Transcript of 532. Hitler's War on Poland: The Fall of Warsaw (Part 3)

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I wanted Warsaw to be great. I I believed Warsaw would be great. I and my colleagues drew up plans for a great Warsaw of the future. And Warsaw is great. It happened sooner than we expected, not in 50 years, not in a hundred, but today, I see a great Warsaw. And as I speak to you now, through the windows I see, enveloped by clouds of smoke, reddened by flames, a wonderful, indestructible, great, fighting Warsaw in all its glory. And even though the ruins lie where fine orphanages should stand, even though there are barricades where we wanted parks, even though our libraries are engulfed in flames, even though our hospitals are burning, then not in 50 years, not in 100 years, but now, today, Warsaw, defending the honor of Poland has reached the peak of its greatness and its glory. That was the mayor of Warsaw, Stefan Starzynski, who was broadcasting to the people of the Polish capital on the third of September, 1939. It is one of the most famous speeches in Polish history, and even in translation, it is, I mean, unbelievably moving and powerful. The more so, Dominic, because, of course, you can tell what the context for this is by his description.

Warsaw is under attack. It's being pounded by German artillery. You've got the Luftwaffe carpet bombing it from the sky Trees, thousands of civilians dead, fires blazing out of control, much of the city in ruins. That great ode, I guess, to this sense of the invincible spirit of the Polish people. But goodness, the invincible spirit of the Polish people has to go through a lot in this episode and has to go through a lot in the years that will follow the events of this episode because we are talking about the Nazi invasion and conquest of Poland.

Yes, it's an incredibly bleak story, Tom, and it is an amazing speech. Very moving to even to hear you reading it out, you have a bit of a lump in your throat, the idea of Warsaw reaching the apotheosis of its glory in circumstances of the most terrible horror. Four days after speech. After Stasin, he gave that speech, after Stas' Intihe, that speech, the city is surrendered. He ended up being arrested by the Gestapo, and he vanished. He was never seen again. It's not clear whether he was shot in Warsaw or whether he was taken to a concentration camp and murdered. If you go to Warsaw, there were loads of monuments to him, the streets named after him and things. At the end of the 20th century, he was voted the Varsovian of the century. His memory, certainly in Poland, definitely lives on. But I guess it would be wrong for us to pretend that this episode is going to be anything other than quite a dark story.

I mean, unbelievably bleak.

We ended last time with the war breaking out, the first shots of the war being fired in Danzig after these false flag incidents on the border. So 4:45, Saturday, the first of September, the German battleship, the Schleswig-Holstein, opening fire on the Polish Munitions Depot on the Westerplatte Peninsula and the Harbor. At the same time, the German police in Danzig and the SS launched an attack on the Polish post office in the city, which they had long seen as a standing affront. Now, those two moments, the attack on the Westerplatte Depot and the attack on the post office, are incredibly well-known stories in Poland. If you go to what's now Gdańsk. There are monuments, there are museums. I mean, it is a place incredibly rich in history, particularly Second World War history, and they've become part of patriotic legends. So let's start with those two stories and tell people what happened. First of all, the to Plata. So this is basically a munitions depot on this neck of land. There were about 200 Polish soldiers there, guarding the depot, and they were completely cut off. They're the first people to come under fire. They They refused to surrender.

Over the next few days, the Germans made 13 separate attempts to storm the peninsula, including sending dive bombers to hit them. These 200 guys held out for a week, and that was a week longer than even their own officers had thought possible. At the time, it was a massive story in Poland. Every day on Polish radio, the news bulletins would have the phrase, The Westerplatte Fights On.

It's like thermopoly, isn't it? A doomed, heroic last stand.

Yeah. Polish historians used that exact parallel. They called it the Polish Themopoli. These guys finally surrendered on the seventh of September. So a week longer than... They'd fought for a week longer than they should have done. Because basically, they'd run out of supplies and those men who had been wounded were dying of gangrene. This is pretty much the only time in this episode when the Germans behaved nobly, and they did behave very nobly. When the polls came out, the Germans couldn't believe their eyes. They thought there'd been 2,000 of them, and there were only 200. The German commander, who was a guy called Friedrich Georg Eberhardt, was actually very gallant to the Polish commander who was called Henry Sukowski. Sukowski gave him his sword and surrender, his saber, and Eberhardt gave it him back. It, and said, No, you keep it. Then lined up as men, and as the polls came out, the Germans all saluted them as they were led off into captiv. Eberhardt said to his men, That's how you fight. That's how you defend your honor. Look at those polls. And look at what they've done.

Because the gallantry of it, the nobility of it, of that scene, it blazes all the brighter, doesn't it, for the near universal darkness that effectively is the rest of this invasion?

Exactly. Because it's such a contrast with what happened at the other totemic battle in Danzig, which was the post office. The post office was being held by 56 people. They were mostly postmen and their families, and they were armed with pistols and grenades.

So they're not soldiers, they're not in uniform? No.

The SS hammered them with howitzers and grenades and whatnot and didn't get any joy. As dusk was falling, the SS resorted to a very brutal tactic. They brought up a railway carriage filled with petrol, and they used fire hoses from the fire engines to pump this petrol into the building. Then they set light to the building with grenades, so the building went up like a, like a candle. Three poles were burned alive straight away and the rest surrendered and rushed out of the building. The first guy who came out was the post office director, and he was holding a white flag, and the Germans shot him dead straight away. The next bloke, they pushed him back into the building so that he burned alive, and then they spared the others at first. But for precisely the point who said that they are postmen and not soldiers. They were rounded up and they were told, You were illegal competence. You weren't fighting legally. And so they are immediately court-martialed by the Wehrmacht. They were all shot by SS firing squads and buried in a mass grave. So a very, very dark story. Again, there's a big monument to the postman in Gdańsk, and it's actually this whole story is a chapter of Gunther Grass's book, The Tin Drum, which is set in Danzig, Gdańsk as it became.

