitler, Ribbentrop, and Weizsäcker had devised the basis of an agreement with the Soviet Union involving the partition of Poland and the Baltic states. Hints about such an arrangement were dropped to Molotov during his meeting with Schulenburg on 3 August. Stalin was in no rush. He had learned what the Germans were up to, and the broad timing of the intended action against the Poles. But for Hitler there was not a moment to lose. The attack on Poland could not be delayed. Autumn rains, he told Count Ciano in mid-August, would turn the roads into a morass and Poland into ‘one vast swamp … completely unsuitable for any military operations’. The strike had to come by the end of the month.
VII
Remarkably, for the best part of three months during this summer of high drama, with Europe teetering on the brink of war, Hitler was almost entirely absent from the seat of government in Berlin. Much of the time, as always, when not at his alpine eyrie above Berchtesgaden, he was travelling around Germany. Early in June he visited the construction site of the Volkswagen factory at Fallersleben, where he had laid the foundation stone a year or so earlier. From there it was on to Vienna, to the ‘Reich Theatre Week’, where he saw the premiere of Richard Strauß’s Friedenstag, regaling his adjutants with stories of his visits to the opera and theatre there thirty years earlier, and lecturing them on the splendours of Viennese architecture. Before leaving, he visited the grave of his niece, Geli Raubal. He flew on to Linz, where he criticized new worker flats because they lacked the balconies he deemed essential in every apartment. From there he was driven to Berchtesgaden via Lambach, Hafeld, and Fischlham – some of the places associated with his childhood and where he had first attended school.
At the beginning of July, he was in Rechlin in Mecklenburg, inspecting new aircraft prototypes, including the He 176, the first rocket-propelled plane, with a speed of almost 1,000 kilometres an hour. Then in the middle of the month he attended an extraordinary four-day spectacular in Munich, the ‘Rally of German Art 1939’, culminating in a huge parade with massive floats and extravagant costumes of bygone ages to illustrate 2,000 years of German cultural achievement. Less than a week later he paid his regular visit to the Bayreuth festival. At Haus Wahnfried, in the annexe that the Wagner family had set aside specially for his use, Hitler felt relaxed. There he was ‘Uncle Wolf ’, as he had been known by the Wagners since his early days in politics. While in Bayreuth, looking self-conscious in his white dinner-jacket, he attended performances of Der fliegende Holländer, Tristan und Isolde, Die Walküre, and Götterdämmerung, greeting the crowds as usual from the window on the first floor.
There was also a second reunion (following their meeting the previous year in Linz) with his boyhood friend August Kubizek. They spoke of the old days in Linz and Vienna, going to Wagner operas together. Kubizek sheepishly asked Hitler to sign dozens of autographs to take back for his acquaintances. Hitler obliged. The overawed Kubizek, the archetypal local-government officer of a sleepy small town, carefully blotted every signature. They went out for a while, reminiscing in the gathering dusk by Wagner’s grave. Then Hitler took Kubizek on a tour of Haus Wahnfried. Kubizek reminded his former friend of the Rienzi episode in Linz all those years ago. (Wagner’s early opera, based on the story of a fourteenth-century ‘tribune of the people’ in Rome, had so excited Hitler that late at night, after the performance, he had hauled his friend up the Freinberg, a hill on the edge of Linz, and regaled him about the meaning of what they had seen.) Hitler recounted the tale to Winifried Wagner, ending by saying, with a great deal more pathos than truth: ‘That’s when it began.’ Hitler probably believed his own myth. Kubizek certainly did. Emotional and impressionable as he always had been, and now a well-established victim of the Führer cult, he departed with tears in his eyes. Shortly afterwards, he heard the crowds cheering as Hitler left.
Hitler spent most of August at the Berghof. Other than when he had important visitors to see, daily life there retained its usual patterns. Magda Goebbels told Ciano of her boredom. ‘It is always Hitler who talks!’ he recalled her saying. ‘He can be Führer as much as he likes, but he always repeats himself and bores his guests.’
