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

I 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.

That 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 attacking.

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.

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 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 Stasin's hearing of that speech, the city 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 are loads of monuments to him, the streets named after him and things. And 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. 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 and the harbour. And 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 legends. So let's start with those two stories and tell them.

people what happened. So first of all, the Westerplatte. So this is this, it's basically a munitions depot 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.

And 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 Westerplatte 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. So when the Poles came out, the Germans couldn't believe their eyes. They thought there'd been 2000 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 Henryk Sukharski. Sukharski gave him his sword and surrender, his saber, 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 captivity. And Eberhardt said to his men,

That's how you fight. That's how you defend your honor. 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 point.

totemic battle in danzig which was the post office so 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 um

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 you know like a candle and three poles were burned alive straight away and the rest kind of 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 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 squads and buried in a mass grave. So a very, very dark story. Again,

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 are 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 Clare Holyworth.

And 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. And the embassy said, well, we haven't heard anything about this. 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? I mean, even though we think of the Second World War probably because of the moving pictures, because of colour imagery. Exactly. We think of it as more immediate.

Right from the start, it is clear the Poles 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. It's often forgotten that Germany is not the only country that attacks Poland because they have their client state Poland.

Now, Slovakia... Oh, under the Catholic priest. Under the Catholic priest, Monsignor Tiso, so 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... It's perfect. The tanks can just roll over the border. Now, as for the two armies, we said the Germans attack with 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. So 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

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. Czechoslovakia, 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, with 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.

The thing that the Germans do now is they concentrate their armours 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 time?

I think a bit of both. So armies always have doctrines, so they will have 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. And 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.

De Gaulle 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 side-bound by convention, maybe, because, of course, they've re-armed more recently. They've rebuilt their army more recently. And 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...

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 is, 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. You 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 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 that's in Spain, in northern Spain. So Guernica in Spain, in the Basque Country...

Probably historians now think probably about 300 people died at 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. Well, they didn't have a great artist painted, 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. It 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 Vielun,

which is a rural town in, um, West central Poland. So this was just a sort of small town hit by the Luftwaffe in the first hours of the attack on the 1st of September. Um,

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 there. They go as high as about 1,200 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 it's the terror from the air that is 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. Scenes like this

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 Villarte, who was, 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. So 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. Carton 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 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 the romance and glory of war is upheld by Polish lancers charging panzers. And this is not true. They did not do this. However,

there were cavalry. Oh yeah. So there's a famous cavalry engagement in the first hours of the Nazi invasion where, um,

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, you know, horses with their guts ripped out and dead cavalrymen, Polish cavalrymen. And one of these journalists who's writing for an Italian paper, he writes it up as a

cavalry charging tanks and i guess it resonates because of the famous story of of the poles arriving at the siege of vienna yeah in 1683 yeah kind yes all of that and so for i mean i suppose for for some poles and certainly for foreign foreign sympathizers it becomes emblematic of an age of chivalry yeah it's been destroyed yeah whereas for the nazis it serves as an emblem of

Polish backwardness. So even Gunter Grass, you mentioned the tin drum. I mean, he describes this, the Polish cavalry as kind of Don Quixote and by extension, the whole Polish state. Yeah. So that's, it'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 about

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. 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 France.

But I think that by and large, they knew that 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...

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 to do it. Well, 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. 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 in 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 Poles, it's reasonable for the Poles to think, well, maybe, you know, 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 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, stabilize our lines and at best, maybe launch a counterattack. 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 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 Polish armed forces, who's a guy called Marshal Rysz Schmigli, he says, OK, let's put this ban into operation. They start to withdraw to the centre 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 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. It 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 do 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. 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...

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 course, I'm sure we will, we cover the phony war. But it is still, I mean, it's weird, isn't it? Why are they, I mean, is it psychological reasons? We could, I think a lot of it is psychological. They think, 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 ardour. They 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.

Yeah, I know. 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. Halik Khorhansky 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 it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And actually it's true. By the 8th of September, when Allied chiefs discuss this, they say, well, that's not waste of 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. 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.

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. And 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.

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 Hitler 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 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. So 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 person.

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. But they have sworn an oath to the Fuhrer. 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. That people may well have had doubts, I think, Tom.

I would be surprised if Liebman 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. But in the context of the 1930s, after years of indoctrination, after years of listening to Hitler's speeches, fuelled by a sense of resentment and victimhood,

Yeah, 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. 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 or this kind of thing.

And we can see the results. In two months of the campaign, hundreds of Polish villages were burned, thousands and thousands of civilians executed. I'll give you one example. Richard Evans, in his book, The Third Reich at War, he describes a guy called Gerhard M., who is a stormtrooper who, before the war, was a fireman. And he came from a place called Flensburg, which is basically Denmark. It's right on the border with Denmark. And this guy, Gerhard, describes...

how in the first days of the invasion, they were going through a Polish village and someone fired at them. And so they reacted by burning the entire village to the ground. Burning houses, weeping women, screaming children, 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. And a few days later, they got to another village.

