Blitzkrieg Unleashed: The German Invasion of Poland 1939
320
Blitzkrieg Unleashed: The German Invasion of Poland 1939
320eBook
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Overview
At dawn on Friday, September 1, 1939, the Germans launched their land, sea, and air assault on Poland—and the world became aware of the awesome power of Hitler’s Third Reich and the limitless and ruthless nature of his ambition.
The Blitzkrieg (Lightning War) attack, spearheaded by panzers, took the German forces to the gates of Warsaw in a week. The vital port of Danzig fell, crushed by naval and air bombardment and land assaults. The Polish Air Force, outnumbered and outgunned, was driven from the skies. In a month, Warsaw fell amid great bloodshed—and in six weeks, the Poles were defeated.
The speed of the German conquest was matched by its brutality. Lives and property meant little to the invaders, and civilians and POWs were summarily executed. Jews received particular attention and these atrocities were not just perpetrated by the SS but by soldiers of the Wehrmacht. Blitzkrieg Unleashed is told in the words of those who conquered Poland, based on the author’s research into letters, diaries, unpublished accounts, official documents and histories, and newspapers of the time.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781781598382 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pen & Sword Books Limited |
| Publication date: | 10/17/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 895,024 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A Certain Foreboding
We will inevitably have a war with Germany.
– JOZEF PILSUDSKI
IN GENEVA'S great Salle de la Réformation, the clang of Paul Hymans' bell silenced the chatter of forty-one nations. It was ten minutes before mid-day on Monday, 15 November, 1920. It was time to call the first session of the new court of world opinion, the League of Nations, to order. Britain's delegates had spent the morning in the church of the Holy Trinity praying for the future of the new assembly. The Swiss had marched through the city's streets bearing the flags of every nation – save the three defeated Central Powers. Expectations and hopes were high. The world looked to these men in Geneva to shape a better world. Hymans, the Belgian president of this new council, was more cautious. 'We are far from believing that we are going to change the world with the wave of a wand. The world changes slowly – and men change most slowly of all.'
Some 800 miles to the northeast, British Army officer Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Lisle Strutt prepared to hand the great Baltic city of Danzig into the care of the League. He too had high hopes. 'May Danzig and Poland serve as an example for Eastern Europe,' he pleaded. 'May both nations live happily and contentedly, grow and prosper through mutual support, trust and friendship.' Such hopes would be shattered. German and Polish hatred was too deeply rooted to allow the nations to live amicably side-by-side.
Danzig was born in the dying years of the first millennium. It was the Poles, not the Germans, who gave birth to Gyddanyzc as a fortress at the point where the Vistula met the Baltic. As the port grew as a centre of trade, so Germans came to Kdansk, Gdanzc, Dantzk, Dantzig, Dantzigk, Dantzike, as it was known variously. German influence turned to German rule in 1308 under the Teutonic Knights, whose control over Danzig lasted for 150 years. When Danzigers rebelled against the knights, they sought the protection of the Polish kingdom. For more than three centuries the city flourished as a semi-independent state under the Poles. The tongue of Danzigers was German, but most of their business was with the Poles as the port became a great outlet for Poland's wares and a great inlet for its imports. But with the partition of Poland at the end of the 18th Century, Danzig became German once more, first under Prussian rule, then under the united German Empire. From then until the outbreak of the Great War, Danzig boomed. Its population doubled as it became one of the centres of German shipbuilding while the port handled thousands of tons of coal, iron, coffee and fish. But that success as a port made Danzig the obvious choice for the new Polish state to gain 'access to the sea' as the Allied leaders re-drew the map of Europe in Paris. Danzigers were horrified. 'Our historic Hanseatic city of Danzig was born and has grown as a result of German culture, it is German to the core,' fumed the city's mayor, Dr Bail. 'We want to remain German forever.' Poles, however, regarded the port as 'indispensable'. The reborn nation needed 'its window on the sea', its negotiator in Paris pleaded. The Allied leaders decided neither for Warsaw nor Berlin. They decided that Danzig should be a free city. It suited neither Pole nor German.
