Fall Weiss

On 3 April 1939 the chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW), General Wilhelm Keitel, sent the commands of the army, the navy and the air force a top-secret directive on the “uniform preparation of the Wehrmacht for war for 1939/40”. Its second part, attached to the covering letter, bore the code name “Fall Weiss” – Case White. It was the plan for a war against Poland. In his letter Keitel passed on further instructions from Adolf Hitler: preparations were to be made so that the operation could begin “at any time from 1 September 1939”; the OKW was to draw up a precise timetable and coordinate dates between the three services; and the plans of the individual commands were to reach the OKW by 1 May. Hitler’s signature on the directive itself was to be “added later”. He signed it on 11 April.

Many chronologies state that on 3 April Hitler ordered planning to begin for an attack due to take place on 25 August 1939. The first half of that statement is accurate; the second is not. The April directive set no date for the attack. It laid down only that from 1 September the Wehrmacht had to be ready to strike at any moment. Hitler fixed a specific date only in August, and he gave the final order on the afternoon of 25 August, for dawn the following day. That same evening he cancelled it. The war began a week later, on 1 September.

From demands to a plan of war

In the autumn of 1938, a few weeks after the Munich Agreement, Germany presented its demands to Poland for the first time. On 24 October the Reich Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, proposed to the Polish ambassador in Berlin, Józef Lipski, a “general settlement” of relations. Poland was to agree to the incorporation of the Free City of Danzig into the Reich and to the construction of an extraterritorial motorway and railway line across Pomerania to East Prussia, and to join the Anti-Comintern Pact. In return Germany offered to recognise Poland’s borders and to extend the non-aggression declaration of 1934 by twenty-five years. The Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, gave evasive replies, and in January 1939 he heard the same demands from Hitler himself at the Berghof.

At that stage Hitler still wanted Poland to march with Germany rather than against it. In his plans for the coming years the Western powers were to be the first adversary, and Poland a subordinate ally, or at least a benevolent neutral that would secure the Reich’s rear. This changed in March 1939. On 15 March the Wehrmacht occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and Slovakia became a state dependent on Germany, which in the Treaty of Protection of 23 March obtained the right to station troops along its western edge. Poland found itself caught in a vice from the north, west and south. On 21 March Ribbentrop repeated the demands to Lipski, this time in the tone of an ultimatum, and on 23 March Germany seized Klaipėda (Memel). Poland responded the same day with a partial mobilisation, and on 26 March Lipski delivered a refusal to Ribbentrop: Warsaw was prepared to discuss easier transit and the question of Danzig, but not its incorporation into the Reich, nor extraterritoriality.

Even before the Polish reply, on 25 March, Hitler spoke with the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General Walther von Brauchitsch. According to a note of that conversation, presented at Nuremberg after the war, he did not then wish to settle the Danzig question by force, so as not to drive Poland into the arms of Britain. He added, however, that work on the “Polish question” had to begin. Solving it in the near future would require especially favourable political conditions, and Poland would then be crushed so thoroughly that it would not need to be reckoned with as a political factor for decades to come.

It was London that determined the plan of war would be drawn up in precisely those days. On 31 March the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, announced in the House of Commons the British guarantee to Poland. Hitler received the news in a fury. He understood that Poland would not become his satellite and that Britain no longer intended to give way. Two days later Keitel sent out the directive.

What the directive contained

The directive “for 1939/40” replaced earlier documents of the same kind and consisted of three parts. The first concerned the security of the Reich’s frontiers and defence against surprise air attacks, the second was Case White, and the third dealt with the seizure of Danzig. The first part stated that in the event of war no state of war in the sense of the German defence law was to be proclaimed, and that mobilisation was to be carried out under peacetime regulations. The war was to begin without formalities.

