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

0:10I wanted Warsaw to be great. 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 100. 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 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 honour of Poland, has reached the peak of its greatness and its glory.

1:20That was the mayor of Warsaw, Stefan Starzynski, who was broadcasting to the people of the Polish capital on the 23rd 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. And all 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 skies. thousands of civilians dead fires blazing out of control much of the city in ruins and that great ode i guess to this sense of the invincible spirit of the polish people but goodness i mean 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.

2:25Yes, 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 kind of lump in your throat, the kind of idea of Warsaw reaching the apotheosis of its glory in circumstances of the most terrible horror. Four days after that speech, after Staszin to hear that speech, the city surrendered. He ended up being arrested by the Gestapo, and he vanished. He was never seen again. He was, 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 are loads of monuments to him, the streets named after him and things.

3:01And at the end of the 20th century, he was voted the Varsovian of the century. So 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. Oh, I mean, unbelievably bleak. So 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 1st of September, the German battleship the Schleswig-Holstein opening fire on the Polish munitions depot on the Westerplatte peninsula at the harbour.

3:39and 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 saw 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 Gdansk 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 legend so let's start with those two stories and tell people what happened so first of all the westerplatter so this is this it's basically a munitions depot on it on this sort of neck of land there were about 200 polish soldiers there guarding the depot and they were completely cut off so they're the first people to come under fire and they refused to surrender and over the next few days the germans made 13 separate attempts to storm the peninsula including sending dive bombers to hit them.

4:39And these 200 guys held out for a week, and that was a week longer than even their own officers had thought possible. And at the time, it was a massive story in Poland. So every day on Polish radio, the news bulletins would have the phrase, the Westerplatter fights on. So it's kind of like Thermopylae, isn't it? A doomed, heroic last stand. Yeah. And Polish historians use that exact parallel. They call it the Polish Thermopylae. and these guys finally surrendered on the 7th of September so a week longer than they'd fought for a week longer than they should have done because they're basically they've run out of supplies and those men who'd been wounded were dying of gangrene and this is pretty much the only time in this episode when the Germans behaved nobly and they did behave very nobly um so 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 and the German commander who was a guy called Friedrich Georg Eberhardt was actually very gallant to the Polish commander who was called Henrik Sukarski.

5:39Sukarski gave him his sword and surrender, his sabre, and Eberhardt gave it him back and said, no, you keep it. And then lined up his men. And as the poles came out, the Germans all saluted them as they were kind of led off into captivities. And Eberhardt said to his men, that's how you fight. That's how you defend your honour. Look at those poles and look at what they've done. Because the gallantry of it, the nobility of it, of that scene, I mean, it blazes all the brighter, doesn't it, for the near universal darkness that effectively is the rest of this invasion. Exactly. Exactly. Because there's such a contrast with what happened at the other totemic battle in Danzig, which is the post office.

6:18So 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. And the SS hammered them with howitzers and grenades and whatnot and didn't get any joy. And 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. And then they set light to the building with grenades. So the building went up like a candle. And three poles were burned alive straight away and the rest kind of surrendered.

6:58and 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 that you said that they are postmen and not soldiers, they were rounded up and they were told you were illegal combatants, you weren't fighting legally. And so they are immediately court-martialed by the Wehrmacht. They were all shot by SS firing squad. and buried in a mass grave. So a very, very dark story.

7:32Again, there's a big monument to the postman in Gdansk, and it's actually this whole story is a chapter of Gunter Grass's book, The Tin Drum, which is set in Danzig, Gdansk, as it became. So while all that's going on, German forces, as we said last time, 60 divisions, one and a half million men, spearheaded by tanks. They are pouring over the borders of Poland. and actually the first person to break the news of this story was a journalist from, of all places, the Daily Telegraph. So British newspaper, and this was a great war correspondent, then very young, 27 years old, called Claire Hollingworth.

8:10And she had only been working for the Telegraph for a couple of weeks. I mean, basically everybody who works for the Telegraph now is about 27, aren't they? I mean, 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 Katowice, to cover the story of the tension in Poland. And she looked out of her hotel room and she heard all these planes going overhead and literally saw German tanks kind of driving down the street. And she rang the British embassy in Warsaw and said, I mean, it's on, the Germans are attacking.

8:41And the embassy said, well, we haven't heard anything about this. So, you know, you're making it up. And she literally held the phone out of the window. And 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, you know, far, far closer to the Great War than it is to us, right? Yeah. I mean, even though we think of the Second World War probably because of the moving pictures, because of the colour imagery.

9:18Yeah, 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 Hitler's. And even if they had been, this is going to be a very tough ask. So 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, and they can also attack.

10:02It'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 Tiso, who said they attack from the south as well. And Slovakia is the only bit where there's any natural barrier, which is the Tatras Mountains. But in the west, there is no natural barrier at all. It is just flat farmland. And 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...

10:34It'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. So there's a brilliant book called The Eagle Unbowed on Poland in the Second World War by Halik Kochanski, who's an Anglo-Polish historian. And she points out Poland's annual defence budget was 50 times smaller than Germany's. And in fact, it was only a tenth of the budget just for the Luftwaffe.

