The Second World War (11 page)
With newsreel film showing children round Christmas trees, the propaganda ministry produced a sickly feast of German sentimentality. But many families were haunted by a terrible disquiet. Although officially informed that a disabled child or elderly relative had died from ‘pneumonia’ in some institution, suspicions had started to grow that they were in
fact being gassed in a programme run by the SS and members of the medical profession. Hitler’s order on euthanasia had been signed in October, but was backdated to the outbreak of war on 1 September to cover the first SS massacres of around 2,000 Polish asylum inmates, some of them shot in their straitjackets. The Nazis’ covert assault on ‘degenerates’, ‘useless mouths’ and ‘lives unworthy of life’ represented their first step in the deliberate annihilation of those they categorized as ‘sub-human’. Hitler had waited for the start of the war to cover this extreme programme of eugenics. More than 100,000 mentally and physically disabled Germans would be killed in this way by August 1941. In Poland, the killings continued, mainly by shooting in the back of the head, but sometimes in sealed trucks with the exhaust fumes piped in, and also, for the first time, in an improvised gas chamber in Posen: a process which Himmler himself came to observe. As well as the disabled, a number of prostitutes and Gypsies were also murdered.
Hitler, who had forsworn his passion for the cinema for the duration of the war, also gave up Christmas. Over the holiday period, he paid a number of highly publicized surprise visits to Wehrmacht and SS units, including the
Grossdeutschland
Regiment, Luftwaffe airfields and flak batteries, and also the SS
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler
, now relaxing after its murderous campaign in Poland. On New Year’s Eve he addressed the nation over the radio. Proclaiming a ‘New Order in Europe’, he said: ‘We shall only talk of peace when we have won the war. The Jewish capitalistic world will not survive the twentieth century.’ He made no reference to ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, having so recently sent sixtieth-birthday greetings to Stalin, a message which also offered best wishes ‘for the prosperous future of the peoples of the friendly Soviet Union’. Stalin replied that ‘The friendship of the peoples of Germany and the Soviet Union, cemented by blood, has every reason to be lasting and firm.’ Even under the hypocritical requirements of their unnatural relationship, the phrase ‘cemented by blood’ in reference to their dual attack on Poland constituted a pinnacle of shamelessness as well as an ill omen for the future.
Stalin can hardly have been in a good mood as the year came to an end. Finnish forces had now advanced on to Soviet territory. He was forced to accept that the disastrous performance of the Red Army in the Winter War had been partly the fault of his incompetent crony Marshal Voroshilov. The humiliation of the Red Army in the eyes of the world had to be stopped, especially since he had been alarmed by the devastating effectiveness of German Blitzkrieg tactics in the Polish campaign.
He therefore decided to bring in Army Commander S. K. Timoshenko to head up a North-Western Front. Like Voroshilov, Timoshenko was
another veteran of the 1st Cavalry Army in which Stalin had served as commissar in the Russian Civil War, but he was at least slightly more imaginative. New weapons and equipment were issued, including the latest rifles, motorized sledges and heavy KV tanks. Instead of massed infantry attacks, the Soviet forces would rely on smashing Finnish defences with artillery.
A new Soviet offensive began against the Mannerheim Line on 1 February 1940. The Finnish forces buckled under the onslaught. Four days later, their foreign minister made an initial contact with Mme Aleksandra Kollontay, the Soviet ambassador in Stockholm. The British and especially the French hoped to maintain Finland’s resistance. They accordingly made approaches to the Norwegian and Swedish governments to obtain transit rights for an expeditionary force to help the Finns. The Germans were alarmed and began to study the possibility of sending troops to Scandinavia to pre-empt an Allied landing.
Both the British and French governments also considered the possibility of occupying Narvik in Norway and the mining areas of northern Sweden to cut off iron-ore supplies to Germany. But the Swedish and Norwegian governments were afraid of being drawn into the war. They refused the British and French requests to cross their territory to aid the Finns.
On 29 February the Finns, with no hope of foreign help, decided to seek terms on the basis of the Soviet Union’s original demands, and on 13 March a treaty was signed in Moscow. The terms were harsh, but they could have been far worse. The Finns had shown how resolutely they were prepared to defend their independence, but most importantly Stalin did not want to continue a war which might yet drag in the western Allies. He was also forced to accept that Comintern propaganda had been ludicrously self-deluding, so he dropped his puppet government of Finnish Communists. The Red Army had suffered 84,994 killed and missing, with 248,090 wounded and sick. The Finns had lost 25,000 killed.
Stalin, however, continued to take his revenge upon Poland. On 5 March 1940, he and the Politburo approved Beria’s plan to murder Polish officers and other potential leaders who had refused all attempts at Communist ‘re-education’. This was part of Stalin’s policy to destroy an independent Poland in the future. The 21,892 victims were taken in trucks from prisons for execution at five sites. The most notorious was in the forest of Katy
near Smolensk in Belorussia. The NKVD had noted the addresses of its victims’ families when they had been allowed to write home. They too were rounded up and 60,667 were deported to Kazakhstan. Soon afterwards, more than 65,000
Polish Jews
, who had fled the SS but refused to accept Soviet passports, were also deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia.
