Chapter 7

(SEP 1939 SOVIET UNION INVADES POLAND)

“I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you are entitled to.” —Col. Jessep (Jack Nicholson)

If betting was a popular feature in 1939 inside World War Two Berlin on the verge of entering a global war with strategy discarded along the wayside joining simple things like logic and reason in making military decisions, then the odds of the Soviet Union invading Poland from the other side joining their new Best Friend Forever, Nazi Germany would have been about one thousand to one. It was such a sure thing I was certain no bookmaker would have the balls to take book on the bet.

Things in Europe were developing rapidly between the opposing powers. The year of 1939 was a year of great tension and political decisions that would change the direction of the entire globe for the remainder of history. In a way, I was happy that I had been sent back to the European Theater of operations instead of the Far East as I had originally hoped would be my destination.

The entire Polish question was a chess game with the Soviets showing their devious long range strategy. While all the sides had serious shortfalls in military preparedness, the Soviet Union was probably the most unprepared of all. The officer corps had been destroyed by Stalin with a paranoid fear of budding revolutionaries behind every bush.

During the decade of the mid and late thirties, The French and Britain had followed a program of non-confrontation with appeasement being the key ingredient. The decision makers had decided that their top priority was to maintain peace at any cost in Europe by constantly agreeing to Hitler’s terms. All parties tended to agree that some of the territorial and military provisions of the Versailles Treaty were too humiliating to last much longer. Most of the old European countries considered the Soviet Union as too unstable to be a reliable ally and their military posture was ridiculed in almost every quarter.

Added to the mix was the fact that both Britain and France was militarily unprepared to fight the newly organized German Wehrmacht with their loyalty now to the Fuhrer and the inspiring hope of a thousand year Reich.

There were many steps to the debacle of the opening chapters of the Second World War, but most would agree that allowing Germany to rearm (1935 – 1937), the resurgence of the Rhineland regions in 1936 and the added game changer of allowing the Sudetenland to switch from the authority of the Czech Republic to Germany as agreed to at the Munich Conference. The diplomatic promises of the British and the French to Czechoslovakia turned out to be pitifully worthless as Germany took control of the entire country in direct violation of the Munich Conference.

The covert nature of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939 was the trigger to start the downfall of Poland and the two former enemies with their dictator-led governments agreed to divide the spoils of war without any hostilities toward one another.

The German Invasion on 1 September 1939 was followed seventeen days later by the Russian invasion from the east making the Polish defense no longer viable without great suffering. The Invasion by Germany was begun on the premise that the Poles had persecuted ethnic Germans in Poland and were plotting to overthrow Hitler leading the German nation without a real leader.

The ploy of making the other side look guilty of starting hostilities was a gambit used by the British on the Americans at various times and the wars against the Hostile Indians generally depended on such treachery to foment emotional responses from the westward advancing populace against the unassimilated native tribes.

I listened to the heated arguments in the coffee shops and in the snack bars that served meager lunches to a work-oriented society that hated to waste time on such traditional niceties in a time of blossoming war.

The street newspapers were filled with glaring headlines that proclaimed ridiculous false news alerts about Polish crimes against the innocent German visitors on Polish land. There were outright lies about the true origins of land ownership on the German-Polish border similar to the types of articles that preceded the takeover of the Sudetenland and the Czech Republic. The inner workings of the ministry of propaganda were so obvious to me that I failed to understand the inability of the usually intelligent German public to not see through the constantly repeated lies.

I must admit that I came to the conclusion that it was either some kind of “mass hysteria” like swathes of people swearing that they had witnessed other world alien invaders in their neighborhood. The ability of a bare-faced rumor to become hard cold fact often amazed me and I wondered if it was a function of a propaganda effort or just human nature to make the facts fit one’s expectations and hidden desires.

It all fit into the Hitler mold that started with phony outrages by supposed Jewish thugs or unlawful financial schemes that always had some unknown Jew banker at the bottom of it. The same tactics were used against the Gypsies, the Catholics and then later, the Homosexuals and the gender-confused younger generation that had hedonistic tendencies not suited to a Nazi state-oriented program. This came to the forefront in the later problems with Hitler’s own “Brown Shirts” that fell into disfavor due to immoral practices.