While all that's going on, German forces, as we said last time, 60 divisions, one and a half million men are spearheaded by tanks. They are pouring over their borders of Poland. Actually, the first person to break the news of this story was a journalist from, of all places, the Daily Telegraph, so a British newspaper. This was a great war correspondent, then very young, 27 years old, Claire Hollywood. She had only been working for the Telegraph for a couple of weeks. I mean, Basically, everybody who works at the Telegraph now is about 27, aren't they? Isn't that the nature of the Daily Telegraph? But then she must have been basically the youngest person they employed by about 50 years. They had sent her. She'd gone off to Silesia, to Katowicza, to cover the story of the tension in Poland. She looked out of her hotel room and she heard all these planes going overhead and literally saw German tanks driving down the street. She rang the British Embassy in Warsaw and said, It's on, the Germans are attacking. The embassy said, Well, we haven't heard anything out there, so you're making it up. She literally held the phone out of the window.

Again, it's a reminder, isn't it, of how, in so many ways, how distant this war is? Because now communications are so instantaneous. The fact that you have to have a journalist on the frontier holding a telephone out to inform the British Embassy of what's happening just seems incomprehensible. It does.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, obviously, far, far closer to the Great War than it is to us. Even though we think of the Second World War, probably because of the moving pictures, because of color imagery. Exactly. We think of it as more immediate. Right from the start, it is clear the polls are facing massive, massive challenges. As we heard last time, the British and the French had persuaded them not to mobilize early to avoid provoking the Germans, so they're not ready. A lot of their reservists haven't got to their barracks. Those who have have not been issued with guns. They're not in any condition, really, to face this incredibly well-drilled war machine of Hitlers. Even if they had been, this is going to be a very tough ask. If you look at the map, Germany can attack Poland from three different sides, from the main body of the Reich in the West, from East Prussia, which is in the North. They can also attack. It's often forgotten that Germany is not the only country that attacks Poland because they have their client state now Slovakia.

Oh, under the Catholic priest.

Under the Catholic priest Monsignor Tissot, so they attack from the south as well. And Slovakia is the only bit where there's any natural barrier, which is the Tatarus Mountains. But in the West, there is no natural barrier at all. It is just flat farmland. As it happens, it's been a very, very dry summer. The rivers have dried up. We'll maybe come to this a bit later.

So there's no mud to clog up the- Nothing.

The tanks can just... It's perfect. The tanks can just roll over the border. Now, as for the two armies, we said the Germans attacked one and a half million men. The Poles have about a million men many of them Infantry, and they have about another million reserves. But Poland is so much poorer than Germany that they are much less well-trained and less well-equipped. There's a brilliant book called The Eagle Unbound on Poland in the Second World War by Halik Khochansky, who's an Anglo-Polish historian. She points out Poland's annual defense budget was 50 times smaller than Germany's. In fact, it was only a 10th of the budget just for the Luftwaffe. That tells you how What a disadvantage they're fighting. The Germans have 15 times more armored and mechanized units than the Poles do. If you think about the air war, which is very important, the Luftwaffe have 2,000 fighters, the Poles have 300 and something, The Polish airmen, by the way, are considered some of the best in the world.

Well, because they go on to fight in the Battle of Britain, don't they?

With tremendous heroism in the Battle of Britain. But there aren't that many of them, and they don't have many planes.

Again, I know that I keep going on about this, but it seems bizarre that the country with impregnable defenses, i. E. Czechoslovakia, gives them up. Poland, that has no defenses at all, fights.

I suppose it's partly because Czechoslovakia has already been defeated, though, the Poland fights. They've already seen what happens if you don't fight, so they feel they have no choice. Anyway, within hours, it is obvious that the Poles, I mean, within hours, not days, hours, it is clear that the Poles are in real trouble because this is the first demonstration of the Germans' famous Blitzkrieg, Lightning War tactics. In the Great War, in the first World War, you had these gigantic armies advancing over a huge front that could be tens, hundreds of miles wide. The thing that the Germans do now is they concentrate their armies into these columns that move very quickly, that punch a hole through your line and then keep going, causing complete chaos.

Is this a strategy that's been formulated, or is it one that evolves in the context of the war?

I think a bit of both. So armies always have doctrines, so they will have an ideal of to do. They have a theory. But then once you put it into practice, you'll always adjust, you'll see what works.

Because the idea of speed and violence is very fascist, isn't it?

I guess. It's very fascist, exactly. Of course, it's a product of technology, of the technological change, the fact that you now have mechanized units in a way that you didn't in the first place.

But it's striking because obviously the French do not adopt this.

No.

The goal is very keen on it, but he doesn't have any leeway with that. But presumably, it's adopted by the Nazi High Command because it conforms with their sense of how a German army should be performing.

I think so. I think they're less high bound by convention, maybe, because, of course, they've rearmed more recently. They've rebuilt their army more recently.

I suppose that's also true of the Air Force, isn't it? Yes. They've had to build it from scratch. So it's that much more advanced. Exactly.

Actually, this is their other great innovation that goes hand in hand with the Blitz Creek tactics. On the first day, the Germans throw 900 bombers and 500 fighters into action. Their Air Force, which is, as you say, is knew is one of the most modern in the world. They've honed their skills, as it were in Spain, the Condor Legion. They've pretty much won the battle for the skies by day two, wiped the Polish Air Force in the skies, bombed their aerodromes. They command the heavens. Now, this thing about bombing, I think, is really important and is a very obvious difference with the First World War. We've talked a few times in this series about how commentators everywhere in Europe in the 1930s were upset dressed with bombing. The bomber will always get through. Civilians will pay the price if there's ever a future war. This is the great demonstration of bombing's potential, even more so actually than Guernica, which had previously been the most famous object lesson.

So it's in Spain, in northern Spain.

So Guernica in Spain, in the Basque country, probably, historians now think probably about 300 people died of Guernica civilians. These were greatly inflated figures at at the time. But in Poland, it's on a completely different scale. It's interesting. It's a sign of our blinkeredness, I guess, that we don't know about this, that these aren't household names in the way the Guernica is because it's Eastern Europe, so people forget about it.