The French government, meanwhile, wanted to pursue the war as far from its own territory as possible. Daladier, exasperated by French Communist support for the Nazi–Soviet pact, thought that the Allies could weaken Germany by attacking Hitler’s ally. He advocated a bombing raid on Soviet oil installations at Baku and in the Caucasus, but the British persuaded the French to abandon the idea because it risked bringing the Soviet Union into the war on the German side. Daladier later resigned and was replaced by Paul Reynaud on 20 March.
The French army
, which had borne the brunt of the Allied effort in the First World War, was widely considered to be the strongest in Europe and certainly capable of defending its own territory. More perceptive observers were less convinced. As early as March 1935, Marshal Tukhachevsky had predicted that it would not be able to stand up to a German onslaught. Its fatal flaw, in his view, was that it was too slow to react to an attack. This came not just from a rigidly defensive mentality, but also from an almost complete lack of radio communications. In any case, the Germans had broken the antiquated French codes in 1938.
President Roosevelt, who had paid close attention to despatches from his embassy in Paris, was also well aware of French weaknesses. The air force was only starting to replace its obsolete aircraft. The army, although one of the largest in the world, was cumbersome, old-fashioned and excessively reliant on its Maginot Line of defence along the German border, which imbued it with an immobile frame of mind. Its huge losses in the First World War, with 400,000 casualties in the Battle for Verdun alone, lay at the root of this bunker mentality. And as many journalists, military attachés and commentators observed, the country’s political and social malaise after so many scandals and fallen governments had sapped any hope for unity and determination in a crisis.
Roosevelt, with admirable far-sightedness, saw that the only hope for democracy and the long-term interests of the United States was to support Britain and France against Nazi Germany. Finally, on 4 November, 1939, the ‘cash and carry’ bill passed by Congress was ratified. This first defeat for the isolationists allowed the two Allied powers to purchase arms.
In France, the air of unreality persisted. A
Reuter’s correspondent
visiting the inert front asked French soldiers why they did not shoot at the German troops wandering about in clear view. They looked shocked. ‘Ils ne sont pas méchants,’ replied one. ‘And if we fire, they will fire back.’ German patrols probing along the line soon discovered the ineptitude and lack of aggressive instinct of most French formations. And German propaganda
continued to encourage the idea that the British were getting the French to bear the brunt of the war.
Apart from some work on defensive positions, the French army undertook little training. Their troops just waited. Inactivity led to bad morale and depression–
le cafard
. Politicians started to hear of drunkenness, absence without leave and the slovenly appearance of troops in public. ‘
One can’t spend
one’s whole time playing cards, drinking and writing home to one’s wife,’ wrote one soldier. ‘We lie stretched out on the straw yawning, and even get a taste for doing nothing. We wash less and less, we don’t bother to shave any more, we can’t raise the effort to sweep the place or clear the table after eating. Along with boredom, filth dominates in the base.’
Jean-Paul Sartre in his army meteorological station found the time to write the first volume of
Chemins de la liberté
and part of
L’Être et le néant
. That winter, he wrote, it was ‘
a question only
of sleeping, eating and not being cold. That was all.’ General Édouard Ruby observed: ‘
Every exercise was considered
a vexation, all work a fatigue. After several months of stagnation, nobody believed any more in the war.’ Not every officer was complacent. The outspoken Colonel Charles de Gaulle, a fervent advocate of creating armoured divisions as in the German army, warned that ‘
to be inert
is to be beaten’. But his calls were dismissed by irritated generals.
All the French high command did to maintain morale was to organize front-line entertainment with visits from famous actors and singers such as Édith Piaf, Joséphine Baker, Maurice Chevalier and Charles Trenet. Back in Paris, where the restaurants and cabarets were full, the favourite song was ‘J’attendrai’–‘I’ll wait’. But more alarming for the Allied cause were those right-wingers in influential positions who said ‘Better Hitler than Blum’, a reference to the socialist leader of the 1936 Popular Front, Leon Blum, who was also Jewish.
Georges Bonnet, the arch-appeaser of the Quai d’Orsay, had a
nephew
who before the war had served as a conduit for Nazi money to subsidize anti-British and anti-semitic propaganda in France. The foreign minister’s friend Otto Abetz, later the Nazi ambassador in Paris during the occupation, had been deeply implicated and expelled from the country. Even the new prime minister Paul Reynaud, a stalwart believer in the war against Nazism, had a dangerous weakness. His mistress, Comtesse Hélène de Portes, ‘
a woman whose
somewhat coarsened features exuded an extraordinary vitality and confidence’, believed that France should never have honoured its guarantee to Poland.
Poland, in the form of a government-in-exile, had arrived in France, with General W
adysaw Sikorski as prime minister and commander-in-chief. Based in Angers, Sikorski set about reorganizing the Polish armed
forces from the 84,000 who had escaped mainly through Romania after the fall of their country. A Polish resistance movement had meanwhile begun to develop back in the homeland; in fact it was the most rapidly organized of any occupied country. By the middle of 1940, the Polish
underground army
numbered some 100,000 members in the Generalgouvernement alone. Poland was one of the very few countries in the Nazi empire where collaboration with the conqueror was virtually unknown.