Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

In Germany itself, despite new economic restrictions, life went on during the Polish campaign much as normal.³⁷ Berlin’s cafés, restaurants, and bars had been packed, as usual, on the first night of the war.³⁸ On the evening that the British and French had declared war, William Shirer heard people saying that the ‘Polish thing’ would soon be over, and that the West would not move. ‘There were food cards and soap cards and you couldn’t get any petrol and at night it was difficult stumbling around in the blackout,’ he reported. ‘But the war in the east has seemed a bit far away to them.’³⁹ A week later, fears of the conflagration in the west had not materialized. Leisure pursuits were not affected by the war raging in the east. Two hundred football matches were played in Germany that weekend. Berliners flocked to cinemas, to the opera to see Madame Butterfly and Tannhäuser, or to the State Theatre, where Goethe’s Iphigenie was playing.⁴⁰ Shirer listened to a crowd of mainly women who had come out of the opera. They ‘seemed oblivious of the fact that a war was on, that German bombs and shells were falling on the women and children in Warsaw’, he observed.⁴¹ ‘I have still to find a German, even among those who don’t like the regime,’ he added on 20 September, ‘who sees anything wrong in the German destruction of Poland… As long as the Germans are successful and do not have to pull in their belts too much, this will not be an unpopular war.’⁴² Reports from the exiled Social Democrat leadership (the Sopade), resting on information filtered out from within Germany, told much the same tale.⁴³ The propaganda version of a war forced on Germany was widely believed. So were lurid stories — mainly wild exaggeration — of Polish atrocities against the ethnic German minority in western Poland. Many approved of the ‘rigorous approach’ towards the Poles.⁴⁴ This stance was given encouragement by letters sent home by soldiers. One, not exceptional, ran: ‘Anything more vile than Polish soldiers has never been seen in a war. They’ve taken hardly any prisoners. Those falling into their hands have been butchered in a horrible fashion, and the Polacks have been treated in such brotherly fashion by us.’⁴⁵ People followed the military advance with keen interest.⁴⁶ They rejoiced in the victory.⁴⁷ But the military triumph in Poland was taken largely for granted. Hitler’s popularity was undiminished.⁴⁸ Most people hoped that the West would now see sense, and that the war would then be over.

The terror unleashed from the first days of the invasion of Poland left the violence, persecution, and discrimination that had taken place in the Reich itself since 1933 — dreadful though that had been — completely in the shade.⁴⁹ The orgy of atrocities was unleashed from above, exploiting in the initial stages the ethnic antagonism which Nazi agitation and propaganda had done much to incite. The radical, planned programme of ‘ethnic cleansing’ that followed was authorized by Hitler himself. But its instigation — everything points to this — almost certainly came from the SS leadership. The SS had readily recognized the opportunities there to be grasped from expansion. New possibilities for extending the tentacles of the police state had opened up with the Anschluß. Einsatzgruppen (task forces) of the Security Police had been used there for the first time. They had been deployed again in the Sudeten territory, then the rest of Czecho-Slovakia, where there was even greater scope for the SS’s attack on ‘enemies of the state’. The way was paved for the massive escalation of uncontrolled brutality in Poland. Once more, five (later six) Einsatzgruppen were sent into action. They interpreted most liberally their brief to shoot ‘hostages’ in recrimination for any show of hostility, or insurgents’ — seen as anyone giving the slightest indication of active opposition to the occupying forces. The need to sustain good relations with the Wehrmacht initially restricted the extent and arbitrariness of the shootings.⁵⁰ It probably also at first constrained the ‘action’ aimed at liquidating the Polish nobility, clergy, and intelligentsia.⁵¹ This ‘action’ nevertheless claimed ultimately an estimated 60,000 victims.⁵² Plainly, with the occupation of Poland, the barbarities of the Einsatzgruppen had moved on to a new plane. The platform was established for what was subsequently to take place in the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941.⁵³

There was no shortage of eager helpers among the ethnic Germans in the former Polish territories. The explosion of violence recalled, in hugely magnified fashion, the wild and barbarous treatment of ‘enemies of the state’ in Germany in spring 1933. But now, after six years of cumulative onslaught on every tenet of humane and civilized behaviour, and persistent indoctrination with chauvinistic hatred, the penned-in aggression could be let loose externally on a downtrodden and despised enemy.