The Free City of Danzig actually encompassed more than just the port itself. Its coast stretched for more than thirty miles from the spa resort of Zoppot to the Frisches Haff lagoon. To the south, it almost reached as far as Dirschau where rail and road spanned the Vistula. In all 760 square miles of land, home to more than 350,000 people – forty-nine in every fifty of them Germans – inhabiting 300 towns, villages and hamlets. The city enjoyed its own currency, its own flag, its own stamps, its own anthem – Für Danzig, For Danzig. Poles and Danzigers shared control of the railways, the port, the customs offices.
Losing Danzig alone gnawed at the nerves of German nationalism. But 'access to the sea' demanded more than just a port. It demanded a strip of land linking the coast with the hinterland, a 'corridor' – a corridor which would separate the heart of the Reich from the province of East Prussia. Germany seethed again. But unlike Danzig, the towns of the Polish Corridor, as it would come to be known, were Polish, not German. In none did Germans outnumbered Poles. In fact, in most towns in the corridor, Germans constituted barely a quarter of the populace. Percentages mattered little to the average German, however. The loss of 'German' soil, the amputation of East Prussia, the fact that more than one million fellow Germans were living under Polish rule – all were seen as a potential time bomb. Danzig and the corridor would plunge the world into another conflagration one day, warned novelist H G Wells in his prophetic The Shape of Things to Come. 'That corridor fretted it as nothing else in the peace settlement had fretted it. There were many other bitter memories and grievances, but this was so intimate, so close to Berlin, that it obsessed all German life.'
Danzig and the Corridor were powder kegs for the future. The industrial region of Upper Silesia was already a flashpoint. Part of Prussia and subsequently the Second Reich, like the Corridor it had stubbornly refused to be 'Germanised'. The Polish tongue was still more prevalent than the German in the first years of the 20th Century. That was hardly surprising: two out of every three inhabitants of Upper Silesia were Poles. They did the work the Germans would not. They worked in the steel mills, in the mines, they toiled in Silesia's factories. They ensured the Upper Silesian basin became one of the powerhouses of Germany. And for that reason Germany was determined to hold on to Upper Silesia: it was responsible for a quarter of all its coal, eighty per cent of its zinc, one third of its lead. When the Allies threatened to hand the region to the Poles, so vehement were German protests that they procrastinated and proposed a plebiscite instead.
Upper Silesia's Polish population were not prepared to wait that long. In August 1919, a general strike turned into a widespread uprising. It lasted only a week. More than 20,000 German soldiers were dispatched to put it down – which they did, brutally. As many as 2,500 Poles were executed in the aftermath of the revolt. Exactly a year later, a German-language newspaper celebrated Warsaw's capture by the Red Army as war raged between Poland and the Soviet Union. Silesia's Germans celebrated: Poland's rebirth would be short-lived. But the report was false. The Poles revolted once again. It took a month before the insurrection was quelled – this time by Allied troops acting as peacekeepers.
Such unrest made a vote on Upper Silesia's future impossible. Only in March 1921 were Silesians able to go to the polls. Nearly 1.2 million people cast their votes. Fewer than 500,000 of them voted to secede from Germany; over 700,000 wanted to remain in the Reich – a mandate bolstered thanks to 190,000 Silesian-born Germans who had moved away from the region who were enticed to return by a very effective propaganda campaign. After six weeks of tension, Upper Silesia exploded again. The third uprising was the largest, longest and most brutal. Some 70,000 Polish 'volunteers' seized eastern Upper Silesia. And in response some 25,000 Freikorps 'volunteers' marched against the Poles. In pitched battles, notably on the dominating heights of Annaberg 1,000ft above the right bank of the Oder forty miles northwest of Katowice, the Freikorps prevailed. The Allies intervened before the German troops could press home their advantage, finally forcing an uneasy peace upon Upper Silesia in the summer of 1921. The League of Nations ruled on the region's fate that autumn. Their decision pleased neither German nor Pole. Most of the land fell to the Germans as did most of the populace. But most of the industry and most of the raw materials, including three out of every four coal mines, became part of the new Polish republic. The Germans of Upper Silesia were livid at the loss of their industrial base. The Poles of Upper Silesia still living under German rule would smoulder for two decades. In time, Adolf Hitler would exploit their simmering hatred to justify his war.