Well, they get to have a great artist painting, I suppose.

That's true, of course.

So Picasso's image of it is the icon of bombing campaigns, isn't it?

It is, absolutely.

So it does stand in for everybody else who suffers from it over the course of the war.

It does. Yeah, you're absolutely right. But so no one probably or very few people listening to this podcast will have heard of a town called Wielun, which is a rural town in West Central Poland. So this was a small town hit by the Luftwaffe in the first hours of the attack on the first of September. The Luftwaffe bombed it for nine hours. They dropped 400 bombs, a total of 50,000 kilograms of explosives. They almost completely leveled the town center. The civilian death toll, I mean, there are different estimates that they go as high as about 1,200 people, so that's a 10th of the entire population. But the thing is, this was a town with no military targets in it at all.

It was just deliberately targeted to create terror.

Terror. It's the terror from the air that is the real... There's very little like this in the first World War. You have these stories, German planes that strafe refugee columns, that fire deliberately on ambulances, that bomb hospital trains. They will bomb a train And then the passengers, the train will come off the tracks. The passengers who survived were all like a... From above, they probably looked like insects flooding across the landscape. And then the planes will come back down for the kill and machine gun them as they flee. Seens like this appall even the most experienced observers of war. The head of the military mission in Poland was actually, he was an amazing character. This guy, Adrian Carton-Deviat, who had one eye and he had one arm. So like Nelson. Like Nelson. If I tell you, his Wikipedia entry begins with the words, In the First World War, it says, He was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear, was blinded in his left eye, I have two plane crashes, tunneled out a prisoner of war camp and tore off his own fingers when a doctor declined to amputate them. He said of the First World War, Frankly, I enjoyed the war.

So he's the guy who's observing all this.

So he's not a wuss.

No, he's not a wuss. This is the interesting thing. He is appalled. He says, This is not war as I understand it. Carton De Ville said, With the first deliberate bombing of civilians, I saw the very face of war change, bereft of romance. It's glory shorn, no longer the soldier setting forth into battle, but the women and children buried underneath it.

Could I just ask at this point? I know that you wrote about this and put it in your notes and then removed it because you were worried about time, but I think it should mention it because it's probably the one thing that most people listening to this episode will know about the early days of the Nazi invasion of Poland, which is a vague, inchoate sense that the romance of glory of war is upheld byby Polish lances charging panzers. This is not true. They did not do this. However, there were cavalry engagement. There's a famous cavalry engagement in the first hours of the Nazi invasion, where a group of German soldiers have moved into a forest, clearing in a forest, that Polish cavalry units see them, attack them, clear them out of the forest. And although they then get attacked by armored vehicles and machine guns, and they lose about a third of their men and horses, the rest get away. They have held up the German advance for a few hours and enable Polish forces It's a drop-back. So very heroic. And then the Germans invite international journalists to come and look at the scene of this skirmish, this battle, and there are horses with their guts ripped out and dead Polish cavalrymen.

And one of these journalists who's writing for an Italian paper, he writes it up as cavalry charging tanks. I guess it resonates because of the famous story of of the Poles arriving at the siege of Vienna in 1683. The wing to SARS. Yes, all of that. I suppose for some Poles, and certainly for foreign sympathizers, it becomes emblematic of an age of chivalry. It has been destroyed. Whereas for the Nazis, it serves as an emblem of Polish backwardness. So even Gunther Grass, you mentioned the tin drum. I mean, he describes this, the Polish cavalry, as Don Quixote, and by extension, the whole Polish state. It's interesting ambivalence, isn't it? It is a myth, Polish lances didn't charge tanks, but it obviously spoke to something that both sides in the war wanted to believe for different reasons.

Yeah, the Poles, the idea of romance, and the Germans, the idea of backwardness, I suppose. I mean, it's definitely true. The Poles had cavalry. The Nazis had cavalry as well, the Germans had cavalry.

They did, they had a lot of horses.

They did have a lot. They had a lot of horses. They took horses, of course, when they attacked the Soviet Union in 1941. And France. Yeah. It's not unreasonable to have cavalry. But at this point, the cavalry mean a lot to the Poles because of their historic traditions, and the land owning classes tend to dominate the cavalry, as as they did in Britain. But I think that by and large, they knew that they weren't stupid. They used the cavalry for reconnaissance and whatnot. There's this one incident, as you say, this very famous story, but they're not charging tanks at all. It basically It becomes an emblem of a doomed futile struggle, which suits, as you say, it has a ambiguity to it. It works in different ways, but it's probably a bit misleading. The Poles are trying to fight a modern war.

They just don't have the tools to do it. Also, it highlights the imbalance in mechanization, which is what dooms them. Exactly. Because basically, the Nazis are stress testing what they can do with tanks, what they can do with modern airplanes, As we all know, it's devastating.

Yeah. By day two, the polls are already going backwards, and a lot of their offices are already shell-shocks by just the speed and the ruthlessness of the German advance. There's a brilliant book on Poland, the Second World War, by a guy called Jan Karski, and he was a cavalry lieutenant, and he basically said it took three hours for the Panzers and the Luftwaffe between them to reduce my division to complete an utter chaos. He said, By the end of the first day, we weren't an army anymore. We were just a collection of random people stumbling pulling towards some wholly indefinite goal. Now, the one hope they have, and it's not a completely vain hope, they have powerful friends, Britain and France. I mean, Britain and France, for all that we have criticized them in the last few episodes, they are serious players, rich, powerful empires, not just industrial democracies. So it's reasonable for the polls to think, well, maybe the weight will be on our side. We outnumbered the Germans. They're fighting on two fronts. The Poles have drawn up a plan called Plan Zahod. Now this envisages, of course, the Germans will make gains in the first few days, but then we will withdraw to these defensible rivers in the center of Ireland, the Vistula, the Bug, the San, and so on.

