The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (128 page)

The man of Munich could no longer be fooled by Hitler’s promises. The next day, October 13, an official German statement declared that Chamberlain, by turning down Hitler’s offer of peace, had deliberately chosen war. Now the Nazi dictator had his excuse.

Actually, as we now know from the captured German documents, Hitler had not waited for the Prime Minister’s reply before ordering preparations for an immediate assault in the West. On October 10 he called in his military chiefs, read them a long memorandum on the state of the war and the world and threw at them Directive No. 6 for the Conduct of the War.
²⁰

The Fuehrer’s insistence toward the end of September that an attack be mounted in the West as soon as possible had thrown the Army High Command into a fit. Brauchitsch and Halder, aided by several other generals, had consorted to prove to the Leader that an immediate offensive was out
of the question. It would take several months, they said, to refit the tanks used in Poland. General Thomas furnished figures to show that Germany had a monthly steel deficit of 600,000 tons. General von Stuelpnagel, the Quartermaster General, reported there was ammunition on hand only “for about one third of our divisions for fourteen combat days”—certainly not long enough to win a battle against the French. But the Fuehrer would not listen to his Army Commander in Chief and his Chief of the General Staff when they presented a formal report to him on Army deficiencies on October 7. General Jodl, the leading yes man on OKW, next to
Keitel
, warned Halder “that a very severe crisis is in the making” because of the Army’s opposition to an offensive in the West and that the Fuehrer was “bitter because the soldiers do not obey him.”

It was against this background that Hitler convoked the generals at 11
A.M
. on October 10. They were not asked for their advice. Directive No. 6, dated the day before, told them what to do:

The secret memorandum, also dated October 9, which Hitler read out to his military chiefs before presenting them the directive is one of the most impressive papers the former Austrian corporal ever wrote. It showed not only a grasp of history, from the German viewpoint, and of military strategy and tactics which is remarkable but, as a little later would be proved, a prophetic sense of how the war in the West would develop and with what results. The struggle between Germany and the Western Powers, which, he said, had been going on since the dissolution of the First German Reich by the
Treaty of
Muenster (Westphalia) in 1648 “would have to be fought out one way or the other.” However, after the great victory in Poland, “there would be no objection to ending the war immediately” providing the gains in Poland were not “jeopardized.”

The generals had objected to haste in taking the offensive in the West. Time, however, he told them, was on the enemy’s side. The Polish victories, he reminded them, were possible because Germany really had only one front. That situation still held—but for how long?

As for Italy, the “hope of Italian support for Germany” was dependent largely on whether Mussolini lived and on whether there were further German successes to entice the Duce. Here too time was a factor, as it was with
Belgium
and Holland, which could be compelled by Britain and France to give up their neutrality—something Germany could not afford to wait for. Even with the United States, “time is to be viewed as working against Germany.”

There were great dangers to Germany, Hitler admitted, in a long war, and he enumerated several of them. Friendly and unfriendly neutrals (he seems to have been thinking mainly of Russia, Italy and the U.S.A.) might be drawn to the opposite side, as they were in the First World War. Also, he said, Germany’s “limited food and raw-material basis” would make it difficult to find “the means for carrying on the war.” The greatest danger, he said, was the vulnerability of the
Ruhr
. If this heart of German industrial production were hit, it would “lead to the collapse of the German war economy and thus of the capacity to resist.”

It must be admitted that in this memorandum the former corporal showed an astonishing grasp of military strategy and tactics, accompanied though it was by a typical lack of morals. There are several pages about the new tactics developed by the tanks and planes in Poland, and a detailed analysis of how these tactics can work in the West and just where. The chief thing, he said, was to avoid the positional warfare of 1914–18. The armored divisions must be used for the crucial breakthrough.

This was a deadly accurate forecast of how the war in the West would be fought, and when one reads it one wonders why no one on the Allied side had similar insights.

This goes too for Hitler’s strategy. “The only possible area of attack,” he said, was through
Luxembourg
, Belgium and Holland. There must be two military objectives first in mind: to destroy the Dutch, Belgian, French and British armies and thereby to gain positions on the Channel and the
North Sea
from which the Luftwaffe could be “brutally employed” against Britain.

Above all, he said, returning to tactics, improvise!

As for the time of the attack, Hitler told his reluctant generals, “the start cannot take place too early. It is to take place in all circumstances (if at all possible) this autumn.”

   The German admirals, unlike the generals, had not needed any prodding from Hitler to take the offensive, outmatched though their Navy was by the British. In fact all through the last days of September and the first days of October Raeder pleaded with the Fuehrer to take the wraps off the Navy. This was gradually done. On September 17 a German U-boat torpedoed the British aircraft carrier
Courageous
off southwest
Ireland
. On September 27 Raeder ordered the pocket battleships
Deutschland
and
Graf Spee
to leave their waiting areas and start attacking British shipping. By the middle of October they had accounted for seven British merchantmen and taken in prize the American ship
City of Flint
.