If less so than in Berlin, strict formalities were still observed. The atmosphere was stuffy, especially in Hitler’s presence. Only Eva Braun’s sister, Gretl, lightened it somewhat, even smoking (which was much frowned upon), flirting with the orderlies, and determined to have fun whatever dampening effect the Führer might have on things. What little humour otherwise surfaced was often in dubious taste in the male-dominated household, where the women in attendance, including Eva Braun, served mainly as decoration. But in general, the tone was one of extreme politeness, with much kissing of hands, and expressions of ‘Gnädige Frau’. Despite Nazi mockery of the bourgeoisie, life at the Berghof was imbued with the intensely bourgeois manners and fashions of the arriviste Dictator.
Hitler’s lengthy absence from Berlin, while European peace hung by a thread, illustrates how far the disintegration of anything resembling a conventional central government had gone. Few ministers were permitted to see him. Even the usual privileged few had dwindled in number. Goebbels was still out of favour following his affair with Lida Baarova. Göring had not recovered the ground he had lost since Munich. Speer enjoyed the special status of the protégé. He spent much of the summer at Berchtesgaden. But most of the time he was indulging Hitler’s passion for architecture, not discussing details of foreign policy. Hitler’s ‘advisers’ on the only issue of real consequence, the question of war and peace, were now largely confined to Ribbentrop, even more hawkish, if anything, than he had been the previous summer, and the military leaders. On the crucial matters of foreign policy, Ribbentrop – when not represented through the head of his personal staff, Walther Hewel, far more liked by the dictator and everyone else than the preening Foreign Minister himself – largely had the field to himself. The second man at the Foreign Ministry, Weizsäcker, left to mind the shop while his boss absented himself from Berlin, claimed not to have seen Hitler, even from a distance, between May and the middle of August. What the Dictator was up to on the Obersalzberg was difficult to fathom in Berlin, Weizäcker added.
The personalization of government in the hands of one man – amounting in this case to concentration of power to determine over war or peace – was as good as complete.
VIII
Danzig, allegedly the issue dragging Europe towards war, was in reality no more than a pawn in the German game being played from Berchtesgaden. Gauleiter Albert Forster – a thirty-seven-year-old former Franconian bank clerk who had learnt some of his early political lessons under Julius Streicher and had been leader of the NSDAP in Danzig since 1930 – had received detailed instructions from Hitler on a number of occasions throughout the summer on how to keep tension simmering without allowing it to boil over. As had been the case in the Sudetenland the previous year, it was important not to force the issue too soon. Local issues had to chime exactly with the timing determined by Hitler. Incidents were to be manufactured to display to the population in the Reich, and to the world outside, the alleged injustices perpetrated by the Poles against the Germans in Danzig. Instances of mistreatment – most of them contrived, some genuine – of the German minority in other parts of Poland, too, provided regular fodder for an orchestrated propaganda campaign which, again analogous to that against the Czechs in 1938, had been screaming its banner headlines about the iniquities of the Poles since May.
The propaganda certainly had its effect. The fear of war with the western powers, while still widespread among the German population, was – at least until August – nowhere near as acute as it had been during the Sudeten crisis. People reasoned, with some justification (and backed up by the German press), that despite the guarantees for Poland, the West was hardly likely to fight for Danzig when it had given in over the Sudetenland. Many thought that Hitler had always pulled it off without bloodshed before, and would do so again. Fears of war were nevertheless per
vasive. The more general feeling was probably better summed up in the report from a small town in Upper Franconia at the end of July 1939: ‘The answer to the question of how the problem “Danzig and the Corridor” is to be solved is still the same among the general public: incorporation in the Reich? Yes. Through war? No.’
But the anxiety about a general war over Danzig did not mean that there was reluctance to see military action against Poland undertaken – as long as the West could be kept out of it. Inciting hatred of the Poles through propaganda was pushing at an open door. ‘The mood of the people can be much more quickly whipped up against the Poles than against any other neighbouring people,’ commented the exiled Social Democratic organization, the Sopade. Many thought ‘it would serve the Poles right if they get it in the neck’. Above all, no one, it was claimed, whatever their political standpoint, wanted a Polish Danzig; the conviction that Danzig was German was universal.
