- Multimedia special. 75 years of the Normandy landing
- History: Everything that died in the Great War
Woody Allen said that every time he listened to Wagner he wanted to invade Poland , but Adolf Hitler, a fan of walkirias, parsifales and nibelungos, the desire was removed with the passing of the days of that August of 39. After years of lies, hate speech and incendiary verbiage, the Führer was suddenly faced with the abyss of taking his country to another planetary conflict of uncertain end even though he had done everything possible to provoke it.
He did not expect his future aggression against Poland to make France and Britain raise a war ultimatum. When he last met with the British ambassador in Berlin three days earlier, he presented the evidence: after years of violating agreements such as the Munich Pact, insulting foreign leaders and incurring provocations such as the annexation of Austria or the Sudeten , peace and diplomacy had run out of space . For several nights Hitler stopped the invasion at the last moment waiting for someone to do something that prevented him from fulfilling his plans. As if an arsonist waited for the firemen to intervene so as not to let him burn the forest. But there were no firefighters to call.
When he realized that he himself had gotten into a dead end, on August 31, today 80 years ago, he gave the order to activate the so-called White Case ( Fall Weiss ) and took some sleeping pills.
The first dead of World War II was not an archduke but a farmer . His name was Franz Honiok and he belonged to a Polish community in the German Silesia. Gestapo agents arrested him the night before, drugged him and shot him on the floor of the Gliwice station, on the German side of the border between the two countries. Seven members of the SS, disguised as Polish militiamen, took the buildings , scattered more dead taken from the Dachau concentration camp and interrupted some Chopin poles to issue the following message: "Attention! Here, Gliwice. The station is in the hands Polish. "
Nazi propaganda used that false Polish assault on the German broadcaster to prepare public opinion. Reinhard Heydrich, the man with the heart of ice, had given Hitler the excuse he had asked for, a false flag operation similar to the "I will set the war" of William Randolph Hearts to attack Cuba . No one gave that night in Germany. Several Hitler generals warned the Nazi leader that the country was not prepared for war. I can not hear you.
Spiked boots and dive bombings
The history of human conflicts changed forever that September 1, 1939. Gone are the humiliating treatise of Versailles, the crisis of 29 being primed with Europe, anti-Semitism, nationalism and fascism spreading like a virus . Newscasts from around the world showed two dreadful images: one, the one with large German columns advancing towards Warsaw marking the step with their spiked boots (clap, clap, clap), their green-gray uniforms and their steel helmets (whose shape George Lucas would copy for his galactic empire in Star Wars) . The other, even louder, was an aerial image of the Stuka bombarding the enemy with their siren howl.
The myth of the invincible Wehrmacht was built with films like that. The lightning war ( Blitzkrieg ) arrived, not yet fully perfected but with a new concept that launched the planes to enemy rear, then broke the fronts with columns of fast panzers and then sent to the motivated and fanatical infantry to liquidate the bags of Polish recruits who were being surrounded. Three days later France and the United Kingdom declared war on the Third Reich and promised to come to the aid of Poland. The French mounted a ridiculous offensive on the border with Germany and the British simply threw pamphlets over their trenches . A drill. That same day, the third of the contest, the air sirens sounded in London for the first time. Churchill, who was not yet prime minister, went down to the shelter with his wife and a bottle of brandy . False alarm. They had just heard Chamberlain read the declaration of war in a tired voice.
The Poles defended themselves well, but did not have the slightest chance of victory. "Poland's misfortune is a geographical misfortune: being between Germany and Russia," says historian Antony Beevor. German propaganda was responsible for propping up an image that has survived until today: the Polish cavalry carrying saber against the panzers . That is, the victory of the mechanized war over the old concept of the nineteenth century. But it is a myth. Never happened. The Poles also had tanks, although of worse quality, and fighter planes.
Gernika's example
What made the difference is the tactic, that Blitzkrieg that was already rehearsed with the Condor Legion in terrible bombings like Guernika's and that will serve to overwhelm Europe. Military experts of the time said that Poland would resist the Wehrmacht for a year. They fell in 19 days and the country ceased to exist. The Stuka bombed Warsaw at pleasure, a city without air defense, as ready for sacrifice. The roads were filled with refugees. One of them traveled a seven-year-old boy named Ryszard Kapuscinski, who as an adult would become a legendary reporter: "I remember walking with my sister next to a cart pulled by a horse."
With the German troops advanced a handful of hit men from the SS and the Gestapo who, armed with blacklists, murdered intellectuals, university professors, politicians, journalists and aristocrats to decapitate Polish society. Only the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact between Berlin and Moscow was missing for the Russians to attack from the east and keep their share of the cake. The Soviet army also arrived with its own butchers: in the forests of Katyn they killed and hid 22,000 Polish officers and soldiers in cold blood in large graves.
Both totalitarianisms, the Nazi and the Soviet, shook hands in Brest before they collided furiously two years later. The Nazi occupiers soon built walls in some neighborhoods to fill the Jews . The occupants soon built walls in some neighborhoods to fill the Jews. The ghettos policy will anticipate the Holocaust, the final solution and the construction of extermination camps such as Auschwitz or Treblinka , slaughterhouses where death was industrialized. According to the historian James Holland, an expert in the operational part of the conflict, Hitler had no chance of winning the war no matter how superior he showed himself in those first months , and more after the entry of the USSR and the US. But Poland would pay dearly for that ambition. After the Warsaw uprising of 1944, the greatest example of civil resistance of the entire World War II, the annihilation of the city and decades of Soviet occupation came. In the rest of the world, the Wagnerian Armageddon that Hitler unleashed on September 1, 1939 left 60 million dead and a configuration of the planet that still survives.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more- Adolf Hitler
- Poland
- Germany
- Europe
- WWII
- Russia
Summer storyDalí and the parties in Mas Juny: orgies, drugs and excesses
BasketballUnited States is no longer the favorite for the World Cup
Supervillains of HistoryIlse Koch: the Nazi jailer who horrified the Gerifaltes of the Third Reich