We will hold the Germans there. Now, meanwhile, in the West, the French and the British will launch their attack on Western Germany. Hitler will have to withdraw troops, recall troops to defend the Father the lamp. That will allow us to, at worst, stabilize our lines and at best, maybe launch a counter attack. So on paper, it doesn't sound like such a terrible scheme. But the issue is, will the French and the British do their bit? Now, when the news broke that France and Britain had declared war on the third of September, there were huge crowds in Warsaw outside the embassies, people singing God Save the King and the Marseillais and stuff, very moving scenes. Two days later, on the fifth of September, the commander of the Polish Army Forces, who's a guy called Marsal Ridge-Schmigli, he says, Okay, let's put this planet into operation. They start to withdraw to the center of the country. Give up Western Poland now. They're waiting and waiting and waiting for the Allies to make their And two days later, they get the first sign, this is going to happen. The French cross into the Zahland at three points. Is this it?

Actually, do you know what? The French just stop a few miles in It's a complete shame. They don't even get to the fortified Siegfried Line, the line of German forts. They hang around for a couple of weeks, and then by early October, they go back to France.

They outnumber the German forces in the West by five to one, six to one. This is the thing.

Goebbels, in his diary, wrote, The French withdrawal is more than astonishing. It is completely incomprehensible. At the Nuremberg trials, General Jodel told the judges, he told the trial, he said the French could have taken Germany in the first weeks of the war. He said they outnumbered us in the West by five to one, and they didn't do it. And not only did they not launch a ground invasion of Germany, the Poles are begging London, please, when are the RAF going to attack the German airfields? When are they going to start hitting Germany? And they send direct messages, When are you going to do this? And the British say, We don't want to provoke German bombing raids of Britain. That's the last thing we want to do. Some British ministers notoriously said, Well, we're not going to bomb German munitions factories and things like that because that's private property. You couldn't attack people's private property. That's absolutely disgraceful. All they do is they send the RF to drop propaganda leaflets over Germany saying, You shouldn't be fighting the war. You've let yourselves down.

I'm sure we'll come to this in due course. I'm sure we will. We cover the phony war. But it is still, it's weird, isn't it? Why are they? Is it psychological reasons?

I think a lot of it is psychological. They assume the war will be long. They don't have the spirit, I think it's fair to say, for an aggressive war.

The martial order.

They don't have it. I mean, is it all psychological? Probably not all biological, but a lot of it, I think, is.

But it's so odd, isn't it? Because the Polish strategy is the best that could have been hoped for. If the Poles do survive as a military force and they're attacking in the West, then you have the pincer movement that Hitler had been so afraid of. Yeah, I know. To squander that, it just seems so odd.

Maybe some listeners will come up with some complicated reasons, some military history reason why this was actually a brilliant plan, but it just seemed to me pretty indefensible. Halik Horkhansky in her book, The Eagle Unbowed, she says, The first justification the British and the French to have is they say, Well, we don't want to do anything because it'll just provoke the Germans, even though they're at war. Then the second thing is they say, We don't want to do anything now because we're not quite ready. We're building up our forces, give it time. Then they wait a few more days and then they say, Well, there's actually no point doing anything now because Poland is going to lose anyway. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Actually, it's true. By the eighth of September, when Allied chiefs discuss this, they say, Well, that's not waste their resources. Poland is clearly going to lose anyway. Let's just wait and fight a long war in the West.

That, of course, will be in due course what the British will say about the French.

Yeah, of course. They're going to lose anyway, so there's no point in helping them. I mean, it becomes completely self-fulfilling. By the second week, Poland is still all alone. We'll just come to the end of this half by talking about the situation within Poland. What makes it really, really difficult for their army is that the roads, the fields are now completely clogged with people with untold, countless thousands of people fleeing eastwards, fleeing the German advance. Now, this is an image that, of course, will become incredibly familiar in the years to come. And they are fleeing with very good reason because they are facing an onslaught that in Europe, I would say, has not really been seen before, unprecedented, even by the standards of the First World War. The First World War was pretty murderous. But this is different because Hitler has set an unprecedented tone. Now, remember that he does not think of the Poles as fully human as the Germans are. He specifically said to Goebbels, They are more animals than human beings. They are totally dull and formless.

That's literal, isn't it? That's his scientific opinion.

Exactly. That's his scientific opinion. It's not a metaphor. He really means that. We talked last time about this meeting you had at the Eagle's Nest before Ribbentrop went to Moscow, where he briefed his generals. I said, Well, we'll talk about what he said in the afternoon next time. This is what he talked about in the afternoon. In the afternoon, he said to his generals, This will be a different war from wars we've fought before. He said, and I quote, The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth or not. When starting and waging a war, it's not right that matters but victory. Close your hearts to pity. Act brutally. Eighty million people must obtain what's their right. Their existence must be made secure. The stronger man is right, the greatest harshness. Our strength lies in our speed and our brutality. This is the analogy he chooses. Genghis Khan hunted millions of women and children to their deaths, consciously and with a joyous heart. History sees in him only the great founder of a state. I'm not actually sure that's true. I think Genghis Khan's reputation is more checkered than Hitler believes. Then he goes on to say, The aim of the war lies not in reaching particular lines, but in the physical anihalation of the enemy.

By and large, people did not say that, I would say, in the first World War. Of course, people do say brutal things, but not beforehand so starkly and so coldly. He says, So in the east, I have put my death's head formations at the ready with the command to send men, women, and children of Polish descent and language to their deaths pitilessly and remorselessly. Poland must be depopulated and settled with Germans.

The generals who are listening to this, what are they making of it?

Well, we know that at least one of them was appalled by it. A guy called General Kurt Liebman, he said he found it repulsive. The bragging and brash tone was downright repulsive. He said this was a bloke who had lost all feeling of responsibility and who, with unsurpassed wantomen, was determined to leap into the dark. This is a guy, a senior general in the Wehrmacht. This is not a pacifist speaking. Liebman said at the time he thought that a lot of other generals were quite shocked, too, and thought, this is all a bit strong. But they have sworn an oath to the Führer. Of course, when wars start, people become radicalized very quickly.

Yeah, but this is before the wars began. That's what's striking about it.