On October 14, the German U-boat
U-47
, commanded by Oberleutnant Guenther Prien, penetrated the seemingly impenetrable defenses of
Scapa Flow
, the great British naval base, and torpedoed and sank the battleship
Royal Oak
as it lay at anchor, with a loss of 786 officers and men. It was a notable achievement, exploited to the full by Dr. Goebbels in his propaganda, and it enhanced the Navy in the mind of Hitler.

The generals remained, however, a problem. Despite his long and considered memorandum to them and the issuance of Directive No. 6 to get ready for an imminent attack in the West, they stalled. It wasn’t that they had any moral scruples against violating Belgium and Holland; they simply were highly doubtful of success at this time. There was one exception.

General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, commander of Army Group C opposing the French on the Rhine and along the
Maginot Line
, not only was skeptical of victory in the West; he, alone so far as the available records
reveal, opposed attacking neutral Belgium and Holland at least partly on moral grounds. The day after Hitler’s meeting with the generals, on October 11, Leeb composed a long memorandum himself, which he sent to Brauchitsch and other generals. The whole world, he wrote, would turn against Germany,

Finally, after detailing military arguments against an attack in the West, he appealed for peace. “The entire nation,” he said, “is longing for peace.”
²¹

But Hitler by this time was longing for war, for battle, and he was fed up with what he thought to be the unpardonable timidity of his generals. On October 14 Brauchitsch and Halder put their heads together in a lengthy conference. The Army chief saw “three possibilities: Attack. Wait and see. Fundamental changes.” Halder noted them in his diary that day and, after the war, explained that “fundamental changes” meant “the removal of Hitler.” But the weak Brauchitsch thought such a drastic measure was “essentially negative and tends to render us vulnerable.” They decided that none of the three possibilities offered “prospects of decisive successes.” The only thing to do was to work further on Hitler.

Brauchitsch saw the Fuehrer again on October 17, but his arguments, he told Halder, were without effect. The situation was “hopeless.” Hitler informed him curtly, as Halder wrote in his diary that day, that “the British will be ready to talk only after a beating. We must get at them as quickly as possible. Date between November 15 and 20 at the latest.”

There were further conferences with the Nazi warlord, who finally laid down the law to the generals on October 27. After a ceremony conferring on fourteen of them the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, the Fuehrer got down to the business of the attack in the West. When Brauchitsch tried to argue that the Army would not be ready for a month, not before November 26, Hitler answered that this was “much too late.” The attack, he ordered, would begin on November 12. Brauchitsch and Halder retired from the meeting feeling battered and defeated. That night they tried to console one another. “Brauchitsch tired and dejected,” Halder noted in his diary.

The time had now come for the conspirators to spring to action once more, or so they thought. The unhappy Brauchitsch and Halder were faced with the stern alternatives of either carrying out the third of the “possibilities” they had seen on October 14—the removal of Hitler—or organizing an attack in the West which they thought would be disastrous
for Germany. Both the military and civilian “plotters,” suddenly come to life, were urging the first alternative.

They had already been balked once since the start of the war. General von
Hammerstein
, recalled temporarily from his long retirement on the eve of the attack on Poland, had been given a command in the west. During the first week of the war he had urged Hitler to visit his headquarters in order to show that he was not neglecting that front while conquering Poland. Actually Hammerstein, an implacable foe of Hitler, planned to arrest him. Fabian von Schlabrendorff had already tipped Ogilvie Forbes on this plot the day Britain declared war, on September 3, at a hasty meeting in the
Adlon Hotel
in Berlin. But the Fuehrer had smelled a rat, had declined to visit the former Commander in Chief of the Army and shortly thereafter had sacked him.
²²

The conspirators continued to maintain contact with the British. Having failed to take any action to prevent Hitler from destroying Poland, they had concentrated their efforts on trying to keep the war from spreading to the West. The civilian members realized that, more than before, the Army was the only organization in the Reich which possessed the means of stopping Hitler: its power and importance had vastly increased with general mobilization and the lightning victory in Poland. But its expanded size, as Halder tried to explain to the civilians, also was a handicap. The officers’ ranks had been swollen with reserve officers many of whom were fanatical Nazis; and the mass of the troops were thoroughly indoctrinated with Nazism. It would be difficult, Halder pointed out—he was a great man to emphasize difficulties, whether to friend or foe—to find an army formation which could be trusted to move against the Fuehrer.