During the night of August 31, 1939 a Mozart symphony was being broadcast over the radio station in Gleiwitz, a German border village now part of Poland, when a group of German Gestapo dressed in Polish army uniforms broke in. They began firing pistols and shouting in Polish over the open microphones that they were invading Germany. They brought with them Franciszek Honiok from the Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg concentration camp, also dressed in a Polish uniform, whom they injected with lethal poison and then shot, leaving his body behind to appear to be one of the unfortunate saboteurs. The next morning, three German army groups stormed across the Polish border starting World War II 72 years ago this week.
With the invasion well underway, Hitler continued the charade. At 10 a.m. that morning he addressed the Reichstag and said:
“Recently in one night there were as many as twenty-one frontier incidents: last night there were fourteen, of which three were quite serious. I have, therefore, resolved to speak to Poland in the same language that Poland for months past has used toward us...
… for the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our own territory. Since 5:45 a.m. we have been returning the fire ... I will continue this struggle, no matter against whom, until the safety of the Reich and its rights are secured.”
Of course, all of the 21 “frontier incidents” had been staged by Germany under the code name “Operation Himmler” whose creator, Heinrich Himmler, was the head of the Gestapo. A week before the incidents, Hitler had boasted to his generals:
"I will provide a propagandistic casus belli. Its credibility doesn't matter. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth."
Leading up to the invasion of Poland, Hitler had correctly concluded that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier were both appeasers – paralyzed by their nightmarish memories of World War I – and would therefore be slow to confront his militaristic aggressions. After all, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles which concluded World War I, both leaders had allowed German rearmament in 1935. Both had done nothing when Hitler again violated Versailles with his reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 and his demand for Anschluss, or union, with Austria in March 1938.
A few months later at Munich, both caved again and allowed Hitler to transfer the “ethnically German” Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia to Germany. The following year in March 1939, betting that Chamberlain and Daladier would do nothing again, Hitler occupied all of Czechoslovakia, violating the Munich Pact that he had signed with Chamberlain just six months earlier. The feckless Prime Minister had flown back to England waving that document and assuring the crowd greeting his return at the airport that he had won for them “peace in our time.” That phrase has gone down in history as the tagline for gullibility when naïve world leaders appease an international bully expecting that conciliation preserves peace. Think Jimmy Carter.
As he continued to reassemble pre-World War I Germany, in March 1939 Hitler demanded that Lithuania return the province of Memel, which Germany lost to it after World War I. Then he demanded that Poland permit the construction of a road and railways across its territories to rejoin East Prussia – severed after World War I – and Germany. Poland refused but thought it wise to enter into an agreement with Britain and France that would bring them to its aid if invaded. Hitler was so unconcerned with this treaty that the next month he ordered his generals to begin planning the invasion of Poland and scheduled it to begin on September 1.
However, Hitler was genuinely concerned that his invasion of Poland might threaten the paranoid dictator Josef Stalin and start a war on Germany’s eastern front. As much as he despised Stalin and hated communists, Hitler proposed that both Germany and the Soviet Union should invade Poland to their mutual gain in reestablishing their pre-World War I borders. Hitler’s Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, succeeded in negotiating a secret treaty with Stalin which was signed on August 23, assuring that the Soviet would not interfere with Germany’s invasion plan.
Hitler could not believe his good fortune.
Without any warning, then, three German army groups consisting 1.5 million men and 2,700 panzer tanks swarmed across the Polish frontier in the pre-dawn of September 1. The German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, which had arrived days earlier in the harbor of Danzig (modern-day Gdansk) on a “courtesy visit,” opened fire on the small Polish garrison there.
German tactics employed panzers to punch holes in Polish defenses in a rapidly-moving advance that prevented a static defense line from forming, quickly allowing the tanks to get into rear areas where they could isolate and envelop defenders before they could regroup. The infantry followed an hour or so behind the tanks to mop up surrounded defenders in a strategy later called blitzkreig or “lightning war.” Overhead 1,300 airplanes provided support to ground troops and tanks. Among them was the Stuka dive bomber acting as airborne artillery. The Stukas destroyed targets ahead of the tanks, preventing reinforcements. They were equipped with sirens intended to terrify their victims as they swooped toward the ground.