Yes, of course. That people may well have had doubts I think, Tom. I would be surprised if Liban was literally the only person at that meeting of 50 people or whatever to have any question marks in his mind.

Because the implication of depopulating Poland and settling it with Germans, the prospect of committing genocide I mean, that isn't really what soldiers sign up to, even if you're serving Hitler.

But in the context of the 1930s, after years of indoctrination, after years of listening to Hitler's speeches, fueled by a sense of resentment and victimhood, I guess you We can see how it happens. I mean, we know it happened, right? It does chime with the prejudices already held by a lot of German soldiers. We know that German officers, when they talked to their men beforehand, they gave them pep talks and they said, Come on, guys, we all know the polls are primitive. We all know they're dirty. They can't be trusted. We can't take any prisoners, all of this thing. We can see the results. In two months of the campaign, hundreds of Polish villages were burned, thousands and thousands of civilians executed. To give you example. Richard Evans, in his book, The Third Reich at War, he describes a guy called Gerhardt M, who is a stormtrooper who before the war was a fireman. He came from a place called Flensburg, which is basically Denmark. It's right on the border with Denmark. This guy Gerhardt describes how in the first day of the invasion, they were going through a Polish village and someone fired at them.

So they reacted by burning the entire village to the ground. Burning houses, weeping women, screaming children, a A picture of misery is how he described it. Gerhardt described how one woman was trying to get out of her house, and we stopped her, he said, and she burned to death. Her screaming rang in my ears long afterwards. A few days later, they got to another village, and he said, burning houses were lining our route. Out to the flames, there sounded the screams of the people who had hidden in them and weren't unable anymore to rescue themselves. It was dreadful. It's still ringing in my ears even today. But they shot at us, and so they deserve death.

That is conscience being put in the shade by fascist ideology.

I guess so, by fascist ideology, by the pressure of war. The thing is, this is in the first week of the war.

I know that soldiers who get shot at commit atrocities, but they don't justify it, I think, in the way that he is.

I think this is different from, let's say, the French troops in the Peninsula war or something. Or the Germans in Belgium in 1914. Or British soldiers in the Bur war or whatever it might be. I mean, there are so many, there are countless examples, but this has been ideologically prepared for. The Supreme Commander, the guy at the top, has briefed his people beforehand and said, kill them all. This is what What do they want to do? People did not do that before the First World War. People say brutal things in wars, and they give brutal instructions, of course. But this is of a different order, and all the historians of the Third Reich and the Second World War.

It's ideological programming, isn't it?

Exactly. Well, here's the thing, because it's not just the army that are doing it, it's also the SS. This is the really ominous thing, that in their wake are following the first Einsatzgruppen under Reinhardt-Heydrich task forces. They are sent in the wake of the army to carry out the SS's ideological vision. These are led by experienced guys who had often been in the Freikorps in the 1920s, the right-wing paramilitaries. Right from the start, they have been sent to round up to find, to execute government officials, intellectuals, officers and so on. They are killing about 200 people a day in the first week of the invasion. And Hydrik is shocked at this and says, This is far too few. We should be killing far more people. On the 20th of September, he had a meeting with General Halder, Commanding the German Army, and Heydrich said, Come on, I want to have a clear-out. Jews, Intelligencia, priesthood, aristocracy. He says, My men have got lists with 60,000 people's names on All of those 60,000 people have to go.

So decapitation.

Yeah, decapitation strategy. Now, of course, the category of people as well that jumps out at you from that is, since we know what's going to happen, are Poland's Jews. Poland has by far the largest Jewish population in Europe, about three and a half million people, which is the 10th of the population. They live in the cities by and large, so Warsaw, Woodge, Krakow, and so on. They are very identifiable.

In Nazi anti-Semitic cartoons, Jews will be portrayed wearing a distinctive style of dress, wear their beards, their hair in a distinctive way, even though most German Jews do not look like this. But in Poland, lots of Jews do. I mean, you can tell them apart from the Gentile population.

Absolutely right.

Which means that they're then sitting ducks to Germans who have been prepared to look on them with horror.

Absolutely right. They're immediately identifiable in the way they might not be in Germany, in the Reich itself. Absolutely, They live in the cities, they have distinctive clothes, they have distinctive hair. They speak Yiddish as their first language. Most Polish Jews are very poor, so they live in a part of town that's maybe a bit more run down, which, of course, then plays into the Nazi stereotype again. Now, we don't need to massively dwell on this because it's so horrific, but we know that right from the very beginning, and it's not just the SS, it's ordinary German soldiers as well. As they pass through towns, they will go into the Jewish areas, they will round people up, they will shoot randomly into houses, they will mutilate people, they will humiliate the women and children, they will do all these kinds of things. There are horrific scenes from the outset. There is no question about where this is ultimately all leading. In Kershore in his biography of Hitler, he identifies in the first week of September 1939 is the point where they cross that moral line. He calls Tom, the Nazi Rubicon, the moment they really crossed the line.

So moral rubicon.

Yeah, moral Rubicon. It's up to this point, Hitler has done terrible, terrible things within Germany. But by and large, not always, of course, but by and large, there has been a pathetic, flimsy legal framework like the Nuremberg laws. Colossal quantities of people have not been murdered at this point, as in hundreds of thousands of people. But from this point, they are clearly envisaging killing gigantic numbers of people. As he says, this is not yet genocide. It is not yet the all-out genocide that you see when they go into Russia in 1941. But, and I quote, it had near genocidal traits. It was the training ground for what was to follow.

It is the neo-Darwinian, social Darwinian nightmare of how nature functions, untrammled by moral considerations, it is the predation of the strong upon the weak.

