Chapter 5

(SEP 1939 GERMANY INVADES POLAND)

“Why did I do them, which is more to the point. You were a loyal foot soldier. It wasn’t your job to ask why did the sun rose every morning ... For world peace, whatever that is? Yes, yes, of course. There will be no war, but in the struggle for peace not a stone will be left standing, as our Russian friends used to say ... Or was it all in the great name of Capitalism? God forbid. Christendom? God forbid again ... So it was all for England, then? There was a time, of course there was. But whose England? Which England? England all alone, a citizen of nowhere? I’m a European, Peter. If I had a mission-if I was ever aware of one beyond our business with the enemy, it was to Europe. If I were heartless, I was heartless for Europe. If I had an attainable ideal, it was leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still.”

George Smiley’s concluding words in “A Legacy of Spies” by John Le Carre

It started off as a relatively quiet day in Berlin.

Then, it finally seeped into my brain that the veil over the Polish operation and the collusion between Hitler and Stalin was self-evident. The first inklings of the scope of the invasion were fed in like tasty oats to a hungry horse locked in a barn. Eventually, it was the “word of mouth” that carried the day for the transmission of current affairs.

The militarization of the scenario was building deeper each and every day. Soon, the entire nation would seem like one gigantic base camp designed for only one purpose, the victory off the Fatherland over the entire world.

The people in the United States or in Australia or Canada had little interest in the rumblings in the Germany of the new Third Reich. Yet, there was no doubt that England was becoming more and more aware of the danger on their doorstep.

When the news flash of the invasion of Poland, I knew exactly what to expect. What I didn’t expect was that France began to twist the details to infer that it was the Soviets that had made the first move and that Germany was just protecting their interests as Poland was right on their border. In fact, the overall media reporting was most critical of the Soviet Union and dismissive of German involvement. Of course, that would all become a moot point because the Soviet Union would be right behind Hitler in dismantling the country of Poland. It was that initial slanting of the news reporting that shocked me because it was a nuance not appreciated by most historians. I thought of it in today’s terms and had to agree that public opinion was a creature of news story bias and there were few media organizations that actually strove to report only the facts without satisfying some other agenda first.

Out on the boulevards, the people seemed subdued as if waiting for some new political rally to blame it all on the Poles, the Russians, or even the Jews because they got blamed for everything that went wrong or threatened the German people. I noticed that very few remaining Jews had the temerity to take to the streets and I had to agree that was a wise decision indeed. I estimated that ninety percent of the original population of Jews in the city had either left of their own accord or were shipped off to some unknown destination with rumored harsh treatment.

Then, the radios were blaring with the effrontery of the Poles to actually invade sacred German lands and the need to restore the proper perspective to a sometimes tenuous boundary. It had been a headache even before the excesses of the treaties of World War One with loss of lands to Poland and the loss of the Sudetenland with the sweep of a pen by some bureaucrat with hatred against the German people.

The problems of the land restoration in the east was a promise of the Fuhrer along with the Austrian union with “one language, one land” with leadership of the Fuhrer alone.

The propaganda was working overtime and if one listened with open ears and watched with accepting eyes, the brain was bombarded with the “doublespeak” of the new Third Reich.

It was like some religious experience to see the transformation of the spirit of the common German people after learning about the Fuhrer’s newest risky gambit in his quest for conquering the industrial world. I had often surmised that the Hitler ploy of using the question of Jewish commercial success against their accelerating accumulation of wealth and assets was merely an affectation to stir up that searing resentment. After seeing him in person several times, I changed my logical theory to reluctant acceptance that he was stating his case from heartfelt hatred of all things non-Aryan.

The Jews made an easy target and he was able to whip up emotional resentment hidden deeply inside the average citizen’s mental facilities to explode into his “unthinkable” deployment of the “final solution”. In some respects, it was the toehold he needed to lever the masses into loyal robots to do his bidding. Of course, he expanded his list of targets to include other unwanted elements like Catholics, Gypsies, Mental deficient persons, Homosexuals and many other segments too numerous to list here.

The ridiculous terms of the so-called German – Soviet Non-Aggression Pact made the invasion of Poland a “done deal” as far as the Nazi hierarchy was concerned. It only lacked the physical presence of “boots on the ground” to make it a fact.

Now that German Wehrmacht forces were on the move, it allowed the Soviet Army to follow close behind and attack from the other direction. The Polish defenses were caught between a rock and a hard place unable to mount a cohesive defense.