Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (71 page)

The first of the gangster pacts came on 22 May: the ‘Pact of Steel’ between Hitler and Mussolini. The latter had already swallowed his consternation at Germany’s occupation of Prague, used it as a pretext for his own invasion of Albania on 7 April, and now jointly acknowledged with Hitler that international order had finally broken down and the reign of force had begun. At this stage Hitler was still anxious to stick to his original programme of dismembering Poland first, then using it as a corridor shortly afterwards for a
Blitzkrieg
against Russia, with Britain observing benevolent neutrality. As late as July he hoped such an outcome was possible. But the news of the arrival of the Anglo—French military mission in Moscow forced his hand, for even the possibility of an Allied deal with Moscow would upset his Polish timetable. He decided to preempt them, and on 20 August sent a telegram to ‘Herr J.V.Stalin, Moscow’, asking him to receive Ribbentrop three days later. The reply came back within twenty-four hours, revealing Stalin’s evident longings. The next day, 22 August, Hitler addressed the High Command at Obersalzberg. According to jottings made by some of those present, he said that the Polish operation could go ahead. They
need fear nothing from the West: ‘Our opponents are little worms. I saw them in Munich.’ He concluded: ‘I shall provide the propagandistic pretext for launching the war, no matter whether it is credible. The victor is not asked afterwards whether or not he has told the truth. What matters in beginning and waging the war is not righteousness but victory. Close your hearts to pity. Proceed brutally. Eighty million people must obtain what they have a right to. Their existence must be guaranteed. The stronger is in the right.
Supreme hardness. ‘
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The deal with Stalin was struck the following night. It was the culmination of a series of contacts between the Soviet and German governments which went right back to the weeks following Lenin’s
putsch.
They had been conducted, according to need, by army experts, secret policemen, diplomats or intermediaries on the fringe of the criminal world. They had been closer at some periods than others but they had never been wholly broken and they had been characterized throughout by total disregard for the ideological principles which either party ostensibly professed – by a contempt, indeed, for any consideration other than the most brutal mutual interest – the need of each regime to arm, to arrest and kill its opponents, and to oppress its neighbours. For two decades this evil stream of exchanges had flowed underground. Now at last it broke the surface. That night of 23–4 August there was a gruesome junket in the Kremlin. Ribbentrop reported: it felt like being among old party comrades.’ He was as much at ease in the Kremlin, he added, ‘as among my old Nazi friends’. Stalin toasted Hitler and said he ‘knew how much the German people loved the Führer’. There were brutal jokes about the Anti-Comintern Pact, now dead, which both sides agreed had been meant simply to impress the City of London and ‘English shopkeepers’.
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There was the sudden discovery of a community of aims, methods, manners and, above all, of morals. As the tipsy killers lurched about the room, fumblingly hugging each other, they resembled nothing so much as a congregation of rival gangsters, who had fought each other before, and might do so again, but were essentially in the same racket.

Their agreement was termed a non-aggression pact. In fact it was a simple aggression pact against Poland. A secret protocol, which emerged in 1945 but which the Russian judges kept out of the Nuremberg trials record, divided up Eastern Europe into spheres of influence and left it open ‘whether the interests of both parties make the maintenance of an independent Polish state appear desirable and how the frontiers of this state should be delimited’.
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Thus a fourth partition of Poland was arranged, and consummated on 17 September when Soviet troops moved in, the division being solemnized by
another gangster-pact, the Soviet—German Frontier and Friendship Treaty of 28 September 1939. The ground covered extended well beyond Poland, Stalin being given a free hand in Finland, most of the Baltic states and part of Romania. Hence in the autumn of 1939 he was able to impose upon Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania so-called ‘security treaties’, which involved the introduction of Soviet troops. He told the Latvian Foreign Minister: ‘So far as Germany is concerned, we can occupy you.’
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When the Finns resisted, Stalin unleashed war on them (30 November 1939) with Germany’s acquiescence.