11:11So that tells you what a disadvantage they're fighting. The Germans have 15 times more armoured and mechanised 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 mean, I know that I keep going on about this, but it seems bizarre that the country with the impregnable defences, i.e.

11:45Czechoslovakia, gives them up. And Poland, that has no defences at all, fights. I suppose it's partly because Czechoslovakia has already been defeated, though, the Poland fights, right? 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. So 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.

12:21The 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. And 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 a kind of idea of, an ideal of what to do. They'll 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.

12:54And of course, it's a product of technology, of the technological change. The fact that you now have mechanised units in a way that you didn't in the first world. But it's striking, isn't it? I mean, because obviously the French do not adopt this. No. De Gaulle was 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 sidebound by convention, maybe, because, of course, they've rearmed more recently. They've rebuilt their army more recently.

13:24And 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 and cutting edge. Exactly, right. Exactly. And actually, this is their other great innovation that goes hand in hand with the Blitzkrieg tactics. So on the first day, the Germans throw 900 bombers and 500 fighters into action. Their Air Force, which, as you say, is new, is one of the most modern in the world. They've honed their skills, as it were, in Spain, the Condor Legion. And they've pretty much won the battle for the skies by day two, wiped the Polish Air Force in the skies, bombed their aerodromes.

13:57You know, 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. So we've talked a few times in this series about how commentators everywhere in Europe in the 1930s were obsessed with bombing. so the bomber will always get through civilians will pay the price if there's ever a future war and this is this is the great demonstration of bombing's potential even more so actually than Guernica which had previously been the most famous kind of 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 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 that Guernica is because it's Eastern Europe so people kind of forget that well they didn't have a great artist painting I suppose that's true of course so Picasso's image of it is the kind of icon of bombing campaigns isn't it it is absolutely So it kind of does stand in for everybody else who suffers from it over the course of the war.

15:13It does. Yeah, you're absolutely right. But so no one probably or very few people listening to this podcast would have heard of a town called Wielun, which is a rural town in west central Poland. So this was a sort of small town hit by the Luftwaffe in the first hours of the attack on the 1st of September. The Luftwaffe bombed it for nine hours. They dropped 400 bombs, a total of 50. thousand 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 1200 people so that's a tenth of the entire population but the thing is this was a town with no military targets in it at all so it's deliberately targeted to create terror terror and that's the terror from the air that is a the real there's very little like this in the first world war and you have these stories, German planes that strafe refugee columns, that fire deliberately on ambulances, that bomb hospital trains, and they will bomb a train and then the passengers, the train will kind of come off the tracks, the passengers who survived were all, you know, like a sort of, from above they probably look like, you know, kind of insects sort of flooding across the landscape, and then the planes will come back down for the kill and machine gun them as they flee.

16:29Scenes like this appall even the most experienced observers of war. So the head of the military mission in Poland was actually, he was an amazing character This guy, Adrian Carton de Wiart He had one eye and he had one arm So like Nelson Like Nelson And 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 Survived two plane crashes Tunnelled out a prisoner of war camp and tore off his own fingers when a doctor declined to amputate them. And he said of the First World War, frankly, I enjoyed the war.

17:09So he's the guy who's observing all this. So he's not a wuss. No, he's not a wuss. And this is the interesting thing. He says, he is appalled. He says, this is not war as I understand it. Carlton de Ville said, with the first deliberate bombing of civilians, I saw the very face of war change, bereft of romance, its glory shorn, no longer the soldier setting forth into battle but the women and children buried underneath it could i 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 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 um the The romance of glory of war is upheld by Polish lancers charging panzers.

18:02Yeah. And this is not true. They did not do this. However, there were cavalry engagements. So 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 armoured vehicles and machine gunned 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 to drop back. So very kind of heroic. And then the Germans invite international journalists to come and look at the scene of this skirmish, this battle, and there were kind of horses with their guts ripped out and dead cavalrymen, Polish cavalrymen.

18:58And one of these journalists who's writing for an Italian paper, he writes it up as cavalry charging tanks. And I guess it resonates because of the famous story of the Poles arriving at the Siege of Vienna in 1683. The Wing to Sars. Yeah, yes, all of that. And so for, I mean, I suppose for some Poles and certainly for foreign sympathizers, it becomes emblematic of an age of chivalry. Yeah, romance. It's been destroyed. Yeah. Whereas for the Nazis, it serves as an emblem of Polish backwardness. Exactly. So even Gunter Grass, you mentioned the tin drum. I mean, he describes the Polish cavalry as kind of Don Quixote.

