Killing Hitler (18 page)

That night, Canaris resumed his correspondence with his neighboring prisoner, a Danish intelligence officer. The two had communicated by tapping an improvised Morse code through the wall of the cell. Soon after ten o’clock, Canaris tapped out what would be his final message—his epitaph: “Nose broken…Time is up. Was not a traitor. Did my duty as a German.”
¹²⁸

The following morning, 9 April 1945, Oster and Canaris were hauled from their cells at 6:00. They were ordered to undress and were herded across the cell-block yard to the gallows. There, with the camp commandant and SS doctor acting as witnesses, they mounted a small pair of wooden steps and a noose was placed around their necks. The steps were then kicked away.

CHAPTER 4
“The Nest of Vipers”: The Polish Underground

An attempt on Hitler’s life was of the primary importance.

—
JAN SZALEWSKI, POLISH HOME ARMY
¹

ON THE EVENING OF
31
AUGUST
1939,
IN THE GERMAN TOWN
of Gleiwitz, close to the Polish border in Upper Silesia, a small SS force was preparing for action. Their mission was simple: they were to provide the world with unlikely proof of a Polish attack on Germany and thus give Hitler the excuse he required to declare war on Poland.

Their leader was an SS
Sturmbannführer
(major) by the name of Alfred Naujocks. Naujocks is often and somewhat bizarrely described as an “intellectual gangster.”
²
He was born in 1908 in Kiel, the son of an engineer. In the turbulent 1920s, he joined the Nazi Party, briefly studied at university, developed a talent for brawling, and had his nose flattened by a communist wielding an iron bar. In 1931 he joined the SS, and three years later he was appointed as aide to the high-flying Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS security service, the
Sicherheitsdienst
(SD).

In this capacity, Naujocks was given license to indulge his twin passions for violence and subversion. The “Gleiwitz incident,” as it came to be known, was to be his greatest and most infamous mission. He had been sent to the town in mid-August, two weeks previously. There he had scouted the radio station and had been briefed by the Gestapo chief, Heinrich Müller, who was billeted nearby. He was told that his mission would involve a consignment of a dozen concentration camp inmates, referred to cryptically as “canned goods.”

At midday on 31 August, Naujocks received a telephone call from Heydrich. The password was given: “Grandmother has died.” The mission was on. Naujocks contacted Müller to arrange delivery of the “canned goods,” put the finishing touches to his plan, and gave a final briefing to his team. At 8:00 that evening, he and five SS men stormed into the Gleiwitz radio station. They fired a few shots and handcuffed the bemused station personnel before locking them in the cellar. Naujocks then found the microphone. A stirring speech was broadcast in Polish, full of anti-German rhetoric, and calling on the Poles to rise against their historic enemy. “The hour of freedom has arrived,” it concluded. “Long live Poland!”
³
Outside, meanwhile, the “canned goods” had been delivered. Drugged but alive, they were strategically arranged around the site and then machine-gunned.
⁴
Their bodies were to add bloody veracity to an unlikely scene.

This somewhat bizarre performance was all part of Hitler’s master plan. Despite his later reputation as a reckless gambler, in 1939 Hitler could scarcely afford to unleash a world war. His expansion thus far had been piecemeal, and he had stressed his good intentions at every turn, hoping to avoid an all-out conflict with France and Great Britain. What he intended in the autumn of 1939, therefore, was a limited war, a swift, surgical strike to knock out Poland while avoiding any wider conflagration. Hence his rather clumsy attempt at Gleiwitz to cast Poland as the aggressor. A week earlier, in conference with his generals at Berch-tesgaden, he had foreshadowed the ruse, saying: “I will provide a propaganda pretext for beginning the war, however implausible,”
before adding darkly that “the victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth or not.”
⁵
Gleiwitz, therefore, was intended as a fig leaf to cover Hitler’s naked aggression.

At first sight, the ruse appeared to have been successful. An astonished world awoke on 1 September to the news that Poland had launched an unprovoked attack on Hitler’s Germany and that German forces were responding in kind. All along the border, German troops moved off from their forward positions. In the north, in the free city of Danzig, the German heavy battleship
Schleswig-Holstein
, moored on a courtesy visit, opened its murderous fire on the Polish fort on the Westerplatte, barely 300 meters away.
⁶
Hitler, addressing the Reichstag later that day, did his best to pose as the injured party:

This night, for the first time, Polish regular soldiers fired on our own territory. We have now been returning fire since 5:45 a.m.! Henceforth, bomb will be met with bomb. He who fights with poison gas shall be fought with poison gas. He who distances himself from the rules for a humane conduct of warfare can only expect us to take like steps. I will lead this struggle, whoever may be the adversary, until the security of the Reich and its rights have been assured.
⁷

It was a vintage performance. But, for all his righteous rage, Hitler may have inadvertently betrayed his guilt in one tiny detail. In accordance with his orders, the
Schleswig-Holstein
had opened fire an hour earlier than he had admitted: at 4:45 a.m.

The September Campaign, as it came to be known, was brutal and mercifully short. As German forces, vastly superior in numbers and equipment, swept over the frontier that morning, they quickly overran Polish defensive positions and threatened the disintegration of the entire front. Within days, the Poles were in desperate straits. Their successes, such as the counteroffensive at
Kutno, were few and short-lived. Their air force was outgunned and outmaneuvered. Their General Staff was overwhelmed by the deadly new military doctrine of the
Blitzkrieg.