By the time the borders of Silesia were fixed, the frontiers of the new Polish republic were beginning to solidify. It was a nation born into a world of enemies. 'From the first moments of its existence, envious hands were stretched towards the new Poland,' observed the country's leader Jozef Pilsudski. Carved out of lands previously occupied by the empires of Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany, Poland was surrounded by nations old and new which were at best cool, at worst downright hostile towards the republic, save for Romania and Latvia. In the East, there were eighteen months of battle with the Red Army, crowned by a decisive victory in front of Warsaw, before the eastern frontier with Russia was settled.
Moscow was no more satisfied with its new border with Poland than Berlin was. Hans von Seeckt knew it. To Germans and Russians, Poland's existence, the monocled head of Germany's armed forces wrote, was 'intolerable'. One day, Seeckt predicted, Russia and Germany would join hands to crush Poland. That was a day Hans von Seeckt yearned for. His armed forces, the Reichswehr, were just 100,000 men strong in the wake of Versailles. They possessed no aircraft. No tanks. No battleships. No U-boats. The German Army of the early 1920s could achieve nothing. In war, its seven divisions would exhaust their ammunition in barely an hour. But the wily von Seeckt was thinking not of today, but of tomorrow. 'History has shown us that in the lives of nations one must be the hammer or the anvil, that the strong always destroy the weak, and that every nation reaches for the sword when the most important and last assets are at stake,' he told an audience in Hamburg in February 1920. 'New, bloody conflicts, perhaps on an even greater scale, are already looming on the horizon, and this so-called peace treaty holds fresh disasters – like Pandora's box – which can only be dealt with by blood and iron.'
Hans von Seeckt's Germany not only lacked the means for war, it lacked the will for war. But one day – and that day was coming – 'the foolish cry: "No more war!"' would be drowned out. The German Volk, Seeckt's senior operations officer Joachim von Stülpnagel told fellow officers in February 1924, realised 'that a nation without its own weapons in this age of sabre rattling is merely a pawn of another nation, but also that the Diktat of Versailles was merely the end of one phase of the war which will be followed by a new phase of the war waged with the utmost ferocity, whose objective is the end of Germany, the destruction of its independent political, economic and cultural identity.' Stülpnagel continued:
We see Germany, our Fatherland, with its fruitful plains and wooded mountains, the silvery ribbons of its rivers, Germany, the country of poets and thinkers, the country with a varied, yet still proud history. Today this land is occupied by the enemy, vast areas are plundered by him.
Amid a whole host of thoughts and questions, confusing and depressing, the historical responsibility of liberation of our land looms in front of us, something which we have to prepare for and, God willing, will be called to carry out.
1924 was not the year for that liberation. Neither people nor army were ready. But they would be. 'It was no different for the men of the Wars of Independence,' the Oberstleutnant added. 'I cannot conclude any better than with the words of Gneisenau from 1808: "A certain foreboding tells me that the day of the revenge will come – and that all our efforts should be directed to the possibility of this day arising." It is the greatest thing we can achieve: the freedom of the German people.'
Seeckt and Stülpnagel were surrounded by like-minded men. 'We must see to it that the shameful peace is not enforced, that our proud Army does not vanish, than an attempt is at least made to save its honour,' Hauptmann Heinz Guderian wrote to his wife. 'You know the Wacht am Rhein and the old Prussian March: "As long as a drop of blood still flows, a fist will brandish the sword ..."' He did not know it yet, but Heinz Guderian would re-fashion that sword.
The clouds hung low over the Masurian Lakes which peppered East Prussia. Only a forest of flags added colour to the occasion – black banners adorned with the skull and cross bones, the Imperial battle ensign, a few standards of the growing National Socialist movement, carried by men dressed in feldgrau jackets. Towering above them was a vast castle-like structure, its twenty-foot-high red brick ramparts linking eight imposing square turrets. Here, on the edge of the small provincial town of Hohenstein on a gloomy late summer Sunday in 1927, 80,000 Germans commemorated their greatest victory of the Great War. Here, three years in the making, was the Tannenberg Denkmal, the Tannenberg memorial, built half a dozen miles from Tannenberg itself.
