One POLAND REJECTS PEACE! POLISH ATTACKS ON THE REICH!! RADIO GLEIWITZ OCCUPIED! Headlines in the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger , a popular Berlin newspaper, September 1, 1939 These were complete lies. The beginning of World War II began as a deadly theatrical performance staged by the SS. Hitler wanted to invade Poland, so an excuse had to be invented. Poles were cast as the aggressors. On the night of August 31, in an operation named "Grandmother Died," the Gleiwitz radio station on the German side of the Polish border was "attacked" by German agents disguised in Polish uniforms. A brief anti-German message was broadcast in Polish. To make the imaginary act of Polish aggression seem more plausible, the corpses of a few "Polish" attackers were left on the site. They were in fact murdered concentration camp prisoners dressed up as Poles.
Similar deceptions were staged at other places along the Polish-German border, an area where Polish-and German-speaking populations had been at home for centuries, not always amicably. In a place named Hochlinden, not far from Gleiwitz, a German customs post was attacked on the same night by a number of men in Polish army uniforms. (They also sported heavy beards and sideburns, to make them look more "Polish"-in German eyes, that is.) A show was made of repulsing the attack by men dressed up as German border guards. All of them were Nazi commandos. Again, a few unfortunate concentration camp prisoners were forced to play their roles as Polish soldiers killed in the make-believe skirmish. Photographs of the murdered men were sent to Berlin as evidence of Polish belligerence. At ten o''clock, on the following night, Hitler, dressed in the grayish-green uniform of the German army, the Wehrmacht, made a speech to members of the Reichstag, a rubber-stamp parliament now hastily assembled in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin''s Tiergarten district.
Since the Reichstag building itself had been heavily damaged in 1933 by an arson attack that the Nazis might have staged themselves as an excuse to crack down on political opponents, the opera house now had to do. Many seats were empty, since their occupants were away on military duty. The stage, upon which great new music by Hindemith and Schoenberg had once been performed, now had a gaudy backdrop of a giant eagle with a swastika in its claws, flanked by massive red, white, and black Nazi flags. When Hitler''s speech reached its sweaty, fist-shaking climax of screaming bombast, the uniformed delegates stomped and cheered like brawlers in a beer hall. Hitler claimed that Germany had had no choice but to respond to Polish hostility with maximum force. "This night," he barked, "for the first time, Polish regular soldiers fired on our territory. Since 5:45 a.m.
we have been returning the fire, and from now on bombs will be met by bombs." Hitler''s speech was broadcast on the radio, and through loudspeakers in the streets. The Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger described the scene around the opera house: "The night of August 31 and September 1 was a short one for Berliners. Long after midnight, thousands of people stood on Wilhelmplatz to be near their Führer, as they always do at decisive hours for the German Volk ." The next day, warm late-summer weather had given way to gray skies. The city was relatively calm. People went about their normal business. By nightfall, however, "columns of SA [Brownshirts] and SS men came marching in to form an honor guard, and Berliners stood behind this brown and black honor guard to get a glimpse of the Führer and his loyal officials, and especially to hear his long-awaited speech to the Reichstag.
Every time one of the Nazi leaders was recognized by the crowd, he was greeted with a storm of applause." There was Field Marshal Hermann Goering, smirking in his black Mercedes with satin furnishing, holding his diamond-studded baton; and there was beetle-browed Rudolph Hess; and there was Joachim von Ribbentrop, the former champagne salesman now strutting around like a great statesman in a black SS uniform. The report continues: "The crowd became more excited by the minute until the Führer''s car, followed by his entourage, left the chancellery. The crowd exploded in a terrific storm of cheers. On this fateful day for the German people, the Führer once again inspired the stormy passion of Berliners." "Storm" ( Sturm ) and "stormy" ( stürmisch ), like "fanatical" ( fanatisch ), were among the most common clichés in the Nazi lexicon. This report, too, was a lie. Witnesses to the event were struck by the empty streets, the sparse crowds, and an atmosphere of glum indifference, or tense foreboding.
