Ruthless and fierce: Hitler's strategy to invade Poland and unleash a deadly hell

On September 1, 1939, at 4:45 am, 80 years ago, the great guns of the former German battleship Schleswig-Holstein fired on the Polish garrison at Westerplatte, on the channel connecting Danzing, today. Gdansk, at the Baltic. . So began the Second World War What It would not end until 1945. An hour later, German soldiers enthusiastically loaded the barriers that punctuated the western border with Poland – one of the emblematic images of the fight – and the vanguard of the invasion force rushed into the neighboring territory. a cloud of colorful Feldgrau lobsters.

The Wehrmacht, the world's most powerful army, ushered in a new method of mechanized warfare and launched into a lower military and economic Poland: Max Hastings recalls that the national budget was lower than that of the Berlin city. Poland naively launched defensive pacts with France and Great Britain who did not come to save her and instead the USSR cleverly led on the 17th of the same month their own invasion in the east of the country, putting an end to the disaster of the Poles.

Hitler had again rolled the dice, persuaded that once again the Western powers would watch another of their military conquests with fear and their arms crossed. Poland fell a month after the death of 70,000 of its soldiers and 200,000 civilians. Villages and cities, more than 10,000, including the capital, Warsaw, have suffered terrible destruction. For the martyred and busy country began a scary crossroads, at the end of the war, six million Poles died, that is to say one in five people living in this country. For the world, on the other hand, it was a real hell. The invasion of Poland, although in the popular imagination, later episodes such as the fall of France, the Battle of Britain, Stalingrad or the landing of Normandy have a greater weight, is the detonator of all this catastrophe.

Was the invasion of Poland inevitable? And once launched, could he have been arrested? "Historians follow the rule that nothing is inevitable," says military historian Antony Beevor, "but it is very difficult to see how the Second World War could have been avoided." The German nationalists were furious with their defeat in 1918 and wanted to reverse the result. Versailles peace agreements they were of course far from perfectalthough they are not as bad as many historians have noted. But the sudden collapse of four empires, with the successor states and the new borders dividing ethnic groups, has given a glimpse of some form of European conflict. "

Beevor points out that it is the rise of Adolf Hitler as dictator of Germany with the most efficient army in the world that "has made sure that the war unleashed September 1, 1939 becomes the most cruel and the most genocidal of history. , author of World War II (past and present), Declare that "Hitler was absolutely determined to go to war and he often even said how frustrated he was not to have to fight for Czechoslovakia in September 1938. The following year, so 80 years ago, nothing could prevent it from happening again. to invade Poland. "

For Hitler to execute his plan, however, a series of basic circumstances had to occur. From them you can, to help understand the story, make a kind of decalogue of the invasion.

1. created an excuse Hitler, like many Germans (and Stalin), envisioned the restoration of Poland after the First World War. an aberration. All the more so because they were awarded territories that Germany considered as their lands (East Prussia and part of Silesia) and housing a German ethnic minority of almost one year. million inhabitants. The Nazi propaganda was intended to emphasize that this population was the object of oppression and exploited the resentment that existed in Germany vis-à-vis the Poles, the origin of their own invasion. Of course, what really drove Hitler, in addition to recovering what had been lost in 1918, was to achieve European domination and conquer "living space" (Lebensraum) in the east.

2. Dizzy to diplomacy. Hitler deceived France and Britain until the last moment, wishing the blood did not reach the river, baduring them that he was negotiating with the Poles. He even thought that the Poles were the most obstinate. Both powers put pressure on Poland so that it does not mobilize its army before, which could be perceived as a provocation by the Germans. As a result, the Poles only mobilized at the last moment and they could not do it completely and completelywhich gave the Wehrmacht an advantage. On Sunday, September 3, however, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany, which did not prevent Hitler from being surprised and pushed Goering to launch it in Ribentropp, Hastings explains: " You've already had your bading war! If we lose, Heaven helps us. "

3. Ensure the rear guard by the west. The main nightmare of Hitler and the German High Command was that when they invaded Poland, France and Britain, after declaring war on Germany, they were invaded by the 39; west. This would have been a disaster for the German army, with the vast majority of its troops engaged in Poland. To attack seriously, the French could have reached the Rhine quickly and won the war that had just begun. But the French were not for adventures, their military strategy, invented in the Great War, was based on defense and psychologically refused to fight again. The British and they behaved shamefully, promising his help to the Poles and leaving them to their destiny. France was limited to a small incursion into German territory and retired shortly thereafter.