The issue which the Danzig Nazis exploited to heighten the tension was the supervision of the Customs Office by Polish customs inspectors. When the customs inspectors were informed on 4 August – in what turned out to be an initiative of an over-zealous German official – that they would not be allowed to carry out their duties and responded with a threat to close the port to foodstuffs, the local crisis threatened to boil over, and too soon. The Germans reluctantly backed down – as the international press noted. Forster was summoned to Berchtesgaden on 7 August and returned to announce that the Führer had reached the limits of his patience with the Poles, who were probably acting under pressure from London and Paris.
This allegation was transmitted by Forster to Carl Burckhardt, the League of Nations High Commissioner in Danzig. Overlooking no possibility of trying to keep the West out of his war with Poland, Hitler was ready to use the representative of the detested League of Nations as his intermediary. On 10 August, Burckhardt was summoned to the telephone to be told by Gauleiter Forster that Hitler wanted to see him on the Obersalzberg at 4 p.m. next day and was sending his personal plane ready for departure early the following morning. Following a flight in which he was regaled by a euphoric Albert Forster with tales of beerhall fights with Communists during the ‘time of struggle’, Burckhardt landed in Salzburg and, after a quick snack, was driven up the spiralling road beyond the Berghof itself and up to the ‘Eagle’s Nest’, the recently built spectacular ‘Tea House’ in the dizzy heights of the mountain peaks.
Hitler was not fond of the ‘Eagle’s Nest’ and seldom went up there. He complained that the air was too thin at that height, and bad for his blood pressure. He worried about an accident on the roads Bormann had had constructed up the sheer mountainside, and about a failure of the lift that had to carry its passengers from the huge, marble-faced hall cut inside the rock to the summit of the mountain, more than 150 feet above. But this was an important visit. Hitler wanted to impress Burckhardt with the dramatic view over the mountain tops, invoking the image of distant majesty, of the Dictator of Germany as lord of all he surveyed.
He played every register in driving home to Burckhardt – and through him to the western powers – the modesty and reasonableness of his claims on Poland and the futility of western support. Almost speechless with rage, he denounced press suggestions that he had lost his nerve and been forced to give way over the issue of the Polish customs officers. His voice rising until he was shouting, he screamed his response to Polish ultimata: if the smallest incident should take place, he would smash the Poles without warning so that not a trace of Poland remained. If that meant general war, then so be it. Germany had to live from its own resources. That was the only issue; the rest nonsense. He accused Britain and France of interference in the reasonable proposals he had made to the Poles. Now the Poles had taken up a position that blocked any agreement once and for all. His generals, hesitant the previous year, were this time raring to be let loose against the Poles.
Burckhardt, as intended, rapidly passed on to the British and French governments the gist of his talks with Hitler. They drew no conclusions from the report other than to urge restraint on the Poles.
While Hitler and Burckhardt were meeting at the ‘Eagle’s Nest’ on the Kehlstein, another meeting was taking place only a few miles away, in Ribbentrop’s newly acquired splendrous residence overlooking the lake in Fuschl, not far from Salzburg. Count Ciano, resplendent in uniform, was learning from the German Foreign Minister that the Italians had been deceived for months about Hitler’s intentions. The atmosphere was icy. Ribbentrop told Ciano that the ‘merciless destruction of Poland by Germany’ was inevitable. The conflict would not become a general one. Were Britain and France to intervene, they would be doomed to defeat. But his information ‘and above all his psychological knowledge’ of Britain, he insisted, made him rule out any intervention. Ciano found him unreasoning and obstinate: ‘The decision to fight is implacable. He [Ribbentrop] rejects any solution which might give satisfaction to Germany and avoid the struggle.’
The impression was reinforced when Ciano visited the Berghof next day. Hitler was convinced that the conflict would be localized, that Britain and France, whatever noises they were making, would not go to war. It would be necessary one day to fight the western democracies. But he thought it ‘out of the question that this struggle can begin now’. Ciano noted: ‘He has decided to strike, and strike he will.’
Important news came through for Hitler at the very time that he was underlining to the disenchanted Ciano his determination to attack Poland no later than the end of August: the Russians were prepared to begin talks in Moscow, including the position of Poland. A beaming Ribbentrop took the telephone call at the Berghof. Hitler was summoned from the meeting with Ciano, and rejoined it in high spirits to report the breakthrough. The way was now open.