But then Tannenberg was a battle named not for its location but for its historical resonance – to erase five centuries of German shame. Tannenberg was 'a word pregnant with painful recollections for German chivalry, a Slav cry of triumph'. For here, in 1410, the Teutonic Knights, the crusaders who carried German colonialists, German customs, and German rules into the lands of the Poles and Lithuanians, were crushed by an army of Slavs. Twice the Teutonic Knights had erected memorials on this battlefield. Twice the Slavs had destroyed them. Tannenberg cast a shadow upon the German soul for the next 504 years until the dying days of August 1914. Once again an army from the east and an army from the west collided in the forests of East Prussia. And when it was over, this time the army from the west was triumphant: 30,000 Russian dead or wounded littered the battlefield; another 90,000 marched into captivity. As the victorious German generals composed their report for their Kaiser, they sought a name for the battle they had just won. They chose the name of the village where they headquarters were: Frögenau. A junior staff officer interjected. Poring over the maps of East Prussia, he spied the name of Tannenberg. It was, he suggested, 'an historic name'. His masters agreed.
Now, thirteen years after the battle, its victor Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg led veterans in an act of commemoration as the memorial was dedicated. The strains of the soldiers' hymn Ich hatt' einen Kameraden drifted across the fields in front of the monument. Two hundred and forty trombones sounded a fanfare in unison as the elderly Field Marshal entered the sprawling inner courtyard of the monument, where a makeshift altar had been erected. Generals and veterans laid wreaths and then the men filed past Hindenburg for almost two hours. Tannenberg had made Hindenburg rather more than Hindenburg had made Tannenberg; his staff and his front-line commanders had largely determined the course of the battle. But Paul von Hindenburg, a few days shy of his eightieth birthday, understood the power of Tannenberg. 'A Volk who won a Tannenberg cannot go under as long as it knows how to safeguard the spirit which imbued its ranks that day,' he declared. The war of 1914 was not the fault of Germany. 'Not envy, hatred or lust for conquest thrust weapons into our hands. Rather, war was our last resort, a way of asserting ourselves against a world of enemies which demanded the gravest sacrifices. We set off in defence of our Fatherland with pure hearts, and the German Volk wielded the sword with clean hands.' Hindenburg hoped that this monument would unite his fellow Germans. 'May it be a place which all hands reach out for, which imbues love for the Fatherland, and where German honour surpasses everything!'
Each year 50,000 Germans made the pilgrimage each to demonstrate their love for the Fatherland. But the Tannenberg memorial was more than just a monument to Germany's war dead. Even at its dedication, guests were welcomed to a land 'surrounded by Slavs'. And so the Denkmal served as a rallying point for the nationalist cause. It inextricably bound the battles of 1410 and 1914 as one, Erich Maschke, an expert on the German East at the University of Jena, explained. They shared a common battlefield, yes. But, crucially, they shared a common foe. 'Both revolved around the struggle for the freedom of German soil against a numerically superior enemy, against a threat from a world whose blood and customs were alien and hostile; across five centuries the defence of German soil as well as safeguarding Europe from the forces of the steppe were united.' Vergeßt den Deutschen Osten nicht – Do not forget the German East – cried souvenir postcards featuring the monument. And how could they forget the German East? Anyone from the Reich visiting the memorial had to cross the Corridor to reach it. Each August veterans groups and the German Right gathered at the monument. They commemorated the dead, but they celebrated a victory over Germany's traditional foe. 'Without Tannenberg,' they proclaimed, 'Germany's border markers in the East would probably stand on the Oder.'
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Blitzkrieg Unleashed"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Richard Hargreaves.
Excerpted by permission of Pen and Sword Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Page,
Abbreviations Used in References,
Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
Prologue: The Polish Danger is Greater than Ever,
CHAPTER ONE - A Certain Foreboding,
CHAPTER TWO - One Hundred Powder Kegs,
CHAPTER THREE - Is It War or Peace?,
CHAPTER FOUR - A Very Beautiful September Day is Beginning,
CHAPTER FIVE - Pluck the Enemy Capital Like a Ripe Fruit,
CHAPTER SIX - Much Blood has Flowed,
CHAPTERSEVEN - The Lord Struck Them Down With Man, Steed and Wagon,
CHAPTER EIGHT - The Edelweiss Becomes the Scourge of the Enemy,
CHAPTER NINE - Putting Death to the Test,
CHAPTER TEN - Shoot Them to the Last Pole,
CHAPTER ELEVEN - A Boiling Kettle of Fire and Blood,
CHAPTER TWELVE - A Chain of Tragedies,
Epilogue: It Is God's Will For Us To Live,
Advance in Poland,
Appendix,
Maps,
Bibliography,
Index,