Hitler's Charisma (29 page)

The following year, 1940, Charles Bleeker Kohlsaat also experienced an event that made him realise the true nature of the Nazi occupation of
Poland: “We were sitting on the balcony on a Sunday having breakfast. Suddenly a cart drove into the courtyard … When I looked down I saw the horses and recognised the farmer … So my mother said, ‘Go and see what he wants.’ So I ran to the courtyard and walked over to the vehicle, where the farmer’s Polish farmhand was sitting, whom I also knew, at least by sight. And next to him sat a man whom I did not know. He was still a young man, and I took a look at him while he was talking to himself. It was as if he was in shock and he was babbling to himself.

“When I got nearer to the cart and took a closer look at the man, I noticed that his feet were tied. And the man was saying to himself, ‘Me good worker, can drive with horses.’ So I said to the farmhand, ‘Who is this?’ He said, ‘That’s a Jew.’

“So I ran back to the house and told them all about it. I felt very important, because that was the first living Jew I had ever seen. Afterwards my mother said, ‘Go downstairs to see the housekeeper and tell her to make him something to eat.’

“So I went downstairs to see the housekeeper, and she said, ‘Well, all I have left is a very meagre meal indeed.’ And I was handed a blue pot with a carrying handle, which contained milk soup, a slightly sour-tasting soup with potatoes in it.

“When I was leaving the kitchen, I had to tell them the story downstairs of course. That took a moment and I had to wait for the food to heat through, so when I was leaving the house by the side entrance, I heard voices coming from the front steps. As I turned around, I saw my grandmother standing at the top of the stairs and two policemen at the bottom of the flight of steps, and they said, ‘Where is the Jew?’

“To which my grandmother said, ‘My grandson has just gone to bring him something to eat.’ Then one of them got out his truncheon, held the truncheon and said, ‘He can have a taste of this first; [after we take him away] he will get more, but until then this will have to do.’ To which my grandmother, putting her hands on her hips, said, ‘Tell me, are you not ashamed of yourself at all?’ But he only shrugged and said, ‘But it’s only a Jew.’ They then took the Jew away. He was probably hanged there that very same day, I don’t know.”

The Bleeker Kohlsaats tried to come to terms with the terrible events they witnessed in Poland—all perpetrated under the leadership of a man they had thought was a “proper German”—by attempting to convince
themselves that all of those Poles who suffered at the hands of the occupying forces must have been guilty of some offence or other. The man they had longed to save them, to come to their rescue, could surely not be ordering the murder of innocent people, could he? As Kohlsaat says, “People would say, ‘Good heavens, the great and glorious Adolf Hitler must be entirely unaware of what his people get up to here, otherwise he would never let this happen!’ We were deeply ashamed about the behaviour of several [German] people whom we observed on the street; the way they displayed the attitude of the master race, the way they showed off their uniform, the whole notion that the Poles were inferior people, all that made us deeply ashamed and it depressed us too. We laughed at them [the Poles], but we did not treat them badly, we just mocked them in secret. Said things like, ‘Look, just look at those nitwits!’ But that was no reason to treat them badly, we wouldn’t have done that, that was not the done thing, that was not right, and everything was geared towards etiquette, wasn’t it? A German doesn’t do things like that, right? But then the Germans came and they did do it!”

Even before the September invasion the Nazis had made plans to target specific Polish groups. In July 1939 the decision had been taken to form five (later expanded to six) special task groups—
Einsatzgruppen
—who would operate behind the front line and destroy the Polish governing class.
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Reinhard Heydrich told senior members of the security police on 7 September that the leadership strata of Poland had to be “rendered harmless.”
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As for the two million Polish Jews, they were particularly vulnerable, with thousands killed in the first months of the war and the rest subject to imprisonment in ghettos. The first large ghetto—containing 230,000 Jews—was sealed in Łódź at the end of April 1940. All this was sanctioned by Adolf Hitler, who according to Goebbels, found the Poles “more animals than human beings” and thought that “the filth of the Poles is unimaginable.” Hitler’s “judgement” on the Poles, said Goebbels, was “annihilatory.”
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Nor was it the case that the atrocities in Poland were solely committed by members of the Nazi party apparatus—the SS or the
Einsatzgruppen
. Elements of the German army also committed crimes. “The achievements and successes of the Polish campaign must not let it be overlooked, that some of our officers lack a firm inner attitude,” wrote Brauchitsch in a decree to all German officers in October 1939. “An alarming number
of cases such as wrongful confiscation, unlawful seizure, personal enrichment, embezzlement and theft, abuse or harassment of subordinates, partly in excitement, partly in senseless drunkenness, disobedience with severe consequences for the subordinate troops, rape of a married woman, etc, paint the picture of mercenary manners that cannot be condemned too strongly.”
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But that has to be set against a background in which a number of German officers—like General Johannes Blaskowitz—were appalled at the systematic atrocities committed by Nazi functionaries. Like Beck before him, Blaskowitz had never succumbed to the charisma of Adolf Hitler. But he was part of that substantial group of army officers who had been affected by the consequences of Versailles—in particular Blaskowitz detested the Polish “corridor” which separated Eastern Prussia, his own birthplace, from the rest of Germany.