Yes, and not all German officers are comfortable with it. There's a guy called Colonel General Johannes Blaskowitz, who is a Wehrmacht Commander in Poland. Two months into this, so in November 1939, he wrote a report, and he said, I'm absolutely appalled by what we've done. By the animal and pathological instincts of the SS, he said, We have murdered tens of thousands of Jews and Polish civilians. He said, If we don't bring the SS under control now, remember, this is just two months into the Second World War, there will be an immeasurable brutalisation and moral debacement. His superiors, they thought, this bloke's lost his marbles. They basically buried his report. He persisted. Hitler was told about it, and Hitler just said very contempluously, you can't wage war with salvation army methods. And Blaskowits was the only senior commander who wasn't promoted after the conquest of Poland. He basically denied promotion. He was brought back later on, but his career stalled. Actually, he ended up taking his own life at the Nuremberg trials, and he was going to be acquitted. He was put on trial at Nuremberg, and he jumped out of a window, killed himself. The judges and everybody were very surprised because they said, not only were we going to acquit him, we were going to say he was how the German army should have behaved.

But he was clearly He's so traumatized by guilt and wanner. Anyway, back to the narrative. All the time, the Germans are grinding eastwards. On the seventh of September, the Poles moved their high command to the far east of the country, to Brest, because they realize that Warsaw is next in the firing line. Their communications network has fallen apart. Their defensive plan is in a complete and utter mess. The next day, the eighth of September, the German Panzers reach the outskirts of Warsaw.

Okay, well, let's take a break there with the German army approaching the Polish capital. In the second half, we will see what ensues.

Hi, it's Cathy K here from the Rest is Politics US. We felt at this time, as America is heading into the Trump administration, that we should look back on one of the darkest moments in recent American history. We have done just that with a series on Trump's insurrection and his attempts back in 2020 to steal the from Joe Biden.

There was an incitement of an insurrection. They stormed the Capitol. They literally have senators running for their lives. We break it down. We give an hour by hour of all the incidents, the fences smashing, the windows breaking, gunshots firing, Trump supporters smoking joints in Statutory Hall.

Just imagine the bedlum.

And incredibly, some of these people are going to be pardoned by Mr. Trump. And so January sixth. I've never told Katie K this, but January sixth is my birthday. Okay, tune in and listen.

Yeah, that's not the only extraordinary thing about the date of January the sixth, however. I mean, this is why this story in this series is so important and so gripping, because so many of these characters are coming back with us today. And so much has been forgiven and swept under the carpet, and America decided in the election last year that they were going to reinstate Donald Trump. With that, there really is no better time to take a look at these events.

To hear more, just search the rest of politics US, wherever you get your podcast, hear a from this mini-series at the end of this week's episode.

Hello, welcome back to The Rest is History, and we're listening to the invasion, the conquest the rape of Poland and Dominic. The Germans have reached the outskirts of Warsaw. How does the city respond?

Heroically, I think Tom, in a word, we heard from the mayor, Stefan Starcinski, at the very beginning. He musters the population of the city to dig anti-tank ditches and to put up barricades and all this stuff. They actually do hold off the first German attack. The Germans surround, they then surround the city with infantry and with Panzers. Hitler says, We will starve and bomb and pummel it into mission. The polls asked the Germans, they sent a message saying, Can we at least evacuate our civilian population? The Germans said, No, no way. On the 10th of September, Warsaw became the first capital in Europe to be subjected to endless bombing raids. We'll come to them in a second. The city held out for another week.

But meanwhile, there is a devastating twist coming, isn't there, which was being prepared in our previous episode. It won't become as a total surprise to our listeners what now happens.

But it does come as a surprise to the Poles because the Poles, of course, don't know what was decided in Moscow. Stalin has been biding his time for two weeks. He's been distracted because the Red Army has actually been fighting the Japanese in the Far East, a place called Khalkin Gol in Mongolia, not really reported in the West at all, but very important in the long run because it actually persuades the Japanese to switch their attention from fighting the Russians to fighting for the south in Asia. Anyway, when that's all over, on the morning of the 17th of September, Molotov, his foreign minister, calls the Polish ambassador in Moscow and says to him, Poland has clearly disintegrated. Poland is dead. Poland is full of our Ukrainian and Belarusian kith and kin, and we feel honorbound to protect them, and therefore we're sending in the Red Army. This is a very familiar argument to the Poles as Halik Cechansky says in her book, it's the same argument the Russians had used in 1795 to justify the third partition of Poland. So the Polish ambassador things are, here we go. Here we go again. Yeah. Exactly. The Red Army crossed the border immediately.

Almost 40 divisions in total coming from Belarus and Ukraine. The Poles were staggered. The Poles didn't know how to react. Are they coming to help us? Are they coming to attack us? Even many Soviet soldiers themselves were actually not sure which shade is Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Are we the goodies?

Are we the baddies? Yeah.

What side they're on? The Polish commander said to them, Don't resist. It's pointless. Fall back. Actually, at this point, the Polish commander said to their army, We need to actually get out of Poland to save the army. So they start to retreat south towards the Romanian border. The British and the French are staggered by this.

So they had no inkling that it was coming.

They didn't. They didn't know it was coming at all.

The fabled British spy service.

It has It has not covered itself in glory. Do you know who really lets himself down here, Tom? Somebody who you know I don't hold in high regard. This will not go down well with our Welsh listeners. It's David Lloyd George. Lloyd George had never been a friend of Poland. Going right back to the 1920s, he's basically He opposed Poland at every point. Lloyd George wrote an article in the Sunday Express, later the home of AJP Taylor, saying the Soviet Union is completely within its rights. It's completely reasonable for the Soviet Union to take its historic lands in Eastern Poland. I think this is really, really poor stuff from Lloyd George.

Well, Lloyd George is one of the guys who's being, I mean, in due course, he'll be lined up as a potential Marshall Pétin, won't he?

Métal Pétin, yeah. I know some people love Lloyd George, but I think he's a terrible man. Because most people in Britain were just so appalled by Stalin's behavior. Chamberlain talked in the comments of his horror. His Assistant Private Secretary, Joc Colville, wrote in his diary, said it was an act of unparalleled greed and immorality. The Soviet justification, the most revolting document in modern history. But of course, what are they going to do? The answer is nothing. If they haven't done anything against Germany, they're hardly going to intervene against the Soviet Union. For the Poles, this is really the death knell. Their leadership flees into Romania. Later, that seems very controversial. Their capital is still holding out. Why have they fled to Romania? I guess they're damned if they do, damned if they don't, really. Now the dictators are free to carve up Poland between them. The 19th of September, two days later, Hitler entered Danzig in triumph.

