The Black Book: What if Germany had won World War II - A Chilling Glimpse into the Nazi Plans for Great Britain. Mei Trow
had also said (although Churchill did not make this public for well over a year) that he expected, within three weeks, for Britain to have her neck wrung like a chicken. William Shirer, reporting for the Columbia Broadcasting System, was in the forest of Compiegne on Saturday, 22 June to witness France’s total humiliation. Hitler had insisted that the very railway carriage in which the Kaiser’s army had surrendered to Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch in November 1918 be used again; this time with the Führer in Foch’s seat, literally as well as figuratively. The sun shone through the elms and cedars that afternoon as Shirer watched history reverse itself. The whole thing, with formal salutes and grim faces, lasted for fifteen minutes. Then the German band struck up ‘Deutschland Uber Alles’ and the ‘Horst Wessel’ song, which was virtually a Nazi theme tune. Shirer noted the inscription, as did Hitler and his cronies, that the French had erected there in 1918 –‘Here on the eleventh of November 1918, succumbed the criminal pride of the German Empire, vanquished by the free peoples which it tried to enslave.’ Twenty-two years later, the free peoples were vanquished after all.
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Britain now stood alone, separated from Hitler’s Reich by twenty-one miles of water. As if to signal the next move, on 30 June, the Wehrmacht occupied the Channel Islands, technically setting foot on British soil for the first time. The following month came to be known to the Kriegsmarine as die gluckhche zeit (the happy time) because of the high hit rate on Allied shipping in the Atlantic.
And on the second day of the new month, the OKW, the German High Command, issued a new order called The War Against England – ‘The Führer and Supreme Commander has decided that a landing in England is possible.’ Luftwaffe attacks on Allied ships intensified. The next day, Churchill made one of the most difficult and fateful decisions of the war. Concerned that the French navy would fall into German hands, he ordered the Royal Navy to open fire on the French and destroy as many ships as they could. Those in British harbours were seized quietly and with minimum bloodshed. At Mers-el-Kebir, however, demobilisation talks broke down and Admiral James Somerville opened his broadsides on Admiral Marcel-Bruno Gensoul’s ships, sinking the Bretagne and damaging two other battleships.
Probing Britain’s south coast and anxious to show what his airmen could do, Goering unleashed a Stuka squadron on a convoy off Portland Bill. Five of the nine ships were sunk. As an obvious prelude to a seaborne invasion, it was vital that the Germans should knock out the RAF first. Poland’s excellent air force had been caught off guard by the suddenness of the invasion but Goering could hardly count on the element of surprise now. Throughout June and July, there was frantic work in the RAF and its support industries to build planes and train pilots. Churchill later wrote:
‘This was a time when all Britain worked … to the utmost limit and was united as never before. Men and women toiled at the lathes and machines till they fell exhausted… and had to be ordered home… Nothing moves an Englishman so much as the threat of invasion, the reality unknown for a thousand years. Vast numbers of people were resolved to conquer or die.’19
The British reckoned 10 July to be the opening of the Battle of Britain. There were dog-fights over the Channel, Messerschmitts and Hurricanes snarling through the summer skies to try to down each other. The gloomy thinking throughout the Thirties was that ‘the bomber will always get through’ and a squadron did that day, hitting the docks in Cardiff and Port Talbot in South Wales. Most of the Luftwaffe’s attacks were on shipping in the Channel and they sustained the heavier losses. In terms of fighters, however, the tally was about equal and the Luftwaffe easily outnumbered the RAF in that respect.
The French had lost heart. Their army beaten, their air force shattered, their fleet non-existent, they rolled over to German occupation, giving the British a foretaste of what might come for them. President Lebrun resigned and was replaced by Petain, the war hero-turned-collaborator. All over the country, his grim countrymen formed Resistance movements, just to show how far they were removed from him.
Two days later, Hitler issued Directive 15. The full blast of the Luftwaffe’s strength was to be unleashed on 5 August. The summer of 1940, now invested with a nostalgic glow as the ‘Spitfire summer’, was unusually hot and dry – excellent flying weather. Goering fell at the first. Having promised Hitler that the RAF stood no chance, he now had to report that his cohorts would not be up to strength by the 5th and precious days were lost.
The next day, Directive 16 was issued in Berlin. ‘I have decided,’ said the Führer with all the confidence that a dictator of a police state can afford, ‘to begin to prepare for, and if necessary, carry out, an invasion of England.’
It had taken Hitler weeks to come to this decision and the rather curious wording implies, perhaps, a lack of conviction. Why prepare for invasion and not carry it out? With hindsight, we know that many of the German High Command were sceptical; that they fully appreciated the difficulties of invasion. But, if they dithered, all Hitler had to do was to point to Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium and France. Blitzkrieg was unstoppable. Some of today’s historians have taken this apparent indecision to extremes; that Hitler never had any serious intention of invasion and that he would much have preferred to make peace.
On 19 July, the Führer made ‘a final appeal to common sense’ in the Reichstag, the last olive branch of peace that he would offer to Britain. The reaction in Whitehall was fascinating. Harold Nicolson was convinced that the Germans would invade in ‘the next few days’, even though Hitler had now fixed the airborne attack, Agler Tag (Eagle Day), for 13 August. Lord Lothian, the Right-wing peer who had been shunted to the role of British ambassador in Washington, essentially to keep him out of the way, rang Halifax on the 22nd begging him not to respond to Hitler’s offer in a way that might close the door on peace. In the event, Halifax did just that. To paraphrase – and invert – Churchill’s epithet, it was to be ‘war, war, not jaw, jaw.’
Harold Nicolson – and, indeed, many of Churchill’s War Cabinet – seem to have had only the vaguest notion of what actual invasion would bring, even though Nicolson’s Ministry of Information had already issued pamphlets on the subject! ‘It may be that Hitler will bomb us first with gas. At the same time, Italy and Japan will hit us as hard as they can.’ In fact, Hitler had already turned down Il Duce’s offer of military help and Japan was almost six thousand miles away. There was one thing, however, that Nicolson got right – ‘It will be a dreadful month.’
The gas rumour emerged in Germany too. Marie Vassiltchikov wrote on 25 July that ‘some gas bombs were found in the wreckage of a recently shot down British plane.’ There were even more bizarre stories. ‘Today, at the office, I received, by mistake, a sheet with a yellow strip across – it was an alleged rumour about a riot in London, with the King hanged at the gates of Buckingham Palace.’
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Eagle Day was imminent. Tanks, mechanised transport, men and machines were massing at Boulogne and other bases along the newly-captured French coast. Another campaign. Another dazzling victory for the glorious Aryan armies of the invincible Third Reich.
And, as part of that preparation, Walter Schellenberg, deputy leader of Amt IV of the Reich Central Security Office and personal aide to Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer SS, was ordered to compile a list. It was the Sonderfahndunglist G.B, Special Search List Great Britain and it contained the names of 2,694 individuals who, once the eagle landed, would find themselves dead.
Notes
5 Pivnik, Sam, Survivor, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 2012, p. 28.
6 Pivnik, op.cit. p. 34.
7 Churchill, Winston, The Second World War (abridged), Grange Books, London, 2003, p. 43.