Blaskowitz was the son of a Protestant pastor, and he himself was a devout Christian. He was also cultured and extremely self-possessed. Hitler disliked him, believing before the war that he was a timid general. Nonetheless, Blaskowitz had led the German 8th Army with distinction at the battle of Bzura, west of Warsaw, the largest engagement of the Polish war. More than 150,000 Polish soldiers surrendered to the Germans, caught in a vast encirclement. But despite this success Hitler was still not impressed by Blaskowitz when he met him in Poland on 13 September. Hitler remarked later that Blaskowitz did not seem to have “understood his mission.” By this cryptic remark Hitler almost certainly meant that Blaskowitz was resolutely “old school”—certainly not a commander for the future. “I’m looking for hard men,” Hitler told his adjutant that same day. “I need fanatical National Socialists.”
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Knowing that Hitler wanted Blaskowitz removed—and believing the charges against him to be unfair—General Halder, Chief of the Army General Staff, supported a study of Blaskowitz which demonstrated how well he had conducted himself during the invasion.
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Hitler remained unimpressed, but Blaskowitz remained in Poland.

A conflict between some of the old school officers and the “hard men” of National Socialism over the treatment of the Poles was always likely. An early sign was when General Halder recorded in his diary on 19 September 1939 that Reinhard Heydrich of the SS had said that “housecleaning” would now take place in Poland of the “Jews, intelligentsia, clergy, nobility.”
However, Halder wrote that the “Army insists that ‘housecleaning’ be deferred until army has withdrawn and the country has been turned over to civil administration. Early December.”
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(“Housecleaning,” of course, was one of many different euphemisms the Nazis were subsequently to use during the war to describe their atrocities. And, as we have seen, this “housecleaning” certainly wasn’t “deferred” until December. In fact, one estimate is that 50,000 Poles had been executed by the Germans by the end of 1939.)
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Halder was informed by General Eduard Wagner, after a meeting with Hitler, that Poland was to become a land of “cheap slaves”
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and that the army must confine itself to “military matters.” The aim was to create “total disorganisation” within Poland. Halder called this a “devilish plan” in his diary. Significantly, the day before Halder wrote this entry, 17 October 1939, Hitler had ordered that the SS and other non-army security units should be considered as outside of the jurisdiction of the army. If the army leadership now saw the SS doing something they disliked in Poland they no longer had any legal way of pursuing the perpetrators.

Nazi-occupied western Poland—not forgetting that eastern Poland was in the hands of the Soviets, who were pursuing their own “devilish plan” of ethnic re-organisation—was to be divided into two. One section, “the General Government” centred on Krakow and, under the control of Nazi stalwart Hans Frank, was to be a kind of dumping ground holding those excluded from life in the Reich, whilst the other was to be incorporated into Germany. This German portion was further divided into several new districts or
Gaue
. The two biggest were Danzig/Western Prussia ruled by Albert Forster and the Warthegau, under Arthur Greiser. These men, both
Gauleiters
, or district leaders, plus their respective higher SS comanders, were charged with racially re-ordering Poland in the most brutal way imaginable. General Johannes Blaskowitz, the army commander in Poland, was all but sidelined.

