The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [9]
‘War is not only not inevitable,’ Sir Thomas Inskip, the Minister for Defence Co-ordination nonetheless reassured the British public in August 1939, ‘but it is unlikely.’ He had not counted on Hitler pulling off perhaps the greatest coup of his entire career so far. With the German generals insisting that Poland should not be invaded unless Russia’s neutrality had first been secured, Hitler decided upon the most astonishing political volte-face of the twentieth century.16 In total contravention to everything he had always said about his loathing of Bolshevism, he sent his new Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to Moscow to negotiate with Josef Stalin’s new Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. Placed beside the imperative for Stalin to encourage a war between Germany and the West, and the equal imperative for Hitler to fight a war on only one front rather than two as in the Great War, their Communist and Fascist ideologies subsided in relative importance, and in the early hours of 24 August 1939 a comprehensive Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact was signed. ‘All the isms have become wasms,’ quipped a British official.
Up until that point Hitler’s treatment of the Austrian President Kurt von Schuschnigg, the Czech President Emil Hácha and the British and French leaders had been characterized by hucksterism, bullying and constant piling on of pressure, to which they had responded with a combination of gullibility, appeasement and weary resignation. Yet with his lifelong enemies the Bolsheviks, Hitler was attentive and respectful, though of course no less duplicitous. Their time would come.
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact safely signed, Hitler wasted no time. One week later, on the evening of Thursday, 31 August 1939, an unnamed inmate of a German concentration camp was taken by the Gestapo to a radio transmitting station outside the frontier town of Gleiwitz. He was then dressed up in a Polish Army uniform and shot. A propaganda story was quickly concocted alleging that the Poles had attacked Germany, thus enabling Hitler to invade Poland ‘in self-defence’, without needing to declare war first. Operation Himmler, as this farcically transparent pantomime was codenamed, thus encompassed the very first death of the Second World War. Considering the horrific ways in which fifty million people were to die over the next six years, the hapless prisoner was one of the lucky ones.
The Deutschland itself – launched in 1931 – was renamed the Lützow in 1940, because Hitler was concerned about the demoralizing effect if a ship of that name was sunk. (For the same reason he never allowed a ship to be named the Adolf Hitler, despite plenty of prompting from obsequious admirals.) The Lützow saw action off Norway in 1940, fought Allied convoy escorts in 1942, was heavily damaged in air raids and was finally scuttled in May 1945, along with National Socialism itself. Yet had Hitler stuck to the terms of the Pact that he agreed with Blomberg on board the battleship in April 1934, allowing the professional strategists of the Reichswehr to set the timing, course and pace of the coming war while he confined himself to boosting morale and making exhortations to self-sacrifice, might the outcome of the Second World War have been different? Might the Pact that was made aboard the Deutschland have left Deutschland über alles? This is one of the questions which this book will seek to answer.
PART I
Onslaught
It is recorded of the great Moltke, that when he was being praised for his generalship in the Franco-Prussian War, and was told by an admirer that his reputation would rank with such great captains as Napoleon, Frederick or Turenne, he answered ‘No, for I have never conducted a retreat.’
Frederick von