19:47and by extension the whole Polish state. So that's a kind of interesting ambivalence, isn't it? Yeah. That it is a myth. Polish lancers 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. They did. They had a lot of horses. They did have a lot of horses. They took horses, of course, when they attacked the Soviet, union in 1941 and france yeah yeah so 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 of course they did in in in britain um but i think that by and large they used the cap they knew that they they weren't stupid they used the cavalry for reconnaissance and whatnot and there's this one incident as you say this very famous story but they're not charging tanks at all and it basically becomes an emblem of a doomed futile struggle which kind of suits you know as you say it has a kind of ambiguity to it it works in different ways but it's probably a bit misleading i mean the poles are trying to fight a modern war they just don't have the tools right to do it well also it highlights the um the the imbalance in mechanization yes which is what dooms them because exactly because because basically the nazis are stress testing what they can do with tanks what they can do with modern airplanes and as we all know it's devastating yeah so by day two the poles are already going backwards and a lot of their officers are already shell-shocked 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 and utter chaos and he said by the end of the first day we weren't an army anymore we were just a collection of random people stumbling 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 you know rich powerful empires not just kind of industrial democracies so the polls it's reasonable for the Poles to think, well, maybe, you know, the weight will be on our side.

22:13We outnumber the Germans. They're fighting on two fronts. The Poles have drawn up a plan called Plan Zachod. 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 centre of Poland, 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 fatherland. That will allow us to at worst stay below our lines and at best maybe launch a counter-attack.

22:50So 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 3rd of September there were huge crowds in Warsaw outside the embassies, people singing you know god save the king and the marseillaise and stuff very moving scenes and two days later on the 5th of september the commander of the um polish armed forces who's a guy called marshal ridge smigli he says okay let's put this plan into operation they start to withdraw to the center of the country give up western poland now and they're waiting and waiting and waiting for the allies to make their move and two days later they get the first sign this is going to happen the French cross into the Saarland at three points and you know is this it and actually do you know what the French just stop a few miles in it's a complete sham they don't even get to the fortified Siegfried line the line of kind of German forts they hang around for a few a couple of weeks and then by early October they go back to France and they outnumber the German forces in the west by five to one six to one I mean this is the thing Goebbels in his diary wrote, the French withdrawal is more than astonishing.

24:06It is completely incomprehensible. At the Nuremberg trials, General Jodl 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.

24:44That's the last thing we want to do. I mean, some British ministers notoriously said, well, we're not going to bomb German munitions factories and things like that, because I mean, that's private property. You couldn't attack people's private property. That's absolutely disgraceful. So all they do is they send the rf to drop propaganda leaflets over germany saying you know you shouldn't be fighting the war you've let yourselves down and i'm sure we'll come to this when we in due courses i'm sure we will we cover the phony war but it is still i mean it's weird isn't it but why are they i mean is it psych psychological reasons we could i think a lot of it is psychological they think they assume the will be long they don't have the spirit i think it's fair to say for an aggressive war marshal ardor.

25:25They don't have it. I mean, is it all psychological? Probably not all psychological, but a lot of it, I think, is. But it's so odd, isn't it? Because I mean, 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. To squander that, it just seems so odd. It's sort of, I mean, maybe some listeners will come up with some complicated reason, some sort of military history reason why this was actually a brilliant plan, but it just seemed to me pretty indefensible.

25:58Halik Horkhansky in her book, The Eagle Unbowed, she says, the first justification the British and the French 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. And 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. And then they wait a few more days and then they say, well, there's actually no point doing anything now because Poland's going to lose anyway. So they sort of, it It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And actually, it's true.

26:23By the 8th of September, when Allied chiefs discuss this, they say, well, let's not waste our resources. Poland's clearly going to lose anyway. Let's just wait and fight a long war in the West. And that, of course, will be in due course what the British will say about the French. Yeah, of course. Yeah, they're going to lose anyway, so there's no point in helping them. I mean, it becomes completely self-fulfilling. So by the second week, Poland is still all alone. And 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.

27:07Now, 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.

27:47And that's literal, isn't it? I mean, that's his scientific opinion. Exactly. That's his scientific opinion. It's not a metaphor. He really means that. So we talked last time about this meeting he had at the Eagle's Nest before Ribbentrop went to Moscow where he briefed his generals. And I said, well, we'll talk about what he said in the afternoon next time. So 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. And he said, and I quote, The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth or not.

28:16When starting and waging a war, it's not right that matters but victory. Close your hearts to pity. Act brutally. 80 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. And 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 it believes and then he goes on to say the aim of the war lies not in reaching particular lines but in the physical annihilation 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

29:22So 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 wantonness was determined to leap into the dark. This is a guy, a senior general in the Wehrmacht. He's not, you know, this is not a kind of pacifist speaking. And 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.

30:00But they've sworn an oath to the Führer. And of course, when wars start, people become radicalized very quickly. Yeah, but this is before the war's begun. Yes, of course. That's what's striking about it. Yes. Yeah, of course. People may well have had doubts, I think, Tom. I would be surprised if Lieberman 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. No. Even if you're serving Hitler.

30:32But 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 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. So we know that some German officers, when they talked to their men beforehand, they gave them pep talks and they said, come on, guys, we all know the Poles are primitive. We all know they're dirty. They can't be trusted. We, you know, we can't take any prisoners, all of this kind of thing. And we can see the results.