When the invasion of Poland, which failed to arouse the kind of "stormy" enthusiasm reported in the Nazi press, provoked declarations of war by Britain and France on September 3, the mood was even more anxious. The patriotic fervor that had greeted the early stages of World War I in 1914 was nowhere to be seen. William Shirer, Berlin correspondent for CBS radio, was there, on Wilhelmplatz, "when the loudspeakers suddenly announced that England had declared herself at war with Germany. Some two hundred and fifty people were standing there in the sun. They listened attentively to the announcement. When it was finished there was not a murmur. They just stood there as they were before. Stunned.
The people cannot realize yet that Hitler has led them into a world war. No issue has been created for them yet, though as this day wears on, it is plain that ''Albion''s perfidy'' will become the issue, as it did in 1914." And yet, it was different this time. In Shirer''s words: "Today, no excitement, no hurrahs, no cheering, no throwing of flowers, no war fever, no war hysteria. There is not even hate for the French and British-despite Hitler''s proclamations to the people, the party, the East Army, the West Army, accusing the ''English warmongers and capitalistic Jews'' of starting this war." Helmuth James von Moltke, a young lawyer, Prussian aristocrat, British on his mother''s side, and a convinced anti-Nazi (for which he would pay with his life just months before the end of the war), wrote in a letter to his wife, Freya, that he had seen Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador, emerge from the German foreign office on Wilhelmstrasse on September 3, after Britain declared war: "There were about three hundred to four hundred people, but no sound of disapproval, no whistling, not a word to be heard; you felt that they might applaud any moment. Quite incomprehensible." These are of course just impressions.
Quite what most Berliners really thought at the time is hard to know. Berlin was a cosmopolitan city, full of leftists, artists, radicals, and minorities. Hitler never trusted Berliners. And many Berliners didn''t trust him, or indeed any central authority bossing them around. But since 1933, they were not free to talk, and there were obviously no opinion polls. There were convinced Nazis and Hitler worshippers, as well as many people who tried to get along by keeping their heads down. There were Berliners who hated everything about the Nazis, and a tiny number who would risk everything to actively resist them. I used to know an eccentric figure in Berlin named Nicolaus Sombart.
A sociologist, a dandy, a Francophile, and a literary man-about-town, he became best known in Berlin cultural circles in the 1980s and ''90s for his Sunday afternoon salons, where tea and cakes were served in the spacious drawing room of his nineteenth-century apartment filled with heavy oak furniture and thick rugs on the parquet floor. One might meet scholars, celebrated novelists, artists, and pretty young women, often of Russian or Eastern European origin. His father, Werner Sombart, had been a famous academic star of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany, whose conservative critiques of capitalism, which he associated with the "Jewish spirit," helped prepare the way for National Socialism, even though Professor Sombart himself was far too refined and fastidious to join the ranks of what he saw as a crude and plebeian movement. To his son, Nicolaus, Werner Sombart represented the finest intellectual tradition of pre-Nazi Germany, a tradition of musical, artistic, and academic excellence carried by the cultivated upper-middle-class. The first day of war was still vivid in Nicolaus''s mind. He and his fellow pupils of a posh Gymnasium , or grammar school, listened to a patriotic speech by the school principal, followed by raised arms and cries of " Sieg Heil !" The pupils were then dismissed to enjoy the day off. Nicolaus rushed up the wooden stairs of his family home to his father''s study. The venerable scholar was surprised to see his son back so early.
The boy could barely contain his excitement; he was bursting to tell his father the news: "Hitler has declared war on Poland. Our German army has been marching into Poland since this morning!" Whereupon, the old man slowly removed his pince-nez. "Do you realize what this means?" "Of course," Nicolaus replied, "it means victory." A long silence. His father shook his head: "It means the end of Germany." Nicolaus claimed that his father''s reaction was typical of most people in the comfortable suburb of Berlin where they lived. Grunewald, with its huge fin de siècle villas, some built in the style of Gothic castles or mock Tudor manor houses, and its fine woods and lovely lakes, was a place where famous professors felt at home, as well as diplomats, bankers, and wealthy businessmen, quite a few of whom were of Jewish origin. The Jewish industrialist and statesman Walther Rathenau had lived in Grunewald, in a grand pastel-colored classicist.