Usual scenes.

Yeah. Flowers, Nazi salutes. He spent a week at a hotel, the Casino Hotel. We know that Hitler loves the hotel.

Does it have a spa?

Probably does have a spa. It's a seaside resort called Sopop, which is just outside Kodansk. And he took twice, took flights to Warsaw to watch the bombing of Warsaw at first-hand. And he loved it. Kershaw describes in his biography how much Hitler enjoyed. He loved war, and he loved watching it.

Well, he must have felt like a God on Balhalla, sweeping over the scene of devastating battle or something.

An analogy that he would have enjoyed, I'm sorry to say. What's happening to Warsaw is at this point, I think it's fair to say, unprecedented European history. Of course, there have been bombings in Spain, but not of a capital city on a scale like this. The city is being pounded by artillery every day, endless incendiary bombs from the skies, Stukas, swoping overhead, machine gunning people. Almost all of the city's hospitals have been demolished or on fire. There's no electricity. Lots of places, there's no water. The streets are full of bodies, dead horses and rubble. And the most common comparison, people say, This is how I thought the end of the world would be. This is the only thing that can possibly spring to mind. To mark Hitler's second flight on the 25th of September, the Luftwaffe really turned the screw. They sent wave after wave of bombers, just indiscipline discriminately hitting apartment blocks, schools, hospitals. At the end, there was so much fire, so much smoke that they basically had to call off the attack because they couldn't see what they were doing. It were just clouds and clouds of black smoke. Most people at this stage had run out of food, Hundreds and hundreds of people are trapped in the ruins of these buildings.

If you want to get a sense of it, I mean, why would you? But if you do, there's a brilliant documentary film, very short film called Siege, by an American photographer, Julian Brian, who was basically the last Western journalist in Warsaw. When you go to the museums in Gdańsk and in Warsaw, they've always got this playing, and it's extraordinarily harrowing. I'll just read one eye-witness account to give you a sense of the novelty of it, because that's That's the important thing. It's the scene that we're used to now from wartime footage, but the time was the first time it had happened. This is from a guy called General Stanisław-Sosobowski. Now, he actually ended up at Arnhem, a bridge too far. Do you know what? He was played by Jean Hackman in the film.

Goodness.

Imagine Jean Hackman telling you this.

I was not expecting Jean Hackman to make it.

No, it was always great to get him into the show. He said, I had seen death and destruction in many forms, but never had I seen such mass destruction which hit everyone regardless of or guilt. Gone were the proud buildings of churches, museums, and art galleries. Statues of famous men who fought for our freedom lay smashed to pieces at the basis of their plinths, or stood decapitated and shell-scarred. The parks created for their beauty and for the happy sounds of laughing, playing children were empty and torn, the lawns dotted with the bare mounds of hurried graves. Almost the only noise was the rumble of bricks as walls weakened by bombs finally subsided. The smell of burning houses is pillared into a windless sky and the smell of putrefaction lingered in the nostrils. If you juxtapose that with the reading that we began the episode with, one of them is Warsaw's glory and the other is a much more unsentimental This is actually the reality of what it's like in the streets. Also finally, surrender on the afternoon, the 27th. Its soldiers who defended it, 100,000 people were led to POW camps. The Nazi vengeance inevitably fell the city's Jewish population.

That was a third of the population, about 350,000 people. Their shops and houses looted. People are beaten up or killed in the streets. Women humiliated, stripped, raped, all this thing. I mean, it's a horrendous, horrendous scene. The news of Poland's defeat back in Germany, there was no triumph, actually. There was no victory parade because, of course, the war wasn't over. They're still technically fighting Britain and France. Actually, the people who were in Berlin, they said, nothing's really changed. There's a bit of rationing, but otherwise nothing has changed. William Shira, the American journalist who've quoted a fair bit, he said, For most people, the war was something they just read about in the newspapers. It was unreal. He has an amazing description of being on the subway, and loads of women late at night get on at the Opera House. He's struck by the incongruity of the fact they're all nattering about the opera they've just seen. He knows that at the time German bombs are falling on Warsaw, and they don't mention it at all. He said, I doubt if anything short of an awful bombing or years of semi-starvation will bring home the war to the people here, which is, of course, very prescient because that is what will come to Berlin.

A week later, or nine days later, 20th of September, he described how he hadn't met anybody who thought there was anything wrong with what the Germans were doing in Poland.

Do they know what's happening in Poland, though?

They know they're fighting a war.

But they don't know the full scale of what's being visited on the Poles.

They don't know the scale of it, but people, I guess, eventually, word will filter back. I mean, this is a huge question in and of itself, of course, isn't it, Tom? It should be a whole podcast. How much did the ordinary German people know about what was being done in their name?

But I'm just wondering whether Nazi propaganda celebrates what's being done in Poland or whether it keeps quiet about it?

I think obviously it disguises a huge amount of what they're doing. I mean, they're not saying we're bombing hospitals, we've set schools on fire, we've burned people alive in their villages. I mean, they're definitely not doing that. So yes, And reasonably, you can say they don't know about that, but even so, they're pummeling war so into submission. People are gathering in shops to look at maps and they'll follow the course of their army and watch them with the pins. Exactly. And Shira says, as long as the Germans are successful and do not have to pull in their belt too much, this will not be an unpopular war. Let's just end by talking about what this all meant for Poland, a huge subject, so we can only scratch the surface. Poland at the end of this war, which basically the whole thing is done and dusted in a month and a half in total, mopping up in the countryside. It's been completely ravaged on a scale, I think unimaginable at any previous point in human history because particularly of the air campaign. Probably 66,000 Polish soldiers were dead. Civilian deaths, impossible to say. Maybe 100,000, maybe 200,000, maybe fewer.

