The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (131 page)

In many ways November 23, 1939, was a milestone. It marked Hitler’s final, decisive triumph over the Army, which in the First World War had shunted Emperor Wilhelm II aside and assumed supreme political as well as military authority in Germany. From that day on the onetime Austrian
corporal considered not only his political but his military judgment superior to that of his generals and therefore refused to listen to their advice or permit their criticism—with results ultimately disastrous to all.

“A breach had occurred,” Brauchitsch told the Nuremberg tribunal in describing the events of November 23, “which was later closed but was never completely mended.”

Moreover, Hitler’s harangue to the generals that autumn day put a complete damper on any ideas Halder and Brauchitsch might have had, however tepidly, to overthrow the Nazi dictator. He had warned them that he would “annihilate” anyone who stood in his way, and Halder says Hitler had specifically added that he would suppress any opposition to him on the General Staff “with brutal force.” Halder, for the moment at least, was not the man to stand up to such terrible threats. When four days later, on November 27, General Thomas went to see him, at the prompting of Schacht and Popitz, and urged him to keep after Brauchitsch to take action against the Fuehrer (“Hitler has to be removed!” Halder later remembered Thomas as saying), the General Staff Chief reminded him of all the “difficulties.” He was not yet sure, he said, that Brauchitsch “would take part actively in a
coup d’état.”
³³

A few days later Halder gave Goerdeler the most ludicrous reasons for not going on with the plans to get rid of the Nazi dictator. Hassell noted them down in his diary. Besides the fact that “one does not rebel when face to face with the enemy,” Halder added, according to Hassell, the following points: “We ought to give Hitler this last chance to deliver the German people from the slavery of English capitalism … There is no great man available … The opposition has not yet matured enough … One could not be sure of the younger officers.” Hassell himself appealed to Admiral
Canaris
, one of the original conspirators, to go ahead, but got nowhere. “He has given up hope of resistance from the generals,” the former ambassador confided to his diary on November 30, “and thinks it would be useless to try anything more along this line.” A little later Hassell noted that “Halder and Brauchitsch are nothing more than caddies to Hitler.”
³⁴

Not many days after the German attack on Poland my diary began to fill with items about the Nazi terror in the conquered land. Later one would learn that many another diary was filling with them too. Hassell on October 19 reported hearing of “the shocking bestialities of the S.S., especially toward the Jews.” A little later he was confiding to his diary a story told by a German landlord in the province of
Posen
.

On October 18, Halder wrote down in his diary the main points of a talk he had had with General Eduard Wagner, the Quartermaster General, who had conferred with Hitler that day about the future of Poland. That future was to be grim.

The Reich did.

A brief account of the beginning of Nazi terror in Poland, as disclosed by the captured German documents and the evidence at the various Nuremberg trials, may now be given. It was but a forerunner to dark and terrible deeds that would eventually be inflicted by the Germans on all the conquered peoples. But from first to last it was worse in Poland than anyplace else. Here Nazi barbarism reached an incredible depth.

Just before the attack on Poland was launched, Hitler had told his generals at the conference on the Obersalzberg on August 22 that things would happen “which would not be to the taste of German generals” and he warned them that they “should not interfere in such matters but restrict themselves to their military duties.” He knew whereof he spoke. Both in Berlin and in Poland this writer soon was being overwhelmed with reports of Nazi massacres. So were the generals. On September 10, with the Polish campaign in full swing, Halder noted in his diary an example which soon became widely known in Berlin. Some toughs belonging to an S.S. artillery regiment, having worked fifty Jews all day on a job of bridge repairing, herded them into a synagogue and, as Halder put it, “massacred them.” Even General von
Kuechler
, the commander of the
Third
Army, who was later to have few qualms, refused to confirm the light sentences of the court-martial meted out to the murderers—one year in prison—on the ground that they were too lenient. But the Army Commander in Chief, Brauchitsch, quashed the sentences altogether though not until Himmler had intervened, with the excuse that they came under a “general amnesty.”

The German generals, upright Christians that they considered themselves to be, found the situation embarrassing. On September 12 there was a meeting on the Fuehrer’s railroad train between Keitel and Admiral Canaris at which the latter protested against the
atrocities
in Poland. The lackey Chief of OKW curtly replied that “the Fuehrer has already decided on this matter.” If the Army wanted “no part in these occurrences it would have to accept the S.S. and Gestapo as rivals”—that is, it would have to accept S.S. commissars in each military unit “to carry out the exterminations.”

Himmler was too clever to let the generals wiggle out of part of the responsibility. On September 19 Heydrich, Himmler’s chief assistant, paid a visit to the Army High Command and told General Wagner of S.S. plans for the “housecleaning of [Polish] Jews, intelligentsia, clergy and the nobility.” Halder’s reaction to such plans was put down in his diary after Wagner had reported to him:

This brief diary entry by the Chief of the Army General Staff provides a key to the understanding of the morals of the German generals. They were not going to seriously oppose the “housecleaning”—that is, the wiping out of the Polish Jews, intelligentsia, clergy and nobility. They were merely going to ask that it be “deferred” until they got out of Poland and could escape the responsibility. And, of course, foreign public opinion must be considered. As Halder jotted down in his diary the next day, after a long conference with Brauchitsch about the “housecleaning” in Poland:

The next day, September 21, Heydrich forwarded to the Army High Command a copy of his initial “housecleaning” plans. As a first step the Jews were to be herded into the cities (where it would be easy to round them up for liquidation). “The final solution,” he declared, would take some time to achieve and must be kept “strictly secret,” but no general who read the confidential memorandum could have doubted that the “final solution” was extermination.
³⁷
Within two years, when it came time to carry it out, it would become one of the most sinister code names bandied about by high German officials to cover one of the most hideous Nazi crimes of the war.