Behind the infantry came the SS Einsatzgruppen (special units) – little more than Himmler’s trained killers – who began roaming from house to house, systematically murdering local officials, teachers, doctors, aristocrats, Jews, clergymen, anyone who might oppose German occupation.
On the diplomatic front Poland called for help from its British and French allies at 8 a.m. on the morning of the attack. Not until 10 a.m. did the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, summon the German chargé d'affaires to ask for an explanation of this "very serious situation." The German chargé said his country was defending itself against a Polish attack.
Hitler still hoped that he might seize Poland without starting a war with the west. To that end, Italy's Benito Mussolini, who was not yet a German ally, hinted to British and French diplomats that he might be able to engineer a resolution with Germany if they would agree to allow the free city of Danzig, then administered by the League of Nations, to return to Germany as it had been before World War I. Without even demanding Germany’s withdrawal from Poland as a condition, the French foreign minister said he was interested in discussing it. But the British refused to engage in any talks without a German withdrawal first. In the end both countries sent their Berlin ambassadors to meet with the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, warning him that they would fulfill their obligation to Poland unless the invasion was broken off.
Hitler remained adamantly silent to their threat. On the second day of the invasion, Britain was ready to issue an ultimatum, but France stalled for more time saying its army was not prepared to take the field. That evening, Chamberlain addressed the British House of Commons about the crisis. But Commons was fuming over his dithering, giving him no choice but to tell the French that Britain would go it alone if necessary.
At 9 a.m. on the morning of the 3rd, the British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Neville Henderson, was told to deliver a final ultimatum. Ribbentrop refused to receive him. Henderson was told to give his ultimatum to his German interpreter, which he did, reading a prepared text to the interpreter.
In 1945 Ribbentrop’s interpreter, Paul Schmidt, recalled the encounter. “I regret that on the instructions of my Government I have to hand you an ultimatum for the German Government,” Henderson said with deep emotion, and then he read it out loud:
More than twenty-four hours have elapsed since an immediate reply was requested to the warning of September 1st, and since then the attacks on Poland have been intensified. If His Majesty's Government has not received satisfactory assurances of the cessation of all aggressive action against Poland, and the withdrawal of German troops from that country, by 11 o'clock British Summer Time, from that time a state of war will exist between Great Britain and Germany.
The two men expressed regret over the circumstances that would end their personal and diplomatic relationship, and then Schmidt took the document to Hitler’s Chancellery. Ribbentrop, he recalled, was standing by a window and Hitler was seated behind his desk. Most of the members of Hitler’s Cabinet and key men of the Nazi party had gathered anxiously in the anteroom next to Hitler's office.
Schmidt translated the ultimatum aloud to Ribbentrop and Hitler and then stood in silence.
After what seemed like an eternity, Schmidt said, Hitler turned to Ribbentrop, who had remained standing by the window. “What now?” asked Hitler with a savage look, as though implying that the Foreign Minister had misled him about England's probable reaction. Ribbentrop answered quietly: “I assume that the French will hand in a similar ultimatum within the hour.”
Schmidt left Hitler’s office and passing through the anteroom he said to those gathered: “The English have just handed us an ultimatum. In two hours a state of war will exist between England and Germany.” Again the news was followed by complete silence.
Air Marshall Goering looked at him and said: “If we lose this war, then God have mercy on us!” Propaganda Minister Goebbels stood in a corner, downcast and self-absorbed. Everywhere in the room Schmidt saw looks of grave concern, even among the lesser members of the Nazi party.
Hitler had gambled and lost.
At noon on September 3, Chamberlain spoke in the Commons saying that his years of appeasing Hitler had come to naught.
This is a sad day for all of us, and to none is it sadder than to me. Everything that I have worked for, everything that I have believed in during my public life has crashed into ruins. There is only one thing left for me to do: that is to devote what strength and powers I have to forwarding the victory of the cause for which we have to sacrifice so much.
In months, the Chamberlain government would collapse, and the king would invite Winston Churchill to become his Prime Minister.