The political annex to Case White opened with the statement that relations with Poland continued to rest on the principle of avoiding disputes. Should Poland, however, change its policy and adopt a “threatening” attitude towards Germany, a “final settlement” would become necessary, notwithstanding the treaty in force. The aim would then be to destroy Poland’s armed strength and to create in the east a situation that met the needs of the Reich’s defence. The Free City of Danzig was to be declared part of the Reich at the latest when war broke out. Policy was to aim at limiting the war to Poland. The authors of the document considered this possible because France was going through an internal crisis and Britain would therefore hold back. The military part envisaged a surprise attack, with mobilisation, open or covert, to be ordered as late as possible.

The words about Poland’s “threatening attitude” were a smokescreen. Poland threatened no one, and its army was far weaker than Germany’s. The prosecutors at Nuremberg observed that the directive alone did not prove that Hitler had taken an irrevocable decision to attack in April. What it did prove was that the armed forces were preparing for an attack on orders and to a set timetable. Hitler himself soon spelled out the rest.

A spring and summer of preparation

The staffs took over the planning. At the OKW the work was done by the National Defence Department under Colonel Walter Warlimont; at the Army High Command, by the Chief of the General Staff, General Franz Halder. Two army groups were assigned to the war against Poland. The northern group, under General Fedor von Bock, was to cut through the Polish Corridor, link the Reich with East Prussia and advance from there on Warsaw. The southern group, under General Gerd von Rundstedt, whose staff was headed by Erich von Manstein, was to deliver the main blow from Silesia, Moravia and Slovakia. The two were to meet east of Warsaw and encircle the main Polish forces before they could withdraw behind the Vistula and the Narew. Brauchitsch’s guidelines for the deployment of the army were issued on 15 June.

Other elements were also falling into place. On 10 May Hitler issued an order on the seizure of Polish industrial plants, and on 16 May the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, sent the fleet guidelines repeating that it had to be ready for Case White from 1 September. In Gdańsk (Danzig) the local Nazis under Gauleiter Albert Forster spent the whole summer secretly stockpiling weapons and forming armed units, and smuggling across the Free City’s border was an everyday occurrence. The concentration of troops in the east was disguised as manoeuvres, the building of fortifications and preparations for the 25th anniversary of the Battle of Tannenberg, for which additional units were moved to East Prussia in August.

The conference of 23 May

The most important document of that spring is the record of the conference Hitler convened on 23 May 1939 in his study in the new Reich Chancellery. His audience included Field Marshal Hermann Göring, Raeder, Brauchitsch, Keitel, General Erhard Milch, Halder and several staff officers. The record was made by his adjutant, Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Schmundt. Keitel admitted at Nuremberg that it was a faithful account of the meeting.

Hitler said that further successes could no longer be achieved without bloodshed. “Danzig is not the subject of the dispute at all,” Schmundt recorded him as saying. “It is a question of expanding our living space in the east and securing our food supplies.” Poland, he went on, would always side with Germany’s enemies, treaties of friendship notwithstanding. “There is therefore no question of sparing Poland, and we are left with the decision: to attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity.” In the original this sentence was underlined. Hitler added that a repetition of the Czech affair could not be counted on: “There will be war.” The task was to isolate Poland, since success depended on the isolation succeeding. He did not rule out that this might lead to war with Britain and France, and spoke of such a war as a life-and-death struggle. He also announced that the population of non-German territories would not serve in the armed forces but would be used as a source of labour.

The conference of 23 May recalled the secret conference of November 1937, at which Hitler had first set out to his commanders his plan for acquiring “living space”. Then the targets had been Austria and Czechoslovakia; now it was Poland. The difference was that nothing in Schmundt’s record suggests that anyone present in May 1939 raised an objection. The military leadership, purged of its opponents in 1938, simply took note of the announcement of war.