And he said, burning houses were lining our route. After the flames there sounded the screams of the people who'd hidden in them and were 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. So that is conscience being put in the shade by fascist ideology. Yeah.

I guess so, by fascist ideology, by the pressure of war. And the thing is, this is within the, this is in the first week of the war. Right. I mean, I know that soldiers who get shot at commit atrocities, but they don't justify it, I think, properly.

in the way that he is. Yeah, I think this is different from, let's say, the French troops in the Peninsular War or something. Right, or the Germans in Belgium in 1914. Yeah. Or British soldiers in the Boer 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...

You know, kill them all. This is what I want to do. People did not do that before the First World War. I mean, 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. Yeah, it's ideological programming, isn't it? Exactly. Well, here's the thing, right? Because it's not just the army that are doing it. It's also the SS.

So this is the really ominous thing, that in their wake are following the first Einsatzgruppen under Reinhard 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've 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 Heydrich is shocked at this and says, this is far too few.

this is we should be killing far more people on the 19th of September he

He had a meeting with General Halder, commanding the German army. And Heydrich said, come on, I want to have a clear out. Jews, intelligentsia, 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 is where it jumps out at you from that is because 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 a tenth of the population. They live in the cities by and large, so Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow and so on. They are very identifiable. So in Nazi anti-Semitic cartoons, Jews will be portrayed as 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. Yeah, 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 a way they might not be in...

Germany, in the Reich itself. So absolutely, they live in the cities. They have distinctive clothes. They have distinctive kind of hair. They speak Yiddish as the 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.

that 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. I mean, you know,

there are horrific scenes from the outset. There is no, there is no question about kind of where this is ultimately all leading. Ian Kershaw in his biography of Hitler,

He identifies in the first week of September 1939 is the point where they cross that kind of moral line. I mean, he calls it, Tom, the Nazi Rubicon, the moment they really cross the line. So the 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 sort of pathetic, flimsy legal framework like the Nuremberg Laws. And...

You know, 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. So 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. So it is the kind of neo-Darwinian, social Darwinian nightmare of how nature functions. Untrammeled by moral considerations, it is the predation of the strong upon the weak.

Yes, and not all German officers are comfortable with it. So there's a guy called Colonel General Johannes Blaskowicz, who is a Wehrmacht commander in Poland. And 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. And 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 brutalization and moral debasement. And his superiors were kind of, 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 contemptuously, you can't wage war with Salvation Army methods. And Blazkowicz 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 kind of stalled. And 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. And 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. He was clearly so traumatized by guilt and honor. Anyway, back to the narrative. All the time the Germans are grinding eastwards.

On the 7th of September, the Poles move their high command to the far east of the country, to Brest, because they realise that Warsaw is next in the firing line. Their communications network has fallen apart. Their defensive plan is in a complete and utter mess. And the next day, the 8th of September, the German panzers reach the outskirts of Warsaw. OK, well, let's take a break there with the German army.

approaching the Polish capital and in the second half we will see what ensues.

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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 Starzinski, 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. And they actually do hold off the first German attack. The Germans surround, they then surround the city with infantry and with panzers. And Hitler says, we will starve and bomb and pummel it into submission.

The Poles asked the Germans, they sent a message saying, can we at least evacuate our civilian population? And the Germans said, no, no way. So on the 10th of September, Warsaw became the first capital in Europe to be subjected to relentless 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. So it won't come 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 at a place called Khalkhin 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 is clearly disintegrated. Poland is dead. Poland is full of our Ukrainian and Belarusian kith and kin.

And we feel honour bound to protect them and therefore we're sending in the Red Army. And this is a very familiar argument to the Poles, as Halit Kuchanski 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 thinks, oh, here we go again. 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 shaded Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Are we the goodies? Are we the baddies? Yeah. What side they're on. The Polish commanders said to them, don't resist. You know, it's pointless. Fall back. And actually at this point, the Polish commanders say 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. 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 opposed Poland at every point. And Lloyd George wrote an article in the Sunday Express, later the home of A.J.P. Taylor, saying the Soviet Union is completely within its rights. You know, it's completely reasonable for the Soviet Union to take its historic lands in eastern Poland.

I mean, 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 Marshal Pétain, won't he? Métal Pétain, yeah. I mean, 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 behaviour. Chamberlain...

talked in the comments of his horror. His assistant private secretary, Jock 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. So for the Poles, this is really the death knell. Their leadership flees into Romania.