The night of Chamberlain’s Commons speech, the British liner Athenia on its way to Canada was torpedoed and sunk 200 miles west of Scotland by a German U-boat. Of its 1,400 passengers, 112 were lost, among them 28 Americans. They were the first to die in the war.
Also that night, Adolf Hitler left Berlin for Poland to see what his armies had wrought. He was met by General Heinz Guderian, his tank commander who had cut a swath through northern Poland connecting East Prussia and the Baltic with Germany once again. Together they toured in Hitler’s car. When Guderian showed Hitler all that remained of a Polish artillery regiment, Hitler asked, “Our dive bombers did that?” Guderian proudly answered, “No, our panzers.” This was the killing power of blitzkrieg.
By September 6 two of the three German army groups had linked up at Lodz in the center of Poland. This cut the country in two and trapped a large part of the Polish army between the attackers and the German border. In two days all that would remain of the Polish fighting strength would be encircled in five isolated pockets.
By September 8 German panzers were in the outskirts of Warsaw. The blitzkrieg had covered 140 miles in only eight days. The battle was essentially over. Two days after that all remaining Polish forces were ordered to regroup in eastern Poland against the Romanian border bridge and hope for relief from the British and French. That help would not come.
On September 17 the Red Army crossed the Polish border in the east, ending any hope for Poland to survive as an independent country.
The Polish navy had fled to England with the outbreak of hostilities. Many survivors of the ground fighting got across the Romanian border and eventually worked their way to the west to fight as Free Polish Forces with the western allies. These included many Polish pilots who made it to England and joined the RAF. They would later fight in the Battle of Britain.
The defenders of Warsaw held out under unrelenting German bombing until September 27 before surrendering.
When the fighting ended, about 65,000 Polish troops had been killed. The Germans seized 420,000 soldiers as prisoners and the Soviets seized 240,000. Most of the prisoners would come to a bad end. About 120,000 Polish soldiers escaped through the Romanian Bridgehead when it was evident that they would get no help from England or France.
Germany sustained relatively heavy losses in vehicles and planes – approximately the equipment of an entire armored division and 25% of its air strength. Their personnel losses were about 16,000 killed, a small percentage of the troops that entered the battle but a substantial enough number to prove this had not been a German cakewalk.
Five weeks after the invasion, Poland was completely occupied and would remain occupied by German forces for another 5 ½ years. Over five million Poles would be killed during World War II, three million of them Polish Jews.
With the invasion well underway, Hitler continued the charade. At 10 a.m. that morning he addressed the Reichstag and said:
“Recently in one night there were as many as twenty-one frontier incidents: last night there were fourteen, of which three were quite serious. I have, therefore, resolved to speak to Poland in the same language that Poland for months past has used toward us...
… for the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our own territory. Since 5:45 a.m. we have been returning the fire ... I will continue this struggle, no matter against whom, until the safety of the Reich and its rights are secured.”
Of course, all of the 21 “frontier incidents” had been staged by Germany under the code name “Operation Himmler” whose creator, Heinrich Himmler, was the head of the Gestapo. A week before the incidents, Hitler had boasted to his generals:
"I will provide a propagandistic casus belli. Its credibility doesn't matter. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth."
Leading up to the invasion of Poland, Hitler had correctly concluded that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier were both appeasers – paralyzed by their nightmarish memories of World War I – and would therefore be slow to confront his militaristic aggressions. After all, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles which concluded World War I, both leaders had allowed German rearmament in 1935. Both had done nothing when Hitler again violated Versailles with his reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 and his demand for Anschluss, or union, with Austria in March 1938.
A few months later at Munich, both caved again and allowed Hitler to transfer the “ethnically German” Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia to Germany. The following year in March 1939, betting that Chamberlain and Daladier would do nothing again, Hitler occupied all of Czechoslovakia, violating the Munich Pact that he had signed with Chamberlain just six months earlier. The feckless Prime Minister had flown back to England waving that document and assuring the crowd greeting his return at the airport that he had won for them “peace in our time.” That phrase has gone down in history as the tagline for gullibility when naïve world leaders appease an international bully expecting that conciliation preserves peace. Think Jimmy Carter.