It's hard to say. What happened to Poland, there was a lot of dithering about what the Nazis and the Russians would do. But in the end, Western Poland was annexed by the Reich. Stalin, that's about 10 million people. Stalin took the Eastern bit, so that's about 13 million people. And that was given to the Republic of Belarus and Ukraine, where it remains today. We will hear next time, in Thursday's episode, about what happens in Stalin's bit of Poland, the killings of tens of thousands of professional people and officers and so on, the people put in prison camps, and in particular, the one and a half people who are put into cattle trucks and then are deported to Kazakhstan or to Siberia. These are people, I mean, it's not just anybody who's a professional person who's in the army, who owns land or anything like that, but even Stalin deported people who, if you spoke Esperanto, if you collected stamps, if you had cosmopolitan tendencies, a sense of sophistication and integration into European culture, you were out, you were off. Yes, that left a rump bit of Poland and the south and the center around Warsaw and Krakow, which had about 11 million people.

There was some talk, we have a rump state, and they said, basically, no, we just leave this as a weird appendage, semi legal colony called the General Government. It was ruled by Hans Frank, the Nazi lawyer. This, the General Government, becomes the location for some of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust. If the big camp Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Belzek are all in the general government. In these areas, Polishness is... They attempt to eradicate Polishness itself. They shut down all the schools, the universities, the libraries, the museums, Polish music is banned, Chopin is banned.

They abolish Polish names, don't they? The town of Osvichien becomes Auschwitz.

Auschwitz, exactly. National monuments are blown up, teachers are murdered, all of this thing. In the first three months of the year, the SS and the German militias of various kinds probably murdered, I don't know, 65, 70,000 people, priests, intellectuals, professional people. But also it's not just working through their lists. They're also killing people almost at random. I'll give you a tiny example. It's just one small example that could stand for so many. There's a town called Godinier in the north called Obouja. There, one day, somebody smashed a window at the German police station, and the SS knew it was someone from the school. They rounded up 50 boys in the school and said, Who did it? These boys, teenage boys, they refused to give up the culprit. The SS called these boys' parents and said, We want you to beat up your own children, to beat them in front of the local church. The parents said, But we're not going to beat our own children. So the SS said, Great, well, we'll do it then. They beat these boys with their rifle butts and then shot and killed 10 of them. And they left their bodies lying in front of the church the whole of the next day as a lesson to the people of the village.

That story is just one among countless stories of the random brutality that would become the norm in Nazi occupied Poland.

Which is effectively as close to hell on Earth as you would get in European history.

I think it's fair to say. If there's one place you don't want to be in all European history, it's Poland between 1939 and 1945, especially Especially if you're Jewish. Because with the division of Poland, of those three and a half million Jews, two million of them immediately have fallen into the hands of the Nazis. Now, even before the fall of Warsaw, Hitler is thinking about what to do with this population He says, Why don't we put everybody into the general government, into this weird colony that we've got centered on Warsaw and Krakow? Even at this point, Hydrik from the SS is saying, We'll corral these people in the general government, but this is just a step towards what Hydrik calls the final aim. At this point, it's not clear what that will be. Maybe putting these people in a reservation somewhere further east? Unclear. But even at this point, just to end with this, there are hints of a much darker outcome. That autumn, Goebbels went to visit a ghetto in Woodge, where a lot of Polish Jews lived, and he was shocked at what he saw. He said, These aren't human beings. These are animals.

He said, So our task is not the humanitarian one, Goebbel said, it's a surgical task. We have to take steps and really radical steps because otherwise Europe will perish through the Jewish disease. And a month later, he had a chat with Hitler, and Hitler said to him, We're going to have to turn to this Jewish and Polish question very soon because, he said, If we're not careful in a few generations, it will reappear to haunt us. We have to be clear about There is no panacea. We have to take radical measures. I quote, The Jewish danger must be banished from us. Tom, I think everybody listening to this will know where that particular story is heading.

Absolutely. Dominic, thanks. I mean, that was a brutal, harrowing, terrifying episode. That ends our account of the Nazi invasion of Poland. But we are not going to leave this story completely. We have an episode that is a coder to the conquest of Poland, but it's also a palate cleanser. It's a story that takes us into the dark heart of Poland's fate in the Second World War. But I think it also offers perhaps a sense of hope and redemption because amazingly, it features at its heart the story of a bear, and we will be back with that on Thursday. The story of Wojtek, a bear that is very well known in Poland, Dominic, and should, I think, be better known here. So you can hear that episode on Thursday. But for now, goodbye. Bye-bye.

Here is that clip from our mini-series on Trump's insurrection.

These senators are being ushered out through a very narrow corridor and one of them says, We were 20 feet away from the rioters. If the rioters had just looked the other way and seen that a whole bunch of senators were coming out, who knows what would have happened? Who knows what could have happened to Mike Pence? I think it is important to point out that Donald Trump was getting these reports and did not care. The Senate has been evacuated at 2:18 PM. Nancy Pelosi is also pulled out of her chair by the Capitol Police and taken off the podium and taken to a safe location at Fort McNair in Southwest Washington. She originally tried to stay. She didn't want to leave the building, but because of security, she had to get out of there. One of the Democratic members of the Congress at this point, as they realized that the riot are starting to breach their area, one of the members, Democratic members of the Congress, yells down to the Republicans, This is because of you. The members are getting texts. This is how they know that things are bad. Because they're getting texts from their family saying, What are you doing there?

Why haven't you left? Are you safe? But they haven't got a television. They're not watching it. They're trying to get on with the business of the day. It's this surreal. I keep thinking how surreal it was that inside the chambers, they're trying to do business as usual, and feet away, the rioters are there saying that they want to have some of these people hung and that they want to overturn the election result. Then a few minutes after that, the house floor is evacuated, literally in front of the rioters. The police manage again to secure a very narrow passageway through the rioters to get them out. One member afterwards says, I could look in the eyes of those officers and I saw the fear. They knew that the officers were outnumbered.

To hear more, search the RestesPolitics US wherever you get your podcast.