Stalin was delighted with the pact. He said it left Russia in a stronger position than at any time since the regime came to power. He did everything in his power to make the agreement work, to fulfil his pledge to Ribbentrop ‘on his word of honour that the Soviet Union would not betray her partner’.
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All over the world, Communist Parties reversed their anti-Nazi policy, preaching peace with Germany at any price, and actively sabotaging the war-effort when it came: at the height of the Nazi invasion of France, Maurice Thorez, head of the French
CP
, broadcast from Moscow begging the French troops not to resist. Stalin placed at Hitler’s disposal all the immense raw material resources of the Soviet Union. This was vital to Hitler. In September 1939 Germany needed to import 80 per cent of its rubber, 65 per cent of its tin, 70 per cent of its copper, half its lead, a quarter of its zinc. Sweden, at the price of freedom from invasion (and German coal at one-third the price paid by Switzerland), provided Hitler with his iron-ore and all kinds of transit and overflight facilities.
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But Stalin filled equally important gaps in Hitler’s war-supplies: a million tons of grain, 900,000 tons of oil (including 100,000 tons of aircraft fuel), additional iron-ore, manganese and cotton. In return Russia got aero-engines, naval blueprints, torpedoes and mines.
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The pact brought a personal rapprochement too. Stalin presented Hitler as a man of genius, who had risen from nothing like himself. According to Ribbentrop, Hitler greatly admired Stalin, especially the way in which he held out against his own ‘extremists’ (a view widely shared in the West). Hitler said that Stalin had produced ‘a sort of Slavonic-Muscovite nationalism’, ridding Bolshevism of its Jewish internationalism. Mussolini took the view that Bolshevism was now dead: Stalin had substituted for it ‘a kind of Slavonic fascism’.
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Yet the pact did not solve any of the problems Hitler had set himself. Indeed it involved a reversal of the original priorities on his timetable. He told Carl Burckhardt, League High Commissioner in Danzig: ‘Everything that I undertake is directed against Russia. If the
West is too stupid and too blind to understand this, then I will be forced to reach an understanding with the Russians, smash the West, and then turn all my concentrated strength against the Soviet Union.’
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Even after Hitler got the Soviet pact, he still hoped to avoid war with the West, trusting that it would stun Britain into impotent passivity. But it had no effect on British policy other than to make all concerned now assume that war was certain. It was positively welcomed by some on the British Right as visible proof that the godless totalitarian regimes were in shameless and undisguised concert, ‘out in the open, huge and hideous’, as Evelyn Waugh put it in his fictional trilogy,
Sword of Honour.
When Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September and the Poles invoked the guarantee, there was never any doubt that Britain would stand by it or that France, however reluctantly, would follow suit.

Thus Hitler’s programme had to be drastically revised, and he found himself with a general war of the type he had hoped to avoid before disposing of Russia. From this point he ceased to nurture his image as a reasonable man, either at home or abroad, and made it clear to all that he would obtain his objectives by the ruthless application of force and terror. The same day he invaded Poland he ordered the murder of the incurably ill in German hospitals.
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He made no attempt to reach a settlement with the Poles. He simply treated the country as occupied territory to be exploited. The victory over Poland was not an end; just a beginning. This was the exact reverse of the general German mood. After the Polish collapse General Ritter von Leeb noted in his diary, 3 October 1939: ‘Poor mood of the population, no enthusiasm at all, no flags flying from the houses. Everyone waiting for peace. The people sense the needlessness of the war.’ But Hitler was determined to burn Germany’s bridges, to lock the nation onto an irreversible course. He told his generals, 23 November 1939: ‘All hope for compromise is childish. Victory or defeat. I have led the German people to a great height even though the world now hates us. I am risking this war. I have to choose between victory or annihilation. It is not a single problem that is at stake, but whether the nation is to be or not to be.’ On 17 October he ordered General Keitel to treat occupied Polish territory as ‘an advanced glacis’ for the future invasion of Russia.
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So much for the security Stalin thought he had bought! But in the meantime the West had to be eliminated: France by
Blitzkrieg
, Britain by despair.