A flurry of diplomatic activity – Ribbentrop pressing with maximum urgency for the earliest possible agreement, Molotov cannily prevaricating until it was evident that Soviet interest in the Anglo-French mission was dead – unfolded during the following days. The text of a trade treaty, under which German manufactured goods worth 200 million Reich Marks would be exchanged each year for an equivalent amount of Soviet raw materials, was agreed. Finally, on the evening of 19 August, the chattering teleprinter gave Hitler and Ribbentrop, waiting anxiously at the Berghof, the news they wanted: Stalin was willing to sign a non-aggression pact without delay.
Only the proposed date of Ribbentrop’s visit – 26 August – posed serious problems. It was the date Hitler had set for the invasion of Poland. Hitler could not wait that long. On 20 August, he decided to intervene personally. He telegraphed a message to Stalin, via the German Embassy in Moscow, requesting the reception of Ribbentrop, armed with full powers to sign a pact, on the 22nd or 23rd. Hitler’s intervention made a difference. But once more Stalin and Molotov made Hitler sweat it out. The tension at the Berghof was almost unbearable. It was more than twenty-four hours later, on the evening of 21 August, before the message came through. Stalin had agreed. Ribbentrop was expected in Moscow in two days’ time, on 23 August. Hitler slapped himself on the knee in delight. Champagne all round was ordered – though Hitler did not touch any. ‘That will really land them in the soup,’ he declared, referring to the western powers.
‘We’re on top again. Now we can sleep more easily,’ recorded a delighted Goebbels. ‘The question of Bolshevism is for the moment of secondary importance,’ he later added, saying that was the Führer’s view, too. ‘We’re in need and eat then like the devil eats flies.’ Abroad, Goebbels remarked, the announcement of the imminent non-aggression pact was ‘the great world sensation’. But the response was not that which Hitler and Ribbentrop had hoped for. The Poles’ fatalistic reaction was that the pact would change nothing. In Paris, where the news of the Soviet-German pact hit especially hard, the French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet, fearing a German-Soviet entente against Poland, pondered whether it was now better to press the Poles into compromise with Hitler in order to win time for France
to prepare its defences. But eventually, after dithering for two days, the French government agreed that France would remain true to its obligations. The British cabinet, meeting on the afternoon of 22 August, was unmoved by the dramatic news, even if MPs were asking searching questions about the failure of British intelligence. The Foreign Secretary coolly, if absurdly, dismissed the pact as perhaps of not very great importance. Instructions went out to embassies that Britain’s obligations to Poland remained unaltered. Sir Nevile Henderson’s suggestion of a personal letter from the Prime Minister to Hitler, warning him of Britain’s determination to stick by Poland, was taken up.
Meanwhile, in excellent mood on account of his latest triumph, Hitler prepared, on the morning of 22 August, to address all the armed forces’ leaders on his plans for Poland. The meeting, at the Berghof, had been arranged before the news from Moscow had come through. Hitler’s aim was to convince the generals of the need to attack Poland without delay. The diplomatic coup, by now in the public domain, can only have boosted his self-confidence. It certainly weakened any potential criticism from his audience.
Around fifty officers had assembled in the Great Hall of the Berghof by the time that Hitler began his address at noon. ‘It was clear to me that a conflict with Poland had to come sooner or later,’ began Hitler. ‘I had already made this decision in the spring, but I thought that I would first turn against the West in a few years, and only after that against the East.’ Circumstances had caused him to change his thinking, he went on. He pointed in the first instance to his own importance to the situation. Making no concessions to false modesty, he claimed: ‘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.’ He also emphasized the personal role of Mussolini and Franco, whereas Britain and France lacked any ‘outstanding personality’. He briefly alluded to Germany’s economic difficulties as a further argument for not delaying action. ‘It is easy for us to make decisions. We have nothing to lose; we have everything to gain. Because of our restrictions our economic situation is such that we can only hold out for a few more years. Göring can confirm this. We have no other choice. We must act.’ He reviewed the constellation of international forces, concluding: ‘All these favourable circumstances will no longer prevail in two or three years’ time. No one knows how much longer I shall live. Therefore, better a conflict now.’