What was left of Poland after Russia seized her share in the east and Germany formally annexed her former provinces and some additional territory in the west was designated by a decree of the Fuehrer of October 12 as the General Government of Poland and Hans Frank appointed as its Governor General, with Seyss-Inquart, the Viennese quisling, as his deputy. Frank was a typical example of the Nazi intellectual gangster.
He had joined the party in 1927, soon after his graduation from law school, and quickly made a reputation as the legal light of the movement. Nimble-minded, energetic, well read not only in the law but in general literature, devoted to the arts and especially to music, he became a power in the legal profession after the Nazis assumed office, serving first as Bavarian Minister of Justice, then Reichsminister without Portfolio and president of the Academy of Law and of the German Bar Association. A dark, dapper, bouncy fellow, father of five children, his intelligence and cultivation partly offset his primitive fanaticism and up to this time made him one of the least repulsive of the men around Hitler. But behind the civilized veneer of the man lay the cold killer. The forty-two-volume journal he kept of his life and works, which showed up at Nuremberg,
*
was one of the most terrifying documents to come out of the dark Nazi world, portraying the author as an icy, efficient, ruthless, bloodthirsty man. Apparently it omitted none of his barbaric utterances.

“The Poles,” he declared the day after he took his new job, “shall be the slaves of the German Reich.” When once he heard that Neurath, the “Protector” of Bohemia, had put up posters announcing the execution of seven Czech university students, Frank exclaimed to a Nazi journalist, “If I wished to order that one should hang up posters about every seven Poles shot, there would not be enough forests in Poland with which to make the paper for these posters.”
³⁸

Himmler and Heydrich were assigned by Hitler to liquidate the Jews. Frank’s job, besides squeezing food and supplies and forced labor out of Poland, was to liquidate the intelligentsia. The Nazis had a beautiful code name for this operation: “Extraordinary Pacification Action” (
Ausserordentliche Befriedigungsaktion
, or
“AB Action,”
as it came to be known). It took some time for Frank to get it going. It was not until the following late spring, when the big German offensive in the West took the attention of the world from Poland, that he began to achieve results. By May 30, as his own journal shows, he could boast in a pep talk to his police aides of good progress—the lives of “some thousands” of Polish intellectuals taken, or about to be taken.

“I pray you, gentlemen,” he asked, “to take the most rigorous measures possible to help us in this task.” Confidentially he added that these were “the Fuehrer’s orders.” Hitler, he said, had expressed it this way:

They would be put out of the way, he said, right there in Poland.
³⁹

At the meeting, as Frank noted in his journal, the chief of the Security
Police gave a progress report. About two thousand men and several hundred women, he said, had been apprehended “at the beginning of the Extraordinary Pacification Action.” Most of them already had been “summarily sentenced”—a Nazi euphemism for liquidation. A second batch of intellectuals was now being rounded up “for summary sentence.” Altogether “about 3,500 persons,” the most dangerous of the Polish intelligentsia, would thus be taken care of.
⁴⁰

Frank did not neglect the Jews, even if the Gestapo had filched the direct task of extermination away from him. His journal is full of his thoughts and accomplishments on the subject. On October 7, 1940, it records a speech he made that day to a Nazi assembly in Poland summing up his first year of effort.

A fortnight before Christmas of the following year, Frank closed a cabinet session at
Cracow
, his headquarters, by saying:

The hounding of Jews and Poles from the homes which they and their families had dwelt in for generations began as soon as the fighting in Poland was over. On October 7, the day after his “peace speech” in the Reichstag, Hitler appointed
Himmler
to be the head of a new organization, the Reich Commissariat for the Strengthening of German Nationhood, or R.K.F.D.V., for short. It was to carry out the deportation of Poles and Jews first from the Polish provinces annexed outright by Germany and replace them by Germans and
Volksdeutsche
,
the latter being Germans of foreign nationality who were streaming in from the threatened Baltic lands and various outlying parts of Poland. Halder had heard of the plan a fortnight before, noting in his diary that “for every German moving into these territories, two people will be expelled to Poland.”

On October 9, two days after assuming the latest of his posts, Himmler decreed that 550,000 of the 650,000 Jews living in the annexed Polish provinces, together with all Poles not fit for “assimilation,” should be moved into the territory of the General Government, east of the
Vistula River
. Within a year 1,200,000 Poles and 300,000 Jews had been uprooted
and driven to the east. But only 497.000
Volksdeutsche
had been settled in their place. This was a little better than Halder’s ratio: three Poles and Jews expelled to one German settled in their stead.