This didn’t stop Hans Frank taking an intense dislike to Blaskowitz and his leadership of the army in Poland. When Goebbels visited Frank on 2 November 1939 the Nazi governor complained that the German army in Poland were not “racially aware”
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and were hindering him in his work. The dislike was mutual. Helmuth Stieff, a German staff officer, was appalled at the effects of Frank’s rule of the General Government when he visited Warsaw in November 1939. “The bulk of the millions of population
of the city eke out a miserable existence somewhere and somehow,” he wrote to his wife, “one cannot tell what they live on. It is an unspeakable tragedy that is unfolding there. One has also no idea how [long] this will go on … It is a city and a population which is doomed … it is depressing if you are in a beautiful hotel room eating roast goose and at the same time see how women, who used to have important roles perhaps only three months ago, sell themselves for a loaf of bread to our soldiers in order to live their miserable life a little longer … The extermination of entire generations of women and children is possible only by subhumans that no longer deserve the name German. I am ashamed of being a German.”
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At the end of his letter, Steiff mentioned that he had met with General Blaskowitz who had “poured his heart out to me and told me about his concerns and worries.” But it seems unlikely at this stage that Blaskowitz blamed Hitler directly for the crimes he knew were being committed in Poland. Blaskowitz seems to have been on a similar trajectory of discovery as General Beck had been before him. At least initially, it was much easier for both Beck and Blaskowitz—much less a matter of searing self-reproach—to act as if the blame for these atrocities lay at the door of the SS or other Nazi party fanatics rather than the German head of state. Even if, in their hearts, they might have thought otherwise.

During the autumn of 1939 Blaskowitz gathered evidence of the crimes the SS were committing in Poland and then, finally, on 16 November he submitted a report to the Head of the German Army, Brauchitsch. The document then passed to Hitler’s military adjutant, Major Gerhard Engel, who showed it to Hitler. No copies remain of Blaskowitz’s report, but we do know Hitler’s reaction to it, because Engel recorded his response. “He takes the note calmly at first, but then starts off again with serious allegations against the ‘childish attitudes’ in the leadership of the army. You do not lead a war with Salvation Army methods. Also, a long-held aversion became confirmed. He had never trusted General Blaskowitz. He had also been against his appointment to the command of an army and deems it right to remove Blaskowitz, because unsuitable, from this post.”
¹⁷

Yet Blaskowitz was not relieved of his command. Halder and Brauchitsch simply ignored Hitler’s views. Blaskowitz was able to stay in his job in Poland in the face of strident criticism from the man who was not only head of state, but head of the German armed forces as well. Just
as before the war, Hitler felt unable to exercise the kind of control over army appointments that Stalin did.

Blaskowitz’s report turned up at one of the toughest moments in Hitler’s relationship with his generals. Difficulties had been growing since a meeting he had held with his senior military commanders just under three months before, on 27 September 1939. It was at least as dramatic an encounter as the one in November 1937 at which Hitler had declared that war was all but inevitable. Because now Hitler announced that he wanted “immediate plans”
¹⁸
to be drawn up for an attack against France. This was devastating news to the army commanders. Just a few weeks before they had been hoping that Britain and France would stay out of the war completely, and they still feared an attack from the West. Germany was especially vulnerable at this moment, given that the bulk of German forces were still in eastern Europe. And now, instead of calling for a period of retrenchment and then hopefully coming to some kind of peaceful accommodation with Britain and France, Hitler was telling them that they should prepare for an invasion of France as soon as possible.

It’s difficult to grasp today how wild Hitler’s idea must have sounded to these generals. Because we all know the eventual result—a dramatic German victory in the spring of 1940—there is a tendency to read history backwards and to think that somehow an invasion of France would have seemed a sensible option for the Germans at the time. It didn’t. The British and French not only possessed more tanks than the Germans, their tanks were better. The French had the Char B tank with a 75mm cannon and 60mm of armour, far superior to any fighting vehicle the Germans used at the time. In addition, as Professor Adam Tooze says, a careful study of the German armaments programme around this time reveals that Hitler’s thinking was still resolutely old-fashioned. “If we look in closer focus at the first months of the war, the extraordinary thing is that the programmes that Hitler prioritises in the initial months of the war are not an increased speed of build-up for the tank arm but, in fact, a huge ammunitions programme which is designed to avoid the munitions crisis which had crippled the German offensive in the autumn of 1914. So he’s an infantryman of the First World War, and well remembers the crisis of German ammunition supply which had allegedly bogged down the German army in the first phase of the First World War. And that’s the Führer challenge of December 1939, not to increase production of tanks but to
triple the production of ammunition in the next six months. So the kind of war that Hitler even at that point seems to envision is a slogging match to the Channel.”
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