From a date to an order

During the summer Hitler sought allies and tried to break up the coalition that might stand by Poland. On 22 May Germany signed an alliance with Italy, and from mid-July Berlin courted an agreement with Moscow ever more boldly. On 11–13 August the Italian Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, found at Salzburg and on the Obersalzberg that Germany was determined on war with Poland that very year and would not be talked out of it. By mid-August the German staffs were already working with Saturday 26 August as the day of the attack.

On 22 August, the day Ribbentrop set off for Moscow to secure a pact with the Soviet Union, Hitler gathered the commanders of all the services and the army commanders at the Berghof. Two German records of his two addresses that day have survived. Hitler said that the conflict with Poland had been inevitable and that he had taken the decision back in the spring. The moment was favourable, since in two or three years the situation might be worse. He named “the complete destruction of Poland” as the military objective and speed as the overriding principle. He did not fear the West. Britain and France, he claimed, would threaten but would not strike. “I am only afraid,” he is reported to have said, “that at the last moment some Schweinehund will produce a plan of mediation.” He announced that the order to attack would come “probably on Saturday morning”. The often-quoted remark that no one any longer remembers the annihilation of the Armenians comes from a third, unofficial version of the speech, passed to an American journalist. Its authenticity is disputed, and the Nuremberg tribunal did not rely on it.

On 23 August, when word came from Moscow that the pact would be signed, Hitler confirmed the date: the attack was to begin at dawn on 26 August. At around 3 p.m. on 25 August he gave the final order. A few hours later he learned that the Anglo-Polish alliance had been signed in London, and a message arrived from Benito Mussolini saying that Italy was not ready for war. At around 7.30 p.m. Hitler halted the offensive. Some units were already on the way to their starting positions and had to be turned back. The phrase found in chronologies, that the attack was “planned for 25 August”, therefore refers to the day the order was given, not to the day the troops were to cross the border.

The Polish side

Warsaw did not know the contents of the German directives, but no one any longer had illusions about Berlin’s intentions. After the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia and of Klaipėda, the General Staff abandoned its previous work, which had concentrated chiefly on the threat from the east, and hurriedly began preparing the Plan West for a war with Germany. It had to take into account what was Germany’s greatest asset: a long frontier that outflanked Poland from East Prussia to Slovakia. The Polish command knew that it could not win alone and counted on France and Britain attacking Germany before the Polish forces were destroyed. Defensive preparations continued all summer, and partial, covert mobilisations were carried out in March and August.

Significance

The directive of 3 April was the first German document in which war against Poland ceased to be one hypothesis among others and became a task with a deadline. It shows that everything that subsequently happened in Polish–German relations played out against the background of preparations of which the other side knew nothing. When in April and May Hitler spoke publicly of his “generous” offer to Poland and accused it of rejecting a hand held out in conciliation, the staffs had already been working on the attack for weeks. When in August Germany demanded that a Polish plenipotentiary be sent to Berlin, the date of the attack had already been set. Danzig, as Hitler himself admitted on 23 May, was merely a pretext.

What followed

At around midday on 31 August Hitler signed Directive No. 1 for the Conduct of the War. The attack was to proceed according to the preparations for Case White, and the date and time were entered briefly: 1 September 1939, 4.45 a.m. That same evening SS men staged a Polish attack on the radio station at Gleiwitz (Gliwice). The next morning the Wehrmacht crossed the Polish border, and the training battleship Schleswig-Holstein, which had been moored in the port of Gdańsk since 25 August, opened fire on the Westerplatte. The plan was carried out largely as it had been prepared in the spring: Bock’s and Rundstedt’s army groups struck from three directions, and Danzig was declared part of the Reich on the first day of the war. One of the directive’s assumptions failed. The war could not be confined to Poland: on 3 September Britain and France declared war on Germany. On 17 September the Red Army entered Poland, as the secret protocol of the pact with the Soviet Union – but not the April directive – had foreseen. Case White became the first operation of the Second World War, and the way it was prepared – secret directives, a readiness deadline, border provocations and an attack without a declaration of war – was repeated in Hitler’s later campaigns.