Hitler was now Generalissimo. The Polish campaign was the last prepared by the old General Staff. From now on, as with security and the civil ministries, Hitler double-banked the direction of the army, with the
OKW
(High Command of the Armed Forces), under his
personal orders, duplicating the work of the
OKH
(Army High Command). The French made things easy for him. They had not wanted the war. After Munich they recognized that their Eastern policy was finished. With Poland they simply went through the motions. They thought the British pledge madness and endorsed it simply because they had no alternative.
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They knew that to enter an all-out war with Hitlerite Germany might mean a repetition of 1870, and it took them fifty-six hours of agonized hesitation to respond to the German assault on Poland, which had been their sworn ally since 1921.
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The military protocol which General Gamelin had signed in May 1939 with the Polish War Minister, Kasprzycki, pledged that the French air force would take immediate offensive action against Germany as soon as Poland was invaded, and that a French army invasion of Germany would follow within sixteen days. Neither promise was fulfilled. All that happened was a tentative army probe on 8 September, soon discontinued. On 22 September, on the receipt of decisively bad news from the Polish front, the French scrapped all their aggressive plans. During this time the Germans had only eleven active-service divisions in the west, but by 1 October they were transferring troops from the eastern front. Thereafter, as the minutes of the Anglo—French staff discussions show, it was the British who pressed for action on the main German front, and the French who wished to do nothing there, while planning diversionary schemes in Scandinavia, the Caucasus, Salonica, Finland and elsewhere.
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The French preference for passivity on the Franco—German border combined with largely meaningless activity elsewhere played straight into Hitler’s hands. Hitler originally ordered the attack on France for 12 November, selecting from the alternatives offered the daring concept of an armoured thrust through the Ardennes. The restlessness of French policy forced him to command and recommand the operation twenty-nine times throughout the winter and early spring. But in the meantime he himself had conceived the brilliant Norway operation, which his military advisers pronounced impossible. Anglo—French activities gave him the pretext and he pulled off the invasion, demoralizing the Allies and discountenancing his generals, who raised no objections when he strengthened the concept of the Ardennes thrust and launched it while France was still reeling from the Norway defeat and Allied logistics were in desperate confusion.

The rapid destruction of French military power in May—June 1940 convinced Hitler that the errors of the previous autumn were not irreversible and that he could still proceed towards his ultimate targets by a series of swift Bismarckian
coups.
The campaign bore the hallmarks of both his overweening self-confidence in attack and his ingenuity in detailed invention: according to Albert Speer, it was
Hitler who thought of fitting the Stuka dive-bombers with sirens, one of the masterly psychological strokes of the
Blitzkrieg.
There were many other examples of his military inventiveness at this stage, including lengthening the gun-barrels of the tanks.
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Just as earlier he had wrong-footed the democracies by the rapidity by which he created and exploited diplomatic opportunities, so now he gave the French commanders no chance to recover from their initial surprise. ‘The ruling idea of the Germans in the conduct of this war was speed,’ wrote the historian Marc Bloch, who served as staff-captain on the First Army Group. His account of those fatal weeks,
L’étrange défaite
, stressed that the collapse was a verdict on the French system as much as on its army. He praised both the populism and the intellectual calibre of Nazism:

Compared to the old Imperial army, the troops of the Nazi regime have the appearance of being far more democratic. The gulf between officers and men seems now to be less unbridgeable …. The German triumph was essentially a triumph of intellect – and that is what makes it so peculiarly serious …. It was as though the two opposed forces belonged, each of them, to an entirely different period of history. We interpreted war in terms of assegai versus rifle made familiar to us by long years of colonial expansion. But this time it was we who were cast in the role of the savage!
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