As he continued to reassemble pre-World War I Germany, in March 1939 Hitler demanded that Lithuania return the province of Memel, which Germany lost to it after World War I. Then he demanded that Poland permit the construction of a road and railways across its territories to rejoin East Prussia – severed after World War I – and Germany. Poland refused but thought it wise to enter into an agreement with Britain and France that would bring them to its aid if invaded. Hitler was so unconcerned with this treaty that the next month he ordered his generals to begin planning the invasion of Poland and scheduled it to begin on September 1.
However, Hitler was genuinely concerned that his invasion of Poland might threaten the paranoid dictator Josef Stalin and start a war on Germany’s eastern front. As much as he despised Stalin and hated communists, Hitler proposed that both Germany and the Soviet Union should invade Poland to their mutual gain in reestablishing their pre-World War I borders. Hitler’s Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, succeeded in negotiating a secret treaty with Stalin which was signed on August 23, assuring that the Soviet would not interfere with Germany’s invasion plan.
Hitler could not believe his good fortune.
Without any warning, then, three German army groups consisting 1.5 million men and 2,700 panzer tanks swarmed across the Polish frontier in the pre-dawn of September 1. The German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, which had arrived days earlier in the harbor of Danzig (modern-day Gdansk) on a “courtesy visit,” opened fire on the small Polish garrison there.
German tactics employed panzers to punch holes in Polish defenses in a rapidly-moving advance that prevented a static defense line from forming, quickly allowing the tanks to get into rear areas where they could isolate and envelop defenders before they could regroup. The infantry followed an hour or so behind the tanks to mop up surrounded defenders in a strategy later called blitzkreig or “lightning war.” Overhead 1,300 airplanes provided support to ground troops and tanks. Among them was the Stuka dive bomber acting as airborne artillery. The Stukas destroyed targets ahead of the tanks, preventing reinforcements. They were equipped with sirens intended to terrify their victims as they swooped toward the ground.
Behind the infantry came the SS Einsatzgruppen (special units) – little more than Himmler’s trained killers – who began roaming from house to house, systematically murdering local officials, teachers, doctors, aristocrats, Jews, clergymen, anyone who might oppose German occupation.
On the diplomatic front Poland called for help from its British and French allies at 8 a.m. on the morning of the attack. Not until 10 a.m. did the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, summon the German chargé d'affaires to ask for an explanation of this "very serious situation." The German chargé said his country was defending itself against a Polish attack.
Hitler still hoped that he might seize Poland without starting a war with the west. To that end, Italy's Benito Mussolini, who was not yet a German ally, hinted to British and French diplomats that he might be able to engineer a resolution with Germany if they would agree to allow the free city of Danzig, then administered by the League of Nations, to return to Germany as it had been before World War I. Without even demanding Germany’s withdrawal from Poland as a condition, the French foreign minister said he was interested in discussing it. But the British refused to engage in any talks without a German withdrawal first. In the end both countries sent their Berlin ambassadors to meet with the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, warning him that they would fulfill their obligation to Poland unless the invasion was broken off.
Hitler remained adamantly silent to their threat. On the second day of the invasion, Britain was ready to issue an ultimatum, but France stalled for more time saying its army was not prepared to take the field. That evening, Chamberlain addressed the British House of Commons about the crisis. But Commons was fuming over his dithering, giving him no choice but to tell the French that Britain would go it alone if necessary.
At 9 a.m. on the morning of the 3rd, the British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Neville Henderson, was told to deliver a final ultimatum. Ribbentrop refused to receive him. Henderson was told to give his ultimatum to his German interpreter, which he did, reading a prepared text to the interpreter.
In 1945 Ribbentrop’s interpreter, Paul Schmidt, recalled the encounter. “I regret that on the instructions of my Government I have to hand you an ultimatum for the German Government,” Henderson said with deep emotion, and then he read it out loud:
More than twenty-four hours have elapsed since an immediate reply was requested to the warning of September 1st, and since then the attacks on Poland have been intensified. If His Majesty's Government has not received satisfactory assurances of the cessation of all aggressive action against Poland, and the withdrawal of German troops from that country, by 11 o'clock British Summer Time, from that time a state of war will exist between Great Britain and Germany.