4. Agreement with the Soviets. The astonishing agreement signed with the USSR on August 25, which shocked the world (especially the Franco and the Japanese), gave Hitler the green light to invade Poland and allowed the Red Army to attack the Polish from behind. based its strategy on fighting in the west and left the east of the country unprotected. The Soviet invasion put an end to any possibility of Polish resistance. Stalin, who had "had troubles in his court" with the Japanese, waited until the 17th to see what Britain and France were doing, to keep their invasion away from the Germans and to avoid the possibility that Western powers declare war on him. to him. The Soviets, who would later exterminate the Polish prison officer, had only 4,000 casualties and occupied 200,000 square kilometers of territory.

5. This caused a spark, a casus belli. In an extraordinary act of cynicism, falsehood and black propaganda, the Nazis launched the day before, on August 31, a crude operation (with the pbadword "deceased grandmother"), organized by Reinhard Heydrich, the right arm of Himmler, in which The SD forces, the secret services of the SS, wearing Polish uniforms, attacked a German customs post and the radio station of a border town, from which they proclaimed proclamations patriotic in Polish. Then they left leaving several bodies (prisoners of Sachsenhausen camp were shot on the ground) pretend to attack Polish soldiers.

6. He let the army "do". At the time of the invasion of Poland, the operation Fall Weiss (White Case)Contrary to what he would do in the following years, Hitler remained quite a traditional political leader and entrusted the direction of military operations to his generals. Moreover, none of them has formulated a moral objection to invade Poland.

7. Iologized everything that is possible for the soldiers. Most German troops launched in the invasion with enthusiasm, national pride, sense of superiority and fanaticism, result in a good part of the years of Nazi indoctrination and its propaganda. Beevor points out how the soldiers' contempt for the Poles facilitated the reprisals, 16,000 executions of civilians recognized by the German High Command itself only during the first five days of the campaign and the murders. Anti-Semitism has also caused the systematic murder of Polish Jews.

8. He used the Blitzkrieg. Although the term was only conceived later, with the invasion of France, the Germans created his "lightning war", with its iconic Panzers and Stukas, in Poland. It was to use armored units as fast moving forces to disrupt the defense of the enemy and in close coordination with aviation (2152 aircraft out of 392 Poles) and the others weapons. Against what we believe As a rule, the invasion of Poland was not a walk. The Blitzkrieg was not yet oiled and there were some noticeable mistakes and the loss of 674 cars.

The Poles, who resisted bravely in the hope that the French would launch the promised offensive in the west, gave the Wehrmacht several dislikes, such as the counterattack of the Bzura River and the Warsaw defense; and the Luftwaffe, despite its superiority, lost 560 aircraft. German losses are high: 16,000 dead and 30,000 wounded. By the way, the brave and stupid charge of the Polish cavalry against German tanks is a myth. The Polish ulanos, who at that time served mainly as mobile infantry and did not carry spears, attacked German troops at different times (as in Brda and Krujanty), but only infantry contingents. and never to the Panzers.

9. He has been busy with communications. When we think of a war, we tend to forget the factors They seem minor but they are decisive. Communications were essential to the invasion and conquest of Poland by the Nazis. With outdated weapons, such as the PZL P-11 high-wing monoplane fighters against the shiny Me-109, for example, and an improvised and amateurish way of thinking, the Poles have suffered a dramatic lack of devices radio and depend Beevor phone notes how the withdrawal of a unit often could not be communicated to those of its flanks, with disastrous results. In the German army, instead each division incorporated a motorized radio company.

10. He was brutal and ruthless. The German army applied the war with extreme severity, following, with very few complaints from the commanders, Hitler's ruthless directives, which sought to destroy Poland and to reduce its inhabitants to a servile clbad. The Polish campaign, which included the use of Einsatzgruppen of the SS, genocidal squadrons, was fierce and constituted a repetition of the Nazi racial war that would then unfold with a sinister dimension during the invasion of the Soviet Union. ; USSR.