The Poles were also shocked by other innovations. The September Campaign, the first serious military adventure undertaken by Hitler, gave ample proof of the sheer murderous brutality of the Nazi regime. The tone was set by the SS Death’s Head Division, which, while making no tactical contribution to the campaign, concentrated instead on terrorizing the civilian population and hunting down Jews and “suspicious elements.” In the town of Bydgoszcz, for example, it arrested and shot some eight hundred individuals whose names had been recorded on a “death list.”
⁸
Few of those killed would conventionally be considered to be the mortal enemies of the advancing forces. As one eyewitness recalled:

The first victims…were a number of Boy Scouts, from twelve to sixteen years of age, who were set up in the marketplace against a wall and shot. No reason was given. A devoted priest who rushed to administer the Last Sacrament was shot too…. Among the [others] was a man whom I knew was too ill to take any part in politics or public affairs. When the execution took place he was too weak to stand and fell down; they beat him and dragged him again to his feet.
⁹

Such actions, coupled with the widespread strafing of refugee columns and aerial bombing of residential areas, demonstrated that Hitler’s forces considered themselves not simply to be fighting the Polish army. They were at war with the entire Polish nation.

The central plank of the Polish defense plan was to hold out until the promised Western offensive against Germany materialized, whereupon, it was thought, the pressure on Poland would be eased.
¹⁰
However, when the British and French failed to make an appearance in the west, and after the Soviets invaded eastern Poland on 17 September, Polish resistance began to crumble.
Thereafter, only the capital and a handful of other isolated pockets continued the fight. The night after the Soviet advance, the Polish government fled to Romania. The majority of Polish troops then surrendered and marched into German or Soviet captivity, but a few followed their government into exile, beginning an odyssey that, in some cases, would last a lifetime.
¹¹
Others followed a third course: they hid their weapons, shed their uniforms, and went into hiding. They would form the nucleus of the Polish underground.

After Warsaw finally fell, on 28 September, it took the Germans another week to subdue the remaining resisters. As the campaign drew to a close, on 5 October, Polish casualties stood at an estimated two hundred thousand; German losses totaled less than a quarter of that figure. The Poles had certainly been comprehensively defeated on the field of battle, but whether they would meekly succumb to occupation was another matter entirely. On this point, the Nazi leadership would have been wise to remember the words of the Polish national anthem:

Poland has not perished yet
So long as we still live
That which alien force has seized
We, at swordpoint, shall retrieve.
¹²

Poland, in fact, had a rich tradition of resistance to foreign occupation. The Polish Republic, established in 1918, had emerged out of the ruins of a three-way occupation of the Polish lands—between Austria, Russia, and Germany—that had lasted more than 120 years. As one might expect, the popular responses to those occupations spanned the spectrum. While only a few opted to collaborate wholeheartedly, many more chose conciliation, seeking to find a modus vivendi with the occupier rather than confront him. But one of the most persistent reactions was that of principled and determined opposition—the route to conspiracy and, ultimately, military resistance. That tradition, as a prominent historian of Poland has written, was

eminently successful…[Its] strength bore no relation to the numbers of its adherents, or to the outcome of its political programme. It reflected not the support of the masses, but the intense dedication of its devotees whose obstinate temper, conspiratorial habits and romantic approach…[were] effectively transmitted from generation to generation.
¹³

Thus resistance to foreign occupation was not only an integral part of the Polish self-image but also an experience of which many Poles in 1939 still had firsthand knowledge. They found little hardship in switching to the conspiratorial lifestyle, little difficulty establishing the organs of a functioning underground, and little trouble finding recruits. It is highly doubtful that the Nazis fully comprehended what they were up against.

German policy in 1939, however, was vastly different from what it had been in 1915. Poland occupied a peculiar position in the Nazi worldview. In the interwar years, it had served as a universal hate figure for the German right: the territorial cessions made after World War One still rankled, as did the perceived maltreatment of the German minority in Poland. Yet, initially at least, Hitler appears to have been less concerned about the Poles than about the Czechs, who earned many more critical references, for example, in
Mein Kampf.

As Nazi ideology matured, however, Poland soon assumed a more prominent position. Occupying, as it did, much of Germany’s desired
Lebensraum
and with a population made up almost entirely of Slavs and Jews, this was perhaps inevitable. The new tone was set by the brutal murder of a Polish laborer by Nazi thugs at Potempa in Silesia in 1932, an act that was later defended by Hitler.
¹⁴
But, for all the official opprobrium that followed, Berlin and Warsaw were not yet irrevocably set on a collision course: high-level discussions were still held, diplomatic niceties were maintained, and treaties were signed. Germany’s “rough wooing” aimed ultimately at chivvying Poland into a bloodless suicide, similar to that achieved in Czechoslovakia, except
the Poles refused to play along. Polish resistance to German offers, blandishments, and threats sowed such frustration in Berlin that war was soon viewed as the only way out of the impasse. By having the temerity to resist, Poland had earned itself a special place in Hitler’s demonology.
¹⁵

The Nazis, therefore, had nothing but contempt for the conquered Poles. Joseph Goebbels spoke for Hitler when he wrote in his diary:

The Führer’s verdict on the Poles is damning. More like animals than human beings, completely primitive, stupid and amorphous…[Their] dirtiness is unimaginable. Their capacity for intelligent judgement is absolutely nil.
¹⁶

Thus, while imperial Germany had been content during the First World War with a Polish client state, Nazi Germany intended to erase Poland from the map entirely. Territories were hived off and annexed to the Reich, and eastern Poland was taken by the Soviets. The rump was then designated as the “General Government”—a supposedly autonomous state run by a German administrator in Kraków.

The Polish population, meanwhile, was subjected to a crude racial sorting. Individuals were examined and categorized—Germans and non-Germans, Aryans and non-Aryans, humans and subhumans. One’s designation decided one’s fate. Those in the higher categories were considered eligible for Germanization, with all the benefits that it implied, while the lowest category qualified only for a starvation diet of 184 calories per day and could expect little but expropriation, expulsion, and forced labor.
¹⁷