The Black Book: What if Germany had won World War II - A Chilling Glimpse into the Nazi Plans for Great Britain. Mei Trow
he does remember clearly about this particular birthday, though, was the burst of activity. The normally quiet town of Bedzin, Poland, was full of people, grim-faced and muttering on street corners. Bedzin was a garrison town and, shortly before lunch, the local regiment, the 23rd Light Artillery, rattled out of their barracks, with creaking wheels, snorting horses and the clash of hoofs on the cobbles. All very exciting to a boy just turning thirteen but nothing holds a kid’s attention for long and Sam and his friends were soon kicking the ball around again.
That was when they heard it. The drone of aircraft coming from the west. It took a while for them to stop their game and focus in the bright glare of the sun. They were fighter bombers, pale blue on their under-wings with tell-tale black crosses. Sam had no idea that these planes had already hit Wielun, 100 kilometres away, leaving a blazing ruin and 1,200 bodies in the rubble. The first bomb on Bedzin smashed through the roof of the railway station. ‘It’s funny,’ Sam remembered long years later, ‘you don’t just hear a bomb going off, you feel it. The shock was like being hit in the pit of the stomach.’5
This was Fall Weiss, the German code name for the invasion of Poland, engineered by a cynical lie. It was necessary if Hitler was to add East Prussia to his Third Reich, to give his people the lebensraum (living space) he claimed they needed. The victors of Versailles – Britain, France and the United States – had created the artificial Polish ‘corridor’ that gave the Poles their only access to the sea, with Danzig (today’s Gdansk) as a free port for use by all. That corridor lay between Hitler and his next objective and it had to be closed.
Accordingly, on the last day of August, Operation Himmler was launched. At 8pm, six SS men in Polish army uniforms crashed into the German radio station at Gleiwitz near the Polish border. There was a roar of gunfire, bullets biting into the plaster walls and the bewildered staff were pistol-whipped. One of the raiders grabbed a microphone and announced in immaculate Polish:
‘People of Poland! The time has come for war between Poland and Germany. Unite and smash down any German, all Germans who oppose your way. Trample all resistance! The time has come!’
They killed no one at the station but the body of a concentration camp inmate, also dressed as a Pole and referred to in the codes of the time as ‘canned goods’, was left on the floor.
The next day, Hitler announced to the German people that ‘the attack by regular Polish troops on the Gleiwitz transmitter’ was the direct cause of the war that was about to begin. Even before his broadcast, Army Group South, commanded by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, had crossed the Polish border with fifty-three divisions, six of them armoured. One eye witness who was not supposed to be there was 27-year-old Clare Hollingworth, who died in January 2017 aged 105. She was a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph who grabbed a diplomat’s car and drove to the frontier. She hung out of an upstairs window with a telephone receiver held out so that her editor, on the other end of the line, could hear the snarl and roar of the tanks. Sixteen hundred aircraft accompanied the advance, the terrifying Stuka dive-bombers snaking over the countryside as the bringers of blitzkrieg, lightning war. Against them, the Poles had twenty-three divisions of infantry, one armoured division, insufficient artillery and an impressive, but obsolete, cavalry force. This was 1939 and blitzkrieg was a new, mechanised and faster-moving kind of war than anything the world had seen. Rumour rode with General Heinz Guderian’s panzers and, for years afterwards, people believed the myth that Polish lancers had charged the German tanks with the inevitable slaughter that would result. It never happened.
Throughout September, the Wehrmacht pushed the Poles back, confident that, because of the treaty that Hitler had signed with Stalin weeks earlier (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), there would be no opposition from the USSR’s Red Army. Poland was to be dismembered, split down the centre by the vastly more powerful states on its flanks. Germany would have the lion’s share of the country and Russia would control the rest as well as Lithuania, Latvia, Finland and Estonia. Despite the uneasiness with which the ideologies of Fascism and Communism worked together, the geographical elements were a marriage made in heaven. In fact, a British cartoon appeared soon after this time showing a smiling groom, Joe Stalin, arm in arm with Adolf Hitler as his blushing bride.
By the day after the invasion, Runstedt had crossed the Warta river. In the south, the Lodz army collapsed and this led to a bizarre scene in Sam Pivnik’s home town. Bedzin, on Monday, 4 September, was full of excitement. The rumours rode again – this time, it was the British and French who were riding to the rescue. People lined the streets to welcome them, the girls and women holding flowers to give to their saviours. But it was not the British and French. It was the dark motorcycles and side-cars of the Wehrmacht’s motorised units: ‘Hard men,’ Pivnik remembered, ‘and hard faces. Behind them came grey-painted trucks, all crashing gears and rattling tailgates…between [them] came armoured cars, with cannon and machine-guns – the face of total war.’6 The cheering stopped. The smiles vanished. The flowers were thrown to the cobbles.
And four days later, hell came to Bedzin. The Einsatzgruppen arrived, Hitler’s execution squads. Shots echoed in the streets and the smell of the burning synagogue filled the air. When the Pivniks came out of their self-imposed home prison after three days, Sam saw his first corpse. In fact, dozens of them; old Jews with Orthodox ringlets, beards and black clothes lay in the gutters, smashed by rifle butts, slashed with bayonets. Others hung from lamp-posts in the town square, swaying with the wind. The names of some of these men were on the Polish Special Search List. This was the reality of which the people of Britain, as yet, knew nothing. And many refused to believe it when they did.
The September War, as the Poles called it, was in many ways a foregone conclusion. Warsaw, the capital, was pounded by the full might of Goering’s Luftwaffe in a foretaste of what all major cities would experience in the coming months. A Polish government in exile was set up in London with Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz as the new president and the unpopular Wladyslaw Sikorski as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, some of whom had got away in the four destroyers the Polish navy had been able to extricate from the Kriegsmarine. On 3 October, the remnants of the Polish army that stayed surrendered near the town of Luck. The Germans took 700,000 prisoners, the Russians 200,000. Fall Weiss had been a total success and Poland had ceased to exist.
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Neville Chamberlain’s plummy, out-of-touch tones crackled over the radio waves on Sunday, 3 September 1939, reaching a numbed British population who would spend the next six years glued to their wireless sets. Some of the men who heard Chamberlain remembered all too well the last time they had clashed with Germany, only twenty-five years before. It had been the Kaiser’s Germany then, a new nation flexing its military muscles on the world stage. It was Hitler’s Germany now and the men and women who listened to Chamberlain that Sunday had watched in growing disbelief as Germany had risen from the ashes of defeat in just six years. Most Englishmen found the Führer funny; he had awful hair and a silly moustache. His high-stepping minions in the black-shirted SS were something of a joke. But some of those listeners were impressed by the economic miracle that Hitler had brought about in a nation all but destroyed by defeat and the Wall Street crash. Some of them believed that the Allies had been too harsh in punishing Germany at Versailles in 1919 and that Hitler’s rise was wholly explicable. Still others rather admired the stand he took against the Bolshevism that had made a monster out of Russia. And a few, although they would spend the rest of their lives denying it, thought that he had a point in his detestation of the Jews.
From that Sunday, Britain was at war with Nazi Germany. So, with immediate effect, were Australia and New Zealand, whose men had bled in the trenches of Gallipoli in the First World War. Chamberlain – the arch-appeaser who had stood by and watched as Hitler annexed the Saarland, sent troops to the demilitarised Rhine, forged an alliance with Austria and snatched first the Sudetenland, then all of Czechoslovakia – called a meeting of his cabinet. Alongside the time-servers and paper-shufflers who did not believe this moment would ever come were two who knew that it would: Anthony Eden, Secretary for the Dominions, the old empire which, fifty years earlier, had