World War II: A Treacherous Raid

Exceptional activity everywhere from the morning onwards. The news about the beginning of hostilities was broadcast on the radio, and the bombing of Gdynia and Krakow by the Germans struck me like lightning. I was especially depressed by the news about the bombing of Krakow… Everyone here only talks about the war, but the mood is good, there is no doubt anywhere, everyone believes in our final victory. “The – vague and untested – rumor about the capture of Danzig by the Polish army makes people happy,” remembers a Polish contemporary witness on September 1, 1939.

Meanwhile, in Berlin, Hitler appeared in front of the Reichstag in a field gray uniform and to enthusiastic shouts of Heil and declared the attack on Poland a great challenge for the German people. He promised, again to lively applause, that he would “not lead the fight against women and children.”
He then raved about Germany’s supposedly peaceful negotiation intentions to achieve orderly conditions for Danzig and the “mistreated” German minority there. He then revealed, avoiding the word war: “I have given my air force the order to limit its attacks to military objects. But if the opponent believes, from that
“To be able to read a license and to fight with the opposite methods, then he will receive an answer that will make him lose his hearing and sight!” Sustained stormy applause. This was followed by the oft-quoted, deadly and lying sentence: “Tonight, Poland fired shots on our own territory for the first time, including through regular soldiers.” The log notes catcalls. “There has been firing back since 5:45 a.m.!”

Demagoguery and outright lies pervaded this speech, as they did all pre-war propaganda. The border incidents and acts of terrorism against the German minority in Poland that were used to justify the German attack never took place.

On August 31, 1939, Hitler gave the order to invade Poland with his signature on Secret Command Instruction No. 1. On the same day, SS security forces in Polish uniforms attacked the “Reichssender Gleiwitz” and read out a fictitious call for rebellion. The action was carried out amateurishly, but served its purpose among the German population, although the intention was all too obvious. The Warsaw broadcaster reported on August 31st: “No words could now disguise the aggressive plans of the new Huns. Germany is striving for domination over Europe and is crossing out the rights of the peoples with a cynicism that has never been seen before.”

In the early morning hours of September 1st, at 4:45 a.m., the old battleship “Schleswig-Holstein,” which only served as a training ship, opened fire on the Polish garrison on the Hel Peninsula, located just outside the gates of the controversial Free City of Danzig on the Westerplatte. The western Polish city of Wieluń had already been attacked by Stukas at 4:37 a.m. and a hospital was razed to the ground; 1200 residents died. Without a declaration of war, a new World War II began, which was to last six years until it began almost exactly to the day on September 2, 1945 on board the battleship “USS Missouri” in Sagami Bay off Tokyo with the unconditional surrender of the last Axis power , the Empire of Japan, came to an end. The result was up to 65 million deaths, immense destruction, millions of wounded, uprooted people, refugees and a new world order.

Poland was the first theater of this bloodiest of all wars. Six million Poles, including three million Polish Jews, became victims of German racial madness. A total of 27 million soldiers in a wide variety of uniforms died worldwide and 19 million civilians. The Soviet Union paid the highest death toll with around 27 million deaths, followed by China with ten million and Japan and Yugoslavia with 1.7 million each. The world domination ambitions of the Nazis and German capital cost 4.8 million Germans with their lives.

Poland was the first theater of this bloodiest of all wars.

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Already in the first days of Hitler’s Germany’s aggression it became clear that Poland’s military preparations for the new major war that vigilant contemporaries had long feared were inadequate. And it was confirmed, as was the case the year before with the Munich Agreement, that the allies in the West would abandon Poland. British and French diplomacy not only failed to avoid this war, it actually encouraged it. Left to its own devices, Poland was effectively a lost cause and was defeated after three weeks by a Wehrmacht that was far superior in terms of technology and personnel.

Similar to the contemporary witness quoted at the beginning, Wojciech Jaruzelski also remembered an initially naive, euphoric mood among the population. The future Polish president experienced the attack as a 16-year-old and still remembered the fatal reassurances from the Polish government: “The German tanks are made of cardboard, or they get stuck in the mud and sand of the Polish plains. Our cavalry will sweep them away faster than it takes to say that sentence… And besides, we have powerful allies in the West.”

Jaruzelski further noted in his memoirs “My Life for Poland”: “Today that seems outrageous, and when I think about it, I feel ashamed. But back then we wished for this war. We could finally show what we were capable of, we would be heroes, we would go wherever we were needed to fight, and we would show these Germans who they were up against. Let’s give the Germans a beating, march to Berlin and that’s it! …The truth should cruelly tear us from these dreams. But that came later.”

“1939” was published by our author in 2022 by PapyRossa Verlag. How the war was made … and Germany was allowed to plunge the world into the abyss” (247 pages, €16.90). Dr. Stefan Bollinger is a member of the Left Party’s Historical Commission.