The two men expressed regret over the circumstances that would end their personal and diplomatic relationship, and then Schmidt took the document to Hitler’s Chancellery. Ribbentrop, he recalled, was standing by a window and Hitler was seated behind his desk. Most of the members of Hitler’s Cabinet and key men of the Nazi party had gathered anxiously in the anteroom next to Hitler's office.
Schmidt translated the ultimatum aloud to Ribbentrop and Hitler and then stood in silence.
After what seemed like an eternity, Schmidt said, Hitler turned to Ribbentrop, who had remained standing by the window. “What now?” asked Hitler with a savage look, as though implying that the Foreign Minister had misled him about England's probable reaction. Ribbentrop answered quietly: “I assume that the French will hand in a similar ultimatum within the hour.”
Schmidt left Hitler’s office and passing through the anteroom he said to those gathered: “The English have just handed us an ultimatum. In two hours a state of war will exist between England and Germany.” Again the news was followed by complete silence.
Air Marshall Goering looked at him and said: “If we lose this war, then God have mercy on us!” Propaganda Minister Goebbels stood in a corner, downcast and self-absorbed. Everywhere in the room Schmidt saw looks of grave concern, even among the lesser members of the Nazi party.
Hitler had gambled and lost.
At noon on September 3, Chamberlain spoke in the Commons saying that his years of appeasing Hitler had come to naught.
This is a sad day for all of us, and to none is it sadder than to me. Everything that I have worked for, everything that I have believed in during my public life has crashed into ruins. There is only one thing left for me to do: that is to devote what strength and powers I have to forwarding the victory of the cause for which we have to sacrifice so much.
In months, the Chamberlain government would collapse, and the king would invite Winston Churchill to become his Prime Minister.
The night of Chamberlain’s Commons speech, the British liner Athenia on its way to Canada was torpedoed and sunk 200 miles west of Scotland by a German U-boat. Of its 1,400 passengers, 112 were lost, among them 28 Americans. They were the first to die in the war.
Also that night, Adolf Hitler left Berlin for Poland to see what his armies had wrought. He was met by General Heinz Guderian, his tank commander who had cut a swath through northern Poland connecting East Prussia and the Baltic with Germany once again. Together they toured in Hitler’s car. When Guderian showed Hitler all that remained of a Polish artillery regiment, Hitler asked, “Our dive bombers did that?” Guderian proudly answered, “No, our panzers.” This was the killing power of blitzkrieg.
By September 6 two of the three German army groups had linked up at Lodz in the center of Poland. This cut the country in two and trapped a large part of the Polish army between the attackers and the German border. In two days all that would remain of the Polish fighting strength would be encircled in five isolated pockets.
By September 8 German panzers were in the outskirts of Warsaw. The blitzkrieg had covered 140 miles in only eight days. The battle was essentially over. Two days after that all remaining Polish forces were ordered to regroup in eastern Poland against the Romanian border bridge and hope for relief from the British and French. That help would not come.
On September 17 the Red Army crossed the Polish border in the east, ending any hope for Poland to survive as an independent country.
The Polish navy had fled to England with the outbreak of hostilities. Many survivors of the ground fighting got across the Romanian border and eventually worked their way to the west to fight as Free Polish Forces with the western allies. These included many Polish pilots who made it to England and joined the RAF. They would later fight in the Battle of Britain.
The defenders of Warsaw held out under unrelenting German bombing until September 27 before surrendering.
When the fighting ended, about 65,000 Polish troops had been killed. The Germans seized 420,000 soldiers as prisoners and the Soviets seized 240,000. Most of the prisoners would come to a bad end. About 120,000 Polish soldiers escaped through the Romanian Bridgehead when it was evident that they would get no help from England or France.
Germany sustained relatively heavy losses in vehicles and planes – approximately the equipment of an entire armored division and 25% of its air strength. Their personnel losses were about 16,000 killed, a small percentage of the troops that entered the battle but a substantial enough number to prove this had not been a German cakewalk.
Five weeks after the invasion, Poland was completely occupied and would remain occupied by German forces for another 5 ½ years. Over five million Poles would be killed during World War II, three million of them Polish Jews.
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