Later, that scene is very controversial. You know, 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. So 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. Yeah. He spent a week at a hotel, the Casino Hotel. We know that Hitler loves a hotel. Does it have a spa? Probably does have a spa. It's a seaside resort called Sopop, which is just outside Gdansk.

And he took twice, took flights to Warsaw to watch the bombing of Warsaw firsthand. 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 Valhalla, 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 in 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 swooping 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 or dead horses and rubble. And the most common comparison people say, this is how I thought the end of the world would be. You know, 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 indiscriminately hitting apartment blocks, schools, hospitals. In the end, there was so much fire, so...

So much smoke that they basically had to call off the attack because they couldn't see what they were doing. There 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 Bryan, who was basically the last Western journalist in Warsaw. When you go to the museums in Gdansk and in Warsaw, they've always got this kind of playing. And it's extraordinarily kind of harrowing.

I'll just read one eyewitness account to give you a sense of the novelty of it. Because that's the important thing. It's a scene that we're used to now from wartime footage. But at the time, it was the first time it had happened. And this is from a guy called General Stanislaw Sozobowski. Now, he actually ended up at Arnhem, a bridge too far. Do you know what? He was played by Gene Hackman in the film. Goodness. So imagine Gene Hackman telling you this. I was not expecting Gene Hackman to make the film. No, no. It's always great to get him into the show.

He said,

Almost the only noise was the rumble of bricks as walls weakened by bombs finally subsided. The smell of burning houses pillared into a windless sky and the smell of putrefaction lingered in the nostrils. And if you juxtapose that with the reading that we began the episode with, you know, 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.

So also finally surrendered on the afternoon of the 27th. Its soldiers who defended it, 100,000 people were led to POW camps. The Nazi vengeance inevitably fell on the city's Jewish population. That was a third of the population, about 350,000 people.

There's shops and houses looted. People are beaten up or killed in the streets. Women humiliated, stripped, raped, all of this kind of 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.

And actually, for people who were in Berlin, they said, you know, nothing's really changed. You know, there's a bit of rationing, but otherwise nothing has changed. So William Shira, the journalist, American journalist, who you'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.

And he knows that at the time, German bombs are falling on Warsaw and they don't mention it at all. And 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, nine days later, 20th 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? This 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, reasonably, you can say they don't know about that, but...

Even so, you know, they're pummeling Warsaw 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. And Shira says, as long as the Germans are successful and do not have to pull in their belts too much, this will not be an unpopular war. So 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,

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 republics of Belarus and Ukraine where it remains today. So...

We will hear next time, 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 million people

who are put into cattle trucks and then are deported to Kazakhstan or to Siberia. And 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 kind of cosmopolitan tendencies, a sense of sophistication and integration into society,

European culture, you know, you are out. You're off. Yes. That left a kind of rump bit of Poland in sort of the south and the centre around Warsaw and Krakow, which had about 11 million people. And there was some talk, will we have a kind of rump state? And they said basically, no, we'll just leave this as a kind of weird appendage, kind of semi-legal colony called the General Government. And it was ruled by Hans Frank, the Nazi lawyer.

And this, the general government, becomes the location for some of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust. So the big camps, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor and Belzec are all in the general government. And 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? So the town of

Auschwitz becomes Auschwitz. Auschwitz, exactly. National monuments are blown up, teachers are murdered, all of this kind of thing. In the first three months of the year, the SS and the German militias of various kinds probably murdered, I don't know, 65,000, 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. So I'll give you a tiny example. It's just one small example that can stand for so many.

There's a town called Gdynia in the north called Obuzha. And there, one day, somebody smashed a window at the German police station. And the SS knew it was someone from the school. And they rounded up 50 boys from the school and said, who did it? And these boys, teenage boys, they refused to give up the culprit. And 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. And the parents said, we're not going to beat our own children.

So the SS said, great, well, we'll do it then. So 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. And that story is just one among countless stories of the kind of random brutality that

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. I mean, if there's one place you don't want to be in all European history, it's Poland between 1939 and 1945, 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. And he says, why don't we put everybody into the general government, into this kind of weird colony that we've got centered on Warsaw and Krakow? Even at this point, Heydrich from the SS is saying, we'll corral these people in the general government. But this is just a step towards what Heydrich calls the final aim.

And 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, we'll just end with this, there are hints of a much darker outcome. That autumn, Goebbels went to visit a ghetto in Łódź, 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 a humanitarian one, Goebbels 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, you know, 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 kind of haunt us. So we have to be clear about this. There is no panacea. We have to take radical measures. And I quote, the Jewish danger must be banished from us. And 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. And 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 kind of coda to the conquest of Poland.

but is also a kind of palate cleanser. It's a story that takes us into the kind of 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.